by Thom Jones
As a rule, there were about thirty men in our ward—the Security Ward, where they kept the craziest, most volatile Marines in all of Pendleton. Eagle seemed to regard me as super-volatile, although I was anything but at the time. He always kept me at arm’s length, but he would get right in and mix with really dangerous, really spooky whacked-out freaks. I figured he was afraid of me because of my history as a recon Marine with three tours in Nam, or because I had been a boxer. But he was a doctor, and his professional fear made me wonder about myself.
One day a great big black man named Gothia came into the ward. I had been there about two months, and this was the first new admission I had witnessed. He was extra-big, extra-black, extra-muscular, and extra-crazy. Gothia was into a manic episode and talking fast: there was a Buick waiting outside with a general in it, and he and Gothia were going to fly off to the Vatican, where the pope urgently awaited Gothia’s expertise concerning the impending apocalypse. He kept repeating, “It’s going to come like a thief in the night—a thief in the night!” until he had everyone half believing that the end of the world was at hand. I immediately liked Gothia. He made things interesting in the ward. As my hair got long, Gothia arranged with the other brothers to give me a hair treatment, a kind of pompadour. It looked like shit, but I was flattered to be admitted into the company of the brothers, which was difficult, my being white and a sergeant and a lifer and all.
A few weeks after he arrived, Gothia bolted unseen up the fence in the exercise yard, did the Fosbury Flop over the barbed wire that topped it, and returned with a six-pack of cold malt liquor. I drank three as fast as possible on an empty stomach and had my first cheap satori—though whether it was epilepsy or the blast from the alcohol is difficult to say. As I finished a fourth can of the malt liquor, sitting against the fence in the warmth of the golden sun, I realized that everything was for the best. Years later, I read a passage from Nietzsche that articulated what I felt in that fifteen-second realization: “Becoming is justified…war is a means to achieve balance.…Is the world full of guilt, injustice, contradiction and suffering? Yes, cries Heraclitus, but only for the limited man who does not see the total design; not for the contuitive God; for him all contradiction is harmonized.”
Weird. Sleeping in the neuropsych ward at night, I sensed the presence of a very large rabbit under my bunk. A seven-foot rabbit with brown fur and skin sores, who took long, raking breaths. I didn’t want to do it, but I had to keep getting out of bed to look. Gothia, who never slept, finally came over and asked me what was the matter, and when I told him about the rabbit he chuckled sympathetically. “Hey, man, there’s no rabbit. Just take it easy and get some rest, baby. Can you dig it? Rabbit. Shit.” But by and by my compulsive rabbit checks got on his nerves, until one night he came over to my bed and said, “I told you there was no rabbit under the bed. If you don’t stop this shit, I am going to pinch you.” He said it louder than he meant to, and the corpsman on watch came over with his flashlight and told Gothia that if he didn’t get to bed he was going to write him up. I lay in the darkness and waited and listened to the rabbit breathe like an asthmatic until I had to check again, whereupon Gothia popped up in his bed and pointed his finger at me and shouted, “There ain’t no goddamn rabbit, goddamn it! Knock that shit off!”
I shouted back at him. “It’s that rabbit on the Br’er Rabbit molasses jar. That rabbit with buckles on his shoes! Bow tie. Yaller teeth! Yaller! Yaller!” For causing such a commotion we were both shot up, and put in isolation rooms. It was my first experience with a straitjacket, and I nearly lost it. I forced myself to lie still, and it seemed that my brain was filled with sawdust and that centipedes, roaches, and other insects were crawling through it. I could taste brown rabbit fur in my teeth. I had a horror that the rabbit would come in the room, lie on my face, and suffocate me.
