The events of this chapter took place between November 1963 and April 1964
I had already returned to Boston via New York in October
Let's Go Away For Awhile
After less than a month in Boston, I decided to go to sleep for awhile. There were certain pressures; like no income. With rent on the basement apartment due in a week, I avoided the landlord by moving into Ricky’s place. Ricky was a fry cook at a White Castle type hamburger joint in Park Square, Boston. He immediately determined that I would be a stay-at-home; a creature he could mold after his fancy. There was no “honeymoon” or “grace period.” When he sent me to the drug store down the street from his MTA stop to buy K-Y Jelly, it was in the manner of a threat that the request was made; no promise of putting stars in my eyes. If it’s gory details you’re looking for, you won’t find them in the present Chapter but thoroughly presented in Chapter X (Novices in Boyland). Suffice it to say, I wasn’t about to have Ricky the-cook-the-baker-the-candlestick . . . In short, things looked mighty bleak, and suddenly the future was something to be feared, not just another place to go toward or step away from once it arrived. After a couple of years ob being able to drift from edge to edge without really falling off, I now found myself at the edge of an abyss rather than at the edge of an edge, which is more or less how I had been perceiving similar potential catastrophic moments. The thought of being raped was enough to bring me to a terrible decision. Ricky never got his K-Y; never saw me again. I spent that five bucks on a couple of bottles of over-the-counter sleeping pills.
It was early evening. November 20, 1963. I used a piece of glass to mercilessly attack my inner arms. This happened in the street in front of a house where a party was going on. I hacked my arms and spun around until a friend, who would reenter my life in 1972, at a summer rental in North Truro, Massachusetts.
Joe Barry was horrified. He and someone named Rollie dashed to a drug store where, inside their car iat the curb, they applied every kind of bandage you can imagine: band aids, butterfly bandages, gauze, gauze, gauze and tape tape tape. They drove me home, such as it was in it's last days of my tenancy.
I met Joe, Jimmy Marconi and Lonnie Longoria at the Punch Bowl during a Red Sweater Party - much more later about that. I clung to them for safety. I was more than a mess. I was self destructive to the edge of the unknown.
These boys would come back into my life during the following year, and we reunited several times between our first meeting and the mid-seventies.
After a bit of a rest, I threw on fresh clothes and sarted walking. Aimlessly westward. Away from Boston. It wasn’t too much past midnight that I got tired of walking. I was in one of those Elm Street USA type places, in Needham. In this quiet place I gobbled up a bottle of patent sleep medicine that Joey had bought to help me relax. I passed out in the middle of somebody’s driveway. Nighty night.
Vaguely Like a Court Appearance
I don’t recall anyone waking me up, but I was awake and hallucinating in the back seat of what turned out to be a local government car accompanied by two local government men with whom I communicated in goo-goos and ga-gas and drools. Ithink they might have been policement but there were dressed in regular business attire. Maybe communicated isn’t exactly the right word here. There were a few complete sentences, but mostly the two strangers acted with official aloofness except when I “communicated” something, upon which expression they would mostly laugh and tell me “no.” There was a vague inkling of having recently appeared before a judge in the same kind of small courtroom that I remember from two previous appearances: when Cecil finalized Lainey’s and my adoption; and when, with a probation officer named Jeanne%%%% Kozinsky positioned between me and Mom and Dad, the ruling was made to hand me over to the California Youth Authority for Juvenile Offenders -- Rather than finding a third foster home; and without hesitation precluding more time in Santa Ana's Juvenile Hall as a ward of the County.
The State of Massachusetts was now going to have a hand in my rehabilitation. It would be several hours before I would realize it and again return to a quasi-sensible state.
The Assassination
Mid-day, November 22, 1963. I was watching television in the lounge of what-was-until-then-I-did-not-know-it-was the receiving ward at Medfield State Hospital. For now I was a basket case. Later I’d learn that from the moment I arrived, I’d been wandering around demanding to know why the doors and elevators were locked. Locked! Locked! They said I demanded to know what kind of hotel was this anyway? I just wandered around, trying doors, windows, cabinets and elevator buttons.
I was alone in the lounge. A news bulletin interrupted whatever I was watching -- President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. It was possible he might be dead. Mortally wounded. Not shot. Mortally wounded as his motorcade passed through downtown Dallas. An assassin’s bullet. It was more than a vague impulse that shook my mind from its slumber in delirium. This was important news. Everyone should know what had happened. I sought out someone in the ward to let them know what was going on.
