His body was terrifyingly skinny. When he took his shirt off I had seen more flesh on pictures out of Auschwitz. There was an utter lack of compromise in him, no give. Some set purpose. But here he was in the middle of nowhere. What was this purpose, this resolve all about?
His hair was halfway down his back. His beard hadn’t been trimmed for at least a year. He was only eighteen. What caused those lines on his face?
I was sure he didn’t eat white bread, was fairly sure he ate no meat. With a body like that, I wasn’t sure he ate at all. Lean hungriness. Was he what Virginia had wanted me to be? Was this the revolutionary fervor I lacked, the strength that would have kept me out of the nut house? Was this the young buck come to take on the old, tired, compromised, weakened stag?
I knew there was no way I could talk about these feelings without Simon and Virginia getting scared that Mark was going crazy again, but it wasn’t just my head, any more than dreams are nonsense.
There was a meal and some chatting about spring coming and what sort of future we could expect for our communities. A little shop talk about seeds and fertilizer, etc.; talk about cooperation among the various groups that were in the area. Little by little, people drifted off to various places to sleep. Some to the barn, some to tents, some to different rooms in the main house. There was a double mattress right in the main room, where we had eaten. Virge and I decided that since no one else wanted it, we would sleep there.
It was our first night together in some time, the reunion I had worried about so much just before I cracked. Then it was just wondering about what her having slept with Vincent would do to our relationship. But now so much more had happened.
She started getting menstrual cramps. Transparent and I almost said so, but the old rules were coming back. We just laughed a little about our lousy timing as far as getting back together. All the progress wiped out, all the pluses out the window. Back at ground zero. Any feeling that my craziness was a positive thing, that it was a chance to start fresh, began to sour in my mouth. My sexuality, which I had clung to so desperately, atrophied under the accusing wither of her pains in the gut.
It seemed like cyanide frosting on an arsenic cake.
If I had succeeded at least partly in putting Nick from Colorado out of my mind for just a minute or so, what he proceeded to do took care of that in a hurry. He came into the room with a lantern and started fumbling around. I think he grunted something like “Got to work on my boots.”
At this hour of the night? In this room? I looked at Virginia with a funny look on my face, like is this happening or am I nuts again? Is this weird or am I weird? This is our first time alone in more than a month and this joker comes in to work on his boots. As if we didn’t have enough shit to deal with.
But how long can it take him to work on his boots? The answer comes to that: about two hours. After which he blew out the lamp and lay down to sleep, maybe all of three feet away from us, where he groaned and sighed for a while and then got into some heavy snoring. If Nick, as I was trying to believe, was a regular, real person, he sure wasn’t starting off on the right foot.
Well, that pretty much shot any chance Virge and I had to talk about much. But we felt a community of having been intruded on. There was good will between us.
I didn’t sleep much that night, but it wasn’t panicky, I’m threatened, something awful is going to happen, pay attention, no time for sleep, and it wasn’t the euphoric breakthrough of having no need for sleep. I dozed off every once in a while but kept waking up again and looking around and thinking some more. It was so nice to wake up somewhere other than the hospital. Not sleeping probably had a lot to do with the fact that I wasn’t on all that medication any more. It would probably take my system a while to get used to not having all that Thorazine fog to overcome.
The next morning brought a swell piece of news. Nick was coming up to spend some time with us on the farm, maybe forever. He had asked Simon if he could come up, and Simon had said sure.
Mostly I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that Simon could be so dumb. I was very tired. I didn’t want any trouble, any argument, any friction. I just wanted to get back to the farm, where I could relax and let all the shit in my system work itself out. It seemed there was plenty for us all to do without throwing a stranger in the pot. The soup looked plenty thick already.
It was going to be tough enough to try to reestablish my life with people to whom I had been close. People I could explain something to in a few words. Getting to know someone is hard work. With anyone it would have been tough, and Nick from Colorado wasn’t just anyone.
Simon, can you really not see what’s in that cat’s eyes? Would you please wake up, Simon? Didn’t I teach you anything?
Early that day, Simon, Virginia, Nick from Colorado, and I headed up the lake.
Without Nick it might have been different. Who can say? I might have been able to relax and live happily ever after at the farm. But relaxing and feeling at home around him was about as likely as…? The stream flowing up the mountain? Why not? Had to use some image and the stream did just that a few days later anyway.
Bea was at the marina. Did she know I had been locked up in a mental hospital? About the things I had said and done? It would break my heart to have Bea be afraid of me. She was my second mother. She had been warm and good to us and obviously wished us well.
There was no fear in her face, but a deep motherly concern. I must have looked fresh out of the grave.
“Mark, I haven’t seen you for a while, you look like you’ve been sick.”
“Ya, Bea, a little flu and then one thing led to another. I was pretty sick but I feel a lot better now and everything’s going to be fine. It’s nice to be back.”
She obviously wanted to take me home and fatten me up some and didn’t think I was ready to go back up to the farm, but she said nothing more.
