They were at Madam in a mental hospital. They were both patients. They had group therapy together, so she knew all the secrets, even before they started seeing each other. And like, they told us not to get involved, and that just made it even more fun, you know, to get involved, and he was very funny.
He was so funny. He just made me laugh all the time. And he was really fun to be with. He was continued, even after they got out of the hospital.
He was officially diagnosed as manic depressive. He was manic a lot. She was depressive. You know, I guess we complimented each other in a way, but he was...
Oh, he was whacked, man. He would just, you know, he'd like be in my apartment and he would walk in like a chicken and stop. I don't know. He just...
he did anything to make me laugh. You're kind of on and off, and then we decided to live together, and you know, I'm just a little different. I mean, I like the crazy part of him. I like that funny, you know, whacky, but then, you know, it's weird.
It's different when you're living with it. It's like you have, like, the stand-up comedian with you, like, 24 hours. It gets to be, like, a little, like, snap out of it, can't you act normal? Can't you just act mellow?
And no, no, that wasn't happening. It wasn't happening, because it was after all. Mentally ill. He was just driving me crazy, because also, like, we would be, like, in a grocery store, and it would take him so long to, like, buy one item, if you'd be, like, looking at it, you know, and then comparing it to another one, and then to another one, and then to another one, and then to be, like, and then he was smart, so he'd be figuring everything out mathematically, and then by grams and stuff.
And he'd be like, no way, I can't handle this anymore. You know, I just couldn't do it, you know. For some reason, like, he always thought, like, he always treated me like, I was the crazy one. I always thought, like, he was crazy.
I guess. So, I don't think that worked. Although there were plenty of people with severe and debilitating mental illness, just as often, the line between crazy and not crazy is blurry. So many different kinds of behavior followed both categories.
And I think what captures our attention and our hearts when we talk with someone who's mentally ill is not how they're different from us, but how they're the same. Well, it would be easy in Chicago, public radio, international. It's this American life. I'm Ira Glass.
Today on our program, we bring you stories of the sanity that is part of mental illness, people who stand on the borderline between sanity and sickness. Act 1, Girl Interrupted. A movie has been made out of Susanna Cason's memoir, Girl Interrupted, by Mental Hospital. If you've never read the book, it is one of the most remarkable pieces of nonfiction writing of the last few years.
We have an excerpt. Act 2, guided by Voices. We also have this tape made by people who actually hear voices in their heads, and the tape is designed to simulate what it is that they hear. Act 3, Plague of Ticks.
David Sedaris explains the voices that he hears in his head. Act 4, you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps. What it's like if you hold the keys to the asylum, but your grip on them is not too steady. Stay with us.
Act 1, at the age of 18, after a brief appointment with a psychiatrist who she'd never met before, Susanna Cason entered McLean's psychiatric hospital. A book Girl Interrupted describes her stay on the ward for teenage girls, where she spent most of two years. It's probably an account of what it's like to have certain mental illnesses, and probably an account of everyday life on the ward. The nurses the girls liked and didn't like, the doctors, and the way the young women on the ward interacted with each other.
One day, a second Lisa arrived. We called her by her full name, Lisa Cody, to distinguish her from the real Lisa, who renamed simply Lisa, like a queen. The Lisa's became friends. One of their favorite activities was having phone conversations.
The three phone booths near the double lock double doors were our only privacy. We could go in one and shut the door. Even the craziest person could sit in a phone booth and have a private conversation, though only with herself. The nurses had lists of permitted numbers for each of us.
When we picked up the phone, a nurse would answer. The law would say, this is Georgina, or Cynthia or Polly, I want to call 555-4270. That's not on your list, the nurse would say. Then the line would go dead.
But there was still the quiet dusty phone booth, and the old fashioned black receiver with its sharp dorsal ridge. The Lisa's had phone conversations. Each one got in a booth, folded the door shut, and yelled into her receiver. When the nurse answered, Lisa yelled off the line, then the Lisa's got on with her conversation.
Sometimes they yelled insults, sometimes they yelled about their plans for the day. Wanna go over to the cafeteria for dinner, Lisa Cody would yell, but Lisa was restricted to the ward, so she'd have to yell back something like, why do you want to eat that slot with all those psychotics? To which Lisa Cody would yell, what do you think you are? Sociopath, Lisa would yell proudly.
Lisa Cody didn't have a diagnosis yet. Cynthia was depressive. Polly and Georgina were schizophrenic. I had a character disorder.
Sometimes they called it a personality disorder. When I got my diagnosis it didn't sound serious, but after a while it sounded more ominous than other people's. I imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless. When she'd been with us a month or so, Lisa Cody got a diagnosis.
She was a sociopath too. She was happy because she wanted to be like Lisa in all things. Lisa was not so happy because she had been the only sociopath among us. We are very rare, she told me once, and mostly we are men.
