Whirlaway

by Poe Ballantine

  Sturtz, whose family had lived in Napa Valley for over a century, told me that Napa State had once been self-sufficient, a sylvan, sprawling, magnificent Vermont-slate, Florentine-Moorish castle with its own gardens, orchards, bakery, dairy, livestock, carriage houses, barns, forges, newspaper, and cemetery. Originally constructed as a spillover for Stockton Asylum, Napa Asylum for the Insane, since it was located deep in the hinterland, took Stockton’s worst cases, the “chronically insane.” Staff and patients lived together on the same grounds. Like monks, they made whatever they needed: shoes, clothes, music, cheese, coal gas, furniture, bread, even beer. An underground railroad conveyed meals and laundry to the various wards. Patients were rarely discharged, they simply finished their lives here. Among these were paupers, the homeless, those without family, the invisible class. As the years passed and the city and lucrative wineries and vineyards closed in around the asylum, monastic self-sufficiency gradually gave way to urban interdependency and the techno-electro-chemical revolution. It was the Age of Anxiety and the Benighted Soul. With Mudville’s eventual designation as “forensic” (criminal), sixteen-foot razor-wire-crowned fences were installed.

  In the days of its idyllic independence, thousands of patients had been buried at NSH, though most of the markers had been uprooted and displaced over time. Sturtz thought that some of the bodies of those who died questionably or unjustly must have been hidden in Mudville walls, for occasionally the corridors reeked with the odor of death. Countless efforts to unearth the source, basement and attic explorations, left the matter unexplained. Perhaps it was the many catastrophic river and sewer floods that had swamped the town and its storied madhouse and subway tunnels, or possibly, I suggested, it was some ghastly immaterial remnant of those who had departed unhappily from these premises.

  “Yeah, but who sang ‘Build Me Up Buttercup?’”

  “The Foundations. And don’t call me Buttercup.”

  “Bingo, Daddy-O.”

  You’re always told when you’re going to get out, four months, seven months, two years, six if you’re a good little boy or girl, and you’ll tell everyone as if you just won a ticket to Wonka’s chocolate factory: “I’m getting out in four months.” It is the highlight of any inmate’s life (and for most of us a chance to unleash once again on society). I had been told many times that I was going to get out, but something always came up, and it was plain after a while that my fate was stamped, that I was going to stay here forever with the killers and the cuckoos and the cons.

  Death is one of God’s better ideas, and I was ready to jump into its sweet marshmallow middle with the faint hope that I would somehow find Sofia Fouquet on the other side. But then one day after one of the aides reminded me that another year had passed and it was now my forty-first birthday this ruddy, broad-chested, clear-eyed man with a nose like a boat rudder and a forehead upon which you could’ve set a dinner for four, and these long soft plumes of gray hair down to his shoulders, strolled into my room, hands in the pockets of his smock. I was listening to the radio, having a Diet Pepsi, and staring at my misogynist Hoopa roommate, Earl Nez, who never talked but always shared with me his acorn bread. The shrinks were all alike, so I didn’t waste much energy on them. He introduced himself as Dr. Horace Jangler and said he had taken over for Fasstink.

  “Terrific,” I said. “I hope he fell off a bridge.”

  Jangler said that Fasstink had retired.

  I said that did not preclude him from falling off a bridge.

  “Oh, an optimist,” he said with a chuckle and asked if I’d like to take a walk.

  I hadn’t been outside in memory, and the sun hurt my eyes. We followed the trails that reminded me of Sofia. Dr. Jangler unlocked a gate and we hiked down into a heavily wooded area where the inmate population was normally not allowed. At the bottom of the trail was a lake upon which floated a single black swan. Dr. Jangler gestured to a stone bench under an ash tree and asked me to sit. I declined his offer of a cigarette. “I don’t smoke money,” I said.

  “Nor should you,” he replied. “Nasty habit.”

  “Pretty lake,” I said. “Never been down here.”

  “Do you miss San Diego?” he asked.

  “Doubt if I’d recognize it.”

