It was the start of another liquid day at Morristown State Psychiatric Hospital. “Cheryl-the-Squirrel-Girl” sat on her usual bench outside the rear entrance of Building 54, the Alzheimer’s ward, feeding peanuts to the hordes of tree rats that threatened to overrun the 130-acre grounds. Cheryl, a pleasant young lady with a perpetual expression of benign dreaminess, had earned unlimited ground privileges for years of exemplary behavior. Every clement morning at nine, she slipped through the unattended front gate, darted across the street to Walt’s Tavern, a convenient noontime retreat for the hospital employees who preferred to drink their lunches, and purchased several bags of roasted peanuts for her pampered pets. Thus provisioned, Cheryl spent her day strolling from building to building, a bench at a time, bestowing with a benevolent smile handfuls of salty manna upon her infatuated darlings.
Chuck and I, “Team A” of the electric shop’s two crews, preferred to spend our time driving aimlessly around the spacious campus swilling beer. “Team B” consisted of Joe, a.k.a. “Casper the Friendly Ghost” for his uncanny ability to vanish at the merest rumor of a nosy supervisor, and his erratic helper, a hyperactive lad nicknamed “Turnaround” for his disconcerting habit of pausing midstride to abruptly spin on his heel. Each morning, we punched in at eight, horsed around in the shop pitching nickels and trading friendly insults until our boss tired of our shenanigans, handed each team two or three work orders, told us most emphatically that he didn’t expect to see or hear from us until the next morning, and booted us out.
The century-old mental hospital was staffed top to bottom with unionized civil service drones, their compasses firmly fixed upon the lodestone of retirement, while I was but a nonunion “temp.” Come spring, after I was laid off, I expected to resume my winter-interrupted masonry business. Until then, I was Chuck’s right-hand man, a glorified title for a humble tool bag and ladder schlepper. Mostly, I guarded Chuck’s back from any unforeseen assault by a psychotic patient. All I knew about electricity was that it was invisible and faster than me. An unforgiving enemy that granted no quarter, it was best avoided.
Once, the hospital had been a virtual city of two thousand patients, all housed in two- and three-story brick buildings, with an on-the-ground farm providing both food and work therapy. Then, in the mid-fifties, a new generation of drugs enabled many patients to be released to the at-home care of relatives. Those unfortunates without family were farmed out to the dubious ministrations of State-reimbursed “caretakers,” whom in all too many instances were opportunistic proprietors of fleabag hotels or shady “retirement” homes.
By the early nineties, only a few hundred “clients,” a politically correct euphemism preferred by the bureaucratic elite, lived on the grounds, lovingly watched over by a small army of doctors, nurses, and maintenance workers. Most of the original buildings were mothballed, cannibalized for fixtures the fields leased to local farmers. The remaining long-term patients, indigent or otherwise, and the transient uninsured dependent upon the mercies of the State occupied ten widely scattered buildings, most built during the affluent sixties. A heavily secured building near the water tower contained the criminally insane, and then there was Building 54, the final stop for those unfortunate souls without family, insurance, or hope.
Both our teams usually managed to complete our jobs by the ten a.m. coffee break, which by a fortuitous happenstance was the very time that the nearest beer distributor opened. The hospital owned a host of apartments across town – their free rental was the “carrot at the end of the stick” that enticed some to the modestly paid doctors – and if caught “off-campus” by a spoilsport supervisor, we could always say that we were just returning to a previous job to retrieve a forgotten tool. However, no one seemed to give a damn. Not even our bosses were inclined to violate the cardinal rule of any bureaucracy: MAKE NO WAVES! So, each morning, we quickly knocked off the jobs, went halves on a case of cheap beer, and drove about the grounds scoping out the pretty nurses and visitors. Around noon, we took the moveable booze-up to Walt’s parking lot to eat take-out sandwiches to coat our stomachs against our afternoon tippling. Finally, a half-hour before quitting time, we returned to the maintenance building to pitch nickels in the plumbing shop, whose shop foreman was a whiskey drunk himself. At four, reeking of alcohol, we stumbled upstairs, punched our timecards, and drove home to finish off our individual loads.
And so my liver and I passed the winter of ’92–’93.
On my first day on the job, conditioned by that persistent trio of social alarmists – television, cinema, and the press – I was a bit apprehensive about entering the wards. Would I be assaulted? Bitten perhaps by a deranged AIDS patient? Shanked by a serial killer?
Chuck pooh-poohed my worries. “Don’t sweat it, man. Most of the dangerous cats are in the prison ward, and the rest of these jokers are harmless. Hell, some of them are so zonked out they can barely move. Just keep your eye on the tool snatchers and ladder squirrels, okay? A few of these characters like a little drama in their lives.”
