Robert Lavender

We have pseudo-celebrities at the psych hospital where I work. Some are the Virgin Mary, the Human Fly, Mary Baker Eddy, Transformers, Jesus Christ. Some have seen UFOs and been abducted. They’ve had sex with aliens and then more sex with aliens' daughters. One guy said he had a cup of coffee with Martians, and when I asked him what they wanted, he said, “They wanted inside my mind, dude.” Usually a person like this walks the hospital picking up subliminal messages or has ideas of reference, meaning people on television are referring to them directly or they have special personal significance. Every conversation—whether on this planet or in their imagination—references them. They are special. They are the center that holds this universe together. But abducted by aliens for sex? Maybe it can happen. I’m not sure. And we have a few Hunger Artists that starve themselves and make their hospital room a cage. It’s fascinating. It’s really an art form worth the price of admission. And, like the butchers in Kafka’s story, we observe. But, unlike Kafka’s butchers, we try to make sure they eat.

I work as a psych tech, which means I get all of the dirty work. If the psych patients puke, I clean it up. If they get confused and wander into the wrong room, I retrieve them. I take them to the nameplate outside their door and say, “This is your room. See. This is your name.” I take them out to smoke. I show them the location of the lighter on the wall of the smoking porch. I demonstrate how to use it. No lighters allowed. They may burn the place down. I follow the patients around the unit with a clipboard and a sheet with their name at the top. I must mark their whereabouts every fifteen minutes. I announce snack time and lead them to the snack room. I’m their guide through Lala Land. I am their shepherd in the fields of madness.

We have a new admission that talks like the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street, but plays the piano like Billy Joel. His voice grades on your nerves after a while. Plus, it’s hard to understand him. He’s autistic and mentally ill—always a tough combination. His eyes have a constant REM motion that makes eye contact difficult. He likes touching his nose six times to the table in front of him. He licks it, too, as if he has some voice giving these commands or some puppeteer yanking his strings. I let them entertain themselves.

Each time he speaks I say, “What? Jeff, slow down so I can understand you.”

Jeff gets impatient with me. Throws his hands wildly about him. Throws his house shoes down the hall. Some of the patients think this is funny. They laugh.

I quickly realize that the way to keep him happy is to keep a cigarette in his mouth. So I keep him on the smoking porch, shoveling cigarette after cigarette at him, thinking he will have his fill soon. But he smokes like a freight train. He can burn through a pack in no time. The nurse opens the door to the smoking porch and yells, “You can’t keep him out there for the whole day. Bring him inside.” I know she’s right. He’ll run out of cigarettes or the other patients will start complaining. “If he can stay out there and smoke, why can’t I?” So I bring him inside.

He shuffles flat-footed to his room. I follow. He’s my one-to-one for the day. I must trail him, keep up with him, mark his whereabouts every fifteen minutes on the Close Observation sheet. I must keep him alive and out of trouble, which proves difficult. He’s on one-to-one because he has no filter and no boundaries. He says what comes to his mind and gets in other patients’ faces to say it. The nurses are afraid he will eventually get clobbered, so it is my job to keep him safe, and the psychiatrist believes his aggression is due to the beating he took at the hands of thugs that lived in Jeff’s neighborhood. On his way to the store one day, they cornered him and beat him good. Blacked his eyes. Cracked a couple of ribs. Now Jeff is on high alert, not trusting anyone. I guess he wants to hit first instead of being hit. I’m not sure. But his aggressive behavior landed him here with us.

It’s 7:00 PM. The activities staff person arrives on the unit and announces a trip to the gymnasium. Jeff wants to play the piano residing there. It’s an old hand-me-down from a local church. It’s nicked and scratched. It’s out of tune.

He asks, “Can I play the piano?”

Up to this point I’ve only heard about Jeff’s talent. To be honest, I’m a little skeptical of the claim. I hear it and see it all the time around here. People claim to have a superpower that’s only magical thinking. Take this guy we dubbed Criss Angel for example. One day in the cafeteria, he cleaned his plate, wiped his mouth with a napkin and stood. Then he took off running for the large plate-glass window that makes up one wall of the cafeteria. We knew we couldn’t react fast enough to stop him, so a holy hush loomed over the meatloaf on our plates as we anticipated the impact. He was in full stride by the time he reached the plate-glass window, and a loud thud demonized the silence. He dropped to the floor like a fluttering bird and passed out. Criss Angel he isn’t, but we still love to call him this.

I can’t picture Jeff, this shaking and irate man, playing a piano, but we join the herd of blemished sheep leaving the unit. All of them wearing blank faces. On the concrete sidewalk between the buildings, Jeff starts hopping on one foot. A pogo stick I must keep grounded. I steady him and tell him to walk normal, but he can’t contain himself. He is on his way to the gymnasium to play the piano.

