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the other window

Patrick Fealey

    i told them i was suicidal when i was fine. doctor’s orders.

    to quit two old meds and start a new one, i went in, because my law-suit-fearing (paranoid) psychiatrist insisted i make the changes inpatient. i had never been institutionalized before.

    the old meds i was quitting were depakote and lamictal. the new med was topamax, an anti-seizure med that was now being prescribed off-label for severe manic-depression.

    the first day, the nurse gave me a very low dose of 25 mg topamax and zero neurontin, a med which was not to be changed. i took 1500 mg of neurontin daily and she gave me zero. then the nurse jacked up my lamictal, one of the drugs i had come in to get off. i told her she was getting it wrong and she said, “you’re not getting paranoid on me, are you?” she was an older nurse. like many mental health providers i had met, she was out to paint the patient as sicker and more dependent than he was. getting my right meds, on time, became a political endeavor more than a medical one. i talked to the other nurses and tried to get word to the doctor. i had to incorporate a public relations firm. i ran internet ads. they mulled over the problem to see if it was a problem. none of these people did a thing without computers and palm pilots, so it took longer than looking at the bottle, tapping the pills into my hand, and swallowing with water.

    the first night, they hold you in a pool with other psyche patients for “observation.” from here, they weed out the ones they’ll treat on the other side of the floor. essentially, you must prove that you are nuts but somewhat sane in order to be transferred. it’s a fine line for a disoriented patient to walk. they want to be sure you’re safe and able to understand a psychiatrist. yet you must be sick enough to be worth their time. sometimes a patient waits days to get out of observation. sometimes a patient never makes it out, in which case he is treated like a sick animal the hospital cannot legally put down. my first night i was given ativan and observed. i’d gone to the e.r. first, claiming i wanted to kill myself. my paranoid doctor had told me to do this. it was the only way in. my paranoid doctor told me he wouldn’t give me topamax unless i admitted myself for the med change. if i had told the truth, i wouldn’t have gotten into the hospital. i wouldn’t have gotten topamax, which i believed would help me. of course, i didn’t belong in the hospital. they didn’t admit stable people for med changes.

    one factor in my transfer out of observation the second day was my constant thirst. this thirst provided reason and opportunity to talk with the nurses, so they could see that i was thirsty, annoying, and a reasonable suicide. they gave me soda. on the other side, patients had a refrigerator stocked with juices and water fountains. the other side also had a living room with couches, tv, a kitchen with a ping-pong table, two patient telephones, two bathrooms, a laundry room — and the privilege of two-hour furloughs outside the hospital if you played their game: be social and go to group therapy and contribute.

    i did not believe in groups and i did not go to them at first, even though they were required. i have always avoided crowds. i didn’t want to sit around and say the right words when i needed to sleep. i tried, but nurses came into my room to tell me i was not in group therapy. i told them i had come to the hospital to rest. they continued to wake me up and seemed to enjoy waking me up. it was hopeless. i went to groups with my new friends and contributed the best i could. the only reason i thought seriously during these groups was because i wanted to be discharged. the psychologists seemed to like me better than the nurses did. i got word that the older nurse had reported to the doctor that i was “anti-social.” we were in a group when the psychiatrist stopped by and i stood up and said to the group, very loudly, “do i talk to you?” and a chorus of 12 people said, “yes. why?” the psychologist took note. i worried about the others that nurse would try to fuck over. she was a sociopath with a name-tag. there was something wrong with her. she gave the wrong meds and lied. she had told me i was paranoid for questioning my meds when they were all wrong. i considered whether her goal was to hurt us.

    social
    un-social
    anti-social

    the silent ones who stare into space with foam frozen on their lips are classified as unsocial. unsocial is acceptable. especially if you’re from a wealthy family.

    i called david twice tonight to talk to an intelligent man about the free world. he wasn’t home.

