The Bigger Lebowski

My favorite patient at the LRC was, no doubt, an older man named M. And I stress the word was. M usually wandered about the ward, smiling or frowning at the staff (depending on the day) and calling the male staff "sir." He also mumbled gibberish, often rambling on senselessly and incoherently about a given topic. His behavior was psychotic. Once in a while he made crude remarks. "Oh, I'd fuck her. I'd fuck her real good," was what he'd say when a female tech breezed past him, his voice casual, not aggressive. He especially liked looking through the Victoria's Secret catalog that was kept in the dayroom.

But M respected women. It would be easy for one to assume he despised women, but not many people realize that one major implication of psychosis is a distortion of reality. A psychiatrist would speculate that M was too psychotic to control these naughty outbursts of his. M had to be in his late fifties or early sixties. Perhaps the fact that he had the chance to see attractive women each day made him feel like a teenager again. That, and the notion that he was dying of liver disease, according to my supervisor.

Which was why I, and everybody else in Building 10, liked M. He was a sweet, gentle man. Never caused trouble. When he wasn't psychotic, he was respectful, a rare type of polite that made me smile when I was reading charts and he asked me for a candy bar.

One afternoon M was in a hot mood and he told me I was THE Antichrist figure. He claimed I was gonna "flood the whole fucking world" once he found out my name. That's me, folks. The Antichrist figure who is here on this planet for one reason and one reason only: to flood the whole fucking world. I laughed at his comment. I think he laughed, too.

It was cool that M sported a mohawk for a while. I can't imagine my own dad with a mohawk. M and I mingled quite often, but he just warned me about certain people and rambled on and on. He came to pet therapy one day, sat next to me, and simply talked. Not about his personal life; instead we talked about dogs. I didn't give a shit. He was a pretty cool fucking dude.

He was discharged, living now with his mother, and the LRC has never quite been the same since his abrupt departure. No update on M from Laura or anybody else.