Don't Sleep With a Bubba

by Susan Reinhardt

  “If someone had just put me to bed for a few days none of this would be happening.” Or maybe I’m in denial.

  More writing in the charts. “I don’t know,” a dour-faced doctor said. “I believe, from all the questions we’ve asked and you’ve answered, you are suffering from Bipolar Disorder.”

  I wanted to die right then. I knew bipolar people, and while creative and interesting, some led tormented lives of hell and tampered with or refused to take their meds and would end up right back where they started. I knew they ran for governor when manic and bought yachts, and then when depressed, they wanted to die and couldn’t get out of bed for days. They went on spending sprees and flew to Vegas. They were out of control with the highs and immobilized and suicidal with the lows. I never spent more than half a day or so in bed or over $200 at a time on some good deals on eBay or the department stores.

  I was not that. I was a lot of things. But not that. Not bipolar.

  No point in arguing. The meds in the baby chef’s hat erased any combative energy a fighter could possess. “Whatever you say. You’re the professionals. Bipolar it is.” The doc in charge took a deep and satisfying breath, after having been designated by a loony as correct in his diagnosis.

  “It’s more common than you think, and lots of very intelligent people have it, this Bipolar Disorder, that is. It’s hereditary at times, and not your fault, and the good news is we have so many new and wonderful medicines to treat it.”

  I thought about my bipolar friends, wonderful people, but who had fits with some of their meds.

  “That’s great,” I said, hoping to get to North Tower soon so I could call my mother and tell her and daddy not to worry—that I was bipolar and had six pills a day that would cure me and all would be back to normal.

  “There are many degrees of bipolar and we’ll go over them later. We’re moving you to North and you’ll be assigned a caseworker and she’ll get you started on a new way of living.” The doctor smiled but it was fake. I know fake from real. I smiled back. Mine was real.

  I made it to North by lunchtime where all the tamer victims of mental illness and excess glared and wondered what we all want to know: “What’s she in for? What has she done?”

  My wrists were bandaged, obviously cut, and my arms covered in the sleeves. I wore my long dark hair piled without thought or combing in a big brown clip and sprigs sprouted everywhere. My face was bare with the exception of lipstick and eyeglasses. Beauty Tip Number One for those who’ve wrecked their lives with too much booze and not enough sleep: Wear eyeglasses. They hide almost everything.

  Everyone’s food once again looked exceptional and I’d never been so hungry. Most of the patients, just like in South, didn’t want to eat. Those like me who did, ate everyone else’s meals. It all boiled down to which pills were in the miniature chef’s hat.

  A man with a semibald head and a ponytail with what was left, eyed me from across the table. He had scabs all over his face and a nasty sunburn. I was certain he was gay and in for the depression associated with either HIV or full-blown AIDS. Wasn’t that how those sores crop up? Those scabby things from the final stages of AIDS?

  He wouldn’t stop looking at me and so I gave him a smirky, “look-at-us-fools-in-here” kind of smile and went about eating everyone’s food, including his. I put up my tray and tried to be funny, though not 24 hours had passed since my admission.

  “Anyone with any CONDOM…ENTS, hand them over.”

  The others laughed at my reference to condoms. They offered up little tubs of butter and pots of cream and packets of sugar. A sweet woman named Phyllis who heard voices saying they would kill her helped me put away all the condiments. We liked cleaning the long table, and I would catch the man with AIDS watching with a certain amusement.

  After that first lunch, I tried to go to my room and lie down because this section of the ward had blinds. Maybe I dosed, maybe not. A ball-busting and intelligent woman bounded in and announced she’d be my caseworker and had an armload of material on my new disorder—BiPolar II—which, she said, was more manageable and less serious than the classic BiPolar I, formerly known as manic-depressive illness.

  “I have it, too,” she said and I wanted to hug her because she was so honest. “If you take your meds, you’ll lead a normal life. If you don’t, you’ll end up here…or much worse.”

  I nodded and reached for the papers.

  “Read the material and I’ll come back. By the way, I love your column.”

  Damn. Why couldn’t I get away from this? I pictured word getting out to my editors that I was a bona fide nut job in a mental institution and then receiving my pink slip, only it would be a thick folder of legal papers so I couldn’t sue them for ditching a crazy woman. No way in hell they’d keep a depressed, bipolar on staff. Would they? Or would it be a sign of catering to those who are different: the underdogs, the minorities, women, Asians, Hispanics, African, Native or just plain old insane Americans? After all, Corporate America DOES have its perks, supporting diversity being one of them.

  This was a small town and word would get out, so instead of lying and pretending I wasn’t Susan the columnist but looked an awful lot like her, which I’d done a few times before, I admitted it all.

  I asked the caseworker a trick question. “Can you drink with all these medicines?”

  She thought for a moment. “An occasional glass of wine would be fine.”

