I’ll show you a side of crazy you never knew you wanted to see. Jane.
Jane.
Riya Anne Polcastro
Copyright 2015 by Riya Anne Polcastro. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author at [email protected]. All cover artwork, photography, and design by Riya Anne Polcastro.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Also by Riya Anne Polcastro:
Suicide in Tiny Increments
Coming in 2015: Teeth
And by R. Anne Polcastro, middle grade/young adult author:
The Last Magdalene, a novella
The Left Behind Trilogy
(Book One: The Forbidden Voyage is out now.
Book Two is coming Summer, 2015.)
To Pete.
I hope they have experienced ice in Heaven.
Part One: Welcome to CrazyTown
Part Two: Enter the Summer of Gin & Juice
Part Three: Generation Lesbian
Part Four: Cocktales
Part Five: Schizo Is as Schizo Does
Part Six: Blood
Afterword
About the Author
Part One: Welcome to CrazyTown
1
In Salem, Oregon, the mental hospital sits smack dab in the middle of the city, halfway down Center Street. It is an apt placement when you consider the character of the city, and yet it begs the age old question, was it the chicken or the egg? Whether it is mere irony or a grave miscalculation in feng shui, the center, the very core of this place, is the Oregon State Hospital.
It is a few blocks out of my way, but I make it a point to drive by. There is something about the soul of the place, all the delusions and demons that have come to make up its very bricks. It calls to me with fantasies of what it would be like to be on the inside, to be locked up with the craziest motherfuckers in the state, to be sane with a free pass to act like an absolute loon. Could I fit in? Could I outdo them even? Feed off of crazy and become a whole new animal? I would prance about the halls and throw off all of my clothes, scream and yell obscenities just because I could, pick my nose and flick the boogers at the nurses, have sex with orderlies—shit, sex with myself—right there in the common room.
Why?
Why not!
This part of Center Street is lined with shade trees, their bare limbs begging for blooms still a month off. These trees have seen each patient come and go, witnessed their triumph and their failure, their joy and their pain. These trees have shared in the madness, buffers between the crazy on the inside and the absolute insanity of the world outside. And now they stand guard as the bulldozers tear down pieces of history and clear the land to modernize and expand this hospital that is both famous and infamous—first for its role in a classic movie and second for its deplorable conditions.
Most of the cracked yellow walls of the unkempt hospital will, however, remain. These walls have seen things, born witness over the years; they hold some of society’s darkest secrets, sickest fantasies, and unmentionable tortures; they preserve grandiose confessions and brutal attacks. Suicides. Lobotomies. Primitive shock therapy. Then there are the tunnels. Oh the tunnels! Every good sanitarium must have tunnels, after all. To walk there, underground, to hear the silent screams, to see the invisible ghosts buried with their tears, I can only imagine the sick thrill of it. And beneath it all, unclaimed ashes are buried. They belong to people that we would rather forget about, people we would prefer to have never existed: the fleas on society’s underbelly, the criminally insane, the whack-jobs whose alienated families left them there to rot, and the harmless souls who were nonetheless too crazy to function in the light of day.
And around this cuckoo’s nest, what better than a fence of penitentiaries? Oregon State Correctional Institute, Oregon State Pen-Minimum, Oregon State Pen-Maximum, Mill Creek Correctional, Santiam Correctional—they are all here. And when sentences expire on their imprisoned, where do they release to? Welcome to Felony Flats, where cheap rent equals ex-cons and ex-cons equal cheap rent, and this is where they congregate and breed.
Scratch the surface anywhere in Salem, is it any wonder you will find crazy? There are lessons here for me to learn, whole other worlds to explore, and understanding that can only come from the brink of insanity. But that is later. Now, I take the next left and head south towards my destination. It is a small house on 15th Street, not much more than a cottage. I pull up and park on the street.
Looking around at the neighborhood, it hits me, everything I left behind when I hopped in my car and headed north just over an hour ago. Gone are the days of a sheltered condo just off campus; gone are the likeminded hippies and anarchist commune dwellers. There is a drastic difference between the life I meet today and the one I knew this morning. Here is something new that reeks of a whole different kind of volatility. There is a feeling, something like quicksand. It tells me to run, to start the car back up and get the hell out of here as soon as possible. Deep down it nags and begs that I loose myself of the ties that bind—get out while getting out is still possible—and yet obligation wins, responsibility beckons, and that sinking feeling settles in for the long haul.
I take a deep breath hoping to calm my nerves, but instead the crisp air cuts through my windpipe and ushers a heavy dose of anxiety into my bloodstream. I try to ignore the tightness in my chest as I open the door and step out into my new life. One, two, three—three paces and two cement steps from the sidewalk to the living room window. There is a small landing at the top of the steps, not enough to be considered a porch, more of a stoop. The brand new house key sticks, and it takes a few jiggles to slide the dead bolt open. Inside, the air is heavy with dust and thick with stagnant latex, as if this little house had been painted and then immediately boarded up. I wonder why a few windows have not been cracked to let the place breathe and unlock the window in the eat-in kitchen. (Or is it the eat-in living room?) I brace my hands against the sill and try to force it up. But it is all in vain; the window is painted shut. All of the windows are painted shut. It must be part of the neighborhood charm.
