Memoirs of a Flower Child

Memoirs of a Flower Child
George S Geisinger

Smoking
Chapter 1

I began smoking cigarettes, believe it or not, at the tender young age of five, when I was “running away from home,” so to speak, on a daily basis, trying to keep away from my hostile, bossy, violent father. I thought surely that man was going to kill one of us, sooner or later, and I did not want to be there to watch.
The places I went, when I would disappear from the house all day, were places I've long since forgotten, but one of the things I do remember was that I would get together with another kid that I had met in my travels, wandering around that town on foot, where we lived. He would steal a pack of his mother's cigarettes, steal a pack of matches, and we'd get together and make ourselves very dizzy smoking an entire pack of cigarettes behind the old movie theater all day long, day after day.
One would wonder how we ever got away with such a stunt at such a tender age, but I can assure you that neither my mother nor my father ever suspected such a thing when I was so small, and were honestly surprised when I finally told them my secret as a young adult.
My dad was a preacher when I was a kid, believe it or not, and he was reassigned to another parish each year or so, probably because he was never popular with his congregations.
As one might imagine, it was quite a challenge to develop new connections for cigarettes in each of the towns we moved to in my childhood. I never did have a regular supply of smokes after we moved away from that first town up on the mountain, where that one little thief and I used to go to the enclosed fire escape behind the town movie theater to smoke ourselves dizzy.
My avoidance of my father, since I was being late or altogether absent from meals as a child, had me in a lot of hot water with my parents when I was growing up. But I would have rather-ed be circumspect about my comings and goings at the time, and do as I pleased, than be obedient or punctual about attending meals and let my folks know my whereabouts like an ordinary kid.
I never did leave town altogether when I ran away from home as a child. I would always come back home for some sort of food and a place to sleep each evening, but my absence was a great vexation to my father, particularly, and I never did tell him that I was running away to avoid him, personally. I never did trust the man with such candor.
My father was a brilliant man, and earned a PhD in educational research by the time I was 13, but he had a chemical imbalance in his brain, which is a hereditary problem requiring medication and therapy. His major failing in life, besides his tendency for violence, was that there did not exist the options for effective medications for that illness at the time, and he was completely uncooperative with the doctors, not submitting to any type of medical help for his illness, and died a lonely, defeated old man, unable to keep reasonable relationships with his estranged wife and alienated children.
He was fired from the ministry when I was about 11 or12 years old. It was a terrible blow to him, and my oldest brother believes he never did recover from that one professional insult. He finished his PhD the next year or so, and deserted his family after an inexcusable bout of violence, and to move to Florida alone. He left his family of a wife, wounded by his own violence, and four teenagers, without any visible means of support. We were forced to call on Mother's family to take us in.

Dad's mother was an incurable chain smoker. I can remember her taking just a few drags on each of her cigarettes, one after the other, putting each one out while it was still quite long, with plenty of it left for more smoking, but putting it out irrationally, then almost immediately lighting up another, taking three or four drags off that one, putting it out in the same irrational way, and so on, as if she was totally unconscious and not in control of the absurdity of what she was doing.
I can remember that she needed Dad's help to get out of bed to shuffle the few feet from her bed to the bathroom. She would shuffle along in her nightclothes, taking forever to walk to the adjacent room, only a few short feet away, and she could hardly get enough breath to use for the walking. Dad or whomever, would normally help her walk that little distance, since it was a time when there was no availability for a portable oxygen supply, or if there were, she was not eligible to utilize it, because she was such a compulsive chain smoker. She would have blown herself sky high.
I'm told she smoked that way till the day she died.

I did not smoke in high school at all, since my few close friends never did smoke, but I did pick the cigarettes up at the onset of my own chemical imbalance in my own brain, when I had my first major nervous breakdown in university as a young adult. Mother seemed to be more upset by the idea that I had picked up cigarettes during my hospitalization, back in the day when one could smoke in hospitals and cigarettes were cheap. She seemed oddly unperturbed that I had been smoking pot and dropping acid, that I had been a flower child with long hair and a drug habit, wasting the money she had been paying for my tuition at university.
The only thing that seemed to really upset her was that I had started smoking cigarettes.
She even agreed to support my return to campus the following year, for more attempt at studies, but the attempt to finish a bachelor's degree with a teaching certificate was an impossibility for me by that time, if it had ever been within the realm of my personal capacities in the first place.
I broke up with my girl, whom I was and still am, thoroughly in love with. I had had enough background with my parents' marriage fiasco, to take any chances with the young lady I was so smitten with after I had a nervous breakdown. I wasn't going to drag the girl I loved through the same ordeal my parents had gone through when I was a child, just because I'd stolen her heart so successfully, and suspected I'd never meet another girl I would feel as much like marrying as I did that young lady at that time.
In fact, I never did marry.
I'd seen too much trouble in my father's household, and in fact, when a doctor finally confirmed that a chemical imbalance in the brain is a hereditary illness, I had myself into the operating room to avoid ever fathering a child of my own. I hated everything my father ever put me through, and knew well enough, at the age of 20, in an instinctive sense, that I had the same malady that my father had.
The only real differences between Dad's illness and my own, were that I was determined to be nonviolent, and take enough responsibility for my treatment to struggle to recover. He was too smart to be sick.

As I've said, I began smoking in earnest in the hospital when I was being treated for my first breakdown, at the age of twenty, and I was a hopelessly addicted chain smoker all my adult life thereafter, until I finally got into a hospital situation, forty years later, which would only allow the use of the patch or the gum, and offered no alternative for me to smoke at all. I simply surrendered to the idea that I could simply stop wearing the patch and go on living without trying to smoke at all. And that's just what I did. I just stopped, after approximately forty years of chain smoking.
One thing I noticed about my smoking, whether I smoked cigarettes, cigars, pipes, or pot; all of it seemed to have an overall calming effect on my nervous system, except that the pot and PCP seemed to confuse the prescribing doctors too much, not to mention the confusion of the patient. Their prescriptions were not as accurate, dealing with my illness, when I was smoking drugs and drinking, as they were when I was finally drug free and sober.
Nonetheless, smoking any form of tobacco had a calming influence on me, generally, until the laws destroyed the overall environment for all of us smokers. I think the tobacco companies used more and more additives as the years went by, also.
I talked to my psychotherapist about this hypothesis at some length, and he agreed, citing his observation that institutions who had large numbers of patients with similar diagnoses to my own, had a lot of addicted tobacco smokers, who always seemed to be smoking as, not only a habit, but as a ritual, in a similar way to the way I smoked. A close friend of mine used to say that I made love to my cigarettes; I did not simply smoke them.
In that forty year interim, my mother and aunt, whom I loved and respected dearly, always pleaded with me to keep trying to quit, but I was not successful until they had both passed away at a ripe old age of ninety, each. They were sisters, born two years apart. Mother passed away a month after her ninetieth birthday, and my aunt passed away two years later, two months after her own ninetieth birthday.
My aunt, in particular, was very spiritually inclined, in a more vocal sense than mother ever was, although mother was a devout Christian woman, and long after my higher power had delivered me from the alcoholism and drug addiction, auntie continued to encourage me to seek God's help to quit smoking.
I eventually did exactly as she suggested, and succeeded in going smoke free at the age of fifty nine, after being an habitual chain smoker since the age of twenty, having quit at least twice a year for all those years, and probably quit more often than that.

By this writing, which is about six months without a cigarette, I have no craving for a cigarette, even when I sit outside in the smoking area here, talking with people who are smoking at the time. I simply enjoy the springtime weather and the company, if I choose to do it.
I am positively free of nicotine addiction, as I am free of all other addictions by the relatively young age of sixty.
I do have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, COPD, which is chronic emphysema, chronic bronchitis and chronic asthma, but those maladies have little effect on my mobility, over all. I'm very susceptible to pneumonia and pleurisy, especially in cold weather, and I was diagnosed with tuberculosis in my youth, but that's long been in remission, and it's not contagious as it stands.
In my consultations with my doctor, I was told that tuberculosis is very contagious, and is easily passed from person to person in environments were a lot of people share a relatively small, mutual space. Since I was confined to state hospital wards frequently in my youth, it's quite possible I contracted the disease easily enough, was treated just as easily, and my immune system adjusted easily enough to subdue the threat against my life.
I had occasion to study some of the historical writings about the famous young author, Ann Frank, from the days of the Nazi concentration camps of WWII. The idea that she had been executed in a gas chamber or some such thing, is entirely a false assumption. In fact, Ann Frank contracted tuberculosis after she had gone to the camp, and died from a lack of medical treatment for the disease. This does not detract at all from her heroic contribution to classic literature, or minimize her sacrifice as a human being in such dire straights at such a tender age. It is only an observation that that age-old disease can still be fatal if left untreated, even in modern times.
All told, I personally feel a lot healthier in general, and a lot healthier in regards to my breathing specifically, than I ever expected I would, after all the abuse I did to my lungs over the years.
I am very grateful to my higher power to be given the opportunity to have so much health and recovery from so many abuses that I chose to heap on my own body by my own hand, when I was such a foolish youth.

Bicycle
Chapter 2

How young was I when my Uncle's old bicycle became mine?
I remember so easily some things about my life.
That bicycle was a classic, a fat-tire Schwinn, heavy as lead, very tall to mount, for a kid, and gave all takers a significant workout.
Nothing like that bike for transportation though, up until the time I could drive a car.
I remember Bond Hill, Cincinnati, where my mom's folks lived. There was a well established old school there, with plenty of cement walkways, and plenty of parking lots to ride on, right across the street from grandma's house, but I'll be switched if I can remember the name of the place.

I remember we lived in West Elizabeth beside the big river south of Pittsburgh, when I had the bike to ride some place different from the big school yard in Bond Hill. Me and my buddy got yelled at a lot going through the old saw mill by the church. They didn't want us kids back there because they thought it was too dangerous for us.
All of West Elizabeth wasn't hardly any town at all. I don't remember anything being there, except for the sawmill and that church.
There were two sisters our age who came to Dad's church with their folks. I thought much later in life that they were recording artists on the radio, or something. At least the names were familiar.
Their parents used to bring the girls to play with us outside on the old jungle-gym. I don't remember much more about those girls.
Billy's dad took the two of us down to the boat races on the river once. They both ranted about the boat races. I didn't want to go to the river because it frightened me. But I did go to the races with them once, scared or not.

Next, we moved out into dairy country to a town called Scottdale, south-east of Pittsburgh. It was different than the river town.
There were hills all around. Some were quite steep. I never really developed much interest in that town, except for riding past the one girl's house to see if she was outside. She usually waved.
I'd become a teenager all of a sudden.
Annie sang with a rumbling voice from deep in her flat chest. Sis was her sidekick. Sometimes they'd wave at me when I rode by on my bike. Sis wasn't anybody, except you never saw Annie without her.
Annie and me had had our chance in the spotlight back when. She was more like a second tenor than an alto. I was a boy soprano. I hated all that. Our chorus did one of those way-too-bitter-sweet, sunshine-up-the-nose, la-Dee-duh musicals from the movies. Annie and me did the duet.
There I was on stage with her in front of that whole town, singing. I stood there with my hands behind my back. That girl wasn't going to get a chance to be all cute and everything, and take hold of my hand in the middle of that stupid song or anything. I kept my hands out of reach, and that was that. I wasn't taking any chances.
Standing up there with Annie was really embarrassing. I thought about her in my sleep. Seemed like everybody knew it, too. I wished I was dead. We got through it, though. One duet, right down the pipe, perfect.
I'd ride my bike up and down the street past her dad's house so much I just knew I was way too obvious. Annie and Sis would come outside and sit on the front stoop again, and she'd wave at me again. I never did get up the nerve to simply stop and chat with her. She was friendly and all. I just didn't want to believe it. Don't call me shy. I just didn't feel right. Besides, there was this guy threatening me about her all the time...
I knew Annie from the time I was 11 to the time I was 13. I've been thinking about her, like so many other girls, for the better part of a lifetime. How do they do that, anyway?

We left town after my dad flipped out. It was such a relief. Dad up and left town. He didn't even sneak away. He said goodbye, and off he went. We left pretty soon after that ourselves – off to Grandma's new place in Maryland. Had to. Dad took all the money. There weren't anymore beatings, though.

We ended up in Maryland with Grandma. Grandpa had died a few years earlier, and Grandma moved to where my aunt was. They had a new house built there, and we all ended up there when dad split.
The new house in Maryland became home for us, and it was the family homestead for many years.

I was new in town and found five girls sitting on the back porch of a house near the corner.
I figured, what the hell. You only live once, right? What were they gonna do, kill me? So, like an idiot, I rode my bike right up to all those girls and proceeded to sling a line of BS at 'em a mile long. I couldn't stop talking.
I was all nervous energy.
Soon enough, one of them came up with some excuse why it was they needed to go in right away, and they all got up and went inside. I just sat there on my bike and watched 'em all go, knowing I was a fool. I told myself I didn't care.
Soon enough, there was the school bus to wait for every morning, but none of those girls were friendly. Not even a little bit. I told myself it must have been their problem.

I rode down by the motel, where I eventually worked as a bellhop, the apartment complex had an above-ground pool, in those days. When I found the place the first time, there was a girl about my age in the pool. Once again, I was all bold & brazen & whatnot. We spent hours of days talking, over the side-wall of the pool. She seemed to enjoy herself, I guess.
There was a song on the radio I'd sing to her, like the flirt I was. I stared at her new bosom and into her eyes, trying to make my eyes more blue than they always are. She smiled a lot.
“Hey there Little Red Riding-hood. You sure are looking good. You're everything that a big bad wolf would want. Ow! I mean bah...” She'd stifle a giggle. We were really only kids. But it was a lot of fun.
One day she said her dad got a new job. She was moving away. I never saw her again. I can't even remember her name.

I met Peaches in my church youth group, MYF, one evening. All my closest friends from school went there. There was some new girl with long straight red hair and a smile right back at me! We were all-of-about 13 or 14 years old; something like that. She smiled at me. I thought I'd fall down on my chin, if I wasn't careful! I was all tripped up.
But I was OK. No problem. I got along just fine. I'd just been notified directly enough, that the new girl in town liked me. She was sweet as peaches. I'd just never seen a real live, pretty girl, come on to me like that before. Right there inside my own church group, nonetheless. Well, I thought I'd only had bad luck all my life. It seemed like I never had any good luck at all. Yet, there she was. I didn't have a clue. Heck! She had to be staring at me to never miss my glance that often. Ahhh? OK.
This was my first time with that sort of girl. The idea kind of blew me away. She was blue-eyed, natural born red-headed, cute. We were only kids, but I forgot about the world when I met her. I call her Peaches. She was really sweet.
Anyway, her daddy was nice whenever it was I got to know him, and her mom was real nice, too. He was a military man. Peaches had one older sister. They were all real nice folks.
We used to ride around on my bicycle together, all over the army base where they lived. She rode side-saddle on the crossbar of my old Schwinn. I never noticed the whole world like that before. Not till I met Peaches. I guess they call that puppy love. I don't know what else it would be.
We were every boy and girl who ever lived, or ever will, I guess you could say.
She and her family had just come back Stateside, from Germany. Peaches daddy was a major in the army. He'd been reassigned after they'd been across the pond for a while. She'd picked up a little German while she was away. She taught me some. She could've taught me anything, if she'd only known. I hung on her every word.
Of course, there was “Ich liebe dich,” she loved me.
“Du hast himmel blau augen,” she said.
Huh? I asked her.
“You have Heaven blue eyes.” It was a self-suspending moment. The whole German language still keeps me going about Peaches. All those stories about Hitler were nothing. That's all negative stuff. There was Peaches and me. That's what was real. I'm still wondering how much German I learned from Peaches, and how much German I have in my genetics.
I eventually had to do some research.

There were ancient tribes who herded “geis,” or small mountain goats, in the Black Forest region of Germany. The ancient way of herding was to sing. That was the reference in The Bible, “His sheep know His voice.” I finally got the connection between my singing voice, my last name, and my ease for understanding German. It all seemed natural all of a sudden.

I should've married Peaches. I've often thought so. But she would not stay; I could not keep her. I'll tell you what happened, and maybe I can forgive myself for the telling of it. I've lived the better part of my lifetime without anyone. I can't help but blame myself for that.
My oldest brother took us to a party back in the day. It was cold out. Peaches and I were in the back seat. I think my sister was up front with my brother. We were on the way to do things like bob for apples, dance the dances of the young, and play silly parlor games. I put my arm around her in the car. I was so thrilled to be with her. I loved her so much. I was staring at her. Honest, I thought what I wanted would be OK with Peaches. She had on her winter coat. Nothing I wanted would hurt her. I would never hurt her. I didn't know I was doing That. I wasn't attacking her. I was just curious about girls, for God's sake.
Why couldn't you understand? Sure, girls are girls, but guys are guys too, right?

A long time after that I saw her at our high school reunion.
I had never understood.
I could hardly breathe as I walked up to her. I asked her why she'd broken up with me, so long ago. After she told me, I left the reunion, drove around in my car all night on those long-familiar country roads where I grew up. I cried my eyes out, long into the darkness, because I could not bear to face anyone. Tears still run hot down my face, Peaches, as I tell here what I did to you.
You said it yourself finally, in just this simple way, and now I understand.
“Curiosity squished the peach, George,” you said with unmasked indignation, and then you just walked away.

I've been collecting impressions of girls all my life, like some guys collect baseball cards or watch football games. I've mostly been under the impression that knowing a woman a little while is a lot better than all the uncertainty, responsibility, commitment, and all that that goes along with a marriage.
I really hate that organ music in a church wedding, the white dress, the idea that every other woman on the face of the planet is supposed to be nobody after the “I do,” and all that.
People are always going to be people, far as I can figure.
And I'm not taking any chances I'd marry somebody like my dad. I figure, heck no, I'm not interested.
But the older I get, the more isolated I feel. There's nobody to burn the turkey at my place on Thanksgiving. There's nobody coming to see me Christmas day. There's just plain nobody.
Well, I guess I asked for it.

