CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

In which I make fundamental progress in the direction I have chosen for myself

 

Before Batanwa Jim  called to tell me he was coming, the pressure to get a job had gotten hairy.

I had the player piano all ripped apart, but couldn’t stand to look at it.  The only part of the player piano I still liked was the air that made it work.  Something about that huge pile of parts demanded I not go near it unless I was in the mood.  Only true involvement could ever hope to sort out that mess.  I was truly involved with only one thing: how to create cash and/or psychedelic drugs out of thin air without leaving my room.  I didn’t even like to go downtown anymore; the spending money hadn’t stopped flowing my direction, but it was a loan now, and I didn’t need one of those.  All I needed was enough money for one thing: my next trip to Haight Ashbury.  I sat in my room and saved my spending money for a few weeks, waiting for the perfect excuse to split, and it came in the form of a gigantic argument with my Daddy over whether or not I should be expected to contribute to the household chores.  It was my position that he had been such a lousy father that my character development had been irretrievably botched, and I was therefore incapable of dealing with any responsibility whatsoever.  He was openly skeptical, and as always, seeing him try to disagree was a frightening thing to witness, sort of like watching someone try to shoe a horse for the very first time.

Heading for the freeway filled me with a sense of power, until hours later when I had gotten nowhere, and was trying to tell myself I hadn’t imagined hitchhiking successfully at other times in the past.  I eventually got to Haight Ashbury, but I am grateful to Whatever that I’m not forced to consciously remember every car that passed me during my hitchhiking years, and every drive-by shouting that was aimed at me for being one-down from the shouter.  It was about 6:00 one morning when I finally reached the Haight, and as exhausted as I was from lack of sleep, food, and privacy, it was not my idea of a good time to sit around for several hours waiting for all the druggies to float back into their bodies and re-inhabit the street, so I got right to work and scoured the deserted length of Haight Street till it ended, and then crossed over into Golden Gate Park, where I found a likely-looking target at last.

I walked up to the man, who had curly red hair worn in an afro, and asked him if he could help me find some LSD.  He asked me to help him adjust his glass eye by touching it and rotating the eye into position.  Once that task was accomplished and I could no longer see the little letters printed on the side of the eyeball, he was much easier to talk to, and he even said he’d try to help me.  He went into an apartment building, whether to get a weapon or some drugs, I knew not which, and he came back a few minutes later with fifteen hits of blotter acid on plain white paper.  I gave him the money and two hits of the acid for his trouble, and was headed back for Portland before the morning rush hour hit.

This was no pleasure cruise.  I didn’t even try the acid yet; it was for something important, and I needed it all at once for what I wanted to accomplish.  Insanity was the only way out, and if they wouldn’t believe me when I tried to tell them I wasn’t sane enough to get a job, then they would be made to believe me.

My Daddy was fairly well pleased to see me when I arrived home, and I played along with it, waiting for the right time to throw the dice for the last time.  One does not purposely cast away the last shred of his sanity forever without first deliberating upon the path that his life has taken, and not without first taking stock, nor without running through the pros and cons one more time—but . . . what the heck, 20 years is a long time to put up with this bullshit, let’s get it over with—it took only a few days to get the old man’s ire up about my lazy, no-good, lounge-around-the-house attitude.  All I needed was one more good pissing contest with him and I’d be over the hump, ready to go to wherever forever, and this time I had the provisions for the journey.

Knowing what this was leading to, I stretched the dramatic potential of our next row as far as I could, eventually locking myself in my room with furniture stacked in front of the door to keep him from barging in to work things out with me.  And—how did I know?—I did have to push the door shut to keep him from coming through.  Finally he got into his car and drove off, and I went outside for a walk.  It was twilight, my favorite time of day, as I calmly chewed the wad of paper in my mouth that had been thirteen hits of blotter acid.  I enjoyed my walk intensely, as it was to be my last wearisome trudge through the lackluster motel that the non-psychotic call reality.  But I only stayed outside long enough to get the wad of paper completely masticated and drained of any potential LSD; then I planted the wad at the base of a tree and hurried home, knowing that I would not have long to wait; I didn’t want anyone to see me coming on to that much acid.

I had no reason to expect that I would be doing much laughing.

