A Story

Fact with some fiction

A friend of mine who witnessed my first melt-down wrote it all down in a story at least 20 years ago when we were both still in college. I am posting it here. I had to post part of my version of the story here first. This earlier post puts things in context to some degree. To add more context it might be noteworthy to mention that every time I was hospitalized I had ingested a hallucinogen and I had been pre-menstrual. Upon each hospitalization I got my period the following day. It took me longer than I’m proud to admit to figure out I could not tolerate hallucinogens and indeed any kind of illicit drug whatsoever.

I ran into my friend, Marcel (eatbees), a few months ago after not seeing him for a good 10 years (we are close to 3,000 miles away from where we met each other and coincidentally both living here now.) The other day I spent the afternoon with him and he still had his story inspired by me on his laptop. I asked him to send it to me–that I might post it.

My first reaction upon reading it was that I couldn’t possibly post it. It was painful and shameful. I have reconsidered and present it here as a work of fiction that relies heavily on observed reality. I also don’t feel the sting I felt when I first read it. I’ve processed some of that and writing the above piece I link to helped with that.

One example of the fiction is that when Marcel writes about my bedroom he says that the Catholic iconography is in part mine and that I loved the symbolism of the Church. Not true–never was. It was a cool room nonetheless. I just wouldn’t have chosen the decoration myself. I became a severely lapsed Catholic at about age 9 when much to my mother’s dismay I refused to go to confession ever again.

That’s the only piece of fiction I care to clarify. The rest is a decent approximation of the truth from his standpoint–artistic license intact. I’d like to add I think Marcel did a beautiful job. I can’t say that my entire blog is anything but a decent approximation of the truth from my standpoint. The process of writing from memory is an act of creation and interpretation. And the only reason I had to say there was some fiction here is because I don’t remember or interpret everything exactly as Marcel does. It was hard for me to read about myself from someone else’s perspective. But I always loved this story from the first time I read it approximately 20 years ago. I have only rarely shared it with anyone though.

Yesterday I told Marcel, “You know I don’t even think of myself as bipolar anymore–I just took some hallucinogenics while pre-menstrual.” His response was, “I could’ve told you that 20 years ago.” Alas, he had faith in me from the beginning.

This story is copyrighted material belonging to Marcel Côté.

GIANNA’S FLIPOUT
(Room 304)

Adam was goodlooking, sullen, with a wide mouth, distant eyes, and a nicely shaped body that looked elegant in a slouch. Pete told me that “I’m not usually attracted to guys, but last night seeing Adam and Gianna together I couldn’t help being jealous—of both of them.” Gianna was a bold, squarefaced Italian who always wore black. She and Adam were lovers that summer, before she went crazy.

I never really knew Adam. Like everyone else I just got to look at him. He spoke to me once to say hello, and that was done grudgingly: we were both in the same small room, and could hardly ignore each other. He was stroking a small stuffed tiger, which he held on his shoulder.

Adam never talked to anyone past a few mumbled phrases. There were rumors about him all summer, but he remained unreachable. He was sunk into himself. You could tell he was hurting. It’s like he knew his soul was a dark place he shared with some vicious animal, and he was scared to even breathe, because then the animal would know where to find him.

Adam was one of the people who stayed in Room 304. No one exactly lived there, but at any time of day or night, if you were looking for a certain kind of company, you could find it in Room 304. There were Hairy Larry, Reynaldo, Leo the Rat. These were the kind of guys who said PCP, a tranquilizer used to knock out elephants, wasn’t such a bad high. If you bought LSD from them you knew exactly where it came from, because they made it themselves, in a basement lab nearby; and from that lab they supplied the whole state. Or you could get heroin, DMT, MDA, or opiated hash. They were the Source. There was no furniture: just a lot of cushions and blankets, a knapsack or two, comic books and tshirts lying in heaps; and the inevitable pipes, needles and scales. You knocked on the door, and if you were one of the people they counted as friendly, you were allowed in. Amid the debris, in a rough circle in the center of the floor, a small group of people would be sprawled, listening to the Grateful Dead on a cheap tape player. Sometimes Adam would be there.