After Lisa Cody got her diagnosis, the Lisa started making more trouble. Acting out, the nurses said. We knew what it was. The real Lisa was proving that Lisa Cody wasn't a sociopath.
Lisa tonged her sleeping meds for a week, took them all at once, and stayed zonked for a day and a night. Lisa Cody managed to save only four of hers, and when she took them she puked. Lisa put a cigarette out on her arm at 6.30 in the morning while the nurses were changing ships. That afternoon Lisa Cody burned a tiny weld on her wrist and spent the next 20 minutes running cold water on it.
Then they had a life history battle. Lisa wormed out of Lisa Cody that she'd grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut. Greenwich, Connecticut. She sneered.
No sociopath could emerge from there. Were you a debutante too? Speed, black beauties, coke, heroin. Lisa had done it all.
Lisa Cody said she'd been a junkie too. She rolled her sleeve back to show her tracks. Faint scratches along the vein as if once, years before, she'd tangled with a rose bush. A suburban junkie said Lisa.
You were playing, that's what. Hey man, junk's junk, Lisa Cody protested. Lisa pushed her sleeve up to her elbow and shoved her arm under Lisa Cody's nose. Her arm was studded with pale brown lumps, gnarled and authentic.
These, said Lisa, are tracks, man. Later for your tracks. Lisa Cody was beaten, but she didn't have the sense to give up. She still sat beside Lisa at breakfast and hall meeting.
She still waited in the phone booth for the call that didn't come. I gotta get rid of her, said Lisa. You were mean, Polly said. Bitch, said Lisa.
Who asked Cynthia, Polly's protector. But Lisa didn't bother to clarify. One evening when the nurses walked the halls at dusk to turn on the lights that made our ward as bright and jarring as a penny arcade, they found every light bulb gone. Not broken, vanished.
We knew who'd done it. The question was, where'd she put them? It was hard to search in the darkness. Even the light bulbs in our rooms were gone.
Lisa has the true artistic temperaments of Georgina. Just hunched, said the head nurse. Everybody hunched. Lisa sat out the hunt in the TV room.
It was Lisa Cody who found them as she was meant to. She was probably planning to sit out the hunt as well, in the place that held memories of better days. She must have felt some resistance when she tried to fold the door back. There were dozens of light bulbs inside, but she persevered, just as she persevered with Lisa.
The crunch and clatter brought us all scampering down to the phone booths. Broken, said Lisa Cody. Everyone asked Lisa how she'd done it, but all she would say was, I've got a long, skinny arm. Lisa Cody disappeared two days later, somewhere between our ward and the cafeteria she slipped away.
Nobody ever found her, though the search went on for more than a week. She couldn't take this place, said Lisa. And though we listened for a trace of jealousy in her voice, we didn't hear one. Some months later, Lisa ran off again while she was being taken to a gynecology consult at the Mass General.
Two days she managed this time. When she got back, she looked especially pleased with herself. I saw Lisa Cody, she said. Ooh, said Georgina.
Poly shook her head. She's a real junkie now, said Lisa, smiling. One girl among us had set herself on fire. She used gasoline.
She was too young to drive at the time. I wondered how she'd gotten hold of it. As she walked to her neighborhood garage and told him her father's car had run out of gas, I couldn't look at her without thinking about it. I think the gasoline had settled in her collarbones, forming pools there beside her shoulders, because her neck and cheeks were scarred the most.
The scars were thick ridges, alternating bright pink and white, and stripes up from her neck. They were so tough and wide that she couldn't turn her head, but had to swivel her entire upper torso as she wanted to see a person standing next to her. Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin.
It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slipcover. It shields and disguises what's beneath.
That's why we grow it. We have something to hide. Her name was Polly. This name must have seemed ridiculous to her in the days or months when she was planning to set herself on fire, but it suited her well in her slip-covered survivor life.
She was never unhappy. She was kind and comforting to those who were unhappy. She never complained. She always had time to listen to other people's complaints.
She was flawless in her impermeable, tight, pink and white casing. Whatever had driven her whispered, die in her once-perfect, now scarred ear, she had emulated it. Why did she do it? Nobody knew.
Nobody dared to ask. Because what courage? Who had the courage to burn herself? Funny aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof.
We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there. You taste it.
It's cold and greasy. Your finger is on the trigger. And you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you.
You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way. What was that moment like for her, the moment she lit the match? Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirin?
Or was it just an inspiration? I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning, and I knew that today I had to swallow 50 aspirin. It was my task, my job for the day.
I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped at 10 or 30, and I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. 50 aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.
She lit the match. Where? In the garage at home, where she wouldn't set anything else on fire, out in a field, in a high school gym, in an empty swimming pool? Somebody found her, but not for a while.
