It was on a frigid New Year’s Day in 1980 that I submitted myself to the Hillcrest Mental Institution. I had a friend drive me there and drop me off in the parking lot. As I gazed up at the large, red brick building, I had to remind myself of why I was there. I needed help. Psychiatric help. Back before the days of out-patient care, before budget cuts had forced mental institutions to close their doors and turn patients out onto the street, places like Hillcrest were where you went if you were “insane“. Most people, as I would come to learn, did not willingly submit themselves. Some of them had no idea that there was anything wrong with them.
I guess you can call me an exceptional case. I’ve always known I’m not quite right in the head. Even as a child, I would sit locked in my room, all by myself, wondering just what it was that was the matter with me. I was not like the other kids in school. My teachers had told my parents I showed signs of autism. I never spoke up in class. I seemed to be off in Fantasy Land. I was the top of my class, though. As a teenager, it got worse. I started feeling down all the time. I started skipping school, faking sickness just to get out of going. I didn’t hate school. I just didn’t feel like I should waste my time being there. I did not like being around the other students. I was a real closet case, too. I never talked about my sexuality with anyone. I started drinking when I was seventeen. My dad was an alcoholic. He kept hard liquor like Vodka in the refrigerator. He had so much of it that he never noticed when I snuck a bit of it. My mother never knew about it. She was too busy with her own set of problems. You would think that they would have given a damn, or at least noticed, that something was wrong with their only child. At first I thought maybe they had suspicions but did not want to say anything, but then I realized that they just didn’t care.
You can see where I’m going. My downward spiral that landed me in the loony bin. All the drinking, the drugs, the suicidal thoughts, the things happening in my head. I managed to graduate high school and got accepted into the local community college. I wanted to give it my best effort, but I failed miserably. I dropped out after a year. That was when things got really bad. I started hearing things. Voices in my head that didn’t sound like my own. They were foreign to me, and I was terrified of them. It felt like my brain was being invaded. I would, on occasion, see things that I thought were there, but in reality weren’t. I also experienced blank periods. There would be hours missing from my life. I would wake up on my bedroom floor with scratches and bruises all over my body. Even covered with self-inflicted wounds, my parents took no notice. I was invisible to them. I was glad they could not see me in that state.
There was one night, stumbling drunk through the back alley of the city we lived in, I was mugged by a gang of thirteen-year-old boys. I stood there laughing at them after they ran away with my wristwatch and wallet. I did not even think to pursue them. I basically had no idea what had just happened to me. I swaggered on home, got in the shower, and beat my head against the wall of the shower until I passed out. I woke up two hours later with the floor flooded and a pretty nasty head wound. I could not recall anything that had happened prior to waking up. I just cleaned myself up, mopped up the water, and put on my sane mask to fool the world. Only later would memories of it come back to haunt me.

I walked through the double doors into the entrance hall. I walked up the steps to the main floor. The nurse at the desk behind the glass asked me for my name. “Hiroshi McKay,” I told her. She looked at me, surveying me. She had probably not met very many half-Japanese guys before. My name sounds a bit odd when you put my first and last names together. The mixing of the cultures - Japanese and American. A different nurse, who resembled the nurse behind the glass in her plain white uniform, escorted me to the elevator. I was to stay on the third floor, with the rest of the men. The women were located in the west wing; men in the east. We got off the elevator on the third floor. We passed through the large double doors into the east wing of the hospital. The walls were white. The tiles beneath our feet were an ugly tan color. Many of them were cracked, and there were chips in the painting on the walls. There was a strong smell of something I cannot describe to you. You just have to have been there, to have smelled that awful smell, to understand it. I quickly realized how bland and basic everything was. Pastels were scarce to be found. The plainness of the nurses’ uniforms, their white tennis shoes, the walls and floors, the décor… It was all lackluster. Was this standard for all mental institutions? I had read Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as well as having seen the film, and I thought of Nurse Ratched. I gave an involuntary shudder as I thought of myself dealing with a woman like that.
