I have an uncle in an insane asylum. I live in his apartment and pay very little rent, on the condition that I visit him once a month.

          Things are always both more interesting and more mundane than they first appear. When I declare "I have a crazy uncle," most times people respond with, "Don't we all?" They tell me about their uncles who do cigarette tricks, their uncles who perform zany jigs at weddings and bar mitzvahs. They have uncles who are terribly nebbishy. Not many people have uncles who have been deemed a danger to themselves and to the society at large.

          I have learned to give lots of information upfront, to paint with an enormous brush. For example, "I have an uncle in an insane asylum," is a bit more compelling. Almost comical. Or tragic. Interest is peaked. I have said this sentence many times. Sometimes, people laugh because of the bizarre weight of it. They ask me why he is in an insane asylum, and I say it's because he sets fires, because when he doesn't take his medication, he thinks he is black and that he fought in the Vietnam War (he truly believe these things). But the more people ask, the more telling the story feels like pulling up couch cushions and examining what is underneath. Pennies. Broken potato chips. Old receipt tape. There are hints of a life. And like life, the story becomes both more interesting and more mundane. The details unravel, tangled and abstruse. Because of the time that has passed. Because information has been passed on from one individual to another. Because the originator of the information is often my uncle, whose mind spins like an unbalanced centrifuge at the edge of a table. The more of the story I tell, the more vague and helixed it becomes. The act of story-telling is a complex procedure.

          I have an uncle in an insane asylum. Uncle Ira was studying for a master's degree in psychology when he began cracking up. My father says he must have been looking for answers, but didn't find them fast enough. He was experiencing what are now understood as typical symptoms of schizophrenia: He was delusional, hallucinating, paranoid. This was in the late 1960s, and the symptoms were made worse by the use of street drugs and alcohol. My uncle, by his own accounts, popped uppers and downers, smoked large amounts of hash, and ingested all manner of hallucinogens. 

          Of course, I did not know him them. I wasn't born until 1976. By that time, he had been institutionalized on numerous occasions. He even had a few visits to Rikers Island under his belt. His mind was addled by illness and also by medication. Sometimes the prescriptions' side effects were worse than the schizophrenic episodes. My earliest memories of my uncle are of him rocking back and forth and singing, "D-E-B . . . B-I-E . . . DEBBIE IS THE GIRL FOR ME," over and over. This was his adaptation of the doo-wop favorite "Dottie" formulated for me, his first niece. I remember him wild-eyed. I remember fearing that if I touched him, I might catch what he had.

          When I turned four, my family moved from New York City to suburban South Florida, and I rarely saw my uncle anymore. When we would come back to visit, he was often institutionalized. There was no shame or stigma attached to this, though. Mental illness runs on both sides of my family, and my parents would talk about their siblings as if they were making jokes. We would laugh at the stories of the terrible, bizarre things our uncle did—tying our grandfather up with a phone cord and threatening him with a butcher knife, punching out a cop and jumping in the back seat of a police vehicle, soliciting money for an engagement ring for a girlfriend who later turned out to be both a prostitute and a man. All three children giggled until our little sides ached. But when we would tell these same stories to our classmates, we would get a different response. 

          Of course, I didn't need a crazy uncle to be thought of as strange myself. I was doing perfectly well on my own. As early as kindergarten, I was biting my fingernails down to bloody crescents, knotting up my hair, then yanking it out of my head, and—my mother's favorite—wearing an old, unwashed sweater to school everyday. We were in South Florida. Highs were regularly in the mid-to-high 90s. And there I was, antisocial and sweating in the red sweater I would not allow my mother to launder, for fear it would lose its protective essence. 

          I was not picked on by my peers so much as ignored. I knew I was different, but I was sure it was because my classmates were the odd ones. They ran around screaming and pushing each other. They made up games which had rules I could not begin to grasp, rules that changed by the minute and followed no particular line of logic. The harder I tried to fit in, to dress like them, to talk like them, to like the same things they liked, the more alien I felt. 

