Deconstruction of the Blues

Theorizing Manhattan State

77 THEORIZING MANHATTAN STATE I was too young to be depressed by the pain the pain a gaudy jungle to me young lion roaring ideas FREUD HARRY STACK SULLIVAN MAX WEBER feel my patients from the inside watch their heads spell SCHIZOPHRENIA through a telescope in deep space But when I caught the bus at 125th St curved off the bridge onto Randall’s Island for the first time those lowsprawled tan rectilinear buildings were just spelling INSTITUTION spelling HUMAN ZOO NERVE CIRCUS As it turned out my friend and I we two college boys on our summer jobs were the only white attendants virtually all the others were black moonlighting out of Harlem and on my first day my supervisor a suave elderly Duke Ellington-ish tan man took me on a tour of the wards I stood before the glassed-in cell of a patient so violent he would attack anyone who stepped in with his hands and his teeth He nailed me awemummy hanging stiff batlike in the middle of his enclosure half naked smeared in shit 78 No way to understand He seemed to be an imploded saint inhuman in his power emaciated matted and filthy How could he have come to this? a baby a child to be chasmed eight feet from where I stared through the glass open mouth of yellow teeth in utter bestial lightlessness I locked eyes with an idiot slumped on a bench against the dayroom wall 200 lbs dense pooling of flesh His look rolled up as I passed and I saw his cock fisted through his hospital pants stiff purple glistening The look was soft astonished It didn’t waver but I thought I saw a flinching would I hit him? shout at him? borderless prehension of that idiot gaze I felt I could fall down into it I thought I could see into his head a crinkling down there submarine a waving like the tentacles of an anemone closing on its mouthparts “How do you like our little hotel?” Green my supervisor I found had been observing me courteous sardonic He made me conscious of my hospital whites the keys at my belt he made me feel like a fountain in a forest fire men prowling the hallways doubletime men jittering rocking men fixed in wry postures as if warped or crumpled in the flames 79 Green introduced me to Korash the patient who fucked his mother He didn’t tell me that though he let me find out on my own that Korash was Manhattan State’s dirty joke She visited him every two weeks “He’s a grown man And I have to take care of his needs Because I’m his mo-o-other . . . ” Then they’d go rushing he in pursuit she in the lead bent beneath her swollen packages Korash began almost to sing his words a barely audible lilting and stop lilt and stop Nonsense what’s called ‘word salad’ It surprised me to feel myself disliking him a smugness sucking himself as he sang And I couldn’t see into his eyes They were narrow too close together not cross-eyed but as if a pulverizing blow had knocked them out of true ballpeen crack so he was looking not at me but at an angle over my shoulder sucking singing Green though went trotting ahead “Alright, young man, let’s take you down to the ward where you’ll be working” Echoing round down the stairwell he said not another word That’s when my Manhattan State time really started 80 They gave college boy me the kushiest ward chronic schizophrenics in remission open ward not like the closed wards I’d been touring upstairs it felt sunny raucous On that first afternoon I took a short flight These were the men I’d become attached to Thompson Baylor my veteran attendants and the patients I’d reverse the upstairs become the fire myself a stove a forge so they could suck the heat of my health Then though I only saw they were irreducible so different from each other so many like me familiar my own anxiousness and sadness Belling outside names We were quick tunnels numbers on the same clock face ...