  This was music to my ears, the sweet melody for an alcohol, wine-craving soul. Whatever she said I had, I’d agree. Bipolar? Why not, if I could drink and no one was even considering what I thought was my real diagnosis: Alcoholism brought on by depression.

  Manic? I get happy sometimes and hyper but a true manic person goes and does completely irrational things, or so I thought, and I’d kept the same job for twenty years and the same husband for eighteen, so something had to be working. Right?

  Maybe not. Variances, she said, are common and there are many degrees of Bipolar Disorder. Some were on broil and others, Bake at 350. Maybe mine was a slow-cooking form of brain sickness that would take over like Georgia kudzu if I didn’t down these six pills that made me feel like shit and eat like a sumo wrestler.

  She asked me to sign a copy of my newly released book, which I thought was nice and rather odd, but later that day, word got around that I’d written a collection of funny stories, and by nightfall, lots of people had copies and I had one of my most successful book signings ever—in the rec room of the Mental Ward.

  Life is strange that way. You just can’t predict things.

  The day was surreal, for lack of a better word, and I felt as if I was watching some movie set in a modern-day institution. I was Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted. Only not as thin or beautiful. That afternoon we had group therapy and were taught things like coping skills other than drinking, cutting or, in one man’s case, walking out in front of traffic and hoping to become roadkill.

  We learned to diagram our lives as we would a sentence and get to the root of things without toppling the trees. We could deal with life’s stresses if we took our meds and deep breaths and kept all doctor appointments, or so they said.

  “The med sled comes three times a day,” said the man with the AIDS-looking sores. I immediately liked him, mainly because he had a calm sense of humor and a balance that threw me off guard. Why in the world was someone like him here?

  I learned later he was an attorney and not gay and didn’t have HIV sores. His wife of more than twenty years had bolted, and when he returned from a trip to help the poor Hisp
anics in Central America, scuffing his face while building Habitat Homes, she had packed up and moved in with another man. As a result he decided to walk out in front of an 18-wheeler until a friend heard the news and dragged him to Brookstone.

  We took our meds and sat in a room where a social worker with a sweet voice one would use for kindergartners handed out wooden objects, plastic wind catchers and beads to carve, paint and string. This was art therapy. Later, we wrote out lists of affirmations and shared them with the group.

  I am good. I am worthy of life. I am loveable. I am kind. I am generous.

  I kept making wooden boxes and earrings for family members, as if they would love having reminders and mementos of my time in the Hopper.

  In the mornings, a frightening woman would arrive with misery etched on her face and ask us to gather in the rec room where she turned off the TV and put on a CD from the Big Chill and started a slow-motion series of geriatric exercises to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

  The man without AIDS and who was not gay began to clog when she wasn’t looking and I couldn’t stop laughing and had to leave the room. I’m certain they wrote in the chart that I had a manic episode because that afternoon, my chef’s hat had seven pills in it instead of six and the caseworker was far more inquisitive as to my moods.

  Can I help it that I laugh? Can I help it that humor heals? Or that the man clogging while the nurse was trying to dance cracked me up?

  I stayed nine days and gained 12 pounds. I fell in love with the staff and most of the patients and even getting to know their families. Many of us still keep in touch, sharing the ups and downs of depression and mental illness and the often difficult effects of the medications we took to make us whole again.

  Nothing is perfect, but I’m learning to find joy and meaning in life and to slow down.

  It’s not hard to believe that if I don’t pour wine down my throat, I won’t slice and pound my arms again. It’s even possible to believe there are chances to heal, to fold the dark wool blankets and tuck them into the attic.

  I may be Bipolar or it could be classic depression, doctors aren’t in agreement. Whatever it is, I learned many lessons in Brookstone. One, that people care and are here to help if one is brave enough or has family courageous enough to intervene.

  And two, you don’t have to die, and life can and will get better if one seeks help. It may take a while, but somewhere around another corner, maybe a mile, or even ten down the road, a breathtaking moment or realization will make pain’s price worth it.

  Living is the choice I’m making. Laughing. Smiling. Being funny. Wearing my lipstick outside the lines. I’m also trying to be real, showing people the other side of the girl who is paid to bring on laughter.

  Going into a psychiatric unit was a time in my life I pray doesn’t need repeating.

  Yet I know for sure, it always bears remembering.

  A Symphony of Seasons

  Summer

  I f I could freeze-frame a slice of time, it would have to be the days of blue-skied grace wedged between the moments before a season takes a final bow.

  Perfection often appears in the pauses, the lulls prior to change when the world shifts gears, abandoning the stage for a costume change.

  It seems to happen each year around September, when the weather turns perfect, and office workers slip away from their desks to catch a glimpse of summer’s final curtain call.

  I play hooky for the show, often taking my lunch by a lake where everything beautiful captures itself in the mirrored surface of the water.

  Ladies in business suits and sneakers walk the dirt path strewn with the first casualties of summer, dried leaves falling at random.

