A Fan's Notes (15 page)

These johns were huge places, too, consisting of three open and cavernous showers and a dozen or so washbowls. In a separate room an entire wall had been fitted with toilet bowls from which, for sanitary reasons, the wooden seats had been removed. For a number of days the cold porcelain to the cheeks of one
’
s butt constricted the bowels; but after a time the intestinal tract, suffering under its burden, forced the defecation painfully from the body. The largest room in the ward was the day or sitting room, a vast and monumental tribute to bleakness. The room was big in every way, in length and width and height. It was the kind of room in which one could imagine high and intemperate winds circulating forever. All about its barren, brown-enameled floor, lining the walls, and as close together as stacked plates, were monstrous, thronelike wooden chairs. To look at those chairs broke one
’
s heart. Some right-hearted soul–—some B.A. in Psychology, no
doubt—had had them painted, in about equal proportions, either a sunny pastel blue or a shocking brilliant orange. It was an attempt to brighten our existence. The effect, in that sad place, was overwhelming, rather like an ugly woman attempting to make herself more amenable by overpainting her hideous features, thereby only bringing to her grossness a disarming attention. Looking at those chairs, one imagined himself looking upon such a woman, trying not to let his face reveal the evidence of his eyes. All over the hospital we confronted these touching and wrongheaded attempts to please us.

Our daily routine was unvarying. Each morning prior to breakfast, we lined up for our
“
treatment,
”
which in most cases consisted of receiving a tranquilizing pill; then we were marched upstairs to a huge, barnlike cafeteria. There we picked up a partitioned tin tray, allowed it to be covered with something not unlike food, then went to one of the tables and took a seat. In the same way that I could not in the first days sleep or defecate, I could not eat. About the third day I succumbed and ate both voraciously and gratefully. By then I had learned to seek out a seat that did not fall opposite those men past caring, those who ate both toast and oatmeal, potatoes and gravy, with their fingers, licked their fingers,
thwap, thwap, thwap
, then upturned the tray and, with precise, snakelike motions, licked it clean.

Because we were forced to work—no one said we were forced to, but knowing what I knew I quickly surmised that the Powers considered working (I had wanted to read in the library—a decadent activity) not only properly humbling but a sign that one understood what makes the wheels go round in America—I succeeded, on the promise of getting the same food as the attendants, in getting a job in the employees
’
kitchen. I worked on the dishwasher. The work was hot and hard; but the food was good,
and I had a chance to study at
close hand the hospital employees, who seemed to be made up in about equal parts of Negroes and Whites. The Whites looked down on the Blacks as niggers, the Negroes looked down on the Whites because they (the Negroes) were for the most part better educated and still unable to find a more suitable work. Both groups looked down on us patients as little more than animals, loathing us—in their eyes, in their furious little gestures—to such an extent that the only thing that distinguished them from the most paranoiac among us was their not-very-clean white uniforms, their mantles of authority. I could understand and forgive this in the Negro. We reminded him—the sweat streaming down our faces—of his long and menial past. The Whites, or most of them, seemed as unredeemable as any Southern racist. Whenever I got anything like a patronizing look from either group, I always put on my face a blissful smile and winked outrageously. To one such wink I heard one of the Negroes say to his buddies,
“
Another fucking loony!
”
They all laughed.

It occurs to me that I have suggested that life at Avalon Valley was unlivable, perhaps unbearable, and I do not mean to do this; I loved Avalon Valley and will all my life remember it the way other men remember the chance seduction of a cinema queen (I know such a man: he was disappointed) or the Thanksgiving Day they blocked the punt to win the game against Big Bad High. It is true that the grounds were bleak, nothing more than a city of imposing red-brick façades, but against those brick walls people threw precise, well-defined shadows. No one here ever felt grand; one heard, without even inquiring, about one another
’
s little men and believed in them. The food was pallid, but only to an American palate already undone by cigarettes; when one accepted the fact of food
’
s design to be sustenance, the food became as good as any. Both sleep and bowel movements came with adjustment. There was a consolation in believing th
at someone had recognized these
homosexuals as being ill, even more of a consolation in believing that they had perhaps committed themselves. They were not walking their pink poodles, leeringly clacking their eyeballs all over their made-up sockets, and
“
slaughtering the innocents
”
along Third Avenue. Neither were they holding
“
open meetings
”
with a view to persuading their legislators that they were just a bunch of jolly-good boys exercising a Hellenistic inclination. The library was as good as that in my home town.

Finally, there was our doctor, Dr. K., who above everything else was a man—a not altogether common phenomenon in America. He was a short, squat man with a heart as big as his girth. He leaked real sweat and was touchingly solicitous of us, perhaps too much so. In a way he hated to come into our ward; he could not go from one end of it to the other without listening to and weighing our minutest complaints. Listening to us, he always dabbed at his perspiration-streaked forehead with a large white handkerchief. One day when we had all crowded about him, awaiting our separate turns to
“
jump him
”
with our outrageously petty complaints, he gave me my most vivid memory of him. A young boy about eighteen was talking with him. Because the boy was speaking in hushed, furtive tones, those of us who waited had judged his complaint was of an intimate nature, had widened the circle about them, and were staring timidly at the floor. When I next looked up, the boy was weeping. His great tears streamed effortlessly down his boyish cheeks, and between terrible sobs, he continued to pour forth his complaint in something like a low, guttural groan. Suddenly Dr. K.
’
s stubby fingers shot out to the boy
’
s cheeks and with furious anxiety began wiping away his tears. The boy continued to weep; Dr. K. continued to do battle with his awful anguish. He wiped and wiped and wiped, furiously. When I looked at his face, I
saw that behind his spectacles,
forming there and beclouding them, were tears of his own. We had all moved away then, aware that our griefs were not so very real. We had large love for Dr. K. We sensed his manhood and felt easy with him. I did, in fact, eventually come to such an equanimity that I believed I could live out my life at Avalon Valley, live it there as well as live it in any America I had yet discovered.

