eleven year loop

ghosting the bottom below bottom

I started scribbling this biomatter chunk for the about me box and it ballooned into a post of its own. Trying to describe what I’m doing here. I used to be a professional writer and English professor. I’m the stolen kidney dude. My first book Kiss Me, Judas Viking ‘99. Boy meets girl, girl steals his kidney, boy falls for her and they try to not kill each other. Judas had a small dark devoted deep following on the internet in the ghosts of myspace days. I lost my mind along about 2010 writing my fourth book, a noirpunk fantasy yarn about a killer of killers named Cowboy, his crippled psychotic war vet brother Fred Valentine, and his mad wise gunslinger girlfriend Polly Lee James who were untethered from reality and lost in an outlaw wing of purgatory called Godspeed.

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I had three jobs at that point. Teaching at the Memphis College of Art. Running the floor weekends on a psych ward. Collecting the midnight dead for transport from coroner to final destination during the week. I dropped the adjunct teaching gig in 2011, left the dead to fend for themselves in 2012 to go full-time at hospital. Because of course I did.

Internal clockwork logic or reverse magical thinking.

It made sense at the time. Like I could stop myself from slipping into crazy by going to work with true crazy.

Either way I spent the next decade on a 92 bed psych unit in Memphis, Tennessee.

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There are a lot of ghosts in this town. For me they are everywhere.

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I was on the unit during the fallout of the recession, the Obama years. In 2011 we had US secret service suits on the unit for a day and a half because somebody kept phoning in death threats against Barack and Michelle from one of our phones. I was on the unit the night of the 2012 Mayan apocalypse that didn’t happen. Kind of a quiet night actually. I was on the unit when Nelson Mandela died for the second time. I was there when the big Hadron collider came online and the multiverse began to splinter our perception of reality and dark matter entered the psychological ecosystem. During the Arab spring. During the long aftermath of Katrina. Even years past the fact we still had refugees straggling in with mad max stories about the 9th ward and chaos in the superdome. The cops picked up folks at the Greyhound station and delivered them to our door on the regular. During the worst of the opioid epidemic. The pill mill caravans. The breaking bad and walking dead years. The grand theft auto and red dead redemption days.

Meth refugees were everywhere. The bath salt zombies. The rise of fentanyl. Sandy Hook and Parkland and the Vegas strip mass killings. The church massacre in Charleston. During the surge of trans paranoia. The Pulse nightclub shooting. During the slow mission creep of social media taking over the collective psyche as everyone disappeared into their phones. During the killing of bin Laden and the Boston marathon bombing and the reboot of antimuslim sentiment. During the Ferguson riots. Charlottesville. During the festering of the tea party, 4chan and Qanon. I had dozens of conversations about adrenochrome and the blood scrolls of Zion. During the manic rise of the orange boogeyman from reality TV come to turn the world upside down. During covid and lockdown and the killing of George Floyd. During the Jan 6 white man goof troop. Meanwhile the southern mafia rap scene in Memphis was blowing up. The soundtrack on the unit was fire. All of the noise and hurly burly of the outside world was muted and faraway but its effects on patients and staff were always visible.

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I watched all this from inside the psych underworld. Deep inside a castaway snow globe on an island of misfit toys in the basement of a burning house. Not long after the 2020 election our entire hospital network was shut down for six weeks by ransomware. I chalked it up as a sneak peek at the inevitable EMP strikes. During the freak snowstorm of 2021 we had nearly two feet and my car was buried at the hospital. I was snowed in on the unit with a dozen other staff for three days waiting for someone, anyone to come relieve us. The admin kindly opened up one of the covid halls for us to sleep on. The rooms were bitter cold and haunted for sure. The decrepit HVAC system made terrible groaning echoes at night.

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I was involved in or witness to hundreds of violent incidents over the years. I saw and did things that compromised me. I rebooted my moral compass more than once. The slow build of cumulative ptsd is a funny thing. For years I regarded it like cholesterol or my credit score. Another phantom ailment. I had my share of knocks over eleven years. Cracked and bruised ribs. Dislocated fingers. Fractured elbow. Torn left meniscus. Two concussions. I was knocked unconscious not once but twice while on the clock. It sounds absurd now to say that out loud.

