Not Dead Yet!!

By Ramon/a Gravez

"From the sticks of Oregon to Central America, California, Kansas, and many points in between, Not Dead Yet is an autobiographical tale of an idealistic, rebellious, gender non-conforming indiviudual who, at a young age, was imprisoned in a state mental hospital.  Upon release, the author finds salvation in a group of misfits at a recycling center, explores her own sexuality and becomes a pro-union activist agaisnt war, poverty, racism, and nuclear testing.

 

In a tone devoid of self-censorship, the author struggles to understand the racist ideologies and history of Portland and her connection to it.  With humility and insight, he examines his own family skelotons of racism.  Ramon/a takes us on a heartbreaking ride, making the connection between early childhood trauma and illness (MS) later in life.  Through joy, loss, confusion, and despair, the author navigates us through hostile political climates, resisting a world too eager for conformity and callousness.  A true survivor, Ramon/a has a unique tale to tell."

~ Christopher Robin, author of All I've Ever Wanted is Nothing to Do, Freaky Mumbler's Manifesto, and numerous other zines and chapbooks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pachinko Pop Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223636670

Book preview

Chapter 1

Iremember the first time i saw her with her milky white skin, dyed blond fringe haircut, and beautiful, slightly rounded body.  Her wrists were scarred from her first suicide attempt.  This time it was pills that got her dumped on the B ward of the juvenile unit of the Oregon State Hospital in Salem.  I had been there for five months and had already gotten a bad reputation which Stella was immediately warned about.  Stay away from her, the pointy-faced, feathered booby, Lori the loudmouth, advised the milky cherub so i could hear. She pointed at me while giving Stella the suck-up tour she's a freak.  

Never mind the fact that we were all freaks there; it was a mental institution for crying out loud- the very same one where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had been filmed.  Even so, there was still a very intact, albeit bizarre, social structure, of which i was near the bottom.  The anorexics and bulimics were among the trendiest residents, with nice clothes and doting parents.  They, along with some of the cutters were usually in for short periods, and seemed to be local to the Salem area, coming from one of two high schools.  Those were the only groups concerned with status there, probably as anything that happened inside the hospital would get back to their outside world.  This overwhelming concern for social status may have been what got them into the hospital in the first place- but then again, what then was my excuse?

Word had quickly spread that i was a lezzie after i repeatedly tried to kiss a skinny blond cutter girl with crimped hair during daily line-up’s, only to get slapped down each time.  This, along with my facial hair, and having been caught with a homemade dildo by my roommate, loud-mouthed Lori, who quickly ran to tell the night staff, helped me to earn me my super freak status.

Stella and I became inseparable after that introduction.  She was my salvation in that depressing hell-hole.  We were each other’s Mack and when Tristan came along, we were three- laughing, telling stories, playing cards for bets of gum and candy. Unfortunately, cigarettes had recently been disallowed on the juvenile unit; still present carpet burns brought an acrid longing to have been around in those days instead of now, but those days were before we were caught and thrown in the bin.  We laughed at the staff, calling some Nurse Ratchet, laughed at the other patients and their antics, laughed at each other, and laughed at ourselves as well as the barred windows that kept us in.

We passed the time trying to guess the stories of past inmates, stories that lay hidden in the layers of the couches, like dormant bugs, ready to crawl out and re-infect us.  These grey sectional couches had developed a hard shiny sheen from years of Haldol induced slobber that had dribbled down the faces of thousands of patients (including my own).  The staff moved them around from time to time, as if doing so created a fresh clean outlook on life. 

Anyone paying attention, who had been present for any recent bodily fluid mishaps, knew which couches to stay away from.  We all had our methods for sitting in the dayroom.  One tall serious boy with glasses ignored the mocking and carried plastic bags taped together to shield himself from the couches.  Many of us, including Stella, Tristan, and i, just sat on the hard plastic chairs where nothing could hide.  The rest were too out of it to care or too new to know better. 

