The Full Catastrophe

by Rebecca Huntley

That all made sense to me. I was a public defender. That’s how I made my living, representing indigent and frequently mentally ill clients. But at night I’d been doing stand-up. And I was convinced that my partner, who had Hollywood connections, had arranged to have me filmed without me knowing because he knew I wasn’t an actor, so it would be more natural.

  I was thrilled. The whole city of New York was my set.

  I sprinted to the park at the end of my block. I was amazed at how well they’d cast ‘generic old man on park bench’. He was old, he had a bicycle. He was too old to have a bicycle. I went up to him (by the way I had a Mohawk) and said, ‘Hello.’ He nervously returned the greeting and I grabbed his bike with the intention of taking a few laps around the block.

  The old man said, ‘No!’ The old man had some chops. So, knowing our scene was up, I sprinted to the dog park. I hurdled the fence and before popping out the other side, I dropped down on all fours to gallop with the pack a little bit, giving the people what they wanted.

  At the end of the dog run, I saw rec league soccer players kicking the ball around, warming up as the game was about to start. Perfect. I’d played soccer in college. I ushered the keeper aside, got between the sticks and started yelling at the strikers. They started shooting. I saved everything. I welcomed the keeper back in the box after a few saves. ‘That’s how it’s done, son, now get back between the pipes and keep clean.’

  Then, from across the field I heard, ‘Get the fuck off the field!’

  I yell back, ‘Who me? Fuck you.’

  I pulled down my shorts and started sprinting in and around the pitch for the entirety of the first half, butt cheeks flapping in the wind. Once I was satisfied we had what we needed, I sprinted across First Avenue and Halston, one of the busier intersections in downtown Manhattan, taxi drivers breaking and screeching and swerving around me while yelling a variety of obscenities. I knew I was all right, though. I knew these were professional stunt drivers on a closed set, so nothing bad could come to me.

  On the other side of Halston and First Avenue, a group of young African American men were standing in a circle, drinking beers and smoking and shooting the shit. I took that opportunity to unilaterally engage them in a rap battle.

  A bomb atomically, Socrates, philosophies and hypotheses

  Can’t define how I will be dropping these mockeries lyrically performed armed robberies flee with the lottery

  Possibly they spot ’em battle scared Shogun explosion where my pen hits

  Tremendous Ultraviolent shine blind forensics!

  I won.

  The guy who seemed to be the leader said, ‘You crazy, man, you should roll.’

  I rolled.

  Minutes later I was on a Brooklyn-bound L train. I’d lost my shoes and shirt along the way, and I started doing pull-ups on the overhead bar, thinking, this is going to be great for promos and B-roll.

  The train stopped. Everybody spilled out in their own direction; half went left, half went right, and I didn’t know who to follow. I’d lost the game. I started crying so hard my contacts flushed out of my eyes. I held my hands up like a captured soldier. And ready for my close-up. That’s when the NYPD walked up. Their uniforms looked real.

  First cop asked me, ‘What’s the matter, buddy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ve got no shirt on, you’ve got no shoes on and you are crying, that don’t seem like a problem to you?’

  ‘I think the problem is I am cold.’

  They cuffed me for safety purposes, and instead of finding myself in the back of a squad car I found myself in the back of an ambulance. After a couple of minutes, the radio crackled on. ‘Intake available at Bellevue psych ward.’

  Cut to psych ward. Interior, day.

  Patients were pacing the ward like drugged-up zombies. People were howling. People were screaming. People were fighting. People were tackled, injected, placed in secluded rubber rooms. The place looked exactly like the set in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, except no one was smoking. For all I knew we’d secured permission to shoot there.

  At the end of that first afternoon I was pulled out of my zombie-like trance when I heard, ‘McDermott, visitor.’

  That was the first time I’d heard the word ‘visitor’ since I’d been there. Standing on the other side of the locked doors was a fifty-year-old woman who looked a great deal like my mother, The Bird. I’d nicknamed my mother ‘The Bird’ when I was in high school because she has a rather large bosom and when she gets excited, about things good or bad, she tends to jerk her head around. And she has a big nose. Kinda like mine. She calls me ‘The Gorilla’.

