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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/book “The False Portrait” cc&d, v281 (the March 2018 issue) Order this as a 6"x9" paperback book:  |
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In Care of:
Joshua Copeland
I sat in a hot tub with an old man. He was nude and leathery and raw and scrawny. The skin on his neck hung like a turkey’s. His elbows dangled off the edge, his biceps were wiry, and his fingers mingled with the water. The bubbles jiggled his sexual organs. His rib cage showed through his chest, shiny and wet. He smiled and was at peace. His dentures sat by the side and his mouth curled up into itself. Then the heat woke me. Tiny patches of sweat covered my pale gray undershirt. The sun had just topped The Highpoint Baptist Church spire, so the time must be around seven forty a.m. During spring, my foil covered windshield sun shade I bought at Walmart for sixteen dollars had blocked the light till about ten a.m. But now, come summer, the earth had tilted, and the sun shone through the driver’s side window, so I’d be getting up a whole lot earlier. The air was hot, I breathed it and it circulated through my lungs, ballooning into my body. The car smelled of body odor and the talcum powder I had dabbed under my armpits.
I unlocked the door by my feet and opened it. The air outside, not as hot as the car, I felt as cool. I lay back down. My shirt chilled. I ripped off a Diet Mountain Dew bottle from the six pack under me and opened it. Some of the soda exploded out. I chugged. It was warm. The caffeine high hit, and I slowly woke up. I just stared at my dirty Nike tennis shoes by my bare feet. They were laceless, so I had to wrap them in duct tape. My jeans were too long for me. I was a size thirty length. These jeans were size thirty four. So the cuffs were scuffed up. I climbed into the driver’s seat and drove to the Y on Bigelow.
Jackson, Tennessee was filled with good people. I wasn’t used to the kindness after growing up in Pittsburgh. The ‘Burgh was a racist city, a corrupt city. The citizenry hustled around moody and ill mannered. Always frowning, chips on shoulders. The Justice Department had investigated The Pittsburgh Police force more than any other city PD in the nation. Six times. Some of my “friends” referred to me as a Heb (Hebrew). I can’t count the number of fights I got in. And Northern Psychiatric Institute and Clinic Outpatient, where I spent most of my time, was crooked to the core. Previous to entering the program, I had been friends with one of my counselors there, Rocco Marciano. In a private session I told him the only semi-thrilling times at NPIC were when clients cry in group. So in a group session he laid into an old toothless woman dressed in mismatched clothes that hung too loosely. He did it on the pretense of “tough love.” He belittled her, and warned her she’d never get sober if she kept living with her son. She cried. After, he elbowed me in the elevator and smiled, “How’d you like that, man?”
“Damn dude. I didn’t tell you to make clients cry. I said it broke the tedium. I meant that and nothing more. Christ.”
A female client with better sense than everyone else there approached me later and said, “I heard what you two said in the elevator.”
“I know, I know. But it was Rocco who did it. I didn’t tell him to rip into her. He did it on his own. It’s not my fault.”
Soon after, my parents kicked me out after they went into my diaries and read I was snorting coke. I was twenty eight. I drove haphazardly and at random, first to West Virginia, then Kentucky, then South Carolina, and ended up in Jackson. It had lots of hotels and lots of churches and two main streets and a bus system.
At the Y, thankfully, the locker room was empty. I undressed and turned the shower to cold. Even the AC there wasn’t enough. I cupped a hand under the powdered body wash dispenser, pressed the lever a few times, and soaped up. I stepped out, dried off, dressed, pulled my brush out of my duffle bag, and combed my hair. My hairline receded day by day. This happened every time life ate into me. The hair had backed up on my head and revealed a dry and flecked scalp. I checked my wallet. Eight dollars left.
I drove back to the Highpoint Baptist Church, sat in the pews, the scent of Monastery incense in the air, and read Factotum. There is nothing romantic about being homeless. Bukowski wrote on and on about the sly misadventures, the comedic drunken outbursts of love, and the streetwise innuendo of life on the boulevards. If anyone looks back far enough, the worst times turn golden. He was smart enough to know better.
The reverend sat down next to me. I smelled cologne. He was a black man with a slight paunch, a blue and white checked button down shirt and a red bow tie with white polka dots. His eyes were set far apart, almost to the point of being feral, his forehead was broad, and his head was shaved. His hands were large and veiny. “So, Mr. Derek,” he said. “I smell you’ve been to the Y.”
“Yeah, I needed it.” I folded the corner of the page, closed the book, and laid it down.
“Look, you can’t keep this up. You can’t keep using the charity jar for gas money. They’re hiring over at The Holiday Inn. Housekeeping. They pay well. And you’d be working in an air conditioned environment.”
“I can’t hold a job. I always fuck—excuse me, I always mess it up. It’s my Avoidant Personality Disorder. I can’t stand the scrutiny. Been that way my whole life. You don’t want me in your lot anymore, is that it, sir?”
