Spending your days on a psychiatric ward can really fuck with your mindset. Everywhere I turn I see insanity, chaos, hopelessness, pointlessness. Thanksgiving Day a nineteen year old kid was admitted by his parents after they found him in the garage stuffing the tailpipe with rags. I was called up front when they were bringing him in, so there would be a “male presence” in case he started going off. He kept yelling at his parents, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.” His mom was in tears, insisting she could not keep him safe, but that we professionals could get him through this trying time. The next morning he hung himself with a bedsheet.
The week before that a kid we discharged blew his brains out ten minutes after leaving the hospital.
It’s the old people though, that haunt me the most. The ones that just want to die so badly, but just can’t seem to get the job done. I spent the weekend talking to a guy who broke both his ankles jumping off a building, drank a bottle of antifreeze, and set himself on fire.
So, forgive me if my perception is a little twisted these days.
Words of wisdom, free of self and doubt, and self-doubt, unruddered and unrutted. Swelling and heavy with a yearning to know and be known, to sing a real song. To move mountains or maybe just my bowels. Frightened–of change and death and daring and wonderful moments. In love with the ghost of an unborn soul. Burning–out and within. Distracted by a date and time, a year without memory, a picture on a yellowing page. My parents are mad now, so I’ve heard. The ones who fucked and named me and dumped their hopes and love and ignorance into me. The ones who raised me high enough to look down on them with pity and shame. My breathing isn’t as smooth as it could be, but my father is smoking himself to death. My mother is a child in an old woman’s body. And I am an unborn soul incubating in the belly of a mouse.
It seems I have some company. The one gripping the pen too tightly and squeezing his ass cheeks to keep from crapping his pants.
Thirty-four. A day late and $40,000 short. A cross made out of sawdust and chicken shit. T minus twenty-six minutes. Nice try kiddo. Better luck next time, champ. So when’s the book coming out? Play a song for me will you? I’d love to hear one. We’d all love to hear one. So fucking what? Dishonesty is death. Honesty is acceptance of death.
A lot of things have gone down in these weeks and days leading up to my thirty-fourth birthday. The first to drop was the toilet seat. After innumerable attempts to figure out how tiny droplets of piss-water could jump out of the bowl onto my shins–given dead center stream accuracy–I finally gave into gravity and cold reason. I sat down and voided like a plaid-skirted school-girl. There’s no turning back now.
And sometime around Halloween my mother fell down the stairs and broke her leg.
Karen will be dropping little Martin in a few weeks as well.
Down, always down.
The days on the psych unit are beginning to wear me down to the point where I feel ready to seize any excuse to quit. But what then? I never seem to have a satisfactory answer to that question.
And then there’s Jimmy. He’s a drooling, bleating, feces factory, but his eyes, if they lock on to yours in just the right way, they’ll suck you right down into a black hole so deep and terrifying and beautiful that you don’t know whether to shit or go blind. He’s the last truly innocent man left in this world of cowards, criminals and hypocrites. If there’s a physical prototype for the man of the future, you need look no further than my little brother. Soon every twenty four year old will be wearing diapers. It’s the logical conclusion once the toilet seat goes down. And back on the psych unit they’re lining up for seizures, and yes the hospital does accept most major credit cards. But this drooling, convulsing, incontinent man of tomorrow might look like my brother, but when you look into this man’s counterfeit eyes you won’t see a damned thing, not even your own reflection.