Mental

by Jaime Lowe

  The video starts with us sitting on Mike’s stoop, talking with a group of moonfaced teenagers. I already had the “marry Mike” campaign going because I got each of those kids to say, “You should marry Jaime.” In my hip-hop drawl—I was starting to absorb Eminem’s talking pattern and the cigarettes were making me sound like Harvey Fierstein—I recited lines from Romeo and Juliet. Then the kids chanted with me: “Roses smelling sweet!” You can see they’re mesmerized and confused by this pseudo-adult, crazed, clad in a tutu. At the end of the exchange I said, “You babies are all right!” Then I jumped into some Eminem lyrics.

  The next scene on the tape is of me showing the camera different album covers and singing songs from each album. I’m wearing a cowboy hat, gold pants, the same fluorescent flower skirt from the day of the fire, and all the necklaces in the world. I pause at Sweeney Todd and say, “Oh, this one’s about eating people, soooooo, that’s cool.” Mike, off-camera, peppered me with questions, asking me to hold the record albums higher or lower or to the side.

  The next morning, I went to the bodega on the corner to get Mike flowers. I set up the camera so the lens’s point of view shows what I’ve made—kumquat-and-avocado salad, cubed PowerBars, and a glass of wine. The first ceremonial meal of the cult of Jaime. I videotaped Mike waking up. On film, he looks pissed, groggy, and confused—like a normal person. He negotiated for more sleeping time. I clearly hadn’t slept at all and was now wearing a silver-flecked red bra and the gold skirt. I tried to get him to eat and he finally acknowledged me by eating a chunk of a PowerBar. I said Baruch atah Adonai over the cup of wine, borrowing from the Hebrew prayer. I hushed it as if my voice were a direct line to God. It felt that way. Mike asked me what I was going to do that day.

  “Today, I’m going to contact MTV to debate Gore, Bush, or Tipper Gore. I hope it’s Tipper. I have a lot of work to do today.” Pause. “I have to change the world.” Ironically, Tipper Gore had been a strong mental illness advocate, if not a champion of free speech.

  Mike asked me why I was holding an avocado pit in my hand. “I saved the pit so we could plant it wherever we decide to land,” I said. Then I started talking about a singing toilet bowl, a scene I was still working on from the musical I had written. I had performed it the night before in the Prospect Park Amphitheater to an audience of raccoons. It was, naturally, a musical about poop.

  That morning, we rode the F train to Mike’s office, one floor below my old burnt-out apartment. Mike told me that I talked to everyone on the subway, that I kept asking people what they did and there was this woman in her thirties who said, “I’m a lawyer.” I said, “This is Mike, you guys should definitely talk.” I gave her a pile of Mike’s business cards and introduced them. “The thing was she really liked you. She was into it.” When we got to Mike’s office, which was launching its site the next day, I put him on the couch and took his desk so that I could arrange my debate with Tipper Gore. I intended to use the Village Voice as a potential sponsor and began calling my editors to see if they could set it up stat.

  Mike, relegated to the couch, had to work and I had many, many things to accomplish as well. I had changed back into the same skirt I’d been wearing most days since the fire—the wraparound number with fluorescent flowers and one pocket. I had been keeping handfuls of granola in that pocket for weeks and today was no exception. I went upstairs. My apartment was cold and cleaned out and apocalyptic. It smelled like devastation. Like rotted flesh. Everything was gone. It wasn’t my apartment anymore, just bones.

  I took a walk toward Fourteenth Street with my pocket full of granola and a couple of stray kumquats left over from breakfast. I was ecstatic in love and every day was kaleidoscopic. I stopped at a bakery a couple of blocks north of Fourteenth because an elderly man with rainbow-colored eyeglass frames was hovering outside. He had a gray beard and I thought he was homeless, so I offered him a kumquat. He accepted, introduced himself as Bobby, and offered me a chocolate-covered rice cake probably thinking I was homeless (which was accurate). We kibitzed together over this strange makeshift snack. He was not homeless; he was a poet. And he had written a poem for his girlfriend, Peggy, and submitted it to a contest and won. The contest was sponsored by Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center that, every Valentine’s Day, would marry a couple every half hour, all day long. Bobby and Peggy would be married, but Bobby was having second thoughts. He loved his girlfriend but had no idea why, this late in life, they needed to be married. I was in favor of his marriage. I was full of unbridled love for everything, and we talked on the corner with our sour kumquat faces about the ceremony that would happen later in the day.

