CHAPTER THIRTY

In which a haze begins to form around the concept of living somewhere

 

Now that I was out in the world trying to work against doctor’s orders, it would have been easy and natural for me, rebel that I am, to prove the Great Doctor Brainbowl wrong by doing better at Albuquerque Piano Service the second time around, but if that was going to be the case, then it would have been my idea to go back there, right?  As it was, I did what I could with what I had, which was trying to take a responsible, active interest in my Daddy’s irresponsible, meddlesome, neurotic, passive-aggressive idea of solving my problems for me, so he wouldn’t have to learn how to deal with the reality of having failed to teach me right when he had a chance.  It was like trying to grab a fish in your hand as it slithers through its own element, when you don’t know why you’re trying to grab the fish to begin with.

And besides that, the government had refused to put me on disability, even after the Great Doctor Brainbowl had decreed that I was unfit for the labor force.  I found out later that the rejection of disability benefits could have been caused by one or more of my parents going up against the Great One’s decree.  The official excuse that the Social Security Administration gave was that they believed I would invest their financial contributions in illicit substances.

As a tenant in my sister Mo’s apartment, and a provenly insane one at that, I felt that it was pretty much up to me to go ahead and do what I wanted when I wanted and smell her apartment up with pot and tobacco smoke like it was my own apartment—

—But wait.  That was another time, later on.  How many times did I stay with her?  This is the confusing part.  Do you know, I had moved at least 120 times by the turn of the century?  Hitchhiked 10,000 miles by the age of 23, back and forth from Kansas to California and Oregon, all by myself.  And I never once begged for money, food or shelter from a stranger.  Well, just once.  I asked some guys that gave me a long ride into a cold night drizzle if I could sleep in their van while they slept in their motel room.  Of course I couldn’t; it was an automatic rejection.  I never asked for anything from a ride again, except maybe a ride, or a cigarette.

So here I am in Albuquerque working for Max and Lila again, rebuilding player pianos, trying to correct leftover problems from a rebuild job I had started last time that hadn’t panned out, hating it very much, and getting into the habit of coming in late and staying late, which they didn’t mind since I had a key, but the only problem was that very little work was getting done. Because of the lack of supervision and the resulting multitudinous opportunities for distraction, and the fact that it was getting dark and I was getting drunk on Max’s beer, and the possibility that I might have pot at home waiting for me if my next door neighbor the drug dealer had gotten his shipment in from Oaxaca, Mexico, and because I hated player pianos more with every passing moment, and because—though I didn’t realize it yet—I was a perfectionistic, duty-bound, rule-quoting geek who used the act of going to a job as the perfect opportunity to suddenly shrivel up: an anti-social basket case, I hated going to a job or being at one, and most especially encountering other people at one; because of all these things, a distinctly low level of productivity was digging me into a hole, since I got paid by the job, not by the hour, and there wasn’t really going to be anything I could do about it, after a certain point of insanity had been reached, with my limited budget.

I had gotten an apartment in an apartment building, with a carpet that smelled like it had been halfway cleaned and then slow-dried, after being used for a doggy toilet by the most recent prior tenant.  My ex-brother-in-law Aaron, who had his own place now, helped me haul four twin-sized mattresses over to my new place so I could use them to build a Primal Scream Chamber that would allow me to make infinite noise in my apartment without anybody hearing me.  Since I blew my budget on the mattresses, not to mention the two ounces of Oaxacan flowertops I had ordered, there was nothing much to do, not much to eat, no money to spend, just an empty apartment that couldn’t possibly remind me of anything except my own empty shell.

I managed to build a mattress coffin by balancing the mattresses on each other so that I could crawl inside a conduit surrounded on all sides by sound-absorbing material, except on the two ends, which were open.  Hopefully not much sound would go that way.

I tried like heck to get in the mood to crawl in there and start working up some indicator of repressed emotion stored inside me, but I was depressed and the apartment was smelly and there was nothing to do—and still no pot to smoke—and eventually I did end up crawling in to see if I could work something up, and what should I find in there but a two-inch long shiny black cockroach clinging perilously to the ceiling of my Primal Chamber, a foot-and-a-half directly above my face.  I screamed like a man about to be murdered and scurried out of there.

