Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin (9 page)

“So what do you do for a living?” I said.

She was a grade school teacher in the city in her second year at a tough school. Lots of behavioral problems. Lots of parental neglect. The usual.

“Well, there’s your problem right there,” I said. “That’s depressing. You don’t need medication. You need to change your job.”

“I know. I know.”

Deborah’s head appeared in the background over Casey’s shoulder. She’d stopped in the doorway to get my attention. She pointed at Casey’s back and put her hands to her throat, miming strangulation. I shook my head, smirking, as if to say, “Yeah, yeah,” and waved her on. Casey turned around. Deborah smiled innocently and moved off.

Ellen emerged from the bathroom.

“Anything?” I said.

“A little.”

“Good.”

Casey went on. She had an MA in education and was only in her second year of teaching. She was in her late twenties, that same time of life that had delivered me up to my first depression. No mystery there.

“What drugs have they got you on?” I said.

“Last night they gave me something called Seroquel.”

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“It made me feel really weird.”

“Did you discuss this with the doctor?”

“No. It just showed up on my chart. I didn’t know what it was, so I asked. They said it was to help me sleep.”

“Unfuckingbelievable. They’re giving you Seroquel to sleep? Jesus, that’s an antipsychotic. Don’t take that shit. Really. That’s hard-core. Just hold it in your cheek and spit it in the toilet.”

“I’m afraid to,” she said. “What if they catch me and they use it as an excuse to keep me longer?”

“Look,” I said, “sit down right now and write your three-day letter.”

I had to explain what a three-day letter was and try not to make it sound like a bad thing that she’d have to write it in Crayola. I gave her some of my paper, though it occurred to me that the missive might have more of the desired prisoner-of-conscience effect if she wrote it on toilet paper or a scroll of rough brown paper towel from the bathroom.

We were just finishing up the details when a loud splatting sound brought the conversation to a close. Ellen had managed to bring the devil up in earnest on the floor of our room.

 

After that, Casey sat with me at meals, trying to avoid the Chinese man who ate like a starving animal, and Clean, who had found in Casey another hapless soul to pester for extra pudding. Naturally, she wanted a buffer against Deborah, too, whom she found more unnerving at table, chewing suggestively.

Still, there was no getting around some unfortunate companionship in the dining room. There was the Hispanic man with the chesty cough who hadn’t quite mastered the art of breathing and swallowing by turns, such that milk and masticated bread often flew from his mouth in long arcs of chunky beige spray that landed on the tables, floor, and chairs and any diners at close range. There was the other Asian man of indeterminate national origin, who had the long, sharp, yellowed fingernails of a Satanist, which he enjoyed sucking clean of the meal’s accumulated mash.

There was Street Kid, a lanky, ninety-pound twenty-year-old who wore his baseball cap several sizes too big and sideways, like the rapper Flavor Flav. He “got medicated” often and heavily, prone as he was to tantrums. This put quite a damper on his hand-eye coordination; scooping the food from the tray to his mouth via fork, or any other means, was an elaborate procedure that often failed. He looked like he was moving underwater, and sounded that way, too. He spoke as if he had a mouthful of marbles, and he usually ended meals by wearing on his front, or depositing on the floor, a good portion of what he’d been served. This made him cranky, messy, and volatile. Not an ideal tablemate.

And then there were the talkers, who, though less offensive than the suckers and slurpers, could try you as much. Cherise was a big talker. So, I discovered, was Tracy Chapman, when the mood struck her.

Per her story, and seeming coherence, I’d been laboring under the misapprehension that she’d been unfairly committed by vindictive foster kids. That is, until one day at dinner, when, deeming her the least of the evils on offer at mealtime, Casey and I had chosen to sit next to her, only to learn that she was, in fact, way, way out there on Pluto after all.

She began innocuously enough, telling us that she’d been a model when she was a teen. It was possible. Then she said, “Let me show you a picture.”

She pulled out a fashion magazine that she’d taken from the dayroom, where there was a pile of newspapers and other recent periodicals set out for patient perusal. This one was only a month old. She opened it to a splashy ad featuring a young dreadlocked girl.

“That’s me,” she said.

She pointed to a group photo on the next page, a gathering of celebrity women that included Madonna.

