Mixed: My Life in Black and White (18 page)

I wanted to curse Anne out in ways she’d only seen on television. Some people are angry drunks; I’m an angry depressive. I got so mad that this fog had chosen to invade my brain, there was no stopping me when I was set off. Luckily for me and the physical health of the people around me, my weapon of choice is my mouth. I have avoided being mugged by using my smart mouth when I wasn’t depressed; when I am depressed, I could end up taking the muggers’ money. I wanted to unleash every ounce of my pent-up anger toward women who looked like this one, women who had never had to live in a world where even the tests designed to help them get well don’t have their kind of people in them.

Be calm. Find a nice PU way to deal with your anger. The ends justify the
means. The end is escape; you need to get out of here.

“Can I make some of these people black, or will that lower my score?” I asked.

Anne told me there was no score.

Great, let’s move on.

The next card featured a woman sitting on a bed; her head was in her hands. A man stood in the foreground of the sketch, looking angry and staring out into space. The room in the sketch seemed too sterile to be a loving home, so I decided they were in a hotel. I named the man Ike and the woman Tina, as they were, in my mind, black and those were the first names I thought of.

I told Anne that Tina was sad because she got a horrible prize on
The Price Is Right.
She won a patio set, but unfortunately she and Ike lived in an apartment in Detroit and it barely had a working bathroom, let alone a place for a patio set—a set that would cost almost a thousand dollars to ship back home to Detroit. Ike and Tina didn’t even know anyone who had a patio. Tina wondered if the set would look good in the living room; she’d have to find someone to take the umbrella. Ike was mad at Tina because Tina convinced him to use their savings and take vacation time to be on
The Price Is Right.
He was also irritated that Tina wouldn’t stop asking him if she appeared disappointed when Bob said she would be playing Cliff Hangers. Tina was only asking him because she didn’t want to look ungrateful on national television. What would the church folks say if she did? A lot of people in their church would have killed to have a patio set.

I liked my story. I started laughing.

“Mmmhmmm,” Anne responded.

Mmmhmmm, what, bitch?
I wanted to say. Mmmhmmm, she’s crazy, or Mmmhmmm, I too wonder what people who live in Detroit apartments do when they win patio sets on
The Price Is Right
? My anger was growing because I’d barely had enough energy to get up that morning and I was getting tired of this PU and being a shining example of my race all because she got scared of my trying to pick up a battery.

Twenty cards later, when my mouth was desert-dry from all the stories, Anne pulled out the Rorschach. I told her every photo looked like a squashed bug except for the last one, which looked like a man with a lasso or a baby falling from an umbilical cord. I told her the umbilical cord one to let her know I was smart and knew the word
umbilical.
The word probably popped into my mind because, the week before, my mother had told me about a doctor she worked with who made fun of the black babies’ exotic names and had suggested the name Umbilical to one new mother. Not knowing the meaning and not wanting to offend the doctor, the lady had agreed that Umbilical was a nice name. After the doctor left, my mother had had to tell the new mother that the doctor was making fun of her.

Finally, Anne let me know the test was over and she’d give the results to my doctor tomorrow morning. I exhaled.

“I can’t wait,” I said, very seriously.

Thursday, 8 A.M.: 34 hours to go.

My doctor, Dr. Chase, and his team woke me. The doctor asked how I was feeling. His interns’ pens stood at attention, ready to take down every word my crazy mouth said.

“Better,” I replied. I wasn’t lying. Better than when I came in, but not good enough to be fine. The students in the semicircle around my bed started writing on their notepads.

All I said was
better.
Why are they writing a manifesto?

The doctor noticed my open notebook on the nightstand, took a look at the material, and said, “You’re studying some hard stuff there.”

Be normal, be normal, be normal! Say something normal so you can
leave.

“I’m really worried about missing my classes. If I miss this semester, I won’t have any money to continue,” I said, knowing damn well that I was not going to go to a single class. I was going to crawl right back into my bed at home. At least it was my bed.

