The studio rests six stories high. On top of an old steam heater a fan drones in an open window. Clyde sleeps on a black futon that sits on the floor. He sleeps under a thick Central American bed cover his ex-girlfriend gave him.

It took a semester in the dorms, but he’d finally he managed to break up with her. It’s been a whole year now and he has established his own space. On the floor to his left there is a cup with olive oil in it.

Suddenly radio from the clock fills the room. Clyde tosses around. Time passes. He gets up and walks into his closet past kitty litter which is full with land mines of shit.

He moves through the closet and into the bathroom past the sink, which he calls the throat. He gets into the shower and cleans the shlock off his Irish wee-wee. Somehow, Clyde has no idea he is predominantly Irish.

It’s the summer. His fifty-four-hour work week is nearing an end. Today is one of his three eight- hour days. His high school friend John Randy is going to pick him up after work. They are going to catch a Phish concert at some theater in Delaware.

This morning, Clyde hits the tape deck and jams to Big Audio Dynamite in the apartment. He likes Mick Jones from the Clash and how he veers toward R+B and diversity in this music.

He attacks fruit out of his refrigerator drawers. The roaches dash over his kitchen table. He puts some water on the stove and prepares sugar-free hot chocolate. The roaches are crazy busy and of various sizes this morning.

Clyde used to have to spray one roach at a time. He’d spray for minutes and finally the roach would roll over on its back and die in the pool of chemicals left behind. A neighbor had suggested this particular black jack spray. Clyde bought it from the Sikh man’s convenience store.

As Clyde uses the spray on the table and around the kitchen area the roaches quickly die. He notices that his cat is watching him. Then he fills his hot chocolate takes a sip and spits out a roach. Once again, he has forgotten to check the clump of chocolate at the top of the cocoa before he sips.

When ready for the day, Clyde takes the stair well two stairs at a time. It takes some dexterity. Rarely does he encounter any one who comments about the noise his descending of the stairs in this manner makes.

Once out the glass doors of the decay of Pierre Apartments, he crosses Cooper Street shaking his head.

Gwendolyn is at the corner by the pay phone. This past winter every time they encountered each other they would both be underdressed for the cold. Now, in the summer, she sips beer from a bagged can. and comes at him with a masculine handshake. “What’s wrong today kid.”

Clyde loves the way Gwendolyn always inserts herself and commands respect even though he never remembers to use her name. He doesn’t suspect that she used to be a nurse. Nor does he get that she too had been put out of her house at an early age. Gwendolyn lives in the complex across the street that always has people coming in and out of it at all hours of the day.

“The roaches are bad this morning, I think the neighbors bombed their room. Does that ever happen to you?”

“Oh, we wouldn’t let there be roaches on our building.”

Clyde lives in the drug free complex and doesn’t understand. He presumes all complexes in the area have roaches.

Sure. he has studied social welfare from a suburban adjunct professor but there is still a lot about his surroundings that he doesn’t understand.

Hi professor had educated the class about what it’s like to be on welfare through assigning offensive books. Many of the students announced that they had been on welfare themselves and challenged his perspective and his choice of books. A few white women would concur with him.

One time the professor had asked the students if they gave money to the pan handlers down town.

“Why not?” he exclaimed, just in love with his power.

As clueless as his professor proved to be, Clyde doesn’t yet understand the concept of cash money even though he gets paid in it. He doesn’t imagine that when there is traffic coming in and out of a complex there is probably heaps of cash money changing hands, unlaundered money that can, with the right neighborhood connections, be used to control the roach problem. All he understands is that he gets angry when the people coming in and out of Gwendolyn’s complex call him Where’s Waldo.

Clyde crosses the parking lot for the dorms and passes a gleaming glass building before arriving at the small minimart. He is opening this morning and his coworker is closing. His boss arrives and unlocks the shutters so Clyde throws them up.

Before he turns the radio on to the local R+B radio station, he hears his boss muttering “Docy, Docy, Docy.” as he carries out his routines. Some might think he was muttering in Korean, but Clyde knows that he is remembering his mentors on the grill Doc and Ray. His boss admired Doc even though Doc cursed him to everyone he knew for taking advantage of Docs connects.

Doc had educated Clyde about how his mother had to lock him out of the house so he would learn how to fight and face the neighborhood beat down without running. Doc would smile at Clyde when he listened and lectured about exploitation. Doc had mentored his current coworker and friend, Craig G not to use the needle.

Doc knew he wasn’t getting paid enough for his long hours and left the job. Clyde had heard that when he stopped working, he went on a crack binge.

Clyde had really ended up liking Doc’s friend Ray who had been very direct with him upon first meeting. “Don’t worry Clyde, you can’t help it if you are an asshole, you were just raised that way.”

On one of Clyde’s first evenings closing the store, Ray had manipulated him to drive him to a friend’s house where he could cop. He’d only done it once. He also tested Clyde out by telling him about his sexual exploits with white women. When Clyde had continued to be cool with Ray, he would accept the role of being Clyde’s mentor on the grill. “Clyde, you have to work smarter not harder,” Ray would exclaim. Ray also gave Clyde the nickname, “Nervous Norton.”

Clyde admired Ray’s fifty-four hour a week work ethic, his wit, and how he had his weight under control. He treated Ray as a surrogate father until Ray left the job with Doc.

His boss used to build airplanes for a Korean Army, but came to America for a better life. Nobody except Clyde likes the boss because he has an educated air. Clyde likes that he is reliable and fair with his work routines. Clyde believes a part of his boss feels bad for the way he’d treated Doc and thus the muttering.

Sometimes his boss grabs his thin arms and crunches the bones and biceps. Then he says, “Clyde, don’t hesitate!” Clyde thinks he knows perfectly well what the boss is trying to communicate and accepts what his boss is getting at and yet somehow fails to give a fuck.

Clyde likes his boss a lot better than the owner. Craig G and all the neighborhood kids like the Korean owner. The owner is big, muscular, and shares his hunting hobby with all who will listen. He used to be gangster until he got married. In Asian gangs Clyde will one day learn, it is customary to leave the gang when you get married.

At first meeting, the owner had let Clyde know that he was easy to pick on. However, the owner stopped when Clyde showed sharp attitude about his compliance with handling the store Glock. All he had to do was let the owner know he wasn’t about to shoot anyone for four dollars per hour and the owner left him alone.

Clyde makes it a habit to pack those sandwiches with extra meat especially the tuna and chicken salad. The owner’s wife makes the salads and gets really angry. Clyde just ignores all the feedback.

Clyde knows that it is because of his attitude that the boss always tells him that Craig G is a better worker than him as if Clyde would care. The boss thinks such comments will curb Clyde’s behavior.

Clyde resents the fact that the stale cereal is sold for seven dollars a box. Clyde thinks the owner is leeching money out of the poor black and brown neighborhood. The deli sandwiches are the only affordable way to eat, and it is an expensive way to live. Clyde has seen the movie “Do the Right Thing!” by Spike Lee.

He contrasts the suburban houses that he imagines the owner lives in with the studio where he and other neighborhood people live. He thinks how there are no grocery stores for any of the kids who live in Camden. They have to drive thirty minutes out of the city to even get to a supermarket. He knows most of the mom-and-pop stores have high prices. Many of the kids in the city had to survive off of Ramin Pride.

As Clyde prepares the condiments for the afternoon rush, he thinks of the first kid he trained to work at the deli. This kid took him to the movies and taught him how to sneak into different theaters. When the kid finally found something that he liked, they’d settled in. The kid only lasted a few months and then went off to the crack trade. That kid was very socially skilled and knew how to connect congenially with Clyde like no other.

Still, Clyde hopes that he will make stronger connections with kids he knows from the neighborhood when they work here. He prays that they will like working with him and Craig G more than the lure of ready rock.

And yet when he hears about the white kids that commute into the city to take classes, talk poor, and boast how they steal from his boss, it somehow pisses him off worse.

Once he heard a frat brother who he’d taken a writing class with calling him out of his name, “Hey do you ever wonder how much change the panhandlers get out of Clyde Dee?”

Clyde thinks about how in reality no one asks him for change. He carries his cash in his sock with a dollar or two in his wallet. The very few occasions he’s been threatened he has donated a dollar or two to avoid a beat down.

In the store the customers treat him like he is family. One told him he was down with the brown. Another told customer told him of a local mechanic who was flaco like him. Flaco means thin in Spanish, but it’s also known as a cool nickname amongst players. The customers had a lot of love for Clyde and the community made him feel much less alone.

When commuting students like the frat boy comes down here and judge the locals according to stereotypes, it becomes hard for Clyde to befriend them.

Clyde has only made one close friend. He is ten years older and is in recovery from polysubstance abuse.

Clyde thinks his friend gets a little manic when he talks. His friend’s best friend is on the Philadelphia police force. He calls his friend a bad lieutenant in the police force. This bad lieutenant funds his friend’s education and expenses in return for under the table surveillance work. Clyde’s friend is also a writer. Some of his work, when he isn’t using vocabulary that makes him sound like Henry James, carries the tone of a mafia flick. He has introduced Clyde to many mafia flicks, but Clyde still doesn’t understand.

Even Clyde’s friend can misunderstand the neighborhood. For example, he accuses Clyde Dee and Craig G of listening to “gangster rap” in the deli. And he made a big deal once about the fact that his co-worker took care of him when he ordered a sandwich. Clyde thinks he misunderstands Craig G.

Craig G shows up after an hour once the grill and kitchen are set up. Clyde and Craig give each other the neighborhood hand shake and Craig straps on the apron the same way Clyde wears it. Craig G developed this style of wearing the apron and everyone follows suit.

Craig disappears into the bathroom and when he comes out Clyde is in the back getting a clean tub to fill with mayonnaise.  Craig chuckles, “You ever notice when its your own shit, it never stinks!”

Clyde who has never had to take a crap on that can retorts, “Oh your lucky it wasn’t me in there.”

Craig pulls out the tape Clyde loaned him and says, “You’ve got a hold of some slamming new jams on this one.”

Once last summer Craig came out of the can at closing time and showed Clyde a bone. Clyde figured he was offering to share it with Clyde.

Clyde shrugged, and expressed no interest with his face.

It was the only time Craig offered.

Craig never seemed to judge Clyde for his refusal.

Clyde went ahead and loaned him his backpack and ID so he could sneak into the University Gym. Last summer when he had acquiesced to get back with his girlfriend, Craig had given him a condom and said it’d be good if he finally got lucky. They had gone to an amusement park together, an event that made Clyde’s girlfriend exceedingly jealous.

Craig puts the BDP Sex and Violence tape in the deck and hit play. Clyde listens to the bass and familiar beat. Customers start to come in in waves and Craig and Clyde take and fill orders. Clyde ponders and learns intermittently from the lyrics . . .

Black drug dealer, you have to rise up and organize your business so that we can rise up

If you are gonna sell crack than don’t be a fool, organize your business and open up a school . . .

Or invest in a Prison, therefore you can be put in it. Everyone else did this and now they chillin

Above the law while you are under the law and still killin

Wake up my African brother, my Hispanic brother. America ain’t your mother or your father so don’t bother with right or wrong

Just check out the logic in the song . . .

In the thirties and forties the drug dealer wasn’t black; they were Jewish, Irish, Polish Italian ectcetera ectcetera, and they were making their lives a lot better . . . 

Organize, legalize, legitimize your business, remember everybody else did this

Clyde had first heard about KRS-One, the rapper, in sociology class. The black professor had said that KRS-One and Cool Moe Dee had been homeless and been able to create this music with almost no resources. Then, Craig had played his first album, Criminal Minded, at work.

Oddly, this latest album came from John Randy. KRS-One had played a concert at his white liberal college from which he dropped out. John had passed on the tape to Clyde earlier that summer. Clyde thinks it is a hell of a lot better than that Phish music John Randy is so crazy about.

This summer, Craig had borrowed his car and returned it with the gas full and invited Clyde into North Camden to ball with him and his boys. Clyde felt good about the real friendship and it was important to him.

One morning Craig G came in traumatized after hiding out all night in an abandoned building. He had been at a doughnut shop with his boys and there was some kind of confrontation. He’d had to run and hide out in an abandoned building.

Another time Craig had cut himself on the slicer and Clyde has taken him to emergency.

Clyde liked being there for Craig and it had helped them bond.

In a few years Clyde will be visiting John Randy at his parent’s shore house one night when John will get lit. Clyde will feel like John will be a bit racist, exclaiming to his father in front of his proper friends about getting picked up by a black man from Camden. Then Clyde will discover the black man is Craig G who will clearly be drubbling high on heroin.

Craig will be dating a white-women from Camden who had a scholarship to attend John and Clyde’s private school in Moorestown New Jersey.

The white girl will exclaim she can now learn all about her new boyfriend from Clyde.

She will only get the seal of his smiling lips.

It will be funny how much Clyde will realize that he’s changed

In about three years, Craig’s mentor, someone Clyde will presume to be his NA sponsor, will recognize Clyde when he will work in a Pennsauken video store and organize a reunion. Craig will have a union job and Clyde will presume he has beaten back smack. He will be so happy for him.

Craig G has a smile and general look like Tupac. He attracts a lot of women. At the amusement park they went to the year before, women kept giving him their number like he was a celebrity.

Craig is always hooking up with girls in the dorm. Even though Clyde is too shy to even think about a date, Craig always treats him respectfully. He has introduced Clyde to his main girlfriend and his best friend too. Clyde hooked them up with some real generous sandwiches.

The boss often polls the female customers about which worker in the store is most attractive and Craig always wins. One time the boss said he talked to a woman who had put Clyde first. He had grabbed Clyde arms squeezing his bones and muscles together: “Don’t hesitate!” he had repeated.

Craig G is not the only local of Clyde’s generation who educates Clyde about the lives that locals live. One day, Julio’s brother has come to meet Clyde and told him about the graphic violence he’d gotten caught up in at a club one night. Julio’s married sister was one of Clyde’s neighbors in Pierre Apartments. She has invited Clyde into her apartment and been really friendly.

Julio, one of the kids who works here, always comes at Clyde with a lot of aggression calling him a “Geiser” (or crack addict.) Also, he calls Clyde a “pus.” Julio makes it a habit to punch him while he is working on the grill.

One evening later on that Fall, Clyde will get fed up with Julio’s behavior and will agree to a fight after work. The boss will officiate and Clyde will wrestle Julio to the ground enough to demonstrate his physical dominance. Then, one fairly beaten, Julio will get up and give Clyde a unfettered knee in the balls.

Unable to speak for five minutes Clyde eventually will manage to call Julio a punk and a coward. The boss will look startled by this and clearly will not know what to do. Julio will just laugh and talk trash like Muhammad Ali.

Soon thereafter, Julio will show up at Clyde’s door step with his cousin and older brother. They will take him to the YMCA pool for a swim.

Clyde will go home after the swim and write a paper that his teacher will want to put up for a prize. Of course, Clyde will decline. He will only use the opportunity to try to make the teacher feel stupid. He hates teachers,

Clyde and Craig work the grill, the sandwich bar, and the pizza oven as the work starts to pick up. At noon the kid Angelo comes in and gives them each the neighborhood hand shake.

Angelo lives with his grandmother and is the oldest child to a woman who appears to be Developmentally Delayed. Clyde’s ex-girlfriend used to dote on him while she gave the neighborhood kids candy. She thought he was a cute and well-behaved boy. He had given his ex-girlfriend the biggest smiles and most sincere looks.

But currently, working with Angelo is a different story. Clyde sees another side of Angelo. Without having the benefit of a father figure, Angelo tends to get mad and bite back when told to do something. There are times he gets the job done and at times he goofs off.

Craig has just a little more patience with Angelo’s willful defiance yet rarely engages him. Clyde gets more frustrated. Thus, with Angelo, Clyde tries to step back and model Craig G’s tone.

Clyde used to work with this kid named Jose and had a much easier time. It’s true that Clyde already had a relationship with Jose having traveled with him to Pyne Point Park to help coach his baseball team. Clyde had known that Jose’s stepfather favored his younger brother and that Jose needed a little extra support.

When Jose had worked with Clyde, he had done everything right and there had been no disrespect. Since he quit, the neighborhood kids had all gossiped about him. Apparently, his step-father had sent him away to some mental health facility.

Today, Angelo directs himself to the walk in and stocks the shelves without comment. He also does the dishes in the back sink and takes the trash out. The lunch rush comes steadily for a few hours. When it thins Clyde and Craig take turns making deliveries. Then Craig leaves at two to return at four to close the store

At this point Angelo announces that he’s going to take his lunch. He walks to the front of the store and picks up a pornographic magazine and sits near Clyde. As Clyde slices meats, he flips through the pages sucking on his teeth and making a lot of delighted noises.

“Hey Angelo, you’re a little young to be checking out those magazines in front of customer,” says Clyde.

Angelo ignores Clyde with provocative expressions of delight.

The boss hears this and puts down his own pornographic magazine which is hidden inside a Korean Newspaper. He strides over from his perch at the cash register with his bullet proof vest on and looks at Angelo.

“No, that is bad,” he says, “You have to put that away right now!”