After my day of isolation, a brig rat, a white Marine named Rouse, came up to me and said, “Hey—you can tell me—you’re faking this shit so you can get out of the service, aren’t you?” Rouse, an S-1 clerk-typist, a “Remington raider” who had picked up a heroin habit in Saigon, had violet slash marks on his arms, and liked to show me a razor-blade half he had in his wallet. He offered to let me use it and often suggested that we use it together. Rouse had a lot of back pay saved up and ordered candy and cigarettes from the commissary, and innumerable plastic airplanes to assemble. He always claimed to have nasal congestion and ordered Vicks Inhalers, which at that time contained Benzedrine. Rouse would break them open and swallow the cottons and then pour airplane glue on a washcloth and roll it into a tube and suck on it. I got high with Rouse once by doing this, but the Benzedrine made me so restless that I begged Thorazine from the guys who used to cheek it and then spit it out after meds were issued.
Actually, Rouse was wrong about me: I didn’t have anything to hide, and I wasn’t faking anything. At the time, I didn’t want out. I intended to make the Marine Corps my home. At group-therapy sessions I reasonably insisted that mine was a straightforward case of epilepsy, and for this I was ridiculed by inmate enemies and the medical staff alike. When I saw I was getting nowhere, I refused to speak at the group-therapy sessions at all, and I spent a month sitting sullenly, listening to everyone argue over an old record player one of the residents had brought in to spice up the dayroom. The blacks liked Smokey Robinson and the Miracles; the war vets were big on the Doors, the Rolling Stones, and C.C.R. I started getting fat from inactivity—fat, although the food was cold and tasted lousy, and in spite of the fact that I fasted on Fridays, because Thursday’s dinner was always rabbit. The thought of eating rabbit after a night of sensing the molasses rabbit under my bed gasping for air, and hearing the air whistle between his yellow teeth as he sucked desperately to live—the sight of fried rabbit put me off food for a solid day.
When I had been on the ward about six months and my fits were under better control, a patient named Chandler was admitted. Chandler was a college graduate. His degree was in French. He had joined the Marine Corps to become a fighter pilot but quickly flunked out of flight school and was left with a six-year enlistment as a grunt, which was unbearable to him. I wasn’t sure if he was going out of his way to camp things up so he could get a Section Eight discharge, or if he always acted like a fairy. No one held it against him. In fact, a number of the borderline patients quickly became devotees of his and were swishing around with limp wrists, putting on skits and whatnot, and smoking Chandler’s cigarette of choice—Salem. Rouse was the first to join in with Chandler by wearing scarves, kerchiefs, and improvised makeup. Rouse even changed his name to Tallulah.
But Chandler wasn’t just some stupid fairy. He was erudite, well read, and well mannered. He had been to Europe. Chandler turned me on to Kafka and Paul Valéry. He knew how to work the library system, and soon I found that as long as I had a good book I did not mind the ward half as much.
Under Chandler’s influence, Gothia somehow became convinced that he was Little Richard. After about the five hundredth time I heard Gothia howl, “It’s Saturday night and I just got paid,” and Chandler respond, “That’s better, but try and put a little more pizzazz in your delivery!” I was glad to see Gothia go. They transferred him to a long-term-care psychiatric facility in North Carolina. In truth, Gothia was pretty good as Little Richard. He was better at it than Chandler was at Bette Davis or Marlene Dietrich—although at that time I had never seen Marlene Dietrich and had no basis for comparison.
Overwhelmed by boredom one afternoon in the dayroom, as we watched Chandler execute yet another “grand entrance” (a little pivot with a serious lip pout and a low and sultry “Hello, darlings”), I confided to Rouse that I suspected Eagle of being a “closet” faggot, and shortly afterward I was called into the Eagle’s den for a rare appointment. Obviously Rouse had snitched on me. I told Eagle that I thought he was a homosexual because he had surfing posters in his office, and I watched him scribble three pages of notes about this. Eagle’s desk was cramped, and hi
s office was hot in spite of a pair of twelve-inch portable fans beating like they could use a couple of shots of lightweight motor oil, and I began to perspire heavily as I watched Eagle write. He was a spectacle—a tall man, cadaverously thin, with his long, angular legs crossed tightly at the knees, his ass perched on the front edge of his chair as he chain-smoked with one hand, flicking ashes into a well-filled ashtray on his desk while he scribbled at the notepad on his lap with his other hand; turning pages, lighting fresh cigarettes off the butts of old ones, scribbling, flipping the pad, seemingly oblivious of me until he looked up and confronted me with that incredible tin nose. “Do you realize that you are sweating?”
