D Howland Abbott
Sit beside the breakfast table. Think about your troubles. Pour yourself a cup of tea, and think about the bubbles. You can take a teardrop and drop it in a teacup. Take it down to the riverside and throw it over the side to be swept up by a current and taken to the ocean to be eaten by some fishes, who are eaten by some fishes and swallowed by a whale who grew so old he decomposed. He died and left his body to the bottom of the ocean. Now, everybody knows that when a body decomposes, the basic elements are given back to the ocean. And the sea does what it oughta, and soon there’s salty water—not too good for drinkin’, ‘cuz it tastes just like a teardrop. Goin’ right into a filter, it comes out from a faucet and it pours into a teapot which is just about to bubble. Now: think about your troubles.
– Harry Nilsson
I have heard it said that LSD, once ingested, remains in your system forever. They say that it sits, hibernating or just bored, somewhere in the gnarl of one’s spinal column; waiting for an inopportune moment to put on its hobnail boots and start stomping around. When this happens, often for no discernible reason (although I have found that certain geographical locations have a tendency to agitate the little devil), it is referred to colloquially as an ‘acid flashback’.
I thought about this one day as I carefully teased the battered green sleeve of a thirty-five year old LP from the indelicately over-stuffed bookshelf which holds a large segment of my personal music library. It’s a collector’s nightmare, that bookshelf—forced to hold far too many platters, with only the rarest and most expensive afforded a plastic sleeve for protection from the dust and ring wear that the others fell victim to years ago. The record I had just liberated from its place on the shelf—a copy of Harry Nilsson’s psychedelic parable The Point!—has been played seven hundred and fifty two times since I stole it from my mother when I was seven. I carefully removed the disc, fit it onto the spindle of the turntable which is by far the most expensive thing that I own, and dropped the needle into the outer groove. Then, using a chewed pencil, I scratch a hash mark on the inside of the record’s worn gatefold sleeve. Seven hundred and fifty three.
Welcome to the Land of Point, where everything is pointed and nothing isn’t. The birds, the trees, the houses—even the people; everything has a point on the top of its head. One day, a little boy named Oblio is born to a set of normally pointed parents. But he is different—poor Oblio is born round-headed. Oblio’s mother knits him a pointed cap to help him blend in, but the cap only serves to draw attention to Oblio’s ‘pointless condition’.
I was raised Mormon, one of seven children born to a pair of devout Mormon parents. This is an awkward and uncomfortable introduction which never quite sounds right, like the way Steve Martin’s character Navin Johnson introduces himself in the opening scene of The Jerk: “I was born a poor black child.” In the summer before I started eighth grade, my parents moved my family from the small suburb of Sacramento where I grew up to a farmhouse which sat on five acres of almond trees in the countryside of central California. Their stated purpose was to isolate the family from society so that we could collectively center ourselves on a life lived in devotion to the tenets of the Mormon church. That little farmhouse became the Land of Point, with my family’s unshakable faith representing the points on the tops of their heads. And so I became Oblio, different from the very first. Pointless. Faithless. I didn’t have the benefit of a knitted cap with which to conceal my pointless condition, and so I had to pretend. To spare myself the scrutiny which would certainly have resulted from admitting my lack of faith to my parents, I wore my black wool on the inside until I was old enough to leave home. When in Morm, I used to joke to myself, do as the Mormons do.
I shared a room with my two brothers, and my four sisters shared the room adjacent. As a concession to their children for uprooting them and relocating them to a new home nearly twenty miles from the nearest gas station, my parents allowed my brothers and I to choose the color which we would paint the walls of our new bedroom. I convinced my brothers that our only option was a hideous, eye-blistering shade of lime green.
I have only my own point of reference, but I believe that the act of raising a massive Mormon family must be an existential nightmare for a set of Mormon parents. Shepherding seven children through the gates of heaven surely requires a tremendous amount of effort. So much, in fact, that I am certain that months or years must go by where a Mormon mother and father have no choice but to take it on faith that several of their children are diligently clinging to the iron rod of the teachings of the church while appropriate levels of attention are paid to the children who are more obviously in need of guidance.
