[Legally Blind: The Book] Part 1: Chapter 22 - Cuckoo’s Nest

New Hampshire, besides having one of the worst educational systems in the country, had a mental health program that felt like what I imagined that of the eighteenth century to be. The institutional facility I was sent to had run out of room to house all the resident nutcases properly, so I was thrown into a ward that was shared by everyone from serious psychotics to children who were committed because their parents were sick of them.

All through the day we heard the screaming, crying, and wailing of the criminally insane who were housed across the yard, screeching Sirens foretelling of our imminent shipwreck on the rocky shores of true madness. One of those screamers may well have been Linda Kasabian, one of Charles Manson’s girls, who was housed there during the same time I was there. We were fed drugs from morning to night. The irony that I was in this place for using drugs was not lost on me. Not once did I ever see a shrink, except to be prescribed new forms of sedatives, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and who knew what else. However, none of that mattered because I never took any of the drugs I was prescribed. Like many others, I would hide them in my mouth then later get together with others to trade. A whole barter system of drugs had developed that everyone, including the attendants and nurses, were quite aware of.

There were a few borderline maniacs who, soon after checking in, slipped even deeper into their insanity, and thus earned themselves a special room across the yard. You had to be dangerously nuts to get moved across the yard. We all knew we could end up in those padded cells, subjected to the frequent electroshock therapy, the beatings by aids, and even the occasional lobotomy. Even though the godless commies of the Soviet Union outlawed lobotomies in 1950s as it was deemed “contrary to the principles of humanity” and “through lobotomy an insane person is changed into an idiot”1 it was then, and still is, legal and practiced in the United States (although significantly less so these days).The unearthly shrieks, day and night, never let us forget that we could be next.

The male patients were on one side of the asylum and the females on the other, separated by a cockroach-infested kitchen. We weren’t allowed contact with the girls except during meals or outside in the yard under supervision. A few times a week we heard tales from the girls about the sexual abuse at the hands of the male attendants, or how some girl was locked away after she’d been raped with a broom handle by the other girls. The whole place stank with an ancient dark instinct we carry in us that compels us to finish off the victims, as if to punish them for being weak.

The people who controlled our lives not only had little concern for us but often found sadistic joy in our suffering. When a fight broke out, the guards hid and watched through a crack in the door until someone was either unconscious or brutally damaged. I kept relatively free from the fighting. The only fight I was in was with a boy who’d been committed by his parents for masturbating. I was shocked when he told me this and in an attempt to console him I said, “There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone does it.” It didn’t dawn on me that those may have been the cruelest words I could have uttered. “Why then,” he must’ve thought, “am I here?” He was committed the same time I was, but it only took weeks before he started to degenerate to the state that was expected of him—out-of-control madness. We were arguing over what TV show to watch. It quickly escalated out of control in a way that one would expect in a mental institution. He hit me across my back with a chair which landed me in the hospital with a fractured vertebra. He was locked in a padded cell. I was the clear winner. Within three months he’d lost the ability or will to speak and just sat drugged and speechless in his chair all day.

The drugs flowed through that place like a shooting gallery. My roommate, a sixteen-year-old heroin addict, had his girlfriend smuggle in barbiturates, amphetamines, cocaine, LSD, an assortment of fun colored pills that no one really knew exactly what they were—everything but heroin…after all, he was in recovery. It was here I first experienced the legendary Orange Sunshine LSD.

Getting drugs into the asylum was never a problem. In theory, it was even a trivial task to get out of the asylum as long as you were back in time. Beneath this prison of madness hid a dark labyrinth of used and abandoned tunnels that led into town and were occupied by people fucking and doing drugs, and also by the dangerously insane, presumably escapees from the asylum mixed in with a few who had not been discovered yet. These tortured, often violent lost souls wandered about these filthy, dark burrows, thick with the smell of shit, death, and burnt insulation. A few times I entered this subterranean maze to try to get into town. I never made it. Either I was chased by the occasional authority figure, or I couldn’t go further without getting lost in the web, or simply the risk of bumping into certain inmates of this prison of souls outweighed the reward. Some did make it through as this was one of the route through which the drugs entered.

This was what my life had come to: imprisoned in a mental asylum controlled by sadistic bureaucrats, lurking in sewers with crazy semi-human mole people, listening to blood-curdling screams of anguish and suffering twenty-four hours a day. I’d seen people come in half-crazy and soon become completely crazy, ensuring the stay was permanent. Banished to the world of lost souls, I began to feel as if this was where I belonged.

My parents visited me once while I was there, but it was no happy reunion. In their minds they imagined professionals treating and healing the psychologically wounded, but what they saw was a filthy prison for the psychologically broken, run by the psychologically ill. The second time my parents came was to check me out and return me to civilization after I’d been rehabilitated in the eyes of the State.

I came out more of a dope head, more imbalanced, more angry than when I’d entered, and now with deep gashes across my psyche. I also came out knowing there were those far worse off than me, which had a pretty profound effect on my self-destructive sense of self-pity.

At the time The System’s concept of justice I had experienced seemed like an aberration to me, but it became painfully clear that it was not an aberration at all; it was quite normal. The solutions provided by The System seemed specifically designed to make things much worse while telling you it’s trying to make things better. The war between “us” and “them” became more defined, and I saw those that worked with The System to make things better as unwitting “uses” who had been duped into enlisting into the army of the “thems.”

My reintegration into the world was now in the hands of my probation officer. An ex-marine, a man trained to mindlessly and arbitrarily kill on command, was now my controller. He never spoke to me; his twisted, scarred face only scowled and yelled commands. With a change of wardrobe he could’ve passed for one of those raving mole people from the insane asylum who wandered around in the dark, scowling and yelling at shadows and ghosts. Like those maniacs, he projected the ugliness of his own tortured soul onto me and the world around him, which he perceived as easily fixable with more violence, anger, and control. The difference between him and the lunatics was that he was paid by the State to keep me in line. I was ordered to keep my hair short, report to him weekly, get a job, and join the Boy Scouts.