Who would kiss a person like that, a person with no skin? She was 18 before this thought occurred to her. She'd spent a year with us. Other people stormed and screamed and cringed and cried.
Polly watched and smiled. She sat by people who were frightened, and her presence calmed them. Her smile wasn't mean. It was understanding.
Life was hellish. She knew that. But her smile hinted. She'd burned all that out of her.
Her smile was a little bit superior. We wouldn't have the courage to burn it out of ourselves, but she understood that too. Everyone was different. People just did what they could.
One morning, somebody was crying, but mornings were often noisy, fights about getting up on time and complaints about nightmares. Polly was so quiet, so unobtrusive a presence that we didn't notice she wasn't at breakfast. After breakfast, we could still hear crying. Who's crying?
Nobody knew. And at lunch, there was still crying. It's Polly, said Lisa, who knew everything. Why?
But even Lisa didn't know why. At dusk, the crying changed to screaming. Dusk is a dangerous time. At first, she screamed, aah!
Then she started to scream words, my face, my face, my face. We could hear other voices shushing her, murmuring comfort, but she continued to scream her two words long into the night. Lisa said, well, I've been expecting this for a while, and then I think we all realized what fools we'd been. We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.
Suzanne case in her police card, you're all interrupted. If you're always stealing goodies from a big department store, you need an analyst, a psychoanalyst. If your pockets hold a little thing, you never owe before. If you need an analyst, a psychoanalyst.
If somebody says, good morning, it will likely tips his hat. And you frown and say, I wonder what he really meant by that. If you're walking down the sidewalk and you won't step on a crack, you're afraid if you step on a crack, you'll break your mother's back. If you're at the Bill Harmonic and you start to do the twist, you need an analyst, a psychoanalyst.
You need an analyst. You need an analyst. We really must insist that you see an analyst. If you're freezing or sweating from imaginary pills, you need an analyst, a psychoanalyst.
If it takes an IBM machine to classify your pills, you need an analyst, a psychoanalyst. You need an analyst. You need an analyst. You need an analyst.
Act 2, divided by voices. Pat Deagon heard voices, and she was a psychologist. When she was a girl, the voices were friendly. She thought everybody heard voices.
She didn't know that other people didn't. When she turned 17, the voices changed. They became vicious, critical, unbearable. She was diagnosed as a schizophrenic.
Years later, as a psychologist herself, she thought the only way mental health workers can really understand what their patients go through is if they hear the voices too. So, she and some other people who hear voices got together to make a tape. They talked about the kinds of things the voices normally say to them, and put together a script and how to record it. And then they set up these training sessions where mental health workers would listen to this tape on a Walkman.
And while they're listening to the voices, we also have them go through a mock psychiatric emergency services situation where they receive a mental status exam. They go to a mock psychological testing center where they do a reading comprehension test. They go to a mock day treatment program where they do some cognitive puzzles. And we also send them out into the community to have some kind of interaction, yet four quarters for a dollar, for instance.
But they have to have some kind of social exchange with the public while experiencing these voices. And the actual voices that we're hearing on the tape are these people who actually experience voices or they are? These aren't actors. No.
All of us where voice here is. And are people simply reciting the voices that they themselves hear in their heads sometimes? No, interestingly, we decided as a group that that's for voice here is much too dangerous a thing to do. People can actually internally get into enormous conflict and go into enormous crisis by revealing the content of what it is their voices are saying.
Voices very frequently don't want to be broadcast all over the place. And so we had to take great care around that as voice here as ourselves. And so, for example, I think there's a man on there who says, you know, you discussed me. That isn't what he himself hears.
That's what somebody else might hear. That's right. That's right. That's right.
Look at them. Their eyes are filled with disgust. They know how disgusting you are. Stop it now.
Stop, stop, stop, stop. I see you. I see you. I see you.
Everybody. They know you. They know how foul you are. You are foul.
Don't touch it. Don't touch it. Don't touch it. Don't touch it.
The layering of voices on the tape. Is that the way people actually experience it so they'll hear several voices at once? Again, there's enormous individual variation with this, but it's not at all unusual for people to have more than one voice and to have more than one voice activated or talking at the same time. Are the voices generally negative?
Are they saying negative things? That seems to be a characteristic of people who are showing up for help with the voice hearing experience is that there aren't a predominance of helpful or good voices, as we would call them. Phil, swine, disgusting, garbage eater. I said, you, yeah, that's right.
You stink. You stink. Phil, dirt, smirk. Laughing, huh?
You're not funny. You're pathetic. You stink. You stink.
You stink. You stink. The only thing that's funny around here is you. That's right.
