“I’d just stand there with my hands in my pockets and stare at the tombstone, and stare at the dates and think about myself being six feet down in a coffin, being cold. But that didn’t bother me because that’s just a physical body. And I knew if that was me down there below that dirt that I would be in heaven with my grandparents.”
“What else do you remember?” I asked.
“I remember kneeling down at a tombstone, and as I knelt with both knees on the soggy, wet ground, I placed my hands in a praying position on the tombstone of this person who I didn’t know. The name was Jeffrey P. Orwell, born 1973, died 2001. Close enough, I thought. I knelt down, put my hands on top of the tombstone like I was supporting it [and] giving it love.” He interlaced his fingers and demonstrated how he put his palms on the top of the tombstone.
“And then I prayed out loud,” he said. “God, why did you take this person and not reserve this spot for me?” he asked.
He rose from the gravestone and stared deeply into the nothingness of the night. Except for the pain of his tics, he was empty inside. A cold wind blew in the echoing silence as he wiped his moist, red eyes and walked back to his car.
24
Luvox, Klonopin, and a Suit to Be Buried In
“POISON CONTROL.”
On the day Jeff decided to kill himself, dread coursed through his stomach like a knot of rattlesnakes. Staring at an open pill bottle, he called the Greater Cleveland Poison Control Center and pretended to be a panic-stricken father.
“It’s my son!” he said. “I think he’s taken thirty Klonopin pills! What do I do? Could that be a lethal dose?”
“Yes sir. That definitely can be very harmful. You should take your son to an emergency room right now. How old is the child?”
“Thank you,” Jeff said.
“It might be better to call 9-1-1. How close are you to the nearest ER?”
“Thank you,” Jeff said. “I have to go now.”
After hanging up the phone, he walked to his closet, then back to his bed. Carefully he laid out his dark blue suit—the suit he wanted to be buried in.
His tics had become too much. Life had become too much. He had run into rude people all day who made fun of him. They pointed at him, laughed at him, mocked him behind his back and straight to his face. Worse, his obsessive-compulsive disorder was out of control. He couldn’t open his eyes without being obsessed with calculating the midpoints of random objects.
Besides, what was the point of life anyway? To suffer? Because it seemed like that’s all he had been doing lately.
It was early 2001 and something terrible had shaken Jeff to his core. His beloved Grandpa Matovic had died the previous September. It hit him like a bolt out of the blue. He had never lost a loved one before. The news did more than leave a hole in his heart. It sent him into a wild, spiraling depression, the likes of which he had never seen.
He always told himself: “If I could just be half the man he is, I will have succeeded greatly in this life.” His grandpa was the epitome of the John Carroll motto—he was “a man for others.” In many ways his Grandpa Matovic was his hero. He wore well-worn, soft flannel shirts. He was a teddy bear. His hugs were special. He would hold you and he wouldn’t let go until you would. Jeff had never hugged anyone and felt that much love passing between them. It was almost like you were getting embraced by the spirit of God and enfolded in his love.
Jeff talked to his grandpa all the time and went to visit him. He had been in assisted living. One day he grabbed a newspaper, got his coffee, and sat down in his favorite recliner. Then he had a heart attack and died—just like that. He was Jeff’s first grandparent to die. He was always his favorite grandparent.
And to know that that relationship was gone just annihilated Jeff’s hopes and sent him spiraling downward.
Now Jeff hated the world. He couldn’t stand to look outside and see happy people. It wasn’t fair. The world was out to cheat him. God was cruel. He had not only given him Tourette’s and OCD, now he had taken his favorite grandfather too? How much was he supposed to be able to take?
Jeff hated all the meaningless clichés that people tossed his way. “Things will get better,” they said. “Hang in there.”
Hang in there? Jeff thought. Fucking hang in there? He was in so much emotional and physical pain he was convinced that it must have been visibly radiating off of him. He felt like saying, “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see my pain? Don’t you know how much I’m dealing with?”
