When you're tired—alone—and afraid of the future, what else can you do? Maybe see a shrink!
Am I having an anxiety attack or is anxiety attacking me? Tonight is Halloween.
I lay the pictures—there are three pictures now!—out on the developing table beside my photo enlarger. I had just finished blowing up the shots taken in the sky. I found my hands were shaking and my body had gooseflesh crawling. It took me more than an hour to overcome the urge. But I did it. Once again I managed to keep my MONSTER! in its cage. Next time I might not be lucky. Next time I might not win.
I fear that next time I might just blow those three pictures up.
God save me from that.
November
Well, I saw Dr. George Ruryk today and this is what he told me.
First of all ask yourself: where do my thoughts come from? We've all heard of complexes. "Stop treating the child that way, you're going to give him a complex." "That man suffers from an inferiority complex." "I tell you the guy is weird. He's got some sort of Oedipus complex." "She's got this Electra complex. She wants to fuck her father." So what is a complex?
A complex is a group of ideas that dominate your thoughts and color your experiences. You come to see everything in relation to those ideas. If you're in love, for example, the slightest thing, like just a whiff of perfume, will bring immediately to mind all the ideas and feelings that make up your "love complex." A complex is to psychology what Force is to physics. But here comes the rub!
What happens if a particular complex is for some reason totally out of harmony with the rest of the conscious mind? Perhaps its ideas are unbearably painful. Perhaps it is of a sexual nature incompatible with the person's rigid views and principles.
What happens is that a conflict arises—a struggle commences and ensues between the rebel complex in question and the rest of the personality.
Perhaps the complex can be modified by the mind so that it is no longer incompatible with the rest of the personality.
Perhaps the mind can weigh the merits of each opponent and consciously choose to abandon one in favor of the other.
Or perhaps this is impossible and there must be a fight to the finish.
If there must be a fight then the common method used by the human mind is the sledgehammer of repression.
In using repression, conflict is avoided by banishing one of the opponents to the cellar of the mind. From there the exile is no longer allowed to achieve normal expression, and the victor of the fight is left in control of the field of consciousness.
But here, Dr. Ruryk said, comes the second rub!
Though the complex is shut up downstairs in the dark and denied its normal function, it is not annihilated. It continues to exist within the deeper layers of the mind, festering, while prevented from rising to the surface by the constant resistance of the guard at the door, namely the mind's force of repression.
Have you ever put tarmac on a driveway before the winter snows set in?
Well if you have—and if you failed to kill every last living seed on the ground before doing so—come spring the tarmac will crack and up through its surface will sprout a small plant shoot.
Same with the human mind.
But in a much more devious way.
For a repressed complex can only influence the conscious mind indirectly. This is because of the "censor"' guard standing watch at the cellar door. It must slip out in disguise.
The uglier the monster, the more circuitous its route.
So, Dr. Ruryk said, back to your inquiry about an obsession with death.
Assume something has happened which has caused remorse in a person's mind. Perhaps you know such an individual?
(Yes, I think I do.)
Now say this remorse is painful to that person's mind. Perhaps it's guilt over a death. To deal with this upset to equilibrium the complex related to this remorse is repressed by the conscious mind. But that complex still tie.. press itself. So how does it manifest?
Sometimes the mind uses symbolism to express these repressed and dissociated ideas: here you have the man who thinks that he is Napoleon. The man with the delusion.
Sometimes the mind uses the device which we call projection. Here the repressed complex is no longer regarded by the personality as being part of its own self. The complex has been projected onto another person—and thus conflict is avoided.
If the complex is projected onto a real person, then a delusion of persecution by that individual may result. And in self-defense the patient may try to kill that other person.
If the complex is projected onto an imaginary person, or one who is long since dead, then the repressed set of ideas appears as an hallucination. The patient sees ghosts. Or hears commanding voices telling him what to do. Perhaps a voice from Hell.
What you must realize. Dr. Ruryk said, is that any one of our instinctive drives may give rise to a conflict in the mind.
Freud said that most cases of repression arise from the instinct of sex.
Perhaps he was right.
But right or not, the fact remains that the origin of a mental aberration is not to be found in any disturbance within the mechanics of the mind.
It is to be found in the material from life fed into the brain of any particular human being.
Therefore to answer the question of whether or not you yourself may go insane, ask yourself: Do I have monsters lurking in the cellar of my mind?
But there's a final rub!
For if you do they've been repressed, and you won't even know they're there until they break out of the dungeon.
That's what Dr. Ruryk said when I saw him early today.
He suggested that if I was interested in pursuing the matter further I might wish to sit in on a psychology seminar given by one of his former students. He told me her name is Genevieve.
I might just do that and find out where it leads.
Of course I didn't tell Dr. Ruryk about my problem with the heads.
Complex is to psychology what Force is to physics. Let's see where this goes. Eh, whadda ya say?
1954.
That would have been the year.
I remember my father standing at the drugstore counter with his change in one hand and whisky on his breath, talking to Mr. Thorson. I was walking toward the rear of the pharmacy where the comic racks were kept. It was the first Tuesday in the month so the new Blackhawk would be in. I remember I never made it to those racks.
