Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  “I do not, under any circumstances, want him going to a state hospital.” Her brother had spent the last fifteen years of his life in a state institution. She’d seen what those places looked like—dilapidated, underfunded, and understaffed; her brother in a straightjacket. “He is not going there.”

  They offered one final option: ECT, electroconvulsive therapy. Electric currents would be shot through my brain, intentionally triggering a brief seizure. Sometimes ECT can quickly reverse symptoms of certain mental illnesses. The hope was I’d just snap out of it. They showed her a video—it was a VHS from the 1980s.

  “You will not be doing that to my son.”

  Once the Osawatomie talk resurfaced, she began bringing a photo of me to the hospital, like she’d done on her Bellevue visits. “That guy you are seeing is not my son. My son is sweet and empathetic. He’s a feminist. He’s not disrespectful to women. This isn’t him,” she said, clutching the picture. But they were done with me and she knew it. The nurses acknowledged that the guy in the picture looked much different from the strung-out lunatic who verbally abused them every day. They just couldn’t reconcile that image with the man they were forced to care for. As far as they were concerned, the nice guy was gone and they wanted the crazy asshole who’d replaced him to be someone else’s problem.

  Day 17 Good Shepherd (1/12/11)

  Judge court ordered Z to Osawatomie State Hospital. Left Good Shepherd at 11:30 a.m. Z out of nowhere tells me he wants to contact and make amends w/ father! Worthless sperm donor, doesn’t even know his son is in a psych ward. Help me Jesus.

  Chapter 17

  I didn’t know it at the time, but it took a court order for the Bird to put us on a plane to California to visit our dad those summers. On the day of the custody and visitation hearing, Mack wore four shades of green to the Sedgwick County Courthouse: emerald-green suit jacket with mismatched forest-green slacks, a lime-green shirt, and a pine-green tie. And he slicked his hair back. He brought his mom with him to the proceedings. The Bird told the judge that, plain and simple, he didn’t deserve to see his children. The judge agreed. “No, he doesn’t. But they deserve to see him.” So ordered. Summers in Cali.

  No, he doesn’t, but they do. Forget seeing him, I still wanted to be him at that point—I missed him tucking me in, Crown Royal on his breath or not. “Your whiskers tickle, Daddy.” How could his face look so smooth and scratch so hard? And he played the drums. As far as musical instruments go, that’s about as cool as it gets.

  I felt like a man when he let me hang out with him. Before he left, the proudest day of my life had been when we’d demolished the concrete steps on the side of our house on Laura Street with sledgehammers. The sledgehammer I used weighed half as much as me, and it brought me tumbling backward the first time I swung it over my head. But I didn’t want to choke up on the handle; I wanted to chop down on it, like Paul Bunyan splitting logs. Like my dad was doing.

  It was hot, and as workingmen do, we took our shirts off. My mom brought us hot dogs and purple Kool-Aid, and we ate and drank outside. That part felt manly too: the womenfolk bringing out provisions. The only thing that could have made it better was if we’d worn hard hats like real construction workers. He smoked pot and drank Crown and Cokes throughout the workday. I didn’t know it was pot then, but once I was old enough to have friends who smoked, I recognized the smell immediately: childhood. It smelled like his friend Billy’s velour couch; it smelled like when he was in a good mood; it smelled like those demolished steps.

  Before our first summer visit to see Mack, California was only a concept to me—like the rain forest or Antarctica. I was aware of its existence but only as an amalgamation of clichés ripped from TV and magazine covers. L.A. meant surfer dudes, Disneyland, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, blondes, and the Lakers. And the beach—I didn’t associate with anyone who’d ever seen the Pacific Ocean, except maybe Pa during his military service. Cool-guy ambitions of all sorts revealed themselves as possibilities. Would I learn to surf? I started weaving “I’m going to L.A. to see my dad this summer” into conversations in the Kellogg Elementary School cafeteria.

