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Man vs. Machine

Joshua Copeland

    Moab was not a nice place. Sweet and clean.
    And Tim and I had to get out. We had both lived in a group home called The Willows for three years now.
    How would we get a date? She asks, “So where do you live?”
    We reply, “In a loony bin. The Willows.”
    Her eyes widen and she walks away.
    And don’t believe what you see in the movies, pretty and single women in small towns. They’re all married before they hit twenty.
    Tim was thirty. I was thirty one. Here we were, wasting our lives away with mental cases and crazies too old to take care of themselves. Our day began at five a.m. They closed the Willows from five a.m. to five pm. We spent the time in between at the Canyon Lands “Club House” with the other mental invalids and Geriatrics who played Bingo and Sorry all day. They had a computer there, but the censorship software it used flagged porn, but it also censored everything: for example, let’s say, “Jesus Wept.” At five p.m. we returned to Willows.
    One day at The Willows I was making a feeble attempt to jerk off. Out of nowhere I get this gut feeling something is wrong with Tim. So I put on my boxers and jeans, left my room, and walked up to his door.
    I knocked.
    “Tim, are you in there?”
    Nothing.
    “Tim, open up bud. I wanna talk.”
    Still nothing. I open the door.
    Tim was trying to choke himself. He was on the floor, and he gurgled like bad plumbing. His tongue stuck so far out it looked like a short, fleshy snake, like a thing spat from him and alive. A suicide attempt (An attention getter, since there’s no way you can choke yourself to death without a noose). We wrestled around and after I pinned him down for a while he stopped fighting. Breathless, we both lay there on the floor. I put all the weight of my torso over his arms and hands.
    “Derek,” he said in between gasps, “We’re not getting any younger. We got to get out of the Willows if we can, out of Moab.”
    All the names have been changed, of people and places, etc...etc...etc...

The Beginning
    The Willows was run by Canyon Lands Mental Health, and Canyon Lands was the only mental health outpatient clinic around. Sharon Relph ran Canyon Lands, which made her boss of the Willows. So Tim and I needed her permission to move out. Looking back on it, Tim and I were in no condition to leave. But Sharon was all money, money, money, and money. She owned her house she had been moved out of for a year. She had moved next door. She said she’d let us move out of The Willows if we moved into her now vacant house next door. What could we say? Moab was a trailer city, and vacancies in trailer parks and apartments were hard to find. Tim and I were on SSI and SSDI—not enough to pay monthly rent on Sharon’s house—or any apartment for that matter, but she talked with both Tim’s and my folks, and our parents agreed to help out with the rent.
    “Your parents drive a hard bargain, Tim. I wanted to charge you five hundred a month rent for my old house, but your folks Jewed me down to three fifty.” I don’t think she knew Tim was Reform Jewish. “Jewing” someone down in a bargain is common slang in Utah, even with the strictest of the Mormons. So we moved in. The house was a three bedroom, so Sharon was on the lookout for a third roommate.
    The first thing Tim and I noticed when we were fully moved in totally flat nonplussed us: roaches. Tons of them—as I had written, the house had been unlived in for a year. They were called albino roaches, and they were as big as water bugs, yet totally transparent, in a milky way. Like nanotechnology, you could see their teeny tiny organs pulse and suck and pump blue and red dyes. When I drank lemonade, if I didn’t down it all at once, and I left some in a glass, within sixty seconds they’d come out of the woodwork and be clambering all over the glass. And they’re hyper sensitive to temperature. Many a night I’d be watching a video in the living room, the night growing colder and colder, and like in a horror story the roaches would overrun the house, where it was warmer. They’d come out the vents, the sinks, the cabinets, the fireplace. And to kill them requires delicacy. You can spray them with Raid, but because they’re so big, they take hours to die. And if you squashed one on the rug, you’d make a mishmash stain impossible to get out.
    Tim had grown up in Grand Junction, Colorado, about ninety minutes from Moab. His mom was an alcoholic, and her boyfriend would play “touchy feely”—Tim’s words—with his brother and sister. It still effected him. He was always, always mad about something. You can spot characters (males) like him out here; they populate the whole Utah mental health system, always fuming and stomping around with a chip on their shoulder.
