And I was normal in every other way, man, I got not one thing or person to peg it all onto, except yours truly, i.e, The Motherfucking Duke. Just one of these things that happens. Some folks get one disease, some folks get another.

So anyhow, I was in there about a week when I encountered the first of the Jesuses. Obviously I ain't gonna go using real names here, so we'll just refer to this individual as Jesus 1.

As an interesting aside, the real names of both Jesuses happened to be the same.

And actually, I believe there was a third Jesus, but said Jesus was much, much better by the time I arrived on the scene. And Jesus 3 had a different name, too.

The ward I was in wasn't really for your schizophrenic types, just folks like myself, folks who were maybe harboring an addiction, folks that were incredibly depressed. You know the type. Like you maybe have a flu, so you puke a little now and again. These folks, The Duke included, they got depressed, and so wept a bit now and again, for no apparent reason.

The Dueling Jesuses though, they were schizophrenic, but manageable.

Jesus 1 didn't speak to me for days, just kinda stared up at me now and again. He wasn't just any old Jesus, neither, he was The Suffering Christ. Now and then, so a friend told me, he'd let you in on all these secrets about how Judas Iscariot was bi-sexual and so on and so forth. I don't know how he knew. He was The Suffering Christ, for Gods sakes, what didn't he know?

Jesus 1 got a lot better in the first month or so of my time there, started talking a little more, but I gotta admit, it was pretty heartbreaking. You think you're having a conversation with someone on a human level of some kind, and you are, but whereas you're probably gonna remember it in ten minutes, they'll have forgotten the fuck about it. They'll still know you, and still know you talked to them, but as to what it was about, most likely they assume it was about comets or some shit. For sure, it was a blast having these mad discussions, but there was that veil over his eyes, that watery, impenetrable divide, and I don't believe I, or anyone else, ever got beyond it.

But we were mates, is what we were, and on account of he'd been there a bit longer, he'd get to go out down the town and so on, and every few weeks he'd head off for an hour and return with some new gadget he'd picked up. One week it was a DVD player, another week it was a camcorder, then a Hi-Fi, then a Playstation 2.