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Before the photographer moved back to Iowa to be with his folks, he was a Mental Health Worker II at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in The Institute of Psychiatry, a couple blocks behind the Hancock Building in the photo. This particular photo is a distorted view of the downtown skyline from the north. It's a reflection in puddles on the concrete pathway next to Rush St. Beach. I call it Alice in Wonderland Chicago, and it seems a suitable shot to prepare you for the upside down world of the psych unit that I worked on, where loyalties among staff ran deep for years, swirled like German marble cake with a sense of irony and humor, that often leapt into states of pure genius. This is one of the most memorable times of my life, even though Nightmouse had not yet hatched from his Hewlett Packard inkjet cartridge. This was several years before the creation of Nightmouse Productions, which was powered by a 386 33mhz computer with a still functional HP inkjet 550 printer. Nightmouse considers them his adoptive parents, even though the printer is seldom called to work, and the 386 has been retired for years. |
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On Wednesdays we had a Community Dinner, prepared by staff and patients, which we all ate together. This was initiated by the author in conjunction with the Activity Department, in an attempt to assist the patients with cooking skills, cooperative ventures, and just plain fun. After supper we broke up for about an hour
for med time, and then came back together to share dessert in
a discussion group, called Coffee Hour, which is a story all
by itself. We discussed meaningful insights into life, like: Will never forget the Gothic type young Hispanic woman, who wore mostly black, including her nail polish, when she said she wanted to be a Vampire Bat. There was a prolonged silence, and they were all looking at me, to get things back on track... "Now, I really don't know what to say... I've never heard that before."... But that was enough, to ease the tension. But on to the story. We had a refrigerator that sometimes needed cleaned, and while trying to make room to store the fresh food that had come, Brad and I found a large mixing bowl of spaghetti sauce, that we needed to dump. He was about to pour it into the trash container, and I stopped him. You know how the housekeeping staff drag those bags over the carpet and sometimes they tear leaving a trail of sooty coffee grounds? Well, we had green carpet, and I didn't want to see a trail of auburn tomato sauce crawling all the way to the front door when I came in the next day. And it would be heavy too! Only once did I live in a house with a garbage disposal, in Southern Illiniois. I mean, the kind in a sink, you know. Where you put the food down though the rubber fringed hole, and flip a switch, and hope it doesn't shoot all over the sink, or the ceiling. Mom had engendered a fear of it, since it wasn't always hungry enough to chew the food she put down inside its throat. Sometimes she'd have to take a knife and pick its teeth, kind of like ground food for a toothless veteran disposal service. I remember in college when we were studying early childhood development. Toilet Training. There were stories about the awful monster that lived just beneath the toilet bowl, just waiting under the swirling water to reach up and grab children by their... You get the point. Anyway, it was suggested that for the first few times, until Johnie or Susie had some accomplishments under their belt, that it might be a good idea to let them get off the toilet... well, better yet, leave the room even before sending that treasure buried under the water to Davie Jones's locker. Why frighten them with the sound and gale force sloshing that consumed that little fragment of all their hard work? Oh, hey, do you think I'm lost? I know exactly where I'm going. It's almost Halloween! So I suppose if that was a water monster, the one living under the sink was a mechanical robot that chewed up people's arms, including adults'. A much more formidable foe. Stand back! Lock your arms behind you, or hang onto the kitchen door. I'm about to hit the switch! As it ate the leftovers, you could hear those shark-like jaws rotating their teeth and grinding right through bones and flesh and potatoes and peas. Awesome! Well, if you don't have a mechanical shark, then you feed the water demon. It has a much larger appetite and if you can get the food in its mouth, it's bound to swallow it. "Brad, maybe we ought to dump it in the toilet, instead?"... Feed the beast. Keep it happy. I don't want it grabbing me some day when I'm sitting there trying to mind my business. "Yeah, okay." As I said, it was one of the largest mixing bowls they make, industrial size, so we carried it together, so as not to spill any... "Ready?... I sure hope it doesn't splash all over." We poured it in, and it just kept pouring. Almost like pouring cement for a driveway... "You sure that this won't clog my toilet?"... He had the room right across from the kitchen. "I don't know... I hope not, or we're gonna have a mess, if it overflows." Instead of a mess, we had a nicely formed cone of dark red spaghetti sauce, rising above the surface like a Hawaiian volcano, strewn with rocks of diced onion fragments and green pepper slice logs. It looked ready to spout lava and flames. We both started laughing, since it looked like you know what. Remember Jeff Goldblum in "Jurassic Park?" when he says, "That's one big pile of $#!T!" During that laughter, the dawning of a new idea. Came on me quite suddenly in all its facets, like when Sir Isaac Newton realized that a heavy body doesn't fall any faster than a small body. All it needed was a bit of testing, to see if it held water. All we needed was an objective observer. "You want to play a prank on someone?" "What do ya mean?" "Are you still on a stool softener?" "Uhh huh... Why?"... Brad and I got along well, and I figured he'd be a willing accomplice. After all we were wayyy beyond the law of inertia. This was the age of space travel. "Well, I owe Mary one, for one time that she and Peg nailed me... You could do me a favor." "Like what?" "Go get Mary and tell her that you think you're having a reaction to your stool softener... Act really worried and say that you want to know if this is normal... Get her to come take a look." He wasn't sure he could carry it off, or even wanted to do it... "I won't get in trouble will I?" "No, if she gets upset, I'll say it was my idea, but you've gotta keep a straight face... Alright?" "Yeah, I guess so." "Give me just a couple minutes to get ready, and then go ask her to come look." Plot laid. Ingeniusly laid out, as long as he could keep from laughing. While he psyched himself into the role of a straight-faced worried psych patient, I gathered Peg, who was a primary patient of Mary's, and a couple others, and we went in the kitchen, to lurk behind the door like trolls under a bridge, just waiting to grab a billy goat or nurse who passed by. They came through the room. Brad was doing very well at keeping a straight face, and she was stomping along behind him... "I don't know why I need to look at it." "Well, I don't know... I just want to be sure I'm not having some kind of strange reaction." Excellent actor. It's nice to be able to count on people to follow plans. In the room they went, and there was this silence for a few seconds, and then, "OHHH, MYYY GODDD!" She rushed out about three times faster than she walked in... "I'm going to call the doctor... Sit down." I waved from the door and Peg started giggling. Mary spun on her heels and saw us standing there. She put her hands on her hips, while her mouth dropped open even more... "HEY, come ONNN you guys!" She was so embarrassed at being trapped between the water demon and the metal shark jaws that she looked like she'd explode as the blood rushed up into her face. I couldn't help laughing. She swung her arms at her sides, looking so pitifully defeated, and I said, "You remember when I told you weeks ago, that I'd get you back... Wellll?" "Butt... but..." |
