Entry 12
By Steven Paul Lansky
"Into Steady Meditations"
They woke me early. I washed my bearded face in the tile bathroom and dressed in my light yellow button down shirt, black gabardines, and slipped on the beige linen and silk jacket. I had my last look at this faded, light green walled dormitory with its gritty tile floor. I followed the final instructions, received my meds (still on Geodon), my wallet with credit cards, business cards and I.D.’s, my cash in the money clip, and the extra cash they had given me for the trip and the train ticket. The whole place seemed familiar. A flash of memory that was eerie as all hell swept through me. Every time I had been asked during treatment if I had “been here” before, I had a sense that I was lying when I said, “no.” I think a part of me believed they would catch me in this lie, as they had records, but they never let on. It was a question that always came in a series of questions and the answers never led to any concrete conclusion on my part, except for the sure knowledge that while I was being questioned the questioner was always, each and every time, weighing the length of my stay and the state of my recovery.
The drug and alcohol counselor had been the least helpful. He had light brown hair that looked unwashed, tattoos on both forearms, looked like he might have had a facelift, and talked in an uneducated drawl. I told him I was clean and sober over twelve years, and I missed my local meetings. He told me that I was too well to attend meetings on the ward. The only treatment available was for current users who were required to go to a six-month residential program. He could not recommend that for me. I think I made a mistake when I asked him if he was a veteran. He was. I wonder if there was something in my file about my aversion to the military.
So, that last morning, I was sure that my release was planned but could be aborted if I showed signs of abnormality. I got my breakfast on the fly. Two staff that I had never seen before took me to a van. I had my pack and the acid burn of the stolen green cotton button down shirt. My hairbrush had broken and been replaced with a better one (The staff member who had procured the plastic replacement referred to it as a Cadillac, a typical slang for the best of its class.), but the shirt was a total loss. I recalled bitter moments when one staff helped search the ward, looking in fellow patients’ hampers and wardrobes for the J. Peterman, forest green, button-down shirt. We searched without accusing anyone, an awkward exercise, but no one took visible affront; I suspected a young fellow who wore a makeshift turban he’d crafted by tearing a pillowcase. He often used the bathroom next to my room even though he lived in another room that had its own bathroom. He was bearded, thin, and often practiced some awkward martial arts in the outdoor smoking area flailing his arms and legs like a gigantic, dizzy daddy long-legs. This thin man also was Arabic and was a regular target of derision from the other patients and the male staff. He had been in one fistfight. We never recovered the stolen shirt. As the van sped through the morning streets I opened the envelopes with aftercare instructions and my discharge plan. I scarfed a bagel and drank a juice after peeling back the foil seal. I watched out the windows trying to figure out where I had been.
We arrived at the train station. All I ever saw of Trenton, New Jersey was the train station and the interior of the Drake facility where I had been held. (I saw local television news, too, but it seemed the same as local news everywhere with urban stories of crime and domestic problems.) I figured out which ticket and which train I needed without help from the staff. They would have screwed it up, from the advice they gave. The two of them didn’t spend much time on me, preferring to talk to one another. Both were black, the woman was heavy-set and spoke in a British accent. They seemed impressed that I could read the schedule and knew that I couldn’t get on the first Washington, DC train, because it was an express commuter train. Then I said good-bye to them and walked onto Amtrak, a free man.
I felt my body change; I walked freely, a new bounce in my gait. I had a time finding an empty seat, eventually sitting next to a young woman. I pulled out Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood and began to read. The book was on my reading list and I harbored thoughts of meeting the author in Toronto later in the summer. Miami University, where I was finishing my MA, had included this text in the first-year curriculum, so I hoped to teach it to undergraduates in the fall. Given my interest in creativity and primary sources, as I read I realized that in the 1970s I had cycled on my ten-speed through the very region where the book was set. (Later in Cincinnati when I talked to a family friend about my interest in the region, in traveling across it by train, and meeting the author, my mother’s close friend had suggested I go ahead and try.) I had a pencil in hand and noted in the margins where the story piqued my imagination the most. One of the psychiatrist’s techniques for opening up the dialogue with the alleged murderess in the novel was to give her a piece of fruit or a vegetable to hold while he questioned her. In one instance he shared an apple, in another a yam. I wondered as I read about the relative sizes of the produce, and then began to think about the size of the character’s hands.
