Sanity's Bane

By Vincent Collazo

Four-year-old Victor falls in love with six-year-old Janice, a disturbed girl from an abusive home, and is rapidly sucked into an alluring vortex of love and madness."Sanity's Bane" follows Victor through a real-life science fiction adventure, unrequited love, unwholesome ruminations on death, a cross-country trek as a fugitive from the rich & powerful, the search for and discovery of a literary hero/ghost, and strange encounters with the insect kingdom. Elizabeth Ruiz, author of the acclaimed play, "Death By Survival" writes, "We are all misfits-but not all misfits are the same. Some, like Victor in Sanity's Bane, help us to fall in love with life despite the hardships. Sanity's Bane is both highbrow and down-to-earth, dark yet full of hope. It paints poetic pictures, waxes philosophical, and tells a story which is both moving and hilarious. 'Sanity's Bane' is a reminder that the love we feel is ours forever."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257303786

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Prologue

History is glorified gossip, according to Lucius Azencole. Accepting this premise—and extrapolating that gossip is therefore History—one might feel ennobled by the public display of the most intimate details of one’s life. I feel no need to hide behind such rarefied ideas; I’m content to attribute the outpouring that follows to rank exhibitionism. If lurid ostentation offends your sensibility, I beseech you: read no further.

It isn’t often that I beseech, but I wish to throw from my shoulders the weight of those readers who would bring a judgmental eye to my story, as well as titillate the more adventuresome. No doubt I will disappoint perusers of all stripes. What then do I hope to gain? Perhaps this answer shall reveal itself (to me, to you) in the course of splaying the cards of my life before you. Plodding ahead in ignorance is a familiar circumstance to us all; one might make a case for it as the human condition.

All choices, no matter how well calculated, tend to feel arbitrary to me. Nevertheless I will begin with Galileo. It wasn’t until 1979 that Pope John Paul II rescinded the excommunication of Galileo and, in so doing, acceded to the fact that, alas, the earth does revolve around the sun. I shall forever have a soft spot in my heart for the Catholic Church’s slowness to recognize scientific progress, for in 1956 Pope Pius XII was promulgating a particularly ineffective mode of birth control known as the Rhythm Method, of which I am the happy result.

It is a strange phenomenon to owe my life to an organization which represents so much that is antithetical to my existence. I use this thought as my personal Zen koan.

My mother told me the Rhythm Baby anecdote without being conscious (I hope!) that she was transmitting the message that I was unwanted. On the other side of the parental conduct ledger, my mother revealed, on a separate occasion, that the night upon which I was conceived was resplendent with love and lovemaking. Perhaps, bolstered by Papal infallibility, my parents erroneously felt free from consequences, allowing them to express their love for each other with passionate abandon. I’ve spent my life attempting to recapture the ecstatic love of which I am both byproduct and encapsulation. How many layers must I peel before I once again luminesce? Will you strip down with me so that we might dance together in the ether?

I don’t mind your knowing that my words are intended as an elaborate seduction. I imagine you as beautiful, therefore you are. Why address a Gentle Reader when I can have a Sexy one? What else may I entice you with? I’ll whisper in your ear not only sweet nothings, but bitter somethings too.

There is much I need to tell you. I want to explain my cannibalism (why mince words when bones will do?); I wish to describe Janice Cooley, a beautiful and beguiling girl; I would like to introduce you to Lucius Azencole, the famed science fiction author; I must also inform you of my brother Slip’s fate.

In the telling of one’s own story there is great temptation to exaggerate virtues and minimize faults, but subconscious elisions are more insidious and memory is a limited tool. This, I think, was the lesson Lucius Azencole wished to impart to me after I recounted my earliest childhood memory. As I completed my story his frown worried me. Rarely did his face display any expression but a frown—it was his automatic response to life. Azencole was in his mid-seventies and looked older. His skin, pale from years of hermitic indoor living, fit loose and wrinkled over his bones. When Azencole slept he looked more dead than alive and when he awoke he still might be taken for an open-eyed cadaver.

