Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (6 page)

Smoking was something almost everyone on the ward was dying to do. It was one of those few pleasures in a destitute’s life that made the days pass. Forbidding it was a form of torture to most of these people, who were homeless psychotics and had been picked up by the cops for disturbing the peace. This meant that they were quitting of necessity cold turkey. Nicotine patches were available to them. But the addiction was clearly far more psychological than anything else, and being trapped in that place, miserishly squirreling away my oranges, it made perfect sense to me why that was so. And I was there of my own doing. They were not—which, of course, made the deprivations that much worse. The one thing they had, their freedom, had been taken away and supplanted by the worst possible substitute, the shuffling shoelessness of the institution.

There are few things more humiliating, more soul-destroying and depressing, than the process of being institutionalized. And the worst part is your own collusion in the process. It doesn’t just happen to you. You allow it to happen to you. You partake. You adopt the mind-set of the place. You become docile, subservient, frightened, dull, unthinking, susceptible to the mysterious self-fulfilling power of the rule. You loathe the tone of your own voice as you mewl and cower to the dingbat shoving you your meds or taking away your pen. You are demeaned by the routine as you regulate your life by mealtimes, loitering in the hall at eight, twelve, and six. You change as you acquiesce to rudeness, becoming less, becoming small, a picker, a stealer, a scratching stray licking the hand that defeats it.

You do strange things. I tried, for example, to make shoelaces out of toilet paper, so that I could walk like a normal person instead of limping like a gangster because the tongues of my tennis shoes were curling absurdly to my toes. The laces tore, of course, but it was a way to pass the time, rolling the long strands of tissue between my fingers as tight and stringlike as they would go, and feeling, even though I failed to make the lashings tie or hold, the momentary elation of knowing that I could still exercise some form of creativity.

I learned to flick on the light over my bed with the teeth of a comb or the tip of the forbidden ballpoint pen so that I could read late at night when I couldn’t sleep and the dayroom was closed. The light switches were in the hall and recessed so that only the staff could access them with a key or some other lean instrument, and thus enforce lights out at eleven and lights on at eight. Controlling light is no small matter, as they well knew. Just one of many daily benefits you take for granted in the outside world and never notice, but which take on an almost religious significance in the bin.

There are many other such things, things like, as I have mentioned, fresh air. Most of us never think about how little time we spend outdoors. We work in offices all day and colonize the couch at night. We rarely exercise the privilege of stepping out, and that is of course precisely because we know we can do it whenever we like. But when the door is locked and you have to rely on a lazy nurse to take you to the roof, only in groups of four (first come, first served), and only at specific times, for specific periods of time, you begin to get obsessive. You begin to think about the word “inspire” and its literal meaning, “breathe into,” and then you think of God breathing life into clay to make man. And you begin to feel that God is on the roof, or some angel who saves you with cool respiration, so that you can face the long night of disinfected air and urine coming through the dusty vent in the bathroom. And that, my friend, is a crazy thought. It’s exactly the kind of thing that any one of my ward mates would have told you on any given day, leaning close to you as if someone might be listening, whispering this heady, sacred secret of the universe: that God was on the roof of Meriwether Hospital just waiting to give you the breath of life.

Pacing was the same; a ritual made sacred by the trap. There was a long wide hallway in the ward. It ran the length, from the men’s end to the women’s, past the dayroom and the nurse’s station, the dining area and the activity room. It dead-ended at the locked door that led to the doctor’s offices and another locked double door that led to the adjacent ward. Usually the small windows in the tops of those double doors were covered with construction paper, but now and again it was ripped, and you could see into the north side of the wing, where other people like us were wandering around in their pajamas.

Most of us paced up and down that hall at various times of day. It was the only exercise you got, unless you did push-ups and yoga in your room, as I did, or a few jumping jacks and miniscule laps on the roof for the fifteen minutes you were up there. Roof laps were always punishing, though, because you had to do them in your stocking feet. You couldn’t run in shoes without laces. The next day, my knees and the bottoms of my feet always felt like they’d been filled with broken glass.