          Once, one of the kids in my class inquired about the disappearance of some playground equipment. I made a joke, something that now seems inane, about it being carried off by an invisible man. Three of my classmates giggled. It was the first time they had ever paid attention to me. I continued. The joke got more complicated. There was an invisible dog, too. And an invisible chair. An invisible fart. Now five classmates laughed. They stayed, enjoying my company. Eventually, my preschool sense of humor grew tiresome and too convoluted; the joke died a natural death. The kids walked away as if nothing had happened. But my life had been forever altered. I saw the secret: If I could tell stories and make people laugh, then people would want to be around me. It was innocent bribery, giving people candy to stand near you. I was prepared to give out as many cheap laughs as I could muster. Only I could almost never guess what my peers would find funny. My jokes about Uncle Ira and the she-male prostitute only made me look like more of a freak. 

          In the second grade, I wrote a play called The Greedy Witch. I have almost no recollection of the plot, except that it involved a greedy witch, a princess, and a lollipop ring. I wrote the play thinking I would play the part of the princess. But my mother said it was too hard for one to write, direct, and star in one's first play. So I cast as the princess the girl I most wanted to be my friend. The play was performed in the classroom after lunch. My mother came and took pictures. Andrea—the princess—was nice to me all afternoon. She ate the lollipop ring. Everyone clapped and smiled at the end of the play, and I walked to the middle of the room and made a grand, sweeping curtsy. I hoped that the small bubble of fame my play created would change my life. Even a little. But the day after the princess ate the lollipop ring, things went back to normal. 

          I was a terrible speller and math made me cry. No matter how hard I tried, I could never get my clothing to match right. In sports, I was weak, slow, poorly coordinated. I dreamed of one day being discovered as a secret genius. But this seemed less and less likely. I was hopelessly mediocre. 

          Except in writing. Book reports were easy As (despite numerous misspellings). Occasionally, my teachers would hold up my work as an example for the entire class. Maybe I wouldn't have cared much if I didn't want to be special so badly. But I did. Writing seemed like the only avenue left to break out of my mediocrity. To the ultimate acceptance: fame. So I worked at it obsessively.

          My writing was never dazzling, but if there was an award to win, I usually got first or second place. It seemed the path I had to take was ever more linear, clearer, more succinct. It wasn't until graduate school that I hit a wall. I started sending out my stories, but all I got back were rejection letters. No first place. No second place. No nothing. 

          The professor I respected most in graduate school told us we should wear our rejection letters like purple hearts. He said even after he had published his first book, his ratio of rejections to acceptances was thirty to one. He told us that to this day he had saved every last one of his rejection letters. Maybe the speech was meant to console us. But to me it sounded like a challenge. The rejection letters, the broken heart, the damaged ego—these were the calling cards of the real writer. Leaving class, all I could think of was: I need a stack of rejection letters that large.

          I began sending out my stories, first to the big publications: The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares. The rejection letters looked different than I had imagined. They were smaller, with few words on them. Some were signed by people, but most seemed completely devoid of any human origin. The broken heart, the damaged ego. I began submitting to smaller publications, to ones I'd never heard of before, to ones with silly names: The Cream City Review, Manoa, Cimarron, Agni. I was pulling the names directly out of a Writer's Market I had bought for $25 at the bookstore.

          I was sending out what I felt to be a wide range of stories, but I realize now the themes were all the same: mental illness, social ostracism, a family life like a room full of funhouse mirrors. Schizophrenia not only tainted my gene pool, it was the dark, coarse thread that had been sewn deep into the fabric of my most unconscious self. Without thinking, I gave all my characters crazy uncles, crazy grandmothers, crazy fathers. And, like me, they were troubled a bit, but mostly still laughing, trying to keep it at arms length. My collection of rejection letters blossomed. 

          I have an uncle in an insane asylum. He was committed to a facility for the criminally insane on Ward's Island after he started a fire. The purpose of the fire was to destroy his own personal effects. But it was started in the open drawer of a wooden dresser. The dresser was in a room in a flophouse in the West Thirties in Manhattan. He was in a flophouse because he had recently "escaped" from the mental hospital. He had left on foot from the short-term facility on Ward's Island, cashed out his savings account, and taken up residence in a flophouse. He started the fire because he was despondent after losing the money. Sometimes when he tells the story, the owner of the flophouse steals it. Sometimes, three prostitutes surround him and one grabs his crotch while the other two jack his wallet and take off.

