by
Gregg Williard
My day job was night
shift at a Community Mental Health Center in Brooklyn, N.Y, working as a
Psychiatric Nursing Aide on the Inpatient Unit. (My union, 1199, called the
position “Mental Health Worker,” which I preferred for its proletarian ring).I
was a burning heap of thwarted ambition, idealism, horniness, loneliness and
rage, i.e. an aspiring i.e. totally obscure painter and writer, and being an
M.H.W. gave me a much-needed sense of belonging somewhere, of being something,
even some thing. And the idea of the Community Mental Health Center was
righteous. It was supposed to be an
alternative to the big Dickensian state hospitals that imprisoned the mentally
ill for decades to drool, rock, pee on themselves and straight-jacket the
decades away. C.M.H.C.s had no big orderly guys in white pants and shirts, (we
weren’t big, didn’t wear uniforms, and some of the staff refused to wear name
badges, though I was proud to wear mine).
On The Unit straight jackets were called “camisoles.” “Escaping” was
“eloping.” No one was drugged, they were
medicated. And peeing on
yourself? Say “incontinent.”
To get to “The Unit” (I
liked the paramilitary ring of “The Unit”) you took a crowded elevator to the 4th
floor and waited inside a locked Plexiglas stall that never seemed strong
enough (and wasn’t) to withstand the fabled (but actual) Unnatural Strength of the
paranoid schizophrenic snapping to their latest command hallucination (ELOPE.BREAK
GLASS. BITE FACE).
Squinting past my
cigarette like Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye I would march to the staff
room and check the nurses’ notes on “my” patients (by this time having been
promoted to “Case Manager” status
because of the high quality of my patient progress and admission notes, which read like Henry James in comparison to the beginning
E.S.L. standard of English writing practiced by the mostly Indian, Pakistani,
Dominican or Chinese residents and interns).
Then I would come out of the staff room and turn right toward the back
of the ward to “check on”, (ever the magisterial clinician) the “The Blue
Room.” The B.R. wasn’t blue and had never been blue and was another locked area
behind Plexiglas walls where the most “acutely psychotic,” or suicidal, or
homicidal, or violent, or “labile” or destructive, or flat out crazy and scary
patients were kept. (There was also a single classic locked “padded cell” in
the opposite end of the ward for very, very hard cases, that I have since seen
duplicated in every middle school I’ve ever subbed at where they are called
“Time Out Rooms”). Then a room check
(ever the magisterial, professional paraprofessional clinician) to make sure
that no one had hung themselves, slit their wrists, set fire to their room or
was sleeping, alone or together, through
assigned “therapy activities”, and then back to the staff room for report from
the previous shift, (mostly orders to put a patient on a liquid diet, or take
them off a liquid diet, or withhold food altogether for fasting blood work, or
make them go to a therapy activity, or all of the above ).
If I were back on nights
the next duty would be to sit down at a round table set up at one end of the
floor and drink coffee, tell stories, play scrabble, smoke (everybody smoked on
the ward -- It was a hospital) and pray that it would be a quiet boring night
of do nothing much except kill time until it was 6:30 and time to collect urine
samples and wake patients for a liquid breakfast or no breakfast at all. And
feel the sorrow of pink first light coming up over the blunt tops of the
apartment buildings across Ft. Hamilton Parkway after another shift with the night
M.H.W. crew. The usual was: Sam, an older, stately political refugee from
Haiti who walked with a limp and told 2
a.m. horror stories about Papa Doc and voodoo;
Belinda, a small round woman from Jamaica whose pressured,
incomprehensible English conveyed perpetual outrage; Donna, an Italian- American Mother of six who
grew up in the neighborhood and knew most of our patients as kids (and scolded
them as kids whenever the police brought
them in violent, psychotic, handcuffed,
and covered in blood and vomit), and Raoul,
a tall, mustached Cuban immigrant with the smooth, purring assurance of
a consummate con man, often taking me
aside to share “unique business opportunities” like the can’t fail plan
where I smuggle diamonds into JFK in the hollowed -out soles of special shoes.
