The Eden Express (27 page)

The funniest mistake I made was that I figured grass would help in a pinch. So when I felt myself losing ground I figured I could just do lots of dope and be fine. I remembered hearing that grass had once been used fairly extensively in mental hospitals.

One of the problems was believing that my problem had anything to do with these pedestrian things. There was such poetry in the disease, it felt only right that there be poetry in the cure—which I guess is why so many shrinks go so far afield and have so little clinical success with schizophrenia.

I could think up lots of poetic explanations for why I went nuts: the state of the world, childhood experiences, my parents breaking up, my kinky relationship with Virginia. Any one of a dozen or more explanations made perfect sense, but my relationship with Virginia was the only one within my sphere of influence, and even there understanding why I had gone nuts, if that was indeed it, didn’t give me many clues about what I should do next. Merely understanding these things obviously wouldn’t help. I had understood them all very clearly for years.

That there were so many reasonable poetic explanations for my cracking up weakened them all. While I was still several months away from a truly reasonable helpful explanation, I began having serious doubts that explanations like the above had much to do with my sanity.

Whatever part Virginia had or hadn’t played in driving me crazy, there was no denying that I needed her desperately then. She could have crushed me like a flea. I hated myself for needing the things I needed but there was no way around it. It was all unspoken but she knew that I knew that she knew and so on that we were both walking on eggs.

Please, Virge. I don’t want to be this way. I’d rather it was heroin, I swear. What I need I have no right to ask for. I don’t love you now. I’m too scared to love anything. Maybe I’ve never loved anything, but for a while—maybe just a few days will do the trick, I’ll try to keep it small—I need your love completely and utterly.

Maybe it’s not even love. Maybe it’s a lie I need, like how I’ve lied to you. I know you never asked me to and it was a fucked-up thing to do and it was bad for both of us, but I made you very sure of me and gave you my unconditional commitment. It wasn’t for romantic reasons. It was more just a dumb experiment, but it’s that sort of half-lie I need now.

Please, Virge, I need a moratorium on reality. Play Doris Day to my Rock Hudson. Maybe we can work out some real love later, but for now the work has got to be curing my addiction. It’s the only hope for either of us to get out of this mess at all intact. I need your blessing, Virge. Without it I can neither love you nor let you go. We’ll be stuck with my hellish needing forever.

 

After I had been back at the farm a few days, my resolve to just forget about the whole thing, never terribly strong, crumbled completely. I wanted to fit all the pieces together. It started as a very reasonable attempt to figure out what had happened so that I could avoid its happening again. As I began to fit things together it became more and more apparent to me that there was very little, if anything, delusional about the things I had thought or inappropriate about my behavior.
My focus might have been a little off here and there, but basically I had been right on. There was too much confirmation from too many different sources that something very momentous had happened and that I had responded at least appropriately and very possibly heroically.

The more I thought about it, the more transparent it became. I was slightly embarrassed that they had managed to fool me as well as they had. What a bunch of transparent, blundering incompetents.

Hollywood Hospital, Fifth Avenue, New Westminster, Dale and McNice—now really.

I was convinced that the crisis was over and the good guys had won, but I wished they had done a better job of fooling me. I was resolved to live my long, peaceful, healthy, normal life at the farm no matter what.

I quickly lost all sense of embarrassment about having been locked up in a nut house. In fact I was rather proud of it. Even when I stuck to what I and everyone else knew for sure had happened, the unwritten codes of myself, my friends, all good radicals and liberals everywhere, gave the bare facts a certain amount of built-in grandiosity as standard equipment. That I had somehow saved the world was optional frill.

The humiliations and restrictions I had suffered made blacks, women, and homosexuals look like fat-cats basking in the good graces of the powers that be. There was nothing subtle about what had been done to me. I didn’t need any consciousness-raising meeting to find out that my situation had not been ideal. Admittedly my oppression and suffering hadn’t been long-term, but if blacks could identify with and be outraged by what the slaves went through, I could certainly identify with all inmates of mental institutions, past, present and future.

I was no longer a male wasp heterosexual of upper-middle-class origin with good intentions. I was a sufferer of the worst humiliations
and degradations afforded by the evil no-good-nik oppressive poison-spewing earth-defiling beauty-raping pigs. I had credentials.

I probably used this angle on my having been nuts more than I really believed it. I was still too confused about the whole thing to really believe anything and too shaky to not use anything that came to hand.

 

CHESS WITH NICK. I don’t know who initiated it. I may have asked him if he played. Maybe he saw my board and pieces and asked if I wanted a game. Anyway, it didn’t take long before I was sorry as hell about it.

When we sat down and set up the pieces, there was a look in his eyes like there was something understood between us. I tried to shrug it off.

My chess board was made by my grandfather, Doc. Inscribed in Gothic script were the messages “I do warn you well” on one side and “It is no child’s play” on the other. Ominous, ominous, ominous.

The hallucinations and fantasies had had heavy chess content. My father had taught me how to play when I was four. In an informal way I had been chess champ nearly everywhere I had ever been. One or two people I knew could play me about even, but I never ran into anyone who could beat me consistently, though I doubtless would have if I hadn’t so conscientiously avoided formal competition.