Forewarned, I followed Chuck into Building 12, a newer ward that housed neither the least nor the most disturbed patients. As predicted, a score of heavily sedated men and women lay slumped upon the dayroom’s couches and chairs, contorted into “tranq” āsanas that would stymie a yoga master. Some gazed blankly at the walls, oblivious to the muted television forever tuned to CNN. Others peered morosely through the smeared, uncleaned-for-years windows. A pair of chemical zombies did laps around the room, stumbling and mumbling and going bump in the day, their eyes half-closed.
“See what I mean?” Chuck asked. “Most of them don’t even know we’re here. Hand me a Phillips screwdriver and a roll of tape. We’ll be out of here in a jiffy.” Twenty minutes later, we were on our way to the next no-sweat job.
Not every ward, however, was quite so peaceful. The residents of Building 10 were afflicted with what the staff carefully termed “behavioral issues,” and on my second day of work, a young male drug casualty leapt up three rungs of our momentarily unattended stepladder to sing in a resolute baritone the first stanzas of what he proudly introduced as “The Crack Song”: “Crack, crack, crack/ O, hit me with all you can smack!” Then, after forgetting the reaming lyrics, or thinking us unworthy of hearing them, he descended to the apathetic applause of a single enthusiast and cockily strode away, chuckling madly at a droll recollection of a rare caper from his salad days.
Later that first week, I narrowly escaped a sudden attack from a man who Chuck called “The Mad Bomber,” a patient in the habit of defecating whenever and wherever he chose. Sighting a bared buttock ten yards down the corridor, Chuck shouted, “Heads up! Land mines ahead!” and a nurse quickly materialized, baggie over her hand, to scoop up without so much as a grimace at the dropped offering.
On the occasion of my sole brush with patient violence, Chuck and I were forced to cower behind the reinforced glass of the nursing station “bubble” as an out-of-control linebacker-type beat a tattoo upon the window with a heavy oak chair. After the “riot squad,” a quartet of beefy male attendants, quelled the uprising, Chuck noted with wry amusement that the female nurses had removed themselves another step further from the potential mayhem by hiding in the nurse’s bathroom, a cozy retreat into which we hadn’t been invited.
But none of these unsettling incidents had quite prepared me for my first visit to Building 54, the last shelter at the end of the welfare highway for the impoverished souls sans family and insurance. Confined within its hard plaster and tile wall and floors lived the sad victims of karma’s relentless milling, society’s wounded castoffs. Warehoused in conditions reminiscent of the pre-tranquilizer era “snake pits” of historical notoriety, the forgotten men and women existed in a chemical haze, unloved and unwanted, until the day that death’s dark carriage kindly decided to stop.
“Look,” Chuck warned me, as he unlocked the outside door, “make damn sure that every door is locked behind us. It only takes a second for one of these birds to weasel by. Some of these cats are faster than you think, not that I’m about to chase them down with a net, you understand, but we’ll catch a shit storm of grief if any of them get loose. Capisce?”
I capisced. The last thing we needed when we were drinking was an in-your-face third degree. Then Chuck opened the door, and a sour stench of urine engulfed us like a fog.
“Jesus!” I exclaimed, about to bring up the morning’s beer. “Does the whole building smell like this?”
“Nah, the dayroom is worse. What say we knock off this job pronto-like and beat feet before the stink gets in our clothes?”
Down the corridor we went, Chuck whistling “Off to Work We Go.” Doors stood ajar on both sides of the hall, the beds unmade, their occupants gone in both body and mind. Framed photos of forgotten spouses and children looked down on the wreckage; the air seemed imbued with pervasive sadness.
Midway down the corridor, we unlocked a precautionary set of doors; the dayroom was sixty feet ahead. Chuck closed the doors, shaking them to ensure that they were locked. “It never hurts to double-check,” he noted with a grin. “Thank God nobody checks on us, huh?”
I laughed; as far as I could tell, nobody checked on anyone. The whole bollixed-up hospital staggered mechanically along, as if programmed by a badly wired robot.
When Chuck unlocked and opened the dayroom door, we nearly keeled over from the stench. At least fifty patients, many in wheelchairs, occupied an area the size of a basketball court, each locked inside the prison of his or her own mind. Forging a tenuous order from out of the chaos, a pair of black female nurses spent their entire shifts changing the soiled diapers of their hapless charges.
“Close that damn door, boys. I ain’t got time for a roundup,” said the older woman. As she paused to reassure a worried man that he was still alive, an old white woman in a wheelchair began to curse the younger nurse with every racial slur imaginable, spitting out the ugly terms like venom. After tolerating a few minutes of nonstop abuse, the exasperated nurse had heard enough, and without a word, wheeled her nemesis into a large linen closet, slammed the door, then turned to me with a shrug.
