“These three are the marks of a Jew, not a Zionist - a tender heart, self-respect, and charity."

"Jack Kerouac was schizophrenic"

Nurse Mitchell brought up another cloth full of warm water and wrung it out over my head.  The water cascaded down my body like bullet trains down to the tub full of water quickly soiling itself with crusty debris of what should have been a nightmare.  Flakes of dried blood tossed on the surface of the water like clipper ships taking on white squalls.

"Brian Wilson is schizoaffective, too."

Her voice was like an ointment.  She smelled like my mother.  The tears and snot were so uncontrollable and unpredictable.

10-10-2008

 "JONATHAN!  WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS!"

My eyes closed and I could see his bloody face and those green eyes.  My hands had doubled their size and ached.  I didn't see my father in him anymore.  Tears from fright spat out from both of our eyes.

"Larry!  You're not gonna get him too!", I screamed out to the energy I could feel floating in the room.

"Baby, I've gotta get to the hospital.", Eric whimpered.  Blood trickling down his lips.  His face all rearranged and swollen.

This all echoed in the present, in the cold tiled bathroom of the hospital unit in the correctional facility I had been taken to.

"Eduard Einstein, Albert Einstein's son, was schizophrenic."

The water rushed over me.  No matter how cold and clinical the place was I couldn't get clean there.

"Eric, we've gotta get you to a hospital.  OH MY FUCKING GOD!!  Look what I did?!! No.  Get up."

We scrambled for one of the bathrooms.  His left eyebrow looked like it had popped open.  His orbitals were so swollen and red and his jaw seemed askew.  Blood everywhere.  It looked like some prize fight had taken place.  Sprays of blood everywhere.  Then I began to see Larry in him again, in his reflection.  I came to believe my father was a demon because of the manifestations I had been witnessing over the last couple of months.  Eric cried over the pain and his wounds.  I did this and now Larry was coming back.  The battle seemed emanate. 

"Larry!  You can't have him too!  Dad get the fuck out of him!  You're not doing this.  Not to him!!"

"Jonathan!  I'm not your dad."

"I have to end this.  I've got to stop this."

My sobbing commenced into the tub.  I didn't have to even shut my eyes to relocate and hear the screams.

"Syd Barrett is schizophrenic."

"Even Jim Gordon and President Lincoln's wife were schizophrenic.  I have a son that is."

The hiccups to follow the quakes of sobs seemed to convulse my body.  Something happened to where the tectonic plates in my life made a great divide between me and the rest of the world.  Sadly, the great love of my life stood on the other side.  It was illness that truly separated us and at that time I had no idea.  I had yet to actually think that my world wasn't true.  What was true was what I saw and what I saw were visions of a demon.  I call him Dad.  Given all the physical and sadistic torture, rapes, selling me off to like sick minded friends to satiate their needs for, in a draconian Greek sense, mentor me.  My father's name is Larry.  He's Dr. Larry Kennedy, a practicing Pentecostal minister of a church with a fold of 1500 misguided sheep.  He teaches at a seminary and keeps twenty year old polaroids of my sister in I in compromising positions, solo and paired, under his pathologically organized, booby trapped bedroom.  These aren't cute, bathing photos.  In 2004 I found that he still had them during a short stay at the Kennedy farm.  He had accumulated a collection that extended beyond just my sister and I.

I began to feel phantom pains in my penis.  Piercing.  I would endure these anytime I fought my father and his phantoms.  Nurse Mitchel was cleaning my genitals off so gingerly.  Her voice seemed to be like kid's gloves.

"There we go, darlin'.  It's okay."
"GET 'EM OFF!  GET HIM THE FUCK OFF!  Fuck it hurts."

I could see the straight pins being plucked out of the tomato pin cushion and driven through my three year old acorn-like penis.  This ability to transcend from past to future was becoming all the more commonplace for me.  The tub filled with urine.  I could only scream.  Larry and his powers seemed to ascend on me like precipitous blitzes with needles.  I could not hear my current cries.  I could just hear that well-known blood chilling scream that toddlers give.  I couldn't move but soon I was being taken from the bathtub by guards.  The next thing was a pinch on a butt cheek and sleep.  It was my first bath in over a week since the night of my psychotic episode, the one that ended not a chapter of my life but killed the chance at marrying, and the life with the man I love.  That love does not die.  Ever.  It was the death of a world I saw as very actual, bona fide, ipso facto that I had known no other that was killing.   When I woke up the next day the stiffness and shooting nerve pain up the side of my neck surged like rupturing powerline transformers.