“We want you here, but you, you don’t want to be here. I mean, how long can you keep living like this? You don’t belong there, in that car, every morning. You need to find yourself a god fearing woman to live with. Don’t you have any friends back in Pittsburgh you can call on?”
“I’m too embarrassed to tell them I’m vagrant. All my Pitt friends would look down on me if they knew what I was now.”
“Have you thought about social security?”
“I don’t have enough jobs behind me. The payout wouldn’t be much.”
My face stung from shaving at The Y. I had used hand sanitizer as aftershave, but it only eased the sear a bit.
“You need to move out of your comfort zone. In a mental hospital you’d have all your needs taken care of. You’d be safe. And healthier. A lot healthier than you are now.”
I slouched down and sighed. “You’re right, you’re right. I got to make a move. Do something.”
“Try going into Western. You’d have a bed and three square meals a day. Think of it, all that food, all that air conditioning. Right now you look like a Serbian death camp survivor.”
I smacked my hands on my thighs and sighed again and looked at the bible stuck in purple velvet in front of me. I couldn’t keep this this lifestyle going. Hanging at the church and the library and Starbucks all day. I was in a rut. I needed change. Thing was, as hard as life was being homeless, it seemed so easy compared with the straight-edged discipline of life in a mental hospital. My freedom would be gone. But I had no choice.
“You’re right, you’re right,” I said for the second time, not knowing what else to say.
At The Madison County ER I was so dehydrated the nurse had trouble hitting the brachial artery. It took quite a few pokes and some fiddling. I told the doctor on call I wanted to kill myself. Always be sure to say you’re suicidal, or else the bedlams of the world won’t accept you. A Madison County deputy drove me the hour and a half to Western in Bolivar. I had to undress in front of a tech with a five o’ clock shadow and a weight trainer’s build. His eyes brightened at my body and his face shaded red as a tomato.
If Jackson was Christ loving, Western was hellfire. State hospitals are weatherworn and decrepit places, but that hospital took the cake. Some big oaf with crooked teeth and an alcoholic’s paunch always tried to take my food in the cafeteria. He would sit across from me, zombie-like, medicated up to the eyeballs, dribbling out of the corner of his mouth, and just stare at my tray. I had to be aggressive and say, “Now look me in the eye. I’m only going to tell you this once: Keep your fucking hands to yourself.” (Profanity was imperative). Patients tried to take my shoes. To them anything was better than the hospital issued slippers with just a thong around the toes to hold them in place. I remember a gangly patient in transparent boxers crept into my room at night and grabbed my sneakers. I leapt out of bed and tackled him. The tech wrote both of us up. After that, I slept with my shoes on. The mattresses were hard as mineral. My arms and hands would fall asleep quickly if I didn’t lay in the exact right position. The patients always stole other patients’ mattresses for extra comfort. Lots of fights, especially over the black and white TV that only had basic cable. Barret smashed in Peyton’s orbital bone with a red and white striped number seven billiard ball. All this made me claustrophobic. I had a yellow pass, and that allowed me to wander the yard during the day. I’d jog circles around the hospital—it was big and shaped like an octagon. But that didn’t help much. And the patients complained about my body odor. I needed to get out of there.
Shari (rhymes with sorry) O’Daniel was a weighty grandmother topped with a helmet of gray hair and a face that looked like it was pressed up against a window. She walked into Western looking to take someone under her wing into her group home, called Farmside. The techs brought up my name. My counselor, Jillian Morris, told her I was one of the few there who could function on the outside. Shari interviewed me and I fit the bill. I was peaceful and mostly followed the rules.
The only problem was money. Shari took SSI and SSDI checks as payment. I had neither. She contacted my parents, but I was nonexistent to them—not only was it the coke, but they stood as Conservative Jewish, and my agnosticism irked them to no end. I told Shari about my sister, Rebecca. She had written a Sci-Fi novel and at the time worked out in LA for the Writers Guild of America. Her job was to give advice online to aspiring screenwriters (She always lamented that a lot of their questions were mundane, that they were nobodies going nowhere). Shari called her, then Bec called me at Western and asked, “Why didn’t you call me before?” She agreed to pay the seven hundred a month. Shari would in turn provide food, shelter, and a dab of spending money.
Farmside, smack in the middle of a forest, sat on the outskirts of Paris, Tennessee. The closest stores were an hour away. The driveway was an endless labyrinthine gravel road. The house was one floor. A small bedroom for four women, a small bedroom for four men, a living room with a big screen TV, a kitchen, Shari and her husband Bill’s bedroom, and a teeny tiny office where Shari surfed the web all day. The whole place smelled strongly of soil. Shari had a son, Dane. He and Reba lived a football field away. They had two children: Boone and Callie. Boone was eight. Callie was fourteen. My first night there a dying water bug slowly crawled up to the gravy simmering on the stove.
