In many cases the staffers, administrators, and psychiatrists were crazier, crueler, and more criminal than the bedlamites they reputedly supervised (note here for the record that Claude Foulk, the director of Napa State, was recently sentenced to 248 years for raping children all the way back to 1965). Napa State was plagued with one sex scandal, drug ring, and unjustifiable death after the next. It was a classic case of the inmates running the asylum, King of Hearts without the laughs. And Morris, just to protect his harem and be a hardass and get revenge on me for putting sneezing powder in his Kleenex, placing ads for him in various Bay Area singles’ and swingers’ papers (“I’m a pink vinyl and diaper-rash ointment kind of guy”), and pouring pancake syrup into his shoes, would bust me for anything—dealing coffee, breaking curfew, playing craps, or changing the channel on the TV without authorization.
Just before my second hearing for release came up, Morris got me kicked off Unit T-15 after I’d told the recreational therapist why I was still at Napa when I could have left long ago. I told her I’d had sex with a hundred female inmates, sometimes two at a time. Her recreational title had misled me and I thought she might be impressed or at least take my elaborate boast in the “recreational” spirit in which it was intended. I certainly didn’t think she’d tell Morris, but it turned out they were makin’ bacon (in his office) and so when he heard the news he told Fasstink and all of a sudden I was a “problem patient,” an “operator,” and though my various infractions amounted to little more than mischief they somehow through the Constitution of Lunacy qualified me as a “repeat offender” and justified my continued confinement without counsel or trial. For a long time I had my father, the prominent southern California circuit horse trainer, hiring attorneys to get me out, but once he learned that all I had needed from the beginning for a release from Napa State was to take a sexual harassment class he washed his hands of me. The larger point was forgotten, that I had done basically nothing to be sent and kept here indefinitely against my will.
2.Mudville / “I Wish It Would Rain”
IT’S DREARY HERE IN MUDVILLE: THE SPIRAL SHADOWS OF THE razor wire against the wire-mesh windows; the hoarfrost rime on the fluorescent bulbs, the milky moonlit halls; the ever-clicking barred and buzzing steel doors and Plexiglas partitioned chambers that make you feel like a poisoned wasp in an electric hive; the yellow-painted rooms and hard little beds; the furtive, whispering, purse-lipped Filipino faces peering at you through parted curtains; the cameras everywhere; the five-point restraints and B52 cocktails — B (50 mg. Benadryl), 5 (mg. Haldol), 2 (mg. Ativan) — when you get out of line; the wailing of inmates and the screaming of the gleaming peafowls; the murders, suicides, beatings, and rapes; the animal rhythm of food, rain, sex, and sleep. And more rain and sleep. And more and more sleep. Mandated biweekly injections of haloperidol (Haldol) blur your vision and destroy your powers. The days and then the years all blend together after a while.
One day they threw a birthday party for me — hamburgers, hot links, potato salad, strawberries, canned jalapenos, watermelon, Diet Dr. Pepper, brownies, and vanilla ice cream. The burgers were fresh ground one-third-pound beef. I ate two and spilled ketchup all over my shirt. It was a gorgeous day, 80 degrees with a slight breeze. Sturtz was there, along with a few other sorry-ass lifers, including Rey Waldo Diaz, Fuckface (no mystery as to how he earned his name), and Boothby with his long nightstick scar like a zipper up the side of his head. Some of the “clients” (as we were called by staff), sore about having been beaten or overmedicated or having had privileges revoked, would not eat the food funded privately for my party (despite the fact that I was an imp I was well liked) by the staff, and instead, in protest ate the crappy state hamburgers. (I was too angry then to thank them for this party. NSH staff, if you’re reading this, I apologize and thank you now.) Then they sang “Happy Birthday” to me. I thought it was a mistake when they told me I was thirty-two years old. I even laughed at the thought of totally wasting my life. It was funnier than the ketchup all over my shirt.
