A Cokehead Goes to the Psychward

A Cokehead Goes to the Psychward
by Laura Matsue

Dorothy June was my room mate for a few years. I loved her and I hated her and she always had some new problem that was encompassing her life that needed my immediate attention. A sucker for anyone deemed mentally ill, I would entertain us both by playing psychiatrist and studied her in a way; trying to figure out what was wrong with her, trying to classify her into a certain personality type. I couldn’t figure out if life kept handing her bad cards, or she was just making it seem like it did so she could conjure excuses for everything that seemed to go wrong. Her problems seemed to pile on top of one another, a never ending supply of dramatic tragedy. We started doing drugs with and without each other, I eventually moved out and in with someone who forbade me from inhaling anything besides cigarette smoke and I found out a year later that she was in the hospital for trying to kill herself. We both found it kind of interesting, so I asked her to answer a few questions to give people an idea of what a manic episode resulting in hospitalization was like.

L: You went to the psyche ward post coke binge right?
D: Yeah. The previous day was started with an 11 am phone call to go for
noodles, which then turned into a noon stopover to get about two grams. We
were riding in a van that had an air horn in the back seat and our driver,
jaundiced and already high, with beer in hand kept stopping to blast it out
the side window yelling "You suck!" at everyone who we
passed in the van. Of course this came to a dangerous point when we
hit some construction along the route back to our shithole house and
were just stopped in traffic, letting all the people who “sucked” get a
good look at our faces and license plate. This was followed by
lines and coffee. I cleaned the house for a while. Went over to a
friend's, where we drank about ten beers and then we were summoned to this
strangely empty mansion in Burnaby for a friend's birthday. Lines, lines,
inane conversation with vacuous blondes (coke dealer’s
girlfriends...generally good fodder for jokes and the
oh-so-pleasurable obvious burns). I spent a great deal of time wondering why
they never used the bidet in the upstairs bathroom. More lines...beer...four
am...then a slow drunken drive home.

L: How much were you doing a day?
D: As much as I could...I don't know something average? Comparatively to,
say, a soccer mom, or a supermodel?

L: How did you support the habit?
D: Habit, smabbit. Put it in front if me, I can't say no, parting with
eighty bucks on the other hand; that is slightly more difficult
when not working and trying to survive on writing gigs alone. In fact, now
that I think about it, the only real way to support a habit is to have
generous friends who want to pull you down with them. Having no financial prowess and not really into paying bills helps too.

L: Explain the day that it all fell apart.
D: Well, I woke up. It all falling apart really consists more of me
cutting it apart. It was a grandiose gesture of having very low serotonin
level and a love of The Magic Flute. Strangely enough, I fucking hate
Mozart; but the overture to the Magic Flute was on CBC2 radio and I was just possessed to turn it up, grab the razor from the mirror on the desk and just start cutting the shit out of my arms while the Queen of the Night was going off the scale.

L: What kind of procedures did you go through when you first arrived? For
example, I’ve had my shoes taken away before.
D: After laying on a gurney for about seven hours, I was wheeled through
the bowels of [a canadian] General Hospital. I mean bowels. I can't
believe the insides of the hospital are actually like my intestines.
It was a comforting, yet disturbing ride for about twenty minutes. The
hallways were dank and the pipes were exposed, moldy. Anyway, rolling into the Brief Intervention Ward (East2B), I sat and waited; for a while. Then I was asked a series of inane questions. Led into a room full of nothing, no knobs, no chairs, no fucking toilet seat, (just in case I decided to smash my head in, I figure), and wire windows. I sat in there for about twenty minutes before this asshole came in and searched my bags and person. I didn’t bring a razor, but only because I figured it would invite some sort of swaddling outfit...then about an hour later they dosed me on Clonazapam, Syraquel (in low doses a sedative, high doses an anti-psychotic-love that’s generally used as a pharmaceutical incentive). I fell asleep.

L: How long did they keep you there for?
D: Just a week; enough time to meet some ex-meth heads, watch a woman masturbate with the bathtub faucet of the shared bathroom, learn some Banghara from a six foot five Indian named Ranjeet, get slapped by mypsychiatrist for being sleepy because of the drugs he put me on. Meeting all the psych ward nurses was pretty amusing - one in particular.
Born into the wrong decade or just a shit head, he wore pleated, high-waist khakis and Buddy Holly glasses. I guessed he was still getting over the whole 1994 Weezer thing. He eventually kicked my boyfriend out for lying down on my bed with me. Actually, to be more specific, he kicked my boyfriend out when my boyfriend got mad about the whole situation, jumped out of bed and started pointing at his crotch, saying, "Look, look, I don't even have an erection, c'mon!" So now he has the claim he got kicked out of the psyche ward for not getting  hard. I guess Buddy also had the ethics of the fifties, too.

L: What illness was this written up as?
D: Borderline Personality Disorder; which is bullshit. I'm a writer.
We're just born like this. I didn't really care too much for the diagnosis
anyway considering it was from the doctor who hit me. His name, by the way, is Solomenz. That's S-O-L-O-M-E-N-Z. Strongly worded letters followed but I'm pretty sure they got "lost in the mail".

L: What kind of meds did they give you for that?
D: Clonazapam, Ativan, Syraquel and oddly enough...wait for it...vitamin B.

L: Have you found effective ways to abuse them yet?
D: You can snort pams (they have a nice minty edge to them by far my
favorite up – the nose intoxicant for smooth taste and flavor) and then smoke some pot. That's good. You can also use them for coming down off coke. Perfect. Vitamin B just makes your pee green.

L: How long are you giving yourself to heal before you start snorting lines
again?
D: Heal? It's a world of wounds and I like to let mine fester openly.