His Name Is Elvis and He’s Slowly Spiraling Into Schizophrenia

Friendship and mental illness make a bitter cocktail.

I met Elvis exactly twenty years ago, while we were both working for a big multinational corporation. Our branch was producing detergent and our early mornings were filled with the fresh smell of clean sheets and the low and calming presence of massive factory-sized machines packing away white fragrant dust.

We were both working on the same floor, just a few feet away from each other. He was the first one to arrive in the morning. I was the last to leave at night.

Between the two of us, our big square corporate building, with its bright lights and hospital-white walls lived a full lifecycle that we felt personally responsible for.

Him more than I, because Elvis was the kind of person who felt responsible for a lot of things that had nothing to do with him.

‘Why is your name Elvis?’ I asked.

‘Why is your name Mona?’

‘My parents liked this telenovela that was going around when I was born. The main character’s name was Ramona.’

‘My mom named me Elvis because she had a crush on Elvis Presley.’ ‘We have so much in common…’

We’ve been friends ever since.

Elvis had been battling depression since his teenage years. Trapped between a narcissistic mother and codependent father, he never really found a safe space to call his own.

Nothing in this world was made for him. There was no emotional or mental space where he belonged.

Not even his marriage. Elvis had married his high school sweetheart, a narcissistic woman made in the image of his mother. They divorced in his mid 30s and Elvis spent a full month in a mental health institution.

The institution was a few miles out into the field on the outskirts of our city: the kind of place Hollywood parades as the location place for horror movies, with paint chipping from urine-colored walls, and anguished screams that would howl out into the night.

It was the first (and only) place where Elvis ever felt at home.

His diagnosis was given swiftly, from the first few encounters with his psychiatrist: schizophrenia.

It was the subject of much debate at the water cooler because the hospital had an obligation to report his severe diagnostic with his employer. As it often happens, word got out and soon everybody knew: Elvis has schizophrenia. It was a label that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

‘My grandfather had schizophrenia’, Elvis told me. ‘My mother used to hate him so much. He was a shameless misogynist who ruined the family when he sold our house to be close to his mistress. He died in a word salad.’

Word salad is an incoherent type of speech, a mix of unintelligible, random words strung together into phrases. The words may be loosely associated with each other, but they are disconnected from logic, reality and have no meaning to the listener.

They do have meaning to the schizophrenia patient though.

‘I might end up like him’, he told me.

‘Why aren’t you taking your pills then?’, I asked.

One year after he got out of the psychiatric hospital, Elvis stopped taking his pills and cut contact with his psychiatrist.

‘They make me into a zombie. I can’t think, I can’t function, I can’t do anything. And what’s worse, I can’t get it up!’

‘It’s been twenty years, Elvis. They have better pills now. And better shrinks. And you have nobody to get it up for anyway.’

‘No, they wouldn’t help me. Plus, what do shrinks know?’

Elvis functioned for almost twenty years without seeing a psychiatrist and without taking pills, although he has a severe mental illness that is known to be unresponsive to any kind of treatment except medicine.

He wasn’t even trying any other kind of treatment. he was just living his life. A calm and stress-free life: go to work, come back home, watch TV, repeat again tomorrow.

That was until the big corporation closed its doors. I had left 10 years before. He stayed until the end.

His elderly father became ill and Elvis is taking care of him. He’s difficult, undisciplined, and miserable and he infects everything around him with his grim death mood.

‘His nails are so big and sharp he looks like a hawk. He uses them to scratch his dirty feet that he never allows me to wash. The house is rancid from all the food that fell on the floor. It’s a death zone.’

There was always something special about Elvis. Something different, something that had little to do with the world that you and I experience: an empty gaze, the inability to keep track of day-to-day existence.

A palpable aloofness that if you tried hard enough you could almost touch. It had a material consistency to it like thick Jell-O suddenly took over his being.

But he used to be functional.

Now he’s not. And I’m the only one who can tell.

Because I’m the only one around, except his dying elderly father. And the sheer absurdity of the situation is more sinister to me than his father’s hawk claws tearing bloody skin off his own grimy feet.

‘I’m ok, I’m ok’, he tells me and I always wonder if he believes his own words. ‘It’s just that I’m tired and my father is sapping my strength. He’s depleting my vital energy source. I don’t know how long I can go this way.’

I can see the sudden desperation in his eyes, followed by a huge black hole of emotion. I used to see resilience there. Now there’s nothing. Just emptiness.

‘Listen to me’, I say looking straight into his eyes: straight face, straight gaze, and squeezing his arm as hard as I can. ‘You’re slipping. I can see it. You’re slowly spiralizing into schizophrenia.’

He smiles vaguely in my direction and all I can think is about the futility of life and how soon I’ll have no more way of communicating with him because the door to the world that he kept open for such a long is slowly closing.

So I keep going while I still have him there.

‘You’ll be in the hospital soon. Please get help. I’m begging you. The moment they put you in there there’ll be no one to take care of your father.’

And just as I say that, I realize what’s going on: he can’t take it anymore. So his creative brain found a way out.

This new episode of the disease is not here to break him, it’s here to help him. The breaking is incidental.

Schizophrenia is the only way he allows himself to escape the horrifying reality of sleeping in the same home with death. It’s the only force strong enough to take him away from the madding crowd.

It’s the only power that can shove him back into the only place that ever felt like home: the mental hospital.

‘Thank you for caring about me, but I’ll be just fine’, he says lightly and looks through me to a point hidden somewhere behind me, maybe in a reality that I have no access to.

I look at him and see a glimmer of life behind his hazel eyes, like the faint flickering light of a plane far up in the deep night, barely visible, but undoubtedly there.

Somewhere deep inside, hidden in the vast expanse of his peculiar brain, Elvis’s plane is going somewhere. I hope it’s somewhere nice.