Beyond the Screen Door

I was shocked he agreed to go immediately. He did not stand up to hug me-- our usual greeting.  I placed the borrowed DVDs on his patio table--my excuse to stop by after he called telling me the police were on their way to take him back to prison. I noticed the jagged cut along his neck.  The blood had dried.  I said in a calm voice, “I need to take you to the hospital.”  He stared at me-- looking confused-- for a long time, took a drag off his cigarette, and finally nodded in agreement.  

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.