THE PACIFYING MILTON Chapter 7

Chapter 7
Of goodliest Trees loaden with fairest Fruit...
-John Milton "Paradise Lost" ( Book IV , line 147 )

After talking to my psychiatric workers and agreeing to new meds
I began to feel better. Seroquel took the voices away and I moved into
a new place. We were a brooding trio of mental patients in a boarding
home. We coffee mates were barred from the kitchen where all the food
and drinks were locked up like a coop. It's 5PM and Norma, the Filipino
nurse, has just left to put the feed bag on her other house, too. Both
houses next big pigout is breakfast. My biggest relief is the joy of
revelling in Milton and his influences ( which is every later writer's
"Ignorance Or Theft" as the great poet Andrew Marvell wrote in his awe
of Milton, in his preface "ON PARADISE LOST" ). Marvell had been Milton's
secretary when Milton was in Cromwell's government as Ambassador Of
Foreign Tongues. ( I wish I hadn't mentioned tongues, because the meds
make us hungrier).
This sixteen hour lock-out is a way of profiteering. We use our
hungry checks to buy pop and chips until the money dries up like an old,
empty bottle. We have all quit smoking rather than go through tobacco
withdrawal every month as most mental patients do; we feel coralled as
horses with no hay. We are bitter but defiant. Then, I suggest something
that men should know about modern women. We should eat of the forbidden
fruit this eve.
So our rage boils into a cooked up scheme. When Norma leaves, the
kitchen door hinges are unscrewed and we greedily chow down from our paid
for food. We toast each other's bread, fill our bellies with milk, coffee
and juice. Our binge goes on for awhile as we three big pigs are smug and
sneaky until Norma, the keen-eyed nurse, says we're getting bigger bellies.
I tell her we're all pregnant and that she'll have to marry us. We laugh
with great zeal.
"Screw you," she says. I tell her the feeling is mutual with a wink
at her cross, but beautiful face.
Then she claims someone has copied kitchen keys because there is
food missing. We deny this. That night, we unhinge the kitchen door and
eat a Pumpkin pie faster than Peter-Peter could have. Then sandwiches are
jammed in our mouths. We are in snack nirvana.
Suddenly, Norma is there and she tells us locks will be put on the
inside of the kitchen. We are are locked out of the kitchen and sent to our
rooms much like church children - as Norma prepares herself a snack...