The Labyrinth
M. Stefan Strozier
Published by World Audience, Inc.
303 Park Avenue South, Suite 1440
New York, NY 10010-3657
Phone (646) 620-7406; Fax (646) 620-7406
Contact: Mike Strozier info@worldaudience.org
Edited by Kyle David Torke
ISBN 0-9788086-6-5
© 2006, M. Stefan Strozier (www.mstefanstrozier.org)
© 2010, revised, M. Stefan Strozier
Cover art and design by Christopher Taylor.
Copyright notice: All work contained within is the sole copyright of its author, 2006 and 2010, and may not be reproduced without consent.
To my children, Carolyn and Jay.
Acknowledgements
I thank Magdalena Ball, Lee Stringer and Kyle Torke, who helped me create this memoir. I would never have been able to finish my reflection without their help. Maggie and Lee had similar comments; but told in very different ways, which allowed me to approach the writing from a unique angle. These two experienced writers showed me I can’t draw conclusions (except briefly at the end), that a memoir is not an autobiography, and that I have to let the action tell the story.
This memoir was one of the first books from my new publishing company, World Audience. But it was not finished and needed an editor. Thankfully, Kyle Torke, who became World Audience’s editor-in-chief ages ago, edited the first edition in 2010. And by then much had happened, which I had been adding to the original text.
To write this memoir, I fell back on my strengths and wrote something like a play, charting a character’s life through action, conflict, story, and dialogue. Though writing a memoir is cathartic, the product is not a diary. A memoir is a way for an artist to step outside of his body and view his own life through art – to impose meaning and structure on experiences that do not occur naturally, in a structured and meaningful way. Thus, a memoir is a self-portrait, which might explain why James Joyce called his memoir A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man. But my portrait goes through middle-age. It has taken me longer to be able to see my refection than he. By viewing myself through a memoir, I am able to put much of my life, finally, into perspective – and laugh at the parts I have yet to transform.
Foreword
Make no mistake about it. You are about to be walked down the darkest corridors of one man's unrelenting Hell. Author Michael Strozier, who lived to tell the tale, has managed to recount in real time, with moment to moment precision, his struggle to fend off various precipitous mental disorders and ultimately reconnect with what the majority of us walking the earth regard as reality.
And yet, all though this harrowing journey, even when immersing us in the bleakest depths of paranoia and delusion, through his prose, which has the profound discipline of relying on the workhorse of narrative—the declarative sentence—Strozier manages to remain strangely aloof and objective, deciphering the source of his agonies with cool and cunning while the HIM he is looking back upon writhes and exalts in poetic pentameter.
Much has been said about the razor thin distance between genius and madness. And for all the pain and turmoil of his psychotic episodes, what's undeniable is that while under the influence of them Strozier saw things in ways that rises to art; a unique, vivid and profound view of what for the rest of us passes by as so much minutia. You find yourself rooting for this genius, even at the ungodly expense of the madness out of which it is forged.
Needless to say, this all makes for an arresting read. As you step into this alien and elusive world, you turn the pages with ever increasing eagerness and foreboding yet are hard-pressed to look away. In the end his book will upset any pat assumptions you may have about mental illness and those who suffer from it. There are two parameters by which I evaluate anything I read. Was it worth the writer's time to write it and is it worth the reader’s time to read it. To both questions I rank The Labyrinth a definite yes.
—Lee Stringer
Mental Hospital
A door. My door. A small window is at eye level, made of two pieces of thick plastic. The sheets of plastic about half an inch thick and set apart by two inches. Trapped between the plastic are many a tiny, strange objects: a miniscule pile of dust in one corner, angled at 45 degrees (how did it come to settle in such a manner?); a small red object, which looks like a tiny sliver of a rubber band; a crumb of bread, maybe; and some tiny dead flies. The window sill is a geranium for the insane, a universe waiting to be explored. I intently study the inhabitants for hours, imagining a world for each item, and the unseen presence of things the wind or time may have swept away.
My fingers are bright yellow from smoking the roaches of marijuana joints. My parents do not visit me. My grandmother, who lives in Chicago, visits me occasionally. She brings an entire deep-dish pizza, which I eat like a ravenous lion. My friends, Chris, Dave, and John Sherekis, visited me once, standing in the door, waving to me; then the door is shut. There are different “floors,” segregating patients by how psychotic they are. I am in the most locked-down floor, for the most psychotic patients.
