PAINLESS?
For those of you who just now logged on to the saga of the Savage Rootboy, I am an insane science fiction author who has finally achieved "normal" consciousness following years of hopeless torment. If this teaser has you curious, check out my main page. There you will discover most of my basic background, that I live in Invisible City, North Dakota, excelled as a student at the Invisible High and then moved to Nite City where my paranoia first developed. With no job and in danger of becoming homeless, I returned to the Invisible landscape. My Father was dying of Alzheimer's so I helped my Mother take care of him.
During the period treated here, my writing, as usual when I'm severely ill, became bizarre. This was the time of my first suicide attempt. I leaped from my upstairs bathroom window, shattering both feet. I spent the night in pain with an air-cast on my legs before they shipped my off to Electric City.
The best doctors are electric. And androids really do dream of electric sheep.
Once they had mended my bones, I was ensconced for two months in the Oldsters Home in a wheelchair, casts on both feet. And experiencing acute exacerbations to my hypersexualit y. These were due to a tease/flirt nurses' aide, tomboy Toni. She was a true Vadisystem, like so many of my girlfriends--aborted relationships--have been. Like the others she was tall, athletic & blond.
She wore a white shirt.
The white nearest green.
She aroused my male ardor until I confessed undying love, mad, deep; deeper than the day could ever know. Only to be told that she already had a boyfriend and they were getting married.
Mind wrought with savage dread, I turned her into the heroine of MINDSTORM. Or, as Philip K. Dick put it, "Never fuck with an author. It'll come back years later in print to haunt you.".
My first girlfriend, Jocellyn, a hypnotist collector, was black--another reason Muhammad Ali was Kool to me. Regretably I left her for VADIS. . Then there was Lucinda Ogdoad, a New Age astrologerette, followed by years of yearning. Finally, I scored and vorkled with a Native American slim-chick in the Invisible Hospital when the nurses were done passing meds.
THE RETURN OF THE DREAD MUTANT KILLER GLAUCOMA
Beginning in the Invisible High, diagnosed in Nite City, I developed glaucoma, had to undergo eye surgery my first year of college. It appeared again when I was living in North Dakota again. In a couple of months I nearly went totally blind, had to return to Nite City for an emergency surgery. Nobody in the Invisible landscape was qualified to perform surgery on something this rare, so we got the world-famous Dr. Tripathi to raise the blade and make the change.
The first surgery was done too late; I'm legally blind in that eye. Glaucoma is insidious. You sometimes don't notice your eyesight failing until it's too late. This is because the peripheral vision goes first. While I was there I went back to the U of Nite psych ward for a second opinion on my medication. I returned to the Hotel Gonzo after I freaked out in the hospital lobby. They were planning to only keep me a couple days, until my Mother and brother Fearless Taco advised me to stay for another opinion. They felt that Dr. URL wasn't helping me. The doctors diagnosed me as both a rapid-cycling manic-depressive and paranoid schizophrenic (schizoaffective disorder) along with high anxiety, and put me on Depakote (valproic acid) and a high dose of Xanax. It was this period when I wrote the rough draft of ARN on valproic acid, I don't know what they put in that acid, but it's the best acid I ever had!
SPICE CADETS OF THE GALAXY RANGERS
At this point, I became a Spice Cadet. It is a little known fact that nutmeg is a psychedelic drug; you make tea out of it or smoke it. There is nothing more vile or depraved than a gonzo in the throes of a nutmeg binge! At this point, I rewrote one of the stories Timothy "Nicotine Tim" Leary had sent me, and called it...
Not understanding the Dead, Grateful or otherwise, Mr. Sunrise (Secret Asian Man) complained about the theme of androgyny which runs thru stories like this, boy-chick becomes girly-girl where the beat goes on. He called it "homosexual sex changes at the end of your stories," but it's actually a mystical religions symbol: the union of opposites,, also known to the mystic as the two and the one, the Caducean intertwining of science and spirit.
THE SECRET ORIGIN OF DR. BABE
While I was still living at home with my Mother, caring yet controlling, I made the acquaintance of one Judy Snooty, first girly-girl-type friend for me since I'd scored and vorkled with Jocelynn, my black girlfriend who told me VD Fantasy was the head of the Ku Klux Klan; my first sexual experience since Lucinda Ogdoad;, since I moved out from my dreamhome/apartment which I'd shared with Alice and Debbie and Jane--Casanova..? Is that your name, or do you live there?
