Houses We Die In

This is a short story in progress.

1.

 

Stare at yourself in the mirror. Look at your balding head. Look at your double chin. Look at your lack of a jawline. Look at your patchy facial hair. You’re such a bald, double chinned, patchy hair piece of s**t. Look at the wrinkles forming on your forehead, your uneven skin. You make funny faces while you try to view your profile, looking through your eyes in an uncomfortable angle. You were an attractive teenager. Sometimes when you look at your eyes, past your eyelids that are starting to sag, you can see a little bit of your younger self. Your eyes are kind of a green brown. There’s a little gold in them, around the pupils. You had defined, arched eyebrows when you were a teenager. Now they’re just kind of bushy. “I didn’t age well,” you think.

 

2.

 

Take your medication. You’re on so much medication. You’ve been on so many medications. Seroquel, Trazodone, Lorazepam, Depakote, Haldol, Risperdal, Thorazine, Xanex, Diazepam, Zoloft, Lexapro, Prozac, Paxil, Effexor, Wellbutrin, all of them. You’ve been on all of them. It’s not uncommon for you to take more than your prescribed. Taking more than your prescribed is practically a rule. The bottles are always empty before you’re supposed to get a refill. You’re on so much f*****g medication. Your psychiatrist is a hack, a f*****g pill pusher. He knows how much you drink. He knows you mix your medication with the beer you drink all day. You don’t wake up, at least not really, until you take your Adderall " 60 mg. You talk and talk for the next 6 hours. You don’t shut up. By the time the Adderall wears off, you’re drunk. You’re communicative but you’re drunk. It’s 4 AM so you take your nightly pills -  well, your only friend feeds you your night pills. You wash them down with High Life. You try to pass out on your bed or even the brown leather Ikea couch in the living room but a lot of times you just tip over, smash your face against the wall and just sleep on the ground in the hallway for 12 hours. Your only friend is too fucked up to realize she’s practically killing you every night by feeding you the medication. The two of you share your psychiatrist and she’s just as overmedicated as you. You can’t blame this on her though. If getting better was what you really wanted, you wouldn’t fill these prescriptions, they wouldn’t even be in the house. You’d find a new psychiatrist. You’d stop drinking. You don’t care though because f**k that. She leaves your apartment by 5 AM.

            Don’t wake up, not today. Somehow you pass out in the stairwell to your building, on the landing just outside the front door of your 3^rd floor apartment. S**t and piss yourself.  Do this over and over and over again. Do your neighbors see you? Mark lives across the landing from you. During the winter you used a spatula to scrape off the ice on your windshield. Mark saw you and laughed. He gave you is extra scraper. You like Mark, but he lives in San Francisco now, and his Chicago place is on the market. You don’t like anyone else in the building and they don’t like you. You play your music too loud all-day and late into the night. The Smiths " you play the Smiths really loud. You’re the bee’s knees/but so am I.

            Your only friend begins to worry about you. She hasn’t heard from you for days so she takes the Brown Line to your building. She buzzes your apartment but you don’t answer. She calls an ambulance and the EMTs and cops; they get in some how, the neighbors or something, find you naked in the stairwell. They wake you up but you’re in a daze. They take you to your room to get some clothes. Put on a pair of cut off shorts, a t-shirt that no longer fits you and some black corduroy bedroom slippers. The soles are falling off. Go down the stairs with the EMTs’ and cops’ arms under your armpits. You trip on the soles of your slippers and fall down the blue-carpeted stairs. Hallucinate that you’re in some haunted mansion straight out of a 1950’s horror film, The Haunting maybe. You hear the two police officers talking about how the shape of your skull just isn’t up to snuff for a homo sapien. You’re hearing things. No one said that. There’s dust all over this mansion!

            Crawl into the back of the ambulance. The EMTs begin asking you questions; why drugs did you take? You can’t answer them. You can’t even talk. One of the EMTs starts yelling at you out of frustration and then they both just start laughing at you. They think you’re just a worthless junkie and tell you as such. You are worthless, but not a junkie. You’re a worthless drunk. You’re a worthless pill popper. You ask yourself, why do I do this? You do this because you want to die. You want to die but you’re not decisive enough to commit suicide. What if you’re going to meet your future wife in a few weeks? What if you’re going to meet your future wife and quit drinking, live your life like a functioning person? If this were true you’d probably end up regretting having hanged yourself, having slit your own throat, having done whatever. You’re so indecisive. You can’t make your mind up about anything. When you were 18 and drunk you slit your wrists with a serrated kitchen knife. That felt decisive, or it would of if you hadn’t regretted it right after you did it. The ambulance takes you to a hospital that is literally 4 blocks from your apartment. You could of walked and saved yourself the thousand dollars you’re going to have to pay for this ambulance ride. You couldn’t walk though. You couldn’t even wake up. You couldn’t even stop yourself from pissing all over the dirty worn carpet and your belly, your fat belly, your beer belly, laying face down.

