© 2010

                                           I

      In 1972, when I was 22 years old, I worked as an orderly for 8 months or so in the Pinel Cottage at the Elgin State Mental Hospital located 45 miles west of Chicago. Pinel was a geriatric ward and most of its inmates had been at Elgin for 40 or so years.  They spent almost all their waking moments motionless in chairs or pacing around in their paper-like shoes (scuffies) in a zombie dance we called “the scuffie shuffle.”  When they approached another patient’s personal space they would veer to one side or the other and when approached by a staff member they would usually stand still.  They weren’t allowed to sit on the floor and they would usually get up if a staff member approached them.  They seldom interacted with each other and, if they did, it seemed like no connection was being made, as though they were each interacting with a figment of their imagination.  Unlike prisoners, they showed no indications of any sort of group consciousness, which seemed to reinforce the idea of insanity as an individual condition.  If you tried to converse with them they would quickly become incoherent and most of the time it wasn’t clear if they were actually “thinking” at all.  When they were agitated, they would babble individually or, on rare occasions, in a group but, for the most part, they were silent. 

I saw many unusual people living a rigid routine.  The busiest shift was the day shift.  The staff would make the inmates get up, take their morning sedatives and breakfast and then herd them into the day room, where they would mostly sit in chairs facing the TV or pace around in circles like prisoners do in their cells.  Rarely they would interact with each other or the staff, who holed up in the nurse’s station writing behavioral observations or gossiping with each other.  I worked the swing shift when we would get them to the dining room for dinner, back to the TV room and then at 8:30 we would make them take their night sedatives and herd them into the dorms to sleep.  Pinel was coed, so the men slept in one wing and the women in another.  I worked the graveyard shift a few times, when they were hopefully asleep and I would sit in the darkened dayroom and play a guitar.  Once I was called to another ward with younger inmates to help hold one down so they could inject him with Thorazine.

  There was a clothing room providing the washed out clothes they wore every day – underpants, pants and shirt for the men, underpants and daydresses for the women.  The patients I remember (and their actual names) are:

      Leroy  Stovall - a black man who I occasionally shot pool with on the cottage’s pool table.  He would consistently sink the straight shots.

      Annette Quacko – an epileptic who always held her elbow, was outfitted with a football helmet when she was falling down, and sometimes looked like she understood what you were saying when you talked to her.  The veteran staffers told us it was typical for newbies to pick a few patients, make them their “projects” and attempt to reach them, and we would quickly find that nobody was going to be reached.  I suppose Annette was my project.

      Mary Ronan and Victor – Mary always smelled horrible and was completely blank.  Victor had a perfect grey pompadour (the inmates could obtain a comb from the nurse’s station).  We had to stop Victor from groping Mary a few times each day.  It was the only remotely sexual behavior I saw among my patients.

      Name unremembered – an elegant looking woman who couldn’t shower so we would periodically put her in a bathtub.  I was called to assist because she had a habit of pooping in the tub and then trying to eat it.

      Gizola Jones - a black man with the biggest penis I have ever seen, then or now, in real life or in pornography.  He always smiled, never said anything, and on shower night he would wash it incessantly although it never went erect.

      Name unremembered – who sat in a chair and said and did nothing but was purportedly once a successful Jewish lawyer.

      Olympia – She was a turn of the century strip tease dancer whose old bald skull was ringed with a wreath of hair.  She only spoke Greek.  When I sometimes locked the women down for the night, her bed was closest to the door and the hall light would illuminate her sitting up, batting her eyelashes and pouting her mouth in a theatrical manner as she beckoned dance-like with her arms for me to climb in with her.

      Paul Newman – a tall, smiling, skinny white man who would mop the floor to make money to buy the “Egyptian” brand tobacco and rolling papers available at the nurse’s station. The station had tobacco and cookies and patients could work to earn them or occasionally just beg for a freebie.  The tobacco was more popular than the cookies. Paul’s mouth was always gyrating and, among the smokers, his fingers were the most stained.   