A nurse in the crafts room didn’t believe me when I told her the President had been shot. And why should she take any stock in what I had to say? After all, I’d been closely observed during the whole 12 or so hours since my admission. And what was being observed was a very confused young man, a clear-cut mental case who’d just opened up his arms with a broken Coke bottle. But more alarming than the brutality of the act was the delirium, the hallucinating, the pervasive disorientation. It was properly observed that these were probably symptoms of some kind of psychosis. (It turned out that the hallucinations were the result of an overdose of patent sleeping tablets—I think it was Sominex—which at the time contained a stiff dash of belladonna or belladonna derivative. That’s only a hunch, reasonably assumed years later when I did some belladonna and reacted to it with those same sensations and hallucations as before.
The jingle sang, “take Sominex tonight, sleep and restful, sleep, sleep, sleep.”
I finally had to get physical with this nurse or psychiatric technician—they all wore similar white uniforms whether their job was cleaning toilets, passing out medication, filling out reports, serving food or teaching crafts to basket cases. I pulled-pushed her to the TV lounge to see for herself. In the instant it took me to tell her, “See? Look!” I was lucid. Bewildered, yes, but only because an epochal tragedy was unfolding before our eyes, and would continue to grip the common consciousness for many days—and years—to come.
If John Kennedy had not been murdered, I would likely still be watching TV in the lounge of an institution for the hopelessly insane. Watching TV and wondering when the elevators would be running again.
Medfield
There are worse places to be held for observation than the Massachusetts State Hospital at Medfield. And my condition, in its way, held the best possible prognosis, considering that I could have bled to death, or, at minimum rendered myself permanently disabled; not to mention the possibility that if I’d internalized the delirium—I’d end up in long-term treatment for psychosis. Dementia!
As it is, the scars are everlasting and, by some accounts, gruesome. I try explaining them by telling people I went through a windshield. But inwardly, the scars were/are more like some kind of mystical brand—as if marked at Valhalla for temporary return to Rancho Horizon. Difficult as it is to explain/convince a sane person (such as you, the reader), I seemed healthy. More astonishing, I was aware that I felt healthy. The gaping wounds began to heal. The experience began to crystalize in my psyche. The extremes of my own emotions were strangely reflected in what had become more like a pageant than real life—the public’s wrenching participation in Kennedy’s passing—the stun, shock and mourning. How many peole living today have experienced an epoch of mourning? All of human history has rarely bore witness to millions of people coming together from across vastly disparate boundaries (both geographic and political) spontaneous; weeping openly. It is indeed rare enough for the public to see even one individual hiding their tears from no one, revealing the depth of their pain to all.
In some ways I was more fortunate than the majority survivors of the Kennedy assassination; in others, faring no better than the rest. Even now, the events that shape our lives and color moments of universality—all are more misshapen and less colorful, thanks in great part to the specter of political assassination in America and the deadly pall it cast beyond it’s virulent stages, 1963-1968.
I’d emerged from the overdose with my wit still intact. It was this wit and the lucky charm of new-born sensibilities that kept me mainly in good hands during the several months I would remain on the Medfield evaluation ward. I shared good rapport with nurses and Psych Techs – the “people in white coats” that came to take some people away. I had definitely molted; a thick layer of skin had peeled away and revealed something quite new to me—a feeling of being alive and part of the world around me. Where before there was no feeling for the moment, only a meandering if hectic walk through the fog, I now had an idea that while in the past I had experienced here-and-there beginnings, I had no real sense of growth. Only the fog. Nice fog, true, but fog just the same. I’m not saying that revelation was spawned by going nuts. I’d shared my thoughts with the boys in Indiana. I had spoken -- conversed! I was renewed at Five Corners 1962, but only for as long as it took to once more know the pain of rejection, by way of a Christmastime phone call. The new molting didn’t make me feel special, but it did make me feel a part of the world around me, not apart from it.
I realize now – at age going-on sixty six - that I had been deeply depressed for over two-thirds of my life. But when moments, days and months would carry me to some manageable plateau, I was always ready to go with that flow. I actually convinced myself that I was happy most of the time.