To call Farmside a farm was a joke. Three goats, a mule named Jack, five chickens, and a cockerel. The mule was kept far away in a cordoned off, small area. He whinnied every time he saw someone from a distance. The only contact he had was when people fed him his timothy grass—and that didn’t happen a lot. When you tried to pet him he chewed on your shirt sleeves. He wanted to play. I heard that when Bill bought him from the King’s Valley Mule Ranch , Jack refused to be pushed into the roped off area, so Bill buckshot him in the ass, and there was a lot of blood. The goats were dying when I arrived. They just laid there and wheezed, yellow and red mucus dripped from their noses and mouths. I had seen “Animal Cops” on Animal Planet. If your animals grew sick, the law obligated you to call the vet. They can arrest you if you don’t. Those goats died a slow death in the hot, humid air. A lone goat lived for a while. I became hopeful. It seemed to take strength, and wandered around the yard a little bit. But it soon died too.
Steven was a red haired housemate in his late teens. One morning, he began to tell us—no one had asked him—“Hey y’all, I’m just going to relax and take a long shower tonight.” And this went on all day. “You know guys, I’m just going to take it easy in the shower for forty minutes. It’ll calm me down.” “Yep, I’m looking forward to it. Forty minutes in the shower.”
Apparently he didn’t tell Austin, a hulky, tough, chubby kid in his early twenties. Steven hit the shower. Austin needed to urinate. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes go by. “MISS SHARI! MISS SHARI! STEVEN’S TAKING A LONG TIME IN THE SHOWER! STEVEN’S TAKING A LONG TIME IN THE SHOWER!”
Shari banged on the bathroom door. “STEVEN! STOP TAKING A LONG TIME IN THE SHOWER!”
“Sorry Miss Shari,” he said after he got dressed. The next couple of days Steven lumbered around sullen and low. He had trouble looking the rest of us in the eye.
Boone slept at Shari’s house at night on the living room floor. With all of us sitting around the TV, Shari was unrolling the sleeping bag. “How long will this go on, gramma?”
“Well, until Callie stops doing all those mean things to you in bed at night.”
Boone would sit all day at the foot of the big elm tree in the middle of the front yard—he always looked like he was squinting, like he was looking into the sun—and play with fist sized Hot Wheels toy cars and action figures. I would sit and play with him. “Whatcha doing there, Boone?”
“Messing around with my Minecraft guys”
“You need some friends.”
“I got friends.”
“Go play with them.”
“They live too far away. In Paris. Dad won’t drive me.” Pee wee, his puppy dog, ran up to say hi to me. Boone picked up his metal toy cars and threw them with an umph at the dog. Pee Wee yelped and tried to hide behind me.
Our day would begin at five a.m. Shari would make us breakfast. I would try and read; I plodded through The Idiot. The book was senseless. Jesuit nonsense. Add to that the writer was psycho. (The characters paid way too much attention to the itty bitty details of strangers, people who in real life they would care little about). I just got used to the mosquito bites. The itching was white noise; it was just there. I was constantly applying Vaseline to deer ticks latched on to my legs—it suffocated them. Shari prohibited us from drinking coffee and my only chance at generic diet cola was when Shari drove us in the white Nissan NV Cargo Van—which was a wreck of garbage and empty coffee cups inside—into Paris. The town didn’t even have a main street. And at The Jarvis Convenience Store, the only convenience store, the product pickings were slim.
So I’d chug the whole two liter and a minor caffeine buzz would ensue. With a high, I sat outside on the porch swing, mosquitos pecking away at me; I looked at The Confederate Roses in the garden and The Eastern Red Cedars and The Bald Cypresses across the yard and the pile of smoked tires that the mosquitos laid their eggs in, and I coached myself: Okay, as long as I have this high, I can do this. As long as I can chug generic diet cola, I can do this.
But most of the time I couldn’t. Each second there lasted a minute, each minute lasted an hour. It’s like my loony bin friend Mikey Zelig back in Pittsburgh said, “The days go by so slow, the years go by so fast.” He’s not around anymore. In Jackson I could read the paper at The Madison County Library, browse their books, get on the internet there, sit outside Starbucks with a Vente cup of coffee, free refills, or get as many trips to the salad bar as I wanted at Pizza Hut. What I liked to do was sit with the city cops on Willows Avenue as they waited for speeders—the drivers who exited off 40 and forgot to slow down. At Farmside life was endless monotony. As if to underline that, the clock on the wall in the kitchen didn’t work. Always set to three thirty-two a.m. All my friends from Pitt ran the rat race, working nine-to-five jobs, copulating, making babies, arriving in skirts and suits to wine and cheese parties. If I called them they might accidentally find out I was in a group home. Paris lacked an exterior social life, no one to date. All the pretty girls in small towns are spoken for by age twenty. And what would I say? “So yeah, I live in a group home.” I looked at the hamster in the critter cage and just stared, bewildered. How did it make it through the day? He just sat there and ran the wheel and did nothing, twenty four-seven. We all need devices to make us forget our lives are worthless. I wanted to die.
