Madness

by Marya Hornbacher

  I pick my way through boxes, stacks of ancient magazines, towers of old, worn books with cloth covers and gilt-imprinted words. I step over a sewing machine covered with dust, and over a steamer trunk. I open a door and find a small room containing a bin of coal, a cord of wood, and piles of old clothes. I climb behind the washer and dryer, look under the sink, go rifling through the racks of clothes. An hour ago, I didn't even know I needed a drink. Now it is my entire purpose in life, and I can't find it, and I am about to scream.

  Maybe I find the energy to focus on something because of the need for alcohol. But maybe, irony of ironies, the fact that I am out of bed means that I am actually getting a little better. That won't last if I get a drink. As soon as the alcohol is in my system, what little effect the meds may be having will be nullified. The alcohol will, in fact, lift the depression—and skyrocket me into mania. It's happened a million times before. And right now, lower than I've ever been, that's what I want. More than anything, I want out of this hell. When that craving for a drink sets in, you don't think about the consequences. You don't think about the fact that there are many levels of hell, and the alcohol will merely take you to another one. It's instinctual. It's not a rational decision. It's a need. It has to be met. The need is all you know.

  By this point in my life, I'm both a raging alcoholic and a person with uncontrolled bipolar. The two have become discrete issues that will have to be treated in and of themselves. Treating the bipolar won't cure the alcoholism, and treating the alcoholism won't cure the bipolar. But until I stop drinking for good, any attempts at treating the bipolar will fail.

  I've never consciously noticed that I use alcohol to control my moods and have since I was a kid—and so I don't realize that its properties as a mood stabilizer have long since disappeared. Like any alcoholic, I ignore the fact that the booze stopped working the way I want it to work a long time ago, and can only remember the fact that, once upon a time, it did. And maybe it will right now.

  So I keep digging through my mother's basement in the middle of the night, desperate for a drink.

  I spelunk my way back to the stairs and look around the room, hoping I'll see something I didn't see before. And I do. There under the stairs is an old record player, a busted-in speaker spilling split wires, and a pile of boxes. I make a dive for them and start yanking them open, their soggy, bent cardboard ripping in my hands. I shove aside boxes full of letters, moldy hats, wool scarves, old kitchen utensils, and there it is. I see the box. I crawl toward it, breathless, crushing boxes as I go. I open it up and find a collection of bottles. Relief floods through me and I nearly dance with joy. I get greedy and start opening boxes all around it, and there's more, the hard stuff, some of the bottles already open, half gone. There are ancient bottles with fancy necks, round bottles, tall slender ones, all of them covered in dust so thick my fingers are sticky with it, brandy, aquavit, bourbon, port, cordials, vodka, gin, whiskey, and, praise Jesus, scotch.

  I am a little kid on Christmas Day. I am a bride kissing my groom while everyone cheers. I am a soldier who just got laid. I am triumphant. The occasion clearly calls for a drink.

  The depression lifts overnight. It's hard to believe, but that's exactly what happens. One day I am nearly catatonic, and the next I go rocketing into a mixed episode. Still, it's better, to me, than depression—at least I am in motion, albeit feeling like a fraying nerve. Everything is moving at a shrieking pitch, and my thoughts turn black and bloody. This hell is garish, sharp, and it cuts at my brain. I dream about blood. Death is everywhere, I breathe it, I smell it in the room. I want it, but the thoughts are spinning so fast I can't grasp it, I go flying past, riding some demon merry-go-round where all the horses smile their evil, mocking smiles.

  There are many things that might trigger one of my episodes. But alcohol will.

  I turn into a monster, screaming at my mother, getting more and more agitated every evening, ramping up into rabid, nasty mania by night. I go crashing out the door, headed for God knows where. In the morning, she finds me lying in bed with my face to the wall. She opens the blinds. You have to have light, she says. No. Please close them. Please. Depression settles in for the day. By evening I am nuts again, and go out into the night, and come back again to lie in bed, hiding from the sun. I can't think straight. I turn into Jekyll and Hyde.

  I sit in the basement every night after I come stumbling home from wherever I've been, huddle under the stairs with my boxes of booze, drinking as much as I can possibly contain before I lurch back up to bed and pass out. I try to be careful. I can't run out. But of course I run out. For the first time in months, I have a reason to get dressed. I find my way to the bar, the neon signs and glittering bottles I know.