My Daddy had already gotten home, and it was just turning dark as I sauntered through the front door, and plopped down in the living room in the big recliner we’d inherited from my Daddy’s Daddy.  I didn’t respond to whatever my Daddy said to me, for I was on my way already and had nothing more to say to him anyway.  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.  When I opened them again, I couldn’t tolerate the light of the lamp next to me, and reached out to turn it off, and discovered that my hand was quivering.  I fought off panic by taking long, deep breaths, but to keep ahead of the panic I ended up taking those long deep breaths faster and faster, till I didn’t know what I could do next to prevent total loss of control.  I couldn’t respond to whatever my Daddy was saying to me—something about if I needed a doctor or whatever.  He soon ran out of the house like it was on fire, and with him gone, the pressure level decreased enough that I had the confidence to open my eyes again.

Shitfire and damnation, brothers and sisters, I am not joking, the walls were not only bending and melting all over the place, just like they did in the junior high school health class anti-drug scare-tactic movies, but it was happening with an accelerating intensity that was not only too much for a closet lightweight like me, but somehow involved me in experiencing the fear of immediate death or the dismemberment of my individual existence—my awareness of me—in a way that was not even remotely palatable under any stretch of my imagination now that it was actually on my plate.  I began shuddering violently and clamped my eyes shut.  I knew I was a goner.  This was not going to be a survivable experience.  I faced the death of my world, if not my body, with absolutely no courage, no resources, and no ideas, certain that a heart attack was building in my chest, until—

—it came home to me that my Daddy was out of the house, and I could forget being nervous and fearful about his feelings and concentrate on what I could do to avoid pointlessly dying from a heart attack caused only by fear.  It took everything I had to calm down enough to think of just one idea, some way I could try to prevent complete collapse of my reality—

—That’s it!  Throw up!  Barf!  Puke!  The age old savior of shamans, our ability to regurgitate overdoses of experimental forest debris.  I wasted no time in rolling out of the chair and crawled full tilt in the general direction of the place where people should go when they need to vomit, and at that point I believe the rest was Standard, till I got my face washed off and returned to the living room.

I was mighty shaky but felt 1000% better and was fairly certain that I was not going to have a heart attack.  I wobbled through the dark living room to the dark picture window that looked out over the dried up dirt clods which comprised our front yard; the house had just been built and had no lawn.  But it wasn’t dirt clods that I saw.  I stared at the ground, but it was a mass of seething, writhing growing plants, mostly purple but some emerald green.  I decided that I was not only not going to lose my sanity the way I’d just lost my dinner, but I stood a pretty good chance of having a good old time tripping on LSD for hours and hours, with nothing to complain about.  I lay down on the couch and gazed toward the window, in awe of what filled the empty air between me and the wall.

It was a little red demon.  I stared at him and he turned into me.

When my Daddy rushed back in a little later accompanied by our next door neighbor, who was a doctor, I was talking, laughing, and singing, puking words with the greatest spontaneity and joy imaginable, and generally having the best time of my life.  As a matter of fact, I was so ecstatic about my existence in the universe that I wouldn’t keep my mouth shut, and a natural-feeling self-confidence told me what to say to the idiots around me to keep them from screwing up my good time for the next several hours as I happily entertained my Daddy, the next door neighbor, and my Daddy’s new girlfriend Marleen.  Then I put on a real good monologue for the psychiatrist at the emergency room, who wouldn’t admit me because I was having too much fun and he needed his beds for people who were suffering.  The student shrink with him thoroughly enjoyed whatever it was that I had to say, and he kept snickering at my twistedly ironic pronouncements, looking out of the corner of his eye to see if his boss the shrink had shown any signs of disapproval of either the fun I was having or the fun he was having.

I told my Daddy and the doctor who lived next door and my Daddy’s new girlfriend Marleen and the psychiatrist at the emergency room and the shrink’s assistant and any stranger who  would look me in the eye that it was an acid flashback, and that was the end of that for the time being. Fortunately, a business trip took my Daddy out of the house the very next day and we didn’t have to talk about it much.

Right after that, Batanwa Jim showed up.  My Daddy was polite as usual but I sensed that I needed to use my friend as a springboard away from my Daddy’s veiled hostility, which you couldn’t criticize him for since it was disguised as concern, and therefore couldn’t be addressed as the hostility, jealousy, paranoia, or self-righteousness that it was.  Batanwa Jim felt guilty for quitting school and insisted that we join the Navy immediately to atone for it.  Since nothing more palatable was being aggressively pushed in my direction, I put up only a little fuss and then went with whatever rationalization fit for the moment and accompanied him to the recruiting station, where we went through two days of tests and procedures—while stoned on our asses—till we had our appointments set to enlist on the very next day.

