July 20, 1982 (Day Two)
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ahunter3= July 20, 1982 (Day Two) =
It takes me a couple beats to figure out what bed I’ve awakened in. Clinically austere room, particle-board side table, a chest of drawers into which I’d unpacked my clothes. Oh yeah. Elk Meadow Hospital. The clinic place. God that was a long day, yeesh, what a way to start a therapeutic retreat, huh?
I dive into a long hot shower, steaming up the tiny bathroom, stretching and inhaling the steam. The needles of water feel good on the back of my neck and shoulders. Towel off and fetch undies and socks and a fresh t-shirt. Consider wearing the same jeans, then decide to start fresh there too. Transfer wallet and keys and pocketwatch and belt.
I meander out into the hallway. A blue Smurf waves to me from the cheerfully painted mural on the wall. Heart's "Even it Up" plays from the institutional speakers. Undeniably a different ambience than any psychiatric hospital I've ever seen, either as a nursing student or as a patient.
I smell bacon frying and follow my nose towards the dining room, get handed a tray, pick out scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns. No Tabasco sauce available. Shake a bunch of black pepper onto my eggs instead. Coffee. Mmm.
“Oh, there you are”, greets a guy in his mid-30s. Broad hand forward for a handshake. Blond hair blow-dried to the side, off-center red tie, friendly grin. “You’re Derek, right? I’m Mark Raybourne. I’ll be your personal counselor. I have a schedule for you”.
Mark hands me a sheet of paper with a grid of boxes. Weekdays listed along the top. Hours on the left. “This column is today. Morning meeting is in an hour so you’ve got time to eat and relax. Did Emily show you where the unit meeting room is? Down that hall and second door on your right. You have me after that, I’ll come get you. Then you have recreation with Joanne. And so on, you see the room numbers here and the times over here, just like school, right?”
I study the schedule. Yeah, a lot like school, except that in high school you get to go home at three o’clock, and even in college you don’t usually enroll in an array of classes that occupy the whole day without interruption. Mark gives my shoulder a pat and departs; I finish my breakfast.
* * *
“Good morning, Unit Two! How are we feeling?” The chirpy redhead leans forward into the microphone. “Turn to your left and high-five your neighbor! Now turn to your right and pass it on!”
I can play along. We all whack hands in mid-air.
“Thank you, Irma”, says an elegant guy with salt-and-pepper hair, attired in a maroon sports jacket. He seems to be in charge. He has an animated face...something about his eyes and eyebrows seem to be full of inquiry as he looks around the room. Well? Well? He is smiling. He dominates the room, and people who I gather are staff seem happy to accede to that. Whoever he is, this is his show and he’s got a following.
“Let’s start with the personal accomplishments”, he says. “Moving to first tier we have Miriam, Valerie, and Richard. You have made amazing progress these last few weeks.”
He slows his pace and puts his hand to his chin for a moment. “Valerie... Miss ‘Somebody Else Broke Me So They’re the Ones Responsible for Fixing Me’... you’re learning to take responsibility for your life, but you still resent it. At least you’re listening. It gets better, I promise.”
Valerie, who is about my age with spiked black hair, is glaring; her mouth is pinched on one side. I think she’s going to respond, but she doesn’t.
“Also in motion we have Ellen, who has fought hard to reach this point, haven’t you? And John B., who’s been digging in. Welcome to second tier. Congratulations to the new third tier people, too, I apologize if I don’t call all of your names at this time, but you’ve made the transition to becoming a part of our community, and all of you deserve applause for deciding to make a go of it here.”
“Dr. Barnes”, says the perky redheaded person who apparently is Irma, “I think we should ask them all to stand and be recognized for their accomplishments.”
Dr. Barnes grins and waves upwards and a multitude of people stand. Someone starts applauding and it catches on. Barnes is amazingly expressive with his shoulders, his eyebrows, those gesturing hands.
“I want to welcome the new people joining us today”, he proclaims. “You’ve made a deeply personal decision to work on your own selves and become who you were intended to be. It won’t be easy but it is brave and you won’t be alone.”
An announcement is made that people coming or going through the south hall should be cautious because it was on the schedule for being mopped and polished today. Someone lost a keyring, please return it if you find it.
* * *
“Come on in”, Mark Raybourne says, indicating the chairs in front of his desk. He's scribbling notes on a ledger but leaves it sitting on his desk. He rises and comes around to sit at the other chair in front, resting his hands on his knees, smiling. “I appreciate you coming on time. So... mostly I’m your person for when it makes more sense to talk one on one instead of in a group. That can be when you just want to ask for a day pass or anything that doesn’t really involve the others, or it can be something where it feels too personal to talk about yet in front of other people.”
I nod. “That makes sense. So far my only major concern is that I feel like everyone is telling me exactly how it’s going to be for me here and what I’m going to discover about myself, but no one has asked me about what I came here for, or what I want from the program. It’s getting rather irritating. But I did just get here.”
“Yeah, I guess it can seem that way when you first arrive. There is a lot of focused activity, a lot of structure that you might not be used to in your everyday life.”
“Well, not this specific structure, that’s for sure. I was recently in a nursing program with classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and practical rotation at the hospital on other days, so I’m used to schedules and timeframes and due dates for things and all that.”
While I was speaking, Mark had been removing his glasses with one finger, after which he pulled out a shirt tail, and is now wiping smudges from the lenses.
“I saw that when I was reading your admission survey. You were studying to be an RN?”