  It being 1990, and me being seven, Mom and Granny accompanied us to the gate. While I watched the planes take off, Granny gripped my hand with misbehaving-in-church-level pressure. Giant sharks with wings, longer than a soccer field and taller than my house. I knew they weren’t fighter jets, but I imagined where the guns would be positioned. (They’d blast out of the turbines.) Every pilot strolling through the terminal was Goose; no Mavericks, sadly. But 300 miles per hour! We were about to blast through the sky at 300 miles per hour! I expected it to feel something like a space shuttle launch. I couldn’t wait to watch Top Gun with my dad again. It seemed like he watched it every night when he lived with us—I’d pretend I couldn’t sleep so that he’d let me lie on the couch next to him.

  The Bird tried to wear a brave face, but she couldn’t hold it in any longer when the gate attendant called for all unaccompanied minors to board. Alexa cried too, which made me cry; Adam was too young to join in. He just clutched his stuffed Littlefoot doll—he’d watched The Land Before Time so many times that he broke the VHS tape. My sister’s tears sprang from understanding where we were headed; mine were solely on account of leaving my mom and Granny. I’d never spent twenty-four hours away from the Bird, and now we’d be gone for the summer. We’d be taller the next time she saw us. “Take care of your brothers,” the Bird said, holding Alexa tight.

  Mack drove like a goddamn maniac. Left lane, right lane, left lane, back to the right, yelling “Get your head out of your ass!”—or some variation thereof—the entire time. It was hilarious to me, and for some reason not at all terrifying. “Get your head out of your ass!” What a phenomenal turn of phrase. Every driver on the 405 was “This idiot.” Alexa gripped the dashboard and sighed audibly as Mack darted in and out of the idiots. “Can we get something to eat, Dad?”

  “Yeah, honey. But first, welcome to Hollywood!” He said it like he owned the place.

  He took us to Red Robin. It was as nice as any restaurant I’d ever set foot inside. Excuse me, am I reading this menu correctly? Does that say unlimited french fries? Keep ’em coming then, miss.

  “If I was homeless, I’d come here every day in the morning and stay all day and eat french fries.”

  “Just eat your food.”

  My mom would have been impressed with such a cunning plan.

  After Red Robin, Mack went out of his way to drive us by the Hollywood sign. “It used to say ‘Hollywoodland’!” That sounded dumb to me. “Hollywood” was so much punchier—maybe that’s why they’d changed it. And maybe the reason he was taking us on such a jaunt—wining and dining and french-frying us, showing off the iconic Hollywood landscape—was that our destination was not truly Hollywood, or even L.A. at large; it was Cerritos, a suburb in Los Angeles County. There were Targets and liquor stores and Chinese massage parlors next to insurance offices in strip malls. Where was the ocean? The surfers? Where was Tom Cruise?

  California quickly revealed itself to be a series of semi-adventures we couldn’t afford. Alexa, ten, was the first to point this out. We ate out almost every night for dinner—at Sizzler or Souplantation! or Red Robin. (Occasionally at Cracker Barrel; never at the Medieval Times across the street from Cracker Barrel, although promises were made.) An average bill would run about $50, and most dinners were paid for by Maggie—Mack’s new girlfriend—who had a job at Sony. Mack very occasionally pulled editing work at a local news station during that first summer we visited, but his jobs were few and far between. I knew he didn’t have any money because Alexa knew he didn’t have any money. She’d beg Mack, “Can’t we just eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches tonight? I’ll make them.”

  “My dinner doesn’t come on two pieces of bread,” Mack told her.

  The restaurant experiences were mortifying. He always flirted with the waitresses, even in front of Maggie, who would later become his second
wife. Usually, we ate at name-tag places, so he could just look at the server’s chest to get her name. He’d then address her for the rest of dinner like they were old pals from college, either by first name or “hun,” which he most often slipped in at least once.

  The overt flirtation was only the second most embarrassing thing about going out to eat with him. Motivated by both gluttony and poverty, he’d always ask the waitress, “Can we get a few more of these rolls, boxed up to go?” He carried himself as if he were some sort of bread connoisseur. “They’re just so good. I’d love to take a few of those rolls home. Can’t beat those rolls.” Maybe it was because I knew we actually needed to take the bread home (he wasn’t above eating his lunch on two pieces of bread), but his affected nonchalance made it seem obvious that he was hiding a certain shame in his request. He’d even continue the front with us after our waitress left the table: “This really is good bread. Isn’t this good bread?” Yes, they are rolls. Rolls with butter are good.