    He was never a physical threat, but he did go postal once. Moab’s dating service is known for being “ineffective” and he had a date with a girl he met through the service. Their date was for Pizza Hut. She never showed. He came home and threw stuff around and the cops came and tasered him and he shat himself.
    He always had to have something to occupy his time. If you left him in a room with no radio or TV or computer, he’d go bat shit. It was one of those deals where I think he was so unhappy he needed potent diversions. But we had no computer or cable, just my small TV and my VCR and my videos. So I tried to make sure he always had movies to watch.
    And he never slept. Canyon Lands prescribed “cocktails” for him, a heaping stack of sedatives piled into a cup, all brewed up to make you sleep for days. The brew wasn’t too effective with Tim. He’d sleep maybe twelve midnight to four am. When we lived at the Willows if he had insomnia he could go up the TV room and watch adult swim, but here we had no cable. So he ended up watching the same movies he’d seen before, over and over. His eyes were always veiny and glassy.
    And he had issues with his ex-wife and his son and daughter, both eight and nine respectively. His wife did not allow him visitations, which was illegal for her to do. His kids didn’t call much, but he loved chatting on the phone with them. I remember a phone conversation with him and his daughter one time, he said, “I’m so happy talking to you, I don’t want it to end.”
    But his kids used him, they used him for money. Here’s a guy who can barely make his rent, and he’s giving away fifty and a hundred to his kids. I told him not to do those things, that they’re using him.
    The ruse: His kids would begin to call him once every few days, then once a day, and after a few weeks of this they’d ask him for money. He’d send it, and the calls would stop. After I told him to quit it, I overheard him whispering to his daughter over the phone, “The money’s in the mail.”
    I lived in Moab for five years and never hooked up once. At the Willows I made friends with a resident there named Marshall. He was a former Peckerwood (Don’t ask me where they got their name, I just work here. Peckerwoods are a sub stratum of the white power prison gangs). He had reformed and was now a born again Mormon. One day he tells me he can set me up with a girl he works with at The City Market (The town’s only supermarket) named Machele. All she talks about is sex, he told me. Okay, no problem so far. I bring her up to my therapist and he told me I can do better than her, that a few years ago she had stripped her two boys and tied them to a coat rack and played doctor with them. She did a year in Popper for it. The therapist said, again, I could do better. Later I found out the town called her “The Wicked Witch of the West.” I told Marshall No thank you.
    Popper Correctional Institute is where Machele did her time. It’s about an hour’s drive from Moab. It housed all the Utah convicted pedophiles and all the Utah “snitches,” groups that would not last in a regular prison.
    I’ve had this story I’m writing here for a few years, and it’s only after I left Utah do I see how macabre it all is. I’ve been in jails and mental institutions across the country, but only in Utah have I noticed in a state such as it with a complex such as that: sexual violation. A few years ago I Googled “Utah sex offender” and Utah ranked like #1 in the country as to the number of sex offenders. In a hefty paradox, it’s an ultra-conservative state. And it’s not just the Mormons, there’s an equal, if not greater, number of Christians. Man oh man, what an underbelly.
    In mental hospitals females are relatively open about being victims of sexual abuse. But in Utah, that’s the only state I’ve been in where men are just as open about being victims. And it’s so common, it’s everywhere you look. And, in Utah mental health, not only do you meet a lot of male victims, you get a lot of PREDATORS, WHO ARE HONEST about their convictions. I never met any in jail, but in the Utah State Hospital, I remember quite a few dudes there who would tell you straight out, first thing, “I’m a registered sex offender.” The whole state has a complex, and under the pale Victorian skin pumps a bizarre Pagan blood.
    Eventually Sharon found us a third roommate. Larry Harmon. A Canyon Lands mental health outpatient, like Tim and I. And Larry was a pedophile. He had been with Canyon Lands mental health for close to a decade. I did not want to live with him. A few years back in his house he stripped naked, covered himself with flour, ran out next door to where a teen girl lived, and tackled and groped her. He spent a year and a half in Popper Correctional for that. About five months into his sentence he came up for parole, but the parents of the girl went apoplectic over that, and he had to do his whole block of time. When he got out he stayed at The Willows for a few months.
