My Visit to Anna, Illinois - July 18, 2017

Anna Illinois
July 18, 2017

Illinois looms larger today than it usually does, since normally it is merely a pass-through state en-route to a more exciting destination. When I say Illinois, the city of Chicago and the surrounding area are excepted due to the stark geographic, demographic, and cultural differences between the two.  If you were to draw a straight line from Apple River to Sheldon, everything to the south and west of that line is what I consider true Illinois, with the exception of Champaign and East St. Louis. The rest is the city state of Chicago, so going forward when I refer to Illinois you’ll know to remove Chicago and the surrounding area normally referred to as Chicagoland, and should actually be called the state of Chicagoland.  

Illinois therefore is a massive expanse of flat farmland in the northern half and resembles hilly western Kentucky in the south, but in either case there are few notable cities, but today there is ONE notable city for me and that is Anna. (Remember, Cairo is a notable city as well on this day, but today I don’t plan on noting it very much.) The reason for the expanded importance is that I plan on meeting with Yuri Slapanovich Ivanov, (not to be confused with Yuri Stepanovich Chulyukin)  that timeless individual whose insight bores easily behind the facades of both the righteous and evil alike, illuminating the depths and underpinnings of the motives of mankind, sometimes to the embarrassment of all. I consider myself fortunate as one of the 6% of people (out of 108 billion) to have lived in the same period of history as Yuri, but I AM one of the few who recognize his gift and one of the SELECT few who know him personally. Today is special because I have the chance to visit him in person, which is tough to do since much of his time is spent in the Choate Mental Health Facility in Anna Illinois, and it is next to impossible to visit residents there for liability reasons. Yes, the staff is physically attacked on a fairly regular basis, and therefore the administration would prefer not to expose visitors to this type of occurrence, again, trying to keep the legal and insurance cost down. It’s not cheap to house and care for a couple hundred crazies in one place, so why aggravate it unnecessarily. 

In addition to the insane asylum, now called Choate, I’m excited about the host city of Anna itself since there is a somewhat blurred demarcation between the campus of the asylum and the town proper. This is due to the fact that Human Rights organizations put great pressure on the asylum to release their residents into the group homes within Anna, where they can live a somewhat normal, albeit supervised life and even get a job like at Casey’s, The Ice Plant, or Walmart. In this way the asylum continually infuses the town with its populace, changing the very fabric of the town demographically and even somewhat genetically through intermarriage and breeding. In addition to this human contribution the asylum also provides employment for about five hundred employees and contractors, thereby funneling cash into the local economy, creating a symbiosis between the town and the asylum as well as a love/hate relationship between the two. If you think your conversation with the person who carries your groceries to your car is a little too interesting at least you’ll know why.   

Therefore, the excitement I feel as I pass into Peru (Illinois) is that same feeling you get when going to a movie. The actual film you came to see has not started yet, but the upcoming trailers and previews start to make you excited, even though you would not watch them at all if they were the only clips playing.  Peru, which I consider the start of True Illinois, is also noteworthy because it contains the first Starbucks site in my newly created state. 

Surprisingly there are a few Starbucks in Peru, but if you just use your GPS to search them the app will yield one that is in a Target, which is NOT the one you want since it is not a real Starbucks, unless of course you like that Target ambience, which probably means you’ll feel right at home at Choate. In any case, if your degree of neurosis falls within two standard deviations from the mean you’ll prefer the one on Exit 75 off of Interstate 80, so yes, you have to get off of Interstate 39 and head west a couple three miles on 80 and then get off on Exit 75 onto state highway 251. Then you’ll see a Patriot Petroleum station and about 3 miles on your right is the Starbucks. 

I need gas so I pull into Patriot Petroleum and immediately an anorexic looking blonde female meth-head with six teeth sticks her head in my window and wants 50 cents to complete her gas transaction.  Remember Windy Wendy in Breaking Bad, the lady to whom Hank introduces Walter Jr.?  Yes, just like that, almost exactly except way thinner, anyway here is the scene with Wendy so you get the idea. https:/youtube.com/watch?v=haUz1ib_jhc.  

I give her the 50 cents because somehow I believe her and so what if I get ripped for 50 cents, and she pays the remainder of her bill to the dot Indian behind the protective window, and gets back into the passenger seat of a pale orange pickup with her 400 pound equally blonde Tranny driver. The larger woman dumps her plastic coke container into the parking lot as they squeal off.  In many places this type of sequence is completely expected if you are in an area where the demographics support it, but this is near a Starbucks which is generally positioned in areas of wealth since a Grande Latte can run north of 5 dollars. Then I remember that this is right off of the Interstate, which holds a demographic all its own, collecting people from every walk of life, every locale, a virtual grab bag of prizes where norms cease and exceptions are the rule. I’ve spent a good part of my life in this virtual, elongated city so I should have expected the Indian behind the cash register's protective window as well as Wendy and the 400 pound Tranny, but I’m tired, not on top of my game, and hence is the reason I stopped in Peru for my latte and not Effingham like I normally do. 