The nurse showed me my room. Number 356. “You’ll be sharing this room with another patient, a Mr. O’Brien. He should be back in a little while. He has been taking to solitary until he can calm himself down,” she informed me.
Plopping my suitcase down on one of the beds, I thanked the nurse.
“Dinner is always at seven in the main hall. I’m sure you will be able to find it,” she said rather coolly before she left.

I spent some time unpacking my suitcase, putting my clothing into the small set of drawers beside my bed. I knew that the next day would be my first meeting with Dr. Walcott. I couldn’t wait to sit there and have him scrutinize me. It was six o’clock by the time I finished unpacking. I lay there sprawled out face-up on the bed, looking over at my roommate’s side of the room. It was more colorful than what I had seen of the rest of the hospital. There was a large David Bowie poster plastered on the ceiling above his bed, and several more pictures of celebrities taped up on the wall. There was also a painting of a red and black mill that looked like something from the post-impressionism era. There was also a stack of books on his nightstand. Looking at the different titles, I noticed a few particular books I had read before: Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a collected works of Edgar Allen Poe, and - surprise, surprise - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Whoever this guy was, he had good taste.
By the time six-thirty rolled around, I found my eyelids growing heavy. I completely ignored the pangs of hunger in my stomach and fell into a dreamless sleep. I was awoken three hours later by the sound of Lou Reed singing “hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side”. It had stirred the queen in me.
I opened my eyes and saw a heavily-freckled face looming over me. I nearly jumped out of my skin, I was so startled.
“Jesus! Shit!” I cried out in surprise. He backed away from me slowly. “What the hell were you doing?!?!” “Trying to wake you up, man. You must be one of those deep sleepers, ‘cause I damn near screamed in your face.” “Can’t you let sleeping people sleep?” He sat down on his own bed, and I sat on mine, facing him. He had long, straight red hair and piercing green eyes. He was on the slender side and looked underfed. Fidgeting with the hem of his navy blue t-shirt, he asked me what my name was and where I was from. I told him. “Hiroshi? How do you spell that?” he inquired. I told him that as well. “Wow! So, you’re half-Japanese, eh? I can tell you have those slanted eyes. Me, I’m half-Irish, half-American. My dad came over from Belfast and married me mum, a nice American girl from New York. Have you ever been to Japan?” “No.” “I went to Ireland once when I was twelve. I don’t remember much of it. I was visiting me grandparents in Hillsborough. It’s a small town outside of Belfast. Nice place.” Why was this guy being so forward with me about himself? Here I was, this absolute stranger, and he was telling me about his heritage. It was a little annoying, how he rattled on about his family in Ireland. All the while, Lou Reed sang on in the background. I sat there listening to him recount various fragments of his life to me. I could not help but think that this guy was insane. A little voice inside me told me he wasn’t the only nutter in the room. When he was finished, he asked me why I was there.
“Did your family force you to come here? Or the court or something?” Things were getting even more personal, and - to my own astonishment - I was not reluctant to talking about it.
I blabbed my story to him. “I’ve been having weird episodes of… I don’t know what… But I’ll have these chunks of my life missing. Hours I can’t for the life of me remember. I’ll wake up with bruises and cuts all over my body and not know how they got there, but they have to be self-inflicted, since no one is ever there when I wake up. Also, I’ve been hearing shit in my head. Voices that aren’t mine. I’ve laid in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, thinking I’m seeing something; shadows. Shadows that have this ethereal quality to them. I can’t tell reality from fantasy half the time. It’s really bizarre. It frightens me. And when I’m not having these… whatever they are… I’m drinking myself stupid. I just have no control.” “Yes, you do,” he said quietly. “If you didn’t have any control, you wouldn’t be here. You submitted yourself. Nobody had to do it for you. See? You admit you have a problem - er, problems. A lot of the people submitted here think they’re all hunky dory; nothing’s wrong with ‘em. But you and I, we’re different. We know we’ve got something the matter with us, which is what separates us from most of the others here. You’ll see what I mean tomorrow in group.” “’Group’?” “Group therapy with Nurse Kilbourne. Everyone on this floor is required to do it. The criticals up on fourth usually don’t have to participate in group therapy. They get one-on-one. Anyway, group isn’t that bad. You just have to talk about yourself, what you’re feeling, et cetera.” “Is Nurse Kilbourne okay?” “You mean is she another Nurse Ratched?” I couldn’t help but smile. I nodded my head yes.