A little of both, actually.
Invisible City had been bereft of babes for me, until I met the elegant and enchanting Dr. Babe. This was my first exposure to the Perky Pam Layout. Pam is a psychiatric nurse who ran our Day Treatment program, Iron Claw House. Named after the Cat's Foot Hills and the Iron Claw Mountains south of Invisible City. Frequently Pam could be seen in the kitchen, spraying pots with Pam. And like VADIS, it was good Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. That's where all the Joe Clip money was coming from. You can't have Andy Roach without Joe Clip. They were roommates in my college dorm.
MY KUTE KOREAN KOMPANION
And then there was summer camp, that halcyon year, when I met Kolleen, my Kute Korean/Nice Norwegian Kompanion. The hot babe from Kauliflower was sitting on the ledge of rock and cement surrounding the lodge, eating a feast of ham and diverse and sundry incredible munchies which the Wako Kid couldn't consume 'cause of his antidepressant. MAO-inhibitors will do that to you. I know 'cause I tried it.
I wanted the summer romance of my dreams to continue unabated, having finally found a babe-type who was not a Vadisystem. If she had been one, I'm certain it would have meant the return of Joe Clip money.
I looked in my wallet--three crisp Friendlies, none of them with the smiling visage of Clip. Or even Captain Kirk, for that matter. I dismissed it with the thought, It's just another delusion. It's good to break the spell of the Destructive Intelligence System, no matter how vast and active it may be.
During that enchanted summer, we had a poetry workshop. Coming home, I wrote over 130 poems. A page of them was my first publication, in "Midnight Zoo," along with a story in "Aberations," was my first publication in print form; Indians Scattered on Dawn's Highway Bleeding had already been published in electronic format.
Soon enough, Perky Pam tooled the Magic Bus down Dawn's Highway back to Invisible City. The slim she-wanna... one day upon opening my mailbox, there was an envelope with her name on it. Kolleen. She came to visit, saw Willy and the Dope Boys, and promptly forgot about me. Until some great future where you can forget your past.
THE RETURN OF THE ROACH/CLIP HEAVEN
Half a decade ago, decades past my decade, the dope decade, and still without confirmation (I've got every sacrament behind me) from Hunter S. Thompson as to the existence of the tapes he made of me threatening to blow away the leaders of the Fireman's Friends, I moved out of my Mother's house. I settled down in Mabel's dump. The worst slum building in Invisible City, it was owned by this little old lady in her 90s. Her granddaughter Kim and her husband Sean were managers of the building. Because the place was so run-down, the only people she could find to rent from her were Narcoholics. Rusty Copper, Chain-Gang Willy, and Aladdin Zane used to always hang around there. And sucker me into trying some kind of weird drug or another. My drug of choice while at home had usually been nutmeg. Cheap, legal and ruthless. (At this point Ruth was running the Layout while Perky Pam went into case management.)
RETURN OF ACID DAWN WITH A VENGEANCE
New Year's Eve, Invisible, North Dakota, weather cold, Chain-Gang Willy showed up with some crystal cut with coke, started scraping out lines. Offers me five hits of acid, which I took all at once--in short, macho ingestion syndrome. Rusty Copper shows up, rolls a submarine and gives us all Bud tall boys. I was up all night hallucinating and wrote a story for Nicotine Tim called FEAR AND LOATHING IN LOS ANGELES. In which Andy Roach and Joe Clip drive all the way from Invisible City to LA to turn Timothy Leary on to the Power Pickle. John Allegro believes primitive Christianity was a sacred mushroom cult. Certainly if you eat enough mushrooms, you, too, will see a man rise from the dead.
And that goes double for the Power Pickle.
It was this period, more than anything, which broke me up with the first babe since Judy Snooty, Kolleen, my Kute Korean Kompanion; another of my typical long- distance relationships. I'd had half a zillion girly-girl type pen-pals, but never been to see them; never to touch Brenda's night-deep black body. Though I did score with Veronica Buckler, pretend-girlfriend of Deep-space Daddy-o, the ultimate sexist who shouldn't use his MS as an excuse. He does things like ask for Mother's milk from you? of waitresses. Hurry up and get divorced so you can marry me asked of strangers met at K-mart while we were Siouxsifying ourselves. Drink pink green yellow blue soda. Every time he went down to Bismarck with me, I'd experience something real atomic while Daddy-o was cut off. And then he'd try to insist that she liked him more than me.
