One of These Things First

by Steven Gaines

  My father’s cheek quivered with a tiny spasm of anger. I knew it was the way Dr. Doris had said, “you people.” I’d seen him bristle like that before.

  “I’m a child guidance counselor in a city high school,” he said, presenting his credentials. “I work with children every day. I can tell you that this was out of the clear blue. Nothing was going on at home.”

  Hmm, I thought, I bet he really believes that. I glanced at my mother, who remained silent.

  “Nothing?” Dr. Doris scoffed. “Compulsions and hoarding aren’t nothing. And there are always warning signs leading up to a suicide bid. Do you have any idea why your son would try to take his own life? What comes to mind?”

  “We’ve asked him,” my father said. “Everybody has asked him. But he won’t say.” He turned to me. “Son, please tell us why you did this so we can help.”

  I felt sorry for him at that moment; he was being so earnest, calling me “son” when he never called me that. So I thought I would help him out. I tried to think of some explanation for what I did, other than the truth, and as I lay there in the hospital bed, my arms sewn up with black stitches like the Frankenstein monster, a very bad idea came into my head—that I should answer, “I did it because I’m the Frankenstein monster.” But saying that, after pretending I was deaf, would only incense my father and make Dr. Doris think I was really nuts. Or was I really nuts? So I said, “I did it because I’m the Frankenstein monster.”

  “I’ll give you Frankenstein monster, mister,” my father said.

  “Now, now,” Dr. Doris hushed him. She stared at me for a moment and nodded, like she had made a resolute decision. “I’d like you to consider getting your son long-term care,” she told my father. “There’s a likelihood of another attempt, and it’s not responsible to just soldier on and hope it doesn’t happen again. He should be someplace safe until we can figure out what’s wrong.”

  “What does that mean?” my father asked.

  “A hospital,” she said.

  “A mental hospital?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t characterize it that way, no,” Dr. Doris answered. She turned to me and said, “There’s a very nice place called Hillside. I think you might benefit greatly from it. Perhaps it might be good for you to be away from home for a while, so you can collect your thoughts, and give you time to think about what’s troubling you, and have somebody to talk it over with.”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” my father said. “We’re not putting him in a mental hospital.”

  “You need to consider what’s best for your child’s safety,” she said.

  “You don’t even know my child. You’ve been here five minutes and you’re telling me you want to put my child in a mental hospital.”

  “There are legal ramifications to attempted suicide by a minor,” Dr. Doris said. “If it’s in the boy’s best interests, if he’s in substantial danger—and I think he’s exhibited that he is—the state could be petitioned that he be committed. And nobody wants that to happen.”

  “My son will never be in a mental hospital,” my father said.

  “We should talk again tomorrow,” Dr. Doris suggested. “Perhaps you need to sleep on it.”

  “I don’t need to sleep on it,” my father assured her.

  “Okay, then,” Dr. Doris said, beginning to execute a three-point turn to leave the room.

  Now here came the really strange part. Since I was already different, if I was going to end up like Michael/Michelle or Christine Jorgensen, why not experience being locked up in a mental hospital? Going to a mental hospital was oversized and dramatic; it would be another chapter in my tragique arc. I would go to a hospital like the one in Splendor in the Grass, a movie I had seen eleven times in one week. It takes place in Kansas in the 1920s, and Deanie, Natalie Wood’s character, is a repressed high school student who has a nervous breakdown over Bud, played by Warren Beatty, whom she so ached to sleep with. After her suicide attempt her parents send Deanie to a hospital that looks like a big old country house, with wide porches and rocking chairs, and a green lawn where patients can paint en plein air. Deanie’s wise, fatherly doctor nurtures her back to health and stability. Of course, when Deanie gets out of the hospital two and a half years later, one of the first things she does is go to see Bud, to put it to rest. He has dropped out of Yale and married a greasy pizza restaurant waitress, played by Zohra Lampert, who has one little kid clinging to her dirty dress and another on the way. Deanie sees this and realizes it’s over. As she’s driven away from Bud for the last time—Bud so changed, Deanie so changed—she recites silently to herself Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality, “What though the radiance which was once so bright / Be now forever taken from my sight, / Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower / We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what lies behind.” I wept bitterly in the movie theater the first time I heard those words, reeling with the sense of loss, not even knowing why.

