Psych Ward 101
The Belle of the Jar
The hospital’s main corridor, long and flush with activity, appropriately resembles an artery. The guy sitting across from me is handcuffed to a handicap assistance bar. My view down the artery is obscured, but I can hear the sort of metaphorical cholesterol blockage evoked by a man covered in his own fecal matter, and many nurses screaming when he apparently tries to lie down on the floor. A cop strides past, ignoring threats from the mystery pooper while attempting to coax him into a shower. “Are you fucking insane?” asks the cop. This is a stupid question.
I see the man once, later that night, when I’m led to a gurney in the middle of that big hallway for a nap. He’s about 6'6" and has a wide, colorless face, like an uncooked Pillsbury biscuit; a face I associate with pedophilia. “You’re looking real pretty tonight,” he says softly.
Around 4 or 5 a.m., I wake and change into an intake wristband, loose socks, and an immense, brain-gray uniform.
The ward is ardently not a place to get help. It’s more of a purgatory while someone determines your chances of survival in the outside world. After intake, a therapist introduces herself and tells me she’ll be back in a few days. “What do I do until then?” I ask. She responds evasively: “This is a place for rest.” A single physician makes rounds once a day, between 6 and 6:30 a.m.; psychiatrists come every forty-eight hours or so. Crystal, a mother of two, tells me she’s been here three months. She still seems tired.
I watch a lot of Katie Couric and think about insanity. I remember the moment I got it: It was sophomore year of high school, when Johanna Rosenberg and I would cut Assembly to huff whippets in her Jetta and talk about love. The topic, one warm afternoon in Hancock Park, was why Matt Schwartz still hooked up with Lauren Castiglione when everyone knew she was practically stalking Nathan Dietz after he fingered her on my living room sofa post-semi-formal. “Well,” Johanna exhaled, her nitrous-enhanced voice reminiscent of Orson Welles’, “Yeah, she’s a crazy bitch. But she’s a crazy bitch sucking his dick.”
Oh, my God. Girls are crazy. This is a fact that goes hand-in-hand with “boys are idiots,” something I would learn years later. Advice tends to only be as good as the person giving it, and for what it’s worth, Johanna Rosenberg would later tell my boyfriend that he impregnated her and convince me that my celebrity doppelganger was Dustin Hoffman — she was just the only person “real” enough to tell me. She was psychotic. I still worry about the Dustin Hoffman thing.
We can’t have pens so I write with the kind of pencil I remember from church and mini-golf. I use one of these when I waitress. I hope I haven’t lost my job because I’m not there, and even if I had my manager’s number, the payphone’s been monopolized by an old woman who I suspect isn’t actually talking to anyone. I have a date, too. I guess I’m standing that dude up, which is maybe better, since this isn’t really the sort of thing I want to explain. I won’t be in class, but I never went to class anyway. Like, how hard is it to show up? How hard is it to wake up and get on the subway? I’m overwhelmed thinking about scrunching up my jeans so I can step into them. Squeezing toothpaste. Looking in the mirror. My pencil is dull but I can’t sharpen it, lest I extract the tiny blade and use it to off myself, or something.
The second morning they take my roommate’s blood twice because the first nurse forgot to document it. When my roommate tells them someone came by, the nurse says it was yesterday, but I remember it was this morning. I say nothing because I’m not a very reliable source. My roommate sleeps all day, but I would too if I were missing twelve ounces of vital bodily fluid.
Another woman down the hall spends a solid hour of each afternoon screaming. She’s locked in her room, I think. I feel like Jane watching Bertha light the bed on fire. Everyone’s got a slut in the attic. And like all things in attics, the whole crazy girl thing is pulled out years later, dusted off, and called art. It becomes a sign of intelligence, creativity, intrigue. What Philistine doesn’t fear her own voicemail? Why be boring when you can spend hours wandering the supermarket, putting things in your cart and taking them out again until you end up sobbing in the parking lot with a single jar of capers?
When there’s nothing watchable on TV, everyone shuffles up and down the single hallway. Everything looks the same everywhere, so there’s only one way to look at it, and without moving around an object you start to feel as though you instead are the object, the thing being watched, that you’re being pulled apart by the objective expectation of an existence as one thing and many. So you move as much as possible, which is not a lot. “It’s time for my walk,” says Rosemary after lunch. “I’m getting so fucking fat, all they feed us is bread.” Inpatient lore is that fiber offsets the blockage of medication; Rosemary’s pretty sure the West African nurses are making her fat on purpose because they’re jealous. I don’t have an opinion except that in New York City it seems wrong to be forced to eat a bagel that comes wrapped in plastic.