On my 21st birthday, I was alone with a bottle of cheap blackberry brandy, which I drank all of, then got sick and went to bed.  I am happy to report that I never used overdoses of alcohol to try to accomplish any of my twisted, masochistic plans for myself, ever again.  My maximum regular alcohol intake at any time in my life—and this was only a few scattered months in my life—was maybe two beers a night.  I think that is a good sign, like there might be a part of me that believes and acts in support of self-preservation over self-gratification.

My Oaxacan buds finally showed up, so I spent that all-important week after my 21st birthday skipping work so I could know what that was like; accompanied by my good friend Oaxaca, along with my old buddies: guilt, fear of starvation, and my ever-present companion, fear of disapproval, I got a lot of inner socializing done in a stupor throughout one long binge of How Far Away Can I Get From The Voices—boundless paranoia, unfounded guilt, homicidal rage, suicidal fantasies, etc.—that torture me day in and day out, every day of the year?  I lay on a mattress in the living room, smoking pot and writing gibberish in my journal, getting more and more depressed, because I wanted to tell someone that I had already given up and should not be expected to deal with the consequences, but I didn’t know who to talk to about it, because I couldn’t imagine anyone having a response that would be useful to me.  But with increased levels of THC saturation in my system, it eventually became obvious to me that there was nothing in Albuquerque except my sister and my niece to keep me from heading for the freeway, and I couldn’t smoke pot around them.

One evening I had an odd thought: Why not quit smoking pot?

It was a novel idea.  I set it on a back burner and let it simmer unattended.

It was right after I scored the two ounces of killer Oaxacan that I had realized that I had gotten myself into a situation by accepting this job where I was living my Daddy’s mental construct of what he thought my life should be like, and after writing mean letters to my parents which I signed “Your Favorite Mistake,” I walked to the edge of town with my backpack and guitar, dropping a letter to my sister Mo in the mailbox on the way out of town, thus delivering unto her the key to my apartment and the deeply rewarding task of packing, storing and shipping the stuff I had left there.  I found out later she didn’t think too highly of me for doing this to her, but at the time it seemed like the responsible thing to do, since I didn’t want to lose all my stuff.  I had about two boxes full of personal mementos, writings, and journals, not to mention some dishes and a few clothes, though I usually wore my personal uniform, which was an old green jumpsuit with an embroidered scarlet Chinese dragon on the back.  But I would need my stuff, if I couldn’t find some acid.  What’s funny is I had some acid coming, on backorder from my next door neighbor the drug dealer, but I couldn’t sit tight a few more days and wait for my paid-for quantity of LSD; and when my sister Mo came by to get my stuff out of the apartment, and my neighbor ran out and asked her if she wanted my LSD, she told him no and then she told him to fuck off.  But it was me she was pissed at.

Or was it someone else who we were both pissed at?  Was it my idea to take back a job I hated, when I had free rent and freedom to experiment in Topeka?  In case anybody ever bothered to notice, something about Albuquerque always brought out the worst in me.  But my Daddy didn’t take that into account when he indulged his urge to dabble in my life by sending me back to the boneyard where I’d almost perished twice before.  Was he trying to make me into a martyr so he would have a dead child to worship posthumously?  He couldn’t just let me languish in the nuthouse a few more months till I could finish making a plan for my life, which might have motivated me to learn how to earn favor with people to get advancement (get off Step Zero), like my Daddy knew how to do, or find some other way of getting somewhere in life, which could have been my true inner goal underneath my psycho-socio-suicidal facade.

Whatever the truth of the matter is about what might have happened but never did, it will be found duly recorded up in the big book they stick back in the back of the coat closet just inside the Pearly Gates, where all things are duly recorded.  In the meantime, the truth as I see it is that I was in a blind panic and had been since the first moment I had set off from my Mama and Daddy’s house to attend piano tuning school at the age of 18.

