Happy Hour
Friday, November 26, 2004
New Roommate
Jeffry’s last night on the unit, I couldn’t sleep. Not because of him, or anything. They’d served us each a paper plateful of baked beans for dinner. Beans that Carol’s decrepit intestines weren’t too friendly with. Her ass gas was so thick and onioney, that night, not even burrowing my face deep into the thin, white sheet could mask it. Nancy was so doped up, she slept through it, as usual.
So, I sat in the dayroom. Alone. Arms folded over my gown. I hung my head and stared at my arms. The bright tattoos of flowers and bugs and stars, and the pink stripes of scars running highways between them reminded me of how just a week ago I had the freedom and right to plunge needles and knives into my own skin. And why shouldn’t I, damn it? I grew this skin. I fed my mouth and slept and drank water so I would grow and live. I worked so hard to be alive for what? To be a checkmark on some psych nurse’s clipboard?
“Pssst!” I heard from a doorway across from me. I looked up. It was Jeffry. He was wearing a coat. They’d given it back to him since he’s leaving tomorrow.
“Psst! Com’ere!” Jeffry said and unbuttoned his coat to reveal a smooth, brown chest with thick pectoral mounds and a rippled stomach. He nodded slowly and raised his eyebrows up and down as he circled his nipples with one finger.
I shook my head quickly no. Jeffry’s discharge order was written already. It would take a court trial to commit him and make him stay longer. So he could do what the fuck he pleased.
As for me, I knew that each transgression, my every insubordinate move equaled more time in these jaundice colored walls. I had stopped hallucinating. I had no urge to fuck this man across the dayroom, offering himself to me. Yeah, he’s sort of old and bald, and the smell of fart and institution laundry isn’t exactly arousing. But he’s got a nice body and a working cock. Which is usually enough for me. Maybe the medicines have kicked in. Fuck! I bet that’s it.
“Hey! Psst! Hey!” Jeffry reached down for the elastic waist of his paper pajamas and pulled the front low to expose his thick, dark cock. Nope. I’m still not horny. There’s definitely something wrong here. I’m a little scared. What if when I go home to my master and he binds me in ropes and chains, then pushes me onto my knees and spreads my asscheeks and tries to slide his luscious tool in me and finds I'm dry as a kitten’s tongue. Would he be hurt? Think I no longer love him and want to deprive him?
Bandana is on duty tonight. The very unfriendly night nurse who always wears a bandana over her braids. I see her behind the counter, now, staring down hard at a magazine, gulping from a large, glass bottle of something clear, Vodka or liquid Haldol, maybe and eating mealy bananas. Fuck you, bitch. Those were probably our breakfast.
Bandana doesn’t see Jeffry. I almost wish she would so he’d stop. Each time he grinds that fist up and down his cock, I’m reminded of my new impotence. Bandana doesn’t see me either, though. If she did, she’d give me a shot.
Elena stomps into the dayroom with her blanket thrown across her shoulders like a cape. She winks one almond eye at me and sinks into a chair in front of Jeffry’s door. I don’t think she saw him.
“I am sooooo sleepy!” she swoons and drapes the blanket over her lap. She begins to snore exaggerately.
“Oh Queen Elena,” Bandana croaks, “You best be takin’ yo Chinese ass to bed.”
Elena “snores” more. In a wispy, sleeptalk tone says, “but I’m Thaiiiii.”
“Yo Thai ass gettin’ a shot.” Bandana puts down the banana she’d been chewing. Jeffry sees Bandana get up, blows me a kiss, and slips back into the dark of the room he shares with Fergus. I sort of wonder what Jesus freak Fergus would have done if he’d have woke to me and Jeffry bouncing up and down in the bed beside him.
“Ooh! That tickles! Mmm…I love needles!” Elena giggled as Nurse Bandana jabbed the shot of Thorazine into her bicep. “I’m already starting to feel all zonkty!”
Elena skipped off to her and Mona’s room and I was alone again.
“Hey, you. Little white girl.” Bandana noticed me.
I blinked and with a big scoop of my neck looked around the dayroom, as if it was a pep rally back at my high school in the suburbs, crowded with little white girls, cheering and shaking their pom-poms in between twirls of their long, blonde hair.
“Uh. Me?”
“You wanna shot, too?” Bandana threatened.
“Have you smelled it in there.” I said and pointed behind me at the room where Carol and Nancy slept.
Bandana bit her lip as not to smile. “Yeah, it do stink pretty bad.”
“I’ll go right to sleep if I can have a different room.”
“Your on frequent ob. I'm sposta watch you. Doctor said he’d take you off it, though. There’s room with the new girl. Go sleep in there.” She pointed to Leesha’s door.
¶ 1:54 PM 4 comments
So, I sat in the dayroom. Alone. Arms folded over my gown. I hung my head and stared at my arms. The bright tattoos of flowers and bugs and stars, and the pink stripes of scars running highways between them reminded me of how just a week ago I had the freedom and right to plunge needles and knives into my own skin. And why shouldn’t I, damn it? I grew this skin. I fed my mouth and slept and drank water so I would grow and live. I worked so hard to be alive for what? To be a checkmark on some psych nurse’s clipboard?
“Pssst!” I heard from a doorway across from me. I looked up. It was Jeffry. He was wearing a coat. They’d given it back to him since he’s leaving tomorrow.
“Psst! Com’ere!” Jeffry said and unbuttoned his coat to reveal a smooth, brown chest with thick pectoral mounds and a rippled stomach. He nodded slowly and raised his eyebrows up and down as he circled his nipples with one finger.
I shook my head quickly no. Jeffry’s discharge order was written already. It would take a court trial to commit him and make him stay longer. So he could do what the fuck he pleased.
As for me, I knew that each transgression, my every insubordinate move equaled more time in these jaundice colored walls. I had stopped hallucinating. I had no urge to fuck this man across the dayroom, offering himself to me. Yeah, he’s sort of old and bald, and the smell of fart and institution laundry isn’t exactly arousing. But he’s got a nice body and a working cock. Which is usually enough for me. Maybe the medicines have kicked in. Fuck! I bet that’s it.
“Hey! Psst! Hey!” Jeffry reached down for the elastic waist of his paper pajamas and pulled the front low to expose his thick, dark cock. Nope. I’m still not horny. There’s definitely something wrong here. I’m a little scared. What if when I go home to my master and he binds me in ropes and chains, then pushes me onto my knees and spreads my asscheeks and tries to slide his luscious tool in me and finds I'm dry as a kitten’s tongue. Would he be hurt? Think I no longer love him and want to deprive him?
Bandana is on duty tonight. The very unfriendly night nurse who always wears a bandana over her braids. I see her behind the counter, now, staring down hard at a magazine, gulping from a large, glass bottle of something clear, Vodka or liquid Haldol, maybe and eating mealy bananas. Fuck you, bitch. Those were probably our breakfast.
Bandana doesn’t see Jeffry. I almost wish she would so he’d stop. Each time he grinds that fist up and down his cock, I’m reminded of my new impotence. Bandana doesn’t see me either, though. If she did, she’d give me a shot.
Elena stomps into the dayroom with her blanket thrown across her shoulders like a cape. She winks one almond eye at me and sinks into a chair in front of Jeffry’s door. I don’t think she saw him.
“I am sooooo sleepy!” she swoons and drapes the blanket over her lap. She begins to snore exaggerately.
“Oh Queen Elena,” Bandana croaks, “You best be takin’ yo Chinese ass to bed.”
Elena “snores” more. In a wispy, sleeptalk tone says, “but I’m Thaiiiii.”
“Yo Thai ass gettin’ a shot.” Bandana puts down the banana she’d been chewing. Jeffry sees Bandana get up, blows me a kiss, and slips back into the dark of the room he shares with Fergus. I sort of wonder what Jesus freak Fergus would have done if he’d have woke to me and Jeffry bouncing up and down in the bed beside him.
“Ooh! That tickles! Mmm…I love needles!” Elena giggled as Nurse Bandana jabbed the shot of Thorazine into her bicep. “I’m already starting to feel all zonkty!”
Elena skipped off to her and Mona’s room and I was alone again.
“Hey, you. Little white girl.” Bandana noticed me.
I blinked and with a big scoop of my neck looked around the dayroom, as if it was a pep rally back at my high school in the suburbs, crowded with little white girls, cheering and shaking their pom-poms in between twirls of their long, blonde hair.
“Uh. Me?”
“You wanna shot, too?” Bandana threatened.
“Have you smelled it in there.” I said and pointed behind me at the room where Carol and Nancy slept.
Bandana bit her lip as not to smile. “Yeah, it do stink pretty bad.”
“I’ll go right to sleep if I can have a different room.”
“Your on frequent ob. I'm sposta watch you. Doctor said he’d take you off it, though. There’s room with the new girl. Go sleep in there.” She pointed to Leesha’s door.
¶ 1:54 PM 4 comments
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Tea Party
Psychologist Kelly clicked in her white, leather heels to the front of the dayroom. Frosted blonde curls bouncing at her shoulders.
“Heh. Where she goin’. Church?” Markus said.
Kelly stood in front of the TV and switched off the Cubs game. “Time for group!”
“Oh, why thank you, Kelly. I didn’t really want to watch that crappy old baseball game, anyway.” Mona said with a sinking in her jowls. Kelly ignored her. Under her gown, Mona crossed one hairy leg over the other and folded her hands on her lap. “I’m just waiting for the bus.”
Mona turned to Markus, who sat on her left, “Excuse me, sir, do you know when the bus will come?”
Markus grinned and shook his head. “Shoulda been here three damn weeks ago.”
Mona says the bus thing a lot. Whenever we’re waiting around in the dayroom, waiting for meals, for group, for happy hour. Sometimes, she really gets into it. Elena does, too. They leave their bathrobes undone like raincoats, hold their pillowcases over their heads like umbrellas and sit in the vinyl chairs, tapping their toes and glancing at their empty wrists to “check the time”. Mona will say, “Elena, it’s starting to pour out here. Where’s the bus?”
Kelly straightened the collar on her skirt suit, Easter pink. “Today we’re going to work on some coping skills. One good way to calm yourself down when you’re feeling stressed out is through meditation.” She paused to purse her lips and look each of her patients in the eye. “Does anybody know what meditation is?”
“I will only meditate on the word of our lord Jesus Christ.” Fergus said and blinked solemnly.