I’m now pondering the 20 ounces of Coke that Wendy’s partner just dumped onto the Patriots Petroleum asphalt, and I’m thinking that even though it’s a liquid, that still it’s a type of litter, a lesser kind maybe, but litter nonetheless since it creates a sticky surface near the pump, and is not something I would do in my neighbor’s driveway or on another person’s property and with this thought process I want to chase that rusted out pale orange pickup and confront the large tranny, but the truck is already on highway 251, and besides, she might have beaten me up, and it is not good to get into a fistfight with a woman, since my mother Betty Bard raised me to never punch a woman, the 400 pounds and tranny orientation notwithstanding. Plus I’m not sure she’s a tranny but pretty sure.  In any case heshe (gender neutral pronoun) has probably never heard about the Golden Rule, which IS actually in the Bible, but it’s not called the Golden Rule by Jesus or anyone else in the Bible. We just added that label later on but it’s still a good label. Or it could be that she actually liked it when people would dump 20 ounce canisters of Coke in her driveway in Assawoman, Virginia (google it)  when she was a young overweight child, enjoying the ants that would accumulate, as well as the sticky sensation on her red Converse All Stars, and this was just her chance to pay it forward. Or maybe she just didn’t want anymore, and since the manager was dot Indian and therefore well accustomed to people urinating in HER driveway back home in Madras (Chenai), making Coca Cola a relatively innocuous liquid. The hearts of men (mankind) are tough to discern at times, but even tougher when they contain the attributes of the driver of the Rusted Pale Orange Dodge Dakota.  

This subtle uneasy feeling of cowardice lingered as I drove  to the Starbucks just a few feet away, and even though it was a minor emotion, minor emotions can be like gas filling a balloon. Even though the amount of gas may be small it will expand, losing density but expanding in volume, to fill the entirety of whatever it is allowed to fill, in this case the emotional district of my brain.  What would I have done if I would have had the speed of thought to process the ‘liquid litter’ concept in only a few seconds instead of a few minutes, would I have confronted her? And what if she were a 400 pound man, which she probably was? Or what if she got out of the Pale Orange Dodge Dakota and came after me. Would I have tried to box her, or feign boxing her, shucking and jiving, throwing fake punches, and thereby obeying my mother, juking to the left, then shifting to the right, wearing down every one of those 400 pounds, never throwing a punch myself, until either the cops showed up or she collapses in a heap on top of her pool of steaming Coca Cola in the mid July Peruvian heat? A totally defensive fist fight won without throwing a punch just like when I had to fight Joyce Quimby back when I was a kid. Joyce was an extremely large woman as well, a few years older than me at 14 years of age, but for some reason I called her a misogynist term that started with a ‘C’, and she came after me in front of all the neighbor kids. I tried all defensive maneuvers, but nothing worked, yet as a woman SHE was allowed to throw punches and I was not due to my protocol, yet running was out of the question since then I could be accused of running from a girl. This was one of those unwinnable fights, so I just tried wearing her out, but eventually got beat up, and the humiliation was present today as I imagined the fight with the Tranny. 

Now that I have mentally subdued the Tranny into the pool of dirty flat hot Coke, the next mental/physical need arises in that I need to urinate, which is almost an involuntary reaction when I enter ANY Starbucks. The men’s room is locked so I try the ladies and it is open so I enter, again reminding me of Transition and by association the imaginary fight with the Tranny.

The seat is down, so I lift it with my right foot since I don’t like touching the toilet seats of ladies (or men), and then, according to the feminist protocol, put the seat down, again with my right foot, yet it hurts my ears when the seat slams against the porcelain, so while initiating the descent of the seat with the top of my right sneaker I also have to quickly catch it or buffer with the same sneaker top before it slams onto the toilet rim just a split second later.  You have to have a really quick right leg, good balance since you are standing on your left leg alone, and coordination is also important since I’m holding a water bottle and keys in my left hand and a Kindle in my right. It is a difficult maneuver and takes practice to pull it off, but can be a valuable skill so the practice is worth it. I have mastered it with my right leg, but my left is not as quick since I’m right leg dominant. 

As I drive out to the intersection of State Highway 251 and whatever faux street /frontage road the Starbucks is actually on, the traffic in front of me rushes through the yellow light, but too late for me. I’m stopped at the ‘fresh’ red light, and a grizzled man, grizzled in both face and garb, is staring at me from 8 inches away with a sign that says I’m a Nam Vet, Please Help.  Four choices come to mind.  

1.      Disregard the man assuming that he is lying about the Vietnam Vet status since he’s about forty years of age, tops.  

2.      Stare at the man, face to face, without blinking for the next 120 seconds.

3.      Give the man a dollar and have him move down the line of cars behind me.

4.      Ask him if he takes plastic. 

      Not really a lie, but close to it. Lying with a question instead of a statement, the media does it all the time. So do some intelligent people. 

