Dr. Wick seemed utterly innocent about American culture, which made her an odd choice to head an adolescent girls’ ward. And she was easily shocked about sexual matters. The word fuck made her pale horse face flush; it flushed a lot when she was around us.
A representative conversation with Dr. Wick:
“Good morning. It has been decided that you were compulsively promiscuous. Would you like to tell me about that?”
“No.” This is the best of several bad responses, I’ve decided.
“For instance, the attachment to your high school English teacher.” Dr. Wick always uses words like attachment.
“Uh?”
“Would you like to tell me about that?”
“Um. Well. He drove me to New York.” That was when I realized he was interested. He brought along a wonderful vegetarian lunch for me. “But that wasn’t when it was.”
“What? When what was?”
“When we fucked.”
(Flush.) “Go on.”
“We went to the Frick. I’d never been there. There was this Vermeer, see, this amazing painting of a girl having a music lesson—I just couldn’t believe how amazing it was—”
“So when did you—ah—when was it?”
Doesn’t she want to hear about the Vermeer? That’s what I remember. “What?”
“The—ah—attachment. How did it start?”
“Oh, later, back home.” Suddenly I know what she wants. “I was at his house. We had poetry meetings at his house. And everybody had left, so we were just sitting there on the sofa alone. And he said, ‘Do you want to fuck?’ ”
(Flush.) “He used that word?”
“Yup.” He didn’t. He kissed me. And he’d kissed me in New York too. But why should I disappoint her?
This was called therapy.
Luckily, Dr. Wick had a lot of girls to take care of, so therapy with her was brief, maybe five minutes a day. But in her wake came the resident.
There was a two- or three-minute breather between Dr. Wick’s departure and the resident’s arrival. During this time we could think of new things to say or formulate complaints. Residents were in charge of privileges, medication, phone calls—the day-to-day matters that were not important enough for Dr. Wick to bother with.
Residents changed every six months. We’d just begin to figure out how to manage one resident when he’d be snatched out from under us and replaced with a new, incomprehensible resident. They started out tough and ended up exhausted and ready to leave. A few started out with compassion; they ended up bitter, because we took advantage of them.
A representative conversation with a resident:
“Good morning. How are your bowel movements?”
“I want to get off group. I want destination privileges.”
“Do you have any headaches?”
“I’ve been on group for six months!”
“The head nurse said you were acting out after lunch yesterday.”
“She’s making that up.”
“Hmmmm. Hostility.” He scribbles in a notebook.
“Can I have orders for Tylenol instead of aspirin?”
“There’s no difference.”
“Aspirin gives me a stomach ache.”
“Are you having headaches?”
“This is in case I do.”
“Hmmmm. Hypochondria.” He scribbles again.
But these two doctors were hors d’oeuvres. The entrée was the therapist.
Most of us saw our therapists every day. Cynthia didn’t; she had therapy twice a week and shock therapy once a week. And Lisa didn’t go to therapy. She had a therapist, but he used her hour to take a nap. If she was extremely bored, she’d demand to be taken to his office, where she’d find him snoozing in his chair. “Gotcha!” she’d say. Then she’d come back to the ward. The rest of us traipsed off day after day to exhume the past.
Therapists had nothing to do with our everyday lives.
“Don’t talk about the hospital,” my therapist said if I complained about Daisy or a stupid nurse. “We’re not here to talk about the hospital.”
They couldn’t grant or rescind privileges, help us get rid of smelly roommates, stop aides from pestering us. The only power they had was the power to dope us up. Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium: the therapists’ friends. The resident could put us on that stuff too, in an “acute” situation. Once we were on it, it was hard to get off. A bit like heroin, except it was the staff who got addicted to our taking it.
“You’re doing so well,” the resident would say.
That was because those things knocked the heart out of us.
Half a dozen nurses, including Valerie, and an aide or two were on duty during the day. The night staff consisted of three comfy big-bosomed Irish women who called us “dearie.” Occasionally there was a comfy big-bosomed black woman who called us “honey.” The night staff would hug us if we needed a hug. The day staff adhered to the No Physical Contact rule.
Between day and night was a dark universe called evening, which began at three-fifteen, when the day staff retired to the living room to gossip about us with the evening staff. At three-thirty everyone emerged. Power had been transferred. From then until eleven, when the comfy women took over, we were in Mrs. McWeeney’s hands.
Perhaps it was Mrs. McWeeney who made dusk such a dangerous time. No matter the season, dusk began at three-fifteen with her arrival.
Mrs. McWeeney was dry, tight, small, and pig-eyed. If Dr. Wick was a disguised boarding-school matron, Mrs. McWeeney was an undisguised prison matron. She had hard gray hair pressed into waves that grasped her scalp like a migraine. The day nurses, following Valerie’s lead, wore unbuttoned nurse coats over street clothes. No such informality for Mrs. McWeeney. She wore a creaky white uniform and spongy ripple-soled nurse shoes that she painted white every week; we could watch the paint cracking and peeling off between Monday and Friday.
