Long Hair

5

 

One thing he didn’t tell her was that he didn’t overdose just once but twice and it was after the second that he first tried to commit himself. One night the previous summer, the Summer of Love of 1967, he stood across the street from Langley Porter Neuro-Psychiatric Institute. He was shivering in the ocean wind and panting because he had just climbed one of the City’s steepest hills. He thought about how to explain his problem to the hospital staff and balked. Maybe he wasn’t sick enough, or didn’t have the right kind of sickness. Eventually, he convinced himself that he somehow wouldn’t qualify for admittance, and anyway with enough time he would master the problem himself. So he didn’t go in. But six months later his condition hadn’t improved and he went there to ask for help.

Those few weeks weren’t a particularly unpleasant experience. The therapy groups didn’t seem to accomplish much. The panic and the chaos and the withdrawal into a barricaded dungeon cell deep inside himself and the urge for panicked flight from anything resembling a human being, they all seemed to dissipate by themselves.

After he left the hospital, at the beginning of the spring semester of 1968, he felt a calm, crystalline lucidity. Demagnetized and socially erased by a straight’s costume, he also felt a giddy anonymity, savoring college like never before. He drifted on the current of bodies jostling through the halls during registration, savored the chicks sunning on the quad lawn, watched the debates beside card tables hung-round with posters and heaped with pamphlets.

Then she shattered his serenity.