Therapist is the Rapist

eduardo 

 3 drawings; Watercolor, Charcoal, and Graphite on Paper

 

I had created word games when manic for more than six years when I landed on this one. I had been avoiding mental health professionals for most of that time, too. Mass rape was a big priority nearby in the former Yugoslavia while I lived in Berlin "˜89-"˜96. My BP made me psychosexually very weird and paranoid, and obsessed with violence. Hence also the skinhead's baseball bat (1993), a doodle I made in class while boiling over about more mundane levels of racism and bullying around me. People were throwing the word "˜rape' around a lot in those years as a metaphor for all kinds of violations of boundaries. I lumped this in with the general intimidation tactics of the "Fourth Reich." When the policeman picked me up as a vagrant on the street in Westchester County and snapped on the rubber gloves, I asked him point blank and loudly in front of the coffee shop habitués, "Are you going to rape me?" He looked stricken. That's a version of the central desk in the B ward at the hospital; the guy on the payphone is a patient or orderly, take your pick (some people like to wear those green hospital shirts, though they have a choice in the matter). The pay phone is one of the few areas of meaningful social activity in lock-up. You might still have a few coins left to call the real world, or maybe some mental patient will come yelling for you that you've been called. That makes your whole day.