CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

In which I compete with famous movie stars and dead saints

 

Having succeeded in reaching my life goal—incarceration for insanity—at the age of 20, it remained only to finish my book, and then my only obligations to myself would be complete, and I could relax and gradually go to sleep in this place, and they would eventually bury me out back somewhere, and Pink Floyd could do an album about me.

In the meantime, I had Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a role model, not to mention my considerable experience as a hitchhiker, an acidhead, a novelist, a musician, a painter, a poet, a cult leader—I had a lot of reasons to be on an all-expenses-paid vacation: I had work to do and needed a place to do it, well away from the job market and the intense discomfort that any proximity to the job market always created in me.

When I first walked onto the ward, an extremely unkempt patient in baggy pants slung halfway down his ass (in 1976 this was not stylin’) mumbled up to me and asked me for a cigarette.  I told him I didn’t smoke, but he didn’t seem to care, and kept on mumbling, trying to shake my hand and welcome me to the ward.  I found out later he was the son of a Pentecostal minister.  He had an 11-inch tall fairy friend who would stand in the palm of his hand.  While the other patients watched TV, Lee Jones, the son of the Rev. Bro. Jones, would talk and laugh with his fairy, shaking her tiny little hand over and over, and chuckling softly at her response.  His eyes were nearly closed from the constant slamming of Thorazine or Stelazine or whatever the Great Doctor Brainbowl was pumping through his veins.

Next to introduce herself was a roly-poly redhead with buggy eyes and the auto-shuffling that marks a Stelazine-enhanced lifestyle.  She said her name was Rita and found out what my name was and shook my hand and asked me for a cigarette.  I announced that I did not smoke, and she wandered away, waving good-bye.

Next was St. Theresa, the patron saint of musicians or travelers or something, an angry prophetess played by a skinny 27-year old hippie chick from Kansas City and/or San Francisco—depending on which set of memories she was operating from at the time—Justerina Beena, as I called her, was a writer like me, and we ended up spending a lot of time together.  She became a member of the cult I had recently unfounded, the Unorganization, which was short for the Unorganized Church of the Latter-Day Germley Wizards of Sioux City Iowa.  I, Gunther Germley, was the Retired Instigator of the Unorganization, and Justerina Beena Germley was the Retired Secretary of the Unorganization.  Germley—properly spelled “gaumley or gormley”—is a hillbilly word for “besmirched;” my gay Master Craftsman friend from Miami had learned the term “germley whore” from his hillbilly cousins, who used it as an insult.  Hugh Leary applied the term to himself and anyone who appreciated his sense of humor, and I eventually changed “whore” to “wizard” to avoid getting dirty looks when I invited people to join my cult.

Other members of the Unorganized Church of the Latter-Day Germley Wizards of Sioux City Iowa, before and since, in no order of unimportance, included Prunesquallor Germley, Hermley Germley (Judas), Joybroth Feterita Germley, Sabin Lothar Germley, Loser Germley, Raffoon the Meek Germley, Pharqwar P. Germley, Mowlfangough Z. Germley, Batanwa Jim Germley, Dangle Steed Germley, Oshean Freewave Germley, Gwenhwyfar Germley (Shade Further), Asparagus Spears Germley, Babochka Bombadil Germley (another of my names), and one of my favorites, Bonzai Bosco Germley, who was Judas’s girlfriend later on when we lived in Santa Cruz, and had at one time been the personal secretary of Olivia Newton-John.  At the other end of the spectrum of success was Loser Germley, who materialized on Earth only for a short time so he could hang around in me and Joybroth’s living room waiting for us to get tired of him and kick him out.  That’s all I ever knew about him.  When Joybroth and I vacated that papier mache house, which Joybroth rented from his parents, Loser Germley probably just evaporated back to his home planet.

So here I was in the nuthouse, a goal-driven superachiever crowing from my own personal mountaintop, a multi-faceted cult leader at the age of 20.  On my first day at the nuthouse I danced on a table, I was so happy.   No longer were there consequences for being weird or different or needy; I was in my long-sought-after element. Surrounded by people worse off than I, it could only come to pass that I would tend to fool myself with a thin veneer of contrast-fueled bravado posing as self confidence.  On top of the tunnel vision, a highly selective memory had me convinced, from time to time, that my search was over, and my life had really just begun.  It wasn’t long before I found out that the staff in this heavenly place was there for me anytime I needed some attention, and negative attention was by far the easiest kind to get—and the most appealing to me anyway—so I was sitting pretty in Happyland: I had evil ward aides to fight with, and I was surrounded on all sides by people who looked up to me and thought I was their natural-born leader, or bull goose loony as Ken Kesey described the role in his novel.  I had horrible inhuman rules and living conditions to campaign against, and best of all, since this was before Reagonomics closed down every other ward in the hospital, I had peers in there.

