Team Wristband 

Escape

Visitor

Sit down Emma.  We don’t have long.  That’s just Ramirez.  He shouts that all the time.  Just like that.  “Give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me!”  What does he want them to give him?  I’ve asked myself the same thing.  It seems to me that they are giving it to him pretty systematically.  Haldol in the hip, one-sided grapples with the lightning-fast Cambodian orderlies, general disgrace and batter, confinement in our bleak little hallway world, where he has to wear marked little socks with no shoes. He’s getting stale air, and a ban on physical contact with any of the women, all of whom are breaking his heart.  I think the guy is pretty much getting it. But Ramirez won’t shut up.  I know it’s a little repetitive, his mantra, but I’ll tell you the truth: I’m beginning to love it.  You have to admit that he has a good baritone.  That voice is the one sure piece of music on the ward.

            Did you bring me anything?  A play.  Great! King Lear.  I would have preferred smut.  No.  Just kidding. A great play.  Smut?  Who says smut?  Am I 70? Porn.  I meant porn.  I would have preferred porn.  But no this is great.  King Lear. Great play.  You laugh.  I love it when you laugh.  This was a good choice, really.  Better than the filthiest smut.  Do you think that I will find redemption in my madness, like the mad king? 

            Maybe I can read this with Ramirez.  I bet he’ll love the bit where they blind the old duke. Ramirez is a revolutionary.  You might have heard: Ramirez and I got into some trouble yesterday.  We’ve been sparring, you know, roughhousing?  You know, to keep busy, feel alive, not go crazy, ha, ha, ok, good point-to not go crazier.  He’s tougher than me as you might have expected, I being the white protestant descendent of slavers, and him being the son of a Mexican janitor and a now dead mother. Yesterday morning he kicked my ass for five rounds.  No, of course not Emma, fighting is not allowed.  We do it carefully when they aren’t looking, and in a few very carefully selected spots that not even the cameras watch.  Anyway it’s good for caged men to fight like that, respectfully to spar, to roughhouse.  I think it makes the chances of anyone actually getting fucked or maimed highly diminished.

            Stop doing that with your hands.  Just listen.  We were sparring in the little alcove that leads into the isolation room.  Just on the other side of that wall, actually. Ramirez kicked my ass five times.  But on the sixth round I had something in me, or he just let his guard down.  I put him on the floor.  I pressed his neck with my knee.  I was scared.  I was scared I was going to hurt him, and I was scared that I was going to win.  I kept pressing him into the shiny tile floor.  He wouldn’t surrender.  I kept pressing.  Finally, thank God, he tapped out.  Just as he was dusting himself off, and I was laughing, both of us getting up, out of breadth, Susanna…She’s the girl down the hall with all the shit in her teeth all the time.  I’m sorry, you’re right.  That isn’t nice.  She’s a beautiful girl!  I just want to give her some dental floss.  I’d show her how to use it if they just let me into her room for a minute. I just want to show her…Ok it’s not important!  She’s the skinny dirty blonde 28-30 with a few freckles and a big smile.  She’s a little like you, but without a shred of oral hygiene or sanity.  Also her hair is a fair bit darker.  Why these cruel jokes about blondes being dumb?  I’m sorry Emma, for the way things are.  Anyway, when Ramirez and I were getting up after round six, Susanna just started screaming.  Totally horrifying screams.   Like a Duchess getting blinded in our play kind of screams.  But worse.  She’s pure soprano.  Her screams were bad enough to mobilize the Cambodian cousins.  Yeah I do know they’re Cambodian.  Doesn’t matter.  No, I don’t know they’re cousins.  I shouldn’t have said that. Anyway Susanna was in for a big shot of something.  The thought of her getting stripped down, pushed down, getting a needle shoved into her, was just too depressing for both Ramirez and me.  We forgot our match to 10 and wandered slowly back to our rooms to contemplate the evil of the world.   

            I don’t want to talk about my family!  The story isn’t halfway through.  Are you listening?  Ok, I’m sorry, I know you are.  Do you want to talk about you?  How’s the peace movement?  That’s interesting.  Yes, I will go on.  Fast forward to lunch.  Ramirez is in a bad mood.  He doesn’t make any trades.  Usually he’s the first up and bartering.  Or he’ll just give stuff away some times.  He always gives his coffee away to an older lady patient.  He’s a generous guy.  But not yesterday.  He just sat at a little table alone in a cloud of hate and didn’t give anything away or bark or barter.  