It's interesting because over the last few days, as I've been thinking about this and listening to the tape and looking at your book, I've tried to be aware of whether in some low-level way, I hear voices in my head. And I feel like I hear songs run through my head a lot more than I hear actual voices. And I was wondering if you view what voice hearing experience is being just on a continuum from what everybody experiences in their everyday life? I think that the idea of a continuum is a nice one, but I'm afraid in this way, I don't think it's accurate to talk about voice hearing as being a continuum.
The big, big, big difference between hearing the song in your head and having experience of hearing distressing voices is that first of all, in the truest sense of hearing, you don't hear it in the way that you hear my voice right now. The voice hearing experience is first and foremost and most primorially profoundly auditory experience, to the point where you can actually startle. If a voice starts up suddenly and you turn around and you're wondering where it all started and if someone is actually in the room. You know, I feel silly that I didn't understand that up until this point.
Somehow, I had thought that what we were talking about were just simply, you know, I didn't realize that it was an auditory experience that one might confuse with actually hearing a sound in the room. Oh, absolutely. You absolutely hear it. Hey, turn around and listen to me.
Hey. Hey. Yeah, that's what you want to talk to you. You're nothing.
You know it's the truth. You know it. Oh, oh, I can't stand it anymore. You are disgusting.
Slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down, get in the house, tell me who you are. Hide away. Hide away. You know what?
You can't hide. You can't hide. They know where you are going to find you no matter what you do. They know.
You know. I know. We know. They all know.
Stop it. You've been together among the materials that you've put out. There's a pamphlet called Coping with Voices, Self-Help Strategies for people who hear voices that are distressing. And you have advice for people who are hearing voices.
Simple things that they can do. And one of them that you suggest is to take a typical one here. One of them is using earplugs. You say that some people who have found that putting an ear plug in an ear can greatly reduce or eliminate distressing voices.
Yes, this is an interesting finding. And empirically, what they've found is that putting the wax in both ears does not work. You have to try to trial an error at work with your right ear than your left ear. For some people, for instance, putting it in the right ear, leaving it there for 15 minutes will interrupt the voices and in some cases make them go away.
For other people, you leave it in the right ear for 15 minutes, and it's only when you take the plug out that the voices are interrupted and or stopped. Do you have any thoughts about why it might work? No, I really don't. It's just as simple as well.
Let's just change the situation and just any change, like any sort of physical change might help. I think, frankly, after my studies and also through a lot of personal trial and error and learning experiences myself, that there really is enormous truth that anything that promotes a sense of personal efficacy and power. That seems to be the key that these voices which present themselves as the all-knowing, all-powerful, we know everything, we see everything you do and on and on and on, to find that I can interrupt that powerful force really creates a space for me to have some power. And of course, this flies in the face of what much of modern psychiatry is saying, that people who are experiencing major mental illness are having broken brains and can't possibly take a stand towards what's ailing them except to take medications.
I feel we are doing an enormous disservice in the United States in particular by saying that medications are the only answer. Pat, do you talk about your own experiences voice here? I don't want to intrude in something that's private that you don't talk about publicly and ask you questions or something if you don't. No, I do talk about it in some generality, yes?
In your own experience, have you successfully made voices go away completely? Did they come back sometimes for you? I live with distressing voices on almost a daily basis, not 24 hours a day, but usually in the course of the day, my voices do come. So for instance, just before coming into this recording studio, I was sitting out in the waiting area in the BUR offices and there's a lot of what I would call white noise out there, white noise coming from a fan and ventilation system in the room.
And for me, that was very prominent. And for me and many other voice here is a white noise situation is a set up for the emergence of distressing voices. So as that began to happen, I could say to myself, okay, it's going to be all right. I know I've got 10 minutes before the interview starts.
And I pulled out an ear plug and I put it in my left ear, which is the ear that works for me. And I reassured myself that once I got out of the white noise situation that I would be doing better. How do you conceive of the voices that you hear? Do you conceive of them as being separate from yourself or do you conceive of them as being a part of yourself that you can recognize?
I think that for me, it's a goal to eventually be able to say these voices are a part of me. And that's actually one of the self-help coping strategies that I do use sometimes. So for instance, if I have a particularly derogatory, awful voice that I might say as a coping strategy, today I am feeling like I am no good. Today I am feeling like I'm a worthless person.
These are my thoughts. These are my feelings. Is that because when the voice is saying that literally you are not having the feeling? Oh, I'm feeling bad today?
That's right. Wow. Dr. Patricia Degan, organization of the National Empowerment Center can be reached at 1-800-POWER-2-U.
That's 1-800- then the word power, then the number 2, then the letter U. Coming up, David Sedaris rocks, but not the way we usually mean when we say that. And other stories, in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's just American life and my reclass.
Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and a variety of writers, documentary producers, and performers to do stories on that theme. Today's program on the edge of mental health, stories of people who stand right at the border of sanity and sickness. We have arrived at Act III of our program, Plague of Ticks. Well, regular listeners show are familiar, very familiar, stunningly familiar with David Sedaris.
In the past, he's coming to the show to tell stories about getting the drama bug in high school of his sister and mother deciding that they're going to solve crimes of his first attempt at visiting a nudist colony. Today's story begins in grade school. When the teacher asks if she might visit with my mother, I touch my nose eight times to the surface of my desk. May I take that as a yes?
She asked? According to her calculations, I left my chair 28 times that day. You're up and down like a flea. I turn my back for two minutes, and there you are with your tongue pressed against that light switch.
Maybe they do that where you come from, but here in my classroom we don't leave our seat and lick things whenever we please. That is Miss Chestnut's light switch, and she likes to keep it dry. Would you like for me to come over to your house and put my tongue on your light switches? Well, would you?
I tried to picture her in action, but my shoe was calling. Take me off, it whispered. Tap my heel against your forehead three times. Do it now.
Quick. No one will notice. Well, Miss Chestnut raised her faint penciled eyebrows. I'm asking you a question.
Would you or would you not want me licking the light switches in your house? I slipped off my shoe, pretending to examine the imprint on the heel. You're going to hit yourself over the head without shoe, aren't you? It wasn't hitting, it was tapping, but still, how would she know what I was about to do?
Heel marks all over your forehead, she said, answering my silent question. It was a short distance from a school to our rented house. No more than 637 steps. And on a good day, I could make the trip at an hour, pausing every few feet to tom a mailbox or touch whichever single leaf or blade of grass demanded my attention.
If I were to lose count of my steps, I'd have to return to the school and begin again. I might touch the telephone pole at step 314, and then, 15 paces later, worry that I hadn't touched it in exactly the right spot. It needed to be touched again. This was a long and complicated process that demanded an oppressive attention to detail.
Bypass that mailbox and my brain would never for one moment let me forget it. I might be sitting at the dinner table, daring myself not to think about it, and the thought would revisit my mind, don't think about it, but it was already too late and I knew that exactly what I had to do. Excusing myself to go to the bathroom, I'd walk out the front door and return to that mailbox, not just touching but jabbing, practically pounding on the thing because I thought I hated it so much. What I really hated, of course, was my mind.
There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it. I didn't remember things being this way back north. Our family had been transferred from any cut in New York to Raleigh, North Carolina. That was a word used by the people at IBM, transferred.
A new home was under construction, but until it was finished, we were confined to a rental property built to resemble a plantation house. The building sat in a treeless, balding yard, its white columns promising a majesty the interior failed to deliver. The front door opened onto a dark, narrow hallway, lined with bedrooms, not much larger than the mattresses which furnished them. Once home, I would touch the front door seven times with each elbow.
A task made much more difficult if there was anyone else around. Why don't you try the knob, my sister Lisa would say. That's what the rest of us do and it seems to work for us. Inside the house, there were switches and door stops to be acknowledged.
After kissing the fourth, eighth, and twelfth carpeted stair, I wiped the cat hair from my lips and proceeded to the kitchen, where I was commanded to disrupt the burners of the stove, press my nose against the refrigerator door, and arrange the percolator, toaster, and blender into a straight row. After making my rounds of the living room, it was time to kneel beside the banister and blindly jab a butter knife in the direction of my preferred electrical socket. There were bulbs to lick, and bathroom faucets to test before finally I was freed and to my bedroom, where I would carefully align the objects on my dresser, lick the corners of my metal desk, and lie on my dad, rocking back and forth and thinking of what an odd woman she was, my third grade teacher, Miss Chestnut. Why come here and lick my light switches when she never used the one she had?
Maybe she was drunk. On the afternoon that Miss Chestnut arrived for her visit, I was in my bedroom rocking. Unlike the obsessive counting and touching, rocking was not a mandatory duty, but a voluntary and highly pleasurable exercise. It was my hobby, and there was nothing else I would rather do.
The point was not to rock oneself to sleep. This was not a step towards some greater goal. It was the goal itself. The perpetual movement freed my mind, allowing me to mull things over, and construct elaborately detailed fantasies.
Toss in radio, and I was content to rock until three or four o'clock in the morning, listening to the hit parade and discovering that each and every song was about me. I might have to listen two or three hundred times to the same song, but sooner or later its private message would reveal itself. I was coming to terms with the shadow of your smile, when Miss Chestnut arrived. She rang a bell, and I cracked open a bedroom door, watching as my mother invited her in.
You'll have to forgive me for these boxes, my mother fliched her cigarette out the door and into the littered yard. They're filled with crap, every last one of them, but God forbid we throw anything away. Oh no, we can't do that. My husband saved it all.
