Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (10 page)

With Kid it didn’t take much. He wasn’t delusional or paranoid. Or if he was, not so’s you would notice. Not like the others. The medication was the biggest thing standing between him and making sense. He just wanted out, or he wanted a burger, or he wanted someone to pay uncritical attention to him for five minutes while he danced.

But time. That was the thing that no one at Meriwether knew what to do with. Yet it was the thing that dragged on and out like a life sentence. It was the thing that weighed so heavily in everyone’s attitude, whether it was the docs who didn’t have any of it, or the nurses who did, but had mostly perfected the art of doing as little as possible, or the social workers who were lost in shuffled papers.

Nobody had time for you. Nobody stopped and paid attention. And yet, caught as you were in the system of enforced desuetude, you were definitively stopped. A stopped clock. A broken thing. A forgotten case. And all you wanted or needed in the world was a moment, the briefest of actual acknowledgments to set you going again.

The Spanish Yenta said it best. He was due for discharge one afternoon toward the end of my stay. He was sitting, as I would later do, on one of the chairs in the dayroom, the ones by the door where you always sat anxiously craning and fidgeting when you were expecting a visitor. You did this because those chairs afforded a view of the ward doors, and a view through the small rectangular windows in the tops of those doors, of the hallway beyond, where your visitor would first appear like a blessed apparition of the outside world. The Yenta was sitting there, fidgeting, too, waiting for his discharge papers, fantasizing about the very first thing he was going to do the minute he got outside.

“I’m going to step out onto the street and stop the first person I see. I’m going to pull all the change out of my pockets and say, ‘Can I buy a cigarette off you?’ And they’re going to say, ‘Here. Take two. And put your money away.’ ”

That was it. Something gratuitous. A favor without the asking. A superfluous act, however small, was recognition, was contact.

It was those attentive moments lost that hurt the most in Meriwether and made you crave them all the more. The times in the hallway with Mother T, when I could not comfort her with even a hand on the shoulder, or the times when someone as skittish as Kid would, in unbelieving thanks for a candy bar—as if this were the world—whip his arms out wide to hug me, big smile, then stop himself and pull back, remembering that touch was against the rules.

 

But, despite the sound of this, I don’t romanticize any of it overmuch. You couldn’t. The reminders were always there to bring you down. Kid was a royal pain in the ass. I wouldn’t have wanted to be his parent. I doubt I would even have had the stamina or patience to be his peer counselor, let alone his therapist. That is, if you were really going to be a therapist, and sit down with him every day plugging away at his problems.

And yet, we had all given up on him too soon, or so it seemed to me. Without a fight? I don’t know. There might have been one somewhere along the line, a long-drawn-out home-front attempt abandoned in favor of triage. But nobody in Meriwether was fighting anymore, if anyone ever had. It was the kind of place that atrophied optimists, turned them gray as dishwater and as unimaginative. These old pros were the epitome of hands washed, outlook poor, going through the motions on the punch clock. And that was an approach, a prognosis very sad to see in a kid as young and alive as Kid was.

To earn points with the nurses for cooperating, Kid went to community meetings and nodded off in his chair, too stoned to participate. When we went around the room introducing ourselves, he had to be elbowed awake. He’d marble-mouth his name or maybe make a brief complaint that was too garbled to understand, then tip back into oblivion.

He waited out his time. And we waited out ours. Mumbling, bumbling through.

In one of her best puns, Deborah cut right to the heart of this predicament, one in which, let’s be clear, mostly resourceless, essentially harmless people who had often committed crimes no more serious than disturbing the peace were confined against their will, forcibly medicated with drugs of dubious or at best limited efficacy and usually unfathomed toxicity, and left to rot until the hospital needed the bed space, in which case they were turned back out into the world twenty to eighty pounds fatter (depending on length of stay), more polluted, emotionally disenfranchised, and in despair. Practically deployed for a relapse.

One afternoon, during a patient karaoke session hosted by Sarah and another med student, Deborah and I sat at a long table together hoping for some Gershwin. Sarah turned to us and laughed.

