Cool for you, p.1
Cool for You, page 1
Copyright © 2000 Eileen Myles
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE AUTHOR would like to acknowledge the following journals, anthologies and web sites which published excerpts from this book:
Transience and Sentimentality, (The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Ma), 5 x 5 singles, Fence, Murmur, Queer 13, Less is More, Boston School catalogue (ICA, Boston), Provincetown Arts, Fetish, and Blithe House Quarterly: a site for gay short fiction (www.blithe.com/) and Nerve.com.
THE AUTHOR would also like to thank Helen Marden, The MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, Hide & Seek (The Bucknell Art Gallery) and Stuart Horodner, the former Soviet Union and Persephone Miele, Ryszard & Maria Wasko at the Artist Museum in Lodz, Poland, Kathe Izzo, Michael Carroll and The Schoolhouse Art Center in Provincetown MA and Provincetown Arts and Jennifer Liese, Elaine Showalter and Annie Iobst, Stephanie Grant, Maggie Paley and Jane DeLynn, Lia Gangitano, Kathleen Finneran and Joe Westmoreland, Bill Sullivan, Jennie Portnof and Matthew Stadler, Marylyn Donahue, Joan Larkin, Tom Carey and Robert Harms, Mary Rattray, Ann Rower, Myra Mniewski and Rumi, Peggy Griffin and her mom, Michelle Tea, Sara Seinberg, Marcie Blackman, Sini Anderson, Sash Sunday and all the girls and boys of Sister Spit, Louise Quayle, Sander Hicks of the brave and visionary Soft Skull Press, and especially my great love, Karin Cook.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
COVER PHOTO: “Rocky” (1983) by Jack Pierson.
Interior design by David Janik
eISBN 978-1-61902-917-0
SOFT SKULL PRESS
An Imprint of Counterpoint
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Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Nellie Riordan Myles
CONTENTS
NORTH BUILDING
IN THE WEST
TO GO HOME
.1
I’ve made up a myth in my life that any time you push yourself through something uncomfortable, say a snowstorm and you don’t have boots on, then you will get the job, because you have been so doggedly good or so stupid—you knew just when to push on. Like most things I pretend to believe it’s usually not true. My feet are wet and I’ve got nothing (like right now) but of course once things happened that way and it wasn’t really all that wonderful. It’s how I got my job at the Fernald School.
I was driving a cab in Cambridge. I know I’ve told you this before but I’m lonely tonight and it’s raining out. The cab was yellow of course and it operated, I mean it got customers by one of those radios, a little pick up thing that this guy’s scratchy voice came out of and because I was a girl and a fuck-up I didn’t get much work. Some guy stopped me in Harvard Square. Ran up and said, can you take me to work. Where do you work. He looked like a hippy. The Walter E. Fernald School. It’s in Waltham. Show me okay. Sure. . . it’s right up on Trapelo Road.
Trapelo Road. It was one of those Italian-sounding names my mother always said. Trapelo Road, she’d go to Aunt Anne on the phone and now I was having my own relationship to the streets of the world. It was snowing hard. What do you do there?
The following Monday I was climbing up the hill that led into the place. I was trying so hard not to lose my mind. Later I was trying not to lose it in San Francisco. Maybe the problem was I was always drinking so much, but it felt like everything. This is the place where you find out if your head is screwed on tight enough, said Tom. He was the Director of North Building. I was thinking he had a really little head, a pretty little head and then he was opening the door to a room full of them. “Severely retarded adult males” was the classification. He said there was a book called Pandemonium in Crisis about the place. There used to be a bunch of ministers from Cambridge who did all the jobs instead of college kids like us and the legend was the ministers would fuck them and kill them, the residents. We didn’t call them patients we called them residents. It was this funny kind of school.
Outside the building next to mine was a porch and it overlooked a green hill and a lot of trees and a young guy sat out there with his legs crossed and he was rocking slightly forward again and again. It seemed like he was in rhythm with every little thing there was. I’d walk in each morning, onto the grounds of the school, and see him swaying and feel incredibly sad that he could exist like that and I could not, and then everything that was inside. . . .
