among jackals

do no harm

First thought was my god that sorry asshole could be me. Not the victim but the killer. I could be Daniel Penny. I’ve restrained and wrestled and physically fought with dozens or honestly hundreds of psych patients while on the job. I’ve used a chokehold exactly twice. By another more distant metric I could be Jordan Neely. I’ve been manic and borderline psychotic in public. I’ve been blackout drunk doing god knows unknown fuckery for up to 24 hours at a time and more than once. I’ve been arrested three times. I’ve had my head bounced off the hood of a police cruiser for saying asshole things to cops. None of them ever killed me or even tried, near as I can say. I’ve been lucky no doubt. I’ve also been the white guy. In every one of those stories, I’m the white guy. The ultimate metric or damn near. I’m not black or schizophrenic. I’m not a former marine. I’m an alcoholic former English professor. I’m a former asshole. But that subway scene was about more than black and white, victim and killer. That video was our mental healthcare system in a dystopian snow globe. Two victims on a train, the loveless and the damned trapped in a hellish embrace.

A little context. The last time the world economy collapsed I saw my adjunct teaching gig slipping away and went to work the floor on the biggest baddest most straight up crunk adult psych unit in the midsouth. I stayed eleven years. Late summer 2010 until spring 2021. The decade of the great unraveling. I was a milieu supervisor. The job description boiled down to enforcing a consensual notion of reality and protecting the patients from each other. The most difficult and troublesome involuntary patients dropped off by family and friends. Homeless patients picked up by the cops for assessment. Transfer patients from shelters, ERs and county jails all over Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas. The most psychotic, the most volatile and combative. They come in detoxing and dissociative. Twitching and geeked, spitting and bleeding. They are by definition dangerous to themselves and others. And the schizophrenic patients are miles past bizarre and disturbed when off their meds and gone manic. They stand uncomfortably close. They have zero concept of personal space or hygiene. Too loud. Too invasive. Too everything. They stink. They spit. They say and do bizarre inappropriate things. They see shadow people. They interact with a different realm. They respond to internal stimuli while the external tortures and bewilders them. The crazy shit they say and do is not personal. They aren’t violent, generally speaking. When they stabilize on their meds the lost souls inside start to blink like they are seeing the sun for the first time. They rarely attack first. But they move in herky jerk ways that suggest they might. 

Takedowns and grappling restraints. Done by the book these are called therapeutic holds in the corporate psych culture and said with a straight face. Because this is America and we can’t call anything by its goddamn proper name. Even by the book most takedowns are ugly or go sideways more often than not. Nothing really ever goes by the book. In the pre-covid years I intervened a few times in gas stations and liquor stores when a random homeless mental patient had come adrift and was inadvertently terrorizing customers and staff. My face isn’t on the internet because I didn’t touch those guys. Talked them down with words and body language, sometimes a growl or a hushed veiled threat if they were drunk but more often just kindness. Offered to buy them a coke, give them a cigarette. The rule of thumb in the mental health community says don’t put your hands on somebody unless you absolutely have to. Unless you plan to take it as far as it goes. But sometimes you’re in an enclosed space and you might think you have no choice. Daniel Penny was in an enclosed space with an unpredictable psych patient and no real backup coming to help. I know how that feels.

Most restraints can be wrapped with pressure points, with arm and wrist locks. The rear naked choke is a last resort. Or it was for me. It’s a dangerous and delicate business trying to stop someone’s breathing just enough to make their eyelids flutter and their legs twitch. It’s very fucking scary actually. I don’t recommend trying it unless the situation is well past desperate. If it’s the only way to get the patient off your semiconscious coworker. If you’re alone escorting a seemingly calm patient down an isolated hallway and suddenly you’re losing a fight you never saw coming and he’s about to kill you for your badge and keys. Or if you just don’t mind maybe snuffing the guy. However it goes down, you can feel them starting to fade. It doesn’t take long. Less than ninety seconds in my experience. To clarify. Once the airway is completely shut down it takes less than two seconds for the convulsions to start. I have never gone that far but I’ve seen it done up close personal and it’s not as elegant as it looks in the octagon. Those guys are artists. The rest of us are savages. I’ve pulled coworker off patient before too. More than once. But I would say that soon as I had my forearm under the chin it took barely a minute or thereabout to convince them that no they were not going to wriggle loose and yes I was going to keep squeezing harder until I did go there. Time speeds up and slows down in inexplicable ways during a fight. Ninety seconds feels like forever. Anybody who has ever strapped on boxing gloves knows how crazy long three minutes can be. There’s a sort of involuntary shudder through the limbs when the body is fighting for oxygen. The body panics when it can’t breathe. The muscles seize up. And I’ve never seen anyone not try to tap out. Jordan was definitely trying to tap. Daniel either didn’t notice or didn’t care. I can go round and round all day trying to figure out which and all I can come up with is he wanted to help. He was trying to be the good samaritan and fucked up.

