Stupid-head

When I first came here--- I think it was after about a year--- I turned 23 and flipped my lid.

I had this life-loving mania fueling me into being very nearly improvisational. I couldn't sleep for days and maybe more than a week, or even ten days, all the while drinking too. I wrote, I wrote like this probably, though I'm far from manic now. And I visited friends, established friends and new friends, carrying with me a slim tube from which I fired bottle rockets to announce my arrival.

This was in the summer and the Spring before I'd been heart-sick over a girl with a parakeet she'd named "Oliver". Her name was Lisa and she loved "Green Acres" reruns, so it was "Oliver and Lisa" and she loved to call for Oliver in the Hungarian accent of Eva Gabor.

"Oliver?" (where are you?").

"Oh, Oliver!! (disappointed. let down.)"

So you can well understand. She was the prototype of many a garpish novel, say where a widowed professor falls for a free spirited grad student who plays the cello and collects marbles and paints her letters and the envelopes too.

Anyway, she came by with a twelve pack of beer several Fridays in a row while I house-sat at a homeless shelter and we had some wonderful, laugh-filled evenings reminiscing about our untroubled childhoods.

One of those nights she stayed, so for a couple of weeks we were a couple. I was hoping she wouldn't fly away and then she flew away. Or rather hooked up with some guy who worked at the head-shop ( a rare black man in white hippy culture, it didn't stop him from ending up in prison and when he got out, he threatened her with a gun, and went back. They have a beautiful son.)

If I measured that Spring's loss with this Summer's euphoria, I must have been completely distraught but in denial.

I was not tentative, I wasn't halting or balking or hesitating with people.

Surprising to remember now, I think I was imitating Lisa, adopting her ready laughter and even some of her mannerisms.

It was a revelation to me that other people were a little shy but wanted to be drawn out. I reasoned that , like characters in a book, you had to give them something to react to, to discover what made them different.

But everyone was the same: happy to see me. Except for my friends. My real friends, I'd already had. They were not happy. They could see, I suppose.
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Lying down was boring, no matter what time of day or night, because I might be doing something else.

It became a sort of game between my friends and me, how and when I would be committed. I knew perfectly well I was sick now. I'd vandalized the police station one night, and I was regularly stalking Mudhead on his job runs for the food bank, firing rockets at him.

I started calling the cops on myself, and do you know how hard it is to get committed when you want to be committed? It was like , "No, son, we admit that's over the top but you're not quite there yet."

A second time, they came again and I suddenly realized they might think I was armed. I cowered in the dark kitchen, yelling that I was paralysed, I couldn't move! Pretending hysterical paralysis until the cuffs were on. "Just didn't want to scare you guys into shooting me. I'm fine."

They left me in an unlocked waiting room at the psych-ward and I got bored and walked home, this perfectly still, warm June night, under the Dutch Elms.
___
Finally a Hindu interviewed me and concluded that I believed I was the smartest person in the world. (I read his notes later, and knew they were out of a book, so I didn't get defensive and argue I was actually quite unsure.) That was--- as we liked to quote SNL--- the ticket.

I was led up there to the third floor and I settled down to read All Quiet On The Western Front. (You should laugh. But shame!) It was not the best choice, but Wodehouse was out of the question since I think Psmith had given me as much of my new personality as Lisa had.

It was a weekend, and a holiday weekend at that, so my 72 hours observation turned into 96. I suddenly wanted my freedom so bad I paid serious attention to how the orderlies came and went, which way of escape, how maybe to steal a key. Of course there was a key ring to grab at the nurses desk, sometimes, but which of those 50 keys was the one?

I was still manic and forward. I met a slender crazy girl named Joanne, who later became my first girlfriend and shack-partner. She twirled and plucked her hairs out. She had a smart, edgy sense of humor, and was fascinated with Edie Sedgewick and Andy Warhol.

Her mom was just out of prison and they lived in a trailer park. She'd had sex with her brother on the bathroom floor when she was 13 and got caught. She couldn't keep her hands out of her hair and would eventually become bald, but that was months later, after living with me.

Then the bad thing happened, I think changed me forever. Anyway it taught me to fear mania and in a sense, to fear happiness.

They gave me a walloping dose of haldol or something and I crashed like a jumbo jet. I was out for a night and a day and into the next evening. I dreamed horrible dreams, where my friends and I were at a farm and had decided to start executing one another by firing squad. One by one. We'd take the bodies away in between wooden planks, tied together with rope. Mudhead was gone now. My insides squeezed into themselves, my heart stopped and my mind consciously refused to register.

I got up, asked for an apple, and went to my claimed space on the couch, where my books were. A nurse handed me a painted envelope. One of these days was my birthday. All my friends had signed the "get well" card "Happy Birthday". Mudhead scrawl: "bastard". I looked for Lisa's name and it was there. Even her signature was happy-happy. Perfect cursive script, feminine, artistic.

I don't remember getting out, I don't remember craving a beer although I'm sure I needed one and got twelve. My apartment was empty until I picked up Joanne, but the main house where my friends lived was full. Mudhead took us to a place called the Devil's Icebox, which is a cave outside of town. You go down several wooden flights of stairs and at one particular step, the temperature drops twenty degrees, though you're still in the sunlight. It makes you stop and step back up and step back down, marveling at the invisible borderline.

The rest of the summer was dull and listless, uninteresting except for Joanne being a fugitive. I ignored her , except when to express aggravation at her pulling her hair out. I was always a little drunk. One night she came home and said she'd just been raped by an old boyfriend. I believed her. We started out downtown to look for him when suddenly she swung around and shoved me so I fell flat on my back, caught completely by surprise.

The breath was knocked out of me for the first time since 5th grade and I thought, this is only my breath knocked out of me, I'm not going to die. She was sorry and after awhile helped me up. She took me to the bushes near the Wendy's where it happened. It wasn't meaningless to see the spot. We looked up and all around, I saw a lot of guys in white t-shirts but she couldn't see him so we went home. Really, I don't remember what we were thinking to do. Later she told me, and I believed her, that she had to relax while he was on top of her. Fighting would make it hurt.

She started spending more time at her mother's trailer, and I missed her a little. I took a bus to Iowa for some reason, and on the way back she was supposed to be at the bus station. Then she was at the bus station and I couldn't believe something so happily anticipated was actually occurring as planned. She looked beautiful too, I remember to this day how she was dressed to slay me. She wore a kercheif by now.

All these months I can't remember where my money came from. I didn't work, so my parents must have been sending checks. I had parents like some people have doting grandparents. Sometime in August I wanted to come home, and that Fall I was back in the damned English -Philosophy building again, musing over Turtle Island. My teachers told me I was a good writer, "humor comes from pain sometimes", and that if I graduated I'd have a good shot at the then renowned Iowa International Writers WorkGarp.

"Huh."