I signed a form voluntarily to admit myself to Michael Reese mental hospital in Chicago. My father, Dr. Charles Strozier, was in the admission room with me, as were a fat, female nurse and an administrator, sitting behind a desk. The induction was all very serious and formal. The administrator explained to me that I must sign the form for my own good. I did not protest. My check in is complete sometime during my sophomore year of high school, during the winter of 1982 – don’t ask me to be specific. I don’t think twice about signing the form. I stood, bravely.
The fat female nurse escorted me across the lobby area to the freight elevator. When we got on the elevator, she stood in front of me, her fat ass unmoving, held snuggly in form-fit panties. She was not saying anything, as if she had admitted crazy teenagers a thousand times before. The elevator door opened to a short hallway. The walls were dimly yellow, wainscot, white above the yellow. There were two doors at opposite ends of the hallway; one read ‘3 north’ and the other ‘3 east and west.’ I followed the fat-ass nurse to the thick, wooden door that read ‘3 north.’ The door had character, scarred and faded. The nurse knocked loudly three times, her back still to me. I smiled to myself.
The door opened. The nurse and I entered the medium-sized mental ward. Two muscular, male nurses quickly approached the open door and talked in hushed tones with the fat-ass nurse. I surveyed the scene. I am not sure who opened the door, but that person was standing on the other side of the door, obscured by the wood.
The common area, to my left, was the size of a large living room in a house, and the space was full of people, maybe 10 people. There was a person sitting in every brown, oversized, musty chair. Most of the patients were young. There was a large table in the center of the room with small plastic chairs around it. Three very thin girls sat at the table, playing cards. They were teen-agers, like me. I learned later they were anorexics. The nightly news was on TV, but no one was watching. A patient sat in his blue hospital gown in a musty chair smoking a cigarette, sucking the smoke deeply into his lungs, and holding it until he coughed. He wrapped his entire hand around his mouth, the cigarette between his middle and index fingers. I faced a long hallway; lining the corridor were more thick wooden doors, each with a small, double plastic window.
A compressed office ran along the wall to my left where a psychiatrist was writing in a chart. It was obvious that he was a psychiatrist. Lining the far wall, to my left, was a row of windows covered with metal bars. Much later, one of my fellow ‘3 North’ patients would find a way to squeeze through those metal bars and jump out the window. He fell 3 stories, but his fall was braced by aluminum awnings on the 2nd and 1st floor, which he smashed through. I remember watching him fall. I must have been sitting right by the window when he decided to jump. He was brought back to the mental ward after his injuries were treated and took up his same seat in the lounge, in front of the television.
The fat-ass nurse returned to the front offices. One of the male nurses locked the heavy door behind her. He locked several sets of locks. The two male nurses suddenly grabbed me under my armpits and dragged me down the hallway. I did not resist and was dragged along limply. We stopped at a door about halfway down the hallway on the right side. One of the nurses lifted a ring of keys from a long, thin chain and selected a key. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. They shoved me into the cold dark and forced me onto a bed in the center of an otherwise barren room. I was held down with force, on my back, by a hand on my chest. The guards removed my clothes and clumsily dressed me in a hospital gown that did not have any straps. Then they put shackles on my wrists and ankles. The shackles were tied on me tightly. I could not move. One nurse gathered my clothes, and they all walked out of the room, locking the heavy door behind him. Tumblers fell, and then I found myself in silence.
I am in shock. I do not move. The room is cold. I lay on a thin, uncomfortable mattress, covered with a sheet that was already wet from my sweat. My hospital gown only covers part of my body. The room was dark; the only light came in through the small, square window from the hall. It was quiet. I could not hear anything from the dayroom. Occasionally, a nurse would walk down the hall, and I could hear footsteps. The nurse would peep in the window a second and leave. I lift my head and try to see her. There was a window behind me, covered with a grate and Venetian blinds, which were closed. I lay there like a caught fish, out of my element, in shock, and probably not too far from death.
This was how I thought. I did not understand reality. I lived in my own imagined reality and I was very happy with doing that. Everything and everyone else could go fuck themselves, and please forgive me if I am bothering you in my depiction of me—I could care less about you. People and their little lives moving this way and that and never understanding a thing beyond what was right in front of them—especially in America, were full of shit! I may not have understood reality; but I was very aware of the reality of not having an imagination. I saw clearly that 9 out of 10 people are god-damn fools. It’s not that they are not smart; it’s that they were not using their minds. I may be misguided; but at least I was experimenting. At least I was alive. My mind was alive, as alive as fireworks on the forth of July.