“Well, meditation does not have to be a religious thing. Though some religions use it. It’s just a way to clear your mind of worries. I have a form of meditation you all can do.” Kelly reached into her bulbous leather purse, white to match her shoes and extracted from it a box of tea. She set the box in the center of the long conference table the patients were seated around in the bare, white meeting room..
“Now, look at this box and concentrate on only the box.”
Hela squinted her big green eyes and leaned forward. “I can mooove it with my miiiind!” she said in an exaggerate, spooky voice. Elena and Mona and Markus erupted in chuckles.
“Hela, just try it.”
“Can I? What flavor is it?”
“No, try meditating on the box. Clear all other thoughts from your head. Let them slide out your ears. Tell that voice in your head to be quiet.”
“Which voice?” Elena winked at Hela and pointed to her head. “I’ve got so many up here!”
“Come on you guys, quiet down. Some of us want to meditate.” Kelly gestured her pink manicure toward Fergus and Milton, who were staring hard at the box of tea.
“Can we drink some afterward?” Hela asked.
“No, I’m afraid not. It’s against the rules.”
“Why?”
“Well, I used to make tea for group time every day, but there was this incident a few months back. A visitor slipped some drugs to a patient in a bottle of Coke. Four patients took it and fell into a coma. So there’s no outside food allowed anymore.” Kelly bit her lip, realizing that Hela had diverted her, once again.
The box was yellow. It said “Sweet Earth”. On the front of the box was a tiny farmer plowing a patchwork field. A glowing orange yolk hung above his head in the cardboard sky. On the back was a list of herbs and in what ways they are good for you. Echinacea- Supports healthy immune function. Ginseng- For energy. Green tea- An antioxidant.
After about 10 minutes of silent staring, Kelly noticed that Milton was drifting to sleep in his wheelchair, head cocked sideways, bead of drool glimmering from the side of his mouth.
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Suicide
I can tell you what happened to Fergus. And why I am here.
It’s like when your computer is not quite frozen. The hourglass icon tips and ticks, the memory crunching, but you press control-alternate-delete, anyway, because starting over is quicker than waiting for things to free up.
It’s like you’re a tourist in Chicago on a cloudy day. Wanting to see the city from the top of the tallest building in the world, but knowing that if you even bothered to ride the elevator up the 110 floors of the Sears Tower, ears popping up to the Skydeck, all you would see out the long, clear windows is 360 degrees of Gray.
And rain is forecast for each day you will be in town.
So you tell yourself, well, that building in Malaysia is taller, besides. If you count the antennas.
It’s like when you sit with your legs crossed on the train. One ankle balanced on the opposite knee, which cuts it’s blood. But you can’t tell, don’t notice your that reclining foot is crowding with icy pins. You eyes are too embossed in the winter sunset, the freezing rain as it stripes the train windows blurry over premature darkening blues and blacks of the sky.
When the train recording announces your stop, slows to the soggy platform like constipation and you have to get up, you step on your good foot, then on your prickly foot and realize that while you forced all your senses into your eyes to observe the outsides beyond your window, you neglected to feel the blood flee from your toes.
You step to the doors as they slide open. You step funny, flinging your ankle with no tactile gauge of how far you are flinging it. You walk like: step, limp, kick. Like a can-can crackhead. Your dead foot bouncing in front of you like a shoed frog.
You wish there were a special room by the train stop for the alleviation of sleeping limbs. A padded space in which you could bang the dozed limb on a soft wall until it fizzled back into feeling.
But there is none such room, so you do your crazy walk across the platform, your shoes tapping out a ka-dunk, ka-dunk rhythm and 50 thousand pairs of mocking eyes and leering camera lenses are watching, giggling at your absurdity and powerlessness. You and your useless foot.
It’s like when the sunless day is so dismal. The artificial glow of night is a whole lot brighter.
Do you get it, now?
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Phone Call
Note From Dr. Yarozik
After reading the progress of this work, Happy Hour, I must warn to please use extreme discretion when crediting Hela with the truth. She has a, let’s say, mutable boundary with reality and is prone to gross exaggeration.
Consider her diagnosis:
Axis I: Bi-polar disorder, borderline personality disorder.
Axis II: Anxiety disorder. Marijuana dependence. Sex addiction.
Axis III: Chlamydia. Heart murmurs.
Axis IV: New living arrangement, loss of job, untimely death of mother, recent sexual assaults, possible homelessness.
Besides, she can't even spell my name right.
Phone Call
After Hela and Dr. Littleboy’s scrabble game, he fed her a fat Valium and sat her down in front of the phone in the hallway between the dayroom and solarium. Hela pressed the numbers she knew so well. The doctor left.
“Hell-o.” a man’s voice answered. Deep, with the bounce of a boy's.
“Hi.” Hela said.
“Hey there, what’s up my little Hel-fire? Where you been?” She heard his lighter flick. Saw him leaned back in the office chair at his desk, taking breath after breath of his hand-rolled cigarette, staring up at the Sears Tower, poking the clouds with it's twin horns of blinking purple. An airplane flies toward the steel devil head and Hela's master, for a moment muses at the prospect of that plane swooping low and crashing, flames and shattered glass, a tumbling of floors like a stack of cards, small bodies plunging…
"I have a request." Hela started with a spaced-out gravity, with a detached bemusement, a funeral tone that snapped her master from his carnage reverie.
"Wear nothing but leather pants and a mask. Fill up your gun. On the cross streets of Montrose and Oak Park, there is a state mental hospital. I am there. Way in the back. In a ward called D-North. Shoot through the locks. Shoot every guard on duty you see. Then chain me up. Carry me out of here. The airport is nearby. We can flee."
"Mmm…to where?" he purred. He thought she was kidding. "Assuming I own a pair of leather pants."
"No, really. They locked me up again."
8/3
Dinner
Before dinner, I finally called Master. He didn't believe this whole thing was true, at first. He won't bust me out of here like I asked, but volunteered to come visit on Friday and bring me a funny book. He asked how it smells here. I told him, like farts.
"I'm homeless in the bosom of my soul. I'm homeless, starving to death." Carol just went off on another sermon. Is standing in front of her fold-out chair at one of these plywood tables, with a far-off, righteous look in her glassed-out eyes, placing one hand above where her heart should be. "I am strong. I'm a OX! I'm a BULL! I'm a, I'm a…DOG!" We all laughed.
"Woof woof!" Markus taunted. We laughed again.
"Miss Carol, siddown!" Nurse I'm-a-turtle Jean just said to her.
Jean is slow at passing out the dinner trays, tonight. I haven't received mine yet. The turtle is probably waiting to give me mine last, since I'm her oh-so-favorite patient here.
Mona and Elena have gotten theirs and from what I can see, this is what's on the menu:
-6 saltine crackers, wheat flavored
-2 slices of American cheese
-Applesauce
-3 2-inch mini dill pickles (which I will try to trade for more applesauce)
-Milk (yuck!)
"Oh goody! Applesauce!" Elena cheered, genuine. I am sitting with her and Mona.
"Oh yay. A full 6 crackers. Won't I be stuffed." Mona said deadpan, lips still, jowls flapping. Big, round glasses bouncing on her cheeks, making Mona into an angry, gray-haired frog in a gown.
Good. Nurse Turtle finally placed my tray in front of me.
"Thanks." I murmered, not looking up then called out, "Is anyone hungry for pickles?"
"Yeah, giv'em to me." this new girl waved from across the dining area. Looking about here, I always flash back to my grade-school cafeteria. Sticky round tables, the sweet reek of packet ketchup and curdled carton milk laid to crust on a seldom mopped tile floor.
I studied the new girl. She is shorter than I am, under 5 feet, but chiseled compact. If Dionysus has designed me thick and soft to consume great quantities of whisky, tough and flexible to sustain bondage sessions in which I am chained precariously with a nullified range of motion, limbs stretched in angles of 90 degrees or wider, joints taut and aching to full extent, this girl was designed by Artemis. The huntress. She was designed to stalk and chase. Bounding on her tight, round chocolate calves. Pouncing, then shredding the muscles of prey with her pointy nails, tinting pink with blood.
The new girl's narrow hips swiveled and cut sharp corners as she twisted around the tables to get to my pickles. She pinched them up with her claws. She left a cup of applesauce on my tray in exchange. How perfect!
"Thanks, Thickums." she smiled. She had the whitest teeth. Small and sharp. Like she is. Bet they'd leave the prettiest purple moons on my neck. The whitest eye. The left eye. The right eye is brown, but the left has a colorless cornea. Wow!
"What did you call me?" I asked. Friendly, not offended. What she said could have been a compliment, for all I know.
"I called you Thickums. You thick, you luscious." she winked her brown eye. My thighs got moist.
"Is that a good thing?"
"Mmmhmmm…" she nodded slowly, inviting.
"Leesha, siddown!" Nurse turtle-ass Jean yelled. The new girl sauntered back to her seat, her tight butt tick-tocking beneath her paper pajamas. I can't see her from here, anymore. Some dude's head is in my way.
¶ 3:53 PM 6 comments
After reading the progress of this work, Happy Hour, I must warn to please use extreme discretion when crediting Hela with the truth. She has a, let’s say, mutable boundary with reality and is prone to gross exaggeration.
Consider her diagnosis:
Axis I: Bi-polar disorder, borderline personality disorder.
Axis II: Anxiety disorder. Marijuana dependence. Sex addiction.
Axis III: Chlamydia. Heart murmurs.
Axis IV: New living arrangement, loss of job, untimely death of mother, recent sexual assaults, possible homelessness.
Besides, she can't even spell my name right.
Phone Call
After Hela and Dr. Littleboy’s scrabble game, he fed her a fat Valium and sat her down in front of the phone in the hallway between the dayroom and solarium. Hela pressed the numbers she knew so well. The doctor left.
“Hell-o.” a man’s voice answered. Deep, with the bounce of a boy's.
“Hi.” Hela said.
“Hey there, what’s up my little Hel-fire? Where you been?” She heard his lighter flick. Saw him leaned back in the office chair at his desk, taking breath after breath of his hand-rolled cigarette, staring up at the Sears Tower, poking the clouds with it's twin horns of blinking purple. An airplane flies toward the steel devil head and Hela's master, for a moment muses at the prospect of that plane swooping low and crashing, flames and shattered glass, a tumbling of floors like a stack of cards, small bodies plunging…
"I have a request." Hela started with a spaced-out gravity, with a detached bemusement, a funeral tone that snapped her master from his carnage reverie.
