SURREAL BOUNCE: 16) LOBOTOMY

In Search of Creativity & Madness

September 2002

Spy stuff takes me to Washington, D.C, where Van Stein stakes the sofa bed in my Georgetown Inn suite.

I immerse myself in deep consultations of the veiled kind while the artist hauls himself to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital—home to John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan—in the worst part of town. (The cabbie says, “You want to go where?” with eyeballs that begged, Are you nuts? But he takes Van Stein, and nervously waits while the artist photographs the asylum from a bluff overlooking DC’s skyline.)

Floater washes in from Chicago, and Van Stein tells us about St. Elizabeth’s over dry martinis at the Daily Grill in Georgetown. “It was real strange. Nobody was around. And I mean no one. Only owls, foxes and rattlesnakes.”

“You’re onto something,” I say. “We should do a madhouse road trip around the country with you painting historic mental hospitals. Start by flying Jonathan Winters to Hartford, reacquaint him with the Institute for Living. He could knock at their door, say, I’m back, and enquire about reunions.”

(Winters had his own take on this when I later suggested a return to his alma mater: “I’ll wear a white jacket and a stethoscope, pretend I’m a shrink. God knows, I’d be better at it.” Then he shuddered and changed his mind.)

“It’s an art exhibition—Madness—but also a book,” offers Floater. “And a documentary.”

“We can follow Walt Freeman‘s trail,” I add.

“Who?” asks Van Stein.

“America’s first lobotomist. He stole the idea from a Portuguese doctor named Antonio Egas-Moniz, who called it a leucotomy. Egas-Moniz injected alcohol into the frontal lobe, but Walt severed it. He drove his lobotomobile around the country, visited 55 mental hospitals in 23 states offering to lobotomize unruly patients with his solid gold ice pick and rubber mallet.

“He could do a lobotomy in 45 seconds, without anesthetic, sometimes with novocaine. He’d wedge the pick through the top of an eye socket, whack it with a mallet, snip!

“They’d line em up for Walt. He’d do half-a-dozen lobotomies in an hour then drive off to the next hospital.

“He even did Joe Kennedy‘s daughter, Rosemary, right here at St. Elizabeth’s. It was a serious no-no. Rosemary was not retarded, just not as smart as her siblings, and should not have qualified for a lobotomy. But Walt did it anyway as a favor to Joe because she was an embarrassment to the Kennedy clan—mood swings, temper tantrums—and it made it easier for them to erase her from the family.

“Walt did a total 3,439 lobotomies during his road trips. His motto was Lobotomy gets them home. Unfortunately, it got Rosemary to a disability institution in Jefferson, Wisconsin for the rest of her life.”

“How do you know all this?” asks Van Stein.

“You kidding? At the Bedlam Bar it’ll be my job to know.”

Next morning we tour the International Spy Museum and, in the surveillance exhibition rooms, dry-clean assorted of spooks on our trail.

Says Van Stein: “I thought you were paranoid—now I know somebody’s watching.”

My cell phone whistles as we exit the museum. “Who’s that?” cracks Van Stein. “The FBI?”

I plant my thumb over the speak-hole. “It actually is—shhh!”

Floater scuds off, part of our strategy to confuse the enemy; Van Stein and I hit the road to growls and groans from Tom Waits, whose lyrics are particularly poignant when we pull into Asbury Park, New Jersey, where one might expect to find the Sultan of Sleaze parked on a bench soaking up decay for his next ballad.

Once a thriving family resort, Asbury almost burned it to the ground from rioting in 1968, and been in decline ever since, evolving over three decades into a modern-day eastern seaboard ghost town.

We drive through, double-back, circle around. A few places are still open, patronized by diehards.

Block after block, the structures are empty shells in varying degrees of disintegration. No people. Except us.

Springsteen turns up once in a while—an image thing (The Stone Pony)—but not today.

“You think you can make this beautiful?” I ask Van Stein.

(He is stumped.)

And a second short book for the Bedlam Bar is born.