“No, just an LPN. Although I was open to going back for the RN later if it worked out.”
“But it didn’t? You dropped out or got expelled from the program or something like that?”
“Yeah, exactly. I discovered that I like patients, I like learning biology and medicine, and I mostly get along with other nursing staff and aides...but I don’t much care for hospitals.”
Mark replaces his glasses on his nose. “So did you show up impaired? Miss class because of blackouts?”
“No, but I was expected to find a way to make patients accept treatment when they were refusing, and we got into an argument about the ethics of that.”
“Do you tend to be hot-tempered and get into a lot of arguments with people?”
“I don’t think I’m at all the temper tantrum type. I am stubborn and passionate about things, and my...I had a girlfriend who told me once that my mind keeps on making unexpected left-hand turns without signaling first.”
“Girlfriend, huh? Were you about to say something else?
“Well, we’re kind of off-again, on-again. She lives in New Mexico and I’ve been in Georgia for the last year and a half. And we’re not exclusive.”
“Uh huh. I saw from your admissions survey that you’ve had sex with men?”
“I remember that question. That’s the kind of thing I was talking about. Someone just arrives here and immediately they’re filling out pages and pages of forms with all these really personal questions on them, and none of them are about ‘Hey, what brings you here?’, so it feels kind of dehumanizing.”
“Some people will say ‘girlfriend’ or use ‘she’ as a way to avoid people’s attitudes if they find out they sleep with men.”
“Aah... no, the person who made the left-hand turns comment about how my mind works is an actual female person, I didn’t invent her or anything. I don’t have any sexual encounters with male people, I mean I tried it. I’d been accused of it all my life so I was already paying the price of people’s attitudes whether I did it or not, but I didn’t much care for it. I actually don’t tend to like men very often as people. The person I tried it with was my best friend in junior high and high school, one of the exceptions. Problem is, I don’t really care much for male bodies and their shapes and smells. I don’t mean like they’re icky or repellent, but they don’t do anything for me in an appetite way.”
“But when you’re a bit strung out and that’s what’s available, it sometimes happens, huh?”
“Umm... are you asking whether I have a substance abuse problem? You’ve kind of made several allusions in that direction.”
“Well, you gotta look at it this way... being a man is a lot about seizing your own fate, and choosing what you want to do, what’s best for you. One problem with drugs is that it interferes with that, because it messes with your clear-headedness, and that makes you vulnerable. You end up with things happening that maybe aren’t what you want. Maybe under the influence you aren’t so picky, or you look around and things are happening to you and you just don’t care and you let it happen.”
“I don’t consider myself to have a drug problem. I drink beer and smoke pot on weekends and I like to drop acid on occasion, but I don’t have any sense that I’m careening out of control and smashing up my own life or anything. And also I’m not into that whole ‘be a man’ thing, all obsessed with control. I think my sexuality is like that of a woman, my personality as well, I call myself a heterosexual sissy. Or a straightbackwards person, because in my relationships with women I’m not usually the butch.”
“Maybe that’s something you could work on here. Put that behind you.”
“Why would I want to do that? It’s not a problem in need of fixing.”
“Well, I think this has given both of us a lot of material, a lot of things to think about. I have a clearer sense of you now that I’ve met you. I look forward to our next session.”
Mark gets up from his chair so I do as well, and we walk down the hall corridor together, rubber-soled shoes making squeaks on the freshly polished linoleum. “Is that more or less the usual amount of time for these individual sessions?”, I ask him.
“Yeah, man, it’s not like psychoanalysis, I’m not going to ask you about how your Mom weaned you or what you thought about your potty training. It’s just a chance to say ‘So how’s it going’ and, you know, if you want to air some grievances or you got something on your mind.”
“Fair enough. Hey, if I’m going to recreation, where do I actually go?”
“Right out through those double doors. You’ll see some people already hanging out, and Joanne will be out momentarily. See you later on.”
* * *
The patchy lawn descends between brick walls down to a sidewalk and an assortment of concrete areas with painted lines on them, I’m guessing for handball or some similar sport. Tufts of grass grow between the sidewalk panels.
One of the female residents I’d been introduced to during my walking tour of Elk Meadow Hospital yesterday is there, I remember her chain that made me think about bikers, a chain from her back pocket wallet to her belt. Dark hair. Denim jacket with the arms chopped off at the seam. She’s speaking to the large jowly guy, the one who tends to speak with a boomy voice, Jake, I think.
“Where’d you just come from?”, she’s asking him. “You havin’ it out with Stevens?”
“Fuck no, I don’t give a shit about Stevens. I just got out of bio kickback. Just starin’ at the lines on the screen and kickin’ back.” Jake hooks his thumbs into his belt loops and closes his eyes and leans his head back self-indulgently. Jake occupies space, horizontally and vertically. Confident and casual, a muscular Pillsbury doughboy looming over everyone else.
Biker Mama gives me a brief nod as I approach. “Hey. You look like you’re still adjusting to arrival.” I nod back.
Jake acknowledges me too. “Umm. David? No, Daryl, right?”
“Close. Derek. And you’re Jake?”
“Yep, sure am. This is April, and here comes Ronald. I bet you like rock music, huh?”
“Yeah, totally”, I confirm. “Led Zeppelin, Heart, Pink Floyd, all that album oriented rock.”
“I figured, because you got the hair. I once had mine that long.”
The person identified as Ronald says “Hi” to April; then to Jake and me, joining the conversation, “Yeah, it looks cool when it’s long, but that’s also not the best way to stick with winners.”
