My Grandfather in the Nuthouse

My grandfather had many flaws, which I won’t discuss, but he was easily the funniest person I’ve ever known. I loved him in spite of his flaws. As he neared the end of his time and his mind didn’t function as it should have, he would retell the same jokes often. Although I knew the punchlines beforehand, his delivery was so perfect that I laughed genuinely every time. And so did he.

He enjoyed cheap whiskey, actually the cheapest whiskey, straight from the bottle, chased with water from plastic gallon jugs he would refill in the sink. When my brother and I were very young, he didn’t want to drink in front of us so he’d sneak off and take swigs in the closet adjacent the kitchen. When my brother one day followed him into the closet and saw him drinking, he asked, “Grandpa, why do you drink in the closet?” He immediately and dismissively answered, “It tastes better in here.”

One thing I respected about him was that he didn’t care in the least what anyone thought of him. He spoke his mind. A twisted mind. If you were on the receiving end it wasn’t so much fun, but to observe him lambasting someone else, throwing any semblance of tact to the wind, well that was hilarious, especially because he was usually saying the things everyone was thinking. One time he told a (grown) nephew of his, “Jesus Christ you smell like shit. Go take a shower. You disgust me.” Whereas most people would keep it to themselves, or tell the person tactfully in private, or just talk about his body odor behind his back, my grandfather simply said exactly what was on his mind without sugarcoating it. And it worked for him. Although he had a lot of people who disliked him publicly, everyone respected him for it privately.

For reasons I won’t discuss, he ended up in the nuthouse. The loony bin. They tried to medicate him to “heal” him, but he refused. He literally spat out all of the pills they tried to force on him and would not allow them to inject him with medication. “You couldn’t pay me to take your bullshit medication!” He insisted nothing was wrong with him, and he was probably right.

After a while he was to be evaluated by a group of social workers to see if he were “sane” enough to be released back into the wild. The lead social worker was an extremely obese woman. The kind of woman whose ass hangs over both edges of any chair. When she asked him why he refused medication, he paused, looked directly into her eyes with a look of contempt, and in the slowest, most emphatic tone (imagine a disgusted Jack Nicholson), he asked, “How do you wipe that ass?”

Needless to say, he didn’t get out at that time.