  I have no more credit cards, no more cash. But at the bar, there are always men. And where there are men, there is money. I am humiliated, disgusted with myself, but I have no other way to get booze. It's easy to find a man who will keep me supplied, take me home, give me a place to sleep it off so I can go home to my mother's house not reeking of alcohol. She suspects that I'm drinking. I lie—just going to a coffee shop to read, or just having tea with friends! At least I'm getting out! At least I'm getting well! She backs off. I come home after she's gone to bed, stumble up the stairs, creeping past her bedroom door.

  I can't keep their names straight. And then I find the perfect sucker. He's nondescript, without personality, ideas, or goals. He is a thing that occupies a barstool. He thinks it's cute when I drink him and his friends and everyone else under the table. Unfathomably, improbably, stupidly, he falls for me. I have lost all sense of human decency. It's no excuse that I'm sick.

  I don't ask myself why I'm doing this. My vision has narrowed. I have become an animal, focused on survival. I stare straight ahead and press forward, terrified, clutching the bottle in my hands, living one day to the next, never slowing down long enough to see what I'm doing to myself or anyone else.

  Then the real party begins. I'm back to the lipstick and heels, the spinning faces, the lights. But this party is different from the old fancy scene. This party takes place in filthy dive bars, where the stink of stale grease and spilled beer fills the air, where the thick smoke spins slowly under the Budweiser light over the pool table, where someone like me couldn't possibly be, but where someone like me absolutely belongs. I try not to think about how far I've fallen. I am broke, desperate, foul-mouthed, shitfaced, stumbling, slurring, clinging to a man I don't even know so he will keep me in booze. Drunk, at night, I'm manic as hell. I'm gregarious, excited, full of laughter and grandiose plans. Anyone who knew me before would back away as I sprawl on the floor. I'm trashy. I'm trash.

  The mixed episode rages on, and I rage on, crashing through my mother's house, curling up in bed, flying out the door at night, hurtling back to the bar, getting more and more manic as the night wears on, then waking up disoriented, confused, squinting at the awful sun. I dress myself in last night's clothes and walk home, wishing to God I'd get hit by a car.

  One night, I go into yet another rage at my mother, stuff my things in paper bags, and storm out the door and into my bar guy's car. Now I am living with him in his father's basement. He's in his thirties and still sleeping in his childhood bed. His floor is covered wall to wall with trash, clothes, magazines, dirty dishes, endless quantities of crap. I lie in bed at night drinking whiskey from the bottle, chattering on like a macaw until I pass out. We're perfect for each other. Apparently I have agreed to marry him. I have trouble remembering his name. I will work on this.

  We move from his father's house into the upstairs of an old house that should be condemned, and there begin what he calls my John and Yoko months. He thinks it's funny. I take up residence in the bed, next to the bedside table crowded with bottles of wine and whiskey and pills. I lie there watching Thin Man movies. I drift in and out of blackouts, or sleep, it's hard to tell which. When the clock strikes five, I haul my drunk, depressed ass out of bed and get ready for the evening. The even
ing is the bar. I am drunk twenty-four hours a day. My tolerance is so high it takes me eleven drinks to get a buzz on. I find the perfect high around sixteen. Of course, I always overshoot the mark. By the end of the night, who knows how much I've had. I'm stumbling through the parking lot, elated. He's holding me up as I slip on my heels like a pig on ice. It's winter. It's freezing. I lie in bed, sweating alcohol, my skin clammy and gray. He feeds me fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. I eat them every couple of days, like an anaconda. I don't look away from the television. I wash the sandwiches down with whiskey. At night, at the bar, I come alive. By morning, I am dead again.

  Ridiculously, one night, I find myself in detox with the bums.

  The cops escort me there during a particularly elaborate meltdown on a busy street and drop me unceremoniously at the door. I pitch a fit. I am wearing a very nice dress. Do they know who I am? I rage like a drunk rages. They ignore me the way you ignore a drunk. In the morning, they let me out. A few days later, I'm back in.