My sister Carolyn was diagnosed with Autism at the age of three, less than a year after our move to the farm, and so for a long time my parents’ primary concern was the aggressive in-home therapy sessions which would hopefully ensure that she would be able to speak in complete sentences by the time she had to start grade school. My aberrant faithlessness went unnoticed.
The almond trees which surrounded our home were all very dead. They had been grazed to the point of uselessness by a small herd of feral llamas which had been abandoned by the property’s previous owners. In an attempt to teach my brothers and I the value of a summer spent laboring in the hot sun, we were charged with harvesting what few almonds the trees had produced by laying dusty tarps at their bases and knocking the almonds down onto them using lengths of bamboo. We performed this task grudgingly, with the promise of being able to split the money the almonds would bring in dangling before us and lacking the option to refuse anyway.
We spent weeks hitting dead trees with pieces of other dead trees. In the end, we had knocked more hornet’s nests from their branches than we had almonds. The net worth of the almonds themselves ended up being less than the cost of the tarps we had used to collect them. Retiring the hated bamboo sticks into a pile near the shed, my brothers and I thought we might finally be able to enjoy what remained of that first summer on the farm the way young boys should be allowed to, but the bamboo had other things in mind. Coming home one day, the dried and splintered bamboo stalks put into my mother’s head the image of her own childhood home. My mother’s parents lived less than ten miles away, in a farmhouse surrounded by a tremendous bamboo forest.
Bamboo trees grow like a weed, with their pointed little heads showing as much as thirty-nine inches of growth in as little as twenty-four hours. My mother was certain that achieving a bamboo forest as majestic as that of her parents was as simple as sending her boys over to collect an appropriate number of shoots to transplant along the driveway of our home. Having no choice, my brothers and I glumly set about this new task. We planted enough bamboo to feed a nation of panda bears.
While my grandparents down the road were preparing to celebrate their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary and resting in the shade of a life well-lived, a family well-reared, a relationship appropriately cultivated and a bamboo forest that had grown wild for decades, my parents were struggling to round the bend to their thirtieth anniversary and waiting for the trees they had planted to take root and thrive. The few bamboo that broke through the dry soil looked as sickly and brown as the almond trees. Our forest never grew. My family began to fall apart.
By the time he grows to be a young man, Oblio has become accustomed to being different and thus accustomed to making pointed efforts to conceal his peculiarity. The knitted cap given to him by his mother helps to some extent, and being perfectly normal in every other regard he makes friends and lives peacefully among the people of the Land of Point. He is raised happily by his parents until one day he runs afoul of the son of the evil Count by beating him in a game of Triangle Toss. The son of the Count runs to his father, who is the advisor to the King of the Land of Point. The Count, in turn, cruelly reminds the King of the law of the land: Everything in the Land of Point must have one. Painfully aware of his duty, the King calls for Oblio’s banishment to the Pointless Forest.
Growing up, my parents made a point of telling us often that our family was different—special, stronger, stopping just short (or sometimes not) of declaring that we were favored by God. I don’t know if this is a common conceit among large Mormon families; at the time I wasn’t inclined to question it, but these claims put the lie to themselves when my father woke up one morning with a cold sore the size and color of a thunderhead blooming on his lower lip. The fault lines widened and spread from that point onward.
I was sitting in the room I shared with my two brothers one afternoon, our beds almost overlapping in the minimal space, when suddenly and again I heard my parents arguing bitterly. Posters of the Ninja Turtles and Bart Simpson bickered for wall space with framed paintings of the Angel Moroni and pictures of the Mormon temple on the wall near my brother Oliver’s bed, while photographs of post-punk bands and images of Pink Floyd lyrics spray-painted on the Berlin Wall identified my quadrant as a secular space. Mom had reached one of a very few obvious conclusions about the cold sore, and Dad was perjuring himself with absurd claims about the ‘negative energies’ our house was apparently smothered in. “I’ve seen things out in those almond orchards, Jenni, and I know you have too. I don’t know what you did to drive the Holy Spirit out of our home, but it is making me physically sick and something has to be done.”
