6th and H: A Night in San Bernardino

As the sun set, the streets came alive with a menagerie of hustlers, pimps, tricks, beggars and street kids. All after either money or drugs. Without any of their own they turned to others for their prize.

Clearly an out of towner, I met the wanted, vulnerable profile. Young, white and well-dressed leading many to the conclusion that I had money to spend. During my short ventures outside, they descended upon me, asking for money, cigarettes and offering up their various services.

I was reluctant to leave the false reprieve of my fifty-dollar-a-night motel room, but I had to have what I had come for. I’d start in the motel parking lot, and if necessary cross the street to the gas station. Outside the air was heavy with a dry and toxic grit. This grit consisted of fumes from the cars and trucks traveling along the two interstates that divided the city into four quadrants. As well as the desert sand, that was carried by the winds. Trash blew freely through the streets.

Lawlessness hit you like a New York winter does immediately upon opening the door. Cars buzzed by with music blaring, past idling police cars that contained officers who were afraid of the streets they were sent to patrol. Women strolled by shifting their weight from side to side, clad in mini-skirts, fishnets and high heels, hollering at passing cars and potential Johns. A thirty-something Mexican man spotted me, and began to make his approach. He wore an eerie smile, a brazen and exaggerated one. One you wouldn't expect from someone's whose teeth weren't exactly well maintained. And then I saw it, the very thing that had brought us all to this God forsaken Southern Californian slum, a red grape-sized balloon clenched between his front teeth.

I nodded at him, and pulled out two crumpled twenties. He spat two balloons into his palm, passed them to me, and was gone. I heard the yelps of police cars in the distance, and considered putting the balloons in my mouth but decided against it. Instead they went into my pocket, where the twenties used to be.

Snowfall

It was a dismal reality, one that I was reluctant to acknowledge as my own. To awaken, if that's even the word, from a cocaine-induced suicidal psychosis, and find yourself in an all white room of a psychiatric hospital. White walls, white bed sheets, a white ceiling and the unrelenting buzz of a white fluorescent light. Even the floor was made of individually white linoleum tiles. Outside, everything was covered in a fresh coat of white January snow. I was tired and could sleep all day.

       For months leading up to my "break," I had held down a full-time job, and an even more demanding and more full time cocaine habit. Once inside, I was put back on my old medications: Seroquel and Celexa. Two cure-all drugs that psychiatrists hand out like candy, and both known to make you lethargic. Somehow I was still receiving two milligrams of Klonopin a day, that I would religiously cheek then crush and sniff once back in the privacy of my room. I would sit there and wait for the bitter taste to drip down the back of my throat, and feel all worry and emotion melt away. So that's what I did, slept all day, waking up only to eat and when mom came to visit me. She came every day, and brought lunch she knew I would like: Pastrami and Swiss, Diet Coke and pretzels. She remembered my minute preferences, even when there was so much more at hand than what I would have for lunch that day. I had become so accustomed to deceiving her: to concealing the extent of my desperation and misery. Our conversations consisted of small talk. I would lie about having read the spiritual Deepak Chopra books she brought me. She would tell me about work and the recent lay-offs. “You need to shave”, she said, as she gently rubbed her hand up and down against the side of my face. Unaware of just how much of a process shaving can be inside of a psychiatric hospital, “I know, I will”, I reassured her, with no intention of shaving supervised. The time always came for her to return to the office, which was a relief. Despite my abundance of sleep, I had very little energy and maintaining facades, even if only for 30 minute periods of time, was trying. She would return to work and worry, leaving me and my bed where I would find temporary solace through sleep.

Inside institutions, time leaves you behind. Sure there are clocks, but those numbers mean nothing. There was daytime, with three meals to serve as intervals. Then there was night time, a dark timeless void.

         One morning, or it could have been afternoon, I was awakened by Dr. Ivanov, the unit's Russian psychiatrist. She came into my room followed by several foreign note-taking interns and opened the curtains. She asked her routine questions, while the interns looked on as if I was a specimen, something to be studied. Then they were all gone as abruptly as they had arrived. I wanted nothing more than to return to my catatonic slumber, but I couldn't, not with sun spilling into the room through the window, only to be amplified by the whiteness of the room. I tossed my blanket aside and stood up quickly. I approached the window where the radiator's dry heat met the cold air permeating through the glass, allowing me to feel both simultaneously and bask in the contrast. Outside was barren and snow covered, void of people and color. I could see a playground, a closed playground equipped with a perimeter fence and signs instructing to "KEEP OFF." Fleeting and forlorn memories of a childhood once enjoyed surfaced. It suddenly became clear: I was living in a perpetual January: everything lost in past and present, as intangible as a playground in a never-ending winter. As distant as memories and dreams, soon to be forgotten, during a long wait for spring.