The Trouble Boy, page 6
“We need to talk to you about something,” Steve said.
Toby cringed, sensing he wasn’t going to like this conversation. It would be something like, We’re okay that you’re gay and we just want you to know that, or We’re okay that you’re gay, but please don’t use the common room in the future.
“Sure,” Toby said, wanting it to be over with as quickly as possible.
“About last night: We asked Jim what happened.”
Toby looked up.
“Jim says you raped him.”
Toby felt the floor drop out from under him. A few days earlier, the four of them had been to a sexual assault seminar (foreboding police officer, dated video presentation) that defined rape and urged people to speak out if they had been assaulted.
“I, I don’t know what to say. I mean, that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Toby said. He wanted to run to the bathroom and throw up.
But what if he had taken advantage of Jim? What if he had, and didn’t know it?
He wondered if anyone in the courtyard could hear the conversation through his open window.
“Well, that’s what he’s claiming. He’s going to talk to the dean tomorrow. We just had a meeting with our freshman counselor.” Their freshman counselor was an affable jock—only serving as a counselor in order to get free housing, Toby thought—who was sure to think the whole thing sordid and disgusting. And tomorrow Jim was going to talk to their college’s dean, a stern French professor with painted-on eyebrows, a woman who was responsible for 500 students. The idea of involving such authority figures in his personal affairs was unbearable.
“Look, if you don’t believe me, then I don’t know what to tell you. The whole thing was completely consensual.”
“It’s not about who’s right or wrong,” Colin said. “We just don’t want that kind of shit going on here.”
Toby looked at Colin. What the hell did a baseball player from Tennessee know about things like this anyway? He was probably the type who had committed a dozen date rapes, who hit his girlfriend and then went to church with his family on Sunday.
“Of course you don’t,” Toby said. It was so much easier for them to turn it into a gay issue. No one would have been claiming rape if someone had hooked up with a girl in the common room.
“Where is Jim now?” Toby asked. “I’d like to talk to him about this.”
“He’s at the library. He’s really angry at you,” Steve said. “You two can talk it over with the dean tomorrow.”
The dean would never understand. Now everyone would know: that he was gay, that he was foolish enough to sleep with his roommate, that he was a rapist. He would be forced to wear a big lavender R on his lapel.
Toby gathered a few of his books in a backpack and went outside to smoke a cigarette. There was no one he could talk to about this. His parents in San Francisco wouldn’t understand. His classmates from boarding school who were at Yale wouldn’t understand. He wanted to disappear, to find a way to escape.
He wanted to end his life.
It seemed like the only solution. Toby imagined that there was no way he could recover from this accusation. Once Jim went public with his claim, once it was out there, Toby would forever be labeled as a sexual predator—and a gay sexual predator, at that. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. No one would believe his story. He needed a way out.
Toby wanted to talk to someone, anyone, who would be on his side. He could talk to a counselor, perhaps even spend the night in the infirmary. He needed someone to defend him, so that he might be able to survive this ordeal.
He decided to go to University Health Services. It was 11 P.M.; and Toby wasn’t comfortable walking alone at night in New Haven, a city known for its homeless, its junkies, its crime. As he walked down Grove Street, he saw two campus policemen.
“Hey, can I get a ride to UHS?” he asked.
“Sorry,” one of the cops said. “Can’t do that.”
Toby ran the rest of the way through a light drizzle up Hillhouse Avenue, where he explained to the night guard that he needed to speak to a counselor. After waiting for forty-five minutes, Dr. Yolanda Sanchez showed up. A short woman with dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, she looked annoyed that she had to come in to work at this hour. Her nametag read “Resident” below her name. Toby wondered if she was a real doctor.
“I’ve been thinking about suicide,” Toby said, after explaining the situation. The words surprised him. Thinking about it was one thing; saying it aloud, in this setting, seemed so extreme, so final.
She made some notes in a file. “And how did you plan on doing that?”
“I don’t know . . . I saw a movie where a guy hung himself with a belt,” Toby said. “I guess I could do that.” He smiled, just a little. While the idea seemed viable, saying it aloud sounded ridiculous.
Dr. Sanchez looked up briefly and then down again at her pad. She was nothing like the counselor he had sometimes spoken to in high school. Dr. Sanchez hadn’t asked him a single question about what had happened, hadn’t said anything to make him feel better about it, to get him thinking logically about the situation.
All she had said was, “Rape is a very serious accusation.”
After finishing her notes, she asked Toby if he thought he could go back to the dorm.
He shook his head. “I’d rather not.”
Toby waited another half an hour while the doctor made a few phone calls and prepared some paperwork. He could stay away from the dorm for the night, and talk to the dean in the morning. She would see how upset he was by Jim’s claim. She would see he was not the kind of person who would do such a thing.
“You’ll just need to sign these forms,” Dr. Sanchez said.
Toby signed them all, skipping over the small print. He caught the phrase, “Patient is a danger to himself or others.”
Dr. Sanchez called an ambulance to take Toby to the hospital. He said he would rather take a cab, but this was policy, she explained.
