I am a misfit...Part 5
Part 5
We decided to leave on May 3. Charles had gotten a psych appointment a month earlier and we had gone to see his shrink at Berkeley Mental Health. He started taking his meds. Wow! He was a totally different person. He was calm and quiet, articulate and thoughtful. Who knew? Maybe if my life had not been such a train wreck, I might have thought of that sooner and we could have had things be different, but I hadn't.
Charles spent part of one of his checks on getting my car ready for the trip. We packed up all my stuff and put it in and on my 04 Subaru wagon. Up until this point, Charles had been riding in the front passenger seat with the seatback all the way back, because he had a terrible case of arthritis. I had not thought of that when we made our plans, and being that Charles did not know how to speak up for himself, he did not remind me. As I later found out, sitting upright in the seat caused him severe pain, but instead of telling me this, he just acted it out. I was really looking forward to the fun we were going to have on this trip, I thought. I was in for a big surprise.
From the moment we got on the road south, he was MEAN. I was in shock. We had had some knock down drag out yelling matches a few times over the past months, but NOTHING like this. He started to abuse me, insult me, yell at me, you name it, and I did not know what to do. I had no job, no home, no where to go and I had this LUNATIC screaming at me in my ear - I was blown away. I just started praying... the whole way.
The other thing that happened that first day was that Charles had told me he was an expert knot tyer, so I had given him the job of putting all the bags of stuff on the roof-rack and tying it down with a tarp and rope. He lied. Charles did not know the first thing about how to secure anything with rope and a tarp, after all. It was very windy on Rte 5, and stuff started to blow off the top of the car and I had to pull over in this wind storm in the dark and pull everything off the roof and stuff it into the car. What a fiasco!The plan was that we were going to stay in rest areas, because we had no money for hotel rooms, so we crept slowly to the nearest rest area and parked.
The first night, it rained at the rest area and Charles almost got in a fist fight with one of our neighbors. He sat outside on a log while I tried to sleep in a little nest I had made for myself in the back of the car. He gibbered and gabbered all night, and pissed people off who were trying to sleep too.
After all, Charles was now taking his meds and had been for a month. He had been quiet and civilized, thoughtful and contemplative for a whole month until this trip and suddenly he was once again a raving, mean, whacko freak, in my car, filled to the gills with my stuff, driving across the country.
I wondered if it was the change - was he afraid? I would try to talk to him about it and he would just call me horrible names and yell at me. I did not know. I got very little sleep.
The next morning, I climbed up on the roof the car and re-tied the tarp onto the roof wrack so that it was secure. I had lost a few bags for sure - my towels and blankets are lying on the side of the road somewhere... I hope someone who needed them found them.
And then we started out again...We did agree to taking 10 minute time-outs in which we would be silent, but inevitably one of us would start raving at the other, after about 4 minutes, until one of us would call another time-out.. We got as far as just outside Las Vegas. Another horrible night. I slept in the back of the car and Charles sat outside on the ground and ranted and raved at people. There were a lot of drunk kids that wanted to fight and gamble, and I listened to Charles all night long picking fights with drunk gambling kids. This was our 2nd rest area, and I was looking ahead to 2 more days of traveling with this person I now refer to as "The Scary Guy". It was May, and I forgot that it is cold in Colorado at this time of year. This was shaping up to be the trip from HELL. And so it was.
We left at about 6am from this rest area, and I drove this mean, antagonistic, belligerent prick in the passenger seat. At times I would just pray silently not to react, and at other times I would yell back at him, which of course was completely wrong of me, but I was out of my mind. I was upset at having lost my mother's towels and blankets. I was terrified of what had seemed like such a good idea before. I was racking my brains asking myself HOW I could be in this situation that I found myself... we drove on and on. Eventually we found I-70 East somewhere in Utah, and entered Colorado.
I pulled over at a rest area in Colorado and there was snow on the ground. This added insult to injury because I realized that I was going to have to drive non-stop to Denver. It was about 2pm. I got a Red Bull out of the vending machine. I don't usually drink energy drinks because they make me crazy, but I did not see how I was going to get all the way to Denver if I did not. And we drove on.
Charles continued to rant and rave abusively and at one point, he rolled down the window and attempted to climb out as I sped along at 65 mph in the dark!!! Somehow I begged and pleaded him back in. Just outside of Vail, it was about 11pm, I stopped for gas and got a 2nd Red Bull. That was a mistake. As I finished it, I had a raving mania attack and pulled over to the side of the road to pause, and Charles took the keys out of the ignition.
I think this was the scariest moment of my life. Charles said he was not going to give me the keys because I was too crazy, and he threatened to throw them into the woods. I thought I was about to be killed and chopped up into bits. I really did. Once again, I was able talk him down to giving me the keys promising him I would be quiet the rest of the trip.
We arrived at my friend Nancy's house at 4am. Nancy had told me she would let us stay with her for a week. She got up and let us in, and we straggled into her beautiful master bedroom. Charles could not handle it. He had not been indoors in a real room for EVER. This was another thing I had not thought about. When we had stayed at my sister's, he had sat outside the whole time. Now here we were at Nancy's in Denver, CO, and he could not stay inside her room because it made him claustrophobic. He went outside on her deck and started to smoke and talk to himself. She lived in an apartment building. It was 4am. She told me - "He can't do that, it will wake the neighbors". OMG!!! Could this get ANY worse? Yes. Yes it could.
I tried to explain to Nancy, who had been homeless herself at one point, what I had been dealing with. I apologized for waking her in the middle of the night, because obviously, she had to work the next day, but I did not know what to do. Charles could certainly NOT sleep in the car in the parking lot, because that would likely bother some neighbors in a few hours when they were getting up to go to work in the morning. I had to find a way to get him to quiet down and lie in the bed. I talked him in to smoking without talking and then to taking a shower and trying to get some sleep on the couch in the living room. He did. (to be continued)
Read Part 1
Read Part 2
Read Part 3
Read Part 4
Artwork © 2017 Joanna Whitney