Yesterday morning, they placed my bed in the elevator. The

nurses were talking behind a pane of glass in the nursing station.

For once, I could understand what people were saying. A male nurse

was telling a lady nurse that if people were brought up Catholic,

they were brainwashed and didn't have much of a chance in life. A

woman called theresa, who had caked white skin like a mummy, came

into the elevator and stood beside my hospital bed with a rosary

and hissed at me, "How many times, my son! How many times, my son!"

She was wearing a pink and white bathrobe and had her hair up in

curlers. She kept waving the rosary in my face. I yelled, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO !"

and that was the first sound I made in the six weeks

since I had been catatonic and locked up in Burgess Pavilion of the

Douglas.

I remember now what happened before I got hospitalized. The

times were evil, I spent a week in jail because I was accused

falsely of breaking a window at a riot and I had dreams at night of

shooting policemen. While I was in Parthenais Detention Centre, I

met a fellow from the FLQ who was being beaten up every day by the

police. When I told him I was getting released soon, he gave me a

coded message, which I delivered to his comrade on the outside. A

civil war was raging worldwide. An Apocalypse.

"A YEAR AFTER THE GULF WAR FACTS ARE EMERGING TO INDICATE THAT
THE U.S. WILL ACTUALLY MAKE A 'PROFIT' FROM THE WAR WHILE THE FINAL
DEATH TOLL IN IRAQ WILL BE 'HORRENDOUS.' Aileen McCabe, Southam
News, January 9, 1992.

I had gotten discharged prematurely from the Douglas in March

1970 and moved in with a mescaline dealer called Garry in Westhaven Village,

in NDG, in Montreal. I remember riding the bus in the

filthy, slushy month of March and feeling like I was a dirty old

fly, with a grimy body and dirty wings. I had a job selling

encyclopedias, but I never managed to sell one and I quit after

about three weeks. My boss slapped me in the face because I

wouldn't smile while practising my sales pitch. I had just gotten

the job to get out of the Douglas anyway. I met Garry at a party

with some college students. He was working in a factory, but once

I moved in with him, he quit his job and just resorted to dealing

for money. I did a couple of deals in Ottawa for a friend of mine

and then I just withdrew to the one room I rented from Garry.

I ate nothing but rolled oats and milk for a month. Harry

would come over and tell me, "You know, all the hippies at the

corner are scared of you. You look like a cross between a desperado

and Charlie Chaplin." And then he would discuss his hemorrhoids for

an hour. My ex-girlfriend Lorraine was in the Allan Memorial and

she dropped over with some friends once in a while. I remember

talking to her on the phone while she was hospitalized and I felt

like my brain was splitting in two. I remember talking to Garry while

we were tripping on some of his mescaline, and he had a huge, golden

aura about five feet wide glowing around his head. I remember going with

aura about five bus to a massive demonstration in Washington, D.C. when

Nixon invaded Cambodia. There were 250,000 of us sitting in a huge park,

and I felt religious as Phil Ochs sang, "I Ain't a' Marchin'

Anymore." When we returned to Montreal, my roommate went away for

a few days, and I inserted pins everywhere in the apartment with

labels saying, "Sofa," "Wall," "Chair," "Table," and so forth for

comic effect. Then I painted a surrealistic picture on the kitchen

wall: there was Dali's head stuck in a sand dune in a desert scene.

I was driving my roommate crazy. He would drop mescaline and

read the same page over and over again in a book. His friends would

come over and do sensitivity training on the livingroom floor.

They would sit in a circle and hold hands and talk about

witchcraft. Mike Kay would laugh at me and suggest I lighten up and

join the Happy Gang. I took all my sixties ideology very seriously.

I dropped mescaline and painted a poster of a fist lifted up

against heaven, with the caption "SUPPORT HATE TRIPS ALL OVER THE

WORLD." That's why the hippies were afraid of me, because I was a

heavy trip.

