by Jessie Close
Journal entry
He came to the Leaf & Bean today to tell me that he is leaving his wife.
Now what?
Journal entry
I have been lying to myself for so long. I need to find myself. I need to know who I am before I can truly love someone else. I need to love myself first if I want someone to love me. I began drinking and began getting involved with men on my 15th summer and drinking and men have been inexplicably intertwined ever since. I still can’t handle either. They are a deadly mix, so deadly that they make me want to die.
1. Men
2. Failure
3. Want to die
4. Drink to not feel
It is a destructive pyramid, a wheel with me in the center keeping it spinning. I keep praying to be free of my obsessions with men. I need to release myself from the bondage that is me.
Journal entry
I wanted my dad to love me but don’t know how to make him. Getting men is easy. Simply spread my legs. Sex seemed to be proof of love. I seduced them so I could reject them to punish myself and to punish them. Why?
Now I have a daughter. How will I protect her from them? How will I protect her from my own self-destructive behavior?
I feel so alone. I feel unloved and unlovable.
I want to die.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Coffee had become cool, and the Leaf and Bean was benefiting from a growing national fascination with specialized coffee shops. We were now earning enough for me to hire a full-time manager and spend more time at home with my children.
I’d taken Mattie to work with me every day since her birth, but she was walking now, and I couldn’t keep an eye on her and conduct business. We kept open bags of beans on the floor near the espresso machine, and one of her favorite tricks was to reach into those bags and throw beans everywhere.
I worked out an arrangement with one of my best employees, who agreed to take care of Mattie at my house in the mornings and then work the rest of her shift that afternoon at the Leaf and Bean.
The investor whom Glenn had brought in initially wanted out, so Mom bought her Leaf and Bean shares, making our store a family-owned operation. I decided to drive with my manager to Whitefish, Montana, to visit the company that supplied our coffee beans. It was a five-hour trek to Montana Coffee Traders, but it was well worth it. I liked R. C. Beall, the company’s owner, from the moment we shook hands. I’d never met anyone so passionate about coffee. He imported his beans from growers whom he knew personally in Monteverde, Costa Rica, a mountain community where he helped growers establish a cooperative so they could earn fair prices for their beans. If you listened to R. C.—and it was hard not to, because he liked to talk—you would think coffee was the most important product in the world. He saw it as a way to bring people together to resolve their differences.
R. C. explained that only about 1 percent of all the coffee beans in the world were air-roasted. Most beans were baked in a rotating drum, but air-roasting—which required suspending the beans on a bed of extremely hot air—allowed each bean to be roasted evenly.
During our tour of his air-roasting operation, R. C. mentioned that coffeehouses in Montana had been created and run almost exclusively by women, because females had been prohibited for years from operating bars.
R. C. and I hit it off so well that we began talking about various ways I could expand sales at the Leaf and Bean, and I came up with what I thought was a clever idea—selling bags of Leaf and Bean coffee in Montana grocery stores.
R. C. thought it was brilliant and immediately offered to join me in a distribution partnership if I could recruit other investors. As soon as I got home, I telephoned Glenn, and she liked the idea. I suggested we sell the coffee in a package that had a photograph of Mom, Glenn, and me on it, since we were the owners of the Leaf and Bean. Paul Newman was making a fortune selling salad dressing, and I felt that having Glenn’s endorsement would give us a similar edge.
Glenn talked to her business manager, and he agreed that the idea of selling Leaf and Bean coffee in stores had potential. He suggested that we begin approaching major coffee companies. I balked. I wanted fresh, air-roasted beans from R. C., not beans from some conglomerate. I needed to learn more about coffee so that I could defend my stance, so I called R. C., and he suggested we visit his growers in Costa Rica. We left immediately, and when I returned, I convinced Glenn and Mom that we needed to use R. C.’s beans.
Glenn arranged for us—R. C., Mom, and me—to meet with her and her business manager in Los Angeles to discuss how we would take the next step. Before we were scheduled to meet, however, my mental illness kicked in. I went from being manic one day to depressed the next and then manic again a few days later. My erratic mood shifts alarmed R. C.—so much so that he pulled out of our deal.
I was determined to make this happen without him. If R. C. didn’t want to roast our coffee, the Leaf and Bean would begin roasting its own beans—or so I thought, until I found out how much it would cost to set up an air-roasting system.
After months of planning and high hopes, I was forced to give up my distribution idea.
In the midst of this turmoil, Noah left his longtime girlfriend, Cherie, for another woman. His new love was Jean, a woman who worked for me at the Leaf and Bean as my baker. Why was he always dating people whom I knew? The situation became even stranger when I invited Cherie to move in with me, because after she broke up with Noah she needed a place to live, and I knew Mattie adored her. By this time, I’d gotten over Noah and no longer cared if he was seeing someone else. Just the same, I dubbed Mattie “my little peacemaker.” Her smiles and energy ended up bringing Cherie and me together as friends.
By 1993, the Leaf and Bean and our adjoining news shop, Poor Richard’s, had twenty-five employees. Everything was going well with both businesses.
