The mystery of Billie Joe

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day

I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay

And at dinner time we stopped and we walked back to the house to eat

And mama hollered at the back door "y'all remember to wipe your feet"

And then she said she got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge

Today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Papa said to mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas

"Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please

There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow"

And Mama said it was shame about Billie Joe, anyhow

Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge

And now Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe

Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show

And wasn't I talkin' to him after church last Sunday night?

"I'll have another piece of apple pie, you know it just don't seem right

I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge

And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

Mama said to me "Child, what's happened to your appetite?

I've been cookin' all morning and you haven't touched a single bite

That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today

Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way

He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge

And she and Billie Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

A year has come 'n' gone since we heard the news 'bout Billie Joe

Brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo

There was a virus going 'round, papa caught it and he died last Spring

And now mama doesn't seem to wanna do much of anything

And me, I spend a lot of time pickin' flowers up on Choctaw Ridge

And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge

I think  more deep psychological meaning has been assigned to this song than (even) MacArthur Park or Inna Gadda Da Vida. I confess here and now that I like it, and that, upon reflection, it's not as schmaltzy as it may appear on the surface.

In only five spare verses, Bobbie Gentry opens up a world. That world is wounded, disaffected, and achingly lonely. The story is about a suicide, but it's also about the callousness of adults casually discussing a young man's death while they scarf down a typical Southern meal ("Pass the biscuits, please").

The food obviously means more to them than the boy, with one exception: a girl sitting at table unable to eat, trying to absorb the shock. Though she narrates the story, she is never named. The trauma and horror of the details accumulate bit by bit, along with her family's indifference towards the  tragedy. And then, of course, there are all those mysteries: who was Billie Joe McAllister, what relationship did he have with the girl, was he black, was he gay, did he make her pregnant? And (most importantly), what were she and Billie Joe throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge?

Gentry, a Southerner from Mississippi who rebaptised  herself from her birth name Streeter (perhaps to distance herself from her po'-white-trash roots), doesn't explain a lot of things, and has even admitted she doesn't know all the details herself. Great storytelling only implies, leaving lots of space for the listener's interpretation.

A movie was later made about the story, solidifying some of the myths, and I think that spoiled it. Of course, in the movie it's all spelled out: Billie Joe was gay and jumped off the bridge out of sexual guilt. I hate it when someone comes along and plugs all the holes and spaces, usually with the most trite possibilities.

And then there are the "mystery verses". As I began to dig into the enigmatic, brilliantly-written lyrics, I discovered there was a so-called "seven-minute version" featuring only voice and acoustic guitar, which was later cut down to four minutes (still unprecedented in length, except perhaps for MacArthur Park) for radio play. Of course I couldn't find it, and it's doubtful it even exists. This version is tighter, and though the lines somehow fit into the sad, almost bluesy tune, many of them don't scan. This gives them a conversational rhythm that's eerily lifelike. It's one of those things that shouldn't work, but does. Obviously this song has been worked on and worked on, and yet the seams don't show.

I'm no Bobbie Gentry fan, and this genre doesn't interest me at all for the most part, but every time this song comes into my head it arrests my brain. So what was it: an aborted fetus, a wedding certificate, stolen cash, a Grammy award? This last tantalyzing detail is probably what secured the song as a timeless hit. (When asked what it was, Gentry was famously quoted as saying,"I don't know.")

There's a lot we don't know: if the family is black or white (unlikely they are black, because they seem to own their own spread and don't give the impression of being impoverished), whether or not the girl is pregnant (?) or just mad about the boy. Or if she even loves him. His supposed gayness comes out of left field: some say the ie spelling of his name (inexplicably changed for the movie) indicates his sexual orientation, though the fact it was recorded by Bobbie Gentry, a masculine name with an unconventional spelling, obscures that (rather stupid) possibility. Billie Jean King was yet to rise to ascendency, but Billie Joe, Betty Joe and Bobbie Joe were already fixtures on Petticoat Junction.The fact Gentry and one of the Bradley daughters have the same first name seems tremendously significant. (Just a coincidence? You decide.)

The song touches on various raw nerves of '60s pop culture: the angst and disaffection of youth (then called the "generation gap"), racial tension, poverty, social status, forbidden sexuality, and lyrics that you had to listen to over and over again and "figure out" (unlike Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I've Got Love in my Tummy and My Baby Does the Hanky Panky). Of course I looked for the seven-minute version with all those extra verses, and turned up only one image of a sheet of paper, a rough draft which may or may not be bona fide. Lots of old threads on message boards from 2007 ask the same questions and come up with all sorts of possibilities. Bobbie Gentry was smart not to answer them. Personally, I always thought Mama was trying to fix the girl up with that "that nice young preacher, Brother Taylor" - did she know more about her daughter's infatuation than she was letting on? Was she trying to get her mind off the whole sordid mess? At any rate, they've invited him for dinner, no doubt so they can throw pleasantries at each other with only passing reference to that unrepentent sinner, Billie Joe.

