After my day of isolation, a brig rat, a white Marine named Rouse, came up to me and said, “Hey—you can tell me—you’re faking this shit so you can get out of the service, aren’t you?” Rouse, an S-1 clerk-typist, a “Remington raider” who had picked up a heroin habit in Saigon, had violet slash marks on his arms, and liked to show me a razor-blade half he had in his wallet. He offered to let me use it and often suggested that we use it together. Rouse had a lot of back pay saved up and ordered candy and cigarettes from the commissary, and innumerable plastic airplanes to assemble. He always claimed to have nasal congestion and ordered Vicks Inhalers, which at that time contained Benzedrine. Rouse would break them open and swallow the cottons and then pour airplane glue on a washcloth and roll it into a tube and suck on it. I got high with Rouse once by doing this, but the Benzedrine made me so restless that I begged Thorazine from the guys who used to cheek it and then spit it out after meds were issued.

Actually, Rouse was wrong about me: I didn’t have anything to hide, and I wasn’t faking anything. At the time, I didn’t want out. I intended to make the Marine Corps my home. At group-therapy sessions I reasonably insisted that mine was a straightforward case of epilepsy, and for this I was ridiculed by inmate enemies and the medical staff alike. When I saw I was getting nowhere, I refused to speak at the group-therapy sessions at all, and I spent a month sitting sullenly, listening to everyone argue over an old record player one of the residents had brought in to spice up the dayroom. The blacks liked Smokey Robinson and the Miracles; the war vets were big on the Doors, the Rolling Stones, and C.C.R. I started getting fat from inactivity—fat, although the food was cold and tasted lousy, and in spite of the fact that I fasted on Fridays, because Thursday’s dinner was always rabbit. The thought of eating rabbit after a night of sensing the molasses rabbit under my bed gasping for air, and hearing the air whistle between his yellow teeth as he sucked desperately to live—the sight of fried rabbit put me off food for a solid day.