One of These Things First

by Steven Gaines

  Behind me I could hear the muffled sound of weeping from a room down the hallway. I would have gone to my room to take a nap, but our rooms were locked until after dinner. My room had a single bed with a metal headboard that looked like a castoff from the TB ward, and bolted to the floor was an old bureau with locked drawers, scratched up as though some maniac had clawed at it. What had I been I thinking? How did I ever imagine that this was going to be an adventure? Suddenly a wave of homesickness flattened me, and I started to quietly cry.

  I heard a tiny voice say, “What the fuck?”

  There was a retching sound, and when I looked harder in the gloom behind me I realized there was a sylph of a woman lying on her side on the sofa, white as a ghost. She was wearing pajamas and a hospital robe, and her knees were coiled to her chest as tightly as if she was doing a full pike from a diving board. Every minute or so she would release and unwind a bit and try to throw up into a green metal pan placed next to the sofa, but nothing came up.

  She squinted at me and groaned, “You’re only ten fucking years old. What the fuck is this, some fucking amusement park?” Her hands trembled as she unclasped them from around her knees.

  “I’m fifteen years old,” I corrected her.

  “Fifteen. Big fucking deal. Jesus,” she said. “Sit the fuck down, you’re making me dizzy.” I sat in a chair near her. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked. I gave her a bare-bones outline of the previous week. “Jesus, that’s an awful, awful story,” she said. “Fifteen years old. Jesus. What the hell was bothering you?”

  I shrugged. “What’s bothering you?”

  “Well,” she said matter of factly, “I was going into P.J. Clark’s around three in the afternoon last Sunday, and that’s about the last fucking thing I remember. On Wednesday they broke down my apartment door. I was so drunk the booze was coming through my pores instead of sweat. Anyway, three days is a long fucking blackout.”

  “I saw Lost Weekend,” I said. Lost Weekend was a movie about an alcoholic writer on a weekend binge, starring Ray Milland, who won the Oscar for Best Actor. “So I kind of understand what a blackout is like.”

  “Sure you do,” she said.

  “My dad’s father was an alcoholic,” I offered, to show solidarity. She snorted. I asked what her name was and she said, “Ellen.” I asked what she did for work, and she said, “Random House.”

  “Oh, I know Random House,” I told her. “It’s owned by Bennett Cerf, who is so witty on What’s My Line on TV. My mother and I love watching Bennett Cerf, but our real favorite on that show is Arlene Francis, who was married to Martin Gabel, the film director.”

  “You’re some piece of work,” she said to me, her eyes closed.

  I asked her what she did at Random House and she said, “Editor.” I asked if that meant that she corrected mistakes and she said I should shut the fuck up. To show her how literate my family was I told her that my grandmother and I read everything that Sidney Sheldon ever wrote.

  A nurse came down the hallways to check on us. There were a lot of nurses and they were always hovering nearby. They all dressed in different white uniforms and caps, depending on what nursing school they went to. This one’s cap looked like a charlotte russe topping fell on her head. Ellen pulled a crumpled pack of Parliaments from her bathrobe pocket, her hand shaking so violently she could hardly get the cigarette to her mouth. The nurse lit it for her because patients were allowed to smoke in the lounge but they weren’t allowed to carry matches.

  “How are you doing?” the nurse asked her.

  Ellen said she felt like shit.

  “It’ll pass,” the nurse said. “You’ll be a whole lot better tomorrow.” The nurse smiled at me and asked how I was doing.

  “All right, I guess,” I said. “I’m homesick.”

  “That’s understandable,” she said. “If you need to talk, I’m in the nurses’ office.”

  When she was down the hallway out of earshot, Ellen whispered conspiratorially, “Don’t tell the nurses anything. They’re fucking spies.”

  “Who do they spy for?” I whispered.

  “They spy for the doctors. They write down everything you say. It’s called charting. They watch you and listen, and every three hours they go into their little office and they write down everything, and your doctor reads it at night. It’s like getting reported to the principal.”

