Nothing General About It

by Maurice Benard

  The diagnosis, however, was painfully elusive.

  During this manic phase, I continued to party, drank more than usual, and slept with so many women I couldn’t keep track. It was one big high, one reckless blur, and my mother and father felt helpless because they didn’t know what to do. Frankly, I didn’t, either. Somewhere inside, I knew my parents worried a lot, but I couldn’t stop the manic behavior. I didn’t yet know how.

  During this time, I noticed a contest advertised at the mall and on the radio, Contra Costa’s Most Watchable Man, which was basically a beauty contest for guys. It wasn’t a soap, but I figured if I could win this, it would make my dad happy and it could be a start to get my career going. Unfortunately, I didn’t win, but I did place second, and with that came eligibility to enter the San Francisco’s Most Watchable Man contest. If I could win that, I’d get to the top tier, America’s Most Watchable Man, and that was the pinnacle, that was where I’d gain national recognition, which would really jump-start my career and impress my father.

  So I entered San Francisco’s Most Watchable Man . . . and this time I won. Finally, I had gotten my dad’s attention in a good way, because San Francisco was where my immigrant parents had first established a home and where I was born. Gaining public acknowledgment for an achievement in my hometown was special and sentimental for him. Of course, my mother was thrilled that her instincts to support me in my endeavor were paying off.

  However, despite all the affirmation and signs of success, I had trouble believing it could last. The darkness was sucking me down into self-doubt, and it would linger there for some time.

  One day in the fall of ’84 Manny told me there was a hot girl working at Merry-Go-Round, a men’s clothing store in the mall, and he was working up the nerve to ask her out. I was curious, so after I got yogurt the next day, I went to see what was so great about this girl.

  Manny wasn’t lying. He wasn’t even exaggerating. The girl with the long brown hair and amazing green eyes stopped me in my tracks as she flashed a bright, genuine smile at me, her soft voice hinting at a drawl. I didn’t even pretend to look at clothes.

  I turned on the charm. “Hi. What’s your name?”

  She smiled again. “Paula.”

  “I’m Mauricio,” I said, staring into her eyes and flashing my dimples.

  Paula smiled that amazing smile again, and for the life of me I couldn’t look away. There was something about this girl, and all thoughts of Manny vanished. I couldn’t help myself, and before I knew it I was asking her out.

  “So, Paula, when do you get off work?” I pressed. “Would you like to go out after?”

  She nodded and went to wait on another customer, and I walked out exhilarated. However, only a few hours later I started once again to feel the darkness creeping into my subconscious.

  I never showed up for the date. Paula waited for an hour and a half after her shift for me and was hurt that I had blown her off. I had no idea at the time that she had her own struggles and her own insecurities nagging at her. She had no way of knowing that my no-show had nothing to do with her or that the demons I was fighting were starting to win.

  Chapter Three

  Highway to Hell

  In 1985, I was still living at home with my mom and dad. I had won the San Francisco’s Most Watchable Man contest, but the victory didn’t have quite the impact I had anticipated. Because I’d expected more success to follow and it hadn’t, I was starting to feel that I had failed. With my confidence waning, I stopped picking up women everywhere, and started seriously dating a small-town girl from Martinez named Anna, who was a quiet, pretty brunette.

  Most mornings I watched Donahue, a popular talk show. Strangely, I had started saying, “I can read his mind,” to the screen. My parents thought I was kidding, but somewhere inside, my mother knew I wasn’t joking. She just didn’t know what to do about it. Whenever she heard me crying in my bedroom, she tried to find out the reason, but usually nothing special had happened to warrant my malaise. She always tried to comfort me and make me feel better, but I always pushed her away.

  “You need to let me go,” I told her over and over. At the time I couldn’t see, nor could my friends and family, that the tears were a cry for help, a loud cry, and a deeper despair was gnawing at me.

  A breakdown was beginning to manifest.

