When an apartment became a social necessity, we took the first of a whole series of apartments together. For me, Kurt was the perfect companion. We’d drive up to a Dairy Queen together and he’d say, “Okay, Callahan, let’s go in and scream our orders.” I didn’t take this seriously, but Kurt walked up to the young girl at the counter and did just that, scaring her silly. In any restaurant his first act was to excuse himself, go to the men’s room, and emerge trailing a long tail of toilet paper, which he seemed not to notice. His mind was always active, just like mine. Two mental escape artists—and we needed to be.
As “Mr. Callahan, Psychiatric Aide #1”—that’s what it said on my badge—I got to supervise ninety retarded men on one ward. Take them to the bathroom and dodge their pee. Give “Vernon” 800 milligrams of Thorazine in his eggnog and try to spot his psychosis coming back before he had a chance to kick some janitor in the nuts. In which case it was off to electroshock again.
There, with Kurt and four other psych aides, I got to assist elderly Dr. Wacker in the performance of his chief duty as director, which was to slam enough volts to fry a steak through the noggin of any patient who gave the least sign of becoming a problem. Kurt and I held the shoulders of the patient, Jim and Chuck held the hips, and Jack held the knees—I forget who had the feet. And Dr. Wacker applied the electrodes to the temples with his badly-chewed fingernails. Each time permanently erasing a large hunk of personality and memory. If anybody was in that nuthouse via an incorrect diagnosis, it wasn’t incorrect for long. Before the treatment the patients got a shot of some muscle relaxant that reduced a screaming maniac to a docile cadaver with a loose, flapping tongue and bugged eyes. The whole body would jump into the air and spasm violently like a shark does after its head is exploded by one of those shotgun sticks. Two or three sessions with old Dr. Wacker and these patients were ready for a lifetime as institutional zombies. Deep inside, I felt awful pity for these poor slobs.
I slammed the lid of my mind firmly down on these emotions. Dr. Wacker himself drank heavily at each day’s end, I noticed. He was a balding closet queen who wore a special pair of prosthetic shoes to conceal (unsuccessfully) the fact that his left leg was shorter than the right, and who preserved his respectability with a “white” marriage to a (presumably) frigid Nordic blonde we all yearned to thaw. But she was off-limits. Instead Kurt and I picked up two hitchhikers, who moved in with us for a while. One of them screwed Kurt and the other tried to screw the still-virgin Callahan, when we were sober enough. That was convenient, except that one day we were skinny-dipping, drunk, in the cold Columbia and somebody stole all of our clothes—and our towels. The girls took this commonplace prank badly and got even madder when Kurt and I insisted on driving home, slowly, through the busy downtown business district. They moved out.
Then, early that fall, I met Cathy, a friend of Kurt’s. She was auburn-haired and wore autumn colors, and her body, thinner than Paula’s but just as delicious, exuded a sweet, smoky perfume. Best of all, she wore boots. She seemed more understated and at the same time more sensuous than any girl I’d known. She fell so completely in love with me that it was obvious even to me, the uncontested self-doubt champion of The Dalles.
Cathy lost no time getting rid of my virginity. Within a few hours of our meeting we were alone in my bedroom and she was very gently undoing my shirt buttons and belt buckle, lowering me down onto the bed and in general taking the lead in a nice way. Being naked under the covers with her was so exciting that I thought my heart was going to blow through my chest, but that was just openers. Though I had no basis for comparison at the time, it so happened that we were ideal lovers for each other. Every move was effortless, every response synchronized as if by magic. We seemed to flow into each other like the confluence of two rivers.
Afterward I felt very grateful and warm toward her, and we were a couple. But, unlike Cathy, I didn’t fall in love, a fact I concealed from her but that, paradoxically, may have been one reason for the lack of nervous tension, the ease I felt when I was with her.
