Going Down Swinging (30 page)

You wake up to the door opening. Don’t know when it is, must have slept. You’re on the mattress. Sit up. Look down at your prickly shins, salmon-coloured cotton from the knees up. Can’t remember. When did they take your clothes? Did they put you out? Or did you just pretend to be good? A nurse opens your door all the way. She’s smiling that ugly basin smile. Bleach-bone teeth. She’s a new one.
Would you like to come out now, Mrs. Hoffman?
Hard, fake cashier-smile.

Be good now. Be a good girl. Show them how docile you are, well-mannered, and bright, not crazy. Not one bit. You stand and hold your gown shut behind, hide your bum at least, dignified is halfway to sane.

In the hallway, a couple patients walking, heads down, hair stringing, old man’s maggot-white legs wander bony down the hall, wrinkly squish hanging out the back of his gown, shaking his head back and forth. A young pretty thing sits in a metal-legged chair a few yards down, hands folded in her lap, eyes straight ahead. Looks like she’s in primary school—straightest spine gets a gold star. The nurse goes into her station—wonder if she’s the head nurse; must be, she looks stark raving. You sit in the chair outside
the quiet room
and look well rested and harmless.

What kind of get-up has she got on? She bustles behind the counter and in front: a brown cape, long brown skirt, starched white blouse, dark stockings, clunky sensible shoes. You want to tell her Florence Nightingale called—she wants her stuff back. Keep your yap shut. Just because
you
didn’t know the nineteenth century had come back in such a big way … Don’t forget where you are: the booby hatch. Takes one to know one is the rule of thumb, and you are no booby. Convince her lest she descend on you with leeches.

Butter the bitch up.

That’s a lovely outfit
, and you do something pleasant with your lips. She smiles back, not really at you, just stretching her lips to show the world a well-formed skull, and she says,
Thank you, I made it myself
. She did? And you think of that head nurse at Hollywood Hospital, years ago; saw her the first time you went in to dry out. Next time you ended up there, there she was again, except this time she was a patient. You look back at Turn-of-the-Century Theresa and her flowing brown skirt, cape flung back, gently kissing the ankles of her dark stockings. Jesus Christ.

Look away. Yes, start looking.

Look up, down the hall.

Look for neon red that smells
Exit
.

You stand up. The nurse glances, flesh pulls back to her ears again, just a little teeth this time.
Well
, you sigh passively,
think maybe I’ll go take a walk
. She nods, makes a sunny
mm
sound.

Now walk. You reach behind again, trying to close the flap. Ridiculous—if they weren’t so busy shooting your ass full of drugs, a person could have a gown that closed in front.

Find the exit, worry about clothes when you get home. Just nonchalantly, not-making-a-break-for-it. Hum. No, don’t hum; too obvious. Be dazed, aimless.

EXIT.

Glance over your shoulder—no reason.

Quick. Throw your weight into the door.

It opens. You’re out! It’s a parking lot. Walk straight ahead. Act natural. Think. Now think. No purse. Well, hitchhike then. Surely to god someone will see you are in distress. Get through these cars, get to the road, just get the hell out of here.

Oh shit, you feel a pressure—patting. A heavy man-hand pats your shoulder.
OK, now
, and you stop.

Freeze.

Orderly. It’s a goddamn orderly. The jig’s up.
OK, now, let’s just go back inside, you’re not dressed for socializing Gonna get yourself in trouble out here
, and he takes your arm in his huge meathook and you go limp like those wildebeests on
Wild Kingdom
when they realize they’re dinner. He escorts you back inside.

She’s
waiting for you, brown drape cascading over her mean little breasts now, hiding her shoulders, just her forearms poking out, ring of keys in her hand. She shakes her head at you, makes a tut-tut noise, you bad-bad girl. Turns on her heel, as only a nurse in a cape could do, and you feel like sticking a fork in that bun at the back of her head, letting the steam out. As you are being tossed back in the quiet room, you give her a snide glare.
You’re a pretty tough broad, aren’tcha?

And she slides you the closed-mouth grin of two-hundred-year-old paintings, the one reserved for heathens and heretics, and she says,
I’m a tough lady, yes
.

