Table Of ContentAnd Then I Thought I Was a Fish
by Peter Welch
12by3 Press
And Then I Thought I Was a Fish
Copyright © 2012 by Peter Welch
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
12by3 Press, Brooklyn
www.12by3.com
For Trinity and Pocahontas
Thanks to Barb, Tom, Sam, Acadia Hospital, the guy in the res-
taurant, Jake, JD, Jun, Ashleigh, Norm, Dana, Jonathan, Deir-
dre, and Amy
Apologies to Big Drug, Earth Mother, Jake’s parents, the waitresses,
my employers, the Bar Harbor police department, the Southwest
Harbor police department, the University of Maine, Sirius, Crow
Abilities, everybody living on Maple Street, the woman Jake al-
most killed, the store Jake wrecked, the third floor of York Hall,
the taxi driver whose car I stole, the woman whose truck I almost
stole, and my parents
Introduction 1
Prelude 1: Why We Thought It Would Be Such a Great Idea
to Drop Acid at Noon in Bar Harbor 5
Prelude 2: Why I Should Have Known Better 16
Everything Goes Straight to Hell 24
I Get the Hell Out of Kansas 44
I Party With a Bunch of Hippies and Do More Drugs 53
Through the Looking Coke Mirror 70
Meanwhile, In My Brain 87
The Mission 99
The Naked Guy 120
People Finally Start Catching On 128
Interlude: Admission Report 146
Welcome to the Nuthouse 158
The Milieu 169
Grand Theft Auto: Orono Dreams 184
Assassin-Demon-Hunter-God-Angel-Thingy, Interrupted 194
Crazy Love 205
Released Back Into the Wild 210
The Light and The Void 223
The End 234
Aftermath 250
Conclusions, Answers, Responses 264
Before and Now 292
Epilogue 308
Appendix A: The Matrix Conceit 314
Appendix B: Narrative 318
Appendix C: Other People’s Stories 324
Appendix D: Medical Reports 336
Bibliography and Further Reading 400
Introduction
Just the fact of having had a psychotic episode creates social
difficulties, long after the business of actually having it is over.
The least successful year of my dating career was my stint at
UMass, Amherst. This was partly because I lived in a dorm full
of students from the suburbs whose life experiences differed
somewhat from mine. I had a protracted conversation with my
neighbors that I let unfold with sick fascination as I tried to
communicate that when I wanted to borrow a bowl to smoke
pot, I wasn’t talking about cooking. This was the first year I let
slip to a stranger that I’d been in a mental institution, and
since it was one of those students, she immediately made some
excuse to leave and stopped talking to me.
If she had known the whole story, she probably would have
changed schools. Her initial reaction was just ignorance:
2 • And en I ought I Was a Fish
plenty of people take a break in the nuthouse for minor break-
downs or other temporary and unshocking reasons. The ap-
propriate response to “I was in a mental institution,” is
“Why?” Unfortunately for me, the answer to that question is
“I had a full blown psychotic episode because I took too many
drugs, thought I was Jesus, and stole some cars.”
A decade later, I live in Brooklyn, I’m surrounded by jaded
New Yorkers, and I work in IT,1 so I have fewer professional
and social worries about elaborating on this particular section
of my life.
The summer of my twentieth year on the planet obliterated
every measure of good, evil, truth, beauty, reality, and fantasy
I’d had before, and makes everything that’s happened since
seem banal. It’s the reason I will never believe in anything
again, the reason I play music, and the reason the Acadia Hos-
pital nursing staff thinks I’m a crackhead. There are probably
three or four dozen people that won’t talk to me to this day
because of these events, and I am a local legend in Bar Harbor,
Maine.
I’m writing this down for a number of reasons, first among
them being that I’m sick of telling it. If I know somebody long
enough, this story eventually comes up, and I have to tell it
again with a varying level of detail depending on the listener’s
1 Where an active cocaine habit isn’t necessarily a deal breaker.
3 • And en I ought I Was a Fish
level of interest and my level of blood alcohol. The shortest,
no-frills version that does it any amount of justice is upwards
of half an hour. With questions it’s usually a one- to two-hour
conversation. Even I get bored talking exclusively about myself
for more than forty-five minutes. If you have a good LSD
story, it can take fifteen minutes to tell it in all its glory, and
that’s just an eight- to twelve-hour ride that feels a lot longer
because your sense of time is on a lunch break. This story is
about a 2,304-hour2 ride, and my senses were a lot further
gone than some measly industrial-grade psychedelic drugs
could have taken them. It’s just too long to tell.
I’m also telling it because I need to get it out of my head
and I’ve been putting off getting it down in its entirety because
it makes me feel weird thinking about it, as it is the cause of
my PTSD.3 But I think eleven years ago is long enough that I
can dig through the memories without wigging out.
It’s not all bad. My mind changed, chemically and psycho-
logically, and ultimately for the better. It was also one of those
2 Approximated.
3 I have a crippling fear of losing my mind, matched only by my pathological
fear of death. Naturally, creative thinking lets me assuage my death fears, but
also triggers the out-of-control free-associative process that triggers my PTSD
and removes my ability to think or talk coherently, replacing it with shiver-
ing, anxious sweating for a few hours.
4 • And en I ought I Was a Fish
crucial experiences secretly treasured by chaotic and intemper-
ate people like me, in which the suffering and fallout are so
monstrously disproportionate to the original sin that you are
freed from judgment—internally, externally, and, at least in
my case, cosmically.4
This is the complete, annotated, and unabridged story of
how I went crazy for three months.
4 Although, I’m sad to report, not legally.
