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After my walk and talk with Ray, I was given unlimited afternoon and evening visitor privileges, and allowed to go out with friends for whole afternoons. Simon, Kathy, Jack and André from Stevens Street all dropped in from time to time, never more than two or three at once. Sometimes I’d go on a picnic with Virginia and whoever else was visiting. I was still feeling shaky but less and less so, and I was more and more eager to get the hell out of the hospital.

My mother went to visit an ailing uncle in California. She and I agreed that I was in good enough shape that she didn’t really need to hang around any more. We were all just waiting for that slowpoke Dale to realize I was OK and let me go.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, all hell broke loose again and I was back in that fucking little room. No visitors, no clothes, no one would even talk to me through the little hole, no nothing.

McNice came in one day with three of the meanest orderlies. I had been utterly alone for days.

“I think I’m dead, I’m dead, aren’t I?” pleading and grasping for his arm.

“Yes, I know you feel like that.” He left quickly. The orderlies held me down and jabbed another needle in my ass.

The third crackup was different from the first two. In lots of ways it was the worst.

Not much fun or funny happened the third time I cracked. Maybe it was because I cracked in the hospital and there was no running room, no slack, no chance for the Eden Express to get up a decent head of steam.

Maybe it was because I really didn’t want to go crazy then. I really tried to stop it and couldn’t. Both other times there had seemed to be some point in it.

I was running out of excuses. My father hadn’t committed suicide. Virginia was OK. My mother was OK. Spring was on schedule. Life seemed to be going on. I had taken all those silly little pills. I hadn’t touched anything remotely dopelike. I had followed all doctor’s orders faithfully and here I was back in that fucking little room again.

Maybe it was just the repetitiveness of it. Once was an accident, twice a coincidence, but three? A habit. Three strikes. Three points define a circle. A closing one. There had been a few weeks between cracks one and two and just a little over a week between two and three. This was how I was going to spend my life.

My suicide attempts became more frequent, more pathetic, and more sincere. Before I had danced with death, loved death, hated death, teased death, been teased by death. Now I was rolling on the floor in my own shit, clumsily trying to strangle myself. Before there had been elements of hope and nobility. By dying I could help others live, bring back the sun, teach some truth. Now I just wanted to die.

I was running out of material. I had been back and forth over my life so often and so thoroughly there was nothing left. I had been Hitler, Napoleon, Lincoln, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Bob Dylan, Billy the Kid, Bach, Wagner, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche, to name a few. I had been through every novel I had ever read and a few I hadn’t at least twice. Movies likewise. I had said everything I ever wanted to say to everyone I wanted to say it to. I had made love to everyone and everything and been made love to in turn and fucked and been fucked. Longings I hadn’t dreamed of had been fulfilled. I had no more unfinished business.

POWER. Just before my third crack-up, I learned that Joe had landed in a nut house and was going through electroshock. It was another hint that “delusions of grandeur” was at least partly a misnomer. I remembered that Warren, the aspiring guru, had also wound up in a nut house shortly after his encounter with me. I felt shitty as hell about Joe being in the hospital. Warren, I felt, had it coming.

Both had played somewhat similar roles in my crack-ups. They were both primary males. Each had been some strange combination of father, devil, and God. Both had tried to cure me. I had had the feeling that these guys were both trying to use cosmic clout. My reaction