Category Archives: Depression

I don’t know if it was Nixon’s idea but, in what might easily have been an extension of his benign neglect philosophy, the first lottery went off on Sept 1, 1969.  The politicians seem to be saying they were going to wash their hands of any attempt to intelligently or thoughtfully administer the draft.  Instead, we will exercise a complete lack of reason and let luck make the decision for us.  The lottery decided I was number 9—a dead certainty to be drafted.

I think I had five physicals.  But I never again had to strip or pee on demand; instead I followed a different colored line that took me to the room where they took excuses.  This was like a different world.  White people every where—hardly any black or brown people—carrying letters of all sorts from doctors, and copies of prescriptions, and x-rays  Proof of any sort of any serious or oddball thing that could get them to let you go.  One friend got out because he had a varicose vein on one testicle.  My brother got braces and flew to a place that he had researched as having a very high reject rate.  He walked in, smiled, they saw the braces and he was free.

I don’t know. Maybe I was just worn down, or had given up, or resigned myself.  I don’t know what, but I had stopped taking the meds, and when they called me up for another physical, I had no excuse in the form of an updated prescription.

Actually, I did have one—an excuse, I mean–but I was afraid to use it.  When I first saw the psychiatrist, I had taken the MMPP, the most sophisticated and accepted instrument for determining extent and type of mental illness.  But I had been reluctant to use the results because they said: A) That I suffered from a massive reading defect, or B) I was malingering or C) I was a danger to myself or others.  The report went on to detail this last finding in three or four single spaced pages.  I figured they would look at the reading defect part, see I had a college degree, conclude I was malingering, and not even read about my homicidal, suicidal, homosexual, apocalyptical tendencies.

But I took it with me because it was all I had.  I also took a good number of the various psychotropics I had on hand.  I was determined that I would not, on the long bus ride up to the LA draft board, feel a fucking thing.  I was pretty loopy by the time I got there, though not so loopy as not to notice they had redone the place, that there were now three shrinks in three offices where there had been just two.  One of them was my bald headed nemesis from previous occasions and another—I could not believe my eyes–was a black man.  A long line wound its way towards those doors—one line for three doors, so you had no idea which shrink you would get.

In one of the bolder moves of my life, I did not go to the end of the line.  But stood in the middle of the room, and when the young man then in the black man’s office starting getting up, I marched right into the office and sat down.  I slid my papers across to him.  .    There I was with my red curly hair rising up like a nimbus around my head, my thick beard over my Adam’s apple, my glasses so dirty my eyes were scarcely visible, and stinking like I had not washed my clothes in a month (which might have been the case).

He asked how I was feeling at the moment. I said, fucking shitty, that I had felt fucking shitty for some time and did not know when I was going to stop feeling fucking shitty.  He read my papers, filled out a form, and handed to me to be taken to a secretary for typing up.  I couldn’t believe it; he had let me off for a whole year.

I would not have to report for a physical again until January of 1972, and I would not have report for that because I would be 26 years old, too old to be drafted.

Go figure…But fuck it, I was free! In a specific sense.

The last job I worked as a brick mason tender was right on the beach by the blue Pacific.  On an empty stretch of sand the Navy was building garages for amphibious landing craft.  They would be able to drive the craft straight out of the water, across a little sand and right into their garages.

These garages were big.  Almost forty feet high.  I was given the job one day of getting all the planks off the scaffolding.  Usually I would just throw the 2 by 6 planks–what were they? 12 feet long maybe–onto the ground.  But if you threw a plank that heavy from forty feet up you could crack it pretty easily.  So instead, you had to walk out to the last layer of planks, bend over, pick up a plank and balance it on the two 2 by 6 that were left for you to walk on.  After this naturally, things go more intense because you had to go out, bend over, pick up a plank, and walk back to dry land, on ONE 2 by 6 while balancing a 2 by 6.  And this was forty feet up going straight down to the concrete floor of the amphibious craft garage.

I did ok for a bit.  I would go out and pick up one and walk back on two.  Then I would go to the scaffolding right next to that, pick up one and walk back on two.  I did this for a bit and you can see I was avoiding the part that involves walking back on one and yet it was impossible to avoid because I was running out of scaffolding that had three planks (except for the part of the scaffolding where we were stacking the planks to be lowered down by fork lift).

Finally I steeled myself and went out to the very end of the scaffolding where there were only two planks, bent over and picked up one, leaving myself with one, which I slowly pivoted across my body to balance it and myself.  Whereupon I completely froze—too much aware that I was standing about 40 feet off the concrete on one 2 by 6 while attempting to balance another one across my body.

