Dear Digby (15 page)

“The sun was setting. Turning the water blood-colored. But nothing could hurt us.”

“We were safe” said Lily. “Safe.”

DEAR LETTERS EDITOR,

Well! I’m Bea Plotkin and I have some socko news that I
know
you’ll be interested in. I’ve written to you many times before from my residence here in Utah, but apparently my letters did not get through to you.

You are absolutely right, gals, when you say you gals are equal to the guys. I’m rootin’ for you! You see, I am the Light of the World and I am a gal. I’m the Savior, I’m god. The reason I didn’t put any caps there on god, you see, gals, is because
she
is now equal to
he
—and to everyone else in the whole cotton-pickin’ human race! Isn’t that a scorch?

I know that this is a bit hard to take in, but if you care about the women’s lib movement enough,
CHECK IT OUT!
Because here’s the clincher: Can you believe that they have me in a hospital here in Skyhigh, Utah, because they are in awe of me, they can’t quite believe that I am who I say I am?! Oh, the tiny, tiny little minnow-minds of them—of wee little faith! god said if you read Chapter 23 of Jeremiah in the King James version of the Bible—he was going to send down another lord. Well, change that he to she, then the lord is
me,
Lordess of All Light: Bea! Think about it—three letters in god, three in Bea! Please send someone
now
to assist in my release, so we can get this dog-and-pony show on the road here!

Blessings on ya, gals!

Bea

I scribbled on a SIS pad. There were six letters in Willis … and seven in “eggroll.” I put Bea’s tenth letter aside.

A handwritten note, no stamp, stuck in with the rest. I recognized the script at once.

Willis,

I missed you last night. I wanted so much to see you. I wanted to explain everything to you. I know when you meet me you’ll listen to me. Zero hour is coming, Willis. Please don’t be afraid.

The Watcher

I ran, with the note in my hand, to Minnie W-W-G’s reception desk.

“How did this get in my mail, Minnie? Did you see anybody putting something in one of the bags?”

“Noooo … listen, Willis, my fiancé and I are thinking of
baby
names!! Do you still have that list I gave you before you had that … miscarriage? I
know
it’s jumping the gun a little, but with our hyphen problems—”

“Minnie.
Shut up.
Concentrate. Did you see anyone hanging around the lobby, my desk, the elevators? This is
important!”

“Willis, I
told
you—I haven’t seen
anyone.
Please don’t take that tone with me. I have a
job
to do here, you know.”

She turned away, pouting.

I asked the elevator operator—he remembered nothing. Either this guy was Mr. Wallpaper or he was dressed up as a janitor—or a mailman. I considered briefly the idea that Nathan Grapes, the 210-pound mailman, was The Watcher, but discarded it.

Page looked at The Watcher’s note. Her round sweet face looked distressed. “If you take those goddamn ears off, you can come and stay with me tonight.”

I started to say no, then I thought of my apartment, of trying to sleep in my bed alone.

“Thanks, Page.”

Lupé strolled over. She looked like herself again in her overalls and black lipstick and Afro.

“Don’t worry, Willis,” she said. “One of the Witches lives near your apartment—she walks her pit bull right in front of your building.
She’ll
let our network know if some bozo is hangin’ around.”

The next morning Page and I picked up papers at the 72nd Street newsstand on our way to SIS.

I was featured in both the News and the
Mirror.
In the
News
there was the piece, as promised, on Bob Hargill—a photograph with the caption:

GUN-TOTING GRANNIES “SCALP” HARGILL

“I’m 72 and I look better than him,” wrinkled “rug” robber retorts!

There was a large photograph of Hargill’s hair hijack, and there
I
was, looking stupid in the background; the rabbit ears sticking up like bright ideas. One had only to glance to the front page of the other paper, “Exclusive to the New York
Mirror,”
an inset box with a photograph of me, again with the rabbit ears on, to make a basic connection.

“Jesus,” said Page, making the connection, “what are you doing to Bob Hargill here? And look at those ridiculous rabbit ears
again!
Aren’t you embarrassed by this stuff?”

I was not, in fact, embarrassed. I was terrified that I would be charged with Forcible Hair Removal or something, but not embarrassed. The
News
made mention of a “young (compared to the others) blond terrorist in Bugs Bunny ears, who seemed, except for carrying a firearm, to be along for the ride.” The
Mirror
interview, as I sped-read through it, simply made me sound like an asshole. In fact, Penny Wall, the
Mirror
reporter, had with unexpected clemency made me sound like a somewhat charming asshole.

Under the headline:

SIS EDITOR WITH “CRAZY” SPIRIT CHANGES THE “LETTER” OF THE LAW

she had written the following:

Sitting at her bright red desk piled high with mail from all over the U.S. and Canada and everywhere SISTERHOOD magazine is sold is Letters Editor Willis Jane Digby. Ms. Digby is wearing (besides a pixilated gleam in her large green eyes) a tuxedo jacket and jeans
and
a pair of rabbit ears on her head. Her bizarre attire underscores her recent personal campaign to redefine what people mean by “crazy.”

Not long ago Ms. Digby began using her bimonthly column to print (often insulting) personal responses to selected correspondents—in a kind of mean-ingenuous, feminist-Will Rogers style. On the other hand, she began to pay closer attention to what her more unlikely correspondents were actually
saying.

Last week Editor Digby tipped the
Mirror
off to apparently widespread sexual abuse of patients of Brookheart State Hospital by staff members. She received information about the situation at Brookheart from a letter that would have been tossed into the “circular file” by most editors, after a bemused reading. The letter, from a patient at Brookheart, read, in effect, like a communication from a “crazy person.” The letter’s style was verbose and wandering, with insistent, recurring accusations about “hypnosis” and “seminal fluid.”

Ms. Digby says: “Most people never write anything anymore. The act of writing is an exotic occupation. The act of writing one’s opinions on paper and sending them out for publication is even more exotic. It’s an occasion. I try to honor that occasion. I try not to publish just the editorial bread-and-butter letters one sees in most magazine columns. A fellow SIS editor, Betty Berry, made me realize that just being flippant worked for some correspondents—for others, it was necessary to have a heart.

“In the main, I get two types of ‘crazy’ letters. I get the ordinary person who sounds crazy, is fed up, and trying to make an outrageous, sarcastic point,
and
I get really disturbed or obsessed crazy individuals who are trying to sound ordinary, rational.

“I see my column as a kind of demilitarized zone where these two impulses—the desire of the sane to go crazy and the desire of the crazy to be sane—converge.”

Editor Digby claims that in the case of the Brookheart resident (whose letter would fall into the latter category), something “leaped out at her” from between the lines; she “identified” with the patient’s heroic attempt to communicate in her own “language.” Then she met with the patient and was convinced. “Because SIS is a feminist magazine, we tend to attract more than the usual crowd of cranks and paranoiacs. But we also hear the legitimate voices of extremity, people pushed beyond the limit.

“I’ve learned to dive off the deep end into the subconscious of the Sex War. I’ve learned to scuba among predictable rhetorical undersea plant life and discover the authentic pearl, the real valuable produced by sexual friction. The letter from the Brookheart patient was a case in point.”

The article ended by my “chirping” (as the reporter put it), “I’m crazy too!” and waving my rabbit ears.

This last made me feel like retching—which meant that my mother would be very proud.
(Until
she checked out the
News,
I recalled suddenly.) I felt dazed.

“Come on, Digby,” said Page, “let’s get you back in the ring.”

The phone on my desk was ringing nonstop. Everybody from the mayor’s office to “New York at Five” wanted to talk to me. Suddenly I was a weird kind of celebrity. The only two people I
hadn’t
heard from were The Watcher and Bob Hargill—would he send a lawyer?

Holly was beside herself with joy. She hugged me again and again. “Willis, you’ve given SIS a vision! You’ve pointed out a new direction for us!” She paused and lowered her voice. “Willis. Marge showed me a photo in the
News
today with somebody who looks like you in the background of that shot of Bob Hargill. Is it you?”

Minnie, with her infallible sense of timing, galumphed up, flushed with importance. “It’s PAPARAZZI magazine on the phone! They want to interview you for their next issue. They want to interview you in your apartment! You’re
famous,
Willis! I told them tomorrow afternoon is okay, okay?? God, Willis, PAPARAZZI magazine!!” She grabbed my arms and shook me up and down. “Names!” she cried.
“Big
names!”

