A Sunday series from RVA Magazine featuring writers from Richmond and Virginia
Writer’s Block is RVA Magazine’s Sunday series highlighting contemporary writers working in Richmond and across the Commonwealth. Each week, we feature original poems, short stories, or essays. Just real voices writing right now.
This week, we’re featuring two narratives from Richmond writer Robert Hoekman Jr, who delivers an unflinching account of institutional memory, trauma, and the blurred lines between storytelling and survival. These linked pieces, A Story of Admission and These People, read like dispatches from inside a psychiatric facility that may or may not still exist somewhere between memory, myth, and medical record. With a voice that’s sharp, darkly funny, and painfully clear-eyed, Hoekman invites us to sit with what it means to be observed, diagnosed, and forgotten.
This is his debut appearance in Writer’s Block.
If you’d like to be featured, send your work to hello@rvamag.com with the subject line “Writer’s Block.”
A Story of Admission
by Robert Hoekman Jr.
She would have gone in with her sympathetic face on, my paper doll of a mother—not the one for getting husbands, but the one she showed to doctors and therapists. Dad must have gone in with his black Xs for eyes and stayed in the corner, because he knew what was good for him. Because he knew, he would have kept his damn mouth shut.
Mother must have told the woman in the comfortable shoes I was unruly. I was chronic. She would have told her about times I remembered differently, quieter times, times I remembered not at all. I watched worms crawl and wiggle between and over the lines in the pattern of the ugly hotel carpet. Gelatinous, milky-colored, fat. There were a lot of them. No one else noticed. I sat in a plastic chair, evidently saying nothing. An hour must have gone by like that. It’s what I got for climbing into the back of a minivan at ten o’clock at night instead of securing my bedroom door.
I went with the man with the red beard down a hall and through the double-doors and into the room with the white walls and the bed with the leather straps and the lock on the outside and the tick-tick-ticking clock and where he left me, loose and free. Something he wasn’t supposed to do. Insurance regulations. I sat on the bed and stared at my shoelaces, picked at my rubber soles, counted one two three four five, one two three four five, five seconds at a time, one minute at a time, one hour, two, three, until the man with the red beard came back and opened the door. Morning, he said. It might have been brown, the beard.
No. We called him Carrot.
Carrot said things like so tell me about your situation, and well, maybe just try to think of this as a vacation, then. I might have told Carrot about the carpet worms. He said that happens, things get disorienting. His face was long and narrow.
He worked the third shift while we slept and left just before breakfast. They didn’t like him getting around us too much, I think because he never lied.
I don’t know how much of this is accurate. The people you left me with, Mother—they aren’t around to vouch for it anymore. The truth is what you make and make and make of it.
These People
by Robert Hoekman Jr.
I’ll tell you about the others, he said. Steve With the Dilated Pupils. He stopped me in the hall my first day. He said:
Ricardo, he’s got a thing for fire. They put him in here because he burns and burns.
Shelly, her biggest problem is she thinks she’s ugly and her parents don’t know that’s why she never knows how to act around people and gets nervous all the time. They don’t know that’s why she draws murder scenes in stick figures on her Converse hi-tops in Sharpie and uses color only for the blood.
Gayter there was fifteen when he was born and they can’t get him off his skateboard. His name is Clay and he’s a gay skater, that’s why we call him Gayter. He ties flannels around his waist and he pops Ollies in the hallway and you’re gonna want to be just like him, but they say he’s manic-depressive. He has a half-pipe in his backyard at home. He catches twenty feet of air sometimes, but other times he faceplants and slides down and down and down.
The blond one, Hannah, she was a swimmer at a prep school before she started drinking the pool water. She flipped her hair and jumped off the high jump and never made a splash and everyone lost their minds over it. But she gulped the water when she went in and she stayed under so long they thought one time she wouldn’t come up.
Then there’s Panopticon. The doc. On Wednesdays, we all go to see him, and he says I hear you and I see you. And he does, too. He has eyes up and down the hall, in every room, all day, all night. Those Psych grads around everywhere, in their street clothes. The minions of Hotel Gaslight. They peek around the corners and prick up their ears at the Rummy table in the dayroom, the classroom, the rec room. Then they report back—he said this, she said that, this one might be ready to go. He sits across from us and he takes his notes, black ballpoint pen, those cheap-ass cheaters he has pinching the tip of his nose, never looking up. How was the week. Say more about that. That will be fine. And the crap he spouts. Your parents love you, he says. They came in with their sympathetic faces on and they told me so, and this is what they pay me for, he says—to hear you, to see you. Then come the meds. One, two at a time, like candy. I said to him once, tell me there’s a way out of this. Not til seven weeks, he said. Then one more week after that, time for the insurance to run out. So I said I’m on to you, man. I’ve got you cracked open. And Doc said but think about what you have to go back to, son. Like that. Son. And then he said
Here, take this, you’ll feel good, and I was like I hear you and I see you and that will be fine.
Yessiree Bob, that will be fine.
There are some others, he said. Steve the Inexplicable. But that’s about all of ’em. These people, I’ll tell you.
These people. These are the people you left me with, Mother, when you put me in that place to learn something.
Main image: Cover art for “Mend” by PSYCHOSIS
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