Ticked

by James A. Fussell

  Since both Jeff and Debra were strapped for cash and neither had a car, they spent a lot of time at home or walking to nearby parks with the kids. Over Labor Day weekend Debra invited Jeff to a family barbecue at her cousin Betty’s house. Thanks to his medication, Jeff managed to keep his tics in check long enough to make a good impression. One of Debra’s cousins brought a horse to the gathering. The children soon glommed onto the tall new stranger, taking turns asking him to put them on the horse. Debra watched the gentle and charming way Jeff played with the kids and interacted with her cousin Nancy.

  “Deb,” Nancy said. “You’ve got a good one there. Don’t let him get away.”

  “Don’t worry,” Debra said. She had fallen in love with him. At the same time, however, Jeff was falling victim to rapidly worsening tics. Deb didn’t see them at first. But within weeks after they started dating little things became more apparent—the constant clearing of his throat, spreading his fingers wide apart, facial grimaces, and the explosive arm and leg movements. Debra knew something was wrong. But Jeff was so handsome, and they had so much chemistry, that it didn’t matter to her.

  It mattered to Jeff. He worried that she would reject him as many others had. Still, he had to tell her. He had to be free to tic in front of her, and for her to accept what she was seeing. It was only fair. But how could he tell her? And what would she think of him?

  More than a month later, he finally worked up the courage. As they 147 sat together on a white love seat watching a movie, he paused it and took her hand. He put his right leg on the cushion and turned his body to face her. Then he put his left hand gently on top of her right.

  “We have to talk,” he said.

  Uh-oh. Debra thought he was breaking up with her.

  Jeff locked his eyes on hers. “There’s something I really need to tell you,” he said, as his right leg began to twitch. “I was born with a condition that causes motor and vocal tics. Do you know what a tic is?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Some of my dad’s patients had movement disorders that caused tics.”

  “Well,” Jeff said. “The condition I have is called Tourette Syndrome.” Jeff cocked his head and smiled. “It can’t kill me. But it does cause me to have arm or leg tics that can be very noticeable, especially in stressful situations. And sometimes the heat can cause them to flare up, or even changes in the weather.”

  He leaned in. “Do you know what Tourette Syndrome is? Because I want to want to make sure you don’t stereotype it like the public does as the ‘swearing disease.’”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m aware of what Tourette’s is, and I know how the public misperceives it. But tell me more about it.”

  Jeff sighed. She hadn’t freaked out. She hadn’t thrown him down the stairs. And she wanted to know more!

  He put on his teacher’s hat. “Tourette’s is a neurological chemical imbalance in the brain in a location called the basal ganglia …” he started.

  Debra relaxed her body and put her arm on the back of the sofa as she engaged more fully in the conversation. After fifteen minutes of talking, Debra said, “Yeah. I’ve noticed sometimes you’ll extend your fingers out and stretch them. It looks painful. I’ve also noticed that sometimes you blink your eyes quickly. I always assumed your eyes were just dry.”

  “Good,” Jeff said. “I’m glad that you’ve seen them. I’ve wanted to tell you for so long, but I was scared and I didn’t want to be rejected—again. Especially after I’ve fallen so deeply in love with you.”

  “They don’t matter to me,” Debra said, reaching out to enfold his hand in hers. “And I love you too. I love you for who you are inside.”

  Jeff closed his eyes and took a big breath. It was as if someone had just lifted a thousand-pound weight off his shoulders and erased a life-time of bad memories.

  “Really?” he said, smiling at her. They fell into each other’s arms in a soft embrace.

  JEFF AND DEBRA dated for another month before Jeff moved out of his uncle Paul’s apartment and into his own place in Shaker Heights in September 2002. It was exciting. For the first time in a long time, things were looking up. He had a job, money in the bank, and he’d fallen in love with a beautiful woman. And now he was getting his own apartment!

  For the first time in his life he felt truly free. This was his time, he thought. The sun was out, the sky was blue, and nothing could hold him back—not even his Tourette’s. With a positive outlook for the days ahead, he paid the landlord in cash and moved in.

