by Alan Sides
“And don’t think that if we’d done something like, I don’t know, played beautiful music for him, it would have fixed everything. Like, all we needed to do was put on some opera, and it would have soothed the savage beast.”
The kid doesn’t respond one way or the other when I say this. Maybe he’s just shy, or maybe he thinks that I’m an old fool and it’s about time someone like him showed up to replace me. But I still want to make my point. I say, “One time, about eight years ago, we had this new RT—that means ‘Recreational Therapist’—who tried that ‘Kumbaya’ stuff with Jackie Straw, and all that came out of it was blindness, blood, and a broken guitar. This RT was lying there on the floor, rolling around, screaming and holding his eye socket. After we got Jackie away from him, the RT was still rolling around, and…I’m kind of a sick bastard, I’m still hearing the song continue in my head: ‘RT’s bleedin’ on the ground, Lord, Kumbaya / RT’s screamin’ on the ground, Lord, Kumbaya….’”
The kid laughs at this, so I guess he’s not all bad. I should tell him as much as I can without scaring him off. I have a responsibility to make sure he’s been forewarned. I go back to the point I was making: “Only thing that soothes Jackie is drugs. Ativan calms him down…and Haldol…you know, the good stuff. Those things always work on Jackie, but we can’t use that stuff so much anymore because of all the new rules. But I’m done working with him anyway… twenty years of working personally with Jackie Straw, and until yesterday, he never gave me the look he gives people before he goes after them. Nobody else’s ever been able to work with him. Just me. But now all of a sudden he’s giving me the look. That’s why I told them I’m done, and that’s why they sent you over here so I could get you ready to take my spot. I don’t know what brought about the change. Maybe he just got sick of me ’cause I’m getting old. Even so, he’s not giving you the look, and you’re a big boy, so you’re going to do just fine.”
Maybe this kid will do fine. He is a big boy—even if he didn’t make the team, getting cut from training camp with the Browns is further than most of us ever get. But I’m starting to worry that all the stuff I’m telling him is making him nervous…’cause of all the eyes.
I take a gamble that they fixed the soda machine here in the breakroom and lose. The machine, like everything else here is getting old and breaking down. This institution houses 327 patients; no new ones are coming in, and many of them are in the process of moving out to live in the community. This place has definitely seen better days—the water coming out of the fountains is orange from rust. And you can look around and tell that they used to have money but not anymore, because today nobody would pony up the funds for the sculpted exteriors on these buildings. You don’t head off to Home Depot for that kind of thing, I can promise you. And the plants—you can tell that somebody was dumping some money into the landscaping at one point, but now things are overgrown, the grass is growing out of control, and you’re always dodging rabbits. There are thousands of rabbits running around. The pest control guy never does anything about it and the population just grows and grows. It didn’t used to be this way. I could tell the kid about all the old movie stars that used to come out here fifty, sixty years ago, back when things were nice.
But instead I’m gonna go back to telling him about Jackie. I offer the kid a cigarette
and get reminded again that he doesn’t smoke. I don’t want to make him too nervous, because then I’ll scare off my only replacement and I don’t want to spend another day, not another minute, not another second with Jackie Straw. Because I value my eyesight too much and, besides…frankly, I’m getting sick of all the stuff you can’t do and say. I’m ready to retire, I just never thought Jackie would be the one to decide the month and year for me. But what’s really bugging me the most is that even though the kid and I are in the breakroom, two hundred yards away from Unit 8, I know that somehow Jackie knows everything I’m doing and saying right now. I think he’s always had this ability.
“So where the hell did he come from, anyway?” the kid asks.
Interesting choice of words. Like, the answer’s right there in the question, though I’d never actually out with it—one more thing I’m not allowed to say. I mean, I can see that the way they treated people with autism and mental retardation back in medieval times was barbaric and wrong, but these days, using the words ‘mental retardation’ is considered ‘hate speech’, even though it’s right there in the DSM-IV. Jackie’s official diagnosis is Moderate Mental Retardation, but it’s a misdiagnosis as far as I’m concerned, and believe me, it can happen—some of these psychologists are just collecting a check. So, I don’t know what he is, but not that.