Room 304 was really two rooms: straight ahead as you came in was the door I’ve mentioned, behind which anything could be had, for a price. To the right was another door, behind which a different kind of business was transacted. This was the headquarters of By Any Means Necessary, a shortlived Leftist broadsheet published by a closeknit group who were not tied to any Party. They looked to the Paris Barricades, whether of 1848 or 1968, as their model of radical action. The paper was born out of a successful street action and was originally simply a program of daily events: rallies, marches, meetings. Later it entrenched itself in Room 304 and started printing articles about how to make your own pipe bombs, how to outflank a phalanx of riot police, how to spot a Government informer. And its editorials became increasingly sarcastic toward any Left group so backward as to still be involved with rallies, marches and meetings. Shortly after that it folded, from lack of funds.

I knew a few people who worked on the paper, and in my life’s slower moments I’d stop in to gossip with them. Pete, my best friend that summer, was a minor contributor. Pete was the smallest fullgrown person I’ve ever known, weighing just over 100 pounds and filled with a nervous energy that kept him always hopping from one foot to the other, like he had to go to the bathroom. He was extremely selfconscious, always experimenting with image devices like wearing the burnedoff corner of a $5 bill as an earring (“$1 is too ordinary, but $20 would be pretentious”). He discussed people like Nietzsche, Jung and Joyce without actually having read them. Also present in the newsroom were Ray, an exBlack Panther who would soon be spending time in jail for check fraud; Travis, a wisecracking New Yorker whose voice was as abrasive and highpitched as fingernails on a blackboard; and Fiona, a young woman with a shaved head whose junkie boyfriend beat her when she tried to leave him.

The place looked just like a militant student newspaper was supposed to look. There were the posters of revolutionary heroes Che and Malcolm. There were the news clips of the more ridiculous public figures, like George Bush or Jerry Falwell, caught in their moments of hypocrisy. There were a couple of donated typewriters, which I’d use sometimes to write papers for my college classes, though things were always a little tense in that room and it was hard to concentrate. In a smaller side room there was a drafting table for doing layout. There was plenty of revolutionary graffiti, from Dylan lyrics and Mao slogans to quips on current events. The paranoia in the newsroom was as great as in the dealers’ quarters next door, and the two halves of Room 304 shared the same fear that they were living too close to the edge, that their inner circle was riddled with spies, that at any moment the door would come flying open and they would be dragged off without warning to face the judgement of the State.

I lived downstairs, in Room 205, by myself. It was a beautiful room with a magenta, turquoise and black paint job and hardwood floors. Sometimes Pete would drop in to borrow records and we’d talk. The talk usually got around to Gianna, who had infatuated both of us. We agreed she was a stunning woman.

I first met Gianna on the roof, where the washing machines were; she was on the way to do her laundry. She’d seen me around before, but we’d never talked. Later, once I knew her better, she confessed that before she met me she was afraid of me and attracted to me at the same time, always a good position to be in with a woman, but totally unintentional on my part. Anyway, when I ran into her on the roof we started talking. She’d just moved in, she said, but already she knew a few of the people who lived there. Same with me, I said. She wasn’t sure she’d like it because there were so many people and no real privacy. Oh, I don’t know, I said, it sure beats living alone in a prefabricated box with nothing to do but watch TV. But, she explained, she was a very independent person and needed a lot of time to herself. Well, same with me, I said; that’s why I have my own room (which I then described to her). If she ever wanted a quiet place to sit and read, or whatever, she could come down and visit. “Really, I mean it.”

I spent a lot of time on the roof that summer, enjoying the sun and talking with whoever else was there. Other times I’d just stay in my room and write. Or I’d go see if Pete was home in Room 305, but he usually wasn’t because, being compulsively social, he was already off visiting someone else. The main gathering was usually in Room 312, down at the end of the hall, where Gianna lived, as did Noah and James, two other friends of ours. Pete, who lived across the hall, might also be there. We’d sit around smoking pot, which only Pete refused, and talking about the state of society. We all felt society needed an overhaul. There was the secret war in Central America, technology’s assault on individuality, warmongering in the press, the spinelessness of the liberal “opposition.” What we needed, it was agreed, was a whole new way of living; and we should start with ourselves. We should start right here in this room, in fact, living together and supporting each other in such a way that we could use ourselves as a model for the way a healthy society should be.

