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July 21, 1982 (Day Three)
Feb. 25th, 2026 10:57 am= July 21, 1982 (Day Three) =
Okay, I have to confess something kind of embarrassing. Because the decision to do the thing I did next was so close, as decisions go, with good arguments in my head for doing it or not doing it. Or at least for not doing it yet. Anyway, I considered each position, having really good orators inside my head for their chosen viewpoint, that I’m afraid the deciding element was ultimately how cute and clever I thought it was.
Not that I expected it to be received that way, mind you. But I couldn’t help appreciating it myself.
(After this, I was really going to have to be extra willing to consider my ego and my defensiveness and all that personal-stake shit as it came into consideration. It’s actually not all bad in this place so far. I do see some potential.
But anyway...)
I did it yesterday, the twentieth. Or I still think of it as yesterday, because I hadn’t been to bed yet. It was around 3 am and I was processing and replaying and feeling and interpreting the two days I’d just been through. Then I dug into my suitcase and pulled out the remains of a ream of blank typing paper, folded a page into quarters and ripped it along the folds, and then picked up a pen.
Cram. That’s what it felt like, my word for being on the receiving end of the process. That since my arrival, the other humans in my environment had been trying their dead-level best to cram their thoughts into my head. Non-reciprocally. A very one-way push, with a lot of enthusiasm on their part.
On the quarter sheet in front of me, I began writing the word “cram’ over and over, above and below and to the right of the first occurrence, but as I moved right on the sheet I made them denser, closer, more numerous, until they collided and combined to form a brick wall. Thanks, Roger Waters!
I put that piece aside and started over on the next quarter sheet, writing the word “CRAM” over and over in a vertical array, a CRAM pancake stack. Then to the right of that, I repeated the pancake of CRAMs but compressed it, squishing the stack vertically so the words were more tightly packed together. I repeated that, with the words now overlapping and the stack flattening. As I continued, they became dense and illegible and then compressed into a flat black line.
I picked up the third segment and on it I wrote the word “cram” except this time in large block letters. Then I filled in the white space within the C with smaller letter c’s and did that again, making the letters yet smaller, until I had a densely c-packed C. Then repeated the process with the other three letters.
Finally, on the remaining slice of paper, I wrote:
Communication is supposed to be a two way street
The flow of thoughts & ideas into my head needs to be balanced by a
flow of thoughts & ideas back OUT. Not just everything crammed into
me.
CRAMMmming your thoughts into my head. CRAMMmming them
into all the hours of the day. Displacing my own thoughts into
smaller and tighter spaces. Squeezing away my thinking room.
There is a lot of WE around here. I am not a part of any WE until I
get to join it as a contributing participant.
I’m here about US but I start off as ME. And on the subject of ME,
I am the authority, the expert, and the person
in charge of
my treatment plan.
I’m here because I want some help with it, so yes I’m here to listen.
But that’s not an invitation to take over.
Then after some trimming with scissors...
Yes, let’s not forget that whatever else this place is about, at least they don’t treat us like imminent dangers to ourselves, hence I can have scissors. And by the way it’s cool that April gets to wear chains and stuff...there’s a lot of freedom here even if there are some intrusive constraints...
...I taped the four compositions to the outside of my door, the public-facing side, then stripped off my clothes and went to sleep.
There is no explosion. It’s not like I lit a bomb and flung it. It’s obviously happening several notches slower than that, and I’m here watching it unfold. Okay. I mean, I’m sure it’s going to have an impact.
I file in behind other folks on the cafeteria line, my hair wet and hanging in ringlets. I nod to April, who is picking out a cinnamon bun; she nods back. I get my coffee, consider some nice-looking sausage links. I notice Emily pouring some half 'n half into her coffee and nod to her too, but she turns away, perhaps not having seen me.
I eat at one of the white plastic tables and then rise, carrying my tray to put on the conveyor belt to be washed. Joe is ahead of me, makes eye contact. There is the start of a smile that disappears into a flat line and a stare and then he glances around.
I'm expecting there to be some reaction to what I put on my door but it's hard to know if I'm observing any of that. Some people's behavior around me seems a little off but since I'm looking for that I'd probably perceive it whether it's actually happening or not.
For instance, when I go in for morning unit meeting, I see Ronald talking with April, and then he nudges her and it seems like they're both looking at me for a moment. Maybe they were talking about me. They aren't signaling a hello or waving me over but maybe they wouldn't anyway. It's not like I'm worried that folks are talking about me or that I'd be upset if they weren't, but I admit I'm curious. I did something from which I hoped to see some ripples. I really wish I was better at this “communicate with other people” thing.
I have biofeedback next on my schedule today, which is a lot less relevant a venue for watching for reactions to my cram posters than psychodrama would have been. But afterwards, when I get out and head for the cafeteria, I eat lunch feeling a bit more like I’m Illustration Figure One to whom everyone’s eyes are being drawn. More surreptitious glances, more conversations that stop when I come close. What I find amazing is that no one has said anything to me yet. I consider that some more. Nothing in this place feels spontaneous. Everything is calculated. This is something they don’t have a rule for yet. No one wants to react and run the risk of reacting wrong.
Or not. I should at least consider the possibility that I’m being paranoid as hell. That could be, you know. Perhaps this type of door poetry is all sufficiently unusual that they just don’t know how to categorize it so as to respond to it.