Holly gave her an icy look, took her arm, and escorted her back to her phones.

I flipped through the mail. There was a billet-doux from Dino, another hand-delivered item.

Hey Digby!

I see here in the
News
they done an article on you. What next? They gonna do one on Ideeya Mean? Hey your not a bad-lookin broad Digby. No tits but see if you can get a pair of big sillycone casabas made and I might give you a turn! By the way, its
still
hard!!!

Yours truly,

THE HUMAN POKER

(A.K.A. Dino)

I hadn’t lost Holly. She sat down at my desk.

“What were you doing in that photo with Hargill, Willis?”

“I was out with W.I.T.C.H.,” I said. “If you want to know more, go ask Lupé. Maybe she’ll tell you. I’m not at liberty to say anything further, unfortunately.”

“What if Hargill calls up? Or his legal people? Can you at least tell me why there was a gun?”

I sighed. “No, I can’t. If I could, though, Holl, I really would.”

I grubbed around inside my mailbags. She sat staring at me for a while, then got up and walked away.

The phone rang. It was Terence. “Come over tonight. After the show I’ll make a fire and we can have a late dinner and an early bed. I promise I will ask
no
questions about what I’ve seen in the papers today.”

DEAR WJD,

As you know from my previous letters, I am OTRO CORPUS, electronic alien being. Most recently I have inhabited a small plastic tub of oleomargarine
and
Howard Cosell, to determine the broad parameters of your protoplasmic entities. Now I am devoting myself to research, which includes inhabiting world leaders.

I have
tried
to inhabit the President of the United States, with results unlike any achieved to date. It appears, after laboratory cultures and electronic data cross-indexing, that either the cerebral and rectal units are reversed, or the brain cavity has been altered by taxidermy, in effect “stuffed.” We are getting severely foreshortened brain emissions similar in structure and duration to those given off in our own bioenvironment by a soil base roughly equivalent to your
Playdough.

I flipped this one in my “Hold: Possible” pile and read on.

Dear Willis Digby,

I am a flight attendant on Trans-National Airlines, and I have to tell you that I think I am going crazy too. I’ve been reading the letters you printed and your answers to them, and I decided, like the woman who feeds her unwitting husband cat food every morning, that
everybody
should have a
crazy safety valve.

I’m absolutely ecstatic when I tell you that without any change in cabin pressure, certain of my passengers are getting high on cocktails “on the rocks” that I serve up with just a weensy spritz of blue “freeze,” a waste-disposal substance we use in the toilet unit. Just a crystal in every irritating bozo’s drink … and I feel so much
better
about everything!

Hope to see you on a flight soon.

Bottoms up,

Anonymous Stew

I took the train from Grand Central, then a cab to Brookheart. I had an old woman cabdriver who was in a big hurry to get me inside. I stared at her caved-in straw hat and the back of her grizzled neck. She was nearly
standing
on the accelerator.

“Hey,” I called, “slow down. I’m not in that big a rush to get there!”

Her cagey old eyes appeared in the dash mirror. “You’re a reporter, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “There musta been a thousand of ’em around here last week. They all wanna get up there
fast!”
She cackled. “You’re a little late, honey!”

“I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I’m a friend of one of the residents.”

The eyes blinked, disappointed. She slowed down.

“I wouldn’t be in such a hurry then, if I were you,” she said, half to herself.

We pulled in at the gates, the young guard slid off his Walkman just long enough to check my name off the visitors’ list. A tiny, tinny Pat Benatar sang like a cricket around his neck as he signed a pass for me.

Brookheart was something of an architectural anomaly. Though it had been built in the late twenties or thirties, like so many other American fun houses, it lacked the usual fake Gothic façade. It looked instead like a monastery, like a photograph I’d once seen of St. Remy, the insane asylum where Vincent Van Gogh spent his last days painting and where he finally killed himself. It had two long, low wings extending from a center, an imposing front with a stone circular pool on the main lawn. It looked escape-proof, but wasn’t, due to its much-vaunted liberality: no locks, no bars. This policy had left its inmates unprotected from internal corruption—that is to say, unprotected from the sane.