Easy Time in the Mental

by Barry | Jan 29, 2018 | 0 comments

Once I was through the inner door and inside what would be my new home, I tried to put on my tough guy persona. It didn’t seem to want to fit. I was shaking too badly to look tough.

I was given a tour of the area – TV Room, Card Room, Cafeteria – and as I walked around I looked at the people I saw, trying to figure them out. Trying to figure this place out. I knew the pen and how things worked there. I knew how to get things, who to avoid and how to do my time. Here I knew nothing and some of these people looked just a little scary: One guy (who I would later learn was nicknamed Abraham Lincoln for obvious reasons) walked the halls with his hands behind his back, looking straight ahead and speaking to no one, for hours at a time, only stopping long enough to hack up a mouthful of phlegm and spit it into the drain of the drinking fountain. This particular practice would later cause me to blow a fuse and tell him, in not very kind words, just what I thought of him spitting his lungs into the fountain we all had to drink out of. (It didn’t help).

The one thing that I really liked was my room. It was just that – a room – not a cell. It was small, but had a completely different feel to it than I was used to. To make it even better, they informed me that my door would not be locked at night! I would be free to go back and forth to the washroom and eventually, once I had gotten to know the staff a little better, would have some time in the TV room with them after hours, though I am sure that was not supposed to occur.

I was still wary. After all, I knew the types of crimes the others were here for and didn’t yet know what to expect, but in the following days I would come to relax more here than in any institution I had ever been in. There was no fear gripping me first thing in the morning when the cell doors opened and no worries about dealing with guards on power trips. The staff here were all calm, friendly rational human beings.
And the food was amazing!

Of course, I was comparing it to the pen food, but the meals in the hospital consisted of real food, with real deserts and the only problem I found with it was that the servings were a little lighter than I would like. Seconds were sometimes available, but I learned very quickly who was willing to sell desserts for a few cigarettes and soon was eating like a king, since my mother still sent money for smokes on a regular basis.

I was there a week or so when Dr. Paulsie returned from vacation to find I had been transferred from the pen. By then I had become very happy in my new surroundings and asked him if there were a chance that I could finish the remainder of my sentence here. He obliged, and I settled in to finish up my bit in style, with good food and low stress. This was the definition of doing ‘good time’.

For the first few days I stayed quiet and focused on getting to know the routine, and of course, the other ‘patients’. One of the orderlies gave me the run down on what each person there had done, who to be careful of and who to avoid. Initially I didn’t quite understand why he went out of his way to help me as much as he did: After all, I was just a young troublemaker from the pen. Eventually though he would tell me that he had a son my age, who I reminded him of.

“Barry, this is no place for you. You don’t belong here at all – you belong back home, enjoying your life,” he told me one evening. “You’re not crazy and you’re not dumb. This is a total waste of your life. You know, if I ever thought that my son would end up in this place, I would kill him. Seriously! I would kill him before I would ever let him end up in here.”

He spoke these words with such certainty that it sent chills up my spine. He was dead serious.

He explained how Ruth had killed her son (or two kids, I really don’t remember now) when she was asked for breakfast. She was ‘manic depressant’ and just simply snapped and killed her own blood. Then there was the guy who shot his parents with a shotgun. Another who strangled his buddy when he thought he was coming on to him. Another had shot someone. I had no idea there were that many killers in Newfoundland & Labrador, until I ended up living with them all. Not one of them would ever give you the impression that they held any violent tendencies. I guess medication and shock therapy kind of takes the killer out of you.

I got along with almost everyone, “Abraham Lincoln” being one of the few exceptions because of his constant spitting in the drinking fountain. I played cards in the card room, smoked my cigarettes, enjoyed the food, and pretty much took it easy for the first week or so. The first time that I saw someone come back from shock therapy though, I began to get a whole new impression of just what ‘treatment’ was for many of these people. It was Ruth, who was sitting playing cards and joking around with us when they told her it was time for her treatment. When she returned a while later she could no longer carry on a conversation. She was barely able to form a sentence, if she could at all. I was horrified when I saw her, wondering how the hell this could be considering a medical treatment: Frying someone’s brain with electricity to the point where they were nothing short of a zombie.

Soon I saw others go for their ‘therapy’ and come back unable to play cards or carry on a conversation. It made me queasy and a little frightened. And very glad that I wasn’t ‘crazy’.

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Flash Forward

I woke on a floor, that much I knew. It was hard and cold but not a jail cell and that brought some relief. I squeezed my eyes shut in an attempt to clear my vision as everything was blurred beyond recognition while the pounding in my head reached levels I thought might kill me.

I moaned and managed to roll onto my back, blinking into the brightness of a ceiling light, desperate to get up but not quite able to accomplish the task all at once. I laid there, breathing, trying to calm myself, telling myself that I was fine and my vision would come back. Just breathe. Breathe.

My focus improved, and I saw the small hallway I was in, with a door above my head – my door! I was outside my apartment! Thank god for that much anyway!

