www.LifeWithBuck.com

Buck is on the Sun Bridge of The State Lunatic Asylum at Taunton, as it was named when it was built in 1854. Listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, it is of neo-classic design by prominent architect Elbridge Boyden. Yes, Elbridge. Later the psychiatric hospital became known as the less-insane sounding Taunton State Hospital. Several of the buildings were abandoned in 1975, and a fire caused a lot of damage in 2006. But today much of it is used to house juvenile offenders and branch offices of various state agencies.

****** 

Me: I’m sick of this shit you’ve been pulling with the batteries in my tape recorder. Quit taking out the brand new ones and sneaking in your stupidass recycled ones –

Buck: No. Those batteries register just fine in the battery tester.

Me: I don’t care how they register, Mr. Scientist. I don’t want used, half-dead batteries in my freaking tape recorder. You’re obsessed with getting a second life out of them. Give-it-up. I only went along with it in the first place because you said you would put them in clocks. I don’t even care that the clocks are always wrong, because time means nothing to me. Now that we have TiVo,  time is none of my business. But my tape recorder –

Buck: The clocks run just fine.

Me: – well now you’ve gone too far. You’re sneaking dead batteries in all my tape recorders and they suck.

Buck: They don’t suck.

Me: They do! They do suck! When I went to transcribe an interview this morning it was so creepy it made my blood freeze in my veins. It sounded like that telephone recording in 12 Monkeys that goes all haywire at the end and says MmmmeRRY ChrISTMASSSS . . .

Buck: No, no, no. That’s just how all your interviews sound. Like the recording in 12 Monkeys. [laughing]

Me: [laughing] It’s true. But this morning it was because of dying batteries and I know it.

Buck: You’re insane. Used batteries that REGISTER IN THE BATTERY TESTER AS GREEN are just as good as new batteries that REGISTER AS GREEN –

Me: I’m insane? Listen. I wanna tell you something. Your little battery experiments are so boring they REGISTER AS RETARDED.

Buck: [laughing] So what exactly is it that you want again? I’m in the middle of doing something.

Me: Testing fucking batteries is not doing something. I’m so sorry I ever bought you that thing. I hate it. But since you’ve brought up 12 Monkeys . . .

Buck: You brought up 12 Monkeys.

Me: You, me, who cares? But it’s rather fortuitous that you should bring it up, because I wanted to talk about the Lunatic Asylum.

Buck: Which one?

Me: Well, the real asylum that’s haunted, but both of them really. 

Buck: Why?

Me: Because in that movie Accepted, the kids moved into an abandoned insane asylum and found an old electroshock therapy machine that they kept zapping themselves with. For fun, you know? And that reminded me of that kid you went to school with. What was his name again?

Buck: Well . . . I don’t want to say his name.

Me: A legitimate hesitation on your part and I’ll accept it. So just refer to him as Winky Hooterstein . . .

Buck: No. I will not refer to him as . . .  that word . . . or whatever the hell you just said.

Me: Then come up with any name you like.

Buck: I’m starting. Got your stupid tape recorder on? . . . He was transferred to my school in about fifth grade, and he had Tourette Syndrome. So all of a sudden, this new kid in school would rise up out of his seat and slowly but surely raise both hands giving the teacher both middle fingers and yell, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

Me: That probably wasn’t Tourette’s. He just said it was Tourette’s to get out of detention.

Buck: No, it was Tourette’s. When he’d come out of it, he didn’t understand what was happening or anything. Anyway, then he disappeared for two weeks. And when he came back, he was like half the kid he was when he left –

Me: The poor little thing. He was like McMurphy.

Buck: Who?

Me: What the hell is the name of that book? It was a movie . . . it was a book . . . Ken Kesey wrote it . . . Jack Whatshisname starred as McMurphy . . . What’s happening to my brain?

Buck: It was Cuckoo’s Nest. And you have raging A.D.D. like no one else on this earth.

Me: Yes, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Thank you. And yeah, I’m pretty sure I do have A.D.–

Buck: So the kid came back and he wasn’t the same, so I asked him what happened. And he told me that basically they had taken him to the nut house and strapped him into a thing that looked like an electric chair and they electroshocked him. They electrocuted him, really. While he was strapped to a chair. And that’s how they handled it back then.

Me: That’s how they treated Tourette’s? 

Buck: Yeah. What was really bad was, he was half-bald in grammar school from all the electroshock. 

Me: Well that was an uplifting story.

Buck: You asked me to tell it to you.

Me: Well, what the hell? I thought you’d tell it funny –

Buck: What the hell is so funny about a little kid getting zapped to livin’ shit in an antiquated electric chair?

Me: Absolutely nothing!

Buck: Well nobody asked you to blog about this –

Me: What I wanted to blog about for cry eye, was the fact that even though Taunton had the insane asylums, it was the so-called normal people such as yourself –  me, too, I’m not letting  myself off the hook here — who acted so insane about them. When I was in school, kids were obsessed with Taunton. And the adults didn’t help any, because even the teachers referred to the mental hospitals as nut houses. That’s what I wanted to talk about. You know, like piling into some kid’s Mustang and driving around in that awful maze out at Paul Dever, getting lost and shrieking for help, and you’d all be so stoned that the shrieking would sound like ten times louder than it probably was? And then you’d all laugh hysterically, like a bunch of nuts. Were there kids taking acid out there when you were in high school?

Buck: I think I’m on acid right now. How the hell did I know what you wanted to talk about? You asked about the electroshock therapy and the only thing I really know about it is what happened to the little kid with Tourette’s!