    And Larry was violent. He scared me, and I’m a black belt. He was a wrestler—wrestling trumps all the martial arts (Maybe save Grappling), even kickboxing and just plain boxing. And he was a virtuoso street fighter. I’d seen him shoot off on one of his paranoid tangents and accuse someone of stealing his cigarettes and then proceed to pummel the dude. Everyone was, to him, always taking his stuff, especially his cigarettes. I protested to Sharon that Larry is a psycho and will make the place unlivable, like putting a shark in a bowl of Goldfish. She said she needed the money. But her reasoning went deeper than that. For years Sharon had had her “favorites,” Canyon Lands clients she’d let get away with shit she wouldn’t let the rest of us get away with. Larry was one of her faves. One of the chosen few.
    So she told Tim and I if we didn’t like it we could move out. But there was no where to go. The Willows had filled up. A trailer maybe? Possibly. I look back and shake my head. Tim and I didn’t have the balls to leave the city. And you see, Sharon was bluffing. If Tim and I said we’d move out if she let Larry in, she’d only have one tenant, Larry, not two, like she had now. But Tim didn’t believe me when I warned him about Larry.
    And I really did make an effort to warn Tim. I told him, “Larry is more familiar with me than with you, so he’ll trust you less, and harass you more.” But at the Canyon Lands mental health club house, all the staff there—who worked directly under Sharon—promised Tim he’d love Larry. I was nonplussed. Were they that blind? Or dark in Sharon’s shadow? WTF? Tim was like, “Well, with what everyone’s saying, I can’t wait for him to move in.”
    And so Larry moved in. They had no problem with it. I remember his first night there. I had eaten a whole load of Garlic bread for dinner. A few hours later I’m in bed, in the dark, and—I wish it was hypnogogic, but it wasn’t—something prehensile scurried up my cheek, then my lips, and nibbled on my teeth for a split second before I screamed and spat it out.
    Soon Larry’s true nature came out, and Tim was scared. I was scared. But Tim was more on the outs with Larry since Larry knew me longer. Larry would harass Tim every day over some such shit, about things Tim never did. A month there Larry had stressed Tim out so much that Tim hid in his room. And any time he left his room Larry hammered him in his in full berserker modus operandi. Larry would chug a pot of coffee and stomp around for hours, mumbling that the local cable company used his body for remote control porn.
    Tim would beg the staff at the Canyon Lands clubhouse to do something about Larry, he’d say that Larry was frightening him. But Sharon’s people toed the line—and no one took action. I was speechless. At the Canyon Lands main center there were therapists and caseworkers who saw the situation more from my side, and I saw an email from one caseworker to another, it said that moving Larry in with us “was just asking for trouble.” But I don’t think anyone saw how serious it was. If they did, Tim would still be here. Or maybe they did see and didn’t care. I don’t know.
    Larry’s favorite day of the week was Friday, when his Viagra arrived through the mail. He’d talk about it like it was a celebration. So I had trouble jerking off myself and asked the doctor to prescribe me Viagra. Stupid me. I told him I was single, and that I needed the Viagara for masturbating. The doctor says he only prescribes it for those who are sexually active with others. I said, “Hey, you prescribe it for Larry. He hasn’t dated for like a decade.”
    The Doctor said,“ Larry is a special case.”
    Tim stayed in his room all day and all night, ruminating, slowly going loopy.
    Finally, someone at Canyon Lands told Larry to lay off Tim and give him a break. Larry just took on a passive aggressive campaign where he’d go stand outside Tim’s bedroom door and talk about him in third person. “Hey Derek, It looks like Tim broke our dryer. When he dried his clothes he never takes the lint out.” “Hey Derek, Tim’s a child molester. He molested both his kids.” That was Larry’s favorite accusation, that someone or another was a child molester. “In the subway restaurant you could just see the way Tim looked at this little girl, he was all bedroom eyes.” Or so Larry complained.
    Tim told me a nightmare that’d run and rerun over and over in his head. He dreamt a monk decapitated him, scooped out his brain matter and other cranial organs, and placed his empty skull in a fish tank, and big scaly fish and slimy eels slimed their way in and out of his eye sockets.
