• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He became a lot less pleased and came on with his antiheroics theme again. I showed him the article my father had clipped from Psychology Today. He wasn’t impressed.

He called my mother and Virginia into the office. He explained that under no circumstances was he going to take any chances with my health. “Remember what happened last time?” Blah, blah, blah, etc.

So I was back on Thorazine again.

On Thorazine everything’s a bore. Not a bore, exactly. Boredom implies impatience. You can read comic books and Reader’s Digest forever. You can tolerate talking to jerks forever. Babble, babble, babble. The weather is dull, the flowers are dull, nothing’s very impressive. Muzak, Bach, Beatles, Lolly and the Yum-Yums, Rolling Stones. It doesn’t make any difference.

When I did manage to get excited about some things, impatient with some things, interested in some things, it still didn’t have the old zing to it. I knew that Dostoyevsky was more interesting than comic books, or, more accurately, I remembered that he had been. I cared about what happened at the farm, but it was more remembering caring than really caring.

After I had been out of the hospital a few weeks, Dale said it would be OK for me to go up to the farm for a weekend. Jack was down visiting us so I went up with him for a few days.

Jack came into his own after I went nuts. His approach was very much no bullshit. He analyzed pretty accurately how the hospital worked and we talked about what parts of it could be incorporated into the farm. There was no mysticism from Jack, no flashy cosmic theories of why I had gone nuts or flashy any-other-kind of theories either. He didn’t think I needed spiritual guidance or T-groups. He didn’t want to love or teach the craziness out of me. For him it was a simple engineering problem. He was ready to build a padded cell. We even talked about it some. If electroshock worked, he was ready to price the equipment and learn how to use it.

He didn’t like the idea of depending on a man who drove Cadillacs and wore baby-blue alligator shoes. If we needed a mini-mental hospital to be independent, he’d build one.

Jack became a dynamo of energy. He took on leadership roles left and right. I loved it. I didn’t have much energy myself and felt I could sort of glide along behind and let this hot knife cut the butter. Jack was saying lots of things that I wanted to say but for various reasons couldn’t. Energy, vested interests, who listens to former psychotics anyway?

The thrust of Jack’s thrusts was that we had a farm and not Eden or some half-baked hippie summer camp. Further, that we really didn’t have a farm but a rather pathetic little vegetable garden and a lot of land that needed lots of work. Our house was a bad joke, our goats were shitty goats. All the dogs except Zeke were less than worthless.

The trip to the farm was fairly uneventful, although without Jack’s dynamism it might have been otherwise. The farm had been going through a decidedly strange phase. There had been a lot of visitors, four of whom were toying with the idea of becoming permanent. Not much work was getting done. The original crew and the visitors were all suffering from various forms of the heavies. A couple of the newcomers, and even Simon, were pretty sure they saw ghosts. There was tension in the air and a lot of talk about it. Maybe the whole problem was sexual repression, lots of talk about that. There were some stabs at novel couplings, straight mate swaps, homosexuality, three- and four-somes, and lots of talk about that and wondering why not everyone in a big heap. Then there were the old faithful heavies of “Why’d Mark go nuts?” and “What kind of a place is this farm going to be anyway?”

Jack filled me in on what had been going on in a very matter-of-fact way. Without his briefing, Simon’s version of the news probably would have given me the hoodoos.

“…Heavy changes…getting it on…coming together…ghosts… heavy vibes…ghosts…” It could have meant almost anything, but knowing who had done what with whom and how it had turned