    they told me my lithium level was 40% above normal. i was toxic. they drew blood three times a day. then they cut the lithium. i had thought my lithium level was okay. i had been on the same dose for seven years, but i felt better and more aware on less. my law-suit-fearing psychiatrist had prescribed the high dose and the regular laboratory tests on blood levels were being sent to him. i guess he didn’t read them. he collected his paycheck and collected lawsuits while i destroyed my kidneys.

    if it could hurt an ant, it was banned. no keys, pens, shoelaces, belts, or spiral notebooks. they had overlooked my shoelaces and i had smuggled in a spiral notebook and pen. nobody else had shoelaces and none of them asked me for mine. the most dangerous thing about a spiral notebook is not the metal wire, but what one can write in it. incompetence documented. it is also therapeutic to write one’s thoughts, but these people were so worried about law-suits, they couldn’t let us do things which made us feel better.

    “this is a prison with nurses and mercenaries and idiots who delight in authority’s entitlements, namely the one where it’s time to fuck with your brain.”

    my friend the nurse, the one who graduated in the 1960s to go on to call me anti-social, told the hospital shrink that i was paranoid. the nurses had a lot of influence because the psychiatrist spent little time with us. we saw the shrink briefly in his office to discuss medications. i saw him come out of his office once in 11 days. he gathered his information from staff members, most of whom were competent. the idea that i was paranoid for refusing the wrong medications had hit the highest level. the doctor gave me an anti-psychotic for paranoia. i took it simply to see if it made me feel better. i left for home on my first two-hour pass, my first cigarette in six days. i was sitting at my computer writing an email when the pill kicked in like bad acid. i felt anxiety, paranoia, disjointed and diminished, vulnerable, agitated, aggressive, and helpless. i limped back to the hospital, a paranoiac. i told the doctor and he looked at me like i was lying. he said, “abilify shouldn’t do that.” (the patient is always wrong.)

    i had friends out in the world who knew what i was doing. they were skeptical of my doctor’s order to admit myself to change a couple of meds, as would be other psychiatrists later. meanwhile, those med changes were happening too slowly. after five days, i was up to only 50 mg of topamax, with 150 mg to go. the way they were giving the meds, it would take 15 more days to get off the old meds and be on a full dose of the new med. i had gone on and off meds before and it did not take this long to quit them or to achieve therapeutic levels. i had always changed meds outpatient, without a problem. most of the time i was given a med and told to increase to the full dose within three days. the hospital was making a project out of this during which i felt like shit and medicare was paying them $1,100 a day. this was my paranoid shrink’s idea of medicine.

    sue was an ex, but we were friends. she was my best friend katz’ ex and we had had a nice affair after his death. sue said she would come visit me, but she wanted to bring along her new friend jean, who wanted to “see tower 8” for the first time. jean was the chick who denied ever sleeping with katz. i believed his version of the story more than i believed her vehement denials. sue and jean had become friends after his cock was incinerated. sue said jean was asking about me, but also was saying she had “never seen tower 8 and wanted to know what is was like.” i said no to the tourist. i didn’t know her well and i didn’t like how she’d denied katz. in her next call, sue didn’t mention jean, but i was still pissed off. she tried to cut me off five times before i finally got across why i didn’t want jean coming. sue then said she had never said anything about jean never having seen tower 8. i told her she was a liar and she didn’t deny it. sue was a bad liar. sue played up jean’s interest in me. i said it was my interest to keep jean off my guest list. i hung up on sue.

    five people returned the scrod tonight. i don’t know what was wrong with it, but it disgusted five fish-loving mental patients stranded in a place where there was nothing else to eat. we agreed it was toxic scrod. we asked the kitchen to send up sandwiches, but they never did.

    i miss coke, my room, cigarettes, and yeah, my freedom.

    craig got a pass, but had no money. i bought nirvana’s nevermind off him for $8, so he could buy butts while he was out. maybe he’d smuggle one in for me in a plastic bag shoved in his armpit. i’d smoke it in the shower. craig and i have a past. we come from the same small island town and went to school together from second grade through high school. we were on the same basketball team. i hadn’t seen him for 12 years until the hospital. he was committed by his mother and brother. i knew his brother in high school and he was a good guy. i doubt he’d take this easily. craig remains as pretentious as he always was, so i just tell him when to shut up. he does. he knows he is full of shit. he never shuts up for long, though.

