Endless Love (51 page)

There’s nothing I really need to say about life in Volkshill. The fear was constant: even the depths of boredom and the mock heights of cynicism were laced with fear. The anonymity was crushing: you could be beaten to death, you could choke on a piece of pork, your brain could explode and no one would care—and perhaps no one would know.

It was my understanding that in less than six months I’d be out of prison, at which time I would not, of course, be free, but would be subject to some alternate, more lenient punishment. This should have made my situation infinitely more tolerable. Nevertheless, I wasn’t equal to it. Though I believed that each day was bringing me nearer to the time when my case would be handled with more mercy, the days themselves, even as they passed, were intolerable: I felt like someone who has been swept out to sea by an undertow; each wave that rolls toward the shore only draws you further away.

I began to see everything through a haze, as real and disorienting as a thick morning fog. There was an accompanying loss of body awareness so that as the world outside of me became less real my own reality decreased as well. My dreams were so vivid and lifelike that I hardly thought of them, and in the midst of my slow, careful prison day there wouldn’t have registered the slightest surprise in me if someone had grabbed my shoulder and shaken me awake. My appetite disappeared; sometimes the aroma of food—not to mention the
sight
of it—would cause a violent revulsion in me. I developed a limp; my hearing deteriorated. I talked to myself—at first, just to keep things organized, to remind myself of this or that, but then it became a habit and when someone would lean into my blurry line of vision and say, “Why don’t you shut your fucking face?” I’d be surprised that I’d been at it again, or else I’d have no idea what they were complaining about. This led to an enormous sense of persecution—really, everything started to go. The world an inch out of orbit can end all life. I could not adapt; I couldn’t recoup any losses; I only got worse. Every now and then in a moment of woozy lucidity I’d tell myself that all the madness, all the physical symptoms, all the unreality were somehow a product of my will, that I could still, if I truly wanted to, take the reins of my life in hand again. But it was empty comfort. I told myself I
wanted
to spiral down into madness, but even at the fullest pitch of self-accusation (which was somehow linked to self-congratulation) I couldn’t see or even imagine an alternate mode of behavior.

Rose and Arthur came to visit me in the humanely informal visitors’ room—shiny geometric wallpaper, orange plastic bucket seats, Formica-covered tables around which families could huddle, a portable Panasonic tuned to the local pop music station supplying the background noise. I don’t know what I said or how I carried myself but I made it clear that I was eroding and soon they increased their efforts to have me transferred out of jail and into a hospital. They spent money they couldn’t afford to keep the pressure on the state, and three months into my stay at Volkshill I was suddenly placed in the infirmary for psychiatric observation. I took the familiar tests and was interviewed by a pair of prison psychiatrists—first a Dr. Hillman, who looked like a big pink friendly animal in a children’s book, and then by Dr. Morris, a young black doctor with an Afro and some kind of enormous fang hanging near his throat. I said whatever popped into my mind, with the objectivity of someone calling numbers at a bingo game. I felt under no obligation to answer their questions or follow instructions and in the end they both agreed that my psychological state was in critical disarray. They recommended I be placed in a state institution, and that’s exactly where I would have been sent if I hadn’t had parents who were willing to struggle for a better alternative and were willing to pay for it. And so on January 15, 1974, I was transferred back to Wyon, Illinois, and readmitted to Rockville Hospital. I was delivered in a police car, sitting in back with a middle-aged prison official who didn’t say one word to me for the entire journey. We ran into a snow squall and had to stop for new windshield-wiper blades. I was freezing cold, shivering; I kept my fingers tucked under my arms. The stubble in the cornfields looked like a world in ruins.

After Volkshill, it was a relief to be back at the hospital. The symptoms I’d been accumulating in prison gradually receded, but I was always in anticipation of their return. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would wake for no apparent reason and not know exactly where I was, and this momentary confusion would frighten me into believing that everything was falling apart again. And then talking to Dr. Clark—trying to be open now, believing I needed help—I’d sometimes burst into sobs that had no obvious relationship to what we were discussing and these sobs seemed to fill the sails of my turmoil and send me as far from shore as I was during the worst days at Volkshill. At first, Dr. Clark encouraged my crying, but I would be so affectless and withdrawn afterward that before long he did his best to intervene. He disapproved of drug therapy but he put me on Lithium. I always had a bad taste in my mouth and I began taking two-hour naps in the middle of the afternoon, but my moods leveled out and I was glad for that.