           

3.

 

You lay on a hospital bed in a small, dark room with a white, somewhat transparent, curtain. Lay there for hours. The staff thinks you’re just another junkie and shot up a little too much heroin and fell asleep. They don’t think you’re a priority and you’re not. Eventually a nurse visits you with a bottle and she wants you to urinate in it so a drug test can be run. You can’t tell them you just accidently took too much medicine. Again, you can’t even talk. The nurse leaves and closes the curtain. Try to pee in the bottle. Keep trying. You can’t. You haven’t drunk anything for days and you’re dehydrated. Now the nurse is yelling at you to pee in the bottle. Make a noise. You want to tell her you’re dehydrated but all you can do is make a noise. Now you’re frustrated. You’re more frustrated than the EMTs were, maybe.  Eventually the staff decides to x-ray your bladder to see if you’re holding out of them. You’re not. Your bladder is completely empty. The fat, brown haired nurse hooks a catheter up to you, up to your dick. It hurts and you hallucinate that you’re getting a Prince Albert from some kind of mad serial piercer or something, a mad serial piercer who pierces people who don’t want be pierced. A mad serial piercer is not piercing you though. A fat, brown haired nurse is hooking you up to a catheter and you start to worry your going to get an erection. There’s nothing sexual about this. This is so far from sexual. What are you even thinking? You’re not going to get an erection. You can’t even make yourself piss, much less get an erection. Eventually the IV hydrates you. Eventually you do urinate and you fill up the bag you’re connected to. There’s some run off and now a small damp patch on your sheets.

            After a few hours your paper work is done and your being brought to the ICU. Maybe they do think you’re a priority, an emergency. Why else would you be on your way to the ICU? Is this more serious than I thought?  You stop hallucinating enough to notice you’re in an elevator, then you kind of pass out, but you don’t pass out. You just fall back into your hallucination. Sometime in the middle of the night, you put the ambulance ride, the catheter and the elevator together and realize you’re in a hospital.  Somehow you didn’t realize that before. You were conscious of everything prior to this but it just didn’t come together. The room is dark and so are the windows. You’re on a psychiatric hold so there is a medical student next to you in a chair. He’s reading a magazine in the dark and Martin is playing on the TV mounted on the wall in the corner of this room. You try to catch your bearings looking around. You recognize the floor pattern - a beige-orange with a maroon running the length of the walls. It’s not tile and its cement. It’s the same material used in roller rinks. Now you know what hospital you’re in. You start thinking about how much fun you had at the roller rink when you were 10 years old, where you held hands with a cute girl named Amy one time, and went around in circles to “Waterfalls” by TLC during a “slow skate”. You had an undercut. The medical student sees your eyes are open and he asks how you’re feeling. You tell him, I don’t know. He asks what the Arabic tattoo on your wrist means. You tell him, I don’t know. That’s really all your can say, but you’re happy to at least be able to talk. The medical student sniffs and screws up his face. Your diaper is dirty. When did you get a diaper? You feel like a baby. He takes off your diaper, cleans you up and puts on a new one. You’re embarrassed of your nakedness. Reach for the TV remote connected to your hospital bed. Put on CNN. You don’t care about Martin Lawrence. You just want something you can ignore. It’s not that you don’t like Martin; you just like Sinbad more. That’s not true. You don’t like either. The light radiating from the television is calming but you really, really don’t want to have to think about anything. You’re not quite there yet. You’re worried you might not wake up again for a while but fall asleep anyway.