After lunch he stopped me in the hall and started pushing me up against the wall.  This was in the middle of the hall.  Anyone could see.  He started calling me a bitch and a faggot and then he called me a nigger.  At this point I was pushing back and calling him a faggot too.   Then I called him a bitch, and then I made the terrible mistake of calling him a nigger. Horrible, I know.  Maybe I am a racist.  I didn’t think so.  I’m glad Ramirez is Mexican and not black.  Anyway my utterance of this terrible word in the grapple was definitely overhead by the staff sauntering over to pull us apart.  The head nurse heard me.  She is the obese black lady who wears scrubs with loony tunes characters. She didn’t like me before, but now she hates me.  I gave her rock-solid proof that I am a racist, and later she said to me through clenched teeth: “I’m proud to be black.” I’m going to be atoning now for a lot of American history.  Maybe I deserve to.  Maybe I need to be cured of my racism.  I wish I could have told her I didn’t mean anything against the blacks when I called Ramirez that.  I meant everything against Ramirez.  It’s no use explaining.  I’m polluted with the American sickness.  It’s in my blood.  As they pulled us to opposite ends of the hall, I shouted after Ramirez “I am a nigger, I am a nigger!”      

            Fuck it.  I’m not going to apologize anymore.  I’m not a role model.  Look at me. I’m a wreck.  Come back tomorrow.  Please.  Thanks for the play.

Gifts!

You’re back!  Give me a hug, how about a…ok I know.  I was pushing it.  Sorry. I didn’t expect to win you back here. I’m not exactly cutting my best figure. How’s your boyfriend?  You don’t want to talk about him.  That’s fine.  I don’t either.  I bet he doesn’t end up in places like this.  I bet he’s organized.  Is he a leftist too?  Do you meet him at the barricades?  He’s a graduate student?  That’s good. That’s the best place to be a communist. Ramirez wants a revolution too. But he thinks that JZ is going to be involved somehow.  He thinks JZ is going to lead the revolution.  I tried telling him that JZ is a billionaire and has his own champagne label and doesn’t care about the proletariat.  He doesn’t listen.  Do you know about JZ?  I don’t think I know enough about JZ.  Maybe JZ is just waiting for the moment the masses are ready, and then he will bankroll the whole thing.  It’s possible.  No.  It’s not.  I don’t know why I humor Ramirez about gangster rappers being like Rosa Luxembourg.  Do you think there would actually be a revolution in America?  Not a chance.  The working class is obese.  No, that’s not true.  I’m sure there are people starving, but they get hidden.  Look at the people out on the street though, people with some of the most militant faces, brains ready to storm citadels.  Look at some of the people most brutalized, most angry.  So often they’re stuffed with white bread, corn syrup, cheap beer, fried-flesh.  Look at this gut I’m developing.  Now look at the rich.  They are all so skinny.  They eat salad and sushi and drink Spanish white wine.  What would Lenin look like today on our streets?  No.  We need Danton.  No. It’s impossible.  There’s nothing to topple anymore.  

Al-Qaeda knocked out two great pins in Moloch’s set, but they struck as murderers and suicides and not as revolutionaries.  By its nature revolution is a bet laid on the future.  Terrorism is a howl for the past.  It offers no horizon but that which can be conjured by the impotent imagination of a blind, vampiric mullah.  Still, stunted men wrought stunning deeds.  Most of that lot, I’d guess, incinerated themselves before they’d even tasted cunt. Imagine their yearnings for the fuck of the hereafter, their yearnings for hysterical submission, their yearnings for the public stoning of the adulteress, their yearnings for the dark ages, the promised harem.  Wow. Ugh. 

Sorry Emma, I forgot you didn’t like the word “cunt.”  I just don’t know what else to call it.  What was, what is your problem anyway?  I think it’s a good word.  I refuse to say “vagina.” I find that word disgusting.  It reminds me of medical instruments and the death of passion and of the word “copulation” used in place of “fornication.” Cunt reminds me of the woods.  Do you remember when we went hiking up north and you had those blue shorts…you remember. Cunt reminds me of that.  Moss, air, sky, birds singing, before the Normans, before New Amsterdam, before I broke your heart and you broke mine.  I could say “pussy.”  That’s probably what JZ says.  “Pussy.” Yeah, you don’t like that either.  We’ll just call it nothing.  That’s what the Elizabethans did.  No joke.  Read the Shakespeare you keep throwing at me.  They called it “nothing.” Nothing.  Nothing. I love your nothing.  Will nothing come from nothing?  That’s from the play.  Get it? I’m not sure I do yet.  Your nothing used to get so wet.  I’m sorry!  Too far. I know.  I’m sorry.  Don’t go. Thanks.    

