CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

In which I attempt to flog a dead horse so lamely that even the horse is embarrassed

 

I hadn’t been in the nuthouse more than a month or two before the Great Doctor Brainbowl deigned to finally meet with me.  She had completed her official diagnosis  and was ready to shove it down my throat in person.

The Great Doctor Brainbowl was a chubby black woman in her 60s who was distinguished in the local psychiatric community.  So they say.  She could pour on the charm when comforting an elderly, helpless patient, but she would be really mean and obstinate toward someone who had something to say.

She could lie to your face and  trained her aides to do the same.  I’m talking about how they would deny the so-called “side” effects of psychiatric drugs.  Side effects didn’t exist, according to the Great Doctor Brainbowl and her lackeys.  Thorazine doesn’t make you sleepy, Mellaril doesn’t block your nose, Stelazine doesn’t make you shuffle; the naming of the “Stelazine Shuffle” must have been a coincidence based on mass hallucination.  They couldn’t explain it; they just knew we were wrong.

It was the Kind and Merciful Great Doctor Rainbow’s chief conclusion, after careful review of notes taken by aides concerning my behavior—since The Great One never set foot on the ward herself—that I was an “undifferentiated schizophrenic,” that I should not try to work for a living, but that I should remain in the nuthouse for quite some time, and that I should start on a mini-dose of Mellaril right now and see how it goes from there.  That was about all she had to say, except that I was here to get better, not to beg for my guitar or sit in my room or cause grief for the aides by being a cocky smart-ass.  And I did too hear voices and there was no sense in continuing to deny it, because she knew it for a fact.

Undifferentiated schizophrenic.  So I’m definitely schizo!—that is, my reality is sufficiently different from the norm that I can be labeled Officially Incompatible with mainstream society—and “undifferentiated” means I haven’t specialized in any particular branch of schizophrenia; maybe I have a little touch of several varieties.  A little paranoid.  Almost hears voices.  That kind of thing.  Like everyone else, but without responsibilities to explain my condition.

Of course every shrink, psychobabble writer, and well-meaning advisor before and since has dreamed up a completely different diagnosis for me, and that’s fine.  I liked them all.  I was proud to be the sole inhabitant of my own little world.  I had to be.

But the Mellaril thing, that would have to go bye-bye.  I tried it once, and found that Terry and everyone else except the Doctor, nurse, and aides were right: it made the lining of my nose swell so that I could not only not breathe through my nose even a little bit, but my whole face was affected in the same way, and my mind took this as a good reason to be on the verge of quiet panic for about 24 hours.  Mellaril is one of the few drugs I’ve refused to take twice.  If someone showed me one dose of pure heroin and one dose of Mellaril, I’d risk a lifetime of being a junkie and take the heroin, come what may, to avoid the near panic of not being able to breathe for a whole day.

As for the invitation to stay for an extended period of time, it made me feel queasy about being there at all.

I had just gotten a phone call from Batanwa Jim.  The aides handed me the phone and told me to make it quick.  And guess where he was calling from?  Halstead Hospital, a private church-operated nuthouse in another part of the state.  That son-of-a-bitch had gone and lost his teeny-tiny little mind, and now he was not just following in my footsteps, he was trying to get ahead of me.  It sounded like he was doing his darnedest to put on a good manic-depressive act, and we weren’t allowed to talk for long, but I got the gist of what had gone on, and now it is my sad task to relate to you the next chapter in the demise of my good friend Batanwa Jim.

He had moved back in with his parents, and one day he was in his bedroom—the closet in the basement bathroom—studying for a class when his Daddy’s socks appeared in his closet doorway, and attached to them was his Daddy.  His Daddy spoke, only to say that the police were there with a warrant to search his premises for illegal drugs.

You may recall that Batanwa Jim had this thing about how getting busted for drugs would ruin his life permanently.  How did he know?  He learned it at home.  He learned it from teachers and propaganda distributed through the school system.  To err is human; it takes the righteous to really fuck up.  Someone planned his life for him, and he was just reading a part out of a script.

And about Reagan’s “Just Say No” so-called War on Drugs: Have you heard about the political speech writer who doesn’t know all about reverse psychology?  I haven’t either.