“I wouldn’t describe him as retarded, by the way…” I say to the kid, but now I think he must think I’m batty because that wasn’t his question and I forgot he doesn’t smoke, so I quickly get back to the question.
“They found Jackie under the bridge on Cherry Avenue in Fontana. I didn’t work here back then, but that’s what it says in his chart. It says that the cop found him rocking back and forth the way does—bowing, like he’s some Swiss guy saying “Hi” to a group of people. Then the cop turned away for a second and Jackie popped the guy’s eye out. Don’t ever turn your back to him. Like I was saying, he’s great with that pointer finger: he’s popped the eyeballs out of five people—popped completely out—but either way, blinded nine altogether. He knows just how to come up behind people. But anyway, after they got some more cops, after they caught him, they asked him his name. The report says he smiled and laughed and said, ‘Jackie Straw!’ And that was the only time he ever talked. Ever. That’s the only time he’s ever been known to say anything. So that’s where they found him—under the Cherry Avenue bridge in Fontana.” I leave out the part about trolls. Again, another thing I can’t say, and it’s hard to say to myself too because it’s so totally nuts. Psych techs aren’t supposed to think such things, but dammit, they found Jackie Straw under a bridge, and what lives under bridges? Trolls.
“I bet his mom was some kind of drug addict and dropped him off there,” the kid says.
* * *
When I was a teenager, I’d drive down that road and say, “Heading south on Cherry Avenue and things are heating up…” But getting acquainted with Jackie kind of put an end to my saying that. After I spent some time with him, that road and that bridge kind of became his in my mind. His and Charlie Manson’s, and that’s why I can’t help but sometimes think that Jackie really is a troll. Because after thirty years of working in this business, the by-far-the-worst patient I ever had turned up on Cherry Avenue on August 9, 1969, the exact same night Susan Atkins was cutting the baby out of Sharon Tate. It was as if something from that evil act in the Hollywood Hills made Jackie Straw—like maybe pure, evil energy floated over to the San Gabriel Valley and then poof!!! grinning Jackie Straw popped into existence right there under the bridge. I started working with Jackie about ten years later, and nobody believes me that he hasn’t aged a bit in all the time I worked with him. You know how Angela Lansbury’s always the same age, well, Jackie Straw is always the same age. I mean, he does bleed blood, and when you knock him out and put a blood pressure cuff on him—and you better make sure he’s really out…
“If you ever take Jackie to the clinic,” I say to the kid, “and they have to sedate him, make damn sure he’s really out. And here’s how you do it: once they’ve given him the injection and he’s laying there, from a safe distance away, say ‘Cary and Steven’ and get ready, because if he’s faking, he’ll sit up with his Jackie Straw grin, and then that godawful Jackie Straw laugh—it’s a giggle really—and then he’ll start raising hell.”
“Who’s Cary and Steven?” he asks.
Oooh, I’ve just given myself away. But maybe not. I just lie. I say, “Oh, I don’t know, really…maybe they were some relatives or something, but the point is, mention of them
always gets him excited. Thing is, if you say it and he doesn’t move, then he’s really out
and the doctor or the dentist can do what they gotta do.”
The Cary-and-Steven-thing was my own discovery and it’s part of the reason I don’t
think he’s retarded. I think I scared the shit out of myself that day. Now you can say lots of stuff to Jackie Straw and nothing bad will happen. You can say anything you want to
him, yourself, the open air, while you’re doing your 1:1 supervision with him outside his
room, while he’s coloring—he colors quite well…
“Jackie likes to color, by the way,” I say to the kid, “Just slide some crayons and a
book over to him and he’ll go right to it. But don’t try to slip him some pictures you ran
off on a copy machine, because he’ll think you’re skimping on him, and he’ll come after you. So keep stocked up on coloring books. Don’t matter what they’re about: Care Bears, Spider-Man—it’s all the same to him.”