“Did you attempt anything?” the ambulance guy asked Toby as he helped him into the vehicle.
“Oh, God no,” Toby said. In the three or four times he had thought about suicide in his life, he had never actually tried to do it.
“You’re one of the lucky ones,” the guy said.
The ambulance left the health services building. The sirens started flashing and shrieking.
“Do they have to do that?” Toby asked.
“We want to get you there quick, right?” the guy said. “So what happened to you?”
Toby stared out the back window. “I had a sexual experience with my roommate,” he said.
“Did he force you to do something?” the guy said. “That is so sick. You hang in there, buddy.”
“I’ll try,” Toby said.
At the emergency services wing, they took Toby up to the fifth floor psychiatric unit in a steel-walled elevator. It was now 2 A.M. After making Toby wait for an hour, two fat nurses performed a battery of tests on him, drawing blood, testing his reflexes, and asking him a series of questions, like what the capital of Connecticut was. Toby was so tired, he could barely remember.
They put Toby in a room with a boy, sixteen or seventeen years old. The boy was lying on his bed with his face to the wall. Maybe he has the same problem, Toby thought. Maybe he’s gay, too, and someone accused him of rape. Maybe the two of us will become lovers here in this little room.
Toby closed his eyes for two hours of sleep.
At 6 A.M., a nurse woke them and announced that blood tests and meds would be administered in fifteen minutes.
Toby’s new roommate stirred. His name was Billy, Toby could see from the tag on the end of his bed. As Toby looked at him, Billy turned around to reveal two enormous gashes across his chest. Toby stared at them in horror.
“What, you never seen a cutter before?” Billy asked, yawning. “Yeah, I got the deepest wounds they ever seen. I almost bled to death, you know.”
“Wow,” Toby said.
Toby’s blood was taken for the second time in four hours. He was given a white pill that the nurse said would relax him. He slipped it under his tongue and then spat it out when no one was looking. Breakfast was juice, fruit, and a muffin, all served in wrapped containers with plastic utensils that couldn’t cut a baby. Toby could barely hold down half a cup of orange juice.
Around him, teenagers swarmed.
“I’ve been here for six weeks,” one girl said. “I’m going to get out soon. My parents are coming to pick me up.” She wore sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt; her hair was greasy and unkempt.
“She says that every day,” her friend said, turning to Toby. “I’ve been here all summer. Sheila says I’m the best on the floor.”
“She says that ’cause she knows you’re psycho,” Billy said, blowing bubbles in his orange juice with a straw.
“Whatever, Gash Boy,” said the girl.
Sheila, the head nurse on the floor, came out of the glass-enclosed nurses’ station to talk to Toby. “Toby Griffin, right? We’re moving you upstairs. Since you’re eighteen, you really don’t belong on this floor. It was the only available bed we had, and we had to put you somewhere last night.”
“What are you here for?” the girl in sweatpants asked.
Toby looked at her. “Suicide,” he said.
“What’d you try?”
“I didn’t try anything,” Toby said.
“Oh, that is so lame,” Billy said.
Toby was moved to the sixth floor, the adult floor. Like the fifth floor, it had steel-bolted doors leading to the elevators, separated by glass three inches thick. The nurses’ station was a glass-walled cubicle that looked out on the main common room.
Toby was asked to hand over his cigarettes, lighter, keys, and belt. They must have forgotten to do this last night, on account of it being so late, he thought. I could have burned the place down by now.
A nurse wrote Toby’s name on his cigarette pack and threw it into a basket with fifteen other packs, all labeled with the names of their owners. She put the rest of his belongings in a plastic bag. Toby saw that his name had been written on a whiteboard, last in a list of thirty patients. Next to each name was a series of check boxes, outlining privileges and med schedules. I am becoming part of a system, Toby thought.
“Okay,” the nurse said. “Make yourself at home. We don’t have a bed for you yet, but we should by this evening.”
“I don’t think I’ll be staying that long,” Toby said. “I just need to talk to someone.”
“The counselors don’t come in until four,” she said. “Until then, we have TV and a whole mess of magazines.”
Toby looked over at the TV area, where a group of patients sat watching a sitcom. In front of them was a coffee table piled high with back issues of National Geographic and People. Like the magazines, the patients—they ranged in age from early twenties to late sixties—looked like they had been sitting there for years.
“Can I talk to the head nurse?” Toby said.
Gladys, the head nurse on the sixth floor, was an older woman who wore thick glasses and a patterned nurse’s uniform that was supposed to cheer up the patients.
“I need to find out what’s going on with my, er, case,” Toby said. “I mean, I don’t plan on spending the night here.”
“I really can’t comment on that,” Gladys said. “You need to wait until the counselors come in at four.”
“But I have classes today. I have a lecture at one.”
“You’re going to have to miss that,” Gladys said. “You don’t have pass privileges yet.”
“How long does it take to get those?”
“Two weeks,” Gladys said.
