So Bad, Narrative @2001

It was the worst the first time. In the desert of southern California where I went mad for the first time. I wasn't necessarily more crazy at first it was just that Helen seemed to, orchestrate it to be so badly handled that I escalated exponentially to be totally psychotic. So that you might understand I will have to go back. From '87 when I was incarcerated for the first time to February of, I think, '85 when the whole California adventure began. I was happily working as a carpenter in Sun Valley, Idaho and mostly ignoring my terribly abusive wife, Helen.
We had had a so called marriage for six years of hellish fighting and frequent separations and reconciliations when she ran out of energy and money or just got kicked out by her boyfriend. I would take her in since I knew she was quite serious when she said she was going to kill herself. My God always told me that’s something that one simply cannot do so I would take her in. It was my job to keep her alive and one would think there might be some gratitude but then you don't know Helen. Immediately she starts in with her noisy, explicit, insistent demands of fidelity down to the merest glance and honesty to last dangling participle. Standards which she herself was of course free of. I didn't care much, I was in a good place and I just fought with her two or three times a day and left. Everything was in walking or biking distance, she could have the car and I stashed my tools on the job sites.
February came and impending layoff and the unemployment wouldn't cut it for Helen's porous fingers so I signed up for a hitch in Palm Desert, California with a local developer who had some land down there he was going to slap some apartments onto and make us all some quick cash. Something pulled me strongly to the job but there was also something else. I was scared to death for the first time in my life. I'd always been a praying kind of person, in a casual, relaxed, kind of way, but now my prayers became fervent and constant; anxiety ridden and deep into the night. Yes, I would go, but nothing would ever be the same and I would be tested. Man, I didn't know the half of it.
I'd been drawing a lot lately, really taking it seriously and having good results, all in pencil. Drawings took me months of careful, agonizingly detailed work. One day a week before I left I picked up a magazine with a bighorn sheep on the cover and the picked up a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen and in two days I had an excellent, detailed drawing of that bighorn completely filling an eight and a half by eleven sheet of drawing paper. I would find out two weeks later at a Palm Desert museum that it was a desert bighorn I had drawn and that the desert bighorn is the symbol of the Palm Desert area, used on all their logos, something I truly had no way of knowing.
And so I went in a carpenter caravan and landed in Palm desert at two AM on a desert winter morning, arriving along with the first valley floor snow in twenty years. Helen stayed back and from her communication her already strange spirituality became stranger by the day, lights flashing, strange dreams and supposed communications from the dead. Work went well but she showed up in a supposedly rented car (I found out later she traded considerable sexual favors for its free use).
Perhaps here a few more words about Helen would help. Most importantly she was not to be trusted, she was cute and sweet and charming and could not tell the truth to save her soul. I especially could not trust her, about anything in any way. The depth and breadth and height of this fault of hers cannot be understated. Not in any of the ways that human beings trust each other could I trust her. She would lie about what she ate for breakfast, if I turned my back she would make a face, she would steal my money and spend it on another man.. Why did I stay? She would have died by her own hand, I could protect myself from her quite well, but at the time her passions ran so deep, she couldn't protect herself from herself. Six years later when her passions had run down a bit and her suicide threats became mere power ploys, I divorced her, having done my job. One of the hallmarks of her life was obtaining money from people by various lies about her needs and health and such. Another was dealing drugs. Both would catch up to her when I was no longer around to keep her in check. Yet another was her penchant for odd spiritualities, this is what came strongly into play now.
She became deeply involved in the then current southern Cal vogue of "New Age" spirituality. In speaking with a group counselor later about all this his eyes would light up and he would say, “I see you are firmly grounded in the New Age." I said, "No, there is no such thing as firm ground in the New Age. I just know what its about." Its not new, it is very very old. It has poked up its head over the years usually as different forms of Gnosticism or solipsism. We make ourselves God and then anything we decide is spirit and truth is spirit and truth and of course the result is chaos and the very real powers that are at work in the world, evil powers, are made stronger and step into the gap left by the exclusion of the real God because that is their greatest and truly only tool, chaos.
