Don't Go Crazy Without Me

by Deborah A. Lott

  My heart was pounding in my head, in my ears. “What is it?” I said.

  “You sons of bitches,” he snarled. “You goddamned sons of bitches!”

  “Who are you screaming at, Daddy?” I stood at the window next to him. Outside, the light was just starting to fade on a destined-to-be-chilly winter’s night. I was scared to look at what might be out there, but more terrified by what was going on inside my father. The veins were popped out in his forehead, and it seemed possible to me that he might just drop dead.

  “The henchmen,” he said. “Seven-foot-tall shvartze henchmen sent by your mother to kill me.”

  Shvartze. The Yiddish word for black. A word with derogatory connotations. Did they have to be black? I thought. Why did he have to make them black? Those were my kinsmen.

  And seven feet tall? I stood beside my father and looked up and down the street. I saw the shadow cast by a streetlight that had just come on. An overgrown tree swayed in the evening breeze, its top branches bent and sweeping its own trunk. Several houses away a man picked up the afternoon newspaper and walked slowly across his lawn. A few dogs barked in the distance. That was all that was out there. I moved my gaze up and down the street again, and finally rested it on my father, clearly where the trouble lay. His eyes were open unnaturally wide, his pupils dilated, and sweat streamed down his face.

  “You must still be dreaming, Daddy,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “They were here,” he said. “I saw them. Two seven-foot-tall shvartze goons.”

  “Oh, come on, Daddy. Where would Mom find seven-foot-tall black henchmen in La Crescenta?”

  “What, are you blind? Are you turning into your mother? How could you not see them?”

  What my father had perceived this time was not paramecium harbored under the flesh. It was not microscopic avian germs. It was not some dangerous process going on in his bowel or my bowel that no doctor or X-ray could disprove for certain. This was not even something as open to interpretation as my mother’s motives. No, my father had said that he saw two seven-foot-tall black henchmen standing at the window of our house in La Crescenta. Even if my mother could find two black men to hire as assassins, could they walk down the streets of La Crescenta unnoticed? He saw them? No, I said to myself, he hallucinated them. He had hallucinated two people that he could not seduce even me—his most devoted, most suggestible, going-crazy-all-on-her-own daughter—into seeing.

  My father had finally exceeded the limits of my overactive imagination. I moved a few inches back from him and looked more closely at his face, contorted in rage and horror. He saw people who weren’t there, and I didn’t. I wouldn’t. No amount of his histrionics, cajoling, hectoring, lecturing, threatening—no amount even of his love—could make me see them.

  “There’s nobody out there, Daddy,” I said.

  “I must have scared them away with my screaming. They were there, the goons that your mother and Uncle Nathan hired to do me in.”

  “Daddy, your mind is playing tricks on you.”

  “Ah, so now you’re turning against me too. I never thought you would turn on me. I thought you were the one I could count on. Get away from me,” he said, bringing his arm down dismissively in the air. “What? You want to join their side. Go ahead, after all I’ve done for you, after the way I’ve loved you, and protected you, go and betray me along with your mother. Just don’t expect her to take care of you. You know how she really feels.”

  “There’s nobody out there now, Daddy, and there was nobody out there before,” I said. “And you shouldn’t tell me that my mother doesn’t love me. That’s wrong.” I walked away.

  My father was nuts, and maybe I didn’t have to be.

  Present, Restaurant, Santa Monica, 1:00 p.m.

  Some writer friends and I are having lunch in a Santa Monica hotel restaurant. They’ve ordered salads and fish and are already comparing their herbal supplements. I have ordered a salmon salad but eye the cheeseburger with bacon a man at another table relishes. One of the women says she’s recently consulted a famous psychic on the phone.

  “I had to know whether my book was going to sell,” she says.

  Apparently he foretold the first letter of the first name of the editor who wound up buying it. “He blew my mind, he was so accurate,” she says. “He knew so much about my past and present life.”