  “What happens if you get charted bad?” I asked her.

  “They zap you,” she said.

  “Zap?” Like Aunt Rifka. Shock therapy. A terrifying thought. I never considered for a moment they might shock me.

  “You don’t know what you’re in for, do you?” Ellen whispered. She saw how frightened I was and she was enjoying it. “After they shock you they turn you into a fucking zombie with Thorazine, it feels like your brain is in a fucking straightjacket.”

  “I’ll refuse to take that stuff, and they’re not going to shock me,” I said determinedly, but scared out of my wits.

  “Got no fucking choice,” Ellen said, taking a drag on her cigarette so sharp I could hear the paper crackle. “Got no choice about anything,” she said. “Got no choice if they decide to give you shock treatment. In the morning you’ll see people in the hallway strapped to gurneys, all doped up, waiting to be brought to the shock room in the basement. You know how they do it? They put a rubber bit in your mouth so you won’t bite your tongue off, and they put wet electrodes over your temples, and then they throw a switch and fry your fucking brains. You don’t remember a fucking thing after that. It erases your fucking memory.”

  I was now so scared I couldn’t breathe. Oh, I had made a dreadful mistake. A terrible mistake. This place was dangerous to my health. The charade was over. I made everyone believe I needed to be here, and I didn’t. It was a hoax. “I don’t belong here,” I said, standing up, my hands shaking so badly I crossed my arms to keep them still. “I’m going to go home.” If they took me home from camp they’d take me home from here.

  “Fat fucking chance,” Ellen said. “You’re a fucking ten-year-old, you can’t go anywhere.”

  “I’m fifteen years old!” I shouted, and stormed down the hallway to the nurse’s office, counting the steps up to twenty to calm down. The nurse’s office had a Dutch door with the top open, and I banged on the bottom part with my fist. I told the nurse who came to see what the ruckus was that I had made a mistake, and that I didn’t need to be there. I demanded she call my parents and tell them to come and get me.

  “But you just got here,” she said to me sweetly.

  There were two other nurses in the office behind her, sitting at desks filling out charts, and they smiled at me sympathetically. “Are you feeling homesick?” one of them asked.

  “Why, are you going to write that down?” I snarled. “Are you charting me? Then write down that I insist you call my mother and father and tell them I want to go home.”

  “You’ll have to ask your doctor about a phone call home,” the first nurse said, a tone cooler.

  Now I made a bad decision. I decided to behave like my father. I banged on the doorframe with my fist and said I would call the police and have all of them arrested if they didn’t call my parents.

  The second nurse scowled at me and stood up at her desk. She said I had to calm down, that I was upsetting myself. So just to show her who was boss, I kicked the bottom of the Dutch door and shouted, “You will call my parents!”

  “Stop kicking!” the first nurse said firmly. So I kicked the door again, really hard, and again, and just then, out of nowhere, a male aide came up behind me and put his arms around me, like a hoop around a barrel. That was the worst thing anybody could have done to me at that moment, to clamp me down, but he was strong, and his hands were locked together in front of my chest. The nurse said, “Quiet Room,” and they carried me kicking and screaming down the hall, the other patients
gaping at me as I was dragged by and locked in a padded cell.

  The Quiet Room smelled of disinfectant but it was toasty warm. I threw myself around the room for a while, flailing around against the padded walls, and then, bruised and spent, I fell to the thick mat flooring and sobbed and drooled. Presently, I felt strangely calm and fell asleep. I didn’t realize that during the struggle they had jabbed me with a shot of chlorpromazine, an industrial-strength tranquilizer. When I was asleep a nurse came in and put a pillow under my head and covered me with a blanket, and they checked on me every half hour and took my pulse.

