Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin by Norah Vincent

your mind. That’s all you need. Keep it. Don’t let anyone take it away from you, because they will. Shit, I want your mind, too.”
    Like Deborah and Ellen, Clean also had his take on the matter. He thought a lot about power. Like so many of them—Deborah, with her ethnic shitpots, or Mother T with her not so extreme or uncommon apocalyptica—he reflected the prejudices and obsessions of his culture. He thought that all white people were German. Germany meant power. Again, the authoritarian tinge to the “crazy” person’s view, history cherry-picked for meaning, out of date, but symbolically in the ballpark.
    “Norma,” he asked me, “was Rome civilized?”
    “Yes,” I said, betraying my own distortions. “Once.”
    “And who’s Rome now?”
    “We are,” I said.

Still, let’s not get too high-handed about all this. The insane are not sages of ill repute, or martyrs of an empire in decline, standing nobly outside or above its vices, crying into the wind. They are deeply and indicatively of their culture, our culture. They are not ennobled by their suffering. They are like the rest of us. And so was I. I responded to them just as the system and everyone else did, even if for a moment I convinced myself otherwise.
    They were not, for example, immune to coveting possessions simply because they had none. If I gave, they wanted more. Always more. (How American.) And very quickly they ceased even to be grateful, becoming as entitled as the rest of us to our accustomed bounty. And when I gave, I became The Giver, the smarmy Samaritan who gets off on giving, the goody-good whom everyone admires, the blessed, kind answer to their prayers. And I began to loathe myself in this position, smiling beneficently, handing out my balms and prizes, graciously accepting thanks, and thinking all the while that God was working up one hell of a performance report for me that quarter. Cha-ching.
    But for a while, before the saintly stand-up gal routine started to make me sick of myself, and before it made me want to bury my greedy, grasping fellow patients alive under a pile of McDonald’s french fries—There! Choke on it!—I played the role. I made myself the wish granter of Ward 20.
    As I lay there, listening to Ellen cry that night under her shroud, I felt so goddamned overwhelmed by guilty thankfulness for the unjust accidents of birth that I resolved the next morning to make her happy, or at least backhandedly, gustatorily happy, the way a jailer grants the death row inmate a last meal and manages to feel magnanimous about it.
    “If you could have anything to eat tonight for dinner,” I said, “what would it be?”
    “Fried chicken,” she said. “And a Pepsi.”
    Ah, she was going to make this easy. How nice for me. I called my visitor for the evening and put in the order. I put in an order for Clean, too, who wanted cigarettes and McDonald’s, and Mother T, who needed a Bible, though she was too resigned to ask for anything, and Deborah who wanted McDonald’s too (they all did), as well as a National Geographic. By the end of my stay I was the delivery whore, passing out dollar burgers that I got by the half dozen, and fries, and sodas, and Hershey bars, and sticky buns and any other cheap sop I could think of or got a request for.
    But before long, the predictable happened. It was like filling a bottomless cup. I gave Ellen her chicken and her Pepsi, and though she thanked me profusely, fifteen minutes later she flagged me down and said:
    “You got anything else?”
    This happened with everyone, to the point where I couldn’t even eat my own snacks without rousing the scavengers. I’d have given away twenty candy bars minutes before, but the smallest rustle of a wrapper and they’d be on me.
    “Have some?”
    I hated myself for begrudging them, and felt like some kind of despicable closet pigger when I took to going into the bathroom to eat, coughing loudly to cover any suspicious sounds.
    Finally, when I