Chapter Thirty
It was a cold night and I walked home from band. I was dissatisfied with my performance that evening but tried not to let my unhappiness show. I had a flimsy smile ready for all band members who drove by in their cars, who waved and left me cheesed off at having to chew their smog. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. If it wasn’t a lack of musical prowess, it was my fellow musicians not offering me a ride.
Walking in the wintry darkness, I figured if I only had enough get up and go to make some decent money I’d be able to afford a car like most everyone else. I would never have to walk stiffly through any black and unfriendly, glacial night again
I’d grown disgusted with myself for living in a group home full of society’s castoffs (of which I was one). I regularly chided myself for needing head pills. I was, day by day, slipping into a dismal mood.
When I got home I went straight upstairs to my room, to the thin curtains I was sure people could see through and the bare floor that was always at odds with my feet. I spoke to no one. With a sense of urgency I cast off my coat, got down on my knees and prayed.
“Dear God, whoever you are, show me what it is that you would have me do. I know that you have something for everyone, what do you have for me? Please give me a sign that will guide me, show me the way. Push me, shove me, throw my sorry ass in the direction you would have me go. Amen.” As I was falling asleep under a mountain of blankets, the answer came to me.
“Stop taking the medicine,” the voice said, a voice that was inside my head but seemed external. “You don’t need it. You will be healed completely, if you stop taking the pills.”
Within moments I fell under the influence of sleep, knowing that I would implement a change in my routine. I would forsake the medicine again and in the process forsake myself and those who cared about me.
If one has a disease that makes him or her behave in ways incomprehensible to most people, that is, beyond the scope of the life experiences of most people, the tendency is to shun that person. The average person who develops schizophrenia doesn’t know what they’re really like when they are off medicine and ill – they don’t have a clear picture of how they are presenting themselves and they don’t understand why, if others insist on doing it, they are being cast out.
So, I wanted to be healed. In my mind, I was certain I was viewed as some kind of basket case by my fellow man. I was always being shown to a seat on the sidelines. Now I had been promised a healing, God had promised me something supernatural. I would be normal again. My mind nagged a bit, questioning. “Are you sure, is this the right thing to do at this time, what if it wasn’t God you heard, maybe it was the devil, maybe you were hearing voices, you might regret this, maybe you should get a second opinion.” When the opposition to my scheme died down, I thought, “This time I’ll prove I don’t need medication, for schizophrenia, of all things. This time anyone who cares to look will see that I’m just as normal as they are. No one will cast me aside again, they won’t dare.” Diving in headfirst, I began the process of unraveling.
When I first went off my pills, I felt so good about my decision and God’s promise that I went out, applied for and was given a job at a local car wash. Truth is, I had virtually been promised a job when I wanted it. This consideration was shown to me only because I was a friend of a certain attractive woman who mentioned me while dealing with the manager of the busy, little endeavor.
I worked at the auto wash during part of my first week off medication. I noticed very little change in the way I thought or felt, as I bungled through the days with my companions in toil. At one point I swore I felt better than I had when I was taking my pills. I had more energy and slept less. I thought that I was doing well at the car wash and I was getting the hours to back that up. I started to wonder why I had hesitated in claiming the job. I recognized that it wasn’t exactly a dream job but we did have some fun there.
During the second week I was starting to feel a little blue, but I still had a lot of energy. I was wiping down cars as they came out of the wash. There were two of us there, one to wipe down each side. By the end of my second week without the pills I was holding a rag in each hand and wiping three quarters of each car. I reveled in the fact that I was strangely full of pep. Most everyone there had to have known that something was up. They probably didn’t want to confront me and ask me if I was as unhinged as I seemed to be. How can you soften a question like that? What if you ask someone something like that and you’re way off the mark?
By the third week without any reason in a bottle, I was growing irritable. I was becoming convinced that people at work were putting me down when my back was turned. Given the circumstances, they may have well been doing so; the whispers I heard might have been authentic. My friend would be asked and she would have to explain that I had a mental illness. I argued with a fellow worker during my third week.
Part way into my fourth week I was cleaning inside a car as though I’d never have the opportunity to clean again. I finished and was exiting the speckless vehicle with several things I had next to do prominent in my mind. My haste was my undoing – I banged my head as I stood up, nearly splitting it on the exasperatingly solid place where the door joins the rest of the car. I rose shakily to my full height.
