Authors: Joe Putignano
The family beach house had changed. Every happy memory of playing there in the summers was murdered by the existence of my father’s new family. Even though I loved my father’s girlfriend and her two daughters, it was still painful to see them living together. The house’s familiar comfort had changed into someone else’s home where the memories my mother, sisters, brother, and I had shared were but a salted mist that evaporated over the sandy beach. I carried my one packed bag up to my room and cried as I desperately tried to cling to the past.
I had always felt so natural near the beach. I felt that if I could recover anywhere it would be there, by the ocean. But this time something inside me wasn’t right, and the place wasn’t easing the pain. A presence of evil had taken residence inside me that I could not control or get out; I was under its every command. Finding a way to quiet that roaring beast became my life’s work—to reach a moment of peace from the debilitating depression, anxiety, and active addiction. If only I could drown that demon in those icy waters, under that
fucking moonlight that had witnessed my entire descent, as that bright, soulless god of a moon withheld its divine intervention.
That night I poured myself a giant cup of vodka, and washed down another handful of pills. I was scared, embarrassed, ashamed, and cornered. I knew I could not continue to live this way, and yet I did not have the strength to change. I thought about my father upstairs as he was probably wondering where he had lost his son—that young boy who conquered fear and performed incredible skills, who won countless competitions as he continued to the Olympic Training Camp, that smiling, happy son full of spirit and life who was now a shell of the child champion he once knew. I kept crying and drinking and taking more pills, and then suddenly knew what I had to do. I had to end this and allow the icy-cold ocean to swallow me whole into its depths. I wondered if my father could feel my crippling pain shoot up through the floorboards into his room.
In pure desperation I grabbed the kitchen knife I had been using to open the moving boxes and began cutting my wrists. I was afraid at first, and the initial gash hurt, but then the pain felt good. I tore through my flesh, trying to release the veins out to the open air so they could bleed out my life. I wanted my soul to rocket through my skin and stain the floor where I once lived and breathed, to forever mark my pain, regret, shame, and anger. I wanted to fill the entire room in my pool of blood, choking on my past and floating to the top as my soul left my damaged body behind.
I kept cutting, trying to get deeper into the veins, trying to dig out the pain and sin. Blood trickled down my wrists and turned my stomach—there was no turning back, and I held my breath, tears streaming; I was hell-bent on severing the radial artery. I could taste in my tears the sadness this would bring my family. I didn’t want them to have to clean up the mess, but I also could not bear to be in my skin any longer. My flesh quivered and my face froze. “Please, someone stop me. I don’t want to die. I just don’t want to feel the pain. Please, God, please help me. I’m dying.” Hating everything about me and hating that I could not change, I knew the only solution lay in bloodletting.
While I was performing the surgery of suicide, my father came into my room. To this day I don’t know why he was awake or what made him come into my room. He saw my wrists and screamed, “What are you doing?” I looked up at him, eye to eye, as the little boy I was—lost, alone, scared, teary-eyed—and said, “I don’t know.” His girlfriend came in, picked me up, put a jacket on me, and said, “We have to get you to the doctor.” I didn’t resist. I let go of the fight and let them help me. I don’t believe I really wanted to die; I had just run out of solutions.
My father started his truck and waited for us to come downstairs, but I remembered all those pills upstairs. I told Lynn, “I’ll be right back, I forgot something.” I ran to my bed, cut a hole in the mattress under the sheets and pushed the pill bottles into the fluff where nobody would find them, and pulled the sheets up.
At the hospital, they waited for my blood alcohol to lower and then gave me Ativan, which brought calm and separation from my body. My father waited with me until the doctors returned. I was so relaxed, I told him everything. I’m sure it must have been the worst thing for any father to hear. I held back nothing. I exposed every private detail to him. I wondered if he thought,
Did I do this to him? Is this my fault? Is this because I left him when he was younger?
He sat there, a pained statue, waiting beside me for the heavenly nothingness to rock me to sleep.