And had I ever understood reality? I was, after all, a 16-year old. Those paths that people travel as they move through their lives are bullshit and I wanted no part of their blind trails! I saw them, clear as day. Take me away and lock me up if you must but keep me out of this life and that fate! I will not concur; I will not conform to your lies and bullshit! And I will tell you how I did it as I see fit and there is nothing you can do to change my mind—for it is my own mind and I own it!
I lifted and turned my head to study the thick leather belts on my wrists and ankles. Each cusp was about four inches wide and had a tiny belt of its own, pulled tight. The shackles are secured tightly to my bed frame. My feet and hands are splayed, my arms above my head. I bend my knee and my leg moves less than an inch and stops. If I bend my arms, even slightly, my shoulder rotates unnaturally in its socket. I have to force the situation. I rotate my body forcefully to the left and instantly dislocate my shoulder. I scream. No one answers. Now every time I move my shoulder I am in severe pain. I carry the wound from the initial separation even today.
The discomfort and the constant nature of the pain – not necessarily its intensity – are agonizing. Torture is a slow burn. The slow burn broke down my nerves, patience, and the dull pain drew out bitter emotions. My mind was in as much discomfort and pain as my body.
The greater my physical pain, the easier to distract my mind. I am in withdrawal from alcohol. It is nearly impossible for me to fathom the reality of my situation: I’m in restraints, in a small room, with a locked door, without any future or, with enough time, any past. I am delusional. I understand only fantasy and paranoia. I struggle against the restraints, shaking them, bouncing off the bed, screaming with primeval rage, but all to no avail. My energy begins to drain. My resistance diminishes. My wrists and ankles are bleeding from twisting inside the leather shackles. The blood dries. I keep fighting. In fact, I love my bleeding wrists and ankles; they are my only friends. The caked blood on my wrists and ankles has broken. If I move my wrists or ankles, the abrasion causes intense pain.
Tension becomes maddening. I twist my wrist inside one of the shackles; stinging pain shoots up my arm. The thrum of pain distracts me from my discomfort. I continued to twist my arms, to send droughts of adrenaline through my body. I sleep.
I wake several times in the night. The room seems darker. Strange shadows fill my sight. Before I panic, I instinctively try to relax. It is so hard to relax. Screaming wastes energy. I meditate. I stay as still and calm as I can until all I feel are the leather on my wrists and ankles and the sweat on my body and the cold of the room and the pain in my calves and my forearms.
I listen. I want to hear a sound. Each tiny sound distracts me from the tension. If there is a rhythm to the sounds, like footsteps resounding down a hallway, I can almost relax, listening to them. I let the sounds enter my mind and cover my tattered feelings. I drift peacefully for a while.
If a bird flies by, calling out, I’m in Nirvana. I allow my feelings to rise and match the bird’s cry. I take the bird’s cry, and the feeling that bird’s cry brings to me, down to my soul and keep the pleasure of the music there for a long while. I am soaring with the bird – not in any kind of metaphorical way; I am actually soaring – away from my thin mattress and sweat-stinking clothes. It seems as if I am communicating with the bird through my soul. I am speaking in the bird’s language. We are communing. I am able to drift to sleep, deep sleep, joyous sleep, restful sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.
I wake.
I speak with my imaginary friends. They don’t reply out loud – only in my head:
“Ah ha! What took you so long to get here?”
‘We were waiting for you to say the same thing.’
“I am stuck in these leather shackles.”
‘We can see that.’
“What can I do?”
‘Relax.’
“I am tired. And I am in so much pain. I am uncomfortable. It is hard to get through this night, and I am not even done yet.”
‘Hang in there, kiddo.’
“I feel the pain in my arms and my legs, and I feel the pain in my wrists and ankles. And my left shoulder is dislocated.”
‘We understand.’
“It hurts so much. No one seems to understand. I am alone.”
‘Try not to worry. We understand. And remember, it is just a body – and just a mind.’
“Okay, all right,” I say. I lean my head back on the flat mattress and stare at the ceiling, watching the shadows drift and dance over my eyes, and the shadows move around the darker corners of the room and my mind.
