by Jacki Lyden
OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SERVICES
PLAINTIFF V. DOLORES GIMBELS N/K/A TAYLOR,
DEFENDANT
George Washington (in absentia)
It was Shakespeare who wrote:
There is nothing either good or bad
But thinking makes it so.
At times this mask which is my face is cold and hard. There is no warmth beneath its surface. The blood that courses through my veins is icy yet I am not dead. I ask myself, why not? Why not? Kate and Sarah and I shriek on receiving our copies of the brief. Why not? W/o/w, aka Mom, that'd sure be easier on US!
It is a logical question. I have sunk to the dregs of desolation on prescription drugs, court-ordered. It was February 1980.1 was finally out of Menomenee County Mental Hospital where I turned 50, an occasion marked only by the cessation of the menstrual cycle, and I attempted to rationalize what had happened to me. Tears did not flow then as they do now. My body was devoid of emotion, my nerves were paralyzed and I struggled to move facial muscles. If I had one friend, it was a neighbor. My meager monies were spent on pills. Pills for what? Pills that desensitized the senses to feel no sensation. No love, no hate, no joy, no sorrow, no fear. Out of the hospital, back to loneliness and desperation, I found a job eventually but not before one more suicide try. It was a good attempt. I swallowed all the pills with a large glass of alcohol. My daughter found me.
Kate found her. I was on the phone from Chicago. At work on a story. I could tell she was blacking out, her voice was melting. Rubbery. Stretched. I left the line open, called the sheriff from another extension. Called Kate. Kept her talking until they got there. I remembered Kate, age fourteen. How Dolores rushed her to the hospital to have her stomach pumped. Kate swallowed pills, my mother says to the Doctor, her husband. She swallowed every pill in the house. He never looks up from his newspaper.
Nobody likes me, my mother is sobbing on the telephone. Nobody likes me at all. I like you, I say. No, I don't always like you. But I love you.
The spring days and nights for my mother wink together like the lit windows of a passing train. In some windows the faces of her children appear. In others, the faces of scoundrels. Then the light blurs to chiaroscuro glowing from a tunnel. No one is there but she, no one is ever there but she. Somewhere at the other end of that tunnel is Alfred. Somewhere at the other end of that tunnel is everything, a catenation linking it all together. She is the scribe and witness, the lone star. Missives arrive from her that could be battle tracts from the Middle Kingdom or the religious writs of fourteenth-century Cathars. I cant make sense of her scribblings, I don't know where things are going. I am a traveler in Sheba's desert. Like me, my mother records what she sees. Like me, she sees what is there and only might be. Unlike me, she reports both the conscious and the unconscious. She sees the bomber, his motive, his fingerprints on the briefcase and what will come afterward. She inhabits their brains, becomes as evil. I send her yet another pleading letter, detailing our efforts on her "behalf" with the county. Three pages, single-spaced, one question: "Will you go for help? Think of all you missed. We want you back. Will you get help?" But you cannot help someone who speaks only to God.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL17, 1989
LAKE PUCKAWASAY
WISCONSIN
Dear Jacki,
I have just finished reading your epic, and I thank you tremendously for the compliments you all paid me! You chose your "word" very well.
I thought (as I was lost in thought) that I heard someone say your article needed editing. Personally—I always feel that is the writer's responsibility, and I think you agree.
Let me thank you again for your companionship, and all the groceries. So many profound things are occurring and from reading your rather lengthy article—I immediately made an important decision.
Surely Krist Gudnason must mean Christ, God's son. The wonderment is to be accepted, never taken for granted.
Love,
Mother
Laus Deo!
Who the hell is Krist Gudnason? I say to Kate. Don't know, she says.
Christ's gonads? says Sarah, on the phone from Denver. Leave it, for pete's sake.
My mother is above and below my consciousness. I want her soul, but Sheba has gotten there before me and seized it without ransom and made my mother her hostage. It is late spring, and every day the postman brings another tract from the World of Mania.
"Oh, you Wise Men of Learning," my mother writes in another of her briefs against the county hospital. As always, I scour it for clues.