Well, since this was Hazing, Kansas, and the police didn’t have anything better to do, they decided they should just go ahead and arrest Batanwa Jim and take him to jail before searching his room.

Yes, it’s true, that’s what they did.  Based on some hot lead from one of the slimy little punks who used to sit around in our apartment and smoke our stash—some habitual burglar buying his way out of jail with my friend’s life—the Hazing Police Department put my friend in their jail so they could search the closet he called home for LSD.  They didn’t know that my friend was fatally prejudiced against being arrested for drugs.  They didn’t know what kind of dead-end they were shoving him down.

The Hazing Journal instantly jumped on what turned out to be a citywide effort to cleanse the suburban homes of our fair city of bored teenagers, and get them all into jail where they belonged.  Either that or the narc squad was trying to clean out the “Miscellaneous Crappy Lead” department in their file of potential business.  The headline trumpeted something about a “Loose-Knit Drug And Burglary Ring.”  It turns out that it was the writers and cops that were a loose-knit ring; the writer made the cops look good, and the writer got a big fancy story out of it, and the truth of the matter is that Batanwa Jim didn’t know any of the other bustees mentioned in the article, and he had just bothered to go clean off drugs by his own efforts; that’s how loose-knit this Ring was: it could include any loose nitwit who happened to get in the way.  But the fact that the article was published at all with Batanwa Jim’s name in it just confirmed to him the obvious truth: getting busted for drugs would ruin his life.

Meanwhile, the drugs had been gone for two months; the search of Batanwa Jim’s possessions turned up nothing, and he was released from jail.  The paper didn’t publish a big story about that.

Batanwa Jim started swallowing any pill he could find, driving suicidally, etc., and admitted himself to the nuthouse to get better access to pills or to get away from his family or both.  He spent the first few weeks there in a catatonic fog, but was pulled out of it by an Indian woman about 15 years his senior who fell in love with him.  They were planning to escape together.  She was committed involuntarily, so he would escape with her, even though he could leave anytime by giving three days’ notice.

That was the end of that conversation.

Once a month was ward cleaning day.  Those of us who could be trusted with a broom or mop were given one and requested to use it.  Mrs. Clara Friend, the head aide, remarked to me that she saw me slinking around and hiding, trying to make out like I was incapable.  She was wrong.  I wasn’t hiding, I was trying to commit psychic suicide psycho-kinetically, by sheer force of will.

Sometime after the talk with Batanwa Jim, I was looking up into the popcorn making area cupboard over in the back corner of the big main room.  The sunbeams struck many years’ buildup of butter, oil, and related scum, and lit them up with a soft glow as if from within.  Earlier in the week I had watched with curiosity as David Corkfin, a Navy veteran, had joined the old Navy Captain on the older man’s mission to eliminate all traces of mold and slime from the shower stalls and shower curtains.  This blustering old loudmouth, who I wanted to kill for Hollering REVEILLE! up and down the hallways every morning before the aides woke everybody up, had taken it upon himself to clean what no hospital employee had cleaned within obvious memory, for which all the hospital employees should be ashamed and embarrassed.  The walls of the two shower stalls and the entire surface of the shower curtains were literally black all over with mildew and slime, because the two shower stalls were used by twenty-five men and the janitors wouldn’t touch them; I would stand in the very center of the stall to make sure that my arms didn’t touch the walls. After the Skipper and his little buddy cleaned the stall, it was like living at the Ritz, but with the added attraction of Robert Cross standing in front of the mirror, six feet away from you while you’re showering, yelling, I DO NOT HAVE CANCER AND I’M NOT GONNA DIE! and checking his fly a dozen times.

Robert Cross, one of the extremely mild-mannered patients, was about fifty years old, with prematurely white hair cut in a flattop (not stylin’ back then) and a tremor in his leg that made him look crazier but was probably caused by Haldol.  He was a reliable Ping Pong partner.  He used to grin as he stiffly moved through a Haldol fog to meet the ball nearly every time.  It was no great challenge for me, because I purposely kept the ball on the table for him, as I could see him doing this for me, but it was fascinating to see such a terrified individual grin in pleasure, and I could fantasize that I was helping him; there were worse lies I could tell myself.  It reminded me of the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where Boo Radley is sitting in the porch swing with Scout, an hour after Boo has saved Scout’s life, just before Scout has to go to bed and Boo back to his basement.  Robert Cross was waiting for a bed to open up for him at the nursing  home in his home town.  That was what kept him going in life while his demons battered at him.

