Juliet the Maniac
Page 10
He acted annoyed but finally agreed. He asked how much I figured it was worth.
“Probably a hundred dollars. You could get me a quarter ounce and I’d be happy.”
Junk Dog said no, which I figured would happen. I was hoping to get an eighth out of him. But he refused to go that high, said the most he’d give me was a gram. I could see he wasn’t going to budge, so I said OK. Holly and I had no money that day, or weed, so a gram seemed a hell of a lot better than nothing. We smoked it all before it grew dark.
HAVE A GREAT SUMMER
At the end of the year, I was in more photos for the yearbook than I could have ever hoped to be at Carmel Heights. The group shot with Mrs. Hunter and all her advisees. The group shot with the girls who did the literary magazine. A picture of me and Holly smiling at lunch. Me and Lily laughing over some dumb thing in the courtyard. The version of me in the photos was perfect: high cheekbones and shiny hair.
Except for one. In the photo of our therapy group, they made us put our legs up like we were doing the cancan. In the photo, all the other girls looked excited, hamming it up for the camera. I was on the end, barely smiling, blurry and looking lost because I couldn’t figure out which way to look at the camera. Better than before, but still very much a ghost.
SIGNS AND SIGNIFIERS
It was late June, the first night of summer warm enough to not need a sweater. Something had been in the works for weeks now, and I’d taken the hot weather as a signal of its culmination. Dylan and Luis had picked us up that afternoon, straight from Holly’s house. Somehow we’d become friends with them recently. They had cars and money and drugs, and didn’t seem to want anything more from us than our company. They just thought we were funny. Liked our taste in music. This had seemed like a sign too, of an elevated status. I’d finally figured out how to act in a way that made people like me. It was a full moon, so bright that when night fell it wasn’t even that dark. I felt a pull that evening, as though I was directed by magnets. I thought it was all knitting together into something good.
But later, as I sat in the back of a police car, it seemed like I must have read the symbols all wrong. They were indeed symbols, and it was true they’d meant something; the mistake wasn’t finding significance where there had been none. But I’d been looking at them backward, or sideways, when I should have been reading down. I felt so stupid for misreading the code.
The cops were saying something, but I didn’t know it was directed at me until I heard them say, “She’s too stoned.”
They were right. I was too stoned. Not just on pot, either—a little cocaine, a lot of acid. I was having a hard time looking at their faces because they kept turning into the shapes of other things. Demons and trolls and skulls. They wanted to know where I lived. I considered telling them something other than the truth, but then they told me the options were for them to hand me over to my parents or spend the night in jail. I gave them my address.
I spiraled out in the dark of that police car. It started with me doing the thing where I removed myself from myself. I saw a girl sitting in the back of a police car and she was too skinny and her hair was all tangled up, with a gaze so flat and pupils stretched so wide that she might as well have been dead. She looked so lost, like she had no idea who she was or where she was going. And I felt so sorry for her. I hadn’t seen any shadows for so long, not since the mental hospital, but now the shadows surrounded her, mutating and pitch black, flocks of birds the color of sulfur, all engulfing her, returning to poke their long dark claws into her chest and around her throat. I saw there was no hope for her, no turning back, no finding her way again. It was pointless.
I had been weaned off Wellbutrin and put on Paxil a week before because I still felt depressed. It was an exceptionally boring strain of depression. This new type didn’t make me sad or tragic, so much as listless. I cared about nothing—not myself, not anyone or anything around me. I didn’t care what happened to my body, so I smoked until my lungs hurt and I was coughing up dark yellow phlegm. I couldn’t remember the names of the last two people I had sex with, because I was so fucked up when it happened and because they were strangers. I only ate when I remembered, and I only remembered when I felt like I might pass out. I was so skinny that whenever I sat on something hard, the sidewalk or the metal chairs at the Palms, it hurt because basically all that was left were my bones.
I still had a bunch of Wellbutrin left though, red and yellow pills the shape of M&M’s, plucked from the black lockbox. I had discovered that if I drank while taking it, I got full-blown fucked up off only a couple beers. I figured I might as well bring the leftovers to the party.
Earlier that evening, we’d driven around for a while, just listening to music and smoking. When we’d gotten to Dylan and Luis’s, it was only the four of us and the sun was just beginning to set. I’d put the Wellbutrin in a glass bowl on the table and it looked just like a dish of candy, and then Luis handed me a beer. They had a big stand-up bong, four feet tall, and they put weed in it, and Holly and I took turns until we were dizzy and almost too high. By then, there were probably a dozen people in the apartment, and someone started railing out lines on the coffee table, and then Holly and I did that too.
And so it went. More people, more drugs. Sometimes when I got high everything turned into a blur, but that night it had the opposite effect. The more I consumed, the higher I got, the more clearly everything popped in its outline. Charged and trembling in a way that made it almost too real. I felt like I was orchestrating it all, in charge of the direction and aligning everything into its exact right place.
Shortly after midnight, Holly, Ramon, and I decided to eat some acid sugar cubes. Ramon had never tripped before, not on acid, not on anything. Holly and I told him we would guide him, make sure everything went OK.