Fortunately, there was a black guy there who had been picking up planks from the other direction.  He saw me and said, “What’s wrong.”  I said I couldn’t move.  “Drop the plank,” he said.  So I did but I still couldn’t move.  “Get down and crawl,” he said.  So on wobbly legs I got down on my knees and crawled.  He gave me a hand up and began to talk about a job he had in Chicago working forty stories up and one guy was pushing a wheelbarrow full to the brim with mud along a two by six and the wheelbarrow started to go and the guy struggled to straighten it and losing his balance tumbled to his death.  “Always let go of the wheelbarrow” the black guy said.

He had an interesting grin because he had a gold cap all around one of his front teeth, and a piece of the gold was punched out in the shape of a star, so that the white enamel of what was left of his front tooth filled in the star.  I hadn’t seen that before and I haven’t seen it since.

At the end of that week, I got a pink slip.  I had been laid off.

By a couple of months or so after I got home, my parents got the idea I wouldn’t be going any place soon.  I had no prospects and had apparently gone insane.  In the south, there’s a tradition of taking care of insane relatives.  Joe, who came back from the war addled in the head because he had seen all his colleagues fried like so much chicken when their tank blew up, would be stuck back in a room someplace and pretty much left alone, until he died or blew his brains out with a shotgun.

 My brothers had the rooms in the house, one just a kid, and the other in high school.  So the old man decided to build me a room outside the house under the deck that extended from just outside the screen door to the dining room slash tv room.  The deck was kept aloft by block on four sides.  Down below there was a door that went under the deck.  You entered and saw dirt and all kinds of crap thrown under there.  The old man had in any case been thinking of putting in a bit of basement.  So we dug out the leche and poured a footing on two sides and built up walls out of block.  Then because the roof was a bit low, we dug out dirt from the bottom and poured a concrete floor that we painted with a green water retardant paint.

That was my room from the winter of 69 to the fall of 76.  Seven fucking years in the hole, as I like to say.  Seven fucking years like a fat slab of meat ripped straight out of the middle of my life as I lived in a hole with a two windows and a green floor.  The old man never threw anything away.  So I got an old dinner table, stuck my Smith Corona on it and it became my desk. I got a box springs and mattress from the shed out back and that became my bed.  I managed to drill some holes in the block and set up a couple of levels of boards for books shelves.  For closet space I used the room itself and a steamer truck I got for nearly nothing that had shelves and hangers in it for clothes.

I had privacy too.  My door opened out on to the great outdoors, meaning the strip of dirt and fucking ice plant between the parent’s house and the house next door.  If I needed to take a leak I could go down back or through a door in the room to an area under the house with nothing but dirt and junk lying all about and piss in there.

Seven years of piss produced quite a fucking stink.

Lights out, I could hear the mice running around in the rafters and the cockroaches would spread like a hoard down the walls.  These were big, black suckers, long as your thumb and about as thick.  Sometimes, when I was sleeping they got in my hair.  Usually that would wake me up and I got so I could grab them and throw them hard so that in the morning there would be bits of dead cockroach hanging there on the wall.

I went to a doctor to try to figure out what was wrong with me, but she could find no physical cause for my inability to sleep, my incessant fatigue, my constant desire to cry, my loss of interest in personal hygiene, the aches and pains in my joints, the electrical sensations that ran over my skin, or my weight loss.  I was down to 135 and could count each rib easily.  So she referred me to a psychiatrist.

Dr. Funk.

He prescribed Thorazine after the first or second visit.  Clearly I had a mood disorder.  I cried the whole first visit just at the idea of seeing a shrink.  He said maybe going into the army would make a man out of me.  The guy irritated me.  He was dressed in a nice little grey charcoal suit.  When he leaned back in his chair, his feet left the floor.  I was turning my life over to a fucking midget.

The next time I let him have it.  And went on and on about how his having become a shrink was clearly related to the fact that he was nearly a midget and he was overcompensating, like Napoleon, who also had been hardly five feet high.  And what the hell was I doing turning my life over to an overcompensating midget who had gone into psychiatry so he could have the legal right to tell others how to live their lives.  I mean how the hell did I know if he knew anything at all or not.  Or was just there to make people as miserable as possible.

I cried through the whole tirade, and when I was done, he asked had I considered institutionalizing myself.  My life, at that moment, teetered in the balance. Had I said yes I could have gone on to be a life time member of an institution; instead, I said no, how the fuck, I said, was I going to pay for that.  My working class background came to my rescue, although I must say I don’t know if I knew they would take you in for observation for nothing.

 But I had the prescription for Thorazine.  I visited the psychiatrist every three months or so for a year or better and I renewed the prescription.  I had a line of Thorazine bottles along the windowsill.  I couldn’t stand the stuff.  It was like an atom bomb in your head.  It blew away everything—anger, fear, grief, joy—and replaced it all with an intense sense of restlessness.  I took it only when I couldn’t fucking stand it any more. Fuck me.

But the next time the draft board called me up, as they would every six months for the next couple of years, I took the prescription with me.  They looked at it and said, “Come back in six months.”  I was an official and publicly certified nutcase.