It is completely accidental. I don’t mean to find the letter. I’m not snooping, only looking for a clothing website. Why he keeps a copy in his favorites folder I guess I’ll never know. But there it is.
  Rendered in black and white on the computer screen is the thing that has been nagging me. The thing I know but can not name. I can not breathe as I read and reread the letter not meant for me. It is sweet in its own shy way and when I can breathe again I cry. Great big sobs that leave me breathless on the floor and then quietly weeping when that’s all I have left until I am dry.
  I email a copy to him so when he gets home and checks his email he will know I have seen and know.  I cannot think of a better way to confront this without falling apart.
  “What do you want” he asks. He’s sitting against the door, knees to his chest. I’m on the bed, curled up, covered up, looking at him almost eye level.
  “What do I want?” I repeat. I want so much. I want to have never found the letter. I want none of this to have happened. I want him to have not done this horrible thing. I want to stop breathing. I want him to stop breathing. I want her to stop breathing. I want to know how involved it really is not just what he says. I want to know why I am so stupid and why I gave up so much for some asshole. I want to know if there were others. I think there were. I want to know if she’s prettier than me, thinner with longer hair.  Does she know how you hit me in the face and I forgave you? Is she forgiving like me? I want to know what I did wrong. And how I can fix it. And I want the world to just. Stop. Spinning. Just for a minute. And let me catch my breath.
  “I don’t know what I want” I’m trying not to cry but the tears are coming again anyway “what do you want?”
  In the end I can’t bring myself to ask him to leave. I don’t want him to go. He chooses to stay.
  He calls her, every night now that it’s out in the open, with the calling card I bought him when I was still stupid and trusting enough to believe they were ‘just friends’.  He talks to her in the hallway for an hour while I cry on the couch. We still sleep together. I still hold out hope.  And it is killing me.
  I can no longer eat more than a few pieces of toast a day or sleep more than an hour a night. After a week I take up drinking. After two he notices the fifteen pounds I’ve lost and does the thing I’ve needed him to do all along. He leaves.
  “Only for a week” he says, “to give you a break.” And I am relieved and horrified at the same time.
  A week turns into three. And then she is visiting and he brings her over to see the cats. Right in front of me and I want to die. And then he’s getting the rest of his stuff. She goes back to South Dakota or North Dakota or where ever the hell she came from and he resumes visiting and sex a few times a week. I can’t say no. He might still come back. And he says he might.
  Two months later he helps me move. I am alone in the city now. I have no car, no friends, no relatives and now live in an unfamiliar neighborhood. He promises to come help me out, visit the cats.  We talk on the phone once. But I never see him again.
  Four and a half years later I think I see him on the train. He won’t look at me. I can’t tell. He’s only on for one stop. On and off so fast. It only might have been.

Mom was on the couch again. Just sitting there, rubbing her head with one hand, cigarette in the other. I wondered if she would notice it was noon and I was supposed to be in school. She ashed her cigarette in the too full ashtray and cringed. Rubbing her forehead some more she reached for an almost empty bottle of aspirin.
  She dry swallowed three. I never knew how she could stand to do that. She ran her fingers through her hair, roughly combing it. It didn’t help much. But when the light caught it just right, as it was now, it was this beautiful shade of gold, mess and all, and I wondered how she used to look.
  Then she turned one bloodshot eye towards me. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
  I walked across the room, stepping over a pile of newspapers, and sat down in the armchair. “Sent home” I said “inappropriate t-shirt.” I was only occasionally very good at lying so I didn’t mention that I was supposed to change clothes and go back.
  She ashed again, this time choosing a days old coffee mug with some stale coffee still in the bottom from among the clutter on the coffee table. Cups. An overfull ashtray. A lone spoon gleamed from the far side. Magazines held down by a pair of dirty salad plates, ashes and another too full ashtray. Mugs. An out of place shoe. A few beer cans.
