Mental

by Jaime Lowe

  “POETRY/RAP” FROM CALIFORNIA.

  Abbot Kinney was different then, full of junk shops and old Venice natives, before the street centered on a gourmand leisure class that hung out on milk crates in front of restaurants with too many consonants. Jeff would take me to the beach in hopes that it would calm me down. It had the opposite effect: “On a Sunday,” he wrote in his journal, “Jaime approached a street performer on the Venice boardwalk and he let her sing a few bars of ‘One Singular Sensation’ [from A Chorus Line] and two women upon hearing Jaime’s awful voice covered their ears and screamed and another man started laughing and videotaping her. The musician Cedrick told Jaime she had a lot of guts to do that and that she should follow her dreams.” My memory was that the busker was pissed that I scared away his crowd but impressed that I took the stage at all. I was Jamya after all, fierce woman rapper, rhyming to the waves. My friends from junior high, Rachel and Miriam, took me out for dinner at Alejo’s and then to my favorite bar, Hinano’s, a dive bar where Washington Boulevard ends and the sand begins. Hinano’s had live music, big bouncers, and juicy grass-fed burgers. (It’s not the kind of place that you would expect to have grass-fed burgers.) I went back into the bathroom and transformed. I glittered my face like the sky was running out of stardust. I was falling from my manic high but still magnetic. I would tell people, I write for the New Yorker, I’m a painter, a poet, a rapper, a muse.

  My dad’s neighbor, an actor ten years older than me, who wore gardening hats while intentionally planting a feral lawn, saw me pacing the blocks in our neighborhood in all my layers and all my gilded armor. He took me to Astro Burger for fries, which I didn’t eat as he described his own relationship to mental illness. The people who picked me up and helped me out knew what was happening with me. Crazy is a secret code. There were also people I encountered such as the waiter at the French restaurant Le Café du Village on Larchmont who bought into my rap and music prowess—he wanted to record together and had a garage studio waiting. Miriam picked me up at my dad’s, and he told her under no circumstances should she give me money or let me convince her or others to buy anything. We walked to Larchmont and into a clothing store, Picket Fences. It was like it had been—when we were in junior high hunting for Betsey Johnson bargains. Only this time instead of searching for riotous floral patterns and checked bloomer onesies, my fashion choices were a question mark, a symptom. A Ganesh tank top hung on a sale rack. I asked Miriam for twenty dollars. She denied, so I started bartering with the sales ladies. We ran into the music producer/waiter and I asked him for the money. Miriam called my dad, who drove to Larchmont and bended to my will. Easier to buy the Ganesh tank top than convince me otherwise. I had an antique suitcase given to me by our deceased neighbor, Mr. Danjou, a former carpenter for Paramount Studios. He built sets in the 1920s. His wife was a costume designer. The suitcase was full of scrap material from ball gowns and custom majesty. Yellow chiffons and brocaded swatches were packed with folded magenta silks. I naturally unfolded them all and shredded the material. I was still working from the assumption that I would be leading a hippie cult into the apocalypse horizon and needed a fanciful cape.

  Around the same time, I wrote on a legal pad: “The plants talk to us. Actively ignored or passively acknowledged, the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity. Quaint indigenous culture that exists on a parallel plane. Virus disease, domination, consumerism, redemptive spirit, monochromatic world of monotony, a fully conscience species of our own demise. Getting by with nothing, multicultural, pluralistic world.” I took out all my paintings from college and painted big bold red slashes over finished canvases. I painted my feet and walked across my work leaving a trail of chaos.

  MORE “POETRY/RAP” FROM CALIFORNIA.

  My mom applied for financial help from a sexual assault victims fund that the State of California had set up—she used it to pay for daycare while she read scripts (her job). She hired a Jamaican woman named Alma who watched me paint rainbow colors over any surface and braided my hair into cornrows and helped me keep my liquid green makeup in line. We spent most of our days together frequenting 99-cent stores and nail salons and grocery stores to buy more cigarettes. One thing that became very clear in this episode if not the first one was that being crazy makes people (including me, especially me) smoke a lot. People with serious mental illness treated in the public health system die roughly twenty-five years earlier than those without mental illness. Tobacco-related illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, and lung disease, are among the most common causes of death in this population (my population). And Americans with mental illnesses have a 70 percent greater likelihood of smoking than the general population.

  My mom—and all my parents—were once again uncertain whether I would get better. Jeff’s brother Tom (my uncle), a psychiatrist, told Jeff and my mom that sleep was the only thing that would bring me out of this. Sleep and time. My aunt Sally came to visit, my aunt Carrie took me to get new pants, and my grandma tried to take care of me. When I showed up (with Alma as backup) at my grandma’s house, I took all her scrap material from her sewing projects and started to sew a second magic outfit-cape-slash-thing. She was such a precise seamstress and perfectionist that watching me cut every which way gave her a heart attack (not literally). She did not recognize me. She could not respond to a flurried frenzy of unmeasured energy. Alma took me home, and my mom took note, one less person who could handle the babysitting. It wasn’t all bad—I went to see Saving Silverman with my mom and grandma one afternoon and was so enraptured with the Neil Diamond tribute and the extremely underrated comic genius of Amanda Peet that I stood up and gave it a standing ovation. With God on my side and Jesus in my veins, I stood and clapped very enthusiastically. I even got my hands on the press materials later.