Maybe if he got his mind out of the gutter.
However, when Kolleen reiterated and rode the Nova Express out to my place, she cut her visit short as she thought I was doing way too many drugs.... but when I laid me down she didn't pick up, her ideal beauty fading away.
And the quack I was seeing for meds did nothing but hit me with a Scooby Club.
Dr. URL eventually left town. We were stranded. Nobodaddy wants to come to Invisible City; the frigid winters, the hot summers. nothing here but the railroad and the Invisible College , a small nursing/teaching college. Which even Descartes couldn't see, though it was all around.
HIT OVER THE HEAD WITH A SCOOBY CLUB
A lot of Dr. URL's old patients went to GPs for their meds, and I went thru Dr. Carley Davison (the Invisible Hog's twin sister) for several more short-term hospitalizations. We at the Perky Pam Layout, however, were lucky (?) enough to ride the Magic Bus once a month to Electric City for med clinic with Dr. Hornby and Dr. Day.
I was unlucky enough to get stuck with Dr. Day. As famous as Dr. URL was for over-medicating his patients, Day under-medicated his. Frequently to the point where they'd wind up tenants at the Hotel Gonzo. And all he ever did was hit me over the head with a Scooby Club, a therapy which failed every time I tried it; eventually he conned me into Treatment. I walked out after three days. Finally, I quit drugz on my own by using my "pills" as a "Higher Power," the interactions they caused as a reason for cutting them out of my system.
Under the drive of Day, I'd go to the meetings, they'd try to get me into Treatment, the Valhalla of Scoobydom for my "pill habit", I'd express to him my dissatisfaction over being pressured to quit my "pills," and all he ever did was keep on pushing this AA crap. I went to see him one time after spending the entire night on a nutmeg binge and told him I was Scoobifying myself; that I had enrolled myself in the Invisible Narcoholics Numinous.
And he couldn't even tell I was thoroughly descoobied on spice- ice-nice.
You'd think if I were a naughty little boy, he could at least have given me a slap on the wrist, but it would've been more reassuring that he knew what he was doing if he could at least tell when I was stoned. But it was because of him I wound up in the spin-dizzy.
THE TEMPEST OF ARTEMIS
Met Jungle Jill in a bar in Electric City, sitting these drinking Cherry Cola, or was it Scooby-Dew? And how far from Shangri-la is this, and could it happen to me? Another androgynous one like tomboy Toni? The stigmata of the Vadisystem: tall, large breasts, long blond hair.
Jill called herself The Tempest of Artemis, Lustrous Lady of a Sacred World, as when a Jung lass she'd read something of Artemis in Plato, her father being a philosophy professor. One thing we shared was an ideal beauty, but ideal love flied away, night, and then there was Trish.
MS. DISH IN A HELLUVA LOTTA LOVE
It was at Tournaments that we met. Or rather, were reunited. We'd met once before in the Electric Bobo Boat, myself sailing on a suicide binge; jumped from a window, busted both my feet.
I really only have two memories from this particular Mindstorm: at one point, speaking of the cartoon Ghost busters, "It's one of the few cartoons that's better than the movie," and in Diet Group (lotsa groovy groups in mental hospitals), "Is cheese one of the basic food groups? They always say, 'Don't forget the cheese.'"
At this point, she was transferred to the State Hospital. I didn't see her again until several years later, at Tournaments. Tournaments are these competitions between different Mental Health Centers in pool, ping-pong, cribbage, checkers, chess, even foosball.
My participation there has been, a couple of times, real atomic. I placed Second in cribbage two different years. However, I don't play pool--can't focus on the ball, stick, and hole simultaneously because of partial-blindness from the glaucoma. Foosball, ditto. My chess is less than auspicious, as well as my checkers.
But the best part of the Electric trip is the dance. The cha- cha until dawn's portals spill violet over the Electric landscape. Much like Invisible City.