    “i didn’t know you were an intellectual,” craig said. “i though you were always the happy, go-lucky trumpet player.”

    i called my paranoid shrink and told him the hospital was moving too slowly. if they didn’t speed up this transition, i was walking.

    i called my paranoid shrink to tell him i was walking. the nurse said, “hang on another day. don’t throw away all the progress you’ve made.”

    they gave me no lamictal on thursday.

    they gave me 50 mg lamictal on friday.

    they gave me no lamictal on saturday.

    i refused lamictal on sunday.

    “sue, i am glad you came by and i didn’t know i would be. you know?”

    each time i start to write, i get called by a nurse, phlebotomist, or nurse’s assistant.
     wake up!
     meds!
     blood!
     shower!
     shave!
     group!

    food, food, fucking food, always food, trays and trays and cups and fucking plastic utensils, which they count on the way out. i ate one meal a day at home and i had never contemplated injuring myself or anyone with a plastic fork.

    darryl was the main man on the floor at night. he was a nurse’s assistant and he’d been there 40 years. built low, like a wrestler, with one false eye. he was married and lived in a ranch with awnings and he handed out peppermint patties when he started his shift. we called him “the enforcer.” he was intent on making sure the garrulous and gangly jane and i were not in the same room together. darryl’s radar was so damned good, he was a form of birth control.

    fu man-chu was my new roommate. he was an artist and animator who was starving himself to death. anorexia is a mental disorder, but i didn’t know what they were going to do for him. they couldn’t treat manic-depression properly. he had starvation down to a science. he was matter-of-fact and calm. he knew that if he could die, his mustache would grow more impressive. he told me that parsley flakes have four calories per teaspoon.

    the hospital shrink’s boss came in. he was also a shrink, using stupidity as a defense. pure arrogance.

    the shrink says he does not want craig hanging out at my place while out on pass. what could it be?

    the beer?

    anne’s email: “sorry to hear your head needs hospitalization, but glad you’ve decided to let it be so, since it does.”
    me: “wait a minute, bitch.”

    the shrink decided to give me all my lithium at bedtime to make it “simpler.” they drew my blood in the morning and were horrified by my lithium levels. then they reduced the lithium, rather than spacing out the doses. i mobilized and lobbied, passed out pamphlets and held 50,000 babies on tv. i got the doses spaced out. then my blood levels were fine. i had to fight. i had to beat them over the heads to achieve common sense. this was supposed to be their expertise? i had to talk to nurses, get the message to the doc, persuade other nurses. they were going to turn me suicidal. what the patient does is fight people who assume they are smarter than he is, assume they know more about his illness than he does. he fights while these professionals are trying to dismantle his brain. i thoroughly resented the mistake and the effort required of me, a patient, to correct it via politics and force. i was weak and there to rest and i had to orchestrate the obvious, teach a course on lithium 101 to eight professionals. it was more stressful being in the hospital than out of it. if consciousness is life, i had to defend my life against these well-trained people.

