This one requires an introduction. The problem is that--no joke--I have someplace to go in about two minutes and I'm not exactly sure how to preface "Cookoo's Nest." The italics are a good start. The column featured here was printed in January of 2007, as a guest column for the Advance-Titan. It was printed not long after I graduated, and the events described here stand as testament to the state of mind I was in before taking the plunge into the real world proper. For optimum reading of this piece, please remove your shoelaces and store them in a safe place; also, on the odd chance that you own an album by Jawbreaker, play the track "Accident Prone." Now I gotta split. When I was asked by the newspaper to write an appropriate goodbye column, the offer seemed enticing. Considering how much I loved this humor column gig (excluding the issues in which I disliked what I wrote), it hardly seemed ceremonious that my swan song be another rambling about a plastic robot.
But when the talented and über-scruffy Tyler Maas wanted to know the topic of my final submission, I began to feel a bit gun-shy. I wanted to write about an extremely noteworthy experience, but doing so would require some hazardous honesty that is difficult to divulge, and even more difficult to convert into humor form. On the other hand, NOT writing about the ordeal and opting for tamer subject matter would be like choosing to write about a hangnail while a gang of naked mimes paraded out of the fireplace. (That sounds like something Dr. Phil would say.)
Therefore, in response to my colleague’s inquiry, I said, “The column’s going to be about my stint in the mental hospital…but with jokes.”
Now, I’ve done my fair share of playful fibbing in my columns. For instance, I have never interviewed pro football logos Bruce Buccaneer and Pat Patriot about their gay marriage. And I’ve never fashioned a ten-gallon hat using paper maché hate mail sent by the Amish—although doing so remains a lifelong goal. But not everything I write is bogus. One selection mentioned that I have obsessive compulsive disorder, which was not a fib. OCD is a confounding ailment, a constant and woeful fretting over the imperfections no one can escape, and I feel I have the right to knock the disorder in much the same way that Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) has the right to make savage jokes about the Jewish population.
Everyone has their battles and, at the time I was admitted into the psych ward, an imaginary scoreboard would have shown me trailing something like 72-3 to my arch nemesis: team Neurotic Albatross. In the spirit of the LighterSide section, focusing on the redemptive qualities of comedy, we’ll give the worst of the ordeal the “yada-yada” treatment. Let me tell you about my first night in the hospital.
I’ve watched a couple episodes of the HBO series “Oz,” and from what I gather, prison is an unpleasant and ruthless place. Now, the facility I spent some time in is about one-tenth as dangerous as prison, but there still remained a very faint possibility that a mentally unstable stranger would bash my skull with a lunch tray because the ghost of Hilter’s dog told him I was a threat to steal his garbage bag full of toenails. To assert one’s place in the pecking order, it’s common practice to become the aggressor and brutalize another prisoner (or patient, in this instance). I am by no means a violent person, but in that potentially hazardous environment, I felt the primal compulsion to ensure my safety, and I did so with a happy compromise. Rather than attacking an actual person, I roamed the commons area flailing karate kicks into thin air as the other patients watched in confusion. My goal was to get lucky and connect my foot to the face of a schizophrenic’s visual hallucination.
Sleep was elusive that first night. The hospital odor lingered faintly in my nostrils as I tried to read from a book of short stories. I noticed a conspicuous smear of red paint on the white wall beside me, as if the wall was blushing because it too was embarrassed to be in the psych ward. From across the hall, I overheard a dispute between a nurse and a patient named Karen. Karen was being scolded for playing with her own poop in the toilet. Most adults consider this improper behavior, but with a series of unintelligible grunts, Karen defended her God-given right to dabble with her own doo-doo. During one of the spookiest nights of my life, Karen’s filthy eccentricity gave me solace that there will always be people crazier than me.
Room 13 was the closest to the receptionist’s desk, so I could hear the nurses talking about a new arrival who had allegedly locked himself in his bedroom with a loaded AK-47. His name is Mark and he turned out to be a benign and exhortative man, but at the time I heard about his misdeed, I remember thinking, “I’d have more faith in the American Justice system if the guy that was busted with a loaded AK-47 got sent to prison instead of the cot ten feet away from me.”
A few days later, Mark told me that—for reasons he couldn’t explain—a biker gang from Washington, D.C. wanted him dead. His eyes darting around the room, his voice lowered, he told me that members of the gang had been circling around his block, scouting the area, riding not on Harleys as one might suspect, but rather mini-vans. And although my heart went out to Mark and his bout with what was most likely paranoid schizophrenia, part of me really wanted to explode with laughter and call attention to the absurdity of a BIKER gang patrolling the neighborhood in MINI-VANS. If you’re the leader of a biker gang and somebody snaps a photo of you behind the wheel of a mini-van, your street cred has got to take a frickin’ nosedive!
The first night at the hospital, just as I was beginning to flirt with sleep, a lush named Dan was entered into room 13. Once this bastard’s head hit the pillow, he began snoring at an unbearably loud decibel level. It was the kind of snore that pries your eyelids open indefinitely. It sounded like the aural offspring of a lawn mower and a Whoopee cushion, and every nasal breath climaxed with a gurgling of saliva that sounded like a coffee maker. At about 5 a.m., I complained to a nurse about the commotion and asked if she could give me something to combat the noise. She offered some cheap foam earplugs, which were far less preferable than the loaded revolver I was hoping for. When it came to lessening the effects of Dan’s deafening snore, the earplugs were about as successful as using a sandwich baggie to protect your eyes while you stare at the sun. I slept for roughly 18 minutes on that first wretched night.
My stint at the mental hospital is too vast to encapsulate in a single column. I was held there longer than anticipated, and nobody wants tenure in a place like that. The absolute worst moment was also the funniest. After a week spent in the institution, I witnessed several patients rejoice when the doctors deemed them capable of rejoining the outside world. I watched numerous people sign their release papers anxiously and, with renewed appreciation, embrace the loved ones that had come to drive them home. Karen was one of these people. And for the first time in my life, I found myself feeling jealous of someone that had recently played with their own poop. I never thought that was possible, but surprises abound throughout this loony-bin existence.
Parting words: Thanks for reading.
And: "What's the closest you can come to an almost total wreck/ And still walk away all limbs intact?" --Jawbreaker
