Now that the interferences are reduced it will no longer be necessary for you to smoke London Dock. It gives me great pleasure to tell you that you should go to the store and buy an ordinary pack of cigarettes. The best brand for you at this time is Chesterfield until further notice. Enclosed is 30 cents, and tomorrow I will send you more.
I am counting on your truthful cooperation and your enjoyment of the things I want you to enjoy. This will assist me in working for your redemption, for which I am responsible and, of course, I won’t let you down.
Truthfully,
Madame Yeti Woman
This evening Leon comes over to the aide and asks: “Is there a woman in this hospital who calls herself a female God?” He then inquires whether the lady who gave the aide the letters mentioned her name. When the aide says no, Leon requests that he get her name and ward number the next time she gives him a letter.
September 28. Leon requests another aide to ask the girl who has been writing him and sending him money what her name is and what ward she is on.
This afternoon another letter is delivered. After taking it and feeling the coins inside, Leon hands it back to the aide, saying he refuses to accept it.
Early in the evening, the aide makes a second attempt to deliver the letter. Leon again refuses it, saying that the money enclosed is from misappropriated funds and that he wants nothing to do with it. He is very firm.
Still later in the evening, Leon hands a letter to the aide with the request that it be delivered to Dr. Broadhurst.
Respected Dr. Broadhurst
Please return these three dimes to Madam Yeti Woman, I know you know who she is.
Tell her I do not want any more donations, or letters. Tell her I trust in the sanity of God, the Ten Commandments of God.
Respectfully,
Dr. R. I. Dung
Dr. Broadhurst, the new resident psychiatrist assigned to Ward D-16 just a few days before, happens to be a young woman, and very attractive.
September 29. Meeting. Leon looks different today. He has had his hair and beard neatly trimmed by the barber. When the aide brings him a letter, he refuses to accept it, saying that Dr. Broadhurst wrote it. I ask to see the letter to look at the signature. I take the letter, open it, and inspect the signature. I then announce that it is clear the signature is not Dr. Broadhurst’s. Leon insists it is.
After the meeting is adjourned, we talk further with Leon alone. I tell him that Dr. Broadhurst has received his letter and has told me she is puzzled by it. Leon replies that Madame Yeti Woman is using the Social Security funds (he means his VA pension fund) that he has requested be sent back. “I don’t care for the insanity of God,” he says. “I can’t divorce her; she’s with me all the time cosmically.” He adds that God is using Dr. Broadhurst’s body and thus tempting him into adultery. I say that I have never believed in the existence of Madame Yeti Woman or Madame God or whatever he calls her, but Leon insists I am mistaken, that Dr. Broadhurst is God Almighty.
When I ask if he is suggesting that Dr. Broadhurst sent those letters, he nods, adding that Dr. Broadhurst’s handwriting matches the signature. He therefore needs no further proof. “My uncle told me about her—she’s a morphodite. I’m glad I didn’t show the letters now, the way it’s turned out; it’s better for me.”
I carefully explain that no one has ever touched the money in his account and that, if he likes, we can both go over to the business office to see if any withdrawals have been made. He refuses, saying that the facts are self-evident. I ask Dr. Broadhurst to come in and sign the name “Madame Yeti Woman.” We then compare her signature with the one on the letter, and I point out to Leon the many differences. He replies: “I don’t care for any more inquest. I don’t care to hear anything more about it.”
What, we asked ourselves, could have brought on this sudden, unexpected turn of events? Why did Leon now reject the letters, when before he had so eagerly accepted them? Had we proceeded too hastily? Was it because of the letter suggesting that he give up his name, Dung? Was it because we continued to sign the letters “Madame Yeti Woman,” even after Leon’s delusions about her had patently changed? Was it because of the money? Or was it because, coincidentally, a young, attractive resident psychiatrist had just been assigned to the ward?
