But you never knew what was waiting for you when the call came over the intercom. Sometimes it was just an overanxious nurse being overly careful, or wanting to display the looming muscle of the psych hospital to a patient acting out. Oh, yeah, I’ll call the big fuckers down to get you… they would say. Or sometimes the unit was completely torn up and a brawl was going down. You just never knew. It made it exciting, in an embarrassing, perverse kind of way. To be excited about something you really shouldn’t be excited about. Like a cop going out on a call.
Calls for C/D, the chronic unit, were the ones I hurried for the least. When they called it usually was bad, and often for Jeffrey, who had sent dozens of people home injured, and ended more than a few careers. He was strong as an ape and crafty and downright evil. He spread lotion all over himself one night in his room after lights out and came out to fight, completely naked and greased and attacked the staff who hardly had enough time to call for help. You couldn’t get ahold of him and he was swinging and scratching and biting. Cliff ended up finally hitting him square in the face, nearly breaking his nose, and it still didn’t knock him out, it just slowed him down enough that Wayne, the ever peaceful and reasonable leviathan, was able to flop on top of the demon-possessed, greased pig and pin him just long enough until help arrived. It was quite a scene to open the door to. Everyone breathing hard with bleeding bite marks and chairs everywhere and a naked little white man peeking out from a huffing Wayne. Connie coming out of the broken half door in the nurse’s station with a shot, her arm swollen with her own memorandum in the form of a bleeding bite mark of her own.
“You stay away from me you fucking devil Jew!” the little Satan’s voice shot out from underneath the mass of Wayne, the Brooklyn accent seemingly unaffected by all the weight pressing down on him. It took all of us and three shots and a full hour. When I finally left he was in 5-point restraints and you could hear him screaming vile epithets all the way out of the unit, down the hall, up the stairs. Throughout the whole hospital like the voice of a ghoul. Our resident demon.
A takedown was a rather simple thing, or at least an effective one was. You grabbed the person from behind, wrapped your arms around them, above their elbow and just across their chest, clasped your wrist with the other hand, and picked them up if you were strong enough. Or waited for someone else to help drag them to the time-out room. A reverse bear hug. I remember being shown the maneuver unofficially by Rich, and immediately started waiting for anyone to teach me something better. More “real.” Surely they would just break the hold I had on my own wrist up front, or stomp on my feet or crack my nose with the back of their head or just wrestle out of the whole thing. It seemed a highly unprofessional, televised wrestling sort of hold that would never work in the unscripted world I was now grappling in. But it did work, surprisingly well in fact. It actually calmed some of the patients down, SOME, maybe because of the fact they were suddenly pressed against another human. That primal squeeze, and an incapacitating one, by someone who was strong and in control.
Some got away. I was around for a couple of those and that always ended very, very badly. I always talked to mine. “It’s all right, nobody’s going to get hurt,” little lies and promises like that. Maybe it was more for me than them, but I always imagined it helped. I never lost one, anyway.
My first was Richard. He was a tiny, old Norwegian man, naturalized for near 50 years, and holding none of the accent but all of the crazy. Old schizophrenic and alcoholic. Nasty as hell when he was sick or out of cigarettes. He looked either like a kindly old gnome or an evil one, depending on his medication and nicotine levels. Legendary mumbler, quick and raspy. When he was told something he didn’t want to hear, the worst of which was “Rich you don’t have any cigarettes so you have to wait,” his gnome face would crinkle up and his little white hairs on his head would stand on end.
“You hell! You hell!!” he would curse at you, his thumb and forefinger squeezed together at your head, at your soul, as he sent you straight to the underworld with the most powerful of his tiny, hate-filled magic.
It was almost impossible to not laugh when he did that. He was so adorable that his anger and hatred was irrepressibly cute. But if you did smile or laugh at him that would only send him on a tirade of more tiny, vile curses and his wrinkled face would turn impossibly red and he would erupt into a full tirade. Then you would have to send the poor little fiend into his room or even the time-out room and you would feel just as bad if not worse than poor little Richard, who only wanted a cigarette.
If you had just given him a cigarette, oh the glories heaped upon your fame, the laurels tossed over your blessed head! “Oh thank you, thank you, kind sir, a thousand blessings to you and your family,” his little guttural growl would bestow as he bowed like an under-grown Norwegian nobleman.
I loved Richard. He was an irrepressible, unique creature that unfortunately would spend the rest of his life on the chronic unit. And he was my unfortunate first takedown.
It was like picking up a bird, a thrashing bird with all its edges sharp, willing to kill itself to escape. I was instantly taken back to banding birds as a child in the great ravine past our house when I was a child, just old enough to be in the Audubon society and waiting in the bushes with the binoculars that I had mowed so many yards for, waiting until a bird flew into the giant net we had all spread between the valley of the two sprawling maple trees. A whirling tangle made the net suddenly visible and we would run down and when it was my turn I would carefully untangle the bird from the net. Careful not to break the wings, so magnificent and fragile. Watch the beak, they peck and it hurts and bleeds so much, especially the tiny ones, the cutest ones. They poop on you and peck you and you have to hold them just right, your hand around their middle, squeezing their wings together with its head peeking above your clenched fist while we put on the little band on their impossibly small feet. The littlest ones, the black-capped chickadees were my favorite and fought the most. You had to grab them quick and full and strong but gentle, or they would break their own wing while they pecked a hole in your hand. I felt like a real giant, a huge cartoon boy, as I held this speck of a bird that I never imagined could be so small once it’s wings were taken away.
“You hell! You hell! I send you straight to hell! You fucking demon rot your soul! Damned to hell you go!” He writhed and spit as I held him firm, his wings clasped to me, on our way to the restraint room to be banded like all the other little birds caught in our net. I squeezed him a little tighter, right between the Maple trees, and he stopped thrashing. “You hell…miserable shit…” he whimpered, limp and heavier in my clutches now. Into the room where Gertrude was drawing the enormous shot up and Messina was waiting with his expressionless smile and Rita was holding the door open. Too late for timeout now. Seemed so pointless to strap him down, but the call had been made and the doctor’s order had been given and once that happened there was no going back, no downgrading the emergency. There was protocol if nothing else.
I fell down on the puke green plastic mattress, Richard below me, and he fought feebly, whispering horrible things with sobs plastered between them as Messina used his shaking hands to place Richard’s withered arms in the leather restraints leftover from an era of torture, the tiniest skeleton key in the world unlocking, then relocking each shackle. Rita clamped his legs down, and I got off him so we could put the leather belt shackles across his backside. Face down. I wanted to say I was sorry as Gertrude pulled down his pants enough to expose his gleaming white haunch and pump the full shot into him. She said Irish things like, “There there now Richard this’ll take care of ya. There’s no reason for ya ta be actin like this. Yea. Yea. OK den. Calm down now and after awhile we’ll give ya sometin ta eat den. Yea. Yea,” and everyone filed out, with me last. Rita handed me the giant restraint room door key, from the opposite world as the tiny black restraint key. The largest key I have ever seen, bronze and shiny and long as my hand. I locked the great lock with a solemn clank and followed everyone into the office to wash up and turn on the little black and white flickering monitor to watch the little banded chickadee Richard lie in his leather bands. Watch him curse himself into unconsciousness.
The key felt cold and cartoonish, yet comforting in my pocket. Too large to be real. It was how we did things. The key belonged in your back pocket and it felt cold and mammoth and official. I washed my hands and listened to Gertrude cackle like a blackbird to Messina in the office, already past it and onto other things.