The Stoned Apocalypse (20 page)

When the ward opened, I was put on the daytime schedule. Yet, the whole idea of schedule bothered me, for my image of a blowout center was that the staff members would more or less live-in, timing their hours with the needs of the patients. At the Berkeley house, we had had many discussions about breaking down the artificially constructed chronology on the ward. As it stood, three times a day, no matter what else was happening, an entirely new shift walked in at eight-hour intervals. Naturally, after a while, the people on the ward ceased paying attention to their inner flow and adjusted to the demands of the clock. Shift-change time. Feeding time. Recreation time. Play therapy time. And so on.

This is, after all, the essential sickness of the civilization, this trifling with schedules while life goes begging. We concern ourselves with the superficial, with the style, with the details, with the mere appearance of things, and miss the fact of being. If a person can hypnotize himself with some compulsive ritual which he calls his “daily routine,” then he can excuse himself for all the things he does not perceive. Is this not the core of the Eichmann mentality, this ability to deal with life as though it were a series of reports on paper, and be purposively blind to the reality which these symbols supposedly represent. Jumping, as I always do, to the logical conclusion of any activity, I began accusing the staff of having a Nazi mentality, and already, in those early days, they began to think I was crazy.

There was not a person there who seemed ready to devote more than the compulsory eight hours out of every day. Such was my need and enthusiasm, and such was the real desire on the part of many of the people to do the best they could, that I didn’t take the precaution of protecting my vulnerabilities. The notion of living-in was picked up by Dan Winters, an executive of Esalen. Dan had, myth told it, flipped out some time earlier, and spent a long time in seclusion in Big Sur, talking to whales off the coast. He was now billed as Esalen’s official schizophrenic, or to put it in their own terminology, “a real heavy.” He arrived a week after the ward opened, slept there one night, and spent the next day screaming at Al for what a poor job he was supposedly doing. He disappeared that afternoon and never returned. I asked Bill, the chief ward psychologist, what the story was. “Dan split,” he said. “He said there wasn’t enough action for him here.” I was somewhat taken aback to hear the ward spoken of in terms of a gambling casino, but such was the way of it.

It became impossible to drive all the way in from Berkeley with Al every day because of our conflicting schedules. I wasn’t ready to be the first person to move in on the ward; my mind was shaky enough as it was. At this point, a beautiful, tall, long-haired and bearded cat came up to me, a man by the name of Joel. And then things began to change. Joel said I could crash at his pad until my money came through, and then I might find a place in town.

Joel spoke little. He was a veteran of several hundred acid trips; he was so much on top of the drug and his own scene that he headed the East Bay Drug Rescue Center. This was one of the services offered by the city’s underground head community, and involved being on call twenty-four hours a day to rescue people from bad trips. He described his work as the Giggle Patrol. “I go into a place where everyone is freaking out, and get everybody to giggling and then, when the vibes are up again, I ask what the trouble was.” Single-handedly, without education or training, he provided the most effective, rational, intelligent, and humane approach to the psychology of drug use that I had ever seen.

Joel and I soon came to form the hub of the radical elements on the ward. Al was sympathetic, but still hung up on his psychiatrist image. Also, he had a legal responsibility which kept him tied down. Harish was hip, but had his detachment bit going, which is to say, whenever it came down to really getting involved with another person’s pain, he claimed cosmic indifference and removed himself. And most everyone else on the staff was hanging in, waiting for the scene to develop in one direction or another.

Develop it did. We got the ward set up, but with a few surprises. The head nurse, Donna, was presented to us by the hospital administration. The hospital wanted the ward to succeed because of the prestige of having such a huge grant, but they were extremely suspicious and wanted to keep their hand in. Donna was the middle finger of that hand, pointed straight up.

From the first, things went badly. We were to have had an open-door policy. That is to say, since all the patients were volunteers, theoretically they should be able to come and go as they pleased. If they split, they would just be returned to the wards they came from. But more importantly, having the doors open would give the patients a sense of humanity which is removed when they are locked in like prisoners. Also, it would remove from the staff the onerous task of being in charge of keys, and give the place a true sense of democratic equality. It was, in fact, the sine qua non for the success of a blowout center.

