CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

In which I attempt to break down the doors of the temple

 

I didn’t want to spoil that last chapter with anything lighthearted, so I saved out one little morsel—a myth actually, a true myth about me—and it happened that same summer of 1978, at approximately—or perhaps exactly—the same time that Batanwa Jim’s body was slowly dying on the floor of his apartment in Wichita while his spirit was frantically trying to dial 911, but was unable to pick up the phone.

After Justerina Beena asked me to leave her apartment and I went back to my brother’s place 25 miles away in Lawrence, Kansas, I spent about a week in Lawrence aggressively absorbing as much anti-psychiatrist sentiment as I could by reading the Madness Network News  day and night, until finally I was ready.  I would get thrown into the state hospital and committed.  I would gnaw away at the system from within, and get the other patients to join in, and there would be a revolution!  Mental patients around the world would unite to overthrow the psychiatric machine, and I would be their leader.  But first I had to get thrown into the nuthouse on a court commitment that nobody in the hospital could veto, so my crusade would not be stopped the way that the Great Doctor Brainbowl had stopped me a few weeks earlier, by evicting me.  I had to get put in by way of the Law.

I went through my little canvas backpack for any signs of my identity, and removed them, except for a Boardwalk Title Deed I’d lifted from a Monopoly game and carried around in my wallet.  On it I’d carefully inscribed the words: “Luther Limbolust, Proprietor.”  I left that in my wallet and put the otherwise completely empty wallet in my back pocket, and put the pack on my back—in it was mostly poetry, my unfinished novel, etc.—and I headed for Topeka, the State Capitol of Kansas, and home of Topeka State Hospital, where I was finally ready to stage a one-man sit-in at the Governor’s office.  In the front pocket of my lawn-green jumpsuit, I carried a letter I’d typed to the Governor, in which I summarized the near murder-by-overdrugging of two specific patients by name, and I complained about the use of seclusion and restraint when it wasn’t necessary and was probably illegal.  I demanded the immediate dismissal of the Great Doctor Brainbowl, and to make sure I would be arrested and (hopefully) transferred to the nuthouse where I could confront the psychiatric machine in person, I also stated for good measure that I would refuse to leave the State Capitol Building voluntarily until the Great Doctor Brainbowl had been fired.

When I got to the State Capitol Building, I lingered for some time on the huge wide stone stairs, because I was ready to puke, I was so afraid of what I was about to do; but I felt so strongly about finding a place to live that this single-handed revolt is what I concocted to attempt to get a reliable roof over my head.  I scoured the huge stairway for cigarette butts, and smoked them.  I used relaxation techniques I’d studied since age 14 when I’d first started trying to learn how to do astral projection; finally the wave of nausea passed.  Somehow I motivated myself through the front door and up the stairs. I walked right on up the ornate stairway and past the huge mural of John Brown abolitionizing by the sword, and it truly inspired me, but not enough, because when I got to the Governor’s office, I just looked in the door, pretended I was in the wrong place, and skedaddled out of there as fast as I could.  There just so happened to be a big Government Office Building right across the street, and I felt that I could probably practice on them before going on to the real thing; I was quibbling with myself at the last minute about purposely making demands that I knew the Governor wouldn’t meet, because I was a little embarrassed about saying anything that anybody might think was stupid.  But I couldn’t just ask them for a place to live.

When I got to the building across the street, I found to my delight that the Mental Health Department was right here at my feet, so I walked in and wandered around past dozens of cubicles, till I came to a desk with a little sign on it that said QUALITY CONTROL.  I asked the girl behind the desk, who seemed to be afraid of me, what exactly she controlled the quality of, and do you know what she said to me?  You’ll never guess.  She said, “I don’t know.”  I howled with laughter; I was starting to find exactly what I was looking for: signs of mental illness at the highest levels of the Mental Health Department!  The young woman got me to stop asking her questions with repeated shrugs and gestures conveying ignorance or incompetence.

I walked across the huge hive of cubicles till I found someone who looked approachable.  I told the man in the cubicle that I was going to have a sit-in in his cubicle, and handed him my letter.  He read it silently and handed it back to me.  The nice man calmly explained his point-of-view to me, which is that I should simply mail the letter to Dr. Harder—chief of the whole entire Mental Health Department—and go home.  He offered me a postage stamp.  He questioned whether my motivation was to get things done; or was I just trying to get some attention?  He urged me to definitely get some attention, but in a different way and a different place.  He asked me if I really wanted to go to jail when I had already written a perfectly good letter that would have the same effect as a sit-in, but without ruining anybody’s day including my own.  He was certainly not against my cause.  But he was not helping me get arrested, so I sneered at his sorry ass and left the building.

Now I was pissed.  I had failed to even enter the governor’s office; I had tried lamely and failed to pull off my sit-in in an alternate location; and now, by god, I was going to go back into that Capitol Building and do what I came here to do.  The nerve of that office geek to try criticizing my methods.  Is there no one on this whole planet who is not going to be totally hypnotized in front of a television tonight?  Is anyone awake?

It worked.  I somehow slipped into my Angry Prophet mode, which I had been simmering within a few hours earlier in Lawrence, and for weeks prior to that.  I stormed up the marble staircase, waved to John Brown on the way past the huge mural, and strode purposefully into the outer offices of his governorship, where multiple office workers looked up and a little white-haired security guard named Sparky casually wandered in my direction.  I announced to the receptionist that I was there to see the governor, and she said that would be impossible, because he was in a meeting till 5:00, at which time the building was closing and the Governor would be going home.

I said I would wait, and sat down.  The security guard took over.  Sparky repeated what the woman said, and I told him I had a letter to deliver to the Governor, and Sparky said he’d give the Governor my letter; I certainly didn’t have to wait, and I said I didn’t mind waiting, and he said, Well, it’s not going to do you any good, and I said, That’s all right, I’ll wait anyway.

So Sparky, who was about 5’ 3” and at least 75 years old, made a phone call and then came over and stood by me, and waited, explaining that he had called in the reinforcements.  He asked to see my ID, so I pulled out the Boardwalk Title Deed and handed it to him.  He said, “Limbolust?  What nationality is that?” then he realized his error and threw the card at me, explaining to me that it was not a valid form of identification.  A younger plainclothes officer showed up, and we went through the whole ritual of Why don’t you just go home and make life easy for yourself, you could be home tonight in front of the TV instead of sleeping in a jail cell, and on and on.  Then a big Highway Patrolman showed up, and he was the nicest man I’d ever met.  He must have been 6’ 4” and three feet in diameter, and he was the most fatherliest, kindliest gentleman who ever arrested me in my life.  He explained at great length that he thought I should most certainly pursue my cause, and he applauded me for having a cause, and he told me that if I truly cared about the treatment of mental patients, then I should care that I was not going to be heard because of the way I was going about it, and I should care to know that the way to be heard is to go through proper channels, and he explained what the proper channels were, and wrote down Dr. Harder’s mailing address for me, and told me that the person I needed to write to was not the Governor, but Dr. Harder.  He offered to deliver my letter personally to Dr. Harder for me.

Now this was all very entertaining, and I was relieved that no one was beating me on the head with a billy club, but I informed the kind gentleman in the trooper’s hat that I was going to wait for the Governor.  So the trooper informed me that we would all be waiting together till 5:00, at which time the Governor and everyone else in the building except us would leave the building first.  Then I would be removed from the building and taken to jail.  I said OK.  That was the plan, after all.

Five o’clock came along in less than an hour, and I could see that the secretaries and other office workers really wanted to stay for the rest of the show, but everyone was encouraged to leave promptly.  A man in a big cowboy hat came over to me.  He said he was the Governor.  He didn’t seem too pleased with me, but he went ahead and read my letter.  He said he would take my complaints to the proper people, but he couldn’t dismiss the Great Doctor Brainbowl immediately because he had to study the matter and have more than my opinion to go on, if he were going to end someone’s career with the government, and therefore the best he could do for me was to offer me one more chance to leave the building on my own, as a free man.  He said good-bye to me and thanked the security guards and the trooper for working overtime, and he left through his private entrance.

