To Mr. Fussy, oddity is an art form
Mr. Fussy is always looking out for odd traits and eccentricities. Because what some people call strange, Mr. Fussy finds perfectly normal. The writer Samuel Johnson, for instance, collected orange peels, and no one knows why. Nothing curious about that!
While reading Women's Health magazine (slogan: It's Good to Be You!), Mr. Fussy learned that novelist Kristin Gore, daughter of our former vice president, has a wrist phobia. "I can't deal with the undersides of wrists," Gore told WH interviewer Celeste Perron. "I don't like looking at them, I can't have people touch them."
In an interview with The
Speaking of feet, the legendary Greenwich, Conn., investor Victor Niederhoffer, who once called his beloved National Enquirer "more accurate than The New York Times," "maintains a no-shoes policy in his trading room, reflecting an Asian influence," according to The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Fussy would remove his shoes at the office, but because he rarely wears socks, an intern would have to be found to wash his feet.
Niederhoffer also disdains air conditioning, another Mr. F. bugaboo. Now, whenever Mr. F. sees a movie, he takes a parka to the local cineplex, the one place in the world where global warming has yet to take hold.
But these are merely trivial deviations from the norm, like David Hockney's father wearing two watches, or novelist Lee Childs refusing to wear a timepiece, because he claims he can tell time to the minute without it. Mr. Fussy prefers genuinely bizarre behavior, like Warren Beatty's refusal to use e-mail, which is part of a larger technophobia. He told writer Amy Wilentz in an interview: "Do you know that Google has a record of every search that's ever been made on it? Do you realize the implications of that?"
Yes, Warren. A lot of people have been researching your sex life.
It is true that Mr. Fussy indulges certain habits that others find strange. He squeezes two different brands of toothpaste onto his brush each morning -- one has a high sodium fluoride content -- and prefers to brush in the shower. He starts reading magazine articles about halfway through, when the actual content begins. Mr. Fussy always goes down the left aisle of movie theaters, because his friend Byron told him 40 years ago that most people walk to the right.
Mr. Fussy's most recent experiment, trying to encourage family members to sleep head to toe in the same bed, has not been enthusiastically received. Some people just won't try new things.
Now here is some deeply strange behavior. Shortly after marrying Amy Catherine Robbins, the writer H.G. Wells proposed that "for everyday use and our common purposes," she be called Jane. She agreed.
Wells often wrote about his "two" wives:
"Jane was a person of much greater practical ability than Catherine. . . . Jane ordered a house well and was an able 'shopper'; she helped people in difficulties and stood no nonsense from the plumber. . . . She had a file of shop addresses where things needed could be bought. Her garden was a continually glowing success.
Catherine, he wrote, "was indeed not quite one of us, not quite one with Jane and me, I mean; she was a quiet, fine spirited stranger in our household. . . ." It may come as no surprise that Wells was flagrantly unfaithful to Catherine. Or Jane.
Shortly after his head-to-toe sleeping proposal was rebuffed, Mr. Fussy thought he might ask Mrs. F. if he could start calling her "Madeleine," a very beautiful name that happens not to be hers. And then Mr. Fussy thought again. He may be eccentric, but he is not suicidal.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 