Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

by Daniel Smith

  Think about how weird and self-destructive this is. Think about the mental contortions you’d have to go through, the thoughts you’d have to beat back, just to get up in the morning and keep doing what you’re doing, to not be totally frozen by the inarguable fact of the matter, which is that you have chosen a life for yourself that makes you, a whole lot of the time, want to vomit. Think about how much you might not want to think about this fact at all, ever. Finally, think about how it doesn’t really matter whether you are conscious of your counter-phobic attitude or not, that the very psychological perversity of your stance toward those things you dread is going to lead, either way, to more dread. Your temperamental refusal to submit to your anxiety is going to clash with your anxious temperament, and that clash is going to give off sparks. Because you haven’t really done anything about the problem. You’ve just contradicted it. After my mother taught me the term “counter-phobic,” I found an entry in the Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. There is, the entry reads, “a quality of desperation about the ‘enjoyment’ provided by counter-phobic actions. It is as if the individual is not really convinced of his mastery of his underlying anxiety.”

  • • •

  “You’re so mature! I keep having to remind myself you’re only fifteen.”

  Esther was constantly saying things like this, and constantly confiding in me in a way that suggested she didn’t remind herself often enough. She would waylay me as I shelved books and tell me her life story—or parts of it, at least, the parts that spoke of old traumas and her continuing quest to transcend them.

  When she was younger than I was, she told me, her parents discovered her kissing another girl. Her parents were devout Mormons. They kicked her out and wouldn’t let her come home until she renounced her blasphemous urges. Headstrong and self-possessed, Esther refused. For the remainder of high school she slept at friends’ houses. She managed, through sheer willpower, to get good grades and to get into a good college. She paid for school by waiting tables and various odd jobs. And all the while she developed a powerful urge to have a child of her own, to redress the crime that had been done to her. Her husband had no illusions about her sexual desire for him. Saintly and selfless, he knew everything and he accepted everything. She had been pregnant twice already, and she had miscarried twice, experiences she spoke of mournfully. They were trying again. At night, they curled up under the covers and read classic children’s literature to each other. “Then,” she said, “we make love.”

  Another word on how alien all this was to me and how uneasy I felt hearing it—often while perched on a stepladder that rocked like a pendulum with the slightest shifting of my weight. For one thing, whenever Esther and I were together I had to keep a close watch on the rest of the staff so they wouldn’t catch me giving comfort to the enemy. For another, at fifteen I’d never before met a professed homosexual. I’d never met a Mormon, either. Yet at the same time it was flattering to be entrusted with this information. It felt ennobling to be thought wise enough to understand such adult difficulties and preoccupations. “You’re so mature!” observed Esther again and again, and I agreed. I wanted to agree. I still knew my anxiety as nothing more than the unnamed sum of my sensitivities. I felt so skinless at times! Things hit me so hard! It was a relief and an attraction to be informed that what felt for all the world like a handicap was actually a virtue. I wasn’t weak or oversensitive; I was precocious. I didn’t have a deficit of strength; I had a deficit of years.

  It was dizzying to experience this revulsion and attraction simultaneously, and it was dizzying when, about six months into Esther’s tenure, she came to tell me some important news and I whipsawed between the two. Esther found me at the back of the store, alphabetizing the Harlequins. She took my hand and pulled me behind the plastic accordion screen that separated the back room from the store proper. There was exhilaration in her eyes. “I’m pregnant,” she said. She pulled me toward her and locked her arms around my back. I had to mumble my congratulations into the damp skin of her neck. I heard muffled words: “I just had to tell you. I couldn’t wait. It’s everything I wanted.” The pregnancy was early. She didn’t want anyone else to know yet. Anyway, no one else deserved to know. “I want this to be our little secret,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  There was something inordinately unsettling about this little conspiracy. Something about the present-tense reality of the data, about its physicality, both the sheer fact of it—a baby! a human baby!—and the way Esther imparted it, made me start scanning the store’s perimeter for the fire exits. At the moment she held me, Esther’s almost novelistic allure—her sudden, mysterious appearance, her outré sexuality, her exotic poverty—and all the flattery of her attention took on the spiky surface of unfortunate, unwanted reality. I’d never before felt so fifteen.