    the psychologist advised me to move out of my house. my upstairs neighbors were pounding on my ceiling when i tried to write, when i tried to take naps, and when i went to bed early (which insured that i’d be up before them, typing again.) these neighbors would not tolerate the sound of me typing on a computer keyboard in a heavily built victorian house. when i typed, they pounded. they were freaks and they worked and were paid as freaks. her phenomenal hearing earned her a job at naval underwater research center (nusc), a subcontractor for the department of defense. she was hired specifically for her extraordinary hearing capabilities to listen to the sounds made by submarine propeller prototypes. i had to live below these motherfuckers, who did not allow one inch for the fact that the problem was theirs. but he was worse than her. he was a big ex-marine who managed a restaurant. he was able to locate me wherever i was in my apartment. he’d walk over and stand above me and rock on his feet. when i walked across the room or into the next room, he followed me and stopped where i’d stopped. one time i walked across the room and he followed me, so i walked back to where i had been and he followed me. then i walked back to where i’d gone the first time and he followed me. then i walked back to where i had been and he stopped after three steps. he knew i was fucking with him. he was the bigger problem and the more sheepish in the hall. when i finally did move out, she said to me, “i tried.” they tormented the living hell out of me 24/7 with their sadistic streak. the psychologists were right, but it would take time to find a new place.

    i’d also had run-ins with a new tenant, a 6'5" former armed forces boxing champion and wife beater. he was smart as toilet water, but much bigger than i was and he had decided as soon as he moved in that he hated me. he hated me because he wanted my two huge rooms. his room was 10x14 feet and darker than a garage. he had one small window, no sun. he was a recovered alcoholic who drank and he owed child support to eight different women. he smoked crack and drove a school bus and had been forced to take classes in anger management. in the kitchen, he poured dish soap into my coffee maker and threw out my food. he commented on my bowel movements and punched the wall when he walked down the hallway: my rooms were on the other side. he got up very early to drive those kids and he busied himself before 6 a.m. throwing pots and pans into the kitchen closet, which shared a wall with my bed. one day i told him what a wife-beating piece of shit he was and he raised his fist, knuckles beside his face. “i could kill you,” he said. “i don’t doubt you could,” i said. he wanted my rooms and the six giant windows and sunlight. he wanted me to move out and so he had declared a war. my paranoid shrink had called my problems with my neighbors “an elaborate construct” and pushed anti-psychotics. my landlord, a methodist and retired naval officer, didn’t want to get involved, which means he chose the side of evil, with whom he had many conversations about the red sox and patriots.

    out on pass

    david, this is me, out on pass, two hours to smoke cigarettes, drink beer, and give myself enemas. we are all navigating errors by the hospital shrink, who yesterday said i am delusional about my upstairs neighbors. to which i replied, “have you ever read the painted bird, by jerzey kosinsky?” and he said no, but he knew of it and wanted to read it. i said, “well, maybe jerzey kosinsky was delusional too.” took the smirk off his face. it is hard to tell whether i am better or worse. i feel manic on these passes. maybe because i’m out. i will be out again tomorrow, so write. the people in there are cool. craig thinks he’s a rock star. jane woke up beside her dead boyfriend. another woman simply does not have the guts to tell her son to move out. he is driving her insane and here she is in tower 8 – because she loves him too much. they check our shoes for cigarettes when we go back. they frown on naps and serve bad food. a real break. i’ll call.

    love,
    tommy

    david, 29f. 9:34 a.m. the house is sunday morning quiet, the streets getting rumbly and peopled. godzilla and bigfoot are not pounding on the ceiling because they can’t get their asses out of bed on sundays.

    shaving is supervised due to the razor.

    all we do is mill about on weekends, waiting for meals and pills. we talk . . . sleep . . . i go into a zone and i know others do too. to avoid the pain of actually living each minute of that lame existence. when you come out here, you cannot quickly pull yourself out of it.

    love,
    tommy

    anne, no tombstone yet for me. but the shrink has a report from a nurse that i am “confused.” maybe i asked her where the bathroom was on the second day. one nurse, maybe the same nurse, accused me of not playing with the other children, but i took care of her. fucking place. you have to fake being well so they won’t drive you to a worse place. i am home on a pass. have to be back in 45. i’ll be back tomorrow.