So, Helen shows up supposedly needing money for the car and starts channeling spirits while I keep channeling her money. She gets me fired off my buddy’s tract, how, I don't really remember but she was good at getting me fired, did it several times. So I get a job on a golf course housing tract where the front door has a million dollar fountain and a bronze gate and tire spikes so you can't back up. You better know where you're going to get in that way. Me, I went in the back, a straight and narrow dirt road with a security card machine and a speaker that asked your name and job number just to double check. She keeps me up all hours of night battling her spirits while I'm working in multi million dollar tracts on million dollar homes on postage stamp lots in 117 degree heat thirty days a month. To say I was under stress is to understate a bit. When I dragged home she’d be sitting there smoking and say some thing snide like, "Have fun?" This meant, "Have fun looking at all the f______ girls all day?" Yeah, like they were letting all kinds of hot women in the back gate, maybe they were crawling over the broken glass embedded in the top of the twelve foot high brick wall in their bikinis? And that particular battle would play. This was nothing though. In the next act the phone would ring twice and she would answer it and the room would go quiet and chill and she would turn slowly to me and electricity would cross the room and she would have a different complexion and eyes and expression. And in a husky voice she would say something like, "Don't look for her here, she's gone, maybe for good this time," and a powerful, cruel but also sad smile would come. This personality would play cruel mind games with me until I decided I had to do something. The first time I finally just bundled her into the car (So strong a personality, she was strangely physically weak), and went for a drive. Our apartment was on the highway that led up into the San Jacinto Mountains so after just driving around town I headed up the mountain and the closer I got to the second lookout the more she became nervous though nervousness seemed foreign to her personality. As we got closer she suddenly convulsed and cracked her head sharply against the window and Helen was back, asking what we were doing and bitching about putting miles on the car.
This sort of thing continued for I'm not sure how long with various permutations, always hostile to me, sometimes claiming to be male, sometimes literally frothing at the mouth with hatred and loathing, her blazing eyes begging to do something to her I would regret. Sometimes claiming if I only joined them I could travel the country helping people "Highway to Heaven" style. I was pretty sure it was a highway somewhere else. One even claimed to be an angel sent to help me but the ridiculous things she had me do proved she could not be so even if I were inclined to stretch my imagination that far. I say all this from a rather distant perspective, a “spectators view” which I have had since childhood as a result of sexual abuse, but there was also another part of me that was, while not being entirely taken in, was wanting to believe in the good and was being totally shattered and torn by the evil. I'm sorry I can't write it from that perspective, it would not be coherent, but I will eventually try to give you some sense of it. I basically decided an evil spirit was out to get me and was using Helen to do it. Which really wasn't far from wrong, I just didn't realize she was cooperating, that she had to cooperate, or "It" as we called it, could do nothing. Yes, I believe in evil spirits, I'm Catholic, we're supposed to, but that is another story, or another part of this story I may not take the space to tell.
Through all this my work somehow did not suffer. I was now running a roof framing crew, figuring hips and valleys and rafters and trusses and sheeting and tails and supervising half a dozen guys. My perception of reality began to recede from me though. I became more and more of a spectator in my own life, watching, floating through my days and sleepless nights in a spiritual place that was far from my physical world. It may sound kind of nice but it eventually became terrifying, I didn't understand it, everything had spiritual ramifications and consequences, the smallest and meanest things to the most important. Some of Helen's New Age thinking began to confuse me. It felt like I was making my own universe, maybe I was. That was terrifying. I was steadily becoming more and more depressed. Each time I closed my eyes, when I opened them, the world seemed changed, dirtier, meaner, farther from the good. Was I the “Lathe of Heaven”? Did I change the world for the worse as I slept. I looked at Helen. As I became sicker, she seemed cleaner, healthier, purer. The demon had done much of his work so he receded a bit, though the inhabitations still occurred. I seemed to be a dwarf star and she my twin, circling a black hole, inexorably being sucked in. No matter where I went, what I did I could not escape my fate.
