July 19, 1982 (Day One)
Feb. 11th, 2026 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahunter3= July 19, 1982 (Day One) =
Instead of the limousine driver I’d been led to expect, I am met at the gate by a blue-shirted Houston Airport staffer. “Derek Turner? We have a message for passenger Derek Turner?” I wave to indicate that that’s me.
“You’re supposed to call this number collect when you arrive.” I’m handed a sheet of paper.
I go to the bank of pay phones and soon find myself talking to a receptionist from Elk Meadow Clinical Retreat. “There’s a problem with the limousine being able to bring you here, so you’re supposed to hire a taxi and the hospital will pay the charges when you get here.”
So after I claim my suitcase, I make my way to the taxi stand and explain the situation. The taxi service wants to confirm so I give them the telephone number. The dispatcher walks over to one of the cabs and talks with the driver, then waves me towards him. “Okay, it’s all set. This is Ben, he’ll take you there.”
I climb across the cracked ochre vinyl of the back seat and the driver pulls out into traffic. “Where ya from?”
“Athens Georgia”
“Visiting, vacation, or business?”
“I guess it falls into business. I’m here for a few counseling sessions and some kind of workup.”
Ben is more inclined to chatter than I am; I answer his questions but I don’t fill any silences and after awhile the conversation sort of languishes.
My mind drifts as I stare out the window but we keep making turns and merging onto highways, then down offramps and roads with storefront businesses and stoplights, then back onto highways, and it seems like we’ve been doing this for a very long time. I find myself tapping my fingers impatiently on the crumbling foam of the armrest. I check my watch and it’s been over forty-five minutes since I landed.
“How much farther is this place?”
“Oh, we’re pretty close now”, the driver reassures me. He aims the car onto another exit ramp; the seatbelt tightens annoyingly around my shoulder and I reposition it. From the highway signs I see through the window, this guy Ben is putting us on interstate spur 610. Again. I recognize a water tower and a big red sign advertising a car wash I’ve seen earlier.
“Excuse me, I’m sorry to ask but are you clear on how to get to this place? We seem to be driving in circles.”
“It’s a little confusing. The road I thought would take us there doesn’t have a turnoff. Don’t worry, I’ll get you there.” Ben’s eyes reflect in the mirror, meltingly apologetic, his smile obsequious and subservient.
I watch the pine-tree air freshener below the rear-view mirror dance on its string. Beneath Ben’s ingratiating mannerisms, I sense a hardness. Or maybe I just sense my own splitting headache and it’s adding to what was already a bad mood.
Another fifteen minutes go by. This time it’s a residential street, with a bank on one corner and a church with scaffolding around it that I’m sure I’ve seen before. I sigh. “Do you maybe want to call in and get directions? I’m not sure we’re making progress.”
Ben picks up the dark grey cube and mashes the talk button and waits. I hear a tinny voice identifying that it’s the dispatcher. “Hey, Arnie, what’s the best way to get to Elk Meadow at 441 West Wichita Springs Road? I’m on 225 business loop...”
“Yeah, stay on until you get past all those dealerships, you want exit...”
The driver confirms and puts the radio back in its cradle and drives. We pass some automotive dealerships and a big Baptist Church, then he’s driving for awhile without making any exit. There are end-of-highway signs indicating we need to pick between 146 north and 146 south. The sun is low in the sky, orange and bright. Be getting dark pretty soon.
“Maybe I should have just tried to hitchhike”, I say.
“Aww man, don’t say that. I told you I’d get you there...” Ben picks up the radio transmitter again and tells Arnie he never saw the exit, and they argue over the radio. The dispatcher gives Ben new instructions and again the radio goes into the cradle and Ben makes some cloverleaf transfers and reversals and after awhile we’re back on 225.
Finally we take a series of turns into suburbia and the taxi pulls up to a big glass-windowed office building. A woman in a beige business suit comes out and hands a credit card to the driver and signs the form.
