When a Mobster Saved My Life
Bada bing in the psych ward
The second and last time I went to the Sutter psych ward, I had recently come out of a coma and was a complete wreck. I cried in bed for the first day. Then I was bored, and came out for dinner. There was the usual clique of functional people, playing cards in the “day room.” This is a room with a few plastic couches, a TV, the excellent library donated by a depressed author who kept his charity anonymous, and a locked cabinet full of DVDs.
I joined the card game and answered questions.
“I’ve been here before,” I said. “When I got caught on the Golden Gate Bridge.”
A pretty blond with freckles and a stylish haircut, about my age, nodded her head. She had her knees pulled up to her as her feet rested on the chair, and her navy scrubs, like mine, were huge.
“That’s why I’m here,” she said, looking at her cards.
“It’s a shitty way to commit suicide,” I said.
“Yeah, your bones all break once you hit the water, and sometimes it takes hours for you to drown. Sharks sometimes eat the half-alive people.”
She was named Lucy. She didn’t have custody of her kids. She lived in a long-term motel in a sleazy neighborhood, and she had lost her job as a paralegal after she disappeared for the twelfth time on a drinking/suicide binge.
A young, east Asian man with very red lips and big glasses was also sitting among the functional.
“My p-p-p-p-arents would never want me to do that,” he said with an accent to a large, olive skinned man with a bald head. “I would n-n-n-never do that to my parents either!” He laughed a goofy laugh.
“Come on, Huy,” said the bald guy, in a Brooklyn accent. “You know you wanna see some girls, I can show you so many girls your head’ll spin around my friend.”
“What are you trying to corrupt him into doing with you?” said Lucy.
“Road trip. Vegas, Boca, Atlantic City. We go see my cousins and my uncle. My cousin Joey just opened a club in Boca. Boobs, Huy. You ever seen boobs?”
Lucy shook her head and laughed.
“Hey, you look like a little Jew broad from Brooklyn,” said the bald guy to me. “An adorable little Jew girl. I used to have a girlfriend who looked just like you.”
Everyone giggled. It was the first time I laughed in months.
For the next three days, we made jigsaw puzzles, were ironic during the group therapy sessions, played cards, danced to the ’70s radio station, boxed (until the nurse forced us to stop), watched movies, and made Huy serenade us at meals with his sentimental pop auditions for American Idol.
The voices in his head weren’t being mean to him since the doctors changed his antipsychotic medication. He was the most wholesome person in our midst, citing Jesus each time he was asked about his role model during group therapy. Huy was an angel. And Vince was our lynchpin. The only medication he took was for the nerve pain he got from being shot in the back of the head.
Vince tried to teach us many things, like loansharking, bookmaking, and identity theft. None of us could follow the instructions when he simulated the process for us. We shook our heads and told him how confused we were, and how horrible it was that he was stealing peoples’ tax refunds.
If a nurse passed by in the middle of one of his lessons, or his long stories about prison, his Thanksgiving with John Gotti in Marion, of robbing jewelry stores or extorting people, Vince would change his tone and say how deeply depressed — suicidal — he was that his girlfriend, Tamara, broke up with him. This was the fake reason he had escaped a police investigation by entering the psych ward. Tamara, meanwhile, called the patient payphone every hour, demanding Vince.
“What is this place, tell me that?” she said to me in a New Jersey accent. “Tell me this, is he really sick?”
“Vince? Yeah.”
“You know he’s a chronological liar.”
“Well here, you talk to him.”
She started crying. “I’m just so worried about him, he’s in a lotta trouble with the law ya know?”
“I don’t think you need to worry about him. He’s fine.”
A psychiatrist asked me if I was on the right medication. The ward’s social worker agreed to try and find me a placement in a treatment center. I was upset about a loss, but I was willing to try any solution since I had failed repeatedly to end my life.
We were eating graham crackers and drinking milk for our afternoon snack. A Boz Scaggs tune was playing on the radio. I was dancing in my seat. Lucy was holding her cards and negotiating with Vince in their game. Two psychotic patients were sitting quietly with us, mesmerized by Vince.
The big guy who called all the nurses “son” and “rogue” was even calm as he sat on the sofa and filled out his menu for the following day’s meals. Vince had tipped him off that if he circled all the food, he would get three meals every serving period instead of one. Food was currency in the psych ward.
An immigrant nurse passed by with a pot of decaf.
“Oh, you all look like you having good good time! I think you want some coffee.”
We took white Styrofoam cups from the cabinet and filled up on decaf.
“How about some regulah coffee, you know, with caffeine,” said Vince.
“Oh, you know we can’t give you anything with caffeine, it doesn’t mix with the medications.”
“I am having fun,” I said to Lucy in a low voice.
“I know,” she smiled. “It’s weird.”
Group therapy happened twice or three times a day for forty minutes. If the weather was good we sat outside on the patio, but usually we sat in the day room around a long white table. It was usually led by a nurse or an aide, and targeted at kindergarten cognition levels. But one day, the theme was “finding meaning from adversity,” and the sophisticated lesson was led by our sexy resident psychiatrist — a totally unprecedented event. We were looking at a handout based on Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, when an older woman with four teeth burst into tears.
“How can I find meaning from my addiction, all those years spent hittin’ the pipe?” She recounted her history of crack addiction and abusive boyfriends, the latest of whom had stolen all her credit cards and split.
