JK Fowler
Archive for
House Mouse No. 1
It became difficult for the children to take him seriously anymore the day their father became a field mouse. Threats of groundings, corporal punishment, and the like just didn’t seem to hold when he said it from 2 inches off the ground while twitching his nose.
Samuel had awoken on a Sunday to the sound of his wife, Betunia, making waffles. While normally a soothing sound, that reminder of the slow paces in life and veritable pleasures that awaited a week worked hard, this morning every atom in his body longed to flee. Opening his eyes, he found the pillows as large as queen size beds, the bed a seemingly endless sea of wrinkled sheets and tossed duvet. He was, to say the least, confused and in nervousness, littered the bed with little pebbles of stool.
The first problem he faced was how to get down from the bed. This was easily accomplished he found by digging his claws into the loopholes of the duvet fabric and spelunking down the side of the bed, leaping off and landing squarely on his four paws. The carpet fibers were filthy and human hairs wedged into the Berber loops hung like nooses, awaiting his entrapment. Weaving through streaked underwear and rolled up socks, the smell of human filth was everywhere. He wondered how it was that they could become so accustomed to the pestilence of dirtied clothes, unwashed pits, sordid counter tops and stained toilet rims. The disarray of their existence seen from inches off the ground revealed a squalor he had never imagined existed: the nail clippings, droplets of lotion, lipstick caps and adventurous chap-stick, endless forests of orphaned hairs, the negative pregnancy tests lodged between the nightstand and the wall, their daughter’s picture, torn and worn at the edges. Memories sprung forth from the lower recesses of their home like nightshade and he imagined them floating upon past times every morning they had placed their feet upon the ground, crunching the hairs, displacing the chap-stick, massaging the lotion deeper and deeper into the carpet.
The door rises like a 40-story skyscraper and Samuel clamours to his back feet, front paws curled and held tightly against his chest and lifts up his neck staring at the door knob, symbolic of the impossible feat before him. He looks down to the base, sees the gap that he had never noticed before and suddenly, as if driven by the invisible force of habit, he is running towards the door, sliding sideways, and squeezing his body through the gap, driving his claws against the wooden floors again and again until he is through.
Bethunia is standing in the kitchen in front of him now, towering over him in his current form just as she had towered over him as a man, a boyfriend, a husband, and later, a father to her children. He wants to yell out to her, beg for her help, have her fix this mishap as she had fixed all the others: the wrecked car after a night of drinking, the money lost on pursuits of grandeur through craps and poker, the lost jobs and times he had forgotten to pick up the kids from school. Her posture is that of strength and confidence: chin held high, chest outright, head back, spine perfectly aligned. She whips the batter, spoons it out in perfect proportions with the large wooden spoons they had gotten from her mother for their wedding, and patiently waits for the light to turn green on the waffle maker. She is giant to him now and he wonders where this longing to have the situation fixed comes from, as if nostalgic for a time when things were pleasantly whole, a time that never was nor ever would be. She lifts her chin higher suddenly as if sensing his presence and turns her head, meeting the eyes of a disheveled, panting mouse near the bedroom doorway and slowly approaches, wielding the wooden spoon in her right hand.
Belle: An Introduction
Belle was a prima donna, a true believer in the power of “I”. Her ego washed the walls with the scented trails of cheap perfume and lotion wherever she walked and when entering a room it was the palpable annoyance that Belle brought that one first noticed. Loud and forceful, it was not uncommon for her to plop herself down on the couch, wedge her way awkwardly into conversation and speedily take it over with the force of a newly-born calf. The conversation would soon digress into ramblings of the latest pop culture motifs, the dress and circumstance of the feigned acquaintances gracing the television screen that Belle did not know but somehow believed took into account her opinions in their day-to-day lives. Others would listen as Belle, seemingly unconscious or uncaring that she had willfully trapped others in her web of, “Oh, did you see what he was wearing? Are you kidding me? Who does that?”s and “She was nothing but a hot mess. Did you see her on the latest [enter any TV show]“s, would continue unabated for minute after minute until everyone was strategically able to exit the room. Alone was something that Belle dreaded and after emptying the room, she would sit, her right leg thrown over the left haphazardly, staring into space until the silence had become too unbearable and she would begin the hunt for her next victim.
Perhaps it was her childhood that laid the foundations for the forceful and vacuous presence of Belle. Perhaps it was that she had never felt loved enough, that her parents never paid her much attention. Then again, perhaps it was just Belle. But when faced with the stench of a Belle let loose, one truly could only think of getting away and no manner of excuse could pave the way to any sort of understanding.
Her hips were wide, her ass large, her breasts over-ripened melons. Her hair was pulled sideways with the loose carelessness of a workday morning begun late, long strands of black hair curled at the tips from the incessant use of her index finger and thumb to play with the locks that had begun forming. Long, press-on nails graced her fingers, each painted with red and orange sunsets over oceans, little white sailboats near the lines of the horizons. These she would click on the hardened surfaces of her desk or a coffee table as she talked, creating a far more interesting distraction than the dribble that emerged from her mouth. Belle’s cell phone was her additional appendage that she seemed to focus in on with all her might, straining at the exercise of texting any number of the men she kept within the recesses of her vapid mind. She considered it rude to ignore texts while talking to a real, live person but this was more understandable when one realized that more often than not, she talked at a person, not to and that she simply never stopped talking.