“It’s hot.”
“It’s hot,” he repeated. He looked down at his notepad and proceeded to write a volume.
By now I was drenched with sweat, having something very much like a panic attack. Without looking up, Eagle said, “You’re hyperventilating.”
Everything was getting swirly. Eagle dashed out his cigarette and reached into a drawer, withdrawing a stained paper sack from McDonald’s. “Here,” he said. “Breathe into this.”
I took the bag and started breathing into it. “It isn’t working,” I said between breaths.
“Just give it a minute. Have you ever done this before? Hyperventilated?”
“Oh, God, no.” I felt like I was dying.
Eagle pushed himself back in his chair and placed his hands on his knees. “There’s more at work here than just a seizure disorder,” he said. “I’m seeing some psychopathology.”
“It’s that fucking nose,” I said, gasping. “I’m freaking out.”
“You don’t like the nose?” Eagle said. “Well, how do you think I feel about the nose? What am I supposed to do, go off on some island like Robinson Crusoe and hide?”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “It’s just—”
“It’s just too fucking weird, isn’t it, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Not normally, I mean, but I’m on all this medicine. You’ve got to cut back my dosage. I can’t handle it.”
“I’ll make you a deal. I’m going to cut you back if you do something for me.”
The paper bag finally started to work, and everything began to settle down. “What?”
Eagle removed a notepad and pencil from his desk. “Take this. I want you to jot down your feelings every day. This is just between you and me. I mean, it can be anything. If you were a kind of breakfast cereal, for instance, what would you be? Would you be—oatmeal? Would you be—mush? Would you be—FrankenBerries? Would you be—Count Chocula?” Eagle reclined in his chair, extracted a Lucky Strike, and lit it—with the same effeminate gestures, I noted, that Chandler used to light his Salems. Eagle had very broad shoulders for such a thin man. The sleeves of his tropical uniform were rolled up past his elbows. He brushed what few strands of hair he had back across his shiny pate. It was impossible to ignore his nose. He looked like an enormous carrion bird, and although I knew I could break him in pieces, he terrified me. He took a deep drag and exhaled through his tin nose. “Would you be—a Wheatie?”
“Don’t try to fuck with my head!” I protested, crushing the McDonald’s sack. I got up and stalked out of Eagle’s office, but that night, when I went to bed, I found the notepad and pencil on top of my footlocker.
To disprove Eagle’s theory that I was borderline psycho, I began to write what I thought were mundane and ordinary things in the diary, things which I thought proved my mental health, e.g., “A good day. Read. Played volleyball and had a good time smoking with the brothers. Picked up a lot of insight in group. Favorite breakfast: Shit on a Shingle. Two hundred push-ups. Happy, happy, happy!” I found such a release in writing that I started a diary of my own—a real one, a secret one, which I recently glanced through, noting that the quality of my penmanship was very shaky.
JANUARY 11, 1975: Sick.
JANUARY 13, 1975: Sick. Managed to read from Schopenhauer.
JANUARY 15, 1975: Borrowed some reading glasses and read Cioran. Sickness unto death. Better in the evening. Constipated. Food here is awful. There are bugs crawling on the wall and through the sawdust that is my brain. My personality is breaking down? I am having a nervous breakdown? Curiously I don’t have the “stink” of schizophrenia.
MARCH 14, 1975: Vertigo. Double vision. Sick. Can’t eat.
MARCH 18, 1975: There is a smell. A mousy smell.
APRIL 34, 2007: I am a boxer dog of championship lineage dating back to the late nineteenth century, when the breed was brought to a high point of development in Germany. I have a short, clean brindle coat involving a pattern of black stripes over a base coat of golden fawn. At seventy-five pounds, I am considered large for a female. My muzzle is broad and gracefully carried, giving balance and symmetry to my head. In repose or when I am deep in thought my face is the very picture of dignified nobility.
