Detour from Normal (29 page)

"Hi, Emma," I said

"Hi," she responded, seeming not to remember my name.

"Why do you have to water these flowers with a hose?"

"I planted all the flowers around the two mesquite trees myself. Unfortunately, there's no automatic watering system."

"Wow, it's amazing that you've been able to keep them looking so great just watering them by hand. I would have thought the heat would have killed them by now. What do you do on the days you aren't here?"

"I have another recreational therapist water them for me, otherwise they'd die."

"It sure looks like a big responsibility."

"I love flowers, so I don't mind the responsibility. I have some large gardens of my own at home as well. I find it therapeutic caring for them."

"I bet your gardens are amazing. I wish I could see them. You must really have a green thumb." Emma smiled but didn't say anything. "Can I help you with them?"

"Sure. I could use some help," she said and handed me the hose. That was the beginning of my most precious time at Gracewood. Each day for half an hour I helped her tend her gardens. We'd water, prune, remove debris that the wind had blown in, and even plant new flowers,
all the while talking or just quietly working together. Over time I learned about her family, more about her gardens at home, and various other facts about her life, but mostly we just made small talk as we worked together. Sometimes Emma would sing softly. Her voice was beautiful, and I knew all the songs that she sang. Her singing never failed to make me smile.

I wanted more than anything to be free someday, but when that day came, gardening with Emma was the only thing I would miss. I wished there was a way that I could have my life back and still tend gardens with Emma.

Smuggling Food

My heart rate and blood pressure had been elevated for weeks when I arrived at Gracewood. Somehow related to that was a ravenous hunger. In addition I was squeezing as much physical activity as I could into the few hours I had outside every day. Overall I was burning a lot more calories than I was taking in.

The meals at Gracewood looked to be just under five hundred calories each. I put in a request for double portions, but after several days nothing had happened. In desperation I began to ask anyone if they had anything they didn't want to eat. Sharing food was strictly prohibited because some people had medical problems and related food restrictions. After being admonished a few times, I backed off and suffered with the hunger.

In general, the female nurses were sticklers about the rules, but the male PAs and nurses would bend a little. Sympathizing with my
dilemma, the PAs began slipping me food. I always treated them with respect. I was well behaved, I had gotten to know them all by name, and I frequently spoke with them. I guess we'd become friends as much as was possible. It was much like being in prison and befriending the prison guards.

After a few days of suffering, George, a black man and the heaviest of the PAs, slipped me an extra piece of cake on my tray. After that Alphonso, or Al, as he preferred to be called, included an extra roll with my meal. I knew I had it made when an entire extra plate of food appeared on my tray one day. My buddies were looking out for me. It took over a week for my double-portions request to go through, but in the meantime I was well taken care of.

Stolen Glasses

When Rich first arrived, he was on prescription medication that seemed to be working for him. Immediately after his arrival, the head psychiatrist, Dr. Davis, initiated a treatment plan for Rich that started by cutting off his prescription medication cold turkey. Taking Rich off his meds so abruptly took its toll. In only a few days, he went from "regular Joe" to "raving lunatic" as he spiraled into withdrawal. During my time at Gracewood, I witnessed two cold-turkey withdrawals: Rich and Sandra. It was brutal watching my friends suffer so much and unbelievable to me that they were forced to do so among the general populace.

Nearly everyone ignored Rich's agony except for me—he was my roommate after all, and I felt responsible for him. As his condition worsened, he began to lose his temper more easily and more often. I felt that
something should be done to ease his suffering, so I went to the nurse and informed her of his rapidly deteriorating condition. A while later the nurse spoke with Rich in private. I don't know what they discussed, but it didn't result in him getting any help. Instead I was immediately evicted from our room and escorted to another.

My new room was much larger, but I had two roommates instead of one: Len and Robert. The room was split into two halves with two beds in each half separated by a partial wall in the middle that ran half the length of the room. On my half was a bathroom that we all shared. Robert and I slept right next to each other, and Len and an empty bed were on the other side of the partial wall. That empty bed was soon to be occupied by a new arrival.