          The reason he had "escaped" from Ward's Island was because he had been granted "ground privileges" with the understanding that he collect soda cans in the yard outside the institution. On the first day of his ground privileges, he collected a whole bag of cans. On the second, only half a bag. And on the third, he had an "episode" and wandered around for two hours, only to realize he had one single can in the bag. He knew he couldn't go back to the institution, because when his social worker saw the solitary can, she would revoke his ground privileges. So he just kept walking, out of the complex and over the footbridge that connects the small island to Manhattan. He went to the bank and cleaned out three thousand dollars from the savings account my grandmother had opened for him. Then he planned to lay low at the flophouse in the West Thirties until he could negotiate a deal with the cops. But all his money got stolen. My uncle claims he didn't eat for several days. He had been off his medication for a week and was having more episodes. He thought he was dying. First, he would get rid of all evidence of his escape from the hospital. And the best way to do that would be to burn the evidence. In a dresser drawer. The sprinkler system in the flophouse came on, the fire department arrived, and my uncle was taken away again. 

          This was not his first fire. Nor was it his first felony offence. He was sentenced to an indefinite stay at the city's facility for the criminally insane. Recently, he was transitioned to the long-term-care civil unit next door, which is next door to the short-term civil unit from which he had escaped more than a decade earlier.

          And so the story unravels. The ball of yarn. The onion's many layers. The farther in you go, the more pungent it becomes, that rheumy inner heart of the story. Storytelling is a powerful tool. It can make people like you. It can make them want to stand near you, to be in your presence, your physical presence or your papery presence. Your words on a page, like pieces of your brain splattered like a Rorschach test. It doesn't matter if it's true. It just has to be compelling.

          After graduate school, my goal was to move back to New York City, the land of writers. I dreamed of wearing black turtlenecks and drinking scotch while chatting with brilliant, artsy people. We were living outside Washington, DC, and Brian, my then-boyfriend-now-husband, was becoming disenchanted with journalism. He took the LSAT and applied to law schools in DC and New York. When he got the acceptance letter from Fordham, we began packing.

          But New York City is expensive. Brian was a student, and I was perpetually unemployed. My rudimentary knowledge of PowerPoint was considerably more impressive than my master's degree in Fiction Writing, which couldn't have impressed temp agencies less if it were actually in Making-Up-Lies. We spent our first year in a blue-collar neighborhood in Queens. When it came time to renew our lease, it was noted that the apartment my grandmother had bought for my uncle was presently unoccupied, as my uncle was too busy being crazy and locked-up to live in it. 

          For $400 a month (plus $200 to keep most of our personal belongings in storage) we could live in a doorman building on the upper east side of Manhattan. All we had to do was visit my uncle regularly in the mental institution and live amongst his things, including his furniture, books, hair oils, and a large collection of black pornography. We were paying $1,100 a month to live in a dilapidated building in Queens, where our landlord would frequently barge in unannounced and threaten to sue us. There really wasn't much of a contest.

          I have an uncle in an insane asylum. Let me tell you more about Manhattan Psychiatric Center. My husband and I have come to know this place in the way that relatives of cancer patients know chemo wards. It consists of three related mental institutions: one for long-term commitments, one for short-term commitments, and one for the criminally insane. My uncle has lived in all three buildings at one time or another. The insides are as charming as a hospital, though less antiseptic. The halls hold that greasy smell of heavy institutional food. Here, one knows the patients not by their gowns, but by the wild, vacant look in their eyes, by the unmodulated timbre of their voices, by the fact that they sometimes have food in their hair.

