by Jaime Lowe
Mack and I spoke again about what it was like to grow up with a mother who was bipolar. And he had a loving but pained reaction, one that was familiar. There were things he couldn’t forgive even though he’d tried. He intellectually understood the dips and turns of the disorder. He even emotionally and experientially empathized, but he couldn’t fully absolve his mom of her actions and forgive the consequent weight that defined their relationship. Understandable. A month after Mack and I spoke, Patty Duke passed away. I asked Mack if he still held on to some of the frustrations and difficulties that came with their relationship. He wrote in an email, “Do I have a better understanding of the difficulties she had raising us? I don’t know if it’s possible for me to truly do that until (and if) I have kids. We’re a real handful, we kids. And until I walk somewhat of her journey in shoes somewhat like hers, I don’t think I’ll ever really understand what she was up against. I can imagine it. But until I’ve lived it, it’s just imagination. Same with the chemical imbalance. If I suffered in the same manner she had, perhaps it’d be easier to understand, and in doing so, forgive. But both those experiences—parenthood and a chemical imbalance—are still at more-than-arm’s-length for me. I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out.” He went on to write that, “She gave so much of herself, I think, that she had very little of herself left for her. And, for all the shit I’ve given her about the shit she gave me and my brother, the impact she had on others is incalculably good. She deserves to be heralded. And, heartless though it may sound, it’s easier for me to do so now that she’s not around.” When I got out of the hospital, I was relatively unformed, I didn’t have kids, responsibility; I wasn’t yet worried about being trusted again, I wasn’t worried about my relationships. Parents forgive and high school friends don’t always last forever.
Diagnosis and medication gave me clarity and a cure, respectively, but they also posed some harsh existential questions: Who was I if my actions and thoughts didn’t represent me? What if they did represent me? What if they were extensions of me, rooted in a subconscious realm? What if the me from before I was on lithium was the real me? What if I would need lithium—for forever—just to function? I didn’t let these questions sink in; I was not in any position to think on the complexities of identity. Like every other seventeen-year-old, I was just beginning to form an identity—to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be. I couldn’t absorb whether I was in fact shaped by my mania or medication. It had happened; like the assault, there was no longer an alternate narrative. I now knew that I could hallucinate without drugs; justify a spending spree on key chains; talk to God; and be persecuted by televisions, pipes, and squirrels. I just wanted to get through high school. And I found an unknowable well of superhero-like qualities raging in the recesses of my neurological development. I took solace in self-imposed seclusion when the canyon became off-limits. I had to relearn myself. Dark movie houses, crashing of saltwater waves, and the collapse of Subway sandwiches—that was my reality. Solitary confinement without walls. I don’t think it was ever clear I would come back. I don’t think anyone could say for certain that I would be the same, and I wasn’t.
Once, I heard Iggy Pop describe being at the beach like this: “It was so quiet, and nobody knew who I was, and there was the beach. There was the ocean, there was the end of all the tension and complications.” And that is what made sense to me when I left the ward: being at the edge of nothing. At the edge of everything.
CHAPTER 10
REACH FOR THE SKY
I APPLIED TO a handful of University of California campuses and got into most with a devastating essay on what it was like to lose my mind. I parlayed trauma into acceptance. I visited campuses—Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Davis—each one more of a dream than the next. In Santa Cruz, I hoped to see a fleshy banana slug but spent most of the visit riding old wooden roller coasters dipping and diving over breaking waves. Berkeley was too familiar with my older brother and his friends populating the good burrito shops and Cody’s, the legendary bookstore on Telegraph Avenue. The air smelled too familiar with dewey eucalyptus haunting the hills. Davis won me over with one impression—an incredibly hairy hippie emerging from a geodesic dome (one of the off-campus housing options), lifting his arms high overhead (past a dreaded beard, a tie-dyed V-neck, and long guru hair). He lifted his hands toward the ethereal sunrise—soaking in energy and rays and power—his limbs nearly touching branches. A latticework of shade covered his closed-eyed face. He just reached high into the sky. And then he was gone, back in the dome after a greeting of the day. Yes, this is my place, I thought, geodesic dome hippies. I didn’t even know about the fistulated cows (cows with portholes in their sides that allow for monitoring of various functions). There was a distinct and persistent smell of fertilizer. This was the only school at which you could major in viticulture and enology. Yes, yes, yes.