“You two look like a panel of judges on
American Idol.
”

“Yeah,” Deborah said to me, pointing to the med students. “They’re American, and we’re idle.”

Everyone had a version of this complaint. A woman whom I met on my second day, but whom I saw thereafter only at meals, or ensconced on the rubberized couch in the dayroom watching TV, said once in an aside to me, “Welcome to Hotel Meriwether, where they give lessons in authoritarianism.”

Mother T’s version was more empathic. She watched over the rest of us, concerned, thinking that someday she would go before the Supreme Court and argue our case or, barring that, lobby God, whose ear she had her lips to.

She didn’t like the way things were done at Meriwether either, and she objected on other people’s behalf.

When Len, the Chinese guy who refused his meds, made a show of tossing his pills over his shoulder rather than into his mouth, the nurse said threateningly, “I’ll be back with an injection.”

Mother T leapt to his defense. “The law says you can refuse treatment.”

And in reply, the nurse actually said the wormish words, “I’m just following orders.”

Mother T made a similar objection to me on my first night in the ward. The purple-glove brigade had taken Carla into the seclusion room, pricked her, and left her there to come down, or pass out, or pound the pads until she shut up. She’d been pacing the halls, crying, and cursing the Savior as a faggot.

“Gay motherfucker,” she said looking up at God on the ceiling. “I hate your son.”

Then, postinjection, she began keening in scales like a wounded bloodhound.

Mother T and I had been walking the length of the hall talking about her merciful God. As we passed the seclusion room she pointed at the door.

“This woman in here,” she said. “It’s not right to be in such a small room when you’re losing your mind.”

 

Ellen protested mostly to herself, spitting soliloquies under her breath or, occasionally, when I asked her about herself, spitting them only slightly more audibly at me.

“I’m sixty-five years old,” she’d say, with trenchant economy. “And I’ve been here for five months. I sit in this chair and I pray.”

She, like Tracy Chapman, thought she’d been shot in the head. I wondered if this was a common explanation among psychotics for the confusion and broken thoughts. She told me about what I can only presume was an imaginary, truant, or deceased son who, she said, brought her breakfast every morning, but was stopped at the hospital doors and turned back.

“They won’t let him visit me,” she said. “So he has to dump that breakfast in the garbage every day and go home.”

When I heard things like this I marveled at what great mercies the mind seemed capable of. If you were spending your golden years languishing in a public hospital while your son, probably alive and well and not giving a shit, had left you there for months on end, the breakfast pilgrimage was a beautiful lie to tell yourself, a sustaining image of thwarted devotion, and a glimpse in one lonely, clinging mind of the origin of human myth.

Myth was her form of revolt. That, and once, late at night, from beneath her swaddling shroud, there came the soft, proud sobs that I could hear her choking out and swallowing.

 

And Deborah, of course. She had lots to say on the matter, not just of confinement or things taken away, but of technique. Survival in the mind.

I asked her about Sweet, trying for a way in.

“What’s she doing? What is all that talk?”

“She’s doing the same thing you do. Just more extreme.”

“Why?”

“Because when they take away everything that you care about, that’s what you have.”

“Is it how she copes?”

“She’s hiding,” she said finally. “We all are.”

She rolled up her sleeves and showed me the scars from where she’d tried to open her wrists.

“I did this when I knew the police were coming for me.”

That shut me up. I didn’t have anything else inquisitive to say to that. She looked at me for a minute, full in the eyes.

“You have your pen. You have your notebook. You have soft skin and you have your mind. That’s all you need. Keep it. Don’t let anyone take it away from you, because they will. Shit, I want your mind, too.”

Like Deborah and Ellen, Clean also had his take on the matter. He thought a lot about power. Like so many of them—Deborah, with her ethnic shitpots, or Mother T with her not so extreme or uncommon apocalyptica—he reflected the prejudices and obsessions of his culture. He thought that all white people were German. Germany meant power. Again, the authoritarian tinge to the “crazy” person’s view, history cherry-picked for meaning, out of date, but symbolically in the ballpark.

“Norma,” he asked me, “was Rome civilized?”

“Yes,” I said, betraying my own distortions. “Once.”

