'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'

"One flew east, one flew west

And one flew over the cuckoo's nest..." 

Back in high school, I took a law class with this excellent teacher I've mentioned a few times, guy named Don. He taught us a very valuable lesson once, which applies to Kesey's most famous novel: if you find yourself in legal trouble, never try to go for an insanity defense (unless, of course, you are batshit). The way he explained this was simple: in prison, you have a date where you get out. Unless you've committed some serious, Dateline-level shit, you can even move that up with parole. On the other hand, if you go to an asylum or a mental ward, your release date is set on when your caretakers decide you're rehabilitated, so it can be a bit indefinite.

Such is the problem faced by protagonist Randle Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. At the time of the writing, his crimes are treated as relatively light and I can turn a blind eye to the gambling. The statuary rape and battery, however, have not aged well either in the film or the book and both serve to make McMurphy less the swashbuckling character he was perceived as then and more a creep in today's eyes, an opinion I'd second.

As the book, or film, progresses, we see the spark of life McMurphy brings into the dull ward run by tyrannical Nurse Ratched. 

His antics continue to escalate, including a lovely fishing trip, as does the tension between McMurphy and Ratched. At some point, McMurphy is quite irked to find out that, with one exception, everyone else on the ward is there voluntarily and can leave of their own volition, he is the only one who is involuntarily there and, therefore, facing further trouble for his shenanigans. But a guy like McMurphy finds a way to bounce back and decides to help Billy Bibbit, a stuttering young man terrified of Ratched and his mother, lose his virginity.

This culminates in a party where McMurphy sneaks two prostitutes into the ward, the deed is done, and an infuriated Ratched finds enough evidence to piece together what had happened (lots of hangovers and not proper cleanup, amateur hour here). When Ratched threatens to tell Billy's mother, the terrified mess of a man is driven over the edge and commits suicide—which Ratched uses as justification to have McMurphy given a lobotomy, that most brutal of medical procedures. 

(Fucked up fact: Rosemary Kennedy, one of JFK's sisters, was given a lobotomy and locked away for being too independent, essentially).

Lobotomies are a brutal, primitive procedure and, after receiving one, McMurphy is reduced to essentially lying catatonic in a bed. Chief, the Native narrator (who is actually batshit and not the kind of guy you want running around in public, he thinks the nurses are robots), suffocates McMurphy, hoists up a control panel and hurls it through a window, escaping this way.

For anyone who has seen It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, this might ring some similarities to 'Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack,' particularly the ending with Frank escaping. This is because One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of Danny DeVito's first roles and it is being explicitly referenced. 

For another fun tidbit: Jack Nicholson played McMurphy in the film, which is part of why Stephen King was averse to him being cast as Jack Torrance in The Shining. King wanted the movie to be like the book, slowly watching Torrance lose his mind, and he thought after One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with Nicholson's manic energy, audiences would find it too easy to walk in and immediately see him as a madman.

Kesey himself, the author, is a pretty interesting figure that I'd put in the "out there" category. Past One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he's probably best known for the Merry Pranksters and rolling around in a psychedelic school bus driven by Neal Cassady, the deadbeat Kerouac based Dean Moriarty in On the Road off of. Cassady's widow, per the documentary I saw, was not a fan of Kesey and for good reason: her husband seemed to be kinda getting his act together then went out and came back a speed freak tripping balls on acid. Don't even get me started on the clips where he leaves the bus driving itself and gets up to stretch his legs...

I also have to say: Kesey's position as a janitor in a ward and being able to observe from the outside in seems a much preferable experience to being on the inside experiencing it. I spent a few days in a ward once, I think it was Thursday—>Monday? 72 hours, but weekends don't count. I mean, they count, you don't just get allowed to go home on the weekend, but they're not "business hours" so they don't add a single second of served time to your sentence, or at least that's what we were told. Seems like a huge flaw in the system but hey, what do I know?

Well, actually let's get into that: I know I went to Valley Cities and that they have some kind of contract with the state of Washington. Which would make you think they're held to some kind of minimum cleanliness or health standard. Based on the fact there was dried diarrhea on the toilet seat when I showed up and it hadn't been cleaned by the end of the weekend when my room was changed out, maybe the state doesn't inspect much or give much of a shit (literally).

As I tried to tell my folks when I was really desperate to get out of there, "If you leave me here, I will come out crazy on the other end."