My brother lives in Vermont and he is knowledgeable about produce, gardening, and pest control, as he is a statistician who researches methods to develop more successful food growing techniques. I wondered about his young daughter and her sexual fantasies as I read about this teenage woman who was accused of such a horrible crime. My niece was years from being a teen. I wondered, though, if my brother would find this historical novel as
compelling as I did. There was this sense of my life moving on to free ideas, into steady meditations.
The books I had read during the hospital stay included one about a college professor traveling to India, one about a Greek shipping family (probably the Onassis clan), one about black women in a variety of sexual relationships, one about an Egyptian king and his harem, and a couple of others that were such quick reads that they slipped unnoticed from my memory. I looked up from my reading. Before long the young woman had disembarked at her stop. I moved to the window seat. A Japanese businessman sat next to me. The train felt wonderfully modern, and full of people who looked so different from the people with whom I had lived for three weeks.
Now, reflecting back on those weeks I feel an odd sense of privilege. As an educated, middle-class, white schizophrenic, the time spent with the mixture of young and old, black, Asian, African, Puerto Rican, and white, downtrodden and unique seemed so worth the time. I know few people are able to cross worlds of such diversity as I do, and it is something both soothing and frightening. There is a sense of humility, somewhat forced, but totally real, that I resonate to.
I changed trains in Washington, DC. In the station, I found a pharmacy, got some suppositories for my hemorrhoids, and a fiber supplement. I browsed a bookstore, walked outside and checked out a fountain on a traffic island. The train station was quite grand, with the tile floors, the tall pillars, the railings, the high ceilings with skylights. On the way to New York, I had stayed in the waiting area and never saw what the station had to offer.
I was on the same train I had ridden up east. I recognized the porters who were the only blacks on the train. Soon I had settled into an observation car. A man with a khaki multi-pocketed vest doing a crossword on a tiny clipboard caught my attention. He had close-cropped gray hair, a good tan, and was working the puzzle in ink, peering with red edged eyes through wire-rimmed reading lenses. The train was in Virginia , passing through the University campus that I recognized from years earlier when I had driven with college buddies from Boston to Mardi Gras in New Orleans . The man and I struck up a conversation. Awkwardly at first, but with growing patience, we took to one another. I think it started when he offered me a newspaper.
“See those steps?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said as the train pulled through a kind of outdoor theater with grass and concrete steps.
“There was a photo,” he stopped talking, turned to a corrugated cardboard trashcan and rummaged through it, pulling out yesterday’s Washington Post. He flipped through the paper and handed me the section folded back.
“A girl from Texas my granddaughter’s age with cancer,” his voice was low, obviously moved by the article.
“What kind of cancer?” I asked.
I read and looked at the photo. The young woman was pictured in the outdoor theater, and it had been taken just days before. She had traveled with her family to Virginia for an experimental treatment.
“Are you a doctor?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “but my mother has cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have Leukemia but it is in total remission.”
I looked at him again. He was fairly thin, well put together, with workman’s shoes, blue jeans.
“The way you asked, and your appearance, I thought maybe you were a physician.”
“No, I’m a writer and a teacher.” I noticed a bullet hole in the glass of the observation car above us. My paranoia did not flare at the sight of the bullet hole, but it registered for a moment. Something about this man in this setting seemed to work with the bullet hole, adding a slightly fearful dimension to the conversation. There was some open land with a huge house in the distance on a hill, hidden by foliage. He noticed my attention to the landscape.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked.
“No.”
“It’s Monticello.”
I looked again.
“I’ve taken this trip many times. I’m on my way to my granddaughter’s high school graduation in West Virginia. I live in Baltimore. It’s easy to drive to DC and take the train from there. Too short a distance to fly, anyway the airport is two hours from the town.”
