He Wanted the Moon (4 page)

At the time of my father’s arrival, Westborough was run by Dr. Walter E. Lang, chief psychiatrist and superintendent, a man that my father neither liked nor respected. This being 1944, it must have been extraordinarily challenging to staff the hospital and to maintain basic standards during wartime, while so many men were overseas and with rationing still in effect. My father had hoped to serve as a military doctor, but he was deemed ineligible due to his history of mental illness. Now, he found himself in the back of a police car, being transported to Westborough for his second stay in less than a year.

THE handcuffs were fitted tightly and were cutting into my wrists. They hurt a great deal. I did not complain but as I twisted my wrists and tried to make them more comfortable, the handcuffs seemed to close more and more tightly. I found out later that these handcuffs were actually equipped with a device that made them close more securely and tightly as the wearer struggles against them.

After admission, I was taken directly to a small cell in the upper floor of one of the violent wards. I sat on the edge of the bed. An officer had just released one of my wrists from its shackle and the key was still in the handcuffs. I toyed with these handcuffs as they dangled from my left wrist and, with the help of a few suggestions from one of the policemen, I loosened the steel shackle and handed it to him.

The state troopers went out the door, leaving three attendants with me. They directed me to remove my clothing. As I took off my garments, the reality of being back in a psychopathic hospital swept over me with added vigor. The damage of this procedure to one’s dignity is inestimable. It
takes away self-control; self-respect. As I took each article of my clothing off, I threw it to the attendants. My watch, residing in my vest pocket, took this aerial circuit, but was caught with the vest by an alert attendant and was saved from damage.

After the undressing procedure, there is always an embarrassing period while one stands naked in the presence of strangers. This embarrassment is relieved only in part by the drab clothing which is presented: ill-fitting white cotton underwear with long tight-fitting legs, ancient slippers and a ragged cotton bathrobe of fading color. Usually the underwear and robe are shrunken, and make one look too ridiculous. When one first sees oneself in the mirror after this change of clothing one might laugh heartily, if one had the courage and humor, but I was never able to appreciate the joke of looking so clownish.

Everyone left the room. The door was locked unceremoniously from the outside and I was alone. All was quiet. There wasn’t much to see. I stood in a small rectangular room, measuring about fifteen feet long and ten feet wide by twelve feet high. There was a bed in the room, nothing more. The floor of my room was made up of a tile surface of a peculiar black and white design. A black line circled the middle of the wall on both sides. The wall was painted yellow above the line and brown below.

My thoughts dwelled for only a moment upon the nature of my surroundings. I was chiefly occupied with one intolerable fact: I was back at Westborough for probably a long stay. It would be many days before any word would reach me from the outside. I was in for the usual stupid psychiatric
procedures—to go through once again what I had faced so many times before: an utterly meaningless period of confinement in a hospital under barbaric conditions inherited from a culture of darkness and ignorance. It seemed impossible that I could have been so stupid as to take any chances upon being caught in the same predicament which had seared my heart and soul so many times before, once again to have my mentality subjected to the destructive powers of loneliness, despair, idleness, filth, the ignorant dictates of below average doctors, lies and deception, the long absence from the strengthening power of work, isolation from all customary environment, disgrace.

I turned off my light and lay in bed. I fell asleep but awoke in a few hours refreshed. The door opened abruptly and three attendants entered the room.

“Come with us,” one of them said.

I went along without argument or resistance of any type. Down the corridor we went, turning down a branch corridor at our right going towards the rear of the building. We passed through the shower room. There, bound fast in a straightjacket, was one of the demented patients whose nightly howling had disturbed me so much the year before. He looked pitiful and miserable as he pulled his head upward and forward to watch us pass through. Often he would jerk his head backward and forward in rhythmic sequence, his tousled blond hair, blue eyes and rounded, lumpy, scarred face made a sad and awesome picture; once encountered, never to be forgotten.

On we went into the next room where I was ordered to remove my clothing. I complied quietly. A straightjacket was
brought forward and I was instructed to put my arms into sleeves that were built in a solid rectangular pattern. I was then told to lie on a bed standing at one end of an otherwise empty room, next to the window. I followed orders without making any comment, but with a mounting sense of indignation and deep despair. The straightjacket was made of canvas and strong canvas ribbons dangled from its edges in pairs. These were tied securely to each side and to the foot of the bed. The sixteen or eighteen such pairs of ribbons formed powerful anchors to the bed, allowing slight motion.

The attendants departed, leaving me alone with the light burning so that I could be watched through a large window from the adjoining tub room. I lay still for a while, trying to adjust myself to this new and most barbaric treatment. My dignity as a prominent practicing physician seemed to have been violated flagrantly. I felt insulted. A wave of despondency passed over me. I tried to imagine that the straight-jacket was just a sort of mental test to be met by getting out of it as quickly as possible. I recalled some of the tricks I had read about in the life of Houdini. I remembered that he could untie knots with his toes and I began to practice. In a relatively short time, I learned a great deal about how to untie knots with a big toe and the first little toe of each foot. Slowly and methodically I went from knot to knot, untying all kinds of knots, and soon I was almost free.

Just as I was about to roll over and free myself entirely, three attendants entered and tied me down again, this time much more securely, leaving me little motion. Soon the attendants left, and—when they were out of sight—again I
undertook to untie myself. It was a much more difficult task now that my motions were so limited.