  “It’s the same city,” he said, “just bigger, that’s all.” He mentioned a few San Diego institutions, the Chart House, Saska’s, Mister A’s, the lowly Padres, the Belly Up Tavern, all still in operation.

  “What about Golden Hall?” I said.

  “Still there.”

  “I saw Neil Young there.”

  “I saw the Grateful Dead there.”

  I said that I had seen the Grateful Dead at Golden Hall too.

  “Imagine that,” he said with a grin. “We might’ve even been sitting next to each other.”

  “I would’ve been too drunk to notice.”

  “That open bar,” he said, with a fond wag of the head. “I see your father is Calvin Plum.”

  “The Great Calvin Plum,” I replied, unable to muster any enthusiasm.

  “I know all about your Plum Variable. Used to use it myself. Once, long back when I was teaching at Tulane, I got six winners at Louisiana Downs strictly using Plum and closing quarter fractions.”

  “No charge,” I said.

  “They’ve got you in the SDSU Hall of Fame.”

  “No, really?”

  “I’m an Aztec, too.” He puffed up a bit. “Graduated ’81.”

  “The year before me,” I said.

  “Funny we never ran into each other.”

  “Big campus,” I said. “And I never took any psych classes. Probably should have. Ha.”

  He watched my right foot shaking up and down and side to side.

  “Dyskinesia,” I said. “From the Haldol.”

  He wiped his hand down his face and stared down at the water. “This is my first hospital job,” he explained. “Had no idea what was going on here. Appalling conditions.”

  “Chamber of Horrors,” I said.

  He rubbed his chin. “First thing I did was review the histories of all my patients who hadn’t committed felonies. Pretty short list.” He paused. “You don’t belong here.”

  “I’ve been telling them that since I arrived.”

  He lit himself another cigarette. “When was the last time you were outside?”

  “Had my appendix pulled a few years ago.”

  “Why don’t we take a drive through the country tomorrow?”

  4.Life Begins at Forty-One

  EVERY AFTERNOON FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS I’D CLIMB INTO DR. Jangler’s black BMW with Boston or Beethoven playing and we’d drive out the hospital gates and into the valley, following the river and the contours of the green hills with their overgrown chateaus and rows upon rows of world-class grapes. Jangler would smoke, periodically tapping his cigarette into a little bean-bag ashtray on the dash. He rarely talked about matters psychiatric; instead it was mutual San Diego-flavored ground, old girlfriends or Dave Winfield or the great nine-year-old-thoroughbred John Henry, the Charity Ball, or the bare breasts of Miss Emerson at the Over-the-Line Tournament. Each day we stopped at the same Italian restaurant, where he encouraged me because I was so thin to go for the butter and cream. I knew he was studying me to see how I might behave in the free world. I always put my napkin in my lap and chewed slowly with my mouth closed.

  At the end of the week we met in his office. He had his feet on the desk. “There’s only so much I can do here, Eddie,” he said, hands folded on his chest. “I’ve replaced an old regime, but the new one I’m afraid isn’t much better. There’s a lot of public pressure on this institution to keep its inmates out of the community.” He paused. “But I think if you can agree to a few things, taking that class, of course, and doing some volunteer work with a few of the patients, there’s a good chance I can get you out of this.”

  “I can’t take that class,” I said. “I signed up before, but that was to see Sofia. And now she’s gon
e. If I took that class now it would be admitting I’m a sexual offender, and I’m not. What else have I got left but my integrity? I said a few lousy things to some women I didn’t know, but I never touched any of them. I’m not a violent person, except in this cesspool of maniacs where I’m forced to defend myself.”

  “I applaud your stand,” he said. “But you’ll have to meet me halfway on this, otherwise I won’t be able to help you. If you don’t learn to compromise you’ll never get out of here.”

  “All right. And the haloperidol?”

  “I’ve cut your dose in half. We’ll see how you do.”

