from my book, ‘PLAY’

The ward is full of interesting people. A few are even on the staff. But most are members of the Bipolar Bear Club. Like my friend Tracy, with whom I still correspond on occasion. Tracy might just be the most creative person I’ve ever met, and I’ve met my fair share – Jerome Robbins, Meredith Monk, Arthur Miller, Julia Child, Balanchine, Ginsberg – people who are not just creative, but prodigiously so, and always at it.

Tracy was always at it too when I met her. All sorts of art pieces, collages, drawings, cutouts, one after another, maybe a dozen (or two) a day. And musical to boot. When I asked her which instrument she played, she said, “All of them.” Really? We went through the list, and it isn’t true. She doesn’t play the accordion. At least not yet. And she doesn’t just play the notes. She sees the notes.

I know because one day Alex – another club-member who blew my mind – was playing the piano. Just riffing on a tune of his own devising, which he often played, but never exactly the same. For some reason, whenever he played it, I would start to cry. It wasn’t something I could control – others were moved by it too, but not to the point of tears.

I asked him the name of the tune. He said he didn’t know. (The next day, the mom of one of the other inmates was in the TV room while Alex was playing it, and she knew right away – “Serenity” – Alex liked the name too, so that’s what it is.) When I asked him if he’d ever written it down, he said no, he didn’t have the slightest idea, as he couldn’t read music.

I was crestfallen. I wanted it for the theme of my play. It was perfect, going round and round in a repetitive loop, but never quite the same, just as the same motifs appear in each new scene, variations rippling outward in an ever-widening circle. It would come in at the very beginning, in the dark, just after the audience was shocked by the first of my awful nightmare images, and it was going to make them cry too, if only out of relief. But there was no way to record it, so that it could be put down on paper, because recording devices of any kind were, of course, streng verboten on the ward – Rule Number 13?

“No problem,” Tracy says. She’ll record the basic melody in her mind, and then she’ll go off to her room and write it down. A few minutes later, she comes back and hands it to me:

Don’t ask me what all the rest means. I ask Tracy if she’s a savant. “Yes, I remember everything.” I ask if she can be in the play I’m writing. She says she’s writing one too. I tell her I’m going to publish mine. So is she. “Is it ok for you to be in mine?”

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Alex: Whenever I come to an awkward moment in a conversation, I just make a sound [blowing into his fist] – fart! And that breaks the awkward moment.

Me: But isn’t that just another awkward moment?

Alex: Exactly. But this awkward moment is funnier. It breaks the tension – fart! – and this one doesn’t even smell.

[Recently I discovered another member of the club had the same bright idea – Mozart – who stood in the wings during the 1791 premiere of The Magic Flute and made farting sounds with his mouth to get the singers to relax.]

Bob: What does the tattoo on your calf mean?

L: Not all those who wander are lost. It’s in Elvish. From Tolkien’s poem, All that is gold does not glitter.

B: No, I don’t know it.

L: (holding forth, as though on stage):

From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.

That’s the end of the poem. By the way, my real name is Boogers.

The more boogers you find, the more gold.

B: Well, yes, but boogers don’t glitter.

L: But they do. You just have to look at them the right way.

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“We call that the Fishbowl.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s where the fish swim. The staff, in their glass bowl – silently moving about behind their security windows – the ones with the special mesh that can’t be broken. Each one seated at their station, endlessly going through their routines, feeding data to the computer network, then retrieving it in some other form (“…titrated down to 15 mg during open-label treatment phase”). That’s all we are to them, data, in some other form. And that’s what they are to us, life in some other form. See that one over there, putting his head through the half-door on the side. Look, now he’s turning red. ‘Go away, can’t you see we’re busy!’ See, they even speak English.”

[Looking outside at the street below] “Yes, but here we are in a fishbowl of our own, looking out at the ocean.”

And here I am, outside the fishbowl, looking back at myself from the other side of the window. And there you are looking at me looking at Them. We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a…

A map of my universe, not unlike the one I made when I was six, except that one kept shrinking in scale, the farther away everything got, and went on expanding forever, at least until my mom swept it all away. This one stops abruptly at the Exit, and is based on a drawing I did one afternoon. It killed three or four hours, so right there it was worth it. And provided a model for my theater set. Besides I always feel better as soon as I have a picture in my mind of where I am. The ceilings are 9-feet high. There are 24 beds. The last time I heard, there were only ten. (Maybe soon there will be none, no little Indians at all.)