Infinitely Complex: Short Stories about Mental Illness, Addiction, Alcoholism and Veterans

By Rick Williams

Infinitely Complex: Short Stories About Mental Illness, Addiction, Alcoholism, Bigotry, and Veterans is a collection of twenty-two short stories about broken people. They specifically delve into various psychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and bipolar disorder; and the ravages of alcoholism and addiction. Veteran’s issues are emphasized, to include service-related disability compensation. The author also tackles present-day topics: undocumented immigrants, racism, threats to our democracy, and clash of cultures. Millions in the United States struggle with mental illness, including veterans and their dependents. The stories will also resonate with people suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction, undocumented immigrants living in fear, and people experiencing the cultural divide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Jul 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662937057

Book preview

Detox Shuffle

Alex Stokes stood outside the doorway to his office and watched as Johnny Sweetwater paced back and forth in front of the nursing station like a caged panther, his slick black hair combed back over his head and hazel eyes darting between a nurse and a counselor standing on the other side of a four-foot wall. Dressed in house pajamas, marine blue with barely perceptible white pinstripes, he growled to the pretty nurse with ebony skin, I got to sign out AMA! I got important business to take care of. When’s the doc gettin’ here?

The veteran nurse, dressed in crisp white, looked up from reading a patient’s chart and responded, He’ll see you when he makes his rounds, Johnny. You’ve been here enough times to know how it works. Please go back to your room. You’re still shaking. We’ll be coming through with your meds in a few minutes.

I got to get out of here. I have important business to take care of.

I know what your important business is. It’s Maria waiting in a car in the parking lot.

Yeah. She’s taking me where I need to go.

Where you want to go, the nurse thought, is the package store to buy a jug.

Alex hesitated before walking down the hall that led to the six wards that often smelled like dirty diapers, anticipating the perpetual cluster of patients at the nursing station clamoring to sign out against medical advice (AMA). As the physician assistant (PA) on duty, Alex was appropriately attired in a knee-length white coat and stethoscope around his neck. He looked back at a list of telephone numbers on his desk; six follow-up calls after mailing his résumé had failed to result in one interview. It was apparent that hospitals and clinics were not impressed with an employment background of detoxing alcoholics, thus ensuring he would remain stuck in the muck of a madhouse longer than he had hoped.

Combined Hospitals Alcoholism Program (CHAP) was a free-standing alcohol detoxification unit with thirty-seven beds that were usually all occupied. CHAP had been created by the three hospitals in Hartford, Connecticut, for the purpose of keeping grossly intoxicated patients out of emergency rooms—one drunk in an ER could tie up a lot of staff—medically detoxing them, and often through intervention, attempting to transfer them to rehabilitation, usually a twenty-eight-day treatment program. In 1976, Connecticut was one of only a few states that had a law on the books that directed police and ambulance companies to bring publicly intoxicated individuals in for alcohol detoxification rather than jail.

While walking down the hallway to the unit, Stokes was confronted by Sweetwater. The thin, tremulous patient with a sickly yellowish tinge to his skin looked on the verge of pouncing on the startled Stokes. Doc, I got to sign out AMA. I got to—

Alex, tall, thin, soft spoken, and bald with a shiny polished dome and black-framed glasses, interrupted Johnny by stating, I will see you on rounds shortly, sir. You are still in acute alcohol withdrawal.

My shakes are not from booze, Doc. I got important business to do. No one here seems to understand. I want my clothes. I gotta get out. Now!

While Johnny’s antics were familiar—he had been detoxed multiple times—Alex looked into his wild eyes and thought he was potentially dangerous. He took a step back from the patient’s fetid breath and stammered, I’ll see you in your room, Mr. Sweetwater. Nothing will happen until then.

The frustrated patient turned and walked down the hall toward his room. His plastic slippers on the vinyl floor made a fading squeaking sound like a mouse before he yelled something unintelligible while his arms flailed about.

Alex rested his right elbow on top of the white wall that separated the nursing station from the rest of the unit. The nurse, Ronica, wearing a glittering necklace with a cross of gold, looked at the PA and said with a Jamaican accent, Maria is parked directly below the room that Johnny’s in. She had the convertible top down in the rain a few minutes ago, lookin’ up at lover boy and blastin’ the horn.

Alex looked down the hall toward Sweetwater’s room and proclaimed, "It’s the Days of Wine and Roses syndrome; she is terrified Johnny might choose long-term treatment and sobriety. It was the other way around with him serenading her with the car horn less than a month ago. Alcoholism is a curious illness; they keep going back to the source of their misery for relief."

The nurse observed, I looked down at rain dripping off Maria’s face, twisted with desperation. It was chilling.

Alex responded, "I suspect Johnny is obsessing more about the bottle Maria must have."

On the way back to his office, Alex heard a distant car horn; its prolonged nature stopped him in his tracks. After he resumed his brisk walk down the hall, he was accosted by Johnny. You can’t hold me against my will, Doc. This ain’t a jail. I know my rights!