My thought waves accelerate. I know that these lights are controlled by systems in the Traffic Control Center of the Peru municipality building, but they also have detectors and monitors to allow for exceptions, and maybe there is some guy named Dylan watching this particular intersection, and can see the upcoming confrontation, and will have mercy on me and preclude me from having to wait the full complement of 120 seconds which IS the normal wait time for the sequence to execute, including the left turn arrows and yellows, before my green would normally appear. Or it could be that Dylan is one sick individual, and enjoys watching my situation, and actually EXTENDS the wait time to four hundred and forty seconds, and it troubles me that if I were Dylan I would do the latter to entertain myself in an otherwise non-eventful job. This type of thought process consumes about 10 seconds, but now the 40 year old Vietnam vet has moved on to the cars behind me and the stare game never happens. Probably for the best, man, I can’t wait to get back on the Interstate. I now dislike both the Tranny AND Dylan. Wendy is fine, but only because I like Breaking Bad. Oh wretched man that I am, who can save me from this body of death! (Romans 7:24 for full and correct context) 

Usually after a few nursing sips from my Triple Grande I have an elevated self-esteem, especially on a road trip, but this Peruvian break has proved to be an exception, highlighting my flaws, and adding insult to injury, the mind is using the caffeine to heighten my intellect so that it may mock my foibles in a more poignant manner. 

As I-80 now turns into I-39 I see the monstrous Grain Elevator off to my right which sits on the north bank of the Illinois River. Actually, it doesn’t look so monstrous now since it’s daytime in July, but I know it is since I’ve passed it before at night, in extreme cold, with the mist rising out of the Illinois, and the outflow exhaust system from the Elevator hanging in the cold February air, faint lights on, flickering, a living breathing behemoth, tiny humans in its guts, unseen, miserable, but doing whatever it is they do all night in grain elevators. When I get to Anna I will ask Yuri since he used to work at one back in the early eighties, but I doubt it was as large as this one. Still he should know. From the outside it looks as if absolutely nothing is going on, but if so then why all the exhaust from the outflow portals? Why all the lights. Is it really full of people, and if so then are there both men and women working there, and if so then what kind of men and women, and are you allowed to bring your pets while you monitor whatever it is you monitor, which is probably the grain chutes to make sure that they don’t collect grain residue thereby impeding the flow of soybeans into the bins. Maybe you just wait in a cage under a dimly lit 40 watt GE light bulb, and read Pascal’s Penses, or maybe you have a girlfriend who works there as well and you do things with her, as I think of  Yuri and Penny. I am truly without a clue which has always been the case but now my curiosity has risen to a new level making me want to see Yuri even more than I had before I had passed Peru. 

As I approach Exit 30 on I-39 the collective past horrors of the Anna State Hospital Tunnels press on my being, yet I’m still excited to see Yuri, and while the grain elevator questions are part of the reason, the real reason is that I always come away with some type of epiphany shortly after a Yuri visit, and sometimes during the actual visit itself, despite his condition, or possibly even because of it.

There are some individuals with whom you can talk for ten minutes in any given social situation and they seem no different than you or I. They can talk about the Cubs and the NL Central, or about climate change, the workplace, Big Data, LGBTQZ rights, whatever. As long as it doesn’t last much past ten minutes you’ll notice nothing amiss.  If on the other hand you talk to them for twenty minutes it becomes apparent that they may not be functioning at full capacity or at least in a different capacity than you or I. Many of these folks are the types you find in mental health facilities across the US, and what sets them apart from the others is that they are voluntarily committed. In other words they are not criminal, not harmless to others, possibly harmful to themselves, and actually WANT to be in there. Yuri Slapanovich, who has been in and out of institutions most of his adult life, was one such individual and currently resides in Anna, Illinois, at the facility there. I find this odd since the Anna facility only houses those who are involuntarily committed, so now I’m concerned, but not too concerned since Yuri knows how to fake it and get himself committed “involuntarily”, of course with a little help from Nurse Penny. 

Yes, it was odd enough that Yuri was back at the facility, but that was not nearly as odd as the relationship between Yuri and Nurse Penny. Her full name was Penelope Saoirse Piano, but since she didn’t really care for it and the patients at the asylum made fun of it, she just became Nurse Penny over time. For what it’s worth I think Saoirse (pronounced Ser-sha) is pretty. What I remember from our conversation is somewhat sketchy, but my recollection is assisted by the espresso.

