Authors: Randy Wayne White

Tampa Burn (44 page)

BOOK: Tampa Burn

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One of Harris's Tampa pilot colleagues was aboard. It was his job to navigate this ship several miles offshore, and then, without the freighter stopping, he would skitter down that ladder and onto a local pilot transport boat, which would take him home to Egmont Key, an island five miles to the west of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

I crossed behind the freighter close enough to read the big gray letters on its stern:

REPATRIATE MONROVIA, LIBERIA

An appropriate name, considering that country's history. Maritime companies who own unsafe, outdated commercial vessels usually register them in countries like Liberia, where inspectors are more easily bribedâif there are inspections at all.

I waved at the wheelhouse just in case the American pilot was looking. A fellow pilot of his was doing me a hell of a favor.

I steered sharply east again, quartering the freighter's long, rolling wake. Ahead, in the far distance, was a small sailboat, its sail a gilded ivory in the late sun.

It was about the size of
No Mas,
but I knew that it couldn't be Tomlinson. It was much too early for my purist sailor friend to be arriving in Tampa Bay.

But it brought his image to mind. Brought back the talk we'd had early that morning, the two of us walking the beach toward Sanibel's Lighthouse Point.

It gave me something to think about as I crossed the last three miles of open water to Bullfrog Creek.

OUR
talk had been more like a confession. Tomlinson's confession.

He was right. What he had to tell me put our friendship at serious risk. Knowingly, what he told me also put his own freedom, even his life, at risk.

“We should have had this conversation months ago, Doc,” he said. “I feel guilty as hell, man, because I've been putting it off. I know it's cowardly, but it's because I'm scared. I know that what I have to say might change everything between us. Forever.”

It had to do with the realization that he'd suffered a severe memory loss earlier in his life. Tomlinson told me that no one seemed to take him seriously when he said he couldn't remember writing
One Fathom Above Sea Level,
but it was true.

He said, “Look man, I realize I'm a figure of fun around the marina. That's fine. I dig the role. Hell, I
play
the role. But when I read
One Fathom,
I went into a kind of identity shock. Some of the stuff I'd written all those years ago, it was so powerful. Some of it was so pure. It scared me. How could I possibly have created something so beautiful, yet have absolutely zero memory of doing it?”

Tomlinson added, “I began to wonder, and fret: What other important events in my life had totally disappeared from my memory. And
why
? It had to be more than the drugs, man. Not even I used that many drugs.”

As we walked the beach, he told me about it. He was so troubled by the mystery that he began to do research into his own personal history. Finally, as I knew, early the previous winter he disappeared from the islands without telling anyone where he was going, without saying goodbye. He'd was gone for nearly four months, and then returned without explanation.

“I went to try and find out what happened to me,” he said. “I went back to my old university. Hung out with some of my old friends. I wanted to pick up the trail because it was during college, during that time of my life, that I lost my own personal trail. I lost my path, and I also lost great big chunks of my memory. It didn't take me long to figure out what'd happened.”

On the beach, he had stopped abruptly, lifted his scraggly hair, and pointed to a burn scar on the side of his head. The scar was shaped a little bit like a lightning boltâironic because he'd gotten the burn as the result of lightning.

“Electricity did it to me. Wiped parts of my memory bank clean, and it also screwed with my personality. Maybe for the better. Because, from what I discovered, I was a serious candidate for Asshole of the Decade before it happened.”

I said, “Before you got struck by lightning? That was only a few years back.”

“No. The memory loss, the personality change, were both caused by the electroshock treatments. I've told you about it. The ones I got a year or so after writing
One Fathom.
It was just after the bomb that killed the sailor at the San Diego naval base.

“The guilt, man, seeing those smoking bodies on TV. I went insane. No other way to put it. They gave me shock treatments when my father had me institutionalized. Strapped me down on the table every day for weeks. I think they way overdid it. I was so screwed up, I'd write letters and sign them âSincerely as a fucking loon.' And I
meant
it.”

He continued, “It took me a while, but I tracked down the physician who'd administered the shock treatments to me. The zapper. The guy went on to become a brilliant psychiatrist, a great healer. I have something I want to show you. To explain what happened to me. He wrote me this letter.”

Tomlinson handed me two pages typed on the personal stationery of a California physician. We were standing on a section of dune near the Sanibel Beach Club. This early, people were already up there playing tennis, hanging out by the pool. I adjusted my glasses and read the letter quickly, skipping some of the more detailed portions:

Dear Mr. Tomlinson:

I must have administered electroshock to at least a thousand patients as a resident. I detested doing it. I apologize to you now. I wish I could apologize to them all individually. . . .

The nurses would bring the patient in on a rolling cot, get an I.V. going, and I would put in sodium amytal. I remember that many of the patients had severe halitosis and I had to hover over them, close as a lover, and I felt guilty and obscene. . . .

Then I would place the electrodes on their heads, two shiny steel plates, about 1.5 inches in diameter, fastened tightly above the ears, and add a gel sticky with saline for good contact. . . .

When all was ready, I took a rubber doorstop, usually red, sometimes brown, shaped like a wedge and wrapped with sterile gauze. I placed that thing in their mouth so when they bit down they would not break their teeth. . . .