But at the party was a new inmate, Sofia Fouquet, twenty-seven years old. I had seen her watching me from a distance. She had a quick way of smiling that I thought at first was cracked or fake but after a time realized was authentic, measured bursts of warmth that seemed solely intended for me. Like me, she had been civilly committed, though she was in for suicide and would not be held long unless she botched her chances as I had. I did not normally get along with women. They were the reason I had been sent to Napa and the reason I stayed here and the reason if I ever get out I will be sent back. They were the torpedo that always sank me. But I could not resist a brooding Mediterranean beauty, cerebral and serene, who wanted to kill herself and who had come to my birthday party. I had also seen one of her photographic exhibitions at a gallery in Ferndale, in Humboldt County, a few years before all my trouble started. Her tide pool and shipwreck photos were as dark and melancholy as she was. She had read my columns and remembered me from her Ferndale exhibition, which she told me was the reason she had come to my birthday party. With a swift, insolent smile she looked at my ketchup stains and asked if I’d been shot.
No such luck, I told her.
We took a long stroll that evening and kept brushing against one another. Haldol is more intoxicating than bourbon, and compounded by the influence of Sofia I could barely walk. Three quarters of the asylum acres were off limits since the psych tech had been murdered, so we kept coming to a fence topped with coiled and glittering concertina wire (“Sure is a lotta barbed wire for a hospital,” she remarked at one point), and each time her eyes would blaze and she’d shake her hair and rail at the world outside. Why were we here? By what authority had our inferiors been allowed to put us in this zoo?
I was in full agreement. Our only crime was being born. How we drifted off into the trees I don’t remember, but I stumbled and she caught my hand. Sitting Indian style in the flittering shade, our knees touching, we whispered in the language of heat as the green leaves seethed and the words we used ceased to have meaning. Behind the Program 3 office, I kissed her. Too fast, I thought, but she kissed me back and everything shifted underneath and fell away to open space.
It’s always easier getting along with someone when you have no future with them, but how nuts is it to meet the woman of your dreams in a nuthouse? To keep creeps like Morris and Cecil from having their way with her, I used my influence and networks to protect her. She called me Big Eddie and said that I was the funniest, bravest person she’d ever met. She spoke a beguilingly fastidious German that convinced many it was genuine until she arrived at the final made-up word in her sentence, düdüscheiner, slutprincessan, or das nincompoopen.
When Morris told me she was undergoing ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), I confronted her.
“It is voluntary,” she said. “For depression.”
“You must be crazy,” I said.
“Shocking, isn’t it?”
“You’ll lose your memory.”
She sucked in her cheeks and crossed her eyes. “Promise?”
In her first month she taped to the wall above her bed a reproduction of Millet’s The Angelus, which she said Salvador Dalí asserted was not a spiritual or pastoral work as the critics had decided but that the two figures were praying over their buried child. Dalí insisted on this so vehemently, Sofia said, that eventually an X-ray was taken of the canvas, where a painted-over shape similar to a coffin was discovered.
“That is my little baby, too,” she said, pointing in the area of the coffin.
“Your baby?”
“Olivia,” she said.
“How long ago did you lose Olivia?” I asked.
“It’s been five years,” she said. “She was only two.”
“You are young enough to try again.”
She turned away and said, “That is not the point.”
Raindrops began to tap the glass then, and I thought of the exquisitely sad Temptations song: “I Wish It Would Rain.”
“What is the point?” I asked.
She wiped her face. “It is the same heartbreak every day,” she said, fighting tears. “It does not diminish.”
“I will try to help you forget,” I said. “I have undertaken a Crusade of Oblivion myself. You should quit the ECT and get rid of that morose painting.”
“I know.” She endeavored a valiant smile. “I cling too fondly to loss.” She tore the painting down. “Dalí was an asshole anyway.”
