John almost never goes to group.
He arrived as the teetering mute who kept shitting himself. It’s a common side effect of withdrawl. One of the more embarrassing things you can tell someone is that they’ve shat themselves, but in a closed ward full of rehabs and mental patients, no one is looking out for his feelings they just start yelling…
“Holy shit, you are covered in shit!”
The male nurse Montego comes and takes him off to shower and change again. He won’t speak to anyone for days just mutter under his breath and draw complex geometrical studies. He seems to have some sort of engineering back ground. I’m drawing my complex webs of clues and he leaves me little schematic drawings of arches and towers with equations in the margins all done on napkins and scrap paper.
I’m convinced he is a plant. In on the Joke. Ready to help rebuild the world in incase of plague or fire, but I can’t really tell if I’m right. This guy is fabulously out of it and shitting yourself is a pretty big commitment to a role… who needs dialogue with that kind of performance?
After a couple of days he becomes more coherent and continent and they try to drag him to group and get him to open up, but nothing comes out of him but a stream of complaints and threats.
He says, “I don’t want to be here. Mandingo threw me in the shower. Mandingo stripped me down. I don’t want Mandingo to touch me anymore! Mandingo tried to rape me.”
This is strange, but also hysterical. I can even see Montego fighting back a smile. For the next few days till he leaves the answer to every question is:
“Mandingo tried to rape me. I don’t want to take a shower.
“Yes,” everyone says. “But you stink.”
