D Howland Abbott
[For the first part of a two-part article go here.]
Dr. Bob wound a chewed pen in his wiry hair and looked at me over the top of his John Lennon spectacles. “So how is your testimony doing these days, David?” I was appalled at the question; he was asking if I was a good and faithful member of the Mormon church, which was none of his business. This question had no place in what was supposed to be a therapeutic relationship; fortunately I knew the language of this particular lie very well. I’d had to recite it dozens of times in my life, and my response was thoroughly scripted.
“Well, doc, I believe that God and His Son appeared to Joseph Smith in the Garden of Gethsemane. I believe that Gordon Hinckley is a prophet, and that God speaks to him directly. I pay my tithing, I attend all my church meetings… My testimony is in great shape.”
He seemed pleased with my answer, which wasn’t very satisfying for me, so I threw him a left hook to keep him on his toes. “Ghosts, Dr. Bob. I get that your question has to do with ghosts—holy spirits, whatever—but I don’t get what it has to do with me. Help me out with that.”
Dr. Bob’s mouth flapped like a fish. I regarded him casually. “Robert Smith, right Your name is Robert Smith. That’s the name of the guy who sings for the Cure. Y’know? Clove cigarettes, boys wearing lipstick, ‘Friday I’m in Love’…? C’mon, I can’t be the first one to mention this to you. Shit, man, that sculpture even looks like the photograph on the cover of Boys Don’t Cry.”
Dr. Bob looked over his shoulder, his eyes following my finger to rest on what looked like some kind of weird fertility statue. When he turned his head back, his expression had become wary. I became concerned that I had shown a couple of my cards by uttering the word ‘shit’. “Are you stoned, David?”
“I’m not, actually. In fact, I never have been. Testimony, Dr. Bob, remember? I’m, like, hella on the straight and narrow. Dig it.” I was playing a character now. A new one. But it was coming naturally, and it was keeping the Pointed Man at arm’s length. I sat there and talked to him until the clock wound down. We did eventually discuss the ghosts, and if I was honest with him about only one thing it was how distressing it is to wake up in the middle of the night to find your mother watching you sleep. Dr. Bob came to my mother’s defense on that issue, and I realized that this was why I had been brought here. My mother had hired this man to reassure me that she had my best interests at heart. That my mother’s way was God’s way.
At the end of our session, he let my mother into his office for five minutes while I wandered around the parking lot, considering taking up smoking. Mom emerged clutching a small piece of paper, torn from Dr. Bob’s prescription pad.
In the car on the way to the pharmacy, Mom wasn’t pulling any punches. “Dr. Smith thinks that you might be using drugs. Are you using drugs?”
“I told him that I have never used drugs before, Mom. I don’t know why he would tell you that.”
“You told him that you’re not stoned, and we both believe you. That’s not what I’m asking you. Trust me, if you were smoking grass, I would know.” I laughed and told her that nobody calls it ‘grass’ anymore. Another error in judgment.
“How do you know what people call it, David? Never mind that. Dr. Bob thinks that you might have been messing around with other things. Psychedelics. He said that might be the reason you have been seeing ghosts.”
I was speechless. “There must be something in the water then, Mom. Seriously, what the hell are we even…”
“DAVID HOWLAND ABBOTT.”
“Sorry, Mom. What in the cockadoodie heck are we even talking about? I’M not the one seeing ghosts. Everyone else has been talking about…”
“Never mind that, too. Dr. Bob gave me a prescription for you that he thinks will help you calm down a little bit. We’ll try it out when we get home and see if it helps.”
*
My mother cracked the bottle of pills open as soon as we got home and fed me one of the tablets. I’ll never forget that: I wasn’t allowed to put the pill in my mouth on my own, it was placed on my tongue by my mother just to make sure it went where it was supposed to. I felt it dissolving in a pool of saliva and within two minutes I was asleep.
In the middle of the Pointless Forest, Oblio finds a sign which reads ‘Point of No Return’. It is posted on the edge of a very deep, dark hole—a bottomless pit, into which a careless traveler might step and then fall forever and ever. The days which I spent under the relentless spell of those little yellow pills were endless and black, a perpetual tumble through dark unconsciousness.
My mother dutifully fed me those little yellow pills—Risperidal, they were called—whenever I was coherent enough to swallow. I spent two weeks in a complete stupor, incapacitated to the extent that I couldn’t be worried about ghosts or anything else. At the end of those two weeks, I noticed a mild tremor in my right hand—a tremor which has never gone away, complicating the dropping of the needle on The Point! from #522 onward.
