Leaving Prudence Hall

Leaving Prudence Hall

Published by Owen C. Schultz at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Owen C. Schultz

Cover Photo: istockphoto.com/Pidah

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Leaving Prudence Hall

A Novel

Owen C. Schultz

Foreward

My name is Stephen. My book is the true story of what happened to me after my father killed himself with a short black pistol in the book room of our house. Everybody but Doctor Mars of the Home thought I had killed him; even the Mater, who became radical, with a changed sign like an electron, and so went into orbits that excluded me.

They used my name on many documents at the police station and in the courts during my trial and incarceration, and it was always misspelled. Most people spell my name with a V, but the pronunciation is exactly the same. I never corrected the error, since I felt like a foreigner in my own land. I came to know first hand how variants like PH or V make it very hard for refugees to learn our language.

I have a great sympathy for refugees, people who have been forced to leave familiar lands and are given different names in strange ports. Sometimes they abandon fathers and mothers and grandparents, who refuse to leave the land of their grandparents. On the bright side, however, there is all the press coverage, and the International Red Cross, and the Quakers, and other succoring groups to help. There is even a certain romance if you are an expatriated writer or philosopher forced to leave because of the nobility of your beliefs. No matter what the danger, you’ve pulled up stakes and left a repressive regime, tracking across vast and sickening oceans in the belly of trawlers full of chilled shrimp. You can insist that your proper name be used.

The best part of philosophical refugeedom comes if you guess right. You are right when they start dismembering the persons who remained at home, sending them to camps for psychological reconstruction where everybody dies or is maltreated. Then all of a sudden the accent you have from learning English as a second language becomes a mark of intelligence, like earning a Realpolitic degree. You can even become an advisor to presidents and kings, if you play your cards right and if the atrocities at home are sufficiently frightening. Much of your upward movement relies on a free press eager to record misbehavior abroad (so everyone knows what you escaped) and to criticize at home (so what you say gets heard by many people at once).

I don’t have much sympathy for refugees who make it big. They can take care of themselves. I’m talking about the little ones who leave carrying cardboard boxes that get soaked in the first storm at sea, spilling their possessions to an indifferent ocean. Or those who leave because the goat was slaughtered by ninja guerrillas, the straw house burned, and all of their nodding older relatives shot by hostile fire. Older people die in greater numbers than the young because they cannot hide as well, or because they are deafened by age and memory to the warnings of leftist broadsides.

Refugees are the people who leave because there is nothing left to stay for, and they have to go somewhere else to get a drink of water, for instance. I feel a great sympathy for these people, and my book is dedicated to all those who have fled carrying little but bad memories and classical tragedies in local tongues.

I know that sounds like I started a book to lead a cause célèbre and make myself famous from the suffering of others, but it’s not the case at all. The things that happened to me could have happened to anybody, but they didn’t. They happened to me. English was my first language, or the English that Americans speak, anyway; I’m still in the same country I was born in, and I still speak Amer-English. Since leaving the Home I have been practicing the plain or vanilla method of speech used by broadcasters so you can’t tell their place of birth. I did not anticipate the record I kept would become a book; it was a journal of events that recorded my private thoughts and my private language during a time of mental oppression and confusion.

If you meet me at a carwash, watching beside me as our vehicles slide through the swirling baths like metal hippos, and ask me a casual question, my answer would seem calm and quite normal. Mimicry and a good ear are part of my arsenal of skills and aptitudes. But once upon a time I did have a lot more of my own language. I scattered neologisms throughout my sentences. In psychological circles this is called embolalia, when you make up new words and use them between ordinary words. There are many reasons why you would do this, but it would take a whole book to explain why. In a way, this book does explain why, and it explains a great many other things.

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A refugee carries a lot of inaudible anguish. It is very hard to discuss your anguish in a new language; for example, phrase books are only good for asking Where is the taxi stand? For a long long time I kept very quiet about my refugee nature, not letting on that alien occurrences had shaped my personality and separated me from the norm. After leaving the Home I spent a lot of time conforming, struggling to learn the nuances of hip speech, costume, and convention so that nobody would be able to tell. Retailers loved me, because I followed fashion with a will and was a prime source of sales. I had ten leisure suits, seven dashikis, a couple of nehru jackets, tie-died underwear, garrison belts and engineer boots, blue workshirts with little embroidered butterflies, English tweed sport coats, and a home entertainment center that filled a wall with bewildering hardware.