I take a cigarette and a lighter from my purse. Somehow it seems fitting to add smoke to the cesspool of fumes already present, reminiscent of cheap hotels just off the freeway. The nicotine helps wear away at my angst with the first puff. Calm resignation is an odd comfort and a reliable friend.
The decision to come here was a bit impulsive. Doubt already gnaws ever so quietly at the pit of my stomach. No. No, this was the right thing to do. I cannot doubt it! What else was I going to do? Stay there with Jaime? Forgive him and continue on like nothing happened? No, that was not possible. Not only had my search for an excuse to leave him finally come to fruition, but Jaime’s transgressions were unforgivable regardless of whether I was still in love with him or not. He handed me the perfect opportunity to cut ties completely, the sweet smell of vindication at my back, a free ride to play the good guy.
That was yesterday. It was the same day my mother called and explained my aunt’s situation, and I jumped on the chance to make an immediate and permanent break. "She doesn’t need a lot of help," Mother insisted. "Pretty much just supervision. Remind her to take a shower, wash her clothes, things like that." In exchange fo
r free room and board, it sounded like a pretty good deal at the time.
Mother also promised "the cutest little cottage," but my official tour suggests she was guilty of exaggeration.
The kitchen comes first. The cupboards are old, covered in layer upon layer of rubbery latex paint and adorned with nostalgic faux crystal knobs. The linoleum scrapes the bottoms of my shoes with its cracks and curls. Just off the kitchen is a utility room with two more doors. The first leads to the washroom, a claustrophobic little closet with barely enough room for me to turn around and go out a second door kitty-corner to the one I came in through. The shower/tub insert is a yellowed plastic, like something you would find in a dilapidated manufactured home. The ceiling above it is splattered with mildew. A cheap medicine cabinet is mounted above the sink, smaller than the hole it sits in, with crude gaps along each side. There are cobwebs in the gaps; the shriveled carcasses of empty flies litter the corners, and a pasty raven-haired girl stares back at me from the mirror. Her emerald eyes are flat, the luster smudged right out, their almond sockets almost drooping. The sullenness of the past few months has smeared the rubicund from her lips and the curves off of her svelte frame. But the time has come, the time to reclaim the fire within. She winks back at me, ready to shine.
One last drag and I toss the butt in the toilet and open the second door, which leads to a bedroom. It is spacious with a walk-in closet, shelves for shoes, and room for a small dresser. But when I cross the room and go through the opposite door, instead of a hallway and a second bedroom on the other side, it opens back into the front room. Weird, where is the other bedroom? I circle back around the house looking for any doors that I could have missed. There is only the second door off of the utility room, but it has a dead bolt and a window with blinds, and it leads outside. Had Mother mentioned this was only a one-bedroom house? No . . . Had I asked? No . . . Had she even implied it? Not likely. Victim once again to my own assumptions, I throw my hands up and head back out front to unload my belongings.
The front stoop lends a decent view of the neighborhood. Most of the houses appear to be from the 1920s, some of them well-maintained, others not so much. There are two more cottages like this one, one on each side of it. Farther down the block is a complex of single-story apartments on our side of the street and a church on the opposite side.
A dog barks at a tall, scruffy pedestrian with long gray hair and a matted nest of a beard. His clothes are filthy and torn. He walks bent backwards at the waist, his gait nonetheless unaffected, and holds an unlit cigarette in his right hand that he slaps against his lips in a short two-drag pattern followed by a smack to his forehead with his left hand. He does this over and over, puffing on the emberless cigarette, seemingly oblivious to the lack of smoke filling his lungs.
I unload what is left of my worldly possessions and stow them away inside before the unsmoker has even left the area. I pass him when I head south on 17th Street towards the freeway. He is still not smoking: one puff, two puffs, smack; one puff, two puffs . . . Strange, true, but he is just the tip of the iceberg in this crazy little town, a comically auspicious welcome to the characters of the ‘hood.
2
Aunt Rose lives in Portland, a forty-something mile drive north, on the third floor of a building owned by the city housing department. Her apartment is a walk-up, and the stairwell welcomes me with institutional concrete lit by naked hundred-watt bulbs. It is cool yet humid, with the ever so slight smell of wet clay. A distinct scent, it conjures memories of years long past so that there I am amid the billows of my new spring dress, the lonely face of guilt, standing silent with my head down. And there again, alive with joy at my first day of camp. Oh the mysteries of the world to be laid bare in the wilderness! Then once more, this time outside of Grandma’s house just before my one and only childhood dog, only four months old at the time, is flattened by a drunk driver.
The fire door opens up onto a dingy hallway covered in greasy palm prints and gummed up indoor/outdoor carpeting. The yellowed wall-paper is worn brown down the middle, the remnants of hand and shoulder trails left by tenants too weak or bariatric or drunk to walk on their own two feet.
