The Conard File [begin November 15, 2019]:
(Dispatches
from the mental health system)
Sarah
made her first batik and gave it to me as a present. It was a fish. She was
unilaterally in love with me. She was 43 and I was 28 and this was in San
Francisco. We were residents of the halfway house Conard for mentally ill
people.
Before
I moved in I was at the Chinatown YMCA, renting by the month. My father had put
me there after I was released from Napa State Hospital. The year was 1977 and I
already been homeless once. When I lived at the YMCA I ate mostly Chinese
cream-filled buns at a pastry shop at Wavery Lane, an alley off of Grant
Avenue, the main street of Chinatown. My father had given me $1,000 and some
nice clothes. He figured that I would bounce right back into economic life, but
I disappointed him, because even at age 70 today, I never made it back to the
workforce.
How
do you account for yourself, mister? When I take occupational preference and
skills tests I always get accounting and it tells me to work for the FBI and
the CIA. A bit of forensic accounting will flush out the criminals and their
money trail. I smell the money, I smell the green. It is because I am good in
math. But such a job is drudgery as far as I am concerned and it is not that I
am unable to work physically or mentally, but it is that I am emotionally
unable to work. And there is a reason for it.
“They
told him to go back to work, and he pleaded that he wasn’t ready. They said
that his disability compensation was over and he needed to go back to work. That
night he jumped off the roof and died.” It was not Franz Kafka who juried his
disability; it was the State. And the man who related this story was the brother
of the said dead man. This was not a major event in a big US city. It was the
small town of Aberdeen. When logging and fishing ceased in this small town,
there were a lot of alcoholism, teen pregnancy, and crime. I lived here and
when I was very young, I started working. An independent contractor was my
first job at age 12. I had a paper route. Then the jobs got heavier and heavier
but that wasn’t why I broke down.
It
was a built-in genetic time bomb. It reminds me of the cartoon in a terrorist
training camp. The teacher demonstrating suicide bombing said to the student
terrorists around him and said, “Now watch very carefully! You are only going
to see this once!”
And
when I was exploited by my family and the State sufficiently I judiciously
broke down. Even a machine needs oiling but I was not perceived to have any
needs. And when one is pulled from both ends vigorously enough, he will snap in
the middle. All that is left of this man now is the sad and urgent lesson not
to treat others this way. For in the long run, you cannot whip the horse
forever to go at top speed and never feed it grass. But maybe “grass” was part
of the problem. The government didn’t take care of its youths well enough and
offers no guidance. Thrown to wolves are many young and impressionable young
men and women. They are sold a false paradise.
Meanwhile,
at Conard, Ben found the suicide note. John had left a big pot of spaghetti in
the basement kitchen sink and it was turning green on red. He had not been seen
for over 72 hours and so Mrs. Wake the director called the police and they
found John walking towards the Golden Gate Bridge. He was taken to SF General
for observations. This was a blow to the Conard management. They did not screen
carefully enough and this is a statistic they didn’t want. Government grants
and private donations depend on what kind of positive reports Conard can give
them for their money. Everybody’s motive seems pure enough – the patients want
to get well, the staff want to have success stories, and the donors really want
to feel they make a difference. And so Dr. Stone the consulting psychiatrist came
and address the group meeting, a pep talk.
Every
resident had a psychiatrist of their own or have a day-treatment program at a
mental health center. When I first moved in my psychiatrist, Ron Smothermon,
was writing a book and he gave me chapters to read as he drafts them. It was a
book about relationships. Ron obtained his medical degree from a Texas
university and he was a firm believer in medication. Back in 1977, many
psychiatrist and therapists thought that talk-therapy was efficacious. But now
I can see that you can talk with me all day, and if my brain was scrambled by defective
biochemistry, you will simply make no sense to me. I would be lost to delusions
and illusions, not to mention inappropriate elations and depressions. I might
not even feel I had a reason to live. Some honestly didn’t feel that way or
felt that no one cared and so like John they would be thinking about walking
towards the Golden Gate Bridge.
But
for the rest of us, Conard was a reprieve. The rent was cheap, we had 24/7
supervision, we had each other, including the Yale dropout James who took Janie
by the hand and used my room for sex, because Jim and Janie’s roommates were
home and my roommate Allen the photographer wasn’t. I couldn’t refuse them
because they had an urgent need. Sex and sexuality were quite open for just a
decade ago, all the flower children descended on San Francisco. I was there
that time too. I spent two summers 1969 and 1970 at North Beach which borders
Chinatown and the Italian neighborhood. I had gone down there because my
hometown friend from Aberdeen was there. He was gay and had a partner. Due to
my puritanical training as a Chinese kid of Confucian parents I did not take
part in sex of any kind, not yet, and there was a horrendous opportunity for heterosexual
as well as gay sex, because in San Francisco the women outnumbered the men and
so many men were gay. At least that was what seemed to be the case.