I was compelled to bleat with an unusual loss of composure: Lucius, I swear, I’m not sentimental on any other subject but that one. I did not wish him to dismiss me as naïve—above all I needed for him to take me seriously. Lucius Azencole has been described as many things, but never once has the accusation of sentimentality been leveled at him.

My first memory, as told to Lucius Azencole: My family was moving from the Bronx to Long Island, into a Levit house. My brother and I danced on the front lawn, amid dandelions and crab apples, while our mother and father looked on from the kitchen bay window. I broke away from the dance and with pure exhilaration skipped and leapt through our new neighbors’ yards until I was stopped by what seemed an unreal image: a red-haired girl sitting on the grass with her legs stretched in front of her in a V-shaped formation. On her lap was a tidy bunch of hand-plucked dandelions; their delicate weight gently pushed her powder-blue dress onto the grass. The colors of this scene live vividly in my mind—the orange of her hair, yellow dandelions, green grass, blue dress, and the milk-white of her freckled legs. More than the sudden exchange of city grays for suburban pastels was at work; as we stared silently across the yard at each other I felt an indefinable force enfold me. She scooped up the flowers and clutched them into a tiny bouquet, looked coyly from her hands to me, arose, turned and skipped away, leaving me gaping and gasping.

I have thought about these, my first moments in Albinville, for many years. I have obsessed about it on nights when sleep has eluded me, yet always there remains an ineffable aura surrounding it. It seemed that all of life rushed into me, that it was at that moment I became aware of myself. I fell in love and nothing else mattered. I was four years old and fell in love. Is it possible? I was four and had been waiting all my life for her. It sounds silly. It may be my fantasy of what happened. Who knows what tricks the years have played on my memory. I’ll protect that memory, false or not, until the day I die. When I’ve nothing else left in my head, this memory, the girl, those flowers, that grass, shall be the measure of all reality.

I swore to Lucius, as if he cared, that I was not ordinarily one to wax romantic. My boy, he rasped, hard and cold, I am merely testing a hypothesis. He’d read a scientific study which had drawn two conclusions: first, that the initial event one remembers is a hallmark for one’s view of the world. Second, that one’s earliest memory generally changes at various stages of one’s life. Not only does primal memory affect one’s outlook on life, but one’s outlook on life also affects the primal memory.

If Azencole had been trying to learn something about the theory or me, he’d been cheated. The girl with the dandelion bouquet, whose name was Janice Cooley, was far from being my absolute first memory; I’d used that story because it was the most powerful.

My true archetypal remembrance occurred when I was two years old. I was alone in my crib, in the children’s room of our Bronx apartment. My father was watching television in the living room while my mother fed my infant brother in my parents’ bedroom. I was resisting sleep and heard the Venetian blinds rustling. The tall dresser blocking the window tumbled forward creating a tremendous crash as objects splattered across the floor. The teenager who’d broken in from the fire escape pushed his head in from under the blinds.

I screamed. He was white with long, straight, brown hair. He wore a black beret, and said, in a sympathetic wise-guy tone: Sorry kid. I was just looking for my pigeon. My mother entered the room and added her scream. The would-be burglar disappeared from the window, and made his way down the fire escape.

In light of the theory of first memory championed by Azencole, it would seem that I see and react to the world as a criminal attempting to break into my room, disturbing my security and tranquility. This doesn’t seem far off the mark. Will the burglar vanish from my memory banks one day and be supplanted by a less paranoid image?

Part One:

Kwelnigon

The Diamond People

It was rare for Janice Cooley to laugh, but when I entered the pigeon coop for the first time she gleefully cackled at the contortions my face made in response to the overwhelming stench of pigeon droppings and eggs. I know I can be alone in here, she said. It seemed an exceptionally high price for solitude, but I was determined to stomach the odors in order to prove myself worthy of her. The grey wooden floor of the coop, densely flecked with years of pigeon leavings, looked as if Jackson Pollock had decided to work in a new medium. Janice trod barefoot upon it, absentmindedly scraping her big toe nail into the pattern from time to time. The longer I stayed inside the coop the more she seemed to trust me; after a great while I ceased smelling my surroundings.

