When Knights Lit up the Night and the Last Man Became the First
By
David Gottfried
Note: In the beginning, this piece may contain abstract language and ideas that may bore those with au courant afflictions such as attention deficit disorder. But keep reading. I promise fires and riots and kisses redolent with images so vital that the pixels on your computer screen may glimmer with reds and purples and sheer, unsheathed ”elan vital.”
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In his dream, Richard remembered what had happened to him when he was fifteen. Richard was in a hospital. It was a hospital for the psychiatrically diseased. Richard had just been told by his doctors that he was disturbed because he had genes that made him schizophrenic. After all, Richard was sick after so many years of psychoanalysis, and if he were still sick, and only getting sicker, it must be because of bad genes. Besides, his Mother loved him very, very much. Also, his shrink and his Mother did everything possible to ensure that Richard grow up properly. They did this by talking about castration complexes all day long, about Richard’s Mother’s supposedly irrepressible desire to cut off Richie’s penis, about Richard’s grandmother’s allegedly successful attempt at chopping off her husband’s cock, and the necessity that Richard grow-up to be flawlessly and completely masculine. And every day Richard learned to loathe faggotry more and more and wanted to be more and more of a faggot.
But suddenly the doctors made a big shift. Now they said that you weren’t crazy because your Mother had tried to chop off your penis. Now they said that you were crazy because you had bad genes. And Richard was told, at the age of 15, that he would have to subsist on anti-psychotic drugs for the rest of his life. He was sort of upset by this, so he committed some petty criminal acts in the hospital; I think he had a penchant for setting off false fire alarms. The doctors told him that his Thorazine would have to be increased. So Richard was more depressed than usual.
He wondered around the Hospital’s recreation rooms. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular. But he decided that he needed a new faith.
For years he believed in Judaism. Then. he believed in Democratic Party liberalism, but Mc Govern had just been slaughtered in the November 1972 election. He wanted to have an idol; damn Judaism and its repudiation of idols. Damn liberal Democrats; they wanted to help fucked-up people, but I suppose they would believe in more spending for mental health, which meant more money to doctors who would give you Thorazine shots. Damn all the faiths of intelligent, dispassionate logic; he had worshipped at the altar of his Mother’s highly intelligent Freudianism and all it had ever taught him was that he had been mangled by his female relatives – and it repeated this lesson on a weekly basis for seven years (Needless to say, his doctors had never read Eric Fromm’s cautionary note, in “The Crisis of Psychoanalysis,” to the effect that analysis can magnify infantile traumas by ceaselessly talking about them, but doctors only read the dogmatic texts they studied in school.) -- and that because of his emasculating early childhood he should doubt the validity of his penis.
He wanted a new faith, a faith that would scream and shout and belt him one; he wanted a religion vivacious and violent and filled with love, and with spread-eagled ears he was ready to receive whatever special sound pounded its way into his brain.
And Richard wondered around the hospital’s recreation rooms looking for his new religion. He saw a room with a cooking class – nothing but fat women making cakes from store bought cake mixes. He walked into the television room – nothing but a bunch of Thorazine zombies watching Hee Haw. He walked into the gym – nothing but a bunch of scowling black men shooting hoops.
But then he walked into a room with one boy and one record player.
The boy had long hair. The hair was as cute as David Cassidy’s, but the massive heft of the dark, thick hair made it seem like the boy and the hair had offerings as deep as the Atlantic Ocean. The boy had a good, manly build, not an excess of body fat. The boy swayed and swayed to the music like a Jewish man praying. And next to the boy was an album cover. It was the cover of the Hot Rocks album by the Rolling Stones, an album cover that featured just one thing: The deep, luxurious hair of Mick Jagger. The waves of the dark hair looked like the angry waves of the Atlantic Ocean on a winter night, and he thought of how his Mother loved to go to Coney Island to look at the Atlantic Ocean, and now he saw the angry waves of the Ocean drown his Mother.
And the voice on the record player was ready to drown or dismember any obstructing force. It was the voice of Mick Jagger. The macho faggot rock and roll star with the queenly, kingly demeanor that exuded all the elegance of Lytton Strachey’s prose. The leaping, screeching, screaming primal beast that harangued, harassed and bit you hard on the neck. The macho faggot who walked into the offices of psychiatrists, in makeup and rouge and a handgun, and said, “Suck my cock.” The macho faggot who told Rabbis and Priests and Imams to bow to his “Satanic Majesty’s Request.” The macho faggot whose microphone was a bazooka, whose guitars wailed like Stuka dive bombers, whose drums were the angry boots of massive invading armies, whose light shows were phosphorus bombs illuminating the American prey that Jagger would ravage and ass-fuck all night long.
In reality, the boy with the thick dark hair eventually left the room, and the music stopped and the deep bass sounds were replaced by the frigid, tinny sounds of the nurse telling Richard it was time to take more Thorazine. But let us take another sugar cube of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and let us savor the stuff of dreams.
