OLYMPIAN REVOLUTIONARIES AND RASCALS MJ Politis, Ph.D. [email protected] Copyrighted, Feb 12, 2019 All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1 Doctor JW Jones looked yet again at the wooden box attached to the wall, eager for the colorfully and, if you let your imagination get the better of you, ominous avian inhabitant inside of it to exit again. It wasn’t that the 30 going on 80 year old Psychiatrist was intrigued by how cookoo clocks worked, or even that the bird which came out whenever it felt like it, so it seemed. Indeed, the star medical student who had become an acclaimed resident, then a tenured attendant at NYU was not intrigued by anything anymore, or anyone. Everything in his life had fit into a formula in his head, or one given to him by one of the medical masters before him, immortalized in print. On exams he was rewarded more for regurgitating back data than coming up with insightful new perspectives. But JW had enough of being rewarded for continuing the status quo, especially because he was so good at maintaining it. The slender, always appropriately groomed Poster Mensch for the Old Guard and the Young Turks wanted and need to be his own medical master. Not a disciple of any school of psychiatry, but the originator of a new one. The patient under the clock, who JW ‘burrowed’ from a very locked ward, seemed to be the key to a new understanding of the human condition, as it is, could be, and should be. Yet, as JW glanced at the still silent old man under the cookoo clock, he wondered who would be the patient and who would be the doctor. Who would be the experiment and who would be the experimenter. And, most importantly, when the bird inside the ticking hand carved house would emerge in key points in the human conversation, saying who is ‘cookoo’, and who is doomed, and cursed, to not colorfully crazy. But the investigation was already underway. To abandon it now was not only unprofessional, but counter- productive. And if the law caught up to JW before it was completed on MANY levels, highly prosecutable for all concerned. Finally, after five more minutes that seemed like hours to the well trained Doc, and a flashing moment in eternity to the wooden cookoo bird, JW gave voice to the central question. It was a loaded one, affording many options for answering. “Who were you then, and who are you now? And, who do you want and need to be?” he asked the subject of his investigation, and the last hope for his professional survival. The weatherbeaten lips on the Old Man’s wrinkled face cracked up into a somber and ominous smile, framed by a thin, straggly white beard defiantly sticking out in every direction possible. The cerebral ensemble was topped off by a mane of thinning white hair that flowed down below his thin but still proudly arched shoulders, covered by a partially beaded weather-beaten leather coat still retaining half of its fringes which smelled of a century of hard, but honest, living. The seventy-five year old dinosaur who had not read not believed that his species was not extinct turned his arthritic neck towards JW. The old fart blasted the young Turk with yet another ‘blessing’ with his piercing blue eyes, which this time matched what came out of his mouth. “What do I want and need to be, you ask? What I have to be so I can merge into this next stage of…” He hesitated, his stare looking both out the window and behind his eyes at the same time, then after five seconds that felt like as many minutes, finally gave voice to his many Visions, and/or delusions, again. The Old Man turned to the young one, this time as a teacher rather than seeker. “The next stage of...what’s that weird acid trip that happens after you get pushed out of the womb without a guidebook and before the Mama Ship comes by to take you back to Om planet?” “Life,” JW answered, still playing the role of the obedient, compliant and hopefully effective student to the geriatric ‘professor philosopher’, who knew as little about the contemporary classroom as JW knew about what it was like in the ‘good old days’ of ‘sex, drugs, music and revolution’ way back in the past century. He looked once more at the Old Man’s file, containing official information about his arrest and his progress as a psych patient who never fit into any classification of mental or neurological diseases. “What’s between birth and death is life, Mister Millhouse. Life.” “Which you’ve studied, dissected and rejected,” the old man informed the young one with a familiar musicality in his voice that JW found himself admiring, hating and envying. “Studied, dissected and rejected,” Mister Millhouse, who preferred to be called OLD Harvey, continued in a strangely dissonant song with notes that only connected if felt rather than defined as any kind of melody. “Studied, dissected and rejected.” “And your conclusions from your studies, dissections and rejections?” JW inquired, having had enough Socratic ‘lessons’ for the day, and year. “Him or her,” Old Harvey said, abruptly changing contexts, and subtext, as was his habit and passion. He pointing to a cookoo clock on the wall in front of him. “Him, or her, who is…” “Cookoo, cookoo, cookoo,” answered the bird as he, she, or it exited the hand carved oak mansion connected to a set of time telling hands on the clock which moved at its own speed, despite what the pendulum under it did. Harvey answered the avian intruder in a language JW didn’t speak, or recognize. In a conversation between human dinosaur and wooden bird that went on for at least ten volleys, till the bird turned to JW, seeming to look sadly at him, then retreated back into its box. “What did you say to that bird, Harvey?” JW inquired from behind his pad and pen. “I just answered the questions asked of me,” Old Harvey replied. He sat back on the chair to which he was restrained as if it was a lounging seat in an office where he could come and go as he pleased, and do what he pleased. “And those questions were?” JW asked, leaning forward, taking in the décor of the hotel room he had snuck Old Harvey into, against all court orders and medical recommendations from his fellow ‘head healers’. “You wouldn’t understand them even if I translated them for you,” ‘Professor’ Harvey explained as he looked at the bedroom he had occupied half a century ago, enduring and enjoying numerous sleeps under the watchful eye, and sometimes loud mouth, of the cookoo bird. “You could get a Ph.D. avian linguistics and still know shit about what the bird or any other is really talking about, no offense.” “Because I’m not versant in the language of cookoo?” the young Doc asked the old coot, as respectfully as he could. “Because you aren’t listening!” Harvey blasted back. “With this, or this?” he continued, pointing to his head, and heart. JW felt like he was now cast as the head smart, but soul dead, Engineer in a remake of Zorba the Greek, merged of course with One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest. This Zorba had no biological Hellenic ancestry in him, but he had a Greek presence to him which occasionally filtered into his distinctively common North Jersey diction. It did so particularly when Old Harvey became philosophical. Or when he talked about the power of Fate and the need to combat futility against it, a Hellenic trademark since the time of Homer. His features were North American Indian, depending on how the light hit his high cheek-boned, particularly when it penetrated through his thin straggley. beard. But whoever Old Harvey was, he went on about the bird, who he finally defined by name, gender and favorite obscession. “At least Petros didn’t shit on you, Doc,” Harvey noted rolling his ‘r’s to excess now. “He usually does that at first meeting with a new arrival.” “So he decided to piss on me instead?!!!” JW growled back, feeling a stream of water sprinking the top of the head, gently neandering down his back from the speaking platform of the clock. “And what did I do to you!” he screamed back at the bird that had “What do I look like?” “Cookoo”, the bird replied, several times, after which he scurried back into his house. Maybe on his human master’s command, as JW noted a rusted covered remote control in Harvey’s shaking hand. How it got there, JW didn’t know. “Alright, enough with the props we let you bring into this hotel room of yours,” the young Doc growled at the old First Nations Zorba. “Props from you childhood?” he inquired, re-gaining his professional composure. “A childhood that I never appreciated until I was an adult,” the reply. “But re-created when you were an adult?” JW asked, finally feeling a crack in the wall between him and the mental patient who the authorities deemed dangerous to himself and others, with regard to body, mind and spirit. “I really am interested in the dreams, and aspirations, you had as a child.” “You mean the nightmare I called adolescence,” Harvey replied, with a strange and secretive bitterness. “During the dream time the cool kids, and the ‘made it to the top’ Yuppie scum’, now call 1970.” With that, Harvey pointed to a blood-stained, severely paint chipped cabinet bearing burn marks and bullet holes in the hotel room that was condemned for twenty years, and un- occupied for another two decades.