Nothing General About It

by Maurice Benard

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  For my beautiful angel, Paula, and my family,

  who never gave up on me, and

  for anyone affected by mental illness—

  don’t ever give up

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One / Cruisin’

  Chapter Two / Livin’ on a Prayer

  Chapter Three / Highway to Hell

  Chapter Four / Doctor My Eyes

  Chapter Five / Free Fallin’

  Chapter Six / God Part II

  Chapter Seven / Welcome to the Jungle

  Chapter Eight / Man in the Mirror

  Chapter Nine / Sweet Child o’ Mine

  Chapter Ten / Isn’t She Lovely

  Chapter Eleven / Beautiful Boy

  Chapter Twelve / Tears in Heaven

  Chapter Thirteen / Celluloid Heroes

  Chapter Fourteen / God Only Knows

  Chapter Fifteen / The Godfather Waltz

  Chapter Sixteen / The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades

  Chapter Seventeen / Accentuate the Positive

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Section

  About the Authors

  Where to Go for Help

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Some twenty-seven years ago, mobster Michael “Sonny” Corinthos, Jr., appeared in the fictional city of Port Charles, New York, and took the town—and General Hospital fans around the world—by storm. Through the years, Sonny has survived his enemies, his wives, and himself, and fans know that there have been a lot of enemies, a lot of wives, and many personal demons.

  We have that in common, me and Sonny, that battle against ourselves. Not so much the enemies and wives part—I’m grateful that I met the love of my life when I was twenty-two and eventually got to marry her in spite of the many obstacles we faced. But I’ll get to that; that’s a pretty wild story, too.

  It’s funny, because when the General Hospital executives created the character for me in 1993, I believed life was going to be great: Hollywood, glamour, money, fame . . . sky’s the limit. But rocketing to notoriety wasn’t as glamorous as people might think, and neither was what would become a decades-long love/hate relationship with Sonny, a guy who nobody else has ever played.

  There wasn’t even a honeymoon period on the show—only three weeks in and I was already in serious trouble. It wasn’t the kind Corinthos gets into, either. He’s always caught up in mobster problems, legal issues, someone trying to take over his territory. Nobody was shooting at me or threatening my kids—I didn’t even have kids yet.

  Nobody was trying to rip me off or put me in jail, it was true, but I did have a credible and insidious enemy that was very dark and very lethal—it just wasn’t a rival mobster in Port Charles. My enemy was worse because there was no way I could escape—I physically could not get out of harm’s way because my enemy was me.

  If your job requires that you learn twenty pages of dialogue a night, and film every single day, without multiple takes, you had better show up prepared, because in daytime TV you don’t get to have bad days or sick days. Binge-watching may seem like a new thing, but that audience has always been there for daytime TV, ravenously tuning in every single day expecting to see what happens next.

  Sometimes, because the show literally must go on, you just have to fake it. I had learned how to do that, to get through the anxiety, until one day when it all fell apart. That morning I got to set and couldn’t remember my lines at all, but what was even more disturbing was that I could barely move. I was too terrified to look in the mirror, because I had no idea who or what I would see. It took everything inside me to open the door and walk out of my dressing room. I’ll never forget how alone I felt, how the fear consumed me.

  Beyond that, I was also hallucinating, and I don’t mean that I was seeing something warm and fuzzy. I was seeing the devil and I was hearing voices—very scary voices telling me to do very bad things. I was convinced they were real, and nobody knew, not the producers, the other actors, or the crew. They had no clue who I was, how I was wired, or that the new guy was in a profound crisis.

  How could they—I’m an actor, after all, right? I can pretend to be anyone, to feel anything, and I had gotten good at fooling myself since the same darkness had started plaguing me as a kid. So now I was in deep shit because I was broke, I needed the money to support my wife, and I couldn’t lose this job.

  My demons had something else in mind; they had their claws in me and I couldn’t fight it because I didn’t have the tools to fight. See, I had stopped taking my medication two years before because I felt great. I had fooled myself into the biggest lie of all, believing I didn’t need lithium anymore.

  Man, was I wrong.

  When you have severe bipolar disorder, and you don’t take your meds, you may end up chasing your wife, or, worse, threatening to kill her. You might wind up nearly ruining everything you’ve built for yourself. Just like Sonny, I had tried to hide from what was in front of me.

  But that’s the thing about mirrors, there’s no way of escaping.

  Chapter One

  Cruisin’

  I wasn’t always Sonny on General Hospital, and I wasn’t always Maurice Benard. I was born in 1963 at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, and back then my name was Mauricio Jose Morales. JFK was in the White House, Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream to share, and both were igniting the youth to get involved with politics. No one had any inkling that the world would turn upside down later that year with the President’s assassination, that MLK’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s would soon follow, that Vietnam would dominate TV sets for a decade, or that the Beatles were the next big thing.

  My dad, Humberto Jose Morales, Sr., was a bakery superintendent at Wonder Bread, and my mom, Martha Mendez Morales, worked in the printing department at a bank. My big brother, Humberto Jose Morales, Jr., six years older than me, was named after our father, and everybody called him H.J. My dad always teased that the nurse must have given my mom the wrong baby, because my brother was the most beautiful infant in the world and I was born with big, bushy eyebrows and hair coming out of my ears.

