On a clear afternoon, Highway 101 rolls between mountains splashed with gold fields and stands of oak. My wife and I are in a rental car searching for the Mendocino State Hospital where I’d once been a patient. We’ve come to Northern California to celebrate a niece’s wedding, but when I’d discovered that the former asylum was close by, I’d felt a powerful disturbance. On a wooded slope near Talmage, the census-designated place where the hospital is located, I spot a maul of gray-brown smoke winding into the sky and panic.
A barista with a hipster goatee at the local Starbucks reassures me the old nuthouse is still there, but it’s been taken over by monks or something. We wind up behind a school bus ambling past modest houses with trucks on the lawns, kids in colorful superhero backpacks racing to the front doors. This is the soul of California, outlying towns you never see on TV. At an intersection, the bus turns one way and we turn the other, and all at once, I know where I am. California State Route 222, which ends at the main gate. There’s nowhere else to go but inside.
If there had been a guard booth, however, it’s gone. In its place a shimmering, three-arch gate. A burnished sign welcomes us to “The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas.” Small tiled roofs float above it, displaying figurines of spiritual guardians. Curiously, the new portal is not designed to keep anyone out. We pass through it, and a broad lawn spreads out clustered with redwoods, Atlas cedar, and Douglas fir. Familiar buildings gradually surround the car. Some have been repainted; others highlighted with Buddhist ideograms. But the renovations can’t disguise their former identity. The bland facades, the limited entrances, the warehouse aura. A white brick smokestack traced with rust looms over it all, an emblem of bygone torment.
I entered a program for juvenile offenders at Mendocino in March 1971. I was kicked out several months later. The last time I saw it was from the passenger seat of my probation officer’s Buick. Eventually, I was rehabilitated in Southern California. My life journeyed thousands of miles from my tumultuous adolescence. I locked the people and places I’d known in a room in my memory I visited less frequently over the years.
If you’d met me in any of the guises I’d assumed as a responsible adult, you would never have guessed that I’d stolen cars and sold drugs.
As we cruise the main drive, I feel as if I never left. A counselor could show up any minute and order me back to the house. But the grounds are mostly empty. A Ukiah fire truck rumbles past, sirens off, nosing toward town. Whatever burned is out. An elderly couple on a bench gazes beatifically at the mountain edging the property. The street signs have new names: Bodhi Way, Kindness Ave., Proper View. I pull over, trembling.
The troubled boy I’d once been draws near. The strangeness I could never shake. Concerned, Dev rubs my shoulder, says we should go. Maybe this had been a bad idea. I stumble out the door, tap a few cell phone shots. Back inside, we wait until I can breathe steadily. And then for the second time, I leave the hospital.
◆
It sometimes comes back to me: the cold breath of mountain fog massing down the mountains. The isolation. Roughly 10,000 citizens lived in Ukiah back then; due north, lay vast, sparsely populated redwood forests. This stretch of California attracted drifters and prophets like Jim Jones, who relocated his flock from Indiana to Redwood Valley and recruited from the hospital. We knew nothing about The Peoples Temple. “We” were teenagers ranging from 15 to 18, young felons and addicts who constituted the Adolescent Treatment Program. Assigned to the F-Compound, we inhabited cottages named after classical epics none of us had read: Aeneid, Odyssey, and Iliad. Mine was Rubicon. It had dorms divided by gender, a day room, and medication desk, but bore only a minimal resemblance to an insane asylum. If you saw us out and about, you would have taken us for hip representatives of the new generation, all got up in bell bottoms, pea coats, and shaggy hair.
At mealtime, we ventured out in groups led by counselors. A maintenance worker or a psychiatrist in suit and pipe occasionally crossed the paths; otherwise, the grounds were ours. Amidst the immaculate lawns, we wondered where they hid the “Loons,” the name we’d bestowed on the mentally ill patients. We disparaged anyone or anything we didn’t understand. The fact that we were better off than these patients didn’t stop our casual cruelty.
And then we’d run into one. A hollow cheeked man pressed up against a building, one finger tracing the wall as if it were a rune that needed deciphering. A young woman—wild, filthy hair, a soiled nightgown—eating gravel. Attendants in white uniforms appeared as if they’d been hiding nearby and whisked the Loons away. The lucky few who’d earned the privilege to eat in public fringed the commissary. They were almost always men. Among them, we talked loudly, our voices echoing off the vaulted ceiling with a tenuous bravado.