  The air in the room changed while I slept; the hot dry air from the radiator turned balmy and soft. The hospital was a hotel, and there were white stucco buildings and a huge blue sky, so much bigger than the sky in Brooklyn that the horizon curved, and the ocean was translucent. There were tiny umbrellas on the strawberry shortcake. I kept the umbrellas for years until they shredded and I threw them away. My mother rubbed suntan lotion on my face and there was that coconut smell again and she said that I had freckles like I did in the summer. There was a tiny windmill and you had to get your golf ball in the hole at the bottom in between the turning sails. Then it got scary because my father was screaming, a small, scratchy voice coming out of a black hammer, but the hammer was really a telephone and he couldn’t get at us until we went home. My mother and I slept in a big bed together with ironed linens that smelled like coconut and Gog killed the pink balloons on the beach with a shovel, like bursting bubble gum. I was seven years old.

  I woke in the Quiet Room. I lay still in the dark for a long time until I came to my senses, and then I wrapped myself in the blanket and went to the window. Eighteenth Avenue would have been deserted at that time of night, except for maybe a drunk stumbling out of McGlynn’s. But Manhattan was lit up with people’s lives. It was a clear, frosty night, and people hurried along the street with cars and many taxis, and smoking manholes like in the movies. I could see the windows of the buildings along York Avenue, lighted by the jumpy flashes of TV sets. Directly below me were the grounds of Rockefeller University, and if I pressed my head against the cold metal grating I could see a sleek, white, ultramodern house, which I later learned was the private residence of the president of Rockefeller University. There must have been some sort of a party breaking up because guests were leaving and a queue of limousines was backed up around a cobblestone drive surrounding a tiled fountain. The women were dressed in cocktail dresses and the men were wearing dinner jackets. This must be what life is like in Manhattan, I thought. It made me sad, because I would never wear a tuxedo to dinner or know that kind of people, and I would never know what to talk about over dinner, even if I ever got invited to one. I was in a padded cell.

  At least, I consoled myself, this was the first night that I would sleep in Manhattan.

  Wayne Myers

  The resident who had been randomly assigned to my case by the clinic was named Wayne Myers, and his name was all I would know about him for many years to come. He was a tabula rasa on which I was supposed to imprint my own fantasies about him and facilitate transference, the cornerstone of Freudian analysis. But I knew none of that then. All I knew was that when the door opened to the Quiet Room the next morning, I was hoping to find a wise, middle-aged doctor, like Lee J. Cobb in The Three Faces of Eve, who guides Joanne Woodward back from multiple personalities and helps her reduce all the people inside her into one healthy person, a role for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1957. Instead, a quiet-spoken, open-faced young man in a white lab coat showed up early in the morning and asked me if I had calmed down enough to go to the dining room with him and have breakfast.

  “I heard you had a rough first day,” he said, sitting at a table with me in the deserted room while I polished off watery soft-boiled eggs and cold toast. He had hooded blue eyes and a soft, laconic way of speaking that was calming. He wrote down almost everything I said on a yellow pad, a voluminous record that I couldn’t imagine he would ever consult again.

  “I made a mistake,” I said, gulping down a glass of water with a shaky hand. “I’d like you to call my parents and ask them to come and get me.”

  “I see,” he said, writing notes. “Can you tell me what happened last night that made you lose your temper?”

  “I just want you to call my parents and tell them I want to go home.”

  He wrote that down and stared at what he had written thoughtfully. “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “I’ll help you go home, but first you must convince me that you won’t try to hurt yourself again.”

  “Okay, I won’t,” I said, with no great conviction.

  “Why’d you do it?” he said.

  “Attention,” I claimed.

  He nodded toward my bandaged wrists. “That wasn’t grandstanding,” he said. He put down his pad and leaned back in his chair, balancing on its rear legs, like a kid in a college dormitory. “People looking for attention make some scratch marks, or swallow some aspirin, but you made a pretty serious attempt to kill yourself. Statistically, you’re at risk for another try.”

  “I’m not going to try to kill myself,” I said, with a trifle more conviction.

  “Again,” he said. I looked at him quizzically. “You’re not going to try to kill yourself again,” he said. “You tried once.”

  “Okay, again.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” he said, nodding. He seemed like a pretty sincere guy to me. “Are you still counting?” he asked.