Survivors of Belle’s conversations would later state that in a way, her presence was productive. It enabled them to drift off, daydreaming to the warbling of a woman unconcerned that her words were not heard, her points not taken seriously. One man later claimed that it was during one of Belle’s sessions that he came up with the design of his later heralded apartment complex, a building covered in wall-to-wall glass which gave it the veneer of transparency while directly behind most of the glass stood concrete walls, 2 feet thick. For many, surviving Belle’s onslaught was an apt lesson in the meaning of thoughtful speech. Belle, however, would continue to be oblivious.
What was perhaps most fascinating about Belle was her uncanny ability to fabricate authority on topics she had next to no knowledge about. The woman had an opinion on everything. Anyone that challenged this was met with the onset of rolling menageries of words violently piled upon one another in no particular order, her voice rising continually when met with resistance as if by being loud she would magically be right. The heavy silences of her victims would resound with spiteful deference and Belle would take this as victory, rearranging her chunky ass cheeks on the sofa, the leather squealing under her unwelcome weight. Transparent, aggressive, inane and superfluous, Belle would more often than not find herself alone, steeping in the uncomfortable recognition that human lifeforms seemed repelled by her presence.
Approaching Finitude
Ten sentences in, he stops. “What’s the point?” he thinks to himself and suddenly with that thought the keystrokes seem infinitely distanced, the ideas far-fetched and overdone. The pens, the pencils, the lined tablets and crusted coffee cups: they all remind him of that which he is not doing, that which taunts him from the emptiness of evenly-spaced, papered lines and a fatal cursor left unsatisfied. The old man in the corner that always threatened to rise up from his slumber does so now, his eyes droopy, his beard long and unkempt and riddled with food particles. His left leg slides and scrapes against the wooden floors of the one-man bar, his jacket hangs in tatters from the edges of his bony limbs, his cane held tightly in his right hand thumps periodically, resounding in the hollows of the bar’s underbelly. This is the man that he longs to forget, the man that haunts his work-less days, the man he wishes never to become.
The approach is long and slow, motion in lines of drawn certitude that weave through the fibers of the bar stools, the floorboards, the empty glasses and resounding silences on dusty lamps and crooked paintings. Memories flash before his eyes of times that once were, nostalgic rememberings of falsified simpler times. Vivid colors resound through the recesses of his troubled mind, mix with the images of a childhood birthday party: cookies and cream ice cream cake, birthday balloons, six magic candles that light again once blown out, the clown with the smeared makeup. There is a wanting to return but neither happiness nor sadness associated with these images. Simply to return which he knows, through all meanings of the word tragedy, he cannot.
The old man is closer now, bearing down upon him with his cod-fish breath, his rotting green teeth, his one glass eye slightly turned inward to the right. He says nothing, merely watches as the man approaches in a dreaded waltz. His craft is one of giving in, of accepting that which comes and rearranging it through fanciful prose, of seeing that which everyone else sees but in a slightly twisted manner, one not accountable to the rigid laws of a mankind bent on destroying the will of the imaginarians.
The old man is here, within him, nestling into his veins and begins to roll out prose through the tips of his fingers. The fear gives way to exhilaration. He has given in to the man’s presence, embraced him within the lining of his being, and in tandem they jauntily walk through the empty lines of the pages, scattering color, expounding upon love, death, life and all the other nonsensical rantings of beings possessed by the power of the written word. He has returned momentarily to the land of the living through the embraced presence of a small and withered death.
Fieldnotes No. 5 (3/3/10): Care, Control, and Vision: Medical Structures of Sentiment (Bellevue Hospital)- 28th Street, Main Lobby, Secondary Lobby, Prayer Room, Back of Bellevue 1:55 PM-4:05 PM
Mind to Hand Mapping of the Bellevue and Periphery
Link to map: here.
6 Train to 28th Street Stop: Feeder Route Into the “Eye” (Main Lobby) of Bellevue 1:55 PM
Notes: I want to trace the feeder street (E. 28th) into the “Eye” of the Bellevue, mapping the approach on the street which runs perpendicular to the main lobby (from now on referred to as the “Eye”) of the Bellevue. Slicing off of 1st Avenue, heading straight into the Bellevue, what are the ways that people can enter the space of the Bellevue? How can people walk there, what are the differing avenues by which people come upon this space? Through parks, past churches, within closed spaces of vehicles?
I feel like I am chipping away at the Bellevue, attempting to understand it from different angles. Connections are being made but I am unconscious of what they are at this time–I have yet to feel a whole picture come to light–I chip away from different physical angles in the hope of seeing differently.
The Approach: E. 28th Street and Park Avenue
FedEx, StoneyBrook, ConEdison building covered in pink and black tiles. Park South Hotel at 124 E. 28th Street, across from it a parking garage and the parking attendant and others passing by watch me as I jot this down. I wonder why I am doing this, how noting specific buildings is going to help me get a sense for the environment through which people wade in approaching the “Eye” of the Bellevue.
The Approach: Lexington and E. 28th Street
Little Michael Corner Deli and Grocery store at 118 E. 28th Street. AY Kitchen across the street, Haandi Pakistani, Indian and Bangladesh restaurant nearby. In the span of one block, three people are caught talking to themselves. The Bellevue is not far. Ajunta Travel Service, Curry in a Hurry. Little India presents itself to me in a myriad of small, hole-in-the-wall shops and bodegas and I continue searching for some meaning that separates E. 28th street from all the other streets in NYC. How will this street tell me anything different? Why focus here as a “feeder street” into the Bellevue rather than 1st Ave?
The Approach: Between Lexington and 3rd Ave.
