God, if You're Not Up There . . . (27 page)

One night I called her a bully.

She said, “You’re rude. You want your daughter to be like you?”

“If my daughter thought she was being picked on by a bully, I would want her to be like this, yeah.”

She was also in charge of who got urinalysis and who got cavity-searched. She was always making the Mayor pee in a cup in front of her so she could see the pee exiting her body.

One night in Group, in front of everyone, the tough-love counselor on our floor carefronted, aka humiliated, Juanita, a voluptuous twenty-five-year-old girl who had been living with a sixty-year-old man who supplied her with crack in exchange for her favors. She was not allowed to leave the house or have friends. Juanita wanted to be a graphic artist, to go to a sober house, to get her five-year-old daughter back. It was a miracle she’d gotten herself into rehab. You have to be gentle with someone who’s been traumatized, and the tough-love counselor got it all wrong.

Juanita flipped out and walked out of the room. We could hear her at the pay phone calling the sixty-year-old, screaming and crying. Within a few minutes, she had packed her meager possessions in a duffel bag and left. We looked outside and saw her get in the car. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what was going on in there.

One patient, who’d recently been paroled after a twenty-year stretch in prison, said, “Damn! Motherfucker is gonna get some twenty-five-year-old pussy this eed’nin’!”

Everybody but the Mayor started laughing. Evidently the sixty-year-old had brought drugs, and she was making her first payment for them right there in the front seat.

I heard that the Mayor walked up to the counselor and said something like, “You’re a disgrace to people who are trying to change their lives. You can’t be abusive to someone who’s been through what that girl has been through. If you were any good, you’d know that.”

Later, I said to her, “Wasn’t that a little harsh?”

“That girl is gone. She could OD on crack any time. This woman has injured a patient, and that patient is fucking gone.”

All of the addicts there were looking for a reason to bail. One of the doctors compared us to people on a relay team waiting for the baton to be given to us. We welcomed anything that could push us into victimhood so we could hate and drink and use.

There was one twenty-something kid named Arthur who’d been traumatized so badly he couldn’t speak at first. When he did begin to talk, the Mayor gave him an audience all the time. He was friends with Juanita, and when she got in the car with her captor, he was heartbroken. The Mayor spent a lot of time with him that night, explaining that he would find another friend one day.

There was one patient the Mayor couldn’t get to, an eighteen-year-old Angelina Jolie lookalike with cascades of shiny hair. She wandered around in tiny tank tops and low-slung pajama bottoms with no underwear. I saw her walk up to one patient on methadone maintenance and say, “Come party with me.” She took him outside into the dark night to do whatever he wanted in exchange for some of his methadone. At first I thought people were taking advantage of this young thing, until I realized it was the other way around. She would let the women feel her up in order to get stuff from them too. Some people were on Ativan, some people were on Klonopin, some were on Seroquel. Some of the patients cheeked their meds, pretending to take them, then spitting them out when the nurses weren’t looking to use as currency later.

She walked into Group one day fully stoned and said, “I’ll suck any dick, I’ll eat any ass, I’ll even fuck that fat piece of shit.” She pointed to a minister who did volunteer work for addicts and criminals.

One night she told me she wanted to give me a Steaming Carl.

“First of all, you’re eighteen, and my daughter’s almost a teenager,” I said. “And second of all, I’m almost embarrassed to ask this, what is a Steaming Carl?”

She described an act that would have been at home in a German
Scheisse
movie.

“Okay, that would be a no.”

Why is it that all the seeming goddesses who have hit on me throughout my life are batshit crazy?

T
he staff thought it would be nice to bring the patients from all fourteen wards together for a karaoke night. Everyone was herded into an enormous hall. There were about twenty tables, each covered with bowls of “fun size” candy bars and bags of chips—every form of sugar or artery-hardening substance known to man. They brought in a technical team to set up a big video screen with the words to songs written across the bottom. You haven’t really lived until you’ve had karaoke night in a psychiatric hospital.

