Rewind, Replay, Repeat

by Jeff Bell

  Whoa!

  Almost overnight, life becomes an emotional balance beam. One minute I’m dangerously close to falling off to the left; the next I’m flailing my arms to keep from tanking to the right. Everything around me is all out of whack as my serotonin levels adjust to a post-Zoloft world. If OCD really is a matter of biochemistry, then I can only imagine how mixed-up things must be in the mad scientist’s laboratory between my ears.

  But I power through, because I’m not turning back. And because I don’t need medication. And because I’m finished for good with my OCD.

  sixteen

  fast-forward 18 months

  A double life. There’s really no other way to describe my first year and a half in Sacramento, and I’ve got two distinct sets of tape segments to prove it. In one set—the cassette airchecks—I am the news personality KFBK hired to cohost its afternoon program. I am confident, in control, on top of my game. Together with Kitty, I cover live breaking news stories with ease, interview celebrities and the nation’s top newsmakers, broadcast from remote locations all around town, and share familiar stories about my wife and kids. I am a friendly, credible, normal guy who thousands of afternoon commuters check in with daily as they battle the backups on I-80 and Highway 50.

  But then there’s my second set of tape segments—the virtual ones—which unfortunately tell a far different story. The guy in these archives is nothing short of a closet basket case. He sneaks around picking up twigs and rocks from the sidewalk. And checking his parking brake and doorlocks again and again. And driving his car in endless circles.

  And he spends ever more of his life hiding in bathrooms, scrubbing his hands.

  This is my latest trick, and I can’t remember just when it kicked in, though I do know it grew out of a story I covered about an outbreak of hepatitis C spawned by a single pair of unsanitary hands. Perfect, Doubt chided me. You can’t let that happen, now can you?

  I’d spent years mocking Jackie’s OCD washers. “What a bunch of freaks,” I’d say about them, never suspecting for a second that I would someday join their ranks, scrubbing my hands under scalding water until I could bear it no more.

  The handwashers I’d always read about tended to obsess about picking up someone else’s deadly germs. Not me. My all too predictable concern was that I’d kill off everyone around me with some virulent plague I might unknowingly be carrying. Still, when it came to how we’d tackle our obsessions, the traditional washers and I had very similar approaches: (1) Do whatever it takes to get and keep our hands clean; and (2) Avoid direct contact with other people unless absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, the latter of these rules-to-live-by presented some monumental challenges for someone in a profession in which community appearances play such a large role.

  Remote broadcasts. Speaking engagements. Client dinners. Everywhere I’d go, someone was always sticking a hand out my way. For a while, I was fine if I could just scrub up before the handshaking started, but after watching some guy in a reception line sneeze into his hand and then shake mine a few minutes later, the rules grew that much more stringent. From then on, to avoid spreading germs from one stranger to another, I’d have to shun consecutive handshakes. Or get creative with the pocket-sized bottle of hand sanitizer that I’d taken to carrying with me at absolutely all times:

  “I’m Steve,” some guy would say, extending his hand in my general direction. “I listen to you and Kitty every afternoon.”

  “Uh, thanks, Steve,” I’d mutter. “I’ll be with you in just one second.”

  And then the real challenge would begin. While turning my back to him (as if taking care of something), I’d shove my right hand into my pocket, opening my little bottle of Purell and squeezing a drop of the goo into my palm. Swinging back around, I’d use my left hand to rub in the lotion, and if all went as planned, I’d have protected us both. Of course, when circumstances didn’t allow for my magic act, I could, and did, opt for my backup plan—lying:

  “Hey Steve, nice to meet you,” I’d say. “Please forgive my lack of manners, but I’ve got ink on my hands.” Or I’d say peanut butter or salsa or anything sticky. Worked like a charm.

