IN THE ROOM

We lie awake at night and discuss the delusions, or truth that we are secret terminator robots controlled by some vast conspiracy of idiots and they are holding us hostage because the wiring has gone off.

The crazier he sounds the more I recognize my self in his delusions.   I’ve been that terminator on the fritz.

And I wonder at about a more poetic time when people thought they were Napoleon.  How great it would be to think you were secretly the emperor of France.  I mean it beats Shwazanegger by a mile.

John almost never goes to group.

He arrived as the teetering mute who kept shitting himself.  It’s a common side effect of withdrawl.  One of the more embarrassing things you can tell someone is that they’ve shat themselves, but in a closed ward full of rehabs and mental patients, no one is looking out for his feelings they just start yelling…

“Holy shit, you are covered in shit!”

The male nurse Montego comes and takes him off to shower and change again.  He won’t speak to anyone for days just mutter under his breath and draw complex geometrical studies.  He seems to have some sort of engineering back ground.  I’m drawing my complex webs of clues and he leaves me little schematic drawings of arches and towers  with equations in the margins all done on napkins and scrap paper.

I’m convinced he is a plant.  In on the Joke.  Ready to help rebuild the world in incase of plague or fire, but I can’t really tell if I’m right.  This guy is fabulously out of it and shitting yourself is a pretty big commitment to a role… who needs dialogue with that kind of performance?

After a couple of days he becomes more coherent and continent and they try to drag him to group and get him to open up, but nothing comes out of him but a stream of complaints and threats.

He says, “I don’t want to be here.  Mandingo threw me in the shower.  Mandingo stripped me down.  I don’t want Mandingo to touch me anymore! Mandingo tried to rape me.”

This is strange, but also hysterical.  I can even see Montego fighting back a smile.  For the next few days till he leaves the answer to every question is:

“Mandingo tried to rape me.  I don’t want to take a shower.
“Yes,” everyone says.  “But you stink.”

The Sly fox sends Mos Def off with words of advice:  “Say hello to your mother” is his joke.  It is from when Mark Wahlberg said hello to a chicken and and egg  on Saturday Night Live and says hey “say hello to your mother” and reminds Nos of the Paul Simon song  borne of a soup from a Chinese Restaurant:  The mother and child reunion.  And didn’t he call her chicken and he was the weasel chasing her about the barn, or bedroom.  Oh to be young and free and dumb.

On the ward they encourage you to attend daily work groups in the common room.  These appear to be more for controlling the group than doing any actual real therapy, but sometimes the conversations allow patients to do some hard work with each other… And probably this group dynamic is what makes behavorial psychologist cream their pants, but it leads to a sort of resentment among some of the more adept and empathetic patients.

Jeffey is spending hours a day with Michelle ma Belle.  No one knows what’s wrong with her.  She is withdrawn and morbidly depressed.  She cries at the drop of a dime.  She is terrified of most of the patients and staff…. particularly the men.  I begin to think she was molested.  I think she is Hatian or West African because she speaks French with me when I am with Jeffey… when I am alone she won’t talk to me.  Jeffey has become her on call therapist and alone at night in the room he is given to ranting about why isn’t he paid by the ward since he is doing the doctor’s and nurse’s work for them when It comes to Michelle Ma Belle.  He uses this feeling of entitlment as a excuse to blow off the suggested… but you are clearly scored on how you participate in groups… it is probably quite hard to get off the ward without doing the gourp work.  But Jeffey has had enough and who can blame him.

Todays group is about sound and healing and is done by one of those reiki types.  She is about four hundred pounds – morbidly obese and the first thought in my mind is “musician heal thyself.”

She plays some new age music whose sound scapes are so clearly inspired by late betles and brian Wilson with a soupcon of Eno, but no one wanted to pay for the rights to the originals and instead we now have pale, derivative imitations and the enormous woman goes about ringing gongs and tuning forks and putting the vibrations to you.  The real sounds are fairly amazing if you can get past the New Age Muzak and then she does Rieki on me and I vibrate like Linda Blair possessed.

