Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Involuntary Goodfellas

The intake interview on 3C mostly consisted of questions I had already answered four or five times that day, first at my psychologist’s asking, and then with a series of emergency room medical doctors, psychiatry residents, and finally the EMTs who were transporting me to the inpatient facility. Bob, the night R.N. who I had been assigned to at the Behavioral Health Services Center checked boxes and slid papers across the table for initials and signatures. There were no surprises for me, although my suicide plan somehow seemed new to him. Like the father Jeff Mangum sang about, I had thought about all the ways to die, and up until now, they had all been more than I had dared to try. The night before I had settled on starving myself of oxygen by breathing in the pure helium commonly sold at party stores where it would otherwise end up in balloons that at their darkest would read ‘Over the Hill’. Bob made sure to stress that the program was short term, just for stabilization.

I was wearing only a pair of boxer shorts that may have been contraband for the elastic waist (shoe strings were banned on the floor, even for visitors), and the gown I was given ten hours earlier in the ER that my psychologist had walked me down to. My personal affects were in a plastic bag with the international symbol for biohazard printed on it - I pictured the scene in every prison movie where the newly released ex-con signs off on receiving the items that had followed them into incarceration as I acknowledged with ink an LG cellphone and the more important contents of my wallet (Bob had no interest in my being 6 smoothies away from a free one, or presumably being a regular shopper at Borders Books).

The unit’s community room doubled as the dining room. By the amount of crumbs on the tables, and the amount of patients I had to assume were also suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (someone must have had a cleaning compulsion), I had just missed snack time, when the sound of the metal window being rolled up draws the patients into a mob that slowly dissipates as they each receive their two food items and one beverage. For the Cleveland Clinic, it seemed odd that the offerings included potato chips, cookies and pop, but maybe the residents of my floor weren’t to be trifled with over high fructose corn syrup or trans fat. But if an apple or a banana could set someone off, I had to question the logic of allowing us to watch Goodfellas on a television which was behind a plexiglass window smeared with body oil in a pattern that suggested someone at been shoved against it before sliding down to the floor. It had been a few years since I seen Goodfellas, but all of a sudden it was slightly comforting that pens were also off limits - I hadn’t forgotten the scene were Joe Pesci put one through someone’s neck over a trivial insult.