Tuschen looked like your average hippie, with a skinny frame and long, straight, lank hair. (My apartment, which I briefly continued to share with two college friends, was also nearby we served as custodians in the building, and the rent was cheap.) We had gotten to be friends, and we both like to drink, so I’d roll down to the bar after a day’s work as a stock boy in the small corner market one block up the street. In the theater’s early days, John Tuschen had started up “The Camel, The Lion, and The Child,” its in-house literary magazine. I’d started going there when I was working in the acting company of Broom Street Theater, the local experimental stage.
This saloon had become a main hangout for the local bohemians in training. My style of therapy took place in the warm confines of the 602 Club, the campus-adjacent bar on University Avenue that I had begun to frequent before my lockdown adventure. The psychiatric care recommended by the hospital did not seem like a particularly useful option, and potentially an endless one, so I dropped my shrink after three sessions. In ’71 I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and had recently dropped out of the university there, after experiencing a drug-induced breakdown in late 1970 that led to several weeks in a psychiatric ward at the campus hospital.Īfter a brief period spent licking my wounds at my mother’s apartment outside Chicago, I returned to “Madtown,” where I immediately returned, unburdened by school work, to doing what I had been doing: drinking and using drugs, enthusiastically. I was actively encouraged in this futile pursuit by a friend named John Tuschen, who cited Berryman as his favorite poet.
Today, through a chain of associations called up by a book about alcoholic writers, and then by a volume of John Berryman’s best known work, I found myself ratcheted back to the year 1971, when I briefly entertained the delusion that I could write poetry.
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