Lucky Girl
Chapter 3

By this time it was definitely the 60's. I was 14. That idiot had blown the back of Jack Kennedy's head off. Kids like me were playing guitars, wearing flowers in our hair, tie-dying t-shirts at home.
Mom sent me off to summer camp with the Methodist kids. I took my guitar. I never had to obey anyone ever again. Summer camp would last forever. I'd never grow up. We were young. We were free. Al was my roomy from home. There was plenty of riot lat at night in the dorm. Sonny was the only other guy who broth a guitar. We sat around and played a lot of guitar, talked shop. The weather was mild, beautiful, comfortable.
Soon there was a girl. Bushy blonde hair, full figured, not really fat, cute, smiled with twinkling blue eyes. All the time there, the only name she had was Lucky. She said it was her name. Lucky. We were, too.
I was the only guy at the whole summer camp for Lucky. Always, she was with me like no one had ever been. All day, everyday. Meals, walking around, hanging out, going for whatever was going on, Lucky was always there with me. It was OK. We held hands a lot. Laughed a lot. Great kid.
One night there was a Sit In. We played guitars nonstop, three hours. Lucky's eyes smiled, close by. There must have been candles. There was very little light. The Methodists talked over whatever and whatnot. My fingertips got sore playing guitar.
Lucky was amazing. Holding her hand, looking into her eyes, always felt right to me. Last day, our worlds stood face to face one last time. We dutifully exchanged addresses, promised to write, promised to get together.
I was happy there. I wonder how I lost track of her.

Trumpet
Chapter 4

I was not quite seven years old when I decided I was interested in learning to play the trumpet. I asked for one for my birthday that year, and noticed my gift hidden in the main floor bathroom of the old house we lived in at the time, several days before my birthday.
I was delighted.
There was the grade school band to join, contrary to the idea that they normally accepted students no less than eight years old, and I was only seven. Nonetheless, I was accepted in the band that year, and began my experimentation with the trumpet. I was not as proficient reading music with the instrument, as I was reading music while singing. Throughout my life, this has been the rule, with no exceptions.
By the time I was in seventh grade, the township where we lived in Pennsylvania had no great number of students to justify building a separate junior high school, so I went to high school as a seventh grader. One of the benefits of the affiliation with the high school at such a tender age, was that I was eligible for the marching band.
I remember dropping my instrument during marching practice one day. I brought it to the attention of the band director. The old horn had a crinkling a little ways back from the bell, but all the band director did was laugh at me. He thought it was a great joke. The kid dropped his trumpet on the ground during rehearsal. Oh well, I never did that again.
I can remember the flashy royal blue and white uniform, and the brightly lit football stadium. We lined up lengthwise from goal to goal at half time. There were the blasts of the whistle, and we stepped off with music and drums, taking the field with a ruffle and flourish. My emotions were overwhelmed.
The entire experience thrilled me.
The following summer, my dad deserted us, and we moved to a small town in Maryland. The number of students there was also less than sufficient to warrant building a separate junior high school building, exactly like the same issue in the township in Pennsylvania we'd just left, so once again I was in high school, but this time I was in the eighth grade.
I was reluctant to continue with my music education when I enrolled in the eighth grade. I had been extremely self-conscious in the seventh grade chorus the year before, and I just wanted to forget about music and go to school like any ordinary kid. I enrolled in a general music class. Maybe the class was for musical morons, or something, I don't know, but I had too much of a bell-tone, boy soprano voice which was so unavoidably noticeable, the chorus teacher had me enrolled in chorus and band before I could say, “Jack Robinson,” the very first day of school. Resistance was pointless.
I recall having girlfriends in the bands in high school and in university, sitting in the bleachers in the cold with them, getting into mischief with ringing the Victory Bell behind the high school in the third quarter of the football game, before the victory was a fact, and getting yelled at by some teacher or some other old fogie, who could not hurt us with any amount of loud talking, no matter how loud or threatening they tried to sound, then laughing the whole thing off, trotting away scott free, like the children we really were at the time. Making out on the band bus with the flute player who wanted to be with the drum major, and all that. It was a lot of fun.
Mother bought me a used cornet to use in high school band, to replace my beat up old trumpet, and the chorus director was so impressed with my singing voice and my musical talent, he had me standing outside in the early morning weather, down by the road in front of the house, waiting for him to pick me up, personally, to get me to the early rehearsals of the men's chorus before the official beginning of the school day, five days a week.
I was very taken aback by the idea that a male teacher of the high school would take so much interest in me that he would volunteer to give me rides to school in the morning, but he was never improper in any way, with the one exception of giving me, and my high school buddy, cans of beer when we dropped in at his house eventually, while we were still in high school. Later in life, that same man had a lot of conscience about that.
I was the drum major of the marching band my senior year in high school, and I was always hamming it up on the field, goofing off in front of the crowd at the games, making people laugh, intimidating the JV cheerleaders in the third quarter of the game. I would ignore everything and everyone around me when I was on break during the third quarter, and walk down to where the youngest cheerleaders were, and stand there staring at them, until their captain would have them doing all their cheers, one after the other, for my benefit, standing there as the great senior drum major in my fancy white uniform. I did that trick all season long, just to get on those girls' nerves. It was better sport for me than any old football game in the world.
In university, my girlfriends would brave the cold weather in the mountains with me, where the campus was, and we'd shiver in the snow and cold, while trying to at least appear as if we cared about the football games a little bit, just because.
I've done a lot of parades, half-time shows and pre-game shows over the years, but I honestly never liked football, and I was not too much more excited about marching in parades, after the first show or two when I was in the seventh grade up in Pennsylvania.
My buddy who was going with me to the high school chorus director's house to drink beer, was the preacher's son at the Methodist Church, where my family went. He was an incurable rebel, and a rabble rouser. He enjoyed his beer so much, it eventually cost him a terminal case of cancer. He died at the age of 47 from cancer, just like that. But he and I did a lot of wild things together over the years.
We rode around on our bicycles going hither and yon, making mischief, and when we were old enough to drive, we bought bee-bee guns to carry around in our old cars and shoot at things we could find to shoot at. The cars were provided by our folks in those days, but the mischief was all our own, and we would shoot birds, the udders of cows in various pastures, and kill chickens when their owners weren't looking, etc, as we drove around in the back country roads, until we almost got in trouble with the law.
One man caught us taking a bead on the udders of some cows one day, from the windows of one of our old cars, produced a mike for a two way radio, but my good old pal was able to talk our way out of trouble at the last moment. We had little regard for wild life at that time, other than our own wild lifestyle. We went away to college with the optimism of youth, but he was more interested in making money than getting a higher education. He dropped out of school without finishing his freshman year, bought another old car, and got a bachelor apartment. That apartment was, loosely speaking, a wildlife sanctuary all its own.
I had gone 500 miles away from home on the written endorsement of that same high school chorus director, who had become not only a father figure, but also a mentor to me, and sent me off to be a music education major at his own lama mater, with his written letter of recommendation to the faculty, where he had gotten his master's degree in music education. At the very least, it provided me with a student deferment from the draft, keeping me out of the Vietnam War, till my health eventually failed bad enough to get me a permanent deferment from all military duty.
The summer after my freshman year in university, my trumpet professor arranged that any of his students who wanted to go, could meet him, just off Times Square, New York City, to study trumpet with a specialist in trumpet which he knew personally from this own studies over the years.
The specialist had a tiny studio, right off Broadway in the midst of Times Square, with a few chairs and one long table on the second floor of a dilapidated building which would never draw one's attention, unless they were purposely looking for it. I noticed there were small, oblong cardboard boxes under the table, and one day I asked the man what was in the boxes. At which point he took hold of one, brought it up on his lap, and took out the most beautiful, brand new, top-of-the-line trumpet I have ever seen.
It was a beautiful French Benson, Meha Trumpet, with a medium-large concert bore and a jazz bell. He put his own mouthpiece in it, and played with such authoritative power, I got chills up & down my spine. He volunteered to front the horn to me, with the casual arrangement that I could send him $300 through my university trumpet professor any old time I could get the money together.
One must remember here, that I was a 19 year old university student with no savings and no job. With the reckless abandon of my youth, I accepted his terms, bought a gig bag to carry my new treasure home in, and boarded a Greyhound Bus for home, to get away from that terrifying war zone of an overwhelming downtown big city environment, and went home to cast my latest debt on my unsuspecting mother when I arrived home.
The price of the instrument had been a wholesale arrangement with someone the New York trumpet teacher knew, bringing him imports off various cargo ships and airplanes, like the horn I got, and mother got a significant discount on a very excellent instrument for my future career as a trumpet player.
One of mother's friends eventually told her she should have let me go to jail. I don't think the woman was joking.
As I mentioned earlier, my university days were happening during the Vietnam War era, and I was a flower child, growing my hair, smoking pot and dropping acid, by the time I was a sophomore at the university. I was not the sort of person who could do that sort of thing and continue to function normally at the same time.
I learned quite a bit about music theory, and how to play the trumpet. But I found my health could not sustain my abuses of myself, and I found myself hospitalized and eventually had to drop out of school, ending up in a series of hospitalizations and stays in institutions for many years, before I eventually straightened myself out somewhat.
But I never did forget the wonderful things I learned about playing the trumpet, and I had that wonderful instrument for many years, as long as mother had a place to keep the horn for me, or however long I had a place to keep it for myself, either one, and I was always enjoying having my trumpet, as I always enjoyed having my guitar, but that's another story.
Of course, there had been many years of playing my horn in marching and concert bands, brass ensembles, and the like, but the one occupation I enjoyed the most was playing my trumpet for the various churches I attended over the years.
I enjoyed using my transposition skills, such that I would not have to write out the trumpet parts for the church services ahead of time. I could easily play the hymns and whatnot by my advanced understanding of how to handle the instrument, and the people in the various churches where I worked my labor of love with my instrument throughout the years, were very appreciative and kind to me. I felt like somewhat of a celebrity with my trumpet, from time to time. People would give me the nicest compliments, and were very good to me about my advanced, well educated playing.
They treated me like the professional I was trained to be, and I never cared that I was never paid for my services. I was more than happy to be able to utilize my talent and expertise to be of use with my instrument.
Eventually, I came down with emphysema from too much smoking. To make matters worse, I developed health problems with my front teeth in my lower jaw, and around the time these issues were coming to bear on me, right and left, I sold my horn to a music store for far less than it was worth, and found myself, as I had anticipated, completely unable to continue to play the trumpet at all, not even as a curiosity for another person who happened to have a trumpet in their home or whatnot.
Even so, I have many pleasant memories of having a trumpet and being able to play so well for so many years. Whenever I miss the instrument, I can remember all the wonderful times I had with it throughout so many wonderful years of my life.

Guitar
Chapter 5

I was at a friend's house from my church one evening when I was 14 years old, and found an old guitar in a corner. Asking if I could mess around with it for a few minutes, and I not only got permission to play with it while I was there, but she gave me the instrument outright by the end of the evening, without charging me a cent. It was a gift.
I had a guitar, and I was fascinated.
I had been a trumpet player and singer ever since I can remember, and this old six string guitar had possibilities written all over it. Since the piano never yielded to me, and I really did want some kind of accompaniment to my voice at my disposal, or at least an instrument with harmonious possibilities, I was determined to conquer the guitar, and set to work right away, doing all sorts of experimentation’s with it, until my fingers bled by the second day I had the thing in my possession.
It had steel strings on it when I got it, but somebody told me pretty quick that that particular instrument was made for nylon strings, and steel strings were just not good for that design of guitar and would only ruin the action, sooner or later, by warping the neck with too much tension. I changed over to nylon strings, and found my guitar far more easy to play with much more ease and comfort, for much more rehearsal and experimentation time without any of the cutting and bleeding I'd gone through in the first place.
It was the 60's at that time, and was a perfect time to be picking up the guitar without having any kind of formal lessons. Seems like everybody was playing guitar in those days, and all you had to do was carry one around, and keep your eyes and ears open. If you had any musical talent whatsoever, you could figure out the guitar by osmosis, just as easily as spending a lot of money on lessons. I had plenty of musical talent.
I was a natural on guitar.
Even though I began by learning a few chord patterns for a few songs at the beginning, I was far more interested in learning how to do melodies and harmonies with the instrument, finger picking as much as I could, the sooner the better. What's more is that I was far more interested in improvisation than learning someone else’s songs. From the get go, I wanted to write music for guitar. I wanted to be a singer songwriter or composer.
I started writing songs and singing at open mike nights, here and there, but I noticed quickly enough that my lyrics were a little too goofy, so I stopped writing songs with lyrics. I concentrated on writing guitar solos, and eventually had a collection of 45 original solos for classic guitar.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I played throughout high school and university days. I took my guitar everywhere, and was quick to get it out of its case and play for people. I spent years going places like open mike nights at coffeehouses and DuPont Circle in DC to hang out and jam, and I was always somewhere, if it was only in my own room, working out more and more things about how to play guitar.
I took my guitar to summer camp both times I went to summer camp, while I was still in high school. I did everything I could think of to be “Guitar George, he knows all the chords,” as the popular song goes. I still think those guys were writing about me, because me and my guitar were so inseparable for so long a time, it is unlikely that anyone would not know, through at least the 60's and the 70's, at the very least, that I was everywhere with that guitar. I was a guitar player, publicly.
In 1977 I bought a new guitar. It was a Yamaha G65, and the longer I owned it, the more beautiful it became in my own proficiency and tonal maturation of the instrument itself. That guitar was beautiful. The action on it was perfect, and the fret markings were exactly where I wanted them to be. I did a lot of good composing on that Yamaha, and in the long run, I became so introverted with it, contrary to the way I had intitially been with it, that I scarcely ever played in public or private for anybody anymore, but only played, memorized and composed some more, with no outlet for my songs for anyone to hear what I was doing, whatsoever.
For a while there, after I had become so introverted, I began to want to make a little money at it, so I was going to a recording studio, trying to get some of my work into digital recording to make it marketable, but the process was slow and expensive. An agent had offered me a recording contract, and he had taken me into a recording studio at one point, but I had an accident, breaking on finger of my right hand, and he lost interest in me right away. When I was going to a studio on my own later, I found I had a lot of difficulty concentrating on playing accurately. I was using checks from a credit account I had, to pay for the recording sessions, and could not keep up with the debt or the recording sessions, either financially or with my concentration.
As a result, I finally got so discouraged that I had so many solos with no one to listen to them, I got so discouraged about my musicianship I ended up giving up the instrument altogether. I ended up putting the guitar back in its case, and letting it sit idle.
Soon, I had a bad fall going up the steps out of the door well of my apartment out of doors, and sprained my left hand desperately, and have not been able to play since, even though I decided I wanted to set myself up with some kind of list of places to play, like senior citizen environments and the few coffeehouses that have survived the demise of the young people's movement to the 60's, but I could never seem to manage the project at all, and most of my work has never been listened to by anyone.
Things seem to go from bad to worse with my guitar music over the years. I had worked on pieces in the institutions I needed to be there, whether I had my own instrument or had to borrow one to work with, and I had very little paper to write on, forcing me to memorize everything, and play everything frequently to keep from forgetting my pieces.
The more time went by, the more discouraged I got, and found myself letting the instrument go altogether, loosing my memorization all at once, having to struggle to read my scores to even try to play any of my work, even for myself, and the spraining of my left hand in that bad fall restricted the possibilities of what I could do with my guitar, and I found myself having to use nonstandard inversions of chords, and the like, to make my music work.

If all that wasn't tragedy enough for my guitar work, there was a bigger tragedy on the way.
I had a lot of confusion about taking my medication not long ago, and soon ended up overdosing on my pills over and over again, several days running, with a series of institutional incarcerations, loosing my treasured Yamaha guitar and all my scores, in the process of loosing almost every possession I had to my name, of every description, except for my financial resources.
Now even my own money is not directly available to me to a large extent, and I wonder how I'll ever get another guitar.
Since then, I've been able to find some of my scores, because I had disseminated them among some friends and family, and I'm at least somewhat equipped to recover a few of my earlier compositions from over the years. But some of my most recent work is lost to a junk yard, I suppose, because I did not have the presence of mind, being so sick from the overdosing, I could hardly arrange to store my Yamaha or scores, or any other of my treasures, for safekeeping, leaving almost of my sundry possessions to be thrown away indiscriminately.
The shock of the loss has been overwhelming to me, even though I've been able to appeal to some family and friends to send me scores I sent to them sometime ago. This has been more successful than I expected, but I'll need another guitar to work with, just as I needed to purchase another computer program for writing the scores down again, having lost my computer along with my guitar and so many other things.
Worse yet, the last of my elders in my family have passed away, and I have no one to look to for moral support.
Though I'm in an assisted living environment near my brother and his family, my feeling is that I am way far out on a limb, with nothing to catch me from falling at all. I wonder how I'll ever be a musician again?

