Undone
Dean Ford
They kept their crazy on the middle floor where it’s harder to escape to the ground or the roof. It was usually the addicts who tried to run. Not like us, playing 1000-piece puzzles till meatloaf came on plastic trays. The walls that faced the nurses were fake glass. We were like fish in tanks. Near the exit was a window to the channel that cut the Portsmouth Naval Hospital off from Norfolk like a moat. I was stationed at the base in Norfolk fixing Blackhawks until I wasn’t.
From the window, aircraft carriers shoved off like logs floating toward the ocean. The patients waited. Sleeping through the day was prohibited although some still got their way. Most of the patients were Navy—comradery still between us, another joint trial. It was clear who was civilian—the broken housewives. Marriage was economical in the military. Double the income for towing a spouse across the country, double the space in family housing. One housewife, Pink, had come in after an incident with kitchen cutlery and her arms. We weren’t allowed to hug each other but she’d mime it, wrapping her arms round what clothes they let us keep—no drawstrings, no zippers.
When you’re gone, outside of yourself, often you cannot see the mess of thread you become, but I could see her, and it made me feel put together. If Pink wasn’t confessing her love to strangers, she was crying and there was comfort in the distance between us. Underneath her glow was an emptiness we shared. She wanted solid ground.
*
I had an itch, an itch like I sat in ants, scratching my thighs and crotch till blood welled, unable to sleep. I’d watch the clock till 5:30am, staring into the shadows that bordered my roommate. Getting out of bed was like wading in water, shivering in the icy air from a frozen window. I’d dress in digital blue NWUs—thermals, belt, blousing straps, jacket, cap—only to change into aviation overalls at the hangar where I’d try, try, try to do the job I’d trained 9 months for, counting minutes between smoking breaks, socializing with stones. The gloom of winter was infectious. Most of us were dust on the cogs of the military, rarely productive enough to make our keep, knowing we would be released but unable to see beyond each day.
I dropped out of high school at 15, the year I felt another boy’s touch. A boy who Judas and Peter’d me. With such a shit first impression, homosexuality didn’t fit into my conventional idea of love. Sexuality was a game of choosing sides. I fought to please God and company in Calvinist fashion in a church that preached love and forgiveness. I want to say I came to an ultimatum, that years of fighting desire burned me out, but it was more complicated. Christianity was an addiction I’d relapse into. Little prayers sent to space work like quick fixes. Abandonment of faith was a rejection of self. It meant mocking my Sunday school childhood.
I went to bootcamp days after my 20th birthday, planning to serve my four years and enter college for music. After bootcamp, I spent 9 months in Pensacola, Florida rushing through the basics of aviation technology. I joined the performing arts unit in Pensacola and sang patriotic jingles at retirements, anniversaries, and award ceremonies, eventually leading the vocal unit and teaching new airmen the songs. I’d march the American flag to and from the main pole for colors. The extra work gave me privilege and I split a nice room in a new barracks with a lax curfew.
The money then was good. There were few expenses beyond my car insurance and phone bill. The excess went to hotel rooms and paying back the friends who’d buy my liquor. We’d soak up the sun and salt water on white sands, relishing the springtime of our youth. But when the drum of the day dulled and the party was over, I would stare into the night sky chain smoking southern cuts, listening to Björk, getting my spiritual fix.
The time away from home in Houston, away from the biweekly sermons and my family’s glossolalia, wore down my faith in anything. Increasing carnality, my church was the joining of flesh. Nothing felt so strongly than exchanging body heat between shipmates. Though the fearful jolt of a surprise barracks inspection came close. We dusted the back of the fridge with our fingertips.
The bonds that put meaning into the space I inhabited were pruned as my friends were flung to all corners of the world, and with the growing unfamiliarity in the faces of the other airmen, I knew my time in Pensacola was over. My assignment was meant to be celebrated. I’d never see a ship working on Blackhawks, while most went to those cities on the sea, aircraft carriers, trapped like rats in a maze or in submarines, tiny little things. I’m a tall man, admittedly much skinnier then than I am now but big all the same.
When I arrived at the HM-15 hangar, I found myself surrounded by disappointment. Not my own but that of my peers. They were disappointed in me. It doesn’t take long for others to realize I’m gay. Surely, within the first sentence they could tell, my mannerisms and sensitivity dripping off each word. I never called another man ‘bro’ or ‘dude’. I couldn’t even fake at relating with hetero attraction.