And that's all I have to say about it for this moment, but the more I listen to that lyric, the more I study it, the better it gets. You see, it shouldn't work - the lines have too many syllables - it's melodramatic and even depressing.  But as with Dionne Warwick's  Do You Know the Way to San Jose (which drew unprecedented numbers of people to the city, in spite of the fact that the song portrays it as a sinkhole of failed dreams), people thronged to Tallahatchie Bridge in the strangely-named town of Money, Mississippi. It was only a 20-foot drop, and I'm not at all sure that's enough to kill a person. But the bridge collapsed in 1972, an eerie thing. It had rotted away, obviously, or merely bucked under the weight of pop-culture legend.

Miscellany

Money Bridge Collapses, Greenwood Commonwealth, 06/20/1972

MONEY – The Tallahatchie River Bridge here collapsed between 11:30 and midnight Monday and presumably joined Billy Joe MacAllister in the muddy waters of the Tallahatchie.

Leflore County Deputy Sheriff Ricky Banks said he received a call from Sheriff Rufus Freeman about 12:15 a.m. today telling him the bridge had collapsed.

Leflore County Second District Supervisor Ray Tribble had called Sheriff Freeman earlier when two boys who had been fishing discovered the bridge had collapsed.

The two boys reportedly had gone upstream to fish and upon returning to Money found they couldn’t get over the collapsed span in the Tallahatchie River.

Tribble and his county road foreman Homer Hawkins then blocked the bridge off at the approaches on each side to prevent anyone from driving into the river.”

[Caption under photos]  BRIDGE OUT AT MONEY – The middle section of the Tallahatchie river bridge at Money tilted towards its upstream side as it collapsed Monday night. The steel suspension bridge was built in 1927. Staff Photos by Steve Bailey.

(Post-script. This now strikes me as a total crock. I mean  - look at the names! Sherriff Rufus Freeman is straight out of The Dukes of Hazzard. Ray Tribble - ? What can I say? Then we get to Homer Hawkins, and we KNOW we are in the territory of satire.)

Biographical tidbit about B. G. :

Of Portuguese descent, Gentry was born Roberta Streeter in Chickasaw County, MS, on July 27, 1944; her parents divorced shortly after her birth and she was raised in poverty on her grandparents' farm. After her grandmother traded one of the family's milk cows for a neighbor's piano, seven-year-old Bobbie composed her first song, "My Dog Sergeant Is a Good Dog," years later self-deprecatingly reprised in her nightclub act; at 13, she moved to Arcadia, CA, to live with her mother, soon beginning her performing career in local country clubs. The 1952 film Ruby Gentry lent the singer her stage surname.

POST-THOUGHTS: This post may have quite a few add-ons, despite the deceptively simple subject matter. I wrote earlier that the girl in the song sits there looking ghostly with shock. But how do we know how she looks? There is no mention at all of how she feels or reacts until the FOURTH verse, and even then, all we know is that she has no appetite. Her mother chides her for it, not so much because her child isn't eating but because all her cooking efforts are going to waste. And that is all we know about her reaction. There is no mention of grief. There is no mention of tears. Nothing! Just a mother getting on her kid's case for wasting food. It's shocking, when you really look at it, because all the rest of it, the assumption of a grief-stricken girl listening to the adults expressing their callous indifference to a tragedy, is imagined, inferred. It's what we don't know about her and about her relationship with Billie Joe that makes the song so compelling.

So how do we even know she loved him?

It's everything that is going on around the subject. Of course the adults aren't as indifferent as they may appear. They're keeping the subject at a distance because it's so horrific. When her brother starts to reminisce about Billie Joe and the playful, if rather disgusting incident at the Carrell County picture show, it's obvious the girl knew him, and her parents knew that she knew him.

Another layer? The stigma of suicide: "well, he done it to himself, didn't he?" is the unspoken subtext as they stuff themselves with cornbread and black-eyed peas. He should've acted like a man, faced up to his troubles, whatever they were.

The end of the song is so heartbreaking that I haven't even touched on it. It's the most masterful verse because of its Southern Gothic melancholy, worthy of passage in a  Tennessee Williams play. By the end of it, the girl is completely alone, idly tossing flowers over the side of that fatal bridge. Ironically, the last verse somehow echoes the terseness of her parents in its lack of emotion. She is simply stating the facts. There is just enough story here for us to make up the rest, projecting our own deepest griefs and yearnings, proving once again that a real story reads you.

AND THIS IS THE LAST THING I WILL SAY. (Promise!) I found out in all my meanderings through the song and the history of the bridge that Money, Mississippi is where Emmett Till was brutally murdered, inspiring Bob Dylan to write one of his fieriest songs when he was only 20 years old. I can't quote it here because it's a subject unto itself. But Money, Mississippi strikes me as a bubbling, seething cauldron, a place where ignorance and evil ruled, and perhaps still rule. I would like to think we are making progress, that all the hard work of the '60s paid off. But these days, as we slouch towards Bethlehem or slide towards that other place, I have so many doubts that I wonder if we're going to make it at all.

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Death of a hero

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day, though almost nobody knows about it or pays much attention. For the most part, the best sufferers of mental illness can hope for is pity.

But there is another way, something that might just break through public indifference and scorn, and that is the power of story. This piece ran in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal in 2005. It mourns the death by suicide of my dear friend and comrade Glen Allen, an award-winning journalist and great human being who suffered deeply from the effects of bipolar disorder.

