“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.
“I heard it was mostly white down there and you had to have private insurance,” my new roommate, Kay, said. “They throw the poor niggas up here.”
Besides the all-black population, there were two other big differences from the level I’d come from. On Floor One, almost every patient had visitors and it wasn’t uncommon for them to stay for the entire four hours they were allowed. On Floor Two, only one person had a visitor all day.
In Floor Two groups, when any of the doctors or group leaders tried to talk to the patients, they’d respond either with a shake of the head or with nothing at all. I fell right in line with the doctor-ignoring culture. I didn’t want people to think I was trying to be the cute light-skinned girl making friends with the enemy. My Occupational Therapy leader sighed in frustration, as if we were beyond help.
When I got out of the psych ward and researched black people and depression, I read numerous studies that detailed rampant misdiagnosing of depression as schizophrenia among African Americans. When black people show distrust of the system, as I had, by calling out, “Of course you’re not going to yell at the white guy,” they are often labeled delusional. It’s hard enough to navigate the mental health system with the right diagnosis. With the wrong diagnosis and no support from outside sources (whether your lack of visitors stems from keeping your hospitalization secret or because your family is ashamed of you), I have a hard time seeing how anyone could get better.
I didn’t want to be one of those people.
What I wanted to do was get off Floor Two. I knew I couldn’t do that by ignoring the group leaders and doctors, so I started talking. In morning meeting, I talked about how shitty I felt and how much I missed my cats, cringing as the other patients looked at me like I was a traitor. In Occupational Therapy, I answered every question asked. If no one interrupted me, I kept talking, certain that pouring out my soul about the emotions I felt while cutting up Jones New York ads would be my ticket to freedom.
“Your group leader thinks you’re manic,” Dr. Chase informed me. I cut my talking back by half.
Finally, two days later, I was allowed to go back downstairs. The official word as to why I was allowed back was that I was finally “behaving properly,” but two nurses and all the old ladies told me otherwise: Rose and her friends, Mary and Elizabeth, had refused to eat until they brought me back downstairs. Three old ladies went on a hunger strike for me!
“They didn’t have to straitjacket you!” Mary said.
“That was wrong. We’d been telling them for quite a while that Gus is a shit!” Elizabeth added.
I started smiling. Look at these three old white ladies with their own problems sticking up for me. They were widowed, with un-caring children, depression, and dementia, and they were sticking up for me. Maybe these frail white ladies weren’t devils.
Who cares if they are? I thought. What if I just do what I feel like doing and not worry about how people judge me for it?
I grabbed my tray off the rack and sat with my new friends.
It seemed like such a simple thing, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had done anything in front of people without fear of judgment. The uncomplicated act of sitting where I wanted to sit felt so powerful that I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer, grateful for the insanity and those three hungry old white ladies for giving me the kick start I needed.
For All My Dogs in the Hood
Census samples show that mixed marriages are more than twice as common in California— involving roughly one of every ten couples, compared to one of every twenty-five U.S. couples elsewhere—than the rest of the nation. And their rate is climbing in Los Angeles among younger adults.
—“Mixed Unions Changing the Face of Marriage,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1998
The temp office interviewer looked at my application. “It took you six years to graduate?” she asked.
“Yes, I took a few semesters off to save up tuition money,” I said. It was a half-truth, but I’m sure if I’d added “And a few semesters for this pesky depression problem I had,” she’d be screaming “Next in line, please!” faster than I could fill out my W-2 form.
After I stumbled my way through a Microsoft Excel test and cursed myself for majoring in Medical Anthropology, I had my official first job out of college. Starting Monday, I’d be assembling tax returns for the IRS.
My office was a small back room I shared with three other recent college graduates. Like me, they all searched Monster.com looking for a better gig when our supervisor left the room. Unlike me, they were all white.
It was only my second job where I was the only nonwhite person. I had gotten fired from the first job, seven years ago. Claire, a white girl I’d become friendly with, had asked me something I considered offensive while we were unpacking a new shipment of clothes.
“Can I ask you something? Exactly how much bigger are black men’s dicks? I’ve always been curious.”
I called her a nasty slut and started slamming the clothes on the racks so hard, customers stared in fear and moved to the other side of the store.
I didn’t talk much to any of my coworkers after that and got a reputation as rude. After the Christmas rush, I received my pink slip.
This time, I was determined to be a team player. I sat with my colleagues at lunch and tried to join in the conversation whenever possible. Usually, it wasn’t possible; I just had no point of reference for the things they talked about. My coworkers went to different bars, liked different music, and watched different televi
sion stations. “Did anyone catch In Living Color last night?” I’d say, to the sound of crickets chirping.
The third week of work, the lunch topic was our parents.
“My mother would drive through a hurricane to save fifteen cents,” Danielle said, picking at the Band-Aids she wore on the tips of her fingers to protect her from 1040EZ paper cuts.
“My mother, too!” I said, excited at a conversation I could finally participate in. “Her favorite store was the House of Bargains. It was in a really scary neighborhood where people were burning down black people’s houses. Once, this kid called me a nigger but my mother said to his mother, ‘How you going to call someone a nigger when you’re shopping in the House of Bargains?’ Puhlease.” I laughed, doing the best imitation of my mother’s voice.
When I looked at my coworkers’ faces, I felt like slinking out the back door. No one laughed with me, not even the sympathy laugh that bombing comedians get. Everyone sat shifting in their seats, trying to adjust to the uncomfortable cloud of silence now hanging over our cafeteria table. Danielle finally broke the silence, and my coworkers’ comments came tumbling out like dominoes.
“Oh, my God! It’s like you grew up in the sixties!”
“Angela, I had no idea. I am so sorry!”
Hey, I wanted to say, didn’t someone else just talk about their father passing out in a drunken stupor night after night? No one apologized for that! I felt so stupid; I was only trying to bond with my all-white coworkers instead of being stereotyped as the black girl who kept to herself. Now I was afraid that people thought I was trying to get sympathy by pulling out some dusty House of Bargains race card.
Of course, after I knew how they felt, I had to spend the next twenty minutes telling them it was all right. “Don’t feel bad, Jake! You weren’t the one who teased me! . . . No, Danielle, I know black women age more slowly than white women, but I’m only twenty-three. It wasn’t the sixties.”
Rebecca, a coworker from Missouri, asked for a list of books to read on “the black experience.” Of course, I was glad she was trying to learn. God bless her. But my job wasn’t to teach, it was to staple tax returns. I wasn’t going to be her Black World tour guide when the African American museum was right down the street from our office. Plus, if she started asking about racial shit that got me emotional, I might lose my job again. I had already slipped up by telling everyone the House of Bargains story. I’d have to go back to being the black woman worker who kept to herself. Better cold than angry, I thought, as Rebecca asked again for a list of black experience books.
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