floating in a tin can

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Lee Rosenberg almost never comes out of her room; like a ghost haunting the halls of the sanitarium, she’s more rumour than person. She’s barely even there at mealtimes, and when she is she sits by herself as far away from everyone else as possible despite the nurses’ urging to socialise. She refuses to socialise. It’s 1969 and she’s a schizophrenic transvestite homosexual Jew. She has nothing to say to these people.

But one day during group she shuffles out of her room and into the circle of chairs, sitting down with her head down and staring at the floor. She’s not dressed, like most everyone else, and her feet are bare. Her short hair is choppy and uneven like it was hacked off with a knife and the hems of her pyjama trousers are ragged like she’s been walking around in them for a long time. A shiny gold Magen David peeks out of the collar of her shirt. After a while she reaches into the pocket of her shirt and pulls out a packet of cigarettes, waiting for an aid to come around with a lighter, and she sits there smoking moodily and not contributing anything.

Someone makes a sarcastic kissing sound and the aid running the group shushes him but a few men chuckle knowingly. Lee says, “Fuck you,” gets up and leaves.

( we are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. )