Ms. Digby says: “Most people never write anything anymore. The act of writing is an exotic occupation. The act of writing one’s opinions on paper and sending them out for publication is even more exotic. It’s an occasion. I try to honor that occasion. I try not to publish just the editorial bread-and-butter letters one sees in most magazine columns. A fellow SIS editor, Betty Berry, made me realize that just being flippant worked for some correspondents—for others, it was necessary to have a heart.
“In the main, I get two types of ‘crazy’ letters. I get the ordinary person who sounds crazy, is fed up, and trying to make an outrageous, sarcastic point, and I get really disturbed or obsessed crazy individuals who are trying to sound ordinary, rational.
“I see my column as a kind of demilitarized zone where these two impulses—the desire of the sane to go crazy and the desire of the crazy to be sane—converge.”
Editor Digby claims that in the case of the Brookheart resident (whose letter would fall into the latter category), something “leaped out at her” from between the lines; she “identified” with the patient’s heroic attempt to communicate in her own “language.” Then she met with the patient and was convinced. “Because SIS is a feminist magazine, we tend to attract more than the usual crowd of cranks and paranoiacs. But we also hear the legitimate voices of extremity, people pushed beyond the limit.
“I’ve learned to dive off the deep end into the subconscious of the Sex War. I’ve learned to scuba among predictable rhetorical undersea plant life and discover the authentic pearl, the real valuable produced by sexual friction. The letter from the Brookheart patient was a case in point.”
The article ended by my “chirping” (as the reporter put it), “I’m crazy too!” and waving my rabbit ears.
This last made me feel like retching—which meant that my mother would be very proud. (Until she checked out the News, I recalled suddenly.) I felt dazed.
“Come on, Digby,” said Page, “let’s get you back in the ring.”
The phone on my desk was ringing nonstop. Everybody from the mayor’s office to “New York at Five” wanted to talk to me. Suddenly I was a weird kind of celebrity. The only two people I hadn’t heard from were The Watcher and Bob Hargill—would he send a lawyer?
Holly was beside herself with joy. She hugged me again and again. “Willis, you’ve given SIS a vision! You’ve pointed out a new direction for us!” She paused and lowered her voice. “Willis. Marge showed me a photo in the News today with somebody who looks like you in the background of that shot of Bob Hargill. Is it you?”
Minnie, with her infallible sense of timing, galumphed up, flushed with importance. “It’s PAPARAZZI magazine on the phone! They want to interview you for their next issue. They want to interview you in your apartment! You’re famous, Willis! I told them tomorrow afternoon is okay, okay?? God, Willis, PAPARAZZI magazine!!” She grabbed my arms and shook me up and down. “Names!” she cried. “Big names!”
Holly gave her an icy look, took her arm, and escorted her back to her phones.
I flipped through the mail. There was a billet-doux from Dino, another hand-delivered item.
Hey Digby!
I see here in the News they done an article on you. What next? They gonna do one on Ideeya Mean? Hey your not a bad-lookin broad Digby. No tits but see if you can get a pair of big sillycone casabas made and I might give you a turn! By the way, its still hard!!!
Yours truly,
THE HUMAN POKER
(A.K.A. Dino)
I hadn’t lost Holly. She sat down at my desk.
“What were you doing in that photo with Hargill, Willis?”
“I was out with W.I.T.C.H.,” I said. “If you want to know more, go ask Lupé. Maybe she’ll tell you. I’m not at liberty to say anything further, unfortunately.”
“What if Hargill calls up? Or his legal people? Can you at least tell me why there was a gun?”
I sighed. “No, I can’t. If I could, though, Holl, I really would.”
I grubbed around inside my mailbags. She sat staring at me for a while, then got up and walked away.
The phone rang. It was Terence. “Come over tonight. After the show I’ll make a fire and we can have a late dinner and an early bed. I promise I will ask no questions about what I’ve seen in the papers today.”