  Restaurants weren’t our only luxury. We saw pretty much every movie that came out. Once we worked through the first-run titles, we hit the dollar theaters. There was less tension in the air at the buck flicks. No Alexa saying, “Three kids is fifteen dollars, two adults is sixteen dollars, that’s thirty-one. Plus, you always get popcorn and two big Cokes, so that’s another seventeen dollars, which makes the total forty-eight.”

  “You can’t go to a movie without popcorn,” Mack would scold. Mack liked his popcorn prepared a very specific way. When the concessions employee would ask him “Butter?” he’d always answer with “Butter layered throughout.” No matter how many times he had to explain it, he refused to acknowledge that his request was unorthodox. He couldn’t wait for them to ask so that he could offer his explanation: “You pour some popcorn in the bucket, then a layer of butter. Then layer of popcorn…layer of butter. One more popcorn scoop. Then, you guessed it, layer of butter. Repeat until full.” He thought it was funny; a second grader could tell it was condescending. Mack would then turn to us, shake his head, and roll his eyes, as if to say Can you believe these idiots? Never heard of butter throughout. Alexa and I learned to silently apologize to all manner of service industry workers, with shoulder shrugs, pursed smiles, and eyebrow pops. It’s not you, it’s him. The popcorn was so goddamn oily with that fake butter-flavored canola oil that it became an amorphous solid and never failed to give me a stomachache. I couldn’t stop eating it, though.

  After the movie, Mack always stayed until the last credit rolled. “Huh, Greg Calvin worked on this,” he’d mutter to himself and all of us. “Anne Schneider.” Maggie pretended to believe that he knew some of these people.

  If asked what he did for a living, Mack answered, “I’m a producer, director, and editor.” Sometimes, casually, “I work in television” or “I’m in show business.” In reality, Dad was a man who needed to get his head out of his ass. In his more grounded moods he’d say as much, and he would plan to do so. That’s how he started most phone conversations: “I’m about to get my head out of my ass.” Soon, tomorrow, next week, he would. You got the sense that, to this man, pulling one’s head out of one’s ass was an exquisitely complicated procedure.

  To his children, the solution seemed simpler. Every summer we begged him to get a job—anywhere. When we’d go to Red Robin in the Cerritos Mall, Alexa would slyly read the NOW HIRING sign aloud. Eventually, we just started begging him outright:

  “Why don’t you get a job at Red Robin?”

  “I don’t wait tables.”

  “Why don’t you get a job at Best Buy?”

  “They don’t make any money.”

  “They make more than zero money.”

  “I work in Hollywood.”

  “Home Depot?”

  “I don’t work for minimum wage. My work is in Hollywood.”

  In 2007, the summer before my final year of law school, I visited my dad in California for the last time. It had been ten years since I’d last been out there, and I’d probably seen him in person five times since. Nothing had changed.

  After working on his cars and smoking pot at his shop all day, we retreated to his apartment. Sure as the ground beneath our feet, his wife teetered over, blackout drunk, slurring and pretending she wasn’t. My brother, sister, and I learned of Maggie’s alcoholism live and in color one summer afternoon twelve years prior while we were watching Maury Povich—our third consecutive hour of daytime talk shows—waiting for Mack to take us to McDonald’s. From upstairs, we heard Mack yell, “If you love it so much, why don’t you wear it!?” Followed by the unmistakable gasp of someone who’d had vodka thrown on their person. Then one of them threw something that hit the wall. We muted Maury; this was better. “CAPTAIN FUCKING SNEAK-A-DRINK!” Mack yelled.

  “You fucking threw my drink on me!” Maggie confirmed what we already knew. “Fucking, fuck. Bastard!”

  A couple of minutes later, Mack sauntered downstairs, easy as Sunday morning, and casually asked us, “You guys want to go see a movie?” We did.

  Maggie didn’t.

  Later that night, Mack ignored Captain Sneak-a-Drink and started picking my brain about my upcoming legal career possibilities.