I will not say he "lost the battle" with this sometimes-nightmarish disorder because I think he won, in that he lived for over 60 years, loved and worked and married and had children and wrote and taught and travelled all over the world. Even in the midst of unbelievable pain, he was articulate and wrote with a grace I'll never approach. I'd like to share this article again, just as it went down ten years ago, when my grief was very fresh.

December is long and dark at the best of times, and this year the merriment of Christmas was dulled by a death. When I opened my daily paper to the obituary section, I saw a face that made me gasp, a face I had never actually seen but knew as well as my brother’s. I read the account of his death in disbelief, shocked but not completely surprised that my friend had frozen to death beside some railroad tracks in Toronto, full of pills, after wandering away from a psychiatric ward.

My friend was Glen Allen, newspaperman, Maclean’s correspondent, world traveller, insightful and witty writer, gentle, courageous (and sometimes lost) soul. What brought us together was some ferociously honest writing about alcoholism, and what held us together for years and years was a mutual struggle with various demons. He always wrote about them better than I did. Or so I always thought.

I never knew Glen in the usual sense. I never saw his face. I had heard his voice a number of times, most memorably when he read his Getting Sober and Staying Sober pieces on CBC Radio’s Morningside. I sensed straight-from-the-shoulder directness and convoluted complexity in one person. This man was in pain, and so eerily distanced from the pain that he could write about it in prose that shimmered and shocked and stung. His writer's mind was so alive and focussed as to be almost crystalline, whereas the rest of him seemed to be slouching towards oblivion.

Sometime during his short tenure on Morningside, I began to write to Glen Allen. This guy just had a magical way with words, and seemed like a genuine (and pain-ridden, and large-hearted) human soul. I just had to get in touch with him. I was delighted to get responses, brief at first, then longer and longer, and over time we developed a sort of relationship through the mail. This was in the days of real letters on paper, written by hand, and I always delighted in his vital and elegant script, even if it deteriorated pretty badly towards the end. Often he’d write on beautiful blank cards, and I have one in front of me now, gorgeous sprays of crimson and gold called Flowers for Lord Buddha.

I think my letters must have gone on and on. I could hardly help myself, in those days, since I had no idea what was wrong with me and why I could not settle myself the way everyone else seemed to. But Glen had the same square-peg syndrome, which in his case registered as endearing eccentricity. He had a black lady cat named Imelda (I can’t think of a better cat name, can you?); he was concerned about his future once, and consulted a psychic in the backwoods of New Brunswick; when asked to be a speaker at a meeting, he shared his “experience (long), strength (not much), and hope (I’m going to hang on if it kills me)”.

Ten years is a long time, ten birthdays, ten Easters, ten Christmases. What did we write about? I can barely bring myself to open the file folder that holds all his letters, preserved and precious to me. The stark end of his life has made it impossible But I know we wrote about recovery: from alcoholism (we were both afflicted, and though his sobriety was patchy at best, he genuinely loved AA and treated it with the greatest reverence in his writing), from our parents (both of us had grown up with oppressive, cuttingly sarcastic fathers who withheld affection unless our performance in life was perfect: meaning we were never loved at all), and the worst thing of all, depression, the thousand-pound rock that weighs on the sensitive soul and destroys pleasure and joy and love. Both of us had bench-pressed thousands of pounds over the years, and though he told me his official diagnosis was manic-depression, now rather slickly called "bipolar disorder", I did not realize we shared the same affliction until this past spring, when I experienced what is delicately referred to as an “episode”.

I thought then of Glen, wondered where he was, how he was doing. It wasn't the first time. Wasn't even the twentieth. We wrote to each other for an incredible ten years, while Glen pulled up stakes and moved again, and again, and again, afflicted with terminal restlessness, an attempt to outrun his own pain. But in 1996, I finally lost the thread. I tried and tried. I even e-mailed his brother Gene, but got no answer. The trail was cold, and I had to surrender him to fate or the angels.

When I read his obituary, accompanied by a picture of Glen looking like a mere boy, sweet and shy, someone who just called out to be loved, I was barely out of my own thrashing battle, still trying to figure out what the hell happened to me, how the genie had exploded out of the bottle and derailed my life. But I kept thinking: Glen would know. He'd know just what to say to me, he'd know how to spread balm very gently on the raw wound of my mind. Like a sherpa, he'd been there before me, braved the elements and somehow survived it all.

Until now. When I read of the way he died, frozen to death like a street person (those souls he so identified with and wrote about with such compassion), with no one to hold him as the life ebbed out of him, I wanted to scream at the injustice of it all: at the medical community's complete inability to help such a large-hearted, lavishly gifted human being; at the gap between Glen and his loved ones (there was no doubt he loved them, but something always got in the way), at the grim, fearful, love-deprived boyhood that left scars on him, and in him, that would never be healed.

I did take out the folder, and looked at his dear, graceful handwriting, but haven't read the letters yet. I had thought of writing a piece about him, a sort of tribute, but I knew no one would really get it. When I think of him, which is often, tears well up, and I just want my funny, sardonic, gentle, wounded, wonderful brother back.