  He wished that the positive feeling he had about his life would last forever.

  It didn’t.

  A month later, the dark clouds that had parted so quickly for him began to roll back in just as fast.

  27

  “Jeff, It’s Deb. Where Are You?”

  DEPRESSION COVERED JEFF like a blanket. He knew Debra had developed feelings for him, and he for her. He dropped his head. It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t.

  You’re going to mess it up, he told himself. You’re going to be a failure, just like always!

  She didn’t know the real him. The voices in his head grew louder and more insistent. You’re a fraud, Jeff. A fraud!

  He wasn’t worthy of her love. And what right did he have to drag her into his secret world of pain? Sure, she knew he had tics. But she didn’t know how ugly they could get. She didn’t know anything!

  As his desperation grew more dangerous, Jeff did little to make his new place a home. He didn’t deserve a nice place. He didn’t furnish it or clean it. Before long the one-room apartment became dingy. Normally a very clean person, Jeff stopped bathing and washing his clothes. His apartment had become a prison. The heat and electricity didn’t work, and he didn’t even care if the landlord ever fixed them.

  Let’s face it, he thought, I’m a nobody. A born loser. The best he could do was survive one more day in the dark and the cold.

  He dropped out of sight, didn’t go to Debra’s house anymore, didn’t return her phone calls. And he wouldn’t answer his door. He wouldn’t even call his own mom and dad, even after they left numerous messages pleading for him to do so. He felt infected, and he didn’t want to spread his sickness—even over the phone.

  Debra was confused, worried. She left numerous e-mails and phone messages. “Jeff, are you all right?” she said. “Jeff, it’s Deb. Where are you? Why won’t you call me back?” Weeks passed.

  When Jeff finally called Debra back, he was not himself. He seemed distant, odd. “I’m not going to be able to see you anymore,” he said. “I’m joining the navy.”

  Jeff was not eating, exercising, or leaving his dirty apartment by this time. He had cut off all social interaction. Not only was he not in his right state of mind, he began believing things that weren’t true.

  “The navy?” Debra said, perplexed.

  “Yeah,” Jeff said. “I applied several months ago. They’re putting me into a secret program. My phones are going to be tapped, and I’m not going to be able to see or talk to anybody for quite some time.”

  “What?” Debra said. It didn’t make any sense. Jeff never said anything about going into the navy. With his bad knee and the severity of his tics, the navy would never let him join. Besides—had he forgotten? They had planned a life together. Debra’s mind raced. What was wrong? What had happened to him?

  The next day Debra had a friend watch her kids and took a taxi to Jeff’s apartment. Worried, she knocked on the door.

  No answer.

  She stepped back and saw movement through a window. Frantic, she banged on the door. “Jeff! Come down here and talk to me,” she yelled. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  He never did.

  It was likely a problem with his medications, she thought. An overdose, an underdose, or perhaps a drug interaction. Concerned, she called Jeff’s parents.

  “Mrs. Matovic,” she said that evening, “my name is Debra Janning, and I’ve been dating your son.”

  Debra could almost hear the “Oh
no” in the silence on the other end. Then Patty said, “Hold on a second. Jim! Get on the phone.”

  Debra swallowed hard. “First off I want to tell you what an incredibly wonderful, caring, loving son you have,” she said. “I think he’s the most wonderful man in the world. But there’s something going on here that I’m concerned about.” Debra recounted the strange events.

  Patty Matovic said she’d call her brother, Paul, who lived in South Euclid to go check on Jeff. The next day Paul knocked on Jeff’s door and got lucky. Jeff knew it wasn’t Debra or his parents, so he thought it might be safe. Besides, he hadn’t collected his mail for several weeks.

  Once inside, Paul knew right away something was very wrong. Jeff was naturally clean and tidy, to the point of obsessiveness. But his apartment was filthy. Even more worrisome, Jeff himself appeared incoherent and had not shaved or bathed in several days.