The Campus and City police come in frequently to fill their coffee or soda for free. All the neighbors point and whisper when the vice squad comes in. “They are the true bad guys,” a customer had once told Clyde. It will take Clyde decades of living to make sense of and understand these dynamics.

The only day Clyde didn’t see police abusing their power was the time the boss got held up at gun point and the owner showed up drunk with an arsenal of hardware. They were too afraid to come get free coffee that night.

Clyde can’t help but feel some judgement towards Angelo, the boss, and the police. What a fucked-up world they are all living in.

When Julio comes in for his shift and punches him and called him a Geiser, Clyde feels relief. Somehow, he stresses about Angelo’s morals and ability to survive the streets. He doesn’t know what to do.

The one-time Clyde will get his car window shattered, Angelo will come and tell him that Jose did it. Clyde will talk to Jose and easily discern that it was likely Angelo who broke the window. Whoever smelt it delt it. Sometime, Clyde fears, Angelo is going to get in trouble for pulling a stunt like that on the streets.

It will not occur to Clyde until many years later that he will have missed an opportunity to help Angelo out.

Clyde listens to the patter of the rain against the tarp above him. It’s an exceedingly gray day and he is sitting on the cement table and chair outside the mini mart. A mini-van rolls up along the narrow street.

When Clyde realizes it’s John Randy, he wonders how John ended up with a mini-van. The door slides open and Clyde recognizes a kid he used to know from grade school and a girl from his graduating class along with two other non-descript white twenty-year-old males.

Clyde’s hair is slicked back with gel. He is wearing a black Marlboro work-tee-shirt, his two- toned florescent green shorts, and his old-school white and black Converses. He doesn’t even think about the fact he smells like the deli.

The front seat is open and Clyde demurs a moment. Then, against his better judgement he opens the front door and climbs in.

His old grade school acquaintance is extremely friendly and catches up with Clyde in a graceful manner. Clyde has heard he is in construction, not school.

Clyde remembers sitting at the table in the grade school library with this guy and talking about war. “Better to kill them than have them kill you,” this guy had exclaimed.

Those were the days when Clyde had clout and confidence, back when he was formulating his pacifist philosophy.

Junior high had turned this kid into a metalhead and a part of the crowd that excluded Clyde. The kid’s favorite band had been Judas Priest.

Clyde tries to be friendly right back at him; however, he notices he is self-conscious. He does not feel grounded and in-the-zone the way he does when he is working with Craig G.

John Randy drives and the van is quickly over the bridge and on the interstate.

One of the nondescript males keeps talking about the dangers of Delaware cops. It seems very important to him that he is going to do something to break the law.

Yeah, yeah, thinks Clyde, Delaware cops are strict big whoop. This asshole needs to get over himself.

Before long John Randy pulls over on the interstate. John runs over to some bush in a wet green pasture and starts taking a leak. Clyde climbs over to the driver’s seat. Clyde learns they are driving the family van of a school associate. The family is on vacation and Clyde doubts they would approve of this expedition.

John Randy is still out urinating on the bush. Clyde feels he has unwittingly been had again. Now he is the designated driver of a stolen vehicle. The crew talks in the back and John is still urinating. They had all been fools to let John drive at all. No one else seems the least bit concerned about the danger that this posed! And the urination continues.

When John finally gets back into the van, Clyde focuses on his role as a designated driver. The crew is blazing weed and drinking in the back. Through the rearview mirror, Clyde spies the girl who graduated High School with him inhale.

Clyde still can’t help but get anxious when he thinks about the blaze of weed. He decided early on that he was not going to be pressured into doing any such thing, ever. Still, the fact that he has to stand out pumps up his anxiety.

He often thinks about how people have died smuggling her that weed she is inhaling! He knows how well these cohorts were treated in the insulated private school they attended. His father and mother were teachers at the school they attended. His father was a top administrator.

Clyde feels all the students at his school had it so easy. He feels this way especially since he has moved to Camden. Every time he sees his cohorts from that school all he sees is that they always want more.

Clyde doesn’t think about how this girl who inhaled had a mother who was a secretary at the school and how she was also (like Clyde) a scholarship kid. She may well have problems like he has! No, Clyde just thinks and thinks about how greedy it is to partake in what is essentially a slave business.

People like the kids will go to jail so the likes of he and his cohorts can be enthralled with no consequences.

As Clyde fumes, his cohorts coincidentally start to criticize his driving. Perhaps they can sense his judgments. Clyde remembers John Randy taking him to a house party back when he lived with him during his senior year. When Clyde started to fulfill his role as a designated driver, John Randy exclaimed that he was driving like an asshole. Clyde really didn’t know what this meant. Is this how all sober people get treated, or just him?

Now Clyde has to get off at an exit to fill the tank. The problem is that everyone has pitched negative energy his way. Some start directing him toward different exits to get off the interstate. Clyde can’t think. When he finally gets off there is no gas station to be found.

He gets on a road that heads the wrong direction and decides he’ll save time and make a k turn. The problem is that he is used to driving a stick. He instinctively reaches down to put the car into reverse and gropes at the air. Car headlights head towards him while he searches for the transmission lever to put the car in reverse. He jams on the gas and the van peals out backwards. Now everybody is laughing and criticizing his driving. Clyde is very distressed.

Drunken John, somehow realizes he has to calm Clyde. He steps up and directs him to a gas station.

When Clyde finally arrives at the stadium, the dark clouds are moving into dusk. The parking lot is full of tailgating hippies. Clyde is entertained with odd sights of funk. There are a ton of white kids his own age from sleep away colleges that he is not used to seeing.

He follows along while his eyes drink in the scene. There are no sport teams that he knows of in Delaware but the stadium is sizable. He is afraid he will be seen as just another damn hippie amongst the crowd without any awareness that he stands out like he is Where’s Waldo different.

Inside the stadium they find seats.

Looking out the stadium through the cemented exit walls, he can see hippies who must be jumping on trampolines. They are silhouetted against the dusky skyline. Clyde watches as every time they bounce up, they strike a different pose. There is water spray that is just barely visible surrounding them though he cannot see where it is coming from.

He can’t help thinking of the parents of these lost souls and wondering what they think of their kid’s lifestyles. This fills Clyde with a sense of sadness.

It will be eight years later when Clyde will learn that hippies use spray like that to get people on trips. LSD is something he should know more about. His grandfather was the head of the Harvard psychology department that hired Timothy Leary.

Many decades later Clyde will learn that his grandfather presided over the same department that conducted mind-control experiments on the likes of Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber,) Whitey Bulger (South Bostin’s Irish Kingpin) Ken Keasy (musician in the Grateful Dead) and Robert Hunter, (Author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) This clandestine program was entitled MKULTRA.

All his mother had told him that his grandfather had done some work for the CIA.

Clyde has learned that Phish formed at the University of Vermont. He can’t help but like the look of the lead singer and guitarist as he is clearly talented. However, as the night wears on the music gets stranger, more intoxicated and psychedelic. At one point John Randy leaves his seat and joins the crowd that is standing close to the stage. Clyde hears one of the others say that John is on an acid trip.

Toward the end of the show as Clyde is getting tired. He has found the long riffs self-indulgent and the psychedelic screech of a violin bow on a steel guitar just sound just plain stupid.

Clyde often looks out the exits as the hippies trampolining in the mist. They are now harder to see against the dark sky. They remain silhouetted by the exit lights. He finds himself looking at his watch frequently. He can’t wait to get going.

Back at the minivan, Clyde continues to think about how stupid everything is.

If he were a cop, he would just perch himself outside the stadium and pull over these badly behaving white kids and cart them of to jail. He starts to imagine the amount of DUIs and drug busts that could quash hippy glory.

All these white kids are allowed to come out and talk tough about evading Delaware cops and risk marks on their permanent record, but it’s all so fake.

Clyde reasons that the police are not allowed to target them. The promoters probably pay the cops off. Clyde thinks if it was found that the band was causing arrests to happen there would be less money to be made and it would be bad for business. He thinks of the neighborhood kids back in Camden and how the lure of the crack trade results in death and imprisonment. The whole scene just makes Clyde so angry.

As he drives out the parking lot John Randy is in the back getting a lot of love and support from the crew. Clyde is tense. He watches the stadium fade out of his side window as he follows signs back to the interstate.

As Clyde drives, he thinks of his ex-girlfriend who would agree with him about the stupidity of this summer evening. It is the only thing he really misses about her.

His mind flashes to the time she got mad at him and threw a milkshake against his windshield. It hit the windshield like the thud of all her attacks.

The attacks would start when she would get mad at him for leaving her Christmas morning to celebrate with his family. Months and months of the silence treatment would ensue. Clyde had found it very hard to be treated in that manner. Clyde remembered how he would often end up in tears after sex. She would be on top and he wouldn’t understand his own reaction. She would yell at him like he was her drunken father. It wasn’t until he needed to leave that shit got really bad.

Leaving her has been so hard. Everyone she knows hounds him about her resulting depression and sadness. It has been ongoing for over a year. The neighborhood was definitely on her side. Meanwhile, she stalked him and sat beneath his apartment window many nights.

Clyde listens to the crowd mingle midst the smell of alcohol and reefer. As the party starts to die down John Randy makes his way up to the passenger seat and keeps Clyde company.

Clyde thinks of the way John shamed him describing his father’s devastated look when Clyde was in the hospital. He remembered how John came at him for no reason and tackled him and held him down during the year they lived together. He remembered most recently how John had shamed him for leaving his ex-girlfriend.

“What’s on your mind John Randy?” says Clyde

“Not much Clyde Ryan!”

It’s been a long time since Clyde’s heard his real last name.

John looks out at the refinery lights and talks about them in a peaceful manner.

Clyde is reminded his favorite Bruce Springsteen music. A song from the Nebraska album starts to ring in his ear:

Mister state trooper, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me . . .

New Jersey Turnpike, driving on a wet night, neath the refinery’s glow, where the deep dark river flows . . .

License registration, I ain’t got none. But I have a clear conscience about the things that I done.

Clyde remembers that John is tripping on acid. He reflects back what John is saying and comments. There is a long pause.

John has an artistic side and can be very creative. Plus, he knows what Clyde likes.

Then, somehow in unison they exclaim to each other: “Who is your Daddy!”

This loosens the tension in Clyde’s shoulders. He and John have known each other since they were three years old.

Once in kindergarten John had found a flat piece of balsam wood and wondered what it was. Clyde remembered a show on Sesame Street where they showed the making of bubble gum in the factory. John and he had used the Mr. Sketch Markers that smelled like mint. Together they had colored the balsam wood. Then they cut it into gun size pieces and chewed. They were both perfectly happy with the results until the teacher discovered their green tongues.

As Clyde listens to John peacefully interact with him, he is reminded of his older friend and fellow faculty brat, Chester. His first impression of sleep away college came from Chester.

When Clyde reflects about reasons that drugs just aren’t his jam, he thinks of Chester who will one day be his step-brother.

Clyde had suspected Chester might be gay. There had been some squeezes that had made Clyde uncomfortable. But Clyde had just ignored them and moved away. He really cared about Chester.

Then, there was the day Chester had come home from the dorms at Wesleyan College.

Clyde’s parents had just split. There was no one to talk to about his despair. Other friends hadn’t talked or seemed to care about it. Clyde had wished they would. He didn’t understand why no one cared about him. There was just so much despair.

So, Clyde welcomed Chester home and hoped to have a meaningful talk about his parents’ divorce.

They had been in the basement and got distracted from their ping pong game. Chester started telling him about college and interacted with Clyde in the same way John Randy is now communicating, using metaphors and making observations.

Chester had boasted that his college was one of the best pot smoking colleges there was. He’d reported that he’d done acid and that he had a crush on a guy who was in the jungle breaking trails with a machete. This was puzzling to Clyde.

Clyde had ignored the sense he was falling into a trap. Yet he continued to hide his distress and deny what was happening to the friendship. Finally, he learned that the jungle man Chester had a crush on was himself. At that point they had made their way up in his room and Chester tried to kiss his hand.

When Clyde had come to and he was hiding behind a sofa in the family room and Chester was in the kitchen talking to Clyde’s mother about gay marriage.

Now Clyde not only hadn’t had anyone he could talk to about the divorce, he didn’t have anyone to talk to about Chester. His Mom hadn’t proved useful.

In fact, his mom will silently judge him for years about being so sensitive about the incident. She will use this as evidence that Clyde is mentally ill. One time she had a girlfriend kiss her and she just said no and it wasn’t a big deal.

Clyde now thinks that Chester was likely tripping on acid. Somehow it helps explain why he was so freaked out as a teen.

Clyde was not proud of cutting off Chester. His resulting homophobic feelings, and the series of men who would later hit on him would be very painful for him to experience.

Clyde looked over at John Randy who was now sleeping and remembered an incident that happened a few years later with his mother.

Clyde had been noticing the way his mother was clearly acting very different with him when he came home from his summer work camp. She had been more permissive than she had ever been previously. When they went backpacking together, she had needed him and he had a sense of being idolized. Hypervigilance made him feel like it was a trap.

Then, the night he got his driver’s permit, his mom got really lit. Clyde didn’t think it was only wine she had been sipping. He had never seen her like this. She began begging him to go out and break the rules with her. She told him about all the men that were hitting on her but they weren’t as good as he. She begged and pleaded. She seemed flirtatious.

After that incident his mother seemed to cut him off. She was out partying most nights while he was up late working into the morning hours, completing school papers. The only contact she had with Clyde it had seemed was to yell at him for not eating. She didn’t show up on his prom night.  He was in the process of losing all trust he ever had in her.

That’s right, drugs may not be Clyde’s jam, but eating irresponsibly certainly was.

The following summer Clyde had landed in the hospital for the first time.

It will be many decades later but Clyde will remember being fondled in a bathtub by Chester’s sister when he was in third grade. Was it possible that this had started his hypervigilance and antagonistic feelings about sexual activity?

Not long after, Clyde will remember witnessing rape and incest among family friends. He had joined the family at a vacation cabin on the Rancocas River. He will only recapture fragments of memories. The graphic memories will feel dream-like and surreal. All he will know for sure is that he had run and been a complete coward. He is a runner not a fighter.

Once Clyde will realize he has a thing about blacking out these memories, it will bring up the question about other forgotten memories and his ongoing hypervigilance and inability to trust, forgive, or accept loved ones. Not trusting his poor mother will be a real problem whether or not it is justified.

Suddenly Clyde recognizes he is in Philadelphia nearing John Randy’s apartment. One of the non-descript male passengers is making a big deal that a cop is tailing them.

Jolted back into reality, Clyde is at a red light and accidentally jams his foot on the gas petal. The light is red and the minivan lurches forward through the light. He is so upset at himself.

“Wow, I love it! Fuck the cops,” said one of the nondescript passengers.

Clyde remembers how John Randy had invited himself to move in with Clyde when he first dropped out of his fancy college.

Clyde found he had mixed feelings about giving up his studio. When the bugs did not prove to scare John away, Clyde had relied on his therapist to help him tell John Randy, no.

Clyde didn’t want to wake up to the smell of reefer or get that reputation amongst his clean and sober neighbors.

So, John rented a place in West Philadelphia out by the colleges. It will take some years but eventually Clyde will realize that Johns father somehow owns the apartment complex.

The minivan finally arrives at John’s apartment. The crew disperses into their various vehicles. John stumbles inside and the lights go out. Then, Clyde goes home.

Luckily, for Clyde, it is a short walk to the Frankfort “L” line. Then it is just one transfer to the high speed-line.

Though Clyde has done this trip many times before, it is already past midnight which means that the stop by Camden’s Market-Street—the one close to his apartment—will be closed. He will have to get off at the downtown Camden exit. Clyde doesn’t care, he knows how to handle himself.

He finds himself thinking more about his choice to move to Camden. He remembers how his classmates had thrown him a party when he came back from the first of his hospital stays. He has to admit it was a nice thing to do, but John hadn’t really bought into the niceness of it. His heart towards his schoolmates had turned sour in the hospital. He no longer openly trusted anyone.

Kids from the streets had seemed to care more about him than his cohorts at private school. At least they saw and supported him while all the issues he had with his parents were stirred up. At school he was usually invisible.

Then, when the treatment failed and he got switched to an all-female unit, Clyde had continued to suffer stuffing his belly. His classmates just couldn’t understand the hell he’d been through.

Instead of accepting their good wishes and gift certificate graciously, he had been visibly embarrassed if not angry. He had thought about the fact classmates were the kids who had always teased him for being out of fashion and who tended to exclude him.

If not for the hospitalization, Clyde may have considered that he’d overcome these issues his junior year. He planned and organized the student body to get active in social services.

But being the identified and abused patient has a way of changing one’s perspective. Plus, John Randy had let him know that his partner had, behind his back, taken all the credit for all of his work. Many of his cohorts believed her.

Perhaps many classmates had observed his embarrassment and opposition. They would tend to take opportunities to cut into Clyde his senior year in high school when he was living with John Randy. After graduation he just wanted to get away from them as quick as he could.

When he had lost weight and had returned to the hospital for a second stay, he had invited this twenty-five-year-old photojournalist he had met at a school event to an event with his class.

