ericboy's Diaryland Diary

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\"You get back on the latest flight to paradise / I found out from a note taped to the door\" - Stars

I went to visit Vennessa when she was in the looney bin in 1996. That was her word for it: Looney Bin.
I rode in the car with her mother and sister. The radio was tuned to the modern rock station and I sang along quietly to each song that came on the radio. When a song came on that I didn't know, I fell silent. Darlene, Vennessa's younger sister, turned around and asked me why I'd stopped singing. I told her that I didn't know the song. She told me I should sing along anyway; she liked to hear me sing.
We get to the looney bin, a swanky, low-to-the-ground structure called Piney Woods or Something Oaks, or, Fucking Shithell, why do my memories have to peel away from me like dead skin all the fucking time? This is my life, goddamnit, and I want it. I want to keep it!
Anyway, we get there and we go inside, a small mob of three, and say that we're there to see Vennessa. They ask us to wait in the receving area, which doubles as the common room. We're sitting there, watching cartoons on the television with some of the other patients. These people do not seem crazy in the slightest. I'm alternating between the cartoon and the floor-to-ceiling windows, giving view to crowded trees and lush green lawns and a beautiful world that these patients are being denied, for various reasons. I'm thinking of the torture that it must be for them to look out on to this when one of them starts to talk to me. Her name is Amy or Kate or Curses to Fucking Memory Loss. She is fifteen and very cute and energetic. She asks me who I'm here to see and I tell her. She says that she likes Vennessa very much and will be sad when she is released. Amy/Kate is very kind and I'm enjoying talking to her when I feel the need to turn my head and look down the hallway.
There is Vennessa, six-foot-one, dressed in pastel blue pj pants, a red Atari shirt, and her naturally curly red hair bundled on top of her head with a hair clip. She was never more beautiful to me then she was at that precise moment. I don't think that anyone ever has been, or come close.
She pulls me immediately away and warns me that I shouldn't let Amy/Kate touch me.
What? Is she a leper? She looks alright to me.
"No, she's a nymphomaniac. If you let her touch you, she won't be able to stop."
Vennessa talks to us while she chews a bundle of Nicorette gum which is far too large for her mouth. She tells us about a quiet room padded with mattresses that they are allowed to use to vent their frustrations. She tells us that she has destroyed three mattresses.
Vennessa is in this place because she tried to kill herself. A ton of pills and poor judgement. I know this because, upon admittance, the doctors suggested that she call anyone who might have had an effect on her actions. She was thinking of me, and the way that I had abandoned her, when she was taking pill after pill after pill.
Our visit is pleasant but short. I fall in love with Vennessa all over again, and assure her that I will be there for her when she gets out. When she does, she smokes a pack of cigarettes in the span of two hours. We move in together and embark on a tumultuous two year relationship that dies slowly like bloodletting and eventually undoes me.
Despite our role reversal, I never went through the motions of the pills and phone-call and mattress destruction. I swallowed hard and moved on. I wonder what might have happened if I had. Knowing me, and my idiot-savant mastery of things I have no business attempting, I would be dead. And, frankly, I don't want to be dead. I've got too much shit to do. And too many memories of a beautiful red-head who redefined love and pain for me. I never want to lose them. Ever.

1:12 a.m. - 2004-12-02

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