He said that to his own parents. “Jeff,” they’d respond, “we just don’t know how to help you. But we’ll try to get you someone who can.”
“I don’t want help!” he screamed. “Nobody can help me! Nobody 139 can fix anything. That’s it! Period!”
His mother cried. She’d sit with him in a dark wooden rocking chair in the dining room of their Bay Village home and put her head on his shoulder.
“Whatever help you need,” she said. “Just tell me. I’ll either give it to you myself, or I will find someone who can give it to you. I just love you so much,” she said in a tremulous voice, with tears rolling down her face. “I am trying every minute to understand what you are going through. I would sacrifice my life if it would get you the help that you need to ensure your safety, and help you achieve all that you’ve wanted.”
His dad would hold him too, and look at his boy with tears streaming down his face as he firmly gripped his shoulders. “You’re the toughest son of a gun that I’ve ever met!” he said. “I’m so proud of you. Look at what you did at John Carroll!” His voice dropped to a whisper. “You did what people said you’d never do. You proved all those assholes wrong!”
Jeff didn’t care about the assholes. He didn’t care about John Carroll. It was as if he had blinders on. All he cared about was making the pain go away. Desperate to end his suffering, he picked up his plastic prescription bottle and poured a pile of multicolored meds into his palm—both Luvox and Klonopin. One by one they were a prison; all at once they were freedom. It was a powerful thought. Liberating.
Try and stop this, Tourette’s! “Stupid life!” he cried out loud. Jeff gulped the pills, as many and as fast as he could, cramming them down his throat as if plunging a silver dagger into the heart of his pain.
Immediately afterward, though, Jeff stood up and snatched the phone in a panic. He was so confused. He didn’t really want to die. It just felt so good to finally take some action, to strike out, to do something rather than just take it day after day. Groggy, he called his mother as the darkness began to close in around him.
Patty Matovic rushed to her son’s apartment. Tasting fear in her mouth, she searched the place, finally finding him, half in bed and half on the floor. She saw the bottle of pills on the nightstand.
“Jeff!” She didn’t know if he was alive or dead. With tears in her eyes she shook her son, desperately trying to get some response. He didn’t move.
With shaking hands, she picked up the phone and dialed 9-1-1. Minutes later paramedics arrived and took him to the hospital.
25
“Get in Here and Take Care of Me!”
“HEY, YOU FUCKING son of bitch! Get in here and take care of me!” Jeff didn’t usually talk like that. He was delusional. Even after getting his stomach pumped at the Cleveland Clinic, the drugs continued to rage through his bloodstream. They caused confusion and paranoia.
“We’ve got to get your respirations up,” he heard a trauma doctor say. “Because if we don’t, we could be looking at a very serious problem.”
Who was this? And what was going on? For a while he didn’t know who he was—or where he was. But one thing was sure. If he hadn’t gotten there, he would have died.
Angry, combative, and suspicious, he took his confusion out on his nurses. He called them names, tried to hit them, and screamed when teams of them held him down to give him shots or force the liquid charcoal down his throat that burned like battery acid. In his altered state he thought he wa
s under attack.
“What are you giving me?” he screamed.
The nurses tried to calm him, tell him they were there to help. Their words were meaningless. He didn’t want to be touched. He felt like a fighter, only he couldn’t tell whether he was still slugging it out or if he had already been knocked out.
He spent three days in the hospital—the three worst days of his life. As his body began to process the chemical soup in his system, his severe withdrawal symptoms scared him more than anything he had ever faced. Frigidly cold, colder than he had ever been in his life, his body shook so hard he rattled the side of his bed. Even after nurses covered him with six hospital blankets, he continued to shiver. It felt like he was lying naked in the snow. The only thing that made sense in his confusion and discomfort was to yell as loudly as he could for help.
“I just want to talk to my dad!” he screamed. “Get my dad on the phone—now! Call him at work and tell him his son needs to talk to him.”