I freak out Ronald with his Christianity and his OCD

Then we go have lunch.

A frank discuassion of the state of mental healthcare in the U.S.  Solutions sought.  All solutions, not just solutions of chemicals, but solutions of word, deed, experience and change.

Avoide the Red hooks… are these distractions or sacrafices?  Or just the area of Brooklyn known as Red Hook.  Is it the police? Or theAliens.

Burnt offerings and the temple mount.  Is this a good idea?

Tell the Hemmingwayesque story of Cash and the 99 bottles of beer on the wall.  All of them lost but for the ones Most Def took as brackets to hold his negotiation with nothing.  Bad form and areal no no, but all the reast lost to a theif only the stolen remain.  THe key to the bank (Banks Key is Becks in bippty boppty talk)  The case of Canada one could drink a case of and thanks to three xxx it looks like a kaws dead Mingus 3 smiley Alien.  Prince to Joni.  Purple to blue queen.  Heart is given not sold.

Benzo is the new tag for Leopold Bloomberg.  Homer.  Eternal return.  What if happy ending is just a cocktail?  Or is it water washing me down?  I think I know but I haven’t written it down yet.3LEVATOR UP>

The two faced outer gouter smiles and cries alternatively while Mr. Delicious  waits for  lunch time.  There is nothing to do but eat and figure out a means of escape, The Peruvian is marching the halls again sporting a face of rage.  I think he’s going to flip out and kill us all.  He is marching and marching like a soldier around the ward.  Is he a guard for Sophie, or an assassin?  Nothing better to do and growing pig gut sends Mr. Delicious marching right behind the Peruvian.  He catches up and marches past and for a brief second the severe face of the Peruvian melts into a smile.  Victory deosn’t smell of Napalm, but rather appears in the form of a smile.

The Peruvian speaks of the bands he played drums in and all the little rock bands that were on the scene back in his glory days.  He has a list he is composing of all the bands from the Peruvian scene.  I don’t know what he is talking about, but the bands have faboulous spansish names.  The Incas, the Aztecs, The Bastardos, El Submarinos, etc.

And when  the drugs come it like lowering the scope on a diving submarine… down down down and the voices cant get through the foggy water hidden in alps and dessert pyramids.  He can see all possible moves on the chess board of his delusion.  He dies, she dies, everybody dies in an elaborate auto de fe like Hamlet meats the Grand Inquisitor… or there is the so called Happy Ending in which the Ice Man Cometh… or maybe it’s just happy cause no one got hurt but that doesn’t seem real happy.  Rather I like the circus tent glass house concert… the charity ball fundraiser concert with Bowie and Bob and Neil and maybe Bruce.  Paid the cost to be the boss.  Raise the red tent.  No blood but wine, no torn body but bread and you know dancing.

Like any good sci fi there are aliens.  In this case it is all based off a twilight zone… to serve man is a cook book.  The invention of money has to do with the deal made by the illuminati with the three eyed pyrimid shaped aliens.  Earth feeds its poor to the aliens and they spare us the species.  We become sort of sacred cows for the Aliens.  But the aliens like the taste like the Japanese love whale blubber and humans are a great delicacy….plus the aliens shit gold after eating us!  A hard bargain and a hard rain… the money hides in the alps.  A deal struck in Basel with the Devil.  Hitler yes, but also blip blip bloop the Alien embassador to Earth.  He hides in plain sight as David Bowie, or maybe a Japaneses school girl?  A K pop idol?  A moony?

Solvents and secret potions.  Awakening the multiple truth in the mind…. Sophie is and isn’t Male and Female, Korean, or Swiss, Red or Blue.  It is a digital coding of the uneverse into choices 0 and 1 being all there need be in its infinite combinations.  Metampsychosis and Joyce blood line and Royal line and one made in the sand define a triangle name a circle.
Ace Hotel is one node All ends here or some such hotel.  The hotel as metaphor for home away from home and the VonBraun CIA space station is known by the key holders as The Hotel

Hotel Romeo Fox Trot shall we dance Wagner Max Wagner  Jew Eat?  I destinctly heard her…  Not did you eat, but Jew eat?

