Poe Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

 

Part 4 of “Alabaster Christ”. Read the whole novella here.

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Dr. Miller was 72 years old and retired from psychiatry for half a decade. His life was simple in his golden years. Breakfast and dinner at home with Miriam, lunch at the clubhouse. He played golf five days a week. The other two days, Mondays and Wednesdays, were spent in volunteer service at the County Mental Health Services in Venice Beach.

Dr. Miller enjoyed the 16-mile drive from his modest but upscale home in woodsy Toluca Lake to the gritty little clinic on Venice Boulevard. He always took surface streets, the same route every Monday and Wednesday: Riverside Drive to Pass Avenue, checking out the new billboards on the exterior walls of the old Warner Brothers Studios, then up Barham Boulevard, skirting the western edge of the Universal Studios back lot, south through the Cahuenga Pass with the Hollywood Bowl on his right, then through Hollywood via Highland and LaBrea, right on Venice and LaBrea and he was almost there. At this point in his drive he always rolled down the window at a red light and inhaled the clean, soothing sea  air of Venice Beach.

One foggy Wednesday morning Dr. Miller was perplexed and preoccupied in thought during his routine drive, so otherwise mentally absent that he almost caused three accidents. A teenager in a Hummer leaned out a window and shouted at him.

“Get off the road, old man!”

That simply compounded the issue that was troubling Dr. Miller. Paul Newman is an old man now, he thought, older than me. Perhaps that’s the answer. The problem was still gnawing at him, hammering away like a woodpecker in his skull, when he entered the clinic from the employees entrance in the rear of the squat concrete bunker with bars in the windows to prevent break-ins.

Louise, the retired welfare worker from Arizona who volunteered as intake nurse three days a week, could see that something was wrong right away. She had known and worked with Dr. Miller for three years and felt she knew him well. Dr. Miller agreed; in fact sometimes Louise knew him better than his own wife and that truth suddenly complicated the matter even more.

“I had the damndest dream this morning, Louise,” he began, shaking cheap powdered creamer into a styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee. “It was about Paul Newman.”

“I hear he’s not doing well.” She sighed. “I always did like him.”

“Everybody likes Paul Newman,” Dr. Miller said impatiently. “That’s not the point, Louise. The point is I was unable to analyze my own dream. Me. A psychiatric specialist for forty years. I had to ask my own wife what my dream meant.”

“And?”

“She didn’t have a clue! And why should she? Miriam’s never been anything more than a housewife. The only intellectual stimulation she gets is at her bridge club and there all they talk about is who’s boning who in Ethiopia to provide Brad and Angelina with their next baby.”

Louise laughed. “Look, Doc, it was probably just a meaningless dream, whatever it was. I don’t really care to pry for details.”

“If it was meaningless,” he said emphatically, wagging a finger in front of her face, “why did I remember it when I woke? I never remember my dreams. Never.”

“Was it … homoerotic in nature?”

“No!” Dr. Miller bellowed, loud enough to cause a collective flinch among the junkies and psychotics dozing in the waiting room of the clinic. “And I thought you weren’t going to pry!”

Louise smiled and shook her head. Some days were like this but she was inwardly worried that episodes such as this were increasing in frequency. She directed the doctor to Exam Room One where she said “a most interesting case” awaited him. She provided no other details.

When Dr. Miller entered the exam room he found a wild hulk of a man pressed into a folding chair. Two hundred and fifty pounds, much of it muscle. Dirt-streaked, unkempt black hair. Eyes wild and excited and then suddenly fixated before going back to wild and excited again. Filthy clothing, mud-caked jeans, a torn T-shirt under a heavy green Army fatigue jacket. Dr. Miller placed him in his mid-forties.

“I’m Dr. Miller,” he said cautiously, keeping both hands clasped behind his back in a nonthreatening gesture. Psychotics, he once told Louise, “are usually easy to deal with if you just don’t show fear.” He noticed that there was no chart for this patient hanging in the plexiglass tray on the back of the door.

The patient simply glared at him through hooded lids.

“Is your first name Henry?” the patient suddenly said in a low, gravelly voice.

“No.” Dr. Miller chuckled.

“I like Henry Miller. I think. Tropical Something –”

Dr. Miller relaxed a little. “‘Tropic of Cancer’, I believe, is what you’re searching for.”

“And ‘Tropic of Capricorn’!” the patient blurted. “I was testing you. I wanted to see if you knew.”

“Well, I guess you got me. What seems to be the problem today?” He remembered the missing chart. “And why don’t we have any information on you?”

“Don’t have any. No ID or nothing like that.”

“No drivers license?” the doctor said.

“No drivers license, no ID, no wallet, no money.”

Dr. Miller settled his tired bones onto a metal chair.

