Travels of the Mind

I began my day sauntering up the East side of Manhattan looking for a gated courtyard with stairs. Maybe the New York City version of this is different than my mental picture. I am looking for a fountain, some plants, maybe a bench. Instead I find a seven-foot tall security guard in a concrete stairwell asking me about my intentions. My intentions? Well, let’s see, “I intend to get into a medical research study for the betterment of all mankind.” Mmm, too broad I guess. He asks again in the way I get asked by customs officers in airports, “Anything to declare?” Then they repeat it in the “We know you have three live octopus in a Ziploc bag, Miss” kind of tone. This guy is no different so I state that I have an appointment. I tried to dress presentably. What on earth made him zoom in on me? Why me I think, as he eyes my tote bag. I was trying to do a mental inventory of the contents: an apple, a book, wallet, journal, concert schedule, and firearms? Was that what his question turned accusation implied? I was wearing mauve pumps did he really think I was up to something wearing this impractical footwear? I realized that he was asking questions out of boredom more than anything. I sort of shuffled away as I answered and he stopped asking me things.

I found myself wandering empty hallways and vacated cubicles. It was nearly ten and none of the research staff was anywhere to be found. The locked offices were labeled with area numbers rather than room numbers. It gave a spooky feel to the psychology research, like those top secret mind control experiments that we see movies about. That idea was fresh in my mind as I walked the other night with my Santaland pal. I saw the bridge and candy striped smoke stacks that are featured in a conspiracy theory movie staring Mel Gibson. So two days later here I am walking my way through area 53 and area 54, willingly nonetheless. I find the “area” of the researcher who conducted a phone interview with me. His “area” door had his name scrolled in frantic letters on a wipe board. These were reminiscent of a note left by a hostage in hopes that someone would find their message on the palm leaf.

On the floor there is a much larger wipe board that looks as if it was left out in the rain. Abbreviated disorders in all capitals along with words like screening, submit, internal, funds, chart, flow sheet, 200/year. I wonder what all of this means, as I interpret it more as a conceptual free verse piece rather than medical research. I hear movement nearby and it turns out to be research assistants in pink sweaters and skinny jeans that accelerate their walk ever so slightly in my presence. Boy they walk slowly, “no wonder we don’t find a cure for anything.” I think to myself as they carry one over-sized binder at a time, just to make the magic last. They were walking even slower than the sales staff at Macy’s at break time. I had sat myself down at an empty cubicle near someone’s new laptop. The assistants’ converse and laugh about some female patient they found crying in the hallway. Oh my, this seemed even too harsh for emotionally distant psychiatrists in training. On another pass by they note that she was crying over a potentially life threatening medical condition. Funny stuff in area 53 I thought. I must have given my Grandmother Pearl’s look of death, because one stammered a bit before trying to change the topic. They both grew slightly uncomfortable at the notebook scribbles I was making. It took them twenty minutes to piece together that I was possibly a visiting researcher in mauve pumps. Next pass by they each carried two binders. I feel relieved knowing that the future of psychiatric medical research is in good hands.

I looked again at my watch and realized that I had arrived so early to the deserted building that I never checked the latch on his door. I knocked a cheerful knock to possibly wake him, and then quickly tried the handle. Nope. Another Doctor had scrawled in an equally creepy hand his name and area number on a garbage can. Where are all of these researchers? Were they all taken hostage just moments after lifting a Sharpie to whatever was in reach? I find myself getting restless after a twenty- minute wait, so I browse the pile of children’s books next to the free verse poetry wipe board. I read book titles like Doggies and My Shimmery Fun Time Book. Anyone being treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has already been to hell and back, so I cannot picture these books helping all that much. I decide to pick up the phone and dial the researchers extension in case he is in there tied to a chair. I find no dial tone and that doesn’t surprise me considering the fire alarm had been ripped off the wall with bare wires flowing out. Hmm, maybe the line was cut in the hostage taking. At my desk I find a PTSD Protocol sheet. Probably shouldn’t have looked at the form that the Doctors must fill out, as it is pretty bleak summarization of your mental health. It is a 0 to 7 rating for how screwed up someone is, from not messed up to wacko is roughly the scale. Oops, I definitely wished that I didn’t see that. I imagine myself in the clinical trial interview trying to decipher if the Psychiatrist just made a 7 on the page. Was that a 7 or one of those sweeping European ones I would think as I tried to read it upside down. A one would give me roughly a rating of “tweaked,” I could live with that, but a seven would potentially make me the hostage taker. Tweaked would have me writing verse with a Sharpie in a bad hand, but not much more.