APRIL 40: My under jaw is somewhat longer than the upper jaw and is turned up at the end, as it should be. The jaw projects just enough to afford a maximum of grasping power and holding power (but without the exaggeration and underbite you sometimes see in poorly bred or inbred boxers). Once my jaws are clamped on something it cannot escape.
My entire muzzle is black. My nose is completely black, the nostrils wide and flaring. My eyes are of a deep brown and are set deeply in the skull. I do not have that liquid, soft expression you see in spaniels, but rather assertive eyes that can create a menacing and baleful effect when I am irritable. This is particularly the case when I fix my piercing stare on its target. I can burn a hole through steel and escape this Mickey Mouse jail anytime I want, and I will as soon as I get my rest. Arf!
APRIL 55: Before my accident I was a circus performer with the simple-minded animal consciousness of the here-and-now. That I had been a great hero of the circus—the dog shot from cannons, the dog that dove from fifty-foot platforms into shallow barrels of water, the dog that rode galloping stallions bareback—that I was Boris, the Great One, a celebrated hero of Mother Russia, beloved by my countrymen meant…nothing to me.
Eagle has me back in his little office, and he confronts me not only with my fake diary but with my real one as well. I’m pissed that they’ve been rummaging through my personal gear.
“Let me get this straight. You say you were this circus dog in Russia, and you got a brain injury when you were shot from a cannon?”
“I forgot to wear my safety helmet.”
“So a famous neurosurgeon put your brains back together and sent you to a health spa—”
“Only the V.I.P.s went there. Nikita K. was there. I knew him. Dancers from the Bolshoi. Army generals. K.G.B. officials. Chess champions.”
“And you…a dog?”
“I wasn’t just a dog. I was the Rin Tin Tin of Russia.”
“You’re pretty bright and well informed. How can you know all this kind of thing?”
“Because it’s true,” I said.
“How would you like it if I sent you to the brig?”
“Fine. The brig would be fine. I’m a howlin’ wolf. Put me in a cage or let me go.”
Eagle drummed his fingers on his desk, changing pace. “Tell me something. What does this old saying mean to you? ‘People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’?” Fingers drumming. “Well?”
“I don’t know—”
“ ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ What does that mean?”
“Don’t know.”
Eagle began to write furiously.
“Why would anyone live in a glass house? It would be hot,” I said. “And everyone could see you.”
“I hear you like to read Kafka. That’s heavy stuff for a young guy. You’re pretty bright. Have you ever read any books on abnormal psychology?”
“Hey, man, just let me out of this motherfucker. I’m going down in this place. Put me in a normal ward and let me see a real doctor.”
“I’ll give it some thought. In the meantime, I’d like
you to check this out,” Eagle said, clapping me on the shoulder. He handed me a copy of Love Against Hate, by Karl Menninger.
STARLOG, JANUFEB, 2010: “Gate is straight/Deep and wide/Break on through to the other side.…”
There was an old piano in the dayroom. When a Marine freaked out and broke the record player, Chandler started playing the piano day and night—driving me crazy. “Canadian Sunset” over and over and over again! One night I rubbed cigarette ashes all over myself for camouflage, crawled into the dayroom recon style, and snapped off the little felt hammers inside the piano. Shoulda seen the look on Chandler’s face when he sat down to play. This was not insane behavior. I knew I was not really insane. I was just a garden-variety epileptic temporarily off my game. Thrown a little by the war. I laughed and said to Chandler, “Hey man, what’s the sound of one hand clapping?”
After I put the piano out of commission, I noticed Chandler was losing weight. They had him on some new medication. He quit camping around and took a troubled leap into the darkness of his own soul. He grew quiet and started sitting in the corner with catatonic Joe. A black Marine, a rotund and powerful murderer from South Carolina named Bobby Dean Steele, was admitted to the ward for observation, and he began to dominate. Despite the charges pending against him, he was buoyant and cheerful. He walked over to Joe’s corner a lot and would say, “Joe-be-doe, what’s happening? What’s the matter, man? You saw some bad shit in the Nam, didn’t you? Well, that’s okay. We’re going to fix you up—not those doctors, but us, the jarheads. We’ll help you. I know you can hear me. Go easy, man.”