MICHAEL HAYES
by CHARLES MICHAEL FISCHER
In 1992, Derrick and I were chilling in our room at Dorothea Dix Hospital near downtown Raleigh. We were 14 and on our creaky beds, hands behind our heads, staring at the asbestos ceiling. We lived in Williams, the short-term locked adolescent building with a fenced courtyard, crabgrass mixed with dandelions and a basketball goal posted in old cement. Derrick mentioned Michael Hayes. I knew Hayes from the news, hospital lore, and Derricks’s obsessive yapping about him. Hayes, a spree shooter, had lived at Dix since winning his insanity plea in 1989. Back then, we assumed Hayes lived in Spruill, the forensic building surrounded by barbed wire, the windows barred, but by 1992 Hayes lived in McBryde, the general adult building. I learned this thirty-three years later while doing research. I’m 47. Years before, in 2007, I found out he would probably be released in a few years. He was released in 2012 to much protest. I was living and working as a Composition Lecturer at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. His case was covered in the local news. Doctors at Dix were convinced he was stable from the Haldol he was given when committed. Once stable, he was taken off the Haldol. For decades, he was medication free yet still diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. It is odd, if not unheard of, for someone with that diagnosis to live symptom free without medication. Afterall, his illness was so bad it caused him to shoot nine people and kill four in 22-minutes in 1988. He’d stood in front of his parents’ moped shop along Old Salisbury Road near Winston-Salem and aimed at passing cars.
McBryde had a sandstone façade. Six floors and on the other side of campus from Williams. McBryde needed to be pressure washed when I was a patient and still needs to be pressure washed. Sometimes, I don’t know whether to speak about Dix in the past or present tense. All of the buildings still stand and are repurposed as various state government agencies. Dix closed in 2012, the same year Hayes was released. Dix is now a “destination” park—308 acres of green space—but that was decades from the day Derrick valorized Hayes in our room at the end of the hall. Through my research, I also discovered Hayes was not only “stable” in 1992, but labeled a “model patient” yet fathered two children from two different women as a patient. How does that happen?
“Hayes is a legend,” Derrick said.
Derrick and I were two raggedy, bipolar 14-year-olds who’d been committed because we were a threat to ourselves and others. Derrick was an orphan. I had a father and stepmother. I was lucky compared to many of the other kids. We lived across from the payphone mounted to the off-white wall. Our beds had green steel frames with scraped paint and green plastic piss covers and formed a ninety-degree angle against each other. Derrick’s bed faced the door. Mine ran parallel to the door. We both had hard, wire-meshed windows that shielded the glass.
“A legend,” Derrick said.
“Yeah,” I said.
But I didn’t think Hayes was a “legend.”
Why was I locked up in the same hospital as Hayes and some of the men roaming Spruill’s barbed wire yard?
Was I that bad?
I needed help. I had an explosive temper mixed with suicidal ideation, but I’d never harmed anyone beyond a simple school fight. I had a conscience and self-awareness. I’d been bullied in 6th and 7th grade. I’d grown a few inches since then and had filled out some, but I was still more vulnerable than a threat. I was sensitive and other boys could smell it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jerry, a tall kid who was constantly on solitary in one of the “quiet rooms,” drop a quarter in the payphone.
“Oh, God, here we go,” I said.
Jerry always hogged the payphone and wouldn’t shut up sweettalking his “girlfriend” who’d probably dumped him for a guy who wasn’t in a mental institution.
“Baby,” Jerry said. “Please, baby.”
Ms. Simmons, a Black nurse, called Ricky’s name from the nurse’s station. Ricky was Mexican and had a rattail.
“Bloodwork,” she said.
Ricky and Andy lived next door to us. Andy rarely talked and walked with his head down.
“Damn,” Ricky said. “My veins need a break!”
Ms. Simmons sucked her teeth and said he had two seconds to get off his ass.
None of this commotion fazed Derrick. He was still daydreaming about his idol.
“What a legend,” he said.
“Right,” I said.
I didn’t remember Hayes’ exact face from the news, but Derrick did.
“A little chubby,” he said whenever he got the chance. “Brown hair. Bad haircut. Looks like he could coach tee-ball.”