On the electroconvulsive therapy machine, there were two dials. One was the strength of the current and the other was a timer for the duration of the shock. I set the parameters according to the age, sex, weight, and medical condition of the patient.

I would then give a couple of whiffs of oxygen to the patient, inject Anectine, and watch until the patient stopped breathing. That meant all the muscles were paralyzed.

I would then reach back behind me, hit the contact switch, and watch a small muscular tremor in the patient that indicated electric current passing through his brain.

The usual course of “treatment” was two weeks, every other day. Judging from the severity of your memory loss, however, Mr. Tomlinson, I suspect you are one of the few who received a far more aggressive course. Some doctors insisted on administering ECT twice a day for as long as it took to get the patient to be incontinent. Those people became zombies.

Again, Mr. Tomlinson, I apologize. It was my duty as a resident to carry out the orders of those above me. If I objected, my residency would have been over.

It was the accepted treatment of the day.

I have many stories of things that happened. Some horrid, some funny, always poignant.

I enclose an article from a medical journal concerning memory loss caused by ECT. You may find it enlightening.

I folded the letter, handed it to Tomlinson, saying, “He sounds like a good man. Like he genuinely regrets what he did.”

Tomlinson handed me the copy of the magazine article, saying, “Me, too. Regret it, I mean. Except that it changed me from Asshole of the Decade to who I am now, apparently. Wait until you read this.”

TWENTY-NINE

I
skimmed the article on electroconvulsive treatment, skipping much of it due to my own impatience. The interesting parts included:

During World War I, physicians noticed that mentally ill patients who suffered convulsions during bouts of malaria sometimes seemed cured of their depression or other emotional problems. This led to the use of the drug Metrazol to induce seizures.

In 1938, Ugo Cerletti, an Italian psychiatrist, while observing slaughterhouse pigs being shocked unconscious, came up with the idea of using electroshock to create seizures in his patients.

For the next forty years, many hundreds of thousands of patients of all ages, and around the world, received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for all kinds of mental “disorders” from depression, to mania and schizophrenia, to even homosexuality and truancy. . . .

I skipped down a page to read a segment that Tomlinson had highlighted with a blue marker:

It has now been documented that memory impairment, and sometimes total memory loss, is the most serious side effect of electroconvulsive therapy, and is the one most frequently troubling to patients.

Sometimes the memory loss is temporary, and includes only the days or weeks around the time of the treatment. In other patients, entire blocks of memory have been erased. Some patients have reported near complete amnesia regarding their lives prior to the therapy. Many patients lose specific or general memory for many months, and sometimes of a year or more that preceded receiving ECT.

As one patient said, “More than a year prior to entering the hospital, my wife and I had bought a new house. When I left the hospital, I had absolutely no recollection of that house. Entering every room was a new experience.”

I skipped a little further because Tomlinson had highlighted and bracketed the following:

It has also been documented that a substantial number of ECT patients have been able to recover sizeable blocks of lost memory by the careful reconstruction, or registration, of key life experiences and places. . . .

I handed the article back to Tomlinson as he told me, “That's what I decided to doârevisit and re-experience key elements and experiences in my life. I was still trying to remember writing
One Fathom Above Sea Level.
That became my focus.”

He told me that the only remaining memory he had about writing his now-famous work was connected to a popular song. It was a song by a classic rock band named America.

He said, “You know their stuff: âSister Golden Hair,' âVentura Highway,' âYou Can Do Magic.' The band's got two genius writers, so they've had a ton of hits.

“Back when I wrote
One Fathom,
though, the song that haunted me was âHorse with No Name.' Everyone knows the lyrics. âI've been through the desert on a horse with no name . . .'”

He sang a portion of it softly, then whistled for a while before explaining, “The line that just rocked me, though, was, âThe ocean is a desert with its life underground, and a perfect disguise above.' Are you familiar with the line, Doc?”

I know very little about rock music. Tend to listen to Latin music, Caribbean basin stuff, and Buffett, of course, and lately have taken an unexpected liking to an extraordinary folk singer and composer, Wendy Webb. But even I knew the song he was discussing, though little else about the band.

He repeated the lyric: “â The ocean is a desert with its life underground, and a perfect disguise above, '” before adding, “For someone like me, a sailor, that line was like a three-pronged probe. It hit me in the marrow, the brain, and the heart. All the far-out implications, all the very heavy vibes and duality it communicated. That song, it just sent me off on a whole new spiritual trip.”

Tomlinson combed long, bony fingers through his hair and said, “The line was the seed that started
One Fathom.
That song. âA Horse with No Name.' That's all I remembered. The rest of my memory from that time period was a blank sheet. So when I disappeared from the marina? I got a piece of pure karmic luck. I called around, found out where the band America was playing. I met their road manager, Erin, and finagled a job as a roadie. So that's where I went when I disappeared. I was working for the band America. Can you believe it? A really cool experience, man.”

I watched him smile, enjoying the memory of it for a few seconds before he continued, “They had no idea who I was, why I was there. A great bunch of people. They do more than a hundred gigs a year, all first-class, and it was pure good karma that put me in the right place at the right time. So I helped them set up in L.A., Phoenix, Chicago, little towns in Iowa and Wisconsin. Yeah, and San Diego, too.”

San Diego, he said, that's where his memory started coming back to him.