Mental Facility

A few inmates holding onto the yard phone stare at the commotion on the basketball court. Their mouths gape against a worn black receiver. The track isn’t dusty with clumping bodies jogging out stress. The runners, too, are still in mid-yawn to what’s about to happen. I’m on the basketball court—drenched in sweat—holding the ball and waiting for this quick hit and run.

A short, chubby white guy is screaming, throwing his hands up in the air, head cocked and bobbling. “You bitch motherfucker, nobody fouled you… goddamn crybaby. What’s up then!” he cries. His attempt to fight Big Mike, one of the biggest guys in the housing unit, might be his last attempt to bobble his head with curse words.

Big Mike is 6’3” and 228 pounds, muscle pressed from downstate free weights. I know him. His hands should be registered, the way he finds the right spot to put his contenders to sleep, and this contender doesn’t have a chance in sweet hell to win this bout. Even the COs watch instead of intervening.

“I’m straight,” Mike announces. “I ain’t playing ball with him.” Mike turns his head from the bobbling insults. He clenches his jaw tightly before walking off the court. I stomp onto the grass until I find a shade against the unit. That is a first for me, seeing a much bigger guy back down from a much smaller guy.

I watch the basketball game and the white guy, who is known at this prison as Bobblehead, is fouling other players with no care in the world and it hits me: maybe he isn’t letting no one punk him out. The answer falls on my tongue, but before I can speak it into thought, my neighbor CJ waves at me. “What happen to the game?” he asks, jogging towards me. “Muthafuckin Bobblehead,” I respond, “tried to fight Mike. You ain’t see that shit?”

I glance into the far corner to make sure Mike doesn’t see me about to spread gossip or speak of the hint of softness he displayed on the yard. I take another glimpse at Mike, but overtly, and nod. “He gonna catch him going in the unit… watch… I’m telling you. Mike ain’t going for that shit.”

‘”Nah, hell nah,” says CJ. “You act like we in real prison—”

“Look around, dummy,” I gesture with my hands. “We is.”

“This is a mental facility,” CJ retorts. “Michigan closed them down years ago to put prisons in place. Pay attention to who the nurse calls out for meds.”

I search the yard with a scanning eye. Of the 40-plus men around me, almost half are on some form of meds or in some state of psychiatric need. What I didn’t know at the time was that the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates one in six men incarcerated across the country are experiencing some level of psychological distress. That statistic translates, in here, to a constant flux of mental breakdowns in prison, an unhealthy mixture of mental health patients with prisoners.

The COs call the end to our yard. Bobblehead is mid-play, nodding and laughing uncontrollably with no awareness of Mike, who is well-aware of him. A glob of drool bubbles out his mouth and it finds its way down his chin. Big Mike waits until he is almost last to go inside. I wait until I am almost last. The drool on Bobblehead’s chin doesn’t wait. Mike hangs his head low, defeated, and proceeds inside all quiet and shoulder shrugging.

In my single-man cell I think about the people referred to in prison as mental bugs. We call them “bugs” because they are people buzzing with no care to where they land, whether it’s dead smack on your face, or their beating wings in your ear.

Bugs assume they want to fight, but if you react loudly they’ll fly away. Then you got people where you just say: he fucked in the head. And there are levels to the “fucked in the head” category. Bobblehead would be referred to as “a mesh with a bug and fucked in the head,” meaning mentally unstable, on top of all the other ways prison worsens him and us.

Like many states, as CJ explained, Michigan largely closed its mental health institutions decades ago. These institutions probably weren’t ideal at all, but at least they had staff trained in how to address mental illness. Now the mentally ill are being punished for being… mentally ill. I wonder if this is the purpose of it all?

***

I’m a unit porter, someone who sweeps and mops and changes the garbage. I have a new perspective of my environment after the biggest guy backed down from a crazy white guy. I reevaluate my presumptions.

“Aye, Buck… what’s up,” Rudy calls to me. He’s standing on the main floor where I mop and sweep.

“What’s good, Rudy?”

“Did you check out the workout lady on the Edivo Tablet? Man, she be working.”

I laugh at his blatant perversion as I tie the bag on the garbage can. Rudy is about 5’0”, skinny, and wears shirts too big over his old frame. He’s a hard worker but sometimes it seems like he isn’t in control of his body, as if he’s moving mechanically or numbly throughout the day. Today, his arm is in a sling and he’s waiting to push a food cart back to the kitchen. This is the first time I’m seeing him one-armed. 

“What the fuck you got going on, man?” I gesture. “Fuck happen to yo’ arm?”

“Ay man, working in the kitchen. Stuck my hand inside the dishwasher. It was on.” He laughs. “And den‘ dis’ happens.” He nods to his arm.

“So why the fuck are you about to push a big ass metal cart across the compound?”

“Nah, I’m straight. They need to put me back in the kitchen—”

“Rudy, not too long ago you had to get twelve stitches! And before that you broke two fingers!”

“I know,” he says, before letting out another goofy laugh. I categorize him a Level 3 on the bug scale to 5. Mentally, he needs help, not this place. He’s more of a harm to himself than anyone else.

The cart is ready to go back to the kitchen and he pushes it out the door. Out of view I hear a heavy thud, sneakers squeaking before a clunk. He falls in the hallway. I can hear him laughing again, then nothing. I know he will never get help here or at any other prison facility they send him to. I think about asking him about his struggles, but I know, like every time I see him, he will begin the conversation about the workout lady on the tablet.

***

Later that night in my cell, I think about what has become of me. I pace for hours, talk to myself and the pictures on my walls, to my daughter. I laugh at nothing specific and pick something worth laughing over. I can hear other inmates talking, but to whom—I don’t know. I think they are talking about me, saying what they will do to harm me on the yard. I stop thinking just in case they can read my mind, because I know sometimes I can read theirs. I never thought this way before, never talked to myself until I did over a year in segregation—more than twice on two separate occasions. Am I a bug or am I fucked in the head?

I wake to the sound of trays being slung against the wall.

“Fuck this bitch motherfucking shit. Fuck it all!” someone yells.

More trays bounce off the wall as the curses double by the second. Bobblehead is the one who passes out breakfast trays; he’s had the job for a week and he’s already losing it right here in the hall. I want to tell him to calm down, but I see he’s long past gone to talk to, and in a sense, his meltdown is rousing me to a fearful fright of something I can’t seem to understand.

“Go lockdown. Now!” a CO yells.

Bobblehead staggers over the spilled potatoes and gravy, face pouting like a child after a tantrum. The inmates locked in their cells beat on their doors and burst out with tearful laughter. If you look closer it’s a tearful cry, each person experiencing a similar meltdown: playing in their own feces; urinating on themselves; fists beating on a small rectangle of glass with a slit wrist; self-gutting their stomach to be rode to the closest hospital; every scream out the cell door and long hours of conversation to themselves, from every breaking to the noise, to the loneliness, to the voices.

We laugh this time because our turn has passed for now. This time, with Bobblehead’s antics, we enjoy in the most powerless way as if to retrieve some control in him losing his.

I don’t partake in the haughty laughter for too long. Bobblehead will be sent to segregation—the hole—and before coming out worse than before, he will have several more episodes like this until the facility tires of his disobedient mental disorder. He will succumb to more abuse like the rest of us until he is finally free, then back again, to pay a debt owed to society.

But now by the look on his face I can see he doesn’t grasp what is going on, the same as what happened on the basketball court. Why rehabilitate what makes the business thrive? I hope to make it out of this mental facility because I feel the craziness, too. ▩

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