I AM A FREE MAN. I am always free when I create. And I’ve always felt this way, especially when I was locked up—institutionalized in a state mental hospital, just four miles from my old family home and yet a world away.
Now here, in my small but cozy studio apartment in Richmond Hill, the first place I could ever call my own, I am also free to keep the light on and paint or bang out songs on my guitar and record all night long to my heart’s content, and not worry about rousing and/or angering a twenty-year parade of broken souls. These haunted men never had the same enthusiasm for my art, all just literally sick and tired, grateful to have a bed to lie in, greeting the evening’s sleep as a just and appreciated respite and reward for surviving another day. A day not only of the cold and sometimes cruel “care and treatment” of Creedmoor, but also another day of the interior passion play in which their fragile minds and wounded hearts ricochet within their hollow bodies, careening and colliding, fighting, crying, trying to comprehend the whys and why-not-just-end-it-alls.
Though I did spend a good chunk of that time in my own room, where I created unbridled, uncontrolled, I still think of those many men whom I roomed with—the maniacal midnight laughter, ominous silences, habitual masturbation, noxious gases, raging sweet teeth, cloak-and-dagger stogies, and stolen money. I think of all those guys and reflect on whether my late night painting sessions had as much of an effect on their lives as those men have had on mine. I also reflect on the Mahatas, unit chiefs, and forensic directors.
And I think about Mom.
ONE DAY BEFORE MY FINAL COURT APPEARANCE, I am scheduled for my last treatment team meeting as an inpatient. Similar to my first team meeting at Kings County Hospital nineteen years earlier, when I entered a room with almost twenty professionals all looking at me as if I were a swab of gunk on a slide to be magnified to the nth degree, reenacting the crime for an audience, hopefully to be found competent to stand trial, this will be my last meeting to go over my treatment plan for discharge. Gathered around an impossibly long boardroom table is a different set of at least twenty mental health workers, all with eyes on me. Here is the old team, the new team, and peripheral professionals who have been or will be involved in my case. Dr. Maggoty presides over the whole affair and is just as combative till the very end.
I hear from Leslie Boobala, who was in the mass meeting of professionals before she was exposed as my attorney and then extricated until I arrived, that the preamble of the meeting was the doctor’s assassination of my character. Leslie says, “Like an ugly drunk on payday giving a nasty toast to her boss in a noisy bar, Maggoty let everyone know of her opposition to your discharge, and even stated that she pleaded with the attorney general to appeal it.” Sadly for her, and lucky for me, she was overruled.
My final court date is just a formality and goes very quickly and smoothly. Judge Freed signs the release order, wags his finger, and I am cut loose after a resounding, “This case is closed.” Though cautious and sorrowful throughout, I knew after a while that I’d atoned, healed, and done my time. And I always believed if a competent and honest judge heard my case he would do what was right. People are a little too used to the system chewing people up and spitting them out. I’m glad that in this one case I fought back, by getting my head right, selling my artwork, mounting a case, doing whatever I could to escape from OMH and the system. I just have to fight back the occasional feeling of it all being a hollow victory, for though I am free, in the eyes of some I will always be a “murderer” and my Mom is no longer living.
My first full day of freedom is my birthday: my re-birthday. I wake up in Stepping Stones Transitional Residence, a halfway house on the campus grounds, sleeping in a different bed, in a room with windows that open, smelling the morning rain … things I hadn’t done for almost twenty years. I start to cry.
I have been granted my conditional release but it is not a discharge. It is as it states, a release on conditions. Though I was acquitted and have no criminal record, I am still and will remain on Criminal Procedure Law status for five years, living under conditions that Maggoty drew up and Judge Freed found satisfactory and signed. I must remain drug and alcohol free and undergo random mandatory urinalysis to support this. After five years I can petition to be fully discharged from this status. Perhaps the most depressing stipulation in my order of conditions is that I can’t leave New York State within this time. There’s nothing I’d love to do more than travel after being locked up for half my life. But there are always postcards, travelogues, and the Internet, which has a way of bringing people closer and showing you the world.