      Paul intrigued me so I went to the administration building and pulled his main file. Like most of the inmates on Pinel he was admitted in the 1920’s or 30’s.  The file said that he worked for the railroad going from the Chicago area to the state line and back again.  He became depressed and upset when he thought his wife was cheating on him, broke a window and when the cops came he was incoherent and this somehow led to Elgin.  The few files I pulled at the main building all told of patients who were committed by spouses, friends or neighbors and who had little in the way of actual family.  Most received electric shocks and/or cold bath therapy in those years.  Paul’s file had the distinction of being flagged CLASSIFIED – TOP SECRET.  He was among those exposed to high radiation during the war years and they wanted his body sent to Washington DC when he died.

      On December 1, 1969, during the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration held a birthday lottery we called “Body Bingo” to decide who would be drafted into the army.  Anyone whose birthday was among the first 195 pulled from the jar was to be drafted.  My birthday was the 44th chosen. Having recently graduated college and no longer qualifying for a student deferment, I was at Elgin doing “alternative service” instead of being drafted into the army.  We were hippies.  We had long hair, beards and sometimes drank beer or smoked marijuana when we weren’t working.  Most of us didn’t live in Elgin and drove 30 minutes or so through farmland to get there.  It was a nice drive before you had to take out your key, unlock the door to the cottage and enter the urine-soaked stench of the dayroom.  It was here I coined the motto, “Stay on the right side of the key.”

At times I would leave Pinel and visit my pals working on other wards.  Three inmates from the other wards that I remember are:

An old guy who mostly held his arm and would say “Oooh my arm” as though he had just injured it.  He would also yell “IPE!” when he became agitated, escalating the agitation to “IPE!IPE!IPE!IPE!IPE!.”

And a patient who, when we walked onto his ward with long hair and beards, would smile and proclaim happily “Oh Jesus …  Jee-sus,” like we were the savior.

and a female mutant who was kept in a wooden crib.  She was hairy, only grunted, had pointy teeth like a dog’s, and flipper-like hands.                                    

One time on the swing shift we took some inmates on a field trip to a department store in downtown Elgin.  They could maybe afford a pack of gum but it was thought that going to a store and “just looking” would be a good, normal, enjoyable pastime for them.  One of the patients wandered off and the staff panicked and started looking for her.  I went out front and found her walking down the sidewalk.  I took her by the arm and headed her back to the store and she said “I bet you thought I was crazy.”

                                           II

The grounds of Elgin were called the campus and there was a vast expanse of grass and trees around the dorms and administration buildings, which did give it the look of a college campus.  Although younger inmates might want to escape, the older ones who no longer had the will to do anything were often let outside to wander the grounds. They only occasionally drifted out by the highway.  The cops knew to pick them up and drive them back to the main building if they did.  Some of these strollers were seemingly braindead ex-drunks like Harvey who every minute or so would stop to loudly curse and resentfully berate the air around him. 

      My training during my time at Elgin consisted of a few workshops on procedure and one where we injected oranges with water, which certified us to give insulin shots.   Of interest to my hippie pals was one workshop with a documentary on the history of Elgin State.  Until the early 20th century, the hospital tried to be economically self-sufficient and make the patients do agricultural work to supply its dining rooms.  There were sepia tone prints of 4th of July and harvest festivals.   There weren’t many meds in those early days but plenty of “restraints.”  By mid-century this had changed to electro-shocking, cold baths and zonking the inmates into the ozone with injections and pills.  The story of the early farm-era Elgin intrigued those hippies who might be taken with the notion of living communally away from urban life.

Some of my contemporaries, who were hired before me, had risen to management level.  They worked the day shift in ward offices where they talked on the phone and engaged in patient trading.  Although the inmates on the younger wards changed more frequently, even the geriatric wards had people die and thus the need to fill an empty bed.  Like trading baseball cards, the managers would negotiate to unload the incontinent patients with behavior problems for the continent patients who could shower themselves and keep quiet. Between spring and summer in 1972 I was given the unique opportunity to temporarily supervise Walter’s Bubble Pipe Workshop while he was on vacation.

                                          III

Walter was young and his face beneath his scraggly red beard was scarred from acne.  He had a big red nose, sad eyes, and a bit of kindly, defeated resignation about him.  The rest of the day crew only liked him somewhat and his rare attempts to flirt with females on the staff usually didn’t connect.  He previously worked for the Bell Telephone Company and advocated that the Bell Company workshops on motivation and positive behavior could be applied to the mental patients, giving them purpose, self-respect and meaning in life through work.  He had sub-contracted with a toy company for the patients to assemble plastic bubble pipes which would then be picked up and packaged to hang for sale in toy stores, supermarkets, dimestores, and the like. 