So here I was looking at the popcorn cupboard that everyone including myself had been overlooking, and it was nasty, real nasty.  You know what sticks to the inside of a greasy cupboard?  Everything.  I couldn’t take it.  I was so bored I’d do anything—

—and already had.  I had started smoking cigarettes, because they made me dizzy, though not as interestingly as pot, and because they gave me something to do, and because they were allowed, and because, because, because, because, because; let me assure you, the whining has just begun on this little cigarette issue of mine—

—but since my tender constitution couldn’t handle chain-smoking in front of a TV, I had to think of something else to do; the grotesqueness of this place, brought home to me by the greasy cupboard that stared me in the face, was getting to me, and something had to change or I would start leaping at the big Plexiglas windows overlooking the vast lawns, trying to break out with the only part of me that really hurt: my head, which felt like it was glowing red hot as I started to remember the future, or a possibility of one.  Then I would remember the present, and the contrast between my potential and my whereabouts was so extreme that I felt terminally embarrassed.  It also occurred to me that the presence of a sink, and a cupboard containing cleaning supplies directly beneath the sink, right in front of my wobbly knees, could make for an interesting situation in which I could make a project of this whole area without anyone’s comment, encouragement, or approval, for reasons of my own and in spite of the fact that Mrs. Clara Friend would be proud of me.  Boredom fever took over my body, and while I watched in amusement, my body started at the ceiling and worked its way down, and three hours later it had finished cleaning the popcorn-making area one square centimeter at a time, but not before Mrs. Clara Friend and Mrs. Bradley had hauled me into the patient inspection area in front of the aides’ station where they sat me down and asked me if I was feeling OK and asked me if I was hearing voices, while they took my temperature and checked my blood pressure.  They made me go lie down when I was done, and rest before dinner.

Mrs. Clara Friend and her fellow aides were a lot smarter than I gave them credit for.  I was lucky to be in one of the cleanest, safest State Hospitals there is, and I was also lucky to have the deadpan Mrs. Clara Friend giving me special attention and calling me special names and such.  But no one was safe from the Great Doctor Rainbow’s experiment to discover what quantity of doctor drugs people could ingest before they would start to drop in their tracks.

Leroy Garten was an extremely mild-mannered man in his sixties who could talk better than Bernie Mulch but had even less to say than Bernie did.  David Corkfin tormented him constantly: Hi Fred, he would say to the poor man, every time they passed in the hall.  Hi Fred, Leroy would call back, with a wave and a pleasant little smile.  If someone was watching, David Corkfin would repeat the experiment over and over until Leroy’s legs were twitching to run away, but each time he turned to get away, it was Hi Fred again and he had to turn back again, smile, and Hi Fred back.

Leroy’s face was a very pretty medium blue-green (not an exaggeration) from many years of Stelazine-enhanced living.  One day he looked me in the eye and spoke on his own volition.  He normally wouldn’t do this.  He said, “My heart’s givin’ out.  My heart’s givin’ out.”

I thought this was very odd behavior for Leroy.  We had all noticed he wasn’t himself; he was pacing with a worried look on his face, and hunched over with his arms held close to his torso, and his pacing was faster than normal.  Not to mention the fact that he had been standing in front of the aides’ station for some time, shuffling like he was in a parade, whining about his heart giving out.  As the Great Doctor Brainbowl’s representatives, the aides knew better than to listen to crazy people try to diagnose themselves, so they told him to go sit down if he didn’t feel good; the Doctor had been notified.  But he couldn’t stay in front of the TV for two seconds before he was up and clutching his chest in front of the aides’ station again.