"I've got to stop this.  This..What is going on?  Dad?"

I made my way to the entry/exit of our flat's kitchen.  

"Stop stop stop stop...." under my breath.  

The room spun around and around.  Erratic breathing and flashes of light, auras, like the ones before one of my seizures.  My mind said "knife knife knife knife".

My carotids seem to pulsate for the blade of Eric's daily sharpened, 7 inch Santoku knife.  Some say it was even steven.  I can't think in those terms.  I turned and there he was.  He did what I was setting out to do.  1st try...futile.  2nd attempt...profitless.  3rd attempt...YAHTZEE!  We had arterial spray and blood pumping out with each pulse.  I went into syncope.  When my lids peeled back I could see him standing sideways by the frontdoor.  I stood and stumbled while hot blood dropped in clumps onto my bare feet.  I went to push him out and he ran.  I shuffled onto the threshold and that was the last I could remember before the full spectrum light of a trauma room hammered out the darkness.

I guess I left a puddle on the landing of a two story flight of stairs outside of our residence because the emergency department staff were beginning a second transfusion.  I had lost around three or more pints of blood.  

"Adonai ro-i, lo ehsar.
  Bin’ot deshe yarbitseini,
al mei m’nuhot y’nahaleini,
  naf’shi y’shovev,
yán’heini b’ma’aglei tsedek,
l’ma’an sh’mo.
Gam ki eilech
b’gei tsalmavet,
lo ira ra,
Ki Atah imadi.
  Shiv’t’cha umishan’techa
hemah y’nahamuni.

Ta’aroch l’fanai shulchanL’orech yamim."
neged tsor’rai
dishanta vashemen roshi
cosi r’vayah.
  Ach tov vahesed
yird’funi kol y’mei hayai,
v’shav’ti b’veit Adonai

I could hear the my mother's screaming from a phone receiver.  

"Where's Eric?  Is Eric okay? WHERE THE FUCK IS HE?"

"Yes.  He's at a different hospital but he's stable.  You on the other hand..."

"Barux hashem!  Tell him I love him.  He's safe now."
"Mr. Kennedy!  Mr. Kennedy, do you have a religious affiliation?"
"I'm uh..I'm Jewish.  I need a rabbi."


I went unconscious from there and soon into surgery to suture my severed artery.  Most of this has been gathered by talks with medical staff and at random recalls over the past year.  My first solid memory was the bath Nurse Mitchel gave me.  Before I left the correctional facility she came to see me.  She had given very special attention to me over the year I was incarcerated.
               

              Jonathan, 
              My Hebrewchaun, you hear the same voices that my own son does.  You know, there's a certain songbird too pretty to fly with the crows, the grackles, and the starlings.  The other birds attack it in flocks and tear it apart when it starts to sing.  Nothing soft endures.  Nature loathes meekness and goodness.  You got hurt early and deep.  Eric kept you from the bridge as long as he could.  But you are the same tribe as my son.  You're both so full of love it causes an imbalance.  You fall over with the unbearable weight of it.  The fall becomes what you do best.  You grow accustomed to great odds.  Love floods you , overwhelms you, and makes you almost impossible to be around.  You need love in equal proportion to what you throw off.  Everyone disappoints you.  It may seem this way all the time.  Don't ever stop fighting that desire to die in the cold thinking that you'll never find the right angel.  You have the most tender heart.  Nuture it because you nurture so many others.  I've seen it firsthand, even in a county jail.  That heart on your sleeve will never be ripped off if you don't let it and your unreturned attempts at trying to mend things, don't let that steal song.  It all strengthens your steel threads of faith that that there is going to be a better tomorrow.  As long as you take care of you life is going to be manageable.  You may not approve of everything that happens but that may mean you need to lower your standards a bit.  


I don't do this sort of thing for ANY inmates.  I've had a year with you, five to six days a week, and a special part of my days were the parts I spent with you.  Please go forth with a thicker skin, made of stronger stuff, and know that when the time is right, and you'll know when, the person that you were truly born to be with will be so much more, so much bigger than the loves you had before.


Love and Light,


J. Mitchel