Visiting Hours

***

One evening in mid-July I find myself in the hills above Chavez Ravine near Dodger Stadium in downtown Los Angeles. I had gone to a friend’s birthday picnic in a park near the stadium. When I get on the freeway I realize I am close to the hospital where I stayed all those weeks 13 years ago.

I always get lost in this part of town. Three freeways converge on the city here, all of them difficult to get back on once you’ve gotten off. There are one-way streets that twist and dead end through hills and no clear pattern of how they are set up.

But as I leave the picnic in the fading light of early evening I swerve off the freeway almost as soon as I get back on. I realize I must be near that hospital, and I want to see it.

I know the inside so well. It is burned into my memory: the locked doors, the ambulance entrance, the courtyard with its barred ceiling. I know the layout of the halls. I know the nub of the carpet from all the times I got in trouble walking barefoot. I can remember a little of the blurred view from the fogged glass windows of the dining room. But I have no idea what it looks like from the outside, nor where it is exactly. I pull off the freeway and annoy the cars behind me as I decide where I can look up directions. I scrounge out my battered Thomas Guide and find my location. Hospitals are marked in small magenta squares, but none of them nearby say “Kaiser Permanente.” I call my mom.

I ask her what exit they took, how they got there when they visited me every day. She doesn’t know. She asks her partner Sharon, and she doesn’t know. They start looking in the Thomas Guide as well, no help. I can’t believe they can’t remember the outside of this place as well as I can remember the inside. They came so often. We are on the phone for ten minutes, then fifteen, its getting darker, I have somewhere to be. Finally Sharon finds a street name from the internet and I start driving. It is three blocks from where I pulled over.

It emerges all of a sudden at the intersection of Figueroa Court and College. Set into the hill, it looks out over the city from dark brown concrete and black windows, a black iron fence, the top of the bars’ curved fingers holding it away from the civilian world.

My jaw hangs open as I look at it, this place that exists so clearly in my mind but which I have not seen since my release. Rising before me it is the confirmation of so many truths: yes, I was manic, yes, I was hospitalized, yes, I was locked in restraints and given countless drugs and spit out after an eternal six weeks with a shrug, and the statement, “Some people just aren’t curable.”

I drive around it, look for parking in the impossibly congested streets, tall condominiums looming around the somewhat innocuous hospital. A family sits on a stoop and watches as I drive back and forth, the hospital a magnet for eyes that should be watching the road. I make clumsy five-point turns and consider parking in the red, so eager to get out and walk the perimeter. A parking officer starts following me and I loop back to the gated visitors entrance. A car pulls in and I hustle to back mine up behind her. She touches some keys on the speaker outside the gate, speaks with someone, and we are in.

I think of my Nancy Drew mysteries and how I loved to imagine myself as a mystery solver. The thought crosses my mind that I’d be horrible at it, for all the anxiety caused by just trying to enter the parking lot of a mental health facility.

I park in the upper lot and stare out at the awesome view of the city, an almost full moon glowing high in the lavender light. It is beautiful, and this bothers me. My heart beats fast and I know I must look suspicious. Everyone must know I should not be here, so late on a Saturday night, the parking lot closed to all but those who know what to say into a security callbox.

I tell myself to act normal as I get out of the car and look around at the well-tended green lawns and small curving paths. I think the ward I was in is just above me, perched overlooking the parking lots and the city and the moon. That part of the building knows me.

Two cars over, a man leans against a white car in white shorts and a white shirt. On top of the car a green cockatiel clasps a small wooden perch. They face each other. As I pass they both look at me and I feel as though I have interrupted a transaction.

***

I enter a side gate and I am in the courtyard my social worker, Ken Shin, took me with my mom on the one outdoor excursion during my whole stay. The grass is the same, and I think of how it must have looked to other visitors gathered at the umbrellaed tables to watch a nineteen-year-old girl in scrubs roll around on the grass like a puppy.

A few families sit in the dim light. Three kids bounce around a couple. I make my way around the outdoor area with its tables and sense of waiting. A few people are inside the cafeteria, a couple inside the indoor lounge. I keep waiting for someone to ask me what I’m doing here. According to the sign I passed, it is not visiting hours, but these people are here anyway.

I sit outside for a few minutes, record my thoughts at this surreal moment when I walk freely through a place I always associate with captivity. I am disturbed by how nice it all looks. This is not the place of my memory, with all this grass and green and a clear moon in a pale sky. This is much cleaner, much more humane than I want to remember it.

I decide to try and talk my way up to the ward. I am too frightened to take the elevators without talking to security. All the ballsiness of my youth is gone. Where is the daring shoplifter, the bold actress who used a Welsh accent to buy alcohol at seventeen? I am cowed by who this place remembers me as.

