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Old haunts

523 Waller Street – My old place!
I had to ask the concierge how to get to the Powell & Market train station. Once there, I had to ask how to buy a ticket and which train would take me to Church Street. Turns out nineteen years is long enough to forget all kinds of things, and plenty long enough to transform the face of a neighborhood. I did manage to get out on the correct side of the Church & Market station, and when I emerged from underground the first thing I noticed was the neon sign above Aardvark Books. Then it all came flooding back. I was twenty-three years old and settling in after a rocky first few months of the San Francisco experiment. I moved from upstate New York all the way across the country on the hunch that the “something more in life” I was longing for would be more likely to announce itself in an unfamiliar setting, and that once I discovered this something more it would knock me out of my low altitude orbit toward the deeper space of my personal potential. On an early expedition of my new neighborhood I wandered into this used bookshop, picked up a copy of Ken Wilber’s No Boundary, and officially commenced my love affair with eastern philosophy, growth-oriented psychology, and the city of San Francisco.

I lived in the Bay Area for five years before returning to the east coast. This period was the most intense and life-altering chapter of my life thus far, and the streets of San Francisco, specifically the Lower Haight neighborhood, have impressed themselves upon the core of my being. Curiously, I had not found my way back until this past weekend, when I had just a day and a half to run around town while my wife attended her annual anthropology conference. It rained hard almost the entire time we were in town, but during a brief break in the weather I did manage to hop that train to my old neighborhood, where I visited my old house on Waller Street, walked up Haight Street to Buena Vista Park, to Ashbury Street where I went to graduate school, then all the way up to Golden Gate Park.

Of course, much has changed since 1993. There is now a coffee shop (Bean There) directly across the street from my old house, as well as countless businesses up and down Haight Street that I swear I had never laid eyes on before. CIIS (my former grad school) has moved to another part of the city, but the old building still made my heart skip a beat when I stood in front of it. The streets still felt electric to me, the overall vibe of the town still filled me with a sense of hope and possibility. Eventually, the clouds gathered again and rain started to fall, so I hurried back down the hill to the train station. Before I left the old neighborhood though, I just had to pop into Aardvark Books. I went straight to the psychology section and, sure enough, a copy of No Boundary was sitting on the shelf, waiting for the next kid with his head in the clouds to pick it up.

It’s strange how years turn into decades, how the lines around our eyes creep in and eventually give us away, how a sense of hope and possibility that buoys us along for so long can turn into a sinking feeling in the pit of our guts. I’m not quite sure what to do with all that’s been stirred up by this walk down memory lane. Next week I turn 42, and it’s true, I miss that sense of hope and possibility, that feeling of anticipation that comes with believing that anything might be around the next corner, that something more might announce itself at any moment. For now I’ll just sit and watch the swirl of images rearrange themselves in my mind, let the rain soak me to the bone, and wait for the storm to pass.

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Double yellow

The first time I met Jesus he was wrapped up like a burrito. I was too late to be of any real assistance, but I got there as fast as I could. Considering we were in the wake of a dreaded “double yellow,” things could’ve been far worse. Jesus was humming quietly to himself in a post-thorazine daze, and the other patient, the one I had been busy wrapping up over on the adolescent boys unit, he would have to spend at least the next hour contemplating in the “quiet area.” Actually, when I left him he was screaming something along the lines of “I’m going to fucking kill you, you fucking cocksucker!” – while already wriggling free from the restraints. We did a rush-job on the wraps, misaligning the velcro strips in a couple of places, so it wasn’t surprising to see the kid pulling a Houdini as we locked the door. But as the only male staff in the building that night, I had to make a choice: spend another ten minutes rewrapping the kid, who was already safely deposited in the QA, or make haste to the gymnasium, where God-knows-what was going down.