  “Why do you do these things?” she asked as she stood up. And I had no answer for her. I wanted to ask why she did the things she did. But I didn’t.
  She looked at me again. “You used to be such a good girl.” she said, as she left the room. She sounded so tired

Dr. Schneider was there when I got there. So Dr. Schneider was who I got. He would come in every day during his rounds and ask me how I slept, like crap, and increase my med. I’m sure he asked me other questions too. But that was the constant. And sometimes the only. I complained about my stomach hurting to him. Enough that I got myself an upper GI exam complete with that nasty barium radium stuff you have to drink. Note to self: shut the hell up. And I did. They said there was nothing wrong with my stomach.
  Dr. Schneider talked to my dad. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what was said. But then he wanted to talk to my mom right away. And where the hell was she anyway? No one seed to know. No one had been able to find her. She was not in San Francisco. Her work confirmed there was no conference or training there for her to be at. Finally, after three days a friend was found that knew the truth about where she really was. Mom had been found. In jail. For her second DUI she had received six months jail time, suspended all but ten days. She had been doing those ten days. She was required to complete an outpatient program too. They wouldn’t let her out of jail to come see me but now, at least, we knew where she was. And that she couldn’t rather than wouldn’t come visit me.
  The day came when her ten days were up and she came to see me. Dr Schneider was there too. He wanted to talk with her as well. I was there for that meeting. I don’t know why he didn’t meet with her privately. But he didn’t. We all went into a private sitting room off the left hallway.
  It didn’t take long before she asked ‘The Question’. The one I wanted to know as well. He hadn’t brought it up, had left that to her. And maybe that was a calculated move on his part, planning how he wanted this to go the whole time. Or maybe he was just a bitter, mean little man who saw an opportunity and took it. Either way, it was the perfect set up.
  “So what’s wrong with my daughter?”
  And we all waited for an answer to that. But what we got was not what we were looking for. My being there was a mistake. Just a huge misunderstanding. And now my mom was here and she could take me home. And he could tell her that. OR he could say what he thought was wrong with me and how I had to take medicine and she could tell him he was wrong and it was a huge mistake the problem was clearly the school and how she was going to put me in a different school, one that wouldn’t hurt me and problem solved and she would take me home now. Because school was the problem, not me. I didn’t belong here, I wasn’t sick. There wasn’t anything wrong with me. It was the school. I was going to be hurt if I went there. And she could tell him that. She had seen how badly I couldn’t go there. I wasn’t sick. There was nothing wrong with me. I just couldn’t go to that school.
  “So what’s wrong with my daughter” she said.
  And without missing a beat , with the straightest face, in all seriousness, “You are. YOU are what’s wrong with your daughter.”

  …….WOW. That was unexpected. I hated Dr. Schneider. But at that moment I loved him too. I had a lot of pent up anger toward my mom, and here he was blaming her. I was fourteen and he was telling me it really was all my mom’s fault. I ate it up. The only problem was It wasn’t true. How could it be when there wasn’t anything wrong with me to be her fault. And how dare he talk about my mom like that. This wasn’t her fault it was his. This was HIS misunderstanding what I was trying to say about the school. And I would have tried to tell him that again but every time I tried I just seemed to make things worse. Besides I was safe here. The danger wasn’t so imminent, it didn’t feel so urgent.
 
  Over games of cards we would also talk about our doctors. Who had whom and who liked theirs and who hated theirs. Our meds and who was on what and our treatments and what was working and what wasn’t. Mostly they would talk and I would listen. I did make my feelings known through a drawing I did of Dr. Schneider with fangs and horns and I believe I even gave him a tail as well.
  I only took one med but had my blood drawn every few days. Others quite a few more and never had blood draws. A few had electro shock therapy. Jamie was one of them. He would go down for therapy two times a week and I wouldn’t see him all that day and half the next. His memory became an issue when they bumped him up to three treatments in a week, towards the end of my stay. It got worse and worse. One day he came up to me and told me it wouldn’t be long before he wouldn’t remember me at all and not to be upset, it wasn’t my fault.
