by Tracy Kidder
He couldn’t let other people inside his rooms. They might touch the few crucial objects that he kept uncontaminated. Maybe that was just as well. He felt beyond embarrassment, not beyond shame. And he was ashamed of his rooms. That was the cruelest side of his illness, he thought. The compulsions that forced him to live in squalor didn’t take away his ability to recognize the squalor, or to see that the madness controlling him really was madness.
In later years Alan’s illness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, would become quite justly famous, but most people didn’t know much about it back then. Alan, always studious and thorough, had learned most of the facts available. He was what clinicians called a cleaner. And he understood with perfect clarity that mastering the proper names of symptoms is far from the same as having power over them. He’d spent time with a psychiatrist back when his symptoms still alarmed him, before they’d become his life, and the psychiatrist had told him there was no cure.
He wasn’t completely unhappy. While he sat imprisoned in his rooms overlooking Pleasant Street, his mind ranged far more widely than it ever had before. He had to spend about two and a half hours sitting on the toilet. The time was usually that long, because the moment he felt that he had finished evacuating his innards, he’d feel he hadn’t. Unable to leave the toilet, Alan read. He consumed books there, among others all of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In Alan, speech and thought were more nearly identical than in most people. He left enormously long messages on friends’ answering machines, messages lengthened by apologies for leaving such long messages. The history of Rome according to Gibbon fascinated him. One of his ruminations went like this:
“As I read The Decline and Fall, I had no thoughts about Northampton, but I did have an awareness of changes I saw taking place around me. For example, the fact that real estate has gone from being a long-term investment to a short-term commodity. Western jurisprudence is based on the sanctity of real estate. It’s the foundation of Anglo-American law, the ownership, inheritance, and use of real estate. So when you change a long-term, sanctified thing into something like jewelry or cars, that’s a huge change in basic values. Now I’m not sure how that comes about, but clearly it represents an erosion. I don’t know if it signals the decline and fall of the American or the Northampton empire. Is there a connection with children in Pulaski Park piercing and tattooing themselves? I don’t know. But certainly this has been a century of dramatic changes.
“Let’s say it’s the year 817 and a horde of Vandals is roaming across the steppes of eastern Europe and they come to a walled town and demand that it surrender, and the town refuses, and the Vandals overrun the town and because it would not submit to them, extirpation takes place. They leave no trace of it behind. Gradually, over the centuries, humanity becomes more civilized. Wars take place between armies and aren’t aimed at running over civilian populations. And then in the twentieth century that changes again. Civilian populations are again dramatically affected by wars. Society exists essentially to protect individuals, and if governments can’t protect individuals, there’s a fundamental breakdown. When people survive the bombing of a city, they tend to feel individually spared. It’s the equivalent of going, ‘Phew!’ That kind of thing heightens your sense of the value of your own life. I think that in this century, because of wars waged on civilian populations, there is a heightened sense of the individual, who wants his voice heard and his influence felt. And that leads to a further inability of society to protect its own from the people who are expressing themselves.”
If someone bumped into Alan when he ventured onto the streets outside, he felt very angry, because for him the consequence was five hours of ritual cleaning. He thought it was a good thing he didn’t have violent tendencies, or else by now he might have killed one of the careless people who didn’t think that bumping into someone else was a big deal. “When I grew up, you would say, ‘Excuse me,’ and avoid bumping into people, or say, ‘Sorry,’ if you did. People have no sense of personal space anymore. Or maybe it’s just that, because of my illness, I have a heightened sense of this. Maybe I’m just a one-note musician. Maybe reading Hobbes’s Leviathan had too much of an effect on me. But I think people are much more focused on themselves than on relations with other people nowadays.” He wasn’t sure, but sometimes it did seem as if he could glimpse connections between the decline of manners, and maybe even the fall of the Northampton real estate market, to the grand, tragic story of civilizations past. At any rate, his reading on the toilet took his mind away for moments from the fact that he was compelled to sit there for hours.
At times he felt something like peace falling over him, descending from despair. “There are certain threads of existence that you abandon. It’s just that you come to grips with the fact that you’re not going to deal with them.” He thought he could have been a monk. “Praying instead of washing my hands four hundred times a day.” He’d been only moderately well-read before. Now he lived in books and movies. He used his old rock-and-roll records to summon up memories, where he could also go for a while. His experience was increasingly limited, and it intensified in proportion. He knew periods of great concentration. He escaped into them. Meanwhile, he considered suicide.
Alan had a charming, roguish friend. He’d done a small business deal with him. Ever afterward he would say that this was the kind of guy with whom you’d never want to be in business, though you’d always be glad to meet him for a beer. The friend had been trying to seduce a certain woman, and in order to impress her had taken her to look at some apartments he’d had renovated. He took this woman to the apartment of a tenant who said he’d be away. He opened the door and saw the tenant hanging by the neck. The body had been there awhile. A frightful sight. That very day, Alan’s friend had begun a course of psychotherapy.
