Growing Up Next to the Mental Read online

  More often than not, though, the field was deserted, creating a complacency—even among parents—that further goaded us to run roughshod over the place.

  That was until the Seadog affair, affectionately named for the box of matches that nearly burned down the Waterford. Or so suggested the front-page headline in the Daily News the morning after.

  “newfoundland constabulary seek culprits in hospital blaze!” it shouted in big, bold, sixty-point text that hardly needed an exclamation point.

  My heart sank into my gut at first glance, returning there every time I pulled a copy from my paper bag to stuff in a mailbox, shove through a slot, or flick between a screen and storm door.

  I usually embraced the solitude that came with my early-morning summer paper route.

  Not on this day.

  Instead, the 5:00 a.m. peace permitted my thoughts to run wild with paranoid abandon over the night before, when a few matches, some dry grass, and a stupid dare had transformed me into an arsonist and fugitive from justice.

  I stuck to my morning routine, pedalling hard up Cowan Avenue to desolate Topsail Road and the brand spankin’ new McDonald’s for some pancakes and OJ. They’d just installed their new drive-thru, which I could only use if someone drove over whatever it was you had to drive over to get served.

  There was always a cop or cabbie in the parking lot happy to oblige, although I’d take the latter over the former today, thank you.

  The police presence caused me to wait for the walk signal, despite the total lack of vehicles at that hour. And the clicks from the traffic control box, easily audible in the quiet, told me I could go before the light did.

  All fuelled up, I pedalled east along Topsail and down toward my Holbrook Avenue customers.

  The damning headline screamed at me each time I tugged a paper from my bag. Yet I steadfastly dismissed blame and instead critically assessed the editor’s exaggeration, not to mention that friggin’ exclamation point.

  It irked me so much that I stopped to dump the papers out onto someone’s dew-damp lawn and shoved them back in upside down just to shift the headline from my line of sight.

  Okay, so we probably shouldn’t have run from what we started, but “hospital blaze”? Gimme a break. Some scorched grass next to a concrete reservoir, not close to any buildings.

  My mind now in overdrive, I tried to reason, rationalize, and even rehearse an apology.

  There really was no getting around the wrongness of it all. This was bad mischief. But I couldn’t fess up now, having failed to do so in the immediate aftermath. I would likely have to face the music at some point, and it would not be pretty.

  Much like a previous indiscretion when I was nabbed shoplifting a pack of sour Cherry Chews from Hamlyn’s store.

  “Go upstairs and wait in your room,” my mother had instructed. “Your father will be home in a half-hour.”

  Oh God, I thought. I have thirty minutes to live.

  I survived with little more than a painful earlobe-twisting. And while I’m sure the sounds of stretching and cracking cartilage made it worse than it was, it must’ve worked, ’cause I never pulled the old five-finger-discount stunt again.

  The fallout this time would be far worse, I feared.

  The only upside to my current emotional roller coaster was the fact that the morning was flying by. Apparently time also flew when you weren’t having fun.

  Mulling over potential alibis and doomsday scenarios, I nearly pedalled past my final customer of the morning: the Brookfield Fire Station.

  I hadn’t even considered the risk and irony here, such was my morning consternation. My once favourite stop, which often included an invite to shoot a game of pool, slide down the brass pole, or help hose down the trucks, had suddenly become as inviting as the dentist’s chair or principal’s office.

  Last newspaper in hand, I approached the station with dread but was relieved to find the big garage door closed and no one relaxing on the bench outside. Odd, but a good omen, I decided, grasping at anything positive to calm my nerves.

  “I’ll just stick it through the door handle here . . .” I quietly said to myself as I completed the action.

  “Who ya talkin’ to?” My knees buckled with fright as his bark broke the calm of the early morning.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” I blurted involuntarily, borrowing the phrase we adopted from our parents to avoid breaching the second commandment.

  “Y’all right there, Wish?” the firehouse captain guffawed as he poked his head out through the open window right above the bench.

  I knew Cap’n Mike and his deep, gurgly growl all to pieces. He was the platoon chief and elder statesman at Brookfield, and a lifelong family friend. One could not conjure a more accurate portrait of the prototypically pleasant and helpful fireman. His picture, some suggested, should be in the dictionary right next to the definition of the profession.

  Tall, fit, and somewhere in his forties, Mike had the friendly, inviting face of a firefighter. And with a surname like Byrne, his career path had never been in doubt, albeit curtailed by a bout of throat cancer that left parts of what he said unintelligible.

  I had barely gotten myself back into my skin when I was startled again—such was my unease—this time by the sudden jerk and screech of chains pulling the garage door up into the roof somewhere.

  “Lil jumpy today, aren’t we?” said Cap’n Mike, the garage door rising to reveal the rest of him.

  I should’ve taken an extra second or two to respond.

  “Yeah. I mean, no. I’m fine. Good, actually. All good.”

  It was only then I realized that the fire hall was empty, save for the small red and white captain’s pickup tucked in the far left corner, just in case Cap had to skedaddle, too.

