The Butterscotch Palace Goes to the Circus

The Butterscotch Palace Goes To The Circus

When visiting a neighboring circus with local patients from a psychiatric institution, there should always be enough supervisory staff.

After leaving the army in the mid 1970s, Bob McIntosh ended up working in a regional 'mental hospital' as an attendant, where, even then, it was not acceptable to have fun at the residents' expense; however, staff members were a different story, so Bob was up to having a little fun between what he considered to be “real” jobs.

Built between WWI and WWII, the facility had not changed much by the mid-1970s, but it did get a cosmetic facelift when it was repainted from forest green to a sickening two-tone beige and washed-out mustard combination. With the new paint, the locals changed the colloquial name for the venerable psychiatric institution from the 'Nut-House' to the 'Butterscotch Palace.' There were a few hundred patients with various levels of psychiatric incapacity on the different in-patient units. Bob was assigned to the 'Tertiary' unit, where the residents had a varied ability to carry out the normal activities of daily living. For example, some were quite articulate and were capable of self-care, but could turn violent without warning, while others would only communicate with grunts and physical outbursts, and many seemed to take delight with evacuating their bowels or bladders wherever and whenever they felt the urge. It was a mixed crowd of patients to be sure, and to Bob's non-psychiatric eye, many of the staff did not seem much better off. 'Tis a fine line, Bob thought.

Many of the younger nurses seemed nice enough in Bob's estimation, as they genuinely seemed to care about the patients, and tried to make their daily experiences more positive. The older nurses, by comparison, seemed to be burnt-out dregs, and Bob avoided them for the most part. Many of the attendants, however, were another story. Most of them had worked at the faculty since the late 1950s and they brought their crude uneducated means of dealing with the patients with them. They were rough and violent, and Bob picked up early on that it was best to bide his time with them, or safest yet, avoid them all together. At least he'd picked up some self-preservation skills while subjected to the various army assholes he'd met, he thought. Clearly, he'd have to make his own fun in this place if he were to last the summer.

Once Bob got the lay of the land after a few weeks, he realized that the attendants were not only easy targets for practical jokes but also would not react well to being taken advantage of, and as most were much bigger than Bob's scrawny frame, and generally looked more open to a scrap, he decided to give them a wide berth. The older nurses seemed too burnt out to get a rise out of them, and the younger ones were very cagey and did not present many fun opportunities. Being constantly on guard and suspicious was likely a coping mechanism they had developed given the milieu they and their co-workers had to deal with. Still, sometimes opportunities just showed up.

For example, just after Bob started in the spring, a new group of petrified nursing students showed up at the Butterscotch Palace. While trying to play the part of professionals, their collective pupil dilation and darting gazes could not hide their underlying anxiety that was likely bordering on panic. With name tags removed so that students could not tell the inmates from the guards, Bob, and his attendant colleagues took perverse delight in concocting detailed backgrounds on their pseudo-patient histories for the neophyte nursing practitioners.

Usually holding court with the new students in the blue cigarette haze of the common room, they were not shy in sharing their sometimes graphic family histories and violent renditions of their made-up derring-do. Patricide, matricide, run-of-the-mill homicide, and other acts of mayhem were thematic in their detailed fictions. As Bob and his crew attempted to outdo each other with their tales, success was usually gauged by the color draining from the students' faces. The ultimate success would be to make one cry or have them run from the room from being overwhelmed with the horrific tales.

Testing the limits of the students' psychological mettle was a two-step process. The common room was the first step, that although entertaining as a stand-alone evolution, was only the precursor to the second step that would escalate the percolating panic exponentially. Once Bob and the boys chummed the mental waters of the fragile minds sufficiently, they spent the transitional time fixing the students' with murderous glares as Bob and his team ambled around the unit as 'patients'.

The second step was to wander into areas like the locked and glassed in nursing station, to be seen rifling through the medication cupboard or to enter the protected staff washroom inside the locked nursing station. The predictable response and the end of Stage II resulted in the students running in abject panic to find a regular staff member to intervene in the patients' coup at taking over the nursing station and medication cupboard. Good for some great laughs, for Bob and the crew, once the staff arrived to see who the 'patients' were, yet, it was only a prank they could pull off once or twice a year with each new crop of students. It sure wasn't enough to sustain the boring work for a full summer. The circus arrived in early June. What's more fun than a circus? thought Bob.