Let’s change the subject.  Did you know that the soviets used to put dissidents into insane asylums to torture them? If they were discontent with how things were in Russia they were objectively insane.  Are Ramirez, Susanna and I so different?  Are we objectively crazy people, and were the Russian dissidents actually objectively sane, brave men and women forced to lie down with the authentically psychotic? I don’t know if it’s all so clear.  You may not see it yet, but we are dissidents.  Not in the way you are with your petitions and protest marches and boycotts.  But we do dissent.  We reject all of it.  It.  I don’t know how to define ityet.  Why don’t you help me?

Listen, this morning I found out why Susanna was screaming.  She confided in me.  Patrick did not come to visit again after he promised that he would. Patrick is scum.  Patrick never comes to visit her.  Susanna opened up and cried for me.  An arms length out of my arms.  That’s the closest we get to intimacy here unless somebody decides to turn renegade for the nothing.  She kept crying about Patrick and she closed her eyes as tears ran down her cheeks.  When Susanna closes her eyes you see something pretty amazing.  She has a pretty amazing tattoo.  It’s on her eyelids.  On the outside of her right eyelid is tattooed the word “Fear.” On the left eyelid is the word “God.” Jesus Christ.  I guess Susanna is also different from you in that she has held onto some of that old time religion.  Are you still an atheist?  That’s fine. It’s just boring.  It means the same old Harvard-studies-have-shown-bastards are winning.  Torturing their monkeys, pickling brains, advancing statistics, shoveling you off to graduate school.  God, I hate them.

 There are no atheists in here.  Except for the psychiatrists of course.  The Cambodians are probably atheists as well.  There don’t seem to be any Muslims or Buddhists here either.  Buddhists don’t end up in nuthouses.  They aren’t fighting anything except their own digestive systems. Psychotic Muslims fall farther faster and miss the madhouse entirely.  I haven’t even met any Jews here.  Isn’t that funny?  We don’t have a single psychotic Jew.  On this ward it is all Christians and pagans.  Susanna is of course a Christian.  Ramirez and I are pagans.  

What do I mean by Pagan?  Well when I first got thrown in here I could only steal one color from the craft table to decorate my room.  With one red water chalk I was determined to sketch my Goddess.  The visage of Pallas Athena now watches over that room in which they force me into sleep.  Her sandals stretch up from a red-clay road.  Her legs are long and white, her thighs covered by her battle skirt, and higher, her stomach and chest by an etched breastplate.  Her left hand and slender arm rest on her shield that sports an olive sprig.  Her expression is alert bemusement.  With fragments I smeared a long line down and up the white wall thickening the spear in her right hand.  I filled out her eyes.  I gave them the gravity, the stress of so much thought.  Athena is thinking all the time.  And she, unlike myself, is rational.  She has enough reason for both of us, and you can see it weigh on her. She’s beautiful, but overworked and you can observe the strain even in a Goddess.  Not to say she doesn’t laugh.  Sometimes she goes wild when the two of us are alone out late, our wits sharpened and flying, and she’s had some wine and isn’t reading literature.  We flirt.  She sees me more than I see her.  She loves those who still fight in ways that the new world doesn’t understand, and she loves those who can sustain their laughter as the string of defeats becomes increasingly savage and absurd.  Years ago she gave me her friendship and her favor.  When I accepted her love in all it’s shades of cool blue and silver I was done forever with God as a tortured, nailed-up young man. I found salvation in her eyes, I found the Ocean and I found the moon there and heard the crashing of wood and tasted goat meat as the sparks flew up and soft pipes played.  Tonight she admonishes the choices I have made to land me in this prison, but she does not deny the root of the passion that drives me still, nor does she care about the waste and wreckage of my identity all along the road to the asylum. With the dregs of the water chalk I fashioned out two owls on her right and left shoulders.  There was no red left then but the stain on my fingers and her birds look like ghosts.  

The model was you Emma, if you hadn’t guessed.  But the Immortal beyond the scrap-dash monochromatic art is real. Dusting my hands, I feel her gray eyes, invisible, already locked on me.  She’s close by, Emma, up in this ship of fools, chuckling at the window’s ledge, regarding the towers of the Empire through the screen.  She reclines.  She rolls those eyes.  She’s here.