The “D” Rodgers
Chapter 6

Mary Lynn was one of the “D” Rodgers, possibly the only one of the whole clan worth remarking about at all, at least from my personal perspective. She was a devout Southern Baptist girl, one who practiced her piano about as religiously as she attended her church services. She practiced her piano for many hours of each day, for an entire lifetime at her tender age, honestly frustrated that she was not 36-24-36 at the ripe old age of 19, that she was too short, her midriff was not flat enough to suit her, and she was totally unnoticed by the young men, according to herself.
She would not permit herself to be wild like her heart told her she should be, in the midst of all her propensity toward propriety. Her entire youth was slipping through her well rehearsed fingers, as if she were destined to be an old maid, whether she wanted to be or not.
She played Chopin in Performance Seminar one day at the university where we were studying music education, and it was heavenly, as if she were an angel playing her celestial piano or harp, and I was aware that I knew her from classes, as she suddenly lost her place in the middle of the piece, tried to begin anew in the midst and couldn't, got up and fled the stage, flushing in the face, but all of a sudden I loved her. I was the young man who noticed her. I wasn't even looking at her until then, but I saw her all of a sudden.
I caught up with her in the lower hallway of the music building after seminar, and cheerfully said something about how impossibly complicated that piece was, and how she should not let it bother her at all. Anyone could get lost in a maze like that particular Chopin piece, and she really did play beautifully, and off I went, into my own orbit, leaving her behind as abruptly as I had approached her, to stew in her own juices and watch the Yankee playboy from out of state, who apparently had ambitions for some sort of musicianship, and Lord only knew what else, darting away suddenly, after saying such a nice thing to her, as she later referred to it.
I had never spoken to her before.
I was a wiz at some of the musicianship classes, making the most accurate replies to the professor's questions, a very talented and precocious lad I was, and too eager to sit near either she or Liz in classes, until Liz became a moot point. Mary Lynn became all the point of everything all of a sudden.
Soon, I was inviting her for walks around the university town after class, oblivious to the notion that everybody was watching and listening to my advances, as we all issued from the classroom door. I persisted, and she would go walking, while I labored at keeping myself between her and the street, and keep her mind occupied with all the things on my heart for this exceptionally talented and wonderful young lady. She walked quickly, as though wanting to get away from me, but we were both 19, and I was quite capable of keeping up with Mary Lynn on foot, talking all the while.
Furthermore, I would patrol the practice rooms in the music building, looking for her to be busy at one of the pianos, and would go into her, and turn pages for her, being gifted at knowing how to follow even the most complicated musical scores well enough, while we found ourselves in the throes of passions we would never speak of, not even much later, when we would be acting them out however much, quite beyond ourselves with our mutual youth taking advantage of the both of us, although I blamed myself singly for all the boldness in my behavior, as if there was never a young man with a healthy libido who ever existed before me.
So I walked her and talked to her, running her around all the streets and roads of that small university town, but she would not “go out” with me for a full six months into the fall of that year. I did everything I could think of to charm her. My first time at the intercom of her dorm, trying to get her to come down to see me, since it was forbidden for a man to go up in the woman’s dorm, I asked for her by name over the speaker, and was greeted with the question, “which one?” Oh, I was momentarily daunted at first, but recovered myself quickly enough, and replied that I was looking for the one girl who played piano like an angel, and she eventually came to the lobby, glowing with the delight of my flattery.
I invited myself to pass through her parent's house at the holidays, to be taken to the airport from there, to fly the 500 miles north to get home to where I lived, and called her on the local pay phone less than 48 hours later, having hitchhiked the distance back down on the interstate roads with a friend, hoping to see her for one more brief, desperate moment, just a few days before that Christmas.
Both her parents, who did seem like very nice people, also seemed like they were old enough to be her grandparents, but I took that observation in stride, and visited their home very seldom while I knew the girl.
I had brought a buddy with me, for safety while hitchhiking, and we got out of the big rig at a gas station, somewhere in the same city where she lived, and I called up and asked her to come get me, getting all the information misidentified over the first call, what kind of gas station it was, what route number of what road – I guessed it all wrong on the telephone, and her father and brother both searched the city endlessly looking for my buddy and me. They arrived together, in separate cars all at once, and we spent the night in their hideaway couch-bed, next the guy I'd hitchhiked down with, realizing I was behaving quite thoroughly like some fool in love.
After breakfast the next morning, which I felt was an enormously rude imposition on their hospitality, we were returned to the same truck route where we'd arrived, by her father, who only kept his thoughts to himself about this wild boy and his wild shenanigans over his only daughter, to hitchhike back up north with that same buddy, who had stolen at least one girlfriend from me in the past. I have no idea why I wanted that guy to meet Mary Lynn, of all people. It was only that I wasn't thinking clearly.
My poor dear mother suffered God only knows how much anxiety over the brief note I'd left her in the middle of the night on the kitchen counter at home before leaving.
Finally back on campus, the poor girl finally agreed to go for a pizza and a show, and we went to a cozy little pizza cellar off campus, with rustic furniture and sumptuous pizza, where I learned the meaning of the word “munchies,” and off we went to the 75 cent movies up on the main drag of the little university town in the picturesque mountains, of the late fall season, being young and happy forever and ever, amen.
But that wasn't the whole story of the evening.
There was a pot seller who'd been after me to smoke a joint with him ever since the beginning of the semester, and when Mary Lynn had agreed to a “date,” and had disappeared in the direction of her dorm to prepare herself, old Charley showed up out on campus, and helped me celebrate this novel turn of events, that the girl of my dreams was about to go out with me – with me, mind you – to get a pizza and a show within the hour! To celebrate, or to suit Charley, I'm not certain which, I concented to smoke his joint with him.
Now, I'd never smoked pot before, and I was in a terrible fix after we smoked two joints off one quarter of the crowded quad on that busy Friday afternoon, smoking away while I worried about getting arrested, knowingly breaking the law right out there in public where anyone could have been watching. But there turned out to be no issue with the Police that day. I noticed, to my stoned consternation, that time slowed down to a standstill under the influence of that stuff.
I had never realized that reefer could effect a person's perspective on the passage of time. Not only that, but my thoughts were thoroughly befuddled otherwise, and when I showed up at the girl's dorm and called her to come downstairs over the intercom, I was too stoned to feel competent to handle anything, much less this first, very personally significant date, while I was just then initiating my own drug problem, ultimately sewing the first seeds of the total ruin of the one relationship I was so anxious to be beginning in my life with this really nice young lady, as well as undermining my very important plans for my future in general, by the one act of giving in to Charley, the pusher, as I had so easily justified myself in doing.
The way the whole ordeal ended up for that one evening was good enough for the moment, but the overall damage to my future turned out to be devastating.
The food and movie were enough to use up all my inebriation by the time we were walking back to Mary Lynn's dorm, and back at her dorm lobby, I told her I thought she was really neat, and she nearly knocked me down rushing into my arms to kiss me goodnight, with some of the unutterable passion between us, knocking my coat from my shoulder to the floor in the process.
I was ecstatic about the evening's events, as I was unaware of the ground I must have covered walking home to my own dorm, caught up in the revery of my glory, that I knew nothing of walking the whole way across campus to my own dorm, thinking things over in an enraptured and distracted state, head over heels for the little piano player who had obviously fallen for the likes of me!
The very idea that I'd been badgered into taking drugs, and the very idea of the fact that that would eventually be the downfall of a significant relationship and the downfall of a significant career was a reality that I avoided considering while the strength of my youth suspended the illusion that both possibilities continued to be avoidable, for about another two years after that.
Well, none of the drug pushing on the part of so many sinister people, learning my vulnerability from the one to the next, none of it was fair to either me or Mary Lynn, and we both paid a dear price over the long run. Eventually I got the opportunity to turn old Charley in to the authorities, and I did do just exactly and precisely that. Old Charley spent a year in jail for trafficking drugs on that university campus, and I ended up with a major nervous breakdown and debilitating disability for a lifetime.
Charley was put out with me, returning to campus a year later, but I think he got the better end of the deal. He got his come-up-in's all at once. I'm still dealing with mine a lifetime later.
My bad turn of health forced me into a long series of hospitalizations and I found myself monumentally inept and demoralized for my entire youth thereafter. I broke off with Mary Lynn after about two years. I'd been in a hospital, and had gone back to campus to try the course work again. At least, that was the rationale I used on my mother, to get the funding to return to the campus to try to win the girl back after I'd gotten so sick so badly.
I ended up breaking off with Mary Lynn, after winning her affection again, which had been my object in going back to campus in the first place. I really wanted to marry her desperately, and keep her in my life forever, and I never did earn any music degree or teaching certificate, or find any way to adequately support myself, much less a wife and family.
She married a friend of her brother's from the Navy, and gave him two daughters. I talked to one of her daughters on the long distance phone one time, and she sounded like she'd heard of me. But her husband objected to my calling, and I desisted, being a man of honor, as I am.
Now I'm an old bachelor, always lonely for the one girl who has become probably the one most unreal of all my memories I have ever had, in the very confused, distressed old thinker of mine.

Gazebo
Chapter 7

I OD'd on some kind of hallucination the year I was 20, maybe it was mescaline, I don't know. It was just before my 21st birthday. OD is not what Timothy Leary or Carlos Castaneda would call It, but the term is good enough for me. I never could figure out quite how to tell this story, but I need to keep trying. It's unusual enough as a story to warrant the ongoing attempt.
It was January, I guess, and as cold as Greenland. I'd been walking around the university campus, where I was supposed to be studying music education, tripping my brains out on something or other that a buddy of mine had turned me on to. He called it chocolate mescaline. I'd been tripping for some unknown amount of time, trying to find the two-legged.
I eventually showed up at the campus chaplain's office claiming to be the Second Coming of Christ. I eventually showed up at the Office of the Dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts confessing to extensive drug abuse, ever since I'd been on campus. That sure was going to facilitate me qualifying for a teaching certificate. By the time the campus psychologists got a hold of me, I was convinced I was an old Native American by the name of Shadow that Comes Inside, and that I was 2,500 Years of the Sun, whatever that means.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
My buddy and I dropped this “chocolate” pill that he cut in half so we could both have some, whatever it was, and we were up in the mountains tripping. I saw the most unusual creature on the mountain. It scared me half to death. Then it disappeared into thin air. It must have been that Mescalito guy Carlos Castaneda writes about. I'd said something to my buddy when I saw it, but he said he hadn't seen the thing. I've never seen a creature like it, before or since. After hitchhiking back to campus, my buddy went his way and I went mine, and then the trip really got underway.
I transcended food and sleep.
All the language of the four legged and the wood was uniquely understandable to me for the first time in my lifetime, as was the language of the wind talking to the tall grasses. The language of the waters talking to the stones in the streams made perfect sense to me. Waters always leaving, but never gone. Wind always leaving, but never gone.
It was all like poetry, some kind of wonderful verse. I understood all of it for the very first time.
But the two-legged were not available to be seen for the longest time, wherever they went. There were only the natural things to be seen and talked with. Other than that, there was only snow and the mountains to walk in. The spirits of all the natural things showed themselves to me, and I could see the inner strength of all of them, while they spoke their poetry in my hearing.
I was not cold for the longest time. I wandered to and fro, not knowing what had happened to me, and after a long time, the two-legged found me. I did not find them. They were simply there along with the natural things.
That was confusing.
The trees had said, “He thinks we're so wonderful, but our feet are buried deep in the ground, and we can't go anywhere. We're at everybody's mercy, standing here in one spot all our lives, drinking the rain water and eating the nutrients from the ground. But he can do so much more.”
The Bambi said, “Yes, and he thinks we're wonderful too, but he has hands to do things with, and all we have is hooves. He thinks we're wonderful because we can eat the tall grasses, but he can do so much more. We have to dash across the man-made stone, which goes on forever across the land. We run for our lives to avoid getting hit by the suicide machines the two-legged go in, to get to the places they rush to, wherever those places are. We risk our lives just to get ourselves a drink of water, where the waters talk to the stones. Some two-legged even try to kill us in the woods, with their long arm that barks so loud, like a dog barks and their long arm reaches out and rips out our guts. But this two-legged doesn't seem to be like that. I don't understand this two-legged anymore than you do,” Bambi said to the trees.
I would wander off again, looking for something else, but there was nothing else to be seen for the longest time. There were only the natural things, and I worshiped them. The good Lord's creation. There was no day or night there. There was only time.
Then there was a time the two-legged had to be dealt with. I could no longer get away from them. I had stopped looking for them because I had no use for them.
But they found me.
The two-legged took me to the State Laughing Academy pretty quick. It was all a long time ago now, but I question, even though I've stopped doing all that sort of thing long since: Did I ever come down off that acid trip? Am I still tripping? I think so.
The two-legged locked me up very quietly, very nice and tidy and neat, instead of causing a big scene. Very neat. Not messy. If it were Hollywood, they would have had some kind of showdown. They'd have shot me dead in the street. But it wasn't out West. It was down South. I was a young Yankee with hair half way down my back, the hippie flower child that I was. I wore a leather pouch from my belt, with a butterfly patch sewn to it. Butterflies are free, man.
There were tombstones in my eyes. The 60's had just ended. So had my sanity. I was diagnosed with acute toxic psychosis, resulting in chronic schizophrenia, which happened to be the two most prominent diagnoses from Haight-Asbury and Woodstock, besides advanced malnutrition.
The two psychologists brought a couple of cops with them. They were very friendly, as though they were talking to a lost child, rather than a Yankee hippie. The five of us quietly left campus in the cop's suicide machine. The cop that was driving disobeyed all the traffic laws, and when I said something about it, he simply said he was doing his own thing.
“So am I supposed to be a dope smelling dog for you guys now, or what?” I heard myself say.
The cop in the shotgun seat turned around and stared at me. He got a real good look at me. I thought I'd just been busted, but I never did get a trial. They just put me in state clothing when we got to the hospital, after I'd finished flirting with the pretty little girl at the typewriter in admissions. They took me over to X Ward in the cop car. There were some of the goofiest looking people in that place that I'd ever laid eyes on.
The first thing I did after I got a load of all those goofballs was to practically knock down some poor lady who was coming through the door she'd just unlocked to come in. I almost knocked her down getting past her, and I was out of there almost as quickly as they'd put me in.
I had had just enough time, before I decided to split, to flirt with the only half decent looking girl on the ward. I suggested we go into the little room on the ward with the mattress in it.
“We could go in there and make out,” I suggested.
“No,” she said, “When you go in that room, they lock the door. It's called 'seclusion'.” Her name was Rosemary. She had casts on her forearms and hands, almost up to her elbows.
“I tried to kill myself,” she'd said. That did it. I was leaving.
When I got out the door, I ran across the road, running for my life, almost getting hit by the suicide machines the two-legged ride around in. I guess you'd say I had a little more fun playing like I was a four-legged, until they caught up to me again.
I ran into the woods, got all cut up on the Jagger bushes, made all the dogs bark, walked on water. Busy day. I walked on water to lose the dogs that were tracking me. I was real important in the eyes of the world. If my hands were all cut up from the Jaggers, but my feet weren't, they'd kill me when they caught me. Made perfect sense to me. So I took my boots off, ran around barefoot, being certain to cut up my feet, so I'd be be safe when they caught me. If I was well enough wounded, I'd be safe.
Then I forgot the two-legged were looking for me. My memory was like that in those days, along with everything else about my ability to think and remember things.
Later, I jumped into some old redneck's pickup truck at a stop sign. He was really glad to see me, dressed so dapper in my state clothes. Soon he stopped right in the middle of the road, explaining that he was just going to talk to a friend of his for a minute. I was so terrified I didn't even turn around to see who he was talking to.
He got back in the driver's seat about the same time some orderly from X Ward piled in the front seat on the shotgun side. I was trapped again. So I did the most logical thing, of course. I took off my wristwatch and shattered the crystal against the man's dashboard.
“This is happening to me because of all my time,” I wailed over and over, as the orderly tried to restrain me.
“Stop! Stop!” the orderly was wrestling with me.
“Why should I?” I cried as the pitch of my voice grew higher and higher. I fought frantically to destroy my watch.
“It's my watch!” I said, significantly.
“You'll damage the man's truck,” the orderly reasoned.
But it was a short drive, and X Ward had already been accomplished. Two other orderlies appeared, and I was spirited into the seclusion room, where I was stripped up to my waste of the wet, torn state pants, screaming about being raped. Soon, they gave me a needle in my butt, in spite of my fighting, and I was locked in by myself. I was scared out of my wits. I simply did not understand what was happening to me. I would fight them every time they opened the door, too. They came with a whole squad of goons to deal with me, for a long time.
Real nice stuff, LSD, mescaline, whatever it was. It really brings out the adult in anyone who takes it. Try it sometime. I recommend it.
So, I spent time in seclusion. Nobody seemed to care, except one person. There was a real nice lady who came and opened the door one night or one day, or whatever it was. Honestly, I didn't know the difference between night and day anyway.
“There's someone here to see you,” she said. She was real sweet.
She showed me into what I later learned they call 'the day room,' and there was a woman sitting in there that looked sort of familiar. I didn't know who she was, and she was a lot older than me, but when she talked about taking me home, I was interested, though I wasn't sure I wanted to go home with her, not knowing who she was. She was nice enough though. She was OK, really.
Anyway, I was starting to get the hang of the language of the two-legged a little bit by then. The woman left without telling me who she was, and the other nice lady told me I needed to go back into the small room again. By that time, I was done fighting. I just went.
So, the days and nights went by in that little room. I was locked in. There was no bathroom to go to, but, believe me, it was not an issue. Society calls seclusion, “a rubber room,” or a “padded cell,” but the only padding I had was a single bed mattress on the floor. I've never seen the other kind, having been in a lot of them over the years. I'll take the other guys' word for it. Why do I need to know first hand, anyway? I've been through enough already. It's also call a “side room,” or “ the quiet room,” but who cares?
I think it was the first or second night, I saw colored lights coming through the cracks around the solid door of the seclusion room, which only had the one-way peephole looking in at me. I asked the nice lady, the nurse, later. She said they didn't have anything like that. I know I saw the lights, though. I remember it plain as day. I guess that's what they call hallucinations. I don't know. I've done a lot of acid over the years, but I don't really know what hallucinations are, exactly, or how to tell if I'm having one. If I experience something, how am I supposed to know whether it's real or not? It's just another part of my perceptions. Right? Go figure.
They started giving me pills after a while, instead of poking me with needles in the butt. I would save two paper cups after they locked the door, for my little alter to God. After a while, I would forget and ball up the cups after I took my meds, so they'd take them and throw them away. Believe you me, taking that medicine made my head feel like I was driving a truck.