Bollywood Corner and Bollywood Grocery next to Coup de Couer. Across the street sits Epiphany School, founded in 1888. On a soiled blue and yellow flag waving in the winds on E. 28th is written, “The Epiphany School: A Tradition in Excellence”. It’s architecture is reminiscent of the Old Psych Ward, angels carved in brown stone leer at me over shields and feathered leaves. Next door there is a Catholic Church, erected around the same time period. I wonder if these are sisters to the Bellevue knowing that education, church and madness are never far apart and note a few dates of interest from Wikipedia:
- 1879: A pavilion for the insane is erected within hospital grounds—an approach considered revolutionary at the time.
- 1883: Bellevue initiates a residency training program that is still the model for surgical training worldwide.
- 1884: The Carnegie Laboratory, the nation’s first pathology and bacteriology laboratory, is founded at Bellevue.
- 1888: The first American nursing school for men is established.
- 1889: Bellevue physicians are first to report that tuberculosis is a preventable disease.
- 1892: Bellevue establishes a dedicated unit for alcoholics.
The church next to the Epiphany School has a cross which is etched into the corner stone of the aged building. The stones are painted sky blue, an odd pairing with the mold and grime-encrusted red stones just above. It is a Roman Catholic Church and the sign outside says, “Our Lady of the Scapular and St. Stephens”. There are tarot card readings next door, Thai NY next to that and a Friends Shoe Repair and Tailor aside the 3rd Avenue Quick Stop. An older woman in tattered clothing slaps a yellow cab with the brunt of her cane asking for change. Awaiting the light, the cabbie calmly practices an air of indifference and she grunts and moves on as the light changes and he drives forward. Again I wonder what it is that I am looking for. A parade of crazy people, remnants of the lasting effects of the Bellevue psych ward? I begin to wonder if it is true that many of the old patients of the Bellevue remain in the vicinity of the site of their incarceration and if it is true, what this means? E. 28th Street is a lens through which the Bellevue will be approached.
The Approach: Between 3rd Ave. and 2nd Ave.
The Rosehill Apartment complex, Chesapeake House across the street. I am in the residential areas now filled with apartment complexes and parks. On my left, the Self Realization Center with its gold leaf signage rises, constructed in 1893, not long before the tuberculosis outbreak where the Bellevue was thrown into overtime. Euro Beauty: Men, Women and Unisex and Aurora’s Bead and Jewelry, Basal Deli and Grocery on the corner of 2nd Ave and E. 28th Street.
The Approach: Between 2nd Ave. and 1st Ave.
Kips Bay Court 500.510.520 sits on the outer edges of 2nd and E. 28th. This is the entrance to the park, a buffer between the Bellevue and the wider NYC. Between Kips Bay and other apartment complexes there is a wide, gray-stoned path, each mass-produced brick interlocking with those around it. The plants lining the path are deadened, the tree branches from the aged trees above rattle against one another. I walk down the path, camera in hand and stop to take a few shots of the apartment complexes and the park. An older woman with orange and brown hair pushing a green laundry cart stops at the sight of my camera. She looks trapped and slightly perturbed and graces the presence of the lower section of my photograph. I finish, lower my camera and she shakes her head as if admonishing me for slyly taking her picture. I want to tell her that it was not her that I was focused on but I do not and instead simply walk past. She is gone and I continue walking down the rolling hill towards the Bellevue.
The Approach: Mount Carmel Plaza and E. 28th Street
The Mt. Carmel Plaza cordons off the section of land directly in front of the Bellevue “Eye”: 344 E. 28th Street. This is property of NYC Housing Authority, a towering 15-20 floors of apartment buildings carved in dark red and black brick. At its base, the barren grounds of tiered garden beds lined with railroad ties sit idly by, a soiled and torn American flag flapping in the winter winds and facing the “Eye” of the Bellevue. I wonder if these gardens are ever used and if so, by whom? I wonder who lives here, watching the Bellevue, being watched by the “Eye”. Are they past or present patients, shuffling through a halfway house on their road to the “real” world or are they simply residents, not unlike any other residents marking the streets of NYC and beyond?
I look up from the barren grounds to the “Eye” beyond. The outer facade is constructed of iron “curtain” and slabs of rectangular, clear glass in a manner quite similar to that of a 50′s office building. Many of the blinds are open to 1st Ave. Inside stand the doctors, the patients, the blood pressure gauges hanging on the walls, the patient chairs wrapped tightly in bright, white butcher paper, the doctor’s and nurse’s tools in stainless steel containers. The blinds on 90% of the facade to the modern wing are open and I wonder if this is an attempt to make Bellevue’s practices transparent and visible?
I look down 1st Ave. and take in the parade of the “Eye”, the Old Psych Ward and the NYU “Ceter,” all sitting next to one another. I look up again at the windows on the “Eye” and take notice that none of them are tinted. Hanging on lampposts just outside the main entrance there are small blue signs with yellow and white writing and an NYPD crests that read, “Bellevue Celebrates Peace Officer Week”.
The “Eye”: Main Lobby, 2:39 PM
I enter the “Eye” and immediately begin searching for a seat from which I can observe the main lobby. Above the Au Bon Pain cafe in the corner, I notice for the first time that etched into the old building are the words, “Waiting Room” and laugh. I mill around, unable to find a seat and find it odd for me to simply stand for the only other people that are seemingly doing this are policemen and food delivery individuals, of which I am neither. I walk over to the the Au Bon Pain and buy a cup of coffee to attempt normalcy and gain legitimacy through finance and consumption. The police officers, one man and one woman are at the entrance to the “brain” of the Bellevue, blocking entrance to the “optic nerve” hallway. I approach and they stare at me. I feign a fake phone call, draw my cell phone from my pocket and begin a fake conversation to gain some sense of legitimacy, talking to this fictional person at great lengths about what section of the C ward they have been admitted to and how I would go about getting there. They both look away and begin talking to one another. I take the opportunity to memorize the Bellevue map as much as possible, the map precariously set between the police officers and the visitor’s desk which is manned by the Bellevue’s private security force. I continue my fake conversation, finding it comical and I think to myself that perhaps I need to be admitted to the psych ward. One more look to the police officers and the visitor’s desk and I walk through the “optic nerve” into the “brain,” searching for my long-sought C ward.