Our best guess was that it was because of the money. The first sign of ambivalence Leon had shown toward his wife coincided with the receipt of the first dollar bill from her. From the beginning he had been in conflict about accepting and spending the money, even though he was able to salve his conscience a little by giving part of it away—first, impersonally, to the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish chapels; then, personally, to Clyde and Joseph. But money and its expenditure for personal gratification seemed to burden him with unbearable anxiety and guilt. As he himself had told us, “I didn’t deserve it.”
Whether or not the money was the main reason, we would probably never know. But this much we did know. Leon had received a series of suggestions for change from a positive reference person—his wife. At first he accepted these suggestions and followed them. Then he began increasingly to resist. Along with the resistance, changes also took place in his delusions about his positive reference person. His wife, God Almighty, who had been male as well as female, now became split into sane and insane, positive and negative. This enabled Leon to reject any suggestions he could not accept by attributing them to the insane or negative side of God. A reasonable hypothesis, then, was that when an individual receives suggestions for change from a positive reference person, one of two things must happen: either the suggestions must be followed or, if the suggestions are for one reason or another unacceptable, one must change one’s attitude toward the reference person. The reference person is no longer positive.
All that had happened with respect to Leon was consistent with this interpretation. We had unwittingly destroyed his positive reference person and with it our potential for continuing to change his behavior in a therapeutic direction. Was there anything we could now do to restore the reference person to her original positive position? The results obtained thus far had suggested that with Madame Yeti Woman, now turned God, “on our side” there was no telling how far we could go in changing therapeutically Leon’s confused, withdrawn, and self-denying behavior for the better. I was now in the peculiar position of trying to stave off the destruction of a delusion. We needed Leon’s positive delusional figure more than he did if we were to effect further positive changes in him. Could we possibly save the situation with the help of another of Leon’s positive reference persons—his uncle, Dr. George Bernard Brown?
Still September 29. Later in the evening, after our attempt to show Leon that Dr. Broadhurst had nothing to do with the letters, an aide informs him that there is a person-to-person long-distance call for Dr. R. I. Dung. Leon replies that he is busy and doesn’t want to be bothered. The aide tells him that it is a man on the other end of the phone. Leon asks who it is. The aide replies that he did not give his name, whereupon Leon comes to the office and picks up the phone. The voice at the other end identifies itself as that of his Uncle George Bernard Brown, and goes on to say that he has been in touch with Madame Dung, that they are both working for his redemption and that Leon must not say that Madame Dung, who is also God, is insane or negative. Leon listens, apparently with much interest. Then suddenly he interrupts: “Sir, excuse me, sir, your voice doesn’t sound like my uncle. Goodbye sir!” And he hangs up and returns to the sitting room.
About a quarter of an hour later, the aide goes to the room where Leon, as before the call, is praying on his knees. When the aide inquires about the call, Leon replies: “Don’t bother me, sir. The call was from someone at the other end of the extension. This was done through the switchboard. I don’t believe in mental torture, sir. What he said doesn’t matter, sir. Now would you leave me alone, sir? Thank you for helping me, sir.”
It was now clear that we had failed in our last-ditch effort to reinstate Madame Yeti Wom
an as a positive authority and that, moreover, our effort had only succeeded in making Leon extremely upset. The time had now clearly come to terminate any further experimental attempts in this direction.
[1]Matthew 6:21. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
[2]This would appear to be a slip of the tongue, which Leon corrected the following day, when he announced: “God Almighty walks in the shape of—is male and female; and such person has to be my father, my foster mother and my wife. She has no ovaries because of the age of that body. He and She is within me.”
CHAPTER XIV
A RESEARCH ASSISTANT BECOMES GOD
“I have to see the relationship to
infinity.” (Leon Gabor)
WHAT LEON did not find out from his uncle’s phone call on September 29—because he hung up too soon—was that an important change in the research personnel was to take place in the next four days. Mr. Spivak would be leaving then, and his replacement—a woman—would arrive. I wanted a female research assistant on the project primarily because of Leon’s unresolved attitudes toward his mother and his preoccupations with the delusions about foster mothers and wives, morphodites, and other women who wanted to commit adultery with him. Perhaps Leon’s conflicted attitudes toward women would resolve themselves in a more healthy way if he were to have daily dealings with a sympathetic, devoted female research assistant.