Sadly, I wasn’t doing as well. My up-and-down cycles, which had helped destroy my marriage to Tom, were back with a vengeance. I would wake up one morning and find myself slipping into a depression that could last for days or even weeks. Then I would begin to emerge from the darkness, have energy, and be my happy self. My manic phase would arrive next, pushing me over the edge, confusing my thinking, terrifying me with strange thoughts, and turning me into an angry, short-tempered monster.
The signs were obvious to anyone who knew me well. When depressed, I would stop paying bills, not open mail, and stay home rather than reporting to work. I would sit in a chair and stare at nothing for hours. I would avoid answering the phone and talking to people, including my own children. I just wanted to be alone—yet being alone made my mood even worse.
When I became sad, Calen would get angry with me. At age thirteen, he didn’t understand why his mother wasn’t doing her job. Because he was the oldest child, he would be forced to take charge. We would have nasty fights, and he would call me horrible names. Calen was rebellious, emotional, demanding. I think both boys were relieved when their father asked them to live in Utah with him during the 1993–94 school year. When summer rolled around in 1994, Calen wanted to stay in Utah with Tom. I knew he missed his father. I had missed my father as a child, too. Still, his request broke my heart.
I talked to Tom, and both of us felt trapped. I decided Calen could stay in Utah with his dad and I would return to Bozeman with Sander, who wanted out of Utah, but Tom said no. He didn’t want his boys separated, so he told Calen that he had to return to Bozeman. Calen felt rejected by Tom and returned for the summer deeply hurt and angry.
I realized that Calen and I both wore our hearts on our sleeves. I couldn’t read Sander as easily as I could read Calen. I suspected that both my boys were disappointed in me as a mother, with good reason.
The stress of overseeing the Leaf and Bean and Poor Richard’s, taking care of three children, and dating a series of men who ended up as disappointments began to close in around me. I woke up one day with a migraine headache that completely zapped me of my strength and made it impossible fo
r me to function. Over-the-counter medication didn’t ease the pain. I couldn’t get rid of these recurring headaches. The throbbing would be accompanied by what doctors call scintillating scotoma, which causes the field of vision in a person’s eyes to flicker and actually compress, making it difficult to see. Whenever this happened, just keeping my eyes open became a huge chore because they were supersensitive to light.
My doctor gave me shots of Imitrex, a drug that actually reduces vascular swelling in the brain, and they seemed to help. One night I was on my knees in the bathroom giving Mattie a bath when I got such a powerful migraine that I crumpled over on the floor. I yelled to my boys, and they brought me an Imitrex injection. All I had to do was place the syringe against my skin and press a button. When I hesitated, all three of my kids, including little Mattie, standing naked in the tub, began screaming, “Push it, Mom! Push it!” I did, and after lying for several minutes on the floor I was able to get up and function again. I was embarrassed that all my children knew how ill I was.
Although the shots helped, I began self-medicating with my old friend alcohol. I started drinking every day, often hiding hard liquor in sodas—Dr Pepper was my favorite—so no one would realize how much I was drinking.
Vodka and gin helped dull the pain, but the migraines proved relentless. Desperate, I went to see a Bozeman psychiatrist. He prescribed Adderall, a strong stimulant normally used to treat attention deficit disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder but sometimes prescribed off-label to individuals who’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. A stimulant is supposed to help you get out of bed in the morning and make it easier for you to stay focused and active. What I didn’t discover until much later was that many psychiatrists refused to prescribe Adderall to anyone who has bipolar disorder because when their “up” feelings begin to wear off, patients sink even lower into depression than they had been before.
The Adderall caused me to fall into a seemingly bottomless pit of despair, and when that had run its course, I would blast upward into a supermanic period. Even though I would be manic, feelings of emptiness would rise in me. I would feel incredibly lonely and ashamed. The shame would always spark thoughts of suicide.
During a migraine-driven manic moment, I telephoned Glenn shortly before Christmas in 1994 and announced that I wanted out of the Leaf and Bean and Poor Richard’s. Immediately! I wanted her to sell both businesses, and she needed to sell them now!
Glenn called Mom, who was equally surprised by my demands. As soon as she hung up with Glenn, Mom called me.
“Jess,” she said, “I thought you loved running the coffee shop.”
I had no patience and couldn’t understand why Mom was questioning me.
“I can’t. I can’t do this anymore!” I told her. “I just can’t. I’m so tired. I never have any time with the kids, and my headaches are terrible. I just can’t do it.”
When Mom suggested that I take a few days to think about selling, I exploded and launched into a tirade about how I wasn’t going to be trapped any longer. I was the one doing all the grunt work and putting in the sweat equity. If I wanted out, then they needed to sell.
“I can’t stand working there another day,” I moaned.
Because of my obvious inability to cope, Glenn and Mom agreed to sell both businesses. We found a buyer, but as soon as the paperwork was signed, I immediately regretted what I had done.
I loved the Leaf and Bean, and I knew selling it had been a huge mistake. What was wrong with me? Why did I behave this way? I quickly slipped into another funk. What was I going to do now? I felt worthless and ashamed, and once again I reached for booze.
Although they didn’t say anything, I suspect my parents realized that I was feeling overwhelmed, because Dad called me with a proposition.