I wonder cynically if Ben was trying to run up the charges and figured the hospital would pay the tab without blinking. I wonder even more cynically if this could all be a standard hazing ritual associated with arrival at the institution. But there’s that Hanlon’s razor thing, you know, “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence” or however it’s worded. Ben strikes me as hard and manipulative but it could all just be his coping mechanism, a cab driver who gets a lot of cranky passengers.
Elk Meadow Hospital turns out to be a modern office complex, it doesn’t have that ominous psychiatric-institutional look. Lots of glass in the doors, a single-story building with wide corridors, acoustic tiles and fluorescent lights in the ceiling like office buildings.
I follow Beige Business Suit down a corridor and she waves me in to an office. “This is Turner”, she tells the fellow behind the desk, a bored-looking thirty-some-odd wearing glasses with heavy black frames. She hands him forms. “Should be the last admit for today”.
Like her, Desk Official Guy doesn’t bother providing his identity. Wants mine, though, even though he should have that already. “Last name? First name? Date of birth?...” He has an open manila folder in front of him and fills out forms with a pen as I answer.
I have to take a rather large battery of intake tests. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). Rorschach test. Oral exam asking me questions about my experiences.
The MMPI test I have to complete on my own, a really long set of statements I have to mark “yes” or “no” to. The guy in the black glasses goes back to doing his own paperwork while I deal with it. A lot of them are the same question, just slightly reworded: “I am bothered by an upset stomach a lot”; “I have a great deal of stomach trouble”; “I get a discomfort in my stomach every few days”. I wonder if they think we won’t notice and will answer differently the second or third time. Or for that matter that we will notice and deliberately answer differently the second or third time. There are also a lot of questions that could be interpreted in a lot of different ways. It feels impersonal and I don’t like the idea of being evaluated with such a clumsy tool.
The oral exam is depersonalizing too. The guy looks over the top of the paper he’s reading from and asks me questions, some of them intrusive like “Have you ever wanted to touch someone you just met?” and he only wants yes or no answers and doesn’t react to anything I say and doesn’t want to discuss any of it.
Finally, finally, he finishes with me. A tall guy with a goatee, wearing a screen-printed Bachman-Turner Overdrive in Concert t-shirt comes in and introduces himself as Joe, says he’s a resident here just like me and will show me around the place. He shakes my hand, asks my name and how I’m doing so far.
“Okay I guess”, I reply. “Seems kind of institutional and impersonal”, I add.
“Yeah, I s’pose it could feel like that when you first get here. It’s really not, though. Trust me on this. You’re gonna get the most hands-on personal experience you ever dreamed of. This place is the real deal, man”. He grins at me and waves at me to follow him down the hallway.
Surprisingly, rock music is playing on the public speakers — Boston’s “More Than a Feeling.” Joe tells me it’s really nice here, he is really getting his life together. He takes me down a corridor. The walls are painted solid green up to knee level then pale green with abstract flowers and cheerful insects. Joe indicates a large room beyond an open double door as we come to it. “This is where we do group therapy. I learned so much about myself in there. They really make you think.” He leads me farther down the hall. “This is where they do biofeedback. It’s pretty cool. They hook you up to all kinds of electrodes and you focus on your mood and thinking and how it affects your tension and rate of digestion and stuff like that.” Around a corner. “We have meetings in there. Everyone gets to talk about their observations on everyone else’s progress, and if anyone has a conflict with other people here, we air it out in there, don’t just carry it around inside you, you know. And everyone has a say in how everyone else’s progress is assessed.” We walk farther on. The linoleum tile squares on the floor have intermittent red or black squares among the grey ones. “Down this row are the individual counselors. Everyone has an assigned individual counselor to help you focus directly on your issues. I’ve got Gary, Gary Stevens, that’s his door there. They’re good. If you have a problem getting the hang of life in here, and sometimes some people find it’s a bit of an adjustment, your individual counselor is like the person you go to. They’ll help you.” Gary’s door, like the others, has his nameplate in black, his name carved in white letters.