With begging and pleading, I was allowed to bring the two books I had with me in the hospital into the ward. Bevington's Complete Shakespeare and a biography of John Quincy Adams. But no notes (well, unless you want to take crayon notes in wide-rule tiny notebooks). I was told I could have a pen and then it became clear that was a lie when I brought it up. Even in group, we weren't given pens—just the removed ink bit, like we were giving prison tats instead of  filling out paperwork. It was a marvelous system.

But it wouldn't have mattered, anyway—because if you shut yourself up and read, you're being antisocial.

So you have to sit in the main room to read (which is fine, it's a pain in the ass to come in and out of your room because you have to get a nurse to let you in, it auto-locks). And if you sit in the main room trying to read, you might, say, have someone come up to you and ask to borrow one of your books. And then start wearing it as a hat while walking up and down the hall and dropping it repeatedly.

You are not allowed to ask for it back or ask that person to stop. It might upset them and, anyway, it's being antisocial and not sharing.

So instead, you have to sit there as another person asks what you're reading now and when you say John Quincy Adams was a president, you get a long explanation about how every president is actually part of an alien-controlled hive mind and no, George Washington was not in fact the first president but "they" don't want me to know that. Again, anything but sitting there and politely nodding means you're antisocial. So it's time to hide the books back in the room as soon as I get them back.

Then I can join the rest of the group and do what everyone else is: staring at Marvel movies on the screen from after-breakfast till the bedtime bell tells us to shuffle off. Occasional group if one's available. Go to the little one-on-one sessions as they're called but don't ask when you're scheduled or you'll be scolded. Try to get the phone and call someone who can help—public defender said they'd talk to me Friday, then it was the weekend, and ultimately the secretary goes from "Your public defender will call you before," to, "Oh, it was a formality more than anything, there was no reason to even talk to you."*

When you do get through to your family because they said they'd help and you're out of options, half the time you're listening to your mom talk about the weather and how her day is going and the cleaning chores she's doing as you're trying to say, "This is serious, I'm in a crisis and I need you to help me!"

But you know what actually got me out?

The psychiatrist who sat me down and, as the questions went on, finally said, 'There's something else going on here. This is way too big an overreaction to be about you having a rough breakup a while ago.'

And it kinda cracked me and I didn't give many of the details. Back then, these were the memories I kept buried real deep with a bottle. Which didn't really help, because as much as I could consciously stuff them down and pretend, the nightmares were awful. They're not as bad these days, now that I'm working on my health, but it was always being tied up or otherwise restrained. If I was moving, it'd be like I suddenly dove into concrete. Couldn't do anything. Couldn't move. Frozen. It was like back then—and I'd even remember my half-brother laughing that the more I struggled, the more I'd make the knots tighten.

But I'd slipped up. And all that drilling about "If you ever tell..." well, I had told. I'd broken my word. And so that first time of speaking out was not a relief at all. I thought I'd landed myself and everyone in even deeper shit. I spent most of the day in a cold sweat, unable to sit still, guilty as all hell until I finally was able to get the phone and get through to my mom and apologize, tell her that I'd fucked up and said something.

I was sure I was in hot water.

I was wrong. They saw the kid-diddler might be in trouble and I was out of that place the next day bright and early. From being left there to rot to, "Get him the hell out, now!" and that really took some time to think about. Cause that was when I had to stay at home for a month after. This was when I read On the Rez and heard mom say I'd confirmed all her bigotries about "Indians" when I had done nothing of the sort. This was when, my dad praised my half-brother for being the "best investor in the family" because he made a "hundred-bagger."

He  first started to tell me this within hours of  me having to talk to a therapist about my half-brother and my mom cut him off with, "He had to talk about everything today. Everything," the implication being quite clear. He told me on the drive home instead of the drive there, he's just so proud of his lil' pedo piggy boy.

It was during this month when I had the lovely, "But you walked in. I remember," talk with my mom, who blithely ignored it and walked off. 

Anyway, yeah, I kinda used Kesey as a springboard to cram some of my own shit in here, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest remains both a book and a film I find worth returning to and contemplating, to some extent due to my own first-hand lived experiences. It's one of those books I thought was on my MegaLit list for a long time—and it does deserve to be held up there as a classic, in my opinion, despite the off-putting characteristics of both its narrator and protagonist.