 

Enough pleasantries.  It is now time to introduce my friend Joybroth.  He was a friend of Judas who I’d met through Batanwa Jim who was a friend of Shade Further who was introduced to me by my Daddy because his friend at work was Shade Further’s Daddy.  Joybroth and Judas had a paper route together.  Joybroth was a medium-sized, oily, sweaty, red-faced, grinning, attention-sponge/clown who was still doing the crazy-stupid act in high school that I had tried in junior high.  The hyperactive act he used to blame on the fact that he was born with a hernia, and because his Scorpio Daddy used to beat him, until his Daddy got a Master’s Degree in Psychology, at which time he felt it would be appropriate to stop beating his children.  Joybroth used to stride robotlike through the halls at top speed, like an android on amphetamine, his bumpy red face highlighted by the way his eyes bugged out; a mask-like, frozen quality to his glistening facial features.

Somehow I found out that Joybroth had gotten his own place, so I hitchhiked to Hazing, Kansas and looked him up.  It was a cardboard shack he was renting from his parents.  His Mama had a Master’s Degree in Psychology too.  So here I was, sitting pretty again, bouncing in and out of Joybroth’s house, and he was overjoyed to have me, because we could be weird together, practice making stupid noises, and try to get girls to come over to the house.  The Unorganization was really taking off, and we had more converts than we knew what to do with.  Since Joybroth made good money working for the city as a garbage man, I wasn’t under much pressure to do anything; besides, Joybroth had wrecked his motorcycle and was laid up on disability for a few weeks, lounging around picking his scabs.

Unfortunately, the Oaxacan buds I’d brought with me from Albuquerque eventually ran out, which I had never expected them to do, and I had to hitchhike to the Rivendell homestead outside of Forward Falls, Colorado, which Judas and I had established earlier, to convince myself that I still wasn’t ready to just walk into the woods and sit there with no food and go crazy.  I walked up the road but never set foot back into the forest, because it was getting dark.  A smelly dog started following me around, and I was thinking he and I could just walk up into the woods in the morning, but I ended up sort of half-heartedly freaking out from a gloom that permeated the atmosphere on this mountain, possibly left there by my last two failures to have a good time there, combined with a moderate fear of the dark, and I tried to drive myself crazy in the time it took me to high-tail it back down the road to civilization toward the hospital where I’d had my tonsils taken out at the age of eight, where I planned to present myself as a wild man from the woods who needed to be hospitalized for observation as a possible lunatic who might need to be kept off the streets for his own good.  But when I got back to town, I was not crazy, I was just depressed and in the wrong town, so I trudged through Forward Falls again, back to the freeway, and waited all night for a ride which took me all the way back to Hazing, Kansas and to Joybroth’s front door.

But something had changed between us now that I had no pot, and it wasn’t long before I decided to retire from Anyplace USA—as Shade Further called Hazing—and everything it represented, and go to Kansas City to celebrate my new freedom.  Retirement from all obligations was super-easy to accomplish, since there was nothing to change except for my attitude about having no expectations of myself, and there was good old Justerina Beena in KC to put me up.  She was just getting her own apartment again, and I discovered that now that she was completely sane and non-delusional, she was a pain in the butt because she thought I should do something for myself instead of just sitting around in people’s houses, but she took me places and fed me, bitching about it the whole time, and I put up with it for the food, shelter and entertainment.  And she needed someone to help her move into her new apartment.

With that task done, it was back to Hazing, Kansas.  I heard a voice calling me from there, and it turned out to be Batanwa Jim’s. 

Fortunately, whoever finked on Batanwa Jim had known me only by my Germley name, and therefore I had not been named on any papers, and Batanwa Jim never named me either.  The least I could have done for him would have been to learn from his mistakes, but to tell you the truth, I could never figure out what made him tick, either before or after his life was ruined by being busted for drugs.  I didn’t even know how my own self ticked, at that time in my life.  Now that I am totally enlightened, I could sit here and tell you whatever you wanted to know about why anybody did anything, if I had enough information.  But back in 1977, nobody knew anything; we were just new, squeaky-clean little creatures puttering about upon the Earth, not oblivious to the consequences of going in a stupid direction for a long time, but using those dirty little consequences as a source of entertainment.

