Wild Nights

An autobiographical story that I wrote in 2013 about my daydreams of 1996.

Jonathan Taylor Failla

 

It was a May night in 1996, and he was at home in Connecticut.  He drank a shake his mom made for him, and then he decided it had a drug in it.  So, he wanted to escape from his parents, and with this in mind he drove away from my house, telling them he was going to CVS.  He took his parents' car into Hartford, where he saw a young man walking and drove up to him, telling him his parents put a drug in his shake and asked him to drive him to his grandparents' house.  The young man said he would and drove him there, where he dropped him off in his driveway.  The young man said he would and drove him to his grandparents', where he dropped him off in the driveway.  He went and rung the doorbell, and his grandfather answered, and he reported to him that he had Pagan parents.

When he got home, he was in great distress in the evening.  He ran away and looked up to his parents' window outside, and his father yelled "No!" in consternation when he took off.  It was nighttime, and he ran quickly down the street to Hall high, where he ran to a person's house and hid around the side of his house and sat under it (on the ground outside of the kitchen), where he stayed in a sitting position for about five minutes before going then to the student lounge, where he spent the night.  His parents meanwhile had called the police, and in the morning was looking for him.  So, the police cruiser soon pulled up, and there was a policeman and a policewoman whom he was talking with, and his parents soon came driving up in their beige Saab 900.  He liked the demeanor of the police though it seemed like they did not realize the seriousness of his mental condition because they did not seem worried or distraught though maybe it was because they didn't care.

During the period of this sickness he headed down to that high school, having notions he was a genie so ran with his Sperry Top-Siders thinking he was gliding on air, and he thought one of his old teachers thought he was a genie, also, when the teacher passed by in his blue Ford Explorer, so he smiled and waved at the teacher in joy.  At a track meet he thought he had telepathic powers there at the high school, and at one time was sitting Indian style on the grass as an ice cream truck passed, smiling at an old teacher, thinking this teacher could tell he was thinking of old time when he used to buy ice cream as a kid from a similar-looking truck (he thought the teacher could read his mind).  Later during the meet, he would hold the rope around the field recklessly as if trying to intimidate someone.  Also, on the campus as he walked along the walkway, he thought he could tell magically the composition of the maroon bricks, what the molecular structure of the material was.

At a different time, when he was in a certain hallway, a student emerged from the indoors doors of the breezeway.  The student was not friendly, but had seen him around campus before.  He went into the Loomis library and sat down, trying mentally to defeat the devil.  One night also at Loomis on the grounds outside the main buildings he was going out for a job and in great consternation yelled, and a female student nearby with her friends saw him but remained silent.  In one incident that happened to him during his illness, he carried his cat Kit to the nearby library where there is a parking lot and put the cat over the fence where in back are railroad tracks. 

His mom came later to retrieve the cat, which through his dream he was nevertheless relieved about.  He journeyed to the close Washington Park in the early dawn hours, and on his way back home from this nearby place he wore his sister's sandals walking down a street, thinking he was an immortal figure, but they did not fit being too tight.  He saw a man at his car, but this man seemed to take no notice of him.  One night he ran away to these same train tracks where he dropped off his cat, but further down the line to the train station about a mile away.  If he had been approached by a train then in that state of mind, he would almost have welcomed being hit; maybe, if the train had approached, he would have soon gotten rather scared and might have bailed.  Yet he was lucky and no train came, and all he had seen there was a driver pull into the parking lot as if the driver was curious about him.

Soon circumstances went from bad to worse, and one misty afternoon in his mind he ran from his home to his grandparents' house, which took him two hours and ten minutes, and he stopped on the route to Hartford at Subway in Bloomfield and skipped strangely and willfully along some of the sidewalks trying to avoid any cracks.  The night was spent that day at his grandparents' house; they nicely let him stay.  He slept pretty well that night, so the next day went to the hospital having promised his grandparents the next day to go to the hospital to take a "drug test" to see if truly any drug was put in his shake by his parents.  His grandparents smartly did not tell him it was for a mental evaluation there by psychiatrists, as he would have refused if they informed him of this bad intention on their part. 

At the waiting room in the hospital, his grandmother, very calmly and keeping her cool the best she could, was working on a crossword puzzle in the “Hartford Courant.”  He was taken into another room and was told he must give a blood sample for what he thought would be the only test (later the test results returned with evidence of no drugs in his system, which relieved him somewhat).  Then, however, after the bloodtest, he took another test, which was administered by a portly woman, and she asked him a question about glass houses (which was a query designed to have no reason to it), and he responded trying to reason it out and put a meaning to it, a response that contained something that apparently did not seem sane to this tester.