“Ah, she’s a peach, really, she is. She ain’t some overbearing, lifeless broad like that. Kilbourne’s all right.” I started to feel the twinges of hunger in my stomach. I had missed dinner and would not be able to eat until breakfast the next morning. I clutched my stomach, which grumbled at me to feed it. Having heard my tummy rumble, Aiden pulled out a brown paper bag from his nightstand drawer and threw it at me. I caught it and opened it up.
Junk food. Candy, specifically.
“It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing,” he said, gesturing to me to eat it.
“They let you keep candy in here?” “What the good nurses don’t know won’t hurt ‘em. It ain’t like they go rummaging through our drawers when we ain’t looking. The idiots trust us enough. I’ve got cigarettes and a lighter too, if ya smoke. I don’t smoke, personally, but the guys always gamble with stuff like that. I’ve got shitloads of candy stashed elsewhere around this room. I bet you’ll find some of my hiding places sooner or later.” Chomping down on all the candy I could fit in my mouth, I sputtered a “thanks” to him.
“Don’t mention it,” he replied. “Besides, I wasn’t out in time for dinner, so I couldn’t have nicked any rolls for you.” “Out of solitary?” “Yep. I was locked up in there.” “Oh.” I wasn’t even going to ask him why he had been shut up in solitary confinement. I figured I didn’t have the right to pry into something like that.
Yet Aiden was keen on talking about it. “They put me in there because I got in a, er, verbal scuffle with one of the other patients. It was petty, really, but Those In Charge thought it best to put me in solitary until I calmed down.” “What were you fighting over?” “He accused me of cheating at Euchre.” “What’s Euchre?” “It’s a card game. Samson and I were playing against this patient, Rutger, and his partner, Bill Bryan. Anyway, Rutger thought I was cheating.” “And were you cheating?” A sly grin crossed his freckled face. “It ain’t cheating unless you get caught. Besides, he couldn’t prove it. I told him to prove it, and he got even madder at me. Called me a lying piece of shit and spit at me. So I kicked him under the table, as he was sitting across from me. He got up, and I got up, and he smacked me across the face, so I tackled him. I had him in a good choke hold when the aides came and broke up the fight. All the other patients in the rec room were yellin’ and cheerin’, and them aides had the damnedest time tearing me off that jerk.” “Did he get sent to solitary too?” “Yep. They love sending people to solitary almost as much as they love using electroconvulsive therapy on us when we misbehave.” “Electroconvulsive therapy? Jesus, that sounds pretty bad.” He nodded his head. “It is. There have been a few guys from the ward who’ve had it done. One of them actually died, or so I heard. The hospital denied anybody dying from ECT. They said the patient got better and was released. It’s all a bunch of bullshit if you ask me. I know treatments back in the early days - I’m talkin’ the early 1900s - were even less humane, but goddamn. I hope I never get so out-of-control that they give me ECT.” Electroshock therapy. I had heard very little of it up until that point. I knew it was a method of “treating” patients, but other than that, I didn’t know what it entailed. I’d read about it a little in books, and it did not sound pleasant. The thought of receiving shocks throughout my body kept me up that night. Listening to Aiden’s rhythmic, light snores, I laid in bed, thinking about it. What if I got so bad they gave me ECT? How many people had died from procedures like that which were meant to “help” patients?