by Robert Ward
Then one day—and it happened just this way so you must believe it—it all went away. I awoke without thinking of the cock. I went to school and put my hand up Darlene Street’s crotch. No cock. No Reed Hadley voice, no nothing. I came home and sniffed glue. No cock. And that night as I sat in the bathtub I remembered that I was supposed to be suffering, and the absurdity of it was too intense for me to believe it. I was tempted to look up into the sky and do a dramatic “Screw you,” but I did not wish to press my luck. No cock is all I can tell you. And it went away. For good.
These images rushing through me, and now there is the heaviest realization of all. I am fucked up. The thought comes to me like a big blow of air running inside my head. Bobby Ward, who has seen all the absurdity in this world, fucked up. I, Bobby Ward, like pain. I, Bobby Ward, am just a hanger-on who is trying to be seventeen different things at once and as a result can be nothing.
My body instantly feels lighter. My head is really a cloud with only impressions for eyes. I am alive, and nobody but me. I do not need to hang on. I do not need to feel guilt, be someone else, find a community, become a mystic. I need to be me. The wonder of the idea makes me want to act like Gene Kelly in An American in Paris. I will go skipping down the street, and I will enlist everyone who happens to be watching … No, wait! That is exactly what I will not do. I will not enlist people. I will not try to be something else. I will be the real me. I will go to a house in the country and commune with only me. I will find out just who it is I am and I will be absolutely delighted, never feel guilt; never, never belong to any groups, never, just be me me me. Yeah, that’s it.
I kiss myself all over. Tourists roll down windows and snap my picture. I do not see them. I am free, free, free.
Oh, but the elation is also false. The moment of knowing is false, is nothing more than an invention, a bit of logic that sticks to the wall like dried-out tape for one or two seconds, and then falls, like an old scab, revealing the cracks in the flowery paper. Because I am standing here on Haight Street remembering more than I have cared to remember, I am feeling now as if someone were passing a sheet of Pittsburgh plate glass directly through the center of my body.
“Something bad is happening,” I say to Warren.
“You are cracking. I have seen it from the start. You are cracking, at the age of nineteen. It will be unpleasant.”
I begin to walk slowly away from the thousands of colors, down toward the Panhandle, feeling that plate glass sticking through my body, oh yes. Feeling the body severing like some hard peach, the red fiber in the middle ripping apart, old adhesive from old Band-Aid. “Emotionally Disturbed” will be the sign. A man named Dr. Lou will put me in a room with a black box.
“This is connected to your head, Bobby. You will scream when the depression comes on, but the box will take care of it.”
“Yes, Dr. Lou,” I will say. But I will feel nothing. I will rock back and forth, like a chair, actually part of a chair. My legs will become maple. Eyes, knots in trees. No, not trees; trees are alive. My eyes will become knots in a chair, dead, varnished trees. It seems to me I have been hiding something. There is a need to recover what I have lost. Other patients in the hospital:
A man who offers to trade me a power lawn mower for my cock. He will be hunched over, have a small head and wear a baseball cap and alligator shoes. His name will be Old Charles. I refuse, walk away from this nasty. Big red nasty. I would like a bit of remembrance there. I would like the picturesque teacher, but that is not what I get. I am Pensy. I have moved from my seat. My skin is Pensy skin, old yellow the color of musty corners in 1938 living rooms, a big wooden radio sitting under the pool of light. Pensy-me reading the paper. Pensy-me seeing the nighttime slipping away, knowing that tomorrow forty screaming, howling children with revolution on no-minds will march into the world, his-my world. I am Pensy. The patient will sell me one lawn mower and one Feldstar watch guaranteed two weeks for my cock. All this happening to me, boy laugh riot. I tell the patient that he must understand about my condition, that I indeed have no cock, that in my crotch now is a Clark bar, a Hershey with almonds, a Pay Day salted nut roll. I am Pensy. You cannot buy my flesh. The flesh is gone, Mother Freda. The body is gone.
“Warren,” I say, attempting to keep up the life-saving monologue.
“Yes,” says Warren, in a voice like Pensy.
“Don’t play games, Warren,” I say, entering the Panhandle.
“Games,” says a voice.
Now I am on television. A man with a flat face and a button-down collar is thrusting a microphone into my mouth. He is saying that I will be on tonight’s news, that he wants to know my name, my original home.
“I am Pensy,” I say, a hardness coming over my spirit, my soul being calcified right here in front of a nation.
“Are you a hippie, Pensy?”
I look at the ground for a body, for a colored leg all black and crumbly. I wait for the Phantom to come and rescue me from this.
“I am suffering from hallucination,” I say.
