Sturtz, whose family had lived in Napa Valley for over a century, told me that Napa State had once been self-sufficient, a sylvan, sprawling, magnificent Vermont-slate, Florentine-Moorish castle with its own gardens, orchards, bakery, dairy, livestock, carriage houses, barns, forges, newspaper, and cemetery. Originally constructed as a spillover for Stockton Asylum, Napa Asylum for the Insane, since it was located deep in the hinterland, took Stockton’s worst cases, the “chronically insane.” Staff and patients lived together on the same grounds. Like monks, they made whatever they needed: shoes, clothes, music, cheese, coal gas, furniture, bread, even beer. An underground railroad conveyed meals and laundry to the various wards. Patients were rarely discharged, they simply finished their lives here. Among these were paupers, the homeless, those without family, the invisible class. As the years passed and the city and lucrative wineries and vineyards closed in around the asylum, monastic self-sufficiency gradually gave way to urban interdependency and the techno-electro-chemical revolution. It was the Age of Anxiety and the Benighted Soul. With Mudville’s eventual designation as “forensic” (criminal), sixteen-foot razor-wire-crowned fences were installed.
In the days of its idyllic independence, thousands of patients had been buried at NSH, though most of the markers had been uprooted and displaced over time. Sturtz thought that some of the bodies of those who died questionably or unjustly must have been hidden in Mudville walls, for occasionally the corridors reeked with the odor of death. Countless efforts to unearth the source, basement and attic explorations, left the matter unexplained. Perhaps it was the many catastrophic river and sewer floods that had swamped the town and its storied madhouse and subway tunnels, or possibly, I suggested, it was some ghastly immaterial remnant of those who had departed unhappily from these premises.
“Yeah, but who sang ‘Build Me Up Buttercup?’”
“The Foundations. And don’t call me Buttercup.”
“Bingo, Daddy-O.”
You’re always told when you’re going to get out, four months, seven months, two years, six if you’re a good little boy or girl, and you’ll tell everyone as if you just won a ticket to Wonka’s chocolate factory: “I’m getting out in four months.” It is the highlight of any inmate’s life (and for most of us a chance to unleash once again on society). I had been told many times that I was going to get out, but something always came up, and it was plain after a while that my fate was stamped, that I was going to stay here forever with the killers and the cuckoos and the cons.
Death is one of God’s better ideas, and I was ready to jump into its sweet marshmallow middle with the faint hope that I would somehow find Sofia Fouquet on the other side. But then one day after one of the aides reminded me that another year had passed and it was now my forty-first birthday this ruddy, broad-chested, clear-eyed man with a nose like a boat rudder and a forehead upon which you could’ve set a dinner for four, and these long soft plumes of gray hair down to his shoulders, strolled into my room, hands in the pockets of his smock. I was listening to the radio, having a Diet Pepsi, and staring at my misogynist Hoopa roommate, Earl Nez, who never talked but always shared with me his acorn bread. The shrinks were all alike, so I didn’t waste much energy on them. He introduced himself as Dr. Horace Jangler and said he had taken over for Fasstink.
“Terrific,” I said. “I hope he fell off a bridge.”
Jangler said that Fasstink had retired.
I said that did not preclude him from falling off a bridge.
“Oh, an optimist,” he said with a chuckle and asked if I’d like to take a walk.
I hadn’t been outside in memory, and the sun hurt my eyes. We followed the trails that reminded me of Sofia. Dr. Jangler unlocked a gate and we hiked down into a heavily wooded area where the inmate population was normally not allowed. At the bottom of the trail was a lake upon which floated a single black swan. Dr. Jangler gestured to a stone bench under an ash tree and asked me to sit. I declined his offer of a cigarette. “I don’t smoke money,” I said.
“Nor should you,” he replied. “Nasty habit.”
“Pretty lake,” I said. “Never been down here.”
“Do you miss San Diego?” he asked.
“Doubt if I’d recognize it.”
“It’s the same city,” he said, “just bigger, that’s all.” He mentioned a few San Diego institutions, the Chart House, Saska’s, Mister A’s, the lowly Padres, the Belly Up Tavern, all still in operation.
“What about Golden Hall?” I said.
“Still there.”
“I saw Neil Young there.”
“I saw the Grateful Dead there.”
I said that I had seen the Grateful Dead at Golden Hall too.
“Imagine that,” he said with a grin. “We might’ve even been
