Once the hospital admission formalities were complete, they took me through some hallways and a couple of security doors and showed me to my room. It had two beds, a nightstand by each, two small dressers, a toilet and a shower. It wasn’t too much unlike a cheap motel room, only cleaner, unadorned and without the well-worn hominess that most motel rooms get. I took the bed by the door instead of the one close to the bathroom, which seemed less prestigious.

The floor was gray vinyl tile, but there were two big squares of yellow and one of red in the middle of all the gray, and I wondered about the tile layer who had installed the floor. Did he miss his home where maybe there was a tree with yellow and red fruit or flowers, or did he simply want to add a little color to the rooms of the people he knew would be sleeping here, people he knew would be scared and sad?

A nurse came in, checked my blood pressure and heartbeat, and then took a blood sample. This is something they do all night long, for reasons that seem diabolical. Every two hours. Wake you up, stick a thick needle into your arm, take your blood.

“It’s almost time for your meds and breakfast. You want to go on and wait with the rest of them.”

There were more people in the main entrance area—men and women, younger than me and older than me. There was also a round receptionist area, which separated our side from where they kept the dangerously crazy people. That was where they sent you if you really misbehaved. They had honest-to-God padded rooms, I was told, like in the movies, and many different kinds of restraints. Personal Safety Rooms, they called them. Aldous Huxley couldn’t have come up with a name so sinister. I had never been in a Personal Safety Room and I knew that, if they put me in one, I would go crazy.

People were crowding around one of two portable medication stands—they look like the kind of tall rolling tool chests you see at Home Depot—and I sat and waited on the floor for the walk to breakfast next to a woman who was being released. “You going to line up for your medications? That’s the best part of the day,” she said and smiled at me, a gentle, resigned smile that was like shrugging her shoulders. “I don’t think they have my prescriptions yet,” I said. She had red hair and a drawn face. She was too skinny. She didn’t ask me why I was entering, and I didn’t ask her why she was leaving. She told me she was a high school math and science teacher. She said her husband hadn’t divorced her yet, but he had moved out and wouldn’t let her see the kids.

“Mine hasn’t divorced me yet either,” I said, “but we’ve been separated a while. Sometimes she lets me see the kids and sometimes she doesn’t.”

“That’s how they do you,” she said.

“I guess technically she’s my wife, not my ex-wife. But she’ll be my ex-wife soon enough, I’m sorry to say. Sorry, I’m talking too much. I’m nervous.”

A nice thing about the psychiatric hospital is that you’re allowed to say how you’re feeling—so long as you’re not talking to your psychiatrist, who will use it against you. But I knew if we talked about our children for long we’d both start crying, so I was grateful when she changed the subject.

“Do you want to go outside and smoke? They give out the drugs and then they let everyone out to smoke. Then it’s breakfast. You’ll get a smoke break every two hours. You can have the rest of my pack.”

“I don’t smoke,” I said. “But I’ll go outside with you. The outside is the only good thing about this place.”

“What are you doing here, anyway? It’s none of my business. Hey, Debbie,” she told one of the nurses, “we’re going to smoke. If my paperwork comes up, that’s where I am. I’ll be right back. Don’t forget I’m out there! You’re going to be too cold without a coat,” she said to me. “Here, why don’t you just put on my coat, since I’ve got two sweaters on and my boots.”

We stood and she put her big jade-green parka over my shoulders. She was wearing well-worn, expensive-looking brown leather riding boots.

“Martin? Clancy Martin?” The nurse at the med station was looking around and calling my name.

“Those are your meds,” the teacher said. She smiled at me kindly. “You sure don’t want to miss those.”

“That’s me,” I said. “I’m Clancy Martin.”

“I don’t want to have to look for you next time,” the nurse said. He was a soft-featured man who looked a bit like Barney, the sympathetic psychiatric nurse from the Hannibal Lecter movies.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m just teasing you,” he said. “I know it’s your first day. What’s up with the coat?”

“It’s hers,” I said. We both looked at the science teacher, who had sat back down on the floor. Barney gave her a smile and a little wave, and she smiled and waved back.

“Rosalind? She’s a buddy of mine,” he said. “OK, let’s see what we’ve got here.”

There was my regular antidepressant, an “antidepressant booster” and three new medications I hadn’t taken before. They were also putting me back on lithium, which was not a good drug for me. Six drugs.

