We went to bed late. Daddy came to sleep at home today. Mummy made an orange cake. It was delicious. Every Friday there’s cake.
They held me down and put on the straitjacket.
Now everyone’s going to do a drawing. I drew Christ on the cross. Now everyone’s going to show their drawings.
I do a drawing of the sky and the sea. It’s when the sky meets the sea at infinity.
In mine, there’s a hummingbird putting pollen on each star in the night sky.
You and your drawings.
It’s how I feel, crucified. In the old days, anyone who was different or who appeared to be a threat was crucified. Nowadays you wind up in places like asylums, which is the best way to not get better.
The B Cops got close to me. They came over like they were buddies.
It’s all right, it wasn’t you, our apologies. We’re nocturnal animals. Images and strange sounds get us going. Here, screams are the means of communication. There’s an enigma behind every lunatic.
The man inside the milk carton slapped another man inside a Colorama shampoo bottle. He was a different kind of guy; he liked to go shopping with his mum. I always ended up with a sweet in my hand for good behaviour.
They did the same in the asylum: if everyone behaved themselves, load them up with endorphins, ie guava jelly. How can you miss a place that no one comes from, that people only go to? People only ever go to the asylum.
The Lady of All Screams sits down next to me. No one knows why or for whom she screams. They say she lost a lover and became that way, possessed by the scream. It’s a uterine scream. A horrible thing. It destroys our eardrums. She eats her meatloaf slowly, like it was fillet steak. Uses her cutlery with precision. The mistress of her own etiquette. Leaves her guava jelly and screams. With her left hand she picks her nose and wipes a bogey on the table.
Some people there aren’t crazy, they’re just old, senile, and seem to live in another time. Granny, for example, is always well dressed in a tailored suit. She’s a fine lady. She goes around made up, well preserved for her seventy years.
There’s not a lot of chit-chat. Idle chin-wagging. Here it all boils down to screams or to I’m going to Paracambi. If you don’t eat, you’ll go to Caju.
What is loneliness? It’s living without obsessions. But sometimes in life we have to choose between pounding the tip of a knife or letting ourselves get burned in the fire.
Which is worse?
A man dressed in jelly blew a kiss inside a Coca-Cola bottle.
You shouldn’t write about asylum life.
No. Everyone has an asylum nearby. Either your handbag is an asylum, or your home, or even your wallet. Lots of things can be an asylum. I’m not talking about untidiness, I’m talking about real asylums.
Rimbaud showed up dressed like an Apache Indian. He said I was turning into General Custer.
There were lots of flowers around the clinic. It was a nice place. That’s why I say asylums are such pretty places that they remind you of cemeteries. Those cemeteries with huge gardens.
Rimbaud liked playing with fire. He lit candles. Baudelaire liked the dark. But he didn’t like fighting and he often disappeared when Rimbaud showed up. Rimbaud was my friend all the time. A real wild child.
I’d never met anyone who’d been beaten.
So I went to Disneyland and beat the shit out of Pluto, machine-gunned Mickey Mouse. All because I liked National Kid and the Venusian Incas10. Violence is so fascinating, and our lives, so normal. I’m talking about a specific kind of violence. Everything can be violent. Even God.
Not God: gods.
I have rituals. I light one cigarette after another and let them smoke. I let each of the gods smoke their own cigarette. Sometimes I light them all at once.
My gods smoke with me. It’s a mess, an orgy of smoke. And Rimbaud dances. Baudelaire runs away. I smile.
What if they were joints? The gods would get totally stoned and turn into devils for life. They’d come in gods and go out demons.
Humphrey Bogart versus Charles Laughton
The B Cops decide to leave the asylum. They didn’t come to any conclusions. What is a conclusion? It’s the certainty of having lost your defences. Someone opens a bottle of Coca-Cola. Someone looks for a recipe for happiness. Some eel in my hair declares that electroshock treatment is for getting back to normal. But do I really want to get my normal back? I don’t know about the cricket and the blue dog. They’re just blue animals. Blue is also the colour of her eyes. Granny comes and hugs me. She wants to dance a tango, but I don’t know how to dance so slowly. I dance to a different beat. Acugêlê banzai!11
I’ve been to Japan. It was a different kind of place. Not unlike an asylum. Full of people. Sometimes, when I think back on Japan, I remember Fearsome Madman. He was a nice guy. He’d killed six people. Strangled. Raped. He was a weird guy, but gentle with me. Like I said, he was afraid of my voice when I spoke in a lower, deeper pitch. Fearsome liked playing chess with himself. Who killed Fearsome Madman? It was a mystery that echoed throughout the little silence that existed in a place like that. I want to fill that silence with my voice.
In my voice, a scream.
But Haldol holds me back. It holds back my screams, whispers. I, having hidden tons of pills under my tongue, now take them all, no questions asked. Who knows if they help. I just know that I miss my two friends. Rimbaud appears and tells me he has AIDS. He wants us to become blood brothers. I agree to it and cut my thumb. Baudelaire appears and says he wants to become our blood brother too. Just the idea of dying from something other than the chip (or cricket) makes me happy. To die with Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Nothing could be better. Acugêlê banzai!
I’ve been to China. Saying it like that makes it sound like I’ve travelled a lot. It was a very pretty place, full of people, bicycles and lots of clouds. The clouds, the clouds. There I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was a foreigner and I was madly in love with those far-away clouds, oh those wonderful clouds! Shapes in the sky. When the day is like that, a sunny day, a day like today, I no longer want to get out of here. I’ll sleep in the calm green of 6 mg of Lexotan. Hold on tight to my blue dog and enter into a pact with happiness. Remember China, its bicycles, its blood-red flag and, finally, those incredible clouds in the Chinese sky. I think I’ll be happier once I’ve taken the bloody blood oath. I want to die of anything, anything but of a chip I swallowed. I swallow the pills. One day, I swallowed three. Another day, I swallowed four. I don’t really know what I should do to get better. Simply because I’m a pterodactyl in a cage. A raven pecking at the belly of a scarecrow. A man who isn’t afraid of the terror of living without fear. Nevermore, no one here is afraid. Not even the Attorney General. He reminds me of a character in a Western or a gangster film. He uses a spoon instead of a knife. The Attorney plays that dangerous game where you stab the gaps between all your fingers with a knife, or in this case, a spoon. We only have spoons here. The old man does it skilfully, as if he’d been practising for a long time. Just for kicks. Letting the winds of adrenaline blow.
Rimbaud appears during gales. The winds that bring him make me wrap up in his scarf. He smokes weed. Puffs of smoke from Baudelaire’s pipe disperse close to me. He tells me that he’s a macumba priest. He tells me he has powers. He renews my language. I believe him completely. Rimbaud is the storm. Baudelaire is the wind. One takes ether. The other, cocaine12. I’m just sad — I’m the guy who finds out that the coloured pills make me fat and stop me, more and more, from spending time with these old friends of mine. What’s life without friends? I’m like Emmanuel Bove, who secretly loved the friends he didn’t have. I’m friends with my eyes. They only see what I want. I look through my tinted glasses and see everything in black and white. Everything looks like a Bergman film.