Bipolarland, Texas part 10

 

8

After I’m finished the paperwork, a black nurse with greasy fake ringlets and a nametag that says her name is Nadine Coward, tells me I’m on precautions until the doctor clears me, that everyone is when they first come in, and I have to hand over my shoelaces, my pen knife, even my Bic pen. Then Marla motions me into a smallish single restroom, where I have to flip up my skirt and shake out my breasts, then get patted down, with the back of Marla’s hand. Marla is smiling and chatty, telling me that I’m lucky I’m not wearing baggy clothes or I’d have had to either take them off to be searched, or let her touch me. She then shows me my room, with three beds, three cupboards (full of shelves), and a bathroom. “Now you can just go relax for a while until dinner,” she says, nodding at the busy dayroom full of eccentric people.

The two street kids are sitting at one of the little round tables, talking loudly about being homeless in downtown Houston. The redheaded black girl chimes in with advice on how to shoplift food, then wanders off to two older people talking about hurricanes destroying their houses and post-traumatic stress. The black redhead tells them about how she was jailed for breaking into someone’s house during the last hurricane just because she needed a place to stay because her bungalow was flooded.

“Oh, Kenisha, you kook,” the female who is talking about the hurricanes says. “Why didn’t you just leave town? They were bussing homeless people out, you know.”

The guy she’s with goes, “You’re lucky you weren’t shot!”

“Couldn’t have gone,” Kenisha says. “I was on the run from the law. See; I’d just stolen a bunch of food; a BIG bag of food, from Kroger and I got caught, and had to give the security guard a whuppin’ with my bag of food to get away. But I lost my ID; dropped it there, so they knew. I might still get deported.”

“Kroger?” the older woman laughs. Why didn’t you go to Fiesta instead? Kroger is really classy and has too much security.”

In the midst of all this commotion; of the TV blaring out an ad for Lyrica (when the narrator in the commercial used the word “antidepressant”, about ten heads snap up, resuming their business when they realize he said “Lyrica is not an antidepressant”), the slapping of playing cards onto the tables, the turning of magazine pages, the incessant babbling, chattering, prattling and yammering; sits a blonde-haired German lady, about forty years old, all by herself at one of the small round tables that are meant to seat four. She sees me looking right, left and center for a place to sit or something to do or someone to talk to, and beckons me over, telling me her name is Johanna, asking if I would like to join her.

I tell her my name is Anne-Marie, and she tells me there’s a pregnant girl here named Ana Maria (whom Johanna says is an illegal alien), and also a girl named Anisha and an Anne. I groan. She points out Anne. Anne is the walking antique in the hooker’s costume. I ask, “What’s with the outfit?”

She smiles and says in her German accent, “I don’t knov, but years ago in her city she vas a, a, a… madame. She van a brothel. She vants to be like the… the girls; she dresses up. She vants…. How do I say this? She vanted; she hoped for the men to pick her. She feels unattractive. Dat's vy she's here; she's debressed.”

Anne is now sitting with the American Indian woman, guarding the kitchenette. They are looking in opposite directions and not saying a word to each other. Both look absolutely miserable, sad, depressed, angry and impatient.

“Zat girl, you see, that girl over there… she vatches you in ze rhestroom. I see her eye in the crhack in the door.” She points out a black girl with blue eyes.

“Well, at least if I can see a blue eye surrounded by dark brown skin, I’ll know who it is,” I say, laughing nervously.

“I tell the staff and zey just tell me to kick ze door vhen it happens.”

“Is she in your room?”

“Yes! She is—she sleeps on ze bed next to mine! Vhen I just need ze rhestroom vitout ze shower, I go zere,” she says, pointing at the little single restroom I was searched in. “But ven I need to take showver, I have no choice.”

“Where do you take a shower? There are no showers in the restrooms in the bedrooms.”

“Zere is a button on ze vall. Press it. Turn for hot vater. No door, zough. No tub; no curtain. No… no…” She tries to communicate a square of walls with her hands. “No valls, no door. Come; I show you.”

It turns out that I share a room with Johanna and the blue-eyed black girl, because Johanna leads me right into my room. I have nothing to put in my room except for the papers containing the rules, the legal rights, the procedure and the daily routine on 2 North, as well as the services this unit is supposed to offer.