I sat down.  We hung around for a few minutes till the building was empty, and then the officers grabbed me by the shoulders and the ankles and dragged me to an elevator, and thence to a little room near the building’s back door where I was plunked down not too gently on the floor.  Sparky took great pleasure in dumping everything out of my backpack as ungently as he could, and I was starting to fear that now I would be beaten up since no one was around to see it happen.  But it never happened.  They dumped everything back into my backpack and dragged me outside through the back door.  Then the big highway patrol officer—or “hypo” as we called them in Kansas back then—wanted to know if I would be willing to walk now, since we were no longer in the building, and my letter had said nothing about refusing to walk except inside the building.  I admired this man’s attention to detail, and was flattered that he had read my letter so carefully, so I happily walked from the building to the curb, where we all piled into the big man’s hypomobile.

The highlight of the day so far came at this point: I listened to three grown men in uniforms and badges each in turn call their wives on the mobile telephone, and meekly inform their wives that they would be late for dinner because they were tied up in a “Mexican Standoff.”  They were so sorry and they would be home as quickly as possible.  For me, that was the ultimate.

When they asked if I’d been to the state hospital before, I let them believe that I had practically been born there; I neglected to state that I’d been evicted from there a few weeks earlier, and the information I gave about myself was all they needed in order to avoid having to book me into jail on empty stomachs at the end of a long day.  Maybe they never even considered taking me to jail; they could have just been bluffing, trying to break down my resolve.  Everything about the way I looked, acted, and smelled was built around my personal myth of myself as King of the Loonies, and having never been in jail before, I neither looked nor acted like someone who was on his way to jail.  I was quite pleased with the efficacy of my act, and the perfect results I’d gotten so far.

Once we were in the familiar admissions lobby that had processed my impudent self twice before, it became the issue of the day to discover my true identity.  The receptionist put out an all-points-bulletin for any staff member who could help identify someone with the nickname of “Luther Limbolust,” and in no time at all here comes my friend Linda, the newest aide from my ward, and the only hospital staff member that I’d had social contact with.  As a student aide or intern of some kind, she really lived in Lawrence and attended the University of Kansas, where I would often bump into her, because the University was the best place in town to hang out.  It was easy to wander around, find usable cigarette butts, and meet girls without being too conspicuous.  Not that I met any girls, but it would have been easy if I’d known how.  I was romantically involved with the long staircases that went up the steep hills from building to building, the ancient ivy-covered buildings, and the incredibly awesome library—one of those good libraries, the kind where they not only keep really old books, but where they also have an excellent selection of them.  As a research buff since the days of Welsh mythology, I could discover more to thrill my soul in a good university library in one hour than I had discovered in my whole high school career.

Linda had been my confidante the last time I’d been imprisoned within the nicotine-encrusted walls of the insane asylum.  She had constantly been on me to do something great with my twisted imagination.  I could tell she liked me, and I imagined that this confused her because she was newly married.  In Lawrence, we used to sit in the student union and talk.  I don’t remember about what; probably about me.  I just wanted her to kick her husband out so she could move me in and study me in greater depth.  But I didn’t say so.  I wouldn’t want to wreck someone’s marriage over my silly boner.  Anyway, I don’t remember what we talked about.  She was worried about me and wanted me to take better care of myself.  She couldn’t see what was so romantic about being a martyr—an unnoticed one at that—and as sweet and gentle as she was, she was still adamant that I had a great potential that I hadn’t tapped into, and that I was wasting my life being pissed off at people for being people.  She agreed with me that the mental health industry was inhumane in some cases, but she didn’t believe that it should just be scrapped.

And now here she was in the admissions lobby, fixing me with the Evil Eye of Exasperation as she announced to the assembled officers that my true name was Irving Maxwell Zdaemon.  She asked me how I was doing and wanted to know why I wasn’t making it on the outside.  She was pissed at me for going in this direction, and she reminded me that I had promised to look into going to school or getting a job.  Then she went back to her ward, and I felt pretty stupid.  I hoped she would still be my friend when I got back to the ward.

With that, Sparky and his two friends were free to go; they found quickly enough that Irving Maxwell Zdaemon was unwanted by the law, and they left without saying good-bye.

Now the two hospital security guards waited in the lobby with me while we waited for  the “on-duty doctor” to get to the intake room to admit me.  It turns out that the Great Doctor Brainbowl was away on vacation, and the on-duty doctor would be admitting me.  This certainly was my lucky day.

The guards were making small talk with each other and ignoring me, so I wandered around the L-shaped lobby.  Since they were at one end of the L, they couldn’t see me when I turned the corner into the other leg of the L.  One of the guards called out to me to stay where they could see me, and that gave me an idea.  I put in a few more appearances in their end of the L, to lull them, and then I snuck through a door in my end of the L that they couldn’t see, and ran down a flight of stairs.  At the end of the corridor I saw a door that said Medical Records.  Awesome!  This was my chance to find out what these peons were really saying about me.  Not letting mental patients look at their own medical records was one of the bones I had to pick with these people.  The door was locked, and all the lights were dim everywhere, so I figured, what the heck, and I backed up and then ran at the door and kicked it as hard as I could.  But it didn’t do anything except make a real loud BANG.  I was sure I was in deep shit now, so I ran back up the stairs.  Bill and Bob had never even missed me.

That was the second highlight of my day: to actually leave the room while under guard, kick a door as hard as I could, and return, all without anybody’s knowledge. 

But that was the end of my pleasure for the day.  The on-duty doctor took me into his little room and blew my whole act out of the water.  He told me I was playing games with psychiatry, and he made it very clear that he would not get involved with my pursuits by putting me back in the nuthouse a few weeks after I’d been thrown out.  He said that if he admitted me, the Great One would just unadmit me as soon as she came back from vacation.  He told me there were people out there who needed psychiatry, appreciated it, and wanted it.  He told me that psychiatric drugs prevent some people from walking through life in an all-out panic.

I was frustrated because this jerk was denying that I needed his help.  What made him think I wasn’t walking around in a panic?  Why, earlier that same day, I had nearly vomited from fear!  He was trying to tell me I was normal, and that I didn’t belong around the psychiatric community.  But I didn’t want to tell this guy I needed help, because I could see that he didn’t like me and wasn’t going to find anything of value in anything I had to say, so I left, slamming the door behind me.  Besides that I could tell that he could tell that I was really looking for a place to live.  I put my nose up into the air and strode out of the building.  I took a big deep breath.  I was not in jail.  Lucky son-of-a-bitch.

Here is the letter that the Governor wrote me:

 

Dear Mr. Limbolust:

 Several days ago you delivered to me a letter complaining about the conduct of Dr. Rasputina Brainbowl at Topeka State Hospital.  I appreciate your sharing your views with me on this matter and have forwarded a copy of your letter to the Secretary of the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, the individual in general charge of all of our mental institutions, with the request that he review your complaint and take appropriate action.

 Very Sincerely,

Robert F. Bennett

Governor of Kansas

  

Here is a brief synopsis of key events of the summer of 1978:

 

·        daily massive doses of high potency LSD combined with some extremely strong mood-altering substance, probably MMDA

·        hospitalization and transfer to the state hospital

·        eviction from the state hospital

·        eviction from Justerina Beena’s house

·        sit-in at the Governor’s office resulting in arrest and transfer to the state hospital and ejection from there

·        eviction by my brother

·        death of my best friend who I’d known over 1/3 of my life

 

I found myself in the perfect place at this point: in my Mama’s arms.  This chain of events which all took place within a few short months actually led to me reversing the general direction of several of my internal gears, which didn’t translate into anything noticeable except in retrospect.  And it just so happened that my Mama had never been more available to me as a human being than she was right now: she had gotten my Daddy out of her hair, she was living alone and liking it, and most importantly, she had learned how to talk to me at Family Group back on the St. Jobs 4th floor Chemical Dependency Unit.  Before that she never knew how to talk to me, so she was afraid.  Being afraid made her bark a lot, as a mother around children.  As a single woman not around children, her whole personality changed.

