Guest post by Carmelo Valone
Some days I wake up and feel fine and overjoyed to be alive and in the ‘real world’. Other days I dream of my former life, a life of ease and sorrow. It was full of simple joys, like eating a nutty buddy cookie and having no aspirations other than smoking cigarettes, taking pills, and watching Melrose Place on TV.
When I am at a Hollywood party I often feel like screaming, “You can’t talk to me like I’m normal, because I am not.” I really just feel like saying, “I have spent time in mental hospitals, and I don’t just mean a ‘summer’ when I was 17, like in some wannabe hip, surface-touching Lifetime channel movie starring Donna Mills as the tortured parent of an insane teenager. I am talking about those dark, horrible places-the tunnels of McLean Psyche Hospital wards in Massachusetts that Sylvia Plath had nightmares about, in and out for years. Horrors you wouldn’t want me to delve into while you’re holding that designer cocktail.” But most of the time I just smile and decline a drink or two. Then one night I had a movie director telling me, “You are probably the most normal/sane person I have known in Hollywood.” I certainly wasn’t the first ‘crazy’ person living in Hollywood as we all know.
All I could do was laugh. That’s all I could do-I mean I couldn’t tell my at the time boss that I was, in fact, a former drug-dealing, career mental hospital patient that survived a coma; let alone that after all of that I spent most of my inheritance going to UCLA to figure out how to trick those horrible things that trick my brain into thinking its normal. How could I tell him about the dyslexia and the lack of education, the punk rock-ness and the emotional mess that I have worked out through 20years of therapy-like in some 1970s Woody Allen film? I’m a person who spent all his money trying to figure out how to use his voice in a way where others can understand the language. Now I am just I just trying to live it.
After all of that, could I tell him that I had other fish to fry-pitching screenplays, like every other idiot who comes to Hollywood with a dream?…..I try to convince myself that it’s like in the early 90s-that pitching is just like trying to convince psychiatrists that I am ok to walk on the hospital grounds alone: I can be trusted to use a razor on my own now-they don’t have to watch me anymore. It’s just like saying, “Yes my script is the best of its kind, and it’s so very original”; even though Joseph Campbell has had over 1000 lectures on the importance of us all knowing there is just one story-the reluctant hero-. Lie, cheat, steal-just be that hustling artistic soul. I tell myself I will be fine. I then remember that ‘Imagination’ saved me when I was inside those safe, locked, and medicated walls-now it has to make me tons of money. It all seems so baffling at times.
Institutionalization – it’s a horrible thing. It tricks you into thinking that life is living inside a box, a heavily medicated box that once you get out of-makes the rest of the world look like the real insanity. The people on the outside dressed in suits that jump off buildings if their stocks crumble into nothing are the real lunatics you tell yourself-not you-and not anymore. Sometimes on particularly rough days in the hospitals, I’d be comforted in knowing that the only thing that never changed was the presence of those delicious and silly “Nutty Buddy” Cookies in the dank institution cafeteria.
These days I will wake up screaming 10 years later. I might look normal, but why do I have these horrible nightmares a few days a week? Most of the time I might write them down-as most of the time they are such vivid dreams about my past hospital stays that I can smell the rubbing alcohol they used to clean –the ECT machines off with. But wait –I never had ECT.
The real truth is I lived there-in the institution-during the death of Kurt Cobain and the day OJ Simpson tried to make a run for it. You remember the man who blew up that building in Oklahoma City-he was the real nut, not me, right? I just got sad-I didn’t kill. I did drugs, cut myself, delivered drugs, and then slept with other mentally unstable types. I hung around the homeless that live in Harvard Square. The only real father figure I have had was a 6’4 homeless black man with dreads named Mister Butch. I spent holidays with him even-he was one of the only friends I cried over leaving behind-because I knew in my heart it would be hard to talk to him again without a phone or address-or email. I can’t say much bad about Britney Spears because I was 10times worse on my best day.
And finally I wrote a book about my life in the 1990s, my institutionalization and the incredible levels of self destruction that are just too hard to explain to the ivy league book agent crowd-because you see I’m not John Nash and I didn’t solve the world’s problems, just my own and I can now write about back then…back then when I had no idea how to express anything. I can write about my heart, its dissection and re-construction into one piece again.
How do you explain any of this to new people, normal people, or anyone? Who would understand?
Those were my ‘college days’. A sick college –with out of control frat brothers and sisters who would never admit to being a member of it in public or are mostly deceased by now.
I can watch Marlon Brando’s acting in Apocalypse Now-and realize that that was me in the 1990s-all my friends were from the hospital and they all loved me and looked to me for answers. I seemed so sane compared to them back then-maybe I was more sane because I choose to hide out inside-where it was easier. Then the doctors told me I had to get out. So am I much better now because I haven’t overdosed or attempted a real suicide in over a year. Is that healthy?
Now I have a different pickle to work out-forget about feeling less crazy-I have to look sane too. And remember-I have no work history, school history, or any history-what do I tell people I was doing for years on end? I feel like a double agent or a CIA operative half the time, unable to talk about my past freely.
Have I killed terrorists on some secret mission? Not really.
How about this:
I was at college……”where’s your degree?”
I was working…“where’s you employment history?”
I was writing a book….”where’s your book?”
I was doing time…“where are your prison tattoos?”
None of these answers are right. It’s just simply called institutionalization. Now all I have to worry about is will those same assholes –friends –people I love–will they treat me like a moron or a lunatic now-now that I’ve outed myself? Now that everyone knows the truth, who will take a real ‘lunatic’ seriously? People seem to only like the ones that hide their lunacy-the people who become powerful enough to rip billions off of regular people and then go on shooting sprees….not writers like myself. We are the barely educated, dreaming writers like Charles Bukowski, William S Burroughs, and now me-the uninvited.
Time will tell. One thing will always stand fast: I have the freedom to get on my bike, and go to the store, and grab my very own bag of Nutty Buddys…and feel safe…and just be me. Freedom. It’s scary, empowering, and all encompassing, but I know now it’s mine. Baby steps, I’ll say, baby steps.
Carmelo’s – Blog, MySpace, Twitter
