The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [112]
Just after I recovered I thought my mother’s attitude and behavior had been a big mistake. “Ma, the first time you visit someone in a seclusion room, you don’t read their palm.” But the more I think about it, the less I think it was a mistake. Arguing with them wouldn’t have made the crazy ideas go away, and being willing to talk about them gave me a chance to get them all out where I could look at them. It made at least part of my insanity a lot less hellishly lonely.
She talked Dr. Dale into letting Virginia visit me and they’d show up together like clockwork every afternoon. They spent lots of time together talking over their visits and plotting my recovery. They were an ideal visiting team.
When I recovered enough to care about where I was, my first reaction was to be pissed off at the hospital. If only they had given me a few pills to take along, this whole thing could have been avoided.
If anything, I was less patient than before. There wasn’t much magic about pills three times a day. What did I need all these jokers for? Why don’t they just give me the fucking pills and let me the fuck out of here?
Then they seemed to loosen up a little. Dale told me about what he thought was wrong with me, what could be done about it, what the pills did. What I had was schizophrenia. It was probably genetic. It was biochemical. It was curable. It might have something to do with adrenaline metabolism. There were dietary adjustments I could make that might help. Dope wasn’t such a hot idea for someone like me.
I was skeptical about some of what he said, but I accepted much of it and was glad to at last be told something. All the same, I was still angry. Why hadn’t they told me any of this earlier, the first time I was here? I still didn’t think of the hospital as a good place to spend much time, but I gained at least a marginal faith that they were trying to help me and a glimmer of hope that they might know what they were doing.
I also found out that my legal situation was quite a bit more complicated than it had been last time around. My first stay I was, technically at least, a voluntary patient. This time I had arrived in a straitjacket accompanied by four Royal Canadian Mounties armed with, among other things, commitment papers signed by three doctors. They could lock me away for years. I decided to work on patience again.
I doubt if the staff would believe how hard I worked at being patient or that I worked at it at all. They steadily maintained that I was the least patient patient they had ever seen. “Look at Mary. She’s been here for years. She’s not jumping to get out of here.” Somehow I didn’t find Mary a very attractive model.
Impatience was a symptom, so I did my best not to mention anything about getting out or thinking that maybe I was ready for grounds privileges or that I was anything but tickled to be a patient at Hollywood Hospital. I read a lot of novels, wrote a lot of letters, drew a lot of pictures, played the old piano as often as I could, tried to develop relationships with patients and staff, all the time saying over and over to myself, “Patient, patient, patient.” I used it like a mantra in meditation. Very careful to keep it quiet and make sure my lips weren’t moving. “Patient, patient, patient.”
Poor Dr. McNice. Hollywood Hospital’s saving grace. The man who allowed us to salvage a bit of dignity.
No hippie, to be sure. But at least he didn’t drive Cadillacs and wear baby-blue alligator shoes. There wasn’t much chance of his actively joining our quest, but we knew he had sympathy and understanding and hope for what we were doing. He had in his eyes a vague apology for not being more like us, an ever-so-faint hint of self-contempt for an even vaguer cowardice.
Poor Dr. McNice. He had tried to be a good doctor much the same way I had tried to be a good hippie. He had