  So when Dr. Doris suggested I go to a mental hospital, I figured I would be like Deanie, and it would be an adventure. A lark.

  Before she could wheel herself out the door, I said, “I’ll go.”

  I didn’t have much else to do.

  Marilyn Monroe

  My father drove me home from the hospital in silence, the squeak of the windshield wipers in counterpoint to the sound of his deviated septum and the splattering of sleet on the windshield. We parked down the block from the store and I followed him up the street, staring straight ahead as we passed the windows of the Culver Luncheonette, the butcher, the deli, and Rose’s, where the saleswomen stared at me from inside the store. We went behind the mirrored door in the lobby and up a gloomy flight of stairs to our apartment.

  Things were pretty hushed in our house, what with me waiting to be put away. My mother made up a bed for me on the three-piece sectional sofa in the living room so I could watch TV. She turned on all the lights, but even with the lights on the room was moody. The apartment would have been a railroad flat except for an airshaft that we shared with Old Man McGlynn and a young Irish couple who never spoke to us in the street but who must have known everything that happened in our house, what with my father screaming all the time. They were our intimates more than anybody, yet I didn’t even know their names.

  That first day back in the apartment was scary, waiting for the phone to ring to say it was time for me to go to the hospital. I watched TV and dozed on and off, the ping of the knocking pipes familiar and comforting. Late that afternoon Dr. Doris called to say that a bed would be available for me at Hillside Hospital in Queens, where I should report at 9 a.m. the day after tomorrow. In Queens? I remembered that there was a hospital complex on a hill in Queens that I could see from the Long Island Expressway. But that couldn’t be the hospital where I was supposed to go, because the hospital in Queens was a state hospital, a massive complex of glazed tan brick buildings, with bars on the windows. It must have held a thousand people. It was a snake pit, for God’s sake, like the snake pit in the movie of the same name starring Olivia de Havilland, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Virginia Cunningham, a writer who wakes up in a mental hospital with drooling psychotics all over the place and she can’t even remember how she got there.

  I asked Dr. Doris if Hillside was the place near the Long Island Expressway, but all she would say was that it was a very good hospital, and I would get the help I needed there. So when Dr. Doris got off the phone, I got the number of Hillside from information and I spoke with a woman in admissions and asked her if Hillside was a tan brick building near the Long Island Expressway. She said it was. I asked if it had bars on the windows, and she said, “No, no. They’re louvered safety windows.” And did they have private rooms? “No,” she said, “there are only dormitories, and a separate unit for adolescents.”

  It was like Oliver Twist. I would be l
ocked behind louvered safety windows, sleeping in a dormitory with adolescent mental cases. This was unacceptable. I called Dr. Doris back to tell her I didn’t want to go to Hillside, but I only got her answering service, so every fifteen minutes I called her service and left increasingly frantic messages until finally Dr. Doris called back, apoplectic. “Why did you call six times?” she demanded. I told her that I had called Hillside and she yelled, “Why?”

  “Please, I don’t want to go to Hillside!” I pleaded. “It’s a mental hospital!”

  “Nonsense!” She was snarling mad now. “You’re going to be committed to Hillside tomorrow.”

  “Committed?”

  “What did you think was going to happen?” she sputtered. “You’re a minor! I want you to put your father on the phone immediately!”

  “He’s not here!” I shouted, and she hung up on me.