I had a sense that I had connected with a raconteur. Easing back into the seat, I wondered if I could keep this civil. A heavyset balding fellow in blue jeans and a crimson sweater with a mustache and bushy eyebrows moved through the car followed by his son. The man noticed the pins on my new companion’s vest and commented, slowing his hike through the train car. “Are you a boyscout leader?” the man asked.
“These are military decorations,” he frowned in disapproval and a sense of feeling offended hung in his tone. “It’s Flag Day.”
The man lowered his head and moved by without apology.
After a moment, I asked, “Where did you serve?”
“In Vietnam.”
“What branch?”
“Marines,” he paused, “that was rude of him.”
From the look on his face I knew he had seen combat and it had taken a lot out of him.
“What do you do now?”
“Semi-retired. But, I was an equine photographer.”
This explained the many-pocketed vest. A niche so specific. My curiosity was piqued. “In the sporting sense? You photographed race horses?” I asked.
“Yes, for magazines and newspapers.”
“Did you write articles, too?”
“No, not usually. Sometimes I would write captions, but usually I worked with a writer. There were times where the writer would have photo ideas, or I might have a story angle connected with a series of photos.”
“My ex-wife is a racing buff. Did you photograph The Derby?”
“Yes. I covered some of the major stories, but mostly I worked for a Baltimore daily doing human interest pieces that sometimes got picked up for syndicated use. I did a piece about a girl that cleaned stables at Churchill Downs. She was the granddaughter of a famous jockey. Those photos ended up everywhere. My editor helped me get pictures of a trainer’s family that had ancestors with connections to Irish royalty. I worked with some great editors over the years.”
“I heard on NPR about this new book on Seabiscuit.”
“Great book,” he said, “I just sent the author a drawing of Seabiscuit that hung in my office for years.”
“You know her?”
He took a breath, “My editor contacted her publicist. The publicist wouldn’t give my editor contact information, but passed word on to the author. She’s real protective. A famous equine artist who is dead now did the drawing. It’s a valuable piece and she didn’t understand my generosity. I think she thought I was trying to sell it. But, it hung in my office for years, and I had had enough of it. You know, I just felt like she would get more out of it than I would. I had enjoyed it, but it seemed the thing to do. So, she accepted it. I shipped it to her and got a nice thank you note. That was worth it. * ”
do the retired
military officers
wear their civvies, pins
on their lapels ride trains through
America afraid to
fly knowing air com-
mand intimately fear-
ing risks like elevators
in tall buildings higher than
twelve floors the limit on sur-
vivable freefall?
while the patriots of psych-
iatric hospitals
re-integrate as train pass-
engers walking between the
cars in fear that they
are still prisoners of some
corporate war al-
ways being relocated,
re-educated, reif-
ied as artists teaching
the retired soldiers to
study war no more.
Now, knowing he was a Vietnam veteran I wanted to talk about his war experience, I sensed he had something to share. I wanted to ask him: Do we study Vietnam to do better in the next conflict, to avoid being in conflict, to understand better how different people, cultures, and races can thrive mutually and convivially with open trade, free communication, and welfare for all? What about a universal doctrine encouraging pursuit of happiness? But this conversation wasn’t ready for such directed dialogue. Am I too paranoid to suggest that what must be learned is to move away from war toward meditation? (Formal meditation can often be attached to dogma, but any kind of meditation can be a key to peace.) Is art a solution to a peaceful time? Does war come and go like the wind? Can I be a warrior without taking up a weapon against an unknown assailant? Is joining an army the first wrong step? Even conscription can be circumvented. There must be an alternative if one believes in honest individuality and nonviolence. Civility. I cannot move out of the civil discourse. Civil disobedience is only understood as a mass movement while individual anarchic acts are seen as behavioral deviance or mental instability. The state reacts to aberrant behavior by trapping dissenters and medicating them, creating the therapeutic state. Who could disagree with that? Am I a dissenter or ill? Maybe both.