The phase of the tract we were working on came to an end and they cut back the crew, certain I was one to be cut I never returned, such was my self esteem. I later learned I'd been chosen to run the roof crew again. I have done such things to myself often. Certain I was out of work, my depression escalated a notch and though I soon found work it didn't last, the job was shut down by financial problems. Out of work again I wandered, I orbited nearer the black hole, drawing Helen with me. Suicide seemed to become an option, I spent days searching in the Santa Anna winds that were really the pull of the black hole for a way to kill my- self but I could find no lethal objects without breaking some law or other or leaving a mess for someone else to clean up. Strangely it never occurred to me to use the tools in my bag, there were many that would have sufficed, but I was out of work and didn't deserve to open it. I realized if I killed myself Helen would probably kill herself. And, paradoxically, I didn't think she would ever allow me to kill myself, perhaps projecting my own values onto her, so the thought occurred to me I would have to kill her first in order to kill myself and I was over come with self-loathing at the thought. How could I even think such a thing? She was so beautiful, so pure, so wonderful, how could I think of harming her? I had chosen this time to forget all the horrific abuse she had put me through. I came home from wandering all day to find her saying she had been worried, take a shower, put on your new clothes, you'll feel better she said.
Most people, one would think, when faced with a spouse in an emotional and spiritual crisis might call a friend to help, or a family member, or a clergyman, or a mental health counselor. Helen called the cops, sure to make my anxiety go up, but then she wasn't trying to help me feel better. In fact, as I was soon to find out, she was sowing seeds sure to make matters worse. As I came out of our bedroom, there they were, in full regalia, night sticks and guns prominent. In my state I was certain they all read my mind, I was afraid I was going to hurt Helen and they were here to protect her. These guys are trained to help you Mark, you can trust them, she says. Soon I was alone in our bedroom with one of them and admitting my awful thoughts. Why not, they already knew, thats why they were here. Red flags were going up for him though he didn't want them to. We had had very positive dealings with these two before, we had started a neighborhood watch program and gotten a child out of a very abusive home and they liked us. (I was to find out later that Helen's involvement in the neighborhood watch was an excellent cover for her drug dealing.) These guys were in a quandary as to what to do until Helen brings up her big lie of the evening, that I was abused by my father and both cops take up the thread like they’d discussed it before and I blew up. My Dad was one of the few men in my life that was not abusive to me as a child and in my heightened emotional state I just couldn't take another lie, and to the cops at that. My paranoia went wild, they could get to him somehow through this, harm him somehow, I couldn't let that happen. I struggled, they cuffed me and I was in the back seat and under involuntary commitment headed for the nearest hospital which just happened to be The Hospital of the Rich and Famous. If you are thinking this is quite possibly the worst way to handle a near psychotic person, you're right, but it gets worse.
