MIMI POND, author of Splitting Hairs: The Bald Truth About Bad Hair Days
In his search for the real America, Poe Ballantine reminds me of the legendary musk deer, who wanders from valley to valley and hilltop to hilltop searching for the source of the intoxicating musk fragrance that actually comes from him. Along the way, he writes some of the best prose I’ve ever read.
SY SAFRANSKY, Publisher, The Sun
Copyright © 2018 Poe Ballantine
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ballantine, Poe, 1955– author.
Title:
Whirlaway: the great American loony bin, horseplaying, and record collecting novel / by Poe Ballantine.
Description:
Portland, Oregon: Hawthorne Books, [2018]
Identifiers:
LCCN 2017016439
ISBN 9780998825700 (ebook)
Classification:
LCC PS3602.A599 W48 2018 DDC 813 /.6 – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016439
Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts
2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue 3rd Floor
Portland, Oregon 97212 hawthornebooks.com
Form:
Sibley House
Set in Kingfisher
98765432
Dedicated to Andy and The Hog,
with special thanks to Marion Winik and Steve Taylor.
ALSO BY POE BALLANTINE
Things I Like About America
God Clobbers Us All
Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire
501 Minutes to Christ
Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere
Contents
1.Railroaded by Luminescence
2.Mudville / “I Wish It Would Rain”
3.Dyskinesia
4.Life Begins at Forty-One
5.Chivalrous Deceptions
6.The Key’s in the Ashtray
7.Island of the Butterscotch Beast
8.Dr. Seuss in the Sky
9.Gigantic Australian Counterclockwise Stampedes
10.Hermaphrodites, Bikers, and French Teachers
11.Coco Puff
12.Marvelous Marvelle / Let the Sunshine In
13.Sex and Murder Self-Help Book
14.Jimmy Is In Good Hands With God
15.Beauty Chasers
16.Tales of Scottish Mastectomy
17.Bee-doo Woman from Another Dimension, Possibly Hell
18.Martha at the Apollo
19.Psychotic Reaction
20.The Missing Prostitutes
21.The Bones of La Zona Basura
22.Mo Ho
23.Whirlaway
24.Zopilote Being an Indian Word for “Vulture”
25.Flowers in the Sea
26.It Ain’t Goldilocks
27.My Boy Lollipop
28.KLIK in Canoga Park
29.Boys Love Their Mothers
30.Try a Little Tenderness
31.Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
32.Whiplash I Was Taking a Bath
33.Mister Jang-Jingler (Dance)
34.Back to the Island
35.The Giant Clam Eats Children
36.Love Does Not Experience Time
37.Give Me Stilton, Blue and Gold
38.Run Through the Jungler
One exists in a universe convincingly real, where the lines are sharply drawn in black and white. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes the lines were never there in the first place.
—LOREN EISELEY
1.Railroaded by Luminescence
AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF WHAT I WAS UP AGAINST AT NAPA STATE Hospital, what they used to call an asylum for the criminally insane, my fellow inmate Arn Boothby, an angry three-hundred-pound paranoid schizophrenic who regularly “cheeked” his meds, tried to kill another inmate one day in the client convenience store by grabbing his throat and throwing him through a glass display case. I was standing in line to buy a pack of breath mints at the time and can attest to him saying, “P. S. I Love You,” as the blood spread across the tiles. Boothby was tackled by two psych techs; a staff nurse and hospital police converged within minutes to beat in Boothby’s brains behind closed doors. Boothby told me later they would’ve killed him had not Dr. Fasstink inadvertently intervened. Boothby went to jail, vacation time for most of us at NSH, and I didn’t see him at the card game for a few months. When you’re surrounded by murderers, bank robbers, arsonists, and child molesters you’ll play cards with just about anyone.
And I know what you’re thinking (I really do): that I’m innocent, that I don’t belong here. Every inmate says this. Well, I’m not innocent, but I should’ve never been sentenced to a high-security psychiatric hospital full of overmedicated, violent maniacs when I had done nothing but shoplift and make a few crude remarks to women in bars, ride twenty-five-thousand miles on an imaginary bicycle, fancy that I was the ruler of the universe, and run a few delusional undercover operations for the CIA, all brought to you by not taking my meds—or so it was explained to me. I think it was the pattern more than the nature of the violations, and the fact that I had left the halfway house before the expiration of my term, that swayed the judge. Whatever the case, I was mandated by court order to an indefinite term at NSH, and once you’re in one of these places you’re pretty much at the mercy of the people who run the show.
I did myself no favors at Napa State, for I was outraged to have been placed in a community rife with the worst kinds of con artists, malingerers, and career criminals who’d pled insanity to avoid life sentences in a penitentiary. Then there were the genuinely insane inmates, not a minor case among them, all wandering around freely to do whatever they liked to whomever they pleased. Half the inmate population had killed or tried to kill someone. All the barbers were murderers. One of the barbers, my close friend and first choice for a haircut, Randy Sturtz, had killed his brother and then a neighbor over a cinnamon roll. Cecil Jebb, my roommate for six months, had raped a woman and then tried to strangle her in the parking lot of an Oakland shopping mall, the only time, he liked to brag, that he’d ever been caught. Darvan Laval, a dining companion of mine many evenings who loved to fight, had killed a schoolmate when he was fifteen. Most of the staffers were unarmed women who could not handle the larger, more dangerous male criminals and often had to resort to calling the police. It was no coincidence that about every three months a troublesome inmate would die after a mysterious reaction to an injection
