The coke-high walk with Green: the grandiose confabulations

pivotal · 11 Nov YDAU

• When: Wednesday 11 Nov YDAU, walking home from the Brookline Young People's meeting
• What: After doing "maybe five total lines" at the meeting, Lenz — instead of diplomatically asking Green to let him walk solo — falls "under huge hydrolystic compulsion" to keep Green beside him and pour out his whole life "(and then some)": that his severed finger-tip regrew "like a lizard's tail," confounding doctors; that he killed a pushy prosthesis-vendor on Boylston with a secret akido "Old One-Two"; that he remembers experiences "in vitro"; the deskulled "Infant" worshipped at a Halloween party; a suicidal "Nuck cult" who leap in front of trains (an unwitting echo of the A.F.R. train-cult about to descend on him). His labial writhing "occurs worst on diphthongs involving o-sounds." The torrent has a clinical basis: the endnote catalogue of Lenz's personal coke-hydrolysis fallout runs from right-eye-only nystagmus, compulsive tooth-grinding, and "megalomania" through "delusions of persecution and/or homicidal envy" to "confabulation concurrent with a manic garrulousness" causing "a complete inability to send from his presence anyone who seems at all willing to listen to him" (n232 p. 1037).