CHAPTER ONE (Of Novel)

THE CONCEPT OF WHITE PLASTER.
A Novel based on a true story.

By Novelvision

Chapters One, Two, and an except of "Freddy," from Chapter Twelve are currently posted here at Writing.com in their entirety.

CHAPTER ONE
TELLER STATE HOSPITAL



There was a huge dairy barn at Teller State Hospital at the time that I was committed there. And they had beef cattle and their own slaughter house. And they grew their own vegetables-- potatoes, mainly. The patients were put to work, and they worked hard. They’d be sent out early to the fields, and all the other places they were needed to do the chores of that big place – the laundry, the ground crew, the cafeteria -- as if on various chain gangs. They were watched so they wouldn’t elope, as if they’d committed a crime. For hadn’t they? Or mightn’t they yet?

My cell was clean enough, yet from the dry side across the hall you could still smell the stench of shit from a certain patient who was deemed too dumb and brain-vacant to endure the lobotomy that would render him less violent. So accommodations were made. They hosed him down, and, under guard, got him out for a walk around the grounds about once a week. Dr. Benz believed in enlightened control. He was both respected and feared because of this --so I had been told, and so I also readily gleaned from how everyone treated him. He knew this and he used his power. Yet he also knew that the perception of power was far more important than its actual use. One time he told me this on one of our walks in the tunnels of Teller State Hospital.

On the wet side I had a toilet in my cell. Three cells were joined, three to a side. Chain wire fencing crossed the walkway between the metal cages. Patient and futile cutting of the bars could be seen --a matter of a string and soap, back and forth, back and forth --all day long. --By some former patient with more hope than I. I did not care to bother. I knew escape was futile. I intended to die by gas. I amused myself those first days at Teller imagining myself in a circus. I made three balls out of paper and soap, and I juggled them. The intercom that played music also had another wire and another purpose: to listen to our conversations. I did not care to talk, anyway. From the beginning, I came to have a reputation as the quiet one, the one they could not figure out --the brain.

Looking back to that time of more than thirty years ago, I suppose I’ve seemed a bit sententious since. I see mathematics as the dance of numbers. I see the dream of Pythagoras. –You know, I once believed in things. I did once. I swear I did. I’ve come not to talk about it much anymore.

And I always saw mathematics as the etherealization of common sense. I swear that once I did. For I am a creature of the mind. When I was young, too young, I did not understand that you must not send out the wrong signals. For if you do, others will think it nice to hurt you. I don’t believe in anyone or anything, anymore.

I began to hide it all back then at Teller in obscure poetry. For I also saw the Despair that’s felt in Beauty’s Faltering Designs, and Forgiveness as seen by Men of Faith –and as also seen by Evil Men, for not all bad men are evil-- and The Truth inside a cage, a belief of things, called History—and all of it at the same time. For I am a man of metaphors and oblique ways of saying things. --The way I say things. The way I’ve said things all along. It’s this tendency that I have that’s made my life so hard.

…And so, perhaps because of this very tendency, I found myself, at sixteen, in a cage at Teller State Hospital so many years ago. For it is a luxury to be understood.

I sat in my cell. I combined a thought or two as I juggled stupid paper balls --all the while, living within my metaphors. It was almost as if I was purposely trying to be an example. As if I was trying to find a new way to communicate. Was my thinking mere schizophrenia? It could easily seem so. And maybe I did not care, for soon I would be dead.

One day, I was taken from my cell to see Dr. Benz, the Superintendent, himself.

Dr. Benz, accompanied by Security, regarded me as I walked into the room just off the wet side. He got to his first question quickly. I hardly had time to sit in the chair.

“Why did you do it, Mr. Kranz?” He tapped his pipe on the arm of his chair.

“I had to,” I said and waited for him to ask me to elaborate. Instead, he started to read his notes as so far collected by his staff. Apparently, he sensed some kind of ambiguity in my simple answer. But, in return, I saw a question in him, as well. I came to realize he operated by keeping everyone off-guard. For the predictable thing that I would have expected was for the Doctor to ask me more about the crime, itself. Yet, he did not. In retrospect, I know why. If you can “explain” your motivations, you are not being honest!

“What do you think’s going to happen?” he asked me, instead. He began puffing hard on his pipe. He drew even harder on it and then held it as if to point at me in a faintly accusatory way.

“I suppose I’ll get the gas chamber,” I said. It came out curtly, yet with a bit of resignation. The battle of childhood had failed. And, now, they would be killing me. I did not intend to protest the inevitable. At least, it would all be over.

“Do you want to go to the gas chamber?” the doctor asked quickly and sternly, as he returned the pipe to his mouth, again drawing hard.

“It doesn’t matter,” I began. “Life is but a spark between two vast eternal seas of nothingness.” Well?—I thought.

I believe he hid his intentions within the action of his next quickly delivered question. It was a distancing question, an innocuous question:

“If you stayed, what do you think might happen?”

I shrugged. Then I asked:

“Could I see my dog?”

“We’ll see,” he said. Beyond that he had little to say. As he left with his personal guard, he told the aides: “De-lice Mr. Kranz and put him in the locked dorm.”

I saw Dr. Benz walk smartly down the hall through the “Big Gate” and around the corner. I had wanted to somehow say more.

…Well? Isn’t life a spark between two vast eternal seas of nothingness? –I thought. Doctor, isn’t it? –I asked him in my mind, in front of my eyes… But he was gone. Matters of Justice began to wheel.

