CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

In which I find cause to abandon the human race

 

Now that I had gotten thrown out of my youngest big sister Mo’s apartment and gotten the best friend I ever had to leave me alone forever, I felt like quite the social overachiever and thought maybe I should slow down and revel in my hoarded wealth for awhile.

And now that I had rebuilt several player pianos in quick succession and was losing interest in what is, after all, one of the most tedious and unpredictable repair jobs known to man, my home haven felt so incredibly huge and empty—and it was both—that I would walk into the two-bedroom apartment and immediately be overwhelmed by a sense of emptiness, uselessness, and nearly terminal boredom.  Each evening dragged on longer that the one before, and the only relief was going to work each day to scrape old glue off of old sticks of wood and listen to the boss’s daughter’s soap operas and country music till I would have rather yanked all my own teeth out of my own head than to tolerate one more moment of this existence.

Although I tried at home from time to time to lay down a good madman act for my own entertainment, it only worked when I was in the grocery store next door buying bags of candy, since I couldn’t afford bags of pot and didn’t have any connections anyway, and at home there was nothing to do but to write songs on my guitar—which was practically my only possession other than my piano tools—songs such as:

 

 

Bus Depot Weirdo 

Think of yourself as a bus depot weirdo

and you’ll never go the way

of the late great dodo.

It’ll put you in your place

and help you to know your foes,

so get your ass back to the Sioux City depot.

 

Maybe I know you and maybe I don’t.

Maybe I’ll approach you

and maybe I won’t.

I could save all my Green Stamps

and give them to you,

to trade in on Sterno

when it’s Sunday in Sioux City

and you can’t buy booze.

 

Someone told me there’s a brain surgeon in town

but I’ve looked all over and he can’t be found.

My head’s in heavy trouble, it needs something now.

Won’t someone please tell me

if there’s anything around.

 

Lay me out, pared and quartered,

and roast me on a spit.

And feed me to the people with caves in their bellies—

I think I might be a hit.

And make it back to Sioux City

sometime before you die,

and send me postcards in heaven,

let me know

when the last stinking Greyhound goes by.

Waste another childhood or two,

stoned out, boned out and dry,

and I’ll be content

in my one-man tent,

in a corner of Glory,

reading postcards in the sky.

 

 

Now if that don’t beat all.  I must have been bored silly.  And tell me if I’m wrong, but do I detect a trace of “without marijuana I may as well be dead?”  For it is a fact, my tender siblings, that it was not marijuana that addicted me, it was the thought that easy fun awaits: sugar candy for the mind, anything to lend drama to this prison that I must pay to live in with the best part of my day gone to snot to further someone else’s ambitions, passions, and needs.

That’s all bullshit, of course.  If I had had the sense to not make any mistakes to begin with, my life would have been perfect.  So it’s obviously all my fault.

Speaking of my fault, let me tell you something about player pianos.  A piano has 88 notes.  For each note, a player piano has one or two valves; one or two leather diaphragms; a long skinny tube; a bellows-like piston that plays the note; linkages, fingers, and more, and that’s just the logic and actuation part of the player mechanism.  It all adds up to an air-powered computer, perfected 100 years ago when computers were not an issue; an issue was whether or not the air powered locomotives that were being tested in some cities should be fitted with dummy smokestacks, so as to not scare the horses, who were used to steam locomotives.

The human race has come so far: now we have cars that wear bras.

Something about the huge piles of parts that came out of those player piano mechanisms made me want to commit suicide more and more every day, even though my boss, Max, was the nicest and funniest man I ever worked for before or since; I’m sure he and his daughter, Lila, were sent down to this Planet specifically to keep me alive.  In fearful reaction to the urge to self-destruct, I began searching the bookstore for psychological solutions, since the problem was obviously a psychological problem, not a physical question of being able to do the work.  It was a matter of not knowing how to not be miserable, either not wanting to change my mood or not knowing how, or not knowing I could, or masochistically enjoying it too much.  Now that I know we are all prisoners on a prison planet, a prison for those who were thrown out of heaven for not knowing how to be happy, it all makes sense, but back then I was so confused and miserable, I still feel sorry for myself when I think about it.