But the hospital said no. And at our first general meeting on the ward — we had two each day, with both staff and patients supposedly attending — the issue was discussed. The patients came in hopefully. For the first time in years many of them had a glimmering hope that their lives could be different. Here were people who, they were told, would not lock them up, shoot them up with massive doses of deadening dope, think they were crazy, or scream at them. And the symbolic proof of this was to be the open door. The open door! The simple freedom to step outside the confines of the building and breathe fresh air whenever one wanted! Such a simple thing, and so glorious!

And at the first meeting, the hope was squashed. They had come with a backlog of suspicion, for from the viewpoint of the mental inmate, society at large is brutal, deceptive, unperceptive, and unfeeling. It was vital, therefore, not to give fuel to that suspicion. And yet, at that very first crucial moment, Richard walked in and threw gallons of gasoline on the flames. There was much hemming and hawing and sidestepping, but finally one of the patients yelled, “Will the door be open or not?”

There was a long pause and then Richard said, “I’m sorry, but you will continue to be locked in.”

All of the patients but three walked out of the meeting. Those who remained were Nick, a fifty-five-year-old professional psychotic who had been drifting up and down the insane asylum circuit for years, following the sun from Mendocino to Phoenix; Loren, a brilliant young paranoid with a cutting edge of cynicism; and Bruce, a hopeless ass-kisser. The staff was furious, and when the patients left, we began to vent our anger. Richard turned up his palms. “What can I do?” he said.

Marvin rose to his feet. “Anyway, it would interfere with the research to have them coming and going as they pleased. Maybe, once we have the schedule down pat, we can give them some more freedom.”

Someone asked, “And when may that be, Marvin?” He smiled. “We’ll just have to wait and see.” Alice, usually a very mild-manned woman, spoke up. “But what about these people we’re supposed to be helping? They need help now. What will the research tell us that we don’t already know?”

“Well,” said Richard, “that all may be true, but the reality is that the doors will stay locked. And that’s the way it is.”

And indeed, that was the way it was.

Interestingly, since my money hadn’t come through yet, I was still officially on a volunteer basis as far as the record was concerned, and as a volunteer, I wasn’t allowed to have a key either. From the first, I was on a par with the patients in having to ask permission to be let out each time I wanted to take a walk or go to the snack bar. This put me in a mind-bending place. For one moment I would be a staff member, sitting in the psychologist’s office rapping with the brass, and the next I would have to go begging to be let out. There was one difference, however. When the patients asked to be “given grounds,” they were often refused, but I was always let out. Very early I found myself formulating the thought, “What if I weren’t so sure that I would be let out each time? What would it be like to be locked in here?” And from that moment, I began to change my viewpoint, I began to understand what it is like to be a patient in a mental hospital, to have one’s liberties, one by one, stripped away, to be treated like an inferior human being. It was a split in perception that would be healed only when I had gone completely around the bend.

I busied myself with my work, thinking that the other problems were beyond my control, foolishly thinking that the central issue of freedom could, somehow, be swept under the rug. At times Al and I would rap about the ward, and get all liquored up on our visions of what it could be like. But he was as helpless in his way as I was in mine. Or Joel and I would get stoned and dream up visions of starting a Schizophrenic Liberation Front. Joel was very heavily into the revolutionary currents around the Bay Area. Like all true revolutionaries, he didn’t belong to any group. He just did the good work wherever he found it needed to be done. From his experience in hospitals, I began to get some idea of what the scene was in the psychotic underground, and his reports were later corroborated by my own experiences.

For example, as with any subculture, the total society was mirrored. There were the dropouts like Nick who wandered from asylum to asylum. He would sit for hours, rolling cigarettes, not saying a word. And every once in a while he would look up and say, to no one in particular, “Fuck them, they ain’t getting any from me.” At first I didn’t understand him, but when I realized that most of the people who worked on the wards were psychic vampires, sucking energy from the patients, I came to appreciate his refusal to get involved in any of the actually insane games played by so-called sane society. He never participated in psychodrama or music therapy or any of the other inane games provided for the inmates by people who would shit purple turds if they ever got the slightest flash on what it really is to be mad.

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

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

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

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

SMASH. Another pane of glass.

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

“Sure,” I said.

SMASH. Another window.

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

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

SMASH.

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

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

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

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

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

SMASH. And he went on breaking windows.

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

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

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

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

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

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