He sizes me up for a moment. “You just got here, didn’t you? You probably never thought about it this way, but, see, you wear your hair like that so you can fit in with people who use drugs, so it’s a dead giveaway about where your head is at.”
I am annoyed again, but he isn’t entirely wrong and I decide I’ll acknowledge that even if he does seem to be trying to pick a quarrel about it. “I had my hair short all through high school, but the group of people I drifted towards, who seemed to accept me best, were the town potheads. And I associated smoking pot with having long hair, and rock music and the ideas about a counterculture, so it all kind of fit together.” I run my fingers through my hair, shaking it out and tossing my head at the same time. Flouncy Derek, luxuriating in my appearance. “But the other part of it was that I associated it all with gentle peaceful guys, and with sex that wasn’t all grabby and aggressive, all that peace and harmony stuff. Later on, I realized I didn’t fit in with the countercultural guys either, but I still like the long hair because it’s pretty, and I still fit better with the longhaired guys than with the ones who cut it short, for lots of reasons.”
“If drugs isn’t the center focus of your life, you could get rid of that. Brand yourself to the world as somebody who’s ready to straighten out and fly right.” Ronald has sandy brown hair with little waves in it. Tall narrow face, horse face with a long flat nose. He’d look better if he grew his hair out.
I point to April with my thumb. “My hair’s about the same length as hers. That’s what I like about it. It’s a way of saying I got a lot in common with the women. If she can have her hair long and not be accused of having it long to get drugs, I get to have mine long too, or else you’re being sexist about it.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it. It’s different for girls.”
“Hey folks”, calls out a young woman in a track suit, walking towards us with a ball bat and and softball. Ellen, about thirty, the resident from yesterday with the short chopped hair and a tight face, is walking with her, carrying a pasteboard box with equipment, gloves and things.
The woman in the track suit announces, “I’m Joanne, for those who don’t know me. I guess actually that’s just you,” she finishes, nodding at me.
“Derek. Hi.”
She shifts to addressing us all. “Let’s give it a few more minutes to see if we get some more people, but I thought we’d do a few innings of softball. We can double up on some positions, catcher and outfielders, and just play for fun, if we don’t have enough for teams.”
Ellen stands close to April. “Hey”, April says.
“Hey.”
Joanne returns to speaking directly to me. “Dr. Barnes likes us to get exercise and do some playing, he says if a person puts their focus on sorting out their situation and processing what they’re feeling and tries to do all that indoors in chairs and couches, it’s like a bottleneck, you get a lot of tension that gets corked up and it’s got to come out if you want to stay relaxed enough to make progress”.
“That makes all kinds of sense”, I say. “I’ve read about holistic health and mind-body-spirit, ... I like to go for long walks, it’s my favorite way of letting stuff in the back of my head sort itself out.”
Behind Joanne, April is asking Ellen something quietly; I don’t catch all the words but from fragments and how they hold themselves, their body language, I think April is asking Ellen if it’s all right or if she’s doing okay. Some of that tightness leaves Ellen’s face. It’s a nice face, a sort of pixie face, the kind that can be expressive when it’s not walled off.
Softball isn’t one of my favorites. I’m not very good at most things that involve aiming and throwing or catching. I stand out in the field to try to intercept the ball if someone hits it my way, and I take my turn swinging badly at the pitch. Part of the purpose, of course, is to get us talking and interacting, relaxed with each other, and I try not to let my dislike for the sport get in the way of that, but I’m also not very good at casual chatter with people I don’t really know yet. It always seems like so much of it is geared towards reassuring the other people that you’re just like they are, and I don’t like to pretend that I am. I mean, I am in at least some ways with most people, but we kind of have to compare notes before we discover those points in common, and in lots of other ways I’m atypical. I think at a certain point in a person’s life, if they have a few too many odd corners and strange surfaces, they stop aspiring to blend in and just accept that they’re different, and after that they have less resistance to anything in themselves that’s also different.
Anyway, I chime in a few times, agreeing or adding some comment of my own, but mostly I just kind of hang out there not being very interactive and also not getting much exercise, and thinking I’d really rather have some time to go off on a long walk and think about things.
* * *
Next on the schedule is psychodrama. I walk down the hallway looking for the room I was shown yesterday, looking for the door with the matching room number. The PA system speakers play a very contagious rock piece, “Jack and Diane” by John Cougar. Song about a lot of optimism and courage and “you and me against the world” spirit that doesn’t take them very far, so kind of a sad song, but touching since at least here’s a song about them, celebrating them anyway.
On the wall is a mural I’ve passed a few times, and I pause to take it in more closely. An angry elk glaring out from the painting, actually snorting steam or smoke from its nostrils. “ELK MEADOW” painted in a loop above it. “NO DRUGS” in a parallel loop below.
Very macho. An elk you shouldn’t fuck with, an elk to be reckoned with. All that “I am so domineering and in charge because of what I can do to the rest of you if you challenge me” stuff just turns me off. Shouldn’t people coming to a place like this get encouraged to be vulnerable and take the risk of trusting instead of lured into snorting smoke and menacing people with their horns?
Psychodrama is another large room with a stage and they have video recorders and tape recorders all over the place. Make movies about your life. The person on the hot seat is April. It sounds like a resumption of a conversation that everyone has had with her before:
“I loved my mom, and I wanted her to love me, that’s natural, right? But at first it was like she has a very important busy life and it has to come first, and I get the leftovers. So, like, I ask for more. ‘I want two hours of your attention between when you come home and when we sit to supper. Not to tell me what I did wrong at school, or for me to tell you what you did wrong as a mommy, but just us, you know, what was your day like?’”
