“I would’ve been too drunk to notice.”
“That open bar,” he said, with a fond wag of the head. “I see your father is Calvin Plum.”
“The Great Calvin Plum,” I replied, unable to muster any enthusiasm.
“I know all about your Plum Variable. Used to use it myself. Once, long back when I was teaching at Tulane, I got six winners at Louisiana Downs strictly using Plum and closing quarter fractions.”
“No charge,” I said.
“They’ve got you in the SDSU Hall of Fame.”
“No, really?”
“I’m an Aztec, too.” He puffed up a bit. “Graduated ’81.”
“The year before me,” I said.
“Funny we never ran into each other.”
“Big campus,” I said. “And I never took any psych classes. Probably should have. Ha.”
He watched my right foot shaking up and down and side to side.
“Dyskinesia,” I said. “From the Haldol.”
He wiped his hand down his face and stared down at the water. “This is my first hospital job,” he explained. “Had no idea what was going on here. Appalling conditions.”
“Chamber of Horrors,” I said.
He rubbed his chin. “First thing I did was review the histories of all my patients who hadn’t committed felonies. Pretty short list.” He paused. “You don’t belong here.”
“I’ve been telling them that since I arrived.”
He lit himself another cigarette. “When was the last time you were outside?”
“Had my appendix pulled a few years ago.”
“Why don’t we take a drive through the country tomorrow?”
4.Life Begins at Forty-One
EVERY AFTERNOON FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS I’D CLIMB INTO DR. Jangler’s black BMW with Boston or Beethoven playing and we’d drive out the hospital gates and into the valley, following the river and the contours of the green hills with their overgrown chateaus and rows upon rows of world-class grapes. Jangler would smoke, periodically tapping his cigarette into a little bean-bag ashtray on the dash. He rarely talked about matters psychiatric; instead it was mutual San Diego-flavored ground, old girlfriends or Dave Winfield or the great nine-year-old-thoroughbred John Henry, the Charity Ball, or the bare breasts of Miss Emerson at the Over-the-Line Tournament. Each day we stopped at the same Italian restaurant, where he encouraged me because I was so thin to go for the butter and cream. I knew he was studying me to see how I might behave in the free world. I always put my napkin in my lap and chewed slowly with my mouth closed.
At the end of the week we met in his office. He had his feet on the desk. “There’s only so much I can do here, Eddie,” he said, hands folded on his chest. “I’ve replaced an old regime, but the new one I’m afraid isn’t much better. There’s a lot of public pressure on this institution to keep its inmates out of the community.” He paused. “But I think if you can agree to a few things, taking that class, of course, and doing some volunteer work with a few of the patients, there’s a good chance I can get you out of this.”
“I can’t take that class,” I said. “I signed up before, but that was to see Sofia. And now she’s gone. If I took that class now it would be admitting I’m a sexual offender, and I’m not. What else have I got left but my integrity? I said a few lousy things to some women I didn’t know, but I never touched any of them. I’m not a violent person, except in this cesspool of maniacs where I’m forced to defend myself.”
“I applaud your stand,” he said. “But you’ll have to meet me halfway on this, otherwise I won’t be able to help you. If you don’t learn to compromise you’ll never get out of here.”
“All right. And the haloperidol?”
“I’ve cut your dose in half. We’ll see how you do.”
That Sunday I went to church for the first time in twenty years, attending the Protestant service because it was shorter and I liked the pastor, a Japanese antilapsarian dentist named Watanabe. Once again, I signed up to take the harassment class and re-enrolled for volunteer labor in the laundry and canteen. I also started attending AA meetings and began to work with some of the schizophrenics in my unit on t-12, one in particular, a crippled twenty-eight-year-old named Jericho Sunday. A high school football star from the East Bay, Jericho had tried to kill himself by driving his ’95 Camaro off a cliff. At great speed, before he could make the cliff’s edge, he smashed into a tree, permanently damaging both legs. Because he walked in a stiff-legged fashion like an emu or an elephant bird and had not been able to get airborne on his suicide flight before hitting that tree, everyone called him Flightless.
Flightless had angels in his head. He’d say, “My angels tell me you’re a dirty butthole,” or “My angels won’t let me buy commissary today.” And if his angels told him something, that was it. But his angels were also telling him to punch staff members in the face and he would get up during TV shows and fight with female employees. The guy was six-four, 265, about my size before I quit eating. They called him The Enforcer when he played linebacker in high school.
So he was put on one-to-one, round-the-clock supervision by at least one staff member. I got him off one-to-one by telling him jokes, buying him cans of pop, and talking about horses and football and his favorite team, the Cal Golden Bears. The breakthrough came when he lent me his Sports Illustrated and we laughed about Dusty Baker yanking Russ Ortiz in the seventh so the Giants could swirl down the toilet. “Champagne on ice and so is Disney,” he said, which is the way the voices used to sound in my head, too, until the Haldol and the lithium carbonate made them go away. Anyway, I gave Flightless back his Sports Illustrated within twenty-four hours, won his trust, and eventually he was assigned one-to-eight staff coverage