And it started out well. We were all sitting on this giant velvet beanbag chair, and it felt like we were an extension of it, something fuzzy and sinkable. We were laughing. Ramon was convinced he was stuck to it, that he had actually become part of the chair, and it seemed like one of the funniest things we’d ever heard. This was around 2:00 a.m. There were only a handful of people still left in the apartment.
We pulled Ramon out of the couch, and he was shrieking like a little girl because he thought we were tearing him in two. When we got him standing up, away from the beanbag chair, he hugged us, saying that we had saved him. Luis was sitting on the couch a few feet away, counting a stack of bills. “Look at this,” he said, handing me a twenty.
I looked at the face and it wasn’t Andrew Jackson but Satan. Then the face flicked back to Andrew Jackson. Then it went back to Satan and pentagrams and flames appeared. It was not a mystery; it was an obvious message that all money is evil. So we burned the bill. It was fun.
And then shortly after, there was a knock at the door. We weren’t expecting anyone. And it wasn’t a knock really. It was more of a pound. Three hard raps. Luis went to the door. There wasn’t a peephole, but there were some little frosted glass windows. I don’t know what he saw when he looked through them, the flash of a badge or lights. But he walked away from the door quickly. He told us to be quiet. He told us it was the cops.
He and Dylan flew into motion. Luis got a paper towel and glass cleaner and wiped the coke residue off the table. Dylan grabbed the bong and the money and headed to his bedroom, where he had a safe hidden behind clothes in the closet. Holly and Ramon sat there, not doing anything—we had nothing to hide; we’d smoked or eaten all the drugs. But something in the movement of the room frightened me. I wanted out—out of my body, preferably, but since this wasn’t possible, I wanted out of that apartment. The cops were at the front door, so I went out the back.
I made it over the seven-foot wall around their tiny patio without even trying. And then I was on a hill, behind the apartment complex, covered in ice plant. The hill was very dark, and the ice plant grew deep, and it was hard to get decent footing.
Dylan and Luis lived right next
to this Mormon temple that was built a few years before. It was white and garish, lit up 24/7, glowing with pointed turrets, like a spaceship or a building in Oz. It loomed there, shooting white out of nothing on the side of the freeway. The lights from the temple and the moon illuminated the road that ran below the ice plant–covered hill. I took it as a sign to head down there.
I didn’t have a plan. The closest I’d gotten was that maybe the road went to the shopping center nearby, and maybe I’d walk there and call someone from a pay phone. But I didn’t know if I had enough change, and I didn’t know who I could call. I was just walking. This was when they got me.
I think they saw me hop over the fence, figured I had something on me, Dylan and Luis’s main supply. But all I had was an old aluminum foil pipe I’d made, dark with resin, and a pack of cigarettes. They got me for all they could: paraphernalia, tobacco possession by a minor, curfew. Stupid charges. But it was enough for them to take me home.
I was watching myself in the back of that police car, and I was watching the shadows, and I was watching the demon cops. And the signs focused until they were pointing to one thing, and again it seemed inevitable. Something mandated by the universe. This was the second time I decided I needed to die.
THE FIGHT
It started the moment my parents closed the door. I hadn’t been paying attention to what the police were saying to them, because I was pretty fucked up and also because I was more interested in reading the expressions on my parents’ faces. Whatever was going through their minds, it wasn’t good. Furious, sharp creases in their brows.
Also I was thinking about the black lockbox.
All I had to do was get the box out of the dining room without them seeing, and then figure out a way to be left alone for several hours. If I could get that to happen, then everything else was easy.
I thought I could tell them I was exhausted, that I needed to go to sleep and we could deal with it in the morning. But my dad—he wanted to yell.
I’d never seen him so angry. I was a failure, he said, his voice so loud it kicked off the walls, face red, eyes gleaming. A disappointment, there was something wrong with me, he gave up. It was the giving up part that made me totally lose it. I felt my chest turning in on itself, something hollow, and then the tears just started falling. I found myself backing into a corner in the hallway.
And then my dad hit me, palm across the face, the noise sharp and sudden as the crack of a whip.
He’d never hit me before.
He really didn’t hit me that hard. I think it was just the shock of it that made me fall over. As I lay there on the cold tile floor in the corner of the hallway, what I had to do cemented in my mind.
The worst thing was he didn’t even seem to care. He crouched over me, his finger in my face and it felt like he was pushing me, and I was falling, falling into a crack in the earth, my heart sucked into my stomach, and then lower still, until my stomach was just a pit of death. “You’re disgusting,” he said. “Despicable. You’re not even worth my attention. You’re a nothing, you’ll always be a nothing, a throwaway piece of trash.”
And it hurt because it was true.
My mother pulled him away from me. “I think we all need to go to bed.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he agreed with her. “We’ll finish this in the morning,” he told me. He was still furious. And with that, they went upstairs.
We had a rule in our family: never go to bed angry. No matter how shitty I’d been acting, my parents always told me they loved me before they went to bed. But that night, they just went upstairs.