It sounds to me like an overall self-empowering message, a good stance to take, but Jake is less impressed. “But you already knew she couldn't do that, right? I mean, you told us before that you'd realized by then that she needs to be the all-suffering Mama who sacrifices everything, she's all invested in that, so like if you took that away from her she wouldn't know what to do?”
“Well, yeah, I guess”, April acknowledges. “She always needed me to be the bad girl who misbehaves. The more she could get me to strike at her, then everything is my fault and how I am gonna hafta change, it becomes all about I’m the one who needs to get herself changed.”
“So you tossed that little bread crumb out there, ‘Let's just talk for a couple hours and see if we can be friends’, knowing that wasn't gonna fly, and then you spread your wings and flew the fuck away from that, because she couldn’t do it, huh? You were already out that door. For better or worse, you’d made your decision already. If you'd really meant to connect to her you knew it was gonna take a long time for her to get past her own shit. She didn't put you out, you did”.
Jake shrugs and continues. “Don’t get that I’m sayin’ you shouldn’t have split, like I get why it was time. Just that you shouldn’t say she put you out. You carry that around a lot.”
There’s a lot of silence after Joe finishes speaking. Marie and Jeremy are the psychodrama facilitators, and I see that they step in and prompt if none of the other program residents is saying anything. Marie, mid-twenties gal in a denim skirt with butterfly barrettes in her hair, suggests, “What would you say to her if you had her here in the room today?”
Jeremy, the other facilitator, guy about Marie’s age with spiky red hair and a gold necktie weirdly looped around his neck like a scarf, chimes in, “Let Marie be your mom. Don’t censor anything, just let fly with it.”
April takes a breath, then faces Marie-Mom and snarls, “I got nothing thanks to you. Like you care! I was just trash for the garbage can as far as you were concerned, well, you win, it all went to shit. I can’t get my life together because you never bothered to show me how. How do you like your daughter the junkie waste, Mom? Are you fucking proud?”
It’s riveting and real; For the first time since I arrived, it feels like some valid process is taking place, something other than repeated promises about how good this damn place is going to be for me.
April looks tough and fragile at the same time. I want to comfort her. I want to make up for how her life has felt so far.
Marie isn’t taking that approach. “You listen to yourself? You’re giving her all the power. Mommy’s the reason you can’t live a decent life, got nothing at all to do with you, so you’re going to punish her by proving she’s right and being a nothing, yeah that’ll teach her.”
Now April looks cornered, attacked. Unsurprising. Wow.
Jake is at her too. “You can’t blame her for everything. I’m not saying she wasn’t a shitty mother in a lot of ways, but we learn to stick with winners and plot our own course. That stuff’s for real, you know.”
* * *
The bell marking the end of the period occupied by psychodrama rings, and people disperse. I stumble out into the hallway with new thoughts. That hadn’t been all good. There’d been something kind of ambush-y about it, and also something just a bit scripted. But there’d been the potential for something very healthy going on in there. I mean they were talking about really personal gut-level vulnerable stuff, the kind of stuff people don’t talk about.
I’d told my dad I’d avoid making up my mind against the place from the outset. The fact that my parents love me didn’t mean it was in my best interest to go the direction they wanted me to, but it did kind of mean they really thought it was. So I should consider what they think is in my own best interests. Similarly, the fact that this institution, Elk Meadow, is considered to be a helpful presence for people under stress and conflict doesn’t mean that it isn’t; it actually could be. Overwhelmingly, I have a considerably greater confidence in the parental than the therapeutic but if I were going to consider this place for real, I have to walk a tightrope. Wary trust, as oxymoronic as that conjugates, you know what I mean?
Yeah. Come show me what you got. I’m actually earnest, not cynical, even if I’m jaded. I mean, it’s not like I have a plan and a next destination. God I’d love a plan and a destination, I seem stuck in perpetual figure-things-out mode.
“Oh there you are, Derek”, a voice says from behind me.
I finish recomposing myself from my startle and recognize Emily and nod. I’m again struck by how she looks attired and coiffed to go to the office. I mean, there’s a dress for the office thing that women often have to deal with, but it’s like she’s feeling power from it and really into it, and she’s just a resident. Today she’s in matching grey vest and pants. The staffers Jeremy and Marie definitely look more casually dressed.
“One of the things you may have seen?”, Emily suggests, “...the way people like Jake and Bob get involved in April’s, or anyone’s, therapy. Part of your own therapeutic goals should be participation in other folks’ process. I mean, your participation is actually one of the things you get graded on. Here at Elk Meadow we don’t believe in experts. It’s not like Dr. Barnes can fix us with a magic gesture. Healing comes as part of a community and we all have to participate in making that happen.”
Emily is interesting. Staff is a social role composed of behaviors and appearance and vocal tone, not just the fact of being on the employment roster, and although she isn’t on staff, she’s doing that role with almost military intensity and precision. She’s all-in on this place, very obedient follower, but it’s also like seizing authority, especially in a setting where the staff don’t wear uniforms or sport name tags. She presents as a professional and she clearly has familiarity with the role. Take me seriously.
I wonder if she’s mocking them derisively. It would be so funny if she were.
I wonder if there’s something sexist about me thinking she’s been acting like staff but not thinking that of Joe. I mean, he’s all in on this place too.