My drinking continued unabated and so did the surreal quality my life took on while I was working at the nuthouse. At this time Kurt and I lived at the top of a huge old four-story Victorian boardinghouse and we had a very stupid, large, and strange-looking dog whose legs were so short he could have been a cross between a Newfoundland and a boa constrictor. One day we were sitting around smoking pot and drinking beer and playing fetch with a tennis ball. The dog would chase, bring it back, then we had to pry it out of his lips so that we could throw it and he would chase it and bring it back again. Finally Kurt banked the ball off the wall, and we watched it bounce across the room. It bounced and bounced, clear across the room, with the dog jumping after it, and finally went out the window, as did the dog. It was his last jump and his best.
When we raced downstairs, he turned out to be not quite dead. Hoping no one had seen anything we hustled him off to the vet for a merciful injection.
We were rapidly turning into mental patients ourselves. We came to work drunk in order to bear the sight of the ninety retarded loonies weaving around and going through their unique cycles of repetitive gestures. We stole patient uniforms, slippers and all, and careened through downtown, flapping and twitching until the cops picked us up. We used to steal pills intended for the patients so that we would be as stoned as they were. We were nineteen, and the sight of the wards full of contorting, gyrating bodies making noises like Halloween had shaken up our reality systems, such as they were.
I remember a patient named Timmy, the product of incest. He was a very pretty and effeminate twenty-four-year-old male. Totally, 100 percent retarded, he was capable only of walking around hallucinating twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes I would study him. He walked around with his little hands out like the pope giving benediction and with an almost orgasmic ecstasy on his face. Other times he had a look of total horror as if he’d seen Dr. Ruth, Betty Friedan, and Mother Teresa all at once. Nobody ever got his attention, except perhaps the homosexual patients, who were always trying to lead him away into a bedroom.
A patient named Gary flapped his hands inanely whenever he became excited. He could work himself up into some state that was almost masturbatory, with a crazed, blissful grin as he flapped harder and harder, to the point of damaging his hands. We were there to keep him calm, but sometimes I found myself unable to resist getting him started.
“Guess what were having for dinner, Gary?” (Flap. Flap.)
“Hot dogs!” (Flap, flap, flap!)
“And that’s not all!” (Flap! Flap flap flap flap!)
“There’s chocolate pudding for dessert!” (Flap! Flap! Flap-flapflapflapflapflapflapflap!!)
One day, just as Gary was ready to fall over from flapping (he had already begun to pee in his pants), Nurse Phillips happened by and instantly sized up the situation. I was summarily dismissed, booted out of the nuthouse. Nurse Phillips probably saved my sanity when she canned my ass.
Kurt and I lived together a little longer. We had both bought big motorcycles, a 750cc Norton for me and a big racing Triumph for him. Real death machines. I can remember riding in the rain, stoned and drunk at 120 miles an hour, in perfect rhythm and grace on twisting two-lane black-top roads. On mescaline the road just felt like chocolate syrup.
Cathy had become more and more attached to me and had gone along on all our drinking bouts, never protesting. But now that I was out of work and seeing more of her, my attitude toward her began to sour. Every evening we made love in my bed, but it got to the point where I didn’t even bother to walk her home. It finally dawned on her that things were not right. One day she said, “You know, you’re just using me. I don’t think you really love me. Is that true, John?” And when she saw the guilt on my face, she picked up her coat and walked out the door.
I was crushed. Once again I was abandoned—never mind that I’d asked for it. I went into a depression deeper than any I’d known before or have known since. I became a prisoner
in my own apartment. At first I paced around and drank; later I just sat on the bed and rocked myself in the fetal position, going out only for booze. It was the dead of winter, and for hours I’d just sit there next to the oil heater and tremble. I couldn’t joke or smile, even with Kurt. My whole spirit felt raw and bruised. I planned my suicide, knew just which cliff I’d drive off—when I could work up the energy.
Eventually I went back to my parents’ house and tried to explain what was happening. My mother decided that what I needed was to get busy and sent me out to weed in the garden. After a while she saw me sitting beside the beds: I was too depressed even to pull weeds. Next she sent me to a clinic downtown. The indifferent doctor gave me Thorazine, and I walked around like something out of a George Romero movie, with my mouth hanging open.
