The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [74]
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Leon retorts.
For the next four or five months we were to hear many variations of this squelch-eye controversy. Leon would accuse Woman Eve or Mary Gabor or Joseph of having stolen it from him. Sometimes he would accuse me of having stolen it from Woman Eve or Mary Gabor. Joseph would in his turn claim that it was his squelch eye, that he would continue to be a weak God until it was returned, and that it was Dung who had stolen it from him. Leon would often appeal to me to return the squelch eye I had stolen, and Joseph in turn would appeal to me to get his squelch eye back from Leon, so that he could regain his power. And I, in turn, tried very hard to give each of them the squelch eye he so badly needed. But this didn’t seem to help, because Leon and Joseph both insisted that there was one and only one squelch eye.
I have already said that the squelch-eye controversy spilled over into other areas. One afternoon Leon was writing a letter—to his uncle, he said. Joseph challenged him. “Mr. Dung, you know you have no uncles or parents or sister or even any friends and, furthermore, you tell fibs.” An argument followed.
Another time, after dinner, Leon sat down immediately next to Joseph; he was doing this, he said, to balance the cosmic energy in the room and not because he had any personal attraction to Mr. Cassel. Joseph exploded: “Mr. Dung doesn’t know what he is talking about; he’s just a big pile of shit.”
“You are so right, sir,” Leon replied. “I am a big pile of righteous-idealed shit.”
During one period Leon refused to sign the Chairman List because, he claimed, Joseph wrote his name with a fancy C, and this created a new electronic imposition. Joseph was upset. “It’s my C,” he yelled, “and if you don’t want to follow the rules, we’ll get someone else in here. Mr. Benson and I can get along. I’ve been giving in, but no more. Put someone else in!”
The battle over the squelch eye came to an end in the latter part of July. Joseph had been hospitalized for several days as a result of an altercation on the ward. A patient named Gibson lay down on Joseph’s bed, and Joseph asked him to lie on his own bed. Gibson, who was easily upset and had assaulted others in the past with little or no apparent provocation, punched Joseph in the face and fractured his cheekbone. Speaking of Joseph’s altercation, Leon had commented: “It was the cosmic evil eye that got him in trouble and it’s the evil eye that I hate.”
Joseph was very apprehensive when he returned to Ward D-16. At the meeting he said: “I want to ask Dung to give me a hand so they won’t hit me anymore.”
“When you are in the wrong,” Leon replied, “I can’t be on your side. I heard the discussion. The man told you twice to leave him alone. You took yourself the initiative to drag that man out of bed and he got up and he let you have it. It so happens that you started it and he finished it.”
Clyde said he saw the fighting and that the other man had been transferred to another ward, but he did not attempt to take sides or to assess blame.
Joseph, who was still extremely apprehensive that he could be hit again, then expressed the fear that Leon would hit him, and from then on he would no longer stay in the sitting room when Leon was there alone. Thus was disrupted a behavior pattern which had become amazingly stable over the period of a year—Leon and Joseph sitting in close proximity to each other in Ward D-23, then sitting together in their small sitting room in Ward D-16. Leon now occupied the sitting room mainly by himself, except when the men were eating or having their daily meeting.
Other Changes In Leon’s Delusional System
In contrast to the significant changes which led up to Leon’s emergence as Dung, relatively few additional changes took place afterwards in his delusional system. We did note some changes in his behavior. He spoke much less about sex, masturbation, manliness, etc., and he dropped the appelation Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doktor. The only significant change