In the restroom, on the wall, is a contraption with a button, and a hole above the button where I guess the water comes out. There is no stall or bathtub, as Johanna says.

“You clean up vith towvels after. Get many towvels. Turn left for hot water.”

We go back into the dayroom. Kenisha is standing at the front of the room giving a loud, expressive speech about how she and her boyfriend saved up their shit in a stainless steel container for a week and then smeared it all over the men’s room at one of the republican party’s offices to protest the death penalty and the war in Iraq.

“And then we wrote in it, with a paintbrush, we wrote ‘Bush is a serial killer!’” She claps her hands once, loudly, and laughs uproariously.

The black girl with the blue eyes is getting told off by one of the staff, a big bald Mr. Clean-type guy, who is trying hard to keep his temper in check as he warns her that she will be thrown out in the street if he sees or hears about her going into someone’s room and spying on them naked in the bathroom one more time.

Anne is practicing her dancing and is really awful at it, the Indian woman is sitting in the same spot but is now rocking back and forth, the homeless boy of about eighteen with a basic-training-type buzz cut is telling a group of about ten people about a time he took a combo of too many drugs, thought his legs were on fire, and jumped into the deep end of an empty swimming pool thinking it was a lake. “But I just broke my ankle… that’s all. Other than my ankle, I was good to go,” he brags.

Suddenly, someone starts calling names out. Then I smell food.

They’re handing out Styrofoam containers with food in them, and all the dinners are personalized with our names.

“Abromowicz!” the bald Mr. Clean-like staff member calls out once again, and the nerdy guy with the taped-together glasses stumbles forth to collect his hopefully-kosher dinner.

I look as he opens it up to see if it is kosher. It looks like what everyone else has, but he eats it anyway.

I feel stupid as soon as I see that… his name doesn’t necessarily make him a follower of the Jewish religion.

“Abdulahad!”

A Muslim woman in a pretty bright bluish-purple head scarf and matching bright purple dress comes forward to collect her hopefully pork-free meal (that is, if she actually wants to follow the Muslim religion).

Mr. Clean calls “Anastassiades”, and the girl in the raggedy men's clothes comes up. There’s something different about her though. Now she’s wearing chains of diamonds around her neck, rings with huge diamond stones on all her fingers, diamond bangles right up to her elbows on both her arms, three pairs of albeit-little diamond earrings. Whoa. Where did she get all that? It must have been hers. At least after she stole it. Maybe she just got off precautions… those diamonds do look sharp.

“Aquan-Assee!”

That’s the boy with the buzz cut.

“Bassette” is the gangsta guy. “Clements” is the girl that spies on people in the bathroom. The two hurricane victims both have the last name Delorme. The little boy with the stunted growth has the last name Hathaway. Anne’s last name is Hennessey. Kenisha’s last name is Kamble. (I’m guessing it’s spelled that way because it was called after the “H”s rather than before “Clements”.) Johanna is Jorgensen. “Roundtree” is the mute American Indian woman. The pregnant girl is Ana Maria Spinoza. The huge fat man is Wright. The guy/girl/other in the dress is Yacarini.

I’m the only one without any food. They end up sending over an extra container of food from Ben Taub’s kitchen because they don’t know I exist yet. While I wait I look over at the homeless girl’s food as she gobbles it down. It’s slop. I don’t know how she and the buzz-cut guy can eat one forkful of it, but here they are eating it all. Johanna is eating hers more slowly, looking a bit disgusted with it but trying hard not to, trying to force herself to eat it.

The only thing I like about this meal is the carton of milk. Well, the mashed potatoes and the butter are good, but other than that, even the dessert is nasty (nasty canned peach and pear bits bathed in yucko fattening syrup).

Johanna talks about when she had a house in Channelview. The homeowners’ association took it away from her because the sculptures on her front lawn didn’t match the colors and styles on her street. She wishes she still had her kitchen to make delicious meals and German butter cake. “I 'ad beautiful art-deco kitchen,” she says mournfully, and it’s clear that no number of years will ease or erase her outrage. “Zey took it all away just because of my sculptures. And I didn’t get to keep my sculptures; they… auctioned them off. And I did not get any money from those sculptures, when they auctioned them off. Or from my house, of course.”