“You overcome your addiction and use the experience to help addicts,” I said. “Then the whole experience is put to good use.”
Vince looked disappointed. “Or, you can become a crack kingpin, and sell to them,” he said.
The woman looked from me to Vince.
“The point is that nothing is meaningless,” said the psychiatrist. “Regret isn’t a necessary emotion because we can use everything we’ve experienced in some constructive way.”
“You have doe eyes, Doc,” Vince said. “The most beautiful, sad eyes. But you have a bright smile. How is that? It’s a contradiction but it’s true.”
The doctor shifted the conversation to our inner child. She encouraged us to scream what our inner children wanted to say about our current pain, and hit the table with a rolled up newspaper.
Vince winced. “Lemme ask you a question, Doc.”
She smiled gamely, crossing her legs.
“What, or who, inspired this idea that we are still children inside?”
“Freud,” said Lucy.
“Yes, it was Freud,” said the doctor.
“You still go by that guy? Come on. He was a cocaine addict who banged his sister! Can’t you find a better role model? I mean how about Nietzsche? Now there’s a philosopher. Nietzsche died hugging a horse!”
“Nietzsche is an interesting philosopher,” said the doctor.
We all hit the table with the rolled up newspaper and laughed about it.
Vince asked me to stay with him at the table after the group. I was cold in the scrubs, and had only a small cardigan a nurse had found in the lost and found, so we went into the day room.
“Why are you in this place?” he said in a low voice, almost a whisper. His Styrofoam cup from the last decaf refill was between his hands on the table, and he was pushing on its walls and rotating it around. “You don’t belong here. You’re very intelligent and you have a very special and rare kind of presence. I’d like to help you get outta this situation. Lemme know if there’s anything I can do for you. I hate to see a good girl like you in here.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You wanna know why I’m here?”
“Lemme get myself some coffee.”
He returned with a full cup and sat down.
I told him everything that had happened in the last year of my steep decline.
Vince didn’t say anything when I finally finished. He crumpled up the Styrofoam cup, sat back in the chair and rubbed his hands over his stomach.
“That girl, what she done to you? I could send her on vacation for a long time. Just say the word and it’s done.”
I laughed nervously. “No, no, I don’t want that. But there is something you can do. It requires guts, and persuasion and confidence that I just don’t have, and you have…a lot of.”
“Anything,” he said. “You’re under my flag now. God is my witness.” He looked up to the sky.
“But why do you want to help me?”
“I’m a narcissist,” he said. “But you’re a pure soul. It would be my redemption.”
Lucy and I sat at the white table drinking decaf. Our frenemy — a pretty twentysomething girl who was lucid and friendly one minute, accusing us of conspiracies the next — drifted back and forth behind us with an insane look on her face. So we spoke low.
“He thinks I’m gonna marry him,” Lucy scoffed. “Like, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, making eggplant parmesan. What’s he gonna do for you?” she paused. “I heard a little bit of your conversation yesterday.”
The nurse came in to tell us that the hospital nun was here if any of us wanted to take communion. Lucy and I went to wait in line behind the boy who violently broke his parents’ TV cabinet while trying to fix it. Vince called him “the cabinet-maker.”
In the little waiting room across from the nurse’s station, I crossed myself and opened my mouth. The woman wasn’t a nun, but a lay volunteer in a Chanel blazer. She handed me a little card with a photograph of a statue of baby Jesus on it.
“Say this prayer every hour for nine hours,” she said, sternly.
I went to my room and kneeled down to read:
POWERFUL NOVENA TO THE INFANT JESUS
For Cases of Urgent Need.
There were three passages, each asking Jesus to grant my request. Coupled with Vince’s effort on my behalf, this prayer would surely be granted by someone! With a shocking amount of hope, I began to pray out loud.
Please let Coco and I be friends and let her forgive me. She’s the only person in this city who feels like my family and I need a family, Jesus. Please help Vince negotiate a truce. I love her more than anyone in the world. Then, as I always did when admitting this hard fact to myself, I cried.
But for the first time in a year, the crying was cathartic and hopeful. Perhaps Jesus would help me. Vince had shown up out of the blue like a gift granted by a genie after I spent years secretly wishing for my own bodyguard/gangster or a boyfriend like Carlito in Carlito’s Way.
Vince was released at noon that day. He gave me and Lucy pieces of paper with two phone numbers on them.
“That’s my father, and that’s my cousin,” he said.
“But what about your number?” I said.
“You call my father or Gianni and they’ll get me the message to me. Within five minutes I’ll be callin’ you back. I need to get another phone because I had to get rid a the last one.”
I didn’t have a phone, nor did Lucy. Ours were stolen when we passed out trying to commit suicide.
Vince put his arm on my shoulders and whispered in my ear.
“I’ll keep you posted about that errand I’m doin’ for ya. But I think you should consider getting out of this town. I don’t see a future here for ya. I could put up some fazules to help ya out. First, I gotta take care a this warrant, and I might have to go to Costa Rica.”
I hugged Vince. He reminded Lucy that they would soon be getting married. And then he put on his green, cashmere sweater and collected his possessions from the safe.
We watched as the white door was unlocked by some button in the nursing station and opened with a click.
My social worker came to see me that afternoon and asked me why I had changed my mind about going to a treatment center upon release the next day.
“Because I’m better,” I said.
If you missed it: “No News Is Good News”
I’m on Twitter