To reach the comic stands at the rear of Thorson's Drug Store you had to pass a long shelf filled with adult magazines. Life and Look and Ellery Queen and Saturday Evening Post. The head was waiting for me buried in among these books.
The head was on the cover of a pulp magazine, Real Man's Adventure. As I recall, those words were printed in red. the same color as the blood which dripped from the neck, from the eyes and from the nose of that head stuck on a pole. Between the shreds of skin that hung down from the hacked-off skull you could just make out a trace of neck vertebra peeking through. But most of all what I remember is the eyes. Rolled back into their sockets, just a slivered moon of pupil showing beneath each eyelid, both eyes definitely staring right at me. I was seven years old.
For at that moment a very strange thing happened, and I was no longer in that store. It was as though I had been sucked right off my feet and transported through the door of that magazine cover. I recall clearly sitting in the front of that dugout canoe facing the Great White Hunter who was crouched in the stern. His khaki jacket was soaked with sweat and plastered to his chest. I remember bullets sewn into loops across the front of the jacket. I could see a St. Christopher's medal around the tense muscle cords in his neck. He wore a safari hat with a leopard skin band pushed back from his forehead. His index finger was on the trigger of the Remington in his hands.
And I knew we were surrounded.
There was a circle of severed heads ringed around our boat, each head stuck on the end of a pole fixed to the front of a dugout. The du
gouts were manned by South American Jivaro Indians (I know that now), all conspiring to close off any chance of an escape. The Indians all had bronze skin and long black hair. Their bodies were naked except for breechclouts covering their loins. Each man was armed: a few with spears that were decorated with hanks of human hair, others with long hollow blowpipe tubes resting on lower lips, most with machetes three feet long with the sun glinting off sharp edges spattered with blood and gore.
Then something bumped our dugout and a hand touched my shoulder.
I could have died of fright.
For there was this grip trying to steady my trembling body before a blade swooped my head away.
"Easy, son," a voice said. "Just turn and look at me."
Though I tried to do as it said, I couldn't—that picture would not set me free.
Then I saw another hand reach over me to turn the copy of Real Man's Adventure face down on the stack of magazines below.
"There," my father said, squatting down on bended knees. "Out of sight, out of mind. That picture bothers you?"
"No," I remember saying, now back in the store. I was shaking my head from side to side.
"Well it bothers me,"my father said. "That's what it's meant to do. It's like your comic Tales From the Crypt but a little more realistic. Don't be afraid of fear, son. We all have to conquer it someday—one way or another. Now go on and pick out a comic. Your mother's got supper waiting."
I did what he said.
Then with his arm on my shoulder, the two of us left the store. But I do remember one final look back at that stack of magazines.
On the back cover of Real Man's Adventure. Charles Atlas was flexing his biceps and asking: Would you like to look like me?
The plane went missing that December as my father was flying to Toronto. He had managed to stop his drinking long enough to land a job and was on his way back east for some sort of business upgrading.
For two months I spent every day sitting by the front door waiting for him to return.
It was the second week in February before they found the wreck of the aircraft. It had smashed to pieces on a Rocky Mountain peak. The papers said my father's head was severed in the crash. I cried for several days.
* * *
The second head was waiting for me on the first Tuesday in March.
My eyes must have seen it at once but neglected to tell my brain, for I distinctly heard the sound of a snake slither across the drugstore floor. I recall my sweat bursting from every pore as if I were in steaming tropical heat. And I know my mind was shrieking: 'I got to get out of here'.
This head was worse than the others.
For there he was again, my friend, the Great White Hunter in his sweat-stained khaki safari jacket. Only this time he was in the background, standing. Remington ready, in the door of a grass hut. You could see him between the Jivaro's legs which made up the picture's foreground. The cover focused on an Indian's loins from his waist down to his knees. That was all that you could see of him as he walked away from the hunter. Except, of course, for his hands.
His left hand held the machete dripping blood and gore.
His right hand held a leather thong attached to both ends of a needle. This needle was made of slivered bone about ten inches long. It had been rammed through one eardrum of the head until it had passed through the brain and out of the other ear. The head itself took up a good one-third of the page. Trickles of blood ran down from the corner of each eye. The eyes had rolled up in the head, one of them nothing but white road-mapped with red veins. The other revealed just the barest hint of a pupil.
I tried to turn away. But I couldn't. I tried to run. But I couldn't. I tried to shut my own eyes. But I couldn't.
"Please, Father," I whispered. "Turn that picture away." My hope was that he'd stop it like he had that time before.
"What's going on here? You're talking to yourself."
"It's back, Dad. It's back. Make it go away."
A hand fell onto my shoulder, giving it a shake.
"Are you all right, son?" the voice of the druggist asked.
And that was when I knew for sure that no matter how much I needed him my father would never be there again.
I guess I panicked.
For a moment there I looked again at the cover and thought that this time I saw my father's eyes staring out at me from that chopped head strung on a string. His pale gray eyes shone faintly through the flesh of those rolled back whites.
