Mental

by Jaime Lowe

  On Monday nights, as determined by Dr. DeAntonio, I’d borrow my mom’s car—to avoid overheating and breakdowns on Mulholland Drive—to go to what was essentially the Breakfast Club for the mentally ill, my adolescent group therapy. According to the neuroscientist Frances E. Jensen, between 20 and 60 percent of adults with bipolar disorder experience the initial symptoms of mental illness before they turn twenty, and severe mental health problems are more common in adolescents than either asthma or diabetes. At group, we discussed how hard it was to be the people we were, stuck in a place that could not accommodate our bottomless anxiety and feverish angst. There was the pretty girl who was bulimic in junior high, a charming dork who had ADD and was armed with a dime bag at all times, another girl who was a cutter, one with anger issues, and me. As I came to realize that my friends from high school were not my friends anymore, I had group. Week after week, it was the only thing I looked forward to. (In fact, I wish I had group now.) It was as much a social space as it was therapeutic. Peer counseling may even be more effective than some talk therapy, especially for teens. Adolescence is so isolating; we learned how to talk to each other and we learned how to listen. We’d talk about our weeks, one at a time, and on most Monday nights the ADD guy would roll a J and we’d all head up to the roof of our therapist’s building to conclude our session by getting high.

  When the tennis season ended, my mom asked what elective I would sign up for, and the only option was drama. I, in a diagnosed depressed state, was forced to try out for the spring musical Pippin, an orgiastic, anarchistic tale of a young prince who longs for passion and adventure in his life. I considered this to be an assault on every sense—Pippin was bad; its most defining feature was its sharp-limbed and exacting choreography by Bob Fosse, it was the show that launched jazz hands. I studied an old VHS recording of the musical from 1972 starring an unbelievably winsome Ben Vereen. I could not sing; I could not dance; I could not believe I had to try out for this monstrosity of a show. But I had vowed compliance, so I did. I was cast as a chorus girl. Our drama teacher was hell-bent on replicating the video, which included an actual orgy, so we all had to wear nude unitards and ripped net stockings and walk around onstage like hookers. I could not believe I was considered manic and this wasn’t. It was weird, and my grandma came to the performances and said that we all looked very nice rolling around ecstatically singing about magic and sexual awakenings. I hated it but I liked having a place to go; I liked thinking that maybe the lead actress would get sick and I would play the princess, or Nora would fall off the swing, and I would have to step in as the carpe diem Granny, unafraid to live life swinging and singing: “Time to start livin’, time to take a little from this world we’re given, time to take time, ’cause spring will turn to fall.”

  There was one teacher I took seriously and that was because she took me seriously: Monserrat Fontes. A fierce, chain-smoking bull-riding-obsessed bowling ball of a woman with familial ties to Mexican royalty, she was my English and journalism teacher and I knew she would hurt me if I didn’t do well. She was bat-shit crazy in the best way, a person so powerful that she was not afraid to wear sweatpants, crack a literal whip (made of bull’s penis), and lecture high school kids on the efficacy of both William Faulkner’s and Stephen King’s prose. She was a woman so intense and dominant that she wouldn’t take shit from anyone—students, teachers, or administrators. She just remained atop her perch, sitting cross-legged on a desk, reading and writing books doused in magical thinking and surrealism, speaking fast when she was excited and shouting angrily when she was pissed. (She was pissed often.) In journalism she pushed for truth, clarity, consistency, and cooperation, sometimes by standing on a desk and shouting it into the rafters.