I’ve seen every Jordan Neely video I could find. He has a sweet magic smile and when he’s moonwalking on the street he looks harmless. But there are other videos of him menacing strangers in Times Square. He looks exactly like the mad scarecrow patients described above. In the subway clip he looks skinny and filthy. He looks strung out. He doesn’t appear to be fighting back at all. And the fact there’s no video of what happened prior to the chokehold is significant, I think. Or not insignificant. It suggests that whatever Jordan was doing, it wasn’t freaky enough for New Yorkers to reach for their phones. According to witness reports, Daniel snatched him from behind in a preemptive restraint. The move you make when you want to disable or kill someone as quickly and quietly as possible. It’s also a common stealth move in military video games. 

Daniel Penny is a good looking white guy, very sympathetic. Former US marine. He looks like the sort of guy who says yes m’am and no sir and helps strangers with their overhead luggage. I don’t believe he meant to kill Jordan Neely. But I don’t quite understand why he went straight for the chokehold. I don’t know if he saw any action or too much action. The jackals haven’t finished picking through his social media footprint. Maybe he isn’t from New York and didn’t realize that that level of freestyle public crazy is normal. Maybe he’s a sociopath and didn’t give a fuck. Maybe he got bounced from the military for loving his weapon too much. Or maybe he was a freaked out 24 year old kid with the wrong experience for the wrong situation doing his best. Maybe he spent those three years in the marines doing some deeply fucked up things in the desert that left him broken. A military brother from another mother pointed out that the one constant all branches have in common is they have three interconnected concepts drummed into them like hardcore religion. The elements of speed surprise and violence. The most efficient violent action available. Those guys are trained from the jump to go directly to eleven. I saw dozens of vets pass through the psych unit because the VA never has open beds. The guys who had spent any length of time on door-to-door urban warfare type shit, those guys were never not damaged inside. They were permanently twitchy. And there are millions of them among us. We have been rotating them in and out of the middle east and elsewhere for twenty years. Two long bloody decades hunting nukes that were never there. I’d like to give Daniel the benefit of the doubt and assume he is not a psycho. Not an edgelord. Not a punisher. He looks like just another traumatized vet. Like a cog in the wheel of the big machine that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the cogs. They break your heart harder than anyone, vets on a psych unit. They get sent straight to the high acuity screaming schizophrenic unit because they have a pre-packaged violent history according to their job description, whether they saw action or not. Exactly the sort of fuck you irony Joe Heller was howling elegantly about decades ago.

The inner workings of how patients get involuntarily committed is byzantine, hopeless, cruel and broken beyond pale. I’d like to give Daniel Penny a hug but I believe it’s dangerous to call him a hero. Likewise irresponsible and misguided to call him a vigilante madman who did a public lynching. I believe that he believed he was protecting his fellow passengers. Believing in something in this new world might make it your own truth but it doesn’t make it actually true. Likewise there were no shadow people on that train, none that showed up on camera. The objective truth is that Daniel Penny did kill an unarmed homeless guy who wasn’t attacking anyone. Jordan Neely was being a total freak, I have no doubt. He was a potential danger to himself and others. He was most definitely scaring people. But we don’t kill people for that, last I checked. Still there were two victims on that train. If nothing else comes of this maybe the dystopian snowglobe finally shatters. Maybe we come together to properly care for the most precarious and vulnerable among us. Maybe we start giving a shit about our homeless and our veterans. Maybe not. 

*postscript. trying not to be judge and jury from afar. trying to see these guys as two humans in a bad situation. trying also to not make it about me. aside from sharing my intimate experience. funny word that. because fighting is not fun or cool especially on the clock but it is terribly and brutally intimate. I realize too that if we are going to survive as a species we have got to sort out our relationship with violence. because it is not done with us.

peace.