We made up stories on the walk back. The Loons lived in the trees or in secret tunnels under the sidewalks. They were famous politicians, movie stars, gangsters (some of this was true). We were infatuated; most of us had never been this close to insanity. “You don’t want to know where they keep them,” said Damon, a beautiful boy with pale skin and a delicate, angular face, a junkie who wore long sleeves to hide his forearms. He’d been in the Program longer than any of us and had a quiet, watchful authority. “It’s no good, what happens to some people.”
◆
Dev and I return from the hospital in time for the wedding rehearsal dinner. Among in-laws and guests on a wood deck overlooking a russet vineyard, we toast the young couple, laugh, and eat well. The sky gradually dims and a vibrant half-moon lifts above the hills. Surrounded by people I love, I’m content.
On a king-sized bed at an inn hours later, I obsess over the photos from that afternoon. All are out of focus. Dev sleeps beside me. The wedding is tomorrow evening—the following morning, Dev and I will fly back to our home in the Midwest. The odds that I will return to Mendocino are bad. All I have to show for the excursion into my history is nothing.
A familiar anxiety stirs my veins. I’m in good health for a man my age, clear headed, still working. Yet, from where I am, I can see the end of the road. Every day is tinted with a simmering urgency that I expect will grow more intense. I have a lot to get done, and recovering my past is at the top of the list. So much of it is gone.
I delicately raise the sheets. The room is hotel dark—the lights are off, but the furniture and big screen TV are as visible as a showroom floor. On the balcony, adjacent suites are draped. A big rig hisses through the stretch of 101 that passes through Hopland, the winery town where the wedding will take place. Yet, the night air hints of salt water. A lone seagull floats over rooftops, and I recall the beach at Half-Moon Bay in 1967, how it bustled with hippies who’d drifted down from the Haight. True believers with glassine smiles and painted faces, they whirled and paraded about as if on stage, brazenly sharing joints and jugs of Gallo burgundy. Crew cut fraternity boys from Stanford and Berkeley trailed their wake, while Hells Angels roamed the bluffs with the ease of dominant animals.
Nearby, my family huddled like pioneers who’d strayed from the wagon track. My mother had insisted on the outing. Perhaps she wanted to put on a show of togetherness. My parents had set an ugly divorce in motion. My father had already moved out of the house and was about to disappear from our lives. On the sand, my younger brother and sisters, sheathed in JCPenney swimwear, nervously observed the goings on. I was halfway to delinquency, smoking, running with tough boys, filching Obetrols from my mother’s medicine cabinet. The hippies radiated a magnetic aura. It was as if I was sitting on the outskirts of a town where people were doing things no one had ever done before. When a freak started bellowing Dylan’s “Everybody must get stoned,” on an out-of-tune guitar, I heard an invitation.
Not long after that, I sprinted from a pot sale gone violently wrong at my high school. I’d been busted in the fall and was drowning in paranoia. A therapist suggested it was time to leave home, to try a different approach. My probation would fail if I didn’t get away from my thuggish friends. Still, the concept of drug rehabilitation for teenagers was brand new. Juvenile delinquents had typically been sentenced to skills and vocational training at institutions like the California Junior Boys Republic. But the counterculture and horror stories of overdoses and suicides were panicking white middle class America. President Nixon called for “a war on drugs.” Parents and politicians demanded a solution. It was in this atmosphere that The Adolescent Treatment Program was born.
The hospital modeled this experiment on its highly regarded adult drug and alcohol unit known as The Family. In line with its principles, each house in the F-Compound put the kids in charge. Our tribal hierarchy enforced iron rules: no drinking, drugs, sex. They planned therapy. Power was allegedly shared: patients could challenge anyone, even the staff. The counselors were graduate students, social workers, nurses, and psychologists and limited to a restrained, advisory role. By ceding authority to the inmates, the administrators believed the experience would transform them into accountable young adults.