Richard got up the nerve to ask the guy what his name was, and his name was John Henry, and Richard told John Henry that he loved him, and John Henry said that he wasn’t gay but that he loved Richard just the same. (And this reminds me: In Prep school, a classmate of Jack Kennedy’s, Lemoyne Billings, wrote a letter telling Kennedy that he loved him. Kennedy replied, “I’m not that kind of boy.” And they remained chaste lovers till Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Look it up on the Internet. Numerous, reputable sources attest to their enduring love)
And then they sang to each other the line in an old rock n roll song by the Animals, “Girl, we’ve gotta get out of this place.” They knew that the hospital thrived on order and that the best way to get out of the place was by creating maximum disorder. By creating a series of disturbances, one coming on the heels of the last like a series of ever larger ocean waves, the law and order that was the religion of the hospital would fall apart and the administrators and guards would be as flummoxed as Richard Nixon giving a speech and finding that his pants had suddenly fallen to his ankles.
Richard exclaimed, “Let’s set off the four fire alarms at the four corners of this building.”
John Henry’s eyes lit up in a smile, and he raised him one, “And then let’s pour kerosene, from the machine shop, on the floor and light a match.”
Richard, as happy as a Vietcong Faggot ready to kill John Wayne, went further, “And let’s throw a Molotov cocktail into the electric shock unit.”
John Henry brought them back to reality: Let’s do all that, but we still got to get out of here. Now all that fire and shit will make them confused and less able to defend the gates of this shit hole, but we still gotta figure out how to get out of this shit hole.”
Richard hit upon something simple and basic: They would grab some baseball bats from the gym, charge the South gate, which was guarded by one fat, slow guard, and get the fuck out of there.
First, they turned the Hot Rocks album to side three, which sported the 1968 clarion calls of Revolution: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Street Fighting Man,” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” They turned the music on full blast and swept through the hospital with the grace of ballet dancers and the power of quarterbacks. They were the Vietcong launching a Tet offensive on behalf of mental patients. They were taking “One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to heart. They were killing the doctors who had made a mint mangling their minds.
The fires burned and the wicked witch’s castle was burning down. Richard, who had never before been very successful with a baseball bat, swung that bat across the dumb empty head of the stupid fat guard, and the guard slumped to the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West slain by water. Richard clung to John Henry like Dorothy clutching Toto, or John Henry was Dorothy and Richard was toto, and the two guys were free, strong men who were not ashamed to be as sentimental as Dorothy.
The Hospital was in the Easternmost part of New York City, in the Borough of Queens, and they decided to run away to Manhattan. So they ran to the Q44A bus, and they took it to the Queens terminal stop of the F train which would take them to Manhattan.
As they sat on the angry train, John Henry, in a seemingly sincere voice asked, “Do you feel the train’s vibrations fucking your ass?”
Richard loudly and lustily said, “The train is fucking my ass real good.”
Yeah Richie, spread your cheeks for the train’s vibrations, get yourself prepped for some big dick in New York.
“You betcha, John Henry.”
There were other people on the train, and they heard what the boys had to say, and they were so astounded by what they heard that they didn’t dare utter a word of protest.
Richie said to the portly priest who got on the train at the next stop, “Father, do you like the way the train is fucking your ass.” The priest crossed himself and turned as crimson as the bloody wine of Jesus Christ.
A couple of stops later, two fat babbling women got on and John Henry asked them, “Did you gals ever take it in the rear before.” The women screamed and moved to another car.
At the Forest Hills Station, a Rabbi, whose flabby body had the consistency of Matzoh Balls, entered, and Richard gently inquired “Would you like some chicken fat to lube your butt as this big goyische train rides your fat kosher ass.” The Rabbi shouted in Yiddish, and sounded like a German as Yiddish is about ninety percent German, and got off at the next station.
Soon they were in Manhattan. They took the train to West 4th Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. Exuberant, they ran through the streets singing “Let’s Spend the Night Together” by the Rolling Stones. They saw reflections of themselves in the windows of Greenwich Village shops and soon they thought they saw the faces of Mick Jagger of Keith Richards of John Lennon of David Bowie of Paul Mc Cartney of George Harrison. Richard sheepishly said to John Henry, “I guess maybe we really are seeing things and are crazy.”
But then George Harrison walked up between Richard and John Henry, and put his arms around them, and his voice sounded like a smile should sound if a smile could talk, and he said, “Hey, blokes, you ain’t crazy. We are really here. And you’re cool cats. And we’re going to be your friends.” And the music got louder and louder and promised rock n roll days at the beach, and picnics in the country, and fucking and kissing and fucking and kissing.
Copyright, David Gottfried, 2008 and 2021.
Postscript:
Today, while ambling down the memory lane that is my computer, I noticed this story. This is the first time anyone save yours truly has seen this document. I have 4000 to 10,000 documents shouting silently in my computer. The overwhelming majority of them have been seen by no one. But I am a lot like the protagonist in this story of arson and liberation.