  Paul called Jeff’s parents, who came immediately and drove him to the emergency room. He was sent to Laurelwood, a mental health satellite branch of University Hospitals, for a seventy-two-hour psychiatric observation.

  When Jim Matovic visited his son at Laurelwood, his heart sank. It was frightening to see his youngest child in a padded room with everything stripped away that he possibly could use to cause himself harm. There were no strings or cords of any kind. They had even removed the cloth tie around his bathrobe.

  Jeff’s father tried to smile, but all he could think was how heart-wrenching it was. He kept the visit short. What could he say other than he loved him?

  After three days Jeff was released, but he was not allowed to go back to his apartment. He stayed with family for more than half a year. At his doctor’s urging he enrolled in an intensive class to learn something called dialectical behavioral therapy. The class, the doctor told him, would help him better deal with tics and the stress of his increasingly difficult life. Jeff took the doctor’s advice. The class helped him to think more clearly and not act so impulsively. It gave him an emotional tool belt to deal with stressful situations so that they wouldn’t spiral out of control.

  A week before Christmas 2002, Jeff called Deb and said he wanted to celebrate graduating from his dialectical behavioral therapy class. And he told her he had found a little calico cat and named her Leah. Knowing how much Deb loved cats, Jeff asked her for advice on properly caring for his new pet. Debra could hear it in his voice. Her Jeff was back.

  Not long afterward, Deb let Jeff stay at her place. A day turned into two, which turned into a week. Eventually they decided to make it permanent.

  In January 2003, Jeff moved in with Debra for good.

  28

  “How Much Do You Love Me?”

  LIVING WITH DEBRA proved to be just what Jeff needed. They watched movies together, played basketball, went out for pizza, and stayed home laughing and talking. As the months passed, their relationship deepened. They had fallen deeply in love.

  On the night of April 3, 2003, Jeff told Debra he was taking her out for ice cream. Except he wasn’t. It was just a ruse to get her out of the house. Instead of stopping at an ice cream parlor, the couple stopped at a Catholic church known as St. Greg’s to say a prayer for Jeff’s knee surgery the next day. Alone in the sanctuary in the early evening, they prayed as the sun streamed playfully through the stained-glass windows in the eighty-one-year-old gothic church.

  Sitting in a pew near the front, the couple started talking quietly about their lives, reminiscing about times that had brought them closer. Jeff rested his folded hands on the pew in front of him. He stared at the church’s crucifix in silence for several minutes. Debra placed her hand on his right knee.

  “Whenever you’re done, just let me know,” she whispered. “But certainly there’s no rush.” When they got up from the pews and headed toward the exit, Jeff reached out to grab Debra’s left hand as they passed a table full of prayer candles.

  “Hold on a second,” he said in a serious but calm voice.

  Debra turned until she was facing him.

  “You know that I love you so very much, and have cherished every 153 moment I have spent with you,” he said.

  “I feel the same way,” she said.

  “Debra?” Jeff said, pausing for effect. “How much do you love me?”

  He knew the answer. “Fifty cents!” she said with a smile.

  It was the same answer he used to give to his mother as a young boy when he thought fifty cents was just about the largest fortune he could imagine.

  Debra took his hands and repeated her answer. “Fifty cents!” she said. “A million dollars!”

  “Well, here’s how much I love you,” Jeff said, getting down on his one knee and pulling a sparkling diamond engagement ring out of his pocket. “This much.”

  She covered her mouth with her hands.

  “Yes!” she said through her tears, throwing her arms around him. “Oh yes!”

  THE WORD OF the engagement spread quickly. Jeff and Debra were planning a life together.

  By this time Jeff had met Debra’s parents and spent time with them. Recently they had all gone to dinner with Deb’s aunt Jean at the Brown Derby, a steak restaurant in Cleveland where the local custom was cracking fresh, ballpark peanuts at your table, then tossing the shells on the floor.

  Mike Janning, Debra’s father, was a good judge of character. Jeff was clearly a good man who loved his little girl. But when he saw Jeff’s tics, he couldn’t help but wonder—as a father and a physician—if love would be enough. While he and Debra ran an errand together, he turned to her in his car.