          The island on which this complex is located is a bit of an anomaly. It sits halfway between Manhattan and Queens, halfway across the Triborough Bridge. It is one of two islands that had been conjoined by Robert Moses in the 1930s. Aside from the Manhattan Psychiatric complex, Ward's Island also houses a shelter for homeless men and a home for delinquent juveniles. It is a place of old buildings with boarded up windows, broken sidewalks, razor wire looped over cyclone fences, trash in the road. The island's conjoined twin is Randall's Island, which is home to a small stadium used for sporting events and rock concerts, the New York Fire Department's Fire Academy, and a number of recreational facilities, including soccer fields, tennis courts, and a two-story driving range. 

          It is an unpleasant journey to the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. My husband and I take the subway to 125^th Street in Spanish Harlem, then we wait for the M35 bus to take us across the bridge. I'm not sure how most people get to the soccer fields or driving range on Randall's Island, because the people that fill the M35 are clearly Ward's Island–bound. Legless old vets, young toughs in grimy do-rags, fat men with lazy eyes talking about how Jesus was crucified not on a cross but "on a stick." And Brian and me. The human odors on the bus are stifling, gnawed chicken bones roll freely under the seats. When my uncle was still in the criminal facility, we had to walk almost a mile from where the bus dropped us off. Then our bags and our persons were inspected. We were not allowed cell phones, metal or glass objects, or hot fluids in the visiting room. Now my uncle has been moved one building closer to the civil long-term care unit. The walk is shorter and the security is less stringent. But the visits are similar. For two hours, we watch as my uncle painstakingly chews his lunch with ill-fitting dentures, pausing frequently to yell about the staff or the doctors or the medication or other patients. Sometimes, he yells that I have not done something correctly, that I got the lunch order wrong or that I haven't called him enough. Sometimes he recites prayers he's made up or sings doo-wop songs or discusses his recent bowel movements.

          My uncle is one of the wild-eyed, he is one of those without proper voice modulation. He speaks always as if you were in an open field or on a busy subway platform. Luckily, my uncle keeps his food out of his hair. 

          I like it when my uncle talks about his wilder days. He tells us that his drink of choice was a Cuba Libre, which is Bacardi 151, Coca Cola, and a twist of lime. He says the secret is in the twist of lime, because it prevents you from ever really getting drunk. His biggest regret is all those drugs. They clouded his vision. Sure, he says, they were fun, but they kept him from seeing the true reality. 

          My uncle's first offense was stealing a taxicab. Since then, he has been picked up for directing traffic in the middle of rush hour and for throwing rocks through windows. He is, for the most part, nonviolent. Though arson is nothing to sneeze at. 

          The visits are not pleasant. I still dread them. But my uncle has mellowed a great deal over the past three years. He is now 61 and wears enormous owl glasses to read the mail we bring him. He seems less angry and agitated, more exhausted. He tells us about the difficult conditions in the hospital. Once, he said, he was moving his bowels and a fellow patient flung open the door and vomited inside his stall. Sometimes at meals, other patients will steal his food right off his plate. My uncle shakes and drools because of the medication, and he often has a thin stream of snot hanging from his nose. When I point this out, he just shrugs his shoulders and says, "I know, I know." Recently he began wearing a yarmulke during our visit. It is old and filthy, and I tell him that I'd like to get him a new one, but he insists on using the dirty one.

          My uncle calls me several times a week. He calls during the day when the social worker allows him to use her office phone instead of the pay phone in the hall. He gets hurt and annoyed that I never answer. When I say it's because I work during the day, he says this is the only time he can phone for free, and that I have to try harder to be home for his calls. Sometimes he yells at me for twenty minutes straight. It is a great challenge to follow the thread of the conversation. If I call him back after he has received medication, his voice is slurred and slow. They give him heavy-duty sedatives with his anti-psychotic cocktail. "They're no good," he tells me. He is speaking underwater. "These pills are no good. The doctors are no good. My roommate Howie, I gave him a candy bar and he chewed it up real fast then spit it on the floor. He's no good either." Every now and then Uncle Ira tells me a cute little story from his past, like the one about the time he went up to the roof of his building and smoked a pound of hash and set off fireworks until he was arrested. 

          In the old days, before his incarceration, my uncle would leave the metal institution and immediately stop taking his medication. The transition from shleppy white Jewish man with a 4-F deferment to black Vietnam War vet didn't take long. 