Yes, indeed, right there in the booby-hatch alongside me were other borderline misfit depressed unmotivated marginally marginal but nowhere near off-the-edge types, in other words, there were at least four other people in my age bracket who didn’t drool on themselves or smoke the cotton part of the cigarette, most of whom had been transferred from jail for being too nice or just obviously in the wrong place..

Terry came from jail; he was a middle-class suburban 22-year-old black man with no record of criminal activity or mental illness, and now he was fighting to keep the Great Doctor Brainbowl from drugging him to death with Mellaril, a  current psychiatric favorite that made it impossible to breathe through your nose.  He was just getting out of jail free, for christsakes, and she wanted to keep him.  She lost the fight somehow and he got to go home after awhile.  It was exciting for all of us to see the Great Doctor Brainbowl let one get away by losing at a hearing, but we were sorry to see a good card player go, because playing Spades with two sets of partners was the only game that we all liked to play, and Justerina Beena was not good for cards; she was busy strutting around the ward spouting off In her best Gypsy accent, pissed at the world because I’d told her to stop being in love with me since it wasn’t going to get her anywhere.  Paul was OK but he was tranquilized, so he preferred to watch TV, as did some of the older depressed housewife types who could have played but probably didn’t want to be in a game with Helen, who was the most beautiful woman ever born, because she was spontaneous and demonstrative in her expression of enthusiasm.  Especially toward David Corkfin.  When those two played across the table from each other, their feet were always in each others’ laps.

Helen came from jail.  Besides having a sharp tongue and a quick glibness about her, she had gotten mixed up with her druggie husband on a burglary charge, but had no criminal record or intent; she just got screwed up partying with the wrong guy—her husband in this case—so they gave her a get out of jail free card too, and like Terry, she had no idea when or if her card would ever become good for a ride out of the State Hospital, where they can keep you as long as they want, since the mental patient has fewer rights than any prisoner.  She was the most normal and likable Italian girl from Hazing that I ever met, and I truly think she was a perfect human being.  It wasn’t till later that I realized I felt this way about her, because for one thing, she was going with David Corkfin of Washington DC, and I’m rarely infatuated with someone else’s woman, and two, I was busy fighting off the aggressive sexual thrust of Justerina Beena and/or St. Theresa, and two other young women on the ward.  One of them was only 17, and the other would not have fit anywhere in my life under any stretch of anything.  Yeah, she thought she was some famous actress, but she didn’t think it convincingly enough to be entertaining.  Her real problem in life was a long history of psychiatry.  It was the only game she knew.

Which leaves David Corkfin of Washington DC as the final holder of a get out of jail free card.  He was mischievous and sneaky, and could get away with little things that no one else would try, and he could smirk and swagger and con his way around Bigtown.  He was a fast-talking pretty boy from the crime capital of the world.  We got along fine but I couldn’t relax around him because he was a male with ego and self-confidence, an alpha dog to me.  My mind always goes blank when I’m around those kinds of guys; I never know what to say.  It has something to do with the way they call me “Pal” or “Buddy” or “Dude,” and I keep expecting them to call me “Fido” next.  David Corkfin used to buy skinny little joints from the janitors for $5 each, and he would share them with me in the bathroom where we would stand next to each other up on the rim of the toilet seat so we could blow our smoke into the ventilator.  Since we only got high about twice a month, it was always a major event, practically hallucinogenic for a weekender like me.  Once the janitor got us a hit of acid to split between us.  Heck, if it wasn’t for the janitors, I might not have stayed more than two weeks.

Then there were the nonfunctionals.  First in line is Bernie Mulch, a swarthy, wiry little man with a hooked nose, no teeth, bushy arched eyebrows, head and face covered with salt-and-pepper stubble building up toward his monthly shaving time; twisted knobby hands with long yellow nails that served as roach clips for the cigarette butts he smoked, till there was nothing (or just cotton) left to smoke.  Bernie’s eyes bugged out a little, and he had a tendency to fly into little rages in which he would start hollering Goddam summabitches!  Goddam summabitches!  while stomping over to the piano, where he would slam both hands down on the center keys several times in a slow, steady rhythm, and then for a finale he would spread his arms apart and slam once on the upper and lower keys, and to cap that off he would then pull the wooden key cover down over the keyboard, slamming it as loud as he could.  That was as violent as I ever saw him get except when people made fun of him, and then he was quick and scary.  Bernie liked to talk when he wasn’t fuming silently in the corner.  He had only enough intelligence to eat, shit, pee, sleep, walk, and try to express himself.  The combination of having no teeth and being either an idiot or madman or both made it hard to understand him.  He was hostile at first, but took a special liking to me since I talked to him so much and said hi to him and never made fun of him.  He liked to write his name: a piece of notebook paper with “Bernard Frederick Mulch” scrawled across it was a treasured keepsake of mine for years.  If delicately and patiently prompted, Bernie would start chattering in his loud, singsong way, in something like a Swedish accent.  He would tell me about his shotgun or something he used to own that he was proud of.  I only understood about every 20th word.  Occasionally Bernie would get horny and go stand in front of the aides’ station, grinning innocently and toothlessly at the women in the glass room, thrusting his bony little hips forward and crying out, I wanna make a baby!  I wanna make a baby!

