Sanitarium

by Scott Steward, 28 July, 2022 Revision 3.

A woman will gut you in public. She’ll pull out a knife and you will never see it until it is too late. I was in love when I was a young man. Her name was Stacy. She was simple. She liked to read. Romance and horror novels from Dean R. Koontz mostly. Not much of a thinker but I liked her. Thinking is overrated anyway. She was the first one to give it up for me. It happened in the aisle of a movie theater. We were closing that night. I finished securing each theater after the patrons left and spoke with Stacy as she finished up her chores behind the concession stand. The manager left us alone.

The manager’s official title was Chief of Staff. She was the number three in the movie theater management hierarchy. She was an eighteen-year-old woman who quickly rose through the ranks into management. Her name was Laura, and she was my friend. Laura was a lesbian in a less than tolerant area of America in a time when being gay meant risking your life to be who you are. It was a friendship that lasted for years. I used to crash on her sofa at the place she shared with her girlfriend when I visited after I moved away. I still see her on Facebook sometimes, but we no longer talk.

It was a cold and dreary night in December when Stacy Laura and I were closing. Laura left us to go make the last bank deposit. Stacy and I began to make out behind the counter of the concession stand. I lifted her onto the countertop, and she looked down into my eyes. My god I was so in love with her. In a frenzy of taking off bow ties and red vests and unbuttoning and unzipping parts of our uniform we ended up in theater number two half naked and drunk with lust. We fell to the floor and it happened. It was magical. It was dangerous. It was taboo. It was beautiful.

Our love affair was brief and intense. I was one of many. She was my first. I was virulent and insatiable. She tolerated my lust. One evening I pounded her for five hours on her mother’s bed when she was out of town with her lover. I felt invincible. I was a machine. Her parents were divorced, and her mother was a sexy older woman. Her father was a cop. We met often in an abandoned field by her apartment. We would fall into each other while sitting inside her old 1979 Plymouth Fury. That car was a boat. It was made of solid metal but had a lot of room inside. Our love affair developed quickly. Too fast for the rational mind to keep up. I was lost in madness like I usually am. I bought Stacy a gold ring that Christmas. It had a tiny sapphire set into it. We moved so fast. I don’t remember what she got me for Christmas. I was unable to deal with my emotions which seemed to overwhelm my overthinking brain.

Stacy had many men who came to see her at the theater. One night I sat with her in the ticket booth. I was out of sight in the back of the booth. A group of sailors came to the window. One of the guys knew her and asked how she had been. “I miss you girl. I’m back from boot camp. We should get together.”, he said through the small circular window. She laughed and said something inaudible. I could tell from the tone of her voice that she wasn’t exactly telling him no. I was naïve. Sex is the first thing that goes in a relationship. We hadn’t slept together in over two weeks. I should have heeded the warning signs.

Women talk among themselves. They tell each other things the universe should never hear. Stacy’s friend was Sharon. They were attached at the hip and did everything together. They typically worked the same shift at the theater. One evening Stacy and I argued about something stupid. Little things become big things when there is a change of heart. After our shift she left with Sharon. I stayed behind with another girl who was closing the concession stand. As I was emptying the trash from the ticket booth, I noticed some torn up piece of paper with letters written in red ink. I was curious. As the other girl worked cleaning out a popcorn bin, I pieced together the note on the counter. I slowly began to read the words and letters until there it was in my face. “Rocky fucked me so hard last night that I thought he was going to wake the neighbors.” I was shocked. I was furious. I felt so betrayed. Hurt. Damaged. Dead. My world shattered around me. My girl was a whore. I felt like someone wrapped my heart in barbed wire and set it on fire. I couldn’t sleep for days. I avoided everyone. I avoided Stacy. I came into the movie theater with my uniform on a hanger. I walked up to the general manager who was a rather large woman from Louisiana named Pat. She was a grandmother. She smoked and had a temper. “I quit.” I told her and laid the uniforms onto the countertop. I made up some bullshit excuse about school. I turned and walked down the stairs from the offices and across the massive lobby through the blinding sun as it bled through the twin double doors of the theater.