She mopped at her forehead with a wadded paper towel. Anyway, to hell with it. You look like I need a drink. Scotch alright?
Miss Chestnut's eyes brightened. I really shouldn't, but, oh why not? She followed my mother up the stairs, just a drop with ice, no water. I tried rocking in bed, but the sound of laughter drew me to the top of the landing, where from my vantage point behind an oversized wardrobe box, I watched the two women discuss my behavior.
Oh, you mean the touching, my mother said. She opened her mouth just slightly, running her tongue over her upper lip, and then she inched forward, her index finger prodding the ashtray as though it were a sleeping thing she was trying to wake. I had never seen myself in action, but a sharp, stinging sense of recognition told me that my mother's impersonation had been accurate. God only knows where he gets it from, my mother said.
He's probably down in his room right this minute, counting as eyelashes or gnawing at the poles on his dresser. One, two o'clock in the morning and he'll still be at it, rattling around the house to poke the laundry hamper, or press his face against the refrigerator door. The kids wound too tight, but he'll come out of it. So what do you say?
Another Scotch Catherine? Now she was Catherine. Another few drinks and she'd probably be joining us on her summer vacation. How easy it was for adults to bond over a second round of cocktails.
I returned to my bed, cranking up the radio so as not to be disturbed by the sound of their cackling. Following Miss Chestnut's visit, my father attempted to cure me with a series of threats. You touch your nose to that windshield one more time and I'll guarantee you wish you hadn't, he said, driving home from the grocery store with a lap full of rejected out of state coupons. It was virtually impossible for me to ride in the passenger seat of a car and not press my nose against the windshield.
And now that the activity had been forbidden, I wanted it more than anything. I tried closing my eyes, hoping that might eliminate my desire, but found myself thinking that perhaps he was the one who should close his eyes. So what if I wanted to touch my nose to the windshield? Who was it hurting?
Why was it that he could repeatedly worry his change and bite his lower lip without the threat of punishment? My mother smoked and Miss Chestnut massaged her waist twenty-thirty times a day, and here I couldn't press my nose against the windshield of a car. I opened my eyes defiant, but when he caught me moving towards my target, my father slammed down the brakes. You like that, did you?
He handed me a golf towel to wipe the blood from my nose. Did you like the feel of that? Like was too feeble a word for what I felt. I loved it.
If mashed with the right amount of force, a blow to the nose could be positively narcotic. Touching objects satisfied a mental itch, but the task involved a great deal of movement, run upstairs, cross the room, remove a shoe. I soon found these same urges could be fulfilled within the confines of my own body. Punching myself in the nose was a good place to start, but the practice was dropped when I began rolling my eyes deep into their sockets.
An exercise that provided quick jolts of dull, intoxicating pain. I know exactly what you're talking about, my mother said to Mrs. Schatz, my visiting fourth grade teacher. The eyes rolling every which way, it's like talking to a slot machine.
Hopefully one day I'll pay off, but until then, what do you say we have ourselves in other glass of wine? I took the violently shaking my head, startled by the feel of my brain slamming against the confines of my skull. It felt so good and took so little time, just a few quick jerks and I was satisfied for up to forty-five seconds at a time. Have a seat and let me get you something cool to drink.
My mother would leave my fifth and then my sixth grade teacher standing in the breakfast nook, while she stepped into the kitchen to crack open a tray of ice. I'm guessing you're here about the head shaking, am I right, she'd shout? That's my boy, all right, no flies on him. This was part of my mother's act.
She played the ringleader, glowing the whistle and charming the crowd with her jokes and exaggerated stories. It's a stretch, but I'm betting you're here about the tiny voices, she said, offering a glass of sherry to my visiting seventh grade teacher. I'm thinking of either taking him to an exorcist or buying him a doll so he can bring home some money as a ventriloquist. It had come out of nowhere.
My desperate urge to summon high-pitched noises from the back of my throat. These were not words, but sounds that satisfied and urged I'd never before realized. The sounds were delivered not in my voice, but in that of a thimble-sized, temperamental diva clinging to the base of my uvula. I was host to these wailings, but lacked the ability to control them.
When I cried out in class, the teachers would turn from the blackboards with increasingly troubled expressions. Is somebody rubbing a balloon? Who's making that noise? I'd like to think that some of my nervous habits faded during high school, but my class pictures tell a different story.
Draw away in the missing eyeballs, and this one might not be so bad, my mother would say. In group shots, I was easily identified as the blur in the back row. For a time, I thought that if I accompanied my habits with an outlandish wardrobe, I might be viewed as eccentric rather than just plain retarded. I was wrong.