I lost the first game. I thought I had him a few times, but each time I felt his wrath building and was afraid that if I won something dreadful would happen. I didn’t get furious. I didn’t cry. I worried that maybe several thousand people were struck down by plague for every pawn I lost, but I didn’t let it show.

There was a second game. I felt much looser. I thought I could loosen up and maybe learn something about chess from him. Winning seemed to make him a lot more relaxed. Since he had won one game, there was no way he could feel humiliated or hurt if I won the second. I paid no attention to him. Just concentrating on the pieces like he wasn’t there. Not letting his face influence my moves. I won.

After winning I looked up. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. He won one, I won one. How could anybody feel bad about that? But he was furious, glowing red. He was just able to talk—very tersely, as his eyes bored into my brain. “Of course we have to play a third.” I tried to beg off but there was no way.

The third game was the worst. My brain was all haywire. The game took forever. I found excuses to go to the fire and get it to tell me what move to make. I didn’t trust myself, didn’t want the burden of whatever was on this game. He had his helpers too. It didn’t take long to see that.

The way he played chess certainly didn’t help my impression that he wasn’t on the level. That this should be the first person I met outside of the hospital was weird. Chess players like him don’t just show up.

I wanted out. Every time I made a good move I thought he was going to throw the board at me. This is no fun, this is no fun, this is no fun. And then to mock me, every once in a while he would look up at me with a cruel smile and say, “Fun, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” I mumbled. Is he going to kill me if I beat him? Or is he going to get to kill me or win my soul or the souls of those I love if I lose? I wish someone would explain these things to me.

It was something my father had always thought would please me. A chance to play a real master. Somehow he had resurrected Paul Morphy and that was who I was playing. Morphy for morphine, more fiend. Morphy because Morphy ended up in a nut house. Morphy because he was my favorite chess player. “Happy birthday, Mark. Paul Morphy.”

“Pretty neat, Pop, but I don’t think he likes me much.”

I talked to Nick about some of the stuff I knew about Morphy. But Nick’s face, per usual, wasn’t giving anything away.

How could I tell the others what was going down? This guy Paul wasn’t on the level. This cat was bad news, like the worst, like awful, awful, awful, like please, please, please. Bustle, bustle, smoke dope and
giggle while the fate of the world is going down on a chess board in your own kitchen. And you don’t even see. Helppppppppppppp!

This was to teach me a lesson. “I do warn you well, it is no child’s play.” Was I supposed to learn to hate chess because it was a competitive, violent, no-goodnik, ugly thing? Virginia was looking at me oddly from time to time. This might be her idea of just what the doctor ordered for Mark. Teach me to think I’m so fucking smart.

Mostly I just tried to play as if he weren’t a ringer, as if it were just a friendly game. Like offering to let him take moves back, playing like there was nothing at stake. He wouldn’t take any moves back and his look let me know that if I blew it, there would be no mercy. Mostly I just wanted out, but I have to admit I wanted to show Virginia and Nick and whatever angels happened to be watching that I was no small-time chess player myself. I could almost hear the anti-Mark team gnashing their teeth, amazed again at how they had underestimated little old Mark again.

“Fun, isn’t it?” Nick said again. His face twisted. Red bones showing. All he needed was horns.

I could barely see where the pieces were. I kept slipping away and coming back to a game that looked completely different from before. He never stopped looking at me, even when he was moving. Inexorable, inexorable.

“Your game is hopeless. Concede.”

“What?” I had been off in a fog. He repeated what he had said.

I looked at the board. It kept blurring and twisting.

“It’s a draw,” the voices said. “You can keep him in perpetual check.”

I summoned all my strength to make my words behave better than the chess pieces.

“It’s a draw,” I echoed. “I can keep you in perpetual check.”

“What?” he said, as if this were a new rule I had just made up. I couldn’t argue the point, I just wasn’t up to it.

“Check,” I said. He moved. “Check.” He moved again. “Check.” He moved again, bringing about the same position. “Check.” I started the interminable round again, hoping he’d get the point.

“You can’t do that,” he almost whined. “As soon as you stop checking me you’re mated, the game is over.”

“I have no intention of not checking you,” I stammered thickly. His rage was rising. He was going to expose me. He was going to tell about how the voices from the fire and wind had told me my moves.

“So we can both live to play another day,” I said incoherently. “A draw. Nice game, Nick. Hope we do it again.” I fled upstairs to bed.

 

Among amateurs, most “touch-move” games are lost on stupid blunders. The game becomes pointless very early: neither player learns anything. I’m capable of playing a good game of touch-move, but I have a hard time enjoying it. I beat players I should lose to and lose to players I should beat. Either way, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Touch-move fans argue with equal fervor that being able to take moves back ruins the game. It’s bad preparation for tournament play, encourages sloppiness. Maybe they’re right. Maybe we should be made to face the consequences of our blunders. Cold hard world and all.

Life is a lot more like touch-move than friendly chess, but maybe that’s because there are so many goddamned touch-move players around.

What I hope is true is that if we go about it the right way, we can take back a lot more than we think we can. If we could all make an effort to let anyone take back anything, if it’s in our power to let them take back instead of jumping so greedily at mistakes, we might be able to make life much more pleasant. We might even be able to find a way to go backward in time and patch up what now look like irrevocable blunders. Letting friends take back chess moves would be as good a way to start as any.