As people mingled with one another, they would introduce themselves by saying their name and which ward they were from: schizophrenic, borderline, manic-depressive, depressive disorder, eating disorder. There were some really good singers, including one bulimic woman who was all bones but for her beach-ball belly; she was pregnant.

Then there was Tony, a Johnny Depp lookalike with an enormous phallus (wait, there’s a point to this) and brain damage from years of meth abuse. He was the sweetest guy, always doing little favors for people. “You need milk in that coffee, man? I could get you some milk. I could get that.” He’d also expose himself to the other patients in exchange for their meds, which everyone seemed to find hilarious.

Tony occasionally saw people who weren’t there. He’d walk across the room to say hello, then have to pretend that he’d gone over there for some other reason. He’d grab his dick, then stroll back to his chair like John Travolta at the beginning of
Saturday Night Fever
. Tony tried to sing “Respect.” When he got to the part, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” he became flustered. He walked away from the microphone to say hello to an imaginary visitor, grabbed his dick, then came back to the mic after that part had finished and resumed singing.

But honestly, it was a wonderful night until someone put Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” on. All at once, it dawned on the patients that he had died not long before of a horrible overdose. Near-death experiences were what connected us all. People at the different tables, with their different maladies, began to get upset in textbook ways, each according to his own affliction. We had all been triggered, and it quickly turned into a melee of screaming and crying and twitching.

The nurses came rushing in like a mom saying, “Everybody out of the pool!” to herd the patients back to their wards. They spewed the little catchphrases they were always saying to the patients.

“Easy does it.”

“Fake it till you make it.”

“It’s not about getting out of the rain, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.”

I never did find out which one of the lunatics chose that song.

O
ne night toward the end of my stay at the Sanctuary, the eighteen-year-old in the pajamas and a thirty-year-old stripper she palled around with decided we should play Would You Rather . . . . They wrote out suggestions on scraps of paper, and we were all given a few to read aloud. Each one was more foul than the last: assholes, cocks, balls, vaginas, camel toes, blow jobs, golden showers, fisting, diarrhea, cum, dildos, bestiality, erectile dysfunction, gangbangs, bologna, incest, cock-chugging, it was all on the table. (I have to confess I introduced “cock-chugging,” which I’d gotten from Eddie. It was an immediate hit in the criminal ward.)

In the middle of it, Arthur the trauma patient blurted out, “Would you rather be raped or be a rapist?” He stood there looking at the ground, his hands shaking violently, his mop of brown hair covering his face. The Mayor talked quietly to him until he stopped shaking.

Tony kept going up to the Mayor and saying, “When am I gonna hit that shit?”

“You don’t want to hit this, honey,” she said. “It’s too much for you. This is for the big boys.”

N
ot long before the Mayor was due to check out, she sat me down to talk. I knew what was coming.

“We can’t be friends on the outside,” she said. “I’m a criminal. I like to steal, and I’m a junkie.”

I asked her why she liked to steal so much.

“I never had a chance. I was kidnapped. My dad was a drug addict, he OD’d. I was left on my own in Mexico. I never had a chance to go to school and join clubs and date. I didn’t have a childhood, and it wasn’t my fault. I’m owed. I go to Wal-Mart to practice, but Wal-Mart is dick. I like to steal from the big people. I fucking deserve it.”

What allegedly got her into the Sanctuary was that she had stolen countersurveillance equipment from the NYPD, and the CIA had arrested her. She had no intention of getting better. She’d only come here to avoid prison.

My doctor told me, “You know she’s a sociopath, don’t you? You can’t catch her in her cons. She feels these things when she says them, but she doesn’t intend to have a meaningful relationship with anybody.”

“Did the CIA really arrest you?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

A rather sobering answer. If she really had been arrested by the CIA, that seemed like a deal breaker to me. I will hang around just about anybody, but that was too much. And if it didn’t happen, and she’d made that shit up? Hell, I think that would be even worse, wouldn’t it?

