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to put your wife out on the street!” shrieked a doctor on the phone one night. It was after dinner, and Dad had just cracked a beer when the call came.
    â€œExcuse me? You must be mistaken; I gave a check to the business office this morning after I got my wife checked in.”
    The doctor called my father a liar and continued with his threatening. Dad hit the roof. Not only had he paid, he had taken out a loan out against his life insurance policy to do it. “You better get us that money by tonight or she’s out!”
    â€œYou put my wife out on the street and I swear to fucking God, by morning you will be crawling with lawyers!” roared my dad into the receiver before slamming it down. Not surprisingly, they did not kick her out of the hospital. They kept Mom, kept the money,and never offered an apology or an explanation for the doctor’s threatening phone call.
    That was Dad’s reality for most of my growing up, so we never blamed him for losing it now and then.
    Years later, I asked him why he didn’t share with us what was going on, why did he shoulder the whole thing and rage at the world alone. He said simply, “How do you tell a four-year-old that her mommy wants to die?”
    The hospitals weren’t all that bad. One, McLean, was downright opulent. I remember marveling at the nicely appointed rooms, decent food, and celebrity guests. When I was a teenager, visiting Mom at McLean, we went into the dining area, where she introduced me to her new best friend, Ricky. “He’s a singer, too!” she crowed at us both, one hand on my shoulder and the other on his. He was shiny and sad, with trembling hands and a thick macramé head of beaded braids. I wondered if Rick James told my Mom to call him Ricky . I somehow doubted it.
    Mom often had a new favorite person in the whole wide world that she would meet in these hospitals. When we would visit her it would go like this: “Stormy, this is my new bestest bestest friend Sheena. Her husband is a shit and so she tried to jump off of a building, but she’s not going to do that again, are you, Sheeny ?” Then they would have a knowing laugh and Sheena would look at her bandaged arms and chuckle as if to say, “Yeah, I’m such a silly pants!”
    Most of my mother’s bestest bestest friends, I could tell, were lifers, either hopeless addicts or so horribly damaged that they could only find connection or community in a medical or chemical environment, and destined be locked up, somewhere, forever. Some of these new friends would want very much to sit near me or hug mein a wrong, hungry way. When those people were Mom’s new friends, I knew never to go to the restroom without my brother walking me there and waiting for me.
    Mom would collect these new favorite people because she was the princess of the ward. She was never ever as fucked up as the poor souls she was bunking with, so she was like a powerful beacon to the rejected and disenfranchised. Build them up and try to love the sick and sad out of them. Mother Teresa for maniacs. A batshit bug light. It always seemed as though she was everybody’s favorite little person in the hospital. I guess that’s why she loved it there so much.
    As glorious as McLean Hospital was, on the other end was a pit of hellish proportions. One hospital was so bad that my father wouldn’t let us go there at all. I was much older when he told me about it, and it shocked me because I was sure there couldn’t possibly be a place more ghastly than Sadville.
    It was a doctor from Sadville who had threatened to throw my suicidal mother out in the middle of the night if my dad didn’t pay up. It came as no surprise to anyone in my family that this pit of an institution was closed. I would even hazard a guess that some of the people who were in charge back then are either behind bars or mopping up their own shit in a soggy cardboard box under a bridge