Chapter 1

Carlos crosses the room slower than a planet; but he ripples inside like a big cat.

Carlos is pale from rooms like this. Snakes twine around his calves. Angels grace his thighs. A doe-eyed girl with a red bandana and blue tears and thick green hair stares from under his shoulder. On his back, a woman vampirizes another woman. On the web between his thumb and forefinger, the proverbial cross with rays.

I study Carlos cuz who knows where I’ll go next and who knows how long I’ll be in a bedroom with a wire-meshed window and a metal door. I reckon Carlos can make it livable cuz he’s been in the Big House.

A staff member yells “Cigarettes;” but everyone down to the lowest schizophrenic has been watching the clock and already knows it’s cigarette time.

Mike walks 4 whole linoleum squares at a time, down the hall, choking himself with both hands. I say “hi” and ask him how Cleopatra and the holy family are doing and he breaks a wide yellow grin cuz he communicates with historical characters of different periods, simultaneously. Carlos asks him if he smokes and strangles himself at the same time. Some of the other lodgers complain at the hideous spectacle Mike makes but the staff says don’t reward him with attention. One day I amused myself by physically removing his hands from his throat and as many times as I did that they would snap back in place like machine parts.

We form a line in front of a room with big windows that have wire mesh in the glass. The staff member hands out two cigarettes to each person and lights one for each person cuz we can’t have matches. Then we sit at round white tables in stackable chairs and enjoy the hideous spectacle.

Hey knock it off James; it’s clean says Carlos cuz James is spitting on the tables and wiping it up with a rag that’s been everywhere. It’s filthy in here says James and continues mixing his saliva into the orange juice, coffee, and ashes on the table top. Quit working I can’t stand custodial activities near me when I’m relaxing I say. Someone ought to throw James overboard says Carlos.

There’s a line on the wall that’s about eye level. I rest my chin on my hands and gaze at it. Sometimes it’s just a line between white cinder blocks and sometimes it’s where the sea meets the sky and then I close my eyes and I’m on the yacht with Izzy. Izzy wears a black bathing suit so she’s always a dramatic composition while she’s out on deck. It’s too hot so we go below deck.

Below deck, Izzy shows me an exquisite plate. I try to remember the pattern on the porcelain. It’s a hard school. Izzy wants me to keep in touch with pattern painting even tho I’m on the yacht, even tho I’m with her. She says the patterns will be easy to remember at first and then progressively harder. I go back on the white deck. I gaze at the horizon until it’s a line between white cinder blocks.

I open my eyes to Carlos yelling “Man overboard!” Three staff members are chasing the nocomprende boy down the hall. The door is hanging open if we want a better look; but anyone here longer than a week stops in front of any door, whether it’s locked or not, except, of course, the nocomprende boy. Hang him from the yardarm I say.

Over the border, thru the orchardland, thru the pastureland, down the paved band under the twined loops of many soaring hawks and now pounding the door of a seclusion room in the big town in the North. There is a Mexico that the nocomprende boy can’t escape.

The seclusion room is a cube with mocha colored walls done in heavy impasto, a bedframe and mattress and pillow without linens, a white linoleum floor, a 60 watt bulb. Occasionally a tiny insect traverses the floor. It’s good to watch the tiny insect. It’s good to feel smaller and smaller so the walls become an expanse of brown fog. Drop anchor and wait for dawn.

But the nocomprende boy pounds the door. He could lose years in a few hours. He could emerge with clean incisors, keen eyes, a glossy coat. He could lurk, graceful along the perimeter, scanning the plain; he could fold into the fold and have his fleas picked like the best of them. His blood would surge dark and steady in his forelimbs. He could hear a lizard from 10 paces. His mama and papa would reside in the earth. He could follow us. He could learn like the first day. He could grasp a pencil and trust what he can’t see.

Out in the courtyard for socialization or a bingo game. We get brownie points for being civilized and social and attending to structured activities. Alas none of these brownie points will help James who is crawling up and down the 30 X 50 rug of grass, a row to the north, an exquisitely bovine turn, a row to the south, and so on. He is blissfully grazing beneath our rectangle of sky. He gathers cigarette stubs, used matches, bits of tissue paper, gum wrappers, bits of potato chips, and less savory things and rolls them into a pouch in the belly of his Tshirt.

A smoked glass panel flanks the north side all across the first floor level and accountants, visitors, psychiatrists and others are likely to gaze thru the glass as if it were one-way glass. I trust that they will not be throwing stones but most of us avoid pacing too far toward the north; and even James only crawls toward the panel; and that’s because even former body builders (like James), artists (like myself), and others known to perform, do not perform in zoos, not as apes, like myself, or as oxen, like James, but prefer to gesticulate and speak and act our awe and reverence for all marvels inside and outside this place amongst freemen and masons and peers known to gaggle about and flock together and to avoid those not kin.

We sit in the shade of the patio at the south end. The funny farm says Rick as he watches James grazing. He has a thing about surfaces I say. Wow, he’s a human vacuum cleaner says Carlos. I wish I had a man like that around the house says staff member Susan. He’s the cordless industrial model says Rick. I’m embarrassed, but, What James is doing looks fun I say; I love small scale repetitive tasks; they clean out my mind and make me stupid and blissful. I’ll drink to that says Rick.

I gaze openmouthed at Susan. She’s working on her master’s, she’s pretty, she’s got an expensive hairstyle and her skin is a cosmetic marvel. She smiles a lot and hands out cigarettes without being begged. In another world I had friends like that, all destined to the middleclass. I’m in a red Tshirt and khaki baggies and K-Mart deck shoes. I have a 5 day beard, the skin is peeling off my ears and nose from the bad soap here and there’s big sweat stains under my arms. So I look down at the cement instead. I draw my knees up and squat like an Arab and keep my monkey arms close to my torso. I feel my canines grow and it’s like she’s some other species. The other guys get that way too. They adjust their shoelaces, draw little curves with their paws in the dust, proffer a twig to an ant, push their hair back with sweaty hands. Eyes avoiding the sky, the girl, the windows. Shoulders drooping close like buzzard wings. The game reserve should be larger. They should tag us and go.