Hoffman, Anne
Eilleen

6.11.74 (T. Baker) Call to Dr. Klaus in morning. He said Mrs. H’s Motivation was lousy, that she had gotten violent in emergency after I had left last night, throwing things around, etc., had left several times, but had come back with him when he went out after her (at one point, she was standing in the middle of 12th Avenue, hitchhiking.) Dr. Klaus had her agree to stay only after he threatened to commit her. He said she was manipulative, looking for support, sympathy, and continuing her dependency. He and Dr. Pantern were going to try to get her into the psych. ward, but did not know if anything could be done as she was uncooperative. If a neighbor would press charges against Mr. H. regarding the knife threatening incident, then a court could order her into a program. Otherwise not much can be done.

Clothing vouchers made out for Grace. A visit was made to Mrs. Pong, the landlady, re Mrs. H. Mrs. Pang does not want to get involved. I talked to Sheryl Sugarman who seemed uncomfortable with the idea of pressing charges against Mrs. H. and besides had never seen anything that would warrant a charge, except perhaps Mrs. H. ppummeling Mrs. Pong’s door last Friday night.

Visit to foster home; Grace was taken to see Dr. Lee. Grace showed excess protein in her urine, otherwise everything all right.

Received call that evening from Julie Smith of Downtown Care Team at V.G.H. We talked a good deal about resources for Mrs. H. but she was rather negative as Mrs. H. was uncooperative and manipulative. Later I received a call from a nurse at VGH emergency who wanted to inform me that Mrs. H. would probably be out by tomorrow morning as she was insistent on signing herself out despite the wishes of her doctor.

Eilleen Nine
NOVEMBER 1974

Y
OU DON’T HAVE
to stay, Eilleen, I just really wish you would … Of course you’re not crazy—I’ve had a talk with them, things just got a little out of hand, on their parts, and maybe yours too or you wouldn’t have ended up here. Calm down. I’m not trying to pull anything on you here, I just want to see you get on your feet so you can get your daughter back. I’ll get you a room upstairs—it’s not like this, I promise, it’s nice
.

That was your shrink talking. Yours, not theirs. You finally got that Cuckoo’s Nest bitch to call your psychiatrist—
Just call him, call him yourself and get him down here
. You requested your purse for the phone number; truth was, you’d only seen him a couple times, ages ago, and couldn’t remember his name. Went to him at Dr. Graham’s suggestion, when Graham got sick of your face, sick of handing out prescriptions. Pissed you off at the time, but now —thank God for boredom and loneliness, the need to talk. To a man who would say in a smooth gentle voice,
And how does that make you feel?

So you gave in; this time too. Maybe he was right, maybe it was worth staying for a while and letting them look after you. And now you’re upstairs, but only because Doctor—oh hell, why can’t you remember his name: Pasteur, Pastern—anyway, your shrink told their shrinks that you don’t belong downstairs, that you can be by an open window with little risk. Fact is, you just want to get the hell out of here. Want to find your baby. Want to know where they put her. And all you get is the runaround.

They’ve already sent one of their quacks in—Doctor Klaus—couple hours after you got up here. He sat down, asked a stream of questions and took notes and you tried to be good, be co-operative, but what’s the goddamn point: you’re a drunk, not a mental case. And it’s been over a week; already been through the worst of it: the shakes and pain, the
DTS
, creeps and gremlins hiding in the corners. All gone. You’re on an upturn now. So you look like shit. It’s what’s inside that counts.

And all during Klaus’s inquisition, you tried to tell him you’d be better off outside, getting your affairs in order. You have to move and clean up the house and you have to find your little girl. His response?
Well, you’re here now and here’s where you’re staying. If you were fit to look after a child, you’d be doing it
. And that bony German face registering nothing but the task at hand, the proper channels. So you tried
Yes, well you’re right, I was having problems, drinking too much, and now I’m not, I’m sober, so I don’t see the point in staying here. I don’t need a shrink, just a kick in the pants and some
AA
and you laughed, ha-ha, see how lighthearted I am, not crazy.

He didn’t look up from his clipboard, stopped scribbling only to scratch his temple with the end of his pen, then,
When you feel depressed, do you experience insomnia or do you find yourself lethargic, sleeping a lot?