There is a song from the 70s by a group called Bread that I keep hearing in my mind. It has a haunting lyric that is like an impressionist painting of Glen's life:

"For a love that wouldn't bloom,
For the hearts that never played in tune.
Like a lovely melody that everyone can sing,
Take away the words that rhyme, it doesn't mean a thing."

The words seem to make a melody of themselves: I think I knew his name. I never knew him, but I loved him just the same. Wish that I had found the way, and the reasons that would make him stay.

But he couldn't stay; the pain was too great, the loneliness had hollowed him out, and the demons that screamed inside his skull had to be silenced once and for all. Such a person, making an intentional exit, is often described as "finally being at peace".

I think it goes beyond that. I think he is everywhere. I know he hangs around here, a warm spot in the room, a kind of disembodied smile, and I don't want him to go.

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Alive and gay and dying in Connecticut

The young man was beautiful. Simply beautiful. Sandy red hair, just a light gold-dusting of freckles, and a graceful body he carried in a sort of princely manner. This belied the fact that he had already attempted suicide four times.

His parents hustled him to a psychiatrist, which is what you did when your child went off the rails. Nobody talked about it, but everyone knew he had to go. It was torture for him because it reminded him of the fact that he could not seem to get his life together, though he was already twenty-three.

The waiting room smelled almost as bad as a dentist’s, though at least he couldn’t hear the sound of drills. He had half-expected wails and screams, like in The Snake Pit, but so far there were none. This was 1956, after all, and he suspected such scenarios were out of date.

“Nigel.” The nurse or receptionist or nun or whatever-she-was announced his name. His number was up. He was reminded of the Negro spiritual, “There’s a man goin’ round takin’ names”. Someone had taken his name already.

The psychiatrist sat behind a huge, monolithic desk, and Nigel was just as glad, because he only had to look at half of him. He was not required to lie on a couch, although a couch was provided.

“Nigel.” The psychiatrist, Dr. March, had all the requisite diplomas on the wall. A spider appended from one of them. He opened a folder which had already been prepared for him. What could be in it?

“Your parents believe you’d benefit from some counselling, psychoanalysis perhaps.” He peered at Nigel over glasses that slid down his nose.

“I guess they think so.”

“Well, what do YOU think?”

“I’m not sure. I think I could do without it.”

“So just what sort of problems are you having?” Dr. March probably knew.

“Oh, a few problems at the university – post-graduate, you know – “

“Your parents tell me you want to go to Europe.”

“Well, see, it’s my last chance to have a few adventures before I – “

“Before you what?”

He was stumped by that one.

“Before you take up a respectable life. So you want to sow your wild oats.”

He wasn’t familiar with the expression. “Yes, sir. I mean, yes, doctor. I think so.”

“What do you plan to do in Europe?”

“I’d like to get a motorbike – “

“Motorbike?”

“Yes. It’s a – “

“I know what a motorbike is. I am curious as to why you would want to get one.”

“Can get around faster, that’s all.”

“Get around.”

“See the sights.”

“What sort of sights are you interested in?”

“Oh, Paris, Rome, that sort of – “

“What sort of companions might you have on this trip? Have you thought about that?”

“Companions.”

“This is what your parents are so concerned about. The people whose company you keep.”

This was such a convoluted way of putting it that Nigel was momentarily confused.

“Oh. You mean – like, fellow travellers and – “

“Yes. Fellow travellers.”

“Oh well. I wouldn’t know that until I got there.” Nigel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He had to use the washroom, but wouldn’t ask, didn’t want to show that kind of weakness on the first appointment.

“Just where do you think you might meet these fellow travellers? Your parents have been concerned about the company you have been keeping.”

There was that novelist at the university, a dazzler really, and Nigel had been so in love with him that his teeth ached. And the prof, simply brilliant, but even worse because he was so completely unattainable. There had also been a couple of covert meetings in bars, their locations by necessity conveyed in a sort of secret code.

“I’ve got friends. I mean – “

“What sort of friends?”

“We have similar interests.”

“Nigel, I will not beat about the bush here. Your parents have sent you here because they have seen evidence that you might possibly have homosexual tendencies. This is a serious mental disorder which should be addressed while you are still in your young manhood, so that there is a greater chance it can be arrested.”

“Arrested.”

“Yes. Though we used to believe it could be eradicated, the measures required were drastic, often involving castration and the use of hormones. This was, of course, only used in criminal cases.”

Nigel could feel his balls contract. He was pushed against the wall. Don’t be a homosexual, don’t.

“Thus a trip to Europe is not a desirable possibility at this moment, when you are just beginning to experience this impulse and might be tempted to act upon it.”

“I haven’t acted upon it,” he lied, putting a sweet expression on his face, an expression that had been plastered on there for a long time.

“Good! Good! That is a very good sign, and indicates you are motivated to resist your feelings and thus take the first steps toward mental health.”

If his reaction to his lie was “good, good!”, then obviously his reaction to the truth would be “bad, bad!” or some variation thereof.

“But doctor, you know, I know some people who – that is, they’ve made the adjustment – “

“These people live outside of society. They are on the fringes of acceptability.”

“I know a poet. Met him through somebody at the university.”

“Exactly right.”

“His name is Allen. Allen Ginsberg. He wrote this poem that – “

“Exactly right! One must contemplate the level of income one can expect from a poem.”