Joe points to a pair of conference rooms. “Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meet in there. I didn’t realize I had a drug problem when I first came here, but you learn a lot about yourself in this place. After you’ve been here awhile you’ll find yourself saying you used to think this or you used to think that but that here in Elk Meadow you really got to understand yourself.” Another big room. “Audio visual taping in there. Psychodrama. You’ll be participating in psychological reenactments that they help you set up, and acting through your issues. It’s good. You get to see your own behavior in a whole new way. They make you think about yourself here.” At the end of the corridor are more doors with plaques attesting to the identity of the person occupying the office. “The doctors. That one’s James Barnes, he’s the one who runs all this. They’re really smart. Dr. Barnes in particular. They’re saving people in this place, from the streets, from themselves. You come in here thinking you don’t need saving. Maybe you’ve already been saved by the Lord Jesus Christ or you’ve been saved by that extra hit you’ve got stashed away with your works in the bottom of your backpack just for when you need it, or you’ve been saved by making it into Who’s Who or the Fortune 500, you and your stock portfolio and maybe your ivory cocaine straw, you know what I mean? But we all came in here thinking we knew a lot of things that were not quite so, and then everyone’s looking at you and saying ‘I used to think that too, before I came to Elk Meadow’ and after awhile you have to take time to reexamine. I’ve had to jettison a lot of bullshit things I used to say and believe.”
Joe steers me around another corner and we’re pretty much back where we’d started. A very composed woman, somehow compact without being small, bobbed brown hair, stands waiting. “This is Emily, she’s a Unit Leader. How long you been a Unit Leader, huh, Emily?” Emily smiles and says this is her second month. Joe finishes, “She’s going to show you some other stuff.”
Emily nods to me. “The facility here is divided up into sections. Your Unit Leader is responsible for paying attention to the feedback you get at group and at community meeting and sticking with you and helping you integrate that. You might not always like what you hear. It might make you feel uncomfortable. How you feel is one thing, and you got to own your feelings, but they can get in your way and keep you from hearing what you need to hear. If you aren’t feeling so good about how things are going, your unit leader will notice and help you with that. Second to your individual counselor, your Unit Leader is the person who’s going to be there for you. And you’ll be a Unit Leader yourself at some point.”
Joe adds, “It’s a lot of responsibility and you’ve got to show that you understand the goals of the process here, but one of the ways you show that you’re making progress and taking your own life situation seriously is by participating, we believe in that here. We have to be here for each other. It’s not always easy but it’s always a brand new day and a new chance, you know what I mean?”
Emily takes over and leads me on a tour of the living quarters. “You’ll be staying in a room like this. You’ll have a roommate, I don’t know who yet. It’s not very fancy but there’s storage space under the beds, those are drawers that pull out. It’s not a very big space and you can keep it picked up and get your bed made, people like to see that you’ve bothered to keep your personal area straightened up, little tip. I’m no June Cleaver but I always make my bed and straighten up in the mornings because you want your space to look like a reflection of your focus. It looks good.”
“I’m not clear... are you part of the staff?”, I ask, “because if you are, you’re the first one to really interact with me.”
“I’m a resident, I’m here on the same basis that you are”, she tells me. “We have responsibilities in this place, and being Unit Leader is mine at the moment, which includes participating in giving you this tour.”
She takes me out to the cafeteria area. “You get something to eat on your way here, I hope? The kitchen’s closed, I’m afraid, but there’s some snacks and fruit.”
“I ate in the Atlanta airport before my flight,” I say.
“When I first came here it was sort of my habit to sit by myself and be by myself. I would come in here and get my lunch or supper and go sit by myself and try to withdraw. The thing is, there’s so much therapeutic work that keeps going, really eye-opening experiences that you don’t want to miss out on, and once I had been here awhile I came to realize all that withdrawing was getting in the way of my personal growth, and I needed to see how everyone else was doing here in the program, you know we all participate with each other and we have to be here for each other, and after I had been here awhile I began to realize how much I was missing out if I didn’t stay connected.”
We walk down a short hall. I notice a little alcove off to the left side with a spinet piano and make note of it for later.
