Just before my second hearing for release came up, Morris got me kicked off Unit T-15 after I’d told the recreational therapist why I was still at Napa when I could have left long ago. I told her I’d had sex with a hundred female inmates, sometimes two at a time. Her recreational title had misled me and I thought she might be impressed or at least take my elaborate boast in the “recreational” spirit in which it was intended. I certainly didn’t think she’d tell Morris, but it turned out they were makin’ bacon (in his office) and so when he heard the news he told Fasstink and all of a sudden I was a “problem patient,” an “operator,” and though my various infractions amounted to little more than mischief they somehow through the Constitution of Lunacy qualified me as a “repeat offender” and justified my continued confinement without counsel or trial. For a long time I had my father, the prominent southern California circuit horse trainer, hiring attorneys to get me out, but once he learned that all I had needed from the beginning for a release from Napa State was to take a sexual harassment class he washed his hands of me. The larger point was forgotten, that I had done basically nothing to be sent and kept here indefinitely against my will.
2.Mudville / “I Wish It Would Rain”
IT’S DREARY HERE IN MUDVILLE: THE SPIRAL SHADOWS OF THE razor wire against the wire-mesh windows; the hoarfrost rime on the fluorescent bulbs, the milky moonlit halls; the ever-clicking barred and buzzing steel doors and Plexiglas partitioned chambers that make you feel like a poisoned wasp in an electric hive; the yellow-painted rooms and hard little beds; the furtive, whispering, purse-lipped Filipino faces peering at you through parted curtains; the cameras everywhere; the five-point restraints and B52 cocktails — B (50 mg. Benadryl), 5 (mg. Haldol), 2 (mg. Ativan) — when you get out of line; the wailing of inmates and the screaming of the gleaming peafowls; the murders, suicides, beatings, and rapes; the animal rhythm of food, rain, sex, and sleep. And more rain and sleep. And more and more sleep. Mandated biweekly injections of haloperidol (Haldol) blur your vision and destroy your powers. The days and then the years all blend together after a while.
One day they threw a birthday party for me — hamburgers, hot links, potato salad, strawberries, canned jalapenos, watermelon, Diet Dr. Pepper, brownies, and vanilla ice cream. The burgers were fresh ground one-third-pound beef. I ate two and spilled ketchup all over my shirt. It was a gorgeous day, 80 degrees with a slight breeze. Sturtz was there, along with a few other sorry-ass lifers, including Rey Waldo Diaz, Fuckface (no mystery as to how he earned his name), and Boothby with his long nightstick scar like a zipper up the side of his head. Some of the “clients” (as we were called by staff), sore about having been beaten or overmedicated or having had privileges revoked, would not eat the food funded privately for my party (despite the fact that I was an imp I was well liked) by the staff, and instead, in protest ate the crappy state hamburgers. (I was too angry then to thank them for this party. NSH staff, if you’re reading this, I apologize and thank you now.) Then they sang “Happy Birthday” to me. I thought it was a mistake when they told me I was thirty-two years old. I even laughed at the thought of totally wasting my life. It was funnier than the ketchup all over my shirt.
But at the party was a new inmate, Sofia Fouquet, twenty-seven years old. I had seen her watching me from a distance. She had a quick way of smiling that I thought at first was cracked or fake but after a time realized was authentic, measured bursts of warmth that seemed solely intended for me. Like me, she had been civilly committed, though she was in for suicide and would not be held long unless she botched her chances as I had. I did not normally get along with women. They were the reason I had been sent to Napa and the reason I stayed here and the reason if I ever get out I will be sent back. They were the torpedo that always sank me. But I could not resist a brooding Mediterranean beauty, cerebral and serene, who wanted to kill herself and who had come to my birthday party. I had also seen one of her photographic exhibitions at a gallery in Ferndale, in Humboldt County, a few years before all my trouble started. Her tide pool and shipwreck photos were as dark and melancholy as she was. She had read my columns and remembered me from her Ferndale exhibition, which she told me was the reason she had come to my birthday party. With a swift, insolent smile she looked at my ketchup stains and asked if I’d been shot.
No such luck, I told her.
We took a long stroll that evening and kept brushing against one another. Haldol is more intoxicating than bourbon, and compounded by the influence of Sofia I could barely walk. Three quarters of the asylum acres were off limits since the psych tech had been murdered, so we kept coming to a fence topped with coiled and glittering concertina wire (“Sure is a lotta barbed wire for a hospital,” she remarked at one point), and each time her eyes would blaze and she’d shake her hair and
