All of my worries seemed to vanish upon meeting Liz Brownlee. She was popular, outgoing, an actress and a singer. After the reception, she invited me to a house party that she was throwing that weekend in Kendall. I went home and begged my mom to borrow her car. I had turned sixteen that summer and had passed my driving test. I asked if I could borrow her new Honda, only this time, to go to a school party. Cautiously, she agreed, as long as I got back at a reasonable hour.
I told her not to wait up.
Liz and I spent much of the party talking, and introducing each other to friends we had in different classes. Every word I said seemed to fall into her hands now, and when she spoke I heard her voice as though within me. That night, Liz’s house was full of students dancing in and out of the living room. Plastic cups were left spinning on the floor. Colored crepe paper bled into pools of spilled beer, and clothes were abandoned in the pool. I drove home in the early hours of the morning, leaving a kiss on Liz’s cheek. I pulled out of her driveway feeling for the first time that I might one day grow up.
The next morning I was awoken with an arsenal of questions: “How late were you out last night?”
“Late, Mom. Not very late.”
“Were her parents there?”
“Yes. Her mom and stepdad were there.”
“Okay. So, let’s get this straight,” she said, emphasis on every word, “her parents were there and they let you stay at the party until damn near three o’clock in the morning?”
“The party wasn’t over.”
“Excuse me? Do you expect me to believe that Liz’s parents allow her to have parties until three o’clock in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“Was there alcohol?”
“Get over it, okay! The only thing that you have to be worried about is whether or not I have a girlfriend.”
“You’re too young to have a girlfriend,” she said, sneering.
“Ha!” I picked up her keys and went for the door. She picked up the phone, threatening to have me arrested.
“On what grounds?” I asked.
“Disobedience.”
“I have no reason to obey you, Mother.”
I spent the day on the beach with Liz, talking about family. When I got home, the fight continued. My mother threatened to have me committed, hospitalized, sedated. She swore that she would play any card and use her full influence if I ever tried that again.
“Really, Mom? You’d do that for me?”
She was my legal guardian, she reminded me, and she could have me locked up for any reason whatsoever. I told her that she couldn’t lie to the police, and she couldn’t prove to anyone that there was a single thing wrong with me. She was certain there was.
“Did Uncle B.J. commit suicide?”
She stood back, astonished. “He killed himself with drugs and alcohol.”
“Was there a note?”
“No. There was no note.”
“Was there an investigation?”
“No. Why would there have been an investigation?”
“Do you think B.J. intended to kill himself?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“So you don’t know?”
Then something snapped. She started screaming, “Get out! Get out of this house if you don’t like it! I’m telling you to leave now!” Again, she went for the telephone. She wouldn’t say more. Like an avalanche, the situation fell out of hand. I left the house, accusing her of having made up her brother’s suicide. It seemed impossible. How could she use the word suicide wrong?
Liz advised that I go live with my father.
“That wouldn’t work.”
“Come live with me!” she said.
In her eyes, I already possessed the confidence to think for myself, and to do what was right. I had my own life to think about, she reminded me. Between Liz and me, she was really the independent one. I was only beginning to understand how she saw the world. Liz was sharp, intellectually, and she was free to do and say whatever she liked at home. Her mother read all her books when Liz was done with them. They piled up like old toys, set down for new ones. Liz wrote me letters. I wrote her poems.
“What should I do?” I asked her.
“Do what you feel is right.”
The next day, while talking to Bruce about his new car, I asked him: “Do you think your parents would let me stay at your house tonight?”
“Sure thing, man. They’re cool. But why? Like, what’s up?”
I told him what my mother had said. “I need a few days, maybe.”
“And your brother?”
“He’s not on my side.”
“Okay.” Bruce looked around at the building we’d found ourselves in, a six-story complex with elevators, galleries, auditoriums, and black box theaters. “Is it serious?”
“Yeah, I need a place tonight.”