My personal demon is over my right shoulder. I can feel him in the corner and see him. It’s not always that I can see him. He is The Smiler. He is the thin veil I use to hide my insanity from the world. He laughs with me as we are going insane. He is the one who I am ashamed of when I see that my insanity is showing, and when I can’t stop laughing at the game going on in my head for hours – he is there. He is in the mirror, smiling back at me.
The Rhymer too is here. He recites idiotic rhymes in my head, read over and over and over:
I would like 6 to 9 times
To frog-size my eyes
And lies dies by my sides
For I know of no bo do ho
But I’ll say the way to pay
Is the day when hey
It can’t come true blue
But you: y oh u.
Presences, as I call them; there are more of them. They are not alter-personalities because I still retain my own personality, but I drift into these other entities. The presences are not imaginary friends because they are real. I copy a presence, become it, taking on its personality.
The air is musty. The walls are made of cinder block painted dull yellow. The floor is smooth, marble-like, and white.
Voices in my head arrive, right on time: intense, stressful, simultaneously loudly speaking as if I’m at a boisterous cocktail party:
A snotty, high-pitched, female voice says, “Trees bebe somedee wee-hee. Low are the days in heaven and ghosts and be there where to doodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoooandboom.”
A rambling, sophisticated, male voice says, “I went to the sky and some time pass-ed and da my oh my and double don’t youins be some dumb shitens and whore by the door score so there was still plenty of time so fine why not dine but then rickety picket the whicker chair’s picket tricked bliket me ticket me ticket! I simply must have me ticket! Young son, won’t you please get me the gun?”
A soft, female voice said, “I would like to say just how much I have thoroughly I do bees enjoying the mostest pleasurable of hostilities eschewable able abe said the time just before he died, Sue, what’s your name again? Oh yeah, Dorothy get thee removed from my faceth and never returnith everith againith. Thank you. Goodbye.”
A young girl’s voice said, “Mommy, mommy, I wanna I wanna I wanna and you do know that this single thing is that is that is that is that is that is is is is is IS IS IS IS IS IS IS IS IS IS IS IS not.”
A clearly enunciating loud man said over and over, “Ricky ticky tavy no saw rembo chaly chaly woochi ricky ticky tavy no saw rembo chaly chaly woochi ricky ticky tavy no saw rembo chaly chaly woochi ricky ticky tavy no saw rembo chaly chaly woochi ricky ticky tavy no saw rembo chaly chaly woochi ricky ticky tavy no saw rembo chaly chaly woochi.”
A man rambled on in a deep, somewhat sinister, voice, “There are precisely fourteen sixteen garter belts that slither back and forth every so emasculating is the worn or scorn I can know of these and sets of other things by way of the manner in which I severely run my finger into your cunt bitch and how that tender trap…scores of adventures have already been deceived by an army of triturating invigorating the blanchest of birch canoes paddled upstream by a team of screams…”
I scream again. I scream loudly once more and shake the shackles. But the voices do not stop, and I am alone.
* * *
I woke in the morning, and there was someone leaning over my face, staring at me. He was a black man, medium build.
“My name is Homer,” he said. He has a full moustache with tiny grains of food in it. His face is kindly and his eyes soft. He is dressed in civilian clothes. His voice is gentle. I could not answer. I could form no words. He seemed to sense my inability.
Homer begins mercifully taking off my shackles. He unties the belts connected to the bed and carefully moves my legs in a little and lays my arms down at my side. I could not move my arms or my legs. He pauses, looks me in the eye. My body was numb. Last, he removes the shackles from my wrists and ankles. The release caused a lot of pain.
“I am going to take you to the bathroom,” he said. He twisted me off the bed, and my feet touched the cold ground for the first time in what seemed like centuries. I could not stand on my own. Homer lifted me up and put my arm over his shoulder. He dragged me to the bathroom down the hall, on the left. He pushed the door open, led me to a urinal, and held up my back as I urinated. He rudely cleaned my wrists in the sink and rinsed my ankles in the shower. Now I could stand somewhat, and we walked back to the room, my legs wobbling in a bizarre way. He set me down on the bed easily. I was in a daze. He walked back out of the room and left the door wide open. He took the shackles with him.
I studied my scarred wrists and ankles, still marked with blood. Sunlight streamed through the Venetian blinds that covered the window inside of the metal bars covering the glass.
