A man named Lester skulked up to me first, inspecting every crevice of the dayroom before advancing the few final feet between us.
“You with them, or us?” he asked me.
I leaned close, my eyes jutting out to either side before I spoke. “Double agent,” I said, doing another sweep of the room for eavesdroppers.
My new co-conspirator walked off with a complicit nod, still convinced that vending machines had acquired intelligence and were conspiring to form a new world order.
“Don’t fuck with him, he’s bat shit.”
I turned to find a young man in his twenties. He had a medium stature and a shock of white-blonde hair. His arms were scarred with a thick pelt of self inflicted hatred and an emotional pain so deep that the only way he knew how to purify himself was with the cutting edge of some sharp instrument.
“You got a razor?” he asked me.
“No.” I shook my head for emphasis.
“Damn. Sometimes they slip up and let one in.” He sulked for a moment then brightened at a new thought. “They call me Snow. You wanna fuck?”
I stared at him. “Ah…, not right now. Maybe later?”
“Okay.” He wandered off with a slight skip and a smile.
I couldn’t tell if he was friend number two or not.
Mr. Bryant greeted me next, his eyes doing a thorough scan of the floor and his brain unconsciously tabulating the number of human feet on its surface. The authorized number varied indiscriminately, if there was an excess then Mr. Bryant would start warbling at the top of his lungs and not stop until the required number of people had leapt onto the nearest bed. This included staff.
Q-tip was next. He was an old black man with a snarled white afro at least a foot tall. He had been abducted by aliens and sexually abused and experimented on, as had his father and grandfather before him.
There was Tiny, a 370 pound 6’5’ pound of flesh whom even the staff tried to avoid. He was harmless, but his eyes were perpetually red rimmed and menacing; staring into a past that included watching his wife mix heroin and Magic Shave together and plunging it into her veins, killing her and their unborn child. He rarely spoke of this, or anything else.
The last person I met was Thai. He was a short man of some obscure Asian descent who had a placidity about him that resembled an almost eerie catatonia. He also spoke very rarely, and only in broken English, usually reverting to pointing and nodding to communicate. To me he seemed the sanest man there, but Lester thought him a spy and avoided him at all costs.
There were others that came and went, but this was the core of the group that I lived with for the six years that I was at the Birch Building. All in all, they were some of the gentlest people I ever knew.
“You want some coffee?” a man asked after I’d found my bunk and started putting my things away.
I looked him over before I accepted. At Sanctuary there were several unvocalized meanings behind both the question and the answer, but my interrogator was a stooped old man who hardly seemed the type to be roaming for sex.
“Sure.”
“Hang on.” He left and came back with a small jar from which he placed two scoops into my cup. He waited until I had finished unpacking and brought me on a small tour of the place; showing me the bathrooms, the nurses’ station, the view from the windows, and all the other minute little details that made up this little world.
He introduced himself as Mr. Goss and took me around another time to meet all the residents of the pod, as if they hadn’t already met me the first time. While he was explaining the activities the institution offered to break the monotony, we passed Snow’s room. Snow took one look at me, at Mr. Goss, and then at my cup and burst into laughter.
About an hour later I found out why. Snow stopped in my room with a big shit eating grin on his face. “You been to the bathroom yet?”
“No,” I answered slowly, “I was just going. Why?”
“Mr. Goss is gonna want that.”
“What?” I asked.
“Your piss.”
“What?”
“He wants your piss. That’s why he gave you the coffee,” Snow said with a huge grin of mirth. “Look outside your door.”
I got off the bunk and went to the door. Mr. Goss stood nearby, a cup in his hand, his gaze direct and expectant. I turned back to Snow.
“What the fuck does he want my piss for?”
“Get your essence,” Snow answered. “He won’t stop until he gets it, so you might as well give it to him now.”
“Like hell!”
“He’s not going to drink it or anything, just swish it around in his mouth for a bit, like the old time doctors used to do.”
“No way.” I repeated firmly.
“Suit yourself,” Snow said as he got up and walk out.
I spent the next three days running from Mr. Goss, my bladder the size of an inner tube. He finally caught me one bleary eyed morning as I stood at the urinal. It was a group commode that some smart ass had designed like a round water fountain for elementary schools and psych wards.
I was still half asleep, not quite use to the new anti-depressants I’d been put on, when Goss struck; interrupting my stream with quick cupped hands and an open mouth. In shock I watched him slurp it up and wipe the excess across his face in some parody of the Three Stooges. He stood serenely, smiled, and after some urinary consternation, declared me to be a person with whom he could now associate.
“Good people,” he informed me about myself.
“Mr. Goss always gets his man,” Snow proclaimed with a chuckle as he walked in.
*****
“So what’s your story?” Snow asked after I’d been there a few weeks. “You don’t talk to anyone. You sit in your room all day and read. What the fuck are you doing here?”
Mr. Bryant went off just then, driving Snow onto my bed with a leap.
