My Decade on Broadway
Page 5/7

“Saving it, right?” he said, twisting around the entrance to the kitchen. In and out, in and out of the doorway he twirled. 
“You must leave the kitchen, you must leave my kitchen!” she hollered and Bruce, struggling with paranoid schizophrenia, stuck his tongue out. 
“Bruce, please leave,” she repeated. Then: “get out!” 
At that point, Bruce, who stood several inches below six feet and weighed about 165 pounds, quickly ran across the room and threw a few roundhouse punches, catching Daisy in the side of the head. When she hit the floor, he kicked her legs, screaming her name. I looked around. My peers stared, openmouthed. The meal was burning—I think it was Sloppy Joes—and he was hitting her again. It took me about five seconds to react but I eventually dragged him off Daisy and threw him on the ground. He quickly bounced up, cursed, and ran away. Ten seconds later he returned and shouted, “Save my dinner, please!” 
Another client helped Daisy up, and she plopped down on a chair and held her face. “Ah, the pleasures of working with the damaged,” she said, trying to grin. Her ebony cheek was bruised, her hair as tight and gray as ever. Bruce ended up in the emergency room and Daisy went right on with her shift. We ate quietly that evening, all on edge, stunned by the assault. Other than the damaged comment, Daisy didn’t talk about it again. I thought that was extraordinary of her. 
They held art therapy in a finished, low-ceilinged basement on Saturday mornings. I’m exactly six feet and had to bend over in one section down there. It sometimes felt like I was going to be crushed, like that subterranean world of despair and malaise had grown so heavy that the building was caving in on us. A crooked billiard table was set against the wall and clients’ artwork hung on a clothesline. Wild, abstract paintings, delicate still life’s of fruit and crucifixes, lonely figures surrounded by black-eyed Susans and bursting, purple daisies dangled from wall to wall. With the hues and shapes being crafted on those mornings, the room transformed itself into a beautiful refuge, a safe nook of color. 
I think self-harmers feel emotionally dead or numb and they hurt themselves to ease their pain, to see that they are alive. To feel anything. Or they have trauma in their past, and they can’t cope with strong emotion, so they wound. Emotional pain is the common thread. But each person’s wounds are specific, each psyche a mishmash of slights, memories, horrors. Some cut, some burn, some break fingers and bones, some punch themselves, some pick at themselves, some pull out all their hair. The list is lengthy. 
Cutting and burning myself never brought me closer to that dreamy, brief fugue that I experienced the first time on the hospital grounds in Hartford. It also isolated me from those I loved. An old therapist had said that most nonlethal self-harmers burn out of the habit by the time they hit thirty. They move on, they grow up. They find a mate, a passion, a life. I hung on until I was forty. Toward the end of my troubles, I clung to them desperately. It had been who I was for a decade and a half. Where the hell was I to go if not to some new hospital? Where I’d meet another collection of tragic, harried women (they were mostly women) who mangled their bodies like me? What would it mean for me to stop? 
When they stopped giving allowance money at PFTL, I brought my used CDs to Cutler’s to get cash for implements. After several trips to the hospital with that funding, the home took away my music. When the tunes disappeared, I started trading my books; parting with Freud was a piece of cake but John Cheever and Kate Chopin were tremendously painful. I traipsed down to the Book Trader Café with The Essential Book of Poetry beneath my arm.
“You sure you want to unload this?” the cashier said. “It seems like a keeper.”
“You know how the economy is,” I mumbled weakly, ashamed and unable to make eye contact. I have sunk to a new low, I thought, but quickly pocketed the six dollars and hustled over to purchase blades. Then I waited for the precise time to mark myself up.