Dad was an attorney, a schooled and practiced liar, and so it was disappointing when the best explanation he could muster for his newly contracted face-herpes involved ghosts. It was bad enough having to listen to my parents shout at each other about mysterious venereal diseases without having the idea that there were ghoulies lurking among the trees put into my head; I could see those damn trees from my bedroom window. Already anticipating nights spent sleepless and watchful for a malicious specter intent on dick-slapping an incurable disease onto my face, I tuned out the sound of my parents relationship dismantling itself by plugging my pair of comically over-sized studio monitor headphones into the little record player I had back then and, for the four hundred and seventeenth time, positioned the stylus over the lead groove and flicked the little bar that would drop me into the Land of Point.
*
It wasn’t until years after I left my parents’ home and took my place in a wiser world of bigger motor cars, as Little Milton would say, that I became aware of the rare and little-understood condition known as synesthesia. A synesthete is a person whose brain chemistry, for whatever reason, is such that signals which trigger one sense will simultaneously trigger another. The most common form of this condition is audio-visual synesthesia, which causes a person to visualize sounds and music as bright flashes of color. A particular tone or combination of tones is assigned, neurologically, a certain shade of green or orange or red; a person such as this will often describe the act of listening to a piece of music as being similar to watching an elaborate fireworks display. The effect is not unlike an acid trip.
Another form of synesthesia, audio-tactile, is far more rare; a person with audio-tactile synesthesia will experience a piece of music—especially one to which they are particularly responsive—as an overwhelming, full body sensation akin to orgasm. A descending pentatonic scale in a minor key can nearly incapacitate an audio-tactile synesthete with an indescribable, alien pleasure; the movements of these sensations through the body will often keep pace exactly with the tempo and mood of the music.
Against what seem like absurd odds, I am both an audio-visual and audio-tactile synesthete. When I was a young man—which is to say, before the internet—I had no way of knowing that this unusual manner of processing stimuli wasn’t standard for all people. I just knew that I sometimes felt things more strongly, and often couldn’t understand why something that would trigger such beautiful and profound sensations would be regarded as anything less than mystical to the people around me.
I had no idea how fortunate I was, or would grow to consider myself to be when I finally learned that this state of being is in fact incredibly rare. My mother had no point of reference for it either; I imagine she was often somewhat concerned when she would walk into my bedroom to find me blissfully rolling around on the floor, fully clothed, as ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ blared from my dilapidated hi-fi.
Even so, The Point! was always something different. The physical effect that Nilsson’s masterpiece had on me then, and has on me still, was much more profound than the vivid, electrical thrill I would get from the Beatles or Jethro Tull or King Crimson. Buried deep in the contemplative stroll which ties the songs and narrative segments of that record together is a biorhythmic key which essentially resets all of my clocks; without fail, the insistent I-IV-V chord progressions for which Harry Nilsson was known would reach deep inside my body and calm my entire system. Within moments of hearing the introductory strains of album opener ‘Everything’s Got ‘Em’, I feel my heart slowing and my thoughts clearing. I feel my muscles relaxing even as the hairs on the back of my arm and neck lift their pointed heads to the sky. Once again, the effect is not unlike an acid trip.
In moments of crisis—which would, in the coming weeks, occur with terrible frequency—The Point! was my escape pod.
*
Like my parent’s financial concerns, or my sister Carolyn’s ongoing struggle with Autism, the cold sore became a problem for the entire family to confront. The infidelity it suggested was never mentioned. Only ghosts—meddling, malevolent ghosts, creeping into our home and destroying our sense of peace. Talk of the ghosts saturated our lives, and soon my parents had whipped my brothers and sisters into a holy frenzy.
Ghosts were everywhere. A dehydration ghost knocked my dad’s fat ass down while he was out mowing the weeds in 105 degree heat a week later. A ghost that was tired of listening to Oingo Boingo was apparently trapped in the t-shirt I got at my very first concert, so Mom threw it away hoping it would dispel those damn negative energies. Some kind of burned spaghetti ghost demanded that we order a pizza even though we lived too far from town to have it delivered and it was in direct violation of the dietary restrictions Dad’s doctor had laid down. Talkin’ ghost fever blues. I got so worked up over the apparent hordes of ghosts that I took to sleeping on a little futon at the foot of my parents’ bed—not to worry, the herpes ghost made sure nothing was going on there. For months I tried so hard to avoid falling asleep that I would wake up in terrors after reaching only the shallowest levels of unconsciousness.