The three of us constantly got separated for telling war stories which led to us being locked up there.  Stella and I had roamed the same streets of Hollywood and San Francisco; both of us had nearly turned tricks, only to chicken out.  We were both into punk and had even been to the same Circle Jerks show in N. Hollywood though we had never met.  She hung mainly with skins- though not neo-Nazis, she assured me.  We had drunk and used with different people who were remarkably, the same. 

I would do anything to make Stella laugh, including making shit up.  Her laugh would roll out of her like waves bouncing on a waterbed.  They would start small, get super loud and high-pitched, and then die down slowly.  If my antics were good enough or my stories disgusting enough, her laughter wouldn't quite settle and would peak and crest again and again. 

Stella and i were loud and raucous, definitely incongruous to the typical weekend activities on the B Ward.  Most of the cutters, pill-poppers, and pukers got weekend passes to go with their families, while the long termers and kids from further away had a little more peace and quiet. 

In the dayroom, the rockers rocked in their hard plastic chairs. (They didn't sit together, or keep rhythm).  Robbie, the head-banger silently banged, in slow motion so he wouldn't get the quiet room.  He had a brain injury with scars all over his head and chest and had been there for years.  Robbie would bang the air with his head while wandering around the dayroom, chanting: faker, faker- Tammy Baker over and over, as this scandal had recently been on the news. 

I wonder now what kind of trauma he had experienced as a child and if his trauma associated with the scars and the brain damage has ever gotten better.  Not once in the time I was there did Robbie have any visitors nor would he talk about any family.  A staff member told me once that he was abandoned as a baby and had been in institutions ever since. 

Robbie was trying to get into Fairview when he turned 18, in a year.  He seemed to think they had a better facility there.  Kids picked on him and made fun of him so you had to know Robbie and talk to him for a while to get this view point out of him.  He was the only one i knew that wanted to be locked up.  This planning of his future mental institution reminds me, sadly, of students trying to get into certain universities.  He eventually got transferred to the adult ward of OSH where he would probably be for the rest of his days.  He didn't get Fairview.

The zombies watched the plexi-glass encased TV or slept on the disgusting couches.  From the hall came the unmistakable sounds of the pacer doing his rounds, the ping-ponger playing against the wall, perfecting his trade, and the loud, bored singing of the current quiet room inhabitant. 

Then there was Stella and me.  I say this as if we were so different, above the rest somehow.  Well, we were- i was anyhow when i was with her; we floated above all the craziness, laughing and talking nonstop without a pause between where she stopped talking and i began.  Nothing got through to break our laugh sessions, not the other patients, not being reprimanded or penalized.  We were in another world when we were together and we were un-touchable there.

Stella was from Van Nuys, CA till her ma moved the two of them to Portland to make a fresh start after the first suicide attempt.  She was 17 and two years older than me.  Her only other family in Portland was her Uncle Steve, who ran an antique store on W. Burnside.  Stella’s dad had left when she was very young. 

Tristan was a young, freshly tattooed skinhead who had the shortest stay at the hospital of the three of us.  He wasn't a suicide but, like myself, had a series of psychotic events that landed him at OSH from his McMinnville home.  Stella and I didn't agree with his white supremacy beliefs and we argued until it was clear that he was dead-set in his views and then overlooked his puppy dog rants because- well, he made us laugh and that, was precious at 2600 Center St.

I was from Portland but i loved to be on the road, wanting to be where the action was, wanting to escape from where i was.  The first time i made it out of Portland by myself was in ’85, when i hitched to Seattle.  I only spent a few hours roaming around Pioneer Square, like I had in downtown Portland before finding trouble.  I told him that i had come from Portland and wanted to travel, maybe to California.  He didn’t have a car but he knew how to drive and said he could get us a car at the airport. 