Last year as I again looked over the files and records in this case, all that I had gathered, I burned. Etched in my memory is everything I need to remember. Much I want to forget. In my sparse sixteen pages I have tried to convey my deepest feelings. I do not know if I have done that well. As a child, I learned and said my bedtime prayers, and I learned the prayers of some of my little friends, especially "Now I lay me down to sleep." These days I make my petitions to God early, and I would like to share a prayer that I have written with you. How do we know if enough has been written to prevent the erosion of our civil liberties? I have been so engrossed in the life, love, and faith of one woman. Bit by bit the erosion wears away the shoreline. Those entrusted with the care of loved ones must have some basic theology. Menomenee County Mental Hospital attendants, nurses, and physicians had none, else we would not be trying this case. I am reminded of President Kennedy's words in June 1963, when he said, "One hundred years of delay have passed." In the 100 years I have been waiting for this case to be resolved, I have learned much. I take no credit—you have all pushed me relentlessly. To kindly pass over a friend or a foe, to share if we can the truths that we know. I wish I could look back on my life and say I have no regrets, but can any one of us do that? My silent prayers run deep—too moving to be audible. My thoughts fly as swiftly as time itself and are often lost the same way. Often I must remind myself to listen, lest my thoughts stray, but for as many times as I falter I know I will try again.
At times I am a very quiet person, at other times a childlike humor overtakes me. I chastise myself, but the medical men say it is good, right, and necessary. I love to laugh!
When I become angry for a just reason, I know that this too is my right. As I try to learn from you men of learning, I cannot help but wonder how you separate the shaft from the grain. It has been my own observation that I am not very good at it. But there are dedicated men and women so empowered, and I am grateful for that. I do not feel you do it without Divine Assistance.
Take what you want from what I say, but take only the best and forget the rest.
Signed,
Dolores "Mafia Godmother" Gimbels
Give it a rest, will you? Sarah says when I get her on the phone. I like to do interpretive readings of Dolores's material. I do it with Kate and Sarah all the time. It's either that or go mad myself, better to do this than some terrible thing, to walk into the street raving, so I sing out the damn violins and paint a few more hearts and flowers. Gotten anything from Mom recently? I ask the girls, and they say, Oh, I got a pair of yellow men's bikini briefs meant for Alfred, stamped "from me" and sent to "Commander in Chief," U.S. Military, Alfred, Washington D.C." "Hey, I got a letter signed Mafia Godmother." "I got a poem for the whole family," I tell them, with rhymes so thick they're blobs of syrup. Want to hear it? No, Jack, no. Shut up. Most definitely not. No.
I declaimed in a lowered voice:
Speak softly when you speak to me
speak clearly I when I do not see
Your point is best expressed this day
You should not argue anyway
religion dwells within the heart
To argue, may a friend depart!
— Jack, you're hurting me. Stop.
— damn. Helen Steiner Rice!
— Put it on a greeting card, make a mint.
— Make a million dollars.
— Speak softly when you speak to me,
or I'll sue you for
everything you've got,
— Kate, U. Bastard!
I scrounge through the traces, peel off the shallow words, catalogue the quirkiest symbols and the most annoying acts. I have a file marked "Rage," one marked "Raving," another folder called "Benign." Her poetry is in the Benign file. I am looking for the chemical elements of the basic equation of mania. I am looking for the source of the blue Nile. What often matters most is this: Even when deluded, my mother hits back. She hits back, and back, and back. And I have to admire her, even if she is hitting me. Because she had nothing to hit with, because she did it herself, with will, and will only. And a will not always her own. "What will I pay you for your humiliation, Mr. Administrator?" she had written. "Held in a jail cell? Handcuffed behind my back? A drain for a toilet? Not one dime. Not one penny." And indeed she was right. Though she had been ill and our interventions had saved her life, they were never something that she could feel grateful for, nor accept or face with dignity. And she was willing to sacrifice everything in her "real" world to right the injustice of her unreal one. To repudiate the unconscious world, she worked like a dog, double shifts in the real world, selling the veal schnitzel special or junior miss separates or spa diets or rooms with bath or without bath, ankles puffing up over her shoes by day's end, all to say, "I was never sick, never crazy." People have built temples with less will. They have invaded other countries with the same amount. The hospital administrator submitting testimony to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals wrote of her 1980 commitment, when the sheriff and stout matron had dragged her to court,
I am assuming here that she was brought in handcuffed to our psychiatric unit. It is secure and locked. If the patient willingly takes prescribed medication, a regimen is established. However, some, like Mrs. Gimbels, resist medication until adjudication. She insisted she did not belong here and attempted to escape. In the process of returning her to the unit, the record reveals she threw a chair and turned over a table. To contain her, two male aides and a nurse were required. She was placed in seclusion. The seclusion room has only a mattress and no other amenities. Staff must accompany the patient out of seclusion to the bathroom when that is necessary. Eliminating on the floor is often a tactic a patient may use to express their displeasure at being in seclusion. Use of a bedpan or urinal is offered to patients while in seclusion. However, their co-operation in the use of it is necessary. The record does not contain information as to whether Mrs. Gimbels did or did not use a bedpan. Adverse behavior such as urinating on the floor is generally charted.
