Chemical restraint. That’s the official term, in case you’re wondering. A marvelous thing, really, at least for jailers. Couple bucks a day worth of medications, sedatives, antipsychotics, combinations thereof, and lo and behold, there’s no need for bars, armed guards, straitjackets, or razor wire. Why, just think of all the money the state could save if only CR were adopted throughout the correctional system. No need for a supermax prison like Pelican Bay-a little chemical restraint and you could house them bad boys in pup tents and guard them with Cub Scouts.
But that’s never going to happen. Can you imagine the outcry? The lawyers, the ACLU, they’d be all over it like stink on shit. And why? Because it’s INHUMANE! It robs an individual of the very things our society claims to value: his personality, his individuality. His humanity, for God’s sake, his simple humanity.
Unless, like me, he’s been deemed mentally ill by a competent, or at least licensed, mental health professional. Then he can expect to spend the rest his life in darkness and dreams, serenaded by a babble of inhuman voices and visited by a bestiary of obscene, impossible creatures.
I was approaching my twenty-fifth birthday when the boy I had been looked in the bathroom mirror and saw the man I had become. While I’d like to say it was due to my willpower or strength of character that I was able to overcome the effects of the powerful drugs they had been pouring into me all those years, the truth, I suspect, is that I probably had something much simpler to thank: my weight.
I’d been around five-six, maybe a hundred and thirty pounds when I entered Meadows Road, but after a late growth spurt I was closer to six feet tall, and weighed somewhere around one sixty-five, one seventy. They were probably still medicating me as if I were forty pounds lighter, though. And while my higher faculties were as yet nonexistent (I couldn’t have spelled fuck if you’d spotted me the uck), something deeper and more basic was starting to surface inside me. You can call it my personality or my identity if you want to, but I prefer to think of it as my soul.
Whatever it was, it told me not to swallow the pills in the little white cup that the nurse brought me that night. Instead I stashed them between cheek and molar. I guess I’d been a good boy for so long that she didn’t bother, on that night or any other night, to make sure I’d swallowed them down. All I had to do was keep my head turned until she left, then spit them out and flush them down the toilet.
I suspect it was that long slow detox that saved me from going into withdrawal when I stopped taking my medications. But since the meds I was spurning also included a nightly sleeping pill, I found myself lying awake hour after hour, night after night, trying to force my poor, benumbed mind to think, to reason, and most agonizingly of all, to remember.
My childhood memories were still there. But they weren’t the problem. I could remember most of the stuff that had happened to me up until the day my father called from Marshall City to say the FBI had him surrounded. Everything after that, except for a few wispy fragments of sense-memory, like walking through a field of pot plants seven feet high, lacy green light filtering through the leaves, was either blank, or so confused and conflated with my CR hallucinations and nightmares that I couldn’t separate the real from the fantastic.
Somehow, though, after a few nights of struggling, I managed to stumble upon a solution to my problem. Write it down, something told me, you have to write it down. Which led to the next problem: how to obtain writing implements without giving away my secret?
Pens were easy, there were plenty of them lying around the nursing station desks. All I could find to write in, though, was this 1995 Pocket Pal notebook-calendar. I found it in a drawer in the nurses’ station. It’s one of those pocket-sized drug company giveaways with the name and address of the local Pfizer sales rep printed in fake gold leaf on the fake leather cover. Not a lot of room for writing, obviously. But by printing in microscopically tiny letters, jamming the lines infinitesimally close together, and making use of every available inch of space including the margins around the “Useful Information” pages (first aid instructions, a metric conversion chart, zip and area code listings, etc.), I have managed to squeeze ten full years of my life into these cramped and no doubt barely legible pages.
It worked, too! My marbles and my memories, they are back. I know who I am, and I know what happened to me. And thanks to my psychiatrist, who left me alone in his office with my records and charts the other day while he went off to attend to some emergency, I even know how they got away with doing what they did.
It all started with a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. In other words, according to the shrinks I am a total psychopath. That’s why, they say, I helped Big Luke and Teddy rape and kill at least three women. No mention of the fact that Judge Higuera dismissed all the charges against me.
Then I strangled Dusty and threw her over the cliff, snuck up on Brent and attacked him from behind, and stabbed Rudy to death for good measure. Never mind that I was never convicted, or even brought to trial, for any of those terrible deeds. Apparently that bit in the Constitution about how you’re innocent until proven guilty doesn’t apply to psychos.
Next they brought me to Meadows Road, where I started attacking orderlies indiscriminately, willy-nilly, no mention of how it was the whitecoats who jumped me the second I arrived. And as for how that whitecoat used to take me into the bathroom and beat me up when I was drugged and helpless, somehow none of that ever made it into the records, even though one of the doctors caught him in the act.
I realize now that in a way, it would have been better if I had been convicted of something. At least then I’d have a lawyer and I could appeal. Instead, I’m serving life without parole and I can’t even argue my own case, because if they so much as suspect that I’ve got my marbles back, they’ll have me back under chemical restraint before you can say phenothiazine.
So come to think of it, yeah, maybe I am a little crazy by now. But can you blame me? I’m only twenty-five years old, but I’ve already been lied to and betrayed by everyone I’ve ever trusted, robbed of my freedom and robbed of my mind, then locked up for life in this shithole they call Meadows Road. And I don’t even know why.
My grandparents do, though. And thanks to some information one of the inmates gave me yesterday morning, I may get a chance to ask them about it any day now, face-to-face, live and in person.
And when I’ve finished discussing matters with Fred and Evelyn, there are a few other people I’d like to have a word or two with.
I know, I know, everybody says that living well is the best revenge. But for me, living well is probably an unrealistic goal, even if I do manage to make it out of here. So I guess I’m going to have to settle for second best: seeing every single one of the treacherous, backstabbing bastards on my list die slow and painful deaths, and maybe even sticking around long enough to watch the turkey vultures munch-munch-munching on their remains.