Chapter Thirty-Six
My head was fuzzy, as though I’d been drinking too much and had passed out. I couldn’t remember how I’d come to be in the bed I was in. It was with a start that I realized the strange bed I was in, lumpy mattress and all, was my own.
It came to me slowly. I sensed a little imp in my room, receding, sniggering, as it got smaller. I began remembering what the little imp was laughing about. I had taken more than a goodly amount of medication at suppertime of the previous day, a dose that would be considered a hefty amount for most people with schizophrenia, and a dose that would likely disturb or even unhinge those who bore the weight of being normal. It was another victory for the evil forces of which the imp was a part. Aye, the dark nature that dominated the sphere I was spinning on never seemed to lose. I was getting queasy. The world was like an eternal roller coaster ride without the thrill. Looking at my clock radio I focused on the wavering red numbers that told me it was just past two in the morning.
I knew I wouldn’t sleep again for a time. My mouth felt perfectly dry, as though I had taken an old vacuum cleaner bag to bed with me and had been licking the dust out of it. It was plain that taking extra medication wouldn’t increase my understanding or awareness; it just made me stupid and uncomfortable. Take it or leave it, this was the freedom from the hospital and its authority that I had wanted. Those in charge believed in me, in their cautious, clinical way. It was hoped that I would be responsible with my medication; however, they wouldn’t police me. I would have to answer to myself. I would be aided in this respect by a guilty conscience.
If I played my cards right I might never again have to listen to someone with leather lungs yelling, “Medication ... MEDICATION! Get in line for your MEDICATION!”
The best way for me to learn what I could handle was through experience. If I woke up feeling as if I’d been eating sand it would make a much greater impression on me than would some guy in a lab coat telling me exactly what the do’s and don’ts were.
I didn’t have juice or pop but water would work. I drank long and deeply. I smacked my lips and realized I was thirsty again. Even though I was three quarters full and bloated, my body still called out for fluids. I tried to swallow and it felt like my throat was all wrinkled up, my poor throat was the forehead of an old, old man raising his eyebrows. I drank water in small sips for the duration of the night.
When I took my medication as it was prescribed a slightly parched mouth was one of the small and usually inconsequential side effects I dealt with. We were advised to chew sour candy or gum or to chew ice chips. I don’t know about anybody else but walking around with ice chips in my pocket proved to be, well, I didn’t actually try it as something made me think better of the whole idea. As far as sour gum or candy went, I just wasn’t interested.
One day I met a woman I vaguely knew, an unexceptional woman, a nurse, someone whose acquaintanceship with me I wished was more than what it was. Our “relationship” was in critical condition though and about to lapse into a coma. While, of course, I hoped for a miracle, I was past wanting any heroic measures taken.
At any rate, I had barely started to articulate in her direction when my mouth went dry and my tongue started sticking to the roof of my mouth. She hung around long enough to see the frothy spittle hanging around the corners of my mouth. Mentally ill, on welfare and a nasty, dry mouth to boot – it all added up to little if any consideration as a love interest. I was not very appealing to her or anyone else, I was well aware of it and it chagrined me like the Americans winning Olympic gold in hockey. These things weren’t supposed to happen – I was meant to be taken seriously and the Yanks were supposed to stick to baseball, golf or beating up small countries.
I could always find a normal woman to go out with me the day I got my cheque. I could promise her a meal at the restaurant of her choice. I’d give her whatever she wanted within reason. If I liked her, I wouldn’t mind if our date broke me. Yet, one reason I had for not approaching any of the ‘normal’ women I knew was a mental image that plagued me. I kept seeing the look on my dream date’s face when, in a crowded eatery, I stood up too fast and keeled over. Most people would swear I’d fainted, they might even throw a glass of water in my face, but my falling on the floor would actually have been caused by hypotension, another wonderful side effect that took me by surprise from time to time. Side effects could complicate life, especially, I believed, for one such as me, for it was the proverbial bane of my existence that I wanted everything to be normal, my health and the women I thought I knew included; it was a pitiable desire that could never satisfied.
I figured I’d bide my time, accepting my fate for the time being. I was poor in several ways and therefore, unacceptable. Women who were my age lacked character, I would tell myself. If a man had some money and a halfway decent car he was a good prospect. If he had some type of presence about him, some money and a vehicle, he might find himself being pursued by the very ones who habitually turned up their noses at me. Chagrin. Sometimes, in spite of it all you just have to laugh.
The Walkman was becoming very big at that time, a really hot item – if you had a Walkman you were on top of the fashion scene in my neck of the woods, you were one of the trendsetters. You were style and savvy with a healthy heartbeat.