It was I who told the aides to get off their asses and do their job, because the man was seriously concerned about his heart, and more importantly, the aides even admitted that he had never acted like this before.  I had found Leroy leaning against the wall halfway down the hallway of the men’s wing, crying and cringing.  I took him by the arm and led him to the aides’ station, where I opened the little French door that let us into the patient inspection area where I sat Leroy down on the same stool where I had gotten sat down to have my temperature and blood pressure tested for cleaning a cupboard, and I walked into the aides’ station, which was almost a federal offense around there, and I pointed my finger at those women and told them that Leroy Garten’s heart was giving out, in case they cared to do anything about it.

Leroy was in intensive care in a real hospital in less than half an hour.  Diagnosis: overdrugging to the extent of a potentially fatal buildup of toxins.  When he returned in a week, he was still blue but he was happy, smiling and talkative, and I believe the Great Doctor Brainbowl eased up on his meds a little at that point, and probably waited till I moved out to get back to burying the little blue man.

A month later, there was a fire drill in the middle of the night, and when I passed Lee Jones’ room on my right, where the unstoppable Mrs. Croft was trying to get Big Lee Jones out of his locker, into which he had stuffed himself when the alarm went off, across the hall I noticed that the door to Rolf McKinney’s room was still shut, and when I got outside he was not out there.  I mentioned this to Justerina Beena, who liked Rolf  and would read to him for hours, and she said she had been worried because he didn’t look well.

Rolf  McKinney was over six feet, maybe 35 or 40, very thin and pasty, with a high domed forehead whose bulbosity was exaggerated by being almost bald on top.  He had long knobby fingers.  He wore thick glasses and was a mathematics genius.  He was reputed to be a cross-dresser, supposedly still living with his mother.  He refused to speak.  He did nothing.  He did not sit in front of the TV.  He did not read.  He sat away from the others and refused to meet anyone’s glance.  He was not catatonic; he was exhibiting extremely angry, but completely withdrawn and repressed, behavior.  I recognized him as a kindred spirit immediately, and would sometimes talk to him, telling him it was OK that he didn’t feel like talking, and I understood and he should go ahead and keep his silence as long as he felt like it.  I also talked to him about Primal Therapy.  I might have told him about my early childhood.  He never glanced my way or uttered a sound, but I imagined that he once twitched to express his appreciation for my good intentions.

The next day we were walking back to the ward from the dining room after breakfast, and when we got to the outside door leading to the ward, which was always kept locked, Rolf McKinney was already standing there, having apparently left breakfast early.  It just so happened that I was walking with Justerina Beena, little old pissed-off Muriel, and of all people, the Great and Seldom Seen Doctor Brainbowl.  Muriel was whining to the Great One about all the horrible things that were being done to her on the ward, and the Great One was saying, There, there, Muriel old girl, you and I go way back, and you know we’re good chums, OK, and don’t you forget that.

Then we saw Rolf  up ahead of us, leaning on the outside of the door with his back to us.  Doctor Brainbowl asked Rolf  why he hadn’t knocked to get let in; Justerina Beena and I looked at each other in amazement when Rolf, without turning around, spoke: “My back hurts.”  I knew by the pinched quality of his voice that it also hurt his mind to speak, so much that he would never have complained if he didn’t feel he was in a dire emergency.  I knew him, though we’d never spoken.  I knew he was in real trouble.

The Great Doctor Brainbowl and Justerina Beena helped Rolf  to his room where he lay down and did not get up, except twice to fall down, for the next three days.  They finally took him out in an ambulance where he was in intensive care for almost a week.  Diagnosis: overdrugging to the extent of a potentially fatal buildup of toxins.  When he came back, Justerina Beena had a talk with him, and she came back and reported to me that Rolf had accepted her friendship and support in a decision to refuse all medication from the hospital.  He started speaking up in group and telling the aides and shrinks how stupid they were and how little they cared.  He started weaving and reading and watching TV.  He and Justerina Beena read to each other.  In a few months he was discharged as cured.  One of the few.  One of the dangerous.  Not only can he talk, but we almost killed him.  We better send this one home.