Do you know what it’s like to smell a building that’s full of shit? Human shit. It was like dying and going to hell. It was just like that every morning. Hardly awake, hungover and the darkness of the barely lit walls and the distant groans and shouts and laughter and the smell of human shit in the walls. And disinfectant. It was like it fixed it a little bit and then it got worse. It was like clouds in the stink.
Tom flung open the door like a real sadist. Peter was coming toward me. Skinny head, big lips. In a way they all reminded me of boys I knew in grade school. In kindergarten. I mean if they grew up absolutely the way they were. Will you play with me. Gonna have a party, gonna have cake, something like that. Feet kept coming my way. Slow. It seemed like one in front of the other like baby steps. Another guy down on the floor, baggy pants around his hips. Da-da, Da-da. There was something intensely erotic about this guy. His whole being felt like drive and it was perched there, demanding Da-da. His hair was black. He looked like Napoleon. There was a wondrous, wondrous boy named Bobby Doyle. His eyes were blue and ecstatic. He was my diaper boy, a beautiful baby. His eyes were whirling around. He walked on the balls of his feet and he looked like a beautiful centaur. His hands were outstretched and dripping down his fingers like a kangaroo. And he was immensely, immensely happy.
The one who said Da-da, I remember, was pissing a lot. His dick was often out and he would piss right on the floor. The name of the job was nurse’s attendant. We made about a hundred dollars a week, not much. We were all recent college graduates and most of us wore earth shoes and the guys had pony tails. I wore boat shoes. Things are different now, said Tom and part of the difference was that as well as the book, there had also been a famous movie, Titicut Follies, about Massachusetts institutions, and so the local caring community, mostly emanating in this case from Harvard, had decided that Fernald would be an excellent target for a behavior mod program.
I was delighted to be inside an institution and not because I was nuts. My father’s mother, Nellie Myles, had spent the last seventeen years of her life at Westborough State Hospital. My parents would never let me go in when we visited her. They would just make faces because it was so horrible. I was lucky I was five they insisted because they in their thirties did not want to go inside. It’s interesting to think of my parents as such young people with the obligations of having two small children and a mentally ill parent, or one perhaps just interned for a very long time. They said Nellie’s hands were clenched tight for years. I had always wanted to go “inside.” Inside anything, so Fernald would do.
At Harvard they had devised this wonderful program and Tom told me this was what I would learn. Each one of these men had some form of negative behavior we didn’t like. Bobby Doyle, the glowing centaur, generally had no clothes on. Nakedness was his negative behavior. The man who went Da-da kept pulling his dick out.
Actually his pants were too big so they were slipping down as well. He was a little guy, short, with excellent sharp features. He had passion. There was a tall character named Francis who also couldn’t keep it in. He had a huge nose, was probably in his mid-forties. You would walk in and go, Hi Francis how are you doing today. He would look at you moistly, going, Today, Today. You’d go, Cut it out. And he’d look right back laughing at you, going, Cut it out, Cut it out. It was the greatest joke and you felt he was the sane man in here and you were one of the fools. He had a condition called echolalia where he would simply repeat the last thing you said. It was disturbing to see how little I required of a conversation, how easily duped I was into believing I was heard. Francis had snot pouring out of his nose and there was usually a gleam of it striping the front of his shirt. I have pictures of these guys I took on my last day at the school and I thought of them as my children walking around in the sun. I left there in the Spring.