Coloring books. Seems like a retarded guy thing to do, right? But the Cary-and-Steven-thing blows that theory out of the water. It was something that I tried out on him one day. It was from having spent so much time with Jackie and thinking about his case for so long—for years: psychiatrists, psychologists, the Filipino born-again lady, every-body coming in wise and going out just as perplexed as the rest of us. But over time, it occurred to me that the evil coming out of Jackie wasn’t the everyday type. It seemed ‘otherworldly’. I’ve never actually witnessed anything else that I’d describe that way—there’ve been techs through the years on Unit 4 who’ve said they’ve seen the ghost of a nurse walking down the halls in the old type nurse’s uniform with the old type of hat they used to wear, but I’ve never seen it. Jackie’s case is about the only unusual thing I’ve ever seen. It seemed ‘otherworldly’, but I couldn’t be sure, so after spending so many years with him, I’m thinking to myself: Honestly, if that Jackie really is evil, then pick something that you think is evil, real evil, and see how he responds. But I had to make sure it wasn’t something obvious that anyone would know about. If I just up and said ‘Charlie Manson’, somebody might think that I’d been teasing him and putting bad thoughts in his head. So I decided I’d pick something nobody would know, but something I truly thought was evil. And in my life, among the most baffling and evil things I can think of is the story of Steven and Cary Stayner.
The Stayner family lived in Central California. There were five children: three girls
and two boys. Steven was the youngest boy. Cary, his older brother, was on the shy
side—kind of an anonymous figure in the background. When he was seven, Steven was abducted, held captive, and molested like Jaycee Dugard. Eventually, when Steven was around fourteen, his abductor kidnapped another boy, and in order to protect the kid from having to experience a fate similar to his own, Steven took him and the two escaped. After Steven rescued the boy, the abductor was captured and everyone was happy to have Steven reunited with his family—they made a movie about the whole thing. But it’s so very sad because Steven ended up dying in a motorcycle accident not long after his escape. Poor kid. All that time, Cary, his brother, was still just there behind the scenes. He didn’t stand out in any remarkable way.
Shortly after Steven died, a relative, an uncle, got murdered while Cary was living with him. The murder’s still unsolved. Afterwards, Cary moved on and got a job as a handyman at a motel near Yosemite. What nobody knew was that from the time he was seven, before Steven even got abducted, Cary had been having rape fantasies. Oh, he also thought he had some kind of psychic connection with Bigfoot. Cary Stayner was about as obsessed with Bigfoot as he was with raping women. It’s also kinda weird that, now as I recall, there were some Bigfoot reports in the area of Fontana near where they found Jackie back around the time they picked him up under the bridge. Weird. Strange fact to throw in. Like maybe Bigfoot isn’t what we think he is. Like maybe he takes on that appearance, but in reality, he’s something else, and that something else is very, very bad… But anyway, there was Cary Stayner at his job at the motel in Yosemite, and then one day, he acted on this craving that he’d been having for years. He killed a mother, a foreign exchange student who was staying with her, and then raped and killed the
woman’s daughter. Later he killed a park ranger, and now he’s on death row.
So what do you got: Steven Stayner is abducted, escapes, and they make a movie about it. Then he dies in a motorcycle accident. Tragic all on its own. Then his uncle is murdered about a year later, maybe by Cary—but maybe not. Then Cary goes on to commit some of the most brutal murders in California history. To me, it’s always seemed like dark forces were somehow involved.
So one day—I don’t know why it was that particular day—I was working with Jackie. We were all alone in the dayroom and he was coloring. I was looking at him, and for some reason, it started bugging me all over again: what is it with this guy? And I remembered about the Stayners, and was thinking: Go ahead. Say it. So I looked at Jackie and said, “Hey Jackie, …Cary and Steven.”