Aunt Rose is in number 309 at the end of the hall.
Knock, knock.
No answer.
I knock again, this time a little harder. Still nothing. A faint odor seeps from under the door. It is something like rotten garbage but also something like burnt beans and bird shit—a collage of utter foulness that burns my nostrils and whips up my impatience.
BAM BAM BAM! BAM!
The door next to Aunt Rose’s opens instead, and a yellow muumuu swallows the entrance. The heavy rasp of a phone sex operator drenched in her own annoyance informs me, "She’s probably sleeping you know. Takes that Trazadone stuff. You ain’t waking her up, but keep on pounding like that, and you’ll wake up the rest of the building."
4:00 p.m. and everyone in the building is asleep? I mumble something like "thank you," but not really, and turn away from her. A wave of anxiety creeps across my skin. What if something happened to her? Aunt Rose knew I would be up to get her today. Why would she take sleeping pills? I dial her cell phone and prepare to wait through a few rings, but it goes straight to a message: "This mailbox is full. Please try your call again later." Full? Really? My aunt does not exactly have friends, how could her mailbox be full? A bad feeling starts in the pit of my stomach, travels up through my throat, and takes up residence smack dab on the back of my tongue. I turn back to Muumuu, who has been watching me like the last drumstick at a picnic. "When was the last time you saw her?"
"Oh, it’s been a few days at least. She didn’t look too good last time I seen her either. Her eyes was all puffy and red. Looked like she hadn’t eaten in a year . . ." Off on a tangent, Muumuu yaps and yaps without really saying much. "She do that sometimes. Just stays locked up in her apartment for days, weeks even, and she won’t come out for nothing. We had a fire drill not too long ago . . ."
I try to shut her out, but worry tumbles around inside my head. I interrupt, "Does she normally sleep in the middle of the day?"
"Shi-i-it, don’t everybody?"
What a different world this is, especially for my aunt, who was never one to sleep before the bars closed. This whole situation feels wrong. When I take a deep breath to calm my nerves, I catch a taste of the putrid odor lurking under Rose’s door instead. What does a rotting corpse smell like? It is a random thought; nevertheless, panic follows on its heels. What if my aunt was so distraught she took too many sleeping pills or slit her wrists clear to her elbows? Morbid though these thoughts are, they are also very real possibilities. She has taken extreme measures in the past.
I found her once. I was ten, maybe a little older. The scene itself could have been a satire on failed suicides if it had not been my beloved aunt lying there peacefully asleep with a dry bottle of Jack Daniels under her right arm and an antique pistol in her left hand. She had aimed the pistol at her head but, as we found out later, its kick had been just brutal enough to throw her drunken aim off. The bullet had hit the rafters instead, and she had been knocked out when that same kickback sent her to the floor. Years later we can laugh about it, but at the time, it was traumatic. A repeat is not necessary, or worse, a success.
3
(Rose) The ache of it all, the anguish, is both overwhelming and dull. Such an odd combination of feelings when you really think about it: emotional neuropathy. It has evolved from the sting of that initial burn to the complete absence of all feeling, and the adage that it’s better to feel pain than nothing at all rings true. A person in pain may take issue with this, but someone who’s truly empty can recognize the facts. There’s nothing nice, nothing comforting about the total and utter absence of feeling where a very strong feeling deserves to be. It is blatant self-preservation on behalf of the ego, base and selfish. The soul has chosen a black hole over the anguish of a thrashed reality. This is the epitome of loneliness in the world; this is ultimate despa
ir and emptiness to an extreme. Nothingness is a horrid death reached only when the spirit’s been broken and all hope for a better tomorrow’s been bitterly starved and beaten to death. Pain’s welcome at this point. Pain means you still exist. Pain means you’re still, at minimum, a sliver human. But once the conscious mind’s been wiped clean of all thoughts save for the one lingering doubt that there should be something where there’s absolutely nothing, destruction of one’s inner humanity’s all but inevitable.
The world shakes with stillness, like pressing pause on an old video game. But then the wind starts to blow through the trees—whispers first then howls. The skies grow black and heavy with rain. Everything’s a little off. I don’t remember what started it all. No doubt there were a myriad of triggers, but the primary reason? Gone. Washed away. Those specific tears were easy enough to wipe away on their own, but combined with everything that ever was and ever will be? It’s all too much to take. Bloodshot, framed with the crusted combination of dried tears and stray mascara, my eyes may be open to the world, but these gray coals might as well be blind—the sparkle drained and shrouded not just from my irises but from my entire being. So far as my mind’s concerned, my body has ceased to exist. Inclement weather's of no consequence. My thin cotton clothing’s soaked to the point of unambiguous uselessness, and yet it just doesn’t matter. Even as the storm grows darker and colder and the rains fall in torrents, I don’t take note. It’s all irrelevant, of course, compared to the repressed burden that gnashes its teeth against my evaporating soul. Nothing else matters when the elephant in the room finally raises a ruckus and shakes the bars of its cage.
Jane. Page 1