"Wear nothing but leather pants and a mask. Fill up your gun. On the cross streets of Montrose and Oak Park, there is a state mental hospital. I am there. Way in the back. In a ward called D-North. Shoot through the locks. Shoot every guard on duty you see. Then chain me up. Carry me out of here. The airport is nearby. We can flee."
"Mmm…to where?" he purred. He thought she was kidding. "Assuming I own a pair of leather pants."
"No, really. They locked me up again."
8/3
Dinner
Before dinner, I finally called Master. He didn't believe this whole thing was true, at first. He won't bust me out of here like I asked, but volunteered to come visit on Friday and bring me a funny book. He asked how it smells here. I told him, like farts.
"I'm homeless in the bosom of my soul. I'm homeless, starving to death." Carol just went off on another sermon. Is standing in front of her fold-out chair at one of these plywood tables, with a far-off, righteous look in her glassed-out eyes, placing one hand above where her heart should be. "I am strong. I'm a OX! I'm a BULL! I'm a, I'm a…DOG!" We all laughed.
"Woof woof!" Markus taunted. We laughed again.
"Miss Carol, siddown!" Nurse I'm-a-turtle Jean just said to her.
Jean is slow at passing out the dinner trays, tonight. I haven't received mine yet. The turtle is probably waiting to give me mine last, since I'm her oh-so-favorite patient here.
Mona and Elena have gotten theirs and from what I can see, this is what's on the menu:
-6 saltine crackers, wheat flavored
-2 slices of American cheese
-Applesauce
-3 2-inch mini dill pickles (which I will try to trade for more applesauce)
-Milk (yuck!)
"Oh goody! Applesauce!" Elena cheered, genuine. I am sitting with her and Mona.
"Oh yay. A full 6 crackers. Won't I be stuffed." Mona said deadpan, lips still, jowls flapping. Big, round glasses bouncing on her cheeks, making Mona into an angry, gray-haired frog in a gown.
Good. Nurse Turtle finally placed my tray in front of me.
"Thanks." I murmered, not looking up then called out, "Is anyone hungry for pickles?"
"Yeah, giv'em to me." this new girl waved from across the dining area. Looking about here, I always flash back to my grade-school cafeteria. Sticky round tables, the sweet reek of packet ketchup and curdled carton milk laid to crust on a seldom mopped tile floor.
I studied the new girl. She is shorter than I am, under 5 feet, but chiseled compact. If Dionysus has designed me thick and soft to consume great quantities of whisky, tough and flexible to sustain bondage sessions in which I am chained precariously with a nullified range of motion, limbs stretched in angles of 90 degrees or wider, joints taut and aching to full extent, this girl was designed by Artemis. The huntress. She was designed to stalk and chase. Bounding on her tight, round chocolate calves. Pouncing, then shredding the muscles of prey with her pointy nails, tinting pink with blood.
The new girl's narrow hips swiveled and cut sharp corners as she twisted around the tables to get to my pickles. She pinched them up with her claws. She left a cup of applesauce on my tray in exchange. How perfect!
"Thanks, Thickums." she smiled. She had the whitest teeth. Small and sharp. Like she is. Bet they'd leave the prettiest purple moons on my neck. The whitest eye. The left eye. The right eye is brown, but the left has a colorless cornea. Wow!
"What did you call me?" I asked. Friendly, not offended. What she said could have been a compliment, for all I know.
"I called you Thickums. You thick, you luscious." she winked her brown eye. My thighs got moist.
"Is that a good thing?"
"Mmmhmmm…" she nodded slowly, inviting.
"Leesha, siddown!" Nurse turtle-ass Jean yelled. The new girl sauntered back to her seat, her tight butt tick-tocking beneath her paper pajamas. I can't see her from here, anymore. Some dude's head is in my way.
¶ 3:53 PM 6 comments
A Digression
http://www.engrish.com/recent_detail.php?imagename=keep-early-hour.jpg&category=Clothing&date=2004-11-09
¶ 11:21 AM 0 comments
¶ 11:21 AM 0 comments
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Dr. Littleboy
For the month of July, the unit was decorated with red, white and blue paper stars, faded old and taped haphazardly to the gold walls. The U.S. presidents, each in a rectangle with their picture and name, in order of office, were hung among them.
Each day, Markus would displace the rectangle of George W. Bush. Sometimes Bush was up before Washington. Sometimes, somewhere in the center near Roosevelt. Other times, Bush was taped to the side of the television, or under a chair.
But this day, Bush was missing. Hela heard Jeffry yelling about how the toilet in the room he shared with Markus was clogged with paper.
Set next to the stars and the presidents was a tall ladder. A lone workman clung to the top. Shoulders tight, Hela could tell from where she stood at the nurse’s station counter, at the opposite end of the dayroom. She smirked to herself. The worker was probably nervous at being inside an actual loony bin. Expecting to see some Jack Nicholson in a straight jacket bearing his teeth.
Elena was tugging a plastic comb, one issued to all patients upon arrival, through her long hair with long swipes of her delicate wrist.
“Hey, Queenie.” Nurse Jean squawked to Elena. “Your highness, excuse me.” Elena looked to Jean. “Do that in your bathroom. We don’t wanna catch your fleas.”
Elena, not one to fight with staff, rose from the vinyl chair with a whip of her neck, of her black hair, as if to prove that her fleas were indeed, non-existent and sauntered off to her room.
Nurse Jean noticed Hela leaning on the counter. “Get’yer arms off.”
Hela thrust her elbows forward and sneered.
“So you’re ready for round 2, huh?” Nurse Jean said to Hela and would have put her hands on her hips for emphasis, if she had any hips and not simply a light bulb of fat for a torso.
“Just tell me one thing.” Hela removed her arms from the counter. “When can I use the phone?" Hela said out loud, but thought, “you god damn turtle, I’ll eat your eyes.”
Nurse Jean had particularly tasty looking eyes. Shadows below them and bulgy and green, much like Hela's own eyes. Her hair was shellacked extra-stiff to her scalp, her shell on full guard.
"You need to talk to your doctor about that."
"Who is my doctor."
"Him." Nurse Jean thrust one puffy thumb at the young man with the backpack behind her.
"Doctor Littleb-er-Jaros, I need to talk to you. Please." Hela said with a flash of her teeth, and a blush in her cheeks from her accidental slip of the nickname the patients had given him. She knew to suck up to the doctors. They write the discharge orders.
"Sure. What's your name?" the doctor smiled back and the white ice spark in his blue eyes made something inside of Hela's chest jump.
"I'm Hela."
"Hela, that's right. I've been meaning to speak with you. Up for a game of Scrabble?"
Dr. Littleboy was called so, not only for his age but the bulge of his cheeks and the fluff of blonde hair, infant-like sweeping in a soft forelock to frame his eyes.
"Marquis." he said and placed an S on a triple-score square.
"DeSade." Hela giggled.
"Would it be out of line for me to apologize for the pen incident?" Dr. Littleboy wrote 30 points on the napkin. Hela eyed his pen enviously.
"You tell me, Doc." Hela set down a U-A-C-K stemming from the Q in Marquis. Wrote 25 points on the napkin with her felt tip marker. "Would it be out of line for me to write on the walls with my shit if it happens again?"
Dr. Littleboy's bottom lip fell. The roofs of his eyes raised, the pupils engorging in black to conceal the blue. He bowed his head low over the Scrabble board. "If I could watch…"
¶ 8:54 PM 0 comments
Each day, Markus would displace the rectangle of George W. Bush. Sometimes Bush was up before Washington. Sometimes, somewhere in the center near Roosevelt. Other times, Bush was taped to the side of the television, or under a chair.
But this day, Bush was missing. Hela heard Jeffry yelling about how the toilet in the room he shared with Markus was clogged with paper.
Set next to the stars and the presidents was a tall ladder. A lone workman clung to the top. Shoulders tight, Hela could tell from where she stood at the nurse’s station counter, at the opposite end of the dayroom. She smirked to herself. The worker was probably nervous at being inside an actual loony bin. Expecting to see some Jack Nicholson in a straight jacket bearing his teeth.
Elena was tugging a plastic comb, one issued to all patients upon arrival, through her long hair with long swipes of her delicate wrist.
“Hey, Queenie.” Nurse Jean squawked to Elena. “Your highness, excuse me.” Elena looked to Jean. “Do that in your bathroom. We don’t wanna catch your fleas.”
Elena, not one to fight with staff, rose from the vinyl chair with a whip of her neck, of her black hair, as if to prove that her fleas were indeed, non-existent and sauntered off to her room.
Nurse Jean noticed Hela leaning on the counter. “Get’yer arms off.”
Hela thrust her elbows forward and sneered.
“So you’re ready for round 2, huh?” Nurse Jean said to Hela and would have put her hands on her hips for emphasis, if she had any hips and not simply a light bulb of fat for a torso.
“Just tell me one thing.” Hela removed her arms from the counter. “When can I use the phone?" Hela said out loud, but thought, “you god damn turtle, I’ll eat your eyes.”
Nurse Jean had particularly tasty looking eyes. Shadows below them and bulgy and green, much like Hela's own eyes. Her hair was shellacked extra-stiff to her scalp, her shell on full guard.
"You need to talk to your doctor about that."
"Who is my doctor."
"Him." Nurse Jean thrust one puffy thumb at the young man with the backpack behind her.
"Doctor Littleb-er-Jaros, I need to talk to you. Please." Hela said with a flash of her teeth, and a blush in her cheeks from her accidental slip of the nickname the patients had given him. She knew to suck up to the doctors. They write the discharge orders.
"Sure. What's your name?" the doctor smiled back and the white ice spark in his blue eyes made something inside of Hela's chest jump.
"I'm Hela."
"Hela, that's right. I've been meaning to speak with you. Up for a game of Scrabble?"
Dr. Littleboy was called so, not only for his age but the bulge of his cheeks and the fluff of blonde hair, infant-like sweeping in a soft forelock to frame his eyes.
"Marquis." he said and placed an S on a triple-score square.
"DeSade." Hela giggled.
"Would it be out of line for me to apologize for the pen incident?" Dr. Littleboy wrote 30 points on the napkin. Hela eyed his pen enviously.
"You tell me, Doc." Hela set down a U-A-C-K stemming from the Q in Marquis. Wrote 25 points on the napkin with her felt tip marker. "Would it be out of line for me to write on the walls with my shit if it happens again?"