  She converted me to literature. I had her in tenth grade and for a long time thought the best way to win Monsy’s affection was to turn in great essays. I found many great essays in a folder in our garage marked “Matt’s English Papers.” I would retype the first page with my name and change the date and hope the typeface and kerning aligned. Matt didn’t have an essay for Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. So I actually read it. The best characters in literature are ones touched with fire—no one gets tattoos of Bartleby—and lucky for me and the world, Flannery O’Connor laced her literature with psychopathic eccentrics. In high school, I did not fit in, but I would have been just fine if I was born into an O’Connor short story. I wrote an essay about Enoch Emery, a profane, delusional, obsessive eighteen-year-old zookeeper, who seemed to have the same kind of crazy as me. (I didn’t kill for a gorilla suit but I would have.) Emery, delusional and vigilant, was guided by “wise blood,” a belief that his blood had instinct based on mystical intuition. (Bipolar here!) He preached redemption and guidance and stole, then worshipped a “new jesus,” a mummified shrunken man from the zoo. (Bipolar here too!) He also managed to let a petty argument with “Gonga the Gorilla” become a transformative homicidal event. (Bipolar to the extreme!) I read about him; I could see me. I had no friends, but I felt communion with these characters—an innate belief in self was our shared symptom. That concept is particularly complicated for a teenager—to be told that confidence is a sign of sickness—at the very time when you are losing all confidence anyway. It’s like a double hit of shattered self-esteem. I was already cowed by adolescence and now I was hyperaware of hyperactivity, of feeling too good, too complicated, too much.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE FACTS OF LIFE

  A COUPLE OF MONTHS after my triumphant return to Uni High, I wrote an article about being bipolar, about my delusions of grandeur—thoughts that I possessed superior qualities like genius, fame, omnipotence, and wealth. Never one to undershare, I “interviewed” myself, a source I called a “student” who wished to remain anonymous and went by the pseudonym “Rose.” Rose, my middle name, was a terrifically unsubtle way of saying it was me, I was Rose, I was interviewing me. This article was about my experience and functioned somewhere between a stilted confessional and a PSA. In it, I described my experience at the hospital, including the four nurses pinning me to the floor, and gave some examples of my grand delusions: “I refused to cooperate with any of the nurses because I thought they were mutant half-siblings who were trying to kill me for my imaginary fortune . . . after four days of not sleeping, I was convinced that I would inherit the world and that Jim Henson wasn’t really dead, just locked up somewhere and that it was my duty to rescue him . . . for Kermit’s sake.” And then I elegantly ended the interview with myself saying, PSA-style: “I’m lucky I was diagnosed early . . . if your screaming thoughts reach an intolerable pitch, ask for help.” Nathan, a friend of mine since elementary school, illustrated the article with a lunatic shouting about saving Muppets and a big sign pointing toward “The Mental Ward.” I was shouting loudly about all the ways I wasn’t normal. I was looking for an explanation myself; it was a battle cry, as if to say, I survived war while you were busy crushing on someone who wasn’t crushing on you.

  There’s an irony in that message, because, for the article, I also reached out to a Uni High alumnus who had been in my older brother’s graduating class—Mackenzie Astin. I knew him as the adorable kid from the sitcom The Facts of Life. He was part of a long TV tradition, the kid with a toothy smile who was tasked with breathing life and ratings into an ailing show. To write the article, I left my second-period journalism class to meet with him in his rented house on Benedict Canyon. He had just finished filming Iron Will, a movie about a fatherless teen who tries to raise money for his family by joining a cross-country dogsled race. The tagline for the movie was “It’s not a question of age. Or strength. Or ability. It’s a matter of will.” Mack had winsome dimples, blue-gray eyes, and a warmth that betrayed his fame. He still had one of the dogs from the shoot and called him Kita. His mom, Patty Duke, also happened to be Hollywood’s poster child for bipolar disorder. She was one of the first prominent figures to really describe the disease from a personal perspective. Sh
e bared all. She said when she was finally diagnosed at thirty-five and given lithium that it was a huge relief.

