by David Leite
When he came to collect me, I stood and shook his hand. It’s odd. I have no recollection of what he looks like. For the two years I saw him, it’s like his face was blurred and his voice mechanically manipulated, like those witnesses to a crime on the evening news.
Apparently, Neil had done the heavy lifting of diagnosing. It was Bercoli’s job to keep things tidy with medication management. After hearing me out—much of the same information that I had already given to Neil—Bercoli wrote a prescription for a pink pill, an anti-seizure medication given to epileptics. “It also acts as an anti-manic,” he said. “Very stable drug, very stable. Been around for years.” He wrote a prescription for an antidepressant sleeping medication as well, saying that lack of sleep is a major contributor to manic episodes.
The side effects of the pink pill were awful. My weight ballooned. I was now 220 and counting. An intense and crushing pain clamped down on my head whenever I stood up. A fog descended, slowing my thoughts—entire days were lived in that midafternoon slump, which no caffeine or sugar could rouse. I would start sentences, but the meaning would meander so that by the end of them I’d forgotten what I was saying. The names of ordinary objects, like “pencil” or “water” or “television,” escaped me, even though I was looking right at them.
I lost control of my body, too. My hands trembled slightly almost all the time, and my bowels went on strike. One afternoon, I was walking through Central Park on my way home from work. My gut began to spasm. The nearest restrooms in the park were padlocked. I ran over to the West Side and into Café des Artistes, but the manager sneered at me as I begged to use the bathroom.
“For customers only,” he said.
“I’ll buy something,” I pleaded, as he shunted me out of the way with his arm to make way for a couple.
With no other choice, I walked back into the park—heel toe, heel toe, heel toe—trying not to jounce my swilling insides. I stood in the bushes, my hands over my face, and let go. Then I walked the fifteen blocks home, head down, the legs of my jeans and socks wet and reeking, ignoring anyone’s complaints of smell.
For months, I saw no improvement in my moods, although the physical symptoms abated some. “These kinds of things take time,” Bercoli said, visit after visit. “Everyone is different.” And as I sat there, despondent, he would lean back in his chair, his eyes heavy-lidded and bored, as if he couldn’t wait for me to leave so he could get back to bidding on a Knight Rider denim jacket on eBay.
Therapy was the only place I saw progress. I culled my journals, highlighting passages, running a thick red marker under others, making big exclamation marks in the margins. And then twice a week I discussed it all with David Lindsey, turning each item over like an antique plate, examining it for potential. Questions that had hovered in the air between us for years were beginning to be answered. Some of my introverted and extroverted periods weren’t just the moods of someone with an artistic temperament any longer; they were the shuttling between the highs and lows of the disease. My sudden onslaught of weekend activities in Barryville—cleaning gutters, painting kitchen cabinets, scrubbing rust stains—which David Lindsey had always held as suspect, were now seen as hypomania, mingled with the ecstatic flush of new love. Slowly, we recast reactions, renamed thoughts, recategorized behaviors. I drew diagrams that looked like enormous bell curves, curves that explained in the most elegant, concrete way what had happened to me since I was a kid.
I traced my index finger along a flat line hurtling ahead to the right. Slowly it rose; this was the hypomania just beginning to take hold. Well-being squared. As it continued to rise, the smooth vertical side of a sugarloaf or anthill, this was where I felt marvelous. Words came easily, charm and sociability bubbled (this was when you wanted to get invited to our house for a dinner party), connections that startled my bosses and me were made here. I’m a genius, I would say to myself. As the curve reached its crest, life swirled, energy crackled, I needed little sleep. But something else began whirlpooling under the surface. Irritability and anger swelled, and a hot, screaming frustration took root. Why is everyone so stupid? Why is everything so fucking slow? And, suddenly, fences broke, and anxiety and panic galloped wildly through every artery and muscle in my body. Anxiety, I came to see, wasn’t the problem. It was the exhausted, pitiful reward for all that hypomania. And it acted as a switching station for the descent, which wasn’t a curvaceous, gracious slope downward, a mirror image of the exhilarating, addictive ride up. It was almost a vertical drop. A free fall into depression. I often think of it now as a half-built roller coaster, the tracks ending at the apex, two metal rods poking the sky. Below, boulders and scarred earth—nothing to break the plummet.