Or nobody has noticed. Yeah, I’ll hold that in consideration, too. Highly useful exercise. But it mostly feels like everyone’s afraid to react because they don’t want to react the wrong way and get in trouble. Seriously.
* * *
The big group, with Dr. Barnes, is where things finally get interesting.
Not right away. First a lot of innocuous news, similar to morning meeting. Our diet has been rated by a cooking show’s chef, and it compares to a landmark eatery, except that it’s healthy. We will miss Ms. Dockery, who has been sorting and aiming our endless mail to the right mailboxes all these years.
My attention wanders. Ronald is eating a leftover biscuit wrapped in a napkin. I wonder again if he and April had been discussing me earlier. I glance around looking for April. There she is, standing next to Jake, who’s in a grey ZZTop tour shirt. My eyes want to linger on the contours of her torso. She has cute shapes and looks so nice in that denim jacket she wears.
Dr. Barnes moves on. “Now, Ellen, here, she’s all positioned to make progress like her friend April, wouldn’t you say so, Emily?” Dr. Barnes looks like one of those “before” pictures for Grecian Formula, his hair a carefully shaped black nest highlighted with metallic-grey wires. Probably sprays it with hairspray once he’s got every strand in place just so.
Emily walks forward from the shadows to the front of the group. She makes a wry disappointed face as she gestures with an open palm towards the pinch-faced Ellen. “We all hope for that, and there’s been real progress on her attempts to make amends, but I’m afraid we’re still stuck on whether to go back to school, and she continues to obsess about running away to take a vacation.”
“Do you have any comment to make about that?”, Barnes asks Ellen.
Ellen’s eyebrows pull down; her shoulders hunch and she tilts her face towards the floor. “I am... considering school”, she says, starting off slowly and accelating into it, “it wasn’t... what I’d planned on doing, but I can see that it might be... good for me to have something regular like that when I get back. But that’s for when I get back. I’ve been planning this trip for years. It’s not like it’s some crazy...fucked up idea I came up with when I was shooting. We have the money for it and I deserve it. I don’t see why everyone is so focused on trying to get me to give it up!” She adds some scowl.
“Amanda, what’s your take on this?”, Barnes asks, calling on one of the other residents.
Amanda stands. Tall gal in a red t-shirt. “Ellen still seems very resistant to the idea that she’s attempting to run away from her problems. It’s a pattern we see often, but she has an emotional stake in not considering that that’s a possibility.”
Jake chimes in. “I know how much that vacation means to you. You were looking forward to it for so long and it’s your present to yourself. But the team is trying to get you to look at maybe the reason it means so much to you is that it represents a get out of jail free card, just hop on board and leave the old Ellen behind.”
Dr Barnes continues, “So there is concern. You hear it, Ellen, but you don’t credit it with any significance, because escape is still more important to you than doing a fair evaluation. Unfortunately, we can’t escape ourselves. Whenever we arrive at our destination, we look around and hey, there we are, same old us. What do you think you can do to get past that resistance?”
“You know”, I burst in, “if you’re demanding she cancel her plans, I don’t think that’s a fair either-or. Maybe Ellen’s vacation is not a good idea for her, but she doesn’t have to hold on to a belief that it is in order to keep planning to go ahead with it. She can still be seriously considering that you folks might be right and she shouldn’t go.”
People look at me briefly, then at each other, then to the center of the room, looking for their cues.
Dr. Barnes replies, “You’re suggesting that she can believe and disbelieve in the same thing at the same time. Humans can’t do that.”
“No, I’m saying that to believe is not good or necessary at all. You make a premise that taking a vacation is a good thing, and you plan around it, but you continue to consider other viewpoints.”
“Oh, so if we call it a “premise”, that makes everything all right. What if I call it a fishhook? Why does giving it a different name fix the problem?” He shrugs and makes an eloquent palms-upward gesture.
“A belief is where you’ve made a mental and emotional commitment to something being true or false. But you can adopt a premise without believing you’re right. Like if I’m in the cellar and the lights go out and I don’t know which wall I’m touching, I can decide to act on the premise that this is the wall that goes to the stairs. I can feel along it and keep walking until I find stairs or get back to where I started from or end up somewhere else. Maybe I’ll throw out the premise as probably wrong, but it gives me a starting point, so I can act.”
“What you’re doing now is intellectualizing. It’s a defense, Derek, a way of not dealing with what’s real and basic. Ellen’s problems won’t go away just because you intellectualize about them. That’s false. It’s not a real reaction.”
“No, I don’t think that’s true of intellectualizing at all. But then, I am an intellectual. So maybe I’m biased. I’m willing to consider the possibility that you’re right about this...but I’m going to continue to act on the premise that you are not.”
Barnes glares explosively for a split-second.
Ellen has been staring flatly at me throughout this exchange, and now jumps in, “Why do you want to get involved, it’s not like you care! I saw what you wrote on your door. You think we suck! So who do you think you’re fooling?”
Dr. Barnes looks distinctly pleased. He slides his hands down into his pockets and inclines his head like he’s thinking carefully, then says, “We don’t like to restrict people’s expressiveness. But at the same time, we feel confined to at least a little respect for how one person’s expression makes someone else feel. I understand that some ‘poetry’ and such is now posted on Derek’s door over in Unit Two. Emily, I believe you are Unit Leader for Derek as well?”
