Crackup at Radio City
Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.
"Will the party from the psychiatric wing of New York University Hospital please come to the front desk?"
Up to that moment, I'd been trying my best to blend in with the clusters of Boy Scouts, the nuns in their habits, the tourists escaping the heat. An afternoon "behind the scenes" tour at Radio City Music Hall had probably seemed like good recreational therapy to the skeletal summer staff. But after that static-riddled announcement rang out across the waiting room, everyone turned to stare at us. An unkempt collection of different races, classes and ages, in various stages of undress and delusion, we were clearly not visiting doctors. We'd been made.
That was more than 30 years ago. But last month, when a friend, visiting from England for the holidays, asked me if we could go see the Rockettes dance at Radio City, I wasn't sure I was ready to go back.
I was 24 in August 1977, and I had just had a nervous breakdown. I'd been getting lost in familiar places for a month before the afternoon I went to Bloomingdale's and saw gun barrels protruding from behind the makeup counter. I called my mother, and, covering the receiver with a shaking hand, told her, sotto voce, that the department store was being occupied by revolutionaries. "I think you better get in a cab and come home," she said. By the time I got to her apartment on the Upper West Side, she'd called a psychiatrist friend for a referral. The next day I was admitted to the hospital.
The doctor's notes from my records say "1. Acute psychotic episode; 2. Some hysterical features." I had no history of mental illness and my mother assured me this was just an "episode" — likely set off by enthusiastic cocaine use the year I graduated from college. But I was afraid that I was no different from the other patients on the ward, who seemed to me authentically and permanently nuts.
My roommate woke me the first night to whisper from the foot of my bed, "Whatever you do, don't let them give you shock treatment." Every morning, a former principal with a scar across his throat stood at attention in the meds line to sing his school song. There were two older ladies who sat together in the halls and cried all day — nicknamed Frick and Frack by Vinnie, an outgoing longshoreman with a satiny pompadour who glad-handed everyone the day he was admitted as though he were running for office. There was an I.B.M. salesman who brought a suitcase full of weights and insisted he was there to get in shape, and an emaciated lady wearing dangly earrings and a turban who said, "I don't know why my children put me here — what's wrong with wanting to have a nice figure?"
In August, in New York, with all the psychiatrists out of town, it was easy to think that the rest of the world had left the planet and forgotten us. The nurses and therapists tried valiantly to organize ward activities to help us remember what normal looked like. There were roof cookouts requiring weeks of planning and trips to the grocery store where, flanked by watchful orderlies, we counted out change. On sunny days we were herded along First Avenue, two by two, in mismatched pairs, like inhabitants of an experimental ark prototype. They tried to get us to play Frisbee in a nearby playground, but when a nurse pitched the Frisbee to the principal, he let it bounce off his chest as he snapped his heels together and burst into song. Finally, there was the trip to Radio City Music Hall.
Counted off in little groups into taxis, one nurse per cab, we reassembled in the theater's waiting room. Sitting there, like anyone else on vacation, after a ride across town with the windows down, I felt a spark of anticipation for the first time in months.
But the public address system, summoning "the party from the psychiatric wing," quickly snuffed it out. I kept my head down as we walked the gantlet of gawking tourists, into the tour's first stop: the sound studio. The room was dark, closed off and filled with equipment that flashed and beeped and recreated sound effects from early radio. I knew it was a bad idea even before the whimpering began. The room filled with the sound of loud crashes and booms — an imitation thunderstorm — and wails of "Turn the lights on! For the love of God, turn the lights on!" erupted all around. The flustered guide fumbled for the switch and led us, warily, out of the sound booth, facing us as he backed up. The nurses aborted the tour then and there.
Everyone seemed relieved once we got back in the taxis. After the tour's stimulation, even I found myself looking forward to the blank quiet of the ward's white walls. Having been reassured that the world was still out there, we were ready to go "home" to our own kind.
In our cab, Vinnie sat in front chatting with the driver about sports, traffic and the weather. I leaned back in the seat and relaxed, happy to be listening, for once, to a mundane conversation. But nearing our destination, the driver asked, "How come all youse guys goin' to the hospital? Ya got somebody sick there?"
I leaned in, wondering how Vinnie would avoid telling the truth.
To my surprise, he didn't bother. "We're patients there," he said.
"Whaddya talking about?"
"We're mental patients — all but the nurse in back."
"Nah — whaddya mean?" the driver said. "You're a regular guy!"
When Vinnie didn't answer, the driver's anxious eyes scanned the rear-view mirror and fixed on mine — the quietest person in the cab, he assumed I had to be the nurse. But after weeks of denial, I had finally accepted my new role as a patient and stared straight back at him, circling my index finger around my ear — the international sign for crazy. His eyes snapped back to the road, and stayed fixed there for the rest of the wordless trip.
Back at the hospital, Vinnie swaggered through the ward's entrance, as though through a tavern's swinging doors. He had a story to tell, and to my surprise, I was the hero. Describing my tiny gesture as if it was the comeback of the decade, Vinnie went up and down the hall, roaring, "And then she goes like this!" twiddling his beefy finger around the side of his head, to Frick and Frack, to the people from the other cabs, to the orderlies giving meds, and then all over again when the night shift arrived. I was a ward celebrity.
A little while later, about six weeks after I had arrived, the nurses brought me a cake, as they did for all departing patients. Vinnie insisted on music and danced me down the hall. Then, pulling Frick onto her feet, he manhandled her into a waltz. I swear I saw her laugh over his shoulder at Frack, who stopped crying and just stared, open-mouthed. "Look!" he yelled, "I got her dancing, here!" When I was released the next morning, he pressed a laminated card with a four-leaf clover on it into my hand, and wished me luck.
For years, before I lost it, I carried that card in my wallet as a badge of graduation, a reminder of the power of laughter and friendship, a talisman to protect me as I crossed over into "normal life." I thought of it a few weeks ago, when I pointed Radio City out to my friend. We stopped and looked at the posters of the high-kicking, rosy-cheeked Rockettes. But then we kept on walking. I took her to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center instead, where we lost ourselves in the holiday crowds.
Merrill Black, a curriculum consultant who teaches at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, is working on a memoir.