My first month in the Rubicon, I did what I was told. I was a ward of the court and acknowledged its might in every double bolted door and reinforced glass window I encountered across the facility. I spoke up in daily groups, attended a secondary school to salvage my high school education, made useful things in arts and crafts workshops. The consequences for not participating were steep. Dissenters simply vanished, like newbies who kept bragging about toking hashish up on Mount Tam. I learned early on to draft the strivers, to feign shyness. I hung in the day room with the tribal leaders, listened more than I talked, nodded at their callow insights. Fran, the counselor I loved and feared most, praised my sensitivity. I shared god-awful poetry I’d scribbled on a sketch-pad with a soulful, brown-eyed girl in braids. Her name is lost to me now, but her gentle, wide-eyed face remains. She said that I was not like the other boys in the program. I felt something I confused with love. We were both mistaken.
◆
A glorious sun burnishes the hospital grounds. It’s the morning after the rehearsal dinner, and I’m back with my nephew and godchild in tow. In the middle of a nearly sleepless night, it occurred to me that Pat was the ideal companion for this journey. He’s battled mental illness for much of his young life. He manages his condition like a sailor artfully navigating rough seas. He’s the only other member of my family who knows what it is to be institutionalized. I needed to hear his voice, his slant.
The Visitor’s Center resembles a school library. There are shelves of biographies of venerable masters, display tables with CDs, recitation beads. A tan counter walls off the back. The young man behind it is alert and calm. His clipped black hair offsets his pale robe, and his smile, when it happens, is more half than full. We sign the register. He hands us a map of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas and politely asks that we keep to the paths.
Back outside, everything seems unfamiliar. The main body of the hospital spreads northward like a vast, undiscovered continent. I’d forgotten how large it is. Some buildings are in fair shape. Others with shattered windows and cracked walls are sealed behind hurricane fencing and “Keep Out” signs. Farther along the sidewalk, the landscape pales and peacocks crisscross the path, casual, unafraid. Pat, who earned a degree in zoology and has devoted his life to the study of animal behavior, retrieves a long, smoky gray feather from the grass.
“Those males,” he says. He’s tall, big-boned with large hands and a lanky body, absorbing Mendocino with a curious, open face. “The tails are cruel, but biologically necessary. More proof of nature’s ironic sense of humor.”
I’m in a better state of mind today. It could be Pat’s measured, amiable presence. It could be the sun, which seems limitless. But the glaze of brightness makes the hospital less threatening. What if my memory of Mendocino is wrong? What if I’d manufactured it? I mask my anxiety as Pat points out pheasants and chukar partridges, small deer foraging under hedges.
“Interesting how they have no boundaries,” he says.
“Why do they call this place the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas?” I say. “I’ve hardly seen any.”
“Maybe they’re fudging the numbers,” Pat says.
The sidewalk abruptly ends at a crossing gate and a warning. Beyond it, foothills climb. We’re hemmed in.
Pat says, “It seems odd that we can only go so far.”
I study the map. The official tour winds visitors on a short circuit from the Visitor’s Center to the Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas and back. It’s a narrow, confined loop. The Buddhists are occupying only a small portion of Mendocino’s 788-acre campus. We haven’t seen anything that resembles the F-Compound. In the sparkling warmth, I’m having a hard time remembering exactly where it was.
◆
The Mendocino State Hospital serviced a population of 3,000 patients in 1955. By the time I arrived, there were fewer than 1800, and the institution was fighting for survival. The leadership was rapidly developing innovative offerings, such as a research branch that studied addiction to modernize its image. But it was too late. Congress had outlawed the involuntary commitments the wards depended on and the public had turned against asylums. A year after I departed, Governor Ronald Reagan decommissioned Mendocino and several other state mental institutions.
To some, the closure was long overdue. The hospital had practiced morally questionable treatments on patients throughout its history: eugenics, insulin coma therapy, lobotomies. Mentally handicapped children were abandoned at the front gate by their birth parents, locked inside the insane wards, and buried in unmarked graves. I knew none of this during my stay. Yet, I lived with the results. Anthony was a pudgy young man with intellectual disabilities who may have been 17 or 30. He had a bowl cut, wore childish blue shorts and a sailor’s shirt that barely disguised his adult body and was often perched on a bench we filed past on our way to school.
We’d yell, “What’s your name?”
He’d reply, “My name is Anthony.”
“How do you spell it?”
“A.N.T.H.O.N.Y!”
We’d laugh at his speech defect.