Bobbie Wilson’s husband hauled another big upright piano into my Mama’s garage for me to refinish, and in a few more months I had money in my pocket from another job I should have charged three times more for than what I did, so I rented an apartment.   It was a cottage made out of a big double garage way behind its companion house, back by the alley.  I liked this place so much that I gave it a name: Garp Waddidge.  Joybroth and Shade Further used to like to hang out with me there.  Something about that house, with its “Welcome To Garp Waddidge”  sign on the wall, made me feel like I was somebody, like I’d done something.  I took on the glow of a cult leader amongst my fellow germleys.  I only wanted to be famous with my friends.  Shade Further said we were two derelicts comforting each other.  Here is a song I wrote at that time:

 

 

Riddle Dance

 

Well, give it to me good, fellas, while you got the chance,

before these slobs toss me up on a cross

the next time they get a sticker in their pants.

‘Cause they think I’m the soul of Jesus,

but I’m really the spirit of the son of the sea,

thrown out nameless to do my Salt City tap dance

on the turbid surface of the death doctor’s afternoon tea.

 

And when they find me out they’re gonna kill me—

they’re gonna do their dance on me.

 

Standing at the window picking my nose for all the neighbors to see.

Who knows what grows in the folds of my Spforildewitt;

who cares but me?

 

Victor Vroombellerator rides on the tides of the numbophrenic sea,

disguised as Death, he collides with our shiny troovammickles

as we drive down that Suction Highway,

our pedestrian souls run over by fate’s mad victims of power-drunk

Politicians’ Pastime Diversions.

 

And when they find me out they’re gonna kill me—

they’re gonna do their dance on me.

 

Smoking with my shoes on, licking my whiskers and wearing my hat.

There’s this used blue goo all over my face, now how about that.

 

Algophobia,

counterphobia,

algo-, counter-, contra-phobic

Swill Gaveling Spaceman:

sitting in your robes of black, it’s easy for you say just maybe

you think I’m insane.

 

And when they find me out they’re gonna kill me—

they’re gonna do their dance on me.

 

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.

 

Well Luther is a prophet, Gunther is a whore,

and Maxwell is a wassol^[1] and a numbophrenic bore,

so don’t talk to me unless you know my real name,

and don’t walk up to me to ask me where I came from,

‘cause I’m here right now,

I’m all here right now, I’m all right here now,

until the Hoveltongue appears on the horizon of my life my life my life my life my life my life my life my life my life...

 

My good friend Narc Shit, who had learned piano tuning from his Daddy who was a music teacher, wanted to introduce me to Mr. Don Puff, owner of Puff’s Pianos and Organs, because he thought it was stupid of me to be broke and unfed when I knew how to tune pianos, an occupation that paid at least four times more than minimum wage.  I tried to explain to Narc Shit that I didn’t know how to tune or didn’t like to, but he thought that was too stupid for words so he hauled me over there and introduced me to Don Puff, who was carrying on the family business from his father.  Don Puff instantaneously put me to work tuning a brand-new stiff little spinet piano just in from the factory.  It had never been tuned before.  Four hours later, I finally gave up and sheepishly went to look for Don Puff, so he could inform me that he had no need for a tuner who required four hours to do a bad tuning.  But Don Puff, in what turned out to be his characteristic fashion, pounded out a few chords on it, and announced that it sounded great, and took me out back and showed me a whole pile of old pianos, including a player piano which he promptly moved over to Garp Waddidge for me to work on.  He gave me the money for the parts, and I made an awesome player piano out of it again.  That one just happened to kick ass.  I took the six hundred dollars I charged for my work—should have charged twelve—and bought a real nice guitar with it and tried to save the rest to finance my next flight to the West Coast.

That winter in Garp Waddidge was quite peculiar, and I have never quite found that same feel anywhere else.  I had a big piano all torn apart in the single-room studio apartment, a kitchen table and big bed that came with the place, and that’s all I had, and that’s all I needed.  I was vaguely aware of the need to generate income to pay for Garp Waddidge, and somehow managed to stay in one place and occupied with this piano job till it was finished a few months later.  The player rebuild turned out so magnificently that I earned a little gold star in Don Puff’s heart; although I was a hippie I could still be trusted with a seriously broken piano, to make it sing like it once had, and my low prices never hurt anybody’s feelings.  Piano-wise, I finally had spent enough time with them that I could solve problems and sometimes even mysteries when I had to: for years there had been more panic than ability; now there was slightly more ability than panic.

One fine sunny winter afternoon I was standing in front of the sink washing my dishes while I stared out of the window, when lo and behold, who should I see floating across my front lawn but none other than my good friend Judas.  This was the biggest of all surprises; it was his first visit to Kansas since he and I had hitchhiked away together, and he has only been back twice since then.  We found a phone and got Joybroth and Shade Further and whoever else was around to come over for a big Germley Reunion.  With the big player piano laid down on its back and torn apart, it made a perfect coffee table.  Somebody had a brand new marijuana pipe and somebody had a little hashish, and I was excited because I had an actual house with actual friends in it.  I began to think that I had downright charisma starting to seep out of me.

One night I woke up around 2:00 a.m. and started worrying about my oldest big sister Glenda.

She had been a Spanish speaking high school student; everything of Mexico and the Spanish language was her extreme passion in life when she was a teenager.  She took four years of Spanish in high school and spent two summers in Mexico with her Spanish class.  She went to a university in California, where the college she attended taught most classes in Spanish.  One semester of college she spent studying in Costa Rica.  She married a fellow student, a Nicaraguan man named Carlitos whose father was president of a college in Managua, Nicaragua.  Since my siblings and I were from a liberal family, we were oh-so-proud that our brother-in-law Carlitos was part Black.

Shortly after my first niece was born, Glenda and Carlitos and their daughter moved to Managua where Glenda wound up working as a teacher of English as a Second Language at her father-in-law’s college, and had more children.

Then the war got way too weird.  Carlitos or his father or both had been on hit lists that were circulating, because Carlos Sr. was a friend of President Somoza and Carlitos Jr. was a government employee.  There was a key event in the war, an occupation of a government building by the Sandanista rebels, that was a #1 headline and signaled the onset of a more serious and deadly part of the civil war, with the rebels on top for a change.  Glenda and her kids got sent home that very day by the US Embassy, and Carlitos stayed behind while he still had a job, working for the new government: yesterday he had worked for the Somoza government.  A few years later he got fired, and he walked over the border that day and made his way to the US, losing everything he owned.

But for now, Carlitos was still in Nicaragua dodging bullets and sneaking around curfewed streets to visit the few neighbors he had left, and Glenda and the kids were staying with my Daddy and Marleen, who had gotten married, in Portland.  My Daddy’s church helped my sister Glenda get her very own apartment, and pretty soon she got a good steady government job and she was all set up.

And I had nothing better to do than to crawl out of my bed on this cold winter night and write my sister Glenda a long letter, arguing that she should move in with Rivendell, because of the long list of reasons I gave her why it would make her life easier, what with all her serious problems and all.

That night I dreamed I was at the Freedom House, out front in the yard.  It was a nice warm, sunny day, and there was Tony Hill, sitting on a big suitcase.  He was smiling at me, a sad little smile.  He looked me right in my eyes and said, “We all got to lie to each other, brother.  We all got to lie to each other.”  I woke up sobbing.