To understand the relationship between Penny and Yuri you have to understand a bit about Penny Piano, whereas you’ll never understand Yuri. Penny’s dad, Vernon (Vernie)  Piano was a slovenly fellow who wore the same hunter plaid trousers every day, soiled with motor oil, and an off-white crew neck tee shirt with a frayed collar. During the spring and summer Vernon worked as a caddie at the nearby Egyptian Country Club where many of the golfers felt sorry for him and gave him work carrying their bags. Before reporting to the clubhouse each morning Vernon would stop by Masella’s luncheonette and buy two jelly donuts, one of which he would eat immediately and the other two would be stored (stuffed) in each of his two front pockets, one for his 10 o’clock morning snack and one for lunch. He would just stuff them in there, no plastic bag, no nothing, just jam it in a pocket  which of course would cause the jelly to ooze out during the day, but somehow it didn’t seem to bother him too much even on those already sticky and hot southern Illinois summers. Though the jelly was no longer contained on the inside of the pastry, he would manage to get both the donut and the jelly onto his hand, and subsequently into his mouth and stomach, so the end result was the same. Many of the golfers had to discontinue using him since their clubs were getting all gummed up with the flavor of the day, but others who pitied him just brought a rag and a spray bottle. There was nothing anyone could do about the smell.

On Saturday night Vernon would do his laundry, washing his shirt and jellied trousers in order to prepare for church the next day. For Vernon, church was simply another opportunity to make money. When the offering plate would be passed around he would purposely mishandle it, spilling the contents on the floor and the kneelers. In the ensuing scramble, acting all embarrassed, he would help put the monies back in the plate, but manage to divert a fair amount into his trousers as well. He could usually get to a couple of services a day, and maybe one at night. Typically daily revenue amounted to about 40 dollars per Sunday, sometimes more if he was able to sit in the back row, which meant optimal opportunity since the plate was at it's fullest once it reached the back. Pointless to sit in the front.

As you can imagine, living with this type of individual was no picnic so eventually Mrs. Piano, Penny’s mom, had to leave Vernon, bringing Penny with her. It was at this time, when Penny was about eight years old, that Mrs. Piano would take her to the Mighty Rivers Baptist church in Cairo Illinois every Sunday where she would attend Sunday school under the tutelage of Laura Potts. At that time Penny was not a very attractive girl, extremely tall, awkward, skinny, and somewhat shy, but she loved going to the church to hear the stories. As mentioned, Laura Potts, a faithful servant of God who would instruct Penny in the ways of the Lord, taught her not just the Bible stories but the meaning behind them and how she could apply them to her life. In addition to the teachings, Laura and her husband Larry, started a habit of praying for her on a nightly basis, a habit that would persist to this very day, however, while that is important, what is more important was the prayer on the night of September 17^th, 1997. 

On this night Penny had just reached the age of 36 and was sitting in a thatched hut just to the south of Iquitos, Peru (South America, not Illinois) at one of those Ayahuasca ‘resorts’ where many young Americans come to experience the Ayahuasca brew, a concoction that produces a significant psychedelic affect due to the DMT portion of the brew which is introduced via the Chacruna vine. The other part of the brew consists of the Ayahuasca vine itself, which allows the DMT to pass through the stomach lining and into the blood stream, thereby releasing it to the brain, creating the hallucinations. It also causes intense vomiting and sometimes diarrhea. 

Penny, seated on her yoga like mat, took the cup after chanting the following mantra…..

Dearest Ayahuasca
I am chanting to you
Your healing is always pure
It leaves my body calmer
Ayahuasca urku manta…
First flower Ayahuasca…
Ayahuasca Balm…
Ayahuasca and Chacruna…
Starry Ayahuasca…
Ayahuasca, image painter…
Roots of Ayahuasca…
Heart of Ayahuasca…
Ayahuasca flowers…
Heavenly Ayahuasca…
Ayahuasca of the children…

Shortly after drinking the contents of the cup Penny relaxed on her mat, facing the ceiling, wondering what she was doing here. Most of the other passenjeros  were here to solve a problem or heal, like Christy from her divorce, or Joey from pornography, or Yuri from being abandoned on the streets of Omsk by his parents.  Like Christy, Penny was divorced from her first husband Jim, and in a rough second one to Bubba McCue, but really was here simply out of curiosity. For some reason though she made some story up about being sexually abused by her father Vernon so that the shaman Don Richo, would think she had a legitimate, reason to be admitted to the camp. Unknown to Penny, Don Richo couldn’t care less about Penny’s reason for attendance, the money was all that really mattered, but to appear legitimate as a shaman he had to pretend to care.

Soon she could hear vomiting in the nearby huts,the retching making her want to vomit as well, so it wasn’t long before she had made her trips to the latrine, with the purging period lasting to be what seemed to be about an hour and half. Everything seemed calm but then the critters started to appear, each with 12 small legs but an out of proportion body, with the 12 legs growing and becoming bodies themselves, splitting off, and eventually filling the room, so much so that now they were in her ears, nose, mouth, throat, and the other two openings, suffocating her. She wanted to roll over and squash them all, or at least run into the shower, but she was unable to move and started to choke on the creatures. At this point the shaman entered the room and sang an icaro, causing the evil being to flee but Penny was in tears. The shaman then told her that she must be purified, and as part of that process that he must remove her clothes as he sang a different icaro. She didn’t give assent but she didn’t say no either, and so the shaman removed her gown and started to mount her, and as he did the critter’s faces took on the visage of the shaman.  Penny started to scream but no sounds would leave her throat, but just then two things happened simultaneously. An image or apparition appeared in the form of Larry and Laura Potts on their knees in their bedroom in Cairo, praying that God would intervene in Penny’s life right at this moment, as if they had a sense of the danger. Immediately after the image one of the other passenjeros tackled the shaman, screaming at the top of his lungs for help which came shortly from the other shamans as well as other staff members. The assistants did their best to comfort Penny, and help her ride out the rest of the trip.

