Go Ask Alice (14 page)

July 3

Today is another beautiful, beautiful day except that Dad got the pictures of Gran’s grave and the tombstone which was finally placed there. It’s a beautiful tombstone, but I keep wondering how decayed her body is by now, and what about Gramps, his must really be a mess! Someday I’m going to get a book on embalming from the library and see just exactly how these things do happen. I wonder if Mom and Dad and Tim think about these things or is it only me? Do I have a morbid mind because of my past experiences? I guess I don’t because Joel said he wondered the same thing when his dad died and he was only seven years old.

July 7

Mrs. Larsen broke her leg in an automobile accident and I’m going over there every day to clean the house and cook for Mr. Larsen and take care of the baby until Mrs. Larsen’s mother can get there. (Good practice for the future!) Little Lu Ann is a sweet little thing and I’m going to love it. I gotta go now to start my new job. (I hope Mr. Larsen doesn’t eat at the hospital all the time because I want to practice cooking.)

See ya.

(?)

My dear precious friend,

I am so grateful that they would let Mom bring you to me in your battered, padlocked little case. I was terribly embarrassed when the nurse made me use the combination and dump both of you out and my extra pencils and pens. But I guess they were just being careful and checking to see that you weren’t filled with drugs of one sort or another. I don’t even feel real. I must be somebody else. I still can’t believe that this has actually happened to me. The window is filled with heavy wires, I guess that is better than bars but I still know that I am in some kind of hospital jail.

I have tried to piece the whole thing together but I can’t. The nurses and doctors keep telling me I will feel better, but I still can’t get straight. I can’t close my eyes because the worms are still crawling on me. They are eating me. They are crawling through my nose and gnawing in my mouth and oh God . . . . I must get you back in your case because the maggots are crawling off my bleeding writhing hands into your pages. I will lock you in. You will be safe.

(?)

I am feeling better today. They took the bandages off my hands and changed them and it is no wonder they hurt so much. The whole ends of my fingers have been torn off and two nails have been pulled out completely and the others are torn down almost in half. It hurts to write, but I shall lose my mind if I do not. I wish I could write to Joel, but what could I ever tell him and besides no one
could ever read this scrawling since both hands are bandaged like boxing gloves. I am still crawling with worms, but I am beginning to be able to live with them, or am I actually dead and they are just experimenting with my soul?

(?)

The worms are eating away my female parts first. They have almost entirely eaten away my vagina and my breasts and now they are working on my mouth and throat. I wish the doctors and nurses would let my soul die, but they are still experimenting with trying to reunite the body and the spirit.

(?)

Today I woke up feeling rational and sound. I guess the bummer is over. The nurse says I have been here ten days, and when I read back what I have written I really must have been out of it.

(?)

Today my hands were placed under a kind of sunlamp to promote the healing. They haven’t given me a mirror yet but I can feel that my face is all clawed up too, and my knees and feet and elbows, in fact most of my body is wrenched and battered and bruised. I wonder if my hands will ever look like hands again. The ends of my fingers look like hamburger cooking under the sunlamp, and they’ve given me a spray to use to ease the pain. They are no longer bandaged, but I almost wish they were because
I have to keep looking closely to be sure they aren’t getting wormy.

(?)

A fly got into my room today and I couldn’t stop screaming. I was so afraid he was going to lay more maggot eggs on my face and hands and body. It took two nurses to kill him. I can’t let flies get on me. Maybe I will have to stop sleeping.

(?)

I just got out of bed and walked to the mirror. I have splints on four toes so I guess they are broken too, but anyway I hardly recognized myself. My face is puffed and swollen and black and blue and scratched, and my hair has been pulled out in big patches till I have completely bald areas. Maybe it isn’t really me.

(?)

I refractured two toes getting up so now both feet are in casts. Mom and Dad come by to see me every day, but they don’t stay long — there isn’t much to say, till I get my mind working again.

