Mozart And Melville
"Keep it simple! And short!" said Susan Thomas, the duck-footed, fat-legged poet who,
word by word, eight times edited, cut, and pasted the early fragments of this book. "Otherwise,"
she shrugged, "only doctors will understand what you write. You don't want that to happen, do you,
Dave?"
"No!" I bellowed. "Never!"
Luckily, the Ontario Friends Of Schizophrenics had given me a special grant: they paid
Susan twelve dollars an hour -- much lower than a plumber's wages, I was told -- for tutoring me
twice a month on ward M and editing the bits and piece of my work in her apartment. At the time,
Susan and I were still good friends: money didn't change hands; that was fine by me.
"In the mornings I polish my poetry," Susan commented the day I put an end to our
relationship. "In the afternoons I eke out a living by inspecting rooming houses, right here in
Parkdale."
On a shelf in Medical Records, my bloated, dog-eared charts fill fourteen volumes. A few
years ago, the shifty, scheming authorities at Nine Ninety-Nine -- in these euphemistic days a
"Mental Health Centre", at 1001 Queen Street West -- finally gave me permission to read my
unauthorized clinical biography. Over the years, I found out, they had repeatedly bad-mouthed me
as "schizophrenia, paranoid type," and coded me accordingly, except for a couple of years in the
early sixties, when I was under the "care" of an abominably big-footed shrink, who daily showed up
2
at the ward in the same greying, rubber-soled shoes. That skinny, paunchy Paki with greasy hair
sported glimmering polyester suits and wash-and-wear shirts from Eaton's bargain basement. Our
ward lord had serious oral problems: a stun-gun bad breath and, even worse, a piercing Oxphoney
accent probably acquired in some Karachi cricket high school. My medical records prove that more
than once that son of Belial slapped on me the "chronic undifferentiated type" label. I've no idea
what that doctoral diarrhoea means. Who cares, anyhow?
From the outset, I might as well make it clear: however disjointed my writings are, they are
not reportage or a work of fiction. I swear that my book contains nothing but slices of my real life,
without preservatives or additives. As I search my conscience, my hand writes my whole truth and
nothing but my truth. Stuff me with Stelazine, or run dozens of electrical shocks into both sides of
my skull. Even in such straits I shall not reveal the names of the shrinks, phuds -- the monsters with
a Ph.D. -- gun molls, and Goliaths who, for almost three decades, tried to manipulate and control
my behaviour, mind, and soul. Locked behind doors of glass and steel, one way to destroy the
enemy is to deny him a name, an identity.
So, may ruby-eyed, split-tongued devils with baboon asses wipe the memories of all
authority figures from the face of the earth for eternity!
"Amen! Selah!" sing the less violent voices I hear much of the time.
You got it right. I was not born in one of the closed wards of Nine Ninety-Nine, but at the
obstetrics department of the old Mount Sinai Hospital. Forty-five years ago, Bathurst-and-Eglinton
Jews like my parents would never trust a ginger-haired, bony-fingered Anglo doctor with red-
3
licorice lips and an uptight smile to bring their babies into the world. Yet, over the years I've been
under the care of countless goyishe shrinks: the paunchy Paki I've already mentioned; a skin-andbones chink with atrophied feet who wore blue-black baggy pants and reeked of the same cheap
aftershave that we, his penniless charges, used. That speech-impaired, truly incoherent Chinaman
got off on prescribing shock treatments, just as we Toronto guys get a buzz from Hockey Night In
Canada.
Only Lucifer knows how many a Limey in brogues and knee-high socks that perfectly
matched his grey gabardine pants I had to put up with all these years. When, at long last, I gazed
into the face of the neatly-combed, sandy-haired ward lord, more often than not the blue-eyed,
ruddy lad had thin, pale lips. Every day the cold fish sported a starched white shirt and a maroon,
satiny bow-tie; he behaved as if he, the enemy, owned not only Nine Ninety-Nine, but the whole of
Canada; he deluded himself into thinking he spoke impeccable English, when he spat cats and dogs
every time he opened his toothy mouth in one of the ward's long, creme-coloured corridors.
Whether imported or homegrown, shrinks at Nine Ninety-Nine were not good enough for
an appointment in a general hospital. Just picture one of my head-doctors starting a private practice
on St. Clair Avenue west of Avenue Road, Toronto's Angst Alley! Could you imagine a physician
or phud in the community referring a Nine Ninety-Nine staff even their mild cases -- the people
who bitch about their awful parents, or chat with the therapist about problems they don't have?
What cultivated, well-travelled neurotic would lower his delicate fanny onto a Nine Ninety-Nine
shrink's couch? And what about writers in search of down-home feelings to fill page after page of
their Great Canadian Trilogy? Are any of my unmedicated fellow writers stupid enough to take
even brief therapy from mean pill pushers and jailers?
4
In the rare event one of my torturers talked a good line, or walked the ward as if he knew his
onions, as soon as he learned the ropes outside the gulag for chronic dissenters, he vanished. So, at
the United Nations of Nine Ninety-Nine, the devils on staff earned their keep by zapping electricity
into our skulls. Monthly they changed our meds pumping us chicks and guys with pills up to our
eyeballs. Good-for-nothings! If they did no harm on our way in, weeks later they turned us into
jalopies.
(Chick-shrinks are a recent breed: I haven't yet figured out an effective way of making their
lives miserable -- something more than just hitting the psychotic button at two a.m., when the
enemy wants only to stretch under her blankets in a warm bed.)
Please, believe me, and don't get Freudian. Nothing went wrong in my childhood. Unlike
the serial killers in the Toronto Star, mine was not a broken home. No physical or emotional abuse
either. I didn't bedwet even once past age two; unlike other kids at school, I never plucked the
wings off flies to watch them scuttle in desperation. I never set fires to neighbours' garages, nor
broke dogs' hind legs.
Until my problems began, Mom was a warmly-smiling, chestnut-haired woman with
shapely lips. Born in Toronto to an unorthodox Jewish family, she didn't have a Bat-Mitzvah -- it
wasn't fashionable in those days; instead of a kosher kitchen, she upheld Jewish tradition by
blessing candles on Friday evenings. You could say her Sabbath began early on Friday mornings:
with a rag and forefinger she applied a thick layer of Silvo to the tall, four-legged, candle-holders
inherited from her Polish mother. After the Silvo had caked, she polished the holders to a dazzling
sheen. She continued that tradition even when she worked full time at Simpson's.
Like me, Mom had no more than a high school education; still, she became the President's
5
executive secretary. Despite her life's hurried pace during my teenage years, she remained a warm,
affectionate mother. She didn't take a job until I entered grade four: she wanted her only son -Mom had several miscarriages after I was born -- to grow in a safe, rich environment with hot,
home-made lunches.
"No sandwiches, sir!" was Mom's motto while I went to grade school.
In those days, Mom and I listened to one of Mozart's symphonies or piano concertos after
lunch; quite often, we went through her favourite reproductions of the post impressionists. "Renoir
is my favourite," she sighed, coquettish. Were I to criticize my Mom, I would say that she hurt me
at the time by admiring Mozart more than my early writings; throughout my teens, I felt jealous of
Wolfgang Amadeus.
Dad, a short, balding, soft-spoken man, brought home the brisket by teaching English and
History at North Toronto Collegiate Institute. He absolutely worshipped every story, poem, and
essay I wrote in high school. Tears gathered in his eyes whenever he read even my first drafts.
Dad had come to Toronto from Poland as a child, and from time to time loved to kick in a
Yiddish wertl. His young man's dream was to write a doctoral dissertation on Herman Melville's
ideas of personality, or something like that. But, Dad sighed, there were no student loans in those
days; my grandfather, a tailor at Tip Top, could hardly afford his son's undergraduate studies, let
alone subsidize seven years of scholarly research. Rancorous, Dad settled for a bachelor's degree,
then a teacher's certificate.
My parents got angry at each other whenever Mom played her Mozart vinyls too many
times. Above the sounds of Don Giovanni or the Jupiter symphony, Dad yelled, "Ann, If you don't
put the volume down, I'm renting a basement apartment."
6
"Avram!" Mom hollered back. "You know where the door is, Avram!"
She got upset whenever Dad woke up late and, without taking the garbage to the curb,
rushed to work.
"I forgot," he slapped his glimmering, growing forehead almost every Thursday evening.
"Avram!" Mom fired, "you never forget to take your lunch to school!"
Late at night, with Wolfgang at last off the air, Dad sat by his desk; into the wee night hours
he studied for the umpteenth time portions of Bartleby The Scrivener, two-inch-thick novels, and
Billy Bud, his idol's masterpiece. (Billy Bud, Dad flung his hand dismissively, was too good for
students high on grass.) Despite my mother's rumblings, my sleepy Dad could barely roll out of bed
in the mornings; Mom held Melville and Moby Dick in contempt.
My problems began in grade thirteen, just when the other kids were having loud parties,
going crazy about Little Richard and Elvis. Too excited to fall asleep, I roamed inside our house at
night. To Mom's chagrin, I cut school and began to eat my meals only in my room. Distant echoes,
loud locomotive whistles, and mean voices of women and men hiding inside the walls tortured me
day and night. "You're a bastard, Dave," they yelled. "Your Mom is a whore, a hooker! Her man
is not your father! That pimp hates you! He'll put poison in your food, then publish your work
under his name."
Every time the voices' volume went up, my muscles and joints hurt terribly. Over the
decades, a legion of physiatrists, rheumatologists, neurologists, orthopaedic surgeons, specialists in
pain management, chiropractors, kinesiologists --to name only the experts -- have tried to help me.
Tough bananas. To this day, every time the mean voices take over, contractions seize my leg
muscles, and, in seconds, radiate to all parts of my body.
7
As my problems worsened, I dreaded looking into others' eyes. I became convinced that
even total strangers could read my mind and, especially, my shame and guilt for masturbating into a
nylon sock hidden between my mattress and boxspring. Though my parents begged me to stop
staring at their ankles, shins, and knees, I continued to hang my head, my eyes on their legs and
thighs. Over the years, I've perfected my shtick: first I glance at shoes and socks; only later I
venture to look at faces. If I feel secure, a rare event, I maintain eye-contact for a millionth of a
second. For an experienced observer, shoes, socks, and the hems of pants can be as revealing as the
facial expressions people wear.
Just a week before the 1958 Christmas break, voices from my black-and-white television
ordered me to kill Dad before he or one of his co-conspirators poisoned my milk. To protect both
Dad and myself, I filled my room with bottles of mineral water and canned food, then boarded the
door from within.
"David, David!" Mom and Dad begged. "Open the door!"
"Leave me alone!" I shouted. "I know you hate me!" That was not true. I feared what I
might do to them.
When not dozing off, I screamed, "Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!" At that stage, not
only my parents, but the Premier of Ontario and his cabinet were on my mind. Since I peed and
pooed in my room, Mom and Dad threatened to call the police. They did, eventually, but I can't
recall whether it was dark or bright outdoors when the showdown with the cops took place. Night
and day, voices from inside the walls and from all corners shrieked, "They poisoned you, Dave!
They poisoned you!"
After pounding and pounding on my door, the dog catchers in police uniform kicked it in.
8
Pinching their noses, they charily tred into the minefield of my room. Standing right behind the
bulky cops, Dad aimed a green garden hose at me, and sprayed freezing water on the shit icing my
bed and body.
It took half a dozen cops to carry me to Nine Ninety-Nine: when I fly into one of my rages, I
kick in the groin, scream, and bite. By comparison, Samson was just a well-behaved pussy cat.
There is plenty of evidence for that in Medical Records.
Once locked up in Lucifer's Lair, the gun molls and Goliaths tied me in cold packs and
straightjackets. (In those days, there was no Charter of Rights in Canada; every shrink did what
was right in his own eyes.) If you paid me a dollar for every suicide attempt, I'd have enough
money for a trip to Israel: I would see, smell, and touch the settings of most Biblical stories.
I tried every trick in the book and some new ones, too: with the bed frame I slashed my
wrists; I swallowed plastic forks and knives; I made a rope out of my sheets and blankets; I stopped
peeing and stuck four fingers up my ass for days. In vain, as you can see.
In those days, there were no sanitized "intensive care units," just dozens of Goliaths to
restrain David Hoffnungs who stood up for their rights -- "combative", in Medical Records jargon.
But even while in restraints, again and again I threatened to knife and blowtorch my parents and all
authorities for locking me up. Later on, I sent Mom, Dad, and the Premier of Ontario some nasty
letters and pieces of vile poetry.
My name put into the heads of my voices all sorts of interesting ideas. To them, "David"
denoted that I was the Messiah Jews had been waiting for thousands of years. "Hoffnung" -- hope,
in Yiddish -- indicated that I alone would bring about all the sweet dreams of white, black, and
Asian women and men. When not tormented by voices, I alternated between ecstatic laughter and
9
soft sobbing: in the beginning God had created the universe so that my glory, wisdom, and
benevolence -- a majestic new sun -- would warm and enlighten all living creatures.
It took me a couple of years at ward M to become "stabilized," my medical records say.
After years of reading only the Toronto Star's headlines, I ached for challenging and gratifying
books; my emptied-out mind felt as thirsty as bushes in the Judea wilderness. Unlucky me found
on the ward only what the gangsters on staff had placed on the shelves: bound copies of the
Reader's Digest, coverless and yellowing pocketbooks, sentimental romances, and antique,
discoloured copies of the National Geographic Magazine. Bored and tired of superficialities with
little artistic or philosophical value, I immersed myself in a copy of the King James' version of the
Bible I found concealed behind stacked-up books. A proud Jew, first I studied the Old Testament,
the most precious of the Jews' many gifts to mankind. (My impaired concentration and drifting
attention span does not, unfortunately, permit me to read more recent Jewish writers I've read about
in the Star: Bashevis-Singer, Agnon, Saul Bellow, or, in a wave of Canadian nationalism, Mordecai
Richler.)
My friends on the ward were observing Christians, and under their influence I also studied
daily brief portions of the New Testament, from St. Matthew to Revelation. In a few years I
became a scholar of all matters Biblical.
Like my parents, I'm not an orthodox or observant Jew; I enjoyed researching and writing
notes on the Bible seven days a week. It was no chore for me, but a source of ecstatic fulfilment.
Though I fasted on Yom Kippur, even on that holy day I took no breaks from my studies, as I didn't
consider my research work, but edification of my soul and character; from the prophets and the
apostles I drew much inspiration for my unceasing wars against all hogs in power. I conducted my
10
investigations even after the late local news. I read, reread, and wrote comments until the by-thebook sadistic staff turned off the lights on the ward. As the enemies of freedom and human rights
did not allow me to make use of their bright, fluorescent-lit staff station, I called it a day, and
resumed my quest for truth after breakfast.
Mom and Dad began to visit me every Sunday afternoon. In a paper bag they brought me
chocolate bars and the New Yorker -- the glossy, overedited review of yiddishe and goyishe gossip.
They never brought me packs of cigarettes, because, unlike other locked-up people, I've never been
keen on smoking. Erratic as my thinking might be, it leans toward biological, not environmental
theories: there must be a genetic underpinning for one's interest, or disinterest, in neurotic smokescreens.
After I became unglued the first time, my relationship with my parents was never the same.
Mom, of course, still hugged and kissed me every Sunday -- a bit perfunctorily, I'd say. Not even
once did Dad ask me his favourite question since grade three, "Do you still want to become a
journalist one day, Dave?"
Weekly my parents sat by my bed, and, a nice and polite Canadian family, we chatted about
every new and old topic under the sun, except how the three of us really felt about me, Avram and
Ann Hoffnung's only son, living in Nine Ninety-Nine all these years. Though I never brought up
anything personal -- that would have upset me terribly -- I could hardly wait for Mom and Dad to
leave. Just being with them in the same room gave me goosebumps. I couldn't help it.
Mom and Dad never got over my accusations and the terrible poems I wrote in the throes of
my initial problems. When Mom died of cancer some twelve years ago, I fell apart, and they gave
me a lot of shock treatments.
11
Months after I recovered, a flat-footed, massive-legged Yidd shrink with thighs the shape of
an overweight prosciutto said, "Your unresolved, ambivalent guilt about your mother made you
sick, Dave."
In a rage, I shot a glance at his cream cheese false teeth and lox lips.
"A full moon is made of cottage cheese, mister," I replied. (Later, I'll tell in detail how I
manhandled another clever Yidd who happened to be a head-doctor.)
Years ago, Dad entered a nursing home. Escorted by an assistant gun moll, I visited him:
wan, skinny, and frail, he almost disappeared in his big bed in a piss-smelling room with three other
old men. I haven't heard any bad news since then, and I suppose he's fine.
There's something evil about so-called madness: it turns your heart either lava-hot or
iceberg-cold -- mostly cold, I'd say. Do normals subsist somewhere in the space between? I don't
know. Let fat-cat shrinks and research-crazy phuds worry about the subtleties of theory. I have
enough problems just keeping my thoughts straight, to write coherent paragraphs.
concentration is so poor that I'm unable to read most books; I write two sentences a day.
Stelazine
My
12
As I tried to explain, for twenty-six years Nine Ninety-Nine was my base -- what target of
the Establishment's persecutions ever calls Shrink City "home"? That is, except for nine months, in
the mid-sixties, when they locked up my best friend Jack Barnaby, Brenda Bell, Bill Owen, me, and
a lot of other ward M long-termers at Hamilton Psych, that huge maze of dark, interminable
corridors, where bloated, cat-size rats trudged in and out of our bedrooms as if they owned the
place.
The Hamilton Psych sleaze began early one afternoon. A Paki shrink that looked like a
hairless gorilla in a navy polyester suit was our ward lord at the time. With a red-nosed, yawning
phud and the ward M bespectacled moll-in-chief to his right, he sat us in a horseshoe around the
black-and-white television.
"Guys," the shrink said. "Medical researchers are doing an interesting study. They're
investigating an effective, new phenothiazine called Stelazine."
The pasha turned me right off: his atrocious accent was even more pitiable than the words
he was mangling.
One by one the shrink scrutinized us victims of his outrageous practices. Failing to stir any
enthusiasm, his voice took an upbeat tone, like a campaigning politician. "Folks! Look left, and
then right. I can reassure you that in six months, only one in three will be back to ward M.
Stelazine," his copper eyes shone, "is a really good drug for people in your situation."
Your situation? Knitting brows, Jack, Brenda, and I exchanged worried glances. Whenever
a shrink or the moll-in-chief hurled the phrase "your situation" at us, more likely than not a poor
13
soul was in for a dozen shock treatments.
"Ste-la-zi-ne!" The shrink raised his voice, as if we had gone deaf from previous pills. "It'll
take a few days for those on the new drug to get used to its mild side-effects. But in a matter of
weeks," he mustered a motherly voice, "we expect those of you on Stelazine to get much better."
He waited for questions. None popped up, of course. Notwithstanding our frozen, passiveaggressive silence, the tyrant continued. "Neither the staff at Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital nor you
guys will know if you're on the new or the old drug. The pills, by the way, will be made to look
identical." The shrink gazed sideways, waiting in vain for moral support from the professorially
bespectacled, inscrutable phud -- that lazy bum, whose one worn-out, salt-and-pepper tweed jacket
stank of cheap liquor and Dutch pipe tobacco. Just a week before, he had passed by the ward and
re-administered to some unlucky souls a battery of humiliating, deceitful tests. So dumb were the
phud's inkblots and gloomy pictures that they didn't fool even Bill Owen, that pitiable ass-kisser,
whose life is an offering at the altar of appeasing even minor bosses.
The shrink went on. "Only a professor at the University of Toronto will have access to a
secret code with the names of those on Stelazine."
(Of the many upsets in my life, the worst took place when, from four emerald, oval pills,
and a pearly round one, they switched me to three ruby-turquoise capsules; for weeks the glittering
gems had made me so sick -- dry mouth, dizziness, and tremors -- that I tottered along the ward, a
twenty-four karat zombie.)
The shrink paused, and one by one looked at his charges. "Tomorrow morning most of you
guys are going to Hamilton--"
"On foot?" Jack hollered.
14
"Of course not, Jack." Lilith, queen of devils disguised as our moll-in-chief, jumped in,
incisors flashing. She must have been about thirty, and her fat legs could have been appealing,
were it not for her black running shoes and folded-down white socks. With contempt and hatred,
her unblinking, narrowed eyes closely scanned me and the other prisoners of war. The evil flowing
from her pupils was disguised only by transparent, nifty television cameras glued to the lenses of
her cute, gold-rimmed spectacles.
Jack, who loved Lilith's torpedo tits -- his words; I'm a leg
man, acute and chronic -- had said, "Sooner or later I'll bang that bitch in the laundry room where
I've broken in a lot of students." Jack, who looks people in the eye more than I ever do, almost
daily rhapsodized about Lilith's pencil-thin lips, always coloured pink. "Just, imagine, bro," Jack
moaned, one instant before an orgasm, "an hour-long, blow job from that wet, pointy tongue."
Nibbling at her lower lip, the angry moll waited for the guffaws and coughs to die down.
"Relax, Jack. Buses," she intoned to signify a personal favour, "will drive you guys there. Take all
your personal belongings with you; please don't leave anything behind."
"Why not?" fired Brenda, a perpetually barefoot friend of mine, who refused to shave her
thin long legs covered with steel-wool hair. Near-toothless, she hated not only shrinks, but dentists,
too. She washed her long, crinkly hair only when two queen-size molls escorted her to the shower.
She hardly ever took her hands off Jack's inner thighs; on a lucky day, her forefinger and thumb
took measure after measure of my cock's calibre, too.
Brenda lifted her voice. "Don't you worry, ma'am. We won't leave behind any lice or bed
bugs."
Waving his huge hands, Jack leaped to his feet. "Brenda! Bet my pink popsicle against one
of your nipples that they've lots of bed bugs in Hamilton Psych, or whatever they call that flea-
15
fucking joint."
"Go for it, Jack!" I yelled. The guys' heads turned. They studied my eyes. At ward M it
was common knowledge: rarely did Dave Hoffnung wear his feelings on his sleeve; only on paper
do I vent what's brewing between my ears.
I sprang to my feet. "What's this watery horse shit supposed to mean? I hate living at Nine
Ninety-Nine! Hate it with all my heart! Worse, I resent being transferred to Hamilton Psych like
cattle. Where are we really going? Auschwitz? Birkenau? Buchenwald? Dachau?"
As it often happens, my thought processes went tabula rasa. Minutes later, when I resumed
thinking, I shouted into the room's bedlam, "Teresianstadt! Teresianstadt! Treblinka!" At the top
of my lungs I sang in Yiddish, "Zog nicht keinmol das du gehst der letzten weg..." (Never say
you're walking down the last road -- the first line of a World War Two Jewish ghetto fighters' song.)
When I went blank on the rest of the lyrics, I hollered the tune until I fell to the floor.
As Jack helped me to my feet, I shrieked "Mordechai! Mordechai!" at the Paki shrink, the
phud, and the moll. I alluded, of course, to Mordechai Anilevitch, the commander-in-chief of the
Warsaw ghetto uprising. (My favourite hero embodied none of the traditional Jewish traits of
scholarship, martyrdom, or victimization. With rusty revolvers, he and his ragtag fighters had kept
the Nazis at bay for almost a month, while cowardly, well-armed Frogs and Polaks collapsed in two
weeks.)
I shook Jack off and squawked even louder. "Mordechai! Mordechai!" As best as I could,
I sang wordless portion after wordless portion of the Jewish fighters' song.
Jack, a one-song man, began to sing "O Canada! My home and native land!" Most inmates
stood up, spread palms on their chests, and, faces solemn, joined him.
16
Still sitting down, Brenda smoothed her kinky hair, and spread her legs as wide as they
went. Raising her skirt until her panties showed, she sang
You ain't nothing but a hound dog!
Crying all the time!
You ain't nothing but a hound dog!
Crying all the time!
For a moment she strained to remember the rest of the lyrics. Then, the ward's diva, a powerful
soprano, blurted out, "And you ain't no friend of mine!"
The shrink, the phud, and the moll sprinted to the door. In an instant the doorhandle
clicked, locking us in.
Soon the door to the ward was unlocked, and a team of Gestapo agents dressed as Goliaths
swarmed into the television area. "Please, calm down. Go back to your rooms," they coaxed, all
the while looking at Jack from the corners of their eyes. When my best buddy even thought he was
being pushed around, he got really mad, then bad, very bad. Though a native of Etobicoke, to the
best of my knowledge Jack had never displayed any signs and symptoms of Canadian niceness and
civility. No sir! Whenever a frequent fit of rage came over him, it took six or more Nine NinetyNine scared Goliaths to restrain him face down on a bed, then shoot Haldol up his buttock. For half
an hour they held him clockwork tight, waiting for their fix to kick in.
Next morning I had a hard time tossing out of bed. Jack, to my side, was snoring worse
than a chain saw. The effects of an extra dose of Haldol? I wondered.
17
Hell, I told myself. Bet a case of champagne against a cup of coffee that the molls had
drugged our tea last night, to make it easier to transfer us to the gas chambers of HamiltonAuschwitz!
I ran into the corridor. "Nazis!" I waved a tight fist at the molls taking cover behind their
glass-enclosed station. "Buchenwald! Zyklon B!" I bellowed.
Years later, a Yidd shrink had the audacity to tell me that I and the other guys were in the
grip of "abandonment anxiety" -- his words, I never use this kind of language.
"Deep down," that pigeon-footed, fat-ankled mind-tinkerer with socks that never matched
his pants told me, "you, the patients, didn't want to leave ward M. You were scared! Look at it this
way, Dave." He crossed one fat thigh over the other, almost bursting the pockets of his tight pants.
"For years the ward was your womb, your home, even your writer's den. Bitch all you want, Dave,
but face it: you just weren't ready to leave Nine Ninety-Nine."
Well, well. The fate of that Judas Iscariot is the topic of one of my most difficult-to-write
scraps.
Back to the Nazi transfer to Hamilton-Teresienstadt. At long last, Jack, Brenda, Bill Owen,
and other chicks and guys woke up. Feeling betrayed by the staff once again, I slowly chewed my
breakfast, dreading it was our last meal at Nine Ninety-Nine -- a feeling Jesus must have had
throughout his entire last supper. After years of living on ward M, in my heart of hearts I dreaded
Hamilton-Buchenwald would be an even worse house of horrors, but had no words for my
paralysing fears.
Soon, a hand-picked team of Goliaths in black, shining jack boots and molls in black
booties marched in. Urging us to take it easy, they escorted almost all ward M inhabitants to huge
18
Greyhound buses parked by one of the side entrances to the warehouse of tortured bodies and souls.
Like aging bulldogs, the exhaust pipes of the chrome-and-tinted-glass monsters were spewing
grey-blue, toxic fumes.
It was a cruelly hot summer day; the intensely blue sky dazzled. Though I usually love wild
flowers, even cultivated ones in a vase, the pink, blue, and white impatiens sprouting by the cement
sidewalk struck me as obscene gestures. Far away, a steetcar swayed past; a few pedestrians in
short sleeves brought me back to an almost forgotten world, the "cold, cruel, world out there," as it
was commonly referred to by equally frightened staff and residents.
I blinked and blinked, doddering on the dazzling cement path. My two suitcases were even
heavier in my hands, now that I had taken up creative writing. To my new asylum I lugged my
entire literary arsenal: the King James' version of the only set of books worth memorizing from
cover to cover; several more recent, lily-livered versions of the above, translated and edited by
sissies; one large, leather-bound volume of the Bard's complete works, a gift from my father; the
Collins and the Webster; my Roget's Thesaurus, and, of course, The Elements Of Style; a sharpener
for a dozen yellow pencils of varying lengths, their pink erasers chewed off; pink and white thumbsize erasers at various stages of wear and tear; half a dozen lined pads; and last, a bunch of
disintegrating anthologies of poetry and prose.
Fearing that the enormous bus might overturn and burn on the way to Hamilton-Treblinka, I
had placed all my writings inside two plastic bags which I harboured under my shirt.
I hate to be repetitive, but for seven years I hadn't been outside Nine Ninety-Nine even once,
and the upcoming trip filled my heart with dread. I pictured Hamilton Psych as a fortress many
times bigger and stinkier than Nine Ninety-Nine. To top it off, we had no assurance that we, chicks
19
and guys from ward M, would stay together. Terrified of losing Jack, Brenda, and even Bill Owen,
I tramped to the bus, my eyes on the pedestrians ambling far away.
made ourselves comfortable inside the air-conditioned bus.
Slowly, we chicks and guys
After my butt adapted to the
upholstered, hard seat, I stared at the frozen-faced S.S. troopers with chins up and blue swastikas
glinting in their eyes. Beside the expressionless murderers, Polak-blond, sharp-fanged Kapos stood
on the sidewalk, waiting for the buses to transport us persecuted people to the crematoria. Inside
my bus, no one shed tears, of course; only Bill Owen, that incurable ass-kisser, waved goodbye. A
slim-footed, long-limbed, stooped guy with a crooked nose that runs much of the time, he disgusted
me both physically and mentally.
Two hours later we arrived at Hamilton Psych, that hell hole where Jack, Brenda, Bill, I,
and many other ward M inhabitants would be locked up like murderers for nine months. If it took
the author of Lamentations one hundred and fifty-four verses to describe his feelings about the
devastation of Jerusalem, who am I to squander strings of words on what happened at Hamilton
Psych?
Okay. We slept four men to a cramped room, more crowded than my Dad's in the
nursing home, many years later. My thin, stone-hard mattress smelled of urine and disintegrating
straw; in the evenings the rooms stank of unlit French cigarettes. The enemy divided us into several
groups, but, luckily, I was locked up in the same ward as Jack and Brenda. Poor Bill spent the
entire time away from us, and the jailers allowed him to visit Brenda and us only once a week.
At the Hamilton brick-red monument to ugliness, three times a week the staff insulted our
intelligence with indoor volleyball with a too low net, finger-painting classes, drawing stick-figures,
and other artsy-fartsy activities. The food was just as predictable as in Nine Ninety-Nine, except
that mashed potatoes with thin, grey gravy were served on Thursdays, not Wednesdays. My parents
20
came to visit me every week, but, thank God, stayed on the ward only an hour -- they had to catch
the bus to Toronto, they said. I suppose they couldn't tolerate for long Hamilton Psych's bleak,
doomsday ambience.
Shrinks are not prophets, just malicious control freaks; it's not surprising, then, that the
results of the new drug therapy didn't turn out exactly as the Paki had predicted. Bill Owen and
several other guys shook as if caught at the peak of an earthquake. Their limbs resembled patients
with terminal Parkinson's disease. These days, twenty years after the Hamilton Psych swindle, he
still eats out of a white plastic bowl with a huge wooden spoon -- his shaking hands can't handle
regular silverware. The meekest butt of shrinks' cruelty, he sees a neurologist several times a year,
and is dumb enough to take the prescribed poisons.
(Neurologists, we recipients of the
Establishment's abuses know so well, are almost as power-hungry as shrinks.) The corrupt nervedoctor butters Bill up with, "Your condition is stable, Mr. Owen, nothing to worry about." What
this crap actually means is that Bill is deteriorating slowly, almost imperceptibly; even if he
mustered enough courage to sue his incompetent shrinks and the makers of Stelazine, he might not
win his court case.
Brenda had more than her share of hassles. The staff at Hamilton Psych took her to court,
where a judge as sleepy as a shrink after lunch declared her dangerous to herself on grounds of
neglecting her teeth for too long. Kicking and screaming, she was dragged into a police car, then
taken to a nearby university clinic. There, dentistry students in blue jeans under knee-long white
coats honed their skills by pulling out her remaining teeth. After, the fiends implanted silvery
crowns in her gums. Poor Brenda! Even before the Stelazine experiment ended, she hid her two
rows of glittering teeth behind one shaking hand as she ate; tears of humiliation shone in her eyes
21
whenever she spoke, even to her best friends. She stopped singing altogether.
These days, Brenda was told that the mercury in the crowns may cause serious health
problems. "They must all come out," a reasonably unmenacing doctor -- from outside Nine NinetyNine, of course -- told her. Brenda still refuses to come near a dentist; even if we, her old friends,
talked her into seeing one, where in the world would she find thousands of dollars for new crowns?
Brenda's social worker has explained that the welfare department considers ceramic ones a luxury;
if all her teeth were pulled out, she'd be entitled to cover her gums only with pink and white plastic
dentures.
The new drug didn't agree with Jack. During the day he fell asleep even while gorgeous
chicks played dumb in soap operas; on and off he dozed until after dinner, when he turned alert and
began to fondle, pinch, and grab the chicks; he wouldn't stop hugging and feeling the tits of the
molls on evening shifts either.
He spent much time in isolation cells on account of his
"inappropriate" advances; eventually, he got tired of the sexual repression all around, and since he
was not certified as dangerous to himself or others at the time, he signed himself out against
medical advice. (A few months later, a swinish judge ordered the cops to return him to Nine
Ninety-Nine.)
The potent drug did take away some of my voices, mostly those I benefited from, blessed
voices that uttered inspiring, memorable phrases. For months I could barely write prose; poetry
seemed an impossible dream. The damned pills made me shake worse than a bottom-of-the-barrel
boozer without a drink. With bent forefingers, I pounded a typewriter: when I wrote with a pencil,
peaks and valleys crowded the lined pad, as if a mechanical device had drawn them. The bottom
line is, the Paki's miracle pill helped me much less than just fingering my virgin-tight, dry ass three
22
times a day.
That Stelazine research project first confirmed, then deepened my suspicions about the
powers to be. These power-crazy monsters didn't merely strive to control the behaviour and
experiences of defenceless and vulnerable people. Oh, no! They conspired to turn us around, force
us to perceive the world the way they had mandated. Our defeat would signal that the shrinks'
conspiracy to conquer the world was on track. Aching to attain unlimited hegemony, they craved
for the moment we victims would spread the palms of our hands on our crowns. Day and night
they toiled to induce us to give up on the struggle for freedom and dignity. They worked
incessantly to see us hang our head in submission, admit that we'd sinned, and, thumping our
chests, declare that the dictators had been right all along.
Untrembling, and despite all physical and mental obstacles, I decided to continue to oppose
my foes with all available means. Deep down I knew that memorizing the Bible and dreaming of
ghetto-like uprisings were weapons too weak to wreak havoc on the perpetrators. At that point in
time I had no plan of action, no outlet for my hurt and rage. In my heart I knew I had to forge sharp
swords, long daggers, and mighty spears to make war with the shrinky Establishment.
Unfortunately, the precise form my weapons would take still eluded me. Every morning, as,
drugged, I crawled out of bed, it became clearer that the enemies of free will had not merely locked
us up. No! They had poisoned our minds and bodies with foul drugs and brain-damaging shock
treatments.
In my estimate, ninety percent of the people transferred to Hamilton Psych returned to NineNinety-Nine. Instead of curing two thirds of us, as the enemy propaganda had boasted, like buried
landmines the cursed chemicals exploded one by one, causing both short and long-term casualties.
23
(There is no new thing under the sun, Ecclesiastes says. We madmen suffer the worst
stereotypes and superstitions, physical and emotional abuses. We are the wretched of the earth!
How many "new treatments" have been tried on our bodies and minds? Guinea pigs, at least, are
not slathered with cheap rhetoric about "research" and "progress".)
To this day I'm convinced that the Stelazine project was nothing but an evil conspiracy, a
scam by the shrinks-pillmakers-bankers-politicians complex to make a mighty buck out of poor
souls like Brenda, Jack, Bill, and myself.
I have everlasting contempt and hatred for all pigs in power! I hope their gummy souls
sizzle in a cauldron of boiling pitch in the noisiest, most nauseating spot in the valley of Gehenna,
even after the Messiah comes!
Poker Chips
Two kinds of gun molls did their nasty tricks at the warehouse of terrorized souls. Usually
of Scottish-Presbyterian stock, the older ones turned me off with their thin ankles, custard-flabby
legs, and huge haunches. They believed, evidently, that a genuine devil's assistant ought to display
24
juicy upper arms and cropped grey hair. The hags never held my hand or hugged me, even in my
days of hell or high water; strictly professional ladies, blessed be their Lord.
The more recent crops of "primary therapists" had submarine feet and Pinocchio legs
accentuated by white pantyhose. They were, as a rule, tower-tall, and their pita-flat chests didn't
work for me, either. But whenever I got upset, a frequent event, some of the younger ones insisted - for ideological reasons, I suppose -- on clutching my hands with their cold, bony fingers. At times
they even gave me a slight hug, usually before the Goliaths dragged me -- yelling, kicking, and
biting -- along the long, straight corridors leading to one of Nine Ninety-Nine's many shocktreatment rooms.
By and large, the molls treated me like a farting old bulldog that had been around far too
long. Apart from veterans like me, both the devils on staff and many of their victims got out of that
deadening joint as soon as they found a cleaner, saner place to stay. Like a flop house, Nine NinetyNine saw a lot of its inmates come and go; the sadistic staff wanted us long-term victims of
malicious practices to vacate our beds to accommodate fresher, younger bodies.
