The Atascadero State Hospital Thanksgiving Feast was the first time since I’d been recommitted that I got to see Sofia and my young son, Clive, who had been born with gray eyes that were now green. Sofia was despondent and barely spoke. (“It smells like pine-masked-shit in here,” she said at one point, “which I guess is better than that pine-masked-death smell at Napa.”) My son, who looked like his mother, shyly and cheerfully had no inkling that he was surrounded by notorious child molesters, several of whom glanced down at him with sly approval.
Jingler, now Jungler, a fundraiser for the Don Quixote Society, came as well, our first reunion since he was a weatherman and we met at Moby Dick’s. He was bald with a coarse white mustache, his stomach was more pronounced than his chest, and the wrinkles were deep around his eyes. Since I had been placed in the California Department of Mental Health System on a conservatorship, adjudged on a string of misdemeanors as somehow being “gravely disabled,” and I was in no way and had proven extensively to the contrary that I was not “gravely disabled,” nor a threat to myself or society, Jungler, familiar with the convoluted parlance of both law and psychiatric institutions, and having dusted off his old counterfeit law degree from the University of Cincinnati (he was Horace Jengler, Attorney at Law, in this incarnation), planned to represent me at my next release hearing in six months and was confident he would get me out.
I was hopeful of this since the Haldol was killing me. The staff was convinced I was an escape risk and did their best to overmedicate me. I had also been assigned a “sitter,” someone who watched over me every hour, even staring in at me from a chair outside my room as I slept. Along with the Haldol I was being given Ativan, which like all of the pestilent, nerve-shattering benzodiazepine family, is demonically addictive, opening doors to indescribable horrors and anxieties, another way to get lost forever in the labyrinths of the mental health system.
We ate the turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, and pumpkin pie — all very good, by the way. I’d like to thank the staff for that, for though these facilities deserve their reputations for savagery, debauchery, corruption, and abuse, you’ll also find kindness and even acts of heroism and altruism here. Clive very much liked the pie, especially the whipped cream, and had two slices. Though he called me Daddy, I don’t believe he remembered me.
Sofia was going to try to keep the two thoroughbred yearlings I had bought to train, and Clive would soon be enrolled in Montessori. Her parents were helping out financially. My father, who’d sold the Island and all its hothouses and groves of old-growth oak, had also sent a generous check, though he was too disgusted with me to venture through the sally port and the metal detectors to actually visit me. Good behavior and a positive attitude were paramount for my release, so I resisted the temptation to believe he and I would be permanently estranged.
The dinner was over too quickly. As tables were being cleared and stacked and metal chairs were being folded, I kissed my son and wife and promised to send her my almost finished novel soon. She thought Whirlaway a good title and hoped that I’d treated her character favorably.
I told her I’d designated her Queen of the Peacocks and Chief Refuter of Salvador Dalí.
“What an asshole that Dalí,” she said.
“And tell Sweets I’m sorry for breaking my promise.”
She pressed her fingers to her temples, closed her eyes, and said somberly: “I will communicate it to him. But don’t you worry about Tortilla Boy. He is very enamored of your son.”
Watching her leaving me once again through the gates to freedom and wondering if I would ever see her again, I felt suddenly desolate.
She seemed to understand and turned to touch me lightly. “It won’t be long this time, Eddie,” she said. “I know it in my heart.”
My nose began to run, my eyes to burn, and I had to turn away, wishing I was not so thick and confounded by drugs.
Before Jungler left, he gave me a stack of postcards. They were years old, all of them from Shelly who had sent them to cabin number 7 at the Island. I read them in my room as best as I could in the order in which they’d been sent. The last one, postmarked a year before, read:
Dear Eddie: Donny died today, melanoma. He was forty-two. He went so fast. Unbelievable that my whole family would be gone within the year. Looks like I’ll be staying here a lot longer than planned, funeral arrangements, these fly by night policies, one I’m collecting on I told you about that paid three million if Donny died of melanoma before age forty-five, which he went and did. More money than I know what to do with or even care to have, though I expect I’ll probably die of cancer here in the next year myself. Until then, Bay Minette is home. I suppose this is my roots, and I’ve got all my family here, and they’ve finally stopped haunting me.
Take care. Shelly
Acknowledgments
IT WAS THE READERS IN THE END WHO MADE THE DIFFERENCE IN