The next morning Penny was still pretty upset, but was coherent and at the moment only half awake. A Peruvian policewoman was sitting next to her holding her hand as she introduced a young man to her. “Hello Penny, my name is Esmerelda and I’m with the local police here is Iquitos, and this young man in front of you is the one who saved you early this morning”.

Penny looked up at her, and then glanced at the young man wearing pale green army pants and a Hendrix Are You Experienced  tee shirt. Yuri put his hand on Penny’s forehead and said, “I hope you’re ok. Did I get there in time?”

Penny started crying again, but this time gently, and turned away from Yuri toward Esmerelda. Yuri was hurt. Esmerelda told him that it was nothing personal, but that the trauma of the event was still very much with Penny, and therefore her reactions may not be what you would expect. She also added that he did get there in time in that there was no penetration, but Yuri wondered how she would know that and was not too comforted. Yuri started to leave, dejected and depressed, with the hanging beads of the curtain behind him when he heard an anguished cry, “No, please come back, please.”

He walked back through the beads and met her gaze as she said “I’m sorry. I hardly even know who I am. What is your name again? ”

“Yuri… Yuri Slapanovich.”

“How do you spell that?” she asked.

“Just like it sounds, S L A P A N O V I C H.”

“Slapanovich?” she questioned, that’s Slavic isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t Slapanovich mean Son of Slapan? What kind of first name is Slapan?  What is your surname?”

“Ivanov”, he replied, and yes, Slapanovich means Son of Slapan, but actually I never really knew my father so I’m not even sure that Slapan was his real name”.

“Hmmm," she replied, "and I wish I had never known mine. What an ass, a worthless bum who beat my mother all the time. Many times I had to intervene by jumping on his back to try and pull him away, but he would just throw me off. A child shouldn’t have to deal that that. Anyway, you do realize that you saved my life don’t you, or at least a good portion of it.”

“What else could I have done? I did get another witness by the way, so legally things should be ok.”

The two talked for a few more minutes about why they were there, and about how horrified they were that something like this could happen.  Both decided to leave for the Iquitos airport that same day and return home to the states. Yuri left to go pack his things and Penny got dressed and they both took the shuttle to the airport later that evening. As they rode back to the airport Yuri noticed that she had a duffle bag with a Cairo Pilots basketball emblem on the side. As they waited in line for their tickets Yuri asked, “Do you happen to be from Cairo, Illinois?”

 “Right now I’m not sure where I’m from, but yes I grew up there and still live there most of the time, except I’m moving to Anna soon for a nursing job. I used to be in nursing informatics but now I’ll be working with the mental patients there.

“But you’re white”, Yuri questioned.

“What does that have to do with informatics?”

“Probably nothing,” said Yuri, “but since I don’t even know what informatics is then maybe it does. I was actually referring to the fact that you are from Cairo and apparently played girls basketball there, which is odd since I thought Cairo was all black and even if you were the only white person in that school I doubt that you could make the team there, being a white girl and everything. Hmmm, you are pretty tall though. Did they just use you for rebounding and blocking out and stuff?”

Not everyone is black in Cairo,” she replied, “but yes, while it’s mostly black there are some white people there and they WILL let you on the basketball team if you are good enough EVEN if you’re white.  For right now I’m going to ignore the other asinine remarks but you should know I was good at all aspects of the game, not just rebounding and blocking out, and could easily beat you at one on one. Where are YOU from that you know that there is a Cairo in Illinois?”

“Anna.”

“Stop it! You’re just saying that since I’m moving there. Are you mental or something?”

As he showed her his ticket reading MDH (Carbondale) he said, “Nice comeback. No, but if you’re referring to the mental hospital there, yes, I have been in there and not as a worker. And since you’ll be a nurse there soon I found it a little disturbing that you, A NURSE, just called me mental.”

“I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t joke about that. Please forgive me.”

“I’m just joking also,” he said, “I wasn’t really there as a patient, I was just trying to make you feel bad, which is stupid and insensitive of me considering you’ve had plenty enough of ‘feeling bad’ lately, so I wouldn't really say that we're exactly even.  In other words I think that you deserve more latitude than I do.” In truth Yuri was not joking, since he actually HAD spent time there in his youth for suicidal thoughts, but he wasn’t sure how much to reveal at this point to this attractive young woman.