Gianna came down to my room one afternoon, and we sat on my bed, by the window, overlooking an alley filled with rubble from a ruined chimney. We talked about intelligence, and how it was OK to be a thinking person. I told her that where I came from, it was considered elitist to have ideas of your own. “You think you’re too good for us, don’t you?” they’d ask. A lot of my high school friends were smart, creative people; but they’d hide it. If they did well on a test or in a play they’d try to pretend it was an accident. “I don’t know how it happened. I thought I was gonna screw up. I didn’t study at all.” Gianna was surprised by this. There’s nothing wrong with knowing how to think, she said. Her hometown raised artichokes and rednecks: most kids got married young and never went to college. Of course she was different, but no one hated her for it; or if they did, she’d never noticed, and didn’t care.

Gianna and I were both smoking more pot than ever before. But Gianna went a lot further than that. She started hanging around the hardcore drug users in Room 304, trying everything they gave her. She was going to Italy in the fall, as an exchange student, and her idea was to pack as much new experience into her last few weeks as possible. She’d never tried LSD before, but within the space of about a week she tripped three times. If I was looking for Gianna, people would tell me I could find her in Room 304, which is how I got to know the people there, and their lifestyle; and how I became trusted enough to be allowed in the door. She’d be sitting on the floor with the guys, waiting for Adam, or waiting for someone to show up with the drug she’d come for. The room was always dark, the window covered with an Indian print, which was there to defeat prying eyes from the apartments opposite.

One day, I was sitting on the floor of Gianna’s bed as she tried DMT for the first time. Pete was sitting on the bed next to her. Gianna was living in a friend’s room for the summer, so some of the scattered objects were hers, and some were the other person’s. The overall effect was of an occult shrine. Gianna was raised a Catholic, loved the sensuality of Mass, and a lot of its paraphernalia was here: candles, incense, devotional objects. At the time, it seemed like some of the more innovative rock bands were moving toward a kind of postpunk occultism: a psychedelic “church” based on collectiveunconscious imagery. She had a few of the albums—R.E.M. and Prince were her favorites—and there were posters on the walls. I sat there, surrounded by this array of icons, as Pete helped her fill the special glass pipe she’d borrowed for the occasion. DMT is a dark sludge that smells like chemical waste when burning. You inhale the smoke, hold it as long as you can, and it sends you on a trip so powerful that for the next few minutes it’s impossible to speak or even move. People who’ve done it say they feel like they’ve been split into a million pieces and then reassembled, perhaps a little differently. There are hallucinations, which rivet the attention while they’re happening, but whose memory doesn’t survive the return to the Everyday. An acid trip takes up to twelve hours; DMT delivers the same intensity in a fraction of the time.

After this Gianna started having trouble sleeping. In fact, she didn’t sleep at all for three or four nights in a row. She stayed in her room, candles burning, playing the same record over and over, looking for hidden messages. She became convinced she had psychic powers that let her see into the souls of others and into the future. One day the phone rang in my room. Pete was calling from his room upstairs: he’d just been to see Gianna. Something was wrong, and he couldn’t figure it out. Now she wanted to see me.

When I got to her room she was lying on her bed, stiffly, in the dark. One candle burned near her. She looked over and said that she knew I would come: she’d been calling me telepathically and could feel me responding. She seemed to have forgotten that she’d sent Pete as messenger. She told me to come over and sit by her, which I did. I could see, then, that she was crying silently. She asked me to put my hand on her chest. “You can help me,” she said. “You have the power to heal.” I could feel her chest rise and fall slowly as she pressed my hand against it. I wanted to help her, so I did my best to project myself into the rhythms of her breathing, to slow them and smooth them out, so her eyes could close and she could get the rest she needed. But after a minute or so of silence she pushed my hand away and said, “It’s not working.” And then she started talking about what she’d seen while she was off on her psychedelic journeys: what in fact she was still seeing, right now while we talked, and was desperate to tell me about. “Then why don’t you tell me?” I asked. “Not yet, you’re not ready.” “Well how do you know that, if you don’t at least try?” “You have to ask the right questions. I can’t tell you unless you ask.” “Well, what are the right questions?” But that was all she had to say.