  Along with the mania, hallucinations began to bombard me. One night while I was shaving, I wiped my face with a towel, but when I looked at myself in the mirror again, I was bleeding profusely. I tried to wipe the blood off but there was just too much, so I ran to get bandages and more towels to soak up all the blood. As I passed a window and caught sight of my reflection, I stopped short in shock, because there was no blood anywhere. Not on my face, my clothes, or the towel I was clutching. Not a single drop.

  I convinced myself that the hallucinations and growing ability to delude myself, including reading a TV host’s mind, were just a result of being tired. After all, I was recuperating from a fever of 103 and had also spent days memorizing a long monologue for acting class that week. I was beat.

  Something else had also started to bother me—I hadn’t ever been invited to meet Anna’s parents. I was sure they disapproved of me; I couldn’t shake that feeling. One night I decided to just show up at Anna’s house to correct that impression. Anna was surprised when she saw me at the door, and didn’t invite me in, so I talked my way into the dining room to meet her mom and dad, turning on the smiles and dimples. I was funny and charming, the perfect guest—but I was totally faking it, I was acting. Inside, I was terrified, coming unglued, convinced they all thought I was a loser.

  After dinner at Anna’s, I went over to Jeff’s and we had some weed. I finally fell asleep at his place for a few hours—the first rest I’d had in days. Terrible nightmares ensued: in every one, something was chasing me and I couldn’t get away. I woke up in a cold sweat and started weeping uncontrollably, trying to refocus my mind, but I couldn’t shake the disturbing images. I chalked it up to the fact that I’d recently been sick. Was I getting the flu again, or was it something worse?

  I got up and ventured out to the balcony with the liter of wine I had been drinking before dozing off, and I leaned over the rail, gazing at the drop below, tempted. Before I could act on my thoughts, I was interrupted by Jeff, who had heard me moving around on the balcony and came to check on me.

  “What are you doing? Why don’t you come back over here, back inside?” Jeff coaxed gently, trying to break the trance.

  For an interminable amount of time we stood there, me with a hand on the balcony, throwing back the rest of the wine, lured by the depths below, and Jeff slowly inching closer, preparing to grab me and get me back inside. After what probably felt like an eternity to Jeff, I agreed to retreat to the ground floor and, relieved, Jeff followed me downstairs. Before he could stop me, I ran out to the pool with my now-empty liter of wine and threw it in the water.

  “I’m an alcoholic! I’m an alcoholic!” I yelled, uncontrollable. Inconsolable. I jumped into the pool with my clothes on. Jeff dove in the water after me in his full gear, too, shoes and all. “I think I’m losing my mind, Jeff,” I said through my sobs.

  “No, man, you’re not losing your mind. You’re just wound up, it’ll be okay.”

  When I heard that, my emotions changed abruptly. “One day I’m going to make it big and we’ll be sitting on the beach livin’ large!” I vowed, smiling and laughing.

  My mood crashed again when I realized I was behaving just like my dad—I was drinking a lot, too much, and it upset me. I didn’t want to do the things he did that I didn’t like, I didn’t want to mimic his anger. Jeff noticed my body language could change markedly in an instant—my eyes went from dark to bright to dark again and my voice went from wavering to confident and then back to unsure.

  Although the sudden change in my emotions threw Jeff, he managed to get me out of the pool and back inside, where he called my mom, explaining that he was concer
ned and she needed to come over and pick me up. When my mom arrived, I apparently walked out in a daze, unaware that I was barefoot, and when she asked me about it, I couldn’t remember where I had left my shoes.

  At home, I became agitated and I called Anna, asking her to come over. Once Anna got to my house, my mood switch flipped again and I suddenly, desperately wanted to go running. I took her outside and I started sprinting, pulling her along so fast she couldn’t keep pace with me. Anna stumbled and I just raced ahead of her to the top of a big hill, spreading my hands to the sky.

  “Soon we’re going to be sitting on top of the world!” I said, laughing at the starry expanse.