Then I broke away from the druggist and made a dash for the door. With glass shattering and exploding in razor-sharp shards around me, I ran right through the pane set into the metal doorframe.
Outside it was raining. That's usual for this city.
I was more than a block away from the store and still running through the downpour when I realized I was cut. Both my hands were slashed and gouged and smeared with blood. I stopped running abruptly and sat down on the ground beside a puddle rippled with raindrops. For maybe half an hour I sat there thinking about my father trapped inside that hacked-off head, watching the water distort my reflection and wash my blood away.
Four days later I knew something was wrong.
At Vancouver General Hospital a doctor had put forty-seven stitches into my hands. My mother was upset as hell and equally pissed off. Paying for the door had cost her fifty bucks that we could ill afford; my father because of his drinking had let his insurance premiums lapse. But more than that, the thought of her son with his hands paralyzed because of severed nerves and tendons had cost her several nights' sleep. And she had desperately needed that rest. It had only been a few weeks since they had found the wreckage of the plane and I know she was struggling against odds to hold up a strong front for the sake of me and my brother.
I never told her about the head on the front of the magazine. At eight years old I was now the man in this family Men like Charles Atlas weren't afraid of magazine covers.
She was the best type of mother. She didn't pry.
The only punishment I got was that four days after the accident she sent me to the drugstore to buy replacement bandages for my injured hands. Like most mothers she saw me off with words something like this: "I hope this trip reinforces the lesson you should have learned. You know you could have been killed."
I bypassed the drugstore with the piece of plywood set into its door—in fact I never went there again—and walked six blocks down from Victoria Drive till I came to a Rexall Pharmacy. Through its glass door I could see shelves of medicine, Band-Aids, candy, toys, and that the bald-headed druggist was passing a youth a package that seemed to emharrass him. There was a young teenage girl about the same age as the youth waiting expectantly outside the store.
I first knew something was wrong when I couldn't through the door.
It was science fiction come true: I was held off by some sort of force field.
Holding both arms out before me I tried to will my hands to press the metal bar that stretched across the door. But my arms refused to move. It was weird and I felt frightened.
The girl outside noticed I was in difficulty and she came sauntering over, peeking shyly into the store as she did so. "Must hurt, eh?" she said, looking at my bandaged hands and pushing open the door to help me.
"Yeah, it does," I said, and I tried to step forward. But now my foot refused to move. It was as if the sole of my penny-loafer was glued to the concrete. I tried to move a second time, and then the fear really set in.
Something's wrong with me,I thought. I can't get into the store!
Just then the youth rushed out through the door, pushing me aside. "I got'em," he said excitedly. "An' these ones are lubricated."
"Jeez, Tim," the girl said, her face becoming bright pink, "you hit that little kid."
"Oh, yeah. Sorry, kid." He gave me a disdainful look. Then noticing my hands he said: "You need some help?"
"Would you buy me some bandages?" I asked. "While I wait out here?"
He looked at me queerly
but did as I requested. A few minutes later as he walked away with his girl I heard him say, "You know there's somethin' odd with that kid."
And he was right.
I knew it too.
It wasn't long before my friends were privy to the secret. When one in their midst is unable to go into a confectionary to buy Double Bubble gum and has to tell his compatriots what comic books to buy him while he waits outside the drugstore, eight-year-olds cotton on fast to the fact that something's queer. Eight-year-olds also have this need to set the world a-right.
I suppose that's why Jimbo made the mistake.
You see, we had gone to the Queen Bee Market one fine April afternoon—Corry and Jimbo and I—to buy ourselves each a pop. I was hooked on cream soda at the time, and hoping to find a bottle of white stuff, not the usual red kind. The woman who ran the Queen Bee was a woman who knew her pop. And just for me she kept her eyes peeled for a case of white each time the delivery truck came around.
I know I should have been wary—what with it being April Fool's Day and all—but the morning was bright with sunshine and my bandages had just come off for good. Much to my mother's surprise, my fingers weren't paralyzed. Anyway, we reached the store and I gave Jimbo my dime. "The white kind, right?" Jimbo asked as Corry opened the door.
"Yeah," I said, totally unsuspecting. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the magazine rack. I was turning a little more to the left to put the rack out of sight at my rear when they pulled the trick.
"April Fool!" Jimbo said and he pushed me through the door.
I have never felt such panic: it literally closed my throat so I couldn't get any air. My heart was leaping about in my chest as I scrambled to get back outside. But they were both blocking the door. Jimbo was laughing and chortling and Corry was slapping his sides. That's when I broke Jimbo's nose. I recall wildly swinging my arm in a pitcher's circle and giving him the old one-two. I popped him square in the middle of his face and heard the small bone crack. Jimbo dropped like a sack of onions down onto his knees. Corry had stopped laughing but was still blocking the door. With a flying tackle I hit him in the chest and with one hand clawed at his eyes. I distinctly remember shouting "Lemme out! Lemme out!" as I pounded him again and again.
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