The manly men of HM-15 saw me as an outsider, a blemish. Even the new ones would take to exclusion. They wouldn’t point a toe at me in their conversation, closing their circles tighter and tighter. It wasn’t a direct malice. It was more like everyone was just ignoring the elephant in the room.
We worked 12-hour days 6 days a week. Half of it probably spent under the smoke tent taking slow drags in the frosty winds. I smoked more than ever. A pack a day at least. My mouth little more than an ashtray. Mostly it was to connect with the others, to show we weren’t so different.
*
They told me I stayed in the nicer barracks at the Norfolk Naval base. My kitchen was infested with fruit flies from the food left by sailors who shipped out. It was a cyclic affliction. A guy would settle into the room and buy a load of groceries to rot for the next lucky bastard. Those who had lived on the ship viewed my barracks like a paradise. I could only see the fruit flies. Black dots whose brood slept in the cabinetry and refrigerator. Dead over the stove top and between the oven and counter; corpses settled like dust in far-to-reach places.
I took it upon myself to clean it all. I would not be leaving anytime soon. It was my new home and only refuge from work. I bought rubber gloves, bleach, raid, trash bags, a mop, a broom. I trashed all the food with little discretion to what was forgotten and what my current roommates may have bought for themselves. The flies survived from inside the sink and behind the fridge. They were the rightful inhabitants of that place and me the intruder.
A month into my stay, a seaman moved into my bedroom. His name was Red, and he was like me, like some mirror showing my disease. The men I had been with before him were not like me. They were incognito and discrete. We would make clandestine maneuvers in dark spaces. I stored my love and feelings like gems in a museum. Natural cut stones glimmering behind a glass case in a dark room without utility.
Red and I fooled around in our shared bedroom, but he felt for me in ways I could not reciprocate. He wrote me poetry. He took me to a bookstore that stacked their collections without shelves; monoliths of dusty jackets. He gave me his confidence.
I wonder what I would be now if not for him. If not for our fight and the threats he sent me and the blows I gave him.
*
I dreamt I was made of string like a doll. The layers of me sewn together emitted a glow. When I pulled at the frays, I came undone, yet I couldn’t stop pulling. Each blood vessel that made up the trails of my body turned to yarn which fell into a coil. If I could lay myself out into this ring of thread and find what was glowing underneath, I could understand what made me do the shameful things I’ve done.
When my body fell lax and the cords of my ribs opened, I reached into myself, passing my hand through the gap like a stretched-out doily. I felt nothing in the space inside me. I pressed into the underbelly and around to where my spine should be and found it cool and soft like velvet. I contorted to reach a conclusion but went numb as I came undone.
I abandoned myself to the outer systems of my world. Animalistic desire, unreasonable reactions, violence for the sake of violence. There are those who cannot fit into this world so they must end. Self-destruction seemed the obvious conclusion.
One night I locked Red out of the bedroom and pretended to sleep. He pounded on the door for so long I was sure his knuckles were bloody. I let him in to stop the pounding and he pushed me coming in. I pushed him back and he threatened me. If you even touch me again, I’ll fucking kill you. The threat set me off, swinging wildly, missing connection, slamming my arm against the wooden bed frame over and over till my bones cracked. I drove myself to the ER and got X-rays taken.
When I fractured my arm attacking Red, I knew it was the beginning of the end. Somewhere along my time in the Navy, the chemistry of my brain changed. I was alone in freezing lot outside the ER, scratching the cords of my thighs. Dejected, staring at the ground, shivering numb in the night. My mind undone, the itching still intact. I plucked the loose ends, pulling out lint and blood, which dried and flaked away.
Parts of me neatly ordered and understood like a timeline of cause and effect, a Venn diagram of desire and shame, Freytag’s pyramid pointing at the fight with Red. Underneath what’s underneath is still beyond me. Parts of me unbreakable and intrinsic, holding me up while the rest of me lay coiled on the floor.
I tried to delay my undoing with visits to the dermatologist for the itching, negotiating with my chain of command to ease the stress. But there came a point when I realized that I was nobody and as nobody, nothing I did mattered. As a nobody, it no longer mattered to me that my failure had gone from social to occupational. The men at HM-15 were right with their disappointment. They could see past my layers and into the emptiness within me. They knew I would never survive in their world. I told them I got in a fight and fractured my arm and they laughed at the idea I’d do anything as manly as fighting, though there was nothing manly about my violence.