Only confirmed idiot would wander the halls of my high school, dressed in a floor-length caff den. And as for the countless medallions that hung around my neck, I might as well have worn a cowbell. They clanged and jangled with every jerk of my head, calling attention when without them I might have passed unnoticed. My oversized glasses did nothing but provide a clearer view of my rolling, twitching eyes, and the chunky platform shoes left lumps when used to discreetly tap my forehead.
I was a mess. College is the best thing that can ever happen to you, my father used to say, and he was right. For it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking. I'm unsure of the scientific aspects, but for some reason, my nervous habits faded at around the same time I took up with cigarettes.
Maybe it was coincidental, or perhaps the text we treated in the face of an adversary that, despite its health risks, is much more socially acceptable than crying out in tiny voices. It's as if I'd been born to smoke, and until I realized that my limbs were left to search for some alternative. Everything's fine as long as I know there's a cigarette in my immediate future. The people who ask me not to smoke in their cars have no idea of what they're in for.
Hey, what's up? Hey, what's up? Here's the story. Plague of Text is in his book.
Make it. Fish, mama, and as hungry as can be. Oh, Lord, how I wish, mama. You could stop the baby crying, cause my head is killing me.
I saw my ex again last night, mama. She was at the dance at my store. She was with me, Jackie White, mama. I killed them both, and they're buried when the chick got sick of one.
If you can't cycle, don't you mama. I didn't mean to break your turn. If you can't cycle, don't you mama. You better let them lock me up.
At four, you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps. When he was in his 20s, Joe Lovell had a job in a mental hospital, helping care for patients. Usually he worked days. Night, he says, we're different.
We often made fun of the night staff, said that they were as crazy as the patients. There was Joe, the monosyllabic bodybuilder, and John the pathological liar, and Sean who arrived each night for his shift, after Roth wrote it in near tears from his own afternoon session of screen therapy. Between midnight and seven, we'd say, it wasn't at all clear who should be carrying the keys. The suggestion, of course, was that during the day it was clear.
And at those of us who carried the keys, the shrinks from Harvard, the nurses in charge of the floor, even the low mental health workers like myself, were all models of sanity in the midst of so much chaos. We had keys to everything. There was a key to the front door and a key to the nurse's station. There were keys to the therapy offices and to the linen closet and to the staff bathroom across from the quiet rooms.
Two windowless, white isolation areas to which we also had keys. And, of course, there was a restraint key, a thin pointed silver thing, more like a tiny pocket knife than a key. That slipped into the buckle of the straps we used to secure a patient's limbs to the corners of a metal bed. If a patient wanted to use the toaster, we had the key.
If they wanted to use their own nail clippers, they were kept in a cabinet and we had the key. During the day, we moved through the hall like a team of custodians, rasting patients out of bed, urging them to shower and dress and brush their teeth, to attend and hospital parlance to their activities of daily living. We ushered them into large group meetings and small group meetings, meetings in which we discussed the dynamics on the hall, meetings in which we explained the effects of medication, meetings in which patients were often told news they didn't want to hear, that they would have to endure another round of electroshock therapy, that they were not well enough to attend their daughter's birthday party, that for yet another week, they would not be allowed to do almost anything unsupervised. It was a place where much more often than not, short-term hopes were dashed, and effibly sad outcomes were commonplace, and anger over illnesses that no one knew precisely how to treat could erupt spontaneously.
We were constantly gauging the mood of the hall, in the way that I imagined desperate farmers gauged the mood of the skies, and reacting accordingly. There has to be more of a staff presence on the hall someone would say, meaning that there was a palpable tension on the unit, a sense of danger in the air, and that rather than spending time back in the nurse's station flowing off steam and catching up on notes, we had to make our presence known out on the floor. Occasionally, for extra money, I work nights. Everything about the place seemed different.
It's a sentimental notion I know, but I could never quite shake the sense when driving through the front gate for a night shift, of entering a parallel universe, a place where all the day's demons were laid to rest, where medicines worked, where minds were calmed, where the safe haven we tried so hard to create during the day was actually made real. I drive slowly along the winding road to our unit and look out at the moon on the snow, at the lights on here and there in the red brick buildings across the hospital grounds, and I think that, for all the terrors to place like this connotes, it couldn't possibly look more welcoming, less coldly clinical, than it did in the middle of the night. The night, of course, can have this effect anywhere. Exhaustion finally wins out of her struggle, but the sense of calm that settled in at the hospital always surprised me.
The job at night, such as it was, consisted mostly of just saying away. If you were the staff member on checks, you were responsible for knowing where each patient was. You sat in the foyer with a flashlight, and every 30 minutes made a tour from one end of the unit to the other, poking your head into each darkened room and shining a quick bloom of light on the patients that sleep in their beds. It was a simple remarkable thing to see, people in so much pain-sling peacefully.
