Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (17 page)

She waited in the ward thinking what I had thought in the same circumstances, that this was not a place much designed to help people like us, the semitalented, sometime wayward overachievers who got a little carried away with the X-ACTO knife when we got a bad grade, or otherwise tripped on the ladder to betterment.

Having a doctor tell you how it was when you bloody well knew how it was, and had told him; having to be paternalistically shut in for your own good despite your protestations that no good was to be had in the shutting; this was not the stuff of recoveries. She shared this sentiment, especially since it was the weekend—her goddamn weekend—earmarked for some well-earned play.

Incongruously laughing now after her phone call, scribbling furiously in a coloring book at the adjacent table, she said, “I’m a kid. It’s my job to play.”

And so we played. All of us. Me and Clay and Bunny and Fridge. Per her invitation and instructions, we played Indian poker.

“What the hell is Indian poker?” I asked.

She held a card up to her forehead, face out.

“Like this.”

It stuck to the grease on her face like a cartoon feather, and she smiled, lowering her hand. She dealt us each a single card.

“Don’t look at your card. Just put it up,” she said.

We did.

“Now,” she ordered expertly, “you bet based on what everyone else has, but not knowing what you have.”

“What are we betting with?” asked Clay.

Nobody had money. Valuables were locked in the nurse’s station.

“Skittles,” she said, producing a large bag and doling out piles to each. She popped a few loose ones into her mouth,

“Okay. Aces are high. Left of me bets first.”

That was me. I looked around the circle. New faces that I seemed to know already. Eased into a game together on this Friday night in lockup. How strange. How somehow easy and almost normal.

Clay had a king. Fridge had a jack. Chloe had a five and Bunny had a ten. It wasn’t looking good.

“Fuck me,” I said, throwing down my card, “I fold.”

I had an ace, which provoked a chorus of near miss “Ohhh”s from the others.

“Damn,” I said, “my deal.”

And so I dealt and we played well into the night. I was coasting by then on my own popped Klonopin, nearly forgetting where I was and what I was, until one of the more officious members of the staff, who saw that we were betting (albeit with candy, but betting nonetheless), stopped us.

“Gambling is not appropriate in an addiction recovery facility.”

Lights out.

No one woke me rudely in the morning. It was Saturday, so no one woke me at all. Another human luxury. Another piece of myself handed back, left to my discretion. As was breakfast, which I wandered into the kitchen around ten to prepare.

On each table, thermal pots of coffee had magically appeared. It was bilge, of course, but I doctored a cup with creamer and sugar and drank it anyway, out of pure gratitude for the option.

Clay stumbled in looking stupefied by the night, as if sleep for him was a beating, or hard labor he needed respite from. Then there was Herbie, whom I hadn’t met the night before.

Herbie was a ninety-two-year-old former night watchman who fought in the Second World War and was now living a strange, reclusive life with his ninety-four-year-old wife of thirty years. Like so many of the rest of us, Herbie was in for depression.

“I don’t have anything to do anymore,” he said by way of explanation for why he cut open one of his arms in what was either a botched suicide attempt or a stab at self-mutilation. But for an extremely old and ostensibly depressed person Herbie was oddly upbeat and on his game.

He used a walker to get around, though he could navigate short distances without it. He often did laps around the octagon, the walker’s wheels squeaking intermittently and wobbling at the base like a busted grocery cart. He liked to play games of chicken with whichever one of the other patients happened to be making the loop in the opposite direction, or he’d make a mock show of running us down as we crossed his path.

Herbie was always full of sly humor. I asked him why he was in St. Luke’s.

“I signed the wrong papers,” he said.

People had taken to Herbie and took care of him, making sure he was eating enough, toasting him a bagel or whatever else he wanted for breakfast, and bringing it to him at the table.

“Do you want some kiwi, Herbie? I know how you like it.”

They’d had kiwi the night before as dessert with dinner and Herbie had never had it before. He’d loved it, and everyone had noticed, saving the leftovers in the fridge for him to pick at over the next few days.