When I finished my breakfast of an apple and a glass of milk, I walked downtown to my Mama’s office to borrow her car, because I suddenly knew I was on my way back to Rivendell, and I needed to get some boxes together so I could store some stuff at her house.  It was too cold to hitchhike, but I had to leave immediately while I still had enough money left after buying a bus ticket to pick up a little LSD on my way through Haight Ashbury.

I realized my mistake before had been to not go back to Rivendell with my acid.  This time I’d try doing acid in Santa Cruz instead of Kansas.  I was seriously into my character by now: Luther Limbolust, Avenging sidearm of Victor Vroombellerator; out to change things—

—but wait.  I am getting completely confused with all these comings and goings, and I am horrified to report that I can’t remember all the whys and wherefores, which trip went where, and worst of all, why.  What could make me want to hitchhike back and forth across the country in cold weather with no supplies or provisions, and why did I turn around and come back as soon as I got to San Francisco?  There was an extra side trip to Rivendell, and there was a fly infestation at the Freedom House.  I got a long ride all the way to the front door of the Freedom House with a young man in a van, a mechanic from the Midwest who was on a quest for a different environment.  I asked him if he was a prophet, and I told him that I was.  There was no Greyhound Bus involved this time.  But was this time this time, or was it that time?  It doesn’t matter.  One time I got a ride from Rivendell back to the Midwest from Rico, the alcoholic engineer from North Dakota.  Rico drank so much that he shouldn’t have been driving, and I smoked so much pot that I couldn’t stay awake to drive more than half an hour, but between the two of us we somehow eventually got to North Dakota pulling his Jaguar with a tow bar.  I hitchhiked the rest of the way to Hazing or wherever I was going.

Debo, the Dragon Lady, a New Yorker of Jewish extraction who had once ran with the Hell’s Angels, was in charge the day that one of the placements from Juvie named Dennis objected that I was swatting flies on the big picture window that he was trying to clean.  I wanted to remind him that he was only cleaning the window because he absolutely had to, and after that he was off to a party where he would stay all night, fucking everything that moved, whereas I, who was only a guest here and didn’t have to do anything, had noticed that there were upwards of 25,000 flies just flying around in the living room, and nobody, including his worshipful window cleaner himself, was doing anything about it except I, the Merciful Madman, whose quest it was to smash as many of the little insects to death as possible, because living with at least 25 flies per cubic meter was unacceptable even to me, an avowed hippie.  But I did not say that, because Dennis was smooth and cocky and I thought it would be better for me if I just stormed out of the room without saying a word, and slamming the door behind me.

As I was saying, Debo was in charge that day.  When I showed up for dinner, we held hands and OM’d and the first thing Debo said after we started shoveling food onto our plates was, “Luther, if you are going to be here you have to stop being so defensive.”  I felt like storming out again, but just kept silent.  I soon left with Rico, and forgot about it.  I don’t know where this fits in exactly, but then I don’t know quite where my head was at in this wandering phase, basically toned down on the drugs but still passing through Haight Ashbury to find acid on most of my trips.

On my final trip to Rivendell I hitchhiked at least from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, and I had an interesting experience in the Haight Ashbury district.  I figured I’d try out Golden Gate Park for a contact, since it had worked before, and sure enough, I talked to this tall guy who sort of fancied himself a folk-hero of the Haight, and on the way to score some acid for me, he dragged me along on all these stops where he picked up his backpack from where it was stored, etc., till finally he got me the acid, and it turned out that since he’d been talking non-stop and making me tell him about myself, he decided he would go to Santa Cruz with me, because he thought I was pretty cool for a hick from Kansas.  I didn’t want to make a scene, and besides that we were tripping; I’d taken one hit and he’d taken three, so I just tried to enjoy myself, the bus driver made me put out my cigarette, the other dude made me pee in the bushes right there on the city street, explaining that the need to piss does not constitute a valid reason to spend forty-five minutes looking for a proper place to do it.

I was not too happy about this plan of his to follow me wherever I went, and the more I thought about my options, the more I thought it was of utmost practical necessity to ditch this man, and really to do it before reaching Santa Cruz would be the very best idea.  I remembered Jed Barney, and the con man’s total need for everything to go totally perfectly, as I had experienced when I planned my revenge on Jed.  I put myself into the same ruthlessly precise state of mind and desperately needed a solution with such one-pointed focus that all I had to do was wait.

The dude was convinced that none of the passing cars was ever going to pick us up, so he was flipping them all off as they drove by.  Unfortunately for my chances of ever getting a ride, he was flipping them off before they got to us.  I couldn’t have been more perfectly interested in a very fast solution to this problem of who I was being seen with.

My new friend went off to scramble around for a piece of cardboard that he could make a sign with.  I hoped a sign might at least keep his hands busy.  While he was in a dumpster enclosure half-buried in garbage looking for a good piece of cardboard, a red sports car driven by a beautiful woman stopped and I jumped in with my pack.  She said, Isn’t that your stuff too?

It was the other guy’s stuff.  No!  It’s someone else’s.  Just leave him, you don’t want to give him a ride.  We zoomed away.  I tell this story because it was the luckiest moment of my life.  I felt that something really bad would happen to me if I let this creepilator follow me to Rivendell.  It was also a shamanic struggle: the rejection of an unwanted energy suck, symbolically by way of a sorcerer’s duel, a stalker’s defeat by an unwary straggler who must become a stalker for one lucky moment of perfect intent in order to move completely out of the stalker’s whole reality.  The point being, when I got to Rivendell, I was in a good mood, I wanted to have a good time, I appreciated the way that these people were different because they were giving me something I could use.  I wanted to try harder to be involved and to participate, instead of sitting on the sidelines feeling superior, complaining and sulking.  I was actually embarrassed to be asking for asylum one more time, and  Tony Hill mentioned that my commitment to the Family seemed to be only at my convenience.  I informed him that I was ready to give the lifetime commitment that one was supposed to give in order to be a member of the Rivendell Family.  I was informed that I would have to work.

I had mentioned earlier a man named Donovan who kindly gave so much attention to the Family Mascot, John Stoats, when he wanted some shirts.  It turned out that Donovan, whom Tony called Don West, was actually a terminally ill lung cancer patient and a friend of the Family from back when they first started up in Southern California.  Unlike Debo and Ellen and Ann Marie, and many others who were from New York City, Donovan was from LA, like Sherry and Melanie and Debbie Szcxhtain.  Donovan, it turned out, had been a huge bear of a man, one of those extremely physical types who could wrestle a hippo with the combination of his size and intensity.  I knew him when he was a 57-year-old, stooped, thin skeleton in constant pain from lung cancer.  He used to make candles a lot, and furniture which he would take outside and scorch with a torch, then sand, stain, and varnish.  He talked about himself a lot.  He never gave up smoking.  He used to fight with the cowboys and  the Indians when he was a biker down south.

When I lived with Rivendell before, I had eaten dinner sitting next to a man whose name I never caught, and who I didn’t see again for awhile, but I kept hearing about Donovan this and Donovan that; back then I hadn’t even been to all Rivendell’s houses yet.  A few weeks later I was with Judas and Rico one night on some sort of inter-house business, and we stopped by the Aptos house.  This was where the famous Robbie lived, who I also had kept hearing about.  That’s when I met her and Donovan.  She was a rich girl my age from New Jersey, who had once been a concert pianist and was now one of our placements.  Judas made her out to be the nuttiest; he kept referring to her as catatonic.  My later experiences with her made me wish she was catatonic.  Her parents rented the whole Aptos house for us; Robbie and Donovan lived in one side and the other side was Maureen’s office and a meeting area.  They were sitting in the near dark, in front of the fireplace.  Robbie looked very disheveled.  Judas had said she was just coming out of a catatonic state.  I figured that’s why her pants were half off.  Later I learned that she pretty much spent most of her time masturbating, wherever she happened to be, which is why she happened to be home under supervision most of the time.