We went back to my Daddy’s house and got to work on the front yard, which we were supposed to be flattening and smoothening in preparation for the lawn he was going to plant there.  It was hot in the sun.  We were sweating.  Our muscles hurt.  We were getting blisters.  We were getting dirty, for christsakes.

I looked at Batanwa Jim, leaning on his shovel.  He looked at me, and the evil broguish laugh start building inside him.  “Fuck this!”  he cried, “We’re fooling ourselves.  We don’t wanna join the Navy.  Let’s go to Haight Ashbury.”

I couldn’t think of a better idea myself.  I could still feel the Navy doctor’s eyeballs rolling up my rectum as I spread ‘em.  I needed some good drugs to get over that one.

Once we got to San Francisco, our first stop was the neighborhood where our old buddy Judas had supposedly ended up, according to Batanwa Jim’s sources.  The nice lady who came to the front door almost in a towel told us our friend was not anyone she knew, and she had never heard of the Commune of Modern Lovers that supposedly resided at her address.  So we walked up and down Pine Street, since Batanwa Jim wasn’t sure he had remembered the address right anyway, and we hollered out Judas’s name, in case he was in one of the very houses we were passing by.  Nothing came of it though, so we got into Batanwa Jim’s car and headed over to a used car lot, after first badgering a bank officer to let Batanwa Jim get all the money out of his Kansas savings account: funds he’d received from his financial aid check, since he was supposed to be in college.  We sold his car for whatever pittance we could get, and got on the bus for the Haight Ashbury district.

Batanwa Jim was better at accosting strangers than I, since he wasn’t worried about his dignity; remember, he had always been convinced that getting busted for drugs would ruin his life, so what we were doing was to him a suicidaloid act, and therefore a reason to stop worrying and have a good time, whereas to me, our quest was just a place to hide while I festered and fretted about my need to feel competent and independent, which never ceased to be a distraction from my desire to get altered as much as possible as often as possible.  Maybe I felt guilty for getting Batanwa Jim to liquidate his assets and trade literally all of them for drugs, which we intended to take back to Hazing, Kansas and start our own business with.  Some part of me knew the truth: I was a bored, cynical, immature, narcissistic know-it-all with a superior attitude, taking advantage of someone who was as openly innocent as I pretended not to be, as honest as I pretended to be, and as lost as I wished I had the courage to get.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but Batanwa Jim’s aiming at the moon was not a passing phase; what I professed to want, he eventually went out and got.

The first person we stopped on the street turned out to be a drug dealer, and he escorted us to his apartment.  When he found out we were from Kansas, he felt safe leaving us there for the night so he could go out to an all-night party.  Batanwa Jim and I sampled our new purchases heavily.  Then I walked over to another apartment building to buy some acid from a friend of our dealer’s who had stopped by the apartment earlier.  When I got there it was about 11:00 at night and there were several young teenagers standing around, scattered loosely around the outside of the building, all of them staring at me in stony-faced silence.  I figured I was about to meet the city on its own terms.  A young man sauntered up to me and grabbed my collar, demanding that I turn over the drugs.  I was so blasted from smoking pot that I found it easy and natural to act confused, like a nut on the street who barely knows what’s going on around him.  Not that far from the truth, but instead of telling the young fellow that I was a businessman on his rounds, I said I didn’t have any drugs and he obviously had me mixed up with someone else.  He kept saying silly antagonistic things so I finally told him I was too stoned to talk to him, and I excused myself and walked past all his nice attentive friends and into the building.

A partially enclosed stairway wound up the outside of the building, which I climbed to the very top as I’d been instructed.  At each landing, four more eyeballs stared me down.  I kept expecting to get jumped, but I needed that acid and took the chance that the acid dealer’s invitation might actually be something other than an ambush.  I got to the top of the stairs without further conversation, and my acquaintance let me in.