I traverse the “optic nerve”, see the adult emergency room, the stairs to the prayer rooms and the empty mural room straight ahead and turn left towards the secondary lobby. On my right, at a fold-out table, there sits a blond-haired woman dressed in a tight white suit in her late 40′s manning the HIV and blood pressure testing table. I note that in a place so marked by disease and deep, red blood, white seems to be the color most aptly used to deny that any such things exist in this space as if to say, “This is a place of sterility and cleanliness, far from the earth tones of feces or ruby-red blood.” I look up and see a sign that reveals that the C ward is down the hallway to my right. Too nervous to make the turn and feeling completely out of place, I continue straight to known lands, the secondary lobby where I had visited once before.
Secondary Lobby, 2:50 PM
I face the large, tinted, rectangular slabs of windows lined with iron beams and look outside to the blue parking structure, three stories high. I have stopped here and sat on the orange, modern, bean pod chairs to gain a sense of the space and calm my increasing sense of anxiety in roaming the Bellevue aimlessly. I look across the floor, notice the other section of the lobby which I have never visited before opposite the entrance doors and make my way to that location. The space is vast and empty and the 4′ by 4′ black, stone tiles, well-worn on the edges and curving into the grout, reflect the light from outside. In the middle of the entryway, dividing the two spaces of the secondary lobby, there sits a diamond-shaped art piece that rises up to the gray, bumpy ceiling above from the black tiles below. It is an odd piece, covered in shiny stones in a manner which bespeaks of a young child let loose with glitter and a bottle of glue. From the ceiling jut out sliced, cylindrical lights about 1′ in length that shoot countenanced beams to the floor below.
The oddity of this space by far is the shiny black piano which sits in the middle of the large black tile floor. Upon noticing this, the ghastly smell of a homeless person floats my way: stale urine, unwashed clothes and greased, unkempt hair. I look around me and cannot locate from where this smell might have come from for I am nearly alone in this space and I am unnerved. On the piano there is a sign which reads, “The auxiliary to the Bellevue Hospital thanks Pfizer, Inc. for its donation of the piano and furnishings in the hospital building lobby,” and then at the bottom in all caps, “KEEPING THE HUMANITY IN HEALTH CARE.” A piano cord lies loosely on top of the cover. It is well-polished but seemingly rarely used. I wonder who would use it anyway. Someone from the street? A doctor or nurse on their break? No, this piano seems rarely used but far from disrepair. It is blocked off from the rest of the space and the people by steel posts and cloth, guarded from use by physical barriers. I look over to the windows near the FDR expressway and see three NYPD police officers patrolling the street just outside the Bellevue. They look in and I briefly make eye contact with one of them.
Having built up the courage, I stand and walk back through the optic nerve of the Bellevue, turn left at the hallway entrance to the C ward and walk down. I project an air of confidence and legitimacy and come upon an elevator bank. A white woman with brown hair with highlights, a neatly-pressed red suit, lightly-dusted makeup and a kind face looks over to me and smiles. I smile back and take notice of the name tag she has on her coat lapel. She is a Bellevue employee, ostensibly someone that works in the very ward I am trying to get in to see. I say excuse me and tell her I am lost, that I am looking for the C ward because my friend, whom I call Daniel, was admitted to the psych ward recently and I am here to visit him. She seems to be in her early 60′s, and holds my arm as she speaks to me. “Well, if he was admitted, he is most likely in inpatient,” she says. “That’s not here you see. He’s most likely in building H.” I remember from the map that the H building is in the main hospital as well and includes inpatient care and a number of psych services. She tells me that I need to get a visitor’s pass in the main lobby, the “Eye”, walks with me down the hallway forgoing her elevator which dings in the background. She has taken her time and effort to make sure I am taken care of and know the way. I feel slightly bad and notice that what I have done has directed me away from the very ward I was interested in getting access to. I thank her and remain in the hallway around the corner, waiting for her to leave. I send texts to friends asking if they know of anyone admitted to the Bellevue and get nothing. I know I need someone to visit to get a visitor’s pass and place this firmly in the back of my mind.
I am at a loss of where to go next and see the prayer room sign on the wall in front of me. I climb the stairs, turn to my right and pass a strange art piece lining the wall. It seems to be a 9-11 memory wall and I find it slightly creepy. Opening the main doors to the prayer room corridor, I notice that to my left there is a synagogue. I turn to my right and head towards the Catholic prayer room. I know this space from movies and limited exposure and cross myself as I enter in case anyone else is in the room.
Catholic Prayer Room, 3:10 PM
I am the only one here and I take some pictures of my surroundings. It is completely quiet. Occasionally the elevators open and ding in the background. The occasional muffled chatter of people roll through the hallways, most of it coming from down the long hallway where the HR department is. A woman enters, sits and the benches creak. Her cell phone goes off and she mutters to herself, praying. The elevators ding readily now and I imagine waves of people coming in to pray. No one else enters and no one seems to exit the elevators. Next to the air vent I notice there is peeling paint on the wall next to where the strange combination of white and surgeon green paint meets. It is calm here and quiet, smells of churches and air purified or heavily filtered. I think that perhaps it is the scent of sandalwood and it reminds me of the small, stone church that sat nestled in the woods near my grandmother’s home in California.