(?)

I’m really dizzy but the nurse says that is just from my brain concussion. The worms have almost gone away. I guess the spray kills them.

(?)

I found out how I got the acid. Dad says that someone put it on the chocolate covered peanuts and I guess that’s right because I remember eating the peanuts after I’d washed the baby. At the time I thought Mr. Larsen had left me a surprise. But now that I think about it I don’t remember why I thought Mr. Larsen had been there and gone without saying anything. That part is a blank. Actually I’m amazed that I remember anything. But I guess no matter what kind of damage I pile on myself, my mind keeps working. The Doctor says that’s normal because it really takes a lot to knock your brains loose permanently. I hope that’s right because I feel like I’ve taken a lot already.

Anyway, I remember that the candy reminded me of Gramps because he was always eating chocolate peanut clusters. And I remember starting to get dizzy and sick to my stomach. I guess I tried to call Mom to ask her to come over and get me and the baby when I realized that somebody somehow had tripped me. It’s all very unclear because when I try to think back it’s like I’m looking through fuzzy, colored lights but I do remember trying to dial home and taking eternities to get each number to the end. I think the line was busy and I don’t really remember what happened next except that I was screaming and Gramps was there to help me, but his body was dripping with blazing multicolored worms and maggots which fell on the floor behind him. He tried to pick me up, but only the skeleton remained of his hands and arms. The rest had been picked clean by wriggling, writhing, slithering, busily eating worms which seethed on his every part. They were eating and they wouldn’t stop. His two eye sockets were teeming with white soft-bodied, creeping animals which were burrowing in and out of his flesh and which were phosphorescent and swirled
into one another. The worms and parasites started creeping and crawling and running toward the baby’s room and I tried to stomp on them and beat them to death with my hands but they multiplied faster than I could kill them. And they began crawling on my own hands and arms and face and body. They were in my nose and my mouth and my throat, choking me, strangling me. Tapeworms, larva, grubs, disintegrating my flesh, crawling on me, consuming me.

Gramps was calling me but I could not leave the baby, nor did I want to go with him for he frightened me and nauseated me. He was so badly eaten I could barely recognize him. He kept pointing to a casket next to his and I tried to get away but thousands of other dead things and people were pushing me inside and forcing the lid down on me. I was screaming and screaming and trying to claw my way out of the casket, but they wouldn’t let me go.

From the shape I’m in now I guess when I tried to get the worms off me, hunks of flesh and hair came out in my own hands. How I cracked my head I don’t know. Maybe I was trying to beat the bummer out of my skull, I really don’t remember it seems like such a long long time ago and writing this down has made me incredibly tired. I have never been so tired in my life.

(?)

Mother and Dad believe that somebody tripped me! They do, they do! They believe me! I have a good idea who it was but I guess there will never be any way of finding out. I must just try to rest and get well as they suggested. I will not think about what happened. Thank God I didn’t hurt the baby. Thank you God.

(?)

In a few days I am going to be transferred to another hospital. I was hoping I could go home because my hands are healing and most of the bruises have started to fade. The doctor said it will be a year before my hands are completely better with the two nails really grown out but in just a few more weeks they should be fit to look at.

My face is almost back to normal and little fuzzy hair is beginning to grow on my bald patches. Mama brought some scissors and she and the nurse cut my hair really short, short, short. It’s almost like a shag cut and isn’t quite professional, but Mama says I can go to the beauty shop and have it trimmed in a week or two or whenever I’m released from the other hospital, besides I wouldn’t want anyone to see me looking as dingy as I do now.

I still have nightmares about the worms, but I am trying to control myself and I never mention them anymore. What good would it do? I know they aren’t real and everybody else knows they aren’t real, still at times they seem so very real that I can even feel the warmth and slimy fat softness of their bodies. And every time my nose or one of my many scabs itches, I have to fight myself to keep from screaming for help.

(?)

