the poor farm
“Like I told you,” said Fanny, “I’m from Downey.”
Downey. Why did that sound so familiar?
Right, I thought. The home of Weird Al Yankovic.
“Aimee Teegarden, too.”
We were doing a little horse trading, and now it was her turn. I never knew this aspect of being in a relationship. Were we actually in a relationship? I still wasn’t sure.
But we were sharing, nonetheless; and it felt good.
“Like I said before,” said Fanny, “my whole family was in law enforcement, except my mother. My mother was a nurse. And not just any nurse, but the head nurse at the Downey Psychiatric Hospital, also known as Downey Psych. Sunny Acres. The Poor Farm.”
Like Nurse Ratched.
“Not exactly. More like Consuelo Lopez.”
Right, the nurse from 70s’ hit TV show Marcus Welby, M.D., played by Elena Verdugo.
“Mother was different from everyone else in the family. I guess it’s because she didn’t have daddy’s blood coursing through her veins.
“She was kind, always wanting to help people, especially the mentally ill. Seems mental illness ran in her family. Her mother had bouts of extreme depression, was in and out of institutions her whole life. So, Mother became a nurse.”
Makes sense.
“That’s how she got the job at Downey Psych. Worked there almost thirty years. That’s how I got a job there, too.”
At the loony bin?
“The preferred nomenclature is: psychiatric hospital. But yeah, the funny farm. Or, the Poor Farm, as it was known in Downey.”
I asked her how the hospital got such a name as the Poor Farm. She told me Downey Psych was in business for more than a hundred years, but is closed down now. It was a mental institution, yes, but so much more.
In its day, the Poor Farm was home not just to the mentally ill, but the homeless, the elderly and the disabled. It was, in fact, at one time a virtual city, complete with its own post office, and even a zoo.
“Now,” she said, “it’s a ghost town. But when I was there, it was a bustling community. It even had its own golf course.”
Crazy people playing golf? I gotta see that. Fore!
“It was for the doctors, not the patients.”
Still.
“You know, people often ask me how I can work in the ER. After time served on the Poor Farm, the Trauma Center is a cakewalk. At least in the ER, when someone comes in with their eyes gouged out, they didn’t do it to themselves.
And with that, she teed off.
“I started working at Downey right out of high school. My mother got me a job as an orderly. I went to nursing school at night.
“At first, there was nothing much out of the ordinary: patients pissing themselves, eating their own feces. Nothing any stranger than might go on at your local zoo. As time went by, it became so much more interesting.
“First off, you have no idea how many mental patients claim to be abducted by aliens. You know what all alien abductees have in common?”
They’ve all been anal-probed?
“Exactly. How did you know?”
Everyone knows that.
“They even have alien-abductee support groups.”
What for, the alien abduction or the anal probe? They also have support groups for Turrets. That must be quite a show.
“We even had a few famous abductees.”
Like who? Tom Cruise? John Travolta?
“Well, it wouldn’t be prudent for me to mention anyone by name, but one of them was a certain “I can’t drive 55.”
Dale Earnhardt, Jr.?
“No. Here’s another clue: más tequila?”
Robert Downey, Jr.?
“No. He was the lead singer for Van Halen.”
David Lee Roth?
“No, the other guy.”
Oh, the other guy. Right.
“Anal probing aside, that was just part of all the insanity that went on there.”
It was, after all, an insane asylum.
“For instance, did you know that vampires are real?”
Of course they are. I’ve seen every vampire movie from Nosferatu to What We Do in the Shadows.
“I’m serious. It’s called Porphyria, and it’s an addiction to the taste of blood.”
Wait. For real?
“We had a woman in there one time, seemed she’d open up her baby’s veins and drank its blood dry.”
OMG!
“Sufferers from porphyria not only crave human blood, they have an acute and immediate hypersensitivity to the sun.”
You mean?