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
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Index of all Blog Posts
It takes me a couple beats to figure out what bed I’ve awakened in. Clinically austere room, particle-board side table, a chest of drawers into which I’d unpacked my clothes. Oh yeah. Elk Meadow Hospital. The clinic place. God that was a long day, yeesh, what a way to start a therapeutic retreat, huh?
I dive into a long hot shower, steaming up the tiny bathroom, stretching and inhaling the steam. The needles of water feel good on the back of my neck and shoulders. Towel off and fetch undies and socks and a fresh t-shirt. Consider wearing the same jeans, then decide to start fresh there too. Transfer wallet and keys and pocketwatch and belt.
I meander out into the hallway. A blue Smurf waves to me from the cheerfully painted mural on the wall. Heart's "Even it Up" plays from the institutional speakers. Undeniably a different ambience than any psychiatric hospital I've ever seen, either as a nursing student or as a patient.
I smell bacon frying and follow my nose towards the dining room, get handed a tray, pick out scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns. No Tabasco sauce available. Shake a bunch of black pepper onto my eggs instead. Coffee. Mmm.
“Oh, there you are”, greets a guy in his mid-30s. Broad hand forward for a handshake. Blond hair blow-dried to the side, off-center red tie, friendly grin. “You’re Derek, right? I’m Mark Raybourne. I’ll be your personal counselor. I have a schedule for you”.
Mark hands me a sheet of paper with a grid of boxes. Weekdays listed along the top. Hours on the left. “This column is today. Morning meeting is in an hour so you’ve got time to eat and relax. Did Emily show you where the unit meeting room is? Down that hall and second door on your right. You have me after that, I’ll come get you. Then you have recreation with Joanne. And so on, you see the room numbers here and the times over here, just like school, right?”
I study the schedule. Yeah, a lot like school, except that in high school you get to go home at three o’clock, and even in college you don’t usually enroll in an array of classes that occupy the whole day without interruption. Mark gives my shoulder a pat and departs; I finish my breakfast.
* * *
“Good morning, Unit Two! How are we feeling?” The chirpy redhead leans forward into the microphone. “Turn to your left and high-five your neighbor! Now turn to your right and pass it on!”
I can play along. We all whack hands in mid-air.
“Thank you, Irma”, says an elegant guy with salt-and-pepper hair, attired in a maroon sports jacket. He seems to be in charge. He has an animated face...something about his eyes and eyebrows seem to be full of inquiry as he looks around the room. Well? Well? He is smiling. He dominates the room, and people who I gather are staff seem happy to accede to that. Whoever he is, this is his show and he’s got a following.
“Let’s start with the personal accomplishments”, he says. “Moving to first tier we have Miriam, Valerie, and Richard. You have made amazing progress these last few weeks.”
He slows his pace and puts his hand to his chin for a moment. “Valerie... Miss ‘Somebody Else Broke Me So They’re the Ones Responsible for Fixing Me’... you’re learning to take responsibility for your life, but you still resent it. At least you’re listening. It gets better, I promise.”
Valerie, who is about my age with spiked black hair, is glaring; her mouth is pinched on one side. I think she’s going to respond, but she doesn’t.
“Also in motion we have Ellen, who has fought hard to reach this point, haven’t you? And John B., who’s been digging in. Welcome to second tier. Congratulations to the new third tier people, too, I apologize if I don’t call all of your names at this time, but you’ve made the transition to becoming a part of our community, and all of you deserve applause for deciding to make a go of it here.”
“Dr. Barnes”, says the perky redheaded person who apparently is Irma, “I think we should ask them all to stand and be recognized for their accomplishments.”
Dr. Barnes grins and waves upwards and a multitude of people stand. Someone starts applauding and it catches on. Barnes is amazingly expressive with his shoulders, his eyebrows, those gesturing hands.
“I want to welcome the new people joining us today”, he proclaims. “You’ve made a deeply personal decision to work on your own selves and become who you were intended to be. It won’t be easy but it is brave and you won’t be alone.”
An announcement is made that people coming or going through the south hall should be cautious because it was on the schedule for being mopped and polished today. Someone lost a keyring, please return it if you find it.
* * *
“Come on in”, Mark Raybourne says, indicating the chairs in front of his desk. He's scribbling notes on a ledger but leaves it sitting on his desk. He rises and comes around to sit at the other chair in front, resting his hands on his knees, smiling. “I appreciate you coming on time. So... mostly I’m your person for when it makes more sense to talk one on one instead of in a group. That can be when you just want to ask for a day pass or anything that doesn’t really involve the others, or it can be something where it feels too personal to talk about yet in front of other people.”
I nod. “That makes sense. So far my only major concern is that I feel like everyone is telling me exactly how it’s going to be for me here and what I’m going to discover about myself, but no one has asked me about what I came here for, or what I want from the program. It’s getting rather irritating. But I did just get here.”
“Yeah, I guess it can seem that way when you first arrive. There is a lot of focused activity, a lot of structure that you might not be used to in your everyday life.”
“Well, not this specific structure, that’s for sure. I was recently in a nursing program with classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and practical rotation at the hospital on other days, so I’m used to schedules and timeframes and due dates for things and all that.”
While I was speaking, Mark had been removing his glasses with one finger, after which he pulled out a shirt tail, and is now wiping smudges from the lenses.
“I saw that when I was reading your admission survey. You were studying to be an RN?”
“No, just an LPN. Although I was open to going back for the RN later if it worked out.”
