As I approached the podium, the room simply disappeared, replaced by another, noisier venue. It was dark. Music blared. In my hand I held a glass filled with something clear. A couple of pineapple pieces floated there on a plastic sword. I looked to the left and to the right. I was outside. To my left there was a palm tree. There were tons of people around. The weather seemed warmer than it was at home on most nights. It felt like summer.
Someone reached out and took my arm. “Hey, you all right?”
I turned to the right and looked into the eyes of a goddess. She had her red hair piled up on the top of her head. She wore a green dress so tight it looked painted on. I guess that was a good thing because if it hadn’t been so form fitting, it wouldn’t have held anything in. It wasn’t so much cut low as sliced open. It only came back together somewhere below her navel.
Women were one part of my life I still didn’t have straight at seventeen. What seventeen-year-old boy does? Lexi’s dismissal hadn’t done much for me there. I didn’t trust girls. I believed women to be all the same; you had to be perfect or they threw you away, so I used them to get what I wanted. Since I’d messed around with Alexis, there had been others. Without getting into the regrets of the play-by-play, let’s just say I wasn’t a virgin. I may have been trying to straighten out my other behavior, but I still had hormones, my puckish charm, and nothing in the way of self-understanding. I combined all three into a potent cocktail, which I used to great effect.
As I stood there trying and failing to look the twenty-something woman in the eye, I wondered what you were supposed to say to your own hallucination? How do you answer when your own mind asks you a question? Hell no, I wasn’t okay, but what good would it do to tell that to a delusion of my own making? For a split second I thought about the truth; then the breasts won out.
I put on what I hoped was my most inviting smile and said, “Yeah, just spaced out there for a moment.” The voice was certainly mine, but it sounded a little deeper, maybe older.
The woman gave an almost too appropriate giggle. To hide my surprise at the depth of my voice, I took a sip of what turned out to be a strong drink. I almost choked.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” the vision asked.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine,” I said, trying to recover. “Enough about me and my spacey mind. What brings you here tonight?”
“Well, I really wanted to talk with you.” With a flick of her eyes, she let the words float in the space between us.
Now I was one hundred percent convinced that I was walking in a delusion of my own making.
“My agent’s been trying to get ahold of you for weeks, and you won’t take his call. I really want a part in the film you’re casting.”
I felt my hormones kick into overdrive. I decided that if I was going to hallucinate, I would just have to make the best of it. I had been fantasizing about a moment like that ever since I first figured out that you could say the word “movies” and attract certain girls’ attention. I mustered a swagger my seventeen-year-old self could never have achieved in real life. I looked very intently into my delusion’s eyes and took a step toward her, cutting the distance between us until it moved from social to intimate. “Well, that sounds interesting. Is there somewhere private we can go to discuss this further?”
My delusion didn’t miss a beat. The corner of her full lips lifted ever so slightly. Her eyes got a little bit bigger, and she leaned forward. “Of cour—”
The vision stopped mid-word and looked over my shoulder, blushing madly. I turned to see what she was looking at and came face to face with a shorter blonde with curled hair. Red-faced, chin high, and legs spread a little wide, the young woman looked at me and said in a rising tide of fury, “I don’t care what you told me. I don’t care! I’m still going to punch you!” And with that, she did.
The instant her fist connected with my cheek, I was knocked back into my walk across the stage. I still held the notebook in my hands. The podium still stood in front of me.
It occurred to me then that I might have just acted out that whole delusion in front of an auditorium full of people. I stood straight, stopped walking, and looked at the crowd. Everyone seemed expectant. No one seemed put out. The principal waved me toward the podium from the front row, a kind smile on his face. Whatever had just happened, my hallucination had taken no time at all.
* * *
I found it much more difficult to justify my second psychotic episode. I hadn’t smoked any pot in four and a half years, but I figured it must be my fault somehow. Driven by fear, I performed all the harder in the last few weeks of high school. I got great grades and was a model student. I stopped going to my dad’s altogether. I even swore off girls and went to church a couple of times. I figured that if I could stay on the straight-and-narrow, then maybe I could hold things together, but now I carried a secret dread with me at all times, a fear that I would unexpectedly and unexplainably lose control.
My short films and decent enough SATs got me into the film school at UCLA, and that fall I left home, never to return. Campus life suited me well. I was a determined student, desperate to outrun the mental weakness that haunted me.
You may not agree with me, but that’s really your problem. I’m old, and you’re not, so there’s still time for you to come around, and you will. But no matter what you think or feel—or what kinds of accolades you get from other people—anything you build on fear is just a sand castle waiting for a change in the tide.
Fear is an evolutionary invention meant to help us survive when we’re being chased by a grizzly bear. It’s a short-term chemical cocktail never designed as a way of life. When you use fear to get a grip on your life, chaos always escapes between your fingers. The tighter you squeeze, the more damage you do and the more brittle life becomes.