That’s the kind of pagan I am.  Ramirez has his own Gods.  I hope JZ is not a god for Ramirez.  Perhaps Ramirez thinks he is going to outsmart JZ and eventually bend him to his will.  Inshalla. Inshalla. Inshalla.

Time to go, Emma.  You don’t need to come back for a while.  I want to make love to you, and I can’t for so many obvious reasons and it hurts.  I hope you’re happy with whatever his name is. Really I am.  You’re a good woman to be here at all.  And you’re brave.  Don’t ever let yourself tell yourself that you aren’t brave.  I love you ok?  Till a better time, mon ami.  

Council of War

She’s gone.  I go to my room.  Here he comes.  I think he’s here to make peace.  He’s wearing his Abbey Road T-shirt which always makes me laugh hysterically on the inside.  He has stupendous pit stains from his long day of marching and shouting and kicking my ass up and down the main fluorescent corridor.  

In a sense it’s a little embarrassing-the ass kicking.  I have about 2 inches on Ramirez and I’ve climbed mountains and scrapped with the lads and thought I was fairly tough in the past. But this little Mexican could make me his bitch in a heartbeat if he didn’t have such a warm heart and didn’t need me to navigate and ride shotgun for him on crusade. 

He stands in my doorway.  I nod. He comes in.  I throw my chin towards the one chair and he sits.  The lights are on.  He considers Athena.  He gets it right away.  We’re at peace.  No more sparring for the day.  Evening is coming on.  Ramirez and I put our minds to the unspoken reality.  Escape is impossible.  Neither one of us at this point will accept even one further submission.  That leaves only insurrection. Both he and I have steeled our selves for that game.  We reason, as madmen sometimes can, our cards.  The Cambodians can take us easily.  Ramirez might be stronger than one of them, but as a pair the Khmer devils could whip us, strip us, strap us down and shoot us up faster than the electrons fly when they are put to the temples of Maudlin.          

Brawn will not avail us.  Guile, cunning then.  Twists and turns.  Athena, give us these.  We hold our tongues and let the silence steep.  Ramirez stares at Pallas.  I stare into Ramirez.  He has olive skin.  No, it’s dark orange, healthy but covered by blackheads and always, in here, a layer of perspiration.  He has 3 good inches of curly lustrous and handsome black hair, some stubble on his face, a Roman nose and a set of utterly baffling black eyes prone at one moment to triumphant laughter and then at the next, mercurially, to an ancient dejection evoking a tragedy of the highest yet forgotten order.  Who is he?  Who is this big-in-the-little man, this granite, bonkers, son of a bold wetback, mislaid Spartan King?  There has to be a way between us.  But I’ll confess:  Now that we must weigh our ugly odds, measure out the stakes of action, arrive eventually at some doomed move, I have to say it: I hardly know this guy.  I stare into Ramirez but my own dark blood pumped by a deranged and histrionic imagination rises up to cloud my thoughts:

I think it highly probable that Ramirez bayonetted me at the Alamo.  I was tending to Jim Bowie-drunk at the last on the last bottle of whiskey in America.  I can see Ramirez twisting his rifle butt with a gleam in the eye and wearing a big hat with a plume, one of Generalissimo Santa Anna’s crack dragoons.       

            To be honest, I can imagine Ramirez killing me in alotof historical epochs. Hell, I’d take the spat all the way back to Jerusalem.  In the first crusade I was one of the first knights up and over, broadsword drawn.  I beheld at last the holy city from the ramparts, tasted for an instant the glory of our conquest.  Then some Saracen put an arrow through my parched throat and laughed. Ramirez.

            When I rode with Cortez and the new world was fresh at our feet and we stomped the Aztec (those heart rippers) with little more than superstition and horses and some dry black powder I was in a good mood then.  Then Montezuma bit dust and we all had to get the hell out of Tenochtitlan.  Somewhere between the outskirts of the city and the jungle a man dropped from a tree and with a good rock caved in my skull.  Ramirez. 

            After I stormed into India with Clive and his cannons and the gay knights-errant of the East India Company, I lasted the summer on little more than braggadocio, tonic and gin.  I dreamed odd gods in a sloshed heat, and held close to the memory of the face of a girl from Surrey who gnawed rose hips in the afternoon, renewed the garlands in her hair after every breakfast, and swore to me on parting that she would play Penelope for a solid year.  I didn’t make a year.   Some malcontent sepoy slipped strychnine in my juniper.  Ramirez.  Of course. Again.  

