Jessica R Pomerantz
Several of us were gathered in the television room waiting for the third and final cigarette break-- the last activity of the day. We were all watching 20/20 with Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters, a preferred television program of the insane, it seemed. I was reflecting on how bad the astigmatism in my right eye had gotten since my admittance to the Hampton Behavioral Health Facility, and I was thinking about what I would say to Barbara Walters in a live television interview as I watched 20/20 with my left eye closed.
Barbara Walters: Are you the spokesperson for your generation?
Me: Yes. (Then I reach out and throttle her.)
I�ll make a great famous person.
This particular 20/20 segment was a follow-up to a story they had done earlier in the year about the instances of encephalitis in frozen broccoli, the subsequent cover-up by the agricultural conglomerates, and the manufacture ultimately of synthetic broccoli. This 20/20 segment included an interview with the Executive Agricultural Secretary of the United States. The interview illuminated several things, important to me personally:
1. Synthetic broccoli may cause insanity or induce coma.
2. Synthetic broccoli may cause genital abscesses.
3. The Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary, assistant to the Executive Agricultural Secretary, was sitting right next to me, mumbling and wringing his pasty hands. They were showing a picture of him on television. I looked at the television. I looked at him. I looked back at the television.
Slowly, I put one, two, and three together, but I only arrived at a sum total of five. I blamed the medication for this. Meanwhile, The Man Who Ate The Letter H, my roommate at the Hampton Behavioral Health Facility, had leapt upon the Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary, I mean like right up onto his knees, screaming and shaking him by the sweater vest. I marveled at his balance and tried to ignore the one-sided fighting. The Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary was still just babbling and shaking his head. Even now, I was adding things up and I still didn�t know what was happening.
Later on that night, The Man Who Ate The Letter H told me everything.
It seems that The Man Who Ate The Letter H was known as one Mr. Louis Schnagel back in the days before he began eating the letter H. Louis Schnagel, doting father and loving husband, returned home from work one day to find his nine-year-old daughter sprawled out on the linoleum, pigtails forming a forty-five degree angle. His wife was in the kitchen corner, shaking and swaying, mumbling and staring. His daughter never recovered from her coma; his wife was insane without respite from that day forward.
The house smelled of steamed broccoli. Louis Schnagel�s family had started dinner without him that evening.
Louis Schnagel did not begin eating the dictionary then, on that day. First, Louis Schnagel did some research on synthetic broccoli. Then he did some research into who was responsible for the creation of synthetic broccoli. The he did some research on the whereabouts of the Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary. Then he looked into the location of the Hampton Behavioral Health Facility. Then he began chewing on his dictionary just a few blocks away from the Hampton Behavioral Health Facility, in view of a police station, and this was how he arrived.
The Man Who Ate The Letter H had not appeared here by accident. Little beads of sweat- capsules of rage and pain- had formed on his head as he told me all this- he on his bed and me on mine. It was like a sleep-away camp for the mentally troubled.
He told me he was going to have his revenge against the Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary. He said it would happen tomorrow.
This opened my eyes, but first I thought of my genitals. They were what brought me to this mental institution in the first place. I thought about several months earlier; I had been living in a monastery off and on, having renounced the collegiate life of drinking and fucking and being overly clever. I left the monastery one day to go see a physician. My ailments had grown worrisome.
�My problem is�� I was sitting up on the cushioned table with the layer of sanitary wax paper. I would shift and the wax paper would make a horrible crackling.
�Yes?� The doctor was wearing his laboratory coat and a pair of goggles. I was completely naked. I didn�t know why this nudity was required, but he had insisted. Similarly, I didn�t understand the purpose of the goggles.
��I have developed a�� I was reluctant to discuss things.
�A�?� The doctor was prompting me with hand flourishes, charades. He formed shadow puppets.
��a physical�manifestation��
�A manifestation?� He sounded hopeful.
��on my penis.� A soon as I said this, I regretted delving into modern medicine. I should have ignored it. I should have let the thing kill me or make me stranger.
�Oh.�
�Well, the real difficulty in all that is, I haven�t been having sex lately.�
�Lately?� The doctor sounded doubtful. He was listening to the end of my penis with his stethoscope.
�Or rather, I haven�t been having sex at all. Ever.�
�Ever?� The doctor was poking my penile abscess with a tongue depressor.
�No. I�m practicing to be a Buddhist monk.�
�Hmmm.� The doctor had gone back to making shadow puppets, in front of a ray of light that shot in through a glass rectangle in the door. I began to question his credentials.
�Yeah. So that leaves me with-�
�That�s amazing. This is great. You�re like the Virgin Mary of STDs.� The doctor stood up to address me. I couldn�t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. I couldn�t quite make out his expression through the goggles.
�Yeah,� I said. �Great.�
�I mean, getting an STD with no sexual contact. This is gonna be big. We�re talking about an immaculate contraction.� He was pacing around the little room, holding the stethoscope up to his own heart and listening as he spoke.
�I just want some sort of cream or antibiotic pill. Whatever is suitable in this case.�
�Are you kidding? We can�t kill it. That�s deicide. Your STD is the next messiah.�
�Oh, fuck.�
And that�s when I decided to find a new doctor.