Everything was suffused in a soft light. My boss came running, his usual cheeky sneer replaced with concern for another. I was touched by this side of the man who had never shown anything but disdain for those under him. Being thus moved was the last vague touch of normalcy that I was to experience for a while.
“Are you alright? Should I take you to the hospital?”
“No,” I replied, “but I have to leave.” I handed him two balled up rags. I stepped out of my coveralls there and then and went to look for my coat. It was where I had left it.
As I was leaving the car wash supervisor, whose father owned the establishment, stopped me and said, “Come back when you’re better, okay?”
I nodded and for a fleeting moment I knew I was sick. I walked away and into another trial that would last much too long.
I wandered around after bumping my head. Everything still seemed to be soaked in a vague, yellow fog. There was snow on the ground and snow also fell from the sky, thick flakes tumbling gently, briefly brought to splendor by the streetlight and then gone. I became elated. I held my hands in the air as I crossed the street. I was catching snow but as soon as the snow landed in my hand it melted. I thought, you’re not catching snow you’re killing it. Some guy leaned on his horn. I continued to wander.
I found myself at the YMCA, home of the best hotdog in town, reasonably priced, sliced open and fried on the grill until they were just right. I had two and washed them down with a cup of coffee, black, because I wanted to watch the oil on the surface, blue and purple with a touch of yellow.
Lighting a cigarette I went out into the street and looked this way and that. Not much was doing and I thought I might go to the mall. While grappling mentally; well the mall is warm but it’s stuffy, it’s not all that cold, I could walk around and get the fresh air downtown, maybe I’ll have a beer, you don’t drink, oh yeah, it’s snowing, maybe I should go home – while fighting to make some type of decision I noticed that the snow seemed to have stopped suddenly. It was as though someone had flipped a switch and whatever had been was now separate from what would be. The earth seemed barren at that moment, as if most everyone on the face of it had somehow flown off it in mid-rotation. Life seemed so sad without the falling snow. I thought for a moment that I might shed a few tears. My eyes watered over, I sniffed a bit and then the illusion was gone. I could live without snow. The world seemed, once again, as overpopulated as always.
One thing I knew for certain was that I’d never go back to that damned car wash. They had almost killed me. I knew without doubt that the bumping of my head had been carefully orchestrated and quite likely rehearsed. I looked back on it and I remembered the slight tug on my arm that made me lose my balance, which in turn caused my skull to crack on the unforgiving metal. There was no doubt in my mind, the guy I had argued with, Doug, had tried to murder me.
I decided I would call the cops when I got home. That would serve them right, the dirty, lowdown, rotten… that was it. I’d go to the mall another time. Instead of going shopping I would go to the house in which a peg waited for my coat, faithless peg that would lend its services to another without thinking twice. Pegs are like people I thought and I snickered.
I started on my way home to call the police and report an attempted murder, and then, in mid step I grew a new set of plans. I decided I was in the mood for walking and set out, head down and without direction. I made a mental note to notify the authorities when I got home, as I didn’t want what happened to me to happen to anybody else. Before I’d traveled a block, my intent to inform had vanished like the cold flakes whose disappearance I had lamented.
I wandered the streets for a prolonged period of time – too long for one to trek in the cold air and snow when one had no destination, when one was without anywhere to warm up, a place to have a drink or two and pass the time of day with friends. Eventually, after misreading street signs, walking in circles, going left instead of right and vice versa, I found myself attempting to let myself in the side door of the group home. I jiggled the door every which way until I finally realized someone had locked me out. I started to get huffy. You can lock the door all you want, I thought angrily; I can and will stay out to the wee hours if I please. Agitated, I used my key as if it were a weapon. I jabbed the lock with it a few times and then plunged it in the keyhole and twisted angrily.
“Lock the door on me, will you,” I muttered, without shame. Once inside I wasn’t quite so sure of myself. Where am I, I wondered?
“Where the heck am I?” I asked out loud.
Something was up, something was in the air; the atmosphere even though somehow washed out was strangely electric, as though someone could be waiting around any corner ready to break the fragile peace by freaking out. The ambience in the group home said, “No nonsense tonight, bloke.” Usually it said nothing. I thought I must be in the wrong house.