Mr. Freeze, a leathery old man in a Giants cap and windbreaker, paced an exact rectangle on the sidewalk over and over, then stopped, raised his hands like claws and hissed. We hissed back. Larry’s face and arms were so splotchy, he looked as if he’d been boiled. Beverly, a big-bodied blond with rouged cheeks and bottomless blue eyes, shrouded herself in bedsheets. She would smile like a fairy godmother and say, “I’m gonna murder every one of you little fuckers.”
I believed the hospital was omnipotent. But the mentally ill patients undid Mendocino’s orderly façade and hinted at the chaos underneath it. Whenever I asked a counselor about them, I was told to focus on my own issues. My housemates were confident they would never end up like the Loons. In my dreams, I couldn’t escape their odd voices and herky jerky gesticulation. It seemed impossible that a person could veer so far from reality. On the paths every now and then, one would shoot a mischievous look my way as if he or she had my number. I would flash on the hippies, another group who specialized in upsetting your perspective. But where the freaks promised a brilliant, kaleidoscopic future, the Loons were haunted. I worried we had something in common. Safe inside the Rubicon, I aspired to embody society’s definition of a normal teenager. On the grounds, I was constantly reminded that normal was an illusion.
◆
The day heats up as Pat and I traverse a walkway guarded by four white Chinese Lion sculptures. We marvel at a giant incense burner that has a steampunk air. The Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas looms behind it. Above the entrance, a large Buddha sits Lotus-style. The statue is resplendent in gold leaf accents with a shock of painted black hair, the head tilted forward, eyes shut in eternal meditation. Brochure in hand, Patrick announces that this is the Shakyamuni Buddha, the most recent Buddha to walk this earth, the one who achieved “perfect enlightenment.” Imagine that, he says. We had our own definition of that word in the Rubicon—the blissful space where no one could hurt you. You got there on your first high. You chased it the rest of your life.
Today that sentiment seems a thousand miles away. I keep digging for the hospital I remember and not quite exposing it. The grounds have improved the farther we’ve wandered from the Visitor’s Center. We’ve passed community gardens, a vegetarian restaurant, the Instilling Goodness and Developing Virtue Schools. But the front doors to the Hall are locked, and we’re shut out once again. We are about to turn back when Pat spies an adjacent hallway illustrated with murals. These are the four great heavenly kings, he informs me. I realize that he and I are experiencing two different versions of this place and wonder which one is true.
I’m hoping this building might have been the commissary; I listen for the clang of silverware, a braying schizophrenic. Instead, the hum of a ceremony echoes through the stucco. We observe through an open door. Lanterns and red banners festoon the ceiling. Buddha statuettes encased in glass shelves line the walls. There are 10,000 of them, I’m disappointed to learn. I was expecting a less literal explanation for the City’s name. Across the red-carpeted floor, monks and nuns in saffron robes kneel on elevated bowing cushions. The only 21st century touch: iPad stands.
A young monk eyes us warily. There’s the sound of ringing bells, a language neither of us speaks. Chanting. In its midst, I’m a tuning fork, subtly vibrating. An unexpected pleasantness alights: the luminance of unfettered devotion. We walk on, and Pat resumes his lecture: “Everyone who visits the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas has a chance to become a Buddha.”
“Really?” I say.
“It’s written right here.”
“How does that happen?”
“There has to be a process,” he says. “Everything is about process.”
“A process based on a chance.”
“Well,” he says, “then all you can do is roll the dice…the Zen dice.”
I grant him a smile.
“But what does it mean to be a Buddha in real terms? I’ve been hearing this stuff my whole life.”
“To stop wanting, desiring things,” Pat says.
Memories of gurus flutter by. In my youth, they’d been revered. They changed nothing.
“It can’t be that simple,” I say.
The corridor spills onto a parking lot. The map indicates we’ve reached another boundary. A long, flat-roofed structure with windows on the second floor only rises in the distance. This is the area where the rest of the patients were housed, including the Loons. What we called “the other side.” After a few weeks in the Rubicon, you figured this out, though you didn’t know which ward contained them. Other buildings partially obscured by trees seem a long way off. A street courses into this shrouded region. It’s clear the Buddhists don’t want anyone to see it. I feel the pull of recognition and a deep unease.