  Dr. DeAntonio could see progress, but it was slow. The first lucid moment I remember was sitting across from Jeff at Jerry’s deli in a mini mall near our house in Marina del Rey. We both had soup. I was anxious and frustrated and angry. And so was he. His voice was elevated, which had never happened before in the twenty-three years I had known him. He said, “Do you know what this is doing to your mom? Do you know what this is doing to her?” I mean, I really didn’t, I hadn’t thought about it. The way he said it made my recovery seem like my choice, which I know it wasn’t and I know he knows it wasn’t, but it shook me. It was the first time I actually heard and understood consequence. I could feel it. Another moment that stood out was when Marilyn took me to the famous deli, Canter’s, where as a kid, the old ladies would give me free cookies. We waited at the counter to get cold cuts and I stood in my one hundred necklaces. A woman approached me to discuss one in particular—a blown glass medallion encased in silver, something I borrowed from my mom that she got in the 1970s. The stranger told me of the magic properties and secret meaning of the glass, the way the blue swirled meant one thing, the way the cream enamel enveloping the color meant another. And I let her talk for a while and thought, She’s crazy. And then it dawned on both Marilyn and me that if I could recognize crazy, I was one step away from it. A week later, my mom noticed that when we left a Dr. DeAntonio appointment, I did not speak to every person in the elevator. I was getting better.

  And then things got dark because I was getting better.

  The lithium was working. And once again, I didn’t care how. I just noticed that it brought me back. I could see clearly that I had destroyed personal relationships, professional relationships; family members saw me in a different way; the world I came in contact with knew two different Jaimes, a medicated one and a manic one, and reconciling all this was part of coming to a painful merged consciousness. It was a cold world; one second I was exuding glitter and rapping with Em, the next I was literally sifting through rubble. There was also the matter of Mike, who responded to my e-mails less and less, as they got more and more primal. Here was the first person I fell in love w
ith, who loved me back. But was it even me? It was so complicated and it sucked. (Love might be a strong word for a two-week fire romance, but we both felt something. I felt something.) The realization that we would not be sitting on a gilded throne with a direct pipeline to heaven sucked. But I could not let go of the foundation, the experience that we had together, that he was part of my mania and me when many people bowed out.

  Meanwhile, my mom had a get-better marker for me. Margie (Jeff’s mom and the matriarch of the Maine crew) had planned a family Passover cruise in April and my mom was convinced that I would be better enough to attend and that I had to get better to attend. The Passover cruise meant nothing to me. She was fixated. I was entering the portion of a bipolar cycle when lithium takes hold and reality washes over like heavy mud. I would sit on the bottom bunk of Matt’s old bed, still, unclear on what exactly I was supposed to do postdestruction. I was functioning again and what I saw was wreckage; what I felt was very tired; what I knew had shifted dramatically to the unknown. I had ruined the life I had built. I was burnt out. What do burnt-out people do, especially burnt-out mentally ill people? They go on Passover cruises to the Caribbean.

  My mom called Margie. Jaime will be joining us on the Passover cruise, after all.

  There were many aspects of this plan my mom did not consider, but I applaud her effort to break the cycle of the bunk bed. The first challenge was getting me there. My mom had already canceled my flights so I was on a different flight. I had a stopover in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I sat in those calming white rocking chairs near the food court, and ended up meeting them in Miami—I’m sure it dawned on my mom that if I wasn’t better, I could have ended up in a different city altogether, on a different adventure, with or without pills, off the rails, riding the rails, who knows? The second ill-thought-out aspect of this adventure was that I would be trapped on a fucking cruise ship. Incidentally, four or five people die by “falling” overboard off Florida’s coast each year, and the height of the particular cruise ship we were on did not fail to impress anyone in my family—cruise ships on average are about twenty-three fucking stories high. My mom had my brother Matt and cousin Meredith watching me most of the time but I remember looking down, roughly 236 feet, into those dark waters. Now, I was never suicidal. But I looked for a long time. I looked hard into that abyss. Even worse than the suicide-around-every-corner was that I spent most of the cruise in my cabin watching Titanic on loop, its own form of quiet suicide attempt. I brought my Discman and a mix CD that Mike made (not even for me, just him fucking around with DJing tools). I felt close to it, like the songs were an extension of Mike himself. I pretended that he made it with me in mind—the Pharcyde’s “Passin’ Me By” was the first track, Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You” followed it, his handwriting scribbled on the surface of the CD. The cruise had bright spots. The seder was short; the octogenarian high-seas rabbi skipped everything but the four questions, paging through the ceremony with the eagerness of a holy man who respected the buffet more than God. There were frequent announcements regarding the Midnight Chocoholics Buffet (Chocolate fondue! Chocolate pound cake! Chocolate chocolate!). Meredith and I snuck out to a dance party in the ship’s hip-hop club. I extended my arms and let my legs get loose and it felt good, the laser lights felt good, the cheese of it all felt good, the disappearing from me—it felt good.

