Saturday, January 30, 2010

Chapter Eleven


It was 1968. I'd just come back from my third trip to Europe and was working as a bartender in a rock and roll club in Dallas called the Phantasmagoria.

I'd written "Dave the bartender is a great lay!" on one of the stall walls in the ladies room and I was having a wonderful time.

Young, beautiful sexy soon-to be-hippie women regularly came up to me to order their beers and casually said things like "Hiiiii. I'm Sherry. What's your name?" "Dave". "Oh! Hiiiii Daaaavve."

There was a lot of flirting and then there was a whole lot of...

Lesson: It pays to advertise!

Turns out I ended up moving in with Sherry for a short time. She was a cutie who had a pad in a nice complex not too far from the club. She shared the place with another girl and her boyfriend. They liked drugs: marijuana being the staple in the household.

I'd never done grass before and on one occasion, prior to my moving in, lit up for the first time. I spent the least part of the evening spewing my guts into the toilet.

It was terrific!

What had gotten me sick was allowing myself to get dizzy from the high. I liked the spinning sensation in my head and "went with it". I over-went with it, though.

I decided I liked grass a lot more than booze. I never got sick on it again, either.

Sherry and I made love one night and I started staying over.

Three days later there was a slight discharge coming out of my penis. It was rather unsightly and tended to stain the front of my pants.

And it burned like a white hot poker was coming out of my pecker!

It was on a weekend when I noticed it (isn’t it always on a weekend?) so I just wrapped the head of my dick in toilet paper to keep from staining my pants and kept trips to the toilet at a minimum while going about my business as usual.

First thing Monday I went to my doctor and got some tetracycline capsules to treat my first dose of the clap, gonorrhea.

I told Sherry she'd given me a dose and she wondered if there was enough medicine for the two of us. I didn't know, but she helped herself to some of my supply anyway.

Later that day I was at the Dallas County Jail to get fingerprinted and released for a carrying a prohibited weapon charge. I'd been in Europe when the case came up and my attorney, Garnet Kelsoe, a former associate of Jack Johannes, the a.m’s adoption attorney, had gotten me a year's probation with the stipulation they would expunge the record if I didn't break my unsupervised parole during that time. And I hadn’t broken it.

Now that I was newly back in the country I had to present myself for the final processing.

The fingerprinting was a formality he told me. But it turned out I had, unknown to me, two warrants for my arrest for misdemeanor bounced checks. Instead of releasing me I was "requested" to stay the night.

How could I refuse?

Now, Kelsoe was the type of man not above teaching lessons. He wanted me to understand that writing hot checks is not something I wanted to pursue as a career so he allowed me to languish in jail a few days...just so I'd get the feel of confinement.

As a result, I'm deathly afraid of jails. I do not want to go there for any length of time. I'm not even comfortable around the outside of the buildings that house jails.

But, I'd learned that from a time long before Kelsoe tried to educate me.

It stems from an experience that happened when I was fifteen.

The a.m. and I were not having too good a relationship...a state of affairs that had been going on for many years. About fourteen, actually.

One Saturday afternoon I came home from a movie and went to say hello to her and Gramma out on the back porch.

"Pack a bag. You're going to the hospital!” were the first and only words out of her mouth.

"What? I'm not sick. What are you talking about?” I asked.

"You are sick and you're going to the hospital so pack a bag and I don't want to hear another word from you!" she shouted.

Somehow she thought my interest in throwing-knives, the kind used specifically for throwing at targets –trees and cardboard boxes-, meant I was practicing to kill her one day and she was having me committed to the Beverly Hills Sanitarium in Oak Cliff in East Dallas, that night.

I had to call my girlfriend, Sandy Parsons, and tell her I couldn't make our date that evening. She didn't understand what was going on, but promised she loved me and would wait for me.

Around 6 pm a Sheriff's car pulled into our driveway and the deputy handcuffed me and ushered me into the back seat. First thing I noticed was there were no handles on the inside of the doors!

Gramma convinced the a.m. and the deputy to remove the cuffs, that I wasn't dangerous. The a.m. wouldn't hear of it, but the deputy convinced her I didn't seem like I'd cause any trouble, “being alone in the back seat and all”.

My a. m. got in the front seat and Gramma rode in the back with me.

Only the deputy escorted me when we arrived and I was checked into the facility...“for observation”.

I was led through locked doors into a world the likes of which I'd only seen in movies.