The photographer spoke in a quiet way, “My brother-in-law, Ola was a famous Danish contemporary writer. I talked to him often about his writing when I visited my sister. What do you write about?”
“I collect moments,” I said. “Lately, the ones that have stirred me have been in performance when I was playing harmonica with a folk group in Cincinnati called Jake Speed and The Freddies. Playing the harmonica involves a set of complex breathing techniques. The breathing calls to mind meditation, and when I think of moments, I feel the breathing that stays calm within them. In writing, I try to capture moments where some situation and combination of ideas meld to generate a story.”
He let me finish and let the words stay in the air, “Ola used to talk about moments. He would get the same tone of voice, the same thrill I hear in you.”
“A spiritual advisor of mine tells me that what is real is what perceives the breath, the knower, the presence that is life itself.”
He listened intently, nodding his head up and down. I think we both saw what would come next in this conversation, a deeper degree of intimacy. I wondered if we talked about Vietnam and war I would boil with anger. He had no idea that I had been in a Trenton State Mental Hospital for three weeks. The Geodon appeared to be holding me now. All that had changed with the new medication was the schedule. I took it in the mornings twenty minutes after a full breakfast instead of at bedtime. The train moved, swaying from side to side, through sunny, wooded, Virginia hills.
“My favorite Vietnam novel is Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien. His The Things They Carried is powerful, too.” Before he could respond I let my thoughts lead me into a meditation: Vietnam era literature by survivors of the conflict are a necessary result of war. Ideas about courage and conflict contrast with the depersonalization of death. Ideological conflicts that lead to war have a millenarian history. What future utopia might be possible if everyone on the planet could learn from the Vietnam War? But each war presents differently to theorists. It’s not like men and women in orange jumpsuits and scrubs could just come and sterilize the remains and bury them with dark steel spades in wet earth. The whole thing seems never to go away nor should it. Is it ignorance that causes conflicts? Are they premeditated? Why should tolerance be so necessary with each breath? I was caught in this field of attachment. What I needed to remember is that there have always been wars, there will always be wars, and to just watch and take the perspective of George Carlin, who says something like, “If people want to kill each other, let ‘em. I can’t control other people; I can just watch and enjoy the ride. I know that my role is just to point out what’s funny about it, follow on the legacy of Lenny Bruce.”
I think I said something like that to this new acquaintance on the train as I was finding another side of myself. I wanted to listen to him, to hear his pain.
“Tim O’Brien is good. The Things They Carried is amazing. There is a new Vietnam Reader that I’ve seen. Do you have any interest in teaching a course on Vietnam literature?”
“No. Not that I’m not interested, but my focus has been on homeless literature. The connection to Vietnam tends to be when the homeless veteran enters my field. Miss America has taken the homeless veteran problem as her issue, but I don’t know of any literature that connects the Vietnam veteran and homelessness. Most of the veterans I’ve come across have been socially and economically integrated into society.”
“When you teach homeless literature what texts do you use?”
“There are many, ranging from personal accounts like Lars Eighner’s to George Orwell’s novel from the thirties. I include a counter-culture classic by Gurney Norman from the seventies and the Buddhist perspective by essayist Gary Snyder. I’m still developing the course idea and I hope to teach after I finish my degree. Currently I don’t have a teaching job; I’m finishing my thesis memoir.” I think I was beginning to bore him. I was losing interest in conversation.
“I think I’ll take a smoke,” he said, excusing himself and heading for the smoking car. I had passed by it before. It was a half a car with ashtrays and haze. It reminded me of smoking rooms in mental institutions.
