5. Other People's Confessions

Prior to the final performance of his play, Jeffrey Weiss had surprised me by showing up by himself in Ward Six in a warm overcoat and a melancholy smile. Later, he confided in me that he too had been in this same place. Jeffrey had an openness and candor which one sees only in some gifted children; he was not a stereotypical artist even though his plays had won many coveted awards. He always extended his warm hand to shake, even to new acquaintances. I felt I had known him a long time after a few swift weeks.

Before I was allowed to leave I had to get clearance at the desk and change out of the hospital pajamas I was in and put on enough street clothes to stay warm in the chilly night. As we started walking we talked about many things. He had lived in Allentown all his youth and left for New York some twenty years before.

I said, "I hadn't even been born then."

I heard him sigh nostalgically, and then he became animated for me. "It's strange being back there. You know, it hasn't changed much at all...."

"Why were you of all people—I mean, how dijou get in W-6 anyway?"

"Huh, let's see....It was so long ago. When I was a teenager I got hooked on morphine after an accident. And the hospitals used to just give it out like water in those days. So I had to be crazy, at least seem so, to get what I needed."

"You were an addict....acting crazy to get drugs?"

"It wasn't all acting...." Jeffrey laughed sotto voce with a playful innocence (which seemed more 'play' than innocence) and went on louder, "It seemed like the only thing worthwhile then. It was the early sixties. Everyone I knew from then seems to have gone through a hospital, a marriage, or a career.... It's hard to explain how so much good could turn into such grist! But I'm fortunate, I'm a survivor."

We walked among the patchy shades and bright pools of the streetlights along the colonnaded avenue. The pace was quick and his words were reassuring. I would survive too. Very little traffic passed as we went along.

"Do they treat you well in W-6, Cayle?"

"Uh, they're okay but it's a prison sometimes. Right now I feel free being outside again. Sometimes I get scared that they won't release me."

"But why? You're perfectly sane. (Coming from me that may not be saying much! but....) And, you have all that time to yourself, don't you?"

"No, they give us all these stupid activities to do. It's like kindergarten sometimes, a nightmare kindergarten."

"A nightmare kindergarten...." he echoed my words slowly and I wondered for a second if he was imagining the experience I meant or if he was thinking of the words for their poetic value.

I flashed back to the anonymous nights we all spent at the window where one could watch the lights of the low buildings that never changed. Gathered around an ashtray, smoking and talking, four or five others and I would always stay in the dark end of the hall by the elevators until we were forced to bed. They had all been there a long time. A deep horror gripped me.

Institutionalization: commitment. My life up for grabs.

"They accidentally put me on haldol after the Intensive Care Unit. You know-it screwed up my speech. I had a side-effect that made me aphasic. It took me five minutes to say 'gi- gi- mu- mu- a- ah- ahhg- gla- sssss o- o- wa- wa- ta.'"

"Give me a glass of water?"

I nodded, continuing, "And they thought, from that, that I was crazy. Jules just visited by chance and he finally got a nurse to listen to me, and I wrote on a piece of paper for her that the drug was making me that way."

"That's terrible! But they know you're all right now, don't they? You shouldn't have any troubles being released. They did give you passes to go out and finish rehearsals for the play, didn't they?"

"I had to fight for that."

I flashed back to the moment in W-6 when Steiger decided to let me perform rather than confine me continually among other suicide survivors (one of whom re-attempted while I was there), schizophrenics, and psychotic and neurotic personalities. I'd said that the play really needed me, and I felt worse missing it.

Jeffrey went on, "Don't worry. We'll kidnap you and hide you if they try to commit you, eh?"

This was a promise I knew he would keep. As far as he was concerned, I was a political prisoner. (The Divine Madness School of Art has always had its own exclusive underground.)

"Thanks," I said.

His laughter burbled up from a strange and warm depth. I heard so much wonderful yet heart-breaking music in his laughter. It was a laugh that told many stories (as he himself did), and I felt through it how much courage he had. His laughter cried against the ridiculous, humiliating world-it sang like a healing mantra. Even at his own expense, his laughter seemed like a sacrament.

A majestic wall of glass shaped like a vast, shining A-frame rose up before us-we walked through the heavy glass doors of the Center for the Arts building and passed a gallery on the left—then being used as a coat room-and turned right toward another gallery next to the sturdy steel doors to the still new-smelling four-hundred seat amphitheater. The Center for the Arts, or "C - A," as it was known, never failed to impress me. Once we were inside, Jeffrey stayed with me until some actor detained him to haggle over a line.

Jules was glad to see me. His musicians formed the 'orchestra,' which was a piano, a saxophone, electric guitar and violin. Really they were a jazz-rock ensemble of vast ability; I heard them tune-up and pick on each other unhappily like oversized funny-looking kids. The technicians were checking ropes, counting props, re-rehearsing light-cues, patching up last night's last-minute patches, and actors and actresses were rushing to Wardrobe (in a backroom) and to upstairs dressing rooms. On the way up myself I stopped for a while when a girl I sort of liked asked me how I was. It was Sabrina.

I had always trusted her intuitively because she was as crazy as me in an analogous way. Aside from trying to kill herself and having a rotten family history, an unconscious sympathy linked us: she was a beautiful artist of the insane. After I got into costume and make-up and was heading back down to the stage with Jules beside me, she passed by again. Then suddenly she turned and stepped up close to me. Her eyes were tender and bewilderedly searched into mine, which were concerned with the opal blue of her eyes and her face forming a word she could not find. I wanted to hold the image of her eyes—she was so ethereal.

"I almost forgot," she said. Then she hugged me gently and with care for a long moment. This was her way of telling me that she knew what had happened and was forgiving me without a word. (Poignant, mute expressions are part of being a Beautiful Artist of the Insane.) Then she started away again but Jules indignantly grunted to signal that he wanted a hug too. So she came back to hug him and left.

Because she was beautiful-or because we were fools—we stood there looking at her go upstairs. She loved to be looked at, and obligingly, everyone watched her, wanted her, and so on—but she was so messed up that even the fellow who actually loved her had been unable to sustain a relationship with her. It hurt him too much when she attempted suicide. On the other hand, being partisan to her side, I know how hard it is to need love. A wonderful time to lose a love, after suicide fails. And yet, if she or I had ever succeeded.... I identified with Sabrina because she felt people could only love her body. After getting to know her, she thought, they would tire—not an uncommon obsession. I too believed I was nothing without my own gifts, that is, nothing to love. If there had not been Jenny, I might have gone out with her-probably to the detriment of us both.