  She walked through the doors that said, ‘Danger of Patient Elopement’, past some nylon restraints, and she looked at me and said, ‘You’re a bag of bones, Gorilla.’

  I said, ‘Bird?’

  She said, ‘The Bird is here.’

  I said, ‘The Bird can’t be here. She lives in Kansas.’

  She said, ‘The Bird got on a plane. What are you doing here?’

  They escorted us to the cafeteria that doubles as the visitors’ room. Mom calmly tried to explain to me that she’d been to my apartment and seen that I’d drawn over every inch of the walls with a red Sharpie pen.

  ‘Zack, you are in a locked psychiatric ward,’ she told me.

  ‘Mom, you are a terrible actor,’ I told her.

  For the next ten days, she was outside those ‘Danger of Patient Elopement’ doors twenty minutes before visiting hours started, twice a day, and she stayed until they kicked her out. Eventually, due to a heavy dose of anti-psychotic medication, coupled with a heavy dose of The Bird’s calming reassurance that this was real, the cinematic dissolved into reality and I realised, as quickly as catching a cold, that I had lost my mind.

  I went back to Wichita, Kansas, with my mom and for the next ninety days I smoked and drank my face off in her garage. She filled prescriptions for me. I lost my hair, I became impotent, I gained thirty pounds. And then my disability pay ran out. I had to go back to New York. I had to go back to work.

  I began public defending again. Same clientele. All indigent, none who could afford a lawyer, many mentally ill. And every time I was forced to send someone to a psych ward, it tore me in half because I knew more than I ever cared to know about where I was sending them.

  I’m all right. I wrote a book. I knew I was never going to end up on a park bench shouting at pigeons. I have health insurance. I have a JD. My mom has a PhD. I have friends whose parents are psychiatrists. I wasn’t going to be the guy who falls through the cracks. But so many do.

  Now my mom, she lives by this philosophy that when people are at their worst, when you are repelled by them and when every instinct you have is to run, what you really need to do is go towards them.

  I’m a gorilla. I’m a bi-polar gorilla. I am also a bird.

  Be a gorilla when you have to be. Be a bird when you can.

  And go towards each other.

  Meet the Catastrophisers

  ALANNAH HILL is one of Australia’s most loved fashion designers and author of the bestselling memoir Butterfly on a Pin. In 2013, at the height of her trailblazing success, Alannah famously parted ways with Factory X, her financial backers, sending shock waves through the fashion industry. In 2014, with her typical all-or-nothing drive, Alannah launched her new brand, Louise Love, sold exclusively to David Jones and online. After a melanoma scare in 2016, Alannah threw herself into writing Butterfly on a Pin, the startling, harrowing and shocking story of her life. Alannah lives in Melbourne with her son, Edward.

  ANDREW P. STREET is a Sydney-built, Adelaide-based author, journalist, commentator and failed indie rock star. He’s written for pretty much everyone at one time or another, as well as three books, including the bestselling The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign of Captain Abbott, and is currently senior writer for GOAT.

  ANNABEL CRABB is a Sydney-based ABC writer and presenter. After the birth of her fir
st child, as outlined in this book, her enthusiasm was sufficiently undimmed to have two more. During her working hours, Annabel writes for the ABC about politics and social issues, and presents TV shows including Kitchen Cabinet, The House with Annabel Crabb, Back in Time for Dinner and Tomorrow Tonight. She is a recidivist author whose latest work is a cookbook with childhood friend Wendy Sharpe. Annabel co-presents the podcast Chat 10 Looks 3 with colleague and friend Leigh Sales.

  ANNIE NOLAN is the media personality behind the popular blog Uncanny Annie. Since starting her blog in 2015 Annie has gained a following across various social media platforms, where she freely shares her life experience and opinions on important social issues, mixed in with a healthy dose of kids, animals, glitter and weirdness. Some of the causes Annie is passionate about include gender equality, LGBTQI rights, Aboriginal rights, environmentalism and animal welfare. Annie lives in Melbourne with her husband, Western Bulldogs AFL player Liam Picken, her three children and all the animals she can adopt. She also co-hosts a podcast with Bianka Thompson called We Want to be Better.