I'd say "piss on you" were it I. If I were the Queen of Sheba. If I had dandelion seeds stuck between my teeth, remembering that mist in the Wisconsin morning off Lake Puckawasay which hung like the veils of time itself outside my back door. I'd wear those veils like armor if they were all I had for raiment.
When Sheba claimed her, my mother devolved and decompensated. That is to say, she went plain stark, raving nuts. The past rose up for my mother like an invasion of sea monsters. Her thoughts turned ugly, her thoughts snaked fiercely alive and entwined her like a bound woman. Yet she wrote, she wrote all the time, day and night, and never slept except to fall in and out of blind trances. She wrote as if to say, If I get it down, if I leave a record of this life that is not life, of this siren song that sweeps me away, then perhaps my account will leave a trail to that subterranean cavern below. In the spring of 1988 when we couldn't be with her, we waited with dread for my mother to commit a murderous act. The sun came up and the sun went down on Dolores, alone and writing in her bungalow, totally mad. She called her writings, which I found later, "The Evil Account." She intended to file her account in court and chronicle the perfidies of her enemies before the judges, or, as she called them, the Wise Men of Learning. Her account was her guide and her companion, her Boswell. The house next door where her neighbor lived became The House Where He Cut Out His Child's Tongue and Ate It. Her ex-boyfriend colluded with her ex-husband in the Den of Iniquity inhabited by Opium Teachers. Her handwriting in "The Evil Account" was an organic sporing, alive with what was wild, like something grown overnight after a heavy rain.
THE EVIL ACCOUNT
"Doc" came to see me regularly at Wagner's in 1966 and disagreed with the treatment program. Whenever they questioned me, he remained in the room. I never saw my doctor alone. I was feeling stronger and more lucid and asked Doc what he disagreed with—no answer. His expression was always sneering but one time he had a half smile and a big chrysanthemum he said was from his "mother." Could not have been true. Rather it was a pink and blue suggestion for the supposed pregnancy that never happened again for him. Dr. Monster.
Last Saturday, April 22, Evil-my ex-husband and Slut———my ex-boyfriend, as they referred to themselves, told me they shot "zingers" at me all over. I didn't know what that meant, I stupidly thought they meant a complimentary glance. They kept asking if I was tired and I said "no." Evil said, "You should be, we shot you with as much as we use on a horse." I said, "What?" He said, "You are the evil one, Dolores, because you won't die. OK. We have to do it anyway." I said, "What?" Slut said, "Search this place fast while Evil's new wife is down." I feigned fatigue and followed them up to my bedroom and I said I would take a nap. Slut and Evil said, "She's out like a light," but I could hear them talking and searching my house. They didn't move anything but photographed my clothes, makeup, and hair combs. I heard Evil recording to someone on his Dictaphone he called "Chief Indian" and said, "This is where we should start. The KGB." I moved in my bed so the zingers couldn't quite get me. He told Kate to "stuff" what he had and Kate went into my bathroom. Evil took the poems he had written for me and ate the paper. He said, "I can't hit her, Slut—you get her. The darts leave little marks and sores—some have vermin as the animals throwing the darts. They said they loaded my cat. They said I wouldn't be around long enough to remember. They would send someone else to finish me. SOMEONE does enter and leaves signs, daily, some signs are sent in by my grandchildren. I have been told I have "no friends" and I do not know who to confide in. There is another plague judge, lawyers, all my doctors and clergy that seem to belong to the "Club of Friends." They seemed to havethings stuffed in their clothes. Some of mine are missing. They referred to HER as a "guy," a "gay old guy" and the Big Chief was waiting in the car. They were going to a "stuffing party." They said I had enough zingers so they could question me and asked where I kept my records. I told them! They know I know the names of their club members and I am "marked."
