Well, there’s nothing else you can do. You’re nine years old and they say you set the school on fire. I say, no I didn’t. They say, yes you did, we know you’re lying. I say, no I’m not lying, I didn’t even know the school was on fire. Yeah, you set the school on fire. We’re sending you to juvenile hall. You go to juvenile hall if you set the school on fire. You think you can get away with that? You can’t set the school on fire. I said I didn’t set the school on fire. Don’t tell that lie. He’s always lying. You gotta watch this kid, man. He needs to see a doctor. You need a sociologist. I just graduated college and I get paid to help you. I’m helping you with your problem. What’s my problem? Well, you’re introverted. You’ve got an inferiority complex. I said, what do you mean? Well you’re short and you feel you’re not as good as everybody else. I do? He said, yeah. I said, okay. I’m really stupid then. How tall are you? What’s that got to do with it? Well, evidently, you got a short man complex because you recognize it in me so it must have been inside of you first, doesn’t it? Doesn’t everything come from within?
They use to have this one guy in reform school, he had a big magnifying glass and he was always looking for crabs, and he’d get all the kids, all the young men, and take their pants down, then he’d come around with his magnifying glass, and look for crabs, and then all the guys with the big Roscoes all seemed to end up in his residence. I think he was picking out what he wanted to play with. He was kind of a weird man, he used to have a room he called the bear den. Anybody who got packages from home, he’d put them in the bear den, and then pass them out to everyone. He was all real honest, and square with it. He’d call up all the kids to his desk, and give them the keys to open up the bear den, they would open up the bear den, get out the stuff, and pass it to all the kids, then he would lock the bear den down, and it went real cool, real good ‘til it got to me. He gave me the keys, and I slipped the key off to the backdoor, and I was gone! I’ve always been one step ahead of the whole damn thing. I was just trying to get away. That’s what I was doing in the desert, trying to figure out how the fuck can I get away from these motherfuckers, I can’t stand them, man. My grandmother started that shit you know, everyone started chasing me. I’ve been running my whole life. I was always running off, stealing everything, every time I got the chance I was on the road. They’d catch me in Iowa, bring me back to Indiana, then they’d catch me in Salt Lake, and take me back to Indiana. Every time you ran away they’d beat your fucking ass, shave your head, work you like a dog. The beatings weren’t that bad, ‘cause I kept doing it.
II
THE PSYCHIATRIC NURSE
As a child, I loved going to school and I had a lot of great friends. It had always been easy for me to connect with people and I formed a lot of close and diverse friendships with all sorts of kids, like the rockers, the geeks, the jocks, and the bad kids. I was more of a rocker kid myself and I was, and still am, completely in love with music. When I was eight years old, I discovered Kiss and Alice Cooper. I began to devour rock magazines, and soon I knew everything about my favorite rockers. My bedroom walls were plastered with their posters. To me, they were living comic book heroes. I spent every Halloween dressed as either Alice or a member of Kiss. Something about the madness in their music fascinated and moved me. Gene Simmons blew fire and spit blood, and Alice had his head lopped off every night by a guillotine. It was theater, and I loved it.
When I was fourteen, my dad moved the family to a small acreage just outside of Tisdale, a rich, agricultural area in northeastern Saskatchewan. We lived in the middle of nowhere, with the closest neighbor almost a mile away. While I loved nature and being outdoors, this level of isolation was a little too much. I read a lot, wrote letters, and listened to music; those things were my only means of escape. It was quite a culture shock for my siblings and me. I think my father decided to move because he saw his life getting out of control in Regina. But the reasoning behind the relocation didn’t extend much past the idea that the grass is always greener on the other side. My dad established a cement business with my uncle, and everything
started to look pretty good for all of us. Things slid backward a bit when Dad began working with a few other relatives who liked to drink.
I’d always been a somewhat shy kid, but my new town and my new school gave me a whole new set of reasons to keep quiet. I can remember climbing onto a school bus filled with strange faces and immediately feeling like an outcast. Those kids were neat and clean cut and they stared at the new guy with long hair as though they’d never before seen a kid like me. And they probably hadn’t. It seemed wise to grab the empty, isolated seat behind the bus driver. As we sped off, the collective commenced trying to figure out which student could name the most herbicides off the top of his head. I thought, “You are so fucked.” And I was.