“Yes. Photosensitivity. Exposure to sunlight causes extreme burning sensations to the skin. Still think vampires aren’t real?”
I’ve always believed in vampires. Aliens, too.
“Once, she even got loose and killed another patient.”
I’m sure they were asking for it.
“If you think that’s nuts,” said Fanny, “wait till you hear about the wolf man we had locked up in the East Wing there.”
Heard about it. What else you got?
“There was this guy used to go around beating his head against the wall.”
A fellow traveler. Why, I asked her?
“Said it felt good when he stopped.”
Makes sense.
“There was this other guy swore he was Elvis Presley. He had the whole act down. Wasn’t much a guitar player though, couldn’t play more than three chords.”
Neither could Elvis. Maybe it really was him.
“We even had Benito Mussolini as a patient.”
Benito Mussolini?
“In real life, he was some rich guy who’d lost all his money, then his mind.”
Just like Fatty Arbuckle.
“Apparently, he still had friends in high places. One day this high-powered attorney shows up and starts threatening to sue the hospital, the doctors, the administrators, everyone, unless they start calling him Il Duce.”
Il Duce means “The Chief” in Italian.
“Anyway, it worked for about a day until the doctors discovered that his lawyer was actually a fellow mental patient.”
Adolph Hitler, I presume. The two made quite a team. Like Abbot & Costello.
“Anyway, most of the patients were pretty harmless, indigents who couldn’t take care of themselves, homeless who had been out on the streets so long they finally lost their minds.
“There were some who were really out there, and my specialty was curing the incurable. I really had a soft spot for those patients that were plum out of their minds. It was better than television.”
Tell me about it.
“Well, believe it or not, besides alien abductees, the next most inhabited hospital space these days belongs to, of all things, germaphobes.”
Germaphobes?
“Yes, and it’s getting worse every day. For example, when I first began working at Downey, out of just over two thousand patients, I’d say we had maybe a dozen or so germaphobes. By the time I left, there were literally hundreds. You have no idea how many people are locked up in psychiatric hospitals these days because of germaphobia”
I might have an idea.
“Most germaphobes, or mysophobes, as they are clinically known, suffer from acute paranoia. A heightened sense of hysteria usually follows, ending up in a crippling state of panic. Most of them wind up in a straitjacket.”
Seems a bit extreme.
“Thing is, at least in my day, no one at the hospital ever did anything to accommodate germaphobes. There were no hand-sanitizer dispensers all over the place like you see these days. In fact, there was no hand sanitizer at all. And the Poor Farm was old. It was dirty, teeming with pathogens of all kinds.
Sounds dreadful.
“Sometimes I think they just enjoyed torturing people there, especially the poor germaphobes.”
Well, germaphobes are a misunderstood bunch.
“They rarely even changed the bed sheets.”
Me neither.
“Legend has it, there have even been quite a few famous people who’ve had their stay at Downey. Celebrities.”
Do tell.
“Frances Farmer, the famous actress turned loon of the 1930s and 40s, for one.”
Frances Farmer? At “The Farm.” That’s funny.
“Marilyn Monroe, they say.”
I never heard that. But then again, sounds about right.
“Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson too.”
Sounds like the cast from a movie.
“Even Gary Busey.”
Too many blows to the head.
“But there was one, legend has it, the most famous germaphobe of all. The Moses of all germaphobes.”
Who? Charlton Heston?
“Nope.”
Theodore Roberts?
“Wrong again.”
Who, then?
“Howard Hughes, himself.”
Howard Hughes? Talk about blows to the head. Besides being the messiah of germaphobes, Howard Hughes was the lord of the concussion. The man had more wallops to the cranium than a game of Donkey Kong.
I asked her: You mean THE Howard Hughes? The billionaire?
“One and the same.”
Howard Hughes was a billionaire back when you could count billionaires on one hand. He was famous for being a movie mogul, a record-setting pilot, and stinking rich; but he was most famous for being crazy. Howard Hughes, the man who ran the Mob out of Vegas, in the loony bin? It sounded too crazy to be true.
