Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

All I can think as I watch him speak is how much I know about that dark place, how I’ve felt it and wished I had what he had. That there is so much in me that feels like it needs to be drowned out, so I keep the noise up.

  “I don’t have all the answers,” he says. “Nobody does. All I can say is I’m here. I’m trying. I’m going to keep trying. And for those of you who are new, I can see you sitting there in the back, itching to get out and use again. I know you don’t know what to make of all this shit, all these fuckin’ weirdos talking about bullshit like serenity and acceptance and regret. These strange steps. Kinda touchy-feely, right? I just want to say, that’s where it’s at. In your feelings. We’ve all had those thoughts, the ones that tell you to say fuck it and drink or fuck it and go get high because otherwise what’s the point of just walking around feeling like you want to die? Listen, you have friends in this room. People who want to help. Everyone here knows what you’re going through because we’ve been through it too. You don’t have to be alone. You can come to a meeting. You can find a sponsor. I’ll sponsor you if you want. That’s why we’re here. And I promise you, this life is so much better than the one spent using in the dark. It’s good to be with people, among friends. My brother is here because I’m giving him my three-year chip.”

  He looks at me. I am shaking. It’s all so familiar and real and I’m so glad he didn’t die and I remember how angry he was when we were kids and how abandoned he was at the School in Synanon, sitting alone on the playground with no mom or dad, how Mom turned him into a mental patient when we left, blaming him for his anger instead of acknowledging he had every reason in the world to be angry. I feel so proud of him now, in awe of his journey, so lost in mine.

  “Anyway, I’m grateful. Grateful for tonight. Grateful for this program. Grateful for all of you. Thank you.” The room erupts in applause and the chair thanks him for speaking and someone brings a small chocolate cake from the back and gives it to me to give to him. I walk to the front and he blows out the candles and gives me a hug. He doesn’t let go, just squeezes me tight and says, “I love you, little bro. I don’t know where I’d be without you.” I kiss his cheek and tell him I’m proud of him and the room forms a giant circle and we all hold hands and say the Lord’s Prayer just like we did at the AA campouts when we were kids. When it’s over, he is mobbed by the young Dope Fiends who surround him like nervous children. They ask him questions, with a look in their eyes like the world depends on what he says next, like he has something they need to breathe.

  They go outside to smoke and I sit in the chair in the front row and think about what he said, how far my life is from anything like the serenity or acceptance or peace he described, how much I live in that darkness, dancing around it like a moth around a flame.

  * * *

  GRANDMA JULIETTE DIED the week the tour ended. They called me and I drove over to the house in Westchester in a panic to see her with the breathing machine still pushing air into her nose. I pulled the tubes out of her nostrils because everyone seemed stunned, motionless, as if it wasn’t real as long as the machine did its work. I checked her pulse at her neck and told everyone she was gone and sat next to her in her little red sweatshirt, my arm around her shoulders as her spirit soared through the room while Aunt Nancy screamed and Bonnie cried in my father’s arms.

  I felt her spirit again when we played the homecoming show at Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles five days later, her presence, the sense that she and my grandfather were dancing in the air above the audience, right next to that beautiful pipe organ shaped like an enormous haystack. I sang a song that reminded me of them, missing them, fully aware of how far I was from the thing they had, the thing I wish I could have: a partner, a friend, a great love to dance with in a beautiful place after I die.

  There was a moment in Amsterdam, in a hotel room near the end of the European tour, after the flight to London, the day when my brother had to move all of my things from the apartment I never visited anymore. We spent weeks in the U.K., then Germany, drinking every night. I was taking Xanax and Ambien to sleep and a couple hundred milligrams of Sudafed every day just to function, a holdover from all those head colds we caught in the States. It was supposed to be for my sinuses, but the colds were long gone and I took it every morning with my coffee. It felt like a wall I could push my body through if I just tried hard enough, to be ever further from a normal day, a restful night, on edge and anxious, squeezed and vacant, filled as if with a nameless gas that kept me going for the shows.

  We went to one of the many cafés along the canal at the center of the city and I ate a large chocolate pot muffin. It didn’t seem to be doing much, so after a few minutes chatting with the band, I ate another. It was a rainy afternoon. I left the café to walk back to the hotel to sleep because we had the day off. The weed hit me about halfway there. The sidewalk began to sway and I felt an intense cold as I listened to the random Dutch phrases that reminded me of another time, a war, a wreckage.

  When I got back to my hotel room, I sat on the edge of the bed, hungover and exhausted after months on the road, as high as I’ve ever been in my life, my arms clasped around my shoulders as I shook back and forth for six hours, my mind winding down a pathway thinking only that I had screwed it all up, the chance at love, the chance for something real, that I didn’t deserve any of it, that I sang all these songs about love but it was all bullshit because what did I know? What could I know, when right at the center of my heart there was only an empty pit, that I had never cared enough about myself to put anything else there instead?

  I remembered there was a decision at the center of it, one made long ago in a tiny trailer at the edge of the world, reeling and confused and angry and hopeless, to just reject these things: love and closeness and faith in another, in favor of a different life. To give up and try to make the pain useful.

