Stick Figures and Root Beer Floats

The cold air stung my nostrils as I peered out the back window. It was barred, like an old armored car or a circus truck. The interior was stark except for remnants of desperate graffiti scribbled out by previous passengers. “You won’t take me alive!" “I think… therefore I’m shit.”

“How the fuck did I end up here?” I thought. One minute I was in the ER begging for migraine treatment and the next moment I found myself on my way to a behavioral health facility. My mind raced as I tried to connect the dots. My mouth. It must have been my mouth. I foggily remembered a conversation with a middle-aged woman in a shabby mint green outfit and comfortable shoes. She was asking me really shady questions and my head was throbbing. I peeked at her from underneath the blanket like a lost little girl as I tried to shield my eyes from the piercing lights.

“Are you hearing voices? Are you thinking about hurting yourself, sweetie?”

“I’m 40 years old—I’m not your sweetie,” I hissed back at her.

She raised an eyebrow at me and began feverishly scribbling into my chart. I asked again about some sort of relief for my headache and her demeanor changed drastically.

“We don’t cater to drug seekers here… SWEETIE.”

She slammed the door with a flourish and the next thing I knew I was being scooted down the hallway and into the back of the circus wagon. I heard the man escorting me shout “72 hours” to the driver before he closed the door.

It took less than 10 minutes to arrive to a well maintained red brick building with impeccable landscaping. I was old enough to know that some of the nicest exteriors housed the most grotesque nightmares and I was leery. A balding man with round, wire-rimmed glasses met me at the door and told the driver “he’d take it from here”. He grabbed a brown paper sack from under the counter, gestured towards an open door—and told me to go change. I looked in the bag as I walked towards the room but was met by Sasha who proceeded to help me out of my jeans and hoodie… and bra and panties. She delighted in snapping her latex gloves while telling me to “bend over, baby”. Complete cavity search. This couldn’t be real. She told me to put on a paper gown that barely closed in the back with narrow Velcro strips. I was told I couldn’t have my bra or underwear because I might hurt myself with them. I was then walked down a narrow white hallway that seemed to be bustling as patients were awoken to start their morning routine.

“That’s your room over there” Sasha said. “But we ain’t got no time for a tour. Get in line. It’s time for breakfast.”

I stood there. Stunned. Trying to take it all in. A woman ran over my foot with her wheelchair, her colostomy bag so full that it had dripped all over her paper gown. A tall, dark haired man stood in front of me slapping the top of his head over and over and yelling “It’s not me. It’s not me”. A purple-headed teen got right in my face.

“Don’t stare at us, newbie. Its not polite!”

She made the mistake of pushing me to emphasize her last syllable and I grabbed a handful of her gnarly purple dreads and had her on the ground in seconds. “

Don’t fucking touch me”, I snarled while pinning her arms behind her head. She cackled furiously. She wouldn’t stop laughing. A large man in white coveralls approached and held out his hand to me.

“We’ve talked about this,Emerald. Quit antagonizing people”, he said to Purple Dreads. She was still laughing when she got up and back in line, blowing kisses at me over her shoulder. I was enraged. The man in the coveralls told me to relax and that I’d feel better after some breakfast. The last thing I wanted to do was eat.

I followed the rest of the crazies out of the main building and through an exterior courtyard that was high fenced.

“What the fuck?” I muttered under by breath as my head swiveled in all directions.

“It IS fucked, right? Like a bad movie” muttered a new voice behind me.

I hadn’t noticed him before. He was probably in his early 20’s and was wearing paper pants and a maroon hoodie that wasn’t zipped. I could see that his chest was covered in bandages.

“It is exactly like a bad movie,” I smirked… “but it looks like your night was worse than mine.”

I pointed at his chest. “This?” He asked. “You should see the other guy”.

I smiled. “I’m Sarah,” I said. “And I’m sorry if you can see my ass through this lovely paper thing.”

“I’m Matt”, he said—“and I’m not.”

We laughed and for a split second I forgot where I was.

Breakfast was interesting. The cafeteria was papered with fliers advertising a "Root Beer Float Social" that was coming Thursday. The fliers confused me. We were lined up on picnic tables and watching people eat was as obvious a diagnostic tool as anything else I would witness during my stay. After meals, smokers were allowed one cigarette in the court yard before we were whisked away to rec time. If you did not have cigarettes in your account then one would be appointed for you from a shoebox allocated to our floor. I didn’t have any as a newbie so the orderly took one out of a crumbled soft pack of a brand I didn’t recognize and threw it at me. There were these weird automatic lighters on the grounds since we couldn’t be trusted with fire. Matt watched as I lit mine and took a long drag before sitting down.