Pacing calmed the mind, too, and assuaged some of the restlessness we all felt at being cooped up under the ever-watchful gaze of Mrs. Weston and her staff. And they
were
watching you. Believe me. You might think me paranoid for saying this, except that I got busted for enough petty misbehavior to know I was being observed. Sometimes the nurses would even object to your pacing itself, maybe because it made them nervous, especially because we often did it in pairs. But mostly they objected because they thought we were planning something. Which was, in fact, sometimes the case.

All the patients on the ward figured out pretty quickly that I was both compos mentis and a sap, meaning that I could be manipulated into getting my visitors to bring them just about anything they wanted, from candy, to phone cards, to cigarettes.

Mr. Clean was the worst in this regard. He was a six-foot, three-inch black psychotic diabetic, who was, to say the least, not exactly looking after his blood sugar. Not that the staff was helping much, but what could you do? The guy wanted candy and his cheap cigars, which they’d confiscated on admission. He loved McDonald’s and pretty much anything else salty or sweet that he could shovel into his sparsely toothed mouth. He was obsessed with his few pleasures, as we all were.

“It ain’t right to starve a person,” he often said.

The whites of his eyes were yellowed and bulged out of his head like gone boiled eggs. His hair was long and nappy, and it always had lint in it. His belly was so incongruously round and protuberant that it looked as if he’d strapped it on for a part in a film. The front of his T-shirt was always dribbled with jelly or gravy or God knew what else—handprints, smears, and stains of all descriptions, crusty, oily, or wet.

I was his connection. He wanted cigarettes. Badly. So he spent a lot of time and energy coaching me on how to make this happen for him, stage-whispering as we walked down the hall.

“See, I’ll save it till night. Then I’ll take it in the bathroom and blow it into the vent. Nobody’ll know. Just get me one, and some matches. Okay?”

His breath smelled like decaying meat.

Breathing through my mouth, I’d say, “I’ll try, Clean. I’ll try.”

And then he’d lean in and go through the scenario again, adding detailed instructions about how to get something past the nurses.

“Just put it in the wrapper of the hamburger or in with the fries, then put it in the garbage in the visiting room, and I’ll go and get it later. Then I’ll just take it in the bathroom late and stand on the toilet under the vent and blow it up in. Nobody’ll smell it. Just get me one, okay? Don’t get a pack. And some matches. Can’t do nothin’ without matches.”

If the nurses didn’t explicitly hear what he was saying, they surely inferred it. It wasn’t hard.

“Okay, you two,” one of them would say. “In the dayroom or in your rooms.”

Throughout the day he’d stop outside my room and moan.

“Norma?”

No answer.

Louder.

“Norma?”

I’d pretend I couldn’t hear him or was too absorbed in my notebook to respond. But he was insistent enough to call attention to himself every time.

“You got any candy, Norma?”

Invariably the staff would see him standing there and tell him to leave me alone. Then, of course, after visiting hours he’d step it up, he and several of the others who’d sniffed me out as the soft touch. They’d prowl around so obviously in anticipation of a fix that it wasn’t hard to figure out who was the source. Very quickly I got caught and taken to task. I had my roof privileges suspended for two days, but they let me off without suspending my visiting privileges as well.

One of my three roomies was a ciggie hound too, though more tactful than the others. I called her Tracy Chapman because of her comely face and short signature dreads. She was the only one of the three of them who didn’t talk to herself most of the day and night, and with whom you could carry on a fairly normal conversation. She’d told me she’d been committed or “called in” to the authorities by her foster children, whom she claimed had done it to punish her for denying them extra funds to buy clothes and high-tech toys.

It sounded plausible enough. Calling in fake abuse wasn’t unheard of, and at first blush she didn’t seem nuts enough to need to be in the hospital.

Ellen was my second roommate. She was a short, sixty-five-year-old black woman who had been in the hospital for five months. She said she’d gained sixty-five pounds in that time, which seemed very likely, since she never left our room except for meals, which she ate with gusto. She hadn’t even realized that it had gotten cold outside, having come in July and having sat in this regulated air for so long.