Here’s a scene for you: Batanwa Jim shows up looking for a place to live in Hazing, with his girlfriend, the older Indian lady.  They were tired of being pursued with a shotgun by the girlfriend’s husband, who was also an Indian, and who apparently didn’t feel that his wife should be living with some other man.  So they came to Hazing with no car and just the clothes on their backs, and rented a two bedroom duplex.  I followed them around for a week or two, eating up this opportunity to spend time with my friend, since I had no place to live and they didn’t seem to mind feeding me, though we mostly smoked cigarettes and tried to stay away from food.  They were on a diet, and eating made me nervous when I was homeless.  His girlfriend wouldn’t let him smoke pot, so I’d carry a big fat joint in my pocket, and when he was ready to smoke, he’d grab her and start making out with her.  I’d light the joint, since I was sitting behind her, and we passed the joint back and forth whenever he came up for air in between making out with her, and she didn’t see a thing.  She pretended she didn’t know what we were doing, I think because she liked having me around.  It didn’t matter anyway; that particular batch of marijuana was given to me for free because it wasn’t any good.

A few weeks of this card-playing, cigarette-smoking, lounging around, laughing-off­-the-boredom paradise, with nothing left to talk about, and those two were gone as fast as they’d come.  The same wind that had blown them from Wichita whipped back around and blew them back there.  Once Batanwa Jim’s lawsuit against the Hazing Police Department got going, his girlfriend wouldn’t let him have anything to do with me.

He did come to Hazing once to do some business, and he took me for a quick spin around town, sort of a Russian Roulette on three or four wheels; his girlfriend wasn’t with him and he wanted to show me how wild and self-destructive he was now that he had gotten his life completely ruined by selling his drugs to pay my rent so he could then watch me suck up most of the rest of his stash for him with no hint of anything coming back from me.  All accompanied by his evil cackling.  Whenever he laughed he really got into it with his whole body.  He told me he was planning to sue the City of Hazing for falsely arresting him and telling the newspaper he was in a drug-burglary ring; he wouldn’t talk to me long, since I had been involved in procuring and dispensing the substance that they had come looking for when they arrested him, and our friendship was the single greatest threat to the successful outcome of his lawsuit, if anybody ever found out about me.

I heard from Batanwa Jim a little later when he called from Wichita.  I was at Prunesquallor’s house, and Batanwa Jim called to gossip about his case, but wouldn’t talk to me.  I yelled some sort of contemptuous crap so he could hear it, and heard him laughing on the other end, and Prunesquallor told me later that he had been directed to convey Batanwa Jim’s apologies with the explanation that I would destroy his court case if anyone found out about our connection, and his girlfriend was making him avoid me.  Meanwhile my poor little feelers were hurt that he would gossip to Prunesquallor and not to me.  I sensed that something was not right.  That laughing I could barely overhear on the other end of someone else’s phone conversation was the last time I heard Batanwa Jim’s voice.

At this time I was hanging out with Prunesquallor and his girlfriend at Prunesquallor’s parents’ house, while they were gone on vacation.  We had the house pretty well torn up; every dish in the house was dirty and laying around all over the place.  A recording studio project had lost momentum and the equipment still sprawled everywhere.  I had taken everything out of my backpack right inside the front door, and spread it out to organize it, but was called away before I could finish my project.  Prunesquallor’s family wasn’t due back from vacation for the better part of 24 hours, according to Prunesquallor’s best calculations, so the three of us were just pulling out of Prunesquallor’s Daddy’s driveway so we could all go for a breather and do some partying somewhere else, and just as we sped off down the lane, here comes Prunesquallor’s whole family in the family vehicle, home early from vacation, and looking tired, crabby, and in desperate need of a nice, private modern home to relax in.

Naturally the three of us shit a collective brick; Prunesquallor drove slowly in thoughtful silence for one block, then spun the car around, and we could only but agree that to face the music now would eliminate the need to face much worse music later.  We put our tails between our legs and crept into the house and tried to clean invisibly while frantically embarrassed.  Prunesquallor’s Daddy, the Rev. Jim Racey, kept coming up to me in his underwear, asking polite questions about myself and my family.  He was a nice man, a self-reformed boy gangster, who took up yoga after he got transferred away from the church in Hazing.

