Chapter Twenty-Eight
I stayed at my folks for a while after being discharged from hospital. While there I bounced around like an Indian Rubber ball thrown with gusto into a small, octagonal room. I ricocheted between dread and hope and miscellaneous points in between. I was waiting for a spot to open up in a group home dubbed the “Transition House”. An ambitious name I thought, a tag that seems to promise a shift from sickness to health.
When I realized the name referred to the home’s role in the move or transition from hospital to a bed in a long-term haven, I was embarrassed at my lack of understanding. I saw that getting better was going to be tough. I had to improve myself while learning about a health care system that, it seemed, viewed me as just another person to consume. I was another somebody turned nobody who would become nothing but a statistic and a burden for the taxpayer.
Before going to the Transition House, I feared that, when I became a resident, I would be walking into the brewing of some unusual magic. I thought that illegal medical treatments were probably practiced there, devil-pleasing goings on that were kept well hidden from prying eyes. Yes, strange things were afoot.
On those times when I was distressed, when thinking about the home made me want to hide, I would do so in my room. My favourite time to be alone was at night when I turned off the lights and the darkness that I provoked would protect me. The strangest kind of people would then cavort in my mind, those, I imagined, that worked and lived at the Transition House. They were tormentor and victim locked together in a morbid yet, on some level, satisfying dance. Some wore looks of confusion if you could see past their ghoulish expressions. Some wore looks of satiety. You could see fear in most everybody’s eyes. I was sure that when I came on the scene I would be pushed aside, put in front of a television and excused from what really went on. I would be left to draw conclusions about any sinister occurrences from the vantage point of a non-participant.
Maybe, I thought, I was far from better in spite of the medicine. I was the same person I’d always be, simply rearranged. The morbid side of my imagination could still chase away good cheer, convincing me that black magic was alive and well in Peterborough. My senses were still, though I was medicated, subject to all manner of distortion.
When I wasn’t daydreaming I was breathing tension-filled air at home, the main conflict, as I perceived it, being between my father and me. He thought I was a bit of a fool and I couldn’t seem to shake the way I had seen him during my episode of psychosis. We would give each other funny looks, but nobody said much. What could you say?
“Hey, remember Universe City?”
“Were you there? I didn’t see you.”
I was once again ingesting food. In the hospital, the staff’s number one priority in my case had been to put some meat on my undernourished bones. Thanks to the injections I received my sanity was imminent and not of concern. I guess this freed up a little time. Whenever I ate something, animal, fruit, vegetable, grain, fish or fowl someone invariably had a moment to make a fuss, praising me as if I were the most wonderful idiot they had ever had the honour and privilege of meeting.
An older woman had pointed out that eating good quality food in any quantity one desired would be heaven on earth for many. Though I resented her supercilious tone I couldn’t argue with the content of what she said and, so, from then on I ate and I got into the habit of eating and before you knew it I was hooked. I was still scrawny when I was released into the care of my parents, but not alarmingly so.
While I was with my parents I continued to take Haldol for a while, a drug I could best describe as being one without feelings. It was a harmless looking green pill, but it was harsh and strange.
One day my mother, who never stopped coming up with ideas for things I might do, suggested that I do a little yard work. I wearily obliged. Weary was becoming the word that best defined me. The day was stark and overcast; it was a sad day. Many leaves had left their hosts and lay dead at my feet, a multicoloured mosaic asking to be raked and laid to rest. I stared for a time and then started raking the same spot over and over. The rhythm was comforting. Eventually, spent, I dropped the rake where I was standing, the very thought of putting it away overwhelming me.
Mom had watched me work. “If I didn’t know better, I would have thought you were a little old man.” By way of reply I collapsed in a chair, spent.
I was 20, going on 80 and seriously in need of a new pill.
When I asked the doctor for a medication other than Haldol he seemed a little surprised.
“You’re having problems with the Haldol?” he inquired, seeming a little disappointed, almost offended.
“Well, yes,” I answered, “it makes me very, very lethargic.”
“Well,” he said and I could have sworn he was huffy, “we’ll give you something different.”