In releasing oneself from an expert straightjacket, one can do little work until one has freed the ankles and removed the pillow that is fitted behind one’s head. By making a heroic thrust of the head beyond a ninety-degree turn, one can just barely catch the cloth of the pillowslip in one’s teeth. Having then caught the cloth, one can then pull and loosen the material enough to get a thicker bite and then, by raising the neck forward—simultaneously with thrusting the head to the opposite side—the pillow may be pulled out quickly. Then, more gradually, it may be shoved across the bed and down upon the floor. With the pillow removed, the head falls back to a lower level and the neck will descend through the opening of the jacket. It is then possible to move downward in the bed. The ankles can then be moved enough to make it possible to free them. As the feet move downward, there is a little play between the binding sheets and by rotating from side to side, and moving up and down, the feet come clear.

The next steps include loosening as many knots as one can reach after freeing the knees from the transverse binder. As one gets freedom of movement, some of the knots can be disposed of by putting the heel between the edge of the straightjacket and the iron rod to which the ribbons are tied. A sharp downward thrust of the heel will then sever the attachment of the knot from its function with the jacket. Some of the knots around the top of the bed can be untied with teeth, but not always. Sometimes the arms can be freed from the jacket sleeve by flexing the elbows,
which may then rip open the seams and allow one or both arms to be freed. If either of the top edges of the jacket can be loosened by teeth, hand or foot, the neck can then be removed from its noose by twisting and rotating it in a complicated series of movements similar to the progress of the head of a child as it goes down the birth canal. It will then be possible to climb out of the opening at the top of the jacket or at some section along the side. There are many ways to emerge, depending upon how the straightjacket is applied, and it is an interesting and absorbing study to work them out. Almost every new straightjacket application represents a new problem.

With patience and persistence, I soon had myself free. In came more attendants who fastened me to the bed with extreme diligence, using not only the canvas knots, but employing tight-fitting, heavy strips of sheeting across my chest, wrists and legs to limit motion even further. By a similar device my feet were strapped tightly together and then joined to the foot of the bed. Again I was left alone, and again I went to work, twisting and turning until I got my feet disentangled, then turning sideways and flexing my knees to get my legs above the rather powerful horizontal leg restraints. As I lay on one side, I was then able to work at untying the knots and could gradually loosen myself.

Time after time I wiggled free. The attendants returned at regular intervals to bind me down by methods growing more and more complicated and ingenious. They seemed surprisingly good-natured about all the trouble I was giving them. This strengthened my conviction that I was merely being put to some sort of mental test. One of them—apparently the one
in charge—engaged me in a conversation about Schopenhauer and various other philosophers as he assisted in the procedure of applying restraints.

As the night passed slowly, I grew to enjoy the task of escaping from restraints and gradually acquired the satisfying conviction that I was doing about as well as Houdini himself might have done under similar circumstances (with no concealed files, scissors, or knives).

Dawn came. I had not slept. The night shift attendants—a fairly decent group of fellows—went off duty and the day shift arrived. Tiny Hayes, one of the physiotherapists at the hospital, arrived along with a patient to take me to the toilet. Already my straightjacket was about free from its moorings due to my continued struggles. As my feet hit the cold cement floor, a wave of chilliness spread over me and with it, a wave of depression. Tiny and the patient, one on each side, guided me along to the toilet in the adjoining hydrotherapy room.

As I arrived at the toilet, Tiny caught a strap of my straightjacket and wheeled me around.

“Sit down,” he said in a loud, superior voice.

I looked over one shoulder to get oriented, and then sat down upon a cold, unprotected, rather moist enamel toilet. The cold edge of the crude toilet seat seemed to cut into my flesh and it precluded any possibility of performing any functions.

“Hurry up!” Tiny yelled as he and the patient stood over me.

The situation was disgusting and humiliating. I arose with feelings of futility and walked back to the bed. A sense
of anger seized control of me and, with a sudden twist of my body, I pulled myself almost free, but Tiny caught a portion of my straightjacket—which still held my arms imprisoned—and jerked me around, catching me from behind, closing his forearm over my throat, choking and hurting me. He dragged me to the bed and made me fall down upon it by twisting my neck. As he sat to buckle me down again, I caught his left arm with my right elbow. He turned and struck me a heavy and powerful blow with the flat of his hand on my left cheek. After this, he proceeded to tie me down with expert skill.

As soon as he left the room, I began to struggle to free myself. I could not tolerate these jackets. I could not restrain myself from resisting. When I was a patient at the Pennsylvania hospital, an attendant told me that he had watched me in restraints for a period of many days. He said that he had never seen me stop fighting restraints whether clearly conscious or narcotized.

After about two hours of struggling I got myself entirely free and stepped out naked on the bare cement floor, free from restraints for the first time in about twelve hours. I then grabbed hold of one of the steel frames used to drape curtains for screening off sections of the room. I was trying to use the frame as a bar to force my way through the steel window frame, when Mrs. Delaney, one of the day nurses, opened the door and walked in.

I was standing there, stark naked.

“Why, Dr. Baird!” she exclaimed.

“I’m sorry. I’m trying to cooperate but my body won’t seem to let me yield to this type of therapy,” I explained.
“I seem to fight restraints with automatic muscular efforts beyond my control.”

She then closed the door and returned in a few minutes with underwear, bathrobe and slippers. I was then allowed to take a shower bath and put on these crude garments. I returned to my room and was locked in.

My memory remains quite clear for the events of the night and following morning. As I left the room where I was kept in restraints, lucidity of memory seems to persist, but as I stepped into the side corridor, a renewed sense of imprisonment came over me, and here my recollection of exact sequences fades. Things come back to me as vivid, indelible scenes that often return to be acted out again upon the stage of my mind.