I’m going to change the way this chapter is constructed for a few lines to attend to some details that now aren’t clear in memory. The photographer talked passionately about the author Sherwood Anderson and his book Winesburg, Ohio. He reported that a developer had demolished the author’s house. To the town’s credit, his office was preserved in a museum or library, but the structure that originally housed it no longer exists. This story held my interest only marginally and I don’t know why it slips from detailed account to summary other than my ignorance about Anderson and his text. Later in the summer I picked up a used paperback copy and read much of it until I discovered insects living in the binding. After that I just tossed it onto the tile porch, only partially hidden from the elements the pages quickly yellowed and turned to leaves. Before I cast the novel aside I was struck by how much the characters reminded me of people in my own neighborhood, especially the undertone of dysfunction. I was coming to understand the story of mental illness is not unusual or rare; it appears in small towns and large cities, in women and men, young and old, of all backgrounds, it does not even respect religious or economic differences. I wonder now how much this traveling acquaintance inferred about me from our dialogue.
Community paranoia exists in the coffeehouses where I write these narratives, the therapeutic state is talked about as a government that controls its population by medicating them. Imagine how much George Carlin would enjoy watching a U.S.A. where the pharmacies no longer had psychoactive drugs. I think of one of my favorite films from my adolescence, King of Hearts. In it a French town is occupied by Germans in World War I while the insane asylum inmates are accidentally let loose to populate the village instead of the villagers who fled when warned. It is touching and humorous and the conclusion seems to indicate that the insane are gentler and healthier than the sane. I wonder sometimes about this but my counselor assures me that I am truly out of balance and at risk of being killed when I am off my medication. I couldn’t bring all this into the conversation on the train with anyone. And I was still out of balance while precariously managing to stay out of trouble for now. My anxiety continued as my companion said good-bye. I went to the dining car for dinner.
I sat with three others and introduced myself. I felt a bit of self-loathing as a middle-aged woman with short, mousy, brown hair and a small, straight nose introduced herself as a retired, prison guard from Oregon. She left her job to travel around America by Amtrak and now was returning to face finding another job. I don’t remember much about her traveling companion except that she was heavier and they seemed to be a lesbian couple; conservatively dressed and trying to fit into the background. Then in a burst, the man across from me, who was balding, thin, in a pale blue, button-down sweater took off his horn rim glasses and while wiping them on a white handkerchief told about the rolling White House on this track and the W.W.II hidden bunkers on this train’s run. As I listened, I wondered if the current government has an official train and if the retired officers who travel by Amtrak are in service still, or if they ride the train because they are frightened of air travel. It came as a flash of conspiracy theory; discomforting and setting my paranoid thoughts afire for a few minutes. Then I ate my steak and potato without saying much about myself. I sensed that if I did disclose who I was, I’d be just like them; and that might have been better than feeling what I felt, but I wasn’t capable of being a healthy member of this society with its necessary right wing hypocrisy. My anxiety now kept me from riding elevators in buildings taller than twelve stories. I would always ask, when entering a modern skyscraper, is there a way to do this by stairs?
After dining with these three and never learning what the bald man did for a living, I paced back through the rocking train cars to my seat where I returned to reading Margaret Atwood and dozing. As it got dark it got harder to read. The lights kept failing when the train stopped for fuel and water and other reasons that were never explained. I talked briefly with a couple across the aisle. The man was a bit of a long hair, and turned out to be a composer returning to make his dissertation defense at the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. His wife had an Eastern European accent. We talked until we tired of things to say, with a mutual sigh, we all sat still as the train bumped slowly along that final turn over the dark Ohio River.
It had been nearly twenty years since I had had a stay in a facility as rough as this one had been. I had told myself then that if faced with a state facility again, I’d rather take my own life. Here I was, not thinking such thoughts at all. Relieved that Dr. Nuñez had had the courage to keep me on Geodon. It was just a matter of adjustment. I would see my counselor in Cincinnati. I would finish the reading list, take my oral exam for my Masters degree and then get a teaching job.
A sense of relief swept through me when the train stopped at Union Terminal. In the dark Cincinnati morning my gray Toyota shone in the amber streetlight of the empty parking lot. I keyed the door after flipping my brown pack into the cluttered trunk. As I sat down I saw the dead daisy fallen, withered and stuck to the side of the clear Stewart’s Orange Creamsicle bottle standing in the drink holder between the seats.
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