  That Sunday I went to church for the first time in twenty years, attending the Protestant service because it was shorter and I liked the pastor, a Japanese antilapsarian dentist named Watanabe. Once again, I signed up to take the harassment class and re-enrolled for volunteer labor in the laundry and canteen. I also started attending AA meetings and began to work with some of the schizophrenics in my unit on t-12, one in particular, a crippled twenty-eight-year-old named Jericho Sunday. A high school football star from the East Bay, Jericho had tried to kill himself by driving his ’95 Camaro off a cliff. At great speed, before he could make the cliff’s edge, he smashed into a tree, permanently damaging both legs. Because he walked in a stiff-legged fashion like an emu or an elephant bird and had not been able to get airborne on his suicide flight before hitting that tree, everyone called him Flightless.

  Flightless had angels in his head. He’d say, “My angels tell me you’re a dirty butthole,” or “My angels won’t let me buy commissary today.” And if his angels told him something, that was it. But his angels were also telling him to punch staff members in the face and he would get up during TV shows and fight with female employees. The guy was six-four, 265, about my size before I quit eating. They called him The Enforcer when he played linebacker in high school.

  So he was put on one-to-one, round-the-clock supervision by at least one staff member. I got him off one-to-one by telling him jokes, buying him cans of pop, and talking about horses and football and his favorite team, the Cal Golden Bears. The breakthrough came when he lent me his Sports Illustrated and we laughed about Dusty Baker yanking Russ Ortiz in the seventh so the Giants could swirl down the toilet. “Champagne on ice and so is Disney,” he said, which is the way the voices used to sound in my head, too, until the Haldol and the lithium carbonate made them go away. Anyway, I gave Flightless back his Sports Illustrated within twenty-four hours, won his trust, and eventually he was assigned one-to-eight staff coverage and could sleep with his door closed instead of having to have his door propped open and a staffer sitting with him in his room.

  I also worked with a kid who had shot three people at his high school and a serial rapist (they always seem to have prostitutes for mothers) and a Taiwanese pedophile named Vic Wang, and since I was more sympathetic to their situations, understood personally their stunted development, disgraceful upbringing, festering minds, was not afraid of them, and refused to use words that contained the root psyche, I think I was more effective in many cases than the shrinks or the techs themselves.

  After I’d taken the harassment class and passed the exam, Dr. Jangler took me for a long drive. He was strangely quiet. It was a Friday. He went to the river just past downtown Napa and parked along the wall. We got out. He stared at the river. “Got some bad news and some good news,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Bad news is I can’t get you out.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ve built up too much rancor. You’ve got this ticky-tack rap sheet a mile long. Most of them up there would just as soon see you rot at Napa State.”

  “What’s the good news?”

  “Good news is you don’t have to go back if you don’t want to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m busting you out.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll just tell them you bolted and jumped into the river. I followed but lost you. It’s stated explicitly in your record that you don’t know how to swim. In my opinion you drowned. Frankly, I think that will come as welcome news. I’m driving back to San Diego tonight. You can ride with me while they drag the marsh. You’ve got people there, yes?”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve been back, but a few, yeah, and my father.”

  “Don’t look so flabbergasted, Eddie.”

  “But how can you do this?”

  “How can I not do this. You’ve spent more than a third of your life in a mental hospital because you stole some suits?”

  “Aren’t you going to get into trouble?”

  “Patients escape all the time. Anyway, I’m not sticking around much longer myself.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Don’t know yet. Who knows? This place is a discredit to the human race. I’ve never seen such deplorable treatment of patients. I had no idea what I was getting into when I accepted this position.” He drew a package of cigs from his smock pocket, shook out and lit one. “Besides, I’m not really a psychiatrist.”

  “What?”

  “I was a theater major at San Diego State.”

  “How did you . . .”

  “I’m an actor, and a pretty fair one at that, but it’s hard to get steady work. So I create my own roles. In the last decade I’ve been a trial lawyer, the mayor of Reno, and the captain of an oil tanker. Before that I was a literature professor at Tulane. Certain jobs are all about presentation. I’m thinking about becoming a cosmologist next, all you have to say is ‘quantum vacuum field’ and the audience is yours. Anyway, if you’re up for it I’ve brought you a change of clothes and a little disguise.” He opened his trunk. “Get into all this after I’ve gone. I’ll pick you up in front of that Italian restaurant around six, how does that sound?”