The fact that I no longer drooled in my shoe, and the way in which I recovered from the drug-induced dementia by bearing the dreadfully bad news of Kennedy’s death; these were significant in the way most of the staff interacted with me. To them I was special, a distinction that prompted me to reward their relaxed social intercourse -- such reward being in the form of entertaining people in white coats and in the form of coming face to face with other patients. When trouble brewed or when a difficult moment occurred, my deepest need was to release the pressure, which was critical to do not only for my own emotional balance but for the subsidiary effect of sharing that balance, or, at least, that distraction, for the general good of all.
To be blunt, however, the reasons I enjoyed high self esteem and being held in high esteem were: (1) I was the healthiest patient on the ward; (2) my inner scars were mystical tattoos, revealed only subsequent to shedding a layer of old baby-skin; (3) the experiences leading up to the present time (involuntary commitment to a mental hospital—no laughing matter) had the strange effect of nurturing my intellect—the same intellect that would one day become the great discovery of my life.
Put more bluntly still: by way of reason number (3), I was smarter than most of the patients and staff. Divine providence must have kept this fact hidden from view. I was not a smart Alec, but who knows how ill would be my treatment if the staff perceived me as feeling superior or special. I only felt special for them. And the only way in which I could approach feeling superior was my notion—still unproved after 30 years and counting—that we were equals.
I joined in, and brought others to join in, too. We had fun. Fun? Amidst some forty shattered psyches pitched together into a situation that was for some, embarrassing, for others unavoidable, or hopelessly ineffective without the therapeutic success that can only be administered by time—weeks, months, years. Worst of all, for the fewest, these were the first unchanging days of what will be a lifetime of the unchanging days of the precognizant futility that is silently invoked with each diagnosis; that hospitalization for life is the only possible cure, the possibility of which they will never know exists. There but for fortune go you and I. My head is bowed; in empathy, in sorrow, in mournful thanks and faithful gratitude to whatever incredible happenstance or whichever omnipotence has let me be here now, as I was and am.
Socializing with other patients took a little more doing than just rewarding the staff a distraction from the acutely ill. The intrinsically disturbed patient was rare. Few patients would require routine observation before being admitted to life-time in-patient therapy (more like “maintenance”). And few patients were kept in observation more than a few days longer than when they first appeared healthy—even after severe depression, a serious suicide attempt suicide, and undergoing prolonged display of psychotic symptoms. There were quite a few patients who needed the safety engendered by the non-threatening (for most “rational” people, anyway) atmosphere of the observation ward(s) (one for males, another for females). These were men and women who’d had traumatic experiences, even such traumatic reactions as to spousal infidelity; break-up of romantic relationship; unexpected loss of employment; all sorts of injuries that can befall normal everyday psyche’s at any unexpected moment. “I can’t cope!” Is not always a hollow exclamation. But by far the majority of patients would be shuffled off to other areas of Medfield, where they might spend a year or more before being released—most likely to an outpatient program. These were the patients that were served best by the minimum—and actually fully realized—potential inherent in the observation ward. Observation. Patients being “observed” and “noted” by a hospital staff that for the most part could only watch the patient and then describe what they’ve seen by way of hand-written entries in the patient’s ward log. Even the most dedicated staff members (a few of them were employed in the field of their greatest endeavor and were absolutely dedicated to the challenge of fixing broken minds) were free to declare the common result of observing these ultimately long-term patients: “I can’t reach him. I don’t know what’s going on with him. He’s living in a world of his own. He’s ‘out there’ somewhere. The guy thinks he’s Napoleon. If he’d say one word...just one word, I’d be happy for the rest of my life!”
Better to be distracted from a patient’s unchanging day than to be driven by the notion that if not by the end of the day today, then by the end of tomorrow’s shift, I’m going to get through to so-and-so. "He’s going to be my first miracle!” But there were no miracles at Medfield, just an occasional victory.
Several of the patients I will always remember—so vividly that even after 40 years I can hear their voices and watch how their bodies moved, how their faces helped express not only their words, but what they wanted to express but found words inadequate to do so. I was drawn to some patients for entertainment value; not as in making fun, but in appreciation of entertainment and having fun. Some patients were almost as entertaining as they were ill.