The security guard at the sign-in booth is talking to a maintenance man, though I don’t realize he is maintenance for a while. I assume everyone is a doctor here. I approach the booth and have no idea what I will say.

“Hello. Can I help you?” The security guard’s voice lilts with an accent—African, maybe something from the Caribbean. He has rich dark skin. We talk through thick reinforced glass.

“Yes, hi, I wanted to know how I might be able to speak with a doctor or the head of psychiatry here.” That sounds reasonable.

His eyebrows shoot up. “A doctor? What is it you need?”

“Well, I just have some questions about the facility, what services they offer.”

“Any questions you have, you can ask me.” Already he’s on to me. There’s no way I’ll see a doctor through him, he’d be putting himself at risk, since he’s supposed to be the gatekeeper.

“Ok, well, I just want to know more about your facility to see if it would be right for someone I know.” Part of me is slowly pulling back from my body, observing this timid self who doesn’t know how to talk her way up to a secured ward. I think about all those spy movies and what bullshit they are. They make it look so easy.

“Well, are you a Kaiser member?”
“I’m not, but the person I’m inquiring for is.” I don’t even have a picture in my head of who this “person” might be. I just keep seeing myself from 13 years ago.

“Ok, well, first thing you have to understand, people don’t just come straight here. They have to be referred. So first they go to the emergency room and a doctor decides if they should come to this facility. It is not open for people to just walk in.”

Of course. That’s how I got here.

I stall. “So, this is only for mental health issues?”

“Yes, this facility is just for mental health.”

“I am just wanting to know more about the units you have, what resources are available for patients, that kind of thing.”

“Oh, they have a wide range of activities, art therapy, groups, recreation, all that kind of stuff. Depending on the situation of the person, what they need, we have a lot of resources.”

I am both the inquirer and the one who is being discussed. It is as though he is talking about me from my past and I feel judged by him, this security guard who sits behind a glass wall and thinks he is qualified to talk about the kind of treatment that the facility can provide.

I try to keep him talking as I figure out how I can get up to the ward. I play the role of a concerned loved one, uncertain as to how to help. He reassures me:

“Listen, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve worked here for 3 years, and this is a very good facility. It has a good staff, the patients are treated well, it is a good facility.”

I know he is right, at least from what I’ve seen on the outside, what he, as a sane security guard would see from the inside. But that’s not what it was. No amount of green lawn and scenic overlooks that I never saw make it a good place for the patient.

At some point he is interrupted by a call, and there are repeated messages into a walkie-talkie. We are interrupted by a girl who wants to go up and find her lemon that she left on one of the floors. He sends the maintenance man who has been listening to our conversation to help the girl find a piece of fruit and still I cannot get myself up there. If only I invoked lost citrus.

“I just want to get a sense of what the ward is like, where he would be staying. Is there anyway I can go see the ward?”

“No, no, I cannot let you go up. Patient confidentiality. They don’t allow any cameras or anything up there because of that.”

At this point a pretty young woman hurries in and asks if she can go up and visit her friend. The security guard is hesitant, the girl is pushy—“I just want to see my friend really fast to give him this phone card,” and I am wondering if this is my chance. Can I get in with her? At least I can watch how she does it.

The girl pushes more—“Look, there are still 5 minutes of visiting hour left, I just need to run up.” She dances on her feet a little, exasperated. She looks at me for sympathy.

I watch her give her friend’s names: Alejandro Esparza. I memorize it for future visiting hours, but notice that the security guard phones up to the ward and asks for clearance. They will be expecting her, and they will be expecting the patient to know her. I want to follow her now, but I can’t. The visitor throws the guard attitude when he asks her the purpose of her visit—what is she bringing Alex. A calling card. Those are helpful. Hospital psyche wards and jails seem like the last remaining use for them.

I thank the security guard and leave, hushed. I want back in that ward.

I drive through the exit gate and park outside the facility and walk the perimeter where my ward was. I get close to the sealed doors that were adjacent to my room. I touch the rough concrete bricks that form the walls of that room. I think of myself in there so many years ago, such a different person. All the tears, all the screams, the collapsing of the self I had known. I walk past the outdoor courtyard, noting the green vines that have grown up over the black bars that stretch along the top, making it a kind of cage. I see into the double rooms with their dark dimmed windows and heavy curtains. I catch a glimpse of the lighted hall, the door to the bathrooms in rooms that patients shared. Rooms I was never well enough to share.

I chart the outside of this place finally, make it tangible after so long of being just a distant dream. And then I drive away, steering into the moon that hangs over the city, my witness. I get lost looking for the freeway entrance, steer into Chinatown with its lights and shouts, and have to backtrack, too close again to the place where I was.

***

About the Author

Hazel Kight Witham spends her days sharing her love of writing with middle school students in LAUSD. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Non-fiction at Antioch University in Los Angeles. She is working on a memoir detailing her experience with manic depression.