“It’s called Howl.”

“Strange name for a poem. Not exactly Wordsworth, is it?”

“No.” He shifted in his chair, his need to void his bladder really bad now, but he had to hold out.

“Your parents believe it would be in your best interests to spend the summer with your grandparents in Connecticut. Lots of odd jobs you can do there. Meet people your own age, that sort of thing.”

Young men? Nigel thought. No, he couldn’t mean that.

“I’m not much interested in Connecticut, doctor.”

“It’s not a question of what you are interested in, Nigel. Quite the opposite. Your parents believe, and my professional opinion is in agreement, that your priority should be suppressing these alarming impulses you have been having before they rise up and assume a life of their own.”

“And this will happen in Connecticut.”

“More likely there than buzzing around on a motorcycle in Paris and Rome.”

“So I’ll end up marrying a nice girl?”

“There’s a greater chance of it, if we start now. We’ve had lots of success stories. Men have learned to quell these impulses and keep them under control for a lifetime.”

“But what sort of effort does it take?”

“Effort? Of course it takes effort. It takes ongoing effort to overcome any major psychiatric disorder. Most men have controlled it through constant vigilance.”

“Vigilance.” Sounded like a very romantic term. Lying next to a woman he didn’t love, sneaking out after she had gone to sleep.

“I am going to put you on some medication to help calm you and get these impulses under control. It is only then that we can begin this work, which I warn you will be long and difficult.”

“What about Connecticut? Will I be ready for Connecticut?”

The doctor, dense as he was, picked up the merest thread of sarcasm, even satire, and didn’t like it.

“Connecticut will be dealt with when the time is right.”

Right. He had the prescription now, and a plan. He realized that it was necessary, if one was to be successful, to commit suicide twice.

Slash your wrists, then hang yourself.

Take the pills, then jump off the bridge.

Shoot yourself in the head just as the train bears down on the tracks.

He could mix and match any way he wanted. It was the only safe way to do it, guaranteeing success. You would never pull through.

It would solve the problem neatly and elegantly. You can’t know poets like that, for heaven’s sake, and get married and pretend. The possibilities were too horrendous.

He wanted to make his parents sorry. But his parents would not be sorry. They would be full of pity and reassured only that their son had been intractably mentally ill, and that there was nothing anyone could have done.

He jumped on the bus, walked to the back, juggling possibilities. Take pills, jump off, shoot yourself. Slash, hang, train. It was like a Chinese restaurant, elegantly simple, one from column a, one from column b.

All he had to do was pick two.

"You had me at hello"

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Lone outrider: Glen Allen's private battle

Glen Allen remembered in his own words

Blogger's note. I happened upon this, as so often is the case, while looking for something else. It was a piece I had seen before, reproduced on someone else's blog. I knew Glen Allen. We never met face-to-face, but we wrote to each other regularly for ten years while he went through storms that I can only imagine. How he functioned as well as he did, for as long as he did, is remarkable, and I strongly suspect the same could be said of Robin Williams.

After being out of touch for years, I learned Glen's fate in 2005, when I was at the apogee of my own storm: I opened my daily paper and saw his picture under the obituaries. Having just taken a massive overdose, he had wandered out of a psychiatric ward in Toronto and passed out beside the railroad tracks in sub-zero December. How people die says something about the way they lived, and it struck me as oddly apropos that he died like some of the street people he understood and loved so well. 

What I didn't know, because he never told me, is that he wasn't just a newspaper reporter but an award-winning print journalist, war correspondent, English teacher in China, volunteer in mental health services, radio producer for CBC's Morningside, and no doubt many other things he didn't think significant enough to mention. 

This piece is very long, but I run it here without edits. Without a doubt, it is the best piece on depression, bipolar disorder and mental illness in general that I have ever read, and it is typical of Glen that he generously shared it even while struggling with his own recovery. Even in the throes of a consuming illness, Glen Allen had a certain unmistakeable quality of grace.

(The following story appeared in the New Brunswick Reader on June 19.
1999, under the headline Angels of Madness. Glen Allen was found frozen
to death last week in Toronto.)

By Glen Allen

The anesthetist, head swathed in a surgeon's fez, plunges the needle in
a ready vein and leans over and says, "You'll smell the smell of garlic
and then you'll be out."

And out I am in this fourth of a series of eight shock treatments on
the psychiatric wing of the Saint John Regional Hospital. While I'm
unconscious, a nurse places two electrodes on my skull and the attending
psychiatrist flips a switch, sending a powerful current of electricity
into the addled spheres of my brain.

Odd as it may seem - odd because no one really knows why it works - I
awake feeling refreshed in the recovery room where I am asked my name,
the date, where I am. I not only answer the questions in rapid order but
I note the clarity of the vivid colours all around, the pleasant
ticking of a clock hung on the wall, the murmur of friendly voices. I am
climbing out of the pit of suicidal despair that sent me to the hospital -
the fifth stay in hospital in three provinces in two years - in the
first place. And for the first time in a long time, I feel healthy and I
tell myself that this is how other people, untroubled by the mania or
depression that has come out of the dark closet of my mind every decade
for the last 40 years, must feel most of the time.

Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), as it is properly known, is the
treatment of last resort for some psychiatric afflictions, notably
depression, and I haven't experienced it for 44 years. A frightened and deeply
depressed boy of 15 - by far the worst time in my life - I was given a
series of treatments without the benefit of anesthesia and while I don't
remember much beyond that first rude shock I felt well for 10 years, I
left home and enjoyed a successful career in the construction industry
from the far North to California until this strange and cruel malady
caught up with me once again.

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it is now called in these days
of political correctness, touches the lives of one of every 100 New
Brunswickers. It is an often devastating malaise that can strike without
warning, rendering its victims subject, initially, to inexplicable
"highs" that can spin out of control. First comes "hypomania" - a time of
great busyness and well-being and then follows full-blown mania when the
afflicted persons will make great plans, sleep not at all, feel a sense
of grandiosity, spend wildly and travel widely.

It can also be a time of delusion or even hallucination (hearing,
seeing or smelling things that aren't there) marked by extreme irritation
with family or friends who cannot share this experience. This condition
leads the manic persons to believe that what they are doing is
absolutely correct. They may, as I have done in the past, write floridly mad
letters to everyone but the Queen simply because it seems necessary to
alert the world to some clear and present danger, again the right thing to
do.

But mania can go well beyond this epistolary extravagance. Earlier this
year, in the grip of mania and hospitalized in Montreal, I saw my
father - dead, lo these 35 years - in elevators and there was a constant
jabber of voices in my ear, one of them a basso profundo saying over and
over again with astonishing clarity in Chilean Spanish, "Los pobres son
dijes" (The poor are good). Prior to this, I nurtured the idea - the
same fevered idea I had had the year before - that I had to travel to
Northern Alberta's Peace River country to complete a novel my father had
written decades ago - one in which the heroine and her children seek to
make a new home there but never actually arrive. I had hitched a ride
with a trucker headed for Calgary. He insisted I leave his company
somewhere south of North Bay, Ont., and get psychiatric help. ("You're out
of it, man," I recall him saying as he reached over and opened the
passenger door.)

I made my way to Montreal where I ended up in St. Luc Hospital and
later a halfway house where a barrage of drugs including lithium
established a calmer state of mind. After two months of recuperation, I returned
to Saint John where my truly enlightened employer gave me yet another
chance to ply my trade as a reporter. But within weeks, mania had come
full circle: its sinister cousin, clinical depression had set in. I felt
a blackness of mood, a sense of dread and despair and a longing to end
my hopeless life I hadn't felt since an earlier suicide attempt and
once more entered the hospital where, this time, ECT was the indicated
treatment.

Looking back on it all now, I might have known something was amiss when
I was yet a small child. My father was off at war and my saintly
mother, I was convinced in my five-year-old mind, was a German spy. When that
war ended and the Cold War began, I was sure that the Soviet Union, our
latest enemy, would invade the leafy precincts of my Toronto
neighbourhood. I remember staring at the Disney decals on my bedroom wall and
believing that taken together they were a bizarre scroll of destiny: the
world would end in fire.

Shortly after that, my parents split up and I was seized with a sense
of power - perhaps my first "manic" episode - when I became their
go-between. Each would have me memorize messages for the other and when my
father - a man deeply hurt by the war - came to pick me up for Sunday
outings in his 1947 navy Pontiac, I would do my best to heal the breach,
subtly altering their second-hand messages so as to ensure that each
knew the other was loved and deeply missed. In hindsight, it was the wrong
course to take. They lived together in a stormy alcoholic marriage
until both died of cancer in their mid-fifties.

But once this feat of wishful thinking was accomplished, I fell into
the deepest of depressions, a malaise that was to last for years. Alone
in my room for days at a time, I wept incessantly and wished for
release. One desperate day, I cut across a wrist with a broken bottle and an
alert doctor in a hospital emergency ward recognized the act for what it
was, a cry for help, and recommended to my bewildered mother that my
mental state be assessed. My parents shared society's distaste for
anything that smacked of mental illness and had a deeply felt distrust of
mental-health practitioners. They had already taken me out of school, read
the angry and despairing poems I had fixed to my wall; they had watched
as I refused food and the attentions of my friends, but they were

reluctant to place me in the hands of the shrinks as if once there, there

would be no turning back. But there was no alternative: I was taken to

see the good Dr. Grant who clapped me in hospital and after rest and
conventional therapies of the day failed, suggested ECT.

And so it went. I would have eight or nine trouble-free years until the
monster reappeared and I would be swept up in the rising and falling
tide of mood. Indeed, in the sixties I spent time in a hospital in
Chicago and 10 years later in Montreal, I jumped in front of a moving bus. In
the mid-eighties, a full two years were blighted by bipolar illness.
That was a time of sheer terror and misadventure. Among other things, I
had concluded that the big banks were to blame for all of society's
ills. I hired a video camera crew and forayed into one of the major bank's
headquarters in downtown Montreal, shooting footage of executives at
their desks. I was also convinced at one point that the Mafia was after
me.

Then came last year and this - two botched trips out West, time in a
hospital in Thunder Bay, then Montreal and three stays in the facility in
Saint John, one of them in a coma following a suicide attempt.