  In 1989, a year after her autobiography came out, Patty Duke testified before Congress in support of the National Institute of Mental Health and National Alliance on Mental Illness in order to increase awareness, funding, and research for people with mental illness. She said, “In 1982, I was diagnosed as manic depressive. My mental illness is a genetic, chemical imbalance of the brain. It manifests itself in dramatic mood swings from states of euphoria or agitated out-of-control highs to disabling, often suicidal lows. From the onset of the symptoms of this illness in my late teens until proper diagnosis and treatment at the age of thirty-five, I rode the wild roller coaster.” Part of the roller coaster included several attempts to commit suicide—Duke took pills, passing out with Mack and Sean in the house. She later said in an interview with 20/20 that she “knew at a very young age that something was not right . . . I thought it was just that I was not a good person, that I didn’t try hard enough . . . the very overt symptoms didn’t start ’til my late teens and that was with a manic episode. . . . In mania I spent a great deal of money for things I didn’t need . . . flights of fancy, meaning almost delusions of grandeur. You feel euphoric, you feel nothing you do has any kind of negative consequence. You can go anywhere, say anything, be anybody you want, marry anybody you want, I married somebody I had only known for thirteen days.” She went on to say that as the cycles increased with frequency, they increased in intensity as well. She described the “depressive end lasting much longer, the deep black hole from which you cannot extricate yourself. This sort of depression goes even further than that and it’s not based on any stimulus. . . . [I]n order to get on with your life you have to forgive yourself and you have to somehow do the best you can to make amends for the pain that you’ve caused. The toughest was feeling that I could ever be trusted again.”

  I interviewed Mack for the article and found the other side of what I went through. He was twelve when his mom was diagnosed. When I arrived at the house there was a semicircle of young beautiful degenerates, some smoking pot, some smoking cigarettes, some just sitting in a semicircle as if it had been ordained. It felt like a child actor’s flophouse, and I breathed in the atmosphere like I belonged. I sat with the dog quietly in the corner kneading his coat. This living room, these people were much more interesting than class, much more real than high school, way more exciting than Pippin orgy rehearsals. A bong or a joint was passed to me, but I said no and explained that I had just been released from the mental ward. I had no filter and could only see it as a badge of honor, my entrée into this particular coven. The interview went well; Mack was friendly and nice because he knew my brother and he felt sorry for me. That semicircle was warm, and I started showing up at random times and crashing in his living room just to hang out.

  There was an enthusiastic openness to Mack, with his bright eyes and tousled red hair. He was completely willing to engage without knowing the extent of what that meant. Sometimes after group, I would go out of my way to drive through his neighborhood, going down Mulholland, turning left, taking the long way through Benedict, driving under the stilted houses and past the cougars that lay in wait.

  Some ditch days, I’d get a burger from Tommy’s or one of my messy, dripping veggie sandwiches from Subway and drive down Benedict Canyon, hugging the switchbacks. I didn’t always slow down at his house. Just passing. I was just passing by, back and forth, up the hill and down. I would drive by, religiously, daily, weekly, sometimes twice a day. I would just check to see if he was home and sometimes call to talk to him on the phone later. It was creepy; I was a little too interested. I had a crush and nothing else in my life—a dangerous combination. I’m sure Mack noticed, and he knew from firsthand experience how precarious a person like that could be.

  I would think about him before I went to sleep. I imagined that if I kissed him, if we became intertwined, if he asked me to prom, if he just held my hand, I would be validated. I would have crossed over from the banality of high school, the insanity of being insane, and into something that felt more tangible. I would be a recognized person because another person recognized me. He was a new friend and that meant something. Even if the Benedict refuge was just a thespian flophouse full of slightly older pot-smoking dropouts and a panting Siberian husky, I wanted to be there. I didn’t have to explain all the layers of who I had become, the person with bipolar embedded in my identity. I felt like Mack could somehow understand because he witnessed it before. He was special: my psychiatrists were clinical, my adolescent group therapy friends had different disorders and went to different high schools, my teachers had papers to grade, my parents were grateful I was alive, my junior high friends were absent entirely. No one really knew what being bipolar meant, but Mack did; he was born into it. And so, in a gesture that signaled totally normal teenage behavior, I wrote terrible embarrassing awful poetry about him:

  I see your name on the rusted grill of a truck

  You are the first syllable of my favorite food

  The small dated picture I possess says you

  So are you talking to me because I get secret esoteric messages from my local UPS

  They warn me . . . you throw stones

  and suck leaves. You’ll never call

  I look at the fallen brick

  the debris of relationships

  with foundation we can build a fireplace

  We’ve got the Bunsen burner—all we need

  is the chemistry set.