I don’t have any of these things now. One year ago, almost to the day, I joined an upscale group for a mescaline experience on the West Coast of America, practicing the vocabulary of illumination and amazement, when I truly realized that I would always be a refugee unless I stopped trying to bullshit everybody. This kind of experience is an enlightenment. A voice came from the mastoidal area just behind my ears. I heard it clearly, instructing me in simple words, with no neologisms, no mystic smoke. It was a voice like a radio announcer’s:

"Stephen, suffering is common. Acceptance is rare. Acceptance is a prelude to understanding. Expression is fulfillment of understanding."

When it first started to speak, I look around the group to see who else had heard. Nobody had. It is disquieting to hear voices in your head, but much easier to take if they are drug-induced. That is why learning from drugs is easy, since you do not disregard your own voices as often. I would recommend it, with qualification, for anyone seeking personal direction. The qualification is that the voices can make you psychotic, so care is called for.

"Stephen, continued the voice, you are trying so hard to hide your past that you have chained yourself to it with deceit and duplicity. It has more effect on you now than ever before, because you know better. Take the journals of that time. Make a book. Take it to a printer and pay for its printing. Send the book to anyone you want. Stop hiding in style."

While the rest of the group was watching God I was listening to my mastoids give advice. Nonetheless, it had an impact upon me; and, as you can see, I have taken the journals to the printer. There were a few sections I had to change and a few more that I cut out completely. These were mainly records of gratuitous sexual encounters that I had after I walked away from Esperanza, the limited care facility I went to after the Home. The only other persons who have read my journals in full are Doctor Mars and Mr. Hirudo, the bloodsucker graduate student that studied with her. They have read the whole thing, because I could count on the sanctity of the doctor/patient relationship not to reveal harmful information about other people.

The story begins at the Home, where I was taken by order of the court after Doctor Mars proved that I was innocent of any wrongdoing in the death of my father. It was a very difficult time, full of trauma for me, and I descended for a period of years into a tragic fugue, which is a temporary period of disorientation and loss of identity. Fugue was the official medical name. It is also a name for a musical composition designed for several voices, which enter a performance successively, imitating one another and singing a short little melody called the Subject. For instance, my book begins with a little tune we all sang at the Home, the Subject. When all the voices have entered a fugue, then the exposition is over; at that point in the composition, the Episode begins, which is a passage of connective tissue like tendons, holding the piece together. It is a very good description of what happened to me. We sang the tune over and over again until it was finished. And then I wrote about it.

In a fashion, all my journals became episodes, and this book is the last one. Of course, in music, the fugue continues with another subject, or catchy little tune, for the voices to sing. It can go on and on like that until the composer is tired. I am not tired at all from the work of making the journals shorter and easier to understand; but after exercising such abbreviation, perhaps they should be called a fughetta, or a short fugue. Anyway, the journals cover more than six years of my life that I will never have back again.

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You have probably heard a lot of innuendo about me, since my case and court appearances made the national scandal-press several times. Many prurient writers work for those papers, and they made a big deal about my relationship to the Mater. In fact, the Mater and I had never entertained notions of illicit intercourse, I was never a present threat to the community, I did not enjoy ‘relations with my prison mates,’ and I was born here on Earth and not on Saturn, as some imprudent reporters suggested. I came from the same place you do, let me tell you. It’s only that I had been educated entirely at home by unusual parents. This made me alien but not illegal. My journals tell the story and contain a lot of wild material not found elsewhere. They also tell the story of my first love.

Parados

(A parados is the song they used to sing before old Greek plays. Stephen.)

When they taught us to sing

for Prudence Hall

at the Home on Visitor’s Day,

there was a big bull-skin drum

that Mr. Hennike pulled into the

middle of the floor and we all

had to hit it with round steel spoons,

singing in time to the whump he made

with his fist against the hide.

The short stiff hairs vibrated in the

sunlight and we were all happy

to be making noise together.

We’d sing anything he wanted because

they didn’t serve oatmeal for breakfast

on Visitor’s but juice and eggy toast.

It was also the time of the year they

chose the ones to leave

for limited care facilities

(LCF’s) and having a good voice,

let’s face it,

having any voice at all was good.

Loudness was also good, up to a point.

Martin was the loudest, but

he made up his own words and

they were in his own language which

no one understood.

Mr. Hennike would scowl

and bring his fist down

hard over Marvin’s spoon,

trapping Marvin’s short calloused

fingers against the bull hide.

He only did that during practice

but it hurt Martin’s fingers.

This was the song we sang:

"Prudence Hall, oh Prudence Hall,

We learn and love to learn.

Prudence Hall, oh Prudence Hall,

We live and learn to live.

Prudence Hall, thank you.

Thank you Prudence Hall."

I learned the song very well

and they let me out and this

is the story of what happened to me

When the Visitor’s finally

smiled on my criminal self

and said go free and sin no more.

No thanks to Mr. Hennike and his

Nasty drum with the dead animal

Stretched tight across like

flat death with the hair on.

Tra la la La!

Boom boom Wa!

Part One

At Home

Chapter One

My Real Journal: Da Blooberano

I am writing this at night in a very dim light from the streetlights. The doctors only get to see the other journal which I keep simple like a movie and very American in tone. They are very pleased with the progress I’ve made in the last five weeks. I will show this journal to you any time you ask. Please respect my privacy and keep it to yourself.

I am still young with supple limbs and the glinting silver balls of a young cock. But there is not a job to be had for somebody with my background. My name is Stephen Demens and if there were friends in the stable of my heart I’d certainly let them call me Stevie. My ladies could call me Steve A’dore for the big muscles in my arms and the fact that I like to live near the docks and head into the wind like a seagull, clutching copper-topped pilings and sniffing for the northwest passage. They would be heartsore but happy while I was around. I would keep them happy by suggesting I was about to leave or die in a tragic and isolated way.

The romance of impending passage would surround me if I could get a careerish job but not for someone with my background. It would be poignant and sweet to send messages by hitch-hiker to old loves across the continent. There are many popular songs where a very sensitive singer is singing to a good friend who isn’t present. The singer is asking that he be remembered to a lover who wasn’t there either, someone he lost a long time ago. They use a lot of if’s in those songs, like it didn’t matter any more: he’s older and tougher but it would be nice if she remembered him anyway. You know while he’s singing that the guy is hurting very deeply and can bearly keep a tune. They are all heart-wrenchers.

But this is an honest account and I have to say that I have never had it with a woman yet even with the silver glintings which jangle and dong in the night as the tide shifts. My HMF (Higher Mental Facilities) are returning slowly, like ice melting. Doctor Mars has cautioned me against prolixity and hyperbole: Mr. Hennike hit the drum and repeated the word Realityfix over and over.

Mr. Hennike is a paraprofessional (a para) who works at the Home. He wanted me to take a Realityfix so badly that his arms would grow heavy with longing for someone else to be as unhappy as he with the shape of the globe and its diminishing textures. Realityfix meant seeing things as they actually were. Hennike spent a long dedicated time trying to tell us all how things really were.

I arrived at the impression that it was like looking through a telescope. You saw a rounded view of something very far away that didn’t make a sound and had no smell. If you did not move the telescope, and everyone took a turn looking at the same thing, then that was a Realityfix. I recall Sergeant Presson of the b/w movies looking through his nordic binoculars at an escaping Yukon crook, and they used a sharp-edged mask over the lens to represent the eyeview. You saw two circles in the middle of the screen, and somebody running away in one of them.

Hennike played the television for us every afternoon when they only broadcast old movies in black and white. Martin called Mr. Hennike’s explanations Blooberlaning and he used it in a verb form like this (I think):

Da blooberano,: which meant: I Realityfix; or Domo blooberandamos: which meant We Realityfix and so on. He could also use it in a cautionary way like: Lan blooberlank dobrich Hennike! which I believe meant Watch out here comes Hennike with the Fix!

Mr. Hennike owned a zero-birthrate button, which he stabbed to the lapel of his hounds-tooth jacket; the girls, even the slow ones in B-Ward, said he always carried a shiek of condoms like a small deck of cards in the inside breast pocket of his coat. Some dropped out over the drum one dull afternoon and he put his big brogan down quickly over the flashing aluminum packages. We all saw them, nonetheless, as a fish sees a spinning lure before thunder, openmouthed and hungry. He said they were catheters, the lie dropping from his tight lips and crawling under the same shoe. We knew, we knew; not everyone was there simply because they were dumb. HMF’s abounded before entrapment, as in my case and several others. I know a rubber when I see one.