I had deliberately witheld any information about the impending change from the three men because I was not at all sure how any of them—and Leon, in particular—would react to the news. Of one thing I was fairly sure. If Miss Anderson, the new assistant, were to appear suddenly and without warning now, when Leon was having “trouble” with his wife and was delusionally refocusing on the new female resident psychiatrist as the source of his woes, the probability was strong that he would change once again and perceive Miss Anderson as the real culprit. It was because I wanted at all costs to forestall this and to assure, as much as possible, that Miss Anderson’s presence would from the very beginning have a maximum therapeutic affect, that I had planned to have the news of her arrival come from Leon’s omniscient if delusional uncle, rather than from us. But Leon’s refusal to listen to his uncle on the telephone forced me to abandon this plan and to substitute for it another, which we put into operation the next day.
Then, at a private meeting, we coaxed Leon into opening and reading a final letter. It was addressed to “My dear Dung” and it came from his uncle, George Bernard Brown. Its purpose was to inform Leon of the change in personnel that was about to take place:
I shall overlook the fact that you hung up on me because you were not sure about my voice. Yes, it was me all right, and I am taking this means of finishing my conversation which I started with you by phone.
In addition to the things I told you on the telephone, I am using this letter to let you know also that a change is going to take place around the hospital. Mr. Mark Spivak, psychologist, is going to leave this hospital to go somewhere else. He will be replaced by another psychologist very shortly. I am sure that you will find that the new psychologist will be for you positively all the time.
This was the last letter that Leon was willing to accept from either his uncle or his wife, but the letters he had accepted and his responses to them were to affect profoundly the things he would do and believe for many months to come. They were, on the one hand, to shape the unique relationship he was about to establish with the new research assistant, Miss Anderson. And, on the other, they were to lead to still more changes in his delusional beliefs. These two sets of effects occurred simultaneously and were so intricately bound together that in the account which follows no attempt will be made to separate them.
October 3. At the meeting I introduce Miss Anderson, explaining that she will replace Mr. Spivak, who has taken a position elsewhere. Joseph asks if Miss Anderson will continue to give out the weekly quarters and I reply that she will. Leon says his uncle had informed him of the transfer in a letter announcing the change.
October 5. At the meeting, I ask Leon why he is sitting with his eyes shut. He replies that he is simply relaxing.
October 7. Mrs. Parker, the head nurse, reports that Leon asked her for an interview. This is most unusual. “When I came to the door of his room,” she relates, “he asked me to sit down, and asked if I would smoke a cigarette. He then told me that when I was eleven and he was five and a half, he met me on a street in Detroit and I told him I was God. At the time he did not believe me, he said, but he now realized he was wrong. He then went on to say that God was a morphodite and that he himself had both male and female attributes over which he had no control. He said he had had sexual intercourse with God, but also with Morphy Broadhurst in England in bilocation. However, he did not know it was she since she had a veil over her face. So he was still faithful to God, the Grand Morphodite Lady. When he realized who she was, he knew he had committed adultery and because of this, he was killed last night. He had regenerated himself today, however, and was ready to start all over again. He kept on talking about having intercourse with God and I asked him if he thought I was God. He said yes, he did. I then asked him if he was trying to tell me that he wanted to have intercourse with me and he said yes. I said that I was afraid this was impossible and he immediately jumped up and said: ‘Thank you, Ma’am, thank you for letting me get a load off my chest.’ He seemed quite relieved, as if he felt that since he had at least told me and as long as I had refused, he didn’t have to worry about it any more.”