I asked Barney what the new medications were for.

“I don’t need all this medication. I do need my Valium, though.”

“They don’t have you down for Valium,” Barney said. “I’ve got Ativan here. It’s less addictive.”

It had taken me months to get off Ativan, which I had done the year before, using Valium to taper down.

For me it has gone:

1985 - 2009

Booze, and occasionally a little cocaine, speed or weed

2009 - 2010

Baclofen, Ativan, lithium, Wellbutrin, Zoloft, and two or three others with chemical names

2010 - 2011

Baclofen, Ativan, Zoloft

2011 - 2015

Valium and Zoloft

2015 - December 31, 2016

Valium

2017 - Present

Drug-free. (I sometimes still take Valium from an old prescription on plane flights and long taxi drives for nausea. I stored up about 3,000 mgs when I was tapering off for the purpose of using them to kill myself, if necessary.)

“I’ll take the Ativan. At least until I can get Valium,” I said. I was starting to get those little waves of electricity that run through your arms and legs and make your mouth dry when you need your benzo. “What are the others for? I don’t want to get started on a bunch of new drugs. It’s too much work to get off them.”

“You’d better ask your psychiatrist. Let’s see who they got you down for. Dr. Ellis. He’s all right. You’ll like Dr. Ellis.”

“That’s my doctor,” Rosalind told me from the floor. “That’s good luck. He doesn’t like to keep people in here for more than a few days. He diagnoses everyone as bipolar and mood disorder. He’ll put you on lithium.”

“Yeah, they just put me on it. I don’t like it. I’ve taken it before.”

“It’s harmless, though. I’ve been taking it for three years now and I don’t notice any difference at all. It sounds scary but it doesn’t have any kick. The ones you should watch out for are the ones that give you a high.”

“Yeah,” I said. For the past year or so I’d been trying to avoid the stronger benzos. But during AA meetings, when I was first getting sober, I ate Ativan like they were Altoids. I came to love the flavor. They are a little sweet.

“Klonopin, that’s the worst drug I’ve ever been on,” she said. “I’d rather be back addicted to Oxycontin than have to come down off Klonopin again.”

“One psychiatrist told me to cut back to three glasses of wine a day and two Klonopin,” I said. He was an interesting fellow from Egypt who had his medical practice near my university. “I tried to kill myself after about a month on that regimen.”

“I like the sound of that,” she said, and laughed. “Come on, let’s smoke a cigarette. I’m about to get out of here. The principal of my school is coming to get me. He’s a good guy. I guess I’ll stay tonight at his place.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Come on, it’s nothing like that. He’s married. Not that I’m saying I wouldn’t. I would. He’s very attractive. But married is off-limits. That’s what started all this for me. Married men. They’re more like heroin than heroin. That’s my thing: downers. Watch, I’ll be back on dope three months from now. Then in six months I’ll be back here.”

“Come on, now, Rosie. That’s no way to talk,” Barney the nurse said.

“Yup, downers. That’s why I like married guys rather than single ones, I guess.” Rosalind gave me the same shrug and smile.

“I’m married,” Barney said, and that made me laugh. It was the first time I remembered laughing because something was honestly funny in a long time. It was my normal laugh.

I repeated it when we went outside into the yard so that Rosalind could smoke: “I’m married.” Rosalind started laughing too. There were a couple of trees in the yard and a wooden fence, probably 12 feet tall, and a wooden door on the far side of the fence. If you climbed one of the trees you could probably walk out on a limb and jump over the fence. But you’d have a 15-foot drop or so. My ankles broke easily. I had broken both of my wrists and both of my ankles at least once when I was a kid, climbing trees and jumping off our garage into the sand, plus my elbow at a roller rink. I broke my foot as an adult stepping off a four-foot ledge.

Anyway it didn’t seem like a practical escape plan, climbing the tree and leaping out into whatever was on the other side of that wall. Probably a parking lot for cops.

“I’m getting my feet all wet,” I said. My slippers were muddy. I liked watching Rosalind smoke. She hid her cigarette under her hand like it was a secret. I kicked at the snow. It was mostly melted in the wet paving-stone-and-grass courtyard but there was a crust running against the brick wall of the building. Rosalind looked over her shoulder, threw the cigarette into the grass and lit a second one. A kid in a black wool hat bent over and picked up her half-finished cigarette.