The large apartment was bare of furniture except for a table in the kitchen, a TV that blared at top volume the whole time I was there, and a blacklight.  Maybe one poster.  No, just the blacklight.  My good friend was on the phone when I arrived, and I sat there very patiently and waited while the tall, gaunt, pockmarked, jittery dealerman practically shouted into the telephone for at least 15 minutes, something about, Don’t do that, I’ll take care of it, please please please hold off just one more day!—that kind of stuff.  I was pretty much kissing my ass good-bye at that point, because guys like me in the movies come out from Kansas and get mixed up with the wrong people and get killed all the time.

Anyhow, the dude finally got off the phone, and come to find out, the shouting was his normal tone of voice, which made me feel better about the level of desperation I thought I’d sensed in the conversation I’d just witnessed.  He got some little baggies out of his freezer and held them up to his blacklight for me.  He said you could tell it was real acid by the way it glowed in the blacklight, and told me to always check that way when purchasing acid.  I got out of there as fast as I could, which was not nearly fast enough, but by the time he’d smoked a pack of cigarettes and I was ready to pass out from the lack of oxygen and the blaring of the TV and my compadre’s constant yammering about nothing, I finally worked up the nerve to back toward the door, grinning and waving, nothing if not grateful, but I gotta go and thank you very much.

My guardians were still at their posts but no one stopped me this time.  I hurried back to the other apartment, the LSD  burning a hole in my pocket.  I couldn’t wait to get some sleep so I could wake up fresh and start tripping!

As I have mentioned earlier in this discourse, it was my highly unfortunate experience to spend the night shivering uncontrollably on the doorstep with a notable quantity of illegal drugs in my pocket because Batanwa Jim was hopelessly comatose till morning and the other building tenants not only wouldn’t let me in, but threatened to call the police if I didn’t stop buzzing.  I comforted myself through the interminable hours in the cold San Francisco night wind by pretending it was also raining sheets of icy needles, and then marveling at how warm I felt, under the circumstances.  For a street person, I was too stupidly timid; I sat there miserable all night from having to pee, and never stood up and did it.  I never left the doorstep all night.  Finally just at dawn, Batanwa Jim woke up and stumbled down the stairs to let me in, apologizing profusely.  I didn’t care; the nightmare was over and I had my acid, we had a pound of good pot, a pound of bad pot, and an ounce of the best pot I’d ever tasted: very expensive Thai stick at a discount price.

We headed for the freeway and before too very long we were headed back for Kansas.  We got dropped off in Reno and had to walk all the way through town and kept walking all the way through Sparks, because no one would pull off onto the shoulder of the freeway and pick us up.  Batanwa Jim kept hollering his new theme song, “Pissing in the Wind” by Jerry Jeff Walker: “Pissin’ in the wind, bettin’ on a losing friend, making the same mistakes we swore we’d never make again, pissin’ in the wind, but it’s blowin’ on all our friends, we’re gonna sit and grin and tell our grandchildren.”  We finally got to a rest area two miles past Sparks and I slept in my nice warm sleeping bag while he froze all night, trying to stay warm in the men’s room.  I suffered all night from guilty nightmares and woke up refreshed and happy the next morning with Batanwa Jim shaking me, clutching himself and hopping up and down to stay warm, ordering me through chattering teeth to get my stuff together because he’d found us a ride and we had to go now.  On the way to the car he upbraided me for telling him to mail his sleeping bag to Kansas, but his pissy mood had no impact on my bubble of anticipation.

I am a drug dealer now!  I am in business!  Competent, relaxed, friendly, good sense of humor, leader among men.  Someone with something to say.  No more bumming around after this first batch gets sold, it’s Easy Street from now on, and plenty of drugs all the time.  I couldn’t believe how well it had all worked out in the end, and to top it off, Batanwa Jim was willing to get a job to finance our living quarters, so I would not have to notify my family that I was back in town.  Of my family members, only my Mama remained in Hazing.  She lived alone with her dog in the little house she had bought for herself after my Daddy left her for the last time.  At this time I considered my family, especially my Mama and my Daddy, to be at fault for my Primal Pain, which explained my unusual circumstances, therefore it was hard to be around them because they kept making these noises like I should be responsible for myself when they knew good and well that I was too messed up by their incompetence as parents to ever rejoin mainstream society more than absolutely necessary.  Not only that, but even when they were nice to me, which my Mama was more than she had ever been when she was married to my Daddy, I still couldn’t be around them for more than a few days before I would become irritated with their mannerisms, the obvious signs of their insecurities and emotional inadequacies that they left lying around like turds on their own lawn.  It is distressing to find yourself flying into a rage every time your parent says or does something.  It’s hard to control your behavior when you feel like that.  So I dismissed them all and let them wonder where I was and what I was doing.