“I think we have to do something,” I told Pete later, back in my room. As we talked we were surrounded by a slow evening hush, which crept in through the window. “I mean, she talks about being onto something, some psychic experience, and I’d hate to see her lose it, the good parts anyway, if it’s real. But she’s obviously not happy, and she needs to get some sleep. Whatever it is that’s happened to her, she can’t even talk about it now.”

We agreed that we needed to look after Gianna for a while—“I haven’t been spending much time with her,” I said, “I wish I knew it was this serious”—and that, as friends, we should keep her away from drugs for a while, maybe even take her out in the country, camping, for a few days to get her out of the building. “She told me she needs peace and quiet. I can’t imagine she’s been getting much of that here.” It seemed she was struggling with herself: the Gianna we knew, collected and selfassured, against something that was at once better and worse. We wanted to give her the room to regain her psychic balance. Besides which, I added to myself, if we don’t help her then all our talk about creating a more perfect society is worthless. I saw this as a test of the values we claimed to believe in. If we couldn’t protect our own friends, then what could we hope to offer anyone else?

The next day I was in my room when Pete came down to see me. “Have you seen Gianna?” he asked. “I was in her room and she wasn’t there. The door’s open, there’s a candle burning, and a warped record on the turntable.” He emphasized warped. Together we went up and looked around. It looked like she’d left for a few minutes, expecting to come right back, but had already been gone for several hours. The candle had burned down to almost nothing. We blew it out, and turned off the pointlessly spinning record.

Later in the day we found James, and he helped us piece together what had happened. First of all, during one of her acid trips Gianna and Adam had become lovers. They’d tripped together once or twice after that, and Gianna had gotten the idea that they were the male and female Messiah, and that she was in fact already pregnant with a superhuman being who would eventually transform the world. Apparently Adam, tormented and silent though he was, had supplied parts of this fantasy himself. While they were making love he’d said something about being God, which she’d taken to mean that he had the same psychic powers she had, and that they had a mission to perform together. This manic revelation made her more and more possessive of Adam, even though he’d quickly gotten tired of the whole thing and wanted to get rid of her.

This past night, again unable to sleep, Gianna had gone to visit Adam in Room 304. His friends there had tried to throw her out, but she kept coming back. They told her: Go away, you’re being too pushy, you’re crazy, you’re hurting Adam, he wants to be alone. Early in the morning Gianna had started screaming and banging metal pots and throwing things. Noah came out of his room and they got into a big fight, which ended with Gianna trying to start a fire in the hall. James, who was running the building for the summer, told her to get out. Somehow she ended up at the Psychic Center in Oakland, where she caused another disturbance when they didn’t immediately recognize her as the new Messiah. The psychics called the cops, and now Gianna was under observation at a private mental hospital.

Pete’s reaction to all was to ponder “the fine line between expanded consciousness and flipping out.” For him it was an intellectual problem. None of us were prepared, at the time, to acknowledge the simple fact that doing too many drugs, or the wrong drugs, can make you temporarily crazy. For us, being crazy was a relative thing, a label society uses to narrow down its definition of what is acceptable. Politically, we sided with the crazy person’s right to be insane. The fact that insanity is painful, that the crazy person is unhappy and would rather be sane again, wasn’t really a factor for us.

Gianna was in and out of the hospital for some time, though she did eventually return to school and a “normal life.” She didn’t make her trip to Italy. Adam took $2000 he’d gotten from Gianna, which was the money she’d saved for her trip, and used it to fly to Sweden. When the money ran out he came back, more withdrawn than ever, his hair dyed black and cut awkwardly to hide his wellconstructed features. By now he had a heroin habit to support, or maybe he’d had one all along; and to get money to support it, he sold his body on the street. People said he “wasn’t happy” about this.

He came to a party once, around this time. He spent the night by himself, isolated not by his place in the room—he was in front by the stage—but by the tension in his body. He waited till the music was especially slurred and aimless, and the floor was clear of people: then he danced.