Edie (55 page)

We made love from eight in the evening until seven in the morning with ecstatic climax after climax, just going insane with it, until he realized it was seven and he had to get back to his office to open it at eight-thirty.

He gave me a shot to calm me down, and because I couldn’t come down, I took about fourteen Placidyls. On the way back something very strange happened. I didn’t realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, “l wish I was dead” . . . the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I’d just gone through were really so alien. I didn’t even know the man . . .it had been a one-night jag . . . he was married and had children . . . and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone.

He dropped me off at the apartment where I was staying with the runaway patient. I had a little Bloody Mary when I got there, and dropped a few more Placidyls. With my tolerance, nothing should have happened, but I suddenly went into a coma. My eyes rolled back in my head.

It was lucky . . . I had called an aide, Jimmy, at the hospital—he had been a good friend—I had called him anonymously and asked him to come and visit us. He happened to turn up just as I went into the coma. He and the heroin addict tried to wake me up. They slapped me
and pumped my chest and they put me in a bathtub full of really cold water. Jimmy began to call hospitals
—
not psychiatric but medical
—
and one of them actually told them to let me sleep it off.

But Jimmy just flipped. He knew I was dying, and he was right. He called Lenox HI’ll Hospital, and the police finally came. Jimmy and the heroin addict were taken into custody, and I was rushed to the hospital. I was actually declared dead. My mother was called . . . and then
BAM
!
started breathing again.

I was pretty shaken up by what happened because I didn’t understand how I could have almost gone out on just fifteen Placidyls when I used to live on thirty-five three-grain Tuinals a day, plus alcohol.

They released Jimmy and the junkie, but of course I was stI’ll in the trap. I thought I was fine and that I could leave. But a psychiatrist came to interview me and I was put in the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital
—
committed on the grounds of unintentional, unconscious suicide. It was a pretty devastating experience. They put me on eight hundred milligrams of Thorazine four times a day plus six hundred milligrams at bedtime
—
an ugly-tasting liquid, but it took quick effect and you couldn’t hide the pills or spit them out later. I had all kinds of bad reactions from it
—
I’d get bad tremors and all itchy and wormy. I said I wasn’t going to take the stuff any more, no matter what, so they finally took me off it one day. I had a seizure, vomited all over the floor, and I couldn’t get up and walk straight. I was going through withdrawal from those tremendous dosages of Thorazine, but they accused me of importing drugs and taking them there in the hospital. My doctor was young . . . a resident . . . and I just told him, “You think I’ve taken drugs. There’s no point in even reasoning with you. FU just go to some other hospital.” I expected to go to some plush, tolerable hospital, but I was not accepted in any private hospital with the record they gave me. They committed me to Manhattan State on Ward’s Island, in the middle of the East River, next to the prison.

It was one of the most unpleasant experiences I”ve ever been through. Really terrifying. I lived in a big dormitory on a ward with about sixty to eighty women. We did all the mopping, cleaning, making beds, scrubbing toilets. And the people there were just
so
awful. Really pathetic. Some of them were mean. The staff completely ignored you except to administer medication. I thought it was never going to end.

In Manhattan State, even in there, there were pushers. One girl who lived in a smaller dormitory
—
there were two with about ten beds in them
—
was pushing speed and heroin. And because Td been warned
that if ever you were caught using drugs in a state hospital you’d be criminally punished, I didn’t touch any drugs during the three months I was there.

SUSAN WRIGHT BUBDEN
 Her psychiatrist was a foreigner I could hardly understand and who didn’t understand her at all. Edie and I always met in the reception room. The first time I went there to see her she seemed very freaked, at loose ends, as if they weren’t doing her any good at all. But the next time she seemed totally aglow; I couldn’t believe how she could look so beautiful in that horrible place. She looked like she’d spent all day dressing and getting made up, and she just sort of floated in . . . as if she was receiving you at her grand estate. But I heard that by the time she left Manhattan State she could hardly function because of all the medication she was given.