For weeks I ate my meals at my parents’, not that the atmosphere was tolerable, but just to have someplace to go each day. That was a technique to keep some residual sanity; so was going to the bathroom for a sip of water, an alternative to a leap out the window.
It was my father who found me the way out. He got me a job with his friend Bob Wilson, a wheat-and-cattle rancher. Suddenly I found myself miles away, in a place that looked like the landscape of the moon, working with people who snickered at the mention of “depression”—they worked far too hard to get depressed.
On the Wilson ranch, everybody was up at 5:30 for a lesbian-sized breakfast of home-grown bacon and eggs. By 6:00 A.M. I’d be out on some godforsaken patch of prairie, digging postholes all by my lonesome. In to lunch we’d come at noon, and then it was back to the rockpile until well after dark. We were supposed to knock off at 5:00 or 6:00 P.M., but nobody ever quit much before 10:00.
At first I remained insomniac, lying awake in my basement bunk—just like home!—filled with depressive pain. But a few days of the Wilson regime had me dropping in my tracks the moment I got close enough to the bed for it to break my fall. So much for angst.
Since this was a ranch, I figured that on Saturday night we hands would mosey on into town, have a few drinks, shoot up the saloon, and generally kick back. But in the real world of the Wilson spread, there was always an emergency, and nobody ever got to town. So during my months on the ranch I didn’t drink either.
A typical ranch disaster marked the end of my tenure out there in the wide-open spaces. A whole bunch of cattle died of bloat when some yo-yo put too much salt in their feed. The carcasses had to be disposed of before they ripened in the early-summer heat. It fell to me to attach each bloated corpse to an antique four-wheel-drive pickup and haul it up a steep track to the lip of a canyon, into which I then dumped the animal’s remains for later burning.
Just once—but it was enough—I forgot to switch into four-wheel before climbing the hill. Halfway up, the ancient truck stalled and rolled back onto the towed cow, its wheels off the ground. The carcass burst in a gush of incredible odor, summoning flies from three neighboring states.
My parents’ neighbor was head foreman at the huge Martin Marietta Aluminum plant, an infernal region nearly as big as the town itself. Under the Old Pals Act, I was hired as a “extraman”—a summer replacement—at an astounding ten dollars an hour, top industrial wages for those days.
The plant and everything in it was on an inhuman scale, dictated by the aluminum-smelting process. A central corridor as wide as a freeway ran for half a mile under an eight-story-high tin roof. At right angles to this corridor were five pairs of “rooms”—vast bays each containing forty smelting pots the size of a large yacht and roughly the same shape. Forklifts the size of army tanks roared around carrying huge vessels—“cruisers”—full of the molten aluminum. Everywhere snaked electrical cables as thick as elephants’ trunks, tended casually by ex-navy electricians.
The smelting of aluminum requires such extreme heat that it can only be generated electrically, which is why the plant was in The Dalles, right next to a hydroelectric dam. The four hundred smelting pots in the plant were in effect gigantic electrical resistors with enough juice to lay Don King’s hair back down again.
As an extraman I was expected to do any job in the plant after it was explained to me once, even though a mistake on my part could easily have killed me or another worker. In retrospect it seems astounding that they would let a nineteen-year-old kid into the driver’s seat of a giant rotating forklift carrying tons of molten metal, much less expect him to pour it, without spilling, into the trays where it cooled into ingots.
But in the ultra-macho atmosphere of the plant, sink-or-swim was the rule. I punched in each day with Mike Bishop, another summer kid. We had slightly long hair under our hardhats, the source of much merriment as we walked the gauntlet of rednecks and sheepfuckers who had worked this job for twenty or thirty years. To them we were a couple of queers.
We worked rotating shifts: seven days of day shift, followed by a forty-eight-hour break; then seven days of swing shift, followed by one and a half days off; and finally seven days of graveyard. I remember exhaustedly sitting at the edge of the plant watching the sun rise. We were then given a four-day “weekend,” after which the whole thing repeated. The heat was appalling. If I got a moment to step outside and drench my entire body, boots and clothes with a firehose, thirty seconds of raking sludge from the surface of a pot would dry me right down to the skin again. Just once I showed up ten or fifteen minutes late. The head foreman putted up on his Cushman scooter. “Johnny, your dad is my best friend,” he told me, “but if you do that again, you’re outta here.”