I felt a sudden tightness in my chest for no apparent reason, and my heart began to beat fast. My head started swimming out of control, in circles, and “fake” demons lurked in the room. The walls were closing in. I could not feel who I was. The walls kept squeezing and squeezing, tighter and tighter, until they seemed to implode. I tried to hold on and focus. My consciousness seemed to be sailing outward. There was nowhere to exist. I was a minor, inconsequential speck inside a vast echo chamber. I grasped the edge of the mattress and squeezed the material tightly.
Homer returned with breakfast, which he wheeled in the room on a little gurney. I was in no mood to eat. I live off of my presences, thank you very much. They sustain me for weeks, they and the voices in my head, plenty of paranoia, plus a smattering of racing thoughts and a few tea leaves. Now, suddenly in front of me, was a full meal. I smelled the hospital food. I double-checked: nothing.
I was lost as ever, deep in my fantasy world. I drifted along inside my imagination, content and happy. The games I played in my head never ended. I could run from one thing to the other in a constant state of bliss. I had no feelings for anyone or anything. No one could penetrate my world. I even had guardians at my gate to protect my castle.
My thoughts rambled:
‘All that passes and the signs and the sighs that slither through the air are not my own, yet they belong to the welled up pent of sorrows of another time and why oh why can not I? There were many people there on that night of blissful sorrows and how the ending of time did just begin for what are but the shells of another’s mind. Who is that which is not what and then where is he whom and they are some other there too I say and I say. The story is far away like the beginning of a day and the way we say what is it whatever we say. I was locked inside of a tomb that with walls and a door and there were some other things by that door. I began to see a way out to the day but all that was in the way had a way to say do not go that way. So I felt an uneasy insolated drip within my soul of easy feelings and not minding all the pressure of the sights that block out the times when each single thing did not have to be here.’
I stare at the floor. As I watch, patterns fade in and out and come together and then go away again. I make out one pattern; another takes its place. I was watching sand swirling, sluicing around in a bucket of moving water. Circles faded into squares and squares became triangles, but each shape held for a minute or so before the next one took its place.
Homer returned about half an hour later. My tray of food sat in the same place he had left it. He walked up to the tray of food. He looked at me. He said, “Tomorrow, they will force feed you like they do the anorexic girls.”
I do not answer. He grabs the cart of food, wheels it out the door and down the hall. Slowly, my confusion dissipates. Replacing confusion is paranoia. My fantasy world is a completely different thing than my paranoia. Paranoia is the way to justify why I am so important in my fantasy world, such a central character inside of my world. Surely, my vast powers must be desired by others. The government must be one such entity. And aliens and secret societies are certainly aware of all my powers. All of these groups are watching me, observing my actions from inside my fantasy world. They are taking very, very careful notes. My paranoia scheme is elusive, yet the mania exists. The truth consists of a watching entity, not visible to me.
What is the entity behind my paranoia? At night, they are right outside the window, or across the street, hidden from sight. They watch right up to the moment I fall asleep, and they continue to watch while I rest. In the day, they are there, in the place I was just looking. When I go around the corner, they are just beyond the corner ahead; or they are following me, behind the corner I rounded. They are, always, always, one step ahead or one step behind me. They are in the way this or that person smiles at me. They are a part of the reason that person is walking with a cane down the street, even though he seems to be a young person. All is suspicion. The fear of what does not seem normal—and everything does not seem normal—is the nature of true paranoia. This fear is in the way a female receptionist narrows her eyes and looks past my shoulder. She is signaling someone from the Secret Society. The Secret Society is involved in certain coincidences of events. The Secret Society is communicating, subtly and secretly, with me. The two of us have been sharing secrets for years.
Oh, but I am crazy? Oh, yes! And what joy!? What a joy to be truly insane! And question everything, every move, every nuance of thought, every minute of the day—and then to perhaps dream of it all. You have no idea, your little mind is like a pea in a pod, and I wish you luck on your undertaking through it all. For does the Universe conform to your little pea brain? Ha!
Is there a God? I do not worry about that; I am too busy thinking about the present. You can take your deep thinking and do you-know-what with it. It means nothing to me!—nor will you ever answer your own questions, so what is the point of it all?—to show off to me how “great” your mind is? It is not great! Your mind is a pea in a pod and nothing more!
Am I getting under your skin yet?
