A Poem For Bellevue (The Mental Wards) Here's to you Bellevue-- your short halls going nowhere, perfect for pacing: up and down and up and down. Pacing, until my legs feel like rubber. Then maybe I will rest a moment in my room with my roommate who is playing an endless game of solitaire. Cards face down, then up, then down then up. Maybe I'll check my closet To see if the vampire who lives next door gave me any of my clothes back. Probably not. He stands at his door all night, looking through the cloudy Plexiglass window. All night. Looking. Staring. Watching. Waiting for another victim. The vampire's name is Jose. He's from Chile, really not a bad guy. During the day, when it isn't so dark outside, Maybe the vampire Jose will give me back my underwear that they gave me when I came in, the underwear with Garfield and little tiny hearts on it. They gave me clothes when I came in because I was homeless, and didn't bring a change of clothes to the hospital like they tell you to do in the admissions literature. I leave my room, walking, not pacing. Down the hall to the recreation room. Kiss FM is on the radio, Maria's playing spades with the nurses. Maybe someday I'll learn to play spades. Everybody plays spades. But I'm too busy pacing, and eating, and talking with Benjamin. Benjamin's been a Hell's Angel since he was 16. He paints abstract art with tempura paint on ceiling tiles he found in the art room. Alice tells me that the best way to smuggle cigarettes into Bellevue is to get your visitor to take the cookies out of a Pepperidge Farm Cookie bag, then pack it with cigarettes. She's a pro. She has a visitor. Later, everyone will want a dollar for something, and somewhere down the hall, a nurse will smell smoke, and there will be the sputtered denials that we weren't smoking, spoken through lips redolent of tobacco. We weren't smoking, all four of us were in the bathroom drinking coffee. There are no cups. What I like best is Monday and Thursday afternoons, when Alex brings his music cart. And we sit around in a circle in the rec room playing our music. I'm a frustrated drummer: I bang on anything-- congas, xylophones, autoharps. Alex says I'm good, but I think that Maria, who sings sad Spanish songs, is better. Sometimes we do drama therapy. Anne the drama therapist brings the curtain up when we begin, and down when we finish. We imagine we're all sorts of things, but I'm not so sure that Anne knows what she's doing. Yesterday, she asked us to imagine that we were lions in the jungle, and Jose got so excited that he had to leave. They say I'm doing better, switched me from liquid Haldol to liquid Trilofon. But I don't know. Bill's been here for a year, says he needs the place. And sometimes, when they're about to release him, he kicks someone or something so hard that they put him in a straightjacket. Then he can't leave anymore. He's a nice guy, though, studied psychology at N.Y.U. Said he graduated and decided to do graduate work somewhere else. Time for dinner. It's chicken again. I trade my breast for Steven's leg, and trade my ice cream for some okra. I like the way they fix okra here. Maybe I'll fix some for myself when I get out. But for now, I'm eating chicken here again, waiting, and wondering what will happen next.
