My mother's honor code is peculiar and inconsistent when it comes to me but when Sound Mentalrix announced Diagnosis based on rumor of Gabriel she weighed in. It was as though when unable to support Sound Mutilationist and mouth poison agency she let me see and did them one better.  I will answer this letter from almost twenty years ago.

Her:  Too bad I lost all the stuff I wrote earlier.  I’ll try to get this

off to you intact, although it won’t be as complete as the earlier

Writing.

Mac:  Given the way Trump has operated I wouldn’t be surprised if that text in in the office of the rabid.

Her:  I think Jim was always a bit fearful and a bit dreamy, although he was

generally a cheerful and affectionate child.  As a toddler, he would

sit under the dining room table and behind the couch and suck his

thumb.  At nursery school, he sat under the grand piano and watched

the others, smiling and seeming to be happy however.  There were

events that seemed to impact him strongly at the time, including the

Kennedy assassination, and since I was always active in anti-war and

civil rights activities, he was aware of events even in the early

60’s.  

Mac:  My father discussed Hitler and the atom bomb with me when I was five.  I found photos of the My Lai Massacre on Flagstaff Hill before I was ten.

Her:  Other deaths, in the family, made him seem to be more aware and

questioning about death than most children are.

Mac:  She must mean the twins who died at birth.  I remember the day Kent State happened and Bobby, as well as the day Martin died.

Her:  Jim also had many ear infections and once a ruptured ear drum, so I

had his hear hearing checked when a toddler.  All seemed normal, and I

decided he had a “listening” rather than a hearing problem.

Mac:  The ear infection was a raging one that took place after the gang associated with King Crimson called the Guttersnipes visited our house when I was in fourth grade.  The ear drum was ruptured by surgery.

Her:  His father opted out of our lives when Jim was 5 and had little

contact with him even when living nearby, although that contact was

genial.  There is a history of mental illness in that family that I

could be more specific about if that would be helpful.

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Somewhere in about 6th grade, Jim was occasionally truant and became

increasingly moody during the next couple of years.  I was working

some 70 hours a week and had no support system.  Single parents and

working mothers were still an anomaly.  There was no free nor low

coast mental health service available, and my insurance did not cover

the more expensive kind, but I did scrape together enough to get his

older sister, 14 when he was 11, some sessions with a psychiatrist.

This was the early 70s and problems with drugs were everywhere.  By

the way, after years of counseling, his sister finally was persuaded

to try Zoloft a few years ago and has found her life transformed.  Not

only are the depressions gone, but so is the deep, deep anger that she

had battled for so long.

When he was 11, a school test turned up a severe hearing loss, and he

underwent the first of two operations to put tubes in his ears for

middle ear problems.  I mention this because I think everything got

muddled in his head at this time with his ears, especially when the

cover of a group that he later had contact with whom he was musically

obsessed with, King Crimson, had an image of an ear with a spike

driven into it and song entitled, “21st Century Schizoid Man.”

Mac:  I don’t feel the need to answer.  She deleted that I was kidnapped and tortured and carefully mis-spells Mancine to hide the obvious agency name implications in her next passages.

Her:  I distrusted some of Jim’s new friends at this time, but he was never

a child who really took words of caution seriously – went out on the

roof, crossed the street, and so one even though told not to.

Mac:  I hated being screamed at by a woman who was drunk all the time.  The Wattenmakers took me out on their roof repeatedly is how I can to be there.

Her:  I did

not learn until much later any details of how he became terrified by

them, but I do believe that drugs, sex, and stealing cars were part of

what was used to terrorize him.  The names most associated with these

times are the Kasperowskis, maybe a Mark Mancini, and occasionally

others who lived in the neighborhood.  Because of his intense fears, I

sold a house in one neighborhood and moved to rent in another one

before he started high school.

Let me just characterize the next few years as troubled and troubling

for us all.  Not a happy time for any of us.  During this time, Jim’s

hearing was deteriorating and I suspected his problems were very

serious, but the clinic to which I took him at Western Psychiatric

characterized him as a normal, rebellious adolescent and me as a

mother who was probably causing the problems.

Jim worked in the Falk Medical Library at Pitt as the news came out

about AIDS.  He quit the job.  While on the job, he had also managed

to get a regular column published in the Pitt News although he was not

a student.  The writing was very political and vehement and often

aroused ire in those on the other side of the political spectrum.

Mac:  I hate Reagan.  I was absolutely indignant at how he treated at risk Queers.

Her:  He

was also invited to write one column for the local daily newspaper and

often had letters published there as well.  He was indeed a prolific

writer, but I was uncomfortable with the fact that much writing was

also on little scraps of paper and even on his bedroom walls.

Jim did indeed meet Robert Fripp and spent a week at a workshop in

West Virginia at some kind of school Fripp had there, an offshoot of a

Gurdjieff sort I think.  He had a correspondence with him but was shut

off, I think, when the letters became bizarre and accusatory. 

Mac:  He is the bizarre and accusatory agent.

Her:   It may

have been there that Jim met Will Zell, who also is mentioned in his

current writings.  Will persuaded him to go up to Bar Harbor, Maine,

in the late 80’s.  I’m not sure what all happened there.  He did some

stringer writing for local papers while working in a pizza shop, met a

lovely young woman about whom he has never been paranoid (others, yes,

and details about them can be provided another time), and may have

been frightened by some Earth First people.  Shortly after he left

Maine for Montana, with Kathy, a biological research lab in Bar Harbor

was destroyed by arson, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if some of

the people Jim met and began to fear had been involved.  This is also

when he became convinced he had been targeted for AIDS.