Body of Christ Body of Christ In Imago Speramus

Smell of Napalm = Smell Gasoline = Victory

As falls Victoria, so falls Victoria Falls

Red Queen, Blue Queen, White Queen, Black Queen

Let X =X=x=x, etc.

A Good Place to Die one, all, and no one

Five easy pieces.

We can’t drink so we go to the bar in the hall to be on point.   When she was a young Greenwich princess,Eileen trained as a dancer and was recruited by Jofferey and American Dance company  if you like. One time she got into an elevator in Rockefellor center and woman rode all the way up while rudely staring at her up and down and down and up.  Kathleen was afraid she was some sort of lesbian masher.  But when Eileen got our of the car the woman stopped her and said “I’m Eileen.”

and She said, “I”m Eileen too.”

“Yes but I’m Eileen Ford and I run a modeling agency.”

“I’m a dancer,” she said and daddy wouldn’t let her model because it wasn’t proper.  Mr. Delicious is uncertain he believes in any of this.  It’s a psych ward after all.  Unreliable narration is the rule but still she got a certain class about her and his job is not to question the script but to continue the improv.

Position 1 2 3 pliet.

She can’t shit.

Salt water cocktail didn’t work but still on point on the the bar and still filled with a fragile beauty. Mr. Delicious is convinced she is an actress.  In fact he is convinced she is Meryl Streep.  Meryl Streep in a deep method roll.  The roll of a lifetime: Eileen the patient.  It’s so secret they had to trap Mr. Delicious in the cuckoo bin just so he could get his first big roll acting with Meryl Streep.  Everyone is in the cast and he can Recall Sophie saying Imagine all you see is happening again in another room with slightly better looking more famous people.  The whole thing is an undercover Prank show in its fine art Version.  A conspiracy of Doc and Dave, or Joan and Bob, or Google, or facebook, or IBM… who knows who is directing, but it is certainly true that it is Meryl Streep talking about cancer and tragedy and bowel movements and drinking a gallon of salt water to try and force shit out and brutal, violent attacks by seventies New York lone man druggie criminals and Alzheimers father And Red dye Poisonings of the spine by Kodak medical imaging dye and fortunes lost and fortunes gained and the rich little brother who has washed his hands of her and it’s sort of impossible to believe even there on the psych ward that someone could actually be hit by all this shit storm of bad luck and tragedy and still be standing…

No.  It is impossible to believe this whole hotel and every story in it are real and taking place in a “REAL” world.  It is easier by far to believe this is some sort of tear jerker of a movie.  I laugh.  Sophie’s Choice.

and she looks like Meryl and I find that I’m a much more sympathetic person when I think I am talking with Oscar Winning Meryl Streep than I am when just dealing with civilians.

They want to dismiss her to a Hotel as she has no apparent reason to be on the psych ward, but she is afraid her intestines will explode from the constipated shit in her colon and she will die in the hotel.

To transfer her to the next circle of treatment hell they want to remove a previously cancer related porta cath.  So she can start a new virgin in the other crazy system.  Doing this she thinks will lower her blood pressure  till she bleeds out and dies.

She says that the salt cocktail will raise her blood pressure and also kill her.

At one point she says, “Go ahead.  Do what you want.  I’ll just die tonight and get it over with.”

“Don’t say that” I say

“baaah” she says

Later when she is calm we take another walk around the ward.  She tell me that her father’s baby brother was killed by a drunk doctor after an accident.  The doctor over dosed the child on anesthetic….

Years later the father encountered the doctor at a steak house…

He picked him up by the scruff and cast him to the floor like a rag doll and said in his Irish Brogue Do you be rememberin Ellis Gallagher?  He was my baby brother and you killed him.  And in a final act of bravery he spared the guy’s life and just walked out of the restaurant with the doctor still sitting on the floor humiliated.