  “Well, why did you write the poem in the first place? Why did you submit it?”

  “I’m a poet and she wants to get married. I thought, why not?”

  “Then get married,” I said.

  I found his nerves and hesitation comforting. Like love’s first flutters never die. By the end of our conversation, Bobby invited me to the wedding at five o’clock; they hadn’t invited anyone and needed a witness.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll see you at the World Trade Center, five o’clock.”

  With that small suggestion, I decided that Mike and I should and would get married, as well, on top of the World Trade Center with Bobby and Peggy at five o’clock. This decision, without consulting Mike or the wedding coordinators at the World Trade Center, was extremely exciting. There was a lot to do. I called my older brother in DC and left a message, “Matt, I’m getting married, if you want to come, it’s gonna be on the top floor of the World Trade Center at five today. DON’T TELL MOM.”

  I called my best friend, Hana, and left her a message. I was getting married! If they could, they should come to the World Trade Center at five o’clock and be at my wedding! My wedding! I was getting married. I needed flowers and white shoes and an outfit that could pass. I went to Rags-A-Gogo and bought a pair of white patent leather shoes with a square 1960s two-inch heel. I needed something blue—everything I owned was borrowed. I went to David Byrne’s record label, Luaka Bop, and asked them for a good wedding soundtrack—they gave me a couple of compilation CDs. I went to the Voice to tell my editors I was getting married. Getting married! I had a lot to do, a long list, many, many things—and at the very bottom of that list, I added, Tell Mike we’re getting married.

  The last fragment of the tape captures that same day at dusk. The camera is pointed toward the floor, and I am dragging Mike up to the roof. You can hear the fatigue in his voice and the growing irritation. He’s resisting, while I’m guiding him upstairs.

  “Why are we going on the roof?” he asks.

  We have to, I insist. He threatens to turn off the camcorder. I ask him to point it at me. Then, on bended knee, I ask him to marry me. “It’s all set up,” I say.

  Then, the picture turns to snow.

  He didn’t say no, but his face was angry and tired. I didn’t even pause to feel rejected. “Okay, can you just come and videotape Bobby and Peggy’s wedding?”

  “Who are Bobby and Peggy?”

  “They’re getting married. Bobby’s my friend from the rice cake corner and Peggy is his girlfriend.”

  We stood by a window that overlooked Seventh Avenue in the front of the office, and Mike asked me to stay there. I looked out the window and it was getting dark and I felt more allegiance to Bobby and Peggy than I did to Mike. I felt more allegiance to love. I wanted to bear witness.

  Mike was my sidekick, he was my cameraman, but if he couldn’t hang with the revolution, I could not be burdened with dead weight. Mike told me his company was launching tomorrow and that he’d be at the office all night. He could see that something was not right. That I was not right, this person he barely knew was not right. He distracted me while his coworker Kelly pulled out my leopard-print address book. Mike made two calls: to my mom and Dr. Schwartz. He told my mom, “My name
is Mike, you don’t know me, I’m a friend of your daughter’s and I think something is wrong.” Mike said that when he talked to my mom, she was all business. “Like yup, yup, getting on a plane now,” Mike said. “Like she had a sense that this call was coming. She asked me to try and stick close to you until you could get to Hana.” My mom said when she got the call, she felt relief. She had visions of identifying me with a toe tag in some NYPD morgue.

  I shrugged off Mike’s inability to appreciate matrimony and took the 1/9 downtown. I had flowers for the bride and I wanted to see them down the aisle. Bobby was waiting for me in the lobby of the World Trade Center with his rainbow glasses. I met Peggy and hugged her and gave her the flowers to hold. There were Latino newlyweds, young couples excitedly strutting, on top of the world with the expansive electric city unfolding below—it was the kind of New York tradition that made me want to marry the city itself, every block, building, and broken soul.

  I walked Peggy down the aisle. I gave her hand to Bobby’s and signed the certificate as the only witness. They gave me the mug from the gift basket decorated with a red drawing of the Towers, hearts cascading from the top floors. It said TOP OF THE WORLD. I hugged Bobby and Peggy again. Just as they were setting off to a honeymoon dinner, Hana came running toward us thinking I had just gotten married to an old man in rainbow glasses or an elderly bookish woman. Her face was totally stricken and long, like she was too late to save me. She wasn’t, it had all just begun.