Donovan was the only one who could handle her.  He had the capacity to heartlessly expect her to come out of a catatonic state, and under his tutelage, she always did.  She didn’t like being told how to live, she didn’t like being chaperoned everywhere she went, but if we let her out by herself she’d go to some stranger’s house and ask to be given sanctuary from us.  This would work for a few minutes till the people figured out what was going on and we’d get a phone call from Robbie’s new keepers begging us to come pick her up, and bring documentation proving that we weren’t the kidnappers she claimed we were.  The next night I got to know her better, helping Judas and Rico carry her out of a stranger’s house where she had managed to gain a sympathetic ear after escaping from Donovan.

The first time Judas and I actually had Robbie duty at the Aptos house, she grabbed me by the hand the minute I walked in the door, and hauled me into her room and made me lay down on her bed.  She lay next to me.  Donovan followed us to the door of the room.  I halfway hoped he was going to put a stop to whatever she was going to get me into, but he just stood there and made small talk with me, with a little smile on his face, and managed to communicate somewhere amidst this dialog that it was essential that Robbie not be at any risk whatsoever of becoming pregnant.  I understood completely and asked him to shut the door behind him.

I was taking my cues from her, brothers and sisters, so I just lay there and waited.  This was not your ordinary treatment for mental illness, and I knew that nothing could be my idea, or I didn’t stand a chance of getting across later to anyone that this was psychotherapy, as opposed to taking advantage of a helpless schizophrenic.   It was quite a hot topic at the very next Operations Meeting.  It was generally agreed that it had indeed been psychotherapy: for both of us, me included.  I pretty much had to live with that; it beat being accused of something, and it was a relief to be in a group of people who weren’t completely, insanely opposed to the human needs of so-called mentally ill consenting adults.  And besides, I kept my agreement with myself, which was to do nothing she didn’t make me do.  I just lay next to her, not knowing what she did or didn’t want me to do.  Finally, after a long silence, she said, in her extreme Jersey Jewish accent, “Well, aren’t you gonna diddle me?”

Oh, so that’s what she had in mind!  So you see, there was nothing in it for me anyway, and I was relieved; she wanted no part of me other than my finger, and when I proved incompetent in its use, she grabbed my hand and used my finger for me.  She loved me after that, in a sense, when she felt like it; it was so weird.  We were in an institutional setting where I was supposed to be helping her, not helping myself; after the big meeting where my actions were very reluctantly not censured, but also not encouraged, and where certain very clear limits were placed on me—such as NO INTERCOURSE!—I felt very intimidated by the whole thing and didn’t like the way they made the whole thing OK for themselves by putting me and Robbie in a class together, so from then on I chose to not be involved in Robbie’s continual quest for orgasm, which wasn’t actually continual at this point but it was a year later, last time I saw her, when her life consisted of living at the Freedom House and laying on the living room couch all day giggling and playing with herself.  Everyone ignored her, and nobody invited strangers to the house.

You see, once upon a time, Robbie had had a boyfriend named Stephen, and Stephen was a wealthy young cult leader.  He had a harem of young women, and they all lived together in a big house, and they all had Stephen’s babies.  He spent all his time with the women and the babies, and Stephen was very smart and very gentle, and rich, and life was perfect.  Except that he didn’t want Robbie in his life, and she had to leave.  That’s when she had lost her marbles.

Since I was so interested in Primal Therapy and the rights of mental patients and alternative treatment strategies and such, I got to spend some shifts with Robbie by myself, after it became obvious that I wasn’t going to get involved in Robbie’s self-gratification schemes.  The main challenge was to keep her from escaping.  She always wanted to go for a walk or go to the store, but Judas had forbidden me to try taking her anywhere without reinforcements.  Robbie had a little portable battery-operated TV, about the size of a briefcase.  It weighed about 15 pounds.  One afternoon I thought I heard something funny from Robbie’s room, where she was lounging around watching her TV.  I looked in on her, and she was halfway out her bedroom window, with the TV in one hand; she had left it on to camouflage her noise.

I ran outside and around to the side of the house and stood under the window.  It was several feet off the ground, and she was halfway stuck straddling the window sill, trying to figure out how to jump down safely with a TV in one hand.  Until I showed up.  Then she knew exactly what to do.  She rared back and smacked me in the head with her TV set as hard as she could.  Now I was pissed.  I tore the TV out of her hand and tossed it in the bushes, and I grabbed her and hauled her down from the window, and carried her in through the front door, hollering for Donovan.  He came out of his bedroom demanding to know what was going on.  I told him she’d hit me with her TV when I caught her trying to crawl out her window, and he told me to put her down.  Then he let loose with one of his famous barrages of words, and the gist of the situation was that Robbie’s TV was obviously a problem.  That same night, Donovan lit into both Judas and Robbie for arguing over what to watch on the tiny little screen.  Donovan went on for ten minutes along the lines of Someone has to be the monster around here, and it’s gonna have to be me.  Something about Donovan’s ability to go on and on in a verbal harangue of one kind or another, whether confronting someone with their behavior or going on about his own past exploits, made me admire him.  He became a role model for me, because he was exactly the opposite of my Daddy, the role model I so actively didn’t appreciate.

Donovan was talking about his ex-wife one time, and he was going on and on about some hard time she was giving him about something, and his response to her was, “I’ll just take on another contract.”  Later I asked Judas what Donovan used to do for a living, and Judas told me he was a professional tennis player.  Judas used to protect me like a puppy with a broken foot.  He preceded me everywhere I went, warning people of my limitations, and effectively keeping me out of the cliques that were the core of everything.  A few years later I met someone who had known Donovan in Southern California in the old days when Donovan was healthy.  This guy told me a story of the time Donovan walked into a party.  He was sort of a mystical, charismatic character, with a streak of true brazen fearlessness to back up his philosophies.  The party was taking place in a long glass building full of people, and Donovan was there to see somebody who just happened to be at one end of the building.  Donovan entered the building from the other end, and the man he was coming to see could see him coming as he traversed the entire length of the building.  By the time Donovan had walked the entire length of the building, there was not a sound anywhere.  We are talking about a big, big man bursting into a party and then moving in a straight line in a very determined-looking way.  Donovan walked up to the man he had come to see, and picked him up in one hand by the throat.  He told him how glad he was to see him, because he had some messages to deliver from a variety of his friends.  This is from so-and-so, POW, Donovan smacked the guy in the nose with a fist the size of a child’s head.  This is from so-and-so.  POW.  This is from so-and-so.  POW.

Another thing Donovan used to do was to take people out in the desert at night to see UFOs.

This fella, Bob the Jaw, told me a story about how Donovan had walked into the office of a Mafia boss and plopped his gun down on the boss’s desk and said, “I Quit!”  He had been a hit man for the Mafia.  So when his wife’s horse ranch was having problems and she was trying to get him to take care of it, he offered to go back to being a hit man to pay for her dream ranch, but he did it sarcastically, more or less on his way out the door.  He didn’t want the pressure anymore.  When I knew him he had no interest in women and declared that he had smoked enough pot in his life and didn’t care to smoke any more.  The only thing I ever saw Donovan do was make candles, make smoothies, make furniture, and most of all, deliver an intense and personally addressed-to-me monologue about whatever came to mind.  Because of the intensity of his delivery, I felt compelled to listen, but was too intimidated to think of anything to say back.  So I solved the problem by putting him up on a pedestal, and just listened to him.

