Extract from The Locked Ward

The Locked Ward

This is an extract from my memoir The Locked Ward, published by Jonathan Cape in the UK at £16.99.

In all my time in the Locked Ward, Theo was one of the patients whose company I enjoyed most. A small man, with shoulder length hair and a goatee beard, he might have been ideal casting for the part of Gimli the dwarf in a remake of ‘The Lord of the Rings’. He could be the most congenial of company, and made me laugh more than any other person on the ward in all the time I spent there. 

            I met him at breakfast that first morning. I was in the pantry, doling out breakfast trays from the trolley. He came in to the Dayroom, yawning and pushing his hair back from his face. When he came up to the hatch, he looked at me, grinned and pointed.

            “Hippy!” he chortled.

“Guilty,” I conceded.

“Me tae!” he whooped with delight. His pleasure was so transparent, you could have seen the distant hills through it. “What’s your name?”

“Dennis.”

“Dennis… Dennis…?” he mused, as if trying to place me, although he’d never clapped eyes on me before. “Dennis Hopper!”

“Yeah, man,” I smiled. “Easy Rider.”

“Easy Rider! Yeah!”

            The fact that I had known this made us blood brothers on the instant.

            “You’re a man with a head full of light!” he chortled again.

            I laughed. Luke and Gordon were looking puzzled in the background.

            “What’s your name?” I asked. “I need your name to get your breakfast tray.”         “Theo,” he said, suddenly serious. “And I’m as mad as a spoon.”

Theo was an old hippy, all right. A year or so younger than me, he had dropped out of mainstream society some time in the early 70s and never been able to find the ladder back up. He clocked me right away as an older version of something similar. We had long conversations about recherche music outfits: The Edgar Broughton Band; Gong; Henry Cow. He suffered from schizophrenia. His delusions were many, but one of them was that he had played in the rock band Black Sabbath, written their hit song ‘Paranoid’ and had all of his notebooks and songs stolen by Ozzy Osbourne.

            I got very fond of Theo and he sensed a kindred spirit, for he attached himself to me very early on. Like many patients, he had absolutely no insight into his condition (despite his joke about being mad as a certain item of cutlery) and he burned with a furious resentment at those he saw as depriving him of his liberty. It was all an establishment plot by the pigs to hassle him and to do the dirty on all Heads and hippies by constantly harshing their mellow and bringing them down.

            “I mean, man,” he said to me, “you should know. You were there in Paris ’68. You were at Haight Ashbury. You’ve seen the pigs in action, man.”

I have no idea why he was of the opinion that not only had I hung around with the original hippies in San Francisco, but that I’d also been rioting with the students in Paris, except that he was extremely delusional.  If he had written ‘Paranoid’, there was no reason why I should not have torn up the cobblestones with the students at the Sorbonne. Je suis Marxiste; tendance Groucho.

            He would deliver utterances like this whilst squatting on his hunkers on the floor next to my seat at the Station. It was a pose he could hold for hours – no, I mean hours – without any ostensible damage to his leg or thigh muscles. If I tried that for ten minutes, even, I’d pop a hip. Or at least straighten myself up with all the grace and creak of an ironing-board and then hirple away like something out of Fellini Satyricon. But Theo must have had the muscle control of a saint on a pillar. Theo Stylites. Or one of those Indian fakirs. He told me that, when he was not in hospital, he never faced the west in the evening, so that the sun could not set in his eyes.

            He considered us to be brothers. He had little time for anybody else. Hunkered there by my seat at the Station, he’d expatiate endlessly about other staff members and how they’d treated him cruelly in the past. It was all fantasy, of course, expressed in terms of the wildest flights of ideas. And Theo never forgot anything. Ever. The smallest incident, the smallest slight, intended or not, was stashed away somewhere in those capacious memory banks. Actually, most of us have equally capacious memories; we just don’t have the instant retrieval that Theo had.

            “Why you working for a bastard like that weasel, Lawlor?” he’d say.

“I don’t work for him. I work with him.”

“He’s a cruel bastard. And he’s a pornographer. You know hows he makes his money? He makes pornographic movies of his wife with workmen. He makes millions out of prostituting his wife. You know her? She’s a nurse too. She works in a medical ward. Lucky for her, because it means she can get the antibiotics she needs to cure herself of all the STDs she gets from fucking strangers for money. Yeah, he’s worth millions. You know that restaurant in town, the Jade Pillar? Yeah? Well, he bought that with the money he made from filming his wife fucking anybody and everybody.”