  “But even if that were true, how could he know about a future that hasn’t happened yet?” I say. “What about all the contingencies that could have affected that future?”

  “We don’t understand the true nature of time; maybe in some dimension the future has already happened. He’s psychic.”

  Everyone else at the table laughs. I shrug and roll my eyes. Here I go again, interrogating basic assumptions.

  Another friend says, “You’re such a skeptic. Can’t you ever just suspend disbelief and go along for the ride?”

  I don’t mention where my blind faith led me with my father, or why adhering to reason feels like a form of protection now. I don’t mention that I feel as if I don’t have the psychological luxury to en tertain irrational beliefs. It scares me to even contemplate the possibility that a psychic medium could communicate with the dead, with my dead, even though the mediums on TV always find the dead to be companionable, contented and forgiving, never the awful people they were when alive, never angry or vengeful.

  The tale of the psychic unleashes a torrent of other anecdotes and testimonials. Another friend claims she is taking a particular herb because her chiropractor muscle-tested her, holding the substance close to her chest and measuring the resistance in her arms.

  “Where’s the science in that?” I ask. “How does the substance get through the glass jar to cause a reaction? Wouldn’t we all be reacting to everything as we walked through the drugstore aisles? Do you really believe all this?”

  I’m fascinated by what people believe and how they come to believe it. I’m always trying to understand faith, to get inside it. What I observe at this table is less full-fledged conviction—none of these women would die for these beliefs—than open-minded pleasure taken in being open to mysteries beyond our current understanding. They enter into these stories—which are all pretty nice stories—but never relinquish the power to pull back. Part of me wants to play this game with them, to call up that psychic and have him tell me something good about my future.

  Instead I say, again and again, “But how do you know that’s true?” If they open the gates to psychics, then does that also let in UFOs and shamans, healing crystals, faith healing? Of course, none of those are what scares me; what scares me is the dark side. Ghosts and demons and possession. Dead grandmothers envying and wanting their pubescent granddaughters the way I once feared my grandmother wanted me.

  “That makes no logical sense,” I say. “That’s not rational,” I say. My level of anger mystifies my friends. It feels disproportionate even to me. My protest of the irrational in every form feels mean.

  The woman who consulted the psychic says, “We’ve all just got to figure out what we’re supposed to do, what the universe wants us to do,” and I snap.

  “The universe doesn’t want you to do anything,” I say. “The universe couldn’t care less.” Your mother must have adored you, I think. You must have had some early experience of a benign and loving world to believe that the universe gives a damn. That kind of belief couldn’t be based on my adult experience of observing the world.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . do I really believe nothing? I cannot seem to rid myself of “beliefs” that have insinuated themselves into my cells, that live on in my nervous system. Wasn’t my current body made by my childhood? It remains a shrine to Ira in the way that my stomach still turns and I have to fight vomiting if I ingest a morsel of food that I imagine is tainted in some way, in the way my bowel still refuses, sometimes adamantly refuses, to give up its cache.

  I cannot seem to divest myself of many “ideas,” conscious and unconscious, carried by the co
ntagious agent of my father’s love.

  So why do I have to be such a fucking killjoy at this lunch table?

  “Tell me more about what the psychic said,” I say, suddenly feeling only compassion for my friends. “Tell me what the universe wants you to do with your life now.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Line Drawn

  When my father hallucinated at the window, he drew a line I could not cross. I couldn’t hallucinate with him to show my loyalty, and even if I could have hallucinated, I couldn’t go along with our enemy being black men. In that moment, he ripped from me the last semblance of any good father I thought I’d had.

  Even now, so many years later, I hold onto that moment as a clear line of demarcation. That, I say to myself, that was the precise moment at which my father dove into the deep, went off the ledge, crossed the divide, that was the moment when he went crazy. As if everything that led up to that moment could be deemed sane. If no such moment existed, then I would have to acknowledge yet again that much of the reality I relied on as a child, much of what I believed about my mother, about the dangers of the world, even about the deepest, most interior workings of my own body was the product of my father’s delusions. I had made the mistake of aligning myself with the parent whose intensity I mistook for love.