            It’s very early and you say to yourself, “It is cloudy and cold out.” It’s not cloudy or cold outside. The windows have a kind of grated tint to them that always gives the outside a grey wintery look. During all of your previous stays at this hospital you tell yourself, “Remember it is not cloudy and cold outside” but, sure enough, you always forget. You think that you shouldn’t visit the hospital so often. It’s not normal. You don’t actually give a s**t though. You left the TV on over night and muted it because you didn’t want the medical student to have to keep reading in the dark but you also didn’t want to distract him. Turn the sound back on and change the channel. You watch A&E but still you don’t pay attention. The First 48 is on and you vaguely note that a gang killed an ex-crack addict on the street in broad daylight. You listen to people who knew her talk about what a wonderful person she was - “She was really trying to turn her life around” In your head you imagine you are in band and playing a concert for everyone in your old high school. You’re playing the guitar and singing. In real life, you can’t sing at all, but in your imagination, you sing like an angel or something, not quite as high though. This is a dream after all, and you already have a pretty high voice and it embarrasses you. They all realize how cool you are now. You smile.

A nurse comes into your room and gives you breakfast on a tray. It is scrambled eggs and toast. Look at the food and decided it all looks gross except for the fresh grapes. You start to wish the medical student would go away and then he gets up to, but then a girl in her early 20’s comes in and sits down. The two know each other and they stop to gossip for a little while about their fellow students and instructors. Listen to them and feel nostalgic about a college life. In college:

 

1. You went to a lot of parties and made a lot of friends. As the parties started to became a little more lively and people began to dance, you’d find yourself in the middle of a circle of people, everyone watching your baffling domination of the Harlem Shake, the Pop and Lock, the Two-Step, etc. Everyone would cheer and cheer until, slowly; the party erupted into one massive synchronized dance routine with you as the leader.

2. You impressed everyone with how smart you are. You always had very interesting ideas and opinions to express that wowed your fellow classmen. Everyone in your Lit Class was blown away by your insights in to The Metamorphosis. They saw you as Kafka himself. Slowly, you literally became a sad Czech Jew with an amazing understanding of alienation and talent of expressing the absurdity of life. You died of tuberculosis before their very eyes, most tragically.

3. You slept with a lot of freshmen. Known around campus as somewhat of a well-endowed stud, you could bed a girl within minutes of meeting her, dazzling her with your charm and wit. Other men viewed you as a myth, an idol. As it’s been said, every girl wanted to f**k you and every guy wanted to be you. In fact, that old saying was created to describe you. Seriously.

4. You were all of your professor’s favorite student. Student might not even be the correct word, as they saw you more as an equal than anything else. You would often find their eyes searching for you after a tough question and your papers became the stuff of legends. You had even received several invitations as a guest instructor. Your professors brought apples to class for you.

 

None of that is true though. You’re just nostalgic for what you thought college was supposed to be like, what you hoped it be like. In reality:

 

1. You didn’t go to a lot of parties and make a lot of new friends. You went to one party one time at a girl’s house that was almost your friend. You ended up getting way too drunk and made a complete a*s of yourself, eventually ending up passed out in the lobby of her building in a pool of what was likely your own vomit. It is possible it was someone else’s which definitely doesn’t make it any better. This girl didn’t want anything to do with you after that. You embarrassed her. You do like dancing, though you’ve stopped doing in front of people long ago because they laugh at you for dancing like Carlton from Fresh Prince.

 

2. You didn’t impress anyone with how smart you are. You kept to yourself during discussions and never expressed any ideas or opinions. Even if you had, you are pretty certain that most of your ideas and opinion are pretty contrived and boring. You had once expressed some thoughts on The Metamorphosis one time. You made some observation about Gregor Samsa’s sister playing the violin and everyone was very confused by the time you finished and they all thought you were an idiot.

 

3. You didn’t sleep with any freshmen. You actually haven’t really met any girl since high school with the exception of a girl named Betsy. You met her at the same party that was previously mentioned. She kissed you one time, then spent the rest of the night avoiding you. You ended up sending her a friend request on Facebook, which she apparently declined. After that, you sent her e-mail after e-mail until she eventually told you to “stop talking her.” You haven’t met any girls since, and you have no idea how to.

 

4. You weren’t any of your professors’ favorite. Your professors didn’t even know who you were. You had one professor who eventually dropped you from a class because as he called role he was no aware of anyone by your name and thus marked you absent week after week. When you approached him to resolve the problem he apologized and said something like, “I guess I didn’t see you there.”

 

Say to yourself, “I’ve wasted so much of my life being boring and keeping to myself.” You weren’t like this before. You had a lot of friends and a lot of luck with girls. You really made an impression on people. You were interesting, and you weren’t so forgettable. You were attractive. (Did I already say that? Because you were! J) Now you’re such a bald, fat, awful-facial-hair piece of s**t. Think, “I’m really going to make some changes,” but don’t follow through on it. You don’t follow through on anything. “I’m really going to start following through on things.” You don’t follow through on that either.