  “What about my medications?”

  “I can write you all the scrips you like, but my suspicion is that you don’t need them.”

  “But you’re not a psychiatrist.”

  “We’ll iron out the fine points later. Right now I need to get back and report you missing. So plunge down the bank and dash along the river there, if you don’t mind. I’ll shout at you a few times from the window, and then I’ll see you in about three hours. You remember where the Italian restaurant is?”

  5.Chivalrous Deceptions

  I SLEPT MOST OF THE LONG DRIVE SOUTH. THE WARM, GLOWING green chamber of Jangler’s BMW was like a return to the womb. Freedom was out there in the night with the city lights like unfriendly faces. I recalled the prostitute at the Mustang Ranch outside of Reno who had explained to me with a sneer just before I fell apart how I was one of the favored millions who lived on the degradation of the rest. My dreams were vivid and bizarre. In one I was going to bet a horse I felt good about. A tiny Chinese man had his twisted head sticking out of a wall, behind which I found a basement room, inside of which was a very cool couple in their fifties, a man with white hair pulled back into a ponytail and his attractive and buxom black wife. The room was furnished in an early capital-punishment theme and filled with endearing frippery such as whirling monkeys on bronze seats, an empty radioactive canister, some sharpened battle axes, and a television that was covered until a second glance revealed it was not covered. I had had many psychic episodes and prophetic dreams, and they had all spelled disaster, yet hope remained that this was my future, that the ethereal man in the dream was me.

  The rising sun was lighting the ocean when Jangler took the Via De La Valle exit off of Interstate 5, turned down the ramp and pulled into the Denny’s parking lot just around the corner from the Del Mar Racetrack. It is cool here every morning, the tentacle shrouds and mists crawling in off the sea. Denny’s had always been a joke, with papery, undercooked hash browns, greasy, slippery eggs, and overcooked spaghetti, but this morning it felt like a godsend. We took a booth by a window.

  The waitress appeared, her nametag read: SHEILA.

  “Coffee?” I asked.


  Sheila was confused. “Yes,” she said. “We . . . have coffee.”

  “I haven’t had a cup in years. Coffee is black market where I come from.”

  Now Sheila looked worried.

  Jangler laughed. “He’s been in a quantum vacuum field.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  I stared at the menu. My hands were shaking (the tremor is still with me). Jangler ordered for us. The coffee came. Coffee was black market at Napa because it was considered a drug. Two gulps in and you could appreciate why. I began to hum. I poured in some cream. The sun cracked a cloud and lit the room.

  We ate with the sun drenching the orange freckles on the backs of my trembling hands. Jangler looked tired but serene. I saw him pulling chivalrous deceptions wherever he went as he amused himself in the pursuit of a higher cause. No one had ever taken this much risk on my behalf (it felt almost fatherly) and it made me intent on success, however that might be defined, outside asylum walls.

  After we’d finished eating he slid across an envelope. Inside was loose cash and the driver’s license of a shellac-faced and felonious looking longhair named Willie Wihooley. “They had a bunch of drivers’ licenses left over from dead patients,” Jangler explained, “and I picked the one that looked most like you. Irish at least. It’s expired, but you can get it renewed. The DMV doesn’t do background checks. You see there are some scrips in there, for Haldol, clozapine, some tricyclics, tranqs, whatever you think you might need. Write to me or call if you need more, codename Willie. Probably best to have them filled in Mexico.”

  “Where did the money come from?”

  “Discretionary funds. Thirteen hundred was as much as I could raise. I threw in a bit of my own. Call it a donation to a good cause.”

  “Long as you don’t try to claim it as a deduction.”

  “The state owes you a lot more than that. They owe you a new life.”

  “I don’t care. I’m just glad to be free.”