So we take the short ride to The Hospital of the Rich and Famous while paranoia and anxiety and all your basic psychoses are swirling in my brain but I'm still remarkably somewhat in control. They then stick me in a stark white safe room with padded walls and a wire mesh window in the door that an ambulance driver keeps playing peek-a-boo-haha-with-the- crazy-guy through the whole time they are debating what to do with me. Of course they don't want me but I'm a danger to myself and others so they have to but I'm too paranoid to sign any admitting papers and Helen is of course nowhere in sight to help out. Probably toasting her great triumph at some bar. So I'm escalating the whole time and after hours of pacing and games with the hilarious ambulance driver I'm strapped into one of the shirts with long arms and onto a cart and into the ambulance for the one hundred and twenty mile ride to County General. Comforting thought, isn't it. The one saving grace was the person who rode with me was a strong, silent man with an easy, gentle manner. I assume Mr. Peek-a-boo was driving. Of course the ambulance was riding the solar wind to the center of the black hole, to the end of the line, to hell, to a place not unlike Dante's Inferno which I had been catching glimpses of in my wanderings. I had found a curious strength in myself, though, I had found that if I only concentrated well enough, perfectly enough, I could break my bonds with my mind and go free, but it had to be the right time. It seemed to come when the ambulance slowed gently to a stop and remained so. Is this it? I asked. I don't know he slowly said. The end of the line? No. My last chance then? A stoplight I think. Maybe now, break my bonds and go out across the desert and hide in the many unfinished homes and find my way north, back to Sun Valley. We began moving again. Oh no. Was that my last chance? I don't now. Silence for miles as my mind floated and flamed into passionate breaking of all bonds of the oppressed and waned into peacefully wandering away into the night to the certainty that I was going to the end of the line, never to emerge again. Lights, many powerful lights and a strong audible click and stop. End of the line, the black hole, the wind had stopped. Hell. And I somehow deserved it.
I was wheeled into a hallway, a cold, dirty white hall, inhabited by the sort of Dantean characters I had been envisioning. Several accident victims in various stages of being repaired, all bleary eyed and bloody. One, in a wheel chair and cast noted my straight jacket and comments, "They must not trust you." Why not? I thought, I have hurt no one. Stumbling 'round the halls seemed to be mental patients as well, shivering and wailing and trembling. Calling out for help. This truly was hell, but as I looked in the eyes of these people I realized there was some mistake, these people were not evil, they were innocents, they were not meant to be here. I must free them, yes I must free them. I was left alone in the hallway, now was the time I would break my bonds and theirs and we could all be free. We can be free if we only will it so. I began to cry out so, be free, you can all be free. I struggled mightily with my bonds and screamed freedom to all. Huge orderlies came and dragged me towards the elevator to the secure rooftop area but had to choke me out to subdue me I was so certain of my mission. I awoke in the elevator in full restraints, arms and legs. One of the huge attendants apologized, saying he hated to choke someone out like that. I thought if only I had had more time, more focus, we would all be free.
In full restraints I was placed on a bed in a small secure room with bars on the windows. I had to call the attendant to pee into a bed pan and slurp soup while still fully restrained. I have no idea how long I was like this, I remember but one night but it may have been many. I awoke from that one night to see Helen and her mother standing over me. I was to be freed to a regular room. Helen claimed if it wasn’t for her they would have never let me out of there. Right, if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have been in there,but I was still oddly under her spell and couldn’t see that. I remember hearing someone say the ones who come in the worst like that rehab the quickest. But now she was involved again, the one who put me here is here again, but as I said I had not yet put that together, I was glad to see her. The rest of the stay is a bit of a blur. Within a few weeks I was released to a halfway house where I met Gloria whose testimony appears elsewhere in this volume. Within a week I was pulled out by Helen and her mother. "He just needs to get out of that loony bin and get back to work!" Right, in the care of the very person most responsible for my being there. And yes, I went right back to work, unmedicated as I could not afford the thorazine they gave me and it did me no good anyway. A relapse was all but assured. While I was incarcerated Helen had gone back to Sun Valley and gotten out of a lot of bills and other troubles by telling people I had died in a an uninsured construction accident. Several years later there were quite a few people very surprised to find me alive.
The relapse came within six months. There was the same kind of spiritual game playing on her part and lots of job politics going on in my work I didn't need, either. Helen decided to move to Idaho for what reason, I'm not sure other than she had been raised in a town near the one she picked, we'll call it Pike. Somehow she construed it to be my idea. Each time I closed my eyes my depression deepened, my world clicked down a notch, once again meaner, dirtier, nastier with each night or even nap. I could feel the click down of my world, like the click of the ambulance locking into the bay at County General. The black hole started swirling again, the only way out, to kill Helen and then myself. Let me assure you I had never harmed her, though she had grievously harmed me often, the very thought of harming her sent me into paroxysms of guilt. The deeply spiritual cast to everything deepened even more, with spiritual evil ascending and I descending.