In stores I would look at all the different types and their prices. I couldn’t afford one and that was galling but what bothered me the most, what made me panicky was that I believed I might never be able to afford one. The clerks in electronics stores thought that it was necessary to watch whatever it was that I happened to touch or fiddle with, which bothered me further. They used no discretion, they didn’t hide or peer at me from behind shelves, they watched me shamelessly with glaring, rat-like eyes, satisfied in the knowledge that when I left their merchandise was intact, that I hadn’t boosted anything.
Every day I watched young people like me walking around with their headphones on, music being pumped straight to the soul. Theirs was an audio fantasy world where the artist of their choice defined life until their batteries ran dead, at which time they were transformed and became once again mortal. I watched them and the noises of urban life grew shrill and mocking. I was broke in an affluent city and that either pissed me off or humbled me completely.
I thought and I thought and when that didn’t work, I thought so hard I could have sworn I smelled smoke. Finally I decided to put together my own Walkman. What I was going to do had been done before; there was nothing original about it. The tricky part would be finding what I needed at the right prices.
After looking in thrift stores, second hand electronics shops, scouring the wanted to sell column of the local rag and otherwise seeking until I had tired of doing so, I found an old tape recorder, on its very last legs, in a stylish, used goods place. Go figure. Like many humans that I’d known it was temperamentally functional, like a rich artist it worked when it wanted to.
I found an old earplug of the kind that was used in prehistory, one that, at one time, had let someone listen to his or her transistor radio without bothering anyone. It was designed to go in one ear and, as pleased as I was to have it, I couldn’t get the picture out of my mind a papery old man. He had yellow-white hair and thick, smudged, black rimmed glasses. I knew the type and could almost picture him ramming my earphone as far as he could into his waxy ear, all the better to listen to the football game. Who really knew where it had been?
I got over that, borrowed some unlabeled tapes, bought some cheap batteries and made myself comfortable on the front porch. There I sat with the group home that I lived in behind me, made mean by its humble status, both of us facing the street. The sky glowed pink as the sun went about its business of bidding us farewell, promising to return soon. I turned on my makeshift Walkman.
Nothing. I stopped and started the machine and still nothing. Stop and start, wait, I heard something. I thought it resembled music and wished for something above a loud whisper, anything. It got a little louder. “It’s not that bad,” I told myself, “things could be worse.”
A guy walked by singing the words of a popular song. He was listening to his Walkman. Pink Floyd, eh? I thought. I tried but couldn’t really make out who the artist was that I was listening to. I cursed under my breath and tried harder to tune into the music that was in my possession. Losing patience, I started to talk to myself.
“If I ever get my hands on the guy who came up with the saying, ‘If life gives you lemons make lemonade’, I’ll make him recant. I’d like to tell him the way I see it; life is a series of problems with one solution, and that solution is final, no matter how much citrus fruit you surround yourself with.”
At the time my spewing of sentiments like that, concerning final solutions and the like, seemed somehow deep, a curious mutation of something Solomon might have muttered when teaching practical ways to view life to a group of tax collectors, chronic gamblers and alcoholics.
I gave up on the front porch and went inside where I was accosted by the old black and white TV bellowing, “THE SURVEY SAID!!”
Richard Dawson was giving it his best as usual as two families, seemingly strapped for cash, tried to outdo each other. I suppose I tuned most of it out. The next thing I knew Shelley was turning the television off, giving it a rub, sighing and saying, “See you tomorrow.”
I thought that it was funny that she liked Richard Dawson and his cheesy suits, but then I was going through a stage of sneering at a lot of what I was wading through from one day to the next. With little else to do, I decided to stir things up a bit.
“I don’t know about you Shelley, but I can’t stand that Dawson guy. I read somewhere that he’s gay.”
“Ha ha,” she responded, “I’m not getting sucked into your little game. I’ll say this though, he looks kind of like you. If you were wearing one of his nice suits, nobody would be able to tell the two of you apart. Are you hungry? I’ve got a little Chinese…”
“No thanks, I just lost my appetite, misplaced it somewhere I suppose.”
She seemed hurt. I could never see why people were offended if you turned down the food that they offered. Food had never resembled anything social to me. Sometimes I wondered if I was lacking some type of warmth or humanness when it came to food, if I was missing out on something by only eating when I was hungry.
Shelley often wanted to feed me. She would lend me a little cash from time to time. She was warm, a good person and an over-comer. She would remain obscure, in spite of having tamed her afflictions. This world we’re on, that belches smoke because that’s what happens when it swallows our trash, could use a heaven sent flood of people like Shelley every now and then.
Besides Shelley I had three other housemates. There was Mary, a lady, (you wouldn’t dare call her anything else), who died her hair black, drank twelve beers every Friday night and most notably and above Shelley’s protestations, washed her panties in the kitchen sink every second or third day. Eventually the people who made sure the group homes ran smoothly sent a worker around to solve the underwear issue. Suffice to say no one backed down.
