Soujourn of Sanity

This post originally appeared on AOL

Suicide, my mother explained after she found me huddled at the bottom of my small, dark closet after a beating I had endured at the hand of my father, is selfish and an easy way out. But more importantly, and this I want you to think about - hard: what guarantees do you have that it's going to be any better on the other side?

And so, harnessing my mother's views, I persevered and went on to find the purpose of my life.

* * * * *

"Good morning," I sang as I pushed open the bedroom door only to reel backwards against the wall as if I had walked dead-on into a hot electric fence. The twin-sized mattress was propped up against the wall and the fresh linens I had pulled across its girth less than twenty-four hours earlier had been balled up and thrown across the room where it lay in a crumpled, wrinkled mass. The tall, lanky man standing at the sliding glass door turned and looked at me with a sheepish smile. His hair was disheveled with tufts sticking straight out, as if he had pulled clumps with two fists away from his skull. My heart pumped furiously as my eyes widened and my tongue grew three sizes larger, choking out the words that attempted to push from my throat. He frowned as he stepped closer. I backed up and pushed against the wall.

"I'm sorry, Miss Donna," he said apologetically. "The voices were really bad last night."

I nodded slowly, then cautiously moved forward to the threshold and peered in. His roommate had tucked in the final corner of the linens on his own bed and turned to look at me. I smiled for a moment before turning back.

"Did you take your medication?" I asked. He nodded. I didn't understand. "So how come you're hearing voices, then?"

They both laughed. My eyebrows pulled together as my tongue began to shrink back to its normal size.

"The medication doesn't help that much," he reached out and pushed the mattress back down onto the frame. The whoosh and thud made me jump just a hair. His roommate scooped up the linens and tossed them onto the bed before moving to the end nearest me where he began working on helping his friend make it up. I watched them move maybe a bit longer than I should have, but was mesmerized by their synchronized movements. It seemed they had done this many times before.

"So, would you please explain this to me?" I asked later at the breakfast table after serving the last plate of hot cakes. Tommy Newsom looked up from his plate, then sideways at Jerry Timber who was shoveling huge bites into his mouth. Twelve of the fourteen men I was charged with providing care for where huddled around the long table and all began exchanging looks with one another. Finally, Jerry spoke.

"They aren't dreams, Miss Donna," he said as he rested his fork on the edge of the plate and pulled the cup of coffee up towards his lips. "They persist continuously and the medication doesn't really help all the time. In the beginning it might, but as time moves on, it's more like candy."

"Which is why we often have problems with drinking or using drugs," another chimed in. I listened intently as I opened the medication log and began pulling out the bubble cards with various pills inside. Thorazine, Clozaril, prolixin, Prozac, lithium? "It mutes the voices and fuzzes the demons we sometimes see."

"But, Gabriel," I began as I poured a pitcher of water and brought out the Dixie paper cups. "You're diagnosed as bi-polar."

"True," he pushed his plate, flatware and coffee mug across the counter then waited for me to deposit his medication into his outstretched hand. "But I'm old and when they first diagnosed me, I was manic. When you're manic, you see and hear some weird things. So they thought I was schizophrenic and treated me accordingly."

"Which was??"

"Shock therapy. They now know that if you treat a non-schizoid with shock it can cause what they now refer to as schizoaffective: schizophrenic-like tendencies, such as perpetual auditory, and sometimes visual, hallucinations."

"Tell her the rest," Pete called out as he scraped the remainder of the pancake and syrup into the large trashcan. I looked back to Gabriel, our resident "doctor" who received a PhD in philosophy shortly after he turned 19.

"The consensus is, at least for us bi-polar types, after 40 our chances for recovery are pretty slim."

"Recovery?"

"Well, remission."

"And guess how old Gabriel is," Tom piped up. Gabriel's face flushed.

"I already know," I replied as I flipped the page in the medication binder. He had turned 40 the week before.

"I vaguely remember being sane," he said as he stuck his tongue out at me and I peered into his mouth. "It was but a brief sojourn in my life."

According to the charts, Gabriel had been diagnosed the year after he received his doctorate. I watched as he touched upon one of the hundreds of skin-colored Band Aids covering his freckled flesh and discovered it was loose. With a perplexed look spreading quickly across his face, he disappeared. I knew he had gone to replace the bandage. His philosophy was the demons that possessed him entered his body through any dark markings on his otherwise fair skin.

* * * * *

A week later, on my 28th birthday, I was called to the morgue to identify a body the police had found in a nearby wetlands area at the bottom of a small creek. It was Gabriel. He thrashed around in less than two inches of water until he drowned. It was ruled a suicide.

My beliefs, adopted from my mother's, had been challenged. For I knew, the world Gabriel went to was guaranteed to be much better then the world he had just left.

Slingshot Catastrophe

First published on AOL

Six weeks ago, today, my husband, Reggie, filed for divorce. He checked off “irreconcilable differences” as the reason. He claimed he tried to get the lawyer to mark “incurable insanity” but Trevor Blithsdale, his attorney, refused. Trevor said they couldn’t prove such a thing. I have half a mind to file a countersuit and claim he’s the one who is insane. It’s the truth, he is; otherwise he wouldn’t have filed to begin with. It was all just a stupid misunderstanding.