“Then you are a hippie.” The announcer is laughing a puppet laugh. I suddenly know that he has gotten that laugh from watching all the other announcers. He is one part of the Announcer, the Big Announcer. It reminds me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, people being reproduced with pods, all their emotions gone, fall asleep for one second and you are hollowed out like the center of the Thanksgiving turkey. Stuffings of you on every plate, every relative eating little bits, all the townsfolk eating little bits, you sitting hunched and stuffing-less.
“I am having depression of a serious order,” I tell the announcer.
“He means his head is in a bad spot,” says a voice. It is the little hippie with Old Shep hair.
The announcer does not like this. He asks me if I am a Digger. No, I am not a Digger, this is a recording, this the disembodied voice doing the recording. No, I am not a Digger, yes, I am for love. Yes-I-am-one-who-believes-that-we-are-a-holy—generation—
Now the little cameraman circles around me. The announcer is asking what we hope to accomplish here. I am answering funny stuff, putting him on. I am saying that I am in Haight-Ashbury because (fill in the ridiculous and colorful answer). I am a member of the Flower Generation because (fill in the ridiculous answer). I hate the establishment because (fill in the answer of indignation). My answers are getting wilder, the crowd of hippies (my brothers, my generation, and they are—they are in spite of anything else I may tell you, for do you see any alternatives?) all crowding around me, saying “Yes, I am a smile, I am a groove. Yes, my answers are surreal.” For example, he asks me if I am taking care of my body and I answer Yes, both my kneecaps have turned to smiles. “Wow,” from the audience. He asks me if free love is not dangerous to the emotional stability of a sixteen-year-old girl. You can see him setting me up, and I take full advantage—I want only to keep this going—so I do not remember that I have absolutely, somehow, turned to dust. This and a fuck and a good shot of something will tell me that I am still here. The interview goes on, I am brilliant. The street is filled with brothers. Do I dream this as well as the mental hospital? Do I dream of America watching me all night, forgoing sleep to sit in ghost rooms seeing me, hearing me, here in the park? I walk away, dead.
I walk away knowing I am enjoying feeling dead.
I want to kill myself.
I am playing with wanting to kill myself.
I am nothing.
I am corny in my agony.
XXXVI.
In Which the Narrator Crawls Inside the Box
The Phantom is walking in circles around me. He is baring his teeth and clapping his hands. I feel as though he wishes to execute me, and am grateful to him for it. The way I figure it, if Phantom can shit on me enough, I may feel like punching him out, which would be an emotion, and adequate proof that Bobby Ward has not floated away down Lollipop Street. “So you feel bad?” asks Phantom.
“Yeah … no … not bad, just gone. Like I am not here.”
>
“So you really feel bad, huh?”
Phantom is playing this for all the drama he can squeeze out of it. If I were here I would find it incredibly juvenile, but I have taken a trip somewhere, if you find me call me and let me know.
“Hey,” says Phantom, smacking his hands on my shoulders.
“I just got an idea. If you feel bad, all you gotta do is take more acid and it’ll all be different. You’ll transcend … and everything will be cool. You need to take a whole lot more acid.”
“Mockery will get you nowhere,” I say lifelessly.
I go over to Mal’s mattress and sit down with my hands on my knees. I look at my hands, and keep looking at them. I have this feeling that if I stare at my body too much it will disappear, but I stare anyway, delighting in my own horror.
“Hey,” says Phantom, sitting down next to me and taking my hand. “You are a soft middle-class punk who is just discovering that it’s all a bunch of shit, baby. Now you got what you came for. Except you didn’t think it would mean any difference in you. Right?”
“Of course you are right,” I say. “I’ve been over that already in my own head. I wanted to be something different since I couldn’t be me. Now I am going through classic psychosis. You are absolutely correct. I know all the fucking reasons. I can sit here and list them for you, but the fact remains—I’ve disappeared.”
It is at that moment the Phantom slugs me. It’s an incredible wallop, and it sends me back on my shoulders, my feet over my head and stuck against the wall.
“Thanks for trying,” I say. “Ironic that you would try to make me feel myself with a Zen trick. I thought you were down on mysticism.”
Phantom does not give up. He is on top of me, slugging my face and laughing at me, and when I begin to show signs of fighting back he is suddenly kissing me; hugging me.
I want to feel love for him. Maybe if I had not suffered this sudden vegetable state I would actually hold him and weep, and know that I am not dead. But for some reason that does not happen. It all seems like a humanistic Phantom trick. I am disgusted with myself for thinking this, but I say it anyway:
“It’s all cartoon, Phantom. Cartoons and clichés. It’s a lousy fucking bunch of clichés, the whole fucking mess of it. I’ve tried it all, you see, and it’s nowhere, and I’m nowhere, and this is nowhere, you see. You are another cliché, the tough guy with a heart of gold, and any moment I expect you’ll break my fucking neck trying to snap me out of whatever’s happening to me, but you can’t ‘cause there is no me to snap out. I done gone down the fucking drain.”