I wasn’t. Mike left, along with the other extramen, at the end of the summer to attend college; but I stayed on for two years. The hard work, the weird hours, the exhaustion and the demonic heat made it impossible for my depression to catch up to me, even though I drank as hard as ever on the weekends. I was proud to be able to hack it, to earn the respect of the old-timers and to acquire a nickname—“Professor,” of course. I was also laying by thousands of dollars, enough to start college when I chose, get married and start a family—or drive to L.A. in Rico Alvarado’s sports car and spend the next six months drinking.
For the moment, though, and thanks to my father’s intervention, I was making it.
Not Kurt, though. He had discovered paint. This was so odious to me that I began to be alienated from him. He would spray the same kind of canned paint graffiti vandals use into a plastic bag, cover his face with it and take huge, hyperventilating breaths until he was in another world. Where he went, even Timothy Leary would have been loath to follow. He became more and more self-destructive as time went on. He began to abuse his girlfriend. He became isolated. No matter how hard I drank, I could never catch up with him.
Riding along the main street on his Triumph one day he slowed down for what he thought was a double trailer rig pulling out of the alley in front of him. When he figured to clear the second part of the huge truck, he twisted the throttle and laid down some rubber. The truck turned out to be a triple rig. Kurt roared under the third section; it cut his head off. It happened right in front of the A & W, and Kurt’s head rolled down the street in front of mom and pop and the kids, sitting there sipping away at root beer floats.
Just after this “accident” I left The Dalles for California, and for a ride of my own.
Chapter 3
I awoke in a long, dark, cool hallway where I lay for hours. At first I was only aware of voices and the chill in the air. Later I could make out, at the edge of my vision, a long line of patients on gurneys. Most seemed to be Mexicans or Negroes. I was flat on my back, I couldn’t move a muscle, and I had no idea what was going on.
Finally a doctor loomed over me with an instrument that looked like a cross between a pizza cutter and a sharp, roweled spur. This he proceeded to run over various parts of my body. Could I feel that? No. Or anything over here? No. How about here? Nothing. So what was wrong with me?
“You’re paralyzed.”
“For how long?”
“Probably for life.”
I did not feel the weight of those words at that time. I heard them, all right; but they held no more significance than hello or good-bye.
I was in the emergency unit at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, south of Los Angeles. When it was discovered that I had no insurance and would be a MediCal patient, I was put in an ambulance, braced with sandbags, and shipped north a dozen miles to Harbor General, a big public hospital in Torrance. I drifted in and out of consciousness. In the elevator to Harbor General’s intensive care unit I told my parents, who had flown down from The Dalles, that I hoped my case would prove an example to other kids who would drink and drive. Fake bravado I would choke on for years afterward.
I couldn’t figure out why I felt my legs to be flexed, as if I were sitting; when I looked at them, they were stretched out flat on the gurney in front of me.
Intensive care at Harbor General was on the twentieth floor. Five patients to a unit, with a panel of nurses monitoring telemetry from behind glass windows. Bright, bright lights. Surprisingly noisy, too. Very little peace and quiet for the dying or the nearly dying. The average survival time for my fellow inmates here was half a day.
They strapped me to a circle electric bed, in essence a chrome Ferris wheel bisected by a hard cot. For the prevention of bedsores, every two hours the bed would be rotated by a motor, leaving me facing either the floor or the ceiling. When I was facedown, my chin was supported by a canvas strap. A second stretcher would be strapped onto my back whenever it was time for the wheel to flip me belly-up. Every time my head passed the zenith, I experienced a tremendous anxiety attack. It was terrifying to feel myself blacking out as a result of all the blood draining out of my head. I’d scream, “Turn it faster! Speed it up!” They’d scream back, “We can’t turn it faster!” The motor only ran at one speed.
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