Monday the dark moved in on me. All week long everything’s been unreal. Today at noon when Mrs. Oggins gave me my second pay envelope with $31 and some change in it, I hardly even bothered to count it. How quickly one becomes jaded! All week long I’ve been feeling like a wage slave, and seeing these little scraps of money only made it worse.
But that’s not what this big depression is really about. I know if my head was straight, I could get behind the job and dig it.
For a while I was sure keeping this journal was screwing me up. I was so tired when I left Will’s greenhouse after my September 19th entry, I swore off these notebooks for good. I’d been overdoing it, so I decided all writing must be some kind of sickness. Anyway, I was so certain I was right, I went around for ten days in a great glow of virtue like some drunk who’s just given up the sauce.
When this sadness began to move in, I wanted terribly to write about it and was afraid to. If writing about really interesting things is sick, then writing about sadness would have to be downright evil.
One night I asked Peter if he thought keeping a journal was a sick ego thing.
He said, “I don’t play the sickness game any more. I’ve given it up.”
“You mean there’s no such thing as real sickness?”
“Nah. It’s just a variation of the old Us-and-Them game. It used to be Us is good and Them is bad. Now it’s Us is healthy, Them is sick.”
“I’m confused. Aren’t there people who really need help?”
Peter nodded about three times. “You betcha. Everybody needs help.”
“But nobody’s sick?”
“If you’re playing that game, sure. Everybody’s sick. But the game doesn’t really help any more. It got too popular. All the nuthouses are jammed. It’s a bust. None of the old games are worth a shit. We’ve got to give them all up and start seeing it like it is.”
“Well, all right, but how is it?”
“That depends,” he said. “What are we talking about? Are we talking about journal-writing?”
“I’d like to, because it’s been bugging me a lot.”
“Well then, you’re the expert here. You better say how it is. Don’t ask me. How is it, anyway?”
Continued a few minutes later, on the uptown subway
I thought for a minute or two, while Peter lit cigarettes for us. “I guess what bothers me is I don’t know why I’m doing it. I used to think I was taking notes for my autobiography so I could get famous and reveal to the world what a big phony my mother is. But I don’t really want to hurt her.”
“Then why not find a way to show your own values without hurting anybody?”
“Yes, but then I think, Who am I? Sometimes I have these big delusions of grandeur about writing some fabulous book that makes the whole world high. Which is really stupid, because I’m not all that high myself!”
“Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean you’re sick! Is that what you do in that journal of yours, call yourself ugly names?”
“Sometimes.”
“Does it feel good to do that?”
“No. But I’m trying to be truthful.”
“Then be truthful. But don’t play games, and don’t engage in name-calling. Let me ask you something. Isn’t it just possible you might write a book someday that could shed one tiny ray of light on some little corner of the world? Of course it’s possible. Anyone might do that. So isn’t it conceivable that someone with a little talent might even do somewhat better than that? You, for instance? Hey hey hey! Why are you trying not to smile?”
“I guess because I’m embarrassed.”
“Dear little Witch,” he said, “you have a capacity for spreading love in the world. That’s an angelic capacity. There’s nothing at all embarrassing about it. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“I have an angelic capacity?”
He looked at me and nodded. “Mm-hm. We all have. That’s why people are so special.” Then he said, “Tell me something. You’re the head psychiatrist around here. Do you think I’m sick to believe that?”
“No, I think it’s beautiful!”
“Well, then, I think I’d better tell you that my case has been diagnosed by another crack professional, and according to him, you’re wrong. There’s nothing beautiful about it at all. No kidding, I mean it. An old colleague of mine from the Coast stopped here in the spring. He took a look at my life here on Canal Street, spent the afternoon, had dinner, the works—and in the evening he declared that I was not only sick but a positive menace to all the people in this house. He diagnosed them, too. He said they were without exception incapable of adjusting to the real world. He told me what I’d created here was a monument to neurosis held together by the demonic force of my own conceit. We were all riding for a fall, a big one! He could guarantee it! He said the minute these victims of mine were forced by reality to hit the streets again, they’d fall apart like dolls made out of matchsticks and library paste. Now what do you think of that, Doc?”