“You self-indulgent little fucker,” says Phantom. “I’m not trying to snap you out of anything. I just wanna beat your middle-class slumming ass. You come out here and don’t get your babbling paradise, and you have a nervous breakdown. You weak, pimping son of a bitch …”
Then, as I expected, he is off me and saying things like I’m not worth the trouble, and he’s heading for the door. And just like in the movies, I call him back when he reaches the door and let him make his next speech. But it’s a better one than I expected.
“You get your shit together, baby, because you got to catch a plane out of here at seven.”
“What?”
“Here,” he says.
He throws me a note that he picked up for me at the Haight-Ashbury Switchboard. It says “Bobby Ward: Please come back to Baltimore immediately. You must report to the draft board October 27. Love, Freda.”
I sit there trying to imagine how I should react. There should be shock and, I suppose, even dismay or a vicious ironic laugh. But I do none of these. I just sit there, across the room from the blank-faced Phantom, very aware that my arms are the reason for my hands, very aware that my feet are the ends of my legs, totally immersed in the beat of my heart.
At the airport I start to shake. Mal holds one arm, Phantom the other. I am having images all over the place, and I am talking a mile a minute to Mal, to Phantom, to the TWA man who will prepare my ticket. I am telling Mal and Phantom all about how I am in this mental hospital, a very funny riff. You should hear me do all the voices:
“Sure, I’m in this hospital, and the doctor is Ed Begley, some old character actor like that. Do you see, Phantom?”
“Get your fucking ticket, man.”
Mal looks at me. “Bobby, you really do have to get it.”
“Yeah, so I’m in the hospital, do you see? And the doctor is standing over me, right? And he’s saying something like: ‘Two hundred thousand hours of this man’s life, the most formative years of this man’s life—years that can never be recaptured—have been spent in front of the television set.’ “
People are floating by us now; literally floating by.
“Do you see that Phantom floating?”
The whole place is made of metal, and the lights are neon. If you pop neon a shower of light dust comes out, and it could get on me and eat my skin. I fear neon.
“So I am lying there, Phantom, and the guy is going on about how television fucked me up. I mean, don’t you think that’s a riot?”
I stop and pull away from Phantom and Mal. I stand in a little open space, watching the people coming and going. I am going to pull a few heartstrings.
“ ‘Doctor, I have watched, without technical assistance and in a variety of homes—most notably down Kirk’s cellar—the following television shows with delight (that is, I’m not sorry) and in a state of complete hypnosis: “Howdy Doody” with Chief Thunderthud; Princess Summerfall Winterspring—and I cried when she got run over for real, so to speak, on her honeymoon; Mr. Bluster; his good cousin from South America, Don Jose Bluster; Flub-a-dub, Poison Zoomack and …’
“ ‘Wrong,’ says the steel arm holding the Tom Corbett laser over my temple. ‘Poison Zoomack was on another show dating from 1954, a show with the title …’
“ ‘ “Rootie Kazootie” ‘ … See, Phantom, I tell the guy ‘Rootie Kazootie.’ I know the show. It was this other show, came on on Saturday mornings—not weekdays—and it never had the class of ‘Howdy Doody,’ and you watched it with a kind of guilt feeling because you felt like you were betraying Howdy and that bugged you for you were never sure that Howdy wasn’t going to come right out of the tube and get you with an electric drill.”
And now a terrifying guilt comes over me. I have betrayed Howdy. I am Howdy, and I am betrayed, and the strings have been snipped, maybe by Kukla, Fran and Ollie. They always looked so nice but you can never tell, and suddenly I am not a human wreck standing in the airport telling desperate comic memory riffs, but actually in the room I have described, and I know that the room is in the Town of Thatched Rooves, but somewhere some little shred of me is saying “You are not in the Town of Thatched Rooves, you are in the airport,” but it is very hard to hear that voice, very hard….
Very hard because the scientists are astounded at my total recall, which is absolutely nothing, for everyone in my generation shares it. We are all image banks but my own are exploding, and you must remember you’re in the airport….
“Where are you, Phantom?” I say, holding out my hands like a blind man; realizing what perfect pathos I am creating.
“Here. I’m here.”
“I watched ‘em all, folks. I watched Johnny Mack Brown, and the Three Musketeers, Bob Livingstone, and Duncan Reynaldo, and some guy with a dummy name of Elmer who used to throw his voice and got them out of trouble, once Smart threw his voice, and once I thought I was Elmer, right now if you must know, and I watched Red Ryder, are you with me folks, and thought I was Little Beaver and covered myself with red paint, but Freda said it would get into my pores, am I in the airport folks? And once it gets in the pores it will drip over every important organ, and the body which is like a clean, spanking linen closet, but can turn moldy and dusty and you will fall over with your eyes still open dead, how about a little hand?”
