Taylor Manor
I once had a 9,000 pound bread truck run over me.
In September of 1970, I landed a job as an adolescent counselor at a private mental health facility, Taylor Manor, named after Dr. Joseph Taylor, a noted psychiatrist and the man who founded it. I trekked out to Taylor Manor for my interview on the city bus. I made this trip with some degree of trepidation, as I had graduated in January of that year with a Business Management degree rather than one in psychology, my goals and values having changed senior year. I was then too close to graduation to retool and complete a degree in Psychology (I was then in my seventh year of undergraduate school, another story). I’d been in therapy three years at that point and felt I might know enough about the therapeutic process to function effectively in a mental health setting. I was interviewed by a very nice man named John Edmonds, the head administrator. As the interview proceeded, I felt uncertain about how it was going, and I was acutely conscious of my mismatched degree. However, as we were talking about some point of psychology of which neither of us was particularly sure, I spontaneously said, “well let’s look it up,” and reached for a desk reference he had on hand. I could feel Mr. Edmonds’ eyes brighten as he watched me flip through the pages seeking the answer. When I found it, I also felt I had the job. As it happened, I did, but I was never really certain whether it was my impulsive gesture that had sealed the deal.
My title was Adolescent Counselor, and I was tasked with working with a group of 12 teenagers aged 14-19. Part of the initiation for securing the position was a kind of trial by fire. Each day, a hippie named Alden (another new hire) and I were locked in the back ward of the adolescent wing where this group was housed. We stayed back there eight hours each day for the first ten days of our employment. We’d wake the boys up, observe their morning toilet, eat with them, and take them to their various classes and therapies, vocational, group, and individual. If they acted out, we were empowered to sentence them to confinement in their rooms all day, take away privileges and/or depending on the gravity of the offence, put them in the rubber room with or without restraints. All of the boys were military offspring whose parents carried Champus insurance, of which the hospital was a big provider. Intriguingly, when their insurance ran out, the boys were discharged as cured the next day.
All but one of the boys, a 19 year old alcoholic, were brain-addled acid trippers, some of whom had had up to 50 trips or more. I liked them all and became close with some. They were mostly mellow but could become very agitated and violent at times and often had to be restrained and isolated for varying stretches of time depending on the offence. I worked at the main hospital, other wings of which housed adults, mainly alcoholics, schizophrenics, and those with bi-polar or depression, most of whom were enduring some phase of Electro-Convulsive Therapy, better known as Shock Treatment or ECT. There was another building, an old shabby one, down a steep hill where they put what we called the baddies, the repeat offenders and chronic elopers. These were the kids who acted out, who were prone to running away (eloping), or to having sex (and getting caught). These youngsters were deemed not fit to congregate with the better behaved ones up the hill at the main building. The other counselors and I—they all armed with Master’s degrees in Psychology—were rotated from the main building to the older one, so everyone at some point worked with the baddies.
Working with these malefactors one rainy day in April, I was tasked to take some newly demoted boys down the hill to the other building. We were just leaving the main hospital, stepping out onto the sidewalk, when one of the kids decided to bolt. It was raining softly as the young man darted out onto the driveway where the 9,000 pound bread truck was backing up. I started after him, misjudged the speed of the truck, slipped on the pavement, and the brown London Fog raincoat I had on caught under the right rear wheel, pinning me as the wheel rolled directly over my chest. It flipped me onto my side, and as I turned back, I saw the oncoming front wheel just a couple feet away. I remember thinking this one might kill me (or at least hurt me very badly) just as it stopped. The driver must have felt a bump. I lay there five or ten seconds before pulling myself out from under the truck and stumbling to my feet. I looked over at the main building just as a therapist was emerging, and the look on his face convinced me I should lay back down. There I lay for perhaps ten minutes before the ambulance, now surrounded by concerned employees and frightened kids who had witnessed the whole thing. Even the runaway came back to watch. They put me on a gurney and loaded me up for the ride to the hospital. Lights flashing, we seemed to arrive strangely quickly. I remember the only question my mother ever asked me about the event was “did they put the siren on?” “No, mother,” I replied. The hospital x-rayed and examined me and the conclusion was “deep bruises.” Miraculous. I was released within an hour and transported back to Taylor Manor.
Then followed a week off with great drugs and the kind of benignly neglectful care only my parents could give. I enjoyed myself nonetheless, getting down, watching TV, and reading The Furry Freak Brothers. I remember charging Taylor Manor $110 for the clothes I had on: the London Fog jacket, my pants, undershirt, and shirt had all been torn. They griped about the high cost, despite the fact that I had been run over by their truck.
An Interesting denouement to all this was that as I began the ride to my parents’ house (courtesy of Lynn Hottle, the Manor’s popular social worker), Dr. Joe himself, who had clearly heard about the event, came up to me as I sat shotgun in Lynn’s station wagon, and gently, solicitously, put his hand upon mine. He told me, in 30 seconds or so, how sorry he was about what had happened, and how I would have good care (exactly whose care he meant, I am not sure). It was then I realized that this kindly man attending to me was surreptitiously taking my pulse. When I realized this, I said “Well, what is it?”
“Elevated”, he said.
I only stayed at Taylor Manor two more months before beginning a hitch-hiking jaunt around the country that eventually encompassed 13,000 miles and included much of Mexico and Canada. Before I left, minions of Dr. Taylor asked me on several occasions if I was thinking of suing them for the truck incident. It frankly never occurred to me to do so, but I hinted to them nonetheless that I might.
Shortly after, they began shocking the kids, a therapy previously only used on adults, and a practice I could not abide. Kids with whom you may have had a lively conversation the day before shuffled down the hall looking at their shoe tops, unable to even remember the previous day. My decision to hitch around the continent came about one day in the Rec room where some young adult heroin addicts were shooting pool. I knew them all, and we were friendly. One, lining up the eight ball, mused that he’d like to go down to Florida and jump into the Gulf of Mexico. 60 days later, I did just that, hitching to Panama City in the panhandle and jumping in.