But not only shrinks, gun molls, and Goliaths conspired to humiliate me. Over the decades,
some energetic phuds sweetly talked me into all sorts of cockeyed research projects, like the one
where I did menial work around the ward in exchange for poker chips that, sooner or later, I lost in
Saturday night card games with Jack, Bill Owen, and other guys.
Susan Thomas once told me, "Don't beat yourself up for your betting habits, Dave. Some
great writers, like Dostoevsky, were really bad gamblers." That was the first time I became
suspicious of her motives: why would she mention in the same breath the author of Crime And
Punishment and a little bed bug like me? What was she really up to? Deep down, what did she
25
want?
Be that as it may, every day we long-termers had a list of personal tasks to perform in
exchange for coloured chips. (Manic depressives were not included in that project.) Before
breakfast, for example, guys could get one white poker chip in exchange for good performance on a
man's three "S.H."s -- shit, shower, and shave. After, we got chips of various colours for brushing
our teeth, making beds, or toiling for hours around the ward. To accomplish the stated goal of
recording and modifying behaviours, all activities were regimented; the ward became a
concentration camp. There were planned intermissions, like coffee breaks, or times for leaks and
dumps. Chips were used to reward whatever the staff considered "appropriate" behaviours, like
taking a shower after a day's work, or bleaching our running shoes in a bucket. I felt so hemmed in
by that infamous "treatment" program, that only late at night, while masturbating under my
blankets, did I, at long last, feel alive, spontaneous, a human being with a sense of privacy.
A connoisseur not of people's faces but of their ankles, shoes, and socks, I was mobilized by
the bosses to mop the ward's floors, an edifying task for which I received five blue chips daily. As
Editor-in-Chief of The Ward M Quarterly, a twenty-page anarchistic magazine spearheading the
fight against locking up people, shock treatments, and meds, I was paid thirty blue chips as soon as
the mimeographed sheets rolled off the press. Were it not for my passion for poker, I might have
become Nine Ninety-Nine's Rothschild or Reichmann.
Since both staff and abused people were clever enough not to challenge Jack to a fight, the
scheming phuds appointed him patients' representative. What that meant, in practice, was that
except for smoking Camel cigarettes, watching soap operas, and pinching chicks you know where,
all day long my best friend did sweet nothing at all. For his "contributions to the ongoing research
26
project" our rep got twenty blue chips a day -- enough to make even his best buddies reel with envy.
In our poker games, he betted wildly, without ever biting his thumbnail the way I did.
Jack's bulk alone was enough to enforce the phuds' fascistic insistence on every chick and
guy quickly doing his best on his assigned job. What the phuds called "behaviour modification"
was, in my editorial opinion, plain theoretical horse manure. Were it not for Jack's presence, the
whole hard-nosed capitalist project would never have got off the ground. Just one of our rep's dirty
looks was enough to make even me, his bosom buddy, work my ass off.
Once, one winter, at
the height of the poker-chips project, I told Jack, "Sorry, buddy. The spring issue of the Ward M
Quarterly will be a few days late."
He furrowed his eyebrows. "Why is that, bro?"
"Change of meds, Jack. I'm feeling awful; they put me back on Stelazine."
"Sorry to hear about the Stelazine, Dave. I know how you must feel; I myself suffered a lot
from it. But your quarterly is due March fifteen, remember?" His moist nostrils flared. "Deadlines
are deadlines, Dave! You must come through, man."
"But Jack," I moaned, "can't you see? The phuds are turning brother against brother! The
quarterly has no subscribers! With a circulation of twelve, what is the hurry?"
"Dave," the patients' rep hollered, "I don't want a perfect work of art! Hear me? I want it
March fifteen! Get your literary ass in gear, and just do it!"
I did. When not mopping the floors, I sat by my typewriter for one hundred and twenty
hours without sleeping a wink. Three times a day Brenda Bell, Nine Ninety-Nine's Virtuous
Woman, kindly brought me meals on a tray. To save precious time, I peed only twice a day. Took
no dumps.
27
On March fifteen, minutes before dinner, moist copies of the Ward M Quarterly circulated
in the ward, one in Jack's huge hands. Incredibly, that particular issue was one of my best. It
included a short story about a Jewish boy who married a Catholic girl (he taught her all about guilt,
she put him in touch with his shame, and they barely survived ever after); two sonnets -mellifluously rhymed, and in iambic pentameter, of course -- one on winter love, the other on
spring death; a hard-hitting editorial against behaviour modification, the ultimate abuse of man by
man; an essay titled, "Quit Whining, Job! Nine Ninety-Nine Would Have Been Much Worse!"
Brenda and Bill Owen jointly operated The Ward M Boutique, a cushy job. Their special
relationship today started, it appears, behind the boutique's counter, where hard-earned chips were
exchanged for cigarettes, candy, chocolate bars, toothpaste, soap, pencils, lined pads, even transistor
radios and toasters. Since Jack was the only sexually active male on the ward, and he didn't care a
damn about procreation or precautions, there were no condoms on the shelves. Jack, incidentally,
got his rocks off by leaving Nine Ninety-Nine against medical advice a couple of times a year.
While away from the can of worms, he went through a stint of sex, drugs, and booze in "the cruel
world out there," as the incompetent staff and we fearful residents badnamed it.
I wouldn't put it past Bill Owen to embezzle a lot of the Ward M Boutique's funds. To this
day I suspect that were it not for his unbridled corruption, the poker-chip economy might have
lasted a while longer.
Another fringe benefit sleazy Bill got out of that research program was a lot of hand and
even blow jobs from Brenda. (To intimidate people and control the cultural scene, shrinks until
recently have labelled blow jobs as diagnosable disorders that required special "treatments", like
shaming, shunning, and pillorying. What is called "oral sex" today was viewed in reactionary
28
quarters as a symptom, or manifestation of weak moral fibre. Both quacks and Holy Joes slapped
Jack's favourite topics of conversation with Latin labels -- "fellatio" and "cunnilingus" -- as if such
ugly words would have the deterrent effect of hydrogen bombs.)
The Bill-and-Brenda encounters took place daily, when the staff gathered behind closed
doors to perfect their tortures and public humiliations. Lo and behold, all the ward's inhabitants
received the frenetic, behind-the-counter workouts favourably. Prior to this liaison, Bill was in the
habit of taking off his pants and shirt, then sitting on his bed, doing weird Yoga exercises for a long
while. With no molls in sight, he took off his greasy, browning underpants. He sat at the edge of
his bed, grabbed one foot with both hands, twisted his leg and bent his spine until one heel rested
on the nape of his neck. Panting, and jerking lower and lower, he tried in vain to lick his pink
English cucumber, his uncircumcised dick.
Before his relationship with Brenda, Bill used to stick corks, carrots, or celery sticks up his
ass, one reason why the molls went through the monthly Care packages he got from his parents.
Though usually as compliant as a graduate from dog obedience school, he paid no attention to the
staff's orders to remove the cork or carrot he had inserted in its unnatural place. Even when his old
friends begged him to go to the washroom before he exploded, he merely smiled, ecstatic, refusing
to abandon his world of private pleasures. As stiff as a Russian soldier on a May Day parade, he
marched up and down the ward's corridors. Bill's anxiety seemed to get worse during the initial
stages of the poker chips program; he began to stuff his ass more often, sometimes even with
twisted newspapers.
After a week or ten days with a clogged rectum, his shining eyes and uptight gait gave away
what tricks he had up his ass; even starry-eyed and bushy-tailed students figured him out. At long
29
last, with the staff and all inmates in suspense, our anal-retentive character in residence perched
splay-legged on a washroom stool. Face and eyes glowing beatifically, his fingers and thumb
groped and groped until he pulled out the caked plug. As he struggled, the entire ward heard tubas,
trombones, and trumpets blaring for as long as the Diaspora of the Jews, it seemed. Despite the
closed doors, Bill's true feelings about the shrinky Establishement soon assaulted our noses; their
stench was the only thing at Nine Ninety-Nine that rendered staff and us guys truly equal. We all
were exposed to the fruits of his creative protests.
Were chemists to synthesize the aromas of
Bill's long-pent up pleasures, they would have to combine whiffs of ammonia and rotten eggs, the
scents of burning hair and burning tires, traces of mustard gas and boiling cauliflower, and the
stench of the grey-green slime that coathangers hook out of bathtub drains.
After farting and peeing, Bill jerked off with gusto, and it didn't take long for him to
ejaculate into the stool, not on his clothes or the floor. He was, in his own way, a tidy guy; he
kissed bosses' asses, I believe, because he became frightened whenever others withheld approval.
Soon after Bill's relationship with Brenda took root, bit by bit he gave up his Yoga tricks
and clogging rituals. The only persistent habit, perhaps not a bad one, was to stick his hand into
the back of his pants, blow the up-coming fart into his cupped hand, then smell it. Whenever he
found the stench intolerable, he rushed to the staff station, where anxious molls provided him with
matches and candles. With several candles burning in the middle, our television room assumed a
magical, mystical appearance -- probably like the small catholic church in which Bill Owen was
raised. Though not at all fond of Bill's deferring to big wigs, I must admit that, once oxidized, his
rear-end emissions became almost bearable. Soon after Brenda and Bill became a couple, the vast
majority of ward M inhabitants had few or no complaints about him.
30
What wondrous things can a woman's affection do for a guy! What unfathomable depths
can a caring relationship stir in a man. What, by contrast, does a lonely wolf like me derive from
life? Not much, really.
(How tartly do Bill Owen's nasty, noisome habits clash with my sweet, moving
remembrances of Mom and Dad, the days of Mozart and Melville. In one of my earliest memories I
am sitting in our tub; the warm, sudsy water reaches my chin. Mom is telling me a story about a
beautiful, black-haired princess that married a well-behaved Jewish boy. With my toes I kick each
one of my plastic toys floating on the bubbly water. I feel pressure in my gut and push it so hard
that my face stiffens and, I think, crimsons. One by one, bubbles float out of my ass and find their
way to the water surface. It puzzles me, How come they vanish into thin air? "Ba-boo-la, ba-boola," I yell, happy. Mom smiles, then crinkles her nose, in feigned disapproval.
I must have been in kindergarten or grade one when I first grasped the connection between
peeing and, upright, blowing farts leisurely. Whenever I relaxed enough to pee into the stool, some
gases amused me by wending their noisy way out. I had, at the time, no words to connect the
bladder with the ass, but experienced the after-peeing gases as one of the amusing internal world's
wonders: it fused bodily sensations, sounds, and unmistakable odours. The latter might have
bothered others, but they left relaxed and not a trifle proud.
Years later, by sheer accident I discovered how to amplify the sound of even the most
mousy farts. Sitting one night on the rim of our bathtub, I blew a blissfully relieving one. The tub
magnified the trombone-like accord so much that a fit of laughter shook me, and tears streamed
down my cheeks.
"David," yelled Mom from her adjacent bedroom. "What's the matter with you? You don't
31
feel well? Open the window!" At that stage of my life, Mom was no longer tolerant of my rear-end
creations. Whenever my bedroom stank of farts or seed, a frequent event, she not only hurried to
open my window, but also lit a couple of candles thicker and longer than the ones used for Sabbath
services.)
One Friday afternoon, the ward's molls called for a special meeting with the project's phuds,
whose names, of course, I shall not mention. All the permanent inhabitants, shrinks, and molls sat
in a huge circle. Three phuds sat next to each other, and I sensed something wicked, sadistic, was
about to happen. My stomach fluttered. My eyes hurt: the bastards, I fancied, would cut off the
subscription to the Toronto Star, or abolish freedom of expression by cancelling the supply of paper
and toner to the Ward M Quarterly.
"Well," the phud-in-chief cleared his throat. That slob wore over-used black socks that
clung to his ankles; his shoes had not been polished for months. My mistrust grew. "The purpose
of this meeting," he said, "is to let you know that all necessary data has been collected. The B-Mod
program is coming to an end."
"When?" yelled Jack, red-faced. He had a lot to lose.
"Next week," the phud resumed. "You'll have a chance to redeem your tokens at the
boutique. Then, we'll begin a new treatment."
"We'll divide you guys into three groups," one shrink followed up. "Each group will be led-"
"To hell with it!" hollered Jack. "I'm signing out of this shithole."
"Are you really, Jack?" asked the shrink. "Are you sure you have somewhere to go?" That
condescending bastard was a recently acquired Israeli import, who, prior to medical school, had
32
been a drill sergeant. He wore a greying, well-trimmed beard and would have looked like Freud
were it not for his chewing gum nonstop, unlike the supershrink's chomping thick cigars. Not only
did he stick bayonets into us, but got off on slowly twisting the blade left and right. From under his
black, bushy eyebrows mister Cruelty eyed Jack up and down. Smiling, he half-whispered, "I may
miss you when you're on your own, Jack."
"Fuck you," yelled our retiring patients' rep. "Why the fuck don't you move your fat,
stinking ass back to the Holy Land?"
"This is a farce," I came to my buddy's help. "Not that I ever enjoyed the poker-chips
program. The opposite. I hated being under your thumbs every minute of the day. But you
announce on Friday afternoon that on Monday we're out of our jobs. What's that? A treatment
centre, or a Canadian corporation?" I paused to catch my breath. "You fuckers call us 'patients',
don't you? So, we too have rights! We're entitled to a tad of compassion. We can't change our
lives at the drop of the hat." In my heart I feared that Saturday night poker games would turn
terribly dull. We would, once again, have to bet on matches, cigarettes, and candy.
"Now you're talking, Dave" hollered Jack.
"What's going to happen to Jack?" asked Brenda. "He has a good job." She looked around
the room. "No, he had a good job." She giggled, and her silvery teeth showed.
Other guys fidgeted in their chairs, but, as usual, said nothing. They watched the scene,
fearful of the vengeful, sadistic bosses.
"Listen, please," the phud-in-chief stood up and, like a preacher, raised one hand. "We ran
out of research funds. That's the bottom line. But the way I see it, there seems to be some mistrust
in the room."
33
"Yes!" I yelled. "Since when do chickens trust the fox?"
"The staff," the phud-in-chief went on, "felt that one week is enough time to get adjusted."
I felt like gouging his eyes out: the phud had ignored my last comment. Once again, the
enemy treated me like a nonentity, not worthy of a response.
"Talking of which," the arrogant Israeli shrink raised his voice, "when you're assigned to
three groups..."
I turned him off, and mentally went on to edit one of my poems. In a world divided into
malicious torturers and abused charges, only my writing comforted me and prevented a slide into
black despair.
The ward meeting went on for another hour. Tired of editing my unwritten poem, I gazed at
my blue-and-white running shoes, blue socks, and the hems of my jeans. What personality traits
did people infer by looking at my lower extremities? I had no idea. Neither normals nor us socalled madmen bring up such topics in conversation. Probably a taboo, like masturbatory fantasies.
One of the many lessons I learned from the poker chips program was: at all times be
suspicious of the pseudo-benevolent phuds! They are as dangerous and conniving as their bosses,
the all-powerful shrinks.
Despite their seemingly innocent charts, rating scales, tests, and
questionnaires, the second-in-command were harmful, almost as deadly as the fiends that stuffed us
with pills, or zapped electricity onto our temples. The scheming, malicious devils disguised as
researchers hid behind the thin veils of "behavioral" and "nonmedical" procedures.
They
desperately wanted us targets of evil manipulations to believe that mental tortures were less painful,
less humiliating than the outright physical abuses. The phuds' "treatments" were as inhumane and
34
destructive as the shrinks' daily mistreatments, or their monthly change of meds.
Another bitter lesson I learned from the poker chip program is that we absolutely couldn't
trust businessmen. We couldn't, in truth, trust anybody but a few long-time friends. Other than
them, we couldn't trust others, couldn't trust, period. Above all, we feared those who presented
themselves as business-like professional helpers, since they were the most ill-intentioned and
dangerous snakes. Under the guise of objectivity and impartiality, the poker-chip marketing experts
worked hard at altering our lifestyle, meddled with our entire behaviour. Using conditioning -- a
method devised to train dogs to salivate as if they were robots -- our science-oriented bosses kept us
so busy we had no time to reflect on their tactics and our humiliations.
Worst of all, the oppressors shamelessly embraced a denigrating, capitalist world-view.
They believed that the most effective way of defeating and subjugating us victims was to arouse our
greed. They dreamed that we vulnerable people would dance to their tune if our hard labour was
remunerated by tawdry trinkets. They bribed us with coloured pieces of plastic and lowered our
self-esteem by letting our own greed temporarily blind us. We targets of exploitation cooperated
with the hope that if we changed our behaviour, we would regain our freedom, even be discharged
from Lucifer's lair. The truth is that the capitalist system didn't, as promised, set us free. Oh, no!
Not only had we turned into slaves at the end of the research project, but all we had to show were
bars of stinking soap and gawdy toothbrushes.
Years after the demise of the poker chip economy, the vixen-in-chief made an
announcement in a Therapeutic Community meeting, that sham weekly meeting of perpetrators and
their victims. The phuds, she said proudly, had written a book together, Ward M: The Behavioral
Management Of Chronic Schizophrenia. She passed around a dark green tome crammed with
35
tables of data, graphs, diagrams, and, at the end, lots of references. Now smiling, that nevermarried witch on a low dose of cock told us that the book had been dedicated to the authors' loving,
dedicated wives. Poor women! They had waited, I was sure, at least five years for their tight-assed,
perfectionist nerds with no stains in their shorts to mail their manuscript to Basic Books.
Our bitch-in-chief added, "Our staff psychologists were appointed associate professors at
the University of Toronto."
Three times I spat on the floor. What a farce! Every day the phuds
showed up at the ward wearing disintegrating, black running shoes and socks that almost never
matched their washed-out khaki pants. Their tweed jackets qualified for Victorian antiques. And
what did the Beelzebubs contribute to the project? Almost nothing! Did the pipe-chomping phuds
give any credit to Jack Barnaby? Nothing, can you imagine? Not an autographed copy of their
book, not even a Thank You card. Only a genius like Isaiah could find words for this bottomless
lack of gratitude to the driving force behind an otherwise mediocre and humourless research
project.
Well, well. Research projects like that never did me any good; I hope it helped the phuds
with their problems. We'll go over the issue of research projects later, because Susan, when we
were still on speaking terms, warned me against my horrible digressions. As vulnerable as
earthworms are when you turn over the soil, I remember every one of my critics, their words and
gestures.
Medical Records, especially the shrinks' early scribblings, often mention my "thought
disorders." In plain English, ideas get jumbled inside my head. What else is new?
One of the many reasons I resumed writing after an interlude of almost three years is that I
can endlessly write, rewrite, revise, and edit what's on paper. Psychotic breaks and real life are not
36
that malleable, right?
37
Yo-Yo Characters
During the time the authorities locked me up, a lot of phoney people came and went through
Nine Ninety-Nine's doors. The phoniest, perhaps, was a swan-footed, flabby-ankled man in brown
orthopaedic booties. I spotted him in his first Therapeutic Community meeting. He wore designer
jeans and a fine Harris-tweed jacket. A bearded, high-browed big guy, after looking around he
sighed like my father would. "The road of my life," he said, "is littered with psychoanalysts who
tried to help me."
How could I trust someone that bejewelled his conversation with words as flattering as
"psychoanalysts"? Right away I suspected that he'd tried to score points with a line safe enough to
appease both old-timers and staff. He threw only a cute zinger at his useless shrinks who, like the
Sphinx, rarely opened their mouths. (Mediocre characters with only one good question have to
work hard on a front of wisdom.)
Soon after the meeting, our four-dollar bill turned out to be the author of eleven books and
dozens of articles on literary criticism, all meticulously edited by his colleagues to eliminate any
traces of wit and humour. Every fall, after writing one hundred days nonstop, the illustrious prof
crashed into the dumps. Good kid, he voluntarily checked himself into the devil's workshop for a
round of twelve shock treatments -- much like his obedient ancestors, who at least once a year
showed up with their brood in Jerusalem, or some other holy place.
38
At the risk of sounding shrinky, I confess that I've never gained much "insight" into socalled "manic depression". The truth is I never liked or trusted any chicks or guys with that crud.
Day and night, these excitable characters paced up and down the ward's corridors, jabbered
nonstop, yelled at their lawyers on the phone, told their stockbrokers to buy and buy and buy, from
ceiling to floor decorated their rooms with magazine pictures, sang and danced Hare Krishna songs.
Too often, some of them bragged how their thirty-four page collection of poems -- published in
Churchill, Manitoba -- would conquer Canada from coast to coast, even change the Earth's orbit
around the sun. They became enraged if we veterans of ward M wars dared to say, "Hey, buddy!
Calm down! Nothing special's going on! You're just one of the guys!"
With M-D's around, I couldn't possibly relax, read the Star, take a nap, or put down on
paper a nifty phrase or rhyme. The manic-depressive crowd trotted in and out of our ward, as if it
were a free, year-round Florida resort. And you never got rid of them for good; like con men,
sooner or later they came back to live in the coop.
In the late sixties our ward harboured a lot of guitar-toting Leonard Cohens and Bob
Dylans: rangy, throaty guys, who evidently took pride in the grime under their fingernails. These
supercilious freaks strutted up and down the corridors as if their shit were Belgian chocolate; they
referred to us victims of the Establishment's persecutions as "lifers", and looked down on us like
blobs developed from inferior protoplasm.
By the early seventies so many aspiring poets graced the beds in our ward that I got royally
mad with their mayhem. So loud was their uninterrupted racket, I couldn't concentrate on reading
the newspaper -- no small task, as I've explained -- let alone do my work as Editor-in-Chief. And
whenever these artistes were feeling down, their long, frozen faces really got on my nerves. How
39
much self-pity can one pair of eyes convey?
Their irritating funks hinted at a hidden agenda: because of their crud -- so unique, poetic,
so deep -- the whiners implied they had a monopoly on depth of feeling; and just like car
manufacturers, they advertised that their products were utterly special. Not too subtly, the forever
ironic songwriters intimated, "Only we grasp life's eternal riddles. We sensitive souls in pain are
the salt of the Earth."
They boasted that nobody else, especially not perennially troubled people, was in touch with
the meaning of suffering. In deformed running shoes and near-white jeans, these long-haired
highbrows put on the air of down-to-earth guys and sang nonstop about the sadness of being
human. They infuriated me by suggesting that only the mood-stricken smelled the flowers in the
meadows and delighted in the stars above.
Did they really believe that their suicidal gestures would ever make The Guinness Book Of
Records? No way! Not only I, but every ward M regular, had had at least two near-fatal attempts
for every time a bard or a balladeer scratched his wrists. For weeks, and sometimes months, the
creeps gave both the staff and us long-termers the silent treatment, as if the room service at Nine
Ninety-Nine were not up to their standards.
My first personal encounter with the ward's minstrels took place in the early sixties. After
years of writing prose and bits of poetry in splendid isolation, a wondrous experience came over me
one evening, during the CBC evening news. A lightning originating from the corner of the room
struck me, and though I fell to the floor, I felt many years younger. When I looked up, I realized
that the ward's ceiling and Nine Ninety-Nine's roof had disappeared. A full moon and the stars
shone, a boys' choir sang a sweet tune. In a moment I saw a silvery chariot drawn by a winged
40
white horse. Panting, I recognized the archangel Gabriel smiling at me. "You can do it, Dave," he
said in a melodious, soothing voice.
Ecstatic, I rose to my feet. "Do what?" I asked God's companion.
He covered his mouth with one wing and was soon out of sight. Stunned, I asked myself,
What did Gabriel, the messenger of good news, mean? I paced the ward back and forth until an
overwhelming insight took over. As if by miracle, my thoughts became clear. What the world
needed, I slapped my forehead, was not more grants to unmedicated writers, but an anarchistic
magazine by the harassed for the harassed, a periodical by persecuted artists who hear voices for
persecuted people who hear voices. When I regained normal breathing, a new ecstasy took hold of
my cells: The Ward M Quarterly, I named my brainchild. It would one day become The New
Yorker of the persecuted, the beauty, wisdom, and wit of those denied attention! Feverish, I fancied
artists from the entire world sending their stories, poems, drawings, photos, and essays to Dave
Hoffnung at ward M, Nine Ninety-Nine. And I, the Editor-in-Chief, would make only brief, wise
comments on the margins, omit unnecessary commas, and mail the manuscripts to the authors for
minor changes. An anti-authorities magazine with no taboos and no restrictions on content and
language. Every issue would report on how the wretched of the Earth agonized under the thumb of
shrinks, politicians, and other perverse pork in power.
I asked all my friends and acquaintances on the ward to submit the fruits of their labour to
the quarterly.
"I've a grade-eight education," said Jack. "I wouldn't know how to write a cheque. How
d'you expect me to write an article?"
"Write a poem," I said. "Something from the heart, buddy. I'll help you rewrite it."
41
"I'll think about it," he said in a noncommittal tone.
Next I hit on Brenda.
"I'm a singer, not a writer," she said after listening to my pitch. "Writing frightens the hell
out of me. I'm terrified of coming up with drippy stuff. I don't want to make an ass of myself."
"Don't worry, Brenda," I said. "I'll edit the final draft."
"If you don't hear from me, Dave, it means I decided to pass."
For weeks I didn't hear from my closest friends and, in desperation, turned to Bill Owen,
ward M's peacemaker, a man who lived in perpetual awe of the overdog. "Write about your life
before Nine Ninety-Nine, Bill. Nothing political, nothing offensive. Just your side of the story,
man." Inwardly, I despised myself for compromising my principles; only God knew how badly I
ached to get the first contribution to the quarterly.
"All I write," said Bill, as meekly as usual,
"are letters to my parents, once a month. But look around, Dave. These days, the ward is packed
with poets and balladeers with guitars. Why don't you ask them to write?"
First I winced at the idea of asking any of the whiners to contribute to my quarterly. After
all, what could they possibly write? About their unending self-pity? About being misunderstood
geniuses? Oh, no! Mine would not be just another periodical featuring the moans and groans of
perpetual teenagers. From day one, my quarterly would shine, an avant-garde beacon highlighting
and expressing the universal sentiments of social injustice. Inspired by Jeremiah, its withering,
merciless sarcasm would point by point demolish the arrogance of all authorities.
But I must admit that Bill had put ideas in my head. Cautiously, I scrutinized the ward. Jim
Harrison struck me as the best target. I'd known him for years, a poet of about forty, who had yearly
admissions for either highs or lows. He was wearing fine black shoes with leather soles; like bagels
42
that failed to rise in the oven, his white socks lay wrinkled around his ankles. Though it was midwinter when I first contemplated hitting on him, he was wearing short khaki pants. His thin calves
were as hairy as a chimpanzee's; when he stood up, his fatter thighs, paunch, and broad shoulders
called to mind a gorilla in a plaid shirt.
Jim wrote every morning and afternoon, sitting on a stackable chair by the television set.
Without raising his head, he pencilled and erased, pencilled and erased a page or two. Off the lined
pad he tore his poem, and crumpled it into a paper ball. As if afraid of being robbed by his fellow
poets, he stuffed it under his shirt. For a while he paced about the ward. As if exhausted, he
trudged to his room and lay on his bed. His feet vibrated and from time to time jerked upwards, as
if getting a shock treatment below the ankle. Stiff arms and palms extended, he seemed nailed to an
invisible cross. He eyes were fixed on the ceiling, shining.
When the manic wave subsided, he
stood up. Panting, he loped back to his chair in the television room. From the depth of his shirt he
unearthed the paper ball and unwrinkled it. One eye narrowed to a slit, he studied his work intently.
Left forefinger following the crinkled passages, he rewrote the poem on a new page. He crumpled
the new version into a new paper ball, which he again stuffed under his shirt. Frantically he paced
about, then headed toward his bed.
This ritual repeated itself several times a day, sometimes even for weeks, until, at long last,
he smiled at the lined pad. Instead of scrunching the pages into a ball, he strode to the staff station.
In a thundering voice he announced his poem, subduing the sounds of the television, the jabber of
long-termers arguing with their voices, and the patter of young bards strumming their guitars:
Like wrestlers,
43
Light and darkness struggle for the upper hand.
Summer flowers play hide and seek with winter ice;
A baby's smiles become a crooked man's walking cane.
Spring and fall lawns sparkle,
Nurtured by ground bones and cigarette ash.
Powerful stuff, I told myself. Right away I decided to hit on Jim at lunch time. After the
kitchen aide filled our plates with mashed potato, grey gravy, and a slab of meat, I followed him to
the table and sat opposite him, our trays touching each other. My heart pounded: the Editor-inChief of a nonexistent quarterly was about to make a pass at an acknowledged poet.
"Jim," I whispered without raising my head. "Have you given any thought to publishing
your latest poem in the Ward M Quarterly?"
"What quarterly?" He bellowed and set aside his fork for a moment.
"The Ward M Quarterly. A new magazine published right here on the premises."
I glanced up. His glimmering, bald head called to mind a bowling ball with a mustachioed
face in front and a curtain of unkempt grey hair glued at the back. A deep furrow ran between his
close-set eyebrows. Anxious, the pit of my stomach in pain, I looked at my untouched plate, then
glanced at him again. Thick as cheap magnifying lenses, his huge eyeglasses enlarged his watery
brown, beady eyes. Scary. No pregnant woman should lay her eyes on that middle-aged poet; just
as hazardous to fetuses as tobacco or street drugs.
He went on with his meal. He sliced the slab of meat into small cubes, then laid the knife
44
on his tray. As in his poem about the cyclical nature of Earth, his fork alternated between stabbing
a cube of meat and scooping up mashed potatoes and gravy. He stabbed and scooped, stopping
only to sip milk from his glass.
"Well, Jim," I made a second pitch. "I'm the editor. Your work'll appear right on the first
page."
Without raising his head, his fork took turns stabbing and scooping, stabbing and scooping.
His plate near empty, he stood up and, still not saying a word, picked up his tray and walked the
few steps to the kitchen counter.
How mortified and humiliated I felt! A nonentity? That's an understatement! Not a single
word, not even an acknowledgment of my invitation!
Why?
What evil intentions, what
abominable plots did he harbour? Just as bad as a shrink! In those early days as an editor, I had
lived about five years at Nine Ninety-Nine. I still had much to learn about the trickery of the
manic-depressive crowd.
For reasons that will become obvious, I won't mention the name of the next artist I
approached. This young man came to ward M as high as a full moon. Even before I could draw a
personality profile from his soiled pink socks and the worn-down heels of his black leather sandals,
he swirled around the ward with copies of his novel under his arm. He darted into every room and
placed glimmering blue, red, and white books on the bedside tables. At the end of his blitz book
tour, our writer laid two copies on top of the television set. Breathless, he sat on a chair, opened
one copy of his book, and scribbled something on a page. As if irresistible impulses drove him, he
stopped by the staff station; and who did he hand the autographed copy? The foes of freedom and
self-expression.
45
Both Jack and Brenda warned me against the new bird on the ward. "Just look at him,"
Brenda said. "A copy of his book to the staff! The writing is on the wall, Dave."
"Stay away from that kid," Jack said. "He tried to find grace in the eyes of the devil's
angels!"
Easier said than done. How can an intellectual, a writer, an editor, and a critic -- in that
order -- stay away from a published, free book? Envy and jealousy devoured my entrails, singed
my sleep. Can you imagine? A hard-working editor was struggling to launch a new magazine
while the beardless novelist plunked free books in the laps of potential readers! Free books? Free
lunch? Is there still anything free in North America besides hackneyed advice from your friends?
At any rate, I began reading Lady H, his novel. First, I noted, it was dedicated "with
affection" to a certain L.R. Probably his first girlfriend, I told myself, since the young author's
thighs were still thin, his bum flat inside his tight, torn-at-the-knees jeans.
Because of my poor concentration, I take on very few novels. I read a paragraph here and
there, waiting for the plot and characters to become thicker, more interesting. When, for whatever
reason, it's hard for me to figure out what an author is up to, I go straight to the last page. Reading
the book backwards knocks off the mind games or hidden agendas that lurk in incomprehensible
passages. I learned the art of skipping boring passages from my father, a Herman Melville scholar.
"The sign of a great novel," he used to say, "is the urge to go back to the passages you left behind.
What must be read in a given sequence is suspect."
Well, Lady H started with a breathtaking six-page paragraph on the fall colours in northern
Saskatchewan. In a ramshackle farm near the Arctic Circle, the drunken parents of Don, the
narrator, called him awful, shocking names. Almost nightly his father beat him with the butt of a
46
shot gun. Life was no rosier for his four sisters, who were thrashed whenever the girls refused their
father's demands for sex. One of the best passages in this thrilling book was the description of a
freckled, red-haired English teacher with horn-rimmed eyeglasses, who smiled lovingly at the boy's
essays and stories. Of course, that chapter made me think of me and my father, but no tears welled
in my eyes: a critic and an editor, I appraise a book primarily for its artistry and style. What
interests lay readers -- content, plot, compassion, and feeling -- takes a back seat in my
considerations.
But no matter how many times I skipped pages back and forth, I still couldn't understand the
role of the mother in page after page of beatings and sexual orgies. Was she a victim or a
volunteer? An oppressed feminist, perhaps? Puzzled, I turned to the author himself.
"Your novel is fascinating," I said, taking a seat next to him in the television room. Panting,
and crimsoned face shining with perspiration, he was taking a break from power-walking and
talking to himself aloud in the ward. "Unfortunately, pal, my mind wanders. I don't quite
understand why the mother never got in touch with the boy's teacher."
Instead of answering, with one hand he shoved me aside, as if I was obstructing him in a
race. Later in the evening, when we sat down to dinner, I stared at his bowl of thin vegetable soup.
"Tell me, pal, is the mother's paralysis an emblem of political inactivity?"
"Fuck off!" He yelled, and my heart skipped a beat. "Who the hell cares about such petty
details? Haven't you heard? I'm having problems with my fucking lawyers."
"Lawyers," I asked, hopeful that our souls might connect. "Are you suing your shrink?"
My heart prayed that in his drawer was a short story for the quarterly.
"No, idiot! My publisher. Haven't you seen the shitty dust jacket he ordered? I deserve
47
better than that."
"I read novels back and forth, pal. Haven't got to your dust jacket yet."
Our eyes met for the first time. He looked more hurt than angry. "Drop dead," he hollered,
"I can't help you, you asshole."
Do I easily get discouraged? No! Twice I skimmed Lady H from the end to the middle,
then understood that at fourteen Don ran away from the family farm. A bright boy, he played the
guitar well in the streets of Saskatoon. Not surprisingly, he found his way to Toronto, where he
lived in an unheated loft with other promising artists. He made a living by playing master-andslave games with grandmothers and grandfathers. Daily he shot up heroine, or "Lady H", hence the
name of the book.
I was just about to put down this interesting work, when one passage gave me goosebumps:
Don got into therapy with a shrink by the name of Larry Rosen! Out of breath, I realized that Don,
with his therapist's help, "got in touch with his feelings," gave up heroine and hustling, and wrote
the story of his life.
Cagey, I flipped to the beginning of the book. Yes, the dedication confirmed my suspicions:
"To L.R." My blood boiled: he had dedicated the book to his shrink! I had visions of blood
gushing out of the author's nose and ears.
I stood up and with my thumbs and fingers shredded the book and its glossy cover.
"Traitor," I thundered, "Quisling! Collaborator!"
Jack rushed to see what had happened. Unable to explain myself, I pointed to the torn pages
at my feet. "Benedict Arnold!" I gasped, "Marechal Petain!"
"What happened, bro?" asked Jack, alarmed. "What are you talking about?"
48
Again I pointed at the remnants of the novel. "He was buddy-buddy with the enemy, Jack.
He even dedicated his book to a shrink!"
He shook his head, astonished. "What a scum bag! A jerk!"
I halted to catch my breath. "Jack, only the spineless seek help from shrinks! Only
monsters dedicate books to the devil!"
"Right on, bro!"
That night I didn't sleep a wink. Detailed scenarios of revenge and retaliation poisoned my
brain. Writhing in bed, I pictured the novelist being kidnapped by Israeli secret agents. Tried in
Jerusalem for crimes against humanity, he would be hanged at dawn. The scene then turned into a
Canadian jail, where the staff hinted to the inmates that the ward M novelist had been a paedophile.
I pictured him being kicked to death one afternoon when, as high as an airplane, he was powerwalking in the yard. In the pitch blackness, feeling exhausted, I thought of a more doable strategy:
Jack and I would stuff the punk's mouth with an old copy of the Star. We'd drag the traitor to one
of the stools in the washroom and keep his head under water until he stopped struggling.
At
dawn, when owls close their wise eyes, Mother Reason came to visit me. With the first rays of
light, I went into each of the chicks' and guys' rooms. Tiptoeing, I approached the bedside tables
and, my heart pounding with joy, stole copy after copy of the cursed novel. (Stolen water is sweet,
says Proverbs). I looked under beds, opened drawers, rummaged inside closets. Predictably, all my
friends and acquaintances were snoring under the influence of heavy drugs. I didn't forget all the
copies lying around the television room either.
"Good morning, Dave," said the moll on call, as I passed by the staff station to steal their
autographed copy. "You're early today. Everything alright?"
49
I didn't answer, of course, frustrated that one last copy might survive. Why reveal your
game plan to the enemies of freedom of action?