*
Shortly after my fracture, under the advisement of my mother, I checked myself into the psych ward. I was under observation for a week, meeting with the doctors under some undisclosed deadline for diagnosis. It was an island of misfit toys, all broken someway. Some worse than others but all vulnerable and raw. I held on to them, listening to their stories about why they were in the loony bin. Self-harm a common thread.
Pink was a newlywed to a Navy man. This was her third time as an inpatient. She described her mania as a warm energy that called her to new levels of productivity and desire. Her depression, the pit she couldn’t climb out of, an antithesis to her usual cheer. Her mood swings affected her relationship and deteriorated her chances at staying together. Where would she go if they didn’t work out?
There was a man, Yellow, who cried during our board games. He told me his father used to smoke crack with him when he was growing up. He told me of the sexual abuse between sobs. Yellow had been in longer than me and had spent time abroad becoming an indispensable member of his company. Educated and experienced, he was needed. He said it was his first time in this wing of the ward away from the addict side. He had faced Captain’s Mast (military court) for the past times he didn’t show up to work and they found him drunk somewhere. It resulted in mandatory rehab and monetary fines, but he was still expected to return to duty after he was fixed.
As time in the ward passed, they put me on Seroquel, making me drowsy and slow. They asked me if I wanted to leave the Navy or if I wanted to return to duty. I felt yellow. I decided I was done.
I don’t remember if the doctor told me my diagnosis or if I read it first. Maybe he told me, and I couldn’t process it. When we talked, I was so weird. I didn’t realize how odd the things I said were and the way I behaved till I read the doctor’s report. Bipolar type 1 with psychotic features. Invisible bugs crawling on my legs and round my crotch. The same diagnosis as Pink. Her crazy is my crazy.
He told me I should reconsider having any children as it’s a genetic disorder and lifelong affliction. Why was I talking about having children? There of all places? Conventional ideas of family so pervasive as to become a topic in my distress. It’s as if I thought having a kid was the remedy to my failing mental health.
This began my 6 months of limbo as I severed from the Navy. I didn’t see Pink again, but Yellow I saw around the hospital. We, those broken boys and girls, stayed at the barracks near the hospital where they still expected us to work while they sorted our papers. We would muster in formation on the 7th floor, one floor above the ward, where Veteran’s Administration held its office. They had me answering telephone calls from veterans seeking benefits. Some people you could tell had nothing wrong with them. They managed to squeeze their way out of service. I couldn’t help but feel no different than them. Cowards escaping hardship. Useless bodies.
A couple weeks after my time in inpatient care, I walked back to my barracks from the telephone duty and saw a door flagged with yellow tape and Military Police surrounding it. A guy shot himself dead two stories above my room. The yellow tape on the door hung like a Halloween decoration. KEEP OUT. KEEP OUT. KEEP OUT.
Past the haze surrounding my time in the ward, I promised myself to never be that person. Whether it mattered or not if I killed myself wasn’t as important as my pride. Fuck the diagnosis and all the shitty things that the doctors wrote about me, I wasn’t going to end up a splat on the wall. It only adds to the chaos of the world. If I was going to be undone, I wanted it to be like Pink: inappropriate affect, paper doll love.
*
They moved me back to the Norfolk base to wait for paperwork, 6 months for a disability percentage and a DD 214, working as a janitor for a new barracks. I befriended a nymphomaniac from Guam. We swabbed stairways nobody used. We shared a man once in a tequila induced haze. I stayed close with Yellow and eventually moved in with his girlfriend who was also a different brand of crazy. She was in the middle of a divorce with a John who was abroad.
They had three dogs, got rid of two as they moved into another place away from John and got two cats. I stayed there, living between the barracks, their apartment, and a neighbor’s place till those 6 months finally ended.
When it was time to finally return to Houston, they gave me the third dog, saying it loved me more than them. It was the ugliest thing, but she grew on me. She’d sleep in my lap. It forced me to sit still, and in that stillness, I started to pick up the pieces.
Dean Ford is a gay veteran and writer living with bipolar disorder and residing in Houston, Texas. He is the current prose editor of Defunkt Magazine. He has a B.A. in English from University of Houston. He has a story published in R2: The Rice Review. Follow him @stevendeanford on Twitter and Instagram. “Undone” is an introspective review of the events surrounding the author’s bipolar diagnosis while in the Navy.