  Valentine's Day

  2001

  I snap out of a blackout to find that I have just put my foot through the windshield of the bar guy's car. I have no idea why. I've had seventeen double martinis—I know this because I count them so I won't drink too much. I fly out of the car and down the icy street in my dress and heels. He's chasing me. I'm pulling out of his grip, screaming. I run up the stairs to the apartment and call a friend, who is surely delighted to hear from me at midnight on Valentine's Day. I lie on the kitchen floor in my dress, pouring a bottle of wine down my throat. My friend tells the bar guy to take me to the psych ward.

  Dr. Lentz: How are you feeling this morning?

  It's bright. I'm still in my dress. The sunlight pierces me and I am filled with despair. I'm still drunk. I tell him I feel like Cat. You know, from Breakfast at Tiffany's? I slur, lifting my head off the pillow to look at him and letting it fall back. She doesn't name him because she doesn't want to get attached to him? So he has no name? He's just Cat? Get it?

  I get the reference.

  I am greatly relieved. He always understands.

  Do you know what your blood alcohol level was when you came in last night?

  No.

  It was point three-five.

  Is that a lot?

  That's higher than hell.

  Even my psychiatrist is disgusted with me. By my count, that makes everyone, including me.

  And now I am sitting in a dirty snowbank on Central Avenue. I've fallen into it. I'm holding a near-empty quart of vodka. I'm crying, mostly because the liquor store's not open yet. It's seven A.M.

  I give up and stick my head in the snow.

  Maybe it sobers me up. Anyway, I find a cell phone on my person. I call my father, crying.

  Marya, put the bottle down, he says firmly.

  I am stunned. Truly, stunned. I have never heard such an amazing idea in my life.

  Carefully, I dig a little hole in the snow for the bottle, and I put it down.

  I'm lying with my face against the door of a cop car. My cousin is a cop. My father has called her to come pick me up. She's not impressed.

  I'm lying in the ER. My aunt and uncle—I've gotten the whole family involved now—appear when I open my eyes.

  It's the shits, ain't it? Aunt Andy says.

  I nod. It is, I manage to spit out of my cottony mouth.

  She nods. I know.

  I'm on a psych ward, screaming for more Klonopin. Klonopin acts on the same neuroreceptors as alcohol, and when you're taking enough of it and go off suddenly, you can get pretty sick. It doesn't occur to me that the same thing will happen once I come off the alcohol itself. Don't you understand that I'll go through withdrawal?

  No offense, says the nice nurse, you're already in withdrawal.

  I am in a room, which is spinning. I stand up and try to find the door, but I crash into the walls and give up and stumble into bed again.

  I'm sitting in a folding chair, looking around a crowded room. Someone is standing on a platform, yelling, Hi! My name is Connie, and I'm a drunk!

  Hi, Connie! everyone yells.

  Motherfucking Christ. I'm in rehab. They've finally got me. It's over.

  In a way, it is—at least this part, the years when alcohol both disguised and worsened the bipolar. As I've said, sobering up won't cure me. Getting sober, in fact, exposes the bipolar in all its awful glory. But getting the alcohol out of the picture at least gives me a chance at managing my mental illness. When I get the alcohol out of my system, Dr. Lentz finds a combination of medications that brings the world into focus. Even I can tell that the madness is receding.

  I walk out of rehab two months later. Over the next several weeks, I slip and have another drink more than once. But one day I wake up sober. June 9, 2001. The sun isn't too bright. The crushing bear of depression is gone. The mania has broken. I lie in bed, watching the branches covered with new leaves sway back and forth across my window. I can breathe.

  Coming to Life

  Summer 2001

  I am sitting on the porch swing of the little rented house in Minneapolis where I am living with my fiancé, the bar guy, a seriously unfortunate situation that is soon to end. I'm swinging a little, watching the cars go by. I am holding myself carefully, like an egg. I am fragile, barely there. I imagine I am transparent, that you can see right through me to the screen behind, and the oak tree beyond that, and the little green house beyond that. I take extreme caution when breathing. I hold very still so that I will not upset the tenuous balance of my mind, tip it on its side, send my thoughts sliding all over again.

  Time barely moves. The world quivers around me. I step carefully through it, not touching anything. The dust on the porch must not be disturbed.