“But it didn’t? You dropped out or got expelled from the program or something like that?”
“Yeah, exactly. I discovered that I like patients, I like learning biology and medicine, and I mostly get along with other nursing staff and aides...but I don’t much care for hospitals.”
Mark replaces his glasses on his nose. “So did you show up impaired? Miss class because of blackouts?”
“No, but I was expected to find a way to make patients accept treatment when they were refusing, and we got into an argument about the ethics of that.”
“Do you tend to be hot-tempered and get into a lot of arguments with people?”
“I don’t think I’m at all the temper tantrum type. I am stubborn and passionate about things, and my...I had a girlfriend who told me once that my mind keeps on making unexpected left-hand turns without signaling first.”
“Girlfriend, huh? Were you about to say something else?
“Well, we’re kind of off-again, on-again. She lives in New Mexico and I’ve been in Georgia for the last year and a half. And we’re not exclusive.”
“Uh huh. I saw from your admissions survey that you’ve had sex with men?”
“I remember that question. That’s the kind of thing I was talking about. Someone just arrives here and immediately they’re filling out pages and pages of forms with all these really personal questions on them, and none of them are about ‘Hey, what brings you here?’, so it feels kind of dehumanizing.”
“Some people will say ‘girlfriend’ or use ‘she’ as a way to avoid people’s attitudes if they find out they sleep with men.”
“Aah... no, the person who made the left-hand turns comment about how my mind works is an actual female person, I didn’t invent her or anything. I don’t have any sexual encounters with male people, I mean I tried it. I’d been accused of it all my life so I was already paying the price of people’s attitudes whether I did it or not, but I didn’t much care for it. I actually don’t tend to like men very often as people. The person I tried it with was my best friend in junior high and high school, one of the exceptions. Problem is, I don’t really care much for male bodies and their shapes and smells. I don’t mean like they’re icky or repellent, but they don’t do anything for me in an appetite way.”
“But when you’re a bit strung out and that’s what’s available, it sometimes happens, huh?”
“Umm... are you asking whether I have a substance abuse problem? You’ve kind of made several allusions in that direction.”
“Well, you gotta look at it this way... being a man is a lot about seizing your own fate, and choosing what you want to do, what’s best for you. One problem with drugs is that it interferes with that, because it messes with your clear-headedness, and that makes you vulnerable. You end up with things happening that maybe aren’t what you want. Maybe under the influence you aren’t so picky, or you look around and things are happening to you and you just don’t care and you let it happen.”
“I don’t consider myself to have a drug problem. I drink beer and smoke pot on weekends and I like to drop acid on occasion, but I don’t have any sense that I’m careening out of control and smashing up my own life or anything. And also I’m not into that whole ‘be a man’ thing, all obsessed with control. I think my sexuality is like that of a woman, my personality as well, I call myself a heterosexual sissy. Or a straightbackwards person, because in my relationships with women I’m not usually the butch.”
“Maybe that’s something you could work on here. Put that behind you.”
“Why would I want to do that? It’s not a problem in need of fixing.”
“Well, I think this has given both of us a lot of material, a lot of things to think about. I have a clearer sense of you now that I’ve met you. I look forward to our next session.”
Mark gets up from his chair so I do as well, and we walk down the hall corridor together, rubber-soled shoes making squeaks on the freshly polished linoleum. “Is that more or less the usual amount of time for these individual sessions?”, I ask him.
“Yeah, man, it’s not like psychoanalysis, I’m not going to ask you about how your Mom weaned you or what you thought about your potty training. It’s just a chance to say ‘So how’s it going’ and, you know, if you want to air some grievances or you got something on your mind.”
“Fair enough. Hey, if I’m going to recreation, where do I actually go?”
“Right out through those double doors. You’ll see some people already hanging out, and Joanne will be out momentarily. See you later on.”
* * *
The patchy lawn descends between brick walls down to a sidewalk and an assortment of concrete areas with painted lines on them, I’m guessing for handball or some similar sport. Tufts of grass grow between the sidewalk panels.
One of the female residents I’d been introduced to during my walking tour of Elk Meadow Hospital yesterday is there, I remember her chain that made me think about bikers, a chain from her back pocket wallet to her belt. Dark hair. Denim jacket with the arms chopped off at the seam. She’s speaking to the large jowly guy, the one who tends to speak with a boomy voice, Jake, I think.
“Where’d you just come from?”, she’s asking him. “You havin’ it out with Stevens?”
“Fuck no, I don’t give a shit about Stevens. I just got out of bio kickback. Just starin’ at the lines on the screen and kickin’ back.” Jake hooks his thumbs into his belt loops and closes his eyes and leans his head back self-indulgently. Jake occupies space, horizontally and vertically. Confident and casual, a muscular Pillsbury doughboy looming over everyone else.
Biker Mama gives me a brief nod as I approach. “Hey. You look like you’re still adjusting to arrival.” I nod back.
Jake acknowledges me too. “Umm. David? No, Daryl, right?”
“Close. Derek. And you’re Jake?”
“Yep, sure am. This is April, and here comes Ronald. I bet you like rock music, huh?”
“Yeah, totally”, I confirm. “Led Zeppelin, Heart, Pink Floyd, all that album oriented rock.”
“I figured, because you got the hair. I once had mine that long.”
The person identified as Ronald says “Hi” to April; then to Jake and me, joining the conversation, “Yeah, it looks cool when it’s long, but that’s also not the best way to stick with winners.”