The Head Nurse was an Indian woman named Gupta, who cut an unforgettable figure
batting away her vaporous orange sari to stab hypos of stelazine into roaring psychotics
three times her size. It was grungy, scary, depressing, sexy.
Then I remember first
hearing about AIDS at the hospital during a staff meeting discussing one of the
M.H.W.s who’d been sick for a long time, and it was explained by our dapper,
diminutive director Dr. Sienna that the M.H.W. had a mystery flu named AIDS. I
half listened, looked interested, forgot about it. He died. The dying kept
coming.
It was a job of sorrowing
mornings after lots of bad coffee, scalding, in Styrofoam cups that I carved
and doodled into with boredom hieroglyphics, and the writing of endless
free-association journals about my runaway ambition, runaway sex drive, runaway
aching burning heart. And scraps of staff and patient conversation that I told
myself I’d someday transform into art maybe 30 years from now until this next paragraph has become
the 30 years later that I wrote for then:
And the patient says I don’t talk to no
guy who looks like a preacher (me in my all black clothes) and all I can say is thank god for thorazine
Joseph is out like a light and yet, I can do a drawing like the drawing I did
for Liberation News Service equating thorazine with capitalism, and I’m thinking about a gigantic ink drawing of a
submachine gun, and Donna says, “I think the big difference between Catholics
and Protestants is that Catholics secretly love death, and Protestants secretly
hate death,” and I protest, “NO! We love death too!”
The thing was, we had
all the enlightened attitudes, there were no lobotomies (though we did do
electroconvulsive therapy-- “E.C.T.” -- which had the vexing property of
actually helping some people recover from acute depression, but that memory
loss, that memory loss), but the patients were still medievally insane, and we were medievally oppressive. They drooled and rocked and screamed and raked
their fingernails across your face and threw chairs at your head and set fire
to stuff and pooped on the floor and tore doors off the hinges and shattered
windows and attacked staff in group therapy sessions and stabbed other people
and themselves with scissors and paintbrushes in Art Therapy and ate glass and cigarettes and obeyed command
hallucinations to take a bite out of your face, all of it
up the wazzoo, as one of my favorite Psych residents (and another short
term girlfriend) diagnosed it.
My side still hurts from where that guy
punched me while I was with a bunch of patients doing “Art Therapy”: “What does
that look like to you?” “Jus the moon.” “But how does that make you feel?” “Jus like
the moon.” And then being socked in the face, coming off night shift and
collapsing into bed and setting my alarm for 2:00 p.m. and hoping that I can
get some painting done today, then sleep then a.m. care this a.m. his face like
a fat hand grabbing a wrench, her cigarette bouncing to the tempo of F-U!!! “I
be takin’ care o-BEEZ-nis.” More
sleepless nights.
In the morning I sit down with David
his blue skin stretched over a huge brow.
His fingers are always interlocked like he’s tying or untangling
invisible shoelaces his gums always bleeding and mornings I give him a new toothbrush and then throw it
away. Specs of old oatmeal fleck his pants. His yarmulke he smashes on his head
like an angry after-thought. Then Patient Emmerich says, Samurai! There’s a
samurai hiding behind me! Watch out! One false word and I’m sliced down the
middle! How many times has it happened already? We all look like slices of cheese,
and the samurai is endlessly slicing each section into thinner and thinner
pieces! What is the source of his skill? Now Debbie’s arms are outstretched in
front of her. She’s demonstrating traditional hand gestures. This is the fish.
This is the waterfall. And this, her hands visibly trembling, is the angry
father. Only a liquid diet? Only a liquid diet? This is all I fucking get??!!
Meanwhile my next, long term girlfriend and I shared a “hobby”:
visiting haunted houses, spook houses, fun houses and houses of horror. We
started out in Coney Island, New York, moved through the rest of Brooklyn. My
girlfriend was a level-headed Irish Catholic Psychiatric Nurse named Beth who
loved me and put up with my enthusiasms for cheap, tawdry horror movies and
cheap tawdry funhouses in a way that still fills me with wonder and awe.
