The Storm Rages from The Heart

Part three of three.

I started writing this after I got two bills. One was for the ambulance ride, which took me to the hospital immediately after the police got finished assessing the situation. The other was for a collection of drug tests, which I never agreed to taking.

When I arrived at the hospital, I was going through a strange sense of euphoria. Everything looked so funny, so I could only sing a happy song and whistle. I wasn't quite sure of what was happening, but it didn't matter anymore. It seemed like nothing was real, anyways.

But the sense of euphoria eventually dissipated, and I was left with a somewhat surrealistic reality. Every waking moment seemed like an eternity. I was stuck there for three days. You have not seen how long eternity is until you've waited in a hospital without any form of entertainment, idle task, visitors, or anything.

The doctor was an asshole. I only saw him for about three minutes, and he decided that I was suicidal and needed to go to the psychiatric hospital.

Why did the doctor say I was suicidal? Because my father told the police I was. The police gave their paperwork (with a wildly different summary of the event then I [or I could even imagine my father] could have ever imagined), and so he said I was suicidal, although he wasn't qualified to say so. The psychiatric hospital trusted the quack and said I was suicidal, too.

I arrived at the Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital sometime in the middle of the night. The people were nice enough; I thought it wouldn't be too bad. I'd seen crazy people before; they're not as terrible as people think they are. I was placed in an observational unit, where they would decide what to do with me. I stayed there for three or four days.

All in all, it wasn't too bad. Or maybe it was terrible. I can't really tell. It got better when I left the observational unit, anyways.

The unit was essentially a triangular room with lots of rather uncomfortable and unusually-stained upholstered chairs facing a television. Along the legs of the triangle were rooms, two occupants each and with a shelf and desk with built-in chair in each room, beside the beds of vynal with extremely hard pillows of the same substance. The hypotenous had a little annex where the doctors talked to the patients, a hallway accessable to staff alone, a telephone for everyone's use, and two constantly locked bathrooms. God forbid we pee without others' attention.

They didn't let me keep any of my things (they were 'unsafe'), not even my belt or mismatched shoes. I walked around barefoot until someone brought me a pair of socks. They took away my cell phone, but at least they let me copy my numbers out from them.

So, yeah. I stayed there for a few days. I called everyone I could (my cell phone didn't have the numbers of everyone I knew, unfortunately) during that time. I called Yaken and told him what happened - which, in retrospect, seems like an extremely bad idea. I called him a few times while I was in the ICU (the term the staff used for the observational unit). I even made plans to go out with him again after I figured I'd get out. I called Julie (a friend to the family), too, and she ended up getting loud and upset after I told her my story, simply because nobody is supposed to be capable of such bigeoted, block-headed, inflexable idiocy. I also called Lauren, who was somewhat sombre about the whole thing. At least, I think she was. I'm not sure.

So those few days passed relatively quickly. I was prescribed Addiman and Ambien (the combination is the quintessential cure-all of psychologists), as-needed. I couldn't sleep on that vynal mattress without the Ambien, so I took that every night. Then, I recieved my 'legal 2000 papers', which were esentially a court summons. They were trying to declare me insane.

This, of course, gave me waves of paroxysms of an unnummerable number of emotions. I cried, and I would have yelled out if I were able to breathe.

So I was brought into unit H4B. It was identical to the ICU, but with more unusual stains on the seats, and people peed on the toilet seats. 'People', as in more then one.

My roommate was douglas, a somewhat slow OCD-suffering nymphomaniac. I'm not kidding when I say that he constantly masturbated. Often when I was in there.

That's not the worst of it. Before I even got there, the janitor threw all the papers I had away. This included the paper that had my phone numbers.

Yaken was now unreachable.

I was depressed and distraught nearly constantly. I cried most nights. Simply because I couldn't call him and tell him I couldn't come for the date. Which was terrible, because I still felt like I owed him something special for that cab fare he paid for me.

At the advice of the most sane-looking of people in the unit (one who had been admitted because of simelar circumstances to my own), I signed a paper which essentially said that I was there volentarily, so I didn't have to go to court, which would, he said, have made me stay longer even if I weren't stripped of my rights.

Ironically, he ended up having another crisis, overreacting, breaking a window with a chair, and being taken away.

I won't go into any more details, mostly for the purpose of brevity. The summary is that my uncle saw me (I finally told him I was gay, which was suprising even for me), he brought me some things from home (mainly another change of clothes, but also a 1138 page book that I finished the second day of reading), and after a long time of consideration, I accepted my grandparents' offer to live with them, in California.