My father built this coop a long time ago. Before I was born even. My mother says the only thing my father brought when they moved from the City was his five best pigeons and her. I never been to the City. Though my family had just moved from the Bronx I was unable to describe it to Janice’s satisfaction. It seemed an unreal blur to me—large, dark and forbidding. When we got older we’d go back together, Janice said; I had no desire to return to the ominous City but her proposition seemed far enough in the future that I could safely agree. I wanted nothing more than to ingratiate myself with Janice. She held me hypnotically in her power; I cried inside when in her presence, not knowing why.

After several hours in the pigeon coop the mysterious bond between us was solidified. Stepping outside I retched, though my heaving produced nothing. Acclimating to the coop made fresh air a poisonous gas. When I got home my mother threw me in the tub and scrubbed me clean, holding her nose and warning me that wherever it was I’d been playing, I’d better never go there again.

The next day I was back in the coop. Afterwards, I met Janice’s family. What’s this? her mother asked when Janice introduced me. Mrs. Cooley held a bottle of beer in one hand and an unfiltered cigarette in the other. Her voice was harsh and throaty, her eyes reddened and suspicious. She swigged the beer, coughed into her wrist and said, Wha’d ya say his name ’uz? Mrs. Cooley became distracted by the game show playing on a small black and white TV atop the kitchen counter and lost interest in the answer to her own question.

Let’s go to my room, Janice said as her mother became engrossed in a swirl of cash earnings and prizes. Janice, at six, was only two years my senior, but moved about the house with an assuredness that made her seem far more mature. Like a proper young woman who has been taught the value of grace under pressure, Janice rose above the situation to conduct herself with elegant restraint. Her understated comportment was in such striking contrast to her ragged clothing and barefoot tomboy persona that I was momentarily afraid I was with a well-mannered twin of Janice, whom I didn’t think I’d like as much. When we got to her room and the door was shut and locked Janice said, She’s a drunk and I hate her.

A variety of objects and knick-knacks were displayed in her room. I stole ’em all, Janice said proudly. This one I took from the principal’s office when he was looking at my records, she said while fingering a clear glass ball used as a paperweight. And this pen is my shrink’s—instead of taking notes he doodled. It’s a pretty good pen. I didn’t know what a shrink was, but my four-year-old mind imagined him to be a tiny artist. I felt thrilled to be holding his golden pen.

Janice continued the litany of filched items. We went to a carnival and I sat on a clown’s lap—he squeezed my leg so I stole his nose. Here, put it on. It was too large for my nose, and I placed it on my ear.

This T-shirt was Tommy Cahill’s. I got into a fight with him last summer. I beat him up and took it right off him. He stood there crying with his skinny chest showing. I felt sorry for him so I made up with him the next week. But I’ll never give the shirt back.

Let me show you something else, Janice said, opening the door of her closet, then jumped back with a sharp gasp. A small girl, with straight black hair and pale white skin stood in the entry, wearing nothing but a faded beige nightgown. Babs! How many times have I told you not to hide in there? Janice flung the child out by her hair; strangely, the little girl didn’t react in any discernible manner. She sat on the bed, stared at Janice with big moist brown eyes and blinked once. All right, it’s okay, Janice said, as if the girl had spoken. You want to stay here with us for awhile?

Then, turning to me, This is my little sister Babs. This is Victor—he lives next door. He’s the one I told you about.

Hi, I said.

Babs blinked once at me. It seemed all the acknowledgement I would get. Babs can talk, she just usually doesn’t.

We spent the next couple of hours in Janice’s room, largely acting as if Babs wasn’t there—and for her part Babs either watched us or stared at some unknown point against the wall or on the ceiling.