“They all said you were bulimic not anorexic! And they were not very positive about you,” the photojournalist, soon to be his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend had said during their courting. Now at twenty-seven, she was the ex-girlfriend.

This had confirmed to Clyde that he had been right not to trust them.

Clyde’s mother had already let him know she was gossiping about him in the family sessions. She glorified the concerns and condolences she got from the popular kids in Clyde’s class regarding his bad behavior. Clyde couldn’t believe the therapist allowed his mother to taunt him in this manner. But the therapist had started punishing him by not letting him speak due to his non-compliant behavior.

Thus, his girlfriend’s words had confirmed that the gossip was slander and that it was controlled via his parents talking to their friends, his teachers. Clyde felt the whole school was unified against him and it only fed his self-destructive streak.

He had never started throwing up until they forced him to eat in the hospital.

In reality, Clyde’s accurate intuition often made things worse for him as it prevented him from faking his way into better relationships with others. Indeed, Clyde’s accurate intuition will get him in all sorts of trouble later in life until he learns this lesson.

Indeed, in the train it is hard for Clyde not to feel tragically flawed.

As he comes up the escalator out of the speed-line stop, he exits the tinted glass doors to witness a knife fight between two men surrounded by a sprawling crowd. One of the men stands upright with his fisticuffs up while the other positions himself horizontally swinging his knife widely. Clyde thinks about how everyone is out testing their nerves and wonders what the fight is about as he motors through the crowd.

By the time he is approaching Federal Street a black man takes a look at him and gives him support for his look perhaps or for just being out at this hour of the night. This helps Clyde feel safe. He is grateful to all the angels he’s met in this city who support him in this way. They far outweigh the stereotypes.

When Clyde hits Cooper Street, his pace quickens. He cannot wait to get back to his apartment. He takes the elevator up to the sixth floor and as soon as he enters his piping hot apartment the poor cat showers him with love.

But Clyde doesn’t waste much time with the cat. He skips over the carrots and the fruit and immediately attacks the graham crackers. Then he hits the ice cream. He isn’t even trying to restrain himself. He goes after some Pathmark muffins and makes sure to hit some of his ice, cold Crystal light drink. He eats the rest of his yogurt covered pretzels and is back at the ice cream.

After a while he goes through the closet, into the bathroom and braces himself on the sink (the throat.) He let’s go of all the disgust he feels from the night out with his so-called friends. The food blurts out of his mouth in clumps. He uses his hands to detach the clumps from the sink and wash them down. Sometimes he gets impatient and just jams the clumps into the throat. When he is empty, he returns to eating.

Clyde focuses his mind on Gwendolyn and Ray and the few people he can trust at the deli. Still, he cannot stop until he has made a dent into his hundred dollar a week food supply. In the hospital he had gone to AA meetings. He doesn’t need to turn to drugs to help him cope with the meanness in this world. He already has his jam. He pukes until he is exhausted. Then, he goes to sleep.

The post Jam on Rye in the X Generation appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I unlock the door to the institution’s finest office. A doctor’s name is inscribed on a linoleum slide that changes every few years. I press the darkened door smudge on the off-white paint job that dominates the unit. The door swings open. I invite Eugene’s cousin in.

Eugene’s cousin sits in the cushioned seat that matched the last dirty rug. The soot spattered on the outside of the window blocks the sun’s stream. She missed my eulogy. She depicts her challenges in finding the right freeway.

I had been up In the ER waiting room anxiously reviewing what I had to say about Eugene in front of the community. When I finally gave up on her, I had to rush back and make the memorial service happen. Somehow, I doubt it was an honest mistake to have missed the community event.

Eugene’s cousin announces has brought pictures and starts positioning them on the wobbly table.

I know that if I do my job, she will leave feeling just a bit of the guilt that I feel.

Eugene could have been given treatment that could have saved him. People do rehab and come back from strokes. The nursing home had reached out to the cousin repeatedly, I had been reassured. There had been no response.

“As usual,” I explain, scanning the pictures on the table, “many community members had listened to my eulogy understanding well the importance of acknowledging the passing.”

In reality many had strained to get a facial recognition of Eugene.

“As you know, Eugene is very quiet. Many were surprised and lifted to hear the complex details of his life and his miraculous turn around . . .

Eugene had spent years amidst the chronic, room 2, crowd. He’d talk to the therapist and answer stupid questions, but he was hard to really get to know.

As I continue to speak, I feel the strongest sense of grief. There has been staff turnaround due to the threat of closure amid the Trump era financial crisis that’s hit urban cities. The sense of sprawling tent encampments that surround us overwhelms me. It feels like Eugene and his legacy will close and be so easily forgotten.

***

When I first started on the unit, it was hard to reach anyone in room 2. The prescribed topics of illness management and functional skills were the only direction and support I was given to solve the complex phenomena of schizophrenia.

Company managers used to say that our clients would never get any better. I vehemently objected to that mentality, and I also was very worried about job security. As long as I wrote meaningful notes, I could survive.

The first time I went in there, one of Eugene’s peers had screamed, “BUZZARDS.” There was wild laughter, and some moaning. Amidst the lonely groaning and drool going on, I had a list of questions about recovery with which to work. I just didn’t know what to do except persist.

Over time, conversing with the three or four loud personalities in the group putting out disjointed content, I’d learn that the one who yelled, “BUZZARDS” thought he was an aristocrat. The aristocrat was light skinned African American man in a porkpie hat with gums instead of dentures.

Eugene would just sit in silence next to him while he talked throwing his head and his eyes back in repetitive manner. He called this “play acting” or “just acting crazy.” He would tell me he did it because he had nothing to lose. He wasn’t really crazy.

Meanwhile, loud personalities would have creative moments of clarity. For example, I once made sure one of the aristocrat’s quotes made it into the community magazine I put together: “Some days I feel like I am somewhere between a giblet and a human being,”

As per the “BUZZARDS!” comment I always knew there was meaning to it, but it’d take time to learn to come out of my shell and really get down with it.

Of course, the buzzard in the room was me. I was feeding off the dead and decrepit. Indeed, with the salary I was making, I would be able to go from nothing to having the down payment for a bay area house.

One day I would have the confidence to start cawing like a crow. I’d caw like a crow and circle the room until I got close to the aristocrat. Then, I’d simulate getting shot straight in the heart. Then, I’d fall until I laid flat on the floor beneath him and abreact a slow and painful death. It was the only appropriate response.

I still remember the aristocrat’s laugh the first time I pulled something like this. The laugh would happen periodically at the oddest of moments, “HA-HA!”

At least when I finally got down with him, the laugh happened at the appropriate moment. Over time I did manage to understand. The aristocrat was an aristocrat. An aristocrat and a philosopher.

Still, Eugene didn’t have time for these kinds of antics. He would just give you straight forward and stale answers.

***

I had a few years to onboard before I officially carried Eugene on my caseload.

Our first meeting, Eugene said, “I want to purchase a book to read with the solution to schizophrenia in it. I had a box filled with haphazardly xeroxed recovery materials I’d gleaned off the internet. I shuffled through it until I found the Patricia Deegan article introducing the hearing voices network in Europe. There was a book recommendation at the bottom I explained.

It took us a while but we sent away for it through snail mail. It was a good effort but it never arrived.

One day we were sitting in doctor’s office. It was the end of the session and Eugene exclaimed, “I see alien green!” They were the last words I’d hear from him for years.

Unlike a few of the colleagues who have come and gone over the years, I insisted in keeping weekly appointments with muted Eugene. Instead of talking we walked.

He was an extremely fast and aggressive walker. I ran ten miles on Saturday and hiked twenty miles every Sunday vying to meet a soul mate; yet, I could barely keep up.

As the muted walks continued, I would try one-way comments to connect with him. I would ask if he saw any objects as we walked that were signs of alien surveillance. I would point out things I saw that could be signs of surveillance. I let him lead.

It took me a while to develop these kinds of connection techniques. We did a lot of silent walks.

When Eugene had a housing crisis, I did some research and found an odd doctor named Bassard who had a board and care that was off in the Hayward foothills. There was reportedly a lot of space out there to walk.

His dutiful case worker in West Oakland had told me he used to lead Sierra Club backpacking trips in his younger years. She sometimes talked to his aunt who would pick him up and take him Christmas shopping for his nieces and nephews who lived in undisclosed location. The aunt might be how she found out about his secret life as a backpacker.

***

Doctor Bassard’s board and care seemed to be a good fit for a while.

One day after our walk Eugene sat with me and explained that he used to work in a print shop, the hardest kind of physical labor there was. He reported that he was the hardest worker and would often demonstrate his superiority to the other workers. He didn’t give a fuck!

The next thing I heard from Eugene was that he was thinking about going to the Alameda County Fair. Then I’d hear about Christmas shopping with his aunt.

I’d learn that he had been a drug and alcohol counselor early on. When he’d gotten married and had his son, he switched to the print shop to increase his income.

His mom had been, “nuts.” The daughter of a famous Irish protestant radio preacher and artist. In fitful rages she would accuse Eugene of being a spy for the Irish Republican Army and beat him. His father was a roofer and (according to Eugene) a bit of a slacker. He supported the mother and later Eugene through the years of madness

Growing up, Eugene’s peers would tease him because his Mom was “nuts.” He learned to hang out with the druggies even though he refused to use. Thus, the drug and alcohol job.

I learned much of this far later in my tenure when Eugene returned to treatment.

We took a walk before he got taken to jail on assault charges. It had been a return to the mute days. He littered. Sensing his ire, I hadn’t corrected him. There was a can on the hospital grounds and he smashed it with his foot. I hadn’t done anything . . .

His roommates had been constantly stealing his food at Bassard’s. They were largely unmonitored. Eugene’s efforts to fix this were not supported by the strange doctor.

***

Throughout I was volunteering after work for my child and family hours. Finally, I passed the exams. I managed to meet my soul mate and collect enough for down payment on a house.

I heard about an expensive group curriculum for psychosis developed by Patricia Deegan. Me being the arrogant cheapskate that I am I decided to develop my own. Thus, I started running psychoses focus groups for years developing a curriculum.

By the time Eugene was referred back to our program, I had left my job for a year and a half, but been permitted to return when the new job hadn’t worked out.

***

This time Eugene was staying at McClure’s board and care home, one of the best licensed board and care in town. His trusty case manager advocated for him.

Eugene was mandated to complete our five day a week PHP program by the board a care facility. Turns out all he had done was gotten angry about taking his medication on day and slammed a door. Now, the hospital could make a lot of money off him.

The hospital had erected world class facilities but left its historic psych ward with bubbled windows (our unit) alone. No longer could we go out and sit by the trash compacter and watch the men work. Walks were no longer easily accessible.

Eugene and his peers had to weave through the historic backwards, passing the freshly built shower facilities for doctors, the hole-in-the-wall medical records department, down a flight of stairs and down and then around the substance abuse ward to find the sunlight. Then they had to walk down a sizeable hill all the way down to the sidewalk to smoke.

Everyday in community meeting they would be reminded that tickets for smoking were eight hundred dollars, the same price as their monthly SSDI checks.

Eugene was one of the few remaining room 2 clients who obeyed these daily threats. He’d be known to skip the last group and stay down on the sidewalk smoking.

By the time he had sat through two days of PHP which was four groups with the same small group of people who were just out of the hospital, he was fuming. When I sat down with him for the second time, I knew I had to do something.

Board and care homes have no legal right to mandate treatment, but they can kick Eugene out for misconduct. When he half way expressed the reason he was fuming, I could see how right he was.

Luckily the clinical manager who hated me was out for the day. I went straight to the director who had been around as long as I had. I made the appeal. I kept it simple, but was compelling enough.

I reported to Eugene that he could come just two days a week as he’d requested.

***

“See, what happened to me was that I leaked a suspicious death to the newspapers. I was afraid thuging residents I knew at the section 8 complex where I worked would find out.

“I sought consult from my best college friend back east, an ex-drug addict. He warned me not to leave town, he had the power to find me.

“Had he set me up to take a fall? That’s what I started thinking.

“I tried to escape to Canada and they put me in a State Hospital for three months. I was discharged to the streets and I took a Trailways to California.

“Turns out the only job I could get was arranged by my family at an Italian Delicatessen. I had to move to the outskirts of the bay area, bike ten miles and take the rails an hour to get to the job. Everyday I was followed on my way to and from the job and no one believed me.

I had told my story as such a million times in the psychoses focus group. If I hadn’t done so repeatedly, I would not have been able to even articulate secrets so raw. But I had a lot of practice and gotten a lot of support from participants who loved and advocated for my group.

“I don’t think your family is really an Irish mafia family!” exclaimed Eugene. Sure, enough he had tracked the details. His words gutted me as brutally as possible. “I don’t think you were really followed on your way to the Italian Delicatessen. I think those are paranoid delusions!”

I remained cool as a cucumber in hot sauce. Experience had prepared me for this moment. I spoke softly and peacefully . . .

“One day at the BART station, a man I knew well from the section 8 housing authority in Seattle Washington walked past me with handcuffs and a shirt that read “CIA.” He sat across from me and stared at me the whole ride. He had told me he killed people.

I answered a few questions: “yes, I knew for a fact he had been busted for impersonating a CIA officer in the past;”  “yes, I knew that for a fact because I had read his file as a social worker;” yes, I ignored him;” “yes, it was just another day for me.”

Eugene’s questions were intelligent ones!

“Then there was the day I came home and my apartment was trashed. My kitty litter had been slashed and emptied over the carpeted floor; my belongings had been taken out of my closet; and the labels of my clothes had been slashed with a knife. When I went to the managers office to complain, this woman I had met before was there. She had flashed her official secret service badge at me. She told me that my uncle had entered my apartment and had the right to do so because he had co-signed on the apartment.

I paused. I was afraid Eugene wouldn’t follow the very real details I shared with him.

“Yeah, I had the secret service follow me once as well,” admitted Eugene. “One time I tried to escape to Canada myself.”

***

“Yes, Eugene started talking,” said his case manager. “I think he did so because he finally met someone to whom he could relate.” I could feel the social worker smiling as she acknowledged me. “I think now he has hope for recovery.”

Eugene and I had a lot of good years of talking and relating. I used to go down and have sessions with him on the sidewalk. Eventually, he started coming to see me in the office during the third group.

***

When I finally get to the place where I tell the cousin about how I had cracked Eugene’s case, to her credit she shifts to trying to help me grieve smoothly.

Listening to her stories is nice. She tells me about cheerful parts of Eugene: his generosity to his family and to his fellow peers at the board and care. I choose to keep a picture of Eugene with her husband, a stout Irish musician, as they shared a cigar with a smile.

Her stories help me see that when he started to tell me about cooperating and sharing TV with his roommates that we really had accomplished something. Previously he’d just talked about walking up to Berkeley to go to a doughnut shop.

The cousin tells me about how they used to visit him at the board and care home in the inner-city with gifts and that by the time they had left they would see those gifts getting sold in a garage sale at the neighbors’ yard. It must have filled them with so much guilt to see what he was going through in contrast to them.

When I was in the State Hospital, the few belongings I had to my name were constantly stolen. For Eugene, living like that was a life sentence.

Eugene had learned more about the mental illness of schizophrenia, than he’d learned about the hidden world of recovery.

In our treatment, I’d finally gave him a book with the solution to schizophrenia. I wrote it. It was my memoir.

***

When my mother told family acquaintances what had happened to me on my way to Canada, everybody we knew, she was sure to tell me, cursed the closings of the institutions in the eighties. They were trying to sooth her. They didn’t want her to have to enable-me any longer.

My life ended in the folklore of the Christmas Card.

Sure, I have had some mainstream accomplishments that could be cited. Sure, the community of people I once knew could stand to learn about the reality of mental illness in the U.S.

But alas, my achievements only become embarrassing reminders of the word that defines me to everyone with whom I grew up, schizophrenia. Some days it feels like that word defines me to almost every one I once knew.

Once, when I credited my Mom that investing three thousand dollars in a car for me, I was trying to honor her support. I said that it was the main thing that enabled me to recover.

Her words were, “I shouldn’t have purchased you that car!”

When I published my award-winning memoir, my grandmother’s dying words to me (who she couldn’t recognize) was that the book made the family look bad.

A relative wrote a bad review. Another made a salty, veiled-in-a-compliment criticism. The whole Clan ignored me at the family reunion.

Eugene in contrast sacrificed himself for his family. That is somehow more admirable in our shared cultural heritage.

***

Sure, Eugene and I talked openly about aliens. He’d explain that he could feel implants obsessively on his brain. I think they were caused by ongoing voices about which he never did get to the point where he’d share.

Sure, he’d talk about the very common experience of being able to transition into different dimensions of reality. He could tell because the board and care rats he’s seen skittering across the floor suddenly disappear into thin air. Finally, he told me about his relative with Top Sec clearance for NASA.

Neither of us suffered for the sharing of these details. We didn’t become worse or traumatize each other. No, we formed a valuable allegiance that enabled him to have relationships with others.

True, this only happened because I broke all the rules and shared with him what many would consider to be delusions about my brush with the underworld and Italian Mafia.

Sure, he died before he could start up his business or take the stained-glass, art class he wanted to take. I almost got him to pay for an art class at one point.