I want to tell her about my kitchen. Maybe if she’s homeless she can come and live with me.

“Where are you now?” I ask. “Are you homeless?”

Before I can finish saying that, she says “I vas homeless. I lived in de-de—what do you call it? De Y—”

I freeze in shock. Is she about to say the YFZ ranch? The Yearning For Zion ranch? The polygamist compound?

Then I realize what it probably is. “Oh, the YMCA! The Young Men’s Christian Association!”

“I ‘ad a tiny little room. Little box.” She moves her hands around in a square, then in a square perpendicular to that square, trying to make a point of how small her room was. To help her make her point, I hold up my little square milk carton. That makes us both laugh.

“Then I vas homeless,” she went on. “I vas on de street! I nearly froze to death. I try to get into a museum and a library to sleep and dey kicked me out of de museum . I slept at table in de library in de daytime. Den dey kicked me owt of de library also, as vell. I vas very deprived—I could not get enaff sleep! I did not sleep for a whole week once. Then I start to hallucinate, and I end up in here. My doctor, do, understanded—he understanded. He give me antidepressant, not antipsychotics.”

“What are you on? Celexa? I’m on Celexa.”

“Yes, dat’s it. I am on Celexa.”

“Does it work on you?”

“Yes… it does. I feel better. I am not—not—not-- anxious any more about homelessness.”

When we finish eating, Marla calls us up to her one by one. Sitting at a small table pushed up against the staff desk, she asks us what percentage of our food we ate, whether we showered that day, whether we brushed our teeth, whether we went to the restroom, and females were also asked if they were on their cycle.

And now for group time.

We sit at the round tables and listen to Nadine tell us we’ll be kicked out if the doctor thinks we’re ready, whether we have a place to stay or not, so homeless people should really ask the staff for resources. She says if we want to really benefit from our stay here, we should come to group and not stay up all night chatting and sleep through group the next day, and that that’s why they no longer give sleeping pills to anyone after two in the morning.

“Now, about y’all’s medications,” she says. “In here, you get called up to the desk to take them. Well, ain’t that convenient. But on the outside you got to remember. You got to call the pharmacy five day s before you run out, not ten days after. If you don’t take yer meds y’all will end up right back in here, and there ain’t no reason every last one of y’all can’t take em. If they ain’t free, they’re damn close to it, cuz you get them for free if you can’t afford em. And please, please pay attention to what they’ve got you on. Write it down if you’re a forgetful person. Remember the name of the medication, and the international name, which is way more important than the brand name. Remember what dosage you’re on, for Pete’s sake.” She starts passing out papers. I look at mine. It has my name on it. And “Name of medication:” and then, handwritten in a little box beside it, “Celexa”. “Dosage: 20 mg/24 hrs”. “Reason for taking this medication: antidepressant”.

“Now, I want you all to turn your papers over and recite what you’re on, why you’re on it, and what dosage you’re on!”

And so one by one, we commence the recital of our private information to the entire dayroom.

The guy with the buzz cut says: “I’m on Celebrex. It’s an antidepressant.”

“No, you’re not on Celebrex. Celebrex is a painkiller. You are on Celexa. And yes, Celexa is an antidepressant.”

“I thought it was Celebrex,” the guy says sheepishly, sounding puzzled but somehow at the same time retaining his coolness and sense of dark humor. “Celebrex should be an antidepressant name. It sounds like one!”

“Yes, I know it sounds like the name of an antidepressant,” Nadine says, sounding amused. “That’s one reason we need to remember the international name.”

“What’s the use in that?”

“The chemical name. Recognized in all countries. Now, what dosage are you on?”

“I’m on four milligrams,” he says confidently.

“It seems,” Nadine says, “that someone wrote ‘40’ on something, or it was on your bottle of pills, and you saw it as zero-four. Are you dyslexic? Or did you just not pay close enough attention?”

Nobody has laughed so far, at least not any of the patients… not even me.

Normally I wouldn’t have been able to suppress a chuckle, but my mood is going down again.

Then the same guy gets Ritalin and Risperdal mixed up, saying he’s on 10 milligrams of Risperdal three times a day and one milligram of Ritalin once a day, instead of the other way around.

