~1975~ (part 1 of 5)
By WordWulf, 20th Jan 2011 | Follow this author
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Posted in WikinutWritingShort Stories
He loves Tina and, come to think of it (in Maury’s opinion), looks just like her. Anyway, hands high above his head, with his butt all wiggly and slinky in his black silk dress with the silver fishes swimming all over it, he goes twirling into his first pirouette.
~1975~ (part 1 of 5)
My hands are cuffed and linked to my waist by a chain that reaches to the shackles on my ankles. An administrative hand covers the top of my head, pushes it down, in a procedural move to keep me from banging it on the door frame as I exit the vehicle. Eyes find me from shadow chairs in dark corners. I respond to them and they all look away. An administrative palm presses into my back urging me forward. Death will be like this, I think, in its primordial gulp. Most of the story I am about to tell is about a would-be crazy guy I met in a mental institution in Fort Logan, Colorado. We, who were kept inside, called the place, ‘The Fort’.
In the year two-thousand-one Maury figured it was time to take a little trip. He decided to go away for a while to live in nineteen seventy-five. Nineteen sixty-nine was his first choice but two of his three children were born after that fine year and he didn’t want to live without them. So nineteen seventy-five was as far back as he could go since that is when his last child was born. One reason nineteen sixty-nine was so attractive to him was that Jim Morrison and Elvis Presley were both alive then. He thrived on the charismatic energy of these monsters of stage and word and had failed to appreciate them in his youth. But Jim Morrison was left behind in favor of his children.
Maury had been a salesman and a truck driver and a roofer and a maintenance man and lots of other work things the twenty-five years before his kids were raised and out on their own. But music is what he always wanted to do. Performing music was Maury’s forever dream. He wrote songs and poems and sang and played in bands but never earned much money doing it. His favorite Jim Morrison song is a piece he wrote called ‘Hell’s Kitchen’. He has written hundreds of Jim’s songs since he died. Jim ordered him to do so and has co-authored several pieces. Maury’s done the same thing with Elvis, his favorite song being, ‘A Tear Gives Her Away’. If you happen to be involved with music or writing, painting, any creative endeavor, you are more likely to understand Maury. He has come to believe that sanity is a chameleon and certainly not the state-of-mind preference for those who exist on the outside peripherals of “the box”.
Very few people in Maury’s surround understand why he came to live in nineteen seventy-five. His children do, sort of. He discussed it with them many times before he bought the ticket. They considered his decision just the other side of slightly weird but quite harmless really, like writing a poem about dying. They pick him up every couple of weeks and take him out to lunch, possibly considering him just plain ‘out to lunch’ to begin with. Some times they barbecue, play volley ball and sing songs. They want him back in real time and out of this crazy place. It has never been said but there is a certain underlying melancholy when they drop him off at the end of one of their outings.
Maury knows they had nothing to do with having him committed to ‘The Fort’. He is fairly sure his ex-boss and a couple of his dear sisters accomplished that feat. It isn’t so bad though, not nearly as bad as his imagination led him to believe it would be. He just has to remember two things to survive here: Don’t smoke anywhere other than the smoking compound and don’t throw your butts on the ground. And never, oh no never, breathe smoke in Nurse Esther’s face. She is the Head Nurse in charge of the little house full of wackos where he has been placed. One time she got smoke in her face and blamed it on Maury and one of his buddies. She ordered him and Ace (the buddy) to police the area.
Maury said, “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!” because he always got to be Gunther Tooty whenever they did the policing thing.
Ace was Herman Munster because he was taller and much more serious. He made a squeaky woman’s voice and called out, “Car fifty-four, where are you?”
Maury replied with, “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!” and began to sing ‘Message in a Bottle’ with Ace running the bass riffs. Esther got really angry at what she referred to as their ‘trite silliness’ and made them crawl around on the ground all afternoon picking up cigarette butts and gum wrappers in the smoking compound. Maury found forty-eight cents and gave Ace the quarter.
Trouble with Ace is he likes to dance. He dances in the disco style with his head up in the lights. He almost always dances alone. He is pretty good too, except for his shoes. His dancing shoes have six inch heels. When he spins off the cement into the grass, the heels stab the earth like sharp pointy daggers. Last time that happened he was really moving, having reached the first chorus of his favorite song, ‘Proud Mary’, by Tina Turner. He loves Tina and, come to think of it (in Maury’s opinion), looks just like her. Anyway, hands high above his head, with his butt all wiggly and slinky in his black silk dress with the silver fishes swimming all over it, he goes twirling into his first pirouette. His heels sink all the way into the just-watered grass and... he should have fallen on his skinny ass. But he didn’t. He twisted his long sinuous body, hair flying wildly around his head. His arms are strong like a cable and he pushed them out in front of himself, attempting to break his fall. ‘Big wheel keep on turnin’, He came crashing down and shattered both his wrists in the process.