Sitting on my bed, one by one I shredded all covers and pages of the treacherous books. As
the morning broke, a large pile of coloured, glossy pieces lay at my feet. To avoid suspicion, I
swept the shreds under my bed.
Breakfast was as usual. Later, when the staff gathered in one of the rooms for their daily
conspiratorial meeting to make our lives miserable, I borrowed a book of matches from one of the
manic-depressive birds. (The staff had forbidden us long-termers to keep matches or lighters.) I
opened the window of my room wide and looked out through the thick, black bars at a crisp,
cloudless day outdoors. A perfect day to carry out my duty.
I knelt by my bed, and with my fingers swept the remains of the books into the gap between
my bed and the wall. With my hands I sculpted a high, conical pile of shreds. Drawing a match
from one end of the pyre to the other, I lit it. The growing flames licked, then engulfed the
shredded paper and glossy bits of book cover. The fire spread into my blanket, sheet, and mattress
and soon took hold of the bed next to mine. Flames filled the room, and smoke floated into the
corridor. Many chicks and guys stood by the door and watched.
"What's doing, bro?" asked Jack.
"Drag the Fifth Columnist's ass in here," I roared. "Let's burn him with his books."
"Fire! Fire!" screamed Bill Owen, that forever scared cat.
With his hands Jack covered Bill's mouth, but it was too late: the staff heard the alarm. In
moments two Goliaths marched in, hollering, "Get out of Dave's room! Clear the corridor!" Other
Goliaths kicked in the fire-glass window, uncurled the hose, and sprayed my room. Meanwhile, the
50
molls paced up and down, ordering everyone to leave their rooms and close all doors.
The fire was put out too quickly. The traitor's pile of shredded books didn't burn to the
ground as I had dreamt, but at least was charred beyond recognition. In the fierce wars of words,
who ever accomplishes all they set out to do?
The staff didn't leave me unscathed. As expected, I spent a week in an isolation cell. While
vegetating in the ding tank, my meds were changed, of course. For a whole month I felt drowsy,
unable to dream up new counterplots against the enemies of moral integrity. The young novelist
was transferred to another ward, because Jack, Brenda, and other friends swore that they'd beat the
hell out of him for the troubles he'd caused me.
Months later I published the first issue of the Ward M Quarterly. It featured only poems,
stories, and articles by its founder. Besides a few letters to the editor, there were no other
contributors to the quarterly in all subsequent issues; its circulation remained the same for the next
twenty years. These limitations didn't faze me much, since I didn't evaluate the quarterly's progress
by its commercial success, but by the vehemence of its articles, and how deeply it probed
controversial issues. I got excellent feedback from my steadfast readers: Jack, Brenda, Bill Owen,
and others. The staff regularly scrutinized it in search of overt calls for rebellion.
My experiences with the manic-depressive crowd taught me a lesson on the difference
between these birds and the damned, the wretched of the Earth. The lifer, the true madman, has
relinquished all hopes of ever becoming another unmedicated "normal" in the crowded streets of
Toronto. We'd rather live in the fringes, even be homeless, than conform to the rules of an
insensitive society. We prefer to freeze under a bridge than let the media-manipulated herds mould
us like a hunk of plasticine. Grudgingly, we trudge through life with despair thick in our throats
51
and hearts. The on-and-off whistles, hums, and voices we hear too often become unbearably loud
and overwhelming. They order us to burn the world to the ground, or at least get rid of the top dogs
that stand in the way of a just society. That's why the devils on staff never allowed us long-termers
who heard voices to carry matches and lighters. Sooner or later we would set fire to our blankets
and mattresses, or burn ourselves in a bout of despair.
The manic-depressive crowd, on the other hand, is nothing but a bunch of guys with timelimited problems, not revolutionaries. In my heart, I often suspected they'd been hired by the bosses
to put on an act, play crazy, intimidate us into submission. These jerks, I noticed, despaired and
became insane only on occasion, more or less seasonally; consequently, their motives and
utterances could not be trusted. They entered Nine-Ninety-Nine only when freezing lone wolves
howled and barked at the full moon, or when long-stemmed, red roses showed off their petals.
They were, of course, allowed to carry matches and lighters in their pockets: these shallow souls
harboured no wishes to set the world on fire. This riffraff's hatreds and agitations were transient;
they wanted merely to go back home, work and play, not liberate the world from head men and top
dogs. Despite all their ranting and raving, they had'nt given up hope to live a "normal" life. They
didn't belong with the damned, the lepers, the homeless, the victims of persecutions. That's why I
made it a policy never again to solicit their poems and prose for my quarterly.
A few months after the Ward M Quarterly began, I was scrutinizing one of our mandatory
Therapeutic Community meetings. (A true intellectual always takes notice of the injustices being
perpetrated on his fellow women and men.) We heard, as usual, legitimate gripes about lousy food,
the poorly-functioning air conditioning, the disturbance that the balladeers were creating with their
singing marathons. As predictable as a cuckoo clock, the forever sanctimonious staff promised to
52
try their best to right the wrongs. Twice I elbowed Jack who was sitting next to me. He snickered.
Bill Owen, the Therapeutic Community chairman for life, turned to the crowded room and
asked the staff and inmates if there were any new items on the agenda.
I raised my hand.
This gesture stunned both staff and long-timers: for long years I had never said a word in
Therapeutic Community, because its only purpose was to make us guys, including manicdepressive bums, feel even more vulnerable and humiliated. Worse, at least one shrink was present
at all meetings, and even if that devil incarnate said nothing, I am severely allergic to the fumes
Pharaohs breathe out.
"What is it, Dave?" Slimy Bill asked.
I wore a poker face. "I think I found a really good song for yo-yo characters, also known as
'manic-depressives' in high places."
The community fell therapeutically silent.
Guess what? I whistled the tune of "Nobody knows the troubles I've seen, nobody but the
Lord." When it came to the refrain, I rose and, standing at attention, sang twice, as loud as I could
Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down,
Oh, yes, Lord.
Sometimes I'm up, or to the ground,
Oh, yes, Lord.
A couple of molls leaped to their feet, ready to escort me to my room. But Jack, my
53
beloved buddy, stood up and hollered, "I'm also getting mighty pissed. For years we've been
reading the minutes of previous meetings. Let's cut out the crap. Let's get down to brass tacks."
Red in the face, he looked around the room. "I'm sick and tired," he yelled at the top of his
voice, "of punks reading poetry and playing guitars. They don't let me sleep!"
Let me tell you, Toronto boys and girls: in his heyday, Jack was four inches over six feet,
and the better of three hundred pounds. In the morning, before breakfast, he crouched by our only
wing chair, clutched the bottom of one leg with one hand, and fifty times lifted it high in the air. So
if I, his best friend, got awful palpitations and cold sweat as he barked, just imagine what the staff
and the guitar-players must have gone through.
"I'm warning you, guys!" Jack shook his colossal fist. "Starting tonight, I'll beat the living
crap out of anyone that says 'booh' after the lights are out."
Bill Owen turned stiff, as if Jack had stuffed a two-by-four up Bill's ass. Chalk-pale, he
glanced at the ward lord, who made a toss with his head toward the door.
"Jack made a good point," Bill bleated. "But our time's up. We'll continue next week."
The staff, long-termers, and yo-yo characters stood up, and quickly filed out of the large group
room in manic-depressive, depressive-phase silence.
The upshot was that for years the entire ward was so quiet after eleven p.m. I could hear the
guys moaning and breathing heavily under their blankets, as they wrote, produced, directed, and
starred in masturbatory movies with Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe.
In my humble opinion, Jack Barnaby deserves the Nobel prize for medicine.
His
unfathomable intuition led him to discover a low-cost, lasting cure for moody actresses pushing
fifty, and sicky artistes of either sex. Though rough at the edges, Jack brought eye-popping magic
54
into the lives of low-key novelists whose tomes were, in effect, wordy short stories. His therapy
might not be as warm and empathic as others', but it redeemed the soul of more than one suicidal
painter whose work never sold. Without pills and shock treatments he wiped out both the frenzies
and the blahs of poorly published poets. His no-nonsense method calmed down mercurial social
critics, whose exalted articles in the Star proved that their authors did not have grade twelve algebra
under their belts.
The Man From Big Sur
"Wherever you turn, Dave, you'll find kind human beings," my father used to say. "Even in
Sodom and Gomorrah, God found a handful of decent people."
By the same token, I can't deny that over my decades at Nine-Ninety-Nine I came across a
few, very few, helpful staff. Having said so, let me tell you about Peter Bradley, the American draft
dodger who even on bitter winter days never wore socks, only black, delicate leather sandals. For a
number of years he was my social worker and, thus, had little or no authority over me. That's why I
55
decided to make an exception and mention his name.
He showed up at ward M in the late sixties or thereabouts. Almost instantly, I took a liking
to his elongated, hairless toes with neatly trimmed nails. Though enchanted, I waited a few days
before I raised my head and caught sight of his blond, curly hair cascading down to mid-nape.
Under his bushy moustache he flashed broad smiles, and his gapped, Chiclets-size teeth didn't
embarrass him the way they would me. Though no one ever reverently called him "doctor", he was
allowed to run a therapy group on Thursdays afternoon.
Once that group got off the ground, Peter had the decency of sharing with us lowly madmen
how he had been working in Big Sur for years. "If Uncle Sam," he said, his face very sad, "hadn't
sent me a letter to get ready to die in Nam, I'd still be doing groups in Cal."
A few adjectives, like "scary", "outrageous", and "bizarre" might help me describe our first
group session. On that memorable Thursday, six chicks and seven guys who heard voices filed
fearfully into a room with no furniture at all. Petrified, I caught sight of straw mats covering the
floor from wall to wall; my mind flashed picture after picture of Madama Butterfly and Japanese tea
houses.
Geisha-style, Peter stood on a mat. With a gracious wave he motioned the group to sit
down; I stood up, of course.
"What's up, Dave?" he asked.
Needless to say, I didn't answer. The more you talk, the more ammunition you give them.
For weeks Peter didn't ask me to sit down, so I remained telephone-pole upright on my flat
feet. (How many Jews with concave, elegant feet have been born since Creation?) Meanwhile, the
group played Trust: eyes closed, members took turns falling backwards, while others caught them
56
before they hit the floor. After, the group milled about with their eyes closed. Hands groping
through the air, they stopped at the end of the warm-up exercises to feel each other's arms and
shoulders, even sniff at faces and armpits.
"No touching of breasts and genitals!" Peter barked every session, and, once again, Brenda
and the guys laughed their heads off. After half an hour of babooning around, the group perched on
the mats cross-legged, and for a whole hour "processed" -- a Big Sur word -- what the touchy-feely
exercises meant to each of them. Words like "closeness", "relationship", and "friendship" were
tossed about frequently.
It took me months to get into the exercises and, eventually, sit on my mat. I joined the club
only after many observations led me to believe that Peter never put anyone on the Hot Seat unless
the chick or guy more or less consented with a nod or a smile.
I swear: in all my years at the Torture Centre nobody scared me as much as Peter did,
primarily because he didn't allow us to chat about safe topics, like our favourite hallucinations or
other carefully-selected headstuff. He demanded, instead, that we "stay with the here and now" -- a
quaint phrase that still haunts me, and makes as little sense today as it did then, many years ago.
Though I much approve of mantras -- they're private and secret -- I've no idea what Peter
meant by his esoteric, humourless prayer. Also, his disarming Californian smiles, so different from
the hypernormal, tepid Canadian grin, scared me. Cold sweat covered me as I anticipated the day
he might overwhelm me by reading between the lines some stuff I'd never revealed to Jack and
Brenda, perhaps not even to myself.
He did.
One afternoon, as Jack sat cross-legged next to me, Peter put my buddy on the Hot Seat by
57
asking, "Jack, what do you want to do, really, at the gut level, the day you leave Nine Ninety-Nine
for good?"
Poor Jack twisted, squirmed, and wiggled like a trout at the end of a line.
Peter's eyes shone. On his knees he scuttled over to Jack's place and, smiling broadly,
crouched in front of that Everest of flesh and bones.
"Say it, man," Peter coaxed. "Spit it out! You'll feel better afterwards!"
Jack lowered his head and stared at his knees. After interminable moments, without
cocking his head he whispered, "A firefighter. To save kids from the smoke and flames."
"Great!" Peter yelled, then looked around the room. One by one we guys gave Jack
enthusiastic feedback on what a brilliant, courageous firefighter he would make. We heaped praise
on his ingenuity and dedication. In the Thursday group, you had better say something soothing and
supportive when Peter asked -- no, demanded -- feedback. Failing to show ocean-deep caring
would, as if by a miracle and in no time at all, get you squirming on the Hot Seat. I've no doubts
that behind Peter's friendly, Big Sur smiles hid an implacable streak. (Reading between the lines,
incidentally, is not an inborn talent, as old wives have it, but an acquired trait, a matter of survival
in a malicious environment.) "How do you feel right now?" Peter fired. Back on his knees, he
slowly withdrew to his place in the circle.
"Not too bad," Jack mumbled.
All the cells in my body panicked. In a moment it would be my turn to share my fantasies
of afterlife, life after Nine Ninety-Nine. Many pairs of eyes were already scanning me, as Peter,
sitting cross-legged on his mat, smiled.
For a very long time I said nothing, hoping that a miracle would happen, and the guys
58
would forget about me.
"Well, Dave!" bellowed Jack. "Time for you to put your balls on the line!"
I felt like an iceberg outside, and a spewing volcano inside. At the shrinks' loony bin I'd
confessed to many things the Establishment wanted to hear, like my hallucinations and even my
plans for writing sequels to each of the books of the Old and New Testaments. I'd never, of course,
shared with my oppressors anything personal. They knew nothing about my passion for Marlene
Dietrich.
Peter half smiled. "Are you goin' to keep us in suspense, Dave?"
Heart pounding, I lifted my head and stared at the ceiling. "A journalist," I whispered,
hoping nobody heard me.
"A journalist!" Peter shouted. "Great!" He cut out his smile. "How about some feedback,
group?" His forefinger drew a circle in the air to signify that, without exception, everybody was
expected to say what a beautiful person I really was.
Panting, I imagined the guys would guffaw or, even worse, patronize me with their
lukewarm smiles. A condescending chorus of women and men sang in my ears. Dave? Him?
Writing for The Toronto Star?
"Dave," Jack jumped right in. "You're really very good with words. I love your quarterly,
especially the way you lace into the staff and the artsy-fartsy manic-depressive punks in our ward."
"More!" Peter raised one eyebrow.
One after the other, all the chicks and guys went around clockwise. "You have a lot of
guts," Brenda said.
"The shrinks and staff don't seem to intimidate you," another chick followed up.
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The emerging consensus was: if Dave Hoffnung worked his buns off, oodles of his antiestablishment articles would shine in the Star and the Sun. He would become a household name.
At the end of that session, several people begged me, "Dave! Don't forget us the day you
become famous! Please, Dave, please write hard-hitting scoops about the shenanigans and shock
treatments going on at Nine Ninety-Nine."
For days I smiled -- very flattered, I must admit. Then one night the journalism bit hit me
right in the gut. I ran to my room to sob into my pillow. The guys were expecting too much. A
journalist? Me?
My mind in those days wandered so badly that I could barely get past the second paragraph
of an article without forgetting its opening line. A journalist? How could a royal fuck-up that
barely read half a page in one sitting make it as an investigative reporter?
For weeks I lamented my horrible condition, silently crying myself to sleep, feeling very
sorry for myself. I didn't, of course, wear my feelings on my sleeve as if I were Toronto's Job, the
classic complainer and victim. No gooey self-pity when the voices gave me a break. I was not a
manic-depressive yo-yo character, remember? I'd rather go through life staring at people's shoes
and socks rather than let them feel sorry for me.
Be that as it may, memories of the Thursday group urging me to make it as a writer in the
real world were some of the most beautiful words I'd heard in my life.
One Thursday, in the mid-seventies, Peter announced that we would not begin the session
with playing Trust and milling about the room.
He sat down on his mat, Buddha-style, and the
group slowly, apprehensively, formed a circle around him. I sat on the floor between Brenda and
Jack. My heart raced: I am very suspicious of any changes in routines.
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"Okay guys," Peter said, unsmiling. "I want you to know that I'm going back home." He
paused, scanning us one by one. "I got a job in Cal and will be leaving T.O. in six weeks. I--"
"I'm going with you!" Brenda giggled. "I always wanted to live down south. Winters in
T.O. are terrible."
"Don't flatter yourself, Brenda," said a chick across from me. "I bet you Peter already has a
girlfriend."
"I'll be working in a hospital south of San Fran," Peter said. "So far," he licked his gapped
teeth, "nobody said how he or she feels about me leaving."
That statement stunned us into silence. I closed my eyes and with my chin rubbed my chest.
I hated Peter! Why open wounds when it is subtler to let sleeping dogs lie? His habit of dragging
words out of us for every feeling or event now struck me as crude, demanding, intrusive,
insensitive.
I opened my eyes and stared at my shoes. "What do you want to hear, Peter? I think you
better tell us what you have up your sleeve."
"Dave," Peter barely raised his voice. "I would like you to look me in the eye, not at the
floor. I'm here, man!" He paused, maddeningly. "And second, Dave, I didn't ask what you guys
think. I asked what do you feel about me leaving."
"Are you angry at Dave?" Jack challenged Peter.
I gazed at Jack's face, glad that he had got me off the hook.
Peter extended his forefinger and thumb. "A little bit. But what about you guys? How do
you feel about me leaving in a few weeks?"
Painful silence.
"Peter," I looked at his chest. "Is this a policy of the social work
61
department to ask 'how do you feel' every four minutes on the average?"
"Getting sarcastic, eh, Dave?" said Peter and his hand invited us to participate. "More,
Dave! More, group! What else is there?"
"Come on, Peter!" Jack hollered. "Cut out the mind-fucking games. Can't you see that
Dave is mad at you?"
Peter made a dumb face. "How do you know he's mad at me? You can't enter his head."
Jack took his time. His nostrils swelled. "I know Dave is mad because I'm mad at you."
"Because I'm leaving?" asked Peter.
I stared hard at Jack, as if no one else was in the room. "The boss expects us to beg him not
to leave. How do you call that, Jack, 'indispensable', eh?"
"Right on, bro. He wants us to bawl like a baby now that he's going back to where he came
from."
"How about the other guys?" blared Peter. "Instead of a group, Jack, Dave, and I are having
a private conversation. What's that, a tea party? What's cooking? How do others feel about me
leaving?"
One by one the other people told about their feelings, murmured their opinions.
Darned Peter! When he got us into heated group discussions he was more skilful than a
juggler with pins in the air. If there is such a thing as past lives, he could have been a brilliant
platoon commander, or a gifted chamber music conductor in his previous incarnations.
After Peter's announcement, the group was never the same again. Our leader had always
been quite chatty, but now he outdid even what you might expect from an American under stress.
According to his axiom, we had conspired to avoid feelings even remotely related to his leaving.
62
The theorems were like sand on the sea: he was abandoning us, and we were angry at him; we were
not simply angry, we were also hurt and disappointed, in that order; we felt betrayed and feared that
our anger would destroy him and the entire group too; our rage, he said, would not merely destroy
Peter, the man, but also our internal image of him too.
The truth is that we ward M veterans were a very skeptical bunch: we didn't easily embrace
Peter's interpretations. This did not faze him one bit. Voice as steady as the directions on a
compass, he changed the lyrics, but not the tune: we were scared of him! Yes, scared! He was the
leader, the authority figure. Even after all these years, the group was still afraid of opening up. We
were neither shitting, nor getting off the pot, he said, looking hurt, as if we, ungrateful sons and
daughters, were showing no appreciation for his hard work.
"Look, Peter," I said one day. "I was terrified of you in the beginning, couldn't even sit
down on my mat. But now you're one of the guys. I won't kill myself when you leave."
"But aren't you going to miss him?" Jack raised his voice.
"Here goes Dave again," said Brenda. "Feeding us a line of bull. At the gut level, Dave,
how do you feel about Peter leaving?"
"Almost as bad as if Jack left." I said.
For a while the guys digested my words in silence. Then Brenda screamed. "Dave! You're
pissing me off! Instead of sharing a feeling, you're dishing us out a comparison, headstuff."
"Brenda!" I barked. "Don't you fucking tell me what to do in group! I've been around; my
Bar-Mitzvah was a long time ago."
"We have to stop for today," said Peter, and wobbled up to his feet. "Have a nice week."
He always started the group on time and finished it on the nose. A real pro, a master of his craft.
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Later in the evening I felt very nervous. I said to Jack, "Dont' you think Peter is talking like
a shrink these days?"
"You don't like it, eh?" He drew up his left eyebrow. "You know, bro. You listen too
much to the staff. I don't. It's like commercials. I know when they're on, but I pay no attention."
"Jack," I said, "I just don't like it. After all, Peter is an American. You can't completely
trust him. Have you ever thought of his real reasons for running groups at Nine Ninety-Nine? Who
sent him here?"
Jack flung his huge hand dismissively. "Bro, you worry too much. You write too much.
Why don't you relax? Try lifting weights, for example."
"Okay, buddy. I'll think about it."
(Years later the Toronto Star wrote that the Central Intelligence Agency had funded a
"research project" in Montreal. In one of the teaching hospitals -- they are the most malicious and
perverse -- a gang of corrupt, grandiose shrinks gave dozens of shock treatments to Canadian
people, both to so-called patients or just regular citizens. Next, they reported to their bosses in the
Pentagon on the effects of brain "depatterning". See? There's nothing "paranoid" about me! I'm
just good at reading between the lines and sussing out character.)
In our last session with Peter, the chicks surprised him by setting a huge green cake with red
icing in the middle of the group room. Paper plates, plastic forks, folded paper towels, and
styrofoam cups for fresh-smelling coffee encircled the cake.
"No therapy today," giggled Brenda. "It's a goodbye party!"
On her knees she ambled to the cake, and with a plastic knife sliced a piece big enough for Jack and
two other guys. She slid the huge portion onto Peter's plate, then served a smiling Peter a steaming
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cup of coffee with milk.
"Dig in, guys," Brenda trumpeted. "There's plenty of cake and coffee."
I whispered in Jack's ear, "Did you see? Brenda can't wait to become Peter's secretary!"
"Cut out the crap, Dave!" Jack said, embarrassingly loud. "You're just a jealous prick!"
In the next while the group members sliced the cake, poured themselves cups of coffee,
strolled back to their seats. When we had formed a closed circle, Brenda clapped her hands several
times, giggling. "We want a good-bye speech."
"No headstuff!" timid Bill Owen quipped.
For a moment we fell silent, then laughed.
Mimicking Peter's accent, Jack preached, "There are three kinds of mind games: chicken
shit, bull shit, and elephant shit!"
Just like Peter, one of the guys massaged his belly, "Please
don't say 'I don't know'. I'm allergic to 'I don't know'."
Peter laughed and laughed, his bent forefinger pointing at each one of his imitators. Falling
silent, he licked his lower lip. "Thank you very much for the party, guys. It's great, really great.
Looks like you'd rather party than share your feelings about me going away."
We froze. After a long while, Peter surprised me by breaking the silence. "You guys made
a choice: to have a party. So let's enjoy it."
I watched him, suspicious.
"Brenda," he smiled, "the cake is moist, wonderful. Could I help it down with another cup
of your delicious coffee?"
She jumped to her feet.
Damned foreigner, I thought. That smiling chatterbox came to Canada, flashed his teeth,
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kidded around. When he was about to leave, he expected us to go into morbid mourning. No way!
Hard enough to cope with shrinks and molls ordering me around. I didn't need a social worker's
therapeutic zeal.
Minutes before the party ended, Peter invited us to stand up and hold hands. I felt painfully
anxious. Soon I would say goodbye to someone I'd never see again. He started singing, "We shall
overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome one day." We group members haltingly stood up
and exchanged worried glances, looking for support from one another before taking that terrible
plunge. What a terrible risk, really, to do something we'd never done before. But one by one we
too sang. Unabashed by her silvery teeth, Brenda opened her mouth wide. Eyes glittering, she
sang, her powerful soprano drowning our muted voices.
Closing my eyes to enhance the vividness of my private movie, I pictured inmates from
Nine Ninety-Nine, Hamilton Psych, and other concentration camps overpowering the Goliaths and
gun molls. They broke down the doors of isolation cells and intensive care units. Singing songs
about psychotic power, they marched to general hospitals, jails, reformatories, detention centres,
and penitentiaries. All resistance fighters were released.
The riots spread. Shrinks and all other head honchos were hanged. Banks burned, red and
yellow. High school and university students announced that their teachers would be elected, not
appointed. The army, police, and spy agencies were disbanded. Books and newspapers were
distributed free of charge. All men and women were paid exactly the same salary.
In Ottawa, half a million people gathered on Parliament Hill to hear Dave Hoffnung, the
Secretary General of The Canadian Anarchist Party. Dressed in greying running shoes, jeans, and a
plaid shirt, I yelled into dozens of microphones, "Sisters and brothers! For millions of years we
66
have been tortured, abused, humiliated. But now, our time has come! Welcome to our world
order! Without bosses breathing down our necks, we'll change the rules of the game, create the
commonwealth of Heaven on Earth!"
I came to. Smiling, Peter was standing in front of me, arms extended, palms up. I felt
embarrassed, not knowing what had transpired after they finished singing; as I often do, I'd
embarked on an all-absorbing fantasy trip.
"Aren't you going to give Peter a hug," asked Brenda, whose hip now brushed Peter's thigh.
She chuckled. "He gave me a big hug. It felt so good."
"A hug a day keeps the shrink away," Bill Owen muttered.
"Come on, man," said Jack. "It won't do you any harm to give Peter a hug."
I bent forward a bit, and Peter interpreted it as permission to give me a bear hug; feeling
acutely shy in that moment of closeness, I hardly patted his back a couple of times. To drown my
emotional upset, I told myself that "fondness" and "intimacy" were not synonyms, thank God.
Laughing, Peter let go of me. "I'll miss you, Dave," he said, "you and the Ward M
Quarterly. Man, over the years I read some really good stuff."
Blood rushed to my face and the roots of my hair. Nothing flatters me more than being
mentioned as an author and editor, in that order.
Peter traipsed to the door. Before leaving the room, he turned around and, as in our first
meeting, bowed Geisha-style. Brenda and other chicks sobbed, softly. Jack cleared his throat a few
times, and though I didn't see any tears, he wiped his eyes with a forearm. In slow motion, from the
floor Bill Owen picked up the paper plates, forks, knives, and whatever food was left from the
party. That all-American brownnoser wanted the molls and Goliaths to have a taste of our cake and
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coffee!
It took, as usual, weeks before a cold weight made my heart sink. I felt mournful on
Thursday afternoons and, despite all my pills, slept poorly. My appetite vanished. More and more,
I missed Peter's effusive smiles, even his confrontations.
Jack commented, "There's nothing to worry about. You have a long fuse, man. That's all.
It takes a while for you to get in touch with your pain."
Our ward lord was on vacation those days. As a matter of protocol, the bosses referred me
to a specialist in mood disorders, a Limey with overwhelming bunions that deformed his brown,
tightly-laced orthopaedic booties.
Unlike most of his compatriots who cared about their
appearance, that slob wore Burgundy knee-high socks that didn't match his grey pants.
Supershrink asked me twenty dumb questions, which I answered with witty, direct quotes
from Proverbs. Whistling, I looked at his chest. Unsmiling, that lowbrow pronounced that my
delayed reaction to Peter's departure stemmed from "intractable schizoid defenses". Were it not for
my fears of doing time in a ding tank, I would have kicked that Limey in the groin, then scrubbed
his big, toothy mouth with laundry detergent. Though his vile statement upset me initially, in a few
days the hurt and anger waned. Besides humiliations and abuses, what else can you expect from
paid collaborators that call themselves "experts"? They are, basically, as harmful as the official pigs
in power.
A couple of months after Peter departed, a postcard for the Thursday group arrived. On the
glossy side, a clump of red wild flowers stood against the backdrop of huge, bush-covered cliffs
breasting the Pacific Ocean. On the back, Peter wrote that he missed us, but was glad to work and
live where he belonged. He said no more, and that was fine by me. I distrust folksy therapists who
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bend forward, pat their hearts, and, sighing, dump on me their own problems.
The Meaning Of Madness
Without warning, day and night the voices of dozens of women and men hiding in the walls
and ceiling tormented me . "Face it, Dave," they snickered, "only born poets write fine prose! And
what are you, Hoffnung? A word slinger! A pencil pusher! A third-rate scribe! Just look at your
style, man: crass, awkward, prosaic! Why don't you give up? Your Ward M Quarterly stinks! It's
not art, but a staff trick to keep your hands off your dick. No wonder they provide you with all the
paper and toner you want. The guys read it out of pity. You embarrass them."
These voices devastated me. Angry and helpless, I made plans to hang myself with Jack's,
Brenda's, and other friends' shoelaces, the last opus by a misunderstood artist. "If the only way to
write is well," I reckoned, "how can a mediocre writer write?" Tossing and turning in bed, I barely
slept despite the white Haldol added to my eight other pills. Dangerous tears of self-pity gathered
in my eyes. I saw no way out of my torture chamber.
"What's up, bro?" asked Jack one evening after the CBC news. "You look terrible! Are the
problems in the Middle East getting you down? You Jews get awfully upset when Israeli civilians
get killed."
"No, Jack." I stared at his shoelaces. "It's my voices. They insist I'm a lousy writer, a pen
pusher, a lump of mediocrity, a--"
"Relax, Dave. You're really good! Your friends love your stuff."
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I went silent.
He pinched my chin and lifted my head. "What's bugging you, bro? Why are you staring at
our shoelaces like that? You thinking of hanging yourself, man?"
I pushed my lower lip forward. "Yep."
He swivelled his head and looked at me from the corner of his eyes. "And what if I'd called
you a great writer? Betcha it would make a difference!"
I kept quiet.
"Now I know," he raised his voice, victorious. "You want to be quoted in the Star, have
interviews with CBC chicks." He laughed. "Tell me the truth, Dave, d'you want high school kids
to write papers on your stuff?"
Twice I snorted. After staring at our shoelaces, I nodded a couple of times.
"No wonder you feel desperate, bro." He laughed again. "Worrying about what the unborn
will think of your work. Come on, Dave, get off posterity's high horse! Why don't you tell your
critics to fuck off, hang themselves with their shoelaces?"
"You know how the voices are, buddy," I stared him in the face, irritated at his insistence.
"They don't knock on your door and ask permission to come in. You can't wish them away. The
voices always yell what's on their mind."
"Do I know that, man." He eyed me sweetly. "But that's no reason to kill yourself. I--"
"Jack!" I hollered, and a lot of guys woke up from their Haldol daze. "Why are you trying
to take away my freedom, my...my last straw of dignity?"
"Dave," he talked as if to a child, "You and I go back a long way; I was brought up Baptist,
y'know that. In my book, freedom is a gift from God. What the Big Guy gave, not even a thousand
70
shrinks can take away. So relax, bro, let go of the shoelaces. Think, instead, about the next issue of
your quarterly. I know! As soon as your baby rolls off the press, you'll smile like a kid unwrapping
a lollipop."
Jack's good advice worked for a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, the voices came back with
a vengeance. In bottomless angst, I asked the staff's permission to go to the library and talk to Mrs.
Faith McKinnon, Nine Ninety-Nine's librarian, and the only person who ever wrote letters to the
editor of the Ward M Quarterly. An aging lady in perpetual brown Clarks shoes and knee-high
nylons, her stilt-thin legs led into some of the most ample hips I've ever seen. Bit by bit, over the
years, I'd learned that moons of rouge adorned her pale, long cheeks. Gold-rimmed eyeglasses
pinched the tip of her diminutive, goyishe nose.
After hearing of my anti-literary voices, Mrs. McKinnon nodded a few times. "You need
help, Dave," she said, kind and warm.
I felt understood. "Please," I almost cried.
"I'll try anything."
"I've an idea." She closed her wise, librarian's eyes. "Let's get started right away." She
reached for her pen and requisition forms.
Through interlibrary loans Mrs. McKinnon borrowed a pile of books of contemporary
poetry. Upon receipt of the tiny tomes, every day I chose the book whose dust jacket advertised the
best word-juggling tricks on paper. On my bedside table I set the book, gently inserted a white
plastic knife into its middle, then flung it open. I read about three or four pages -- my mind
wandered, as usual -- then memorized the stanza I liked best. Over a period of several months I
studied the books that kept coming and coming; to hone my own writing skills, I wrote, rewrote,
and punctiliously edited a piece titled "The Meaning Of Madness".
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I felt shy to the point of paralysis about Mrs. McKinnon reading my first modern poem.
(All my previous work resembled what I'd studied in high school.) Though aching to hear my
mentor's feedback, I couldn't bring myself to hand her the typewritten version of my song.
"Mail it to her," suggested Brenda, who, were it not for her voices, would have become
Canada's first woman prime minister.
I did. Days later, Mrs. McKinnon asked one of the ward's staff to escort me to her haunt.
My heart pounded as I stood by her desk and stared at the books piled on top.
"I like your poem," she said. "I really do. Dave," she stood up and took a step toward me,
"why don't you publish it outside the Ward M Quarterly?"
"Why?" I shot a glance at her neck, overwhelmed by a wave of suspicion.
"Your poem has a clear message," she replied, emphatic. "Many readers will enjoy it. No
offence, Dave, but your quarterly has a limited circulation.
Your work deserves a broader
audience."
As kind as always, she provided me with the addresses of all Canadian little magazines.
Over a period of two years, one by one all periodicals returned my submission with rejection slips,
with no invitations to submit my work again. I felt so hurt and discouraged that even the staff, my
worst foes, tried to cheer me up. They asked a student to escort me to Mrs. McKinnon's office.
"Feeling down, Dave?" she asked as I stood by the door, afraid to step in.
"Yeah," I murmured, my eyes on her shoelaces.
"Dave," she sounded reassuring, "how about submitting your poem to the Schizophrenia
Bulletin?"
Blood rushed to my cheeks. My eyes swelled. "What bulletin, ma'am?"
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"The Schizophrenia Bulletin. A journal for people involved in the treatment and research of
this..." she searched for words, "... disorder," she let out at last.
"Oh." From below my eyebrows I glanced at her shoulder.
"Dave," she said, "you have to build your readership."
"Even in enemy territory?"
"I'm afraid so."
Listening to her womanly advice as closely as I do to Brenda's, I rewrote my Meaning Of
Madness song one more time. Susan Thomas, then my coach and editor, worked on it once again.
This time she crossed out all exclamation marks, cut down the number of commas, and edited my
poem by making a couple of excellent structural suggestions. Eventually, my poem appeared, uncut
and uncensored by the enemy, in the Schizophrenia Bulletin, Spring 1979.
David Hoffnung
The Meaning Of Madness
To Jack Barnaby, my true Jonathan
Listen, love,
to this plain, disjointed song.
Never mind words,
just pay close attention
to the three D's of madness:
Dis-ease, Dis-order, Des-pair.
Dis-ease lives inside
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all crannies and nooks
night and day.
It's the anguish
of never being at ease
with myself
as all my bones shatter
and their marrow sears my heart.
The self, dis-eased, rots
faster than a peeled apple
within my healthy flesh.
But self and fles(h)
are not just inversions,
dear,
but the two sides of the same warped coin.
Dis-order, my dove, dwells outside
where unshared voices rip
the skin
of my private and confidential world.
The blue there glows here
and the here beams there, parsley green.
Then and now cohabitate unto madness.
And the beautiful turns ugly,
while the ugly corrodes everything.
The false, sly and shrewd, corrupts the true.
Why is it right to be wrong, and wrong to be right?
Whether the world feels hot or cold
God eats gods
and gods eat gods
and gods eat dogs
and dogs eat dogs.
Des-pair, love of my life,
is pitch-black and lead-heavy.
It fills my veins and heart.
Des-pair is not being a journalist for the Star
but beaming, instead, this sad address:
Ward M, Nine Ninety-Nine.
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And though I stroll, spring and summer,
in the valley of the light
I see nothing
but black clouds.
The bleak landscapes of my inner worlds.
I have called Him
too many times.
Like all my lawyers,
He never calls back.
The shrieking sounds of His silences.
Let's not be scared, sweetie pie,
of pacing and pacing
the sooty back alleys
of Dis-ease and Dis-order,
the unending corridors
of Des-pair;
because another D,
cold, incorruptible Duke of Death
waits, yawning,
for our night to end.
Montreal Smoked Meat
It came to pass in the days when Pierre Elliot Trudeau was king of Canada that there was a
great uproar over tongues in the land of Quebec. Many a Jew feared that God's second plague in
Egypt -- multitudes of frogs -- might take over the fat land of Westmount. Panting and trembling,
they went to sojourn in the country of Ontario. And a certain shrink, whose name I shall not
mention, of course, went forth out of the place where he was and obtained a position at Nine
Ninety-Nine. Where else in the universe would that big-bunioned, fat-thighed physician over fifty
get a job?
