The Most Desolate Time

In February of 1993, on Super Bowl Sunday, I was hospitalized for manic depression at Eastern Oregon State Hospital in Pendleton, Oregon. I spent mornings in the day room where the books were kept, castoff volumes from the public library. They had a small writing desk that looked out to the window. I found a copy of the King James Bible and started reading the Gospels and the Psalms, and an old hardbound volume of The Old Man and the Sea. My brother sent me a spiral notebook and pens in a care package, so I started a journal.

The window was covered with iron grating on the outside. The first night, deeply manic and lost in delusion I threw a cup of urine in the face of the night attendant and tried to escape. It took five of them to subdue me. They gave me a shot of Haldol and put me in restraints. I was terrified and completely helpless and alone and ashamed. I was afraid I would be there forever, with those other lost, broken people. One of the voluble manics took me under his wing. He coaxed me into calling my wife and pleading my case with her, told me to be sure to request certain medications and refuse others. I did push ups and chins on the pipes above the grated-in deck, thinking of softball season.

The Eastern Oregon mornings were bitter cold, temperatures in single digits. I window in the day room looked out on the prison yard next door. The cons would gather in groups, hands in their pockets, breath rising above their heads. The morning sun gleamed off the razor wire.

The meals were starchy and tasteless, and I shuffled through the day, spent hours writing. By the third week lithium had stabilized my symptoms and they assured me I'd be getting out soon. About then it was revealed to me Susan "would not be a resource for me" when I got out. My mother agreed to have me stay with her. At 6 a.m., on a Monday in early March, they took me to the bus station and rode the long hours through the one gas station towns to Portland. To begin a new life.

I called for jobs the next day and got a temp assignment, and a few days into the week called the garbage company and they hired me back. I have no idea why. I suppose everyone there was crazy too in their own way. The other guys were understandably wary of me, but just as happy to not have to double up on their routes. I kept to myself even before, so my isolation and unspoken separateness didn't seem unusual. I think I've always held myself apart from people. Everyone probably assumes it's out of snobbery or unfriendliness or a spirit of judgment, but it's not. It's the fear of being found out, of having all that vulnerability and shame exposed. Not just the mental illness. I've been relatively healthy and functioning for 17 years now. It's the weight of everything else, growing up poor, having yellow teeth, secretly feeling unlikeable and unworthy and eccentric.

Eventually the shame faded. I buried the experience, began my grief over the unraveling of my second marriage, got an apartment, reconnected with my kids. I went to movies and played golf, read books. I went back to night school and finished my degree. It was just a night school diploma from a nothing college in a subject, Human Development, that would lead to no kind of career, but it was an important symbol to me. I finished something. I started something new. There was no triumphant moment or get breakthrough, but I stayed healthy and never had to go back to the window with the iron grates and the razor wire and the bitter cold. I don't think of it often but you never forget a place like that. It's surprising, given that experience, that I don't live with more purpose and humility and perspective. Sometimes I have this fragile shell of pretense about me, and it doesn't serve me well.

These days I keep myself busy with amusements. Sometimes we use things and activity to hide from the truth of our lives. All of those painful and misspent choices have something to teach us, the failed relationships, the dead end jobs, the dark corners and blind alleys of time. I kept myself hidden from other people. I have a job I hate and do poorly. There was a lot I didn't want anyone to know, and was frantic to forget myself. You can use television or poker or Bowl Bound College Football like a drug. You can throw things away or keep them hidden away, but the gleam of the razor wire is still blinding in your memory.