  The decision had produced wonderful gifts, but it didn’t solve the problem at the center, the problem so crystal clear to me as I watch my brother smoke and laugh with the young Dope Fiends on the street outside, a problem that plagues me, following me through sleepless nights and quiet empty days at the end of the tour, slipping into the cracks of my thoughts, a notion that comes to me when I don’t look too hard, the way an image comes in a dream.

  What does it mean to be broken?

  It means no one picked us up when we cried and we thought it was our fault and we carried the shame of that loneliness with us throughout our lives and we weren’t able to give it a name because no one acknowledged it, including us.

  We hid ourselves. We created masks. We built stone towers where we felt safe.

  As we got older, the shame became anger at others for the loneliness we felt, for the confusion, eventually for things we’d done that we wished we hadn’t, the people we hurt, the relationships destroyed because of that shame, wondering to ourselves, Are we monsters? Orphans? Are we insane? There was no one to tell.

  I can see my brother’s round cheeks and blond hair, his sad eyes as he leans against a stump in his corduroy jacket in the field behind the Tomales Bay compound. No wonder he smoked crack and shot heroin and drank himself blind.

  When you peel away all the layers of masculinity—the cleverness, power, sarcasm, the strength we built (or faked), the toughness (which is really just quiet suffering), white knuckles, bodies covered in boots and beards, muscles, green ink skulls, arrows and ghosts, hearts surrounded as if by barbed wire—what you see is a sad boy in the dark afraid that he will always be alone because that is the first thing he ever learned about life.

  We don’t want to look at any of it, because there’s just too much to look at, too many times we hurt others or ourselves, when we decided we didn’t deserve tenderness or warmth, or that maybe these things didn’t even exist.

  It’s so much work. To admit it and admit it and realize you can’t change. To go to meetings and you still can’t change, to whisper these things into a willing ear in some quiet room at dawn and sti
ll you can’t change, to say it to the occasional friend who gives you advice, offering his phone number to call if you need a hand, and still you can’t change, to write it in a song, in thorough detail, aware, awake, viewing it from up close and from far away, drenched in metaphor and irony, and still you can’t change, to scream it into a microphone in front of a crowd of people who’ve felt it too, and despite the speakers, the stage, the lights, the sweat, the gritted teeth, you go home to a place you tried to bring the whole world into and realize you are there alone—and still you can’t change.

  * * *

  “SO, WHY ARE you here?”

  The room upstairs at the back of the house is small, wrapped with windows that let in the bright California sunshine. There are chairs and a desk and trees outside where the occasional squirrel scurries by. The faint sound of water echoes up from a fountain in the courtyard. A kindly, young British man named Misha sits across from me. He’s got rosy cheeks and warm eyes. My mind races through all the confusing things I feel, wondering which pose to adopt, which mask to wear, how to take it off, if this will even do me any good.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what prompted you to seek therapy?”

  I hear the words fall out of my mouth before there is time to think: “I want to be able to fall in love and I don’t understand why I can’t, only that I know that I am the problem and I have to change.”

  Okay.

  CHAPTER 43

  A FOREST, A RIVER, A MOUNTAIN, A SWAMP

  He stares at me and I stare back. The silence hangs over the room. What have I walked into here? It’s strange to have so much space to fill, to be met with quiet. It’s not really like having a conversation, more like being in an empty landscape with a very kind and quiet guide.

  Misha is patient, prompting my words with grunts and nods, the occasional Britishism: “Well, yeah, but you can’t control that one, mate.” He never says much. There isn’t much to look at. Just an emptiness to fill.

  It takes a few weeks to get going, to start talking about anything of substance, but I soon find so many feelings I didn’t realize I had: grief over Paul dying, confusion over him maybe not dying, shock and fear over Phil getting beaten in front of me, the blankness like negative space at the edge of a watercolor I feel when I try to contend with Mom’s version of events, confusion over never having gotten a chance to deal with the pain of these moments, to think about them and see them in the light because they were never acknowledged. I find so much anger, over having been forced to be a caretaker of a severely depressed woman who did not consider my needs, who saw me solely through the lens of her own victimhood. I learn more about attachment disorders, the emotional world of orphans I inherited from living in the Synanon School, how being raised in a place without parents destroyed any chance we could’ve had to see our world as a stable place, leaving us afraid and ashamed, as if our loneliness was our own fault. The attachment disorder made us unable to trust close relationships because the first thing we ever learned is that people leave you. Then it also made us panic at the prospect of being alone.

  It’s slow, difficult, excruciating work.

  Most of the features around Mom are like quicksand. Over time, Misha and I come to believe she has narcissistic personality disorder or the closely related borderline personality disorder, or elements of both. It’s never anything we can verify, more a puzzle we reconstruct as we slowly review events.

  She still has trouble with reality. It’s not accurate to say she’s crazy in any cartoonish way. She can navigate a supermarket and balance a checkbook. She is still astute about the political moment, still attending sit-ins and protests, marches. But there are odd moments when it seems reality is a puzzle to her.