Later in the afternoon, at the meeting, Leon announces to Miss Anderson that he was killed last night and got another body. Joseph disputes Leon’s claim, saying that Leon has the same body he had yesterday. “Pertaining to external appearances, yes,” Leon replies, “but pertaining to internal construction it’s a different body. I was shot by God Almighty and I dropped like a sack of shit.” Once again Joseph disagrees. The exchange between them continues:
“Sex is a basic factor of human behavior.”
“I’m not a homosexual, so I don’t have to worry.”
“That’s not the point, Mr. Cassel. Don’t put the penis in the wrong hole or you’ll become a disfigured midget.”
“That’s a bit strong, Mr. Dung. There’s Miss Anderson to consider.”
“Excuse the expression, but it’s coming out of me and I believe it’s best to let out pressure, and if I have hurt your feelings through rude expression it was due to using a word that Mr. Cassel can more readily understand, and strike at.”
October 10. At the meeting, Leon discusses his changing delusions about Miss Anderson, Dr. Broadhurst, his wife, his mother, his father, and the Virgin Mary. The main theme is bisexuality.
Miss Anderson is now God Morphy Anderson. God is spelled with a capital “G” because she is bisexual.
Dr. Broadhurst is also a Morphy and is now in the “he” stage.
Madame Yeti Woman is no longer his wife: “I don’t care for the negativism of God implied in the name ‘Madame Yeti Woman.”’ Instead, his wife is a bisexual creature variously called Ruth, God, Lordess. “Right now he’s Lord, Potential Lordess.” Later on in the discussion Leon promotes her. “I am married to Grand Morphy, my wife who fostered me, but she is not my mother.”
Leon’s father is Grand Morphy, Sir. “My father is my foster woman wife in a male state.”
The same is true for the Blessed Virgin Mary who, now in a male state, is called the Blessed Virgin Brother.
October 11. At the end of the meeting Leon asks Miss Anderson if it’s all right to call her God Morphy, or should he say Miss Anderson. She replies that he may call her whatever he wishes, but that she prefers to be called Miss Anderson.
From this day on he calls her God Morphy Anderson or G. M. Anderson. He sometimes addreses her as Sir, sometimes as Ma’am, depending on whether she is in her “maleity” or “femaleity” stage.
October 17. As we go in to the meeting Leon hands Miss Anderson a lette
r, saying it is the most important document he has written in his life.
Joseph interposes: “It’s ridiculous—all that stuff about God being bisexual. Why should a woman be bisexual?”
“She doesn’t deny the fact that she is God. She …”
“I’ll tell you, Mr. Dung,” Joseph interrupts. “No man can get away from what he is. If a man is sick, he’s sick.”
I ask Clyde if he thinks Miss Anderson is God. “Oh, not quite,” Clyde chuckles. “She could be godly, I guess.”
“Ask her the question!” Leon says belligerently. “See what she says for herself!” I suggest Leon ask her himself. “I already know, I don’t have to ask her. It spoils the essence of a conversation to ask questions when you know the answers.”
The letter Leon had given Miss Anderson was lengthy and for the most part incoherent. It read in part:
Sanity of Grand God Morphy, Sir, Potential Associate God Morphy’s: Instrumental gods, goddesses, hollowed out, or not:
All of myself, God given prerogatives, I Dr. Righteous Idealed Dung Sir have given to positive bank use of the Ten Commandments of God.… On October 14, 1960, out of my own free will choice, I gave the small seeds of regenerative water; the seven large singular Seeds I gave to the male part of the Ten Commandments of God … From those seven seeds as many as the Sanity of God Wills can be regenerated through Penis Testicles of the Ten Commandments of God.… Female recipients can be protected through use of female Ten Commandment Belt-bar, with vagina face oval squelch, as precautionary protection of being Loved to death in pos. manner. …
Later, during a private interview, I tell Leon that I have heard about the conversations he held with several women about bisexuality.
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Page 25