“And who’s Rome now?”

“We are,” I said.

Still, let’s not get too high-handed about all this. The insane are not sages of ill repute, or martyrs of an empire in decline, standing nobly outside or above its vices, crying into the wind. They are deeply and indicatively of their culture, our culture. They are not ennobled by their suffering. They are like the rest of us. And so was I. I responded to them just as the system and everyone else did, even if for a moment I convinced myself otherwise.

They were not, for example, immune to coveting possessions simply because they had none. If I gave, they wanted more. Always more. (How American.) And very quickly they ceased even to be grateful, becoming as entitled as the rest of us to our accustomed bounty. And when I gave, I became The Giver, the smarmy Samaritan who gets off on giving, the goody-good whom everyone admires, the blessed, kind answer to their prayers. And I began to loathe myself in this position, smiling beneficently, handing out my balms and prizes, graciously accepting thanks, and thinking all the while that God was working up one hell of a performance report for me that quarter. Cha-ching.

But for a while, before the saintly stand-up gal routine started to make me sick of myself, and before it made me want to bury my greedy, grasping fellow patients alive under a pile of McDonald’s french fries—There! Choke on it!—I played the role. I made myself the wish granter of Ward 20.

As I lay there, listening to Ellen cry that night under her shroud, I felt so goddamned overwhelmed by guilty thankfulness for the unjust accidents of birth that I resolved the next morning to make her happy, or at least backhandedly, gustatorily happy, the way a jailer grants the death row inmate a last meal and manages to feel magnanimous about it.

“If you could have anything to eat tonight for dinner,” I said, “what would it be?”

“Fried chicken,” she said. “And a Pepsi.”

Ah, she was going to make this easy. How nice for me. I called my visitor for the evening and put in the order. I put in an order for Clean, too, who wanted cigarettes and McDonald’s, and Mother T, who needed a Bible, though she was too resigned to ask for anything, and Deborah who wanted McDonald’s too (they all did), as well as a
National Geographic.
By the end of my stay I was the delivery whore, passing out dollar burgers that I got by the half dozen, and fries, and sodas, and Hershey bars, and sticky buns and any other cheap sop I could think of or got a request for.

But before long, the predictable happened. It was like filling a bottomless cup. I gave Ellen her chicken and her Pepsi, and though she thanked me profusely, fifteen minutes later she flagged me down and said:

“You got anything else?”

This happened with everyone, to the point where I couldn’t even eat my own snacks without rousing the scavengers. I’d have given away twenty candy bars minutes before, but the smallest rustle of a wrapper and they’d be on me.

“Have some?”

I hated myself for begrudging them, and felt like some kind of despicable closet pigger when I took to going into the bathroom to eat, coughing loudly to cover any suspicious sounds.

Finally, when I was taking my orders one day, and Kid asked for an iPod, I got the reality check I deserved. I decided this whole fellow man thing wasn’t for me. There was just too much childish need for gratification and endless expectation of same. This was no solution. I was giving junk food to diabetics, recovering addicts, and sedentary near-vagrants whose meds were already well on the way to making them obese. And all purely for the hit of pleasure it would give them and, more important, me.

The worst of it is that they came for me in other ways too. As soon as I extended my rubber-gloved helping hand to them, they grabbed hold. They latched on. They wanted to keep in touch on the outside. They wanted to be my friend. But I just wanted to help them from a safe distance and be rid of them. I didn’t want their company. I was posing, or passing, but I didn’t really want to know them. They were my subjects, and if I cared about them at all it was out of authorial self-interest and pity and moral vanity. Moral vanity being that great middle-class indulgence that makes us write checks to charities and do the right thing for the less fortunate, because doing so reinforces our fiercely guarded belief that we are good people. But when the less fortunate come banging on your door and your heart in real time, up close, blowing their not so fresh breath in your face, wanting to be a person instead of a project or a write-off, then your cherished little antibacterial ideals turn all squeamish and stuttery, saying “Well, but, . . .” “Yeah, but, . . .” and finally show themselves outright to be as vaporous and self-serving as they always were.