It’s true I wasn’t so committed to him that I would quit my day job and help him come back from his stroke.

***

So, when the cousin leaves the hospital, I think she feels some of the guilt I felt when I drove across town with cards and letters after work only to learn that he expired. As she leaves the hospital, she expresses a little upset that I only accepted one picture of Eugene that she had collected. I sure hadn’t realized she would feel that way.

But as I say goodbye, I still hope for the best for the cousin and Eugene’s family who accepted his gifts at Christmas and never reached back. I call his son with the phone number the cousin gave me, but never hear back. I still call my mother weekly and vie for a less hurtful relationship.

Still. I hope and pray that the fact that Eugene and I were finally able to work together gave him a sense of peace and that he may rest from the torment of that damned word we use to bill for services, schizophrenia.

The post Eulogy On Irish Schizophrenia appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

It will be my first EMDR training with a master trainer. I receive a message on my Facebook Messenger account. Someone I friended from Los Gatos California asks if I want to be rich and famous? I can join the illuminati, there are twenty available slots. Do I want to apply?

I have heard many people denounce the illuminati. I mostly know about the organization from a Tupac lyric. Still, it takes me a minute to figure that the post is probably a hoax. I get my ass off the commode and prepare to depart.

If I can trust this EMDR trainer, I may choose to pay to join her network and attend her trainings. I have found the other two famous experts I have taken workshops from to personally wound me.

I have already tried EMDR with my therapist. I am in therapy because of my history of bad experiences with therapists and my inability to get along with my head-shrinking colleagues. One time my therapist got frustrated with me and said he thought I wasn’t a good candidate for EMDR, but I hadn’t allowed him to give up on me.

Taking time for the sake of learning is a challenge at this time. At work we are switching to computerized records. It is not clear if we are going to survive this transition. Our unit has been targeted by administrators who call our service a dinosaur.

***

On my way across San Francisco traffic I listen to a podcast I’ve agreed to appear on in a few days. This podcast is: Baltimore is Talking Live; with hosts Reverend Dr. Q and Aaron Green. I am a little old school. Podcasts are generally not a part of my world unless I am going to appear on one.

In this era, reality is NPR and MSNBC verses Fox News. The impeachment inquiry is on the table and Dr. Q bounces from the bullets in his neighborhood to slavery to the hypocrisy of the left.

I think about the propaganda of each side so often I have a tendency to tune out; but I kind of like Dr. Q.

I work primarily for people who live in board and care homes amid the buzz of bullets in the inner-city. I feel their stories of oppression are not even part of the debate.

If I believed the text books I’d read in college, I would not believe the things they tell me about oppression in the inner city. It seems like books and education the fact program participants can’t write notes on themselves as a justification to take money that should be going to them.

Alas, I don’t trust books written by psychotherapists all that well.

On the podcast, the guest is an author about porn addiction who seems to talk like the hosts weren’t there. His own porn addiction put him in jail for a year and he clearly was far more down to earth than he would have been otherwise. I am impressed that he speaks from a place of lived experienced.

For my clients with porn addiction, the short discussion really helps.

***

I race through the last lanes of traffic and break a few laws. I follow google and park in a lot under the Hilton and get to the bathroom before the conference starts.

As introductory comments are being made a woman who is my age slips into the seat next to me. She whispers at me some introductions and asks if I had read the book that the training is based on. I lift my hand to flash my wedding ring and tell her no just a bit bluntly.

I think back the dating years and think about how blatantly rude I had been. Others might think it was as if someone had lobbed a big fat softball at me and I whiffed horribly. I make some other friendly comments to compensate.

At the first break, I am feeling pretty good about the training.

The woman next to me explains her behavior by exclaiming she’s got poison oak. This genuinely interests me and I inquire and learn that she’s been in Ventana Wilderness which I know well.

I met my wife on an event like that and recall how hard it is being single.

I am quick in and out of the restroom because there are almost no males in the conference. Scanning the room of hundreds, one might see maybe three or four.

As if he read my mind, a man walks up and starts a conversation. He looks very dapper wearing an earthy necklace with a stone in it. He works in a group practice in Palo Alto primarily with adolescents. Clearly ten year older that me, he approaches me like he is interviewing me for a position and wants to know what I’ve read about my specialty, psychosis.

I explain that I am an award-winning author who writes about my experience running professional groups for psychosis. I am not afraid to tell him I have not read many authors who write about my specialty.

He suggests John Weir Perry. Of course, I recognize the name. He was mentor to a psychotherapist I know. I have heard this psychotherapist call me out my name with a bitter voice. Meanwhile, other cohorts he would call, dear.

I acknowledge that I have heard of this deceased writer who was in favor of medication free clinics in the seventies. I mention Soteria House, I-Ward, and Diabasis. The man correctly acknowledges that Perry started Diabasis . It figures, Diabasis was clearly the expensive version of the three! I am less motivated to read the academic ghoul now.

The man, really suggests that I read Perry. “He really did some deep work, and it is very assessible.”

***

The illuminating woman with poison oak invites me to lunch. As if she knows it will interest me, she talks about living in Nicaragua and how most Americans don’t even understand how lucky they are.

She agrees with me when I talk about the facility I work at and the disparities in mental health treatment verses physical health. She says in the nonprofit she works at the quality of facility is an afterthought.

My attention lapses. I remember the trainer’s rehearsed voice, “and then, you start bilateral stimulation and let the person process . . .”

I think about the urinal I am most used to using. I think about the leak that has colored the underneath floor on its way to the drain. Seven years ago, I put in a work order to fix the urinal and years later the drip did get fixed. Still the glistening yellow stain remains. Stradling the stain daily, my eyes are likely to notice the psychotropic shit smears on the textured wall. Psychotropic shit is particularly rich in odor! I think of the soot on the screen outside the bubbled window. The soot built up the years they demolished the old wing next to us the clang and buzz sounding above our voices in the group rooms.

And when I am ready, I submerge from my trance. I figure maybe three seconds have lapsed.

Somehow, I doubt the we are talking about the same level of neglect!

I continue listening to the poison oak woman who has talked about her South Bay family in a scenic suburb. Sure enough, they were personal friends with the trainer. She intends to say “Hi” to the trainer from her sister.

My first supervisor comes from the same town and it conjures up images.

“You know mental health is a very small community,” said that old supervisor the last time I saw her, “If you do something to piss someone off, word definitely gets around.”

I think about how I believe I have been black balled from the county panel that would enable me to open a practice.

***

In the next hour I listen to the trainer’s current concern about the rise of homelessness that is overwhelming the Bay Area. I think about the Great Depression and the presence of Hoover towns often when I see the sprawling encampments.

She launches a story about a kid from Danville who ran away and lived on the streets. Years later a newspaper found the hardened street person and reconnected them to their wealthy brother and got him therapy. He was doing well and getting treatment for his trauma, but then ran away again and overdosed in an encampment. It’s a story that sounds like the movie, Paris Texas.

The trainer says, “I think when people live on the streets, they get a sense of community in the encampments. I mean why else would someone return and choose to live there?”

As the whole room bobs its head, I fume.

I think of the old flick Paris Texas and I know there can be a lot of reasons people choose to run away. Why can’t a trauma specialist think of other reasons? When I saw Paris Texas, I remember the clear sense of an affair that happened between the homeless man and the brother’s wife who hadn’t wanted him to return home. It was a reality one had to sense. My whole life I have wondered how it is that other people don’t all run to join the streets!

One can feel very guilty for coming back from leading a life outdoors and feel rageful! And there can be so many millions of reasons to run! Some of us are born to run, baby!

At lunch I get a Messenger spot on my phone. The person who invited me to join the illuminati has actually contacted me again and is demanding a response. This time the face on the little circle is one that I recognize. I put the phone down before I am sure of this.

I remember collaborating with the face on the little circle picture. She’d sent me a flyer with the silhouette of a cannabis leaf to announce our mutual event at the hospital.

I recall how I played dumb and asked a patient who was once affiliated with a famous drug dealer before legalization. Publicly he says his family business is in “manure” so some of us may not understand. He comes to program so he has a public excuse not to behave violently and works to avoid smoking.

When I’d taken the time to assess his feelings about the cannabis symbol, he’d sighed and confirmed it was a leaf. I think he appreciated my effort to console him. We’ve always liked shooting the shit with each other.

I think that as a psychotherapist on a psychiatric unit, I am already a member of too many secret treatment team societies.

I pick up the phone and respond: “No, thank you for asking.”

I am not going to sell my soul any more than I already have.

***

I bump into a colleague who used to work at the unit I work in and we decide to lunch.

She got caught in a cross-fire of bullets one evening outside the hospital on the way to her car. This caused her to ask for a transfer to the more suburban outpatient psychiatric unit.

She is an attractive married woman with a slender physique. She says she’s on a gluten-free diet and we discuss this a bit.

I want to tell her that she can’t con a con.

We had never been super close. I’d shied away from her because I’d sensed she was still a partier. But we’d had a few good experiences together.

She was a basketball star in college, comes from Texas, and likes Whole Foods. She has recently seen my presentation on psychosis and was nice about it.

I am surprised to learn that she comes from El Paso as she also is part Italian. She talks about how distressed she is about the mass shooting that happened in the WalMart. She has a private practice two days a week and that is what I want so I pick her brain a little. She talks about her history of receiving EMDR and what she’s gone through to become a specialist.

I think about how I felt hearing about homelessness and lie. I say how much I am enjoying the conference. She really supports me in my wish to open up a private practice for my niche.

“People at Fairmont don’t understand how well they have it. Things were really tough at Highland,” she says. “I have a friend in the county, I will follow up with him and see if I can find out if you are really on a blacklist for the county panel. I heard they are currently looking for providers”

***

The rest of the training is a review of the basic tenets of EMDR mixed with four videos that demonstrate them in action. I am pretty able to follow. Participants are asked to visit very dark places and use images and memory of personal resources they have developed in their life to now support them in imagining different outcomes.

The fist two videos are done with therapists who are in training. They are clearly very trusting and articulate. They really demonstrate how this treatment can transform lives. The discussion and review of the points of training are very helpful.

However, as we all know, people who are used to therapy have an easier time processing traumatic events and moving on with their lives.

When I worked with my therapist on resourcing, I realized that all the people I identified as resources had also seriously hurt and betrayed me. Outside my wife and my dogs, it was hard to identify sources of comfort. When I was finally able to think of the writer Charles Bukowski as a resource, I got somewhere. I love his writing and never felt bruised by him.

Indeed, when I will try EMDR post workshop, I will find that bilateral stimulation with the paddles to sound artists like Tupac and Bruce Springsteen help me significantly as well.

***

The rest of the day is a video on her effort to do EMDR on a difficult community person. He is a porn and meth addict who got busted for having some child pornography mixed in with his volumes of pornography.

He did a year in jail and got connected to a church and is now clean, but denies that he has much of a problem and expresses no remorse or emotions when you ask him.

“And,” says the trainer a little playfully, “You might notice that this man is not very intelligent.”

As the video starts the hulking man is wearing a Yankees cap. He is clearly not a hat wearer as the hat is unworn and does not come close to looking good on him. The hat reminds me of Omar from The Wire wearing a tie in the courtroom. His demeaner is like Kevin Spacy in Unusual Suspects.

I instantly think of the Yankees cap as a gang symbol. I know some local gang signs from Oakland, but this man appears to be of Italian Heritage and I think of the New York five families.

He comes across like he’s not going to trust this snobby goof and does deny all his feelings as promised. And who would? The good doctor’s demeaning opinion of the man comes across clear in my eyes.

Sure enough, the man is married with children to whom he had stopped paying attention because of his addiction. He admits that he used the porn to seduce porn stars who stayed late at the strip clubs to film after hours. There is no mention or concern for how he got money for the copious amount of meth he used. In high school, he regrets he was more of a bully than a student.

I rage at the trainer’s clear lack of understanding.

The man has the respect of authority of a soldier. In the conference, the expert doctor makes fun of him for having it. At the end he pretends to want to make her happy.

I have been trafficked by people like him. And now I work in a public sector job that is being choked by one of his buddies.

Once again, bovine heads bob. Now I am almost certain I do not want to learn EMDR from this person who speaks before me.

I have been too hurt by people who have failed to understand me in therapy!

That said, the man did get to the point where he could cry before her and access those pent-up gangster emotions.

Who knows what masterminded violence he was processing by taking that meth and porn! I think about drugs women, or guns, the commodities of the black-market America. I think of how smart and twisted the courts were to use the child pornography charge to force him away from gangsterism. He likely would have had to go protective custody in the pen with a sex offence.

I am grateful he is healing and living more in love, though. He’s got to live in mind-dumbing fear of retaliation through, no doubt.

***

On my way home at the end of the conference, I say goodbye to the male adolescent therapist. The illuminating poison oak woman has distanced herself since I stood her up at lunch. Oops!

I check my phone and clearly the option to join the illuminati has passed as the two messages have been erased off my messenger account.

My ex-coworker comes over to say goodbye and I lie again and say I really liked the conference. I really can’t say anything bad about our talk other than the fact that I lied.

I know that I have gotten a lot of learning from the conference. I am impressed with how EMDR enables a person to work through trauma without taking the therapist there with them. Like the last scenes of the TV series the Sopranos, I feel surrounded by shrinks who are sipping wine and being asses all around me.

I remain unmotivated to read therapy books or join therapy associations.

Alas, I am not internally moved past my stubbornness. I am not vying to become a fucking liar like the rest of them!

The post Modern Day Healers and Tupac’s Illuminati appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

When I took the job at the Housing Authority facility dubbed the “Hotel of Horrors” in the local media, I thought I was on a mission from god. 

The weekend before I started the job, I took a spiritual retreat with the Quaker community I frequented. Out on an island on the Puget Sound, in a quaint room, I told a small group of my cohorts that I was following a spiritual calling by taking this job. Maybe that’s just how I dealt with my nerves.

Everybody at the community mental health center where I worked was far too afraid to take a job there. 

I was a master’s level professional. I was able-bodied and good at helping others. I knew that trying to “save” a community was risky. But I did not imagine what I was about to endure.

***

Years earlier, in college, I’d moved to the inner-city in Camden, New Jersey to hide a history of male anorexia.

In the beginning of my senior year, I had to take a semester off because of a mental health crisis. An observant resident of my apartment complex introduced herself to me upon my return from the hospital as if she knew what was going on with me. Her name was Cece. 

Like me, Cece was a fish out of water in the inner-city, entirely alone, surviving amid the roaches. She admitted to a history of shooting heroin in her toes. She knew a lot about psychiatric meds and liked to recommend different medications to me often second guessing my doctors. She had been on all of them!  Now she was on social security, clean, and was seeking employment. 

At the same time I started to get invited out with a group of my fellow students who all commuted in from the suburbs. The leader of this clique was an English student who wanted to help me out in spite of my hospitalization. He would go to law school and use my rental history to establish a bachelor pad for four of us. I was invited to go out with the group, but they made it clear, I was not to bring Cece. 

A year later I was living with the suburban clique and I received a call from Cece. She found a job at a photography store and had managed to get off social security. I had just landed a job in a mental health clinic and was starting my master’s program. Somehow, Cece found out my work number and called me. 

“You are getting ready to do things that are really wrong, but that’s okay, I forgive you.”

What a wise intervention that was! Indeed, I felt bad about leaving her behind. At my new job I’d have to follow the lead of my supervisor who seemed to demean the clients. Cece was right: I’d surely done wrong, and I was fixing to do a lot more that I didn’t feel was right. 

It was the psychopharmacology craze of the nineties and I learned to see schizophrenia as a medical problem that just required medication. I distracted myself from feelings of guilt by chasing connections with fellow students in my master’s program and holding on to the bachelor pad clique. Maybe curing my loneliness, and tendency to get scapegoated by suburbanites, really was as simple as a complex cocktail of four medications. 

To my credit, I worked hard and went the extra mile to help the people coming to the clinic where I worked. And as I got credentials, I took more risks and made more effort to do the right thing. 

Once I successfully graduated, I left it all behind and moved to the west coast. 

***

So, as I was on my mission from god and entering the “Hotel of Horrors,” I pledged to only do what I felt was right. 

In six months there I saw doors torn off of hinges by thugs in broad daylight. I saw addicts get stabbed and nothing done about it. I saw vulnerable residents get hauled off to jail when they were bullied into using their apartments for drug deals. Mostly, the police only came around to take a barricaded paranoid resident off to the hospital because he refused to pay rent.

I did a lot to support vulnerable clients. I met with local advocates. I leaked stories to the media. My job was threatened. When a resident without an addiction ended up dead from a heroin overdose I was suspicious. I arranged for a young newspaper reporter to investigate. I stopped taking my medication.

“One time we had a social worker come down here like you and try to straighten out this mess,” a resident told me. “They told him to stop but he wouldn’t. He ended up having to move down here with us. I just don’t want that to happen to you!”

I started to get a sense of connection. All parts of my life were in play. Had I heard those words for a reason? Were they a threat! I was getting scared. 

