The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity Read online

  I said that maybe the last section of my generational collage should be a piece by her about why she hated my stories. I was looking for something to tie the whole thing together and that seemed like a brainstorm. She didn’t say anything.

  She gradually stopped seething but still wasn’t much interested in hearing about what had happened in jail. We’d be at Gary and Cheryl’s with ten hours of driving. They loved my stories and I loved theirs. I could hold out that long.

  Between Pittsburgh and West Branch, Iowa, we were stopped three more times by cops. It was like someone was trying to give me more material. One guy was nice enough. He just wanted to tell me a tail-light was out. In Indiana we were stopped for a “routine check.” Since we didn’t have that “holding” look in our eyes, the trooper let us go after a quick once-over. In Illinois the rear light and the fact that my plates were held on by wire instead of bolts cost us $25. And finally we were there.

  West Branch, Iowa. Birthplace of Herbert Hoover. We arrived about 2:00 A.M. We had called ahead from Illinois to tell them we’d be showing up that night. Gary was waiting up for us and showed us to our room, where we collapsed for a solid ten-hour sleep.

  The next day was spent catching up on each other’s lives and talking about our coming adventures. Gary had just gotten a Guggenheim fellowship to finish his third novel. They were going to live in Morocco for a year. We played a lot of chess and talked about how strange life was getting and how something had to give sooner or later. What was going to happen next was anyone’s guess. We had to find all the people we cared about and make a tribe of some sort and all take care of each other. We needed some answers and pretty quick. Gary was looking in his dreams and hoped to find some clues from being in Morocco. I’d check out B.C. We’d stay in touch.

  Gary and Cheryl asked if I would preside over some sort of christening ceremony for their son, my namesake, Mark.

  The next day was a perfect Iowa day. Mid-June, seventy-two degrees, blue sky forever, slight breeze, fields of young corn green forever.

  Welcome to Earth, Mark Jackson. Welcome to Mark, Earth. Just one or the other would be a mistake. I figured fifty-fifty was probably the best way to play it.

  We got a lot of nice things together—flowers, incense, candles, and an excellent bottle of white wine my parents had given me for graduation the year before. They had given me a red too, but I was saving that for when we found land. We had picked out some Bach organ music for background.

  Gary set up his tape recorder to capture the whole thing. He had the labor and delivery on tape too, and was constantly writing letters to Mark and putting them away in a special place.

  I was wearing a shirt that Virge had made for me out of linen with lots of different weaves, the closest thing to vestments I could come up with. We all sat in a circle, Gary and Cheryl holding Mark, some friends of theirs, Virge and I, all holding hands. We lit the incense and candles, threw the flowers around a bit. Anyone could say whatever they wanted, anything they thought would be appropriate to welcome young Mark to Earth. I remember Gary saying something about how we were silly enough to try to live our lives in peace and that he hoped Mark would join us when he grew up. I told him not to take anything anyone told him too seriously, since everyone started off as helpless little babies just like he was and everything they learned they learned from people who had been helpless little babies themselves. We all told him that for no particular reason we were very dedicated to him and that one way or another there were a lot of people who would do almost anything they could for him. I told Mark that if there was a God petty enough to hold the irregularities of our little ceremony against him, then He no doubt ran a petty heaven that Mark wouldn’t want any part of anyway. We talked some about what a strange historical time he happened to be born in. I tried to explain a little about my being out on bail. We all drank wine and sprinkled some on his head as we passed him around the circle, kissing him gently on his soft spot.

  Two years earlier, Gary and Cheryl had asked if I could legally marry them. That they saw me as their pastor probably had a lot to do with why I didn’t go to seminary. I’ve always been a fan of priesthood of the laity and I thought maybe seminary would somehow spoil whatever fragile magic I had that made them and a few other people look at me that way. I didn’t want to trade the substance for the badge, and besides, most seminary programs I check out seemed candy-ass one way or the other.

  The day after our ceremony for Mark, I had to go back to Pennsylvania for a hearing on the legality of the search and arrest. My lawyer figured we could get the case thrown out in a hurry, but the cops never showed. Maybe we could get another hearing in a week, maybe not. I couldn’t stick around that long, so we’d just have to wait till the trial, which was set for some time in September.

  All that traveling, all that hassling for nothing, was a royal pain in the ass, but somehow I didn’t mind. This foolishness was telling me I had made a wise decision: to get away from all that shit.

  When I got back to West Branch, Virginia was barely able to say hello. She was rigid, almost holding her breath, one step away from catatonic. I had seen her in this state a few times before and I saw it a few times later, but it wasn’t something you could ever get used to.

  It was like walking in and finding someone crumpled up on the floor. “What is it? What’s wrong? Say something, please.”

  But she couldn’t say anything. She’d just sit like that, maybe nodding or shaking her head slightly. I’d go on frantically, “Is it this? Is it that?” Trying everything till I hit on something that would make her eyes a little brighter, her breath a little deeper. It was like charades. The warmer I got the more she loosened up, until I’d finally said what was on her mind. Then she’d gradually regain her ability to speak and go on as if nothing strange had happened.