Fourteen
DEAR WJD,
As you know from my previous letters, I am OTRO CORPUS, electronic alien being. Most recently I have inhabited a small plastic tub of oleomargarine and Howard Cosell, to determine the broad parameters of your protoplasmic entities. Now I am devoting myself to research, which includes inhabiting world leaders.
I have tried to inhabit the President of the United States, with results unlike any achieved to date. It appears, after laboratory cultures and electronic data cross-indexing, that either the cerebral and rectal units are reversed, or the brain cavity has been altered by taxidermy, in effect “stuffed.” We are getting severely foreshortened brain emissions similar in structure and duration to those given off in our own bioenvironment by a soil base roughly equivalent to your Playdough.
I flipped this one in my “Hold: Possible” pile and read on.
Dear Willis Digby,
I am a flight attendant on Trans-National Airlines, and I have to tell you that I think I am going crazy too. I’ve been reading the letters you printed and your answers to them, and I decided, like the woman who feeds her unwitting husband cat food every morning, that everybody should have a crazy safety valve.
I’m absolutely ecstatic when I tell you that without any change in cabin pressure, certain of my passengers are getting high on cocktails “on the rocks” that I serve up with just a weensy spritz of blue “freeze,” a waste-disposal substance we use in the toilet unit. Just a crystal in every irritating bozo’s drink … and I feel so much better about everything!
Hope to see you on a flight soon.
Bottoms up,
Anonymous Stew
I took the train from Grand Central, then a cab to Brookheart. I had an old woman cabdriver who was in a big hurry to get me inside. I stared at her caved-in straw hat and the back of her grizzled neck. She was nearly standing on the accelerator.
“Hey,” I called, “slow down. I’m not in that big a rush to get there!”
Her cagey old eyes appeared in the dash mirror. “You’re a reporter, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “There musta been a thousand of ’em around here last week. They all wanna get up there fast!” She cackled. “You’re a little late, honey!”
“I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I’m a friend of one of the residents.”
The eyes blinked, disappointed. She slowed down.
“I wouldn’t be in such a hurry then, if I were you,” she said, half to herself.
We pulled in at the gates, the young guard slid off his Walkman just long enough to check my name off the visitors’ list. A tiny, tinny Pat Benatar sang like a cricket around his neck as he signed a pass for me.
Brookheart was something of an architectural anomaly. Though it had been built in the late twenties or thirties, like so many other American fun houses, it lacked the usual fake Gothic façade. It looked instead like a monastery, like a photograph I’d once seen of St. Remy, the insane asylum where Vincent Van Gogh spent his last days painting and where he finally killed himself. It had two long, low wings extending from a center, an imposing front with a stone circular pool on the main lawn. It looked escape-proof, but wasn’t, due to its much-vaunted liberality: no locks, no bars. This policy had left its inmates unprotected from internal corruption—that is to say, unprotected from the sane.
“Hello!” called Iris, poking her head into the Reception Area, where I sat reading Psychology Quarterly. I was shocked again by her physical appearance. Her rolling eye seemed more anchored today, but her stitched-up face and skull looked as raw as recent suturing. A surviving victim of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
She wore a
bright green shiny taffeta dress; her rigid prosthetic fingers plucked at it nervously.
“Hi there,” I said, shaking the plastic hand. “Iris. You’re famous, kid.”
“So are you!” she shouted. “You and me, Digby! You and me!!” The eye rolled back in her head.
She snapped her fingers. “It’s gone,” she whispered, “gone! All rampant seminal fluid on the premises! It’s evaporated!” Her strange speech impediment grew more pronounced. She said “e-val-porated.”
She sat in one of the ugly naugahyde chairs and bounced up and down. “Reporters have been coming and going, going and coming. They indicted the Spiders, the guys who pull the strings at the top! They found Basil Schrantz, trying to run to California. …”
“You,” I said, “you did it all. You wrote the letter that brought the empire down.”
“Yeah,” she said, glancing around furtively, “but now somebody, I’m not sure who yet, is smearing Tiger Balm on each and every sanitary napkin in the washrooms!”
“Let’s talk about it later, okay? Can we go see the Crafts Fair now?”