Whereas my first stay had passed with my anonymity virtually intact, the second time around virtually everyone knew my name. I wasn’t one of those natural leaders and no one looked to me as the vanguard in the eternal struggle between patients and staff—which of course existed even in a genteel asylum. I was liked because I was older, knew the ropes, and because I was given more responsibility than others were. When new patients checked in, it was I who gave them the second-day tour around Rockville. I was like a failed career officer, soft and toothless, with a yarn or two and a shoulder to cry on. I couldn’t fail to notice that whenever someone really was at odds with the Rockville staff, they turned on me as well.

I learned how to use a Super-8 movie camera and a simple editing machine, and before long I was the all but official filmmaking instructor. We did the ordinary, expected things: movies of people jumping up and down, zoom shots, slow motion, Keystone Kop parodies. I co-scripted a twenty-minute movie we called
The Attack of the Gigantic Mommy,
in which we photographed a patient named Sally Walsh from below a glass table, where she stood surrounded by tiny trees and cows, such as decorate the domain of a Lionel. I’m sure it was terribly therapeutic for all involved. Also to my credit: when Mitzi Pappas freaked out on some LSD her eyebrowy brother smuggled in to her, it was against me she huddled for comfort; when Myron Friedman stood perched on the verge of suicide (or, more likely, compound fracture), it was me who got him off the fourth-floor ledge with the slogan: “Myron, on my hands and knees I beg you to get your skinny white ass inside!”; and when dreamy Michael Massey failed to return from a group outing into Wyon, Dr. Clark appointed me a member of the five-man search party even though I was still strictly forbidden to leave the Rockville grounds, and it was I who found Michael, staring into his hands in the back yard of a boarded-up house.

On June 3, 1974, a letter arrived for me, and it was from Jade. It was given to me by Dr. Clark after a session in his office. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “It came yesterday and I read it. I gave myself a night to decide whether or not to give it to you and—well, here it is.”

Dear David,

I’m still in Stoughton, but not in school and not living at Gertrude anymore. Except to move my things out, I haven’t been back to the old house since the day. I live on the second floor of that little green and white house near the North Stoughton post office. It’s a little too large for one person but it gives me all the privacy I need. I suspect you may raise your eyebrows, but I’ve learned some meditation techniques. Keith learned them from a guy he works with and we all share the same mantra, which is the words you say to yourself when you are beginning your meditation. It’s marvelous how fifteen or twenty minutes of sitting and breathing can make you feel so renewed. Now that I’m a College Graduate, I am using my expensive education by working as a salesgirl at Stoughton Stoneware. It’s a wonderful job in some ways because I think their stuff is so great—I’ve got enough “seconds” to make a service for forty-eight—but it’s exhausting being on my feet all day and putting up with customers, many of whom treat me as if I were their personal servant.

I’ve been going to Boston a lot in my spare time. It started when I signed up for this course in psycho-drama, which was pretty strange to begin with! Twenty strangers from twenty separate private lives in this old former warehouse near some North End wharf, acting out our deepest feelings. Or trying to, anyhow. For me it combined a longtime interest in theater and in the newer modes of psychotherapy, two fields of study I’ve never had a chance to explore as much as I would have liked to. I must say, at the end of the course I was left with more of an interest in theater than in therapy, but then Ira Woods (the teacher in the psycho-drama course) would say that’s because I shy from the implications of psycho-drama and what it revealed about my “deepest feelings.” Maybe I am running away from myself, but I’ve signed up for two theater courses—one here at Stoughton in theatrical design, which the college is letting me take (without credit) free of charge, and the other in beginning acting, in Boston, taught by this absolute marvelous madman named Rudyard Lewis.

It’s been very good for me to shift my center a little toward Boston. It’s not New York, but at least it’s more of the “real world” than Stoughton and the best thing about Boston is I’ve met a lot of good people and have made myself a few actual, bona fide, dyed-in-the-wool
friends.
Mostly theater people, which I guess is limited because they’re all pretty crazy, but I’ve met a lot of people from outside the theater too. Everything from an absolutely great and beautiful woman from Senegal who works in a health food store to a fifty-three-year-old corporation lawyer who lives all alone in a fantasy penthouse, reads people’s astrological charts, and knows all there is to know about the Comèdie Française.

