Katzenjammer - Excerpt
Prologue
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
—Rita Mae Brown
It’s her voice that’s so disturbing—the equivalent of fingernails on the chalkboard of life—just like the nurse from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest if she ever let go emotionally. All that’s missing in this place is a game of basketball with Jack Nicholson and the lobotomy.
“He’s doing it again,” she screams across the room to the nurses’ station. Now the orderlies are coming. I can see them running, pushing open the heavy double glass doors. The embedded chicken wire doesn’t obscure anything; it just keeps the glass from flying when some of the patients become too violent. They’re on a rampage, these goons in white, furious with me for getting out of yet another regime—the taking of my meds. I hate them and the pills they give. They take me away from who I am, where I’ve been, my efforts to deal with the past.
And now the restraints; the hard hands of the orderlies pressing down on me, their shiny wristwatches Navy-ship-reflecting the sun that streams in through the barred windows of the hospital.
Then, out it comes—something of interest for everyone: “Whosoever sayeth this is snafagoo-goo . . . can eat a willibeeeeeetheeeeeeth!” screams one of the newest pieces of meat to an overly large Deco light fixture that hangs, slightly askew, from the ceiling. (Well that made sense.) The screamer is male and totally naked except for a pair of gray satin bikini briefs, the front of which forms the trunk of an elephant. Two crossed plastic eyes hover above the genitals. The lunatic’s penis is now becoming erect and Babar is raising his proboscidian appendage triumphantly. It’s not a large trunk, but even so the tip of it droops over about two thirds of the way. Someone should have bought a smaller elephant.
As the orderlies lean down, tying my hands to the chair, their stiff uniforms stand out from their bodies momentarily. There’s a whiff of aftershave, underarm deodorant, or the lack thereof. White rubber shoes mock-scuff the floor. Theirs are overly muscular forearms, one with a tattoo, another with a large mole that looks suspiciously like the British Isles. God Save the Queen. There’s also the smell of urine wafting about—permanent in this place. I think they mop the floors with it. Another of the patients is shuffling by in his bathrobe, saying something about God being dead, about the end of the world, about a sale Bloomingdale’s has on ladies’ bras that he’s interested in, even though he doesn’t need one himself. And why does it always seem that people in mental institutions are obsessed with bodily functions? If not theirs, then yours? It’s “Piss this,” and “Fuck that,” and “Shit this,” and every other obscene word; so much so that all the soap in the world couldn’t clean out these potty-mouthed loonies.
“You know that if you don’t take your meds we’re going to have to go back to the injections,” another nurse says, trying to be firm. She’s one of the more amusing ones. Everything’s relative.
“Have you ever seen The Snake Pit with Olivia de Havilland?” I’m about to ask, but I catch sight of our Lady of Perpetual Insanity, the resident top-loon; the one who’s got us all beat. She’s behind a glass partition. Again, the chicken wire motive continues. She’s standing on her bed, mouthing something at me. I suspect her cloistered area is a result of the Tourette’s Syndrome she suffers from—that lovely obscenity-laced problem that involves an individual spewing forth any and every form of verbiage, most of it nonsensical. I try to follow what she’s saying, having become an expert on lip reading since being committed here. When she gets really out of hand they lock her away, behind this wall of wire and glass, like some overly large exotic pet at a turned-upside-down Woolworth’s, wedged in between the dried-out pothos vines and the aquariums of goldfish. Mint-green smocks, laminated ID badges, piped-in Muzak—it’s all that’s missing.
Our Lady is bouncing slightly now, her two bandaged trophy-wrists held up for all to see, her greasy hair streaming downward like rivulets of dirty water. Who said there’s no counterpoint in this place? She yells at the top of her lungs, yet what squeaks through the inch-thick glass is only a faint reverberation, like some disheveled siren’s song from a far-off land with no water, no hope. I can’t make out what she’s saying. Her lips twist about so that reading them is next to impossible.
“We can pick him up in the chair,” I hear one of the orderlies say. They’ve got me tied to the arms and legs of the thing with nylon rope. I feel like the hostage that I am.
“I’m innocent!” I scream at them, hoping that the three-hundredth repetition of the phrase will finally sink in.
