Don't Go Crazy Without Me

by Deborah A. Lott

  “You keep it, Daddy,” I said.

  In the time my father had been in the mental hospital, I’d acquired a boyfriend. David had luscious ivory-colored skin with a smattering of freckles across his nose, long eyelashes, and full lips. He was cocky and vital, funny and self-confident. I’d met him at a “social” held by AZA/BBG, a Jewish club for teens that my mother had signed me up for. I had to import him to La Crescenta from the San Fernando Valley for Saturday night dates. He told me I was pretty. I’d felt like a social pariah in La Crescenta, and he said I was pretty.

  From the very first, our kisses sent more electricity through my body than my father was receiving in the psychiatric hospital. Making out with David was a more effective curative than anything a psychiatrist could have offered. It told me that whatever I’d been through, I was intact and alive. Who could obsess about death or disease or madness during kisses like that? They pulled me out of my father’s orbit and proved that stronger forces were at work in me, forces unequivocally on the side of health and life.

  Anticipating our Saturday night dates sustained me during the long weekdays of feeling like a misfit at school. I showed off the hickeys he planted on my neck to my classmates. I concentrated on the sensation of his arm around my shoulder, his kisses, on everything about his touch, when the lingering urge to not arose. His face became a mandala I used to push disturbing images out of my mind.

  Though there was not a single sport I could play well enough not to elicit the full-blown scorn of my athletically minded classmates in La Crescenta, at making out I was a natural. I had finally found a physical activity at which I excelled. I had form, I had sensuality, I had superb timing.

  What I’d always thought of as a problem, my suggestibility, my capacity to tune in too much to others’ feelings—particularly my father’s—had become an asset. Tuned into David’s every response, I knew just how fast or slow to move my hand up the side of his neck, the precise moment at which to slip my tongue into his ear. Being with David gave me a different sense of my body—not as flawed, inadequate, dysfunctional, but as a medium of bliss for myself and for another person.

  Out of the body, through the body. This was the way out I hadn’t envisioned. I’d finally found the right venue for letting go.

  Being with a boy-in-the-flesh helped, but my overall mental state was still shaky. Any odd coincidence or convergence of numbers could still set me off. I asked my mother to find me another psychiatrist. Instead of going back to UCLA, where I’d received the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, she took me to an iconoclastic clinician who was achieving a reputation for radical new forms of therapy. He had a cult-like following for his group therapy sessions, and a hippie-ish lingo.

  In his fifties, Dr. Daniels possessed a full white beard, a Brooklyn accent, and a girth and charisma and valence that rivaled my father’s. He seemed as much rabbi as doctor. I guess that’s what was required.

  “I tell it like it is,” he said in his heavy Brooklyn accent. We were sitting in his small office in Silver Lake on the evening of our first individual appointment. “No bullshit here,” he said.

  He looked right into my eyes. I told him about the UCLA psychiatrist’s diagnosis, and that I was afraid I would wind up crazy like my father, who’d been locked up in a loony bin. If I hadn’t inherited his craziness, I had learned it. In either case, I feared it had already taken deep root.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “You have choices.”

  I told him all about my grandmother dying, and not being able to get the image of her dead body out of my head. I told him how I kept getting the dead girl’s books—“Twice, I got her books twice”—and the weird coincidences that happened all around me that I didn’t know how to decipher, and that sometimes I was convinced the universe was sending me dark signs. I told him that my brother thought we should have a séance and that I was too scared to do so; I told him that I was afraid the dead people wanted me, that they didn’t want me to live or write or be happy.

  “What does it mean?” I said. “What do you think it all means?”

  “It’s a story,” he said. “You know what a megillah is? It’s a megillah. A miseh. You took random incidents and made up a story. You’re the only thing that connects any of it. You made it up and now you believe it. I can see that you’re a girl who needs to tell stories, but there are a lot nicer stories you can tell.”

  He wrapped his bearlike arms around me and hugged me, and for some reason, I chose to believe him.

