I’d been sent here, by my erstwhile editor, to answer a question: Is Everbleak the weirdest place in America? To do that, you first have to define ‘weird’. Then throw that definition out the nearest window. Weird? You have no goddamn idea…
Benji Redwood
By normal road trip standards, this was an easy drive up the east coast, hugging the Atlantic shore through Georgia and South Carolina. Always on the quiet roads, with the Mom ‘n Pop shops and the old timers filling your gas for you. I had a motel booked and waiting for me, but you never knew if it would still be standing after the latest hurricane had passed by. The weatherman on KWTQ said it wouldn’t hit land this time, but the sky was grey, ominous… everbleak.
The storm passed overnight, so I arrived at Everbleak on a bright morning after a dismal sleep in a dismal motel I won’t embarrass the owner by mentioning. The outer banks of North Carolina are weird enough anyway: remote, flat, and with an air of impermanence. The houses stand on spindly legs waiting to be washed away, and the trees are bent double amongst the platinum blonde grass and reeds.
But Everbleak is way weirder than that, hombre. It squats, dark and brooding like a monster about to pounce. And all around it are it’s dark little monster children waiting to be fed. Was I going to be a regurgitated titbit for their hungry mouths?
But then I get met at the door by Jenny Occam, general manager, and she’s all smiles and ocean breeze like I’ve just arrived at a hotel on Miami Beach. She’s going to show me around. ‘Good trip?’ she asks; ‘Can I offer you a lemonade? The clowns hand-pressed it, but the nuns keep them clean mostly’. And just like that, I’m intrigued at what lies beyond her smile and the crumbling portico of the grand entrance hall.
I’d been sent here, by my erstwhile editor, to answer a question: Is Everbleak the weirdest place in America? To do that, you first have to define ‘weird’. Then throw that definition out the nearest window. Weird? You have no goddamn idea! My on-off drinking buddy Hunter S Thompson once said ‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro’. I was about test exactly how ‘pro’ at this writing / journalism gig I was.
But first, let me explain what Everbleak is, because it seems to be as schizophrenic as some of its inmates.
Everbleak is essentially three demons possessing a single, dark host: a mental hospital (or ‘Asylum’ in old parlance), a regular medical hospital, and an Institute for medical and parapsychological research. They inhabit a sprawl of buildings, clustered round a main hospital, in grounds that almost reach clear to the beach. It was founded at the start of the century, but most of the buildings were already forty years old by that point, and crumbling in the sea air. Every painted surface here is peeling. Bad skin, bad juju. The sense of foreboding it gives from the outside is palpable.
‘What’s with all the nuns?’ I ask my guide as she waltzes me through wards and corridors. ‘The Sisters of Everbleak’ she tells me, ‘they oversee discipline, security and admin. This place couldn’t function without them’.
They look at me as I pass. But it’s not a look of welcome or curiosity: it’s outright murderous intent. At first I wonder if it’s the beard and cowboy boots, but then one of them stares at my camera and says: ‘No photos. Respect the privacy of the inmates my child, or we’ll feed your nethers to the alligators’. She says it with a smile, so I don’t know whether it’s a joke. I look at Jenny but she just gives this little ‘psychos will be psychos’ kind of resigned shrug. And on we go, deeper into the heart of darkness (if I may steal that imagery from Mr Conrad).
Apart from the psycho nuns, it gets weird real quick. There’s a lot of clowns here: midget ones on hobby horses, alpacas being ridden by (living) ventriloquist’s dummies, and trapeze artistes with streaked mascara. There’s a lot of noise too: part jungle hubbub, part funeral (lots of wailing). It’s like Ken Kesey dropped some LSD in my coffee at the motel: a triple dose. And then the fear comes on. This place is swallowing me; the corridors are digesting me all the way to this thing’s dark stomach.
‘Would you like a cookie?’ asks Jenny as we pass the nurse’s break room. They’re pink wafers, and I’m struck by the colour of them against the peeling green wall. A man in a trilby walks by carrying a live lobster. He’s arguing about something with a chimpanzee dressed as a sailor: an old-fashioned jack tar one. It doesn’t seem to matter to people in Everbleak that animals can’t talk. And now the nuns are looking at my yellow reporter’s notepad with glowering eyes beneath their wimples. ‘Why am I even allowed inside?’ I ask myself as we arrive at Jenny’s office. She looks embarrassed, and then the smell hits me. Before I can ask what it is, she goes behind her desk and grabs a midget nun and a ventriloquist’s dummy (in a state of mid-coital undress) by their collars. Then she virtually throws them into the corridor. You can hear the clack of the wooden dummy hitting the old linoleum, then the sound of the interrupted lovers scampering away. She ushers me to sit, and a clown in a white doctor’s coat asks if we want tea. Jenny declines, but pops a couple of pills. They’re pink and green like the wafer/wall combo, and I wonder whether any of this is really happening. Maybe I’m drugged in the trunk of a car somewhere. Or in a hearse driven by clown undertakers.
For the next hour, I’m regaled with stories… assaulted with anecdotes. Jenny is a good storyteller, and the drugs have opened her skylight up. The sun beams in, beatific and groovy. She tells me a bit about the alchemy and parapsychology going on in the basement labyrinths of the institute: the astral projection and the telekinesis; the ESP and the black magic. ‘Can I see it?’ I ask gingerly. No. Firmly no. But I can have my fortune read if I like. They have a Sherpa from Nepal with a clairvoyant crow, apparently. I politely decline.
Later, we eat lunch in the West Wing staff canteen. It’s pretty clear they’re mostly stoned, and a lot of the nurses and orderlies are wearing masks or circus greasepaint. There’s a dark edge to most of them: a weird kind of menace as they sip their instant coffee and read the daily funnies in the Manteo Bugle. Jenny asks if I want to see the garden, and I leap at the chance for some fresh air. Everbleak smells of musk and decay covered up by cheap perfume, and I still have the sex-stench of her office as a bad memory to exorcise.
The grounds seem bleak on a day like this. This big clouds were back, rolling black and ominous as the wind is punches seven bells out of the weather vane on Everbleak’s gothic roof-steeple. But it’s spacious out there, and they have all kinds of circus folk and people with visible mental illnesses digging, planting and growing things under the watchful eyes of the nuns and nurses. It feels more like a commune than a hospital – or a medieval village, where witches are revered rather than burned.
I suddenly realise that I’ve only just scratched the surface of Everbleak, and that I have absolutely no pictorial evidence of the surreal things I’ve seen. Eventually they let me take one picture of the staff before I go: Doctor Mabuse and Claudia – a nurse in one of the psychiatric wards. They are unwilling (or not allowed) to explain the significance of the blindfold or sea urchin though.
I drive back to the motel in need of a drink. Everbleak presents infinitely more questions than answers, and apart from the things you do see, you’re left wondering about what you didn’t: the closed doors, the locked rooms, the smoke from the outbuildings. What are they hiding? Would I even want to know?
everbleak 