Wandering deeper into the Pointless Forest—and further from home—Oblio suddenly finds himself standing in the shadow of an enormous pterodactyl. The prehistoric bird descends upon Oblio and snatches him up in his claws, lifting him high into the air. From this point of view, Oblio can see the Pointless Forest stretching out beneath him. Breathless, resigned, and thoroughly excited, Oblio can see where he has come from… and where he is going.
I woke up one morning, unusually lucid, feeling like my mouth had been filled with dried mouse turds the size of packing peanuts. My vision was wobbly, and my legs were useless. I felt like a junkie. Mom heard me moving around and came into my room. I could hear the bottle of Risperidal rattling around in her pocket. I was crawling across the floor toward my little stack of records, reaching for The Point! like it was lifeline. “I made you some breakfast and then you can take your medicine,” Mom said. “How are you feeling today?”
“I feel like the punchline of a joke about a kid who gets in trouble for using drugs, Mom.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that if you are trying to break me of a drug habit that I didn’t have by force-feeding me horse tranquilizers, then I can’t think of anything to do but laugh. I’m not taking those fucking pills anymore, Mom. I haven’t felt like a human being since we left Dr. Bob’s office.”
My mother stood rigidly in the doorway of my room. She looked angry, but then she folded slowly onto the arm of the chair where my little brother Oliver was playing Super Mario Brothers. Oliver, once the baby of the family but then displaced by the sudden arrival of four younger sisters in quick succession, was still always ready with an attempted joke to defuse an emotionally charged situation. “Hey, ma, if Dave doesn’t want ‘em…”
I held my breath and waited for the inevitable explosion. My mother is not quick to anger, but it’s hard to figure out which buttons not to push with her. And then she was sobbing, and then she was shaking, and then she was wailing. Oliver slumped out of the chair and rolled out of the room like a snake going down a hill sideways. I laughed, quietly, because I didn’t know what else to do, and because Oliver is a funny son of a bitch.
After the incident with the bottomless pit, as the haze began to clear from my thoughts, I found that my family was still in the grip of ghost fever. Mom had already begun drafting a series of alternate plans to take the place of the Risperidal. I didn’t dare tell her that I was working on a plan of my own. My brief meeting with Dr. Robert Smith had been utterly useless, but the curious aftermath had convinced me that LSD might actually cause a person to see spirits. Deciding that it was important to me to actually see the hellish rascals that were causing all of this trouble to begin with, I became determined to track down some acid and go find the damn ghosts myself. A point in every direction is the same as no point at all.
I carefully sought out some of my older brother’s more worldly friends and casually struck up conversations about LSD. I got the same response from three people in a row: “Are you sure you’re not looking for LSD?” Very funny.
Eventually, I found what I was looking for. A friend of my brother’s friend, a cat named Wil Silva, ran into me in a McDonald’s. I told him I was curious about psychedelics, and begged him to keep our conversation on the downlow. I was pleased to discover that the vocabulary of these conversations came naturally to me; apparently, Wil was impressed as well. We ended up back in the garage of his parents’ house, where he lived like an animal surrounded by pizza boxes, incense fumes and framed posters of Jim Morrison.
Wil sold me two tiny squares of white paper for ten dollars. I was skeptical. “This isn’t really what I expected, dude,” I told him.
“Trust me, man. And don’t eat them both at the same time, either.”
Acid comes and goes. It rolls into town when the weather changes, like Mary Poppins, and goes where it is needed most. When the necessary good has been done, it unfurls its umbrella and disappears as quietly as it came. I put those little ghosts in my mouth and built them a tiny home in my spine, where they could live forever.
For nearly an hour I couldn’t differentiate between the effects of the drug and an overpowering sense of anxiety. I sat in my room, looking at the pictures on my walls, waiting for them to start talking to me or something. Like they do in cartoons. My eyes began to feel like they were coated in liquid, and when I stood up to find a tissue I had the sensation that I was wearing a body suit made out of electricity.
Visually, my surroundings didn’t twist and change—as I had expected—but instead began to take on strange, unexpected significance. I stared at a poster for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and it became profoundly hilarious, and moments later it made me feel like a little boy again. Ren & Stimpy, who had leering down from the same patch of lime green wall for years, were suddenly strange and unfamiliar. I wandered out of my room and down the hall toward the front door, stopping to regard a photograph of my four sisters participating in a Mad Tea Party with the Hatter and the Hare. It had been taken by a trick camera at Disneyland when they were very small. I realized how much I loved my sisters, and then I realized how much I loved my brothers. And then, almost as an afterthought, I realized how much I loved my parents. My mother, cruelly and strangely lied to by my father for so long. And my father. Just a man, but a man who had come home one afternoon suddenly overcome with excitement to introduce me to his collection of Kinks records. A man who had woken me up in the middle of the night when I was eight years old to take me to play Q*Bert, and then to a late screening of Weird Science. My father, my father. My idiot father.
On the way out the door, I passed a framed photograph of the LDS Temple which sits in the hills of Oakland, where my parents were married years before. I looked at it long and hard, and I felt nothing. I realized that it was a place that I would never go. Several of my brothers and sisters would, over time, take their companions into the upper levels of that beautiful, strange building to make eternal covenants; I, an apostate, unworthy, would be unwelcome at these events. Sometimes it is useful to be sad.
I walked out into the night air and regarded the expanses of dead, useless almond trees. Passing the shed—which my brothers and I had started calling ‘Bubba’s Burger Barn’, after an old episode of Fraggle Rock—I picked up one of the old, dried stalks of bamboo from that miserable summer and walked out into the orchards to look for the ghost who seemed so intent on destroying my family. I invoked his presence, calling out to him by names I thought suited him. Abbala. Sandrick. Multithos. The names felt satisfyingly perverse on my tongue. I knew that if the fucker was anywhere to be found, he’d surely know I was trying to address him even if the syllables were incorrect.
I held the bamboo stalk in my hands and tried to beat him down out of the trees like a hornets’ nest. An almond, of all things, tumbled down through the branches and bounced off my nose. I had re-discovered gravity. I was pleased.
After soaring above the treetops of the Pointless Forest, the pterodactyl deposits Oblio in an enormous nest at the top of a tree. Sitting in the nest a few feet away is the thing that Oblio has hoped, for so long, to see: an egg. More specifically: a thing, other than himself, that has no point. Moments later, the egg begins to crack open and from it emerges a smaller version of the strange bird that brought him to the nest. Points in every direction.
Disappointed, Oblio carefully climbs down from the nest at the top of the tree. Taking in his surroundings and trying to get his bearings, Oblio finds a sign posted next to a trailhead which reads ‘Destination Point’. Setting out in the direction indicated by the sign, Oblio soon realizes that the trail leads out of the Pointless Forest and back into the Land of Point.
The townspeople give him a hero’s welcome, and they surround him with questions about the Pointless Forest. They are astounded when Oblio explains that the Pointless Forest really isn’t pointless at all: all of the branches on all of the trees have a point, as do all of the rocks and birds and people that he met. With all eyes in the town on him, Oblio tells the townspeople that if everything has a point, even in the Pointless Forest, then he must have one too. He then removes the pointed cap his mother knitted him from his head, and there on the top of his head is, at last, a point.
Around needle drop #600, I read an interview with Harry Nilsson in which he explained that he wrote The Point! following a particularly vivid acid trip. It should have been apparent, I suppose, but I never guessed it. Through my early experiments with LSD, I learned what I needed to—a ridiculously circuitous journey to ascertain the perfectly obvious, just like little Oblio on his trek through the Pointless Forest: a ghost cannot give a lawyer herpes.
Once you receive the transmission, they say, you should turn off the set. The wind changed and Mary Poppins floated away to find another child in need. Out of deference to the time when my family was favored by God and The Point! was just a bedtime story, I never listened to that record through an expanded consciousness. As the number of hash marks climbs upward to one thousand, I am comforted by having held onto something that belonged to my mother before the ghosts came. I take pleasure in watching the diamond-tipped stylus drilling out those grooves one rotation at a time, until the day when it cuts right through and my old record resembles the waxy snake of an expertly peeled apple. I love knowing that the physical reality of the tiny etchings that report, again and again, the tribulations of poor Oblio are the same etchings that told me that story for the first time over thirty years ago. It is important that some things never change.
My hand trembles slightly as I position the tone arm over the invisible andante that leads me into the Land of Point. I flick the drop bar; I make another hash mark. This is the town, and these are the people.
[D Howland Abbott is a freelance writer based in Portland, OR.]