  My father was right: the shock treatments had scrambled his brains. He couldn’t remember many of the events of the past year. He couldn’t recall familiar people’s names or recite the terms of insurance policies. When he didn’t look blank, he looked sodden, as if thinking required slogging through cement. During the time he’d been out of the house, I’d gotten a new perspective: I had grown angry at everything he’d done to me, to us, to himself. Even if my mother really hadn’t wanted to kill him, I sometimes did. I wanted to yell at him and batter him with an accounting of all the damage he’d done. I wanted to make him listen while I told him how he’d abandoned me and interrogate him about the ways he’d distanced me from my mother. But I couldn’t; he was still too fragile.

  We were lying on the bed in my parents’ bedroom, a hot day shortly after he came home from the mental hospital. The master bedroom and the office were the only rooms that had air conditioning, and I was holed up in there with him to escape the pollution, both of our breathing passages overly sensitive to the effects of the late summer smog.

  “My chest hurts, Daddy,” I said. “It hurts to breathe.” Despite my anger, I suppose I was looking for a path back to him, a way to renew our camaraderie. We’d always found intimacy through a sharing of physical symptoms. It seemed much more natural, more comfortable for us to translate emotions into soma than to talk about them directly.

  “Just lie still,” he said, “and don’t exert yourself.”

  “Does your chest hurt too, Daddy?”

  He coughed for effect, then breathed out hard.

  “You’re wheezing too,” I said.

  He took my sharing as an opening. After a beat, he said, “I have worse problems.” He put his pincer hand on my forearm. I wanted to believe that he did it to convey affection. In the beginning, it felt like affection. But then he pressed down harder on my arm, and I realized that he was holding onto me not out of affection but as a way of keeping me from getting up and leaving the room. He knew that I would choose to flee if given the choice.

  “Don’t think I’ve forgotten what the doctors and your mother and my brother were trying to do to me. I just know better than to talk about it. I’m just biding my time because if your mother hears me talk about it, she’ll put me back in the crazy house.”

  It turned out that the paranoid delusions were the most resilient part of him. The inability to let go, the refusal to accept death and loss, the fixation on the body—in short, my father’s mishegoss—was still there. You could kill everything else around them but like some stubborn cancer cells, the brain cells where my father’s craziness resided would be the last to go.

  “Please don’t tell me any more,” I said. “I don’t believe your conspiracy theories, and I’m sorry if you do, but it makes me crazy to hear you go on and on about them. I just don’t want to hear any more.”

  He pushed me away.

  Later, when he’d returned to his hypochondriacal obsessions, his ingestion of pain pills, his search for the doctor who could finally cure him of the unnamed but pervasive illness he knew was doing him in, and his agitated calls to the FBI, my mother called the psychiatrists. They upped his dose of the mental sledgehammer Thorazine. After that, he became more sedate and compliant. Less troubled, or at least less trouble for others.

  Seeing him finally subdued, I thought again about the circus picture book I’d had in early childhood. He looked more than ever like its brown bear, though he no longer stood on a ball on his hind legs or danc
ed. There was no crowd left to laugh at his antics, and no one feared his attacks. Instead he merely lumbered, a stunned look on his face, reeling.

  Some days, my mother could put him on the phone and coach him through a call with a client or an insurance company, and occasionally she could coax him to get dressed up and go out to dinner or to a movie. But he never returned to the state he’d been in before the breakdown. Before my grandmother’s death. Before. Before. Before. Had there ever really been a before? Or had I just been too young to see him accurately? Had he ever really acted in my interest? Been able to separate my needs from his? Seen me as other than a mirror?

  I made it through eleventh grade in La Crescenta. After that, I gave my mother an ultimatum: I would drop out of school if I had to go back to my senior year there. She thought I was being unreasonable; she thought I was being melodramatic, and that the situation couldn’t possibly be that bad. She still considered the Glendale Unified School District’s academic superiority worth whatever else I had to endure to graduate. If I could just get through the next nine months, I could go to college elsewhere.