◆
No lies. It was our number one directive. We were all highly skilled cons. To break this aptitude, we were forced to embrace a radical new form of group therapy called The Game. The Game was created by Chuck Dederich, Sr., the founder of Synanon, the most successful drug rehabilitation program in the country. A former salesman and recovering alcoholic with no formal training in psychology, Dederich preached that conventional talk therapy failed addicts. The only cure was aggressive confrontation.
It’s telling that Synanon devolved into a dangerous cult. We now have evidence that such therapy causes lasting harm. But The Adolescent Program needed quick results to stay in business. Once a week, we hiked to a dimly lit room in another quadrant of the facility. We sat in a circle on hard, folding metal chairs, plumes of cigarette smoke feathering upward. The counselor explained the mechanics to newcomers. The goal: to help you confront your worst self. The rule: the group went after only one person at a time. Once a “target” was chosen, there was no deviation. The counselor was there to observe.
For a long moment, silence. We gaged facial expressions, nervous tics. Then, someone started. One of us had fibbed about his or her past or had put on airs or was still secretly using. The charges could be numerous. It took a few minutes to sharpen our aim. Sometimes an early salvo fell flat. Sooner or later, one hooked a guilty conscience and The Game was on. You gripped your seat bottom, relieved if it flew past you; terrified if it yanked you in. People yelled. Screamed. Called you a motherfucker, a bastard, a liar, a pathetic junkie, worthless, fucking scum. Under the barrage, you swore you didn’t do anything wrong. You were punished. Who the fuck do you think you are? You’re nothing. You soulless fuck.
Our daily groups covered practical, day-to-day issues. The Game was where the truth lived. Among us were those who had broken through. I remember a guy everyone called “Bones.” He was about my size, intense, blond hair and beard, muscular forearms. He was known for his prowess at Games, feared and fearless. He initiated them so often that just his presence in the room inspired panic. We joined his assaults as fast as we could. The more the target resisted, the uglier they grew. When catharsis finally erupted, the patient collapsed in tears, wailing. People lurched out of their chairs to build the victim back up with loving gestures. But by then, the damage was done. In the Games I witnessed, telling the truth didn’t change much. One young girl, her blonde hair frayed, mascara smeared, shouted out that she had always been in love with her stepbrother. This was seen as a brave confession, applauded. A week later, she was busted selling speed to an alcoholic in the adult program and sent back to juvenile hall.
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Pat and I drift back from the Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas. I’m hovering above defeat. The Visitor’s Center materializes, and I decide that I hate it. That in roping off any trace of the hospital’s troubling past, the Buddhists are complicit in it. But in the overgrown brush beyond the center, shapes emerge from the greenery. A wall corner, a slice of roof. It’s another set of buildings. They are off-tour, at an angle to the Center, back and behind it as if they’d been swept from view. Why hadn’t I noticed this earlier?
We cut across a field patched with dying grass. For some reason, there are no animals in this area. A rutted maintenance road comes into view. Between trees, the sun glares as if in warning. The road leads into an alley that stops between two mustard colored buildings. They are similar to dorms we’d seen earlier that morning, but in much worse condition. A tiled overhang shades the walkway that connects them. The gap between reveals an interior, a dirt lot that may have once been a courtyard. It’s the F-Compound, I’m absolutely certain. I remember the covered walkway, how the rain pounded it, how on our trips back and forth to the commissary, we funneled through this alley
It seems unreal, a mirage. A clarifying apprehension threads through my body. I’m delicate, happy, and fearful. I question whether seeing the Rubicon will be enough.
“We’re here,” I say.
Pat lays a hand on my shoulder. “Holy shit,” he says.
◆
The Game got away from us. It billowed out from the half-dark room in which we attacked each other and cloaked the Rubicon in a haze of agitation. At any point—and it was always surprising when it happened—a daily group could blow up into a Game. Tribal meetings chugged on for hours, deteriorated into shouting matches. Confrontations were routine. The staff encouraged us to be as real as possible with each other. And so we ganged up on one another in the halls, on the way to the bathroom. You’re too soft on people, we howled. You’re rationalizing. You’re fake. This too was considered therapy.