  I sit under a tree whose canopy reminds me of hair in early middle age, losing hue at the crown and edges, showing signs of letting go while I’m trying to hang on to summer.

  It seems the world is made up of people who claim favorite seasons the way some take over certain pews in church. Maybe there are summer people, fall people, winter and spring people. If so, I’m a summer, and seeing tarps covering sparkling swimming pools, watching the sun clock out earlier each evening and hearing the diminishing melody of the insect’s nightly choir rehearsals drape my mood in melancholy.

  I watch from the bank of the lake as a man in a white T-shirt and shorts aims his kayak and joy toward the water’s edge. I see mothers strolling happy babies and couples clasping hands as they walk along the perimeter framed in cotton clouds.

  I lean back on a park bench, thinking of a man who once told me you could slow time if you sat on a bench, so I sit and stare at the endless stretch of sky so blue it appears to have been washed and waxed. The wind, instead of blowing a hot yawn, offers a cool whisper of what’s to come.

  Days don’t get any better than this, even when one sees the signs of change: the confetti of fallen leaves whirling in the air, the grass turning hard and brown, the flowers along window boxes struggling to stay alert, offering their last encore of pink and red smiles.

  A lawnmower sounds in the distance, muffled by urgent calls from birds making plans to fly south.

  A few days earlier, I was at a middle-school football game, the sun so hot many carried umbrellas. It won’t be long before those umbrellas are replaced with wool blankets and mugs of hot chocolate and coffee.

  It won’t be long before I see the explosion of color: the quilt of red, gold and sienna hugging our world before the blasts of cold and winter’s bitter beauty. In a short time, smells of wood smoke will trail wind, signs of autumn and those anxious for it to begin anew.

  I try to feel the excitement, a bit of fondness for fall.

  On the lake, the water ripples, invigorated by a sudden, hic-coughed breeze. I wrap up my leftovers and head back to the office, the sun still holding summer in its hands.

  In a few days, according to the calendar, it’ll be fall, the season I used to loathe, feeling that with each bleeding leaf a part of me died along with it.

  Autumn reminds me of saying good-bye too soon. But the truth is, it’s not unusual for people like us to turn our heads and look back one last time as we do when autumn nudges summer to the back of the line.

  Not long ago I got a phone call from a man named Charlie, the man with theories about benches and slowing time. He lives in a nearby town and wanted me to write about the bench he’s planning to order and cement to his lawn, wanting to extend his life by sitting and doing nothing but enjoying the days.

  Charlie and I had one of those wonderful conversations in which a person realizes she’s listening to wisdom. He said he’s getting up in years and has invented a way to tie the hands of a clock so they don’t run up and down its face as if it was a race.

  He told me about the bench he bought, similar to those at bus stops.

  “Only be sure to put it in a place where a bus never comes,” he said. “That’s the key. Otherwise, you’re once again in motion. Motion is the enemy of extension.” He promised that as soon as his bench comes in he’s going to call and we’ll sit a spell. His reasoning is that as he sits, doing nothing but watching life all around him, the world will halt on its axis or stall long enough to grow sluggish.

  Charlie will breathe in the smell of summer and lengthen his enjoyment of all the things in life one wishes to freeze before it ages, changes or gradually disappears. I didn’t know then that Charlie was dying. He kept
that part to himself, and I never heard from him again.

  I’d forgotten about his bench theory until we moved into a new house that summer. Shortly after our move, I walked to the end of the cul-de-sac and there it was. A bench. A curved cement seat planted directly beneath a Norway spruce. It was the kind of bench Charlie would have wanted.

  Fall

  Last Sunday evening I glanced around at the beauty of the dimming day and took a seat on that bench surrounded by smells of fresh mulch and evergreens. I drank in the youth and innocence of my children’s faces, the pure joy of living and not having known enough disappointments to rust the heart.

  So this must be why Charlie wanted a bench in the middle of nowhere in particular. He didn’t want everything to end too soon. Like summer has. Maybe he, too, grew sad when a season wore itself thin.

  Children are already in school, even when the air is too thick to breathe and the Saturday and Sunday sun lingers all week in the heat of their cheeks, along with the smell of swimming pool in their hair.

  The scrapes and scratches of summer remain written on their skin.

  I stared from my perch, waiting to see if a flower stood alert or if its petals would fall. I heard children riding bikes down the road, taking one last loop around the neighborhood streets until the day was lost to baths and homework, schedules riding piggyback with freedom’s last gasp.

  Even sitting on this slab of cement, I could see a season slipping, giving pieces of itself to the yellow squash in a neighbor’s garden. Or weaving with last bits of steam through the faint cicada songs and trailing a finger of cool air, tickling its way through an August night.

  Fall was on its way. For the autumn people, summer is the misery before glory, the spell of endurance before they enjoy what they live for: lighting a fire in the fireplace. Pulling out wool sweaters and blankets. Sitting in a football stadium and drinking hot chocolate or coffee to stay warm.