35
COPE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD
The circle of people sitting on metal folding chairs looked glum. I stood in the doorway, about to back out, when a woman’s voice from behind said, “Welcome! Join us!” Like a rogue wave, her unrelenting buoyancy pushed me into the room. I took a seat on the far end, away from her, and waited. A heavy woman across from me, dressed in a ratty skirt and T-shirt dotted with what I could only assume were food stains, worried her hands. The twisting and knotting of fingers was causing a bubble of nervousness to rise inside. I took deep breaths, trying to keep calm.
I had joined a bipolar support group at David Lindsey’s suggestion. “It’s important to see where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going,” he liked to say of the benefits of being in a group. Looking around the room at the slumped bodies, restless knees and feet, shifting eyes, frightening cheerleader smiles, I didn’t feel particularly confident in a sunny future.
“Who would like to start?” asked the Rogue Wave. I could feel the group move back a bit, as people suddenly took an interest in their sneakers or fingernails.
“I will.”
“Great!”
The speaker was a small, doleful woman with loose steel wool for hair. Her face was slack, as if it needed a puppeteer to pull strings to make it express anything.
“I still can’t work,” she said in a monotone. She explained that no matter how hard she tried each morning, she couldn’t rouse herself from bed to find a job. She’d get as far as the bathroom and have to turn back, all freaked out, and sleep until midafternoon. Only then could she face the day. I understood that. When I was depressed, mornings were the worst. Only as the day passed, and bedtime with its merciful blackness drew closer, did I start to feel better, knowing there was an inevitable end to the pain. But, still, I forced myself to go to work.
The group murmured its empathy, and a few people offered resources. The woman nodded robotically. “Thank you.”
Can’t hold down a job, can’t afford medication, boyfriend/girlfriend left me, parents kicked me out, am thinking of suicide again, swirled through the conversation. Hands rubbed backs, faces burrowed into a nearby neck, shoulders hitched with tears.
At the break a young guy, in his twenties I’d guess, came up to me.
“Pretty intense, huh?” he said, smiling.
I looked around to make sure I was out of earshot of everyone. “Are you kidding?” I whispered. “This is enough to make me want to put a gun to my head.” I leaned in. “Of course, I mean that in the most figurative of ways.” I didn’t know if gallows humor was allowed.
He stifled a laugh. “It isn’t always like this. When people are on the upswing it’s more positive and fun.” I looked at Rogue Wave. “But when they’re feeling too good,” he continued, “they take off. They think they don’t need the group or their meds. Then they end up back here.” He pointed to the cluster of lumpy, sagging bodies. “Like this.”
“You’re in a pretty good mood,” I said. “Will you be taking off soon?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Depends. I got a mild case, and I take my meds.”
Was that possible? Could that be me? Could my pink pill do that for me, too?
Rogue Wave spoke, in great swells, after the break. She’d been s
itting on her hands and rocking, an impish smile on her face. She said she knew she was feeling good and just wanted to enjoy it a little bit longer before she had to put the kibosh on it and get back to taking her medications. As she flitted in and out of how she was feeling, she suddenly recounted her first time having a manic episode.
She balanced her ass on the edge of the chair, her legs jumping as she pumped up and down on the balls of her feet. “I was seeing a revival of Gone with the Wind in a theater,” she began. My gut lurched. A movie? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. The last thing I needed was to hear another story of madness kicked off by a movie, but to hear it from her—this knot of insanity—was just unfair. I needed to think I was better than her, healthier, that we shared nothing—nothing—but a diagnosis.