With great anxiety and trepidation on my part we set out on our move. Such a stressful thing as moving is another thing one does not want to do with a near psychotic person, but she was not inclined to care for me. We stopped for lunch in a little Utah town in the midst of a minor snow storm, it may have been June, I don't know. I noticed a small hospital, a place of safety for a person in extremis like me. She drove out onto the freeway for several miles. My brain was whirling I can't go on, there is a blizzard up ahead there is death in this pickup and I cannot stand it any more. She would say I tried to strangle her but all I did was turn my hands toward her then open the door at sixty miles an hour and put my foot in the snow and yell at her to stop. I tumbled out at about forty five and brushed myself off and stumbled slowly, zombie-like across the freeway. We'd been going uphill and I remember no traffic in those lanes but as I crossed the median I saw an old white semi coming down the hill. The driver was visible and his "Oh shit" was almost audible as he locked up and almost jackknifed on the snowy road. I continued my zombie-walk unperturbed into the next lane as a brand new shiny black semi crested the hill doing about ninety. There was no "Oh shit" here, no response at all from the driver dressed in black with black mirrored shades. He knew there was no way he could do anything at all to avoid me. He knew it was all up to me. If I had slowed my pace but a fraction I'd not be here today, if I'd taken one less step I'd have been scattered for hundreds of yards down the freeway. I had my choice and I made it, I took that one last step and the semi wind whipped warm exhaust and cold, stinging ice crystals through my thin shirt as I stood watching death fly down the hill doing ninety in the slow lane.
I walked down the hill after him toward the little Utah town and its little hospital where I would get some help and call my mom and dad to maybe come pick me up. They were divorced but they would come together on something like this. I wasn't hitch hiking but a man stopped and picked me up. He was like the guy in the ambulance, strong, but gentle. I asked where he was going, he said anywhere you want to go. I said the hospital he said OK. We got there just fine and I called my mom but who should show up but my lovely wife and three huge state troopers who took me into custody and finger printed me and put me in jail for the night. Thats my Helen, always comes through in a pinch. It wasn't too bad except for when the urinal next to my bed was flushed and wouldn't stop running and I had a river running into the drain under my bed all night. And the anxiety attack I had early that morning that they gave me Haldol for that locked my jaw then the Valium they gave me that helped my jaw but my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth all day. My brother came and got me out the next day and well, something made those troopers change their minds because they were saying "Y'all come back now" and such when I left and Helen was nowhere to be seen.
To make a long story a little shorter I stayed in a psyche ward in the capital for a few weeks and got out and eventually got free of Helen as I said and have had ups and downs with my illness, nothing more so dramatic but some episodes just as severe, they were just handled right and didn't escalate like these two did. I need to make something very clear here, what I blame Helen for, beyond twelve years of abuse, is the extravagant escalation of and the incarcarations during these episodes. I do not and cannot blame her for the presence of my illness. She contributed to the severity of it, but not to its existence. Its existence, I believe, is part heredity, part childhood sexual abuse and part a lifetime of disfunctional thinking and unhealthy handling of stress. I was depressed and experienced anxiety before I ever met Helen. Had we not had a relationship perhaps I would never have gone completely psychotic, though I would have been vulnerable to it, and I still would have been ill. The psychotic breaks I’ve had have left me broken in subtle and not so subtle ways that can never be repaired. Though I have achieved a fairly high level of functioning I have never been the same and right now consider myself to be functioning at about 60% of my capacity. Once your mind has completely failed you , been completely out of your control, you can never completely trust it again. This sets up a fundamental insecurity that subtly underlies your life. I've been hospitalized twice since these two episodes and nearly hospitalized a few more times. I say the illness is king, I just adapt to it and the various medications that I take to battle it. Its always there, never really gets better, sometimes gets worse, and a good day is when I'm not afraid.

@2001