Have you awoken to your lack of thinking yet? Because that is what you are—nothing! I am in love with being insane! I wish I could be insane for all time, until the end of the world and the end of the cosmos and the end of God. This I pray to God above. That is my prayer to Jesus and to Allah! Let me stay insane!
I fear that a secret society may be infringing on my fantasy world, and the whisper of their presence is a new level of fear, and there is no way to escape my paranoia (no matter if there is a way or not). It is no longer being lost; it is all loss of hope, as if I’ve passed through Dante’s gate. And, because no one can read my mind to help me with the labyrinth I have created, or help me find a way out, I become perpetually lost, running in fear, down alleyways and corridors of my mind. I feel as if I have done something horribly wrong, that I am no longer a central character, and I am no longer able to manage my maze. The maze now manages me. The secret society I was communicating with now controls me, and I run from them. What started as an uncertainty has turned into perpetual hell. However, as with any well-laid plan, even the chase breaks down, eventually.
I was ready to report to the secret society with my information. But they hadn’t called or left any messages in my brain. I tried to come up with an ulterior reason why I have not heard from the secret society. It began to dawn on me that I was wrong. The Secret Society had let me down (but I know it is impossible for the Secret Society to let me down – or anyone down – that the contradiction is maddening); or, just maybe, the Secret Society had never existed. That is the most terrifying potentiality of all. It is simply too hard to imagine, and I have never imagined they could be a machination before. My fantasy world, and the paranoia that was its lubricant, were shattering and collapsing before my eyes.
A nurse walked down the hallway past the open door of my room. Another patient stumbles in front of my door, stares in, continues walking. I heard a commotion in the room across the hall. I look up and see another young patient in his room, walking around in circles. He’s running his hands through his hair, one after the other. He is a very big man, maybe six foot four and rather heavy set, probably at least 275 pounds. He has long, shaggy brown hair that reaches his shoulders and small facial features. I can’t see his eyes. He is wearing the same strapless hospital gown I am. I feel like I know him, recognize him. He is vaguely suspicious, but a vagueness that is gaining on clarity.
He walks intently in circles, starring at the ground. He groans in a low, raspy voice. It sounds like the moan of a dying animal. I hear commotion from the end of the hall. I’m still clutching the edge of my mattress from when my mind was flying in circles. Suddenly, four male nurses appear at my neighbor’s door. They stop abruptly in his doorway, bunched together. The patient does not pause walking in circles. I hear the nurse’s words:
“I am afraid we must secure you to the bed right now,” Mr. Vague Man Combing Hands Through His Hair.
No answer. The guards stepped cautiously forward. Two of them quickly grabbed his wrists. Instantly, all hell broke loose in a big fight, which ended when the patient was put into the same shackles I had worn the night before. My neighbor also screamed and yanked at his shackles during the night. The six nurses slowly walked out of the room, looking like soldiers crawling out from a battle trench. One of them locked the door behind him, and they walked away out of my sight. I heard the patient screaming across the hall. He kept screaming.
The shackles were put back on me that night. I wore them several nights. I accepted them. I had no concept of choice. I dealt with them as best I could manage. The shackles were torture, but I acquiesced to the punishment.
I ate my meals after the second day. Who was I to protest? The day arrived when I did not have to endure the shackles anymore. I began to wander the mental ward. I sat in the lounge’s musty chairs with everyone else and watched the nurses, the patients, the doctors. “Friday Night Videos” was always the big hit, and the patients would gather in the lounge for that TV show. I remember the cylindrical object that flipped and gyrated at the opening of the show, and I liked the spinning, the certainty of the colors. During the day, I would sit in the lounge and watch the other patients, the nurses, or the doctors in the nurses’ station behind the glass. I would watch, quietly, studying movements, listening to speech, smoking my cigarettes. On some level, I will admit that I was utterly fascinated. But I did not want to be in the hospital. I was 16 or 17, and I had a life to lead. The clock’s minute hand slowly turned around and around and around and around and around and around.
The 3 anorexic girls move like a 3-headed robot. If they look at me, all 3 heads turn and stare: 6 big eyes in 3 little heads. The robot can see deeply inside of me. At feeding time, the anorexic girls cleaned up every ounce of food on their big trays, as if it were a mammoth task, like shoveling a long driveway clear of snow. The anorexic girls ate their 3 daily meals fast, methodically, determined, in unison, while never panicking. They were generals in battle with their massive plates of horrible hospital food:
Thin General 1: “Launch the cavalry down that ridgeline to the right and clear the potatoes, Thin General 2.”