  “Will you be my lawyer?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Would you represent me?”

  Of course I knew literally what “Will you be my lawyer?” meant, but it didn’t seem my unemployed father was presently in need of representation. And I was a second-year law student, specializing in criminal law. “Why?” I asked. “Are you thinking about committing a crime?” Best-case scenario, he meant parking tickets.

  He pointed to the TV. We were watching Ocean’s Twelve. “No, I mean, like, if I produced Ocean’s Thirteen, would you represent me?”

  Fuck. I felt the heat rising from my collarbone and into my skull. I tried not to answer too quickly, but I didn’t want to pause too long either. Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say: What, are you just going to call George and say “Let’s call Brad, get the gang back together—do it with me. Fuck Steven Soderbergh. I’ll shoot it in my garage.” I didn’t say it, but I couldn’t just leave it either.

  “Do you really think you could produce Ocean’s Thirteen?” I asked.

  “Why not?” Silence.

  You know why not, motherfucker. You didn’t do Ocean’s Twelve, or Eleven. Your alcoholic wife is standing in the kitchen, too drunk to make couscous. You are drinking MGD. Your only computer weighs thirty-five pounds and you don’t have the internet. Your last “project” was a “commercial” for toner cartridge refills, and they didn’t turn out to be the wave of the future you were predicting. You don’t have health insurance. You don’t own a cell phone. You just smoked your seventh Marlboro Ultra Light in forty-five minutes. The baseball-pitching machine you bought me when I was twelve is still in its box in your garage. You have three cars on cinder blocks, no checking account, and you bum weed from your next-door neighbor. You are not producing Ocean’s Thirteen, Fourteen, or Fifty-seven.

  “Like, if I get my head out of my ass and produce Ocean’s Thirteen, would you represent me?” He wasn’t at all kidding.

  Goddammit…

  “Sure, I’ll represent you. That’d be a nice commission. I wouldn’t know how to do it, but I’d figure it out.”

  “You’d figure it out!”

  I accidentally broke my first Mack rule: quit trying to impress your father.

  After I agreed to be his lawyer, Mack had one more favor to ask: “You have to tell me the secret after they swear you in.”

  “The what?”

  “The secret. When they swear you into the bar, there’s a secret they tell all lawyers.”

  “Is that right?” Shooting down conspiracy theories without coming across as condescending is difficult. Also, with Mack, entertaining his fixations can become a “choose your own adventure.” Challenge the lawyer theory and he’d just move on to the next one, about health care or rigged elections or sex o
ffenders or the politics of Hollywood or Jesus or the Bible or…take your pick.

  “Sure, I’ll tell you.” We clinked our MGD cans on it.

  Chapter 18

  Sacha Baron Cohen was being transferred from Good Shepherd along with me in the van. Our destination was B2—the violent and sexual offenders ward at Osawatomie State Hospital. Good Shepherd reported that I met both criteria: violent from the softball incident, sexual from my nudist walks.

  Even filtered through the gloomy gray glaze of winter, the farms and fence posts dotting the Kansas plains looked idyllic. The landscape seemed so slow—the polar opposite of my brain. If I could just get out of the van, I could run through those fields to the end of the earth, no locked doors between us. Had I known what hell awaited me, I would have tried harder.

  Osawatomie State Hospital is two hours and several decades away from Wichita. Set in the middle of the flat Kansas prairie, it was originally built in 1855 and known then as the Kansas Insane Asylum—folks preferred plain-speak back in those days, before we started pretending loony bins were hospitals. Owing to a ghost infestation, the original structure had to be destroyed long ago, but if the original had been knocked down on account of a few poltergeists, it’s hard to say why the 1970s replacement has thus far been spared the wrecking ball. When I walked in, the original linoleum was peeling and stained, the drinking fountain appeared to be duct-taped to the wall, and the fluorescent lights, those that worked, cast a stale glow over the place.

  By the time I got to Osawatomie, I was still having starbursts of psychosis, but lucidity was slowly returning in patches. That said, I didn’t give my state of affairs much thought: I was so heavily medicated that it didn’t occur to me to think about where I’d been for the past couple of weeks.