Shari and Bill and the housemates were virulently Christian, so the only shows we ever watched were on CTN, The Christian Television Network: shows like, “The Glen Campbell Variety Hour”, “Davey and Goliath”, and “The 700 Club”. I wanted to watch other shows, like the news, to find out what was going on with the DC Sniper, but the housemates always outvoted me. On one CTN soap opera, “Another Life”, a girl who looked like Alanis Morissette sat around looking glum. Her mother walked in and said, “Britney, what’s the matter?”
“Mother, why does God bring us hardships?”
“Honey, God doesn’t bring you hardships, God brings you through hardships.” The bang of a firecrackers snapped from outside, then a yelp. Boone had taken to tossing Mighty Might firecrackers at Pee Wee. I called my sister and begged her to give me the money to set myself up in a trailer in Jackson, but she said the group home would keep me away from drugs.
The radio stations picked up mostly static—sometimes snippets of songs would break through. I tried to escape CTN by sitting on the porch with my cassette player and playing Guns N’ Roses or Metallica. But one of the housemates would always walk out with their own cassette player and sit down on the green and white patio chairs and play sermons from Reverend Harry H. Ironsides or C.H. Spurgeon or William T. Redbud. There was no escape from the almighty. He was omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, omnivorous. Were they trying to convert me?
Missy’s hands shook out on the porch as she talked: “Derek, Jesus is a power beyond words. If you let him into your life he will cure you everything.”
“I’m agnostic.”
“What? What’s that? Ag-agonistic?”
“I was Jewish. Now I don’t know about anything?”
“Goodness. Your ancestors killed our savior.” She turned the sermon up.
I had a history with mental health hospitals. The courts had committed me to the children’s unit at St. Francis when I was in fifth grade. In tenth grade my parents sent me to a special high school with only fifty kids in it. I couldn’t hack the crowds at Middleton High. Too many eyes. The special high school was super expensive, and lots of organized crime families sent their kids there because other high schools kept kicking them out. Pitt was a Rorschach blot. I drank my way through most of it. It’s when you graduate college, and you can’t coast anymore, that testosterone is needed.
I drove cross country to make it as a screenwriter. To write well, you have to write terribly first. I couldn’t get past the “writing terribly” part. Hunter S. Thompson used to type out Hemingway to practice. So I tried typing out Queer. The first paragraph was about a boy Burroughs wanted to screw. The boy didn’t reciprocate. The starting line read, “Lee turned his attention to a Jewish boy named Carl Stienberg, whom he had known casually for about a year. The first time he saw Carl, he thought, ‘I could use that, if the family jewels weren’t in pawn to Uncle Junk.’” I typed no more of the book.
I drove back home and lived with my parents. For the next few years I worked on and off. Many bosses fired me for twisting up and out and baring my teeth and making my coworkers walk on egg shells around me.
My dad took me aside one evening after dinner and sat me down. He said, “You’ve hardly even ever had a girlfriend. Don’t you want to make it in the world?” He spoke plaintively. “Look at your friends. Rob. Scott. Zoltan. They have families. They have full time jobs.” I was already aware. Hyper aware. “Don’t you want to become something? Establish yourself? Remember high school? You liked your Rite Aid job.”
“That was different. My boss was a Mormon.” He had that Christ-like smile and dough-faced simplicity and was always kind and generous. I told my mom what my dad said. “I don’t need this now, mom.”
“I’m sure it was just a little pep talk. Maybe you misunderstood him. I’ll talk to him.”
The next day he told me I had read his diatribe the wrong way.
A few weeks later my mom left to Beaver Falls for three days. My dad invited me out to Katz N’ Kids Deli for dinner. He downed a few Dos Equis and in a total non sequitur, he said, “You know what? Let’s talk about your friends. How about...Scott. He has a job, doesn’t he? He has a family. Who else? Let me see here...Rob. He has a nine-to-five job and a boy. And how about...Zoltan...”
In Western I met up with a housewife who didn’t belong there. Sandy Neergard. She was a nurse at the Southwest Mississippi Regional Center in Olive Branch, Mississippi. She and her husband Lonnie lived on a farm. Lonnie brought me OR scrubs to wear when my regular clothes reeked too much of sweat. Sandy wrote down her address and phone number for me before she left. She told me I could live with her and that there was a lot of work to do on the farm. I’d be around rational, reasonable, well-adjusted people. Within the walls of civilization. That meant I could call my Pitt friends. And with a little luck, I could watch what I wanted on TV and access the internet. But I blew it. I lost the address and phone number.
I told Shari about Sandy. “Miss Shari, I like living here and all, but I think I’d do better on Sandy’s farm.”
“Now Derek, don’ you worry. My hubbie has connections with cops all from here to Saskatchewan. I’ll call up the Olive Branch PD and get her number for you. Alright?”
The next day Shari ran up to me enthusiastically, like she was playing a game. “Bill called the Olive Branch PD. They didn’t want to give out Sandy’s number. They said she unlisted her number because of a stalker.”