Alan had sent away to the Hemlock Society for advice, and read their pamphlets thoroughly. For him, he thought, carbon monoxide would be easiest. He had keys to his friend’s garage and to one of the cars inside it. One night, he figured he’d get a little drunk and lock himself in there with the car running. He imagined his friend finding his corpse and rushing off again to a therapist, and he laughed in perverse amusement. Alan had a distinctive laugh. It began with an “Ah” and proceeded in an even tempo, “Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha,” and died away in a tone that sounded a little sorrowful, as if at its being over.
But he wasn’t ready to die yet. He often sat alone at one of his windows, looking down at the street. The sounds of night in Northampton rose up to him, of music, happy voices, arguments. He watched the town pass by below, the friends on their way to restaurants, the drug dealers and swaggering homeboys, the body-pierced Goths, the married couples, the lovers, the lesbian mothers pushing baby carriages, the homeless who rooted through the trash barrels, the staggering collegiates who appeared from the bar across Pleasant Street as night in Northampton began to end. And all of them seemed enviable, because they were alive in the world. He sat for hours sometimes, gazing down with longing.
In nearby cities and towns the name “Northampton” used to be synonomous with the state mental hospital. If a mother told a friend that her son had gone “to Northampton,” the friend was apt to say, “Oh, I’m sure he’ll get out soon.” The hospital was founded in the nineteenth century, in an age less euphemistic than the present one. The Northampton Lunatic Hospital was its first name. But the place wasn’t built to imprison what the mid-nineteenth century called lunatics; they were already shunned and tied up in their beds. The hospital was supposed to free them, to get them out into the country, to place them in front of lovely views and in airy interiors, to give them religion and outdoor chores, and thus to relieve them of the greatest imprisonment of all—by curing them. For the working people of Northampton the hospital had meant jobs, of course, but if you looked at its oldest buildings—the inventive flourishes in the brickwork, the elegant dormers at the rooflines, the grand scale of the whole—you knew that the peopl
e who built it and worked there and ran it had the best of intentions. Eventually, however, it became a terrible place.
In the 1950s, when she was a student at Smith, Sylvia Plath described it in a letter to her mother.
We changed then, for the cocktail party, and walked over to the professor’s house. On the way we decided to keep on walking for a while longer, and so walked up to the mental hospital, among the buildings, listening to the people screaming. It was a most terrifying, holy experience, with the sun setting red and cold over the black hills, and the inhuman, echoing howls coming from the barred windows.
The hospital the young poet saw held about two thousand patients. Now it lay empty up on Hospital Hill, where the Indians used to bury their dead and where the gallows had stood and where children now went sledding. It was a haunted spot, the kind that makes you feel how small a piece of time the living occupy. The old hospital sat there decomposing, about a mile from downtown, a vast collection of giant buildings, all shut up and moldering, surrounded by enormous trees, like a lost civilization, a gigantic lost cause. You craned your neck beside the buildings, looking toward the leaking roofs. There were vermin in the maze of tunnels that connected all the parts. Some windows were covered in plywood. In others ragged curtains hung, and now and then a passing jogger saw one stir, and was startled, and hurried on.
As the hospital closed down, a lot of patients were offloaded into little old Northampton. A former inmate set fire to a downtown building, and two people died. Then, at last, the state got busy, and a brand-new social service apparatus was erected. Rather quickly, the furor passed and Northampton got accustomed to its new strange characters. When Tommy was a child, playing down by the Mill River with Rick and other friends, he’d hear the siren go off on the hill and, assuming that meant an inmate had escaped, he and his pals would run for home. A couple of years back, a national public-TV show singled out Tommy and some of his colleagues for the firm and kindly way they dealt with former mental patients who were living in the town. Former patients had become a part of the place that Tommy and the other cops routinely patrolled. A lot of the most florid characters were gone now: The Sun Tan Man, who used to stand bare-chested on corners. The Bird Man, who used to go up to people on the street and say, “Suck my cock. Oh, come suck my cock.” (Once, when Tommy put him in protective custody, he announced that he was going to take “a bird bath,” and started splashing water on his face from the toilet in his cell.) The Hamburglar—named for a cartoon character—a tiny man who always wore a trench coat and got in raucous fights with himself on Main Street. He’d throw roundhouse punches at someone only he could see, then go reeling backward from the counterpunches. Sergeant Bobby Nicol would walk up and say sternly to him, “All right, you two. Break it up.” And the Hamburglar would obey.
Samuel Johnson said, “A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.” Perhaps an even finer one is the way a place treats the mentally ill. A lot of citizens went out of their way to speak to the town’s former mental patients. Some downtown merchants joined the cops in looking after them. Alan Scheinman was a harder test. Normal citizens could see right off that people like the Hamburglar weren’t like them. But Alan was a lawyer. He was rich. He’d seemed fairly normal just a while ago. Then he’d changed. If something like that could happen to him, it could happen to you.
