Call him Rodney

The night we had to take a pencil away from a resident at the nuthouse

In the spring of 1997, I worked as a TR Specialist on Building 5, B Shift. We had a resident there, who we’ll call Rodney. He was a big, young guy who was crazy and retarded to boot. When he got angry, he got scary. He would threaten to kill people as well as to maim them, often with weapons. In those days, people got locked in their rooms for making threats like that (can you imagine?).

So, one evening while I was working and Rodney was locked up in his room, he managed to get his hands on a pencil. (We never did find out how he got it, but it was strongly suspected that another resident slid it under the room door to him). He was in an observation room, adjacent to the control room, for “close” observation. He was not allowed to have a pencil. He was asked, by me, to give up the pencil. He refused to give up the pencil, instead politely offering to stab me with it. No, really, what he said was “Do you wanna get stabbed?” in a conversational tone. Like he was giving me a chance to mull the offer over. I declined. Why, you ask? Because I did not want to get stabbed with a pencil, what the f**k is wrong with you?

Anyways, after some back and forth verbalizing, we decided to call security to come to the room and get the pencil. Back then, building staff had the authority to ask for security assistance outside of an emergency call (are you imagining this, in your head?) Well, Rodney overheard us discussing the call to security, and it made him even more stabby. In my limited experience, few things were worse than a person becoming “stabby”, with one of those worse things being “more stabby” (stabalicious, stabtastic and Stabgasmic {this is always properly capitalized} are three other worse things, but really all just varying grades of stabby). He was yelling very clear, explicit threats at us.

I should take a moment here to elaborate on this guy’s speaking voice. He had a pretty peculiar pattern and sound to his speech; it was slow, deliberate, and got quite high in pitch when he was yelling. Imagine Muhammad Ali ranting and yelling threats into a microphone while inhaling helium, but slowed down like the mad scientist from that episode of Bugs Bunny where he broke the bottle of ether. On second thought, don’t imagine that, it’s accurate but f*****g horrible. Sorry.

So imagine, for a moment, there I am, standing outside the guy’s door, with him just on the inside, at the door window. “You m***********s come in here, and I’m gonna stab you right in the motherfuckin’ eye!” as he shows me the pencil in his hand. There I am, now making little more than token efforts to convince him to slide the pencil under the door before the security team arrives. Really, I’m more watching him to see where he is in the room, and to monitor that he wasn’t making other weapons appear or trying to hide the one we knew he had. Doing my job, in other words. Cause that’s how I roll.

Well, in walks the security team. Five guys, one “institutional security shield”. One of the guys was a little shorter than me, the rest were as big as me or taller. They get to the guys door and try to talk him into giving up the pencil. At this point, I see him hyperventilating and running in place, just inside the door. Getting pumped up for his fight. Not speaking.

So the team gets ready to go in. The “smallest” guy (about 5’ 10” and uber fit) has the shield. The shield is pretty big, and curved. It’s made so the person holding it by the handles is, by the laws of physics, outside the reach of the guy. His job is to hit that guy with the shield and run that guy into a corner / wall / onto the floor. Each of the four bigger guys behind him has an agreed-upon limb to grab. They literally discuss it before they go in, like getting dibs on the drumstick at Thanksgiving. “I got left arm, I got left leg” like that.

So, they nod to the control board operator to access the lock on the door. I open the door. They go in. And, ladies and gentlemen, it was at this point, as the ancient Sumerians liked to write on papyrus scrolls, that the s**t was on.

I’d never seen it before, and I’ve never seen it since. Rodney reached, with his empty hand, across his chest and grabbed the shield by one edge, and ripped the shield out of the officers f*****g hands. Flying across the room it went, making a loud clangity-clang-clannngggg sound as it caromed off the wall and hit the floor. The officers well hid the collective shitting of pants that followed by remembering their limb-based assignments, with the previous shield bearer jumping on Rodney and getting him in a headlock. I saw the pencil hit the floor a moment later, apparently free of blood or vitreous humor, and some officer kicked it out of the room a moment later.

So there they are, five on one, fighting to what looked to be an awe-inspiring draw. Rodney stayed on his feet and managed to drag all five officers across the room to the sink in the corner, about eight feet. I saw that two of the officers were tripping on the shield, so I reached in and grabbed it and brought it right the hell back out of the room. I knew better than to jump into a fray with a team of officers who actually train for this s**t. They then managed to drag him back across the room to the bed and got him down, after a great deal of fists, knees to the thigh, and various twists and chokes. This whole time, Rodney does not make a sound, much less utter a word.

Finally, they get him under control. Belly down on the bed, face facing out to the door (which was important, because I was in the door). One officer has his knee on the side of Rodney’s head, kinda squishing his face into the mattress. The rest of the officers were busy holding him and / or applying as many pairs of handcuffs as they had thought to bring. So, now, Rodney starts yelling again, eyes squinched shut from the knee on his head / in his face.

“YOU M***********S! JUST WAIT TILL I GET OUTTA THIS! I’M GONNA F**K YOU UP! I’M GONNA CALL ABACUSY (as far as I remember, this was as close as he ever came to remembering how to say “Advocacy”)! I’M GONNA CALL ABUSE! I’M GONNA CALL MY LAWYER!

Then he stopped. Somehow, he opened his eyes. He looked around, and had a thought. I saw it. Then, with as much indignity and righteousness as he could muster, he cried:

“I’M CALLIN MY MOTHER!”

So, of course, I lost it. Still holding the shield, at the door to the room, I started laughing. At this point, I heard a sort of gasping cry from behind me. It was at this point that I remembered Zack. Zack was not an employee, nor was he a resident. He was a student; a high school senior, to be specific, who had for some reason been left to shadow me for the evening. I guess somebody thought it might be a learning experience. I know I learned something that night: a stabby Rodney can put a young Zack completely out of your mind, if only for a little while. The kid, already traumatized by seeing this much violence not framed by a television screen, was further traumatized by my laughter. It probably sounded very super-villanous to him. The look the kid was giving me was the same exact look you see if a kid, while sitting in Santa’s lap, overheard Santa ordering an elf to take Rudolph away, to be made into sausage. For Christ’s sake, please don’t ask me how I know that look.

So then I fucked up. The one real, regrettable mistake I made the whole night. I tried to explain it. I tried to rationally tell this kid why that was funny.

It did not work.

Epilogue: Rodney promptly got a shot in his a*s, and subsequently took a nap. When he woke up, we gave him his dinner tray that we had saved for him. He ate it without comment and went back to sleep for the night.

Author's Note

see Intro to The Nuthouse Stories for setup