People huddled together in corners, whispering. They closed ranks in the commissary like nasty middle-schoolers tracking your every move. You detected fear in blanched faces. The way your fellow inmates perched on the ratty furniture, ready to run. Often, you heard whimpering after lights out. We didn’t trust each other. We were conditioned not to. After a while, it became manifest that there were two classes of people in the Rubicon: those who got the Game, and those who didn’t. You were never sure where you belonged.
The daily combat gnawed at me. When I discovered that all I had to do was yell louder than anyone else, I became adept at the Game. If the program thought it could break me through verbal abuse, it hadn’t met my parents. I reverted to the furious boy I’d been hiding all along. I found my true class: the practical jokers, the rebels, and miscreants.
Together we wreaked havoc. A brother from the Iliad house turned me on to a kilo of sinesemilla wedged under the gazebo. I swiped glue from woodshop, box cutters. Ambling through the empty dining room of the geriatric unit one evening with a guy named Barney, I stepped on a numbered ping-pong ball on the carpet. The room had been set up for the next day’s Bingo game with scorecards and multicolored chips, a metal cage spinner. We trashed it. For punishment we were ordered to wear janitor’s clothes (khaki pants and shirts), dunces’ hats and signs strung around our necks that labeled us “stupid and mean.” It wasn’t enough to bring me down. I disrupted camping trips, music jams, classes. Late one Saturday night, I lay in bed in the dorm relishing my power. The daily staff had gone home for the weekend. The only authority figures in the Rubicon were a local Presbyterian minister and his wife who watched over us in their absence. In the semi-dark, I launched a pillow over the cube wall. It landed with a laugh from the other side, flew back with a pleasing ferocity. I glanced up—Barney was leering at me. Then, he ran. I chased him up and down the aisles. Others quickly joined in. Before long, nearly every boy in the dorm was darting around tight spaces, slamming into walls. One guy swung from a ceiling lamp until he fell and took a chunk of particle board with him. We hunted in packs. We busted windows, kicked down doors. When the lights blazed on, we froze. The minister and his wife stood at the entrance, accompanied by men I’d never seen before. Someone may have told me they were community members who volunteered at the hospital: local store owners, farm workers. The minister announced that the ring leaders would be rounded up. Of course, I was first.
A farm worker ordered me to get dressed. He marched me out of the house with a fist clamped on my elbow. Across the courtyard, an Econoline van had been parked alongside his partner. I was the only passenger. I remember the quiet drive, the back of one man’s neck rimmed with fuzz, the yellow slits of light on the speedometer. The van’s headlights swept the deserted lawns and larger buildings on the other side of the hospital. We entered one through a maintenance door and followed the stairs down to a basement of empty padded cells. They looked as if they hadn’t been occupied in years. The farm worker yanked a door open. I knew what I was supposed to do. He seemed embarrassed as he tried to lace the straightjacket, then gave up and let it hang loose. He had pomaded black hair, and the face of a man just doing his job. After an hour or so, an attendant undid the restraint and said “don’t do anything funny.” I didn’t. The cell reeked of urine. The padding on the walls was stained and slashed apart, the stuffing billowing out. The next morning another attendant shoved through the door without a key. It hadn’t been locked all night—apparently, there was a bit of theater in my punishment. Still, I was so frightened, I spoke only to answer questions. I was ushered upstairs and into an office, handed a bowl of lukewarm Cream of Wheat, and a round of blue and green and white tablets. I swallowed them with a paper cup of water.
The attendant walked me to the day room. He deposited me on a sofa near a coffee table lopsided with magazines and returned to the office. He knew I wasn’t going to be any trouble. The long night, the lack of sleep, and the drugs wrapped me in a liquid haze. It was all I could do to raise an arm. And besides, I had company. The Loons I’d encountered so often across the hospital grounds, the broken people I’d humiliated, they were all there: Mr. Freeze, performing his Frankenstein stutter step; the man with the hollow cheeks; the gravel eater who seemed content to merely chew her fist. There were others in bathrobes and pajamas, beltless pants, blankets. There were those who hadn’t shaved and those who hadn’t bathed and those you could smell the shit on from across the room. Some talked to themselves. Some talked to invisible others. Some rotated around the furniture in erratic patterns.
