Chapter Five

      After lunch I paid my ransom at the local parking lot and drove off through the rain for the hospital. I drove a Rambler American. My colleagues drive Jaguars, Mercedes, Cadillacs, Corvettes, Porsches, Thunderbirds and (occasional slummers) Mustangs: I drove a Rambler. At that time it was my most original contribution to New York City Psychoanalysis.

      I went east across Manhattan, up over the Queensborough Bridge and down onto the island in the Eastriver where the State Hospital is located. The ancient buildings appeared bleak and macabre. Some looked abandoned. Three new buildings, built of cheerful yellow brick and pleasant, shiny bars, make the hospital appear, together with the older horror houses, like a Hollywood movie set in which two movies, ‘My Mother Went Insane’ and ‘Prison Riot’, are being filmed simultaneously.

      I went directly to the Admissions Building, one of the old, low, blackened buildings which, it was reliably reported, was held together solely by the thirty-seven layers of pale green paint on all the interior walls and ceilings. A small office was made available to me there every Monday and Wednesday afternoon for my therapy sessions with select patients. The patients were select in two senses: one, I selected them, and two, they were actually receiving therapy. I normally handled two patients, meeting each for about an hour twice a week.

      A month before this, however, one of my two patients had attacked a hospital attendant with an eight-foot-long bench and, in being subdued, had received three broken ribs, thirty-two stitches and a hernia. Since this was slightly less than he had inflicted upon the five attendants doing the subduing, no charges of hospital brutality seemed justified, and after his wounds healed, he was to be sent to a maximum-security hospital.

      To replace him, Dr Mann had recommended to me a seventeen-year-old boy admitted for incipient divinity: he showed a tendency to act as if he were Jesus Christ. Whether Dr Mann assumed all Christs to be masochistic or that the boy would be good for my spiritual health was unclear.

      My other QSH patient was Arturo Toscanini Jones, a Negro who lived every moment as if he were a black panther isolated on a half-acre island filled with white hunters armed with Howitzers. My primary difficulty in helping him was that his way of seeing the world seemed to be an eminently realistic evaluation of his life as it had been. Our sessions were usually quiet ones: Arturo Toscanini Jones had very little to say to white hunters. Although I don’t blame him, as a non-directive therapist I was a little handicapped; I needed sounds for my echo.

      Jones had been an honors student at City College of New York for three years before disturbing a meeting of the Young Conservatives Club by throwing in two hand grenades. This act would normally have earned long tenure in a penitentiary, but Jones’s previous history of ‘mental disturbance’ (marijuana and LSD user, ‘nervous breakdown’ sophomore year – he interrupted a political science class by shouting obscenities at his professor) and the failure of the two hand grenades to maim anything more valuable than a portrait of Barry Goldwater, earned him instead an indefinite stay at QSH. He had become my patient under the questionable assumption that anyone who throws hand grenades at Young Conservatives must be sadistic. That afternoon I decided to let myself go a bit and see if I couldn’t provoke a dialogue.

      ‘Mr Jones,’ I began (fifteen minutes had already passed in total silence), ‘what makes you think that I can’t or won’t help you?’

      Sitting sideways to me in a straight wooden chair, he turned his eyes at me with serene disdain: ‘Experience,’ he said.

      ‘That nineteen consecutive white men have kicked you in the balls doesn’t necessarily mean the twentieth will.’

      ‘True,’ he said, ‘but the brother who came up to that next Charlie with his hands not protecting his crotch would be one big stupid bastard.’

      ‘True, but he could still talk.’

      ‘No suh! We Niggahs gotta use our hands when we talk. Yessuh! We’re physical, we are.’

      ‘You didn’t use your hands then when you spoke.’

      ‘I’m white, man, didn’t you know that? I’m with the CIA investigating the NAACP to see if there’s any secret black influence on that organization.’ His teeth and eyes glittered at me, in play or hatred I didn’t know.

      ‘Ah then,’ I said, ‘you can appreciate my disguise: I’m black, man, didn’t you know that? I’m with –’

      ‘You’re not black, Rhinehart,’ he interrupted sharply. ‘If you were, we’d both know it and only one of us would be here.’

      ‘Still, black or white, I’d like to help you.’

      ‘Black they wouldn’t let you help me; white, you can’t.’

      ‘Suit yourself.’

      ‘That’ll be the day.’

      When I lapsed into silence, he resumed his. The last fifteen minutes were spent with us both listening to the regular rhythmic shrieks from a man someplace in the Cosmold Building.

      After Mr Jones left I stared out the gray window at the rain