At the little bighorn, on last stand hill, I was too stupid and too stubborn to put a bullet through my head.  Sitting Bull’s braves cut off my genitals while I still drew breadth and then they shoved them into my open mouth so that I couldn’t make the crossing…whole.  It worked, I guess.  I didn’t see Ramirez with that lot, but I’ll wager 12 to 7 that he was there with a blade, erect and proud upon the Greasy Grass.    

I could go on, but you get the idea.  And now I must repent the lie that I made earlier:  I doknow this guy!  I know him all too well!!  Wherever, whenever I played the white devil, in the new world or the old, the Gods sent in this little bastard to dispatch me. 

            But it’s fine.  Really.  I had it coming.  All is forgiven (save for the Bighorn).  Water under the bridge.  It’s history. And as our most erudite and impotent philosophers have now made abundantly clear:  We have reached the end of history.  Take note ladies, this is what the end of history looks like: Jim Bowie’s right hand, Santa Anna’s fiercest warrior, Black Jack Pershing’s meanest gringo, Pancho Villa’s toughest spic at peace at last, brothers sans arms, shot up on sedatives and warehoused with no more frontiers left to contest, together plotting a completely futile and insane revolt against an invincible mad house, praying to a Greek Goddess dashed on the wall in red water chalk, listening for a signal in the humming of the fluorescent tubes.  And one of them is wearing an Abbey Road T-shirt with tremendous stains.  Of the pit. 

“We need O’Connell.” 

Ramirez has broken the silence.  I know what he’s thinking, and I think it’s a bad idea.  O’Connell is a tall good-humored and evil Irishman who got thrown in here day before yesterday.  He’s handsome, dangerous, looks about forty-five and like a serial rapist. 

He doesn’t mind being in here, which is the thing that really worries me. He says he is on vacation, and that then he is going back to his people.  I asked him who his people are and he just said The Irish.  I guess O’Connell missed the end of history seminar. Doesn’t the end of history mean an end of tribes?   Can’t he look to Ramirez and I and see the way we’ve been ironing out the whole Alamo manifest destiny shit; evolving into proper universalists?  Maybe I’m just annoyed because I wish I had a people.  All this aside, something is definitely off about the guy and I don’t trust him.  To put it bluntly, I think he’s going to try and rape Susanna.  Maybe it wouldn’t be rape.  Maybe she’s given up hope over the Patrick bastard and she’d allow O’Connell to take her up against the wall at some odd hour.  But even this churns my stomach and makes me want to put O’Connell into solitary.  It’s cunts like him that give me an ounce of understanding for the system and so weaken my resolve to resist it.   

Ramirez probably likes O’Connell because he reminds him of JZ.  A destitute,, drying, drunk Irish JZ.  This is Ramirez’s biggest blind spot and weakness. He admires the fabulously rich, or in this case someone who just acts like he is fabulously rich.  He thinks these are the kind of people who make revolutions.  This is because he grew up dirt poor.  I grew up semi-rich, surrounded by the rich and I went to Harvard so I know that the rich aren’t any better or smarter or stronger in the clutch.  They have their power but ultimately they are weaker.  But I can’t seem to get this across to Ramirez.  O’Connell may be a poor man but he has the rich man’s charm and swagger and air of entitlement and all this goes a long way with my Mexican friend. 

“He’s not going to get in any fights,” I say. “He’s on vacation”

“You’ll make him fight.  You’re Irish.”

“I’m not Irish.” 

“What are you?”

“I don’t know.  American. Scottish, English it doesn’t matter. I’m protestant.”

“You said you were a pagan.”

“Yeah that too.”

“You get him on our side.”

“To do what?  We don’t even have a plan yet.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Go ahead.  I’m here. I don’t have any hot dates lined up tonight.”