  The remarkable thing about my elaborate double life in Sacramento is that I managed to pull it off so well. A full eighteen months I went with nary a soul knowing about my secret world of obsessions and compulsions. No one—not even Kitty, who shared a studio with me for three hours a day—had any clue about my laundry list of hang-ups and quirks. Not a solitary new blemish had I allowed on my permanent record since arriving at KFBK.

  But on a Tuesday morning in late April 1997 this is about to change. I have called our minister, Wayne Manning, out of desperation, really, having summarily dismissed Jackie many months before, conceding to myself that I wasn’t even trying anymore to do her assignments. I’m guessing there’s not a whole lot Wayne can do to help me with my new germ concerns or any of my other OCD issues, but that’s okay. I’ve got an even bigger challenge for him. After writing off every form of psychological and medical support made available to me, I know I’m now close to doing something similar with all things spiritual, including the Believer tag I’m so tempted to yank off my neck in a final surrender to Doubt’s taunting about my pathetic hypocrisy.

  If Wayne thinks he can talk me out of doing so, well, I figure I really ought to let him try.

  “Is that all I have to accomplish in the next sixty minutes?”

  Wayne deadpans the question after hearing me spell out the purpose of my visit and learning that it’s now up to him to keep me from turning my back on God forever.

  “I’m thinking you might need more than one hour,” I concede.

  “I’m yours for as long as you want me,” Wayne says, and I know that he means it. The two of us have become casual friends over the past year or so, and during that time, I’ve seen his genuine compassion make a huge difference in a whole lot of lives. A former Army man with post-military experience in at least a half dozen fields, Wayne is a roll-up-the-sleeves kind of guy, a minister who practices what he preaches—which at a Unity church is a gospel of “applied spirituality.” If anyone can dispense any practical advice on sacred matters, I’m certain that it’s Wayne.

  “So where do you want to begin?” he asks.

  The million-dollar question. I haven’t a clue.

  “Well, for starters,” I say, “there’s a lot you don’t know about me, Wayne.”

  “Okay. How ’bout you give me the rest of the story.”

  Wayne’s choice of words is a deliberate reference to Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story feature, which runs during my show every afternoon. Wayne is a diehard KFBK listener and a former radio guy himself—facts greatly compounding the discomfort I’m feeling at this particular moment.

  “Hmmm… okay, well, I … uh … have this thing, this anxiety disorder … something called OCD.” I spit out the words like olive pits, then bumble my way through an overview of all the basics—my obsessions, my compulsions, the tape reviews (real and virtual), and so on—along with a detailed recap of my treatment history.

  Wayne keeps his eyes locked on mine, and I see in them a growing pool of confusion. I know what I’m confessing here has got to be coming at him from deep in left field. Like the rest of our listeners who drive home with me every afternoon, Wayne has come to know the guy on my cassette airchecks, the normal one who’s got his act together.

  “So there you have it,” I say when I can think of nothing else to explain.

  “Wow.”

  Wow? This brilliant Sunday morning orator can preach for hours on end, and Wow is all he can come up with for me after I bare every cubic inch of my soul? I have left him speechless.

  “Pretty bizarre, eh?” I say, just to break the silence.

  “Unbelievable. Never in million years would I have guessed you were dealing with all that.”

  Wayne asks me a whole series of questions next, and I do my best to answer them. I hold nothing back. I put it all
out there in one big ugly pile. When our hour is about up, Wayne tells me he feels entirely unqualified to offer any clinical suggestions regarding OCD, but that he’s very curious to learn why I’m convinced there’s no room for God in my obsessive-compulsive world. We make plans to pick up our conversation the following Friday.

  “It’s the damn Twelve Steps,” I inform Wayne in the opening minutes of our second meeting.

  “The Twelve Steps?” he says, again looking deep into my eyes, as if perhaps I’m stashing some rational explanations in the back of my head.

  “Right. Steps eight and nine, as I recall.”

  “The making of amends,” Wayne says without missing a beat. As a Unity minister, he is more than familiar with AA’s pragmatic approach to spiritual recovery.