“Sure thing, you can stay at my house. I’m all right. Don’t worry. I don’t bite.” He punched me in the shoulder, and we were both laughing. “You’re going to love my car, man, it’s a beast I’m telling you! It’s a 1966, but it hauls ass, man!” He was trying to cheer me up.
After our classes let out that afternoon, Bruce walked me to a brown Cutlass Supreme and opened the door for me. There was no paint on the vehicle. It had been paid for in cash and accepted as is, primed in Rust-Oleum. He liked it that way. We hopped in, and, after a few tries, started the engine. The car was great because Bruce loved it; his excitement made up for all of its flaws. With a squeal out of the parking lot, Bruce took to the highway and raced into the heart of rush-hour traffic. When we got to his house on a busy strip of 135th Street, I was welcomed in. Bruce’s sisters were as boisterous as he was. Jokes flew across the room. I thought about the stillness and sterility of my own home, and the sour feelings I had to endure there. My house was like a dentist’s office compared to Bruce’s kitchen. Here there was warmth, laughter, and food enough for everyone.
My third night away from home, two squad cars pulled into Bruce’s driveway. Beside them, my mother’s Honda pulled up on the lawn. Three sets of headlights glared into the living room. It was late, after eleven, and the police didn’t even knock. They stood outside and called me out of the house with a megaphone. Bruce’s dad stood behind my shoulder and told me that I didn’t have to go. He said I could stay right there if I wanted to. To this day, I wish I had listened to him. Instead, I stepped out of the house and walked right up to the police.
There were two women in uniform, and then there was my mom. All three were giving me the same look. They told me, either I go home with my mother or they would take me to jail. I asked the police to arrest me. I gave them my wrists. I said that I would not go home with my mother unless she’d promise that something would change in our house, and in the way she treated me. We stood there on the lawn waiting for new words to come from the surrounding traffic.
That’s when Mom told the police that she was a social worker, and that I was seeing a psychiatrist.
“No I’m not.”
“We’ve been through this.”
The police turned to her sympathetically, and didn’t hear another word I said.
A minute later I was sitting in the passenger seat of her Honda and she was starting the engine. “Things will change,” Mom said, ominously. Voices caved in, sealing my jaws and locking my shoulders. Why did she want me home? I couldn’t understand. My thoughts kept running up behind my ears. Pop music filled the car, and, as we got onto the highway, I began quietly hyperventilating. I locked the door. Arriving at Walden Pond, Mother parked the car and opened the driver’s-side door.
I didn’t move, and couldn’t speak. She left me there trying to breathe. I was sealed in glue. I could not stand up. After a few minutes alone in the passenger seat, I found that I could move my wrist and one of my fingers. I slowly opened the door and set my feet on the pavement. When I tried to stand, I fell, knocking my head against the fire hydrant. For a moment, I lay in the parking lot hold
ing my head.
Slowly, I walked past my mother and brother as though they were on display in a window. I locked my bedroom door. Hanging on my wall were the two masks my mother had given me, bonded together as one. I removed the ornament, set it on the counter of the mirrored hutch. With an available hammer, I took aim and shattered it.
Then, with care, I began systematically destroying all of the other breakable objects in my vicinity. I toppled my dresser and smashed my alarm clock. I dropped my bedside table onto a box of old cassette tapes. I broke a tape recorder, pulled the drawers out of my upturned dresser, smashed my lamp on its side, shattered the lightbulb, and kicked the plug across the room. I tore down my drawings and posters. Mother did nothing. No one came to my door. Then I picked up Dad’s sixty-pound weights that now sat at the foot of my bed. I looked at myself in the mirrored hutch full of candles, ornaments, and photographs. I lifted the weight to my chest, dropped one foot back, and hurled the bar into the mirrors and glass shelves. I watched my reflection explode into shards. Glass, mirror, plastic, all came back flying, dusting me in the face and arms. The weights bounced and fell to the ground, ringing like a bell.