Thin General 2: “Roger, Thin General 1. Mission accomplished. I have sustained some damage to my left flank, Thin General 1.”
Thin General 1: “That’s okay, Thin General 2. I am busy with my meatloaf sandwich. I attack head-on, launching the bulk of my infantry and several thousand reserves. There is great resistance. Thin General 3, status report, please.”
Thin General 3: “I am consuming dessert of a large cherry pie at this time, Thin Generals. Please hold your lines until I have chance to respond.”
After feeding, if there wasn’t a dramatic regurgitation (that being the norm) – with much flailing, weeping, gnashing, and pulling of hair – the 3-headed robot was peaceful, buzzing and beeping very quietly. (Note: if there was regurgitation, all 3 thin generals did so nearly simultaneously in an awesome spectacle nearly as entrancing as the spinning cube of colors.) One of them even had a guitar that she strummed and sang gentle songs in her room, just like Karen Carpenter. Sometimes in life it’s cliché that sustains us even through our darkest times.
The snow would build up in the corners of the windows during winter. The place always smelled like urine, or puke, or bad, stale food, or cigarettes. There was a flurry of activity before every meal: quietude after them. After meals came medication from little, white, perforated baskets. Dust rose from a sofa chair when someone sat down on the cushions.
The clock on the wall made me mad when I watched the hands ticking away time. I could not move the clock along faster, and I could not set it back and do my life over. I was stuck in a loop. I was very angry at Time.
On my psychiatrist’s first visit, I happened to be sitting on my bed, in my room, clutching my mattress. I seemed to be out of the restraints – provided there was no reason to be put back in them. (It took me some time to understand fear was a means of purposeful intimidation; this same feeling of dread follows me through my life, though I’ve learned its finer points.) He dragged one of the plastic chairs, from the central dinner table, down the hall and into my room, whereupon he sat and took out a pipe. His name was Dr. Zinn. He was a tall, lanky man who walked with an uneven, limping gait. He had a very pock-marked face and large, dark, beady eyes behind thick glasses. His hair was longer than average, black, very shaggy and unkempt. He seemed to me more woman than man, and his strange stride had a peculiar feminine grace to the clunk, shuffle, clunk. If a part of a doctor’s job description lies in his bedside manner, then this doctor would cause a hyena to bolt in fear. I can still recall the sound of him dragging a chair and all the dread and nausea the scraping caused in me.
He stares at me for several minutes. He is aware who my father is, I am sure. That is my first thought, yes. My father is famous in the world of psychology and even psychiatry. And, for all his education and insight, Dr. Zinn was strange. I did not want to speak, but I had noticed something that had happened to me since I had started taking medication, and I needed to get my problem off my chest.
“I can’t write.”
Dr. Zinn said, “Ah, very good. You’ve decided to speak. The nurses told me that you refused to speak. I was a little concerned we would have to send you to a state facility for the insane. You might not have left there for several years. They would have been much harsher on you there than we are now.”
“I can’t write!” I said, yelling.
“Why don’t you tell me what you feel?” Dr. Zinn said.
“What fucking difference does it matter what the fuck I feel? Can’t you tell how I feel?”
“I would like you to express yourself.”
“Express myself,” I said under my breath.
“Yes. Please express yourself to me.”
“Express myself? All right, fine. I feel like you are robbing me, and I feel like you, and this place, are a crock of shit. What gives you the right to treat me like this? I want to know how I got here because I don’t remember anything, but it is now dawning on me that my fucking parents are double-crossing, worthless pieces of shit. They talk a big game – a lot of people talk a big game – but they are fucking wrong. I feel like my parents turned on their own son.”
“Very good” Dr. Zinn said, and now he reached for his right pocket.
“Did you hear me? I said I feel like my own parents turned on their own son!”
“Yes, I heard you,” Dr. Zinn said, producing a pipe.
“I don’t think you understand what I am saying!” I was standing now.
“Please sit down, Michael.”
I quickly sat back down, the shackles looming in my mind, like creeping monsters.
“Maybe it would be better if you tried to express what you are going through. Apparently, you can do that very well. Your father…”
“My father,” I said sardonically.
“Just tell me what you are experiencing, right now.”
“Okay, fine, you fuck!” I shouted.