Once, Derrick was sick and rode in the beige Chevy Cargo van with bright yellow state tags to the infirmary in McBryde, which was on the first floor on a special wing. I hadn’t been to the infirmary yet, but I’d heard it was scary since it was for patients of all ages and levels. Mr. Thompson drove Derrick and accompanied him during the visit. Derrick couldn’t wait to pass Spruill on the way there. He wanted to spot Hayes in the barbed wire yard. I was spooked thinking about it. What if some of the men in white t-shirts were child molesters? Derrick returned an hour later. I sat on my bed.
“I think I saw him in the yard,” he said.
“Man,” I said. “You’re crazy.”
“For real. I think I saw him.”
“Okay,” I said. “You saw him.”
“A little chubby. Brown hair. Bad haircut. Looks like he could coach tee-ball.”
I’d seen Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer on CNN. Now they looked like monsters. Dahmer in those oversized wire glasses had that deceptive nerdy look you knew hid demons and an appetite for human flesh. Manson had those crazy eyes and a bad swastika tattoo between his eyes. Hayes, according to Derrick, blended in with other patients.
It was unsettling how “normal” many Dix patients looked. I was petrified of the adult patients. They faded into the background, which made them scarier. They could be released tomorrow and no one outside would notice.
Derrick plopped on his bed and narrated Hayes’ spree, how Hayes shot at the cars because they were “demonically possessed.”
“The cars said, shoot me.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Crazy, huh?”
“Yeah.”
What’s insanity?Where’s the line drawn?What will kids back home think about me? Is Fischer reallyat Dix? Isn’t Michael Hayes at Dix?Is Fischer crazy? The more Derrick talked about Hayes, the more worthless I felt.
“What a legend,” Derrick said.
I stuffed a Pearl Jam cassette in my Walkman and turned over in bed. I couldn’t take Derrick anymore.
A little over a year later, long after I left Williams and lost touch with Derrick, I saw Hayes for the first and only time at a Christmas play in Haywood Gymnasium. I was still a patient. At least I think I saw him. He fit Derrick’s description. By then I was a patient in Ashby, the long-term unlocked adolescent building for the most well-behaved kids. Derrick was probably discharged to a group home or orphanage shortly after I left Williams. Mental hospitals discourage patients from maintaining friendships after discharge. When we left, we were encouraged to “move on.” This was before social media and cell phones; back then, it was easier to never see or hear from other patients again, but after I was discharged home from Ashby, I did see two old Dix peers—Mark in a bank and Julie in Kmart. In both cases, we made eye contact but quickly turned away and pretended we hadn’t seen each other. It took me over a decade to realize I could and should write about my time at Dix. Don’t get me wrong, when I was discharged, I was ecstatic to be “free,” but once I was, I yearned to connect with old friends, staff, and Dix itself—the property and all that majestic greenery that’s now a trendy park in a gentrifying part of the city. I haven’t revisited Dix since I left in May of 1994. I imagine visiting and a security guard stopping me as I walk down the sidewalk connecting Cherry and Ashby. Cherry was the long-term locked adolescent building where I lived for five months before I was transferred to Ashby for the remaining eleven months of my stint.
“What are youdoing here?” the guard says.
“I used to be a patient.”
“Do I look like I care?”
I walked that sidewalk several times a day. Cherry and Ashby kids did everything together, from school, dining, rec, field trips, and trips to local fast-food restaurants, drug stores, grocery stores, record stores, arcades, the zoo, the beach, and community and sporting events. If we behaved and didn’t land on a highly restrictive “level,” we got out. We weren’t warehoused on the wards. When I tell people this, they’re surprised. It doesn’t match their perception of mental hospital life. Ashby kids got out even more.
Haywood Gym had a stage behind one of the basketball goals. The flooring was wooden. The curtain was blue. The basketball court was white with random bits of blue masking tape. Rec staff, accompanied by three-four techs, often took Cherry and Ashby kids to Haywood for dodgeball, basketball, other games, and now this play.
I don’t remember if the play was A Christmas Carol or a Nativity play. I didn’t care. I would be discharged in May. This was just another thing to get through. Five more months. I yawned, then heard commotion from the row behind me.
“That’s him,” a woman’s voice said.