Emily stands up, cold-eyeing me. “Everyone in my unit is very upset. We tried to make Derek feel welcome, like he was joining us on our journey, and he acts like we were kidnapping him! People are saying privately that this is blocking their progress and erasing their confidence in their project. Derek could have spoken to any of us at any point, but he chose to attack us all and make these accusations.”
I nod. I wait.
Dr. James Barnes stares at me for several beats, then shrugs and says to one and all but addressing it to me, “I take it that you accept what you’re hearing?”
“Well, I was definitely the one who taped the messages on my door. Whether my doing so means what Emily says it means is open to interpretation, and so is the meaning of what I taped up there. People should read it and make up their own minds. Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“Well, don’t you think as a person welcomed into Unit Two you should care about what the others on your unit think? Are they that unimportant to you?”
“They’re of central importance to me because they’re the people most likely to understand me and be understood by me, and I came here to participate.”
“Everyone here who has gone down to look at your door says it’s a real poke in the face, that it’s hostile. Not the kind of thing you do to let people know they’re important to you.”
“There are reasons for giving someone a sharp poke aside from being hostile. Or wanting to hurt them. A few basic understandings needed to be spelled out. Otherwise their care seems likely to take a bad trajectory. I had to clarify my own relationship to my own case management and how anybody else’s participation is going to be viewed.”
“Yes, you find all kinds of ways to not need anybody. You can do it all yourself. Too together to need feedback. Too wise to need any advice. Behold, this is Derek. He is self-contained. He doesn’t need you, for anything.” Barnes winks conspiratorially at his rapt audience. “We’ve heard that song a few times, haven’t we? Well, I suppose since we’re unnecessary to Derek’s recovery, we may as well stop focusing the spotlight on him and leave him in peace. Valerie, I hear you had a real breakthrough in NA. Is that true?”
Heads rotate. Again, Valerie doesn’t like the attention. “I guess so”, she answers flatly.
Ronald pats her shoulder and said, “She’s been on the same road as the rest of us.”
Joanne from recreation says, “Well, she’s come a long way towards recognizing that she’s part of a group.”
Valerie says, “I just wish this would all be over. I want to go home.”
April gives her a brief hug and says, “We all want that.”
* * *
“I’m Jake, and I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hi, Jake!”
Alcoholics Anonymous meets in one of the conference rooms, and, like all the other items on my schedule of activities, has been chosen for me.
“I always knew I had a drinking problem, don’t get me wrong. Like, you know, you tell yourself when you wake up in the morning and your shirt is all caked with where you threw up on yourself and your head is pounding, and you say ‘I can’t keep going on like this, I gotta stop’, right? But you can’t do anything about that yet, first you gotta get your stomach settled and scrape the shit off your tongue and get some clothes on and figure out what day it is today. And by the time you got yourself put together to face the day, you got Red and Joel and Renfro saying, ‘Hey, you going to the party? Let’s get a fifth of vodka and see what’s bouncin’ around’, and you’re thinking that sounds like a good idea.
“So yeah, Ellen and George and them, when they say ‘We got promised’, and ‘You said it was gonna be like this, and now you’re saying that’. Sure, ol’ Dr. Barnes, ol’ Sneaky Pete, he made me all kinds of promises, told me all kinds of things, all to get me to sign on the dotted line. But they got me in here, and, you know something? I’m an alcoholic. Maybe they lied some to get me in this seat, but I need help. So that’s my news to celebrate today. I am where I’m s’posed to be.”
Gary nods approvingly. “Thank you, Jake. Who else has something positive for us this evening?” Gary Stevens himself is apparently not necessarily an alcoholic, or at least not as far as any of us know; Gary is a facilitator, an Elk Meadow staff member. I always thought one of the selling points of AA was that everyone was on an equal footing. But in here we have a facilitator. “How about you, Luis? Anything good you can share?”
“I guess. Hey everybody I’m Luis, I’m an alcoholic, how’re you doing, blah blah blah. I heard from my brother and he says their loan got approved, so when I get out he’s going to put me in the showroom, I got a job when I get out.”
“Yay, high five”, Ronald says, and they smack palms.
Valerie shrugs. “I sort of have some good news, I guess. I was on the phone with my sister. We haven’t exactly been the closest. Growing up, I mean, not just recently. But I really felt like talking when I had the chance, and it’s like we’re not as angry, it was actually nice talking with her. She was in a good mood and wanted to tell me about this party where she made this chili that everybody loved and it’s got, whatchamacallit, you know, that green stuff that looks like parsley all cut up into it...”
“Cilantro”, I supply, recognizing it from the description.
A couple people glance my way. Valerie looks at me blankly, then keeps going, “...anyway, her kid sees this mound of chopped green stuff and gets the idea that they’re making pot brownies and I guess it ended up being pretty funny instead of an argument about it, anyway, she’s telling me about all that. And I’m going ‘yeah’, and ‘uh huh’ and enjoying the conversation, ... so then out of nowhere she says ‘We could try it.’ So there’s a chance I could stay with them for a while once I’m clean.”
Ronald nods at that. I do too.
Amanda says, “That’s cool. For her to say that, and also if it works out.”
* * *
I go through the food line and get my dinner tray, then sit down at the empty end of a nearby table. I open the book I’ve been reading and find my place.