I tried to escape to Canada, but I was followed and harassed by police. My parents had put out a missing-persons report so the police were initially violent with me. I believed that they were trying to trap me in a hospital and went to great lengths to resist.  Finally, I surrendered.

Being confined to Montana State Hospital for three months was a lot to go through. Two months in, I was transferred to the chronic unit which was barely heated above freezing and over-crowded. When I finally got discharged to the streets, I purchased a Greyhound bus pass to Fresno California.

***

When I ran out of medication, I lost my low-wage job. I couldn’t seem to find another job and, with my money dwindling, my family arranged a job for me if I moved to the Bay Area. If I didn’t take the job, I was on my own. 

It was quite a coincidence because I had decided that my family was a mafia family, and the job they arranged for me was at an Italian deli. I kept the deli job for close to a year before I agreed to go back on medication and try to return to working in mental health.

Returning to my former career wasn’t easy though. I had to bike twenty miles plus take the rails for two hours just to get to my job at the deli and back. Customers and co-workers targeted and humiliated me; they seemed to know things about me they shouldn’t. I ran into residents I recognized from Seattle on my way to work who sat next to me on the train. Every day there were signs I was being followed. Sometimes it seemed that I would be the only person who could recognize the signs, but they were always there. One day the police tailed me in the car I managed to acquire.

When I started back on medication the following continued, but I was better able to ignore it.  Eventually, I was able to get hired away from the deli and back into a mental health position.

For me, it took being diagnosed a schizophrenic to finally realize that just because I am an educated rich kid who knows how to write billable notes, I am not any better. I never fit in with the graduate students that went on to populate suburbia, I was a better fit with my inner-city neighbor, Cece.

Now, I am grateful for all I went through. 

I have found so much meaning in my work in the seventeen years since I returned to working in mental health. It took me six years to start to disclose my history. Then, I started psychosis focus groups and looking for a systematic way of redefining psychosis. I have really appreciated my privilege of working and being innovative to get results that might not have happened if I didn’t know that recovery was real.

I still take medication, but I would never do something like leaving Cece behind again. Instead, I am opening up a practice that aims to help people like her rise above a hopeless mental health system.

I feel for people who work in mental health and believe schizophrenia is just a medical disease that entitles mental health workers to their salary and power. I would be so burnt out and uncaring if I still believed that to be true. I am grateful that I have learned to be a different kind of worker.

This was published in the Better Because Project!

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The post A Different Kind of Worker appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Tin Man thinks of his great grandfather’s ancestral quilt that hangs in the suburban guest room and how it disgusts him. His people were lumber barons back east, in upstate New York. He was given the quilt even though he feels like the black sheep of the family. Tin Man did what he could to leave the family behind at age seventeen.

Tin is meeting with his associate Lang for the first time. He is navigating with Lang’s directions scrawled on a piece of paper in his little put-put Ford Fiesta. He still resists navigating with Google Maps on his phone like everyone else. Before long he finds himself deeply embedded in urban Richmond.

As he starts negotiating one-way streets, a much younger part of himself emerges. His chest puffs out and his shoulders naturally drop. It’s as if a piece of the inner-city has entered him. He chooses to view this as acculturation rather than racism. He is proud of years he spent striving to fit in amongst an inner-city context as a college-age-youth.

When Tin Man arrives at Taco Bell, he knows his dog, Jesus, won’t do well in the car alone with the window down. Indeed, she barks despite the treat. Tin Man is thrown off center by this.

Lang (short for Langston) is easy to spot in the small sitting area with a sprawled-out suitcase open and many small objects. Tin man notes a carrot stub, a prayer book, some writing pages, a phone, and a candle among other meaningful trinkets. Langston looks like he has lost a lot of weight.

“Hey, isn’t it great, they finally allow them to play Mexican Music in Taco Bell,” says Langston loudly.

Tin catches the wise smile as their eyes meet. But in many ways Langston looks sweaty and vulnerable in his undershirt in a way he did not when he was Tin Man’s guest speaker some years ago.

Tin finds himself having to slow down, check out the scene, and make small talk while Lang collects his stuff and talks.

Finally, Tin Man explains that the barking dog outside is his.

“That’s right,” says Lang, “You have a new dog.”

Tin explains about Jesus’s separation anxiety.

Before long they are headed across the parking lot. Lang says, “Oh, I think we are going to have to make friends.

Soothing Jesus, Tin Man leashes her and lets her out of the back seat.

Lang takes off his hat and bows his head and says, “When she sees I have no attachments to material belongings she will become more at ease with me!”

Before Tin can control Jesus on the retractable leash, Jesus bares her teeth, gets extremely close to Lang’s face, and snaps with precision, just missing.

Tin’s apology does little to pierce the intensity of the moment for him. Lang only becomes more determined and flattens his entire body against the pavement.

Jesus barks as she is pulled backwards but slowly presses against the leash until she successfully sniffs Lang.

“Now we will be okay,” says Lang with assurance.

Lang ignores Tin’s second apology and arranges to put his suitcase in the trunk of the car. Jesus allows Lang to get in the passenger seat without protest.

***

As the car rolls out of the parking lot, Lang lets Tin know what time he needs to be dropped off by to make curfew at the shelter where he is staying. He gives himself an extra forty-five minutes so that he doesn’t have to go to a church service. He is sure he can get away with it.

Tin Man has no problem accepting it when Lang quickly falls into a pattern of doing most of the talking. Tin recalls a time period when he was coming out of crisis when he had needed to do the same thing. Unfortunately, his hosts had usually been very judgmental and socially disciplined him. Tin can almost taste his own bitterness towards them as he drives slow devoting his attention to Lang.

When the car hits Richmond Parkway which circles the north half of the declining, post-industrial city, Tin knows the way. They cross under the freeway and enter the posh Point Richmond. Tin navigates to the little tunnel that goes through the hill.

As Lang talks, Tin is reminded of elements of Lang’s story from the hospital and occasionally fills in blanks he might not otherwise get. Langston was dropped off at an orphanage and adopted by his grandmother. His family expected high levels of success and when he got accepted at UC Berkeley, he had to admit that he couldn’t read due to learning disorders he’d hidden. Lang is good at telling his story!

Now Lang is talking about dropping out of Medical School, which he points out happens to a small portion of every class. A van comes from behind and violently speeds past on the double lines.

Lang is clearly thrown by this display of contempt. He interrupts himself a couple of times to exclaim his disbelief.

Lang’s comfort with homeless shelters is admittedly foreign to Tin. Back when he was in an emergency state, he had worked seemingly endless numbers of twelve-hour days to avoid them. He’d had to bike and BART four hours a day just to travel to his job at a suburban Italian Delicatessen, Money from home was needed for ten months to supplement his nine dollar an hour income to keep him in the boon town apartment he’d rented. He hadn’t considered the alternative of receiving food stamps. If he had been resourceful and applied for entitlements, he would have felt far less tortured by his family during that time period.

As a result, Tin understands that he can’t relate to Lang’s disgust with the speed of the modern word.

***

In the trailhead parking lot, a camper van is parked for the night. There are more and more people enduring a homeless lifestyle in every pocket of the bay area these days. Up north fires are raging and the air quality is poor.

Tin notices a few dogs leashed on clothes lines. He hastens to leash Jesus and move her away from the dogs.

The dogs get up and bark forcing the woman and man sitting in lawn chairs in the dust to pull on the clothes lines. Both Tin and Lang greet them and hasten to get Jesus out of their way by starting up the trailhead.

The walk is a little steep for Lang who is fifteen years Tin’s senior.

It takes Tin a little while to tease out where Lang is coming from. He senses Lang knows some about his struggles against the black-market economy during Tin’s emergency. Lang seems to be trying to help him. There are many stops and a great deal of description.

Lang is proudly able to describe some of his grandfather’s attributes. The attributes explain his rise to power. He ran a company that operated along the west coast in Canada and the U.S. that smuggled alcohol during prohibition.

Lang explained how his grandfather won and maintained his power and how the workers used him to police and eliminate dangerous people. “It is not an easy business,” exclaims Lang, “but it is necessary part of life.”

Lang shifted over to his mother’s father. “When Communists came to take over his village, my Paw Paw who was the leader encouraged everyone to escape and stayed to fight the Communists all by himself

The trio arrive at a fork in the trail. Tin who had envisioned doing a bit more walking accepts that this is the place most of the work is going to happen. Jesus is quite nervous and constantly claws into the dirt pressing against the leash.

“My mother couldn’t look at me as I grew up and my grandma loved me to death. However, when I boarded the plane to come to America, Grandma said she would be right back and I didn’t see her again for two years. I was six years old and I felt utterly abandoned. I have been repeatedly hurt by people who abandon me as a result. When grandma died, I felt I lost everything! I have struggled not to blame people for abandoning me my whole life and it wasn’t their fault . . .”

As Lang talks boldly in this manner including flurries of details, he cries openly; and then, quickly returns to laugher. Then, he seems to return to his next lesson. Tin Man recognizes this being a sign of true healing. He does his best to link into the analogies made to demonstrate listening.

“My mom was hateful to me. She expected me to become a doctor and disowned me when I got into drugs. I wanted to be a minister and author and she said, ‘I will not have a poor penniless preacher for a son!’ That is when I went into the corporate world. It is the one time I really committed evil in this world. I am ashamed of myself for that.

“I never knew a thing about my mother until I visited her on her death bed. She loved my Paw Paw so much she refused to flee with everyone else. The communists killed her family and forced her to come with them. She essentially had to marry one of her beloved family’s murderers to survive. There was a rape in the process. When I learned about that on her death bed, I learned to forgive her.

“Memory and history are funny little beings,” ponders Lang, “It is like that movie Castaway with Tom Hanks, when they tried to find the deserted island that his plane crashed on. All they have to do is be off a fraction of a degree, and they won’t even know the island exists. And the ego suffers in isolation.

Tin had been touched by the Castaway movie which he saw eighteen years ago. He wonders if Langston knows this. Back in his crisis, Tin’s one black market friend had referenced the movie and promised him that one day he would get off the island. Tin wonders if Langston is destined to be his handler of sort. He is just fine with that.

In Tin Man’s crisis, he believed he was being gang-stalked by his own family. He had not trusted a soul other than his puppy dog.

He’d done everything he could to defy his black-market friend and his family. His black-market friend had after all threatened his life. His family had supported a long-term hospitalization. His father had begged him not to leave the dilapidated compound called unit C at Montana State Hospital.

In Fresno, Tin Man had prayed for the chance to have safety in a therapy session like Tom Hanks did in the movie. That kind of safety he hadn’t found until he met his wife twelve years ago.

***

“It wasn’t until 2000, continued Lang that I was finally able to admit that I was bipolar. I was working as a social worker in Fresno and in the height of my addiction.”

Tin noted that he was in Fresno at that time, nearly homeless and looking for work. “That’s where I was when I saw the movie, Cast Away!” he blurts.

When Tin finally got hired at a Foster Care agency called Genesis, he’d had to choose between the job and family support. The only way to get family support was to move up to the bay area and take the Italian Deli job with the killer commute.

He tells this to Lang whose eyebrows rise.

“Yes, I know of that foster care agency!”

Lang makes a reference to the apocalyptic fires burning in the distance that are clogging up the air with smoke. “How can a tragedy so vial become something we learn and grow from. Tin, you should imagine how Moses felt when he wandered through the desert for forty years. Can you imagine what that felt like to walk in circles for forty years.”

“Yes, I can. It must be like the people who drive circles around the city of Richmond without ever knowing the stories that lie within!”

Tin imagines that many of Lang’s stories lie within the city. He is still not sure he’d made any sense. He is either feeling a sense of heightened connection or has a desire to impress, he isn’t sure.

Lang’s point seemed to be that it takes time to heal from slavery. Tin has always known the stories of those enslaved in Oakland and feels the world will learn to care again during Armageddon.

“Tin, I too have written a book and I lost all of it one day when my car got burglarized. It is about the seven deadly sins.” Lang lists each sin and creatively defines each . . .

Jesus’s claws are still digging in the dirt. Lang continues to go from tears to laughter.

Finally, Tin proposes that they begin walking on the flat trail. Tin unleashes Jesus who instantly puts some distance between herself and her owner. Tin notes the distance.

“Give your dog some trust and she will trust you back,” suggests Lang.

Tin definitely understands where Lang is coming from. He reflects on Lang’s suggestion knowing Jesus.

Jesus bolts after a squirrel, a sure sign she will not respond to calls to return to safety. Jesus is a devout hunter and her prey instinct is very high. Lang and Tin are safely above the street on the trail and Jesus is barking up a tree that is ten yards from the road below.

Tin calls for Jesus twice. Eventually Jesus responds. The two reconnect. Lang and Tin walk along the flat trail and the conversation flows.

“You may wonder how a person with a background such as me ends up in prison!” says Lang.

Tin thinks about the terrors of prison and the warehousing of so many undeserving individuals. He believes that it is far too easy for a body to get framed or marked during the process of incarceration. Prior to his hospitalization he had been the only law-abiding social worker in a section 8 housing authority. His black-market friend had connections to dirty Philadelphia Police who paid him cash for surveillance work. Since he’s started understanding the realities associated with these details, he has developed a distain for the law which is made by rich men for rich men.

Lang goes on to reflect on his time in prison fondly. He identifies the role he played as being a negotiator between the gangs.

“Prison gangs have complete control over the behavior of people on the streets because they know where everyone lives and can harm gang member’s loved ones if they don’t comply.

“But for me,” continued Lang, “I knew that my negotiations could result in many lives being saved on the streets and a strong sense of justice that was of optimum benefit for everyone. It was one of the better times in my life.

Langston’s words reinforce many of Tin’s views about prison. Tin thinks of the prison stories of his clients. Prison politics remind him of the State Hospital where he received a few recruitment efforts from the Mexican Mafia and an Aryan gang. Since undergoing these experiences, prison has been a bit of a preoccupation for him.

“I know how easy it is to get caught up and even framed or sacrificed by your crew. I make no preconceived judgements. I was afraid for two years that I would end up in prison. Three months in the state hospital was enough for me. I get what it’s like. So, I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with me.”

Tin measures Lang’s facial expression to see if his effort at active listening has landed properly.

Jesus has made her way back to the vicinity of Lang and Tin. She creeps up on a mole hole. Suddenly she pounces. Jesus’s motion reminds Tin of the dance move in the 1980s movie Teen Wolf. Jesus assumes the pose and slowly lunges for maximum impact. Then, she digs at the hole trying to terrify the mole.

Suddenly, Jesus makes a high-pitched grunt and then jumps back in fear as the mole has lunged back at her. Poor Jesus has to get a taste of her own medicine.

The three reach a dirt road that cuts back to the paved road. Tin Man leashes Jesus. They descend down the road. It has been a very short hike but a lot has happened.

Tin knows he is not a man of color like Lang. The privilege of his skin is one of the only reasons he did not end up in prison. He really appreciates his freedom. He thinks about how conscientious people like him often become the mark. They end up poor and penniless in the mental health system. From Tin’s perspective, jail and prison are a slave industry just like the mental health industry from which he now takes a salary.

***

The streets of Point Richmond are full of cars on Saturday night. Tin Man circles the blocks hoping to find a parking space with shade for Jesus. He continues to listen intensely to Lang until Lang realizes that it is dangerous to keep talking. Then, Lang aids Tin in just barely finding any space.

Tin knows Jesus is occasionally able to stay in the car for his wife when she runs errands. He sets her up with water and another treat. She immediately starts trying to pry open the window with her two paws and then with her proud chest. She is shrieking with anxiety.

“Okay,” says Tin, “I am sorry but we are going to have to find a place where we can eat outside with Jesus.”

“I’d be happy to break bread with Jesus,” says Lang with a smile.

Tin, Lang and Jesus circle adjacent blocks looking for restaurants with outdoor seating.

Lang talks about wanting to open up a restaurant with friends from the shelter. He is having fun and showing his creative side. The restaurant would be called the melting wok and it would be full of all varieties of America’s stolen cuisines. And workers would share in the profits.

Tin had once wanted to have a show for single people who wanted to avoid domestic tasks. He had always bragged to all who would listen, he would be the nemesis of Martha Stewart.

Lang, it turns out, is on a walkabout, traveling between here and LA. He explains that his wife and son stay in his studio apartment in San Leandro. He doesn’t explain that his wife is an addict and a bad influence in terms of substance abuse, He stops and befriends some patrons of a restaurant with gregarious manners.

Tin can see Lang has resiliency and hosts of social skills that he can use to survive on his walkabouts. Tin ponders Lang’s positivity,

Tin was utterly demoralized back on unit C in Montana State Hospital when he was living a life of neglect. He remembers that Lang is likely dealing with bed bugs and a cot in barracks back at the rescue mission. All his belongings including the carrot stub are in the suitcase he has in the trunk of the Fiesta. And here he is still upbeat and wanting to have a good time.

Unlike Lang, Tin has always been sensitive to depravation. In college he went to an inner-city commuter campus. He never went to a single college party. In those days Tin was an unapologetic Marxist. He gave up his privilege in search of a better world.

Tin Man knows if he was in Lang’s situation, he would not be able to walk up to diners at restaurants and spread good cheer the way Lang does in half con-artist style.