You have a history of serious alcohol withdrawal, Mr. Sweetwater, including seizures and at least one episode of delirium tremens. You may be in impending DTs now!

As he looked at his yellow sclera, Alex mused that having an enlarged liver with alcoholic hepatitis didn’t faze Johnny, nor did being given a warning a day earlier that he was going to die if he kept drinking; it was like telling him he had arthritis.

***

It was after 10:00 a.m. by the time Alex began morning rounds with a nurse and counselor. The rickety wagon with thirty-seven silver metal charts banging against each other was on wheels. When the team rolled into room number two, they saw Johnny Sweetwater standing at the window. Hearing the clanging of the charts startled Johnny; he threw a lit cigarette out the window, limped from the window, and sat on the edge of his bed.

The nurse walked to the place Johnny had vacated, looking out the window and down at Maria in an old, beat-up, rusty yellow Mustang convertible. Maria, wearing a red scarf and with eyes fixed on the front, was holding what looked like a fifth of booze, that magical elixir that kept its promise of tranquility, but it was fleeting as it was always followed by more horrors.

The nurse yelled through the open window, Get your car out of here, Maria! You are blockin’ the fire lane. I’m going to call the police.

Maria started the car and pulled out without looking up or uttering an audible word, although she turned up the volume of the music on the car radio.

Alex pondered on the awful obsession to drink. When alcoholics are in the throes of it, it’s like a runaway train with no way to jump off, the brain awash in an expanding toxic chemical mix that drowns out every modicum of rational thinking. The fact that he could relate to that made him uncomfortable. But ignoring the progressive nature of the disease, the PA believed he was at worst a borderline functional alcoholic because he was well thought of at a demanding job and confined his drinking to weekends.

Back at the nursing station, Alex joined two nurses and a counselor; they were having an animated conversation with a visitor. Frank Samanski dropped by to say hello. Alex, looking back and forth between staff and the former patient, recalled, When Frank was discharged from CHAP to the veterans home no more than six months ago, he was babbling nonsense and the discharge diagnoses included probable Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome with psychosis. The lay term for that mouthful is wet brain. And now you’re looking like a million bucks.

Frank, with a pinkish complexion and widened eyes, beamed. Thanks to you guys, I’m thinking clearly for the first time in years. I just needed to be defogged.

The nurse looked up at the former patient and observed, It’s amazing what abstinence from alcohol and a good diet can do.

Shortly thereafter, Alex took a hanging blue mug marked with his name and filled it with coffee before joining three counselors and two nurses in a large conference room. Sitting around a round wooden table, they went through the charts and discussed the status of each patient.

When they got around to Johnny, the consensus was to try to hold him for at least another twenty-four hours, preferably forty-eight to seventy-two hours.

Slumped back in his chair, Alex sighed, Ya know, the cops or ambulance companies scrape them off the sidewalk, dump them off here again, and all we do is dust them off and get them ready for their next drunk. I wonder whether we do more harm than good.

Miss Davis, a counselor, an attractive, mature woman with cinnamon skin and hazel eyes, wearing a light gray business skirt and jacket, shook her head in disagreement and countered, But look at Frank Samanski. The guy looked like a corpse six months ago, and he just walked in wearing a suit like he’s going to a board meeting.

Alex answered, Yes. It’s amazing. But he’s one in what? One in a thousand? And that’s if he keeps going to meetings.

The counselor answered, The percentages are much better than that, Alex. And we keep people alive until some of them—not a lot, but some of them—get sober. The success stories don’t return; we only see who’s coming back through the revolving door.

After the team returned to Johnny Sweetwater, Alex cried, Why are we keeping this guy? He flouts the rules and ties up staff. He sucks time away from all of us, time that could be better spent on those that want help or at least aren’t fighting it. Is it because we need an entertaining diversion? Let’s face it; Johnny and Maria are a good-looking couple, and they certainly provide drama.

Miss Davis spent more time with many of the patients than the medical staff did and often talked to their family members. She asked the PA, Do you know why Johnny has a limp?

I think it’s an old injury, probably alcohol related.

It’s alcohol related, all right, but from birth. He has a congenital hip disability. His mother was an alcoholic and drank heavily during her pregnancy with Johnny. That history was obtained from her through shaking tears.

Fetal alcohol syndrome.

Exactly. And it’s probably why he struggled in school and dropped out. I’ll tell you something else interesting about Mr. Sweetwater. He came here as a child from a Navajo Reservation out west and sang in local bars and clubs like his father did before the old man left his family. That’s how Johnny met Maria. She was a dancer. They had dreams like most people, but they have been shattered by booze and drugs.

Alex answered, Yeah. I talked with him at length once. His father was also an alcoholic. What we see is ugly, and it has a tendency to color everything, but Johnny is many things that are not ugly. The problem is alcoholism is progressive, and it ends up swallowing everything else. He was maimed at the start in more ways than one; with his family history, he was genetically stamped an alcoholic at birth.

Upon leaving the conference room, the nurse with the gold cross said to Alex, You seem to relate to these patients better than most of us.