  • • •

  I WAS LANGUISHING in the adolescence of it all, rolling around in angst. Decades later I can say this: macaroni and cheese was never my favorite food. Obviously, Mack wasn’t real to me, so I sat in the circle and passed the bong and petted the dog and listened to Marley and smelled the misty chaparral and lupine of Benedict Canyon. I drove by like a phantom and called like a ghost, hanging up when it was too much me. Sometimes I knew. Sometimes I didn’t.

  On January 17, 1994, at four thirty in the morning, deep under Northridge, California, the tectonic plates shifted violently, and the people of LA were jolted from their slumber by a magnitude 6.7 earthquake. One aftershock was immediate. The most formal definition of an earthquake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, is when “the tectonic plates get stuck at their edges due to friction. When the stress on the edge overcomes the friction, there is an earthquake that releases energy in waves that travel through the earth’s crust and cause the shaking that we feel.” Not dissimilar to a manic episode—a release of energy. The ground was unstable, the earth moving. Pulling back, earthquakes form continents, our world. Manic episodes did that to me. I was staying at my dad’s house in Hollywood, closer to the epicenter in Reseda. My brother Matt was in town from Berkeley for his winter break. Nothing in our house was broken. Things shifted, our dog Nature cowered in a corner, the hair on her hackles standing straight up. My immediate thought was of Mack in the canyon and his house built on the side of a mountain. I tried to go back to sleep but I had to make sure my Benedict Canyon posse (not my posse at all) was okay. They were fine, but when I showed up may have been the moment Mack realized that our friendship was probably bad for both of us—for me to have expectations of him, and for him to have a fresh-off-the-boat bipolar girl (underage to boot) hanging around his house for unclear reasons.

  Eventually my mom figured out what was happening and she told me that I couldn’t drive to Benedict Canyon anymore. I still hoped that Mack would resurrect my number and call me in May to go to prom in June, a John Hughes fantasy that never came to be. I knew I wasn’t going to prom, but I bought two dresses on the off chance that I might. (Both long, black, and velvet.) I did not want to participate in high school, but of course I did. I was pleasantly shocked when I won a senior superlative for Celebrity Look-Alike. The student body had voted me as an Annie clone, and I was more than happy to take the picture w
ith a Leapin’ Lizards pin attached to my hoodie. I thought about prom—how great would it be if I showed up with Mackenzie Astin, driving a dogsled full of Akitas and malamutes and Siberian huskies through the Hilton Airport ballroom. Fuck prom queen, I would be adorned in a full wolfskin onesie, howling at the lunar eclipse. I was depressed, alone, bored, but I still had fantasies. I only had fantasy. Recent studies have shown that one of the main characteristics that separate humans from animals is the ability to think and plan and fantasize about a future. And Mack was that for me—a fantastical, abstract future. He was the person I thought of when I sat in the dark, listening to my Magnavox stereo (at normal volume now), to the same song over and over—Peter Gabriel’s “Washing of the Water.” I lay shuttered in darkness, taken away by the spare drum and his solemn voice, a wish to go back “to the place where” he came from; Peter Gabriel sings: “Will you take me on your back for a ride / If I should fall, would you swallow me deep inside? . . . I feel like I’m sinking down.”

  When I talked with Mack decades later, he didn’t remember my stalking or much about our friendship except that I had been around and that we had talked about his mom. We had pancakes at Du-par’s and he was exactly as I’d remembered, open and willing and expansive and generous in sharing with me what he had been through, his view from the outside that I could never experience. It gave me a better understanding of my mom, my dad, Marilyn, Jeff, Matt, David, Monsy, Sarah J., Hana, Rachel, Miriam, everyone I came in contact with who had to deal with me while I was internally lit. They had to endure the uneasiness of the unknown; they had to navigate being the complement to crazy.