“Pink Cadillac” Kristina Morgan

1 PINK CADILLAC

Kristina Morgan | 1st Place

Ishared a room in the psychiatric hospital with Bethany. Bethany is bipolar. In a manic state, her speech is so fast that it barely makes sense. Most of what she says is gibberish. However, she managed to alert the staf to the fact that she was afraid of me. She told them my stare was mean and that I called her stupid because she couldn’t talk properly. Neither of these things was true. Well, maybe the stare was. It drove me batshit crazy how she wore her t-shirts inside out, tags showing, and put her underwear on over her cotton slacks.

“Annie Cobalt,” the nurse said to me. “We’re moving you out of Bethany’s room and into Gladys’s room because everyone else is afraid of you. Gladys is fearless and not one to push around.” The patients were afraid of me: afraid I would turn my stare on them, sling profanities, spit on them when lockdown became too hard. I have schizophrenia, and when I was sick with psychosis, I was hard to be around. I barely The patients were noticed the other patients put as much distance between me and them as they could when walking in the hall. They also afraid of me: afraid I would turn my never looked me in the eyes but would bow stare on them, sling their heads as if in reverence; at least that is what I liked to tell myself, reverence profanities, spit on

instead of fear. them when lockdown

It is true: my illness had left me unkind. became too hard. Once, I took a swing at Penelope when she came too close to me. Fortunately, I just punched air. When I wasn’t sick, I thought of others often before myself. Did my friend with a cold need groceries? Did a friend with a broken arm need help washing her hair? I would genuinely want to know how they were and if there was anything they needed from me. I was good at making good. Sick, I was consumed with myself. My emotional pain left me hanging from a tree of doubt. I felt that I could not move on in life. I couldn’t be bothered by interactions with others. I didn’t think I could ever wave hi or have a small conversation about food. Psychosis was worse than just being antisocial. When psychotic, I was locked inside a hard shell of plaster. Nothing could touch me, and I could touch nothing. It was a stalemate of reasonable thought. I knew I couldn’t move into sound judgment anytime soon. I tried to spread my wings, only to fnd there were none attached. I would crumple to the foor sobbing, saying that if I couldn’t be a bird I would die. I begged someone to please kick me senseless. Living with schizophrenia is like slathering toast with hot sauce; I am bland and then fre is added to me, igniting me in my hard

shell of plaster. “Move the broad from my room immediately!” Gladys stormed into the hall, leaving me alone in the room we had shared for one night. Her words to the psych technicians were deadened by the glass partition separating us from staf. The staf couldn’t hear the power in her voice. She raged, her face contorted in a frightening way like a mad clown, red lips in a straight line, eyes wide open, almost bulging out of her face. She ran her fngers through her hair as if she was going to pull strands out. I thought to myself, I am no broad, I am just eighteen. I did tell Gladys to choke on her snoring, in the middle of the night, wishing she would so I could sleep before morning swept the dust from the foor and the nurse shouted for us to come swallow medication.

Gladys was thin and frail, swimming in a housecoat the color of salmon with a voice as large as the Liberty Bell on a clear morning of quiet birds. She sang a cappella at all meals. I didn’t recognize the songs, but they were beautiful. Often, they were about pretty women who are scorned by their lover for not behaving like a lady. She wore lace socks that frothed over her white slippers and gloves that ran all the way up her arms to her elbows. She used her red lipstick to brighten her lips and also to lengthen her brows in perfect arcs above each eye. Day two of living with Gladys was no better. Gladys told the psych tech that I told her to fuck of. The word “fuck” splintered in her mouth. It didn’t ft her the way it ft the vocabulary of my punk self. And I had told her that. She got it into her mind that I smelled like shit and started draping toilet paper over me where I lay in bed. What the hell. I kicked her and told her to fuck of. They didn’t move me from the room. We stayed to We stayed to scream scream at each other long enough to become friends. We were in our bedroom both leaning against the wall, at each other long enough to become our pillows behind us. friends. “So, kid, I like your grufness,” said Gladys. “And I like the fact that no one is like you.” We were lucky. It took only a week for us to fgure out we liked each other. I loved her authenticity. She loved my fghting spirit. I would joke with her and call her sleazebag. She would come back at me with “ho bag.” I learned to tolerate her snoring, and she slipped me her elephant pills. I swam in my bedsheets, my feet tangled in sand. I was the only one able to stand up to Gladys, and she was the only one able to stand up to me. She would thrust her tiny self at me as if to embrace me in a tight hug, only to slap at my stomach, saying I was too skinny and needed to be fattened up. I would say, “What? Like Gretel? You need me fat so you can eat me?”

I told her she was the only one who looked beautiful with red eyebrows. She would tell me she learned it from her mother. I asked if she was close to her mother. She said, “Not a chance.” I didn’t push her for any more than this. All I knew was Gladys’s mother was dead and that Gladys liked to speak to her ghost. The staf thought she was just talking to herself, but I knew diferent. Gladys told me her mom spied on her, wanting to make certain she wasn’t being mean to the neighbors. We ate separate from the rest of the patients and picked at the food on each other’s plates. She always went for my fsh and me, her beef. I once freaked out because there was a worm in my salad. She said I should be glad that the whole worm was there because, “Wouldn’t it be terrible to fnd half a worm?” Eventually, the staf caught on to the fact that Gladys was feeding me her pills. It took them a couple of days to recognize I acted as if I were stoned. I would sit in the middle of the room on the foor cackling. I stumbled when I walked. I drooled and couldn’t put a full sentence together. They asked me why I acted fucked up (fucked was my word). I told them I was taking Gladys’s pills. I immediately regretted that. From then on, Gladys was forced to tip her head down, stick out her tongue, shake it so the nurse could be certain she swallowed it all.

At Christmas, we strung the tree with popcorn and construction paper cutouts. The scissors were annoying because they were children’s scissors; not sharp at all and barely able to cut.

One morning, Gladys got caught eating popcorn from the tree with an empty strand of string in her hand. I asked my grandmother to please make popcorn balls for Gladys as a Christmas gift. She did and wrapped them in red cellophane. I placed them under the Christmas tree.

Two days later, they were still under the tree. I asked Gladys why she had left her Christmas gift untouched. She said it was because she couldn’t chew apples with her gums. I laughed and told her they were popcorn balls not apples. She was delighted. Gladys told me that one day her son would pull up to our window in her pink Cadillac. She said she would drive away with her song. I couldn’t imagine it. “I didn’t know a Cadillac could be pink.” “Yes. A big boat of pink. It was the only one on the lot.” “I think of you more as being a bus rider rather than a car driver.” “What? You think this old biddie can’t steer? Push on the gas pedal and go?” “Do you even have a license?” I asked. “Of course I have a license. I would show you if my wallet wasn’t locked up.” “I can’t imagine you driving away.” “What, you think I’m never going to leave this place? That I’ll always sleep with a plastic pillow and eat overcooked broccoli?”

“No. But—”

“But I’m certifably crazy?” “Maybe. But—” “But what, Annie? It is possible to drive away. And I will do that in style with my pink Cadillac.” I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe this small, tiny, frail woman doped up on pills and in and out of hospitals because of schizophrenia since she was sixteen could possibly drive. I also didn’t believe there I also didn’t believe was a pink Cadillac. Cadillacs were either red or black. there was a pink Time hung itself in the ward as the calendar moved on. Cadillac. Cadillacs Gladys sang. The rest of us paced up and down the hall. were either red or We ate three meals a day with Lorna Doone cookies for snacks. I would hoard the Lorna Doones so I could eat black.

many all at once, making myself full. I liked feeling full. The weight of it helped keep me tied to the ground. Full, I was somber and still. Empty, I ran circles around Gladys. I was the only one who ran in circles.

One patient would bang his head against the wall, throw a fst into a door, jump from chair to chair, and burst out laughing. Another patient would lie in the middle of the foor stretched out like a snow angel. She was an obstacle to walk around. I don’t know why she believed no one would step on her. The two phones on the wall rarely rang. I wondered if people outside simply forgot about us. I imagined everybody had a plan to steal my soul and my ability to think; my loved ones included. For a while I thought telephones sent rays of electricity through my ears and into my brain. Eventually, after being on meds for a while, I considered using the phone. I didn’t realize for a long time that it was up to me to make phone calls to the outside world. I thought I had been forgotten. The staf encouraged me to call someone. “Why not your grandmother? She visits you after all.” So I did. Using the phone was magical. I was connected to someone. And my grandmother said I love you before hanging up. Her words lit me up. Time read like a single storyboard, the frames never wavering in their ink. I was glad to write Gladys out of the story of mentally ill people in the hospital. I imagined her in Target shopping for purple items and socks. Writing was something I did to soothe myself and to rocket myself safely out of the reality I was in. Unlike swallowing a glassful of pills hoping I would die, I could write, I want to die but today is not the day. I tried pills in the past, but they make me very sick, changing my reality immediately. My body spasms over and over again. My mind feels poisoned. There is an odd metallic taste in my mouth. Someone fnds me and takes me