My computer allows me to log on to the Citi Field site, break through the cyber-throng, and purchase tickets to see Paul McCartney on tour the summer I get out. Being a lifelong Beatle-freak and having been denied the opportunity several years earlier, I am overjoyed and enjoy the show. As Sir Paul once sung to me when he was just a Scouser and I was a cherub, “It’s getting better all the time.”
PLENTY DON’T UNDERSTAND OR ACCEPT marijuana’s negative impact in my case. I get the same surprised reactions, nervous laughter, and ignorant resistance: “Are you sure it wasn’t laced? Pot doesn’t make you kill people.”
Rather than chafe the very vocal stoner culture by casting aspersions on the reefer decriminalization juggernaut, and wishing not to solely blame pot for my illness and Mom’s death, I prefer to attribute the tragedy to a cluster fuck of coincidences. It would seem my hard knock lifeboat capsized under a perfect storm of young adult angst, familial grief, racial tension, social anxiety, marijuana abuse, and falling within the age of onset for developing mental illness.
Like Dad’s endorsement when I was young, I do acknowledge that cannabis does indeed have medicinal properties, helping glaucoma and cancer sufferers, among others, deal with their symptoms and pain. However, in my case no pain was evident, except that of a broken heart. All I know is marijuana does me no good.
Whenever I smoke I get symptomatic, with irrational paranoia, delusions, ideas of reference, and bizarre behavior. I have teased it out enough times to know this. Like a tragicomic action serial, the insanity picks up right after the last cliffhanger as if no time had passed, or all that “normal” time was part of a secondary storyline. Sort of like The Domestic Life of Clark Kent, complete with many seasons of all the mundane things a nerd would do, pretty much forgetting he’s the Man of Steel. But when I smoke again … up, up, and away!
I only hope to add my own personal caveat to the marijuana glamorization and minimization of its dangers, and catch other young dreamers, possessed with talent and promise or just the good fortune of youth, from flying too high then falling so far. Making the same mistakes I made, having to travel the same dark road.
ONCE I GOT RELEASED the sex between Lily and I started to wane. Was it the sudden lack of danger, the absence of the possibility of our getting caught that tempered both our libidos? Or did we just run our course and were now going through the motions, united in hardship and strife but rudderless and apathetic when faced with normalcy? It doesn’t help when I admit to Lily that I have been unfaithful, giving my juices to other women these last few years while still seeing her.
I used to tell Lily that I am married to the state, tied to the hospital, and she had to understand that she would always be the mistress in this affair. “OK, but now that you’re out are we going to make good on all those faraway promises of moving in together?” she asks. “Are we going to get married?”
It breaks my heart to tell her, “I can’t marry you or anybody right now. I have to find myself and my place in this world after being locked up for half my life.”
After fifteen years in this stunted relationship, and with my getting released, Lily feels me slipping away. “OK, I understand,” she says. “But I also feel rejected … and betrayed.” I should have let her go to find that husband and house full of children, cats, and rabbits. After coming clean about my other girlfriends and years of multiple infidelities, like my Dad purging his guilt to Mom many years before, Lily cries. “The only reason I stayed was because I thought you were faithful.”
We both cultivated and nurtured love lies to each other and ourselves. She loving the perfect man in a box, unable to move and thus a captive audience and eager receptor for her attentions. And me loving the only woman in town, desperate to believe that our union was more than just convenience.
In truth, Lily will stay close because we get along so well and I’m the only man for which she’s ever had any feelings of real love. And I love her. She’s my best friend, kind of like a sexy army buddy, both of us having an unbreakable bond, a psych hospital symbiosis. But I find it strangely ironic to have cultivated a serious long-term relationship with an angry, implosive woman who says she would willfully do to her mother what I did accidentally to mine.
AFTER NOT HEARING FROM GAIA for a long while, our mutual friend Sherri Ferrone calls with dread in her voice. “Gaia’s had a stroke,” she says.
