Doing a Double (fiction excerpt: Madhouse Diary)

(10/2004)

Ed on Madhouse Diary: Doing a Double

Dad worked in a mental hospital. He'd come home at 4:30 except on the days when he worked double shifts. Then he came home after 11:00. When he was mad at us kids for fighting or generally being difficult he'd remind us that just to keep us in clothes was costing him two sixteen hour work days a week. Every Sunday night and every Thursday night was the schedule. I guess he had Saturday off. He usually slept all day. His snoring was loud enough to make us all understand that we better be quiet. I counted sixteen hours on the clock one day and realized that, as far as functioning through the day, sixteen hours was more than one day. It was all the day's life drained from it, and some of its bones ground into dust as well. I was a kid then, and I knew that a length of time you wouldn't even be bothered doing fun things had to be torture. Dad was a big strong man but we knew he was killing himself gradually.

Years later I'd work a couple sixteen hour shifts to see what it was like. I didn't have kids at home, I wasn't working in a mental hospital, and I wasn't an overweight smoker like dad, but I bet I felt something like what he felt. You don't want to feel that. Around the fourteenth hour I remember something like madness creeping in, then fleeing quickly and leaving me with a queasy sense of triumph that I hadn't fallen into the abyss. There was some gateway that opened in the mind during the double, but it was easy for young, fearless me to see it as a fearful place and step away from it. But was Dad able to avoid its lure?

The whole notion of working in the mad house is a Dickens nightmare. How did Dad come to it as a viable employment option? He could've worked fifteen miles closer to home at something far safer. Safer both physically and mentally. I worked it out in my mind that something about being in the crazy house made Dad feel justified in being in a terrible mood all the time. When it came time to voice his state of mind to the world, what else need he say besides "mental hospital" and "kids at home" before even the most cold-hearted listener would begin to think, that explains it.

(Written 10/2004)