The Exorcism of Hinkee Joubler

 

John Clark: hoping to replicate an exorcism that worked some twenty years ago. In that instance, I had a recurring dream that I had murdered a young woman while still drinking and after getting sober, kept waiting for the police to nab me. The story In Your Dreams was published in an early Level Best Books anthology. I made $25 and never had the dream again.

In 1970, after graduating from college, I was granted conscientious objector status by my draft board and was thus required to do two years of alternate civilian service. My choices were work at the Augusta State Hospital, or the Bangor State Hospital. Augusta was closer to Union where I grew up, so I chose to work at what soon became AMHI. Since I wasn’t allowed to live in my home town, I got a free room (bed, bureau, and high walls with no ceiling) on the third floor of the old chapel.

I was hired as a basic psychiatric aide at a weekly salary of $86.50 and assigned to the 4-12 shift on the Harlow Building. My first night on duty, while awaiting being scheduled for basic aide training, my supervisor, handed me the keys to the medication cabinet and said, “I’m off to dinner, have fun.” Having zilch for experience and training, I was justly apprehensive. That feeling was reinforced when an hour later, I had to escort an older man who was in the manic phase of his bi-polar illness, to a seclusion room and lock the door once he was inside.

That should have been a heads-up, but I was a bit slow on the uptake and my two year commitment stretched for twenty-seven years. During that time period, I got married, got sober, earned two masters degrees (adult education and library science), and had experiences that rival things you’ve read in fantasy and horror stories.

In hindsight, I should have found a different job in state service early on after fulfilling my commitment, but that didn’t happen. Let it be said that state (probably local and federal) jobs come attached with varied levels of dysfunction. I believe your average dairy farmer could govern or legislate as well as most folks who get elected. The Peter Principle certainly runs riot in state government.

Here are some of the experiences that I suspect contribute to the dream I can’t get rid of (specifics about that later). When I was promoted to assistant team leader on the 3-11 shift, my current girlfriend who also worked at AMHI and I took a van load of patients to a hockey game at Colby College. When we were getting ready to leave the arena, one of them bolted out the door. We searched, but couldn’t find him, so we went to the police station and reported what had happened.

What followed was painful and stressful. He was found dead in a cornfield three days later and my girlfriend and I were treated as though we had completely neglected our responsibility since we were dating.

You’d think that would be enough trauma for a job, but wait, there’s more! One inescapable fact of working in mental health is that patients kill themselves (some staff, too, but that’s another matter). There’s no way you don’t make connections with certain patients. That’s simple human nature. One young woman who had made a serious suicide attempt stabilized, but we knew it was just a matter of time before she succeeded. She did so by cutting her throat with a butcher knife. Another man who I became friends with, was unable to work through guilt over how he’d treated his family. A year after being released, he walked into a river and drowned. Another young woman who I befriended went to a private psychiatric facility in another state. She mailed me a post card telling me that life looked much better and she now had a boyfriend. The day I received the card, she shot herself.

One woman who I didn’t know jumped off the big bridge before the suicide fence was erected. She did so in November, but her body wasn’t found until March. When we tried to put her on a morgue slab, we had to jump up and down while pushing on her knees to get her legs straight enough to slide the metal tray into the opening.

My next experience was right out of a Twilight Zone episode. We had reorganized AMHI into geographic units and I was the evening team leader for one that served Androscoggin, Oxford, and Franklin Counties. As part of our planning for community re-entry, we had an internal halfway house on the top floor of the building adjacent to where we treated patients. One evening, I went over to administer medications and found one of the male patients hanging from a light fixture.

Help arrived quickly, but it was too late, so the physician on duty ordered us to put the deceased in a body bag and take him to the morgue. No sooner had we done so than he realized we needed to involve the medical examiner. The good doctor had me retrieve the body, dress him and then re-hang his corpse. Once the medical examiner arrived and did his job, I had to re-do everything. Once I returned from the morgue, the physician threw up his hands and said, “I can’t deal with any more right now. You call his wife and tell her.” I did and it was probably the most painful and awkward phone conversation I’ve ever had.

If traumatic experiences had been confined to interactions with patients, it would have been bad enough, but places rife with pathology attract pathological people as employees. When I got sober in October of 1980, that changed the dynamics between me and those who supervised me. The two who were above me in the supervisory chain were pieces of work. My direct supervisor was the activities director. She had been divorced by an alcoholic husband and had a level of hatred for men in general that was scary. My being in recovery pushed plenty of buttons. It got so bad that every time I went on vacation, I knew when I returned that something unpleasant would happen, like work hour changes, losing staff, or extra duties without any logic.

Her boss was more subtle, but had a problem with prescription medications that also left her feeling threatened by my recovery. In addition, some of the people running the department of mental health were sicker than the patients. When I volunteered to be an affirmative action trainer, I was informed by the airhead from central office that I could no longer tell jokes because it would tarnish my credibility as a trainer. You can guess where that went.

Plenty more strange events happened in my twenty-seven years at AMHI, but I’ve given you an insight into why I might have disturbing dreams. Oddly enough, the one I have at least once a week is about my still working there even though I haven’t received a paycheck for five years. Nobody appearing in my dream seems to find that odd except me. Hopefully, this blog post will banish that semi-nightmare. Stay tuned to find out.