The VA Psycho Check Chicks

As the staff said at Goebel Senior Insane Center, "He fell for it." Not yet, girls.

 

Free Story

When a senior Mental Health Coordinator retired, for about a year I was the state official who was the “overseer” or “monitor” for the 96 hour paperwork and civil commitments at Jefferson Barracks. I will not allege Norma was lazy, but I don’t think they saw much of her. It took months of negotiation to schedule a training presentation for the nursing staff, as was required by state law. 

Once in meeting after meeting over there as if good state & federal bureaucrats, I became suspicious they did not want me on the psychiatric ward for some reason. Finally, I recall sort of muscling-up and saying, “I want my tour” and got it. I have few unique characteristics, but one that comes in handy is, I never forget a face, even when it is only a brief look. Thus it was with a VA nurse by the med cart at Jefferson Barracks. 

Let us now “flash forward” from 2002 to 2011, when I found myself oddly stuck on a California parking lot chatting with CHP officers and the county’s most skilled sociopathic individuals. A Lutheran social service agency was more or less insisting I accept help from a “case manager” who later confided to me that he’d been booted from the United States Marines for plotting a terror event. The “demand” was that I meet with him and a nurse from the VA. My position was, “No double-teaming” on false allegations of mental disorder. 

Jason thus appeared separately in his white Toyota Rav 4, and after a fairly brief meeting agreed to drive me and my “stuff” back to St. Louis. This commitment was quickly broken, or as the lying politicians are saying this election cycle, he “Walked back” from his promise. Separately, the nurse of yours arrived in a Mini Cooper. She conducted what I laughingly termed a “Five minute psych eval” and handed me a McDonald’s #1 Meal out the window of her car. 

Later, “JULIE REYES” and I would chat at the Lutheran agency about working on psychiatric wards. The last I saw of her, she was strolling along a small shopping mall with her hands behind her back as if handcuffed. When I asked the ex-Marine where she went after Thousand Oaks, he said, “Colorado” on the way to the Oxnard bus depot. 

What’s not funny here? Julie’s name is an alias, and adapted from a street name where you exit U.S. 101 if headed to the Hilton Foundation, where a shabby looking me talked to Steve Hilton, who has about two billion dollars on hand, supposedly to do good works. [Reyes Adobe is the street name]. The Hilton receptionist’s name is Gwen, and I don’t think you want her on speakerphone to at least verify part of my story regarding three visits to the foundation. 

Why did Julie and I get along so well? We had met before at Jefferson Barracks VA Hospital. How did she make sure I recognized her? She told the same “big fight on the ward” story in 2012 California as was told to me in St. Louis ten years earlier when I was the Mental Health Coordinator at JB. Her story and her face matched. Any comment from VA officials on this? I’d be happy to go to a federal court and swear to it.

 

 

William Hughes, MSW