One evening, as I lay on my bed jotting down ideas on a piece of paper with a stubby pencil, there was a huge commotion just inside the main entrance of our unit. Commotions were a fact of life there, but that didn't mean they weren't interesting. Being in Gracewood was like living a tabloid reality show: there was always something of entertainment value going on. I went out to see what was happening.

What I saw was quite different than I expected. Most of the people in Gracewood were frail-looking drug addicts, and the few who weren't were just normal-looking folks. Near the entrance were four PAs, the swing-shift PAs—Jose, Antonio, and two others apparently from another unit. Instead of being in control of yet another spindly, still-high drug addict, they were keeping their distance from the new patient, who'd just been brought into the unit. It reminded me of a show I'd seen on TV in which a lion was being released back into the wild. Once the cage door on the back of the truck was raised, everyone scampered for cover.

At the center of the action was Nick. Nick was a former champion cage fighter, or at least that was his story—and I believed it. He was tall
and massive. There wasn't a square inch of his body that wasn't covered with solid, intimidating muscle. He had tattoos on his arms, his gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and his eyes were dark and wild. Had he been a lion, he'd have been roaring in anger. Instead what came out was "Where's my fuckin cell phone? If I have to ask for it one more fuckin time, I'm going to call 911. You hear me? I'm going to call 911. Get me my cell phone NOW!" Anyone could see that there were drugs involved. The really great news: that raging madman was my new roommate.

Nick never did get his cell phone, but he did come down to earth over the next few days. It was pretty touch and go during that time, and I elected myself as his champion. I showed him around, introduced him to the guys I knew on the staff, and told him which of the female staff he needed to avoid pissing off. Basically I showed him all the things that no one ever showed new patients when they first arrived.

I got the impression that Nick really appreciated that I took him under my wing. We hung with each other almost all the time, and I have a lot of fond memories of him. We played basketball together, we threw footballs together, we argued about religion, we even figured out how to exercise using towels and chairs. All in all, Nick and I had about as normal a relationship as an engineer and a broke ex-cage fighter—who had just spent his last twelve dollars in the world on a large pizza and two cans of pop—could have. I loved the guy. He made me laugh and he made me think.

Nick was actually an older guy. He was older than me by about a year. He was quite handsome, and women swooned over him wherever he went—even toothless ones at Gracewood, much to his chagrin. He did have one problem that we older guys have: he needed reading glasses. Nick usually kept his reading glasses on top of his cubby, but
one day he was reading in the main area and left his glasses on a table. Shortly after that, Robin, a gal who had been released a few days earlier, came in to visit Sandra. They both sat down at the table with the glasses to catch up, and, knowing both of them, I pulled up a chair to join in. Eventually Robin inquired about the glasses.

"Whose glasses are those?"

"I think those are the community glasses," I said. "Someone left them in their room when they were released, so now anyone can use them who needs to."

Robin picked them up and inspected them. "These are nice," she exclaimed. She removed her own glasses, set them on the table, and put on Nick's. Then she looked around. "Wow, I can see a lot better with these than with mine." She kept them and no one thought anything of it. There were still glasses on the table for everyone to share. Soon Robin said good-bye, taking her new glasses with her.

About an hour later, Nick came into the room. He looked around, picked up the glasses on the table, and set them back down. "Who the fuck took my glasses?" he asked. I felt like crap. I'd had no idea those were his. I squeamishly told him what had happened. To my surprise, all he said was "Hmm." Then he picked up Robin's small, black, horned-rimmed glasses, which looked like throwbacks from the fifties, and put them on. He looked ridiculous. He gazed around and exclaimed, "Hey, I can see better with these than with my own damn glasses."

Nick used those glasses the entire time he was at Gracewood and then left them for someone else to use when he was released. Nobody made fun of him, in part because we were all funny in our own ways, and because we were afraid he would beat the tar out of us if we did.