In another sense, he is observing a new skill he can learn here. He often learns by observing the beautiful spirits of others. He now believes in a spiritual world that guides people. It’s taken him a while but he can understand how elements of the spirit can be lost in some Communist regimes as well as by countries that enslave and exploit others for profit or cheap labor.

***

Tin has to reject almost all the restaurants because he is a vegetarian. Many places that look interesting don’t have outdoor seating. Lang and Tin settle on a Russian delicatessen.

Lang has made it clear that he is going to drink with his meal. And asks Tin if he drinks.

Tin explains that he hasn’t had a drink since he was sixteen.

“I had problems regulating my eating and ended up sitting in on twelve-step meetings while in my second hospitalization. Listening to those stories and struggling with an eating disorder was enough for me. I steered clear from all drugs and alcohol.

“How about you,” inquires Tin without judgment, “are you a friend of Bill’s?”

“Yes, the halls are a large part of my life,” admits Lang. “I get a lot of support in meetings. But I still drink. I believe in balance when it comes to substance abuse. I don’t believe in labeling myself an addict.

Tin leaves Jesus with Lang and takes Lang’s order, a sandwich with two meats in it. After he orders for Lang, he orders a cheese sandwich for himself. Then, he gets himself a Gatorade and Lang the Mickey’s Ale he requested.

Tin innocently wonders how strong the Ale might be. Then, he smirks. On the streets a mickey is a laced drink so his answer is clear to him. This Ale must be super strong.

***

Lang admits his shock that Tin does not drink. He eats half of his sandwich and packs the rest of it. He makes polite conversation. Tin Man is not at all hungry but finishes his very boring cheese sandwich. Jesus lays loyally at Tin Man’s side.

Suddenly Jesus lunges violently. I small child has just run past the table.  Luckily, Tin iwas sitting on the leash with all his weight. The table tilts as does Tin’s chair.

“Jesus,” mutters Tin man.

Even Lang doesn’t know what to say. After a moment, he comments that this is very unusual. Jesus is clearly deeply wounded. “I think Jesus has a young soul!”

Tin Man has observed this behavior before. It is very hard to understand what triggers Jesus. Some dogs don’t bother her, yet sometimes dogs and kids set her off.

It has occurred to Tin Man that Jesus may be able to read the personal thoughts of other beings much as he’d been able to do when he was in his psychosis.

Training Jesus has been a far greater challenge than his last puppy dog. Tin Man’s last dog was very mature, loving, and resilient, kind of like Langston.

Tin Man had learned to train himself to act as if his ability to sense reality is not real through caring for his first dog. His past love had to endure twelve-hour days alone. The dog’s love and resilience had been a true inspiration. Her spirit was gregarious.

Tin had sensed that Jesus was wounded when he visited her at the dog rescue clinic. Even the literature that the rescue operation had written about her hinted that she needed help. But now that Tin has a house, a wife, a salary, and is not coming up off the streets, he has chosen to challenge himself.

Tin has his freedom and Yang has had to sleep in bushes and shelters to survive.

And now Tin can help Jesus not react to what she sees. Now he can better understand what others went through during his struggles. Now he could right the wrong that was done to him. Tin prays Lang also has his own sort of freedom and doesn’t have to work for free in prison gangs. He doesn’t really know about this for sure.

***

Tin Man has been collecting his thoughts through the meal. He is stunned by the way Lang honors and loves his family in spite of all he’s been through! The fact thar Lang could forgive his mother really makes Tin think.

Tin Man’s ancestors had total control over a series of Lumber Towns in Upstate New York. His great grandfather had been the justice of the peace over his town. His great grandmother had been the social worker. Together while they exploited the work, they controlled the workers and made sure they didn’t go home and beat their wives and children. While this had always sounded great and noble the way his grandmother had conveyed it, Tin had grown to figure that the workers who acted this way probably struggled with way they were treated by the company. Being a lumber jack is hard and dangerous work.

The rest of the family seemed far more accepting of their privilege. But coming up all alone during summer vacations in the Adirondacks, Tin Man tended to see things differently. Early on neighborhood kids took their anger out on him by peeing on him when he was three years old. His parents did not intervene.

When he was a preteen, he felt he was a part of the welfare family who rented a cabin from them. He worked for his father with them. He rode their dirt bikes down the railroad grade with them. It was with their spirit that he fought back when the private school kids picked on him. His father always told Tin that they worked harder than he did. Then, his father evicted the family. It was true they had stopped paying rent, but this led Tin to having complicated feelings. He stopped being able to sleep. His parents were moving into a modern home and Tin rebelled against this with everything he had.

Now as an adult, Tin Man has learned enough to know what it is like to be treated like a slave. True, his ancestors may have believed they were loved by their workers, but growing up Tin tended to sense the underlying resentment.

Tin always remembers old Jack McKinley who was such a loyal company man he befriended Tin’s father and helped teach him to be handy. Tin’s whole family would visit the old lumbar jack and hear stories, summering away from suburbia away from their private school.

By the time Tin was ten years old the old man started a pattern of ranting at him. Tin’s father would sit back, smile, and let this go on as if there was something wrong with Tin. Year after year, the old man would seem to let out his lifetime of resentment on Tin.

The onset of the rants happened when Tin had repeated something his father had said about the work that was done by the townspeople to clean up the mill site. Tin had merely told his cousin what his father had said. His cousin had told this to Jack on a visit. Tin’s father had never said anything in defense of Tin, just smiled.

Years later, as Tin turned to the service economy for survival at age seventeen, he certainly started to understand how the old lumberjack felt. When he started laboring fifty-four hours a week in the inner-city summer, he wanted nothing to do with the vacation land that the rest of the family seemed to cherish.

It was the land he was raised to take care of. He learned the skills to be a do-it-yourselfer like his father, but he wasn’t having it. Tin would one day get the understanding about how his townsfolk friends like the welfare family survived poverty by running drugs amid rural poverty.

Tin just couldn’t let go of this reality and love his ancestors. The disparities in the summer were just too strong. It wasn’t all his father’s fault! His journey had caused him to empathize with the townspeople.

Ever since his struggles some eighteen years ago his family just seemed to treat him like a schizophrenic failure. That only made it harder to forgive his people. His grandmother’s last words to him were that his book made the family look bad. She hadn’t remembered Tin Man due to dementia, but she had remembered the book. A few years ago, at his father’s 75^th birthday celebration he had experienced a high degree of microaggression from his relatives. Tin man supposed they felt the same way about his writing.

***

Tin and Lang had to hasten themselves from the meal to the car to make Lang’s curfew at the rescue mission. Lang takes a precious minute to see what is left of his Ale. He carefully stows it in his water bottle so it can travel through the shelter undetected.

“Wow, Tin Man, I had so much fun tonight. If this was a date, I’d definitely sleep with you.

There is an awkward pause.

“No, Tin don’t worry! I am not gay!”

Normally, Tin feels embarrassed to have someone witness the deterioration of his affect. However, Tin senses that Lang might recognize that Tin’s extremities are tingling. Tin sensed that Lang could see some of the truth that had made its way back to Tin’s memory when he’d written his memoir. Still, he doesn’t understand this part of himself very well. Somehow, it comforts Tin to imagine that Langston understands

In the car ride back, Lang tells Tin Man that he is a really good teacher for him.

With utmost sincerity, Tin Man repeats these words to Lang.

Tin hopes Lang knows how helpful his work tonight had been for his own sense of healing. Sure, Lang might have to engage in hustles to maintain his habits, but Tin Man is sure, he does mostly good for others. He fancies himself a good reader of Lang’s spirit.

Like clockwork, Tin pulls up to the mission and Lang hops out, grabs his suitcase out of the trunk and, joins the crew coming back from their mandatory church meeting.

***

Tin Man is alone driving back from Richmond and is hit with a sense of sheer exhaustion. He remembers that when he had crossed the boundaries of his job as a social worker and investigated street murders some eighteen years ago, he had lost his heart for beautiful souls like Lang.

As a result of those actions, good people like Lang had been forced to gang-stalk him for two years.

Was this true?

Had all the people who appeared part of the scheme really been forced to go out of their way just because he had not understood the black-market rules?

Tin really does not know.

At first Tin Man had blamed his experiences entirely by his own family. Eventually, he started to use medication. Now he attributes the gang-stalk to the powerful oligarchs that that set up the inner-city sectors of our country.

Tin man can see his interdependence on good people like Lang. Tin prays they can be there mutually for each other in the name of generational healing.

Tin Man still wants to have his heart back. Perhaps all he needs to do is stop all the hypocritical rage.

Tin rages about his own good fortune that forces him to exploit good people like Langston for a living in a slave industry. He prays he is a mole in the system.

His coworkers and colleagues treat him like his dog Jesus treats the moles that burrow neath the surface of this land we call America. Sure, his clients are happy to use him to heal. Sure, they love him. But are they not unlike like his ancestors’ townsfolk? Does Tin really know he is any different?

Langston is right in the wisdom conveyed in his stories. Tin must find a way to forgive his father for his part in Tin Man’s neglect. He needs to love his people more and judge them less even if they treat him like he is invisible to them. Still, he longs to end his dependence on the mental health industry and the machine.

The post The Crossings of 2 American Shamenz appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Twenty years ago, I experienced what might be termed a break from reality while I was working as a mental health worker. I worked in a last resort section 8 housing project that was rife with crime. It was called “The Hotel of Horrors” in an article in the local media.

For six months, I dedicated myself to acting as a safe resource to residents facing significant violence. I had the sense that my conduct which included alerting the press and working with local activists, was putting me and the project at risk. I kept doing what seemed to be the right thing and thinking, “I would be paranoid if I thought this action would be problematic!”

Still, my job was threatened by a supervisor who had a substance abuse problem. The pressure increased from the management company and a small segment of the residents. I decided to withdraw off the three medications I took for my hard-to-treat depression.

***

My own mental health struggles started with anorexia in high school and led to a rather impoverished and isolated collegiate experience. My best and only friend was an older recovering addict. I lived in a roach-infested apartment complex and made more friends with local people than I did with other students. However, when I graduated, I thrived as a social worker and was promoted once I put myself through graduate studies.

I was aware that I had a personality disorder that was often linked to schizophrenia. However, when I withdrew off my medication I found that I had enhanced intuition and that I experienced facts that were suggestive of corruption more intensely.

***

I called my old college friend and asked for advice and he threatened me. I bolted. I withdrew all my money from the bank, shaved my head and headed for the Canadian Border.

Sure enough, it was just as I feared! I was forced to stop to fill the tank at a gas station. Police had posted themselves at the station. “Did Mommy and Daddy say your brain chemicals are out of whack?” mocked an officer as they approached me.

I had my peaceful-ass taken in taken into custody with unnecessary pain tactics and bruised wrists. I was driven eighty miles from my car to the state capital where they turned me over to a psychiatrist to put me into a state hospital.

I first got confirmation that the mafia was in fact following me five days later after I finally surrendered to the police on a mountain pass late one night. My roommate identified himself as a Native American “hillbilly” with 130 IQ and told me the mafia was following me.

I had already met with my parents who had flown out to support the incarceration, so I told the “hillbilly” that I thought my family was the mafia.

***

I was only physically hurt once in the hospital. The beat down was by staff. My best guess was that I was outing an undercover FBI agent. I was confused. My parents were told I had become violent.

Indeed, I resisted invitations to run away with a Mexican mafia connected female who persisted in wooing me. I refused to join a white gang for protection against her. You see, I was hospitalized for three months in the State hospital. There would be icicles frozen on the inside of the window that was located above my bed.

***

When I got released, I packed the few belongings I had left that weren’t stolen, sold my car, and took a greyhound.

I tried to make it on my own. I got a job working in a daycare; but lost it when I ran out of medication. Then, I couldn’t find any work anywhere!

I had an aunt who found me a job at an upscale Italian deli in the bay area if I relocated. I moved to the outskirts boon town where housing was more affordable. I had a long bike and BART commute. I was able to use the service economy job with some help from my parents, to get back on my feet. It wasn’t easy because I had a bone to pick with the mafia and I was working at an Italian Deli with some substance-abusing rich kids, but I survived.

***

When I found myself incarcerated into a small day room for two weeks, I was traumatized. At least I knew not to accept the hospital social workers housing arrangements. Those kinds of resources are offered with the presumption of ongoing disability. Not only would I have had to deal with loss and ongoing psychosis, I would have had to languish behind the iron curtain of the mental health system. Many of my cohorts do so and end up on the streets. Many get put in jail or otherwise incarcerated and this dehumanizing treatment so often exacerbates the crisis.

For those readers who haven’t heard voices, try going through the traumatic treatment in our incarceration institutions, our public housing authority projects, or many of our board and care homes. See if you don’t come out hearing voices! I finally did hear voices after I escaped the Deli. I heard a demonic voice calling my name.

Now I am employed as a Marriage and Family Therapist and work with people in an inner-city mental health facility in Oakland CA. More and more as people are displaced in the city where I work, they end up in sprawling encampments, hard-to-get-into homeless shelters, board and care homes, bucket automobiles, and if they are lucky in a few years they may make it into an apartment in a housing project like the one I worked in. Many people who live in shelters work low wage service jobs like I did. Nowadays, it is easier for someone who has mental health struggles to fall and not be able to come back like I did.

The post A Glimpse Behind the Iron Curtain of the Mental Health System appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

What was emerging now was different than anything I had experienced prior.

I had just gotten support from relationships I had built over the past year at the Quaker meeting-for-worship.

Maybe my situation at work had been getting whispered about among my friends. Maybe my spirit was exuding a sense of desperation. Either way, I’d felt safer under the spell of the service, the last bit of community support I would experience for years.

When the service was over I’d checked in. A year-long friend gave me a deep hug with just a little more boob than I was comfortable with.

“I guess I am learning that it’s not safe to talk about what’s going on at the Morrison to anyone,” I told my slightly newer friend.

The Morrison was the notorious Section 8 housing project where I worked setting up social services for disabled residents. The deal was, homeless and disabled could get off the streets and into affordable housing, but they had to live in crime ridden contexts. Many good Seattle folk were concerned this just wasn’t good enough. As a result, there were frequent news articles written about the project.

“Well, I guess you know I will be holding you in the light,” said my newer friend who was so genuine I knew he was not an informer. He could be a life-long friend, I thought as I fingered the phone-number-paper-scrap in my pocket. I had obtained the number from a female just before the service.

But alas, I was ready to lay down my life to rectify injustice of what I’d seen at the Morrison. I was directly responsible for three recent news articles articulating the neglect. Maybe it was just a matter of time until they figured out it was me.

Now, here in this adjacent coffee house, it was as if I had just walked into a sting operation.

Having just gotten barked at by this addict with bulging veins when I had tried to use the bathroom he was occupying. I sat waiting with urgent need to pee, watching this father with his son.

The father was hefty and awkward, and his son was this with-it Seattle youth who looked adoring.

In fact, this father looked like a hometown acquaintance. I had just last night heard that this acquaintance had been found with a bullet in his head in his shed. Just last night, my oldest friend had told me the story when I contacted him. I had contacted him in hopes for his assessment of the level of danger I was experiencing.

“Just don’t let that happen to you!” my friend had said concerned.

Now it occurred to me that my oldest friend and I were basically saying this “suicide” sounded like a mob hit. Was it possible that the FBI sent a look-alike because they were tapping my phone?

Now this familiar looking man goes to the bathroom and pounds on the door. I see the addict emerge and fire an insult at him just as he had done to me. But the man, unlike me, was waiting for him. He barked right back. It was as if he were punching the addict in the gut. Still, no one was going to get in that bathroom! But the father walked away and was respected by his son.

Was this scene really staged by an arm of the government that trying to get me to change my Quaker values? I had a sense that I was meant to see this interaction! Was I being brainwashed into taking people out?

I did want justice; but violently taking people out and putting the wrong people in jail was more the work of the local law enforcement! It wasn’t what I was about.

My mind skipped. The night before I’d asked my mother if I had ever been sexually abused. I’d brought up some memories and had suspicions with a menacing tone.

I was believing that I was traumatized, not a mental case like my therapist had been telling me for the past seven years.

It was true, I once suffered from an eating disorder that almost killed me. It was also true I was extremely shy and had some disassociated memories. But still I had nothing direct to prove I was experiencing PTSD. Instead I carried the diagnosis of a schizotypal personality disorder. That meant when people picked on me I was paranoid.

When I finally left the coffee house, I drove north past my apartment, to the discount theater where I caught the afternoon showing of Me, Myself, and Irene. As the movie progressed, I remained astonished by the coincidences. Jim Carey had to suppress a secreted abuse. He had to raise his wife’s kids alone. Everyone around him mocked him. It was like that for me too. That was what my life had been like.

Now, as I watched the film for the second day in a row, I wondered about the role of the FBI following him. It was ironic that they were using his psychiatric profile to pin blame. Meanwhile to protect Rene Zellweger from the abusive ex-boyfriend who is controlling the FBI, Jim Carey has got to go through a caper to cure himself. I sensed that this is what I was getting ready to go through!