The air was charged. When Mary was told to keep her bloomers to herself, or at least out of the kitchen sink, she took it gracefully, though I was sure I could sense retribution in the air. Mary was a nice woman who would play rough when she thought she was in the right and I had the feeling she thought she was precisely that, most of the time.
Then there was Donald, a large man who had twenty years or so on me. He took such a high dose of antipsychotic medication to control his schizophrenia that I wondered how he even got out of bed. He spent a lot of time shuffling around the streets in his jeans and scarred, tuckered out work boots whose laces were chronically untied. He smoked a lot and had a boastful stomach. In one area he didn’t shuffle though. Donald was always limbered up when it came to telling expansive tales. His imagination was surprisingly nimble.
I was on my third day at the home when he caught me relaxing on the couch, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and trying to understand why I was where I was. I became aware of his voice, low with a type of gurgle that put me in mind of what a half drowned man might sound like when he calls for help.
I wanted to believe him. When he was describing in considerable detail some of the better goals he’d scored while playing in the NHL for Boston, I wished it were true but I knew it wasn’t. When he was shooting a line about body slamming Whipper Billy Watson I pictured him in tights and I smirked. An image of Donald in Maple Leaf Gardens hoisting Whipper Billy in the air and pausing before he threw him to the canvas, made me laugh. Eventually I decided to feign sleep. I pretended I was dreaming until make-believe blurred and became actuality. My mind overflowed with oversized men who wouldn’t stop talking and who were unquestionably laying it on thick. Anything anyone said was quickly outdone. I couldn’t seem to find my own voice and so, was forced to listen. I woke in the dark and pulled a nearby blanket over myself.
The final character in our house, Bobby, wore his hair short and gold, wire-rimmed glasses. He was around my age. It wasn’t until years later, when I went to visit him in the town in which he’d chosen to plant himself, that he explained that he was no longer in the closet. When he told me that and I looked back, I remembered, red faced, that he had really wanted to be my friend, so much so that sometimes I felt like I was being smothered.
I told him that once; I said that I needed some space. He flew into a rage and I thought he was going to belt me, but he managed to hold back. Still, it was all very unfortunate because I shared a room with him, a tiny little room. When we were lying there in that miserable room on the night of the day he freaked out I thought, this moment is so insignificant, all things considered, so microscopic, he could do anything to me. Whatever he chose to do would barely make the local papers and never be included in the history of this world except as the footnote of a footnote of a footnote. My life would register as a blip in the cosmos; over and forgotten before it had a chance to make any kind of a difference. Thinking like that could really bother me, so I broke the silence.
“You still pissed?”
A moment passed during which I envisioned this former private in the Armed Forces strangling me and laughing, say, “Space, eh? Space?” Froth forms at the corners of his mouth and spews on me while he laughs and I turn beet red from trying to scream while I am being choked…
”No man, I’m not mad, how could I stay mad at you?”
“You know that Joseph guy,” I asked, relieved that I was still alive and able to change the subject.
“Yeah,” he said, “he’s a jerk.”
“You think so?”
“Oh yeah, he’s right into that D&D shit.”
“Really,” I said, stalling for time, hoping he’d tell me what he was talking about. But he didn’t, he just rolled over as though he was ready to sleep.
“Hey Bobby. What the hell is D&D? Is that some kind of sex thing?”
“Are you ever naïve,” he answered, laughing and rolling over to face me in the dark.
“D&D,” he commenced to explain, “is a game, a role-playing game. He and his buddies are all getting stoned and taking on new identities, elves and shit. Some of their roles are evil. Sometimes people get screwed up. Some players are supposed to be more powerful than others. Joseph told me he was some kind of dragon master or something and I almost leveled him. Take my advice and stay away from that guy.”
There was one thing I didn’t get about Bobby. He walked around with this T-shirt that said A Flock of Seagulls. Since I had been naïve once I figured once more wouldn’t hurt. I whispered, hushed yet perceptible. “Hey Bobby, are you awake?”
“What?” he answered in a conversational way.
“Why do you wear T-shirts with ‘Flock of Seagulls’ written on them? Are you into animal rights or something, I mean, I thought people were trying to save whales not seagulls - there are too many of the old shit hawks as it is. What’s with the shirts?”
“Listen,” he said quietly and getting up he put a cassette in his tape machine.
It played for a while and I said, “Yeah, so.”
“A Flock of Seagulls,” he said, “techno pop.”
“It sounds like a lot of electric crap with some kind of rhythm, computer disco,” I commented.
“Goodnight Carm,” he said and left the tape to play itself out and shut itself off.