  Anna wasn’t sure what to think, because I was acting so strange and unpredictable. She went home and I just kept running. Later that night, I started to feel feverish and found I had a temperature of 102. I didn’t want to sleep because I kept having terrifying hallucinations that were so vivid I couldn’t distinguish whether they were real or not. In them, I was standing over my parents, but when my father turned to face me it was really a snarling, horrifying devil. I screamed so loud my father heard the bloodcurdling cry, running into my room only to find me holding a crucifix up to shield myself.

  “You’re the devil! Stay away!” I said to him.

  “No, Mauricio, it’s me, your father, see?”

  I could hear my mother calling someone on the phone and waved the crucifix even more fervently. “Who is she talking to? Who is she calling? It had better not be the cops!” I said menacingly, racing past my father.

  He ran after me downstairs to find me in the foyer violently shaking my mother as she cried. He pulled me off her as the doorbell rang, cutting into the fray. Wild-eyed, I bolted to the door, jerking it open, my mother whimpering in the background. A patrol car was parked out front and two policemen were at the door. I glared at my mother, feeling deeply betrayed.

  Fortunately, one of the officers happened to be a high school classmate of mine, and when I turned on the charm and told my pal it was just a family argument, the officers believed me and left without incident. When the door closed behind them, suddenly the adrenaline that had kept me going vanished, as did the manic high, and I instantly crashed, dragging myself upstairs, crawling into bed, and falling into a deep sleep.

  In the morning, my mother insisted we go to Martinez County Hospital, and because I still felt feverish and thought it was the flu, I agreed to let them take me there. My brother, H.J., met us there. Outside the hospital, I picked up a cigarette butt from the ground and leaned against a pole pretending to smoke it like James Dean. I wasn’t being cute—I thought I was James Dean.

  Everyone nearby was staring at me, along with my family, and I angrily yanked the sunglasses off my father’s face, breaking them and screaming, “Why are you wearing these?”

  “Because of the sun, Mauricio,” he said, trying to remain calm.

  “No! You don’t want me to see you cry!” I yelled.

  Once I had been coaxed inside, the doctor had a nurse take my blood. He told the family it could be anything from drugs to a virus in my brain, and he would have to run some tests. I got more and more anxious the longer we were there. There was a guy in a wheelchair in the waiting room as well, and I didn’t like him looking at me. I thought he was trying to get in my head and steal my thoughts, so I grabbed a full water bottle and threw it at him.

  “What the fuck?” the guy screamed, and got up, lunging at me in a terrifying burst of rage.

  I tried to fend him off as attendants rushed to break up the scuffle, separating us and restoring calm, but the altercation had already unnerved my family. After a long wait, the doctor appeared and told us it wasn’t a virus and I was drug-free, so my problem was most likely psychological, and he suggested I check into the psych ward.

  “Hell, no.” I flat-out refused. I did not want to go and my parents didn’t want to commit me against my will, so my mother tried to explain that they would help me. I finally acquiesced, but signed my name on the forms as Rick Madrid—the bad stage name Michael Olten and I had argued about so many times.

  But once I realized the doors between the main area and psych ward locked, and there was no other way out, I instantly had a change of heart. I resisted being led through the doors, so two burly male attendants had to handle me as I struggled, somehow managing to get me inside the locked area while my brother and dad accompanied them, trying to help. As the doors slammed behind me and the locks chillingly clicked into place, the sounds reverberated loudly inside my head. I fought the attendants all the way to the room, where my brother and father said they would settle me on the bed, thinking I’d stop if the attendants left; however, I continued to struggle.

  “I’m the exorcist, motherfucker!” I screamed, spitting on them.

  My father finally had to call the nurses in to give me a shot to sedate me, and then, mercifully, I drifted off. Some time later, I woke up and thought I had died and this was heaven and momentarily felt a surge of relief . . . maybe all this shit was over. But slowly vague muffled voices in the distance drifted into my consciousness and I realized this wasn’t heaven, and I wasn’t dead.

  This was real and it was hell on earth.

  In the bed next to mine was a bedridden old man who had clearly lived hard—he was eating his toenails. I was shocked to see him drink his own piss from the bottle meant for relieving himself. Next to him was a Mexican guy, most likely a gang member, who had so many tattoos you almost couldn’t see his skin color. The guy on my left looked like he had gotten run over ten times. The tension was palpable.