The red haired researcher sweeps in several minutes late and doesn’t piece together that I, the person sitting in his area cubicle is his ten o’clock. When I introduce myself as a potential research patient he drops his hands down in a “I am unarmed” gesture while asking me in overly polite, cautious words to “Please step back into the waiting area.” On the phone he had told me to appear at his “area.” Now I am being treated like a loose cannon. I am given about twelve pages to fill out with the top one being a PDSQ test booklet. Boy that was loads of fun as it made you carefully sort through your life looking for personal traumas, encroaching detachment from society, anxiety attacks, panic, isolation and depression rearing it’s head. Add to that compulsive behavior, over eating, under eating, the works. Each question on this sheet must be answered in a clear-cut black or white answer, yes or no, when really nearly every question was a shade of grey. “Did you frequently” starts many sentences. “Did you often,” starts many others. It is kind of relative. If it is noticeable is it often or frequent? Does often mean hourly, daily, weekly? Oh crap, I see a seven looming on my horizon.

I continued through my multi hour task of number making and box ticking. These forms use the sneaky strategy of overlapping time frames and questions. One column on another sheet makes you consider frequency and the other column is degree of distress it caused. I find myself at the trauma grand finale sheet checking nearly every trauma with the boxes marked “I witnessed,” or “it happened to me.” I tried to curl my hand over the answers that were so depressing just to look at, let alone experience. The natural disaster column read like a full house on poker night. Earthquakes, check, volcanic eruption, check, fire, flood, and landslides all check. Five yes’ yeah I win, or do I? I realized that the sheer number of atrocities may put a 7 on my form. I felt like I was a new patient at the Dr’s office when they want your family medical history. I try to just make looping circles around all diseases known to man and write “both sides” in bold print. Doctor’s always give me that “God, your screwed” look and try to decide if I would be a profit making patient, or if I will be a problem patient and die in the waiting room, which is not good for business. I have even had some Doctor’s say, “Really?” “No,” I want to reply, “I was just joking about the pancreatic cancer! I just wanted to make you laugh.”
Research assistants now realized that I was a potential wacko, or 7 to them and went by like a binder carrying gawker’s delay. I scrolled out the full spectrum of numbers with a whole lot of twos. Two’s were everywhere though at times I wanted them to be zeros. I had to be honest because dishonesty would help no one. I was here in part due to my Father who died shortly after our summer fishing trip that I wrote of last week. He was a WWII vet who came home with severe nerve damage and what were then termed flash backs, and now would be treated as full blown PTSD. I too, seemed incapable of having a life without some kind of trauma. I keep thinking that this will be my year, but I end up either in column a, “I witnessed,” or column b, “I experienced” the full range of human tragedy. It has been so consistent that everyone begins to question how much can the human brain handle before it shields itself out of self-protection. So that is what they were looking for. They wanted to determine if I had managed to navigate the psychological gauntlet. So every number assigned, every tick mark checked had to be honest. If they felt that I was developing PTSD like my Dad, then I would be a case study in their valuable research. If I was still handling the mountain of trauma in a restricted, but with “normal” brain and emotional responses, then I would be rejected from the study. So it was really a bit of a dilemma. In order to help people like my Father, I needed to be like him, which was to be mentally ill from witnessing horrific crimes against humanity. If I was rejected, I could not help in this study, but it would be a relief to learn that your brain is coping regardless of the onslaught. I wanted to help, but I also wanted to be well.

So two’s remained two’s except for one that was marked in the wrong column. I was finding myself glancing ahead and answering the easy black or white questions first. Thoughts of worthlessness, nope, “0,” suicidal thoughts, “0.” Those were clear and easy for me, but when I returned to the shade of grey questions I would sometimes return to the wrong answer line on this multi page, tiny print form. “Damn,” I muttered as I realized that my 2 could not be made into a zero without being obvious. Add to it that the mistake was in a column that would certainly send up a red flag. It was a question fishing for compulsive disorders that I did not have but now gave the illusion that I was trying to conceal them. Now I was muttering, “oh shit,” to myself as the assistant walked past. Great, now I am talking to myself, and on another pass by I had tears rolling down my face after having to make a detailed account of my recent account of my horrors in Switzerland. I hoped that the binder carrier would go to lunch instead of arriving in the hallway as I was switching answers, mumbling swear words, and crying. It did not help that I had a construction crew rewiring, drilling and installing doors six feet from where I was supposed to navigate my way through these probing questions. Twenty pages of questions about shock, loss, violence, assault, natural and unnatural disaster and how I have handled it.