Herbie had hit it off especially well with one of the other patients, Karen, the most high-functioning psychotic I have ever met. She was another repeat. She came in every now and again—via ambulance from a hundred miles away—to have her meds adjusted and chill out from an episode.

She knew enough about the course of her condition to know when she was losing touch with reality, and she had a very helpful circle of psychotic friends with whom she had what she called regular “reality checks.” This meant that, because their delusions were all different, she could call one of them and say, “I think the CIA is watching me,” and they’d be able to set her straight, confirming that, in fact, no, no one was lurking in the bushes outside her house or listening to her phone calls. Similarly, when they called her to ask if aliens were landing in the park down the street, or check whether the computer chip in their molar was actually picking up signals from police radios, she could assure them that they were, in all likelihood, mistaken.

Karen also went to group meetings, which functioned as a similar corrective if she was slipping into delusions.

Karen had a delightful sense of humor about herself. She said of one such group meeting, “Yeah, I was sitting in one of those meetings and I said, ‘Am I God?’ and everyone shouted, ‘Noooo.’ Now there’s a reality check for you.”

Like Herbie, Karen was extremely well liked around the ward. People appreciated how easygoing she was, especially since they knew that she managed to be that way even while she was hearing voices and seeing shadowy figures skulking in the corners of the room. People would say, “How’s it going Karen?” and she’d point to her head and say, “Getting louder in here.”

Karen was a good example of what a support system could do for you when you were seriously mentally ill, and how much of a difference a social network could make in how functional you were. The people at Meriwether were largely without resources, and most of them lived on the street. As a result, they didn’t get regular reality checks. They had no friends to speak of, certainly no psychotic friends who were functional enough to help anyone. And no “normal” person was going to serve as a touchstone in their world. Normal people gave them a wide berth and looked away as they walked past.

It’s not hard to imagine that a sane person living on the street for a few weeks, frightened, isolated, and scorned, would start to lose touch with reality. It happens to any of us when we spend too much time alone in our homes. But then factor in the chaos of the street, the dangers, the drugs and alcohol that make beggardom bearable, the dejection and extreme loneliness of being an outcast, and you have a very bad situation for anyone’s mental health. Throw voices and delusions into that mix, and you’re guaranteed to get someone who is barely reachable.

Karen was getting the benefit of both friends and nurturing asylum because she was middle-class. She had insurance. She had resources, both social and financial, and she got the benefit of effortful care in a hospital that was not overcrowded, overburdened, poorly managed, and resentfully staffed. In stark contrast to the patients at Meriwether, when Karen came into the hospital during an episode, not only was she greeted by nurses who treated her respectfully, but, most important, she found herself among other people like herself, people who were not the products of the ghetto or life on the street. This meant that they could almost all, in some measure, take care of each other, offer an ear, advice, laughter, and companionship in distress, even if only in a game of cards.

These are the luxuries of the relatively healthy and at least marginally grounded. Being such a person, I am learning, has a lot to do with your present economic station in life, as well as the one in which you were raised.

Karen was not the sole example of this type. I met four diagnosed schizophrenics during my time at St. Luke’s, and all of them were like Karen, highly functional, capable of discussing their illnesses and taking part in group sessions where they could both give and receive at least some counseling. At Meriwether, you were lucky if you could keep order in a ten-minute meeting. Perspective and co-counseling were unheard of. Impossible. People were too drugged or too incoherent from their life on the streets to do much but slump or babble.

Of all the psychotics at St. Luke’s, I got to know Karen best—or got her to say the most intimate things about herself—when we were on smoke breaks.

Among the many ways in which St. Luke’s far outstripped Meriwether—allowing the patients to smoke and get some fresh air was one of the best.

