Letters Written During a Period of Insanity

an excerpt from "Letters from the Asylum"

by Kenneth Alewine

2 December 1991
University of Texas Medical Branch
Mary Moody Northen Pavilion
Galveston, Texas

Theo:

Things you do not believe in affect you in the weirdest ways. My roommate, Jesse, is one of the older patients on the ward and slanders all the black nurses in language I imagine plantation owners of the antebellum South would have taught him had any lived here, in the asylum, as orderlies working a slave trade for lunatics. Here the instability of mind overrides the color of skin, the abuses of prejudice, which may be given by the inmates but not returned by the staff. Jesse's skin is tobacco-bronze. His short hair, barbed curls twisting into the scalp and down his sappy brow, is weighted with sweat after he sits for long periods in the sun, cast broadly in isosceles triangles through the half-raised window blinds. He yells at random intervals between meals and meds in the Day Room the way people do who fight bulls, wear sombreros, or sell Mexican knick-knackery in the streets when there is some natural cause to disturb. Jesse screaks out his own causes and has never answered my questions or responded in words to my gestures. He only laughs with gritty gringo effect as the ashen whiskers on his chin vibrate like tarantula-leg hairs filmed in documentary close-ups. Jesse mostly sits and smokes and swears often at nothing. Mostly, Jesse sits.

The nurses encourage bathing but do not force it on us. To fester and rot or to scrub and soak have all become choices. The first steps toward recovery and self-containment are to be "clean" inmates. It is assumed that a mere remission of our assorted illnesses might be had if we at least wash our hands before dinner. The alternative, to fester and rot as abscessed lunatics, is to remain the way we are told we are: sick and depressed, but never crazy. Crazy is a bad word in here; it is like profanity in a sanctuary. Yesterday I looked up the word "asylum" in my dictionary, and was comforted that it meant "sanctuary." Later I looked up "insanity," and discovered that it was a legal term, and I wondered if this were the reason for Jesse's swearing. I felt considerably less comfortable.

There is an old Spanish lady on the ward, whom I'm calling Senora F1ora Opal. She is older than Jesse and seems epileptic at nights, catatonic during days, except the afternoons, during which time she shuffles up and down the main corridor, pulling up the hem of her shift to her collapsed navel, exposing her diaper and a distributor cap of tubes that braid a metal stand with wheels and inverted glass bottles in tow. She speaks only Spanish and eats her meals with a straw. She cries when the nurses put her for bathing in the hydrotherapy tub. Senora F1ora Opal is forced to get naked and move around in running water, then the hysteria turns a Saturday-night bath into a Holocaust, or Spanish Inquisition, or Mexican-American War, with aging epileptic hispanic lady as the pearl for torture. The hydrotherapy has not seemed to help Opal's fits nor stifle her demon-possessed nights. Sometimes from her private room I hear Spanish at alternating decibels between geriatric shout and childish whimper. Often she goes into seizure. Once the nurse held her while Opal shook. Nothing super violent, just the kind of shaking one might expect from an acrobat who makes tightropes out of power lines in the rain.

Candy is a young woman I have just met who does not appear to have any problems. She watches television a lot, stares listlessly for hours into the heavy glass screen. But then millions of people do this everyday in the seclusion of homes, and no one thinks them mad. When, as a fellow inmate, I ask Candy what she's "in" for, she looks downward, discomfited, and says the reason is because she is "bad." This is my response to her when she asks me why I'm here. So we are bad people to be here and we don't seem to be getting any better. The nurses tell us everything is fine, with smiles wider than clown's lips, and grinning "thank yous" after needles, b.p. checks, and circus-animal-sized pills we swallow whole. We are thanked for being docile patients much the way children are rewarded when they color inside the lines, or eat their food slowly, or get it down in a straw. Eating from a straw is an evening's performance extraordinaire from Senora F1ora Opal, who, after every other slurp, looks off bemused as if pestered by gas.

There is another woman, Sandra, middle-aged, who cooks the Tuesday group meal, usually lasagna or enchiladas. She drinks purple medicine and says she is a manic but seems down enough to be a depressive. What people say they are in here and what they turn up being do not often coincide, since oftener what is said collides with what is meant or believed, so that what is not, actually is, and what is, usually is not. This is why what I don't believe in here, at first, affects me in the strangest ways a little later, when I realize how little most people know of themselves.