D
ISCOVERED BY
R
OBERT
H
OOKE, THE CELL IS THE SMALLEST FUNCTIONAL UNIT OF LIFE THAT CLASSIFIES AN ORGANISM AS LIVING.
T
HE CELL IS THE BUILDING BLOCK OF LIFE.
H
OOKE COINED THE WORD
cell
IN 1665 WHEN HE COMPARED THE CORK CELLS FOUND THROUGH HIS MICROSCOPE TO THE TINY ROOMS OF MONKS
. C
ELL IS DERIVED FROM THE
L
ATIN WORD
cella
,
WHICH MEANS “A SMALL ROOM.”
I woke up in a strange bed. They had transferred me to a mental institution, and I could not recall anything. Did they wake me up and put me in a car? Did they drug me more and strap me to a gurney? I didn’t know, but I was afraid. My father was not around, and I heard people outside the door. It sounded like a hospital, but I wasn’t sure. I got up out of the bed to check out the situation, started recalling images of the night before, and considered maybe this was the right place for me to be.
When I opened the door, I saw a large nurses’ station crowded with odd characters waiting in a crooked line for something. A large chalkboard had a list of names on it, including mine. I laughed as I thought,
Well, at least
someone
is paying attention to me
. I caught the eye of a girl who seemed to be my age, and before I could listen to my gut, which told me to stay away, she abandoned the line and started walking toward me. Stuck in place, I couldn’t move, and gave her a slanted smile. She was clearly seeking some sort of affection as she started flirting with me, asking questions like “What did you do? How did you get here? Where are you from?”—you know, the usual pick-up lines heard in a
mental institution. Luckily, a nurse saw me as I stood in my doorway, demoralized by my surroundings and being harassed by a patient. She said kindly, “Joseph, you can get in line with the others.” She had a warm, Betty Crocker cookies-equal-love smile.
The bothersome girl kept talking to me and I noticed she was talking through her teeth, seemingly unable to move her jaw.
I asked, “Why are you talking like that?”
She said, “My mouth is wired shut,” swishing her tongue around behind her teeth with a sticky, gross sound. She smiled proudly to show a row of metal wires locking her teeth together that formed into a big metallic block. I immediately knew I didn’t belong here and I had to get out.
I then asked a very stupid question. “What happened to you?”
She said strongly, and somehow didn’t slur through her grate, “DON’T EVER DO HEROIN!” This was the third time someone had told me that. I was thinking about that coincidence as she began publicly and shamelessly recounting her story while standing in line, for everyone to hear.
“I’m a junkie and I turned my roommate on to it. She ran out of heroin and knew I had some hidden in my room. She asked me for it and I wouldn’t give it to her. She was dope sick and insane, so she came back into my room with a baseball bat and started swinging it at my face. She hit my face like a hundred times, bashing my teeth in, breaking my nose and my jaw.”
The line had moved up to the smiling nurse behind the desk, and the girl talking about her tragedy grabbed a cup of red liquid from the nurse and threw it back like a shot of Hawaiian Punch. “Methadone,” she said proudly, presenting her religion to me.
She continued on with her story. “When I woke up from being knocked out, I was in so much pain that I shot up and went to the hospital. They put me out and did surgery, putting my jaw and mouth back together. Then, two weeks later I ended up here.” She smiled coyly. I was screaming inside to be released.
While I was still in shock from her heroin story, the nurse called my name and handed me a little white paper cup of two bright, shining Klonopin and a Prozac. I threw them back without water and, with a sudden change of attitude, I thought,
I love this place! I want to stay here forever!
It was slightly lower than my normal dosage, but I wasn’t about to argue with free drugs. I took my pills and hoped they would calm me down. As they kicked in, I had to join a group meeting, where we were forced to look at one another and talk about our feelings. I fell asleep. Everyone fell asleep. It was amazing they even bothered trying to communicate with us. My attempt to listen was no match for the pull of sleep as my eyelids dropped. I finally woke up, covered in drool.