HUDDLEK BISBY
 I can remember going to visit Edie in the Manhattan State Nuthouse. I was’ nuts myself at the time. I had come to New York after spending a week in the desert on . . . I forget what was the name for the Red Hot Psychedelic of that moment. I think it was called MDA, or DMZ, or DDP. Being an acid casualty myself, I naturally can’t remember which one it was, but it was a strong one, and somebody gave me fifty of them. it was like melting into the desert. Living in a state of complete and total hallucination. I’ve only driven a car in my adult life maybe three times and that was one of those times. I drove it because I couldn’t see anything. I figured, It’s safe. we’re driving in a neon tunnel, no problem.” I survived.

I flew back to New York on an airplane out of my mind. Totally out to lunch. I was singing. Speaking in rhyme. Dancing. Dancing wherever I would go.
Very far out
.

I got off the plane. I went right to Susie Burden’s house and there’s this friend of Edie’s, Casey the Crip. He’s got chrome-plated aluminum crutches. He’s got shrunken legs and an Alpine Sunbeam convertible he drives by using auxiliary mechanisms. He drove us out to this loony bin where Edie was. On the way I took two more pills.

We got inside the hospital (me and Susie and the Crip) by saying we were Sedgwicks, part of the family. They let us in. You give the names, they lead you through doors and doors and doors. Fantastic place. Everybody looked very poor, extremely retarded, and mostly middle-aged. Grown-up fat ladies in blue-gray hospital outfits. Edie was surrounded by these Fat Black Welfare Pussycats, drooling and pissing in their chairs. Very public.

Finally we were able to sit down with her at this long table with some soft drinks we’d brought up from the machines. Seven-up.

By this time I was so wrapped up in Edie that I began to forget where we were. I was looking at her, and she at me, and we started to “Go Up.”

To “Go Up” is a time on drugs when you expand in size, become very
large
in context to the size of whatever other loonies are sitting around.

We started to do this, but it was upsetting because she began to look at me as if she was saying, “How the fuck do you qualify to be walking free on the outside while I’m in here? You’re no more or less crazy than I am!” I agreed completely. I agreed just in toto.

It freaked me out. All I remember is that when we left, on the way out, we discovered the controls to the public-address system of the hospital (in a little unattended broom-closet of a room). We went in and I tuned the dials to a rock station . . . Up
Full Volume I
As we ran out of the hospital, with our chauffeur in tow on his chrome-plated crutches, we could hear all the inmates freaking out because of the music being blasted at them. The whole hospital went nuts for a few minutes.

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 My mother finally took Edle out of Manhattan State Hospital and brought her back to the ranch in the late fall of 1968. She couldn’t walk. She’d just fall over . . . like she had no motor control left at all. The doctor did a dye test of some sort and it showed the blood wasn’t reaching certain parts of the brain; they said that in the X-ray pictures it looked like a Swiss cheese. She couldn’t talk I “kk . . . kk . . . ggg . . . ddd . . . wowo . . . well, uh, well, no, well . . . sa-ay.” It was really strange, man,
awful.
Once in a while three or four words would come out in a rush. Slowly she began to come back. She knew she could do it, but she needed people to have faith in her. I always believed she would make it. I’d say, “Edie, goddam it, get your head together. Man, you have the head to do it. Let it come out.” She’d say, “I . . . I . . . I . . . know . . . know . . . know . . . I . . . I . . . can . . . but it’s ha . . . ha . . . ha . . . hard.”

She was working at it: she apparently reworked or rebuilt other parts of her brain. Every day it would be a little better. You could see how desperate it was when you looked into her eyes and you could see how hard she was trying to reach you. She couldn’t even move her arms right to
indicate
what she wanted to tell you. She rarely left the house. Inside she was grabbing something to keep from falling over. When it was dinnertime, she’d wobble in and wobble out and fall down a lot. My mother was uptight about it, trying to be cool about it, saying that Edie would get well.