I was already in Chino Hills by the time I got to tell Yaken that I was leaving. I was already there.

So now we don't even know eachother anymore.

I can't even express how terrible an experiance this was, so I won't even try. I will say, though, that the most terrible thing to lose is an opritunity for happiness. It will cause you to have the most pure sense of unhappiness that you can ever experiance.

Well, I'm at a lack of words, so I'll just wrap this up.

Is the storm of events that started from my father's hate over? I can't say for sure, but the bills I recieved tend to suggest not. The good news, however, is that storms are supposed to be the sign of ecological change. Perhaps it means happiness in my future?

... That's bullshit. I don't believe it. Nothing has changed. only the pretences. It's like being throwm back into the past. I'm still unemployed, I'm still dependant on others, and I'm still not going anywhere. And now I'm lonely again.

Welcome to Storm

Part two in a series of three.

I'm not entirely sure that I want to write this right now. It's a very sensitive topic for me, and I'm unsure of how I should feel about it. It's a long story, and one I hate; I'll never tell it again, that's for sure.

...

OK, here we go, I guess....

The conflict with my father has been raging along for quite a while before The Event happened. I guess it started when my step-mother had to be hospitalized, but really, this fight was going on silently for years. My father had become incredibly upset about Debbi. He became obsessed with her, and couldn't do anything else. No matter how many people, how many doctors, told him that she'd be all right, he'd go on thinking she was going to die. He was acting in obvious unhealthy manners, including behaviour so desperate as moving into the hospital's parking lot.
I made many accomodations for him. I kept excusing his self-destructive behaviour. My memory of this specific time is vague, but I remember one night where my father had come into the dining room. I was making a sandwich in the kitchen, seperated from the dining room only by an archway. He had asked me to do something for him, I think, and I told him I couldn't do it; it was late already and I was tired. He started crying desperately and threatening me about how he might die at any moment. I believe this is the time when I stopped forgiving him; when I lost respect for him; when he ceased to be considered a human being.

I think I kept doing things for him, but once more, I'm not entirely sure about it. I do know, however, that it quickly stopped. I had gotten tired of him asking me to do things I didn't know how to do or to find things I wouldn't know the location of. The longer I kept living with him, the more hateful he became. Sometime a while back, Lauren (Marylin's daughter) had mooved in, and, unfortunately, she had recieved the brunt of his random attacks. His behaviours made me hate him.

Then I met Yaken; sweet, indearing Yaken, who has previously been described. Of course, the experiance was too positive, and so the universe corrected itself by giving me an avalanche of negativity. The very next day (I think), I had lost my temper with him. I went up to him. I yelled and I sworn moderately, which was enough to make him show me the door. I made sure to take Buddy with me.

Let me describe more fully what had been happening at that point. My father had been making everyone in the house miserable, you know, doing what he usually does. By this time, he had gone to the point of turning off the internet for Marylin and Lauren, and disconnecting my power which he does from an illegal modefication to the electrical system. So, essentially, he had taken away anything I had to keep my attention away from my rage, and also my only gateway to see what little friends I had at the time, who, at the very least, would listen to my rantings. I would always plug the power back in again after he left; I simply didn't have any respect for him. So, he asked me to do something, threatened me some more, and started threatening Marylin and Lauren again. I simply couldn't take it anymore; I lost my temper, gave him a piece of my mind.

I thought this was as bad as It was going to get; me being homeless. This, I thought, is a crisis. After walking a few blocks, I called Yaken, who had told me earlier that he had experiance with homelessness. He instructed me to go back to the house, since he wasn't there, and hope he had cooled down. He had, I suppose. But only on the outside. Inside, he was the same pot of hatrid boiling over onto other people.

Not even a week after that happened, he yeilded to his blind rage. He had disconnected Marylin and Lauren's connection to the internet, then proceded to switch off the circuit breaker that provided power to my room and locked it up so I couldn't get to it. Ironically, I was thinking of doing the exact thing to the shop because of my hatrid of him (I couldn't; my only lock was too big for the box). I took a saw and broke the tab on which the lock was added, then threw the still closed lock into the trash can.

Naturally, that didn't go well. I was homeless yet again, and I was too drained to even take Buddy with me. I just walked down to Washington, down to the bus stop near Torry Pines. I was so tired and emotionally drained, I just laid down on the sidewalk.