Ramirez thinks and suddenly I am angry at him.  I’m angry that he doesn’t know that the bastille fell in 1789, I’m angry that he doesn’t know about Sophie Scholl and Emma Goldman and John Brown and Joan of Arc.  But it isn’t fair.  I don’t even know Spanish.  I made a half-assed attempt to learn because a Puerto Rican girl in college was giving me very generous love, but when she went back to the island I quit.  I want to scream at Ramirez that he is of the wretched of the earth, and that he must be proud and march under that frayed rouge standard.  I want to scream at him that his fetish for JZ is death and he is keeping us in the swamp with a stunted imagination and intellect.  He is being stupid.  And he isn’t stupid. I hate his guts right now, and it has nothing to do with all the past life hoodoo.  “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”  That’s what Bob Marley said.  I want to scream that at him, I want to wake him up.  He wakes me up by kicking my ass.  He needs to get his ass kicked existentially.  It’s not about revenge.  He’s just not in fighting shape.  He’s more poisoned by the fucking magazines they leave around here than he is by the pharmacology.  He’s buying it all like a dumb housewife, my Spartan King who wants to be a gangster rapper. Ugh.  There are more things Ramirez than you have dreamed in that philosophy. I’ll try not being a Harvard prick about it.  Spiritually we are on the level, but as my body is soft and weak, so is his grasp of the times.  There will be no resolution tonight.  I can already sense the failure of imagination in both of us.  Though sunrise and set are denied us in the closed ward with black-screened windows, still there is always tomorrow.  I let myself fall asleep on the bed.  There are some strong chemicals at work in my blood. Let the pugilist sit sentry, doze or depart as he wills.  I’m out.  I have some hope for tomorrow.    

It’s after breakfast and I am hanging out with the most gorgeous and articulate girl in the joint.  Shari. She’s not even insane.  She’s just sad, and that was enough for her overbearing Hindu parents to push her in here.  She’s reading a big fat hardcover book called “The Greek Achievement.”  I want to fuck Shari so badly right now that I am at a point of significant discomfort.  A lot of these drugs make it so a man can’t get it up.  That side effect is not in effect right now.  Watching her read makes me sweat.  She is the first person I have seen here actually read a book. Let me reemphasize: Shari is genuinely not crazy.  Susanna, Ramirez, O’Connell and I are indeed authentically nuts in some way, but Shari is stone sober and totally lucid.  She’s simply melancholic, sublime, smooth shapely Melancholia.    

 I want to talk to her about the book.  What is the Greek achievement?  I have prepared some good Western, possibly chauvinistic polemics concerning the moral superiority of the Hellene over the Persian.  It boils down to this, I tell her:  The Greeks never made a man into a God.  When Alexander conquered Persia, his own officers who fought and bled next to him were ready to mutiny after he took on the oriental posture.  He wanted them to prostrate themselves before him like he was Zeus.  His hard-bitten Macedonian veterans were willing take his war to the end of the world-India-but they couldn’t square with this new sacrilege and humiliation. Their defiance, not the Parthenon, not Sophocles is the true Greek achievement.  That’s the thesis I lay out for Shari.  I hope that its originality will make her want to fuck me too.  It doesn’t produce much of an effect.   

“You know Mark Twain visited the Taj Mahal,” she says.  “He said it was exactly as beautiful as Hartford Connecticut after an ice storm.”

I really don’t know what to make of that.  I guess the big surprise here is that Shari is probably much smarter than I am. She knows how to confuse me.  I’m so used to thinking I’m the sharpest knife in bedlam’s drawers.  I move to sit next to her but she tenses so I slide away.  I don’t want her to be tense. I just want her to have something to be fucking happy about!  Ramirez, Susanna and I live in states of constant horror and perpetual struggle, but we have moments of faith and exaltation.  We are all banking on the future:  Patrick and JZ will come, the obese head nurse will be thrown into solitary for a day with nothing but a pack of cigarettes, the psychiatrists will be chained down and given a dash of their own medicine, the Cambodian cousins will get the firing squad etc.  But Shari has given up.  Is she in an arranged marriage?  It’s possible.  The more I dwell on it the more her resignation seems obnoxious.   And I’m not saying that because she doesn’t want to kiss me.  I want to breathe some fire into her guts but she is all pale blue and yellows.  Christ, this is frustrating.  She is the only person here with whom I know I can have a conversation sans scatology, paranoia, hallucination or grand delusion. 

She’s leaving me now.  Going to music class.  I am not going to follow her and bang a therapeutic drum, begging for a tender glance. I stew in the common room. Ramirez comes.  He has not changed his Abby Road T-shirt.  He probably smells terrible.  I can’t smell.  But he looks great.  Must have slept well.  There’s mischief in his eyes.  As I mentioned, Ramirez had a plan a couple of days ago that he laid out for me.  It involved JZ, but also other gangster rappers and investment bankers.  I didn’t really understand his plan.  It was a terrible and insane plan even by the standards of an insane asylum inmate.  This morning he has no plan, and he is relieved.  His plan is to have no plan.  A weight has been lifted.  Good. Square one.  Lets try to see our world now with fresh eyes.  