  But to my seventeen-year-old self, one more year felt impossible. I had to get out of there, not only because I felt socially ostracized, alone in my more-and-more radical political views, but because being there only reminded me of what had happened with the dead girl’s books. If I no longer fully believed that evil forces were out to get me, I could not completely discount what I had believed, so I felt prone to relapse.

  About the school I would not back down.

  “I’ll really lose my mind,” I told my mother, “unless you get me out of there.” David had left my life, but through other social events in the Valley, I had acquired a new boyfriend, Marc. He attended the same high school as my cousin Joey. Every weekend we went to plays at the Music Center and art house movies; we’d seen Richard Pryor perform at the Troubadour. We’d go to the beach and to political rallies. We were both committed to ending the war in Vietnam, to the cause of civil rights, and to radically transforming the world. La Crescenta was no place for me.

  Joey and Marc and I schemed for me to use Joey’s address so I could transfer to their school. Aunt Sonia would have to tell the school authorities that I had moved into their house and that she and Nathan had become my legal guardians. I still didn’t have my driver’s license, and Ben worked full time, so my mother and Paul would have to agree to drive me. The drive would take an hour and a half every day. It was a tremendous sacrifice to ask of my mother, who was running the business by herself and trying to take care of my father, but she relented and agreed to drive me to school in the morning, and Paul, who had begun to attend college in the Valley, agreed to take me home. It was a thirty-mile commute, and I would have to get up very early to make 8:00 a.m. classes. But it was worth it.

  Marc welcomed me to my new school in September with a silver peace symbol necklace that I never took off. At recess and lunch, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin played on the loudspeakers. The school did not have the rigid dress code of La Crescenta, and the boys wore long hair and scruffy beards and moustaches, the girls miniskirts.

  The first week of school, I knew I had made the right decision when in the girls’ locker room after PE, all of us sitting on benches getting dressed, I overheard another girl. She was complaining about the state of her manicure.

  “Does that coach really think I’m going to break a nail so that I can get the ball over the net? Is she nuts?” Everyone laughed and applauded and cheered. She needed those nails to stroke her boyfriend’s neck. No one thought it unusual for her to buck authority or condemned her for her lack of athleticism. We were in agreement that defiance was our right, and making out a legitimate sport.

  My AP classes were filled with well-read, questioning, intellectual eccentrics. There wasn’t a John Birch Society aficionado among us. Half of my teachers were Jewish and respected the Jewish intellectual tradition of questioning and whining and wondering and never accepting the status quo. Quirky, neurotic, driven, my classmates were tolerant of one another. I felt immediately at home.

  In my first few weeks at school, I got into trouble twice. The girls’ vice principal hauled me into her office for French kissing Marc in the hallway. In between class periods, I was slunk against my locker, deep in his embrace. When the bell rang for the next class, we didn’t intentionally ignore it; we didn’t even hear it. We just kept on kissing. We both got sent to the respective VPs’ offices. The girls’ VP got my Aunt Sonia on the phone and said officiously, “She appeared to be soul kissing her boyfriend outside the classroom and didn’t make it to class on time.”

  “I wasn’t only appearing to, I most definitely was,” I shot back. I was through with feeling ashamed of myself or my actions or my body. I would defy uptight authority; I would sing the song of myself. Eros had finally won over Thanatos in my psyche, and I would be triumphant in the joys of the flesh.

  When Marc and I, along with an ever-growing contingent of peacenik allies, refused to stand up for the National Anthem at a forced-attendance, Friday afternoon football game pep rally, the principal wrote down all our names and sent home notes. This is to inform you that your child is showing disrespect to our country by refusing to stand up for the National Anthem, the note read. Aunt Sonia, annoyed that they were pestering her, signed it. I didn’t care. I was proud of my own resistance. I wasn’t about to pledge allegiance to a country that daily bombed and napalmed the innocent brown people of Vietnam. I wasn’t about to pledge allegiance to a country that let a corrupt and evil man like Nixon be president. I wasn’t about to pledge allegiance to a country in which racism was still rampant.

