THE EXCHANGE OVER LEMONADE: A Sour Spat

Another day that began like any other, one pant leg at a time and a cup of coffee slightly too hot for chugging, scarfed down in desperation. I walked down the hallway to my assigned unit, Unit Two today, scanned my badge and entered my security code placed my hand on the door and took a deep breath, “Here we go,” I muttered to myself quietly and pulled the door open and went inside. Almost immediately I could sense that something was off within. Whether it was the patients or staff, I was not yet sure, but something did not feel right.

As I stepped into the dimly lit “Day Room” I had to give my eyes a second to adjust. The nurse’s station sat directly across the room from my egress point, and on either side of the station were the access points to the respective “Pods” in which the patient sleeping quarters were housed. The large day area had a picnic table not so dissimilar to ones you would see in a high school cafeteria, with featureless rubber chairs that littered the institution’s eggshell-colored walls made of cinderblock. Sitting across the room from each other sat a handful of patients, some waiting for breakfast, some semi catatonic and simply present. One of the pod doors opened and I could see a patient entering the room, I made my way over to the nurse’s station, something still didn’t quite feel right.

That intuitive thought was given confirmation within seconds of its arrival. Two patients that had originally been sitting across the room from each other were suddenly engulfed in a contest of insults. In the center of the room, lay a cup of lemonade with its contents spreading out across the surrounding floor. The fuses were lit, aweigh went the cannons.

“You knocked over my Lemonade you bug eyed bitch,” said the owner of the cup.

“Yeah, I did, fuck you and your lemonade,” He threw up his arms in dismissal, “What are you going to do about it, huh?” a challenge.

The other patient stood, chest puffed out, arms thrown upwards in aggravation, “I’m going to poke your bugged eyes out of your head and shove them down your fucking throat!”

Now, one must keep in mind, in a psychiatric facility such as this one that primarily serves patients that are from Juvenile Corrections, this is a locked down facility. There is nowhere else for the patients to go, other than to sit in this enclosed space with whitewashed cinderblock walls and locks on every door, whether they are manual or electronic. The available activities for the patients are to sleep, sit “on pod” and watch the same ten television programs, or create their own excitement by fighting amongst themselves.

“Do it then, bitch!” exclaimed the challenger.

With a scream of rage, the owner of the cup soared across the room, hands in fists and swinging left, right, and upwards. As he reached his challenger, the first two swinging punches missed their mark, the third one made sudden and devastating contact, an uppercut directly to the underside of the challenger’s chin, sending him up in the air and just as suddenly to the floor in a slump. The cup owner looked over his handiwork then at me, coffee cup in hand, and said, “Good morning, Mr. Teddy! Can I have some more lemonade?” with a tremendous grin upon his face, bright and sunshiny. Happy Tuesday.