The crafts filled a few long steel tables in the Day Room, a big windowless space with dull overhead lights. The unindicted nurses and attendants kept a discreet distance from the patients manning the tables, coming forward occasionally to pull a fist gently from a drooling mouth or to help make change or take someone to the bathroom.
There were painted ceramics and hand-thrown pottery bowls and clay ashtrays and bowlegged clay horses and many-legged clay octupi. There were bead earrings and bangles and colored fish mobiles and woven baskets. Then there were the products of altered visual imaginations: a plaster-of-Paris gnome with a huge erection, a Tina Turner scrub brush, a clay tarantula with a Groucho Marx face and cigar, a hardened Playdough Jesus on a trapeze, swinging by one leg, an arm raised in casual blessing. There was a sampler that read: STICK A VITAMIN IN YOUR EYE in shaky script, and blue knit infant booties, size 9, and a tea cozy that said “Butt Out.” Iris showed me the pairs of underpants she’d personally tie-dyed.
“The investigators wanted to keep only a few of these for evidence,” she confided. “The rest I made Art of.” She paused and looked levelly at me. “I washed them first.”
I bought the “Butt Out” tea cozy and an ashtray that said “Camomile Smile.” “Those are Dolly Winkey’s,” said Iris. “She gets thing reversed.” I bought a pair of Iris’s pants, as a memento. I really wanted the trapeze Jesus, but the mother of the young man who had made it picked it up and held it to her heart, protectively.
At the last minute I picked up an Empire State Building made of bits of wire soldered together. I wondered where the artist got wire (the Electric Shock Room?), but I didn’t ask Iris. The spire was sharp as a hypodermic. Iris saw it in my hand. “They only allowed one of those to be made,” she whispered as I bought it. “Dalbert kept trying to clean his ears with it.”
We moved along the tables, looking at the wares. “We expected a real crowd,” said Iris sadly. “We thought all the recent publicity would be good for business. But people rushed up here for two or three days—then poof!”
A group of patients, mostly women, mostly shapeless and ageless, dressed in civvies (carefully buttoned shirts and dresses and out-of-date pants, bell-bottoms and floral prints), stood by, pointing and smiling, whispering among themselves. A dwarfish girl with a huge brow she’d tried to cover ineffectually with bangs had a very loud case of hiccups. Another, a camel-faced woman with long red stringy hair and a Hawaiian shirt, stared at everyone and repeated, “Short form! Use the short form!” in a commanding tone.
Yet another, young and mongoloid-looking, very fat, stepped away from the crowd of patients, hurried over to me, and kissed me very softly on the cheek.
“Thank you,” I murmured, touched. She kissed me again. And again. Her eyes were huge and brown.
“That’s enough now, Nina,” said Iris. She gently disengaged the girl and pushed her toward a refreshment table. Nina began walking away but turned back.
“Hey,” she called after us. “Hey, you!”
We picked up some Cokes and piled chocolate chip cookies on paper plates and went outside to sit under a tree. I threw my bag carelessly on the ground. I’d remembered at the last minute to remove the .38 on a pit stop at my apartment. I’d been right about the metal detector and the security guard. Besides, carrying a gun was making me too nervous.
The “grounds” stretched around us, about half an acre of what I call Bronx grass: hybrid of yellow-green bald spots, bottle caps, gum wrappers, and some stunted vegetation.
Iris wolfed her cookies, then looked at mine. I pushed them toward her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You’re not hungry.” (She said hung-ly.)
“Iris, there’s somebody who wants to kill me. He’s following me.”
Her jaws stopped working; she stared at me.
“At first he was just trying to scare me, I think. Then I published one of his letters to me and he got really angry. Now he’s after me.”
I told her about the note on my door and the note at SIS—how he seemed to be able to get in anywhere.
“I got a gun. And I’ve been staying with friends at night. But I can’t do that forever. I’m going home tonight and I’m going to stay there, no matter what happens.”
Iris started chewing again.
“Where is the gun now?”