“Give me your ticket Yuri," said Penny, "since we’re both going to Carbondale I’m going to see if we can sit together for the rest of the trip. I like you and you interest me, but not just because you saved my life and not because you’re good looking, because you’re not, but some things just are, and how about if we just leave it at that. It's awkward to discuss things like this, and in fact it may even ruin it.  Ok, maybe that rape-save had something to do with it. Or maybe it’s that you’ve seen me naked, and in the process of being raped thereby creating some type of automatic connection, it hard to say. I really don’t know what to think since normally I’d be embarrassed about sitting by someone who had just seen me stark naked being mounted by a Peruvian shaman or really any kind of shaman”

“So you WERE saved?” he asked.

“Actually, it’s hard to tell since I was kind of out of it, but I’d like to just assume that there was no penetration for now and probably forever, so we can just leave it at that? You know, the whole perception is reality thing. Also, just so you know that while the connection exists for whatever reason, I’m still feeling some discomfort regarding you having seen me naked, kind of like the feeling you get when someone has just seen you on the toilet, and you have to talk to them a few minutes later in a social situation.”

This last comment bothered Yuri since he was familiar with the toilet peering antics of Johnny Piano, and now was wondering if Penny knew him as well, not realizing that Penny was actually his sister. He didn't mention anything about Johnny, but simply stated, “But you weren’t ON the toilet and if you are really that uncomfortable then why did you just offer to sit next to me for the next twenty hours?”

“Good point, I think I’ll go ahead and change them back.”

“No no no, it’s okay, plus there’s no time, it looks like they’re boarding. I’ll try to behave. Besides, the nurses at Anna used to walk in on me all the time when I was on the toilet, and it didn’t faze me at all after I got used to it.”

Penny acquiesced with some type of flirtatious smirk, and the two boarded the Avianca flight which would first take them to Lima, then American Airlines to Orlando, O’Hare, and finally Carbondale. It’s unclear as to exactly what happened over the next 19 hours to Carbondale, but an inseparable bond was formed between two individuals as they discussed their homes, fathers, Ayahuasca, Christianity, Basketball, Yuri’s trials at the Anna State Hospital, Jimmy the Janitor as well as the Mighty Rivers Baptist Church in Cairo.

The first flight from Iquitos to Lima was relatively short, only an hour and forty five minutes but mostly consisted of Yuri sharing his background, the horrors of the orphanage in Omsk in south central Russia, his adoption by American parents in Bethany Beach, Delaware, his teenage years there on the boardwalk, and the happiness of that phase of his life, although not without many trials. He had been a very skinny child, and did not like to wear short sleeved shirts due to the fact that the wrist bone would stick out so far as to make him appear even skinnier. The children made fun of him and the girls didn’t think it was attractive since it wasn’t but this caused him to struggle even more to compensate in both areas. Due to the teasing he eventually learned how to fight, not great, but good enough to make people think twice about starting something. In other words he rarely ‘won’ a fight but the opponent always paid a heavy price, with Yuri paying a heavier price. The only fights he really won were the ones in which he was either drunk or was able to succor punch the opponent to get an early advantage.  

It was also important to be able to do well at sports, but due to a mix-up on his birth certificate coming over from Omsk he was a year younger than the other kids in his grade and therefore was much smaller, however he was still able to do well in soccer, baseball, and football. Basketball was a different story since while he thought he was good enough to make the team he never did, neither in grade school nor in high school. Yuri blamed it on the coaches never teaching him the proper way to make a jump shot, and that you had to use the momentum of your body to gain enough thrust to allow the ball to reach the bucket. They also didn’t tell him about the geometry of the game, in that the shots needed a high arc to increase the probability of them entering the bucket without bouncing off the rim. Since Yuri was ignorant of this he had tried to just use his puny wrist alone to shoot the ball, limiting his range to about three feet and firing the ball in a straight line towards the rim off of which it usually bounced.  He did figure this whole body motion/arc thing when he was about 40 but by then few scouts were interested. Nevertheless, even to this day, Yuri takes great pride in his jump shot abilities, even though he is in his late sixties, and I know he’s going to want to play me in a game of one on one once I reach Anna later this afternoon.

Yuri went on and on for the full flight ad-nausea describing his prior basketball situation to Penny, however what was really odd was that Penny was totally enthralled by the whole topic. Whereas most women would think he was just mental, (which he was and is), Penny was extremely familiar with the whole jump shot thing since she had played basketball in high school and was actually a star forward for the Cairo Lady Pilots. In addition, she just liked the way Yuri talked, the tone, the meter of his speech, the sports metaphors, parallels, etc. He was one of those people with whom she could talk forever on really any topic. Actually, I feel the same way about Yuri, in that he is a rare individual who can talk about the most mundane of topics and make them fascinating, even though he rarely understands the topic. It doesn’t matter and nor did it matter to Penny. She just wanted the trip home to last forever and so did Yuri.