After a moment, Ronald slides in across from me and props his chin on both palms and stares at me for a long couple beats. “Fucking hell, doesn’t it piss you off that nobody’s talking to you?”
“Huh? Oh, that explains a few things. I didn’t realize I was being coventried!”
“What’s ‘coventried’?”
“I don’t know why it’s called that, but when you give someone the silent treatment, lots of people call that ‘sending them to Coventry’.” I make quotation marks with my fingers.
“Oh, okay. Well anyway, dude, look, it doesn’t have to be this way. C’mon, man, we’re all in here trying to get our shit together somehow. I don’t know what you think we’re up to, I didn’t get all that what you put up on your door, to be honest, but we all want to work on ourselves. For some of us, this may be our last chance.”
“I’m here to work on my own shit too. I’m sorry everyone feels like I’m against them, or against this place. That’s not how it is. But you need to understand a couple things. First off, two years ago the people at my school tricked me into signing a paper and next thing I knew I was on a locked ward and I had no rights. So I’m very protective of my right to decide what is and what isn’t going to happen to me. And another thing. Just because I need to get better in certain ways, and work on my own hangups, doesn’t mean I’m trying to catch up with normal. In most ways, normal is several steps in the wrong direction. I’m doing better than most folks out there, and I’m sure as hell not handing the reins of my life over to anyone else, I just want to get even better with some stuff.”
“You sound almost human.” That doesn’t come from Ronald, but from Ellen, who has slipped in from behind me and is now sitting to my right. “You should talk like that all the time and quit trying to impress everybody with all that bullshit you keep flinging out.”
“I still hear a lot of bullshit”, Ronald responds. “You’re still saying you’re better than everybody else and you think you can confuse everyone with your made-up pretending, you’re all ‘Look at me, I’m so smart I don’t have to change my shit’, yeah that’s you, bro.”
“It’s not all bullshit”, says April, who has followed Ellen over to the table. “What you said to Dr. Bigshot, I caught that. You told him he’s taking the position where the only way we’re not in denial and still blocking the truth out is if we go with everything he says. You didn’t say it plain like that, you said it the way he likes to talk, which is like calling him on it, like ‘Hey, I caught you making like you can’t ever be wrong and whenever we don’t agree it means we’re in denial, but we’re onto your game’. And he didn’t like it much.” She snorts.
“Blah, blah, blahcakes”, Ellen says. “Look, you say you want to work on yourself. So work on yourself.”
By now, Jake and a few others have wandered over to the conversation. Jake says, “Hey, you know, we all came here from different places. Not just ‘I got sent here from Detroit’ or ‘I’m from Dallas’, but also our situations. Ronald used to be a hotshot business manager for some record label, and rode around in big limousines, didn’t you? Cocaine and fancy spoons. And me, I was looking at time, too many possession busts and I used to steal and fence some stuff to support my habit, so they said maybe I straighten my shit out, I just get probation. I don’t know how you got here but once we’re here we kinda realize we’re all in the same boat.”
“I was in a nursing program”, I tell them, “and I got crossways with the hospital and the program staff over patients’ rights issues, and for my parents it was kind of the last straw. I keep flunking out of colleges and not being able to keep jobs. My folks are very sheltered and old-fashioned and neither of them drinks except on special occasions, and they think all drugs, pot, LSD, cocaine, heroin, it’s all the same and if you use any of them you’ve got a drug problem. So for them it’s an explanation for why I’m not getting on my feet and getting on with life. They also think I’m probably mentally ill, although they think the drugs probably did that too. Those aren’t my reasons, but that’s how I got invited to come spend some time here. I got told a lot of stuff about how they were gonna work with me on improving my social and communication skills, and how I get more of what I want and need from my social environment, and that did sound kinda cool. I’ve got a lot of frustration about never fitting in or belonging anywhere, and I wasn’t doing anything else at the time, so I went along with it.”
April and Ellen state that they’re tired and are going to go back to their room. I think maybe Ellen is mostly tired of the conversation, and of me, whenever she’s looking at me it’s a scowl and a yecch, full-on revulsion and disgust.
“Shit”, George says once they’re down the hall, “That Ellen, staring at you like you just poured dill pickle juice all over her ice cream.”
“Yeah, right? I don’t know what that’s all about.”
George looks at me for a moment. “She’s maybe got a problem about who you get hot for.”
“I haven’t ever come on to her or anything. If I were going to try to flirt with someone in this place, I don’t think it’d be her.” And definitely not when she’s glaring at me.
Ronald says, “Well, I hope it isn’t me.” He actually looks awkward and apologetic about it.
Oh, that. “You shouldn’t worry anyhow, but relax. I got nothing against people who do, but I don’t personally find male merchandise arousing. Contrary to expectations. I know I set off a lot of people’s antenna in that direction.”
“Uh, yeah, nothin’ personal dude”, Jake remarks, “but I just totally assumed you were gay. Well, like you said, nothing wrong with it if you were, and if you aren’t, you aren’t.”
“You think Ellen’s got an attitude about gay guys?”, I ask. “The ones that do...they don’t usually think it makes it all wonderfully different and okay if I tell them I’m a straight sissy femmy boy instead.”
George says, “It’s kind of hard to tell with Ellen. She don’t warm up to people easy, and yeah, she thinks she’s got you pegged as something she don’t like, but I never heard her say anything about it.” He looks at me as if contemplating.