  The Merck Manual defines Bipolar I as manic patients who are “inexhaustibly, excessively, and impulsively involved in various pleasurable, high-risk activities (e.g., gambling, dangerous sports, promiscuous sexual activity) without insight into possible harm. Symptoms are so severe that they impair functioning; unwise investments, spending sprees, and other personal choices may have irreparable consequences.”

  Yes, on all of that. This was full-blown mania, round two.

  CHAPTER 16

  CHEEKING MEDS, BARTERING FOR UTOPIA, AND THE PASSOVER CRUISE

  I’M NOT SURE if I went home with Hana or if I insisted she come back with me to the old building on Seventh to see Mike. They knew each other from the Fire Pizza Party and now they were crucial members of Team Rescue Jaime from Herself. My mom borrowed miles from a friend and was on a redeye due to land at six a.m. the next morning. Between Hana and Mike, it was babysitting time. Hana’s roommate, Jim, vacated his room and stayed with a friend without even a conversation. He could just tell something was up and that we were all in need. My mom arrived and slept in Jim’s room.

  I had missions to accomplish and would drag my mom to art galleries or different offices I had outstanding “business” with. We went to the Prospect Park Zoo, where I popped in and out of human-sized badger holes, thinking how profound it was to see the universe from ground level. Eventually she convinced me to go back to Dr. Schwartz. I met with him alone—while my mom waited outside—and told him I slept well at Hana’s and he described me as “combative.” I asked him to draw a diagram of why I should take lithium again and he did—a happy face (mine) with smaller circles surrounding and contributing to the happiness (lithium). I grabbed the drawing and drew over it—a demonic me with a curlicued kangaroo claw holding a polarized world, with chaos surrounding the globe in the form of scribble on top of scribble on top of scribble. According to The Notes, I threw the drawing at him and then said I would take the medication. My mom and I left his office and crossed the street to Central Park. It was crisp and sunny and rich and I could feel the agitation growing, that the people around me were insisting on repression, that they were monied and well fed and unaware of suffering. I felt that an invisible they was trying to contain me, that I wasn’t special, that my inner iridescence was unacknowledged. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a cab hit a Corgi crossing the street. I ran to the dog, knowing I had healing powers, and held him and helped him back to the curb while others tried to stop the cab from driving away. I could feel the dog’s heart racing and I held him close to comfort him. I squeezed his Corgi body and massaged his haunches. The dog had gotten out of his collar; he was hurt. We tried to find a dog ambulance or someone who could help, and a limo pulled up. Ben Vereen (actual Ben Vereen, star of Pippin from the 1970s!) got out wearing a dapper yellow scarf and made one call to a dog ambulance to assuage our worries. Corgi would be all right, Ben Vereen rescued us all. And once again, like the wedding night, I felt chosen and special and connected to a larger narrative. My narrative. Ben Vereen was the narrator. I was queen. Ben Vereen just doesn’t show up out of nowhere for anyone.

  While my mom filled medications—lithium and Risperdal, an antipsychotic medication—I went into a bar on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and told the bartender I had invented a drink. I dumped some mint chip ice cream (not sure where that came from) into a tumbler with two shots of vodka. I sat next to a grizzled man who hid his aging features behind tailored clothes and tinted glasses. He introduced himself as Bruce; he had been a Broadway director and insisted I leave the bar for my own well-being. It was two p.m. and he thought I was an alcoholic and gave me a stern lecture, a real monologue about the perils of drinking. The kind of monologue that comes from someone who knows, someone who was actually drinking in a bar at two p.m. I didn’t even want to drink my mint chip ice cream vodka slosh concoction; I didn’t want to drink alcohol at all but I thought, I dunno, it might taste good and I was in an inventing mood. I was making magic everywhere—I saved Corgis! Bruce instructed his driver to take me to Hana’s apartment, around the corner. My mom wrote down his phone number from a card he gave me just to keep track of all my new friends: “the man who put you in a car (at a bar), Bruce” followed by his number.

