The Intervention of the Demon

In high school I wondered why I couldn’t easily get a date or go steady like my classmates. This profound sense of failure in the social scene gradually had built up in my subconscious psyche. But I felt the next time I would meet my dream lover.

Hollywood movies captured my attention, instilling that dream. It would happen to me when the stars aligned just right. I would be transformed, falling in love. The right girl would be magic, just as I saw in the love stories. Rock ‘n roll parties with Elvis crooning captured my imagination. He and others invoked the theme of the dream. I didn’t know why I was looked at and avoided and snickered at in the few social events that included girls like the teen “Drop-in-Hop”. I had collected names and phone numbers there. Fewer classmates went out with me in junior high than in grade school during the 6 years I spent there. I couldn’t take the bullying from the few in the 70 student boy’s school. The rest seemed a conspiracy of silence. Lectures from the headmaster’s “helping me” only deepened my pariah status. “Next time someone bullies you, come right down to my office.” Now I earned new epithets: “squealer,” “big baby,” were added to, “homo”. (I was on the opposite side of the divide: Only the headmaster himself saved me from being beaten.)

The lower my reputation became, the lower my grades went, from what was essentially honor roll from grade school when I was 8. I didn’t seem to belong anywhere but a twilight zone. Afraid of people, I was “less than.” I internalized the ridicule. What was the meaning of “special” when it applied to me? Why was it so exhausting for my folks to find a place where I would be happy? In kindergarten, far from home, why was I placed in the same institution my mentally retarded brother was?

My folks found a boarding school for my senior year at age 18. This grew out of a similar summer camp. This was a respite, a new beginning, a sense of belonging I never knew before. But with graduation that had to disappear, regardless of my new level of trust in others. The family psychiatrist placed me this time in a state hospital system. Again, I was far from home. They had their own bullies, “juvenile delinquents,” who otherwise would have fared worse. I was put in a common category with the bullies among the clientele, receiving the same attitudes from the staff. All mail was opened for the year I was there. I was exiled.

This was a failure. Dad and Mother found a “therapeutic farm community” closer to them and in a part of the country dear to my heart. Still, during the two years I was there, no one could crack my lack of trust and sense of isolation. The state institution had rekindled the demon parasites inside my psyche. (I was to return to this therapeutic community 13 years later.)

The demons stayed dormant through the following four years of college. I gained no close friends even though I admired the “hippies.” I limped by with barely passing grades to my undergraduate degree. After graduation I set myself up in a large city and tried to find my way, complete with psychological tests. I made real social efforts. It was the ‘60’s now. As before, woman after woman, after being initially attracted to me, left frustrated. All these failures with women acted like a hidden acid.

August 2, 1974 was a sunny bright summer day. Possible rejection from a woman acquaintance on our upcoming vacation was intolerable. I was just finishing a task at a clerical job for a newspaper. Blackout sensations! Just stress? I was about to start a hiking vacation in a lovely area for a week.

The panic came back the next day on my vacation. The woman I was with made sharp comments, something like, “getting your shit together.” I was taken to the ER and given Valium to calm me...