So, there was a nurse there out in the hall outside his room with a kindly mien who was taking his side and trying to make the transition to the hospital for him without any major obstacles such as forced medication or any kind of harsh restraint or force used against him, and he wanted to talk to this nurse.  So, Popee nicely told the nurse that I wanted to speak with her, and she came over.  He asked her about the medication the staff could put him on, and in response she said they could not force him to take any medication.  (When I went to Hartford Hospital recently, though, in November to December of 2023, they forced me to take the criminal Thorazine and Benedryl, but I have recovered wholly).

Nevertheless, he was very frightened and wanted to escape from the hospital fearing the future.  Mamaw was near him in the room, and he told her implicitly his intention of leaving the hospital and soon carried out this plan by running out of the room and out of the front doors of the hospital waiting room, while a man's voice behind me yelled for me to stop, and he was frightened by this.  He wanted to run somewhere for safety, and, although he ran into a man's backyard with this in mind in order to hide in his garage, the rather elderly gentleman suggested to him to keep running, so he took his advice.  

Behind him was a young man running for him from the hospital, but his coming after me was no match for his legs even though he was only wearing some top-siders, and anyway he kicked these shoes off when running faster.  Yet eventually he got caught, and this capture was made by the following means.  A nondescript van came up to him, and the back doors opened revealing some young Rastafarian men who asked him if I wanted a ride, and, thinking this was a means of escape, he said "Yes," but when he went into the back, the young man from the hospital who had chased him down the street was there and soon took him to an official hospital van.  When he was back at the hospital, he no longer had the desire to escape from there at the time.  So, the nurses and the men of the hospital staff put him on a stretcher, which one could wheel around and which had restraints on it.  In the hospital he was led (upon arrival on the Eighth Floor) into the sole solitary confinement room.  This day was May 20, and he would stay two weeks at the hospital.

There was an "exercise" class, but the exercises were very simple though he was lucky enough to escape his floor because of his desire to have some good exercising done in the hospital mostly below in the lower floors, where there was a gym, where a girl and him discussed briefly some tennis scores at the recent US Open and where he got to lift some weights.  There was only one exercise machine in the floor, which was ironically located near the smoker's room as if the two were interrelated and, furthermore, the machine was not very good for exercise there at the hospital, which could have been expected with all that he had been through mentally; he tried doing pushups and sit ups in his hospital room, but the main thing was that he was safe and sound in the hospital.

There was like the command center of the Eighth Floor of the hospital (in front of the oppressive dining area), which consisted of a giant front desk and computers and printers and which was where the psychiatrists would gather, and it seemed quite imposing to him because it was for all the "normal" world and the "normal" people (where they would be) though he derived some strength from this knowledge. 

During his two-week visit, each day it seemed he would have some sort of group therapy, and he talked about losses, problems, and depressions (these were under discussion there).  His dutiful parents came to visit often during visitors' hours (5:30- 6 P.M.), which was a great comfort to him, and his grandparents visited him once.  His family was very reassuring, and they made me feel comfortable and gave him hope.  Also, he did some writing in the hospital, thinking there was a lot to take in, expressing myself in my personal journal.

Once out of the hospital, he was readmitted on June 20, but he eventually was discharged again July 4, the hardest part of this stay at the end, where time was passing slowly the day before getting discharged.  When he returned to his home at this point in his life he was forced to take Risperdal for every day (yuck!), which caused him many problems, including waking up many times at night.  Also, being exhausted physically was a problem as, when trying to take up tennis again having been an avid tennis player, he soon found he was easily exhausted after every point had ended.

Not only did he feel exhausted but physically sick after one such tennis outing, and, at these times of suffering, he wished he could relax with a book if his eyes would only stay open long enough.  Some incidents brought his life back into a degree of "normalcy," and he went to the Enfield Mall to buy games for his computer (he bought Overlord and Doom II at this store).  Yet still even when he tried to run, only seven minutes of slow running totally exhausted him, and he was always feeling tired. 

He felt that if his medication would be dropped to a lower dosage, the side effects of the medication might decline (effects like mouth salivation and tiredness).  Another side effect of the Risperdal were the pounding headaches he would get, and once he even had to vomit because of this.  So, these side effects were debilitating, but eventually they lessened some.

However, his health was improving after getting through an operation, for he rapidly took up playing the trumpet and signed up for 5K racing, which are things he had not even been able to do before!  I can lift almost 12 hours straight (11 hours and 31 minutes is my record, and I lifted 11 hours and 20 minutes also)!  Who knows what the future holds?!

 

6/10/13!