Memoirs of a Flower Child, George S Geisinger [books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗

with it. As I've said, it was an awful long time ago, but I still feel the same way about the TV.
I spent some time mopping floors, talking about walking on water in the woods. Some old orderly, who looked a little bit like my grandfather, said he'd like to see that. Could I show him just then? Sarcastic bastard.
Rosemary got discharged with the casts still on her hands. She had cut the nerves as well as the tendons in both wrists. She was in real trouble with the future of the long term use of her hands, but the doctor let her go home anyway.
Butch, the family man, never said much to me. He looked more “normal” than most of the folks there, like he'd really be a nice guy if he'd just relax and open up a little. The doctor let him go one day, but then, he was back a few days later. It's hard to say what goes on with people. His wife and two kids were real nice looking people. His little boy and little girl were real cute. Well, who knows what goes on with people? Butch seemed to be afraid to talk, as if the idea of someone knowing anything about him would be some terrible thing for him to endure, or some such thing as that.
There were the smoker-men who sat by the locked outside door in the dorm. I hung out with them, because it was better than sitting with that evil TV in the day room. It got me started smoking cigarettes, sitting with the smoker-men, which mother never approved of, but I smoked for 40 years, until after mother was gone, before I quit. I think those guys were alcoholics. I never knew I was an alcoholic, or quite what to do about it, until I finally found a way to quit drinking better than a decade later. They were all older than me, all the smoker-men. Actually, I was one of the youngest guys in the entire hospital, I think, at the age of 20. There was one other guy I saw from the hospital bus once. He had long hair like me. He spoke to me, but all he'd say was that he was crazy. I couldn't get into that. I knew I must be crazy, but I didn't feel like bouncing around about it.
There was the guy who took me out for rides in the country every afternoon. We'd get out in the van with some old men, and go around all the dirt roads outside of town, near the hospital. He was a nice guy, but all those old men were always shocked at the idea that I was a drug addict. I was really surprised at that. I thought everybody was a drug addict. Everybody I knew took drugs, except the other music majors at school. That was a big part of the problem, too. After a while, I'd just talk about drinking, to keep the old guys quiet while I sat up front and talked to Norman, the driver.
Then there was Clay.
I had ground parole before Clay, and had gone out off the ward with some totally disgusting, must have been retarded old character, or something, who had come to the outside door looking for someone to go out on the grounds with. I went with the guy once, just to be free to go outside and look around. Calling home from a phone booth in the administration building, I learned that my mysterious visitor had been my mother, so I at least figured that much out. I could hardly stop crying the whole way through the phone call.
Then Clay got ground parole. I had wanted to go out on the grounds with Butch from the get-go, because he was such a nice quiet guy, from what I could tell, but Butch was always too busy to bother with me. Clay was nothing like too busy to deal with me. In fact, he talked to me about a lot of his really serious stuff, like his philosophy and whatnot. He even dared question the existence of God. Amazing. So, we walked around a while when we went outside in the blustering cold, discussing everything about life, until we came to the gazebo.
“Come into the gazebo,” Clay said when we got there. “I want to do something very important here.” He was as intense as I'd been through this whole hospitalization, as if he were tripping as heavy as I was. He probably was tripping, too.
Clay said we should take a solemn oath together, that two together, making an oath, was more powerful than one person doing it alone. One of us should walk clockwise around the inside of the gazebo, the other counter-clockwise, and shake hands when we'd gone the full circle of the place. So we did, until the deep, philosophical ceremony was played out. We spoke the words Clay had in mind, whatever they were, did the circles and shook hands with a heart-and-soul hand shake, the way folks were doing then. A solemn oath to... what? I can't remember.
I remember all those things about that hospitalization, about the most violent onset of schizophrenia my longest-term therapist has ever heard of, in a lifetime of working as a psychotherapist. I remember all the details I've set down here and more that I'd rather forget than tell ever again, but I cannot remember the substance of that oath.
But I do think it was important what we said and did. I think God heard the two of us, Clay and me, and I think God eventually honored both of us in the process, too. I can't quote that oath here, or even come close to a quote, but I think it was a prayer between two very sick young men, to some kind of God.
I think God honored that prayer for Clay and me both, too.
I was 20 years old then, and God has delivered me from all my addictions since then, and gave me a life and environment I can live with by now, too. It took Him a long time to accomplish it, but the good Lord got the job done. All I really did was start cooperating after a while. That's all I did.
Also, in my prayers for Clay, since I never saw him again after I was discharged, I believe God has come to me and reassured me that Clay's OK too, just like I am.
Maybe, if you've had enough patience to read this much of this story, you can understand that I learned that I wanted, and desperately needed, in the way of God's help to get along in life, and that God has honored my prayers for help so thoroughly, I think I'll be alright from now on.
The good Lord has answered my prayers.