  I sank to the floor in despair. What would happen? Would men in white jackets come and take me away, carry me down the stairs to an ambulance with everybody on 18th Avenue watching, the saleswomen clucking their tongues, Silverstein in the deli standing behind the hot dog griddle in the window calling his wife to come see the spectacle, Klenetsky standing outside his butcher shop in a bloody apron, scowling and shaking his head, like he knew it was bound to happen? And in the Culver Luncheonette, Arnie and Irv would be laughing with happiness. I would rather die than have Arnie and Irv laughing with happiness that I had come to no good.

  So I decided that I would finish what I started. Later that night I would slip out of the house and throw myself under the D train, northbound to Manhattan, which I thought was more glamorous than throwing myself under a train headed to Coney Island. The trains ran only every half hour after midnight, so I could time it for about 2 a.m., when my parents would be asleep and the station deserted. It was only a one-minute walk to the elevated line, up a flight of stairs, the booth would be closed, and I could sneak under the turnstile. Standing up there I would be able to feel the vibration of the train at Avenue J, the stop before 18th Avenue, and I would turn toward the tracks and clench my fists and jump into the lights of the train as it pulled into the station. I would be crushed to pieces before I knew what hit me.

  But once I started thinking about it, I realized it would be hard to do, jumping in front of a train. It made my heart beat wildly just thinking about it. Would death be quick? Instantaneous? Would I be dead before I knew it? Or would I just be mangled? Maybe I could electrocute myself on the third rail instead. Gog always warned me about the man who peed on the third rail and the electricity traveled up his urine into his penis and killed him. I could pee myself to death; that would give them something to talk about.

  So when my parents went to bed, I wrapped myself in an old quilt over my street clothes and watched the time on the clock on the end table. As it got closer to 2 a.m I decided I would say kaddish for myself, the Jewish prayer for the dead. I didn’t know what the words meant, but they were the only words I ever remembered from Jewish prayers. They were Aramaic, thousands of years old, and the prayer was especially beautiful because of the way the sounds kept repeating. Yis-borach v’yish-tabach v’yi-spoar v’yis-romam v’yis-masay, v’yis-hador v’yis-’aleh v’yis-alal, shmay d’kudsho, brich hu … Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, honored, elevated and lauded, be the Name of the holy one … Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, honored, elevated and lauded, be the Name of the holy one… I prayed for my parents, and for everyone I loved, and I even prayed for people who forsook me, like Lily Williams.

  While I was doing all this praying the TV was on in the background, and I heard a man say that Marilyn Monroe was going to star in a new movie called Something’s Got to Give, with the French actor Yves Montand, and that it was a remake of a screwball comedy from 1940 called My Favorite Wife. I got distracted by the Marilyn Monroe news and stopped saying kaddish. There was footage of Monroe with Tony Curtis from Some Like It Hot. A reporter said Something’s Got to Give would be her first film since she was hospitalized the year before. Then they showed black-and-white footage of her looking frantic, wearing a coat with the collar pulled up, being jostled by a huge mob of reporters and photographers. She was trying to make her way through the hallway of a hospital. There was pure hysteria, the hot white bursts of flashbulbs going off like lightning, and she was petrified. The reporter said that after Monroe divorced the playwright Arthur Miller she had a “nervous breakdown,” and that she had signed herself into the famed Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of New York Hospital. They showed a picture of a formidable piece of real estate standing hard by the East River Drive, a stout, nine-story building with Gothic arches and small, screened windows. The announcer said that Payne Whitney was the “Ivy League of psychiatric hospitals,” and it was so exclusive that only two hundred patients were treated there in a single year.

  I didn’t have to throw myself under a train. Nervous breakdown! That’s probably what I had, a nervous breakdown, a wonderful expression that described the sort of despair and general hopelessness to which I was partial. What I needed was Payne Whitney.

  Early the next morning I called the admissions office at Payne Whitney to inquire if they had private rooms with baths. The woman hung up on me. I called back and I begged her, “Please, this is no joke. They want me to go to a hospital called Hillside in Queens and I need to find out what it’s like in Payne Whitney.”

