Stories from the Crowd: Rescue in the Night

by Toby Johnson

Author; Gay Perspective, Two Spirits, Secret Matter
tobyjohnson.com

Production Manager/hi-tech guy,
Lethe Press
lethepressbooks.com

Early one Saturday morning I was awakened by the ring of the telephone. It was 1980 and telephones had loud ringers in those days. The call was from Bob Benedict, a client I’d seen at the mental health clinic in San Francisco I worked in a couple of years before. He lived in the Tenderloin and I’d run into him on the street recently, so that he called wasn’t a complete surprise, but the time and the reason for the call certainly were. He called me about two A.M. and was begging for help.

When I’d run into him the week before, he’d told me proudly that a prostitute who hadn’t wanted her baby had given him the child to take care of. That had meant a lot to him. Shortly before I’d seen him at the Clinic he’d lost custody of his own child in a divorce. Because he’d been hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder, his wife maintained he was an unfit parent and should have no parental rights to their daughter. This had been particularly traumatic for him. When he was a boy he’d been left to baby-sit his infant sister. The baby died, apparently of unexplained crib death. Of course, his parents blamed him. That had been the start of his psychiatric problems. Losing rights to see his own child brought up again all the guilt and fear that had surrounded his sister’s death.

He was still fighting for some custody of the child. Taking care of the prostitute’s baby seemed a chance to prove he could be a fit parent. But apparently early that Saturday morning his dream had turned into a nightmare.

Something was wrong with the baby, he told me. I advised him to go to a hospital. He was afraid to do that; the court would find out, and he’d lose his child forever. I talked with him a while, really just trying to get him to take care of the matter on his own. It was the middle of the night. I did not want to get involved beyond giving some advice on the phone.

Quite recently I’d seen the Robert Redford, Academy Award-winning film Ordinary People. The memory of the psychiatrist’s going down to meet his suicidal client in the middle of the night came back to me. They might do that in movies, I’d thought, but in reality that’s considered bad practice. But in the movie it had saved a life. Now Bob was begging me to save the baby and save him. I tried to put him off.

Almost everything can wait till morning, I assured. But then, beginning to scream, he said the baby was turning blue.

I woke one of my housemates to explain what had happened and to borrow her car. As fast as I could, I drove down into the Tenderloin and found the address. Bob was waiting outside crying. We went up to his room. The place was a shambles. But there was no baby. Bob was hysterical; he could barely talk. He just kept saying, “She’s not here, she’s not here.”

I got him calmed down and he said he’d start at the beginning. His story moved quickly through how delighted he’d been with the baby, but then how helpless he’d felt when it cried. He wanted it to love him, but it was only concerned with its own wants. He’d grown depressed and then angry.
He started sobbing and screaming. He then calmed down enough to say he’d wrapped the baby in a brown paper bag and buried it in Golden Gate Park the day before. “What can I do now?” he begged me. He was afraid of going to the police because he’d once been brutally beaten by a policeman.

I was stunned by that revelation. This was much more serious than I’d expected. I told him he could go to the psychiatric hospital. He agreed, saying he wanted to be locked up. I told him to get his things together and we’d go right away. He seemed dazed but obeyed me. He got some clothes out of a drawer and then went into the bathroom.

He came out with a sort of ornamental dagger. “Look here,” he said, sticking the point into the wall. “This is how the cuts were in the baby—this same shape, only they were full of blood.”

“Come on, Bob, let’s go.”

“No,” he screamed. I wondered when the building manager was going to come to the door to tell us to cut out the racket. “I don’t want to go to the hospital. I’ll kill myself. I can jump out the window.” It was a five-floor drop to a concrete slab.

“Bob, you don’t have to die. We can go to the hospital and they’ll help you.” I had talked him out of suicide several times before, though that had been in the office and the suicidal ideation but another psychiatric symptom, not an imminent possibility. My office in the Clinic had had no windows…

“You don’t care about me,” he suddenly shouted at me wildly. “You just want to take me there so you can watch them kill me. This whole thing was your idea. I know that. You made me kill the baby and now you want me to kill myself so you can write a book about it.” From our friendly meeting on the street recently, he knew I was working on a book project. He’d woven that fact into his delusion.

He started jabbing at me with the dagger. I grabbed hold of his wrists and held him. He was strong but I thought if I could just hold him a while without getting into a real fight he’d calm down.

Now he was sobbing softly, talking about the voices in his head: his father, blaming him for the baby’s death, calling him a shit over and over. He still clutched the dagger tight. He looked over at a paper bag lying half open on the floor and startled, saying he could see the baby all cut up in the bag.

Every so often he’d get angry with me again, but most of the time he just cried or listened to the voices. But whenever I’d relax my grip, he’d start to thrash about and lunge at me. He was between me and the door. I knew I couldn’t make it past him safely. The dagger wasn’t that sharp, but in the back it could easily kill me.

I fought to keep down my own fear. I remembered the advice of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was all a dream, a deadly dream, but nothing to be afraid of. I was only fearful for my ego. That was all I could lose. And that wasn’t worth much in the long run anyway.

And I remembered that I was, after all, Bob’s therapist. That gave me some kind of power over him. If I stayed calm and showed that I believed he could pull himself together, he probably would. I kept up a slow patter of talk, urging him to stay in control. He told me how much he loved me, but how frightened he was.

We both fell silent for a while. He looked off into space to his left, listening to the voices, then grew very calm. He looked at me straight in the eye and said matter-of-factly, “There’s nothing we can do. Let’s just get this over with.”

I felt a scream in my throat and heard a voice inside my own head begging him not to kill me. Not here. Not now. But I kept it inside. Dying like this in a sleazy Tenderloin hotel didn’t fit any of my expectations, but, I told myself, it was okay. I’d done what had seemed like the compassionate act in coming here. I did not want to spoil my death by regretting anything as insignificant as the circumstances.

For a moment I looked beyond the boundaries. For a moment I knew I could accept death; I didn’t have to be afraid. And at the same time, I knew I didn’t have to die. Bob started to pull away to get some leverage with the knife. I held his wrist tighter.

“No, Bob,” I stated, firmly. “Give me the knife,” I ordered.

He looked dazed. I released the other wrist and took the knife from his hand. Only then did I begin to tremble. Before I was overwhelmed and while I still had command, I ordered him to get the things on the bed and come with me.

He followed obediently and I drove him to Mount Zion Hospital where I knew friends of mine would be on duty in the Psych Emergency Clinic. Once there, Bob started fighting again. This time it took four security guards to subdue him and put him in restraints. He wouldn’t talk to the doctor beyond shouting obscenities. He was given an injection of an antipsychotic drug and fell asleep. I went home.

In the morning I called the psych facility. I was told that after the drug had worn off, he’d seemed clear. He’d been transferred to San Francisco General where he denied the story about the baby and said he really wouldn’t have hurt me. They released him.

After a couple of days I’d calmed down. Bob called me about that time and apologized. He said he just didn’t know what had come over him. He said he thought the story about the baby had been a bad dream. I had the feeling it was me who’d had the bad dream. I made a promise to myself to stay professional from then on; I saw why there were rules for professional practice that said not to go rescue clients in the night.

Excerpt From
Stories from the Crowd
Scott Ballew
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