You introduce yourself to the medical student and try to be chummy by telling her you understand how boring this must be. She looks up at you from behind her textbook and laughs " “Oh, it’s not that bad!” She is average height and Latino (Puerto Rican?). You can tell her hair is curly, but it’s gelled back into a ponytail. Her hair is dark brown, almost black. The gel gives her the appearance of having wet hair, which makes it even darker. She wears wire-rimmed oval shaped glasses. You weren’t wearing your glasses when you were picked up by the ambulance, so you can’t see as well as you’d like to. These things you note about the medical students are just broad observations, partially based on your assumptions of what a Latino girl in her early 20’s should look like. That’s so only thing you really know for certain about her " she’s Latino and in her early 20’s. For a moment you think that these assumptions you’re making might be racist but then you decided they are not -  “Whew! Glad we escaped that one!”  Wait, does she have penciled on eyebrows? STOP. The medical student gets back to her textbook and you get back to watching TV " well, kind of watching TV. Outside in the hallway you hear an old man yelling. He’s saying, “No! No! Stop!” then you hear a door slam " Bang! You look at the medical student and kind of raise your eyebrows as if to say, “Oh, boy. Isn’t this nuts? The things we put up with… normal you and normal me…”

The day is boring, very boring. You spend half the day watching The First 48 and the other half watching Dr. Phil. You feel grateful for having control of your own TV as you’re not sharing the room with anyone until another patient comes in at about 9 PM. You listen to him talk to a doctor. You pick up that he is 52 years old, homosexual, HIV positive and got into some situation with a police officer and wound up jumping off the Michigan Ave bridge and nearly died in the process. He apparently broke the law because you also pick up that he’s going to jail once he recovers from whatever it is he’s recovering from. He talks about his daughter and you wonder if she is HIV positive too, and if she was adopted, seeing as he is a homosexual. You were adopted but your parents are not homosexual. Think about how disappointed in you your adoptive parents are and how disappointed in your biological parents you are. The world is a pretty terrible place and you fault them for not deciding on an abortion instead of bringing you into this terrible world. That’s not fair though. They were probably very young and confused. You don’t really know. Also, you really shouldn’t complain about how awful the world is. Things could be a lot worse "a lot worse.

A psychiatrist comes to visit you the next day. He’s young. Maybe 35 years old? He’s pale. He’s tall and thin, lanky even. His face is covered in acne scars. This makes him look even younger, drawing up images of oily pimple covered pubescent faces. He’s going to assess whether or not you’re going to be held in the Psych Ward, but you know this is only for show. You’re already on a psychiatric hold, and that’s why the medical student is there to watch you, to make sure you don’t hurt yourself. When you first got stuck in this pattern " these monthly hospital visits " you used to say to yourself, “Maybe I won’t go to the Psych Ward this time…” You’d even argue with the resident psychiatrist, trying to tell him you weren’t trying to kill yourself, it was an accident, but now you know you have no control over these things. You will always be held in the Psych Ward. The hospital is worried that if they release you and you get out and kill yourself that they will be sued. The doctors have to be able to say that they at least tried; they took precautions. Still, you have to try. You tell the psychiatrist that you weren’t trying to harm yourself. You’re not a threat to yourself or others. He tells you he has to go talk to some people but he’ll be back. Get angry and slam your fist on the mattress. Aaaaarrrgghh!

