Wake Up Bitch And Fix Me Some Chicken: Crazy People Say The Darnest Things

By John Booth

WAKE UP BITCH AND FIX ME SOME CHICKEN is a humorous look at the patients and staff at a state-run mental health hospital. In his first book, John R. Booth chronicles stories of some of his most memorable patients during a career as a social worker. Whether divinely driven or by serendipitous happenstance, John R. Booth, after a career in the pharmaceutical business, found himself working as a social worker at the largest mental health facility in his state. His preconceptions of what the patients would be like began an almost immediate transformation upon his arrival. He had heard all the stories and seen all the movies that depicted these souls as dangerous mental defectives and was sure that his life expectancy would take a turn for the worse with prolonged exposure to the “crazy kooties” he knew they must be infested with. On that first day, it took about ten minutes before his ideas of mental illness began the transformation from shock and revulsion to seeing humor in the patients’ distorted reality and their reactions and adaptation to this reality.
It is true that some patients were truly scary and dangerous. Most turned out to be really funny. Sometimes they would say funny things, and at other times they would say things funny. John knew it was wrong to “talk out of school,” but some of this stuff was too good to keep to himself, so he would take these stories home and tell his family and friends. They universally believed that he was a liar and had to be making this stuff up; however, after he repeatedly brought home new tales, the consensus changed. It was agreed that he was not smart enough or creative enough to fashion these characters himself, and they must indeed be actual people and events.
WAKE UP BITCH AND FIX ME SOME CHICKEN is a collection of these anecdotes as seen through John’s eyes. Dan, Poor Pitiful Paul, Doug the Firebug, and all the others are real patients, with real problems, who are really funny, if you just look for it. Whether it is midgets in the walls, misunderstood English, fast-talking Gilbert, or the psychobabble of Nurse Kiki, rest assured, you will not “sleep right through it.” This easy read will keep you turning pages, give you a new view of the mentally ill, put a smile on your face. In the end, you’ll see why John believes that his patients are some of the most precious people on earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Booth
• Release date: May 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311769343

John Booth

John R. Booth is a graduate of Oklahoma State University. He has never met Boone Pickens, Barry Sanders, or Garth Brooks, even though they too are graduates of O.S.U. He has worked in both the pharmaceutical industry as a sales representative and trainer and in the mental health field as a social worker. This is the first time he has been published. However, he has written, produced, and performed vocals on three CDs of song parodies. He is a frustrated musician who plays drums, piano, guitar, and ukulele, and although he has not played professionally in more than thirty years, at the age of sixty-two, he continues to hold onto the dream of one day being a rock god. John is retired and resides in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with his wife Becca. He and Becca love spending time with their grandchildren, Gavin, Will, Ava, Owen, and Lucy, and last summer attended one hundred fifty of their baseball and softball games. He plays golf passionately but poorly, and is an avid fan of Oklahoma State University football and wrestling. Go Pokes!

Book preview

Wake Up Bitch And Fix Me Some Chicken

Crazy People Say The Darnest Things

true stories from the nut house by

John R. Booth

Wake Up Bitch And Fix Me Some Chicken

Crazy People Say The Darnest Things

Published by John R. Booth at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard word of this author.

Copyright 2015 by John R. Booth

Freeze Time Media

Cover illustration by Di Freeze

Chicken Illustration by Memo Angeles

This book is dedicated to all my crazy patients and the woman I am crazy about, my wife, Becca.

Acknowledgments

First, I must give a big thanks to my wife who, for more years than she thought she bargained for, has endured my presence and that of the patients I brought home in my mind. She encouraged me to continue when mental acuity was impeded by brain lock and knew when departure from writing was the cure: Honey, I know you can find the right word eventually, but right now, fuck it, go play some golf. I love that girl.

Next, my children and grandchildren, who kept the memories alive by having me tell and retell the cleaned-up versions of these stories. Thank you, Lindy G., for making it impossible to not write this book by telling everyone I was writing it before I had put one word to the page. Thanks to my mother for encouraging me to get into social work (I would have thought she would have wanted better for her oldest son), and thanks to all who I worked with … too many to name but you know who you are: the nurses, doctors, social workers, administrators, housekeepers, security staff, charge aides, primary care aides, maintenance crew, medical records staff, pharmacy crew, IT guys, administrative assistants and psychologists — even the one who treated most of us like shit.

Thank you, Di Freeze. I had nothing but words on a page, and you turned them into a book. Don’t ever let anyone blame you for the content. That’s on me.

Most of all: God bless my former patients. They are some of the most precious people on earth. Anybody who has ever worked with mentally ill patients and says they loved them all is a liar. Some of my patients weren’t even likable, let alone lovable. But they were all precious. Not one of them ever asked to be mentally ill. At one time they were all somebody’s baby child, with parents who wanted nothing but the best in life for them. Not one of them ever told me that they woke up one day and decided, Yeah, crazy. That’s the ticket. If I could just be a burden to my family. If I could just strain their nerves, finances, and love until it has all run out. If I could live under a bridge, get arrested and put in jail, spend most of my life scared shitless, guess at reality, and guess wrong most of the time, expose myself to unspeakable diseases, self-medicate with alcohol, be beaten up regularly, be taken advantage of routinely, teased for just being me, live with unrequited love, and have no understanding of how it all happened. Yeah, crazy, that would be my heart’s desire. Most endured. Some found it too painful and ended the suffering. All will live in my heart.

Contents

Foreword

Cast of Characters

Glossary of Terms

Introduction

Dan

Doug the Firebug

Eldon

Gilbert

A Little More About Gilbert

Jerry

Sergio

Poor Pitiful Paul

Pam W.

Walter

Some Random Memories of W.

Short Stories

About the Author

Foreword

Writing a book is difficult and humbling. It makes you doubt if you were ever really funny, creative, clever or even literate. So:

To all who bought this book, I apologize. I am not, nor have I ever aspired to be, a writer. Family and friends goaded me into writing this collection of anecdotal remembrances as a social worker at the oldest mental health facility in our state, and later, at the only forensic mental health center in our state. I would entertain these friends and family members with stories of funny things my patients had said or done. They insisted that if I should ever write a book containing these tales, everyone would buy a copy. (I intend to hold them to that.)

What I found immediately upon initiating this literary endeavor was that it is much easier to tell a funny story than it is to write a funny story. An oral accounting of an event is punctuated and heightened with vocal inflections and physical interpretations, which add emotion and character to the telling. When I would put the same story down on paper, it would just lay there, sounding to me like a monotone collection of vaguely related words sans interest or readability. I wrote and rewrote every line. I obsessed over the characters and spent hours debating every verb and adjective. After months of stuttered starts, flurries of penned sewage, and prodigious amounts of self-inflicted dubiety, I finally decided Fuck ’em. None of them are now or ever will write a book. At least I’m trying. If they don’t like my book, tough shit. They still have to buy it. They promised!

But to you, the anonymous, the unsuspecting yet very much appreciated few who bought this book believing that it would be a good read, I apologize.

No refunds!

But, I do apologize.

Cast of Characters

Before you read this book, it is important that you know the cast of world-class characters that I had the privilege to work with every day. Most of the people listed below are actual staff members I got to work with; however, some are an amalgam, based on two or more people, blending their most remarkable, best, and in some cases worst, traits. All the people are real. All the names are fake. The patients (with all of their names changed) are all true, and no blending of characteristics or traits has been attempted. They are unusual enough by themselves. All the stories are true.

John Booth: That’s me. I was a social worker at both the state mental hospital and the forensic mental hospital that it morphed