Her hands fluttered in front of her as if she were drawing the scene for us, erasing, sketching, shading. She had walked into the theater hunched and sullen, she said, barely able to follow the story as one scene bled into another, colorless, even though it was Technicolor. As Scarlett, played by bipolar compatriot Vivien Leigh, pushed herself off the red clay of her ruined plantation and lifted her fist to the sky, vowing, “I’ll never be hungry again,” Rogue Wave was infused with a renewed strength and resolve. When she exited the theater some four hours later, she was giddy. “I had no idea why, but I was joyous, spinning around and talking nonstop”—not unlike what she was doing now—“about how absolutely! marvelously! tremendously! positively! happy the movie made me feel.”
It was like she was a human electroshock machine. The rest of us looked on, some reinvigorated, others dazzled; the woman with steel wool for hair was even smiling.
When I spoke after Rogue Wave, I brought down the mood of the room to mildly depressed. I talked about how I didn’t think my medication was working. A chorus rose, punctuated with Latin-sounding words: Try lithium! You can’t beat Topamax! Ask for Tegretol! Lamictal will do the trick! You can get Prozac from China for practically nothing!
I sat in David Lindsey’s office and recounted my night.
“That’s why I said you weren’t manic depressive,” he said. “You never presented like that.”
“Then I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’m not crazy enough to relate to most of those people, and I’m more than crazy enough to have to quit school—twice—destroy relationships, quit jobs over and over again when I’m on top, not complete things—”
The hand again. “It will not always be like this.”
“How do you know?” I suspected he was right, but I wanted to drag him around the block and make him say it, plainly.
“Because this medication or some other medications will help, and you’ll learn how to cope.”
There was that word again. I’d heard it since I was a kid, from my family, school counselors, Kim Mueller of the Eames Chair, and now him. Cope. One of the most hateful words in the English lexicon. It comes from the ancient Greek word kolaphos, which means “a blow with the fist.” A strike down in battle. I didn’t want to cope anymore, because I was over getting my ass kicked. I’d never thought I’d get to the point in my life when I would beg to be ordinary, average. But I had. I wanted to be in the emotional fiftieth percentile, right in the middle, lost and safe.
36
MEET THE LEITES
I eventually returned to school, taking one class a semester so I could keep the stress to a minimum. At David Lindsey’s suggestion, I hired a tutor. Although I still had a 4.0 GPA, new math was threatening to topple it. (Why old math wasn’t good enough was beyond me.) Finally, when I was thirty-seven years old, I graduated with a B.S. in psychology, four schools and nineteen years after starting.
My parents came for the ceremony, which I hoped would go better than their previous visit to the city, almost a decade before. Then, as I’d toured them around Manhattan and Brooklyn, my mother had sat in the front seat screaming almost the whole way. Back at my apartment, she collapsed on the couch, exhausted. “Too much traffic,” she said, looking up at me as I handed her a glass of water. “All those people. It was like an obstacle course. I don’t know how you do it, Son.” Visiting this time meant facing what I hoped wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle: Alan. Although I don’t recall this, he told me my parents had had several phone calls with him before their trip.
It was my mother, he said, who had reached out. They were cordial talks, never addressing the lavender elephant in the room, except that once she did floor him by saying, “Let me tell you something, Madison,” her nickname for him, because I’d told her he sold high-end real estate, “I’m not suddenly going to jump up and join PFLAG.” How she’d known about the largest parents, family, and friends organization that supports the gay community, he had no idea—and he knew it was better not to ask.
When they arrived, I flung open the front door to the apartment and kissed and hugged them.
“Mom banse, Dad banse.”
“God bless you,” they said together.
My mother was in her tan trench coat over a flowered print dress, both redolent of Chantilly, her perfume for years. My father looked dapper in his blue sports coat and tie.
While my father admired the apartment, leaning back and looking up the staircase and out at the view from the balcony, I noticed my mother was standing motionless, as she darted her eyes over the living room and kitchen without moving her head. Something she does when she’s nervous.