I rolled onto my side wincing at new pain that seemed to come from everywhere at once and then settle to be concentrated in my side and head. Broken ribs maybe. But the head was the worst and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to fight through it enough to stand up. I would have to though – I couldn’t just lay here. I had to get inside my apartment.

Trying not to cry out, I struggled to my knees and then fought to get my keys from my jeans pocket. Still trying to breathe without screaming, I shuffled over to the door to insert the key. It went in, but would not turn.

I noticed that the hallway, the walls, everything seemed brighter than usual and at first thought it was just my messed-up vision. I looked around a little, still up on my knees. “Wow, they must have painted while I was gone,” I thought, trying the key in the door again. It still would not open. I looked at the door across the hall (if you could call it a hall – it was in the basement and there were only two apartments whose doors where less than ten feet apart) and then it dawned on me: I was not even in my apartment building. They had not painted the walls while I was gone – I was in the wrong damn building!

A new and unpleasant wave of emotion washed though me. I looked up the stairs that I had to climb and wanted to cry. There were only a handful of stairs, less than a dozen for sure, but I just didn’t think I would be able to do it.

I leaned forward, head resting on the floor. It made the pain in my head worse, and I thought about laying down and waiting for someone to find me. Fear alone drove me to try standing, as I wondered what I had done, where I had been. I had to get home and straighten up and then maybe some answers would come to me.

For a lifetime I rose, from the ground to a somewhat upright position, and stood with my hands resting on my thighs, breathing, just breathing. Finally, I turned right, put my left hand on the wall to steady myself, and made my journey to the top of the stairs, one foot, the other foot, breathing, breathing. Next step… Knives piercing my chest with each shallow, careful breath.

I made it to the landing and dropped to my knees, closing my eyes against the piercing brightness and the pain. What the hell had happened to me? I looked at my hands and for the first time noticed that there was blood and dried mud all over them. Upon further inspection I saw that my jeans were also covered in mud… and blood.

Fear drove me back to my feet and towards the door, staggering against the wall before opening it. To my right were mailboxes – much newer and brighter than those in my apartment building. Yes, I knew for sure where I was, and home seemed like a long way away, though it would measure less than a hundred yards.

My heart hammering in my chest now, louder than the drumbeat in my skull, I hobbled though the door and into the coolness of morning Labrador air. To my right was home. I staggered towards it, falling after only a few steps. Tears escaped my eyes, and in my altered mental state, I almost expected them to burn my face as they rolled towards the ground. Breathe… breathe. Almost home.

Twice more in those few yards I fell, the last time deciding that getting up wasn’t worth it: I crawled on my hands and knees to the front door of my building, seeing the mud and blood on my hands each time they shuffled me ahead another foot, feeling the pain and the fear. Pulling myself to my feet with the aid of the door handle, I was relieved. I had made it home. Now to go down the same number of stairs I had just climbed.

Down was much easier – I fell half way down and ended up on my back, the door to my apartment at my left hand. Fuck it – I was home now.

Saturday. It is Saturday. What was so important about Saturday, I wondered while fighting to get my key out of the now opened door. I saw the clock on the far wall of the tiny, dark apartment and thought it said six thirty but would have to get closer to tell for sure. Saturday! It was Saturday and I had to work today!

Drums still playing in my head, each breath a lesson in pain tolerance, I closed the door behind me and made the three steps to the couch. I needed to lay down. Then I changed my mind – I needed a mirror.

I headed to the bathroom down the hall but didn’t bother walking. I got back to my knees and made my way like some form of primate that had not yet made it upright in its evolution. Once the light was on, my feet were beneath me, and I was looking in the mirror, my fear took on a new life. My hair was a matted state of wet and dry blood, mixed with mud. I touched the main source of pain and my finger went into a gash that burned like fire when my finger hit it. I gingerly touched other areas of my head, feeling rises and valleys that definitely were not part of my normal skull shape.

My coat was a dark, multi-colored mess, heavy with what I assumed was mostly dried mud. I shed the coat to find more blood soaked into the sleeves of my shirt. Under the shirt, the collar of which was a dark dried red, I didn’t find any cuts, but my right side was an interesting mixture of blue, black, red and purple. The knuckles on both hands were swollen and crusted in red. Apparently, I had not been hit by a truck. But what the hell had I done? Where had I been?

I struggled to remember something, anything, but failed to come up with anything other than a brief flash of memory of being at the Ashuanipi – a bar I went to quite often when I was allowed in. Sitting at the bar, drinking a beer… and then nothing.

Shame and guilt challenged my fear, the three of them jostling for top position, and I turned away from the mirror, no longer able to look at myself. Holding walls along the way I headed to the kitchen, disappointed to find there were only four been in the fridge. I managed to bring them to the couch without dropping them, downing one of them as soon as it was open.

I fought to stay awake so I could drink my beer. I had no painkillers, and four beer wouldn’t help much, but I was determined to stay awake long enough to drink them.

I failed. I fell asleep.

When I woke, it was Monday.

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