“Well, obviously I think he’s insane!”
“Now now! Steady there! No name-calling!”
“Well, not insane, maybe. But he’s badly mistaken.” After a moment of quiet, I said, “Isn’t he?”
“Not necessarily. Maybe in a certain sense, by the rules of his game, some of us are doomed. Maybe all of us, who knows? It’s dangerous as hell to live by your own sense of reality. I can’t promise any of you you won’t end up in prisons or concentration camps or insane asylums. In fact those are all very real possibilities. You realize that, don’t you? The old games still have a lot of power over us, Witch, and most of them have the law behind them.”
“I was just thinking of Will, in prison.”
“Me, too. I’m always thinking of Will. Shall we send him one?”
He held out his hands and I took them, and we sat there on the floor of the attic sending love to Will in prison. After a few minutes, with his eyes still closed, Peter said, “Will is in prison because he believes in the wisdom of the Self. The Self is the only master. Do you know what the Self is, Witch?”
I said, “No, not really.”
He opened his eyes and smiled. “Well, neither do I, come to think of it. But I know where it’s to be found. In our desires. We have to trust them and follow them and experience them. We have to live them out.”
“No matter what?”
“No matter what. If we desire a thing, a hundred per cent, with everything we are, heart, soul and body—then we’d better get at it.”
“What about the mind, Peter?”
“Oh, the mind’s nothing, just an instrument. Don’t give it too much importance. If you do, it’ll drag you into game-playing. The mind is a servant to the Self. Keep it that way. Keep it peaceful and efficient. Don’t let it take over the show. They sometimes do that, you know. Quite often in fact. The mind tends to be a usurper. It’s always grabbing up authority that really belongs to the being itself—the soul, the heart, the body. And it doesn’t work. You can’t think your life. It’s got to be lived—with everything you are.”
My hand is trembling as I write this. Just as I was trembling when Peter said it. He noticed it, too. He put his hand on my head and said, “You’re frightened, aren’t you?” I nodded because I could hardly speak. He said, “Is there anything else you want to talk about tonight, Witch?” And I said no.
Why? Why didn’t I tell him the truth? Why didn’t I tell him it wasn’t just writing that frightened me, but my entire life? Why didn’t I tell him I’d been wandering around in a daze for the past week? Why didn’t I tell him I’m worried about my father to the point of obsession? Why haven’t I told him or anyone else about my visit to Staten Island?
Peter said, “Why are you trembling so, Witch?”
“What you said. It’s very scary. A person’s got to live his life with everything he is. Wow,” I said, flashing on the old personality. “That could get a gal in real trouble, couldn’t it!” Ha ha ha.
And Peter s
aid, “Yes. It could. But then, what’s wrong with trouble? Is there some other route to the Self?”
I just missed my goddam stop. Which means I’ve got to ride all the way back to 96th Street, change trains, and then go all the way downtown to Columbus Circle. By the time I get there, class will be half over.
I wonder if something in me made this happen on purpose?
Maybe I should go back to Canal Street and leave my poor father alone. Besides, what would he think of me in this fucked-up condition?
Subway platform, 96th Street
An old memory just popped into my head for no reason whatever, and for no reason whatever I think I’ll write it down:
Mother is standing in the doorway of her gorgeous Belle Woods kitchen, a kitchen gorgeous enough for a magazine cover. Her face is all splotched with frustration that looks just like terror. She and I have just come back from Bowling Green, Ohio, dragging behind us in a U-Haul trailer some old wreck of a cabinet called a Hoosier kitchen, which she “practically stole!” from an old lady there who didn’t know what it was worth. All the way back to Detroit she’s been gloating over her triumph, marveling at the skill with which she wields her checkbook, only to discover, the very second she sees it installed at home, that the “absolute steal!” doesn’t fit in with Formica and General Electric and Vinyl. It looks, in fact, like someone has taken a rather untidy but generously proportioned turd and mounted it exquisitely in the show window of Hudson’s Department Store. Mother is an antique freak, and the shock is more than she can bear. She goes into a depression that lasts for days and days and days. My own sympathies of course are with the old lady who’s been robbed! I wonder why Mother doesn’t simply haul the hideous thing back to her and forget the whole matter? And now I wonder why I’m still wondering about it a thousand years after the fact?