“Your mother and I would like to pay for Calen and Sander to attend boarding schools back east,” he explained. “They’ll need a good education if they are going to get into the right universities.”
“I’m not sure they want to get into the right universities,” I replied.
“It’s a family tradition,” Dad continued. “You want the best for them, don’t you?”
I wondered but didn’t ask: Do I have a choice?
“I need to speak to Tom,” I said, demurring.
Tom was dead set against it. He knew enough about my family history to realize that this “family tradition” was one reason why I believed my father was emotionally crippled and distant.
“I don’t want someone else raising my kids,” Tom declared. “Besides, the kids I know who grew up in boarding schools are not the kind of kids I want mine to be.”
I should have agreed with his stance, but I didn’t want to disappoint my dad, and I also, deep down, knew that I couldn’t keep taking care of my boys. They were becoming difficult to handle, especially when I was depressed. Because Tom was away I would call my big brother, Sandy, and he would zoom over to help. Inevitably, Sandy would get us all laughing.
I told Tom, “The boys want to go. They want to follow in my dad’s footsteps.”
Tom and I argued, but in the end he relented.
Calen and Sander were both excited. I suspect they were tired of my moods.
Dad was all smiles when he arrived in Bozeman to take my sons back east to visit schools. The trio went first to his alma mater, St. Paul’s School, which dated back to 1856. Dad and his twin brother had attended St. Paul’s after his parents returned to the United States from Paris, and my mother’s father and her late brother also were St. Paul’s alumni along with several male cousins.
Dad loved walking them around the now co-ed campus, singing the school’s praises. Sander ended up at St. Paul’s, and Calen enrolled at the Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire.
Calen was fifteen and Sander was fourteen in 1995, when they left Bozeman. Mattie was four, and I was forty-two.
PART FOUR
THE MONSTER WITHIN ME
I’ve been known to complicate my life.
—from my private journal
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was just Mattie and me—or it should have been just the two of us—but being me, I couldn’t simply leave it that way for long.
A local newspaper asked me to write a column called CloseShots, which would contain a five-hundred-word profile of someone local along with a photo that I took of that person. For one of my first columns I chose an old cowboy who lived about fifty minutes away from Bozeman. Actually, he lived in McAllister, which was named after the local family who’d settled there before Montana’s statehood. But it never caught on as a town and wasn’t recognized as one when the federal censuses were taken. The closest “big” town was Ennis, which boasted 838 residents.
The cowboy’s ranch was in the foothills, and after I finished interviewing him and snapping photos, I headed west toward McAllister and the highway back home. Somewhere I got off track, and as I was rounding a turn on a gravel road I saw a cottage with a good-size outbuilding near a creek shaded by cottonwood trees. A For Sale sign stood at the entrance. I decided to investigate.
A real-estate agent would call this listing “charmingly rustic,” which meant it was pretty run-down. Peering through its windows, I counted two bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and an equally small living room. The lot contained two fir trees, flowering crabapple trees, and a lawn that took me down to a creek. That creek was what captured my imagination. Clear water flowing over and around multicolored stones made a gentle trickling sound that was sweet to me. I leaned against the house and took it all in—the creek, the hills, the dots of bright yellow and blue wildflowers—all leading to a backdrop of blackish-blue mountains that jutted from the earth like a giant’s backbone. When a blue heron circled over me, eyeing the cool creek waters, I took it as a sign. This would be a good place for Mattie and me to live.
I’d stumbled on this adorable bungalow by chance, but my decision to buy it was not based entirely on serendipity. I had met a man who
lived in McAllister—let’s call him Phillip—and my newest infatuation clearly was influencing my desire to leave Bozeman. I called a real-estate agent and told her that I wanted to purchase the bungalow in McAllister and sell my home in Bozeman.
As soon as I listed my house for sale, I began having second thoughts. I found myself in yet another familiar place, making another rash decision. Although my boys were attending boarding schools, this was their home, and selling it would make them feel as if they were strangers when they returned for holidays and summers. I pushed those thoughts away.
Because I’d already signed contracts, I couldn’t back out. I had reached a point in my life where I could recognize the mistakes I was making while I was manic. Recognizing a problem, however, is not the same as fixing one. I left my Bozeman house feeling sad about what I had done but also excited to start over. Again.
Mattie and I dubbed our new home the Mouse House, not because of all the mice who lived with us but because Mouse was Mattie’s nickname. We both settled in nicely. I especially enjoyed listening to the water in the creek as it gurgled by us. In the summer, the creek became a wonderful play area where Mattie and I could wade, sail miniature boats, and search for fish. In the winter, it would gorge from its banks and freeze inches from the retaining wall. Mattie loved skating on this ice while I slid around, trying to keep from falling, and our dogs scratched at the ice with their paws for footing as they slipped over it. At this time we had Mattie’s little white dog, Murray, Sander’s dog, Joey, and my dog, Wowie. Joey was a cattle dog whom we’d rescued down in Utah at a shelter, and Wowie was a Samoyed whom Noah had given us, a dog he had raised. Wowie guarded Mattie at all times, and the wildness on the ice worried him. He stayed very close to his little girl.