The PA felt heat on his face. While walking to the nursing station, they saw pajama bottoms and a top strewn on the floor next to the elevator. Looking down at the pajamas, the nurse said, Johnny pulled a Houdini. This happened once before. I’ll bet Maria had his clothes in the car.

Looking at the pajamas before his eyes returned to the nurse, Alex declared, It’s as if he dissolved into thin air without leaving a trace.

The charge nurse notified the director and staff and took care of the paperwork pertaining to Mr. Sweetwater’s escape with the belief based on experience that CHAP had not seen the last of Johnny, and Alex finished the day by giving his biweekly lecture on the medical complications of alcoholism. There were sixteen patients that showed up: twelve men and four women, all dressed in marine blue pajamas with fading white pinstripes.

Halfway through the lecture, after the PA used chalk to draw a liver and a brain on a blackboard, he stopped talking and scanned the room. More than a few patients were nodding off, and at least two were snoring. As Alex examined the faces, he counted four patients with drinking histories that were not as bad as his. But they were in pajamas; he was wearing the white coat.

***

That Friday evening, sitting in his easy chair with his feet up, watching the Red Sox play the Yankees on television, Alex poured himself a third glass of wine, thereby going over his limit of two, a seemingly wise constraint an hour earlier that had evolved into an unnecessary restriction as he was off Saturday.

The sudden loud ring of a telephone sitting on an end table next to the bottle of wine startled him. He was informed by Miss Davis that Johnny Sweetwater and Maria had been involved in a car accident that afternoon. Johnny was hospitalized in critical condition. Maria was dead.

Delirium Tremens (DTs), snapshot from film of same title

A Lamp Unto His Feet

Thanh kneeled as he took the small white cotton towel out of the silver basin filled with soapy water and washed his father’s feet. They felt soft and cold. Thanh tenderly cleaned between the toes with his fingers. Unlike the rest of his body, the small feet were without wrinkles or remnants of gunshot wounds. Thanh created his own history of where they had been. Bare, battered, bloodied, and bruised, running down hard mud paths fighting the French. A decade later, they’d slipped in and out of villages scattered throughout the Mekong Delta, attacking Americans and their lackeys. Thanh imagined them submerged in rice paddies with clinging black leeches sucking his blood and covered with lacerations from running through the jungle. To him, the feet were no different from when he was a boy more than four decades ago. After drying them with a clean towel and sprinkling baby powder on top, he slipped white wool socks and cushioned gray slippers over the silky-smooth feet.

Gently lifting his father under his arms, and then placing his right hand on a bony left shoulder while firmly holding a limp left forearm, he guided his father to the dining room, the largest room in the house. As they made their way, slowly, Thanh descended further into his waking surrealistic dream. The feet were aglow, a lamp for his comrades in arms, a light on their path to keep them from stumbling off course. How incredible that a five-foot body that never exceeded a hundred pounds could furtively slay so many dragons!

Dressed in loose white cotton with his thinning white hair neatly combed to the right, Nguyen Đình Diệmyn’s gait was unsteady, but Thanh watched each frail step until the old man took his place at the end of a rectangular wooden table, covered by the family’s finest white linen. Thanh, being the oldest, sat at the head of the table next to his father. It was the patriarch’s eightieth birthday.

The dozen men of the family, including the celebrant’s other two sons, all dressed in starched white shirts with thin black ties, silently filed into the room and took their seats. In such settings, the father let his eyes and expressions speak for him. A glance with uplifted eyebrows broke the solemnity of the gathering, and the men exchanged pleasantries. The women brought large white ceramic steaming bowls of food filled with fish, rice, vegetables—the latter bright yellow and lime green—and small cerulean blue bowls of Nuoc Mam, with its familiar pungent garlic scent, and displayed them on the table.

Thanh leaned back and looked at his father. He seemed smaller. Bent forward with downcast eyes and chin on his chest, the old man lifted his head and led the family in saying, Bless us O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we… After his voice trailed off, he nodded to his youngest son to finish. The extraordinary old man, who spoke the languages of his enemies and had held court for decades, projecting strength and decisiveness, rarely uttered a word now, and in whispers when he did.

After the men were served, the women gathered at a table in an adjacent room, their meal interrupted multiple times by their husbands’, brothers’, and uncles’ needs. Only Thanh’s seventy-nine-year-old mother, as the eldest among them, remained seated at the head of their table in her traditional red silk áo dài, which was befitting of the regal matriarch.

Thanh turned away from his father to his brother Thuong, two years his junior, and sighed, How paradoxical; Catholicism was a gift of the French colonialists. And he excludes women from his table, including his wife? Thuong nodded his assent. Internally, Thanh questioned why he was afraid of this shrinking old man—a relic imprisoned by religion and culture. Nevertheless, he deserved respect as the eldest in the family and for his heroism in battle. In response to his youngest brother finishing their father’s prayer, Thanh rolled his eyes while looking at him sitting across the table and was met with a smile.

Thanh knew the elder’s current frailty concealed a different man, one who had fought with men and boys from a third world, emerging as a leader to help defeat two world