When I got to my apartment that evening, I was starving. My roommate was at work. I opened the refrigerator, and it was empty. I had no money and would have to wait for my last check at the theater which wouldn’t even be that much since I only worked one week out of the pay period. I opened the cupboard and found some spaghetti noodles. There was a can of olives, beets, and some cans of tuna. I boiled some water to cook the noodles and added beats and tuna to my meal for the evening. It was the only thing I ate that day. Beets and tuna over sphagetti. I don’t recommend it. The next morning, I scraped together some change and bought a couple of packages of Ramen noodles at the grocery store. I had something to eat for the next few days before I picked up my paycheck. Ramen noodles. One or two per day. When my roommate returned, he brought leftovers from a hearty meal at his mother’s house which sustained us for a few days.

I found a job doing those irritating marketing surveys at the local mall. You know, the ones everyone avoids. We would ask generic questions looking for the demographic who had the right answers for further interrogation. We lured the rubes in with prizes for answering our questions. I was a hunter. Every shopper who meandered through the mall was potential prey. I would size them up as they walked by and refer to my list of targets that the marketing company needed for their surveys.

I was studying political science at Oklahoma City Community College. I had graduated high school just two years earlier. I took a semester off after high school before starting college. I was held back in fourth grade when I attended a private school in Malta. I turned nineteen a month after graduating. I got the theater job just after my twentieth birthday. I was a late bloomer. I worked with a woman at the marketing company who was my age. I found her attractive. She was married. We talked all the time when we worked together with our clipboards in our hand. She was a huge fan of Andrew Dice Clay, the American comedian whose brand of vulgarity caused him some controversy which ended his career. She was obsessed with him. She quoted lines from his skits in the middle of the mall. “Hickory dickory dock, this girl was sucking my cock. The clock struck two, I blew my goo and dropped her off at the next block.”, she said smiling. I found it shocking that a young woman would speak in such a manner. “She’s crazy.”, I thought. I had much to learn. I pretended it didn’t bother me.

One day the phone rang around noon. I was still in bed. I was off that day. I woke up and picked up the phone. “Hello?” I answered. “May I speak with Stephen Kelley?” the woman’s voice asked. “This is me.” I spoke. “I’m calling about your application you submitted to Willow Acres hospital. Are you still interested in the cashier position?”

“Yes, of course!”

“Excellent, are you available for an interview tomorrow at nine am?” she asked.

“I am available.”

“Perfect, we’ll see you then.”

I hung up the phone and fell back to sleep. There was nothing else better to do.

The next morning the alarm clock blared in short irritating pulses at seven thirty in the morning. I hit snooze for about half an hour before getting out of bed. I turned on the shower and brushed my teeth as the water got to temperature. I wore my best shirt with some business casual pants. I walked downstairs to my car, a blue Datsun. It was a two-door coupe. On the hood the word “FUCK” was scratched into the paint. I was able to get $200 off the sales price because the vandalism happened after I had already agreed to purchase the vehicle. I drove off with it for $600.

I arrived at the hospital. It was located at the end of a long street on the outskirts of town. It was a two-story brick building surrounded by trees. There was nothing else around it. A sign at the entrance to the parking said “Willow Acres Mental Health System”. I parked the car and went inside. The lobby was cozy with a fireplace and comfortable leather chairs. The walls were made of flat tan bricks and had a Frank Lloyd Wright look to them. A tall slender woman holding a notebook called my name. She was wearing a grey dress skirt with a blue suit jacket. She was a few years older than me. She was professional. She hired me.

I got back to my apartment and my roommate was there. Mikael was from Puerto Rico. We met at the movie theater where we both once worked. He fell in love with one of the girls there and they moved in together. It ended with him suicidal as she used him up and spit him out. She ran off with her high school sweetheart when he got back from the Marines. Mikael asked me to move in with him. I agreed since my parents were moving to another city soon. My mother wanted to live closer to her sister. I don’t know why, my mother didn’t even like her sister. I needed to stay in the area because of school. I needed a place to live.

We did our share of starving in that small apartment. Sometimes we would go to Mikael’s parent’s house for a nice feast. Often that was our only meal for the day. We would hang out with Mikael’s younger brother and play video games on the Nintendo or watch the new TV show “The Simpsons” or “In Living Color”. He was thirteen. His name was Nicholas. We called him Nikito. Mikael’s sister was Amelia. She was beautiful. She was three years younger than me, and we shared the same birthday. Every time I saw her, she was wearing her flour dusted brown uniform from the pizza place where she worked.