A new doctor somehow convinced me I was in the grip of a terrible insanity. Maybe I was. How can a person ever tell with these things? It�s impossible to self-evaluate one�s own mental functioning, like it�s impossible to look at your own eyeballs.
�Whatever you say, pal,� is what I think I said to the new doctor. �As long as my dick doesn�t fall off.�
It had been several weeks now since I landed in the Hampton Behavioral Health Facility. I was lying in bed, looking at the ceiling in the dark. I wondered if they would release me if I told them the whole thing was just a broccoli- based disturbance.
The Man Who Ate the Letter H was snoring.
The next morning came. I felt sick. All the peace in my mind generated by careful meditative study and a monastic way of life was shot to hell with psychiatric medication and an impending murder. I didn�t know what to do. Did I have a responsibility to my roommate�s karma? Would I be an accessory to murder? Would the Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary�s death be the best thing that ever happened to him?
I was sitting in the lobby, in the communal area. All the furniture in the Hampton Behavioral Health Facility was brightly colored, but in a subdued way, neither light nor dark. Mauve seemed to be pretty big here. I questioned a psychiatrist later on about the moderate register of color, about the sheer lack of lights and darks, whether it was to keep people from anthropomorphizing the furniture into good and evil.
He upped my meds.
Some of the other mental patients wandered out over the next half-hour or so. We all gathered in the lobby to go to breakfast every day. I never knew if it happened at a specific time or not. I don�t remember ever seeing any clocks. But maybe they were there.
Several of us held a sad, makeshift conversation, talked at each other, around each other, past each other, seated on small pink sofas-not too dark, not too light- in the lobby of the adult unit at the Hampton Behavioral Health Facility. You might want to pin this on insanity, but you sane people do this all the fucking time. You speak and you never listen. You speak and you never listen.
What did we talk about?
Well, the weather of course. Always the weather. I don�t think any of us had even seen weather in days, weeks perhaps, but maybe we discussed the weather inside that Hampton Behavioral Health Facility.
�Nice fluorescent lights today, huh?�
�Yep. Life-affirming.�
Most people assume that mental institutions have a particular smell to them. Now, I don�t know if this is true or not, as the Hampton Behavioral Health Facility was my first and last experience with the mental health industry. But, what truly struck me throughout my stay was the complete lack of smell. I don�t remember anything giving off a scent, ever. I think the entire building was deliberately deodorized. I think the building itself absorbed and dispensed of odor. They say that smell can be the most effective memory-triggering agent. A schizophrenic smells Old Spice, remembers when she was raped as a child, slips into catatonia. A murderous psycho smells broccoli, remembers when broccoli destroyed his family, kills the man he holds responsible. The absence of smells was for the best.
Finally there was a quorum, maybe seven or eight of us out there, and the attendant was rounding us up to go down to breakfast. I breathed a sigh of relief-- the Co- Executive Agricultural Secretary had shown up, but The Man Who Ate The Letter H was still sleeping. The attendant was unlocking the door, and I began to feel more hopeful about everything, but then just before we made it out the door The Man Who Ate The Letter H arrived, stomping and snarling, carrying his Oxford English Dictionary, shoving pages into his mouth.
He winked at me, and ripped out more pages from the H section.
We started down to breakfast. My palms were sweaty, and I tried to think about what the Buddha would do.
Six months before I had eaten that fateful broccoli, I went on a pilgrimage to go visit the Buddha. He was on a world tour; he had come from Norway and would leave in the direction of Los Angeles. I caught up with him somewhere in between. He was sitting amidst a ceremony for a Theravada sect of monks. I waited in line to see him. I got up close and I hunkered down so no one else could see or hear. I made eye contact. The Buddha was sitting inside several chambers made of gold and glass; he was a small shiny piece of what may have been tooth or bone. I tapped on the glass.
Psst. Hey. Hey you. A little help here?
The Buddha didn�t say anything. I know, he had been dead for some twenty-five hundred years or more, but I figured the Buddha could do anything if he put his mind to it. That little bone fragment could have lent me a hand if he really wanted to.
I mean, sure, those Buddhist monks could rumble up multiple chords in their throats, but what good did that really do anybody? If I renounced every worldly thing for this monastic life, wouldn�t that make me just another worldly thing? What would be the point?
The Buddha didn�t offer me any help, no help at all. What a jerk.
And the Buddha wasn�t helping me now, either. Could I stand by while a man murdered another? I couldn�t just freaking chant about it, could I?
Stupid useless Buddha.
So, we were all at breakfast. Every morning at breakfast the Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary- instead of actually eating- would take some broccoli out of his pocket that he had stashed from dinner the night before. He would place the broccoli on a single plate by itself on a plastic tray, like it was a vegetable version of royalty, and he would have a seat at our unit�s designated table, but he would never eat the broccoli. He would pick it up by its stalk- gingerly, so as not to harm it any way, and he would bring it up to eye level, and he would chant this litany:
�I�m sorry. I�m so sorry. I�m sorry. I�m so sorry.�
The Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary was doing this now. The Man Who Ate The Letter H was sitting there across from him, chewing his dictionary with homicide in his molars.