Vanity carries its torch with diligence, if not pride, in Grooming Group. Grooming Group is like the saddest slumber party in the world. We play with nail polish and generic hair products. We have “girl talk.” Shawn, the lone male, sprays himself with aerosol deodorant, the gender-neutralism of which is suspect. Debbie shaves her chin. She says she’ll be here five more days and she doesn’t know if she can take it, which is ironic.
Once we’re beautiful, we go to Music Group, which does not involve making music. It involves sitting in silence around an iPod and then talking about how that makes us feel. First up is the Grateful Dead classic “Box of Rain.” “I like the imagery,” explains our caretaker, a hopelessly foppish intern named Scott. I don’t know how anyone can take anything seriously here and not go more insane, but I don’t bring that up in discussion. Debbie sings along quietly but she has to leave because her meds are making her antsy. She returns to the pacing hallway and Scott takes requests. Shawn sings the first few bars of “I Will Survive,” because he can’t remember the title. For someone with few teeth, his Gloria Gaynor impression is sharp. Shawn has dark greasy hair all over his head and face and most of his body. He lives with his mother, whom he loves, I learned in Social Skills Group, and this is his sixth or seventh visit to the ward. Shawn’s the first and only person who offers information about the events leading up to his visit. According to a saga he relays to me over lunch, he’s here as the result of a misunderstanding with the first police officer on the scene after he was beaten by a home invader who was there to abduct his mother. A mouthful of gluten keeps me from questioning details.
Shawn wants the lights off for Gloria but Scott says no. The lights stay on, and I can see everything, everything being all of us sitting around a fold-out table with our hands in our laps, listening to “I Will Survive” and trying not to look at one another. When I sneak a glance at Shawn, he’s so happy. One woman, Chris, cries and says she’s trying not to laugh at herself, all the years ago she listened to this song, all the other times she’s heard it. Her voice wavers. She’s tiny and veiny and bird-like, her thin hair as stiff and gray as steel wool. She’s so delicate looking; you just want to destroy her. I don’t have to ask how she got here.
Chris requests a song from the seventies that I don’t recognize. It’s a love song: “It’s so important to me that you know you are free/ Lord, I would never want you to change for me.”
My nails are ballet pink and smudged because there was no nail polish remover, because it’s dangerous, and not only am I crazy, but I have no cosmetology skills.
We wrap up with Fleetwood Mac. You can go your own way! I start to think I’d make a really good psychologist.
It’s my half-birthday when my mandatory seventy-two hours are up and I’m deemed sane. The nurse manager who hands me my paperwork has miniature oil paintings of boats and floral arrangements all across his office radiator, in gilded frames the size of playing cards. This seems like a sign of madness to me. I say “thank you” a lot and wonder if this makes me sound like I was faking whatever proved I wasn’t crazy.
Everyone asks why I get to leave so soon. “My mom’s a lawyer,” I say, or “I don’t know.” I can go my own way. I go home to Los Angeles for a while. I take a sobriety pledge and break it several times. I go to a party and sit on the floor cutting lines with a group of boys who tell me about the time they met the girl who tattooed DRAKE across her forehead. She was a cunt. I fuck someone with man-boobs, though to be fair he keeps his flannel on and only tells me after. He says it’s because of the estrogen in an antipsychotic he took as a teenager. He says he tried to hang himself when he was fourteen but the cord broke because he was obese. Then he went on these meds that gave him breasts. He tells me this over a breakfast sandwich. I start to think that dignity is the only reason people are crazy anyway. When I walked out of the ward, I felt the same mix of disgust and arrogance that occurs when you walk into a public bathroom and know immediately that the person you just saw leave took a massive shit. I know that you’re as bad as me. It might be the lowest human emotion possible.
Two months later I’m late to outpatient, considering missing it, and I see Shawn on the uptown N. He’s singing to himself. I don’t know if it’s Gloria Gaynor. He’s dirty. I’m not. I’m in a special program for manic-depressive pixie nightmares. He’s probably not. I wonder if he wants to talk, but when he looks up at me, I focus on the undulating floor of the train. I’m motion sick. I look fine.