He sizes me up for a moment. “You just got here, didn’t you? You probably never thought about it this way, but, see, you wear your hair like that so you can fit in with people who use drugs, so it’s a dead giveaway about where your head is at.”
I am annoyed again, but he isn’t entirely wrong and I decide I’ll acknowledge that even if he does seem to be trying to pick a quarrel about it. “I had my hair short all through high school, but the group of people I drifted towards, who seemed to accept me best, were the town potheads. And I associated smoking pot with having long hair, and rock music and the ideas about a counterculture, so it all kind of fit together.” I run my fingers through my hair, shaking it out and tossing my head at the same time. Flouncy Derek, luxuriating in my appearance. “But the other part of it was that I associated it all with gentle peaceful guys, and with sex that wasn’t all grabby and aggressive, all that peace and harmony stuff. Later on, I realized I didn’t fit in with the countercultural guys either, but I still like the long hair because it’s pretty, and I still fit better with the longhaired guys than with the ones who cut it short, for lots of reasons.”
“If drugs isn’t the center focus of your life, you could get rid of that. Brand yourself to the world as somebody who’s ready to straighten out and fly right.” Ronald has sandy brown hair with little waves in it. Tall narrow face, horse face with a long flat nose. He’d look better if he grew his hair out.
I point to April with my thumb. “My hair’s about the same length as hers. That’s what I like about it. It’s a way of saying I got a lot in common with the women. If she can have her hair long and not be accused of having it long to get drugs, I get to have mine long too, or else you’re being sexist about it.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it. It’s different for girls.”
“Hey folks”, calls out a young woman in a track suit, walking towards us with a ball bat and and softball. Ellen, about thirty, the resident from yesterday with the short chopped hair and a tight face, is walking with her, carrying a pasteboard box with equipment, gloves and things.
The woman in the track suit announces, “I’m Joanne, for those who don’t know me. I guess actually that’s just you,” she finishes, nodding at me.
“Derek. Hi.”
She shifts to addressing us all. “Let’s give it a few more minutes to see if we get some more people, but I thought we’d do a few innings of softball. We can double up on some positions, catcher and outfielders, and just play for fun, if we don’t have enough for teams.”
Ellen stands close to April. “Hey”, April says.
“Hey.”
Joanne returns to speaking directly to me. “Dr. Barnes likes us to get exercise and do some playing, he says if a person puts their focus on sorting out their situation and processing what they’re feeling and tries to do all that indoors in chairs and couches, it’s like a bottleneck, you get a lot of tension that gets corked up and it’s got to come out if you want to stay relaxed enough to make progress”.
“That makes all kinds of sense”, I say. “I’ve read about holistic health and mind-body-spirit, ... I like to go for long walks, it’s my favorite way of letting stuff in the back of my head sort itself out.”
Behind Joanne, April is asking Ellen something quietly; I don’t catch all the words but from fragments and how they hold themselves, their body language, I think April is asking Ellen if it’s all right or if she’s doing okay. Some of that tightness leaves Ellen’s face. It’s a nice face, a sort of pixie face, the kind that can be expressive when it’s not walled off.
Softball isn’t one of my favorites. I’m not very good at most things that involve aiming and throwing or catching. I stand out in the field to try to intercept the ball if someone hits it my way, and I take my turn swinging badly at the pitch. Part of the purpose, of course, is to get us talking and interacting, relaxed with each other, and I try not to let my dislike for the sport get in the way of that, but I’m also not very good at casual chatter with people I don’t really know yet. It always seems like so much of it is geared towards reassuring the other people that you’re just like they are, and I don’t like to pretend that I am. I mean, I am in at least some ways with most people, but we kind of have to compare notes before we discover those points in common, and in lots of other ways I’m atypical. I think at a certain point in a person’s life, if they have a few too many odd corners and strange surfaces, they stop aspiring to blend in and just accept that they’re different, and after that they have less resistance to anything in themselves that’s also different.
Anyway, I chime in a few times, agreeing or adding some comment of my own, but mostly I just kind of hang out there not being very interactive and also not getting much exercise, and thinking I’d really rather have some time to go off on a long walk and think about things.
* * *
Next on the schedule is psychodrama. I walk down the hallway looking for the room I was shown yesterday, looking for the door with the matching room number. The PA system speakers play a very contagious rock piece, “Jack and Diane” by John Cougar. Song about a lot of optimism and courage and “you and me against the world” spirit that doesn’t take them very far, so kind of a sad song, but touching since at least here’s a song about them, celebrating them anyway.
On the wall is a mural I’ve passed a few times, and I pause to take it in more closely. An angry elk glaring out from the painting, actually snorting steam or smoke from its nostrils. “ELK MEADOW” painted in a loop above it. “NO DRUGS” in a parallel loop below.
Very macho. An elk you shouldn’t fuck with, an elk to be reckoned with. All that “I am so domineering and in charge because of what I can do to the rest of you if you challenge me” stuff just turns me off. Shouldn’t people coming to a place like this get encouraged to be vulnerable and take the risk of trusting instead of lured into snorting smoke and menacing people with their horns?
Psychodrama is another large room with a stage and they have video recorders and tape recorders all over the place. Make movies about your life. The person on the hot seat is April. It sounds like a resumption of a conversation that everyone has had with her before:
“I loved my mom, and I wanted her to love me, that’s natural, right? But at first it was like she has a very important busy life and it has to come first, and I get the leftovers. So, like, I ask for more. ‘I want two hours of your attention between when you come home and when we sit to supper. Not to tell me what I did wrong at school, or for me to tell you what you did wrong as a mommy, but just us, you know, what was your day like?’”
