Mental

by Jaime Lowe

  I went on job interviews, dissuading most people from hiring me. I was particularly negative with Bill Vourvoulias at Talk magazine, where I had freelanced before the fire. He was looking for a full-time fact-checker—the pay was decent, I knew most of the staff since I had freelanced there before, and it was a good way to pitch editors.

  Yet I told him, in no uncertain terms, that I was a terrible candidate and that I was only interviewing for practice.

  He said, “Everyone I talked to recommended you highly.”

  I said, “I’m the wrong person.”

  He offered me the job. I said I had to think about it; he said every other person he made an offer to accepted immediately. I still needed time, I said.

  It seemed absurd to be a fact-checker when my natural, unmedicated state was based on anything but fact. I doubted my ability to do a job of any kind, let alone one that involved determining what was real. By June, I took the job. By July, I got a shared apartment with a thirty-five-year-old cancer survivor who shared my depressed state; we were both wearing depression ponchos and that environment was okay until it wasn’t. I gained more weight and felt more and more uncomfortable with being me again. Apart from friends I had known forever like Hana and Sarah J. and Sarah P., I was impossibly awkward. When you are depressed you want to be a time traveler going back, going forward, being anywhere but in the here and now. I got invited to socialize with publishing friends and people I’d known before. I was nervous and with each interaction announced what I had been through. Oh hi! It’s nice to see you again, I was gone because I’m bipolar and my house burned down but now I am back and trying to . . . get back to normal! So, I did what felt like a natural trust fall with myself—I signed up for improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) theater. It was not because I wanted to be a comedian or an improv player; it was a form of therapy and forced social time. (There is a natural irony that I went to a class that taught a “Yes, and . . .” technique which is pretty much the opposite of depression, which functions more on the level of “No, but . . .”) I was terrible at improv and I hated it. I was not entertaining and kept referencing Shakespeare and James Joyce and the only person I connected with was a hyperkinetic dude named Sharif who had just broken up with someone as well. Part of my recovery was connecting with other people who also had devastated hearts—trying to figure out what the Mike whatever-it-was-relationship-ish-thing meant. Sad broken-up people seem to find each other—Sharif didn’t seem sad, though, just like a genie let out of a bottle. I was a better improv watcher than doer and found my devotion centered on an improv troupe named Respecto Montalban—I went to every show, practice, battle, open performance of theirs I could access. Comedy was helping more than the Zoloft; improv people were easier to stand near than anyone who had known me through my episode, largely because the improvers didn’t know me at all. They didn’t care. I did not have to speak to people if they were performing. That was much more preferable. I could shout one word and it counted as participation.

  On the morning of 9/11, I turned on NPR and heard about the first plane. It was early and I assumed it was a tragic mistake. I took the F to my office in the Flatiron District and saw people standing in the middle of the street looking at the plumes of gray and black and white smoke—the billowing tragedy erupting in lower Manhattan. It was the first time I felt my depression really lift. I had been unable to get out of bed for months prior, shocked by personal, self-inflicted destruction, blame, doubt, fear. I felt alone through September 10, 2001. And now an entire city—no, the world—mourned with me. It turned out suicide rates dropped after 9/11 and so did crime and murder. Soldiers with PTSD felt better. At Talk magazine, we watched live on CNN as the second tower fell. We thought the footage was a replay at first, until the second tower started to fall. There was an enormity, a camaraderie, and a silence that took hold. Some of the staff, including me, began clearing out, looking back toward the dust cloud of downtown. We walked uptown to James Lochart’s apartment to watch more CNN and make phone calls, and I ended up sleeping on the couch of a friend who stayed up snorting heroin with his roommate. That feeling of togetherness in the wake of international tragedy was weird, it was confounding. I finally felt okay. I felt guilty that my first thought upon seeing unspeakable tragedy was that I felt calm and better than I had been in months. It was so selfish, so narcissistic, it was embarrassing and awful. I could not handle the day-to-day things so well—bill paying, being on time, scheduling, responsibility, living. I had a more natural affinity for chaos. So when the world spun sideways, my poles were more aligned. At the same time, Dr. Schwartz decreased my Zoloft and tried Prozac. By the end of the year I was still introducing myself to strangers with pronouncements of fire and mania, but I was leaving the house and smiling every now and then.

