Crackpots #20: EXILE! (Patreon)

BY BRACE BELDEN

All my life I've been in some kind of trouble--I have an insolent face! My eyes are sort of beady and while overall physically I am fairly normal, there is the air of the rodent about me, certain people can sniff it...No reason you would know this, but people have always fixated on me, I inspire a certain amount of automatic loathing in a certain type of personality, I can't help it!

I have just one book recommendation this month, it’s a shorty called A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor about time he spent living in a pair of monasteries. It's not really anything like his much more famous A Time of Gifts, but I still loved it, you can read this on the train, it’s a slim thing, you can keep it in your pocket...I actually read it back in December but just wondering about it now...It taught me about monasteries, got me thinking about my own experiences among the cloistered, and then about exile...

 The self-imposed exile of the monks (though I’m not sure they see it that way), and the forced exile that was so common at one point in history...I think both are important. The formal processes of internal exile during the Tsarist regime and the various happenstance sort of exiles that revolutionaries were forced to undergo after things went bust were crucial to development of certain thinkers and revolutionaries: Lenin in Siberia, Lukacs in Vienna, even Nechayev in Switzerland…maybe exile "gives space" for the honing of thought, of sharpening of attitudes, distance! But too much distance is a bad thing, one must always have ones thoughts on the "motherland" in some form or another, scheming...I think if I've ever learned anything, it's that too much or too little can drive you insane.

Anyways I’ve been in all sorts of places. The first, of course, was the therapeutic school/community which I lived in, the Monarch school---which even at the time I recognized as a form of exile; certainly it felt like that, being cut off from all friends and family and sent to live on a farm in a rural state...we covered it in some detail in the Game.

But one thing that we weren't able to really get into in the series, it didn't really fit, was that I am in a sideways manner grateful for the experience---maybe I mentioned this obliquely but I learned a great deal about maneuvering there, though in retrospect there was danger in learning big lessons at 13/14. The obliteration of childhood assumptions of adult competency, finding out about ones capacity to endure...these are all things it's important to learn, but too much, too early, and it can hurt you in the long run.

I ran away after a year, though I had developed the plan (such as it was) early in my time there, when I realized more immediate avenues of escape were too prone to failure. Nobody had made it out successfully before, though a small number of energetic or psychotic kids had tried...but they'd mostly presented as rebellious types, and so a watchful eye was kept on them and their own hot blood prevented any real chance at actual escape.

All that is to say I kept my plan hidden, even from myself at times, and was able to present as a middling, somewhat reluctant, but in the end earnest participant of the program. The manner in which I governed myself to keep a kind of internal honesty worked well enough: I'd do things like tell small lies that I'd have to keep up, inconsequential things but ones I'd need to reinforce with regularity. This helped me keep a wall around my hatred; nothing could douse it.

It was occasionally excruciating.

I realized early on that it's amazingly easy to fall in love with your captivity. Everyone around me at Monarch seemed bought in; occasionally I would feel like I was maybe actually nuts for thinking the program was so weird. And people would be kind...

For instance, some counselor would talk to me in a friendly way, and being starved for affection, I would find myself suddenly apologetic for them and by extension the system. I'd have force myself to snap out of it by undertaking some minor act of rebellion. I needed to keep my hatred huge and brutal in order to betray the freaks keeping me on the farm, and my own family, plus everyone I had spoken to in the previous year...

I remember thinking: These people all believe I'm in their movie but I was in touch with the actual truth, which was that these people were crazy. In this instance, I was totally correct, but I drew the wrong conclusion from that---which is that I always would be.

My plan worked, and I'm glad it did. Another exile: Some months spent in flophouses, alleyways, public parks etc. More lessons: Self-reliance, cunning, meditative staring. But more burdens: Superstitions, hidden paranoias, I think this is where my sleeping problems began...and when I discovered that taking narcotics makes you feel invincible, I began to use all the lessons I'd learned in exactly the worst ways...

Heroin allows you to feel serenity even when your own life is apocalyptic; the warmth of the drug allows the fiend to construct all manner of illusory mansions on top of that artificial construction of sublimity provided by the dose. Bullshit heaped on bullshit...

Eventually I was arrested. I got diversion. This time exile was decidedly more adult: I found myself in an old gay motel that had been converted into a state-licensed rehabilitation facility. It wasn’t a very nice place, but it had a little pool that nobody ever went in, and it was in the desert, and it was fine to feel the heat...I felt like a lizard.

 Almost everyone in there had been busted, which made sense–everyone in there was very stupid. Not me, of course. In this place, as with the others I went to, I thought: Good for them but I'm different. I latched on to anything that proved that. I needed to build new illusions; I had ample material to work with.