“You know…. I watched a twitchy dude piss all over that shitty pack of smokes yesterday before that other douchebag picked it up and put it in the shoebox.”

I started coughing uncontrollably while I snuffed the tainted cig out with my slipper socks. Matt smiled widely as he puffed on his and never answered me when I asked if he was serious.

Recreation time was next. The rec room was fully carpeted but had a basketball goal on one end. An older skinny blond lady was leading a twisted version of yoga on the floor. Picnic tables in the middle were loaded with worn art supplies and half sheets of construction paper. Grown women drew rainbows and happy faces while the young male orderly stood over their shoulders and feigned delight over their masterpieces with comments like “That’s outstanding, Debbie! Those daisies are so life-like, Maria!”.

I scanned the room trying to decide where I might fit. I chose a spot by myself near the basketball goal that provided optimum people watching capacity. My eyes darted back and forth across the room until I saw Matt. He was leaning against a brick wall, his legs out-stretched and crossed in front of him. He was very calmly writing in a little black notebook. Curiosity got the best of me and so I wandered over to him and asked why he needed a little black book in the depths of hell.

“To keep track of my bitches’ digits,” he replied.

I chuckled but tried to peer over his shoulder to see what he was actually doing.

“Easy, there nosy Nancy. Get your own from the arts and crack table,” he said to me through a smile.

I grabbed a notebook and a partially sharpened golf pencil from the basket and slid back beside him. I held the book partially open—so Matt couldn’t see—and scribbled in the margins. It ended up becoming one of those flip books you make when you are a kid. The kind where stick figures can move if you thumb through the pages fast enough. I put the notebook in my paper gown pocket and got up enough nerve to ask Matt why he was “in”. His hands were shaking when he unzipped his hoodie to expose the enormity of the bandages underneath.

“I was drinkin’,” he said. “I had just finished my 9th beer and was smoking on my patio. I still had a box cutter from work and I was talking on the phone and popping the blade back and forth while I talked to my girlfriend. I was pretty drunk. We got into a fight and I was so mad that I took the blade and ran it across my chest. Must have passed out after that. Woke up in the ER with 48 staples. Wanna see?”

He lifted up the corner of a central piece of gauze and his chest sparkled from the silver staples.

“Sweet! I said utilizing my most charming sarcasm. “You’re the low budget Iron Man”.

Matt laughed so hard that he dropped his secret black notebook.

“I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours?” I quipped as I tossed my unbrushed hair over my shoulder with mock seductiveness.

“Deal!” he said.

I tossed him my notebook and we both sat dumbfounded as we paged furiously through them. Both notebooks contained the exact same drawings of a stick figure man sucking down root beer float after root beer float until he eventually exploded. His drawings were more detailed than mine but the idea was the same. What were the odds?

“Aww” I said. You’re my low budget spirit animal!”

For the rest of our forced 72 hour hold, Matt and I were inseparable. Our paths would have never crossed in real life. He was a 23 year old nurse’s aide and had been in and out of trouble since he was 14. I was a 40 year old twice divorced science teacher. We were from opposites sides of society and it may as well have been opposite sides of the planet—but we understood each other, in that moment, like no one else could. Mental health is fickle that way.

Matt’s hold ended before mine did. We were given strict orders not to exchange personal information but before he left, he snuck me his black notebook. He had added a few more pages to the drawing—this time of a very shapely woman making a phone call before a shoddy Iron Man appeared brandishing a glass with a straw. His number was underneath.

My mother had passed away the month prior to my psych stint and my husband had left me several months before that. I felt misunderstood, devastated, and alone. I had been working up enough nerve to end myself when a migraine took hold from all my crying. I drove myself to the ER and ended up meeting Matt on lock down. We were the same yet totally different. I didn’t feel alone anymore.

I had inherited some money from my mother’s passing and knew that Matt was struggling and in between places. I had a lawyer call him to tell him that his long lost Great Aunt Toni had left him a sizable inheritance. When he came to pick it up and saw a check for $20 grand, the lawyer said he was excited “beyond words”.

Two months later, I thumbed through the old black notebook and decided to call Matt to check in. We chatted for hours and then decided to meet up. He invited me to his new place and we laughed and reminisced over our previous time together. I got up to throw something away and a cartoon on his fridge caught my eye. It was a female Iron Man in a hospital gown handing a ginormous mug of something to a stick figure man. Matt saw me grin at the drawing.

“Hey, doofus”, he beamed while holding up his beer. “Here’s to my Great Aunt Toni Stark!”