Crazy people were everywhere. One old geezer was walking the halls in a padding gait. He was barefoot. He looked neither right nor left nor up nor down. He just padded along: flap flap flap flap flap flap. I later learned he had a degenerative brain disease that was actually eating his brain tissue away.

Today, we know it as Atzheimer’s.

I was sure I’d seen a scary B-movie about it.

I had visions of some horrible beastie vigorously gnawing away at his gray matter and I imagined I would catch it from him and end up that way too.

They said in his heyday you could stop him anywhere in the complex and he could tell you what number tile he was standing on: he had counted and memorized each and every one of the floor tiles, a human GPS system. Now he was just another blithering idiot locked out of society's way.

Like me.

Lesson: Know where you stand.

I was given a room. The next day they issued me my daily clothes. They handed me pants, a shirt and clean underwear. Never mind I might have wanted to wear a different shirt.

I asked for another and they said they just handed out the duds and they didn't care one iota about fashion; I wasn’t going out anywhere, was I?

Everyone looked sartorially mismatched, so I guess I fit right in. That explains why mental patients look so bizarrely dressed. They have no choice in the matter.

From the outset I thought I’d been put there forever. That I was doomed to listening to the daily screams of the insulin shock patients and seeing the deadened eyes and limp bodies of the electro-shockees being wheeled back to their rooms. Or being jolted awake in the middle of the night by some patient who wanted to yell real loud. For a real long time.

They never once told me there was even the slightest possibility of ever getting out.

Scary to a fourteen year old.

One evening they held a dance and the women from the women's section were brought over. In those halcyon days of psychotherapeutic treatment the sexes were segregated.

Most of the inmates of the asylum just stood around and looked at the walls or stared into space, oblivious to the music. Some of the more "normal" sorts danced...with emotionless expressions on their probably drugged faces.

I was at the Zombie High Prom!

There was an attractive young woman close to my age: I was 15 and she was 18 or 20. In there, that was almost even steven.

Of the group she looked the most lucid. I asked her to dance and she accepted. She seemed grateful that it was I and not one of the “regulars” she was used to.

She told me she was in a trance. She'd gone to a hypnotist's show and had been inadvertently hypnotized while out in the audience. When the show was over everyone went home, but her.

She just sat there.

She told me she was in the trance even as we danced and spoke.

She said she knew what was going on around her but that she was just in a trance and couldn't get out.

I glanced around the dayroom and, believe me, she wasn’t the one in a trance.

Nonetheless, I started imagining I’d catch a “trance” from her on top of the brain eater.

I’d been well trained by the a.m.’s paranoia.

I had a meeting with the psychiatrist after a few days of lollygagging around on my bed or hanging out in the dayroom.

After we talked about why I was there (I told him I didn’t have any idea other than what she’d told me) he had the nicety to tell me he thought the a.m. was the one whom they should be observing.

I appreciated that. It gave me a little bit of confidence that I might get out of there alive and within the foreseeable future. It also validated my budding awareness of what I’d been adopted into.

I'd told the Doctor, a heavy-set, red-headed, cigarillo smoking hulk of a man who was ensconced in a maroon colored leather upholstered wing back chair at least 6 feet across the room from me, that I was supposed to be taking final exams at my school that week and that I'd have to take the whole year all over again if I didn't get out of there.

He said arrangements had been made with Highland Park High for me to take my exams after I got out of the lock-up section and that I’d go to summer school to make up for any subjects I might have failed: my first indication of possibility of release.

A week later I was moved to the "courts", a group of little refurbished cottages, not unlike an old roadside motel court.

I had a roommate who was a teacher. He had committed himself to the place -a circumstance I could not fathom anyone doing voluntarily- and had been there about a year.

He told me he'd had a nervous breakdown but said he was getting better. I'd heard the phrase but didn't have any idea what it meant.

The deal now at the sanitarium was this: I could come and go at my leisure but I had to check back in when I returned in the evenings. I’d taken my exams and I was to take the bus to summer school for history (I added typing to fulfill an elective requirement) in the mornings and be home by 10pm. I was free to do anything I wanted during those hours.

Well, I was out of there. I came back anytime I liked but I never checked in. It was freedom from that snake pit of the week before and I wasn't about to hang around the place if I didn't have to be there.

After a week on the courts I was allowed to move back home. No one came to get me. I wasn’t even allowed a cab. I had to ride the bus home! Transferred twice.