  When the tour went through Phoenix and she and her husband picked me up to take me to dinner, I was sitting in the backseat as we drove on the highway and she asked if I was wearing deodorant. It seemed like an odd question. I told her I was. “Well, can we pull over and can you wipe it off? I’m allergic to deodorants.” When we got to the restaurant, I went into the bathroom and for the briefest moment considered wiping off the deodorant from under my arms. But then I caught myself, wondering which reality I was going to live in, hers or mine? How much of my life was spent inhabiting that strange reality of hers, the one adjacent to the real world, the one in which she is a perpetual victim, a long-suffering hero, and it is my job to confirm this, to explain it to the world, to explain the world to her?

  I went back to the table and she asked me if I wiped it off. I told her I did. “Yes, I can tell.” She sniffed the air. “That’s much better. Thank you.”

  There are countless moments like this. Children of narcissists learn their feelings don’t matter to the narcissistic parent. The child carries an ever-present sense that he must bury his own ideas about the world, his own self, and do the thing required of him to please the narcissist, to receive the impossible-to-reach love and approval he craves. In short he doesn’t really know himself because he spends his life seeking to fulfill the fantasy world of the narcissistic parent.

  Not all narcissists are brash, cocky, or even extroverted. Some get the constant attention they crave from the world by playing the victim. Children of this type of narcissist tend to feel more like the parent’s spouse than child, burdened with the responsibility for the parent’s well-being. When I learned this one day, I shouted, “Bingo!” and laughed out loud. It wasn’t funny; it was just such a relief to have a name for the thing I’ve lived with for so long: Mom and her demands, her life story full of holes and easily debunked lies, the panicking sense I always had that it was my job to take care of her.

  Parents with narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder tend to cross physical boundaries. Without a feedback mechanism to understand which touch is appropriate, which body language is comfortable for others, which types of affection are welcome, they tend to invade the space of others, to leave others feeling physically uncomfortable in their presence. We are not taught our own right to determine which touches are welcome, which forms of affection are welcome. Our personal space is violated by such parents who do not recognize our need or desire for space, because they see us only as extensions of themselves.

  The crossing of physical boundaries can lead to tremendous shame in adulthood and a tendency to put up with unwanted touching and sexual advances. We simply are left with the feeling that we are not allowed to say no, because we were taught that the narcissist’s needs are more important than our own.

  Parents with NPD tend to view their children in strict aesthetic terms, wanting them to be cute and berating any physical flaws because the parents believe these flaws reflect poorly on them. It’s so strange to me how I spent years as a child believing I was fat because of this. When I look back at old photos, I see only a perfectly healthy little boy.

  Narcissistic and BPD parents often pit their children against each other. One becomes the chosen child, the repository of all the parent’s best qualities, receiving the most attention, praise and pressure to perform. Another becomes the scapegoat. He is often blamed as the reason for the narcissist’s behavior and the reflection of all the parent’s worst qualities. The scapegoated child resents the attention the chosen child receives. The chosen child resents the undeserved resentment and anger from the scapegoat. It is so strange to me, upon learning these things, to see how much my brother and my relationship as children hewed to these precise patterns.

  It’s all so familiar, so precise, the simple and terrifying moment when you see your life as if in the key to a map and say, Yes, there. Exactly that.

  Narcissistic personality disorder is somewhat misnamed. It conjures an image of a person who is in love with himself, a person who regards himself above all others. That isn’t accurate. The defining feature of the Narcissus myth is that when Narcissus looks into the water, he sees only his own reflection. That is how it is with people with NPD. They look into a world, into
their relationships, and are so terrified, so misshapen they can only see self-protective images of themselves, who their kids will be, who their spouse is, what this or that idea represents to the world.

  NPD and BPD are notoriously difficult to treat because narcissists are so deeply caught in the self-protective web they’ve created. Narcissists simply don’t know they are narcissists and if told will reject the idea. Some say there is an element of autism or Asperger’s syndrome at work, a sense that human emotion is somewhat baffling to them and so they tend to fake emotions and view them through a transactional lens. Will this situation benefit me? This tends to be a more common question in the mind of the narcissist than the kind of instinctual give-and-take of human relationships involving empathy, sympathy and love.

  They are, of course, emotionally abusive parents. The child is unseen, unheard, which is all another way of saying unloved.

  In retrospect, it all seems so obvious. And it takes a long, long time to sink in, for Misha and me to complete the full picture. It’s difficult to admit when a parent does something bad because a piece of that parent is always in you. So a piece of you always feels like you did it too. There is a sense of feeling marked, cursed, destined to walk the earth like a fundamentally flawed object. It’s not true. It only feels that way.

  And anyway my life is my own responsibility now. Not Synanon’s, not Mom’s. Mine. And one of the hardest impediments to change is the sense of grievance, the feeling of defensiveness for these scars that I would never have chosen. But there’s no salvation in defensiveness. It’s a dead end, a bottomless pit in the landscape that goes nowhere but down. And no matter the origin, I have to slowly learn to be responsible for my own actions and emotional world.

  Change is slow. Change is slow. Change is slow. And it takes a long time to feel like I know myself, to understand the landscape in my mind, to see the ways I acted out of fear, to understand the instinctual panics I felt and calm them.