Be that as it may, the roly-poly Montrealer took over ward M. Weeks after the dust settled,
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the head moll had the nerve to sit on a chair by my typewriter. I felt anxious and cagey. I hate it
when the enemies of dissent and fragmented art lay their eyes on my first drafts, and that witch
bewildered me, beaming an almost pleasant smile. "What's the real story," I asked myself even
before she opened her mouth.
"The doctor wants to see you in his office, Dave."
"Why?" I barked, intensely suspicious. "What's the special occasion?"
"The doctor's interested in creativity, literature, and the arts," Lilith smiled again, pretending
spontaneity. "In a team meeting, it was decided that you, a writer and an artist, might benefit from
psychoanalysis."
Ears straining, I told myself, "Why is she telling me that? Is she the shrink's new messenger
chick? And what the hell is psychoanalysis? Is it good or bad for Jews?" Raising one eyebrow, I
eyed her shoulder. "What the fuck does this psycho-schmyko have to do with me, girl?"
"Well," she said, "every morning you'll lie on a couch and tell the doctor your feelings,
dreams, and fantasies. He'll sit on a chair behind you and analyze..."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Make comments. He'll comment on your conscious and, even more important, your
unconscious mind. That'll put you in touch with your lost memories, deep symbols, creative
energies, hidden talents."
I gazed at her shoes. After a long while I let out, "I'll have to think about it."
For days I asked myself why that Jewish Mephistopheles wanted to root in my mind and art
five times a week? What was in it for him?
Brenda, a good listener, tried to soothe my apprehensions. "Well Dave, it's not so bad. No
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reason to lose sleep over it. If you don't get along with your analyst, just dump the fat bum!" As
always, I paid close attention to Brenda's words. Over two decades, her womanly common sense
had kept me out of countless troubles with my sneaky, ornery foes.
To get even sounder advice, I told Jack all I knew about psychoanalysis. "If I were you,
bro" he said, "I'd never agree to lie on a couch, while a shrink flea fucks me from behind." He
patted my arm. "No slur intended, man, but you can't trust this bullshit Jewish science. Mark my
words, Dave! Only students don't abuse us to the hilt because they don't know the ropes around
here! Not with a ten foot pole would I touch an analyst-schmanalyst!"
The truth is that after almost seventeen years of creative writing at Nine Ninety-Nine, my
work had hit an embarrassing, despairing ceiling. Month after month Susan Thomas told me what
strong fragments I'd written, but at no point did she call them powerful! Panicky, I researched
Roget's Thesaurus, and riffled through all my dictionaries. While the experts viewed "strong" and
"powerful" as perfect synonyms, such facts not only failed to reassure me, but even raised my
anxiety. When it comes down to the wire, I trust no authorities, whether they write tomes, or
scheme against me in their corner offices.
In abject desperation, I asked Jack, Brenda, and even Bill Owen, if they saw any difference
between "strong" and "powerful" stories. They didn't.
I panicked.
In anguish, one morning after pill time, I stepped into the staff station. Just being inside
enemy territory gave me hot, humiliating ants in the pants. I asked my foes sheltered behind the
station's glass plate if they saw any difference between a strong paragraph and a powerful one.
One after the other the molls shook their anti-therapeutic heads. "Not at all, Dave. Why do
77
these words bother you?"
I didn't answer, of course. For survival's sake, I may ask my enemies direct, pointed
questions; it's hazardous to answer theirs.
"Peggy," the moll on call told her student, "don't
forget to enter Dave's questions in his chart."
After weeks of torturing ruminations, I signed on the dotted line to start my analysis. From
the outset, I admit, my wavering goal was not to get cured and leave the loathed asylum while still
alive. Oh, no. I had given up that dream years before. To be honest, I prayed to improve my style
and cadences so one day soon Susan would spontaneously label my fragments, my stories, my
poems, my entire Ward M Quarterly "powerful", not "strong". A vain, grandiose, touchy writer,
eh?
In fairness, the first minutes of my analysis weren't all that bad. The mind expert from
Montreal met me in the waiting room outside his office. He didn't shake hands, nor did he smile. I
barely heard him say good morning. He marched into his office without glancing back even once.
Mute, he sat on an Iambus chair: a wide leather embedded in varnished wood. Not knowing how to
behave in a Jewish lab, I perched on a stacking chair by the door, ready to wend my way back to the
ward if psychoanalysis turned to be too hot to handle. It surprised me a bit that he allowed me to sit
by the door. If I ever got enraged, I could block out his way to the safety of the corridor.
I looked around. Cheap Mexican bark paintings daubed with too much red paint adorned
three of the walls; on a long windowsill an almost leafless, yellowing ficus tree struggled to stay
alive. Above the shrink's unpolished black shoes deformed by huge bunions my eyes stopped.
White socks? How disrespectful! Have you ever seen a corporate lawyer, or even a dentist,
wearing white socks at work? The shrink's black leather chair, the withering ficus, and, above all,
78
his white socks didn't augur well.
After a silence of half an hour, without lifting my head I asked, "This office feels just like
any other shrink's office. It has a desk and chairs. But where is the couch?"
"Your sitting up is a parameter," the mind surgeon said.
Eyes fixated on his white socks, I shrilled. "'Para' what?" Greek terms like "paranoia",
"mania", and especially "schizophrenia" get my back up; on the other hand, I just love sterling, sixhundred-years-old English words I check out in the Collins.
"May I talk to my lawyer?" I said.
"No need, Dave," the art-loving shrink said. "Sitting up is just a parameter, a temporary
measure. As you get better, you'll lie on an upholstered couch. Right now, this is the treatment of
choice for people in your situation."
Your situation? The polite password for a dozen shock treatments? I hadn't bargained on
them.
"Why not the couch now?" I asked and studied the quarter-inch grime under the shrink's
fingernails. With a salary three times higher than a moll's, why was he doing the dirty work in his
backyard? The pasha should have had the decency to wear work gloves while hammering a new
roof over his house. "Sloppy handymen make sloppy analysts," I told myself.
"Do you want to lie on a couch?" He asked.
On the spot I vowed: never ask any questions, because the clever Yidd would just hurl
another back at me. To answer a question with another is, I suppose, a genetically-determined
Jewish trait. The survival of our three-thousand-years-old culture, especially the Talmud and the
Pilpul, hinges on pointed queries.
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"But what the Dybbuk am I doing here?" I asked myself.
For the next few months, I didn't say boo, of course. Five times a week, my appointments
began at eight-thirty on the nose and lasted forty-six minutes. You could set Toronto's City Hall
clock by my analyst's watch.
"The idea," Brenda tried to allay my suspicions, "is to get hold of bits and pieces of your
unconscious when your dreams are still dancing on the floor of your mind. Take it easy, Dave.
Give it some time, man."
"How," I shot back, "will that cheapo get hold of my dreams, when I don't open my mouth
in his presence?"
Brenda shook her head. She sighed. "Dave, fools ask questions no wise woman can
answer."
Oh well. The silent treatment worked both ways, with the analyst and me waiting for the
other to blink. Personally, spending time in total silence was not much of a problem. As I stared at
his white socks or grimy fingernails, in my mind I rewrote weak passages in my stories, concocted
fresh images, searched for alliterations that bite.
As a break from the harrowing work of editing and revising unwritten manuscripts, I
studied the shrink's clothes: on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he wore a polyester navy blue
suit, light blue shirt, and a phallus-thin, discoloured yellow tie. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he
donned a grey suit, a white shirt, and an old red tie. Other mind mechanics considered, he didn't
dress all that badly. He had, I suspected, bought his garments second hand, at the Ex-Toggery. In
almost three decades at Nine Ninety-Nine, I'd never seen a shrink or a phud wear a brand-new suit,
unlike their better-known colleagues -- Franco, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler -- who were all sharp
80
dressers.
Every day the shrink's huge bunions, white socks, and grimy fingernails puzzled me anew,
but, I told myself, "Don't dwell on the depths and heights of his personality. Who, after all, is the
patient, you or him?"
Hearing him breathe softly, I learned to relax in his quiet office: unlike the ward, no
television blared at all hours of the day, no inmates argued with their private, tormenting voices, no
pesky poets sang what their Muses had inspired them to sing.
Despite his attempts to breathe regularly, as if unfazed by my passive-aggressive muteness,
the Montrealer showed signs of impatience. As time passed, he even became restless. He began to
clear his throat more often, and from under my eyebrows I saw him playing with the arms of his
reading glasses. At times he startled me when he shut his eyeglasses' brown box with a bang.
Every day he spent a long while vigorously polishing his lenses with a greying, wrinkled
handkerchief. In slow motion, as though to gain time, he squeezed it into a ball. After, he tilted his
fat thigh to the side and upwards, and inch by inch stuffed the handkerchief into his side pocket.
Though I made a point not to ask where in the room he kept a clock, he frequently eyed the
window, as if anxious to end his torture. At last he announced, obviously relieved, "We'll stop for
today."
Inwardly I laughed. Stop what? Nothing was going on! What a waste of taxpayers' money!
I wondered when Montreal Smoked Meat would concede defeat and give up on me. So far, his
conduct had suggested that I could easily stir my creative juices without his useless "professional
help."
It came to pass in time that the demon disguised as psychoanalyst caved in. After half a
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year of deep and meaningless silences, he said, "I understand you don't look women in the face."
I came to, my back up. I thought about it over and over, then decided to be a good Jew and
answer with a pointed question. "How do you know that?" Raising my eyes from his socks for the
first time in weeks, I caught a glimpse of his hoary, well-trimmed beard, and blue eyes. Blue eyes?
A Jew with blue eyes? Generations before, a woman in his family must have been raped in a
Ukrainian or Russian pogrom. Poor girl.
"The nurses' notes document this point very well," he sounded triumphant.
I drew in much air. "Some are leg men by choice, chief. Others are leg men by conviction.
I am a leg man because of biological fate." I wasn't playing games with my jailer: I believe that
gazing at shoes and ankles is, to a great extent, determined by my biological make-up, not my
personal history.
We Bible-readers are extremely suspicious of all bleeding-heart,
environmentally-oriented theories and theorists.
He smoothed his Vienna-style beard. "I think you are afraid of looking at their breasts."
I let out a wolf whistle to conceal my rage at his know-it-all tone of voice: he talked as if he
had figured me out at the molecular level. "Is that so?" Despite my attempts to stay cool, my
cheeks were in flames. It took a while before I caught my breath. "Judas Iscariot will sell me to the
Gestapo for thirty pieces of silver!" I told myself. To control my impulse to gouge his eyes with
my fingers, I bellowed, "Ta-ta-ta-tum! Ta-ta-ta-tum!" from Beethoven's Fifth.
"How do you feel, Dave?" the serpent asked.
I didn't answer. I'll trust four-dollar bills before I share my feelings with a shrink.
From that session on, things went from bad to worse. The more I gazed at his white socks
and grimy fingernails, the more barbs, snide-remarks, and zealous zingers I elicited from him.
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About three months after he first broke the silence, my tormenter began to employ banal
and inimaginative tactics. In not-too-subtle ways, he would claim that each one of my feelings was
just a reflection of my ongoing "treatment." These distortions started, as one might expect, in
sneaky and treacherous ways.
I first became aware of this harmful pattern the day I let go of my guard and more than
naively said, "My Haldol has been increased. My hands and legs shake. I can't use the typewriter."
Thirsting for a drop of compassion, I added, "My dry mouth is even drier."
"And who changes your medication, Dave?" His pseudo-benign tone of voice suffocated
me.
"Don't the fuck play with my head, mister." (There is nothing that infuriates shrinks and
phuds more than being called "mister"; it reminds them of the ten -- or more -- years they spent at
university, only to engage in unsophisticated work that family doctors and social workers do just as
well.) "You're the ward lord! You prescribe my poisons!" I said. "I have," I told myself, "to tread
this minefield very, very carefully."
"Do you feel I have you under my thumb?" the monster went on. In between the lines I
sensed another gruesome skirmish was about to erupt.
"Perhaps?" I hollered. "What 'perhaps'? You do!" At that moment it hurt me to admit that
they too often won major battles. Without consulting me, they would take away my beloved Bibles
and typewriter, supposedly for my own good. In that manner, my unhumorous persecutors curtailed
my determination to fight back. They never got the point of my ironies and viewed them as
symptoms of my "underlying" pathology.
I let minutes elapse, desperately trying to guess what he had up his sleeve this time.
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"Nobody's in control of me!" I blared. "All my enemies -- including you, mister -- have to use
brutal force to make me do what I don't want to do. My self-respect isn't for sale!" (In those
terrible days there were no human-rights lawyers to help you to stand up for yourself.)
"Are you afraid I am telling you what to do?"
I shot a millionth-of-a-second glance at his face: a triumphant smile shone in the corners of
his mouth. "Wipe your grin, Lucifer! I could just jump to my feet and get the fuck out of your lab
forever. The only reason I play your sick little games is my hope of stirring up some creative
juices."
"Has it ever occurred to you we have a relationship?" he sang mellifluously.
That turn in the power play floored me. A relationship? Something I had not had with my
own parents since I first fell ill? For many years I connected only with buddies who, like me, were
involuntary guests in Satan's quarters.
"Relationship? What relationship?" I asked after keeping him in suspense. "You know I
don't have a love life with the enemy."
"Now you are devaluing me," he whined, dispirited, "You are denying how much our work
means to you."
It pleased me to see that I had got his goat. "There's nothing to devalue, boss. Your mindfucking insinuations are a hassle, but I stay away from the ward an hour a day."
"What if I told you are ashamed to admit how much I mean to you? How, deep down, you
look forward to seeing me? I think..."
"Don't think! Listen, you war criminal! I'm not interested in your opinions."
"You interrupted me, Dave. That means I was right, I..."
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"Fuck off!"
"You are just proving my point," he spoke softly. "You shut me up in the middle of a
sentence. The value of our work embarrasses you. You rage, but every day you are here at eightthirty on the dot."
I almost gouged his eyes. "Let's have it out, chief. Every day a moll escorts me here. If
you've complaints about my punctuality, why the fuck don't you discuss it with the ward bitch?
He didn't answer. It was his policy to let me stew whenever I was about to win a debate.
In the next few weeks, our meetings deteriorated.
In those harrowing days for the
umpteenth time I requested the court to review my confinement to ward M. Despite all odds, from
time to time I fits of hope of being de-certified and thus leaving Nine Ninety-Nine for good. At
least, I fantasized, I would be allowed to live in an open ward and get passes for the weekend. I
prayed that my case would become a precedent, and soon Jack Barnaby and other buddies would
join me.
My anxiety peaked as I waited for the judge's verdict. In all my years of incarceration I had
not bitten my nails so viciously, to the quick. One day I couldn't cope with the pain any longer and
told my brain-washer about a recurring nightmare: how judge McPherson -- glittering pointy
brogues, black, transparent, silky socks -- daily mocked my appeal over breakfast. His fat-ankled,
stumpy-legged wife giggled uncontrollably about Dave Hoffnung's efforts to set himself free! In
his office, as the judge reviewed my case, he laughed his ass off, sneering at a madman's nerve to
ask for life outside a locked ward.
"Who does the judge remind you of?" asked the Montrealer.
"Remind me of?" I fired back. "A judge is a judge is a judge, a member of the medical-
85
pharmaceutical complex. What else?"
"Let's dig a little deeper. Has it occurred to you that
the judge is a representation of me?"
"Oh, shut up!" I thumped my thigh, to protest his infuriating use of "has it occurred to you."
To the sensitive ears of writers and editors such repetitions bore holes in our inner-ear membranes.
"You got angry again," he chided me. "This means I was right. The judge in your dreams
represents your fears of getting close to me. You are scared I will gobble you up."
"Listen, Napoleon! Get off your white high horse. Not in a zillion years I'd dream about
you. That judge didn't have your huge bunions and fat thighs. I would've noticed such deformities
right away."
He fell silent. Even in my dreams, he knew, I stare at people's feet and socks. My world
view is foot-ankle-and-sock centred.
From then on, he capitalized on how anything under the moon and the sun was a metaphor
to his ubiquitous presence. If I got furious at the onion-skin toilet paper the miserly authorities
provided, my rage reflected feelings about him. This implied that only dimwits express anger so
indirectly. If I had one more fight with our chick-in-chief, it was another for instance of my
frustrations with him. I began fearing my own shadow, lest it too become one more illustration of
our "relationship." Even the sacred memories of my parents were not spared. I hated them just as I
hated him so often. My beloved buddies whom I often quoted were a manifestation of my hidden
love for him. I lived in terror of all my feelings.
To add insult to injury, he also played the sincerity game. "I will be frank with you," he said
one day out of the blue, "your denial of our relationship amazes me. I may write a paper about it."
"What an honour! And I thought I was a piece of shit! I may make history," I paused for
86
effect. "And you're a writer too. Amazing! You must have a lot of stories about victims, eh?"
"I will be honest, Dave," he said, and I heard him pat his chest. "I have never had a patient
as difficult as you. What keeps me going is my determination to help you. Man to man, Dave,
sometimes I feel frustrated."
"I'm flattered! A worm like me is frustrating a Freudian. Your directness floors me."
"Here you go again, putting me down, trying to hurt me." I heard him draw a deep breath.
"Frankly, your sarcasm is hard to take. I have to consult a colleague."
"Quit whining! I shake in my shoes whenever Herr Doctor pretends to be opening up."
When his sincerity ploys miserably failed, he played the game of Warmth.
Now I
metamorphosized into a wounded, suffering man and he, my guardian angel, was sympathetic to
my agony. He whispered consolations, as if the mere thought of my pain would any moment make
him sob.
"Dave," he tried, "your life is very hard. Right now I feel distressed."
"So why do you change my meds every four weeks? Because of your wife's periods?"
"Yes, I know. I have also hurt in my time."
I, of course, put my faith in him the way people trust golden dimes. When would he remove
the kid's gloves and pounce me over the head?
One day he crossed his ankles and proclaimed, "Dave, you have to get down to the bottom
of your problems."
"What's the hurry, your honour?" I mocked his phoney, velvety voice.
"Dave," Lucifer's disciple spoke avuncularly, "you have to deal with..."
"'Deal with', 'deal with', 'deal with'! What the fuck do you mean by 'deal with'?"
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"You interrupted me, Dave. Your unconscious knew that I was about to tell you why you
fell ill."
"Get to the point, snake."
"Face it, Dave. Like all little boys, you wanted to kill your Dad, then sleep with your Mom.
You fell ill because you never learned to recognize and accept these feelings." The holier-thanthou monster used only sanitized English with me; no down-to-earth, "dirty" words ever came out
of his mouth.
"Is that so?" I yelled. "How do you know it's not the other way around?" Murderous rage
seared my throat, my heart, the pit of my stomach.
"What do you have in mind?" he whined, hurt and angry that I didn't gobble up his bait right
away.
I leaned forward, stared him in the eye, and crooned sweetly, "First fuck Mom, then kill
Dad." Flaring my nostrils, I raised my eyebrows, triumphant. "Did you forget how Reb Freud
himself said that sex is mightier than aggression? First fuck, then kill! Isn't that the correct priority
list, Reb Yidd?"
I glanced at the shrink. He had blanched. Then he blushed to the roots of his hairs. For a
brief moment, I almost felt sorry for him. Bested in his own game, eh?
Next day he came back with a vengeance.
"Your analysis ground to a halt, Dave.
Consciously, you're telling me that your interpretations dig deeper than mine. You're convinced
that your penis is bigger than mine."
I felt like strangling that wiseacre, but feared that after slapping my back with a "criminally
insane" label, the authorities would take away my literary arsenal and leave me only my Bibles.
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(Pashas and potentates never read the Good Book: the idea of only one God scares them, poses a
serious threat to their arrogance and omnipotence. Still, the monsters order the poor, the humble,
and the abused to memorize a few harmless passages, but turn a blind eye to the revolutionary
teachings of the prophets and Jesus.)
"You're wrong, sir," I barely managed not to holler. "I'm a leg man, remember? I don't get
off on guys stretching their dicks on a bench to check out who has the longest. Do you?"
He didn't answer.
Days of silence followed. "David," he said one day, out of the blue, "has it ever occurred to
you that deep down you equate penises with breasts?"
"And what if I do?" Instantaneously I lost my cool. "What's so fucking meaningful about
that?"
I looked him in the chin. His nostrils swelled in triumph. "You see, Dave, you got angry
again with me." He paused, and I fancied his cherubic cheeks glowing in glee. "My interpretation
must be right: on the surface, you want to suck my penis, but in the deep recesses of your mind you
want to feed on my breasts." He halted to give himself plenty of time to enjoy his victory. "Stop
resisting your analysis, David. All you really want from me is mothering, a warm breast. Your
fantasies of oral sex and intercourse are just smoke screens."
I shuddered. For days, this ten-ton interpretation got me thinking of birth, death, and
everything in between. Was I little more than a bundle of base, selfish impulses? What about the
Ward M Quarterly? Wasn't it a reflection of my wish to create something beautiful, to be of some
value to my fellow men? True, only a dozen friends and Mrs. Faith McKinnon ever read my
poetry, fiction, and seething denunciations of authority figures. But in my own eyes, I was a
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contributing member of mankind, a writer worthy of attention. I offered my readers nothing but the
fruits of unrelenting, merciless self-exploration.
At this point in my busy work with Montreal Smoked Meat, I began to daydream of
bioanalysis, a discipline that would explore the human condition in mad people.
Poetic,
uncompromising, incisive, the new science would unmask, then correct, the glaring distortions and
limitations of the Viennese and New York competition. It would bring into the world powerful
new insights into the relationship between madness and morality -- yes! morality! -- madness and
history.
"What's up, bro?" asked Jack Barnaby, one day right after one of my analytic sessions.
"You look down in the dumps, man!"
"My analysis hit a snag, Jack. We talk a lot about sex and mothering, but never discuss art
or my writing."
"Is that what's eating you up? Come on, Dave. Just kick your analyst in the balls and get it
over with!"
I sighed as my father would. "It's not that simple, Jack. Once the analysis kicks in, you
can't just throw your shrink overboard."
"Listen, Dave!" Jack said, impatient. "It can't be all that complicated either. Don't let that
Montreal hunk of brisket analyze your ass until your Messiah comes. I was brought up Baptist,
and, personally, have no doubts that Christ already came. But you and your Yidd shrink are flea
fucking each other, waiting for the second coming of Barabbas."
I pondered before answering. "A piece of me says it's even worse than that. Some would
call it brain fucking."
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He showed me his palms. "Educate me, bro! With my grade-eight education, I've no idea
what's the difference."
"Flea fucking, like rape, leaves permanent wounds."
"So," Jack raised his voice, "what the hell are you going to do about it?"
"I still don't know, buddy."
My ruminations came to an end the day the son of Beelzebub did himself in. "Dave," he
spoke softly, seemingly on my side, "I think you don't look at breasts and faces to avoid your real
problem."
"What is my real problem?" I hissed. "What the hell do you know about me?"
"There you go, Dave! Your anger just proved my point. You trust nobody. Not the nurses,
not your parents, not even me!"
"What?" I asked myself in bottomless amazement. "Is he out of his mind? Trust a shrink?
Of all people?"
I kept silent and hung my head. Temples boiling and pounding, my brain felt like hot mush
bubbling inside my skull. I feared my brain would overflow, pop my eyes out. His tricks were
having a wicked effect on both my mind and body. Eyes closed, I could barely inhale through my
nose. I had to keep my mouth wide open.
The time to take action had come. Left forefinger
pointing high, I opened my eyes and said, "There!"
The Gehenna-trained Yidd made the most spectacular mistake of his career: he slewed in
his Iambus chair to look at the corner of his office.
I leaped forward and slid my palm under his genitals, then squeezed them tight. The shrink
turned, choking with pain, barely muttering, "No, no!" Fearing that a Goliath outside might hear
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him, I stuffed my other hand into his gaping mouth. He went silent. Only his bulging blue eyes
begged me to let go of him. I didn't, of course, determined to enjoy to the hilt that delicious,
fulfilling power struggle, the ultimate shrink-madman entanglement. In moments he collapsed and
fell face down on the floor. I turned him over and furiously, methodically, delivered well-aimed
Karate chops to his nose, his face, his belly, his genitals. His office reverberated from my
poundings; it sounded as if again and again a baseball bat was pounding a thick mattress. I halted
only when my exhausted hand could no longer dent his soft tissues. Breathless, I stood by the
shrink's body and gazed down at my defeated foe. After two decades at Nine Ninety-Nine, I had, at
long last, done unto my enemy the evil he had done unto me. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for
hand. I felt exhilarated, liberated, vindicated.
"So let all your enemies perish, oh David," I sang on top of my voice.
After closing the door to his office, I walked all the way back to ward M, thoughts inside
my skull bubbling and exploding as never before. Once in my bedroom, from under my bed I
pulled a tawny-coloured, ink-smelling Bible, a recent gift from The Gideons International In
Canada. Face aflame, as the voices screamed within and outside my head, I stood on my bed. At
the top of my lungs I read Psalm 18, for the day God delivered David from the hands of his enemies
and from the hand of Saul.
"Montreal Smoked Meat is my Saul!" I thundered, suddenly aware of the two-year-long
conspiracy to brainwash me. It dawned on me my analyst had conspired to fit me into a tight
pigeonhole. "He's been conspiring to destroy me, my mind!"
In minutes, several Goliaths stood by my bed. They ordered me to get out of the room I
shared with other guys and go to another place they would show me. In silence, I picked up a
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writing pad, a few pencils and erasers, and my new Bible.
They locked me into an isolation cell for six long weeks. My meds were changed, of
course, and with the resulting dizziness and tremors I couldn't read or write. A new shrink, the
drunken phud, a police officer, and a lawyer came into my cell and asked me question after
question. Staring at their flies as if they had been left unzipped, I did not utter a single word.
(There's little the bosses can do to a guy who doesn't talk. Only when we madmen speak up, or put
our ideas in writing, do we get in trouble with the peccaries in power.)
The last person to visit me was Reb Gluckstein, an enlightened, some would say
"reformed", Rabbi who passed by the ward a few times a year to comfort me and discuss my Bible
studies. In my own way, I was fond of that swan-footed man in black shoes and silky blue socks
that matched his Navy polyester suits. Over the years, bit by bit, I'd discovered a tall, lean man who
often pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his trousers to wipe his perspiring brow. Was
he congenitally high-strung? Had God already condemned him to endless hard labour? For what?
Out of respect, I didn't ask him any such questions, of course.
"What happened, David?" He sat on the edge of the bed beside me, and stared from behind
his inch-thick lenses. "Please, let me in."
I didn't answer.
A few months before, the Rabbi and I had had a major fallout. He was insensitive on that
occasion. "The King James' version," he said, "contains too many inaccuracies. Its English was
already outmoded at the time of publication." He handed me a black tome. "Why don't you try a
more recent translation, one that better reflects Jewish traditions and spirit?"
Waving a clenched, white fist, I jumped to my feet and hollered, "Nobody tells me what to
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read! Nobody rams yiddishkeit down my throat! Even Yahweh can't deny that the King James'
version is the most important event in the history of English! It trickles into all serious writings,
intrudes upon all major works!"
When Reb Gluckstein gasped, I paused. Guilt singed me
from scalp to toe: in my fury I had uttered the name of God! To settle differences of opinion with
the fine Rabbi, I had broken one of the Ten Commandments, taken His name in vain! It crossed my
mind, "I'm nothing but a filthy, hopeless sinner, a piece of shit. I should fall on my knees, beg
forgiveness."
But despite my guilt and shame, I couldn't get hold of my rage. I thundered till my lungs
hurt. "Even the Bard's influence pales in comparison, Reb Gluckstein! And almost every day I find
traces of the authorized version even in the fluff printed in the Toronto Star! Open your eyes,
Rabbi!"
He eyed me calmly. To allay my guilt and shame, I accepted his tome and promised to
study that translation, too. (Unlike most Jews, daily I study not only the Old, but also portions of
the New Testament. I am especially fond of Revelation. In a special edition of the Ward M
Quarterly, I've written an anarchistic commentary on how that marvelous book prophesies the
destruction of all governments and privileges.)
Now, sitting beside me in the ding tank, a pensive Reb Gluckstein eyed me. "How can I
help you, Dave?"
I raised my right thigh several inches above my bed. I stared him in the face.
He furrowed his eyebrows. "I don't understand, Dave. What do you mean?"
I slipped my right hand under my raised thigh and tightened my lips.
His eyes shone. "I see. You want me to place my right hand under your thigh and swear I'll
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not tell anybody." He got off the bed, crouched, and slipped his hand under my thigh. "I swear!"
he said.
And God opened my mule's mouth, and I said, "The son of Belial wanted to brain fuck me,
Rabbi."
"You almost killed him, Dave."
"Rabbi! The truth is that I feel very guilty for leaving that piece of work unfinished."
His eye narrowed. "Dave, nobody understands why you did it to the doctor."
"They don't, eh?" I screamed, and he winced in fear. "So, I'll tell you, Rabbi! He wanted to
turn me around, to tinker with my brain and my soul. He wanted me to see what couldn't be seen,
what was not there, what had never been inside me. He dumped on me perverse, meshuguene
speculations."
Despite my efforts to get hold of myself, I began to sob. "He wanted...to exorcise...a
Dybbuk...a Dybbuk that wasn't there, Rabbi! I've never wanted...to sleep with my Mom...or kill my
Dad. I may be a madman, Rabbi, but not a sinner. Yes, I wrote awful things to my parents, but
incest and murder never, never entered my head, Rabbi. I swear."
"May I tell the hospital administration about your analysis?"
Rage shook my body. I bellowed, "Haven't you just sworn you wouldn't tell anybody?
How do you expect me to trust you again?"
He slid his hand from under my thigh, then stood up. "Of course I won't tell anybody, Dave.
But if the world knew about these excesses, they could be corrected."
I pondered at length. "When they let me out of this black hole, I'll write an article in my
quarterly. I promise, Rabbi."
95
"I'll pass the article around, Dave."
Weeks later, they returned me to ward M, and I resumed editing the Ward M Quarterly. As
I'd promised Rabbi Gluckstein, I wrote a lengthy article on the manipulative, self-serving, and
murderous strategies grouped under the word "psychoanalysis".
For the first time ever my
oppressors allowed me to work in the library --always escorted by a Goliath, of course. Obviously
the shrinks and their handmaids fear that, if allowed, I might unearth too much incriminating
evidence.
In the library, I began my studies of the history of shrinks' abuses and premeditated harms to
their charges and laid ground for explorations that would, one day, become the foundations of
bioanalysis.
Years after, after I'd settled into the new routines, I read in the Star about research on new
tranquilizers that were touted as "miracle drugs". From the few articles the Establishment allowed
the Star to print, it was obvious that the demoniacal shrinks and multi-national pill makers were not
satisfied with ramming their poisons down the throats of people like me. Oh, no! The monsters,
the criminals against humanity, were plotting to catch billions of unmedicated normals with their
dragnets. If the devils' conspiracy succeeded, sooner or later tonnes of psychoactive drugs would be
dumped into the water supplies. Everyone on Earth would be too drowsy to resist the nefarious
schemes for world domination; the bastards will rake in trillions of dollars in the process.
Brenda approached me one afternoon and invited me to watch a talk show about the new
tranquilizers. "Bill and a lot of other guys will be there with me. Why don't you join us, Dave?"
"Will Jack be there?" I asked.
"Oh, no! These days he's after a new pretty-faced chick on the ward. He doesn't leave her
96
for a second."
Brenda, Bill, a lot of guys and the staff on call sat on a horseshoe around the TV set. You
could feel the electricity in the air. The staff and even some naive victims of the shrinks' power
games expected a breakthrough. After a few introductory remarks by a cute, blonde chickinterviewer, who do I see on the television screen but my Montreal Mephisto, now a pear-shaped,
bald, professor of psychotherapy at the University of Toronto?
Brenda pointed at the prof. "That's the shrink you beat up, isn't it, Dave?"
"Beat up?" giggled Bill. "The guy looked like stew meat when Dave finished."
"Sh..." said Brenda. "I want to hear what he has to say about the new pills."
"I'm against the use of major tranquilizers," the Montreal devil said. "They create a slavish
dependence on chemicals." He looked sad-faced, as if he needed them badly. "Instead of helping
people solve their underlying conflicts, drugs just sweep problems under the rug." He paused, a
clever effect. "Drugs are inhuman," the fiend wagged his finger, "a negation of fundamental
freedoms and humane values."
"What do you suggest instead?" piped the chick-interviewer.
"Warmth, empathy, compassion," said the son of Belial, his voice firm and didactic.
I couldn't believe my ears.
"People," my ex-analyst continued, "are thirsting for mirroring, not pills!"
"Mirroring?" Asked the interviewer, perplexed. "Could you explain what you mean by
'mirroring', Professor?"
"Sensitive attunement to feelings. The validation of innermost potentials," the Montreal
Yidd preached like a televangelist. With his fat palms up, I couldn't see whether his fingernails
97
were still grimy; unfortunately, the camera didn't show whether he still wore white socks.
"Vulnerable people," he added, "are not looking for chemical solutions.
They yearn for an
understanding therapist to reflect their assets, their talents."
Gasping, I leaped to my feet. "I should have killed that two-faced mother-fucker! I'll never
forgive myself! I let that jerk climb all the way to the top."
"Sit down, Dave, relax," said Bill. "It's a corrupt, stinking system, man. Nothing personal
between you and this prof. You know that."
"Prof schmof." I swallowed the saliva cumulating in my mouth. "That bloody liar lay at my
feet. I should have strangled him, or kicked him to death."
"And where are you going?" asked Brenda, alarmed.
"To my room." I said. "If you guys want your brains fucked royally, that's your problem. I
had two years of Montreal Smoked Meat mirroring. Two years!"
"Aren't you staying for apples and tea?" asked Brenda.
"Thanks, Brenda. After this elephant shit, I really need space, to be on my own."
Brenda tilted her head left and right, girlish. "A cup of tea with old friends won't do any
harm, Dave."
Grumbling, I sat down on my chair again. Late in the evening, after a fit of rage, even
anarchistic writers and editors crave company.
98
Mrs. Palmer
The story I'm dying to tell began in the fall of 1984, or perhaps later, in mid-winter. I'm not
sure. While locked up at the Toronto Centre For The Advancement Of Sadism, I barely took note
of the changing seasons: like water spilling down Niagara Falls, months, years, even decades
flowed uniformly. I was reminded of the passage of time only because like drill sergeants the molls
brayed twice a day, "Pill time! Pill time!"
From time to time I peered past the windows' black iron bars and saw snow piling on the
ground. Later in the year, daffodils and blood tulips bloomed before green grass made its first
appearance. Once in a blue moon, whenever the devils on staff adjudged I was sane enough, the
99
Goliaths unlocked the ward's door and escorted me for brief walks in a fenced-in back yard.
During my twenty-six years of involuntary confinement, I systematically scrutinized all
persecutors and jailers. They, and top dogs like bankers and politicians, could wreak irreparable
harm on me. But flowers, trees, lake, and clouds posed no threat at all. Mother Nature was not my
enemy. Only man-made things like pills and poisons, or institutions like Nine Ninety-Nine and the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police frightened me. I kept a close eye on all conspirators.
One day, the ward's bulletin board posted an announcement for a meeting of all staff and
long-termers with Doctor Albert Whitfield, a phud with the University of Toronto. (Astonishingly,
he did little or no harm to me; that's why I feel free to bring up his name.) That extraordinary event
was scheduled to take place in the "Conference Room", a grand salon to which I had never been
invited in twenty-six years.
The phuds, I told myself, were staging another inane research project. But this time, I
sensed, the second-rate devils had staged a major event in the history of their young, but harmful
science. My experience had taught me that sooner or later I would have to get the staff off my back
by scribbling "David Hoffnung" on a dotted line. My signature was an admission of "informed
consent": that is, despite my voices, discombobulated thinking, and rotten concentration, I had
understood the personal risks involved in filling out piles of idiotic rating scales and marking True
or False on intrusive questionnaires.
I could have stayed out of such a cockamamie grind
altogether, but it is not in my nature to relax until I know exactly what this world's demons have up
their sleeves. Later on, I hated the staff rubbing it in that I hadn't checked things out when I had an
opportunity. Under no circumstances do I leave stones unturned.
The Conference Room, incidentally, was no huge hall, as I had fantasized, just a small, dark
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auditorium. On a podium, four men I had never seen before sat on upholstered chairs behind two
tables joined to form a long one. Down on the floor, rows upon rows of chairs formed a half circle.
At the back of the room, shrinks and their underlings sat, leaving the best seats in the house for us
lifers. You can bet a loony to a louse that this arrangement alone gave me awful vibes and made
my forearm hair bristle with suspicion.
I sat in the fifth row next to Jack, not too close to the demons on staff, of course, and not
near the bigwigs on the podium, either. From time to time I glanced back at my abominable foes.
"Jack," I leaned over. "What do you think they're scheming this time?"
He kept his eyes closed. "Wanna bet they'll beg us to volunteer? A clinical trial? A new
drug? Shit like this."
"Jack, baby," I whispered. Except for me, nobody at Nine Ninety-Nine had the guts to call
Jack "baby".