  What she wanted this time was to turn around, to head back to Boston or New York, get an apartment, and find a job. In a way I envied her. Turning around didn’t seem like an option for me. If it was for her maybe she should do it. I knew what was back there and it was just too much nothing. There just wasn’t enough hope back there. In my mind those bridges were burned and I had to keep moving till I found something that would either save me or kill me. I didn’t even care all that much which. I just couldn’t take any more limbo.

  BOSTON. My job had been an interesting one. In fact you’d have to say it was unique. How many full-bearded, hair halfway down their backs, B.A. in religion, pacifist chiefs of police do you know? I was chief of a twenty-man detachment of special state police that provided the security for Boston State Hospital.

  How did this come to pass? I had filed an application with my draft board to be considered a conscientious objector. I knew there was a good chance of their refusing my application, but just in case they accepted it, I wanted to have an acceptable alternative-service job going. That way they wouldn’t send me to East Jesus, Nebraska, to empty bed pans and might even give me credit for the time I put in prior to their granting me my status.

  A draft counselor at the Unitarian Service Committee told me about a Dr. Bliss who ran the adolescent unit at Boston State and had hired C.O.s before. I figured teaching English or something to screwed-up kids wouldn’t be a bad way to spend two years and set up an appointment to talk with Dr. Bliss.

  Dr. Bliss is a big man who smokes big cigars and smiles most of the time. It isn’t a nervous smile like so many full-time smilers have, but still it made me wonder what the hell he thought was so funny. Part of what he thought was so funny was C.O.s. He wasn’t a pacifist himself, which I think was the first thing he said to me. His thing about C.O.s was a loving paternalism that flirted with sadism. In his eyes C.O.s were sweet, well-intentioned, upper-middle-class kids who had been overprotected and were in need of a touch of real work and real life, with which he was more than willing to provide them.

  After we had been talking and smiling for fifteen minutes or so he appeared to have a brainstorm. I say appeared
because I’m pretty sure he had it planned from before he even met me, it was so much up his alley. His brainstorm, his prescription for my pacifism, was that I take on the job of reforming and administering the security force of the hospital.

  “That would make you a chief of police.” A still bigger smile.

  “It sounds like the sort of opportunity I’m not likely to be offered again.”

  “Then you’d consider it?”

  “Ya. I don’t think I could ever forgive myself for saying no.”

  So we went over to discuss it with Dr. Leen, the assistant superintendent of the place. The whole security mess had just been taken out of the steward’s office and dumped in his lap. He was dying to have someone to deal with it. So I was hired. A week later, I started my career as chief of police.

  I was a very good chief of police. For starters, I cut crime. And I set up all sorts of reporting and filing systems so I could prove exactly how much I cut crime.

  Special state police are a lot like special children. There were very few in the group who could have been regular state police and those who could have been were mostly young, working their way through college, or taking a second job they could sleep through. Had they been capable of being real state cops, they would have been fools not to. At Boston State, $130 a week was the top salary they could get and that was after five years. They spent a lot of their time on the job drinking coffee, bitching about being handcuffed by the Supreme Court, grousing about not being respected, avoiding any sort of work, and watching television. Being a security man at a state hospital wasn’t exactly what you’d call a prestige job. They were looked down upon by just about everyone else working at the hospital. They didn’t get to carry guns. They didn’t even have uniforms before I got there. The hospital was plagued with breaking and entering, theft, muggings, the occasional rape, vandalism, and so on. What I was supposed to do was anything that would make these guys an effective security force.

  What I did was mostly showmanship. I’d give the heads of different units of the hospital a call and tell them that I’d like to address their next staff meeting on security. I’d talk about what they could do to help make our job easier, and what things I was doing to improve security. It took them by surprise. Lots of people working at the hospital didn’t even know there was a security force. Whenever there was a crime of some sort I always showed up with a Polaroid camera and took copious notes from anyone who was there. Everyone was impressed. I created the impression of motion and that was as good as the real thing. People became aware that there was a security system and that it was being reformed and run by this dynamic, earnest young man. No one had ever gotten a memo from security before. Now everyone got them all the time.

  I got my men uniforms, a shiny new office, standardized procedures for handling and reporting incidents. I dressed up the patrol cars with flashy decals.

  All my previous jobs had been manual labor of one sort or another. Landscaping, loading trucks, pumping gas, shell fishing, marine maintenance, things you couldn’t really say much about one way or the other. But this was an adult-type job with adults under my charge and all manner of heavy social issues every day.

  But the hospital was a depressing place to work. I got to know a lot of the doctors and very few seemed to think the hospital was doing the patients any good. It was just a dumping ground for human garbage. Regular hospitals are places you go to get well. A state mental hospital is where you’re put if you don’t get well.

  Although I never took any psychology courses at Swarthmore, I had read a lot of psychology and was very much interested in it. In a way, being a religion major was a way to be a psych major without all the boring stuff about rats and statistics. Most of my friends were psych majors one way or another. We were all fascinated by psychological stuff, which is how many of us came to be called “heads.”