I walked at my high school graduation—reluctant but proud—fuck if I wasn’t shocked that I actually graduated and that I got into my first-choice college, UC Davis. I spent the summer before college interning at the tabloid news show Hard Copy. The program was supposed to be on hiatus, and then O.J. happened. My job—which had been confined to sitting in a dark corner “logging the competition” and occasionally organizing the archives—shifted dramatically. I was only seventeen, but a tragedy that included race, football, blondes, Brentwood, and every Hollywood lawyer required all hands on deck and a return from hiatus for all the tabloid shows like Inside Edition, A Current Affair, and our program. The talking heads who anchored the show wore blazers and airbrushed faces and big hair that defied gravity or logic; they were camera-ready from the waist up; below the lens view, they wore jeans or sweatpants. Psycho up top, comfy from below. I was deployed to Kato Kaelin’s press conference and sent with crews to search for trails of blood staining otherwise pristine Brentwood sidewalks. I tried to find exclusives or breaking information, but I mostly just tagged along in between shifts of my other more appropriate job scooping ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s. They say one way to ease pain is to feel pain, more pronounced and sudden, in another area of the body. Distraction, really. I was on to someone else’s tragedy; their bloodbath felt worse than my strange brain. I could deal with hallucinating Muppets. Slowly, I got used to the lithium, to being the person who takes lithium.
I arrived at the UC Davis dorms with a meal plan (unlimited soft serve and cereal), a bunk bed (in a dorm room shared with a girl named Nina), and a pair of patchwork overalls that I bought on the corner of La Brea and Beverly (perfect for a geodesic dome party). I also had a three-month supply of lithium, three 300-milligram pink pills to be taken every night. What I didn’t realize was that this was the dawning of the age of the psychopharmaceuticals! I was like Queen Fancy Lithium and had an entrée to every party. “Hey, man, I’m on drugs, what combo do you take?” According to the New York Times, “From 1994 to 2006, the percentage of students treated at college counseling centers who were using antidepressants nearly tripled, from 9 percent to over 23 percent. In part this reflects the introduction of S.S.R.I. antidepressants, a new class of drugs thought to be safer and have fewer side effects than their predecessors.” Every goddamn person I met was on some kind of prescription cocktail to help with sleep, anxiety, ADHD, OCD, depression. Lithium was hella exotic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “From 1988–1994 through 2005–2008, the rate of antidepressant use in the United States among all ages increased nearly 400 percent.” There was a new method of addressing madness and it was through a flurry of pharmaceuticals.
Once I got into a rhythm with lithium, it was just a pink pill. On a day-to-day basis, I never thought of myself as defined by my disease or my drug, but that’s dumb. Of course I was and am. Looking back at my college career, I made video art interviewing friends on meds, calling it “Pill-ars.” When I interviewed myself (again), the shot was composed in stark black-and-white, almost like a security cam, and I spoke so sad
ly about my time in the hospital, my voice gravelly and dramatic. In my sculpture class I made a wooden box with bars that rested on top of a pedestal raised to brain height; inside the box were long branches stripped and then stained red, busting out in every direction but still jailed and contained like bursting blood rivers. I made a painting of a cartoonish me running away, hospital gown flailing. What I did in college was a thinly veiled attempt to work through what had happened. I wrote a short story about a mental hospital in the style of Thomas Pynchon and interviewed Elizabeth Wurtzel for my nonfiction writing class. (She stood me up for our first meeting in San Francisco but then took me out for a very chatty dinner at Chez Panisse in which she bewitched the waiter with so many detailed questions about the menu that we almost didn’t order. Her book Prozac Nation had been published the year I graduated high school and was one of the few comparable accounts of what I went through. Kay Redfield Jamison’s books Touched with Fire and An Unquiet Mind were among the others.)