At that time houses of horror were still pretty low-tech
affairs, labors of amateur love with handmade and hand-painted sets, papier Mache
gargoyles and demons, smoke machines, strobe lights, Halloween –cassette sound
effects and creaky, wobbling mechanical skeletons and skulls rattling
pathetically out of the dark like hell’s own grocery carts. Funhouses were a
source of part time work for area high school students, ex-cons and psychiatric
patients willing to dress up as ghouls or sit up out of caskets for minimum
wage. I was always on the lookout for “my” patients, as if they belonged to a
merry band of migrant workers roaming the countryside to pick the fields of
tactile hallucinations. The funhouses were mostly open in the summer and did a
good business because they were cheap and cool and pitch-black places to cop a
feel. But one funhouse stayed open
through the winter, an especially infamous Brooklyn winter, bitterly insanely
cold, the day Hell froze over for real, so to speak. The poor guys who had to
lay in the casket all day and all night, they couldn’t relax because they had
to sit up and snarl every couple of minutes when a new car load of rubes clanked
by. And the amplified shrieking on the speakers beside their heads, poor guys, and
it was so cold that one of the Draculas was wearing earmuffs and a huge down
coat, so cold there were icicles hanging off the painted flames of hell, icicles
hanging off the bloody maw of the devouring demon at the gates of the Hell
Hole.
The
housekeeping guy says something about “Off the Handle Crandle.” A woman in the Blue Room asks me for more
toilet paper. “We need more toilet paper, Jerry.” “My name is Tom, Janet.”
“Until I get more toilet paper your name is Jerry. “ I get her the toilet
paper. She says, “Thanks, Jerry.” “You
were going to call me Tom. “ She takes the toilet paper. “Is this all your name
is worth?” Make sure the RR train is
marked “Astoria” for local to Manhattan. Now I drink sanka. I smoke camels.
Exit sign buzzing. Light up a cigarette.
The rubber bats that flopped around on wires were so stuff
that they packed all the terror punch of black paper towels bouncing in the
air, and I wondered how and why the place could stay open when the weather
turned so record breaking bad. Turns out the owner thought he could capitalize
on the cold, promised a warm hangout and a toasty freaky good time to teenagers
trying to get away from the cold and their parents, but the wiring didn’t pass
code and all the space heaters blew the works but good, plunging the Hell Hole
into a freezing inferno pit. The staff of part time zombies, ghouls, Draculas,
Jason knock offs and teenage Elviras and headless cannibals (this was the
owner’s idea; he wouldn’t listen to the kids’ protests that it didn’t make
sense, I mean, how could a headless cannibal eat you, you know?) were sent in day after bone chilling day, night
after hypothermia night until the staff of the undead refused to go (the public
long gone by now), instead starting a bonfire in the vacant lot across the
street that quickly engulfed the place and burned like the Hell Hole it was
meant to be. I also heard the version that the night shift ghouls ran their own
propane heaters and were either overcome by carbon monoxide fumes or burned to
death in an electrical fire. Or maybe the owner, haunted by responsibility for
their deaths torched the place himself, dying in the final char.
This was the
beginning of a doomed, five-year plan to write and draw an epic graphic novel
called Explosion in a Mask Factory. Pieces of it later became my first novel
(the one that all writers are supposed to “get out of your system” before your first
“public” book is written, keeping it hidden in the bottom of a locked drawer to
remind yourself of how bad bad can bad).
In my case I’ve got 6 reminders filling most of a footlocker and maybe
am working on number 7 right now ; it has really taken me 30 years to
understand that “paying your dues isn’t the painful, necessary first step, but
the whole stairs). And the burning ambition,
the profligate blaze that’s long since hunkered to blue white embers, stewed to
red coals, settled into hot ash that I keep fed and coddled with a history of
lies, the stuff that torques and torches my stories, has torqued
and torched my memories to this day.