Dr. Littleboy's bottom lip fell. The roofs of his eyes raised, the pupils engorging in black to conceal the blue. He bowed his head low over the Scrabble board. "If I could watch…"
¶ 8:54 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Intake
"Spread your knees and squat." the intake nurse snapped on her rubber gloves and stood behind Hela. Hela did as instructed, the nurse patting both hands along the insides of Hela's bare thighs, with a slap slap sound. The metal detector in the background, watching them with a guillotine's eyes.
"Now go put back on your undies and these pajamas." the nurse said, brown skin tinting purple and translucent worms shooting out from her eyes. Colorless tubes in rippled streams. Hela's muscles thumped. She jumped when the worms started wrestling, twirling their bodies in braid shapes over the nurse's corneas.
"Whatta you starin' at?" the nurse glared, squeezing the eye worms into flat shapes.
"Um…I'm cold." Hela said. Which was true. The tile floors froze the sweat on the soles of her naked feet. The air conditioner vents spat snowflakes through the flickering fluorescent light. False light characteristic of institutions.
It’s like grade school, but with strip searches, Hela thought, watching a grid of hexagon shapes spread out in a net across pee-colored walls.
The nurse's latex paws thrust a pair of light blue paper pajamas in Hela's arms. Limp with submission, Hela turned to a room behind her with a wheelchair logo on the door that she suspected was either a bathroom, or a room full of wheelchairs.
"Oh wait, missy. You got a lot of cuts and scars. Come back here. I gotta write those down." the intake nurse called after Hela, pulling open a desk drawer, removing a clip board. Hela walked over to the desk and bent to study the page on which the nurse was writing H-e-l- above a human-shaped outline. Genderless, vague. It waved to Hela with it's empty arm. Her jaw locked up and her green eyes swelled big.
"Now stand up straight." the nurse demanded. Hela stiffened and aligned her vertebrae. Her large, pink nipples stuck out as if acting, puckered with exposure, nervous bubblegum, as the nurse drew an X on each part of the human outline on which Hela had a scar or a fresh slice. X X XX X on the stomach, X X X on the upper thighs, X X across the chest, X X XXXX X XX on the arms, X on the left shin.
"Bike accident when I was a kid. Fell off my bike and got my leg gorged out by a metal pole. Got stitches." Hela explained.
"Mm." the nurse responded and drew an X on the outline's left bicep. "You sho' been busy with the razors." She shook her head and clucked her teeth.
Hela looked down at her nude self. Doughy, cream flesh punctuated with shiny, pink slash scars and newer red lines crusted over in rosy scab. A red X over the rose tattoo that said "Mom" above her heart.
I'm a pink and white marshmallow zebra, Hela thought, with hexagons. The pattern, the grid, the honeycomb of hexagons that Hela had seen on the walls now netted her flesh in 6 sided divides.
"Go put yo clothes on." the nurse barked and waved to the wheelchair logo room. Hela's anus clenched with the deja-vu of being ordered into the attic closet by her master. She would wait, chained there with her arms above her head, the blood pouring down from her fingers and into her arms, draining them to chilly blueberries. She would wait there that way for days. Stomach throbbing and eyes dull from looking at only dark. She would wait there and as the endorphins tickled numb every speck of her inside, she'd bask in the lapis-blue glow of her own desperate energies, buzzing and lulling into exhaustion, chin bowing for her neck, then jerking up whenever a creak cried out from the stairs. His footsteps?
She would wait there and after she'd thought about everything obvious, like death and very young memories, she would then simply dangle and breathe and feel so safe. Locked away like a little treasure. Hovering outside her body.
And how grateful she would be when Master returned and unlocked her wrists for a while, kneading the blue out, the pink back into her palms with his thick, soft fingers. A regal smirk on his lips and a wet look in his fishbowl eyes as he watches the power he has over Hela's body. The power to deprive it, teasing death. To toy with it, take pleasure from it, his treasure well. And how grateful she would be to see him, this hot silhouette in a beam of sexual strength standing over her. Her bottom lip would sink and her tongue would slither out, silver ball in its middle gleaming at his mere reaching for the fly of his leather pants. She would take his cock in her mouth and gulp as it thrust at the back of her throat. A moan would rumble in his Adam's apple as she sucked him, harder and wetter, hoping she'd suck so hard he'd get stuck there.
Hela shut the door of the bathroom behind her.
"Don't shut that door." the nurse said. Hela pushed it back open. Slid the rough paper garment over her skin.
"What day is it?"
"July."
"How old are you?"
"20."
"Are you hallucinating right now?"
"Maybe."
"What drugs do you use?"
"Just weed."
"Do you know where you are?"
"The state hospital. In Chicago."
"Recite the ABC's backward."
"Um…Z, Y, W…er…, Z, Y, X, W…"
Hela watched her clothes and purse being dumped in a plastic storage bin.
"These are going into the vault." the intake nurse told her. "Those earrings, you gotta take them out."
Hela raised her limp and defeated wrists to unscrew the barbells in her ear lobes. She laid them to rest in the nurse's gloved palm.
"The nose one, too."
"But it isn't sharp." Hela twisted the loop in her nostril.
"Fine, fine. Leave it in."
The nurse didn't notice the metal stick in Hela's tongue.
The intake ward was a wood-paneled square room with a few chairs and some small, white observation bedrooms: mattress and camera. Hela sat in her paper pajamas, knees to chest, watching the worms wiggle jolly and fat throughout the honeycomb. They swallowed each other. Goopy fronts of large worms pried open, forcing a smaller worm inside. The honeycomb leapt from the wall and crawled closer to Hela, waving a screen of shapes that threatened to choke around her like an evil blanket.
Beyond a small counter carved in the wall sat the nurse, filling out more forms. A lanky black man in paper pajamas like Hela's limped out from a bedroom, eyes popping and pink, lips jerking in dialogue with an entity seen to none but himself. He looked over both shoulders, said "Wooooahhhh!" and thrashing his skeleton fingers against the air, spun on his slippered feet. Perhaps he saw the hexagons, too.
"Roger, vamoose!" said the nurse. And Hela giggled at the word "vamoose". Wished she had a piece of paper to write it on. The old man limped back into his room, still muttering.
A phone behind the counter rang. The nurse answered it.
"Hello? Yeah, she's here. I'll let you in."
The metal door with the sign above it that screamed, ELOPEMENT RISK. KEEP LOCKED. buzzed like an apartment door and opened to 3 security guards in brown suits.
"D North." the nurse told the guards. They marched to Hela and one clamped his hands on her forearms.
¶ 12:36 PM 1 comments
"Now go put back on your undies and these pajamas." the nurse said, brown skin tinting purple and translucent worms shooting out from her eyes. Colorless tubes in rippled streams. Hela's muscles thumped. She jumped when the worms started wrestling, twirling their bodies in braid shapes over the nurse's corneas.
"Whatta you starin' at?" the nurse glared, squeezing the eye worms into flat shapes.
"Um…I'm cold." Hela said. Which was true. The tile floors froze the sweat on the soles of her naked feet. The air conditioner vents spat snowflakes through the flickering fluorescent light. False light characteristic of institutions.
It’s like grade school, but with strip searches, Hela thought, watching a grid of hexagon shapes spread out in a net across pee-colored walls.
The nurse's latex paws thrust a pair of light blue paper pajamas in Hela's arms. Limp with submission, Hela turned to a room behind her with a wheelchair logo on the door that she suspected was either a bathroom, or a room full of wheelchairs.
"Oh wait, missy. You got a lot of cuts and scars. Come back here. I gotta write those down." the intake nurse called after Hela, pulling open a desk drawer, removing a clip board. Hela walked over to the desk and bent to study the page on which the nurse was writing H-e-l- above a human-shaped outline. Genderless, vague. It waved to Hela with it's empty arm. Her jaw locked up and her green eyes swelled big.
"Now stand up straight." the nurse demanded. Hela stiffened and aligned her vertebrae. Her large, pink nipples stuck out as if acting, puckered with exposure, nervous bubblegum, as the nurse drew an X on each part of the human outline on which Hela had a scar or a fresh slice. X X XX X on the stomach, X X X on the upper thighs, X X across the chest, X X XXXX X XX on the arms, X on the left shin.
"Bike accident when I was a kid. Fell off my bike and got my leg gorged out by a metal pole. Got stitches." Hela explained.
"Mm." the nurse responded and drew an X on the outline's left bicep. "You sho' been busy with the razors." She shook her head and clucked her teeth.
Hela looked down at her nude self. Doughy, cream flesh punctuated with shiny, pink slash scars and newer red lines crusted over in rosy scab. A red X over the rose tattoo that said "Mom" above her heart.
I'm a pink and white marshmallow zebra, Hela thought, with hexagons. The pattern, the grid, the honeycomb of hexagons that Hela had seen on the walls now netted her flesh in 6 sided divides.
"Go put yo clothes on." the nurse barked and waved to the wheelchair logo room. Hela's anus clenched with the deja-vu of being ordered into the attic closet by her master. She would wait, chained there with her arms above her head, the blood pouring down from her fingers and into her arms, draining them to chilly blueberries. She would wait there that way for days. Stomach throbbing and eyes dull from looking at only dark. She would wait there and as the endorphins tickled numb every speck of her inside, she'd bask in the lapis-blue glow of her own desperate energies, buzzing and lulling into exhaustion, chin bowing for her neck, then jerking up whenever a creak cried out from the stairs. His footsteps?
She would wait there and after she'd thought about everything obvious, like death and very young memories, she would then simply dangle and breathe and feel so safe. Locked away like a little treasure. Hovering outside her body.
And how grateful she would be when Master returned and unlocked her wrists for a while, kneading the blue out, the pink back into her palms with his thick, soft fingers. A regal smirk on his lips and a wet look in his fishbowl eyes as he watches the power he has over Hela's body. The power to deprive it, teasing death. To toy with it, take pleasure from it, his treasure well. And how grateful she would be to see him, this hot silhouette in a beam of sexual strength standing over her. Her bottom lip would sink and her tongue would slither out, silver ball in its middle gleaming at his mere reaching for the fly of his leather pants. She would take his cock in her mouth and gulp as it thrust at the back of her throat. A moan would rumble in his Adam's apple as she sucked him, harder and wetter, hoping she'd suck so hard he'd get stuck there.