A few days after the Mayor was released, she called me on the cell phone I’d eventually been given permission to have. She had driven her car into a tree, she was high, and she’d stolen someone’s stash, which was apparently in the car with her.

While we were on the phone, I heard her say, “Officer, what am I being booked for?”

“Leaving the scene of an accident, felony narcotics, and DUI.”

I knew she was on parole with the condition that her urine tested clean. She was fucked. “I want you to forget you ever met me. I’m going away for a long time.”

I have to admit, I was a little bit crushed, but I wasn’t surprised.

A couple of days letter, a package arrived from her with a pair of Nike sneakers and a note that was signed with a number 7. I guess I must have told her how obsessed I was with Mickey Mantle.

Dr. K. looked at the note and said, “She’s good. But I’m not going to let you keep the shoes.”

“Why can’t I keep the shoes?”

He thought she was capable of planting a chip in the shoes. “She’s going to find out where you live, and one day she’s going to come for you.” I didn’t keep the shoes.

D
r. K., the Sanctuary’s resident genius, a small Moroccan man with a disarming smile who the world’s power structure sent their fucked-up children to, explained to me that when you have been tortured and beaten by your mother, when you’ve had suicides in your life by people you’d exchanged I-love-you’s with, and you’ve been cursed with a progressive fatal illness you didn’t ask for, your brain starts searching for a way to explain it. Most of the time, your brain says, “It’s because of you. That’s why your mother hit you, cut you, slammed your hands in the door.” You think you’re shit, you think you’re worthless, you think you’re unlovable, you think you can’t do this, you can’t do that. Life is always bad. Your brain has tried to simplify a perfect storm because it’s so confusing. Why would this shit happen to me?

One day early in my stay he came to my room and said, “Do you believe you are the kind of person who is willing to frighten the people who care about you for the sake of your anger? Are you willing to sacrifice your life for it? Are you willing to take this all the way to the grave?”

As he stood in my doorway to leave, he said, “I would suggest to you, Mr. Hammond, that you are.”

What must it be like to wake up in the middle of the night unable to find your husband, knowing that he’s been in the emergency room with cut wrists before? It must be terrifying, especially when there’s a child. I don’t know that you ever fully repair trust. How do I make amends for the way I behaved when I believed that I was entitled to everything because I was mistreated?

After the doctor left my room, I looked out the window into the bleak snowscape outside, no friends, no family, no money. My credit cards and my phone had been taken away. I was completely cut off from my life. A few years earlier, Drew Barrymore had treated me to a burping exhibition. Sean Connery told Jay Leno on
The Tonight Show
that I did him better than he did himself. Gwyneth Paltrow held my baby daughter, and Kate Winslet taught her how to pucker up for a kiss.

How in the same lifetime could I have had Tom Hanks telling me he’d been honored to work with me on my final show? Compliments from Bono and John Mayer. Lengthy discussions with David Duchovny and Sylvester Stallone. Tom Brokaw sharing a story with me in the hall about visiting the beaches of Normandy. Meeting John Kerry and mistakenly introducing him to someone as Trent Lott. Hanging out with a shirtless, cigar-smoking Chris Matthews in his backyard while he talked about his favorite photo of Babe Ruth. E-mails from Maria Bartiromo, Katie Couric’s voice on my answering machine, asking me to imitate Matt Lauer as a favor. Hell, I’d kissed both Paris Hilton and Monica Lewinsky in sketches.

These things kept whizzing through my mind as I sat there, filled with the first healthy shame of my life, with no way to contact anyone, no wallet, no e-mail, no connection at all. How could I have lived in that world and lived in this one as well?

I
n
Les Misérables
, Jean Valjean is imprisoned by a sadistic guard for nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving child. He’s tortured, beaten, put on the rack, whipped. When he comes out, he determines that he is going to take his rage out on the world. He meets a priest one evening who invites him in to stay for the night and get out of the cold. The priest gives him wine, bread, and meat, a nice place to sleep. Jean Valjean repays the priest by getting up in the middle of the night and stealing all the priest’s silver.