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I kept winning round after round. Having my memory erased and going back to whatever normal was would have been more than fine with me. All of China gave up without even trying.

“We have some crazy people here, but no one that crazy.” And it was on to the next round.

During this time the hospital billed Blue Cross Blue Shield for two thousand dollars’ worth of psychotherapy I don’t remember.

The thread that was to help me succeed in getting to wrestle and prevail over the Russian Bear was the joke about the courageous Indian brave:

There’s a young warrior who is told by the shaman that he can have a long, happy life and save his father from the loan shark, his tribe from starvation, whatever, if he…

1. Climbs an unclimbable mountain and brings back the tail feathers of an eagle from the nests on top of the unclimbable cliffs.

2. Wrestles a polar bear.

3. Makes love to a beautiful princess.

He climbs the mountain, scales the cliff, gets the tail feathers, then comes back to the village, his clothes and self bloody, torn, and tattered.

“So where is the princess I’m supposed to wrestle?”

Yip di mina di boom di za

What’s the white stuff in bird poop?

“That’s bird poop too.”

Explanations of what was going on and why were presented by the voices. You know that you are dead. You know the world is ending. You know it’s up to you. Package it up. Put a skim coat on it and hope people think it’s a wall.

There were five teenagers in the dayroom who threw things at me and called me doctor. I was an injured lion circled by Rhodesian ridgebacks. I hoped one of them would slip and get close enough for me to grab.

There are no grown-ups.

There will be no reckoning.

The day before the day before Christmas 1985, in the dayroom where the five mean teenagers ruled, I went up to the very overweight curly-haired girl I knew was the Russian Bear and said, “Do you want to dance or what?” and she fled crying. It was pretty much the end of Soviet-style communism. They took me back to my room like nothing big had happened.

It was over. I tried to explain my theory of grammar and psychosis to the people at the hospital, and they listened politely.

If

If you come to weighing ten pounds less than you remember yourself weighing…

If there are a bunch of psych patients hanging around outside a door you can’t open or lock…

If big people come through the door, angry, like maybe you gave them a hard time the last time they came to give you shots without so much as a hello how’s it going or goodbye…

If you think about what it was you were thinking just before all hell broke loose and you get a little nervous…

If you find yourself thinking it again even if you can’t remember exactly what it is…

Then you are a nut, my son.

My hospitalization was all black and gruesome punctuated by daily moments of peace and light when they gave me pathetic little fragments of Xanax around 5 P.M. For twenty minutes or so there would be hope in the world and color and then it would fade and I’d wait for 5 P.M. the next day. Never trust a drug that’s spelled the same backward and forward and has two x’s in its name.

I was not addicted to Xanax. That would have made me a drug addict. I just needed it to breathe. Six years of drinking a little every day with a little Xanax to help me sleep = no trouble. One week of no drinking, no Xanax = big trouble. It’s not easy to go from being one of the seven righteous pillars holding up the planet to being just another mental patient.

My frightened eight-year-old son came out of the fog to visit me in the hospital. I wished very much that he didn’t see me like that. Maybe having kids was pushing things too far.

Big strong man, strong right arm, machete, will of steel, had managed to hack his way deep into the jungle.

“Things will get better, Zachary.” I vowed I would fight through hell itself (might as well, since I was already there) to make this moment go away and not be what my precious son remembered of his father. My mother looked at pictures from