urine-soaked towels. Clarence and I carted them to the infirmary and later returned them to their wards.
“Shipping and delivery is all it is,” he said. “That’s all there is to it except when they got shit on their hands and smear
up the cart.” The patients moaned, whimpered, and shrieked. They cackled and hooted and drooled in a drug-induced stupor.
Clarence took it all in stride, but I had never imagined such a world. A bedsore would eventually heal, but what about the
patient’s more substantial problems? A regular hospital, with its cheerful waiting room and baskets of flowers, offered some
degree of hope. Here, there were no get-well cards or helium balloons, only a pervasive feeling of doom. Fate or accident
had tripped these people up and broken them apart. It seemed to me that something like this might happen to anyone, regardless
of their fine homes or decent education. Pitch one too many fits or spend too much time brushing your hair, and that might
be the first sign. There could be something hidden away in any of our brains, quietly lurking there. Just waiting.
“Spare me the details, Dr. Freud,” Lisa said, sitting in the front seat of the car as our mother drove us home that afternoon.
She had spent her day on the maternity ward, offering patients a selection of ladies’ magazines and paperback novels. “God,
I hope I never get that fat. Some of them looked like they’d swallowed a portable TV.” She wore a crisp red-and-white-striped
uniform and studied her reflection in the rearview mirror, rehearsing her smile in hopes of meeting a cute intern. Lisa didn’t
understand what I was talking about, but my mother did. Every night, rattling the ice cubes at the bottom of her highball
glass, my mother knew exactly what I was talking about. Health, be it mental or physical, had never been her family’s strong
suit. The Leonard family coat of arms pictured a bottle of scotch and a tumor.
After his shock treatments my grandfather returned home, where he spent the rest of his life coring apples and baking pies.
His children gone and his wife hypoglycemic, there was no one around to eat the pies, but that did not deter him. He baked
as if the entire U.S. Marine Corps were stationed outside his front door, drumming their forks against tin plates and shouting
in unison, “Dessert! Dessert!” Four pies in the oven and he’d be rolling out flag-sized sheets of dough for the subsequent
crusts. Twice a year we visited my grandparents’ house, where I recall pies cooling on every available surface: the window
sills, the television set, even the dining-room chairs. The man never said a word, but neither did he take another drink.
He just baked, dying, finally, of a stress-related heart attack.
I worked at Dix Hill all that summer and then again the following year until, at age sixteen, I took a paying job as a dishwasher
at a local cafeteria that had a practice of hiring outpatients. These were both current and former Dix Hill residents, grown
men who would occasionally weep in panic at the sight of a burned casserole tray. They’d get behind and take to hiding in
the stockroom or, even worse, in the walk-in freezer.
I went off to college and volunteered for class credit at a nearby state hospital. At Dix Hill I had functioned as an orderly
without keys. I’d had responsibilities, whereas here I was nothing more than a human cigarette machine. Two evenings a week
I would visit the fetid, stagnant ward and make small talk with women who wanted nothing to do with me. I was studying Italian
at the time and would attempt to practice my verb conjugation with a paranoid Tuscan named Paola, a patient in her late forties
with a perpetual black eye and a pronounced mustache. Some nights Paola could be very charming and helpful, while others she
seemed truly possessed, overturning the television set, attacking her fellow patients, and tossing lit cigarettes
“Shipping and delivery is all it is,” he said. “That’s all there is to it except when they got shit on their hands and smear
up the cart.” The patients moaned, whimpered, and shrieked. They cackled and hooted and drooled in a drug-induced stupor.
Clarence took it all in stride, but I had never imagined such a world. A bedsore would eventually heal, but what about the
patient’s more substantial problems? A regular hospital, with its cheerful waiting room and baskets of flowers, offered some
degree of hope. Here, there were no get-well cards or helium balloons, only a pervasive feeling of doom. Fate or accident
had tripped these people up and broken them apart. It seemed to me that something like this might happen to anyone, regardless
of their fine homes or decent education. Pitch one too many fits or spend too much time brushing your hair, and that might
be the first sign. There could be something hidden away in any of our brains, quietly lurking there. Just waiting.
“Spare me the details, Dr. Freud,” Lisa said, sitting in the front seat of the car as our mother drove us home that afternoon.
She had spent her day on the maternity ward, offering patients a selection of ladies’ magazines and paperback novels. “God,
I hope I never get that fat. Some of them looked like they’d swallowed a portable TV.” She wore a crisp red-and-white-striped
uniform and studied her reflection in the rearview mirror, rehearsing her smile in hopes of meeting a cute intern. Lisa didn’t
understand what I was talking about, but my mother did. Every night, rattling the ice cubes at the bottom of her highball
glass, my mother knew exactly what I was talking about. Health, be it mental or physical, had never been her family’s strong
suit. The Leonard family coat of arms pictured a bottle of scotch and a tumor.
After his shock treatments my grandfather returned home, where he spent the rest of his life coring apples and baking pies.
His children gone and his wife hypoglycemic, there was no one around to eat the pies, but that did not deter him. He baked
as if the entire U.S. Marine Corps were stationed outside his front door, drumming their forks against tin plates and shouting
in unison, “Dessert! Dessert!” Four pies in the oven and he’d be rolling out flag-sized sheets of dough for the subsequent
crusts. Twice a year we visited my grandparents’ house, where I recall pies cooling on every available surface: the window
sills, the television set, even the dining-room chairs. The man never said a word, but neither did he take another drink.
He just baked, dying, finally, of a stress-related heart attack.
I worked at Dix Hill all that summer and then again the following year until, at age sixteen, I took a paying job as a dishwasher
at a local cafeteria that had a practice of hiring outpatients. These were both current and former Dix Hill residents, grown
men who would occasionally weep in panic at the sight of a burned casserole tray. They’d get behind and take to hiding in
the stockroom or, even worse, in the walk-in freezer.
I went off to college and volunteered for class credit at a nearby state hospital. At Dix Hill I had functioned as an orderly
without keys. I’d had responsibilities, whereas here I was nothing more than a human cigarette machine. Two evenings a week
I would visit the fetid, stagnant ward and make small talk with women who wanted nothing to do with me. I was studying Italian
at the time and would attempt to practice my verb conjugation with a paranoid Tuscan named Paola, a patient in her late forties
with a perpetual black eye and a pronounced mustache. Some nights Paola could be very charming and helpful, while others she
seemed truly possessed, overturning the television set, attacking her fellow patients, and tossing lit cigarettes
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