————
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.
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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.
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Index of all Blog Posts
Okay, I have to confess something kind of embarrassing. Because the decision to do the thing I did next was so close, as decisions go, with good arguments in my head for doing it or not doing it. Or at least for not doing it yet. Anyway, I considered each position, having really good orators inside my head for their chosen viewpoint, that I’m afraid the deciding element was ultimately how cute and clever I thought it was.
Not that I expected it to be received that way, mind you. But I couldn’t help appreciating it myself.
(After this, I was really going to have to be extra willing to consider my ego and my defensiveness and all that personal-stake shit as it came into consideration. It’s actually not all bad in this place so far. I do see some potential.
But anyway...)
I did it yesterday, the twentieth. Or I still think of it as yesterday, because I hadn’t been to bed yet. It was around 3 am and I was processing and replaying and feeling and interpreting the two days I’d just been through. Then I dug into my suitcase and pulled out the remains of a ream of blank typing paper, folded a page into quarters and ripped it along the folds, and then picked up a pen.
Cram. That’s what it felt like, my word for being on the receiving end of the process. That since my arrival, the other humans in my environment had been trying their dead-level best to cram their thoughts into my head. Non-reciprocally. A very one-way push, with a lot of enthusiasm on their part.
On the quarter sheet in front of me, I began writing the word “cram’ over and over, above and below and to the right of the first occurrence, but as I moved right on the sheet I made them denser, closer, more numerous, until they collided and combined to form a brick wall. Thanks, Roger Waters!
I put that piece aside and started over on the next quarter sheet, writing the word “CRAM” over and over in a vertical array, a CRAM pancake stack. Then to the right of that, I repeated the pancake of CRAMs but compressed it, squishing the stack vertically so the words were more tightly packed together. I repeated that, with the words now overlapping and the stack flattening. As I continued, they became dense and illegible and then compressed into a flat black line.
I picked up the third segment and on it I wrote the word “cram” except this time in large block letters. Then I filled in the white space within the C with smaller letter c’s and did that again, making the letters yet smaller, until I had a densely c-packed C. Then repeated the process with the other three letters.
Finally, on the remaining slice of paper, I wrote:
Communication is supposed to be a two way street
The flow of thoughts & ideas into my head needs to be balanced by a
flow of thoughts & ideas back OUT. Not just everything crammed into
me.
CRAMMmming your thoughts into my head. CRAMMmming them
into all the hours of the day. Displacing my own thoughts into
smaller and tighter spaces. Squeezing away my thinking room.
There is a lot of WE around here. I am not a part of any WE until I
get to join it as a contributing participant.
I’m here about US but I start off as ME. And on the subject of ME,
I am the authority, the expert, and the person
in charge of
my treatment plan.
I’m here because I want some help with it, so yes I’m here to listen.
But that’s not an invitation to take over.
Then after some trimming with scissors...
Yes, let’s not forget that whatever else this place is about, at least they don’t treat us like imminent dangers to ourselves, hence I can have scissors. And by the way it’s cool that April gets to wear chains and stuff...there’s a lot of freedom here even if there are some intrusive constraints...
...I taped the four compositions to the outside of my door, the public-facing side, then stripped off my clothes and went to sleep.
There is no explosion. It’s not like I lit a bomb and flung it. It’s obviously happening several notches slower than that, and I’m here watching it unfold. Okay. I mean, I’m sure it’s going to have an impact.
I file in behind other folks on the cafeteria line, my hair wet and hanging in ringlets. I nod to April, who is picking out a cinnamon bun; she nods back. I get my coffee, consider some nice-looking sausage links. I notice Emily pouring some half 'n half into her coffee and nod to her too, but she turns away, perhaps not having seen me.
I eat at one of the white plastic tables and then rise, carrying my tray to put on the conveyor belt to be washed. Joe is ahead of me, makes eye contact. There is the start of a smile that disappears into a flat line and a stare and then he glances around.
I'm expecting there to be some reaction to what I put on my door but it's hard to know if I'm observing any of that. Some people's behavior around me seems a little off but since I'm looking for that I'd probably perceive it whether it's actually happening or not.
For instance, when I go in for morning unit meeting, I see Ronald talking with April, and then he nudges her and it seems like they're both looking at me for a moment. Maybe they were talking about me. They aren't signaling a hello or waving me over but maybe they wouldn't anyway. It's not like I'm worried that folks are talking about me or that I'd be upset if they weren't, but I admit I'm curious. I did something from which I hoped to see some ripples. I really wish I was better at this “communicate with other people” thing.
I have biofeedback next on my schedule today, which is a lot less relevant a venue for watching for reactions to my cram posters than psychodrama would have been. But afterwards, when I get out and head for the cafeteria, I eat lunch feeling a bit more like I’m Illustration Figure One to whom everyone’s eyes are being drawn. More surreptitious glances, more conversations that stop when I come close. What I find amazing is that no one has said anything to me yet. I consider that some more. Nothing in this place feels spontaneous. Everything is calculated. This is something they don’t have a rule for yet. No one wants to react and run the risk of reacting wrong.
Or not. I should at least consider the possibility that I’m being paranoid as hell. That could be, you know. Perhaps this type of door poetry is all sufficiently unusual that they just don’t know how to categorize it so as to respond to it.