One night, I rolled over in my tepid sleep and sensed a figure standing over me. I cracked my eyes open, and for five seconds my fears became manifest: there stood a woman, dressed all in white and perfectly still, apparently watching me sleep. Terrified, I began kicking and rolling away, tangled in blankets. The figure stooped over me; I heard it whispering ‘No! No, no.’ It sounded like it was trying to be soothing and it looked like it was trying to embrace me. Blind with fear, I shrieked and flailed as I felt the ghost wrap its arms around me.
Banished, frightened and alone, little Oblio finds himself with nowhere to go but into the wilds of the Pointless Forest. Starting down the trail which leads away from the Land of Point, Oblio meets the first of many strange and unpredictable characters: the Pointed Man. With faces which reach towards every compass point, the wisdom that the Pointed Man has for Oblio is perfectly vague: “A point in every direction is the same as… as no point at all!” Unsure what to make of this advice, Oblio continues on his way hoping to find shelter for the night.
My brothers and sisters were under the influence of my parents’ surreal paranoia. The Mormon church claims that the spirit world occupies the same space that we inhabit in the physical realm, and that the only reason we aren’t aware of it is because of a metaphysical barrier called the ‘veil’. Reports of places where the veil has grown thin are not uncommon, and because of this Mormonism is steeped in its own particular brand of ghost stories.
For reasons I do not understand, the sturdy faith of my brothers made their questionable encounters with the ghosts somehow less distressing; they took it in stride. My four sisters were all younger by at least five years; their ability to correctly interpret the emotional undertones our family life had taken on were limited. They primarily occupied themselves by acting as a miniature society for Carolyn, whose Autism had proven to be so severe as to have closed off any concern for the ghosts, or my parents’ relationship, or the connection between the two. Half of the garage had been converted into a makeshift therapy room, where Carolyn spent her days earning pieces of candy for correctly identifying pictures of horses and goats and pigs.
Deep down, of course, my parents knew that they were lying to their children. If the lie was serving to reinforce my brothers’ faith or failing to interfere with the lives of my sisters to any great extent, then they could see no harm. As ever, I was the anomaly. My nerves were suitably rattled—not least of all by my own encounter with the ‘ghost’ who had turned out to be my own mother, who had been standing over me in her white nightgown, watching me sleep. But I wasn’t buying the ‘ghosts gave my father herpes’ bullshit, so my emotional distress needed to be attributed to something else and my parents didn’t know what it was.
And so it was that I was deposited on the couch of one Robert Smith, M.D. Doctor Bob was a psychiatrist, a reformed hippie, and—of course—a Mormon. I was confused and felt horribly lost. Like Oblio, I was feeling my way through strange and unfamiliar territory one cautious step at a time, wondering what I had done so wrong that I would find myself in such a miserable situation. Dr. Bob entered the room wearing what had to have been an intentionally ugly tie. He was still a relatively young man, probably in his late thirties, but his hair was the premature white of a car crash survivor; of someone who has been almost, but not quite, scared to death. It sat in a wild tangle on his head offsetting his babyish face, making for a distinctly unsettling appearance.
“Hello, David!” Dr. Bob cried ebulliently as he shook my hand. His grip was damp and loose, and I remember having the thought that he had just been masturbating in the bathroom. A point in every direction, indeed. “Your mother tells me that you are having some trouble. Let’s talk about it.”
“You could say that, Dr. Bob. You could say I’m having some trouble. I could say it too, and frankly I wish I had been the one who had. For our purposes, I don’t see the benefit of having had my mother brief you on precisely what it is that is bothering me, considering that my mother is a large part of the problem.”
Dr. Bob grunted in surprise. Whatever response he had been expecting, apparently that wasn’t it. It’s useful to get the upper hand in situations like this one, so we were off to a good start. Mom had paid for fifty minutes of counseling from Dr. Bob, and I could see them stretching out before me like the deserts of Mars. He seemed ready to start diagnosing me before we had known each other for five minutes, and it was pretty obvious that my ma and the Doc were all buddy-buddy anyway. I assumed that anything I might say to him would be relayed directly to my mother, confidentiality be damned. So I happily and effortlessly lied to him.
[To continue on to the second part of this two-part article go here.]