One night, I accidentally conjured up an evil spirit. I was

drawing obscene pornographic pictures to exorcize some negative

energies from my subconscious mind when an evil presence came into

the room. It felt like pure disembodied hate in the air or

electricity projecting thoughts in my brain such as "Good is evil,

evil is good, follow me." When I couldn't get rid of this unwanted

and disturbing energy, I went into the other room to wake up my

roommate Garry. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Garry, wake

up ! Can you feel those vibes?" He immediately sprang up and yelled

at me, "Ya, that's weird ! What is that?"

"IT WAS A GIGANTIC COMMERCIAL IN THE SKY" FOR THE U.S. 
ARMS INDUSTRY AND, ACCORDING TO ADMIRAL GENE LE ROQUE 
OF THE U.S. CENTREFOR DEFENCE INFORMATION, "THE BEST 
THING THAT HAS HAPPENED TO U.S. ARMS SALES IN RECENT YEARS... 
WE WERE ABLE TO DEMONSTRATE THAT MANY OF OUR HIGH-TECH WEAPONS 
PERFORMED EXCEEDINGLY WELL."

All I owned was a mattress and the clothes on my back and I

couldn't talk. People would speak to me, and I would stare at them.

One time, I met a friend of mine on the street and I told him I was

turning into a machine. Sometimes Harry would come over and take me

out for a walk. He wanted to put bombs in churches, because he felt

it was the Church that kept the Establishment in operation. Garry

and I went to love-ins and outdoor rock n' roll concerts. I was

terrified of meeting his friends or going outdoors because of the

straight people on the streets. I had been raped in a church by a

black guy a couple of years before, and I was afraid of blacks. I

felt I couldn't discuss this with anybody in those days. It wasn't

politically correct.

I was driving Garry crazy, so he finally kicked me out. We

carried my mattress to my parents' place on Patricia, where I

stayed for about four days. My parents were gone to Europe and

returned the day after I took off hitch-hiking and headed west. My

original intention was to go to Southern Ontario in order to get a

job picking tobacco.

After about a month of hitch-hiking back and forth up and

down Highway 401, I was good and psychotic. I slept in Salvation

Army hostels, abandoned cars, public toilets and sometimes, just in

ditches along the highway. The rednecks at the Salvation Army

didn't like hippies and they poured gasoline in my travelling bag

while I was having breakfast. A policeman gave me five dollars and

I couldn't even say thank you. A housewife saw me walking through

suburbia, invited me in for a meal, but I ran away after using her

shower to clean up. Another time, I was discouraged and laying in

a ditch, but a local long-haired guy wouldn't help me because I

looked psychotic.

I felt like I was running away from something in Montreal, the

police, God, myself. I was running away from my identity. I felt I

had a mission to save Quebec and I was running away like Jonas from

this mission. And the further away I ran, the tighter the fishnet

of identity would wrap itself around my mind. I wanted to lose my

identity. One night on the streets of Oshawa, Ontario, I tore up my

passport, my I.D. and threw my wallet in a garbage can. Everywhere

I went, I saw oppression all around me. I saw a newspaper, and it

said something about a judge getting shot and something about

Angela Davis and this was in August 1970.

I hooked up with a bunch of long-haired freaks near London,

Ontario, but they couldn't handle me. They got jobs picking

tobacco, and I kept hitch-hiking. One afternoon, it occurred to me

that my thoughts were going through my brain at the same frequency

as passing cars. I was shedding my past. I would walk along the highway

and think of Davie Crockett and old television shows. I was casting off

my social and cultural identity. I wanted to drop out for good, to disconnect

with society once and for all. Mostly, I didn't want anything to do with dollars and cents.

"FILMMAKER GEORGE CAREY AND HIS TEAM SPENT MONTHS EXAMINING 
THE LEDGER SHEETS FROM THE WAR, TALKING TO EXPERTS AND PIECING 
TOGETHER EVIDENCE TO AT LEAST PARTIALLY REVEAL THE TRUE COST 
OF LAST JANUARY'S $70 BILLION DESERT STORM."

After I threw away my I.D. in Oshawa, Ontario, I slept in the

basement of an apartment building that night. In the morning, I

went out on the front lawn, sat down, stood up and stared, sat

down, stood up and stared. I was hungry but I didn't realize it. I

had lost a lot of weight in weeks of travelling.