Or nobody has noticed. Yeah, I’ll hold that in consideration, too. Highly useful exercise. But it mostly feels like everyone’s afraid to react because they don’t want to react the wrong way and get in trouble. Seriously.
* * *
The big group, with Dr. Barnes, is where things finally get interesting.
Not right away. First a lot of innocuous news, similar to morning meeting. Our diet has been rated by a cooking show’s chef, and it compares to a landmark eatery, except that it’s healthy. We will miss Ms. Dockery, who has been sorting and aiming our endless mail to the right mailboxes all these years.
My attention wanders. Ronald is eating a leftover biscuit wrapped in a napkin. I wonder again if he and April had been discussing me earlier. I glance around looking for April. There she is, standing next to Jake, who’s in a grey ZZTop tour shirt. My eyes want to linger on the contours of her torso. She has cute shapes and looks so nice in that denim jacket she wears.
Dr. Barnes moves on. “Now, Ellen, here, she’s all positioned to make progress like her friend April, wouldn’t you say so, Emily?” Dr. Barnes looks like one of those “before” pictures for Grecian Formula, his hair a carefully shaped black nest highlighted with metallic-grey wires. Probably sprays it with hairspray once he’s got every strand in place just so.
Emily walks forward from the shadows to the front of the group. She makes a wry disappointed face as she gestures with an open palm towards the pinch-faced Ellen. “We all hope for that, and there’s been real progress on her attempts to make amends, but I’m afraid we’re still stuck on whether to go back to school, and she continues to obsess about running away to take a vacation.”
“Do you have any comment to make about that?”, Barnes asks Ellen.
Ellen’s eyebrows pull down; her shoulders hunch and she tilts her face towards the floor. “I am... considering school”, she says, starting off slowly and accelating into it, “it wasn’t... what I’d planned on doing, but I can see that it might be... good for me to have something regular like that when I get back. But that’s for when I get back. I’ve been planning this trip for years. It’s not like it’s some crazy...fucked up idea I came up with when I was shooting. We have the money for it and I deserve it. I don’t see why everyone is so focused on trying to get me to give it up!” She adds some scowl.
“Amanda, what’s your take on this?”, Barnes asks, calling on one of the other residents.
Amanda stands. Tall gal in a red t-shirt. “Ellen still seems very resistant to the idea that she’s attempting to run away from her problems. It’s a pattern we see often, but she has an emotional stake in not considering that that’s a possibility.”
Jake chimes in. “I know how much that vacation means to you. You were looking forward to it for so long and it’s your present to yourself. But the team is trying to get you to look at maybe the reason it means so much to you is that it represents a get out of jail free card, just hop on board and leave the old Ellen behind.”
Dr Barnes continues, “So there is concern. You hear it, Ellen, but you don’t credit it with any significance, because escape is still more important to you than doing a fair evaluation. Unfortunately, we can’t escape ourselves. Whenever we arrive at our destination, we look around and hey, there we are, same old us. What do you think you can do to get past that resistance?”
“You know”, I burst in, “if you’re demanding she cancel her plans, I don’t think that’s a fair either-or. Maybe Ellen’s vacation is not a good idea for her, but she doesn’t have to hold on to a belief that it is in order to keep planning to go ahead with it. She can still be seriously considering that you folks might be right and she shouldn’t go.”
People look at me briefly, then at each other, then to the center of the room, looking for their cues.
Dr. Barnes replies, “You’re suggesting that she can believe and disbelieve in the same thing at the same time. Humans can’t do that.”
“No, I’m saying that to believe is not good or necessary at all. You make a premise that taking a vacation is a good thing, and you plan around it, but you continue to consider other viewpoints.”
“Oh, so if we call it a “premise”, that makes everything all right. What if I call it a fishhook? Why does giving it a different name fix the problem?” He shrugs and makes an eloquent palms-upward gesture.
“A belief is where you’ve made a mental and emotional commitment to something being true or false. But you can adopt a premise without believing you’re right. Like if I’m in the cellar and the lights go out and I don’t know which wall I’m touching, I can decide to act on the premise that this is the wall that goes to the stairs. I can feel along it and keep walking until I find stairs or get back to where I started from or end up somewhere else. Maybe I’ll throw out the premise as probably wrong, but it gives me a starting point, so I can act.”
“What you’re doing now is intellectualizing. It’s a defense, Derek, a way of not dealing with what’s real and basic. Ellen’s problems won’t go away just because you intellectualize about them. That’s false. It’s not a real reaction.”
“No, I don’t think that’s true of intellectualizing at all. But then, I am an intellectual. So maybe I’m biased. I’m willing to consider the possibility that you’re right about this...but I’m going to continue to act on the premise that you are not.”
Barnes glares explosively for a split-second.
Ellen has been staring flatly at me throughout this exchange, and now jumps in, “Why do you want to get involved, it’s not like you care! I saw what you wrote on your door. You think we suck! So who do you think you’re fooling?”
Dr. Barnes looks distinctly pleased. He slides his hands down into his pockets and inclines his head like he’s thinking carefully, then says, “We don’t like to restrict people’s expressiveness. But at the same time, we feel confined to at least a little respect for how one person’s expression makes someone else feel. I understand that some ‘poetry’ and such is now posted on Derek’s door over in Unit Two. Emily, I believe you are Unit Leader for Derek as well?”
