He wore a long green army coat, a black beret, black boots, jeans, and round glasses that made him look like a revolutionary, Che Guevera, maybe, or someone from dark Russia. He had black hair that fell down over his shoulders in a sleek pelt. As he walked, he smoked and, even from a distance, I could see how hard he pulled on his cigarette. The wind flipped the hem of his coat up and open and blew his hair across his face; he lifted his hand and pushed his hair out of his eyes and dashed the cigarette he smoked to the ground. A minute later he jumped up on the bus where the rest of us waited. Someone said, “About fucking time.” Everyone else clapped. He grinned and shrugged and swung into the seat behind the driver and we were off. Later, he’d tell me that he saw me the minute he got on the bus but I don’t remember this.
He was an upper classman. He ran the student radio station and his band played local bars. He was an American Studies major and had written his baccalaureate essay on the Green Lantern. He told me later that there was no critical apparatus to support work on the Green Lantern so he carefully made the whole thing up, from the names of essays and books consulted to phony authors to fake publishing houses. This may have been the first of many times I believed him when a more skeptical response might have been called for.
The college employed a self-promoting Famous Professor of English; allegedly, it was an honor to take a course with this man and you had to go to his office and get him to sign a permission slip before you could register. Rumor had it that before he signed that form, he made you recite passages from books like Moby Dick or obscure stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Once you were in, he had strict rules about attendance and locked the door to the classroom smartly at the beginning of each class. Nothing could induce him to open the door once it was locked and tardy students would be shamed for their tardiness even as they stood outside of the door, begging to be let in. He was clearly a man who believed in public spectacle as a form of discipline.
One day, the Famous Professor arrived late to class and discovered that Zip had locked the door. Zip later described this act as the logical result of a rule that applied to the class in its entirety. He had no patience for those who claimed superiority over others and lampooned pomposity whenever he encountered it. He was contemptuous of most of the faculty. Later, after he dropped out of school and worked for the college treasurer, he told me he enjoyed notifying faculty who had fallen out of political favor that they would be moved from their swank departmental offices to new offices made out of closet space in the basement of the administration building. He said this had happened more often than I might imagine.
No matter what he told me, I believed him.
I knew him as a brilliant, creative man with an impish sense of humor, a man who could speak insightfully on just about any subject that might come up, a man who had the ability to cut quickly to the heart of the matter. He also was one of the gentlest people I have ever met. In college, we were friends, not lovers. I had other boyfriends, a rotating roster of hopefuls, the rugby player, the art historian, the chemistry major, until I finally settled on a boy who dreamed of being a writer, the son of a famous literary agent. Zip and I only saw each other at the radio station and at parties. He later told me he would fake reasons for me to be at the station when he was there, like the time he set up phony election-night coverage of the local races, supposedly reported from the county Democratic headquarters but really broadcast from the student radio station in the basement of Murphy Hall. He’d called me up and asked me to come and be the girl reporter. They had too many guys on the air.
WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN and finished with my first year of college, I took a summer internship at Fountain House in New York City. In those days, in the mid-seventies, hundreds of people who suffered from serious mental illnesses were being dumped into the community as, one by one, the big state hospitals closed. Just like now, there were supposed to be community placements for all of the people who’d previously lived in institutions but for many people, maybe even for most people, there were no such placements and so they wandered the streets without food or medical care or shelter. New Yorkers recoiled at the sight of these homeless, who raised in them the nearly instinctual fear of the mentally ill that is commonly recorded across Western history. That fear, which feels almost biological in our experience of it, stems from our widely held and unconsciously doctrinaire conviction that mental illness is a thing chosen by the afflicted, a moral failing and a deep personal flaw, rather than an illness that emerges in a single organ with symptoms as specific as the symptoms of failure in other organs. For no other illness do we throw its sufferers out in the street and shudder when they come near us, not heart patients or liver transplants or folks with pulmonary disease. But those who suffer from epilepsy have been demonized across the ages as the possessed, locked up in asylums in the nineteenth century for fear that their disease might be contagious. The psychotic appear among us in popular culture as wise fools or mad men on the heath, with some contravening force from God at work in their brains; since the advent of film, they’ve appeared most popularly as the wielders of chain saws and knives and hatchets, as cannibals or demons, strewing the land they pass through with death, dismemberment, the bodies of the innocent. Even now, as they gather by the sides of roads, begging, or sit in piles of smelly clothes on our city streets, we offer nothing but contempt for the choices this person has made. We turn our heads and say to ourselves, I had to get a job; that man needs to get a job, too.
Fountain House offered job coaching and life-skills training and group housing in little apartments scattered around the city to those who suffered from schizophrenia. If you were a client, you could just show up and spend the day at the clubhouse, talking to social workers if you felt like it, keeping to yourself if you didn’t. You had a place to go during the day and once you got there, you could learn or practice job skills, have something like a social life, learn to live in an apartment with others, find ways to care for yourself, or you could simply have a meal and a place to sit when it was pouring rain outside.