He might get insulted, and not many people -- certainly not "mental health
professionals" -- could manage his hurt and anger without a shot of Haldol up his buttock. "Doesn't
look like they'll pump us up with some brand new pearls," I said.
"How do you know, bro?"
"I can smell it in the air," I whispered. "The bastards are cooking up something really sick.
Look around, man: only old-timers invited to the party."
A man in brown Clarks shoes and grey socks matching his baggy pants stood up on the
podium. Ruddy and greasy-haired, after swivelling his head this way and that to examine the
audience, he introduced himself as Nine Ninety-Nine's shrink-in-chief and professor of the most
harmful branch of medicine. Just hearing his titles was enough for my heart to pound wildly and
my ribcage to shrink.
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"Why?" I tormented myself, brimming with self-loathing. "Why did you come to the
meeting?" I asked myself many such questions, but listened very carefully to the bigwig's story.
Luckily, the head honcho's speech was brief, another homily on the importance of new
research for the unbridled growth of the "mental health" industry. Next, he introduced the honcho
sitting beside him, Doctor Albert Whitfield, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
As Whitfield-the-phud stood up, the hem of his blue-black pants concealed his ankles and
socks, but not his polished shoes. What? A phud with shining shoes? I couldn't believe my eyes.
The prof wore a salt-and-pepper tweed jacket, less than five years old in my estimate, and a
pleasing green-and-orange tie. With his short-cropped, greying hair he must have been about forty;
his ruddy face shone baby smooth, as if just shaved. His businesslike, inexpressive eyes seemed
only mildly interested in the audience.
"So different from the phuds of the sixties," I told
myself. Phuds from the old school wore horn-rimmed glasses and uncombed, hoary beards. Unlike
his predecessors, Whitfield-the-phud didn't chew on a crooked, unlit Dutch pipe, and didn't pick his
nose or scratch his balls in public. He had not, I concluded, bought his tweed jacket and tie at the
one of the shmates stalls at the Kensington market. That character made me curious: he put on no
shows of rehearsed warmth and choreographed compassion.
Whitfield-the-phud's fable ran more or less like this: for the sake of comparison, sixty
schizophrenic people -- I didn't dislike the phrase -- would be assigned to two groups. (He sounded
like the synopsis of his forthcoming article.) One group would have twice-a-week psychotherapy
with experienced shrinks and phuds for three months; the other thirty would chat twice a week with
trained volunteers, who had been selected on the basis of their reliably measured
compassionateness and proactive conversationalist behaviours.
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Reliably measured compassionateness? Proactive conversationalist behaviours? I swear
these were Whitfield-the-phud's own words. Even when I unzip and fall apart, I never concoct such
crazy word salads.
Superphud sipped from a glass of water, then continued. "As an integral part of our
project," he shook a professorial forefinger, "every six weeks psychiatrists from U. of T. will
interview all patients, and my students will administer tests and rating scales. Medications will be
monitored as usual."
When superprof finished his speech, the room was so acutely silent that I heard Jack breathe
in and out, though being no smoker, he doesn't aspirate like a pig.
"Please," Whitfield-the-phud smiled, a bit strained. "Feel free to ask any questions."
I raised my hand.
"Yes, mister..." the phud bent over.
"Dave, mister, just Dave." I said. "What I want to know is, can I have rap sessions with a
volunteer?" In those days, I ached to talk to someone in the real world about the Ward M Quarterly
and my Meaning Of Madness in the Schizophrenia Bulletin. A show-off, eh?
"Sorry, Dave," Prof Science shook his head lightly. "This is a research project. People are
assigned to one of the groups at random. Do you know what I mean?"
"Yeeees, mister," I mocked his irritatingly didactive voice. "I may be crazy, but I ain't
stupid."
Jack and most long-termers cracked up.
Whitfield-the-phud didn't smile. "I apologize if I hurt your feelings, Dave, but we cannot
make exceptions. But I'll tell you what you can do: sign up, and if you don't like your designated
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group, just drop out of the project."
"And they record it in Medical Records, right?" I shouted. "Then you guys use the material
to fuck the hell out of us, right?"
The shrink-in-chief sprang to his feet.
Gesticulating, he
insisted, "This research is totally independent of the hospital! Doctor Whitfield and I are convinced
that this study will eventually do a lot of good for our future patients."
Jack stood up, shaking his mighty fist. "And what good will it do to the staff?" He
bellowed. "Fuck it! Let's hear the whole story! What's in it for you?"
Be that as it may, the project turned me on. For the first time in my life, I had seen a shrink
get almost emotionally involved. Also, the project called for no change in poisonous meds. There
was, as well, a fifty-percent chance of chatting twice a week with a "reliably measured" kind person
from the real world. I would have never agreed to rap sessions with a philistine "specialist" who
couldn't tell Ezekiel from Luke.
Like Jack, I pondered what was in it for the big cheeses. Eerily, Peter Bradley's voice
echoed. Vividly, I saw his twinkling, gapped teeth. "Have to take risks, Dave! Life is not a
thermostat you set at seventy degrees, then pray for no changes within or outside. To live is not to
ogle lilies in the valley."
For weeks I obsessed about what to do. One morning, like a drugged duck I wobbled to the
staff station and knocked on the glass wall. Lilith, the devil's girlfriend camouflaged as gun-mollin-chief, got the surprise of her career when I yelled, "Count me in, Beelzebub broads!"
For a moment she stopped scribbling the mountains of nasty notes molls devote their lives
to, and flashed me a wicked smile.
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If, like me, you received only two or three pieces of mail a year, you'd think long and hard
before opening an envelope with the logo of the fingers-in-too-many-pies University of Toronto in
its upper left corner. Indeed, a week passed before I chewed it open.
In
a
form
letter,
Whitfield-the-phud announced that I had been assigned at random to a volunteer, Ms. Lysiane
Palmer. Overly polite and polished -- Canadian, eh? -- he asked me to fill out, date, and sign an
enclosed form. It warned me that, though supervised, the work of a volunteer was a budding art,
not a science. Thus, he and the University of Toronto could not assume responsibility for any harm
that might occur to me as a result of chatting with a lay person twice a week. In the next paragraph
he said that I would meet Ms. Palmer in a few days, in room B-107, at the Queen Street Mental
Health Centre.
Jack, Brenda, and I studied the letter many times. The idea of meeting a Ms. Palmer at the
"Mental Health Centre" right away made me cagey. Where else could we meet? For twenty-six
years I hadn't lived outside crazy shrinks' cans! Also, the overly-edited letter, whose style reminded
me of the bellybutton lint published Mclean's and other glossy magazines implied that the lady and
I could, in principle, meet at some other place. Why did superphud remind me of my miserable
address?
Mulling over the too-many complications the rap sessions with a volunteer were
introducing into my life gave me goosebumps.
The researchers scheduled me to meet Ms. Palmer at two o'clock, one Thursday. At the last
moment gargantuan ants and ice-cold butterflies wreaked havoc in my pants and stomach. Despite
the humiliation involved, I asked one of the molls to escort me to that area of Nine Ninety-Nine
where I had never been before.
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The moll opened the door to Room B-107. A glance revealed a pair of black, low-heeled
shoes, and dark green pants, which, in the fifties, were the hallmark of ladies of a certain age from
Leaside and Moore Park.
"Hi," the woman said, and extended a veiny, pearl-white hand. I caught sight of a white,
long-sleeve blouse. "I'm Lysiane Palmer, but my friends call me Marie, my middle name."
Gently, I shook the tip of three of her fingers. The one-thousandth-of-a-second glance I shot
at her face revealed a thin, obviously goyishe small nose barely jutting out of an oval, smiling face.
In the weeks to follow I discovered that her thin lips were pale. She wore no makeup.
"Dave," I murmured, gazing at my shoes. "David Hoffnung."
"I'm leaving now," said my escort.
My anxiety shot up. I wanted to ask the moll to stay in the room a while longer, but, at the
same time, feared intimidating a lady who had volunteered to spend time with me.
The door closed. I held my breath. A wave of raw panic stabbed the pit of my stomach.
Would I faint?
"Won't you sit down, Dave?" She asked, and with her hand pointed to one of the room's
two brown upholstered chairs with chrome arms.
I pulled my chair as close as possible to the door and sat on its edge. I avoided eye-contact,
of course, but took note of her knitted brows, as if she expected me to kick off the conversation.
We remained silent for some of the most excruciating moments of my life. Fortunately, the
lady had a really fine bedside manner: first, she didn't gaze into my eyes like a lot of incompetent
shrinks and phuds try, but looked slightly to the side. I liked that. After my anxiety went down a
notch, it dawned on me that Mrs. Palmer was a genuine amateur, not a confederate. Except for my
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grandiose psychoanalyst, no pro I ever knew would sit with a lifer's chair blocking the door. They
always sat as close as possible to the exit, so they could run out if we victims of persecution got in
touch with their condescension. Some jerks even kept the door wide open, to humiliate me.
"I was born in Quebec," she broke the silence. "I moved to Toronto many years ago. That's
why my English is not too bad," she snickered.
"Your English is just fine," I reassured her. "Much better than the impurities the Limeys
breathe into this pub."
"Dave," she bent forward, sounding puzzled. "I'm not sure I understand what you're driving
at."
I liked that one too: instead of putting on the airs of "understanding" what was brewing
behind my eyeballs, she admitted to being at a loss. Shrinks, phuds, and their copycats will move
mountains rather than confess their ignorance.
We fell into silence again. After a couple of minutes, she broke in. "I was a kindergarten
teacher for many years."
"How many?" I fired.
"Forty-three. I retired a few months ago. Had a lot of time on my hands, and decided to do
some volunteer work. I called the Volunteer Centre and they gave me an appointment. I had an
interview and they asked me about my skills." She paused to catch her breath. "I said I was mighty
good in conversing with people. I had more interviews and was videotaped while talking to a
research assistant. To make a long story short, one thing led to another and, voila, here I am."
"Are you married?"
"Oh, yeah," she said proudly.
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"Kids?"
She bent over once again, as if ready to do away with the niceties -- how could I possibly
use words like "cut the crap" on a fine lady volunteer? -- and start talking, really talking, as in Peter
Bradley's Thursday group.
I started to daydream of Jack, who had dropped out of the research project because
Whitfield-the-phud had assigned him to a shrink. "No dice," Jack yelled the day he chewed open
the envelope with his form letter from the U. of T. "Not for a million dollars is a shrink going to
flea fuck me twice a week for three months." "I have two sons and a daughter," the lady ripped into
my reveries. "All married." She smiled, pleasant. "And five grandchildren."
"Great!" I shouted, pleased.
I am a creature of the fifties. I don't give a damn if my many enemies call me "oldfashioned". I give them all the same Royal Canadian Mid-Finger that King Pierre Elliott Trudeau
used to flash at the media. I don't, of course, approve of divorces, broken homes, custody battles,
and most of the filth I read about in the Star. Homosexuality and abortions are fine by me: what's
going on in someone's bedroom, or in her family doctor's office, is no else's business. The Ward M
Quarterly proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am an uncompromising champion of privacy,
confidentiality, and, above all, secrecy. Though not as God-fearing and observant as Jack, Brenda,
and Bill, I certainly know right from wrong. And like oil and vinegar, right and wrong don't mix
for too long.
"What about you?" Mrs. Palmer put an end to my daydreams.
"What about me?" I blasted, startled, my back up.
"Have you been married?"
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Blood rushed to my face and neck. My throat clogged up. What a question to ask of a
forty-five-year-old virgin! How humiliating! In a moment she would ask about my favourite
position! I stood up.
"What happened?" She asked, alarmed.
"Oh, nothing," I lied.
"Please, sit down. We have a lot to talk about."
"Really?" I imitated her silk-soft tone of voice. "About what?"
"Oh, about you, and your life, and how you like to spend your free time."
I sat down and crossed one thigh over the other. I twisted my mouth. A moment later I
said, poker-faced, "I'm a journalist. Writing a book."
"Oh, how nice! What are you writing about?"
She had gobbled it, hook, line, and sinker! Still, a flash of anger came over me. I get
defensive when lay readers try to remove my veils of secrecy by asking what I'm writing about. To
teach her a lesson, I pouted.
"What are you thinking about?" She asked in a while.
"About my book." From under my eyebrows I noted her pretty smile.
"Please," she said, "I would love to hear about the book you're writing."
"I'm not writing." My eyebrows darted up and stayed high. "Just thinking about it."
"That's fine by me."
I liked that comment. Unlike the phoney molls, she wasn't babying me so I would let my
guard down. "Okay, I'll tell you about my book."
"Good!"
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I wasn't looking at her face, but I believe she smiled, very pleased. "It's..." I paused, fearful
of revealing too much. "It's about..." My head flopped backwards, I studied the ceiling. "It's about
the biology of altruism and the altruism of biology."
Her hand sliced the air above her greying hair. "Sorry, Dave. That went right above my
head."
I knew it would. Whenever people try to get close to me, I check them out with an off-thewall comment, just to see how they handle the ricochet. I never let my guard down. Trust is like a
match: you can use it only once.
"What I was trying to say," I worked hard to suppress my laughter, "is that human beings are
pre-wired. Yes, pre-wired to live in small villages, communities. We're condemned to cooperate,
give a helping hand, even at Nine Ninety-Nine. There's no escape. That's why I edit and publish
the Ward M Quarterly."
"Pre-wired? Condemned?" She looked dumbfounded. "Sorry, Dave, you lost me."
"That's okay," for the first time I gazed into her brown eyes. "I read about 'pre-wired'
behaviours in the science section of the Star. We journalists first read ninety-nine books and
articles to verify the credibility of our sources. Only then do we write an up-to-date piece."
"I see," she replied, eyes lit. "You have to let me know how your book is coming along."
"I will, Mrs. Palmer."
"Please call me Marie, Dave."
"Yes, Mrs. Palmer."
It was not my intention to be her class clown. But "Trust does not come easy," Peter
Bradley's words, rang outside my head. "You guys," his voice now boomed in room B-107, "have
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nothing to be ashamed of. I also find it hard to trust people with my feelings before I know them
well."
Mrs. Palmer scanned me, astounded.
I couldn't help it: a hallucinated Peter sat on a Japanese mat, smiling at the entire Thursday
group -- Jack, Brenda, Bill, and other chicks and boytchicks. He tilted his head to the side, as if he
felt relieved now that the painful stuff was coming off his chest.
"Before our first Thursday group meeting," Peter smiled shyly, "I was scared shitless. For
days I worried to the point of puking that you guys would reject me and my work."
Like a boy on his first date, Peter blushed and smiled, voice quivering. "Thank you for your
help, guys."
I shot a glance at Mrs. Palmer. She was staring at me, eyes frightened and chest heaving.
On Mondays and Thursdays I spent exactly forty-six minutes with Mrs. Palmer. The length
of our sessions was determined by methodological reasons: since all shrinks defraud the taxpayers
of Ontario by talking down to their victims for a fraction of an hour but charging for a whole one,
pure science dictated that the project's volunteers also had to cheat. Unwittingly, these kind souls
perpetuated not only the shrinks' greed and corruption, but also one of their monstrous distortions of
reality. After three weeks, I filled out an inch-tall pile of intrusive and humiliating rating scales and
deceitful questionnaires.
Mrs. Palmer was, indeed, a fine "proactive conversationalist", as superphud had put it.
Though I sat silent and avoided any eye-contact longer than a tenth of a second -- as I treat
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everybody except Jack and Brenda -- my shtick did not deter her one bit. Seemingly content with
my silences, she would chat and chat about every one of her hobbies -- needlepoint, bridge, golf,
knitting, Margaret Atwood. I suspected that she enjoyed hearing the sound of her own voice.
When she ran out of ammunition, she told me long-winded anecdotes about the accomplishments
of each of her children -- one son an engineer, the other an MBA; the daughter was an obstetrician.
She filled me in about the cutesy sayings of her clever grandchildren.
Heaven's floodgates opened the day I shared with her that my Dad had been an English
teacher. Laughing, and hands slicing the air, she began to tell me long and slightly boring stories
about her ex-students' dizzying wisdom and wit. Her tales were nothing I would invest time, ink,
and paper on, but I loved the way the sweet lady tried hard to put an incurable lunatic like me at
ease. Not only did I appreciate her efforts, but, slowly, even dared to think that she looked forward
to spending time with me.
Erratic at the best of times, my mind wandered while she recited her stories. Still, I always
nodded, even smiled, when, at long last, she delivered the punch lines.
She told me about herself, too. Born and raised on a farm a hundred miles east of Montreal,
as far back as she could remember she had spent long hours after school helping her Mom feed and
wash seven younger brothers and sisters. Despite all the hard work, she got good grades in French
and English -- but not in Math and Science, she chuckled, as if it were self-evident what her cute
laughter meant.
If I got her convoluted tale right, after graduating from high school she studied in a Catholic
teacher's school for a couple of years.
"My first job was in Sherbrooke," she giggled. "That's where I met Jim, my husband. He's
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English-speaking, from Montreal. An engineer."
"How often do you make him pea soup?" The chapter on Jim romancing her sounded so
scary I had to change topic. Such a tale might turn me on, and how the hell would I, an aging
virgin, handle sexual fantasies about a retired grandmother of five? I would feel awfully guilty if,
under my blankets, I found myself masturbating about her as a young woman.
"Once or twice a month." She sounded hurt. "You anglophones have some misconceptions
about us Quebecois."
Some misconceptions? What a delicate phrase! I couldn't believe my ears. Even while
locked in the ding tank, over the hums of my voices I would hear of "fucking frogs" and their
bizarre language being responsible for all the problems and conflicts in Canada, from Halifax to
Vancouver island.
On the other hand, I daydreamed, except for my Dad and some bright boys and golden girls
on the CBC evening news, I hardly ever heard English pronounced properly. In my moments of
mirth, I pictured the average bigoted, disgruntled Canadian writing down his personal opinions on
constitutional or moral issues. Even my Dad, a scholar who spent too many hours marking poorlywritten papers, couldn't have deciphered more than a few sentences.
Nights, I tossed and twisted on my bed, worrying about the future of English in Canada.
After returning to so-called reality, I glanced at Mrs. Palmer's puzzled look. "Hope I didn't
hurt your feelings," I apologized. I felt awful for throwing a venomous barb at the delightful lady,
then, as selfish as ever, withdrawing into political fantasies. Even minute doses of guilt devastate
me.
"Take it easy, Dave." She laughed. "I'm not a fragile figurine."
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Fragile figurine? What a lovely phrase! Would it qualify as an alliteration?
I'm not exaggerating: with every rap session I enjoyed Mrs. Palmer a bit more and looked
forward to the sound of her voice.
Yet, I had difficulties trusting her, too. First, I didn't know her as long as I knew Jack and
Brenda. What bothered me more was her total blindness to and denial of Satan, the Evil inside us
all. (Devils, demons, and fiends like shrinks dwell outside; Satan is the Evil that lives under the
skin of all men, women, and children.)
Yes! You heard me right! Satan! Evil! What offensive words in this euphemisticscientistic day and age!
But I'm an incurable madman, remember? As if by a law of nature, I am expected to shoot
off my crazy mouth. No one is surprised at the visions, sounds, and ideas that only I can see, hear,
and think.
And what was David Hoffnung at the time? A pauper! Living off the dole! No job to lose.
Could well afford to call a spade a spade. He would lose no customers for telling nothing but the
whole, honest truth. Did I care what my employer thought of me? Of course not! I had no
employers -- only arrogant ward lords who vowed to change my character and conduct.
But whenever like a baby chick I emerged from my cracked shell, I hollered at my
oppressors, "Behold the palms of your hands! Kinky hair shall sprout there the day you succeed in
turning me around."
David Hoffnung. Schizophrenia, paranoid type, code 295.3 Emotionally, I could well
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afford to write and edit the Ward M Quarterly, honestly tell the world what I saw, heard, thought,
and felt, right?
Yes, Toronto boys and girls, I didn't live off Canada Council grants! The Ontario Friends
Of Schizophrenics paid Susan Thomas, my starving poet-editor a pittance. That was all. Unbribed
and unfettered by financial considerations, I was a free writer -- or as free as one can get.
So I beheld Satan lurking inside everyone -- including myself, of course. Most normals,
poor souls, cannot possibly afford to look their own Satan in the eye; they have back-breaking
family responsibilities, dental bills, mortgages.
Demons, devils, and fiends cross the paths of my fellow citizens who are too sissy to call
the princes of darkness by name. Instead, they chitchat about bellybutton lint, the sanitized fluff of
"culture", "society", "the environment" that resides outside their skins. How pious, how convenient,
how lily-livered!
Do you need a doctoral degree in philosophy or divinity to prove Satan's existence? What
for? Just read, instead, a single issue of the Toronto Star from first page to last: wars, murders,
tortures, rapes, racism, kickbacks, crooked politicians. Walk the streets of Parkdale and you'll come
face to face with the most vile of all sins: child prostitution -- the conclusive evidence that Satan
and the demons within us are alive and well.
Behold, and you shall see: when the all-knowing phuds are interviewed on the CBC, they
never bring up Lucifer and Lilith, Belial or Beelzebub. Why are the nerds stuffing Evil under the
rug?
Psychology.
Sociology.
Anthropology.
Only Lucifer knows how many little black
bastards -- like "social psychology" or "social anthropology" -- are playing in his backyard. What's
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all this highfalutin talk? Nothing! Just gauzy curtains unable to conceal Satan, the Evil lurking in
the hearts of all ordinary Canadians.
Of course, most of you cowards will be lowered into your graves without ever facing Satan
or Evil. But if you're man or woman enough, gaze into a mirror, preferably a cracked one. Muster
all the courage in your veins and, straining your eyes, peer beyond your own clear image.
In a moment, your brow and nose will grow hair, and murderous, glinting eyes will jut out;
filed, blood-dripping fangs will bite your lower lips. The raucous voices of the dukes of darkness
will sing in your trapezoid ears:
I am your true self,
The true significance of your phoney, mediocre lives!
Ladies and gentlemen!
Your quest for insights is over.
You're just as evil as your next-door neighbour.
And the more you deny Satan within,
The more out of touch you'll be with yourself,
The more violence you'll do unto others.
Face purple with indignation, you normals shout back, "Dave, get real! Why smear and
disturb solid citizens with your jeremiads? Aren't you just projecting your misery onto innocent
bystanders?"
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Listen, Toronto The Evil!
Have I murdered one-and-a-half million Jewish kids and the same number of Armenians?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't remember me throwing mustard gas at eighteen-year-old boys.
Have I raped Chinese women, then thrust bayonets up their semen-soaking vaginas? Did I wipe off
the face of the Earth whole nations in Africa and the Americas? Come on, tell me, how many
slaves did I ever own?
The people who dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why did they carry no
diagnoses?
Reading the papers these days, I come across juicy genocides in Kuwait, Bosnia, Rwanda,
and other spots on Earth. Tell me, civil and civilized Torontonians, who gets their jollies from the
tortures, looting, profiteering, and rapes? We madmen with real problems, or normals like you?
Sweet and phoney, you ask, "What turns innocent children into sadistic bastards?"
Prick your clogged ears, hypocrites!
Here is mad Dave, his pencils, erasers, and lined pads ready to confront us all with our lust
for control -- the only thing that truly turns our crank.
Listen, greying boys and girls! Lay off that self-pitying crap about "victimization" and
"self-esteem" and pay attention: the lust for control is the only gasoline fit for our tanks, our Holy
Grail and Promised Land.
There is nothing we women, children, and men crave as much as manipulating,
embarrassing, and putting to shame fellow human beings. Can one attain a higher ecstasy than
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make others, like robots, do precisely what we have told them to? Is there a more intense bliss than
forcing others to grovel for mercy at our ankles? How pitiable are multiple orgasms in comparison
with watching others lower their frightened eyes, implore the tortures to stop, beg forgiveness, beat
retreat!
And where does the lust for control reside? Not outside our skins, atop a mountain, or in a
rain forest. No! It flames the pit of our stomachs, boils behind our eyelids, swells our nostrils,
gives our genitals a rise.
The lust for control! That's why unmedicated people hate us madmen so much: were God,
devils, and all angels to hold hands, they still couldn't turn true lunatics around. Yes, you can make
a horse drink, but you can't take a madman to the water. We are the most pigheaded people on
Earth. We'll spend our lives at Nine Ninety-Nine, or at some other cemetery of tortured souls,
rather than betray the voices we hear.
You normals have locked us behind bars, published our obituaries while we were still alive,
messed up our brains with icepicks, bloated us with insulin, castrated, and medicated us -- you have
harmed us with anything under the sun. But we madmen will not change, even if we wanted to.
Face it: we madmen, and not the Yankees down south, are the true individualists of the
Earth. Our faulty biochemistry makes us steadfast, incorruptible moral compasses. We have no
choice.
It goes without saying that you normals need us badly, more than we need you. Indeed, how
could there be culture and civilization without mad women and men smelling the Evil brewing
inside us all?
In every generation honest people ponder how they too are responsible for what took place
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in Armenia, Auschwitz, Biafra, and other places. And in every generation people who dare look
into a cracked mirror see how they too are responsible for the burnings at the stake, incarcerations,
lobotomies, and shock treatments of "schizophrenic people".
Listen, folks! There are no "bystanders" or "neutral observers" in human affairs! This is a
bitter pill to swallow, but we are condemned to care for our fellow men. Even in our dreams we are
moral organisms. There is no escape. Just as we all take credit for Stone Henge, pyramids, and
cathedrals, we partake in the blame for all tortures and genocides.
Six weeks into the research project I was interviewed by a research shrink whose monstrous
running shoes made me think of a Sherman tank without a cannon. He wore plaid socks. A furtive
glance revealed dark green corduroy pants, a Madras shirt, and a shiny black, leather tie. That devil
gave me the creeps: a second one-thousandth-of-a-second glance revealed an uncombed,
bespectacled young man with a gorilla beard. After grabbing a cheap, blue-and-yellow ballpoint
pen, the examiner fired at me at least one hundred questions. Obviously convinced that Dave
Hoffnung was the guest of honour at the Royal York Hotel, he asked me dozens of questions about
my appetite, sleep patterns, and sex drive. Only when I said that my concentration had improved -I had recently been writing four sentences a day -- he raised his hairy head from his forms, looked at
me intently, then nodded approvingly. For the first time ever, a power figure at Nine Ninety-Nine
eyed me with a bit of personal interest.
After that two-hour interview I felt exhausted and, needing a break, tried to read the
headlines. I failed. Frustrated, I watched television for a while. I wound up gazing intensely at the
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staff's station, expecting persecutions and humiliations to occur. Nothing happening, I felt angry at
the lack of opportunity to vent an incomprehensible, lousy mood. Jack and Brenda were nowhere
in sight. Aching badly to talk to someone, I was startled at the violence I felt inside.
Panting, I leaped to my feet and rushed to the staff station, where a moll in white canvas
shoes and folded-down pink socks was plunking coloured, mind-bending pills into white paper
cups. Her cocoa-coloured fleshy legs made me think of Marilyn Monroe's.
"I'm dropping out of the project," I announced.
"Dave," she said, "you better talk to your volunteer."
"Listen, shwartze!" I hollered. "Don't you understand English, turd? I said I want out."
"Dave," she continued to fuss over her motley gems without even glancing at me. "Sorry!
I'm not your messenger boy. If something is going on, you'd better have it out with the folks in the
research project."
"Get a baseball bat and fuck yourself royally!"
Luckily, Jack passed by and talked me into a game of Scrabble and out of trouble with the
devil's altar girls.
In the next rap session, for a long time I didn't say a word to Mrs. Palmer. She took no
offence. Instead, she told me a long, long tale about one of her ex-students. That smart boy -- all
her students were either "smart" or "bright" -- had shared with the class that he had a new sister,
whom Mom was feeding every few hours.
"I want Mrs. Pamma to feed me," the boy told his class.
"I was over sixty at the time," Mrs. Palmer said, "and even after all those years on the job I
still didn't know how to deal with such a lovely request. Fortunately," Mrs. Palmer beamed an
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enigmatic smile, "the boy's eyes shone when he said, 'It's okay if Mrs. Pamma makes a big paper
plane for me.'"
She laughed heartily.
I eyed her, suspicious that she was hinting at some deep flaws in my character. "I'm
dropping out of the project," I whispered to the floor.
She turned quiet for an eternity and a half. "Why, Dave?"
I didn't answer.
The most painful silence in my life followed.
At last she begged, "Why now, Dave? Tell me, please." Like aspirin kicking in, her warm
voice soothed the chaos inside my skull.
I shrugged.
"Does it have anything to do with your interview?"
I shook my head.
With her index and thumb she lifted my chin, something no one besides Jack and Brenda
had done since my problems began. "That interview means we are halfway through the project.
Does that upset you?"
First I peered sideways, then rushed to look at her face. "Mrs. Palmer!" I exploded. "Don't
you dare play shrink with me! I don't think I can take this...this...this..."
Of course I didn't say "horse shit"! Am I a pimp? A paedophile? A psychopath? An S.S.
officer? I may have problems managing my anger, but even after twenty-six years in the gulag I
knew damn well how to behave in the company of a kind lady.
"Yes, Dave."
"Mrs. Palmer..."
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"May I go now?"
She took her time. "I can't stop you, Dave. But I would like you to stay to sort things out."
I just wished I could tell her that I'd already begun to miss her, no less than I missed Peter
Bradley, and no less than I longed for Mom and Dad the way they were before my problems started.
How could words capture my wishes to go back to my sweet life at home, before Nine NinetyNine's cruel punishments? No woman except Mom had ever told me she loved me. It was pure
bliss to recall the good old days of Mozart and Melville.
"Mrs. Palmer," I said. "I can't put it into words. There's no point bombarding you with
stories of guts and brains churning, turning into hard glass, boiling and freezing at the same time.
No need to tell about voices you'll never hear. What good will that do to you, to me?"
"But don't you feel lonely?" Her chest heaved.
"Of course!" I closed my eyes. "But why should I dump on you what's hurting me?" I
stopped to think things over. "Mrs. Palmer! All the words I know are dark shadows fluttering
around my thoughts and feelings. All the words never capture, settle, or grasp anything solid. A
waste of breath, believe me."
"Please, let me in, Dave, " she whispered. "I want to understand you a little more."
"What for, Mrs. Palmer?" I opened my eyes and stared at her shoulder. "I wanted to be a
journalist, voice my opinions, lace into the injustices and corruption around me. But the way my
life turned out, words escape me, as if I lived outside their reach." I halted to draw air. "Guess
what I really would like to do with my life?"
Brows wrinkled, she shook her head.
"Be a janitor!" I shouted. "Sweep and mop floors, change toilet paper, wipe mirrors clean.
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That's the best I can do, Mrs. Palmer! I would love to make some money, have a desk of my own."
I stood up. "As the Bard put it, the rest is silence."
"Dave," she stood up. "What...what...if we prayed? I don't mean...to Jesus...necessarily.
But what if you prayed in your language?"
"Pray?" I felt furious. "Pray? In Hebrew? You must be kidding, Mrs. Palmer. I thought
that the Lord of the Quebecois accepts prayers only in French!"
She winced, white-faced.
Enraged, but guilty, too, I continued to holler. "Mrs. Palmer, you're a kind lady, and I like
you a lot. Having said that, I'll tell why I can't pray!" I laughed and, at the same time, tears welled
in my eyes and threatened to stream down my cheeks.
"Please sit down," she said.
I did.
It took me a long time to organize the thoughts that like waves surged and
disintegrated inside my head. "I'm a Jew, Mrs. Palmer. After many of my relatives and million of
others were exterminated like termites, I see no need to pray. But it runs deeper, more personal
than that. I'm a meshuguene, Mrs. Palmer, a madman, un fou, Mrs. Palmer.
For a long while I paused to sort out my messed-up thoughts. "Do you care to hear what
madness means?"
"But of course," she cocked her head, readying herself for the worst.
"I already told you, Mrs. Palmer, there are no words to describe things like that. But I'll put
it this way: madness means that even God cannot drag my...my...yes, my ass to Gehenna, Tophet,
Sheol, Abbadon, Azazel, or whatever He calls His dull, pathetic, little hells!"
I shook with laughter. Tears rilled down my cheeks and the collar of my shirt felt wet.
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Right in front of my eyes I saw huge, bearded, perspiring Rabbis with dangling, curled-up sidelocks
to their elbows. They wore black furry hats and silken coats to their knees, long, white cotton
stockings, and mudded black shoes. Clutching the handles of long tridents with their Samson-size
hands, they thundered curses in Hebrew, Yiddish, and broken English. Furiously, incessantly, in
the neck and back they stabbed sinners lolling in steaming cauldrons of soupy shit. Screams and
moans pierced my ears. Afraid of overwhelming her, I bit my lower lip. In a moment I laughed and
spat on the floor.
Barely breathing, she looked aghast.
I remembered her and went on. "I already live in hell, Mrs. Palmer. In downtown Toronto,
it's called Nine Ninety-Nine. I know for sure this is hell, because I lived a good life before the
authorities corralled me into this joint. Like Gehena, Nine Ninety-Nine is smoky, and it stinks. It
has ice packs and straightjackets galore. Plenty of pills with horrible side-effects. Lots of devils on
staff. No shortages of shock-therapy rooms."
I exploded into a long, convulsive laughter. I wiped my tears. It took me a while to get
hold of myself. "Believe me, Mrs. Palmer, there's nothing God can do against me. I'm not terrified
of Him! After living in hell for twenty-six years, how could He possibly punish me? What really
scares me are pigs in power, like shrinks and politicians. The devils of the Earth can do me a lot of
harm, like developing new, more effective instruments of mind control."
Tears had gathered in her eyes. "Let's pray, Dave. That's all I can offer you right now."
"Thank you, Mrs. Palmer, but no thank you. It's useless. Once you're thrown into hell, not
even God can yank you out of Dis-ease, Dis-order, and Des-pair." This was, I believe, the first time
I'd brought these fragmented words into a conversation.
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Chalk-white, she wringed her hands, stunned to silence.
I strode to the door. I twisted the handle. "You've already given me a lot, really. Thank
you! I appreciate your time, your kindness, your Christian compassion."
In our next rap sessions, looking pale and tired, Mrs. Palmer was less talkative. Convinced
that my angry outburst had irreparably damaged her, I couldn't bring myself to ask how she felt.
Guilt and shame suffocated me. Inwardly I prayed she would not mouth the devastating criticisms I
expected to hear.
One Monday morning, the head moll said the U. of T. research shrink wanted to talk to me
in Room B-107.
"I know my way!" I yelled at a moll student, who seemed about to follow at my heels.
This time, the young fiend wore an almost decent pair of black leather shoes, matching grey
socks and pants, even a spiffy maroon mock-turtleneck, I soon noticed. He held no forms and no
chart. My heart pounded, I could barely breath.
"Dave," he turned to me softly, as I installed myself in my chair and stared at his chest.
"Get to the point, Mephisto!"
"It's about Mrs. Palmer." His eyes searched mine. "Her husband called. She's ill, had to be
rushed to emergency. I don't think you'll be seeing her for a while."
Shrill voices outside my head yelled at me, "You, David Hoffnung! You murdered her!"
From head to toe my blood froze. Dread engulfed me. "Don't faint, David," I ordered myself.
"Don't give your foe the satisfaction of watching you fall on your face."
After staring at my
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shoelaces for a long while, I said, "What is the matter with her?" Despite the turmoil chopping my
innards, I stared him in the chin.
His Adam's apple surged, then collapsed. "Before her operation, the surgeon had suspected
cancer of the liver. When he went in, he found it had spread pretty bad."
I clenched my jaws.
"How do you feel, Dave," he bent over a bit.
For a moment I hung my head. With my hands I covered my face. Terrified of crying in
front of an authority figure, I jerked my head up. "Listen, mister Mephisto! I don't know you, and I
don't feel I need to!" I leaped to my feet. "All I want is Mrs. Palmer's address and postal code."
"Are you going to write her?" The fiend looked almost triumphant, flattering himself he
had started a shrinky "dialogue" with me. "Maybe you can write to her directly at the Wellesley
Hospital."
"Mister! I don't need your rat-fucking advice!"
I stomped out the door and left it wide open.
Stunned, feeling mortally guilty, I stayed in bed for a week. Since I left the food tray by my
bedside table untouched, Brenda spoon-fed me. The molls helped me suck juice from a straw. I
didn't read the Good Book; I ignored the Star handed to me in the afternoon. For the first time in
twenty-six years, not even once did I tell a moll to get a baseball bat and fuck herself royally.
Thoughts pierced my brain like pins and needles gone crazy; unblinking, I lay on my back and
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studied the ceiling.
With worried faces, Jack and Brenda stood by my bed several times a day.
I didn't say a word.
One morning, the moll-in-chief and my too-dumb-to-do-research ward lord stopped by my
bed. "Dave," the shrink said, "we are transferring you to another ward."
I sat up. "Really, mister?" I smirked. "Over my dead body."
The shrink and the moll ogled me as if Dave, a gob of flesh, would soon be scalpelled.
"You're not well," the shrink pronounced, and the moll nodded. "You need intensive care."