“The Jade Pillar is a Chinese restaurant, Theo.”

“Yeah, and he owns it. How can you be so obtuse, man? You’re educated. The bastard’s responsible for me being in this fucking predicament in the first place. I was in my pad quite the thing, minding my own business and writing songs when he came to visit me. And he reported me to the authorities; accused me of having a dog’s head in my fridge. And the next thing I know, I’m in the IPCU in that asylum on the hill up there…”

“Hang on, Theo. You had a beheaded dog in your flat?”

            He looked at me as if I were a simpleton and then explained slowly and patiently, like a good tutor.

            “Well no, man. It was more like a … be-dogged head.  And it wasn’t in the fridge.”

“Why did you have a dog’s head in your flat?”

“Somebody gave me it. I’m not into animal cruelty, man, or sacrificing things. But that’s not the point. I was arrested in a night raid. The pigs came at night and huckled me out of my place and into the asylum. Then, well, you would fight against the forces of evil, wouldn’t you, man? Children of the revolution? And because I fought against the brainwashing in there, they arrested me again and threw me in the State Hospital. And the first nurse I met in there was that bastard’s brother! Another fucking Lawlor! I couldn’t escape them. A vast conspiracy, man.”

            The State Hospital is in Carstairs in the Central Belt of Scotland and houses psychiatric patients with tendencies to dangerous, criminal and violent behaviour. It was known widely in the ward as ‘the Big Hoose’.

            “And Simpson. How can a man of education and culture like you, a man who’s read The Tibetan Book of the Dead (I hadn’t; I still haven’t; I’m not going to), who listens to The Incredible String Band, how can you work with someone like Simpson? He’s a thug. A hired thug. He works part-time as a heavy for drug barons in London. I’ve seen his picture in the papers. I’ve seen him on the newsreels. He’s a torturer. SAS trained. They can never hide it. It’s obvious. They bear the mark of Cain. He uses army techniques on patients. I saw him use them in the asylum. He knows all the nerve points. He can paralyse a man in seconds just by sticking his fingers into his neck. That’s how they do the big injections. He paralyses the patient and Lawlor injects them with poison.”

            Luke was ‘a pimp and a rentboy’; Clyde ‘a poor deluded immigrant forced to work for the services against his will’; Gordon ‘a moron and an imbecile who’ll just do anything the clever ones tell him’. Actually, I agreed with the last bit.

            But, like Bill, he reserved his greatest bile for Dr. Bankstreet.

            “That cow, Bankstreet, man. She’s an evil bitch. All she wants is to have me incarcerated in here so that I’m not out there in the world. She’s terrified I’ll tell the newspapers about her. I know all about her injecting folk with mind-altering drugs, man, and getting them to pass on personal secrets. Bank details. Property holdings. All sorts. She has a vault in Switzerland stuffed with Nazi gold and treasure she’s extorted through psychic torture. It’s all heavy shit, man. She’s a fucking Witch. The fucking Witch Queen of New Orleans. You know that song, man, don’t you?”

“Marie, Marie, da voodoo veau?”

“Yeah, you’re hip to the groove. You know, I don’t understand why a Head like you would want to be working in a torture chamber like this. They were Native Americans, man. Unreconstructed racists call them Red Indians, but the term is Native Americans.  You’ll know that, you’re an educated man. What was it you studied at university?”

“English and American Literature.”

“American Literature, yeah?” He got quite excited. “Do any Native American literature in that course?”

“Nah. It was all the stuff you’d expect. But I’ve read some Native poetry. Gloria Bird. Chrystos. Folk like that.”

“Cool. Yeah that bitch Bankstreet. She resents me because I’m creative and she’s the Death force. So she calls me schizophrenic and bangs me up in here and nobody does anything about it. Do you know, man, she refuses to believe that I wrote Black Sabbath’s entire first album? You know the one? With the chick in black by the old watermill on the cover? That’s a chick I was balling at the time. I could show you the notebooks, music - well not dots on staves because I’m not into that - just the chords and the lyrics. Lyrics like poetry, man. Like the sublimest poetry, like … fucking … I don’t know … Shelley or somebody. I could show you them but Osbourne took all the credit. 1970. He’s still got my notebooks.”