Emily directs me outside, through a pair of pneumatic-bar doors, into a courtyard area that opens up into some kind of sports fields. “We come out here once a day for recreation. I’m sure you’ve heard ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. It’s true. People who don’t get exercise dwell on their problems instead of solving them. Before I came to Elk Meadow I was never much of an athlete or active person, but I’ve discovered that I can pitch a baseball pretty decently.” She leads me back in and turns me over to the next person, Gary Stevens, Joe’s individual counselor.
“The important thing”, Gary tells me, “is that you want a fresh start. It’s your life, dude. You gotta reclaim it. You got a safe place here to rethink what you came in with, stuff that ain’t working for you, and find yourself some new paths. I like my work here, man. I take the people who get assigned to me and help them let go of what’s holding them back and give them a push in the right direction. If you can start over fresh, it’s gonna be new chances and new opportunities all across the board. It takes a lot of courage and that’s why we’re here, no one should have to do this alone. When people first come to Elk Meadow they’re all dominated by who they’ve been before, know what I mean? That gets in the way of them having an opportunity to go past who they’ve been and reach out and embrace the possibilities. After you’ve been here a little awhile, you’re gonna find yourself saying ‘Wow, I never realized how much I was a prisoner of my own past’. You are, you know. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can move on past it. Not be chained up by it, huh? Get yourself a new chance.”
Several other residents come out and introduce themselves to me: April, Ellen, Jake ... everyone is smiling and chatting up a storm. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for the program. They ask if I’ve eaten and then take me to the cafeteria as they continue the conversation. “A lot of us, when we first came here, like Ellen here, we’d had a lot of bad experiences with ‘programs’ and we didn’t expect to get much out of it, did we?” Ellen, who has a sort of pinched-off scrunched-in face, takes the cue, “Yeah, I had been in a lot of things, things I got put into, things I put myself into, and it was all like ‘You’re a loser’, but then I got in here and everyone believed in me and said I could be a winner, I can be anything I want.”
I'm not good at learning new people's names, especially if they're easily mixed up. Okay, Ellen is this one, with the pinched-looking face, Emily's the one I mistook for a staffer earlier.
The residents are all very animated, trading off telling their stories and radiating real awe for the place. I can’t match them for energy, can scarcely pay attention at all at this point, I want to sleep. They escort me back to the wing and stand around close to the nurse’s station, an area set apart by a rounded-edged partition at waist height and a door. I get introduced to the evening shift nurse, who, exactly as advertised, is wearing casual street clothes, and she says hello to me with a welcoming smile. She asks me to fill out a cumbersome array of additional medical forms. Every medical doctor under whose care I had ever received any form of treatment, and where and when and for what. Release of information permission forms. It goes on for pages and pages. “I could have done this a lot easier if you folks had let me know to bring this information with me”, I grumble. Then I have to pee in a cup for them. Then get blood drawn.
After that, the residents take me to my room and sit on my roommate’s bed and hang out talking. I am told that my roommate has just been discharged and so I will have the room to myself for probably a couple of days. There is a lot of discussion of former residents and what they had been like and when they had graduated out of Elk Meadow, and how they are probably doing now.
I feel seriously exhausted and darkly annoyed. I was on a long-delayed plane flight, already tired and irritable by the time I landed in Houston. Then I was driven around in circles by an incompetent taxi driver. Then a long long barrage of tests with me answering questions yes or no. Then this neverending tour. I’ve now been here for hours and not once has anyone asked me to talk about myself and what brought me here and what I was interested in getting out of the experience. I feel drowned in “WE”. ‘WE’ felt this way before we came to the great and wonderful Elk Meadow Hospital. ‘WE’ all had certain personal behaviors and then we came to realize they were not in our best interests. ‘WE’ had had all kinds of bad habits that we came to realize had to be abandoned if we were going to get the full advantages of Elk Meadow. I feel like I haven’t spoken twelve syllables except while answering the test questions. I feel assaulted. I need a chance to talk back. There’s a ‘ME’ that the ‘WE’ in this place are going to be hearing from. Tomorrow...