“That’s not what they tell me,” counters one of the more surly health workers. Just as I’m about to spit in his face, the tape comes out. It’s hard, torn, and tasting of petroleum. I’ve had it before, I know. It gets slapped across my mouth and now I am, for all practical purposes, a complete vegetable—at the whim of those less intelligent than myself. I’m nothing more than a plaything for incompetents and they know it, trying everything they can to erase, scramble, or rearrange my mind. But why should life in this place be any different from the outside?
As I’m carried through the double doors I strain my neck, intent on seeing Our Lady of Perpetual Insanity as she bawls in my direction. It appears to be a warning of some sort, a revelation; a talisman that I am to take with me as they haul me out. I squint. She mouths a word dramatically, trying to will it through, but it’s no use—the thing is lost. Heavy doors slam behind and I’m lifted up—a Gandhi high atop his elephant, riding through throngs of the cheering mentally ill, their bathrobes carelessly tied, their hair unkempt. Bedroom-shoe-clad feet shuffle after me.
“Doesn’t anyone dress up for a coronation anymore?” I try to shout through the tape, but the attempt is futile, muted, and damp—I’m gagged, out of earshot, and heading down the hall.
Excerpt copyrighted by Jackson Tippett McCrae, 2005,2006, 2007
Katzenjammer - Excerpt
In order to test the editor, I typed out a complete chapter of Huckleberry Finn—a chapter from the middle of the book. Then I presented it, along with the statement, "I'm working on something new as you've convinced me that my current novel isn't any good."
"This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about," she started in after skimming Twain's work right in front of me. "You're telling the story instead of showing. As this stands now, you'd never get it published. Your use of English is deplorable, and the phrase is African-American—not nigger. And why would anyone want to read about the Mississippi River anyway?"
The next week I tried a chapter from Faulkner's Light in August.
"Boy, do you need to learn to write!" she said, settling onto the sofa. "You're lucky you came to me. I can really help you with this sort of thing. Do you even know what a sentence is supposed to sound like?"
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood was next.
"People don't generally like reading about this sort of thing," she said, her eyebrows up. "You'd be hard-pressed to find a publisher for it but if you agree to work with me for the next year-payment in advance-I should be able to help you whip it into shape. We have to start by taking out all the violence. That never sells." And then she added, "Just how many examples of your bad writing attempts do you have?"
Her response to three complete chapters from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, again typed out so as not to look suspicious, garnered the comment, "Didn't you do anything interesting at all on your summer vacation?"
In an attempt to see just how far I could push the envelope, I began to send samples of famous books to various publishers, reasoning that they were as inept as my editor. I attached my name and a different title, just to see how they would react. I knew that the samples would either be ignored, read by some ignorant twenty-year-old whose idea of great literature was the Peanuts comic strip, or given the proverbial "shove-off" letter. Strangely enough, I actually got back responses instead of the usual form letters. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I lied about having an agent and being wealthy enough to fund my own marketing campaign.
For the first three chapters of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which I called Morning Aubade, I received the response, "Works like this are generally not publishable and there has never really been a market for this type of thing."
In response to the complete Nine Short Stories by Salinger (it took me two weeks to retype them all), I received, "We are not in the habit of printing the work of fifth-graders. May we suggest a writing course at your local junior college?"
And then there was the response to Steinbeck's last three chapters from The Grapes of Wrath which I had re-titled California Dreamin'.
"We suggest you try one of the lesser-known publishing houses for a work of this genre as the market for this type of thing is usually small. Also, you may want to change the ending as the breast-feeding of the hobo is a bit over the top."
One acquisitions editor at a major house even had the intelligence to recognize the name Max Perkins and accuse me of pretending to be someone I wasn't. "I happen to know the real Max Perkins," she wrote, "and as soon as I put this letter in the post, I'm calling him up and letting him know that you're using his name." I wanted to wish the acquisitions editor luck as the Max Perkins she was referring to had been dead at that point for forty-three years.
But the best response was given by one of the city's most elite houses, which, after I had sent in the book of Genesis from the Bible-double-spaced and in twelve-point type, just as they had requested-wrote back with the pithy quip, "Dear Mr. Perkins, if you insist on plagiarizing Shakespeare, we suggest you at least give him credit for his 'creation' somewhere along the way."
Excerpt copyrighted by Jackson Tippett McCrae, 2005,2006, 2007