    love,
    tommy

    david, at home, edged out on drugs. craig is coming after he picks up a pizza. for me, craig and jane make the place. at this point, jane could be gone any time. she has been there two weeks. craig could be in another week. his relationship with his family is bad and they put him in there, though his committal has since been reclassified as voluntary. anyhow, he is unique enough to be in there another week. still adjusting to the meds. i feel better, but not strong in the head. you have to guard yourself from these people every inch. i played ping-pong with jack the ripper yesterday. nice guy. i couldn’t beat him. they put him in here because they got tired of him probing his innards with sharp objects, nearly killing himself twice. he thrusts knives into his belly-button when he drinks, or is on drugs, or during big emotional bouts. he stabs himself and then twists the knife and pokes around. the surgeons are apparently sick of this guy, so he is actually under arrest.

    love,
    tommy

    david, a patient walking around at night is something they can’t deal with. imagine, a mental patient with insomnia. they break out the clubs. tell pete i was committed for washing my hands in the rainy streets.

    love,
    tommy

    sue, i don’t know what to do with the two hours i have at home and a part of me looks forward to going back up and doing nothing. i need more than two hours. i need days to figure out what to do down here. it’s pathetic, huh? craig just left after eating a pizza in front of me, allowing me 20 minutes of silence. $100 check from granny. nothing new around here. i’m going to try a new drug. i do not think i’m paranoid and i know my problems with my neighbors are real, but sometimes my thoughts get scrambled and daily i descend into a depression that is unbearable. it is also possible that the constant attacks are creating a paranoia. i’m willing to try anything once. jane, the yankee who acts like a new yorker, left. enter stage right: two hot chicks. a crack-head junkie and prostitute has joined us for day classes and a redhead with tattoos is shaping up to be good material. when she told us why she was in there, everyone applauded. what did she do? she asked a cop for a tampon. the cop gave her something and when she went to use it she discovered it was a maxi-pad. she was wearing a pair of $90 jeans, so she threw the maxi pad at the cop. that’s what can land you in a mental institution these days. i gotta run. i’ll talk to you later.

    love,
    tommy

    post discharge

    the two rooms have a harder pair of eyes, but i’m willing. medicinally, i am less than 30% the same. singing just now i found my voice is not as blocked as it had been. i got to know some interesting people in there. maybe about three or four of the dozens. they made it tolerable. humbling scene. i feel okay. time is the test.

    feel weird. took the anti-psychotic geodon to see what happens. a little early for it, but fuck. i feel weird. ole george is glad i’m back to walk kelly. the ole bastard doesn’t seem to remember he owes me for a couple days before i went in. i’ll just add them to this short week. he’s been patient. eleven days i was in that zone. i am disoriented out here. craig and i went for a walk downtown to starbucks on his pass. he’s still hanging with the shady despite of shrink’s orders. i guess the shrink believes i am not good for his mental health. craig seems less and less stable. today he was a prick, rude, not listening, cruising women by trying to start conversations with strangers on the sidewalk. craig has never been a lady’s man and he never will be. his attempts were embarrassing. he was never the tough-guy or burn-out type either, which some chicks gravitate toward. he was a scholar at a catholic university and a great choral singer in high school and college, where his best friend was the school priest, who he says cured him of his pacifism. i knew his father all too well and his father did not like me. he was a dry drunk kind of prick, an empowered junior high english teacher kind of prick. he was beating a’s out of craig and making kids cry at school. he was a tall, loud, possessed, perfectionist who was very subjective in his grading and made kids stand up in front of the class and say “i am stupid” fifty times if they made a mistake. he liked to flirt with the girls and graded the better-looking ones leniently. he stuck me in the last row by the window. he was an example of how aggressive the wrong can be. when i saw craig’s mother on tower 8 early on in his committal i remembered her from years ago, a diminutive and calculating bitch who was a secretary for a navy subcontractor. she could be behind the shrink’s order for craig not to hang out with me. she didn’t like him hanging out with me when we were kids. at first it was because she didn’t feel i was smart and talented enough. when i got better grades than craig and unseated him as first trumpet, i was invited over once or twice, but she saw i was trouble. she didn’t want to expose her precious scholar to a kid who was almost deported to australia. more recently, she knew me as a reporter for the local paper, in which i had crucified her brother, dick.