Upon arrival, I soon heard about Thursday nights on frat row and rumors about some of the things that went on in the apartments around Westwood. I had a narcissistic year. I went through a lot of girls. It was a real eye-opener for me to discover that there were girls in the world who liked to have sex without attachment. I set out to find them all.
So now I had my uppers and my downers. Fear of failing gave me a drive and determination that made me productive in my classes. When the stress of it all became too much, casual sex gave me the break I needed to continue letting fear rule my life.
But UCLA would change my views on women in many unexpected ways. Until I got to college, I had never really had a woman in my life whom I considered a friend, and I was never expected to treat them with respect. To be uncomfortably honest, in college I finally started to see some women as people instead of a means to an end.
I still remember the “aha!” moment, when one of my buddies from the film club told me about the things she heard from men on a daily basis—how it made her feel less than a whole person. I had been humiliated by my peers ever since I was thirteen. I didn’t want to be part of the problem.
So in relationship to women, life became something of a double bind. On the one hand, I had a lot of sex between consenting adults—but let’s be honest about that. How many drinks can I buy a girl before that “yes” is just the alcohol and not the girl? The whole process of the hook-up is a carefully orchestrated mutual manipulation pushing toward a desired outcome. Casual sex trapped me in my means-to-an-end thinking about women, but college had given birth to some small piece of me that was no longer satisfied with that thinking. Despite the evidence to the contrary, I wanted to believe that I treated women with respect. However, hunting for casual sex provided what I felt to be a life-giving source of stress relief. Stress relief that I didn’t think I could live without.
Not that I could have articulated any of this my freshman year. At the time, I managed my internal chaos by compartmentalizing. There were the women I chased for sex, and then there were women who were my friends, and ne’er the twain shall meet.
Nothing out of the ordinary took place in my head until the next fall. Sch
ool had just started, and I was shaving in the mirror with a towel wrapped around my waist.
Over the summer, I had moved in with some of my partying buddies. Overall, it was a calm and collected morning. No one had gone out the night before.
I had the razor plowing through the gel on my neck when, just as last time, the room disappeared, and I was somewhere else. Instinctively, I reached up for my face. There was no shaving gel, just smooth skin. I was sitting at a long, low table in a wood-paneled room.
“All rise!”
A steely-eyed man dressed in a perfect suit sat next to me. He stood, and I followed his lead.
“The Superior Court of Los Angeles, California is now in session. The honorable Quintin MacMillan presiding.”
A rather chiseled man with white hair walked to the bench with long, deliberate strides.
My feet went cold, and my palms started to sweat. I looked to my left and took in what must have been an audible gasp. Across the aisle that divided us stood a shorter, blonde woman with ringlets. Her face was creased with a few lines and her body had a more middle-aged shape, but I was sure it was the same woman who had hit me in my last delusion. She stared resolutely forward, her jaw muscles clenched tight.
“Be seated.”
My stomach turned over as I sat back down. For a second, I thought about running out the door of the courtroom and trying to find my way back to the bathroom in Westwood, but I couldn’t see how that was going to help if I were having a delusion. Best to just ride this out, I thought.
Looking down at his notes, the judge said, “We are here to finalize the divorce decree for the case of Stuart versus Wilson.”
Startled to hear my own name, I looked back across the aisle. This time the blonde glanced back at me. For a second, we made eye contact. Her eyes narrowed, and her cheeks got all blotchy. She turned away and looked back to the front of the room, and I knew. I knew that in my delusion I was living out my own divorce, and it was my fault. Those were the eyes of a victim, a vengeful and betrayed woman.
And just like that, I was standing in front of the mirror again, razor halfway down my neck.
I yelped and threw the razor down in the sink in front of me.
One of my roommates looked out of the nearby shower. “You okay, dude?”
I put both hands on the countertop, trying to keep a grip on reality. I took a deep breath and calmed myself before I said, “Yeah, I’m fine. I just cut myself.”
I made an appointment with the UCLA Counseling Center that afternoon.
* * *
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I arrived at my first counseling appointment. Certainly something a little more dramatic and invasive than a sympathetic listener and a couple of diagnostic tests. While sitting in the waiting room, I kept flashing back to Jack Nicholson getting shocked in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I only stayed because I was so scared by what had happened the week before. I was determined to be honest about my delusions and hallucinations. Even so, it was a very near thing. Honesty won by a hair. It felt good to get my fears off my chest.
It took only a couple of weeks to get a diagnosis—Dissociative Identity Disorder a.k.a. multiple personality disorder. It seemed sensible. The idea was that I put on these different personalities when I felt threatened or emotional, while the real me retreated to the back of my head.
I started therapy and tried out various medications. My film work suffered accordingly. Ideas which used to explode in my mind like sky rockets now seemed dull, coated with molasses, and always just beyond my reach.
