Memoirs of a Flower Child - George S Geisinger (the best books to read txt) 📗

was going away to a state hospital the next day. The two of them were talking in the hall.
“I'm going to a new place tomorrow.”
“You want to go for a walk before supper?”
“Sure. Let me check with staff and sign out.”
“OK.”
The two young people found the springtime all around them; the green fields, the budding plants. They walked and talked. Stanley and Susan didn't know each other very well. They were just two people walking around talking. They settled down in an open field to rest themselves and relax. There was a gentle breeze, mild sunshine, the beauty of nature all around them. The company was agreeable. The time scurried away.
Susan left for the state hospital the next morning.

Major Medical would not shelter Stan indefinitely. The night before he was discharged, a pretty young staff girl took Stan outside for a walk. She told him his problem was still inside him, and there was no way for anyone else to know what it was until he told someone. She said he had to start talking, or he would die. He did not know what to do. He was afraid to talk to people. He was afraid his thoughts would make people want to hurt him.
He was scheduled to go to a home the next day. He had not liked what he saw at the home. There was no one there to relate to. The food was not good, and he did not know anything about that side of town. It was so far away, and they wanted him to go to the day center, three buses away. He was afraid to leave the hospital. He wanted to cut himself, but he could not tell anyone. He held in his fear.
He could not stop the inevitable.
They took him to the home across town.
Two months later, he cut his wrist with a razor blade in the bathroom of the home. The nurses at the ER scoffed at him. They were angry at him. They said he had cut himself “the wrong way.” They instructed him on how to cut his wrist “the right way” so he'd succeed in killing himself. He wondered why an RN would give a suicidal patient that information. The doctor, arriving at the ER in his good old sweet time,the way doctors do, and stitched up the wound.
The home did not want to take him back right way, because of what he'd done. He went to his sister's apartment for the night. They took him the next day. They wanted him to promise he wouldn't hurt himself again. He played the game. He said what he had to say.
Stan kept threatening the day center that he wanted to kill himself. They said they wanted him to stay out of the hospital. But he wanted to go back into a hospital.
He had his car by this time, from up at his mom's, but they wouldn't let him drive it. At the bus stop, a man picked him up in the cold and rain, gave him a sympathy story and asked how he broke his arm. Stan lied. He couldn't bring himself to tell the truth to this man in this fancy new car. He was scared.
He continued his threats at the day center. They took him to the state hospital because he left them no choice.

Stan spent a lot of years in and out of state hospitals and psych wards. He did not know how to live any other way. Whenever he had a chance to, he took alcohol or drugs, and did not realize that that was the pivotal factor keeping him in such turmoil.
There came a day, after a long time, when Susan was at the front door of his ward. Somehow, she had come directly to where Stan was, and asked for him by name.
They spent the day on the campus of the state hospital, as they had done so long ago on the campus of the private hospital. They walked and talked. He couldn't help wondering why she had come to see him. Women were not very friendly to him generally. It was a strange thing to happen.
Susan bought their lunches and refreshments all day. Stan was broke. Susan didn't care. She kept him company as if they had had a long-standing relationship. Maybe they did. His memory was shot. Too many drugs, too many breakdowns. His mind would not serve him.
It was still wintertime. They made love in the late afternoon in a hide-away place Stan knew of. It was a simple act of honest humanity between two people. One might easily have called them strangers. There was no motive, no pretense to their love making. It was what it was.
Susan saw Stanley back to his ward and caught the bus home.
Stan had supper on the ward.
He couldn't understand what had happened.

Again, years went by.
One of the state hospital doctors along the way sent Stan to the Program. In spite of himself, Stan got sober. His life began to turn around. He started to think and feel better.
He'd been committed. He'd been a danger to himself. They could have simply warehoused Stan and thrown the key away, but they didn't. After he'd been sober a while, they set him up with a group home, let him out into the community.
The man finished college.
The man got a job.
The man attended the program regularly.
The woman brought a little girl to the program one evening. She told the man the child was eight years old. The man sat with the child during the meeting. They played on the indoor staircase outside the meeting.
For the man, being with that child was like sharing one's self with some novel part of one's self. Looking at that child was like looking in a mirror.
Susan called the child Sharon.
Susan gave her phone number to Stan easily.
“Who is the father of the child?”
“I decided to take full responsibility for the child.”
The man was dumb struck.
Baffled.
Stopped.
He did not know what to say or do.
He begged off the call. He awkwardly said goodbye and hung up the phone.
Susan never came back to the meetings with or without Sharon.

Stan found out, after years of therapy, that he was far more of an abused child than he had ever imagined. He'd buried the memories deep in his subconscious. When the block broke loose, he needed hospitalization for a time, but he stayed sober and faced his demons.
He cried and cried.
After a lifetime of self-loathing, self-deprivation, anger – he's free.

Starry Starry Night
Chapter 10

Paint your pallet blue and gray. I was on the Inside with Jonathan when we were young men. It was not jail. It was an institution. I met him in a creative writing seminar on the Inside. A college girl brought the class to the hospital for any of us who wanted to write. She believed in the power of writing. So did several of us patients. Jonathan's writing was powerful. I could feel what he wrote in my perpetually sad heart. He made me cry the way he wrote about his life. I knew the kind of sadness he knew. I'd tell you some of the things he wrote about, but it was a long time ago. I've forgotten.
I saw him in the hallways and in the dining room. He walked with the girl who was very thin, but very beautiful. When you're in an institution, sooner or later you know who everyone is. Her name was Pamela. She was the daughter of a famous man. She had an illness that effected how she ate, an illness that effected how she thought about herself and food. She did not want to eat because she was too fat. She looked very thin to me. To herself, she was very fat and overweight. She fought that idea a long time before she got better. Pamela and I became friends, and she told me about how she felt.
I thought Pamela was Jonathan's girl for a long time, but they were just from the same ward. They walked around together sometimes. That was a part of the way things worked at the institution. I could not take my eyes off Pamela she was so beautiful. Even after we talked and became friends, she told me she had to sit with her back to me in the dining room to eat her food, because I could not look away from her. I apologized wholeheartedly, but couldn't get myself to stop staring at her. I was empty in that way.
Jonathan got a small apartment in town after a while. I'd gotten out too, and had my car I'd bought while I was still working. I would drive there, and hang out, smoking hashish with him. I was afraid I'd get busted walking around with the stuff in my pocket, so I gave him my stash.
He didn't have a car, so he'd get together with me to drive around. We looked all over the city for hashish. I'd drive my car into the war zone of the city, where the Bloods and the Bro's would shoot each other for drugs, as he looked and looked for hashish in place after place. He always got the money from his dad through Western Union. We looked for hash in that way several times per week. I couldn't imagine how he got all that money from his dad. It's a wonder we didn't get busted or shot the way we went around so often. It was such a transparent urgency.
Then I went to the state hospital. I lost track of everyone. I heard after a long time Jonathan “took his life as lovers often do. This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.” He's gone, and God destroyed him because he destroyed himself. That's what the song says. That's what the book says. Jonathan's gone. He doesn't say anything anymore.
Pamela got married after she learned it's OK to eat food. I only heard she got married after it was too late for me to ask her out. I was in the state hospital too long. I saw her once, a long time later, and she was not so thin as she used to be. She was more beautiful than ever. I wanted to kiss her she was so beautiful, but her husband was right there. So I asked her if she had some reefer, but she didn't.

***

I met Christopher downtown. He and I would hang out together a lot in the city. He went to the methadon clinic over by the hospital, to keep one step ahead of the Jones's. He was a needle junky. He understood the ways of the street, how to get up-town on the college bus without being a student, how to get free food at the