“Do you have a name?”

“Poe.”

“Poe?”

“Poe. P-O-E. As in Edgar Allen.”

“Is that a first name or last name?”

Poe shrugged his shoulders. “It’s my name.”

“Are you experiencing feelings of amnesia?”

Poe smiled softly. “No. I remember what I want to.”

“Then you would certainly remember that Poe cannot be your full name.”

Poe folded his large hands into his lap. “If that was something I would choose to remember, yes. Are you going to help me?”

“You have to tell me what’s wrong first, Poe.” He laughed genially. “That’s how it works. You tell me what’s wrong and I see what I can do to help.”

Poe paused and studied the kind old doctor sitting across from him. The man was sitting, elbows resting on bony knees, relaxed. He was not afraid of Poe and Poe admired that.

“I have a mental illness,” Poe confessed.

“Have you been professionally diagnosed?”

“No. Yes. I mean, I don’t remember. Maybe. I was in the library yesterday morning. Trying to read.”

Dr. Miller could smell the alcohol seeping out of the man’s pores but he didn’t seem intoxicated.

“You wanna know what I was reading?”

“Is it important to your medical history?”

“No, it’s just funny. ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’. I wouldn’t know if it’s a good book because suddenly I couldn’t read. The words were a jumble, a big mess and I’d had some embalming fluid — that’s what my Dad used to call it — bourbon, I mean, but I wasn’t drunk. I swear to you I wasn’t drunk. It was like the words turned to liquid.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I left the library to get some more bourbon, okay? And then I started thinking about my old dog Kerouac and that got me really upset so I went into that church — the one over there, in Santa Monica, the Catholic deal on, I think, California Street. You know the one?”

Dr. Miller nodded.

“So I went in there and I was just standing there minding my own business and this statue of Jesus — this statue of Jesus starts talking to me. I mean, clear words, little statue lips moving and everything. It was so real, Dr. Miller, that I thought there was no way I could be hallucinating but, hell, statues of Jesus don’t talk, if you think about it logically, so I had to be hallucinating, right?”

“Do you use illegal narcotics, Poe?”

“No! A man in my condition? God. Keep it real, Henry.”

“What ‘condition’ are you referring to?”

“Who am I?” Poe said, locking eyes with the old psychiatrist. Dr. Miller didn’t like what he saw there. “No ID. No home. No money. Just the books in the library during the day and sleeping on the beach at night. So, who the fuck am I? I have some ideas. I have some memories. And, no, I don’t fucking have amnesia. You know what I’m like? Huh? Ever read Beckett, Doctor? Samuel Beckett? Have you?”

Dr. Miller had to think for a moment. “No, I don’t believe I have, Poe.”

“I’m like a character in search of a plot. I already have a little bit of backstory, what I care to remember, but I just need a plot to insert myself into. Does that make sense?”

“Poe,” Dr. Miller said evenly. “I don’t know what I can do for you. I can’t even dispense anti-anxiety meds to you if you don’t have any identification.”

“See, that’s the thing. We don’t know if my character even needs meds, do we? Is my character really mentally ill or is he someone lost looking for something — not something to go back to but something ahead. Out there. In the distance. Maybe? Perhaps?”

After Poe left the clinic, slouching his shoulders all the way to the front door, Louise entered the exam room and found Dr. Miller still in the chair, his gaze locked on the barred window with alarm sensors.

“What was his story?”

Dr. Miller drew a palm across his weary face. “Just another one whose wiring has come loose, Louise.”

“The world’s full of ‘em, ’specially here in Venice.”

Dr. Miller rose and pushed a palm against his hip bone as sciatic pain radiated down his leg. “Guys like this, they worry me, though. To be less than clinical about it, Louise, he was crazy as bat shit and he knew it but he’s totally imploded, completely surrendered to it. But there’s a part of him still reaching out for help.”

He walked over to the exam room sink, shrinking into the shadows.

“That takes courage,” Dr. Miller said.  He poured water from the tap into a paper cup. “I’ve been reading a lot lately.”

“Yes, you mentioned that a few days ago,” Louise said in a halting voice. She was worried about him. He seemed distant, depressed, preoccupied.

“Been reading Updike,” he said after swallowing the water. “East coast guy. I avoided east coast authors most of my life, their disdain for L.A. leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but Updike, surpisingly, I like. Anyway, it was something he wrote in this book I was reading the other night. I copied it down in a looseleaf but I’ve committed it to memory now, guess I’m still a little sharp: ‘The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started’.”

“Sounds like you need some lighter reading fare,” Louise suggested.

“Yes,” Dr. Miller agreed, pressing a palm into the small of his back again. “And if I could just figure out what that damn Paul Newman dream means.”