  My mother says that when I was a child my high-pitched voice and dimples were adorable, but less so was the developing strong will that often clashed with my father’s. He grew up in a macho generation and was unaccustomed to showing affection. A tough guy with charisma, he attracted people’s notice when he walked into a room.

  He had strict rules and set a high bar, usually expressing his displeasure or anger with a belt. That’s how I learned early on that everything had to be perfect.

  When I was three, my mother bought me an expensive little suit and my father told me that I was absolutely not to get it dirty. The thing was, it was a pretty day and I could see all the other neighborhood kids playing and laughing outside. They were sliding on cardboard down the hilly sidewalk to the end of the street, so I wandered out and started playing with them, repeating the thrill ride over and over until the mothers started calling the kids in for dinner. However, when I stopped and stood up, I realized the entire backside of my pristine suit was shredded, with gaping holes in the fabric right down to my underwear. I immediately panicked and sat down on the front steps of our house, thinking I could somehow just hide it.

  When my mom saw me sitting there, she came to give me a hug and kiss, but I wouldn’t get up. While she didn’t immediately understand, she saw how frightened I was and finally got it out of me that I was scared of what my father was going to do. She calmed me down
and told me to go inside and take off the suit, and later, when my father came in, it was never mentioned.

  That was a pattern in our household I’d see throughout the years. My mother often overcompensated for my father’s lack of sensitivity by being extremely caring and affectionate. I know she meant well, but she loved me to the point of being obsessive about it, always worrying about whether I was okay at any given moment.

  Soon enough, I started to take on that worry. I internalized it to the point of being frightened all the time. One intense memory is being too scared to go into the elementary school on the first day of kindergarten. I refused to go inside, and instead wound up crying against a fence. It didn’t help matters when another school mother, who was a stranger, tried to comfort me by offering a hug. It didn’t matter to me that she was another mother—she wasn’t my mother. I was already so anxious about being there that it scared the hell out of me.

  I did eventually make it inside, and the rest of the year was less eventful. In first and second grade, I switched schools and attended Mission Delores Academy. One thing I clearly remember is how my mom used to make me take tuna sandwiches on the Wonder Bread my father brought home from the bakery. I hated those sandwiches, because the mayonnaise on the bread always made them soggy. Because she was my mom, though, and nervous I wouldn’t eat at all, she had the nuns watch over me to make sure I ate the damn sandwiches.

  The dislike of tuna sandwiches would last for years, but that wasn’t the only big impact second grade would have on my life. That was also the year I had my first experience with a kid in class who was mentally challenged. I vividly remember watching him struggle and feeling bad for him. I thought, If I could just trade places with him for one day, maybe he could feel my happiness. Years later, when I told a therapist about the boy and how the experience haunted me, he pointed out that it spoke volumes about my childhood self and for it to still remain so prevalent in my mind reflected the terrible vulnerability I felt then, even if I didn’t have words for it yet.

  My mother tells me when I felt happy it was more intense than my brother’s or my friends’ happiness. It was the same with the lows—things weighed upon me too heavily. When I had a bad day, I would go into a funk, which would sometimes last for weeks. That hypersensitivity was always nipping at my heels, even as I grew up to be tough and street-smart instead of book-smart.

  I was also terrified of the dark. I had a deathly aversion to the shadows and dreaded bedtime and turning out the lights. I always lay there in the dark crying, with the covers pulled over my head, unable to move. But as the fear intensified and I was certain I could hear terrible things coming to get me in the night, I would begin shaking. It never failed—I always panicked at the monsters I was certain I could see, their claws outstretched, and fled into my brother’s or parents’ bedroom, crawling under the sheets. Being afraid to sleep alone would last for years.

  As I look back, the pieces of the puzzle seem clear: the highs, lows, and visions were symptoms of a disease I didn’t even know I had.

  Up until I was in third grade, we lived on Guerrero Street in the Mission District. Our apartment was a black and white walk-up flat in a colorful row of buildings and was our home during some trying days, like the time my brother gave me a ride on the back of his bike and about six guys came up and demanded he relinquish it to them. When he refused, they pulled us both off the bike and held me back while they punched him in the face. As they rode off with the bike, laughing, we ran home to show our parents his wounds.

  My mother panicked when she saw H.J.’s bleeding face, swollen and bruising. As she tended to him, then checked me over, my father insisted on hearing the details. What he found out made him furious, and it was then he decided we would move away from the high crime rates of the city to a quieter life in the suburbs.

  My parents wound up choosing Martinez, a small town about thirty miles outside San Francisco. In many ways my life was small, too, in a middle-class house in a safe middle-class neighborhood where everybody knew each other. My school, Hidden Valley Elementary, was a few blocks away, so I could walk there and back every day.

