BrodyBlog

Dispatch from San Diego, California
"America's Finest City"
(October 16, 2006)

Apparently, people only commit suicide after 10:00 a.m., because that is when the emergency psychiatric ward opens its metal grates for business. If Los Angeles is the city most of the world thinks of upon hearing the word "California", San Diego is the city they dream of. But in the home of the sun, twice as many people die by suicide than murder: It is the leading cause of non-natural death.

By the time you finish reading this, you might not wonder why.

When I first approached the main entrance, I was greeted by a butch, bloated woman with gnarly gray hair and putrid facial blemishes, as if she were slapped with a piece of lumber at birth and never recovered. Her limbs were fat and the skin keeping her fleshy mess together was riddled with hail damage, sort of like cottage cheese lying about in a gravel driveway.

"How are you going to kill yourself? Standing there with your cell phone?," she asked in a snyde voice after I answered her questions about whether I had a weapon in my backpack. I guess she never heard of stepping in front of a speeding train.

While I filled out the intake forms, she asked what I expected of the clinic. When I noted that, due to financial crisis caused by lack of employment and a deteriorating mental state, I was soon to be out of an apartment as one of may reasons for being suicidal, she said, "so...you expect the county to provide you free room and board?" I expect to be diagnosed by a trained psychiatrist for what is obviously a serious mental illness, treated, and given reasonable assistance in finding a way to help build the city of my dreams.

She was married (wedding ring), so right then and there, I prayed to any god that might exist to have pity on her husband's soul for having to fuck her. And I'm an Athiest.

I told her the days when someone could reasonably survive on financial assitance provided by the government were long gone. Like when the streams were still safe enough to fish from, and the pier was a bleak collection of wooden planks sitting in shame for the way it dug into the sea floor below. Now the wood has rotted, replaced with concrete.

She made small talk with a colored gentelman who was a security guard while I filled out some intake forms. He certainly didn't do much to break down any stereotypes of blacks. He pushed his bifocals up on the bridge of his nose as he scanned me with his eyes, then leaned back and propped his feet up on the small desk next to the metal detector and entrance to the hospital. Working hard. I couldn't imagine him stopping a psychotic person with the wrath of hell and haldol from putting a pen into someone's neck.

In the course of my eavesdropping I heard her say "they should require that these kids spend time in the military, it might give them a little bit of discipline." Apparently this woman was as stupid as she was ugly. Take a suicidal person and put a gun in their hand in a place with more stress than a jet airliner can take. Brilliant!

When opening time came around, I carefully placed my belt and belongings into a paper sack which was labeled with my name and stored in the vault. Inside the clinic I was given flip flops (shoes were not allowed because one could hang by their laces) and a urine test to screen for drugs, had my blood presure taken and saw a stout doctor.

She was at least in her late 50s if not older, with a slight hunchback only surpassed in clarity by her rude demeanor. She hated her job. So a quick interview with her was all I was afforded. She made no real probing questions as to the problems I have with the world and the people in it, no real advice to me on what causes there are for these things, and no solution to any problem if I had before. If anything, due to the financial cost of my one night stand there ( about $1,000.00 ) I am now even more fucked, for lack of a better word.

She failed to catch my bipolar disorder, although any shrink worth their weight in carbon might have known that from the way I perked up only a few hours after being confined in the pink pastel atrium of the psychiatric ward, shuffling about in bare feet curiously observing the motions of the day, the gestures of the staff, and the rants of the other patients in the building.

I made up a bullshit lie about catching a flight to stay with some friends the next day out, and was released on my own recognisence the next afternoon, not wanting to spend another day in what was really a holding tank for the violent homeless and drug crazed criminals. Stay tuned.

Eventually I made my way down to another public hospital in the state of Texas, only to find that because I am a resident of California, I cannot recieve any treatment from them, but with no job, I cannot afford to see a psychiatrist on my own. Even the medication that might be able to treat this nightmare that has me stuck between the dark and the light is costly without health insurance.

And it's so sad to think that there's no other way.

P.S. Did I mention that every public hospital I've been to has a McDonald's within? Brings me back to thinking you were mine under Golden Arches.