September 15, 2013
Vladimir Putin
~
What else? I got Mickey successfully ejected from the funny farm and he’s managed a week’s “normal living” and counting. “Normal” means free of 24-hour private doctoring, Jackson-style. It’s the private doctors that got Mickey into the fix he was in first of all, anyway. I”m a fan of Dr. Mike. However, I think he and Mickey had gotten a little close, maybe….I remember when he and Mickey first met, now I”m thinking about it.
“Dr. Mike” (real name unknown) is known to many people in the Beverly Hills-Malibu swath on account of his first-rate attendance in medical emergencies, and emergencies only”emergencies that, for one reason or another, must be processed beneath the radar of the law and the medical establishment. Like Winston Wolf in Pulp Fiction, Mike cleans up messes. I”ve seen him in action a few times. He once worked his magic at my apartment, no less, early one morning years ago.
A trust-funded aspiring screenwriter, suffering from a clinically diagnosed schizophrenia, had overdosed on a cocaine-LSD cocktail and had turned suicidal. What was a happening party had transformed into an edge-of-your-seat drama when Mickey”for it was he, having disappeared from the main action in the sitting room (and peripheral action with the girls in either bedroom or bathroom)”was found hanging out the top floor window on the 27th story of the Westwood Tower block where I was living. He was going to jump, he told us. I hesitate to call it “suicidal” because in his mind there was nothing hara-kiri about it. He saw, albeit through a zoom lens viewable only to him, a tall, broad magnolia tree whose apex reached only to twenty meters”twenty stories below us.
Mickey kept putting a foot out the window, feeling his way, testing the air, so to speak”in preparation for a window-to-tree leap that, to his lysergic-acid-addled brain, was a perfectly feasible feat. The topmost leaves of the magnolia, he told us repeatedly, once we had found and gathered around him”the leaves and branches were just beyond the tip of his toes, the way he saw it. He”d earlier on that evening placed a blotter of an “Om” acid tab on each of his eyeballs. It was an old hippie trick, the better to trip with, from a visual standpoint. It turned out to be so much better that any distinctions between foreground, middle, and background ceased to exist altogether. As dawn came up, the sun hovering just below the rim of the San Bernardino Mountains, everything outside appeared but a small extension of his little finger. Everything and anything seemed possible to him right then. We were young in those days, and some younger than others.
The girls started freaking out first. One of them had to be removed from the room when Mickey did a feint”a practice jump”in anticipation of the big show jump. The dude was really considering it. He was a jumper not because he was depressed, but because he was”well, because he felt he was”invincible. Nothing less. To all others, Dr. Mike included, he was to be treated as a suicidal jumper. There is no category in the medical literature to date that covers the eventuality of a happy suicide. Consequently, a different kind of help was needed. And given that his father was an 800-pound macho media mogul, enlisting his father’s help, or any of his family’s, would result in a certain vault from the window. We knew better than to call his family, and for my own reputation’s sake, I”m glad we didn”t. This selfishness is retrospective, let me add. At the time I”d have done anything to save him from jumping off the 27th floor and onto a magnolia tree that most certainly would not have broken his fall. It was a Leonardo da Vinci, “man with bird wings” sketch moment”and it was sure to end badly. The pool was way too far from the magnolia tree to offer any relief.
What were we to do? It was 1992, and we were young: sixteen years old. Our means were therefore limited. How does a sixteen-year-old get a hospital to come to them? Medicine is not room service; not until you”re a few years older, and maybe self-incarcerated in your own home, thanks to a sleeplessness-induced paranoia following an Oscar Week-long, pharmaceutical-grade blow binge with a blonde Swiss heiress-divorcee. I digress. That’s a different story. At this time, we were royally scared.
I was holding Mickey’s sleeve, and his arm when he would let me, like his life depended on it. It so happened that the doorbell rang while I was doing my worst, trying to talk Mickey out of the idea of free flight. He was fixated. The doorbell kept on ringing until I yelled, “Will somebody please get that?!” Somebody did, and upon opening the door they found a shifty-looking, late-night drug dealer. He was the narco equivalent of a last-last-minute booty call: the only guy anybody knew who would be operating at 5AM. One of the girls had, it turned out, called him before the suicide watch began.
He was apprised of the situation in the next room and”hail Santa Muerte!”he announced that he knew what to do. Kind of. “Call Dr. Mike!” he exclaimed. Before the question “Who’s Dr. Mike?” had been asked the tenth time, the fella had called said doctor himself.
And within ten minutes, no more, the good doctor arrived in person. He was ushered into the room in seconds. Somebody had grabbed Mickey’s belt while I”d stepped off the ledge for a moment, conferring with the doctor as to tactics. The doctor calmly told me my friend was in a state of psychosis and was, indeed, capable of anything. There were no two ways about it: He had to be tranquilized, and tranquilized fast. He told me to get up on the ledge with him and continue my watch. In the meantime he”d be readying his potions in the bathroom.
When he returned and gave me the nod, I was to tell Mickey, “If you really want to jump, will you hold on so we can get downstairs and watch?” Mickey continued to have his back to the room and exhibited no interest in, or awareness of, any of the people in the room he was on the verge of leaving behind forever. The doctor, as I stepped down, would step up in my place, and smother a hand towel doused in ether across Mickey’s mouth. I was then to yank him back, catch him (I collapsed under his weight), and, while still unconscious, the doctor would inject him with a syringe prepared with 80MG of Diazepam and 60MG of Quetiapine.
The plan worked like a dream, exactly as described. The rest of us stayed up all morning and into the afternoon, fretting about Mickey”until finally he woke from his prince’s sleep and pronounced what a great party it had been. He was lucid, calm, and back “in this world.” He”d forgotten the entire episode, too. Dr. Mike left as rapidly as he”d come and only reluctantly took the two hundred or so dollars we”d gathered in a whip-around to say thank you to him.
“Don”t mention it,” he replied. When I asked him how come he worked like this”house calls; night calls; emergencies only”he muttered something about how somebody once had saved his own life, too. He was simply paying the karma forward. Dr. Mike’s still out there, saving lives without asking questions, working under cover of night, serving the kind of people who drive solo in the car-pool lane when the freeway is empty”i.e., serving the people who live fast lives. To this day, nobody knows his surname, nor if he is (or ever was) licensed, or perhaps discharged from the profession…or whatnot. It matters little. Like Wang Lin, he is a self-proclaimed “healer.” In a more “Western” kind of a way. In precarious situations, when the mere hint of authority could send a casualty over the edge, Dr. Mike’s out there, saving lives and saving reputations. And I for one am still grateful.
And so is Mickey”a million times over.
With such fond memories, my good man, I will take my leave. See you next week”sometime after the Late Show has ended.
Pip pip.
“Bombay
