Pen's Nest

= July 13, 1982 (Six Days Before) =



I’d been prescribed another dose of telephone.



There’s a phone alcove in my grandparents’ home, a recessed area in the hallway. It’s shallow, not like a room you can go into to be on the phone, but just a wooden stand built into an indentation in the wall, with a shelf for the phone to sit on, and under it, behind a hinged wooden lattice, room for phone books and note pads and pencils. I lurked there all morning and early afternoon. One thing that occurred to me was to be the one to place the call. To be less passive and less acted upon.

Yeah, but... Grandpa and Grandma’s phone bill. Not mine.

I played absent-mindedly with the rotary dial. Metal, not plastic, that dial, painted black but with shiny silvery finger holes, stiff spring, and you can sort of feel the pulses. A serious black vintage machine.

A measured ding, ding, ding chimed from Grandpa’s mantlepiece clock.

Phone finally rang.









“Your father and I have been looking at some materials and talking for some time now with some other families. And we have a proposal we’d like you to consider. Don’t answer until you’ve heard the whole thing, because we’ve put some serious thought into it. All right?”

“That’s reasonable. Okay, go ahead”

“There’s a program center just outside Houston we think looks promising, with counseling and activities to help people who are trying to get away from their drug or alcohol problem...”

I winced, but kept my silence.

“...not just about drugs, though. They look into a person’s diet and see how it fits with their metabolism and whether people are getting all the vitamins and minerals and components for making the right amino acids for mental functioning, and they do something called biofeedback so that... let’s say somebody had a hot temper, which is not a problem that you have, but someone else, biofeedback can help you choose your reactions and learn how to think more calmly before you act. Or someone who kind of acts impulsively, I think you maybe do that on occasion.”

My dad added, “It’s not just about possible problems with your brain itself. I know you’re not inclined to think there’s anything wrong with how your mind works, and I strongly suspect you’re right about that. But they also work on communication skills. Being in a group. Developing habits that make it easier to participate instead of sticking out and not fitting in. They know that some people who are struggling are those who have never become comfortable socially, and they want to help them deal with that.”

Now that sounded interesting. It’s not that I want to become one of the group-belonging, fitting-in-mentality kind of people, but I’d like to at least pick up their skillset as a second language.

“I knew it was going to be hard to sell you on the idea of a therapeutic service after what happened to you at UNM”, he continued. “Kate shouldn’t have said what she said the other day about you getting yourself kicked out. I agree they had no justifiable reason for putting you into that place, and frankly I didn’t realize they still had those medieval snake pit places, locking people up and pumping them full of drugs and not trying to help them! That’s not therapy!”

Mama said, “This isn’t like that. Their brochure shows the staff and the patients and everyone is wearing regular clothes, no medical uniforms or hospital pajamas or anything like that. It’s a very modern place where they respect patients, or clients, I’m not sure which term they use, but it says if anyone doesn’t feel they’re getting any good from it, it’s all voluntary, and you can just sign out and leave.”

“But we’d want you to give it a real try”, my Dad noted. “Don’t stalk out the first time you think there’s some policy or some person that isn’t perfect. You won’t get anything out of it unless you go in intending to get something out of it.”

“They won’t try to put you on those horrible psychiatric drugs,” my Mom added. “They don’t believe in drugging people. In fact, they want to get everyone off drugs.”

“This all sounds good”, I admitted. “Yeah, I mostly don’t think I have the problems you think I do, but it sounds like they’re willing to look at everything. I have problems that come from...you know, always being an unpopular kid, things... that I do guess get in my way now that I’m trying to reach out to people and make a difference. I don’t feel like either of you two really understand that for the last two years, the most important thing to me has been to share some of my own understandings and connect with people. I want to have a social impact. I think I have some really important insights that could help other people. Those things about growing up as a heterosexual sissy that I’ve been trying to tell you about.”

“You know”, my mom replied, “you keep obsessing about things that most people aren’t comfortable discussing. Personal, private things. When I was your age, that wasn’t an appropriate topic for conversation! Doesn’t it ever occur to you that there’s probably something unhealthy about focusing on the same things, when so much of it is all in your past anyway?”

I played with the coiled black telephone cord, sticking my fingers through the stretchy loops. “I think it’s pretty normal for a person to keep going back to the same ideas”, I said. “Maybe they’re on the verge of a breakthrough, like a deeper understanding. I bet if you could listen in to a person’s brain you’d find that they return to a lot of the same stuff and keep digging into it.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and rubbed them. Rubbed at memories and visions that lurked perpetually behind my eyelids. I continued, “It’s been frustrating so far trying to talk to people about any of that stuff. And if I got to the point of feeling like I had any traction with that, I’d probably be less distracted from everyday things. Like getting along better with hospital staff, for instance. Yeah, since I’m not in the nursing program any more, I suppose this is a good time to give this kind of thing a try.”


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I'm posting my autobiographical narrative, Within the Box one chapter per week on my own DreamWidth page. (This post was to give you a taste of it, but it would be inappropriate and self-centered to shove it all into queerly_beloved. Future installments will be at https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/)