  “Debra,” he said in his best concerned father voice. “Are you … sure about Jeff?” He talked about his tics and how difficult life could become if they got worse. He talked in stark terms. These things can be hell to live with, he told her. And they can change and make your life harder than you could possibly imagine.

  And so he asked her again. “Are you sure?”

  Debra put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sure, Dad,” she said.

  “But his tics …”

  “I’m sure, Dad. I don’t care about his tics.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Very much,” she said.

  Mike Janning sighed and gazed far out the window, still not sure himself. “Well,” he finally said, “as long as you’ve thought about this.”

  29

  Little Beige on the Side

  JEFF AND DEBRA eagerly started planning their future together. They talked about getting married at the Great Lakes Renaissance Fair in the summer of 2004 in Rock Creek, about an hour outside of Cleveland. And in early August 2003, they moved from Debra’s small apartment on Green Road to a two-story rental house in Lyndhurst.

  The large white house felt like a palace by comparison. It had a full living room, a full dining room, and a large great room. There were three bedrooms upstairs and a finished rec room and workshop downstairs. Built in the 1950s, it had dark hardwood floors, a hoop in the driveway, and a wooden fence around the backyard. Morning and afternoon sun poured through new windows in the great room, while the living room sported a light brown window seat under a bay window. Virtually everything was new in the large kitchen, and the gorgeous light brown oak cabinets made Debra smile.

  Little by little they began to make the house their own. One Saturday they decided to paint their bedroom beige. Jeff wore an old John Carroll T-shirt, a pair of paint-spattered navy gym shorts, and old white tennis shoes stained green from mowing the lawn. Deb wore old blue jeans and a white paint shirt. They laid down a clear sheet of plastic to protect the hardwood floor and began to paint the walls. Debra smiled as she painted.

  “What?” Jeff said, looking back at her.

  “It’s just going to feel so good to get everything the way we want it. I can’t wait until we get this done. We already have the paint for Bonnie’s bedroom and your office. Do you still want the accent wall in your office to be hunter green?”

  “That’d be great,” Jeff said.
“We can go pick that up tomorrow morning.”

  As they continued painting, Jeff quipped, “You know that green wall may just give us luck and make us rich,” he said. “It is the color of money!”

  “Yeah, right!” Deb said. “When Ed McMahon shows up on our doorstep on Saturday morning, then I’ll believe it.”

  “Hey, a guy can dream for miracles, can’t he?”

  Deb smiled and shook her head. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  By the middle of the afternoon they had both made good progress on their walls. But with all his hard work, Jeff soon overheated. That sent his tics into warp drive. His right leg began thumping against the wooden floor so hard it rattled the lights in the living room. He let out a series of five explosive grunts. His eyes opened wide, before blinking shut hard. His nose scrunched like a bunny’s and his mouth grimaced and contorted.

  “You want to stop now, babe?” Deb said. “Get a drink of water?”

  “Nah, I’m all right. Just let me just take a breath. I’ll be fine.”

  “OK. But after we finish let’s go down and grab a sandwich and have a nice lunch.”

  “Yeah … sounds good.”

  But painting a wall when his Tourette’s was acting up was difficult at best. Jeff loaded his roller with beige paint and pressed it to the wall with his right hand. But before he could start rolling, a savage tic caused that arm to jerk backward with a violent twitch. With all the force he could muster, he flung a large blob of beige paint over his left shoulder, tagging Debra square in the back between her shoulder blades with a loud splat!

  Oh God! Jeff turned around quickly to see where the paint had gone. Did he hit the ceiling? Had he tossed some out in the hallway?

  Nope.

  Slowly, Debra reached over her right shoulder and felt the splotch of paint. With her mouth and eyes wide open in surprise, she turned around and extended her hands as if to say, “Oh you did not just do that!” Then Debra showed Jeff a side of her he had never seen—an exciting, childlike side that he liked very much. Wearing a wicked smile, she glared at the brush she had just loaded with beige paint and said, “Oh yeah? Well, take this!”