Nevertheless, I became obsessive about her. That night, I lay in bed and when my cock lifted at the thought of her I followed its ascent and was in her room moments later: Nurse Seroppian was asleep at her post, her enormous purple eyelids shuddering, and she was known for the dependability of her nightly doze. I spent the night in Rochelle’s bed and entered her once after she’d fallen asleep. She woke for a moment, didn’t seem to mind, and slipped back into sleep. It went on that way for weeks; we made love like people beating their heads against a wall. It sometimes amazed me she was only sixteen and so bereft of romantic illusion, but mostly I didn’t care. I didn’t discuss this liaison with Dr. Clark—I knew it would give him trouble—but I did slowly gain a secret sexual reputation: for endurance, if nothing else, or just plain availability.
Before long I took a second lover, a girl from Chicago named Pat Eliot, who had curly yellow hair, cupid’s-bow lips, prodigious breasts, and who pronounced her first name in two syllables. Pat was in her early twenties, an actress. She was actually a success in the world: she’d appeared at the Goodman Theater in many plays and had had a good role in a Hollywood movie, though it hadn’t been released. She was a wonderful lover, tender and powerful, without a trace of athleticism. Her breasts fascinated me but they were so huge they also made me shy, which pleased her because I would guess people had made too much of an issue about them. And so I had two lovers, and then a woman named Stephanie was admitted to Rockville.
Stephanie was just twenty and already a graduate student at the University of Chicago. She had brutal nightmares and wandered about in her sleep. I didn’t know her last name. But I was fixated on the idea of making love to her, and as soon as I had an opportunity to approach her, I did. She had no interest in making love with me and not much interest in knowing me. But I pursued the matter with increasing single-mindedness. Like any losing gambler, I could think of nothing else. I stared at her, followed her, dreamed of her, thought of her when I was with Rochelle and Pat, wrote notes to her, and finally lured her to my room, where I threw myself at her with odious abandon. She ran from my room, not exactly screaming, but saying “Christ sakes” in a loud, excited voice, and within the hour I was taken down to Dr. Clark’s sunny little office, where he waited for me behind his desk, drumming his fingers on its polished surface, empty except for a folder that turned out to be my records.
We talked for a long while; I told him I was “sexually active,” and he said that he knew I was. He told me that nothing unfortunate was likely to come of my friendship with Pat, but with Rochelle I was involving myself with a “girl of mysterious pathos,” and that with Stephanie I was simply behaving like a jerk and a bully. The peculiar thing was that the reprimand didn’t end in a warning; my actions were not directly proscribed.
I continued to pursue Stephanie despite my failure to interest her and despite Clark’s words with me. I cannot even remember what attracted me to her or what I wanted: I analyzed the attraction as sheerly magnetic and I gladly surrendered all memory and forethought to an urge that really wasn’t quite so blind as I would have liked. I felt myself capable of any low behavior. I imagined forcing myself on Stephanie, grabbing her from behind, sneaking into her bed at night. I took these empty, frustrated thoughts as signs of vitality, and so I welcomed them even as they destroyed me from within. The real point, of course, was not to think of Jade, and in this all illness served its purpose: if it had not been erotomania it could just as well have been hysterical paralysis. Finally, one day I convinced Stephanie to come to my room; I think my persistence was beginning to work on her, added to the emptiness and loss of self that was growing inside her as her stay at Rockville became longer and more routine. I had gotten her into a conversation about Nobel Prize winners and we were going to check in my almanac how many Americans had won the prize for literature. Rochelle saw us leave and a few minutes later she went to her room and uncovered the cache of Librium she’d been hoarding over the past couple months and attempted to commit what she might categorize as a revenge suicide.
Rochelle was saved without much difficulty, but the day after—with the entire hospital in a nervous hush—Dr. Clark told me that he was recommending that I be “released” from Rockville. I knew that it was only bad news, but I asked if this meant he was recommending me for outpatient treatment, if I was going to be allowed to return to Chicago.
“You know very well what it means and what it doesn’t. I’m a little surprised, even as your doctor, that you’d use this as an occasion…Well, never mind. The answer is no. The decision is limited to one consideration: we don’t feel that we can treat you with any great hope for success. At this point, your presence is disturbing the overall therapeutic community. I’m afraid your treatment is going to have to continue in a setting in which community is not as important. And who knows? It might be the change you need.”
Right…
My grandfather Jack wasn’t paying part of my hospital charges any longer; my breaking parole and Arthur’s affair with a black woman launched Grandfather away from us and our interminable problems. My parents had been able to negotiate a slightly lower rate with Rockville, but it was still a lot more than they could afford. When it was decided that I could no longer stay in that permissive Wyon hospital, a cursory search was begun to find another comparable institution in the state of Illinois, but nothing suitable seemed to present itself—and the truth was that my parents couldn’t afford to pay for private treatment any longer. At the recommendation of the court, my psychiatric files, my body, and my fate, were transferred to a state-run hospital called Fox Run, in Highland Park, a Chicago suburb. Breaking it to me—the details, that is—Arthur tried to be encouraging. “I think this is just the kind of place the court wants you to stay in before you get your release. The trouble with a place like Rockville is it’s got a reputation, and the thinking is if you’re spending your time here you’re not getting helped and you’re not getting punished.”
“Then why’d you put me here?” I asked.
“It’s what you wanted,” said Arthur. “You said it was.”
“And now you’re putting me in Fox Run? I’ve heard about Fox Run, you know. There’s been people here who’ve spent time there. It’s a goddamned hole is what it is. Oh God, can’t you feel what’s happening? I’m getting lost in the shuffle. Fox Run is the kind of place you disappear in. You get beaten to death, or drugged to death, or forgotten. Fine. OK. I’m not going to care, not another word. I just want to suggest that you both take a good look at me. If you think I’m bad now, next time you see me you’re not going to recognize me at all. I swear, it’s the end of me.”
On July 1, 1976, Eddie Watanabe and a rabbinical-looking staff worker from Fox Run took me by Ford to my new quarters in Highland Park. As a parting favor, Dr. Clark had given me a whopping dose of Stelazine and the bright neon anxiety I’d been feeling was now encapsulated in a soft, faintly transparent gel. I was bleary, silent; I sat in the back seat with my valise and a paper bag, watching the cornfields turn to suburbs, the sky turn from the blue of robins’ eggs to the blue of faded denim, to the barely decipherable blue of smoke. Eddie and the fellow from Fox Run talked about the mayor and the governor and the federal budget and then about things they’d believed when they were younger. Finally, Watanabe said, with weary pride, that they were both “survivors of the sixties,” and the fellow from Fox Run nodded in agreement.