This is a good place for me to work and I will return. Another person comes in and I decide to leave. I exit the prayer room and take notice of a bulletin board where people have pinned prayers up. I take a photo, look to the floor and find yet another piece of 9-11 memorial artwork. This too I take a picture of and move on, leaving the hallway, exiting the “optic nerve” and the “eye” and I walk over to E. 26th street.
E. 26th Street, The Back of the Bellevue, 3:35 PM
I walk down E. 26th, past the modern forensics building and along the darkened corridors cast in shadows from the tall buildings flanking it. There is a row of ambulances and two EMT men exit their ambulance and enter a steel grate door to what looks to be the EMT garage/hang-out spot. I ask them how I can get to the blue parking structure from where I am and one of them stops and points out that I need to walk around the bend in the road and I will find it. He is in his late 30′s it seems, carries a burly mustache across his face and is visibly fit but with great care, explains that I need to cross the street and use the sidewalk because cars won’t be able to see me coming around the bend. I thank him and continue on my way, taking pictures of the FDR Expressway, the strange apartment towers and the “Bellevue Sobriety Garden” which sits at the base of the three story, blue parking structure.
Walking behind the Bellevue gives me a different perspective on things. I think back to the late 1700′s/early 1800′s when the hospital was being built. The East River back at that time was reportedly lined with disease-ridden cesspools and bogs and I imagine what the smell must have been like. NYPD trucks sit parked behind the hospital, “NYPD: The Boldest” emblazoned across the sides. This seems to be the EMT trail, men and women dressed the part carousing the back alleyways of the hospital en route to their chariots. As I walk further, I know this is a space of the Bellevue to explore further, see the views of the Empire State building from over the corners of the Old Psych Ward on E. 30th. There is a strange white tent behind the Old Psych Ward. I take pictures and see as I spproach the many signs warning people not to enter, that guards are armed and the premises are fully on camera. As I walk up E. 30th towards 1st Ave, I look through the gates to the entrance to the structure, note the torn pictures and illustrations and weathered wood paneling lining the entrance way. The place is eerie, a modern-looking structure lined with eons of time-now-past. I take more photos and continue walking up E. 30th. Stopping an older black man, I ask him what the building is. He tells me it is where they kept the remains of the World Trade Center victims and the torn pictures and illustrations now make sense. They are the remnants of loved one’s grieving. This spaces around the Old Psych Ward and the Bellevue as a whole are marked by the stench of death.
Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/47478409@N06/sets/72157623441033741/
Fieldnotes No. 4 (2/18-2/19/10): Care, Control, and Vision: Medical Structures of Sentiment (Bellevue Hospital): The Dream, 11:30 PM-12:30 PM
I wake up at 11:30 PM with an image in my head of the Bellevue as a body. My past obsessions with light photons and their travel through the eye into the brain and manifesting in action resurfaces and grafts itself onto the Bellevue project. I draw it as best as I can which leaves much to be desired.
Bellevue as Body: Attempted Drawing
Link to drawing: here.
Bellevue as Body: The Face
The office building facade, steel “curtain” facing with wide slabs of windows. Steel frames as bone structure.
Bellevue as Body: The Eye
The modern wing of the Bellevue Hospital main lobby is an eye, gathering visual data from the people that enter. People are light photons in this image and as they walk in, they are sent as visual data, as electrical impulses down the “optic nerve” of the Bellevue, that long hallway that connects to the entrance of the old Administration building encased within the new modern wing, the “Eye”. I think to myself how people are electrical impulses, driven by voltage, producing voltage, as if we are batteries, amalgamations of light bundled together. The three white floors of the modern wing are in fact shaped like an eye looking out to the city, to the busy 1st Ave moving by.
Bellevue as Body: The Brain
Beyond the facade of the old administration building and through the curving hallways of the “optic nerve”, one enters the “brain” of the Bellevue, that multi-storied, multi-purpose construction, the hospital apparatus. The photons (people) move in and through the “brain”, moving in and through the collection of buildings. Off to the side of the brain sits the Old Psych Ward, the darkened corner of the “brain” where more than questionable things have occurred.
Bellevue as Body: Action
Through the actions of the “brain” what then occurs? What are the emotions engendered, allowed? I equate emotion with action. The processes of the “Eye”, the “Optic Nerve”, the “Brain” as creating emotions, engendering emotions, denying or promoting particular affective states.
People are seen through the “Eye”. In entering, they are processed continually by the “Body” of the Bellevue. The “Eye”, in effect, not only sees but processes, frames the ways in which people see and move.
This dream stays with me for weeks afterwords. It will greatly inform the way in which I present my final work.
Fieldnotes No. 3 (2/24/10): Care, Control, and Vision: Medical Structures of Sentiment (Bellevue Hospital)- Old Psych Ward, Main Lobby 11:59 AM-1:34 PM
| Note: this should be read in conjunction with Fieldnotes No. 1 and 2 |
I walk down E. 30th to 1st Avenue, take a few pictures from different angles this time. There is an older black man who has walked with me incidentally down E. 30th and now stands next to a forgotten phone booth, its phone dangling from a mangled chrome cord, its plastic walls cracked and soiled. He simply watches me from within the booth while I take pictures, saying and doing nothing. I smile and cross the street.