On Mental Health
It was Friday when I stepped into the lobby of the address in my hand. At the fifth-floor office, I matched the name, Greenbaum, on the door. This test had made me nervous all week. Because of my blowout, Mother had arranged to have me taken out of school for a comprehensive psychological examination that would include the Rorschach test. Inside the office I found a small waiting area with a flowery love seat pushed up against one wall. A lithograph hung above it in a blue frame. I sat down in a pink wicker chair, next to a watercooler, and leafed through a small stack of magazines. After a moment, the office door opened, and an old man in a white lab coat stepped out and introduced himself, chewing and shaking his head. I now understand that he had Parkinson’s disease, but at sixteen I found it distracting. The doctor verified my name from a clipboard and thanked me for being on time. I could barely understand him.
Dr. Greenbaum showed me into his office and had me sit down at a small table. “So, how do you feel today?” he said. He asked where I went to school, what grade I was in, and if I liked going to school. I thought he was trying to trick me, and so I gave him one-word answers and watched him as through a mask.
He started asking me simple questions about home, how many brothers or sisters I had. I didn’t tell him about my uncle, and I didn’t tell him that I had run away after my mom told me to get out of the house. I didn’t tell him that my parents had separated after my dad beat me up, or that I had been jumped at school. He didn’t ask for specifics. He looked at his watch and began the test.
There were many stages to the exam. He said I should try to think of each section as a game, but that meant they weren’t games. We began with an odd deck of cards that didn’t have numbers or suits but only shapes, then figures in different situations. I was given flash cards that I had to arrange into a sequence. Then I was given a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and told to draw my family. I drew us all around a huge TV set. I was the shadow in front of the box. He handed me a maze to solve. Then he cleared the table, checked his watch, and told me that he would now be showing me a series of inkblots. As he brought them over, I thought of a branding iron.
The first image was black and white. I told him what I saw: I saw three things. I saw what an average young man would see, I saw what an average young woman would see, and then I saw what I saw. “Where should I begin?” Song voices were harmonizing. Dr. Greenbaum blinked, shook his head, and told me to begin wherever I wanted to. In three equal groupings I began to list what I saw in the first image. “An average young man would see a baseball diamond, the back end of a totaled car, a shaft of light coming into a dark room, pork chops, a squashed bug, a formation of rocks, a continent.” I went on. “An average young woman would see a tulip flower, a vagina, a bug, a butterfly woman with two heads on a chariot with two horses, a statue of angels with four falling babies.” Then I told him what I saw: “I see a four-eyed reptile. I see frogs on the bank of a river. I see flashlights in a dark pool. I see clouds over the Grand Canyon.”
Dr. Greenbaum shook his head and showed me the next image. I started right in: “a bird flying into a flower, two unborn babies being pulled from the ocean, a carousel—the saddle and the pole, a hand with a hole in the palm, a brain inside of a stomach, a burn, a birthmark, an arrowhead in a river, a satellite in space, a spaceship, the Challenger.”
The next image had color, red and orange, and black. “An autopsy, a pelvis, a slice of the brain, a dog’s head swimming in the water, a crocodile, a set of cherubs flying, children falling, a fly in the mouth of an alligator, a series of islands, a centipede, horizons at morning and night, a virus in milk, the shadows of two big birds balancing a butterfly.”
“Big birds?”
“Yes, like Big Bird from Sesame Street, and they’re pouring something into this big brain.” I pointed out their hands, their heads, the brain.
The next image began with a train wreck and led to fresh nuclear waste traveling over rocks. The colors in the inkblots were becoming more complex, but they all seemed very intentional, full of angels, animals, insects, bodies, skeletons; people.
In a way it was horrifying. After the last image, a crushed walnut, my eyes were exhausted. Dr. Greenbaum shook his head and tried to catch up with me. I thought he’d be impressed with all of the images that I had come up with. I thought he’d say something like “Very good,” but he didn’t say anything at all. He turned the pages back one by one, running the butt of his pen down two columns. This time he shook his head for real, flipping back pages until his notebook had finally closed.