It was quite a while before Edie was considered well enough to get out on her own and live in town. She ended up in Isla Vista, which is where the street people hung out near-the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. I heard she was much better. She’d been away from the ranch for a few weeks when I ran into her on the street. She yelled out, “Jonathan!” I turned around and there was Edie running toward me. We hugged on the street. I was going into the coffee shop, Borsodi’s. She was wearing sandals that barely stayed on, and her blue jeans were hanging down almost below her butt. She was wearing a see-through T-shirt and a purse slung over her shoulder, looking very disheveled.

We went into Borsodi’s and talked. I had a lot of things to tell her I had been through, and we started talking about-flying saucers and extraterrestrial beings that talked to us, and she agreed they talked to her, too.

We talked about California falling into the ocean. Do you know that you can take a submarine
under
California . . . eighty to a hundred and twenty miles straight in under Long Beach in those chasms? So California is going to dunk in there and cause a tidal wave that’ll be a couple of thousand feet tall. The coastal cities wI’ll go. I’d tell these things to Edie and she’d simply say, “Yeah, I know. We shouldn’t tell people about it. I mean,
I
know it, and
you
know it, Jonathan, but don’t talk about it.”

She told me she’d ended up in Bellevue Hospital because she was riding a motorcycle with Bob Dylan and they’d had an accident. I don’t know if this is true. She really loved Bob Dylan. Edie—they didn’t know who she was—got thrown into Bellevue. She told me she was bearing a baby and they made her abort in the hospital because in her condition she shouldn’t give birth to a child. And that killed her. She cried and said, They made me give up my baby . . . and it was the one thing I really loved and lived for.” I don’t know whether that was the truth or not.

One night Edie and I were sitting there. She was drinking coffee to speed herself up some more—God I—when out of the blue she said, “Hey, Jonathan! I think you should make love with me!”

I said, “No, Edie, no. I’m not into that!”

“I really think you should do it, Jonathan.
I’d
like to.” She reminded me of the time when she went to London with Suky and my mother, and I came over from Germany, from the Army; Edie wanted to make love with me, and I didn’t do it then either.

She said, “Everybody always wanted me. My father wanted me. He
tried to make love to me. All the men on the ranch wanted me. Even
you
wanted me, Jonathan.”

I said, “Yeah, I did. For sure.”

So in the coffee shop she kept saying, “I think it’s something you should do. Jonathan, I . . . I really think you ought to make love with me now.”

She was very high on speed. Her head was shaking up and down. “Jonathan, I think we ought to do it now.” I felt maybe we
should
find out what our love was for each other. She was beautiful; I liked her. I knew she’d teach me something . . . but I didn’t do it.

Edie had this other trick of being able to talk your sentences as you said them. . . . Did it blow my mind 11 couldn’t get my words out fast enough. I couldn’t beat her I She had me. Edie was right on, it was a lesson . . . and I wanted to learn it . . . to be in the
now,
like Christ in the Mount Olive speech, and then to be able to go to England and do it and just blow their minds because there they’ve got to feel, and then think, and then talk. With Edie there was no time between feeling and thought. But then finally I disliked it and I got up and left the coffee house. I just didn’t like being read that closely.

JOHN GRABLE
 I was called Mad John from a song on a Donovan album about a guy named Mad John who escapes from an insane asylum and drifts around the countryside and gets girls to buy him breakfast and all these neat things. I’d heard the song and needed a good street name. My name is John and I was a little bit loony, so I thought Mad John sounded fine. Not any more. I haven’t gone under that name for years. I’ve changed totally. I work, I bathe, I have a roof over my head. About all that’s left are the tattoos . . . two big spiders that are on the back of my hands . . . biggest mistake I ever made, since you can’t hide them. The rest of my tattoos I can hide with a long-sleeved shirt, but not the spiders.