Now that my backpack was nice and organized and all packed up, and I had no place to live, it was only natural to walk in the direction of the freeway.  When I got there, I headed for Portland.  I stayed a few days at my Daddy’s new house, which was where his new wife Marleen had been living for many years, since it was hers.  Marleen was very traditional and family oriented, and wouldn’t let me help in the kitchen.  Her house was spotless, so I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

On the way back to Kansas, I got stuck standing in the hot sun all day somewhere in Idaho because I stupidly took a shortcut instead of staying on the freeway, until finally a nice 29-year-old woman picked me up in her old car and took me all the way to my Mama’s house in Hazing, Kansas, where my Mama cleared out of her own bedroom for Cindy while Cindy hung around toying with me and testing me for a few days in the process of deliberating over whether or not she should make me come after her, till finally she decided, based on my brazen willingness to take a five dollar bill she gave me as a gift, since she knew I was totally broke, and then use it to buy a pack of cigarettes.  That sent her back to her original mission, and it was off to Nashville with her to find her ex-boyfriend.

That whole incident irritated me right back into the end-it-all mentality that I had gotten so well rehearsed before she had showed up and made me be happy for a few days.  Now she refused to kiss me good-bye; it didn’t matter because she never kissed me hello either.  She just took me over to my pothead friends’ house on her way to the freeway, and when my friends told me about quarter ounces of hashish available for $45, I turned right around after getting good and stoned on my friend Boss’s stash, and went back to my Mama’s house, because she was out of town, and I took a check out of her box of checks, and wrote it to myself and signed my Mama’s name on it, and scurried back to Boss’s apartment by way of the grocery store where I cashed the check.

Now I was all set up: I had cigarettes, a grudge against a girl, and a large quantity of hashish and nothing else but time to smoke it.  I hung around my Mama’s house for a few days till we started arguing, because her comments about this and that always ended up getting to me; she tried to be nice about my mental disability but she thought she smelled pot on my clothes or she thought I should stay home more and watch TV with her in the evenings instead of running around staying out late every night.  It seemed important at that time to find my Mama’s personality irritating and overbearing, a threat to my independence as an adult, and after a big argument where I tried to leave the house and she stood there telling me to do something about my hostile attitude if I wanted to live with her, I walked over to the Rabid Flock Jesus Fellowship House and surprised my old buddy Larry Love with a visit, and I asked him if he would take me to Topeka, and help me get back into the Topeka State Hospital.  He didn’t want to do that, but he took me out to the freeway so I could hitchhike to Topeka, and he wished me good luck.  I tried hitchhiking for awhile, but my heart wasn’t in it.

So I walked back to a city park and sat on a park bench smoking hash till I couldn’t smoke any more, then walked back to my Mama’s house, walked in the door and through the living room without speaking, and into the spare room I was using, and laid down with my face on the floor, and my arms wrapped around my head to block out the light.  I was ready for someone else to make a decision about my life, and I was not going to do anything for as long as I could possibly hold out, because I knew if I held out long enough, I would end up with a place to live.  I couldn’t live with my Mama because when she tried to say or do anything parental I twitched like a live wire, and we just kept irritating each other that way.

So there I lay, ignoring my Mama’s requests for information, not moving, and listening to various voices coming and going throughout the evening as my Mama called in Rev. Jim Racey and then some other guy, and I just kept on not moving so they would make no mistake that I was a complete basket case.  I heard them say they should leave me to sleep it off and pick me up in the morning, and sure enough, the new guy showed up in the morning, and he hauled me off to the Fourth Floor of St. Job’s Hospital, which had been turned into a chemical dependency unit for people like me.

My first reaction to this place was to show them my worst side first, just in case they were bad people who were trying to hurt me.  And it looked like it might be that way, because they said I had to wear my pajamas until I had taken my “First Step” which was their way of introducing me to the Twelve Step Program, also known as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.  This was like the Great Doctor Rainbow’s “Step Zero,” but worse: I had to admit that I was powerless over drugs, which just wasn’t like me, and I had to turn my life over to a “higher power,” which sounded like the Foursquare Church, and I wanted nothing to do with any of it.  I was just looking for a place to stay, and I was hoping they’d let me do Primal Therapy there.  It was slow going at first.