It was 3:00 AM. Time had no meaning in the haze of his drug-addled brain. After his body stabilized and the drugs left his system, he was released.
He felt lucky to be alive. After all, he really didn’t want to die.
It was one of the biggest mistakes of his life. In the months that followed he realized how foolish he had been and how much it would have hurt his family if he had died. Slowly he refocused himself and regained the will to live.
26
“Nice Boots!”
IN HIS LATE twenties, Jeff got a job working with severely autistic kids at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation’s Children’s Center for Rehabilitation. His job gave him both a steady income and great satisfaction. The kids inspired him, and they didn’t care if he ticked.
After months of work he had finally made a breakthrough with a five-year-old nonverbal boy by using behavior modification to get the child to point to pictures in sequence to communicate the phrase, “I like to play at recess.”
Jeff smiled broadly as he sat across a desk from the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy. “Recess?” he said, using the picture book to give his response. “Me too!” He pointed to pictures in sequence to say, “Let’s play ball at recess.”
The rail-thin boy smiled in return. It was essentially his first successful communication. Jeff had taken a special interest in the boy and worked hard with him. He even researched special techniques on his own time.
Jeff stayed with his uncle Paul and aunt Karen in the Cleveland suburb of South Euclid while he looked for an apartment nearer to his job. Life was far from perfect, but it was as good as it could be considering his serious tics. Medications helped—most of the time. His job at the center kept him busy and distracted. That helped hold his tics in check. Sure, he had his dark days. But other days were good. August 20, 2002, was great.
Done for the day, he waved good-bye to his coworkers. Dressed in khakis, leather dress shoes, and a blue, three-button, short-sleeved polo with the rehab center’s logo on the left breast, he felt good as he walked to the Rapid, Cleveland’s light-rail train. Jeff didn’t have a car. The reasons were more than financial. While he could drive, he didn’t trust himself to do it all the time. Every day after work he took the green line to his stop in Eastern Cleveland, just outside of Shaker Heights, where he caught a bus home. He made the same trip every day.
But on Tuesday, August 20, 2002, his commute was anything but ordinary.
DEBRA JANNING WASN’T looking for a man.
The five-foot-three, attractive thirty-three-year-old with the reddish-brown hair had two children—preteens from her first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1995. She had just gotten out of a relationship six months earlier, and she had recently turned down several men who had asked her on dates.
You know something? she thought. I’m done with men. That’s it. I’m going to focus on myself, and my work, and raising my kids.
She worked as an administrative assistant to the director of sales at the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau of Greater Cleveland. She and her kids, eleven-year-old Bonnie and nine-year-old Mike, lived in a duplex on Green Road in South Euclid, right on the bus line. With no money for a car, she took the bus to her stop in Eastern Cleveland, just outside of Shaker Heights.
At the end of the day on August 20, 2002, Debra Janning walked to that same bus stop to go back home. Her kids were spending the week with her ex-husband, who had moved to Toledo after the divorce. Bonnie and Mike would be coming home that weekend.
It was sunny, with just a pinch of autumn in the air, when Debra arrived at the bus stop just after 5:00 PM. She felt good in a new outfit—a crisp black suit with a three-button blazer and a burgundy shirt and mid-cut, black leather zip-up boots not even twenty-four-hours old.
A slight breeze blew as the train doors opened and passengers began stepping off of the green line. Debra’s eyes glazed over them all … until—
Wait a minute! Her eyes settled on Jeff. He was six-foot-five and athletically slender, with coal-black hair and large white teeth. She had always liked tall men. And this one was cute!
At the same time Jeff had taken notice of the petite woman in the sexy black boots sitting on the bus bench with her legs crossed and her hand over her purse. Wow! he thought.
She was so pretty and well dressed. She looked like a professional. Better yet, she was alone! Jeff smiled as he walked toward the bench and sat down next to her.
At the time, the cocktail of meds Jeff was on were working well enough so that—over short bursts of time—you wouldn’t notice anything was wrong.