Sofia suspended the ECT and joined my Crusade of Oblivion. We gamboled the woods, sneaked off into the back wards, tossed the egg (with the insides blown out so it was hollow) and the coffee can lid. We golfed in the halls, argued about Kafka and grappa, sang improvised campfire songs, paid exorbitant underground rates for her precious English cheese, and played gin rummy while sipping from foam cups of smuggledin cognac before an Amish electric fire.
One day Sofia borrowed a pair of reading glasses, pulled her hair into a bun, and wearing one of Morris’s lab jackets went around visiting patients and pronouncing in a German accent with her chin nested in her fingers: “Hmmm, well mein liebchen, it’s obvious you’re a cuckoo.” We both had level-three ground passes — you could buy one for one or two cigarettes — and we would share courtyard time and go to the commissary and Crossroads together and at every opportunity wander over to T-13 or the S-Complex to use the Gateway computers. I had begun a story about a man unfairly incarcerated in a mental hospital who meets a wandering goddess trapped among the mortals. Once, Dr. Pettipiece, who was widely known to smoke joints with his patients, found us on the monkey bars and hollered at us until he was red in the face. Sofia screeched at the old doper like a chimp and furiously scratched her armpits while I told him in a German accent that he was obviously a cuckoo.
A hospital is no place to carry on a wine-country romance, so whenever we could we would run off behind the trees. I had not been monogamous since my marriage to my Chinese former wife, Fang-Hua, whom I still loved — though love is neither pain nor betrayal, so I’ve got the wrong word. The grounds teemed with wild peafowls some eccentric had imported long ago from India in the belief that they would cheer up the residents, even if they shrieked and bred like rats. One time after Sofia and I had made love in the shadows of the woods Sofia began to talk about what we were going to do when we got out and it finally dawned on me what all this meant. The course of my life came to light: I’d run this gauntlet of agony and injustice solely to meet her.
Sofia was out in six months, deceiving her team and meeting all the discharge criteria with flying colors. I kissed her at the gate and looked back at this daft palace of damnation that had held me for more than five years. But my time here was coming to a close. I was young enough to start over, and I knew I could do it with Sofia.
“If I can’t get released legitimately,” I whispered to her through the bars, “I’ll saddle up one of these peacocks and fly out.”
“Bring one for me,” she whispered back, her sultry brown eyes shimmering. “I always wanted a peacock as a child.”
“We’ll run away to some foggy little fishing village where you can take gloomy photographs and I’ll crank out the great American loony bin novel. And we’ll have baby peacocks.”
“I love you, Big Eddie,” she said. “And I promise to write you every single day.”
We held hands until the psych tech dragged me away.
That day I ditched all my schemes, tore up my racket sheets, and took a vow of chastity. I swallowed my Irish pride with two cans of diet root beer and ceased to respond to provocations from patients and staffers alike. I had known all along how to talk to the shrinks but now I saw the wisdom of actually doing it. Like any good conversation, it works best when you show interest in the person you’re talking to, so along with agreeing when it was useful, volunteering shopworn phrases such as “becoming proactive,” “changing my ways,” and “accepting responsibility,” guarding their dirty little Bedlam secrets, and massaging regions of credibility that would one day be regarded as fairy tales or mass delusion, I always tried to chat about the doctor’s home life — the lawn mower, the daughter at Stanford, and that frustration in the bedroom, whatever they were comfortable discussing. It was not about milking them for information. It was about building trust, making them believe, as Sofia had done, that I was on the mend, that pharmaceuticals and neuroscience and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders were the only road to social re-entry for me.
Morris was the hardest to appease. I apologized for all the crap I’d pulled: buying him a muscle magazine subscription, enlisting him in the U. S. Marines, wedging pennies in the jamb of his office door so he couldn’t get out, making him look bad on the basketball court, and blowing his cover on the female patients he took home on the weekends. I told Morris he’d have no more problems with me, then bewildered him by giving him all my coffee, cigarettes, and bingo cards. I took over recycling for our unit and within the month we had $147, enough for tri-tip and potato salad instead of the usual nachos and ice cream. I started working fourteen hours a week in the cafeteria, eight in the library, and reluctantly signed up for that sexual harassment class offered twice a year. Whenever Jody, the gay nurse, would give me my Haldol injections he would try and hit my sciatic nerve just to see me jump, but I pretended he was making love to me and moaned with pleasure. I could do anything for Sofia. She stood in the center of my mind like the light of God. I pored over the letters she wrote daily, held them, and smelled them, and taped them to my walls.