Mrs. McWeeney and Valerie did not get along. This was fascinating, like overhearing your parents having a fight. Mrs. McWeeney cast on Valerie’s clothes and hair the same disapproving eye she gave us and clicked her teeth with impatience as Valerie gathered her coat and pocketbook and left the nursing station at three-thirty. Valerie ignored her. Valerie was able to ignore people in an obvious way.
As long as Valerie was on the ward, we felt safe hating Mrs. McWeeney. But as soon as her long tapered back had receded down the hall and out the double-locked double doors, we were overcome by gloom shot through with anxiety: Now Mrs. McWeeney was in power.
Her power wasn’t absolute, but it was close. She shared it with a mysterious Doctor on Call. She never called him. “I can handle this,” she said.
She had more confidence in her ability to handle things than we did. Many evenings were spent arguing about whether the Doctor on Call should make an appearance.
“We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” Mrs. McWeeney said about ten times per evening. She had an endless store of clichés.
When Mrs. McWeeney said, “We’ll just have to agree to disagree” or “Little pitchers have big ears” or “Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone,” a faint but delighted grin came onto her face.
Clearly, she was nuts. We were locked up for eight hours a day with a crazy woman who hated us.
Mrs. McWeeney was unpredictable. She’d gnarl her face up for no reason while giving out bedtime meds and slam back into the nursing station without a word. We’d have to wait for her to calm down before getting our nightly Mickey Finns; sometimes we waited as long as half an hour.
Every morning we complained to Valerie about Mrs. McWeeney, though we never said anything about waiting for our meds. We knew Mrs. McWeeney was a crazy person who had to earn a living. We weren’t trying to get her decertified; we just wanted her off our ward.
Valerie was unsympathetic to our complaints.
“Mrs. McWeeney is a professional,” she said. “She’s been in this business a lot longer than
I have.”
“So what?” said Georgina.
“She’s fucking nuts,” Lisa yelled.
“You don’t have to yell, Lisa—I’m right here,” said Valerie.
We were all protecting Mrs. McWeeney, one way or another.
Mrs. McWeeney wasn’t the only person in need of protection.
Now and then there was an influx of student nurses. They were migratory, passing through our hospital on their way to operating rooms and cardiac-care units. They followed real nurses around in a flock, asking questions and getting underfoot. “Oh, that Tiffany! She sticks to me like a barnacle,” the nurses would complain. Then we got the chance to say, “Sucks, doesn’t it? Being followed around all the time.” The nurses would have to grant us this point.
The student nurses were about nineteen or twenty: our age. They had clean, eager faces and clean, ironed uniforms. Their innocence and incompetence aroused our pity, unlike the incompetence of aides, which aroused our scorn. This was partly because student nurses stayed only a few weeks, whereas aides were incompetent for years at a stretch. Mainly, though, it was because when we looked at the student nurses, we saw alternate versions of ourselves. They were living out lives we might have been living, if we hadn’t been occupied with being mental patients. They shared apartments and had boyfriends and talked about clothes. We wanted to protect them so that they could go on living these lives. They were our proxies.
They loved talking to us. We asked them what movies they’d seen and how they’d done on their exams and when they were getting married (most of them had sadly small engagement rings). They’d tell us anything—that the boyfriend was insisting they “do it” before the wedding, that the mother was a drinker, that the grades were bad and the scholarship wasn’t going to be renewed.
We gave them good advice. “Use a condom”; “Call Alcoholics Anonymous”; “Work hard for the rest of the semester and bring your grades up.” Later they’d report back to us: “You were right. Thanks a lot.”
We did our best to control our snarls and mutterings and tears when they were around. Consequently, they learned nothing about psychiatric nursing. When they finished their rotation, all they took with them were improved versions of us, halfway between our miserable selves and the normality we saw embodied in them.
For some of us, this was the closest we would ever come to a cure.
As soon as they left, things went quickly back to worse than usual, and the real nurses had their hands full.
Thus, our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.
Nineteen Sixty-Eight
The world didn’t stop because we weren’t in it anymore; far from it. Night after night tiny bodies fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young people, Vietnamese people, poor people—some dead, some only bashed up for the moment. There were always more of them to replace the fallen and join them the next night.
Then came the period when people we knew—not knew personally, but knew of—started falling to the ground: Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Was that more alarming? Lisa said it was natural. “They gotta kill them,” she explained. “Otherwise it’ll never settle down.”
But it didn’t seem to be settling down. People were doing the kinds of things we had fantasies of doing: taking over universities and abolishing classes; making houses out of cardboard boxes and putting them in people’s way; sticking their tongues out at policemen.