  I liked my teacher Miss Moffett so much because she was always nice to me—and it didn’t hurt that she was blond and pretty, too. I asked my mom to take me shopping so she could help me pick out the perfect gift, but I was mad when we left the store with a scarf. I didn’t think that it was a nice enough gift for my favorite teacher, and wished I could present her with a beautiful necklace. At that young age, that idea of everything having to be perfect—the best—was still stuck in my head. So the next day, when I gave the scarf to Miss Moffett, I told her my mom made me give her the present, because I didn’t want her to think I was responsible for giving her something less than perfect. Miss Moffett thought it was a beautiful scarf and a lovely gesture, but that, of course, was lost on me.

  In Martinez my brother and I got to keep our favorite hobby of biking. Really, there was nothing better than riding our bikes around all day in our new town where my parents didn’t have to worry about us encountering gangs. We still found ways to get in trouble, though. Since H.J. was older, he babysat me while Mom and Dad commuted into San Francisco together for work. I was a royal pain, annoying my big brother constantly and promising, “When I’m eighteen, I’m gonna kick your ass!” He was more passive, like my father, but I always kept provoking him until he came after me, and, like my dad, when he got angry, he got angry.

  Once, when I was about ten, H.J.’s girlfriend and her sister were hanging out in the street with some of my brother’s friends while H.J. mowed the lawn. As always, I was trying to be funny or cute, so every time he turned the mower at a corner, I stuck my foot out in front of it. I kept doing that and he kept telling me to cut it out and you can guess what happened—the mower ran over my foot and we all heard a terrible grinding noise.

  Everyone stopped laughing as I screamed in pain and H.J. killed the motor, rushing over to pull my foot from the mower. There was blood everywhere, all over the lawn but also soaking into my mangled shoe. He left it on, wrapping my foot tightly with a towel while someone ran to get the neighbor, a friend of my dad’s. He drove us to the hospital because my mom and dad were still at work, and I bled and cried all the way there. I was still crying when they carried me into the ER, where the staff put me in one of the curtained examination areas. The doctor had to cut the top of my shoe off because my foot was swollen, and once my toes were exposed, all I could see was blood covering my mutilated foot. It turns out the mower had sliced off the tops of my big toe and the second toe.

  By the time my mom and dad had rushed to the hospital, there was nothing the doctors could do other than clean and bandage my foot and send me home with painkillers and a crutch. I was in shock—I was an active kid and worried this would screw up my ability to play sports. My dad was upset and my mother just wanted to make me feel better, and H.J., who felt awful, kept apologizing all the way home while my father lectured us about being irresponsible, though I was high on the pain meds and didn’t hear much of what he said. After that I hobbled around on a crutch for a while and went to school wearing that cut-off shoe like a badge of honor. I was such a little jerk.

  What was tough about that time was that I couldn’t play or run for a while, and I loved to run. Sometimes I’d run until I couldn’t breathe. Every time I did, it felt like I was escaping from something that was in pursuit—but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. It would take years to find out what I needed to escape from, although the signs started early on, beginning with an anger that was always just under the surface, one that I learned to equate with my fists.

  The first fistfight I remember was in third grade when I decided to go up against a bully in school, who was cruel to this other kid in our class. Every day he did something terrible, wielding his power mercilessly, and no one felt they could tell on him or do anything to stop him. I don’t know if it’s because I felt powerless when my father stood over me
with a belt, but I couldn’t stand watching this powerless kid suffer anymore, and one day I snapped and started punching that bully with everything inside me. He was big, much bigger than me, and it was probably stupid to do it, but I had to stand up to him. When the teacher heard the fight going on, she stopped it and I explained what the bully had done, so the teacher sent him to the principal’s office. He was suspended, but I wasn’t punished, and the class was so happy, especially the kid who had been bullied. I was a hero.

  I didn’t know how my parents would react, however, and I dreaded telling them, for fear of my father’s anger. I was surprised when I learned that day that my dad was old school and thought sometimes a man had to take up for himself. My mom, however, didn’t want me to get hurt fighting, so I just stopped telling her when I got into an altercation—and there were plenty of those. As with that second-grade experience, I felt compelled to help the underdog without really understanding why. Sometimes I got into fights for a noble reason, but not always.

  We moved again when I was in fourth grade, this time to a house on Silverlake Way. It was bigger, and was the place where my parents would stay for more than fifty years, until they moved to Southern California. I liked to watch the Giants on TV with my dad, although at the time they hadn’t won a World Series since 1954 and we were always just hoping they’d get to the playoffs. I didn’t just want to watch other guys get all the glory, so I decided I wanted to join a Little League team. When I did, the coach let me play center field—just like Willie Mays—which made me happy. I loved sports, and watching or playing sports was one of my favorite ways of connecting with my father.

  My dad took me to my Little League games and it was exciting when my team made it all the way to the championship game. I executed a great catch and hit some good balls that night to help push my team to victory. I was thrilled to bring home a trophy to display in my room, because I always wanted to impress and please my father, even though he had that terrible physical power over me. I wanted so much to be strong like him, and as a result, I always tried hard to be perfect—so much so that my budding competitive streak would get more and more intense.