to match the ten Roman digits to their amounts, learning math ceased to have any curve for me, but I didn’t know that. I could shuffle four digits in my head as soon as I learned how to do one. Add or subtract, not saying anything out loud or writing anything down. Feeling the new numbers bloom and swell within my chest. If I had to write it down or show my work, the numbers were silent. Math problems looked like broken numbers, their pieces misaligned for no reason. You don’t need water in a dry river to know where it’s going to flow. The bends, falls, banks and slopes tell you everything, water or no water. That’s what numbers were like for me from the beginning, and listening to a teacher explain how to line up columns—ones, tens, hundreds—and carry digits, I felt like a bird enduring a laborious, pop-up-book description of flight.
I faded out in class one day, zeroed in on a linoleum square on the floor, the dull color of old milk, peppered with flecks and spots to camouflage its age and damage. I copied it on the back of my paper, ignoring the class exercises, matching it point for discolored point with my blunt pencil.
Mrs. McMahon stood over me. She’d called me to the front of the class to solve one of the problems on the blackboard but I hadn’t heard her.
“I’ve already solved them,” I said.
Five other kids stood at the board showing their work, some drawing little stick-bundle fives to help their math.
“He can’t count on his hands,” somebody said. Mrs. McMahon sent me to the principal’s office. I went three more times before they tested me and took me out.
When you’re being tested for a special program, you’re lumped into a deaf-mute/brain-damaged category, longhand for stupid. I’ve seen kids in wheelchairs and on crutches, nerves that never touched in the womb so their joints are permanently kinked, the wrists, fingers and feet not fully formed, or their lips and faces struggle to give shape to the words in their brain. Someone will say How old is she? or What’s wrong with him? Because clearly, she or him can’t hear you or understand you or speak for themselves. When people think you’re stupid, they’ll talk right in front of you, like you’re nothing more than furniture. People thought I was stupid, so my notion of mental hospitals comes from a frankenstitched patchwork of the details deemed worth repeating in front of me—prurient, psych-student, water cooler gossip they thought I couldn’t comprehend.
I learned that:
Some patients sat in their own shit for hours before they were tended to.
Medications were forgotten or transposed, sending one patient into an epileptic seizure and rendering another comatose.
Patients were left for hours upon hours in a locked room with no toilet, then punished for urinating on the floor—a display of antisocial behavior.
Restraints were used less to protect one patient from another or himself, and more to protect staff lunch hours or coffee breaks.
Not finishing dessert or not wanting to watch television with the others was considered antisocial behavior.
Electroconvulsion had long since gone from a last resort to routine procedure.
Diagnoses were exaggerated to perpetuate the flow of revenue from insurance companies.
You were watched when you wanted to be alone, ignored when you needed help. An understaffed, under-qualified team of interns and trainees reported to an over-aged, overworked Board of Directors. They read insane into your every word and action, decided when you leave if they came to any decisions at all. And if you were a patient and a good-looking woman, then you were as good as in Hell.
In jail, visiting day draws mothers, wives, fathers, siblings and children who skip work, school, drive for hours and tolerate spot-searches, metal detectors and X-rays to see their loved ones. When and if a mental patient receives a visitor, that patient is old and wealthy. Look at their visitors, check the watches and shoes—that’s how you spot money. Heirs come out of the woodwork, start spending before the judge can raise his gavel.
“Did you go to college, Daniel?”
“I did a couple of years at a junior college. Not my thing.”
“And what about high school?”
“Yeah, I went to high school. Graduated in ’78.”
I finished barely over two years of high school. I spent most of it in jail, arrested twice between ninth and tenth grades. I logged eight fights in those two years, three of them broken up by a teacher or gym coach who had me suspended. Mom and Dad never knew. I signed their names on the forms, wrote an angry letter of apology in Mom’s cursive to accompany one that I mailed back, as well as signing Dad’s signature to an expulsion warning which was obviated by a stint in juvenile hall.
“What were your grades like?” he asks.
“Mostly B’s, except for a D in Art.” Plant the seed while I have the chance. “We had to do at least one semester of Visual Art during the four years.”
“Didn’t like Art, I guess?”
If you aspire to be the next Picasso or Gauguin, bury it for two hours with a guy like this. Even if you know for a fact that he owns a house full of stupid earth-hugger whale paintings or hippie pottery, keep your mouth shut. You mention art, anything creative, and your Evaluator has a mental stack of color-coded tab cards with a new question for every response that will cattle-prod you to a predetermined diagnosis. Drop your guard and some mommy-hating intern will take you by a leash to the manic-depressive-suicidal-multiple-personality-schizophrenic-sociopath diagnosis they’re dying to assign to someone so they can feel like their tuition wasn’t wasted.
Creativity is either positive or negative, it has zero middle ground in an evaluation. And if your evaluation is mandated by a hospital, your artistic yearnings are going to be a three-alarm warning. Listen: you hate art. You are not creative. You get outdoors, socialize, go to the beach, hike, feed the homeless, visit your family, and surf. If an Evaluator sees creativity accompanying depression, anger or any sign of self-destruction, then that creativity is going to be relegated to finger painting and puzzles with grown men and women wearing cotton gowns, diapers and head injury scars.
“I just wasn’t very good at it,” I say. “They had a beginning drafting class that filled the requirement and I thought I could handle that. But it was full, so I spent a semester sketching fruit bowls. My drawings stank, but the instructor passed me out of sympathy. He knew I made an honest effort.” True and false. I can draw if I have to. I’ve got a steady hand and a good eye, but I don’t understand the urge to create interpretive pictures of sunsets or fruit bowls.
“So, what were you good at?”
Math guys are loners, so:
“History. Science.” False. False.
“Do you remember your GPA?”
“Three something.” Zero point eight.
“Besides Art, did you have any other weak subjects?”
“English, reading, those things were tough. The grammar. Too many exceptions to the rules.”
“Were you involved in any extracurricular activities?”
I signed permission slips and academic performance warning notices for five bucks a signature, sold records and pipes I’d shoplifted, and forged learner’s permits for the students who failed Driver’s Ed. I forged signatures on work permits and signed overtime on burger joint time cards. I did math homework for some students, charged big time to do it in their handwriting, and even more if I had to show their work. By high school I could do it, show my work, but it was a chore.
“I played basketball in a church league. Mostly I worked, though. Dad wanted me to save for college.”
“But no outside activities related to school?”
“No.”
“Was there a conflict with your working?”
“No.