I knew there was alarming abuse going on at the Morrison. There were the secret files the management company held. There was a world of undercover informers and intelligence. These were the real muddy waters that infect those corridors of housing for the disabled, the backwards, the board and care homes, the jails, the prisons, and the inner-cities. I wasn’t accepting those: “now, that sounds like your paranoia!”— words my therapist frequently sang at me.

Since I stopped taking my medication a few weeks ago, I was starting to better see through the limited lies of the mental health establishment.

Back when this movie first came out, I choose not to see it because of the criticisms of the AMA! Now, I was meant to see this film when I did. I concentrated hard on the details guided by a higher power. More and more, the film seemed to be about me!

Earlier that week while at the Morrison, a resident had given me a great compliment about my work. “But I just want to say,” he added, “one time we had a worker like you who came and fought for the clients, but then he lost his job. He had to come down here and live as a resident himself. I just don’t want that to happen to you!”

As the movie finished, I felt at risk. I felt compelled to figure out the truth!

Later that night I made more phone calls in the bunker of my room just as I had done the night previous. Eventually, I called by best college friend who was fifteen years older than me and whose first career was that of a drug dealer. I called him believing that I was selected for this high-profile job by people who knew I would take it. People who knew me so well they knew what I’d do before I did it.

Indeed, it had been a strange shock to all involved that the power-brokers had selected the contract proposed by our agency. Now that I was getting wise, maybe I was becoming a threat.

My best friend always had delusions of grandeur that were associated with his bipolar disorder. He had this thing when he got manic. He sounded like he was connected to the mafia. He had shown me so many great mobster movies and was always seemed to use them to teach.

But now he replies in blunt tone “If you ever betray me, Tim, you need to know that I do have the power to harm you and I will use it if I have to.”

My mind sped through all the coincidences that had caused me to form this strong connection with my college friend. Was it true that it was all as it seemed? He often called himself a dry drunk. Maybe that meant he was still in the mafia.

Within twenty minutes I packed my car with the fundamentals and I took off. I would not live under this threat the rest of my life!

When I left Seattle that evening, I stayed in this state of emergency for two years. It wouldn’t be until many months after I returned to taking medication that the crisis dissipated.

On my way to Canada, I got stopped by police separated from my car. I was tracked for three days until I was remanded into a three-month psychiatric hospitalization in Montana State Hospital.

Once discharged, I got off the streets by getting a job but ran out of my discharge supply of medication. When I was told not to return to my job, I still had to pay rent! Despite intensive local efforts, the only job I could get was an arranged job at an Italian Delicatessen. To get the job, I had to move to the bay area.

To this day I still believe the job involved a mob connection. I know this sounds unlikely to many. It’s true that half of my evidence was faulty. But still a lot of it turns out to add up.

I also think I was correct about trauma and the mental health system during those tense days I was going through spiritual emergence almost eighteen years ago. I still work in the mental health system amidst great trauma and exploitation. I cannot maintain living in the murky waters of this modern-day fiasco we call the mental health system without using the medication I was started on twenty-five years ago.

I now pay mortgage on my own house, but still have no desire to do what it takes to be included in the false sense of community support I had back in Seattle. I wash my hands in the muddy waters of the mental health system.

It may be true I work hard; but I make money while my brothers and sisters remain warehoused and in dire circumstances. I sometimes think my ability to see all the angles and oppression is not really a disability. But I take my medication despite all the side effects to tolerate the abuse I see.

The post Spiritual Emergence in the Muddy Waters of the Mental Health System appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Warning: Graphic Content

“I have heard real stories,” said my female therapist, “of men doing graphic and horrible things to women. I don’t think based on what you just told me, there is any justification for any accusation whatsoever. I think you have been saying a lot of hurtful things.”

I figured my mother who was paying for these forced sessions put the shrink up to this confrontation. I never did bring the issue of sexual abuse up.

It is true I have had an ongoing suspicion that I was sexually abused. Particularly when locked up for extended periods of time for an eating disorder, and most recently for schizophrenia, my suspicion that my suffering had sexual abuse behind it escalated.

It was also true that in the state hospital I had just gotten out of, I had made rash accusations.

I can only recall making the accusation against my mother to my best college friend who had a nefarious past of drug dealing and a grandiose mafioso mentality while manic. When I confided in him that I had alerted the press in a section eight housing authority complex, he threatened me. With this feeling I had been led into this role I was playing as a whistle-blower all along, I’d fled towards Canada until the police intercepted me.

From the phone in the State Hospital, without knowing his level of responsibility for the fact that I was there, I told him what had transpired between myself and my mother in a provocative manner.  I told him he was lucky to have a family who cared about him when he had faced going to a state hospital for bipolar disorder. I’d also said, “Friends don’t threaten each other!”

“I think it is time for me to visit your mother,” my friend said.

Scared for my mother, I called to warn her.

“You shouldn’t make such accusations about Joe being in the mafia,” my mother said, “He really does care about you!”

When I later asked my Mom where she had heard about my provocative accusation, she told me she forgot.

At the time the female therapist confronted me, I could not remember the real incidents of sexual abuse that I experienced. I just stopped confiding in her.

Initially, shit just happened when I was a teen, built up and I just distracted from the pain through starvation. The incident with my Mom was just one of many. People like me who don’t realize that their suffering is due to trauma are often unable to discern abuse from re-traumatization. They may attract a long list of psychiatric diagnoses. They may feel abused a gazillion times and it becomes hard to see how any community might come to the rescue.

What I have come to believe is that if a person has experiences of disassociation, there is the possibility of incidents of forgotten events.

An example of a disassociation I experienced was when I was alone scouting a trail. I stepped within six inches of a rattlesnake, a childhood obsession of mine. The rattle made me run even though I knew better. Then I became aware that I lost track of time. Finally, one of my peers on the Outward-Bound course came and found me staring off into space and I grounded myself.

Also, after being teargassed at the WTO Protest in 1999, and pepper sprayed directly in the eye, I took a walk and lost track of where I was and what I was doing. Suddenly, I realized I walked past my destination and had been out.

Much later, after the state hospital incident, I disassociated in front of my nephew when he was a bathing cherub in a tub in front of me, I was going outside my body but didn’t leave all the way. This had been happening to me on a few occasions when I was working seven days a week trying to get back on my feet financially.

In fact, when I did write about this occasion, during an editing session I suddenly I got a vague flash of being molested in a bathtub. The girl, my best friend’s sister, was only one year older. I would later remember that she ordered me to take my clothes of and get in the tub with her while our parents were out walking.

I didn’t remember my disassociated response, I only remembered the hands disappearing beneath the suds. There is a story that I ate a moth ball thinking it was a marshmallow necessitating poison control to be contacted. I was a little old to make such a silly mistake. It’s true I could be wrong, but I connect that action to my response to the tub incident. I do believe that around that time I started bathing in my trunks.

I do recall becoming very angry at my best friends’ sister for not choosing the kind of ice cream I wanted when it came to selecting ice cream for her birthday celebration. I recall experiencing a lot of disapproval for that strange show of selfishness.

When I took this story to my mother, I got an additional answer. “No, you are thinking of the time we caught the babysitter touching you,” she said.

While I continue to have no memory of this incident I remember several occasions when I was around this babysitter later in life. Before I hadn’t been able to understand my piercing feelings, behavior and memory of those occasions.

“Thank you for telling me,” I stated to my Mom.

“I probably shouldn’t have told you,” she said, “Now you are going to think you have been abused a gazillion times!”

It’s true that the bath with my step-sister might not have been distressing to many untraumatized young boys. Now, however, I have some explanation for my suffering.

Before I broke through the wall disassociation I could never understand why I got such strong intuition and suspicions. I didn’t realize that I was doing this for a good reason. I often presumed there was something wrong with me.

Perhaps now I can better understand and accept why I get uncomfortable in bars and socially withdraw. Maybe now I can understand why I withdraw in trauma trainings with other therapists. When we are all learning emotional freedom techniques, for example, I am unable to benefit from them. Now, I know I am on my way to disassociating in these contexts.

Now I understand why I always have a hard time defending myself when I get attacked. I am numbing out! Now I know why when I do defend myself, I come off too strong and the results never go well. It is ongoing hypervigilance!

People who prey on others can see these signs and chose people they can hurt without getting in trouble. This can open a body up to bullying that can become institutional when labels get attached. People who appear to be victimized end up being soft targets.

And, so, I understand better how I got in some other hard-to-deal with situations and other disassociated memories. And, so, one day, while hiking with my father on a visit back east, I finally got up the courage to ask what had happened to our family friend who was a few years older than me and had dissociative identity disorder.

When I found out that her brother had sexually abused her, I suddenly I had a flash and an image. I saw him over top of her, became paralyzed with fear and fled. Had I really behaved like that? It seemed like more of an intuitive dream, that a solid reality.

Typical, I thought, for a schizophrenic to hear about sex abuse and think it is all about him. Perhaps some of the readers may think so as well.

However, I do remember visiting the two of them alone in a vacation cabin along the Chatooga River in the Adirondacks. They were skinny-dipping, she with just a shirt on, he in the nude, and me, very attached to my bathing suit. My last memory of the evening involves him standing behind her wrestling her around.

The distinctive flash of what I saw and an overwhelming feeling of cowardice and helplessness that overtook me is unconnected to any other part of the evening.

The brother has only admitted to inappropriate touching. So, I acknowledge that even suggesting the word rape may be inappropriate and unfair. I have taken myself closer to this flash and tried to remember visual details. I realize in doing this there were sleeping bags on the floor and that I saw no direct flesh. And yet I felt a sense of penetration internally. But the sense that I could only flee in cowardice connects to other times I acted in similar manners and the shame is enormous.

If I considered these flashes of disassociated memories to be true, there are several other incidents I had with adult men who were significant in my life that were suspicious.

These events help explain why all those years later when I was working in the section eight housing project, I used to walk in the evenings around a lake having rescue fantasies in which I physically psyched myself up to respond to rape scenes. I took these walks to relieve stress while I was using community activists and the press to fight the management company, the police and the black-market dealers against all odds. This is action that caused the police to attempt to institutionalize me in Montana.

I have come to understand that if I am to heal from my psychiatric labels of depression, anorexia, bulimia, schizotypal personality disorder, dyslexia, ADD, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder (now that I am in “recovery”) and perhaps dissaociative disorder I am going to have to accept that I will not know if all my conglomerate sex abuse incidents are true but accept that they may be part of my journey and are possible in the world. I, personally, cannot vilify people who are hurt and use it to perpetrate. To move past these types of incidents, I must forgive so many deeds that seem so strikingly wrong to me. I see them in a variety of things on a regular basis.

The post Dissociation Beneath the Suds and Psychiatric Labels appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I was a skinny and reluctant social worker when I first started out. I was working through an eating disorder. Initially, I didn’t really believe that taking home a middle-class salary for nickel and diming those less fortunate was my idea of contributing to the world.

I guess, I’d gotten the idea that that was what the field was like during interviews I’d held with middle-class white women who worked down the street in government agencies during a social welfare class. I’d set up residence where I was finishing up my schooling, in Camden New Jersey. I needed money to stay independent from my parents.

Then, I took a computer test that suggested that I should become a cop in the career development office. I’d worked under-the-table at a local Korean deli for several years. Most of my neighborhood friends had pointed to the vice squad when they came in under cover and took coffee from us for free and told me they were the real bad guys. Sure enough when we were held up at gunpoint, the cops were scared to come around.

“Yeah, picture me as a Po-Po,” I said to my best friend, an English major who used to sell drugs and was going back to school.

“Well, actually, you always have had a cop mentality,” said my friend.

I shot him a look that said he was insulting my intelligence. I started looking at social work internships.

***

During my second job, I worked at a day program that was connected to a 30-day crisis house. Since I was only just entering a master’s program, I felt extremely privileged. As a result, I aligned myself with my supervisor and other more experienced workers. Without credentials, I was focused on working with people who would get my back.

One day, I received a client and was ready to get to work on housing issues, when I found out that she came attached with a more experienced case manager. Though not very talkative, she did tell me very clearly that she did not want to go to a particular boarding home, the largest such facility in the county. When I talked to the case manager, he was clear about the woman’s future. She had to go to the unwanted boarding home.

“Wow, that girl is really sick!” I heard a coworker who worked the graveyard shift at the crisis house say.

“I don’t get it,” I said, “I don’t see why she can’t live where she wants to. I help other people find housing, why can’t I help her.”

“That girl is very sick, I can just tell by the way her eyes roll to the side” said my co-worker

I deferred to experience. Sure, I had been hospitalized for six months myself, but I knew better than to make waves that would impact my work reputation. My therapist was teaching me that I could be a little paranoid and I wouldn’t let that affect my clinical judgment.

The woman was shipped away to the very place she most did not want to go. I can now see that she had been right not to trust any of us. For us, she was just protocol.

***

Once I graduated my master’s program and was promoted to a case management position, I visited the infamous boarding home which was buried in the New Jersey Pine Barrens in the far reaches of the county. Out in the pines, there were few stores, lots of sand and aged pine trees whose growth was stunted by fire. The pines were where most boarding homes in the county were located. I admired the scenery as I drove out.

The home’s one-story buildings were made of quarter inch plywood and styled in rows like chicken coops. There was no insulation from the elements in any of the buildings. Corridors were long and full of small rooms with cots and no furniture. At the end of each there was an open rec room where open vats of warm, iceless bug juice sat out under the dim lighting. There were no fans to drown out the buzz of the flies. These halls reeked of sickness. The chipping linoleum floors were being mopped with cheap chemical stink water that reinforced the sick feel. Almost all the clients were either gone to a day program or had walked the three miles to the store. I could not even begin to picture what the place looked like when it was full.

When I finished I followed the owner to the front office. The owner’s daughter had been in my sister’s class at our posh private school before male anorexia had drained my bank account and lowered my social standing. Back at the office, the owner had barraged me with gossip and information about the school.

Once freed to collect my thoughts, I recall betting to myself that they treated mentally ill better back in the Middle Ages.

***

A year later, I made enough money to fund a move to the west coast. Within six months of moving, I made a job transfer into setting up services in a section eight housing authority facility.

Here, I was reminded a lot of my inner-city days in Camden. I got to know a more urban style of warehousing. The project was scrutinized by the local media in the City of Seattle with its large homeless population. To get section 8, a homeless person had to spend time in this project.

I witnessed quite a bit in the six months I worked there: thugs tearing down doors and emptying apartments in broad day light; stabbings of impoverished addicts that were barely sanctioned; a suspicious death by heroin overdose; vulnerable individuals’ going to jail for being bullied into letting their rooms be used to deal drugs. And some of the things the residents said were even more eye-opening. I figured it was finally time I do something!

When I found out my supervisor had a significant drug habit I became suspicious of her intent. I stopped heeding her. Like a vigilante, I leaked info openly to a community activist and to newspapers and was starting to face unforeseen levels of threats.

One day, a resident with a job who had pointed out the local drug kingpin to me, told me, “It’s true we all love you here, even some of the shady people like you . . .”

“It’s just that we are afraid of losing our housing,” added his partner.

“You see,” continued the resident, “we all know this guy who came to work here and was just like you, fighting for all the residents. And he ended up having to come and live down here. I am just worried that that is going to happen to you . . .”

Shortly after this interaction, I received an unsuspected threat from my best friend from my inner-city college days who I called to consult. I found myself in a unique state of crisis. Was the threat real? He paid for college by working surveillance for a “bad” lieutenant in the Philadelphia Police. I matched up stories and began to see the world from a new nefarious perspective. . .

***

Three days later, I was picked up out of a ditch on a mountain pass outside of Butte Montana.  I had been harassed by police for the past two days since they had violently halted my escape to Canada and separated me from my car. Finally, I surrendered to them.

Two months in, I was transferred to the most chronic unit. The temperature inside was below freezing. There were icicles inside the window that sat above my head. It was almost as bad as the boarding home in South Jersey.

When I first entered those dank halls, I felt destined to behave with the subservient merriment of the thirty-year residents. I was given old, dirty clothing so that I could layer up among the crowded halls. My appearance and sense of self declined. Fungus off the bathroom tiles grew under my toenails and warts covered by hands.

I still remember waiting outside the ward in the freezing Montana winter, staring at the cash cattle in the field. I’d be waiting for the staff to return via bus, late from lavishing with their lunch.

There I was determined to stay hopeful, industrious, and independent as I weathered the biting chill and it only annoyed the staff to no end. They all rolled their eyes when they returned as if to say I was entitled.

“That’s what they all say about you,” said my psychiatrist who I finally got to meet with her two and a half months in. I had put requests to meet with her in writing, but it never worked.

The staff didn’t have any hope for me. They all knew I wanted to take down the mob for what they were doing to me. The Cowboy Security Squad even gave me a beat-down to discourage me. Maybe I was a little entitled because I kept mouthing off.

Meanwhile, other patients told me the mafia really was following me. Many said they were in the mafia. One even tried to lure me to join a local gang for protection.

***

All this I went through was just the beginning of some very hard times that would last for two years.

Discharged to the streets I moved to Fresno, California and the temporary work I landed to get an apartment to let me go when I ran out of my month’s supply of medication. I started to feel I was being harassed in the streets. I didn’t know what to do. Somehow, despite extensive efforts, the only other job I could find was at an Italian Delicatessen.

