by Adam Zorzi
“You spent time at Petersburg?” Gregg looked shaken, or as much as a ghost could look shaken without changing pallor.
“Yes.” LouLou fetched her iced tea and sat next to him on the sofa. “I told you Sick gets into trouble and LouLou deals with the fallout. I was a patient at Commonwealth Psych three times when I was nineteen and again when I was twenty-three. I went off my meds. I didn't hurt anyone—burglary, vandalism, larceny. Both times I took meds so I would become competent to stand trial. The first time I was found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, or NGRI as patients like to call it, and was sentenced to community service. The second NGRI landed me there for about nine months.”
“Were you treated?”
LouLou shrugged. “I went to private hospitals first, so the worst of my Sick episodes were over. I got meds while I waited for competency hearings, but I think Dr. Youzny prescribed them. When I did my sentence for NGRI, I was on my standard psych meds to prevent episodes. I guess the answer to your question is no, I wasn't treated.
“I admit all of that was arranged by my parents. Private hospitalizations until the worst was over, supervision by a private psychiatrist which is unheard of, and then maintenance meds to bide time until a judge could consider the sentence long enough to fit the crime. I'm privileged. It made a difference. I'm not ashamed of having my father using his influence. I saw a lot of people who really needed treatment but weren't getting any.”
“Why not?”
“No staff. No treatment plans. Most people got enough sedatives to keep them under control until someone declared them competent. I don't know about the NGRIs. They were pretty hard core and in seclusion most of the time.”
Gregg stood and paced.
“Why are you so interested in this? I told you I'd committed crimes. I assumed you knew that meant jail or hospitalization for someone like me.”
Gregg put his face in his hands. When he looked up, he was crying. “I spent thirteen or fourteen years in Commonwealth Psychiatric Hospital after I turned eighteen. I died the night I was released.”
***
Gregg had a mental illness, too? Why hadn't he told her? LouLou didn't know where to begin.
“More secrets? Gregg, you're a genius musician and I thought you were a good man, but you know I need stability. Springing information like that on me is too much for me to handle.”
She busied herself putting her salad back in the refrigerator, pouring water, and checking the clock for the amount of time before her next round of meds were due. She reached into her cupboard and took a mood stabilizer that would get her through the ninety minutes before her meds were scheduled. She knew she was being overly cautious. One missed or off-schedule med wouldn't necessarily bring on Sick, but she didn't take chances. Plus, she was angry and hurt that Gregg hadn't been completely truthful with her.
She returned to the striped sofa and curled into the corner, wrapping her soft blue sweater around her like a robe “This sofa is beginning to feel like Freud slept here. I'll listen to what you have to say, but I may not be able to hear all of it. I may have to kick you out. You may just be too much for me. Ghost or not. Your raison d'être or not, I'm human and a frail one at that. I'm always anxious about Sick. I can't handle you being a ghost with a mental illness, too. I protect myself. Some people are off-limits.”
Other than the panic buttons, she wasn't sure how she'd protect herself should Gregg try to physically harm her. She forced that thought away and waited for Gregg to speak.
Gregg leaned against the counter and faced LouLou. “I'm sorry. No excuses. I didn't connect your Sick with Commonwealth Psych.”
She stared at him. “NGRI patients go to Petersburg. You know that. Tell me your story. I think there are two parts. First, how you died. Second, what you were doing there, okay?”
“This is hard, LouLou. I'm reliving my death. Cut me some slack.”
She nodded. She also thought “cutting some slack” wasn't a phrase he’d used when he was alive. Skylar probably taught him that.
“Sorry, Gregg. I can't. Spit it out or leave.” She reached into her ever-present red tote and took out a blue pill and put it under her tongue. She felt it fizz some calm into her body.
Gregg remained standing, much as he had when he'd told her he was a ghost. He kept his hands at his sides and remained still.