I went home with a prescription for thioridazine, a drug that was much gentler. Thioridazine made my eyes go a little slit-like and, as I discovered one lonely night, it also made me impotent. So what, I told myself, no woman in her right mind would have you anyways. I had to laugh, because I didn’t want any woman in her right mind.
As I began to understand what I’d become the days painted themselves in different shades of grief that put a lump in my throat and a funny pain in my chest. When the sadness struck and pushed me around, I would go out walking in spite of my fear of meeting someone I had known in high school. I believed that bumping into any of those who still believed life was a roller coaster ride would only screw me up more, but if I was really down I sought perspective, at the risk of high school hangover.
Once I’d been unperturbed and a little wild. Suddenly, it seemed, I found myself fearful and full of sadness, stiff and wooden as only neuroleptic medications can make you. Around this time of a type of self-discovery I could have lived without, the Transition House called with the news that a bed had become available and I had the privilege of claiming it, for a year at the most.
The group home was a huge, old yellow house in Peterborough, a warehouse like building that was equipped to handle eight people at a time. We bought our own food, and drink. You could have a beer if you wanted to, you could smoke cigarettes, sleep on the couch, stay up all night watching TV or come home in the wee hours of the morning. One of the few rules written in stone was that you had to attend a program at the hospital, usually occupational therapy. I did not see any basket weaving during my time at the Peterborough hospital though, if that was what you were into, OT would have been the appropriate setting in which to indulge yourself. On any given day I might play with clay, while someone else cut pictures out of a magazine and pasted them on pieces of paper and another made boxes out of wood. It was adult kindergarten without the promise of advancement.
When we were finished for the day we all went to the cafeteria where we could belly up to the trough and stuff our faces with as much of that day’s fare as we wanted. After all the excitement, after OT and eating, I often went home and slept. The day’s first dose of antipsychotic medicine would have kept me captive through the hospital morning, bound in a chemical dungeon where I languished, sleeping with my eyes open, drowsily thinking about just how soft the world’s softest mattress might be. When I got home I was always more than ready to stretch out on my rack and catch a few winks.
One night a bunch of us went out for coffee, six people in total. In the all but deserted restaurant we happened to find ourselves at a table that had twelve chairs, so we sat with a seat between each person and his or her neighbour. We were talking about nothing in particular, small talk, a bit of gossip, a joke or anecdote about one doctor or another when the waitress in her unfortunate uniform and softly whistling nylons approached our table and offered a joke. “What are you, a bunch of schizophrenics?”
She laughed, but we laughed harder. Yes, we laughed pretty hard for people on medicine and we asked, “How did you know?” “What gave us away?”
Sooner or later you get used to the personality myth. It’s very common for people to believe that those who have schizophrenia have two personalities and quite possibly a great many more. (It’s also very common for those with schizophrenia to believe ordinary people have preposterous, fixed ideas and that they see life as a great big one-dimensional stereotype)! The truth is that I have only one personality, just like anyone else, excluding those with multiple personality disorder or death row inmates in Texas trying to escape the sting of a lethal injection.
The man of colour walks by dressed up on a Saturday evening – he’s obviously going the dance hall to use up some of that rhythm he’s got inside…Anyone who’s blind can play beautiful music if they want to…bored housewives are nymphomaniacs…rich people are snobs and poor people are uncouth and dirty… It seems that whoever’s in charge likes to sort everyone out; please, no pushing, no shoving, there’s a box for everyone; if you don’t fit someone will be along shortly to apply a little pressure.
Some days we endured group therapy. In the room in which group therapy took place was a see-through mirror. Everyone knew it was there, that someone could be on the other side watching but it was never officially acknowledged. When I looked at the mirror I’d primp a bit, smile at myself and check my hair. In the smoky mirror, we saw ourselves in many ways.
To those whose medicine made them ravenously hungry, enduring the morning program was not a problem. The Monday to Friday, all you can eat lunch was well worth the sacrifice of a couple of hours. To me, not a large consumer of food, the morning ritual in exchange for an all you can eat meal was like dragging me behind a car, shirtless and over gravel and then offering me a dab of skin cream and a single, standard issue bandage.