Room 1149

The roommate who slept next to me, Robert, was the crankiest person I'd ever met. Despite the fact that he, Emma, and I had played a few fun-filled rounds of beanbag together, he was no friendlier toward me. Before landing there, Robert had been living his ideal life: he was surviving off taxpayer money and spent his days in seclusion at his apartment, watching TV and chain-smoking cigars.

Robert was probably in his late twenties, and looked very unhealthy. He had dark circles under his eyes and looked like he hadn't slept in weeks. I consistently made efforts to befriend him but was always met with outbursts of mock cursing in response. That first night I went to bed about 10:30 p.m. I soon found out why Robert looked like he hadn't slept. At first he lay on his belly, breathing normally. Then he rolled over onto his side and began to snore. The snoring was definitely bad but not intolerable. Finally, he rolled onto his back and the real party began. Robert generated the most inhuman racket I'd ever heard. Intermixed with periods of gurgling, gagging, and sputtering were long, irregular spans of silence during which I wondered if he was still alive. Worst of all, he was five feet away, and there was no escaping it. After an hour or so, I got up and stood next to him in the dark, trying to figure out what to do.

"Robert...Robert, wake up," I said with no response. Then I poked him. "Robert, turn over on your belly. You'll sleep a lot better." After again getting no response, I shook him. He awoke like a grizzly bear roused from hibernation.

"Gosh dang it. What the frick are you doing? Get the hey away from me." Then he turned onto his belly, and I had some relief for a while before
the cycle repeated itself. By the third night in the room, I'd had so little sleep I was approaching my seizure threshold. Nick was likewise having trouble sleeping with so much racket, so we both went to speak to a nurse. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible for her to do anything. I finally convinced her of how important a night of good sleep was for my health. She let me take my sheet, blanket, and pillow to one of the quiet rooms, room 1149.

I was pretty excited to be able to get my own private room for a night, so I grabbed my things and hustled over there as quickly as I could. The quiet room was where they put violent patients until they settled down. At that point I didn't know much else about it. There were two steel doors to the quiet room to further isolate a patient from everyone. That way they could pound or kick on the inner door, and with the outer door closed, no one could hear much of anything. In between the two doors was a small bathroom area to one side with a very basic sink and toilet. The sink had no handles, just push buttons for hot and cold water like all the other sinks in Gracewood. The water only stayed on a short time when the buttons were pressed. On that particular sink, the hot water button didn't work at all. In between the buttons was a small stainless steel dome the size of half a golf ball with a hole aimed at 45 degrees, from which water spouted, much like a drinking fountain.

The mirror above the sink was stainless steel and covered with fine scratches from years of cleaning. I couldn't see myself very well in the foggy mirror. It gave the illusion that I was younger; the wrinkles near my eyes and on my forehead vanished into the haze. The toilet was solid stainless steel. It had no lid or seat, just a seat shape as part of its design. The reason for the odd design of everything was to prevent people from being able to hurt themselves or others. I felt privileged to have my own personal bathroom, since at least one of my new roommates, probably Robert, had bad aim.

I flipped on the switch next to the bathroom to illuminate the quiet room. With pillow, sheet, and blanket in hand, I stepped into the room and suddenly froze.
I know this room,
I thought. Chills ran up my spine and goose bumps sprang to attention on my arms. Tears welled in my eyes, and my hands began to tremble. I sat on the bed thinking I might collapse if I didn't and took it all in: the harsh, white, windowless concrete walls and ceiling, the steel frame bed bolted to the floor, the quiet emptiness. It was where I had been abandoned on my first day when I arrived by ambulance still paralyzed.

Before long I was sobbing uncontrollably. For the first time in a long time, I experienced a negative emotion—sorrow. I couldn't help myself. The room brought back all the memories of the PDC, the ambulance ride, and my abandonment. I'd never felt as helpless in my entire life as I had on that day. Seeing the room again was also a relief; it put a face on a mystery that had plagued me since the day I'd arrived. Until that moment I'd had no idea where that place was. I wasn't sure if it had been real or a dream. Now I finally knew, and it put an end to the nightmare.