I started breathing fast in the library. It was really bad because I remembered some of the schizophrenic kids in the hospital when I was little. And it didn’t help that this was the day after I noticed that all the kids were wearing their new Christmas clothes, so I decided to wear my new suit from Patrick to school, and was teased mercilessly for nine straight hours. It was such a bad day. I skipped my first class ever and went to see Sam and Patrick outside.
“Looking sharp, Charlie,” Patrick said grinning.
“Can I have a cigarette?” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say “bum a smoke.” Not for my first one. I just couldn’t.
“Sure,” said Patrick.
Sam stopped him.
“What’s wrong, Charlie?”
I told them what was wrong, which prompted Patrick to keep asking me if I had a “bad trip.”
“No. No. It’s not that.” I was really getting upset.
Sam put her arm around my shoulder, and she said she knew what I was going through. She told me I shouldn’t worry about it. Once you do it, you remember how things looked on it. That’s all. Like how the road turned into waves. And how your face was plastic and your eyes were two different sizes. It’s all in your mind.
That’s when she gave me the cigarette.
When I lit it, I didn’t cough. It actually felt soothing. I know that’s bad in a health class way, but it was true.
“Now, focus on the smoke,” Sam said.
And I focused on the smoke.
“Now, that looks normal doesn’t it?”
“Uh-huh,” I think I said.
“Now, look at the cement on the playground. Is it moving?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay… now focus on the piece of paper that’s just sitting there on the ground.”
And I focused on the piece of paper that was sitting on the ground.
“Is the cement moving now?”
“No. It’s not.”
From there you go, to you’re going to be okay, to you probably should never do acid again, Sam went on to explain what she called “the trance.” The trance happens when you don’t focus on anything, and the whole big picture swallows and moves around you. She said it was usually metaphoric, but for people who should never do acid again, it was literal.
That’s when I started laughing. I was so relieved. And Sam and Patrick smiled. I was glad they started smiling, too, because I couldn’t stand their looking so worried.
Things have stopped moving for the most part ever since. I haven’t skipped another class. And I guess now I don’t feel like a big faker for trying to put my life back together. Bill thought my paper on The Catcher in the Rye (which I wrote on my new old typewriter!) was my best one yet. He said I was “developing” at a rapid pace and gave me a different kind of book as “a reward.” It’s On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
I’m now up to about ten cigarettes a day.
Love always,
Charlie
January 25, 1992
Dear friend,
I feel great! I really mean it. I have to remember this for the next time I’m having a terrible week. Have you ever done that? You feel really bad, and then it goes away, and you don’t know why. I try to remind myself when I feel great like this that there will be another terrible week coming someday, so I should store up as many great details as I can, so during the next terrible week, I can remember those details and believe that I’ll feel great again. It doesn’t work a lot, but I think it’s very important to try.
My psychiatrist is a very nice man. He’s much better than my last psychiatrist. We talk about things that I feel and think and remember. Like when I was little, and there was this one time that I walked down the street in my neighborhood. I was completely naked, holding a bright blue umbrella, even though it wasn’t raining. And I was so happy because it made my mom smile. And she rarely smiled. So, she took a picture. And the neighbors complained.
This other time, I saw a commercial for this movie about a man who was accused of murder, but he didn’t commit the murder. A guy from M*A*S*H was the star of the movie. That’s probably why I remember it. The commercial said that the whole movie was about him trying to prove that he was innocent and how he could go to jail anyway. That scared me a lot. It scared me how much it scared me. Being punished for something you did not do. Or being an innocent victim. It’s just something that I never want to experience.
I don’t know if it is important to tell you all this, but at the time, it felt like a “breakthrough.”
The best thing about my psychiatrist is that he has music magazines in his waiting room. I read an article about Nirvana on one visit, and it didn’t have any references to honey mustard dressing or lettuce. They kept talking about the singer’s stomach problems all the time, though. It was weird.
Like I told you, Sam and Patrick love their big song, so I thought I’d read it to have something to discuss with them. In the end, the magazine compared him with John Lennon from the Beatles. I told that to Sam later, and she got really mad. She said he was like Jim Morrison if he was like anybody, but really, he isn’t like anybody but himself. We were all at the Big Boy after Rocky Horror, and it started this big discussion.
Craig said the problem with things is that everyone is always comparing everyone with everyone and because of that, it discredits people, like in his photography classes.
Bob said that it was all about our parents not wanting to let go of their youth and how it kills them when they can’t relate to something.
Patrick said that the problem was that since everything has happened already, it makes it hard to break new ground. Nobody can be as big as the Beatles because the Beatles already gave it a “context.” The reason they were so big is that they had no one to compare themselves with, so the sky was the limit.
Sam added that nowadays a band or someone would compare themselves to the Beatles after the second album, and their own personal voice would be less from that moment on.
“What do you think, Charlie?”
I couldn’t remember where I heard it or read it. I said maybe it was in This Side of Paradise by From. Scott Fitzgerald. There’s a place near the end of the book where the main kid is picked up by some older gentleman. They are both going to an Ivy League homecoming football game, and they have this debate. The older gentleman is established. The kid is “jaded.”
Anyway, they have this discussion, and the kid is an idealist in a temporary way. He talks about his “restless generation” and things like that. And he says something like, “This is not a time for heroes because nobody will let that happen.” The book takes place in the 1920’s, which I thought was great because I supposed the same kind of conversation could happen in the Big Boy. It probably already did with our parents and grandparents. It was probably happening with us right now.
So, I said I thought the magazine was trying to make him a hero, but then later somebody might dig up something to make him seem like less than a person. And I didn’t know why because to me he is just a guy who writes songs that a lot of people like, and I thought that was enough for everyone involved. Maybe I’m wrong, but everyone at the table starting talking about it.
Sam blamed television. Patrick blamed government. Craig blamed the “corporate media.” Bob was in the bathroom.
I don’t know what it was, and I know we didn’t really accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things. It was like when Bill told me to “participate.” I went to the homecoming dance like I told you before, but this was much more fun. It was especially fun to think that people all over the world were having similar conversations in their equivalent of the Big Boy.