Memoir Shorts: Trans Conversion Therapy
Three (Failed) Escape Attempts From A Mental Health Facility: Attempt #3
We should have known when to give up
Escape Attempt #3
Then there’s the most elaborate attempt I ever heard of. The one I told you about at the beginning. The one Patrick, Steven, and Brent would see through to the end.
I wasn’t even supposed to go home that weekend. I wasn’t getting any better, I had no idea what to tell anyone, and as far as I could see, I was never getting out.
I finally persuaded my therapist Sharon to let me go home. She was sufficiently impressed, she said, by my effort (my whole heart) if not my progress (she couldn’t see any).
I spent the weekend in the company of my family, rigidly adhering to the diet and schedule the hospital gave me. But as soon as I came back, I saw the haunted faces. I smelled the lost hope.
I heard what happened.
The statute of limitations on escape is forever
Patrick, Steven, and Brent made a perfunctory glance down the hall to make sure the nurse was still watching television, the other was still on the nurse’s dumping station, and the other was earning her money the easy way.
Eyes shut, dreams on high, and the rest of us forgotten.
Patrick and Brent waited in the doorway of the bathroom while Steven tiptoed barefoot to the nurses station. Socks, it turned out, made more noise on naked tile.
A string of drool hung from the sleeping assistant’s mouth. She was an older woman named Faye. We all liked her. She treated us like people.
Steven thought that made her stupid.
As Steven went to open the door to the nurses station, her eyes opened — and fixed on him.
“What are you doing?” she said.
Steven wasted no time
He leapt over the nurse’s station before Faye could touch him. She was old. He was young. If he hit the switch, he’d be back over the counter, and she’d still be right here.
She was fumbling for her keys already. She knew it, too.
The nurse’s station was always locked, so in the seconds she searched for the keys, he flipped every switch along the panel. Who cared which did what? One of them opened the doors.
In Faye’s scramble, she hadn’t even called for help.
Steven leapt back over the desk where Patrick and Brent were waiting for him at the doors. They’d followed everything as it happened. If they didn’t make it through those doors, it was over.
But if they did?
Free at last
The moment they were outside, Steven took off.
Brent and Patrick had said they would all split, but the two of them ended up running, sometimes walking, through the creek on the side of the highway.
They never said how the state trooper caught them so fast. At six the next morning, I sat at the window and held my hand over my mouth as the two of them were brought back in handcuffs.
Steven “Tongue-Stick” Maynard may have escaped completely
Steven’s tongue had gotten him out of plenty of fixes. He just never paid attention to how often it got him into them, too.
He was smart enough not to call his family. If you did, you could start the clock on how fast the hospital found you. Your family were the ones that sent you there. What made anyone think they wouldn’t send them right back?
The secret, if Steven truly wanted his plan to work, was to trust no one.
But everyone has their drug. The one that doesn’t do it for 90% of the rest of the world, but for you? You just can’t do without.
A week on the streets was enough. He called his girlfriend for a trade that didn’t need trust.
She loved every word of it, eagerly accepted the proposal to be his safe house — as long as he lived up to his nickname. A day turned into a week, but then a fight turned into a catastrophe.
I never forgot the look on his face
They brought him back in like a prisoner, his hands cuffed behind his back, his ankles shackled so that every step brought him just inches closer to being trapped again.
To anyone else, that slow and awkward amble looked like desperation.
I knew better.
Steven hung his head low, but underneath those sunken eyes was a grin split from ear to ear, like that of a child who has just fallen from his first bike riding attempt but knows that every try afterwards will be a step closer to two-wheeled flight.
He couldn’t have known
Just down the hall, Patrick already had an escape plan. To tell you the truth, he’d had it in his back pocket all along. It’s just that he couldn’t take anyone else with him. And once he took that first step, he’d have to accept the inevitable.
Escape was always going to be a one-way trip.
ADDITIONAL READING (offsite links)
A 2017 Escape Attempt From That Same Mental Health Facility (Mississippi State Hospital/Whitfield/Oak Circle)
A mental health scandal haunting America (Starting In Mississippi)