It’s bad enough hearing one “code yellow” called over the loudspeakers, as you never know what type of “psychiatric emergency” you might be in for. You always hope it’s followed by the words “child unit,” not because you’re happy a person under the age of twelve has gotten out of control, but because you know it will be relative easy to restore order. But if a yellow is called on the adolescent unit, you don’t know until you burst through the doors whether you’ll be dealing with a 13-year-old throwing a temper tantrum or a pair of 6-feet tall, 200 pound gang members beating each other with table legs. Fortunately, on this night, the youth in crisis was a wiry lad of 15, whom I could manage fairly easily aided by a pair of sturdy nurses.

An adult unit yellow is the most unpredictable scenario of them all. The crisis might be a 19-year old opiate addict trying to bust out of the place, and he or she may quickly calm down when the “show of force” arrives on the unit. Or it could be a 75-year old grandmother trying to hang herself with a bed-sheet. You just never know. A double yellow — two simultaneous crises –, especially on the weekend when staffing is at a bare minimum, is potentially a disastrous situation. Like this one night, when there were only two males in the building, myself and Charles, a big lug who works over on the adolescent boys unit. He and I were on the floor struggling mightily with a homicidally angry (and rather large) 18 year-old young man on the adult unit when a second code yellow was called back on adolescent boys. There was no way either of us could respond to the second code without leaving the other to be pummeled. It took us twenty minutes or so to get the guy into a locked, safe place where we could let him loose. By the time we arrived on the boys unit, the plexi-glass protecting the nurse’s station had been broken down. One nurse had been struck in the face with a three-hole paper puncher, her cheekbone shattered. The other nurse on duty was bleeding from her nose, having taken several punches to the face. It was a horrible scene, and Charles and I spent another half-hour rolling around on the floor making human burritos, desperately attempting to manage the chaos. We found out later that a few of the boys had been planning the assault for days, monitoring the cafeteria at meal times to see which staff people were on duty and thus who would be available to respond to code yellows. When Charles left the unit to respond to the adult yellow, the time was ripe for the boys to strike. “With Charles gone,” they must have surmised, “there would only be that little shit from the druggie unit on duty, and no doubt he’ll be busy helping Charles.” They were right. There was no one left who was strong enough to stop the carnage.

Fortunately, double yellows are rare, and the hospital is not always full of dangerous psychopaths. In any event, physical intervention is always a last resort, but there are nights you simply can’t avoid coming home with rug burns on your elbows and bloodstains on your pants. But again, on this night, when I first met the Son of God, things could have been much worse. After the first yellow, the wiry adolescent eventually succumbed to the effects of his forced injection before he could break through the outer “tortilla” restraint, and the second yellow had also ended peacefully, with Jesus humming himself to sleep. I didn’t see how the second yellow began, but I heard all about it in the adult nurse’s station while they were filling out the incident report. Apparently this man, intent on proving his divinity to each and all, had jumped up and grabbed the basketball rim during a friendly game of HORSE (a miracle in itself for someone no taller than five-seven), then somehow clambered up to a standing position, ten feet off the ground and about to take wing when his foot slipped through basket, enough that a fellow patient was able to grab hold and pull him down. Not one to give up easily, Jesus ran to other end of the court for another go, and things got yellow from there.

I say this was the first time I met Jesus. He and I would come to know each other quite well. That first time he introduced himself to me in the form of a short white guy in his twenties, with unbelievable hops. A few months later, his skin had turned brown and he had aged a couple of decades at least. Black Jesus — a name he invented himself and insisted upon –, he and I became especially good friends. The best of friends, really. Finally, just a few weeks before I left the hospital for good, Jesus checked in again, this time as a former psychiatrist, ironically the same psychiatrist who had treated the previous two incarnations of… well… himself.

Mysterious ways — that’s how the man works. That’s how he rolls. Me, I like to know what to expect, to know what I’m getting myself into. Back in the day, they used to call me Dr. Armstrong, the guy who would always come running when the call went out. These days, when two people are beating each other with table legs, I’m running away from the madness, not toward it.