When I’m depressed, I find myself depressed. Doctor Paster told me I could leave if I wanted and I’ve decided that I want to
.

If you’re referring to Doctor Pantern, that’s irrelevant. He’s not your attending physician, I am, I’m your doctor and only I can sign you out, and frankly, I don’t see fit to do that. If I were in your position, Mrs. Hoffman, I’d be doing everything I could to make myself a reliable healthy parent in order to regain custody of my child. At the rate you’re going, you’ll never see her again
.

Is that a threat?

It’s an evaluation
.

And then he left. And you sat on your bed feeling like someone just clubbed your face in, thinking there’s no fucking way he’s going to keep me here, no fucking way. But scared, heart flitting around like maybe they could do anything they wanted. They could take her permanently, find her father and give her to him.

You had your regular street clothes back on, so you went and sat in the common room, ended up talking to some guy, kind of a cute old thing, and chatted, and it turned out he’d spent time in Hollywood Hospital too. Said he’d had electric shock treatment. And he wanted it again because it was the only thing that could get him off the booze for any length of time: the dizzy mind-blank and the darkness afterward as if there were nothing but the very moment he was experiencing; he kind of liked it. Said,
Christ, maybe I just need it now and then—blots out everything the way booze does me except it clears me out for a while and gets me off the booze, ’cause I’m tellin’ ya, the same as they told me—if I don’t get off for good, it’s gonna be the—pardon my French—fuckin’ death of me
. He asked how you were making out, if you needed a Librium or something for the shakes,
I got a whole barrel of ’em in my room
. He told you his partner brought them by. He and his partner had this scam going where they printed up their own prescriptions with a fake doctor’s name and the number of a phone booth in the east end somewhere. One guy would bring it to a drugstore downtown while his friend waited at the phone in case the pharmacy should call and double-check. It sounded so brilliant yet familiar —Genius: it’s always on the cusp of the obvious.

It’s your fourth day in here, no, third, it was day before yesterday Baker brought you in and you’re starting to lose your temper. You don’t try to escape for fear they’ll sick the hospital thugs on you, throw you back in the cubbyhole. The nurse said Klaus would be back in to see you today at 3
:00
p.m. That’s your appointment. In five minutes. All day you’ve been putting in time, figuring how the hell to get yourself out of this. Even called Baker; tried yelling at him. Then you appealed to his Mighty Mouse sensibilities, ones that might rescue. Told him that Klaus had threatened you with never seeing Grace again, threatened you with being here indefinitely.

He had shit-all to reply, really. Baker—why bother. Said he was sorry and that he was powerless at this juncture. Then you started to cry and told him that there was no way that son of a bitch was keeping you from your baby. He said a lot of nothing and then he had to go. So you spent the next five hours puttering and trying to think up a plan. A plan, a plan, my Librium for a plan. That shock therapy guy gave you ten of them this morning, brought them in on the q.t. and dropped them into your palm like Smarties. Like Christmas. They don’t do much, but they do soothe the shakes and twitches, might help you feel more human in the face of Herr Shrink—and speak of the devil—Germans, nothing if not punctual.

He says,
Hello, Mrs. Hoffman, how are you today?

Shit, no plan. So you say,
Fine. How ’bout yourself? … Ah, I’d like to talk with you about something, though. I’ given a lot of thought to it and I’ve decided that this isn’t the kind of place conducive to, uh, getting better, healing, for me and I’d like to discuss being an outpatient
.

He jogs his head and rolls his eyes to the side before he looks at you, and when he does, it’s as if he’s looking at someone so nitwitted and swine-like, it’s an annoyance to cast his pearls before you.
Look, Mrs. Hoffman, you better take a good hard look at yourself and what you’ve become. If you don’t make some changes and pull up your socks, you will never see your daughter again. And that’s not a threat, it’s a fact
.

Your heart is crawling into your throat like something from a horror movie. If he’d just stop saying that, if everyone would just stop holding your child for ransom. Christ, now you’re drizzling in front of him. He thinks he’s trumped you now, that you’re crying in remorse, that you’re broke like a scrawny dusty old nag. He says,
Cry all you want, Mrs. Hoffman, if that helps. Realize, though, that you’re not getting out of here and things aren’t going to progress until you make some attempt to co-operate
.