Judging the Whore

From the beginning, which is to say, when George was nineteen years old and had first "come apart," his dementia seemed much more than something psychological, seemed essentially spiritual and in a strange way in which the rules of the universe had likewise become strange in a kind of moral inversion, seemed rooted in the demonic, seemed a part and parcel of his destined perdition.

The voices on the bus ride that brought his crazy ass back from the West Coast, determined the nature of this brand new moral quandary, one fragmented step at a time, by adding grist to his year-old philosophy studies which delved into the nature of "evil as egoism." One step at a time, the voices in cajoling him to act out "primal" and violent sexual behavior, also convinced him as a part of the dialogue and process that something called "the word of God" was his only hope for divine or earthly salvation in laying him low in the terror and humility of sexual trauma . . . as he "confessed" it in the action that these voices spelled out for him. Cowardice laid him low . . . not sex! At the age of nineteen he was burning his nerves in a jaded Prolixum dance, wishing to stand up when he was seated, wishing to sit down, when he stood up . . . and the voices kept themselves hidden . . . but it was OBVIOUS to George that they were quite real, though he would have done anything to have it otherwise. Given the obvious nature of his Hell, he could not avoid the power and perdition of their fact.

There was a pretty nurse in the dayroom one day, when George was nineteen, nearly twenty. She stared at him with ice blue eyes that seemed so strange for a woman whose hair was completely black. That's how he remembers her. Jet black hair and blue eyes! . . . a matter of affect . . . the facts could easily be different. She was assigned to him in the Mental Institution as a client to attend to and write up for her nursing internship. She was sweet! Rather quiet! The voices had always told him that women were whores to be fucked hard. That he was just a hypocrite not to realize the nature of himself and his predicament. A voice that sounded like his older brother told him "It's either fuck or be fucked! You fuck and fight and fight and fuck and never stop fighting and fucking" . . . that was exactly what made him collapse, the notion that life could be like that. Because he knew that he could not be a man!

Still, here he was, not allowing himself to be subject to the weirdness of general male to male sex and malice as it floated around in a kind of contemptuous stiff lipped scorn among the mad, not to "be fucked." In fact it did not occur to him to do that . . . would have seemed absurdly unnatural! The voices told him to rape women. The voices that appeared to come from women told him this . . . until . . . the voices subsided . . . and his only real pleasure was sleep and escape.

He fought this sleep and escape sometimes. While the pretty nurse sat next to him he tried to tell her something with his mind. He called her a "whore." She did not respond in any obvious way, but there was a slight sense of preplexion about her and she asked him "would you like for me to go away?" And he was a little fearful about her response! . . . a little startled for all of its logic. But he assured her "No! Of course not!"

"From the beginning money was an issue for a whole lot of people" George Pruit thinks to himself. When "Becky" kept seeing him even after the internship kept showing up for some unfathomable reason, and then, learned about his rather premature release (though obviously "he wasn't cured" as the comments run) and took him to a motel room in his hometown even though she was married and had an eleven year old boy. And the sex was not all that great . . . though of course, she said that it was for her. But she told him "I love you. I don't love my husband. I know, with our age difference there isn't any future between us. My husband takes good care of me. He's a good man. I'll never lack."

George was a failure in the ways of madness. Even from the beginning.