Clarence Kelley was a new guy, transferred over from the VA Hospital like his buddy the Navy Captain.  Clarence Kelley could get through most of a very short conversation before making some kind of reference to the fact that the head of the CIA had the same name as his.  He also identified with Machine Gun Kelly.  He was a 65 year old diabetic alcoholic who could only survive under lock and key.  Once I tried playing cards with him, and when I started winning and wouldn’t let him change the rules, he overturned the table and started pulling me around the room by my beard, screaming insults at me.  I followed along until we got up in front of the aides’ station, where I grabbed my own whiskers by their roots and steadily pulled back.  I was amazed to find, as I silently and calmly held my ground in front of the paralyzed aides, that I was enjoying myself intensely.  Clarence Kelley, Head of the CIA, Machine Gun Kelley, finally gave up and they put him in isolation for a few days.

Isolation.

That was it.  That’s why I stayed calm.  I’d seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest eight times, and I knew if I didn’t stay calm in a confrontation, they would either drug me, put me in isolation, tie me to a chair, or move me to a meaner ward.

As a matter of fact, next time the Great Doctor Brainbowl was in her observation mode behind the safe glass walls of the aides’ station, Mrs. Clara Friend informed me that the Great One would speak with me.  I approached the glass cage with a rush of excitement.  What would it be?  Isolation for a year or near-lethal doses of Haldol?

This is what the Great Doctor Brainbowl said to me.  She told me she had heard about the scuffle with Clarence Kelley, and she had heard that I remained calm and did not struggle or fight back, that I remained a neutral influence on the event and did no harm by being attacked by an unprovoked madman, and I didn’t open my big mouth to make things worse by having an opinion about the whole thing or to pin blame on someone, and I walked away as soon as I was able to do so.  Then you know what she said to me?  The Great Doctor Brainbowl looked at me in my eyes and she said, “Keep on keepin’ on, sonny.  Keep on keepin’ on.”

A couple of young men had recently moved in with us.  First came Mike, a quiet, friendly farmboy in a gray workshirt and thick black-rimmed glasses, whose brother was a janitor at the hospital, as well as an ex-patient.  Mike was one of those pre-Reaganomics vacationers who would check in and out of the State Hospital as a way of keeping their routine in balance and getting away from it all.  The other new guy, Frank, was a medium tall, thin black man with a long, unkempt Afro, who the cops had brought in off the street because he was angry and shouting at himself from time to time as he wandered the streets.  He refused to take a shower and was restrained a couple times for trying to refuse his medication.

One day Kim and I both noticed cigarettes missing from our lockers, and Kim told me he was sure Frank was stealing them, because Frank had no cigarettes of his own, but he was always smoking.  I happened to pass this information on to Mike later.  Mike was trying to play cards with Frank, but couldn’t concentrate, and he kept making passive little pissy remarks about cigarette thieves and the like, until Frank threw the table across the room and starting beating the shit out of Mike.  Mike tried to run away, but Frank pushed him down and starting kicking him in the back and in the head with his slippered feet.  Mike wrapped his arms around his head and whimpered.  Everyone on the ward was standing around watching as Mike tried to crawl away.  Lee Jones followed Frank around tapping his shoulder and mumbling at him to stop, as Frank started picking up plastic chairs and smashing them across Mike’s back.  Mr. Searcy, a 65 year old aide, tried to restrain Frank and got smacked around a little.

I looked around to see what everyone was doing about this.  The nurse and all the female aides were standing there with their eyes bugging out and their hands over their mouths, paralyzed.  David Corkfin and others able to help were not around at that moment.  I’d seen the aides calling for reinforcements on the telephone.  Most of the patients were cringing but still shuffling for a good vantage point.  This was better than TV.  Finally I realized that Mike was going to get hurt, Mr. Searcy was going to get hurt, and Lee Jones was going to get hurt, if nobody did anything to diffuse Frank’s one-pointed focus on hurting Mike.  I slowly walked up behind Frank, not knowing what I was going to do.  I shouted his name, and he ignored me.  I realized he was hypnotized, completely focused on Mike, and almost oblivious to me.  I was able to safely follow him around like Lee Jones was doing, shouting in his ear: Frank! Stop!  Frank!  Stop! until Mike crawled over by some larger, metal chairs which I realized Frank was going to pick up.  Not knowing what to do, but knowing that serious damage would be done to a human body right in front of me if I did nothing, when Frank grabbed the arms of the heavy metal chair to pick it up, my body grabbed the chair’s arms too, and pushed it back to the floor.  For once I had the complete advantage, because Frank was already exhausted, but I was just walking around yelling with lots of fresh adrenaline running, having a great time.  Frank moved on to the next chair, which I also grabbed and pushed to the floor.  He barely noticed me, just moving from chair to chair, till finally the big security guards came in and hauled Frank out of there. 

