While reading Steppenwolf, Harry Haller’s records -- “for Madmen Only” -- the memory returned. An auditory memory.

LAUGHTER!!!!!!!!

The sinister laughter, cackling laughter, angry - hateful - insane Laughter which came from her mouth, reflected a voice which was new to me - a voice never heard from the auburn haired ghost before. The auburn haired man of stone, listening from the blue room, heard my stern words, finally escaping my cowardice, finally standing up for myself, standing up to the ghost who owned my soul. But the stone man’s ears were deaf when it came to her laughter. He did not witness the insanity, the complete possession of her mind by irrational evil forces.

The forces of evil and insanity came in voices John had warned of .... The voices of the pit, beckoning those who could hear to take the step of faith into the realm of unreason to the joy of insanity. She had taken the step and in the laughs only I could hear a cry of help.

In a brief codependent moment, I foolishly believed that I was her savior, that I was the only one on earth who could rescue her from the caverns she had fallen into. I conjured the abyss in my mind and leaped in.

For nearly six months my mind slipped in and out of realities, fantasies -- one never knew the real from the fiction.

I met the Biafran Jew
    who
        read my palm, discussing rainmaking he promised me a
trip
to meet his
medicine man and learn time travel. A sorcerer....and threatened my friends and I fought his mind and he made my body move through space and time to places I have never known. He distracted me momentarily with an hallucination of Black Moses leading his people out of Egypt to a promised land in the other direction from Israel; and then I saw a Black Jesus nailed to a Black Cross and then a Woman Named Moses with Auburn Hair ---- and they burned her at the stake like Joan of Arc ....... then someone bumped me on the ped mall and I was safe and the sorcerer left to torment someone else.

I sat at the river Styx -- day after day with a deck of cards playing solitaire -- a game called patience/ a game called Idiot’s delight. Playing cards with myself. Playing with myself. Invisible to most.

I sang to myself as I turned the cards over and over again the last lines from Shelter from the Storm - -

    “If I could only turn back the clock
            to when God and her were born.”

And the wind would howl, and the Iowa river would shake the banks near me and I would watch the people walk by unable to see me -- seeing through them.

When the winds would die and the smell of tornadoes left the air, I would begin to walk across the city to Dan and Mary’s - the dog people - shepherd people - who brought lightness to the dungeons and dragons games .... games I never played, for I preferred solitaire, playing with myself.

My best friends were sunflowers and when they died I cried and searched for new sunflowers and one grew seven feet high at my mothers .... and I went to the law building and taught the classes ... and laughed and howled at the moon, as the students painted anarchy on the dorm windows and the counselors cried at the insanity, which filled the air.

And the priest declared that “I” was Alpha and Omega and I accepted the part and split the universe in my mind -- angry at the abyss for stealing the auburn ghost. I spoke with her once that summer but she could not see or hear me.

She read the lawbooks as I saw the black paint cover Danforth Chapel ...

And then astral projection in my mind took me far beyond the galaxy and glancing back at the Milky Way I saw the gateways to a parallel universe -- hidden doorways at the L-5 points/ gravity points between Earth and Moon, where they want to put the space station -- and suddenly I understood her abstinence, her fear of conceiving Captain James Kirk who was to be born in the town where we lived -- Riverside Iowa, birthplace of the Starfleet Captain -- Who spoke the prime directive of non-interference in alien culture while fucking every alien woman he could lure into the sack.

I crashed somewhere near the river. The reentry was devestating.

After a while I took my place on the stone benches and turned the cards and sang songs to myself. Then she met me there at the River Styx and I signed the paper and I was free. Free at last. Free at last. Until the magician at the Dead Wood aksed if it was what I wanted and I said it was too late and he showed me his disappearing tricks and said maybe not and I gave him a book called Miracles and left the decision to the Universe and told him his magic could make the papers disappear from the Courthouse if the divorce was not intended by the Fates.

Then I tripped down the street to see Batman but left before the Joker died and talked with the student in the lobby who was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

And I retired to the Heartland to the banks of the Missouri River and collected myself collected from people all around the country and played Hanks Williams’ songs “I’m so lonesome I could Cry” on Dan’s Red, White and Blue Buck Owens’ guitar and I helped Mary with her Alzheimer’s by trading minds with her and with her thoughts in my mind I was diagnosed.

So I escaped to the camp by the River and rested for a year preparing for my journey from the pit. The climb out of Hell would require all my energy. So I came to the banks of the Mississippi River - Highway 61 Revisited - After my father had sacrificed me to old Doc Whitehead and his Haldol.

I abandoned solitaire for spades and played often with three Rock Island Ghosts - one who’d been to Woodstock and then to prison when his father and brother sacrificed him on Highway 61 for a little marijuana. And then the divorce destroyed his mind just as mine had - so I gave him my wedding band and he wore it as a pinky ring. I still wear his stocking cap to sleep for protection from the brainstorms.

His partner in spades was a homemaker not by choice - by fear. A lover once took some acid and then took a lighter and burned her vagina and she protected herself with several quarts of Colt 45 each day and she never left the house in the two years I knew her and once she took twenty-five minutes to decide which card to place because her mind was so distracted from the alcohol haze.

My partner was a giant ghost who saw Jimi Hendrix alive in Davenport and thought Hitler was righteous and he explained the angel paintings and deconstructed words to find hidden meanings. The hospital was the true pit, the clue was right there in the middle of the word -- hos-PIT-al -- so he didn’t take his medications very often.

And we were playing spades and Fleetwood Mac was playing hypnotize and then David Gilmore started playing out of this world and I left my body and looked down and saw us playing cards and when I returned I was sick for hours and passed out on the couch I gave them.

The next day I told a friend I almost died several times on that couch. I felt my heart stop and start again.

Janis Joplin sang a funeral song while I read a clipping about AIDs not knowing that the auburn ghost was working on quilts in San Francisco and

the brainstorm came and lasted four days .... no identity ... no sleep ... for four days walking aimlessly searching for hope
...........................

And I reached the white house long past midnight and the stairs were lit by a Goddess and as I climbed the stairs I heard Led Zeppelin in my mind and each level reflected another stage of consciousness. when I reached the third level a huge American flag symbolized the New World Order ... I saw a stairway going up and realized that the flag and the New Order were a sham.

I went to the next level
sat on a lawn chair
threw a lightbulb
into the parking lot
my last bright idea
shattered on the pavement.

REM’s “It’s the End of the World as we know it” played in my head.

I took the child’s toy, the red chalice brought it to my lips and quenched my thirst. I heard William Burroughs voice: “A wise man once said that you can only call the Doctor once.” I smelled the unleaded on my breath. My mind screamed out : “Doctor! Doctor!”

I lived.