SP: Suicide Prevention

Thursday, Feb. 07, 2002 - 8:59 p.m.

In memory of Barbara A. I. September 16, 1949-September 17, 1997

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I was lying on her bed, reading the riveting new "non-fiction novel," IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote, which was in The New Yorker. I probably shouldn't have just plopped myself on her bed, but she was on the chair.

She played Bessie Smith on the "record player" that we all had in our rooms. It was the first time I had heard Bessie. "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" wowed me. Astonishing song.

Holding in my mind the story, the Kansas household and its normalcy, Bessie Smith, and keeping only one occasional lazy eye on Barbara.

She was a new patient in the mental hospital and I was a seasoned veteran of about 6 months experience. She was angry; ferocious even. I didn't want to get in her way, but why was I on her bed? It didn't seem to bother her.

What bothered me? I hated doing SP. It was a part of the process: every new patient, every upset patient, every patient who was acting out was on SP: "Suicide Prevention" and for a two hour shift the patients who were NOT on SP status were the guards. I hated being the guard because I felt it was a gross violation of privacy; some guards would leer when you went to the bathroom. I let them close the door and I would pray that nothing would happen.

For there was no greater trauma or cause for remorse than if someone killed himself or herself when you were doing SP duty. I knew. Three of the patients were haunted by this. They were doing SP when someone had succeeded--one guy had flung himself down the stairwell on the way to a meeting; another had managed to find his way to the roof and leap.

And then there was Ann.

I did not know Ann. When I was first admitted to the hospital everyone was still reeling from her death. Somehow she had managed to hang herself in a closet. In the closet in this room.

Barbara was a new girl; the next youngest after me--I was 14; she was 15 and an officious girl, a patient I fervently hated had greeted Barbara about 10 minutes after her admission with the story that Ann had hung herself in that closet. The closet that was in Barbara's room. Yes. That closet. "In YOUR new room," Laurie Gold had said, floucing out.

"Don't listen to her; she's a chippie," I said.

CHIPPIEEEEEEE I screamed out the door as the steatopygian Laurie slunk or really waddled down the hall.

Barbara snorted.

Now she had to unpack her clothes and hang them in the closet. Why did she have to find out about Ann on her first day? First days were the worst.

I was afraid of the closet. I knew that it was identical to mine, but no body had died in my closet. At least not within recent memory, which went back at least 8 years since a woman named Treat had been in the hospital for 8 years. She called the hospital her "womb." Chilling. She also could reel off all the names, dates, circumstances of every suicide. It was a veritable DeBretts for the Mental Patient; her own private Almanach de Gotha.

"Let me help you unpack, ok?" I said. I was worried. Could a confrontation with the closet hurt Barbara? Could it hurt me? I had often wondered how Ann had managed to hang herself.

"Was she really short?" I had asked. "No, not really," someone had answered.

NO! Barbara said. I think I might have sniffled a little. I returned to Truman Capote.

She sat next to me. "It's not you. I'm sorry. It's just that my mother packed for me. It's all flowers and stuff. None of it's cool. I just didn't want you to see these clothes."

She was on Suicide Prevention and she was comforting me, her watcher.

"I like you. I think you're cool. You are really cool. I think you're the coolest person I've ever seen here," I said. Eager to please, but I also meant it.

"Well, you don't need to go overboard. THAT is not cool." She rolled her eyes and said "If you want any of these clothes you can have 'em!"

"I think I can trust you," she said, somewhat warily. This was after I had immersed myself in more of Truman Capote and let her unpack. Ignored the peril of the closet. Had been quiet about what it might have been like to face the closet.

"Brownies. Made by Mom," she said sarcastically and lifting up the layer of very real brownies that had passed staff inspection she revealed a layer of wonderful contraband: grass, vodka, matches, brandy, condoms and an elegant small silver flask, which was the sine qua non of mental patients everywhere back in the 1960s.

And we became friends. Good friends really. Even though she was cool and I wasn't. Then another girl came into the hospital. Born April 1, 1949. Jill. We were the three youngest and we hung out together. Jill and Barbara were really cool. I thought that they were like James Dean and Humphrey Bogart. I was like a retarded little puppy following them around.

Barbara got out of Suicide Prevention much quicker than the average patient. Even the doctors could see that she was too cool to kill herself.

On my 15th birthday, which was her 16th birthday, she gave me "You Can't Hurry Love," by the Supremes. It was one of the best gifts I had ever had, since I needed to know that love don't come easy and the language of Motown was more compelling than the langauge of Freud and the mental hospital. I don't remember what I gave her.

Thirty years later I talk to her on the phone. We don't talk about the past much. But at one point she said to me, "You were always the smart one."

"No, you were the smart one," I said. I meant it.

"You were the smart one," she said with that tone--that authority; the coolness, the final-word-air she had.

We both knew that she was dying of emphysema.

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