'The Madame': weeks under the Euclidian grid sky, then a month of Haldol and tapioca

pivotal · B.S. 1989

• When: B.S. 1989 (his own telling); relayed at an Ennet House Monday Community Meeting during his YDAU residency.
• What: Glynn tells the House how in 1989, after "a reckless amount of a hallucinogen he'd refer to only as 'The Madame,'" he spent several unbroken weeks under a Boston sky that was no longer a kindly curved blue dome but a flat, square, coldly Euclidian grid — black axes, a thread-fine reseau of coordinate lines, the dead gray-green of a switched-off viewer screen — "with the DOW Ticker running up one side of the grid and the NIKEI Index running down the other," time and temperature flashing along the bottom axis; and whenever he checked a real clock or paper, the sky-grid turned out to have been accurate. The accurate empty sky drove him to his mother's Stoneham fold-out couch and then into Waltham's Metropolitan State Hospital for a month of Haldol and tapioca. It is his one sustained self-disclosure in the whole record, and it lodges: Lenz, hearing it, privately thought a sky you could read the time off sounded "wicked nice."