Tag: being mental

KARMA

There was a time when I took my anger and pain out on others. Okay, I lied. I still do it. Just less these days. But I used to be awful. I never let anyone off the hook. The hell. I took it out on everyone.


One day I’m working a shit job slicing lunch meat, and some lady with a speech impediment comes in and orders a pound of “tookie”. I asked, “tookie?” And she nodded. I looked at her. Silence. Then she says, “Tookie.”
I looked at her. “Tookie?” I ask.
The lady with her, about the same age, says nothing. I figured they’ve come from a home for the mute or something. I knew damn well what the first lady wanted. But she was gonna have to work for it. Because I didn’t like her looks. Fake blonde at her age? Ought to be punished for such a travesty. I stood there, staring. I hated slicing lunch meat. I hated using that rotary slicer. Fuckers are responsible for more lost fingers than rabbits, squirrels and power saws combined. I could sell cigarettes and soda all night long and not care, but lunch meat? God I detested it.


The Tookie woman never budged. There was a long line at the register. I didn’t give a fuck. I wasn’t giving in to the centenarian suicide blonde and that was fucking it. “Tookie”, she repeated. I shrugged, and asked “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Finally her friend says it for her. Her “friend” liked watching Tookie Woman suffer as much as I did. I sighed, got the turkey breast from the case, slammed it onto the slicer and deliberately sliced it extra thick. Four sandwiches and that shit would be gone. She–they–never came back. Now stay with me. This is going somewhere.


Fucking asshole comes in one night. Wants one piece of Braunschweiger, holds up his thumb and says, “like this.”
I say, “Like what? You want it the length of your thumb or the width, or are you communicating your dick size?” Braunschweiger Man gets pissed, storms out. Month later, he’s back. Orders the same thing. It’s for his bloody dog for pity’s sake. Oh, but it has to be cut just right. So I take the roll out and use a knife to slice it. “No! That is not acceptable!” he shouts. Now for a second, I’m stunned. This motherfucker is so particular and testy that I think maybe he’s a undercover shopper gonna tell my boss on me. I apologise and soon he decides to take the shit. He pays and leaves. Month goes by. I had time to tell my manager about Braunschweiger Man. She tells me not to put up with abuse and if he orders that shit again, refuse to serve him. Sure enough, he gets this mean look on his face. Holds up his thumb. I say, “Stick that thumb up your ass.”


He turned a molten-steel red. “What?”
I said, “Get the fuck out of here, and don’t come back, you dick cheese!”

Couple years go by. I land a great gig making acetylene gas in a union plant. Couple more years go by. They close an office and open a new office section in our building for customer service representatives.
And Braunschweiger Man is one of them.
And he remembers me.


A year goes by. There’s a company-wide restructuring. Braunschweiger Man winds up in a position of authority over me. And he remembers.
And behind the scenes, he is a corporate ass kisser. And he works some strings. The union gets busted. I’m on the street.

I saw him a year later. He got fired. Brags he’s selling insurance now and getting rich. I’m a security guard in a fucking dollar store.

I still hate Braunschweiger Man. I haven’t seen him in a long time but between us, I’d have lost the union job anyway as my condition got worse. Lost the dollar store job too, but one day, honestly, I just woke up and I couldn’t move. I was sick, I was depressed and I wanted to die.

Of course, I had PTSD all along. Severe clinical depression with bipolar affective disorder and PTSD all tend to worsen with age. But that misses the point. Braunschweiger Man remembered. And he took the opportunity to harass me. Because every one you are mean to, and every one you make fun of, and every time you choose to fuck with someone or just take shit in general out on them, it comes back to you. Every time.

I’m not here to preach. I still get off on cussing Republicans and evangelicals. But I know it’s really wrong. I do. And I feel bad sometimes. I wonder, can I really call myself a Christian what with all the sinning I do?

At least I’ve learned a lesson: if you’re ever working in a convenience store slicing lunch meat and you get a customer who gives you the shits, just do the best you can to do your job. Later on, he’ll decide on his own to shop elsewhere. People like that are never satisfied with anything, and never stop acting like spoiled, pompous, entitled assholes. They never stop looking for people and places that will take their shit and kiss their ass. Oh that’s right, I forgot to tell you. Braunschweiger Man was a deer-hunting, beer-bellied, fuckball republican. Nowadays he’d be wearing a red hat. He’d be a MAGA Nazi.

Tookie woman was a casualty who was innocent. I never saw her after that but trust me: karma remembers. I know. I lost… everything. It wasn’t worth it. Kindness serves you better. ❤️☮️

Regular People

He had piercing, crystal blue eyes and tears welling in them. He wasn’t focused on anything. He had the Thousand Yard Stare.

We were outside on a porch, about twenty feet by six feet. Chairs lined the wall and faced another row of chairs backed up to a chain that ran along the outer edge. The smoking area. Always crowded with smokers socializing, smoking their own or trying to get one from someone else. Tobacco, see, is a necessary medication in a hospital like this one.

Someone in the shade from the summer sun had a radio playing. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” had just played. Robert with the blue eyes was quiet as it played. When it was over, he said, “I used to wonder what that song meant. I never figured it out til I got here. It’s about a mental hospital.”

I’d never thought of it like that. It made sense. Some guy can’t continue on his own anymore, checks into the “hotel”, and finds himself surrounded by nightmares that make him tear a path to the door. The night time guy at the door says, “Relax, we are here to take in those who have earned it. You can check out if you want, but you will never leave here.”

