night

After passing through an eerie series of security stations and electronically locked hallways, I emerged in a blue-lit chamber half-filled with heavily medicated men and women. More disturbing than their disheveled appearance or the vacant looks on their faces was noticing that the patients were all shuffling about in socks, slippers, or slip-ons. For their own safety—to protect them from self-destruction—shoelaces are not permitted.

Finding the Sacred Heart customer I had come to visit, we sat down facing one another. The chairs we sat on were heavy—far too heavy for a person to lift. He slurred something, then his eyes fixed on my shoulder, and he was immobilized—except for his palsied hands. A bead of drool slowly crept from his lip. I wondered, How had it come to this?

 

As a young high school English teacher, I had to learn the hard way that 15 year-olds aren’t generally manic for the likes of Chaucer, Milton, or Keats. But Andy, a particularly gifted junior, was an exception. He devoured Dostoyevsky between classes and counted Kafka a like-minded confidante. He wrote both poetry and prose for pleasure and enjoyed wrestling with the classical philosophers as much as analyzing independent cinema. Andy was a popular student, a starter on the varsity football squad, played electric guitar, and appeared to have an auspicious future before him.

Upon graduation, Andy went off to university. The next time I saw him shook me profoundly.

The athletic intellect I had known as a high school student was now heavier by 80 pounds and had trouble finishing a thought. Instead of living in a well-appointed home, he wandered the streets at night. Instead of working on a graduate degree, he spent his days pulling recyclables from city garbage cans. He delivered interminable rants on esoteric topics, punctuated by pure fantasies of dealings with politicos, publicists, and the occasional movie star. His world was now consumed by an inner violence, sometimes directed toward others, sometimes toward himself. 

Andy had experienced a psychic break at about the age of twenty. Without warning, this bright, personable student was plunged into the darkness of schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. His behavior quickly became erratic, and after assaulting both his mother and father was relegated to the streets.

Now, at thirty years old, it seems that things are deteriorating further. He is currently locked in a psychiatric hospital—his fourth visit in two months. He has been caught in a cycle that reveals a massive breech in our social safety net.

Unwilling or unable to maintain a disciplined regimen of medication while trying to survive the vicissitudes of homelessness, Andy’s episodes are becoming more frequent and more volatile. But the system’s answer is woefully inadequate: usually it is a 72-hour hold, followed by a cab ride to a downtown street corner. In the more egregious cases, he will get up to two weeks in a hospital, capped off by a bed at a homeless shelter.

Nine days ago Andy called me at home. He was terrified and begged to see me. Aware of his recent degeneration, I agreed to come see him. It was the middle of the night and he was at St. James Park in the heart of downtown. When I found him, he began to weep, perhaps as much in relief as in agony. He complained of a wizard who was putting thoughts into his head, a wizard who appeared to him in the form of a black squirrel. He agreed that it was best to call the police and have him taken to the hospital, and after I got off the phone, he brightened up a little.

We sat on the park’s swing set while we waited for the police to arrive, and as we swayed back and forth, he suddenly took off his shoe, telling me he wanted to show me something. He lifted up his shoeless foot and began to peel off his sock. I looked intently, having learned to expect the unexpected in circumstances like these. As the sock came off, I stared at his bare foot, trying to make out what I was seeing. It was a shoelace wrapped neatly around his arch.

In a voice suddenly sane, Andy said matter-of-factly, “When they admit you, they take away your belt and your shoelaces, they check your hair and your pockets, they remove your shoes … but they don’t take off your socks.”

He unraveled the shoelace and handed it to me.

 

Andy will be released from his present stay within the next couple days—I don’t know how much longer he will last.