  This is the world. I am trying not to take up very much space or make any noise, because there is a kind of silence that bewilders and fascinates me, and I am afraid of my voice. I am afraid of myself, the self that was mad. The madness sleeps under the house, its scaly tail over its nose. I walk carefully in the house, placing my feet one in front of the other, making sure the floor doesn't creak.

  I've become concerned with solid things. I like the oak tree and the little house, the kitchen, with its hefty pots and pans. I like the food I buy at the store every day, and I like the store, its heavy sliding glass doors, its rows and rows of produce, its aisles of boxes and cartons and cans. I take things off the shelves. I look at the writing on them, and I look at the price. I put them in my basket. They will stock my cupboards, giving proof that I live there, that I am in a place, that I am capable of living my life.

  I sleep at night. In the morning, I do my tasks. First, shower. Next, get dressed. Dressing is essential. So are sensible shoes. Next, go to the kitchen. Real people pour themselves bowls of cereal and read the paper. So far, I don't read the paper, because it overwhelms me, implying as it does a larger world, a world beyond my little street. I wash the dish and put it in the rack to dry.

  Next, I wander around the house, touching the furniture and walls. I have become so brave that I get the mail. When there are bills, I write the checks, feeling wild and a little dizzy. This way the lights will stay on, and the water, and the phone. I understand that if I complete my tasks, nothing will go wrong. The world is an orderly system of cause and effect. This is a wonder and an enormous relief.

  The real things matter. They are the bones on which one hangs a life. I've never understood this before. Back then, I couldn't be bothered with dishes or meals or bills. When the madness had me in its teeth and thrashed me back and forth, I didn't even know what the real things were, or how to do them, or what they were for. Now I know: they keep the madness at bay. It sleeps quietly under the house, only occasionally grumbling in its sleep.

  I only think about the here and now. When the memory of madness slides in by mistake, I empty my head of everything until it passes. Sometimes, a fly buzzes by. Sometimes, I see a neighbor. When he waves, I am stunned at having been
seen. It takes me a minute, but I wave back. Then I go inside. That's enough of the world for today.

  I cook an elaborate dinner, delighted with the organization of recipes, their one-step-at-a-time. The bewildering man comes home and pours himself a drink. He will drink all evening, because that is all he does. I am terrified of the drinking, of the bottle itself.

  When he isn't there, I sit with my hands folded in my lap, holding completely still. If I hold still, I will not get up and get the bottle and start drinking, because if I start drinking I will not stop. And the madness will come roaring up through the floor.

  I understand this because the people at treatment explained it, and Dr. Lentz explained it further. It, too, is cause and effect: ifI have a drink, then I will keep drinking. I know this to be true. I have plenty of evidence. And furthermore, ifI am drinking, then my meds won't work. Marya, if you want to make this work, you just can't drink. You need your medication to be effective. You need to get your life under control. If you keep drinking, neither of those things can happen. I can't help you if you won't help yourself.

  My meds are helping. I have evidence of this as well. I have a house, toothpaste, food, a porch, and a porch swing. It is finally quiet, almost silent, in my mind. Dr. Lentz has explained that the madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up. I live in quiet terror, and try to put it from my mind.

  I've called an uneasy truce: I've acknowledged that I have bipolar. I think I have accepted it. But really, what I've accepted is the medication. I tell myself that if I don't drink anymore, the illness will clear up, but as long as I'm at it, I might as well take the pills all the time, just to cover all my bases.

  I have a strikingly simplistic understanding of what having bipolar means. I go by the just-like-diabetes theory—a mental illness is just like diabetes; it's something you have to take medication for, and that's okay. I never use the word bipolar outside of Dr. Lentz's office or the confines of my parents' homes. I'm not eager to mention a mental illness, either. It implies all the things I don't want to believe—that I'm hopeless, completely dysfunctional, totally divorced from reality, possibly dangerous. I know that's what a lot of people think when they hear the words mentally ill. Depression, that's one thing—lots of people have depression, and they're not crazy. Bipolar, schizophrenia—that's crazy. That's mental illness—the psychos, the nut cases, the incurably insane, the muttering bag ladies and bums, the freaks. So I take my meds, and don't accept the name for what I have.