“You look good.”

“Thanks.”

“No, really, you do.  Did you fall asleep in the chair?”

“Yeah.  Then I woke up.  Went to my bed.  Was Shari here?”

“Yeah.  Why?”

“I like her.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Do you think she likes me?”

“You need to change that shirt.”

“Do you think she likes me?”

“I think she might be too sad to like anyone right now.”

“Why is she sad.”

“I don’t know.  She’s really complicated.”

“How?”

“She just is.  She’s in her own head.”

“Are you in your own head?”

“Fuck no!  I’m ready to blow this place to smithereens with you.”

“Smithereens?”

“Blow it into little bits.”

“Ha!  Good. Give it to me!”

“Are you over JZ?”

“Fine.   Fuck JZ.”

“Fuck JZ?  That’s what you said?  Fuck JZ?”

“Fuck JZ.”

Ramirez lets me hug him for 2.5 seconds.   

  Then he says: “We need O’Connell.” 

Shit.  Fine.  If this is how it has to be this is how it has to be.  I’ll go cajole the Fenian.  Maybe he’s filled some cisterns of Gaelic rage overnight.  Maybe he isn’t a serial rapist.  It takes all sorts to start an insurrection.  Besides I’d rather have Ramirez dote on a lecherous allegory of the IRA than on an urban development merchant whore bent on giving Brooklyn o’er to Babylon.  Yes, yes, this is fine.  We can do it.  Baby steps. 

            I find him in the kitchen eating ice cream.  I have no idea where he got the ice cream.  It isn’t mealtime, and when it is they never serve ice cream.  He has his feet put up on two separate chairs, and his legs splayed.  He’s wearing the hospital smock and wearing it as well as I imagine it can be worn.  He winks at me when I come in.  Odd. But maybe not.  The Irish have always adopted me somehow.  I have a strong measure of Celtic blood, and look like a black Gael.  I probably became a drunk over the last few years so that I’d feel finally like I had a people.  I drowned countless hours and drained endless pints of black beer in search of a home in the new world.  I memorized all of their/our best poetry and hungrily committed myself to learning all the intricacies of the prolonged fight for The Republic.  The names of the martyrs, the passion play of Pearse, the mind of Collins, the killer with the wit and will to bring the British to the table. 

I even committed myself to writing the autobiography of the pub owner.  He was sure he had a 2ndAngela’s Asheson his hands.  I spent hours with a cassette recorder interviewing him, but the whole venture was impossible.  5% of what he talked about involved politics, his marriage, the IRA of his father, his various jobs, coming to America.  But 95 percent was recollections of playing games barefoot on muddy roads, hunting rabbits, a thousand little ditties about birds, little aural survival poems for the Catholic living on the fringes of Cromwell’s estate system. It was the richest poetry but I couldn’t make a book out of it.  I’m not a good enough writer.  He needed Patrick Kavanagh, not an earnest Harvard lad who’s never even been to Ireland. What I’ll always remember-dismiss it as maudlin if you want: He told me he’d trade all of his tomorrows for just one day back as a boy, hungry and poor, singing and taking in the sun on an empty road with his brothers, watching the wren fly, feet squidgy with Kilkenny mud                       

            When I dried myself out for a while, Michael Collins and the men of Easter, 1916 remained my heroes, and I realized that there could be luck and pluck and defiance and lilt and song and swing without all of the whiskey.  I wish I’d realized that before I’d driven off the best woman who’d ever touched me.   But that’s a story for another time, and to hell with repining–here we are:

            “How you doing?” I ask O’Connell 

            “Splendid, friend.  Yourself?”

            “Where did you get the ice cream?”

He winks at me again using his other eye.  

            “How long do you think you’ll be in here?” I ask.

            “Who knows? I love it here.”

            “How the hell do you love it here?”

            “Plenty of rest, gorgeous girls, plenty of ice cream.”

            “You don’t want out?”

            “Eventually.”

I don’t know how to talk to this guy.  He’s a fucking wall, a winking, smiling wall. And he’s enjoying that he’s a lot more patient and a lot more relaxed than I am.  I want to leave the kitchen, but I promised Ramirez I’d try to bring him over to our hypothetical crusade.  There is a space of silence and he reads me quickly.

            “You want to start some shit,” he says.

            “What do you mean?”

            “I can tell you want to start some shit.”

            “We want to fight back”

He laughs too loudly.

            “Who is we?”

            “Me and Ramirez.”

