Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

  If you ever need to be let into our house make sure to knock on the door with a strong and identifiable rythm, otherwise we will think you are E. and hide.  We have to hide for a while because no one answering the door is never a clue to E. that we are either not home or too busy to attend to his needs.  When he gets sick of knocking he stands on the front porch and hollers "Popppppp Bottttttllllesss! I need some popppppp botttlllllesss" for up to 20 minutes before leaving.
  E. is our mentally disabled neighbor.  Sometimes I refer to him as the Village Idiot but mainly when he's being good natured or doing some sort of wacky Village Idiot type thing. Like, for example stealing my keys. He did that once because we wouldn't  give him spare change and he had exhausted our beer can supply the day before. I tracked him down to the liquor store and said, "Do you have something of mine?"
 "You just left your keys out, someone could have stolen them!" He said
 
Yesterday E. was not being good natured. He wasn't even being lucid. He came over first around 4 o'clock screaming incoherently. Eventually we were able to work out that Henry Ford Hospital had been calling him about a bill.  Cap'n J's little brother (who's intial also is E. so we'll just call him J.'s little brother) who lives down the street came over and offered to drive E. to the Hospital but changed his mind about finding out that E.'s goal was not to get medical care but to beat up the bill collector that he was convinced was at the Hospital.
E. went away but came back around 7:30 telling me that he had been beat up by someone at his home. I drove him to the hospital.  He came back to our house around midnight convinced that fifteen black men were waiting at his house to beat him up. When we wouldn't drive him back to the hospital he stood in the middle of the street yelling obscenities.
 Cap'n J called 911 which were utterly useless and eventually one of my housemates was able to walk E. home. 
 After this my whole house stood around in the street either smoking or not smoking but fullfilling the same psychological needs as fullfilled by smoking: standing, staring, processing. We talked about the uselessness of 911 and then came the moment in all weird situation where someone tells a story that relates to the situation.
 "Remember," said M. to Cap'n J., "that time we found a naked man in the final stages of hypothermia and 911 said it wasn't their problem?"
 "Yeah, and the guy in front of us at the light put the naked guy in the backseat of his pickup truck even though he had two little daughters in the front seat and drove with us to the police station."
 "It was awkward," said M., "You guys went into the police station while I was left to make pleasant conversation with two little girls while a half-naked dying crack head mumbled in the back seat. They gave me M&Ms"
  Evidently when Cap'n J eventually carried the naked man into the police station he began to shout, "There are two kinds of people in this room: nice people......and cops!"
 It was a good punchline.