Virginia and Simon let me play captain. I was grateful, as I had been grateful for their letting me drive my car alone. Nick didn’t say much. His face was as clueless, as warmthless as ever. He seemed to be looking at me contemptuously, wondering what the hell I thought I was proving, waiting for me to show my weak spot, for me to fuck up.
Just ’cause I’ve been nuts, just ’cause I weigh a hundred and thirty pounds, don’t get any ideas that I’m not still someone to be reckoned with.
Jumping gracefully to the dock and moving well and organizing the boat, packing exactly right. If just Simon and Virginia had been there I might have acted very differently. But here was this new element, this unknown who felt like bad news. I piloted the boat perfectly, docked it without a mistake, sprang ashore and tied it up.
Up the beautiful path to the beautiful farm. Back to life, back to my dreams. Back to home and friends. Back to where I was before I was so rudely interrupted.
Kathy was there alone. Jack was in California and she had held down the farm all by herself for a couple of weeks.
She hadn’t been off the farm since before I cracked up. For the first time she really felt that the place was home, that she belonged there. She was radiant. It was good to see her that way. She deserved it.
BRAKES. Maybe Nick was there to make me behave. Brakes. The same way Virginia had, the same way I had hoped getting to town with Simon when I had so obviously stopped behaving would. I wasn’t supposed to be in Eden. Something didn’t want me there and there was obviously nothing in myself that would hold me back, so I needed brakes. I had given up or thrown away my own brakes a few years back. For one thing, Virginia and other things were such good brakes that mine had just sort of atrophied. It was a nice feeling that I could rely on others’ brakes. It was a little unfair to them but they didn’t seem to mind, or maybe they just didn’t notice. So I just set my sights on Eden and put my foot on the floor.
To get to Eden with Virginia and Simon and Kathy, I really didn’t have to start from very far away. So much was understood. We were pretty close to the take-off point, where the ac
celeration gets pretty hairy. But with Nick there it was back to ground zero and lots to be filled in, lots to be established before I got anywhere near take-off again. That many steps away from being an organism, from Eden, from cosmic orgasm. Simon’s brakes, Kathy’s brakes, Virginia’s brakes? I had burned them all to frazzles. They couldn’t have stopped a toy truck going uphill.
So it was getting to know you instead of getting to Eden. How old are you? Where are you from? Did you go to school? What made you drop out? Etc. Very safe stuff.
In a way, I felt like a diabetic who had to explain to those around him what they should do if he went into a coma. It was trickier than that. Much less for sure is known about my thing than diabetes, and I knew just about nothing then. Dale had been planning to fill me in when he got back from Hawaii. I knew that if I could eat three times a day and get to sleep every night it would help. I knew I had been given heavy doses of vitamin C, vitamin B3, and other vitamins. I didn’t know how they worked if they worked at all, or whether they were just a shot in the dark. I didn’t know whether these were things I needed to take just in rough spots or all the time. The tranquilizers were another mystery. I hated Thorazine. I figured it was just a chemical straitjacket to make me less trouble to the staff.
The funniest mistake I made was that I figured grass would help in a pinch. So when I felt myself losing ground I figured I could just do lots of dope and be fine. I remembered hearing that grass had once been used fairly extensively in mental hospitals.
One of the problems was believing that my problem had anything to do with these pedestrian things. There was such poetry in the disease, it felt only right that there be poetry in the cure—which I guess is why so many shrinks go so far afield and have so little clinical success with schizophrenia.
I could think up lots of poetic explanations for why I went nuts: the state of the world, childhood experiences, my parents breaking up, my kinky relationship with Virginia. Any one of a dozen or more explanations made perfect sense, but my relationship with Virginia was the only one within my sphere of influence, and even there understanding why I had gone nuts, if that was indeed it, didn’t give me many clues about what I should do next. Merely understanding these things obviously wouldn’t help. I had understood them all very clearly for years.
That there were so many reasonable poetic explanations for my cracking up weakened them all. While I was still several months away from a truly reasonable helpful explanation, I began having serious doubts that explanations like the above had much to do with my sanity.
Whatever part Virginia had or hadn’t played in driving me crazy, there was no denying that I needed her desperately then. She could have crushed me like a flea. I hated myself for needing the things I needed but there was no way around it. It was all unspoken but she knew that I knew that she knew and so on that we were both walking on eggs.
Please, Virge. I don’t want to be this way. I’d rather it was heroin, I swear. What I need I have no right to ask for. I don’t love you now. I’m too scared to love anything. Maybe I’ve never loved anything, but for a while—maybe just a few days will do the trick, I’ll try to keep it small—I need your love completely and utterly.
Maybe it’s not even love. Maybe it’s a lie I need, like how I’ve lied to you. I know you never asked me to and it was a fucked-up thing to do and it was bad for both of us, but I made you very sure of me and gave you my unconditional commitment. It wasn’t for romantic reasons. It was more just a dumb experiment, but it’s that sort of half-lie I need now.