Bernie’s counterpart in the female wing would be Melba.  She had it together enough to stand around the aide’s station begging for her “good cigarette.”  Please give me my good cigarette.  Why can’t I have my good cigarette.  Then she would stick her tongue out till it nearly touched her chin, and rub her cheekbones with her tight little fists, walk around a little, and come back to beg some more.

Tired old Muriel was a step closer to the rest of us, but she couldn’t control her temper and refused to control her bladder when she didn’t get her way.

A big smelly man would sit alone in another world, never conversing but occasionally yelling real loud and threatening some hallucinated bad guy with a call to the sheriff.

A retired Naval officer who couldn’t keep still, couldn’t keep his mouth shut, couldn’t leave people alone, and couldn’t keep his pants on dwindled into a chair in front of my eyes as the Great Doctor Brainbowl lulled him into non-behavior with enough Thorazine to stupefy an elephant.  By the time the Great Doctor Brainbowl got through with him, he couldn’t keep his eyes open long enough to get out of the chair.  That was mental health, as opposed to mental illness.  Before she drugged him, I wanted to kill him.  After she cured him, I wanted to kill her.

Oklahoma Winters was a huge dyke from guess where who would occasionally place herself in isolation voluntarily when she could feel an attack of furniture throwing coming on.

Mary Rogers was a pretty young woman whose fundamentalist Christian father had stopped on the way to put her in the nuthouse back in Big Springs, to get a motel room where he raped her one last time before giving her away to the State.  At Big Springs she was harassed and molested and raped and finally got to Topeka by turning 21, where at least she was only being drugged to death.  Once I tried to get her to do Primal Therapy, and she started hallucinating that I was the devil, and walked in circles for three days holding her face between her hands with a glazed, bug-eyed look.  That was the last time I tried to do Primal Therapy on anyone but myself.

Before that I had tried it on Kim.  He was a pale 19-year-old with buck teeth and a Dutch-boy haircut who had practically grown up in the nuthouse and would never leave.  He had no behavior problems that anybody cared about, was lucid, friendly and intelligent, didn’t seem to get depressed, and to top it all off, he was the Holy Spirit.  When I tried to do Primal Therapy on him, the head aide Mrs. Clara Friend walked in on us and I had to explain to her why Kim was laying in bed with his arms up in the air.  He was trying to get his mommy to pick him up.  Oh yeah, sure, so why don’t you go do primal scream therapy on yourself, and leave these poor patients alone so their doctor can help them?

And so I finally tried “Primalling,” and it was Mrs. Clara Friend who made me do it.  She saw me all depressed and bored and not going anywhere, and she said, “Come on in this room over here, lay down on the floor by the Ping-Pong table where you waste all your time anyway, when you’re supposed to be getting better, and start screaming about your childhood, because I’m tired of hearing you whine about it, and I won’t sit still for a handsome white boy like you feeling sorry for himself and not doing anything about it.”  So I did what she told me.  She held my hand and stroked my head while I screamed at my near-mute Grandpa Zdaemon for watching me, as a five-year-old, fall down a whole flight of stairs, give me a dirty look like I was stupid, and sneak away so he wouldn’t have to deal with it.

This was my Daddy’s role model.

Can you get where I was coming from?  Don’t look at my pretty face or my father’s front lawn.  Look at my foundation:  a mute grandfather, whose wife is a hand-wringing helpless person. A verbally abusive grandmother with a philandering drunk for an ex-husband; she hates my father, who came from the mute and the hand-wringer and then had to suck some old guy’s dick for a few months as his high school graduation present, and a mother who got married to the molestation victim solely because he emotionally blackmailed her into it.

Can you see where I was coming from?  Under any stretch of the imagination, can there be some remote possibility that somewhere along the line, someone in the family (like me) was going to feel compelled to play the role of Festering Wound in the family drama, in which the other family members would play the concerned-but-skeptical Infected Body that meddles and fusses with the festering wound but never recognizes its own meddling and fussing as related to the infection, and never sees the special role played by Festering Wound as the safety valve for the whole family’s excesses and lacks.

I did not want to accept the blame for people like my Mama and Daddy deciding to make babies.  Sooner or later I would have to try to accept some of the responsibility for my own existence, but not yet.