“Oh, it’s true, all right,” said Fanny. “There was even a room named after him.
“Back in 1950s, when Hughes was living in LA, his underlings had him committed under the name of John T. Conover. They were trying to take over his empire.
“Rumor has it that, after faking a seizure and being taken to the infirmary, Hughes escaped with the help of a nurse. Only it wasn’t a nurse, but his long-time lover Jean Peters.
“Thing is, Peters was an actress; she was only pretending to be a nurse. Best performance of her career.
“They were married shortly after. You see, when you’re married, only your spouse can have you committed.”
Sounds a little far-fetched.
“Far-fetched? They were married in a cheap motel wearing duck-hunting outfits.”
Okay, maybe he was crazy.
“After the wedding, Peters never saw Hughes again. Such is married life.”
Such is married life. Never truer words.
While this all sounded riveting, ghoulish even, the question still weighing on my mind was: were there any germaphobe, alien-abducted, anal probees?
“You have no idea.”
Wow. But then again, I suppose it made sense.
“You get used to all the crazies,” said Fanny. “Starts to become just a part of everyday life. Then one day this man comes into the hospital talking gibberish. Not speaking in tongues, we get plenty of those, but authentic SoCal gibberish.”
A surfer dude, perhaps.
“I’d seen a thousand germaphobes before, but there was something special about this guy. He wasn’t your typical schmuck. With all his craziness, somehow he really got to me.”
Germaphobes are infectious that way.
“He starts going on and on about germs and how they’re going to take over the world.”
Sounds familiar.
“In fact, he was going on in such detail, I started to buy into what he was saying. Luckily, I snapped out of it; but for him, I knew there was no going back. Time to cure the incurable. Only, his treatment gets interrupted.”
Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door. It’s Wang, the Chinese maintenance man. Says he has to change the air-conditioner filter. Really, Wang? Now?
Wait. But I didn’t even have an A/C.
I told Wang to fuck off. He thanked me and moved on down the hall. Very suspicious.
Then what happened, I asked her?
“Well, then one day,” she said, reminding me how Downey was the wrestling capital of the world. “they bring this guy in, says he’s Mil Mascaras.”
I remember Mil Mascaras: the man of a thousand masks. He was one of the original costumed wrestlers. In his day, besides Andre the Giant, he was just about the biggest thing going.
“So they bring this guy in and he goes nuts; starts wanting to wrestle everyone.”
Sounds like fun.
“It sounds harmless enough, but it’s not. This guy is six and a half feet tall and weighs at least three hundred pounds. Besides, even if he isn’t really a professional wrestler, he’s been boning up on his moves and he starts body-slamming the old folks there. Takes an old patient in his eighties and drops him down over his knee, breaking his back like a twig.”
That’s called the Spine Buster.
Then he gets this elderly woman, flips her upside down with her head between his legs, and falls to his knees, breaking her neck on the marble floor.
They call that one the Pile Driver.
Last but not least, he gets one of the nurses in a headlock and runs her straight into the concrete wall, crushing her skull and killing her instantly.
I don’t know what they call that one. They don’t have concrete walls in professional wrestling, just ropes and turnbuckles.
I was sure I was next, when in come two of our biggest orderlies and a brawl ensues. It took six orderlies in all to finally bring him down.
They call that one, the Battle Royale.
“After that, I decided the time had come to move on. That, and the fact that Mother died.”
From the crazy wrestler?
“No, nothing so exotic. Mother had an aneurism, dropped dead while standing in line at the Safeway one day. After that, there really was no reason for me to stay. Besides, they closed the hospital six months later. Now, it’s just an abandoned old mental institution.”
Wow. What a story. After all that, no wonder Fanny wasn’t scared of germs. Or anything else, for that matter. No wonder she was a ninja warrior.