A few people stopped and asked if I was alright. I couldn't really answer them too well; I was too drained to talk above a mumble. Someone called 911, and the police came over to see if I was alright. They sent me back home, armed with a little booklet of public servaces (especially homeless shelters) and the knowledge that I couldn't be kicked out without an official notice of eviction, which takes at least 90 days to get.

I went back home, which turned out to not be a good idea after all. He was angrier and more hateful then ever. Then, apperantly, someone told Debbi about how he had been treating me, and she became incredibly worked up about it; she told him to back off and turn the electricity back on. But when he came back, he was even more upset. He was no longer a human being, but a living breathing demon. I was asleep at the time, and he kept ranting, something about the trash. I figured the best way to deal with him was to ignore him.

The next thing I remember is him bursting through the door and being showered with assorted organic wastes, discarded paper, cockroaches, and used syringes.

I screamed. I freaked out. I chased him out and threw trash back at him. I closed the door. He kept opening it again. He yelled at me. He screamed at me. He tried to tear me apart with his words. He singlehandedly destroyed my door. No matter how much I screamed for him to get away from me and to leave me alone, he would keep coming back at me with his harassing attacks, unyealding.

I was having a panic attack. I called 911, and told them I was having an emergency. I though my heart was going to explode. I vomited. I called 911 again when I realized that I had knives in my room, terrified that I would use them.

After what seemed like an eternity, the police finally arrived. The crisis control officer tried his best to help the situation, but he could unfortunately do nothing. An ambulance had to come pick me up and take me to the emergency room.

Calm Before the Storm

Many things have happened within the last month. Mine is a story of grief, sorrow, and loss. Quite a long sequence of very unfortunate events have unraveled themselves. I believe that this depressing time has finally ceased; however, I have this looming feeling climbing over me that something terrible is going to happen. I prey it never does.

But just as there is a calm before the storm, so was there a calm in the paroxysmal crisis. Please allow me to paint you a portrait of my life from before.

Imagine Las Vegas; not a glittering metropolis, but a collection of cockroach-infested homes and business, both hurting from the economic recession.

I was very idle in my house, I'll admit it. Living with me was my ex-step-mother, another failed relationship of my father's. She was a soft creature, nice to a fault, who did the cooking and cleaning in the house. With her was her daughter, a strong and proud lesbian girl, who was incredibly reliable, although you probably wouldn't notice unless you had entered a situation which required her.

Also in the house was a demon of a man, an unpredictable maniacal man, a man of low quality, a man confused by his own greif. He was my father, but no longer. He was a very hateful person; he wouldn't hesitate to inflect his own brand of torture on you. In fact, he had been torturing me for quite a while in this timeframe. He had been cutting off my electricity, cutting me off simultaniously from contact with the outside world. He had done this many times before; but this time, I acted differently. I knew how he was commiting the act. Any respect I could have had for him had disappeared weeks, maybe months, ago. I wouldn't put up with him anymore. I took matters in my own hands, restoring power to my room whenever there was a chance.

But this is not about my father. Not yet, at least. This is about a man I met, who, given more time, I am certain would have changed my life. He goes by the name of Yaken.

We met after I responded to his ad on (of all places!) Pounced.org. We went to Texas station. He had the hardest time trying to find me there. We started at the buffet, then we went to the theatre. We saw Quarrentine. I held on to him during the scary parts. We went to the arcade. We blew a lot of money. Then we went to the bowling alley and played for a while.

I don't believe I've ever had so much fun with another person before. When we were tired, and had to go home, I realized that I wanted to spend so much more time with him. We spent probibly another half-hour bent over the bus map, trying to find a route which would allow me to spend more time with him on his long journey home. Walking to the bus stop, we realized how cold it had gotten. I was wearing a short-sleaved shirt that day. I didn't even have to think twice when I stuck my arm around his back. We got to the bus stop, which gave us both the opritunity to take in more of eachother. The bus came, dropping us off at Jones.

The events after that are my most preacous memories. The bus never came; it was too late. Yaken, being chivalrous, had insisted that we call a cab and he'd take me home. I don't know how long we were waiting for it; probibly four or five hours (We ended up calling three different cab companies; the second one was the first to send us a driver). In the meanwhile we kept holding on to eachother. According to Yaken, there are six or seven people gunning to be his mate; in no time at all, I had become the most favored of them all; in no time at all, I had fallen in love with him.

This love was a substantial thing for me. I had been in love what feels so many times with people whom I would never even meet. For the first time, I had someone to hold on to, to love physically as well as emotionally and spiritually.

And this is one aspect of what I have lost.