    craig studied with shaman healers in california. he confessed to me, and that’s what it was, that he has the voice of a native american shaman in his head. he wants to get rid of it or get it under control. he spoke, or let the shaman be heard, in some strange language. he said the indian is always there and has been for the last five years, coinciding with the onset of his bipolar disorder, a disease he does not want to hear about. he refuses to go on lithium because if it worked it would be evidence he is a manic-depressive. he prefers to lie to doctors about his symptoms. i got to thinking about the indians at the school we both attended. our elementary and junior high school was built on an ancient indian burial ground. they dug up the bones and moved them to one spot on a hill overlooking our playground. artifacts were put on display at the town library. i don’t know where craig was born, but ever since i knew him (about age eight) he lived a half-block from the school, on the same sacred ground. i went over there once or twice and we’d look at his father’s magazines, all the women with their legs spread to show us what they had. i got flea bites sleeping overnight in craig’s bed and they were lax about the dog shitting on the carpet. the home had no spiritual cohesion.

    i seem to be okay, materially. i feel cut loose, without a routine here yet, lonely, skeptical of the place. lonely is a funny one. i hung out with some good people up there on a constant basis. thought-provoking circumstances, intelligent.

    craig was over here yesterday, eyeing matt’s hendrix box set. it is still here. i recognized craig on the observation side when he gave me his first name – when he stopped pacing. he’s been roughed up by life and worked over by alcohol, but the kid i knew was there. he didn’t recognize me. he was walking around the hospital listening to nirvana, motown, led zep, dylan. he can sing anything, anybody, but he is not the rock-star he sees. i’m out, looking for the routine, looking to move. i leapt through the revolving door at the hospital. i was going out for good. it was too late to walk through, but on a personal dare against physical fate, i became superman and beat the motherfucker, setting off the alarm and shutting down the door. one leap for a man, one small step for a man. i usually don’t act that way in public. i got jane’s number. she hasn’t called me back. maybe she just wants to forget the place. or the rules have changed, for we are now on the outside. she is a paralegal and i discerned that she did not dig upon my no-work philosophy.

    craig came by yesterday and stole back the nirvana cd i bought from him for $8. today he has called me four times regarding the led zeppelin cd he let me borrow. he says that he remembers that it belongs to his uncle dick and his uncle dick must have it by thursday. uncle dick is a 60-year-old millionaire, engineer and politician, and one of the most corrupt city council presidents i ever encountered when i was a reporter. dick has a sudden interest in the led zeppelin bbc sessions. i guess dick either got bored with highways and high-rises or craig feels he must bring out the big guns and invoke the name of an uncle who’s power he doesn’t question. craig leaves messages in a very serious lawyerly tone. he speaks in a low voice. he wants to meet. we must have a summit at which led zeppelin will change hands. jimmy page and f. lee bailey will preside. i put the cd in a box and rode to the p.o. and mailed it to him. he has some of my cd’s and he can keep them so long as i don’t see his fucking face again. all things as they are, spinning in perfect circles.

    i’ve still got terrific mood swings, but i am less vegetative when i go down. it is either the topamax or the anti-psychotic geodon that’s keeping me out of the darker places. at the same time, life feels less life-like, less open and exciting. i am subdued, silent, cracking fewer jokes. this chick i’ve met, sade, is a strange one. she’s brilliant and she’s a good fuck, but she’s going to put me back in the hospital. last night we got into a fight about the catholic church and politics. she wants to be married in a catholic church. it was quite a surprise because she is an artist and intellectual. granted, schizophrenics can be preoccupied with religion, but she is smart enough to be a protestant. i was focused on retrieving my shoes from under her bed, where she had kicked them to prevent me from leaving.