Luckily the researcher popped on the scene with a drug test cup. That made the entire construction crew disappear. Nothing like a drug test to clear the room. It was some nifty pee, cover, and tip, settle and read gizmo that probably earned the inventor an island in Fiji. I was impressed with its simple design. The sheer poetry where form meets function, its hard to add grace to a pee cup, but someone did it. The red haired researcher walked by elated that I passed. Maybe that was what that long pause followed by a confused stammer was yesterday on the phone. When I told him that I would be in first thing in the morning, maybe he was thinking that there wasn’t enough time for all of the illicit drugs that an artist consumes to clear my system in that time frame. “You sure? Is that ok, (pause) ah, there is a drug test involved.” The topic came back again later in the interview as the pixie like councilor made a little stretch and a hand sweep across the page in an ok, lets make some room gesture. With a pen at the ready she leaned her compassionate mid twenties face to mine in a lets cut to the chase style, asking me to report all of the recreational drugs that I have tried. “Ever,” “never?” Nope. I joke about the fictitious art school award for being the only one to graduate “clean.” She laughed and scrolled an empty set sign in a space that was large enough to list every drug known to man. I may have the traumas, but at least one page was as white as snow.

I probably should have mentioned Kava, and other questionable tribal beverages and chewed fermented things, but I don’t think she was looking for anything made from pounded jungle roots. Last night the colorist that I modeled responded to my mention of exotic travel by mentioning his friend drinking cobra venom somewhere near my usual Indonesian haunts. I smiled back at his inquiry as he pushed to know if I had experienced the same. He seemed a little to eager to learn of its hallucination granting properties and I grew momentarily concerned that he could potentially be under the spell of such potion as he mixed my hair color. Thinking that his friend may have been a bit of a storyteller who really drank too many pina coladas at the Denpasar Hilton and may have thought that the former sounded more adventurous. Or maybe he really did it. Maybe he was briefly adopted into a cobra venom sucking hill tribe in Kalimantan who filed their teeth. He could have possibly donned a penis sheath and sucked down a shot of cobra juice before disembarking in his dugout canoe in Irian Jaya. I could just see the friend he was speaking of. If he looked anything like my stylist, the whole scene would have looked like a Calvin Klein model that had been rolled in mud and placed behind a line of red and white carved war shields with the cobra venom still glistening on his perfect pout. A little bit like a misadventure at an exotic day spa. I chatted about my comparatively innocent Kava experiences that left me numb and dancing till dawn at a seven-day village marriage ceremony on Kandavu. Time to rinse the color before I got to the fermented palm beverages.

It is ironic in this time of upheaval that I would look like a million bucks. I decided to use my well shaped skull to its full advantage by being a hair model once again. Last time I did that was for the Michigan Ave salons back in Chicago. I was their wild card as I had the creative mural painting job and did not want to blend in too much to the relatively conservative Chicago scene. It began right before I left business school and I guess the change in my physical appearance made it clear that I was moving on. The last couple of weeks have again really spoiled me rotten. I go from having hair that had been growing out since mid- summer to the latest cut and color from two different top NY salons. I have to say my baby faced stylist cooed at what a dramatic before and after shot it would be. I wasn't sure how to take that one. It was sort of the same reaction I had while undergoing that Indian eyebrow threading thing. I was sitting there wincing and feeling as though I was shoving my face into a fishing line and trying not to cry. She stopped suddenly after a long look at me and said, is there anything else you want to do? I curled my fingertips under to hide them from her manicure hungry gaze and was going to say yeah, my forehead needs threading. Luckily I was scared of the thread torturing woman, because I stopped short and then noticed that forehead was an option on the menu. How can she complain about me being unkempt when some people come in with a fur forehead. I mean really.
To be continued