It sounds to me like an overall self-empowering message, a good stance to take, but Jake is less impressed. “But you already knew she couldn't do that, right? I mean, you told us before that you'd realized by then that she needs to be the all-suffering Mama who sacrifices everything, she's all invested in that, so like if you took that away from her she wouldn't know what to do?”
“Well, yeah, I guess”, April acknowledges. “She always needed me to be the bad girl who misbehaves. The more she could get me to strike at her, then everything is my fault and how I am gonna hafta change, it becomes all about I’m the one who needs to get herself changed.”
“So you tossed that little bread crumb out there, ‘Let's just talk for a couple hours and see if we can be friends’, knowing that wasn't gonna fly, and then you spread your wings and flew the fuck away from that, because she couldn’t do it, huh? You were already out that door. For better or worse, you’d made your decision already. If you'd really meant to connect to her you knew it was gonna take a long time for her to get past her own shit. She didn't put you out, you did”.
Jake shrugs and continues. “Don’t get that I’m sayin’ you shouldn’t have split, like I get why it was time. Just that you shouldn’t say she put you out. You carry that around a lot.”
There’s a lot of silence after Joe finishes speaking. Marie and Jeremy are the psychodrama facilitators, and I see that they step in and prompt if none of the other program residents is saying anything. Marie, mid-twenties gal in a denim skirt with butterfly barrettes in her hair, suggests, “What would you say to her if you had her here in the room today?”
Jeremy, the other facilitator, guy about Marie’s age with spiky red hair and a gold necktie weirdly looped around his neck like a scarf, chimes in, “Let Marie be your mom. Don’t censor anything, just let fly with it.”
April takes a breath, then faces Marie-Mom and snarls, “I got nothing thanks to you. Like you care! I was just trash for the garbage can as far as you were concerned, well, you win, it all went to shit. I can’t get my life together because you never bothered to show me how. How do you like your daughter the junkie waste, Mom? Are you fucking proud?”
It’s riveting and real; For the first time since I arrived, it feels like some valid process is taking place, something other than repeated promises about how good this damn place is going to be for me.
April looks tough and fragile at the same time. I want to comfort her. I want to make up for how her life has felt so far.
Marie isn’t taking that approach. “You listen to yourself? You’re giving her all the power. Mommy’s the reason you can’t live a decent life, got nothing at all to do with you, so you’re going to punish her by proving she’s right and being a nothing, yeah that’ll teach her.”
Now April looks cornered, attacked. Unsurprising. Wow.
Jake is at her too. “You can’t blame her for everything. I’m not saying she wasn’t a shitty mother in a lot of ways, but we learn to stick with winners and plot our own course. That stuff’s for real, you know.”
* * *
The bell marking the end of the period occupied by psychodrama rings, and people disperse. I stumble out into the hallway with new thoughts. That hadn’t been all good. There’d been something kind of ambush-y about it, and also something just a bit scripted. But there’d been the potential for something very healthy going on in there. I mean they were talking about really personal gut-level vulnerable stuff, the kind of stuff people don’t talk about.
I’d told my dad I’d avoid making up my mind against the place from the outset. The fact that my parents love me didn’t mean it was in my best interest to go the direction they wanted me to, but it did kind of mean they really thought it was. So I should consider what they think is in my own best interests. Similarly, the fact that this institution, Elk Meadow, is considered to be a helpful presence for people under stress and conflict doesn’t mean that it isn’t; it actually could be. Overwhelmingly, I have a considerably greater confidence in the parental than the therapeutic but if I were going to consider this place for real, I have to walk a tightrope. Wary trust, as oxymoronic as that conjugates, you know what I mean?
Yeah. Come show me what you got. I’m actually earnest, not cynical, even if I’m jaded. I mean, it’s not like I have a plan and a next destination. God I’d love a plan and a destination, I seem stuck in perpetual figure-things-out mode.
“Oh there you are, Derek”, a voice says from behind me.
I finish recomposing myself from my startle and recognize Emily and nod. I’m again struck by how she looks attired and coiffed to go to the office. I mean, there’s a dress for the office thing that women often have to deal with, but it’s like she’s feeling power from it and really into it, and she’s just a resident. Today she’s in matching grey vest and pants. The staffers Jeremy and Marie definitely look more casually dressed.
“One of the things you may have seen?”, Emily suggests, “...the way people like Jake and Bob get involved in April’s, or anyone’s, therapy. Part of your own therapeutic goals should be participation in other folks’ process. I mean, your participation is actually one of the things you get graded on. Here at Elk Meadow we don’t believe in experts. It’s not like Dr. Barnes can fix us with a magic gesture. Healing comes as part of a community and we all have to participate in making that happen.”
Emily is interesting. Staff is a social role composed of behaviors and appearance and vocal tone, not just the fact of being on the employment roster, and although she isn’t on staff, she’s doing that role with almost military intensity and precision. She’s all-in on this place, very obedient follower, but it’s also like seizing authority, especially in a setting where the staff don’t wear uniforms or sport name tags. She presents as a professional and she clearly has familiarity with the role. Take me seriously.
I wonder if she’s mocking them derisively. It would be so funny if she were.
I wonder if there’s something sexist about me thinking she’s been acting like staff but not thinking that of Joe. I mean, he’s all in on this place too.
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
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