  “So . . . where is everyone, and everything?” I asked innocently enough, my voice bouncing off the concrete walls and floor of the station and up into the rafters.

  “Gone on a call,” he said, stretching his yellow suspenders up and over each shoulder. “Back to a flare-up with that stubborn one down by the Waterford last night. Déjà vu all over again.”

  A huge Yankees fan, he loved to quote Yogi Berra any chance he got.

  “You were probably already off to Lala Land,” he added.

  I wish, I thought to myself, briefly bemused by the unintentional use of my own name in another context. On the contrary, I’d been wide awake while it was all going down—discovering previously unnoticed patterns on my bedroom ceiling while my heart tried to beat its way out of my chest.

  I’d heard the sirens all right, that quirky Doppler effect thingy changing key as the trucks whizzed by my house en route to the Mental. Then different sirens joined the haphazard chorus with a cadence that I knew only came from police cars.

  “The cops, too?” I whispered to no one as I lay there.

  I fought the pull to survey the scene from my window, which provided an almost unimpeded view of the Mental Field, its parking lot, and surrounding trees and brush—right down where we had foolishly been less than an hour earlier.

  Curiosity prevailed and I slipped out of bed for a peek, just as an ambulance was casually arriving, its lights flashing but no audible siren.

  “One of two things going on there,” my father would say. “False alarm or they’re already dead.”

  I was also taken aback by the sheer number of flashing red lights splashing against the brick walls of the Mental in the pitch black. Probably see that from space, I thought.

  The scene was suddenly obscured by several plumes of grey-white smoke from the fire-dousing.

  “Mooney!” Cap’n Mike brought me back.

  I scrambled for something to convey both surprise and concern for what had transpired the night before.

  “Oh yeah . . . heard all the s
irens, all right. Anyone hurt?”

  He yanked the newspaper from the door handle, snapped it wide open, and began perusing the entire front page.

  “Nothing too serious . . . just one of the patients. Nothing about that here, though. But buddy only burned his foot trying to stamp it out. Said it wasn’t him that started it, but he was kinda caught red-footed!”

  He laughed hard at his own joke, inducing one of the grossest, phlegm-filled coughing fits I’d ever heard.

  Well, I guess that explains the ambulance, I thought.

  And just like that, the weight of the world had been lifted off me.

  Blame had apparently been assigned to someone else, and conscience be damned.

  3

  As nerve-wracking as the morning had been, Cap’n Mike had managed to wash it all away.

  I found new strength in my legs as I peeled away from the fire station on some loose gravel. No need to fret or avoid heading home now.

  I swerved toward our house with speed, ensuring enough momentum to jump that wide, nuisance crack in the slope to our driveway. Clearing the crevice with ease, I stamped hard on the brakes, skidding sideways to a halt inches from the rear bumper of our family’s wood-panelled station wagon.

  I straightened my BMX and sat back in a slouch, treating myself to a moment of relief while savouring Cap’n Mike’s words again.

  “Nothing too serious . . . just one of the patients . . . caught red-footed!”

  The three phrases echoed over and over in my head like broken vignettes, sometimes changing order. The monotony was only altered by the high-pitched strains of singing off in the distance.

  Still on my bike, I walked it backward to the curb and peered up and down the street, fully expecting to see a bunch of kids on their way to Bowring Park for the day. But the only humans within sight were a tight cluster of adults strolling through the Mental Field.

  This was new, I thought. Must be a “field” trip. I laughed out loud at the really bad pun.

  They disappeared out of sight to the bottom tier of the field before emerging again, this time outside the fence. Were they even allowed to do that? Especially after what one of them had done last night, according to Cap’n Mike?

  I cringed from having even thought that. Turns out I had a conscience after all, though not enough to come clean just yet.

  “Just one of the patients . . . nothing too serious . . . caught red-footed!” The good captain, it seemed, would be sticking around for a spell yet.

  The singing, meanwhile, was getting louder as the group came into view again, making their way up Cowan Avenue like giddy school kids.

  This would be my introduction to the emerging therapy of deinstitutionalization, and the world of “voluntary” versus “involuntary” patients—the former deemed by the resident shrinks to be no real threat to anyone, except maybe themselves, and thus given regular opportunities to venture beyond the Mental Field all in the name of independence.

  The ones coming my way were male and female, very tall and very short, wearing floods for pants, shirts and blouses that were too loose or too tight, and all holding hands like a daycare train aimlessly being pulled along to somewhere exciting.

  The new McDonald’s was my guess.

  They were nearing our driveway when I finally recognized what they were all singing in different tempos and octaves.

  “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy . . .”

  A rather large girl who could’ve been fourteen or forty was leading the choir and the way, clasping the hem of her bright yellow dress tight around her knees for fear the non-existent breeze might whip it up. The importance of that must’ve been instilled by someone early on.

  A very tall and skinny black-bearded man brought up the rear, carefully holding what looked like a crisp, new, unfolded twenty-dollar bill in his hand, ready to hand it to the cashier, who was still a fifteen-minute walk away.