Mac:  By selling this angle she encouraged sadistic berserkers in Seattle to follow through with this ripper mayhem promoting the evil leer of The Green Party who rubber stamped my father’s obituary with the language of Zell prior to being lured to Mt. Desert, an evil cause of Seattle that led to the Covid massacre beiing left unchallenged while there was still time.

Her:  I’m not sure when Jim started his correspondence with Peter Gabriel,

but I know he got postcards from Gabriel before and during the time he

was in Maine.  I also know he had letters from Gabriel’s assistant, an

Amanda Harcourt.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if Gabriel really did

use some of Jim’s own words in some of his lyrics, as Jim claims.  I

don’t know when he started a correspondence with Vaclav Havel, but it

was after he was elected President of the Czech Republic.  He also

wrote to and had letters from Martha Gellhorn, Lewis Lapham and other.

His later letters may have presented himself as an AIDS victim, but

they were definitely more coherent than his writing would become or he

would not have received the responses he did.  (By the way, he had

taken a cross-country trek with a group of Carnegie Mellon students in

the mid-80s and encountered his first AIDS victims in San Francisco at

that time.  He immediately left the group and came home.  A letter to

me from one of the young women among them, who wrote about money he

owed, had a line I will never forget:  “I hope I never have a son like

him.”)

Mac:  I didn’t leave because of Carl and his crude insistence on sharing straws.  I left because I got a job offer.  Debra was indignant that Karen slept with me the night before.  I loved my father’s sweater, my only inheritance.  I didn’t really expect her to but I gave it to her and Rollie followed me around sniping at me about it.

Her:  I received a letter from him while he was in Montana, after Maine,

that was very paranoid, and I was not even more sure he had a mental

illness.  I called immediately, but he sounded just fine.  This was

the pattern that seemed to have developed over the years.  A paranoid

letter or postcard to someone, but then a seemingly okay person when

talked to.  I read whatever I could about mental illness, but he just

didn’t seem to fit any pattern I found.  When he came back to

Pittsburgh in 1991, he went to work in the library at the community

college where John and I worked.  When the Oliver Stone JFK movie came

out, he became an absolute expert on that assassination.  His

obsession with the John Lennon assassination and his belief that he

had secret information about that came later, as did his belief that

my husband, whose initials are also JL, was somehow involved.  I can

write another time about the Gail Burstine letters that somehow

contained the info he has been trying to get out for years.

We were in California teaching in 1992-93, and during that time things

really went downhill for Jim.  He had somehow managed to get a regular

column in an underground student newspaper at Carnegie-Mellon, who

seemed to be willing to publish anything he wrote, no matter how

bizarre.  And, believe it or not, I believe that at CMU he did become

privy to a lot of drug info – and Jim is very, very anti-drug – and

that he was set up with a prostitute and pictures were taken, with

which he was indeed threatened.  He often refers to this in his

Writings.

Mac:  As well I should.  Gail Burstyn is the letterhead of the AIDS attack combein and the knife behind the murder of the Kennedys by the Beatles.  Her effigy appears on a King Crimson record called God Save the Queen and her collection agency for Warhol and Ono operate openly in Seattle even after their covid attack.

Her:  Oh, gosh, I’m getting depressed just thinking about this stuff.  Let

me start pulling this to a close.  There is a lot of truth in the mess

of what he writes, but it’s all put together in ways that are clearly

delusional.  A final example.  George W.B. Bush was indeed an airforce

pilot on the aircraft carrier on which Jim’s father served in WWII.

Jim found this out during some internet research.  I think he wrote

Bush, got a reply, and then probably sent him one of his delusional

missives.  That’s what has seemed to happen with people like Coretta

Scott King and Oliver Stone.  I think he may have had detectives

investigate him.  I know the FBI and Secret Service have, because I

and people I know have been contacted.  One thing leads to another.

And pretty soon he is reinforced in his beliefs that he is the target

of some vast conspiracy.

Mac:  Lead character in a scripted AXIS revenge attack.

Her:  Jim is very resistant to medication.  I recently read Xavier

Armador’s, “I’m Not Sick, I Don’t Need Help” and sure recognized my

son.  But he is very much in need of both medication and therapy.  And

he wants and needs the kind of support he is finding there in Seattle.

Generally, he is hostile to his family, except sometimes me, to whom

he does feel close even though he is very angry at me much of the

time, and has driven off friends, most of whom weren’t of much help

anyhow.  My dear husband, who tried for over 20 years to be there for

him as his own father had never been, has just washed his hands of the

whole thing since Jim has hurt him deeply in his belief that John is a

prime instigator of much of the plots against him.  And since Jim

actually succeeded in suing one of our good friends, who had

befriended him when he was taking classes at the college, (a suit

immediately denied by the panel who heard his claims, of course) when

Jim threatened to sue his step-brother, David, who is part of the

Hollywood, “plot”, David being a sound engineer at 20th Century Fox,

John became very angry as well.  Jim is very alone.  Very isolated.

He is also a creative and affectionate person.  In fact, I have to say

that if “schizophrenia” actually did mean a split personality, the

term might seem to apply.  And I think he feels this too.  One of the

things he was writing when he was accepted to the Governor’s School

for creative and performing arts in 1978 was “The Heaven and Hell

Odyssey,” which I think was partly autobiographical.

Well, we never really give up hope, do we.

Thanks for being there,

Nancy

Mac:  I’m glad she remembered and revived the H20.