I believe Dr. Benz knew I was quite different from the beginning –something about my actions. As always, I suspect it was the fact that I do not make eye contact. That would be invasive of me. It would be –somehow—impolite. Perhaps, it made me look shy to some. Or perhaps it made me seem insincere to others. I just do not know. And I think at some point he put me on thorazine and labeled me a paranoid schizophrenic to keep me out of the penitentiary, and possibly—the gas chamber. My very demeanor would have been the death of me in prison. I think the Doctor knew this. I think the Doctor came to believe that I had already suffered enough at the hands of my father. --And so curiously, besides. I think the Doctor came to believe that, although I had killed my sister, perhaps the real target of my rage was only tangentially addressed.

But about the time I shot my sister, Janine, in 1968, a certain type of drug was being introduced at Teller State Hospital. And within a few years of my arrival, agricultural funding dwindled from Teller’s operations, for it was then deemed unenlightened to treat mental patients in the ways they had been treated in the past.

There were still shock treatments, but lobotomies were becoming rare. Phenothiazines, a new class of drugs, were then widely introduced at Teller. Perhaps you’ve heard of thorazine. But there was also stelazine, compazine, prolixin, and some others, too.

I was on thorazine for the first few years that I was there. It was the main antipsychotic medication used back then. But Dr. Benz realized that it did not control my anger the way he intended. For if I was crazy at all, it was from being angry at what had happened to me –the crime, unseen, of my father. In the Bible it is written: The sins of the father will be visited upon the son. I believe it’s so.

I don’t think I was ever psychotic –just somehow unwell and very uncomfortable. Nothing ever seemed right to me. It was always too cold for me. My clothes, no matter how good, always felt bad to my skin. I have never worn jewelry. I have always hated mud. All my life I have avoided gutting a fish. But I was a boy of sixteen when I was sent to Teller for murder. I was an intellectual, meek boy. A little boy, really-- picked on and bullied in school. I was a studious boy, the kind the “real” boys hated. This story is about how I fought back and how I lost.

…The years this story spans, have informed me of this: As best I will try, you may still not understand. Yet, in spite of all my doubts, I will try. Explaining things is so hard for me, and so tiresome. Let me do for you what I must, but the metaphors will soon begin inside. There is so much to say. And it is the more natural way of my mind. There is so much that must be said obliquely.

A few of my doctors after Benz have always suspected that somehow I was not really crazy. The psychologists at Teller loved to talk with me. But for some oddly uncharitable reason for ones who have chosen a “helping profession,” some of the shrinks have resented it–that maybe Dr. Benz crafted an end run to save me from the death penalty. The price I paid was to become addicted to a medication meant for schizophrenia --when I was actually autistic. Many psychiatrists are arrogant, opinionated careerists. But Dr. Benz understood my situation, and he helped me as best he could within the rules he had to follow.

As I’ve said, though no one on God’s green earth can be sure, I’ve probably had a form of autism, called Asperger’s Syndrome. Who can say in this world of poisons just what it was that poisoned me.

In years on out, from my time of thought and study and seclusion, at Teller -- those years of peace, in what amounted to being my secular monastery -- it was conjectured that I was manic-depressive or a bipolar, even though my mind does not really “race” like some are led to believe by my outward, anxious, behavior.

I found myself on lithium once. It is a terrible drug. It made me feel that I was somehow “outside” myself in a most uncomfortable way. And the arrogance of “wise” doctors, as well as different theories of treatment and different theories of the mind -- forced other meds and other therapies down my throat that were not needed.

During my fourteen years at Teller, as well as afterward, other new drugs were tried on me, too. But, through the years, since my early twenties, I was always able to convince the doctors that anger was my main disease, and that it was effectively controlled by my mellaril, and that they should just keep me on it. It made me into a wary man. I do not exactly trust “Mental Health” or its intentions. It is in the service of society, not the individual. –And society is a lie. I know that now.

I’m not particularly dangerous now, no more than you. Curious. I don’t believe you know how dangerous you could be –had you grown up like me or some of the desperate others that I knew at Teller. People like Ross Randall.

I suppose I look dangerous enough –what with all the muscle twitches I now have from all those years, now over, on mellaril—but, no. No crime wave’s following me around. I do have anger enough to tell you a story about a crime. But which crime? I will tell you a story about the Crime in the Garden of Eden. I will tell you of the crime of taking the food out of little boy’s mouth with social disparagement. With gossip. I will tell you how the wisest cruel use society, itself, as a weapon –and how I’ve come to know this.

--Because I am not talking here about my crime alone. I want to tell you about sex and about why the human race is really in perpetual war.

All my life I haven’t picked up well on all the social chatter, and the facial nuances of others. I have often found myself rebuked in social situations because of this. Yet I have never been as mean as all these “normal,” social people, who have no patience with anyone who is a little different or a little odd. For as socially wise and sophisticated as think themselves, they don’t care about anything but how things look to others and how they, themselves, “fit in.” Their lives are all about style and appearance. Their lives are not in the service of the truth. I call them all the common run --the vapid, common run. They destroyed my life with their cruelty and their sheepism. Do you understand why some children go to school with guns?

I know that my life’s a “write-off.” And what of a life undermined by disparagement when you’re just a child? Well… If someday, of course, surely as a matter of pure discussion, a whore should piss on me, and –somehow –if someday I should think I that I’d desire it-- so what? Would you be able to understand? Would you say I was the immoral one? Was it me who did the initial crime? Would you brand me further? Hurt me further? Do not answer. I already know the most likely possibility –as a matter of pure discussion, of course.

Why would I say such a thing? I’m just looking back at the path and arc of my life. That’s all. And, so, I hear myself walking on a curious floor in my world of metaphors, asking about the initial crime. What was the initial crime? What was the Crime in the Garden of Eden? I will tell you a tale of justice and psychological invasion. I want to tell you a hunch I have about why Neanderthal lay murdered so long in the ancient forest of our human past. I know from the start you’ll have none of it. For I am just a boy from long ago who once murdered his sister. That’s all that matters to most. I suppose.