Then one day the letters stopped coming. I thought at first that they’d been intercepted, a common practice. The last letter was full of remarks about futility and death and had been signed “Persephone.” When I asked that Dinky Russian Stinkpot Dr. Fasstink, he told me with a wiry little smile that Sofia had taken her life. I said in dull shock that I did not believe him. She had jumped from a window, he said, and if I cared to look, the obituary was in the Chronicle. I had not been told the news because it would have upset me and possibly required another increase in my antipsychotic regimen, and we didn’t want that, did we? The old doctor, wearing an ill-concealed simper, had to help me to the door, saying over and over, “I’m sorry, my lad. I’m sorry, my boy.”
3.Dyskinesia
THE YEARS WHIRLED AWAY LIKE THE VAPOR FROM A BAD DREAM. But I believe from a comment made by one of the drug nurses after it happened that I was thirty-six when I got into a fight with double-felon Kenny Monique. I probably should not have fought him since he was a habitual criminal who had once boxed professionally, and I had been wandering numbly up and down the corridors, refusing to speak and only eating enough to keep them from feeding me through a tube. But I did not like Kenny, who had murdered a pharmacist and gotten off with an insanity plea, nor did I like being called a “dicklicking Mick.” A meth addict with access to Ritalin, he had also learned how to steal diabetic syringes from the treatment room. I had stopped fighting on a regular basis since Sofia had died, so he quickly got the better of me and rammed me headfirst into a wall. Just before I blacked out I thought he had broken my neck and I thought good, but I came to some indeterminable time later with nothing but a black void and buzzing prism-shaped bats across my field of vision, the flesh of my forehead wired together with what felt like guitar string. For a while there was talk of moving me out of circulation, especially since I could see the intermeshing cogs of time and how you could jump between them like a nursery rhyme cow and know for instance the name of the unnerved person who had just entered your room. If I had not regained my eyesight within a few weeks I’m certain I would have gotten discharged from Mudville.
I remember the ceaseless monsoon of winter, and then another wet gray winter, and then Arn Boothby, the three-hundred-pound paranoid schizophrenic who threw a fellow inmate through a glass case, though he really wasn’t such a bad guy, died. They said natural causes, but he was only forty-six. He had always told me that after he died he’d come back and te
ll me what it was like on the other side, so I think it was his spirit that woke me up one day when there was no one else in my room: “None of this is as bad as you think,” the voice whispered, “and God is a chocolate donut.” It was Boothby’s laugh, without a doubt, and I laughed too, the first time a sound like that had passed from my lips since Kenny Monique had bulldozed me into that wall.
Since random sex takes about fifteen minutes and the three meals all told take about an hour and a half and the horned peacock in the oak tree outside your window makes sure you only get eight hours of sleep a night, there is a lot of unfilled time and by the time I turned forty I’d borrowed and read every book at NSH, and had become something of an expert on trivial subjects, especially pop music. I’ll tell you, sitting there in your living room, it’s a lucky thing we’ve got these snake pits like Napa so that we can keep people like Sturtz, the barber who killed his brother over a cinnamon roll, out of the general population. But the guy was bright, and for hours in his room we’d play “What’s that tune?” — a cigarette for every song you guessed right first. I’d usually come out after thirty or forty songs, six or seven cigarettes ahead. Cigarettes went for ten dollars or more apiece, so for a single smoke you could get a bottle of Morris’s homebrew, a high-level ground pass, an extra hour of television, or the butter-roasted whole walnuts or halvah that Zaahida in T-6 received from her Uncle Baba in Jordan.
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