  My writer friend Donnell from the LA Weekly and Amy from House & Garden had a going-away party at a club in DUMBO, when DUMBO was still industrial lofts and Gleason’s, the world famous boxing gym. He introduced me to a writer named Brett who for some reason took pity on me and invited me to play pool at Lucy’s in the East Village on a random Tuesday night. I sat on a stool and Lucy, the squeaky-voiced Polish matron, opened a bottle of Żywiec and Brett introduced me to a whole new round of friends: Mason, a Shakespearean actor who ran a monthly comedy night; Dana, an editor at Spin; and Ned, a mysterious entrepreneur. There was a group of dudes playing pool most nights at Lucy’s and I was more than happy to be folded into their company to cultivate crushes on all of them like a rotating roulette wheel. As if being broken up has a scent, Mason found me first. We swapped heartache, talking about how much we missed our people, what we did wrong, what we did right. A month later, he invited me to bartend at Moonwork (his comedy show), where I got the kind of behind-the-scenes comedy experience no comedy fan wants. It turns out most funny people are deeply depressed or deeply disturbed or both. The trope of the sad clown felt especially relevant—humor masks an underlying darkness. Charlie Chaplin once said: “To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it.” In a 1978 article for Time magazine, psychologist Samuel Janus looked at the link between Jewish humor and tragedy. He found that “Jewish humor was born of depression and alienation from the general culture . . . comedy is a defense mechanism to ward off the aggression and hostility of others.” Throughout his decades of research on Jewish and non-Jewish comedians, he also found that many of the performers he interviewed had experienced significant trauma during their childhoods. Most of the performers at Moonwork and UCB hid it well, but they were kindred spirits, I could tell. We stayed out late at the neighboring bars talking about the energy of the crowd, whose sets worked, who bombed; we broke down the room. And I cleaned up the Sam Adams bottle caps.

  I was happy handing out beer and listening to comedy sets on repeat. We had Marc Maron, Eugene Mirman, Slovin and Allen, Louis C.K., Todd Barry, Demetri Martin trying out new material and then sticking around for the after-party. I was happy to set up chairs and stow them away at the end—I was happy to be part of something again. The Prozac was working, or time was working, or Moonwork saved me, or Lucy’s or Respecto Montalban or whatever, I was getting better. I stayed on Prozac for three or four months and then Dr. Schwartz decreased the dose until I was back to just lithium. Talk magazine folded; I started writing music reviews for the Voice again; I interviewed to be a reporter for the National Enquirer; that didn’t work out but I saw the desk where a reporter had died from anthrax; I fact-checked for Men’s Journal and Glamour and signed on to help launch Radar. I dated some people; I mostly pined for Mike, who was back in Chicago. I stayed in touch with him; we talked for hours on the phone late at night and every time it felt like my mania had some validity to it, like if I could legitimize a relationship with him, it would somehow make me less crazy, make my episode less surreal. In March 2002, I told Dr. Schwartz that I had an idea for writing a book about my manic episode, “but rather than treat it as a personal
memoir, she would treat it as a subject to investigate, as if she was reporting on someone else. (She wants to interview me.)” The same month I planned a trip to visit Chicago, ostensibly to see my cousins and Aunt Sally and Uncle Aggelos, but it was really to see Mike. Dr. Schwartz noted that I had fantasies of getting back together with Mike and I didn’t “deny the likely outcome of more misery.” I told Dr. Schwartz I didn’t want to rule out the possibility of something good—a possibility that was super small—but that I also had “nothing else going on.”

  A couple years later, I wrote about seeing Mike in Chicago for the Voice:

  We walked back to my aunt’s house, his arm hugging my shoulder. Everyone was asleep. He took off my clunking boots. We lay on the leather sofa cringing from the sound two bodies make against leather. His arm snaked around my waist, his head on my chest. His mouth parted in sleepy gasps, my heart pounding in what-the-fuck. We moved against each other for warmth and for wondering what happened. We lay still. He grew heavy. I grew tired of his weight. I rolled to the floor with my head on his lap.