  My job didn’t involve working directly with patients, but I thought about them a lot. I saw them as victims of our fucked-up, materialistic, impersonal, hectic, overmechanized, dehumanizing society. There wasn’t much mystery about why these people were so screwed up. The mystery was why everyone else wasn’t nuts too. But somehow I never figured it could ever happen to me, that I could some day be shuffling around in slippers and pajamas, bumming cigarettes and mumbling to myself. There were too many people who loved me, who would never commit me to an institution, whose love would keep me from getting that spaced out.

  Another theory I had about the patients was that they had taken their very justified frustration and rage and turned it inward, thinking that it was they who were screwy instead of their society. My clear vision of what was wrong would keep me out of places like Boston State.

  If all else failed my vanity would pull me through. I could never degrade myself that much. Maybe being crazy was being honest or right or enlightened even, but I could never stand to have people look at me the way they look at mental patients.

  Szasz, Laing, and Jung were my favorites at this point. These people weren’t really sick (Szasz). If they were acting a little strange it was a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable society (Laing). If they wanted to do something about it their best bet was a Jungian journey back to their individual and cultural roots. Most of the doctors at Boston State seemed to have similar notions.

  Some of my special state police hated my guts so much they probably would have killed me if they’d thought they could get away with it. Most of them were sullen, devious, and small-minded. It was a bitch to get any work out of them, though all I ever asked was that they go out now and then and walk or drive around a little. Their union demanded my resignation because my job hadn’t been properly posted. Most of them had seniority so there wasn’t much I could threaten them with. But even if I had been able to fire them, had been able to offer decent salaries and attract better people, what would I have accomplished? Giving Boston State Hospital a crackerjack security force didn’t seem like much in the face of the corruption and collapse of Western civilization. Some of my friends thought what I was doing was more harmful than good. I was humanizing and giving life to institutions that had to be utterly destroyed before the world could be set right.

  But more than hassles with my men or ambivalence about what I was trying to do, the city—the noise, the cars, the rush-rush of unhappy, unfriendly people—was getting to me.

  The draft board had denied my application for C.O. status and ordered me to take my physical. I went to it so hyped and furious about the war and everything else that I saw everyone there, including others taking the physical who for a moment talked lightly or smiled, as mass murderers. I wasn’t terribly cooperative. Things got jumbled. I was given a psychiatric 4F, without even the usual letter from a shrink. My friends said I should get an Academy Award for my act. I knew it wasn’t an act and thought some about what that might mean, but I was so glad to have beaten the draft that I didn’t worry about it much. My victory also meant I could quit my job whenever I felt like it.

  Virginia had gone back to Swarthmore about a month after I became chief of police. She came up for weekends now and then, but most of the time I was lonely and horny. I was living in a run-down house with Vincent, a couple of other Swarthmore people, and assorted passers-through. Everyone I lived with, everyone I saw on the street, everyone everywhere seemed depressed. People didn’t like what they were doing or have any idea about what they should do next. It was all just killing time till the sun went out.

  Things were especially bad on the subways. There I was more and more desperately unhappy and self-conscious, sure the people could see how upset I was. Everyone except the occasional drunk was so lifeless. I started feeling that anyone who wasn’t as upset as I was by the subways was guilty of not paying attention.

  Sometimes I thought these strangers felt contempt for me, but more often I imagined their compassion. “You’re right, fella, but what can we do about it.” Contempt, compassion didn’t make any difference. There was always the loneliness a
nd the impossibility of doing anything about it.

  I talked to my father about these feelings and he said that no one was watching that closely.

  “I am. I do. Anyway, that doesn’t help, that’s the problem. Maybe if people paid more attention the subways wouldn’t have gotten that way.”

  August September October November. More and more miserable, shakier and shakier, but still a damn good chief of police. Drinking more, not sleeping well, but there were so many good reasons to be upset that I saw my state of mind as more an asset than something to worry about.

  Part of what I was doing was justifying what I had already made up my mind to do: split, chuck the whole city nine-to-five reformer bit and try to find some real answers to the nightmare life our society had become.

  Another thing I was doing was confusing disability with virtue. It was easy to do since all the things that were disabling me were bad things. The frantic city pace, rush-hour traffic, callous institutions, war, racism, and greed were all from the same pot of stew. If enough people became disabled by it instead of just intellectually opposed to it, the whole mess would come to a grinding halt.

  And it seemed to be happening. The gyre was widening. The center wouldn’t hold. More and more blown minds more and more blown out all the time. With all our preconceptions blown away we would be forced to confront the full horror of what was going on.

  Today a slight inkling that all is not as it should be. Tomorrow a crippling pain in the gut. Today I can’t take rush-hour traffic. Tomorrow there’ll be no more war. All the generals and fat-cat fascists will be home puking their guts out.

  December rolled around. I had done everything I could think of to improve security within the present administrative and budgetary setup. I submitted a report on all I had done, with a list of proposals and options for future organization, and quit, stating that I had completed the job I was hired to do.