Relax Said the Night Man....

Excerpt from Chapter Two, Ballad of a Sober Man: 

The inside of the building looked less like an academic center and more like some stately manor home past its prime. Tony led me through a maze of narrow, carpeted corridors with uneven, creaky floorboards and around corners until we arrived what appeared to me like a makeshift nurses’ station, as if the lord of the manor had retrofitted it in the tight confines of a hallway between parlors. A burly, serious-looking man in navy-blue scrubs, perhaps sixty years old, with a solid gray Afro, stood behind the desk, staring. I froze.

“Relax,” said the night man, “we are programmed to receive.”

On the opposite wall was a giant whiteboard, stretching ceiling to floor. Black electrical tape created columns and rows, forming a giant table filled with random symbols in combinations of red, green, and blue. The first column contained capital letters in pairs. It must have been a status board associated with resident names, I surmised. I didn’t see my initials up there . . . yet. Before I could even think to ask a question, Tony was introducing me to Avery—a young, fair-skinned, and chubby nurse with fiery red hair and a knowing grin, who would coordinate my new resident orientation. I became vaguely disoriented with sensory overload, andbefore I could think to ask him anything, Tony was gone. I flashed back to my private pilot training, when the flight instructor and I would be at seven thousand feet and he would have me close my eyes. He’d proceed to put the aircraft in a highly awkward orientation, then have me open my eyes, grab the control yoke, and return to straight and level to learn how to reorient the plane. Here, I had no training. This kind of disorientation was something I had never prepared for.

Avery led me into a small side room that appeared to be a clinical exam room, but which I would soon come to know as the whiz quiz room, in honor of all the pissing in cups for drug screenings that the residents would do during their stay. I remained there for two hours while....