Free Body Parts by Caitlin Rother

away,” Wayne said. “I just need a place to live.”
    “Okay, that won’t be a problem.”
    But when Wayne got back to California, Jimmy said, he didn’t “have a nickel to go to school on.”
     
     
    After three and a half weeks in the Okinawa hospital, Wayne was flown by medical plane to Letterman Army Hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco. He was supposed to go to San Diego but ended up in the Bay Area “due to an apparent lack of inpatient beds” in southern California.
    When he arrived at Letterman on October 21, his medical records had been lost in transit. The admitting doctor’s initial impressions: “No evidence of a psychotic disorder presently. The etiology of this problem is unclear . . . an underlying personality disorder is likely, though uncertain.”
    But before Wayne was discharged, he received a very different diagnosis: “1. Borderline Personality Disorder, severe as manifested by intense and inappropriate anger and lack of control of anger, marked shift in mood from normal to depression, irritability and anxiety. Depression when alone and a chronic feeling of emptiness or boredom. 2. Atypical psychosis manifested by frequent psychotic breaks, unmarked by hallucinations or affixed delusional system, not caused by a mind altering drug. 3. Rule out schizophrenia. Rule out paranoid disorder.”
    The hospital staff arranged to transfer Wayne by ambulance to the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland. Wayne didn’t want to go there because he was worried they would give him a sedative, a likely reference to his dislike for Haldol. He began “expressing feelings of religiosity and was seen playing his guitar on the ward,” one doctor wrote.
    Wayne was admitted briefly to Oak Knoll on October 23, then was transferred to the naval hospital in San Diego on October 25.
    Still without his records, he said during his intake interview that he’d been hospitalized in Okinawa because he “was working fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, without breaks, and so I broke.”
    He also reported that he’d been admitted to the Long Beach naval hospital in 1983 for “homicidal ideations.”
    “I found my wife in bed with another man and I wanted to kill them both,” he said. “I have been separated from her for two years. I’m not bothered by the incident anymore.”
    At the hospital in San Diego, Dr. M. J. Foust Jr. and Dr. R. J. Forde recorded their impressions about Wayne, noting that he was not a “reliable historian” about himself. Forde also wrote that he had “serious doubt” that the head trauma Wayne suffered in 1980 was contributing to his current psychiatric issues.
    “He describes his mother as a very religious person, who later went to India to live and work with Mother Teresa,” Foust wrote. “He left his mother to live with his father because ‘the grass is always greener.’ He lived with his father for one year, after which time his father gave him his own apartment to live in at the age of thirteen. The patient states that he became a ‘juvenile delinquent,’ engaging in car theft, burglary and truancy. He was arrested at least twice and spent some period of time in Juvenile Hall on detention. At the age of fifteen, he bought a car and traveled around the country. He was then taken in by a woman of middle age and lived with her until the age of seventeen when he joined the US Marine Corps . . . , worked in electronics and did poorly and then became a truck driver, which he quickly became bored with. He became interested in NBC, liked it and became ‘the model Marine.’ He quickly progressed in rank to sergeant. He did well until his wife abandoned him for another man in 1982.”
    Foust wrote that Wayne’s aggression and manipulation of fellow patients supported the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder.
    “He appears to have recovered fully from his previously decompensated and psychotic state and further hospitalization does not appear warranted at this time,”