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Instead of the limousine driver I’d been led to expect, I am met at the gate by a blue-shirted Houston Airport staffer. “Derek Turner? We have a message for passenger Derek Turner?” I wave to indicate that that’s me.
“You’re supposed to call this number collect when you arrive.” I’m handed a sheet of paper.
I go to the bank of pay phones and soon find myself talking to a receptionist from Elk Meadow Clinical Retreat. “There’s a problem with the limousine being able to bring you here, so you’re supposed to hire a taxi and the hospital will pay the charges when you get here.”
So after I claim my suitcase, I make my way to the taxi stand and explain the situation. The taxi service wants to confirm so I give them the telephone number. The dispatcher walks over to one of the cabs and talks with the driver, then waves me towards him. “Okay, it’s all set. This is Ben, he’ll take you there.”
I climb across the cracked ochre vinyl of the back seat and the driver pulls out into traffic. “Where ya from?”
“Athens Georgia”
“Visiting, vacation, or business?”
“I guess it falls into business. I’m here for a few counseling sessions and some kind of workup.”
Ben is more inclined to chatter than I am; I answer his questions but I don’t fill any silences and after awhile the conversation sort of languishes.
My mind drifts as I stare out the window but we keep making turns and merging onto highways, then down offramps and roads with storefront businesses and stoplights, then back onto highways, and it seems like we’ve been doing this for a very long time. I find myself tapping my fingers impatiently on the crumbling foam of the armrest. I check my watch and it’s been over forty-five minutes since I landed.
“How much farther is this place?”
“Oh, we’re pretty close now”, the driver reassures me. He aims the car onto another exit ramp; the seatbelt tightens annoyingly around my shoulder and I reposition it. From the highway signs I see through the window, this guy Ben is putting us on interstate spur 610. Again. I recognize a water tower and a big red sign advertising a car wash I’ve seen earlier.
“Excuse me, I’m sorry to ask but are you clear on how to get to this place? We seem to be driving in circles.”
“It’s a little confusing. The road I thought would take us there doesn’t have a turnoff. Don’t worry, I’ll get you there.” Ben’s eyes reflect in the mirror, meltingly apologetic, his smile obsequious and subservient.
I watch the pine-tree air freshener below the rear-view mirror dance on its string. Beneath Ben’s ingratiating mannerisms, I sense a hardness. Or maybe I just sense my own splitting headache and it’s adding to what was already a bad mood.
Another fifteen minutes go by. This time it’s a residential street, with a bank on one corner and a church with scaffolding around it that I’m sure I’ve seen before. I sigh. “Do you maybe want to call in and get directions? I’m not sure we’re making progress.”
Ben picks up the dark grey cube and mashes the talk button and waits. I hear a tinny voice identifying that it’s the dispatcher. “Hey, Arnie, what’s the best way to get to Elk Meadow at 441 West Wichita Springs Road? I’m on 225 business loop...”
“Yeah, stay on until you get past all those dealerships, you want exit...”
The driver confirms and puts the radio back in its cradle and drives. We pass some automotive dealerships and a big Baptist Church, then he’s driving for awhile without making any exit. There are end-of-highway signs indicating we need to pick between 146 north and 146 south. The sun is low in the sky, orange and bright. Be getting dark pretty soon.
“Maybe I should have just tried to hitchhike”, I say.
“Aww man, don’t say that. I told you I’d get you there...” Ben picks up the radio transmitter again and tells Arnie he never saw the exit, and they argue over the radio. The dispatcher gives Ben new instructions and again the radio goes into the cradle and Ben makes some cloverleaf transfers and reversals and after awhile we’re back on 225.
Finally we take a series of turns into suburbia and the taxi pulls up to a big glass-windowed office building. A woman in a beige business suit comes out and hands a credit card to the driver and signs the form.