My first psychiatrist was an uptight, balding little man who reminded me of a beetle. He insisted that I stay on the medication. He kept waiting for signs of disaster and treated me like I was a cripple. As I would learn, there’s a difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy tips things up on end. It looks down from above and judges the victim. It controls and categorizes. If you weren’t a victim before your diagnosis, you have to be one now. When someone who hallucinates gets sympathy-based therapies from the mental health community, he loses his ability to make choices without doubting everything. It creates an untenable dependence upon pharmaceuticals and therapists who become the mediators of reality.
It took me six months and a steep drop in my GPA before I worked up the courage to make a change.
In those early days, I was never proactive when it came to my own health, so it was only by chance that I ended up with a woman who would be my therapist until she retired. Her name was Eva. I owe her my life. The first thing that Eva and I discussed was getting off the medications to see what would happen. What happened was that my creativity came back, and my anxiety decreased because I could think again.
Eva refused to see me as dangerous or crippled. For the first time in my life, I started to learn how to examine the layers of motivation behind my choices and thoughts. I started learning to trust myself. Eva introduced me to a cutting edge idea in the treatment of D.I.D.—listening to my hallucinations. This method of therapy starts with the unshakable belief that buried deep behind every delusion and hallucination lies a grain of truth—perhaps a fear or a lose/lose double bind. Real, valuable insights can be untangled if the patient is willing to listen without either bonding with or judging the fears, delusions, and hallucinations of his broken mind. It’s a much tougher road for the patient than simply taking medication, but my symptoms, though momentarily strong, were also sporadic and so far not dangerous for me or others. To create a grounded sense of self separated from what we both believed to be my trapped and damaged unconscious mind, she taught me meditation.
I don’t think it’s any wonder that even after sixty years of measured success, many therapists are still wary of such a practice with those who hallucinate. It seems inherently dangerous to encourage a patient to run toward their delusional thinking rather than away from it. At the time, it was positively radical.
I kept up the therapy through the rest of my time at UCLA and graduated without any major incidents.
Even after leaving UCLA, I kept seeing Eva. I found the insights she gave me useful in my work. My scripts and short films had a depth that was lacking in most of the trash coming out from the major studios. Later, when I taught classes on filmmaking, the first thing I would tell students was to get a therapist and then start listening to themselves.
At twenty-two, I got work as a production assistant on Star Wars VIII and then Aquaman. When I could get on the set, I tried to absorb everything from camera angles to lighting to how to interact with the crew. Always I kept my eye on the one chair that mattered to me: the director’s chair. When I wasn’t working for the studios, I managed to scrape together enough cash to create a low-budget feature. You know, one of those melodramatic talking head pictures that just requires two cameras, a few lights, and time on the weekends to get it done. That film became my baby.
By the time I was twenty-four, things were beginning to pop for me. My film did well at the Venice (California) film festival, and it had been picked up for a screening at Sundance. A couple of studios were circling, talking about distribution, but that never really happens to indie films anymore. However, I was able to use the buzz to fire my useless agent and pick up Dan Cohen over at William Morris to represent me. It was a huge step.
I first realized my status had started changing when I was presented a ticket to the afterparty at the Aquaman premiere. I swear my heart was beating a million times a minute as I took my seat for the showing. About half an hour into the afterparty, I was standing by myself in the corner when the director walked over to me and congratulated me on the success of my film. He even knew my name. I hurriedly chewed up the prawn I had just put in my mouth and nearly choked in the process. My body felt like it was floating. I thanked the director, and I think I made some kind of sensible small talk about his work. He encouraged me to keep in touch, patted me on the shoulder, and walked away.
The whole thing lasted about twenty seconds, but in Hollywood, tha
t was far, far above my pay grade. I had a serious case of perma-grin when I walked away from that conversation and headed to the bar for another celebratory drink. I got something fruity, I don’t remember what. I was just picking up my glass when a young woman in blonde curls walked up to the bar and asked for a refill on her martini. This time I did choke and spilled some of my drink down my front. Dressed in strapless red, the girl from my delusions looked over at me and gave me a not so unpleasant smirk before she walked away. From high as a kite, I plummeted into paranoia and fear. After nearly four years, my hallucinations had returned.
Needless to say I had a lot to talk about in my next therapy session. After I had explained it all to Eva, she started with her usual profound but infuriating question. “What do you make of it, Noah?”
It was a demonstration of my deepest trust in Eva that I told the truth. “To be honest, I’m convinced she’s real. I mean, I watched her the rest of the night. She interacted with the bartender, and she talked with several other people at the party. They responded to her.”
To my amazement, Eva didn’t judge me at all. She just nodded and said, “So she was real. Does that mean that she was the same person in your hallucinations, or are you projecting that backward?”
I pinched my lips together as I considered this new thought. “I guess that’s possible. Perhaps I should really be considering who the blonde represents in my hallucinations and why I picked this girl at the party to put in that place.”
Eva smiled and sat forward. “I think that is much more important than concerning yourself with whether or not she is the same girl.”
“Well, in my hallucinations she was dear to me. That I’m sure of. We were together. She punched me because I was about to cheat with someone else. Then in the divorce hearing, I had clearly hurt her.”
The Time Travel Chronicles Page 18