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By then I had a touch of stockholm syndrome or similar and had begun to think this level of trauma and workplace violence was normal. My first year on the job we had one patient kill his roommate in between fifteen minute checks. Dude wouldn’t stop touching me, he said.

I cut down three hanging attempts over the years.

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Two of them made it. I felt more sane and functional when I was on the psych unit than out in the world. I started having freak panic attacks in public places. I also got into a dangerous habit of intervening solo in uncontrolled or uncontrollable public mental health situations like the homeless psych patient terrorizing staff inside the gas station or liquor store. My friends asked if I was actively trying to get shot. Two of my closest friends and three of my fellow staff killed themselves with opioids and booze. They were all younger than me and I tried to follow them down that hole more than once. I was sober when I started that job.

Two years in and I was medicating self.

I was a functional pill head and on off again alcoholic for seven years. I had one borderline psychotic break and two thirty-day jags in rehab. I destroyed my marriage but paradoxically saved my family from myself. By getting the monster out of the house. I broke my best friend’s heart and she kept loving me anyway. She saved my life in 2017. After the second concussion and a near death night at the ER it was refreshing comforting and surreal to find myself on the other side of the med window. I got clean and kept it together another three years. Then started slipping with the pills and edibles again toward the end. I lost and wrecked a half dozen relationships. I was the stereotype of first responder staff everywhere. On top of it and focused on the job but unraveling out in the world. I hurt people in my life. People I didn’t want to hurt and people I needed to hurt to stay alive.

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I resigned from the hospital soon after the Texas blizzard. I allowed myself a mostly controlled relapse then got sober and clean again. And again. The controlled relapse is a fantasy. Third time charm. Raw and ragged as a naked space monkey. The long dark chaotic years on the job changed me. Damaged me in ways I’m still dusting off. How could it not. I have phobias I didn’t have before. Fear of crowds and tight spaces. I’m paranoid sometimes. I can be twitchy and hypervigilant. My mind’s eye takes over my head sometimes and I suffer stuck in amber fugue states. My startle reflex is tripwire sharp. I regret some of the things I did to survive. Likewise regret some of the things I failed to do. I was blessed or cursed with a photographic memory that made the first half of my life easy as cake. The second half not so much. And over the past dozen years I’ve primarily used that skill to waterboard myself from inside my own head.

I scroll through the internal film reel and the memories come buzzing at me fast and furious as phantom wasps in high def. The sadface necrophiliac dude everybody wanted to kill. The bath salts guy who tore his fingernails off climbing shadows in his room. The nonverbal slingblade plagued by unknown demons who performed his own castration. In his kitchen. The trans kid who blew half his face off and had to wear a wire cage around the left side of his head. The end times prophet found living in a cave by the river with a machete. The zombie kid on acid and sherm who got tangled in barbed wire. The mean little junkie grandma with gangrene. The one-armed public masturbator who fought like a panther. The high school senior who hung herself in the shower with yoga pants, the one who didn’t make it.

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The adorable seven year old future serial killer who murdered all the animals on his family farm. The big Jesus freak in overalls drawing crosses on every TV screen with his own blood. The spooky catatonic chick who chopped up her boyfriend and left him in a gym bag in her closet. The little elderly hobo with a swollen adult diaper full of blood. The paranoid soccer mom who destroyed her house with sledgehammer and fire axe and made her kids live in the attic because of the monsters downstairs. The voodoo spitting crypt keeper who threw a washtub of blood and piss at my head. The meth head who tried to kill himself in our dayroom by eating light bulbs. The manic stripper who scrubbed her pussy with a toothbrush until it bled. The junior high guidance counselor who drank a Haitian voodoo fertility potion off the dark web and started hemorrhaging on the unit. The lizard dude who got into the ceiling and air ducts above the unit. The naked bloody deaf girl we extracted from the back of police cruiser.

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Imagine being schizophrenic and deaf.

