Standing up like a frail old man
afraid of falling, he walked slowly toward the screen door. I watched him closely from the patio, making
sure he did not walk towards the bathroom-- where he kept his razors. He grabbed his keys off the coffee table,
glanced around the room looking for his cigarettes and lighter. I did not tell him he would not be allowed
to smoke at the hospital.
I tried to think of a happier
time-- before the voices began to terrorize him, before the nightmares from
spending 10 years in prison kept him awake at night, before he began
self-medicating again by shooting heroin and cocaine into abused and scarred
veins.
Shortly after we moved into this house, we
spent a happy afternoon sanding the cracked and peeling paint off the screen
door. He picked out a mix of songs
downloaded from the internet to his computer-- Gillian Welch, Emmy Lou Harris,
Gramm Parsons, and Johnny Cash. It was
the monsoon season-- the heat of the afternoon cooled by torrential rains. Lightning lit up the sky in the distance and
the smell of creosote floated through the air.
We drank cans of Mexican beer with lime and salt on the rim while we
painted the screen door blue.
He opened that blue screen door
we painted years ago, cigarettes and lighter in hand. “I’m ready,” he said.
I filled out the paper work in the ER lobby
for him. He was still standing outside
the sliding doors finishing a cigarette when I checked off the boxes for
self-harm and suicidal ideation.
Suicidal people are always brought back to triage right away-- to keep
them safe.
The triage nurse walked into the
small private room. A look of
recognition spread across her face.
While tightening the blood pressure cuff on his arm, she glanced at the
needle tracks. I noticed the tattoos on
the back of her neck. She looked up at
him and told him she loved his music.
She told him she had all his albums.
He smiled and thanked her. She
asked if I was his wife. I told her we
were divorced.
She said, “Your songs are such
great stories. They're filled with such great visceral imagery of this dusty
old desert town. The struggles and
suffering, love and loss, drug addiction and prison you sing about makes me cry
sometimes. You remind me a little of
Townes Van Zandt.”
The social worker knocked on the
door and asked to speak to me. She took
me to a private room. She asked why he
tried to kill himself. I told her the
voices coming through his computer told him the police were on their way to
take him back to prison-- something he lived in fear of daily. I told her he harbored a lot of shame—the
shame that he feels for making his parents suffer, for all the money they spent
on countless rehabs he ran away from, the private schools that he got kicked
out of because he had a learning disability that was never recognized by
teachers who instead labeled him a troublemaker. I told her that he was a kind, smart, and
talented man who served a ten year prison sentence for a non-violent
drug-related crime. I told her he was
free from the bars of that prison, but he would never be free of the prison it
created in his head.
