The Stoned Apocalypse (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  Then there were the “good patients,” like Bruce, the broken product of a gently vicious Jewish mama. He was in constant inner pain, and continually hoped, somehow, that the doctors would cure him so he could go back to school and get a job and get married. He was thoroughly homosexual, but the only sex he ever knew was lonely masturbation late at night. Whenever any of the staff passed by, he would look up like a puppy, smiling, hoping for a gram of attention.

  There were the radicals, like Loren. Loren had memorized most of Blake, and could zap a person’s mind with unerring quotations at the apt moment. During our raps, he would spin out analyses of the American culture which made Marcuse seem like an infant in his understanding. The difference between Loren and any political philosopher was that Loren was the living experience of the way in which our society cripples people. He was it. He knew.

  The only problem with Loren was that he was crazy. That is to say, his unhappiness would get past his ability to sustain it, and he would have to do things which seemed inexplicable to anyone who didn’t understand him, which included almost everyone on the ward. Every once in a while, he would get up and methodically and calmly break every window-glass on the ward.

  Once, in the middle of his act, I went up to him. “What’s happening, man?” I said.

  SMASH. Another pane of glass.

  “Do you know that Donna is a witch?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  SMASH. Another window.

  “People have the wrong idea about witches,” he said. “They think a witch is a funny lady with a hooked nose and a conical cap.”

  “That’s a historical error,” I said. “People don’t understand the notion of witch as a psychological model.”

  SMASH.

  “Why are you breaking windows, Loren?” I said.

  He turned and looked at me. “Well, you know, I have to,” he said. “Do you understand?”

  “Sure, I understand,” I said, and did, because there were many times when I needed to break windows but just didn’t have the courage to do it.

  “But you know,” I said, “they may put you back on Thorazine and throw you into your old ward.”

  He stopped for a moment. “That’s too bad,” he said. “I hate being on that stuff. It makes me feel like I’m buried alive.”

  SMASH. And he went on breaking windows.

  I decided to give classes in relaxation. They were a qualified success. I couldn’t give them outdoors because Thorazine makes one’s skin ultra sensitive to sunlight. Indoors was difficult because there was always someone bustling around, some schedule to be met, some hassle to be dealt with. And there was the further problem of the delicacy of the condition.

  As soon as a person lets go and begins breathing, the first thing he contacts is the anxiety he had been suppressing by holding his breath. And the last thing these people needed was to have their anxiety liberated in a scene where it couldn’t be dealt with. The entire notion of blowing out had been shelved in light of the interpersonal and administration problems we were facing, and in light of the great open-door defeat.

  I set up a small room to hold individual sessions, and was told that I was blocking a fire exit. With that, and the lack of continuity from day to day, my classes became less frequent.

  Our daily meetings continued to get more acrimonious. Now that the first flush of beginning had died down, the staff settled into normal human relations, that is to say, suspicion, hostility, false civility, selfishness, and all the rest of it. The meetings got so terrible that not only the patients but even some of the staff stopped going. Our policy was not to force anyone to attend, so the staff was left to its own inner resources. It got like a badly run encounter group. We began attacking one another, highlighting one another’s faults, bitching about the administration.

  Once a week, Alistair Frazier came and gave little talks on the dynamics of insanity, illustrated with material from his private patients. Then, having collected his fee for his little performance, would dust off the chaos of the ward, and split.

  Then Marvin arrived one afternoon with a great pile of forms. They were the behavioral-norm charts that we were supposed to fill out. Partially because his approach was so inhuman, and partially because the group was looking for a lightning rod for its pent-up frustration, Marvin received the full venom of the staff. We began to discuss the relevance of his research, and got him to the point where he admitted that the research was, “in a sense, meaningless.” But he insisted, it had to be done.

  “That’s all bullshit, Marvin,” a voice shot out. “You’re just interested in your own career.”

  Marvin leapt to his feet. “I know that,” he cried out, “I have to live with that. Don’t you think I’m tortured. Half of me wants to be down here with you, helping people, doing the real work. But half of me needs to support a house and a family and a style of living. That part of me is real too.” And then he stretched out his arms like Christ on the cross and shouted, “I’m torn between two worlds!”

  The humor of the demonstration and the pathetic honesty of his self-exposure let us overlook the fact that he had once again bypassed the basic question, which was, Why are we going through all the rituals of a research project when we all understand that it means nothing?

  Then, drawing himself up to his full height, he eloquently said, “The work you people do is beautiful, but I want to quantify it, to bring it into the scientific community at large. Don’t you see, if we can show that our method works, we have a chance of changing the attitudes of the entire scientific community.”

  God help me, his eyes grew moist. He actually believed it, at that moment, anyway. In face of the fact that the psychiatric community in this very hospital was showing unrelenting blindness and hostility to anything which would involve them past the point where they need only prescribe Thorazine and run an orderly internment camp. And in face of the fact that “our work” had not begun to get off the ground and was mired in our total inability to act in anything but a bestial fashion.

