"Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon"

Yeah, that Greystone. I feel like a hepcat knowing that my father slept there. Foetid halls indeed! I smelled them. I remember the crazy people there, and I remember the knowledge that my father was among them.

I have no other souvenirs of my visit to Greystone than the "admission tickets" above, which came to me in a pile of papers forty years after the visit. Was it only one visit, or did I only remember the first, or did I coalesce several into one? 

In any case, there's another object that has come to be a souvenir of the Greystone experience: a short story called Belly Up that fed my hunger for memories of my father for all the years when I didn't know the tickets existed. It's pretty much the ur-tale for me––one of the first I ever wrote, and full of things like familial strife, the reverberations of violence, and visions of insanity that have dominated my writing ever since.