the asheville asylum

part 1.

part 3.

in 1980 hamid zartosht safna emigrated to the hamlet of asheville from iran and was promptly naturalized by the citizenry. educated in zoology at uppsala, and in religion and philosophy at cambridge, he was offered the chair of neuropsychiatry at freiburg. his first research dissertation was entitled "wechsler measurements of verbal performance deficits in patients with penetrating brain injury suffering left hemisphere lesions due to misuse of the subarachnoid screw." he became, to our growing cosmopolitan population, a welcome bastion against further penetration (as dr murphy put it, and our new mayor) by foreign dravidians. after only three years he was appointed director of the asylum, a move by the county board of commissioners that ruffled a few feathers among our staff. he was well liked, especially by the growing number of retiring professionals. however, his occasional jests about our indigenous fundamental cosmology did earn him some rebukes by our numerous preachers. on one christmas eve during a conversation regarding the conception of jesus, dr safna, innocently taking the role of historical detective was heard saying, "so he visited mary every night until she finally said 'oh well, what the fuck.'" personally i don't believe he was referring to zeus and his many amorous avatars. he's still here albeit only as titular head of our institute. under his care are jimbo dorr (10), sweeney (62), mort katz (34), jennifer clapsaddle (20), and barry finkel.

update. on wednesday, october 23, 1986 fitzgerald a. sportrane died of massive trauma to the head during a routine morning shower, according to nurse katrin who had been assigned as his special caregiver.  the coroner stated today that he had evidently slipped and fallen, hitting his head on an unusually large brass drain in the custodial showers. he will be cremated at the behest of his family this sunday and his ashes interred on the asheville asylum grounds.

this is Dmoll. we sat in the chapel a while till sweeny finally got the gas lit. nobody from the family came, but murphy, MWF, me, jennifer, daniela, twyla and nurse katrin were there. we invoked by song, god arrived, had a meal- it's good to know that god's got ears and a working olfactory-- the lesser gods got the bones i imagine. nurse katrin was crying especially loud, i guess she knew that she shouldn't have used the fire hose. but i suppose in the great scales of life, saving 2 people outweighs killing 1 person. anyway, it was sad.

dr. ringer, his real name... at least that's what's on his gravestone in the riverside cemetery. but he had others, each for a business he steered from the plaza hotel. of his two biggest enterprises, the mary-you-wanna warehouse was the illegal one and the other was the slaughterhouse. when he up and died everything came out. it seems that he conducted business under various aliases. claude and paul barco who nobody ever saw ran the pork and beef activities. the auctions ran late into the night, some think, too late, like to 3:00 in the morning with the parking lot filled with old jalopies and spent home blown bottles that you'd not want to light a match near. i don't know if the good folks in asheville knew what every schoolboy on a saturday night could see peeking through the seams of the warped plank siding of the auction pen. he had a big woman he called madam doing the calling... she was an attraction some say was a leftover from the portworth carnival. i never had the honor. he'd pass out funny business cards, funny ones that the members of the homemakers club would find in their husbands' billfolds... and raise cain at wednesday's revivals. but worst of all was that these card were being collected, specially by the boys in town who'd pass them around during miss simpson's english class and ask her what this or that word meant. and worst of all miss simpson more than once complained to principal hawkes that there'd be a raucous and a fidgeting under the desks and the boys wouldn't come to the front of the class without carrying a big book in front of them and the girls would be snickering. but in spite of all that, ringer was on every county and city committee there was. he was what you'd call respectable. but worst of all was what came out about the warehouse. ringer claimed that those jagged leafs were a new kind of tobacco plant that he was experimenting with with a grant from the north carolina state agricultural association he called mary-you-wanna. he used to joke that you could smoke it and hogtie someone with the same plant. but there were some of us who knew what he was doing, some of us may not be from chicago but we weren't stupid either. and it wasn't right but what could you do. he was respectable. then one night there was the fire and we all knew which moon shiners had the belly full of him. zeke, jaybird and the cramer brothers. i was there that night. the whole town was lit up like a left on skillet and white smoke was everywhere and when the fire departments from 3 townships and police and another thousand of us arrived we just stood there in that sweet white smoke and couldn't do a thing. and for a couple of hours we all thought that the flames were the most beautiful fireworks we'd ever seen. and then everybody started getting hungry and people were running home and coming back with mountains of food and everybody was eating and having a good time. i will never forget that. anyway. ringer went to miami beach after that and at the waldorf towers hotel on ocean drive at north street he up and suffocated at the bottom of a pile of prostitutes. so we all collected these postcards. but we went on with our living and soon forgot. and that was that. this is sweeny. Dmoll asked me to write a memberance from way back for our own asheville asylum gazette.