By the time I reached high school, I’d completely retreated within myself. I would often go to school and return home without saying a word all day. I could go for days in complete quiet, and the longer each silent streak lasted, the more my isolation felt like a game. If I could answer a lecture question with a nod or a shake of the head, if I could contribute my name to the attendance sheet with merely a wave, I felt a huge sense of relief. I truly didn’t want to talk to a single student or teacher. I was bullied, ridiculed, and ruthlessly stereotyped. I was clearly depressed. Each night in my dreams, I’d test drive new and terrible ways to kill myself. I’d jump from a building, put a pistol into my mouth, or hang myself from a tree.
Things went that way until I got to grade eleven. I wasn’t friends with any of my peers, but the younger kids seemed to gravitate toward me. I was an outcast, and I think they identified with that.
Eventually I came out of my shell and I actually enjoyed going to school. I found amusement in the ways people reacted to me. I have fond memories of my algebra teacher, Mr. Pitzel, completely losing it after seeing a picture that I’d hung in my locker of Blackie Lawless drinking blood from a skull. Mr. Pitzel was one of my most influential teachers; he illustrated what I never wanted to become: a complete asshole. Because I was so quiet, everyone assumed I was addicted to drugs, gay, evil, etc. I was content to let them believe whatever they wished.
When I finished high school, I refused to attend the graduation ceremony, despite incessant requests by the school’s principal to reconsider. I explained to him that I didn’t really feel any sense of accomplishment; I hadn’t forgotten how I was treated when I first started. Because I didn’t accept my diploma in cap and gown, the school decided to withhold it from me. To this day, I have no physical proof that I completed grade twelve. As soon as I could escape that time and place, I moved back to Regina, where I have lived ever since.
Back home, it was difficult to find work. I started playing in a band and I refused to cut my hair. Twenty-five years ago, no one would hire a guy with long hair. I ended up taking a job as a dishwasher, because that’s all there was. Eventually, I got the chance to apprentice as a pastry chef. I loved to cook, in part because of the eclectic, eccentric group of people attracted to the lure of a sweltering hot, pressure-cooked kitchen. A lot of ex-cons end up working in restaurants, as do musicians, alcoholics, transients. I became friends with a guy named Floyd who would share all kinds of wild stories while he worked at the prep table beside me. He professed a belief in the fine art of robbery and
explained that a thief’s success depends on a pristine, precise ability to read people. “You need to keep calm and in control,” Floyd would say. And so, according to Floyd’s philosophy, the most successful robber nurtures the very same quality as the most successful brain surgeon: command of the situation.
While I climbed the ranks in the restaurant business, my older brother began pursuing his education in psychiatric nursing. He had been working construction jobs until he decided he wanted to do something completely different with his life. I supported this decision, and I became fascinated by the stories he’d share. At one point, he told me that, even if I had no desire to pursue a career in psychiatry, the experience of taking classes and learning about myself would prove well worth it. I decided to take his advice, and as I pursued my own education, I fell in love with the field.
For the past fifteen years, I’ve enjoyed a career as a registered psychiatric nurse. During that time, I’ve worked in jails, hospitals, and community programs and facilities. I’ve counseled people suffering with major mental health disorders (schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder), as well as murderers, psychopaths, junkies, and sex-offenders. Among the eccentric and the insane, I’ve met some of the most extraordinary, beautiful people. Through them, I’ve discovered what a strange teacher life can be, because, often, as the caregiver in a nurse-patient relationship, I am the one who learns the most. Many people associate psychiatry with
Silence of the Lambs
or
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
But, in truth, mental illness can happen to anyone and it’s a lot closer to most people than most people are willing to believe. All of us experience loss, with which we have difficulty coping.
Lots of us are overrun with thoughts that won’t let us sleep at night. Horrifying things happen to ordinary people, and tragedy can overshadow the rest of people’s lives. I’ve always known I had much more in common with a psychiatric patient than I had with a president of a bank.
