The Eden Express Read Online Free PDF

again.”
    “Then you’d consider it?”
    “Ya. I don’t think I could ever forgive myself for saying no.”
    So we went over to discuss it with Dr. Leen, the assistant superintendent of the place. The whole security mess had just been taken out of the steward’s office and dumped in his lap. He was dying to have someone to deal with it. So I was hired. A week later, I started my career as chief of police.
    I was a very good chief of police. For starters, I cut crime. And I set up all sorts of reporting and filing systems so I could prove exactly how much I cut crime.
    Special state police are a lot like special children. There were very few in the group who could have been regular state police and those who could have been were mostly young, working their way through college, or taking a second job they could sleep through. Had they been capable of being real state cops, they would have been fools not to. At Boston State, $130 a week was the top salary they could get and that was after five years. They spent a lot of their time on the job drinking coffee, bitching about being handcuffed by the Supreme Court, grousing about not being respected, avoiding any sort of work, and watching television. Being a security man at a state hospital wasn’t exactly what you’d call a prestige job. They were looked down upon by just about everyone else working at the hospital. They didn’t get to carry guns. They didn’t even have uniforms before I got there. The hospital was plagued with breaking and entering, theft, muggings, the
occasional rape, vandalism, and so on. What I was supposed to do was anything that would make these guys an effective security force.
    What I did was mostly showmanship. I’d give the heads of different units of the hospital a call and tell them that I’d like to address their next staff meeting on security. I’d talk about what they could do to help make our job easier, and what things I was doing to improve security. It took them by surprise. Lots of people working at the hospital didn’t even know there was a security force. Whenever there was a crime of some sort I always showed up with a Polaroid camera and took copious notes from anyone who was there. Everyone was impressed. I created the impression of motion and that was as good as the real thing. People became aware that there was a security system and that it was being reformed and run by this dynamic, earnest young man. No one had ever gotten a memo from security before. Now everyone got them all the time.
    I got my men uniforms, a shiny new office, standardized procedures for handling and reporting incidents. I dressed up the patrol cars with flashy decals.
     
    All my previous jobs had been manual labor of one sort or another. Landscaping, loading trucks, pumping gas, shell fishing, marine maintenance, things you couldn’t really say much about one way or the other. But this was an adult-type job with adults under my charge and all manner of heavy social issues every day.
    But the hospital was a depressing place to work. I got to know a lot of the doctors and very few seemed to think the hospital was doing the patients any good. It was just a dumping ground for human garbage. Regular hospitals are places you go to get well. A state mental hospital is where you’re put if you don’t get well.
    Although I never took any psychology courses at Swarthmore, I had read a lot of psychology and was very much interested in it. In a
way, being a religion major was a way to be a psych major without all the boring stuff about rats and statistics. Most of my friends were psych majors one way or another. We were all fascinated by psychological stuff, which is how many of us came to be called “heads.”
    My job didn’t involve working directly with patients, but I thought about them a lot. I saw them as victims of our fucked-up, materialistic, impersonal, hectic, overmechanized, dehumanizing society. There wasn’t much mystery about why these