Later that night, I woke up in terror as the pills started to wear off. I tried going back to sleep but couldn’t, and coming out of my fucked-up, comatose state I noticed something horrifying. I ran to the mirror and was furious with my reflection. It was true. How had I not noticed it earlier?
Shit
, I thought,
all of my holes are going to fucking close up
. Body piercing isn’t like ear piercing—body piercings close up and heal themselves if left open for too long. Face, nipples, stomach, all the hardware was gone, and I didn’t know what to do about the holes. Did they remove them while I was asleep? I had to find something to put in place of the steel rods and rings. Any object would do to fill in my nose, septum, lip, tongue, nipples, and stomach holes. They removed my armor and now I was bare, my only defense being the skin I was born in, weak, soft, and vulnerable. I searched my tiny, cell-like room for something to stick in the holes. I had a fortune invested in my piercings and would burn this place down if they closed up. I took a second and realized I had to calm down; one should not flip out in a mental ward, or it becomes a permanent residence. Though things were bad, I needed to try to keep them from getting worse.
Our cutlery was plastic to limit self-inflicted injuries, and I decided this might work perfectly. I broke the prongs off the fork, making little spears, and methodically inserted them through my various pierced parts. The plastic hurt like crazy because it was thicker than the flesh openings and it stretched the holes. Since my piercings
outnumbered my four plastic fork plugs, I rotated them throughout the day and night, ensuring all holes stayed open. The hardest was my tongue; when I spoke the piece would fall out, and I swallowed it while sleeping. I collected forks at breakfast and stashed extras in my room as backups. I can’t imagine what I looked like in group therapy: a sleeping, medicated, dirty boy with pieces of plastic forks running through his face. I began to think that maybe the wired-jaw girl was my soul mate after all.
Throughout the day I would call Nick collect, and then break down and cry. He would say positive things like “Everything’s gonna be fine” and “You’ll be out soon,” which I hoped was true; those people were crazy, and I was just visiting. Jaw Girl continued her romance mission, asking me tight-lipped, “Why won’t you be my boyfriend?” That question shut down my entire system. I quietly laughed at her—a broken-spirited girl desperate for a man’s approval. And the man’s denial fueled her desire even more. She became the failure she set her sights upon, and I now became her daily unachievable goal. But I wondered,
Wasn’t I in the same shitty situation and blind to it? Had my eyes been wired shut?
The next day when I received my little paper pill cup, I poured the meds under my tongue, quickly walked away, spit them into my hand, went to my room, and then hid them under my mattress. I took them before bedtime and started sleeping through the night. I continued to receive Klonopin for my deep anxiety and Prozac for depression; however, the staff couldn’t figure out what made me so melancholy. In group meetings I began identifying with some of the other patients and heard my story in theirs. I saw a reflection of my own madness through them. I felt like I wasn’t alone. The only way out of this place was to show some sign of progress. I started to pretend I was happy.
My case was reevaluated after two weeks, and I finally got discharged. I had never been so happy, and would never have to see that girl again or be haunted by her face. My brother picked me up, which was strange for us both. What is it like to see your younger brother saying good-bye to the other mental patients in the psych ward?
Michael battled his own demons, and I never could figure out how he kept it all together. He didn’t do drugs, not even pot, but we drank the same way, and somehow he was able to handle life. I hated him for that. How come when I drank it put me out of commission, but he managed to get up the next day, function, and go to work?
He drove me to my mother’s house, which was closer to the mental institution. I would stay with her for a few days. My parents were deeply concerned and wanted to spread me around the family to lift my sadness and help me as best they could. My mother tried to have patience with me, but her own inability to stay sober tore open the roof of my addiction—being next to her made my need to use urgent. We returned to our vicious relationship cycle of numbing, fighting, hating, and disappearing, and carried that toxic formula into our language. In my pain, I could not find any kindness to speak to her, and no matter how she approached me I subconsciously felt her hatred. I treated her as I treated myself and cut her down to a wounded woman, left defenseless and bare.