Batanwa Jim got a job right away and borrowed money from someone so we could get off the street quick and into an apartment.  It was my chore, as his roommate, to—well, never mind, my friend was nice to me for what seemed like a long time, but probably amounted to only a month.  I sure was grateful that he didn’t mind working for our living, and I doubt that I told him that, since my act was scornful of anyone guilty of that goody-goody middle-of-the-road politeness.  Isn’t it simple enough that if a person—like me—wants to blast out of the state of mind his parents left  him with, then that person has the right to make that decision and take that journey without consulting any other person on the Earth about it?  Who can tell me not to go insane?

Especially if she doesn’t know I’m in town.

We spent every evening in Batanwa Jim’s apartyment, under a huge gold and red parachute that we’d hung to cover the ceiling.  It gave the impression that we were in a cave.  We sat around a candle with our important new friends: the guys who planned to “buy some” as soon as they could.  Meanwhile, our PR campaign—or just the excitement of being suddenly popular—helped to dwindle the supply of marijuana that we were supposed to be selling.

I also helped personally in this regard, since I had an insatiable appetite for attention, and have found many times that the way one’s attention fondles one’s own metaphorical insides can be very satisfying—though only temporarily and with a substantial price—when one is stoned on marijuana.  It was so heavenly to have my own supply of free marijuana that I became ecstatic and spontaneous, writing down all my ingenious thoughts, and besides that I started writing a novel called It Fell from Heaven: Suicide Dance Interviews.  The empty apartment was mine all day with Batanwa Jim at work and an ounce of Thai stick just sitting there waiting for me to sell it, but by the time I’d sampled it for breakfast, I didn’t want to leave the house, and besides that the ideas were stampeding through my brain and I had to write them down fast before they were forgotten.  I found it became necessary to roll larger joints of the Thai weed, because the rolling papers we had bought were so big that they didn’t work right if you tried to roll a small joint.  It also became obvious to me that it was much more efficient to keep working continuously, and not have to stop and roll another joint all the time, so I would roll several large joints of the Thai weed before I set out to do what I had to do for the day, which would be either to go over to harass Larry Love at the Rabid Flock Jesus Fellowship House, by blowing marijuana smoke in his face, or hang out with Lothar, who was really sweet, but she still didn’t want to get naked with me, or go to the library, or as was the norm, the commute was just over to the soft chair by the window where I would sit and smoke and work on my novel all day till Batanwa Jim would find me approaching zombification at the end of his long work day.  I was elated to be on a self-destructive binge; no bathing, little eating, and no real sleeping, just a 24 hour fog blending into itself as time passed unnoticed by me.

One night I took acid on top of beer and pot, which was a first for me, and I must confess, that was a very formative night in my development since I finally discovered what they were talking about in  those junior high drug panic movies: the monster I had formed in my visual field, where I lay practically under the bed to avoid light and sound, wouldn’t go away.  That was not a boring experience, and I even swore off drugs a couple times in a couple hours, before I finally realized that the urge to puke—and most of the panic was just caused by embarrassment that the others might see me puke—the urge to puke could be diluted many times over if I would just belch a couple of times to relieve the feeling of pressure in my tummy caused by nervous stomach gases.  With that settled, I had to puke anyway, because I had taken acid on top of beer and pot, and I am one of those people who has no tolerance for any of that stuff.  The part that scares the puke out of you is this: what if this alteration I‘m undergoing is in control of me, and what if my control never returns?  What if I’m trapped in this self-actuating nightmare forever?

But it’s really just your own shit haunting you.  All psychedelic drugs including pot loosen up your compacted shit and some of it starts to leak out.  Thus the potential for anyone to have a bad trip on anything.

At these great meetings of minds under the parachute, I would quote from my notes, my novel and my poetry.  It was delicious to have finally arrived.  Here is an example of some verses I wrote during hitchhiking tours, which I probably repeated endlessly for my audience, which was too stoned to get up and leave:

 

Next time you find

as you drive down the highway

you’re bladder’s so full

that your hair starts to curl,

pull over quickly

and grin at the passing motorcars

as you zip down,

flap it out, and piss on the world.

