Stones in my Passway

Brooklyn, NY, 04, July, 1984

I sat, my back against the north wall of my bedroom, legs splayed before me, the charcoal gray of my levis obtusely askew and matted by the floor I’d painted a glossy black. The somber hues of jeans-against-floor formed a colorless chord, and reminded me of the last paintings of one of my artistic and spiritual mentors, Mark Rothko. My brilliant friend Janet, who, tragically, within four years would end her own life, had once mocked this work, dismissing it to me, because of the notion of the paintings getting progressively darker, the closer they got to the date of his suicide. This had struck her as a woefully trite and obvious correlation of an artist’s inter state, to-the-work, making poor Mark R.’s oeuvre therefore unworthy of any serious further inquiry, or admiration. And, body and mind hopelessly bent, I so, in that moment, wished my pants were blacker, more towards pure, a Royal Black (if there were such a thing), and become just camouflage, disappearing against the subway-inspired, viscous black enamel of the floorboards.

My mind was a frantic, cataclysmic and rushing torrent of non-sense, no-station AM static, urgent and spastic flight-response impulse, quivering, bleating prayers-to-whomever, and merciless self-immolation. The guy I’d split the small bag of crystal with was older, a bit flighty, vaguely artistic, career-less and adrift-- a fellow flunky from the Strand Bookstore (only eight miles, of books, in those days). He had said, about methamphetamine, “Yea, it’s nice—real mellow--” (it is interesting who, and what, Youth, and wishfulness, allows us to believe). I thought the dun colored powder, which had arrived through bohemian channels from San Francisco through the US Post, might be useful in exorcising my chronic, throbbing and palpable, and even, physically, painful—depression, which had overrun me these last few months like a mountainous and impossibly dense Oklahoman dust storm. I’m not sure I even knew that it was speed.

I had tried to reach my Italian analyst on the phone; I even tried to call a psychiatrist (also, oddly, Italian) that I had seen when I had first began to experience the soul-crushing feelings known to most of us as ‘depression’ (a term that, as a word and as a label, always depressed me), at fifteen, back in Chapel Hill—a pipe-smoking, and handsome ex-New Yorker who had impressed me, when, after I had proved almost incapable of verbal communication, had deduced, after a silent game of chess, my neurotic tendency to ‘pull my punches’. I managed, through Information, to reach some old crone in Queens, who I somehow believed might be my Carolina therapist’s father, which he grumpily and brusquely denied, in classic outer-borough manner. I was desperate in a free falling, welcome-to-my-private-apocalypse, way, and all I could think of was Bellevue, and all I knew about ‘Bellevue’, was that it was an infamous Manhattan nuthouse, and the last stop of more than one sad protagonist, whose stories I had encountered in a smattering of mostly forgotten novels and film.

I had found the hospital’s address, which it turns out, had not been necessary—after catching the D train at Brooklyn’s Fourth Ave., I made the rib-and-cranium-rattling trip under the East River and into Manhattan, detraining at W. Fourth in the Village, where I hailed a cab, fell in, and said simply, ‘Bellevue’, which apparently needed no further explanation, as the cabbie immediately rocketed north, then east, without saying a word. Within minutes we were at the entrance of my imagined Valhalla, where I thought my salvation, or at least some temporary chemical succor, might lie. I tipped the driver—which boosted my mood and shattered sense of self some, but invisibly: by a forlorn and desperate, smidge.

The hallways were long and cold corridors of droning fluorescence, and it seems like I went miles before breaking occasionally at right angles, and then find again some arrow or signage leading the way to Emergency. Almost at the edge of the Psychiatric Waiting Room, I passed a walrus-of-a-New York cop—and, curiously, thought to engage him. I mean, he had—a uniform. Hey, help, I took some meth, I said, I took some meth. The What the Fuck that was most the way out of his mouth stopped abruptly, about the time he had made the turn to look back, and had me sized, figured—at which point he just harrumphed, and turned back, to go on about his apparently more urgent, police business.

Some paperwork, and I took a seat along the back wall in the concavity of an early-sixties-vintage, aqua fiberglass seat. Next to me was—stench, stench and a manic, whirligig babbling, coming from a legless, and queer, boy bohemian-casualty of the downtown scene, spinning, with some dexterity, in a crud-encrusted wheelchair. His rant was directed at no one, at some imagined, rapt, audience, perhaps, and mostly indecipherable-- but I gathered, both, that he was a very close personal friend of Bette Middler, and that some motherfucker had dumped a full and very pungent can of garbage on him (leaving behind an acrid olfactory mêlée at least partly constituted of, I was fairly sure, rotting fish carcass, from some downtown market), the feverishly ranting cripple, and his wheelchair.

I alternately ignored and involuntarily glowered at this misfit spectacle, and the boy-man kept spitting sentences into the air, and then at one point, seemed to size, and get a lock, on my individual gestalt—at my inner cripple, and in a flash made me a part of his mad and wise running commentary, in the way of all big-city sidewalk madmen, saying shit Jesus somebody needs to get fist-fucked, and in my personal horror at his pronouncement, I ratcheted-up the glowering, which somehow, magically, had the effect of shaming him into silence—for a while, at least. And even in my addled, neurotically cranked state, I realized, at least two things—that this fuck-wad knew something about me that I didn’t (not that I literally needed a fist up my ass, though, admittedly, in the time since, I’ve never tried it), and that his mind, or that part of his mind more appropriately called spirit, was the stronger and more resilient, between the two of us, here, in the Bellevue Psychiatric waiting room, on the nation’s birthday, 19 hundred and eighty-four. This filthy, twisted, legless, wretched snotty-little-twit, was not giving in, or up, and was vibrantly alive and fighting, with a pure heart, with what was left of his dignity, and the tangled web and errant synapses of his cerebral cortex. This little fuck, he, he and his BFF, Bette the Divine—were gonna make it.
I waited a long time, some hours, and was able somehow to relinquish the draw of the unending soliloquy beside me, to just another thing, an element and another part of the humming fluorescent headspace that was me, my compromised mind, replete with its pernicious, whispering failures, nightmarish but innocuous fears, and the actual details of the Waiting Room— the sherbet-colored chairs, the smudged but scrubbed and sterile floor and walls, and the Impressionist prints framed badly, their color receding into a over-all bland, cheap tint: a candy-sweet Renoir, a brocaded child with a hoop, a Monet inlet scene of sailboats anchored and empty, only vaguely present, against but enmeshed in an atmospheric dabble of late afternoon sun. I didn’t predict or addictively await the junk of any more revelations or colorful prescriptive cures, from my buddy one slot ahead of me, in line to see, The Shrink, and eventually he was signaled, and wheeled himself squeakily into the attending physicians Interview Room— the shuttered and sacrosanct cloister of the Wizard, or snake-oil hawking Kansan, perhaps, behind the curtain.