Hospital Food #2

We had to have our names ticked off at the door of the dining room, as apparently people were just wandering in from out on the street for a meal. We amused ourselves by giving rude names - "Wayne Kerr", "Jack Mehoff", "Richard Head, but everyone calls me Dick" - and watching the poor secretary scour the list, inadvertently muttering obscenities under her breath.

While the meals were cooked on-site, the servings were small, and oil, fat and MSG-free to the point of blandness. We all had huge appetites as a result of the hospital's standard poly-pharmaceutical regimen: Largactil or Stelazine, plus Prozac or Zoloft, plus Xanax during the day, Temaze at night and lithium if you'd really been misbehaving, supplemented by drip-fed nicotine, as well as alcohol from any one of the four pubs within a five minute walk from the hospital. (This was more than ten years ago, with Effexor and Risperdal being the upcoming drugs du jour back then.) One day the guy who was the main source of the jokes snuck into the cafeteria, rubbed the menu off the blackboard and created his own: 'ECT-fried fish', 'Lobotomised lamb's brain' and so forth. This kid was a demon with a red marker pen - there was hardly a surface in the place that he hadn't defaced. I recall how startled I was to look in a mirror on my first day there and be confronted with a big smiley face with the eyes crossed out and 'PROZAC' written across the forehead.

On my first day, I met the psychiatrist assigned to me (or to whom I was assigned; whatever direction this collusion should take), who traced constellations with the toes of his leather shoes as we spoke, sprinkled the word 'fuck' throughout his monologues and practised his swing with an imaginary four-iron in the corridor. He explained that I was a perfectionist, too overly preoccupied with issues of justice and fairness, rights and wrongs, shoulds and oughts and that I required an intensive inpatient program of rational-emotive therapy. He blinked at me intensely while I considered this, his eyes like viciously hewn jewels, deflecting from all angles the white water vectors, the escaping gas of my petty nit-picking dissent. But all this time, have I not been the high priestess of stoicism? Didn't I fight their attempts to reconstruct human nature? When the interview was over, I bummed a cigarette off the third person who reciprocated my slack elastic band smile in the corridor and began sinking artesian wells over the freckles of my left arm out in the courtyard. The trapezium of sky above was as blue as the inside of a lid of a Coke bottle, and the crevasses between the bricks below were thick with ash, the remnants of a thousand personal volcanoes. "Yuck", says the nurse taking my blood pressure afterwards, as spots of shrivelled lemon-yellow skin are sheared off under the denim tourniquet, and my smoking privileges cancelled.

The days ran together in a blur of booze and drugs, highs and lows, infractions and restrictions. One day we went out into the carpark and noticed a car with a number-plate that began "ECT...". We laughed like the pack of lunatics that we were, and someone managed to get hold of a screwdriver to souvenir it. We dyed each other's hair and scratched our arms with broken glass while discussing the best place to get a decent coffee. We signed contracts saying that we wouldn't "self-harm or drink alcohol", which we promptly forgot about. We made our own coffins and tombstones as art therapy. One guy bought himself a piano that he couldn't play and pissed off the top of a high-rise building onto the sun umbrellas below. I learned how to fake-out a breathalyser. If someone got discharged, they'd OD on lithium or slit their wrists and be re-admitted within a couple of weeks. Sometimes there'd be two of them once, flying out the back of an ambulance on stretchers like bread out of a toaster.

There was a McDonald's down the road, directly across from the gay pub where we did most of our drinking. As well as using it as a means for topping-up, we celebrated a 30th birthday there, complete with ice-cream cake, Ronald McDonald paper hats and polaroid photos. That night, I was too restless to sleep, so I took a book into one of the lounge rooms and settled into a chair. Within minutes, I was accosted by a nurse, face blooming bright red with anger: what did I think I was doing, it's past bedtime! I explained that I was too wired to sleep and didn't want to bother my roommates by turning my lamp on to read, and her face burst into scarlet fireworks, a veritable son et lumiere at which I stared and stared, spacing out, timing out. "Go to bed! You have to go to bed!" she kept screaming, until she eventually attracted the attention of another nurse. "Yeah, your doctor's orders are for you to take your medication and go back to bed," this one said, moving closer and closer. He had breadth where he should have had length, and a baritone instead of a tenor, but none of this mattered, for suddenly the B-Man appeared, in his usual three-piece pinstriped suit and reeking of red wine. I hadn't seen him for more than a year, a length of time I could barely conceive of while trapped in a cycle of ups and downs, fractured memories and untrammelled impulses. With all time and space collapsing into that instant and place, and the nurse moving closer, I saw only one possibility, and bolted. There was a door leading outside around there somewhere, I knew that much. "It's locked, Ruth," he taunted as he chased me. It wasn't. It was dark outside and the grass was damp and slippery under my bare feet and I was being chased my a man who wanted me to suffer the most exquisite pain imaginable, who wanted me dead. I hit a rock and went flying, and then there were three of them on top of me, pinning me down in the here and now, as history re-opened like an accordion. My last meal there was a mouthful of dirt.