But away from my marijuana, it quickly started to seem more glamorous to be a “recovering” drug addict and earn all kinds of approval, so I figured out I might as well appease them and admit that by all appearances—though I never really believed it—I was powerless over little ole marijuana, and I made Reality my higher power and gave It the deciding vote in my inner arguments, or tried to.  It was a little like going to a Catholic Church to chant Sanskrit mantras, but I liked the approval I got for getting with the program, and immediately became obsessed with becoming the greatest psychologist the world has ever known, and started making plans to go to college.

In the meantime I had to deal with 30 days of incarceration, which eventually turned into 40 days at the hospital and 40 more days at the halfway house, since I was a tough nut to crack and failed the core of the program, which was Family Group.

I was required to write letters to all my relatives and invite them to Family Group to tell me what a bad little pothead I was.  My sister Glenda couldn’t make it because she lived in Nicaragua with her husband and children, and she was having the time of her life teaching English in a college.  My brother Dirk couldn’t make it even though he only lived 130 miles away, because he hated this kind of shit being shoved down his throat every time I needed attention.  He is the least confrontive of all us siblings and had no interest in sharing his feelings at someone else’s prompting.  But my sister Mo showed up, and so did my Daddy who came in on an airplane, and my Mama was there of course.

I walked in pretty cocky.  Things were going well for me.  I was in rare form, like when I had gotten a lot of attention as the Retired Instigator of the Unorganization.  I had been elected Ward President and was getting caught up in my duties as representative of everybody, and I had participated as a spectator in last week’s Family Group, with a different group of patients’ families.  I had found it hard to keep my mouth shut.  I knew the program so well by now that I could catch anybody in their shit and loved to tell them about it in front of a bunch of people.  So, little did I realize when I sat down in the hot seat out in the middle of that crowd of six patients and their families, with my own family seated in a row facing me a few feet away, that I was about to lose all my new-found enthusiasm for self-improvement.

It got pretty weird, with them telling me, as they had been coached, exactly what I had done to hurt them and how that had made them feel, and then telling me I could never stay at their houses again because I had blown it too much already, and they would not give me money, etc.  I was supposed to respond so I blew my presidential cover and pretty much tried to blast them out of the water as only a true undifferentiated schizophrenic can do.  My Daddy blubbered like a baby, my Mama felt the seed of doubt as to whether this was the right program for me, and my sister Mo made plans to come back in the evening to visit with me casually, so we could talk like real people.

By the way, the psycho testing was really interesting this time around.  I took this 550 question test about what I would do if such and such happened, and a bunch of other tests, and when my grades came back I was told that they couldn’t use the results because I had shown an extremely high level of dishonesty, apparently by getting caught in what the Test Grading Board felt were inconsistencies in my responses.  Or something.  No one could explain what was so dishonest about me, so I took their silly 550 questions over again and was told that the results again came back as a complete washout in the honesty department, but they decided they would neglect these results and go ahead and use the rest.

My counselor wouldn’t let me look at the report on my test results, which is the same kind of irrational attitude I had gotten at Topeka State Hospital that really irked me, I mean we’re talking about my life here, and I’m the last person in the world who’s ever gonna get told!  But anyhow, while my counselor sat about two feet away from me, scanning one page of the report and imparting the allowably insipid portions to me, I didn’t hear a word he was saying because I was rapid-reading, upside-down and backwards, the back side of the page he had flipped over behind the one he was looking at.  I read with great interest that the Test Grading Board had decided that I was not schizophrenic after all, but that I was schizoid instead, which was good enough for me, because it sounds bad, although it just means I’m a dreamer, lost in a fantasy world, passive and dissociated.  I also discovered that my IQ was 137, which they said was a little short of “genius,” and that it was the highest IQ of any patient that they had ever had at St. Job’s chemical dependency unit.  But my ego development was supposedly one of the most pitiful, lame, emaciated-looking structures they had ever had the privilege of perceiving on a test.  They predicted that I would probably not stay away from street drugs, but there was a fair chance that I could if I really got interested in doing it.  I was grateful to that counselor for hanging that paper upside down in front of my face, even though he wasn’t allowed to show it to me on purpose.  I didn’t care what it said; I was just thrilled that I had gotten the Test Grading Board to care about me enough to have all these opinions about me.