So an hour or two after lunch, I would set up picnic tables and folding chairs in one of the sleeping dorms and bring in the previously chosen men and women to work for an hour.  Whether they felt like making or actually made any bubble pipes, they seemed to like getting out of the TV room.   There was an old tweed covered portable phonograph that I could use to play records while they worked.  I had selected a few records from the main building library with mostly old blues and folk songs on them. The albums had nondescript covers and the records themselves were old and a little thick.  One of the newer albums had some Lead Belly-type blues, a few folk songs, but also the recording “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia.  That was my favorite record to play.

The first few minutes were given to orienting the patients to the idea that they would be making these pipes.  Some would actually make them, most would quit before the hour was up, some would just sit there, some would get up and pace around, some would lay down on a bed and some would leave.  I’d do a little minor coaxing of their productivity but I didn’t really care. I was happy to think of myself as a sort of host.

There were a few free cookies provided and they could behave however they did as long as they didn’t get too visibly upset or upset each other.

There were two plastic parts to the pipes: the bowl and the stem.  The parts were colored yellow or red and it didn’t matter if they matched on the finished pipe or if it was a two-tone. I would half-heartedly try to reinforce the “correctly-constructed-bubble-pipe” concept, since there were patients who would attach two bowls to one stem, stick stems in both holes on the bowl, or try to stick more than one stem together.  The patients didn’t seem to care much about successful productivity.  It was more or less hit or miss with them.

At the end of the hour I would count the successfully completed pipes piled in front of each inmate, log the total beneath their name on a form, and put the pipes in a box.  On Friday, the inmate’s sheets would show their daily totals and the sum total of pipes they had assembled that week.  Given the overall hygiene of the patients, I sometimes conjured the unsettling image of a toddler somewhere sticking a newly-purchased pipe in its mouth, but quickly dismissed it from my mind.

The patients were paid in cash per pipe – their average weekly take was between a dollar to 3 dollars and change.  Some inmates made so few pipes that they received less than a dollar.  The star employee was a blind Polish woman who didn’t speak English.   She assembled them by feel and usually worked the full hour.  I’m sure she made almost 5 dollars in a week.  The particulars of the pay procedure didn’t seem to matter to any of them.

It’s the Bubble Pipe Workshop in the afternoon that I always seem to remember if I think about Elgin State; the daylight through the metal grids over the windows, the grass and trees outside, the mostly empty metal beds in their rows, the unusual people gathered at the folding tables or moving around, the red and yellow plastic bubble pipes, the music playing, and me.

“Love,

love is strange

Lot of people take it for a game

Once you get it

You'll never wanna quit (no, no)

After you've had it (yeah, yeah)

You're in an awful fix

Many people

Don't understand (no, no)

They think loving (yeah, yeah)

Is money in the hand…”

        Mickey Baker, Sylvia Robinson & Elias (Bo Diddley) McDaniel,1957                         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Is_Strange

                                          IV

The Nixon administration and the military were concluding that an enlisted military was preferable to conscription.  In summer of 1972 I received a letter from the draft board saying they no longer required me to work in any alternative service and I was free to go.  The head nurse for the swing shift at Pinel suggested that I was getting along at work okay, I was good to work with, and I might want to consider sticking with Elgin anyway.  Her seniority gave her some authority even though she was rumored to have once received a week’s suspension when she was somehow caught taking a few cartons of milk from the dining room.  But I soon resigned my job, cashed out my retirement and set out with my girlfriend Mary to try to live on a “hippie commune.” My social security statement records my income for 1972 as $3,607, which converts under the consumer price index to $18,557 in 2008 dollars. On July 1, 1973, the draft ended.

Elgin State admitted its first patient on April 3, 1872.  In 2009 the hospital houses patients from the northern Illinois area and also forensic patients who have been “found not guilty by reason of insanity” or “found unfit to stand trial but who are required by law to remain confined in a mental hospital for a period of time.”