Once the bus let us off, he took out a thick ring of keys, trying a few types of cars till one key fit.  People always said i never smiled, always glaring with a rabid scowl on my face but now, i was elated and beamed like the guy had just pulled a rabbit out of a hat when he started the car. I was amazed that we had just won this car, for free.  We gassed and dashed our way along I-5, heading for CA.  Eventually, of course, someone got our license plate and the cops were set onto us. 

One cop car became three, and then all i could see behind us were cop cars.  We kept going as fast as we could, just like the movies, with me lighting his cigarettes and turning the mirror to blind them with their spotlight. We made it as far as Medford where the cops had set out nail-strips after a two hour pursuit; we still had plenty of gas and i wasn’t ready to stop. 

It's amazing how a 14 year old body can bounce, unharmed, against the windshield, then to the back of a hatchback, only to jump out and try to run.  The guy, whose name i never knew, told me to stop running, that it was over.  It wasn’t until he told me this that i realized we weren’t going to continue on the run and get to California.  I looked up to see shotguns leveled at us.  I thought it was a joke somehow ‘til they made us lie in the mud of the ditch where we had flipped.  For some reason, they were under the impression that we had weapons. 

The next morning, the staff at Juvenile Detention opened the door to my private suite. Your mom says to say 'Happy Easter, Ramona’. Who the hell says ‘Happy Easter’ to someone in this situation? However, i had to smirk as i got the cosmic joke, recalling the drunken James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, playing with a toy circus monkey in the police station.  When his parents come in, Jimmy stands and bows his head reverently, and says to his obnoxious, fur-clad mother, Happy Easter ma’am, happy Easter.  The fake name i had given didn't take them long to unravel and before they could fly me back to the JDH in Portland,  my ever cheerful and annoying mother had called to do her hallmark duty, as always.  This car theft wasn't the straw that had gotten me locked up at the state hospital, but it didn't help my case. 

Before i could blink, Stella was released back to her N. Portland home.  I was dazed at first and sat for days, where we had always sat, unconsciously waiting for her to come to me.  She wrote me as soon as she got home, just like she had promised; i immediately fell in love with her big, curly script.  It was just like her personality and was written in three or four different colors.  She drew her pets and sent a photo of herself too, promising to make me a tape of her favorite bands.  Even though i wrote her back and tried to imagine i was just in a vacation home for a little bit, i was bitter and felt abandoned. 

It creates a totally different dynamic to have a best friend who is inside, than to have that same friend outside.  Why had she gotten out so quickly after trying to kill herself?  Was it because her mother wanted her back and mine didn't?  I no longer had anyone to buffer me from the walls that oozed sickness and pain.  It oozed from me as well. 

The staff soon realized i had been cheeking my pills after i streaked naked through the drab, dreary halls, twirling and dancing, ranting and raving.  I needed colors, chocolate and laughter to keep me alive like they had done when i had Stella.  I had never felt the void of happiness at the hospital ‘til i had Stella to fill that void and to share in my misery.  Now she was gone and i needed that exaltation which made me feel so good.  The drugs were in the way, stifling my emotions like a concrete lid, trapping me in a cold deep well.  I had to break out, show them i was not a drone.  I had to show my emotions and be proud of my body and spirit. 

I started by painting sheets of paper with the water colors that the Christian Hell’s Angels group had gift-wrapped and handed out the Christmas before.  The paint wasn’t communicating what i needed to say so i began to melt all the bits of chocolate i had squirreled away on the top of the heater in my room.  Some of the residents had apple juice growing in their closets to ferment into alcohol but that wasn’t what i stocked away.  On my diet, i wasn’t allowed to buy sweets at the canteen but i would get someone else to buy it for me or trade for it. 

As each piece became slightly soft on the heater, i rubbed it up and down my legs, swirls on my belly.  It was a slow process though, as i ate the ones that weren’t melting fast enough; i wished i had some berries or jelly for contrast.  I remembered the paint and with the brightest colors i could find, i painted an eye on my forehead and big polka-dots all over the rest of my body.  I was getting more and more excited as i painted and ate and smeared.  I was completely lucid throughout however, knowing i would have to wash it all off later but wanting, needing the release.