I guess, Theo, you will be wondering why I'm here, in the nut-house. You might already think me a nut and that I should belong in this place. If I could say I was a pecan or walnut, waiting to be shelled, then it would be scantily humorous, and then the obscure joke finished, and we could move on with whatever our lives have for us. But I am not a nut and I am not crazy. Why they have put me in here is for other horrific reasons I'll be writing you about later, if you wish to hear them. There is not much joking and playing around in here. The nurses and doctors seem as cordial as the orderlies, and they seem better suited for guard duty at a correctional facility. Maybe we are, as inmates, being corrected. Maybe the encyclopedia was correct. If we are insane on this ward, perhaps this must be proved by a court of law and not a board of psychiatrists. If insanity is a legal term, why have I not yet gotten my trial? Why have I been put in this place with heavy locked doors? Who, Theo, may I ask, were the twelve angry souls on my jury? And if I entered this ward by signed voluntary admission and by my own wits, how then am I still judged as one vagrantly "out of my wits?" It seems bizarre that a person of unknown mind can be forced to make such a sound judgement as admitting himself to an asylum, only to remain there, incarcerated, specifically because he is "of unsound mind?" I am sane enough to put myself away, but am insane enough to be retained by others, by drugs and by the City. I am enough and not enough. I am here in the asylum because I am deemed unfit to live outside of it. If I am not crazy I should not be here. If I am crazy I should live here forever. I am not insane and yet I am insane.

Julian called you over Thanksgiving while he and his wife Polly were down. I was standing close to the phone and heard how you still didn't want to speak with me. I realize now why you don't want to talk anymore. Soon everyone won't want to talk anymore. The news will get out that I'm deranged, which will put the kibosh on any hopes for my having normal relations again. But I will be dead soon and people may know that I had only died and would care as much if I had simply died and much less if I had died a lunatic. Yet I am not a lunatic.

Thanksgiving Day, Theo, everyone here in Galveston lost it. If you would have been here, you would probably have shot me, and I would have thanked you if the dead could appreciate. I thought often of shooting myself, or overdosing with eucalyptus oil or driving the car high-speed into the cement wall on the island's East End. But it takes cool resolve and solid thinking to kill yourself, and I haven't been capable of either since the early summer. I am crazy.

The nurses will not let me leave the Unit, otherwise I might consider a drive to see you. They had me sign some consent paper and I did so in a scrawl that reminded me of serial-killer penmanship. My hands shake and feel weak, so grabbing a pen and writing is like hammering a chisel against granite. My life is consigned to pieces of paper and the clip-boarded treatment team who will see me in the morning. Each in the team has an angry face and is named after some zoo animal, mechanical process, trade, or building. Doctors Balinese, Sawn, Needleman, Shoemaker, Rosenberg and Lyons are to see me sometime tomorrow, either morning or afternoon, depending on their conference schedules. I am remembering names, specifically those of my doctors, and forgetting the poems I had been writing. The words we speak, Theo, are more than language, and as in poems, words are infinitely connected. Everything I see and hear and touch and smell of late is connected, webbed like Charles Baudelaire's "forest of correspondences," so that I can't keep track of all the meanings, the subtexts, the everything-speaking-to-me that was once silent and immobile. My life is full of syllables, Theo, and has become a long poem. I've got the last page right up to my face. If I stop reading, I stop being, and since I am forgetting, I must memorize other things like the names of my doctors, if I'm ever to remember anything at all. There is a power in names that Solomon knew. That is why a poem has a title. That is why people have titles and titles before their names, to set the mood, the way you may take them, before their reputation is lost or surpassed by all the conversation you go through, just to know someone, or to wish you never had. And, Theo, all that I sense right now is intensely itself, and I feel as a scaled fish must feel, if, again, the dead could approximate the living. I am all nerves without skin, and I must somehow subdue the power of the sensory world before me. The world, the environment I'm living in, is all names, is nominal, and though it were a rose it would still be as fetid as it is now. Sometimes I cannot smell the world or any other thing, and sometimes I taste what I smell, when I smell. Other times I see what I hear, and the reverse of this. Everything is cross-pollinated, grafted in, in the strangest ways, the way limbs of a tree turn incestuous in a storm.

It is getting late, Theo, and I've got to get used to a new bed, roommate, and to the effects of a motley assortment of high-powered drugs, so I should be closing. I've dozed off the Ativan and now they want to give me Stelazine and medication for the shaking and what Dr. Lyons calls "obsessive-compulsive disorder." If I told you what their real intentions were, you wouldn't believe me, which, of course, means I get affected in the weirdest ways.

