Hob Broun - Odditorium

“What is this? You’ve got stockholders now?”

“You haven’t been up here since I renovated, have you? My hermitage. I shut off the phone, come up here to read and think.”

“You’re in clover, Pierce. What’s to think about?”

“Everything. The past. The future. The book I want to write.”

“Uh-huh.” Christo had heard this bedtime story before. “A little soon for your memoirs, yes?”

“No, no. Something with a broader scope. An extended essay on the ingredients that threaten the most basic structure of our lives: psychiatry, deified technics, the credit economy. I’m calling it Under the Wheels of History .”

“Sounds like a thriller.”

“Be as snide as you like.” Pierce’s top lip bounced on the rim of the sweating gimlet glass; he took tiny sips as though it was medicine. “But in this business you’ve got to have an escape route. You must leave yourself some open space, in the same way that it’s essential to maintain that distance between yourself and the street.”

Christo propped his feet on the table, rolled down his lids. “A little crackerbarrel philosophy?”

“All I’m saying is, stay with the game too long and they grind you up for hamburger. What breaks most guys is their own greed. They go for that one last score and get buried.”

“But that won’t be you, huh? While those other clowns are sinking out of sight, you’ll be dickering movie rights.”

“It may not be easy but it can be done. Boston’s biggest smack dealer from the sixties is now running a three-thousand-acre Christmas tree ranch in Wyoming. And Denny Sunshine — you might remember him as the man who once dropped ten thousand hits of mescaline into the Fenway Park bleachers from a helicopter — well, Denny retired years ago to a vanilla plantation in Guadeloupe where he weaves rugs and makes babies. So I’m not worried. I’ll get clear in time. There’s more discipline and prudence in my genes than either of them could even think about.”

Though the timing wasn’t right, Christo laughed. “Those genes, where would we be without them. And how is Sara? Have you heard from her lately?”

“Holding up pretty well.” Pierce looked down, buffing one section of mahogany with the sleeve of his shirt. “She lives on a feminist commune outside Austin. They grow grapefruit there, and not bad. She sends me a crate every couple of months. They look after her down there and she’s coming right along. Goes spelunking on the weekends she says — you know, crawling around in caves with a carbide lamp on her head? She was a total claustrophobe when we were kids. Five minutes in a closed car would make her sick and in the dead of winter she slept with all her windows open.”

“Really. I didn’t know that.”

“I haven’t forgotten, jazzbo, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

Christo smiled sweetly. “Neither have I.”

It was seven or eight years ago. A judge with a crowded calendar had remanded Christo to a state institution for purposes of “observation.”

It was while waiting in the hallway for his preliminary hearing on a charge of attempting to redeem stolen traveler’s checks that Christo realized he could go somewhere other than prison. In this particular round of The State v. No Fixed Address they had him backed into a corner, but there was no reason why he couldn’t take the punches on his arms and shoulders. In the time it took to walk to the water fountain and back, he worked out his maneuvers.

When the Hon. J. Roccia banged the gavel to start things off, Christo grasped his head and dropped to the floor. Before the bailiff could reach him, though, he was back on his feet and circling left behind a straight jab, explaining to the court that the colony of soldier ants inside his skull was often upset by loud noises. Judge Roccia reminded him that it was within his power to order physical restraints. Christo replied that if proof was needed, he would try to coax one of his little guests out the front entrance (defendant here indicated his nose) for cross-examination. He could try for one of the colonels, Christo said, but he was a lot closer to the enlisted men. The Hon. suggested that Christo’s attorney make some effort to control his client; at which point Christo, throwing looping hooks as he bulled his way toward the bench, confided that this court-appointed scumbag had made sexual advances to him. The public defender, a young busy-bee only a few months past his bar exam, experienced a jolt of paranoia that caused him to believe a single drunken episode with his wife’s older brother was now about to bring an oh-so-promising career down in flames. As he rose to stammer his indignation, Christo backpedaled and began to lead an entire ant battalion in a double-time march across the defense table.

And that was all. Citing the fact that defendant had no previous convictions (That you know of, Christo murmured to himself), the Hon. Roccia stated his intention, pending agreement of counsel, of rendering Mr. Christo into the custody of qualified professionals who could determine his mental competency. Whenever that might be.

Plumdale was in several respects an unusual institution. One of its inmates, before amputating his son’s penis with a bread knife, had been head chef at Galatoire’s in New Orleans and, since he spent all his free time in the hospital kitchen, the food that came out of there was nearly good. The chief administrator of Plumdale actually lived on the premises. He was a 72-year-old Alsatian widower who believed that tobacco was a tranquilizing agent and that the last event that could be truly marked as progress for mankind was the invention of the pop-up toaster. Under his aegis, hydrotherapy, a curative method first codified in the mid-seventeenth century was still practiced on a regular basis at Plumdale.

Subbasement A, two levels below ground, was a huge vaulted room of pastel green tile, fitted with shower stalls and canvas-covered tubs, called the “soup tank.” There was a heavily chlorinated wading pool in which the water was piss-warm. There was a sauna that only the staff was allowed to use. Intransigent patients were sometimes strapped into chairs under small-bore pipes from which water poured directly onto their heads. Flow and temperature were controlled from a panel of valves and wheel cocks in an adjoining room that had a long, shatterproof window.

Long a watersports enthusiast, Christo visited the soup tank frequently. Also, this was one of a very few unsegregated activities and afforded the best contact with female inmates. There was one in particular who interested him, an emaciated girl with a white streak in her hair. She was always there, silently cross-legged in one of the shower stalls with her leotard full of holes. He imagined her to have once worn fashionable clothes and French cologne, to have made witty conversation in ritzy cafés where domestic champagne was never served. It took hours of cajolery to elicit the single fact that her name was Sara.

Christo brought her sourballs and pictures he’d cut out of magazines, which she accepted with a small and wordless smile. But it was not until he slipped on the wet tiles and fell, ripping open his hand on a screwhead not quite flush, that he won her. Sara knelt beside him and applied a shred of her drenched leotard to the wound. She cried as she licked the blood off her fingers. She permitted him to towel her off and comb the knots out of her hair. And she spoke.

More than two years ago, she said, her parents had arrived one night unannounced at the tenement apartment she shared with her lover, a 34-year-old body builder and part-time bouncer. For months they had been bombarding her with letters and phone calls, berating her for the aimless and degenerate life she was leading. But they seemed calmer now, conciliatory. Let’s go for a drive, they said. We’ll stop somewhere for coffee and a nice long talk. They had a friend waiting downstairs, a member of their tennis club, named Dr. Soberin. After a ten-minute interview in the back seat of the car as they drove to the hospital amid shouted abuse from Dad, waterworks from Mom, he signed Sara’s commitment papers. Dr. Soberin listed such symptoms as: sexual acting out, masculine role playing (she was wearing cowboy boots and a denim jacket that night) and refusal to accept responsibility for her actions.