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Attorney at Law
Chapter 8

A stark figure reposed in silence in the sitting room. I don't remember what she was doing. Reading, having a smoke, looking out the window?
It was some forty years ago, before the laws had caught up with us smokers. Nonsmokers were still minding their own business. They had not yet demanded their place above the rights of smokers. They were still sucking it up.
We were enjoying our habit, publicly just as privately. Those were the days...
Most of the residents were still at the dining room eating breakfast.
I think she was ignoring life. She often said the first cigarette in the morning was very important.
Ignoring life was the one thing she most often said she was doing, if someone were to ask how she was. She was not trying to be funny, though she wanted others to think she was.
Maureen was miserable.
This young woman could have been on vacation from her profession, her business woman's two piece suits left behind in her suite in the city. She had her casual, modest clothing to wear daily. She seldom spoke, unless one were to ask her a question worth her breath. Don't anyone worry. She was just another quiet girl on vacation.
Everything was fine, where she was concerned. Let her be, please. She was only there to rest and relax. Her obvious, disquieted self-possession gave her away. The idea that she was in terrible trouble with her thinking was a perception just below the surface. But that perception was like a distant fire siren.
My heart of hearts had been awakened with feelings of alarm, sensing that disquieted soul. Maureen was in trouble, and neither she nor I knew how to get that kind of help, for ourselves or each other.
Maureen was neither sexy nor unattractive.
Her education, whatever it was, accentuated her intelligence. She understood things readily; spoke directly to the point, whenever there was a discussion involving her; she knew what was going on.
She was no glamor girl, but she could suspend a man's interest in her without trying to. That's where I caught myself in regards to Maureen. She was always cordial, even friendly. But she always defined her own space. I remember that about her, but I didn't understand it at the time.
In those days, I was so far “out there,” I really did not understand much.
Maureen never flirted with me. She never had to. She drew my attention according to my thirsting instinct. I think she did not want to have anything to do with men one way or another. It was not that men were her problem. They were irrelevant. Her distraction was something else.
We were in a hospital.
I was as miserable as she was, in that one, most expensive waiting room for meetings of the most disquieted hearts in the country. The only meetings happening in that place were intended to be helpful to folks like Maureen and me. But they were not helpful in the slightest.
How she reacted to those often scheduled sit down sessions, I've already said. She paid attention and replied intelligently at every turn.
On the other hand, my only reaction to those group meetings was that they were torturous to me. I couldn't stand them.
We were always waiting.
It seemed we were always talking as a group. We were all strangers to each other. I could never grasp how I was supposed to get help through someone ease's problem, or through revealing my own.
I was always lying down, waiting to die. My life was over. I told the doctor and the nursing staff my life was over. I was not 24 years old yet.
My plans had been thwarted.
The Bachelor's Degree, Teaching Certificate, and marriage I had set up for myself, had all fallen through.
Why were all those Professional jerks blowing sunshine into my ears all the time? They had no way of relating to my failure. They had all these totally successful shingles on their walls. So why didn't they ever get it? I blew it. My life was over. I couldn't even drive light delivery and keep the job going. What the heck was I supposed to do?
Someone must have told me I had to find a way