The bookstore was my final hope.  Since each book I bought meant skipping two meals, I considered my choice carefully for weeks, waiting for new volumes to show up, but no matter how long I waited, there were only two books on the shelf that spoke to me: The Structure of Magic by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, and The Primal Scream by Art Janov.  Magic appealed to me because it had a wizard on the cover and it was supposed to be some sort of analysis of language, and I was intensely interested in language, but when I opened it up it seemed cerebral or chart-like; as I learned later when I read dozens of incredibly effectual books that followed The Structure of Magic, Neuro-Linguistic Programming is pragmatic and solution-oriented, not generally grubbing down through one’s deepest emotional traumas, but helpful in real change work because it cuts through the crap and gets the ball rolling in a new direction.  That kind of thing had no hold on me back in 1975.  I didn’t so much care to get on with it as I wanted very badly to prove there was something wrong with me so I could stay home and fight boredom my way, rather than spend my days performing boring tasks for wages out in the cold cruel world.  Looking for solutions was just an act of desperation, not really part of a game plan.

The Primal Scream appealed to me for all the wrong reasons, so naturally it won out; it promised a bona-fide cure for (fill in the blank like I did) and it was chock full of who-fucked-who-over, and why-it’s-all-someone-else’s-fault, so I finally took the book home and gobbled it like a comic book, and ran back to the bookstore as soon as it opened the next morning to drool over Art Janov’s other books which I could not afford.  I was an instant convert, and remained a loyal follower for a long year-and-a-half,  preaching Primal Theory to anyone who would listen and to some who wouldn’t.  I made a thousand bogus plans for how to save $6000 plus living expenses so I could take the primal cure and be rid of all my inner demons forever, not just patched up, but really cured!  It was like the Jesus Freak days but different, in that nobody was there to agree with me this time; I was not surrounded by a core group of common non-thinkers to shield me from the embarrassment of being a True Believer.

At work I embarrassed everybody by not being able or willing to have a conversation.  My boss, Max, was such a blustery good-time-charlie that he worked around who I was by making a joke about it.  I would walk in and he would immediately call out, “Say hello, Maxwell!”  He made quite a habit of this, until I would be ready to smack his bald round head before I even walked in the door.  He had no idea why I seemed unfriendly.  He didn’t know where I’d been, and most importantly, he didn’t know how far out of shape I had to bend myself to even be willing to be around people in a workplace at all.  For him to draw attention to my silence the way he did embarrassed me so badly that I instantly would fly into a silent rage, as I sat down at my workbench to begin my day.  That’s pretty much how that job went.  Max and his daughter Lila were such perfectly jolly, working angels that I eventually began to feel pressure to move in their direction, but didn’t know how, and getting me to approach any authority figure in a genuinely relaxed and friendly fashion is sort of like getting a badger and a dachshund to sit down for tea.  Those two drove me absolutely crazy with their dastardly good cheer.

I loved them of course.  Max would squirt out these nasty sounding series of farts, and then wonder aloud if it was a wet one or not.  He was too much like I wished I could be, for me to be comfortable around him.  There was always something twisted in me that was frozen with mortification in the presence of a boss.  A boss I liked was even worse.  The fear of saying the wrong thing was overpowering.  The shoulders tightened up, the stomach muscles stiffened like a board.  Worst was when Max would load me up in the piano moving van he invented and take me off to help him move a piano.  Having to do something requiring strength and coordination, where other people could see me, was bad enough, but having to endure a boss who I liked, trying to start friendly, casual conversations with me for 45 minutes there and 45 minutes back, was almost like holding my breath.  How long can this go on?