We had these meetings at the Shriver Center. That was the shiny facility at the front of the grounds where politicians and scientists would visit to see how things were doing at the school. No one ever came back to the residences and even the Harvard psychiatrists who designed the programs rarely did and then it was with undisguised expressions of disgust. It was disgusting. The place and the smell and these guys. At the Shriver Center we would discuss each boy’s bad behavior—the nudity and exhibitionism. I don’t think there was really much else. Swearing. There was an old man, Walter, who was really schizophrenic and he would loiter over by a big window in the corner holding his massively outsized trousers like the folds of a dhoti, and he would murmur and mumble fuck you Leroy goddamn piece of sh
One of the things you learned quickly about the Fernald School or North Building was that it was a nightmare of misclassification or just no classification. Walter should have been in a mental hospital, not a state school for the mentally retarded. But of course, seeing this place, what’s the difference. His problem was he swore. And we had a chart. Each one of us nurse’s attendants. Usually we were two on a shift though there would be long expanses of time alone either because of someone’s days off, or they were needed elsewhere—or, as the social relationships among the attendants became more complicated, because somebody wanted to fuck with your head.
This guy, Mark, my partner, who I will tell you more about later, had the theory that if they had IQs of 40 and mine was really great—150 or 172, then it would just sort of average out, and they would get a little smarter having one of us around but their stupidity would be overwhelming. Alone with them you became an idiot. Half your intelligence, it was clear, arose from congress with other people. Or something from them. Here you got nothing. So alone, dumber and dumber you’d go.
Up at the Shriver Center we were given our tools. The chart for each guy on which the day was broken up into fifteen minute intervals. And we were given aprons to wear, the kind newsboys use. Attached to our aprons were little time pieces that went off buzzing every fifteen minutes. In the aprons were band-aid boxes full of chocolate stars. Once back in the locked wards of North Building we would hear the buzz and quickly scan the room to see if any penises were exposed. If Bobby Doyle was naked. If he were clothed I would go up and hug him and say, “Good boy, Bobby!” And I would give him a chocolate star. This was very good for me. I would feel swept up with a feeling of beneficence when I was administering hugs. I wasn’t that kind of person, who went around hugging all the time. This was the early seventies when it seemed that everyone wanted to give you a nice back rub which quickly turned into a sexual opportunity. I just couldn’t see letting anyone who rubbed my back fuck me so I didn’t get touched much. I liked being the dispenser of positive emotion in a population that wouldn’t identify me as a slut. I was tired and now I had a job.
The psychiatrists at Fernald would teach us these methods and then when we did our reinforcements correctly they’d go, “Good work, Eileen!” I cringed at that for the obvious reasons—being totally uncomfortable with these “good parents.” It was a middle-class thing to get stroked for doing a good job. Where I come from, the confused upwardly mobile working class, such encouragement was slimey and manipulative. You were supposed to do a good job and if you didn’t you would get fired. There was something rotten about this slippery in-between where the assumption was they could get more from you by patting you like a dog. They were right. It was embarrassingly true.
My partner Mark and I took up the reinforcement therapy with a vengeance. We wanted to quit smoking. We wanted to be good. All around us was the subtle feeling of a campaign for self-improvement. If we were daily, moment by moment, improving these men’s capacity to live “normally” then what could the therapy do for paragons of intelligence like ourselves. When the buzzer went off we would hug each other for not smoking. Because naturally behind the closed doors of the ward we could do whatever we wanted. It was a smoker’s job. Probably it was a drug addict’s job. One day Mark gave me some speed and it was a terrific day at work and the guys made tremendous progress. In these freedom-loving times we were being handed something scarily wonderful. A discipline.
Of course helping these guys advance our sense of their autonomy was a wonderful thing. But the psychiatrists at Harvard were not so much older than us. Some of us (there was this married couple, for instance, who were going to graduate school) had incrementally improving lives but mostly I think the other nurse’s attendants fell into the blur of “Cambridge people.” The slightly educated well-meaning down-and-out confused.