Your ever affectionate,

- Keneke

P.S. - "Keneke" is the proper Hawaiian name for "Kenneth." When Dora left Hawaii, she brought back a clothing patch, the kind fashionable in the seventies. The patch had stitched in red on its face my Hawaiian name Julian has never stopped calling me Keneke-Poo since.

3 December 1991
Moody Pavilion
Galveston

Dear Theo:

The drawstrings to the venetian blinds in my room have intricate knots angler-tied at the ends. The knots are enclosed by bullet shaped caps that make the sound of muted whistles when blown through. Sometimes, bored in the mornings, I pull the caps away from the knots that emerge like the aborted buds you squeeze off flowering bushes to force a bloom. Other times I simply twist the bottoms of my UTMB shirts with my forefingers, then remove my fingers, holding steady in another hand the twisted miniature cowl, forcing it to bow like a hooded monk given a little pressure at the nape of the twist. These shirt-twisted monks are accompanied by my own Gregorian chants and the "Jesu Dominie" in the holiest tones I can mimic, which - under powerful antipsychotics - come off the way a heavy-weight boxer might render them with gauze and mouthpiece. Yet a boxer's bell sounds at the end of his bout. My ears these days never stop ringing. I'm thinking of tangled fishing line as I write to you.

My thoughts recently, if mapped by yarn and pinned to a cork board, would resemble illustrated aviation bombing routes over Eastern Europe during World War II. It is plainly less possible to ignore the significance between knots and spaghetti, or between tangled fishing line and the twisted monks I make of my shirts.

Dr. Lyons says that since I did not end up here in the asylum overnight that I should not expect to leave by tomorrow. Dr. Lyons is tall and angelic. Still thinking of fishing line.

A day or two after Thanksgiving, I waited several hours in the emergency room before my actual admission to UTMB. One crimp-haired nurse checked my blood pressure. I thought the Velcro cuff of the sphygmomanometer would boa-constrictor my arm into jelly. Another nurse asked a fusillade of questions, the answers to which he recorded on some official-looking form. The crimp-haired nurse said something about my being "obviously disturbed" and suggested I wait in a secluded room, one decorated with threatening medical diagnostic instruments and blow-ups of large Texas cities. I sat there, with Dora, for three or four hours, no one stopping in to monitor my obviously-disturbed condition. It then became clear that I was being tested, that I might not be disturbed, sick even with a cold. Dora opened the door and through it, in catty-corned fashion, I could see genuinely sick people, one lying IV-ed on an adjustable bed, tubes coming out of his nose like prehistoric tusks, high-tech machines alongside him performing the repetitive mathematics that were keeping him alive. It was as if I were mocking the sick, for there was nothing visibly wrong with me, no bloody chest, no bones cracking the surface of my skin like teeth, no grand mal on the examination table. There were no tubes plugging my face. I was sitting in barely a slouch on a very blandly upholstered chair, doing my two-o'clock-in-the-morning obviously-disturbed person impressions. Dora seemed to sense the scandal and her face registered contempt for my mockery of human suffering, of moribund illness. She sat across from me. Her pupils were the size of a shrimp's eyes; her hands, lithe near the knees. She stared at the large cities we had, over the years, visited together. She asked if I wanted to go home, which was actually her way of needling my paranoid scandals. If I were so "obviously disturbed" wouldn't I be surrounded by doctors, bespectacled interns, physician's assistants, E. R. personnel clad in blue scrub? Wasn't I being left to cool in the room with Dora and my incongruent thoughts? Didn't I soon realize how little I needed a hospital, a psychiatric ward?

My subterfuge was gradually going public. I was criminal, guilty of impersonating a lunatic with the intent to seek treatment. We were there, in the Texas Tourist Bureau Room of UTMB's Emergency Center, Dora still taking in the blow-ups of towns on the walls. And we had toured Texas before and had found it leading us to the Gulf, where the long sand bar of oleander and palmetto called Galveston, an island calloused by hookers, hurricanes and gambling, brought on also hurricanes of the mind, one of which was a force five I had been faking since before Thanksgiving. Galveston Island seemed to me, at times, a sunken tall ship barnacled with corruption for hundreds of years. And then the irony overtook me, for how could a city sunken so long ago remain afloat if only to catch the flotsam of tourists every spring and summer? Unlike the Titanic, perhaps certain things take a long while to sink. I had been sinking since the summer of '91, and thought by September I had hit bottom. In September of 1900, a great storm razed Galveston, killed thousands. My storm of the mind, last September, was merely in the process of gathering strength for a decidedly wasted November.