After this incident Ace began to rock, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, too fast and forceful for rhythm to sneak in. Now if he isn’t dancing, he’s rocking. He never talks when he rocks. His face is a dark stone, devoid of expression, driving the long muscles of his body. When he’s dancing, he and Maury talk and smoke and laugh between numbers. He is free and very animated, a frenzy of conversational activity. The dance pulls him laughing to his high-heeled feet. He is a complete cutup. Maury asked him once why he refused to talk when his hair was tied back and he was rocking back and forth in his jeans and sneakers but became ‘Miss Silly Boots’ when his hair was flying free, the silver fish swimming madly on his silk dress and his tall heels click-click-clicking on the sidewalk. Ace’s face was sweating from the exertion of the dance and makeup was running down from his angular cheekbones, lending his countenance the appearance of a haunting tribal ceremonial masque. He let rip with a shrieking laugh as he launched himself into the introductory moves of his beloved ‘Proud Mary’. “I am a schizophrenic and so am I!” he squealed.
When Ace begins to rock back and forth (sometimes he sucks his thumb), Maury goes looking for Esther. They call everyone who works at The Fort ‘staff’. If you want to do anything, and they mean anything at all when they say it, you have to seek the permission of ‘staff’. It has been Maury’s experience that even though several ‘staff’ persons are obviously Esther’s superiors, it does no good to obtain their permission to do anything. Esther always finds out and makes the bosses change their minds. Or else, if you’re sneaky and enjoy your privilege before she can stop you, she does really mean things.
Maury got a taste of Nurse Esther’s meanness just the other day. He got permission for himself and his pod-mates, Ace, Blacky, Joaquin and Mister Leary, to go to the basketball court. Esther knows they don’t really go there to play basketball. Except for Blacky. He is short and stocky, heavily muscled, but nobody, not even the staff players, nobody stands a chance against Blacky on the basketball court. Blacky shoots hoops and generally shows off for everyone while they sneak cigarettes, cut up, talk and play the ‘yo momma dozens.’ On this particular day Ace brought a boom box. He danced the court while Blacky shot it. They were perfect. The ball never touched Ace and Blacky never missed a step of the dance. It was mad poetry, an angelic dance of lost devils. Time had no place there and they lost temporary track of themselves, but not for long. Esther came on shift and wondered why the pod was empty. She found the pass slip with Maury’s name on the bottom and had him summoned to her office. When he appeared, she handed him two paper cups, not saying anything about his ‘basketball’ game. One cup was full of nasty looking little pills. The other had plain old water in it. “You forgot your meds,” she said. Old prune face. He swallowed the pills, gagged and slobbered on her when she shoved her fingers in his mouth, under the tongue and between the teeth and gums. When she was satisfied that all the meds were down his gullet, she pulled her fingers out. He got the hell out of there.
Later that night, like midnight or so, she rushed into the pod. Flipping on the light, she ran straight to Maury’s bed. She pulled his covers back and pointed an accusing finger at the middle of his front. “Look at you!” she cried as she plinked at his pecker with her finger. Her aim was perfect as usual and he knew the next day the end of his pecker would be covered with small dark bruises. However, he enjoyed her plinking attention so much that, rather than turn away, he allowed his flesh to stand tall and accept all the punishment she chose to lavish upon it.
“You got caught walkin’ your woodie.” Blacky’s syrupy voice, thick with sleep, oozed across the room. Their room, or pod as they referred to it, was circular in shape with five beds arranged in a tight symmetrical circle. Blacky was in the bed directly across from Maury’s so that they slept feet to feet. Blacky winked and blinked and squinted his eyes constantly and, though Maury couldn’t see him, he could almost hear him blinking at Esther’s plinking. Maury reached for his covers but Esther pushed him back and rolled them up in her arms. “Wear your shame proudly,” she said then strode purposefully across the room, slamming the light off and closing the door behind her. She took his covers with her. Maury was very sure she had manipulated his meds to allow herself the opportunity to bust him with a woodie, thus humiliating him for his earlier basketball transgressions. Her plan worked very well indeed.
Click on this link for Part 2
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