    Finally Canyon Lands sent over someone to mediate between us.
    Mel. If ever there was a Mormon stereotype, that’d be Mel. She worked directly under Sharon at the clubhouse. She had four kids. Claims she’s only had sex four times. Said French kissing is disgusting. If you agitated her, she’d cry. One day she drove me and a few other clients in the white van over to the Moab drug store (The only drug store in town). As she backed into a spot, she nipped the car next to us. She got out, called Sharon, and began to cry. Sharon arrived and got mad at Mel for losing it in front of us. I kept a school notebook for my diary, and one day I wrote in there “MEL BELIEVES IN GOD” followed by three pages of nothing but explanation points. Mel led a religious group—constituted by both Mormons and Christians— to protest at the waterworks cinema (The town’s only movie house). They protested that the movie house showing an R rated film.
    As for Larry what was there to mediate? Larry was a schizoid violent pedo psycho wrestler, and we wanted him out. Tim was laying in his room all day, going bonkers. You could hear him in there sniffling and crying. What Mel should have done was meet with Tim and I separately from Larry. Instead she gathered us all up together. No one in their right mind would complain about Larry to his face. His brain chemistry is so FUBAR, that if you make the slightest complaint, he’ll hold it against you for months and months. You become, “an adversary,” you are “out to get him,” the demon that haunts the house of his head. He’ll take it out on you either passive aggressively or with just plain naked aggression.
    At the meeting Tim tried to stand up to Larry. Tim’s fingers shook violently as he said, “Larry, I am not stealing your cigarettes.”
    “Tim, my cigarettes don’t disappear out of nowhere. Every day I wake up and two or three are missing.”
    I said, “Um, Larry, you are, uh, violent and hard to deal with. Mel, remember when he beat up Marshall at The Willows. He yelled at Marshall for taking his, uh, cigarettes, and...beat him up.”
    Mel said, “And when did this so called beating occur?”
    So called?
    I looked at the table and said, “Larry, you can occasionally make people nervous. You drink a whole pot of coffee and uh, stomp around the house mumbling.”
    Mel said, “Derek, remember, he who throws the first stone...”
    She left with nothing solved. The whole thing, all of it, defies description. As she walked out the door she turned around, looked right at me, and said, “Derek, I don’t want to have to come back here.”

THE END

    Tim began to drink to settle himself down. But he had diabetes, and the alcohol only worsened that. He stopped testing himself with that needle. He stopped watching what he ate. Twice I had to call 911 when I busted in his room and found him in a diabetic coma. Canyon Lands should have sent him off to a nursing home, why they didn’t do that you’ll have to ask them. His first attempt at suicide came at the club house when he gashed himself with a steak knife. A Grand County deputy hand cuffed him at the waist and drove him the four hour drive up to the Utah State Hospital. After a few weeks he was out.
    “On the way there I told the deputy about Larry,” Tim said.
    “I don’t think that’ll help you, bud. Especially in small towns, but really anywhere, the mental health and Law Enforcement are like that. They won’t step on each other’s toes.”
    So that was Tim’s first attempt. Not genuine—or else why do it at the club house?—but it was meant as attention getter. Tim did not want to die. Still, you’d think the attempt would succeed in getting attention.
     It did not. “Tim,” I said, “I am in awe. I don’t know What to say.” (About six months after this, with a LOT of luck I found an apartment in Grand Junction, ninety minutes from Moab. The mental health there is called Colorado West, and they had many things to say about Canyon Lands professionalism, or lack of)
     Things just went on the way they did before. Larry would stand outside Tim’s room and badmouth him in the 3rd person. Canyon Lands went on its merry way.
    With the second suicide attempt, Tim meant business. That day Tim didn’t show up at the club house, and Sharon called me up to go check on him. I busted open the door and I saw that he was asleep and would not wake up. I shoved him around, slapped him, screamed in his ear, pinched his nose. On his bed stand I saw three empty medication bottles: Klonopin, Klozeril, and Depekote (that last med is a real doozy and would TKO anyone). So I called 911 and soon he was making the drive up to State again.