  He brought me closer, lifted my arms to his shoulders, my body to his. Tired and looking for a fit, I moved my legs to his waist. We grazed face to face but thought better of it. We fell back asleep breathing what used to be until 4:30 became too late for napping and too late for us.

  I walked him to the door and didn’t kiss his cheek, knowing the dinner we talked about having would turn into a phone call of sorry and a mouthful of not mine.

  • • •

  WHEN I MADE it back to New York, I was clear about my disappointment. When I moved to New York initially, in 1998, I had unlimited hustle. I pitched nonstop to anyone who would listen. After the fire, I was less and less confident about sending pitches and writing. I didn’t feel like I was a real writer. I started fact-checking at Sports Illustrated for Women, which required late-night closes. There was a chaos to the last-minute edits, swapping profiles in and out of an issue, and designs upon redesigns, but watching Susan Casey, the editor in chief, mold issues from a subject I had always wished to read about (WOMEN’S SPORTS! FINALLY!) was overwhelming, almost moving. I thought I was finally in a space I could own—something I believed in, somewhere I could pitch and write. But Sports Illustrated for Women folded just a couple of issues after I started working there. I sat in the back of the conference room where Casey gathered to tell the staff and I stifled tears even though I BARELY worked there. I felt like the black widow of magazines (three in one short six-year career!). In retrospect, I was probably more akin to a canary in a coal mine as journalism and magazine publishing advanced into the digital age. I went back to fact-checking at Men’s Journal and then got hired as a reporter/researcher at Sports Illustrated on Campus, a college edition of Sports Illustrated, because the managing editor, Meesha, had worked with me at Sports Illustrated for Women. For the first time I had a full-time job that included writing regularly—I interviewed Larry Holmes; covered college wrestlers making weight; went on a cross-country roadtrip in an RV with two other reporters during the NCAA March Madness tournament; I played water polo with Tony Azevedo and the Stanford water polo team. I was happy to report on the lesser-covered sports, but it was clear that my job there would always be dictated by the fact that I didn’t breathe and sleep and die by sports, and I was not a dude (although the gender disparity was more of an issue at the main mag than at On Campus). I traveled for work and stayed in real hotels and expensed meals and had to get a cell phone. My paranoia had subsided but I still had my suspicions about tracking and brain damage. I was bad at using the phone and would drain the battery talking to crushes or my mom or dad while I was on the road. I had no idea that little flip phone was powered by lithium-ion batteries. (Lithium everywhere!) I got into trouble with interoffice crushes and I knew my days at SI were not forever days. I did not want to be trapped by genre, which is why I never got far as a music or culture critic either. I always felt that a good story was just a good story, and I wanted the freedom to write about anything. Although it’s entirely possible that I just wasn’t that good at criticism or sports writing. One of my last stories for SI was an interview with Shirley Muldowney, aka “Cha Cha” or the “First Lady of Drag Racing.” She was the first woman licensed by the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) to drive a Top Fuel dragster. She won the NHRA Top Fuel championship in 1977, 1980, and 1982. She was a chain-smoking badass and as we sat together in lawn chairs in Joliet, Illinois, talking to her fans, she told me of all the sexism and all the bullshit she faced as a female driver. But she didn’t care—she was driven by the speed and the adoration and the competition. She told me to stand on the starting line of just one race and I might get a sense of what she experienced as a driver. I did and could feel the hot asphalt erupt beneath my feet. I worried that the heat might melt the soles of my Vans. The sound reverberated like a bomb; that starting line was a full body experience, sensory overload. I had never been to a Top Fuel race or a NASCAR race and I could see the appeal; fans approach drivers. They see the engines. The sport is felt and participatory. Everything is accessible.