“Right now, Sean,” Nadine announces, “you are a danger to yourself. Full-blown schizophrenics who are on Risperdal are only on a maximum of eight milligrams once a day. Ten three times a day could simply make you sleep off and on if you're lucky, but kill you if you aren't lucky. And one milligram of Ritalin, just once a day at that, will not work. You may’s well take none.”

Gangsta Guy is next. First he derails the conversation with talk about all the street drugs he did and how they changed his thoughts, feelings, sensual experiences and behaviors. Then he says he was on venom but forgot the actual name of the drug, only remembering that he called it venom because it gave him bad side effects and he had even worse withdrawals coming off it. “But the name of it sounded like ‘Venom’,” he concludes.

“Could it be venlafaxine?” Nadine asks him.

“Yes! That’s the one!”

“Turn over your paper and look.”

“It says something totally different… Eff—ex—or.”

“Effexor and venlafaxine are the same thing. Effexor is the brand name of venlafaxine.”

“Oh.”

So then he’s asked what dosage he’s on and all he remembers is that he has to pop a capsule twice a day, and he has to look on his paper.

“Another one that’s a danger to himself,” Nadine sighs.

Anne says she’s on so many pills she can’t remember or keep track of what they are any more… or indeed, which ones she’s still supposed to be taking.

Diamond Girl can’t remember the brand or generic name of her medication, only remembering that she called them Helldol and Hellbutrin because of the awful side effects (and the drugs turn out to be Haldol and Wellbutrin). The Indian woman is completely mute and unresponsive when her turn comes, and the Muslim woman just sits there sobbing, explaining that the reason she was upset was that she knew she needed her meds but that her husband and his sect of her religion forbade them, and she doesn’t know what to do.

Turns out that the geeky kid and myself are the only ones who can remember what we’re on.

Now it’s time to take the pills. They call on us one by one to get some water and go to the staff desk. When it’s my turn, Marla says, “The doctor would like to see you before he gives you anything.”

And so the next morning, I see the doctor. I must have looked really down and out, still wearing the plaid get-up I’ve been wearing for four days. I doubt I'll be getting any sleep or even a shower tonight either, what with Miss Perverted Peeping-Thomasina Clements. Her bed is right in the middle, between mine and Johanna’s. I’m on the inside where the bathroom is; Johanna’s bed is closest the door leading out into the dayroom. There’s no lock on the bathroom door. I’m jealous of Johanna for having been placed next to the door leading out of the bedroom.

“So how are you feeling today?” Dr. Javenson says after Nadine introduces us and leaves. “Not so good?”

“I just couldn’t sleep,” I say, telling him why, before telling him my entire bipolar history.

He says, “That could be because of the Celexa, in which case it is bipolar type three, but it could also be a coincidence, in which case it would be type one bipolar.”

Oh, joy. To be lumped in with Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie and all those other crazies. Well, maybe that’s not so bad.

“Just in case, I’m going to replace your Celexa with Cymbalta…”

“No way, Jose! My friend tried to kill himself when he was on Cymbalta.” I shudder as I remember finding Don passed out on my bathroom floor surrounded by empty pill bottles and empty Vodka bottles, one side of his face in a pool of vomit and his hand resting protectively on his note.

“I understand your concern. I don’t want to put you on Wellbutrin because it’s one of the worst drugs for inducing mania. Prozac and Paxil are right up there with it. How about I try a different class of antidepressant altogether. How about Sinequan? It’s a potent antidepressant, but it isn’t known to induce mania.”

I have never heard of Sinequan. I ask, “Is that its international name?”

“Nope. The international name for it, as you put it, is doxepin.”

He also prescribes me Ambien for sleep if needed (maybe it will help me sleep through getting molested by the blue-eyed black girl) and then he dismisses me and it’s Diamond Girl’s turn. She’s white and shaking, an “I need to get out of here NOW” expression on her pale diamond-studded face, but she runs into the doctor’s office anyway, her diamond-embedded bangles jingling and jangling. I wonder what’s up with her, but I don’t think about it for too long. I have my own problems.

I wander back into my room, into the bathroom. And then I stop short. There’s a girl laying on the floor amongst several small yet substantial pools of blood.

Why am I not surprised?