One evening at the apartment Mikael was showing me some Aikido moves. He studied it and was a teacher of sorts. His cousin Jaime came to the door. “Look what I got” he said in his broken English. He reached down his pants. “Whoa whoa whoa brother!” I laughed. Jaime stopped and looked at me and laughed. Then he pulled three packs of lobster tails from the inside of his baggy pants. I never asked where he got them and why they were in his pants, but I suspected he stole them from the store. Jaime had some trouble with the police. He was accused of smashing a pay phone during an argument with his girlfriend. I forgot which one. I helped him out by finding an attorney for him and going with him during the consultation. He pled to a misdemeanor and had to pay a fine. Jaime was rough around the edges, but the girls loved him. That night we ate like kings. Lobster and leftover steak from Mikael’s parent’s house.

On my first day as the cashier for the Willow Acres mental health hospital I helped serve food to the patients and staff while the new dining facility was being finished. It was a part of the new wing of the hospital. My supervisor was Helen. She was a short woman with thick thighs and short curly hair. She must have been recently promoted because she had a hesitancy in her decisions coupled with a power trip which made her almost unbearable. I was an easy go lucky sort. I just ignored her mostly. Although I did gain a certain mischievous pleasure making her life a little difficult. I can be a shit like that.

The first wave of patrons were teenagers. Patients in the hospital. Many of them not much younger than me. They came from all walks of life. There were prep kids, goth kids, punk kids, nerds, geeks, misfits, heavy metal kids with their long hair and black tee shirts. The first thing that struck me was that most of these kids came from affluent homes. I got the feeling they were only here because they were non-conformists. I’m no expert. That’s just what I thought. They probably smoked weed or broke into their father’s liquor cabinet or got caught with a porn collection and their parents put them here because they were rich and didn’t want to deal with them. I imagined these kids to be victims of societal narcissists who punish anyone who’s different or colors outside the lines or challenges the status quo. Religious narcissists are the worst. Combine that with fundamentalism and you have Oklahoma back in the day. Some of the worst people I’ve met have been fundamentalist Christians. I once remarked that the Bible Belt of America has Oklahoma as the buckle. That is why I suspected most these kids were here. There was this one kid though who had real problems. He was heavily sedated. He could barely walk or hold his tray or speak. He made me sad.

The state of Oklahoma was a backward place. They had no lottery. They considered it gambling. One couldn’t buy alcohol on Sundays and for many counties not at all. Part of the Christian blue laws. Many counties debated whether to allow liquor by the drink. You know, as in from a bar. Liquor stores were closed on Sundays and every day they closed by nine pm. Oklahoma imported special beer which had a lower alcohol content than the beer sold in other states from the same companies. You could buy real beer at the liquor store, but it was unlawful for the liquor store owners to refrigerate it. I jokingly referred to Oklahoma as Oklahomastan.

“Amelia likes you.” Mikael said one night. “Your sister?” I asked. “Yes. Back when you were still with Stacy, she told me if you weren’t with her, she would be talking with you.” Amelia had just broken up with her boyfriend Paul, who I worked with at the movie theater. Paul was an artist. He liked to draw the grotesque. He was into horror. He was dark and introverted. He treated Amelia like shit. Paul’s family was friends with Amelia’s. Paul’s stepfather was Hervé. He was a sergeant in the Army stationed at Tinker Air Force base. Hervé was also a chef. “Stevo!” Hervé called me. “I made something especial for you! You will love it!” Amelia and Mikael’s family would often visit Paul’s family and Hervé would cook the most amazing gourmet meals. I was always tagging along. That’s why it was weird with Amelia and her crush on me. Like a dipshit I fell for it anyway. We started dating and Paul started hating me.

One morning Amelia came over to my place with her friend Rachael. Mikael was at work. Mikael was Rachael’s love interest, but Mikael treated her like shit. He would fuck other women while stringing her along. Rachael would have done anything for him. She was so much in love and just as blind. Rachael came from a Mexican American family. She was beautiful. She had long brown hair with blonde highlights. Looking back, she reminded me of Gwen Stefani from the band No Doubt. They both shared the same smile. I secretly fell in love with Rachael over time. We would hang out all the time and she always never stopped asking me advice about Mikael. I know what unrequited feels like.