  “Yep, good old-fashioned amends-making. My OCD is having a field day with that whole concept.”

  Wayne’s a sharp guy. I can almost see his brain connecting all the dots as I continue to explain things: “One of the steps involves making a list of all the people you’ve harmed—”

  “And the other involves making direct amends to those people wherever possible,” Wayne interrupts, eyes closed, face raised to the ceiling.

  “I guess all that makes sense for a recovering alcoholic,” I say. “But, man, in the hands of an obsessive-compulsive who’s convinced that he’s harmed every person who ever crossed his path, steps eight and nine are a brutal one-two punch.”

  Wayne nods his head. “Your Step Eight list is a long one, I’m willing to bet.”

  “You have no idea,” I say, trying to keep myself from falling apart in yet another therapist’s office. “All that mental reviewing I do in the middle of the night, it’s all about checking and double-checking my list, making sure there’s not a single person I’m forgetting to include.”

  “And what exactly is it that you want to ‘make good’ with all these people?”

  Another tough one. How do I explain the whole parallel to scrubbing my hands till I’m certain they’re sterile? “I guess I just want to fix everything. Restore perfection to my moral record.”

  “Your moral record?”

  “Yeah, Samantha accuses me of running for Messiah.”

  Wayne likes this and laughs. He then suggests we try tackling a specific example. I pick a minor car accident I was involved in back in the late ’80s and explain how the circumstances were such that it was unclear who was actually to blame, and how I’d made a comment suggesting as much at the time of the mishap. Days later, though, when it came down to who would pay for what, I played hardball as I’d always been taught—even denying that I’d implied at first that we were both to blame. This other guy thought we should each pay for our own damages; I, having convinced myself that the mishap was all his fault, insisted he pay for everything.

  “So what happened?” Wayne asks.

  “My insurance company chose not to push the issue and we wound up taking care of our own expenses, just as he’d suggested.”

  “Afraid I lost you, then. Where’s the problem?”

  I try to describe for Wayne how my black-and-white world works. How, for years, my taunting what-if? thoughts have raised a variety of possible horrors that might have happened because I recanted my initial comments about mutual blame.

  “So what is it you feel compelled to do?”

  “Track this guy down and tell him he was right—we probably were both responsible, and, yes, I had implied so that day—and I’m so sorry for having been such a prick about everything.”

  “Two questions,” Wayne says, holding up a pair of fingers. “One: would it change anything now? And two: for whose benefit do you want to do this?”

  “Well, no. And mine, I suppose,” I mutter in reply. “But all these damn spiritual books I’m reading, even your lessons Sunday after Sunday—they keep suggesting I need to confront my mistakes.”

  “Yeah, but I think you might be missing the—” Wayne interrupts himself and says nothing for a good couple of seconds, almost as if he’s trying to tap into some invisible reservoir of inspiration he keeps in the room. “Okay, here’s the deal,” he finally says. “I want you to have that conversation you’re longing to have. Tell this guy everything you want to say. Listen to his replies. But do it all on paper. And just for good measure, toss in a few lines for God, whom we’ll pretend is there and taking part in your chat.”

  It takes me days to get past the first sentence of my little homework assignment. The whole exercise strikes me as a supreme waste of time, and I put it off again and again. When I finally do sit down at my word processor, I want to put the most venomous words possible in the mouth of my accident nemesis, make him hate me for all the pain and suffering I imagine I’ve caused him over the years. But I can’t. Not with my God character standing right there, taking part in our conversation. Instead what comes out on my paper is an almost tearful reunion of two guys who come to understand that their seemingly chance meeting was no accident at all, that it played out for some greater good, and that only its lessons are worth hanging on to anymore.

  This is all a bit too weird for me. But with each word I write, that much more of my guilt slips right off my shoulders like thick layers of melting snow sliding down a sloped roof in the first sunshine to follow a storm.