As soon as I said it, Jackie sat straight up and dropped his crayon. He looked me right in the eye and he started his giggle and then the giggle turned into a moan. I knew all hell was going to break loose. I knew I’d done something wrong. I activated my alarm pen and hoped to hell that they’d send Lottie, Dottie, and friggin everybody. Jackie hit me with a chair; I ended up with a bruise on my cheekbone for the next ten days. He pushed the TV over, knocked everything off the shelves, and then after we had enough people, we put him in 5 pt. restraint. For some reason he didn’t go after my eyes.
“So do the Cary-and-Steven-thing only when you have to,” I say to the new guy. Then I add, “In fact, do me a favor, and don’t tell anybody I told you to do that. Just…don’t be too afraid to trust your suspicions about him. I tell you, he’s pretty smart.”
“Like what else? What else is there about him that shows he’s smart?” the kid asks.
While I begin to tell him about Conejo, I start feeling really uptight, because like I
said, even though we’re so far away from Unit 8, I just know that Jackie knows what
we’re talking about, and somehow I know that he’s mad because he doesn’t want me saying so much about him to the kid. I’ve crossed a line. I’m giving away too much information.
Suddenly, there’s a big crash outside, so loud it makes me jolt. At first, I’m thinking it’s Jackie and that somehow he’s gotten off the unit and he’s outside trying to get in; he’s so mad at me that he wants to take more than just my eye. But then I hear an engine rev and remember that the garbage truck comes by on Thursdays. The sound I heard was of the dumpster being dropped on the asphalt. Part of me is mad at myself for being so jumpy, but another part of me is certain that Jackie knows and is mad at me now that I’ve started telling the kid about Conejo.
About fifteen years ago I had about four or five incidents where I was coming to work in the morning and the night shift guys would say, “Foggy night. We saw Canejo last night.” I didn’t know what in the hell they were talking about, so when I told them to fill me in, they said, “Oh, well, I guess that story about that old AWOL patient is true.” This was, by the way, back when we called them ‘patients’ instead of ‘clients’, although I still slip up once in a while. But anyway, the night shift guy went on, saying, “Yeah, didn’t you ever hear of Conejo? He was one of our patients that took off one night and he’s still living somewhere on the property, lurking around in the dark, living off rabbits.” Conejo is Spanish for ‘rabbit’.
This institution is surrounded by two hundred and sixty acres of woods, empty fields, and rabbits, rabbits, rabbits. So these night shift guys were saying that on foggy nights, they’d see a patient suddenly pop into view, dart up a hillside after a rabbit, and then disappear in the fog. Sometimes they’d hear Conejo howling with his catch. They’d hear the rabbits screeching, and the next day they’d find headless rabbits—like ten or twenty of them—laying around out where the old cabin still is. I guess nobody wanted to report the situation to any of the higher ups we got here because they were worried that if Licensing ever found out we had a lost patient roaming the grounds, we’d get shut down. But we were all getting nervous because the story was turning into kind of an urban legend around town—”Did you hear the one about Conejo?” and “Some teenage girl said she saw Conejo last night in the fog.” But I wasn’t thinking Conejo. I was thinking Jackie Straw.
So a couple days later I surprised everybody. Even though I’ve got seniority, I volunteered when they were taking requests for people to work the night shift. I wouldn’t ordinarily do it, but I did that day just to look into this ‘Conejo’ business. So, there I was on the NOC shift and it was a foggy night. I walked around Jackie’s unit, Unit 8, looking for the guy they assigned to do 1:1 supervision of Jackie while he’s sleeping. I finally found the guy. He was down at the other end of the hall talking to this hotsy totsy new tech we got from up north; he couldn’t keep his eyes or his hands off of her. So I walked into Jackie’s room, and sure enough, Jackie had put all his clothes under the blanket and made it look like he was in bed asleep. I kept quiet about the whole thing, and then at about five in the morning, I saw Jackie sneak in through a side door that he’d propped open with a comb. He walked right past me, got in bed, and went to sleep. After that, I told my boss. He got rid of the idiot night shift tech, and all the stories about Conejo stopped.