    sade’s best friend and lover of 11 years nearly decapitated himself with a saws-all 11 months ago. her brother shot himself several years earlier. the medical examiner said her boyfriend’s suicide was the most horrific thing she had ever seen a human being do to himself. sade found him. he did it when he knew she was on her way over with lunch. now she tells me she is my angel of death and is here to guide me through my suicide. she is serious. it gives her a feeling of importance and surely helps legitimize her boyfriend’s death. but i am not sure my angel of death will be so overt about it. it seems if sade was working for god, it would be a more sublime duty. such a demonic encounter can only be taken as a test. hearing her talk about me killing myself makes me think there are about six safe hours in the day to be with her and i won’t be there for any of them. there is not enough evil in the word cunt to cover this cunt’s presumptuousness. by the way, her boyfriend was a patient of my paranoid doctor’s. the doctor missed his psychotic state and sent him home. the guy was having auditory hallucinations, exactly what this doctor now accuses me of having (the pounding on the ceiling). he’s so paranoid, he’s affixing ailments to patients so that he can treat them and be safe from lawsuits that never would have happened.

    craig sometimes admits he is bipolar, but i think schizophrenia is closer to the mark. i think his identity may have been crushed by the beatings and expectations from his old man – if it was not genetically destined to be fractured. anyhow, i don’t want to hang out with him and i’ll have to let him know that if he stops by. the day we were both out and walked downtown to starbucks: along the way, he talked to, or i should say at, everyone in newport. he didn’t say a word to me. he didn’t look at me or acknowledge that i was beside him once, walking with him. we’re talking a mile. i was useful and discounted. it was reminiscent of the arrogance which overcame him in junior high. he lacks a grasp, an appreciation of the other. he doesn’t feel the connection. he is too inflated. he stopped by here on his way to an aa meeting, where he was meeting a girl. he was going to take her out after the meeting. i was glad for him. he needed a woman and i needed less of him. but he only had $2 to take this chick out. i gave him $20. the next time i talked to him, about a week later, he told me things were going well with this girl. then he says, “did i tell you i met her at aa?” i’ve stopped taking and returning his calls and now he leaves messages day and night calling me a “fucking asshole.” i’ve given him enough chances.

    craig came by last night. he got his ass kicked in the park when he insisted on singing to a group of blacks . he was beat up pretty good and i felt sympathetic because i’d been beaten up by a group of blacks while walking down the street. even beat up, he still couldn’t shut up. he thinks he is kurt cobain and the cia is after him. he ranted about blacks. i agreed blacks were hypersensitive, but i didn’t go pulling a sinatra for them. he drank my gin. he puked. i had been passed out after four martinis before he arrived. i had to baby-sit for 12 hours to make sure he didn’t burn the house down. he kept the neighbors up, which is fine, but he left this morning pissed at me for telling him he was difficult. sitting on the floor in a pool of vomit, vomit on him, vomit on my blanket, vomit on my pillow, he said “where am i?” “newport.” “good. can i have some more gin?” “no.” the prick rearranged my room while i was asleep. he emptied the fridge of all its contents and carefully arranged them on my desk. the milk sat out for six hours. he threw comet all over the toilet and bathroom. he stole from me a knife, cds, an anthology of poets, and a sweater. before he left this morning, ashley stopped by on her way to school. ashley is a 17-year old beauty i just started with. she is a wampanoag indian princess and natural punk. craig: “is this your girlfriend? you should marry her. be good to tommy. he’s a genius.” he tried to pick her up and she ignored him. “you hang out with guys like that,” she said later, “why?” when we finally parted, he called me a “bitch.” i said, “you’ve called me a fucking asshole, a bitch, and stupid. you know who else called me stupid?” “who?” “your father.” “i’m my father’s son.” walking off the front deck, he turned and said: “you know why you didn’t become a professional musician? because you’re a coward.” i had never told him i was a writer. instinct had kept me silent in the hospital and afterward. if he was his father’s son, he was swine.

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