The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [49]
Supper. Leon’s tormentor appears again. Clyde says: “Stop making trouble for him. Talking about my name. I’m Jesus Christ. You wanta make something of it?” Clyde gets up, tries to hit the patient. The patient melts away and Clyde is very upset. Leon is calm.
9:00 a.m. Group meeting—poetry reading. Leon reads Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, and interprets it as a description of copulation. His interpretations would not raise an eyebrow in Freudian circles: cave=womb; river=penis; cave of ice=frigid woman.
4:43 p.m. At supper table, Clyde holds out his pipe for me to light. Smiling and clowning, he puts the salt cellar on top of the pipe bowl. I laugh, he guffaws. Leon says: “I put my sodium in it, Mr. Benson, it will act like a flare.” Clyde cackles again. Joseph bows his head and makes gestures. Such playful episodes occur only rarely.
1:55 p.m. All three men are leaving the laundry. When Leon approaches a tunnel junction, he calls out: “Coming through, coming through, please!” thereby commanding one and all to get out of his way. Joseph, pushing his truck, repeatedly booms out: “Thar she blows! All the enemies of the world are going to be blown up!”
5:30 p.m. Joseph reminisces about life outside the hospital, about where he used to eat and drink, in what restaurants, and the fact that he used to ride a streetcar for six cents. Informed by Leon that it costs twenty-five cents now, Joseph exclaims: “Twenty-five cents! I’ll walk!”
6:44 a.m. Clyde sits in the recreation room mumbling quietly to himself. His soliloquy is incomprehensible. The only things I can make out are: “God,” “man,” “banks,” “kill,” “dead,” “that’s the way it has been,” “Bible”—in that order.
9:40 a.m. At work, Joseph tells the foreman that he used to be an artist. The foreman asks if he painted in oils. Joseph replies that he painted in fresco to save money for Wesson and Mazola oil.
Breakfast. Leon, who never drinks milk, pours water on his cold cereal and dilutes his coffee at least fifty per cent with water. His breakfasts always look singularly unappealing.
11:45 a.m. Lunch over, Joseph wends his way slowly out of the dining room. Leon is right behind him. Patients line the walls of the corridors and sit outside in the sun. Joseph, like a town crier, calls out rhythmically as he passes the others: “Well, everything’s all right! For the British! I’ve saved the world!” He raises both arms high above his head and clasps his hands in the victory salute of a prize-fighter. “I’m God!” “Everything’s all right for the British!” No one pays the slightest attention to him.
4:00 p.m. On his way to the dining room, Joseph picks up magazines from the rack and tosses them out the window.
6:00 p.m. The three men are at a dance held for the patients. Earlier, Leon had announced that he was not planning to go. But when the time arrived, he went first to the washroom to comb his hair and then to the recreation room where the dance was held. Although he sits near the dance area, he spends his time looking at a magazine or discussing fossils, religion, and cosmic phenomena with one of the observers. Joseph sits nearby, staring at the dancing couples. Clyde, who had combed his hair and begun singing before the dance got under way, is the first on the dance floor; he goes over to a young girl and asks her to dance. He dances most of the numbers, including the Pennsylvania and Beer Barrel polkas.
Supper. A young female patient, rather seductive in appearance, joins the three men at the table. Joseph tells her she would make a good wife, but that he wouldn’t touch anything unless it were his own. She asks him if he has ever been to Mexico, and he replies that he is the mayor of Mexico. Suddenly she turns to Leon and asks him if he would like to go outside and make love. “I don’t believe in such, sir—or madam,” Leon replies, and pulling his chair away turns his back on her.
11:00