Along came a police car, and they picked me up. They took me down

to the station. The first thing they did, in the entrance of

the police station, was to tell me to stand facing the wall. Then

they told me to bend forward and pull down my pants. They saw my

rear end and laughed. I was afraid that they could read my mind and

find out the names of my friends in Montreal.

They asked me for my name, and I gave them fictitious names.

One detective in a white shirt and short sleeves told me, "Look,

kid, tell me your real name or I'll punch your face right through

that wall !" I told him my name, and then he told me to stand up.

I was alone in a little office in the Oshawa police station with

the detective, who was big and husky. He punched me in the stomach

so hard that I fell down and gasped. He had knocked the wind out of

me, and I hadn't even done anything wrong yet. I was laying on the

ground trying to catch my breath and I could see the policeman

lurching over me, laughing at me as I groaned and clutched my

stomach.

When I appeared in court the next morning, I was about to

appear before the judge, when another detective came up to me and

said, "Tell us what drug you're on, kid, and we won't say anything

about THIS !!!!" And he reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out

some marijuana. I didn't even know how it got there.

When I was ushered into the courtroom, after a long wait with

other inmates, I couldn't talk. As I walked behind the prosecutor,

he suddenly stood up and told the judge, "Your Honour, I suggest we

drop the charges against this boy, because his father came here

from Montreal yesterday, and he is a very prominent man in

government." Some time elapsed, I still couldn't talk, and the

judge sentenced me to thirty days in a hospital for the criminally

insane. He struck his gavel on his desk.

I spent four days in this hospital. Everything happened. A

nurse would walk into a room and meanwhile, another nurse would

walk out: I concluded that people changed bodies when they went

through doors. In the common shower room, one man forced me to

suck him off. Another time, in the pool room, some guys were shooting

pool and I was laughing insanely; one guy smashed me on the head with

a pool cue. I was getting more and more psychotic. I was playing

dissonant music on the piano, and a patient slammed the lid on my

fingers and nearly broke my fingers. I was getting more and more agitated.

There was a war going on somewhere.

"THE FACT IS THAT INSIDE IRAQ THE LOSSES WERE HORRENDOUS,"
SAID GEORGE JOFFE FROM THE ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT. "IT'S
ESTIMATED, EVEN BY THE PENTAGON, THAT LOSSES IN THE IRAQI ARMED
FORCES WERE AROUND 150,000 PEOPLE. AND CIVILIAN LOSSES COULD HAVE
BEEN AS MUCH AS 200,000."

That is when I was transfered to the Douglas in Montreal. Four

policemen and I drove by car down to Montreal. I was watching

the highway through the front windshield of the car, and it looked like

a movie, the movie of my life. After a while, the movie didn't make

sense anymore and I lost track of my thoughts. I was handcuffed to

a policeman.

When we arrived at the Douglas, it was a bright hot sunny

afternoon. I saw a male nurse called Mike at the admission and I

made a gesture drawing my index across my neck as if slashing my

own throat. They put me in a room in Burgess Pavilion, and I peed

on the floor. They were not amused but they mopped it up. They

assigned me to a room across the hall, and as soon as they weren't

looking, I jumped out of the window.

I didn't want to be brainwashed to go straight again, I didn't

want to be re-integrated into society. I was in a johnnyshirt, and

I jumped on to a roof below, and one more storey further down on to

a cement driveway. I didn't hurt myself landing. I was gone. I

could see the sun shining on the vast fields ahead of me, and I was

scot free ! Someone grabbed me and hauled me back to my room in

Burgess. No sooner was I alone in the room, that I jumped out the

second-storey window a second time, just to end up back in my room

again. This time they nailed the window shut. They were going to

crucify me, all right.

"AND THE DYING HASN'T STOPPED YET. ACCORDING TO JEAN DREZE, 
AUTHOR OF THE STUDY HUNGER AND POVERTY IN IRAQ, AN ESTIMATED 
100,000 MORE CHILDREN WILL DIE AS A DIRECT RESULT OF THE DISEASE, 
SHORTAGES AND POVERTY THAT WERE THE SECONDARY EFFECT OF 109,876 
BOMBING RAIDS THAT DESTROYED IRAQ'S INFRASTRUCTURE."