            “The little Mexican?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Why?”

            “Look what they’re doing to us!”

            “Not too bad.  I’ve no complaints.”

            “Are you insane?”

            “Suppose I am now.  Yeah. Crazy.  Beats Rikers.”

            “What did you do?”

He winks again.  I don’t know why I asked.  I don’t want to know.  I’m sure it was violent.  I’m also sure now that if we really wanted, the three of us together could take the Cambodians in a scuffle.  But the fighting cock in O’Connell is gone.  It’s been medicated and reduced to ice cream inertia, sucking not fucking. He’s in a sort of glib leprechaun Zen paralysis.  No hope here.  The auld triangle goes jingle jangle.  No one hears. Another dead end. 

What now, hero of this farce?  Do we swallow our pride and swallow our pills and wait like caged laboratory animals patiently for release papers.  Maybe O’Connel is the genius here.  Maybe it isn’t all that bad.  We are getting metaphorically raped.  In prison I could be getting literally raped.  This is not an insignificant distinction.  Somehow my fury is ebbing, but then I think about the monkeys, the chimpanzees in the basement of William James Hall, back at fair Harvard, experimented on, and at the last “sacrificed,” for vivid images of their brains.  That was the word Steven Pinker used.  “Sacrificed.”  They were tortured and sacrificed for science.  I think back to his lecture hall, the black crocodile boots he wore, his arrogant white locks, his jars of pickled brains, his contempt for those who believed in God.  And now my hatred returns.  I want crocodiles to eat that faggot alive.  I want him to burn in the circle of hell reserved for Mengele.  I want to kill and burn and murder these people. It’s a war, and we are losing. But we have to fight, or they will exterminate our strong and drive our weak to suicide.  Ramirez is right.  O’Connell is an aesthete.  I’ll take the ignorant crusader over the wise cutpurse.  I never thought I’d feel that way, but we have to make a stand somehow, and we must make it here, in the belly of the most infamous madhouse.  I cannot see the battle, but I have seen and known and feel the scars on the hip they gave me (gained 60 pounds in 2 weeks driven to a freakish uncontrollable gluttony by high doses of an atypical antipsychotic), feel the war.  Things will take shape.  Redemption is in resistance.  To not resist is to accept their classification and objectification of us.  Our furor poeticus is nothing more than disease incurable.  Our madness is neutered unto illness.  No!  I will never accept their terms, and neither will Ramirez.  We will fight with all we have though it may be merely our own over-powered bodies, wherever we must, we will wrestle the angel so may raise the sword against incarceration without due process of law.  We will resist, and our resistance in and of itself will be our victory. For when we are free again we will remember that we fought.  We will remember that we were men and not rats, and that remembrance will prevent us from acquiring guns and putting bullets through our heads.  There it is.  I don’t know how we will do it.  I lack the strength to lead and the faith in any other here to follow, but I have a friend and we will not let them kill us or strip us of our dignity.  We will survive and we will live and from this crucible of injustice and horror and pain compacted will come passion, from passion the love of the whirlwind, and in the whirlwind my sisters and my brothers persecuted for strangeness will find Victory winged, strong arms enfolding. I have faith in this terrible place.  And I love those lashed alongside me. There is a way.  We will light fires with our passions, we will comfort the timid, We will confront the dulled lackeys and jailors and the shrewd collectors and judgers of specimens.  We will love Susanna as our sister, we will protect her.   We will accept our courage, and teach courage to our fellow prisoners.  The war isholy.  Perhaps the last war that may be so.  I repent the sins of my madness but never the vision God gave to me in it, of a world unshackled of the petty burgher’s fear that turn life into a lockstep towards longevity, pleasure and despair, while stifling almost completely the boundless orgasm of the trinity.  Anarchic Aphrodite, heroes and victims of love, prisoners all, I bind you into my heart and say I am by your side.  There were Jews who marched into the gas chambers singing loudly proudly to meet their God.  This is true. Don’t forget it.  The worst that the manglers and scratchers and the architects of hell on earth devised could not break these men and women. Sister, have a shred of their defiance here in club med by comparison. We must encourage each other.  In that encouragement is fraternity, in that encouragement the insurrection of the righteous ferments.  For a moment this is all so clear and I let joy take me from the toes to the hair. Back to the hallway, the delicate dance, the old long walk.  A I A I A.

I’ve been reading too much Victor Hugo.  I always wanted to die on the barricade.  Why am I barricade drunk?  Who knows?