While in morning report in the small kitchenette just off the main ward, where the day staff got a hand over from the night crew on the evening and night's misadventures, Bob was seated at a table next to Mike Mathewson, a rotund, heavily bearded, bald, wheezy chain smoker who had worked at the facility since dropping out of Grade X in the 1950s. He was not very pleasant to either staff or patients, but he could be relied on when things got physical, and some believed that he actually seemed to relish the occasional encounter. To Bob's left were the two middle-aged and haggard looking nurses, Sue McDonald, and Mary Nicholson. These old dragons were pension hostages and primarily focused on minimal exertion while just counting the days till retirement. Bob avoided them because they were usually trying to slough work off on him. Eileen Buttsowski, a petite and energetic nurse in her mid-twenties, who was not yet tainted by the burnt out old dragons she worked with, cheerfully tried to engage the others in chit chat before the morning report. It was a hard room. Bob, in trying to help her out a bit offered, “I see the circus is back at the mall. . .it'd be a blast if we could take some patients over there, but I know that wouldn't happen. Be too much like fun and—um, therapeutic, and all that.”

Eileen perked up and rose to the challenge. “Who says we wouldn't be able to go?

"Well it seems to me that whenever someone has a fun idea around here it gets shot down by management," Bob added, in the hopes of keeping this theme going.

"I'm going to see Jeanette when she gets in to ask if we can do it. I don't see why it should be a big problem if we can have enough staff to cover both areas, especially as it is so close to the hospital,” Eileen, said—her commitment to this outing now firmly planted in her mind.

Jeanette, the unit manager, was in her early sixties, and although she frequently seemed to take great delight in figuratively stripping the skin of the younger nurses, she capitulated easily to Eileen's request. Perhaps it was the unit's lightened mood now that spring was here, or maybe she just thought that having a number of patients off the unit would make for a peaceful afternoon. Regardless of her underlying reasons for agreeing to the outing, she did make a provision before agreeing. Eileen could take no more than fifteen patients and she could only take two attendants from the four on shift. Eileen readily agreed, believing that the three of them could easily handle a small group of patients like that for the short walk to the circus. After all, it was practically next door to the hospital.

Perhaps in an effort to show Bob how adept she was at managing management, or because it was his idea when he planted the seed, Eileen recruited Bob first. The next two attendants had been at the facility even longer than Mike, and were quite adamant with a “Not fuckin' likely. . .” when Eileen pitched the idea to them. Mike was the last choice they had to round out the team.

“Why the hell not,” said Mike, when Eileen asked, probably figuring that an afternoon out would be a great distraction, plus he'd likely be able to smoke as much as he wanted during the outing. Even though it was only about 500 feet to the circus parking lot, Eileen hoped that Mike had enough physical strength, and breath, to make it there and back on his own. She was stuck, so Mike rounded out the team.

It took Eileen and Bob until noon to coax 13 of the ward's patients to join them. Mike would have no part in that effort—the less that went, the easier his afternoon smoke break would be. They ended up with ten men and three women ranging in age from mid-forties to early sixties. Some were vocal and cooperative, and others less so. The last person Eileen recruited was Joseph, who at six feet seven inches and close to three hundred well-proportioned pounds, was a little intimidating to look at.

It wasn't just his height and looming size, he also had large dark brown vacuous eyes, topped with a continuous dark brown eyebrow that lopsidedly traversed his forehead. His hair was a mixed gray and brown bowl cut that stopped abruptly at the top of his ears. Nobody was sure if he had an underlying condition like acromegaly, but his symptoms of gigantism started in puberty, his hands looked abnormally large, and his freakishly long, nicotine-stained fingers were either spasmodically hyperextended, or in the thumb and forefinger "pill-rolling" movements frequently seen with those on high doses of antipsychotics. Joseph had other extrapyramidal symptoms, as did many of his fellow circus goers that day, including stumbling gait, facial grimaces and spasms, and the off-putting involuntary protruding tongue. Despite his size and other undesirable mannerisms, Eileen was determined to bring him along. Joseph seemed equally determined to not go. Eileen finally won the battle of wills by bribing him.

"I'll give you a whole pack of smokes, if you come with us, and be good," said Eileen, playing her ace in the hole. Although the token cigarette economy was frowned on by the therapists, desperate times make for desperate measures, and Eileen was determined to get as close to 15 patients as she could.

“Get-da-smokes,” slurred Joseph around a protruding tongue, a long drool sliver slowing descending from the corner of his mouth. He held his hands out for the ransom.

“As soon as we come back, I promise.”

“Not goin' den,” said Joseph, fixing his vacant eyes on her.

“Fine then!” said Eileen, slamming a small package of the much sought after Export A into Joesph's outstretched hands.

Caught up in savoring the victory over Eileen, Joseph tore the cellophane off the cigarettes, dropped it and the inner tin foil cover on the floor, and put a cigarette in his mouth.