I made myself quit crying, and I sat in the hallway, listening until I no longer heard movement coming from their bedroom. Then I walked, quietly as I could, into the dining room. I opened the cupboard. I grabbed the box. I went into the bathroom.
I swallowed all my pills. There was a handful of my mother’s muscle relaxers left, and I swallowed them too. There weren’t any Tylenol or Benadryl in the box, just Advil, which I wasn’t sure would do anything, so I left it there. I wished I hadn’t left my Wellbutrin at Dylan and Luis’s. I hoped I had taken enough. It was still a lot of pills.
I went into my room. It was almost 4:00 a.m. I figured I had at least six hours before my mother would come check on me. It seemed like enough time. I thought it might take a while, because of the coke and acid, but it didn’t. That night we went to bed angry. I fell asleep right away.
SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT: DOCUMENTS
And so I went to the hospital again. Everything was the same as it was seven months ago. Except this time my mother found me in the middle of a seizure, and somehow this time I didn’t need to be intubated and so I didn’t get pneumonia. This time my parents looked less devastated and more just tired. This time they marked Catholic on the patient information sheet for some reason, and so a priest came to see me, and when he asked why I was there I told him the truth, it was a suicide attempt, and the look on his face was pure shock, and when he left the room my parents laughed and I didn’t know why until they told me about cardinal sins, and then I laughed too. This time Holly came to see me in the hospital, and she had a bouquet for me and also a gigantic card that everyone had signed, everyone at New Hope and everyone at the Palms, and it was full of inside jokes and compliments. The kindness of it, of all of it.
Get-well card, June 1999.
SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT: INVASIVE SPECIES
And this time when I woke up, I felt even stupider and guiltier. This time when I woke up, I truly felt like I had a broken brain. Except it wasn’t even my brain. It was the brain of a homicidal maniac. She was trying to kill me.
But everything else was the same. Hospitals. Always the same. I was in there for the same amount of time, even. Three days, same as last time. The same, the same, the same.
SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT: PATRIOTISM
Patient Evaluation, June 1999.
And so I went to the mental hospital again, and everything was the same there too. Same sexist doctor, same milk bags of glue, same needle in the arm every morning, and the patients were all the same except different. This time it was less crowded; it was a holiday. This time my roommate was a girl named Carrie, who was very fat, and everyone called her A Lot of Carrie, and she didn’t say much to me and so I didn’t say much to her. On the Fourth of July, I imagined all my friends at the beach eating hamburgers and drinking beer while I was in my slip-on shoes (same as last time) with Band-Aids all over the crook of my arm. At 9:00 p.m. we both sat on Carrie’s bed, stiffly so we wouldn’t touch, and looked out the narrow window, where we could see just a sliver of the fireworks at Sea World. And it made me feel like what I was: someone removed from society, who was therefore only able to see a tiny reflection of the outside world. The fireworks were small and far away but they were beautiful, because it turns out society is something that looks best from a distance.
SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT: THE OUTSIDE WORLD #2
And this time Holly tried to see me every day, but my parents made her skip a couple days so we could have some alone time. I thought “alone time” would be bad, but they just sat there and held my hand and told me they loved me over and over.
This time. When Holly came, she always brought someone with her, sometimes two someones, Rachel and Junk Dog and Ramon and Lily and people I wasn’t even that close to but who wanted to come anyway because they wanted to make me feel better. And this time they didn’t stand there awkwardly, looking as though someone had forced them to be there. This time they told me what was going on in their lives, what they’d done that day, gossip from the outside, laughing and lighthearted as though there was nothing too weird about any of it.
SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT: DEFICIENCY
But it also made me feel like: What the fuck. All these friends. I nearly died. Again. Totally different than last time, but also exactly the same.
SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT: SAINTED
And this time I wasn’t given my medic
ine because they were worried about “the levels,” since I’d OD’d on it twice now. Instead of giving me Zyprexa or something similar they gave me nothing, and so I was more awake in the therapy sessions and CBT made a lot more sense. But at night, I couldn’t fall asleep till late, midnight or one or two, one night not until four, which is a very long time to be lying on a thin mattress in the dark only to get awoken a couple hours later and stabbed with a needle. And by day six I was feeling pretty wild, and in group therapy I started talking and couldn’t stop. I was saying things that didn’t even seem like my thoughts, comparing people in the group to people in the Bible, saying I had come back from the dead twice now, I was a miracle, and there was a war in my brain between good and evil, and Jesus would help me because I was just like Him. Part of me was watching and thinking, What the fuck are you saying? Shut up, you sound insane, where are you even getting this? And another part of me was thinking, Oh good one, Juliet. Clever delusions. Biblical. Way to be a total cliché, you loser. But the biggest part of me was the part that could not stop talking. And that night was one of the nights where Holly wasn’t allowed to come, it was just my parents, and I told them what was happening, and they looked at each other nervous, and our visit was cut short because they went to go talk to the people in charge. And even though we’d switched insurance since the last time and now were covered for ten days instead of seven, my parents arranged for my release the next day because they thought I wasn’t “receiving adequate care.” So again, I was in there for seven days. Three and seven, both times. Something biblical.