One day the seclusion room door opened again. By this time, I was done jumping up when I heard the bolt throw. I just sat there, in the far corner of the room, trembling. The same sweet nurse was at the door. This time I knew it was daytime.
“Are you ready to come out with the other people now?”
She gave me a choice.
I was trembling violently and could hardly stand. I was still only 20 years old. She headed toward the day room, as I struggled to keep up. I could hardly walk, too.
“Would you like something to eat? You must be starved.”
“Well, OK,” I said.
I was shaking violently and could not pick up the tablespoon. She fed me like a small child. She had to. There was no other way I could get fed. The closest thing I could do, in the way of feeding myself, in the whole process of getting fed that morning, was to pick up a dinner roll with both hands – I do mean both hands. I couldn't keep hold of it otherwise, I was trembling so badly. I tried to pick up the milk cup, but it spilled all over the place. But, between me and the nurse, I got fed breakfast. I really was hungry, too, just like she'd said.
I hung around the day room some.
The characters on the TV were all devils. Everything about the TV was evil. I couldn't stand to be in the same room with it. As I've said, it was an awful long time ago, but I still feel the same way about the TV.
I spent some time mopping floors, talking about walking on water in the woods. Some old orderly, who looked a little bit like my grandfather, said he'd like to see that. Could I show him just then? Sarcastic bastard.
Rosemary got discharged with the casts still on her hands. She had cut the nerves as well as the tendons in both wrists. She was in real trouble with the future of the long term use of her hands, but the doctor let her go home anyway.
Butch, the family man, never said much to me. He looked more “normal” than most of the folks there, like he'd really be a nice guy if he'd just relax and open up a little. The doctor let him go one day, but then, he was back a few days later. It's hard to say what goes on with people. His wife and two kids were real nice looking people. His little boy and little girl were real cute. Well, who knows what goes on with people? Butch seemed to be afraid to talk, as if the idea of someone knowing anything about him would be some terrible thing for him to endure, or some such thing as that.
There were the smoker-men who sat by the locked outside door in the dorm. I hung out with them, because it was better than sitting with that evil TV in the day room. It got me started smoking cigarettes, sitting with the smoker-men, which mother never approved of, but I smoked for 40 years, until after mother was gone, before I quit. I think those guys were alcoholics. I never knew I was an alcoholic, or quite what to do about it, until I finally found a way to quit drinking better than a decade later. They were all older than me, all the smoker-men. Actually, I was one of the youngest guys in the entire hospital, I think, at the age of 20. There was one other guy I saw from the hospital bus once. He had long hair like me. He spoke to me, but all he'd say was that he was crazy. I couldn't get into that. I knew I must be crazy, but I didn't feel like bouncing around about it.
There was the guy who took me out for rides in the country every afternoon. We'd get out in the van with some old men, and go around all the dirt roads outside of town, near the hospital. He was a nice guy, but all those old men were always shocked at the idea that I was a drug addict. I was really surprised at that. I thought everybody was a drug addict. Everybody I knew took drugs, except the other music majors at school. That was a big part of the problem, too. After a while, I'd just talk about drinking, to keep the old guys quiet while I sat up front and talked to Norman, the driver.
Then there was Clay.
I had ground parole before Clay, and had gone out off the ward with some totally disgusting, must have been retarded old character, or something, who had come to the outside door looking for someone to go out on the grounds with. I went with the guy once, just to be free to go outside and look around. Calling home from a phone booth in the administration building, I learned that my mysterious visitor had been my mother, so I at least figured that much out. I could hardly stop crying the whole way through the phone call.
Then Clay got ground parole. I had wanted to go out on the grounds with Butch from the get-go, because he was such a nice quiet guy, from what I could tell, but Butch was always too busy to bother with me. Clay was nothing like too busy to deal with me. In fact, he talked to me about a lot of his really serious stuff, like his philosophy and whatnot. He even dared question the existence of God. Amazing. So, we walked around a while when we went outside in the blustering cold, discussing everything about life, until we came to the gazebo.
“Come into the gazebo,” Clay said when we got there. “I want to do something very important here.” He was as intense as I'd been through this whole hospitalization, as if he were tripping as heavy as I was. He probably was tripping, too.
Clay said we should take a solemn oath together, that two together, making an oath, was more powerful than one person doing it alone. One of us should walk clockwise around the inside of the gazebo, the other counter-clockwise, and shake hands when we'd gone the full circle of the place. So we did, until the deep, philosophical ceremony was played out. We spoke the words Clay had in mind, whatever they were, did the circles and shook hands with a heart-and-soul hand shake, the way folks were doing then. A solemn oath to... what? I can't remember.
I remember all those things about that hospitalization, about the most violent onset of schizophrenia my longest-term therapist has ever heard of, in a lifetime of working as a psychotherapist. I remember all the details I've set down here and more that I'd rather forget than tell ever again, but I cannot remember the substance of that oath.
But I do think it was important what we said and did. I think God heard the two of us, Clay and me, and I think God eventually honored both of us in the process, too. I can't quote that oath here, or even come close to a quote, but I think it was a prayer between two very sick young men, to some kind of God.
I think God honored that prayer for Clay and me both, too.
I was 20 years old then, and God has delivered me from all my addictions since then, and gave me a life and environment I can live with by now, too. It took Him a long time to accomplish it, but the good Lord got the job done. All I really did was start cooperating after a while. That's all I did.
Also, in my prayers for Clay, since I never saw him again after I was discharged, I believe God has come to me and reassured me that Clay's OK too, just like I am.
Maybe, if you've had enough patience to read this much of this story, you can understand that I learned that I wanted, and desperately needed, in the way of God's help to get along in life, and that God has honored my prayers for help so thoroughly, I think I'll be alright from now on.
The good Lord has answered my prayers.

###

Attorney at Law
Chapter 8

A stark figure reposed in silence in the sitting room. I don't remember what she was doing. Reading, having a smoke, looking out the window?
It was some forty years ago, before the laws had caught up with us smokers. Nonsmokers were still minding their own business. They had not yet demanded their place above the rights of smokers. They were still sucking it up.
We were enjoying our habit, publicly just as privately. Those were the days...
Most of the residents were still at the dining room eating breakfast.
I think she was ignoring life. She often said the first cigarette in the morning was very important.
Ignoring life was the one thing she most often said she was doing, if someone were to ask how she was. She was not trying to be funny, though she wanted others to think she was.
Maureen was miserable.
This young woman could have been on vacation from her profession, her business woman's two piece suits left behind in her suite in the city. She had her casual, modest clothing to wear daily. She seldom spoke, unless one were to ask her a question worth her breath. Don't anyone worry. She was just another quiet girl on vacation.
Everything was fine, where she was concerned. Let her be, please. She was only there to rest and relax. Her obvious, disquieted self-possession gave her away. The idea that she was in terrible trouble with her thinking was a perception just below the surface. But that perception was like a distant fire siren.
My heart of hearts had been awakened with feelings of alarm, sensing that disquieted soul. Maureen was in trouble, and neither she nor I knew how to get that kind of help, for ourselves or each other.
Maureen was neither sexy nor unattractive.
Her education, whatever it was, accentuated her intelligence. She understood things readily; spoke directly to the point, whenever there was a discussion involving her; she knew what was going on.
She was no glamor girl, but she could suspend a man's interest in her without trying to. That's where I caught myself in regards to Maureen. She was always cordial, even friendly. But she always defined her own space. I remember that about her, but I didn't understand it at the time.
In those days, I was so far “out there,” I really did not understand much.
Maureen never flirted with me. She never had to. She drew my attention according to my thirsting instinct. I think she did not want to have anything to do with men one way or another. It was not that men were her problem. They were irrelevant. Her distraction was something else.
We were in a hospital.
I was as miserable as she was, in that one, most expensive waiting room for meetings of the most disquieted hearts in the country. The only meetings happening in that place were intended to be helpful to folks like Maureen and me. But they were not helpful in the slightest.
How she reacted to those often scheduled sit down sessions, I've already said. She paid attention and replied intelligently at every turn.
On the other hand, my only reaction to those group meetings was that they were torturous to me. I couldn't stand them.
We were always waiting.
It seemed we were always talking as a group. We were all strangers to each other. I could never grasp how I was supposed to get help through someone ease's problem, or through revealing my own.
I was always lying down, waiting to die. My life was over. I told the doctor and the nursing staff my life was over. I was not 24 years old yet.
My plans had been thwarted.
The Bachelor's Degree, Teaching Certificate, and marriage I had set up for myself, had all fallen through.
Why were all those Professional jerks blowing sunshine into my ears all the time? They had no way of relating to my failure. They had all these totally successful shingles on their walls. So why didn't they ever get it? I blew it. My life was over. I couldn't even drive light delivery and keep the job going. What the heck was I supposed to do?
Someone must have told me I had to find a way to go on. Someone must have said I had to keep on living my life somehow.
But the idea wouldn't connect.
That's where Maureen and I met face to face, if we'd only realized it. She found law school to be too much. I found music school to be too much. She had a big idea about sleeping pills. I had a big idea about razor blades.
The two of us were never close. We were in and out of institutions, psych daycare centers, the whole bit. Our paths would cross from time to time. We had some mutual friends, so there was a little communication to be had about each others well being. There were always more ER visits and hospital stays. But there was no breakthrough for either one of us.
We both stayed sick, hopeless, lost.
I only cut myself once, but I was fighting off starvation, because I simply did not have enough money to get high and have enough to eat at the same time, whenever I was on the outside. I had a real problem with loneliness, or was it a major problem with social skills? My luck getting a girlfriend was about zilch. My way of dealing with that whole issue was to threaten suicide.
Well, it would get me locked up, anyway. It got me three hots and a cot, with people around. It wasn't an entirely useless trick.
I never knew what made Maureen tick, like I did about myself. She was beautiful and brilliant, she had such wonderful insights about life, but I had no clue why she kept OD'ing on sleeping pills.
One day, while we were in the same daycare center, it was raining in the afternoon. I offered her a ride home. We drove down to the fancy, expensive place where she lived. I parked my car.
“Can I talk to you a minute, Maureen?”
She was silent, but she did not get out of the car.
“You know, ah, you and I never talk much, but I just want you to know something.”
Her silence continued.
“I can't say I really know anything about you, Maureen, but I'll offer this, for what it's worth. Whenever I get too lonely, I want to hurt myself, because I think nobody cares. I care about you, and I wish you wouldn't take so many sleeping pills. It frightens me. Please be good to yourself, Maureen. You really are someone special.”
I don't remember that she said anything then. She just opened the car door and stepped out into the rain, went in the building.
Somehow, I lost track of Maureen for a couple of years. I went to a hospital for a long time, and then went home to mother's for a while. I stopped by the daycare center after a long time, and the other George asked me for a ride home.
We were out in my car, going down the same road as Maureen and I had gone down back when. He lived in the same direction into the city.
“Did you hear about Maureen?.”
“No, I didn't.”
I held my breath.
“She's gone, George.”
I had difficulty breathing.
My eyes got hot and wet.
“She died?” I choked.
He was silent.
I dropped him off at the halfway house, flooring the gas peddle at every turn, abusing my old car. Steam rose from under the hood. I found a service station and left the car there to be fixed, took the Greyhound home.
It was a long bus ride out to the country where I lived with my mother.

Sheppard's Blonde
Chapter 9

The Christmas rush at the only flower shop in town was too much for the delivery guy.
Twenty hours a day?
When's a guy supposed to sleep? Driving all over Belair is dangerous enough on a 9 to 5. What about all that overtime? It's all behind the wheel time, ya know. He wasn't quibbling about the money. He was not feeling safe.
The shop had two designers, one driver and the boss. Business boomed.
Normally, holidays were gravy for Stan. You'd get pretty girls at the door, give them flowers or fruit, and you'd get delighted, refreshing smiles in return.
“Thank you,” they'd say.
Besides that, you'd get paid for the privilege. It always seemed to him that he was getting a better deal than the guys ordering the deliveries. They paid for everything and Stan would get all the initial, pleasant responses. How cool was that?
Belair was the county seat. Sooner or later there'd have to be another florist set up shop. Belair was a promising, growing community; the whole county was gaining population and growing in commerce.
As it was, Dale had been advertising for a relief driver since early November. Now it was mid December. Stan was against the wall. He had hallucinations popping out of headlights, streetlights, tree trunks – you name it. The guy wasn't lazy, he was sick.
Stan was a hippie flower child trying to earn a modest living. He was trying to be a composer of music, singer songwriter, trumpeter, guitarist and delivery driver all at the same time. He had surpassed his limit.
“Ah hate to do this to ya, Dale but ah just can't keep this up. I gotta quit.” Stan was so flipped out he could scarcely form the sentence. He needed medical help, bad.
“You sure you don't want a leave of absence, Stan? You've been doing just fine,” Dale insisted. “It's up to you. Think about it.”
Stan stood there looking at Dale, fighting a feeling of panic. It was late in the evening. Stan's breakdown had him way beyond confusion.
He didn't have any idea what to do. He couldn't think.
Stan quit the job. He couldn't formulate another course of action in his mind.
Dale, a young man like Stan, had been brought up in the flower industry from childhood. He knew the nuts and bolts of how to make the business go.
Stan was a music school dropout and a pot head.
Dale liked Stan. Stan worked up his melodies and lyrics for love songs, singing, with the windows of the delivery van wide open, singing his heart out as he memorized his songs.
Flowers by Dale. Love songs by Stan. It was working. That's what Dale liked about it.
But Stan's health was not good. He'd had a nervous breakdown in music school, and smoking pot was not helping. The guy would load up his reefer bowl in the delivery van sometimes. But now his mind was beyond the limit again. He was already breaking down again.
Stan quit.
Thump.
It was over.

Next stop was a private psychiatric hospital for Stan. Mom's Major Medical got the best hospital money could buy. Semi-private rooms, plenty of therapy, good food, burnouts galore. It was the beginning of the 70's. All the young people, seemed like, were taking drugs and drinking. Drugs were everywhere. Plenty of drug addicts were right there in the hospital. Some of them were offspring of celebrities, too. You never knew who's son or daughter you were partying with.
That place was a haven for rich hippies.
But all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Stan back together again. He had some serious desperation and extremely deep. depression. The guy was beating himself up about everything. He could not see anything good about himself.
He broke up with his girl when music school went sour. He quit his job when the hours went sour. Lost his chance for the degree, the girl, and an ordinary job – he was overly impressed with his own incapacity.
He couldn't do squat.
Stan told those people at that fancy crazy house about what had happened. They didn't get it. They didn't seem to be listening. What did he have to say to get his point across?
His life was over. There wasn't anything left to do but die. Nobody was listening to him. He screamed a lot. They'd put him in isolation sometimes.
Then he just stopped talking.
He was 23.

The bedrooms were always unlocked. Couches were everywhere.
Stan laid down to die.
Anyone who wanted to talk to Stan got a vulgar greeting. “@#$%&*. Leave me alone.” He was usually screaming, if he said anything at all.
He buried himself in self-pity and despair. No one could help him. He refused to talk or listen. He simply laid down wherever he could find a place to stretch out, and he tried to sleep 24/7. He was certain nobody could understand. His depression was complete.
Maybe he'd doze off, forget he was alive for a while... Maybe someone would come along with some drugs... Maybe there'd be a girl... Maybe he'd die if he just kept his eyes shut long enough.
There wasn't any point to anything anymore...

Six months went by like that. Somebody on staff finally got Stan a position walking the interdepartmental mail around the hospital. The job felt good to him. It was delivery work. Stan called Dale about his old job, but Dale said that he had another man. He might have been able to help if Stan had taken the leave of absence, but he hadn't. That's the way it was.
Stan was damaged goods. The agony of defeat. He had no contact with any of his talents, abilities, former successes, nothing.
He'd been diagnosed with a chemical imbalance in his brain. The doctor might just as well as said leprosy. The young man took the diagnosis like a branding iron and burned his whole life with it down to his bones.
No one could have guessed why he was so rough on himself. There was no need for it.
But he was.
He wasted ten years of his life with that attitude, and it only got worse for a long time to come.

Taking the mail around helped Stan. He got some confidence back, and he could see that people were nice to him.
Time went by in that place, and after a while, it was no longer a prison to Stan. It was a refuge. The anorexic girl touched his heart. The drug addict runaway girl made sense to him. He understood those people. The most revolting humor about suicide was funny to him. He enjoyed the people and the food.
If Stan was crazy, he no longer cared. He was comfortable in his refuge. Unlike the university, the campus of the refuge had a curriculum he could cope with. He was at home with the place.
Stan was never articulate in those days. He would blurt out sick jokes or vulgar sayings, but the doctors were at a loss to help him deal with whatever issues were behind his depression. He was disaster waiting to happen.

Somewhere along the way, there was a charming girl on a nearby ward. She took an interest in Stan, and he sensed it. Susan was going away to a state hospital the next day. The two of them were talking in the hall.
“I'm going to a new place tomorrow.”
“You want to go for a walk before supper?”
“Sure. Let me check with staff and sign out.”
“OK.”
The two young people found the springtime all around them; the green fields, the budding plants. They walked and talked. Stanley and Susan didn't know each other very well. They were just two people walking around talking. They settled down in an open field to rest themselves and relax. There was a gentle breeze, mild sunshine, the beauty of nature all around them. The company was agreeable. The time scurried away.
Susan left for the state hospital the next morning.