Emily stands up, cold-eyeing me. “Everyone in my unit is very upset. We tried to make Derek feel welcome, like he was joining us on our journey, and he acts like we were kidnapping him! People are saying privately that this is blocking their progress and erasing their confidence in their project. Derek could have spoken to any of us at any point, but he chose to attack us all and make these accusations.”
I nod. I wait.
Dr. James Barnes stares at me for several beats, then shrugs and says to one and all but addressing it to me, “I take it that you accept what you’re hearing?”
“Well, I was definitely the one who taped the messages on my door. Whether my doing so means what Emily says it means is open to interpretation, and so is the meaning of what I taped up there. People should read it and make up their own minds. Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“Well, don’t you think as a person welcomed into Unit Two you should care about what the others on your unit think? Are they that unimportant to you?”
“They’re of central importance to me because they’re the people most likely to understand me and be understood by me, and I came here to participate.”
“Everyone here who has gone down to look at your door says it’s a real poke in the face, that it’s hostile. Not the kind of thing you do to let people know they’re important to you.”
“There are reasons for giving someone a sharp poke aside from being hostile. Or wanting to hurt them. A few basic understandings needed to be spelled out. Otherwise their care seems likely to take a bad trajectory. I had to clarify my own relationship to my own case management and how anybody else’s participation is going to be viewed.”
“Yes, you find all kinds of ways to not need anybody. You can do it all yourself. Too together to need feedback. Too wise to need any advice. Behold, this is Derek. He is self-contained. He doesn’t need you, for anything.” Barnes winks conspiratorially at his rapt audience. “We’ve heard that song a few times, haven’t we? Well, I suppose since we’re unnecessary to Derek’s recovery, we may as well stop focusing the spotlight on him and leave him in peace. Valerie, I hear you had a real breakthrough in NA. Is that true?”
Heads rotate. Again, Valerie doesn’t like the attention. “I guess so”, she answers flatly.
Ronald pats her shoulder and said, “She’s been on the same road as the rest of us.”
Joanne from recreation says, “Well, she’s come a long way towards recognizing that she’s part of a group.”
Valerie says, “I just wish this would all be over. I want to go home.”
April gives her a brief hug and says, “We all want that.”
* * *
“I’m Jake, and I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hi, Jake!”
Alcoholics Anonymous meets in one of the conference rooms, and, like all the other items on my schedule of activities, has been chosen for me.
“I always knew I had a drinking problem, don’t get me wrong. Like, you know, you tell yourself when you wake up in the morning and your shirt is all caked with where you threw up on yourself and your head is pounding, and you say ‘I can’t keep going on like this, I gotta stop’, right? But you can’t do anything about that yet, first you gotta get your stomach settled and scrape the shit off your tongue and get some clothes on and figure out what day it is today. And by the time you got yourself put together to face the day, you got Red and Joel and Renfro saying, ‘Hey, you going to the party? Let’s get a fifth of vodka and see what’s bouncin’ around’, and you’re thinking that sounds like a good idea.
“So yeah, Ellen and George and them, when they say ‘We got promised’, and ‘You said it was gonna be like this, and now you’re saying that’. Sure, ol’ Dr. Barnes, ol’ Sneaky Pete, he made me all kinds of promises, told me all kinds of things, all to get me to sign on the dotted line. But they got me in here, and, you know something? I’m an alcoholic. Maybe they lied some to get me in this seat, but I need help. So that’s my news to celebrate today. I am where I’m s’posed to be.”
Gary nods approvingly. “Thank you, Jake. Who else has something positive for us this evening?” Gary Stevens himself is apparently not necessarily an alcoholic, or at least not as far as any of us know; Gary is a facilitator, an Elk Meadow staff member. I always thought one of the selling points of AA was that everyone was on an equal footing. But in here we have a facilitator. “How about you, Luis? Anything good you can share?”
“I guess. Hey everybody I’m Luis, I’m an alcoholic, how’re you doing, blah blah blah. I heard from my brother and he says their loan got approved, so when I get out he’s going to put me in the showroom, I got a job when I get out.”
“Yay, high five”, Ronald says, and they smack palms.
Valerie shrugs. “I sort of have some good news, I guess. I was on the phone with my sister. We haven’t exactly been the closest. Growing up, I mean, not just recently. But I really felt like talking when I had the chance, and it’s like we’re not as angry, it was actually nice talking with her. She was in a good mood and wanted to tell me about this party where she made this chili that everybody loved and it’s got, whatchamacallit, you know, that green stuff that looks like parsley all cut up into it...”
“Cilantro”, I supply, recognizing it from the description.
A couple people glance my way. Valerie looks at me blankly, then keeps going, “...anyway, her kid sees this mound of chopped green stuff and gets the idea that they’re making pot brownies and I guess it ended up being pretty funny instead of an argument about it, anyway, she’s telling me about all that. And I’m going ‘yeah’, and ‘uh huh’ and enjoying the conversation, ... so then out of nowhere she says ‘We could try it.’ So there’s a chance I could stay with them for a while once I’m clean.”
Ronald nods at that. I do too.
Amanda says, “That’s cool. For her to say that, and also if it works out.”
* * *
I go through the food line and get my dinner tray, then sit down at the empty end of a nearby table. I open the book I’ve been reading and find my place.