Upstairs, rustling in the bedroom. My mother pulled her purse to her chest and began backing up slowly, as if away from a rabid dog, until she’d wedged herself into the corner of the living room. She stared at the top of the stairs, waiting. I have no idea what she expected—bugle beads? studded leather? Liberace?—but her preemptive expression of horror unsettled me. When Alan descended, wearing a broad smile, an oxford shirt, and khakis, relief rippled across her face. I caught her sizing him up out of the corner of her eye as he talked with my father. I couldn’t ferret out what she was thinking, and I wasn’t about to drag her into the bathroom giggling and say, “So . . . whaddya think?” You just don’t do that sort of thing with my mother.
At graduation, my parents, Alan, Becca, her sister, and her mother all sat together in the theater. I had also invited Danny Pring, our next-door neighbor in Washington Depot, Connecticut, where we’d bought a country house. Danny and Alan were extraordinarily tight, and having her there was a bit of an emotional bolster for him. As I waited in line for my diploma, I watched them. Finally graduating from college wasn’t the greatest accomplishment that day. (By this time, I was certain I wasn’t going to graduate school to become a shrink. I’d had enough of pain, depression, and hopelessness in my life, thank you very much. I was now looking for joy.) Seeing my parents sitting next to Alan—my mother obviously enjoying his company, because she kept leaning across my father to speak to him, just like she and I did in church—just about did me in. The secrets were no longer. There was no need to hide who I was or parry questions from anyone, especially my parents.
As the ceremony dragged on, the crowd grew rowdy. Loud shouts and whistles rose when the names of many of the graduates were announced.
“David Joseph Leite,” thundered through the hall. I caught my mother as she stood and shouted, “We love you, Son!” Then she slipped her little fingers into her mouth and let out a piercing whistle, that clarion call that had summoned me all my childhood, which caused most of the auditorium to turn toward her, laughing. Some even applauded.
“What can I say? He’s our kid!” she yelled.
My mother was never outdone.
Afterward, I spotted David Lindsey, whom I’d also invited, sitting by himself.
“Congratulations,” he said, hugging me.
“Thanks. Just a minute.” I returned with my parents and introduced them.
He stuck out his hand, “Manny and Elvira, it’s a pleasure meeting you.” Only he pronounced my mother’s name El-veer-ra, even though I had corrected him a million times. “El-vye-ra,”
I’d say, “it’s El-vye-ra.” He liked to get my goat that way.
My father choked up. “Thank you for what you’ve done for our son all these years.”
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” my mother said, leaning in. “Every morning, we pray for you and the work you do.” She then reached out and touched his arm. “May God bless you.”
And to my shock, he replied, “Thank you. God bless you.” That man never stopped surprising me.
After a late lunch at a local restaurant with views of Lincoln Center, my parents hugged everyone goodbye, including Alan. I walked them down the street, past the screaming kids in the school playground, to their car.
“Thank you so much for coming,” I said, wrapping my arms around my mother. “Dad banse,” I said, kissing him.
I wanted to gush. I could feel the excitement of the day dovetailing with swelling hypomania; words were pushing against my teeth, trying to get out. All kinds of over-the-top movie goodbyes, weepy rococo thanks kitted out with emotional embellishments that were way out of proportion to the moment. A bravura performance just waiting for the curtain to rise. That’s the seduction of my illness, I came to see: I feel it, and because I feel it, it’s real. But I’d fought back. I was slowly learning to stay in the moment—not the chemically manufactured fantastical version of the moment exploding in my brain, but the unadorned moment between me and my parents, who had come so far in their own lives—and in their faith—to be standing here with me.
“Oh, no!” my mother said, fishing in the shopping bag she was holding. “I forgot my coat in the apartment.” Now, my mother doesn’t forget things. She’s the person who’ll remind everyone else not to forget their things, regardless of who they are.