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It wasn't until he was kicked off a Greyhound bus for utterances beyond his control that Marc Elliot learned the real social consequences of Tourette's syndrome.

Elliot found himself saying the "N" word in line for a Greyhound bus in Indianapolis, offending a black woman in line. When he got on the bus, Elliot warned the driver, also a black woman, of his disorder, and the driver made a courtesy announcement to the whole bus about Elliot's condition. But the woman who Elliot offended in line yelled out that he had been saying the "N" word, prompting the driver to change her sympathetic tone and tell Elliot to either shut his mouth or "get the hell off my bus."

After much debate, Greyhound officials didn't let Elliot back on, he told a crowd of about 80 people at Shalom Torah Academy in Morganville on March 9.

"It really was the first time I realized 'Hey, Marc Elliot doesn't live in this bubble anymore where everybody is tolerant and everybody is understanding,'" Elliot said.

Friendship Circle of Western Monmouth County, which operates out of Chabad of Manalapan as a local branch of a national organization that provides support to the disabled and their families, brought Elliot, a Jewish St. Louis native who now lives in New York, to Morganville. Since graduating from Washington University in St. Louis in 2008, Elliot, 24, has traveled the country as a motivational speaker, using his disorder to teach tolerance. The title of his presentation is "What Makes You Tic?"

Elliot handed out cards to a number of audience members with instructions for words to say or sounds for them to make at specific times during his presentation, with the cards explaining that the instructions represented involuntary tics that Elliot often produces. The idea, he said, was to have the audience learn exactly how it feels to have Tourette's and how embarrassing it can be.

Simply put, Tourette's is "absolutely crazy," Elliot said, because at times his free will is inhibited.

"It is a crazy, crazy disorder," he said. "Why do I do what I do?"

Comparing a tic to an itch, Elliot said Tourette's is like having 15-20 itches in one spot all at once -- and once you scratch the itches, or tic, the itches come right back. One of Elliot's most common tics is chomping down. He wears a retainer to alleviate the pain, and when dentists see him they say, "You have teeth still. Yay!"

As a 5-year-old, Elliot said he began ticking "excuse me," which eventually turned into "I love you," leading friends and family to believe he was "full of love." However, when Elliot started to say "I love you" to trash cans, it was clear something was wrong. By the time Elliot reached middle school, he was having head convulsions and saying body parts, curses, and racial slurs.

"This is by far the worst part of my Tourette's syndrome," Elliot said of saying dirty words when he doesn't mean them.

Since he also has obsessive compulsive disorder, Elliot said he walks into a room thinking of the worst thing he can possibly say -- and that becomes his itch. Once in McDonald's, Elliot told a boy of his Tourette's, and the boy responded, "That's so cool! You have an excuse" to say profanities. Elliot then told the boy to get up in the middle of McDonald's and say the "N" word, and the boy suddenly wasn't so excited.

Tourette's is actually only the second-largest challenge in Elliot's life, he said. Elliot also has Hirschsprung's Disease, meaning he has no nerve endings in his intestines. While adults normally have 25 feet on intestines, Elliot has only four feet, leading to five to eight bowel movements per day, which are all liquid since his body can't absorb water.

Elliot goes to the bathroom so frequently that he calls the bathroom "sanctuary," and also uses the term as a verb, saying that he "has to go sanctuary."

While Elliot admitted that his disorders cause him considerable stress, he said they give him a unique perspective on life of seeing how people react to someone who is different. From that perspective, he said he has learned what true tolerance should be about. Elliot said he wasn't going to be giving a definition for tolerance, because many people learn about that anyway but are "out of practice."

Elliot's slogan for tolerance is "live and let live," because he has been in so many intolerant situations when people couldn't live with his tics and turned their assumptions about him into actions. One time when Elliot was barking in Wendy's, a woman in line who he explained his Tourette's to announced: "Don't worry everyone, he's retarded," meaning "she chose not to live and let live," Elliot said.

When he was kicked off the Greyhound bus for saying the "N" word, Elliot knew that it was his calling to teach tolerance to others, and convince people to let their assumptions "just be that." He asked the audience what they would have thought of him if they saw him on the street, whether he was weird, crazy, drunk, on drugs, or "possessed by the devil." All of those assumptions are fine, Elliot said, as long as they aren't turned into actions. That's because one never knows exactly what someone else is going through and what makes them tick (or in Elliot's case, tic), he said.

Asked if Tourette's makes it difficult to find employment, Elliot said "The good news is, this is my job now," referring to his motivational speaking. Regarding whether he tics while he sleeps, Elliot responded by asking right back "Do you scratch your itches when you sleep?" That's impossible to know, Elliot said, but in general, "once you're asleep, you're out cold."

Rabbi Boruch Chazanow, director of Chabad of Western Monmouth County, asked Elliot "Would you consider if you went to Levy's Kosher Pizza [in Manalapan] that [people] would not act like they did [to you] in Wendy's and McDonald's?" Elliot said he didn't think things would be different at a more upscale environment, because people make assumptions about others and act intolerantly regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds.

Seventeen-year-old Bekka Hyman of East Windsor, a volunteer for the Friendship Circle, said she learned from Elliot's presentation that "giving people a chance to be who they are and not judge them is very important, because I feel that, in the end, they teach you the greater lessons."

Zara Leibowitz of Manalapan said Elliot's talk will give her a new different perspective when she works with special needs children for Friendship Circle.

"I'm going to think more about how they experience life," Leibowitz, 14, said.

Friendship Circle also used the event to promote its May 2 "Walk4Friends" at Brookdale Community College, an annual three-kilometer walk and fundraiser for volunteers, families, and friends of the organization. Joy Ryan, whose 13-year-old son Jake is a special needs child and a Friendship Circle participant, is organizing the event.

"This is the most amazing, wonderful, special group of people," she said of Friendship Circle volunteers.