Mr. Searcy had gotten his collar bone broken and was permanently transferred to the children’s ward.  Frank was taken to another ward to be kept in isolation; our isolation room was needed for none other than the Grand Felon Himself: Mike!

Yes, it’s true; the Great Doctor Brainbowl had decided that Mike was as much to blame for this conflagration as the actual conflagrator himself, and Mike was put in isolation for some reason none of us ever understood and no one could explain to us.

Six weeks later he was still in there, still crying, still not knowing what he had done that was so bad.  Apparently he refused to accept blame for the incident.

The Grand Old Man of the operation, the real movie star in this booby hatch, was Mr. Adams, who was some sort of Chief of All Aides hospitalwide.  He was the teacher who kept charge of all the nice girls and idealistic young men who got turned loose on us from time to time to play Ping Pong with us or practice giving shots on us or do the note-taking in the journal or count pills.  Mr. Adams had true charisma: three hundred pounds and well over six feet of charisma, not to mention the usual dripping self-confidence, charming personality and winning ways that are included in the generic charisma package.  Like most of our caregivers, he was black, and everyone loved him; he was just like those rare angelic beings in the movies who always know what to say to the weak and broken-hearted that flock around for pats on the head and ego-boosting sessions.

So naturally it was Mr. Adams who I continuously confronted about the fact that we were being held prisoner against our constitutional rights and against our will, not even permitted to go outside and sit in the grass, and I chose Mr. Adams as the receptacle for my concerns because I was convinced that he was a good-hearted man with a conscience.  He informed me that I could leave anytime I wanted by giving 3-day notice, since I was voluntary.  All of the sudden Mr. Bigheart is a company man.  Get off step zero, he told me. Then you will get your grounds pass and activities.

That jerk really pissed me off. I fantasized throwing his big fat ass through the Plexiglas picture windows that showed us everything we were missing.  I continued to harass him out of spite and disillusionment with his charisma, until I got tired of resisting the pressure of watching my friends climb the ladder of success toward imminent release, while I apparently planned to live in this place voluntarily, fighting everything they did and didn’t do, for the rest of my life.  Justerina Beena had overcome her delusions and was set to be released as cured.  Helen was making serious headway with the staff.  David Corkfin was just waiting out some paperwork to get transferred back East somewhere.  I was sitting in a stewpot getting addicted to tobacco and already hating it.  And Spring was here.  For the rest of the world.

I finally got off Step Zero, the level where Lee and Rita and Bernie and the other nonfunctionals resided permanently.  I got to walk around the grounds, go to the library and the candy machine, and I had activities such as badminton, ceramics, and music therapy where I astounded the young babes working there, who loved my songs and wanted to know what I was doing in this place.   One of the student aides on the ward gave me her address, and stupid me never went to see her.

One day I got a phone call from my Daddy up in Portland.  He told me he had called my ex-boss Max in Albuquerque, and explained my situation to him.  He asked Max if I could have my job back rebuilding player pianos, if I would check myself out of the nuthouse, and Max said yes.  So my Daddy wanted me to think about checking myself out and going back to work for Max.  That sneaky shit Daddy of mine knew I was getting ready for a change and as usual insisted on being one step ahead of me ever getting a chance to make my own decision about anything or do my own talking or asking for things.  If I was ever to gain any kind of momentum in life from being in this place, it was all canceled out by this sudden and unexpected intrusion into the life I was trying to live, which I was nearly ready to change on my own, until my Daddy got confused about who was supposed to be doing what for whom, which is a specialty of his.  But faced with the challenge of finding a way to entertain myself in this place all Spring, Summer, and Fall while real life went on without me, or the other choice of going back to the worst job I ever had working for the best boss anyone could ever hope for, I chose the latter and said good-bye to all my little friends.