—

*Apparently, my Depression Journal "had so much in it, we can keep him for the max [of Ricky's Law]." The most damning entry in my Depression Journal, which was, again, private and stolen from me, had changed dates on it. 11/XX/20 was scribbled out to X1/XX/21 (may have the specific dates wrong, but it was clearly changed) but the text still refers to the end of 2019 and 2020 in the future tense. If you're going to lock me up for nearly three years because I was in a suicidal place and crawled my way out of it, don't do it with Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, you troglodyte, because frankly, I should be able to sue over this even just the brief unlawful confinement I believe I endured. 

—Ratched is also a name I have used for my half-sister a few times because they're both conniving, manipulative people who wear a false mask of kindness. This story might give her some sympathy, I guess, because the punishment was draconian and abusive. Then again, though, maybe not since she now won't own up to her actions.

To my knowledge, Ratched has a lifetime ban from the Altamont Mall. This is because back in school, when my folks would go to the lake and bring me, they'd let my older siblings stay home. Ratched would stay with a particularly close friend and they'd go shoplifting together. Now, given the amount of stuff later found: hard to believe my mom wasn't aware something was up, but as ever with my family,: it's the negative attention of being caught that's the problem, not the crime itself (see: burning pictures).

Anyway, so one weekend there's a call at the lake and my folks are outraged because they have to go home early and get Ratched, who has been arrested for shoplifting. 

(Never confirmed this, but apparently they'd done it so often and so brazenly security was keeping an eye out for them. One of Ratched's classmates [her younger brother was my old weed dealer,] had a dad who worked Altamont Mall Security; dunno if he was around back then, but I'm curious if he'd remember; guy would probably be pushing eighty these days, though; anyway, I digress again).

My parents were furious: they had to leave the lake early, they had to worry about the neighbors finding out, and it might soil their white-picket fence reputation.

So, Ratched was punished. She had to go to every shop and return everything that mom found in her room that was stolen and apologize. Then, she had to march in front of the mall with a picket sign saying "I am a Thief" to really humiliate her. (These days, she claims she never stole anything, it was all her friend and she didn't know).

And then, for extra measure: there's a septic tank at the lake and it needed some work done, so someone had to dig it up. I'm sure my parents would've found some way to dump the job on us kids, but Ratched did us a solid there so she had to solo the job.

Not like it was her first foray into theft—there's a reason my parents put a deadbolt on their bedroom door in the old house that stopped being used after Jasmine left (well, at least until they started locking up the GBA my half-brother left behind). 

And, most painfully for me: the day she told me about being abused by our half-brother, including a claim she now vehemently denies, she really laid on a heavy guilt trip about this antique key I had. It was a memento of my grandmother's, saved from the garbage bin because my family sees no value in "knickknacks." So I kept it on my keychain and had for years. She begged and begged. "I don't have anything like that. I don't have something I can carry with me."

When someone's just told you some of the things she did, the guilt really hits you: Do I need this? She's really struggling and she's right, I have had this for years...

Well, doesn't matter anymore because she claims the story she told me that tipped me scales on that guilt and got her my key? I imagined it. It was all fake. And I imagined giving her the key too. Over the course of the years and asking about it, it's gone from "brief borrow" to "I gave it back" to  "I never had it, he's crazy." And then mom starts it all over because, "One of the kids used it in an art project and then she threw it away." The chain of possession for my Depression Journal is similar.

That day, I will add, was also the day she told me another very strange thing about my half-brother, who I believe had recently stopped living with her. She told me that when he was living with them, odd enough on its own, they had to ask him to stop playing some video games in the living room because he would use character generators to dress up child-like characters in scanty clothing, known in pervert circles as "lolicon," a reference to Nabokov's troubling Lolita. This is one of the most disturbing things I was told over the years that make me concerned and increase my suspicion that my half-brother's disgusting proclivities have not changed. But she denies that conversation happened now, too, gotta protect the pedo.

She and I also got into a disagreement because she gets her vaccine advice from Joe Rogan's guests instead of doctors. This led to her once showing up to an event, exposing everyone to COVID, and then basically saying, "Well, you've already been exposed—what are you going to do, make us leave now?" This was the weekend I moved to Illinois. My mom complained to me for the better part of an hour on the phone about a baby, recently released from the NICU, that had been exposed, as well as how she now couldn't visit her friend going through chemo for fear of exposure.

When I called out my half-sister on this, my mom suddenly became meek and denied that phone conversation ever happened, which made me look like a real asshole when she was the one who told me the whole damn story.