I did other things, more college-y things. I finally achieved a first kiss with my brother’s best friend, Stu. It was who I imagined it with (I had loved the idea of Stu for years) but not quite how I imagined it. Just after we kissed, he barfed all over the bathroom and passed out; to be fair, it was his twenty-first birthday party, and it was at the end of a long night of drinking and weed. Matt was mad. “Don’t fuck with Stu,” he kept saying. But Stu called me once I was back in Davis to say he didn’t regret it and was just sorry about the barfing. I had friends in college, good friends; I vomited up gallons of cherry-pink jungle juice on my way home from frat parties; I obsessively skateboarded from downtown to the outer reaches of East Davis and back again; I shaved my head; I ate eggs at Delta of Venus; I learned that musicals were not cool, and Op Ivy was, this according to my roommate/BFF Autumn, whose dad was a roadie for Willie Nelson. I sold coffee at a mystery bookstore; shroomed in the arboretum; had drug-induced auditory hallucinations that made me think a helicopter was following me; vomited more exotic combinations of alcohol; smoked many trees of Humboldt green; skipped class; wrote papers at four a.m. about books I had never read; wrote a column named “SPAMCO” for the Daily Aggie; wrote about music; saw a lot of free concerts using my press pass, which was why I chose to write about music in the first place; went to a secret Beastie Boys show at a skate park after MCA borrowed my friend’s skateboard and put us on the list; I lived in Edinburgh for a year and learned to love the twenty-four-hour light on the summer solstice when I camped by myself on Orkney; ate wine gums till my teeth were sticky. I was introduced to Jean Rhys and the melancholy prose of Good Morning, Midnight; I went to half a dozen Beck shows and hundreds of shitty ska shows; I obsessed over KDVS DJs who went on to become Solesides musicians, then Quannum musicians, like MCs in Blackalicious and DJ Shadow and Latyrx; I named a pet bunny Coco and hoped for bunny babies; I listened to live music next to the too-tall speakers blasting directly to my gut; I got good grades; I got bad grades; I cared more about my painting critiques than I did about my English Lit classes; I interned at the LA Weekly and got my first bylines; I dreamed of working at the LA Weekly someday and being as pierced as Ron Athey and as badass as my editors; I saw the movie Kids with the manager of my Ben & Jerry’s who used to deal weed out of the walk-in freezer and would occasionally pass out from inhaling too many whip-its; I lost my virginity in Istanbul to a Chilean traveler named Arturo whose only English was “You are zee feesh. I am zee piranyah”; I was freaked out by dating and so I didn’t; I kissed a South Park writer in the parking lot of Smalls; he dipped me low to the asphalt after last call and asked me to go with him to his Hollywood apartment; I was scared, so I didn’t; I protested the regents’ decision to end affirmative action with Autumn and fellow activists Joel and Fraser; I saw salmon spawn for the first time; I listened to demo CDs; I flailed through more mosh pits; I listened and loved early 1990s hip-hop—Tribe, Wu, Outkast, Biggie, Nas, Missy, the Fugees—it all seeped into my spongy brain and I painted. I loved Davis. I loved those four years.
I did one thing that fell into no particular category. I created an alter ego superhero named Silver Girl—I made plaster breastplates studded with rhinestones, a hat with curlicue antennae, armbands, and fanciful silver tights, and I just strolled through campus occasionally in full regalia as if I were on metallic patrol. Lithium metal, its state in nature when not a compound, is soft enough to be cut with a knife. When cut, it possesses a silvery-white color that quickly changes to gray as it oxidizes to lithium oxide. While it has one of the lowest melting points among all metals at 180°C, it has the highest melting and boiling points of the alkali metals. I subconsciously took the element inside of me and wore it on the outside. This was normal enough for me, normal enough for the quad on campus. It was around the same time that Berkeley had their own Naked Guy.
I was not manic. I was still on lithium. Inventing Silver Girl was just what I wanted to do.
PART 2 — EPISODE 2
CHAPTER 11
MIDNIGHT COWGIRL: 1; HOUSE & GARDEN: 0
“MAKE SURE to go to the deli two doors down and not the one on the corner,” Hana said over the phone the night before I left Portland, Maine, in September 1998. She didn’t have a cell; I didn’t have a cell; the whole city didn’t have a cell. She had four different jobs: hostess, waitress, baby-sitter, and assistant to the feminist writer Marilyn French. Hana had offered to let me sleep in the sixth-floor walk-up apartment in the East Village she shared with her cousin Sarah P. and a third roommate. I was in Maine, visiting relatives and dragging two duffel bags full of my move-to-New-York essentials around. A skirt suit for entry-level interviews, flannels, ripped jeans, ill-fitting vintage finds, and one pair of slacks. My duffel bags were dramatic and enormous. Set against the scenery of the Portland Greyhound station, I looked more like a teen serial killer, schlepping bodies instead of schmatas.