this is sweeny again and its 1988 and it was Dmoll's birthday yesterday. we used to celebrate birthdays with balloons but once when sheriff neelys sisters son had one here and he (the sheriff) brought one hellofa balloon like a weather balloon that because he couldn't find any helium went ahead and filled it with propane and anyway since i wasnt there except later to clean up the mess and was as big as a table, so they were all singing and the it was crammed into the buirthday room next to the window and twyla started writing phone numbers on it and i guess was planning to send it up and away as a sorta advertising sign and being a smoker started so i hear getting too close and then it happened. everyone i know wondered why the balloon wouldnt float, but it did after twylas cigarette lit it. it's a wonder that nobody was killed. the fire department came and took everyone to the hospital with minor burns except for twyla. twyla whose shiny long black hair was no more because it was completely burnt to a crisp along with her eyebrows and nurse katrin said when they peeled off her garments she had on one of those braziers with coiled wires in them even though god knows she didnt need them and when they got that off there were like coil burns on her breasts and according to joey who overheard murphy later they were like 2 tattooed targets that really made her look sexy. but i never saw them so i don't know and when Dmoll heard that he decided that one there would be no balloons and two he even wouldnt celebrate his birthday ever again even though he didnt know when he was born. and thats what i knew then and jennifer is here to tell you the other story whose past i just told you about the last party here with balloons. this is jennifer and yes it was Dmolls birthday yesterday and i saw him last night in penny rochers little garden naked. he told me to get a camera and take pictures and told me to read about dionysus and the maenads that he gave me last week. anyway i saw twyla standing on the footpath whirling her hands like she was pulling strings with Dmoll dancing. she was naked from the waist up and he from the waist down. and his hair was curled and knotted and he had long earrings and in about 15 minutes i guess he or word had spread and a lot of women from ward b started to gather. it was embarrassing because i think Dmoll wanted to be the center of an orgy and i was embarrassed to see that he was prepared and pretty eager, but they all just stood there and poor Dmoll just danced and danced with his face painted white and twyla began to chuckle. i felt sad for Dmoll because nothing happened and i had to go to bed and fell asleep reading about dionysus again and the constrained women of athens who occasionally left their husbands to be with young men every once in a while. i just felt sad for him.

MWF shouldn't've told anyone about my room or why i go there or what i do there, because that's private and nobody NOBODY interrupts me when i'm there and NOBODY ever spells my name without a capital D, nobody period, not murphy, not safna, not that new admittance, another capitalist whose wife is cheating on him and he can't run for commissioner cause his son's been arrested and is in rehab and he blames the pushers and he blames the media and he blames the workers at his plant and he thinks god's testing him, but he doesn't blame god. safna and nurse katrin took some blood and pus and i've seen the culture and it oozes and is black and i've seen this shit before and i know who's to blame cause i've read about this drench. marx was right and brecht was right and if yr going stand between two contemptuous philosophies like christianity and ethnocentrism then you've gotta choose. and which one are you going to choose. and i know it's a fool's choice because opposites don't exist because they are hypothesized post facto...but you waver anyway between the two like a like on a tightrope, but there is only one choice, and that is NO choice (thank you sartre), because like marx said if i find that quote DAS SEIN BESTIMMT DAS BEWUSSTSEIN, NICHT DAS BEWUSSTSEIN DAS SEIN. and i know now that hegel was wrong because he was sheer clarity and everybody could understand how simple everything could be and history was clear and cleansing and no guilt, but he was wrong and schoupenhauer was right cause he had balls cause he went to berlin university he gave his courses at the exact same time as that charlatan hegel but nobody listened and hegel corrupted the young minds of the next generation. CORRUPTION because of simplicity. and like right now i know what dante meant in the prophecy "to feel me in the solitude of kings, without the power that makes them bear a crown." i know what it's like to know the answer and nobody's listening, to stand against the glare of a sun and hold up the truth high in my fist and everyone can only see the shadow of it. and i've tried in the kitchen when the supplicants pass by me to give my own bread and to give my own wine and nobody's listening. and that's why his wife's probably cheating on his yes dear, no dear and why he can't run for office because he'd pledged law and order, and wants a private life and he blames his workers for not pushing product, paying for sweat so he gives them free coffee and sugar and donuts, anything to make their hearts beat faster and die sooner so he can hire younger workers and convince himself that their dependency is his meager and crusted glorification, and their dependency makes them just more children in his sick family. cause i've seen this all before and i know the answer but nobody listens. nobody listening. i've seen them coming and punching the time clock in their befuddled post-industrial ritual era and it never changes because they never change because they can work at a company for 20 years and not have grown and so they've reduced themselves to talking about sex organs and soap operas and trucks and any slight deviation from their banal workday and this new nut case wants it that way and doesn't understand why they can't think. and if there were a god then he wouldn't have created the industrial revolution or the slag heap that is zola's le voreux. but i've been on the outside too and i sat under a tree and i have seen more than newton because i could see the through the illusion that my head has created a cushion. like the ditch running alongside the tracks that i could see as almost like a seurat painting but vibrating like monet. the atoms knocking and buzzing around, but i don't have the words. i could see the messenger i could see the atoms and molecules and energy and i could see reality like condensing molecules to form what everyone else calls vapor and i could see the tightness of molecules, the structure like rows of waves but i did not call it iron and i could see zillions of air molecules and sunlight waving in staccato bursts and knew for one magnificent instance the duality of radiation and i knew for one magnificent instance that soon these would disperse and join other atoms and create a thing that has a name. for that instant i saw the messenger, i saw the messenger and i knew that my senses only report what's already receding and what i usually see is not the way it really is out there. i saw the messenger and i saw the messenger but i don't yet understand the message. not yet but i will. i will understand the flux that does not produce names. i know i will. i will because i have seen the messenger.