Finally Shari agreed to drive me the two hours to Jackson to pick up my car at The Madison County ER. So now I could drive places to escape Farmside and all the requisite vegetating that came with it. But there was nowhere to go. I spent some time in the microcosmic Paris library and tried to find decent, unchristian books to read, but the pickings were scant and sparse. I surfed the web there. I googled “Scarlet Fever”, curious to learn more about the disease. I clicked on the first hit, and that landed me on the adult film star Scarlet Fever’s web site. I kept clicking the back arrow but the site didn’t let me leave. It didn’t even let me close AOL. I had to unplug the computer. The next day I walked into the library, and the librarian, who looked like her name was Hortense, called me into her office. “We can’t have you in here anymore, sir.”
I grinned. “How kind. Why?”
“Oh, do you really need me to tell you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do.”
“You’ve been using our computers to search for pornography.”
One day I sat out on the porch swing, listening to “Welcome to the Jungle”, and Shari stepped out of the door and beckoned me in with a hand. “Come on in, son. I got something to show you.” She carried a hard drive, monitor, and then a keyboard out of her office. She set everything up on the living room floor. We both sat down. She hooked all the devices up and turned on the monitor and hard drive. “You want to be a writer, don’t you? Well here’s your chance. Write your heart out.” She stood up with effort and walked back into her office. There was no Word program, just a Notepad icon. It was almost impossible to click on it because there was no mouse, so I had to use the arrow keys. The pointer on the screen didn’t move fluidly. It jerked. I pressed an arrow key and held it down, and the pointer crossed the screen exponentially, first a centimeter a second, then two centimeters a second, then an inch a second, then two inches, three inches, ad infinitum. There was no printer. The Marquis De Sade and Jean Genet wrote on toilet paper in gothic prisons that dripped with sewage, but I couldn’t do it. And who cared? I was too frazzled to write anything anyhow.
Austin had spent most of his life in Juvey and prison. Sometimes I’d drive to the Jarvis Convenience Store with him to keep me company. When I got to the register with my two liter of diet cola, he’d come up behind me with bags of candy, sandwiches, and ice cream treats, and dump them all the counter. “Hey partner, I’m broke. Pay for all this.”
“Ah ah. You pay for it.”
“I don’t got the dollars. You pay for it. Now.”
“No. Put it back on the shelves.” His ruse never worked, but it still agitated me.
One time I was at The Jarvis Convenience Store alone. “You from that farm-mentally ill home, ain’t you?” the teenaged checkout girl asked, not without sympathy.
“Yeah. I feel so honored.”
“So you know Callie? Dane and Reba’s girl? Walks around with a smirk all the time?”
“Sure. I see her every day.”
“The only reason that devil girl and that poor boy Boone wasn’t separated for good is that Bill O’Daniel was top cop here in Paris for twenty years.”
“I didn’t know Shari’s husband was a policeman.”
“He’s a PI now. Before, he was Paris chief of police. So now you know.”
“They tried solving the ‘problem’ by Boone sleeping over Shari’s at night.”
“And ain’t that the biggest bullshit you ever heard. She still got access to him during the day.” She shook her head.
“That’s Callie. She’s always getting belted. She can be hard to deal with.”
“Hard to deal with? She needs a exorcism. She has a rep already at Taylor High. Always getting’ sent down to principal Brill’s office and getting the paddle. Always. It’s permanently marked into her behind. That whole God forsaken family is white trash to the core.”
I remember when Austin and Callie wandered off into the forest. Shari lost it: “AUSTIN! YOU DON’T NEED TO BE WANDERIN’ OUT THERE ALONE WITH CALLIE!”
Her voice was operatic. She called a house meeting and chastised Steven. “STEVEN! STOP USING SO MUCH TOILET PAPER! I’M DARN TOOTIN’ SICK OF TELLIN’ YOU! STOP IT! THIS INSTANCE!” Steven walked around downcast the next few days.
Our bed times were at eight p.m., so Shari didn’t want me driving around at night. And she told me to curb my driving during the day. I think she was worried I was untethering myself to the farm and she’d lose me as a client. And so began The Great Crackup. Off the wall, into little jigsaw pieces of bone, no one could put me back together again. My skeleton shattered. I’ve never been right since. My sleep took a nosedive and went haywire. Five hours sleep a night. Four hours sleep a night. Three hours sleep a night. It was like “Restless Body Syndrome.” I was up at all hours, standing, bouncing from foot to foot on the balls of my feet, swinging my arms up and down, squeezing and opening my fists, the same verse from “Sk8ter Boy” repeating itself in my head: “I’m with the skater boy. I said see you later boy”, over and over. They had me cornered. Now I really prayed for death. I meant it this time. Steven put his hand on my forehead and tried shouting out the demons, but it didn’t work.
There was the night I tried to leave. Jumping up and down in place in the bedroom, I realized I needed to drive, hoping that would ease the tension. Make me more elastic. Shari would just have to deal with it. My clock read one fifty-five. I walked the stone path to the driveway and stepped on something that made a really loud crunch. One of Boone’s plastic toys. A pink and white weasel, now in pieces. It wasn’t there during the day. Bill and Shari’s light flipped on. And then I could see my car clearly, and a large tree branch sat a few feet in front of it and a large tree branch sat a few feet behind it, so if I tried to drive away, the branches would scrape the gravel, and I’d make a huge racket. Shari stepped to the window in her nightgown. “WHAT DID I TELL YOU? JUST WHAT DID I TELL YOU? NO DRIVING AFTER DINNER! NOW YOU COME IN HERE THIS VERY MINUTE!”