Major Medical would not shelter Stan indefinitely. The night before he was discharged, a pretty young staff girl took Stan outside for a walk. She told him his problem was still inside him, and there was no way for anyone else to know what it was until he told someone. She said he had to start talking, or he would die. He did not know what to do. He was afraid to talk to people. He was afraid his thoughts would make people want to hurt him.
He was scheduled to go to a home the next day. He had not liked what he saw at the home. There was no one there to relate to. The food was not good, and he did not know anything about that side of town. It was so far away, and they wanted him to go to the day center, three buses away. He was afraid to leave the hospital. He wanted to cut himself, but he could not tell anyone. He held in his fear.
He could not stop the inevitable.
They took him to the home across town.
Two months later, he cut his wrist with a razor blade in the bathroom of the home. The nurses at the ER scoffed at him. They were angry at him. They said he had cut himself “the wrong way.” They instructed him on how to cut his wrist “the right way” so he'd succeed in killing himself. He wondered why an RN would give a suicidal patient that information. The doctor, arriving at the ER in his good old sweet time,the way doctors do, and stitched up the wound.
The home did not want to take him back right way, because of what he'd done. He went to his sister's apartment for the night. They took him the next day. They wanted him to promise he wouldn't hurt himself again. He played the game. He said what he had to say.
Stan kept threatening the day center that he wanted to kill himself. They said they wanted him to stay out of the hospital. But he wanted to go back into a hospital.
He had his car by this time, from up at his mom's, but they wouldn't let him drive it. At the bus stop, a man picked him up in the cold and rain, gave him a sympathy story and asked how he broke his arm. Stan lied. He couldn't bring himself to tell the truth to this man in this fancy new car. He was scared.
He continued his threats at the day center. They took him to the state hospital because he left them no choice.

Stan spent a lot of years in and out of state hospitals and psych wards. He did not know how to live any other way. Whenever he had a chance to, he took alcohol or drugs, and did not realize that that was the pivotal factor keeping him in such turmoil.
There came a day, after a long time, when Susan was at the front door of his ward. Somehow, she had come directly to where Stan was, and asked for him by name.
They spent the day on the campus of the state hospital, as they had done so long ago on the campus of the private hospital. They walked and talked. He couldn't help wondering why she had come to see him. Women were not very friendly to him generally. It was a strange thing to happen.
Susan bought their lunches and refreshments all day. Stan was broke. Susan didn't care. She kept him company as if they had had a long-standing relationship. Maybe they did. His memory was shot. Too many drugs, too many breakdowns. His mind would not serve him.
It was still wintertime. They made love in the late afternoon in a hide-away place Stan knew of. It was a simple act of honest humanity between two people. One might easily have called them strangers. There was no motive, no pretense to their love making. It was what it was.
Susan saw Stanley back to his ward and caught the bus home.
Stan had supper on the ward.
He couldn't understand what had happened.

Again, years went by.
One of the state hospital doctors along the way sent Stan to the Program. In spite of himself, Stan got sober. His life began to turn around. He started to think and feel better.
He'd been committed. He'd been a danger to himself. They could have simply warehoused Stan and thrown the key away, but they didn't. After he'd been sober a while, they set him up with a group home, let him out into the community.
The man finished college.
The man got a job.
The man attended the program regularly.
The woman brought a little girl to the program one evening. She told the man the child was eight years old. The man sat with the child during the meeting. They played on the indoor staircase outside the meeting.
For the man, being with that child was like sharing one's self with some novel part of one's self. Looking at that child was like looking in a mirror.
Susan called the child Sharon.
Susan gave her phone number to Stan easily.
“Who is the father of the child?”
“I decided to take full responsibility for the child.”
The man was dumb struck.
Baffled.
Stopped.
He did not know what to say or do.
He begged off the call. He awkwardly said goodbye and hung up the phone.
Susan never came back to the meetings with or without Sharon.

Stan found out, after years of therapy, that he was far more of an abused child than he had ever imagined. He'd buried the memories deep in his subconscious. When the block broke loose, he needed hospitalization for a time, but he stayed sober and faced his demons.
He cried and cried.
After a lifetime of self-loathing, self-deprivation, anger – he's free.

Starry Starry Night
Chapter 10

Paint your pallet blue and gray. I was on the Inside with Jonathan when we were young men. It was not jail. It was an institution. I met him in a creative writing seminar on the Inside. A college girl brought the class to the hospital for any of us who wanted to write. She believed in the power of writing. So did several of us patients. Jonathan's writing was powerful. I could feel what he wrote in my perpetually sad heart. He made me cry the way he wrote about his life. I knew the kind of sadness he knew. I'd tell you some of the things he wrote about, but it was a long time ago. I've forgotten.
I saw him in the hallways and in the dining room. He walked with the girl who was very thin, but very beautiful. When you're in an institution, sooner or later you know who everyone is. Her name was Pamela. She was the daughter of a famous man. She had an illness that effected how she ate, an illness that effected how she thought about herself and food. She did not want to eat because she was too fat. She looked very thin to me. To herself, she was very fat and overweight. She fought that idea a long time before she got better. Pamela and I became friends, and she told me about how she felt.
I thought Pamela was Jonathan's girl for a long time, but they were just from the same ward. They walked around together sometimes. That was a part of the way things worked at the institution. I could not take my eyes off Pamela she was so beautiful. Even after we talked and became friends, she told me she had to sit with her back to me in the dining room to eat her food, because I could not look away from her. I apologized wholeheartedly, but couldn't get myself to stop staring at her. I was empty in that way.
Jonathan got a small apartment in town after a while. I'd gotten out too, and had my car I'd bought while I was still working. I would drive there, and hang out, smoking hashish with him. I was afraid I'd get busted walking around with the stuff in my pocket, so I gave him my stash.
He didn't have a car, so he'd get together with me to drive around. We looked all over the city for hashish. I'd drive my car into the war zone of the city, where the Bloods and the Bro's would shoot each other for drugs, as he looked and looked for hashish in place after place. He always got the money from his dad through Western Union. We looked for hash in that way several times per week. I couldn't imagine how he got all that money from his dad. It's a wonder we didn't get busted or shot the way we went around so often. It was such a transparent urgency.
Then I went to the state hospital. I lost track of everyone. I heard after a long time Jonathan “took his life as lovers often do. This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.” He's gone, and God destroyed him because he destroyed himself. That's what the song says. That's what the book says. Jonathan's gone. He doesn't say anything anymore.
Pamela got married after she learned it's OK to eat food. I only heard she got married after it was too late for me to ask her out. I was in the state hospital too long. I saw her once, a long time later, and she was not so thin as she used to be. She was more beautiful than ever. I wanted to kiss her she was so beautiful, but her husband was right there. So I asked her if she had some reefer, but she didn't.

***

I met Christopher downtown. He and I would hang out together a lot in the city. He went to the methadon clinic over by the hospital, to keep one step ahead of the Jones's. He was a needle junky. He understood the ways of the street, how to get up-town on the college bus without being a student, how to get free food at the soup kitchen I needed to know about, how to get nickels and dimes for cigarettes from the Jesuits, how to sleep in the mission when it was too cold to sleep in the park.
Christopher knew how to work the streets, how to get along. He rarely broke the law, except to use his heroin and his pain killers, smoke his drugs. Like Jonathan, he had his sources for drugs. By that time I could not afford to drive a car anymore. My mom sold my old car to a cop, with my bong on the floorboards. I wondered why the cop didn't come looking for me. Christopher was a small man, and slight, with a trim red beard and blonde hair. He was a nice guy, bright and kind. He and I shared a room now and then. We were close friends. He knew the same drug addicts and drunks I knew. We were all like that. It was a brotherhood. Drug addicts and drunks. It seemed nothing could ever take that issue away from any of us. It was a brotherhood on the streets of the city. The drunks and the drug addicts of the city. That's who we were.
He would bring home a little cheep wine and a little bit of cheese for supper, when we never had any supper otherwise. He would give me a cigarette or two now and then. I would go over to the place where the university students got lunch and sit on the park bench outside, where one waits for the bus, and a healthy, strong young man would walk by sometimes. He always gave me a cigarette and a light. I don't remember that young man's name, if I ever knew it. He was a student. He was not a part of the street brotherhood. Christopher would come home to my single room where he slept on my floor, and he would bring some little morsel to eat when he could. He knew I was starving. He knew I was at the mercy of the streets.
We would drink our alcohol and smoke our drugs. We were both addicts, like I said. He was a nice guy, a good friend. He never hurt me. He never did anything to hurt my feelings or did anything to treat me badly. Then I went back to the state hospital suicidal again, and lost track of him.
A long time later I found the program and got sober. The streets and the brotherhood of the streets did not want to forget me. Those guys did not want to let me go. I was one of them. Wouldn't I just smoke a joint with them? Wouldn't I just have a beer? But my answer was always “No” then, until some of those guys would not speak to me anymore. I didn't care. I'd found sobriety. I found the way out, and I stayed out.
One day I saw the other Chris, the one who freeloaded his way to California with me once on the bus. He always said he'd pay me back. I've stopped waiting. Chris was at an outpatient department of a hospital with some little pregnant girl. She looked like she'd pop in about two weeks.
He said, “Where are we living now?”
I asked him if he still partied anymore.
He said he had a joint now and then.
I told him I'm sober. I did not tell him where I was living.
He said Christopher had opened his window in his little room downtown one day, and started shooting his guns out the window. The Police came and tried to defuse the situation, but Christopher would not stop shooting.
He had stock-piled a lot of ammo for his guns he'd brought to the city with him when he was kicked out of the house by his folks a long time ago. He could not find sobriety and was tired of playing the streets. He was trapped in the game, a needle junky and a drunk. He believed he would never be anything different. He believed he could not win.
The Police did everything to defuse the situation, they tried not to hurt him, but Christopher would not stop shooting. The Police killed him. Suicide by cop. “He took his life as lovers often do. This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you. Starry Starry Night...”

***

I went back to the state hospital to visit, in my car one day after I was sober a long time. There was Gibbs, the artist, sitting outside the ward in a chair with some other guys. There he was, hobbling along slowly, as I beckoned for him to come to my car.
A long time ago, Gibbs and I, and a car load of guys from the halfway house had driven out to the country once, to a place where the creek had a beautiful rocky bed, where the water babbled like music, to a place where Nature had not yet been adulterated. He had taken his sketch pad. I had taken my guitar. Some of the guys went swimming in the creek on the hot summer afternoon. The hood of my car accidentally blew up over the windshield on the way out to the country on the interstate, blocking my vision at 75 MPH. The latch to the hood had broken. A man and his father we'd never met before, helped us. They had an old junker, just enough like my old car, they had the parts. They knew what to do. We were back on the road, all fixed up, in no time.
Now, these many years later, Gibbs was noticeably shorter in stature, and walked slowly, as if his feet hurt him. He'd been a strong, tall, strapping young man, full of life and health and strength when I knew him. This was Gibbs, the less of a man, and he got in my car reluctantly, complaining he would get in trouble if I took him off grounds, afraid of me, as if I didn't know he couldn't leave. Gibbs had become a defeated man.
I asked him what had happened to him.
Gibbs had jumped off a bridge trying to kill himself, shattering his ankles and lower legs. He would not die. He was lucky he could walk at all. I asked to see his sketch pad. Gibbs had always been a talented artist. Many of his sketches were still brilliant in his state of defeat.
I asked him about the other George. He said George's mother had thrown away his prize record collection. George had one of the finest classic record collections I'd ever seen. He had the complete recordings of Beethoven and Mozart, for one thing. George had a source of income for a while. It must have been a job or an inheritance or something. He'd spent thousands on the recordings of the great masters of music. Other guys in the brotherhood of the streets spent their money on classic rock, but not George. George spent his fortune on the masters. His mother had thrown them all away when George went into the state hospital the last time. George was another defeated man. Gibbs said George scarcely ever talked anymore.
I offered Gibbs $20 cash for one of his sketches. It was worth every penny of it, and then some. Gibbs wouldn't take the money. He took $5. I asked him to tear out the picture so I could keep it. He was nervous, jittery, self-conscious. He tore into his work with trembling hands, until it was worthless, ruined. But I kept it, insisted he keep the money.
I could never find that country stream again. I went there looking for it with some girl driving me years later, and we got lost. She couldn't understand why I cried over it. I couldn't tell her about my friends then. I could never tell her. She couldn't ever seem to understand how I could talk to God like I believe He's real. Well, if He's not real, what is? But I couldn't make her understand, about the time I lost my mind again.
No one seems to understand why I cry whenever I hear that old song.

Driver
Chapter 11

When I was making a living, I was a driver.
No, not the big rigs.
No, not the big time, either.
I drove pizza.
I drove flowers.
I drove rental cars to auction.
Penny ante stuff.
None of the rental car companies ever run their cars into the ground. Sooner or later, I think it's usually around 45K or 50K on the odometer or so, they all auction off their cars and renew their fleets with new inventory.
GPS systems did not exist when I was driving for a living. We relied on maps and our own working knowledge of the area on the job, any job. I almost had enough confidence about certain areas, I considered driving taxi more than once, but I had enough trouble with the money driving pizza, I decided against driving taxi. Besides, taxi drivers have a bad way of getting mugged or shot. I never needed money that bad, not even when I was starving, believe it or not.
Shuffling the rentals to auction was an interesting job.
We were centrally located near the BWI airport, but we operated throughout the tri-state area, including the District. There were auction sites all over, and there were multiple pickup sites for cars.
I remember we were on the job in the rally van, waiting for a run on 9/11. When the Twin Towers fell, we were all listening to the radio as we waited for the last minute inspections to finish. The supervisor got the call to move, and he drove us down past the Pentagon for a pickup. There were Military vehicles with 50 caliber machine guns mounted down there, with the National Guard at the ready, as we drove passed the smoldering Pentagon. Those boys meant business. Yes sir. The traffic passed them by very politely, no doubt about it.
We'd get assigned our cars, slap on a tag, get the keys and we'd be gone. There were usually six or eight drivers. We'd run one driver per car, running flat out all day long. The only break we'd get was when we were riding in the rally van, going to another pickup.
Sometimes we'd work 6AM to 8PM. We got paid by the car. Those were usually gravy days, making lots of money, but some days we'd burn up the whole day in traffic trying to get from one drop-off point to the next pickup spot.
Sometimes we'd work the interstates all day, running about 85 to 90mph all day, watching for cops, weaving through traffic. It was dangerous work, and I didn't like that part of it. I've seen too many fatalities on the highway to take that sort of thing lightly. More than once, I talked to the other drivers in the rally van about slowing down the pace on the interstates, but they always said they needed to get in as many cars as possible to make the money.
Eventually, I got another job. The chances of causing an accident at those speeds were just more than I could abide by. There's got to be someone somewhere who stands for responsible driving.
Last I checked, that company looked like they closed up shop. I'm certain the operation still goes on somehow, but the lots we were working, down by the airport, were empty.

