CHAPTER II THE DIARIES OF AN INSANE SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR # ISOLATION IS A LONG TIME & LONELY I was sitting in the lounge of the Hotel Gonzo, the place where I'd finally been cast away like an Invisible Gilligan, after going to the University of Night City, only to write Betsy Rogers a suicide note--& the Ladytron had turned me over to the Dream Police. Too bad. Her blow jobs were real atomic. O, well...at least I didn't have to put up w/ little Loathsome Lonnie & Normal Bean (who wasn't), the Art Fairy: the Druggie wanted to be the Great Fantasy Artist, but the only place he was a great artist was in his fantasies. & so it goes.... Granny sat in the rocking chair--I guess today they'd finally gotten her out of her wheelchair: She was a schizophrenic hypochondriac, she'd tell the nurses that she couldn't walk, her legs were paralyzed, then when she thought nobody was looking would walk to the pop machine for a Mr Fruity, & return to her chair & complain that "they don't build hospitals the way they used to." "So the Dreamers busted you. What for?" a fat Mexican dude asked me. He seemed a haunted man, a living cadaver--the world was an eater of corpses; it had already eaten him. "Wrote some chick a suicide note," I replied. "What'd you do?" He replied: "I tried to kill myself." He raised his arm. It was scarred, furrowed as though by some great plow, showing needle tracks. "I shot up w/ Drano. Missed the vein. They're giving me shock therapy...curare so I won't jerk all over the place, then they turn up the voltage gradually...then zotz! It's like there's this great white light in my brain & I have a headache for a week. Name's Juan. Who're you?" I extended my hand. "I am the Savage Id." "Seems like a good place for the Id. We've got the Ego in here, too. In fact, I think he's your roommate....Hey, Ego, come here & meet the Id!~ This totally burned-out carcass who looked like a drug dealer from Proxima Centaurii walked over & said, "I'm Brain Ego, musician: Guitar, synthesizer, MIDI....I'm a U-boat Captain; I'm always torpedoed...." "A famous Timothy Leary quotation," I said. Ego said, "Actually, I think it's 1 of Dani Rowe's." I said, "How'd you get in here? You don't seem completely weird like some of the creep-os in this place. & I know creep-o!" "I was stoned, not insane: I dropped a hit of angel dust, took off all my clothes, & ran around the block naked....It's like once you get into 1 of these places you can't get out...!" So this cute little she-bop comes around to pass out the inevitable pills. "What is this stuff?" I asked as she approached w/ dread hypodermic. Psychokillers scream for more! 21st Century Schizoid Man. "Schiz-vaccine," she replied sweetly, like a broken-hearted Melanie. "You've apparently been delusional...you think the mindstorms are caused by psionic weapons from space, actually they are bio-psych weapons from Mare Tranquilium, fired off by Hermann B Saklas, dictator of the moon. The lunar rebels have created a schiz-virus which affects everyone, not just those w/ the genetics for schizophrenia: Saklas is no cosmic Demiurge but the Dictator of the rebel planets." I took my pills--I knew I had to...if I refused, the van Hohenheim Act gave them the power to tie me down & shoot me up. The Dream Police follow me into bed.... The cute blond said her name was Rachel. Rachel Ahura. Given the right time, the right place, boy meets girl where the beat goes on...I think I could've like her, even loved her.... Death-seed. Blind god's greed. 21st Century Schizoid Man! # AN IRON MAIDEN PASSING PILLS ...approached, bearing a clear plastic cupful of mental medication. I wanted to perform the von Hohenheim Act w/ her, but they tie you down & inject you if you try that. Rachel, the nurse, was fantastic, gorgeous: She was so chic; I lost myself in her sheer nylons; the wind whispered outside the Hotel Gonzo like a broken-hearted melody. I contemplated the grim realities of suicide. Indeed, there were times when I had to kill myself for love as whenever I die a batwinged demon princess from the planet Lucifer drops from the skies & gives me a blow job & I rise from the dead--psychotic dreams torn straight from the heart of the Savage Id. I was contemplating resurrection w/ Rachel & even life w/ her, perhaps a shared apartment, a heartache of a dreamhome, when there was a tap on my shoulder: I turned, looked: It was the avenging Fritz Boyardee. W/ Betsy Rogers instead of his weadly deapon, (sic) the Boyardee doorknob. Schmidt-faced