The last time I confessed that souls of the deceased were communicating with me from beyond the grave they locked me up in a psychiatric ward in Elizabeth, N.J. For almost a month they tortured me with psychotropic medications, take-downs and restraints. It’s hard to write about it, but I will, because I’m off my meds and I’m not afraid of the pscyo-Nazi mental health professionals any longer!
I have no shame about by diagnosis of Paranoid Schiozphrenia. I’m an open schizophrexual. I’ve been alive long enough to know that I’m not the only manic monster running around on this planet.Medical authorities insist I sometimes see, hear and smell things that are not really here. It’s a genetic illness of my mind they say. Perhaps it comes from the Amish side of my family with all that in-breeding my ancestors were apart of.The Holocaust was not the only sin of mankind where everyone turned their backs and ignored the truth of torture and slaughter. I would have rather been gassed to death than electrocuted or have been required to wear those light- blue hospital coats and force fed those pills. Those rapes of the mind of clairvoyants are far worse than what went on in the Amish community recently.If my claims seem exaggerated, I challenge the sane take a few dopomine inhibitors. Then try remembering how to spell your name or say the alphabet. And when they are done with you– all of that electro-shock therapy and mind-fucking, they spit the wounded onto our city streets with just a one month supply of their medications. There is no assistance offered to those who manage to escape concentration camps. There are no handsome American soldiers there offering a hand nor is there a new Holy Land to run to. You are on your own with no feelings, no thoughts and no love– only a diagnosis that ensures that everyone in the world will look down upon you for the rest of your life.
I want to see a reality television show where celebrities like Barbara Streisand take samples the drugs that they give to individuals with severe mental illness.
“Memories, light the corners of my mind….”, now that would be a concert worth paying $300 to see.
The pills! My God those pills. ‘Forgive them.’ That is all I have to say about the drugs and those who administer them.
Ghost busters of the frontal lobe, that’s what they are. Who are you gonna call if you start hearing ghosts?
It’s no big deal that I lashed out at a handsome Black male nurse who worked in unit G at Trinitas. That does not make me ‘crazy’. Those brain authorities in white coats thought I was just a sissy who they could toss around like a typical schizophrenic. You would fight back too if you found yourself inside one of those places wearing hospital gowns that tie in the back and were forced to wear fuzzy house slippers made of Styrofoam.
There are smiley faces on the toes of those Styrofoam slippers!
They misjudged me and mis-diagnosed me. Eventually, despite my inability to think clearly, I fought back.
Doing my best impression of Linda Blair from the movie ‘The Exorcist’, I bit the fool who tried to restrain me and taught the staff of Trinitas Hospital a valuable lesson about delusions of being grand.
I demanded that they return my insurance card to me and I dialed the number of the back of it using a payphone in the hall. Fortunately it was an 800 number.
“Hello, Aetna. Yes, this is Charles George Taylor and I’m glad to have met ya.” Just imagine what may have happened if I were on public assistance with all those Medicaid benefits and unlimited time for in-patient stays.
“If you are a provider, press one. If you are calling about a claim, press two. If you are calling to pre-certify coverage, press three.”
There was not an option to connect to an actual person. I pressed every number on the pay phone numerous times until finally someone picked up.
“Hi there! My I.D. number is CGT7187224202666¢?
“Date of birth?”
“January 9, 1968.”
“How may I help you Mr. Taylor?”
“Please tell me how long my insurance will pay for this hospital visit I’m currently locked into.”
“Oh, are you Mr. Taylor?”
“Yes. Please tell me how long it will be until I get out of here.”
I don’t know who that woman was on the other end of the line, but she said something to someone because that big ‘take down’ in Trinitas did not extend my stay there nor were they brave enough to ship me off permanently to an institution. They transferred me to a quieter ward and gave me my own room.
“He did it,” an old man shouted at me. “He reached inside himself and pulled it out.”
I looked deep into his eyes and was saddened. There was nobody for him to talk to. I wondered where his family was too. He must have lived such a long and productive life, but there he was with me inside a psychiatric ward.
“It’s not hard to do. You can do it too,” I said to the gentleman.
“I don’t want to.”
“Just reach inside and pull it out of you.”
“I’m afraid.”
“Well then, it’s your decision. There is no right or wrong. Jesus will save you,” I told him while making the sign of the crucifix for him.
He started to cry and I told him not to and went back to my private room and took his ghosts with me.
I was in the hallway stretching when that big ‘take-down’ popped off back in unit G. You know, I was exercising– something those fat ass clinicians who take anti-depressants would know nothing about. Everyone else was running around with slashes on their wrists or they were terribly thin. Some were mind readers like me, looking inside others and pulling facts about them out of thin air.
I was simply stretching, felling all that energy pour through me– bliss, heavenly bliss it was I tell you.
I wasn’t hurting anyone. They shouldn’t have bothered Shawn and I when we were meditating, connecting and communicating.
“Charles, what are you doing?” a Muslim nurse dressed like a nun asked as I stood by the window praying for freedom and standing with my leg stretched from behind, curling into an arc towards the back of my head.