Me: That’s true. I did. Okay, let me start over. Taunton housed the state’s two biggest and scariest mental hospitals. Except for the one over in Bridgewater, but you had to be criminally insane to get in there, Titicut Follies and all that. But in your hometown of Taunton, The State Lunatic Asylum was similar to the one where Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis met in 12 Monkeys. Back in the day, people were scared of them and they were spooky. 

 Buck: Well, I suppose if there were gonna be any actual spooky stuff going on, Paul Dever would be the place where it would happen. It doesn’t have a very happy history. Not that either of them do, they’re both pretty sad places, but Paul Dever was worse, I suppose.

Me: This is fascinating. Please go on, and try to tell as many lurid details as possible.

Buck: Before it became a mental institution, it was 1,200 acres of land they used first as a military training camp and then as prison camp. It’s where they kept the German and Italian POWs, but mostly the Italians for some reason that I don’t know, so don’t ask me. But it was still called Myles Standish back then, it wasn’t called Paul Dever Mental Institution until the late Fifties. WHY THE HELL DO I FEEL LIKE YOUR HISTORY TEACHER?

Me: Well . . . truthfully . . . I already know all this crap. I had it in Local History when I was a senior in high school. I needed the credits and Local History had the exact amount I needed, so I took it even though I really didn’t think I’d like it except for all the field trips, but they started taking us to all the really old cemeteries, and they also took us to this old house where in like 1885 this lady had thrown up out the window of her second floor bedroom, and all these chickens in the yard ate the vomit, and it turned out she’d had Smallpox, and when everybody in town ate the fucking chickens –

Buck: Jesus. If you know this crap, why are you asking me?

Me: When my sister was in high school they used to take them on field trips to Paul Dever. Isn’t that disgraceful? They would parade the kids through the wards to look at all these poor people strapped into their beds and just totally out of it. They also took them to Walpole State Prison! You guys graduated the same year, did you go on disgraceful field trips like that?

Buck: Some kids did, but I opted for the vomit and Smallpox tour like you. I needed the credits.

Me: [laughing] Now talk about the pigs.

Buck: What the hell sort of photographs are you going to run with this?

Me: Don’t you worry about my photographs. Photographs are none of your business. I’ve got millions of them, I’ll never run out. Talk about the pigs.  

Buck: There were all these ruined old barracks or whatever, and the state leased them out to people who raised pigs. Like, giant pigs. There’d be tons of these huge pigs living in swill, just lying in the mud with seagulls on their backs. My father always threatened me if I was bad that it was where he was gonna send me to live there with Charlie Flabbergaster –

Me: God. I hate stupid, made-up, asinine names.

Buck: Well what was that bullshit you wanted to call the kid I was just talking about?

Me: I don’t remember. Go on.

Buck: And my father said that Charlie Flabbergaster kept a girl as his pet, and her name was Frischy Frischette. He said Charlie kidnapped her, but then he ended up keeping her as a pet.

Me: Oh, it was a bedtime fable.

Buck: And Frischy had to cook for the pigs and eat with the pigs and spend her days cleaning up after the pigs, and her only friends were pigs. I think he got the idea for the story from Pinocchio, when the little kids were getting kidnapped and turned into donkeys or pigs or something.

Me: Didn’t you feel sorry for that little girl?

Buck: I was more scared for myself. It loomed big on my horizon that I could end up there. I didn’t doubt my father would send me to live there.

Me: Let’s jump to the fact your whole town was a magnet for people who were mentally ill.

Buck: Yes. We had a lot of cast-offs from the state mental hospitals.

Me: Living in the woods and stuff.

Buck: Well you could get away with that then, apparently. You’d tell people you were from Taunton, and they’d go, Oh yeah, you’re all nuts down there.

Me: Well being from Easton, I believed it. That was the word on the street. Taunton was the nutty town where all the nuts lived. And to prove it, they took the kids there on field trips just to look around. That’s why when you were a teenager driving around with a carload of high teenagers on a Friday night, everybody drove over to Taunton to get even more stoned and run around Paul Dever or the Insane Asylum. It was spooky-fun-for-every-one. 

Buck: We always went up to the nut house during a full moon. We’d sneak through the grounds and you’d hear people howling. There’s always been that thing about them using the basement for like, I don’t know, satanic rituals or something. They were probably just torturing people.

Me: You could hear them?

Buck: Yeah. We would run around and sneak up to the building and stuff.

Me: How old were you when you did that?

Buck: Right up till graduation from high school.

Me: Yeah, me too. It’s funny I never ran into you out there.

Buck: Now THAT would have been scary.

Me: WHY?! [laughing]

Buck: [laughing] Because when you were 17, I was 27. That would have been very weird, don’t you think?

Me: [laughing] Oh, that’s right. And when you were 17, I was 7.

Buck: [laughing] That’s even scarier. If you were running around out there under the full moon, stoned and 7-years-old, I would have run the other way screaming. I’d probably be running still.

Me: And still screaming.

Buck: Yes. I’d like to scream right the hell now.

 

LINKS: Taunton: The Cursed County A site of paranormal activity dedicated to keeping alive the creepy ambiance exploited by generations of Bristol County teenagers, including Buck and myself.  

Titicut Follies, which I accidentally saw in an art house movie theater once. Horrific.

History of Massachusetts insane asylums, as well as those from other states.

Technorati Tags: Humor, Buck, Life With Buck, 12 Monkeys, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey, Pinocchio, Camp Myles Standish, Paul A. Dever, State Lunatic Asylum At Taunton, historic lunatic asylums, Titicut Follies, Bridgewater State Mental Hospital, Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis