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I work as a psych tech at a psych hospital, which means I get all of the shitty work. If the psych patients puke, I clean it up. If they get confused and wander into the wrong room, I retrieve them. I take them to the nameplate outside their door and say, “This is your room. See. This is your name.” I take them out to smoke. I show them the location of the lighter on the wall of the smoking porch. I demonstrate how to use it. No lighters allowed. They may burn the place down. So the hospital has installed a lighter on the wall that works much like a cigarette lighter in a car. And every day after lunch, it’s my job to take the patients outside for a smoke break, and today Jean, one of my favorite patients, approaches the desk where I sit, handing out cigarettes to the ones who want us to keep them securely in the desk so no one can steal from them. She approaches and says, “Can I get my tobacco.”

Her family dropped off Bugler tobacco and a pack of rolling papers for her, not thinking about the fact that she can’t roll. Maybe they can’t afford real cigarettes. Who knows?

I hand her the pouch of Bugler tobacco, along with the rolling papers. She takes a seat at the table in the dayroom and rolls a cigarette while I let the other patients out onto the smoking porch. Her plump fingers are struggling with the task. The final product is unstable and loose. She goes to the door and I let her out. She’s wearing her usual pink fleece sweat suit.

“Don’t pick the flowers,” I tell her, as I have to every time she goes out to smoke. It’s my job to remind her. The hospital is tired of her pulling up the flowers on the smoking porch. She takes them and replants them in strange places. She uproots pansies and puts them in the outdoor ashtrays that have the capacity to hold 14,000 cigarette butts. These ash-buckets have a long neck that stems up from the base with two holes on each side where smokers place their cigarette butts, but Jean keeps planting the uprooted pansies inside these holes. If she’s not rearranging the flowers on the smoking porch, then she’s planting the daily newspaper inside an empty flower planter on the wooden fence. She’s one of the patients caught inside the revolving door of behavioral medicine. She can’t shake herself free of this place. She’s admitted and discharged at least three times a year. Her usual stay is two weeks each time.

The door shuts, and I take a seat in the dayroom where I can see the entire length of the smoking porch through the unit window that runs the length of one wall in the dayroom. I watch her put the cigarette to the lighter on the wall and push the button. The lighter glows cherry red and she takes a few puffs. Then the cigarette breaks open at the seam she’d licked, and the fire tumbles out. She spikes the rest of the cigarette into the concrete. Then plops down onto the concrete with her legs stretched out like a child throwing a temper tantrum. Her back against the wooden fence that surrounds the outer edges of the smoking area. Tears ooze from her eyes like liquid glass from a glass blower’s tube, spreading out like a hot gooey liquid on her wrinkled face. She’s in her late fifties—too old for this kind of behavior. But this is what makes this place interesting and sad.

Before I can get up and retrieve her, another patient points to her out the window and says, “She’s crying.”

I put my key in the lock on the wall and open the door. I crack it and the cool April breeze sweeps by me and into the dayroom as I yell, “Why are you crying?”

She yells back, “Why didn’t they buy me bought cigarettes?”

When she says it, everyone laughs, even the psychotics, and it hurts her feelings. She cries harder and louder. Then screams, “Don’t make fun of me.”

I feel bad for her, so I take out her Bugler tobacco with papers and use my old dope smoking skills—skills I haven’t used in twenty-six years. In place of the weed that I once smoked—usually ten joints a day—I pack Bugler tobacco into the rolling paper and turn the occasion into an exhibition, a rolling party. The more I roll the larger the crowd grows around the desk. Everyone looks on in amazement. They ask, “Where did you learn to roll like that?”

This gives me a sick sense of pride, and I roll and keep rolling, as if I’m Forrest Gump running, as if I can’t stop rolling until they put my face on the cover of High Times. The stack is climbing, getting larger, reaching higher. I roll at least twenty, packing them into an empty cigarette pack, before handing them over to her. No one will ever laugh at her again as long as I’m around to roll for her, so bring the cheap tobacco. Supply the rolling papers, you cheapskate family. It will no longer be tragic.

Later she thanks me, and it’s as if I’m a confidant now. She tells me that her first husband was a drunk, and her second husband sniffed glue, and when I ask her which one was the better husband, she says, “Neither one.” Then laughs. I do too.

She says her father abused her. Says she can’t stop wondering why he would do this to a child. She says, “He did it to all of us.” I figure she means the whole family.

Then she randomly says, without the least bit of shame, “A cockroach crawled into my ear one night while I slept. It gives you a crazy feeling.”

“I bet,” I say.

“You want to know how I got it out?”

“How?”

“Peroxide,” she says, “But this is not why I’m deaf in this ear.” She grabs her earlobe. “A raindrop infected it.”

“A raindrop made you deaf in that ear?” I nod toward the ear.

“Yep, a raindrop just dripped into my ear,” she says, and the way she says it makes me believe her, and it gives me a crazy feeling.

After the smoke break, the music therapist arrives. It’s one o’clock. It’s group time.

Once a quarter the hospital provides music therapy. One of the social workers is a musician, and he loves to play for them. He has more fun than the patients do, and it makes for quite a show. People get happy. They sing and clap their hands. And if the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter is line with Mars, they will dance. They will boogie. And today, Jean will attempt a break-dance move.

I go room-to-room gathering the patients, calling out, “It’s group time.” I can hear the music therapist strumming his guitar in the dayroom. I look back up the unit corridor to the dayroom and see him bent over it, trying to hear while everyone takes their seats.

Once all have gathered, another therapist kicks things off by doing what the therapists call “checking in.” This is the therapist’s way of seeing how they’re doing.

The therapist doing the checking in has been battling cancer. At times she seems lively, other times she looks tired. She’s lively today. Smiling. Joking at times. She goes around the group asking, “How are you doing today?”

Jean says, “Not good. My father died, my brother died, my sister died, my uncle shot himself in the head with a gun, and my children won’t speak to me. And, today, my cigarette fell apart and everybody laughed at me.” Then she starts crying.

The therapist validates her feelings. She allows Jean to cry, to get it all out, offering her a moment of human understanding. It’s hard to be a therapist to a bunch of psychotics. Making contact is the hard part. It’s like asking aliens to sing God Bless America in Chinese, while instructing them to put their hand over their hearts. Psychotics can’t make sense of their realities, as you and I can. They don’t have appropriate emotions, so checking in can go in one of two directions. They can refuse to speak or they talk nonsense with strange emotions. For this reason the therapists use cards with questions printed on them. They look like game pieces or trading cards, and the questions are simple, such as tell us about a happy moment in your life or what’s your favorite color and why. Easy stuff. Their therapy doesn’t go deep into the recesses of their psyches. It’s more like doing soundings in deep water to see if land is near.

After checking in with them, the music therapist asks if anyone has a request. Jean requests Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues. They sit quiet and still as the music therapist deepens his voice to a baritone growl. Jean sings along with him.

Then another patient who’s been having heart problems as well as mental illness requests Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler. After group, he is scheduled at the main hospital for more tests. But for now, he sits in music therapy clapping along with the song and lip-synching the words, as if this song is taking him back to happier times, to a life that was simple and hopeful, because at first doctors thought he might have clogged arteries and be on the verge of having a heart attack, so they ran tests. But everything checked out. Then they discovered a mass around his heart. He’s in his early thirties. His bangs hang down over his eyes. He is clean. I’d helped him take a shower before lunch. During the shower, he had a bout with uncontrollable laughter. He couldn’t stop laughing. He laughed so hard he couldn’t catch his breath at times. I envied him. I told the med nurse to give me what she’d given him. And when I asked him what he was laughing about, he said, “I wish you could hear these voices. They’re telling the funniest jokes.”

“Tell me what they are saying.”

He said something about putting gravy over biscuits. It sounded random and unfunny. But maybe angels were entertaining him. He’d even asked me one time if I believed in guardian angels. “I think they exist,” I’d said.

“Can they have sex with humans?”

“It’s highly unlikely,” I’d said.

“Do you believe angels can come to your bed at night and hold you?”

“Yeah, that’s possible,” I’d said, wishing it were true.

Who wouldn’t want that kind of attention from angels? Who wouldn’t want angelic beings tending to our sadness and loneliness? God knows no one else is going to hold and comfort the insane. Maybe holding them and listening to them might have a greater affect then behavioral medicine. Who knows? But I believe God would be up for it.

After the music therapist sang The Gambler someone requested Elvis’ Teddy Bear. The therapist sings, Baby let me be/Your lovin teddy bear/Put a chain around my neck/And lead me anywhere/Oh let me be/Your teddy bear. Elvis’ song livens things up. Jean and two other female patients stand and start dancing. Jean becomes a Go-Go dancer in a pink sweat suit. Her arms flay the madness. The other two are doing nothing more than running in place while turning in circles. This is my only dance move as well. I watch them and realize how funny I must look dancing like this. I have no rhythm either. One female patient is wearing glasses that cover half her face—huge suckers. She has on blue jeans with an elastic band, and she’s giving the elastic band a workout. When the song reaches the line— Oh let me be/Your teddy bear—the woman with huge glasses stops mid-dance and strikes a pose, framing her face with one hand on top of her head, the other one beneath her chin. She has one hip sticking out and a smile on her face. Then she takes off jogging in place and twirling with the beat. The dayroom lifts from earth. We seem to be hovering. Then things take a chaotic turn. Jean starts dancing wildly, flaying the air even harder, spinning faster, as if she is caught within a tornado or maybe falling down some rabbit hole. Too much movement for this Elvis song. Then the song ends and Jean hits the floor as if her intentions are to perform a break-dance move. She tries to spin on her back, but scoots more than spins. Her dirty tennis shoes are above her midsection as she looks like a half-dead bug on the floor trying to rollover. I’m trying not to laugh, so I start clapping. Thoroughly entertained. It’s so tragic and hilarious. But I never laugh at them.

At the end of the Elvis song, the female patient who’d framed her face with her palms, says, “My daddy taught me that song when I was four.”

I smile and say, “Well, you know the words.” Then I give her a high-five.

I pictured her father’s old 45rpm, pictured the record being held in the turntable. I saw the needle drop. Heard the scratchy sound before it became Elvis’ Teddy Bear. Maybe her father did it for her those first few times. Maybe he said, “When Elvis sings Your Teddy Bear, do this.” Maybe he framed his face to demonstrate. Maybe he stuck his bony hip out. Maybe he had snuff in his lip. Maybe he had a velvet poster of Elvis hanging in the living room. Maybe he bought it from a roadside vendor on the way to Memphis. Maybe this is her greatest memory of her father. Maybe he didn’t seem so drunk when he sang Elvis songs. I’m not sure. But she’s country—back in the back of the backwoods. Deep country. And I admire her for it.

The therapist battling cancer helps Jean up from her botched break-dance move.

“We have time for one more,” the music therapist says.

The male patient with the possible mass around his heart says, “Danny’s Song by Kenny Loggins.”

The music therapist looks down at his guitar and positions his fingers. He begins. When he gets to the chorus, we all sing about not having money and about how in love we are honey, about how everything is going to be all right. And in that moment, we all believe it. We are hopeful. It’s on our faces. It’s in our words. I even feel better. I’ve stopped thinking about the world, about the bills I’m unable to pay, about the fight I had with my wife this morning before coming to work. I realize I’m getting just as much out of this as they are. I love the last paragraph of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, where Fuckhead describes what it’s like to work at Beverly Home: “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

When the song ends, the music therapist strums his guitar in a random way and says, “I enjoyed it. Hope you have a great day.”

I rise and announce another smoke break. Jean walks to the door that leads out to the smoking porch, and I know she will be all right out there. No more crying now over spilt tobacco. I’m sure of it. I open the door, knowing there’s a place for people like us.