Charles Monroe-Kane - Lithium Jesus: A Memoir of Mania

Lithium Jesus

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Copyright 2016

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Monroe-Kane, Charles, author.

Title: Lithium Jesus: a memoir of mania / Charles Monroe-Kane.

Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2016]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016012943 | ISBN 9780299310004 (cloth: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Monroe-Kane, Charles. | BroadcastersUnited StatesBiography.

| Mentally illUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC PN1990.72.M66 A3 2016 | DDC 791.4402/8092 [B]dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012943

This work is a memoir. It reflects the authors present recollections of his experiences over a period of years. Some names and identifying details have been changed, and certain individuals are composites. Dialogue and events have been recreated from memory, and in some cases chronology has been sparingly compressed or rearranged for the benefit of narrative clarity.

Lithium Jesus

A Memoir of Mania

Charles Monroe-Kane

The University of Wisconsin Press

Dedicated to

Erika

(full stop)

In memory of my big brother

Joe Kane.

I love you man. You left way too goddamn soon.

Thanks to Raphael Kadushin at the University of Wisconsin Press.

Thanks to Andrea Riley, Anne Strainchamps, Sara Nics, Katie McGlenn, and Jennifer Dargan. Your critiques of my first draft were invaluable.

Special thanks to my editor, Seth Jovaag. Without you there would be no book. I am forever gratefulall respect.

Prologue

The Jesus Years

The Movement

Romantic at Last

Afterword

Epilogue

B y the time you get to my age, youve experienced fear. A man with a gun. An acid trip gone wrong. A serious car accident. Holding a loved ones hand in the ICU. But there is something singular about the fear that comes from hearing voices. Voices no one can hear but you.

The first time I heard the voices, I was watching BJ and the Bear on TV with my siblings in the basement rec room next to the bedroom I shared with my older brother. It started with a humming in my left ear. Then came an airy sound, as though someone standing way too close to me had just inhaled. It grew louder still, like a box fan on medium speed, a little white noise. But from inside the whirring, spinning fan blades someone on the other side was now whispering what very well might have been my name.

I had been out of control all eveningtalking incessantly, pissing off my brother and sister, standing while everyone else sat at the dinner table because there was no way I could hold still. My family was fed up with me, and it only got worse. I started spinning around and jumping over the couch, confused by the increasing volume of the sounds in my head. Finally, my mom said enough: off to my room. I crawled into the bottom bunk and cuddled up with Sir Bosley, my grandmothers Boston Bull Terrier that I claimed as my own, and strained to hear the show through the thin basement paneling.

The voices were getting kinetic now. I felt like I was on my Uncle Butchs speedboat on Mosquito Lake, when I would dangle over the edge, daring fate, skimming my hand on the fast moving water, the roar of the outboard motor so thick you couldnt actually talk to the person next to you. But as I lay motionless in my bed the sound was being replaced by something elsefaint voices, off in the distance, and they were clearly calling me.

I was scared. So fucking scared. And then all was still. Silent. Good. Even as a child I must have sensed itthe calm before the storm.

Im so happy cause today

Ive found my friends...

Theyre in my head.

Nirvana, Lithium

D ont talk like a fat man. Never get above your raisin. And dont you ever, never ever, get played by the man. Because in my family, you can play anything you want: just dont play the sucker.

In theory, this made life for the Kane clan easywe just didnt do anything. Working hard at a job, caring at all for it, got you teased at a family BBQ. You were a dupe at best, or worse, a sucker, if you got caught up in the fools quest of chasing success, and a scarlet letter S would be forever on your forehead if your efforts were discovered. Only a moron would let themselves be bamboozled by the government, the military, a job, religion, or even college. Because in the end, the boss always got more out of it than you did. Be free by doing nothing: that was the Kane way.

Nearly as admirable were those who could make gobs of money for doing almost nothing, preferably in about twenty hours a week or less. Several years ago, after my wife had our second child, she left her high-powered sixty-hour-a-week job to become a part-time consultant. When my family heard what she charged per hour, they first thought she was joking. Then they glowed with Kane pride.

They pay you to give your opinion?! my dad crowed. Fantastic!

It was as though my wife had cured cancer.

This work-sucks philosophy, by latent design, meant everyone in my family was very poor. And in the rare instances when someone had two nickels to rub together, there was great pride taken in not doing so.

One summer, in the humid suck-your-soul stickiness of northeast Ohio, my uncles went Dumpster-diving and came back toting trash bags filled with thousands of greeting cards. For a few days, some of my cousins and I happily spent hours organizing them on my kitchen table into categories like birthdays, anniversaries, sympathy, and Christmas. The cards were then stored in my Aunt Lynettes basement, on a shelf next to Uncle Joes multiple deep freezers of popsicles hed pilfered from Dumpsters. For years afterward, various cousins and aunts and in-laws would swing by Lynettes to pick up a free greeting card for some special occasion. Of course, since we had such a large family, most of the cards ended up going to each other. A greasy smudge on the envelope was a tell-tale sign. As was the +1 handwritten next to the 9 on a card for your tenth birthday.