Ben Soul

  ***

  Several sessions later, I again asked Beau about his military title. He responded with this incident:

  “When it came time for me to meet my draft board and hear my country’s call, I was a little under the influence of the grape. The secretary of the draft board was profoundly impressed to have a recruit with so honorable a family name. He was Louisiana-born, and complimented me on being such a fine specimen of Southern American manhood. He asked me to take the traditional step forward. I took it, and, overcome with excitement, I flung my arms around his beefy body and kissed him loudly on the lips. He recoiled in horror, and promptly reclassified me 4-F. I suppose he retreated after I left to scrub his lips with cleanser or something. That’s how I dodged the draft.”

  Encouraged that he had responded, even if obliquely, I asked him how he came to The City.

  “I came on a bus, a Greyhound Bus. It was a big one, with a long dog painted on the side.”

  He curled up on the chair and withdrew. I got no further response from him for several sessions.

  When he chose to respond again, his remark was unrelated to anything he had mentioned before. By now, he was in reasonable control of his body; his movements were fluid and normal, no longer jerky or out of context. We were listening to Vivaldi’s Autumn from the Four Seasons when he spoke.

  “Can you make the others go away?”

  “What others?” I asked him.

  He did not respond until the closing phrase of the music.

  “My head is full,” he said. “Too many of us.”

  Our session was at an end. The orderly came to take him away.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll work on that tomorrow.”

  He nodded and left the room. It was over a month before he consented to any further therapy.

  When Beau met me the next time, he had lost weight, his complexion was sallow, and he gave every appearance of illness. I suggested he be tested for HIV; he consented (the test was negative). I asked him what troubled him. He muttered he couldn’t sleep, because “they” kept arguing. He wouldn’t identify who “they” were. I talked with the orderly for his ward, and discovered Beau had had a private room for over a week, since the discharge of the two patients who shared his room. “They” were evidently in his mind.

  We went on some weeks without any breakthrough occurrences. Some days Beau animatedly talked about his Louisiana boyhood. Other days he was silent and withdrawn, responding with gestures, or monosyllables, or not at all.

  One day Juan came out. Juan Loosa lived in Beau’s body, but inhabited it stiffly, not with the languid loose-jointed manner of Beau.

  “I am Juan Loosa,” he said. “I control this body. When I choose, I show. I don’t often choose.” He spoke with a light Spanish accent.

  “Hello, Juan,” I said.

  “Understand, Doctor, that Beau handles the world far better than I do, or than Luis does.”

  “Who’s Luis?”

  “Luis Cruz. He was the first one in this body. He doesn’t come out at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “It hurts him too much.” Suddenly the patient’s joints loosened, and the Beau persona returned.

  “He’s been out, hasn’t he?” Beau drawled.

  “Who?”

  “Juan.”

  “Yes.”

  Standard theory at the time confronted multiple personality disorder with the desire to integrate the personalities into one “healthy” personality. I explained this to Beau. I also explained it to Juan. Luis refused to listen, or to come out, claiming he couldn’t understand English. My Spanish was too accented for him, he reported. That is, Juan reported for him.

  This is a transcript of a statement made to me, Dr. Chester Field, by Noah Count, a longtime friend of my patient, Beauregard LeSieupe.

  “I was there when Luis became Beau. It was a dark and stormy night, don’t you know. I had seen him around the bars and on the Street. He was just another one of the pretty bodies in the City in those innocent days before the Plague. I hadn’t paid him much attention. He wasn’t my type. I preferred blondes to the Latin look.”

  “My usual hangouts were livelier than the Wounded Cherub, but I was on the upper Street when the rain started. The Cherub was handy, so I went in. Luis was the only patron in the bar. He was crooning to his beer. I took a stool and ordered my own brew. He looked up when he heard my voice, and said something about the weather. Then he introduced himself as Luis. His drawl surprised me. It was the kind that could make ‘Damnyankee’ a twelve-syllable word. We stumbled around in a conversation, drank several more beers, and became friends for the night. Late in the evening, we wound up in the Marina under the palm tree. He re-introduced himself to me as Beau after we’d had a few hits of weed.”