  Over the next few days, Manny came to see me and couldn’t believe the characters surrounding me, relating everything he saw to my mother and begging her to get me out of there. She spoke with the doctors, who agreed to release me on one condition: I had to be admitted to a mental institution. I was not happy about that.

  The nurses somehow got me in a wheelchair, which I resisted, and wheeled me out with some difficulty. As they put me in an ambulance, I became even more belligerent.

  “Shut up, asshole, I’m the devil and you’ll be sorry if you drive me there!” I yelled at the driver.

  My mother apologized to him, but he had seen it all and told her as much. “Don’t worry, I understand,” the driver sympathized.

  I felt powerful pushing someone’s buttons, and it fueled me to strike and hurt whoever was in my line of fire.

  When we arrived at the Walnut Creek Hospital, this time my family had to admit me against my will and I was put in the locked psych ward for observation. I was even angrier and fought harder than I had at the county hospital and told my parents I never wanted to see them again. My mother sobbed as I yelled at them.

  The mental institution was a step up from the hospital and at least I could walk around, but I was always in a group environment in a large room, surrounded by patients. It was like being in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—they were all wacky, so I thought they had to be worse off than me. I stood in the bathroom on more than one occasion, staring in the mirror, confused, because I appeared the same on the outside but everything was different inside my head.

  What is happening to me? I thought.

  My mother and father had to work every day, but they came to visit me at night, and each time my mother got upset. It didn’t help matters when I was on an aggressive jag—like ripping the curtains from the windows or throwing furniture. I probably made it worse when I asked my mother over and over to take me home, though she couldn’t comply with my request, no matter how much she might have wanted to. I kept telling her they were giving me too many medications and I hated the way they made me feel. I felt hopeless, and although I couldn’t see it at the time, I know my parents felt that way, too—they looked at me and wondered if this place was my future, and theirs.

  Every day I defied the powers that be on any level I could, refusing to take my medication. I clenched my jaw so tight the staff couldn’t administer the meds. Instead of
swallowing, I hurled the pills across the room. I fought with everything inside me, clawing, spitting, whatever it took, like those street fights I had been in when I was in high school. More often than not, the staff had to sedate me in order to administer all the meds, including Haldol.

  My rebellion didn’t end with the pills. I also refused to engage in the group activities, and instead of playing whatever game the caretakers coordinated in the main area of the psych ward, I jumped on the counter screaming, riling up all the other people and causing a great commotion. The daily battles, the insubordination, the physical altercations all led to the same destination: strapped to a bed by my wrists, waist, and ankles in seclusion.

  The worst part about this solitary confinement was the window, which rubbed in the fact that the clear blue sky and freedom were close—but I was literally shackled to a bed. When night fell, it wasn’t any better, because the night felt as if it would never end, and the sounds in the darkness beyond the door frightened me just like when I was a little boy afraid of those encroaching shadows.

  Anna, only eighteen at the time, couldn’t handle seeing me there with all the other patients, and after a few days she stopped coming to visit. I became obsessed with escaping so we could be together again. When Manny and Jeff came to visit, they put me in a laundry bin and tried to sneak me out, but we couldn’t get past the locked doors before the attendants noticed. Jeff and Manny’s visitation rights were revoked as a result, but that didn’t deter me one bit.

  One night I convinced the night nurse I had chapped lips and needed Vaseline, but instead of using it on my lips I slathered it on my wrists, then worked on slipping them through the leather constraints that confined me to the bed. Hours passed and the rubbing made my skin painfully raw, but I finally managed to free my wrists and then I began the same slow, determined, painful assault on my leg and waist restraints. As the sun was rising, I was exhausted, and also exhilarated to find myself free, so I slipped away undetected and snatched a knife from the cafeteria. However, my escape to the outside world was thwarted when the hospital authorities discovered me and strapped me down again. In addition to the staff being instructed not to fulfill any more of my requests, I was forced to eat with plastic silverware for the rest of my stay.