“I'd been at Petersburg for more than a dozen years when I was released one night. I was pretty much the same guy I'd been when I got there. Maybe they needed the bed. Someone signed release papers, the gates were opened, and I walked out at midnight with two five-dollar bills the night nurse gave me.
“There was no moon. It felt chilly, but it wasn't raining. I was disoriented. I hadn't been outside the gates or seen anyone other than residents and staff for all that time. I knew the hospital was in Petersburg, which I thought was a twin city to Richmond like Minneapolis and St. Paul. I was from Norfolk and didn't know my way around any other part of the state. I didn't have a driver's license, so I didn't know the roads. I thought if I just kept walking, I'd eventually get to a road or town and take things from there.
“Ten dollars was a lot of money back then. Enough for me to eat and buy a local bus ticket. I kept walking and walking, and then I stumbled and fell face first into a creek. I drowned. That's it.”
LouLou tried to take it all in. More than twelve years in Commonwealth Psychiatric. Sudden release. Midnight. Dead.
“Didn't you have a discharge plan?”
“A what?”
“A plan the doctors make for what to do when you leave. Didn't you get one?”
Gregg laughed. “I don't think any doctors knew I was there. Like I said, a guy I'm not even sure was a guard woke me up, said it was time to go, and out I went.”
“And you drowned.”
He nodded.
LouLou processed that. She'd always been driven in and out of the hospital grounds and always had some sort of official paper. Maybe that wasn't done in the 1980s. He'd been treated terribly. He'd wandered around and drowned. Ghastly. She wanted to hug him until his tears stopped, but he'd been a patient. What kind of patient?
“That's unspeakable. I'm sorry.”
“Yeah, it was. Looking back, I see how inhumanely I was treated, but it's too late. As for the rest of the story, I'll tell it. No interruptions.”
She could do that, but she wanted to know his diagnosis first. “Why were you in the hospital? What was your diagnosis?”
“Nothing. There was nothing wrong with me. Back then, there wasn't a mental illness requirement to be a patient or an inmate. Being undesirable was one of the requirements. I was considered part of the undesirable population.”
Despite the mood stabilizer and the sedative, fear crawled through LouLou's stomach up to her throat. He wasn't saying anything that made sense. She'd ask a few more questions and then he'd have to go.
“I've never heard of an undesirable patient. I know what the word undesirable means, but I never heard anyone at Petersburg say that was their reason for being there. What does that mean? “
He perched on the edge of the sofa as far away from LouLou as he could while still being on the couch. He looked down at his feet as he spoke. “I was admitted in 1968, the summer before I was supposed to start at Juilliard. I was with about seven or eight other guys standing outside the Trailways bus station in downtown Norfolk to go to Washington to protest the war. I was exempt from the draft because I'd had migraine headaches most of my life. Otherwise, I would have been a conscientious objector. Vietnam made no sense.
“We were waiting for the bus with tickets to DC, but the police said we were loitering and hauled us off to jail. We weren't there more than an hour before four of us were transferred to Petersburg by the sheriff's office. We were admitted and given cell-size rooms with bunk beds and told to follow the routine. We weren't locked up, but we weren't treated like patients either. I was there until I wasn't.”
LouLou interrupted. “That makes no
sense. The police can't just round up people and put them in institutions. You must have had a phone call or talked to a lawyer or something. Didn't your parents wonder what happened to you? And Juilliard. You were accepted to the best conservatory in the United States. That's major.”
Gregg wouldn't look at her. “Forget Juilliard. Things were different in the 1960s. Really different. I mean, there was segregation for schools, bathrooms, restaurants. Everything. There was a black world and a white world. Surely, you know about the Civil Rights movement.”
“Vaguely. I was raised in Europe. I went to high school in DC for two years and don't recall any history classes except for Western Civilization. I know a lot about French colonial states, but almost nothing about American history. I know who Martin Luther King, Jr. was and that there was segregation in parts of the United States. I've never thought about what it was like to live through it. You're not black. Why were you arrested?”