Thinking about Yuri creates more excitement now that I’ve left I-39 and am traveling west on Illinois state highway 146. As I enter the town of Anna I am reminded of its racist roots and how the name is actually an acronym standing for Ain’t No Niggers Allowed.   Indeed it used to be a sundown town back in the early twentieth century, in which Negroes were barred from living within the city limits, and had to leave town by sundown. Kind of like Camden today but in reverse. 

Now I see Casey’s General Store where I turn right onto US highway 51 for about a mile until I reach Anna Quarry Lane, then left again onto North Lime Kiln Road for a little bit until I see the sign on the Main Entrance to my right which reads Clyde L. Choate Mental Health & Development Center. Sounds a lot more pleasant than Southern State Hospital for the Insane, which was its name in times past, and which I actually prefer. Euphemisms are a useful convention however. They somehow soothe our conscience without changing anything other than the color of the paint. Like calling abortions birth control, which I guess technically they are, similar to ethnic cleansing, but just in a preventive sense according to the book Freakonomics by Steve Levitt and John Donahue. People will debate that segment of the book forever, but the data doesn’t lie, unless it does. There could have been other reasons for the decline in violent crime in the nineties, but the data does suggest that abortions in the seventies put a significant dent in violent crime in the nineties as troublesome as that is. Read the book.

From what I understand there are less than two hundred residents here today at Choate, but the grounds and buildings are large enough to hold thousands, which was the case back in it’s heyday in the 50’s and 60’s, when it housed over two thousand patients as well as additional cottages for the staff. You can still see the little cottages today where the psychologists, psychiatrists, and their families had lived on-site. Back then it was called Anna State Hospital and was rivaling the population of the town of Anna itself.

Everything here is extremely well kept, there are no weeds or trash on the side of the entry road, the grass is well manicured, and from a distance the brick buildings give the place the appearance of an Ivy League school, except for the fact that it is so expansive, looking to be over two hundred acres as I drive through the complex. Upon further inspection I see that all of the white exterior window framing is in need of painting, and many are barely painted at all. Odd, since everything else seems so neat and well kept, why would they choose to leave off painting the exterior windows?  In addition, I notice that inside the windows there is no light at all, just pitch black, as if the buildings are not used at all, which many of them are not. It appears as if most of the buildings use window air conditioning and not central air, although it could be that the window units are merely there to augment the central units.

Eventually I see the The Fountain in front of the two-story Administration building, both of which are impressive. What is also impressive is that there are no people visible for an operation this large and well kept. The fountain shoots water about ten feet into the air and adds a cooling dimension to this hot July afternoon in Southern Illinois. Actually there are three of them together, with one shooting higher than then others sharing a single pool, but they are referred to in the singular as The Fountain kind of like The Trinity.  In the background against the brilliant blue sky and white cloud puffs is the campus water tower  which I believe used to be white, but is now mostly rust colored, needing painting similar to the window treatments, so it hard to make out any writing on it. Maybe there never WAS writing on it, but it is rumored that one of the maintenance men did paint the caption Crazy Town on it years ago but in very small letters.

There are only a couple of cars in the parking lot by the fountain, but for some reason I park away from the two cars in the most distant spot in the lot. Since I don’t have an appointment, and I don’t really know how to visit a resident I just walk in and start looking around. Inside the building is not well lit, with dark wood walls and hallways that extend into the various portions of the structure. I don’t really see a reception area so I just start walking through the cavernous hallways and eventually I see a corpulent young lady, about 30 years of age, fake blonde hair, well dressed, with a pleasant but aggressive demeanor. Her complexion was a type of cocoa, kind of like Beyonce, yes, like if you took Beyoncè, put her in the car, drove her to the gas station and pumped her up with the air hose.  She greets me with a smile and says the obligatory, “May I help you,” which is exactly what I was hoping for. I tell her that I’d like to visit one of the residents, at which point her friendly countenance turns taciturn as she asks, “Are you family?” 

“Well, kind of, you see he and…”

“ARE you a blood relative?” she asks interrupting me mid-sentence and emphasizing the ARE, as if she’s annoyed and has heard this a million times. 

“No,” I replied sheepishly, “but I think he would be highly pleased to see me and I don’t believe he gets many visitors.”

“What’s his name?” 

“Yuri Slapanovich,” I reply. 

“Yuri!” she exclaims as her face brightens again, you’re a friend of Yuri’s?  How do you know Yuri?”

“Well he and I kind of grew up together back in Delaware, and we also lived on a commune together in upper Washington State.”

“YOU were at The Family of Man commune with Yuri?!” 

“Yep, sounds like he told you about it.”

“He sure did, I love listening to his adventures, and not just during his communal days. I absolutely adore that guy, likeably odd, but not a Choate type of odd. I really don’t know how he keeps getting admitted here, but I think he has an in with one of the staff here. By the way, what is your name?”

I try to keep a straight face as she tells me this since I know full well that it’s Nurse Penny with whom he has an in with, but I obviously say nothing so as not to blow his (and Penny's) cover.  

“My name is Bill, Bill Snyder.”