All this time, all through these years I had been told by professionals
that I had to take medication - namely, lithium - to ward off the
depredations of an illness that is of the brain, not of the mind, an illness
that is largely due to faulty genes and biochemistry being grievously
out of whack.

But for years, especially when I felt well, I denied to myself and to
the world at large that I had bipolar disorder. I wanted badly to be
like other people, even given the fact that members of my immediate family
had been stricken in the same way resulting in hospitalizations and
suicide.

Instead of taking my pills, I would attempt to cope in other ways.
Sadly, until the bottom fell out of my world in 1984, I drank heavily, just
as my father had done before me. I also moved constantly. I always felt
better for a time when I changed location. I have lived and worked in
England, Italy, Algeria, three American states and seven Canadian
provinces. After I married, I trucked my little family around, bag and
baggage, as far afield as Chile and China.

.

But there were no cures, only palliatives. One of them - alcohol - was
ruinous. As for travel...well, as someone wiser once said, when you get
off the bus you're always there waiting for yourself. Depression, my
lone outrider, would inevitably close in just as a ship spotted as a tiny
smudge on the horizon inevitably comes to shore, looming larger than
life itself.

Manic depression is a mood disorder as opposed to schizophrenia, which
is a disorder of the thought process itself. In it, there is a
disruption of a person's normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness.
The moods of manic depression include at one end, utter melancholy,
passivity and fatigue and thoughts of suicide and at the other, elation,
grandiosity, agitation and, when extreme, delusions and hallucinations.
Delusions can include grandiose beliefs: a person may think she or he
has special talents or is related to a special person. A manic might
also believe that he or she is the subject of whispers of friends and
strangers alike, or that Lloyd Robertson is sending special messages during
his newscast. Hallucinations are usually imagined sights or sounds.
Auditory hallucinations are more common (although all senses may be
affected) and may have a religious overtone, such as the voice of God or
angels and may sound like commands.

Most people go through many more bouts of depression than mania, though
to be considered "bipolar" a person must have gone through at least one
manic episode. For some, it is a chronic illness that becomes more
pronounced with age but a manic depressive typically goes through long
periods of remission in his or her life. A person may be relatively
symptom-free with only mild mood swings for years, then for any number of
reasons (the primary one being discontinuing prescribed medication) the
cycle returns.

There are manic depressives who experience only one cycle in their
lives and others in whom the illness disappears at an early age. But
complicating things is the fact that depression and mania can exist at the
same time. As writers Diane and Lisa Berger state in their excellent
primer on manic depression called We Heard the Angels of Madness, the term
"bipolar disorder" deceives because the mania and depression "do not
occur in even opposition. It is not like the North Pole and the South
Pole; instead, it more closely resembles two points on the equator.
They're side by side, sharing a border and overlapping.

Researchers don't yet have a definitive cause of manic depression but
they do know that it runs in families and that defective genes must, in
part, be at fault.

But all that said, why tell this tawdry story at all? I have lost all
appetite for the confessional and take no pleasure in this exercise. But
there are two points I would like to make in passing. One relates to
stigma. The mentally ill, however much society has changed in recent
years, are prey to an abundance of myth and misinformation that is, quite
simply, astonishing.

Victims of major mental illness - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and
clinical depression - are still often shunned and tucked away, even
though their maladies, most experts would now agree, are physical in
nature, just like diabetes or heart disease. And the most serious of these
diseases, schizophrenia, has disabled many of the 300,000 Canadians
affected by it, many of them young people in their prime. They are our sons
and daughters, wives and husbands, our neighbours and we have all too
often tended to see them as a tribe apart, spoken of in whispers. They
are no more "violent" than the population at large and their illnesses
are, for the most part, episodic in nature. Most enjoy great islands -
even archipelagos - of calm and productivity between short-lived bouts
of illness. And they are much with us: one of five New Brunswickers, at
some point in their lives will, like me, go beyond the brink and need
the attentions of the mental-health-care system.

The other point worth making is that there is help out there. Each of
13 regions in the province has a community mental-health-care centre
staffed by a psychiatrist or two, nurses, social workers and
psychologists. There are problems: there is a dire shortage of child and adolescent
psychiatrists and public money is short indeed for the chronically ill.
But for the most part, the work of this corps of professionals is
largely unsung. While they may be too few for the demands placed upon them,
in my experience - a view confirmed recently by an Ontario study - New
Brunswick has one of the best mental health-care systems in the nation.

Meanwhile I have come through once again feel eminently sane. If the
demons come calling again it won't be for many years hence. I have hope,
I have met some interesting people along the way and am very glad to be
alive.

For these blessings I thank the God of my understanding. Without Him by
my side would I have been here to tell this sometimes sorry tale?

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Grief Relief (short fiction)

Everybody said the same thing. Oh, they said it all right, but only officially, and only because it was a fad. A fad, in that, like the ice bucket challenge, everyone was doing it, and almost no one was thinking of the true significance of it.

And it was a lie.

What did it mean to "reach out for help"? If things spilled over and it was just too hard and the loneliness too agonizing, what were her choices? Her friends were uncomfortable with her grief and always tried to cheer her up. They talked brightly and continuously, trampling her attempts to communicate. Sometimes they brought things over, cookies, a hand-crocheted tea cozy. They steadfastly didn't talk about her depression, and made it know somehow that she wasn't supposed to, either. Then they said to themselves, "There. I have tried to help Sarah, but she doesn't want my help."