On the downtown subway
I bought some Chiclets a minute ago and saw my own face in the mirror over the gum machine.
Witch, shall we lay it right on the line? The face you’re wearing these days is your mother’s, isn’t it?
Sorry. But yes.
THE LADIES’ ROOM AT CAPRICORN CAPERS, MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1969
I’m sitting on the toilet, constipated, but it gives me a place to write.
My sadness continues, and the weather is torturing me. It’s perfect. The sky is such a piercing blue it goes right through my heart like a dagger. Every time I glance up, I feel the blade twisting. Even the air today is clean. My unhappiness grows fat on it. But I don’t have any tears to shed. I just feel dead. I drag my body around like a corpse. And act. I’m always acting these days. Scorpio has taken over my life. I feel this excruciating shame for the mood I’m in and so I disguise it when I’m with others. Which is seldom. I’ve been avoiding everyone, even the ones most likely to help me. Why don’t I go to Peter? He was wonderful to me last time. Or to Doris? Or to my dear brother, Roy? Or to my beautiful, wise sister, Sally Sunflower? Or anybody?
I feel some ugly, stubborn secret inside myself. It’s like a lump of tightness right under my belly button. Jesus, I’m probably giving myself cancer right this second! And what’s worse, I don’t even care. So what if I died? Big deal. There’d be one less phony in the world.
The most awful thing to bear is that everything I’ve been so certain of seems to be collapsing inside of me. Roy and I vowed to stay high no matter what. I’ve broken the vow. I’ve been doing a what-if-we’re-wrong scene for days now. What if I and all my friends are wrong about everything? What if the Vietnamese really are dying to get their hands on San Francisco? What if marijuana is really the devil’s weed? What if misery is the natural condition of man and it’s really foolish to fight it? What if love is just a soft, decadent blight wiping out man’s powers of survival? What if war and booze and $ are really the keys to the kingdom of heaven?
What would Timothy Leary say to me in this mood? He’d say, “My dear child, your thinking is psychedelically unsound.” And he’d laugh at me. No. No, he wouldn’t. He’d give me a joint and tell me to be happy.
But I don’t want a joint. I want to know what’s wrong with me. I want to know why I’ve been running all over New York for the past week wearing my mother’s face. I want to know what happened to my own.
Don’t I?
Later, Central Park J.C. Cafeteria, after class
The 15th will be Moratorium Day. This morning at work I started wondering if my father’d be holding class on Wednesday. So, having nothing better to do with the afternoon, I decided to come up here and see what’s going on.
It was horrible, of course. Everything is these days. But I don’t think I mind as much as I did last week. I’m getting used to being a miserable wretch, pretending to my loved ones—who never believe me—that everything’s fine.
When I went in, Hank looked at me in a friendly way, but he didn’t actually smile. It was obvious he’d never expected to see me again. But there I was, and he didn’t quite know what to do about it. Poor man, how could he when I don’t know myself?
Anyway, he was conducting a Questions and Answers session on Vietnam. But he did it sort of mechanically, like a sleepwalker, or someone too tired and sad to care what was happening. I wonder if he was depressed before he saw me, or because?
The discussion was pretty tacky. I felt as if I’d heard it all a hundred times. All the arguments began to rhyme with one another.
Some painted-up chick with a bouffant hairdo said she didn’t understand how the United States could be completely wrong. Hank said no country could ever be excused for going against its own constitution and the United Nations Charter.
“Not even to save people from Communism?” she said.
Ordinarily I think he would have lit into her, but not today. All he did was look at her and shake his head. “No, miss, not even for that.”
A boy named Terry spoke up. “I’d like to ask her a question. I’d like to know where we get the right to save anybody from anything—if it’s something they want.”
