CHAPTER TWO (Of Novel)

Paupers' Row

THE CONCEPT OF WHITE PLASTER

By Novelvision



CHAPTER TWO

PAUPER’S ROW


When they finally tore down that big barn --for all the reasons for progress that always are -- at Teller State Hospital -- they found a man hanging by his neck in a little shaft that no one had known about. A draft of air had dried him out like a piece of leather. He twisted there, just out of sight, for years. He was a nobody, everybody said. But I personally care about the suicides of desperate, dispossessed men as much anything. I trust what such men think more than the philosophies of the sanguine.

I’ve watched such men.

That man who twisted for years in that shaft in the quiet moving air, I have so little doubt – found himself spurned by all love. And when he saw the truth -- that was that, and, then, there was nothing left do but perish. But, at least, you should know his name. It was Eban Thomas.

Joe and I were on grave digging detail the day Eban was buried. Whoever lined up the graves on Paupers’ Row got a little off their line. You could see the rough box just showing in the dirt from another patient’s grave, one line over. Joe and I slid ourselves down into Eban’s grave. Joe did not have any sense of decorum, at all. Joe smiled at me, and with a wink and his smoke dangling at the side of his mouth, he quietly said to me, “Watch this.”

He took his shovel and banged on the just barely visible rough box.

“Hey!” he yelled loudly. Everyone stopped and looked down at us.

“Hey!” Joe yelled again and pounded on the box as loudly as he could with his shovel. “Wake up, asshole!”

He pounded on the box again really hard. And he hit it very hard, again. And, then, he hit it hard --again! The wood cracked open. He tried to put his hand into the hole he’d made, but he could only reach in so far.

“Hey! Come on outta there!” he yelled. Then he bent over, laughing in Eban’s grave. He got down on the bottom of the grave and pretended to have a fit.

“I’m dying!” he cried, in mock fear, for Joe wasn’t afraid of anything. He was my friend. “I’m dying!”

Joe looked over, bug-eyed, as if startled at the hole he’d made.

One of the guys up top said, “Hey, he’s looking at you, Joe.”

At least it was all good for a laugh. But, still, all the joking seemed a little wooden to me. This is what I suspected: There were subtle things about people’s brains that made them all different. At Teller’s gravesite, I first had my troubling thoughts about volition and “free will.” I quietly thought about this thing, this matter of free will, for almost all the years that I spent at Teller—as I thought about our human cruelty, and how we entertained ourselves with “justice.”

Joe and I finally straightened out the corners of Eban’s grave.

Joe lit a smoke and he asked me: “Why do you suppose old Eban died?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did you know Eban Thomas?”

Joe rammed his shovel perpetually in the soil. “Saw him around on the ward years ago. Seemed okay to me. But just like you and me, Tom. No one will ever care. Get the ladder up. I hear the crew coming.”

Then the rest of the crew pulled us out –but not before “forgetting” us and dumping a little dirt on us to keep the good times rolling. I think we laughed about it all just a little too hard. –Because it all wasn’t all so funny. It seemed it was always that way on grave detail. Because no one, certainly not “hardened” convicts –and pervs and general creeps -- had any thoughts about religion or the meaning of life. There was always this possibility of violence among us. That was the deepest concern that most on the crew had. And it was pussy this and pussy that. Because the meaning of life was a hard-on and a contraband drink brought from town. But it always bothered me, those thoughts about the meaning of life. I’m sorry, for as evil as I was supposed to me, it has always bothered me. I’m sorry.

Once everyone was attending to their different things, Joe looked at me. He smiled kindly for such a hardened man. I think he knew how I felt.

“Kid, you’re ok,” he said. I gave him a smile, a quiet smile.

Later that day we buried Eban Thomas. The usual things were done and said –all that stuff about redemption and The Coming of The Lord. It was all a disgusting lie. Joe looked around once Eban was down and the higher-ups had gone. And we all shoveled. Joe spat in bitterness.

“Yeah, you take the Pope, tie him to a radiator, and kick him in the balls for a month,” Joe said, ramming hard on his shovel like he was killing the world, “And then get him to tell you about Jesus Christ.” Joe began to puff and puff and breathe heavily, and then angrily, once more, he spat on the very world… He spat on Eban Thomas. For Joe spat on everything.

“ –And the good assholes that believe that shit? …And then they’ll turn right around and screw everybody they can.” Everyone stayed quiet. We left Joe alone, while Joe rammed and rammed his shovel –into this world.

We continued to shovel in the silence of disinherited men. The clods of earth thumped on top of the coffin. And then all you could hear was the slicing of spades through the dark soil, as we all fell silent inside our private shiverings. On the drive back, Joe and I stayed in the back of the truck. It was getting darker. Evening was coming and it was becoming cold.

“I’m sorry,” Joe said. I just smiled.

The next day it happened that I stood alone with my shovel at Eban’s grave on Paupers’ Row. The other boys were elsewhere. The loamy earth was heaped, there, above the cemetery’s plane, for the earth there would soon be sinking. I stood there and listened. What was it I heard there on that day?

I began to walk, from line to line. I looked down the long rows, as I paced it with my shovel’s stab, as, if in pride, to style myself the caretaker of this eternity that I ruled.