I had an image of arriving, face pressed up against a Greyhound window, everybody looking at me. My three reference points of New York were Midnight Cowboy, the first two thirds of Tootsie, and The David Letterman Show. I wished I had worn cowboy boots. It’s not the best New York arrival fantasy—to wish to be Jon Voight strutting through Manhattan with a fringe jacket and high-water pants and a comically small cowhide suitcase in the hopes of becoming a high-paid street gigolo. But Voight had bluster; he left Texas. His tragedy was not yet evident. He did what he wanted and he still had the humanity of a country boy (just like me!). While he was on that bus, he still aimed to strive and arrive. I got into Port Authority, stupid as hell. This was my logic: After summers of writing for the LA Weekly and Film Threat magazine and working on the daily campus newspaper, I thought, I will make my living as a writer. I will work in publishing. Publishing is in New York. I must go to New York to write. My parents did not object. My brother Matt sternly said I should not go, warning me of all kinds of failure or destruction or you’re-gonna-lose-your-mind-again. I did not hesitate. In fact, I flatly ignored him and may have even called him hysterical.
When I asked him what his memory of this phone call was, he wrote: “I did worry about you; NY was far away, we had little support network there, and we had only been there once before in our lives. It seemed like you were taking a huge leap, and making the first year of post-college life more difficult than it needed to be, especially with the threat of episodes lingering. But you were adamant; you wanted to get the hell out, and you were convinced you would be okay. You had a lot of confidence, and even though I didn’t think you had thought it out at all, and had only half-assed your plans, you expressed little doubt. In fact, I got the sense that my skepticism only hardened your determination.”
My brother and I are different. He is cautious and rational; he had to be sane when I wasn’t. I wondered if his objection was that I didn’t think too hard on failure, or that I was more willing to “get the hell out” of LA, something that was stressful for me to navigate and related to our parent’s divorce. Los A
ngeles was my home, but after four years of stable living in Davis, going back to Los Angeles felt impossible. I did not want to commute between parents or feel guilty for choosing a place to live on one side of town over another. I also had been to New York on my own. I stayed with Hana, Miriam, and Karen in a walk-through apartment in the East Village for a few days just after my first year of college, the highlights of which I journaled about—“a cold shower in the middle of the kitchen, going the wrong way on the subway, ice coffee, and the Cloisters! I wound up mistakenly at the World Trade Center. The view from the 107th floor is beyond magnificent. It encompasses Liberty, Jersey, and the New York skyline, which seems like it should be in my future.” New York was somehow easier—I didn’t think twice. I was going to New York. I was not nervous on the bus ride. I was not nervous about hailing a yellow cab. I was not nervous about tipping appropriately. I was not nervous about the dirt and the noise and the pushback of the city. I was prepared; the city’s mania suited me. I had my bags and about seven hundred dollars. I was ready to build a life. A rich life, full of poverty and drama and art and music and fights and drinking too much and smoking too much and generally being a fucked-up early-twenties human on the hustle.
I got to Hana’s, collected her keys. I saw my reflection in the door at 516 E. Eleventh Street. My hair was terrible—still the length of a stunted Chia pet from having shaved it two years before. (I had some idea that if I shaved my head, skateboarding would be more aerodynamic. It took two years to get to this length, one in which my only options for styling were bobby pins, spit, glue, and fanciful hats.) I dragged both bags up the short stoop. I opened the first door but there was only room for one duffel bag inside. That did not seem architecturally possible. The East Village is the capital of architecturally impossible but I did not anticipate this squeeze; I could not get both bags in the door. At that point I panicked. I was unclear on what to do next. I whimpered. How am I going to get my two duffel bags—TWO enormous duffel bags—up six flights of stairs? I was certain someone would steal one bag if I left it on the stoop while I dragged the other bag up to the sixth floor, but it was my only choice. I chose the bag with the preprofessional suit in it to drag up first. I dropped it and ran down the six flights of stairs to find what I’ve found every time I’ve doubted the humanity of the city . . . my second bag was still on the stoop. I sat relieved and thrilled and in love with New York.