The joy of discovering that I would never be happy till I could somehow save $6000 soon faded as I finished Art Janov’s last book and  had nothing left to do but sit around in my empty shell, waiting for my life to change so I could start saving an inconceivable sum of money.  Now that my entire coping mechanism had been explained to me as faulty, based on neurotic responses to repressed trauma instead of rational responses to what’s really going on, I stopped using all my dad-blasted coping mechanisms and just sat waiting for bedtime.  No more records on the stereo, no more homemade pizza experiments, no more guitar playing, no more reading or searching; the goal was well-defined and there was obviously no way for me to get to it.  Thus ensued one of the top ten binges of depression in my ridiculous self-indulgent existence.  All based on the belief that my Mama and Daddy had screwed me up so bad that there was nothing I could do about it, and on the hope that if I couldn’t go all the way to the top, at least maybe I could get all the way to the bottom where someone might recognize my need for help and find that a reason to take care of me.  One can always hope that limbo is a temporary state.  Without hope there is only reality, a frightening thing for a highly energetic young person who is nevertheless nearly paralyzed with fear and not getting any help foisted on him from any direction except from the total strangers that he works for.

So because it was now officially all my Mama and Daddy’s fault that I was a self-pitying fuck-up, why shouldn’t my Mama and Daddy be the ones to get off their asses and do something about it?  So I wrote them and told them what was going on and my Daddy dropped what he was doing and drove down to Albuquerque to haul my sorry ass home.  Just before he got there I developed a head twitch—that is, my whole head would jerk off to the side every few minutes.  It kept him from trying to talk to me very much, since it kept him busy wondering and worrying.  The twitch faded away after a night in my bed at home; I couldn’t have pulled it off around my Mama anyway, and my brother Dirk wouldn’t have been fooled for two seconds.  The twitch was for my Daddy.

By morning I was feeling so much better I was ready to go out partying with Judas.  It turned out that my friend Lothar—a girl who Prunesquallor had tried to date rape a couple times (but without the date, so I guess you could call it “hang-out rape”)—sweet Lothar was hanging around willing to waste time with me.  She liked me because I used to go for walks with her to help her cool off after Prunesquallor’s horny rampages.

It wasn’t long before my Daddy was bugging me to do some work around the house.  As my Mama has said from time to time, my Daddy never wanted to see us be disciplined as little children, so when he started trying to discipline us as teenagers, and accelerated his efforts with me when I acted like I had a rent-free spot in his house, it worked in reverse for him.  The more he bugged me about mowing the lawn, the less I got around to it.  Finally one morning, in desperation, he woke me up before leaving for work and said, “You WILL mow the lawn today!” and then he hauled ass before I could say anything to ruin his day worse than he had just done himself, for both of us.

I figured since my day was ruined already by being woken up before 1:00 p.m., I might as well mow the lawn and get it out of my hair.  So right after breakfast, I hauled the lawnmower out of the shed and got about halfway through mowing the front lawn before I boiled over inside and left the mower right where it stood, and walked away from my Daddy’s house without a backwards glance.  I’ll be goddamned if anyone is gonna cheat me out of an opportunity to say just the right thing to ruin their day.  How dare he spin on his heel like that, as if I had nothing to say?  I’ll show him who has the power to walk away.

I got ahold of Lothar and she met me with her car.  Judas had been bugging me to find him a place to live, since he’d saved up some money and couldn’t handle living with his parents anymore, but he was working so he had no time to look for apartments.  The idea was that if I found him a place to live, we would have a place to party, and I could stay there too.  Lothar and I  instantly found him a little apartment in a big building downtown.  The kitchen sink was too small to put a normal-sized dinner plate in, not that we had any dishes.  My diet consisted mainly of frozen chocolate chip cookie dough, because that’s all Judas ever brought home; he worked in a fast food fish restaurant, and did all his eating there.