Hela shut the door of the bathroom behind her.
"Don't shut that door." the nurse said. Hela pushed it back open. Slid the rough paper garment over her skin.
"What day is it?"
"July."
"How old are you?"
"20."
"Are you hallucinating right now?"
"Maybe."
"What drugs do you use?"
"Just weed."
"Do you know where you are?"
"The state hospital. In Chicago."
"Recite the ABC's backward."
"Um…Z, Y, W…er…, Z, Y, X, W…"
Hela watched her clothes and purse being dumped in a plastic storage bin.
"These are going into the vault." the intake nurse told her. "Those earrings, you gotta take them out."
Hela raised her limp and defeated wrists to unscrew the barbells in her ear lobes. She laid them to rest in the nurse's gloved palm.
"The nose one, too."
"But it isn't sharp." Hela twisted the loop in her nostril.
"Fine, fine. Leave it in."
The nurse didn't notice the metal stick in Hela's tongue.
The intake ward was a wood-paneled square room with a few chairs and some small, white observation bedrooms: mattress and camera. Hela sat in her paper pajamas, knees to chest, watching the worms wiggle jolly and fat throughout the honeycomb. They swallowed each other. Goopy fronts of large worms pried open, forcing a smaller worm inside. The honeycomb leapt from the wall and crawled closer to Hela, waving a screen of shapes that threatened to choke around her like an evil blanket.
Beyond a small counter carved in the wall sat the nurse, filling out more forms. A lanky black man in paper pajamas like Hela's limped out from a bedroom, eyes popping and pink, lips jerking in dialogue with an entity seen to none but himself. He looked over both shoulders, said "Wooooahhhh!" and thrashing his skeleton fingers against the air, spun on his slippered feet. Perhaps he saw the hexagons, too.
"Roger, vamoose!" said the nurse. And Hela giggled at the word "vamoose". Wished she had a piece of paper to write it on. The old man limped back into his room, still muttering.
A phone behind the counter rang. The nurse answered it.
"Hello? Yeah, she's here. I'll let you in."
The metal door with the sign above it that screamed, ELOPEMENT RISK. KEEP LOCKED. buzzed like an apartment door and opened to 3 security guards in brown suits.
"D North." the nurse told the guards. They marched to Hela and one clamped his hands on her forearms.
¶ 12:36 PM 1 comments
Monday, November 08, 2004
Fergus Saved Clark and Belmont from the Demons
Fergus hung out with these "Satanic" dudes. They had pentagram marks on their wrists. They’d smoke crack and stand out on Belmont Avenue, preaching the good word of Satan to all freaks that passed.
Now, the waitress at Clarke’s didn’t like these guys. Especially Fergus. Fergus is pretty damn creepy. He has this glow in his eye like an evil toddler, a nose like a rabbit, lips thick like they’ve both been punched. He’s a big guy, too. A nightmare bunny. He’d creep about Clarke’s, never eating there, only waddling duck-toed from booth to booth, stopping at each one, gesturing to his wrist and spewing quick words, which almost always sprouted a pissed-off look on the face of whoever he was preaching to.
Becky, the waitress, hated him, how he bothered her customers.
“You gonna order or what?” she’d pinch one hand on her hip and roll her eyes.
“No, I’m good. Thanks anyway.” Fergus would smile a big, gooshy puppy grin and shuffle off to another booth.
Becky refilled the coffee cups of a young couple, professional types, who Becky, being tattooed and blue-haired, laughed at in her head for being so lame, but still treated nicely because they had the money to tip her well. These two were perfumed with stale smoke-air, which told her they’d probably just come from a bar.
“How is everything?” Becky asked them. The woman, a thin blonde in black nudged her man in the side.
“That creep over there.” He pointed across the restaurant to Fergus, a shadow attacking a table of teenage girls. “The big dude in black. He came over here and he told my wife all this shit about Satan. It freaked her out.” His eyes were pinched to two blue slits.
“Hold on. I’ll tell ‘im to leave.” Becky wedged her pierced lips into a stiff smile.
“Fergus.” She called as she neared the table of teenage girls. A troop of jailbait gothlets in fishnets and corsets and black lipstick. They were giggling at Fergus, one stroking the mark on his wrist.
“You’ve gotta leave if you won’t order anything. You’re scaring my customers.”
“Scared? Hehe! We’re not scared.” One of the teenage girls purred. Becky looked up and pretended not to hear.
“If you won’t go, I have to call the cops.” She said to Fergus.
“Aww, come on!” Fergus winked. Flecks of gold.
Becky sighed, her shoulders climbing and dropping and walked over to the phone behind the counter.
¶ 2:07 PM 0 comments
Now, the waitress at Clarke’s didn’t like these guys. Especially Fergus. Fergus is pretty damn creepy. He has this glow in his eye like an evil toddler, a nose like a rabbit, lips thick like they’ve both been punched. He’s a big guy, too. A nightmare bunny. He’d creep about Clarke’s, never eating there, only waddling duck-toed from booth to booth, stopping at each one, gesturing to his wrist and spewing quick words, which almost always sprouted a pissed-off look on the face of whoever he was preaching to.
Becky, the waitress, hated him, how he bothered her customers.
“You gonna order or what?” she’d pinch one hand on her hip and roll her eyes.
“No, I’m good. Thanks anyway.” Fergus would smile a big, gooshy puppy grin and shuffle off to another booth.
Becky refilled the coffee cups of a young couple, professional types, who Becky, being tattooed and blue-haired, laughed at in her head for being so lame, but still treated nicely because they had the money to tip her well. These two were perfumed with stale smoke-air, which told her they’d probably just come from a bar.
“How is everything?” Becky asked them. The woman, a thin blonde in black nudged her man in the side.
“That creep over there.” He pointed across the restaurant to Fergus, a shadow attacking a table of teenage girls. “The big dude in black. He came over here and he told my wife all this shit about Satan. It freaked her out.” His eyes were pinched to two blue slits.
“Hold on. I’ll tell ‘im to leave.” Becky wedged her pierced lips into a stiff smile.
“Fergus.” She called as she neared the table of teenage girls. A troop of jailbait gothlets in fishnets and corsets and black lipstick. They were giggling at Fergus, one stroking the mark on his wrist.
“You’ve gotta leave if you won’t order anything. You’re scaring my customers.”
“Scared? Hehe! We’re not scared.” One of the teenage girls purred. Becky looked up and pretended not to hear.
“If you won’t go, I have to call the cops.” She said to Fergus.
“Aww, come on!” Fergus winked. Flecks of gold.
Becky sighed, her shoulders climbing and dropping and walked over to the phone behind the counter.
¶ 2:07 PM 0 comments
Saturday, November 06, 2004
Fergus
Snacktime. Looking about the dayroom, eyes like a panoramic camera, just watching it. Not quite believing I’ve been locked up again, still hit by this proof. Yes. The dayroom. You are in the dayroom of yet another psych hospital. U-shape of blue, vinyl chairs with heavy, wood frames, too heavy for disgruntled patients to throw. Half the patients, gowned for bed sitting on them, munching apples and staring blinkless at the fuzzy, evening news on the tiny television screen and the other half pacing behind them, marching wearily around the perimeter of chairs.
A young guy sits next to me.
“There comes a point when you’re eating state apples, drinking state Kool-Aid and watching a broken TV and you tell yourself, never again.”
“And then it always happens again.” I answer the boy. I have never spoken to him before. “I’m Hela. Who are you?” I ask. I bite my apple.
“I’m Fergus.”
“So what if you go back to the art school, go to a party and this group of people, these Satanic people approach you. They’re dressed in the finest black leather clothes. They promise you that they can get your book published. They’ll introduce you to the best agents and editors if you’ll just do one thing for them. You’ll get their mark on your wrist. Would you do it?” Fergus touches his wrist.
“No...I’d never follow them, just as I’d never join your church. I don’t believe in affiliating myself with religious groups. I have my own, individual beliefs that don’t fit into any existing religion.” I say.
Fergus blinks twice. His long, black lashes skimming the golden sparkles dripped throughout his pharmaceutically glazed brown eyes. His upturned nose and puffy, bottom lip scream to me about how much he looks like my ex-fiancée.
“You know, from you books you read,” he points to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a 760-page monster on my lap, “and from talking to you, I can tell you’re intelligent. But it’s too bad that someone as intelligent as you are should be so worldly.”
“And it’s too bad that someone as intelligent as you are should be a fanatic Christian.” I say. Then ask, “Worldly?”
“Yeah, overly concerned with things of this Earth. With success and sex and money.” he nodded to show he agreed with himself.
“How can you accuse me of these things? I’m very spiritual. You don’t know me.” It occurs to me then how much I sound like a Jerry Springer guest.
“Well, it’s been nice talking with you, Hela. I don’t think I’ll be talking with you again.” Fergus half-smiles and gets up.
“Wait...no. Don’t go! What the fuck is the matter? Just tell me.” I whine and toss House of Leaves on the chair next to me.
“Didn’t you used to hang out on Clark and Belmont?” Fergus’ pupils widened.
“Yeah, sometimes.” I thought back to high school. Me and my best friend Madeline would go tranny-watching there on Saturdays.
“I was involved with some bad people down there. You sort of remind me of them.” Fergus lowered his swollen pupils. “You know that restaurant, Clarke’s?”
I nodded.
“I broke a cop’s ankle there.”
“What? Why? How?” I laugh and lean toward him. Behind him, Carol limps out from our bedroom with her gown undone in back. Fergus hears the stick-stick of her bare feet on tile and turns around to watch. Carol seems to be the main form of entertainment, here. I turn to watch, too. I’m surprised at how firm her old, brown butt cheeks are. Not a dimple of cellulite or a stray hair.
“I’s run outta panties. I need some panties. Size 9 Hanes. Some panties.” Carol barks at nurse Bigfoot, who puts a giant hand to her blonde head.
“Carol, get back in your room and I’ll bring you some.”
Across the dayroom, a couple of patients laugh.
“I need some panties. Some panties. Size 9 Hanes.” she repeats and retreats to the bedroom. Fergus turns his spacey gaze back to me.
“So tell me about the cop.” I say.
“Well, I was involved with the Satanic ministry. See. Had the marks of loyalty.” Fergus touches a finger to vague scars, blurred pink slugs on his wrists and forehead. My eyebrows raise, my interest piqued.
“But then I found Christ.” his fat lips beam.
“Oh.” I say, disappointed.