Even in broad daylight, the building of the old psych ward sends chills down my spine. It is only 8 stories tall, far from the most imposing building in New York City but for some reason never have I felt more uncomfortable near a space than this one. I take in the dead ivy once again, the yellowed windows and cross the street. I am now on the corner of E. 30th and 1st Ave., the corner where the murals are. I look at them closer this time, capture them with photos the best that I can. The dead gardens at their base are photographed as well and I turn the corner and head down E. 30th to the main entrance where I hope to take a clearer photo of the original entryway. After shooting a few distanced photos, I watch cautiously as an NYPD officer exits the gates and walks to the left towards 1st Ave. He pays no attention to me and as he turns the corner to the left, I enter the old Bellevue gates and approach the security booth once again, this time with another security guard whose name I come to find is Santos.
Santos comes out of the security booth as I enter and I ask him if I can just take a picture of the entryway and he says, “Absolutely not”. Santos is a tall man, seemingly in his early to mid 30′s with a piercing in his left ear, a large fake diamond lined with gold dangling from his elongated earlobe. He wears Dolce and Gabana eyeglasses, is around 6’3″ tall (slightly taller than myself), is lanky and slumps his shoulders over his chest, closing off the chest cavity, a physiological move of protection-habituated. His skin is splotched with past and current acne markings. He has picked some and carries the resulting scars, particularly on his right cheek near his lower jaw bone. His arms seem to go on forever. Stringy and out of control, they ride the movements of his skinny legs like young children in a carriage, never seemingly in tune with one another, prone to indifferent swayings this way and that. When he tells me that I cannot take a picture, he says it with a down-turned mouth, a mouth that tells me he would rather not be saying this, that it is his job that forces him to be this way. He walks towards me calmly, as if he is coming out to meet an old friend. Smiling, I say, “But I can go across the street to take one, right?” He smiles and says, “You said it. Nothing I can do ’bout that.” I turn and he continues walking with me, continues saying that he can’t do anything about me taking pictures from across the street and as soon as we hit the sidewalk, his manner changes, his shoulders relax even further. “Couldn’t tell you anything on Bellevue property but I can out here,” he says smiling, his teeth crooked, oddly spaced, the silver from the back of his mouth catching my attention. “This isn’t their property.” He wears a big smile now out of the left side of his mouth. It is a clever defiance that he practices, one that has no way of getting him in trouble and he is eager to talk. I smile and approach him. There is now only three feet between us but it is a comfortable three feet, one that bespeaks of secrecy and sharing. I ask him how long he has worked at the Bellevue and he tells me two years and that he has been working in mental hospital security for five. He repeats everything twice, as if confirming these facts for himself. He tells me that he grew up on the Lower East side for his whole life, tells me about how he and his friends used to walk by the Old Psych Ward when they were young. “There’s some stories. There’s some stories,” he says, reapeating this again and again. I am intrigued but cognizant of the fact that we have just met and am reticent of scaring him off with intrusive questions. I simply listen to what he is willing to say.
I ask him if he ever works the night shift and he tells me he tries not to, that the place is creepy as hell. I ask him if he ever hears stories from those that do and he tells me there are tons, tells me that the 9th floor is completely off limits to everyone, that they shut it down when there were too many voices and people were hearing regular tappings on the windows when there weren’t any birds outside. He tells me that when the voices became too loud on the 9th floor, they shut it down and totally forbade anyone to go there. He continues and tells me that pictures are totally forbidden inside and outside on Bellevue property, that the Bellevue is a landmark building and mentions Bloomberg and says that he never wants to be on that man’s bad side. It is odd in the way that he mentions Bloomberg, as if the man himself has forbade photographs, and we laugh. This interests me: the security guards cannot take pictures inside or out nor can the public. They are taught to look for cameras from the male homeless people that now inhabit the old psych ward, are taught to be on the lookout for flashes and confiscate any cameras they encounter. Santos talks about how many people want to expose the Bellevue, that they want to document the dirtiness and the violence. He says that it can’t be exposed, that it is highly protected by the government. He tells me that there are so many stories to tell and that it is his job to stop people from telling them as much as possible. In addition to the private security firm that is employed by the Bellevue, the NYPD has officers specifically assigned to the hospital. These policemen (and they are all men from what I gather) watch the private security guards and reinforce the laws of Bellevue. The inside of the Bellevue is guarded and watched over by the Bellevue Hospital police (separate from the NYPD and the private security firm from what I could gather) and the orderlies inside. Something begins to unfold. As fear-inducing as the old psych ward of the Bellevue is, it becomes apparent that the Bellevue is fearful of outsiders, fearful of exposure with too many bad stories locked within. The building has become a composite of its historically-insane inhabitants, a collection of the traces of its psychiatric patients. The Bellevue is afraid and I think about this for a while, try to discern what this means for a building to be afraid. I then imagine the old psych ward as an old man, veined hands and lonely. It is the old man that has lost touch with reality, the man that was always an asshole to his kids and perhaps drank too much. It is an old man that has withdrawn and recoils at the approach of anyone or anything that threatens to disrupt his stagnant, habituated lifestyle. I imagine this building as deeply unhappy, its walls resounding with the voices and cries of its past patients in pain and insane laughter.
Santos tells me that beneath the nine floors there are two sub-basements, the bottom sub-basement being what they still refer to as the “chambers”. These rooms still have all the original equipment including the tables where they administered drug treatments (many experimental) from when the psych ward closed in 1984 and its inhabitants were moved to the Southern section of the hospital. Everything remains exactly as it was when the psych ward closed. All remains. This fascinates me. What does it mean that nothing has changed in 26 years, that the original equipment lies untouched? What are they preserving? Is it mere laziness or is it something else? Are they afraid and if so, of what? What lies dormant in the stagnation of the old Bellevue psych ward?