  BERNARD SALT AM is a columnist with The Australian newspaper. He is also now the managing director of the speaking and advisory firm The Demographics Group, following a long career as a partner in a global corporate advisory firm. He has written six books, is a regular on the Australian corporate speaking circuit, and is an adjunct professor at Curtin University Business School. In 2017 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM). Bernard also single-handedly, and quite inadvertently, popularised the term ‘smashed avocado’ globally.

  CATHY WILCOX is a cartoonist for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, for which she has drawn since 1989, collecting three Walkley Awards for her work along the way. She is the mother of two mostly grown-up children and one eternally childlike dog. She lives in Sydney.

  CLEM BASTOW is a screenwriter and award-winning cultural critic. Her work appears regularly in The Saturday Paper and The Guardian, and she has written for journals, including The Lifted Brow and Kill Your Darlings, and books, including Copyfight (NewSouth Publishing, 2015) and the upcoming ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press). In 2017 she wrote and co-presented the ABC podcast Behind the Belt, a documentary ‘deep dive’ into professional wrestling. She holds a Master of Screenwriting from VCA, teaches screenwriting at the University of Melbourne, and is currently undertaking a PhD in action cinema and screenwriting.

  DEBORAH KNIGHT began her career in radio working for Mix 106.5 in Sydney and for Triple J. Moving to television, she was a presenter–reporter with the ABC’s Landline, and then a journalist in the Canberra Press Gallery for Network Ten, going on to head up Ten’s US Bureau, covering such stories as September 11 and the Iraq War. Renowned for her journalistic skills, Deborah moved to the Nine Network in 2011, where she hosted and co-hosted Financial Review Sunday, Weekend Today and A Current Affair. She now presents The Today Show with Georgie Gardner. Deborah and her husband, Lindsay, have three children.

  EMMA ALBERICI is the Chief Economics Correspondent for the ABC. Until 2017 she was the presenter of the ABC’s flagship news and current affairs program Lateline. She has worked as the finance editor for the ABC’s 7.30 and as a reporter for radio current affairs programs AM, PM and The World Today. Between 2008 and 2012, during the height of the global financial crisis, Emma was the ABC’s Europe Correspondent based in London. She was a reporter and producer with A Current Affair, Business Sunday and The Today Show on Australia’s Nine Network. She has written three business books and has been a finalist three times in the Walkley Awards.

  ESTELLE TANG is a senior editor at ELLE.com, where she interviews celebrities and sometimes dresses up like them. She was once asked if her life was like the movie How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and the answer was not ‘No’. She was previously a literary scout, a textbook wrangler, and a contributor at Rookie. She has written reviews and essays for the Guardian, Jezebel, The Age, The Australian, NewYorker.com, Pitchfork, frankie, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Australian Book Review. Estelle lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  FRANK MOORHOUSE has won major national literary prizes for his novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for the highly acclaimed Edith trilogy, Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light novels, which follow the career of an Australian woman struggling to become a diplomat in the 1920s and 1930s through to the 1970s. His most recent book, The Drover’s Wife (Penguin Random House, 2018), brings together works inspired by Henry Lawson’s story and Russell Drysdale’s painting of the same name. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1985 and a Doctor of Letters by the University of Sydney in 2015.

  IVAN COYOTE, born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada, is a writer and storyteller. The author of twelve books, the creator of four films, six stage shows and three albums that combine storytelling with music, in 2019 Ivan will mark twenty-five years on the road as an internationally touring storyteller and musician. Coyote’s new book, ReBent Sinner, will be released in 2019 with Arsenal Pulp Press. In 2017, Ivan was awarded an honorary PhD from Simon Fraser University, Canada, for writing and activism.

  JAMES JEFFREY is the award-winning parliamentary sketch-writer and Strewth columnist for The Australian. His latest book is The Wonks’s Dictionary (MUP), co-created with cartoonist Jon Kudelka. He is also the author of My Family and Other Animus (MUP, 2018) and Paprika Paradise (Hachette Australia, 2007).

  JAN FRAN is a journalist, TV presenter and online commentator. She is best known for hosting The Feed on SBS Viceland and creating The Frant, where she dissects the daily news online, and as guest-host on Network Ten’s The Project. She speaks three languages, has lived in Lebanon, France, Bangladesh and Uganda, and has shot and produced international documentaries for SBS. A social commentator on Sky News and the ABC, she was a finalist for Best Television Personality in Cosmo’s Woman of the Year Award and for the 2018 Walkley for Women’s Leadership in Media. Jan is a Plan International ambassador, advocating for women and girls.