In 2005, I was studying fiction writing in Georgia College & State University’s MFA program but took a summer memoir course that changed my life. I realized I could write about my time Dix. I also had my first full-blown manic episode as an adult that summer. I was twenty-six. I did endless pushups, barely slept, listened to hip-hop on loop, and met women from the internet for booty calls, usually in the middle of the night. And I laughed. I couldn’t stop laughing. I didn’t know why. I didn’t have words for what was happening to me. I laughed and laughed and laughed. Shirtless, I laughed and flexed in my bathroom mirror. I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed during and after my fourth or fifth coffee. I laughed at my shaking hands. For my memoir course, I wrote an essay about Dix, but I didn’t write anything else that summer. I couldn’t focus. But the course planted a seed in me: I had permission to write about my secret and the shame associated with it. For years after that course, I wrote autofiction about Dix, not memoir—close to memoir and inspired by that summer course, but not close enough. In my late 30s I fully committed to memoir when writing about Dix. I’m still proud of the autofiction I wrote—most of it was published—but memoir gives me more range for this topic.
We always took the same vans we took into the community to Haywood and the infirmary. The vans were a mix of blue Aerostars and the beige Chevy Cargos. The Chevy Cargos reminded me of prison vans I’d seen on highway shoulders with inmates in orange vests collecting trash and guards holding guns. Were the vans retired prison vans? Central Prison was across the street from Dix. Sometimes, in Ashby, after lights out, I watched a spotlight from Central circle the sky. The spotlight didn’t circle every night, so when it did, I paid attention to it. For many inmates, the journey to prison starts in places like Dix. How many former Dix kids had ended up at Central? How many had watched the same spotlight circle the sky that predicted their destiny?
When we ventured into the community as patients, I worried we’d be “found out.” Could outsiders put two and two together and figure out we were from Dix? Once, I sat in the back of a Chevy Cargo, on the way to Taco Bell with other Ashby kids and looked out the window and saw a middle-aged white woman—the passenger—say something to the driver, then point at us. I couldn’t see the driver’s face, but the passenger pointed her finger at us. We were a ragtag bunch of different ages and races, including staff, and the vans had bright yellow state tags. We stood out.
We weren’t always safe from gawkers on campus either.
When we went to Haywood, staff parked the vans next to the gym in full view of Spruill. You could throw a rock from Haywood to Spruill. Spruill patients in their rooms or in the barbed wire yard could see us step off the vans and into the gym, though the yard was empty the day of the Christmas play. The walk between the vans and Haywood was often terrifying. I pictured Spruill patients in their rooms “gunning us” and the patients roaming the yard saving us to their “banks” for later that night. “Gunning” is prison slang for masturbating at passersby. Today, Spruill’s old yard is a parking lot. The barbed wire is gone and there’s an art installation on the opposite side of the building. “Get Well Soon” is the installation’s name. Lamar Whidbee, “a licensed mental health counselor,” is the artist:
Get Well Soon features five suspended panels creating a large-scale three-dimensional collage, with the principal subject being Whidbee’s daughter holding a flower. Artificial flora, blossoms and greens entwine the piece, floating off the building and rising 15 feet in the air. (“New Art Installation Overflows from Shuttered Mental Health Facility at Dix Park,” https://www.dixparkconservancy.org/blog/new-art-installation-overflows-from-shuttered-mental-health-facility-at-dix-park)
I’d never seen a play in Haywood. I sat in a folding metal chair with my Ashby and Cherry peers. Rows of chairs reached midcourt with adult patients of all ages and staff from across the hospital. I didn’t want to be there. I was grateful I had an upcoming home pass for Christmas and would enjoy my grandma’s cooking, but until I was discharged in May, I’d have this label—Dix Patient—hanging over my head. Also, home passes, especially for holidays, were a double-edged sword: the temporary freedom was a respite from being a mental patient, but losing that freedom as soon as you were dropped off and signed back in was a gut punch.
And I didn’t want anyone to perform for me. I was tired of getting “inspirational” advice from visitors, either in talks or artistically like this stupid play. The year before, when I was in Cherry, a young white man with blond hair—I forget his affiliation or background—talked to us about transitioning from the hospital to the “outside world.” I was despondent listening to him. What was I going to do with this “advice” when my discharge date was more than a year away? One year in Dix was like three years in the free world. He meant well, but I left his talk more depressed than ever.
Waiting for the play to start, I squirmed in my seat and thought about my grandma’s Christmas dinner: Virginia ham, moist turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, and pecan pie with ice cream. I closed my eyes while everyone around me talked. I asked God to transport me to my grandma’s house, but God reminded me I would have a better Christmas than many of my peers.
