Chapter 3. Tuesday: Morning Med Call

In this chapter, we see a little bit more of Green Oaks Psychiatric

TUESDAY

 Morning Med-Call

 

                Every morning, at 7:30 am, the fluorescents flicker to life all over the ward and you can hear the orderlies move down the halls, one dorm room at a time. They hit light switches in each room and say things like “Alright, you got 15 minutes! Rise and shine, ladies, it’s time to get up!” or “Let’s go, gentlemen. It’s a beautiful day! Up and at’em! ” and like something out of a zombie flick, the depressed, the manic, the delusional-they all come filtering out, staggering, bleary eyed and grimacing. Down the hallway and towards the commons area, they shuffle in their hospital socks, arms pulled in close to keep warm against the frigid AC of the institution. Many of them are waking up from the death-like state of medicated sleep, incoherent as they make their way to the usual haunts; a table by the window or a chair next to the radio. A rocking chair or a spot near the nurse’s station.

After arriving, it usually only takes a couple of days for someone to choose their spot. This isn’t assigned or anything, it just happens that way. Out of the twenty or so long term patients at Green Oaks, the oldest is Maria, at 62. Her spot is a round table near the book racks on the windowless side of the commons. Aside from meals, meds, small group, and lights-out, Maria will spend the entirety of her day at this table.

Some days, she reads from the small collection of paperback novels on the nearby rack. Other days, she writes in them. With pens and pencils she’s lifted from the craft room during art therapy, Maria will write her life stories in the blank spaces and margins in each novel. These are only fragmented pieces of events she half-remembers. After she’s chosen a book, she’ll look over her shoulder both ways to make sure no one’s looking. Then, in the margins around the printed text, she’ll write in detail about the time she was thirteen and her stepfather raped her in the back of the family’s Buick. How he kept saying he loved her, even while his fingers were leaving bruises on her wrists and thighs. She writes about how the alcohol on his breath made her eyes water, and how her mother, after finding out what happened, snuck into Maria’s room while she slept and burned her neck with a lit cigarette. She’ll write how, afterwards, she was taken to a catholic church. Her mother told the priest that Maria was possessed, and that a demon had turned her only daughter into an incestuous w***e.

On a different page, upside down on the very bottom, Maria writes about her first daughter’s wedding. The way the maid of honor drunkenly wept during her speech, and the way her dear Chloe had fought and fought with her about the dress. Chloe didn’t want to wear her mother’s dress, no matter how hard her mother insisted. No, not Maria’s dress, who married only to get divorced three years later, and moved with her child from California to Massachusetts for the sake of starting fresh. It was Chloe’s life now. Her marriage. And even though it was a deep disappointment, Maria writes about how beautiful her Chloe had looked on her wedding day. How the bride’s maids looked like basset hounds in comparison. Her daughter was clean and good, something that was taken from Maria long ago. 

Then she’ll write about her love affair with various talk show hosts and celebrities. Or her experience as a high fashion hair dresser. Many of these stories are true. Some aren’t. Whatever the case, when she’s done writing, she’ll carefully pull those pages out. Slowly, methodically, she’ll tear as close to the binding as she can, taking out six or seven pages. Then, she’ll look down at her work and start to eat it, stuffing one full page into her mouth at a time. She’ll get through more than a couple of these before someone notices. A maroon mob of orderlies will rush in, and Maria, gagging and choking on her own stories, will kick and fight them with everything she has, red faced and bug eyed. She’ll get a few good punches in before Big Charles Harrison gets his arms around her from behind, pinning her arms down. Even then, as he’s hauling her through the common room, she’ll struggle and kick and spit, screaming, “You rapist pig! You f*****g n****r-rapist pig!”

This has happened three times since her arrival, six months ago. The most recent episode was yesterday afternoon. But today, this morning, in her pajamas and with her grey hair sticking up at odd angles from her pillow, Maria groggily walks up to Big Charles Harrison and says, “Mornin’.”

With a big, sunny smile, Harrison looks down and warmly says, “Well, good morning, Miss Maria! You’re looking very pretty today”          

Maria rolls her eyes and says, “Oh shut up, you big sweet talker,” and then asks, “We got coffee today?’ and with the back of her fist, she rubs the sleep from her eyes.

                “Yes ma’am. Every morning.”

                Maria nods. “Good. That’s good. Thank you, Harrison,” and then she shuffles to her table by the book rack.

                Harrison smiles after her.