“How do you know what they want?” the girl shrieked.
“Because they been fighting for it for twenty-five years, and nobody’s been able to beat them—not even us! That’s why!”
“If we haven’t beat them,” she spat out, “it’s only because we’re too humane to use the H bomb!”
“Neither side is using the bomb,” Terry said, “so that doesn’t make any sense! We haven’t beat them because we can’t! And if we’re so humane, what are we using napalm for?”
Somebody else got into it then, and pretty soon the whole room was in an uproar. Hank just watched. I don’t think he was even listening, but he might have been. After a while he took a piece of chalk and printed with big letters on the blackboard: NO CLASS WEDNESDAY. It was only twenty minutes to four, but he picked up his notebook and walked out of the room. Some of the students left a few minutes later. One boy passed out black armbands. I took one and thanked him for it.
Then I came down here to look for Hank. But he wasn’t here.
And neither am I, not really.
I died.
My ghost is riding home with my father on the ferry. The rest of the world is sunny today, but there are dark clouds over Staten Island, and all along the ferry route the bay is choppy. An angry wet wind tears through my father’s dark hair and his face is wild with despair. He looks into the distance, but his eyes are missing, and the black sockets aren’t really seeing. I know if I weren’t with him, by his side at this railing, protecting him, he might
A few minutes later, on the subway platform, Columbus Circle
I’m obsessed! Obsessed with my parents! They’re all I think about!
Suddenly I saw, really saw, what I’ve been doing! This whole hangup I’m developing of seeing my father as a tragic figure in need of his fair daughter’s rescue is a bunch of shit. How can I save anybody? I can’t even keep my own head straight!
And that’s what I came to New York for. To get away from families
and all the horror that goes with them. The fact that I sprang from the loins of H. Gliss no longer has any novelty value for me. I stopped toying with that little number about two weeks ago, when I gave up writing in this notebook long enough to sit still and think.
As for my mother, I don’t even know who she is! When I close my eyes and try to think of her, all I get are three pictures. None of the three is real of course.
But then, how could they be, my dearie, when your mother isn’t real?
Picture A. She’s a little girl, skipping rope, trying to impress hell out of somebody across the street, but she tripped and fell. The picture was obviously snapped one second after the pratfall, and one second before the full indignity of it hits her. It’s the realest of the three, and although I don’t dig the chick, she is kind of touching.
Picture B is a real specimen of my mind’s evil. It seems to have been snapped at midnight in the kitchen of some whorehouse where she’s bawling out the girls.
I’m the girls—all of them! All you can see of Mother in this one is a red housecoat, a lit cigarette, two deadly eyes, bitter as the shit of little beetles. These really tough, nutty, nasty eyes are letting you have it straight, they’re not fiddling with the facts for one second, they’re laying it right on the line: You’re a louse and a bitch and you caused the Whole Thing! (What whole thing? The ruin of her life. What else?)
Ten seconds later, on the subway
Now in Picture C we have a change of mood. Mother’s just as happy as a little piss ant in this one. She’s been to Maine Chance, where they not only did her up brown (Roux #7) but flattered her butt off in the bargain. At the moment of posing, Mother begins to enact her own favorite self-portrait, and her performance is stunning. She’s all teeth and dinner ring, a poisonous green emerald the size of her elbow, and it’s glittering away like mad. Mr. Random, whom I refuse to call Daddy in my notes . . . ( To his face, I used to do it, but not in here. Not in here, I can’t! This notebook is my fucking castle, and the token I used to get on this train was bought by me. I’m no longer eating your food, Random, no longer driving your cars, no longer— Um, excuse me! Back to the photo of Mother.) She’s posing, that is to say she’s got her teeth and her jewels and her hairdo all propped up in front of the cameras, on a Very Special Occasion. Mr. Random has just been elected president of the world and somehow (!) word has leaked out that Mother was secretly responsible for the entire thing. She’s being sublimely modest about it, so charming and self-effacing in fact that the photographer will have to scrape her off his lens with a blowtorch.
Season of the Witch Page 21