It was 9 A.M., still too early to call his parents in California. Toby knew there was no way he could miss two weeks of classes. How had it come to this? How had he managed to screw up so completely? It was homophobia. If Jim hadn’t freaked out, if he hadn’t wanted to be accepted by Steve and Colin, he would have taken responsibility for what happened. It sounded so dramatic. Homophobia: like a big black monster that threatened to destroy everything in its path.
But it was his own fault he was here. Why had he mentioned something as drastic as suicide?
The thought, the fantasy of killing himself, wasn’t foreign to him—hell, he doubted any teenager who hadn’t had a suicidal thought once or twice. In boarding school, when he was resolutely in the closet, the reality of being gay had seemed too horrible, and he had fantasized a few times about what it would be like to end his life. He wouldn’t have to worry about coming out, about what his parents would say, about what other people would think. Whenever he had felt that way, he talked with the school counselor, and she would assuage his fears. Simply mentioning a suicidal fantasy hadn’t meant that he would be sent to the hospital. That was all he wanted now: to be talked down from the proverbial ledge.
But this wasn’t boarding school. This was Yale University, an organization that held not being sued as a primary concern alongside light and truth. Of course they were going to hospitalize him if he cried suicide. From now on, he would have to keep such thoughts to himself.
Toby rifled through the books in his bag. For his American Studies class, he was supposed to read The Yellow Wallpaper.
At 10 A.M., he saw the dean of his college, Dr. Nicole Sexton, enter the doors of the floor. She was ushered quickly into a glass-walled conference room where she met with several other doctors. An Asian girl, probably a student, sat at the end of the table. Maybe the dean was used to deciding the fate of her charges.
Toby kept watch over the meeting. When it was over, he jumped up and bounded across the room.
“Dr. Sexton,” he said, “I’m Toby Griffin.” He was embarrassed to be seeing her under such circumstances, as if she were going to give him detention for being here when he should have been in class or studying in the library.
“Yes, of course,” she said, even though they had met only once before, at the college’s welcome dinner. They sat down together. “Jim came to speak with me this morning.”
Toby explained what had happened, explained how he needed to get off the floor.
“Jim says you took advantage of him.”
“Do I look like I could take advantage of him?”
Dr. Sexton looked him up and down, as if evaluating the question.
“No,” she finally said. “I know this is about Jim, not you. But I can’t promise that you can go back to the suite.”
“I don’t want to,” Toby said. “I’m disgusted with all of them.”
“Let’s not speak too soon about that,” she said, sighing. “Jim said how well things were going otherwise.” She seemed sad that one of her artificially created living units had spontaneously combusted so early in the semester.
“That girl in the meeting, she’s a student, right? Will she get to leave?”
“Some people need to stay in here longer than others. Some are not ready to be normal students again.”
Toby desperately hoped he was not one of those people.
“Please,” he said. “I can’t stay here another night.”
“I understand.” She paused, considering her options. “You may have to stay the weekend.” As she stood up, she said, “You realize this is coming right in the middle of registration. This is absolutely the worst time for this.”
Yeah, right, Toby thought: he should have considered her schedule first before sleeping with Jim.
An hour later, Toby called his parents from a phone booth on the floor. After explaining what had happened with Jim, Toby told his mother he was bisexual. He knew he was probably gay, but he thought this would be an easier way to break the news to his parents. Toby didn’t realize this made the issue all the more confusing for them.
“But you slept with a man,” his mother said. “That sounds like gay to me.”
Toby decided to focus on the more important issue.
“We’ll come out immediately,” his mother said. “Can we leave tomorrow?”
“Sooner,” Toby said. “You’ve got to get me out of here.”
His mother was a woman who believed in working quickly. Within an hour she had booked herself and Toby’s father on a red-eye to New Haven. She then proceeded to get in touch with Dr. Sexton and the head nurse on the floor. But it was clear to Toby that it was up to him to get out of the lockup.
Two hours later, Gladys came over to talk to Toby. “I spoke with your mother,” she said. “I told her you’re doing fine.”
“But I’m not doing fine,” Toby said.
“Sometimes we need to keep people here under observation for a few weeks to see how they do.”
“Everyone keeps talking about a few weeks, two weeks, the weekend,” Toby said. “I can’t stay one night here. The people here are crazy. Their wires are all crossed.”
“The people here are not crazy,” Gladys said. “They just need a little help getting readjusted to normal life.”
Toby wondered if he had foolishly insulted the patients under her care. He was getting agitated, and he realized he needed to control himself.
“It could take two weeks, or it could take years,” Gladys said. “It depends entirely on the person.”
There is no fucking way, he thought to himself, that I’m going to let myself become Boy, Interrupted.
Toby remembered a toy he had as a child, a small colored woven tube, something called a Chinese finger trap. The idea was to stick an index finger in either end and then try to pull the fingers out. The more he pulled, the tighter the tube clamped onto each finger. The only solution to freeing himself was to relax and then wriggle out.
Daily group started at 3 P.M. The residents of the floor, the TV watchers, the previously bedridden, the patients who shuffled through the halls on an endless loop—everyone except for the student Toby had seen earlier in the meeting—gathered around the common room in a large circle. Toby imagined the missing girl had been sent off to solitary confinement or shock treatment.