“Oh honey, how could you possibly understand what it is I am doing? Go back to praying to Allah, girl,” I said to her without coming out of my one-foot stance. “Oh and by the way, someone tells me that your daughter likes to take it up her ass too,” I said.
I should have turned the other cheek and not pissed her off. She sent her troops after me– the boys in white with the long needles.
I smacked the living hell out of the six-foot-two muscular dude dressed in white in a Mommy Dearest kind of way. He didn’t know what hit him when I suddenly came down from Nirvana and had a spasm in my right arm.
It was the hand of God!
“Blasphemer!” I yelled as I struck him across his big nose. “How does it feel to be tortured? You should know better. You are Black,” I screamed in delight, unleashing weeks of suppressed anger at the psychiatric establishment as he fell to the floor.
“Can a queen grieve her dead lover? Go ahead, gang bang me! I’ve done it all before,” I yelled so that everyone inside of Trinitas Hospital, including those on the maternity floor below could hear.
“You little white bitch,” he shouted back.
I kicked him off of me and sent him crashing into the white walls. Several others joined in on the take- down. When he tried to punch me, I lost it. I grabbed his arm and bit as hard as I could.
There was blood and that is the last thing I remember. I awoke with my arms strapped to the bed and a hole in the wall behind me which may be the real reason why they moved me to another room in another unit.
Several days later I woke up. Everything was calm again in the ward. They were very nice to me for some reason. I don’t know why. I didn’t say a single word for two weeks and it was only after I spoke up and whipped some ass that finally someone started to listen to my claim that I had no reason for being there because I was experiencing a Kundalini break through.
“Charles, we are going to have to take a few blood samples just to be sure you didn’t infect the nurse with anything when you bit him.”
“Sorry,” I said, lying between the space in my teeth. “I don’t know what came over me.”
I knew I had turned him into a vampire too. Poor thing. That nurse kept yelling “It burns! It burns!” You are damn right it burns just wait ‘til it happens to you.
“I don’t have anything. I just had an AIDS test before I got locked up in here. My lover died from AIDS and I went and got tested as soon as I found that out. The stress of waiting for those results was too much, not to mention Shawn’s death. Oh, and by the way, I stopped smoking at the same time and my cat died and so did my grandfather, all in the same week. I got a little freaked out and couldn’t sleep you know.”
My tests came back negative again and the nurse kept his distance looking at me from far ends of brightly lit hallways– as if he were going to step to me again, BITCH!
It has been five years since I last popped a Zyprexa or a nurse. I can think and dream again. I still meditate. Life has returned. The hounds of hell are gone. Now that the misunderstandings regarding my diagnosis have been cleared up, I have learned to let those messages from Shawn come and go without freaking out. It wasn’t easy though. Coming off those drugs is terrifying, far worse than imaginary voices. I could hear Shawn laughing in the distance as I grew fat from the Lithium.
“Nobody but me wants that ass now, sexy,” he whispered from behind my Lazy- Boy recliner. “Who loves ya baby?”
I should have just killed myself. It would have made life much easier, but I remembered the look in his eyes when he died, how terrified he was, how horrible the other side seemed to be to him.
I was so afraid for his soul. I dove into the underworld to save him and found myself drowning in a sea of nothingness. There wasn’t anything to save to begin with. It all was meant to be.
When close friends die, we all get a little religious. I said a prayer over Shawn as he faded out and it triggered something in me. Those words I spoke that day, that funny language, the way the hospital bed jumped up and down and how the lights in the emergency room suddenly flickered was a little nuts. Everyone looked my way as if it were my fault when his body shook like that. That’s what set it all off and opened my eye. The ordeal sent me over the edge and I stepped into that other dimension, the place where only ghosts roam in bliss.
Taste it once and you never want to come back. Life’s a drag here that’s for sure. I often long to be back inside that bliss I felt when I said that prayer.
Life turned into a living hell soon after I spoke in tongues. I spiraled down like a bat after a moth, blind sighted and nothing but grief plagued my soul– my Dark Night of the Soul, my spiritual Baptism kicked in. Finally it all made sense, that stuff about the Holy Ghost.
That’s what my “psychosis” was.
I’m still afraid of dying. I don’t want to die I want to write. Because of those ghostly whispers in my head, I know that death is not what it appears to be.
It wasn’t about suicide or depression. I never wanted to harm myself or another. I felt his death and my grandfather’s too. They both were talking to me from over there. And Bette, my cat– those meows, those purrs.
“I promise baby, if you survive, I’ll marry you,” I said with tears streaming down my face as blood poured from his mouth around a plastic tube that ran over his tongue like a tar highway on a long stretch of desert terrain.
“If he is dead,” I asked God, “Can’t I simply forget about him and that relationship? It was just one of many.”
For some reason I couldn’t forget about it like that. It was something so much more than anything had been up to that time. He was so sexy. I remember how I had him pussy-whipped. He treated me like gold. He didn’t have a lot of money but spent every dime on me. And he was so butch, so handsome– the kind that girls try to convert.