“And that’s my posse. I was in with Madonna and all them.”

Casey and I nodded.

“Oh. Uh-huh.”

“That was before I got shot, though,” she added. “The bullet went through the back of my head and came out my mouth. Ended my career.”

So much for safe harbor.

 

Ellen and Sweet Girl were best at meals. They kept to themselves, ate passably, and if they spoke, it was usually, as in Sweet’s case, to themselves. You weren’t required to listen. Sweet didn’t eat much, which was why they gave her a cup of Ensure with her meds every day at five. She wasn’t much interested in solids. This made her a good source of extras for people like me who weren’t eating the gristle burgers or the starch substitute. I could usually get her milk and her veggies if I moved fast.

You had to move fast. Meals were like a bazaar. The minute we sat down, you’d hear someone say, “Anyone got bread for a milk?” or “Dessert. Anybody not want their dessert?” Much of this was orchestrated by José, whom I had come to call the Spanish Yenta, because he was in everybody’s business and fancied himself the mayor of the ward. He took to answering the pay phone regularly and coming to get you for your calls. He knew most people by name within the first day, and he started the bidding at meals, often walking between tables to make the trades.

I always promised my dessert to Clean, and usually my bread, unless I was hungry or feeling self-destructive enough to go against my principles.

By far the safest bet in dining, both for quietude and for extras, was the Yemeni woman, who didn’t speak English, didn’t talk to herself, and hardly ever ate any of her specially ordered halal meals. They were sealed in plastic, so I knew nobody had had his germy fingers in them, and they were usually tastier, if not always healthier than what I got. She usually just handed them over wholesale the minute we sat down.

I have no idea why she was in there. She cried a lot and mostly kept to herself, making copious use of the phone, presumably to beg her relatives for help. I don’t know what or when she ate. Probably oranges and peanut butter sandwiches in her room late at night.

When she gave me her meals, I always said the only Arabic words I knew, “Allahu Akbar,” and she always smiled.

Street Kid was another regular. Though barely an adult, he’d been to Meriwether three times already, in fairly quick succession.

Somebody told me, “Yeah. His family just gets sick of his bullshit and sends him on a little vacation with us.”

Deborah and Mother T were repeats, I knew, but, it turned out, so was Sweet Girl. They were like family, actually. They knew each other’s habits and quirks.

I found this out one night sitting with Kid and Sweet Girl in the dayroom. Sweet was wearing a long khaki trench coat over her hospital issue, sitting in front of the TV having a heated conversation with Patsy. Something about God’s knees and Bloody Mary.

Kid said, “Damn. Is she still doing that shit? She was doing that the last time I was here.”

The Bloody Mary part was especially interesting to me, because it started with an exchange Sweet and I had had in our room one afternoon, and was one of the clues to her mental leaps.

There was a bit of graffito on the wall above my bed. It said “Darkside.”

Sweet asked, “Norah. What does it say on the wall behind you?”

When I told her, she said, “Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary.”

To me the leap seemed clear. Sweet was a college kid. She was remembering her reading. Mary Tudor was famous for her reign of terror, hence the moniker. The graffiti in the Tower of London is equally famous, prisoners scrawling their names and paltry testimonies into the stone. Meriwether was a prison to Sweet. She was not there voluntarily. She was giving her own testimony. Oral history to a deaf world.

I liked the puzzle quality of these exchanges. I spent a good deal of time in Meriwether doing crossword puzzles from the newspapers, and I started thinking in clues and clever answers, because it seemed that that’s how the people around me were thinking, too.

I remember looking at my dinner tray one night examining the hard plastic cover that always fit over the hot portion of the meal. It was manufactured by a company called A La Carte. And as I sat there next to the Yemeni woman, eating her halal chicken and peas, I thought, A la carte. Allah Cart. Clue: What is a God wagon? Answer: An Allah Cart.

It was a code. For Sweet, usually a safer way to speak to someone like me whom she didn’t know but wanted to, a way around her crippling shyness and the shame she felt about her illness. Her internal monologue was punctuated by insults of the kind she’d clearly been hearing all her life:

 

She was afraid I’d say the same thing, which was why she backed away when I’d try a direct approach and say something stupid like, “When you talk, does someone answer?”