The room was a collision of voices. It was larger than the day room in the Rubicon, with a tall ceiling and barred windows that looked out on a landscape that seemed foreign. I worried I’d been transferred to another institution. But when I tried to rise and get a closer look, I fell back onto the couch, exhausted. I stayed there for the rest of the day. There was a wooden TV console with no screen. I seem to recall music, but can’t remember what it was.
Across the coffee table, Anthony lounged in a battered armchair, one leg dangling above the tiled floor. He scowled, then unfolded an Encyclopedia Britannica, aimed an index finger at a page, mouthed words. I smoked one cigarette after another. When the pack ran out, an attendant tossed me a fresh one, the same guy who’d given me breakfast. He had thin blond hair and a tan, and in any other setting, I might have taken him for a surfer. He retreated to the folding table near the medication cage where he and his colleagues were playing poker. There were four attendants altogether, and they did as little as possible.
I yearned for invisibility. Mid-morning, a tussle broke out between Anthony and an older black man. He was bone thin, draped in a tweed jacket and glasses with thick lenses that lent him the air of a college professor. The two fell into a tug-of-war over Anthony’s book. Anthony shrieked, “No, you may not; no, you may not!” An orderly with big arms rose from the card table. Anthony let go. The other man strolled away with his prize, snickering. Anthony curled up in his chair, hid his face behind his knees. I picked up a magazine from the coffee table, the August 27th, 1945, issue of Time, General MacArthur on the cover. In my peripheral vision, a body inched across the floor in my direction. It was a woman in a black sweater and white blouse with a veil covering her face. She gradually lowered herself onto the couch, folded her pale hands on her lap. A tiny silver crucifix on a chain vibrated on her neck. She appeared to be crying. I made the mistake of asking what was wrong. She began speaking a rapid high-pitched gibberish that rose and fell between sobs. It was sing-song, bits of pig Latin, nonsense. I don’t remember how long she sat there.
Other patients came and went. Some shuffled, others peeked between fingers or glared. I was the intruder, the uninvited guest. One man brooded above me. He had a puffy face and a damp, bald head.
“Don’t believe it,” he said. “All of this is a lie.”
When I asked him what was a lie, his face reddened.
“It. Is. All. A. Lie.” He shook. He clenched his fists, stomped away.
The professor circled the perimeter of the room with a pained expression, as if he didn’t belong, as if there’d been a mistake. Though they roomed together, shared meals and nearly every minute of their life with one another, the patients in this ward were profoundly disconnected from one another.
We may have had lunch. There was a medication line. An attendant accompanied me to the bathroom. By afternoon, I became less interesting, and visits to the couch dwindled. Although I could sense the vibrations, only a handful of people were responsible for the commotion. The rest leaned against walls or radiators, staring, open mouthed, blank. Many were terribly old.
For the rest of the afternoon, nothing dramatic happened. Those who were moving about kept moving about. Anthony got his Britannica back. My head cleared. Although the hospital had once housed the criminally insane, none of these people were remotely dangerous. The day room was like a three-act play in which all the acts were exactly the same. This was the end of the run for these actors and actresses. They would never perform anywhere else. That evening, a counselor from the Rubicon arrived to take me back. I remember the light outside, how beautiful it was fading from the leaves. How I wanted to feel relieved but couldn’t. The discussion about next steps. The counselor was named Dennis, light red hair, pasty face, and for the first time, he seemed relaxed in my company. Like old friends, we walked casually back across the grounds.
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The F-Compound is fragmented. It’s hard to tell how many of the cottages remain. Some walls are dense with vines. The gazebo is gone, its floor an octagonal chunk in the courtyard. Birds flutter to the roof line, then dart away as if it’s unstable. In the alley, a large dumpster sits beside a crossover SUV, the tailgate down.
Pat and I are stunned like archaeologists who’d never expected to find the ruins. Abruptly, a plump woman with a buzz cut zips around a corner toting a box. She’s followed by a young man with a coil of hose. They stop. Both wear gray outfits with knotted belts that resemble karategis. The woman cautiously sets her load down, balls her hands on her hips.
“You can’t be back here,” she says, distressed.
I apologize. I tell her, “We mean no harm.”
“This is a private area,” she says. “No tourists.”
“I know,” I say. “I used to live here, a long time ago.”
She frowns. “In these dormitories?”
“Yes,” I say. “Back when it was a hospital, a mental hospital.”