But I proved to be a bad listener, for as much as he said, I remember almost nothing specific; for years I held a feeling of his intensity close to my heart to combat the whiny, begging, apologetic icon I had as a role model of manliness; the role model that made me cringe around people.  Conversation would sometimes end when I walked into the living room, because my tension around all these people used up all the energy in the room.  The first time I was at Rivendell, I remember standing in a circle of people in the living room at the Freedom House.  I had walked up to the circle and joined it, and I noticed that the energy stopped flowing around the circle when I joined it, and I thought it might be because I would join a circle of conversers without saying anything or looking at anybody, until they had all tried to acknowledge me and been rebuffed by my lack of attention to their eyeballs, and returned to their conversation, while I started stretching and contorting my back and arms, and yawning, all of it such obviously pathologically self-conscious behavior, that I should be satisfied that they just ignored me.  But since they did ignore me, my tension grew and I kept trying harder and harder to pull the tension out of my body by stretching.  This is how I learned to pop my joints: no amount of stretching satisfied me until I heard the “pop” to announce that I had gone far enough, and a lot farther than most people do.  A useless but fairly benign form of entertainment.  Thus did I become a person who pops his joints: neck, back, ankle, you name it, I either pop it several times a day or I don’t know how.  I am aware that I am simply trying to pull the tension out of my body by breaking my body open so the tension can pour out.  That’s OK.  I can’t stop.

As for Robbie, my next and last gruesome encounter with trying to be her caretaker took place the very next afternoon that she was alone with me.  She had been bugging me to go for a walk, and I kept telling her I couldn’t take her by myself, until finally she just stood up and walked out the door, and I had no option but to follow.  She walked and walked.  A couple of times I tried to pick her up and carry her the other way, but that just made her screech at me in contempt, and I was pathetically incapable of carrying her the many blocks that we were away from home.  Finally she started getting pissed at me for trying to pick her up, and do you know what she did?  She stood there and unbuttoned her shirt, smiling at me as if to say, now what are you going to do, sucker?

I didn’t need two nipples pointing at me, with family automobiles driving by every few seconds; I knew that I was out of my league, and that I was being outfoxed at every turn; all I could do was to button up her blouse again, promising that I would stop trying to pick her up.  From then on I just followed her, and she ended up at a large house in an expensive neighborhood.  I followed her to the front door.  She walked in without knocking, and the fireworks started immediately.  A young woman holding a baby called out, Stephen!  Stephen!  and here comes a clean-cut young man holding another baby, and another young woman comes and takes the baby from him and they all disappear except for Stephen, who gives Robbie a hug and asks her how she is doing.  She starts right on in begging him to take her back, and it isn’t long at all before Stephen and I are carrying Robbie to his car.  He drove us home, Donovan sent Robbie to her room, and then he came over to me and looked me in my eyes and said, “You were my last hope for her.”

So that is the story of Robbie.  As for Donovan, he continued to get weaker, and just before I left Rivendell for the second time, he announced that he was ready to die, and he wanted to light his own funeral pyre.  We looked into the legalities of this, and informed him that he would have to forgo being a participant in his own Viking funeral, because it just wasn’t legal in the State of California to light your own funeral pyre.  He was still around when I left.  Here’s the rest of the story: Donovan decided to die on his birthday, and as his friends congregated around his bed to say good-bye to him—on their way to his birthday party which he was too sick to attend—he looked at Judas and the others and said, “If you all aren’t good after I go, I’m gonna ride down on one of those shit-eating sky chariots and kick your shit-eating asses.”  Then he said, “I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do.”  Those were his last words, but he didn’t die for eight more days.  At the very end, Judas was with him, breathing with him; Donovan died in Judas’s arms.

And then there was the short trip to Rivendell from which I returned to the Midwest with Rico: when I got there I wound up meeting up with everybody at a restaurant they called Donovan’s, after their recently departed friend; they had recently bought the restaurant and seemed to be changing their focus from taking placements at $600-1200 per month income per placement, to taking over businesses that other people were smart enough to not want.

So here I was, back at Rivendell, and this time I wanted to be involved.  And it was a good thing, because  I was being required to, in the form of manual labor.  I became the dishwasher at Donovan’s Restaurant, and thus was born my interesting and functional off-and-on career as a dishwasher.  There was no machine for my dishwashing job at Donovan’s; just three big stainless steel sinks and massive quantities of dishes for me to keep in supply.  I felt very important and needed: I was hooked.  Bobby Furlani had finally kicked Methadone and he was so much happier; he had put on weight, changed his hair, and now he was head chef at Donovan’s.   He and Judas used to call me “Lust.”  Short for Limbolust.  Bobby also called me “dishwashin’ brother,” and “Limbo.”  He only had a few years to live, due to stomach cancer caused by the methadone.  As long as I live—and that might not be very long—I will never forget the great boost I had in life by having the privilege of spending these times around people from the Big City Back East.  My point of view was stretched continuously.

I learned how to keep my rinse-water ultra-hot and sparkling clean, so the dishes would steam-dry themselves, since there was no time to dry anything by hand and it wasn’t allowed anyway for health reasons.  I developed a system, and made my system the absolute law, and anybody who disobeyed my system got scolded.  Well, it’s better than hiding in Judas’s room, don’t you think?  Each Monday evening, when Donovan’s was closed, Judas and I deep-cleaned the kitchen, and somehow on these nights, large quantities of cheesecake and Kelly’s Avocado Pie would disappear mysteriously from the restaurant’s inventory.  I was learning as I got to know Judas better that he would ignore me and not respond if he thought I was being whiny or stupid.  This is how I learned how to recognize stupidity in myself: by hanging around with Scorpios, and acting as if their opinion mattered.  It beats sitting around in the nuthouse doing crosswords, you know what I mean?

It soon became apparent to me, from attending OIC (Operations-in-Center) Meetings that Donovan’s Restaurant was bleeding the Family dry.  We hadn’t paid the rent on the Freedom House, where a third of us lived, in many months.  Nobody ever got paid for their work, but we were driving a fleet of new Honda automobiles that we had gone in debt for.  We had just bought a print shop, and now we had to pay Peter the Printer, a long-haired guy about 6’4”, to run the print shop.  I calculated that we were pumping 425 man-hours per week of our time into owning a restaurant, and even with nobody getting paid, the restaurant was losing money.  It turned out that the actual legal owner of Donovan’s, a retired school principal from the ghettos of LA who had been recruited to join us in Santa Cruz, was getting all his bills paid by the restaurant income, and there was nothing left to run the restaurant with.  Since he had lent us his good credit to buy all those Hondas and houses and businesses, he had to have his bills paid.  Meanwhile, morale was low throughout the family because everyone was sacrificing everything for—for what?  A hardened 13  year old criminal with a heart of gold?  A mumbling nut who might someday relearn the process of forming a sentence?—hell no, we were doing all this for a trendy upscale overpriced restaurant next to a creek in a trendy overpriced shopping park in the trees.  I took my calculations and my warnings to Debo and to Sherry, because I liked them and because they were in charge of Rivendell’s finances.  They pretty much agreed with me that we seemed to be hooked on having this restaurant for sentimental reasons, and they said I had to talk to Melanie, because she was the manager of the restaurant.

This is where I ran into a brick wall.  Melanie was Tony Hill’s girlfriend, and when I came to her restaurant meeting and told her to sell the restaurant quick before it got us into any more trouble, she didn’t even look up from her clipboard, she just said, “That’s a stupid idea,” and changed the subject.

When I found out that the fleet of Hondas and everything else had been purchased on the school principal’s credit, I lost interest in washing dishes, and started looking for something else to do, but not before selling my guitar and going to Haight Ashbury for some acid, because I was embarrassed about quitting my job at the restaurant and felt that someone should overreact to it, if only me.  I bought the acid from a car full of young men who said they were White Panthers.  They said they robbed food from grocery stores and gave it to poor people.  Tony Hill called me when I returned and informed me that, “This is not a happening,” that is, the acid was not going to be allowed.  I asked him why not, and he told me it was because I was in an altered state of consciousness so I should not be trusted with psychedelic drugs.  I informed him that we are all in altered states of consciousness, depending on where you’re standing, and he had to admit that I was right on that point.  His argument lost momentum and he told me to be careful and to keep it quiet and away from the placements.