on Animal Beer, he'd pulse-pounded me the night of my suicide attempt. Betsy started to say nicely, "We heard y'all was on the psych ward & we wanted to..." when I became a violent, rampaging Id. I mean, rampaging in terms of violence, force, drive: In the Real World (whatever that is) I was still just a 5'2" comic book nerd who weighed 165 lbs. Yet even in his secret identity as W.C.Leadbeater the wrath of the Id was terrible to behold: I charged into Betsy like some mad rhinoceros, like 1 of the muggerapists they put fences around Virgin Village to protect the Virgins from. I was intent on total, murderous destruction. I punched Boyardee in the gut like some vengeful Reality, shouting, "I'm going to fry your ass for steakburgers!" Fritz & Betsy recoiled even as the hall was filled w/ Dreams. Fairies in boots assailed me; Iron Maidens attacked me w/ vicious blows. It was truly the violence of the Id...but I still wasn't able to change into Slime-thing as dangerous, hideous, in mad, wanton destruction they tackled me, subdued me, dragged me down the hall. They shouted, "Boy Howdy, we gonna fry your ass for steakburgers!" Some Id I was. I couldn't even beat off the avenging Boyardee. I couldn't beat off the avenging Dreams. It was like being hit by the entire front end of the Green Bay Packers....Id struggled futiley w/ the violence of 8 Dreams, armed w/ pulse-pounders, jackboot sprayers....I was crushed by vorkling fury, then lifted bodily....The world spun dizzily; I passed vistas of tile & glo-tubes: The ceilings seen from upside down & being carried. Then I was in a little rat-hole: The Isolation room. The rest of the Hotel Gonzo was clean & well-lighted; this place was dim, murky, lit only by a single bare bulb. There was a bed in the center of it. The orderlies tied me to the bed; the door slammed behind them. Mysticism is the flight of the alone to the Alone; I was truly Alone.... # THE GREAT DICTATOR I was the world's greatest living science fiction author & better than the dead 1s. I was the world's greatest living unpublished science fiction author & better than the dead 1s. Harley Davison, author of I Am All Mouth & I Must Scream, was the world's greatest living published science fiction author, but he hadn't written many stories lately because he'd had his brains surgically removed from his bodanon & transplanted into the Invisible Hog, an advanced attack motorcycle w/ enough armament to sink a battleship. The nurses found out in no time that I was an obsessive-compulsive about writing the cosmic comic books when I started holing up in my room w/ typewriter fever, dreadful disease--I just had to get Stan Gleason to look at some of my scripts for the Marvelous Comics. Who should know better how to write the adventures of the rollicking Rootboy than the Savage Id? So they took my PC away from me during Activities. Like, I actually had to go to Shop & make reptiles out of clay; serpentine sleekness was always my weakness so I did sculptures of snake-ladies. & nobodaddy would listen to me explain what a pleiotropic meme was: meme = gene-analog; pleiotropic = multi-functioned; so a pleiotropic meme is a gene/mind/society system which stacks multiple symbols on the same holographic plate: Like the Slime-thing. The reptile was a phallus at the Freudian level, a fetus at the Rankian level, an archetype of Chaos at the Jungian level. Like, I had gotten an A+ in Richard Roberts' course in "Genes, Memes, & Logoi", but talk above a psychiatrist's head & it's schizophrenic language! So I had to sit thru ridicle-wurst crafts projects & I hated it. But the stupid nurses didn't realize that there was such a thing as paper; I picked up a notebook at the gift shop & holed up in my room to write the cosmicomics anyway. I wrote tales of lust torn straight from the heart of the Savage Id; I wrote of Rachel's transmutation into Achamoth, the white death-angel whose blow jobs resurrected supervillains. The eeeeeeevil angel-woman had multiple incarnations; she was Sophie, she was the Resurrectuarant Betsy--now she had become a nurse. The sinister Ahura would've made a good Big Nurse in somebodaddy else's looney bin book except she was little. Then w/o my realizing it this great & monstrous evil who kept her wings full of eyes hidden w/ a Vulcan cloaking device (in other words, Rachel) was standing at the threshold w/ a Drunken Fuhrer. "Lead, you have a new roommate." A hawk-nosed man. A trim moustache. "Ja. Mit mine Drive soon ve vill be cruisin' der inter- stellar depths in