  The morning after SI’s 2005 Christmas party, I boarded a plane to Los Angeles still drunk and wrecked from the party. I was groggy from two hours of sleep and ready to pass the fuck out in a back-row seat. But when I walked through first class, I noticed an extra-wide black man with a face tattoo. I assumed this was a hallucination, or maybe some kind of Christmas wish fulfilled by boxing fairies. I had been fixated on Mike Tyson since I had seen the Barbara Walters interview from 1988 with Robin Givens, the interview in which Givens says that Mike Tyson is manic depressive and on lithium. “Michael is a manic depressive, that is just a fact. When he’s in a manic state, he has enormous amounts of energy. . . . He doesn’t sleep,” Givens says. She explains his temper, his violence, his abuse as instances when Tyson is out of control and manic. Tyson responds by saying, “This is a situation in which I’m dealing with my illness.” Givens, controlling the interview, concludes that Tyson’s disease went untreated for so long because he was dominant in the ring, such a brute force, being used by his trainers. (Shortly after the interview, Tyson’s manager at the time set up a one-hour doctor’s appointment, which cleared Tyson of any psychiatric disorders, in order to sanction a Frank Bruno fight. Boxing, a sport always known to be free of corruption.) I had always wanted to interview Mike Tyson. A year before that plane ride, I had begun training at Gleason’s with the idea that if someday I got the opportunity, I would have a sense of the sport from inside the ring. I found a trainer who taught me how to tape my hands and wrists in yellow wraps, how to jab, how to punch, how to slip and counter. I learned the basics of boxing and was hooked. On that plane, that morning, though, I sat in complete disbelief. That could not be Mike Tyson.

  By the time the plane landed, I had drooled all over the seat tray in front of me and assumed that the face-tattooed person was in fact a phantom. Besides, I was sitting in the last row, he was in the first, I would never catch up to him. But I got to baggage claim and sitting on the edge of our designated area was Mike Tyson, by himself. I have never been so starstruck. I hovered. A girl ran up to him and asked for a picture, which he obliged. But he looked devastated, in sweats, his thick musculature resting on the baggage wheel. This was before his cameo in The Hangover, and his book and one-man show. I have to imagine it was among his many low points.

  I walked up to him and said, “Hi, I’m Jaime Lowe, I’m a reporter for Sports Illustrated, if you’re ever interested in talking for an article, I’d love to talk to you.”

  I gave him my card. He shook his head and said, “Why can’t anyone just want to talk to me. To go out to dinner and just talk to me.”

  “I’d go out to dinner with you.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me or care. It was hard to believe this was the man responsible for such quick brute force and aggression in the ring. He just seemed sad and human. Sad like I had been sad. Our bags came,
his baggage undoubtedly heavier than mine.

  In anticipation of Mike Tyson calling me some day, I continued to box. I wanted to know what it felt like to get into the ring, to fight, to punch, to be punched. That’s when I met Fluff (not his real name, but his chosen pseudonym), a sixty-one-year-old former boxer, former photographer, current member of the Iron Knights of Newark. He was married to a preacher named Pam and trained at Gleason’s. He taught me to extend my jab, to turn my glove, to slip, to punch, to move. A few months into training, Fluff asked me if I wanted to spar. I said no, but he got the headgear anyway and we got in the ring. He chased me around, pulling no punches. After two rounds, three and half minutes on and thirty seconds of rest between, I wove through the ropes, gassed out but completely enchanted. It was not fight, it was dance. After that, I’d show up every Saturday morning to spar. Sometimes with Charlie, a cavernous-chested but thick-backed dude who would sip hard liquor between rounds. I didn’t like sparring with him because he was erratic and threw haymakers that sometimes landed. He couldn’t see straight. Sometimes I sparred with Carlos, little George, big George, Maureen, Yuko, Devon, Sonya—whoever was there. The first year of sparring was like dating: I was aggressive and angry and I chased and was occasionally chased back. As I learned and watched and practiced, I realized it wasn’t about emotion. Mike Tyson was at his worst when he was emotional. Boxing looks like revenge, like hate. But it’s something else, it’s a kind of feral sport that makes everything disappear. In the ring you react and act; you inhale and exhale; you are calm in an environment that mimics war but the only way to win is to be buoyed by breath.