With some patients I could socialize, drawn to them mostly by empathy, outrage, puzzlement, sorrow, a need to understand and, probably most of all, curiosity. Never revulsion. I was never repulsed by any patient—in the observation ward or elsewhere on the grounds. The worst Techs were the ones who were constantly on the look out for patients who might be too happy, feeling too good, expressing himself too openly—in laughter, in wanting to share long stories, in skipping down a corridor. Such behavior was frowned upon by Nurse Tuttle, who passed along her skepticism and fears to at least one fresh Psychiatric intern named Tony. He was handsome and easily smiled—especially during a crisis. Crises made Tony shine. He was a hero, a cad, a friend to all and friend to none. I liked him.
The World According to Doyle
Doyle was severely epileptic. He would sometimes ask for a shot of Thorazine in the mornings when his emotions were stretched thin enough to make him feel that a gran mal would come unless he got that shot. He wouldn’t always get the shot. But when he was really disturbed and emotionally piqued, he’d get the drug and be mellow most of the day. But for Doyle, thorazine was not the hoped-for preventive medication. It was a narcotic. Doyle loved to be high on thorazine. A big boy (20 years old or so), with a touch of Down’s syndrome, Tony spent most of his waking hours either walking the corridors, saying nothing, acknowledging no one (not even by glancing). Sometime’s you’d find him standing just out of heavy traffic, swaying in place—and not a graceful swaying, but in a state of high agitation. That’s usually when he’d either ask for another shot (no “preventive” shots after 8 am) or he’d suffer a seizure. He could get by a petit mal without disrupting the entire ward. He’d just kind of fall down and wiggle awhile, rest a minute afterwards, and then stand up and resume whatever it is he wasn’t doing on purpose (one of the two activities described above).
Gran mals were more or less catastrophic, to Doyle and to the rest of the ward. As violent as these great seizures were, though, a few minutes later, Doyle’d be Doyle again. And, sometimes, Doyle’d be a stoned Doyle a few minutes after the gran mal had spent itself, in wild, violent thrashing against the shiny, cold and very hard asphalt tile-on-concrete floor.
Tony was “positive” that Doyle would occasionally stage a siezure as a means of getting more thorazine than two or three men of average deportment. One thing was absolutely certain, though, and was pretty much common knowledge: Doyle did not like Tony. Tony felt likewise. He didn’t like Doyle except for the one thing he absolutely loved about Doyle: his weakness for upping a variety of ways to express an agitated state convincingly enough to lower the DOD’s defenses just enough to okay an out-of-schedule shot for Doyle. Strangely enough, no matter how much he used it, the swaying thing, which was the most common way he’d fake an agitated state also turned out to be the most rewarding in terms of thorazine value received. Now, one would think that in a non-Draconian run facility like Medfield State Hospital, day-to-day observations, log entries and staff activities would be fairly well documented and the information disseminated for maximum assurance. And such would be the usual pattern. But not always would the left hand and right hand effectively communicate for maximum therapeutic value.
You see, Medfield was a State run institution. There were budgetary constraints, unexpected shift absences, attrition of personnel and all the usual potential for glitchy cross talk. But the biggest flaw in sharing what should be simple notes shared by all interested parties was not a glitch but a gap. The doctor on duty one day was rarely on duty the next, except, maybe, in another institution. Some DOD’s would never repeat. Most of them were medical interns. In therapy, one would pretty much have to start over again with each session, because nobody seemed to hand off notes until that new session had passed, if ever.
Patients Other Than Doyle
Don O’Frio was tall and lanky; a goofy kind of boy of maybe 17 years. Don expressed virtually all situations using meteorological terms. A good time was a ‘High pressure system’ and a bad time was a stream of super cold turbulent air in collision with a stationery warm front. In his life, as in ours, there were balmy times and barometric calamities; varying velocities of wind; climatologically unsound depressions; inversions; streams; hot-and-cold-running snaps.
