Almost Home (15 page)

After being locked in a cage for weeks, the thought of ever getting out became one of those things that was too good to be true.

My mother and father came to see me the next day. There was no way to touch, and we had to talk to each other through two-inch thick bullet-proof glass. My father didn’t even recognize me. When he and my mother walked through the door, I heard him ask her, “Is that him?” We were allowed to talk for fifteen minutes, them on one side of the glass and me on the other. That’s not much time to get reacquainted, but my father promised that he would be part of my life from now on. The guard then came and told them it was time to leave.

I look back now and find myself filled with a tremendous amount of anger at how unjust it all was. The punishment didn’t fit the crime by any stretch of the imagination. All I did was walk into an abandoned trailer. This made no sense.

A couple of days later Jerry Driver arrived once again, this time with my mother and father present. He needed a guardian in attendance to put me in the mental institution. I was given my clothes and told to get dressed. If you’ve never had to wear jail clothes, then you can’t comprehend what it’s like to finally be able to put your own clothes back on. It takes a while to get used to. The clothes are designed to strip you of any identity and reduce you to a number. You don’t even feel like a human being when you have to wear them. You have no dignity.

The four of us traveled in Driver’s car, and it was a long ride. It took several hours to get from Jonesboro to Little Rock, where the hospital was located. He restrained himself from asking more insane Satanist related questions in front of my parents, but I could tell it almost caused him physical pain to do so. Every time I looked up I saw his beady rat’s eyes staring intently at me in the rearview mirror. For some unknown reason he had come to visit my mother while I waited in jail, and asked her if he could see my room. She let him in and left him back there alone. He told her that he was “confiscating” a few things, even though this was blatantly illegal. He took the Goya-like sketches from the walls, and a new journal I had started (It was in a funeral registry book, morbidly enough). He also took my skull collection.

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It sounds kind of odd to have a skull collection, but it’s easily explainable.

There’s a hard-packed dirt path behind Lakeshore that the local youth wandered on. It doesn’t go anywhere specific, just sort of meanders around a small lake and a few fields. For some reason I always found odd pieces of skeletons that had died out there—possums, raccoons, squirrels, birds, and even the occasional dog or cat. I began collecting them because my teenage mind thought they “looked cool.” I’ve never denied having questionable taste when it comes to interior decorating. The oddest thing we ever found was a beer bottle with two tiny skulls inside. The problem was that they were slightly too large to get out of the bottle.

We spent hours trying to figure out how they got in the bottle in the first place.

At any rate, Jerry Driver took my personal possessions as “evidence.” Evidence of what, he didn’t say. I wouldn’t know this for quite a while, as it would be some time before I ever saw Lakeshore again. For now, I was on my way to the funny farm.

By the time we arrived, all the other patients had been put to bed. It was about ten o’clock at night and the place was completely silent. My mother and father sat in a small office giving my personal information to the woman in charge of filing paperwork on new patients. The process took about thirty minutes, and Jerry Driver sat silently listening to every piece of information. I was exceedingly nervous, having never been in such an environment before. The only thing I had to base my expectations on was the jail I had just left, so I was expecting the worst.

A nurse came to escort me through two large doors, back into the heart off the building itself. My mother was still answering questions as I left. Beyond those doors, it wasn’t nearly as nice as the lobby we had just left behind, but it was also no chamber of horrors. All the furniture was made of a material similar to plastic, so that if anyone vomited or pissed themselves, there would not stain. It also possessed the added bonus of only needing to be hosed off after the occasional fecal smearing.

I was told to sit at a small table where I was introduced to a tall, thin, black guy named Ron. He looked through my suitcase, logged down everything I had, then showed me to a room. There were two beds, a desk, a chair, and a small wardrobe in which to hang your clothes. I was alone; there was no one in the other bed. I’d been through so much stress and trauma during the past few weeks that I immediately fell into a deep sleep which lasted until morning.

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The day began with a nurse making wake up calls at six AM. She turned on the lights and went from room to room telling everyone to prepare for breakfast.

Everyone got up, took a shower, got dressed, and performs whatever morning rituals the insane carry out in privacy. You then march down to the day room, sit on the puke-proof couches, and stare at each other until seven o’clock.

On my first morning there were only three other patients. The first I saw was a blond haired girl who was sitting with her back to me and singing a Guns-N-Roses song. I looked at the back of her head for a while, until I became curious about what she looked like. When I could no longer take the curiosity I walked around in front of her. She looked up at me with ice blue eyes that seemed either half asleep or fully hypnotized, and she smiled. By her gaze alone you could tell that something just wasn’t right with this picture. She seemed happy, and right-fully so, as she was being discharged later in the day. Her name was Michelle, and she was there for attempting suicide by swallowing thumbtacks and hair bar-rettes.

Soon a second patient entered. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, and could have easily passed for Michelle’s twin brother. I never knew what he was there for, and he was discharged in less than three days. The third patient was a young black guy who seemed to be the most normal of the trio. He went home the next day.

If I had any fear of being left alone, it was soon laid to rest. Patients began to come in on a daily basis, and soon the entire place was full. I had to share my room with an interesting young sociopath who was sent there after being discovered at his new hobby—masturbating into a syringe and injecting it into dogs.

The entire ward was a parade of bizarre characters.

We lined up every morning and strolled down to the kitchen for a tasty breakfast of biscuits and gravy, orange juice, blueberry muffins, hash browns, scram-bled eggs, toast, sausage, and frosted flakes. The insane do not count carbs. The food was delicious, and I enjoyed every meal. Conversation around the table was never dull and covered topics such as who had stolen whose underwear, or whether or not Quasimodo had ever been a sumo wrestler.