I spent six weeks in that bed without talking. They had three

shifts of nurses to watch me and make sure I wouldn't escape. The

painting on the wall at the foot of the bed kept changing shapes

and I thought the black female nurses watching over me were Black

Panthers discussing revolution.

My mother came in to visit me. She asked me if I recognized

her, and I didn't answer her.

Doctor Ast was my doctor, and she was German. I thought she

and the rest of the staff were Nazis who wanted to interrogate me

to find out secrets about reincarnation. So I wouldn't talk. My

family gave me a radio and I listened to CHOM religiously,

absorbing all my hippie doctrine. I even felt like my mind was a

radio, taking in news and other documentary data through my senses.

"THE DOCUMENTARY ESTIMATED THAT WHEN FACTORS LIKE TRADE AND
OIL PRICE HIKES ARE ALSO TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT, "40 THIRD WORLD
COUNTRIES SUFFERED A BLOW TO THEIR ECONOMIES EQUIVALENT ON THE UN
SCALE OF DISASTERS TO A MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE."

Outside my window they were doing construction and the noise

was very loud and disturbing. I thought the staff had pulleys in

the spiritual world to tug me towards them and change the channel

on my mind-radio to an Establishment channel. There was a tug of

war between the staff and the patients. At night, there were fewer

staff and the patients used the TV set to pull my mind in their

direction. I knew the hospital was trying to reprogram me, to

regroove me and socialize me. I didn't want to hear about it.

For days on end, during the October crisis in 1970, I could

hear the TV reports about the police and the kidnappers and Trudeau

rattling off the names of members of the FLQ. I thought the doctors

were extracting this information out of my brain.

They took me for regulation blood tests upon entering the

hospital. They put me in a wheelchair and walked me down through

the endless tunnels underground beneath the Douglas' various

pavilions. I could hear the noise of the wheelchair overhead and I

was convinced I was responsible for World War III. Everything I

imagined was an image of doom and destruction.

"MANY ENVIRONMENTALISTS ARE NONETHELESS ALARMED. PAUL HORSEMAN
OF GREENPEACE INTERNATIONAL MAINTAINED: 'THE SCALE OF THE DISASTER,
IF YOU ACTUALLY LIVE IN THE AREA, IS CATASTROPHIC. THERE IS NO
DOUBT ABOUT THAT. IT WILL MARK AMONGST THE CHERNOBYLS, THE BHOPALS,
THE OTHER DISASTERS THAT HAVE HAPPENED WORLDWIDE, AS A MAJOR
ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHIE."

I was struggling to maintain my identity in this militant

generation gap, and I felt the massive doses of largactyl they were

administering were meant to brainwash me to joining the

Establishment again. One morning, I thought I was a wolf and my

mother was a wolf. I felt some kind of tenderness about being a

wolf.

Whenever the nurses gave me an injection of largactyl, I

thought the syringe contained a microfilm of my future life story.

I felt they were conspiring to get my inheritance from my parents.

Mike would give me medication to drink and tell me, "Better than

hash, eh, Robert ?" And I still wouldn't talk to a soul. One night,

a nurse sat on my bedside and leaned against me and said to me in

French, "I would give a week's salary to hear you say one word to

me." And I was staring at him and I still wouldn't talk. I was

catatonic.

That was some time ago. I am glad they reintegrated me into

society, because they nipped an apprehended insurrection in the

bud. As I was sitting on the piano bench in the dayroom of the

ward, I noticed there was a dead housefly lying there beside me; I

knew it had a microphone in its head. So I put the fly in my mouth

and ate it. Its head tasted crunchy. On the other hand, I remember,

at the demonstration in Washington, D.C., in the spring of thatyear, I

was mindblown to see a black guy in the vast crowd carrying

a fullsize cross over his shoulder like Jesus; I didn't know how

to react, because I wasn't sure it was politically correct.

"ADD THAT TO THE REGION'S ACCELERATING ARMS RACE AND IT IS
ENTIRELY CONCEIVABLE THE REAL PRICE OF DESERT STORM HAS YET TO BE
PAID."