My Right Hip
Chapter 12

I was less than 60 years of age, needing to take medicine for a chronic medical condition for the past 40 years, when I finally got confused about how the doctor wanted me to take the pills, how many of each I had already taken when I was in the process of taking them, and so on, until I was overdosing myself daily for better than a week without realizing it.
The tell-tale sign I could not understand at the time was that I was losing consciousness nightly, finding myself fallen prostrate on the floor for several hours running, on a nightly basis, unable to get up on my feet at all. I just laid on the floor all night, night after night. To make matters worse, I was living alone.
My one saving grace in this state of affairs was that I had left the hot water running all night the first night I passed out, flooding my entire apartment with a thin film of hot water everywhere, along with the adjacent apartment, such that my landlord was summoned by the neighbors to fix the problems cause by the flood. He had his work cut out for him, fixing all the problems. It caused him great inconvenience and great expense, coming day after day with his helpers, only to discover me flat on the floor, day after day, unable to get myself up without help, every day for better than a week.
One of his daily helpers was strong enough and young enough to lift me to my feet, but the lifting was a daily occurrence that knew no resolution.
My landlord finally lost his temper with me when I ultimately refused to get into the ambulance he had called for me, and threatened to evict me if he found me on the floor just one more time. There happened to be a social worker there at my apartment at that moment, by some sort of beckoning I am still unaware of, and between the social worker and my landlord, I was convinced to get in the ambulance and go to the hospital for help.
I had been so unwilling to go there, because I had already been going to the ER frequently enough, and had been turned away each time, after being screened as usual and told I was OK, and sent home without getting any help at all. But that particular time was the charm. They admitted me for observation, and finally came up with a diagnosis. It was determined, as I've said, that I'd been overdosing on my medicines for quite some time, and needed to be detoxed from all my medicines completely for several weeks, before I could be medicated at all, afterward.
I was kept in the hospital, then transferred to a nursing/rehab facility for treatment and supervision while I was going through the process of detox. It was a very dangerous process, considering my need for constant medication for my life-long, chronic problem, but the only recourse for my recovery was to take me off all medicines for several weeks, regardless of the perils involved. It was their only recourse to really help me.
I found that the OD effected some very noticeable brain functions, like my memory and my speech, for instance. In fact, my entire communication center in my brain totally shut down for a considerable length of time, and I was utterly unable to communicate, talk or write coherently at all, for a considerable length of time.
It was terrifying.
My power of attorney was summoned, and made arrangements to get me into an assisted living community, after my insurance coverage for the nursing/rehab facility was exhausted, and I was installed there at assisted living by the single handed help of my loyal, capable power of attorney.
The assisted living facility was nice enough, though small in size and taking care of a rather small census of residents, even so, it was relatively new and well kept, and comfortable enough for my needs. My acceptance by my peers, as you might call them, although I was easily young enough to be the son of any of the other residents, was especially tenuous because of the unfortunate fact that I could not communicate. It was extremely awkward for me at the time.
Nonetheless, I fumbled along, enjoying my private room and excellent meals, prepared by chefs, no less; not to be confused with the usual staff of cooks in other institutional facilities. Those guys really knew how to make the most delightful meals. I enjoyed each one with unmasked enthusiasm, lavishing the head chef with compliments, and faithfully looked forward to getting my medication accurately, finally tumbling to the fact that I had been overdosing myself so dangerously before I'd gone to the hospital.
I had been in such total denial of my confusion for such a long time, until I finally understood that I had nearly lost my life in the process of talking my medications wrongly, not understanding how to take my medications correctly at all anymore. I was thinking that my loss of brain function had been due to the detox process, but I finally tumbled to the idea that taking me completely off all my medications in order to detox my system, was the solution, not the problem.
I may be restricted to needing someone else to administer my medications indefinitely, but it's better than forfeiting my life over it.
But to return to the narrative, I was in the assisted living facility for a relatively short period of time, when a very strange thing happened to me.
I was walking in the main hallway with my cane, which I had been in the habit of using to help me with my balance, when all of a sudden I found myself in a dream. Yes, that's right. I was walking and lapsed into a dream. From the way I remember it, I was dreaming I was the first human being to discover how to fly without the aid of an aircraft. It was a very novel concept.
The next thing I knew was that I opened my eyes, coming wide awake suddenly, and noticed myself in an advanced stage of falling, with no recourse to cushion the fall. I was going down, falling and falling, and there was nothing I could do about it. I hit my head on a wall twice on the way down, and landed very violently on my right side, causing the most excruciating pain throughout my entire body – the worst pain I had ever had in my entire lifetime.
The nurse arrived quickly from her office or wherever she was, but the ambulance crew seemed to take forever to get there, and even the slightest motion gave me such pain I was screaming uncontrollably. Though the paramedics, arriving at long last, were careful to strap me down to a solid board as gently and carefully as they could, I was still so frightened that I would be in so much pain, that I continued to scream until I arrived at the ER in the ambulance, and thought the medical people finally understood how badly I was hurting, so that I final suppressed my screams, but could not avoid my moaning and groaning at every turn.
Unfortunately, the ER people were completely powerless to help me that evening, in any way at all. I could not give any indication where I might be hurt specifically, because I still couldn't talk, and they simply sent me back home to assisted living in an ambulance, just as I had been brought to them earlier. I have no quarrel with the ER about that visit, though. No quarrel whatsoever. I hurt all over, and could not give any description of any kind about my fall to the ER staff, since my communication skills were still so bad at the time. It wasn't their fault they couldn't take any xrays. They had no idea where to point the camera.
All they had to go on was the idea that I had fallen, had been doing a lot of screaming, moaning and groaning, but could not give any coherent accounting of my fall or tell them anything about where I hurt more specifically.
Well, I was taken home and put to bed, where I slept all night, flat on my back, which was the least uncomfortable position I could find. Waking early the next morning, I knew exactly where I hurt. It was my right hip really giving me a fit, no doubt about it, and I had had enough of screaming about it. I was taken back to the ER for xrays, and sent right back home again afterward, and was soon informed that I had broken my right hip.
I figured as much.
Back to the hospital I went, to be operated on.
The orthopedic surgeon came visiting several times, and was a bright young man, and a very personable, quite reassuring, brilliant young man. He came to see me several times before the surgery, and won my complete confidence. He told me his job in an operating room was to “fix bones.” And I believed that he would be very good at it, too. What's more is, I've found that he was, indeed very good at his job, no doubt about it.

There had been this girl in her early 20's who had thrown herself at me, as the expression has it, ever since I had shared about the demise of my dear mother in a public group gathering some two years earlier. She had manipulated her way into my life with tearful complaint that she had lost her father when she was only 12 years old, and would I please be her daddy.
Well, I had never had a wife or daughter, had just lost my mother, who had always been the most significant person in my life, and here I was being offered a “daughter figure,” out of the clear blue. I had accepted the request gladly, since she seemed to be sincere, with all the emotional display, and was a very attractive young lady besides. She spent two and a half years introducing herself publicly to everyone I knew and talked to, as being my “adopted daughter.” I internalized the expression, because our informal agreement was defined in that way in the first place.
I was to be her “daddy,” and labored against the fact that I was sexually attracted to her at first, the way she wore dip necklines and such. At great length, after she had called me on the telephone nightly at 3 or 4 AM on a nightly basis for months on end, while I sat up and crocheted in the middle of the night next to the phone. I finally realized how immature she was, and gave up all ambition to have her as a sex partner under any circumstances. She had always maintained there was too much of an age difference between us for her to be attracted to me that way anyhow, but my own feels would not let up for the longest time, until I finally realized the impossibility of any mature intimacy between us. The deciding factor was her emotional instability. She was as unstable as if she were still 12 years old at 23 and 24.
The night before my hip surgery, she came to my hospital bedside, and put on quite a show of worrying about my mortality, and the prospect of my need for major surgery, weeping and wailing about how I must please not die, Papa, please don't die. She just could not go on without me, and apparently went to the nursing station, where she apparently assigned a Do Not Resuscitate order on my medical chart, “by order of the family.”
The next morning, before I was wheeled into the OR, the nurse came in and put the DNR wristband on me, as my “adopted daughter” must have ordered, since there is no other person in my family who would do such a thing to me, and she was hoping to gain my mother's inheritance from my will, by the idea that I might die on the table, coupled by the knowledge that I had let her know, in so many words, that I loved her so dearly I had put her in my will.
Well, I know what DNR means, and I demanded to have the wristband removed from my wrist and my chart, and essentially made a point, and practically a major scene, in front of the entire OR team that I am a Full Code, and don't spare every effort to revive me if the need arose during the surgery.
I've been told that my “daughter” was in the waiting room during the surgery, which lasted a full four hours, but I never saw her afterward, not to this day.
I heard nothing at all from the girl after surgery, for a full month running. Until that time, she had been very active and loyal in her attentions, in spite of the idea she was living with a boyfriend in her mother's home, with her mother condoning the arrangement. But I was too sick from the injury and surgery to handle making any out-going phone calls, and could scarcely struggle to the nursing station with my walker, to receive phone calls from people like my sister and my power of attorney, when they called, however infrequently, however long they waited for me to have enough recovery to be able to hobble to answer the telephone.
Even though I was expecting the girl's visit at every moment, she never appeared at the rehab at all, and never called me on the phone. Just before my discharge from rehab, to return to assisted living, I was finally able to call her house phone, with inquiries whether I had given the girl checks for thousands upon thousands of dollars, as my fantasies had had it, and whether I had been too much of a nuisance, as I talked to her mother on the phone, asking about whether the woman minded me staying in their garage while I had been recuperating. The woman assured me her daughter never acted as thought she had been given any major sum of money, and assured me that her garage did not have any of the physical features I described over the phone.
I had been delirious, imagining all sorts of things after four hours of surgery, under the knife so terribly long.
Nonetheless, I learned how to walk again, first with a walker, which I could not do without for quite a while, though throughout the entire process I was still a mere 59 years of age, and expected myself to have more vitality than I actually had.
The surgeon subsequently told me I have osteoporosis at an unusually young age, with the calcium leaching out of my bones, for no known medical reason he could find, though he researched and pondered quite deeply. I continue to take high doses of calcium twice a day in pill form, while I drink endless glasses of whole milk, hoping I'll still have enough bone density to be at least somewhat mobile when I really do get old.
I'm afraid I'll end up with an entire skeleton of disintegrated bones before I ever pass away in the first place. The idea scares me no end.

Anyway, I took the girl's name out of my will, which I had so foolishly put it into in the first place, and even more foolishly let her know about it in the first place. She became quite the gold digger in the long run. Apparently, though I hate to admit it, her motivation to associate with me in the first place was that I was that I might receive an inheritance from my mother, and might also receive one from my aunt as well, and she had apparently done everything in relating to me, from the beginning, to get the advantage of being in my will so she could cash in, in the first place.
She even tried to buy my car for a pittance, finally calling me on the telephone at the assisted living home where I was, talking nasty, angrily and hatefully to me over the telephone, being obviously annoyed that I had survived surgery, and had not freed up my mother's inheritance money soon enough to suit her.
In fact, I finally realized her treachery, and made arrangements to take her name out of my will altogether, and found her to be extremely uncouth and hateful toward me, because I had survived surgery and she did not get what she wanted as quickly as she wanted.
Since my mother and aunt have both passed away now, I've yielded to an invitation offered by my brother and his family, to relocate to another, quite remote city away from that annoying person, in another assisted living situation several hours drive away from anywhere that poor excuse for a “daughter'' cannot hope to drop in for a visit, to torment me and attempt to manipulate me any longer.
Now I'm within a local call and a local visit from my brother's family, and this was a very advantageous situation until my brother and his wife seem to have become particularly put out with me for the moment, and I'm going along with my own life and with my own future under my own steam in the assisted living place I find myself in, and I'm well enough set up to get along without my brother's family for the moment, since I'm apparently being expected to do it, as well as getting along quite well enough without the girl who dared called herself “my daughter,” under what I have begun to realize were very false pretenses altogether.
I'm left to my own devises, and have recently graduated from using a walker to using my cane again, with a goodly amount of strength and reassurance in the state of affairs where I find myself. I'm quite resourceful, and can get along fine without my real and false families, until the real brother and sister in law decide to come around again, whenever that's going to be in the future.
I've been recovering from my fall and surgery from the end of October to the latter part of April, and my progress is remarkable. I have very little issue where my walking ability is concerned. My knee bothers me more often than my hip, except when I'm sitting down. The only other thing about the fall that bothers me, is my right shoulder, but I'll put up with that and the bothersome knee as well, since I'm drowning in medical bills already.
I had given rave reviews for the food in the small assisted living community up north, but I must add that where I find myself now is an assisted living facility having a census of well over a hundred residents, requiring two separate settings for meals, and I must say their food is usually better than a lot of the institutional food I've had to live with in various times of my lifetime. At least there is a relative anonymity in numbers here, and my every thought, word and deed are not a matter of public record here, like it seemed to be at the smaller place. I am not the talk of the town, incessantly here, as I suspected up north.
Of course, I'm spending my inheritance hand over fist to live in these institutions, but I have not come up with a less expensive alternative. I really don't mind being in assisted living. I find it agreeable enough, but I've racked up a heap of medical bills, as big as a mortgage on a medium sized house, I'm afraid, and I have no idea how to remedy that fact either, except to whittle away at it for as long as I live, I guess. It's the only idea I can come up with. There are many people who get into lifetime debt one way or another. I'm just one more bozo on the bus.


Fraud
Chapter 13

I gotta wonder, sometimes, what God wants from me. I know the language, I know literature, I know what makes music tick, I know crocheting, I know decency.
Grandma, Aunt Flo, Aunt Oli, Aunt Vi, Sarah and Mom all taught me about basic decency. By the time I really had to know, I found my way to what is good and decent and right. I've made a lot of bad choices in life, but I was awful rebellious, too. It came to me naturally.
I used to hate to be alone. Now I don't mind, as long as I can get in a few meetings of the program now and then. The program means a lot to me. It took away a lot of the insanity in my life, calmed things down a lot.
People come around and use me, just because I want to have a little company in life. People have always done that to me. They got my money and whatnot, but it was only money, right? I'd starve, and be all strung out. I've been used and abused a lot. I don't want to be saved from being alone anymore. I want the kind of friends who just like me for who I am, instead of all these jerks who think they're going to get something just because I'm nice to them.
The last user I had to deal with was a young girl in her early twenties who tied my emotions all up in knots about being a “father figure” to her. She said her daddy died when she was 12; would I be her daddy? Heck with that. She just wanted my inheritance money from mother. She even asked me how much money I inherited from mother. “How much?” she said. I told her, too.
I even told her when I put her in my will, giving her money right and left, for food and gasoline, etc. I had to get away from her. She was trying to kill me with a DNR on my chart when I was going in for hip surgery, “by order of the family,” they said. The girl called herself my “adopted daughter” so often, she made it stick at a real live nurse's station at a real live hospital, the night before my hip surgery. You should have seen the performance at my bedside that night. She should have gotten an Oscar. I think I was the last person to figure out the whole scam. I finally did figure it out, though. I'm not stupid, just slow on the uptake. People know it, too.
But it's not fair to simply call Kim a scam artist. That's not the only thing that happened. She came to me when mother died and wanted a friendship with an older gentleman. She wanted a father figure in her life. That's what she said. She was curious about me as a person, and visa verse. We developed a friendship and a relationship with each other, and I was really very surprised that we became as close as we did. There was daily, glad contact between us. We shared many of our inner most feelings and experiences; we had a second sense about each other, and when there was something wrong with one of us, the other knew it without being told. She wanted a father. I wanted a daughter. We got what we wanted. We were that close. It wasn't a falsehood. It was a reality.
I'm a really vulnerable person. I can't see a dangerous situation very readily at all. Trouble comes raining down all over me before I can see it coming. It's been happening all my life.
When I jumped into alcohol, feet first, willingly, I was just a kid. I didn't know anything about the negative power of what I was getting myself into. I just wanted to have fun, be a part of what was happening with my generation, get away from the old fogies for a while and forget all the troubles I'd been through. There were so many abuses I went through growing up, like getting beaten up a lot and all that.
I don't understand why people can't be trusted, why they have to be so nasty and hurtful. I never could understand why people want to do other people harm. It was never something I wanted to do myself, or thought about doing, except once or twice when I felt really slighted by someone. People can be awfully hurtful, and it always comes as a surprise to me. I never expect it unless I get paranoid, and then it doesn't make sense to anyone else.
I just wanted to forget all the abuses I went through and start over in life, but I didn't know how. That's why I got loaded with so much enthusiasm. It made me forget. I couldn't ever find my car, I couldn't find anything to eat because I couldn't hold on to any money, I couldn't find where I lived. I got really lost in a big way. I couldn't remember things, and that's what I thought I wanted. I wanted to forget the abuses I went through in life. But that meant that I lost touch with an awful lot of other things, like losing control of my affairs. I thought forgetting was what starting over was.
Well, I'd have never guessed it, but getting sober and staying sober is all the forgetting of anything and all the starting over I'm ever going to need. It works better that way than the other way – one heck of a lot better.
Now I can face life and have some control over my affairs. I'm finally catching on. Being in assisted living helps, because the people here have distorted problems. I can see the problems coming, like in an institution, because the problems are more obvious. They're easier to spot.
Now I've moved to a whole new place, six hours away from everything I ever knew. That's starting over. Kim's too far away to worry about anymore. She can't hurt me now. I don't have to deal with all her tricks. I'm finally free of her. We've both moved on.
I've been so close to death so many times in my life, I wonder what God is keeping me alive for. He's got to be keeping me around for some reason. I could make a list of things that should have killed me. It would be a really long list, too. But if I did that, I'd just get awful darned depressed, and I don't want to go there. I owe myself better.
Being around my brother and his wife is the only set up I could think of that makes for a safe environment. Everyone needs someone, and Kim was doing too much manipulating. It would have been one thing if she was on the level about caring about me. I believed the lies she told me about how she loved me, trusted me, and wanted to be in my life, how she and her family loved me, wanted to help me and be there for me. I believed her when everyone else was telling me she was just trying to get my money. Now I can see how right they all were. I feel like such a fool.
Well, I mentioned the idea of decency. Charley wouldn't let me loose about smoking weed with him when I was at university, so I finally sent him to jail with the help of some undercover cops. Why shouldn't I send the guy to jail? He broke the law, and had me doing it too. We spent the time it took to smoke two joints, standing right out in the open, in one corner of the busy quad on campus, on a bright, sunny, late afternoon, at the beginning of a weekend. I had been turning him down for months, but he wouldn't take no for an answer. He just waited for the time I would give in. He ruined my whole life. He ought to have gone to jail for that. That's a crime alright.
Taking drugs was exactly contrary to everything I was ever brought up to believe in. I have always been a law abiding citizen, except for that drug habit Charley got me started on. That one incident in my youth held me back from having a marriage, a career, self esteem and a positive attitude for an awful lot of years. Sure, I turned the guy in. He had it coming. He spent a year behind bars, and I spent a lifetime with a chemical imbalance in my brain so bad I still lose my mind every six months whether I need to or not, and I'm living about as healthy as I can muster.
Oh yes, I get lonely. I really wish I had a wife and family sometimes, but I did Mary a favor. Instead of marrying her, I set her free. She didn't get a whole house full of mentally ill children and a sick husband to take care of, living barefoot and pregnant for her entire youth while I floundered with a drug problem, couldn't hold down a job, and all the rest of it. I spent all those years starving, between trips to the dope man and trips to the state hospital. She might have gone with me through the whole ordeal. She was acting like she would do everything I was doing in order to be a partner with me, but I wouldn't let her do it. I knew what was what. I've always loved her too much to do that to her. Sure I miss her. Mary was the one of nicest girls I ever met. I realized she was special, and that's precisely why I had to let her go. It was the only decent thing to do.
But a guy has to move on eventually. Mary happened a long time ago. All the other nice girls I ever met are just fine, too. It isn't as though Mary was the only nice girl I ever met. It's that I've had trouble trusting people. I've been trying to let myself open my heart up a little bit easier. I'm not good at trusting people. I keep getting screwed up again. I don't feel so lonely here at assisted living. There are always people around. And I'm finding a friend or two here and there. It feels good sometimes.
I looked at whether to prosecute Kim for fraud or not. I do think she has it coming, at least in some sense. She dragged my emotions through the ringer so bad, crying over my telephone in the middle of the night, night after night for well over a year, churning up my heart strings in my ear all night long on the phone, apparently over mother's and auntie's money, as if it were her personal entitlement. She spent two and a half years working on my emotions, digging deeper and deeper into my feelings until I had her in my will – and told her so, besides. Just so she would try to set me up to die the first time I needed major surgery. It looks like it was just as much a crime as what Charley did. She ought to go to jail if that was the only reality of our friendship. If it's true, it's where she belongs.
I just don't think I want to give her the free rent in my head anymore. She's too far away to hurt me now, so I guess that solves the problem. I don't have a clear understanding of what happened or what she was doing. I only know how much I miss her affection.
I don't know. I endorsed her at that hospital. I told the RN's on more than one occasion that she was to be accepted as if she were my daughter, that she should have full privileges to know the full extent of my physical and mental health, as if our DNA matched and as if she were, in every sense, as much my blood kin as any natural offspring. I opened the door. For all I know, the night before surgery, I could have told her that I was just going where God was taking me, and that there should be nothing standing in His way if He wanted to take me home in the midst of the surgery.
I was thinking of my own mother, the way she was finally free to die that last night of her life, and that there was nothing I could do or say to stop her from going. I love Kim, and I'll never try to prosecute her for anything. Yes, I've lost all my possessions, and I have no idea how much of my stuff Kim took and sold for her own purposes. She is the only girl who ever had the audacity to tell people she was my daughter, and I let her do it. I've been friends with young ladies over the years, but never like that. She's a beautiful, confusing, lovely, glorious, frustrating young creature. Apparently, she has decided to move on, and so have I.
I've hurt long enough. I'll let her go. She deserves the right to move on in her life as much as anyone does.