“She’ll pipe down soon enough, then out she comes. It’s like a game we play to kill time.” As the nurses tended to other patients, wiping drool from their chins, a dolly of fresh adult diapers and wipettes at hand, the woman’s muffled curses droned on and on with the sound of an insect trapped in a jar.
As I watched the women at their Sisyphean labors, a frantic woman in her late-fifties seized my arm. “Mister, you have to take me out of here!” she cried in a panicked voice, her eyes as blue and clear and empty as a patch of reflected winter sky in a puddle of snow melt. “There’s been a terrible mistake! I came for a visit last month, and now they won’t let me leave! Please, sir, take me home!”
Glancing apprehensively at the nurses on the far side of the ward, she tugged me towards the door, moaning softly. As I struggled to pull free, I detected the peculiar odor emitted by certain schizophrenics, possibly caused by the metabolization of anti-psychotic medications. Before the scene grew ugly, a nurse hurried to the rescue. Speaking to me as if the woman wasn’t there, she warned me of the patient’s constant efforts to abscond.
“This one here, God love her, is a tricky one. She wants to fly her happy coop. Go on, finish up your work, now. These folks tends to get stirred up whenever somethin’ new pops up, and Lord knows, we gets plenty of excitement just so.”
After Chuck replaced the chewed-through cord of a floor fan, we fled as hastily as a pair of scallywags dodging an unpaid hotel bill. When we got to the end of the corridor, I looked back to see the woman’s distorted face against the dayroom window, her lips mouthing a plea for relief. I turned away, before Chuck noticed my tears.
* * * * * *
No sooner do I enter my seventy-seven-year-old father’s darkened living room, then I’m lashed by his harsh voice. “You better bring back the title to the farm, goddamn it! Do you think I’m stupid? You told Suzie to sneak into my bedroom last week and steal it! I want it back NOW, or I’m calling the police!”
Suzie is my ten-year-old daughter, and she doesn’t know any more about the “missing” title than I do. Last week, Dad became obsessed with the notion that various neighbors – most of whom he’s never met – had conspired to shrink our acreage by moving, stone by stone, the old fences that once delineated part of the property’s perimeter. When I pointed out that most of the fences had been “recycled” long before my grandfather bought the property during the Depression, he accused the neighbors’ fathers of stealing the stones. Last year, he’d been convinced that the indefatigable neighbors had been sawing down our cedar and walnut trees when his back was turned. God only knows what dastardly deed they’ll think of next, but I’m sure I’ll be promptly informed.
“Look, Dad, I don’t have the damn title, I don’t want the damn title, and I don’t know where it is. And, just for the sake of argument, suppose I did? It wouldn’t mean squat unless you legally transferred it to my name.” But logic is a useless weapon against a tireless opponent like Alzheimer’s, and my father has retreated into its foggy reaches, that insubstantial land wherein the primeval hobgoblins and bugbears of his subconscious fears reside, only to emerge periodically to assert their primacy and confirm his paranoia. And, apparently, one has convinced him of my treason.
I stifle a sob, blink back my tears, and leave the room. At the front door, I turn to see his stern visage, eyes closed, bathed in a pool of light. Then, I shut the door, and he is retaken by the darkness.
* * * * * *
Over the course of the long winter, we periodically revisited Building 54, and each time the woman who Chuck had dubbed “The Prisoner” tried to squirm her way to freedom. Her attempts handily foiled, she begged and pleaded and wept, asked for mercy in a low, tremulous voice. Chuck ignored her, cracked unfunny jokes as he shouldered by, but I felt obligated to apologize for my inability to grant her freedom.
“Why do you hate me?” she sometimes asked, twining her fingers into knots, as she watched for an opportunity to bolt. Ashamed of my complicity, however minor, in her detention, I assured her that I didn’t, knowing full well that even love wouldn’t set her free.
The months flew by; we completed our daily quota of jobs with a thirst-driven efficacy. Although we tippled nearly every day, we raised no waves. Inside the wards, patients came and went; outside snows fell and melted. Winter became spring and, on April Fool’s Day, I commenced a two-week countdown to my termination date, intending to collect unemployment checks, while working on the side at my own business. Several stucco jobs were already lined up, and my trowel hand was getting itchy.
The new season had also brought on a recurrence of my father’s paranoia. He had been fairly quiet for months, occasionally digging up an old bone or two to gnaw upon for a few days, then abruptly burying them again in the depths of his addled memory. But when I stopped at his home on the first day of trout season, to see if he felt like drowning a few worms, he exploded in anger.