“Alan Scheinman is the Tylenol killer,” someone had written in the women’s room at Packards bar and restaurant. One woman, well connected politically, referred to him as “Alan Scheincreep.” A few clerks called him “the germ-crazy lawyer who won’t touch any change.” But those were the exceptions. “He has a strange illness which makes him cross the street to get away from you,” Mayor Ford said, catching a glimpse of him on Main Street. “He was one of the people responsible for the renaissance of downtown. It’s very sad.” Judge Ryan made a point of falling into step with him, so that when Alan got to his destination he could open the door for him. Alan could sometimes count on strangers, too. He stood outside a downtown restaurant once—looking desperate, he supposed—and a woman inside with her leg in a cast, a woman he had heard described as a man-hating lesbian, saw him through the window, got up from her chair, hobbled to the door, and opened it for him. Many people were kind, even the notoriously difficult functionaries at the registry of motor vehicles.
The world outside Alan’s apartment had turned into a giant obstacle course. His greatest freedom was a car. But to drive one, he had to have it registered. Inside the registry, on King Street, the lines were always long. He couldn’t expect to stand in one without someone brushing up against him. The transaction with the documents would be impossible. The clerk wouldn’t understand. In a panic, Alan called ahead. “Look, my name is Alan Scheinman. I’m a lawyer here in town.” (Saying he was a lawyer sometimes helped.) “I suffer from an illness which makes my behavior seem bizarre. I have to register a car, but I can’t stand in line, and I can’t touch papers that anyone else has handled.”
The clerk’s voice said, “Just a minute, please.”
Then another voice came on the line. He explained again. He heard that second voice say, “Just a minute, please.” He thought this wasn’t going to work, but the third voice offered hope. “Come on down, and we’ll see what we can do.”
Alan stood a little distance from the crowds at the counter, in his usual defensive mode—forearms pressed together, both hands in plastic bags, one hand cupping his chin. From the other, also near his chin, dangled a plastic bag full of documents. “I was a sight,” he remembered. He waited there for a few minutes, feeling desperate and helpless, and then a clerk appeared from behind the counter. She looked at him and didn’t even seem surprised. She led him to an empty office, took the bag of documents, and returned ten minutes later with all the paperwork completed. She even escorted him out to the parking lot, opening all the doors for him.
That Christmas Alan sent a four-pound box of Godiva chocolates to the registry, along with a thank-you note. He got back a letter signed by the entire staff. Were there tearstains on it? The letter said how very rare it was for them to get a thank-you note, let alone a present. On Valentine’s Day, Alan sent the registry two dozen long-stemmed roses, and on Thanksgiving a large fruit basket. He’d sent those presents every year since. He also sent chocolates to his bank. The head teller would fetch a stack of crisp, new money from the vault for Alan. Alan sent his gifts to his auto dealership, too. He couldn’t let anyone inside his car. The mechanics allowed him to drive it into the service shed. No one there openly made fun of him, though it was a strange sight, Alan’s car aloft on the lift with Alan sitting in the driver’s seat.
At the grocery store, Alan would take a box of plastic garbage bags from the shelf, open the box, pull out a bag, put the rest of the box inside the bag, then start moving down the aisles. He’d put each item in his bag. He’d practically empty the shelf of cleaning agents. Sometimes another customer scurried up to the service desk and whispered that a strange man in shorts was shoplifting. One time Alan confronted a would-be snitch. “I hope you feel better,” he said to her, thinking to himself, “Oh, Alan, another pathetic comment, out of abject hostility.” But the employees were obliging. They didn’t make him stand in checkout lines. He went to the customer service desk instead, took each item out of the garbage bag, and read the price to the clerk, who added everything up and called out the total to him. He’d ask the clerk if he still had enough on account to cover the bill, and if she said he didn’t, he’d pull some cash out of his shirt pocket, crumple it up, then toss it to her. He sent his gifts to the grocery store, too.
Not many ironies were lost on Alan. Northampton was kind to him, all in all. His wealth helped him to secure that kindness, through what he called “preemptive bribery,” and it also allowed him to equip himself for illness—to buy, for instance, the expensive turbo tank that kept the water hot during four-hour-long showers. Wealth and local kindness. Those good things had made it
possible for him to spend a decade avoiding confrontation with the demon in his mind.
OCD had its allure. All by itself, it made his parents suffer. He could speak to them through it, without having to utter his thoughts: “So sad. You can’t do anything about it now. You’re screwed. Gotcha.” Of course, the illness wasn’t operating on a tabula rasa. It evoked and magnified parts of his former self, like his cunning, and it called on what felt like a deep, inborn desire to have exclusive management of his own life. OCD provided him with what he called “secondary gains.”
According to the current clinical definition of the most common form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the victim engages in compulsive rituals that relieve obsessive thoughts, these rituals and thoughts interfere with the victim’s normal functioning, and most victims realize, to some degree at least, that their fears and rituals are inappropriate. They often suffer from other problems—depression is common. But a single illness seems to lie behind compulsive hoarding, checking, cleaning. It may afflict as much as 3 percent of the general population, a very large percentage for a psychiatric ailment. It chooses people of every race and both sexes equally and without regard to position or intelligence.