At my explosion, the psychiatrist reached in his left pocket of his dark grey, winter sport’s jacket, removes a pouch, unzips it, and begins packing his pipe with tobacco. Finished, he returns his pouch, produces a shiny gold lighter with grooved parallel lines for additional gripping from his shirt pocket inside his jacket. He flicks his lighter and lights his pipe. The flame is large. He tokes many times to get his tobacco lit, pulling the flame down with each intake of breath. He puffs. Waves of smoke are created. Now his pipe is lit, and he places his gold lighter back in his shirt pocket. He begins smoking, listening in silence. He leans back a little in his chair. The pipe reminded me of my father, who also lights he pipe when we start arguing.
I began calmly, even a little excited about telling someone my story, “I can think a little clearer now versus a few days ago, when I first got here, I admit.”
I continued, “What you feel, that I hear and see. If I am forced to deal with people then I have to concentrate on what you are feeling to avoid what you are saying. But I have an answer for everything; every nuance that you iterate with your body: with your eyes, with your gestures, with your sighs, and then some and then some and then some more. There is nothing that you can feel I can not see. In other words, you can look at me directly and ask a very straightforward question but it just flies right by, but every muscle’s movement, every twitch, every dart of the eye that you make while speaking whatever you are saying, I see and listen to, and then I answer in what you think is garbage, but it is just another language that you do not and can not understand. Ah, but this is the plus side to paranoia.
“I am speaking to you but by way of your actions, body movements, inflections, or any other subtle sign. I am answering your feelings and telling you about my own feelings because I have no feeling where I am because I am no one because I have no identity as you know of the word identity because your identity is based on reactions from other’s feelings, but where I am there are no people, so I have no identity.
“The Them are entities I envision. They come to me at different times. They were here in this room on the first night I was held down on this bed. I see your feelings are hard and edgy, but your feelings talk to other people too, but your others are real people, and I do not know those other people, and then I still try to tell you about the others I talk to: The Them.
“So, I tell you how I talk to or relate to my others, and The Them, by seeing how you relate to others because I can read your feelings. That is why I don’t care. I don’t care about your feelings, no. Because your feelings represent your own personal hell, and we can communicate with each other about our hells, but there is no sense in trying to have any concern about your hell, and, besides, you seem to be doing just fine walking, blindly, through your own hell,” I finished and paused for a moment, my hands suspended in the air. I had been gesticulating, emphasizing my story.
The psychiatrist, Dr. Zinn, took to his pipe for a few more puffs. Then he turned it upside down and tapped out its against the heel of his shoes; the bits of burnt black tobacco fell in a small pile on the polished floor. What a cock-sucker he was; God, how I hated him.
“Very good,” he said, with a degree of finality.
“But I still can’t write,” I raised my voice. “My hand shakes and I can’t form the words on the page.”
I said with desperation, “Do you even care about my ability to write?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, I must go now,” Dr. Zinn was saying as he stood. I watched him drag his chair out of my room. I listened to his chair scrape the floor all the way down the hall. I sat back down on the edge of my bed and stared at the wall for a few minutes, and then I put my head in my hands and breathed deeply through the tiny gaps in my fingers and smelled my sweaty palms.
Dr. Zinn began visiting me with regularity, and I reluctantly talked more each time about strange, nonsensical things. I dreaded the thought of going to the state institution, so I rambled out of coercion. I think he took me dead serious the whole time, and I came up with some pretty hilarious and poignant stuff. Here is an example of our conversations:
“When I embark upon the empire of the Orcs and the Hobgoblins, I must travel with my loins girded and with the pure focus of mind. It is that that gets me through the days of the empire of the mystic fogs and the Gods of the night. I sit in an open park in the middle of the day and people pass by and they do not notice me at all but I continue with my quest and then from above I see a walled path weaving before me…”
“Weaving?” Dr. Zinn questions with a puff of his pipe.
“Weaving like a snake in front of my face, and showing the way up to the next Kingdom…”
“Like a snake?”
“Yes.”
But he rarely spoke, and the initial conversation had set the tone for the several hundred meetings we had. So, on top of being scary-ugly and strange, he was a fool. I learned absolutely nothing about myself or anyone else or the world or society; except how to ramble, and I remember investing energy to cure this bad trait of mine after I left the hospital. But, the evil state hospital was ever-present in my imagination. In reality, the state hospital was probably not much different than where I was.