Solitary Man
Chapter 14

The day gets long when I can't hang out with her as much as I'd like. It's the woman's company I thrive on. It seems like I've had to get along without her all day, but that's not true. She's all but a stranger some ways, and already I'm lost without her by evening, an hour after I've left her to do as I please. I try to imagine what I did before I met her, before we'd sit and I'd talk while she smokes cigarettes outside in the courtyard. I wonder what life was before her I met her, as if I've forgotten. I don't even remember how we met. I only know I talked about being lonely, about not having someone to talk to. I talked about not talking.
Now I'm writing about not knowing what to write.
I was wrong when I was young. I can't get along without company. I need people.
She wanted to go hear the live music in the lounge after lunch. I took the first elevator I could get after I got her wheelchair in through the outside door, and came home quietly enough, with my very musical tail between my legs, getting out of Dodge, talked to my brother awhile on the phone. I told the woman the music would make me cry. It's true, too. I feel so bad about letting my music go lately. It's not fair to my talent to let it go. I need my music. It's not fair to God's talent.
I can't help wondering what my life will be like with a guitar in the apartment here. People come and go around here all the time. There's really no privacy for such things as introspective music composition, playing only for my own amazement. I hope I can get so I can play with some reassurance soon enough to suit me, after I get the instrument. I don't want to be a has-been for the rest of my life, musically. I'm still the musician; it's not dead in me. I'm not dead. My instincts continue to thrive, my training is second nature by now. I'm getting the guitar to have an instrument to relate to. I'm getting the instrument to help me.
The sun is down past the trees in the west now. My clock has the volume up, I guess you could say, ticking like the clock it is, with an attitude. It's a wonder there aren't more people hanging out in the hallway, looking for life outside my door, at the medication counter of the retirement community, laughing it up on payday.
She was grumpy today, soured at the service in the dining room as always, she said. I wonder how I get along sometimes, feeling lost and alone so often, with plenty of people around. I called here and there on the phone, but my brother was the only one to answer. The woman says she doesn't know her phone number. It doesn't even sound like a strange thing to me, that she doesn't know it. She survived a burst aneurism in her brain. If she's grumpy, or doesn't tell her phone number for any old reason whatsoever, it's perfectly alright with me. Besides, I don't think I've any room to complain, anyway I look at it. She's listened and read everything I've thrown at her. Then she asks for more writings, saves my seat out in the smoking area outside after a meal. I'm only finding out a little bit about what she has to say, for a change. We're busy being people together.
(It's not the end of the world until Saturday, according to one of my buddies, anyway. He predicts the Rapture of the Saints sometime this Saturday. This is Thursday night, and he doesn't answer his phone tonight. Maybe the Lord was early. Maybe I wasn't invited. Now it's Saturday night, and all this doomsday stuff seems to have fizzled.)
It's getting late again, though.
Why I cannot stand the workings of my own mind any better than I do is a constant mystery to me. My brother says it's my illness. I'd like to be able to feel good about myself more often, to feel good about my friends and the people I know, about the things I do. It's as if I feel really rejected because the phone doesn't ring, while I go about doing exactly what I want to do, which is write this dribble into my laptop, practicing my writing all the livelong day and late into the evening.
I don't know what I want sometimes. I'm just being fussy here. I've got my sodas and my coffee. I've got my retired-writing-professor-friend, and a very nice personal lady friend, too, both cheering me on, especially about my writing. I cannot present either of them with enough original material to suit the three of us. Sometimes I look at the young lady and make a sincere effort see who she is, as a person. My buddy always talks to me about my idealizations of women. Women aren't what I think they are. I look at her and have nothing to say to her at the dinner table, and she catches me looking, thinking Lord knows what, gives me the evil eye, so to speak, like the youngster used to stick out her tongue at me when she'd catch my eye. It's alright.
I still find life to be very strange. I've been living a while now, but I'm still not accustomed to it. Life is strange. I keep waiting to sense more of a fulfillment, more of an essence of completion, reaching for that illusive reality. There's not a beverage or food that gives me a sense of filling me, no relationship that gives me the sense of fullness either. It's the same idea King Solomon wrote about in Proverbs in the Old Testament. It's all vanity, a chasing after the wind.
But it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Mr Rogers had it right, too. They were both men for their times.
I seem to write about my life almost exclusively. My life is my story.

***

A solitary man remembered the woman who had befriended him as he sat quietly alone in his apartment late one night. The way her body was rounded, softly feminine, the way she was womanly in every way. She had long since outgrown the girlish look about her. She was not thin and hourglass-like. Her figure was full of womanhood. She was responsible for herself, gladly mature. There was no trick there, no tease. Her body could have described a pregnancy at some unknown time in the past that was unspoken, even lied about if she'd chosen to lie, some untold time ago she could just as easily failed to complete a delivery, as kept it to herself in front of him; the one surprise only a woman or a girl can hold against the will of any man who cannot contain himself and his appetites. That almost cruel sentence of a sudden lifetime of responsibility falling from the softness of the woman's lap, a possibility of an untold depth of unending reality, untold uncertainty, an idea that that particular man had never fully understood.
It was beyond him.
The way she would sit quietly and listen as he babbled on and on about his lonely life would fascinate her. She would smile now and then, when he said something lighthearted, but mostly she would listen to his sadness. She was always listening, seldom speaking, entertained by the words of this man who didn't seem to want anything but to talk to her, talking as if it were something very personal he was trying to say or do, something abstract, and it was never clear to her what it was that could be his object behind his constant flow of words and memories, his ideas; his continuous generating of thoughts, as though he was trying to accomplish something important, possibly convince her of something.
But what?
He was sad a lot of the time. He had crystal clear imagery of a thousand tragedies, like life had dealt him so much heartache and injustice he could hardly contain the memory of it, while he would speak the ongoing contradiction of gratitude to be alive, inexplicably alive when it would have made more sense that something or other would have taken his life. It was clear his fates had stolen his very breath from the jaws of oblivion, like the thing that had happened to her, that one time her body had revolted against living. God Himself had stolen her demise away from the impossibility of continuing life at least once, and the man seemed to be able to remember that God had stolen his from the clenches of death a thousand times. He seemed to need – even delight – to talk about every one of those times, one after the other, as though his memory made him more alive.
She seemed to understand him, for all he could tell.
The man had odd habits. Reading stories that took only a half an hour to read from start to finish, crocheting like a little girl till late at night, keying his thoughts into his laptop when he ought to have been sleeping, drowsing all the livelong day in his armchair, when he could just as easily have been busy at the same time the rest of the world was.
He revolted at the idea of being like the rest of the world.
But he wanted to remember this feminine person in the late evening, as if it would bring her to him. It was fast becoming late at night. He'd slept all day, and the hour was immaterial now. He was not tired, and cared nothing for the passage of time. He wanted to remember her, the way her hair revolted against all her attempts at parting it. They had that in common. The way she would snatch an irony out of thin air, before he could consider such a thing, and her idea would be past him, out in the open air and gone before he could grasp it. He would remember later, and laugh like a little cheater, cheating her out of the satisfaction that he understood her irony anytime soon enough for her to know he got the joke.
He was slow on the uptake, but honestly laughed so heartily later, when they were together, it might have been reasonable to question whether he laughed or cried.
She wondered at his object, he supposed, but he wondered about it himself, what he might want, what he might hope for, what he might offer to this other singular human being. His humanity was full of suggestions, but he'd rather entertain her at her own preference of activities, smoking and sitting was just fine with him.
Having and being a friend was intensely important to him now. She was not a glamor girl, a wonder child of false impressions, like that callow youth he'd been betrayed by so recently, whose only interest in him had been the overly estimated possibility of his having money to pilfer with false hugs and false kisses. That was a girl. This is a woman we're considering here.
This woman was different than that girl, every bit an adult as anyone, and clearly no child of childish games, to his great relief. They would get together and visit; while visiting is nearly a lost art, by this late date. It's something lost or stolen or destroyed, like a death which the TV is guilty of perpetrating. Television is the cold blooded murderer of the art of the visit between people, of the art of the conversation, a polite way of spending comfortable hours with another person. One can delight in another person by simply keeping them company. It's like reading, except fewer people than ever before can recall how to do it now. It's become almost impossible to find a person to engage in pleasant conversation, even in the retirement home where they find themselves, two younger old people. Even their elders seem to have forgotten how to visit, or have lost their hearing – or have even lost their minds to forgetfulness altogether.
But there they sit, out of doors so she can smoke, like the trendy law demands. She smokes, and he remembers how he used to, from his life-long habit, finally given up for fear of his mortality. His druthers would be different if he were 40, but at 60 he's just as delighted to sit there and talk, without cigarette or coffee, conversing about what they mutually agree to call “world peace,” with a mutual air of amusement at the futility of the expression. It's a pleasant afternoon, as she has a smoke now and then, and he babbles on about his inexhaustible ideas on everything and nothing, like this absurd writing.
It takes a reader to be a writer, and it takes both, now and then, to make up an artist, a conversationalist, a visitor.
If these two younger old people can remember how to visit while she smokes and he fills the air with thoughts, maybe the rains will hold off long enough for them to enjoy themselves over something ever so polite and decent as just being people together.
A man and a woman have found something to enjoy about each other, all the same from the beginning of time.

Flower Child
Chapter 15

In the fall of 1969 I went 500 miles south to a university, two states of the union away from home, help or security, to study music education, and by the next fall, a year later, I totally bought into the idea that I would grow my hair, smoke pot, and drop acid, because Richard Nixon was crazy, and the Vietnam War was way too horribly graphic on the evening news every evening, and because the United States of America is not a free country, it's a capitalist country, selling a lot of fairy tales about liberty and justice for all, while killing coeds on our own college campuses, who didn't like the war in Southeast Asia, from sea to shining sea.
Though I never read anything by Timothy Leary, did not go to Haight-Asbury, Woodstock or Vietnam, I was a product of all of those things in the midst of that day and time. I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. I cast my fate to the wind, and starved on the streets of anyplace I happened to be for an entire decade, by the time my family gave up on me, over my drug addiction, long after my education had become an impossibility, and I wasted the entire decade of my 20's, of the very flower of my own youth itself, for the sake of being a Child of the Flowers, whatever that is.
I have read Richard Alpert, or Ram Das, or whatever he calls himself now, and I read Carlos Castaneda, too. Be Here Now didn't make too much sense to me at all, but I read a lot of the Carlos Castaneda collection in the 70's, and it helped me understand my tripping quite a bit better while I was still doing it. I did see some strange creature on the mountainside when I was tripping the first time, and I guess it was the peyote god, Mescalito, but I don't know how useful that knowledge or experience was, or is in the long run. I enjoyed the Castaneda books when I read them, and wish I still had them to read again, if I ever wanted to. I don't think they're any great literature or anything, but they were amusing books, like Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, was amusing, too. Douglas Adams was another wild and crazy guy, like those other two, but I'm not certain I can adopt any of those guys' techniques in writing anything I've got to say. They wrote their way, I write mine.

Though I can remember countless, wonderful, lovely young ladies I might have continued relationships with over the course of my lifetime, I have lived to the ripe old age of officially a Senior Citizen all alone and totally without a lifetime companion, not even so much as a dog or cat of my own, and can refer to no one to share my personal life and times with, whomsoever that I know I can count on when the lights go out and I get into bed. I get into bed alone, and that's all there is to it. It's OK, too.
The price I've paid in anguish and loneliness, frequently out of my mind with psychosis, mania or depression, locked away to shelter myself from destruction for so much of my lifetime, while I was successful at doing just that very thing in so many multiples of different ways, effecting my ability to think, act, and reason so desperately, I wonder at the idea that I am alive at all by this time, much less living in the lap of luxury in such a nice place, in my advancing years.
I cannot figure how God ever decided to perpetuate my existence, while I've worked so hard at doing away with it, in cooperation with so many awfully hateful, sinister, manipulative people over my entire lifetime.
I think of the many, wonderful people I've known, too, and wonder why they have mostly gone their own way, although I figure they probably just gave up on the fellow who just never quite figured out how to take care of himself. Maybe they just got tired of waiting for me to grow up.
Making a living, continuing a relationship, building a life for myself, and the like, were never things I was good at. I've had people hang up the phone on me in mid-sentence, or block my number from calling them altogether, just because they couldn't bear to listen to the intensity of all the confusion I was muddling through, like a lost soul, and refused to tolerate my calls another minute.
But I'm alive and kicking, surviving all of everything, whether I have anyone to interact with or not. The devil may care who will choose to approach me, but I will continue until God decides that I won't. I've grown weary of making threats and attempts at destroying myself. I'll go on just to spite all the impossible situations that come up in my life, and the devil can care whether I give him the satisfaction of ever loosing hope again. I don't want to die and lose my relationship with God.
This is the beauty of having a word processing machine like the one I'm using to notate all this nonsense. Writing these things this way is as much comfort to me as saying them to someone, even if no one ever has the patience to read this. Frequently, no one has the time or the patience to hear me out anyway, and I'd just as soon do the writing as do the talking.
“I almost cut my hair. It happened just the other day... It kind of increases my paranoia, like looking in my mirror and seeing a Police car.”
Long hair got tiresome to keep up after a while, but even though I keep my hair short now, I absolutely refuse to shave. It's not that my beard is particularly nice looking or anything like that. It's that once you start such a thing as shaving, there's no end to it.
I'm not so afraid of the Police most of the time anymore, because I'm basically a law abiding citizen. I no longer use drugs or alcohol.
Oh, I used to tie the stems of daisy’s together for a necklace or head dress, dandelions, too. I used to sit around with my guitar on my lap, playing the most wonderful music, whether anyone was close enough to hear it or not. I used to tell one girl or another that I'd never forget her, but if my memory did not serve me up her name quite so quickly later, after not seeing her a long time, well, she could just go ahead and be insulted. I'm not going to try to stop anybody as silly as that from hurting her own feelings all by herself over the likes of me. I've been rejected and alone too long to fall for that crap by any woman. Who do they think they're fooling, anyway?
I live for God and for myself, and that's that. He's the one that pull my life out of the fire anyway you want to look at it. I didn't do it myself. It was God's gift.
One time I called Caron on the phone, because she was so young and beautiful when I was so young and crazy. I just wanted to make a little noise in her ear, prattling about anything at all over the phone, simply to know that I'd be on the phone with a pretty girl, and she told me to get off the phone, and to talk to myself, if I needed someone to talk to so badly, but leave her alone to get her beauty rest. She had exams to take the next morning and it was late, at only 11PM when we were all of about 21 years young, and she was on her way to bed, to get her rest, so she'd do as well as possible on her exams. She didn't have time for the likes of me.
I didn't care about such foolishness as an education when there were girls in the world, at that time of my youth, hanging out on the same college campus I was. I was full of that idea.
I think it was Charley, the pusher who got me involved in all those drugs I could not assimilate into my lifestyle without serious health repercussions, who was Caron's drug connection, and he was possibly working under Caron's personal request, trying to overthrow my sanity, which actually did happen, or overthrow my success in life, which also did actually happen, but Caron, Charley and the whole host of other people, who also probably tried to kill me did not succeed can just forget their big plans for my untimely demise. I'm still alive.

I've known no pretty biddy nor shitty kiddy to take up space and pollute my home with noise and trouble in my adulthood. Oh, I've had plenty of dark skin guys and gals walking around noisy day rooms with me, when I had no way of getting out to get any privacy, but now I have a nice, quiet apartment to myself, and people wonder why I don't seek out more company, when I see more company, as more of an annoyance, unless I'd like to be around someone for a brief period of time, like to get a meal, for instance. Even then I have a tendency to want to be left alone, when I have to put up with the dining room.
Just leave me alone to write. Sympathy has no substance anyway.
Yes, I was a flower child. I made love, not war, in one of those hideaway places, known as an asylum, before Ronald Reagan dismantled our sanctuaries, nationwide.
I believe I may have a daughter from making love, not war, but her mother refused to corroborate my suspicions a long time ago, and I don't know anything recent about either mother or daughter, and never really had much recourse to have much of anything to do with either one of them, regardless of my inclinations or my capacities, either one.
I've recently had such a terrible time with a girl working a scam on my resources and my future, over the concept of paternity, I've had to block all access to my assets even from myself, much less some offspring who is making themselves scarce all my life, not keeping me any company whatsoever, over the idea that they're my family. That's not right. There will be no child of mine avoiding me up into my senior, elder, lonely years in life, coming around after I'm dead and gone, and succeed in bilking my estate by passing a DNA test in a medical lab. That's not going to work.
I've left my money to my family, and if someone has something to say about being my family, they darn well better start talking to me about it before I'm dead and gone, or they will certainly come up empty handed, from the statement of my last will and testament, leaving me all solitary and alone all my days. Family isn't just for money. Family is for sticking together.
Family is for company, and that's that.
I'm all sick and tired of that last girl who tried to push and shove her way into my heart and into my inheritance, on all kinds of false pretenses, and then trying to set me up to die on the operating table for her personal financial enrichment and aggrandizement. There will be no more of that. If you think your my son or my daughter, you'd better be proving it now, by forensic means and your personal fidelity of presence in my life, by your own free will, or leave me the heck alone about it. I've lost too many possessions and personal treasures, like gifts of antiques and caring remembrances of people who really were my family and really did love me. I don't need any more nonsense over that idea again. I'm not trusting anyone like that, idly, ever again. Either prove my paternity over your existence, or stay the heck shut up about it.
Yup, make love, not war, that's my motto.
I been up the creek and down the avenue smoking fogs and drinking mad dog 20-20 with the Yo's, the Blood's, and the bro's, and I know what the @#$%&* I'm talking about. I'm not going to starve for nobody no more, never again. Heck with that. That's like hurting myself and expecting someone else to feel the pain. I'm all through with that nonsense. And I know a lot more about a lot of things, to keep myself from getting scammed again, so watch your step, buddy. I'm not in the mood anymore.