“Son of a bitch!” he yelped. “I hate it when he does that shit.” He peeked cautiously around the corner of the door, put one foot down, then the other, priming himself for another leap should Mr. Bryant’s alarm go off again. Finally he sat down on the bunk with me and pulled his legs up Indian style. “So?”
“It’s a long story.”
“You going somewhere?” he asked.
“No, I just don’t want to talk about it.”
He put his hand on my arm and rubbed it gently. “I ain’t trying to pry. You just look like you needed someone to talk to. You keep it in and it just fucks with your head. I know,” he added as he turned out his arms and exposed his scars to me.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Like you, it’s a long story. The short of it is that I had teenage cousins that started fucking me when I was six. They took me willingly or unwillingly, they didn’t care. Then they started pimping me out to their friends.” He motioned down to his arms. “It was my only escape. Still is, sometimes.”
“Jesus,” I said as I ran a finger over his pelt of scars.
“It doesn’t hurt, it’s like this big flood of release,” he explained. “Need some coffee?” he joked, swirling his tongue around his lips with a laugh. He got up off the bed and looked down at me. “Well, whenever you want to talk...” he said leaving the room.
“I’m gay,” I blurted.
“Hell, I know that.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“’Cause you’re gay?” he asked as he came back in and sat down again.
I nodded, tears forming before I could stop them. I slumped and let my story flow out of me. I finished by telling him of the dreams I’d had of Robert and myself when I was at Sanctuary.
“I keep trying to put him out of my head,” I explained, “but it feels like he’s right behind me, poking me in the shoulder. I can still smell him, feel his skin, like he’s going to show up and make me feel safe again.”
“They can’t separate you forever. He’ll find a way. He might write,” Snow offered.
“He can’t,” I said bef
ore I burst into tears again. When I calmed some time later I explained to him how Charlotte on her one and only visit to Sanctuary had broken the news of his death.
*****
Robbins came and collected me from my room with a sneer. “You got a visit.”
“A visit?” I asked with excitement. I jumped from the bed and watched Robbins’s grin grow long across his face, then I remembered. The Bug. “No. I don’t want it.”
“They said it’s your mom, fag boy. She might decide to let you out. But either way, visit or not, you’re going to the Bug just for making me walk all the way down here for you.”
“Just go, Charles,” my roommate said. “It might be a chance to get out.”
I nodded resolutely, following Robbins down to the White Room like a martyr. But trepidation gripped me as we got closer and Robbins grabbed me to propel me forward, laughing that no one ever made it all the way down there without chickening out.
When I finally saw Charlotte some time later I was still trembling with aftershocks. She was dressed as if going to a Sunday outing after church; a long creamy dress, short flat shoes and a wide brimmed hat. She looked down her nose at me with a sneer, her lips tight against her teeth. “You look like you’re developing tics, Charles.”
When she flouted Minot’s credo any fantasy I might have had of going home evaporated into pure malice. My eyes cinched tight around her lips, watching them move but not hearing anything until she spoke Robert’s name.
“He’s dead. He committed suicide three days after you got here. I hope you’re happy.” She stared at me for a long minute, pulled her gloves out of her purse and left without another word.
*****
“I got this letter, and haven’t heard from her since,” I told Snow, pulling Charlotte’s note from among my things.
“What a fucking bitch,” he declared after reading it.
“She never wanted me,” I said.
“You can’t know that”
I recalled a conversation I walked in on between Jarrel and my grandfather.
*****
“She’s never wanted him,” Jarrel was saying as I came in.
“Of course she wanted him you damn fool! What kind of mother doesn’t want her own child?”
The silence that followed answered it all. But it was the convictionless edge in my grandfather’s words that I remembered most; their defensiveness, and their bold proclamation of a truth he did not want to face. I finally knew what it was like to feel truly unwanted; to understand the cold stare of life-long contempt. It made me acknowledge that old feeling of emptiness that I had always had but never quite understood.
My grandfather noticed me only moments after, the shocked realization on my face paining his own and confirming the truth of it.
Jarrel walked out of the room wordlessly.
“I’m sorry, Snapper” my grandfather said.
For what, I wanted to ask. That he had raised her? Spoken the truth? That he had not been able to eliminate Charlotte’s hostile greed and selfishness? I realized just at that moment what the slow drip of acid she’d always carried in her eyes for me was about.
I was like the rain; an annoyance that tousled her hair and muddied her life. But rain had no value unless you were farmers, which we weren’t. Sharecroppers neither; unless you count the delusions we so generously shared with the rest of the world. Our family had only pain to share; a windswept misery that made outsiders nervous and a lightening potential for revenge that scared the rest of the family senseless.
*****
“Life kind of went downhill from there,” I told Snow. It was the first time I had ever spoken to anyone about my conversation with my grandfather.
“Too much, too heavy,” Snow pronounced, after a momentary silence. “Watch this.” He began stripping his clothes off and with a mad grin streaked off into the common area, naked and shouting.
The commotion was immediate. Half the wards joined him; the other half chased them around or simply panicked. Mr. Bryant went off immediately, the warble of his vocal siren proclaiming that the apocalypse was finally upon us.