5:00 A.M. Read Adam and the Fallen Man! Good News Day! Alpha and Omega. Bank / Post Office / Shower (done) / Self the beginning and the end.
Organize. Trash Out Day. Call the family!
Jacki (done) 5:10 A.M.
Kate
Sarah
To finish the evil account. I state only that I found the cross and crown pin I knew to be mine—in Raymond L.— (my father's) dresser drawer, by snooping for it! Also in the drawer were pictures of mortals having sex with various animals in stone. The pin leads the Holy Purpose. It is for HIM. Amen, Alfred. After bearing the cross, ye receive the crown, and it is a light to the gentiles and all who love for: God is love. Write no more of the evil account. Go and tell others that I, God, am angry. Some have heard you and fear. But you Dolores are one of the chosen, you have nothing to fear, you are a writer. You are the Seventh Angel.
I am a writer who has nothing to fear. We are sitting at the Al Qadisseyah parade grounds in Baghdad, November 1990, a little jaded at the passing military parade. I have seen Saddam Hussein's megalomania in his architecture—the dun stone swords held aloft by crossed forearms said to be modeled on Saddam's, the sickeningly endless rows of Iranian helmets collected from dead fighters, now used as speed bumps on the road to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I am at Saddam's parade, where a troupe of beleaguered Kurds, exploited by Saddam, dance in vivid color below the reviewing stand with a lambskin standard allegedly painted with their own blood. "Bel rooh bel dam nifdeek ya Saddam, bel rooh bel dam nifd
eek ya Saddam," they chant, pounding each syllable like a drum. "In our blood and spirit we sacrifice our lives for Saddam, and the lives of our children's children for Saddam," the sign translates. That was true, in more ways than one and almost surely not of their own choice. Amir, one of the translators and minders assigned by the Ministry of Information, tells me the blood is real. But I wonder. Amir is a pudgy marshmallow of a fellow who insists he holds a black belt in karate. Later, we are dancing in the black cave of a disco at the Sheraton Hotel with my friend Susan, who works for Newsday. She has already scored great rugs in the souq and has had intense conversations with her minder, Hassan, who is a student of existentialism. Susan and I are the only women gyrating. All the other guests at the disco are men who hulk together beyond the dance floor, smoldering in the shadow like lumps of coal. Susan and I tease each other with the titillation that Saddam's son Uday might show up, deliver himself of his pistol, and blow a few people away. Definitely it's happened, she claims, here at this very disco. An argument over a woman. A pistol shot could give us some news.
Sheba is here, I can sense it. At night in this realm I hear the drumbeats of dread, Saddam's drink-your-blood style threats, and reveille music as the Iraqi flag is hoisted on TV. I'm listening to the news. Amir translates. "Sawfa n'hawil Kuwait ila ham-maam rrin al dam, sawfa naja'l taboor altwaabeet yamtad rrin al Kuwait ila washinton, laatoon biakfanhim ma'hom." "We will turn Kuwait into a bloodbath, we will let the line of coffins extend from Kuwait to Washington. Let each soldier bring with him his own body bag." At the Al Rashid, the hotel's business cards boast: "More than just a hotel." How much more? We assume our phones are bugged, which makes me feel at home, as it is one of my mother's peculiar fantasies when she is sick that everything in the house is bugged. Amir says that in better times he was a sports journalist who covered international soccer matches for Baghdad. He went to Romania! To Poland! But now he's a jelly doughnut of a baby-sitter, glumly stuck on the minder beat with gawking journalists like me. One night he comes to my room at the Al Rashid with an open bottle of Scotch, a drop of it hanging from his mustache.