And then there was The Awesome Doctor Guzman.  He only met with me once, and it was right around the time when I was flunking out and had been removed from the Presidency because I failed to worship the 12 Step Process throughout Family Group when I told my family members and the whole crew to take a hike and refused to speak or move for two and a half days until a patient named Eddie, who looked just like Jack Nicholson of Cuckoo’s Nest, came in my room and hauled me out of bed and dragged me down the hall to a room where there were these padded bats which I was forced to smack Eddie with for as long and as hard as I could.  Obedient little buddy did as I was told and the catatonia was gone, but the Awesome Doctor Guzman had to have a talk with me, because he was the ward psychiatrist, and I was taking more than the 30 days that normal junkies and alcoholics on their deathbed take to get through treatment, and I was refusing to participate in the 12 Steps, and I was just a pothead, for christsake.

The Awesome Doctor Guzman informed me that he was quite certain that I was not schizophrenic, that I was an intelligent person but that I used my intelligence to hurt myself in a relentless, organized, and all-consuming effort, that I was a good looking man and he was sure that women would be attracted to me, and that I had the sort of demeanor that caused most people to like me immediately upon meeting me.

Now let me tell you all, while I have your attention, that this man might have saved my life with those few words.  They didn’t blow me over at the time, one way or the other, although I was a little disappointed that he wasn’t threatening to chain me in the basement of the nuthouse with a constant trickle of electroshock coursing through me to keep me in line, but over the years every one of his few words has come back to inform me in a time of need, so I hereby officially state and affirm that the Awesome Doctor Guzman did right by me, in spite of being a psychiatrist.

I got back with the program because I was already tired of being locked up and didn’t want to go on to the nuthouse, which is where I’d be going next if I didn’t shape up, so I did what I had to do and started getting to go off grounds to Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and next thing you know I was moving into the halfway house.

Those alcoholics could put away the cigarettes and coffee like nobody’s business.  They were they gloomiest, most emotionally deprived people I’d ever had the privilege to be around.  My task while there was to look for work while continuing to work the 12 Steps, so I worked the 12 Steps so obsessively that I had no time left to look for work.  For a while I thought I wanted to work in child care, so I could protect the poor little children from being screwed up like my Mama and my Daddy screwed me up, but my sponsor in the Almighty Program said I would be setting myself up for failure by attempting something so noble, and I couldn’t take any more failure right now, and he advised me to do something I knew for sure I would be good at.  I helped one of my housemates sheetrock a house one day, and it was the longest four hours of my life.  I gradually lost all status in the “recovering community.”

The 40 days in the halfway house motivated me to look for an alternative to working, and I got interested in going to college.  The local university was going broke and therefore was highly motivated to capture all prospective students, and got me a student loan at the last minute, so I moved into the dorm.  There I suddenly found myself in a state of excitement, making out long schedules for every hour of every day, so that I would not only get an A in each of my classes, but I would also master every aspect of playing the guitar.  In the course of failing to do this and because of the time involved in keeping my schedule updated to take lapses into account, it soon became obvious that I would not have time for school, because I was getting so far behind in my homework that I’d never catch up, and I couldn’t remember why I’d decided to go to school to begin with.

One of my instructors was a sort of iconoclastic quasi-new-ager from California, a sociology professor who had recently converted from the Mormon religion to straight christianity.  He found out I was a lover of psychedelics and asked me to attend a question and answer session on street drugs which he was holding for all his nursing students.

Since I’d been straight for over three months, I had a lot of energy and was relatively aggressive socially, for me, in the context of the college campus.  Gone was the stay safe/do-nothing policy I had towards straight people when I was under the influence of THC.  The student nurses thought I was charming, and I hammed it up for them pretty good.  I loved the attention, and one of the girls started running over to talk to me every time she saw me after that.  I did not take the hint.