Judas was concerned that the cost of keeping us both high was going to prevent him from ever saving enough money to get us out of Kansas, so we decided we’d better start selling pot; that would take care of both problems.  We could smoke for free and make big bucks fast, and then we’d be gone to California in no time.  Except that I wanted to go to Colorado.  I’d always fantasized about being totally alone with no possessions out in the forest, and for some reason I thought I could enjoy losing my mind.  I wanted to go back to Forward Falls and find a cave to live in the rest of my life, all by myself except I wanted Judas to go with me.   He always wanted companionship.  He would befriend people at the pool hall that nobody would want to even meet, and drag them home to smoke all our pot.  He was totally compulsive about making friends with absolutely anything that crawled up to him.  Desperate to get into dealing, he got ripped off over and over by street urchins posing as suppliers, sometimes by the same person more than once.  Judas was, despite his great intelligence, as befuddled about people as he was desirous of their company.  Fortunately, over the years he has learned how to pick and choose amongst them, but back in the spring of 1976 it was all still a big experiment, and the raw material was cash.

It finally came to pass that Judas fronted his last $22 to some guy who had already ripped us off once before, so the dude could make good on his once-broken promise to score us some mescaline.  The first bag of pills he’d brought us had turned out to be gelatin capsules from the drug store, and to get him to make good we had to come up with some more cash.  This time, he promised, he would make that asshole connection of his fork over the real stuff.  We dropped him off in a parking lot behind a big brick apartment building and watched him run in the back door of the building, and waited.  We are still waiting.

In desperation, I turned to other sources for my drugs.  I snuck into my Mama and Daddy’s house and stole some Ellavil from my Mama’s prescription bottle.  She was having a hard time coping, but she hated every mood enhancer and de-depressant that her shrink tried to get her to take, so I figured she wouldn’t miss a few Ellavil pills.  I went back to the apartment and took all three pills, which was maybe six times what she was taking as a dose, and sat back and waited.  Before I knew it, I was looking at Prunesquallor and asking him where the hell he had come from, because the last thing I knew, I had been home alone.  He informed me that I had let him in when he had knocked, and suggested that perhaps I might consider not destroying my brain with drugs.  I thought it was pretty cool that I was blacking out and doing things I didn’t remember; maybe I could go crazy after all.

Another time I got some morning glory seeds from the store and ate them.  Combined with pot, I found the high to be a jump-off point into another world that I was afraid to step into; but despite my fears I was relieved to discover that such a point in the spectrum of possible experiences existed, and was delighted that I could hold such a powerful trigger in the palm of my hand, not ready to jump off yet, but willing to consider doing it some other time.  I could literally feel myself psychically trying to hold two parts of me from separating from each other.  I was afraid to just let it happen.  As usual, people worried about me, and I didn’t want to do anything that might embarrass them.

Judas and I continued arguing about whether to go to California to join a hippie commune out there, or to go to Colorado to hide in a cave.  He finally gave in to my way of thinking after his last $22 was stolen.  He worked till his next paycheck came, then we packed up our backpacks and sleeping bags and Prunesquallor took us out to the freeway where we could hitchhike to Colorado to become cavemen for the rest of our lives.  He took us out to a rest stop in Russell, Kansas, driving at least 90 miles an hour, since he was late somewhere and had to get back to town, but he wanted to make sure he got us far enough from Hazing that we would not be tapping on his bedroom window in the middle of the night after giving up on getting a ride.  And he was wise to do so.  We were stuck at the rest stop for nearly 24 hours before we got smart and started asking people face-to-face for a ride.

Although being a hitchhiker was a matter of personal pride for the next several years, I cannot say that I ever liked it.  But I met people who did enjoy it and taught me better ways of going about doing it, and they had attitudes very different from the fear-driven attitude I usually had. These relaxed wanderers were taking their time, soaking in the experience, choosing their rides instead of begging from every car that drove past.

But I could never get to like it; I hated meeting people, so I didn’t really want anyone to stop and pick me up.