He told me I should stay and give the treatments a chance. He thought I was seriously depressed, he said. I told him I felt good enough to leave today and I actually had just had an overreaction and I was not going to kill myself. I didn’t tell him it was all a misunderstanding. Normal people take responsibility.

He said if he couldn’t convince me to stay, he’d have the nurse bring forms for me to fill out.

“You’ll be signing out against medical advice, but I have to tell you, most patients who do that end up back here within a week.”

I told him I doubted if I’d be back, but I’d reconsider if they got some black people on the Thematic Apperception Test. His interns began scribbling notes again. I imagined that they were writing Jane Doe, BF, 21, leaving because there are no Negroes on our testing materials.

“Do you want a copy of your TAT results?” He opened his folder and held three sheets of stapled paper out to me.

I began reading the analysis. “Angela’s responses reveal a preoccupation with issues of race and physical appearance.”

Because I made some people black on their all-white test meant I was preoccupied with race? They needed to diagnose the testmaker as being preoccupied with the white race for not putting any black folks in the test.

Reading the results made me even more anxious to sign out against medical advice. I didn’t want to read any more. I folded the rest of the test results up and placed them in my pocket.

Before leaving to check on his next patient, Dr. Chase wrote me a prescription for Prozac and wished me well. His interns wished me nothing, at least not out loud. All of them walked through my door looking down at their pads, still writing notes.

I had few things to pack, but it took me an hour to gather the energy to move from my bed. When I steeled myself to face the outside world, I went to the nurses’ station to retrieve my one hazardous item (earrings). Ally was sitting there playing cards. “Do you want to play Spades before Cognitive Therapy?” she asked.

I smiled down at her. “I’d love to, but I’m leaving,” I replied, putting in my contraband earrings. “Told you,” I added as the bulletproof doors opened. I turned and walked through them like I was gliding down a catwalk, trying my best to blend in with the normal people.

Friday 8 P.M.: 10 hours of freedom. Nation of Islam Lite meeting.

For two hours before the meeting I sat in my apartment trying to figure out a way to get help from the conscious brothers and sisters without saying the word
depressed.
I finally settled on
sluggish.

“Does anyone have any recommendations for herbalists who deal with extreme, severe, desperate sluggishness?” I asked.

A grad student, Isis, gave me the name of a woman who was an herbalist as well as an iridologist.

“Makeba is good. She can tell your life story, your energy, and all your illnesses from looking at your eyes,” Isis told me.

Saturday, 10 A.M.: 24 hours of freedom.

Makeba greeted me with a stare so hard, so stiff, I half expected a computer printout to come from her mouth. Seriously, if you’re going to greet someone by staring, at least tell her what you see. She freaked me out; I was way too scared to tell her I needed herbs for depression, plus if she didn’t see it in my eyes, I must not have really needed any.

“I need herbs—for a rash,” I said, when she asked what I came for.

“Where is the rash?” she asked, still scanning my eyes.

“Between my legs,” I replied.

Damn, that’s what I got for not being honest and telling her what I really needed. Now she would think I have VD. What are you supposed to do when someone stares at you and doesn’t look away? It’s abnormal to stare at people; that’s why we have contests to see who can stare longest without blinking. I did have a rash between my legs, but it was on my upper inner thighs and it was just because I was fat and my legs rubbed together when I walked.

She started reaching for her tincture bottles. I needed to speak up before she mixed some Herpes-B-Gone concoction and called Isis to tell her I was burning. “The rash isn’t really bad. It’s between my legs on my thighs.”

She stopped shuffling the herb bottles. “A thigh rash? Do you know what caused it?”

“My other thigh,” I replied, very seriously.

She almost laughed, but stopped herself by focusing on my eyes again. I heard buzzing and clicking noises coming from her brain.

“Have you tried putting Band-Aids on your inner thighs when you wear skirts?” she asked, looking down at my thunder thighs. It didn’t take an iridologist to tell me I was overweight and Band-Aids would stop the chafe. I had read that tip on an online weight-loss message board.

Just tell her you’re depressed, I thought, but instead, I thanked her for the Band-Aid suggestion and bought some spirulina because she said it might help me lose weight.