“Spent two years in Cook County. One at Elgin. It seemed God used to favor me. That the strength of my light could burn away demons. But now...”
“Same here. But I don’t think a “savior” is necessary. What is there that someone could do on Earth that is so bad, they’d deserve hell, forever as punishment? Even killing millions of people...why would God discard a soul he’s created?”
“God is not a fair God.” Fergus folds his hands in his lap and I notice how roughly they shake.
“I think he, she, it is fair. Well, balanced, at least. A dichotomy of good and evil.”
“God is in Jesus.”
“If Jesus existed. I don’t dispute that God would be in him. But God is also in me. In you. In all these people.” I gesture backhanded toward our 15 or so glazed-eye companions. Pacing or watching TV. Crunching their apples, still.
“I don’t think so.” Fergus says.
I leer and bear my teeth. “So tell me about the cop.”
¶ 11:14 AM 2 comments
A young guy sits next to me.
“There comes a point when you’re eating state apples, drinking state Kool-Aid and watching a broken TV and you tell yourself, never again.”
“And then it always happens again.” I answer the boy. I have never spoken to him before. “I’m Hela. Who are you?” I ask. I bite my apple.
“I’m Fergus.”
“So what if you go back to the art school, go to a party and this group of people, these Satanic people approach you. They’re dressed in the finest black leather clothes. They promise you that they can get your book published. They’ll introduce you to the best agents and editors if you’ll just do one thing for them. You’ll get their mark on your wrist. Would you do it?” Fergus touches his wrist.
“No...I’d never follow them, just as I’d never join your church. I don’t believe in affiliating myself with religious groups. I have my own, individual beliefs that don’t fit into any existing religion.” I say.
Fergus blinks twice. His long, black lashes skimming the golden sparkles dripped throughout his pharmaceutically glazed brown eyes. His upturned nose and puffy, bottom lip scream to me about how much he looks like my ex-fiancée.
“You know, from you books you read,” he points to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a 760-page monster on my lap, “and from talking to you, I can tell you’re intelligent. But it’s too bad that someone as intelligent as you are should be so worldly.”
“And it’s too bad that someone as intelligent as you are should be a fanatic Christian.” I say. Then ask, “Worldly?”
“Yeah, overly concerned with things of this Earth. With success and sex and money.” he nodded to show he agreed with himself.
“How can you accuse me of these things? I’m very spiritual. You don’t know me.” It occurs to me then how much I sound like a Jerry Springer guest.
“Well, it’s been nice talking with you, Hela. I don’t think I’ll be talking with you again.” Fergus half-smiles and gets up.
“Wait...no. Don’t go! What the fuck is the matter? Just tell me.” I whine and toss House of Leaves on the chair next to me.
“Didn’t you used to hang out on Clark and Belmont?” Fergus’ pupils widened.
“Yeah, sometimes.” I thought back to high school. Me and my best friend Madeline would go tranny-watching there on Saturdays.
“I was involved with some bad people down there. You sort of remind me of them.” Fergus lowered his swollen pupils. “You know that restaurant, Clarke’s?”
I nodded.
“I broke a cop’s ankle there.”
“What? Why? How?” I laugh and lean toward him. Behind him, Carol limps out from our bedroom with her gown undone in back. Fergus hears the stick-stick of her bare feet on tile and turns around to watch. Carol seems to be the main form of entertainment, here. I turn to watch, too. I’m surprised at how firm her old, brown butt cheeks are. Not a dimple of cellulite or a stray hair.
“I’s run outta panties. I need some panties. Size 9 Hanes. Some panties.” Carol barks at nurse Bigfoot, who puts a giant hand to her blonde head.
“Carol, get back in your room and I’ll bring you some.”
Across the dayroom, a couple of patients laugh.
“I need some panties. Some panties. Size 9 Hanes.” she repeats and retreats to the bedroom. Fergus turns his spacey gaze back to me.
“So tell me about the cop.” I say.
“Well, I was involved with the Satanic ministry. See. Had the marks of loyalty.” Fergus touches a finger to vague scars, blurred pink slugs on his wrists and forehead. My eyebrows raise, my interest piqued.
“But then I found Christ.” his fat lips beam.
“Oh.” I say, disappointed.
“Spent two years in Cook County. One at Elgin. It seemed God used to favor me. That the strength of my light could burn away demons. But now...”
“Same here. But I don’t think a “savior” is necessary. What is there that someone could do on Earth that is so bad, they’d deserve hell, forever as punishment? Even killing millions of people...why would God discard a soul he’s created?”
“God is not a fair God.” Fergus folds his hands in his lap and I notice how roughly they shake.
“I think he, she, it is fair. Well, balanced, at least. A dichotomy of good and evil.”
“God is in Jesus.”
“If Jesus existed. I don’t dispute that God would be in him. But God is also in me. In you. In all these people.” I gesture backhanded toward our 15 or so glazed-eye companions. Pacing or watching TV. Crunching their apples, still.
“I don’t think so.” Fergus says.
I leer and bear my teeth. “So tell me about the cop.”
¶ 11:14 AM 2 comments
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Hela Gets Her Marker
7/30 (I think) Bedroom
I had to throw a tantrum to get the felt-tip marker to write these things down. I don't know if I can get them out before the shot kicks in and puts me to sleep. Pens aren't allowed here. I explained to them that I'm a writer and if I can't write, I become crazier so it's counter-therapeutic for me to be deprived of a pen.
When I swore to that fat, evil turtle of a nurse that I would scoop her eyes out and eat them, she got out the bag of restraints. I'm restrained quite frequently, on the outside. But by my master. Sexy and evil. It's all in fun. He's the only one I would ever let take my motion. I miss him. Didn't think I would so badly. Already. Every time I eat food or sleep. Or breathe. It is sharing the daily, life-sustaining activities with someone that binds me to them more so than the leather cuffs on my ankles and wrists. The harness, the ropes.
Each time I lie in my itchy, plastic-lined bed here, my skin buzzes with the reflection, the echo, the imprint of my master's moist and glowing flesh. His ocean-blue aura waving through each of my cells. The soft scratch of his orange moustache still uprooting membranes on both of my lips.
When I pass out, like I know I will soon, since my muscles are drooping like pudding, I want to wake up to the freckles on his shoulders. Nestle my temple into the warm ridge between his pectoral and collar bone. A perfect pillow cut out for my head exactly. His armful of fading tattoos will cradle my neck. How he chokes me…oh…
At 8am, his alarm clock will chitter with politics and blablabla NPR. And I'll wake up to it. He will stir and kiss my head and sleep again.
I will not wake up here. I will
Hela Gets her Marker
Hela sat cross-legged, slumped, elbows on her knees and chin on her palms on the scratchy white sheets of her bed. Bored. The sleeping old woman across from her snored and farted, a rising and dropping mountain of geezer flesh abandoned for the dream realm.
The state hospital bedrooms were dull and crowded. Three narrow beds arranged in a triangle shape, two with their headboards against the back wall. A window blocked by grinning, iron bars between them, the third bed crossing before both of them, perpendicular, closest to the door. The third bed was usually given to patients on frequent observation so they could be checked on throughout the night without the other two room mates being disturbed.
Hela was in the third bed. Sitting up because the most common psych ward past time, sleep, was not an option for her. Carol's buzzing throat and unceasing, methane onion farts made it toxic to breathe and much too loud to sleep in the bedroom that Hela and Carol and Nancy shared. Nancy, doped down heavily with antipsychotics, slept anyway. Hela watched Nancy through the cracked-open door of the bedroom, napping upright in a dayroom chair, head bowing to the open magazine on her lap.
This was Hela's first afternoon in the state hospital, but her 5th stay at a place like this. She was hyper. Her mood stabilizer medicine wouldn't kick in for a few days. And she hadn't met any allies amongst the other patients, yet. Wasn't quite in the mood for chatting, anyhow.
Awake and alone to amuse her manic self through the bare, long conscious hours of the institutional day, Hela rocked on her buns just to burn up the zaps of energy tickling the dendrites of her under-stimulated nerves. The mattress crinkled beneath her. It was covered in plastic. She wanted to ride her bike. She wanted to fuck. She wanted to yell. She wanted to do something.
On the bed next to Hela's, Carol's butt trumpeted once again and before the smell could scare all the oxygen from the bedroom, Hela got up, pulled on her socks and stepped directly outside the door to the nurse's counter.
"Can I have a pen?" she asked the nurse, a black man she hadn't seen before.
"Patients are not allowed to have pens." the nurse barked in a crusted, Jamaican accent. Hela had never heard a Jamaican accent carry such malevolence. Then again, she had only before heard them on travel commercials and Bob Marley songs.
"But I need to write. I'm a writer. That is what I do." Hela stood on her tiptoes to raise her eyes to the nurse's level. Defiantly. Challenging.
"Patients are not allowed to have pens. We've had incidents…"
"I'll sit right here." Hela waved her palm to a chair and table right next to the nurse's station, which was used for the blood pressure readings each morning. "You can watch me. I promise. I won't hurt myself with the pen. I just need to write."
"You can't have a pen. That's the rules." the nurse looked above Hela's head when he said this, as if he were bored with this argument already.
"I need a fucking pen! Give me a fucking pen!" Hela screamed, then. The dazed heads of all the patients, who were plopped like park pigeons on bolted down blue vinyl chairs in front of a fuzzing TV, twisted mechanically, slow like periscopes to watch the new girl take on Mean James, the day nurse.
"Jean?" James called. A sneering slug creature stomped out of the medicine room behind the counter.
Hela took a breath for composure. She knew better than to act up in the psych hospital. It would only prolong her stay. "I want a pen." she said to Jean.
The slug creature, no, more like a turtle creature, round and immense with a shell of short, sprayed down orange hair capping her hard head. A beaked nose and baggy eyes that looked as if they'd been punched and punched and punched…
"Patients can't have pens!" the Turtle croaked. "So Siddown!" She thrust her finger at an empty day room chair among the other patients, the higher functioning ones of which were giggling at the erupting confrontation.
"I need to write!" the electric zaps of fury stirred and grew sharp beneath Hela's skin, fried the sensible thoughts from her brain. There was no reminder of consequence, of punishment, of anything but this pen, this pen was the striving of all her existence.
"Give me a fucking pen!" Hela roared and reached for the chair at the blood pressure table, which was perhaps the only piece of furniture not affixed to the cold, tile floor of the dayroom.