“I left it in my apartment—in the drawer of the night table next to the bed. I’m not going to carry it around anymore. I don’t like it.”
Iris polished off the last cookie. She drank some Coke and burped an enormous burp.
“Kill ’em.” She belched.
“Huh?”
“Kill the rat-head, the bag of seminal fluid. Blow him into New Jersey.”
“Iris. There’s something else I have to tell you. I did that once to someone. When I was a kid. It was an accident, but nonetheless I did it. It’s made me crazy. But”—I leaned closer to her—“what I can’t understand about myself is as soon as this guy started bugging me, I wanted a gun. I went out and got a gun. Why? Now I can’t sleep at all. I keep seeing the face of … Matthew, the kid I shot. Then I keep dreaming of this gun I’m carrying. I dreamed I was carrying it wrapped up like a baby. Then I talk to a baby that I lost some months ago, as if she were still in my womb. Her name is Lily, Iris.”
Iris nodded and belched again, a long, low, grieving expulsion of air. She had eaten all the cookies and had drunk both Cokes. Her face was so chopped up it was hard to read; it did not organize readily into identifiable expressions. Now was no exception, but then I saw a tear slowly form at the edge of her jumping eye.
“Babies and guns”—she burped again—“that’s America. You were having a patriotic dream.” She sat up a little, reached over and touched my hand. “If anybody hurts you, I’ll kill them,” she said. “If anyone touches you when I’m not there, you kill them for me. What happened to you before, shooting the kid, that was an accident. I had an accident too. I had an accident and I was exploded.”
She brought her face close to mine, brushed the tear away. “I was exploded, and my heart stopped three times. They wanted to pronounce me dead three times, the doctor told me afterward. There were pieces of me, an arm and most of my face, on the sidewalk and in a litter basket. I mean, they couldn’t find enough of me, of unburned skin, for grafts.” She laughed and touched her scalp. “I think they used the surgeon’s rubber gloves on my head. I hurt a lot, and I have … seizures when I black out and can’t remember anything. I have phlebitis because I have to lie flat on my back in bed for days at a time. And on top of that I had people spraying seminal fluid up me every five minutes. But, Willis, I survive, don’t I? You had an accident when you were a kid. So did I. So what? Every day I write in my journal, just to document this great life! It’s now now. And if people spray seminal fluid at you, you spray ’em back in spades—get ’em like we did Basil Schrantz! If somebody kills you
, kill ’em back in spades! You know what I mean. Just enough to scare ’em.”
I nodded, trying to follow her reasoning.
“I’m not saying an eye for an eye here. I’m saying a leg, an arm, an internal organ, and an eye for an eye. But be fair about it. Have a little mercy.”
She burped again.
“Whatever you say, Iris.”
“Willis, God’s telling me something … hold on. Hold on. She’s sayin’ to me that the guy’s gonna show up tonight. Face him. Fight him. Wake up, Willis! I’m getting angry, I’m talkin’ to you!”
“Who is God saying will walk out of my apartment alive?”
She patted my arm, suppressing another blast, puffing out her cheeks.
“Coke gives me gas,” she said.
Later, after I’d met her yoga instructor and the crafts teacher and some other patients, I shook hands good-bye. Iris stood by my side as I waited for my taxi. She leaned very close, her ripped mouth panting, her loose eye rolling kindly in my direction.
To my horror, she began to cry. “You haven’t really heard anything I’ve said,” she whimpered. Nina appeared out of nowhere and began weeping too, standing on one foot and then the other. She reached out her arms to Iris, then tentatively embraced her. I put my arms around them both and joined in the tears.
“Iris,” I sobbed. “I’m sorry.”
We all cried, holding on, weaving back and forth.
“Here, Iris.” I fished in my bag and gave her the extra key to my apartment, the one I’d forgotten to deliver to Terence at a high point in our romantic evening the night before. “Come anytime you need to talk,” I said. I kissed her and pulled softly away from Nina. Nina stopped me, looked into my eyes, and gave my face a long, wet lick.
Dear Digby Page 12