Once breakfast was over we walked single file (in theory) back down to our wing and had the first of four group therapy sessions for the day. At this session you had to set a daily goal for yourself such as, “My goal for the day is to learn the rules,” or “My goal for the day is to deal with my anger in a more constructive
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manner than I did yesterday.” This made everyone irritable, because it’s hard to come up with another goal every single day, and we couldn’t use the same one twice. My last group was right before bed. I had to say if you had achieved your goal, and if not then why not.

Next came my weekly visit to the psychiatrist. We’d all sit on the couches and fidget while she called us in one at a time to talk. She had a small, dark, pleasant office filled with bookshelves. This was the doctor in charge of making your diagnosis and deciding what medication you needed. My diagnosis was depression.

No shit. My life was hell and showed no signs of improvement, I had a stepfather who was a ten on the asshole scale, I’d just spent weeks in jail for reasons I still didn’t understand, I didn’t know where my lover was being held, and I was locked in a building full of sociopaths, schizophrenics, and other assorted freaks.

You bet your ass I was depressed. I’d be more inclined to believe I had a problem if I wasn’t depressed. At any rate, I was prescribed anti-depressants, which I was given starting that night.

Anti-depressants were a horrid invention. The only thing I could tell they did was make me so tired I couldn’t think straight. I told one of the nurses that something was wrong because it hurt to open my eyes and I kept falling asleep every time I quit moving. I was told not to worry, this was natural, and I’d get used to it. That’s not something you want to hear. Over time I did grow used to it, and in another month I wasn’t even able to tell I’d taken anything.

After talking to the doctor, I went to the gym for a bit of morning exercise.

There was a stationary bike, a punching bag, a rowing machine and a stair master. Everyone spent time on each one. There was also a foosball table and a basketball goal we could use after lunch.

Every so often we went to an arts and crafts room to work on individual projects. I made two ceramic unicorns that I took home with me when I left. I’ve no idea what eventually happened to them, but I was proud of them at the time.

For lunch it was back to the kitchen, then another group session, which was usually greeted with outraged cries of, “This is bullshit!” I agreed wholeheartedly, but kept my opinion silent. After suffering through this indignity, we were allowed to take a thirty-minute nap.

In the evening we went outside to a large fenced-in area to walk around and enjoy the air. We talked, looked out into the woods, or bounced tennis balls back and forth. Before bed we were allowed to choose a snack. There were granola bars, chocolate milk, peanut butter and crackers, or a cup of pudding. It wasn’t a bad place to be, as far as psych wards go.

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We were rewarded for good behavior by being taken on field trips. Once we were all loaded into a long, white van with a giant handicapped symbol on the side and taken to the circus. It was hard to tell if there were more clowns in the show or in the stands. Another time we were taken swimming. I never even got in the pool. I stood under an umbrella, dressed head to toe in black and waited to go back to the hospital. The last and most wretched trip was to a movie theater, where we watched Whoopi Goldberg in
Sister Act.

Life went on, with my anxiety continuing to build. After I had been there for about three weeks my mother, father, and sister came to visit. A therapist came in with them to describe how and what I’d been doing over the past few weeks.

Before turning to leave us alone she informed them that they could come to her with any questions they may have. This was the first real chance I had to talk to my father in many years, and we discussed both the future and the past.

He lived in Oregon now and had been preparing to go back when my sister had contacted him. He had been married several times since he left, and my eight-year-old half-brother now lived with him. I was amazed to learn that he and my mother would soon be married again, and as soon as I was out of the hospital, we were all moving to Oregon. Ordinarily I would have been thrilled, as this was everything I could possibly have wanted—Jack was gone, my father was back, I was receiving a twenty-four hour pass to spend the next day with my family, and we were moving up in the world—but now it was a nightmare. I was leaving Deanna behind. I started to rock gently in my chair as I silently cried. I didn’t make a sound, but the tears came so fast and heavy that I couldn’t see the room. I was looking at the world from behind a waterfall. I was sad and desperate, but something in my guts turned to steel. I knew I would keep my word no matter what.

I barely slept that night, thinking of the adventure ahead. This was a whole new life. I could leave my past behind like an old skin, something I would have previously given anything for.

When morning arrived, I got dressed and packed my things, because I would be staying in a motel room that night. I love hotels and motels. There’s something exciting about it, even though you’re only sleeping. I hadn’t had a chance to do it in many years—not since before my mother and father were divorced.

They arrived to pick me up in my father’s Dodge Charger, and I was

impressed. Chrome mags, a nice paint job, and top-of-the-line-stereo system. I loved the car immediately. They asked me what I wanted to do, so we went to McDonalds, where I saw some people I knew. They were in the high school band and had some sort of competition in Little Rock, where by some amazing coinci-Damien Echols

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dence they had wandered into this very McDonald’s. When a girl named Becky asked what I was doing there, I informed her that I was out on a twenty-four hour pass from the nearby mental institution. After she realized I was serious, she erupted into peals of laughter.

We got a motel room, and my father and I went down to rent a VCR and some tapes. We got every Steven Segal film they had and went back to watch them. He already had all of these movies at home, and they were some of his favorites. I enjoyed myself more that night than I had in a very long time, even though there were things nagging at me. We ordered pizza, watched movies, and talked about what it was like in Oregon. They tried to please me and kept the curtains drawn and the air turned low so that the room was like ice. It was almost as if today were my birthday. They knew I’d been through hell lately, and were being extra nice. I fell asleep early because I was still emotionally exhausted.

The next morning I had a breakfast of doughnuts before heading back to the hospital. Before they left, the doctor told my parents I would be discharged in twenty-four hours and they could pick me up. I never understood the point of having to come back for one more day, but it passed quickly enough. After saying goodbye to the other patients, I was on my way to Oregon.

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