PART FIVE:

Asylums- 350-82
Behavior of patients 520-1

So I sat here talking to some deadheads and needing a bowl of soup. Tell the men that left our head that our hero was filled with words. But we need some heroes and criminals to grow and learn and tell them an entertaining story.

I hope I haven’t left you with the impression that this book is about me.

This book is about a strange young man that lives in this turn of the millennium. This man will grow up to become the president of the United States of America. His life started with quite the bang.

“Each word is longer than the next,” he said, “So I need a drink.”
The man at the counter glanced at him and said, “There are three things direly wrong with that statement. First, you are not yet twenty-one. Second, you are at work. And third, it is noon, you fool.”
And Richard Channing stammered, “But I need a drink. I do own this hall, page. I am the first born son of the Channing family.”
“There is a beer in the fridge,” a sullen old black man told him.

When the old black remembered this event later, thinking as well of a memory. He still saw tracers from the last time he had looked at the sun.

It had been years since he had seen young Master Channing as the man had fired him for writing and singing that song. Or maybe it was one to the tone of, “Jesus, just put away their guns. Before they kill someone, I remember thinking this, so I stared into the sun. And sir, ask him if you want to keep your son.”

Somewhere around the time he was last able to sing the whole song, an awkward man in a funny hat showed himself to him as a silhouette.

The skinny black man smiled and whispered, “He is this silence, my dear friend.”

And the butler left Richard Channing; never knowing whom the awkward man was until they met again in Summerland. The young white man who fired him did not know what he had done. It was best that they had left when they did. There was little the old servant could do but smile.

Though Richard Channing remembers this day quite differently. “You are an angry teen,” he was saying to himself. He was worried that every schoolmate he passed could hear his awkward and peculiar thoughts. He grew concerned when they looked as if they did.

“You were happy,” he choked in order to stifle what he knew was coming, “You were nice… And unabashedly homosexual for three full days, but your playground superiors do not approve of your sexual revelation. So you turn black. You are pulled into a rage. You quickly stormed out of this school.” While saying this, he pushed a younger student on the stairs and spilled his books to the ground dramatically.
He also committed his first murder.

Our hero quickly called a cab from the street and takes it home to his father’s large mansion. The driver left him at the end of a winding driveway. He marched past a guard, cursing in some daze about the lush grounds surrounding his palace.

As he passed the front porch the maid had not brought the American cheddar cheese squares on sticks, so he smashed the overhead light. It fell to the ground and he stomped it with two feet sure to twist the ruins of the broken glass into dust and marking the expensively varnished wood.

Richard Channing’s grey suit pants were covered in dust and he suddenly burst into tears. The crying lasted but a moment, until he slapped his own face. “Bitch!” he screamed at himself before running inside, catching his pressed pants on a sliver he made in the varnished wood and tearing the leg up the side.
He began to do what most teenagers would, jumping towards the couch to try and break his neck. If he had truly wanted to he would have. But there our hero rested, holding a throw pillow and twisting back and forth.

So he stood from the couch and stormed towards the kitchen. He grabbed a knife from the drawer and ran back to the living room. Well he stabbed through the pillow little Rick smiled, pausing to carve through the couch on the other side. He pulled the knife through the middle of the cushion and tore the blade back towards himself.

He nearly cut his suit pants and threw the knife to the floor before running crying up the nearest stairs.

He found his thoughts in an upstairs bedroom. It was on the left at the end of the hall furthest from the stairs. It was the first time in ages that he sat on that bed cross-legged and crying. When he stopped his tears he was shaking back and forth with his eyes fixed tight on the mirror behind the dresser.

He sat there still after a moment and mouthed words at his reflection, “Yeah, man. Keep crying. Ladies like that.”

He had learned from his father that strong words make strong people. It is okay to be hard on yourself once in a while. Always be faithful. Learn from tough words. Do so with fortitude. That is the right thing to do.

So Rick Channing stood from his bed and straightened his sheets out.

He took off his school suit and began to speak his actions as he preformed them, “You slip out from here and put on a ragged tracksuit. You put on your fine leather dress shoe and stomp down the stairs. You pick the knife up off the living room floor. You stomp your way through the down remains of the couch.”

And of course our hero began to narrate, “White feathers mark the floor around the room and the gash in the couch seems remarkable. You think that you will have to blame the oldest Mexican servant for you, of course, were at school. For this purpose I smile at the idea of the woman who raised you to be hurt by your actions.”

He strolled out the front door of your family’s mansion, “This means you are better than the servant. So you slide the kitchen knife into your kangaroo pocket and begin the march down the driveway to that big black gate. When you reach the end of the driveway you step past the guard, mentioning in passing that you must get back to school…”

This was a lie but it made him feel good.
His hooded sweatshirt is grey, like the clouds above his bitter world’s sky.

He knew that he should go back to his private school. The next course was math, taught by that sexy long-legged redhead. Dick had told a few students that he had bought her dinner and jewelry in exchange for some tutoring and housekeeping.

None of that matters now. They all heard what he said. The funny thing was she hadn’t rebutted. The people at school must have known it was rude to discuss a pretty teachers history with students. The student he had told felt he had a chance with this teacher if only he kept silent. He spent most of his classes grinning. He would wink when he answered a question, quite as Richard suggested. And Dick Channing smiled his half a smile, crooked on the right of his face in such a way rumors of his health sometimes surfaced.

But Dick Channing would cringe at the thought that people in those hallways heard him when his thoughts drifted to fantasies of his father’s military brigade. The old black and white photo had his fathers face burned out. Our hero had told friend he did that in a fight with him and he regretted it. The truth was he regretted it for other reasons.

He even doubted that the classmates even believed such tales of such a redhead.

The truth was, he didn’t even know if she was cute. It came from a conversation overheard in the hallway between classes. A calm terror he had to repress made his left eye twitch once. Richard cracked his half a smile instead.