The short story pictured above is about visiting my father in the

famous mental hospital 

Greystone.

I have only a few impressions left in my actual memory of being there. I do have three visitor tickets, though, that somehow prove I was there.  I remember the smell of urine. I remember gaining a sense of what truly crazy meant, and a sense that my father was truly crazy and never coming back to the man he'd been. 

I wrote this story in Binghamton, NY, where I'd gone hoping to study with John Gardner (though he died before I got there). It was 1983 and I felt like I had to confront/make peace with/become one with the ghost of my father. Proletarianism ruled Binghamton once you got off campus, and though it wasn't Paterson, NJ by a long shot, it was a place where an artsy/intellectual type could safely explore the delusion of his own proletarian nature. 

I wrote this piece when I first tried to become a fiction writer. Part of wanting to become my dad, I guess. Part of wrapping myself up in the same blanket of mystery and bravado that had failed to protect him from the cold

                 because the cold was inside him. It took me a while to figure that out. But now I think I have, and I want to talk about it. 

You can read the original story itself if you want to. In fact, I'd recommend it. I've tried to avoid making edits, but certain moments cried out for them. It's primitive, and I think I could have done a better job of getting into the child's mind, and it's way too autobiographical for my current tastes. (In fact it's sprinkled with links to other parts of the labyrinth that show you just how autobiographical.)

I could probably rewrite this story a lot better now that I have kids around my protagonist's age. But what would be the point? It belongs in the past. It deserves to be one of my sacred objects something I know the location of that all times.

Holy cow, you should've seen me the day I thought I lost it. Right before I transcribed it into its own page in the labyrinth. Be calm, I kept telling myself. It'll turn up. And until it did, I felt like my life was over–– I'd lost the one thing I was never allowed to lose. The record of a primal event so seismic that its echo became a primal event in itself.