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All this saves the staff a lot of time. They can just look at a patient and know they’re dealing with a “pajama, stage 3” and act accordingly.

It’s possible to cheat, which I did every chance I got. You go to the bathroom ostensibly to wash your hands when someone a few levels above you is taking a shower and borrow his clothes—instant promotion. You get visitors to smuggle in a decent pair of pants—suddenly a whole new wing of the hospital opens up to you. Clothes alone don’t always do the trick. You’ve got to stand next to a locked door with just the right sort of aloof impatience and walk with just the right stride or a whole week’s progress can be wiped out in nothing flat.

You play mommy-daddy games for all they’re worth: But Dr.… said…or Nurse…has been letting me…again with the right impatience, the right tone of voice.

It seemed awfully Mickey Mouse. I complained a lot about it, but at the time I appreciated it as a nice change of pace, a game whose rules and objectives were transparent and trivial. Trying to get out of the mental hospital was a nice vacation from being a good hippie, battling the forces of darkness, trying to figure out if an apocalypse would be a good thing or a bad thing.

I had blown my cool. I had done a lot of silly things, things that would have made sense if what I thought was going on had been right, but I had been wrong. The world wasn’t ending. There was plenty of oxygen to go around. Virginia hadn’t died. My father hadn’t died. Extraordinary measures weren’t called for. I’m OK.

There was nothing to do at the hospital. As soon as I was OK, I was bored. I wrote some, played the broken-down piano in the day room, read some, talked to some of the patients and staff some, but mostly I just wanted to get out.

What were they doing for me? Pills three times a day. No doctor saw fit to try to explain what had happened to me or what if anything I should do to avoid its happening again. A doctor named McNice and I had some very pleasant, urbane, sophisticated chats about Russian literature, religion, and a lot of other stuff. We sat around making sense out of all the apparently senseless things I had done. I knew that the things I had done made sense. It was nice that he didn’t just throw it all out as crazy. He had a certain respect for it, the sort of respect it deserved. I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know already but we had pleasant enough conversations.

If you had broken your leg, would you be trying to “deal with it”? Forget about it. You were sick and now you’re well. Me thinking, talking to myself. At the hospital they gave me no such advice or any sort of advice at all. By intention or default I was left pretty much in a vacuum to figure things out on my own.

“What happened?”

“You’ve been a very sick boy. We don’t have all the answers.”

Treating it like a broken leg was probably good advice. I tried to stick to it but it went very hard against my grain. I had had a long career and a lot of fun making mountains out of molehills, milking experiences for all they were worth. A life in prison out of eighteen hours, a marriage with lots of kids from a casual affair, genocide from stepping on an ant, and on and on. And here I had a real live mountain to try to turn into a molehill.

No one else seemed inclined to treat it like a broken leg. Everyone had their own little theories, but there was a consensus of sorts. The consensus was that whatever else it might be, it was definitely “heavy.” It wasn’t like a broken leg. There’s nothing heavy about a broken leg.

Heavy heavy heavy. It wasn’t just my comrades in arms, fellow hippie freaks. When the doctors told me they didn’t have all the answers, the nurses, the orderlies, fellow patients, my parents, everyone, all their faces seemed to be saying, “Heavy, heavy.” If I had broken my leg, would the doctors have bothered to tell me they didn’t have all the answers?

My father flew up from the “real” Hollywood, where they were making a movie of Slaughterhouse Five, and spent a day visiting and