Elgin State Hospital Part II

More, even,  than architecture and ambience, any place is really all about the people within. Even Elgin State Hospital. I am surprised by how vivid the faces are in my memory, though the names have vanished all these years later. People who walked around conversing with the voices in their heads, people who were in straight jackets tied to beds, people who were trusted enough to be out of the locked wards and buildings to run to the commissary or roam the grounds. Catatonic people, manic people, alcoholics with DTs trying to detox, really sweet people, truly dangerous people, tons and tons of people.

Wait, one name popped up---Ida Rabinowitz!  The tiniest of ladies, all of 4 feet (maybe with shoes on), she probably weighed as much as a plate of spaghetti, without meatballs.

Even though she was a day or two past middle age, and then some, there was something so young, so girlish about her. Her bobbed hairdo? Her seeming innocence? Standing on top of her bed, Ida would read the Bible and spew out scripture & commentary to the air; she was an avid Jehovah's Witness and somehow seemed current with JW events worldwide. Guess that old Watchtower can find you anywhere.

Barbara had a bed not far from Ida's. The youngest at 27 in this particular cottage, she was the daughter of a Chicago cop. The combative paranoid daughter of a cop. Constantly vehement about the FBI conspirators lurking outside the building hiding in the bushes, she would insistently be pointing out the enemy agents (shadows)  surrounding us.

Brusque and obnoxious, she kept the routine from ever being boring. Although one day Barbara caught me off balance when she emerged from the bathroom with tears in her eyes, grabbed me and fervently exclaimed, "Every time I go to bathroom and have a bowel movement, I praise the Lord for it!" Somehow I had never considered that an actual religious movement, but it was all about new horizons in that place.

Another woman in another cottage was unfailingly at the ready and irrepressibly cheerful, dressed and eager to greet her husband who, she pointed out, was just beyond the locked door at the curb.  "Look, right out there in the car, if you would please just unlock the doors now to let me go to him and we'll be out of your way." Every 4 or 5 minutes we would have this conversation whenever I walked through the common area. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year. Clicking her pocketbook open and shut.  Clicking her dentures.  She was relentlessly polite and buoyant, and never, I mean NEVER, gave it up. Positive attitude on steroids.  She made the Energizer Bunny look like the most lackluster of slackers. And she just wore me out.  She didn't strike and pinch me like another old woman sitting in her chair did, constantly screaming about the 3rd World War we were apparently in the middle of. And she didn't gross me out like the disarmingly cute little old lady who would pick up pieces of "chocolate" off the bathroom floor and kindly offer to share them with anyone in the sitting room. But... you simply couldn't keep Gladys down.

Of course there was that tall, slender, perennially anxious and downcast German woman who had some carryover from the 2nd World War---she had a hard time speaking distinctly, not just because of her accent---her tongue was cloven, and she would shake her head and moan about that awful Dr. Stiller, things she couldn't mention any details. I didn't know if she was a concentration camp survivor or not. Her own personal Holocaust or the universal one.  There were some things perhaps I just wasn't ready to hear.

One of the angriest patients came to be hospitalized the last summer I was there. Ann. She had been confined there evidently through her parents' doing. She was intelligent, assertive, convincing as to the gross miscarriage of justice it was for her to be there, and I was sympathetic to the point of helping her plan an escape.  I think I was enlisted.  May well have been drafted.

I may have been swayed by the fact that she was allegedly a member of the famous Second City in Chicago, according to the story. Didn't you have to be certifiable to be part of that scene? That bold escape didn't materialize before back to school did for me, and I'm not sure if that's good or bad. For her. For me...it kept me out of jail.

There were lots of other things that I'm not sure I am guilty of or should be proud of as I learned the ropes in this strange environment, but that's a discussion for next time.