When I lived in Baltimore, I had a few artist friends who’d make money by participating in drug trials, usually for Johns Hopkins or University of Maryland Hospital. They’d disappear from the Mount Royal Tavern for a week or two, do the trial, and then one day show up again with beer money and tell everyone for which drugs they’d been guinea pigs. Though I found the tales interesting, I never did it. The idea of chemically screwing around with my body and mind wasn’t appealing to me.. However, there I was drinking beer to excess.
Once I visited the now-abandoned Spring Grove State Hospital with a friend who’d been an inpatient there for a drug trial and was going to get his paycheck. I stood in the entrance hallway while he went to an office. I noticed a woman walking back and forth, mumbling to herself, oblivious to me and the surroundings. She was small and hunched over with black hair and a pointed face; she’d make an occasional clucking sound with her tongue. When another patient spoke to her, she didn’t make any gesture of recognition. I realized this woman was locked inside her mind. I felt a repulsion seeing her, likely some primitive fear. I hope her interior mental landscape was pleasant place, but from the look on her face, it seemed closer to hell.
Thinking my friend had stayed in this place was a shock. I’d been there two minutes and was ready to leave. Seeing the doctors come and go also struck me as odd. Who on earth would voluntarily spend time in this environment? I’d read that, from time to time, an inmate in a prison may try to fake insanity to get submitted to a mental hospital hoping it’d be more comfortable. Supposedly none can stand it for more than a week, so they confess and go back to lock-up.
If the schizophrenic woman at Spring Grove was a non-functional schizophrenic, there are also functional schizophrenics. In Baltimore a heavily-medicated schizophrenic would come into the store where I worked and talk. He was abused as a boy by the neighborhood pedophile. Once he jumped into the Harbor when a voice told him to do it. He couldn’t hold a conversation; he’d tell the same stories and jokes repeatedly. Thanks to drugs he could exist in society, living in a half-way house, his Social Security given to him in weekly installments. He’d run out of money every Wednesday, come into the store and borrow money from me for cigarettes.
I knew a woman who’d been a runway model, hung out with the in-crowd in London, Paris, L.A. and Milan. She’d been on the cover of fashion magazines, in films, on rock album covers, etc. Then she hit 30. People she thought were her friends stopped taking her calls, there were no more modelling gigs, it was over. She coped by making the world her audience. She told me about the orgy she’d had with Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe in 1963 (she wasn’t yet born), said her children (she had none) were the handymen in her apartment building, went off on tangents inspired by any chance word. I saw her in summer, she was dressed in several layers of clothing; her life consisted of trips to the grocery store (she ate only boiled melons) and her psychiatrist.
Further down the scale is a woman who’d call me just to complain. She had a method. First, she’d ask how I was, I’d say a few words and then, feeling justified that she’d given me the opportunity to speak, would go on about a repetitive list of complaints, from the people in her apartment building, to her health, her mother, etc. Her opening line was always “I don’t feel well.” After this happened a couple times, I finally said I couldn’t just be her audience, that I couldn’t stand feeling controlled. Her response, “But I asked you how you were!”