“I apologize but I’m going to have to send you to Psych. We just can’t risk it. Myself and several other doctors will evalute you once you're on the ward. We’ll contact your personal psychiatrist and set up a withdrawal plan, get you an appointment and figure out what steps can be made to ensure you don’t do this again.” You’re not surprised. You were really expecting this. A nurse comes in and tells you that your insurance isn’t going to cover a stay at this hospital. For a second you think that this means you’ll just be sent home, but then she tells you they are going to have to send you to another hospital, one that’s covered. The nurse prepares you for your transfer. She asks you to get up and try to walk around. Stand up. Your legs are a little wobbly " okay, really wobbly. You almost fall over but catch yourself on the side of the bed. You’re a little weak from lying in a bed for 3 days. The nurse removes the IV from the top of your hand. You bleed more than she expected and she puts a cotton swab on your hand and covers it with a piece of medical tape. Sit and wait for an hour. Things move slowly in the ICU. You have Taylor Swift stuck in your head " shake it off, shake it off, shake, shake. It plays in your head over and over again. You wiggle around in your bed a little to the drumbeat. Two EMTs come into your room to bring you to the ambulance that will transport you to the other hospital. They’re not really EMTs, but they drive an ambulance so you don’t know what else to call them. You think about Bringing Out the Dead - Nicholas Cage driving around in an ambulance with a soulful black man whose real name you don’t know. Actually, you don’t know what his name is in the movie either. You just remember that he was black, had a conk and sang gospel songs. He talked to the female dispatcher on the radio in a low, sensual voice like Isaac Hayes. This makes you think about this kid you went to college with. He was the son of Curtis Mayfield. One of your favorite records is this Otis Redding live double LP that your parents gave you. In your mind, all of these things are related and for a moment you wonder if that’s racist, but you decide it’s not. It’s a soul thing, not a black thing. Okay.

           

4.

 

You’re strapped to a stretcher in the back of the ambulance. The young brown haired kid in the driver’s seat asks if you have any music preferences and you say you don’t care. He’s asks if you’re ready go and you say, “sure.” He turns on a rap station and you recognize one of the songs. You miss your records. It’s a long drive, much longer than you thought it would be. The two guys up in front, the EMTs or whatever, are talking about getting hookers. The driver seems really enthusiastic about this but his buddy is just nodding his head in agreement, probably to shut him up. You don’t think he likes the driver too much. You stare out the rear window and try to keep tabs on where you are, but eventually, you’ve gone so far south that you don’t recognize any landmarks anymore. “Am I even in the city anymore?” You’re not. By the time the EMTs (or whatever they are) pull you out of the ambulance you’re in Oak Lawn. You’ve lived in Chicago for almost 10 years and this is only the second time been to the suburbs. You think, “I’ve got to get out more” but then decide that the suburbs aren’t a place you think you really need to be spending any time in. F**k it. It’s not a large hospital and it’s not a nice hospital. You’re pushed into an elevator and then a hallway. The floor is covered in a dark grey carpet and the walls are a light grey. You pass various large rooms that are under construction; actually, almost the whole building is under construction. “This can’t be sanitary,” you think. You stop at a locked double door and the EMTs (seriously, who are these guys?) press a button. You hear a loud buzz and the door unlocks and your stretcher is pushed through the doors. A nurse asks you if you’re her new patient and you say you think so. The two EMTs turn around and head back through the grey hallway in various states of construction. The Psych Ward looks just as messy as everywhere else in the building. Like the hallway, there is dark grey carpet and light grey walls.

You follow the nurse into a small room where she begins intake. She is maybe in her late 40’s. She is slim with greying blonde hair and tired blue eyes. She looks as if she might have been attractive in her younger years, not that older women can’t be attractive because they can, but she’s not, at least not anymore. She asks you to take your clothes off so she can note any scars or identifying marks. You get undressed and she asks how many tattoos you have " “I don’t know.” You got your first tattoo when you were 15. You got it done by a girl who was trying to learn how to tattoo and, prior to your misshapen nautical star, had never tattooed human skin before. You got a nautical star because of the late 90’s and so on. It looked awful but you thought you were cool anyway because how many 15 year olds have tattoos? The answer is not many. It was springtime and you didn’t wear long sleeves for months but, had it been winter, you still wouldn’t have. The nurse hands you a gown and tells you to get dressed. Ask for another because you’re going to be naked under this and want to be sure you’re covered up. You put on the two gowns and the socks with the rubber grips on the bottom that she hands you. You’re all set. She walks you around the ward pointing out the day room, the various therapy rooms (there’s people talking about their feelings in one of them) and your bed. Thank her and take an apple from the fridge in the day room. For three days all you’ve been eating is grapes, grapes, grapes.