  JENNY VALENTISH is well-accustomed to catastrophe, so much so that she has dedicated three books to the topic: the anthology Your Mother Would Be Proud, the novel Cherry Bomb, and the non-fiction book Woman of Substances: A Journey into Addiction and Treatment. Jenny is a journalist who writes for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Saturday Paper, The Guardian and The Monthly. She lives and works on Dja Dja Wurrung land.

  JEREMY FERNANDEZ is a journalist, producer and presenter with the ABC. He has anchored and reported in the field for some of the network’s most complex broadcasts, including state and federal elections and budgets, the Brexit referendum, the Anzac and Remembrance Day centenaries, Sydney’s Martin Place siege, Melbourne’s Commonwealth Games and Perth’s Claremont serial killer investigation. He has also hosted the Australian of the Year Awards and the Australian Human Rights Commission’s annual awards ceremony. Jeremy has previously worked with CNN, News International and the Seven Network. He was born to an Indian family in Kuala Lumpur, and has since lived and worked in Perth, Melbourne, London and Sydney.

  JUANITA PHILLIPS is a writer and broadcaster who presents the ABC TV’s 7 pm news bulletin in New South Wales. She started in journalism nearly forty years ago, bashing out newspaper stories on a manual typewriter, before moving into television. Juanita has worked in London for the BBC and in the US for CNN International, written children’s books and a memoir called A Pressure Cooker Saved My Life. She tweets about life as a single mother to Boy Teen and Girl Teen.

  KATE MCCLYMONT is an investigative journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald and a seven-time Walkley Award winner, including the Gold Walkley. She was named the 2012 NSW Journalist of the Year for her investigations into the head of the Health Services Union, and the business activities of Eddie Obeid. McClymont is also the recipient of numerous other awards including the Australian Shareholders’ Association Award for excellence in financial reporting, and the NSW Law Society’s Golden Quill Award for excellence in legal reporting (1990
and 1992). In 2017, she was inducted into the Media Hall of Fame. With Linton Besser, she published He Who Must Be Obeid, which chronicles corruption in NSW. She is currently the Pro-Chancellor at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the Senate.

  KIRSTIE CLEMENTS is an author, journalist, speaker and former editor-in-chief (1999–2012) of Vogue Australia. Her memoir of three decades in fashion publishing, The Vogue Factor (MUP 2013), was published in seven countries, followed by a behind-the-scenes novella, Tongue in Chic (MUP 2014), and Impressive: How to Have a Stylish Career (MUP 2015). She has also co-authored two illustrated books on fashion, In Vogue: 50 Years of Australian Style (HarperCollins 2009) and The Australian Women’s Weekly Fashion: The First 50 Years (2014) for the National Library of Australia.

  LARISSA BEHRENDT is the Distinguished Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney and Director of Research and Academic Programs, Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research. Her novel Home won the 2002 David Uniapon Award and a 2005 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, and her second novel, Legacy, won a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Larissa’s most recent book is Finding Eliza. She hosts ABC Radio’s Speaking Out; wrote and directed the feature films After the Apology and Innocence Betrayed; has written and produced several short films; and won the 2018 Australian Directors Guild Award for Best Direction in a Feature Documentary. Larissa was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year Award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year.

  MARC FENNELL, interviewer, author, journalist and presenter, has hosted the ABC podcast Download This Show since 2012, and is regularly on ABC Radio Sydney. He is also the co-anchor of SBS’s current-affairs program The Feed. Marc has worked with the BBC, Triple J, Network Ten, Showtime, Foxtel, Monocle, Fairfax, Junkee, the Sydney Opera House and Red Bull. Based in Sydney, he has reported across the USA, UK, France and Asia. He has written two books, That Movie Book (HarperCollins, 2011) and Planet According to the Movies (HarperCollins, 2016), and created the 2019 Audible Originals series It Burns. Marc is the Creative Director of the not-for-profit group Media Diversity Australia.