der chiant spaceships, undt der enemy iss Amerika! Who can fight alone against der monster Amerika?" He was babbling incoherently. Yet it all made sense: Like me, he had been granted a vision into the anti-Universe; he knew what Erich von Heisselman, Jr, was up to: Only Heisselman, being a scientific genius w/ a whole laboratory full of equipment, was able to create a perpetual motion machine while Blade merely made a Tinkertoy mockery of the Platonic ideal. The operation of the perpetual motion machine was simple, really: The revolution turned a generator which powered a Drive for drawing negative entropy out of the future so the thing would actually acquire energy. Blade kept trying to build his Tinkertoy perpetual motion machine no matter how futile the quest may have seemed. & the little magnetic motors would spin the wheels for hours on end, then the thing would grind to a halt & Blade would curse, build a new motor; set the tumblers of the Cosmic Circus turning once more. Lest the Mirror stop turning: I saw crystal cities in the Mirror, & it was my brain which had crystallized. Why did they call my brother Taco Brains when I was the 1 who ended up in the Bobo Boat? The None & the One: I was turning into God, seeing invisible landscapes where chaotically mercurial machine elves made toys out of the air w/ their voices; I knew it was my Destiny to be a Dyer; & it is the Dying which makes the One Two. Where there are Three gods, they are gods; where there are Two Gods or One God, I am w/ him....I studied obscure Scriptures in the hopes that Knowledge would save me--I was ignorant; I was drunk but not w/ wine. The Drunken Fuhrer had his dream; I had mine: Rachel: 1 evening while she was passing pills I tried to pick her up. Foul incarnation of a Death God though she may have been. "I want to be friends." Cuz it makes me feel like I'm a man when I put a trank into my brain, & I tell you things ain't quite the same, & I guess but I just don't know.... Then the amazing transmutation changed her the way Lead is changed into God (when he is insane): She became Achamoth, the Divine Whore whose blow jobs resurrect supervillains (how else do you think they always escape the Good Guys at the end?) & whose very fornication would bring permanent, total Death to the Savage Id. It would be a victory for Ego, & I also knew that I couldn't count on Superego now....I was fighting, alone against a False Day. & now this angel-whore, the sultry she-bop of perfection, was approaching w/ wings aflutter & hands on her hips, offering to blow my woody. I had X-ray vision. As she passed me my meds I could trace the delicate outline of each aureole like blossoms, semen eyes in her nipples.... I stared at her w/ the horror any Catholic feels at fornication. Catholicism...how much sense did the religion I had grown up w/ make in this mad era? I saw God. God was the Source, like Gravity pulling all things toward the end of time when all the religions would converge.... I didn't reply to Rachel. Because she was actually a superbeing from another galaxy.... Triumphantly, she said, "See? You're put off already!" "...undt so ve see dot der perpetual motion machine vill bring about der end of der Verld! Thru my entelechy which is already being generated even as ve speak..." The Mad Dr said as he returned to the room, apparently not noticing that his perpetual-motion machine had died in entropy again. "Oh, can the phony German accent, Blade, & quit playing w/ your Tinkertoy," I said, swallowing the reality pills & not feeling much saner for it. "We all know you're actually from New Jersey, anyway." Achamoth had disappeared in smoke like a psychedlic warlord while Blade smashed up his Tinkertoy shouting, "Shit! She isn't going to smart off to me when the 4th Reich conquers the world! Like, dig this: I am an agent of Satan; I work galactic evil for the interstellar overlord. Why does every electron have the same mass & charge? Because it's the same electron!" "I'm the science fiction writer here," I said. "I think I'm going to wander down to the lounge & see what's cooking. Maybe I can pick up a slimchick or something...." "Der nurses here ge-von't ge-fucken! Dey all schwore an oath of virginity!" Blade threw a Tinkertoy monstrosity at me & I wondered, in these strange days, what had ever happened to simple insanity? Like the cosmic comic books. I used to have 10,000,000 comic books in my room. But that was before I learned that I could rise from the dead.... # EVER SINCE HE WAS A YOUNG LAD HE WANTED