to the emergency room where my stomach is pumped. It is painful to have a tube shoved down my nose, making its way to my stomach. I write this and feel no physical pain. I write, now I am alive. I sit at the table in the corner of the hall and write Gladys and myself out of the hospital. We move from the store to a bench in the middle of the park. There is always a little dog. Being a patient in a psychiatric hospital is hard. The days wrap around each other while ofering little. There is no puppy to welcome me. There is no garden in which to watch my tulips bloom. I am stuck sleeping with a plastic pillow and begging for just a little bit more dental foss. They shine a fashlight across my bed every half an hour as I sleep because I was suicidal and because they want to make certain I’m not doing anything with my sheets in order to hang myself. Being suicidal is a constant I live by. I am terrible at dying. I’ve attempted to kill myself thirteen times. Once, I tried to cut my wrist and then every other time it was with pills. I fnd the world to be an odd place, a place that I have trouble showing up in. Most people appear to be happy. I am not. I’ve even seen homeless people who are full of smiles. I can’t imagine how hard life is for them. On a hot day with the air conditioner working overtime, Gladys’s son, Bob, comes to get her. Despite the heat, he wears a tan jacket and black slacks. His blue, button-down shirt is tucked neatly into his pants. He has short, black hair, a small nose like Gladys’s, and stands over six feet tall. I know this because he is taller than me, and I am six feet tall. “I can’t believe you’re going, Gladys.” I have tears in my eyes that are sliding down my face, dangling at my chin. I swipe them with my sleeve. “You’ll be all right, kid. We all have to get healthy sometime.” “I want to get healthy and go with you. Please Gladys.” I don’t know why I’m saying this. I don’t want to go with her. I have my grandmother. What I said is just my way of telling her I will miss her.

“Do you want to see my car? Come look out the bedroom window.” I do. A pink Cadillac is sitting proudly in the parking lot. “Oh my god. It’s for real!” I squish my nose to the glass wanting to reach out and touch it with my hands. “You didn’t believe me?”

“I didn’t believe most of your stories.” “Ah. Well, there you have it.” She picks up her small pink suitcase. Bob picks up the larger one. The nurse comes out from behind the partition with Gladys’s After Plan, covering a single piece of yellow paper. “Be well, Gladys,” she says. Gladys turns away from her. Gladys has never liked her. She is the one who made Gladys

wag her tongue. Gladys says goodbye to me as the glass door clicks open. Freedom. She is no longer restrained behind a locked glass door. I return to the window in our room. I am astounded when Gladys gets behind the steering wheel. She will steer her way out. I don’t think I would trust Gladys to pull away. But she backs out and does just that, drives in a straight line through cars sitting silently in the parking lot. Gladys got well. I watched it happen. She went from imagining a sniper was going to kill her to feeling safe. The CIA was no longer interested in her, and a rattler was no longer going to slither its way out from under her bed. She didn’t have complicated conversations with invisible people, some telling her to blind herself. My grandmother not only came to visit me, but she had been the one to drop me of here. I didn’t have a snake under my bed; I had an ogre in the closet. I wanted to die but I didn’t want to be eaten. My grandmother had found me in a hot bath with a lamp plugged into the wall sitting on the edge of the tub and a long-serrated knife in my hand. She had also watched me cower behind the couch attempting to hide from people she couldn’t see. I whispered softly to the dog I didn’t have. I cried because I knew my grandmother was not going to wake up; here she was, stepping out into another day. I loved living with my grandmother, but I didn’t think she was always safe being around me. Monsters hunted me and would kill anyone who got in their way. I have been in the hospital for a month now. The monsters have dissolved, and the ogre has disappeared. My grandmother will pick me up today in a Honda. We will have a quiet dinner and watch Jeopardy together. Tomorrow we will go grocery shopping. I will be able to choose my own cereal. I plan to sign up for a writing class at the community college. My story will be simple. I will turn it into poetry. Other than walk Gracie, the Shih Tzu my grandmother bought me upon my release from the hospital, I can’t think of a better way to spend my time. Time is miraculous to me. I walk into minutes of the day and look forward to the changing hours.