But I didn’t keep it quiet enough; when Oshean Freewave Germley found out I had some acid, he wanted a hit, and then of course he wanted more the next day and threw a tantrum when he didn’t get it.  From that point forward I have never considered drugs a thing to share.  I keep it to myself and try not to even socialize with most people who smoke pot, because so many of them are dull, confused, self-absorbed, lazy, unhealthy, lethargic, and whiny.

I had a hard time with that acid; I caught the greedy bug from Oshean Freewave Germley and started trying to take it every day.  But this was not the Green Dragon; nothing ever was that good again.  You could only take it every third day at most, if you wanted a truly intense experience.  I ended up eating 11 hits of acid one night, trying to get high, and never felt a thing.  That was the end of it.  It was the last time I ever tried to commit emotional suicide with overdoses of LSD.  It was sort of like wetting the bed; one day I just grew out of it, I don’t know why.  I did consider doing it one other time, some time later, and that night my apartment house coincidentally burned down.  After that I never ever found myself wanting to go crazy by means of psychedelic drugs.  All it took was for me to witness my friend Oshean Freewave Germley get mad and say Fuck and throw his tea cup out into the field when I refused to give him a hit of acid, to make me to change my whole attitude about craving LSD.

A few weeks earlier, to mark my retirement from the work force when I quit my dishwashing job, I had gone out in a field on a moonlit night with a pair of scissors and my alarm clock.  I smashed the alarm clock to smithereens, cut my hair off with the scissors without a mirror, and then I broke the temples off my glasses—they were broken anyway, and taped together—and tied a string onto my glasses that looped around my head to hold my glasses on.  Those were my official glasses for almost a year.

From then on I have been my own barber, with few exceptions.  I’ll never forget the time Mrs. Clara Friend, head aide on my ward at the state hospital, took my temperature and blood pressure after I cut off my beard and my hair, which I hadn’t combed in over a month.

After the acid was all gone, I realized or was informed by Judas or Ellen or someone that this is not the big bad world I’m living in, this is Rivendell, an alternative lifestyle based on the extended family, and if I didn’t want to work at the restaurant I didn’t have to, but I would have to do some kind of useful work that needed to be done.  The three things I never could tolerate about jobs was asking for them, keeping them—by voluntarily going there every day—and quitting them with proper notice and without burning my bridges.  The work itself was a fairly tolerable nuisance, but it was these other three aspects of the job experience that often influenced me in other directions than working.

It just so happened that Patty, who had the job of buying the food each week and distributing it to our eight households, was pulling crazy stunts like buying cases of things we didn’t need because they were on sale, and I saw an immediate need for a food buying person who actually wanted the job enough to sit down and figure out how to make it a happy event for the people who it was supposed to be serving.  I was tired of hearing people complain about having only the cheapest dairy products, doing without special treats and more interesting special requests, so that our freezers could be full of cases of things we didn’t need just because they were cheap.  I talked to Patty about it, and she said she didn’t care about the job; I could have it if I could get OIC to say OK.  So I devised a two-page checklist, all typed out, of all the kinds of foods people wanted to eat all the time at Rivendell’s houses, and people could check off what they wanted and write in other stuff too.  For some reason Patty had always asked everybody what they wanted and then not gotten any of it for them.  I learned how to spend the $500 each week on the things we really needed, exactly as indicated by the check marks on the papers, and then buy as many of the special requests as possible.  I made yogurt once in awhile for the women who had young babies, and I made granola for all the houses.  I was in heaven living with these people and I wish I was there again right now.

When I made my presentation, not only did I get the job as food buyer, but Ellen, my goddess, mentioned that I was the only available responsible family member out of the sixty people in our outfit who had proven to be a consistently safe driver.  Suddenly I was in charge of picking up the garbage at all the houses and taking it to the dump, and I was in charge of taking the pre-school kids to their pre-school in the morning and picking them up at lunch time.  Suddenly I felt like a million dollars.  This was better than the nuclear family.  This was freedom to be myself, to experiment with different kinds of responsibilities, to fail again and again and still be accepted as long as I kept on trying.  My main failing was jealousy, for OIC’s next act was to appoint Judas to go on most of these work assignments with me, and from then on, because of the difference in our personalities, people came to Judas as the director of these activities and I sometimes felt like I was being mistaken for a completely incompetent person who had no idea what was going on and couldn’t be trusted to make a decision.  But I did need help sorting out $500 worth of food and delivering it to eight houses in order to get done before midnight.  All in all, Judas and I had a lot of fun doing our routes together.  He didn’t like to drive, so I did all that.  We nailed some old rotten sheets of plywood up on some wooden posts in the back of Asparagus Spears Germley’s ‘52 Chevy pickup, and about the time we got out on the freeway and got the truck up to speed, one of the rotten plywood sheets ripped itself off its nails and I learned a valuable lesson about the force of air pressure multiplied by a large surface area.

While I was at Rivendell, I started wondering whether Primal Therapy was really “The Cure For Neurosis” or not.  For a year and a half, I had preached it as gospel and presented myself as an expert since I had read the works of not only Dr. Art Janov, but also Dr. Frederick Leboyer, a modern-day pioneer in natural childbirth, and Dr. Ashley Montagu, an anthropologist who wrote about the importance of natural childbirth and breastf-eeding, and Touching in general, as a foundation for the healthy emotional and social development of young humans.  Why should a baby’s first experience out of the womb involve being tortured with bright lights, cold air-conditioned rooms, a drugged mother who doesn’t respond in instinctual ways to engage the baby’s normal processes, beatings and slashings and burning eyedrops and sugar water and on and on.  But I failed to remain completely convinced that somehow managing to retraumatize myself by means of Primal Therapy was going to reform my personality and motivational structure, and despite my curiosity about any repressed memories that might be lurking in the gloomy, out-of-the-way nooks and crannies of my psyche, I decided to drop Primal Therapy as a religious belief, and that meant I could get interested in my real interests again; I no longer had to label everything I liked to do as neurotic.  I felt a surge of freedom similar to when I quit the christian religion.

I started reading metaphysical books again, starting with Findhorn, which is about a magical garden in Scotland started by a man who could see fairies and satyrs and such, and then I read all of Lobsang Rampa’s books.  He was a Tibetan monk from Lhasa, the great walled city and capital of Tibet, who wore out his body and then inhabited the body of an English accountant who liked to write metaphysical books.  It was all very entertaining, and it made me want to have an out-of-the-body experience very badly, but try as I might, I couldn’t get the hang of it.  Of course Judas said I should be trying to get into my body instead of trying to get out of it, but he and I were very different body types: he liked to get into his and work, while I liked to get out of mine and think.

One day I went out on the flat roof outside our room, which was the second-story apartment in a four-car garage, and burned some incense and determined that I was going to have a supernatural experience.  Maureen and Debo and Judas and Ellen and some other Rivvies had been talking about a breathing technique lately called Rebirthing, which they claimed was the cure for Primal Therapy, and I didn’t know anything about it, but I figured I’d do some breathing exercises to see if it would induce any unnatural experiences.  I was off acid by then.  A channeled spirit named Doctor Duran had called my name out at a big family seance that was given for us by a traveling medium.  Out of the dark, the good doctor called out: “Lust?  Are you out there?  Where are you?  Lust?  I know you’re out there.”  The moral of the story is that Doctor Duran had determined that I was taking too much LSD and that I was damaging my Astral Body by doing it, and he insisted that I give it up.  So I did; I didn’t take any LSD for a couple of years after that.