“I want a daughter.” Amelia said. “I want to name her Raven.” We were talking about life and the future. Women always seem to know what their children’s name will be long before they have them. At least the ones I’ve met. “I want to be an ambassador or a writer. Maybe a pilot.” I said. I knew my eyes were too bad to be a pilot. I wore contacts. “You seem like the sort of person who would be a secret agent.” Amelia said as she stared into my eyes. “You have that look and aura about you.” We kissed. “Are you saying I’m shifty?” I teased. “You seem to look right through people.”, she said.

Amelia and I dated for a few months. She went on a trip to Puerto Rico with her family. I called and she wasn’t available. When we did talk, she was distant and short. When she got back to the US after being away for a month Mikael and I went to his parent’s house. “Hi Amelia! I missed you!” I said as I gave her a hug. She didn’t respond. She mostly ignored me at dinner. When we sat around with Mikael and Amelia’s younger brother Nikito talking she made a rude comment of which I don’t remember. I stood up. “I’ll catch you later Mikael.” I said and walked out of the door and out of Amelia’s life forever. Mikael later told me Amelia said, “He’ll be back.”

“No, he won’t.” Mikael told her. “I know him, and I know when he’s done with someone. He won’t be back.” Later Amelia’s mother spoke with me. “She’s like a fly. Given the choice between shit and steak she’ll go for the shit every time.”, she told me.

Amelia had some affair in Puerto Rico that went wrong. She was upset and bitter when she returned to the United States. I wanted no part of that. After I walked away, she shacked up with an Airman from the Air Force. A guy named Phillip. Mikael went to visit her one day at Phillip’s apartment and noticed bite marks on her neck. “You’re better than that.”, he told her. She looked down in shame. Phillip and Amelia eventually married and had a daughter. They moved to Japan when he went on orders by the Air Force. I spoke with her once more when she came back to visit her family without him while they were moving to Tennessee. Years later they divorced. Then tragedy struck. While visiting Phillip their daughter was killed in an ATV accident. She was riding on the back with him, and he lost control and crashed into a barbed wire fence. Raven was killed. She was eight years old.

After a few weeks of working at Valley Acres the new wing of the hospital and cafeteria was finally finished. Helen trained me up on how to do the cashier job. It was a nice dining facility. Much nicer than the old one. Everything was new. I began to recognize the kids as they came through my line, and we had short exchanges. I was sympathetic to their plight. I identified with most of them. Life is hard. We all find our own ways to cope.

I became fast friends with the cooks and kitchen staff. Ida was the head cook. She was also the kitchen administrator. All the cooks and kitchen staff were middle age and elderly African American women. Coincidentally, all the management staff were white women. I called them the ladies. The ladies were so kind to me. “Here hon, I made you something special.”, one of the cooks would say. They made sure I was well fed. I identified with them. I would often go back into the kitchen and speak with the ladies between lunch rushes as they prepared the next meal. I was particularly fond of Ida. “She’s seventy-six years old!” I exclaimed when one of the ladies told me her age. She doesn’t look a day over forty-five. “You look tired honey.” Ida said one day. “Why don’t you go rest yourself on my sofa in my office.” I took regular naps in Ida’s office during the week. She was like my own grandmother.

One morning while sitting in Ida’s office she came in upset. “My granddaughter Cherry had a run in with Jimmy.” Jimmy was the local bad boy legend. The boogie man of the ladies. Jimmy was a felon. A drug user and drug dealer. He ran girls in a prostitution ring. He was always armed. “Cherry told me he approached her when she was going to school to see if she would get in the car with him. She ran off but is upset.”, Ida said. “Did you call the police?”, I asked. “The police won’t do nothin’”, she said. “Honey, we live on the wrong side of the tracks. The police don’t go to our neighborhood.” Segregation ended in the United States decades ago, but it was still alive and well in practice. At least from what I’ve observed living in Oklahoma off and on in my life. Ida was able to send Cherry away to her aunt’s house in Moore, Oklahoma. I like to think things turned out well for her.