It’s 7 PM now " visiting hour. Your only friend took the Red Line and bus to get to the hospital so she could drop you off some books and just check on your overall wellbeing. She tells you she’s having a difficult time and is having suicidal thoughts. Tell her to try not to worry too much. You know things are tough " things are always tough " but things will always get better eventually too. Visiting hour is over. Give her a hug and tell her you’ll see her once you’re released. Head to your bed and read a Marguerite Duras book. You’re in love with Marguerite Duras. You fall in love with all the authors you read, at least the female ones. That Unica Zurn! Oh, boy! It’s 9:30 " time for PM medication. You’re actually looking forward to your medication. It’s been far too long since you’ve taken your Xanax and without it you’ve been feeling a little… seizure-y? You’re on way too much Xanax. The doctors don’t want to give you any Xanax. The nurse hands you some Clonazepam and a fraction of the Trazodone you’re accustomed to taking. “There’s no way I’m sleeping tonight.” You go to bed and stare at the ceiling for hours. You hear some rustling in the bed next to you. Look over. The guy in the bed next to you is staring at you and jerking off. You try to let him know you’re staring right back at him so he’ll stop. He doesn’t and you roll over. He makes this kind of heavy breathing whimpering sound. merha, merha, merha. He makes a whining sound. Eeeeeeeee. Then he finishes. Ahhhhhhhhh. It must of been quite the orgasm because he sounded so pleased and proud of himself that you couldn’t help but feel a little proud of him too. Good job.

You wake up very early in the morning. It’s still dark out and will be so for some time. You’re exhausted. You feel like you haven’t slept at all, tossing and turning, waking up every 15 minutes. You remember falling asleep but maybe you didn’t really sleep. Maybe you were just really bored. It’s hot. Maybe the air conditioning isn’t working; after all, there is a lot of construction. You get up and walk to the day room but the doors are locked. A nurse sees you and tells you to go back to your room. Go back to your room and stare at the ceiling yet again. You miss the Internet. You miss looking at pictures of Bulldog puppies on Pinterest. You follow a bulldog picture group on Facebook. It’s normally really cute but people are always posting about their dogs that are dying of old age or getting surgery and not waking up. You don’t miss that. You don’t miss dead bulldogs. After an hour, you get up and look out the window. The building is shaped like an H. You look across the corridor into the window of the dayroom. The lights are on now. You wait in the dayroom on a pleather couch as it slowly fills with the rest of the patients on the ward. There are people lined up to use the two telephones on the grey wall next to the wide windows. You think you should call someone. You wait your turn. Pick up the phone. You dial your cell phone number and talk out loud to your voicemail. Talk to your voicemail like you’re talking to an actual human being, someone who loves you and feels dizzy when you’re around. The other patients will hear you and will know that you are loved.

 

“Hi, honey”

“Oh, I’m okay. It’s rough, but I’m okay. How are you?”

“I miss you too!”

“You stop it. You’re making me blush.”

“Well, I think you’re beautiful too!”

“You really think I’m as smart as all that?”

“That’s just very nice of you to say. That’s all.”

“I know what you mean. I’ll be out soon though.”

“Do you think you can visit me today?”

“Visitors are allowed from 7 to 8.”

“No, silly. 7 PM. Why would anyone visit a hospital at 7 in the morning?”

“Okay… Yes… So I’ll see you tonight then?”

“Great. I have to go.”

“Awww, I love you too!”

“Ha, ha. Okay. Bye!”

 

You turn around and give the big guy behind you an I’m-pretty-lucky look. He farts and starts yelling gibberish. You wish, buster.

You eat another apple for breakfast and follow everyone into the music therapy room. The group is lead by a woman in her late 40’s with short red hair and black-rimmed glasses She is wearing these arty looking earrings, like something you’d find at a craft fair. She listens to All Things Considered in her hybrid car on the way to work, Democracy Now on the way home. Her apartment is full of PBS documentary DVDs. During this particular session, everyone picks a song they’d like to hear and the woman with the short red hair and black-rimmed glasses plays it on her computer. You think she’s using Spotify. You listen to track after track of rap songs you’ve never heard before. And b***h if it’s a problem we gon’ gun brawl/Shots poppin’ out the AR. It’s your turn. Ask her to play The Smittens or Heavenly or something equally cute, sweet and a little obnoxious. I can’t wait to see your face/I like staying at your place/and the way you make my heart race. You feel happy and warm but everyone else is wondering what the hell they’re listening to.

A psychiatrist pulls you out of the room halfway through your song. You know you’re about to be evaluated, which means you’re one stop closer to you’re discharge but you were really enjoying your song and almost ask him to wait a couple minutes but end up going with him anyway. You feel a little more confident in this guy than you did in the young, lanky psychiatrist at the last hospital. You know intellectual types always have beards, and this guy’s got a grey one, so he must be good. There’s a little more color in his hair than on his face, it’s more salt and pepper. He looks far healthier than the last psychiatrist. This gives you reassurance that he’s paid well; he can afford to eat more. The other psychiatrist looked like he was starving. You are healthy (fat). The healthy are your people. This is a man to be trusted. He started with the usual round of questions:

 

“How old are you?”