So anyway, there I was up on the roof, breathing real heavy and fast for awhile and then holding my breath for as long as I could.  I found out that I could pass out in any number of ways, using different combinations of breathing and holding the breath, until finally something went click and I was looking at a big huge fat ancient leather-bound book opening up in front of me, on the backs of my closed eyelids, while perfectly aware that I was sitting cross-legged on the roof holding my breath.  I began to read the words that focused themselves and became real words only as I looked at them, and then went out of my comprehension immediately as soon as I moved on to the next phrase.  I read the whole page this way in awe of what was happening, because the words I was reading were more powerful than I could imagine ever making up myself, but my awareness was not able to hold on to any of the ideas for more than a few seconds.  This frustrated me and I made an extra effort to home in on the delicate state of mind that had somehow captured me, and I saw one phrase near the bottom of the first page leap at me in bold print, and I noticed as I continued to read—because I had to keep up with a certain balancing act in order to sustain the realness of the vision—that I could still remember that one phrase, and I still can, very vividly.  The words were, “ . . . Freedom Oh Freedom!  Ilaväet! . . . ”

Now that was something.

I am still searching for Ilaväet.

The California Youth Authority—the caretakers of juvenile offenders in the State of California—paid us $600-1200 per month for each young offender who we gave a home to, and the supervision from the California Youth Authority was so loose that I literally never met a California Youth Authority officer the whole time I was with Rivendell.  We did a good job; if a kid wanted to screw up, he didn’t come running back to us afterwards, because he knew he couldn’t come back and he knew he couldn’t lie to Tony and Freddy and Maureen.  The placements rarely left the house at night because they had each other to socialize with, and they didn’t want to lose what they had by getting in trouble in town.  Not only was Rivendell better than jail, it was also a lot better than the homes they came from.  It was better than all their homes put together.

We had a young man living with us by the name of Kelly.  He was a California Youth Authoriy placement who had been with us a long time.  He was established and comfortable with the family before I got there the first time.  One day his big brother and his brother’s wife came to the Freedom House to drop off Kelly’s Mama and 8-year-old brother Stanley.  They were going to live with us.  Kelly’s big brother’s wife had a brand new baby who was going to die if somebody couldn’t figure out how to make him keep his formula down.  Kelly’s big brother’s wife didn’t know about doctors, and she had let them give her a shot to dry up her breast milk.  She told me this on their way out, as they were piling in their car to leave.  I told them to wait, and I went in the house and called Maureen and asked her what to do.  She told me the baby had to go on goat’s milk with acidophilus, and everything would be fine.  I went back out and told those nice people they had better stop putting formula into that baby, because Maureen said all the baby needed to eat was goat’s milk with acidophilus, and everything would be fine.  The worried young couple looked more hopeful as they drove off, and they called Kelly a few weeks later and he relayed their gratitude and said Maureen had saved their baby’s life.

Kelly’s mama was a tired old waitress who puffed around with a cigarette and a ragged cough.  She was at least 45 years older than her baby boy Stanley.  He was a rough little kid, very independent, capable and intelligent.  He was loud and dirty, and I thought he was cool.  Tony Hill suggested that I take him on as a little brother, and help his Mama out by taking him camping in the hills there on our very own 33 acres at the Freedom House.  I went along with that, and we ended up going up the hill one night to camp out.  On the way up the hill we spent quite some time digging through an ancient riverbed where we liked to dig, looking for smooth, river-polished jaspers of all colors.  Then we went up and set up camp, and tried to make potato chips over a fire.  They were soggy but we ate them.  Then we looked at each other, and there was no lying to be told: I was bored and wanted to go home, and Stanley wanted to go home and sleep with his Mama like he always did.  So we packed up our dirty dishes and went home, where all twenty people who lived there gave us a hard time for being lightweights.  I did not mind; I had come up with an idea, something I could do for Stanley even though I was a boring companion who didn’t know what to talk to an eight-year-old boy about, and I needed some time off from being big brother to think about my New Idea.

As it turned out, I seldom spent time with Stanley after that, because I got involved with a woman who had her own family, but the New Idea that came out of that time gave birth to my Task, and my Task changed my life completely, becoming a focal point in my quest for something Big and Sweepingly Revolutionary that I could do without getting in too much trouble, with the fringe benefit of taking some of my internal focus off my own puny problems so I would be forced to have new experiences, to have them with complete involvement, and to take risks in learning new things and getting other people to participate.  Somehow taking Stanley camping, or trying to, or wanting to, opened a fissure in my matrix of possibilities and introduced a new concept: the Task, the specific nature of which I will reveal shortly.

When I lived at Freedom House this time round, Ellen and Pete were in charge.  They were both veteran Rivvies, both Irish from New York City, and they had recently become pregnant and were living together as a couple.  It made me feel all warm inside the way Ellen took me aside specially and told me all about how their son had been born at home, with no drugs.  She said she just squatted down and out he popped.  Ellen had good solid energy, lots of spunk of her own so she didn’t need to borrow any from any man, and she was smart enough to be scary.  I liked her.  She could cut things down to the nitty gritty real fast, which made her the perfect leader for a house of over 20 residents, none of us overtly normal.  She had a loose and easy-going style, cutting and soft-spoken at the same time, and what with freckles and all, it’s good that Pete was in the way or I might have tried falling in love with her.  That would be like the tortoise trying to ride on the hare’s back.  Why should she have slowed down for me?  She’s one of those beautiful and fascinating women whose energy once touched me and always inspired me after that.  It was not the sun tea she showed me how to make, or the way she showed me what to do when there’s nothing in the fridge but strawberries and sour cream; it was the fact that she bothered with me at all, when I had not the slightest of ideas that I deserved the attention of such an intricately cool human being.  Several times she showed me how to turn around my point-of-view, and not gently, but not roughly.  She had perfect congruence.  She was completely genuine.  That’s how I think of her.  She was one of the few people I’ve known that I was comfortable around, yet in awe of at the same time.  It’s easy for me to be in awe of someone, because my empty shell is role-model happy, and always sniffing for a new way to exploit my chameleonoid tendencies.  But it’s very hard for me to be comfortable around people I like, respect, and look up to.  There was something about the depth of her eyes that made me relax and feel good.

Pete was my special friend.  He was in the hard-core counseling end of what we did with kids from the California Youth Authority.  He was tall and relaxed and completely un-macho—as were most of the people I met from the East Coast—and he liked to tell me funny stories about the City.  Like Ellen, he shared his experience and comfort level with me, without the slightest hint of condescension or pretentiousness.  And a total lack of condescension, by the way, was something I could really respond to, as far as it making me suggestible.  I was so hungry for experience in my agoraphobic little existence that I loved to just stand close to those awesome people—especially Sherry—and try to apprehend the source of their self-confidence, and hope that a little of it would rub off on me.  Ellen and Pete and Debo and Sherry and Von Loon (Asparagus Spears) and all the others did more for my self-regard, just by the friendly but neutral way they engaged my eyes with theirs, than any amount of Mellaril ever could have done.

Ann-Marie did the same thing for me one evening.  I discovered that her intensity, which normally scared me, became soothing and comforting, the closer I voluntarily moved toward her, and as she softened and accepted my existence in the universe, I just sat there like I was a happy kid in my Mama’s living room and wrote a song on my guitar, and two feet away Ann Marie was sitting on the couch sewing.  Nobody else was home out of all the twenty-odd people who lived there.  We didn’t talk much, but for some reason the clumsiness of the moment meant nothing to me and I accepted that we were both busy, and we were hanging out together for some reason, and for some reason I was liking it to the extreme.

It was these types of indescribable household experiences with my 60 brothers and sisters in Rivendell that changed my life forever and made me realize that limits are sometimes made of cardboard; there is more to the world than I have already experienced, and as a matter of fact, although the jury was still out at this point, it was Rivendell that influenced the late-coming verdict that I was not now, nor had I ever been, the center of the universe.  Such depth of insight came much later, of course.  This was only 1979, and I was only 23 years old.

 

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