  “Who told you about that?”

  “Dr. Milman.”

  “Oh, you spoke to that witch. What does she know? I only knew her ten minutes.”

  “She said that you had been saving things and touching things and counting for many years.”

  “That stuff stopped,” I told him. “I only still do it sometimes when I get nervous.”

  “Oh? When did it stop?”

  I told him the counting and touching had started to “fade away” a year or so before.

  “It’s unusual for that kind of behavior to fade away,” he said, writing it down.

  “Well, it did.”

  “And Dr. Milman said that your grandfather is paying your hospital bill?”

  “He owns a successful bra and girdle store in Borough Park,” I said. “And we’re very comfortable.”

  “I see,” Dr. Myers said, writing it down. “Still, this hospital costs a great deal of money,” he said. “It would be a pity for you to waste your grandfather’s money.”

  “I won’t waste his money because it won’t cost him more than one day, since I’m going home as soon as you call my parents.”

  “If I called your parents I would advise them against taking you home,” Dr. Myers said. “You haven’t convinced me you won’t try to hurt yourself again.”

  “I don’t need to be here! I want to go home!” I shouted, bursting into tears. “I’m not your prisoner!”

  “No, you’re not a prisoner,” he said, unperturbed by my shouting, offering me a Kleenex from a neatly folded pile he kept in the pocket of his lab coat. I blew my nose resentfully.

  “What were you thinking when you started to cry?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You can’t be thinking nothing. The mind is always working, even when you’re asleep.”

  “I don’t remember what I was thinking,” I said.

  “Really? You can’t remember what you were thinking a second ago that made you cry?”

  I tried to remember why I cried. I cried because I missed everything about 18th Avenue. I even missed the salesgirls. Funny how you can miss almost anybody. Maybe not Arnie and Irv. I could never face them again, after being locked in a mental hospital. They probably knew about it: Lily would have told them when she went for her coffee break. It was probably all over the neighborhood. How could I ever show my face again
? Maybe I could stay in the apartment above the store all day and only go out at night.

  Who would be the least likely person I could miss? Manny, the fat kid from Ocean Parkway, who had a strange odor. What was that stale smell that came off him? Manny used to hold his cocker spaniel dog up in front of the mirror and repeat to it over and over, “The dog. The dog. The dog,” to see if he could teach the cocker spaniel he was a dog. Manny sometimes came over to watch TV and we read the National Enquirer out loud. Back then the Enquirer was all about gore and bloody accidents. One issue there was a photo caption under a horrific auto accident, “Martha’s brains, circled.” Manny and I laughed for hours. Martha’s brains, circled.

  The National Enquirer had a weekly contest where they paid five dollars for the best letter, so I wrote them a fake letter and signed it with my grandmother’s name. The letter was supposed to be from a woman who went to a funeral and was offended that the corpse was buried in a blue satin evening gown. The letter writer railed that all dead people should be buried in black shrouds. Manny and I laughed ourselves into a puddle. I was stunned when two weeks later my letter won the contest, and it was published under a banner headline “Bury ’Em In Black.” I carried that page of the Enquirer around with me for weeks and showed it to everybody on 18th Avenue. It was the first time I was published. I guess Manny was a friend, although I didn’t have any normal friends, even before I was counting and touching things, because I didn’t play sports and my father wanted me home immediately after school was over, and he made my mother come fetch me every day and bring me back to the store so something bad wouldn’t happen to me, like getting kidnapped or hurt in the schoolyard. He said that it was no big deal to be picked up from school; his own mother had followed him to school every day. They lived in an apartment in Brownsville, a tough Brooklyn neighborhood. We drove there once; it looked full of Jewish thugs, and he showed me the little apartment building in which they lived where he was born on the kitchen table. I couldn’t picture my grandmother, Leah, on the kitchen table with her legs spread. Leah watched him go to school every morning, following him from the rooftops, hopping and jumping from one to another to keep an eye on him until he got to school safely.