Once a week I sat through an hour of therapy. Every week the Kleenex box sitting on the table confronted me, daring me to make use of it. That box would catch my eye as soon as I’d sat down. I’d envision myself snuffling, maybe sobbing a bit while my therapist held out the offensive receptacle, coaxing me, “Here, help yourself, use all you want.” It never happened.
Tuesdays we went bowling and Thursdays we played volleyball. Most of us were of the lamb being led to the slaughter variety. We arrived at the bowling alley or the YMCA in a yellow school bus and we filed into those facilities quietly. I was already humbled by what had happened to me in my life, what had happened to my mind. It was a further affront to be carted around like some kind of burden, a sponger, grown old before his time, one who would never do anything but waste oxygen and consume food and drink he hadn’t earned. It wasn’t lost on me that I was among people who needed professional caretakers and that I in no wise was considered any different by said keepers. I was often given the sense, by those who were paid to watch over me and my peers that we should be grateful that anyone would take on such a demoralizing, disagreeable job.
During the winter preceding June of 1981, the month and year that I would leave the group home bound for a wedding halfway across the country, some of us tried to improve our predicament by taking care of a large outdoor ice rink. That was one cold winter and colder still for us because we had to flood the rink at night. Winter’s unyielding breath was intrusive, penetrating my clothing, giving me the feeling that I was standing around in my birthday suit. Winter laughed at extra sweaters and thought toques were nothing but ornaments.
It was on one of those cold nights with a sky so exceptionally black and the air so clear you were halfway breathless, that I realized I’d really been out of touch. One of the others that I was freezing with was sliding across the ice. He yelled, “Nystrum scores and it’s all over.”
“What the hell did Nystrum do?” I asked.
He stopped and looked at me. “Are you sure you’re a hockey fan?”
“Of course,” I replied, “of course.”
“Well, you must have missed the playoffs last year. Nystrum scored the winning goal in the Stanley Cup finals.”
“For who?”
“For the Islanders, who’d you think?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, “I don’t know.” I had to wonder how much I’d missed.
I managed to fall in love while I was living at the group home. Smitten as I was, I often dreamt of her at night and, when I woke warm in my bed, half asleep and savoring my nocturnal imaginings I would try to fall back into slumber, hoping for just a touch more.
Thinking about her, thinking about her, thinking about her – it was well within the bounds of possibility that I had her on my mind too often. During the day when I had to meet the criteria for being awake she was utmost in my mind and, at night when I gave in to the medicine and to sleep, she was one long warm thought. I was just a bit too enchanted I suppose. I knew she was out of reach; whether I felt warm and misty or not she was still staff and staff were in no manner available when it came to ways of the heart. It was an innocent, one-sided, sun-spun infatuation, surprisingly pleasant, entirely harmless, and very free of commitment.
I developed a hobby, playing chess, and this took my mind away from forbidden desires. I started reading books of fiction and books on chess. Where the time had crawled it began to flee. The days peeled off the calendar and rushed to find their place in history, each one exclusive, standing by itself as one that would never play itself out quite the same again.
I was lying on the couch listening to some guy, an American, talking about his nation’s 1980 defeat of the Russians in Men’s Olympic hockey and their subsequent gold medal triumph. I shook my head, mildly amused. When he started comparing it to Canada’s 1972 victory over the Soviets, a feat that was just barely accomplished in eight grueling games, I got up to turn the TV off. Before I could silence the offensive language I noticed an envelope on the coffee table that was addressed to me. I wondered why nobody had told me of it. I opened it. I read it twice. The southerner proclaimed the superior nature of the American game to deaf ears. He was effectively silenced. I shook my head back and forth in wonder while a Charlie Brown smile took over my face. My brother was getting married in Edmonton and I was invited.
It was perfect. To my way of thinking I had my health back. I figured I was as close to wellness as I’d ever be and this knowledge emboldened me, filled me with confidence. I knew that nothing short of an ice storm in July could stand in my way of getting to the impending festivities.
I didn’t know at the time that the respite from sickness I was enjoying, would evaporate. I would find my way to the wedding. I would return to Peterborough and for a while, things would be okay. Then I would be struck down as I had been before. I’d be left wondering who was driving the truck that had, once again, hit me. It wasn’t yet my time for lasting peace, for permanent transformation.