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The rainman kid who ghosted around for two weeks muttering numbers then went home and murdered his dad with a baseball bat. The oddball creeper who smuggled a razor into court tucked in an egg sandwich hidden in his sock. The asshole who stabbed his brother in the eye over a drug debt then faked suicidal to dodge the police. The sixteen year old emancipated minor who got bounced from St. Jude’s after a kidney transplant for trying to choke out his doctor. Metal staples in his side and still trying to fight everyone. The skinny little mama with postpartum who went home and stabbed her sister and two little kids.

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Eyes open or closed they keep coming. The sweet old lady who went full exorcist in assessment. Kicking and clawing and spitting Aramaic curses at us with her eyes rolled back smashing her head repeatedly into the floor. Blood spraying everywhere. Took three of us to restrain her and she was fighting so hard I felt one of her wrist bones break in my hand. The Afghan war vet who killed a twelve year old muslim kid coming at him with a knife. Man they gave me a  medal for that shit. The ginger slingblade kid moonwalking with a diaper on his head. The coal black dude from Nigeria who kept saying in a British accent but I am not like these niggas. Welcome to america dude you’re not gonna fit in here you keep that shit up. Nice guy Bob who burned his mother’s house down and said mk-ultra made him do it. The state trooper found in the bushes behind Waffle House dodging phantom snipers on the roof. Pat the bunny going Hulk and heaving his toilet onto the hall.

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The deadeyed former marine sniper whistling for his invisible dog, come on buster. The one-legged Vietnam vet wrestling shadow demons from his wheelchair. The pissed off muslim guy who hollered verses from the Koran in a Texas drawl and spit on our female staff and called them infidel whores for not covering their faces. The father of three who stayed with us a week and seemed cool as a breeze then went home and hung himself on Christmas Eve. The backwoods white power militia dude with the swastika tats who got along fine with his crip roommate with teardrops under his eye because they were both so far gone into the paraschiz otherworld they just laughed at the sky together. The gangster Rastafarian with gold grill and prison tats and giant pornstar cock in the shower with the little autistic white boy who was always singing the Hannah Montana theme song. And what we did about it. This is just the tip with the demons behind my eyes. I can’t unsee the shit.

There’s no unhaunting yourself. These images plus a thousand more buzz my skull all night if I let them. I had lucid waking flashbacks for a few months in 2022, when I did my second and final 30 day run in rehab. I could write a thousand words about each of those patients above. But so many of those stories end exactly the same way, with a fight. A physical struggle that ends the same every time. With medication given by force. With or without both staff and patients getting injured in the crossfire because psych patients past the far edge believe they are fighting for their lives.

Because once the shot is ordered we are required by law to give it.

I can think of only a handful of times we were able to pull back the shot after talking a patient down peacefully and then convincing the doctor to reverse the order. The homicidal muslim Texan for instance. He chilled out after we retrieved his prayer mat from security. But endless stories like these just bleed together and become relentless and gratuitous after a while. Alt versions of a few of them will likely turn up in the Jack Fell stories. But my aim here is to walk among the afflicted without judgment and without making a spectacle of the already dehumanized. To see these memories from multiple points of view whenever possible. To go inside the crazy and explore what lies beneath.

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To be clear.

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Fort Pillow is the psych hospital in the Jack Fell diaries, a fictional cannibalized mutant version of the real. I’ve been writing the Fort Pillow stories since 1995. The first published was called The Velvet. The Fort exists in an alternate timeline on the edge of the Mississippi River in the near distant future. The exact year is a matter of dispute. The characters are entirely fictional but no different from the patients and staff I came to know over those eleven years. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental but the words that come out of their mouths are often words plucked from the air around me.

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The photo memory is useful for nothing if not total recall dialogue.

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The Jack Fell diaries will dip in and out of reality to explore the inner world of the schizophrenics and the other realms they navigate and less about the mundane physical business of fighting to medicate. To chemically restrain. But I do believe it helps to remember what happens every day inside the walls of American psych facilities. The people inside are the lowest of our low. The misfit toys who have fallen through the cracks past bottom to ghost the bottom below bottom. How we treat them surely says something about us.

peace.