    This time they kept him two months. Tim told me on the day he left for home, the doctor wished him luck, walked away, then turned back and said, “If you come up here one more time you’ll become a permanent fixture here, we will keep you here for good.”
    One night it was about midnight, and I couldn’t sleep. So I went up to the living room, and I saw Tim laying on the sofa.
    He said, “I was watching that documentary you got.”
    “Yes, you’ve seen it before.”
    He said, “But what it says, like, if you live in the jungle, that it’s survival of the fittest...”
    “Yeah, evolution worked like that till nuts and bolts and the wheel came around. If you’ve got states, cities, counties...” Evolution only applied to the animals.
    He said, “Sharon fucked us. I never should’ve left. I should have listened to you about Larry.”
    “Well, now we’re trapped here.” I laughed hopelessly.
    Tim gave that some thought. “Yeah,” he said “I’m going to try and get some sleep. I’m tired. If you knock on my door I won’t answer, I’ll be trying to sleep, so don’t bust in. For once in my life, let me get a good night’s sleep.”
    I said nothing.
    Many things, good and bad, come in threes. His third attempt was the final. I left back to my room and lay in bed. A huge wave, tidal in proportions, crashed over me as I lay there in bed. Puke welled up in my throat. Well, so what? That’s just paranormal crackpot TV psychic babble. Tim’s just fine. I’ll wait a few hours.
    By four a.m. my gut was still keeping me awake. I got out bed, walked up the stairs, through the kitchen, over to his room. I knocked. Silence.
    “Tim, are you OK?” Nothing.
    “Tim? Come on man, don’t make me break down the door again.”
    I banged with my fist. “Alright, you’re going to make an asshole out of me, I’m busting down your door.” He had installed a lock on it. I grunted and threw all my weight. The door slammed up against the wall.
    Blood smells like rusty iron. It dripped off his wrist like a faucet just shut off. It inked his bed sheets dark red. He looked pale as a ghost. I yelled his name, I nudged him. Nothing. I called 911, then wrapped a sheet around his wrist and lay down on his wrist to apply pressure.
    Everyone appeared in a relatively good mood at his funeral. Only his sister cried. His kids laughed. Sharon and Mel’s faces were dry. As for Larry, there is no third person with him. He was calm and frank and...oblivious. He wore T shirt of a red, white and blue American Flag, and under it was “These Colors Don’t Run.”.
    Later that night I lay in bed trying to sleep. My shirt was on the floor near me. I saw some blur gliding around on it, and I got up and turned on the ceiling light. An Albino roach was grazing on my shirt. I had forgotten to brush my crumbs off. If you left just one teeny tiny crumb on your clothes before you hit bed, the roaches would swarm all over it later that night.
    These guys were brazen. They kept on foraging, despite the light. I had a bright desk light next to my word processor. I clicked that on and focused it at them. Then they took off.
    I thought, why not write memoir style about Tim, and expose Canyon Lands mental health for the eely outhouse corruptors they are. (I had been to the Utah Disabilities Law Center, and they said nothing could be done since Tim was deceased, BUT the lawyer there said Sharon had no right to move Larry in there if we didn’t want him in there. You see, Sharon was yanking my dick. Sharon made it sound like it was her place, that we had no say in the matter). But if I wrote a short story, maybe it’d get publicity. I don’t think anyone, even Tim’s sister, though I did keep in touch with her, saw how wrong the whole thing was.
    About six months later I moved to Grand Junction, Colorado. One night, as I worked on the story i got a call from Tim’s sister. I told her about the story, and she said, “You better not use Tim’s real name, or mine.” Right, I was going to give those two a pseudonym, but then it hit me: Not just Tim’s name, or his sister’s name, but I felt I’d have to change all the names. Canyon Lands is not the real name of the clinic. Utah is the real state, but Moab is a name I took from the bible. So I left Moab, Canyon Lands skipped along on their merry way, there’ll never be justice, Sharon will continue to allow Larry to stomp and cavort around, and Tim’s sister and I are the only ones who know what happened. You see...we know the names.

RIP Bud
Finally you can catch some Zzzzzzs

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