“You’re right. You’re right,” I said under my breath.
I don’t remember who performed the play, but it would make sense if Broughton High School’s renowned Theater Arts Department did. Broughton was full of rich kids who all ended up at top colleges and universities. The previous summer, I qualified for Raleigh’s Summer Employment Youth Program. My parents made enough money for me not to qualify, but I was a state mental patient so all that went out the wire mesh window I looked through every night. Other Ashby kids had jobs too. Most worked at restaurants like Shoney’s or stores like Circuit City. I was a janitor’s assistant at Broughton and trailed whatever janitor needed me that day. Even though it was summer, I would see or hear students in the hall on their way to visit a teacher or coach. I would hang my head or dip around the corner or into a classroom I’d just wiped down. I was humiliated to be a 14-year-old janitor at a high school when I was also entering 9th grade. I smelled like stripper and wax the entire summer. My acne was out-of-control. My work jeans were shit. My sneakers were waterlogged and my soles were worn. After work, I’d sit outside the school on a stone wall by the entrance, waiting for my ride, either an Aerostar or Cargo with those embarrassing state tags that made me immediately suspicious. The drivers would be different techs or nurses every day. The janitors knew too. They never said anything, but I’m sure they knew I was a Dix patient. They were distant and one time I overheard them joking about my acne. Apparently I masturbated too much and that caused my acne. Every day, I sat on that stone wall listening to Led Zeppelin or Naughty by Nature on my Walkman, waiting for my ride “home,” head down, praying none of those cut-out-of-a-magazine Broughton girls saw me and figured out I was a filthy Dix patient who’d cleaned their bathrooms every day.
*
In Haywood, the curtain was still closed. Most of the seats were filled. I looked for the Williams kids, but I wouldn’t recognize any of them anyway. To my left, I saw a man standing against the wall with a tech on each side of him.
“That’s him,” the woman’s voice from behind me said. “Michael Hayes.”
Our row got quiet. The legendary Michael Hayes. Like Derrick had said, “a little chubby…brown hair. Bad haircut. Looks like he could coach tee-ball.”
He could pass for Derrick’s description, but Derrick’s description was generic and could describe many middle-aged male patients.
He wore light-wash jeans and a crisp, white button-down. His hair was parted. Could this be the guy who picked off strangers driving home from an overtime shift? Strangers who thought about the leftovers that awaited them? Strangers who thought about their weekend plans? Strangers who thought about reading a bedtime story to their kids? Strangers whose cars and trucks veered off the road when the bullets hit? Strangers who were murdered by a man who wouldn’t do any prison time—a man about to watch a Christmas play in a mental hospital when everyone thought he should be serving life in Central Prison?
What if the woman behind me was wrong?
And wasn’t he in Spruill? Shouldn’t he be shackled up?
I believed the woman and assumed he was a Spruill patient with special permission to attend the play because of good behavior. I wanted to believe her for Derrick, for all of those conversations we had about him in Williams that helped pass the time.
Were other Spruill patients there, sprinkled throughout the crowd with Spruill staff? Maybe I had the whole Spruill thing wrong—maybe there were Spruill patients who could attend events like this if they were well-behaved.
I felt dizzy.
Thirty-three years later and it makes sense, it could’ve been him because he was actually a McBryde patient. He was never a Spruill patient when I was there.
Hayes, or the man who could’ve been Hayes, chatted with one of the techs beside him and caught me staring, but didn’t seem to care. I wished I had Derrick’s number. I’d call him on the Ashby payphone. Dude, you’re not gonna believe this. I saw him at a Christmas play in Haywood.At least I think I saw him. A woman behind me said it was him.
I watched the play, but don’t remember any of it, or if the Broughton kids performed it.
He’s a legend, Derrick would reply in my imaginary phone call.
Afterword, I would hang up and stare at the drab cinderblock wall.
And I would think, what will I tell kids back home when I’m discharged? I was a patient like Hayes. I couldn’t deny it without lying.
But why should I have to lie? I was at Dix to get help.
I looked at Hayes again, or the man who could’ve been Hayes, and this time we held eye contact for the longest three seconds of my life.
author pic here
Charles Michael Fischer ’s nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review, and The Citron Review. His fiction has appeared widely. He is currently completing a memoir-in-essays about his adolescent commitment to Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, NC, in the early 90s.
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