Robert had himself a very astute observation. While most hospitalized patients are released as quickly as possible, some never are. They can’t be. They just…can’t.

Robert…was one of them. The song is not about a mental hospital. It’s kind of loosely based on a real place. A hotel, that is. Part of the beauty of the song was always its ambiguity; listeners can make of it what they will. And it will always be special to them for that reason.

Robert’s eyes got very wet as he stared at something in another county. And his soft voice uttered one of the most heartbreaking sentences I’ve ever heard: “I don’t think I’ll ever be a regular person again.”

***

He’s probably still there. Only acute cases get to stay. Under Reagan, the third mental health care reform of modern times had been enacted. In the name of civility, he’d “reformed” institutions. Draconian practices were outlawed. But that was a lie; what he actually did was cut federal funds to states and force hospitals across the land to shut down completely or to cap the number of beds that could be occupied. Hundreds, thousands of chronically mentally ill people, most of whom could never hold the simplest of jobs, or who were institutionalized and therefore dependant, were put out. Back then, and yet still, there was nothing in place to help them. A few programs, but never enough. They gravitated to larger towns and cities where they could panhandle and occasionally get a bed at a homeless shelter. By 1985 they were all over the town I lived in. You couldn’t help but notice them. Same clothes every day. Walking nowhere. Talking to people who weren’t there. I knew some guys, pigs, actually, who took advantage of a girl. She was a blonde who would have looked awesome had she anywhere to go and anyone to help. But she wore rags and had a rash I guessed indicated syphilis, and word got around that she tricked. These god-damned guys at a tire store on Robert Crain Highway gave her a twenty dollar bill and got her to orally copulate a dog. They took pictures.

By then, also, a term had come into use for old women who carried their possessions in green garbage bags, usually pushed around in a shopping cart. The horrible term was “bag lady”. God bless America, you know?

People today still utter Reagan’s name in reverence. Forget Iran-Contra. Forget high taxes. He was an orator who filled one’s heart with pride to be a citizen of the United States of America.

Except, for all I know, he never made it to Heaven. He had the blood of innocents on his hands, enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool with. Because by the winter of 1986-7, I never saw another one walking around. Not one. And most of them were dead. Illness, exposure, dehydration, starvation and predators all had a go at them. One guy sleeping under an overpass was stabbed to death. Probably by some “regular” person. For kicks.

***

At Springfield Hospital, and in the private Sheppard Pratt system, I had met and had plenty of time to talk with a lot of people. Some were predators. They weren’t going anywhere. Some were so out of touch that, like Robert, their lucid moments, when they realized who they were and the hopelessness of their situation, were few and fleeting. I liked him. Wasn’t a mean bone in his body. I wondered if he ever was a “regular person”, if there is such a thing. And if he was, what had the poor bastard been through that could hide his beautiful soul from his own mind?

Because that’s what mental illness is: being betrayed by your own mind. That’s it, no frills or fancy accessories. Whatever the cause, no matter the cause, it is simply a betrayal.

***

When I was between three suicide attempts in a two-month span, I visited so many hospitals I can’t remember them all. They’re all different. Even different facilities in the same system, like Sheppard Pratt, were as different as night and day.

One of their places was the old rehabilitation center for drug addiction and alcoholics in Howard County.

I think I was still so unstable from my overdose that when I got there all I did was sleep. I wasn’t allowed clothes. A gown. I wasn’t allowed to have a bed. Suicide Watch, you know. I had to sleep in the day room. It was shared by both men and women. So if I got an erection while sleeping, it was like I pitched a fucking tent for everyone to see. Humiliation does not deter nurses who suck their thumbs and steal shit out of your locker. As I stabilized and realized where I was, I was horrified.

The place was dark. So dark that I dare to this day to say that any degree of recovery is not possible there. And that even stabilization is an iffy deal. Artwork adorned the walls. Patients had rendered them. God damn they were ghastly. One oil painting in a prominent place depicted a dance outside during the so-called pilgrim era. People in the background watched as a couple danced. The man was best described as a predator. The woman bore the expression of one who was being forced. I hated it. The nurses loved it. Make sense outta that, regular people.

Nurses sucked their thumbs. Night shift mostly. The doctor had no clue what to do with my meds. I was getting worse with every passing day. I wanted just to die and have it all be over. I was in hell. My depression grew.

In the dining facility, I spotted something I thought was pretty cool. A potted, grafted tree. Tree grafting is a part of the citrus farming industry. Outside of that, it’s a lost art, and I thought, you know, wow.

Then I was told it was artificial. In Maryland, if you see artificial trees, there’s a good chance you have entered the mental healthcare system. I knew this. But an artificial grafted tree? How fucking mental is that?

The fact is, I met some of the bravest, kindest, noblest and wisest people of my life while in the hospital. We all get a tough way to go, not merely with stigma from “regular people”, but also uneven health care from doctors and nurses who hate us like all other “regular people” do. To them, we are nothing but a paycheck.

We go through some really awful shit. Literally. One day I had the runs. Three stalls on our ward is all we had. While two users were legit, one wasn’t. How he got his hands on skin mags I don’t know. But he spent hours in a stall. Someone spied on him and said the guy was beating off at least a dozen times a day.

Then there are your “friends” who are regular people. Call them from the hospital. Go ahead. They’ll never answer another call from you again. Even family will fuck with you: you’re making them look bad. You’re faking it. You’re only sick because you “want to be”. A brother who went through the abuse too told me these words when I was in the hospital after my first suicide attempt. I told him to leave.

One thing I know, after being both mental and an asshole for all these years is this: regular people suck.