Let’s talk about shades of crazy. There’s the time you emailed the person you liked that didn’t like you back and wrote some blathering, stupid crap that you regretted ten seconds later all because your blood sugar was so low you couldn’t think straight. Then there’s the guy at the end of the block who paws through your garbage can. Then there’s the guy at the end of the other block who paws through your garbage can with a real human hand he cut off a drifter. So there are shades of crazy. And only two of them have ever happened to me. “One Life to Live’s” Nathaniel Marston, 32, is somewhere between the last two definitions of crazy. The guy plays Dr.Michael McBain on the show, and has a long history of anger issues. On Saturday night he attacked three people with a metal crate, broke a guy’s leg, and assaulted some of New York’s finest, all apparently without provocation. Well, unless you consider being on (what we suspect is) a lot of cocaine to be provocation. Which I’m guessing Marston probably did.

Salvatore Cabibbo was having a cup of coffee when, he said, Marston hopped out of a taxi and started arguing with the driver. Shouting “I’m going to get you,” Marston inexplicably charged at Cabibbo swinging the metal crate. “He was crazed – I don’t know the guy from a hole in the wall,” said Cabibbo, 46. “I’ve never seen anything like that.” The raging Marston struck a glancing blow to Cabibbo, he said, then kept on running into a gas station nearby, almost getting hit as he dashed into traffic on 10th Ave. A source said Marston has been an emotional wreck in recent days, and last week his behavior led to a blowup on the set of “One Life to Live.”

Police said the 6-foot-3 actor appeared to be under the influence of narcotics, possibly cocaine, when they were called to the scene. Marston, a former amateur boxer, began flailing his arms and kicking at officers as they went to arrest him, officials said. “I don’t want to talk to you, and please don’t ever come to my home,” Marston told the Daily News Sunday after his release from Bellevue Hospital. He answered the door of his midtown apartment bare-chested, sporting a fresh bruise over his left eye.

Marston was charged with two counts each of felony assault, reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon as well as one count of resisting arrest. He was taken to Bellevue, where he was labeled an emotionally disturbed person, police said. He has admitted to anger problems in the past that stem from a childhood learning disability. “I was the kid who’d sit there in class, real quiet, didn’t scream or yell until someone would mess with me. And then I’d explode: boom! It was fierce and violent,” Marston said in a 2003 interview with Soap Opera Weekly. The actor was arrested in October 1999 on criminal mischief charges after he punched and damaged an automated-teller machine in Manhattan, police said.

[From the Daily News]

I love how the Daily News basically said they went to Marston’s house without saying it. “I don’t want to talk to you, and please don’t ever come to my home,” Marston told the Daily News Sunday after his release from Bellevue Hospital. He answered the door of his midtown apartment bare-chested, sporting a fresh bruise over his left eye.” I’m not sure he’s actually the best guy in the world to provoke, [what I’m guessing is a] random little Daily News reporter. If he can beat the crap out of three guys and the NYPD, you best stay off his turf. Marston started working on “One Life to Live” in 2001, but was fired in 2003. Fans led a huge protest and he was rehired. According to Carolyn Hinsey, an editor for “Soap Opera Weekly,” “He is definitely going to lose his job. They’ve given him chance after chance after chance.” I’d recommend they hogtie him first, just to be safe.

Picture note by Jaybird: Here’s some stills from the show and a headshot… they’re not actually Nathaniel Marston in the hospital.