So, I ran into Trish once more, and she-wanna. A couple weeks after Tournaments a few years ago, she phoned me over the electronic wire, which initiated a long-distance relationship, cyber-sex without computers. A little phone sex, though. And on all her visits, she was real atomic. A girly-girl and not a transvestite tomboy like Jill.
FROM HELENA TO INVISIBLE IN ONE DAY
Making love to her was never second best...
After three or four visits to see her, and the Deluxe and Delightful Ms. Dish coming to visit me for Christmas, I finally proposed marriage. It was decided that she should become an Invisible resident; Mother was to fix up the basement room for her in the small house I rent. She slept on the couch until my brother and the contractors transformed the place.
The first couple of months were Paradise, more of a Valhalla than anything of which the Scooby Religion is capable.
IT GREW HOTTER, THAT'S HOW IT ENDED.
Summer came; welcome to the Kamp: Shari and Sharon, the Staff at Iron Claw House took a group of half a dozen of the Invisible consumers to the G ates of the Mountains. This is a real atomic piece of Montana scenery, discovered by Lewis and Clark. From a boat sailing down the lake, it looks like there's no exit, then when you move further along, it divides.
I woke up the final day we were slated to be there, totally blind in my good eye--an eye which I've nonetheless lost a third of my vision; I'm legally blind in the other one. The problem turned out to be iritis, an inflammation of the iris. Besides the drops, my doctor injected me in the eyelid with something to relieve the inflammation.
But that caused the cataract to worsen.
CLOAK OF NIGHT, YOU KNOW IT'S UNION MAID
With that my Mother became frenzied, frantic, frenetic. As though manic herself, she took it upon her to "help" me by making all sorts of calls to doctors, nurses, hospitals. Babying me. She's always been over-protective of me.
One of the doctors she tried calling was my old surgeon, glaucoma researcher Dr. Tripathi. She called a number given her by someone in Nite City, couldn't get thru. Finally, my older brother, Joe, found him on the web. It was on a Sunday; Trish and I over for Sunday dinner. In addition to the numbers she already had, they gave out one extra, a hospital ER number. But she refused to let me call the number from her phone, saying, That's an emergency number only for people in South Carolina, where you can come in the same day. I finally made the call from my home, after arguing with her all day. Once the call made it thru, she changed her mind, saying This is an answer to our prayers!
However, I was not fated to have another surgery from the man. There was now a glaucoma specialist in Electric City, and as long as there was someone in-state who could handle it, Medicaid would not pay for an out-of-state trip. My brother Dave gave me a ride down to Electric City in a vehicle that is in too new a vintage to be called a Bat-mobile, a term I use in spite of the Marvelous Comix lawyers, as it is simply a slang word meaning "used car," and you cannot trademark slang.
The first time I went to see Dr. Boes (pronounced "Bays") was for a consultation. Trish went with me; we rode the bus to the central city in the Invisible landscape. We ended up blowing most of our buckadingdongs for brecchie, and split a plate of biscuits with sausage gravy.
At this time, though, the cataract in turn caused the old glaucoma surgery to fail. My pressures went sky-hi all over again. But the surgery had to be delayed just a little bit longer, as I developed an infection after visiting the hot springs at Sleeping Buffalo. Entering the water was something I knew I shouldn't do, but Karen At-the-Center kept getting pushy about it.
At last, with the infection cleared up, my brother, who was in- between jobs at the time, drove me to the City of Electric Lights; neon tracers, the automobiles. And we moved with inflexible authority down Dawn's Highway with an appointment with the knife.
He raised the blade, he made the change, he rearranged me so I wouldn't lose anymore eyesight. Only nanotechnology can resurrect the nerve-tissue damage, but that is 21st Century technology; probably will be perfected a decade after my death. Maybe later, if I get into the suicide thing again. Though right now, the Source is with me.
Beware the dark side of the Source!
WHO CAN RESURRECT A DYING RELATIONSHIP?
Unfortunately, as soon as the eye problems developed, my relationship deteriorated. Eventually, after one month short of a year living together. we separated. It was only at camp the next summer that we were reunited, truly, madly, deeply: she sang of Savage Gardens on karaoke, and we danced a slow dance to a pop art phenomenon, finally free of VADIS: the sensual satellite no longer beamed thoughts into my brain from orbit.
This is a story in progress...
CONTINUED NEXT MONTH
To be continued...