The other Buddhist doesn’t know what to do with the hose. He sinks to one knee, wraps it tighter around one arm. It’s an odd decision, given the context. Two strangers have breached security, but at this moment, the hose is crucial. The sun falls straight onto the alley. The asphalt, the bumpers of the car, and the walls ripple with it. The two Buddhists are sweating; dark stains mar their armpits. In the harsh brightness, the woman stands like an animal protecting her own. She’s middle aged or approaching it, her crew cut tinted gray.
“So, how do you like it now?” she says. “Is it the same or different?”
I’m thrown by her switch in tone. It takes a minute to answer. In that minute, I feel the passage of time, the space between what the hospital once was and what it is today. The distance life carries us from our origin stories. Mendocino had always been mine. When I picture the boy I was back then, I see someone not much older than a child, a lost soul who was only temporarily lost, stumbling upon those who would never find their way.
“Both,” I finally say.
The other Buddhist has risen, abandoning his chore. He’s young, deferential in the way some young men are at that age, eyeing his partner for cues.
She nods half-heartedly, as if she can’t decide what to do next.
“You see,” she says, “you can’t be back here because our students rest and study here. Our students are very special. We must do everything we can to safeguard their efforts.”
“I know,” I say. “At least I think I know.”
“But you were here,” she says.
I can sense the battle she’s waging between her faith and her curiosity. In an instant, I understand how the Buddhists see me. I’m a ghost from a dark past they are transforming into a more enlightened present. I wonder if she’s feeling something like I did, the first time I encountered a Loon.
“Would it be possible,” I say, “if we just looked around a little?”
“We won’t hurt anything,” Pat says. I’m startled by the sound of his voice.
The Buddhist in charge retreats. “You can go as far as there,” she says, pointing at the gap yawning between the dorms. “And not for too long.”
I drift towards it with Pat behind me, tentative. We reach the break in the walls and hesitate. Around the corner, there’s bound to be a clearer view of the whole layout; the walkway as it squares around the courtyard; the cottages with their pretentious names inscribed on the address plates; the Rubicon and the green fields beyond the complex. But I go no further. I’m finished. The waves of anguish I’ve been riding all day have settled. I no longer need to recover something that isn’t there anymore.
We thank the Buddhists for their kindness. They allow a couple of cell phone photos. They smile as Pat and I turn to leave. Then, the leader jogs after us.
“Wait,” she says, her hands clasped. “You can come back again, sometime. But you must check with me first, okay?”
I nod, speechless.
“You are always welcome here,” she says.
My sternum tightens. The warning that a difficult emotion is surging. I weep a bit, choke it back, this ancient, fragile pain. Like the veiled woman in the insane ward, I can’t make words work.
The woman in charge points to Pat. “Bring him, too.”
He grins like the Buddha.
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My niece’s wedding is everything we hoped it would be. Another shimmering day among family and friends, a ceremony under a trellised grape arbor, presided over by my sister Ann, who lends a homemade touch. It is a universe away from The Adolescent Treatment Program, a reminder that my life has held moments of grace and joy.
Dev and I depart Hopland early the next morning. We say goodbye to Pat, who’s lodging with my mother and other relatives at a bland, frontage road hotel. He brandishes the peacock feather in the lobby, that luminous black and violet stripe. We promise to de-brief later. As the car winds between amber hills towards San Francisco, I’m blue. I’m leaving the hospital for what will surely be the last time. As Pat and I made our way across the grounds, some of the frail old buildings appeared to be leaning off their foundations, prophesying collapse. One day, the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas will also disintegrate.
On the flight, a light pressure fills my ears as the jet ascends. The hospital lingers. I close my eyes and envision it as a living being who has lost everything: its dignity and authority, reputation, promise. Life is nothing but change, the Buddhists warn us, even for a former insane asylum, the crumbling haunted wards and the people who died in them.
I picture the day their spirits return. They skim the walkways, glide above the lawns, marvel at the Buddhists and their curious rituals. But they can’t stay. They soar into the vast California sky, clouds now, wisps of memory. High above the red-roofed buildings, they hover. The power the hospital once held over them has long since dissipated. Higher still, they see how small it is in the greater scheme of mountains and forests rolling north. How it vanishes into a world hardly any of them know.