Mr. Cooley came home. I was surprised to find that he was meek and quiet—in direct contrast to Janice’s description. He had curly gray hair and bore no physical resemblance to either of his daughters. We watched him arrive and snuck into the kitchen to catch a glimpse of him munching on a snack. She didn’t dare introduce me because her father was angry with her and Janice thought he wouldn’t like me, just to spite her. It wasn’t long before he stalked into the backyard and disappeared into the pigeon coop.

In order to spend as much time as I could with Janice, I told my mother of the wonderful chocolate chip cookies Mrs. Cooley baked for us, the enchanting stories Mr. Cooley acted out for our delight, the Parcheesi games that Janice and I were so fond of, and how Babs would make a great playmate for my little brother Slip. This was the sort of idyllic suburban living for which my family had come to Albinville. The vicarious joy my mother derived from my descriptions of Life with the Cooleys made me wish that at least some of it were true.

One benefit of my friendship with Janice was that she had access to her father’s Playboy magazines. Fascinated at first by female breasts, I soon wondered about the lower portion of their anatomy. Even the hint of a pubic hair would have caused a scandal at that time; each month the beauties found new ways to conceal that mysterious region. I demanded from Janice as many issues as she could steal without her father suspecting. We’d sit in the pigeon coop and she’d watch me voraciously speed through the pages in search of a photograph—one picture—that would show what it was that women kept between their legs. Each viewing increased my exasperation—what were these voluptuous women hiding?

I ached to solve this mystery. My resources were limited—I knew that both my father and mother would know the answer but suspected they would not provide it. My father was unapproachable on such a matter—in fact he was unapproachable on all matters. He wasn’t a large man but his voice had a low boom that penetrated my bones. I cringed the moment he walked into the room. He rarely spoke to me except to give a command and often would do this in the third person. Tell Victor to get his feet off the couch, he’d say to my mother. This treatment was endurable; what I found most frightening was sitting alone with him in the living room for an hour or more without a word being said. He would slowly flick the pages of the newspaper harder and harder. When he flicked pages hard it indicated anger—at what was anyone’s guess. Usually it turned out to be me. I’d sit in silence trying not to notice his increasing fury, which was somewhat like pretending you’re not really in an earthquake. He would suddenly lower the newspaper and I would see his face; his eyes would focus on me for a terrifying instant and he would boom out, Get your feet off the couch! I’d do so immediately, glad to finally know what was arousing his ire. My father would go back to flicking his newspaper pages hard—unappeased.

Perhaps you can understand my reluctance to ask my father about what the voluptuous women were hiding between their legs. Although it was possible to talk with my mother, that she constantly covered up for my father made her suspect. She would say things like Your father is tired tonight, he’s had a hard day at work. Or, Your father just wants what’s best for you and, Your father loves you in his own way. It would have been nice to hear my father say any one of these things himself. Still, I might have asked my mother about the women except that she was one herself. Though far from being voluptuous I sensed that she too would have an interest in keeping hidden what those magazine women would so coyly and inventively conceal. Sometimes they held a large blue feather in front of them, or strategically stood in back of flowers or bushes; mostly they would simply cross their legs in an infuriating manner. I remained with the anatomical puzzle and begged Janice to find more magazines in the hopes that in one of those photos one of those women would relieve me of my ignorance. At night I lay awake creating bodily parts that would fit in that small region, wondering not only what women were hiding but why.

In the autumn I started kindergarten and made friends with a classmate named Craig Smith. Craig lived four houses away from me but it took school to bring us together since Janice consumed nearly all of my first summer in Albinville. What I liked about Craig was his regular appearance and behavior. His mother was in the PTA, his father played golf—they were the epitome of a suburban family, enjoying a lifestyle that my parents could never quite bring themselves to possess. My parents would remain the children of immigrants, the stain of the Depression indelibly marked upon their psyches. When they spoke of themselves it was the past that glowed most brightly—the City Past, the Poverty Past, the Five-Kids-in-a-Room Past featuring the loony characters and criminal element of their old neighborhood. The Past they had escaped sounded alluring; I felt cheated. When they refused to join the community in Albinville I felt doubly swindled—why had they brought us here? They’d had a dream, they’d bought a house—but it was someone else’s house, someone else’s dream.