The hospital staff walked around the different wards of the facility with sets of keys, a whistle, and a small wooden baton for self-defense. “Wow! Has anyone ever had to use those?” I asked Helen. “A few weeks ago, before you arrived one of the nurses was attacked by an adult patient in the adult wing. She suffered bruises and a busted lip before security could arrive. So yes, it does happen.”

One day I walked around the different wards of the hospital. Long glass hallways led different buildings of the hospital through a garden setting outside. At the end of the hallways were security doors with a keypad for the six-digit pin code required to open them. The garden outside had a small lake with picnic tables and trees. Flowers were planted everywhere. It was a serene place. I often visited the garden to think about things.

I grew bored with working at the mental health hospital. I asked for some time off so I could go on a cross country trip to San Diego with Mikael to find a famous Aikido master. “We won’t be able to let you go for that long.” Helen told. “Then I quit.” I said. Mikael and I drove to California. When we got into San Diego is was late at night. We were lost downtown. A man approached our car. “Do you know anyone who has weed?”, he said. “No, sorry. We just got into town.” Mikael said.

When we found the Aikido master’s dojo we sat and watched from the entrance as he threw his students around the mat. They were training with wooden swords. Then we left. Mikael didn’t even speak with him. We spent a few days in San Diego before driving up to Las Vegas. We stayed at the Circus Circus. We drove a marathon on the way back to Oklahoma City. A twenty-hour drive straight through. The two of us switched off driving every few hours. It was hot in the desert and Mikael’s tiny Chevy Sprint didn’t have the best air conditioner.

When we got back my best friend William called me to come over for Daquiris he and his wife made. I called him Will. He was a year older than me but graduated High School two years ahead of me. I didn’t drink much then. I was exhausted but it was only the afternoon and I’m always down to day drink. I’ve known Will since I was twelve years old. Our father’s worked together in the oil industry. They were both big shots before the oil bust in the early eighties ruined them both. My Dad survived by driving a big rig truck. He would stop in on me from time to time. Sometimes he would let me go with him on short runs to Texas or within Oklahoma. Once when my car broke down, he showed me how to install a repair kit into the carburetor we pulled from the “FUCK” mobile I affectionately called my car. The two of us worked into the night with the carburetor on my kitchen table. Will’s dad turned to the bottle. Will’s parent’s divorced and his dad sunk further into alcoholism. Will’s mother drifted from man to man dragging Will with him from one shithole apartment to the next. All of her men were all alcoholics. One day Will’s dad was found dead in an apartment. He was killed by murder suicide with his girlfriend. Maybe it was the other way around. In my senior year of High School my dad and I attended the funeral. I didn’t ask too many questions. I was there for Will. By the time he was twenty one he had already suffered more than most.

After High School Will worked in fast food. He met his future wife, Trace, at Burger King. She was an African American woman from rural Oklahoma. She was kind to me. Being in an interracial relationship in Oklahoma in those days was difficult. People mostly accepted them. At their wedding Will’s uncle stopped recording the moment they kissed. “Something must have happened to the video recorder.”, I overheard him tell someone. I never told Will and Trace. I always thought Will’s uncle was an asshole. There are certain Americans I despise.

“We want to see if you want to move into our spare bedroom.” Will told me as he took a sip of his frozen daiquiri. “It would be half as much rent as you’re paying now.” I was tired of living with Mikael. I didn’t approve of the way he treated Rachael. She deserved better. Love makes us stupid as well as blind. Our lease was coming up and saw the opportunity to get out. Mikael and I lost touch after I moved out. Rachael figured out he was a philanderer and left him. Mikael blamed me for telling her about the girls in the downstairs apartment. He was secretly sleeping with one of them. Mikael and Rachael eventually got back together, got married and had a daughter. I still speak with Mikael. We buried our differences in the past. He and Rachael have been long since divorced.

I went back to work for the movie theater. It had a new manager. He was a nice man from Iran who was working on his MBA. He hired me on the spot with a pay raise. One day while working two beautiful girls walked into the lobby of the theater. They were twins. Alesha and Alina. They could be models. Alina worked at the theater. They were coming to pick up her check. Alina was tall and thin and had a voice that sounded like Marilyn Monroe. Alina would become one of the great loves of my life but that is a different story.

The End.