 

Next time they bust you with your fingers in the dust

as you’re just in the midst of inhaling a crime,

try to explain to the piglets at play

that fantasy is sacred, delusion divine.

 

Blessed Virgin Mother Mary

got knocked up but kept her cherry.

How she did it I don’t know,

but nonetheless it goes to show

that birth control ain’t all it should be:

if God thinks you could be a would-be

mother of a Holy Babe,

your virginity can’t hope to save you.

So beware, young virgins, if you’re shapely,

the Holy Ghost might come and rape you.

 

These orgies of sitting around got so good I cannot remember them.  I can’t remember who was there or what we talked about.  I think I had to entertain those fools.  I don’t remember what I said to keep them there so long.  Oh, that’s right.  It’s coming back to me.  I was ready to fly over the cuckoo’s nest.  I was planning to go loony, so I could get free lodging at the State Hospital.  I obsessively maintained that it was the only practical solution to my dilemma; that way my friends wouldn’t have to take care of me, and besides I really needed to punish myself in Batanwa Jim’s presence, because he had put his education, his savings, his car, and potentially, his life and his sanity and his freedom on the line for me so I could sit around and smoke huge joint after huge joint of his best weed, which he had sold his car to buy so I could become a successful pot salesman.  Batanwa Jim finally asked me to be out of the apartment by morning.

In the morning, Batanwa Jim was sorry he had told me to leave, and he said we could work something out; I could get a job and we could keep the apartment together and party every night.  I explained that I had purposely traveled to the end of my rope in order to get them to put me away, and now I had reached my goal, bloated as I was with pot and LSD, this was my opportunity to get my foot in the door down at the State Hospital in Topeka, and now that I was unshowered and underfed, and now that I didn’t have to act, in order to act genuinely confused, I felt that it was the perfect time to make that move into the life I’d always envisioned for myself: the life of a chronic, hospitalized mental patient who never has to think about making a living, ever again in his life.

The funny part is that all this avoidance of working was not due to laziness; it wasn’t avoidance of working at all.  It was actually the avoidance of asking for a job.  Getting jobs would have been easy for me, if the asking could just get done; looking for jobs was kept as a distant, vague goal, if that; something I just wasn’t ready for.  So unready for it, as a matter of fact, that I was willing to chemically bolster my actual incompetence to find a safe asylum in the asylum, to avoid having to think about my duty to my future.

I could no longer put off the next stage in my development, which was to show up on my Mama’s doorstep, destitute, dirty and bedraggled, ready for her to do all the work of convincing the State Hospital that I needed to move in with them.  Since I had to be in just the right mood to show up on my Mama’s doorstep with demands and a new project for her to accomplish, I was forced to show up at her job where she worked, because that’s where she was when the mood struck me—in other words, I had no pot, and a major emotional freak-out was obviously the only way to go, because I’d be all cleaned up soon and wouldn’t be able to keep up the crazed act once I had clean clothes on.  In order to accomplish a major emotional freak-out with the minimum of attention from my Mama’s boss, I decided on giving her the silent treatment.  So I walked into her office, shocking her since she had no idea I was in town, and sat down next to her desk.  I commanded her to put me in the Topeka State Hospital immediately, and refused to speak after that.  It wasn’t long before 5:00 rolled around about an hour and a half early, and she whisked me off to her little house to get me cleaned up and try to get some information out of me.

Let me briefly mention that the 1700 miles between my Mama and my Daddy had improved her personality and demeanor by a good 25% or more. At that rate, each mile she got away from my Daddy had increased her personality at the rate of .015% per mile.  I later found out that not only distance, but also the passing of time away from her child-rearing years, tended to improve her disposition.  It’s a good thing, because I called upon her from time to time over the next few years to give me a place to stay.

I was horrified to learn that there was a waiting list for entry into the nuthouse by voluntary commitment, and I had done nothing that my Mama knew of for sure that should get me committed by her, so I had to sit around feeling all clean and spiffy in my Mama’s house for about two weeks waiting for a bed to open up at the nuthouse.  I enjoyed myself immensely, and wrote a major guitar fingerpicking epic in the ragtime style I’d learned as a teenager, which I called “Prunesquallor.”  It started out, “Old friends are worse than old habits . . . “ which I later changed so I could actually play it for my friends.