Flowers, hippies, peace.
Yup, the United States Government undermined the young people's movement in the 1960's and 1970's so effectively, most of us hippies and flower children can't even remember what we were so worked up about anymore, and that's that. We've plum forgotten, and the government saw to it that we did, too. And the old saying, “save your Dixie Cups, the South shall rise again” is only a silly joke by this late date in US History, too. No state of these United States is ever going to get up enough power to secede from the Union again, no sir. This place is too powerful and too well fortified against any such crap like that, any day of the week, and twice on the weekends.
If you think you're so free around here that you can never be locked up and kept someplace against your will, without legal charges against you and without a trial, you are sadly mistaken. All that little trick takes in this country is two doctor's signatures against the supposition of your sanity, and you're gone, buddy.
I am a hippie, and I am a flower child.
I've played that game & lost it too many times not to know the realities of the deficiencies in the game, of individual civil liberties of the general populous, of the Grand and Glorious United States of America, come hell and high water to the whole concept. We are only as free as we are let alone to be, and don't forget to keep some money behind you to pay your way to keep you free, too. This country is capitalism, and it charges what it charges. Be prepared to pay the price to stay free, or you'll end up in a situation you don't like. Trust me. Been there, done that.
Jack Kennedy died over his freedom of speech, and that's all there is to that. If I ever get murdered for real, it will probably be done to shut me up, just like Khrushchev arranged for Jack Kennedy. There are people in this world that just don't appreciate a guy doing too much talking on some subjects. That old Russian Tank Driver didn't like the way that young punk PT Boat Driver tried to throw his weight around, so he made arrangements to kill the young bastard. At least, that's the way I figure it. Jack was a great guy, but I think that's what happened in Dallas.
I only got free from two doctors' certificates by getting sober and staying sober, and nothing less. I'm grateful to be at my own liberty, and my own leisure, and I'm not going to forget it ever again.

Liberty
Chapter 16

I'm free. There's nothing on the face of this earth I need that I don't have or can't get by some reasonable means. I don't have to punch a time clock, or beg, borrow, or steal. I don't have to say, “Yes, Sir,” to some man who simply likes to get on my nerves when I'm on a job trying to earn a living – and he's the boss. He's the guy that signs the check. I'm not in that position. I'm retired, that's what I am, and living in a really nice retirement community, where I get three good meals a day that I don't have to cook or clean up after, a nice comfortable bed to sleep in – day and night, if I like, with someone else cleaning that place, too, and plenty of people around me to relate to as I please. If I feel friendly toward someone, I'm free to check them out. If I want to stay to myself, I can do that, too.
I know how to stay sober. I know how to stay smoke-free, too. I know that I can choose to drink or smoke anytime I want, but I know the consequences. I know where it leads, and how fast I'd get there. There's no further experimentation necessary. All the results of all the experiments are in. I know the results. It'd get me so sick so fast I'd be lucky to survive long enough to even get back to my apartment, from the next moment after I'd have just one drag or one swig, when one only wets my whistle for a binge so big I'd never survive and would hope to die, and I've already used up all that kind of luck a long time ago.
I'm not interested in testing God that way ever again, not even once – with one cigarette or one drink, or anything else like it, because I know where it leads. One's too many and a thousand's not enough. There I'd be, in a strange city with no idea how to get around and no way to take myself anywhere. I'd be out the door of the retirement community on my nose, because I wouldn't be able to deport myself properly. They'd put me out, and probably have me arrested or committed, quick.
I know that the only thing between me and total disaster is one bad decision, but I know what that decision would be before I try it. I been there, done that. I'm free from all the guess work.
God has finally made me truly a free man.
I know my options and what lies beyond them, not like when I was a youngster. Back then, I was trying things out, just to see what would happen. I was experimenting. Now I don't have to play that game with anything, ever again. Now I know the consequences already.
I've written all this into a book, and now I want to praise God for my liberty. I've cried the blues long enough. I'm a happy man. I'm free. Thank God Almighty I'm free. I'm alive. I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to present that which He has promised against that day.
I didn't let someone cheat me out of my resources this time. I have cooperated with the people who know how to get along better than I do. I didn't get swindled this time. My family understand how I can't see a swindle coming, till it's already got me dead to rights. My family has finally provided for that glaring vulnerability of mine. I'm the most safe and secure I've ever been, even since childhood. I've learned who to trust, who to turn to.
When I was a child, I didn't trust my folks, because dad was so unstable, and I learned rebellion rather than the trust of my elders. I paid dearly for that choice, and as I've noted here in these pages a hundred times, it almost cost me my life repeatedly. It certainly did cost me a lot of money and a lot of trouble to learn what I know now, but now I know. Now I don't have to experiment. I've got the results of all those experiments.
It's not that I'm stupid. I'm far from stupid. It's that I'm too vulnerable to be totally in charge of my own affairs. I didn't learn how to take care of myself effectively when I was growing up, for all the various reasons I've noted down on these pages, and more that I've passed over in the telling. One either learns how to take care of themselves in life, or they don't. I didn't. I could have been a ward of the state for the remainder of my natural lifetime, beginning at the age of thirty. In fact, I got so close to it, sometimes it makes me shiver to remember how close I really got.
I know I had doctors' certificates on me once, at least, and getting sober was the only thing that got me out of that state hospitalization. How many other certificates have I had against me? How many other times did I look down the hallways of the state hospitals at the idea that I could be there with no recourse forever? How many times? I honestly don't know.
Yes, I'm a free man, alright. I live under a roof where I'm paying what's required under family supervision, and I'm getting more benefits in the bargain than I can imagine. That's how free I am. I haven't been so well provided for since I left my mother's house.
I want to be grateful, thankful, and respectful to my God and my family, to the idea that I've finally, really gotten liberated; I've really, finally succeeded; I'm cooperating with the one scheme that works.
All my life I've believed I didn't have anything going for me, that I was the worst sort of person, that I did not deserve to be good to myself and take care of myself, that I was worthless. I wasted my entire youth believing that. I didn't believe in any of my talents or abilities. I didn't believe I had anything worth anything to myself or to society. I was worse than a failure. I was self-destructive. That was the consequence of all the abuses I suffered when I was growing up, in that state of not understanding how to take care of myself.
I was a chronic runaway, starting early in childhood, and never learned how to take care of myself as people learn growing up. It's one of the reasons I'm writing this book, so I can look honestly at the things that happened to me and around me, and know those things for what they were.
I can write. I can compose music. I can find my way around some place new, like this entire new city I live in now. I can read better than a lot of people I've met, here and there in life, in my going out and coming in, and I can crochet like a professional. Besides that, I'm a gentleman, believe it or not. There are ladies who enjoy my company, and I know how to enjoy theirs without stepping on their toes. I'm not worthless by a long shot. My life is not a total disaster. I'm actually kind of a nice guy, if I do say so myself. I've believed the opposite for so long, I'll just say so for good measure. I need to be good to myself for a change. Sure I've got a psychiatric diagnosis. That cat has been out of the bag a long time now. But I don't hurt people, and do my best to be nice to people.
I think that's a pretty good bottom line.

When a person dies they are not completely gone. They go away physically, but they do not go away in every way. A human being is energy, and the only thing energy can do is change form. It cannot be destroyed.
What Jesus did on the cross was make it available for human beings to remain themselves as individuals, after their bodies die. The unforgivable sin is God's destruction of the essence of the individual after the individual destroys their own body by their own hand. The individual can no longer be part of God, like the Evil One is no longer a part of God. This is completely irreversible. It's the reality of this destruction that makes suicide such a tragedy. It's a death within death, and I've learned that that's what I want to avoid.
I have been able to understand this on a deeper level for a long time, so that when my schizophrenia gets me thinking about destroying myself, I have something to keep me going, something to keep me living when I'm thinking self-destruction.
When Mom and Aunt Vi were both of them finally dead and gone, crossed over, their spirits, their energy, got behind my own spirit, my own energy, and we all quit smoking cigarettes together. They never smoked. I always did, even when I had tried and tried to quit, ever since I was young. I never had the power to keep it going, until now. Now, I have succeeded with the help of the greatest love of two mothers: mother and mother's sister.
I needed that kind of spiritual power to get the job done, and almost immediately, after Aunt Vi passed on, I was able to let go of the smoking and become smoke-free, a nonsmoker.
It's spiritual power for spiritual warfare.

Artist
Chapter 17

Disoriented, ill, the young artist awoke on a bare mattress on a bare floor, with no sheet nor blanket to cover him, in a small, cold, olive-drab, cinder-block room. There was no knob on the door inside his cell. He'd risen to his feet easily enough with the strength of his youth, to explore his confined surroundings. He was vaguely dizzy. He could not see anything through the peep-hole in the door. He understood it was there to look in at him from the other side. The door was closed and locked against him. The cell was about six-by-nine, and had no furnishings but the sturdy, plastic-covered mattress on the floor.
He wore olive-drab, with some hospital's name faded into the old shirt and pants he was wearing, but he could not read the inscriptions upside down very well. His eyes were blurred somewhat, for some reason. The clothing was worn out from too many washings, from other people wearing the clothes before he'd had them on. They were hospital standard issue clothing.
He was alone in the cell, though there were sounds from the other side of the door. Someone spoke to two of his friends from the university, which was the last place he could remember being. The sounds came from the other side of the door. How could the people there know his friends' nicknames from university? He thought he'd never said anything about his friends where he was, although he had no idea where he was. But they did speak to his friends. He could hear them, he felt certain of it.
“Mop? R? Are you out there?” He called to them through the door. “They've got me locked down in here, Mop! R! Get them to let me out of here, please, Mop? Please, R? Where are you? Mop? R? Hey! You there! Hey!” He realized he was screaming, and stopped. He was crying.

The young artist went to the far wall of the cell, stepping on the mattress as he went.
There was a window where he could stare out into a cemented courtyard, like a small sized, empty parking lot, where the cops had brought him around from admissions. He looked through a window on the far side of the cell from the door with the peephole. He could look outside where there was another building and a yard. These things encompassing his immediate environment. He could see he was on the ground floor. The other building was two stories high, made of old, distressed red bricks, like the ones outside his heavily-screened, locked window-casing in his cell, that looked as though the brick'd been laid a century or more earlier, as though the building had held countless people captive over a parade of lifetimes before him. The entire place looked as though it was accustomed to tormented people living there for a long time. The windows of the building across the courtyard yielded nothing more to his understanding, than that vague impression, to his frightened curiosity.
He did not understand.
What was this place? It was like no other place he'd ever been to in his young adult life. It was like no place he'd ever even heard of in his thoroughly abused youth. He was scared, and did not know what to do. Occasionally, someone would come to the door of his cell, but they would leave it locked, mostly, unless they'd come to give him another injection. They would come to the other side of the door, and ask him questions through the door. He asked who they were, and they said they were the doctor. He didn't know what to say, so he answered everything best he could. It never occurred to him while he was in that cell that they could have been other patients on the ward making sport of him.
He was very confused.
The young artist could remember fighting a gang of men several times since he'd been there, as they'd wrestled him down to the durable, plastic-covered mattress in the room, and he'd been screaming with terror, getting his pants yanked off him, getting artfully pushed down on the mattress, and artfully jabbed with a needle in his butt, people re-dressing him skillfully with other, dryer pants, pleading with those several people who were in the room with him, holding him down as he struggled against them in his fear and alarm.
“Please leave me alone. Please let me out of here. Please? Please, don't rape me! Please, don't Rape Me!” He was tired after they'd left him laying down there, on the indestructible plastic-covered mattress; surrendering, he fell into a deep sleep; or should we say, he passed out, almost immediately after getting the shot in his butt.
Then, he dreamed.

***

The artist talked to his instrument with his hands, like a living computer talking to its monitor through its keyboard. He was playing his music to his audience; like a sane person talking with his open, forthright heart, speaking through his instrument to his listeners, all happening with a natural quality of a significant intelligence and a significant talent, coupled with plenty of rehearsal under his belt, and plenty of love to share with all who surrounded him in the sumptuous auditorium. That's what it was to hear the mature artist: his love for his music, his love for his instrument, his love for his audience, all were there at his fingertips. He played some of the music he'd written over the many years since the olive-drab.
He'd known nothing of computers when he was young. In those days, only the government had computers, and he knew almost nothing about that when he was young. But his dream was in reference to a much later time in his life, when computers had become what they are now, though he did not understand in his stricken youth.
The artist sat alone on the stage in the spotlights. His instrument, Nature's Cradle, speaking his heart into the spotlights and into the audience, on the stage in some unknown future, in his vivid dream. His instrument spoke of his love, with his heart in his lap, a six-stringed, nylon-stringed, wooden voice embodied the love he spoke, with its solo sound, his love for his audience, his love for his Maker, his love for his girl.
The audience was mostly obscured by the darkness of the auditorium, of the dream. Hushed. Intent. Wondering.
He played masterfully.

Suddenly, the artist felt himself falling the whole way around the world in every direction at once, like the paint that covers the globe commercial on the TV. He could feel his spirit covering the globe, understanding universal secrets he immediately forgot on waking, later. His dreaming was full of understanding and short on memory.

The mature artist spoke his love with his disciplined, gentle hands. Hands skillfully speaking through his six-stringed, nylon-stringed, wooden voice, his Nature's Cradle. The artist could remember instinctively now, knowing another love in that long-ago, ruined youth of his, before all that would have to happen afterward, to heal him, it had all had to happen just the way it did happen, as his present-day performance to an outstanding audience brought a more clear understanding of his life to him as he played his own creations on his solo, classic guitar. It was for this purpose that he'd been kept through all those horrible, awful years.
His Maker had given him a series of dreams to help him to recover his youthful brilliance after his long illness. His breakdown was a severe experience, and it repeated itself several times in his youth, equaled by the severity of many of his terrible troubles when he was young. His Maker had given the artist the heart of his true love, to help him understand the true nature of human love, as well as the true nature of the deeper love of God Himself. His Maker had given him so many beautiful gifts over the years since the olive-drab, over his time of becoming.
Playing on this stage, to this audience, felt to the artist like the ultimate fulfillment of his purpose for existing, his redemption. He was performing his own music to an adoring audience. For this purpose was he kept.

The girl had spoken her heart to him long ago, a little while before the olive-drab cell with the olive-drab clothing he had had to wear. She had spoken with her strong, kind fingers, coursing up and down her ivory keyboard, as he turned the pages of her intricate master scores, her university lessons, as she coursed through her talented, intelligent, gloriously beautiful youth, daily rehearsing, speaking her love to his heart through her piano. She spoke of her love in her frank innocence, in their shattered relationship, speaking so especially to his own young heart, playing her piano for him, practicing with all the love of the centuries encapsulated into one single moment of music after another, sparking the romance of his lifetime. He could remember loving in that way, until his health had failed him, and he knew he had to let her go. His illness would not have been fair to her. He had to set her free.
He was on stage now, in his dream, a lifetime later, crying through his guitar, without the necessity of tears in his eyes, letting the instrument weep for him. It was his heart and his guitar that cried. He'd been through all the tragic memories long enough that he could allow the instrument to speak his emotions for him now. His instrument knew what he wanted to say. He'd worked with the composition of his pieces to speak the depths of his sadness in his aging heart. He'd long-since known that he'd lost her.
His audience would not understand his years in the state hospital. They would not understand the loss of his one, true love. Not in words they would not understand, but his instrument could say it all for him in his art, and the world would understand that.
There were no words to be sung. He'd long ago stopped trying to sing, his voice ruined from strong smoke over so many years, a lifetime of smoke. Nature's Cradle did the singing. She was his first love, his cradled, singing guitar, whom he'd loved long before he'd met the girl.

It wasn't that he knew nothing of the girl after he'd set her free. She'd married a friend of her brother's, from the Navy, after she'd graduated from university, where she and the artist had been in love in their impressionable youth. She gave that sailor, who became her husband, children of their own. She could not come back to the artist. She could not come back. He understood. Though they'd love each other a lifetime, they were forever separated, because of his illness, and because of the family she mothered elsewhere. She was not lost to him just as surely as she was lost to him. His heart remembered how it felt to love her. That love was the purpose of knowing her in the first place. He could never loose that memory. His love was immortalized. His guitar could always speak of her to his audiences.
When he finished his concert, his hip aching from an old wound, his audience rose to their feet with warm applause. His heart was full of love, full of a recovery his audience could not understand in concrete terms. All he could offer was the ethereal terms of the music. But that much he could do with all mastery.

Cover graphics by Fiona Johnson and http://www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Texte: George S Geisinger
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 22.04.2012

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