"I'm not going anywhere, mister. I'm getting out of this shit hole."
Both of them put on masks of professional concern.
"You heard me," I said, courteous this time. "I'm signing out."
They exchanged perplexed glances. "But you're not well," the shrink said.
"I heard you, mister." In twenty-six years, I'd never been that polite with one of Lucifer's
angels. "You can bring me the forms. If you don't, I'm getting out of hell against medical advice."
"You'd better listen to the doctor, Dave." The moll tried to sound motherly. "He said you're
not well."
"I told you guys many times," I raised my voice, "and I'm gonna say it again. Dave
Hoffnung may be crazy, but he ain't stupid." I smiled, cold. "Would you be kind enough to bring
me the necessary forms?"
For a week they detained me in Shrink City. Meanwhile, the shrink and his accomplices
advised -- almost begged me -- not to act impulsively. I was examined by another mind surgeon. I
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told him I no longer harboured wishes to burn shrinks alive at the stake. The voices, I swore, no
longer ordered me to blowtorch pill makers and bankers. "I've no personal enemies, critics, and
detractors," I declared.
All a lie, of course.
One afternoon, the door to our ward was unlocked to let in a chick lawyer in black patentleather high heels and light pink pantyhose. Silent,I stared at her muscular calves as she discussed
my legal rights.
Rabbi Gluckstein came later. Sitting on my bed, he talked about the hardships of living in
the "world outside". He felt I should listen to the experts' advice.
Out of respect to what he represented I listened without barking.
"How do you feel, Dave?" He too looked worried, as if I, a child, could not take care of
myself. That annoyed me.
"Okay," I said. "Rabbi, do you care to hear my favourite verse before I leave?"
"Of course, Dave." He eyed me, warm and receptive.
Chin raised, from under my eyebrows I gazed at the ceiling. "Even though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death..." I bit my tongue to refrain from laughter, "I fear no evil...for She
is with me...Her rod and Her staff they comfort me."
The Rabbi's cheeks blanched and stiffened as if I'd lodged an icepick in his gut.
I asked myself, "Does he know about Mrs. Palmer and what she means to me?" Truly, I
didn't give a hoot about what the world thought of me. I felt renewed, firm, relaxed. I knew what
needed to be done to fulfil my moral duties in the real world.
I stared the Rabbi in the face. His cheeks were less tense, even relaxed. I stared at the
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ceiling again and, wagging my head, crooned merrily, "Even though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death I fear no evil, for I'm the most sardonic son of a gun in the valley."
He cracked up and let out a loud laugh. Tears welled in his eyes. For a while we laughed
heartily, the way only Bible-lovers could. With due respect to the sacred text, we swapped ironies
about King Solomon's thousand wives and love life; we compared notes about those passages of the
Song Of Solomon that most turned us on. A Solomonic heart-to-heart, eh? We had a Leviathan of
a time.
My Rabbi stood up. Sighing, he put out his hand. "Goodbye, Dave," he said. When I
shook his warm hand, he patted my shoulder with the other. "Yevarchecha hashem k'ephraim
um'nashe!"
"My Hebrew is very rusty, Rabbi! Would you be kind enough to translate?"
"May God bless you like Ephraim and Manasseh!"
"I thought so. Same to you, Rabbi!"
Only atheistic, evil shrinks and phuds never seek the company of sweet, benevolent doctors
of the soul.
Moments after the Rabbi left, Jack came to see me. "Are you signing out? Really?" he
asked, very sad.
"Mmh, mmh," I answered, merry. "Don't worry, Jack baby. I'll be all right." We stared
each other in the eye. "And don't hold your breath. I have no intentions of visiting this hell hole.
But as soon as possible I'll send you a postcard with my new address. I'll write to you and Brenda."
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"I'll miss you a lot," he snorted back his tears.
I've exposed Nine Ninety-Nine's evils many times, but I've never said it was chaos within its
walls, or that it was nothing but jungles of bricks and mortar. Oh, no! The devil's abode in
downtown Toronto lived by strict rules and regulations, it boasted its own volume of policies and
procedures.
Even while grieving for Mrs. Palmer approaching death, I knew that sooner or later the
authorities would let even a die-hard, anarchistic Bible-student out of the warehouse for intractable
authority-haters. By 1985, when changes in Canada's Charter of Rights were wreaking havoc on
the lock-them-up industry, all I had to do was to keep my mouth and nose clean. Madness, as I had
read in the Star, might be just a case of faulty fluids between the brain cells. But what kept us
madmen in Lucifer's Lair was not necessarily our actions, but what we wrote and, especially, shot
off at the mouth. Besides beating up my know-it-all analyst and some pushy Goliaths, I've never
robbed nor raped, never killed even a fly.
When my discharge time came, I wanted to say goodbye to Jack, but couldn't find him
anywhere. I searched even in the chicks' closets and under their beds. At long last, I found him in
the laundry room, behind the washer. I begged him to crawl from behind his hiding place, which he
reluctantly did. In a moment we gave each other a tight, long-lasting, Big Sur hug. Peter Bradley
would have been proud of his disciples.
"Please write often," Jack wiped his tears.
"You'll always be on my mind, buddy," I said.
I went around the ward. First, I gave Brenda a very tight hug, thanked her for her wise
advice over the decades, and kissed her on the lips. After, I vigorously shook hands with Bill Owen
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and all the other lifers. I mumbled goodbye to the artistes and the manic depressives on vacation at
Nine Ninety-Nine. Eyes fixed on my shoelaces, I waved at the molls and Goliaths. Thank God, the
ward lord was in his office scrawling prescriptions for poisons, and I didn't have to pretend to make
peace with the devil.
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Parkdale
On my first day out of Shrink Farm, I had an early afternoon appointment with Ms. Vera
Oakley, a community social worker. On that leaden end-of-winter day, I stumbled for hours in and
out of the dirty alleys of Parkdale. Wherever I turned, unshaved and haggard men like winos idled
on the disintegrating wooden porches of the sinking brick houses. I tried, instead, to picture my
parents' white brick bungalow with its manicured lawn stretching from house to curb.
At Nine Ninety-Nine, my under-thirty social worker had been a canoe-footed, hairy, bowlegged chick who, obviously, couldn't find a better position and settled for a job in hell. She had
referred me to the out-patient clinic. (I deem all agencies suspect until proven innocent.) In the
waiting room, I caught sight of Vera Oakley's flabby, shaved legs with the pin-size black dots that
reminded me of my head moll's. Was that anatomical similarity a mere coincidence? More
probably, a dirty scheme to bring me back, crazy, whining, and on my knees to the emergency
department of the penal colony I'd just left.
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Inside her windowless office -- social workers ply their trade in rooms much smaller than
shrinks' -- she showed me a chair across from her brown formica desk. She sat with her shoulder
almost rubbing the door. "Vera is no amateur," I commented to myself.
I glance at her face, pretty but business-like, without lipstick; her gold-rimmed glasses lent a
sexy spin to her slightly squinting eyes. Like an aging gun moll, that fifty-something also smelled
of Ivory soap -- a must for frugal women who no longer care, or are unaware of their continuing
sensual impact on men. Turned on by the first female to come my way outside the asylum, I stared
at my shoes. How could I possibly handle all the excitement of being free and in a small room with
an appealing woman?
She broke the silence. "Where are you going to live, mister Hoffnung."
"Mister?" I asked myself, surprised, and still studying the toes of my running shoes,
straightened my spine. A few people had tried, but nobody ever called me "mister" more than once.
Why not "Dave"? There had to be a reason. What was that social chick really up to?
I shot a glance at her left finger, where a thick wedding band and a diamond ring glittered.
A meaningful, strong statement, eh? "Madmen of the world!" I proclaimed inside my head, "at
night, on your bed, you may jerk off all you want! Right now, don't start up with me!"
It took me a while to find the right words. "No fixed address, ma'am."
"So where do you intend to live?"
I fell quiet. I saw no reason to make things easy for her.
At last shattered the silence. "Do you mind if I call you David?" She crooned in the
warmth-and-empathy tone that oppressive profs drill into their social-work students. "We need to
go over your plans for the future."
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We? What we? I wasn't stepping into the trap of talking about my future plans. What was
that? Instant intimacy, like instant coffee? It takes me years to open up to people I'm fond of. No
stranger was playing that sincerity game with me. What the hell had that chick ever done for me? I
eyed her wedding band and diamond ring again. Who did she work for? And her pay cheque,
where did it come from?
"David, you can't count on money from your father." She searched for soothing words she'd
memorized from a textbook. "He's in a private nursing home, barely getting by. You'll have to rely
on welfare."
Should I leap to my feet, run to the door, and never come back? Instead, blood rushed to
my face; my pride hurt, I barely breathed. "Handouts?" I blasted. As clear as a radio commercial, I
heard Jack saying, "Scottish Presbyterians chicks never relax before their second drink; you can
fuck them only after the fourth."
I smiled and winked at Jack. "A brilliant observation,m buddy! It's well worth a few wellcrafted lines." I said to him. I searched my shirt pocket for a pencil and paper to jot down a first
draft, but felt startled to realize that naive me had left all pencils and pads in my suitcase, in the
waiting room. Should I rush to check my stuff, or stay put and be the butt of further putdowns?
The mirthless Oakley specimen sitting across the desk stared at me. What a drag. "Ma'am,"
I said, my fury rising.
"Besides a cheque once every two weeks, what the fuck will the
Establishment do for me?"
Her fingers tensed. Her cheeks strained. One of my best kicks in life is to stab power
figures with anxiety. When an authority winces or cringes, I feel like singing.
Not breathing, that uninspiring creature tore off a sheet of lined paper, and one by one wrote
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down all the federal, provincial, and municipal benefits I could draw. "Keep your eyes on groups
like Friends Of Schizophrenics and Schizophrenics Anonymous. They might help you." She
checked if I was listening. "When you're out of the hospital, your social life is very important. Join
organizations, make new friends. That's very important! The more support groups you belong to,
the better you'll feel."
Twice she had said "very important"! Was I an idiot? Flabby calves with pretty face was
patronizing me! "How do I know you're really trying to keep me out of the Humilation Research
Centre?" I shouted. "Ma'am! I've heard before all your rat-fucking advice."
I longed to sing a Spanish or Italian anarchistic song, but didn't know any. (While locked
up, I did become a sympathizer of pre-World-War-II anarchists; at Nine Ninety-Nine, I'd never met
anyone old enough to know the old revolutionary songs.) As a second best, it crossed my mind to
sing the "Internationale", since we anarchists and the power-crazy Marxists still saw some issues
eye to eye. But after all the years in the gulag, I could barely call up the tune, let alone the lyrics. In
the thirties, my Dad, an intellectual and a Jew, had flirted with Communism. Even in the repressive
fifties he still sang that rousing song aloud whenever workers went on strike.
"If there are any problems," the social chick said, "give me a shout."
A shout? A phone call, she meant? Was that how professionals of the eighties talked?
After decades of incarceration, maybe I didn't understand all that people referred to.
How
dangerous! At any rate, how could I trust that joyless female? What a waste of time to spend even
one minute with someone who would never offer to pray with me when the going got tough. Never
again would I set eyes on Ms. Vera Oakley's lumpy legs. Besides, I wanted to get settled, buy my
own bed, start on the projects that had inspired me to leave ward M for good.
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I jumped to my feet and saluted. Eyes open wide, holding her breath, slowly she rose from
her chair. As if she were my drill sergeant I looked right through her. Loudly I sang what I'd
memorized in grade ten:
Alors enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrive!
Contre nous de la tyrannie--
"Contre nous de la tyrannie" made my heart leap to my throat. I heard Peter Bradley's voice
thunder. "Dave, you just got in touch with real gut stuff. It's painful alright, but stay with it, man.
You can't expect a thing from good-looking tyrants! Have to rely on yourself, Dave! There are no
miracle pills."
I turned on my heels, marched toward the door, and opened it. In the waiting room, a dozen
women and men sat on stackable chairs along the walls; on top of a low, round table a switched-on
lamp with a shade stood beside a pile of glossy magazines. I halted by the table, raised my fist high,
and sang
Formez les bataillons!
Formez les bataillons!
The chicks and guys in the waiting room pretended I wasn't there. I sang and sang that
portion of the refrain until Mrs. Oakley entered. "David! I'm asking you to leave the Centre." She
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said in a mousy voice. "You're disturbing the other clients."
Clients? Not patients, as at Nine Ninety-Nine? Since when did social workers hustle for
work like lawyers? Soon they would turn into store owners and hawk their useless wares to
"customers". I stared at her chest. "And what if I don't, ma'am?"
"I may have to call the police."
I panicked. Police? The pigs that first hauled me to Nine Ninety-Nine? Several years had
passed since two swines in power had come to my isolation cell, after I got even with Montreal
Smoked Meat. "Okay, ma'am, okay!" I said mortified, then enraged at my own vulnerability. "I'm
getting my ass out of this deadly joint. But I ain't stupid. I've figured you out: you are a gun moll in
disguise, aren't you? I got it! And now you're threatening to call Goliaths!"
"David! Calm down! I'm your social worker. I don't know what do you mean by 'gun
moll'."
"Get off my back, you shrinky bitch!" I bellowed.
I turned around and kicked the low table. The lamp toppled and thudded against the wall,
its bulb flaring like a lightning. Like coloured spaceships the glossy magazines flew onto my
fellow "clients", and on the floor.
Singing the mother of all revolutionary songs, I picked up my suitcase and marched to the
door.
Determined to make it on my own, that same afternoon I went for a consultation with Dr.
Herbert Joyce -- a family physician, not a mind-tinkerer. I stepped into his walk-in clinic and told
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his secretary that I was just out of Nine Ninety-Nine, and needed to see a doctor. While waiting, I
noticed that he wore fine black leather shoes, charcoal socks that matched his dressy pants, a white
coat, and a stethoscope.
A couple of hours later, I sat across from his desk and gazed at his shoulder. "I'm a writer,
doc," I told him. "An essayist and an editor just out of the nut college. Right now, I'm looking for a
room and a job."
"I understand, Mr. Hoffnung," he said in a soothing voice.
"Call me Dave," I raised mine.
"Okay, Dave. Please tell me in your own words, what's hurting? Where? And when did it
start?"
I liked his less-is-more approach. Fine bedside manner. Not a bad clinician. "Doc," I said,
"my mind races when I search for memorable phrases. I've a lot of problems falling asleep."
"And how long do you stay asleep?"
"Three, four hours max. Sometimes, the voices wake me up in the middle of the night."
"Voices inside or outside your head?"
A wave of suspicion flooded me. He was getting too close, too soon. "Why do you ask?" I
barked.
His raised eyebrow suggested he was thinking long and hard. He leaned forward. "Do you
have a letter from your psychiatrist?"
I turned my head to the side. After a while, I glanced at his desk. "No, doc. I didn't want
one."
Tweaking the rubbery hose of his stethoscope, he took his time.
perphenazine," he said matter-of-factly, "you'll sleep five to six hours a night."
"With a bit of
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I didn't comment, of course. Still, I decided to give him a try. In comparison to shrinks,
that real doctor with white coat and stethoscope looked almost innocuous; nothing about him
seemed vengeful or imperialistic. He didn't even wear an overbearing polyester suit. What did I
have to lose? If I didn't like his pills, in a couple of days I could throw them in the garbage.
"I'm not giving you a refill." He said, handing me a script. "I'll see you in two weeks, to
hear how you're sleeping."
"Do I have to come here every two weeks?"
"No! After we adjust your medication, you'll come just a few times a year."
I breathed in relief! My doc wanted me at arms' length, the best possible stance for me to
deal with people in the know, the authority figures I feared and hated so much.
I rented the cheapest room available at the Y. In the first nights outside the asylum I slept
rather well. Was the perphenazine kicking in, as Doctor Joyce had predicted, or was I relaxed, all
my cells celebrating my freedom? The answers to these theoretical questions didn't occupy me
much: for days I looked for a permanent roof over my head. Also, I needed money to buy the
necessary equipment to start the projects racing inside my skull.
In one of my few nights at the
Y, while taking a shower I met a shlepper with grimy, untrimmed toenails and inordinately flat and
hairy feet. As we towelled ourselves by a bench, he told me about a car wash at the corner of
Bathurst and St. Clair Avenue West. There, "temps" -- a new word for me -- put in a few hours on
Fridays and weekends. Few questions asked.
"What d'you do there?" I asked, more than curious.
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"Dry the dripping cars with rags," he said. "You get paid less than minimum wage, but it's
all under the table."
I searched for days, and finally rented a small room with peeling wallpaper in one of
Parkdale's disintegrating, urine-smelling houses. Where else could a guy with real problems afford
to live? Rosedale? Forest Hill? Moore Park?
So widespread is the hatred and fear of us guys that hear voices that not even for a thousand
dollars a month would a sane landlord let me a small cubicle in one of his clean properties. No
doubt, his holier-than-thou neighbours would burn crosses or stars of David on his front lawn.
Even bleeding-heart liberals want the wretched of the Earth miles away from their back yards; so
we prophets and prostitutes crowd the decaying houses and garbage-filled alleys of Parkdale. It's
true: sometimes we damned of the Earth pee when and where it pleases us; then the spiteful citizens
of Toronto long for the "golden days" of burnings at the stake and irreversible lobotomies.
Parkdale inhabitants, mark my words! With shrinks at the helm and politicians at the
rudder, our enemies are working on new laws reinstating the old "treatment" methods. And until all
the paper work is done, we're corralled into places unfit for hamsters.
Back to my new home. In the nearest Goodwill store I bought a single bed, a four-drawer
dresser, a desk and a chair, and, dearest to me, a goose-neck lamp for a buck. With furniture and
books in place, my room was more crowded than Vincent Van Gogh's at Arles.
Since I truly wanted a job, I called Mr Robert Evans, the car-wash manager, and made an
appointment for a job interview in two days. For that crucial event, I wore a white shirt and black
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jeans, my best clothes.
Mr. Evans' office -- a windowless cubicle -- incessantly rattled and vibrated as outside cars
were sprayed with detergent and pressured water. To sell myself well, right away I smiled, even
looked him in the face. "No meshuguene mannerisms," I told myself. "Behave as in Peter
Bradley's Thursday group."
"I'm back from Vancouver," I lied. With a part-time job on the line, I even stared him in
the eye, friendly. "Mister Evans," I tried to sound convincing, "I'm a hard-working man looking for
ways to make ends meet."
Inwardly I kicked myself. Almighty God! I'd forgotten to say "please"!
"Okay, Dave." A long-nosed, unshaved man, Mr. Evans puffed nonstop on a cigarette stuck
in the corner of his mouth; he looked me up and down. "Why don't you start next Friday? Let's see
how it goes." His tone of voice was like Humphrey Bogart's, especially when the star talked down
to a chick.
In 1985, there were still openings in the car-drying industry. These days, they're using
mostly huge, automatic equipment; car washes employ only a small number of minimum-wagers to
look after the machines. It's really tough for us guys without what blood-sucking bosses define as
"marketable skills".
After settling in my room, I bought a Parker fountain pen, my only luxury, and a dozen
large, beautiful Hallmark cards. Now I could work on the main purpose for leaving Nine NinetyNine against medical advice and taking a plunge into the vast oceans of freedom.
As
if
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transcribing a Psalm, carefully I wrote inside one of the cards:
"Dear Mrs. Palmer:
Thank you for all your help.
I'm feeling much better now that I left Nine Ninety-Nine for good and have a real job. It
pays minimum wage, but I was promised a raise in a few months. Also, I want you to know that
you were more than right about how good it is to pray when in distress. So, I'm attending services
every Saturday morning at a nearby Shul. There, I thank God for all the good things happening in
my life.
I wish you a speedy recovery.
Sincerely,
Dave Hoffnung"
What a pack of sordid lies! First, I had no "real job", just the promise of towelling dripping
cars on a trial basis. A raise? What raise? Even under the table, I would get less than minimum
wage forever!
Most sinful lie of all, I had no intentions of ever setting my toe inside a Shul, though daily I
studied the Holy Book. I'm suspicious of organized religion, since shrinks and phuds are members
of any congregation. These jerks don't come to pray, of course. The Freudian crowd is as atheistic
as their adored Rabbi. All they want is to be seen praying in public, to sell themselves and their
nefarious services; before and after prayers, the devils entice naive neurotics to swell their lucrative
private practices.
Does it take a professor of astrophysics to figure out what was I up to?
Well, my idea was to send Mrs. Palmer a card every week with my Parkdale address in the left
upper corner of a white envelope.
Why this wacky dance? Simple! Cheery letters from one of hell's back wards would not
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have been sufficient evidence that her kindness and compassion had helped me. What better proof
of recovery than a madman paying his own way and staying out of noisome Nine Ninety-Nine for
good?
And what did a royal fuck-up like me have to lose? Once I took off all my sociallyacceptable masks, who the hell was I? An angry soul, feared by his own parents. A parasite who,
for decades, milked the government for handouts and never contributed a single penny in taxes!
Now, that bothered me a lot! No, I didn't ache to fill Ottawa's coffers -- I'm not that crazy -- but my
mooching off the system was an emblem of helplessness.
My all-absorbing daydreams! My elaborate fantasies of becoming a journalist! Elephant
shit! At forty-six, I would as likely become a columnist at the Star as dance on stage with pretty
ballerinas. And what about other dreams, like writing an illustrated best seller on the altruism of
plants and animals?
Even more vivid and persistent were my daydreams of turning into Captain Brett
McPherson, a six-foot, two-inch, mustachioed peacemaker. Tears of pride would rill down my old
parents' and Jack's cheeks the day they saw me interviewed live on the CBC. Seized by the spirit of
forgive-and-forget, I would drop by ward M. In black, tightly-laced boots, fatigues, and a cute
blueish beret, I'd shake hands with all staff, even with the ward lord. Smiling, I'd stare them each in
the eye.
Painstakingly, I had worked out another metamorphosis: Assael, the black-haired,
bespectacled Israeli secret agent who smiled like a carefree teenager. His huge hands with thick,
hairless fingers were licensed to strangle fully-grown pigs. Working out of bunkers packed with
electronic gadgets, he discovered where in the world Jew-haters hid. With a single shot to the
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forehead from his pistola Beretta, one by one he dispatched to Gehenna the rubbery souls of
conspirators against the revival of Hebrew, the sacred language of the Old Testament.
While lying on my bed at Nine Ninety-Nine, I had studied the ceiling and mourned Mrs.
Palmer's approaching death. At long last, it began to sink in that Dave Hoffnung was not the sum
of his daydreams and fantasies, but of his actions. My weekly cards would not cure Mrs. Palmer. I
knew that, I'm not that crazy. Still, I felt it was my inalienable duty -- yes, duty -- to send her every
week a reminder of how much she was on my mind.
Listen, Toronto philistines and mediocrities! I know it's hard for you to give much thought
to anything beyond your annual vacations and swelling savings accounts! But what on Earth does
"human" mean if not enhancing the well-being of another person?
Yes, I had daydreamed of writing articles and books about the demise of authority,
anarchism, cooperation, compassion. I would demand that the Canadian government be kind to
Third World's children. But what did I actually do for twenty-six years? Write and edit the Ward
M Quarterly, and little else.
Please don't get me wrong. Once outside Nine Ninety-Nine, at no point did I flatter myself
to be an altruist! I was just as self-absorbed and withdrawn as ever, but Mrs. Palmer's terminal
illness gave me a chance to stick my neck out, get over my painful isolation. Her dying gave my
almost worthless life a semblance of dignity.
I was not searching for "meaningful activities", "self-actualization", or "fulfilment" -- the
ruminative quests of those who root in their own shit, then complain they don't like its texture, taste,
or smell. We madmen spend too much time and effort warding off voices and torturing trains of
thought; we have little energy left for writing resumes of all that is wrong with society and culture.
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Treated worse than dirt, and sick much of the time, we welcome those few blissful moments when
neither voices nor racing thoughts torment us. No time for chicken shit, as Peter Bradley would
have said.
No, my weekly cards to Mrs. Palmer were magical crutches. Every morning they propped
me up to look into the mirror and face the shame and guilt of a disgusting, almost useless life.
So let's have it out, once and for all: madness and the blahs are no excuses for unending
flights of fancy and sheer laziness! Hear me? No excuse!
Last, I have to bring up my gratitude. Yes, "gratitude" -- that un-trendy, un-hip word! But I
am a Bible-student, remember? Don't I know the Old Testament by heart? And when I fall apart
don't I vow to write sequels to each of the books in the Old and New Testaments? Isn't the lack of
gratitude of the children of Israel one of the main themes in the greatest of all books? Didn't all
prophets, beginning with Moses, denounce the Israelites' for adoring idols, rather than the God that
delivered them from the land of Egypt?
How phoney could one get? To study the Bible daily, then fail to express my gratitude to
the human being who had changed my life? Hadn't she inspired me to live as free as an eagle, miles
from closed wards and useless therapies? The "moral law within me" -- Kant's haunting, harrowing
phrase I had discovered in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations -- kept me awake on Thursday nights, as in
my mind I edited and revised what I would write next dawn to Mrs. Palmer.
Without fail, she answered all my cards. For the first time in my life, I received mail
regularly. (I had no credit cards and lived on macaroni-and-cheese dinners and milk; not even
advertisers mailed me their junk.)
Mrs. Palmer's coloured postcards were incontrovertible evidence that she was still alive, and
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that Dave Hoffnung was on her mind. That made me happy: my scheme for enhancing her wellbeing -- and mine, too -- was working. It made me proud. In my heart, I despised both madmen
and normals who went through life without the joys of gratitude in action.
It even occurred to me to stroll through her neighbourhood, peek at the house where she and
Jim lived. A bungalow? A duplex? A split level? A lawn in front? Perhaps even knock on the
front door, shake hands with Jim, look him in the eye, say he was the luckiest man on Earth.
Of course I didn't do any of that! Paranoid-shmaranoid, there's nothing I fear and despise
more than busybodies. Since when was Mrs. Palmer my personal friend? No! I was just a lifer, a
madman she'd volunteered to spend time with while she was healthy. What gave me the right to
disturb her privacy? Dave Hoffnung knew his place.
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In The Eighties
Living on my own brought me hourly pleasures. I delighted in fresh -- or least circulating -air, in flowers, public libraries, even malls. It was lovely to be spared the sound of people arguing
with their voices, and the sight of shaking extremities. Not that my fellow lifers ever embarrassed
me in the least. I truly admired their tenacity in overcoming the many hardships of a toxic
environment like Nine Ninety-Nine. It was refreshing not to live hemmed-in by cream-coloured
walls.
But in a world largely populated by normals, the life of an ex-inmate had its hassles. I could
barely recognize my home town. Instead of a white, Scottish-Presbyterian city where Italians,
Germans, and Jews kept to the fringes, everywhere I turned, brown, black, and Asian people
crossed my path. Slurs like "shwartze" had adorned my lexicon since childhood, but now I added
to my treasure-trove such jewels as "spics", "pork-chops", and "grease-balls". What had happened
to Toronto between 1958 and 1985?
As I strolled, addled and overwhelmed, I felt like an
immigrant, a Newfie, a D.P.
Even crossing a street made my heart race. Cars rolled by everywhere I looked. Mostly,
they were small, Japanese, and cute, and not, as I had stored in my memory, American, with fin tails
and huge chrome bumpers.
Daily I battled with my "altitude problem". I coined this clumsy phrase because even with
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the help of the Roget's Thesaurus it was almost impossible to convey my overwhelming feelings in
the first weeks outside Pill City. Shrinks, of course, would dismiss my feelings as just another
symptom of their contemptible "schizophrenia"; I have nothing but derision and hatred for overeducated mind-doctors and their Greco-Latin lingo. How could such a language that centres on
manipulation of vulnerable people evoke my torments?
I've never been inside a small-propeller plane, and have no intentions of ever flying one.
But imagine such an aircraft plunging a hundred feet in one second. That might come close to what
I felt several times a day. And as that plane dove, my mind and my own Satan slipped out of my
body, refusing to re-enter. I felt like a robot, but in intense, devastating pain. To make matters
worse, the boundaries between the robot's skin and the rest of the world flickered on and off like
Christmas lights. I could hardly distinguish between what hurt within, and what ached outside. My
poem Meaning Of Madness called this mayhem Dis-order, but Dis-ease and Des-pair were crucial
ingredients of my daily suffering.
My bouts assaulted me at unforeseen places and times: when I wrote by my desk, or
daydreamed of fondling Marlene on her canopied bed, or as I strolled, always lonely, inside one of
Toronto's glitzy malls. The sudden drop in altitude ushered in a cocktail of cold sweat, heartbeats,
and intimations of death. Right in front me, black, tusked monsters grunted and barked gleefully,
begging me to faint, to fall to the floor, or rush to Nine Ninety-Nine's emergency department.
How humiliating, I thought, as soon as the overwhelming wave abated. Why go back to the
nut house? To hear the gun molls bray twice a day, "Pill time! Pill time!"? To drink lukewarm,
frothy tea that tasted as if it had already been drunk once? To suffer outrageous putdowns by
shrinks and sadistic abuses by their butlers?
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Worst, my altitude problem could take over even while I towelled cars dry. I dreaded losing
my job, and persisted with my work, wiping my cold and moist forehead as often as the cars.
Whenever my visibly alarmed co-workers asked, "But how are you, Dave?" I took a deep breath
and pretended to smile. "Just fine, guys. Thank you for asking."
What else could I? Lose my job, my deepest source of dignity, my reason for living outside
Shock Therapy Town? No matter what I went through, I felt it was my inalienable duty to write her
a postcard every week; I lived for this duty, not for my pleasures and rights. (What Canadians need
these days is not a free condo in Key West, but a Charter of Duties: every week to make at least one
other person feel slightly better than the week before.)
But at night, panting into the ear-piercing silence of my room, in black despair, I pictured
myself tied forever to the posts of a bed at Nine Ninety-Nine. My sneering persecutors rendered me
unable to do what truly mattered in my tortured life: to hold a job, have a fixed address, write her a
weekly card.
Often, I lost track of who and where I was. Hogging pill after pill brought little or no relief.
The only way to soothe the hours-long assaults was to study Psalm after Psalm in my room, and
pray for the current bout to fade. My studies didn't eliminate the pain, but they had no harmful side
effects either. Probing the depths of King David's poetry allayed my dread of dying and made my
anguish almost tolerable. Only rarely did I think of jumping in front of a subway train.
The rest of the time I had my car wash, my essay on bioanalysis, the altitude problem, and
my postcards to Jack, Brenda, and Mrs. Palmer. I lost no sleep over ethnic hatreds, or insipid and
interminable issues like Canadian nationalism and the constitution.
Despite my habitual aloofness, I soon noticed that on Saturdays normals raced about town
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like hungry rats in a phud's maze. After weeks of spying on my next-door neighbours and the
tenants of nearby apartment buildings, I found that these unmedicated people were shopping for
electronic gadgets. Sundays in Parkdale were eerily quiet, as the shoppers struggled with the
gimmicks' incomprehensible manuals. I know how the poor normals felt: I still haven't figured out
all four push-buttons in my twenty-buck Timex. Imagine how much could go wrong under the
hood of a Japanese car, or deep inside a computer's entrails.
The fate of book-loving characters like myself utterly depressed me. Where and how did
we fit into a world galloping through technology? How could we survive the verbal diarrhoea that
soiling even the Toronto Star reviews of art and books? Who would listen to our voices, act on our
insights? Most normals, I suspected, were satisfied with the sports section for breakfast and talk
shows for supper.
In the forties and fifties telephones were massive, ebony-coloured things. Millionaires, or
teachers like my father, chatted on the same black gadgets, the embodiment of egalitarianism. In
the eighties, on the other hand, telephones came in all sizes and colours, without dials; some were
even portable, reflecting one's personality and social class. Working under duress, I had learned to
assess dangerous people, like shrinks and phuds, by observing their shoes, ankles, socks, and the
hems of their pants. Sooner or later, sensitive writers would evoke enduring personality traits by
describing beloved or feared phones.
Even more frightening were the ominous green or amber monitors of the personal
computers I came across everywhere. Their glittering rows of names and numbers petrified me; I
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kept my distance. I felt sure these devilish devices would suck me into invisible webs. Millions of
pigs in power would have unlimited information on Dave Hoffnung's literary plans, his
correspondence, and how he fell asleep only after a long love scene with Marlene.
Toronto boasted hundreds of book stores and movie theatres I hardly ever entered because I
couldn't enjoy them. I never bought books: in a short while my mind wandered, and I lost track of
what the author was telling me. At the movies, shortly after the opening frames I no longer
followed what the characters on screen were saying. Fortunately, the subtitles of foreign films kept
my attention focused on the dialogue. Slowly, I turned into a scholar of stylish European angst.
From this filthy, modern Torah I learned how futile are all attempts to communicate, especially with
your spouse and girlfriends.
Strolling by the glitzy theatres and bookstores, and reading bits and pieces of the Star, I
theorized that there were two species of Torontonians: those who went to the movies to digest the
best sellers they'd read, and those who read books to understand the movies they'd seen. Only
moody misfits and rebels didn't fall into either category; they were labelled "mentally ill" and
shipped to Nine Ninety-Nine or Hamilton Psych for what Stalinists of many colours still call "reeducation".
In Toronto in the eighties, one of my first discoveries was that millions of kids in running
shoes, white socks, and jeans controlled the city. You found them everywhere: roller-blading,
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smoking, cutting classes, necking, holding hands, doing drugs. Almost all normals looked much
like teenagers, including grey-haired, bearded, and paunchy men. In the fifties they had been called
"middle-aged", but now they greeted each other with a loud, juvenile "Hi!" Even more perplexing
were the good-looking chicks wearing clunky running shoes with panty hose and smart blue
business suits. I felt sure that those running shoes were meant to jar me. Always carrying cute
black leather briefcases, those chicks strode like the military. How different from my softly
walking mother!
Another conclusion was that the school calendar, not clocks, regulated normals' lives. Their
vacations, I remembered from pre-Nine-Ninety-Nine days, revolved around Easter and summer
breaks.
Some children toddled to school as early as two years old, or were wheeled there
even earlier; some students still lugged school books in their early thirties. Since most people made
babies school schedules controlled all aspects of life. Only in the nursing home were normals
allowed to rest in peace, far from the teachers' tyranny.
Teachers like my Dad, Mrs. Palmer, or Whitfield-the-phud actually never left school. They
were forever entangled with the ceremonies of writing and marking papers, receiving or bestowing
prizes, praising achievements; even the sweetest of teachers embarrassed and humiliated the less
accomplished students. Do teachers ever let go of the power of the blackboard, the chalk, the
extended forefinger? When people clung to schools like to my analyst's warm tit, did they crave
authority?
How come some people spent so many years with youngsters?
paedophilia, problems with adult intimacy, or plain lust for control?
Was it latent
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History shows that teachers were as abusive and punitive as shrinks; despite my love for
Dad and Mrs. Palmer, I find it too dangerous to trust those who spend their lives cooped up in
classrooms.
Fellow madmen! Suspect all pedagogical figures! Beware of the fronts of good intentions.
Only seventy years after they kicked the bucket, can you assess what was behind such masks of
benevolence.
Reading the Enclyclopaedia Britannica in the public library helped me resolve one ancient
puzzle: is the experience of time innate? From early on, does the brain automatically register time
passing, the way it perceives light? Or is this awareness learned, like my mother's love for Mozart's
symphonies?
For the unmedicated, the controversy eventually boils down to nature-versus-nurture. Since
scholars, unlike physicians, are afraid of seeing blood, especially their own, it doesn't take long for
the factions to arrive at wishy-washy compromises. For peace's sake, they get together at an
international convention and proclaim that both nature and nurture are at work.
How lily-livered! But most eggheads dread telling their stand on issues, for fear their
opponents will seize on their weak points and beat them to a pulp. Instead of trumpeting, loud and
clear, that talents are inborn, or acquired, the experts hide behind mountains of data; when
pressured, they gaze heavenward and sigh, "More research is needed."
More research? Whoever said more research was needed on whether Raquel Welch was a
sexy chick? The man in the street is perfectly in touch with his preferences. Only scholars hide
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behind five-syllables words, and crave more research, more tables of data.
Mad thinkers spit out
clear opinions. Our experience of time, or talent for poetry, is inborn. Bellies afire with moral
conviction, we cut the crap, emulate the prophets and take firm stands before the profs can say Jack
Robinson.
Sex lurked everywhere. In the car wash where I earned a few dollars, my co-workers
laughed their heads off about their women being like their scotch: smooth and twelve years old.
My explorations of downtown Toronto unearthed more dives devoted to lap dancing than fine
bookstores. Beer commercials flaunted sex, sex, and more sex.
Parkdale was full of boys and girls showing off thighs and bums; the competition for every
john was stiff, a true dog-eat-dog world. Many children spent nights on the street without making a
dime. At dawn, I saw two savagely beaten by flashily-dressed, cigar-chomping pimps, who had just
come out of a night-long poker game.
Though I have suffered much in my life, and will suffer even more, I felt immensely sorry
for the poor kids. No matter how miserable my life has been, there are others who have hurt even
more.