“It happened in the middle of the night. No one knows how long she was lying there. John woke up and saw her there unresponsive and called the EMS. She’s in Flushing Hospital now, hooked up to all sorts of tubes. She can’t breathe on her own so she’s had a tracheotomy. She can barely talk. God, I don’t know if she’ll pull through but pray for her, Issa. Pray for her. She’s in a bad way. You wouldn’t recognize her, Issa, and I wouldn’t want you to see her as she is now. She’s eighty-five and quadriplegic and I’ve made peace with how I knew her, how alive she was and how good she was, to me, to you, to everybody she met. It breaks my heart seeing her like this. I don’t think I’ll be visiting her much anymore. It’s tough for me, working as I do, only to run after work all the way to Flushing Hospital and have her crippled daughter, alcoholic son, and emotionally unavailable husband sit at her bedside like ghouls, all waiting for her to get better, get up outta that bed and go back home to cook and clean up after them like she did all her life. The fuckin’ bastards. If the stroke doesn’t kill her they will. I whispered to her that I loved her and she mumbled back to me ‘Will I ever get out of this place?’ I heard her say that and I knew it was time to go and turn the page. She’s a good woman and God will take care of her more than I or those crazies she left at home ever could. She was so good to you too, Issa. She loved you. Take those memories; cherish those times you spent with her and pray for her, Issa. Pray for her.”
Gaia Sapros was the mother of all mother figures. She took great care of me, seeing that I was lonely, needing affection, human contact, someone to smile at me and look me in the eye—the things that made me a human being. With both Gaia and Bella happily offering up fine Mediterranean and Spanish cuisine, as an alternative to the nauseating mess the hospital usually served up, I don’t see my accepting these and other amenities as manipulation, as Maggoty opined. It was survival. I knew I was doing a potential life sentence. I was cold, scared, hungry, and angry that I couldn’t express myself without repercussions, where everything I said, did, and felt was held against me. Gaia and Bella soothed that uneasiness for a little while, even as I knew they were authority figures breaking the law.
I do cherish those times. I remember most the sessions spent in Gaia’s office, not engaged in therapeutic heavy lifting or even having hot sex, but with me painting at an easel set up in the corner while she busied herself with her progress notes, looking up occasionally to survey the emerging work and calling out quiet encouragement. Just like Mom.
THE DA’S OFFICE HAS FOR YEARS been in touch with my family. My sister Carol is the loudest voice in the family choir to keep me locked up. However, for reasons unknown to me, my release has gone unnoticed by my family. This is a good thing, as for years I have worried about finally being freed and one or more members of my family angrily trumping up some false claims, getting me sent back to the hospital. I understand their resentment and pain. Not only have they lost their mother but they’ve also lost a brother.
I may never be on civil ground with them ever again. After more than twenty years without their concern or positive involvement I think of them and I miss them but believe it may be best to let them be. I only hope they feel the same. I pray for my family, especially my sister Carol, the nurse, who did not offer help when I ran to her in Oakland. And I cry for Mom, who tried to help but didn’t know any better than to rub healing oil on my head.
I AM NO LONGER SYMPTOMATIC but I do occasionally hear a voice, Mom’s voice, offering artistic advice and personal encouragement. She guides me through difficult stages, aiding me in making wise choices. Like supernatural pep talks, she is my spirit guide, holding my hand through moments of doubt. Mom’s voice reaffirms what she knew from my birth and reinforced all my life: “You are a great artist, son.” I honor her by living up to this dream. My art keeps me in touch with Mom and keeps me sane. I am finally whole, at peace, and resolute in honoring my greatest influences, the artists who taught me the most, my Dad and Mom.
As dawn approaches and I move freely about my space, from the mixing palette to unfinished canvas, ready to fill in the blanks with color and wit and bite, I think of Mom. And I feel her. Here with me now, as always, full of love and radiating warmth, never wanting me to suffer. Dancing to my music, calling out, “That’s great!”
Standing in my periphery, just out of sight, Mom surveys my work, as I finish this piece. Coming around the clubhouse turn, I can hear her say, “That’s it, son. That’s it. Perfect.”
I smile, pleased and proud, and say, “Thanks, Ma.”