As an intern, it was my job to learn the skills that we wanted our clients to learn and then pass my wisdom along. I rode the bus every morning from New Jersey into midtown and passed through the clamorous riot of the Port Authority Bus Station, where I was often accosted by men sporting large plumed fedoras who assumed I needed another line of work, and by desperate people who were running cons and scams—the three-card monte games, the pleas for money just to buy a bus ticket home because unbelievably someone had stolen all of their cash not ten minutes before. From there, I walked a few blocks to Hell’s Kitchen where Fountain House occupied a five-story brownstone.
On the fringes of the acceptable world, its location was representative of the borderland still commonly occupied by the disabled no matter where they live. In the 1970s, Hell’s Kitchen was only marginally a neighborhood where you’d want to spend time. Forty-ninth Street was narrow and lined with overflowing steel trash cans; over on Ninth Avenue, there were a few bodegas with crusty windows and newspapers piled out front; in between, you found brownstones with inscrutable graffiti sprayed on their old stone steps and rusty chains with padlocks strung through their wrought-iron gates. You had to walk many blocks to a D’Agostino’s grocery. On Eighth Avenue, there were a few shabby Laundromats, as well as storefronts for businesses with uncertain purpose, but no barbershops, newsstands, dry cleaners, florists, dime stores, cobblers, or other businesses that suggested that this was a place where life of some sort was lived.
They took my measure fairly quickly at Fountain House. I was trained to chop lettuce and to run a Xerox copy machine; I spent several weeks teaching a client how to feed paper into the machine, pretending that the machine’s many Xeroxing options didn’t have me a little baffled and overwhelmed, too. Mostly I spent my time hanging around with the clients in one of the social activity rooms. They weren’t much older than me: Ricky, who at nineteen knew all the good bars for hearing live music and who acted li
ke this whole thing was a big mistake; he was merely humoring everyone while it was sorted out. He didn’t talk about it much but, given half a chance, he’d tell you that he didn’t belong at Fountain House the way the others did but had landed there as the result of the work of unseen enemies who were scheming to make his life hard; as soon as everyone got that simple fact straight, he was going to go back to Long Island, where he would maybe start a vending-machine service. Susan, who often talked with me about hair and clothes, had a somewhat disconcerting habit of watching smokers tap their cigarettes as they smoked and tapping her own cigarette in return; the taps were a form of communication oblique to everyone else but as translatable to her as Morse code. Billy, who was planning on going back to school and had even begun by taking a single evening class at the New School; he played piano so beautifully you’d tear up when you heard him but he did not survive his leap from a rooftop one morning.
The older folks were more distant; in some cases, they’d been in hospitals their whole adult lives. They looked to others to structure their days, and if no one did, they sat by themselves and talked to no one and looked at nothing. One sat in the same chair under the same window wearing the same shirt and the same expression on his face every day. I read the file of another: long ago, she’d been a troublesome teenager with a tendency to disobey her mother’s rules; her shrink had her lobotomized, which led to permanent psychosis and forty-one years in a state hospital.
I WAS NOT COMPLETELY inept at my job but I wasn’t very good with Fountain House clients, either. I was frightened much of the time, not of the clients but of doing or saying the wrong thing, of someone finding out that I was no good at the very things at which I was assumed to excel. My fear caused me to appear as a tourist among people in possession of a great deal more local knowledge than I, or to lack empathy, or worse. I could see that others around me cared and I told myself that I cared, too, and that the experiences at Fountain House were especially good for someone like me, who longed to write but didn’t have the first idea what in her life mattered enough to write about.
In those days, I didn’t possess anything like clear sight. I was much in debt to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton for the poems I wrote, but what my writing revealed was not my own deepening humanity but my shallow fascination with the mad, among whose members I often secretly thought I myself should be counted. I romanticized madness as a moral condition, just as our Western tradition taught me to, and I relentlessly failed to see the biological components in madness, the symptoms and subtexts that belong to organ malfunction.
If we romanticize madness, it is because we have, from the Enlightenment forward, elevated the brain of the individual to something other than mere biology. We believe that our very rationality gives us special status, perhaps just as pre-Enlightenment scientists knew that when the body’s fluids circulated in unbalanced ways, our black bile would lead us to madness, to despair. When I worked at Fountain House, I had no awareness of any of this. I’d read Virginia Woolf and the Romantics and the Beats, the whole canon of those who called the public’s attention to their distress. But it would be years before I realized that I’d believed in a heroic view of madness, as something that existed simultaneously in excess of reason and also as personal choice.