This is one of the principles of the new science of bioanalysis.
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Bioanalysis
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After a couple of months in Parkdale, five crisp twenty-dollar bills hid deep inside my
mattress coils. (Of course I didn't trust bankers -- the criminals that lent money to the makers of
Stelazine?)
After much shopping in Queen Street West book stores, I put my life's savings down for a
second-hand set of the 1977 Encyclopedia Britannica.
Britannica The Magnificent! Thirty brown volumes mostly under my bed, a few stacked on
my dresser. Britannica! Brief articles summarizing all knowledge, a blessing for distractible
writers who can read no more than a few paragraphs at one sitting. Britannica! My research tool,
my most trusted colleague! Lobbing hand grenades and firing a machine gun, it cover me as I
mopped bunker after bunker of over-educated madman-haters. From my point of view, the pen is
mightier than the sword only when dipped first in the Toronto Star, a cesspool of current
information, then in Britannica's inkwell of wisdom.
Well armed, confident in the credibility of my sources, I worked on my essay, Bioanalysis:
Understanding The Human Condition In Mad People. I had begun to organize these thoughts since
the days the Westmount shrink tortured me with his Jewish-Viennese distortions. Since my own
analyses revolved on biologically-flawed individuals, the prefix "bio" was entirely justified. My
new science rested on the solid ground of the body, not on airy-fairy mind games.
However excited I was by the project, its subtitle brought some misgivings. Not only was
"the human condition" a penny-trite phrase, but I feared that my essay might come across as one
more "egg-sistential" account of egghead malaise.
No! Ann and Avram Hoffnung did not bring their only son into this world to dwell on
emptiness, alienation, futility, and boredom. No! It was not my passion to root in the mud with
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brainy boys and damsels in distress. No! Bioanalysis did not delve into the heartaches of the
shallow; it probed primarily the souls of the damned, people betrayed by their own biochemistry.
Bioanalysis, like Freud's self-analysis, is a thorough examination of its author's own hangups. Like my illustrious predecessor, I also throw into the cauldron my extensive observations of
other people's torments -- true madmen, in my case. Unlike the competition, however, my point of
departure is not sexy but flaky chicks -- so called "hystericals" -- but shit-disturbers with
uncontrollable rages and unheard-of ideas.
For us daily life is so godamn awful that we pay little or no attention to our dreams. What
for? How much difference is there between our nightmares and waking life? Not a hell of a lot. By
day, with our tortured eyes open we hear voices; by night, we lie awake, a blanket over our heads.
Only normals and neurotics are puzzled by their dreams: for a moment madness flashed behind
their eyelids. In terror, the poor babies rush to consult soothsayers or good-for-nothing shrinks.
Bioanalysts never stop examining the activities of over-educated figures, especially shrinks
and phuds. We scrutinize what they actually do, and pay limited attention to their stated intentions.
The most prominent precursor of bioanalysis was the unnamed genius who first observed that
actions speak louder than words. (All lobotomies were committed by "well-meaning shrinks", an
oxymoron.)
Take a simple example. For over twelve years, German professors of philosophy and ethics
saw all the atrocities and genocides going on during the Third Reich. How could they possibly not
hear the countless screams for help? No doubt, some of these well-meaning men had noble feelings
about what should be done -- like slaughtering myriads of Canadian soldiers to liberate the
cowardly profs from their dictators. Well, did the eggheads take any action? Of course not! They
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didn't wiggle even a finger, as if they'd been stuffed into straightjackets and dumped into ding tanks.
Bioanalysis is a lyrical science. Whenever it studies the souls and works of so-called
normals, it prefers to dwell on great artists like Marlene Dietrich. What did the main actress in my
nightly masturbatory movies do about the Fuehrer? Well, well! Quite a lot, as a matter of fact!
First, she did not yield to the temptation for her adorable legs and face to become an emblem of
Aryan beauty. Then, "the eternal womanly that draws me on" (Goethe's phrase I learned from
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations) denounced the devil and his angels, even entertained Allied soldiers
at the front.
Who cares about Marlene's "real" motives? And who gives a hoot if her actions were born
of supposedly yearnings for everlasting fame? Okay! Let's say my idol was nothing but a
calculating bitch: she sensed where the winds of history were blowing and took advantage of them.
So what? The bioanalytic bottom line is, what did Marlene do for her fellow men; what sins did
she omit.
We bioanalysts judge people primarily by their commissions and omissions. Not that
people have no feelings and motives; of course they do! Could you name people more driven by
their emotions than we madmen. But feelings, I must emphasize, are secondary issues. What really
matters are people's conduct and misconduct; morality, the core of bioanalysis, is not about pleasure
or pain, but about actions and inactions.
Only normals and neurotics fuss over feelings, daydreams, motives, intentions -- as if their
inner world were a soap opera packed with sly attorneys, sleepy judges, phoney witnesses, and
dumb jurors. But actions speak louder than fantasies, folks. Except in the Harlequin romances that
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the staff at Nine Ninety-Nine urged us "patients" to read, who the devil ever knows what's brewing
between a person's ears? After two years of "mirroring" me, my analyst knew me and my motives
as much as he knew the man in the moon.
A madman's vivid fantasies never cease; we have luxurious feelings, the noblest of all
intentions. Does every lunatic deserve a statue in the park?
Open your ears, whiners of the world! Who are the most persecuted people on Earth? Who
are the most hated, cremated women and men?
Listen! For every Jew and Armenian exterminated in a Holocaust, there was at least one
madman locked up for life or burned alive at the stake. And for every humiliated black, there was
at least one madman slapped with labels more offensive and damaging than "nigger". How about a
taste of "chronic undifferentiated type", served with a lobotomy cordon bleu?
Quit yammering! Even Job, the most famous of all complainers, eventually got a handle on
his problems, didn't he? After a lot of hot words with his cronies and even with God, dear old Job
owned fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand sheasses -- not to speak of seven sons and three daughters. The second part of his life was even better,
his own book says. Not bad, eh? At Nine Ninety-Nine, not only I, but a lot of lifers would have
loved to take on Job's trials.
By way of contrast, who ever heard of a madman with reversible pain and suffering? Even
minor cases -- lucky yo-yo characters -- barely manage to keep their noses above water. There's no
such thing as a madman that lived better than before his troubles began.
We bioanalysts join
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hands with zoologists: all humans, even madmen, are born to cooperate, give a helping hand. Were
it not for the pork in power, and the uncivil and uncivilized "civilization" they ram down our
throats, most people would enjoy a more dignified life.
Most of my discoveries came about while editing the Ward M Quarterly. Surely I wanted
both fame and notoriety for hitting hard at corrupt dictators! Certainly I dreamed of curtsying to
Gustav XVI Adolf on the occasion of my Nobel prize in literature. At the same time, I dug deep
into my heart to create beautiful passages for those who read my stuff. I was not altogether selfish!
In bioanalysis, the goal of life is to enhance the well-being of at least one other person, like
sending weekly postcards to Mrs. Palmer. There is no need to take a stroll atop mount Everest, nor
to concoct a cure for cancer.
The devil and his cohorts beg us to enjoy what the Ten Commandments forbade.
Whispering in our ears, they tempt us to be disrespectful of God, the Sabbath, and our parents; they
lead us into murder, theft, adultery, and bearing false witness. Last, the demons drive us to covet
what our neighbour owns, instead of cooperating and making him feel better.
Hug for hug, kiss for kiss, kind words for kind words. This is the most important principle
of bioanalysis.
To date, I've confined my research to the following sites:
Armenia
Dir Yassin
Milai
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Auschwitz
Biafra
Cambodia
Dresden
Nagasaki
Hiroshima
Jakarta
The cumulating evidence is that we madmen were not the perpetrators at those sites. We
have excellent alibis: at the time of the atrocities we were behind bars, being tortured in the likes of
Nine Ninety-Nine. When the day of reckoning comes, we madmen will refuse to sign on the dotted
line that we share the collective guilt and shame for these crimes against humanity. (We may have
been guilty of our own crimes; we too have Satan right under our skins.)
I feel nothing but everlasting contempt for the hoax of madmen's violence! Brenda, Bill
Owen, Jack, and I never killed even a fly! Financed by bankers intent on world domination, books,
newspapers, and movies deliberately portray dangerous killers as madmen.
What a devilish
distortion! Mass murderers truly enjoy carrying out their atrocities; we madmen derive pleasure
only from those rare moments when our anguish comes to a halt.
During the Holocaust, not a single concentration camp commander was a genuine madman
with Dis-ease, Dis-order, and Des-pair. The butchers in Armenia and Biafra did not hear voices the
way Jack, Brenda, and I do. Serial killers do not suffer from impaired concentration and attention
like me. Their actions are entirely focused and pre-meditated.
My thought processes are so muddled that a line-by-line editor must work hard to improve
whatever I write. My biological vulnerabilities prevent me from planning my own short stories.
How could I possibly execute massive acts of violence?
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Toronto The Evil
162
For a whole week screams alternated with titters. In vain I tried to suss out what my voices
were conspiring to make me do. At night, when no cars or trucks trundled by, I heard stifled, lewd
laughter. Like waves in a stormy sea, my altitude fell and rose. Fearful of losing my job, I called
my boss.
"Mr. Evans," I said, humble. "I'm under the weather. Must take a few days off."
"Take it easy, Dave," he said. "Hope you'll be okay next Friday."
"I'll be there, Mr. Evans." I said. My phoney, cheery tone surprised myself. Truly amazing
how low will a man stoop to keep a shitty little job!
Days after that phone call, things came to a head. To this day, pieces of the puzzle still hang
in my closet: a crown of dried-up maple leaves; a burlap robe fastened with safety pins; a blue rope
the length of a belt. On the closet's floor, dirty white socks swell oversized brown sandals. I don't
remember buying these items. Did I wear them? In broad daylight? What an embarrassing
thought!
Like a vivid dream, I recall entering Britnell's book store by the corner of Yonge and Bloor
in mid-afternoon: whatever preceded has been erased from my memory the way my mother
removed stains from my T shirts. At the counter, I paid for a coloured postcard with an aerial view
of Toronto, showing the CN tower, the black Toronto Dominion Bank Centre, a few other
skyscrapers, parks.
In that sweltering Saturday afternoon, I made my way through crowds lugging plastic bags.
Again and again I bit my postcard and slowly chewed it into a pasty ball. Though initially bitter, it
soon tasted like maple syrup.
Heart pounding, guts collapsing, three times I circled a city block, past the skyscraping
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Workers' Compensation Board building, the entrance to the subway, Britnell's book store, two
streets, the long, almost windowless Hudson's Bay. Bellowing verses from Amos, Hosea, and
Isaiah at the passers-by, gradually I worked up a bit of courage to go public on the issues.
"You can do it, Dave," sang a few kind voices inside my head.
"You're a show-off, a
shit!" screamed others. "You'll never make it, kiddo."
"Please," I pleaded, "please almighty God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. Let Dave
Hoffnung go. I'm your youngest son, and the least of your poets!"
A voice thundered, and the earth shook. "No! Wasn't King David the youngest of Jesse's
sons? Didn't Obadiah deliver his one-chapter vision with heart and soul?"
"I beg you!" I yammered. "Please reconsider!"
He thundered, louder. "Who shall I send, but you?"
"I'm scared, God. I feel dizzy. My mouth is dry."
"Be strong!" He said. "Have courage, Dave. I'll put the right words in your mouth."
I wobbled up the stairs to Two Bloor Street East. At the top I turned and looked down. A
hotdog vendor scraped his black grill with a metal spatula. With blue, red, and yellow chalk a
woman on her knees drew huge smiling masks on the sikewalk. A skinny old man in a blue
baseball cap crooned a love song. I raised my arms and hollered at the multitudes in the sidewalk:
Listen, Toronto The Evil, evil boroughs, evil burbs!
Nine hundred and ninety-nine sins I have overlooked.
Child whoredom I will not.
Rapists! Butchers! You have violated my children,
Maimed undersized bodies, damaged young minds.
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Have you forgotten? All kids belong to me,
The almighty boss of all bosses.
From my private collections
I loan boys and girls to their parents.
But you robbers slobbered over thin thighs
As if you owned them!
Who gave you permission to squeeze tiny tits,
Stick your dicks into minuscule, knee-dry cunts?
Face to face and from behind you raped my treasures,
Your filthy pleasures ruined young souls
That belonged only to me.
No breast-thumping, I say.
Do not fall on your knees, do not beg forgiveness.
Too many times you ignored screams and torn tissues.
Now it is too late for appeals and calls for mercy.
For my justice is deaf and blind, swift and brutal.
Behold! Punishment comes to pass here and now,
And not in the last of days.
Raise your eyes, citizens of sin!
Blue flames devour the CN tower,
Engulf banks, consume high-rises.
Burning brimstone yellows your proud lawns,
Sears your red-tiled mansions.
With a finger I beat railways into pins,
Glass towers into marbles.
Hiroshima? Nagasaki?
How dare you compare?
They were fairy tales, parlour games.
At midnight,
Not angels, but my own sword strikes.
Like bees,
Trillions of green flies buzz about beheaded bodies,
Then litter the streets, dead.
Even cockroaches don't survive my wrath.
Blood streams into the quiet Don,
Swells the lazy Humber.
Pomegranate-red lake Ontario smothers fish small and large.
And when the yellow-and-black smoke settles,
Neighbours and pilgrims come to see:
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Was this stinking heap Toronto The Mighty?
Breathless, trembling, the tourists whisper,
Yes, this was Sheol, the devil's home town,
New Sodom, modern Gomorrah,
Where God's girls were fucked for a penny.
Ninety-nine years my rain will not kiss that corner of the Earth.
Even thorns and weeds will not sprout in that cursed patch.
But, rage over,
I will recall my love for the First Nations.
And in those blessed times,
Ninety-nine days it will drizzle nonstop.
And in nine months north and south will sing:
No longer is southern Ontario a barren, foul desert.
The Golden Horseshoe is greening.
Quietly the Don and the Humber stream, virgin-snow clean.
Sturgeon, trout, herring, and sculpin teem in lake Ontario.
Cherries, apples, peaches, and pears blossom.
Buffaloes and deer graze in the shade of huge oaks.
And from east and west,
The first owners will flock to their land.
Lovingly, they will nurse and nurture my gorgeous, wonderful kids. And I, authority over all
authorities,
Swear by the North Star that never again
Will I wipe out cities and towns,
For Satans within and devils outside
Will no longer molest what is mine.
"Amen! Halleluiah!" my voices shouted in unison -- for the first time ever.
"What's your name?" a male voice put an end to my ecstasy. Staring at the stairs, I caught
sight of two pairs of glistening black boots and the navy blue pants of the Metropolitan police. The
pigs carried revolvers. Male power, blue-collar type.
"What's your name?" the same cop
asked.
Without raising my eyes, I thundered, "I am David son of Avram, who heard voices and
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wrote prose and poetry in the days of Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark, John Turner, and
Brian Mulroney, kings of Quebec and Canada."
"And where do you live," fired the other cop.
"Officers!" A young man in the crowd butted in. "Leave him alone. He's a good guy. Was
ranting against child prostitution. That's all. Let him go, officers."
"Yeah!" shouted a woman. "He's okay. Not breaking the law or anything! Just telling the
johns like it really is. Let him go!"
"David," said the first cop, "go home, relax. And don't come
back for a while, okay? This time we won't charge you."
"Hey, officers!" shouted a young woman. "This is a free country! David can express what
the hell he feels about pimps."
"Right!" shouted a woman from the crowded sidewalk. "Let's back guys who stand up for
kids' rights!"
"Fuck the establishment," a young man yelled. "Let our man say his piece. Don't you dare
muzzle him, pigs!"
"Yeah! Yeah!" many people hollered, others whistled.
"Break it up!" The officers brayed. "Break it up!" Out they pulled their black, shiny sticks.
Gripping them till their knuckles blanched, they pushed the crowd towards the street.
It took a long while before the women and men stopped shouting, and went about their way.
When the steps leading to the sidewalk were empty, one cop grabbed my elbow and shoved a
panicky me down the stairs. As if afraid I might deliver my sermon all over again, he hurried me to
the nearest stoplight. "Go home, David!" He barked. "Come back only when you're well."
In a daze, I crossed Yonge Street. Turning a blind eye to the glitz in the shopwindows, I
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traipsed along Mink Mile all the way to Avenue Road. Many times I repeated my sermon aloud, so
later, at home, I could write it down, and word by word chronicle the heart-warming response from
the multitudes. Not even in my sweetest dreams had I hoped that a callow, insecure prophet would
find such a welcoming audience in downtown Toronto The Evil.
Susan Thomas
One evening I came home late from the car wash. As I trudged down my apartment
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corridor, despite my fatigue and clouded senses, I felt like grabbing a lined pad and writing the first
draft of a sweet, soothing postcard to Mrs. Palmer. I stopped dead: there, with creme-coloured
masking tape someone had attached a folded yellow page. Only after I had locked the door and
stood by my desk, did I open the message and study it. "Just passed by. Call me at 926-8742.
Don't be afraid. Susan Thomas."
My back went right up. Who had given her my address? Mrs. Palmer? Why would that
sweet lady betray my secrets? Nine Ninety-Nine? Vera Oakley? No, they had never known it.
Jack Barnaby would never disclose where I lived, even to his most sadistic voices, loud and throaty
Palestinian terrorists barking deadlines and threats. Brenda, I knew, would rather have a root canal
without freezing than tell madman-haters about my whereabouts.
For days I obsessed: my privacy, my peace of mind, had been violated! Fear pinched my
throat. Rage boiled in my heart and face: suspicion narrowed my left eye to a slit.
For almost ten years, Susan had been my private tutor and editor. She had read, made
corrections, cut, and pasted most of my works. Not for a moment had I enjoyed her grand,
imposing handwriting above crossed-out phrases or her comments written in the margins. Her
towering Ts and Ss made my stomach curl up like sizzling bacon; as I went over her line-by-line
editing I felt like a penny flattened by the wheels of a streetcar. For reasons that still upset me, she
used wan masking tape to paste together my edited manuscripts. Panting, I riffled through my
work, my flesh and bones. I hated to see how some pages had turned longer than legal pads, others
gnome short. More than anything I resented the careless, zigzagging way -- with garden shears, it
seemed -- she sliced up my pages, my delicate, fragile nerve endings. Though loud and mercurial
about matters of justice, I had never challenged her ways of handling my writing. Was I afraid of
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rocking the boat? Perhaps. I feared that if I voiced my resentment, her criticism would become
even harsher. Again and again she made me feel painfully vulnerable as desperately I clung to her
expertise and good will. Without her help I dreaded that my Ward M Quarterly might become a
homespun newsletter with too many disjointed, less-than-seamless passages; in my heart I prayed
that her editorial savagery would, as if by magic, turn my ramblings and fragments into stylish,
perfect pieces.
"Is this my work or yours," I challenged her, but only in my mind. "Who's the author? You
or me?"
Whenever I opened the manila envelopes she handed me on ward M, my hands shook.
Better than Brenda, or even Jack, she knew all the shades of black and white between the valleys
and peaks of my volatile self. For days I felt devastated by her or augmenting my pages, her
insensitive monstrous capital letters, and, especially, the masking tape. In private lessons, as one by
one we went over her written comments and suggestions, I felt patronized, harshly judged, put
down. My heart thudded, about to fly off my chest and pound the wall. At any moment she could
demolish me by remarking in her small voice, "Dave, you're just a beginner." Even more I dreaded
she would add matter-of-factly, "Still mediocre."
A bookish woman, she impressed me as naive about the workings of the mind, especially
the mind of the damned; despite the hundreds of hours of tutoring me at my table and chair -- I had
no desk of my own -- she never recognized the enormous power she wielded over my sense of
worth. For a decade, twice a month I experienced her as the stern judge who either denied or
bestowed upon me what I most thirsted for: recognition as a competent writer. In an instant, her
notes or even her off-the-cuff remarks plunked me from the peak of Mount Sinai to the Valley of
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Gehenna -- and vice versa. Whether unwittingly or deliberately, she sat in judgement on what was
beautiful or ugly, right or wrong, true or false about me. In her uncompromising zeal to pass on to
me her art and craft, her death-black ballpoint pen sadistically crossed out phrases I cherished;
without pain-killers, often she amputated whole paragraphs.
"A cold, castrating bitch!" I told myself. "The passages she corrects and crosses out are my
flesh, part and parcel of my pained, defenceless self."
Minutes after our tutorials ended, I flew into impotent, mute rages that seared and shrank
my entrails.
Weeks later, I hated myself with childish passion when, cheeks aflame, I
acknowledged that she had been right: her tutoring -- both face to face and in writing -- had
improved my style, heightened my artistry, made clearer, more obvious, what I'd meant. Imagine
my plight: an unmedicated woman who, except in her nightmares, had never been psychotic made
my mad poems sing sweeter! By changing a word or two she magnified the power of my prose!
Like a snail lugging a cracked shell, I despaired, felt helpless. Shame singed my cheeks. Seething
with hurt and revenge, I had lain in wait for a decade, longing for an opportune moment to strike
back.
It enraged me whenever she re-arranged my disjointed, feverish sentences into punchier
arguments. I ached to the marrow whenever she challenged, even dismissed, some of my most
cunning sayings; too many times she questioned the logic behind my reasoning and the validity of
my conclusions. ("What does that have to do with the previous sentence," she often underlined
"that" in the margins.) Every time I came across such comments, my nostrils flared to the point of
exploding. My innermost self felt simplistic and obvious, like the drawings of a cretin. How I
hated her, the cruellest of all stepmothers!
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"I can never win with that bitch," I raged, but only inwardly.
I admit: Susan hurt me badly twice a month, but without her help and advice, my writing
could never have become wholesome, understandable, readable; without her slicing and
suggestions, my artistry might not have shone through. The Ward M Quarterly, I'm afraid, would
have added up to a bundle of perplexing hollerings. Still, despite my mixed feelings -- I alternated
between wishes to kiss her hand and vivid fantasies of cutting her tits off -- I dreaded meeting her
face to face now. It might remind me of my miseries at Nine Ninety-Nine. Thinking of her, I tried
in vain to expel the torturing memories of that terrible place. I feared the ghosts of my many
enemies would visit me during the day, as I fought back the three cursed Ds of madness. Even
more frightening was the possibility of the sadistic staff intruding upon my nightmares as I writhed
on my moist bed for hours.
At any rate, the day I gathered enough moxie to call, Susan answered the phone. Over the
whining of East Indian zithers she said, "I wanted to know how you were doing, Dave. I--"
"Where did you get my address?"
"From the Friends Of Schizophrenics."
"How come?" I barked.
"Just a moment, Dave."
The sound of zithers vanished.
manuscripts. They've been with me for months."
"Why didn't you mail them?"
She fell silent. "You don't want to see me?"
"Mmh...." I hesitated. A woman, in my room?
"May I pass by sometime next week? I work in the area."
"I wanted to return your
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I paused, as if studying my busy social calendar. "Okay," I said at long last.
The following Thursday, as I memorized passages of Ecclesiastes at my desk, a knock on
the door startled me. I held my breath. Who but Susan would pass by? Door-to-door fund raisers
for any imaginable organ and illness never wasted their time on Parkdale residents -- like goddamn
pashas they threw no galas for the widows, orphans, and sojourners in their midst.
"Hi!" Smiling, she stepped into my room, uninvited. As usual, she was wearing enormous
brown Birkenstock sandals without socks and an almost transparent, florid pink-and-blue sari to her
knobby ankles. I stared, mesmerized, at her left big bunion. (How come overwhelming bunions
grow on women's left feet while the right remain reasonably gracious?)
I sat on my bed. She loped to my desk and set a manila envelope on top.
"Why don't you sit down?" I croaked. Except for my mother and the molls at Nine NinetyNine, no woman had ever sat on my bed. She perched on my chair; I breathed out. With much
effort, I gazed at her ample chest. "How do you want your coffee?" I asked the first guest to grace
my room.
"No coffee, Dave. But thank you anyhow."
I stared at her face. Her broad smile revealed nicotine-stained girl's teeth. One front tooth
overlapped the other.
"I was just passing by, Dave. How are you?"
I studied her round, freckled face. At all times, she managed to keep her carroty pigtail over
her right shoulder. A deft manufacturer of images, eh? Flashing her persona every moment of her
waking life, eh? "Not bad," I muttered, feeling under a microscope.
"Are you writing these days?" She broke the silence.
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Blood rushed to my face; my throat and forearms swelled. Had she come to snoop on me?
I tightened my lips to signal disapproval. "Mostly Hallmark cards."
She winced, then eyed me as if for the first time. "I'm not sure what you mean."
I raised one eyebrow. "Don't you know Hallmark cards? Some people write cheques.
Others scribble on cards."
"Postcards, you mean? Postcard stories?" She tried her utmost to smile, and I resented her
trying to baby me.
"No!" My patience had run out: she was spying on my work-in-progress, probing secrets,
meddling with my innards. Soon I would have to affix words to embarrassing longings, perhaps
even apologize for mistakes I had not made. "Just Hallmark cards, once a week."
"I would love to read them."
"No!" I blared. "You can't! I mail my cards to...to...a friend!
"I see." She furrowed her brow. "But what about your essay on bioanalysis? I edited quite
a few pages."
"It's coming along very slowly. I have too many things on my mind. God knows if I'll ever
get to the finish line." I turned my head to the window and looked out. In the next building, a
couple of Nine Ninety-Nine's ex-residents were sitting on the floor, watching television, sipping
beer. I turned back to her and shrugged. "Write essays, Susan? What for? Who'll ever read
them?"
"But Dave," she wailed. "You have talent!"
Talent? That word infuriated me; it implied that I harboured more than my share of Satans.
"What does talent mean, woman? I barely manage to keep my part-time job at the car wash. I
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suffer from unbearable altitude problems. I live in fear of losing my job."
"You don't feel well?" She asked, motherly.
That bugged me.
"What I meant," she continued, "is that you have a strong, original voice. Most people have
no idea how it feels to live in places like Nine Ninety-Nine. Your writings are so informative."
"Who the fuck needs to know shit like this?"
She reduced her left eye to a line. She too raised her voice, "But Dave, you're an artist.
Right now your work doesn't get the recognition if deserves, but I feel..."
I jumped to my feet. "Words, words, just words! That's all you know."
"That's right!" She shouted what still haunts me today. "In the mornings I polish my
poetry, and in the afternoons I eke out a living inspecting halfway houses, right here in Parkdale.
The entire day, even while I'm sleep, in and out I breathe words. I taste them, ponder their texture,
weight, and power."
"You call this thing about words a life?"
She shrugged, anger contorting her mouth. "That's the only one I want for myself!"
Flailing my arms I hollered, "Listen, young lady! You know sweet fuck nothing about birth,
life, or death. Like a mole you hide deep inside mountains of words." I caught my breath. "Why
the fuck don't you get married, have kids, live like a mensh? For God's sake, stop daydreaming
about art and talent! Then, maybe one day you'll have something real to show."
Slowly she rose to her feet.
"Time to wake up, little girl," I shouted, mean and hurtful.
She ran to the door. I heard
her galloping down the stairs. In a moment the front door slammed shut.
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Gritting my teeth, I thought how hard it is for me to trust. Could it be that Montreal
Smoked Meat had had a glimpse of my character, the true me? How quickly, automatically, I
perceive in others the most humiliating, malicious intentions. Unless I fight back my fears nonstop,
I'm convinced that my many enemies will skewer me with a small, rusty fork; and I, on my knees
will have to beg forgiveness for sins I had not committed. Small wonder I keep all men and women
at arm's length: I expect them to conspire against me and, smiling, harrow my flesh with metal
combs. Except for Jack, Brenda, and, at times, Mrs. Palmer, I have not been close to anybody and
have trusted no one. The unmedicated, I'm sure, will torture me until I fall on my hands and knees
and swear I'll be a good boy who defers to nasty, abusive porcine figures in power.
Never! I'd rather have the enemy insert pins and needles under my nails than allow this
world's czars to mould me as if I were a hunk of plasticine.
How could a chick like Susan understand what really made me tick? True, she had read
most of my work and hundreds of novels; that, no doubt, gave her an edge over my other readers.
But did that mean she ever grasped the basic me, my relationships with Brenda, Jack, and Mrs.
Palmer? And what about my Satan, myself, the drive behind my mean actions and utterances?
Could a babe in the woods who never battled pork in power grasp the meaning of howls that fused
into "bizarre" phrases and "incoherent" sentences? How could I trust someone who not only was
oblivious to Evil within, but never had to face shrinks' "treatments" and mistreatments?
With all her heart Susan believed that, bit by bit, her ecstasies with words would cast
Creation's light upon the mysteries of unwanted suffering and much-desired life, the absurd riddles
of aging and death. How cocky, how naive, how self-absorbed! Could someone who had suffered
so little ever hope to perceive anything beyond her nose, get in touch with her own Satan, write
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something outrageous -- or sublime? Did her limited angst reveal anything but the suburbs of her
mediocre life?
What did Susan Thomas' sobs and sighs on paper have to do with a survivor of shrinks'
abuses like me? Who ever "understood" anything about me unless they had suffered what I went
through? Sure, Jack, Brenda, and even Bill Owen understood me well; but they were targets of the
Establishment's conspiracies, lifers who had been in shoes like mine for decades. They had
soldiered on through miseries, fought back their own versions of the three Ds of madness.
Could a word freak like Susan ever connect, at the gut level, with what I experienced daily
when not even my beloved Mrs. Palmer failed to do that? Would Susan feel for what I struggled to
vent, give shape, make understandable, even if I used confused and confusing phrases? She was,
no doubt, a craftsman and, at her best, an artist; she toyed with words and fragments until they lay
side by side seamlessly, even beautifully. But no matter how much she probed her own soul, she
didn't have what it took to drink from the fountains of Evil bubbling inside her. Thus, she had
condemned herself not to become one of humanity's lighthouses, those agonized souls that dared be
in touch with the wicked nature of their true self. (During seemingly unending nights, lighthouses
twinkle shyly against the darkness. They warn us against the shoals of despair and futility.
Remember King David's Psalms!)
I give Susan not only professional, but also some personal credit: while still tutoring me on
Ward M, she was daring enough to lend me her booklet of poems. Several times I read it carefully.
Though marvellously crafted, her work left me cold, unimpressed. No matter how hard she strove
to strike poetic gold, most of her writing tasted like a stew without salt and spices. Yes, some
words popped up in surprising places, but, clearly, the artisan had never hobnobbed with her inner
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demons, the Satans that inspire us madmen, the uninvited guests to the rowdy celebrations of
"normal" life, to write.
Above all, my coach and editor wanted to adorn, make palatable her mildly interesting but
flat ken of emotions. Though perceptive, even sensitive to her own pain and to the suffering of
others, she harboured no fantasies of burning to the ground an unjust, immoral world. She crowed
over the hardships of her modest life, as if privation bred inspiration. In our numerous discussions
about the art and craft of writing, I learned how hard she worked toward being accepted into the
Establishment. Not only had that schiksah published poems, stories, and book reviews, but she
proudly mentioned her poetic novel about survivors of the Holocaust growing tomatoes in their
backyards in Willowdale! Tomatoes? An emblem of fresh, juicy hopes? Could a goyishe chick
who had never got in touch with her inner demons write about hell on earth? How out of touch,
how phoney!
Sooner or later, I daydreamed even in her presence, she would receive literary prizes, teach
creative writing to crippled writers. One day she wouldn't resist the temptation of taking part in one
of the endless schemes of the shrinks-pillmakers-bankers-politicians complex.
(Joining the
Establishment is like having smallpox: it leaves marks for life.) She would compose corrupt,
distorted songs to pillmakers' contributions to the "well-being" of mankind. The day her publisher
advertised how her praises of pills and shock treatment had been translated into nine languages, her
renown would hit the stratosphere. Glitzy shopwindows would display her glossy softcover; at the
back of the book, a decade-old, black-and-white photo of her would shine. Her folksy pigtail,
minuscule teeth, and freckles would entice lovers of girl-next-door poetry. Such marketing devices
made me queasy: they reminded me of real-estate brokers who baked bread and burnt logs in
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fireplaces during open houses.
Targets of conspiracies, watch out! Proximity to pork in power corrupts!
In the next few weeks, I furiously rewrote the fragments that Susan had edited, then added a
few new passages. One Friday afternoon, I called the Ontario Friends Of Schizophrenics from the
car wash. (I kept no phone in my room. Except for tele-marketers, or people dialling the wrong
number, who would ever call me?)
A rasping male voice answered.
"This is Dave," I said.
"Dave who, please?"
"Why are you asking?"
"Go on, Dave. I'm listening."
"Susan and I had a terrible fight."
"Who's Susan?"
"A poet. You see, my thoughts get messed up, and I write fragments. I need a line-by-line
editor. For years you guys paid Susan."
"Take it easy, Dave. Don't worry. Give us some time, and we'll find you a new editor."
Two weeks later I called him back.
"Dave," the man said, "your new editor is Maureen Everett-Smith."
"Who is she?"
"A high-school teacher. Has a book of poetry out."
"Does she believe in God?"
"Dave," the man lowered his voice, "for many years the Smiths were missionaries in
Zambia."
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"Good! Is she married?"
"Oh yes."
"Kids?"
"Five, three adopted."
"How much are you guys going to pay her?"
"Relax, Dave. Maureen's editing is a labour of love."
"Sounds okay." Guts
fluttering with suspicion, I gave the man my address and postal code. "I'll mail her some of my
stuff to see if we can work together. Ask Maureen to cut my manuscripts with sharp scissors, not
with shears or a fork. I want her to paste my fragments with transparent tape. I'll be glad to pay for
it. Also, tell her I'm not interested in private lessons."
There is something peculiar about me or, perhaps, my biology: whenever people try to
approach me, I feel they're piercing my flesh to the bone, boring holes in my heart, then filling them
with red-hot lava. Enraged, I fret, I lash out. When the dust settles, I feel guilty and withdraw into
one of the black corners of the cave of Des-pair. A deranged golem, I dance to the rhythm of this
self-defeating tune. Though my vulnerability haunts me, it brings no inspiration: not a single poem
or story ever grew out of my bouts of total withdrawal. Like a fish bone I can neither spit out nor
swallow, this affliction sears my throat, singes my being.
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In The Snake Pit
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Days after I mailed the first few fragments to Mrs. Everett-Smith for editing, I received a
white, almost square envelope with Mrs. Palmer's address on the back, written in the shaky, peaksand-valleys handwriting of an old man. Her name was not mentioned. I panicked. I flipped to the
front: my name and address were also penned in an old man' hand.
Panting, I set the letter on my desk, fearing that an enclosed card announced her death. "I'll
read it after dinner," I told myself.
The next night, the envelope still lay on my desk, untouched. In bed, I worried myself sick
until dawn whether my best clothes were fine enough to wear at the funeral home. I dreaded seeing
her chalk-white, powdered faced with ruby-red lips, the way the goyim adorn their dead. At work,
my altitude problem got so bad I feared my boss would fire me: too often, as I took a break from
towelling the cars dry, my hand stopped dead in mid air. I stood up straight, my upper sleeve
soaking and wiping the cold sweat off my forehead, while huge, insolent tuskers grunted and
barked all around me. Whenever the tuskers went silent, I heard women and men tittering.
Luckily, the summer of 1985 was quite mild. Despite my bursts of cold sweat, I didn't catch
a cold.
One night I woke with a start: black peccaries and boars thumped around my bed. "Aren't
you man enough to open the letter?" they taunted. After moments of heart-slicing silence, men
hiding inside the walls guffawed, "Scaredy-cat! Yellow! Waiting for the Messiah to come, eh?" I
couldn't bear the onslaught. I plugged my ears.
Through the black room, I trudged to my desk. I turned on the goose-neck lamp on and
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down. Hands shaking, with the pointed end of my pen I slit open the envelope. I pulled out a
white, unadorned, undated card addressed to "Dear Dave" and signed by "Jim". In a few words he
let me know that "Marie" had passed away quietly in her sleep. That's the way the just people of
this world die, I told myself.
In slow motion I slid the card back into its envelope. I opened the upper drawer and stuffed
the envelope and my pen into far end. After clicking the lamp off, I stumbled to my bed. Eyes
close, I lay on my back, arms by my sides. Like a bucket churning with molten lead, my head was
about to explode. I resisted the temptation to yell back at the tuskers' growling and howling in the
corners of my room, as scalding tears rilled down into my ears. For the first time since my mother
had died, I wept not from rage or humiliation, but like an abandoned tot. (There is, I admit,
something bizarre about my problems: though I hurt easily, I cry only into soft pillows. At Nine
Ninety-Nine, it felt safe to cry late at night, when the skeleton staff made only hourly rounds, and
the snores of guys -- and chicks -- sucking air in desperation echoed like water swirling down the
bath drain. But from daybreak on, I faced the day's humiliations and persecutions dry-eyed.)
Next morning, as soon I could make out the doorhandle, I trudged to the closest variety
store. A printed sign on the door said that coffee would be served only after nine. Disoriented, I
felt like a mangy hound, as I plodded up and down the dirty, nauseatingly bad-smelling streets and
alleys of Parkdale, incessantly looking over my shoulder.