  “I can’t even remember my mom sometimes” I cried when it finally happened.
  Jamie was caught trying to jump off the Suspension Bridge. His lover had left him. He wanted to die. Jeff had taken an overdose. His wife had left him. He wanted to die. Same scenario. Same doctor. Jamie got ECT treatments. Jeff got meds. Jamie deteriorated. Jeff did okay. Jamie was gay. Jeff was straight. Jamie came to me and protected me on my first day. Jeff spent thanksgiving with me after my mom left and every one else still had visitation for an hour. No one explained to me the extreme difference in treatments between the two with very similar problems and the same doctor. So, at fourteen, I came up with my own explanations. That doctor doesn’t come off so well in my idea for why this was as it was.
  The man in the room off the left hall got IV treatments several times a day. At meal times he was rolled into the nurses station in a wheelchair and fed through an IV tube. But he was in for AIDS not psych. His treatment was worse than the rest of ours, if only because he was no longer capable of complaining about it with the rest of us. I put up pictures in his room so he wouldn’t have to stare at blank walls, but I don’t know what good it did in the end.
  Which is worse, to be left in the psych ward to die. Or to be left in the psych ward watching someone else left in the psych ward to die. 

Joe came everyday in the afternoon to visit me. He rarely missed a day. Thanksgiving and there was a day I was refused visitation because I overslept. The doctor saw my regular visits and used them as ‘motivation’. If I wasn’t up and showered and dressed by ten a.m. I had lost visitation for the day. That only happened once and Joe was refused at the door that afternoon. But once he found out where I was he came often. Nearly every afternoon. More than my family came.
  He brought me all the gossip of our mutual friends and lots I didn’t know. All the news of Short Vine, the neighborhood area we hung out. He was very upset with all the people there. And he complained to me about them. Told me all the things they were doing and what he felt they should be doing. One of our friends had been beaten up by her boyfriend Walter, beat up bad, put in the hospital even, and he didn’t think they were upset enough. Angry (violent?) enough. He wanted to return the favor and wanted everyone else to, as well. That was the main complaint on most days. He hung out with the S.H.A.R.P. skinheads (skin heads against racial prejudice) and he was just starting to resent them. Thinking they were letting Walter off because he was black. Joe started to pull away from them, and so he would visit me everyday, telling me all the things they should be doing to Walter for what he did. Joe was angry. And hurt. What Walter did hurt more than just his girlfriend. And as long as I knew him Joe never got completely over it. Though he did get better in time.
  When he wasn’t complaining to me about what S.H.A.R.P. was or wasn’t doing he was giving me all the details about who was or wasn’t doing whom. Very juicy stuff. And who was doing it behind who’s back. Even better. Who got caught and who was clueless, pretty much like a soap opera, except most of the people I barely knew. But I loved hearing about it anyway. And one day knowing all these people better was my hope, getting out of the psych ward and hanging out with them.
  One day Joe came in while I was napping. He didn’t wake me up though. Instead I woke up to quiet laughing. Well, not quiet enough, I woke up anyway. Apparently Zanex makes me drool in my sleep. A lot. The whole pillow was wet. Hahahahaha. Very funny. And Joe just stood there and laughed. Quietly. At least he was trying to let me sleep?
  Another day he brought me a big bag of t-shirt. T-shirt and a trench coat. Olive with orange and green striped inner lining. I didn’t have any where to wear the trench coat but I did wear it a few times on the unit anyway. The t-shirts I wore everyday. I still had to wear my hospital pants and rope and slippers, but the t-shirts made my look complete. They were band t-shirts. Punk bands. C.O.C. Exploited. Circle Jerks. Black Flag. There were probably eight or nine in there.