My stomach tied in knots when a chiding, sinister voice scolded me from out of nowhere, welcoming me to ‘town’. “You escaped once,” I was told, “you won’t get away this time.”
Suddenly, in a matter of seconds I understood the fundamentals of town, the dimension I had encountered in Moose Jaw, the one from which I had apparently escaped. I knew why town was spelled with its trademark small “t”. Everything in town was less, in particular the inhabitants. There was no capitalization because nothing was worthy of even that degree of respect. The small t that I saw in my mind was to be a constant reminder that you were small, worthless and doomed. The keepers were no better, they were just rats, people who had been inmates themselves and had committed foul or indecent acts to get a measure of relief. They were slaves to the small bit of peace they had and would do anything to keep it intact. Oh God, I thought, why can’t I just wake up somewhere comfortable, as if it were the old days? Though I couldn’t really remember a specific place or time where I had known peace of mind, I lived with a sad sense that I’d once been there and that it was probably long gone, far beyond the peripheries of my life. I heard canned laughter. Was I on TV?
I looked on the kitchen table and saw an old tennis ball. “That’s your world,” an oddly persuasive voice declared, “a ball of crap.”
What am I going to do, I wondered after a minute or so of gazing at the ball. I envisioned it being devoured by a clockwise spiral of water made pristine by the amazing 2000 flushes.
Evoking virtually no noise, I went upstairs and lay on my bed. I kept seeing a toilet in my mind. That was where, it seemed, my life belonged.
“Gone,” I said to myself, “your world’s a ball of shit that will be gone forever.”
I swung around and put my feet on the insensitive floor that would see me numb from the ankle down. I got out of the lumpy bed with stains of unknown origin on the mattress and grabbing all my pills I went to the bathroom. “This was my world,” I said and dumped my pills in the white, porcelain crapper. I watched the water propel them in an ever-tightening ring and then witnessed their complete disappearance. I went back to bed satisfied. I had responded fittingly to a rather abrasive comment that had unkindly related my life to a turd.
The next day there seemed to be more cars on the road than usual. Brutes, I thought, loud and smelly. They all seemed frenzied, all trying urgently to be somewhere. I found the traffic distressing. To escape the kerfuffle I pointed my feet in the direction of the waterfront and started walking. It was colder than it had recently been. As I plodded along I realized that I was alone except for the voices.
“Well, look who thinks he can escape.”
“No-one escapes from town, absolutely nobody.” The second voice sounded like my dad.
“Dad,” I said, “why don’t you guys just leave me alone. I won’t tell anyone about your secret cities, really, you can trust me.”
“Trust you. I wouldn’t piss on you if you were a fire.” I heard laughter and tried to smile and laugh with everyone else but I couldn’t.
I ran through the snow a bit, until the truth matter-of-factly hit me in the forehead. There was nowhere to run. If I were sensible I’d go to the hospital but I was in no way reasonable. Sadly, the law was on my side. I could walk around in this wonderland of delusion as long as I wanted to. If I wasn’t a threat to others or myself treatment couldn’t be forced on me; it was strangely against my rights for anyone to do so.
With care I retraced my steps back to the group home where I hurriedly packed a few things in a small bag. Though my money situation was somewhere between humble and embarrassing, I thought I would go to Toronto for a few days to see if I could figure out what was happening to the world around me. Everything’s closing in on me, I lamented; I used to be so much more at ease here. I was beyond equating medicine with a measure of peace. I threw my bag on the floor and, downhearted, I lay on the bed. I tried to stay completely motionless believing that if I remained still nothing would hurt me. While assuming the position so to speak, I fell asleep.
I was dreaming. I was a little kid and a bigger kid was sitting on top of me. I told him to get off, I asked him, I begged him, I cried and I laughed, I taunted. He would never get off, he swore an oath that he wouldn’t and I betrayed myself by believing him. The other kids walked by and looked curiously, some stopped and laughed and others stopped and cried. Some yelled and one kid freaked out and had to be restrained.
I woke to the darkness between day and night. That damned kid, I thought, just didn’t want to get off of me. I shook my head viciously trying to rid myself of the sleep that induced such nightmares. “Jeez, it’s cold,” I remarked to the shadows that were playing in the corners of my room.