“Sorry Miss Shari, but I can’t sleep!” If I was with Sandy Neergard I’m sure I could go on all the midnight drives I wanted to. And I’d have the chance to watch TV all night. TV shows the rest of America watched. So this was how Bill O’Daniel, the inveterate private investigator, was handling me. When Shari was out, it was his job to make us meals. He made us bacon sandwiches. Three pieces of bacon on two slices of white bread.
Sometimes I’d drive to Jackson. So I’m driving down Highland, my eyes on fire, and I saw red and blue flashing behind me in my rearview and heard the squelch of a siren. A Madison County deputy pulled me over. “Sorry to tell you this, brother, but you’re driving without a plate.”
“You’re kidding me. My plate’s gone?”
“Yeah. I won’t write you a ticket, but don’t come around here no more without a plate.”
“Yes sir. I didn’t know.”
I told Shari.
“You don’t need to be fixin’ to take long drives anyway. Not with your sickness. Stay home.” If PI’s want a surveillance target to stay in one area, they’d “steal” your plate. They’d unscrew it and rip it off in the black of night and hide it somewhere in your car, somewhere you’d never think to look. If they stole it away from your car, that would be actual theft, i.e. unethical and illegal. I searched under the back seats, the front seats, the trunk, the spare tire compartment, but I couldn’t find it.
“Miss Shari, can you take me down to the Paris DMV so I can register a new plate?”
“Now hold them horses there. I’m gonna be busy this week and the next. Stop bothering me about it. You don’t need no plate no how anyway.” Every day it was a new excuse. But soon I thought, why bother replacing it at all? Bill would just “steal” it again. When I stoked up the courage to tell Shari someone on the farm took it, she said, “Maybe you need to take your medication. No one here ripped off your gosh darned plate. Must’ve been done in Paris or Jackson.”
I was tachycardic day in and day out. I’d pace the stone path back and forth from the front door to the gravel driveway all day, that same shard of song ringing through my head. My paroxysms disturbed the housemates, but they loved Shari, and they always sided with her over me. I bought a Walkman and at night I’d listen to it in bed, rocking back and forth.
It was three o’ five a.m. Enough knocking my knees together. Time to do circles around the living room sofa. I stepped out of bed in Sandy’s OR scrubs and walked round, round and around. I noticed a heap of trash dumped on the floor. I walked over to it and uncrumpled some papers and studied them. Everything I’d thrown away from the past few weeks: SSI applications, SSDI applications, Medicare statements, bills from Madison County ER, a letter from my parents, two letters from my sister, a Writer’s Digest magazine, and lots of Kleenexes. Why did Bill and Shari save up and then show me all my detritus? What was the take away moral? They knew I lapped around the sofa at night. The next morning I called Olive Branch PD. I asked the secretary for Sandy Neergard’s number.
“Sorry. We can’t give out citizen’s numbers. That would be illegal.”
“Did a Miss Shari O’Daniel call you a month ago, asking for the same number?”
“No sir. Not that I can recall.”
Then the perdition kicked into high gear. I went from little sleep to no sleep. Shari and Bill paid that no mind. I tried to nap during the day, but Shari said that wasn’t normal, so she’d send in a housemate or two to strike up conversation or bang their belongings around. I counted a lot in bed, sometimes in my head, sometimes out loud. I’d get up into the three thousands before I lost my place and had to start over. On my fifth all nighter a long string of tapping sounds came from the corrugated tin roofing above me. It would palpate in time to my heart. So I clenched and unclenched my bedsheet until my fingers hurt.
During the day I tried deep breathing out on the porch swing. It did no good. A huge Daddy longlegs bathed in the sun on the wooden rail by the swing. Its body segment was a bumpy gray, and its legs were striped gray and black. I said out loud, “Okay, so that means that on the opposite side of the porch there’s another Daddy longlegs on the railing. Yes. Of course.” I stood up and walked over. I was right.
I hadn’t eaten in eight days. Shari occasionally offered me a Boost, a nutritional supplement, but I always refused.
On my seventh day up all night, an idea popped up above my head. If I could get to a General Hospital ER, maybe they could do something for me. So I poised this to Shari. She began to accommodate me. “You know, oh to heck with it, I can let you watch TV for a couple of hours after we all go to bed.”
“No. I need to see a doctor. Please.”
“Don’t you worry now. I’ll make you a cup o’ coffee. That caffeine will make you so uppity that you’ll get all tired and sleep like the dead.” It was like running a gauntlet. “Derek, I don’t got no time to drive you there. St. Mary’s is eighty miles away. The stuff they give you, you can’t drive yourself home. You need someone to take you. And Bill’s on assignment.”