TO KILL JEWS I was in some dark, forbidding place: Abaddon, Tartoros, Hades. Pits receded 1 inside another; souls were tortured there.... Inside the pits were mammoth ovens.... This was no cosmic Hell, no supernatural afterlife where the dead tarried for their sins: This was an earthly Hell, a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Jews were burned there, flesh seared, bones becoming white as salt, ashen powder--for killing Christ? Wasn't this a greater suffering than Christ had ever endured? Above it all presided a Drunken Fuhrer: He laughed like a broken tree w/ the wind sighing thru its branches, like a hollow thing that had no center. In the east the sun was rising--blue sunrise over grey lagoons. I screamed. The Primal Scream of the Id. I leaped out of bed, sending the covers sprawling--I launched myself at Fuhrer as he lay snoring, leaping howling across the distance which separated our beds. I was a primordial fury, a bestial rage: I was the Slime-thing. The reptilian monster had replaced the nerd science fiction writer I'd been all this time. Schiz-vaccine? It was a dismal failure as the transmutation of Lead into Id continued.... Tentacles of acid slime lashed out at the reincarnated Fuhrer. My pseudopods quivered as I danced like Muhammad-boxer, striking out w/ every step, horny beak darting to snap away chunks of quivering flesh--had he cared when he had ripped apart the bodies of pregnant Jewish mothers & their children? & whatever knows fear & loathing burns at the Slime-thing's touch!!! The sprinkler system turned on at the same time as the alarms; the Drunken Fuhrer went up in a fiery conflagration at my acid touch. Blade broke from the clench of my powerful sucking tentacles. Laughing evilly, he shouted, "Welcome to the Camp; I guess you all know why you're here!" I circled, waving my quivering, rubbery saurian arms. I was going to fucking kill the bastard. Suddenly the room was invaded by Achamoth. The evil power who served the Dark Side of the Source. She carried the inevitable hypodermic full of haldol--it's my wife & it's my life. The last thing I saw was the cold, sinister light of the Fuhrer's eyes--& he was not drunk, nor was there insanity there. W/ total sobriety he butchered his victims.... I struggled futiley, but the instant the needle bit my flesh I was no longer a savage slime monster; I was just another fat little nerd struggling w/ a Nova bent on bondage. The cold light I had seen in Blade's eyes burned ever stronger as sleep, numbing cold from the tranks, enfolded me: a nightmare sleep, the sleep of a poisoned mind: I had encountered a dark & perverse force from dark dimensions beyond even the farthest star. # AFTERMATH Rachel stared me down w/ cold eyes. I dreamed of Achamoth & it was only a pretty nurse. I had never seen Rachel look so stern--or so troubled. Blade had had to go to the ER for treatment for his burns--were they finally going to believe my story? That I actually did change into a drooling, slavering reptile whose touch could burn? (But only those who feared & loathed him.) Lightning flared in Rachel's sapphire eyes; distant storm clouds moved. "Where'd you get the matches?" "What matches? I burned him w/ my acid slime!" She whirled in her little swivel chair, turned to face the Mad Fuhrer. His arms were bandaged; he seemed to be in a good deal of pain. Like the pain he'd caused from Aushchwitz down to Dachau. "Kenny...why were the 2 of you fighting? Who started it?" Hitler gestured as though he were ordering Stormtroopers to confrontation. "He did. He jumped out of bed & attacked me for no reason. I am the reincarnation of Hitler; it is mine to create the 4th Reich upon an Earth where the Jew will at last perish from Time...for the sin of killing Christ!" I spat on him, screaming, "You're insane! You hate Jews--you fucking idiot--your own grandmother was Jewish! I hate you, you cocksucker; I'm going to kill you, you bastard; I'm going to..." I looked into Rachel's angel eyes; they were like a hurricane--there was calm at the center. "You were dreaming, Lead! You had a dream about how Blade was Hitler--is your delusion that you're a swamp creature any more strange than his idea that he is Hitler? There's nothing to either of your fantasies! You're roommates; you're going to have to learn to live w/ each other...." "Then how do you explain this?" I asked. I pulled back Ken's sleeve. There were sucker marks all along his arms. "So I'm not a reptile? Then what about these marks? Not burn marks--round, smooth, sucker