Doctor Mars, who is a lady doctor responsible for my case from the first day onward at Prudence and who still calls on the telephone and visits to check up on me, disdained the whole idea of Realityfix and really treated it with contempt and scorn.

(DISDAIN: to look upon someone or to treat them with visible contempt by snorting through the nostrils at them. Stephen.)

( I think it is a very good idea to use words well and correctly, but in the interests of clarity it’s also a very good idea to tell the occasional reader what a word means occasionally, only when you think they might have another feeling about it, or when it might be something they haven’t run into in quite a while. A lot of words have become strangers to our video tongue, so I’ll take the little extra time and give the definition. If I have to make the word up myself I will be sure to say that too, and maybe give a little of the background. If it is a word that the dictionary has wrong, I will give what I think it really means now and maybe help the cause of clarity along as long as I don’t become too prolix. Stephen.)

It was the way she breathed through her nose when Mr. Hennike said Realityfix that expressed her feelings, like it was below notice but she was noticing it anyway because she was a professional.

(PROFESSIONAL: How you make your money at something. If you make a lot of money at something then you are very professional, and if you blow out your nose a lot, then you are very professional. If you make a lot of guesses, wear clothing that is out of style, and mouth-breathe, then you are not professional. Stephen.)

Professionals notice everything even when things are very tasteless and unpleasant. For instance, I will never forget the afternoon at Prudence when three of the boys and two of the girls decided to have a shit party and they made large unhealthy-looking poops in the middle of the floor. They mixed all of the poop together and then coated a wall with it like dada muralists. It was very strong and proletarian. It seemed very regressive to me as well, but my HMF had been well stomped on pharmacologically so I sat as far away as I could and tried to exercise a disdain by snorting through my good nostril. But then Doctor Mars was called by one of the attendants and she really whipped into a professional therapeutic routine like a young supple dancer.

She had a novice in tow that morning, someone doing their graduate study -- you could see the clipboard with the class schedule on the back. Dr. Mars kept up some very impartial chatter for the student as she tended to the shit-crisis. It was impressive, and I was amazed at the conclusions which can be drawn from a little poop on the wall. I could tell that all of the kids, even the LM’s (lower mentals) were embarrassed. It was very professional of Doctor Mars never to mention the odor, either.

Any average person would have walked into the room and said something like: Jesus H. Christ what a stink! but not her. I did notice that she did not even try to clean up the wall, or clean up the kids. Mr. Hennike had to do that. He is not a professional.

(PROFESSIONAL: A clarification: someone who does not clean up the shit but talks about it knowingly in the third person. Stephen.)

I sincerely believe that I could make a woman feel nostalgic and giving in the way of the cinema if I could get a job. I have been on several interviews since Prudence let me out. They were arranged by Doctor Mars arid her staff of vocational professionals after a whole lot of testing to judge my aptitudes and skills. Apparently there were not many opportunities available for a person of my aptitudes and skills.

Even if you consider yourself a hotshot someone else has to agree with you enough to be willing to pay you to do what you do as a hotshot. They said that I did rather well on the tests before Prudence would let me go but the test of the pudding is not whether it will hold up a spoon. The tests were strange and wearisome to take and took many days to get through with a soft pencil filling in wide purple boxes on long sheets of paper. There were also many tests of dexterity and endurance with the fingers, putting things in receptacles and matching parts or pieces, or folding letters and putting them in envelopes and gluing fake stamps on the outside.

They were called names I cannot remember now. I was not full of HMF when I took them and asked if that had been taken into account. Doctor Mars looked at me, I thought, with some longing, and said that, Everything has been taken account of, Stephen. All you have to do is the best that you can do. Don’t clench, don’t get too excited, but do your best. You were good, at one time, at taking tests. I have seen that, and you and I have talked about it many times. Just do your best.

It was that look of longing that gave me the energy to get through the tests and to do rather well but they have not helped me get a job. The days are very long without a job, as I’m sure you can imagine if you’ve ever lived by yourself for any period of time. I try to return Doctor Mars’ longing look whenever I see her. When we talk on the telephone I try to sound longing but not despairing.

(DESPAIR: a complete loss of hope; abject hopelessness, or the thing which causes hopelessness; or something of