She’d get understandably defensive and say, “I’m okay. It’s just thoughts. I’m fine.”

Then I’d say something even dumber like, “I’m worried about you.”

And she would say, “Thanks.”

I could tell I was making a somewhat favorable impression, though, because every now and again she’d say something stunningly lucid that was meant for my ears. She could never say it directly to me, because that was too scary. She’d say it to herself, but slowly and deliberately so that it was clearly distinguishable from the scanning speech, and so that I could follow. Once, after one of our brief exchanges, I’d gotten up to go into the dayroom for something, and just as I was crossing the threshold into the hall I heard her say, “Talk to Norah.”

But mostly she couldn’t. It was too risky. Instead she went the long way around, inching her bed closer to mine whenever I wasn’t in the room so that at one point her head was only about a foot from my own. At other times, her appeals for my attention were truly desperate.

One night I was standing in the doorway of our room talking to Casey about a recent meeting she’d had with her docs, when I heard Sweet call me in an uncharacteristically roguish manner.

“Hey, roomie. Will you get me an orange?”

She was under her covers, fully swathed.

“Sure,” I said.

When I came back from the dayroom with two oranges, she was sitting on the edge of her bed naked. I handed her the oranges as if nothing was strange, and went back to talking with Casey. A minute later she was back under the covers, the oranges lying by her head, uneaten.

After that she often asked me for things, a sweatshirt or snacks, but she never used or ate them. If I’d been there longer, and if she’d been less sacked out on meds, sleeping most of the day, we could have made more progress, I’m sure. As it was, we did the best we could, talking in code or short bursts, with me usually taking refuge in the customarily blunt forms of exchange that sent her back to Patsy embarrassed.

Kid was far more functional than Sweet. When he wasn’t overmedicated, he could hold a conversation, albeit one usually punctuated by goofy dance breaks and aptly chosen lyrics of popular songs.

“Get crazy. Get crazy. Everybody get crazy,” he’d sing, spinning on his heels, and chicken-winging his arms, or moonwalking with little hops of pleasure in between.

He was another toughie like Carla, clearly bred half on the street, and probably involved in all kinds of nastiness that you didn’t want to know about. When he wasn’t collapsed on the rubbery furniture in the dayroom, he was pacing the halls agitatedly, as any cooped up young kid would do, grumbling about wanting his possessions back or picking little tiffs with Deborah and others. Like so many other high school discipline cases, he’d probably been given some hybrid cockamamie ADHD-bipolar diagnosis at a very young age and been medicated into submission for the benefit of his homeroom teacher. We’ve all read about them in the paper, the problem kids who get slapped with five disorders by the time they’re twelve, and horse-pilled by a culture that has pathologized everything from PMS to teen angst.

Clearly the kid had problems. But what might be causing those problems? Brain malfunction, acquired or inherited, recreational drug abuse, unstable or violent home and neighborhood life, or just plain time-of-life maladjustment and bad manners? It was anybody’s guess. And that, of course, is exactly what his diagnosis was, a guess. A whole tangle of dysfunction and undesirable behavior blamed on his brain, on the behavior of neurotransmitters whose functions we cannot in any meaningful sense of the term measure, do not understand, and cannot regulate with any reliability or accuracy.

So we take a kid whose signs of “mental illness” were classic youthful irritability, impatience, restlessness, rebelliousness, selfishness, rudeness, agitation, and ebullience, and we turn him into a chemical waste dump before he’s old enough to vote? Were his moods and outbursts more extreme than those of other young people his age? Sure. Was he unreachable? By no means. Not in my experience. Was he pissed off about the same things that the rest of us were pissed off about? Things like having your few prized possessions and pleasures confiscated and forbidden by lazy, mindless bureaucrats who treat you like a deficient dog; or being doped senseless every time you let out the understandable and mounting frustration you feel at being cooped up and forcibly medicated by a bunch of arrogant nincompoops whose diagnoses and treatments are conjectural. You bet he was. Was that reason enough to throw him into limbo and pump him full of meds that made him incapable of buttering a piece of bread or completing a sentence? Was anyone even trying? Were the professionals at a loss? Or, as was the case with me, were they not in the business of making conversation?