  “Beau passed me the joint. We were sitting under a palm tree planted in a big tub on the sidewalk. The rain had stopped, but the leftover drops were still sliding off the palm fronds. We were careful to keep the wet off our dope.”

  “A guy dressed up for a fried chicken promotion stumbled along the street. We watched him lie down under another palm tree in a tub. We tried to hear what he was mumbling to himself, but couldn’t make any sense out of it. He rolled against his tub and fell asleep. His hat fell off, taking the attached wig with it. Beau and I laughed. The drunk snored louder.”

  “The drunk’s outfit reminded Beau of his childhood in Louisiana. It sounded like the plot of a movie I’d seen somewhere some time. He said he was the last son of a French family that had lost their plantation in the Civil War. They had never recovered their fortune, but had never lost their dignity. He claimed a lot of his older male relatives had dressed, like the drunk, in white linen suits.”

  “I asked him how he got to the City, and he told me about his encounter with the Selective Service. When it came time for him to meet his draft board and hear his country’s call, Beau was drunk. The secretary of the draft board was profoundly impressed with so honorable a history, and complimented Beau on being such a fine specimen of Southern American manhood.”

  “When he asked Beau to take the traditional step forward, Beau did, and in his excitement, flung his arms about the beefy sergeant and kissed him loudly on the lips. The sergeant recoiled in horror, and promptly reclassified Beau 4-F.”

  “‘This army is for men, you hear?’ the sergeant raved as he propelled Beau out the door, and then went to wash his mouth. It wasn’t possible to live in the Parish after that, Louisiana being what it was, so Beau drifted west to the City, and found a home.”

  “I spun my own yarn about growing up on a ranch in the Rockies, and being dispossessed by the Forest Service. I borrowed from Beau’s story, and gave it a cowboy twist. It was a good night for bullshit.”

  “As the moon went west it made the restoration scaffolding cast black skeletons on the sidewalks. The drunk snored louder.”

  “Beau gauged the man’s height and weight.”

  “‘I do believe, Noah,’ he drawled, ‘that suit would fit me.’”

  “‘Try it on,’ I said. Beau passed the joint back to me.”

  “‘Take care of this,’ he said, and went over to the drunk. He shook his shoulder. The man didn’t respond. Beau removed his jeans and plaid shirt and put them on the rim of the tub. Then he removed the drunk’s shoes and pulled his pants off him. The drunk muttered something. Beau patted his shoulder and said, ‘That’s all right, honey. Go back to sleep. I’m just making you comfortable.’”

  “Then Beau put on the pants.

  “‘They fit nice,’ he said; ‘help me get the shirt and jacket.’ I put the roach on the edge of our tub and went over to hold the man up while Beau pulled the linen jacket, the ruffled white shirt and the little string tie off him. Beau tried them on. They fit him better than they fit the drunk.”

  “I rescued the hat and its white wig from the sidewalk.”

  “‘Co
lonel, Sir, your hat,’ I drawled in my best Texas phony and put it on Beau’s head. Beau neatly folded his jeans and plaid shirt and covered the drunk’s chest with them.”

  “We were halfway down the block when Beau remembered the mustache and goatee, and that his wallet was in his jeans. He felt. The drunk’s wallet was in the suit he was wearing. He told me we should go back to exchange the wallets and get the mustache and goatee.”

  “We exchanged the wallets easily, but the beard and mustache were a different matter. We woke the drunk peeling them off, and only with difficulty were we able to persuade him that we meant no harm. Finally we gave him a dollar to buy another bottle of cheap wine.”

  “Beau, from that night, never wore any other kind of costume. He became a fixture on the Street. We all came to call him ‘Colonel.’ He was the Street’s mascot for several years. He recognized newcomers right away, and welcomed them to the City. He’d sleep anytime anywhere with anyone. This was before the Plague, when the Street was two miles of party and the City was Paradise.”

  Over several months, I pieced together Luis/Beau/Juan’s development. Luis Cruz was born to a farm worker’s family in the Pedernales Valley of Texas. He grew up much as any other small Hispanic boy might have in that time and place, scorned by the Anglos around him. The pain of prejudice gnawed at him more than it did at most of his peers. When he left the Pedernales Valley, he invented Beauregard LeSieupe, scion of a Louisiana plantation family, together with its