asylums

It has been my custom to not write about what I do for money. The j.o.b.... But where I am now, this next asylum in my long list of asylums, is so transient, my position so temporary, that my feet barely touch the ground. And the people are so odd. SO ODD. And, for reasons of confidentiality (oh, please) I can't discuss particular features of the distressed humans I am shepherding these days. I mean, they don't have two heads or anything, but one has a gray face. Gray-blue, actually. Permafrost. Looks like an Everest alumni. I'd watch the Thorazine dosing if I were you. Shameful, what we have done in the name of mental hygeine. She hardly seems cleansed, but she is docile most of the time.

I have done my time in this field. Been here since I was a kid and emptied my first bedpan. I was an eighteen year old robber in need of honest work. I'd just held up Jack's drive up (sue me) and traded my ill gotten money for a jar of beans. Remember beans? When speed was speed.... Anyway, since I almost got caught for that, I figured legitimacy was my best defense. So, I dressed up as best I could and walked into Hillhaven, bowled over by the smell of urine and old skin. The lobby was lined with wheelchairs occupied by old women mostly. They seemed identical then: thin, longish gray hair pulled into severe pony tails, secured with thick red yarn. Like people of a different race, I could not pick out individual differences. Each little lap was covered with a crocheted blanket or quilt, bright awful colors, end pieces of yarn strung together haphazardly. I did not yet see the clear bags of urine hanging beneath many chairs. They seemed to be waiting for something, Bingo or Jesus, it was hard to tell. Gnarled hands reached out as I passed as though to touch me was to touch youth. Undeterred, I asked for an application. I don't remember filling one out, all I remember was a starchy German woman named Ingersol telling me to be back at one o'clock. She didn't care if I had a uniform, just a pair of white pants. I asked about experience-- did I need any? "Do you know how to take a temperature?" was all she wanted to know. I did. I came back at one.

My real training took place with two time-hardened aides who drug me around like the dead weight I was. I didn't want to be there, was just biding my time until something better came along, you know, like a ride out of town. But it didn't come. No one showed up to save me from my future. Toward the end of the first day those aides answered a call light and we entered a room. The man seemed suspended from the center of his hospital bed by all manner of trapeze-like straps, sitting semi-upright, with a leather helmet on his head. They went to work on him, cleaning him up, getting him ready for whatever was next in his abbreviated life. At one point they handed me a bedpan full of shit. In my wisdom, I said, "Oh, so I get the dirty work." They fell silent. The pause lasted a lifetime as my words clattered to the floor. Then the man spoke. "Honey," he said. "If there was any other way...." And my life changed in that moment. I saw him--a WWII pilot with the top of his skull blown off--and I have seen so much since then.

There is so much to tell. I wonder if I am ready, finally, thirty years later, to tell it.