"Siddown!" The Turtle glared, her green corneas bright and sharp like radioactive limes.
With a howl that rung and then hung from the yellowish walls, Hela heaved the chair in her arms and above her head, it dwarfing her body while also bestowing on her the illusion of strength. Hela is Atlas. This chair is her world.
She howled again and with a slingshot motion released her hand's grip, launching the chair to soar horizontally, skimming the curly, black head of Elena, who ducked and laughed and then crashing in front of the TV, causing the Cubs game reception to skip and Mona to yell, "I was watching that!"
The Turtle reached into the medication room and dragged out a mesh duffel bag stuffed with leather straps. Mean James picked up the office phone and chanted "Code Green, Code Green" on overhead loudspeakers.
Soon, five brown-suited security guards. Large, scowling. Waddled nonchalant in their largeness across the dayroom. From where? Were they kept in a closet with the spare gowns, or something? They clustered in circumference around Hela.
The Turtle held up the restraint bag. "Are you gonna siddown, or do I havta make ya?"
"I'll scoop your fucking eyeballs out and eat them!" Hela yelled. A guard grabbed her arm. A few patients laughed.
"What's going on?" a calm voice said behind the barricade of security guards. A young man with a wide and doughy child's face and seafoam eyes. He set down his backpack beside him.
"Dr. Littleboy!" Elena cheered.
"They won't give me a pen." Hela said to the doctor. Breathing heavy to steady her wavering words. "I'm a writer. I need to write."
"Then give her a felt-tip marker." Dr. Littleboy said to the Turtle and Mean James, with a spice of contempt in his tone and a sneer in his lip.
"And a shot." the doctor added. He smiled at Hela.
¶ 1:17 PM 0 comments
I had to throw a tantrum to get the felt-tip marker to write these things down. I don't know if I can get them out before the shot kicks in and puts me to sleep. Pens aren't allowed here. I explained to them that I'm a writer and if I can't write, I become crazier so it's counter-therapeutic for me to be deprived of a pen.
When I swore to that fat, evil turtle of a nurse that I would scoop her eyes out and eat them, she got out the bag of restraints. I'm restrained quite frequently, on the outside. But by my master. Sexy and evil. It's all in fun. He's the only one I would ever let take my motion. I miss him. Didn't think I would so badly. Already. Every time I eat food or sleep. Or breathe. It is sharing the daily, life-sustaining activities with someone that binds me to them more so than the leather cuffs on my ankles and wrists. The harness, the ropes.
Each time I lie in my itchy, plastic-lined bed here, my skin buzzes with the reflection, the echo, the imprint of my master's moist and glowing flesh. His ocean-blue aura waving through each of my cells. The soft scratch of his orange moustache still uprooting membranes on both of my lips.
When I pass out, like I know I will soon, since my muscles are drooping like pudding, I want to wake up to the freckles on his shoulders. Nestle my temple into the warm ridge between his pectoral and collar bone. A perfect pillow cut out for my head exactly. His armful of fading tattoos will cradle my neck. How he chokes me…oh…
At 8am, his alarm clock will chitter with politics and blablabla NPR. And I'll wake up to it. He will stir and kiss my head and sleep again.
I will not wake up here. I will
Hela Gets her Marker
Hela sat cross-legged, slumped, elbows on her knees and chin on her palms on the scratchy white sheets of her bed. Bored. The sleeping old woman across from her snored and farted, a rising and dropping mountain of geezer flesh abandoned for the dream realm.
The state hospital bedrooms were dull and crowded. Three narrow beds arranged in a triangle shape, two with their headboards against the back wall. A window blocked by grinning, iron bars between them, the third bed crossing before both of them, perpendicular, closest to the door. The third bed was usually given to patients on frequent observation so they could be checked on throughout the night without the other two room mates being disturbed.
Hela was in the third bed. Sitting up because the most common psych ward past time, sleep, was not an option for her. Carol's buzzing throat and unceasing, methane onion farts made it toxic to breathe and much too loud to sleep in the bedroom that Hela and Carol and Nancy shared. Nancy, doped down heavily with antipsychotics, slept anyway. Hela watched Nancy through the cracked-open door of the bedroom, napping upright in a dayroom chair, head bowing to the open magazine on her lap.
This was Hela's first afternoon in the state hospital, but her 5th stay at a place like this. She was hyper. Her mood stabilizer medicine wouldn't kick in for a few days. And she hadn't met any allies amongst the other patients, yet. Wasn't quite in the mood for chatting, anyhow.
Awake and alone to amuse her manic self through the bare, long conscious hours of the institutional day, Hela rocked on her buns just to burn up the zaps of energy tickling the dendrites of her under-stimulated nerves. The mattress crinkled beneath her. It was covered in plastic. She wanted to ride her bike. She wanted to fuck. She wanted to yell. She wanted to do something.
On the bed next to Hela's, Carol's butt trumpeted once again and before the smell could scare all the oxygen from the bedroom, Hela got up, pulled on her socks and stepped directly outside the door to the nurse's counter.
"Can I have a pen?" she asked the nurse, a black man she hadn't seen before.
"Patients are not allowed to have pens." the nurse barked in a crusted, Jamaican accent. Hela had never heard a Jamaican accent carry such malevolence. Then again, she had only before heard them on travel commercials and Bob Marley songs.
"But I need to write. I'm a writer. That is what I do." Hela stood on her tiptoes to raise her eyes to the nurse's level. Defiantly. Challenging.
"Patients are not allowed to have pens. We've had incidents…"
"I'll sit right here." Hela waved her palm to a chair and table right next to the nurse's station, which was used for the blood pressure readings each morning. "You can watch me. I promise. I won't hurt myself with the pen. I just need to write."
"You can't have a pen. That's the rules." the nurse looked above Hela's head when he said this, as if he were bored with this argument already.
"I need a fucking pen! Give me a fucking pen!" Hela screamed, then. The dazed heads of all the patients, who were plopped like park pigeons on bolted down blue vinyl chairs in front of a fuzzing TV, twisted mechanically, slow like periscopes to watch the new girl take on Mean James, the day nurse.
"Jean?" James called. A sneering slug creature stomped out of the medicine room behind the counter.
Hela took a breath for composure. She knew better than to act up in the psych hospital. It would only prolong her stay. "I want a pen." she said to Jean.
The slug creature, no, more like a turtle creature, round and immense with a shell of short, sprayed down orange hair capping her hard head. A beaked nose and baggy eyes that looked as if they'd been punched and punched and punched…
"Patients can't have pens!" the Turtle croaked. "So Siddown!" She thrust her finger at an empty day room chair among the other patients, the higher functioning ones of which were giggling at the erupting confrontation.
"I need to write!" the electric zaps of fury stirred and grew sharp beneath Hela's skin, fried the sensible thoughts from her brain. There was no reminder of consequence, of punishment, of anything but this pen, this pen was the striving of all her existence.
"Give me a fucking pen!" Hela roared and reached for the chair at the blood pressure table, which was perhaps the only piece of furniture not affixed to the cold, tile floor of the dayroom.
"Siddown!" The Turtle glared, her green corneas bright and sharp like radioactive limes.
With a howl that rung and then hung from the yellowish walls, Hela heaved the chair in her arms and above her head, it dwarfing her body while also bestowing on her the illusion of strength. Hela is Atlas. This chair is her world.
She howled again and with a slingshot motion released her hand's grip, launching the chair to soar horizontally, skimming the curly, black head of Elena, who ducked and laughed and then crashing in front of the TV, causing the Cubs game reception to skip and Mona to yell, "I was watching that!"
The Turtle reached into the medication room and dragged out a mesh duffel bag stuffed with leather straps. Mean James picked up the office phone and chanted "Code Green, Code Green" on overhead loudspeakers.
Soon, five brown-suited security guards. Large, scowling. Waddled nonchalant in their largeness across the dayroom. From where? Were they kept in a closet with the spare gowns, or something? They clustered in circumference around Hela.
The Turtle held up the restraint bag. "Are you gonna siddown, or do I havta make ya?"
"I'll scoop your fucking eyeballs out and eat them!" Hela yelled. A guard grabbed her arm. A few patients laughed.
"What's going on?" a calm voice said behind the barricade of security guards. A young man with a wide and doughy child's face and seafoam eyes. He set down his backpack beside him.
"Dr. Littleboy!" Elena cheered.
"They won't give me a pen." Hela said to the doctor. Breathing heavy to steady her wavering words. "I'm a writer. I need to write."
"Then give her a felt-tip marker." Dr. Littleboy said to the Turtle and Mean James, with a spice of contempt in his tone and a sneer in his lip.
"And a shot." the doctor added. He smiled at Hela.
¶ 1:17 PM 0 comments
Monday, November 01, 2004
Blue Moon
7/31
Solarium 9pm
The Solarium is the temple, here at the state hospital. Tonight is a blue moon, the second full moon this month. I can’t see it from inside my fishbowl. This square room at the back of the unit with windows on three sides. Shatterproof windows, smeared with prints of the fingers and faces that have pressed to them, as hard as they can, to lean as closely to freedom as possible.
Inches, only inches.
Standing in here I see a tree with berries, an outside sky with a plane and a street. With nice houses. Old renovated brownstones with summer flowers bloomed in the front. Montrose, I think, is the street. I can watch the cars. I can watch the planes, all the planes! The evidence of transit, movement.
“S’good to stand. We been sittin’ around so much my butt hurts.” Rosa just said to Markus behind me.
O’Hare…Midway maybe. Rising and dipping like condors from one of these points. Those hallow metal sausages with wings, the passengers cutting so quickly through the air. But stuck still. Muscles crusting over with the crab-shell of inertia, bound to such limited indoor boundaries of motion, like I am. Eating from stale lunch trays, too.
This place is like an airplane. More like a ship. I can feel it wave, sometimes. The illusion of going somewhere. The creak of the poop deck boards protesting the heft of human weight.
“Do you like the food here?” Mona just asked Rosa behind me. I didn’t hear her response.
Fuck, I’m starving! Only 11 more hours until breakfast…
* * *
The Solarium door swings open. Elena swoops in with a classic movie star entrance, tossing her black silk hair over one shoulder, bathrobe becoming a mink.
“It’s happy hour!” she proclaims and tosses her hands like “tada”!