  In a strange way, joining these larger social causes finally put my own small life and obsessions in perspective. Death was no longer an anomaly when boys my age were being killed on the battlefields of Vietnam every day. Now we all knew young people who had died. I resisted the dogma I sometimes heard other students spout as various leftist persuasions fought for our loyalty. If I’d learned anything from my experience with my father and madness, it was not to pledge allegiance to any orthodoxy, to any patriarchal authority. I’d been a cult of one in the religion of my father. He’d seemed like a god to me, and later, like a monster. I had to keep reminding myself that he’d always been just one more flawed, troubled human being.

  I made a conscious decision every day to stay sane, and to do what I could to be a positive force for change in the world. While my friends experimented with hallucinogens, I refrained. One bad trip of acid, I figured, and I could wind up in the loony bin. And yet I still felt that pull, that desire to lose myself, to surrender as I had surrendered to the sound of my father’s voice on the bimah, to be swept up by a powerful story. Still I would have to be cautious about the stories I let other people tell me. I would have to be careful about the stories I told myself.

  Ira survived fifteen years after coming home from the psychi atric hospital. Then the emphysema, the dangerously high blood pressure he’d always refused to treat, and a series of massive strokes over the course of a couple of years did him in. When he had the first stroke, which the doctors presumed would be fatal, I returned to Los Angeles from Boston, where I’d been working in book publishing and barely surviving on an editorial intern’s salary. I intended to go back to the East Coast after he died. Instead he lingered for weeks in the ICU. Every time I saw him, he clutched at my arm with terror in his eyes, and I lost my resolve to return to what had been a pretty tenuous life. Despite all he’d put me through, I could not leave him.

  After months of rehab following the stroke, which left him paralyzed on one side, his eye stitched shut because he could not blink, his once-handsome face contorted, he returned home. He’d lost his beautiful radio announcer’s voice to the stroke, and his words were garbled. He didn’t have the physical energy to express his agitation anymore, and could only sit in his wheelchair and stare out the window of the living room. Paul gave him a portab
le CD player that he could carry on his lap and listen to music. He’d developed a passion for the opera singer Luciano Pavarotti. He’d sit in his wheelchair, tears running out of the unstitched eye, and I’d sit beside him. We’d listen to those sad and soaring arias, and share a measure of grace.

  My very body seems less my father’s now. As I age, I look more like my mother, with her thin skin and broken capillaries, her broad, capable shoulders. When I look in the mirror, I see the cast of her mindset in those shoulders, her bemused expression on my face. Our resolve, physical and mental.

  When I think about my father and what happened during my childhood, and where it’s left me, I’m more ambivalent than most people who hear my story think I should be. Yes, he shouldn’t have told me about Roy’s dying, or killed the baby birds while I watched, or hijacked my birthday party, or terrified me about food poisoning or rare diseases, or kept me from ordinary childhood activities. He shouldn’t have sown doubt in me about my mother’s love, or bred distrust in my own body. He shouldn’t have treated me like an adult playmate, like a collaborator.

  The list could go on and on and on. I kept that sort of mental list for much of my late adolescence and early adulthood. I was enraged, and my rage helped fuel my commitment to feminism.

  But my father also gave me my love of poetry. I can still hear him declaiming Robert Louis Stevenson:

  In winter I get up at night / And dress by yellow candlelight. / In summer, quite the other way, / I have to go to bed by day.

  He passed on his talent for public speaking, his affinity for rebellion, his devotion to irreverence. My father was outrageous, and I’ll still take outrageous over mincing adherence to social propriety.

  I know intellectually that my mother loved me; I see it now in her self-sacrifice, in her efforts to reason with me, in everything she did to help me have a normal life, everything she did to save me. If I did not fully feel her love, it is because it was because it seemed always overpowered by her reticence.