While I completed my education and training, I dreamed of one day working at The Regional Psychiatric Centre in Saskatoon, a secure, forensic mental health hospital operated by Correctional Service Canada. The facility holds some of the most dangerous, criminally insane inmates in the country. Many of the prisoners are legendary psychiatric patients, and so I felt extremely lucky when I achieved a practicum on the women’s unit. At the time, Saskatoon had recently received many new, extremely violent inmates transferred from Kingston Penitentiary, and the Saskatoon unit had to be divided in two, separating those inmates who would literally kill each other if they ever got the chance.
Working in Saskatoon, it became clear to me how profoundly people’s mental health is influenced by their experiences. The first patient assigned to me was a woman I’ll call Mary, a timid, soft-spoken woman in her early thirties, with long black hair and chiseled features. Mary wasn’t able to make eye contact with me when we spoke. This habit was common among the unit’s other women, most of whom had been victims of atrocious sexual abuse. Diagnoses are difficult, but someone like Mary is more likely to be consumed by “behavioral” problems than by mental illness. She was depressed and anti-social and she suffered with addiction and low self-esteem.
Mary had been a prostitute. She’d pick up men who were drunk because they were clearly the easiest to rob. In seducing them, she would instruct them to remove their clothes and convince them to allow her to tie them up; it would be more fun that way, she’d say. Once she’d secured their hands and feet, she’d take their wallets and leave them, bound and exposed. Once, Mary picked up a man who was not quite as inebriated as she’d hoped. Before she could restrain his last limb, he intuited her plan, broke free, and began to beat her. In defense, she smashed his face with a wine bottle, and when the bottle broke she used the shards to stab and slash his body. Mary told me she couldn’t talk to men, she had been abused her whole life, and, even though she thought I was a nice guy, I still scared her. The only thing I could do was thank Mary for her honesty and request a new patient.
I worked with a woman I’ll call Ivy full-time for two months straight, and to this day her story remains one of the saddest I’ve ever known. When I knew her, Ivy was in her late twenties. She was tomboyish and wore her straight black hair short around her plump features, her round cheeks and her tiny, upturned nose. Like Mary, Ivy had worked extensively as a prostitute, and she’d also been abused. She told me that, typically, the more rich and powerful a man was, the more deviant he liked to be. It was completely normal, she said, for a lawyer dressed in a “fancy” suit to pick her up and reveal later that he was wearing women’s underwear. Ivy had been incarcerated after her pimp forced her to participate in a botched armed robbery. But she’d been damaged long before then.
Ivy was diagnosed with schizophrenia and she believed she
was possessed by demons. Her body was riddled with wounds, thousands ofself-inflicted scars that completely covered her limbs. Ivy had been involved in a cult since she was a small child and she told me gruesome stories about the way she’d acquired the cult’s beliefs. As a young girl, she’d once been forced to single-handedly abort a fetus as part of a sacrificial ritual. Ivy told me the baby was “stretched out” on a tree and that, over time, it completely disappeared. When I asked her where it went, she replied, simply, “The birds ate it.” Ivy believed that she gained strength by allowing demons to enter her, that the more demons one had the mightier one became. Because she possessed so many demons, Ivy said, she had super powers: mind-reading capabilities, extraordinarily heightened intuition, and immortality. She truly believed that if someone were to shoot her, the bullet would simply hit her and harmlessly drop to the ground.
Ivy wanted to be loved more than anyone I ever met. This quality may have fueled her illness, because her need to please predisposed her to becoming other people’s prey. Ivy had a son and she was devastated when he was immediately removed from her at birth and put into care. She would spend hours in her cell just staring at the little boy’s picture; I’m pretty sure that photo was the only thing she had left of him. Ivy didn’t have any friends or family to speak of. She eventually developed a relationship with her cellmate, but they would often fight viciously and Ivy always got the worst of it. A year or so after I stopped working with her, I was shocked to read about Ivy’s death in the newspaper. Late one night, Ivy’s lover strangled her and then tried to string her up to make it look as though Ivy had committed suicide.