While I lounged around in my Mama’s house playing the guitar and working on my novel, my Mama was proceeding to silently get worked up about putting her son to the snake pit.  She had some of the symptoms of the flu, and said she was dizzy and was afraid she was going to faint.  One morning I was lying in bed when from her bedroom I heard a loud THUMP which was literally the worst sound I have yet to hear in my life; the sound of my Mama falling on her face in the next room.  I could hardly stand to go look, and wondered what kind of day I was in for because of this.  I found her barely conscious, and got her into her bed with a little help from her.  She told me to call the doctor and get her the soonest appointment possible.  They gave me a date three days away, and when I informed her of this, she begged me to call them back and tell them she had just fainted and fallen on her face and she couldn’t stand up or walk and there was blood coming out of her mouth.  I called them back and told them these things, and they said bring her on in, so I brought her on in and they put her in a wheelchair and zipped her on back to an inspection room, and it wasn’t more than five minutes before her doctor came out and asked me to follow that ambulance I could see out the window over to the hospital, because my Mama was in it and I would be needed to fill out some forms.

It turned out that I had given my Mama a peptic ulcer by failing to be a successful adult, and I hadn’t even realized she was upset about it.  She was still in intensive care a week later when the Reverend Jim Racey came over and informed me that the nuthouse finally had a bed for me, and he would haul me over to Topeka himself the very next day.

Naturally it seemed important to appear as insane as possible for the big induction, so that evening I spent under the parachute at Batanwa Jim’s house, putting enough LSD into my system that I was worried about myself, but had no problems, and Batanwa Jim took nine hits and complained that the acid wasn’t very strong.  That was true, but at least we had a lot of it.  It was our goal that night to finish it off, because Batanwa Jim said he was swearing off drugs after this; he wanted to go back to school or join the Navy or something.  His Daddy was threatening to disown him for refusing to join ROTC, and he wanted to move back home to save money, so he had to get sober.  It sounded like a bunch of hogwash to me.  We stayed up all night lashing out at each other like a couple of drunks in a pub, trying to have a normal night of verbal aggression and bitterly knowing that this was good-bye.

Finally I headed out into the early morning. Batanwa Jim begged me to change my mind about going to the nuthouse.  I kept on going.

You know what the Rev. Jim Racey said to me on the way to Topeka?  He said that my Mama’s ulcer was an indication that she wasn’t doing as well as she wanted people to think.

Let me tell you a story.  When me and Batanwa Jim had been driving down the coast highway from Portland to San Francisco, we stopped at the side of the road to smoke some hash.  The car was parked pointing straight out toward the ocean which was way below us since we were perched at the very edge of a tall cliff.  Looking out the windshield, it looked like we were flying, because you couldn’t see anything in front of the car but sky and ocean.  Presently we passed out and it got dark and we just slept in our seats there in the car.  I was a little disappointed that he’d passed out so soon, because I could have smoked some more hashish.

Then he started having these fits in his sleep: he would start thrashing around, his eyes closed, looking for his car keys, shouting, “Stop the car!  Stop the car!”  while he tried to start the car.  This happened a dozen times during the night, and I was very worried that he had gone crazy and would not come out of it.  That would ruin all my chances of getting him to sell the car for drug money.  I took the car keys out of the ignition and waited for morning; he finally woke up normally, completely oblivious that anything had happened besides normal sleeping.  I explained it all to him, and he was so impressed that he suggested I load up another bowl.

I define our friendship by that experience.  While it disturbed me to see him become confused and useless, it was necessary to bring him to just such a place so I could get what I wanted.  You see, my friends, all this acting up and being nutty was good for me; I needed the shock, I needed to destabilize the rigid  system that I’d built up since age 1-1/2 when my normal personality was splintered or bruised or whatever happened to it.

My Mama thinks splintered is too strong a word.

Splintered.

Batanwa Jim, on the other hand, needed to be in school, learning to be a good boy, and instead I dragged him out into the middle of an arena that he always knew would destroy him.

Not that I was a bad person; I just did a bad thing in another misguided effort to smooth over the panic that had spread throughout my body the day I first left my Mama and Daddy’s house, a fledgling nobody.