  Then something extraordinary happened. A few weeks later I was back in the stacks, now on to the fantasy and sci-fi alphabetization, when Esther called the store looking for me. She was gasping and frantic. She said she was in the emergency room. I couldn’t understand anything else. She begged me to come over. I pumped the pedals of my bike furiously. In the hospital, Esther was lying on a gurney in a tiled hallway, her face flushed and her stout body draped with a paper gown. She was calmer now. She told me what had happened. It was terrible. A cluster of cysts had formed in her uterus, little distended balloons of flesh surrounding her unsexed fetus like bubble wrap. Then they’d started to pop. Pop pop pop pop pop. The muted explosions going off inside her even as I held her clammy hand and mopped her clammy brow, making her double over and groan, pushing her baby out of her months before it was ready.

  Where was her husband? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. What amazed me was where I was, which was a state of serene confidence.

  It was the most remarkable thing. I still didn’t like Esther all that much. I still felt uncomfortable with and about her. I was still my petty, brooding, easily disequilibriumed self. But in the heat of emergency that all was temporarily blocked from consciousness, sealed off from mind and body. In the heat of emergency I became something better than I’d ever known. I became doubtless. All apprehensions and anxieties evaporated in the fire of What Needed to Be Done.

  I would experience this phenomenon many times in the years to follow. It would lead to a somewhat melodramatic sensibility as well as some wrenching confusions—a hunger for the dire and the tragic, and therefore a detachment from some important emotional realities. I was twenty, for example, when my father was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer, and listening to the doctor deliver the news I felt, above a rivulet of doom and grief, a great cataract of excitement. Awful as it sounds—awful as it felt—I was grateful. A sick father was an excuse, a valid, inarguable excuse, to rise up from my mundane life, where anxieties teemed like mosquito larvae. It had urgency, his disease. It was like a magnetic field that slammed all other concerns to the periphery, creating a wide and clarifying corridor in my mind.

  This kind of snapping-to of priorities is a familiar part of grave situations, of course. Something comes along to foreground mortality, be it cancer or a car crash, and we are expected to lay down our everyday concerns. We are expected to become less anxious, since anxieties are essentially big reactions to small, false, or inflated things, and death is so large, so true, and so solid that it demands all our attention or (here’s the superstition, but who’s prepared to sniff at it?) death will feel disrespected and attack. That’s why it’s so absurd—monstrous or comic, depending on how you look at it—when a guest at a funeral starts complaining about, say, her bunions. She’s showing herself insensible to the triviality-stripping dignity of the situation.

  This isn’t what I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about something a lot less customary and a lot less useful, almost definitely a lot less healthy. I’m talking about an attitude toward emergencies that obliterates anxiety and awareness. When my father was diagnosed, and when he died, the rush of excitement I felt
wasn’t because the situation was going to be a portal out of the niggling everyday and into the ultimate. It was because it was going to be a portal out of the niggling everyday and into . . . nothing. It was a ticket to leave my worries behind for a while, that’s all—a narcotic. Only unlike a narcotic, an emergency doesn’t dull the senses; it sharpens them. It telescopes the vision so that you can concentrate on whatever the emergency demands, or on getting out of the way whatever tasks and obligations you have to get out of the way so that you can get back to the emergency. It’s like Ritalin. It’s like magic.

  Sitting in a molded plastic chair in the emergency room of a Long Island hospital is where I first made this discovery. For four hours Esther cried and cringed and moaned her grief at her body having failed her yet again, and all the while I held her hand and nodded my sympathies, feeling calm and able—feeling, finally, as mature as she imagined I was. Sometime after nightfall I called my mother to pick me up. I had a quiz in the morning.

  Within a month, Esther quit. I don’t know where she went or what she did next. I don’t even remember her saying good-bye. I only remember feeling, now that the emergency had passed, relieved—as relieved as all of the other nostalgia-minded, nationalistic denizens of the store—that things would finally be getting back to normal.