The spirulina was of no use to me because I couldn’t OD on it, so I threw it out as soon as I got around the corner. Instead of going back to school, I walked ten blocks back to the hospital.

Saturday, noon: One minute left of freedom.

I walked into the Emergency Room and told the receptionist that I was just on the psych unit and needed to go back. When I got back up to my floor, I shoved my tail between my legs and swallowed my pride. It was like breaking up with a man, calling him a piece of shit, and then realizing he’s the best man out there and having to beg for him to take you back. My bed was still open; I was the last discharge and the newest admit.

Mentally ill people are the most forgiving bunch of people I’ve ever met. “We’ve all done it. Welcome back. Don’t touch me!” Rose with the combination dementia/Alzheimer’s said.

Her white old-lady friends actually hugged me. “Give it a shot,” Mary said, then sat down and told me she tried to bite a doctor the first time she was committed.

I apologized to Ally for dissing her. She snuck her curling iron into my room for the next two days, and then she was discharged.

The only person I wanted to stay away from was Gus, a tall white guy who was always a little jumpy, like he was high. He swore he was the don of the psych ward, telling anyone who would listen about how much money he had and how he could do whatever he wanted because he paid cash for his treatment.

Rose and her circle of old ladies became my primary hanging partners. Not that I’d had a change of opinion about white people but I only had energy for old people. They didn’t want much—mostly, just someone to listen to them—and that’s all I had to give.

My fourth night back, I was sitting there watching
Beverly Hills
Cop
with them and Gus sat uncomfortably close to me on the couch. “I’d like to stick a banana in your tailpipe,” he said, modeling a very vulgar come-on line after a scene in the movie.

“Could you get away from me?” I asked. He looked shocked, got up, and walked into the kitchen.

“He’s a real asshole,” Rose offered.

Gus came back chomping on a Saltine, with crumbs falling out of his mouth. He sat so close to me again he was rubbing up against my arm. I asked him once to stop. He moved away for a second, then rubbed his hand up and down my arm. I pulled back and clocked the shit out of him, aiming for his eye but hitting him on his ear.

“Nurse!” he yelled, holding his ear like it would fall off if he didn’t keep his palm pressed to it. “She violated the no-punching rule!”

A small female doctor ran up to me. “Sit down! Sit down!” she yelled. I started screaming at her.

“
He
rubbed up against me, yell at
him
! ”

Not one patient was having a manic moment or was caught in the grip of dementia. My yelling was more captivating than any medication, any phone call, anyone Eddie Murphy was arresting on the television set.

“I said
sit down
!” she yelled.

“Of course you’re not going to yell at the
white
guy! He can do whatever he wants!” I replied, refusing to sit. She ran to the phone, and soon two black security guards were buzzed through the doors toward me.

My mouth stayed on full blast. “Oh, sure, y’all do whatever the white woman says. Beat up the black woman for the white woman!” I said as they grabbed me under both arms and threw me into a restraining jacket. With me safely in the jacket, the doctor injected me with something.

When I woke up from the shot I was on another floor, locked in a room with only one window that looked out to an empty hallway. The floor was made of soft squares of padded foam. I was bored as hell, so I played hopscotch. Finally, I pounded on the door to try to get someone’s attention.

“I have to go to the bathroom!” I screamed, thinking that was an ingenious way to get someone to let me out. The door opened a crack and a nurse’s aide threw a plastic toilet in at me like she was throwing meat to a vicious animal. While I peed in it, I said hello to rock bottom. To this day, whenever I think I can’t get through something, I ask myself if it is worse than crouching in the corner of a foam room, peeing in a plastic toilet and hoping that no one decides to peek in the small window as I do it. If the answer is no, I keep on pushing forward.

Finally, I was deemed sane enough to get out of isolation, but not sane enough to go back to the floor I was on. Because of my ear punch, I was marked more dangerous and had to stay on Floor Two, with the psychotics and the schizophrenics. No need to search for black people up on Floor Two; it was all black. When word got out that I was from Floor One and was transferred to Floor Two for punching a white guy, I was Miss Popularity.