TRIPP © RJD 2013 PROLOGUE Thursday 29th January 1959 If ever a man had shown in his eyes and his face the anguish of insanity as it rose up through his soul - it was now. Without the need for white-collared attendants, straight-jackets, or barred windows, the man who sat in the Army Recruitment office, Times Square, New York City on that cold and windswept evening was a total vision of madness. He was a prisoner, but not held captive by the authorities, he had committed no crimes. He was caught in his own mind and he was desperately trying to escape as he tripped between reality and delusion. He was no longer able to decipher one from the other, and you cannot begin to imagine how that would make you feel unless you had been in such a situation yourself. Behind the eye-lids and far out towards the rugged frontier of REM sleep is where we see leaping phantoms and murderers. We can run through the warm sand hand-in-hand with our love, breathing in the air and taking comfort from the fact that the sun will stay on our backs and reality will bend around us forever. Such dreams and nightmares are products of the unconscious mind, and if a man ever dared to see creeping death on the ceilings and in the doorways whilst his eyes were wide open then he could be sure he had moved away from normality and crossed the border into the realms of psychosis. The DJ had been awake for 200 hours, and as time moved on strange things occurred under controlled conditions. It was more than the tortured data uncovered by the scientists as they scrutinized their lab-rat celebrity who was live on air throughout. With newspaper and TV reporters circling at the height of his delusional behaviour he felt like he was about to be ripped apart by ravenous wolves. Totally at the mercy of their evil eyes and shining fangs he had convinced himself that their stares were slowly turning his flesh to stone. That is how far removed from reality he was and you could not measure it in yards or miles. There were no psychometrics, no EEGs, no kind of test which could give you more information about his condition than when you looked into his eyes, and all he could do was hold onto the desk and pray for the kill to be quick. Cameras flashed intermittently as the world’s media jockeyed for the best position and he could feel the bile rising in his throat. In normal life he was a regular guy, with slick hair, he had that Hollywood glow and the pearly white teeth. All the stars had the Californian suntan, even the ones in New York City where it had been raining forever. And if you didnt pick him out on the street, or in a bar as a celebrity, all he had to do was yell out his catchphrase: The curly-headed kid in the third row, and his voice would be instantly recognisable. Always ready with pen in hand for autographs and photos, he would usually respond to their requests with the airs and graces befitting a man in the spotlight that people looked up to. All of this was, of course, was on a good day, and this day felt like the one in which he would finally make his descent into hell. Never-ending, all signs of the ‘personality’ he had been when he first entered the recruitment office were long gone and he now clung to the crumbling ledge of sanity as it fell away into the abyss below. Unhinged and burnt-out he shook with fear, the uncertainty of death was all around, he was caught somewhere between physical reality and the dark and lucid dimensions of the dream world. Rational thought had abandoned him and the voice inside his head which, under normal circumstances, did his day-to-day reasoning in a calm and collective manner, had become infested by lunatic demons which were slowly consuming him.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 21:54:10 +0000
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