Working at the Italian Deli forced me to move from the Central Valley to the outskirts of the Bay Area. Only then, was my family who I believed was connected to the mafia was willing to do what they could to support me.  I had no supporter who seemed to believe that anything that I went through was real. They only treated me as though I needed tough love.

After ten months of employment, I finally learned to stop being bullied by drug-dealing, suburban kids who were half my age. I stopped letting my white shirt wrinkle during my rainy twenty-mile bike commute (and two-hour-long BART ride) to work; I accepted that I had to be polite to the Republican clientele that wanted to know all the ridiculous details about which farm their fine fucking olives came from. Finally, when I got insurance and could afford medication, I was able to get the anger and paranoia out of my eyes.

I believed people were entering my apartment during this time. Mail from job interviews would come to me already opened in spite of my complaints to the mail service.

***

Now, I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who works in an inner-city psychiatric day program, primarily with warehoused individuals. Boy, did I find it difficult to return to my career after being warehoused? It was a real uphill battle. I even lost a per diem job at one point and nearly landed back on the streets.

And the survivor’s guilt really keeps me up some nights.

Don’t worry! I have learned my lesson about being an advocate. Additionally, I know better than to try to educate the public about the evils of stigma and mental health warehousing. Research says that this will only make the problem worse.

Sure, I feel bad that twenty years ago a woman was committed to squalor and I did nothing.  But I learned advocating for the mental health of the vulnerable needs to be done carefully, one case at a time. Alerting the press and crossing the police is a good way to lose your housing and end up destitute yourself. I learned first-hand about how arrogant my actions were when I thought it couldn’t happen to me.

In these days of escalating disparities, I am grateful now to respectfully extend my therapy skills this forgotten about population which is growing exponentially in our local homeless encampments, our flooded shelters, board and care homes, our county jails and over-crowded prisons. When I think of all I went through and still go through because I was warehoused for one month, I am amazed to see people come back and do better and better. There is a lot to know and respect about them. It is important for social workers just starting out to learn from them. They know an awful lot about their situation.

I think in this era, losing housing could happen to many of us. Try attaching schizophrenia to your name and see how many people stick around to support you and listen to your woes. Some days I come home distressed that I cannot do more to help, but over the last sixteen years I have learned how to share my story and develop programs that do help people. I am extremely lucky!

The post Mental Health Warehousing And I appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Fifteen years ago, I remember hearing a psychiatrist who had just been away for two weeks say, “There is no such thing as a vacation when you are schizophrenic!” As an unlicensed professional vying to get a staff position on the unit, I had carefully avoided rolling my eyes. I had politely nodded my head as though it had been a thoughtful thing to say.

***

This year’s weekend of April 1^st, my wife supports me in insisting that we take a vacation day. She packs up her hybrid SUV with camping materials and when I finish my Friday commute, we hit the interstate headed north. We plan to camp and hike at the Kings Range on the Lost Coast in Humboldt County, but we know even before we sift through the remains of the Bay Area traffic, there’s no way we are going to make it the whole way.

We make it to the city of Ukiah and drive until we find a Safeway. I am about ready to drop as we load our shit into the front of the car and depart to hit the restroom. We pass the panhandlers and the no camping sign and I start to stress about the possibility that the security will force us to move on in the middle of the night.

“Don’t worry about it my boobie,” says my wife.

I look into the eyes of a particular panhandler and hate our privilege. There sure are a significant amount of late night shoppers who are finishing their long weeks. I ponder the meaning of it all over the urinal. After we regroup, we steal into the back of the SUV.

***

We hit our exit in Garberville the next morning before seven am. Throughout the drive, I have processed aspects of my week and history. My wife has been sharing too. I hear about an upcoming trip; house projects she still needs to accomplish; artistic visual displays she might create to soothe anxiety-driven migraines; and many assorted details pertaining to family, her nieces, and her gardening jobs. I most definitely dominate the discourse, but she is supportive and relates to my sense of strife.

As we exit the highway beneath a beaming blue sky we follow signs to Shelter Cove and end up on a country road that is surrounded by lush spring grasses. There is no shoulder and only an occasional gravel pull out. Rundown tweaker properties mix with farm gates with video surveillance. We pass a couple men putting up a thick wooden fence that appears sturdier than the ghost town we just passed a few minutes ago and we ascend the switchbacks of the first of a series of significantly wooded ridges.

By the time we’re driving on the dirt road, we pass a campground and hit an intersection. Then, we leave the flat behind and ascend eroding, mud-gauged switch backs that make my wife progressively uncomfortable to the point where she wants to turn around.

“No, that isn’t a good turnaround,” I suggest, “There isn’t enough room. Keep driving.”

My wife intones her voice, “Now may have passed our only choice. We have got to turn around now!”

At the next switchback we turn around and retrace out steps to the last switchback where we manage to park out of harm’s way. I mimic my wife’s tone in exaggerated falsetto manner. She laughs but quite seriously stands by her decision to park the car.

We make a lunch and boot up and before long we are walking up the steep grade our SUV couldn’t make.

***

When my mind settles into the hike, I ponder the issues that my client’s face.

One of my clients recently shared with me that a corner boy sold her some bunk weed. It was supposed to have the buds in it so that it would be strong so she confronted the seller about the price and quality who turned around and threatened to kill her.

Many of the people I work with have spent half of their lives bouncing from the streets to jail, to the hospital and back. They are used to scraps and neglected facilities. You might think they are used to being threatened. But still a threat is a threat.

At some unlicensed board and care homes they may settle into, it is not uncommon to be bullied. Big clients might be solicited to work as a thug. I have heard that some board and care workers lay claims to their violent pasts to maintain order. Over the years I have heard the most ridiculous sorts of abuses you can imagine.

I have learned my lessons painfully that advising this person to call the police is not an option on this occasion. I now use discernment before contacting the police or APS to investigate abuse. Believing in and respecting the realities of street-life is key to supporting anyone through. I struggle but remind myself being a concerned ear, and reminding her to avoid the d-boy is the best I can do.

At least I respect her belief that she is a religious figure and learn more about how it is true.

Like the psychiatrist, I have come to realize that smoking weed and tobacco may be the only vacation many schizophrenic peoples get. I know many who are afraid to go outside the smoking areas of their homes. I would love to have all my clients accompany us out here, but their work with me does not entitle them to an SUV and a day off. It sure took me a long time to get here, I think.

***

When we get back to the car four hours later, we decide to leave the Lost Coast instead of take a treacherous road down to a favorite hiking zone.

Back on the interstate, we take an exit and find that the road we need to reach the coast has been washed out. Instead, we find a vacant campground where we can use our credit card, set up our tent, cook some dinner, and retire for the day. We settle into a stupid slapstick movie. Somehow Bill Murray’s flat a deadpan face is funny and entertaining as he intermingles in a caper with government spies and corruption. I can never understand how he pulls it off.

***

Traipsing off to sleep I retrace our steps of the day. My mind falls back into hiking down that mountain road when I had remembered studying the whaling industry in fifth grade. I had remembered a private-school-trip to Mystic Seaport during which we had walked through the hull of a restored whaling ship. I had contrasted the packed in crew’s quarters as opposed to the luxury of the captain’s quarters.

I have never done well with the contrast. My whole life I have had this inexplicable hostility for the captain seething through my veins to the rhythm of the old Ranzo-Me-Boys work-ballad. It did not bode well for my relations with my landholding family. I’d thought about how family member after family member tried to quell my stance on the matter and how alienated I have become.

My wife and I met too late in life to have kids. I’d strained financially to stay independent and understand dating regulations. Perhaps I should have just let myself get kissed-rich, but I didn’t understand. When I was in high school my room was converted to a study before I even graduated because I had opted to move out early.

While I work quite well with the crew back on the ward, my work has earned me a 1000 square foot, well-tended captain’s quarters at the end of a commute, not to mention the SUV and vacation day. I am reminded of my own contradictions.

***

The next morning, we travel about five minutes down the interstate and pass a sign that says, “Mendocino Wilderness Area, 42 miles.”

We follow a maze of rivers, some flowing in different directions. It’s another bright blue day and groves of trees and carved hills intersperse themselves just off the road. Low growth fenced-in green pastures dominate. I find myself needing to pull over frequently as raging large trucks seem to travel this route very fast.

Then, I get that familiar sense that I am being tailed. I look in my rear view mirror and sure enough there is a state trooper behind us in a beefy vehicle. I look for a turnout. It takes a while. I can almost sense he is running my plates.

It’s been about seventeen years since I’ve recognized these feelings. For two and a half years they dominated my life.

When a turnout finally arrives, I let the trooper pass and he does so reluctantly at first and then with quite a bit of speed.

I always wonder what is on my dossier that cops pull up.

***

“One time we had a patient come here saying that the FBI was following him,” my psychiatrist at Montana State Hospital had said. “And he was right, they were. He hadn’t done anything bad, but he was a person of interest.”

I had waited two months to finally get a meeting with this old hag who had the power to commit me for an additional nine months. I didn’t trust her enough to ask her if she was referencing me. But I sure though she was. I had a lot of reason to think this. And in the following two years in which I struggled to find work, I endured cop searches and opened mail and many signs that I was being looked at. I was a renegade, blacklisted revolutionary—a vigilante press-alerting pigeon. It’s just that no one believed me. All that attention for little old me, and now, I am afraid to go to even so much as a mainstream protest.

***

We arrive at the town or Quinto, which is a Native American reservation. We pass the tribal police headquarters and find a small outpost store where I pull in.

Sure enough, there are souvenir shirts that say, “Homeland Security since 1492” with a picture of traditionally dressed native peoples. But mostly the store is there for the locals. There are a plethora of cheap toys for the kids, a help-your-self pile of DVDs to rent or buy and about five isles of your basic food necessities. The store is empty accept for us. The owner, a gaunt, wrinkled Caucasian-looking woman, gets off the phone we ask her about hiking trails.

The woman talks to us a while. She explains that the road to Interstate 505 doesn’t open up in this season because of snow in the mountain pass, so we will have to retrace our steps to 101.

“Yes, you have to worry about straying onto private property around here,” she replies. “People end up dead around these parts for the dumbest reasons.”

A few Native American woman enter the store timidly to buy smokes and the woman takes a minute to ring them up.

An angry blonde white woman streams in saying some kind words to the owner. She buys some hotdogs and I follow her outside while my wife waits to complete a modest, respectful purchase we want to make to thank the owner.

I start by trying to make friends with the old skin and bones dog that is working on a hotdog.

“Don’t interrupt him while he’s eating she says.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re right,” I say. “She reminds me a little of my dog who passed away this year.”

“There is nothing sweeter that this old dog the white woman explains, but you can see how timid he is. His owners are tweakers and his life is full of random senseless violence. They don’t even feed him. I just do what I can to help out.”

“I know what you mean,” I say wondering if I sound as genuine as I feel.

My wife and the store owner join us and the blonde woman continues, “In fact, no one would care if you just took that old guy away from here. I was just telling him,” she adds to the store owner, “that we would all be happy because his owners do not take care of him.”

The store owners offers her endorsement of the scheme. We talk for a while.

“Think about what I said,” says the angry white woman about her life and dog.

***

Down the road a patch we stop at the Ranger Station we had been told about. There is a woman ranger in hiking boots who is gardening when we pull in. She looks wildly offended by our presence until my wife emerges from our black SUV and warms her up.

She insists on inviting us in to show us a map of her favorite hiking spot. I stop and pet well-fed friendly dog.

“I’m from Idaho,” she volunteers.

“I’m from New Jersey,” I counter.

“Yes, this time of year you see the cartels come through here,” she explains, but you’ll be safe if you stay on the trail.

“In this county, you can see nature everywhere you look,” she adds, “but you just can’t get out into it.”

I think of the conference I presented at in San Diego earlier in the year. I met a tribe from Oregon in a workshop who told their very disturbing efforts to get clean, recover from prison terms/recidivism, and address the generational trauma of their heritage. I had never heard such powerful and vulnerable stories. Many of them broke down and cried describing their transition away from thug-life. I could not have respected their efforts more. And I work with this recovery stuff on a daily basis.

The Idaho woman gives us the most detailed directions you could imagine. I think, wow, any idiot could follow these directions. She is really heady. She even supports my wife who fears the treacherous off-road we’ll have to take.

We all talk about how relieved we are that the state is decriminalizing cannabis and how it will translate into better economic opportunities and less violence for the tribe.

“I am a mental health counselor who works on the streets of Oakland,” I explain.

“Oh, so your accustomed to all this,” she says. “Yeah, my sister is bipolar. She self-medicates. And you don’t want to be around her unless she is high on cannabis.”

***

It takes us a long time to find the trail head. We take a wrong turn mistakenly follow the map twenty miles into the reservation before I realize what a fool I am. We don’t make the trail head until two o’clock. We scarf some food and get to it as fast as we can to alieve my angst. Really it’s not much different than your typical Sunday when I spend my time writing to process and heal my week and then have to charge to get into the woods before I explode.

We follow a single track trail through a thoroughly burned woodlands for an hour and fifteen minutes until the trail becomes so untended that my back starts to get activated climbing over fallen trees. It’s a miraculous, beautiful experience especially if you like to be reminded of the pending apocalypse.

***

On the way back, I spot a supped up black Jeep standing on a side road just as we are reentering the reservation. I can see a CB radio antennae and note that the vehicle waits for us to drive first. Like I had with the cop car earlier, I get the sense my plates are being ran and in a few minutes the Jeep thunders past our speed limit pace. I tell my wife, “It’s good we aren’t part of a gang. That interaction was a little thug-like.”

***

We return to the interstate and after we pick up gas, we find a popular hamburger stand in the town of Willits that even has a special for veggie burgers. As we sit in small town Americana, I get a call from my Mom.

“I was just reading your book,” my Mom said. “I am at the part where you are in Fresno and you just talked to the detective. I was scared, and I just wanted to give you a call.”

When I published for the first time two years ago, I was desperate for feedback. Usually, I can’t find anybody to read what I write. I have always been too cowardly to publish my work. Now, in spite of marketing efforts, I am still thirsting in the desert when it comes to getting feedback.

“I tried to recapture the perspective I had at the time,” I stammer once again.

“No, I don’t find your work offensive,” my Mom says. “I think you really did a good job putting the reader right there in the moment.”

“Thanks,” I say, “That means so much to me to hear you say that!”

I talk on about how I can manage everything I went through when I am on medication. “In fact I just experienced similar experiences traveling to a Native American reservation. I do every day at work,” I say.

I feel like a bumbling fool on the phone with my Mom. I am talking to her like I have never talked about this with her before. But she is being very strong for me here and it is clearly a moment of healing between us.

After the burger we head west on a road heading for Fort Bragg and the coast. There is a huge elevation gain and many switchbacks filling forest with asphalt. As we descend we enter a coastal pine grove woodland and there are clearly hiking trails surrounding us.

***

Before we stop for the night, I find myself thinking about what the psychiatrist said on my unit some fifteen years ago: about schizophrenics and vacations. I think about how I have fought for years to build up economic empowerment so I could have a wife, an SUV, and a day off. Often it was years on end without a day off to make ends meet. Often it was twelve to sixteen hour days in order to attain credential and licensure. I think how this started out a choice when I was seventeen and became a necessity.

It is extremely devastating to catch a schizophrenic case, lose everything that you own and then to have to escape the street life that suddenly envelops you. I took me two-and-a-half years of hell to get it together enough to get blessed with a good job.

In this day and age the earth is getting scorched beneath us! I am here, preparing to take a mental health day as a schizophrenic. Tomorrow my crew will be at work on the institutional corridor with some of the old bubbled windows still intact. I will wake up in a rundown trailer park. I will find that the public bathroom to be wrecked like the ones I’ve seen in public section 8 housing authorities and Oakland’s single-room occupancy hotels. We will drive into a posh vacation town for an overpriced cup of coffee. Then we will drive from park to park looking for hiking trails. Through miles and miles of farms and wilderness on thinnest of roads, we will find, just like the ranger on the reservation said: that there will be nature everywhere we look, but that we just won’t be able to get out into it. We even drive across a hot springs resort, enter its fence in search of a map, and find a group of shirtless white men on an LSD trip midst couples, gravel, stench and steam. We will end up finding only a small system of hiking trails only in the city of Ukiah that was built by Arnold Schwarzenegger. We will explore the trails and side trails to the point where we find local homeless encampments with the piles of water-logged cardboard beer logos spewed everywhere.

I will forever be struck with seething survivor’s guilt that the good people I work for are not free to enjoy these experiences with me. I will think how they seem to be forever sailing on our society’s ship of fools, deprived, intimidated, humiliated, and straining to make it from smoke to smoke. Meanwhile, society criminalizes every move they make from the inner-city ghettos to the reservations. Every day the law will bear down on them harder leaving them with less and less, lest there be another mass-shooting incident.

Maybe the psychiatrist was right after all! Maybe there is no such thing as a vacation for a schizophrenic. But I am just not sure if he and the rest of mainstream society knows what it really feels like to see the world in this way.

The post A Vacation Day for a Schizophrenic: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".