“Your son can do it. Dane.” I badgered her and she shouted back, but I was too burnt out to care. Excuse followed excuse followed excuse. Finally she called Dane, and he said he could drive me. Around ten at night he drove over. Shari took him aside and whispered to him. Then she steered me into her office and shut the door. She hugged me and sat me down. “Now watch what you say, Derek. There’s a whole lotta love for you here, and we wouldn’t want to see you go back to Western. Don’t do any badmouthin’.” As she spoke bright flashes blinked on and off, first in the corners of my eyes, then the perimeters, then my whole field of vision, like walking the red carpet at a gala.
So Dane drove me. He was really friendly. We were the same age. He wore a beard, a “Don’t Tread” baseball cap twisted back, and a purple and whitely squared lumberjack shirt. He sniffled a lot. The waiting room at St. Mary’s ER was empty, save for a woman with a narrow face, model’s cheekbones, and wraparound sunglasses. She wore a fat suit and ate potato chips out of a small foil bag. The munching and crackling filled the room. Soon a nurse escorted Dane and me into a waiting room. It smelled of disinfectant. The man next door kept sneezing and coughing. “Damn niggers,” he said. We waited. Dane was fidgety.
The doctor walked in. He was Asian American, short, in his mid-fifties. He had graceful, large, friendly eyes and smiled like a missionary. Before he could say five words, Dane said to him, “Sir, can I speak to you outside?”
“Yes, by all means.” They walked out. I heard murmurs and whispers. When they walked back in, the doctor asked, “So, you hear voices?”
I have never heard voices in my entire life. I’m not schizo. I’m neurotic, not psychotic. “Um, no I don’t.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
I explained my insomnia.
After doing a quick physical he said, “I can help you. What we usually do in these cases is shoot you up with some Valium.” If this was a big city hospital they wouldn’t have given me anything. They would have thought I was medication seeking.
“Thank you, sir,” I said. The doctor asked a few more questions, patted me on the shoulder, and left.
“See, I told you they could help you here,” Dane said.
“Not really. Benzo’s don’t do anything for me. I’m in for more hell when I get home.”
“Come on, man. Lighten up. It’s not that bad.”
A male nurse walked in. He asked me to pull down my jeans and boxers part way and lie on my side. He shot me in the hip. I was fucked. For life. I’d be up forever, wishing for death, counting up to a googolplex, never to sleep again. Dane drove me home. Back to the maelstrom.
Then, in the car, it was like a whirlpool of euphoria sucked me down into the depths. I realized the nurse hadn’t shot me up with the equivalent of one or two pills, but like twenty pills. I cackled. HAHAHAHA! I went from fireplace to AC in no time. I felt so good I felt guilty.
“So what’s up with the DC sniper?” I asked.
“They caught the dude. It was terrorism. They’re trying to cover it up by not using that word.”
“Well that’s wrong. The country has a right to know.”
“No they don’t. If they did, the people’d be running in the streets, shouting their heads off, going bananas. Got to keep ‘em in line.”
I turned conversational. We talked about Atari and Intellivision, games like Combat. Asteroids, Pac Man, Activision Triathlon. He laughed too. We arrived back at the farm around one a.m. I got in bed, chuckling.
“Come on, man. I’m trying to sleep. Don’t make me come over there,” Austin said. I shut my eyes for a few hours and opened them. Three forty. I flew. Life went white. I shut them again.
After a bit I looked at my clock. Four o’ five a.m. I had never popped acid before, so hallucinations were new to me. Right in front of my pillow was a slide show the size of a twenty-seven inch TV. Flashes of aisles in a drug store. A cottony wisp of cloud framed each image. What was happening to me? I saw hairspray, shaving cream, toilet paper, six packs of soda, candy bars, toilet bowl cleaner. My brain made up the names: Vive Amour Extra Hold Hair Gel, Maximum Security Shampoo and Conditioner in One, Mr. Crackle Potato Chips, Mexican Water Stool Softener, Smoothy Shaving Cream, Sleepy Head Benadryl, Mississippi Cola, Lou Ferrigno Power Drinks, Mr. Crunch Chocolate Candy Treats, S and S Sun Screen, Whistely Clean Toilet Paper, Sweet Stripes Candy Canes, Ocean Kettle Tuna Fish. The final shot was of the drug store itself at night. It sat on a ridiculously steep hill, and the store was not horizontal but sloped with the hill. A sign lit up in spring green and marine blue read, “Silverscript Drug Store”.
Dawn lightened the windows. The cockerel sung. Sprinkler water caroused through the pipes. The coffee machine clicked on.
That morning Shari drove us to the St. Nicholas Church, about half an hour away. It was small and lost in a wilderness of Asparagus ferns, Dragon Trees, Ficus vines, and ivy. Daddy longlegs covered the creaky double doors. White paint crackled off of the wood. I was high as a kite. We sat in the backroom for bible studies, just Shari, the eight housemates, and I.