Watch James, whispers Carlos, and looks over at the ashtray and winks; He’s gonna make a fire. James, puffing and sweating, arranges all of his collected debris in the barbecue and then starts doing calisthenics near the patio. Susan and the others go inside cuz it’s hot and cuz James seems to ruin the bliss of things, and cuz no one wants to play bingo. James goes to empty the ashtray, and there’s what he’s been waiting for: Fire. Carlos and I turn into giggling, grimacing baboons before this promethean act. Act like you don’t see him; don’t make him shy, says Carlos. James adds rotten rags from his anti-cleaning expeditions of days before. He stands with his broad back to the windows. Thick, black, eyesmarting and stinking smoke drifts toward the patio while a staff member shrieks, “Fire!” Let’s have a barbecue announces James.

The 4 staff members get all mixed up while the accounting staff on the second floor come to their windows to see what the commotion is about. 2 staff go for the mop bucket; one staff goes for the fire extinguisher and one staff yells about having to get James away from the fire while a patient douses the fire with water from a paper cup. I just wanted to have a barbecue says James.

Next day I get shore leave. Be sure and get back before the Love Boat leaves for the Bahamas says Carlos. I’m just gonna sit in a park somewhere; I got a lot of things to figure out I say. Gonna see some friends? asks Carlos. No, it would feel crummy saying, “sorry, I have to get back to the ward now.” That’s smart says Carlos; you’re just on vacation right? Yes sir, I spent the summer on the Love Boat.

It’s scary out here so I take it in stages. It’s scary cuz 2 weeks in a mental ward makes them “normal” and me “ill.” A few years of poverty does the same thing. It’s a bright and eager phalanx of joggers, shiny cars, manicured lawns, well clothed folks with pens and calculators to some real purpose. You don’t know how to look at me, hunched over, hands in pockets, masking fear with impossibly slow strides, a tourist in suburbia; I grew up here with skateboards, with the Beach Boys, with gropings in the garages, girls with their first Revlon faces, model cars, water balloons, touch football. They roll a film forwards and the President gets shot and then they roll it backwards and his head comes up again and then they roll it forwards and he gets shot again and then they roll it backwards and so we go out in Linda’s pool to see if her breasts are growing. I present church and full silos and majorettes. I present the junior chamber of commerce, the 1965 Ford Mustang, and the proper rewards of General Business class. Things got mixed up. Dad always said tomorrow. I stayed in a jar of alcohol and when I got out I couldn’t have what I left so I went back in the jar so that today I’m on a little hill of mowed grass on the hospital grounds in the July afternoon, the sun flashing bright and painful blips off the cars, the trees roaring with bugs, and I see across the way my mother going to see my doctor and it occurs to me that it’s gonna be like that film of the president, back and forth, back and forth, her getting out of the car forever to see the doctor on some film in my mind and I try to feel something and it would be better if it hurt but I don’t feel anything; I’m just a camera on a tripod and I know I left your world doctor.

There’s a question on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory that really bugs. You’re in a theater and you see smoke rising in the corner and you know there’s a fire in the theater, would you:

a. yell “fire.”

b. go to the lobby and inform the manager.

c. quietly leave the theater without telling anyone.

I pick “c.” It’s been that way for a while—and I know I left your world, doctor.

I could leave the love boat with several blank videotapes in my head. The shock treatment that’s already done done is that none of my tapes get me anywhere but here. Erase them, I think, and a chill goes down my spine. I’m 35 years old and, for a few seconds, in all fairness, I’m afraid to cross the street and go to the little grocery store in suburbia and purchase some minor luxuries.

So on the way to the store I’m thinking I better get on the phone and be honest cuz I can’t live on the street and the street is the bright promise when I get off the ward and I never had to beg no I never had to beg.

I buy a Vogue magazine, a giant Hershey bar, and some menthols cuz it’s more important to be steady and pleasant on the phone this afternoon than it is to save money. I think of it that way, a real cosmetic job, a smooth con.

I go over to campus to find the last phone booths in town that have a closing door and a bench to sit on. I light up a cigarette, I start thumbing through Vogue. I find a picture of Izzy just perfectly expressionless. It’s a pleasant world. I’m a pleasant guy. There’s people who pay just to have me around. I can’t help it. I was born this way. Oh wow, where did Linda get those legs. Let’s go to Miami. Now I’ve got it. I dial friend A. No time for emotion so I’m working it out like a flowchart. Friend A says he will get in touch with some folks and surely my family couldn’t be that cruel and surely my brother will pull thru for me and why didn’t I tell him I was on the ward till just now? Friend A arranges to visit me on the ward this evening cuz I gotta go after this problem right now. I call friend B, who asks me if I’ve called friend A and says he’ll keep his eye out. I call C and D and now my program is looping. I’m not going to blow a fuse cuz there’s time. Anyway, there’s this scene in my head of me with my clothes in a plastic bag, with nowhere to stay, and that might have to be the approach I’ll use.

I find a pretty place by the duckpond and eat my giant chocolate bar and look at all the pretty pictures in Vogue. If I’m a reasonable guy, everything will fall in place; that’s how I was raised. It occurs to me that recently folks decided I was not a reasonable guy, and earlier than recently too. There’s a bridge over the freeway; or, maybe I could score a hot shot. Well I was always afraid of pain. I better go back to the ward now. I see why they only let me out 3 hours.