I didn't speak to the a.m. for about three months after that. She'd made it quite clear to anyone who'd listen that she was afraid I'd stab her in the back with my knives which were nowhere to be found when I returned, by the way.

I didn't miss them. They were just toys. But to be locked up like that re¬affirmed my belief I'd been given to the Hellbitch From Hades.

So now, nine years later, my being locked up again in a jail full of crazies made me very uncomfortable indeed.

But God had a surprise in store for me. I would not have to spend my days with the dregs of society. The first night maybe, but not any more than that.

That first night was spent mostly getting checked in. I spent up till about 10pm in a holding cell while they processed me. Then I was moved into the general population.

The place was so overcrowded there were mattresses on the floors and on the steel lunch tables.

Inmates with arms the size of hog's legs played a quaint game of "Hit". One guest would slug the other on the bicep as hard as he could and then the other player would slug the 1st as hard as he could. No one kept score. There were no prizes.

Fun game.

I said God had a reprieve in store for me and He did: the clap, remember? It kept me out of harm's way. And, sadly, the thrill of playing Hit!

Or any other games, like stud or pokim, they might have wanted me for.

By now the pain upon urinating was excruciating. I had to hold on to the wall behind the communal toilet to brace myself. A stance that went not unnoticed by my new playfriends, who avoided me like...well...the plague.

The next morning I sent a kite –encarceratese for “a note”- through the system to see the doctor. Upon arrival they took me into the hallway outside the cells where I was told to drop my pants to be examined. He agreed I was ill and had me moved immediately to solitary confinement.

Lesson: ‘...but do please, Brer Fox, don’t fling me in dat brier-patch!’

Solitary! What a wonderful place for a loner.

With small biceps and a love disease.

I was one happy camper! I didn't have to do anything and for three days I didn’t do it.

I literally slept the time away. I ate the food they shoved through the door and shit and peed into a hole in the floor in the corner. No flush. Just a hole.

I met with Kelsoe a couple of times and he finally got me released by promising the court that I'd make restitution on the checks over a period of time.

I was outta there!

They gave me one gigantic penicillin shot while I was inside. I protested it would be ineffective, but I was cured by the time I got out.

My relationship with Sherry was immediately severed and I moved out.

The Phantasmagoria was formerly the Sidney Lumet Theatre on Knox Street in Dallas. Lumet was the director of such films as “Dog Day Afternoon”, “Serpico”, and “Network”. The theatre had been closed and shuttered for many many years.

In the early '60's a young man named Michael Carr re-opened it as "The Speakeasy", a bar. He even staged a run of "The Drunkard" there, for which I handled public relations. It ran fairly successfully, too.

The bar made him a bit of money, not a lot, but it was what he wanted to do. He later moved down the street to a little place he opened, called "The Quiet Man" -after the film.

Ike and Tina Turner’s manager, Pat Morgan, took the Speakeasy over around 1966 and renamed it "The In Crowd".

It was a hip place to dance and hang out. Later, it was reincarnated as the Phantasmagoria by Dave Cox, an accountant, who ran it at a loss for someone whose identity no employee ever learned.

It drove us nuts that he never did do much to try to get business through the doors.

He had some truly great bands playing there, including Johnny Winter, who called his group: “Winter –A Progressive Blues Experiment”.

It consisted of himself, Tommy Shannon on bass, and drummer John Turner. Rolling Stone Magazine called Johnny the hottest thing in Texas outside Janis Joplin!

I was the not only the bartender; but I also did a little emcee work too, with some gags thrown in to keep my chops exercised.

Paul Peterson, of the Donna Reed Show, came by one night and hung out. I invited him and his entourage to join me at one of the hotter after hours clubs, Yee’s Chinese Garden -about a half mile from the spot I where I’d photographed the Kennedys.

He accepted my invitation as did a half dozen other of my friends.

At Yee's, like the Pompeii Club, it was commonplace for visiting entertainers to get up and do a bit, albeit there was no radio broadcast. I did a couple of jokes and then, proudly, introduced Peterson to the crowd. He just sat there and barely acknowledged the introduction, not to mention ignoring the enthusiastic crowd.

I returned to the table a bit embarrassed and tried to coax him gently into singing something for us.

He snapped, "Why the Hell should I? They're not buying my dinner!" Indeed, they weren't.

I didn't mention that it was I who was buying his “dinner”.

Lesson: The audience knows a classless has-been when it sees one.

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