Inside the gymnasium, he sits at the piano and touches his nose to it. He wants to lick it, but stops short when the activities director says, “Don’t do that.”

Jeff sits up straight and prepares himself. He sticks two fingers down his throat, as if he is trying to make himself throw up. He does the same thing with two fingers on the other hand. Then he begins to play, swiping his slobber on the keys, playing the hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross.” His eyes widen, as though the gods have stimulated him. He is focused and in his element. All of his unwanted tendencies—the whining, the throwing of house shoes, the way he wants to touch his nose to things—are all gone. He plays with his head up. He plays as if this is what he is born to do. How can a man be so primal one minute and so tender the next?

I clap when Jeff finishes. I give him a high-five. A smile crosses his face. He is everything I wish I could be—serene and happy. He has joined the human race in an envious way. He has transformed. He is something else entirely. He is the Piano Man.

He says, “How you like my playing?”

“Lovely. Outstanding. Play again,” I say, as I lean against the side of the piano.

He sticks his fingers back down his throat. He is getting ready. He pushes his head forward. He touches the keys. His eyes roll back as if the piano is shooting an electrical current through him. Then the music flows from the ex-church piano, the one once used for worship, the one that probably accompanied dozens of red-faced, angry preachers as they drove their sheep into submission at the altar. And now semi-retired in the psych hospital, it’s doing a different work. Holy work? It depends, I guess. But tonight it hums with former glory beneath Jeff’s touch. And the beatific sound floats through the gymnasium as the patients work hard for their sanity. Three of them are playing volleyball with a beach ball. They look lethargic. They chase the beach ball with feet made of concrete. Six are playing Uno. They hardly ever make a sound. Their eyes travel from the table back to the cards in their hands. One is sitting in front of a radio with her hand on the volume control knob, singing lightly some song on an easy listening station, and the others sit like real estate novelists who never had time for a wife or like Davy who’s been in the Navy and probably will be for life, and the place looks like a carnival, the atmosphere feels like fear. And if this were a better life we’d stick bread in his jar and say, “Man, what are you doing here?”

When Jeff finishes, I clap again and give him a high-five, and I want to freeze this moment in his life. I want to make the rest of his life this moment of a high-five, this moment when he took flight above his condition. But I can’t. The world doesn’t work like this. Not for me, not for him. But tonight he’s played us a melody, and he has me feeling all right.

Back inside his room, Jeff tears coupons out of an old newspaper and arranges them in piles on his nightstand. He can do this for hours—tearing, placing, rearranging, and then restudying the piles of coupons and various pictures. At first I’m mesmerized by it. When he focuses, his hands stop shaking. They obey. I watch his diligent work. But I’m under strict orders not to let him take the unit’s stack of magazines into his room. They believe he is flipping pages, finding women, and masturbating, which makes me pull out a small bottle of Germ X that I have in my pocket every fifteen minutes. I disinfect my hands whether I’ve touched him or not. But taking away his magazines has proven disastrous.

When one of the young female nurses brings his daily dose of medicine to his room, I step out of the doorway and let her in. I never venture inside his room.

“Jeff, I have your medicine,” the nurse says.

Jeff looks up from his pile of coupons and waves her away. Then goes back to studying the piles of coupons.

“Here, Jeff,” the nurse says, extending a small cup containing the pills.

“I don’t want that,” he says in his usual grunts without looking at the extended cup. Then he looks up at the nurse and says, in a voice that makes you believe he’d been thinking of this conversation and waiting for it his whole life. He says, “I want sex. I’ve never had sex, and I want it.”

It sounds like a prayer spoken with a mustard seed of faith, a heartbroken appeal for sexual salvation. It comes without forceful behavior on his part. He’s sitting on his bed with a pitiful look on his face. Completely mortified by the thought that he may never have sex in his lifetime, and in all likelihood, he won’t.

“All I have for you is medicine,” the nurse snaps.

“I want sex,” he says again. “I’ve never had a woman and I don’t want to die without having sex.”

“Well, honey,” the nurse says. “This is a hospital, not a cat house. Now take your medicine.”

“Go to hell,” he says.

The nurse turns and stomps out with his cup of pills.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“I just want sex. I’ve never had it. Don’t you understand?”

“No, not really, but I know what you’re driving at.”

Ten minutes later, the nurse returns with a shot for Jeff. She has two male techs with her. “Jeff,” she says. “We have a shot for you.”

“I’m not taking it,” he says shuffling his piles of coupons.

I walk to his bed. “Okay, Jeff, lie on your stomach so they can give you a shot. It’ll help calm you down.” “I don’t want a shot. I want sex.”

“Roll over and I’ll let you smoke after you get the shot.”

He concedes. He rolls over. The nurse gives him a shot.

“What does sex feel like?” he says after they are gone.

“It depends,” I say. “It feels the same way you feel while playing the piano.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Then he picks up his stack of coupons and separates them out.