  Even as I chose not to buy into my father’s hallucination at the window, spending so much time with him had fractured my hold on reality. Unlike my grandmother’s cancer, madness was contagious. My father had given me a lesson in how to go crazy, and though the content of my delusions would be different, I would now proceed to do so, all on my own. The more I gave into my notting compulsion, the more the compulsion took over. Like my grandmother’s cancer cells, given an inch, madness had a propensity to metastasize.

  Partway through tenth grade, Wendy’s mother became pregnant and her father got a position at a church in another city. With little warning, Wendy moved away. I felt completely alone again in La Crescenta. Alone with my family; alone with my crazy brain. Alone with the dead girl who wanted me.

  To an observer, I might not have looked in as much trouble as I felt myself to be. I went to classes, wrote poems, tried out for plays and got parts in the chorus or company, did my homework. Then, in English class one day, we had to pick a book from a stack of anthologies so we could read Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The idea of the story already spooked me, and any time I had to pick anything at random, particularly a book, I got nervous. I looked over all the bindings, felt and then aborted impulses to pick one book or another from the stack, held my breath, shut my eyes, and finally chose a book. I opened it to find the dead girl’s name in it once again. This overcame my capacity to be rational.

  Twice. I had gotten a dead girl’s book twice. And the second time, I’d gotten that dead girl’s book in association with a spooky story. This couldn’t be coincidence; this had to be a sign. The sign’s most likely meaning was that I was going to die next. I also figured it possible that she had to keep trying harder and harder to send me her message because I kept ignoring it, because I didn’t want to be getting messages from dead girls. This probably pissed her off and meant that she would have to keep trying harder and might never leave me alone.

  I also considered it possible that evil demon forces had taken over her energy and were using it to drive me crazy. My father behaved as if he were possessed; maybe I was too. I was certain of one thing: someone or something wanted to take my writing away from me; something wanted to make sure that I never wrote again.

  I couldn’t concentrate on the Poe story. Afterward, when we had to answer questions about it, notting consumed me. My paper looked like a spasmodic scribble of words written and revoked.

  After that, nights became even more treacherous. With none of the day’s distractions, I’d not myself into mental contortions until, exhausted, I finally slept. Mornings, I’d try to tell myself that my fevered mental state of the prior day had been a bad dream that I needed to put behind me. Within a few minutes I’d see some number or sequence of words that led to some devious association; an odd coincidence would reveal itself to me, and the universe would become darkly loaded again.

  While I notted myself into a state of limbo, my father’s mission to find the doctor who could save him continued. He finally talked a young, seemingly uncorrupted internist into admitting him into Glendale Adventist Hospital for a round of tests. By this time, he had nearly stopped eating, was hunched over trembling much of the time, and had lost more than fifty pounds.

  After my father had been in the hospital for a week, the doctor concluded that he was seriously mentally ill. He told him that he would be admitted to the hospital’s psychiatric facility. My father began to get dressed, packed his bag, and called my mother.

  “They got to him,” he told my mother. “This one’s in on the conspiracy too. Come and get me right now.”

  He’d reached the limit of my mother’s endurance. She lied. She betrayed him as he’d always feared. She told Ira she would come down to the hospital and pick him up. Instead she went and signed involuntary commitment papers. I’ve always imagined my father’s passage through the halls of the hospital as crossing another line of demarcation. I see the orderly come, put him in a wheelchair, push him down one long hallway, and then turn a corner and enter another darker hallway that terminates in the locked doors of the psychiatric ward.

  When Ira realized what my mother had done, he began to rant and rave. This confirmed his worst paranoid fantasies; she had con spired with the doctors to do him in. When they let him use the pay phone in the hall, he railed at her. “You traitor,” he said. “To my dying day, I’ll never forgive you for this; I’ll never forgive any of you.”