I was singing loudly to an absent Stella when a staff member came in to check on me.  I could tell by her face she was going to try and shut me up, shut me down, and kill my soul.  I slid past her tackle and raced down the hall.  It was going to take more than her to get me, even if she was 300 lbs. with big soft arms that she liked to wrap around you, pinning your arms in a fluffy hug.  I knew i was found out for cheeking my meds so there was no use trying to play it cool.  The jig was up but i wasn’t about to go down quietly only to get drugged up again. 

I wanted off that shit, didn’t want their poison mucking up my brain, confining my energy, and sterilizing my emotions.  I didn’t want to be on the slow, crashing train any more. It wasn’t me, wasn’t what i wanted to be in my life.  That was someone else’s decision- not mine.  I didn’t want any more drugs, not street drugs and not pharmaceuticals.  First they had me on Haldol, then switched me to Thorazine- it was all garbage and didn’t solve any of my problems, only made more.  How was this supposed to help me?  All it did was put me to sleep in my own brain, ‘til I was too numb to know better. 

Well, i did know better since i had gone off of it for two weeks.  I knew i felt better without it.  I knew it wasn’t what i needed yet no one listened to me.  They only trusted the doctors to know what i needed.  Why couldn’t they try any other type of therapy with me instead of just feeding me full of these goddamned chemicals?!!  I was just a kid having a hard time like any other teenager so why was i punished so much?

I tried justifying myself with these reasons to the four staff who were closing in on me but it doesn’t help your case much to be stark naked, smeared with paint and chocolate.  Since they weren’t going to take me seriously, i began to yell loudly so the kids who were shut in the dayroom could hear.  The staff always tried to shield the rest of the residents from anyone who was flipping out, maybe they worried the madness would spread like a bug and there would be a mass revolt.  A revolt would have been fine with me.  I wanted the rest of the kids to understand that the way we were fed these poisons was bullshit.  They are experimenting on us with chemical lobotomies and they have no idea if they will work or are safe.  What kind of deformities are we going to experience later because of these chemicals?  My dad had told me of Agent Orange, made by Dupont Chemical, an herbicide that had been sprayed on the crops of Vietnam during the war, causing deformities on the Vietnamese and U.S. troops.

That’s why, I continued loudly, they have to keep trying different drugs on us until one of them finally makes us shut up.  Then whatever diagnosis goes with the drug that made us go to sleep, is the label we are given!  I yelled at them to stop taking their medications, to demand to be involved in deciding what was being put into their bodies. It’s still your bodies, you know! Your bodies are not their property- they are yours!

The four staff members had been surrounding me, letting me talk while using motions like you would to a scared horse, telling me to calm down, slow down.  Now that i was inciting pill abstinence, they had to put me down.  They were closing in fast, corralling me towards the open quiet room door; one had a sheet, ready to wrap around me and another held a syringe full of shut-up juice.  I didn’t need it, i told them.  I knew i had to go into the quiet room and be punished.  I told them i would stop yelling and take my pills orally.  It’s procedure, the needle said and stuck me. 

I was no stranger to that yellow-painted quiet room though it had been months since i had counted and compared the number of floor and ceiling tiles- they were the same as before.  They brought me the regulation pajama’s with no-slip footies and a wet washcloth so i could clean off the chocolate and paint.  Once you get put in there, you automatically get a 24 hour hold inside.  Then if you’re not yelling, spitting, or smearing poop on the walls, you can get back on the floor, dropped to level one again. 

Afterwards, i had to lift my tongue for my mouth to be checked after the twice-daily medication call.  Dr. Bug Eyes rarely saw me and when she did, she wouldn’t address any of my concerns except to say that this was what i needed right now.  My dosage was increased to the point of a catatonic catacomb-like existence, which i numbly accepted.  I slept all day, ate everything in sight, and drooled (just a little bit), even when i was awake.