But alas, the pressure of having so much fun doing my street tripper act for a roomful of tender young things made me so horny for a puff on my favorite weed that it was only a matter of time before I had tracked down my friend Boss in his new apartment, and was biding my time, waiting for a perfect opportunity to complete the failure that I was building at school with my lack of attention to class work.  Unfortunately, my friend Paco had railroaded me into taking over his place as guitar player in the school’s jazz band, and I knew almost as much about jazz as Tarzan knew about the North Pole, so it took all the time I had for homework to try learn everything there is to know about playing the guitar, starting, of course, with classical music.  That’s how my mind works—because I enjoy the process of the search so much that I never want it to end, if I’m pretty sure that something is over here, I’ll go look over there first, and be lucky to ever get back to my real lead.  Then I stopped going to jazz band because I was too embarrassed to be heard attempting jazz improvisation again, and the whole motivation for being at school dropped out from under me.

I sat in my dorm room one night, smoking cigarettes and wrestling demons, until it finally grew sufficiently dark that I could get on my bike and ride like the wind the few blocks to Boss’s house, with the 12 Step demons, led by the black beast, biting at my heels the whole way.  It was all over.  I went in, sat down, someone handed me something that I smoked, and my four months of being able to think clearly were over.  Just as well; thinking clearly just kept getting me in trouble for being fooled by my own whims.  When I was stoned, none of my whims involved doing anything in public if at all possible.  My whole attitude was utterly changed by the 12 Step programming, and I have seldom properly enjoyed my sins since.

Soon I was living with Joybroth, and selling the $1200 stereo which I’d gotten a loan to buy, and using the money to buy quantities of marijuana which Joybroth and I sold to the teenage members of the Unorganization, thereby indirectly keeping the senior class of Hazing High School South ripped to the tits for a few weeks while I exploited my new level of hopelessness by promoting the Unorganization and actively contributing to the party groove at Joybroth’s moldy little shack.  Joybroth managed to bring home a few interesting new drugs, primarily poppers, an inhalant for heart patients that makes you feel extremely wonderful for about ten seconds maximum.  I was an abuser of this stuff instantly; I couldn’t get enough.  Everyone was worried about me because this was a prescription heart medicine, and because I almost knocked the refrigerator over once after taking a hit that made me feel a little too good.  Joybroth gave the rest of the vial to Little Chicken so he could stop worrying about me.

My Mama called me up and told me that a lady named Bobbie Wilson who went to my Mama’s church had a player piano she wanted rebuilt and refinished, so I eventually moved into my Mama’s house and did the piano job in her garage.  During that time I decided to move to Hollywood and become a professional songwriter.  I whipped through the job; fortunately it was a straightforward, easy one, and I took my $500 or whatever pitiful sum I charged for a job that Max or anyone else with any brains would have charged $3000 for, and got on a Greyhound bus for California right after New Years 1978.

While I’d been at my Mama’s house, Boss had moved back in with his parents so that he could save some money.  He worked for the railroad but they were always laying him off.  He said if he stuck it out he would be making big bucks in a few years.  I used to go hang out with him in his basement apartment at his parents’ house.  I was amazed how he just blew pot smoke everywhere, without concern for hiding anything from his parents.  They whined about it and he just told them to shut up.  I figured since his Daddy was a banker, he would just call the police on his son, but it apparently didn’t work this way in Boss’s family.

 Boss was a Scorpio and a devout Republican, sort of a racist even though it was Jed Barney who had introduced us.  He was living off unemployment. 

That a pothead could be a devout Republican proves it is what personality you really are despite all you tell yourself and the bullshit you purvey onto society at large, that determines the kind of person your child will become, and it is not the beliefs and ideals you consciously espouse and simultaneously try to cram down your child’s throat that determine what kind of person your child will become.  Your child will be just like you, except with opposite beliefs and ideals for a period of time, because it is not nice to cram things down someone’s throat just because they’re smaller than you and you were there first.  We are supposed to ask first if we want to put something down someone’s throat, and if you do try to cram something down someone’s throat, even niceness, then expect to be resisted, rejected, and to become the object of knee-jerk rebellion that doesn’t make any sense to you.  Contrary to popular belief, children aren’t unobservant.  They know when you hate them, when you want them to get the hell away from you, no matter how nice you are, how guilty you feel, and how much you try to make up for it with bullshit apologies and bogus promises.  If you are going to ignore your family, then do it, but don’t then turn around and shove your guilt down their throats.  Do them a favor and get lost.  Make like a folk song and ramble.