Chapter Thirty-One
The next day I tried to thumb to Toronto. I stood rigid, watching a drawn-out line of cars glide by, driven by shy people I guessed. When it came to the spectacle of a beggar, they wanted no involvement. After a while I concluded that everyone was going to pass me by and so I made the lengthy trek home.
It turned out that I could really have benefited had any of those timorous motorists helped me to reach my destination. The day after the highway farce was one I had hoped to spend wandering around Toronto. Instead, on that cold winter’s day, my housemates in Peterborough turned me in. In their defense, they did so because they didn’t know what else to do. They had run out of ways to deal with me. If they couldn’t understand or deal with the problem I’d become, I suppose they thought the psychiatrist could. But he is only one human being, who happens to have enough education to be legally sanctioned to give injections, or order others to do so.
So, it was bend over and take your medicine. Depending on whom I queried, most believed the needle was good for me. For some reason the doctor only injected me with enough haldol to last two weeks.
Once again, I refused to eat while I was on the ward, because I believed there was poison in my food. Every morning one or two nurses would get me out of bed and try to talk me into ingesting something. Every morning the smell of breakfast would plead their case and though the argument was persuasive, each morning I remained resolute. My stomach complained more and more loudly, but I was sporting a deaf ear. I couldn’t satisfy my hunger because I feared death. I envisioned my gravestone and it read – “Poisoned in a Psychiatric Hospital”.
I was soon given the same option I had been given the last time I’d been in hospital - join everyone else in the dining room and eat or be restrained and nourished intravenously. Knowing that I could be poisoned intravenously, I changed my tune. I told myself that a little poison never hurt anyone, that I could eat small portions and minimize the damage. I began to eat one meal then two and finally three meals a day. The powers that be were satisfied and I was left alone, none the worse for wear, a little resentful and a bit embarrassed because I believed I had caved in.
One day a bunch of us were standing around in the cloud of blue smoke that seemed to follow the in-patients around the hospital. One ragged looking man stopped pacing and, while flicking his cigarette, expressed a popular sentiment to no one in particular. “It would sure be nice to walk out the door and just keep on going,” he declared.
A few voices were raised in agreement. One man put forth a solid “Amen” that seemed to hang in the air.
“You’re right,” I said and in spite of the fact that I was only wearing jeans and a t shirt I walked out the front doors into the fresh January weather; baby blue sky and bright sun. It was cold enough to freeze most anything but a rock.
I walked a good mile at a brisk pace until I found myself at the bus terminal downtown. There I caught a bus that would take me to the group home. On the way there some guy who was too old for such arguments was trying without success to convince his friend that Raiders of the Lost Ark was superior to The Empire Strikes Back. Their arguing hurt my head. Someone coughed up a complaint and a woman looked over the top of her book mischievously. The cover of her book read “Bodily Harm” and I took it personally. I looked in time to see I had arrived at my stop. I disembarked without the knowledge that I’d been kicked out of the group home. My room sat waiting for its next inmate.
Letting myself in quietly, I snuck to my room as though it was my nature to be secretive. My digs looked vacant, as if a high-powered vacuum had sucked up everything resembling me and, trailing bile, had wheeled itself to the gutter outside and puked it all up. I found the sleeping pills that I had for some reason hidden in the closet and taking three, I spread out on the bed. The bed squeaked and groaned as if it were quarrelling with me.
One of the capsules seemed stuck in my throat and I thumped my chest for a minute. It wasn’t all that long until a doped up sleep relieved me from thinking about the great and imagined responsibilities that I figured I’d been ducking out on. All that was really expected of me though, was that I take my medication and, sadly, I wasn’t even very good at that.
I was eventually discovered by someone who slipped away and called the police, someone who believed there was no alternative but to squeal on me again. For all I knew my former housemates might have been instructed to automatically summon the law if ever I showed up. I was the big, bad wolf.
At any rate, when Peterborough’s finest arrived, they found me hugging the Sandman, begging him to never leave me. I was woken from a sleep full of images that were fuzzy, friendly distortions of people I knew. One cop lifted my left leg and the other one grabbed the right. After I’d made haste to convince them that I wasn’t going to try anything they let me get out of bed on my own steam.
The police took me back to the brick hospital building where some type of smoke or steam was coming out of a gray pipe on the roof and crystal-like snow sparkled undisturbed on the grounds. Everything looked cold and brittle. None the worse for wear aside from having a chill, I walked in the door I had so recently used as an exit, accompanied by one of the officers of the law.
I was a minor celebrity for a short while. Some guy with a Fu-Manchu moustache slapped me on the back and called me ‘Houdini’. The name stuck for the rest of the day. I fancied that a few of the nurses were amused as well. I could have sworn they were suppressing laughter when they spoke to me, but I was probably imagining that.
Eventually and with real intent to be successful, I did run away from the hospital and when I did, I found my way to the highway that led directly to Toronto. I was sure a while later, as I entered the city courtesy of a quiet traveler, that there were trials ahead of me. Still and in spite of my active psychosis, there was a genuine and wordless feeling in my chest that intuited that, in the end, all would work for my good. I knew that I’d dodged a bullet, that the hospital hadn’t put enough medicine in my system to have much of an effect on the well-rooted psychosis that ran me.
I stayed at the wonderful four-star hostel, The Salvation Army at Queen and Sherbourne. If I needed a change of pace from being pampered there I would try to get into the Fred Victor Mission up the block, but they were usually full. One afternoon, after a month or so at the Sally Anne I took all my belongings, most of which was trash - broken glass, rocks and stones, colourful bits of paper and newspaper, all of it in plastic bags, and I moved them with me to Seaton House. Having graced that fine institution with my presence before, I wasn’t surprised when the closer I got to my prospective new abode, homeless men seemed to be popping up out of nowhere. They must be hungry, I supposed, they must be waiting for a meal. Sure enough, it turned out to be suppertime.Dejected men, disappointed men, intoxicated men, deviant men and mentally ill men all began filing through the hostel’s doors and I joined them.