I had recently gone on a new diet and lost over twenty pounds in no time at all. After a two-hour workout at the gym followed by a long shower, I treated myself to a Pepsi, one that I savored as I sifted through my email. (If I could have had a diet one, I would have, but they give me a blaring migraine.) I was all cozy and comfortable in my pajama’s and had just taken a big swig ofthe sticky-sweet liquid as I clicked on the email from Aunt Gretchen. A few seconds later, I was spewing the drink out of my mouth. It splashed across the screen, the keyboard, the desk and the mouse. There wasn’t an inch that had been spared.

Now, you have to know a bit about my aunt to understand where I was coming from. She’s from the mid-west and while she’s only nine years older than me, you’d think she has twenty on me, at least. It’s as if she was raised in the late forties, early fifties. She’s the youngest and her parents raised the majority of their brood during that period so maybe that’s why she is that way. When I told her I was living with Reggie three-months before we got married, she choked, gasped for breath and then declared: “it wasn’t very ‘proper’.” When I tell her an off-color joke she blushes madly and gets all jumble-mouthed. I think that’s why I relish saving all of my raunchy jokes for her; I like getting her flustered. So, you see, when I went to open the email with a photo attached, I didn’t expect to get what I got.

Miss Prissy had sent me a photo of a man in an unusual looking thong. I kid you not. Remember the women’s one piece that you could hardly consider as conservative as that type of outfit should be? It’s a thong that barely covers the privates, splits out as it reaches up over the shoulders, just manages to cover her breasts as it swoops back down into a single bit of material that works as butt-floss. They call it the “slingshot”. Low and behold, this man, with his arms wrapped around the shoulders of two much more decently attired women, was wearing one of these things. It was bright green and aptly covered his groin before it awkwardly stretched up over his shoulders. The next photo was the backside of the man. And that’s when I lost it. My eyes were glazed but wide open, staring at the brown-spot covered screen as a faint puff of smoke erupted from the keyboard and my circuit board began to fry.

Panic thus ensued. I only had the laptop for a few short weeks. Even though we had the money to pay for sixteen of them, all of which could have had keys made of rare gems, Reggie is a hardcore penny pincher. You’d have thought we were living paycheck to paycheck with the way he went on when we were buying the thing, but that’s just the way Reggie is and it’s rather annoying. Regardless, I had to replace the laptop before he found out what happened.

That was my first mistake.

I have three credit cards, two are joint, and the other is my own. I opened an account shortly before we got married and he never knew about it. I use it for purchases that I know he won’t approve of. Sneaky and underhanded, I know. Instead of using that one, I mistakenly gave the cashier one of the joint cards. Reggie found out within hours because the credit card company, thinking our card had been stolen and someone was using it illegally, called him. They asked if he authorized a purchase for a HP Pavilion laptop computer. No, indeed, he had not.

Ka-ching: rack up the second mistake.

He was enraged that I had gone out “behind his back” and bought the replacement. He was angry that I hadn’t told him what happened and even more angered that I had “downloaded porn” onto the laptop, which was now in the service department at the computer store. He ranted on saying that now the FBI was going to come after us—him—for downloading porn. They’d confiscate the computer and find out not only was there porn on it, but they’d find the true records for the businesses he owns and operates. Records that conflict with those on file with the IRS. And then he’d—we’d—go to jail for a very, very long time.

Mistake number three: I rolled my eyes and told him he was full of cow manure. It wasn’t so much that I used a swear word, nor that I scoffed. No, indeed. It was because I had found my backbone and stood up to him. It caught him off-guard—for a moment—and when he finally recovered, he did so with a right, then a left, catching me square in the jaw. I groaned as I fell back against the wall, but I didn’t back off. I’m sure my eyes were on fire as I sprang back and shoved him. He reeled back, catching himself on a chair that caused him to tumble down to the floor. Reggie, all six feet of him and lean and lank at that, looked like a box of Lego’s that had been dumped onto the floor. He gathered himself together and fired himself back up with a single, nimble spring, once again landing a punch—this time to my belly. I swear I could see the air escape from my mouth as I landed within an arm’s reach to the cordless phone.

I don’t even remember thinking as I plucked the phone up and dialed 9-1-1. I didn’t say anything, instead, I kicked it away, underneath the large buffet table where he couldn’t reach it without having the move the three-hundred pound thing. I knew that the police would send someone out on a “welfare check” if I didn’t answer, just left the line open as he screamed at me. I was right. As he pounced on me and began pulling on my hair (for a guy, he fights a lot like a girl), there was a knock on the door and the shout “Open up! Police!”

They hauled him away, handcuffs and all.

In the hours that followed, the phone began to ring incessantly until I pulled the plug. I knew it was him calling from jail with pleas and threats in attempts to get me to spring him. But I was too busy to worry. I lost another five pounds as I packed up everything I owned and everything I wanted, then hauled it off to storage. I hired a truck and driver to deliver my belongings when I sent for them, then boarded a plane in less than twelve hours after they took Reggie away.

I arrived in Florida shortly after and was greeted by Slingshot Man, better known as Stan Guthrie. A few days later my aunt faxed me a copy of the divorce decree which I immediately signed and shipped back, overnight express, to my friend, Trevor. The paperwork I signed “doesn’t add up to a hill of beans,” he informed me. “You’ll get everything you want and then some when they indict him for tax evasion. Good thing you never signed those tax returns, Betty, otherwise you’d be right there next to him.”

I never would have done that, but Trevor doesn’t need to know why. Instead, I relish the days ahead of me, back in the arms of Stan who agrees he doesn’t look good in a slingshot but swears up and down that I look like a brick of solid gold in the one he bought for me. I couldn’t agree more as I romp on the beach. Stan and I are one hell of a team.