I wonder cynically if Ben was trying to run up the charges and figured the hospital would pay the tab without blinking. I wonder even more cynically if this could all be a standard hazing ritual associated with arrival at the institution. But there’s that Hanlon’s razor thing, you know, “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence” or however it’s worded. Ben strikes me as hard and manipulative but it could all just be his coping mechanism, a cab driver who gets a lot of cranky passengers.
Elk Meadow Hospital turns out to be a modern office complex, it doesn’t have that ominous psychiatric-institutional look. Lots of glass in the doors, a single-story building with wide corridors, acoustic tiles and fluorescent lights in the ceiling like office buildings.
I follow Beige Business Suit down a corridor and she waves me in to an office. “This is Turner”, she tells the fellow behind the desk, a bored-looking thirty-some-odd wearing glasses with heavy black frames. She hands him forms. “Should be the last admit for today”.
Like her, Desk Official Guy doesn’t bother providing his identity. Wants mine, though, even though he should have that already. “Last name? First name? Date of birth?...” He has an open manila folder in front of him and fills out forms with a pen as I answer.
I have to take a rather large battery of intake tests. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). Rorschach test. Oral exam asking me questions about my experiences.
The MMPI test I have to complete on my own, a really long set of statements I have to mark “yes” or “no” to. The guy in the black glasses goes back to doing his own paperwork while I deal with it. A lot of them are the same question, just slightly reworded: “I am bothered by an upset stomach a lot”; “I have a great deal of stomach trouble”; “I get a discomfort in my stomach every few days”. I wonder if they think we won’t notice and will answer differently the second or third time. Or for that matter that we will notice and deliberately answer differently the second or third time. There are also a lot of questions that could be interpreted in a lot of different ways. It feels impersonal and I don’t like the idea of being evaluated with such a clumsy tool.
The oral exam is depersonalizing too. The guy looks over the top of the paper he’s reading from and asks me questions, some of them intrusive like “Have you ever wanted to touch someone you just met?” and he only wants yes or no answers and doesn’t react to anything I say and doesn’t want to discuss any of it.
Finally, finally, he finishes with me. A tall guy with a goatee, wearing a screen-printed Bachman-Turner Overdrive in Concert t-shirt comes in and introduces himself as Joe, says he’s a resident here just like me and will show me around the place. He shakes my hand, asks my name and how I’m doing so far.
“Okay I guess”, I reply. “Seems kind of institutional and impersonal”, I add.
“Yeah, I s’pose it could feel like that when you first get here. It’s really not, though. Trust me on this. You’re gonna get the most hands-on personal experience you ever dreamed of. This place is the real deal, man”. He grins at me and waves at me to follow him down the hallway.
Surprisingly, rock music is playing on the public speakers — Boston’s “More Than a Feeling.” Joe tells me it’s really nice here, he is really getting his life together. He takes me down a corridor. The walls are painted solid green up to knee level then pale green with abstract flowers and cheerful insects. Joe indicates a large room beyond an open double door as we come to it. “This is where we do group therapy. I learned so much about myself in there. They really make you think.” He leads me farther down the hall. “This is where they do biofeedback. It’s pretty cool. They hook you up to all kinds of electrodes and you focus on your mood and thinking and how it affects your tension and rate of digestion and stuff like that.” Around a corner. “We have meetings in there. Everyone gets to talk about their observations on everyone else’s progress, and if anyone has a conflict with other people here, we air it out in there, don’t just carry it around inside you, you know. And everyone has a say in how everyone else’s progress is assessed.” We walk farther on. The linoleum tile squares on the floor have intermittent red or black squares among the grey ones. “Down this row are the individual counselors. Everyone has an assigned individual counselor to help you focus directly on your issues. I’ve got Gary, Gary Stevens, that’s his door there. They’re good. If you have a problem getting the hang of life in here, and sometimes some people find it’s a bit of an adjustment, your individual counselor is like the person you go to. They’ll help you.” Gary’s door, like the others, has his nameplate in black, his name carved in white letters.