“They thought I was gay, although that's not the term they used. Long-haired skinny white boy. In jeans and a white shirt, they knocked themselves out laughing that they couldn't tell from behind whether I was male or female. The other guys who went to Petersburg with me were black.”
LouLou's hands shook. Unbelievable. Could this be true? People were grabbed off the street because they were black or gay and put in the state mental institution?
Suddenly, Gregg laughed out loud. LouLou looked at him as if he really was crazy.
“LouLou,” he gasped between laughs, “think about it. You're upset about Juilliard and the indignities of the pre-Civil Rights era but completely accepting of me being a ghost.” She smiled. She did see the irony, but she'd also confirmed his ghost story with Skylar.
“It's a horrible truth.”
Gregg sobered. “Yes, it is. It's how Big ended up there.”
That got her attention. A detail she knew to be true. “You know Big? Of course you do. He's been there forever.”
Gregg shook his head. “Not forever. Since the late 1920s.”
“How do you know?” She turned to face him.
“I feel like I'm teaching history.”
“I wasn't a great student, but I'm pretty sure what you're about to tell me wasn't in a French or American history book.”
“You've got a point.”
He rolled his neck from side to side, stretched his hands upward as far as he could, and exhaled.
“Involuntary sterilization was legal in Virginia until right before I was released. Petersburg was the place it was done. Half the psych patients at Commonwealth Psych were sterilized when I was there. Important people like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes decided three generations of imbeciles was enough, so psych patients were prevented from reproducing.
“Hell, people didn't have to be patients to be sterilized there. There were whispers about Mountain Sweeps. A local sheriff and his deputies would go into mountain towns, round up black people, undesirable whites, and people they just didn't like and take them to Petersburg to be sterilized. Sometimes, they'd release them after surgery. Sometimes not. Big was picked up in a Mountain Sweep and stayed.”
Her hands flew to her mouth. “Big? Sweet Big?”
Gregg nodded.
“Big looks about thirty-five. How could he have been hospitalized in the 1920s? Could Big be a ghost, too?”
He shook his head. “I don't know. I was alive and human when I was there. I wouldn't have recognized a ghost.”
She was off-track. She had to get back to Gregg's story. Just Gregg. “Sheriffs just rounded up people they thought shouldn't reproduce and took them to Petersburg? There weren't any guidelines?” Of course not. What kind of guidelines could there be for having citizens taken out of their homes and sterilized? A wave of nausea hit. “What about you? Were you…sterilized?”
Another laugh. “No, they seemed certain I wasn't going to get any girls pregnant and bring more of my kind into the world, so they left me alone.”
How this hot guy could be mistaken for gay for a long period of time was beyond her. It shouldn't have taken a doctor twelve or thirteen years to reach that conclusion. “Did you ever see a doctor?”
“No.” He was back to speaking quietly and looking away.
“You never saw a doctor in a dozen years? Or a nurse?”
“No, LouLou. You've been there for treatment. You had a diagnosis and a court order. If you hadn't had a private physician, how often would you have seen a doctor?”
“Rarely.” LouLou was treated because she was privileged and had a family with influence overseeing her. If other patients weren't treated, a person who wasn't a patient—part of a group of people some official didn't like—would never see medical staff. LouLou sat quietly in her corner and thought. What Gregg said sounded horrible, but it also sounded true. Without moving, she said quietly, “I'm sorry that happened to you. You spent half your life there. You lost your youth. You didn't go to Juilliard.”
Gregg seemed eerily calm. Maybe that came with being a ghost. His past didn't affect him anymore.
“Doesn't matter. I composed. No one messed with my head. Music was always there and sometimes, I was able to write it down. And now you have it to play for the world. It turned out okay.”
He looked at her, his eyes pleading her not to send him away because he hadn't spilled his entire story immediately.
“You're incredibly brave and not bitter at all.”
“I can't be. I have a second chance. To love you. To share my music. It's all I've ever wanted.”