One point for the monasteries is the Monks are all a bunch of celibates, though I imagine a good number of them bang around with each other in deserted wings or sepulchers or whatever…that’s tasteful, there’s a certain charm to it. Rehab isn’t like that. You aren’t allowed to have sex (in fairness, a lot of places are single-sex) but everyone is just crazy about the stuff—in fact they don’t shut the fuck up about it.

 Not that I was such a gentleman...

But get this: Some of the guys started putting their cocks in the elastic waistband of their basketball shorts, so just the dickhead pokes out, and they rub the top like it’s a genie’s lamp whenever any of kind of woman walked by.

I let things like this convince me that I had been exiled among madmen; there had been some kind of mistake.

Once, in my first place, about a week after I got there, this dude broke into the counselors office to have phone sex with his girlfriend. He was caught because he’d left some globules of jism on a chair…we all lost phone privileges for a few days ....our vow of silence! Everyone was really sore and disappointed but it didn’t matter to me – I was afraid of the phone, I wouldn't go near the thing, because who knows, my enemies might come through the wires and bite me (I was innocent, of course).

The truth was mostly nobody gave a shit where I was, except the people I owed money to. But they couldn't get me, or anyone, in there. No debt collectors, whether they were from one of the debt collection firms or just some dope dealer, could get in. Every time I went into rehab, I’d try and engineer some big rip-off from whoever I got my shit from…I did this about four times, ended up owing a lot of money to not so great people, I was once beat up badly on the street...

Speaking of delusions: One morning when we were deep in meditation, eating sunflower seeds and smoking menthols, Curtis tells me that when he gets out, he was gonna fuck his dealers bitch.

 I said: That’s a wonderful idea, I think she’s gonna love that…but listen…while I have no doubt that you can fuck her, you’re no doubt the better man, I know you’ve got money (or you will, 30 minutes back on the street you’ll be a millionaire), you’ve got swag, I can tell you’ve fucked a lot so your penis is amazing but, still, this might not be such a good idea. After all…

He dismissed me. I apologized for trying to fuck with his vision. After all, what did I know? He told me a secret…he gave it to me sotto voce… this chicks ass is fake. It had been made tremendous by injections. Not only that, but he’d heard she’d even arranged for this sleazy doctor to put a fake asshole in. He was sure he was going to fuck it.

The junkie commands an extraordinary capacity for self-deception. I knew this---lived it--but excepted myself. I thought I emitted a certain luminosity because my spirit was good, because I told myself I always meant well, but the reality is that my use of methamphetamine had turned my blood electric...

 Curtis’ mind was destroyed from the years he spent injecting obscene chemicals.  His arms were studded with penny sized red dots, like he'd got hooked up with a humungous mosquito. He must have been using a needle of incredible gauge. That’s not uncommon though. I was learning that some people could shoot drugs for a heroic number of years but never get it right. I don’t think Curtis had gotten much right ever. Curtis was very skinny. He was scabby and profane. He sucked to be around. 

(Meanwhile I was 110 pounds, I had scars up and down my arms--I still have some of them--I stunk, my clothes were torn to shreds...)

That always happens to me. I always end up stuck with some bum or another. It took me a while to figure out that I was one too. 

I remember thinking: These assholes are never going to get clean, while at the same time nurturing in hidden chambers of my heart my own plans for spectacular relapse, calculating how long it would take for the beam to be off of me, where I could scamper away and shoot a little bag or two...I was in the process of inverting my own youthful formulation, where I was still the sane one and everyone else was nuts, only this time my evidence wasn't so strong...I was living in an alternative reality where things would just work out and I'd be fine, whereas everyone else saw this wretched thing scampering around like a rodent---and they were right. I was too afraid to face this...I needed to rebuild my illusions. I went straight from that rehab to the dope man. From there I went all sorts of places.

When Curtis was telling me about how he was going to fuck his dealers girl, I thought: Wow, what an amazing guy. But he's lying to himself; it's unlikely that he'll ever stick his penis in anything ever again. He is, I'm sure, going to overdose and die the minute he leaves. His illusions were stupid, the product of a diseased mind. Mine were noble, glorious, and in the final analysis not illusions at all but the sober assessments of a brilliant figure. Two days after I left the program I overdosed in the bathroom of a burrito place on McCallister.

Later, things changed. My exile deepened. I went to more programs; I lived in a number of facilities. Eventually I was totally alone, in a basement with no windows. I was very sick. I stayed there for a long time. In retrospect it was the narrow end of a wide road. I no longer had a foundation for my illusions. I was twitching and ill. I had, as they say, run out of runway.

I should, I suppose, have found God there. I've heard of that happening to people. I did not. Instead I found myself totally naked, stripped of my delusions, looking down and seeing not the writhing form of a young man undergoing acute heroin cessation but the fat oily body of a massive rat.

But anyways that was a long time ago. I'm normal now. See you next week!