“Have you been hospitalized before?”

“Do you take drugs recreationally?”

“Are you sure?”

“I only ask because the drug test revealed a significant amount of methadone your blood stream.”

 

Methadone? You are decidedly not a drug user. Even when you did socially use drugs, you certainly never used anything as serious as heroin, which seems like it would significantly lessen the likelihood of you ending up on methadone. The doctor tells you that he has heard of certain circumstances in which Benzodiazepines have shown up as false-positives for opiates. This has to have been the case. You picture yourself in some dark alley. You’re all sprawled out on the ground, leaning against a brick wall. You’re wearing torn up acid washed blue jeans and a dirty black hoodie. It is snowing. There are big bags under your blood shot eyes, they’re half closed and you keep nodding off, a needle in your forearm. “This is what I would look like if I was a heroin addict,” you think.  Next, you picture yourself standing in a line. You are wearing black leather boots, jeans, a white shirt and a black leather jacket. Your hair is spikey and there is a ragtag blonde standing next to you. She’s your girlfriend. A man behind a table hands you a cup with orange juice and what you know to be methadone in it. This is actually a scene from Sid and Nancy. “This is probably not what heroin addiction is actually like,” you say to yourself. “That was a very bad movie and Gary Oldman is a ridiculous actor. He was also pretty terrible in Léon the Professional. I do not like Gary Oldman. Natalie Portman is pretty cute though, but she was like 8 years old in that movie.” The psychiatrist tells you that he will give you another drug test, and if you test negative for methadone, he’ll release you that very day. You get excited about the thought of going home and say, “Alright. Give me a cup!” The doctor tells you to see a nurse for the cup.

You get a cup for your drug test from someone at the nurse’s station. You don’t know if she’s actually a nurse but she did give you the cup and she had spoken to the psychiatrist and knew about the drug test. Take the cup to the bathroom. You get a little pee on your hands and wash it off with some soap and water. (It’s gross, but you actually normally don’t wash your hands after using the bathroom) Take the now warm yellow cup back to the nurse's station. You give the cup to the same women that gave it to you. “We’ll send this off and give the result to your doctor.”

You’re feeling pretty good. You’re excited about going home and you want to share that excitement with someone, that’s making you feel talkative. There’s a group going on in the dayroom. All 12 of the patients on the ward are sitting on the dark grey carpets and light grey pleather couches you sat and waited on this morning. You don’t know what this group is all about and you don’t care. You wait for the overweight social worker to look at you and just start talking like she actually asked you a question.

“Yeah, um… Well, I don’t think I really belong here. I had some trouble with my medication a few days ago… I guess I drank a little too much and it didn’t mix well with all the different medications I take at night and that wound up getting me in the ER. I took a drug test and ended up getting a false-positive for methadone so I guess that the psychiatrist thought I was some kind of heroin addict, trying to kill myself by purposely mixing the methadone with a bunch of prescription drugs. Well, not drugs. You know, medication, my normal medication. Anyways, so I just talked to my psychiatrist here and he’s giving me another drug test. He said that if there’s no methadone, if no methadone shows up in the tests, that he’d discharge me today. I’m pretty excited about that. I really want to be home right now. I’m homesick or whatever. I want a cigarette really badly, too. I haven’t had a cigarettes in days and it’s really driving me nuts.”

This starts a bit of a shark frenzy in the group. Everyone’s talking over each other, talking about how they don’t belong here either. There’s one woman, she’s probably about 22 or so, short, black, very large, you’ve heard her talking all day about how she’s being discharged this afternoon. She’s saying it very loudly. The social worker is trying to get her to calm down a little bit. She keeps trying to remind the woman that her psychiatrist told her today just wouldn’t be the day. This makes the woman very loud. She starts cursing at the social worker and then she flips a coffee table over. Magazines go everywhere. They aren’t really magazines, per say. They’re actually countless editions of the monthly NAMI newsletter. She’s going absolutely nuts. She’s crying, and screaming, “This is some bullshit! This is f*****g bullshit!” Everyone’s going nuts and you regret having said anything. You look at the social worker and mouth, “I’m sorry.” You’re making a face like, yikes. All the excitement is either making you very bored or very anxious, so you decide to go to your room and get out of there. 

Author's Note

Ignore grammar problems.