marks! Tonight I was transformed back into the bestial Slime-thing!" "My Drive will protect me," Blade gibbered, insane--even had he been attacked by a bestial Yog-Soggoth the staff wasn't going to get much out of him. "Shut up, Ken. I have to think," Rachel said, brows furrowing. She bit the end off her pencil. "So you're a Jungian sociobiologist," she said, trying to erase something & finding the rubber absent. "The wounds are probably self-inflicted; 1 of you probably ripped off a pack of matches.... "It's late & I gotta go home pretty soon. Go back to your room; get some sleep--& try not to fight....If we can't iron things out between you, okay, I'll put in for a room switch. "& Lead...? If you have any more dreams, for chrissakes tell it to the staff, don't take it out on your roommate. Okay?" I said nothing. Schizophrenia, be the death of me! Yet the sucker marks were still there, etched into the skin of the Prophet of Evil. There was no so-called "rational" explanation. Rachel stood, took me by the arm--the friendliest she had ever been to me--as she guided me thru empty corridors, the yellow nearest white, whispered, "I'm on your side. This gonzo gives me the creeps: I'm Jewish, you know. I sure wouldn't want to be living w/ Hitler. Even if it is a paranoid delusion." Then we were back at the room. I slid between burned sheets, tried to sleep, caught snatches of troubled dreams: the loathsome Id in perpetual danger from strange creatures from outer space; the Evil Prophet merely fiddled w/ his invention. "Shit, Blade, will you turn out the light & go to sleep? It's bad enough having to live w/ a mass murderer, but on top of it all you keep me awake all night playing w/ that goddamn Tinkertoy contraption of yours!" "Iss der vast entelechy from der fvuture," Blade whispered, a gruesome light shining in his eyes. "My Drive." # YOU'RE EVERY DREAM THAT I DREAM It was a typical day at the Hotel Gonzo. Barbara Woodchuck was going, blivet, blivet, blivet, & making spastic gestures w/ her hands; she talked to herself--mostly, whispered. So they had her ODed on haldol & muscle relaxants & now the gestures & the little half-whispered words were still there, only stretched out--like introducing a damping factor into a resonating system. Steve Milton was wandering around w/ an IV in his arm because God was telling him not to eat; but then, God was his Father & I knew God was a Mother. He had a hardcore Freudian problem: His father was this overbearing religious type who beat the crap out of his 18-year old son, even though Steve was about twice the size of the dude. His shrink was convinced that his God-image was a father-figure; whereas actually there was a lot of Jungian stuff floating around in there, too: The black Steve was the only slave; everyone else was his Master, sort of a Baptist gnosis. His God needed Death. & though many of the ladies were total nubiles all of the patients were strictly forbidden to screw except they gave up on convincing Anne-Margaret w/ the big tits; she was sitting in everyone's lap & French kissing them until this tall dude walks around the corner, "Oh, have you met my husband yet...." "Hi." A blond sat next to me; Penthouse perfection. I was especially attracted by her boobs. "Hi yourself. You a new patient or what? You want to learn the routine? Okay, 7:00 each morning, it's into the showers; Blade can fill you in on that...." She shook her pretty hair. "I'm not a patient; I'm a student nurse. Name's Laura. Laura Gallahan. I've got to spend a couple hours in the Bobo...I mean, in a mental hospital interviewing the patients. I've read your chart--you think you're a comic book character & you wrote a suicide note to a girl....Are you aware that the schiz-krieg is actually due to a virus from the rebel planets?" "It seems like 1 of the nurses explained that to me...a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." She said sweetly, so funky there in her filmy white shirt & acid-washed jeans, "We can talk about anything you want, but it's going to be taped in the interview room." In the little conference room the cameras zoomed in & after a few minutes of dumb questions, What is the Id, anyway? I asked her, "Tell me...if you hadn't met me in the Hotel Gonzo, & if you weren't just being nice as part of a class project--would you go out w/ me?" "I couldn't, this is strictly a professional relationship." Suddenly all her Penthouse perfection turned into a dumb blond. I happen to like smart blonds. I said perhaps a little too sarcastically, "If you want to be a professional, get yourself some purple hot pants & put a red light in your window & charge $20 for a blow job!" All at once I was a ravening, gibbering monstrosity. The phallic Id assumed the awesome form of a serpent-priest; the virgin herself was the sacrifice....