  5.

  the trip

  When I was sixteen, my parents took me to a kosher deli a mile from our house to question me about my emotional state. Since my birthday I’d grown sluggish, withdrawn, detached. I’d stopped making eye contact. I did even more morose skulking around the house than the average teenager. They thought something might be seriously wrong.

  They had nothing psychiatric to worry about. The changes they had noticed in me were caused not by a dawning depression but by something greatly more prosaic: run-of-the-mill, dime-bag-buried-deep-within-the-sock-drawer, bored-teen drug use. I wasn’t mentally ill. I was stoned.

  To discover this, I’m sure, would have brought my parents very little comfort. It was remarkable that they hadn’t discovered it already. All the signs passed them by: the mounting obsession with The Grateful Dead; the purchase of black-light posters, pungent incense sticks, and a paperback copy of The Doors of Perception; the hair beginning to curl around my ears and down the nape of my neck; the insatiable appetite for salted pretzels and lavishly sugared cereals. They saw none of it. Consequently, when in the spring of my sixteenth year I asked permission to travel with my best friend, Justin, to see Phish perform in Binghamton, three hours north—Justin, with whom I’d recently raided our school’s science supply closet, stealing a plastic graduated cylinder which, with the help of a drill, a narrow steel pipe, and a foul-smelling epoxy, we fashioned into a serviceable bong—they agreed without hesitation. I was a sensible, trustworthy boy.

  It was a modest weekend trip, Friday to Sunday. Lodging was covered. We would stay in the dorm room of a mutual friend, Jesse, a freshman at the state college in Binghamton—a school that, since we were going to be graduating soon, we would need to check out anyway. The question was what we were going to do about transportation. For a teenager earning six dollars an hour at a part-time job, marijuana is an expensive habit. Greyhound and Amtrak were options, and Justin owned a car, but tickets or gas would make a painful dent in our party budget. And our party budget defined the trip.

  Here is where Esther reemerged to cut the knot of our stoner dilemma. One brisk morning, without warning, she reappeared in the bookstore. Her manner had changed dramatically since she’d left. No more with the jaunty sincerity. No more with the gluey eagerness. And no more, especially, with the strenuous efforts at ingratiation. She was there, it was at once clear, to see me: to look at me, to ask after me, to thank me in some muffled, obscure way for all that I had done for her.

  Cornering me behind the counter, Esther asked me what I’d been up to since she’d gone. What had I been up to? What is a sixteen-year-old up to? I went to school and I did my homework and I studied for the SAT and I smoked pot. I watched Seinfeld. I watched Mets games. What was I up to? The only news I could think of was our upcoming trip, a little spot of excitement in the monotony of growing up well cared for.

  “Really?” she said. “I’m headed up there, too! I went to school upstate. Did you know that? Did I already tell you that? That’s amazing. Wow. What are the chances? When are you going?”

  I told her.

  “Holy shit! Me, too! I’m going to be driving up on Friday afternoon. Do you want a ride? It would be great to have company.”

  I called Justin and he agreed. I’d introduced Justin to pot, but he smoked a lot more of it than me, and invested more in the lifestyle. He had a bright-eyed, idealistic worship of the 1960s counterculture, particularly its communal parts. We were, in his view, simply accepting a favor the universe had brought us in its course, and saving a few bucks along the way. Now the cost of fuel and tolls could be split three ways instead of two.

  Justin didn’t know Esther. However cruelly expressed the clerks’ opinions of Esther might have been, they had her thrift pegged perfectly. A week later, as she drove us in her battered blue hatchback off Long Island, through the thrumming tunnel, across Manhattan, and into weed-choked New Jersey—I in the passenger seat, Justin silent at Esther’s back—she made clear to us, first by innuendo, then in the most explicit of terms, that the cost of our transport was the full subsidization of every aspect of the trip: gas, tolls, food, maps. She was carrying minors; we would carry the load.