After a moment, Ronald slides in across from me and props his chin on both palms and stares at me for a long couple beats. “Fucking hell, doesn’t it piss you off that nobody’s talking to you?”
“Huh? Oh, that explains a few things. I didn’t realize I was being coventried!”
“What’s ‘coventried’?”
“I don’t know why it’s called that, but when you give someone the silent treatment, lots of people call that ‘sending them to Coventry’.” I make quotation marks with my fingers.
“Oh, okay. Well anyway, dude, look, it doesn’t have to be this way. C’mon, man, we’re all in here trying to get our shit together somehow. I don’t know what you think we’re up to, I didn’t get all that what you put up on your door, to be honest, but we all want to work on ourselves. For some of us, this may be our last chance.”
“I’m here to work on my own shit too. I’m sorry everyone feels like I’m against them, or against this place. That’s not how it is. But you need to understand a couple things. First off, two years ago the people at my school tricked me into signing a paper and next thing I knew I was on a locked ward and I had no rights. So I’m very protective of my right to decide what is and what isn’t going to happen to me. And another thing. Just because I need to get better in certain ways, and work on my own hangups, doesn’t mean I’m trying to catch up with normal. In most ways, normal is several steps in the wrong direction. I’m doing better than most folks out there, and I’m sure as hell not handing the reins of my life over to anyone else, I just want to get even better with some stuff.”
“You sound almost human.” That doesn’t come from Ronald, but from Ellen, who has slipped in from behind me and is now sitting to my right. “You should talk like that all the time and quit trying to impress everybody with all that bullshit you keep flinging out.”
“I still hear a lot of bullshit”, Ronald responds. “You’re still saying you’re better than everybody else and you think you can confuse everyone with your made-up pretending, you’re all ‘Look at me, I’m so smart I don’t have to change my shit’, yeah that’s you, bro.”
“It’s not all bullshit”, says April, who has followed Ellen over to the table. “What you said to Dr. Bigshot, I caught that. You told him he’s taking the position where the only way we’re not in denial and still blocking the truth out is if we go with everything he says. You didn’t say it plain like that, you said it the way he likes to talk, which is like calling him on it, like ‘Hey, I caught you making like you can’t ever be wrong and whenever we don’t agree it means we’re in denial, but we’re onto your game’. And he didn’t like it much.” She snorts.
“Blah, blah, blahcakes”, Ellen says. “Look, you say you want to work on yourself. So work on yourself.”
By now, Jake and a few others have wandered over to the conversation. Jake says, “Hey, you know, we all came here from different places. Not just ‘I got sent here from Detroit’ or ‘I’m from Dallas’, but also our situations. Ronald used to be a hotshot business manager for some record label, and rode around in big limousines, didn’t you? Cocaine and fancy spoons. And me, I was looking at time, too many possession busts and I used to steal and fence some stuff to support my habit, so they said maybe I straighten my shit out, I just get probation. I don’t know how you got here but once we’re here we kinda realize we’re all in the same boat.”
“I was in a nursing program”, I tell them, “and I got crossways with the hospital and the program staff over patients’ rights issues, and for my parents it was kind of the last straw. I keep flunking out of colleges and not being able to keep jobs. My folks are very sheltered and old-fashioned and neither of them drinks except on special occasions, and they think all drugs, pot, LSD, cocaine, heroin, it’s all the same and if you use any of them you’ve got a drug problem. So for them it’s an explanation for why I’m not getting on my feet and getting on with life. They also think I’m probably mentally ill, although they think the drugs probably did that too. Those aren’t my reasons, but that’s how I got invited to come spend some time here. I got told a lot of stuff about how they were gonna work with me on improving my social and communication skills, and how I get more of what I want and need from my social environment, and that did sound kinda cool. I’ve got a lot of frustration about never fitting in or belonging anywhere, and I wasn’t doing anything else at the time, so I went along with it.”
April and Ellen state that they’re tired and are going to go back to their room. I think maybe Ellen is mostly tired of the conversation, and of me, whenever she’s looking at me it’s a scowl and a yecch, full-on revulsion and disgust.
“Shit”, George says once they’re down the hall, “That Ellen, staring at you like you just poured dill pickle juice all over her ice cream.”
“Yeah, right? I don’t know what that’s all about.”
George looks at me for a moment. “She’s maybe got a problem about who you get hot for.”
“I haven’t ever come on to her or anything. If I were going to try to flirt with someone in this place, I don’t think it’d be her.” And definitely not when she’s glaring at me.
Ronald says, “Well, I hope it isn’t me.” He actually looks awkward and apologetic about it.
Oh, that. “You shouldn’t worry anyhow, but relax. I got nothing against people who do, but I don’t personally find male merchandise arousing. Contrary to expectations. I know I set off a lot of people’s antenna in that direction.”
“Uh, yeah, nothin’ personal dude”, Jake remarks, “but I just totally assumed you were gay. Well, like you said, nothing wrong with it if you were, and if you aren’t, you aren’t.”
“You think Ellen’s got an attitude about gay guys?”, I ask. “The ones that do...they don’t usually think it makes it all wonderfully different and okay if I tell them I’m a straight sissy femmy boy instead.”
George says, “It’s kind of hard to tell with Ellen. She don’t warm up to people easy, and yeah, she thinks she’s got you pegged as something she don’t like, but I never heard her say anything about it.” He looks at me as if contemplating.
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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.
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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.
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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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