There was a school on-site for the patients, or residents, or inmates.  Whatever you want to call us; but students, we were not.  It was not much of a school, just a way to implement a routine and not let the kids fall too far behind.  Every week day, we marched up and down the stairs five times for meals, then through the cafeteria to the school.  Instead of calling the school OSH high, they called it Capitol High, to protect whatever dignity we could salvage on the outs. 

Short-timers did not have to go to school, as they were in and out within a week or two.  Maybe the parents just wanted to leave them with us crazies long enough so they could shake their finger at them, You see where you'll end up if you don't shape up missy/mister.  Do you want to live there all the time with them? No mom, please... the kid would wail, promising to go to therapy and act right.  I, on the other hand, was there for eight months (the first time), and had to go to school.

I don't know how those two teachers put up with all the acting out, violence, pharmaceutical induced brain lag, and just plain apathy that must go along with teaching in any mental institution.  Being a free, state institution as well, it's doubtful that the staff were very well paid.  One teacher, who taught social studies, math, and geography, was particularly patient with me. 

It was 1987, just after the Iran-Contra affair had broken and she explained to me, repeatedly, what had lead up to this conflict.  She was very informed on the history of the Iran - Iraq war which had been going on for some time and the growing U.S. involvement.  I was interested in the subject, but i know i stared at her with the same glassy stare that i probably still have while in school these days.  At least now days i keep my mouth closed. 

I must have driven that teacher to drink, such an ass.  I noticed it disturbed her to no end if there was, even a very small hair on the paper, so i amused myself with this.  She would start me on a math problem and as soon as she'd walk away i would scratch my head and pull hairs from my bushy eyebrows, covering my paper with dandruff and hairs; I had recently seen The Breakfast Club and imagined myself to be Ali Sheedy. The ever-patient teacher would come back over, brush the garbage off my paper and continue to help me, over and over.  Even when i told her she had bad breath, she quickly recovered and thanked me for letting her know, never mentioning my terrible hygiene.

When i first got to the Oregon State Hospital, i had been transferred there from San Francisco General, where the juveniles and the adults were all on the same ward.  Anyone who smoked was given ten cigarettes per day but no matches.  When i was first hauled in by the cops to SF General, i had a terrible skin infection all over my legs from chigger bites i got from sleeping in the dry summer weeds with no shower for weeks.  It wasn't the last time i was homeless, but it was definitely the worst.  Crank had me hearing voices, walking for days on end throughout the city, on secret missions which to me, were crystal clear and crucial. 

One afternoon, i remember waking up and finding myself standing up on a bus, surrounded by people.  The bus was packed with people going home from work.  A woman was holding on to a bar in front of me, blocking me in.  I felt trapped and wanted to get off the bus but i couldn’t speak, so i bit her hard, on the arm, and raced off the bus.  I heard her scream behind me: She bit me! That girl bit me! 

In a fit of paranoia, i had called the police on burly Red, a 50 year old ex-con, for kidnapping Mousie.  The police went to the hotel room where i told them that Red was holding her hostage.  Of course it was true he pimped her out, and shot her full of drugs but she was (barely) an adult.  The cops left after Mousie told them she was fine and that she wanted to be there.  Afterwards, Red told me, in a matter of fact way, he would cut me if i ever did that again. 

Mousie was a skinny girl, with a pock-face, full of dark shadows under her eyes and streaked hair and arms.  She eventually told me i wasn’t cut out for the streets and needed to go home; that i wouldn’t survive otherwise.  We had all met in LA where Red had dangled me as bait to convince a hapless gardener named Rick to first let us move in to his apartment and buy us drugs, then to drive us all to San Francisco.

After a couple of weeks at San Francisco General, when i was lucid enough, i broke down and told them my real name and where i was from.  The last time my parents had seen me was eight months earlier when my dad's new wife had picked me up from JDH to bring me home and i had bolted at a stop light.  I had done a lot of damage to myself in that time and, although