  These periodic parades would become regular occurrences up and down our street in an effort to get patients out of their straitjackets and back into society.

  And sometimes our house.

  It was not uncommon for one or two to branch off and explore beyond where they were supposed to, like our basement, the door to which was hardly ever locked. Yes, we lived next to a mental hospital while maintaining an open-door policy. One might suggest it was us who needed our heads checked.

  The truth is we were oblivious to the fact patients had been browsing and helping themselves to our clothes until one year another one of my winter coats went missing. Thing is, I really liked that new one—camel-coloured wool duffel with those little wooden knobs for clasps.

  So when I couldn’t find it one Christmas morning before Mass, the shit hit.

  “Don’t say it, Aloysius.”

  My mother knew what was coming.

  I had returned from the basement with a pained look on my face, unable to find said coat.

  “What did I say? You’d never get another one. Where did you leave it this time?”

  I opened my mouth in protest, but there was no denying my poor track record when it came to misplacing stuff.

  But this time was different. I had a clear recollection of dumping the coat on the dryer when we’d arrived home from our annual viewing of seasonal displays on other houses. Yes, Christmas Eve provided more than its fair share of distractions. But I knew for a fact that coat was on my back when we got in the door.

  “I left it downstairs. I know I did.”

  “Well then, it must be down there. Check again, please,” said Mom.

  My father did his best to temper his anger with short, stern instructions, given the occasion.

  “It’s Christmas. We’ll deal with this later. Put on another coat, Aloysius. We’ll never get seats in the church.”

  We did. Barely. Dad always managed to find space for all eight of us at Corpus Christi, even if it meant breaking us up into separate pews.

  But we were really pushing it this time, prompting my mother to quietly suggest Wish could go up in the balcony if it was okay with elder cousin David, the church organist up there.

  I gleefully overheard, but knew enough to stay silent given the current coat fiasco. I loved the balcony, where I could see everyone and everything, as opposed to the cramped pew where I could see nothing beyond the wall of backs and backsides in front of me.

  My father nodded and Mom brought me up. David greeted us with a glance and nod over his shoulder as he continued filling the packed church with a medley of festive, pre-Mass music.

  Time flew up there, too, and before I knew it, Monsignor O’Keefe was into the home stretch.

  “Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit . . .”

  Won’t be long now, I thought. Just the Our Father, a few peace-giving handshakes, the lineup for a bland, paper-thin wafer, then home to open gifts!

  There was still that little matter concerning my coat, but Mom and Dad were good at just moving on—forgiving and forgetting. It was likely the single most important attribute that enabled all eight of us to cohabit in relative harmony.

  And besides, it’s not like they were gonna cancel Christmas, or deny me what I’d already seen under the tree in the living room this morning.

  Thus, I was floored by the first words out of my father’s mouth after we’d all piled back into the wagon after Mass.

  “Do you have any idea where it might be?”

  I glanced at the rear-view mirror to see Dad glaring back.

  There was brief silence for a moment until everyone else clued in.

  “Your new coat, Aloysius!” snapped my father. “I still cannot believe you lost another one.”

  Wow. It wasn’t over, after all.

  “Way to ruin Christmas, Wish,” m
y middle brother unhelpfully intoned.

  I’d lost things at school, at St. Bon’s forum, on the bus, at camp. But the feeling was worse this time because this time it really wasn’t my fault. I was sure of it.

  Having just come from church, and as a last resort, I prayed for divine intervention. But none seemed forthcoming. Maybe I put it in the dryer, I pondered as we arrived home and unloaded from the car.

  I was uncharacteristically the last one out when I glanced toward the Mental Field and there, moving through waist-deep snow that had almost eclipsed the fence, was my coat.

  Of all people, Flag Fag had it.

  I know, I know. It was, without a doubt, one of the more unfortunate nicknames we had for a patient. But it satisfied all the prerequisites for a good one—rhyme, alliteration, and it was pretty funny.

  Unacceptable by today’s standard, but rather tame for the time, truth be told. Others included Icky Ricky, Smelly Kelly, Freddie Fingered, and my personal favourite: Janet from Another Planet.

  Anyway, I couldn’t have cared less who had the coat, as long as the mystery had been solved and my execution stayed.

  “Mom, Dad!” I screamed, elated with my improbable luck and pending vindication.

  I beat it in the house, up the stairs, and into the kitchen.

  I went straight for the big front window facing the Mental, urging someone, anyone, to come and look.

  “Oh my God,” my eldest sister announced with bemusement. “Buddy with the flag . . . he’s got Wish’s coat on!”

  “It’s gosh, not God. Do not take the Lord’s name in vain, please—especially today,” my mother responded, wiping her hands in her apron as she made her way to the window with everyone else.

  Almost eight years on and he was still carrying that friggin’ flag around with him. I had to get to the bottom of that some day.

  The growing number of faces pressed against our window must’ve looked as comical to him as he did to us. Way too small to wear, he had the coat draped over his shoulders with the sleeves tied just under his neck like a preppie in a Ralph Lauren ad—minus the chiselled features and, well, everything else.