  Joe liked G.G. Allen. If you don’t know who that is a good google session is in order. I thought GG Allen was disgusting. I think Joe probably thought so too. Maybe he was more fascinated with him than actually liking him. Or maybe it was just the shock factor and the shock factor of telling people that you liked GG Allen. (hint* look up gg Allen on jerry springer) I don’t believe Joe ever went to one of his concerts, although he threatened to go quite often. Any discussion of Allen, and it always turned to GG Allen, always, ended with the same “what would you do if you woke up in bed next to him one morning?” The only acceptable answer was, of course, suicide. The real question was ‘how did I get there?’ After all, I would not be going to one of his shows, whereas Joe would and could be drugged.  This was a conversation we had almost every day when he would visit. It was the appropriate setting for such a conversation. Maybe that’s why we were compelled to have it so many times. It was almost always interrupted by staff or other patients or something else. One time it was a page over the intercom for a “Dr. Slaughter”. That broke us up. We didn’t stop laughing for the rest of the visit. But I don’t ever remember coming to a conclusion about how I ended up in bed beside GG Allen. It had to be a believable scenario. What I would do about it didn’t even matter if I wouldn’t believe how I got there in the first place. And so the debate raged on. And still there is not a satisfactory answer. I just don’t know. Fortunately the man is dead and I don’t have to contemplate that particular question anymore. 

Its not like there weren’t some fun times. Aggravation was fun. Headache was fun. Daytime tv was lots of fun. At least back then it was. Looking back, 5C was the best place I was ever put in. There were some good times there. Even though it was illegal to put a fourteen year old on an adult locked unit. You had to be sixteen in an emergency. And they had to have made a suicide attempt at least. I wasn’t and I hadn’t. It was still the best treatment I got.
  Headache was a game we sometimes played. At first we played it a lot. You got to push the pop-o-matic bubble to see where your man would go. You tried to get your cone shaped man to land on top of, and thereby capture, another players man. It was fun. (The pop-o-matic bubble was the best.) Especially when there really was nothing else to do.
  As the days went on I was introduced to another game. One I had never played before. Aggravation. I ended up liking it better. No pop-o-matic bubble. But marbles with this one. And dice. It was also simpler to play. And quieter. We could play it later into the night. If we could be quiet ourselves, that is. And so it became more popular. Towards the end of my stay we didn’t play Headache at all anymore.
  Of course the card games were the most popular. You only needed two people to play, one really. You could always play solitaire.  Hearts, spades, gin, rummy, speed. We played them all. And cards were the quietest of all. You only had to shuffle, a whisper really compared to the dice and marbles of Aggravation that could be heard into the hall. And the pop-o-matic? That could be heard all the way to the nurses station if it was quiet.
  Then there was daytime tv. And by that I mean talk shows. And they were nothing like what they are today. Sally Jessie, Jenny Jones, Maury, Donahue, Joan Rivers. If you didn’t live through talk shows in their original form you really missed something. Geraldo had a talk show. Remember that? I do. I didn’t watch it in the psych ward though. We watched Sally Jessie and Jenny Jones,  Joan Rivers and sometimes Donahue. What daytime tv was meant to be. Sometimes I’d watch cartoons with Jeff. Back when they still had cartoons after school. They had them in the mornings before school too. Imagine.
  And school? The tutor only came over from the drug rehab for an hour and a half twice a week. That was it. She mostly taught me nothing. Everything she brought I had already been through. I think she was just there for show. Because, as a hospital, they had to show they were providing for my education. But no one expected much, I’m sure.
  Cards and games and daytime tv were a nice distraction from why we were there and how we all got there. They allowed us to talk and gossip and get to know each other. Learn each others stories. What else was there to do. Sometimes I would draw and color them in. The designs, all line drawings I still do today. They filled the long days and empty nights when some of us had no visitors.  We would drink hot chocolate (or coffee or sanka for the others, I stuck to hot chocolate) and eat individual ice cream cups from the freezer while playing and talking and smoking cigarette and after cigarette. I must have been smoking a pack a day while I was in there. Not that much compared to others but still a considerable amount compared to what I had been smoking.