Escape From Bellevue
by Freddy Bosco

The psychiatrist they assigned me to was named Jenks. Rhymed with “jinx”, and boy, did she ever live up to that assessment of my luck in that hospitalization? For those who haven't spent much time in New York, let me explain that Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital was, at the when I was committed there, a huge dirty snake pit.

Highly overmedicated patients in ragged pajamas roamed the halls hour after miserable hour waiting for lunch or dinner or bedtime. Bad as Bellevue was, we all lived in fear of getting shipped off from there to Manhattan State, a facility where the desperately hopeless cases were sent. In Bellevue, we at least had a good ratio of patients to staff, so that assaultive behavior got noticed and addressed right away.

I had gone to Bellevue a year earlier for a week during my first official nervous breakdown. On my second visit, I had been taken there directly from my job by the police. I was in handcuffs which went well with my three-piece suit and Brooks Brothers tie. The officers had decided I was a risk, so they saw to it that my hands were tied.

After refusing to say anything to anyone once the cuffs went on, other than to tell the nurse at Bellevue that drugs were against my religion, the staff decided I needed an immediate injection of Thorazine. After tranquilizing me, they stripped me and put me in pajamas, then onto a gurney which they put on an elevator to take me to My New Home.

For a horrible month, I struggled to make Dr. Jenks understand why I had been living the way I had been living before I flipped at my job. At one point, the staff decided to let me have my suit back. One morning, I was called to see The Jinx in her office. My girlfriend was in the office, and something about seeing her triggered me.

I stormed out of The Jinx's office. I walked down the hall and saw that the front door was open because a janitor was scrubbing the floor, down on his hands and knees. He evidently thought I was not a patient, because he smiled and excused himself to move aside to let me out the door. In my delusion, I decided that everything had been set up to let me get out of the place. I thought I was supposed to leave.

Out on 29th Street, the first thing I did was throw the artichoke my girlfriend had given me over the tall fence into the lawn. I was convinced that it held at the very least a homing device. I did not what to have my location known. I really had no idea what to do next, so, of course, I went to a bar, looking for a woman I'd met who worked there.

She was not there, so I made my way back to my job. Back to the scene of the crime. I had no idea what else to do. I went into the office of the company president and, not finding him in, sat down at his desk and put all my money onto his desk. I began to count my money but was interrupted by the arrival of the police. My escape thwarted, I was shipped back downtown, in a screaming ambulance, my escape from Bellevue nipped in the bud.