I got a terrific reaction on my thesis, by the way, and I’ve always wanted to thank you for that because you did a lot of the work. Some people who’ve read it have been trying to encourage me to have it published, but I think I’ll leave that particular limelight to Ann. I don’t see who’d publish it anyhow, but it certainly is a boost to the old ego to have someone say that it could be.

Ann’s publishing ventures are starting to pick up.
The New Yorker
bought three stories from her, all in one day. I don’t know when they’ll appear, but whenever it is I probably will decide not to read them. As I said to her recently, I’d like to see her face before I study her masks. At least one publisher has written her and asked if she was working on a novel and he hadn’t even
read
her stories yet. He’d just heard about them from someone who works at
The New Yorker.
I’m sure Ann is on her way to success. I wonder how it will affect her. I think when Ann was a proper young New York girl she fully expected the world to beat a path to her doorstep, but college and finding out how her father used the United States Foundling Homes as a source of his own personal enrichment and then marrying such a strange fellow as Hugh and getting saddled with a family, all of it combined to make her forget her girlish dreams. But I have a feeling that success will make Ann young again. She also seems to have a serious relationship in the offing with this guy who sells paper to printers. I was my usual outraged self when she first told me about him, largely because they met through one of those “personal” ads you see in the back of some magazines. It seemed very degrading and dangerous, but strange things have a way of working for Ann. I have to admire her gutsiness—I’d be afraid to even meet someone like that, just a box number and three sentences describing how lonely and eligible he is. But Ann’s used to it. She seems pretty happy with this new guy. They’re planning a trip to Europe—by boat, since the guy is terrified of airplanes. I haven’t met him yet; I figure if he lasts six months, I’ll look him over.

Keith is eternally himself. He’s been as steady as a rock for me this year, always
there
when I need him. He and I got totally involved in redoing his old farmhouse—with the money from Pap’s insurance, Keith bought the place he’s been renting up till now. I spent ten days on my hands and knees doing nothing but scrubbing the old wooden floorboards. Talk about occupational therapy! By the time I discovered those dark walnut floors were really bright pumpkin pine, my mind was as empty as a cup. Keith’s been such a good brother and a good friend, it’s been great rediscovering him. He’s smart, funny, and wise as an owl, and the most loyal man on earth.

Sammy continues on his march toward the presidency. He’s a freshman at Harvard now and the scourge of the Yard, I’m sure. He is so devastatingly handsome. A Greek Orthodox priest has fallen in love with him! It’s getting a little difficult figuring out just what Sammy believes in at this point. I think he’s getting too educated to believe in Universal Justice; now he talks about a Decent Chance for a Decent Life and it sounds all right but rather politician-y, too. He’s doing super well in school and modeling at Jordan Marsh in his spare time, to the tune of thirty-five dollars an hour! Last week I saw a picture of him in the Boston
Globe.
He was in a dark corduroy suit and had the preppiest grin this side of Groton. Sammy is the only Butterfield who has to cope with temptation. The rest of us can only be what we are and our choices are not only narrow but tend to be singular. There are no forks in our road, no momentous decisions. But Sammy can do anything. He can be a revolutionary, a liberal Democrat, a preppy, a student, a monk, a heel, and no matter what he does he’ll get applause. I suppose I
do
envy him, but his life has been such a constant series of choices. I don’t know if I could really stand it. He’s over- optioned, as Ann says.

I’ve had this letter on my desk and in my purse and on the kitchen table and just about everywhere I go for the past week. I don’t know how personal to make it. Knowing you and keeping myself open to experience whatever it is that happens when we’re together has meant, among other things, that everything we say turns out to be intimate. I know that I’ll never stop thinking of you. I’ve tried to but now I don’t even try. You are my past and I’ve come to realize that it’s better to have a frightening, upsetting, largely unhappy past than to have no past at all. But that’s silly, too, isn’t it? Who cannot have a past? Even amnesiacs stare at paintings. If it was only grief I think it would be easier. I wish I could mourn for us simply and cleanly. But knowing that you are locked away, even though you’re not in jail and are back in that good hospital, and knowing it was me calling the Stoughton police that put you there. It’s so complicated and my feelings are so divided against themselves. It’s like finding the black and white markers for your Go set mixed into the same messy pile: by the time you have them sorted, you don’t feel like playing the game.