Dora was aware that neither of us had the money to pay for hospitalization. You know well, Theo, that I have no insurance and have not worked consistently for four years. I still don't know where Dora is getting the money to keep me locked up in here. A student doctor came in to my room this morning, saw books on my night stand and asked about my reading. I replied it was strange that I was in the asylum and had no money to pay. His nod was all.

After four to five to six hours sitting in the Emergency Room, my sense of time enjambed, Dora took me away from the hospital and stopped at a Jack in the Box. In the street lights flooding over the dash, she looked pale and moribund, like the I.V. patient at the hospital. I thought she was dying and she still is pale when she visits me here, her perfumes reminding me of funeral homes, of expansive floral arrangements the size of beauty pageant wreaths. She says she loves you and that you love me, even after I test her definition of love, since things are terribly backwards of late, especially with words - all that language, all the forests of correspondence, tangling meanings like limbs of a tree in a storm. Love now means hate and hate love, since I must be in the counsel of Macbeth's witches, in a world where fair is foul and foul is fair, where I am encouraged to hover through fog and filthy air. I know this is difficult for you. It's all that I know to write. At least I've forgotten about the fishing line for a few moments.

Dora stopped at the Jack in the Box to buy food only for me. I hadn't eaten in three days, and would not drink any fluids except what water I forced down. Dora said I was dehydrating, which explains why I was sprinting to the bathrooms in her garage apartment and G-Ma's house. I ate some of the hamburger, fries, and downed a cola. It was okay to eat then, since I had mostly starved over Thanksgiving and ate only Lay's Potato Chips and Owen's Sausage Biscuits. I ate nothing for Thanksgiving because I didn't deserve to eat. I know that sounds crazy but I couldn't put the food in my mouth, nor drink the water, as if something invisible, something I didn't believe in, were keeping me from nourishment. I've written you already about how things I don't believe in affect me. It is insane, but that is what I'm supposed to be, here in the Moody bin. Mad.

I miss meals here, too, whenever the intangible notions come and hamper my eating and drinking. They usually bring on a bout of shaking in my hands and knees. It is impossible to do what you can not force yourself to do. I could not eat during Thanksgiving as I can not eat sometimes now, particularly the mornings. I don't get out of bed some mornings until the nurses harangue me out of it. It's plainly not wise to move often in bed because somebody or something might notice and ask questions or make incomprehensible noises to keep you up. Last night, I heard what sounded like huge gurneys carted up over me on the floor above, then down alongside the walls beside me and underneath on the floor below, as if patients were being wheeled around the clock around the walls of my room, the way a fan belt makes revolutions around its rotors. I asked one of the doctors about the noises, Dr. Shoemaker, and she said something about this place being a "hospital" and that I should expect "noises in the night," which, with the spooked mind then and currently in use, I translated somehow to mean "shadows in my shade."

After Dora brought me home to her apartment she went inside ahead of me then begged me to come in. I thought that I should stay outside since I had no shelter that was mine and deserved to sleep as a stray cat. Eventually I went in the apartment and put the empty hamburger wrappers and cola cup on the drain board in the kitchen, which was dimly lit by lamps, perpetrating basement bar settings. There was the sense that I might die at any moment, a notion that rarely left me then and is with me now as I write, so I must hurry. You may not accept this, Theo, but it is true. It is the reason I've always written speedily, even my novels, because I know I am prone to death and that death will be punctual in killing me.

Return to subject.

Low-tidal moonlight shone through the jalousie windows which sectioned the glow into skewed quarters on the floor. I could see the back yard lighted by a bucket-shaped fluorescent lamp hung from the back wall of G-Ma's house, in a metal arc which extended like fishing tackle, as if the house might be floundering for the night. Dora got in bed while I sat in the dark for almost two hours, watching the half-open closet door, checking for moves in the dark I knew where there when I wasn't looking. Julian and Polly had left soon after Thanksgiving. But since the E. R. people at the hospital had exposed my stealth and since I had ruined Thanksgiving and destroyed my family, I believed Julian and Polly were renting one of the beach town houses on the West End, waiting for me to wander off so that they could kidnap me. But the night after the E. R. scandal, I was convinced Julian and Polly had died, had become spirits and were laying wait for me behind the closet. At times during the night, after two hours sitting frozen in the chair, watching the closet door, I lay in bed and thought I heard Julian outside, coaxing me to accept the inevitable. You see, Theo, I had to die a torturous death of mutilation with just enough nutrition to prolong the sessions of torment. I was to be tied to a bed and power-tooled into submission, drill bits biting into my knee caps, an awl to scratch my sins on the corneas of my eyes, so that I could never forget them wherever I looked. Some days, here in the ward, it is possible to believe that Julian's ghost truly was there, outside Dora's apartment, and was commissioned to be my torturer, my executioner. Julian was stymied over the phone, yesterday, when I revealed to him how I thought he was going to kill me. "I'm your brother," he said, and was silent. I am sure he has told you this already. It never hurts to confirm.