                By the time they open up the door to the quiet room and force Ben out of bed, everyone else is already in their usual places around the common area, either waiting on coffee or meds before the breakfast cart arrives. Like a ghost moving past other ghosts, he crosses the room and settles into his own spot, a recliner, closest seat to the only television in the room. It’s not on. In fact, they won’t turn it on for another two hours, until after breakfast and small group, but that’s okay. In a lot of ways, being at Green Oaks was like being in Pre-Kindergarten. If you wanted to color, and someone else wanted to color too, you had to share the crayons. Want to paint with water colors? Chances are, someone else does too. At Green Oaks, working on a puzzle just means dealing with two or three other emotionally unstable people with the same passion for finding all the straight edges first. No, this was good. No one else wants to sit in front of a blank TV. Maybe, just this morning, Ben will be left alone. No one to ask about his broken, swollen nose. No one wanting to make small talk. No one else to put up with. Ben lets his head sag back against his armchair and stares down the length of his scabby nose at the blank screen. No one else listen to.

                “Dude!”

                No one, except Reggie.

                Sitting in the chair next to Ben, Reggie talks a million words a second, with his blue eyes wide and animated. “Dude, what the hell happened last night? One second you’re there, and then they called your name, so I thought, well, whatever-he’ll be back, but then you weren’t, so I’m thinking holy s**t, like, what are they doing to him? So I asked the nurses, and they kept telling me it’ none of my business, and that I need to get back to"“

“Jesus. Reggie, please, not now. Please?”

                Reggie’s eyes go wide. His jaw drops, and in disbelief he says, “What happened to your face?”

                “I’m serious, man. I don’t want to talk right now.”

                “Guess your session with Lutz didn’t go so good. What happened in there? Did Lutz do that, or was it an orderly?” Then Reggie’s voice drops real low. “Holy s**t,” he says, and his voice drops down real low, ”Was it Harrison?”

                Sideways, Ben looks across the room at Harrison standing at the common room entryway, his clipboard dwarfed in those massive black hands. He beams at everyone as they frown their way past. A patient stops and asks about getting a new pair of hospital socks, and Harrison raises his clipboard to jot down a note, but fumbles the pen. Like something out of The Three Stooges, he bends over to pick it up and knocks down a passing nurse with his big maroon butt. Apologizing profusely, he helps her up like a child handling a baby bird. Obviously annoyed, and rubbing a tender hip, the nurse says, “Seriously, Harrison?”

                “No.” Ben turns back to the blank television and says, “No. It was just an accident, that’s all.”

                Reggie whistles. “Well, whatever it was, I think you have grounds to sue, here. I mean, you’re under Green Oaks’ care,” and pointing at Ben’s face, he says, “This is how they treat their patients? It’s negligence, man! I bet you could even get a lawyer to take your case up, pro bono. There was this guy I knew, his name was Cheese "that wasn’t his real name"and he slipped and broke his ankle at a grocery store, because the floor was wet, right? And this lawyer guy "well, he wasn’t really a lawyer, I guess"he called to"“

                “Look, Reggie"“

                “I know. I know…” Reggie sinks down into his seat, dejected. “You don’t want to talk. You never do,” and shaking his head he says, “What’s the point in having a friend in this s****y place if you can’t even talk to them?”

                In the background, one of the nurses, Deborah, calls out in a bored voice, “Med-call! Please listen for your name. Amberson, Charles.” And somewhere behind Ben and Reggie, the legs of a chair scrape against the tile floor, as Charles Amberson stands to get his morning dose of Zyprexa.

                Friends. What the hell had Benjamin ever done to convince Reggie they were friends? Reggie had been admitted maybe a week before Ben arrived nearly a month ago. That day, in the lobby, two deputies had removed Benjamin’s handcuffs, signed their paperwork, and left. Two males nurses took him into a windowless room, had him strip naked, and checked his body for scrapes and bruises. Then the older of the two snapped the latex glove around his wrist said, “Squat, please. Hands on your knees,” and with a flashlight, checked Ben’s anus for contraband.

                “Delaney, Vivian!” calls out Nurse Deborah. “Med-call for Delaney!”

 After his clothes were searched and returned, minus his shoes and watch, Ben was given a brief tour of Green Oaks Psychiatric by the same man who had shoved a gloved finger into his a*****e only minutes before. There was the dorm hall (locked after 8am), the crafts room (locked, except during art therapy), the nurses’ station (off limits unless under staff instruction), two classrooms (locked except during small groups), the bathrooms, and the common room. Half the common room was comprised of round tables and classroom-style plastic chairs. There was a flat-screen TV mounted up onto the wall, a love seat, and a few recliners. Here and there in corners of the room were (locked) metal cabinets containing board games, puzzles, and other forms of low-energy entertainment. The other half of the common room had three rows of cafeteria tables. This half, the old nurse just called, “Dining.” And then he had said, “Welcome to Green Oaks.”