She could barely walk, her ankles were so swollen with edema. She wore a white rag tied around her head, a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and a pair of Acti-Treds on her feet. She sat all day and night in a plastic chair by the bathroom door. She never used her bed because she had some problem with mucous, or reflux—I wasn’t sure which. She just said that the devil was in her stomach, and when she lay down he came up and she couldn’t breathe.

When she wasn’t sleeping she was staring at the walls, or at me doing my yoga or writing in my notebook. She saw everything I did unless I did it in the bathroom. After a while she started to feel like my conscience. Every time I looked up I’d see her staring at me in that blank unflinching way that went right into me, and then through me and past me.

When I still thought pleasantries applied, I’d smile nervously and say, “Hey.”

She didn’t respond, which was awkward at first, but came to feel natural and easy, even pleasant over time. It was actually a relief to stop making small talk. That was one of the things I liked best about hanging around my ward mates. Social conventions didn’t apply. It was one of the privileges of being “disturbed.” It was probably one of the diagnostic criteria. But God, it was nice. I really liked being able to just end a conversation and walk away, or say nothing to fill the silence.

At night, Ellen wrapped herself in a sheet and put it over her head, so that sitting there in the dark with the lights of the city coming through the window and picking out the whiteness of her form, she looked like a dead body, as if propped up by the staff for some sick joke. At first, I didn’t understand why she did it. My third roommate, Sweet Girl, did it too, though she did it for much of the day as well. As time went on, and I came to understand that privacy was one of the other major deprivations of that place, and one of those other things that most of us take for granted in the outside world, I realized that they did it because it was the closest they would ever come to having a room of their own, to reclaiming the structural integrity of their minds as separate places that belonged only to them.

Of course, in public hospitals, private rooms are an uncommon luxury. And, of course, people who are a danger to themselves or others can’t be left unwatched. All of this I understand. I am not comparing Meriwether to the gulag. And yet, as any Solzhenitsyn will tell you, watching is a form of torture. Being watched is a soft violation that grows into a harder one with every passing day. Like dripping water on a stone, the eyes of other people wear you down, slowly, invasively. They leave a hole.

Lying there at night, unable to sleep, I’d look at Ellen and Sweet Girl wrapped in their shrouds and think that I was in the morgue. In part it spooked me, but most of the time it just made me terribly sad, because the shrouds were not only for privacy. They were, I think, also a way of saying no to what was happening. This was the pose of the abandoned, the dress work of a despairing mind that was tired of being poked at and observed, degraded by the treatment, and talked down to.

Yes, the “treatment.” That deserves to be in quotes, and probably italics, too, because I mean it in both senses. I mean it disrespectfully, as in pseudo, as in your treatment is a joke and an insult and an arrogant, dehumanizing, lazy nonsolution. And I mean it, too, euphemistically, in the same way that cartoon hit men mean it when they say, “Give him the treatment.” As in work him over, make him easy, like pulp. Treatment as in, dealt with, put in place, made malleable, and put down.

Sweet Girl was in her early twenties as far as I could tell. I never found out for sure, but she talked often of having been a student at a local college, and she had the face and bearing of someone very young. She was beautiful—high-cheekboned, mahogany-skinned. She hardly ever spoke to anyone but herself, spending most of her time deep in scanning speech colloquy with an imaginary friend she called Patsy. Usually she was curled up in the fetal position on her bed under the sheet, though sometimes she’d sit bolt upright as if surprised by or aghast at something Patsy had said. Then she’d stare into the middle distance and argue the point until she was satisfied, or maybe make a trip to the dayroom, where she’d continue the argument in front of the TV.

When I first heard her talking to herself, I thought it was a foreign or made-up language. But then, as I got used to it, I realized that it was English, just very fast English full of all kinds of shorthand and slang that presumably only she and Patsy understood. Sometimes she would coo and giggle and say discernable things like “I love you, too.” Other times she’d blurt something about “your smelly cunt” or reprimand Patsy for saying something worse.