          When I got my MFA, Brian bought me a domain name and a web host as a graduation present. I knew immediately that a portion of my site would be dedicated to posting my collection of rejection letters, which was by this time quite substantial. Partly as a joke—to keep the actuality of the rejection at arm's length. And partly to spit back in the eye of the journals who had refused to publish me. If I couldn't get famous for my writing, maybe I could get famous for my rejections.

          Once I tried to tell my uncle about my website. He just looked at me blankly. He has been locked up for almost a decade, and completely missed the Internet boom. I asked him if he knew what a computer was, and he just shrugged. He doesn't even know how to work the microwave in the visiting room. I said, "A computer is like a TV set that is attached to a typewriter. You can look at pictures on the TV. And type things into the typewriter to send messages to other people. Instantaneously."

          "Now how could that be possible?" my uncle said. "How could that possibly work?"

          "I'm actually not sure. I think it has to do with ones and zeros."

          I thought he was going to tell me I was full of crap, like he often does, but instead, my uncle looked around the room suspiciously. "There are computers everywhere," he said. "They use them to monitor us at all times."

          I had been submitting my work for almost five years, and my most personalized rejection letters only had the name of the story submitted hand-written in the corner. I was in crisis mode. I wasn't famous. I wasn't published. I wasn't even writing anymore. I was as much a writer as Uncle Ira was a black Vietnam vet. I said to Brian, "I'm fooling myself. I'm not special. I am never going to get published. I have to grow up." 

          Brian said, "You can't give up now. You'll regret it."

          Brian, because his heart is good, and not bloated and green with envy like mine, secretly sent away a piece I had written in graduate school to a number of literary contests. When he told me what he had done, I yelled that he had wasted our money on postage and entrance fees. Neither of us mentioned it again.

          Two months later, I got a call on my cell phone saying my story had been chosen as the first place winner of the Arts and Letters literary contest. At first, I thought it was a prank. An evil prank call that played on my wildest hopes. But the more I talked to the person on the other line, the more apparent it was that my story had really won, the story Brian had submitted. My story would be published in the fall, I would get a fat check, and I would even be flown in for an awards ceremony. 

          The news was almost unbelievable. And perfect. When I first told Uncle Ira, he showed almost no interest at all. Anything that did not involve him directly was of no concern to him, whereas last week's bowel movement was a subject matter that could be relished and relayed for a good half hour. I later heard from my grandmother that my uncle wanted to read the winning story. At one of our visits, I presented him with a copy. He handed it back unceremoniously two weeks later. 

          I used to send him copies of stories I was writing in college and early graduate school, but he marked them up in black Sharpie, diagnosing me as a "SPOILED BRAT YUPPIE WHO IS PSYCHONEUROTIC + PARANOID" or his personal favorite: "RAMBLINGS OF A SELF-HATING JEW!!!" Sometimes he would send them back to me, and sometimes to my brother. So I stopped sending him my work. My prize-winning story was the first he had seen of my writing in four years. He hadn't said anything, nor had he marked up the story in black sharpie, so I didn't know what to think. Several months later, I asked him what he thought of the story. It occurred to me that he might not even remember having read it. 

          "I didn't like the ending," my uncle said. "You left everything hanging. I don't appreciate that."

          "But what did you think of the writing?" I said. I was preparing myself for a new diagnosis.

          He exhaled loudly and said, "It was pretty good."

          "Pretty good?" I was shocked. "Really?"

          "Yeah. It was very creative. I don't know why you write about the supernatural. It's not science fiction. And it's not fantasy. It is SUPERNATURAL."

          "I like to think of it more as magical realism.'"

          "What?"

          "Nothing." This promised to be a dead end. "But you liked the writing?"

          "Sure," he said. "They don't give away prizes for nothing. HEH, HEH."

          This might have been the first approving thing my uncle had ever said to me. And it was about my writing. I felt like crying. I had even managed to win over my crazy uncle. I was embarrassed and annoyed with myself; his approval meant much more to me than I had ever dreamed it would.

          "Thank you," I said.

          He chucked his eerie chuckle again and said, "Of course you can write good," he said. "You're my niece."