  When I got back to LA, it was time to plan my return to New York. I passed the Passover cruise test.

  THE OFFICIAL PASSOVER CRUISE PHOTO.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE CORNER OF SIXTH AVENUE AND GARFIELD; COPING SKILLS 1, IMPROV, AND THE SAD CLOWN

  MIKE TOLD ME he was planning a cross-country trip in a van with his friend for June and my goal was to get back to Brooklyn before he left. But I was scared. A week or two after returning to LA from the Passover cruise, I had a phone session with Dr. Schwartz. I was supposed to have left for New York the day before, but I pulled back, feeling uncertain about finding work, securing housing, and resuming a social life that felt damaged (at best). I had already started gaining weight back and wearing more normal clothes—brown and black cords and regular blue jeans—but I was far from normal. I missed manic me, the person who was an ethereal god. The person who feared nothing. She would have gotten on a plane, sat on the pilot’s lap, and sung a fully improvised set from the cockpit.

  No one around me missed that person, but I was in mourning. I wanted just one one-hundredth of that confidence. Dr. Schwartz wrote of our phone session, “She’s afraid she burned her bridges with writing because her editors were exposed to her mania, but she’s not sure about what she wants to write. Freelancing feels too unstable—she’s looking for safety and security right now.” By the end of April, I packed my new clothes and flew back to New York. I stayed with my dad’s first cousins Pam and Terry and their daughter Emma, who lived next to Prospect Park. They took me in and said I could stay in their guest room as long as I needed. I got in touch with Mike. We sat in the same empty amphitheater in the park where I had performed my poop musical. We were different. Subdued. Not romantic. Not anything like what I wanted. A gut punch. In my head, we still had a chance to date. In Mike’s head, he was already in the van, on the road with his college friend. We sat close to each other but I could tell he had already pulled away. Mike didn’t like me for me, he didn’t know me. And I didn’t like me either—we were both missing this ghost. I wished for the style of Jamya, the metabolism, the flow of ideas, the genius. I was drained of my magic.

  I wanted to be invisible to the world. I slept past noon most days. I tried to stay out late, walking the streets because I had nowhere to go and I knew I couldn’t sleep. The nights were lonesome and oppressive and unbearably awake. My cousin Emma remembered later that all of a sudden there was this new person in her house at the same time she was approaching adolescence, a curious person slightly closer in age and experience to the traumas of teenaging. “I remember not seeing you for days on end because you would sleep all day and be awake all night. The thing I most remember is wishing you would never leave. I liked knowing you were there, even in the months when you were just occupying the second floor and I thought perhaps someone should wake you up to feed you (my parents stopped me from doing that; I guess they realized from the fridge contents that you weren’t starving yourself).” She remembered the two of us talking about life, boys, friends, family, California, college, jobs, politics—and that I was argumentative. “I remembered nights at the dinner table, early on, when your hair was in a giant Afro that matched your telling of the apartment fire or a dinner with Hana or an experience at a bar. I remember debates we had about articles in the NYT in which you far surpassed the fervor with which even my dad talked about them—and I think a lot of them were political, so that’s saying something.” She told me, “Even in what must have felt like your fog, you made a huge impact on me.” It didn’t feel like I made an impact on anything at the time. Sometimes I would just watch Seinfeld reruns quietly. Being me hurt.

  In therapy, Dr. Schwartz described me as “depressed,” “more depressed,” “irritated,” “bored,” “depressed,” and “slumped over in the chair.” His notes had shifted from noting combativeness and ferocity to more than a hint of worry—I was lackluster. I assume he was more aware of my depression because the mania had acted as a siren, warning him about what would come next. I stopped making art; I stopped caring about art. I worried that I had moved back to New York too soon, and I thought about moving back to LA (my mom supported this; my dad thought I should try to stick it out). I started Zoloft with the lithium, but it had no effect. Mike and I spent his remaining days in New York together, sniffing this new normal from a distance. I told Dr. Schwartz that I was bored by Mike, which had to be a defense mechanism, knowing he was leaving just two weeks after I came back to Brooklyn to be with him. When he left on May 14, I was devastated. I remembered our Valentine’s Day together; I walked by the bo
dega on the corner where I got his bouquet and fingered the flowers. This felt like a return to the days of driving Benedict Canyon.

  I drove Emma to New Jersey for horse riding lessons. She would ride and I would walk through an abandoned field adjacent to the stables, and just wander through the wheat with nothing in my head or heart. We would stop at Wendy’s on the way home—I would get a Greek salad wrap and Emma would get chili. One morning, after refusing many previous morning runs, I went with Pam and her sister (my cousin/aunt) Katherine on a run in Prospect Park, completing the loop. It had an impact. I finished something. I did something. One foot in front of the other.

  There were glimmers of good. But it was hard. Depression is thick, endless lukewarm molasses. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t see a reason to. I had nightmares about the weather. This is when depression becomes physical, clogging arteries and pores and openness alike. It’s when thoughts in your head lie. Lying to you like you don’t belong or deserve a smile or a chance or just a flicker of happy.