Austin said, “I can never sleep. How come every time I want to go to St. Mary’s ER, they put me back in Western?”
Missy said, “I worry when I can’t sleep and I ask a doctor for sleeping pills that they’ll put me back in Western.”
Julia, a spinsterly woman with an austere haircut and a strong southern belle accent, said, “Western is an awful place. A dang roach motel. I’d never want to go back there. But I’m afraid if I go to St. Mary’s I’ll end up back in that heck hole.”
“That’s the way the ball bounces,” Shari said.
Threats...
“God is a bluff in a poker game,” I said.
Later that evening I sat on the porch. The sun shone spokes of orange through the trees. I felt my pineal gland throb. Three dust devils appeared in the front yard. They didn’t have mass, kind of like an image through static. They mixed, partnered, spun clockwise, then counter clockwise. “Where’d you guys come from?” I asked. A dusty hand poked out, its pointer finger aimed at the horizon.
A huge tornado twisted there, snake-like, a living thing. The sun hued it copper. The twister boomed that she was the mother of the all and the every, and that Shari, Bill, Austin, Callie, Boone, Reverend Harry H. Ironsides, all the saints, even God, answered to her.
That night in bed, still high, I saw books in a book store. Shelves surrounded me. My brain provided the names: The Forecast of Tantalus, Atheism is Unstoppable, The Thesaurus from Hell, Twisted Train Tracks, That Ever Present Hole in the Floor, Slit Wrist Lit, De Sade’s Ghost, Brainstorming Detritus, To Tremble before a Monolith, Computing Forever, Ogden the Antitheist, Branded, Poke and Peek. I didn’t fall asleep.
The next day, still drifting on Valium, I called 911. I lied to the operator I had fractured my kneecap. I waited in the yard, sitting cross legged. The ambulance arrived an hour later. I heard the sirens for a while as it made its way carefully up the gravel driveway. It parked in front of me. Shari walked out. “Now what’s this all about?”
A paramedic stepped out. “Who has the busted kneecap?”
“It’s not my knee. I lied. I can’t sleep.”
“You made us come all the way out here for that?”
“I’m sorry.”
Shari said, “He don’t need no paramedics! He just can’t cop any Z’s! That’s all!”
I said, “This wildebeest hippopotamus doesn’t understand my situation.”
He took mercy on me. “Well, we’ll get you on up and strap you in and take you to St. Mary’s. I’m sure they’ll give you something for it.” Farmside receded into the distance, with Shari standing there, her hands on her hips. At St. Mary’s they admitted me as an inpatient and shot me up with more Valium and I still couldn’t sleep. They tried other sedatives: Depakote, Trazadone, Clozeril, Buspar, Serequil. Nothing worked. And I couldn’t have cared less. Eventually they shipped me to Methodist North Hospital in Memphis.
That’s where I am today. Doctor Trellis keeps me high on huge doses of Atavan and Klonopin and Xanax via intravenous. The medical world has made a minor celebrity of me. The guy who just doesn’t sleep no matter what they inject into his blood. Famous doctors who specialize in insomnia have visited me: Dr. David Patz, Dr. Robert Kresh, and Dr. James Wellington. The orderlies set up an Xbox One on my TV and my parents buy me all the new games: Gears of War 4, Forza Horizon, Destiny, Halo 5: Guardians, Fallout 4, Battlefield 1. In 2009 they bought me a laptop, so now I can do all the writing I want. My Pitt friends have visited occasionally. Lack of sleep has sharpened my sex drive, and the nurses leave me alone to masturbate under the covers. I get hard when my Serbian masseuse works on me. She doesn’t care. She’s a stripper by day and she feels sorry for me—she even offered me a hand job. The Marriott Hotel on Beale Street donated three pillows.
One night—or day, it doesn’t matter anymore—Scotty, an orderly, walked in. “And how’s Derek doing tonight?”
“Reading Justine.”
“As long as you’re keeping occupied.”
“Can you turn the thermostat down a bit?”
“Sure.” He walked over and turned the knob down with his thumb. Then he sat down on the chair next to the bed. I smelled his aftershave. I put the book down on my lap.
“Scotty, will it always be like this?”
“Everyone grows into their nook. And they become that thing, whatever their DNA shapes them into. Like me, I’m on the night shift and working on my second wife, and it’s like, this is my position, to work nights on a long term care ward as a divorcee and for my wife to keep the kids. You drift and drift, and gravity settles you into your own personal niche. So what if you’re eighty years old with your dentures lying in a glass of water beside you here? You were never meant to run the rat race.”
Derek Stienbrenner
C/O Methodist North Hospital
10
Long Term Care Ward
6019 Walnut Grove Road
Memphis, TN 38120
Write me. Better yet, come up and visit. I’m semicoherent. Writing is getting difficult—my hands don’t always obey my brain. I’m losing the ability to talk. My mouth feels like someone else’s muscle, something foreign. I spit a lot when I speak. Visiting hours are from five p.m. to eight p.m. I’m not going anywhere. I have the feeling I’ll be here for a long, long time.
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