Please, Virge, I need a moratorium on reality. Play Doris Day to my Rock Hudson. Maybe we can work out some real love later, but for now the work has got to be curing my addiction. It’s the only hope for either of us to get out of this mess at all intact. I need your blessing, Virge. Without it I can neither love you nor let you go. We’ll be stuck with my hellish needing forever.
After I had been back at the farm a few days, my resolve to just forget about the whole thing, never terribly strong, crumbled completely. I wanted to fit all the pieces together. It started as a very reasonable attempt to figure out what had happened so that I could avoid its happening again. As I began to fit things together it became more and more apparent to me that there was very little, if anything, delusional about the things I had thought or inappropriate about my behavior. My focus might have been a little off here and there, but basically I had been right on. There was too much confirmation from too many different sources that something very momentous had happened and that I had responded at least appropriately and very possibly heroically.
The more I thought about it, the more transparent it became. I was slightly embarrassed that they had managed to fool me as well as they had. What a bunch of transparent, blundering incompetents.
Hollywood Hospital, Fifth Avenue, New Westminster, Dale and McNice—now really.
I was convinced that the crisis was over and the good guys had won, but I wished they had done a better job of fooling me. I was resolved to live my long, peaceful, healthy, normal life at the farm no matter what.
I quickly lost all sense of embarrassment about having been locked up in a nut house. In fact I was rather proud of it. Even when I stuck to what I and everyone else knew for sure had happened, the unwritten codes of myself, my friends, all good radicals and liberals everywhere, gave the bare facts a certain amount of built-in grandiosity as standard equipment. That I had somehow saved the world was optional frill.
The humiliations and restrictions I had suffered made blacks, women, and homosexuals look like fat-cats basking in the good graces of the powers that be. There was nothing subtle about what had been done to me. I didn’t need any consciousness-raising meeting to find out that my situation had not been ideal. Admittedly my oppression and suffering hadn’t been long-term, but if blacks could identify with and be outraged by what the slaves went through, I could certainly identify with all inmates of mental institutions, past, present and future.
I was no longer a male wasp heterosexual of upper-middle-class origin with good intentions. I was a sufferer of the worst humiliations and degradations afforded by the evil no-good-nik oppressive poison-spewing earth-defiling beauty-raping pigs. I had credentials.
I probably used this angle on my having been nuts more than I really believed it. I was still too confused about the whole thing to really believe anything and too shaky to not use anything that came to hand.
CHESS WITH NICK. I don’t know who initiated it. I may have asked him if he played. Maybe he saw my board and pieces and asked if I wanted a game. Anyway, it didn’t take long before I was sorry as hell about it.
When we sat down and set up the pieces, there was a look in his eyes like there was something understood between us. I tried to shrug it off.
My chess board was made by my grandfather, Doc. Inscribed in Gothic script were the messages “I do warn you well” on one side and “It is no child’s play” on the other. Ominous, ominous, ominous.
The hallucinations and fantasies had had heavy chess content. My father had taught me how to play when I was four. In an informal way I had been chess champ nearly everywhere I had ever been. One or two people I knew could play me about even, but I never ran into anyone who could beat me consistently, though I doubtless would have if I hadn’t so conscientiously avoided formal competition.
I lost the first game. I thought I had him a few times, but each time I felt his wrath building and was afraid that if I won something dreadful would happen. I didn’t get furious. I didn’t cry. I worried that maybe several thousand people were struck down by plague for every pawn I lost, but I didn’t let it show.
There was a second game. I felt much looser. I thought I could loosen up and maybe learn something about chess from him. Winning seemed to make him a lot more relaxed. Since he had won one game, there was no way he could feel humiliated or hurt if I won the second. I paid no attention to him. Just concentrating on the pieces like he wasn’t there. Not letting his fac
e influence my moves. I won.
After winning I looked up. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. He won one, I won one. How could anybody feel bad about that? But he was furious, glowing red. He was just able to talk—very tersely, as his eyes bored into my brain. “Of course we have to play a third.” I tried to beg off but there was no way.
The third game was the worst. My brain was all haywire. The game took forever. I found excuses to go to the fire and get it to tell me what move to make. I didn’t trust myself, didn’t want the burden of whatever was on this game. He had his helpers too. It didn’t take long to see that.
The way he played chess certainly didn’t help my impression that he wasn’t on the level. That this should be the first person I met outside of the hospital was weird. Chess players like him don’t just show up.
I wanted out. Every time I made a good move I thought he was going to throw the board at me. This is no fun, this is no fun, this is no fun. And then to mock me, every once in a while he would look up at me with a cruel smile and say, “Fun, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I mumbled. Is he going to kill me if I beat him? Or is he going to get to kill me or win my soul or the souls of those I love if I lose? I wish someone would explain these things to me.
It was something my father had always thought would please me. A chance to play a real master. Somehow he had resurrected Paul Morphy and that was who I was playing. Morphy for morphine, more fiend. Morphy because Morphy ended up in a nut house. Morphy because he was my favorite chess player. “Happy birthday, Mark. Paul Morphy.”