Sooner or later, I dreaded, the
dogcatchers would grab me. Down my throat they would ram meat laced with Stelazine, then haul
me unconscious back to ward M. My worst miseries and humiliations would resume. I would
suffer bouts of panic and never complete my essay on bioanalysis and other projects.
Hours later the store opened. Off the shelves I picked bottles of mineral water, bags of
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sliced bread, a few apples.
Embracing my two paper bags, I doddered to the door.
"Hey," the storeowner shouted. "You forgot your change."
Mortified, I stayed put. What else was I doing wrong?
Puzzled or frightened, the storeowner walked right up to me and into my shirt pocket
shoved a bill and some coins.
Back in the house, I fetched boards, a hammer, and long nails from the basement. For a
while my hammering shut up the men hiding in the walls and the taunting tuskers, as I boarded up
my room from within. As soon as my pounding ended, the men resumed their contemptuous
guffaws and, by my bed, the tuskers flashed their saliva-dripping fangs. My small room thundered
with men's laughter alternating with swinish grunts, as if the devil himself conducted a choir of
thousands of human and animal persecutors. Like all authority figures, both men and beasts
showed no compassion for my suffering, but did whatever they wanted. Day and night I lay in bed,
opening my eyes only to sip mineral water or to swallow unchewed lumps of bread.
"Dave!" Pounding on my door, my neighbours shook me out of my thin sleep.
I opened my eyes to a slit.
"Why aren't you going to the can, Dave?" they hollered. "Your room is stinking of shit. It's
disgusting, awful, man!"
"Fuck off!" Raising my head from the pillow, I mumbled. "What about the tuskers and the
men in the wall? Why the hell don't you do something about the monsters?"
I've no idea when the dogcatchers in police uniform kicked in the door and, pinching their
noses, warily trod into my room.
They poured buckets of cold water over me. Shivering, eyes
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closed and soft-limbed, I offered neither cooperation nor resistance. Curled up in my bed, I had
turned into a huge fetus.
The cops and paramedics wasted no time. They undressed me, and after I was naked as
Adam in Eden, they struggled to stuff me into fresh underwear and clothes. Like a carcass they set
me on a stretcher, then heaved me into the back of an ambulance. Minutes later I trembled
uncontrollably, perched on a wooden chair in the waiting room of the emergency department of
Nine Ninety-Nine.
This time the enemy didn't ship me to ward M. For weeks I didn't see Jack, Brenda, and
other friends. Instead, the ogres gave me dozens of shock treatments. They stopped melting my
brain only when I lied through my teeth that my voices had disappeared. They hadn't, really; only
became tolerable to the point I could recite Psalms and Ecclesiastes and read a few paragraphs in
The Star, my mind drifting to all corners of the globe.
Slowly I became reacquainted with myself. Though my return to Nine Ninety-Nine came
about against my will, it filled me with bottomless shame and guilt. Obviously, the enemy had won
a major battle and, behind my back, was celebrating. Nightly they sang paeans to their gods -Freud, Cerleti and Bini, the inventors of shock treatment, Wagner-Jauregg, who "treated" his
"patients" by inducing malaria, and B.F. Skinner, the father of behaviour modification. They
feasted on pheasant and quail and, dancing the night away, guzzled case after case of brut
champagne out of crystal glasses, the way my parents celebrated their fifteenth anniversary. In the
mornings they gathered around a varnished, oval table for triumphant "case conferences" -- debates
on whether to stuff me to the eyeballs with anti-erectile or anti-ejaculatory concoctions.
I had, indeed, miserably lost my fixed address and my job. The gun molls, the Goliaths,
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perhaps even some guys with paralysing problems, were sneering or, even worse, pitying me for my
failures. Unlike my voices, those cowards didn't laugh at me openly, honestly. They dreaded my
violent temper. That thought was my only consolation prize.
One morning, after breakfast, my attending shrink sent word that he wanted to see me in his
office.
"Why don't you sit down, Dave?" the ward lord gestured to a chair.
Too weak to show my contempt for the devil with brown suede shoes and blue-black socks
that surprisingly matched his pants, I complied.
"Dave," he said, "I know it's hard on you, but could you please look at me?"
I looked aside and started a fantasy: on the lenses of his eyeglasses pictures of taut lids and
disgustingly short eyelashes had been glued to the to conceal the tiny computers installed all around
his emptied orbits.
"We're transferring you to the Community Living Program," the computerized pig said.
More bored than angry, I ignored whatever else he said.
Days later, the fiends on staff sat Brenda, Jack, Bill Owen, myself, and twelve other oldtimers around rhomboid tables with green formica tops joined to form a hexagon. On a green
board, consultant after consultant -- actually, thick-ankled, fat-thighed thirty-something broads in
confining miniskirts and no wedding bands -- made inane presentations. Even survivors of the
forties' outrageous lobotomies would have been aware of the topics being discussed: tenant's rights,
filing income tax returns, venereal diseases, how to cash cheques -- humiliatingly basic stuff, a
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premeditated, orchestrated insult to our intelligence.
For weeks, the chubby chick-consultants began their presentations with choreographed,
rehearsed smiles, then cracked corny jokes about their own Community Living Program. Each
"lecturette", as the broads called it, boasted an easy-to-memorize title, like "alcohol will kill you
slowly" -- as if we lowly madmen were brainless and badly needed such insipid snippets of
wisdom. In vain the miniskirts tried to involve their passive-aggressive audience in "life skills"
scripts, such as shopping for hand-me-downs at a Goodwill store, or contacting our guardians by
phone.
Throughout the role-playing sessions we lifers made sure that our trainers hurt like
amateurs who had tried to teach new tricks to old foxes. Daily they admonished us never to skip
our meds, as if this sin of omission were a path to eternal damnation.
Most humiliating were what the consulting vixens called "cognitive strategies". The fatassed trainers broads believed, no doubt, that right around the corner simple solutions lay in wait for
people entangled in complex problems, or those ruminating about philosophical issues like the
three Ds of madness. All we moronic madmen had to do was to snap out of the negative thoughts
that crowded our crazy heads. We should, instead, think positively, constructively. The enemies of
finesse never said it openly, but they implied that a madman's failure to accomplish what any eightyear-old did was a sign of systematic stupidity.
"So what about God and Satan, right and wrong?" I trumpeted. "How do you think
positively about such issues?"
"Dave," the consultant smiled, sweet and patronizing. "We're here to discuss survival
tactics in the community, not your private fantasies."
"What private fantasies?" Jack barged in. "I think about things like that all the time."
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"Me too," said Brenda and, after her, Bill Owen and others nodded.
"We'll come back to the business of morality later," the consulting broad said.
They never did.
Unfortunately, besides my sarcasm I had no weapons to fight back the positive-shmognitive
mumbo-jumbo: in weeks we lifers were scheduled to be "reintegrated" into communities that, the
trainers implied, just couldn't wait for us guys who heard voices to solve our survival issues in their
midst. Thus, I saw no point in resuscitating my Ward M Quarterly.
Every day, without fail, the speakers spread the same credo: think positively, conjure simple
arguments against negative "cognitions", immerse yourself in the lowest common denominators.
Then, you'll necessarily conclude that even the dread of death and the immobilizing agonies of
madness are overrated; they're not as tragic or revelatory as they initially seemed.
And if
genetically-inferior entities like us lifers couldn't control our crazy thoughts, we were to engage in
"stress-reducing behaviours", like eating a banana, or solving crossword puzzles. Simple.
"How about jerking off?" I asked, and the class cracked up.
When the laughter died down, the broad on duty cocked her chin, in vain trying to conceal
her glaring discomfort. "What about it, Dave?"
"That's the only thing that gives my negative thoughts a break. Right after I come, I sleep
like a baby."
"Me too," said Jack. "I beat my meat, then fall asleep."
"Go for it, Dave!" shouted Brenda. "Right on, Jack!"
The class laughed so heartily the broad announced we were taking a break.
When we resumed, she recommended that since masturbation in public is not "socially-
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sanctioned", we should try "thought stoppage": to stop thinking altogether by yelling at ourselves,
inside our heads, "Stop! Stop!" If that did not work, she added in a hurry as if Jack or I might
object, then we cretinous crazies should wear a special, inch-wide rubber band around our wrists.
When negative thoughts crowded our skulls, all we had to do was to pull the band as hard as it
went, then let go. The pain alone would relieve us from the cerebral poisons that made our lives
miserable.
It didn't take long for us survivors of dozens of ineffectual therapies to realize that our
trainers had gathered their wisdom from step-by-step manuals with pictures. Obviously, those
broads lacked subtlety or understanding of what it felt like to live in Dis-ease, Dis-order, and Despair. Had they ever given a thought to how impaired people survived toxic environments like Nine
Ninety-Nine?
Upon reflection, it became clear: our consultants had been hired and trained by
pharmaceutical companies! The catch was to brainwash us official madmen into taking the
demoniacal chemicals while living on our own. We would be hooked for life, and pillmakers and
shrinks would make fortunes over decades. The wishy-washy "cognitive" stuff was just a scam, a
last-ditch attempt to appear liberal and progressive. Not too cleverly, the enemies of critical
thinking and creativity had tried to conceal their evil conspiracy to stuff us like Thanksgiving
turkeys with glittering money-making drugs. Long before the Community Living Program ended, I
had tuned the broads right out and in my mind resumed editing several manuscripts I had neglected
since my readmission to the snake pit.
On a Friday afternoon, for the first time in my life I
entered a cab, a beat-up, black-and-orange Diamond Taxi, which drove Jack and me to Parkdale -where else? A chatty gun moll who wore white clogs and purple pantyhose -- her fat ankles were
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unmistakably Jewish -- led us on a grand tour of the drafty, cockroach-infested house where Jack, I,
and seven other residents live to this day. She showed Jack and me our small, peeling bedrooms
and introduced us to a ramshackle, dark kitchen and a turd-coloured, seventy-year-old washroom
that smelled of well-aged urine.
Wherever I looked, cigarette butts, beer bottles, yellowing
newspapers, and empty cans littered the floors.
Incidentally, my chick-lawyer moved mountains and on her knees begged the almighty
shrinks and their lackeys not to separate Jack and me. Apparently, the bosses feared that even
outside Nine Ninety-Nine we would continue to wage gallant wars against compliance and
conformity, and ridicule the wisdom of all hogs in power. She wrote letter after letter to various
authorities, stating that it was unsafe and inhuman for Jack and me to live apart after more than
twenty-five years together.
Sometimes laymen, even shysters, understand sensitive matters far better than over-trained
shrinks and phuds.
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Blessings
The Friends Of Schizophrenics, I found out, had stored my books, Britannica's thirty
volumes, my bed, desk, and other possessions during my brief stay at Nine Ninety-Nine. As soon
as Mrs. Everett-Smith, my new editor, had heard of my problems, she rushed to my room. She
stuffed my manuscripts, especially all copies of the Ward M Quarterly, into two plastic bags, then
laid them in cardboard boxes. Other Friends stored various belongings, including my prophet garb,
in their basements and attics.
To this day, I haven't laid my eyes on Mrs. Everett-Smith. I am, of course, immensely
thankful for her keen and helpful editorial comments written in a lovely, unimposing handwriting. I
truly appreciate the kind and sensitive way she snips my manuscripts with sharp scissors, and pastes
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my fragments with transparent tape. Yet, despite my deep gratitude, I harbour no curiosity to meet
her in person. These days, when I live without shrinks breathing down my neck, I find it too
draining, even embarrassing, to have face-to-face contacts with people who know too much about
my literary projects, my spiritual strivings, my angst, my failures. Also, after sweet Mrs. Palmer
passed away, I became even more skeptical than ever of connecting with any normals again. The
Friends' helpfulness notwithstanding, at present I do not wish to have people calling me at the car
wash, asking how I feel, and how my writing is coming along. I restrict my communications with
the unmedicated to brief, inevitable queries, like the day I felt overwhelmed by the new technology
of cable TV. Flustered and fearful, I called the Friends and asked for step-by-step help on how to
operate the hand control -- another demoniacal gadget, a conspiracy against Judeo-Christian values,
a scam against the aristocracy of the spirit, refined habits, the arts, and all that's worth living for.
Who, I pondered before I called, was behind the wizardry of remote channel-switching? Who
would really benefit from it? Banks? Advertisers? Manufacturers? Even when one of the Friends
tried to reassure me that this new invention could help the public, I did not believe him.
Be that as it may, besides advice on practical matters and my editor's helpful suggestions, I
keep ninety-nine percent of humanity at arms' length. Apart from a few kind souls like Mrs.
Palmer, I'm sure that the suspicion and antipathy work both ways. By and large, the man in the
street is as indifferent to the fate of the wretched of the Earth as he is unconcerned about black holes
in the skies.
More than ever, I'm convinced that the unmedicated face their Satans only up to a point.
Instead of acknowledging what day and night impels their crimes, the babies resort to scandalous
denials or project their own Evil onto crooked politicians, abusive men, bitchy women, lousy
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teachers, the sensationalist media. These days, all you need to become one more substitute Satan is
a birth certificate; a driver's licence might overqualify you. No experience required, no questions
asked. As desperate as salmons springing upstream, damned normals do just about anything to
ignore that they are as evil as their feared and despised enemies.
Not too deep under our skins, Satans smile. Forever patient, they wait to prove that they are
the lords of our inner worlds. They know: sooner or later they'll reveal themselves as the dark
inspiration for our unending crimes.
Humiliated, but hungry for a few dollars to spend on new reference books and depraved, but
artistic European movies, I made an appointment with Mr. Evans in his office at the car wash.
"Had to spend some time in Vancouver," I said, inwardly calling myself a liar and a cheat.
Cheeks on fire, I tried my best to look him in the eye. "Mr. Evans, I hope you have a job for a hardworking guy like me."
"Sure thing, Dave." He stood up and, puffing smoke in my face, slapped my shoulder.
"These days, a lot of fellas drink or do drugs on Fridays. Next day, they don't show up. When
d'you want to start?"
"Friday."
I sensed that he damn well knew that my "trip to Vancouver" had been a stay at one of the
locked depots for dissidents and critics of the shrinks-pillmakers-bankers-politicians Establishment.
One good thing about capitalists' attitude toward madness is that they ask few or no questions when
there is plenty of poorly-paid, dirty work to be done.
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Now that I have my welfare cheque and the car-wash money, I buy not only The Star, my
old vice, but The Globe And Mail, too. Big spender, eh? Coming up in the world of words, eh?
Also, I go not once, but twice a week to subtitled movies in the afternoon, when you pay half price.
After a broadside of sophisticated, foreign decadence and angst, I head home for a cup of strong
coffee that knocks sense into my boiling brain cells. The shot of caffeine also helps me sort out
what happened during the wordy wars of attrition on screen. My Mom and Dad had their problems;
they argued about Mozart, Melville, and many other things, but they never came even close to the
moral filth that passes for high art on screen. A Bible student, I see it as my inalienable duty to
investigate what the enemies of the Judeo-Christian culture are painstakingly hatching in the
systematic, delicate way archaeologists dust artifacts. I won't leave a stone unturned until I know
what our enemies abroad have up their sleeves.
Jack snores until noon, then swills sweet wine or moonshine for breakfast. As if influenced
by me, he got into the bad habit of rarely staring people in the face. It worries me that he's not even
looking for a meaningful occupation, like a part-time job. He has no hobbies and his lack of
interest in inspiring activities is slowly driving him to the ground. Unshaved and in oversized
clothes -- he has lost a lot of weight since Nine Ninety-Nine -- he loudly serenades "Oh Canada!"
along Parkdale's streets and back alleys. At times, he borrows subway tokens from me or from
Elaine King, a chick down the hall, and he takes off. For years he hasn't repaid us.
In the spring, summer, and even fall, Jack baby prefers to sleep on a park bench rather than
on his bed. Beats me why. The fierce warrior that valiantly struck terror in the hearts of scores of
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Goliaths is now reduced to a helpless wino. What is he afraid of? Of life in Parkdale? Of life in
general? Is he down in the dumps because he lacks attachments, passions, and commitments? Or
is it the other way around: his depressions prevent him from becoming involved in anything
meaningful?
Has he despaired, leading an empty life because he didn't benefit from the
unconditional kindness and compassion of a volunteer like Mrs. Palmer? Oh the joys and rewards
of non-sexual intimacy! How life-enhancing and healing are my memories of conversing with a
sweet lady who tried her best to enjoy the company of a man coded 295.3
I don't understand why Jack stopped struggling. What's bugging him? It bothers me, I
admit, that he doesn't open up and confide in me. I'm hurt and angry that even after so many years,
so many shared joys and tribulations, there are still mysteries and secrets in our relationship.
Except for my awkwardness about revealing fantasized literary projects, I don't hide anything from
him. He even knows the details of my passion for Marlene.
In the winter, I search and search for him on Parkdale's snow-covered benches and
newspaper-littered porches. He has lost, I dread, his lust for women and life; sprawled on a
sidewalk, he may be freezing. When I do find my buddy, I pry his mouth open wide, then help him
to sips of vodka from a chrome-coated mickey I bought at a garage sale, and which I use only on
Swiss-style rescue missions. After he comes to, from behind I slide my arms under his armpits, and
as his bare elbows protrude from his threadbare coat, I raise him to his feet.
"You can do it, baby, you can do it!" That's the pep talk I give my old friend, as step by step
we struggle through the snow and ice toward the nearest subway station.
Once at home, I help him out of his coat and into his bed. I set a kettle of water to boil, then
take off his disintegrating grey shoes. His pink heels and pallid toes shine through the huge holes in
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his socks; I swab his dirty toes and heels with Vaseline to prevent frostbite. After all he has done
for me, especially the literary passions he inspired over decades, my fussing over his well-being is
just a drop in the bucket. Hug for hug, kiss for kiss, kind words for kind words, remember?
I concede: the slightest insecurity or suspicion is enough to overpower my reasoning and
common-sense; letting go of my upsets and fears is a prolonged, gruelling process. But once I feel
attached to friends, or to helpful figures like Peter Bradley and Mrs. Palmer, I'm as loyal as a
Doberman Pinscher.
Fifteen hours a week I make a few loonies under the table. It's an easy way to supplement
my meagre income and to fit into a corrupt world dominated by bankers, bureaucrats, and powerhungry lawyers turned politicians. The extra work still leaves me plenty of time to work on my
essay on bioanalysis and other projects. But on account of my character -- some would say my
biology -- my days are regimented. Mornings, I compare paragraphs from the Star with the stuff in
the Globe, since, deep down, I don't trust either. (Media people are just as corrupt and insincere as
bosses; they might be trusted only twelve years after they barfed their last words.) When I'm not
rewriting a paragraph, I patrol the city parks in search of Jack, or watch subtitled movies. From
outside shopwindows I spy on fine book stores; like Moses, I'll never set my feet inside the
Promised Land -- pleasurably reading books from cover to cover.
One night, months ago, Jack came home roaring drunk. Ear-piercing loud, he yakety-
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yakked down the hall with Elaine King, a never-married woman about forty with black-painted
toenails, bony legs so closely shaved and creamed they glimmer. From the empty packages I find in
our shared bathroom upstairs, it's obvious she dyes her hair blond. She has never been a Nine
Ninety-Nine bird and, unlike most Parkdale chicks and guys, doesn't live off welfare cheques, but
works as a cashier at a nearby Loblaws. I've often wondered why an unmedicated person chose to
rent a room in our bleak, decrepit house. Of course, I haven't asked her. I'm afraid she might ask
me personal questions back. Just the thought of being interrogated by a woman of my age, a
potential sex partner, makes my blood freeze.
"You betcha," I overheard Jack holler. "He's forty-six, but still a virgin."
"Really?" Elaine guffawed. "Scared of hookers? Saving himself for true love?"
The roots of my hair exploded. "Shame" and "mortification" are too mild to describe my
anguish. How could my best friend be so cruel? Why tell that fake blonde about the most
embarrassing flaw in my biography?
A few evenings later, knocks on my door interrupted my analysis of the book of Samuel.
Of all Biblical stories, I scrutinize King David's the closest, study them back and forth for possible
signs and omens. Both Jews and Christians believe that the anointed -- whether He has already
arrived or not -- descends from Jesse's son. Interpreting these stories in depth is, in my opinion, the
key to understanding Judaism and Christianity, myself and Mrs. Palmer, diversity and unity. (But
deep down, I feel so intimidated by this book that overshadows most other writings that I ask
myself, Am I even entitled to an opinion? Still, I can't resist throwing my two-cents worth into the
wondrous cauldron of interpretations and speculations.)
Miffed at being disturbed, I strode to the door, and opened it. In pink slippers, bare ankles,
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socks, and white flowing pants stood Elaine.
"How about a decaf, Dave?" she asked.
Decaf? What was that? Glue kids sniff? Something Parkdale derelicts "shoot up"?
"Mmh, mmh," I mumbled, curious and excited by the invitation.
She stepped into the
corridor and wiggled her skinny butt toward her room. Despite my fears of becoming trapped in
her web, I followed. Her freshly died hair bounced up and down over her shoulders, shining even
more than usual. Aroused, breathless, and more awkward than I've ever felt in my life, I feared
losing altitude, falling flat on my nose. She'd tell Jack and the rest of the world.
Once inside her room Elaine motioned toward her only chair. "Sit down, Dave."
I perched on the edge; she sat on her bed, knees far apart, more shamelessly inviting than
Brenda's in the bad old days of Nine Ninety-Nine.
She chuckled.
I glanced at her face. What the devil was so funny? Me?
"Is it true?" she asked.
"What?" I fired.
"That you," she giggled again, "have...no...experience with women?"
I must have blushed. "No," I said after a very long while. "I've had quite a few women in
my life. Two of them died on me. One, I kicked out. The rest are still alive. Gun molls."
"Kicked out?" She smiled, strained. "Gun molls? What are you talking about?"
My voice rose. "I got angry at the one I kicked out."
"Why?"
"Too many words. She fussed too much over words."
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"Mmh," said Elaine, and we fell silent. She moved over about a foot. "Why don't you sit
here next to me, Dave?"
Trembling, I perched on her bed, hoping that my awkwardness and virginity would vanish
like mist at sunrise. My forehead felt hot. What would be her next step?
She wasted no time. With one hand she fondled my inner thighs. My heart pounded as
never before; I was perspiring. Was I losing altitude? Would I roll from her bed onto the floor?
Would all Parkdale hear the tale about Dave The Virgin who couldn't get it up, not even when a
woman offered her affection -- or services -- free of charge? Even in my sleep I would blush.
I stared at my running shoes and her pink slippers. I felt her unzip my pants. With thumb
and forefinger she rubbed my little one back and forth, more forceful than Brenda or I ever did. (In
my love life with Marlene, I use a lot of Vaseline; what would I do if it ever got sore down there?
Tell a doctor? How embarrassing!)
After I got used to her rough strokes, Elaine's massage felt
better and better, even pleasurable. My damned thing, however, remained as creamy as bagels'
dough. "Give her a helping hand," I told myself and pictured Michal, the daughter of Saul.
Lavishly anointed with olive oil, her black hair, lips, thick thighs, pubic hair, and labia glistened.
Obtaining no hard results, I called to mind big-bosomed Abigail, Nabal's wife. She lay on her back,
legs splayed wide, her kinky pubic hair almost concealing her puny vagina. My member was still
not moving. I visualized Ahinoam of Jezreel with her top off, squeezing her tawny, pencil-thick
nipples, winking at me time and again. My penis was still flaccid. From elongated toes to raven
hair I imagined swarthy, shapely Bathsheba bathing on a roof, naked, majestic. In desperation, I
conjured Abishag a Shunammite palming her breasts, stretching her gazelle-long legs, then setting
the palms of her feet flat on the royal bed.
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Despite my vivid daydreams, my member gave off no signs of passion. Angry with myself,
but still hopeful, I added to my scripts King David himself, panting and moaning, as one by one he
entered three of his wives with his red-hot, steel-hard, dagger-long member. I spared only Abishag
a Shunammite, a virgin, from the orgy of penetrations and, at the end of his passionate thrusts, King
David's pink penis squirting porridge-thick seed onto his wive's bellies.
Nothing doing. My little one didn't rise at all.
Anxious, as an aspiring fiction writer who capitalizes on sensual depictions, I started a
fantasy. I imagined firm pomegranate-shaped breasts and, below a tight belly with a tiny navel,
contemporary Marlene-style legs. I threw in the scents of myrrh and frankincense. Frantic, I added
flavours of Turkish delight with walnuts.
Still, my button remained miserably soft, an
embarrassingly cool noodle. One by one my visions, scents, and tastes vanished. I panicked. I
could feel myself losing altitude, getting dizzy.
Elaine stopped stroking. "What's the matter, Dave? I'm not good enough for you?"
I locked my eyes to stop blinding blasts of shame from scorching me within and without.
"Dave," I heard her come to her feet. "Tomorrow I've a long day. I'm going to bed now.
Good night."
I opened my eyes and stood up. Twice I tried to zip up my pants, but my hands shook; I
failed. Determined not to apologize for anything, I trudged to the door, my fly wide open.
Like my father I mumbled, "Vooss kan ich tee'en?" At forty-six, what could I do?
But deep in my heart, I wanted to be a man, not a wanker, a kid. I would have been happy
to lose my virginity, the most embarrassing symbol of my inadequacy, even to a mid-life bimbo like
Elaine. I wished I could entrust my body to a woman so I could enter her and come inside. Perhaps
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my partner would roll her head left and right, moan and yell the way my teary Marlene screams
when the curtain falls at the end of our love scenes.
Oh fantasies, oh dreams of a lonely wolf! How pitiful to realize that only Mom and Dad
ever told me they loved me!
These days I drag myself through the streets of Parkdale and Toronto, shoulders grazing the
shop windows as a cat's tail brushes walls. How long can a man masturbate and sleep alone on a
twin bed? Endlessly, I'm afraid. But I'd rather partake in the stirrings of imagined relationships
than live as painfully isolated as a wounded cougar. I prefer a make-believe partner to sharing my
life with tormenting voices. At night, I don't pine for three minutes of pleasurable friction crowned
by a relieving squirt, but long to commune with Marlene. I imagine intimacies, like the shape and
colour of her underwear, the softness of her pubic hair, the taste of her saliva. Only when I fondle
her nooks and crannies do I rise above the commands and titterings I hear in the dark.
But irrigating sheets with my seed is not the ending I look forward to for my life story. At
heart I am not a vitriolic polemicist, but, like my father, a family man. In the Lifestyle section of
The Star I've read many times about middle-class life. I remember my father puttering around the
house on Sundays. The truth is that I too would love to build miniature furniture for my two
daughters' doll house, or play ball in the street with my two sons. Yes, four children, a lot of work
for two working parents. I would, of course, share all household chores and help my wife to raise
our kids. Every day I would tell each of them, "I love you." But instead of sweeping the driveway
of a little house and watering my beds of flowers, I live in a room crowded with Bibles,
dictionaries, thesauruses, and the Encyclopedia Britannica piled under my bed and along the walls.
Walking from my desk to the door is like squeezing through World War I trenches. My only
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offspring are essays abounding with spite and sarcasm that, except for my editor and a few friends,
no one ever reads.
It is devastating to acknowledge that my forty-year-old dream of becoming a journalist will
never materialize. My biological fate and life in the cuckoo's nest have twisted me into a whining
mosquito that keeps even those hiding under gauzy nets from falling asleep. Poor normals! How
hard they strive to forget what I, one of Parkdale's many prophets, and a virgin to boot -- preach:
"Your children and grandchildren live off street drugs; they barely survive in violent societies and
polluted environments!"
Occasionally the mosquito bites, but it leaves no permanent marks on the skin; it is, I'm
afraid, almost harmless.
For decades I've waged wars with my voices and power-hungry swines. In my free time I
ogled ankles, legs, and thighs. Never fingered, let alone entered, a flesh and blood vagina. What a
great lover the world has lost!
Biology is fate. Vooss kan ich tee'en?
Brenda and Bill Owen live in an about-to-collapse red-brick house just around the corner.
They share all expenses and can afford to rent a puny, one-bedroom flat with an unfinished pine
dining table and so minuscule a kitchen that two of the four odd chairs touch the cracked formica
counter.
On Sunday afternoons, Jack, Brenda, Bill, and I get together for dinner. I wish our
communal meals were on Friday evenings, the Sabbath, but I compromise. I don't want to impose
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on my Christian friends. Anyhow, I work late quite a few Fridays.
Sunday mornings I polish the candle holders I inherited from my mother. I do it just the
way I remember her doing it on Fridays: first I scrub them with a clean cotton cloth -- an old shirt
sleeve from the Goodwill store -- then with my forefinger I rub on a liberal layer of Silvo. Once the
liquid has caked, with another piece of white cloth I burnish the metal to a sheen.
About four-thirty, Jack and I walk over to our friends' place. In addition to the glistening
candle holders, I bring along a pound of hamburger and a bottle of no-frills Cola -- not to give Jack
any ideas that we approve of sweet wine or moonshine. Jack is in charge of the salad: when he has
not spent all his money on booze, he brings along a two-day old stalk of celery and a couple of
heads of wilted lettuce. With all the alcohol he guzzles, he has little money left for fresh produce.
His best friends never confront him, or tell him how to straighten out his life, or complain when
there is no salad. Why kick him in the teeth when he is down?
Brenda, who wears only faded jeans and plaid shirts since she joined a women's group at a
nearby church, boils the pasta and cooks the meat sauce. The sauce is mostly water and tomato
paste; the four of us live primarily off our welfare cheques and can hardly afford a pound of
hamburger a week.
In the vaporized dining-room-kitchen, Bill sets the table, slices the day-old bread, and neatly
folds paper towels into triangular napkins. If there is salad, Jack tosses it in a white plastic bowl. I
light the candles I'd stuck in the glittering holders, then blow them out.
When Brenda announces we're ready to eat, the four of us stand behind our chairs. I cover
my head with a skullcap and light the candles' black wicks. The candle holders and their sweet,
humble light cast silver and gold onto the cracked, peeling walls; the room basks in the sweet magic
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of a millenarian ritual.
I raise my voice. "Blessed are You, maker of the universe, that kindly recommended that
we light candles on festive occasions." I never refer to Him as "King of the Universe" or "King of
the Kings of Kings." My unremitting allergy to people in power renders my eyes rheumy and my
nose runny at the mere thought of concrete representations of Him. Also, when the voices don't
have me in their clutches, even He doesn't tell me what to do, only offers suggestions.
"Amen," say the three of them.
Brenda motions us to sit down. She hangs her head and crosses her fingers. Mostly to
herself she whispers, "Our father...that art in Heaven..." She strains her eyebrows, but in a moment
remembers the rest. "Give us this day...yes...yes...our daily bread," she says in a trailing voice. She
pauses, struggling with the blanks that, on and off, muddle her thought processes. "For yours is the
kingdom...and...and...the power, and...the glory, forever."
"Amen!" her three men say in unison.
"Let's start, guys," says Brenda. First, she ladles a hefty portion of pasta onto Jack's plate.
Poor Jack! Since he left Nine Ninety-Nine, he has never been the same. Can't be counted on in
new battles. Is there anything in his life except for booze and soap operas -- in that order? Though
I never view myself as an example for my friends, I have my writing, my car wash, my newspapers,
foreign films, and, above all, my Bible studies to keep me meaningfully occupied. Brenda and Bill
have not only a pad to keep them together; these days they are born-again Christians, though, like
me, they care little about organized religions or churches. They pray a lot at home, attend church
only on holidays, take long walks every day.
"Good sauce, Brenda," says Jack.
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"Yep," Bill and I follow up.
The conversation dies down. Even though fond of each other, we madmen utter a word a
minute, perhaps even less. Only Peter Bradley kept us talking -- "interacting", he called it -- with
one another in the Thursday group.
Our Sunday meals are much different from the dinner parties in European movies. Brenda,
Bill, Jack, and I don't entertain one another with tales of kids that refuse to grow up; we don't gossip
about middle-aged friends who dumped their arthritic, wrinkled wives for bimbos whose boobs
point in the right direction. We never chat about the profundities of French literary critics that all
eggheads quote but never read -- except introductory books with pictures. We don't need to
exchange words. Shy and retiring people, we commune mostly through silences; we'd rather listen
than talk. Why chatter like chimps about what's brewing behind our eyeballs? What's the point of
wasting breath on small talk? We don't bore our friends with detailed accounts of adventurous
travels abroad. The sacred names of trendy restaurants don't impress us, and we don't hoard
information about tax loopholes. Gentle dentists? Shrewd shysters? Even if we could afford such
services, we wouldn't trust professionals in cahoots with porcine power-grabbers.
When Brenda is through eating, she springs up from her chair and, singing, she leans over
the kitchen sink to rinse her plate. One of the non-negotiable rules she learned in her women's
group is that since she cooked the meal, it's up to the guys to wash the dishes, scrub the pots and
counters, sweep and mop the floor. No doubt in my mind who wears the pants in the freezing-inthe-winter, blistering-in-the-summer, Brenda-and-Bill residence.
While three men work their tails off as in the days of the poker chips program, Brenda sits
on the beat-up sofa in her tiny living room and watches television. Chores done, we guys join her
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and watch our favourite shows -- wordless, of course.
Reckoning
Standing up and eyes level, I address You, God, authority over all authorities, and you faulty
fluids between my brain cells, and you shrinks, phuds, gun molls, and Goliaths.
Listen!
You tried to control me, even locked me up most of my life. You shot Haldol up my
buttock and wrapped me in tight ice-packs. When I stood up for my rights, you certified me as
crazy or corralled me in solitary cells. You turned a potential journalist into a writer of get-well
cards.
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But there's one thing you never managed: you couldn't stop me from what I felt was the
right, honourable thing to do.
I know. I raged more than most madmen, but, still, I wrote Mrs. Palmer one card a week.
And I enjoyed -- yes, enjoyed -- doing the right, honourable thing!
Hear me? I enjoyed every bit of it, just as I enjoy shlepping baby Jack all over town.
Listen, all authorities within and without!
You took away my pencils and writing pads, whenever you insisted they upset me too
much. But nothing under the sun can stop me from writing, and no Pharaohs or czars can stop me
from wriggling my toes.
Whenever you tied me to bedposts I wriggled my toes to prove no one could control me.
When you zapped electricity into my skull, the instant I came to not ten, but a hundred times I
yelled, "Fuck all tyrants!"
I wanted, above all, to be myself, an individual, pure and simple, not a "patient" or a "basket
case". Daily, sneers and loud bells and whistles disorganized my ideas, cut off my trains of thought.
Despite my never-ending panic, I yearned to live as a whole person, to affirm that whatever
happened outside my skin was not me, but something else, or somebody else.
It's easier to tell what an individual is not, than to come up with clear-cut definitions. Being
a person meant not to be locked up, not to have power-crazy shrinks adjust my mind with colourful
chemicals like a set of wheels in need of monthly alignments.
I wished to be taken seriously, not patronized or pitied as the editor of a quarterly with no
subscribers. Undoubtedly, I was vain. But I wanted to be listened with respect: I had thought out of
all the ramifications of what I'd put on paper.
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No, I'm no "grapho-maniac" who writes volumes, whose sentimental pieces embarrass
others. I wrote only what my blood and guts coerced me to write. My prose may not be pretty:
after all, I am a Bible-lover, and stingy with adornments. But as I write, my chest aches, and tears
fill my eyes.
It's very hard to live with Dave, I'm told. I've kicked Goliaths and gun molls in the groin, bit
their necks, spat at all faces that ordered me to swallow pills.
The "normal" world becomes more and more irrational, as it rushes into the age of trivial
information. I'm no longer a young man. One by one, my rages are burning out; seldom does my
aging blood boil these days. Though pushing fifty, I still ache to make my own mistakes rather than
hear people whine, "Dave, you're making others' life difficult."
How in God's name does my reading the prophets disturb the peace? Whom do my essays
and memoirs threaten? What harm do my voices do, except to myself?
Despite all my problems, four times a year I published the Ward M Quarterly! Certainly I
dreamt feverishly of recognition, prizes, and gold medals, but I also craved to be heard.
I know I'm incurably mad. But as a writer and a spiritual descendant of Amos and Isaiah, I
will never smile at social injustice, nor turn a blind eye to the corruption and arrogance of the
swines in power.
You God, maker of the universe, have created us human beings to know we'll die one day.
We are, therefore, all equal. Do I need to remind You how our flesh and blood harbour Satan right
beneath our skins?
In Your wisdom You have set the Earth so that no one has the right to tell
others what to do, how to talk, what to write. But isn't it obvious that to enjoy our cherished, inborn
freedom we must acknowledge the angel of Evil lurking inside every woman, man, and child?
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Listen, God and Satan!
Unlike Job, the well-known complainer and victim, Dave Hoffnung is not a perfect and
upright man. As a matter of fact, as a young man too many times he tried to kill himself. But
despite his chemically-flawed brain and countless enemies, he never cursed the day he was born.
Chin up and dry-eyed, these days he agrees to live his miserable life over again, even including
twenty-six years at Nine Ninety-Nine!