Another kid thought he was Ricky Nelson. Honest to God, he really did. To this day I think he really did believe that he, not someone in California, 3500 miles away, was the real Ricky Nelson. His parents didn’t believe him (they were old fashioned, I guess) and so he would refuse to see them on visiting day unless they confessed that yes, indeed, it was their son—not Ozzie and Harriet’s boy, who appeared on a weekly television show and whose recording career had made him hot stuff with the girls—and with the boys who could Ricky-it-up in hopes of pleasing the girls. Me? Well, Ricky Nelson (the real Ricky Nelson) was my first real crush. I didn’t know it, but I knew it, y’know? Anyway, this young man (the unreal Ricky Nelson) adopted me as his one friend—that one person in the world who was Ricky Nelson’s friend. He sang “Hello, Mary Lou” to my pounding piano accompaniment. He wanted to prove to his mom & dad that he really was Rick Nelson because he could sing “Hello, Mary Lou, Good-Bye Heart, Sweet Mary Lou I’m So In Love With You....” in a voice that he thought was Ricky Nelson’s voice but which was really his voice—a squeaky, nasally voice that, no matter what words it was singing, it was saying somewhere beneath those words, “I’m trying, damn it, I’m trying!
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I don't remember the name of the man who, whenever it was his turn to respond during group therapy, he would always - always - put one hand to the top of his head and raise the other skyward, during which pose he praised Jesus. I think I felt sorrier for him than I did for everyone else combined.
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Klaus was the first person I’d met since Peggy who used the word communist. He was in Medfield for “observation.” Apparently court-ordered after some incorrigible or antisocial behavior that did not amuse the people who are not amused by, shall we say, eccentric behavior? Klaus and I fell in love, although we didn’t know it and we weren’t lovers. Fell in love as brothers would do, if brothers met in pick-up bars for brothers. We had social and political consciousness. He was bright, charming, and eccentric. And he was discharged from the place after only two weeks. He tried to come back to the ward to visit me but was prevented access by the powers that be. He was treated only a little bit better by those powers than I was by similar mind-police when, a year or two later, I tried to visit Peggy in the hospital in Florida.
My response to the ejection of Klaus from the hospital grounds was to punch out 21 small windows with my bare fist. I guess it was because I now held the record for such a demonstration that I was given 1000 mg Thorazine a day (in 250 mg doses) until I calmed down. I managed to avoid swallowing enough of them to save up for a 1000 milligram megadose which knocked me out and sent me into shock. I emerged from that ‘mini-coma’ under the careful eyes of concerned nurses and friendly Psych Techs, whose payback for caring about me as a person was in the form of a suicide attempt right under their noses. Nice going, Chris.
“I Wanna Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles was at the top of the American charts. Soon I would be rescued.
But there’s more to tell about Medfield - and the Beatles, too, who’s invasion of American pop was presaged in my mind by Del Shannon’s version of their “From Me To You” - it’s the version I’ll always prefer. It was jumping out of the radio as I hitch-hiked east in 63. The Beatles, who led the British Invasion, would have their first hit song given to them by one of America's Top Forty legends. Gee thanks. Del would later find work again and be in the charts, but it was a long dry spell for him, and the end of the line for hundreds of others who had started the whole business 10 years earlier. Okay, so I resented the British Invasion. But I got over it.
Someplace to Belong
At Medfield the boys were strictly separated from the girls, but at meals the opposites would attract (though not at the tables). Meals for the intake observation wards were taken cafeteria style. One of the servers never smiled. At ever meal. Always deeply frowning. One day I said what I’ve always hated people saying to me. “Why so glum? Why don’t you smile? Come on, smile! Please?” And smile she did, that day, but only half of her face had muscles enough to smile. I felt awful. Really bad.
There were occasional dances, joined by nearly every ward of the sprawling old hospital. The boys and girls, men and women would gather in what I took to be a gymnasium. It was at one of these dance that I met Karen. She fell in love with me. She was my "girlfriend," if there could be such a relationship here. At meals we’d exchange ga-ga smiles and try to talk a bit. One of the nerses (a matron, really) resented the hell out of this “affair” and one day she laid into me good. “Why don’t you go to Provincetown where you belong.” Was her admonishment an insult, a clue, a hint, a revelation? It turned out to be a clue as to what my future would be.
The psychiatric staff informed me that my mom had written a very straightforward letter to them in which she outlined for them my history and offered her analysis of my pathology. Before firmly declaring my disownment, she made it clear that I was first and foremost a pathological liar; always had been; always will be. Selfish to the core. Without an iota of thought for other people. She was wrong, of course, and I learned the roots of her anguish only in July and August of 2009.
It was agreed that I would live with my Aunt Beverly and Uncle Scotty who had a row house in South Boston. It was April of 1964. I had a stop to make before invading what turned out to be unexpectedly different kind of adventure.
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