Joe points to a pair of conference rooms. “Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meet in there. I didn’t realize I had a drug problem when I first came here, but you learn a lot about yourself in this place. After you’ve been here awhile you’ll find yourself saying you used to think this or you used to think that but that here in Elk Meadow you really got to understand yourself.” Another big room. “Audio visual taping in there. Psychodrama. You’ll be participating in psychological reenactments that they help you set up, and acting through your issues. It’s good. You get to see your own behavior in a whole new way. They make you think about yourself here.” At the end of the corridor are more doors with plaques attesting to the identity of the person occupying the office. “The doctors. That one’s James Barnes, he’s the one who runs all this. They’re really smart. Dr. Barnes in particular. They’re saving people in this place, from the streets, from themselves. You come in here thinking you don’t need saving. Maybe you’ve already been saved by the Lord Jesus Christ or you’ve been saved by that extra hit you’ve got stashed away with your works in the bottom of your backpack just for when you need it, or you’ve been saved by making it into Who’s Who or the Fortune 500, you and your stock portfolio and maybe your ivory cocaine straw, you know what I mean? But we all came in here thinking we knew a lot of things that were not quite so, and then everyone’s looking at you and saying ‘I used to think that too, before I came to Elk Meadow’ and after awhile you have to take time to reexamine. I’ve had to jettison a lot of bullshit things I used to say and believe.”
Joe steers me around another corner and we’re pretty much back where we’d started. A very composed woman, somehow compact without being small, bobbed brown hair, stands waiting. “This is Emily, she’s a Unit Leader. How long you been a Unit Leader, huh, Emily?” Emily smiles and says this is her second month. Joe finishes, “She’s going to show you some other stuff.”
Emily nods to me. “The facility here is divided up into sections. Your Unit Leader is responsible for paying attention to the feedback you get at group and at community meeting and sticking with you and helping you integrate that. You might not always like what you hear. It might make you feel uncomfortable. How you feel is one thing, and you got to own your feelings, but they can get in your way and keep you from hearing what you need to hear. If you aren’t feeling so good about how things are going, your unit leader will notice and help you with that. Second to your individual counselor, your Unit Leader is the person who’s going to be there for you. And you’ll be a Unit Leader yourself at some point.”
Joe adds, “It’s a lot of responsibility and you’ve got to show that you understand the goals of the process here, but one of the ways you show that you’re making progress and taking your own life situation seriously is by participating, we believe in that here. We have to be here for each other. It’s not always easy but it’s always a brand new day and a new chance, you know what I mean?”
Emily takes over and leads me on a tour of the living quarters. “You’ll be staying in a room like this. You’ll have a roommate, I don’t know who yet. It’s not very fancy but there’s storage space under the beds, those are drawers that pull out. It’s not a very big space and you can keep it picked up and get your bed made, people like to see that you’ve bothered to keep your personal area straightened up, little tip. I’m no June Cleaver but I always make my bed and straighten up in the mornings because you want your space to look like a reflection of your focus. It looks good.”
“I’m not clear... are you part of the staff?”, I ask, “because if you are, you’re the first one to really interact with me.”
“I’m a resident, I’m here on the same basis that you are”, she tells me. “We have responsibilities in this place, and being Unit Leader is mine at the moment, which includes participating in giving you this tour.”
She takes me out to the cafeteria area. “You get something to eat on your way here, I hope? The kitchen’s closed, I’m afraid, but there’s some snacks and fruit.”
“I ate in the Atlanta airport before my flight,” I say.
“When I first came here it was sort of my habit to sit by myself and be by myself. I would come in here and get my lunch or supper and go sit by myself and try to withdraw. The thing is, there’s so much therapeutic work that keeps going, really eye-opening experiences that you don’t want to miss out on, and once I had been here awhile I came to realize all that withdrawing was getting in the way of my personal growth, and I needed to see how everyone else was doing here in the program, you know we all participate with each other and we have to be here for each other, and after I had been here awhile I began to realize how much I was missing out if I didn’t stay connected.”
We walk down a short hall. I notice a little alcove off to the left side with a spinet piano and make note of it for later.
