The Boys from Santa Cruz

11

“Asmador?” Pender and Epstein exchanged baffled glances.

“Asmador,” said Hillovi.

“But that’s what he calls himself.”

“Yes, that’s his alter ego whenever his delusions get the better of him-which is to say, when he’s not sedated to the point of near-catatonia. Originally, however, Dr. Shiffman’s Asmador was the commercial name for a popular over-the-counter asthma remedy. Its major active ingredient was belladonna. I don’t recall what else was in it, but I remember it came in a powdered form, and was intended to be burned in a smudge fire or smoked in a cigarette to alleviate severe asthma symptoms.

“There was a period of time, however, back in the late sixties and early seventies, when certain poor souls decided it would be a good idea to ingest the stuff. Those that vomited immediately survived with relatively minor damage. Those with stronger stomachs fared less well. They became highly delusional, were unable to differentiate between reality and hallucination, and exhibited behavior patterns that ranged from unusual to downright bizarre.

“Some mistook human beings for objects and vice versa, another saw a solid floor as a piranha-infested lagoon, and still another passed most of his time watching Technicolor movies on his thumbnail. One patient died as a result of banging his head against a wall, trying to turn off a radio only he could hear. Another was run over by an automobile while trying to dig a hole in the middle of a busy street to free the people he believed were trapped beneath the pavement.”

“And how did this stuff affect Mesker?” Pender asked, kneeling next to Skip’s chair so Hillovi, lying on his side, could see him without having to raise his head from the pillow.

Profoundly, was Hillovi’s reply. Charles Mesker, he explained, had been seventeen years old, an insatiable reader possessed of a brilliant mind and an eidetic (more commonly known as a photographic) memory, but long-haired and rebellious, with a disturbingly intense interest in demonology. He was also already an inveterate and indiscriminate drug user by the summer of 1972, when Santa Cruz experienced a temporary drug drought.

No one seemed to have any pot for sale, and what few psychedelics were available were of poor quality, or heavily boosted with methedrine, so Charles and a friend decided to experiment with the friend’s grandmother’s asthma remedy. Someone had told them that eating the stuff, as opposed to smoking it, would result in an intense psychedelic experience, during which they would be able to contact their cosmic archetypes. Neither boy was sure exactly what that meant, but they each managed to choke down several teaspoonfuls of the noxious green powder.

Charles never saw the other boy again-whatever his friend’s archetype was, it was evidently airborne, because a few hours into the trip, the young man did a Linkletter off the roof. In some ways, he might have been the more fortunate of the two.

Charles’s trip, perhaps due to his interest in demonology, took on a dark cast. Leaving his friend’s house, he found himself wandering through a hellish world in which features of the familiar Santa Cruz landscape were conflated with visions of what he would later come to call the Blasted Land.

Gargoyles cavorted on rooftops and swung from the hands of the Santa Cruz town clock. At the Boardwalk, where the shrieking of the damned souls all but deafened him, Charles saw hideous demons cavorting among the crowd. Some masqueraded as vendors, serving up scoops of steaming shit in ice cream cones and severed penises in hot dog buns.

As day gave way to night, the ocean turned into desert dunes and the beach into red-hot coals. Fleeing the Boardwalk, Charles trudged westward along the sand, castellated cliffs towering above him like battlements, blocking out the stars.

The next morning the authorities, alerted by alarmed beach-goers, found Charles dancing and waving atop the rock formation known as Natural Bridges, naked as the day he was born and completely out of touch with reality. Still, he cooperated wholeheartedly with the officers, referring to them as his loyal minions and graciously allowing himself to be led through the knee-high surf to a waiting ambulance.

Although they had never treated a case of Asmador ingestion before, staffers at the Dominican Hospital emergency room were not unfamiliar with handling psychedelic overdoses. Their basic approach was to administer Thorazine until the patient quieted down or fell asleep. Twelve to twenty-four hours later, most patients were generally as good as new.

But not Charles Mesker. As soon as the Thorazine wore off, Charles’s delusions and hallucinations-the Blasted Land, the demons, the Infernal Council, and so on-returned unabated. So the E.R. doctors knocked him out for another twenty-four hours, and once again, when consciousness returned, so did the effects of the Asmador.

After a short stay in the psych unit at Dominican Hospital, Charles was transferred to the Meadows Road facility, where the most effective treatment they managed to come up with was to keep the boy so heavily tranquilized that he was unable to respond to his hallucinations or act upon his delusions. In other words, chemical restraint.

The side effects were predictably devastating, said Dr. Hillovi, who was by then exhausted and in growing pain. Charles suffered a loss of motor control, was wracked by tardive dyskinesia, and worst of all, from Charles’s point of view, he lost the ability to read, which had once been his chief consolation. So every few years, his doctors tried weaning Charles off his meds long enough to see if the effects of the Asmador might have worn off on their own.

But the hallucinations and delusions inevitably returned, said Hillovi-that is, up until their most recent attempt to withdraw Charles from chemical restraint, a little over four years ago. “To our delight and surprise, within two weeks Charles was giving every indication of having recovered from his disorder. He appeared to be cooperative, rational, and high-functioning on an intellectual and emotional level-he even began reading again.

“After three months without any sign of a relapse, Charles was deemed an appropriate candidate for supervised release into the care of his parents. For six months he slept in his own room, read everything he could get his hands on, and even applied for his driver’s license. Then one December night, he crept into his parents’ bedroom and cut his mother’s throat with a steak knife.”

Just then, the light on the front of the machine that timed the automatic release of morphine sulfate into Hillovi’s bloodstream switched from steady red to blinking green. He sighed gratefully and closed his eyes for a moment; when he opened them again, his pupils had already begun to contract. “When Charles was arrested, he gave his name as Asmador, and told the police that he’d cut the old lady’s throat on orders from the Infernal Council.

“Mrs. Mesker refused to press charges, of course, so Charles was returned to Meadows Road.” By now, Hillovi’s pupils were mere pinpoints, and his affect disconcertingly jocular. “And so, my jolly green giant,” he told Pender with a crooked grin, “if you have any further questions, I suggest you ask them soon, or forever hold your peas.”

Pender, who had a million of ’em, winnowed them down to two with immediate and practical applications. “What do you think’s going to happen as the effects of the chemical restraint continue to wear off?”

“Based on past history, I’d expect Charles’s hallucinations to grow more vivid, yet also better integrated, as time passes. In other words, his two worlds should begin to merge again, and continue to merge until they become as one to him.”

“Last question: Do you have any suggestions as to the best way to handle Charles when he’s in that condition?”

“From a great distance, with a tranquilizer dart,” said Hillovi, with a stoned wink and a laugh that sounded more like the barking of a phthisic sea lion.