  My father’s rejection saddened my mother even more than the prospect of living with an irremediably insane husband. All she’d ever wanted was his love. She had jeopardized her children, herself, everything we had, to try to hang onto that love. Now the situation had become so untenable that she’d had to risk losing that love forever to retain any sort of reasonable life at all.

  With my father gone and my mother in charge, events in our household proceeded in a quiet, orderly, and affectless slow motion.

  “I’ve been sucked dry,” she said. That was how she seemed, like the undead victim of a vampire. Always stoic and held-in, she now rendered herself militantly denuded of all feeling. She was going to cope, she said. She was going to keep the business running, and the house payments made, and no one had better get in her way.

  In the days following my father’s hospitalization, my mother and I circled around each other cautiously. I thought she might seek payback for my Oedipal excesses. I thought she might cut me off from the enemas on which I still depended, and force me to go on one more noxious and ineffective laxative regimen. Whenever I started to tell her about my fear of the dead girl, she stopped me.

  “I don’t have patience left for any more mishegoss,” she warned.

  “But I got her books twice,” I said. “Twice. And other weird things keep happening.”

  Paul proposed calling in a medium. “These energies around you aren’t necessarily bad, but we should find out what the ghost wants. After all, she chose you.”

  I put my hands over my ears and screamed. “Make him stop saying that! It scares me so much.”

  “If I could make anyone start or stop saying anything, I wouldn’t be in this mess,” my mother said.

  My mother arranged for my appointment at UCLA’s Neuropsy chiatric Institute (NPI). It was there that a young, austere European clinician awarded me the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. And I must have seemed psychotic, for when I got very anxious, as I had been that day, I would lose the border between what was inside my head and what was outside. A thought about the body would instantly turn into a sensation in my body. That day in the psychiatrist’s office, I believed that I’d dreamed his face the night before, believed that the dead people were after me, bel
ieved the doctor was part of some nefarious scheme to drive me even crazier.

  Yet, even that day, some rational part of me always watched from a distance, analyzing, weighing the evidence, considering alternate hypotheses. The psychiatrist’s words, and my mother’s sadness at hearing them, gave me a jolt. I decided that I had to marshal all the forces of reason I could muster. Whether outside demons were trying to make me crazy or I was doing it to myself, I needed to do whatever I could to stop it. I had to fight back. I didn’t want to wind up like my father. My mother was right. If I did not get a grip, I would soon be in the hospital in a bed next to my father’s; if I did not resist, I could go crazy for real. I could already feel how close I was.

  When the urge to not arose, I resisted it. I shut my eyes when numbers presented themselves to me, so that I would not make too much of their sequences and relationships. I refused to draw the connections. I used a test: if anyone else would see a particular string of numbers or events or words as unrelated, then I had to regard them that way too. If I was the only thing connecting them, I had to conclude that the connection wasn’t true. When my compulsions said, “Do this or something bad will happen,” I defied them. Trying to fulfill them had proven exhausting. Like a blackmailer in a B movie, their demands kept escalating.

  I was still afraid to think of the dead girl’s name, to think of so many words, but I tried to just put them out of my mind rather than getting stuck in an endless loop of doing and undoing.

  “I dare you,” I said to the universe. “Give me proof, not these ambiguous presentiments of meaning, give me proof. Tell me exactly what you want from me, and if you can’t give me proof or show me what it all means, please just leave me alone.”

  I would have to battle to take my writing back too.

  In English class, we read Melville’s Moby Dick, a novel whose opening words are a bold assertion of self: “Call me Ishmael.” I was to write a paper about “Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale.” Under the pressure to produce, the compulsion to not kicked in. I tried to ignore it. Although notting fatigued me, resisting it sapped my energy too. But I saw the paradox: I felt as if I had to perform an act of self-negation in order to save myself from dying, and yet by doing so, I was actually annihilating the most vital part of myself.