  I share this with Wayne the following morning when we get together in his office. He congratulates me and suggests I take note of what this feels like to truly let go. To forgive and be forgiven. To put the past behind you. To repent, in the truest sense of the word.

  Now I am breaking down again and I don’t even know why. The only sound I can hear is that of my own hysterics. Wayne’s not one to waste his words on hollow, feel-good BS, so he lets me get this out of my system.

  I am embarrassed, though. Horribly embarrassed. I’ve fallen apart in front of plenty of therapists before, so that’s not the issue. Nor is coming unglued in the company of my minister. But Wayne, in my mind at this moment, is neither a shrink nor a clergyman. He is simply a loyal KFBK listener, one whose image of me is forever shattered.

  “I know there’s a reason for this,” I whisper at last, pointing my index fingers inward at this pathetic figure balled up on the couch. “I know it’s all part of God’s plan for me.”

  Silence. Nothing from Wayne. I can hear him breathing in a nearby chair.

  “Someday,” I say, “I’m going to conquer this beast. And when I do, I’m going to have quite a story to tell. And I am going to tell that story.”

  Good God, where did that come from?

  And what was that in my voice? Confidence? Certainty? Resolve? Conviction?

  I feel a hand on my shoulder now. Hear Wayne clearing his throat, about to say something.

  “You do know, don’t you, that you’re writing that book right now?”

  Yeah, right, I laugh to myself, thinking about the hours it takes me to write and rewrite, check and recheck, and again write and rewrite, a simple news script at the station. I can only imagine what Doubt would do with a full-length manuscript covering a subject so wrought with uncertainty, a subject I’m already regretting having brought up with anyone.

  seventeen

  fast-forward 3 weeks

  I suppose I should have seen this coming, should have anticipated the inevitable backlash. Doubt doesn’t like me conjuring up hopeful images of the future, not even for just a few minutes as I somehow managed to do in Wayne Manning’s office. Now there is hell to pay, and Doubt is collecting from high atop a director’s chair, barking Take that! through a megaphone, plotting new and twisted ways to cast me as a villain, and stealing script ideas from the very news stories I read day after day. It’s the same little trick that led me from that news item about hepatitis C to countless hours of hand-scrubbing ever since.

  The pattern soon becomes all too familiar. One afternoon, Kitty and I do a story about a house burning down because of dead batteries in a smoke detector, and that night, I lie awake reviewing tapes of every hou
se and apartment in which I ever lived. Did I leave any of their smoke detectors inoperable or without fully charged batteries? Another afternoon we cover an embezzlement story, and hours later in bed, I toss and turn my way through tape after tape spanning years’ worth of jobs. Did I ever fail to return company property—binders, reference books, rulers, anything?

  And so it goes day after day, week after week, until Doubt grinds me down and leaves me defenseless. I have no fight left in me, none, when yet another freeway episode from my distant past grabs hold of me, so I start looking for relief at any cost.

  I come up with a plan. If I can just have a peek at this stretch of Highway 280 (more than a hundred miles from home), then I can figure things out and be done for good with this entire mess.

  “That’s a trap, and you know it,” Samantha tells me, when I run the idea by her. “We’ve been through this before. So many times!”

  “This one’s different,” I protest.

  “You say that about all of them.”

  “I just don’t know what else to do.”

  “Go back and see Wayne.”

  “No. We had closure,” I say. “We wrapped up our sessions on such a positive note. I don’t want to go messing with that.”

  Samantha can’t understand this. “Okay,” she says, “then give Jackie a call.”

  “Too awkward. I pretty much sent her packing the last time we talked.”

  “Fine. Then you come up with a plan.”

  “I did,” I remind her. “That’s why I want to call in sick tomorrow and go to the Bay Area.”

  Sam is running out of patience with me. As of late, her pity and compassion are turning to frustration and anger. I know she’s feeling helpless. Or worse yet, ignored.