I ask Santos about the murals outside on the corner of 1st Ave and 30th street. Cracked and sordid, these were painted by the psych patients themselves he tells me. There are gardens in front of them, still with the stakes in the ground and dying plants at their base. Santos tells me that these too are from the psych patients. 26 years and nothing has changed, not even the landscaping? I air my doubts and sense of surprise but he reassures me, laughing and pointing to the bushes near the original intake entryway of the old psych ward. “Ha. It’s all the same man. Just like it was. Nothin’s changed.” Why remain the same for so long? Stagnant and fearful. Highly patrolled, largely protected.
I look up at the ivy walls again, ask him if the ivy grows back in Spring and he tells me it does. I say, “Good, cause this dead stuff just adds to the creepiness.” He laughs and says, “It is such a creepy place. You should come back at night and see it.” He clicks his fingers as if remembering something and says that he wishes a certain lady was around but she just took off. I ask what her name is but he can’t recall. “She’s an African lady,” he says. “Man, I wish she was here ’cause she can tell you some stories. She could tell you stories for days.” I ask him if it would be okay for me to leave my number with him so that he could text me when she was around and he agrees. I say text and not call intentionally, thinking a text is less intrusive, doesn’t take up his minutes in calling a stranger. He agrees and we walk back through the Bellevue gates, enter the security guard booth. He calmly hands me a pen and sets a piece of paper on the table. The air is comfortable, the company loose and trusting. I notice a log book with lots of red and black scribbles but I don’t want to seem intrusive. I write my name and number, thank him and he walks me out to the gates. Santos is a man willing to share what he has seen and experienced but obviously feels bound by his job. On multiple occasions, he tells me unprompted that he wishes he could take me inside but he would lose his job and as if to prove this says, “Here. Come with me. I can’t take you inside but I can show you this.” He takes me to the entrance of the psych ward and pushes a bush to the side with his arm to reveal a plaque on the wall covered in algae and soil. “I don’t read Roman numerals very well but believe me, its old.” We laugh and he releases the bush and it flies back to hide the plaque once again. He apologizes for not being able to let me in but I reassure him time and time again that I completely understand and tell him that I have been looking for a legitimate way to get inside. I ask him if they allow volunteers at the men’s homeless shelter. They do not. Everything is highly regulated and restricted. I tell him I will probably see him around and he tells me good luck.
Questions: The rooms are exactly the same. What is this stagnant nature about? Why remain the same when so much bad existed there? How have the past bodies imprinted themselves in the walls? The lines between bodies and buildings are becoming blurred. There have been serious rumblings from real estate developers of the old psych ward being turned into a fancy hotel and conference rooms. What does it mean to simply cover up the layered histories of the psych ward? What does it mean for the sordid conditions of the psych ward to be repainted and repaved for some of the wealthiest individuals in New York City? What happens to the voices of the ninth floor? Are they sealed within new drywall, muted by pink insulation or do they remain unscathed, haunting the new inhabitants that have paid millions of dollars for a top-floor penthouse overlooking the East River? Where do such voices, such spirits, the remnants of past inhabitants and workers go?
1st Avenue and East 27th Street: 12:40-1:10 PM, Main Lobby
I leave Santos and quickly enter the main lobby to jot down remaining thoughts and insights from our conversation and my observations which takes me 30 minutes.
1st Avenue and East 27th Street: 1:10-1:34 PM, Main Lobby
I buy lunch at the Au Bon Pain and begin eating lunch near the manikins wearing red. Above me in the three curved floors of the modern wing, I see a circled “C” on each floor indicative of the psych ward, one in orange and one in blue. I make a note to find out what these colors denote next time.
The building is not passive. It communicates with bodies just as bodies communicate with it. I am coming to terms with this, realizing that this is the challenge that I face and know that Michelle Murphy’s book, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty will be indispensable to the process of building my case. I realize too that few people believe the onus of an investigation can be placed on what is taken to be an inanimate object by many such as a building, that ethnographies are by their very nature studies of human beings. I have no doubt that buildings, being assemblages of human being’s ideas and energies, are worthy of any investigation that would normally be reserved for a flesh and bones human being. To offer an exploration of the flesh and bones of buildings and the indivisible co-existence between human beings and buildings is my challenge. I think as I sit there on that marble bench that at no time are people not physically touching the building whether walking, sitting, or leaning. People, once inside the building, are in constant communication with the forced boundaries of the structure.
An older Hispanic woman (perhaps in her 50′s) has an amputated leg and rolls herself in a wheel chair with a small boy to her left. She is slightly overweight, is dressed in a light floral top with short sleeves and a longer dark blue skirt made of heavy cotton, and carries joy in her facial expressions, crow’s feet showing at the corners of her eyes. She says, “Mira, mira,” to the child and points skyward to the translucent ceiling above. The child looks upwards and giggles. She pulls him closer in a warm embrace as I notice from behind her on her left, a young girl most likely in her teens comes up on crutches, both legs bandaged from the knees down. She speaks to the older woman and they both laugh. She is related somehow, a daughter or granddaughter perhaps. I watch as the girl moves past them and sits down hard on the marble benches a few feet down from where I am sitting and I wonder if they are recovering from a car accident. They have come to the hospital through pain and suffering of some sort but the older woman and boy seem joyous, the girl despondent in a common teenage way but seemingly happy. There is a multiplicity of emotion experienced within these walls.