She went to him and let him hold her. They were both on earth to make music and love each other. They were each flawed. Together, they were awesome.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
August
“Six weeks and done, done, done, done. Four beautiful, fabulous new pieces scored.” LouLou and Gregg high fived each other.
“Finished early too,” Gregg added. “I can't wait for Skylar to hear them. He's our best audience.”
“No, he was our first audience. The music industry loves your work. The outpouring of offers I reviewed with Brooks last week were pretty amazing. I told you about them.”
“The names of the companies don't mean much to me. They're all initials. I remember record companies with names like Mercury, Atlantic, and Decca. It's good to know professionals like our work, but my goal was to get it out of my head and give it to you. You ran with it.”
“Gregg, we've got to talk about credit.”
“No, we don't. It's all yours.”
“But it's your music. I did some arrangements and produced. It's your legacy.”
“I'm fine with just you and Skylar knowing that.” He grabbed his jacket. “C'mon, we don't want to be late for the movie.”
LouLou dropped the subject. She loved going to the movies with Gregg. They went to an art house that played indie and classic films during late afternoons, when the theatre wasn't crowded. She and Gregg didn't talk during the film because no one could see Gregg and she'd look like she was talking to herself or the screen. She felt normal at the movies. She and Gregg were on a real date. A normal, relaxing date. They held hands.
After the movie, they'd spend hours in her loft talking about film. LouLou loved film almost as much as music. Gregg was learning. He absorbed everything. He knew some of the classic films. Current films mesmerized him, particularly special effects, but he was awed by some of the stories told by foreign language films. He was stunned at how much movies had changed since he'd last seen one. The first time he'd seen nudity, he seemed to expect her to close her eyes. He couldn't believe the cursing and violence that was now acceptable. She thought it made him a bit uncomfortable.
This afternoon's movie was a desert movie—LouLou's weakness. She'd no idea why. She'd never been to a desert. There was something about a love story playing against the backdrop of seas of sand and the feelings of intimacy and isolation it stirred in her that always made her cry no matter how happy the ending.
After
the movie, Gregg and LouLou returned to her loft. She was going into hibernation the next day.
“Do you have everything for the tour?”
“The CDs are being delivered to Roy's tomorrow. I'm trying a new company to burn and package them. The demo was good. I'm all set musically.”
Gregg brushed a strand of blonde hair away from her eyes. “Tired?”
“Exhilarated about tonight.” She filled a glass of water and plopped on the sofa. Gregg sat close.
“Tell me where you're playing again.”
“It's a no-name after-hours blues club owned by my friend Clive and his wife, who is, believe it or not, named Olive. Mostly, the club attracts newcomers and old-timers. Sometimes, it turns into an all-night jam session depending on who's there. It's the only place to get a drink after two in the morning. I've heard some great stuff there.”
“Sounds good.”
“I'm going to eat now, take my meds, and nap until about midnight. I'll probably have a snack before we leave. Skylar's picking us, or shall I say me, up at about one. It's about a forty-minute drive from here.”
“That's not much time before a show. Don't you have to do a sound check? Lights? Get dressed?”
LouLou laughed. “Clive's really is underground. I think it's a basement. There's two restrooms. Whichever one's not in use is my dressing room. The lighting guy is older than Skylar and he’s been working longer. If he can't find me on stage, no one can.”
“What about the turntables? The booth?”
“Prop turntable. No booth. It's as basic at it gets. There is a stage to separate the show from the crowd. No curtain to raise or lower.”
Gregg looked thoughtful. “Kind of like a church basement.”
“Exactly like a church basement if it had kegs, bottled bourbon, and tequila.”
***
“They're going to boo me off the stage.” LouLou adjusted her short-short backless yellow dress with red and orange flames shooting up from the hem and rested her hand on Clive's shoulder for balance as she put on one red stiletto and then, the other. Olive put finishing touches on her makeup and pulled a strand of blonde hair out of the way to better frame her face.