I stood in the doorway to my room bent over in a peal of hysteria; crying because of the pure hilarity of the scene and touched that Snow would wrestle with the orderlies just to give me this small bit of respite. Eventually Snow and I became lovers and friends. In between his trips to the infirmary and his post-lacerate calm, we would discuss the so-called simplicities of life and how complicated they really were, and sometimes we would feed Lester’s belief by procuring some new evidence we’d heard or discovered in the newspaper.
Months went by, then years. The monotony of the institution became my monotony. The Turtle never wavered in his review of my file and I sat around staring at the walls until I pestered the staff enough that they gave me a job cleaning the commodes.
People with mental health problems are simply not the most sanitary in the world, and after a particularly pissy day of cleaning I came back and found Snow lounging on my bed.
“I’ve got a question for you,” I said as I threw my arms to my hips. “Every time I go to clean the commodes there’s a puddle of piss on the floor. Now my question is, is it the little dicks with a lack of aim, or the big dicks with a lack of control?”
Snow cocked his head in a reflective gesture of his sexuality. “Honey, trust me. It’s the big dicks. A little man’s got to have finesse. He knows control. Take that as knowledge from experience.”
We studied each other a moment and burst into laughter. After our chuckles died off I asked him what was wrong. He had that look about him that said he was planning another trip to the infirmary.
“Actually, I was thinking about you,” he told me. “I was curious. What got you over Robert?”
I pulled in a deep breath and let it out slowly before I answered. “I’m not over Robert. I don’t think I’ll ever be.”
“Not like that,” Snow said. “I mean those first few weeks after you found out he was dead.”
I sat on the bed, the blunt edge of his words throbbing in my gut. “I told you about Bruce Livermore?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he got there about a month or two before Charlotte’s visit. I don’t remember if we were in group therapy or what, but somehow we got on the subject of self worth. As you can imagine, Bruce scoffed at the idea. I remember him sitting all tight and cross-armed as he looked out the window and proclaimed that the rain didn’t even have any fucking value, and that’s what made life tick, so how could we.
“I worked myself up and set out to prove him wrong. I don’t know if I was doing it more for him or me, but we had to have something against all that shit they tried to jolt into our heads.
“Anyway, I found this old government report in the library. I don’t know how it got there, but it had rain valued at the acre-foot all throughout the country. They put it against what it would cost a farmer had to buy the water, plus all the costs that would have been associated with it.”
“But it didn’t work for him, did it?” Snow asked.
“No. I even calculated it out to drops per inch, but there was just too much behind Bruce to start looking forward.” I shrugged slightly. “So I kept it for myself. Now I look outside when it’s raining and the calculations start automatically. I don’t even realize I’m doing it. It’s like Mr. Bryant with the feet.”
“What about snow, could you calculate it for that?” Snow asked.
“Sure. There’s just more air and less water involved, so the computation’s a little different. It’s cheaper, unless you get those big fat snowflakes…”
I should have just cut my fucking tongue off. It would have been easier than watching Snow’s face crumble into misery.
“That’s not what I mean!”
But he was up and gone in an instant, and I didn’t see him for another month. Somehow he’d gotten a razor and devalued himself even more.
At the end of a month I began my rounds of annoyanc
e; pleading with anyone who would listen to let Snow out of observation, or to, at least, let me talk to him. But the staff had a hard time fathoming our relationship. Their misconceptions couldn’t get past the sexual aspect and grasp the emotional impact we had on each other. They saw the effects in Snow’s severally diminished outburst, yet could not comprehend its hushed serenity; its ardent tenderness. That type of depth was a little too difficult for them to understand between two men.
Whether it was my pestering or the fact that Snow had bled himself to lucidity, he was finally released. He wore a sneaky smile when he rolled into the dorm and immediately began playing Mr. Bryant like an instrument. Rather than leap when Mr. Bryant went off, Snow skipped over to a bunk, sat down, and began a rhythmic tapping of his feet on the floor. The staff thought Mr. Bryant was going into convulsions and attempted to dose him until keen-eyed Nurse Barr noted Snow’s dance and set off to dose him instead. But it was too late by then, the rest of the wards had caught on and were soon laying bets as to who could make Mr. Bryant yodel closest to the tune of their choice. After a week the nurses gave up and started requesting tunes of their own.
“When did you have your first idea that you were gay?” Snow asked me later that day.
I recounted for him the day that Penny was brought home from the hospital and change for the first time. I watched with the interest and curiosity of a normal ten year old, but was instantly revolted by the cleft between her legs.
Surely something was missing; they had lost some parts on the way home or something. “Why is she like that?” I asked Charlotte, my unbelieving eyes glued to the gory plump little lips of my sister’s vagina.
“All superior creatures are made that way,” Charlotte had informed me.
I puckered and groped myself. I thought that I’d rather be inferior than look like that, but Charlotte saw me checking that my own equipment was still there and pushed me away in disgust, interpreting my actions for something they weren’t.
“I was so ashamed,” I told Snow. “But I think my first inkling of my sexuality came from that dismissal.”
The Value Of Rain Page 5