Rosewood Guilt

 Rosewood Guilt

When I was in high-school I agreed to do volunteer work at Rosewood State Hospital.  It wasn’t clear what I’d be doing there but the priest who suggested it assured me it was quite rewarding and not too strenuous.   I and some of my friends agreed to go on a Friday after class.

It was so bad there it almost defies description.  Built in the 1890’s the buildings were excellent backdrops for a Victorian Horror movie.  Scattered over 10 acres or so, Rosewood was a large, centralized ‘mental hospital’.  When we pulled up to our building that first day and saw SPASTICS in two foot letters on the front we were freaked out.  Then we pulled open the door to a high-ceilinged hallway walled with old cracked white ceramic tiles and floored with grey stone.  The smell was a physical presence, then a slap, then a punch.  The hallway was lined with some of the worst.  Grown men, big naked men with heads like watermelons sat wrapped in sheets on the floor.  Some were slowly banging their enormous heads and moaning, some of them were masturbating.  Other deformities sat cheek to jowl with them, people with hydrocephalus, microcephalus, no legs, or baby sized arms.  They were blind, deformed, twisted, drooling - the variety was staggering.  There were urine puddles around many of the men, but they didn’t seem to notice.

The nurse who met us said that those in the hall were the ones we shouldn’t bother with; she said that they couldn’t be reached.  There were rooms off that hallway filled with beds and cribs and bassinettes.  We were told we could try to connect but … the reachable ones were collected in the ‘TV Room’ in the back for us.  There were TV’s in every room playing to blank stares and unnoticed tears, but that Friday afternoon the television was turned off in one large room that didn’t have beds or cribs and the TV’s drone was replaced with goofy laughter and excited chatter while some teenage boys played bouncy-ball with adult men.  Not everyone wanted to do it again, but a core group of us did it every Friday after that.

          Mostly we didn’t know their names, some we gave nicknames.  One we called Muscles.  Wheelchair bound with withered legs, barely verbal and smelling as bad as any of them, Muscles had a trick.  He could raise his body up out of his wheelchair using his arms.

          Every Friday I’d watch Muscles do this about 15 different times.  “Know what I do?” he’d ask over and over and over and I’d say ‘no’ every time and he’d show me his trick again.

          It was funny how I never tired of that ‘trick.’  We also played bouncy-ball and sometimes he’d pull out a photo so creased and old that it could have been a picture of anyone.  “My mama,” he’d say pointing.  “Oh,” I’d always say as I nodded and smiled and looked at it carefully.  “Know what I do?” he’d ask and yet again I would be amazed at his strength as he lifted his shriveled lower body off the wheelchair’s seat.  He would always laugh out loud at my amazement.

Sometimes I did venture into the crib rooms where the smells were even worse and the sounds were tinier and sadder.  Some of the bed people could wave back, some could smile, but it was hard to look at most of them.  Many of the crib ‘babies’ were hooked to feeding tubes or IV’s and they did little more than breathe.  The attendants told us that although they were infant sized some of them were teenagers.  I don’t know why but sometimes I would gently place my hand on one of their tiny chests and feel their breathing.  Sometimes a tiny hand would reach up and hold on to my finger for a few seconds.

The patients were of all races but all the attendants were black and seemed to be either attentive old women with strong hands and sad eyes or young men who were strong handed and angry.  We whispered between ourselves about abuse of various kinds but … we were advised to ‘leave that stuff alone.’

One day during a crib room venture I walked up to a bassinette and before I looked down into it I glanced up at the TV.  The Mike Douglas show was on, the volume was turned all the way up. When I looked down there was a face looking back at me, a black face with intense brown eyes that could see me, relate to me.  I saw a face and a head far too normal for its little two foot twisted body in a diaper.  Pumping myself up with a big smile and a big cheery voice I said, “So, hi!  How are you today?”

His eyes looked back at me, actually looked at me, and he said, “Look at me, how the fuck do you think I am?”

I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t think.

“How would you feel?” he said.

After all the terrible things I had seen and smelt and suspected - this was the worst.  I went on overload and I said something inane like I had just wanted to say hello.  I wandered away - down the hall to Muscles and all the ‘reachable’ ones.

          After two hours we left and the people we were leaving behind waved and shouted “Come back, come back!”  Muscles raised himself up and down, like he always did.  “Next week!” we shouted back, “Next week!”

There were always ‘next weeks’ until graduation and my trips to Rosewood stopped.

I don’t think about that place much but once in a while I do think of my buddy Muscles.  I can see him clearly right this second – his grey and red hair, the residue of lunch ringing his mouth, his twisted skinny legs, his dirty tee shirt tight over his bulging arms as he lifts himself out of his wheelchair.

 

 I can also see those intelligent eyes looking up at me from that bassinette while Mike Douglas chatted with a movie star on TV. 

On all of my later visits I never did go back into that crib room.

I never saw the tiny twisted man with the penetrating stare again.

And I’ve never gotten over the guilt.