“I just got out of jail,” I said. It seemed relevant. In fact it had been a couple of weeks, but it felt fresh.

“They brought you over from county?” Rosalind asked.

“No. I just woke up in the hospital and then they brought me over here.”

“You’re lucky. Usually they’d put you in the tower. It’s awful up there—like you’re stuck in somebody’s bad dream. I was up there once for a week before they even knew who my psychiatrist was. They give you your meds and forget about you. If you have lousy insurance that’s where you go. All the homeless wind up there. They don’t even separate the violent offenders from the regular ones like us.”

I had been up in the tower. It was indeed an awful place. My father had died in a tower like the one we were talking about, in a mental hospital for indigents in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Yeah, I’ve spent some time in the tower,” I said.

Rosalind looked at me with surprise.

The sun was out and it was warming up a little.

The whistle blew, and we went back inside. Rosalind’s paperwork was ready, and she gave me a hug before she left. She wrote down her email address for me. She fished around in a big yellow canvas duffel bag and pulled out a coffee-stained hardback copy of Richard Yates’ Liars in Love.

“Did you ever read this?” I shook my head no. I had read it, but I believed she would be happier if she thought she was introducing me to the book. I had almost pretended to be a smoker and taken her cigarettes. “He spent a lot of time in mental asylums. He was an alcoholic. He was crazy, too, really crazy. So we all have that in common. I didn’t know about him, but the last time I was in here someone showed it to me, and it’s great. It was still here when I got back, and I was going to steal it because basically it’s the only good book we have, the rest is romance novels and Stephen King and the Bible, though we have The Shining, which is good, of course, but since you came now I think I should leave it. It’s yours if you want it. Nobody here reads. They all just argue about what channel to put the TV on.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I was hoping I would have a book to read.”

I didn’t know if there was anyone who would bring me books. During one stint at Research, I had Rebecca, my wife at the time, bring me The Collected Shakespeare, for the volume and the variety, and that was a mistake. I must’ve thought it would make me look cool and smart, but I felt silly reading it in the common room. It was good for going to sleep at night.

“I’ve read it about 30 times now and honestly I think it’s probably not helping me with my recovery. Dr. Ellis says we should stay away from books that are written by other addicts or about other addicts. He says even literature about recovery can trigger a relapse. But I mean ‘Heroin’ is my favorite song. Am I really never going to listen to Lou Reed again?”

“Don’t ever read Alvarez’s The Savage God,” I said. “I read it and Styron’s Darkness Visible in a hotel room downtown a few years ago, and I tried to kill myself about a month later. Back in 2008. Well, 2008 or 2009. It was New Year’s Eve.”

That was the first time I’d tried hard to kill myself in Kansas City. I was working on a book and my editor, who didn’t know me very well yet, recommended I take Alvarez as a model. I was still a drunk at this time and one morning with a blistering hangover I skipped classes, checked myself into a nice hotel downtown and spent the day in bed reading Alvarez and Styron and drinking myself back onto my feet to come home to Rebecca and our children at 5:30 that afternoon. But the Alvarez—which is a study of suicidal poets—and the Styron—which is a study in the depression he suffered when he quit drinking—stayed in my head. A few weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, I was drunk on champagne I’d snuck out of the refrigerator and although Styron and Alvarez were not romanticizing suicide, they did make it seem inevitable. I hanged myself in a closet with a sheet. My wife found me when I started kicking at the door.

“Well, hell. I wish I was going to get to know you.”

“Me too,” I said. “I’ve never had a real friend in one of these places.” Which was true.

“Email me if you want when you get out. We dingwingers always say we’re going to email each other and then we never do. We’re not supposed to do that either, really. I dated a guy I met in here. Yup, you guessed it. He was married.”

“OK, Mrs. Maxwell, time to go,” the nurse who had Rosalind’s paperwork said.

“OK, time to go,” Rosalind said, and she hugged me. She was weeping. I felt like I had made a real friend and I didn’t want to let go of her. She was a mom who couldn’t see her kids. We could get an apartment together, just friends, when I got out. We could help each other raise our children.

Then she was gone. Later when I looked for the slip of paper with her email address on it I discovered I had lost it. But of course I could find her if I wanted to. How many Rosalind Maxwells were high school teachers in Kansas City? [1] Not her real name. I cannot recall her real name, and never looked her up when I still could.