Writing is the best way to channel him and stop him from asking me to make love with him as a ghost. I do it a lot– writing that is. It sets us both free and gets him out of my system. I don’t hear him or his whispers any longer or that licking sensation between my ass cheeks late at night.
He knows not to talk to me anymore. I have a new lover now and despite his demands that I remain his bitch from beyond, I simply tune him out and go on living. I only call him when I need him, which is not often now. There are no longer ghosts in white chasing after me.
He sends me messages when I write things though—often they are typos. Look a little closer. Those are his keystrokes as he possesses my soul and causes words to flow from my fingers effortlessly. Hell, my mind is shot. These cannot be my sentences. Those nerves in my head have been permanently fried. There is nothing left up there but memories lighting the corners of my mind– everything spins around– thought broadcasters inject me with intrusive thoughts every day. It’s only when I let him come to me, while sitting in front of my laptop does the craziness stop. Like a witch at an Ouija Board, I sit here and let my fingers run as he guides them and shows me what it is I need to say before it’s too late.
The strange smells I once imagined are gone now too. My olfactory nerves were once flooded with delusional smell that were not there—scent delusions of his body odor haunted me every time I took a breath. I could smell him all around me– that mix of cocoa butter and African oil that I had grown so attached to. Perhaps it was just my mind wanting another whiff of him that made me mad, but sometimes, when there is no breeze, I can still smell him near me.
I hear him taunting me on rare occasion, especially when I’m in the kitchen cooking for my new man. When I fry chicken and simmer greens I can almost see his silhouette in the steam. Those loud grease splatters tell me he’s over at the stove dipping his fingers in my recipes, longing for the soul food I once made for him almost everyday. I’m glad he’s still here but I sometimes wish he’d stop doing threesomes with Bradley and I.
The haunts are simply gentle touches to my psyche, angelic kisses from a lover who was gone for what seemed to be forever, but has returned to claim what is rightfully his and he has one hell of an appetite.
My new friend Bradley notices Shawn lurking around too. We still live in Shawn’s old place and mysterious things happen all the time. Bradley is a funeral director and has dealt with the dead all his life. My new partner has shown me how to ignore those ghosts and go on with life, without appearing crazy to those who fail to acknowledge the after-life facts.
“Where the hell did Shawn put my du-rag,” Bradley often asks.
“Look silly. It’s on your back, stuck inside the collar of your t-shirt.”
“Shawn does not like me, Charles. He’s always fucking with me.”
“He does like you. I told him about you when he was still alive. Shawn knew I screwed around with other men when we dated.”
“He did?”
“Of course.”
“What did you tell him about me?”
“Just that I met this thug with a gold tooth who knew how to make love just as good as he did.”
“Did he get jealous?”
“Of course he did.”
“Why did you tell him?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t want to feel guilty for cheating on him, although I constantly reminded him that I never wanted to be in a monogamous relationship again.”
“Why are you in a monogamous relationship with me?”
“Because I love you like I do him, but in a different way. You are not a voice in my head.
In Moscow, as in many cities in formerly communist countries, the new, non-communist governments made the assigned apartments of their citizens available at affordable prices so that everyone who had a place to live would continue to have one.
As the elderly die off, their children–who now have apartments of their own–rent out their parents old places. Often, they leave quite a bit of their dear departed’s possessions behind. These things are mostly ignored by the new tennants except for the necessities like kitchen stuff.
My current apartment is litterally stuffed with the possessions of the former owners, including a baby grand piano and an oversized desk that make a good half of the one room unusable.
I have figured out that the last owner was a woman by the abundance of sewing supplies she left behind. I have no need when it comes to searching for the right color of thread or a button to match the one that popped off my leather jacket on the subway. The piano is horribly out of tune, I can’t play anyway, but it would be nice if it were at least useable.
Evidently, the former owner isn’t upset that I pushed the desk over in front of the out-of-tune piano (to make more room) or “borrow” some of her sewing supplies, but she is very upset about one thing.
I like–no, make that love–coffee.
During Soviet times, anything that wasn’t readily available was branded as evil or unhealthy. The myth that a cup of coffee in the mornings is one step away from a massive coronary still lingers among the elderly. In Eastern Europe, strongly brewed tea (even though it has been proven to contain more caffeine than drip-brewed coffee) is the healthy and acceptable alternative.
I don’t have a coffee pot, so I use her tea stuff to make my coffee. First, I boil a pot of water. I pour the boiling water over the coffee grounds in her tea pot and then pour the brewed coffee through a tea strainer into my cup.
The tea strainer refuses to stay on its shelf. It is forever falling into the sink, the last time it chipped a hunk of the porcelain off. The tea pot lasted two months until it flew out of the cabinet where I (we) stored it and smashed to bits on the floor.
I’m going to have to get stainless steel coffee mugs if I plan to have anything to drink from at the rate her coffee (tea) cups are flying out of the cabinets lately.
Why can’t the dead, especially the elderly dead, just be satisfied with the life that they had and leave the living to do as we will with our own?