  I-95, I-280, I-80, I-380, I-81, NY-17 . . . it’s all a blur of cigarette smoke and small talk, a case of retrograde amnesia. There is no bright impress of image until the hatchback rumbles across the Susquehanna River into Vestal and Esther inquires as to what our plans are for the evening. We have none. We will be doing whatever Jesse does, which, if college hasn’t changed him much, is getting high and watching Super Fuzz. The concert is Saturday night. It’s Friday at dusk in the year 1994. Esther takes her thin eyes off the road, turns her small head.

  “Want to go to a party?”

  • • •

  We pay for the booze, of course, waiting in the idling car—Jesse now alongside us, absorbed effortlessly into the evening’s coming debauchery—as Esther trolls the liquor store, emerging at last with a bottle of vodka in a paper bag, a case of Molson Golden, and a six pack of Zima. Zima: the girl’s guzzling beverage of the 1990s, a sweet fizzy thing like Sprite dosed with undetectable intoxicants. There is, when we are done helping Esther load up the car, suspiciously little change. Justin is rolling a joint on a Rand McNally road atlas, his work barely illuminated by the sickly light of the car’s interior.

  The party is on the second floor of a house that has been converted into apartments, on a quiet residential street a few miles from campus. When we enter it’s discomfiting to find that we are by far the youngest people at the party, as well as, it would seem, the only heterosexuals. All of Esther’s friends are gay men. At the time, this is a breed as exotic to the three of us as Maori tribesmen. A gay party! We had no idea. Jesse, with his easy smile and smooth cheeks, attracts fervent attention. One man, neatly dressed in a crisp white shirt, with spiked, inky hair, hangs on his arm for sport. “Just give me one night,” he says. “One night. I swear I’ll change you.” Jesse declines but beams.

  We drink. We do shots. We take long pulls from the bong on the table. We grow thinner and lighter and bolder in mind. Esther orbits around me, a blond satellite falling into a decidedly minor planet. Her seductions are unsubtle. But, then, she’s working with pliable clay. To maintain a sense of safety, Jesse, Justin, and I spend most of the party huddled together on the couch, and at some point Esther joins us and says, apropos of nothing, “I can come just by someone licking my neck.” She invites me to try and, encouraged by the amused looks on the faces of my friends, I do. She is sitting to my right. I know this neck a little; we met under different circumstances. I know other necks, too. In the last few months I have had the opportunity to l
ick two separate female necks. Both tasted like vanilla. This neck is different. Esther’s skin tastes like the sea on my tongue. And she is all business. Instantly she starts to moan. It sounds, my mouth nestled beneath her chin, like an animal at the bottom of a well. I lick some more and the tone creeps up the chromatic scale. It becomes staccato, reedy, sharp, a horse whinnying in the distance, agitated, diaphragmatic, clenched . . . until, with a sudden suctional break, she disengages, flushed and panting.

  “See?” she says, smiling. “I told you. Isn’t that a unique talent?”

  The spiky-haired man reminds Esther of another talent she possesses. She disappears and returns with her blouse knotted at her spine, exposing a round belly pale as a fluke, with a deep, dark navel. She inserts a cassette into the stereo, straps cymbals to her thick fingers, and to a bassy oriental melody begins to dance. To me. To only me. A personal belly dance, as if it were my birthday at a Moroccan restaurant and my friends had sprung for the works. Hum da-da hum da-da hum da-da hum da-da. She lifts and lowers her hips on the axis of her navel. She makes the flesh of her belly roll rib to groin and groin to rib. She clinks and slithers toward me. Jesse, to my left, giggles. Justin, to my right, is too stoned to say a word. She is above me now, her thighs at my knees, undulating from the waist up, pressing her lips slyly together. The dance becomes less belly and more lap—a private transaction in a private room in a private club. Everyone is watching and smiling. You can feel them watching and smiling. Esther is smiling. She is enjoying herself, it’s plain to see. She is enjoying the attention of her friends and she is enjoying lavishing attention on me. She is a depot for the room’s attention. She takes it in and she metes it out.