"What in the hell are you doing!" said Eileen, pointing at the mess on the floor. "Pick that crap up and get over with the rest of them," now pointing, straight-armed, at the gaggle that Bob and Mike had assembled by the ward's entrance.

Joseph seemed to think about the options for a few seconds before all his synapses fired correctly, and he slowly bent down and picked up his garbage. Standing erect again, he held out the wrappers to Eileen.

"Now what is the hell are you doing?" said Eileen, her right arm once again pointed straightly at the garbage can by the exit. "Put that Gee-Dee crap in the garbage, and get over with the others for the love-of-God!"

Joseph mumbled something, ambled off to the garbage, then joined the rest of the outing at the doors.

Once outside in the Palace's parking lot, Mike and Bob herded the gaggle over to the well-used dirt path that unofficially connected the facility to the neighboring mall. In a flash of deja vu, Bob thought back to his time in the army, and how he moved from point A to point B with his fellow recruits. All were sized perfectly, with the tallest guys in the front and the shortest at the rear, in two or three columns, and everyone marched in step, least they suffer the colorful verbal wrath of the marching sergeant. This little adventure was as far from that as a person could get.

Today's platoon was a rabble with everyone huddled into a blob with a central core of humanity, and frequent outliers trying to make a break for it from the group. Bob and Mike acted like sheep dogs rather than marching sergeants as they shepherded their wayward charges back into the rabble. What a cluster-fuck, thought Bob, as they passed the half-way point to the mall. Looking behind he saw Billy, a forty-year-old, short balding man in a straw cowboy hat stopped and urinating onto the trail. Bob raced back to him as Billy's impressive bladder capacity was evident given the amount of time and volume involved in his unplanned stop.

“What the fuck are you doin'?” said Bob, pulling up to Billy while generating a small cloud of dust from the trail. “Stop for fuck's sake!”

Without even pinching off a bit of stream, Billy turned to Bob and asked without any noticeable affect or concern, “What's your problem—it'll evaporate?”

Bob glanced at the rabble still moving towards the mall, then back at Billy, who was finally starting to trickle off. "Yeah, you're right—what was I thinking," said Bob. "Come on, let's go so we can catch up."

It only took 30 minutes or so, but eventually the whole group made it the 500 feet to the circus. It was a relatively small affair but held more than enough distractions for the Palace's group. After all, they had little distractions to take up their time. Eileen picked a relatively vanilla ride consisting of a big slowly spinning circle with walls that the riders leaned against as it rotated and slowly tipped on its axis. It took Eileen and her team all their control to keep the rabble together as they were processed through the turnstile, one person at a time. From the turnstile, they were buckled into their spots on the ride, with the staff being interspersed among them. Anything milder, and they would all be on the merry-go-round, thought Bob. He soon found out, though, that even the blandest rides can generate some excitement, depending on who the riders or spectators are.

In this case, almost all were riders, yet in their haste to get all the patients onto the ride, Eileen, and her team miscounted. After their second cycle on the ride, she'd missed Joseph! Fuck, she thought, how could I miss someone that big and scary. Eileen looked around quickly while hollering over the noise to Bob. "Have you seen Joseph?" she shouted.

Bob did a quick scan of the faces on the ride. “We missed him?”

"Fuck," said Eileen, as she started to scan the areas around the ride as it continued to make its revolutions.

“There he is,” said Mike, pointing towards the concession stands as they went by.

Sure enough, there was Joseph standing mid-counter of the small hot dog stand, jamming a foot-long into his mouth, with another foot-long at the ready in his other hand. Joseph hoovered the first one then started in on the second one while motioning for the crying teenage girl hot dog stand attendant to give him more. Eileen could see the attendant shakily pass over two more, that Joesph started in on immediately, even though he hadn't finished swallowing the second one.

"Stop this God-dammed ride," Eileen screamed at the carny as the made another revolution, losing site of Joseph for a minute or two. The carny did not hear Eileen, and by the time the ride got around to the hot dog stand side again, Joseph was starting on hot dog number five. The teenage attendant was now sobbing, her shoulders shuddering in fear.

“For fuck's sake—stop the fuckin' ride,” Eileen made herself heard that time.

The carny stopped the ride, and Eileen scampered off, shouting back at Mike and Bob, "Get the rest of them off and meet me at the hot dog stand."

Bob was starting to get the giggles because this outing was turning out far better than he had expected. It only took a few minutes for him and Mike to get the others off the ride and herded over near the hot dog stand. Eileen made it to the stand just as hot dog number six was disappearing into Joseph's overstuffed gob.

