One twenty-year-old boy who had lived on a farm for the first nineteen-and-a-half years of his life had a psychotic breakdown on his first day in the army when some burly sergeant yelled, “Hey, farm boy – lift your fucking duffel bag and get in the fucking line!” By the time they brought him to us, he was catatonic.
My main job on the day shift was to help administer electroshock therapy, which meant holding the patient down while the doctor induced a grand mal seizure. I had a terrible time emotionally for three or four weeks, until I started to see the good that often came from it – perhaps only temporarily. The analogy the doctors gave us was that it was like lifting up a car that was stuck in the snow because its wheels kept spinning, digging the car in deeper. When the troubled mind is no longer in the same rut, maybe it will take a new path.
The evening shift was my favorite. I helped escort the patients from the locked ward to a Red Cross dance, three times a week. It was held in a reception hall on the ground floor. No bars on the windows. A busload of young girls – all volunteers – came in from town, which was two miles away, to dance with the patients. The other corpsmen and I were not allowed to dance with these young girls. The Teamsters always provided a small band, which played popular standards. I was tempted to break the rules and ask one of the young ladies to dance. I thought of what might happen if a nurse came in and started reprimanding me:
“Silberman, don’t you know the rules?”
“Mam, I was dancing with this young lady to show this patient that there’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.”
But I was too chicken to ever try it. There was one young patient who played bridge with me at these dances, when we could find two other bridge players. He was so normal that I couldn’t understand why on earth he was put into a mental hospital, let alone into a locked ward.
“Dick,” I asked, “what the hell are you doing here? You’re saner than I am.”
“When I was attending class at Officers’ Training,” he said, “it took me 5 minutes to straighten all the books on my desk. They had to be stacked properly, all facing in the same direction and with all the edges touching each other in a correct way. The next day it took me 15 minutes to straighten my books, then 30 minutes, then 45 … and by that time the class was over.”
Another young man, named Roger, was terrified of stepping on cracks. He was also terrified of dancing with any of the girls. The few times he did ask a girl to dance, he got a horrible headache and begged me to take him back to his bed. Once, while we were walking along the wooden corridor, on the way back to the ward – with him zigzagging all over the place to avoid stepping on cracks – I said, “Tell me something, Roger: what do you think is going to happen to you if you do – just accidentally – step on a crack?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But please don’t make me do it.”
Another patient would go into the latrine every night and wrap a thin white string around his penis. That fellow I stayed clear of. Sure, I wanted to ask him, “Why the hell are you wrapping string around your penis?” But he was so sick I was afraid my question might set him off.
Of all these young men, the one who got to me the most was the patient who knelt down each morning in front of the television set – blocking the view of all the other patients who were watching Amos and Andy – and began praying … to the monitor? Or Amos? Or Kingfisher? Or God? (Hold on here, I thought. You’re getting into my territory.)
That’s when the heavenly thought first occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t called on by God to do some special and sacrificial thing…. Maybe I was just sick.
We were given two days off each week. The other soldiers wanted Saturdays and Sundays; I wanted Mondays and Tuesdays, because New York was an hour-and-a-half train ride away and that meant I could attend acting class at the HB Studio every Monday night. Corinne and her husband, Gil, said that I could stay with them and their baby, in their small apartment in Queens, on my two days off. All my friends at Valley Forge loved me for never putting in for weekends.
The following November – while I was in Queens on my two days off – I got a phone call from my uncle Irv, in Milwaukee, telling me that my mother had just died. I wasn’t surprised, because she had been so ill. They had discovered that she had breast cancer the year before, but they couldn’t treat her because her heart wasn’t strong enough. She died of heart failure.
I called my sergeant at Valley Forge Hospital and told him about my mother. He was usually pretty gruff or stoic, but on this occasion he was very kind and said that I could go to Milwaukee for the funeral and that I should just come back when I was ready. So I flew to Milwaukee, and at the cemetery I got into an argument with two of my uncles, who told me that – according to the Jewish religion – I couldn’t be a pallbearer for my own mother. I grabbed one of the handles that held up the casket, and I walked along, with five other men. We set her down in her grave.
Now here’s a strange thing: about a month later I bought my first condom. I didn’t know quite how to use it; it seemed tricky to me. I mean, exactly when do you put it on and do you ask the woman for help and when do you take it off? Of course, a more important question would have been, “Who the hell is this woman you’re talking to who’s going to help you put a piece of rubber over your penis?”
By the way, I wasn’t praying as much anymore.
“See you in New York!”
I said that to Joan so many times when we had our baby-sitting dates on Saturday nights, watching George Goble, kissing during the commercials, standing in the doorway for a last good-night kiss, and then … “See you in New York!”
Joan had written to me once while I was in the army, just to let me know that she was studying singing at the Ansonia Hotel and that I could see her in New York. She gave me her address.
I hadn’t seen Joan for over a year, and now I’m riding on a train from North Philadelphia to New York with a condom packed as carefully as I could place it in my wallet, and it was burning a hole in my brain because I kept thinking, What if there’s a tiny hole in the condom because I inserted it next to my plastic driver’s license and the train is jostling back and forth and side to side and up and down? Jesus, it sounds like the condom is making love already. On its own! I wish it could – then I wouldn’t have to figure out how to do it. Twenty-two years old and still a virgin? Why? Could it be that if I made love – not hugging and kissing, but actually putting my penis inside a woman’s vagina – I would somehow be betraying my mother? That’s crazy. Or is it because God has more important things for me to do than to fuck around with pleasure? Oh, excuse me – that’s not crazy? I feel like I’m talking to one of the patients on the locked ward. Maybe I’m the one who’s crazy. Maybe I should be on the locked ward with them. But if I can say that – then I’m not crazy. That much I learned at the hospital. Acting seems so much easier than life. When I’m on stage, I feel safe. “‘They’ can’t get me.” (Careful, son … you’re talking crazy again.) But onstage, everyone listens to me and watches me and – if I’m any good – applauds me. And when I’m taking my bow, I have the belief that I’ve earned my feeling of grace – as if God were saying, “You did something worthwhile, so I won’t punish you … for a few days.”
Then I heard the conductor shout, “NEW YORK NEXT! LAST STOP – NEW YORK