Other days in the asylum it is possible not to believe anything at all, that you were ever a real living being, that you ever had a history and that there was ever a world to contain it.

Dora bade me come to bed, after I had sat before the closet door, catatonic as the door. The ceiling fan blades above the bed were exaggerated, chopping up the air like B-17 propellers, and in my thoughts, chopped my femurs, too, even if I were to go quietly with my executioner, Julian, as a kind of belated penance the damned know. I lay in the bed but did not sleep, had not slept peacefully in three weeks, and at all in two and a half days. Julian kept calling for me outside, at four in the morning, and the shadows inside, like cats, tripped about as if blown around the room by horror-film effects specialists. Everything is metaphor when you are insane. But I'm not crazy. Life is just a long poem with more meaning than one reading can reveal. You can not see all the trees in a forest, even if you pass through it many times, any more than you can know a poem for all that it is in words.

There were three kittens in the bed with me. Their falciform claws kneaded my feet and threshed the grass from socks I had crossed the yard in, between G-Ma's house and Dora's garage apartment. Rising up from the bed, the early day breaking in, the kittens chewed into my feet, so that I thought them familiars of demons from kitty-cat hell. It was Sunday morning, 30 November. I had not slept. Dora readied herself for church, where she directs the choir. Something began to press down on my upper skull as I sat at the edge of bed. Suddenly, as if I were about to convulse, there was an intense need to confirm my existence, since I could move in and out, through states of being and non-being, of living one moment and having been dead for several more. It was during these death moments that I discovered the secrets to life, that I had died and gone nowhere, only to discover there was nothing to go to but the realization that one was dead. It was a paradox that tormented me, for if all there was was death after life, how could I be alive, in some sense of the word, to recognize my deadness? I think, therefore I am; but I thought, and still I was not. I had in my death duped Descartes.

Thus the need to confirm my existence, to prove that I was still flesh and alive and safe. My hands felt otherworldly as I started to rub my legs, back and forth, in sanding motions, without end. There mustn't be a pause, I thought to myself, because I could be dead during my pauses, and I might not come out of death. And if I had died, my ruminations continued, was the hell I was condemned to merely a Sisyphean task of rubbing my pants legs to prove my existence? Was this demented philosophy? My thoughts were geysers until my head was little more than pure pressure in a clay pot of flesh and bones. Yet the "pressing" on my head seemed to come from without, not within.

My gray trousers began to fade, registering the repetitious rubbing of my legs, small pills of fabric gathering at worn patches above my knees. Dora came out of the bathroom, heated and stressed. She asked nervously what I was doing with my pants, then told me to stop. I did stop and decided tapping my foot on the floor was a good enough sign that I was still alive. Dora still cried and bemoaned the horrors of Thanksgiving I put her, G-Ma, Julian and Polly through. She couldn't understand why this was happening to her. I said I was sorry but saw the contempt for my lies she had in her eyes. She knew that very moment (Sabbath morning I was not keeping holy), as she went to church, her son had been condemned by God to the place of the impotent dead. It was a little more time, and then I would be dead and in hell, tormented, power-tooled by demons. This I saw in her nebulous blue eyes. Her harried condition was my fault, too, and I would get my reward in hell for it. It was holy justice, theology set in covenant stone, a system since days immemorial turned into a Calvinistic decline of the mind, which had been recording my evils even before I was born. One made the devil's is always the devil's, and ever the impatient, having even kicked my way out of Dora's womb, I had been a bad son growing a cloven hoof all these years. I felt satanic, sitting there, isolated and unscheduled, watching her leave for church, wishing I could go with her, to repent, to be cleansed, to expiate, to make amends with the God whose Deuteronomic curses I was damned in perfect terror to incur for eternity.

Eternal damnation is no way to end a letter, Theo, but a nurse just came in for half-hour checks, so I have to close. I'm writing these letters everyday, sometimes three or four sessions a day, just to keep out of Occupational Therapy and the twit-wits that attend it.

Your affectionate,

- Keneke