It was in Seaton House that, one night, I witnessed the spectacle of two thin, malnourished and drunken winos fighting each other. It was a two-punch fight – each man took a great big swing and each missed his target. One man fell on his face and the other’s momentum carried him into a wall where he remained spread out like a mosquito having been swatted. After their “fight” the combatants became fast friends and shared a drink of something. I laughed until I was worried about the state of my underwear.
In Seaton House I would rise early and come across the sadness of fallen men, sharing their early morning drink of shaving lotion, lovingly poured into small cups. After a salute hastily made, the unloved men welcomed the first jolt of the day, a taste to get them upwardly mobile, ready for another twenty four hours of wandering and shoplifting their drug of choice.
When I was in need of money I worked for those who supplied workers by the day. There were several outlets in the area that catered to businesses that had small, monotonous and messy jobs that nobody else wanted to do. On a fairly regular basis and in spite of my curious behavior, I was sent to different work sites.
I met many people while I waited for work and many of them were odd like me. Frankly, there was no shortage of eccentrics in that neighborhood. Some were quiet and afraid and others indifferent to everything. Some were loud and disturbing.
I met a man one night that had to have patterned his own brand of weirdness off someone deep and disturbed. We had both been locked out of the shelter and he had asked me if I wanted to go for a coffee. He had such intensely serious eyes that I didn’t dare say no. Before we set off to find a cup of joe, I hid my bags of glass, stones and paper in some bushes. I worried about them the whole time they were out of my sight.
He had the money. When he sent me into a restaurant to get two coffees to go, I couldn’t refuse.
“I don’t like sitting inside,” he explained and I understood. Who needed all the dirty looks?
We went into a park with our coffee. The trees were playacting, being silhouettes of things other than trees, forgetting their daylight existence. I looked through the darkness and saw people I knew in the branches. I looked at the ground – it probably wasn’t a good time to play with trees.
I needed a smoke and so found some dead leaves that had blown onto the sidewalk. That was where the dry ones were to be found. I asked my companion if he wanted a smoke and he looked at me with his more than strange eyes, knowing very well that I was rolling dead leaves in newspaper that I carried in my pocket and said yes, yes he’d like that very much. He wondered how I came to be so kind. I looked at the trees and at him and I started to walk away.
He caught up to me and for most of the rest of the night we walked the dimly lit streets. A sleeping body here and there, sleeping or passed out – what was the difference. Lots of garbage in doorways and alleyways, the odd person cruising, for what, God knows. We bought readymade cigarettes and then he told me he didn’t really smoke. I began to think I could take advantage of his loose way with money. He picked up on my need for his money, I could tell, and he began to withdraw and then to walk on his own.
He stopped in front of a donut shop and I caught up to him. He gave me money for a coffee and he gave me the smokes. He said that he had to go make a phone call and that he would be back. He walked away briskly. I knew he wouldn’t return and I was right. He had been in too much of a hurry to get away to be someone who would return.
Sometimes things seem to come in pairs. It was only a few days after my encounter with the strange man with the money that, while lounging in the wee hours on a downtown bench, I encountered another peculiar person.
I sat up agreeably on the bench as he approached. He sat down wordlessly and pulled some cards out of one pocket and a joint out of another. We smoked and he tried to show me a game, but I couldn’t understand. He laughed at me for being dim, but it was a kind laughter. We got up and walked and talked and daylight found us drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups near the train station. He had smoked a lot of dope and was tired. We parted ways as quietly as when we met. I felt as though I had been useful to him. I was someone he could talk to and then walk away from. Doubtless, he counted on never having to deal with me again. I had to wonder though, why he walked the streets all night long, smoking dope and befriending strangers. What was with the card games?
Eventually the weather turned warm and my feet began to itch. Without much thought I set my sights on Peterborough, where I thought living outside would be pleasant. Toronto and its shelters hadn’t proven to be the tonic I was looking for after all.
There was no one to meet me when I got back. There were no marching bands. I wasn’t Gulliver returning with a team of acrobats in a matchbox, nor Elvis come back from the dead. In my grandiosity, I thought that no one was waiting at the gates of the city because they didn’t recognize me, what with my beard and matted hair.
The blue cars and their drivers still bothered me but not as much as before. Since I had begun communicating with God things had been different. Even the shadow of ‘town’ didn’t affect me much. In my delirium I was almost happy.
So there I was, the prodigal son or conversely, some kind of beast, depending on who you were and how you looked at it. I phoned my father and it was safe to say that from his point of view I was the same old beast. He wanted me in the hospital immediately. I was still in possession of a mind of my own and wasn’t ready for hospitalization. The weather was nice; I could get a cheque from city hall and live outside.
I ran into people I knew here and there I could have sworn by the look on their faces that they were disappointed or disgusted. Were they sneering at me, mocking me when I walked away? Someone gave me a card with a picture of Jesus on it and I cried.
Sometimes I felt that God was about to tell me a joke that had survived the ages, one that had been making people laugh for centuries. Almost invariably, when I had that feeling, something would happen within the next few days that would make me laugh hysterically. I was sure God had let me in on something funny. I would remember His joke for a while and I would smile and shake my head.
As I began to believe more and more strongly that God, the Creator of everything, was with me, I handled delusions and fear much better. The Lord of it all was not only involved in my world he was in my corner. The people in the blue cars hated God as I saw him – all powerful yet willing to share a laugh. I didn’t care what they thought, I felt stronger than them. Their days were drawing to an end. New trials awaited me though, as I would fight my diagnosis and the need for medication for several years to come.