I look up and notice that the modern wing is shaped like an eye pointing outwards to 1st Avenue. People can and do look over the glass walls of each floor to the lobby to where I sit below. I notice a man strapped down to a bed being pushed by two medics. He is a black man in his late 30′s and he peers down at me from the 2nd floor, C orange. “A psych patient?” I wonder and take further notice of the multiple black straps lining his torso and legs.
I look around and notice as I am sitting in a dynamic space where visitors and patients can view each other through the glass of each floor of the modern wing. It is a space of being watched and watching within a space of the Bellevue which is shaped like an eye.
1:29: Recording Made of Main Lobby
Audio Clip (Main Lobby): http://chirb.it/dz22Kd
The unnerving sound of a child crying from behind me can be heard. It seems to come from the walls themselves but I eventually look up to see an open window in the old administration building. The glass barriers on each floor are at least five feet high–someone would need to struggle to jump over. A white marble carving to my left of a man and a woman huddling with children sits poised precariously on a small slab of salmon and black marble. The scene depicted sends chills down my spine with the accompanying sound of the bloodcurdling screams of the child either in serious pain or scared out of its wits. A man in medical scrubs sits down next to me on the left with lunch and starts to eat. An older man in a fur-lined black jacket and well-pressed khaki pants sits down to my right and simply looks straight ahead. Two Chinese men in their early 30′s stand next to each other, silver cell phones in their right hands, bags of food with yellow smiley faces in their left. I make a note to study the presence of food deliverers at some later time and decide to leave.
Side Notes:
Treat 28th street as a feeder street into the eye of the Bellevue.
Spend next week on one of the C floors looking down.
Try to come again when Santos is working.
Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/47478409@N06/sets/72157623382715999/
Research:
Weekends at Bellevue Review: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/from-bellevues-psychiatric-er-a-doctors-memoir/
“Checkout Time At the Asylum” (NY Mag): http://nymag.com/news/features/52176/index1.html
- -In 1975, Saul Bellow memorialized him as Von Humboldt Fleisher in the novel Humboldt’s Gift: “To me, Bellevue was like the Bowery,” Bellow wrote. “It gave negative testimony. Brutal Wall Street stood for power, and the Bowery, so near it, was the accusing symbol of weakness. And so with Bellevue, where the poor and busted went … And poets like drunkards and misfits or psychopaths, like the wretched, poor or rich, sank into weakness—was that it? From Bellevue he phoned me … He yelled, ‘Charlie, you know where I am, don’t you? … This isn’t literature. This is life.’ ”
- Bellevue, he says, was “always a zoo. Never enough rooms, never enough space for people to be waiting—and the people who were waiting were not exactly calmly sitting around until they could be interviewed.” When patients came up the 29th Street ramp to the first-floor admitting area, “the majority were probably brought in by the police, since severely mentally ill people don’t have the insight to know they’re severely mentally ill. So usually you’d have cops all over the place in the psych ER.” Adding, literally, to the boiling-point atmosphere was the fact that the hospital had very spotty air-conditioning—a particular problem since summer heat waves exponentially increased the kind of behavior that tended to land patients in Bellevue in the first place.
-
After 54 years, the facility looked and felt outmoded. There were treatment rooms still filled with bathtubs covered with canvas sheets that left just enough room for a patient’s head to stick out; the huge basins, which were once thought to calm the manic, had lain unused for decades, museum relics of a less enlightened time.
- As for the actual rather than the figurative Bellevue, it’s now a more modern hospital, in a different building, in a new era. It seems unlikely that anybody would be sorry to see the words “Psychiatric Hospital” chipped off the northern entrance of its old quarters. And while the EDC’s plan to turn Bellevue into the latest in luxe accommodations has occasioned a certain number of jokes about the Sid Vicious Suite (yes, he’s an alum) and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Casualty Atrium, those memories aren’t likely to have much traction. After all, nobody is more expert at eradicating swaths of urban history with great dispatch and little sentimentality than a real-estate developer.
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”: http://sprayberry.tripod.com/poems/howl.txt
Eggs, Well Done
She was there again, leaning with each arm draped over the carved wood door frame and the puce and lime green wallpapered walls. Achromatic hair tied tightly into a nest of black steel hair pins, each roll well-placed, a manicured perm of transcendence. Her face, crumpled and crimped, lights up the room with its fiercely-driven marks of amethyst and henna. Her eyes of steel gray are half open, glinting in the overhead diner lights and she looks forward and meets my eyes. I imagine her sanguine lips meeting mine, our teeth clattering in the lawless pursuit of pent up passion now released. Her milky breasts will falter and strain against the worn fabric of her over-sized brassiere and we will throw caution to the wind as our hips pop and diner customers run wildly out the door, hands over their mouths. The rolls of our flesh will intertwine and for that timeless moment, our bodies will become enmeshed in olfactory inquisitions of Dove roll-on deodorant, Old Spice cologne and baby powder. We will laugh as our teeth fall out to the grimy tiles below and we gum each other into eternity. Her figure is perfectly imperfect, her every move sensually slow and wizened. Our endless times alone will come to pass and all the singular moments of watching cars out the window and sleeping and eating alone will melt away in the presence of two. Her warm fingers will trace my body, along my jaw line, on the edges of my cheek and ear. In her ears I will whisper notes of longing and long-awaited love and she will quiver. Fully embraced, the world will cease to exist and time, for all of its menacing faces, will simply cease. The eternal through embrace, the eternal through love. She puts her arms to her side, still watching me, and takes uneven steps using the backs of the booths for balance as she approaches. “The hunt is on,” I tell myself and with a swig of OJ, I take my pills in anticipation for what is to come.