Sex—or the lack of it—was a very palpable problem; but not as real as the sense of one
’
s anonymity, the loss of self. This loss was brought vividly home to us one morning on coming down to the ward from breakfast.

A boy had hung himself.

He had hidden in the toilets until we were safely upstairs, shoveling in our oatmeal. Then he had stood astride the edges of a toilet bowl, tied the loose ends of his necktie (I can remember wondering if it had regimental stripes) to a steel rod separating the partitions between the separate bowls, let his feet slide away from the porcelain, and swung himself free from the hot, awful agony of his life. Immediately on our arrival downstairs, he was discovered by a man intent on relieving himself of yesterday
’
s slop to make way for today
’
s. The next few moments proved a panic of running, shouting, and cursing.

We were instantly forced by the attendants into the ward across the hall, where the door, for the first time in weeks, was locked behind us. There, like indigent children pressed to a window of the grandest house in town, we flattened our noses against the glass of the door, our breaths steaming the window, our breathing as labored as defective engines. A number of attendants ran by. Then came Dr. K., trying to speed up his great weight and testing a hypodermic even as he ran, squirting a spray of fluid into the air. It was the hugest hypodermic needle I had ever seen. It was one of those containing adrenalin
that they shove into the human
heart; but it looked big enough to destroy life, not restore it. After Dr. K. went by, it was very, very still for a long time; and I suppose all of us could visualize him, having made his injection, now bent intently over the boy, giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A priest came next. He was running, too. At that point we began breathing again, began drifting away from the door, began smiling self-consciously at each other. When we were able to talk, we all agreed the boy had been a good fellow.

It was this latter that preyed on me. I had not known the boy. I could not visualize him, and it was only because a new patient to our ward could not place him either and made inquiries that I learned anything at all. The boy had been young, quiet, handsome, and inordinately neat; and had been much given to a particular orange chair in one corner of the ward where he had sat by the hour staring amiably off into space. I knew why I couldn
’
t remember him. My attempt to stay uninvolved had worked so admirably that I had lived with him without being cognizant of him. Out of embarrassment I never in the ensuing days mentioned that I could not for the life of me recall him. I now sat by the hour myself, staring at the chair he was said to have occupied, trying to call him back. But I never had any luck. And I never mustered the guts to tell the other boys I couldn
’
t remember him. Out of a misplaced shame, and in answer to inquiries about him from one or another incoming patient, I even began to describe him as knowledgeably as I could. I know it was shameful of me, but in my way I felt his death as much as anyone. Where the others looked upon it as the passing of a buddy, or an acquaintance, or simply of a face (but still a face of flesh and blood, one capable of expressing hope and melancholy and tenderness), I looked upon it as the passing of something faceless; where the others had the memory of something that had lived and laughed
and known pain, I had only the
memory of a thing dead that had never lived; for a number of days I lived benumbed, horrified by the possibilities this fact suggested. My dreams had had nothing really to do with gold in Eldorado, or sensual mulattoes in Port Said. But the dream of fame had been real enough: I had wanted nothing less than to impose myself deep into the mentality of my countrymen, and now quite suddenly it occurred to me that it was possible to live not only without fame but without self, to live and die without ever having had one
’
s fellows conscious of the microscopic space one occupies upon this planet. The thought almost overcame me, and I could not dwell upon it without becoming unutterably depressed.

It was at the moment when things were bleakest that Paddy the Duke began to throw his abundant and alarming shadow all over the hospital. It was he who taught me that a man can have self no matter where he is. Now I needed only sex to come to terms with Avalon Valley. Even in this respect the possibilities were not out of reach. One could always ask for increased amounts of saltpeter or, I suppose, even castration. I asked for neither, of course, because it occurred to me one day, reading a smuggled copy of de Sade, that even on the
“
outside
”
one never comes to terms with desire. .

I had my first encounter with Paddy the Duke in the Reception Building on the day we had our initial consultations with the doctor—those preliminary consultations in which they want to know whether we love Mommy and Daddy, why we won
’
t work, and the frequency of our masturbation. A number of us were lined up in wooden chairs on either side of a long hall, facing each other, and awaiting our separate turns to talk with the doctor. The conversation was animated, those men who had already had their interviews filling in the rest of us on the kind of question to expect.
“
What did you answer?
”
someone would say breath
lessly. On being told, we would
all fall into grave and momentary silence, doubtless brooding on whether that particular answer suited us. Then immediately new questions would be put.

Throughout this only two of us remained silent, Paddy the Duke, who sat directly across from me, and myself. In the interest of self-preservation I wanted to hear the questions and determine how best to answer them, even to the extent of formulating in my mind the proper pauses in speech and voice inflections. More than anything, I knew it was mandatory to convince the doctor that I took him as earnestly as he took himself, dilettantism being a lamentable sin with psychiatrists. I did, in fact, get so carried away that I began silently mouthing answers and, after one particularly long and convoluted reply, I became suddenly aware of what I was doing, looked up to see if anyone had noticed, and immediately the blood rushed to my face. Paddy the Duke was looking directly at me, smiling. It was a strange smile, both patronizing and hostile. It seemed to accuse at the same time it laughed at me. It seemed to indicate that with my methods I was making a grievous tactical error.
“
That nonsense,
”
it seemed to say with finality,
“
will get you nowhere.
”