“I sent a letter to your so-called ‘buddy’,” he sneers. “You know who I mean: the no-good son-of-a-bitch who built his house with the rocks he stole from my fencerow. Yeah, Dave Reinert, the clown you think is such a fine guy! Well, when my lawyer gets done with him, he’ll wish to hell he never heard of me!”
Oh Jesus! The man in question built his house over twenty years ago with thirty-bucks-a-ton limestone, not the local sandstone! Now, Dad has contacted a LAWYER? This is the kind of wave-making bad news I can do without!
I know better to argue, so I excuse myself as quickly as I can, intending to apologize to Dave and explain my dad’s actions.
But he just laughs. “Hell, don’t worry about it. I just chucked the letter away. I know that he has Old Timer’s Disease. My dad wound up the same way.”
I’m not laughing, though. Eight different properties adjoin our farm, and not all of the owners are friends like Dave. And none of them know of my father’s illness. So, I call each on the phone, ask if they have received a threatening letter. To my horror, most of them have. Begging their forgiveness, I explain the situation, assure them that no legal action will ensure, apologize for my father’s accusations. Nearly all of them understand, even commiserate with similar tales of their own wayward relatives. Only our closest neighbor, a reclusive sourpuss, whom both my father and I dislike for different reasons, is unsympathetic, informing me that he has consulted a lawyer in the event my father petitions for legal redress.
“Look,” I assure him, “he’s not about to sic a lawyer on you or anyone else. He’s suffering from dementia, and sent that letter on one of his bad days. Throw it away, and if you get any more, let me know. In the meantime, I’ll ask my mother to censor his mail.”
Unfortunately, this proves an empty promise , because when I tell Mom about his crazy letters, ask her to confiscate his unsent mail, she claims that he waits by the front door until he sees the mail lady’s Jeep approaching, then shuffles across the year to hand-deliver his latest screed.
When I confront him, tell him that this shit needs to stop before he gets sued, he denies that he’s done anything wrong, but beneath the bluster, I sense a trace of guilt and shame. His disease hasn’t yet erased all of his memory , nor expunged a residual sense of remorse. According to my mother, while he can no longer operate his hand-held chess computer, he has retained his formidable typing skills, and with a frisson of dread, I wonder what kind of wave-making golems he might summon up next, keystroke by keystroke.
* * * * * *
On my penultimate day of work, Chuck and I stop at Building 54 to deliver a rebuilt floor fan. Cheryl is at her favorite bench, smiling happily as she feeds appetizers to her mangy pets. We exchange waves, then Chuck and I lug the heavy appliance through the service door and down the long corridor. After we lay it down outside the door to the ward, Chuck tells me to ask one of the nurses to latch onto “Prisoner 54.” “We gotta prop open the door to drag this big son-of-a-bitch in, and I don’t know about you, but I ain’t up for a footrace this early in the day.”
He waits in the hall, while I hunt up a nurse. The old white lady in the wheelchair is threatening to have her nemesis fired for reverse racism, but judging from the poisonous glares shooting her way, she’s about to earn a timeout first. The ward seems fairly quiet, our would-be escapee nowhere in sight, so instead of pestering the overworked nurses, we prop open the door and carry in the fan.
Before we can shut it, the “Prisoner of Building 54” emerges from the restroom, sees her chance, and bolts for freedom: sweet, sweet freedom.
“Oh, shit!” the older nurse exclaims. “Quick, close that damn door!”
I start for the door, but lag back when I see the woman’s beatific expression. “Oh, mister!” she begs. “Please don’t pen me in, let me go!”
* * * * * *
My father’s eyes bulge with fright when he overhears my mother whisper to me the words “nursing home.” Dad has been having a bad day, and her careless remark has just made it worse. I look away with shame, mortified that Mom’s cruel intentions have been revealed. A medic in General George “Blood and Guts” Patton’s Third Army during World War II, my father waded through rivers of gore, witnessed unspeakable horrors, including the liberation of Dachau prison camp, had even won an unlikely Bronze Star as a noncombatant, but now the mere possibility of undesired confinement has reduced this brave hero to tears.
* * * * * *
“Go for the light, honey!” I urge, faking a half-hearted grab.
Her passing face is radiant; in her imagination, she is a young girl once again, free in a world of infinite possibilities, alive in a fresh universe in which old age is but a rumor, a malicious tale told by jealous granddames.
“Bless you, mister!” she murmurs, darting through the door towards the shaft of golden light streaming from the windows at the end of the corridor.
The younger nurse curses, angrily shoves me aside, rushes after the ecstatic lady. The older nurse stands next to me, watches the short pursuit.
“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” she asks, softly. “You knew she wouldn’t get far, yet you let her go. Why did you do that, honey?”
But I’m thinking of another prisoner, in another room, and hold my peace.
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