  We went back to see Dr. Schwartz the next day. I reluctantly told him and my mom that I would start taking the lithium and the Risperdal when I went back to Hana’s apartment, that was the plan. We made a pasta dinner and Mike came over and I ate a lithium dessert. Only I didn’t. Because the only reason I was cool with getting the meds was that I had learned how to cheek medication by reading books like Girl, Interrupted and because I learned in the ward that they checked under the tongue for a reason. It’s easy to store pills in your cheeks or other crevices in your mouth, let the sink water wash by and then spit out the actual capsule. Kept that a secret for a dose or two until I told Mike that I was not being drugged, that I was still me and we could still be in love. Mike told my mom and Hana, and it became clear why the antipsychotic had not taken hold. I had a glint in my eye and was smiling until I realized he was a narc. This time, my mom gave me the meds and checked in my mouth, under my tongue, and in the crevices of my fleshy maw looking for any stray capsules.

  ME, IN GOLD PANTS, A FRINGE BELT, TUBE TOP, AND A BAZILLION NECKLACES.

  Risperdal wrecked me. Like with most psychiatric meds, it’s unknown how Risperdal works, but the idea is that it affects the way the brain processes things by interfering with communication among the brain’s nerves. The medication stunted me, stopped me in my manic tracks. I went from frothing and plotting to drooling from the meds and crying uncontrollably. My tongue was swollen to the point where I could no longer talk. Another invisible straitjacket.

  I was broken so that my mom could get me on a plane back to LA.

  Hana sent me back with a pocket full of marbles, and although she was the daughter of a rabbi, one had a picture of Mother Teresa on it. She wrote me a note to be opened on the plane. It read: Dearest Jaime, I want to remind you that as you are flying high above that: 1) I love you dearly; 2) I am holding down the NYC fort for your return; 3) you need to have patience in all this adjustment; 4) you have the most amazing fashion sense of anyone I’ve ever met and wear more gold than Mr. T like a rock star and finally; 5) you need to listen to your friends and family who know you MOST and love you the BEST. I love and admire you so much more than you know. Love, h.

  PAINTING FROM COLLEGE
ABOUT MY HIGH SCHOOL MANIC EPISODE THAT I PAINTED OVER DURING MY SECOND EPISODE.

  Even though I was seven years older than eighteen, Dr. DeAntonio, an adolescent psychiatrist, agreed to see me again since I had been his patient before. He weaned me off the Risperdal and kept me on lithium. I resisted and tried to cheek my meds again; my mom was wiser. Even with the meds, the mania did not stop. The montage version would go something like this: I was angered by restrictions; agitated by anything resembling rules; I sang to anyone who would listen; I smoked Fantasia cigarettes and left a trail of rainbow butts everywhere I went; I painted my face green with makeup; I painted over all my college canvases, making them look like garbage can oil spills; I rapped, a lot; I was convinced I was a battle rapper and changed my name to Jamya; I carried around a pocket rhyming dictionary and a pocket Webster’s dictionary; my rapping was terrible and mostly centered on poop; I was obsessed with bodily functions. I thought I was Jesus and was not afraid to tell most people. On one of my thrifting expeditions I found a jean jacket from the 1970s with Jesus stitched big and wide on the back—I bought it and wore it without irony. It was me, a name tag not a religion. I could touch the sky and bring back the holy. That the world didn’t bow down was a mystery—but not an impediment. I had plans. I described my love for Mike and strangers would feel it acutely, like a tangible thing occupying the center of the room.

  My parents all continued working, not knowing how long this would take—they couldn’t afford to take off work—but Dr. DeAntonio stressed the absolute importance of doing everything they could to keep me out of an institution. He warned that now that I was an adult, I would be subjected to a much more challenging environment than NPI—that my version of bipolar was on the light end of the adult spectrum and institutionalization should be avoided. He advocated for home care and so they scrambled. About three weeks after I came home, Jeff was in charge of babysitting duties. He wrote in his journal: “She’s still not close to well. She’s foul-mouthed, smoking like a chimney, unable to do anything for longer than a half hour, messy, grandiose (‘I’m gonna be a rock star.’), longing for New York, and often sad. Some light moments—I took her over to Abbot Kinney, to the Zephyr antique shop, and the owner there was a white-haired hippie who listened to all of Jaime’s crazy questions (‘Can I barter? . . . What kind of drawing would you like?’) and had a normal conversation with her, and when Jaime went into the back room, I pulled him aside and told him Jaime was in the middle of a manic episode, and he said ‘That’s cool man. I picked up on that right away. I’m just riffin’ with her.’” I remember trading him a couple bucks and a drawing for a pair of red and black and white cowboy boots that I wore throughout the rest of my episode (to match my Jesus jean jacket and gold tutu, naturally).