Elena is entirely too amused by this mental patient thing. She loves her pills and the “zonkty” (as she puts it) way they make her feel. She gets a kick out of going to psychotherapy group and flitting about in a hospital gown like some kind of trapped and medicated butterfly.
The Solarium door swings shut and Elena zips on her tiptoes down the hall, to the nurses’ station at the front of the dayroom for her Celexa, Zyprexa and Ativan. I hear Rosa and Markus and Mona’s hospital slippered feet pad across the chilly tile floor and I don’t want to follow.
I can tell it’s a blue moon. All I can do is stare, stare at the milky lunar glow and how it illuminates everything, the tree with the berries, the faraway airplanes in soothing tones of silver. I should be out there. I should be at the lake, on the beach with the breeze and the rocks and the water, slick feet kneading the seaweed, hands wet, singing.
Singing. I can do that here. Rosa and Markus and Mona are gone. The staff checks on me, though, every 15 minutes, to make sure I’m not trying to cut myself with something or have sex with someone.
Bedtime 10:15pm
What to do when I’m out of here:
-Apply for student loans
-Dye hair (Cherry red?)
-Wax eyebrows
-Clean up bedroom
***-Find job
-Finish River Story
-Pay phone bill
*-Find rent $
-Tell people where I’ve been
-Go swimming!
I am sharing a room with Nancy and Carol. Carol is in the bathroom. She farts and it echoes. Nancy is sitting calm on her bed and flipping through a magazine with that dazed-cow look in her eyes. Body still. Wax museum still. Except for the tick-tock motion of her wrist as it turns the glossy pages.
I am with them in the first room, right next to the nurses’ station, because I am monitored so frequently. Which is my fault. For being honest. I wanted help. My perceptions had lost all grounding. I was believing every single story my galloping brain came up with. Listening to that voice that sounds like me, just like me but isn’t me. It is deeper and much crasser than my usual internal narrator. It talks seductively about train car headlights and deep waves. Handfulls of pills washed down with whisky and strange men beaconing “baby, com’ere” from cars in the alley behind my building at night.
Sometimes it is happy. Chittering. Falling in love. With everything. And then I’m in love with everything. Sunset glittering through tree leaves, the white tall buildings of Edgewater, where I live glowing orange in it. Everyone that I see, I swear I know and I love. From some other lifetime, I bet. That old man with the gentle brown eyes was my mother. The really tall guy that lives down the hall was my best friend. The baby that rests in the lap of a tired woman in a McDonald’s uniform on the train was my wife. But mostly it’s sexual.
This particular facet of my psychosis tossed me out horny on hot streets at night and then landed me here. I can fall in love with just about anyone for a few hours. Spill my affections for their every nuance, love them for their accent, their blinking, their shoes, whatever it is. The way they remind me of someone I fucked in the past. The way they remind me of me. Or at least I’m convinced that they do.
I must have them inside me. Make them me, once again. Perhaps the people I meet are simply projections of my imagination. I want to reclaim them as mine.
* * *
“Turn them lights off! You, white girl.” Carol just hobbled out from the bathroom. A trail of spicy stink has clung to her gown. A med fart. I know that smell. Like rotting hummus. The smell of a psych ward bathroom. The pills fuck with your stomach. I have been to 5 of these places.
“Hey, whitey-white. You wit yo blondie, blonde hair and yo light blue eyes. I know you. You so cute, but yo evil!” Carol’s gravely voice squeaks high on that last word. Is she talking to me? I’m not blonde. But I’m the only white girl here. My hair is a dingy gray-brown, “mousy” they call it, my eyes are deep green. A murky, Chicago River green. Polluted. They were blue when I was a kid.
“Shut off that light.” Carol stops in front of my bed and continues. On second thought, I don’t think that everyone I meet could be merely a hologram of my mind. Most people are so predictable. They remind you of at least 5 other people you know. A few set human molds, a blend of a few lifestyle and mannerism options. But others, like Carol, are otherworldly. Or maybe hyper-worldly. Wild, primal, undomesticated.
Just look at her. Hunchbacked but strong boned. Wrinkled raisin skin, tight fuzz of nappy, yellow-white hair in clumps on her head. Her lips pump, sucking her toothless mouth, like an angry bulldog puppy. Those eyes that swirl deep as if under 2 inches of water.
I couldn’t have made her up. Not Carol. Those things she says. What the fuck?! She’s absolutely unpredictable. A creature not to be taunted. Which is why I am putting my journal down and getting up now to shut off the light, as she’s asked me to.
¶ 1:25 AM 7 comments
Solarium 9pm
The Solarium is the temple, here at the state hospital. Tonight is a blue moon, the second full moon this month. I can’t see it from inside my fishbowl. This square room at the back of the unit with windows on three sides. Shatterproof windows, smeared with prints of the fingers and faces that have pressed to them, as hard as they can, to lean as closely to freedom as possible.
Inches, only inches.
Standing in here I see a tree with berries, an outside sky with a plane and a street. With nice houses. Old renovated brownstones with summer flowers bloomed in the front. Montrose, I think, is the street. I can watch the cars. I can watch the planes, all the planes! The evidence of transit, movement.
“S’good to stand. We been sittin’ around so much my butt hurts.” Rosa just said to Markus behind me.
O’Hare…Midway maybe. Rising and dipping like condors from one of these points. Those hallow metal sausages with wings, the passengers cutting so quickly through the air. But stuck still. Muscles crusting over with the crab-shell of inertia, bound to such limited indoor boundaries of motion, like I am. Eating from stale lunch trays, too.
This place is like an airplane. More like a ship. I can feel it wave, sometimes. The illusion of going somewhere. The creak of the poop deck boards protesting the heft of human weight.
“Do you like the food here?” Mona just asked Rosa behind me. I didn’t hear her response.
Fuck, I’m starving! Only 11 more hours until breakfast…
* * *
The Solarium door swings open. Elena swoops in with a classic movie star entrance, tossing her black silk hair over one shoulder, bathrobe becoming a mink.
“It’s happy hour!” she proclaims and tosses her hands like “tada”!
Elena is entirely too amused by this mental patient thing. She loves her pills and the “zonkty” (as she puts it) way they make her feel. She gets a kick out of going to psychotherapy group and flitting about in a hospital gown like some kind of trapped and medicated butterfly.
The Solarium door swings shut and Elena zips on her tiptoes down the hall, to the nurses’ station at the front of the dayroom for her Celexa, Zyprexa and Ativan. I hear Rosa and Markus and Mona’s hospital slippered feet pad across the chilly tile floor and I don’t want to follow.
I can tell it’s a blue moon. All I can do is stare, stare at the milky lunar glow and how it illuminates everything, the tree with the berries, the faraway airplanes in soothing tones of silver. I should be out there. I should be at the lake, on the beach with the breeze and the rocks and the water, slick feet kneading the seaweed, hands wet, singing.
Singing. I can do that here. Rosa and Markus and Mona are gone. The staff checks on me, though, every 15 minutes, to make sure I’m not trying to cut myself with something or have sex with someone.
Bedtime 10:15pm
What to do when I’m out of here:
-Apply for student loans
-Dye hair (Cherry red?)
-Wax eyebrows
-Clean up bedroom
***-Find job
-Finish River Story
-Pay phone bill
*-Find rent $
-Tell people where I’ve been
-Go swimming!
I am sharing a room with Nancy and Carol. Carol is in the bathroom. She farts and it echoes. Nancy is sitting calm on her bed and flipping through a magazine with that dazed-cow look in her eyes. Body still. Wax museum still. Except for the tick-tock motion of her wrist as it turns the glossy pages.
I am with them in the first room, right next to the nurses’ station, because I am monitored so frequently. Which is my fault. For being honest. I wanted help. My perceptions had lost all grounding. I was believing every single story my galloping brain came up with. Listening to that voice that sounds like me, just like me but isn’t me. It is deeper and much crasser than my usual internal narrator. It talks seductively about train car headlights and deep waves. Handfulls of pills washed down with whisky and strange men beaconing “baby, com’ere” from cars in the alley behind my building at night.
Sometimes it is happy. Chittering. Falling in love. With everything. And then I’m in love with everything. Sunset glittering through tree leaves, the white tall buildings of Edgewater, where I live glowing orange in it. Everyone that I see, I swear I know and I love. From some other lifetime, I bet. That old man with the gentle brown eyes was my mother. The really tall guy that lives down the hall was my best friend. The baby that rests in the lap of a tired woman in a McDonald’s uniform on the train was my wife. But mostly it’s sexual.
This particular facet of my psychosis tossed me out horny on hot streets at night and then landed me here. I can fall in love with just about anyone for a few hours. Spill my affections for their every nuance, love them for their accent, their blinking, their shoes, whatever it is. The way they remind me of someone I fucked in the past. The way they remind me of me. Or at least I’m convinced that they do.
I must have them inside me. Make them me, once again. Perhaps the people I meet are simply projections of my imagination. I want to reclaim them as mine.
* * *
“Turn them lights off! You, white girl.” Carol just hobbled out from the bathroom. A trail of spicy stink has clung to her gown. A med fart. I know that smell. Like rotting hummus. The smell of a psych ward bathroom. The pills fuck with your stomach. I have been to 5 of these places.
“Hey, whitey-white. You wit yo blondie, blonde hair and yo light blue eyes. I know you. You so cute, but yo evil!” Carol’s gravely voice squeaks high on that last word. Is she talking to me? I’m not blonde. But I’m the only white girl here. My hair is a dingy gray-brown, “mousy” they call it, my eyes are deep green. A murky, Chicago River green. Polluted. They were blue when I was a kid.
“Shut off that light.” Carol stops in front of my bed and continues. On second thought, I don’t think that everyone I meet could be merely a hologram of my mind. Most people are so predictable. They remind you of at least 5 other people you know. A few set human molds, a blend of a few lifestyle and mannerism options. But others, like Carol, are otherworldly. Or maybe hyper-worldly. Wild, primal, undomesticated.
Just look at her. Hunchbacked but strong boned. Wrinkled raisin skin, tight fuzz of nappy, yellow-white hair in clumps on her head. Her lips pump, sucking her toothless mouth, like an angry bulldog puppy. Those eyes that swirl deep as if under 2 inches of water.
I couldn’t have made her up. Not Carol. Those things she says. What the fuck?! She’s absolutely unpredictable. A creature not to be taunted. Which is why I am putting my journal down and getting up now to shut off the light, as she’s asked me to.
¶ 1:25 AM 7 comments