As soon as I finish saying this to the kid, I hear this warbling sound about twenty
yards outside of the building. After a second, I realize that it’s not Jackie, but for some
reason, I still feel jittery in my wrists, my throat, my chest—whenever I feel it like that, I know I’m really afraid.
The one making the warbling sound is Brian Wheeler—he’s been doing it all his life. It’s a habit. It keeps him entertained. Some clients say things like ‘Ma, ma, ma, ma…’ or ‘Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!’ over and over again. Brian likes to warble. It occurs to me that a tech must be walking a group of clients back to their unit after an activity, and Brian Wheeler must be one of the clients in the group. After a couple of seconds, I realize why the warbling is bugging me so much. It’s because Brian used to be on Unit 8, and the only other time I’ve ever seen anyone get their eye popped out by Jackie, Brian’s warble was related. We were sitting there, Frank Carver and me, just talking at change of shift. Frank was watching Jackie, and then all of a sudden, Brian did his warble thing while he was walking past Frank. The sudden noise made Frank jump, and he turned away from Jackie long enough to see Brian, long enough for Jackie to jab his finger behind Frank’s eyeball. I didn’t really hear it pop out, but I saw it roll away a few yards. And then I looked and saw Frank just standing there motionless in shock. There was that bloody red cavity where his eye was supposed to be. He still didn’t make a sound for a few seconds, but then he started screaming, and once he started screaming, he didn’t stop.
I can feel it now. It all comes back, but then I remember where I am and that I’m supposed to be telling the new guy about Jackie.
To break up the dead air that I now see must have been going on for a while, the kid says, “Yeah, sounds pretty smart to me.” Then he surprises me and says, “But you know, even though I was a jock in college, I actually went to all those classes I was supposed to take as a psychology major; it’s how I got this job. So, you know, this isn’t exactly the first time I’ve worked with difficult clients. In fact, I’ve already worked with some pretty tough ones. So, I hope you won’t take it the wrong way if I try to do things a little different with Jackie. But thanks for the info…anything else you want to tell me?”
“No. Guess that’s about it,” I answer, and decide it’s best to just leave it at that.
So I’ve told the kid all I’m going to about Jackie. But now that I’m done and there’s nothing more to do, the break is over, and I’ve got this dread. And it’s growing. Because I know, I just know that Jackie’s not done. It occurs to me that he’s been holding all the cards the whole time, and he’s not gonna let me out of here. He knows what I’ve been saying—he even knew when the conversation would end, and now I’ve got this idea that any moment now, I’ll hear an alarm get activated, and me and the kid will have to run down to Unit 8, and Jackie Straw will be waiting for me and my eyes. I’ve never cut and run on a restraint in my entire career, but I think I just might today if I hear that alarm sound.
I hear some clanking in the distance…but it’s just the janitor, and now there’s this awkward silence because the kid is wondering why we’re just sitting here. The second hand is turning, and the kid’s starting to look kind of funny at me while I’m staring at the clock. He looks to the side and screws up his face the way you do when you think some-body’s acting crazy, but I’m just paralyzed while we sit there. The kid says something, but I can’t really hear what he’s saying because I know that goddamn alarm’s got to go off pretty soon. It’s like watching a Jack-in-the-Box.
And…yes!!!…there it goes. It makes me jump in my seat. The voice comes on the
loudspeaker, “Assistance required on Unit 8! Help on Unit 8, right now! Immediate
Assistance required on Unit 8! Help on Unit 8! Jackie Straw!”
About the Author
Alan Sides is from Claremont, California just outside Los Angeles. He has a lifelong interest in the paranormal, experimental music, and Evel Knievel. His creative output is largely the result of having applied the maxim: harness the power of your own psychosis.
©2010 Alan Sides