I know you think I’m a silly man, and this all sounds so silly, too. It all sounds like stupid poetry. Please…

I had no gloves. I moved through the silent wind, blowing across Paupers’ Row. I heard my own breath. I heard my very life. I heard the wind and I heard only silence, on cold Paupers’ Row. I thought of those other boys, soon dead—so many miles away—in Vietnam. I thought about our Evil. For a moment, my eyes went steel with the cold of the wind that drove me to this curious destiny of mine. I knew the wind, that stung my gloveless hands as I stood on Paupers’ Row, would blow over us all, very cold, one day. I hardly believed in anything. But I knew this: some kind of sin was happening in this world. But who was I but a nobody.

I turned and looked back at the mound, those many yards, away. And I really tried to look. I tried to really see. I’m sorry that I sound so silly to you.

“Eban, why did you die?” --I asked… Then, at that, as if bidded by how low and desperate I felt myself to be-- even the wind’s blowing made no sound. Again, I spoke out, against that bitter flowing air, and I elicited his name in a strange prayer:

“Why did you die, Eban?”

How, in my own evil, could I be so full of tears?—I asked myself, as I stood there with my shovel at that row of graves. How was it that for the rest of my life, I would be the cursed one, the reviled one? Hadn’t some people smiled at me when I was younger? At least, some? After my tears of childhood, would there be only more tears? I had lost the battle of my childhood from the cruelness of my father, for the world saw only my sister in her grave, and not the larger reason which I could not say. How could I ever explain it –I who talked in metaphors? And, now, the common run would continue to hound me forever and never understand. For the rest of my life I would live in the cold desert of other people’s only love, their justice –their most icy love.

I felt the ice around me. I shuttered. I said to myself:

“Why do you live, Tom?”

I’m sorry. Because who knows why Eban really died. Who ever cared to know? Perhaps, he just had no way to say. I stabbed the earth and began my walk –not just on the earth of Paupers’ Row, but on that longer walk.

I saw Eternity that day, a “boy” of maybe twenty-two, and the truth about all our faint weakness. I am so sorry for us all.

There are so many people who think life is wonderful. But, really, life is ravenous. It uses up the individual in its service. Life has fed on itself for eons. Do you see it? Look down your row of graves, caretaker. Be humble, my caretaker boy!...

At Teller State Hospital, I got in the habit of just watching. I would watch the old men on the back wards as they shuffled along on the new drugs. I could hear their hospital shoes sliding on the wooden floors. The tobacco smoke hung heavy in the air. I watched it all, so quietly. I saw the wildness in their eyes, anyway. They knew things about the power of Desire. Their past, so hidden, told them shameful things about sex. They did dishonorable things in the commode. Some knew how destructive Desire was—and how it can even kill you.

Once in a while, I would see Dr. Benz in the tunnel, walking alone, like me. He would say a kind word to me, for solitary thinkers are so kind, one to another, no matter their supposed station. Yet, my station was a curse. And no one could save me from it. Benz had given me a diagnosis and the pills to support it. It had been dutifully noted that I had “improved.” But, still, those goddamned pills!

It all made me think of my friend, Ross Randall, and how he died from swallowing those pills. I think when he ditched his mellaril, he realized just how crazy he was and how powerless he was over the evil he, too, found himself so unarmored against –when he would sneak off and visit his whore, downtown. –When he would kiss her beautiful ass and tell her that he loved her. For it wasn’t just that Ross was a murderer that made him know that he would be forever condemned. It was the very testimony of life, itself, inside Ross that killed him –and the inherent despair and desperate quality of his very biology. In the end, it was not free will. No one and no thing is unconnected from the rest of this world. It was not free will.

That “normal” people find it so perverted that a man would want to kiss a woman’s ass just shows you how little normal people really know of their own frailties and human variability. It tells you something about dignity and the very theory of the self that is at the root of our tragic delusion about free will and the deep reason why humanity is not humble and is constantly finding its revenge –and why we spend so much time teaching each other “a lesson,” instead of being encouraging to each other. I know you think I’m just naïve for saying such a stupid thing. I’m sorry. But I know this thing that most people don’t: In the moment of your anger, you believe in free will. And this is exactly what is wrong with the world.

I wouldn’t be able to tell you just how I knew, but there was something more “abnormal” than is usual with the brains of those men on grave detail. I think I could tell this more easily because of my own autism. There was something very desperate about their biology. To believe in Darwin is no sin. And I do not believe in free will from what I’ve seen concerning this matter of brain structure and brain chemistry. From the testimony of my own brain and biology, I can’t really believe in free will.

I knew how unhappy they were—those crazy old men --and the women, too, in their dirty, bleeding clothes-- what “losers” they knew themselves to be –and how some of them sought to just be alone, to find their own little shaft, maybe in a barn, just out of sight, to be alone, away from cruel society—or to use these new pills, themselves, to find a way die. I grew up admiring suicides. For don’t you know that I was hurt? Call it a legacy of my own abuse.
But, more than fire, the basic and necessary invention of mankind is suicide. Humans live in a hum of delusion, a halo of belief about how everything is well and how the drama of their lives means something important.

Our lives mean nothing. That’s the real truth.

But if you become parted-out, if you become atomized from the common run, you will soon feel the Cold, the very reality of this existence. You will soon realize it’s all a lie –all the stuff about how humans are so good. And then, if you could overcome society’s lies and the lies that are within yourself, you will find, one day –I do believe it’s true –that suicide becomes an effective possibility and something you find yourself considering. I often did just that, in those fourteen years where I grew up at Teller State Hospital. It made me a most unusual person. Probably, the only reason that I am alive is that live inside my mind, trying on this idea and that, in some new metaphor that I happen upon. That, rather than die, at least, for now. I hope, in what I’ve said so far, that you’ll find sufficient reason to proceed.