Mother brought me a packet of letters from Joel. She had written and told him that I was in the hospital very ill, and he has written every day since. He even called one night on the phone and not wanting to get too involved she told him that I had had kind of a nervous breakdown.

Well, that’s one way to put it!

July 22

I could tell Mom had been crying when she came to see me today, so I tried to be very strong and put on a really happy face. It’s a good thing I did because they are sending me to an insane asylum, a loony bin, a crazy house, freak wharf, where I can wander around with the other idiots and lunatics. I am so scared I cannot even take a full breath. Daddy tried to explain it all very professionally but it was obvious that he had been completely unhinged by the whole thing. But not as much as I am. No one could be.

He said that when my case was taken before the juvenile judge, Jan and Marcie both testified that I had been trying for weeks to sell them LSD and marijuana and that around school I was a known user and pusher.

Circumstances really were quite against me. I have a drug record and Daddy said that when Mrs. Larsen’s neighbor heard me screaming, she and the gardener came over to see what was happening and thinking I had gone insane they locked me in a small closet, ran to check the baby who had apparently also been awakened by my screams, and called the police. By the time they got there I had injured myself severely and was trying to scratch the rough plaster off the walls to get out and had beaten my head against the door until I had a brain concussion and a fractured skull.

Now they are going to send me to the Boobie Hatch which is probably where I belong. Daddy says I probably won’t be there long and he will immediately start proceedings to have me released and put into the hands of a good psychiatrist.

Dad and Mom keep calling the place where I’m going a youth center, but they aren’t fooling anybody. They aren’t even fooling themselves. They are sending me to an insane asylum! And I don’t understand how can that be. How is it
possible? Other people have bad trips and they don’t get sent to an insane asylum. They tell me my worms aren’t real and yet they’re sending me to a place that’s worse than all the coffins and the worms put together. I don’t understand why this is happening to me. I think I have fallen off the face of the earth and that I will never stop falling. Oh, please, please don’t let them take me. Don’t let them put me away with insane people. I’m afraid of them. Please let me go home to my own room and go to sleep. Please God.

July 23

My parole officer came and got me and took me to the State Mental Hospital where I was registered and catalogued and questioned and everything but fingerprinted. Then I was taken to the psychiatrist’s office and he talked to me for a little while. But I didn’t have anything to say because I couldn’t even think. All that kept running through my brain was I’m scared, I’m scared, I’m scared.

Then they took me down a smelly, ugly, dingy, paint-peeling old hallway and through a locked door, which was locked again behind me. My heart was pounding so hard that I thought at any second it would explode and spray the whole hall. I could hear it pounding in my ears and I could hardly get one foot in front of the other.

We walked down an endlessly dark hallway and I got a look at some of the people here and now I know I don’t belong here. I can’t get over what it feels like to be in a world of crazy people, a whole world of them. On the inside and on the outside. I don’t belong here, but I’m here. That’s crazy isn’t it? So you see, dear friend, my only friend, there’s nowhere to go because the whole world is crazy.

July 24

The night was interminable. Anything in the world could happen in here and no one would ever know.

July 25

This morning they woke me up at 6:30 for a breakfast I couldn’t eat and bleary eyed and still shivering, I was led down the long dark hall to the big metal door with the barred window in the middle. Keys were clanked into the big lock and we were on the other side. Then the keys were clanked again. The day attendants talked a lot but I really couldn’t hear them. My ears are clogged up, probably from fear. Then they took me to the Youth Center which was just two buildings away, passed two slobbering men with another attendant who were raking up leaves.

At the Youth Center there were fifty, sixty, maybe even seventy kids, milling around preparing to go to their classes or whatever they were going to do. All of them seemed pretty normal except one big girl who looked to be about my age but who was eight or ten inches taller and at least fifty pounds heavier. She was stretched out stupidly under the pinball machine in the dayroom, and there was also a teen age boy who kept bouncing his head and muttering idiotically.