“YOU”RE Bill Snyder!? Family of Man Bill Snyder?” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe it, I feel like I already know you with all the stories I’ve heard from Yuri!” and just then she gave me a big hug while jumping up and down which was awkward and almost caused be to stumble taking her to the floor with me. While still hugging and rolling she said, “I guess I should have asked earlier. You really ARE like family and actually kind of famous here in the cray-cray house.” 

After releasing the embrace, we both got up, and she continued, “Anyway, I’m sorry for your sake that he’s not here right now. He was actually released from the facility last Thursday but has moved again back into one of the group homes here in town, probably the Cardinal House over on Casey Street. He should be easy enough to find even if he’s not there since everyone knows Yuri in Anna, both inside and outside of Choate. I’m sorry I have to go right now but let me give you my card if you need anything else.”

I thanked her, looked at the card which read Cheryl Anne Coleman, Patient Administration. 

I didn’t think much about the name at that time, and walked out to my car, however before getting in spotted a soda machine over by a pavilion, and purchased a Diet Dr. Pepper. As I sat down to drink my soda I noticed that now there are groups of adults walking from building to building, and I’m wondering if they are visitors or residents, or residents with their visitors. In each group there is at least one person that had a large key ring on their belt, with about ten to twenty keys on the ring. I’m assuming that this is the security guard assigned to each group as they take their supervised walk from one building to the next. As my curiosity grew I decided to get up and take a closer look, attempting to walk past them without making too much eye contact, as if I had some official business in one of the buildings. It was easy to tell the three categories of individuals in each group, guards, residents, and family. The guards held the keys and therefore the power. The residents were pretty easy too since while they had faces like everyone else, their gate was a bit different and their eyes were still, staring into space, kind of like Jack Nicholson after his operation in One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest. The remainder were family visiting their loved ones and they had no identifying features other than normalcy which normally is not an identifying feature unless you’re at Anna, which I am. 

After about 15 minutes of this type of observation I went back to the shade of the pavilion where I had left my Diet Dr. Pepper and sat down to ponder the groups, specifically the residents with the blank stares, and thinking back to my time when I ran a small commune up in Alaska.  In our commune, most of us worked at a group contract job cleaning a major department store in the downtown portion of Fairbanks. Besides running the commune I was also in charge of the janitorial crew that would clean the store each night, shampooing all the carpets, stripping the wax off the linoleum floors, applying new wax, sanitizing the bathrooms, and so on. In my charge were about eight young people, between twenty and forty, but a couple of them had this similar blank stare that I had just witnessed here in Anna. I’m not sure how they got on my crew, but I will tell you this, that people who are mentally deranged should not be locked in a department store every night, six nights a week, for eleven hours at a time. It may seem relatively safe, but department stores take on a life of their once you spend that much time in them especially with that type of solitude. Generally you were working by yourself, since the other workers were cleaning their particular portion of the building, usually not within earshot and usually not visible. Therefore the solitude in combination with the merchandise, the late hours AND the mannequins, especially the mannequins, would drive a sane person crazy but if you’re starting off crazy then the results are unpredictable. It was my job as supervisor to make sure that the carpets were clean, and the floors were waxed, but it was also my job to keep my more unbalanced staff from copulating with the mannequins in the Lingerie section and to persuade others to refrain from masturbating off the loading docks. The sane ones just copulated with each other in the furniture section.  It should be noted that only one such individual had that flat mental stare about them, the others seemed like normal people from twenty yards away. I’ve had difficult jobs before, but that had to be one of the worst, and to this day I avoid all department stores, and I certainly never would buy a couch or love seat from them.

Note: Our communal group had won the janitorial contract because the previous firm was caught stealing women’s panties on a nightly basis and selling them in bulk to a distributor in Mexico. The workers got caught because they appears quite a bit larger than when they had entered the night before, actually wearing multiple layers of lingerie themselves as they walked out the door each morning. 

In any case these folks that were in my employ and members of the commune were really the only truly crazy people that I knew well. They had different reasons for being the way they were, some upbringing, some drug induced, some genetic, but all human at the core. In one case the individual saw his mother and father fatally shoot each other at point blank range when he was five years old. That type of stuff tends to stay with you.

Another thing I found amusing was that in Alaska it seemed like all of the crazies were part of separate social fabric or ecosystem. They mostly all knew each other, but not just each other but the judges, the institutional administration, the nurses, and the psychiatrists, with a great deal of inter-dependency between all of them. I remember overhearing a conversation between two of them as I was doing the dishes in our house on Jenny Street in Fairbanks. Liza the Eskimo was telling Kenneth the Athabascan how she was planning to go back to API (Alaska Psychiatric Hospital) in the winter and was asking Kenneth if his nurse could get her admitted and back in. Kenneth then told her that yes, he loves the volleyball games there, and that HIS nurse gets him back in all the time, whenever he wants. In other words, at least in Alaska, it was a revolving door, but from what I understand about Anna, most are trying to get out, not in. Except Yuri. Thanks to Nurse Penny.