Conard
itself is an old Victorian house that survived the 1903 San Francisco
earthquake. It had been a hotel for world travelers. It is so interesting that
the electrical outlets were still capped by a steel cover because they back in
1903 believed that electricity would “leak” the same way that natural gas would
leak. It consisted of three floors and a basement. As far as the patients were
concerned, the third-floor kitchen was the “intelligentsia” of Conard. It was
here when Maria the well-bosomed woman of Greek descent asked me whether I
liked Chinese girls or American. I said I didn’t know. I was that naïve. I said
I didn’t know and that was one reason why I was at Conard. She had a different
motive though. She was deciding between me or Ben. Ben is younger than Maria
but he was the loud type and his father was some kind of military big shot. The
only time Ben showed any deference to anyone was when I was demonstrating my martial
arts kick in the house’s main living room. He said, “I wouldn’t want to walk
into that.” So, Maria and Ben became a couple and rode around on his
motorcycle. Yes, people pair off and change partners once in a while. My turn
will eventually come with Loraine.
I
don’t want the reader think that all this is amounts to no more than sex and
suicides. But since most of the people at Conard are from their twenties to
their forties, with most of the in their late twenties, and mental illness was
quite new and in most ways unexpected, some, like me, thought it was just an
inconvenient stage of life, like the acne stage of their late teens. And the
management at Conard had “great expectations” of us [you know, that is the only
thing about Charles Dickens that I could ever empathize with]. I found out that
I could go to Cogswell College on a CETA scholarship and so I went there and
majored in Safety Engineering. One of the courses was industrial chemistry, and
we learned about the many ways to put out chemical and electrical fires. We
even make plastic. But let me tell you, having a mentally ill guy in the chem
lab was taking a chance. I could have easily dumped some acid into another
container of acid and have it splatter on everyone’s flesh. I almost did that. All
my classmates ignored me until the teacher said that “one student” made a super
improvement from the first exam grade to the second, and by then, valences and
orbitals were above everyone’s head, and so they all wanted me to have a cram
session for the final. This kind of utilitarian friendship I did without.
The
chemistry thing goes back to my high school in Aberdeen. Since working in our
family restaurant beginning at age twelve and assuming full responsibility in
the kitchen by age sixteen, I learned to cook. And high school chemistry was
just like cooking but with Bunsen burners instead of a wok. And since I was
good in math, algebra especially, I can balance chem equations well. All the
girls wanted to be my lab partner. Again, you see how naïve I was? I didn’t ask
them out for a hamburger but instructed them how to write the lab report. I
never like this kind of paperwork. And I ended up with the highest grade and
reputation in high school and the chem teacher, Mr. Sieler, gifted me with a
set of chem handbooks with my name engraved in gold on the cover. And I was selected
as one of six people from our high school to attend a special conference by MIT
in Seattle. I was impressed of course, but later, when I applied to MIT, I
wrote that I would either study electrical engineering or literature. I was summarily
rejected. I very much doubt if I would have succeeded there being born a
village boy who tracks mud into your dining room. I think had I been accepted
to MIT, my mental illness would either never have occurred or that it will
never be discovered by others, unless I was in a Walmart shopping mall.
But
here at Conard I studied chemistry with a little woman sitting on my lap in the
third-floor kitchen. Her name was Iris and she was of French descent. She said
that her father used to dress her in tights and take her to parties where she
would strum the guitar and sing “Five Hundred Miles.” The reason she was at Conard,
she said, was because she experienced a catatonic state. She didn’t mind it when
I fondled her breasts and at the same time, drink ice water, and work on
chemistry problems. Keller would be beside himself with jealousy and demanded
to know why she wouldn’t’ let him do that. In so many words, she thought Keller
was vulgar. One truth was, and nobody besides my psychiatrist and Iris knew, I
couldn’t get a boner. Iris felt safe enough to have her tits fondled. Those
medicines can castrate you better than saltpeter. I was on Mallarill. On 300 mg
a day to be exact. That doesn’t mean that you don’t think about sex, but it is
useless thought.