& I didn't even need 4 hits of blotto acid to see this way, see all things perfect. "Help!!!! Someone help!!! He's trying to rape me!!" she screamed. But such is the violence of the Id.... The return of the Dream Police.... I was assailed by 10 Dreams at once; there was a fantastic violence, a brutality, a ferocity.... The needle bit into warty reptilian flesh. It's my wife & it's my wife: Haldol, be the death of me! When I came to I was in Isolation. W/o even a demon to comfort me. Though I would've settled for the angel Achamoth; even death at the hand of VADIS would be better than this hell, this heat/night of busted air-conditioning. I looked in a Mirror & saw a great, hungering darkness: & if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness itself? # HOW I ROSE FROM THE DEAD IN MY SPARE TIME & YOU CAN, TOO! "Where're we going for Group Trip this week?" some ravishing blond asked Nikki, 1 of the nurses; a black girl--though I was still in love w/ Nikki I was starting to feel new desires: I loved Rachel, too. It was a classic love triangle, the Two were backbiting or at least teasing each other greatly now--& both of them were teasing me. I liked it. But how long was it going to last? "The Roxy," Nikki answered the girl's question sprightly; said, "We're going to see The Return of the Slime-thing...I know Lead's going to be excited; he's every issue of Slime-thing Comics ever written!" "Yeah, except for the 1s I missed while I was in the stupid fucking Hotel Gonzo." I kept wishing that she'd go back to being a demon vampire-princess from another planet. She said, "Oh, but Lead--you've improved so much since you came in here! You used to think you were a Slime-thing...." "& I still think I'm a Slime-thing!" The schiz-vaccine seemed to be having no effect--although I now knew that my insanity was due to a deadly space-virus the cosmicomic kept intruding. Ah, the problems of being a 21st Century Schizoid Man. The boarders at the Hotel Gonzo filed into the Magic Bus. As we tripped down Ocean Drive I listened to "The Haldol Blues" on my Walkman. A good swamp monster never goes anywhere w/o his Walkman. # THE HALDOL BLUES [Lou Reed/W.C.Leadbeater] Cuz when the tranks begin to flow then I really don't care anymore about all the politicians making busy sounds & all the dead bodies piled up in mounds.... Ah, when the haldol is in my blood & the blood is in my head, then thank God I'm good as dead...& I guess I just don't know.... Haldol, be the death of me! # We arrived at the theater. It was obvious who we were, what we were doing there; you can't mistake a group-trip from a mental hospital, no matter how they try to hide the obvious....Big Nurse chowed down on the incredible munchies as the opening credits rolled by. The mad scientist in the wilds of the Okifinokee swamps, perfecting his formula...a fearful explosion...the man transmuted! The awesome reptilian-insectoidal murk creature lives! Instantly I became a gibbering, slobbering, loathsome creature of insectoid, saurian, octopussy form. I slithered toward the exit as fast as my pseudopods could carry me. All around me, people feared me, loathed me. & whatever knows fear & loathing burns at the Slime-thing's touch!!!! A mighty conflagration ate the theater. Meanwhile, the return of the mighty Rootboy brought confrontation between the slime monster & the Dreams, the last defenders of sanity in a world gone mad. Nikki twisted her decoder ring & was changed into a black, batwinged alien: Nekbael came to me aid. Suddenly her batwings were unleashed from her disguise; w/ fang & nail she fought off the oncoming Gestapo of the Neurotransmitter. Nekbael whispered, "Quickly. While they are all distracted." Yet the Thorazine Police were armed & dangerous. I fell to a stray bullet. & whenever I die a batwinged demon princess from the planet Lucifer drops from the skies & gives me a blow job & I rise from the dead!!!!! I was reincarnated in some dark alleyway, amidst garbage & shadows measureless to man. I didn't know how I had gotten there; for awhile I didn't even know who I was--but I was free. & freedom tastes of reality! (Whatever that is.) # End of file Press RIGHT ARROW (#6 key) of the numeric keypad to load the next file.