One day, in the late summertime, when Billy still played piano for us, Sulah—my supervisor—announced that we needed to check on Robert, a boy who used to come to Fountain House every day and liked to work in the kitchen. She also thought I should see the inside of a state psychiatric hospital, and so I rode with the treatment team out of the city to the small part of Pilgrim State that was still open. I’d imagined our destination would be one of the huge Gothic monsters that everyone thinks of when they hear the words insane asylum. I was, in fact, looking forward to seeing one of those places on the inside. But we stopped at a long, low mid-century building with a flat roof and few windows. Inside, the hallway was long and dim with doors to patient rooms opening off of it, each room like a brightly lit cell, each door open.
We found Robert sitting on a mattress with no sheet, wearing a hospital gown, his knees tucked up to his chin. He was tall and dark-haired and so emaciated you could see his blue veins through his milky skin. He didn’t look at us. His face was expressionless, flat and blank as a plate. Sulah talked to him as if he could hear her, telling him about things we were up to at the clubhouse in the city, the wonderful things he was missing out on, that he had to get well and come back to us soon. His expression never flickered nor did he turn his head or smile or cry or even lick his lips. He sat on the bed nearly naked while the unit nurse found a vase for the bouquet of daisies we’d brought and talked to Sulah and said how much better he was doing. “Look at him,” she said. “He’s sitting up today.” I watched him for signs of life, for his chest to rise and fall or for a glimpse of emotion in his eyes. But I saw none of these things. Instead, he stared unblinking at the wall and I stared at him until Sulah said it was time for us to go.
THE NEXT SUMMER, Zip and I both got jobs working for the summer conference program at the college. Late on a July night, after we finished checking the visiting Mormons into the dorms, we went to my apartment and I made scrambled eggs and we sat next to each other on the sofa with only one small lamp burning, sat in the near dark with the drapes moving in a night wind until fewer and fewer cars passed on the street below us, until finally the street was empty and the light at the intersection blinked from yellow to red to green for nothing, as if nothing existed but the widening space in the living room, as if our room had joined the night sky and was everything in the world the universe was. It seemed amazing to me that a room lit by just one low-wattage bulb could suddenly feel so spacious, could feel like it was expanding. And Zip made jokes but every so often I caught a solemn look on his face and then a kind of tenderness for which I was not prepared. We sat like that until the sky grew light and the living room came back up around us in the gray predawn light and I reached over and snapped the light off and we sat awhile longer and smelled the lake on the breeze and pretty soon after that, a car or two began to pass the building and then we knew the sun was up because the light in the room turned from gray to pink and then to that golden early light that feels new every day. We sat close enough that I could smell him and he could smell me; all night, we’d lolled and drunk and didn’t touch one another. He never even brushed my hand, my hair, my face. When the sun was up, he stood and stretched and headed for the door. Our neighbors had begun their early morning drumming; they’d been to India and brought back tablas, which they played as daylight came every day. After Zip left, I lay on the sofa and listened to the drums and to his footsteps on the stairs and then I lifted myself on my elbows and watched him cross the street and turn the corner and disappear.
He had girlfriends: Emily, who loved horses; Marilyn, who must have reminded him of his mother; and Jen, the tall blonde who left him because, she said, Zip and I were in love with each other and anyone could see it. I was always in his orbit, somehow. Later, he told me that he used to watch my apartment from his bedroom window and, when the lights came on at the end of the day, try to imagine what I was doing.
Sometime during his senior year, he stopped going to classes. He quit the radio station and he rarely appeared on campus. He moved to Keuka Street and lived with his college roommate in a third-floor apartment across the street from Cosmo’s Bar. Late one afternoon toward the beginning of winter, I walked down the hill from the college, down through old brown leaves, down past the graying lawns of the big houses that looked out over the lake, down to the place where the sidewalks heaved and broke. I waited at the corner for the light to change and then climbed the cracked brown linoleum stairs to his apartment. I hoped to talk some sense into him. I hoped to get him to change his mind.
Every apartment door had been shellacked the same dark brown as the stairs and the air reeked of fryer oil from the crummy pizza joint below. I could hear music from someone’s apartment and
dishes clattering. When Zip answered the door, I followed him into his living room where an umber sofa covered with yellow flowers and brown leaves and a gray plaid upholstered chair that must have come with the place stood next to a drum kit and a pile of cords. Thin light filtered in through dingy sheers at the window.
He told me that his classes were stupid, that he knew more than the professors, that college was a monumental waste of time and an even bigger waste of money. I asked him how many credits he needed to finish his degree. He couldn’t say. Six, perhaps. Maybe nine. Six probably.
“That’s less than one semester,” I argued. “Worst case, it’s just one semester.”
He shrugged and reached for his cigarettes and tapped the pack against his leg to settle the tobacco and then pulled out a cigarette and let it hang from his lip while, in a practiced move, he slid his Zippo across his thigh, in one quick snap, to open it, and then in another quick snap back, to light it. He raised the flame to his face and didn’t look at me.
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 5