OK then: so how else does one "reach out for help"? How about a minister? The Word of God would solve everything. No, SHOULD. Not only that, she must obviously be faithless to be in this state. Cheer up, for the Lord helps you all the day long, even if you are too ungrateful to recognize it.

"Sarah. Soooooooo. I see you are having some feelings of slight depression."

Slight, my ass. But what am I supposed to tell him: that I want to cut my wrists most of the time?

"Well, I'm having a little bit of trouble sleeping."

"So how much sleep are you getting, Sarah?"

How much sleep are you getting? How much sleep are you getting?

"Four hours, maybe five."

"Well, dear, as we get older, we require less sleep. This may just be an adjustment. But I'll give you more Seroquel just in case."

"I've gained thirty pounds on the Seroquel."

"Well, dear, we'll just have to exercise more self-control, won't we ?"

Self-control to forfeit her one form of self-comfort? An adjustment to the weird jangles and patterns in the air and on the walls which she knew represented months of severe sleep deprivation? But no. Don't tell him about that. It would be antipsychotics for sure, the big guns, and then it would truly be over.

CUT! CUT! Don't print any of this, throw the footage away because it is useless. There is NO ONE to talk to about ANY of this: "resources" do not exist because everyone is uncomfortable with the erosion of her personality. It's too macabre, so it isn't happening. There, now, we're finished.

When Dan died, she felt as if she were falling endlessly, the air whistling in her ears, sure she would never hit bottom, but then when she did, she began to fall again. Everyone told her to go on a cruise. She remembered widows who had done that, who seemed suddenly liberated and twenty years younger, joyful for the first time in decades. Dancing, kicking up their heels, getting new boy friends that their families didn't approve of.  It didn't happen to her. A year and a half went by, her friend Doris died suddenly of a heart attack,  then her grandchild Nathan committed suicide. The act was a searing thunderclap, followed by white noise that blotted out every colour there was.

Can all this happen to one person? Oh, no, I guess it can't then.

But it did.

There was lots of hand-patting, a ton of advice and homilies ("a person is only as happy as they make up their mind to be", "the only thing we can control is our attitude", "it's always darkest before the dawn", etc.), but also some savage things leaping out at her from nowhere (or somewhere?), including her daughter snarling at her, "This is all your fault. You had a bad influence on him, all that mental illness crap. I never should have let you near him."

You walk along. You get through the day. Friendships wither because it is harder, and harder, and harder to keep a smile on your face, harder and harder to "act normal", cover the abyss. Then one day you walk into the living room just as a news announcement flashes on the screen, some sort of message: "The Williams family requests privacy at this time." Then it quickly moves on to the next item.

The Williams family. 

As you head upstairs to the computer, hoping to find out more, a thought hits you, a jolt coming straight down on you like lightning out of the sky. 

It's Robin Williams. And he has killed himself.

For a while the news bubbles and burbles. Some people say it was his fault, others say he was being selfish. A psychologist writes him an "open letter" long after he is dead, telling him why suicide is such a bad idea and why he shouldn't consider it. Helpful. He should have reached out for help, of course. All you poor, distraught fuckups out there, make sure you reach out for help! But if you were so in touch with things that might help you, if you were a real person, a normal person, not a percentage point dwelling in the sludge at the bottom of the human barrel, reaching out wouldn't be needed to begin with.

All right then. I know this is a bad idea, probably an unpopular idea, but he set an example, didn't he? The brightest, most effervescent personality who ever lived, hanging himself with a belt. Myself, I always thought it was a good idea to use two ideas concurrently: take the pills, THEN hang yourself. Cut your wrists, THEN jump off the bridge. That way, you won't have the sagging-through-the-floor humiliation of waking up from a failed suicide attempt, the entire family furious with you for being so selfish.  But what about throwing yourself in front of a train? I've run out of prequels there.

Oh all right, this method will do. I know enough to follow the correct procedure because I have read up on it. There's just tons of stuff on the internet now; you don't even need to go to the library and get that odd look when you check out all those books. I know the drill by now, mainly by doing it wrong. Don't just take the pills, because you'll throw them up for sure. Have a sandwich first, a sort of symbolic Last Supper, the final meal before the convict is executed, with a nice hit of alcohol. (I've been sober twenty years, but what does it matter now? My family told me I never should have been an alcoholic to begin with.) Then a few Tums and two Gravol to avoid puking them up. Let it settle, then start to take the Seroquel, but NOT all at once. My God, someone must have supervised this to get it exactly right! But they call it mercy killing, or they used to. Assisted suicide? There's no one left who will assist me.

A life is done, then it's undone. It's completed, meaning that it is finished. (Didn't Jesus say that on the cross? Such a wag.) People can run around and scream all they like, blame me, say everything is my fault, which they will. But they won't have Sarah to kick around any more. Oh, no they won't.

She lies down on the bed, and in a last bitter joke that no one will understand, spreads her arms out in a crucifixion pose. Blessed assurance: the wave passes over her, enveloping and dark, bringing her at last the peace that passeth all understanding.