  Dmoll has been in his room for the past week. MWF told me that this last outburst will probably keep him there until thanksgiving. it was the service they had for the guy who died on wednesday, and i think it was also that sweeny couldn't get the gas lit when the gas should of been lit and it's franklin, because it's getting around the anniversary when he disappeared. i asked MWF if i could take him his food and he said it was alright if Dmoll opened the slit for me to put it in. he's only allowed to see katrin, MFW and murphy. nobody else is allowed into the west wing sub level 1 (see photo, on far left, the lowest level). i work the third shift and when everything is quiet and only when everything is quiet we can hear Dmoll writing with that quill pen he made and then scream and then cry and then repeat that all night long. nobody can understand what he's saying. the diary he keeps is in a language only he can read. he's even showed me pages and pages of scribbling he calls the afflica diaries, he says contains the words of some messenger. who knows. safna, murphy, andrews, katrin and MWF keep meeting about him, but i don't know what they're saying. when they're done everybody leaves except MWF who paces and scratches his chin, then paces some more. i think something is going to happen soon. i'm klaus, been janitor here for over 20 years and know Dmoll pretty good. you know he even has his name on a shiny brass plate his door all in capital letters. i know because i shine it for him every day.

(april, 1996 visi's recollection two years after the asylum fire) when we came here in 1983 my parents had no money left and our education visas had run out. safna and regis managed to hide us and they risked breaking the law to finally get us green cards. my father helped sweeney take care of the grounds and my mother worked in the kitchen. my sisters and i learned a kind of english i'd never heard before. it was hard but instructive. we were always being asked what we did before we came here and try as i might, i could not bring them to understand. they would just stare in amazement when i told them that laksari worked from 8 till dark weaving rugs at the looms of ms. nervati when she was 9 years old. or that the other twin cut and glued bulsa into miniature dining tables and chairs for a dutch merchant who exported to an american gift company. or that shofawati who took up the least space would reel the threads together on large spools. she cried when we left becasue they had told her she would be learning how to weave the raw silk into "mattes" for european artists. i was the fortunate one. since everyone else worked i became the house mother. my mother called them her 3 hands. when my father was a boy he stepped on a stone fish and they had to amputate his left foot. when he was 20 a group of missionaries paid for a mechanical ankle and foot.

this is klaus again. i just got a note from Dmoll and a painting. he slipped it to me last night. i think it's weird but he wanted me to show it to daniela before she leaves. he also wrote a message i'm supposed to give MWF: "for the intellectual to become a true revolutionary he must become one of those whom he shall lead; be them; live their lives; copulate with them; dare to inflict their pains on himself; submit to their vocabulary; and in the end know that one day he must betray them for their own good." i don't know if i should.

november 14, 1987. this is klaus. they found franklin, or what was left of him. not two miles from frank's knob. he only had on his underwear and a sweatshirt from the asylum. daniela's been gone for a while, but writes us. safna got the can but they let him consult, so murphy's acting head of the place. Dmoll's been in his room for 7 or 8 weeks and is still going at it. Dmoll's beginning to get letters from a lot of people. MWF says it's Torrance's book that did it. he's even getting letters from a guy called johann korec in a place called gugging in europe somewhere. another state hospital, says MWF.

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