Emily directs me outside, through a pair of pneumatic-bar doors, into a courtyard area that opens up into some kind of sports fields. “We come out here once a day for recreation. I’m sure you’ve heard ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. It’s true. People who don’t get exercise dwell on their problems instead of solving them. Before I came to Elk Meadow I was never much of an athlete or active person, but I’ve discovered that I can pitch a baseball pretty decently.” She leads me back in and turns me over to the next person, Gary Stevens, Joe’s individual counselor.
“The important thing”, Gary tells me, “is that you want a fresh start. It’s your life, dude. You gotta reclaim it. You got a safe place here to rethink what you came in with, stuff that ain’t working for you, and find yourself some new paths. I like my work here, man. I take the people who get assigned to me and help them let go of what’s holding them back and give them a push in the right direction. If you can start over fresh, it’s gonna be new chances and new opportunities all across the board. It takes a lot of courage and that’s why we’re here, no one should have to do this alone. When people first come to Elk Meadow they’re all dominated by who they’ve been before, know what I mean? That gets in the way of them having an opportunity to go past who they’ve been and reach out and embrace the possibilities. After you’ve been here a little awhile, you’re gonna find yourself saying ‘Wow, I never realized how much I was a prisoner of my own past’. You are, you know. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can move on past it. Not be chained up by it, huh? Get yourself a new chance.”
Several other residents come out and introduce themselves to me: April, Ellen, Jake ... everyone is smiling and chatting up a storm. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for the program. They ask if I’ve eaten and then take me to the cafeteria as they continue the conversation. “A lot of us, when we first came here, like Ellen here, we’d had a lot of bad experiences with ‘programs’ and we didn’t expect to get much out of it, did we?” Ellen, who has a sort of pinched-off scrunched-in face, takes the cue, “Yeah, I had been in a lot of things, things I got put into, things I put myself into, and it was all like ‘You’re a loser’, but then I got in here and everyone believed in me and said I could be a winner, I can be anything I want.”
I'm not good at learning new people's names, especially if they're easily mixed up. Okay, Ellen is this one, with the pinched-looking face, Emily's the one I mistook for a staffer earlier.
The residents are all very animated, trading off telling their stories and radiating real awe for the place. I can’t match them for energy, can scarcely pay attention at all at this point, I want to sleep. They escort me back to the wing and stand around close to the nurse’s station, an area set apart by a rounded-edged partition at waist height and a door. I get introduced to the evening shift nurse, who, exactly as advertised, is wearing casual street clothes, and she says hello to me with a welcoming smile. She asks me to fill out a cumbersome array of additional medical forms. Every medical doctor under whose care I had ever received any form of treatment, and where and when and for what. Release of information permission forms. It goes on for pages and pages. “I could have done this a lot easier if you folks had let me know to bring this information with me”, I grumble. Then I have to pee in a cup for them. Then get blood drawn.
After that, the residents take me to my room and sit on my roommate’s bed and hang out talking. I am told that my roommate has just been discharged and so I will have the room to myself for probably a couple of days. There is a lot of discussion of former residents and what they had been like and when they had graduated out of Elk Meadow, and how they are probably doing now.
I feel seriously exhausted and darkly annoyed. I was on a long-delayed plane flight, already tired and irritable by the time I landed in Houston. Then I was driven around in circles by an incompetent taxi driver. Then a long long barrage of tests with me answering questions yes or no. Then this neverending tour. I’ve now been here for hours and not once has anyone asked me to talk about myself and what brought me here and what I was interested in getting out of the experience. I feel drowned in “WE”. ‘WE’ felt this way before we came to the great and wonderful Elk Meadow Hospital. ‘WE’ all had certain personal behaviors and then we came to realize they were not in our best interests. ‘WE’ had had all kinds of bad habits that we came to realize had to be abandoned if we were going to get the full advantages of Elk Meadow. I feel like I haven’t spoken twelve syllables except while answering the test questions. I feel assaulted. I need a chance to talk back. There’s a ‘ME’ that the ‘WE’ in this place are going to be hearing from. Tomorrow...
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
