Everything about bustling, sometimes overwhelming, Harvard-centric Cambridge, Massachusetts, and McLean Hospital, in nearby Belmont, seemed fresh and new, and the experience woke me from what felt like an eighteen-year coma, or at least a very deep sleep.
What made McLean most interesting were the patients.
James Taylor was a patient at McLean. The musician checked himself in for depression as a prep-school senior and stayed for ten months. He wrote “Knocking ’Round the Zoo” about his time at McLean. His breakout hit, “Fire and Rain,” was a sad, beautiful tribute to a friend from that time of his life who’d killed herself.
And Taylor definitely was Sweet Baby James. Long blond hair, stunningly handsome, musician, poet. His sister, Kate, was also a patient at McLean. So was his brother Livingston. Both Kate and Liv also went on to record albums. There was actually a small school on the grounds of McLean and I sometimes escorted Liv or Kate to classes. My only experience with James was hearing him sing several times in the hospital coffee shop. Free admission, good acoustics, great seats ten feet from Sweet Baby James himself.
The poet Robert Lowell checked into McLean twice while I was working there. Lowell would do private readings in his room for an audience of three or four patients and staff.
He would read his poems and occasionally explain what he was trying to accomplish in them or complain about the hospital food or that he wasn’t admired enough by some critics and peers he respected.
Lowell was just another crazy guy, but a bright and interesting one. We were friendly, and I found him to be a sweet, generous man. I sat in on as many of his readings as I could.
Hell, I was getting paid to listen to James Taylor and Robert Lowell.
Susanna Kaysen was a patient on South Belknap, which housed young women who weren’t violent. She wrote her memoir Girl, Interrupted (which became a hit movie) based on her experiences at McLean. My opinion is that Susanna made up some parts of the story, stretched the truth, anyway, but isn’t that what we writers do?
The summer that I worked on the hospital’s male maximum-security ward, Bowditch, a Brandeis University premed student named Marty Cohen was a patient. Marty and I became close friends that summer. He was a suicide risk, and it was actually kind of nerve-racking to be his friend.
Late in the summer, several of the patients on Bowditch got to spend a long weekend with the nurses, aides, and a couple of doctors at a camp that had just closed to the public for the season. For some reason that I didn’t completely understand at the time, this trip was thought to be therapeutic. It was definitely going to be interesting. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Goes to Summer Camp.
The camp was on the north shore of a beautiful lake in southern New Hampshire, and late one afternoon I went on a canoe ride with Marty. We stopped paddling and talked pretty much nonstop for an hour or so, like we always did. Only this time, it was out in the middle of a dark blue lake surrounded by birch and balsam firs and rapidly deepening shadows.
There was no breeze. The water was still. The world seemed silent and serene.
Finally, Marty looked at me and quietly asked, “Jim, don’t you find it strange that the doctors let a suicide risk like me come out on a lake in a boat like this with you?”
He saw the fear in my eyes and quickly said, “I would never do that to you.”
I loved Marty for saying that.
A year later, when he was back at Brandeis, Marty killed himself. I still haven’t gotten over that. I’m still thinking about Marty—and writing about him.