  My money ran completely out. I began sleeping on the ward a few nights each week. My last pair of pants gave way at the zipper and I went into the stock room to put on a pair of hospital issue. Now I was broke, without keys, sleeping on the ward, and dressed like a patient. The transformation was taking place, but I still wasn’t aware of what was happening.

  Crushing news arrived. We would have to move out of Ward Sixteen. The hospital director, a man who liked to shuffle people about on paper and then have the real people follow the plans, had decided, quite arbitrarily, that we would move to Ward Nineteen. The staff set up a howl of protest. Nineteen was a double ward. It was one of the older buildings on the other side of grounds, and quite depressing. It involved using a shared dining room. It went even further against the notion of setting up an environment where restraint and fear didn’t rule the roost. The move was to push us even deeper into the regular hospital setup, with old nurses who looked upon their patients as animals to be controlled. It was part of the scene which reeked of hopelessness and the stench of the chemical lobotomy, Thorazine.

  We demanded that Richard come to our next meeting. He had stopped coming to the ward altogether. He was leaving the dirty work to the peons. The psychic proletariat felt crushed, the people like Irene, a beautiful black nurse who had a simplehearted belief that we might accomplish something on the ward, and the darkness of the mental hospital might see some light.

  “I sympathize with you, of course,” Richard said at the next meeting. “But the hospital director is a very difficult man to convince.”

  “Have him come to the ward,” we said. “Let us talk to him.”

  That turned out to be impossible. Finally, we badgered him into letting Al go see the man. Al returned with an earful of doubletalk that boiled down to a single message: NO. The move was scheduled.

  Joel and I talked
that night. We decided that the hospital strategy was clear. They would keep putting pressure on until we had stopped fighting. The more active staff members would leave, and, with the docile people left, they would set up a nice safe Thorazine study ward, with all pretense at a blowout center gone.

  The current research schema called for putting half the patients on Thorazine, keeping half off, with no one to know which was which except for Marvin. Then, we were supposed to do our blowout scene, and see, via the behavior forms, which patients “improved.” The trouble was that improvement was measured by inane external standards having nothing to do with a person’s well-being or understanding of himself necessarily. Also, our “blowout thing” never came off, and each day on the ward was spent in a round of random behavior, punctuated by the routines imposed by the hospital structure.

  The following day, I went with Al to a meeting of the general hospital staff and had all my fears confirmed. It was like a Republican convention. Everything was discussed in generalities. Perhaps a thousand people sat stiffly in the auditorium, listening to the director lay down a vague rap about dedication to the improvement of conditions at the hospital, and then enter into a round of discussions on rules and regulations, and “essential services,” meaning everything but the actual state of the patients. Boredom reached cataclysmic levels; yawns were stifled; voices droned on in monotone.

  Not once was there a hint of humanity, a wave of humor, a spark of awareness. There was not the slightest sense that what was being discussed was the condition of actual human beings, with as much existential worth as anyone in the room. These were the “doctors” discussing the “situation,” these were the “sane” discussing the relationship to the “crazies.”

  When I left the meeting, I was suffocating. I got out onto the green lawn outside the building, and was swept up by the sunlight and air and trees, and in a burst of exuberance, jumped in the air a few times to get the circulation going in my limbs. I let out a loud exhalation to clear my lungs.

  Suddenly, several people standing around me jumped back, and one man glared at me with heavy hostility. And then I realized. I was dressed in patient’s clothing. As far as they were concerned, I was a “patient” and I was exhibiting “psychotic” behavior, that is to say, behavior which fell outside the accepted boundaries imposed by the strictures of the culture. After all, “normal” people don’t jump up and down and breathe loudly. In a flash I saw the entire vicious cycle of the mental hospital scene. The doctors, by law, by definition, were sane; by the same criteria, the patients were insane. Therefore, whatever the doctors did, whatever they did, including sitting for two hours in a stultifying and dehumanizing conclave, was all right. But whatever the patients did, including exhibiting some simple physiological relief, was crazy, was sick. It was like the situation between teachers and children, between police and citizen; the masters ruled, the others had to obey.

  But this was what Laing was talking about! This is what drove poor Ronnie to the brink, his insight into the way the cards are stacked, the way civilization breaks its members, the way the people internalize their sense of being malformed, and are then punished for their inability to conform. Visions of Reich and Jesus came crashing home, as well as of every other man who has seen once and for all the vicious trap of sleep which has captured almost every single human being in the world. The doctors and nurses were all mad, truly mad, but their madness had been controlled and compressed until they could walk around like automatons with a great semblance of self-control, all the while being the people who contributed to the wars, to the crises, to the general unhappiness of mankind. The only difference between them and the patients was that they had the guns behind them, they had the power. It became a political question after all.