We’d cheer them on, those little people on our TV screen, who shrank as their numbers increased until they were just a mass of dots taking over universities and sticking their tiny tongues out. We thought eventually they’d get around to “liberating” us too. “Right on!” we’d yell at them.
Fantasies don’t include repercussions. We were safe in our expensive, well-appointed hospital, locked up with our rages and rebellions. Easy for us to say “Right on!” The worst we got was an afternoon in seclusion. Usually all we got was a smile, a shake of the head, a note on our charts: “Identification with protest movement.” They got cracked skulls, black eyes, kicks to the kidneys—and then, they got locked up with their rages and rebellions.
So it went on, month after month of battles and riots and marches. These were easy times for the staff. We didn’t “act out”; it was all acted out for us.
We were not only calm, we were expectant. The world was about to flip, the meek were about to inherit the earth or, more precisely, wrest it from the strong, and we, the meekest and weakest, would be heirs to the vast estate of all that had been denied us.
But this didn’t happen—not for us and not for any of those other claimants to the estate.
It was when we saw Bobby Seale bound and gagged in a Chicago courtroom that we realized the world wasn’t going to change. He was in chains like a slave.
Cynthia was particularly upset. “They do that to me!” she cried. It was true that they did tie you down and put something in your mouth when you had shock, to stop you from biting your tongue during the convulsion.
Lisa was angry too, but for another reason. “Don’t you see the difference?” she snarled at Cynthia. “They have to gag him, because they’re afraid people will believe what he says.”
We looked at him, a tiny dark man in chains on our TV screen with the one thing we would always lack: credibility.
Bare Bones
For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin?
The hospital shielded us from all sorts of things. We’d tell the staff to refuse phone calls or visits from anyone we didn’t want to talk to, including our parents.
“I’m too upset!” we’d wail, and we wouldn’t have to talk to whoever it was.
As long as we were willing to be upset, we didn’t have to get jobs or go to school. We could weasel out of anything except eating and taking our medication.
In a strange way we were free. We’d reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: All of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves.
Naked, we needed protection, and the hospital protected us. Of course, the hospital had stripped us naked in the first place—but that just underscored its obligation to shelter us.
And the hospital fulfilled its obligation. Somebody in our families had to pay a good deal of money for that: sixty dollars (1967 dollars) a day just for the room; therapy, drugs, and consultations were extra. Ninety days was the usual length of mental-hospital insurance coverage, but ninety days was barely enough to get started on a visit to McLean. My workup alone took ninety days. The price of several of those college educations I didn’t want was spent on my hospitalization.
If our families stopped paying, we stopped staying and were put naked into a world we didn’t know how to live in anymore. Writing a check, dialing a telephone, opening a window, locking a door—these were just a few of the things we all forgot how to do.
Our families. The prevailing wisdom was that they were the reason we were in there, yet they were utterly absent from our hospital lives. We wondered: Were we as absent from their lives outside?
Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can’t go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling, that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family’s mental health.
Most families were proving the same proposition: We aren’t crazy; she is the crazy one. Those families kept paying.
But some families had to prove that nobody was crazy, and they were the ones who threatened to stop paying.
Torrey had that sort of a family.
We all liked Torrey, because she had
a noble bearing. The only thing wrong with her was amphetamines. She’d spent two years shooting speed in Mexico, where her family lived. Amphetamines had made her face pale and her voice tired and drawling—or, rather, it was the lack of amphetamines that made her this way.
Torrey was the only person Lisa respected, probably because they had the needle in common.
Every few months Torrey’s parents flew from Mexico to Boston to harangue her. She was crazy, she had driven them crazy, she was malingering, they couldn’t afford it, and so forth. After they left Torrey would give a report in her tired drawl.
“Then Mom said, ‘You made me into an alcoholic,’ and then Dad said, ‘I’m going to see you never get out of this place,’ and then they sort of switched and Mom said, ‘You’re nothing but a junkie,’ and Dad said, ‘I’m not going to pay for you to take it easy in here while we suffer.’ ”
“Why do you see them?” Georgina asked.
“Oh,” said Torrey.
“It’s how they show their love,” said Lisa. Her parents never made contact with her.
The nurses agreed with Lisa. They told Torrey she was mature for agreeing to see her parents when she knew they were going to confuse her. Confuse was the nurses’ word for abuse.
Torrey was not confused. “I don’t mind this place,” she said. “It’s a break from Mexico.” In Torrey’s mouth, Mexico sounded like a curse.
“Mexico,” she’d say, and shake her head.
In Mexico there was a big house with porches back and front, there were servants, there was sun every day, and there were amphetamines for sale in the drugstore.
Lisa thought it sounded pretty good.
“It’s death,” said Torrey. “Being in Mexico means being dead and shooting speed to feel like you’re not quite dead. That’s all.”