To Debra he just seemed charming.
“Nice boots!” he said.
Debra looked down, then smiled shyly. “Who are you, and why do you like my boots?” she said.
“I just like ’em,” he said.
They exchanged names. Jeff made her laugh. The small talk was nothing special—but the sparks they felt when they looked into each other’s eyes were. He asked about her job, then she about his. They realized neither of them owned a car.
The Number 34 Green Road bus came in four minutes. It seemed like seconds.
Debra stood up when her bus arrived.
“Oh, that’s my bus too,” Jeff said.
Great, Debra thought. What a wonderful chance to keep talking to this guy.
They boarded together. Debra sat down first on one of the bench seats on the right side facing the middle of the bus. There was another seat in front of her and behind her. But to her surprise, Jeff sat down right next to her. They sat together facing a young man in his early twenties on the bench seat on the left side.
The conversation continued, and for fifteen minutes it was as if they were alone on the bus. They couldn’t take their eyes off each other. Debra’s heart beat faster. There was just something about this guy—his eyes, his smile, his charm.
Debra Janning wasn’t looking for a man. But she may have found 145 one. As the bus neared her stop, she handed Jeff her business card with her phone number on the back. “Give me a call sometime,” she said.
Jeff took the card and watched her walk off the bus. After she did, the guy in the seat facing him raised his eyebrows and gave Jeff a thumbs-up.
“Smooth move, man!” he said.
BACK HOME, JEFF pulled the card out of his khakis and put it in his wallet. He couldn’t stop thinking about the pretty woman in the sexy boots. He called her the next night for a date that weekend. Deb couldn’t make it then but they made a date for the next week. In the meantime they continued to see each other at the stop and on the Green Road bus. Jeff was smitten by Debra, a woman as smart and interesting as she was sassy and sexy. They continued talking, and laughing. And the more Debra looked into Jeff’s deep brown eyes, the more she felt like she was falling into them, getting lost in them. It was almost like she could see into his soul.
After four days they had their first romantic moment, a tender kiss while sitting in the steel-and-glass bus shelter. It was the most natural kiss Debra had ever experienced
. And the electricity was off the scale. If there were people sitting around them, she neither noticed nor cared.
On the night of their first date, Jeff came over to Debra’s house, where they watched Beauty and the Beast with her kids and ordered a hand-tossed cheese pizza from Marco’s. It wasn’t anything fancy, but for Jeff and Debra it felt right. They had fun just being around each other, and neither felt pressure to be someone they weren’t.
Debra lived on the second floor of a stylish but humid three-bedroom duplex on Green Road. The house had beige walls, seven-foot ceilings, and low-hanging ceiling fans. Many times the former basketball player would forget the fans were there and take a spinning blade to the forehead. After the kids went to bed, Debra and Jeff walked down to the first floor and out to her landlady’s front porch. Debra usually didn’t go there. But it was such a nice evening that she made an exception. She sat with Jeff on the porch swing with blue-and-white striped cushions.
For their second date, Jeff borrowed his uncle’s car, an older four-door sedan. He took Debra to the Improv, a comedy club on the West Bank of Cleveland’s Flats. He showed up at Debra’s door in a suit carrying a bouquet of summer flowers. She answered the door in a little black dress.
While Debra enjoyed Jeff’s company, it wasn’t long before she noticed his curious collection of shakes, blinks, twitches, and sounds. While she wondered about them, they weren’t bad enough to scare her off. She had seen tics before. In high school she had worked in her father’s medical office and had seen many nice people with many odd problems. She herself had worn braces on her legs when she was a toddler. Her father, a podiatrist, taught her never to judge people by their medical issues, but to look inside. The more Debra looked at who Jeff was inside, the more she fell for him. They began spending a lot of time together. The more comfortable he became, the more his fun and playful personality came out. Not long into their relationship, Debra’s kids had grown close to Jeff too.
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