There was Barbara, the reverend's wife, who previously had snuck in the utility razor and cut a five-inch gash into the soul of her foot. And there was Tim, the former track star, who'd gained so much weight from picking anti-psychotic meds that he'd spent hours each day with his high school yearbook in his lap, open to a page that had a photo of some graceful, muscled kid who looked vaguely like him. There was Anne and Mike, and there was Carol, whose sister came every Thursday afternoon. Whenever she visited, I'd watch them in the foyer.
Carol's sister talking, and Carol staring out from behind her thick glasses, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Her face, her hair, lick a smudged version of the attractive woman sitting next to her. My own brother, the person I loved most in the world, was a patient in a psych hospital in Saratoga, New York. It seems obvious now, though I couldn't quite articulate it to myself at the time, that I worked where I did not because, as I told myself, it would help me on my applications to medical school, but because it allowed me to be both closer to my brother and more distanced from him, to understand in some vaguely intimate way what he was suffering, and to reassure myself that I was in fact safe from his madness, that I was so sane I carried the keys.
Whenever I visited him, I couldn't stop myself from imagining us like Carol and her sister, his goofus to my gallant, and a thought both comforted me and filled me with shame. After I checked in the last patient, I'd go back to the foyer and back my time. I'd sit and drink coffee and watch the clock, waiting for the next half hour to take by. Or I'd find a deck of cards on one of the shells and play solitaire, or sometimes I'd try writing letters to my brother that I never sent.
Opening them with some bad joke about how at that moment both of us were in a hospital, but he was probably deep in a sleep, and I was the one up scribbling nonsense. Sometimes late in the night, it could feel like I too was starting to unravel. I'd go into the nurse's station and pull charts and read my notes from the day shifts. I'd focus on their authoritative tone.
Patient-oriented to time, place self, but continues to ruminate about radio messages being sent through her braces. Patient remains highly paranoid, fears government is poisoning him through hospital food. At the end of most of my night shifts, my notes were all the same. Patient-slapped, patient-slapped, patient-slapped.
On the last night shift I worked, I fell asleep while on checks. The one mistake a night worker was never supposed to make. I was probably out for 45 minutes, long enough theoretically for something terrible to happen. I woke to Carol standing in front of me in her nightgown, a cigarette in hand.
I need a light, she said. And then she sat down next to me in the foyer and made fun of me for falling asleep. Go lie down, she said. I've got everything under control here.
She wasn't wearing her glasses and her hair was pulled back. Her dishevelness seemed normal in the middle of the night, the way any of us looked when we shuffled in half sleep from our beds to the kitchen or bathroom. I'd been having a dream in which a party was going on in a hospital, though not the one where I worked. Patients were coming out of their rooms and ball gowns and tuxes, and my brother was there, looking happy and handsome.
Now the pleasantness of the dream was fading, and Carol must have been able to see it on my face. She asked me what was wrong, and because it was 5 a.m., and because I was exhausted and nauseous and not my appropriate take-time self, I told her that I'd been dreaming of my brother, and that he was in a hospital sick. In the body or the head, she asked. The head, I said.
She nodded knowingly, took a tremendous drag under cigarette and blow a cloud of smoke out over the two of us. He'll be all right, she said. In what seemed to me to be the sanest tone I'd ever heard her speak. We'll all be all right.
Carol finished her cigarette and went back to bed. I did some jumping jacks in the foyer in order to stay awake. Eventually the sky began to lighten. The day staff came in with snow melting on their shoes.
They crowded into the nurse's station for the change of shift report. I stood there for a while watching the quick nods, the efficient division of responsibility. I considered saying something about Carol about how Lucid she'd seen to me just a couple of hours ago. It wasn't so extraordinary, I knew, but still I wanted the conversation on record.
On the way out, I stopped to see Carol. She was awake and eating breakfast, and I wanted to thank her for our conversation. I appreciate what you said earlier, Carol. She didn't look up.
She was preparing her cereal and muttering to herself. Something about the children's book, Johnny Tremaine, that she'd been reading over and over for the past several weeks. I thanked her again, and again she didn't look up. When I left the room, she was pouring sugar and huge spoonfuls over her apple jacks.
Joe Lovell, let's input them. When you get out of the hospital, let me back into your life. I can't stand what you do. I'm in love with your eyes.
And when you get out of the dating bar, I'll be here to get back into your life. I can't stand what you do. I'm in love with your eyes. What I program is produced today by at least speaking to myself, Peter Clowney and Nancy Updike.
Additional production and editing by Susan Burton. Special thanks today to Lisa Rosenthal, Jason Fujioko, and all the people at Thresholds. Musical Help and Peter Margusack, John Connors and Sarah Val. To buy a set of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago.
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Like was too feeble a word for what I felt. I loved it. Last time I walked down the street. No, the help was cried.
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