I don�t think The Man Who Ate The Letter H ever told The Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary about what had happened to his family, about his personal pain, about how the broccoli destroyed his life, about how he held The Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary responsible. If he had, maybe The Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary would have dropped the broccoli and apologized. Then maybe he would have felt better. Then maybe they both would have felt better. But that�s not how people operate. And I was a nervous wreck.
After breakfast, they marched us into group therapy. They sat us down in mauve chairs; there were perhaps seven of us altogether who could function enough to sit in chairs and speak semi-coherently. We sat around a big, long, mauve table for all our therapy sessions. It was like a little insane board meeting.
�Imagine you�re nine years old again. I want each of you to talk about what you�d like to be when you grow up.� This psychotherapist was some kind of idiot. People could very well be killing each other today, and she wanted to know about my career plans. She was thoughtfully chewing on the end of her eyeglasses, looking bright and interested. I saw The Man Who Ate The Letter H looking demonic and sad out of the corner of my eye, chewing his dictionary. Some of us didn�t have plans beyond today, I thought. Some were planning just for today. Some were going to be dead today. I was a big, raw nerve by this point. I was getting more and more afraid and nervous as time went on. I was biting my fingernails and spitting them onto the table as a mark of disgust.
The thing that just completely annoyed me about the whole situation was this: whom could I discuss the impending murder with? My peers were insane. The staff would chalk it up to a little delusional ranting on my part. I was alone and incompetent.
The psychotherapist was looking at me. �What about you, Jesse? What do you want to be when you grow up?� She was so freaking smug, her career plans all in order, talking to us as if we actually were nine years old.
�Just when you think that your magazines are printed with 100% recycled soy ink, just when you think that absolutely everything you eat and wear is animal cruelty-free, just when you think that you have gone an entire day without the benefit of a single drop of fossil fuels, you come to find out that your dish soap has been tested on dog eyes.� I got out of my chair and put one knee on the table. �The true philanthropist is the corpse, rotting in the woods without preservation by toxic embalming fluids that will seep into the water table for years to come.� I put my other knee up on the table. �The real ecologist knows that to stop eating meat is to do almost nothing. To stop eating altogether is to do a little more.� With each sentence, I crawled a little further down the table towards her. �To stop functioning, to stop producing and exploiting, to quit throwing little bits of plastic into the landfill; to stop breathing, and to start the process of decomposition: now that�s progress. One�s mere presence supports the entire infrastructure of apocalyptic consumption. When I grow up I want to be dead.� I was several inches from her face. She was still chewing on her damn eyeglass arm. Thoughtfully.
I climbed down off the table. She had my meds upped.
By the time lunch rolled around, the medication had slowed my thoughts and movements down to the point where I wasn�t sure I could react to a murder until several hours after it had happened.
We were all sitting in our standard places at lunch. The Man Who Ate The Letter H was staring at the Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary, who was looking, again, at his daily broccoli. The Man Who Ate The Letter H was chewing more and more pages, furiously, his mouth was just crammed with them; the pulp was running down his chin. I could see him seeing his wife and daughter in his mind�s eye.
Here the three of us were, all in some good amount of pain. It injured me just to observe. My eyes were starting to ache. I was hurt by the whole world.
�I�m sorry. I�m so sorry. I�m sorry. I�m so sorry.� The Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary was going on. I wished he would stop.
And he did. He stopped because The Man Who Ate The Letter H threw down his pages, stood up and threw back his chair. He tried to seize the broccoli, and that was when the Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary threw back his chair and ran. The Man Who Ate The Letter H ran after him. I didn�t know where they were getting this energy. Who was issuing their meds? I tried to stand up. It took me four minutes, I think. They were both outside the cafeteria by this time. Their options for movement and escape were limited; we were all relatively locked down.
Now the attendants had realized that something was amiss. They usually fraternized amongst themselves at their own table, happy to have contact with the sane. One of them looked at me:
�Who�s missing? Which way did they go?� In all actuality, I wasn�t quite sure which way they had gone. Some of the standard- issue menthol conditioner had run into my right eye in the shower that morning after breakfast. It had been nothing but a cool minty burning ever since. I followed the girlish squeals of the Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary out into the hallway, along with the other mental patients. Some of the staff was already out there, trying to pull The Man Who Ate The Letter H off the Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary. I pushed my way to the front, slowly. All my movements seemed to take place in a giant pool of water. I may have been drooling. I saw The Man Who Ate The Letter H pull back his fist with something in his hand. A knife, I thought. I rushed forward to stop him.
By the time I got there (several minutes later), he had thrown the object on the floor. It was the broccoli. He screamed a great war cry. His eyes bulged. He stomped on it until it was pulp. He pounded it with his fists.
The Man Who Ate The Letter H had herbicide in his incisors. His revenge was extracted. He smiled a victory smile as several attendants tackled him and took him down. The Co-Executive Agricultural Secretary was down on his knees, scooping the broccoli remnants together. He closed his eyes.
I guess somebody had to pay.