Seven times a day—twice in the morning, twice in the afternoon, and three times in the evening—one of the nurses took us outside (there was no limit to the number who could go) to a small fenced-in garden area just off the ground floor. It wasn’t much, and since I didn’t smoke, I spent a lot more time inhaling the other residents’ furious puffs than I did breathing actual air. But still, it was outdoors, and if the weather was fine and I found which way the wind was blowing, I could steer clear of the smog, and even get a little sun on my face. It was glorious, even when it was cloudy or raining. It got me through, knowing that I always had a break to look forward to.

People stood around in groups, having procured from the nurses their two allotted cigarettes, chain-smoking and catching up with people they knew from the main ward upstairs.

The main warders took their smoke breaks at the same time as we did, and this was usually when repeat offenders like Clay and Bunny reunited with other addicts whom they had met during previous stays at St. Luke’s.

Slapping each other’s shoulders and laughing, they’d say, “Still a class A fuckup, I see.”

“Oh yeah. Always.”

“How’d they get you this time?”

“Oh, ya know. Dog ran out of the house. Got hit by a car. Caused an accident, and the cops came. I came running out after him so coked out of my gourd that I forgot I was carrying an armful of the stuff. Busted right there.”

“Wow. Sucks. Dog okay?”

“Oh yeah. He’s fine. Ducked right under the chassis. No scratch.”

“Lucky fucker.”

“Yeah. I could kill him.”

The dog owner was Fenske. He’d been in repeatedly, like so many others, for drug rehab. I noticed him right away because he looked like a New Yorker, a college-educated bohemian East Village type, who’d somehow been airlifted to this desolate place and left to languish among the drab, doltish natives. He had luxurious wavy shoulder-length blond hair and a pale freckled complexion. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, jeans, red Puma Clyde sneakers, and a beat-up black leather blazer.

He made an impression on me right away, as I must have on him, because going up in the elevator after one of the breaks he looked across the group of us, all crammed in like cattle, focused on me, and said,

“You,” he pointed thoughtfully. “You’re some kind of emotional parasite, aren’t you?”

“A spy, actually,” I murmured.

“Thought so.”

“Nah. Just an emotional cripple like the rest of us. Wrist-slasher, oven-header, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, okay. Gotcha.”

He said this like I was telling him what I did for a living at a barbecue, which is what we all learned to do in there when we heard even the most extreme stories.

I found myself doing it when I made the mistake of asking the shaved-headed handlebar-mustachioed guy in the Marines sweatshirt what he was in for.

“Drinking. Drugs.”

“Were you in Iraq?”

“First time around. Got discharged.”

Post-traumatic stress, I presumed, but feigned ignorance.

“Why?”

“Liked it.”

“Liked what?”

“Killing.”

“Oh, right.”

“Volunteered for one too many missions and they were on to me.”

I remembered reading a recent article about sociopaths flying under the radar in the military and then surfacing as the henchmen of some civilian massacre or Abu Ghraib-type fiasco.

We crowded into the elevator right after he told me this. I was standing close enough to practically lick the scorpion tattooed on his scalp.

“Uh-huh,” I said, pretend-thoughtfully. “Gotcha.”

In the ICU, I had a room to myself. It was a double, but I didn’t have a roommate. It was just me and the empty bed next to mine, and the deliriously clean tiled bathroom.

I was in love with that bathroom. I sat in there a lot with the light out and the door shut, like a kid playing fort in a closet. I forgot myself in there, where there was only the thick enveloping dark and the band of light around the door frame, and the close, cool quiet. I was whole in it, unseen and unseeing, crept away in a cleared place so perfect in remove, like a pod gliding in space.

Sometimes when I sat in there I thought about odd things, more of those depressive thought patterns I had come to recognize. I thought, for example, about the woman who cleaned my bathroom. Like everyone else here, Fridge excepted, she was white. Scandinavian white and chirpy cheerful even as she mopped. I imagined she baked pies on the weekends for her extended family and smiled at the weather from the porch, where she rocked away her aching back and what I thought must be her quiet desperation. For all I knew she was happy. But I couldn’t imagine that. I inhabited her bland life as I saw it, and grew sadder.