  I grabbed Al, but he was deep in some Scorpionic depression of his own. I got back to the ward and saw Alistair, and spilled my vision out to him. He puffed on his cigar. “Yes, it really is a vicious cycle, isn’t it?” he said in the best Rogerian manner, and I recognized the tones as those he reserved for his patients. He was agreeing intellectually; that is to say, he was humoring me. I could have hated the man except that I realized that he had spent his entire life humoring himself.

  The situation on the ward suddenly got to seem extremely grim. For one of the few times in my life, I was seized by a passion which put the suffering of others before my own. These people in the hospital were really in trouble. Not only were they burdened by a vision and a pain they couldn’t sustain, there wasn’t a single human being they could talk to who would listen to them with true understanding. The best they could hope for was an uneducated sympathy, a soft shoulder. For when they really started to talk about what they saw and felt, they were put into the category of crazy, even by those who wished them well. For who would believe a patient who said that the doctors were mad? I mean, truly mad? A great poet might say it, and get away with it, but some poor loonie locked in the asylum would only get himself deeper into trouble.

  For, if the doctors were mad, what did that say about the priests and presidents and generals and teachers? The message was clear enough. The civilization is rotten to its core. The entire bag, all two thousand years of it in the Western world, and some six thousand years for as far back as there are written records in the East. In fact, man is malignant at heart, a broken spoke in the wheel of creation, a stupid bestial creature who is barely redeemed by odd moments of decency. And his quintessential madness, his wars, are so totally accepted as natural that one rarely considers them as the blasphemy that they are. Our history books are very little else but the record of our wars. And because, somehow, through some ironic joke on the part of nature, we attained to the use of language, we deign to consider ourselves as images of God.

  We made the move to the new ward, and the situation got worse. Many of the staff members weren’t even talking amicably to one another. Everyone was depressed. The art therapist, theoretically the lowest on the hierarchical flagpole, was doing the only creative work, hanging pictures, providing crayons and paints for people to use, trying to get the patients to express something of their inner states through paint.

  No one could relax. There was always so much going on. Nurses were walking through. Phones were ringing. Research forms were being filled out. If only it could have been possible just to stop everything for a while, to allow us just to settle down and look at one another. If the place were only something like a home. I saw all this, and was as powerless as anyone else. The system was too strong, both inside and outside of us. The ward nurse began a personal vendetta against me.

  Since I wasn’t being paid, and since I practically lived on the ward, I decided I would just follow my own inclinations in regard to working with the patients. This involved mostly flowing with the vibrations on the ward, to be present with whoever needed me at any given time. This came as a challenge to her authority, and was the focal point for other resentments.

  She had married into the upper middle class, and was working because it was a chic thing to do, and was having trouble with her teen-age children, and really didn’t like her husband all that much. She was physically attractive for her age, somewhere in the late forties, and from time to time I amused myself by playing sexual eye games with her, which both turned her on and put her uptight. A major blowup came during one of the meetings, when I let down my guard and let everyone know what I really thought of the way things were being run. I had written a two-page denunciation and circulated it among the staff, and almost gave Marvin a heart attack for fear it might be seen by someone in the administration. As in any encounter situation, when a person comes forward, he serves as a magnet for the accumulated feeling of the group, either love or hatred. This time, I got the negative reaction, and for a half hour was ripped into by the entire staff for sins both real and imaginary. Since I wasn’t too stable anyway, I felt my personality disintegrate from under me, and at that point, Donna unleashed a vicious at
tack.

  “You’re a pig,” she said. “You pick your nose. You don’t wash. You’re arrogant. You’re always looking for a handout. You have no decency.” And so forth. I had no recourse but to stumble out of the meeting.

  Some form of retribution came to Donna, however, through Larry. He was a tall thin veteran who spent all his time walking around the ward, to the point where his feet got infected, and drinking coffee and mumbling to himself. As with so many other of the crazies, one had to spend a great deal of time with him and listen to his rap to learn what he was saying. In effect, he was giving a running commentary on his condition, including what was going on in the ward, exaggerating his perceptions. He was a superb mime, and when Joel and I sat and watched him, he would put on little performances that were invisible to anyone who didn’t know what he was doing. His craziness came out most fully when he started rapping about how the ward was a concentration camp and that the Geneva Convention promised more freedoms than he was now allowed.

  Donna was in the habit of massaging him. She would go over to him, get him to sit down, and rub his feet tenderly. It was, in her mind I am sure, a strictly humanitarian gesture. But the fact that she was so warm to him and to no one else indicated that there was a chemistry happening between them. Every once in a while, when he was in a playful mood, Larry would make a grab for her crotch. And she would turn, with that jocular anger women show when they are pleased but refuse to show it, and say, “Now, now, touching’s not allowed.” And once or twice he shot back, “Hubbie wouldn’t like it, eh?” Which simply proved that insanity is a relative notion.