I took one last look at the Prairie View County Home, just north of Oelwein, and experienced the same sadness that I had experienced one day in L.A. when I wrote this poem:
Richard
And when you turned to wave
you turned
and when you turned to wave
you waved
and when you turned to wave
I knew that you were going.
It was no big deal, I was leaving L.A. to go back to Iowa, and this was the last meeting with my brother before I left. But all of a sudden I felt the months and maybe years before I would see him again.
Prairie View didn't wave, or turn. But I turned, onto a more major highway and sped south to a life filled with work, love, laughter, and friends, while my childhood friend Chuck had to stay, there in the County Home. For some reason I knew that it would be a long time before I would see him again. And it has been.
It's not that I don't think about him, or want to see him. I just feel the need so much. It's hard to know where my life stops and my duty to him begins. My training is that my life is all duty, especially to the insane. That's why it's hard to go.
My first trip to the mental hospital was to Independence. My mother had a tendency to end up there every few years. I was too young to sit on the ward, so I had to visit sitting outside a screened door, while the older members of my family sat with my mother on the inside. It was strange to see her, in there with all of those people in mental disarray. Some staring, some drooling, some making loud senseless sounds. Some just shuffling along.
I don't remember it happening, but it did happen quite a few times in my childhood, these trips of hers to the mental hospital. The last major one in my childhood was in sixth grade. She didn't go crazy again after that until I was in graduate school in Iowa City. And I visited her every day, since that time she was being treated at the University of Iowa Psych Hospital, listening to her stories of how everyone had it in for her, and just telling her I loved her.
Most of the time anyway. Sometimes I would just joke with her and tease her into a laugh that would cut right through all of the depression and she would be right back there as my loving, fun, poetic mother. Like the time when she asked me if I thought she was attractive and I told her that it depends on whether you are trying to attract flies or compliments. I know it sounds cruel, but in context it was hilarious and she laughed the biggest laugh she had come up with in months, before trying to punch me, quite ineffectively.
But I admit it. I hate hospitals. Especially Psych Hospitals. And psychiatrists, well, those guys are just the people who take your mother away. Now I justify my mistrust by noting that they are into medication, not cure, by commenting that they misdiagnosed and mismedicated my mother for forty years. But really, I know it's just that they are the big bad guys in white coats who can take away your mother on a sheet of paper.
But ain't it grand, the names of the locations of the mental hospitals in Iowa. Independence, Mt. Pleasant, Clarinda. Independence is the funniest. Though Mt. Pleasant must be the most ironic. And not only because the closest thing to a mountain in Mt. Pleasant must be the gentle rise on the west side of town. "Nice Little Hill" would be more appropriate. (See "The Mt. Pleasant Theory," this issue) But Independence, it's the best. Nothing could be more independent than a mental patient, while also being completely helpless. If the South had decided to secede from the Union by simply drinking itself to death, it's very possible that they would have succeeded. Not that there would be much left to drink to.
Yes, mental patients get away, each in their own way.
I have to admit, if I cracked up like that it would be much worse than death. It happened to H.L. Mencken, a chronic cynic with an acid wit whose career was cut short with the most ironic of ailments, a stroke that left him capable of thinking but deprived him of the ability to express his thoughts. I wouldn't want anything close to that one.
Hence my hesitation around psychedelic drugs in the Sixties. Anything that plays around with my mental reality starts to get into an enormous fear area. Plus a guilt area. Being in a family with a mental patient, you feel somehow that your family is a shame to society, that the only thing that you can do to rectify the family's burden on society is for you personally to be no trouble. You have to be obedient, well-mannered, never cause a problem. Otherwise, you're another relative on the debit side of the social register.
So, I admit that I didn't like marriage counselling, once I found out what it could end up like. I wouldn't go to a psychiatrist, unless he had a private court and wanted a tennis lesson. But my future ex-wife demanded that we get counselling before divorcing. She had the right to demand that in Iowa, so I complied. But it wasn't exactly what I thought it would be.
After meeting with the guy as a couple a few times, he suggested that we meet him individually. So I came to my individual session, and actually enjoyed some of the role-playing exercises that he put me through. Then he had me lie down on my back and start breathing very deeply. Inhale, exhale. Inhale completely, exhale completely. Not a long, slow, comfortable breathing thing, but a deep, forceful inhale and exhale. This seemed to bring up a lot of powerful feelings, and I ended up curled into a ball, breathing deeply. The sensations were those of being totally cramped up, curled tightly in this fetal position, and I kept thinking, "Why is he doing this? Why won't he make this stop?"
My training in meditation told me that growth didn't have to be this painful, that release of stress, if that was what was happening, didn't have to be done in a stressful way. That's contradictory, like fighting for peace. Whatever it was that was happening was physically painful, and powerful in some way, and I didn't know what was going on. But eventually he somehow let me get out of the experience into a more relaxed state.
I thanked him, paid him, and then walked out into the street. And I had a strange sensation of not really knowing who I was, or how to act. It was like I had been all beaten up and rearranged inside, so that the boundaries of my personality were not very clear anymore.
To some people this is evidently a very valuable experience. I guessed later that I had been through a kind of "rebirthing" experience, something that people pay money to be guided through over and over. But I didn't like it much, during or after. I didn't like not knowing what I was getting into, and not agreeing to it beforehand. And I really didn't like those moments of mental non-stability before the regular routines of my life brought me back to normal in an hour or so.
I guess playing around with my mind is a risk I'd like to let others take. I just wish Chuck hadn't been one of them. Chuck had evidently had a few counselling sessions as a child, but the general consensus is that it was the brain-in-a-blender combination of drugs and alcohol that knocked him out of the mainstream of life over fifteen years ago.
You have to understand that this is Chuck, Chuck of the blue eyes and wavy hair, tall, athletic, funny, energetic, mischievious Chuck. Chuck of pom-pom tackle, trail tag, pole vaulting. Chuck of that bike ride to Readlyn where we heard the horses making horse love.
Now Chuck is on prolyxin, an extremely powerful drug. Once when I saw him he was fine, he said, but could I please help him button his shirt because the drug slowed his coordination so much that he couldn't do it. And due to years of medication his gums have receded and his fine teeth have an odd look that reminds you that you can't ever have the old Chuck back.
On that last visit to Prairie View he told me that he had hopes of getting out someday soon, that there was a halfway house for mental patients in Mason City, and that he had heard that some mental patients go into remission of their illness in their late thirties and early forties. I was amazed that he could discuss his illness so objectively in the same conversation as his explanations of what his "voices" were telling him recently. His major complaint, though, was that in the group ward that he was in, there was one guy who occasionally got up out of his bed and sleepwalked six feet south and four feet west over to Chuck's bed and urinated right on him in the middle of the night.
To me it was somehow unjust for him to have to be on that ward, in any such group, or in the building at all. And as I drove away from Prairie View, I felt guilty, guilty to leave him and guilty that I could just get in a car and drive off. And in subsequent years I always feel funny when I talk to him of this little business failure here, or that one of my marriages broken up there. My problems seem so tiny in comparison to a guy who hasn't been on a date in fifteen years. And I felt guilty about how long it might be before I would see him again.
And it has been a long time. But I will see him, and I will talk to him again, soon. And maybe someday I will see him more often. As soon as I fully face the fear that if you get too close to the screen in the door on Ward C, they somehow will suck you in.
Map of Iowa Index Page
Next Chapter, #11. Fairfield