                “Freedman, Arthur!”

After seeing the sights and signing through a thesaurus sized stack of paperwork, Ben was allowed to join the rest of the fold right around lunch. He chose an isolated spot on the corner of an uninhabited table, and one of the maroon scrubs served him his first lunch from a large, rolling metal cart. A square slab of pizza, a generous heaping of boiled green beans, and an unopened plastic cup of fruit salad. But before Ben could take his first bite, there he was. Reggie-freaking-Hinkley, with his curly hair and bright eyes, words spraying out like a broken fire hydrant, asking things like, “What’re you in for?” and “What room are you in?” or “See the redheaded nurse in the orange Nikes? One of the chicks here, Milly, says she saw that nurse blowing a counselor in the craft room. But you can’t really believe everything Milly says. She’s crazy--sees  nakes and s**t.” Reggie had helped himself to Ben’s fruit salad, and started talked unceasingly about his friends and ex-girlfriends, and how, after he got out, it would a non-stop parade of junk food, p***y, and real TV. Then he went on awhile about the “good old days” when his brother and him would drive to Cape Cod for sailing weekends, and how, after docking their 22ft Catalina sail boat and flaking the sails, they’d hit up local bars until 2am and find a ride back to their father’s condo. Then they’d crash until noon and do it all over again.

“Karol, Jason! You’re up, Jason. Please don’t make us come get you again.”

All of this --the questions, the stories-- they poured out of Reggie manically, with Ben only responding in short nods or polite grunts. During that first lunch, Reggie, licking syrup from a plastic spoon, had asked, “You ever been sailing?” and when Ben shook his head, Reggie slammed his open hand down hard on the table, making several patients jump, and putting the nearest orderly on edge. “That settles it, dude! That f*****g settles it. I know for a fact "for a fact- that my brother is setting up another trip for me as soon as I’m out of this place, and if you get out, you have to come with us. It’s going to change your life. Thanks for the fruit cup.”

“Kenzie, Stanley!”

Reggie carried on that way from that point forward, following Ben around, and holding up both ends of the conversation. He seemed so out of place and foreign; a ray of golden sunshine in a very grey and unhappy place. More than anything, Ben found him intrusive. It wasn’t until the fourth day of his stay that Ben spoke more than one syllable to Reggie. It was in the craft room during art therapy. Reggie was making a dream catcher out of purple and green pipe cleaners, going on and on about his brother’s athletic prowess. How his brother had a black belt in karate, and how at sixteen, he had secured a scholarship playing lacrosse.

Cutting him off, Ben had looked over and said, “What are you doing here, Reggie?”

And Reggie, without looking up from his dream catcher said, “I get down, sometimes. You know? We all get down, sometimes,” and went right on to talking about all the countries his brother had traveled through after college.

Back to now, sitting there next to Ben in front of the blank TV, Reggie’s playing with a loose string hanging from the sleeve of his t shirt and he says, “You know what I think we really need?”

Ben says, “A bottle of vodka, and an hour of silence?”

Reggie laughs, and this early in the morning, the sound seems too loud. “No, you snarky a*s. Better food. This place would be a lot less miserable if everything didn’t taste so bland. It’s like eating Styrofoam. God, I would sell my left nut for a real hamburger.”

Then, in a bored voice, Nurse Debora says, “Lowe, Benjamin!”

Quickly, Ben stands from his seat, “That’s me. I gotta go,” and he starts making his way across the common room.

Behind, Reggie calls after him, “Alright. Good talk, buddy. You hang in there.”

When Ben gets to the nurses’ station, Nurse Deborah holds out tiny plastic cup. She rattles the pill around inside and says, “Twice a day, doctor’s orders.”

Taking the cup, Ben shoots back the pill and chases it with water from a small paper cone. He opens his mouth wide to show the nurse it’s empty, and lifts his tongue up so she can see there’s nothing underneath. Benjamin looks at Nurse Deborah, pauses, and says, “Thank you.”

 She smiles back blandly and says, “Monroe! Milly Monroe! You’re up!”

Walking away, Benjamin casually hooks a finger deep into the back of his cheek and scoops out the capsule, dries it carefully on the bottom inside edge of his shirt, and tucks it into the waistband of his pajama bottoms. One dose wouldn’t be enough.

Reviews

[Stacy Purvis]

Man, I love your dialogue. Keep it up!
Love it. Thank you for sharing.