“Stop Joseph,” she said, as she pulled him away from the hot dog stand by the sleeve. The attendant was now hunkered down on the floor, her sobs subsided to quiet whimpering.

“What in the hell were you doing Joseph—you scared that poor girl to death?”

"Hungry," said Joseph, around the remnants of the last few tidbits. There were a few chuckles from the rest of the outing that had now caught up to the show. Some clapped their hands in obvious glee at the spectacle. Mike looked bored, and Bob seemed to be doing his best to appear all helpful-like for Eileen. He got over close to her, in time to hear her layout Joseph's punishment.

“Give me those smokes,” said Eileen, her hand outstretched and her back straight as she looked up into his dark brown vacuous eyes.

“Nope!” said Joseph, clear and distinct, but he was starting to look around, searching the crowd with his eyes, and beginning to move his weight from foot to foot.

“Give me those damn smokes,” said Eileen, leaning forward and reaching around Joseph's back to snatch the cigarette package from his grip. This agitated Joseph more than Eileen demanding the cigarettes. His weight shifting increased speed and he began to make a deep growling noise as his normally vacant eyes took on a menacing glare. Eileen backed up. Bob saw his opening.

Coming up to stand in front of Joseph, Bob shook Joseph's arm to get his attention momentarily away from Eileen. “What in the hell is the matter with you?” said Bob, fixing Joseph with a stern glare.

“You're a grown man,” said Bob, continuing. “Look at the size of you, and look at the size of her. If you want your smokes—take them back. She can't stop you. We won't stop you.”

Joseph's growling stopped as he seemed to think this over. Eileen got the message right away.

"What the. . ." she managed to get out but abandoned the last of the question to start running.

“See,” said Bob, “you can get your smokes back easy. Go get her.”

Joseph didn't move.

“Go'wan,” said Bob, “we're not going to stop you—you can still catch her.”

Joseph started to move slowly, just as Eileen made it to the dirt trail.

"RUN Joseph! Get her," shouted Bob, and a little louder "RUN Eileen, he's gaining on you—Run!"

Joseph's loping pursuit sped up. Eileen looked behind in a panic, saw Joseph reaching the path, and started screaming as she ran. Bob and Mike hurried the rabble along the trail, with both of them shouting encouragement to Joseph who was now fully engaged in the chase. Eileen's screams subsided as she reached the hospital's main entrance and went inside.

"She's inside," said Bob to Joseph as the whole group assembled outside the main door to the locked ward. "I'll let you in first, and you go get her," said Bob. Joseph just grunted and shook his head. His eyes were now back to the normal vacuous stare, but he was committed to getting his smokes back and didn't need much encouragement.

Eileen was standing just outside the glassed-in nursing station when she saw the entourage come back on the unit. Seeing Joseph break away from the crowd right away, caused an involuntary panicked squeak from her, as she fumbled with the key to the locked nursing station for an escape. Once inside she looked out at Joseph and the rest who had now gathered outside the glass. Any sense of relief was fleeting, however, as Bob smiled and held up the large brass key to the nursing station for Eileen to see. Realizing that the chase was still on, Eileen let out another scream and ran into the staff bathroom inside the nursing station. Bob let Joseph into the nursing station, whispering to Joseph, "Go get your smokes."

Feeling fully supported in the chase, Joseph immediately came into the station and started pounding on the bathroom door with his big meaty hands. The screams inside intensified. Bob and Mike let Joseph pound on the door for a few minutes until Eileen wasn't screaming as much.

“OK, bud,” said Bob, pulling Joseph's hands down from the door, “that's enough now.”

“Smokes!” said Joesph, about to start pounding again.

“Here by', I've got some smokes for ya. New pack n' all,” said Bob as he pulled a new pack of smokes from his pocket.

"He's gone, c'mon out," said Bob, through the closed door.

After almost a minute delay in the quiet of the nursing station, there was a click of the lock being pulled back, and Eileen tentatively opening the door to look out. Her hair was disheveled, her face red, and her eyes were glassy from tears. Two tear rivulets cut through the trail dust on each cheek. She looked terrible.

“That was some fun, eh?” said Bob, and without waiting for a response added, “we should do that again tomorrow.”

The look on Eileen's face was the perfect topping to an excellent circus adventure.

Photo Credits

Butterscotch Palace from

http://www.capebretonpost.com/content/dam/tc/cape-breton-post/images/2016/8/31/cape-breton-hospital-3141987.jpg.imgtransform/ELRL/image.jpg

Hot Dog Stand: Google labelled for free use

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Hot_Dog_on_a_Stick_Santa_Monica,_California_2006-06-20.jpg

Roundup Ride: Google labelled for free use

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/RoundUp_-_NYSFair.jpg