Our lives were a mess and we needed training too. Mark and I became fast friends through the many hours of internment we shared. Things never got very intense in the ward when there were two of us. Everyone seemed to know their places and we would entertain each other with stories about our lives though I can’t remember a thing about this guy except he wore earth shoes, had gone to college in Vermont. Had a beard and long hair and my initial impression of him was evil. He invited me to his “house” for dinner and then it got weird. I never understood what men wanted from me. I mean I always knew but the unfamiliarity and the predictability shocked me again and again. Why would you want to fuck someone you didn’t know. Perhaps I was spectacularly good looking. I don’t think so. I was just female and relatively young. Very young, 22. Mark was maybe 26. He had already been around too long. He shared his house in Somerville with several “people.” Boys, girls, who knows. There was an animal smell to the place, old furniture. These kind of lousy tossed-down lives. He made dinner and we brought it up to his bedroom. It was probably some rice thing. He was probably macro. He started rubbing my back. It felt weird. He was speaking in this soft voice he had never used before. Maybe a little bit with the residents when he was trying to get them to do something. (Which we weren’t supposed to do. Behavior modification was about freedom). He persisted for a while, asking me if I wanted to hear some music and holding my hand and looking into my eyes. All his behavior seemed patently geared to hanging in until I got the picture that we were going to have sex. I was almost missing that that was his intent, it felt so vague and meaningless. Finally I said I had to go. I was sick of sitting in his room. By now he had retreated to petting the cat and speaking with her. He looked up smiling gently with flashing anger in his eyes. You know, it’s going to be weird with us now, he said as I went out the door. It really felt like a threat.
Mornings I’d stumble into the storage room once I’d waded through the stink. We started work at seven. I was usually late. In the storage room I’d grab an apron which contained yesterday’s band-aid box and flip the lid and fill it full of M&Ms. The chocolate star phase had passed really fast. We were doling out teeny little orange and yellow and red and butterscotch M&Ms. They were cheaper and you could really buy them in bulk. And quickly they got hard as a rock. There was a huge cardboard box full of them in the metal cabinet in the storage room. I dipped in with my band-aid box and then I’d often grab a pawful and pour them in my mouth. That was a bad day. I could tell I was fucked instantly—pouring hard old M&Ms down my throat at 7:15 or 7:20 usually meant it was all over already. Because I’d be dipping in all day, not really capable of eating human food and there was something frightening about being completely plugged into what we were reinforcing them with. I was gorging on the prize and I was dizzy.
I’ve had a funny association all my life with work and candy. Nuns were my primary teachers growing up and they all had big food problems. In fifth grade we had the candy nun, the one who supplied it and stored it for the whole school, and candy was a big money maker at St. Agnes. Sometimes during a math test Sister Jenilda would tell us with an extra element of angry fear in her voice that no one, no one was to turn around. And then you’d hear her creaking the wooden cabinets open at the back of the room and the soft but unmistakable rattling of candy papers and the quiet murmur of her satisfied chewing. We’d all be smirking and giggling wildly and we would make a silent chorus of chewing pig faces at the front of the room that we could slyly appreciate in giggling profile. Oh grade school how I miss you!
After school when I was fifteen I’d take the bus down Mass. Ave to the Harvard Coop where I rang the register for a long time at the candy counter. It’s where I gained twenty pounds. I’d slam a Lindt hazelnut bar down on the floor and then feel compelled to eat it because it was broken. I thought hazelnuts were the most ethereal taste in the world, almost like a whistle! That milk chocolate just began melting, rather than being brought there by body heat like the processed chocolates of America.
The M&Ms numbed me. I went reeling out into the dark red halls and my first responsibility was to make sure everyone was out of bed. It was a treacherous feat because inevitably there’d be a few stragglers: big James and his smaller friend guiltily rolling around with shit encrusting their long nailed fingertips. It probably felt good, it was sweaty and hot and dark and I, in the grip of my chocolate jones, was spoiling it. I’d pull the blankets off them and rustle them up, guiding them in the direction of the clothes room where we would dig up some duds. No one’s clothes fit and that was the look. I think they were all donations and in my thrift shop mentality I also went scouring through the endless racks and bags for a sweater or two for myself though like the M&Ms there was something creepy about taking their goods. But of course I did.