  “How old are you?” she asked. When I told her I was fifteen she softened. “I can’t say much,” she said. “But you can’t just call up and request a room—you need to be referred by a doctor.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I have a doctor. But I need to find out, are there private rooms?”

  “Payne Whitney is a hospital, not a hotel, and patients can’t reserve a particular kind of room,” she said. “But yes, there are private rooms.”

  “And are there bars on the windows?” I asked.

  “No bars.”

  “This is good,” I told her. She gave me the name of the admitting doctor and I wrote it down on a piece of paper. Then I left more frantic messages with Dr. Doris’s answering service.

  She sounded exasperated when she called back. “What is it?”

  Without mentioning Marilyn Monroe, I told her that I would go to a hospital peacefully if it was Payne Whitney. I said that I had already called Payne Whitney and needed her to make the referral, and that Payne Whitney was the place I really wanted to go. I must have sounded like I was pledging myself to a sports team.

  “Payne Whitney?” she asked incredulously. “The temerity! Don’t you dare call any more hospitals! You have no say in the matter! You’re going to Hillside.”

  “But why not Payne Whitney?”

  “Because Payne Whitney is an expensive, private psychiatric clinic.”

  Expensive? Of course. I hadn’t thought about money. I guessed Marilyn Monroe could afford it. “What if I can get my grandfather to pay for it?” I asked Dr. Doris.

  “It doesn’t matter! I forbid it. They can’t give you the kind of long-term care you need.”

  There was a sudden silence on her end of the line, as if she had let something slip.

  “Long-term?” I asked. “How long?”

  “Now you listen to me, young man!” she said, raising her voice.

  “This is my life you’re talking about!” I shouted back, and I hung up on her this time.

  Gog

  Gog—the nickname I gave to him when I was a toddler—was sitting in the living room on one of the two gold brocade chairs my mother bought from Modern Living on Kings Highway. The winter sun had disappeared behind the elevated line, covering the room in shadows, and through the front windows I could see the Great World Chinese restaurant neon sign flickering on. Gog was ruminating about the marvels of modern engineering. He was wearing a striped suit, a dress shirt with no tie, and he dabbed at his watery blue
eyes with a linen handkerchief. He was saying that the giant exhaust fans in the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel were so big that they exchanged all the air in the tunnel every ninety seconds so people wouldn’t get carbon monoxide poisoning, and wasn’t it remarkable that in the middle of the heat of an automobile engine you could make air conditioning? The car show was at the New York Coliseum, he said, and he had just gone the day before.

  “Boy-oh-boy,” he said with glee, rubbing his hands together. “The new Corvettes are certainly beautiful. They’re made of plastic. Plastic cars, Stevie, stronger than steel!” He was the only one who called me Stevie.

  “Are you going to get one?” I asked.

  “Without doubt,” he said. “But if you ever wanted to see the most beautiful car ever, you should see the new XKE Jaguar.” He said that the XKE looked like a bullet, and it was slung so low you rode in it with your feet out in front of you and your behind only inches off the ground. He loved cars, like I did, or maybe I loved cars because of him. Gog was so charming that, no matter all the flashy cars and girlfriends and Miami Beach suntans, everyone still adored him, including my mother and me and a whole harem of women in the store. Much to my father’s consternation. Despite Gog’s serial philandering, he had what my father wanted more than anything in the world—koved, it’s called in Yiddish, honor and dignity.

  Harry Goshinsky was a rake from the start, a Lower East Side boulevardier from Pinsk, a nineteen-year-old who cut a dapper figure in a black waistcoat and derby. Rose Yashinovsky, twenty, short and sturdy, was an old maid by the wisdom of the time, the homely daughter of a fishmonger from Bialystok. By the time Harry got my grandmother pregnant in 1923, he had bedded every decent-looking girl on Rivington Street. At first he refused to marry Rose, but after he was railroaded into it by her family, he grew to love her. They had two daughters, Ruth, my mother, and three years later another girl, Lamour.