I began to feel nervous, like I might have said or done something I didn’t want to. I stared at him, trying to tell myself that his shaking head didn’t mean anything. In the end, my mother was handed a document that effectively gave her permission to have me sedated and hospitalized at any time she chose.
Dear Mrs. Fox:
Your 16-year old son was seen for a complete battery of psychological tests on October 25, 1989. He was extremely cooperative throughout the testing and worked diligently.
Severe emotional disturbance emerged immediately and was present throughout all test protocols. He has feelings of being left out, of others not paying attention to him, of being different than others, and tends to handle these feelings in a variety of ways that are barely allowing him to cope.
Some of his thoughts are unusual and different. He tends to cover them up with role-playing, but is aware of the fact that some of his percepts are not realistic. Boundaries between what is real and what is make-believe are weak, and at times he responds to his own fantasies as though they were, in fact, reality. This inability to distinguish between his own fantasies and reality places him at serious risk in a number of ways. Should he be a failure in his chosen career of being an actor, he is likely to be overwhelmed by his tenuously controlled inner drives.
In view of his impaired self-esteem and the intense confusion of dealing with sexual feelings, he finds it difficult to approach people of either sex with any intimacy.
He is well aware of his inner conflicts: his working diligently on the test indicated a willingness to work on his own problems. In view of his tenuous hold upon reality, his tendency to act out in aggressive and/or destructive fashions, it may be necessary to hospitalize him at some time during his treatment.
If you have any questions concerning this report, please call on me.
Sincerely,
Richard Greenbaum, PhD
I left the office, and I went to school somewhat by habit, I guess, even curiosity. I didn’t have to be there, I felt I belonged. New World was having another of those big TGIF parties. This event, like the last, was equipped with refreshments, a DJ, and something of a dance floor. I didn’t want to miss out. The mezzanine was full. People were dancing. Liz was there. I saw Marta by the l
edge overlooking the atrium of the Wolfson Building. It seemed all of the theater kids were stressed-out about whether or not they’d been cast in the next main-stage production, The Suicide. Then I heard Bruce off in the distance, calling for help, and I thought I knew what to expect.
He’d found a certain detail in the architecture, a second mezzanine protruding from the side of the building. From this, he could stand, raise his arms, and pretend to be hanging off of the ledge. The illusion was successful, and for a second it was funny. In the next second, our health teacher, Dr. Doan, saw Bruce against a blue skyline hanging from one hand, waving the other in the air. She leapt into life-preservation mode, a sixty-year-old marathon runner. When the impulse took, she ran and threw herself against the ledge that Bruce appeared to be hanging from. She grabbed his arms and tried to pull him back onto the mezzanine. Bruce looked up at her from below and turned his hands around, smiling. Dr. Doan grabbed him with both hands, like he was her own child, and screamed.
On Monday, when the call-board was posted, Bruce’s name wasn’t on the cast list and he wasn’t in class. Our new acting coach, Carol Cadby, gave us the news. Bruce had leapt—out of the fishbowl—and was now being sent back to his regional school. It was the worst news a student could bring home. I was devastated. I knew his parents would be crushed. The room felt empty as we came to the end of class. For the first time since coming to New World, we were no more than a handful of listless students wandering through the hallways.
The Theater of
Literacy & Illiteracy
There is a book in my apartment, a book of many volumes. It is a journal, a diary, which I began here in the fall of my junior year and have maintained into my adulthood. The journals themselves vary. They are simple sketchbooks. Most are black or white. There are a few blue volumes, and a set of red volumes. There is one orange journal, and one green journal. They come in some variety of sizes. I have counted them, but as I continue writing, their number grows and I lose track again. Each volume is related to the next, just as each entry is. While the journals follow few conventions, those that I have chosen have come to shape my life.
A Comedy & a Tragedy Page 13