The first thing my mother did after giving birth to each of her children was to count the fingers and toes. She had a fear of giving birth to something which, if not precisely a monster, was also not exactly normal. I am the fruit of my mother’s paranoia.

I did have a birth defect that was evident upon my arrival—an enlarged navel. The doctor’s explanation for it was that I had a congenital umbilical hernia. This may be so, but I think that the true root of the difficulty had to do with the pain associated with the separation from my mother, to which I was preternaturally sensitive. The doctor taped a silver half-dollar over my navel to keep it from further distention. My bellybutton was (and is) an awesome sight to behold. It juts about three-quarters of an inch and the knot is shaped like that ubiquitous yellow smiley face, minus the eyes. In later childhood, before going to the beach, I would fill in these missing parts of my navel face with a magic marker in order to amuse those who wished to ogle my prodigious natural body ornament.

In transporting us from the South Bronx to Albinville our parents Anglicized as much as possible—our surname became Cruise instead of Cruz. The absence of that distinctive z was a small price to pay to help our neighbors accept us. Long Island’s only contact with Puerto Ricans in those days were the ones portrayed by Natalie Wood and George Chakiris in West Side Story, with music by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim—not very high on the verisimilitude scale. In keeping with our parents’ Americanization plan the Spanish language was hidden, if not forbidden—used solely by my parents when speaking in code to each other on subjects deemed unfit for the children. With the exception of traditional food, our being Puerto Rican held little meaning for me; it seemed distant and foreign. I grew up in the same cultural vacuum as all the white boys did. Years later, I would feel more comfortable in the midst of a prep school crowd than I would visiting my own relatives in Puerto Rico. This was the ultimate triumph of our assimilation, albeit one unanticipated by my parents.

If Janice was my link to the adventure that had been abandoned in the Bronx, Craig was the suburban ideal incarnate. It didn’t matter that he was ordinary, too dull to be considered boring; he became a friend. I spent time with him and his younger brother Garee. Little Garee, as he was often called though there was no Big Garee in sight, was one of those kids whose nose was constantly running, face perpetually dirty, whining at the slightest provocation. Mostly we ignored him. Somehow Janice had developed a distinct distaste for Little Garee. She let on that he had offended her, but the possibility seemed extremely remote since the two of them occupied different planes of existence as far as I was concerned. One afternoon in the pigeon coop Janice told me that she wanted my help in striking back against Garee.

Lawns in Albinville had thin, colored fiberglass sticks popping out from the ground, as if someone had planted them. When grass seeds were sown, string was threaded through the sticks to prevent children from trampling the lawn. We were often inspired to pull the fiberglass sticks from the ground to use as play swords. When I asked Janice what her plan was for Little Garee, she pulled up a lime-green stick, whooshed it through the air, and then led me to the side of her house. We stood directly beneath the window to Janice’s bedroom, surrounded by bushes.

I want you to bring Little Garee here. Then pull his pants down and I’ll stick this in his rear end. She brandished the fiberglass stick.

Now? was all I could manage. I’d never considered something so outlandish. I couldn’t imagine what Garee had done, or how to tell Janice I wouldn’t take part in her scheme; I couldn’t think of anything at all for a few moments.

"Not now, she said, first we have to practice."

Practice? Janice yanked her dress over her head, leaving her clothed only in her panties. Her nipples were pink and boyish, as was the rest of her body. Her legs were thin and freckled, her feet, as always, bare. I stared at her flesh, in mindless anticipation. Janice! her mother bellowed from inside the house. I jumped along with my heartbeat. Janice lost her cool for a moment and rushed to pull her dress back on. Wait here, she said, and scampered into the house while I obediently remained to receive her mother’s judgment. I stood frozen in place imagining how embarrassed I’d be when my parents found