“Just call them and tell them you want it,” he says.
“I’m in a bad way after the whole robbery thing,” I say. “I’m worried I might get out there and completely lose it.”
“I’m more worried about what might happen if you stay in New York,” he says.
“Karissa’s another issue.”
“Portland’s not that small. You’ll probably never even see her.”
“But we run in a lot of the same circles. I’m sure I’ll bump into her.”
“Then you’ll bump into her. Worse things have happened. Now call them up and accept the job.”
“But what if—”
“Call them up and take the goddamned job.”
I haven’t heard Gabriel raise his voice with anyone for years. He’s possibly the least authoritarian person I know, but since I can’t supply one myself, he gives me this final voice of authority. So I call. And accept. And try to do so with the most enthusiasm I can muster. And then fall asleep feeling relieved that I’ve made a choice; that is, until I wake up in the middle of the night, in the throes of an even deeper, more dislocating anxiety attack than the one I’d experienced out at Grodin’s.
A few days later, after a series of sleepless nights, I stumble into work and open my email, and there it is, finally, a note from Karissa. She apologizes for taking so long to get back to me, and explains that she’d been on vacation up in Massachusetts with her boyfriend, and that during the trip her boyfriend asked her to be his wife.
Forecast for the Manhattan Skyline: New LARGE groundswell that should show strongest over the afternoon/evening. Look for 15–20 feet+ faces at many spots. Select outer reefs hold occasional bigger sets 25 feet+ late in the day. These are conditions for expert and very experienced surfers only. Anyone else should NOT paddle out as conditions are life-threatening.
Near the end of the film Basquiat, the eponymous artist has lunch with his estranged girlfriend, played by Claire Forlani. It’s an awkward, tragic scene; Basquiat is strung out on drugs, drowning in his own fame, and this is all exacerbated by seeing how well his ex-girlfriend is doing for herself and learning that she’s romantically involved with a mutual friend. He excuses himself to go to the washroom, where he scrutinizes and picks at his blemished face in the mirror, while the lugubrious Tom Waits song “Who Are You” plays in the background. At this very moment, the film cuts to the skyline surfer, who takes an epic, potentially fatal bail and then gets hammered by the falls, a not-so-subtle metaphor for Basquiat’s own fall from grace and his impending heroin overdose.
As I’m sitting at my desk, staring at Karissa’s email, something like a wave crashes over my own head, a neurochemical storm surge that holds me down for a long, long time. When I finally surface, I call Gabriel.
“The fact that you loved her so much shows that she’s a really good catch,” he says. “So it’s not all that surprising that someone else asked her to marry him.”
For the first time in my life, I hang up on my best friend.
My therapist agrees that I should go to Portland, but he strongly suggests that, after everything I’ve been through, I need to start taking some medication first.
When I object, he recaps my past two years: How he’s watched me grow increasingly despondent at my job. How exhausted I am by the city, by my long daily commute from Brooklyn to Midtown. And how having a gun pointed at my face has brought me right to the breaking point.
“Why should you suffer any longer?” he asks.
It seems risky to me, beginning a heavy psychotropic and then moving across the country a couple weeks later, but if it means relief from the kind of pain and anxiety I’ve been feeling, then I’m all for it. And doubly so if it can help me deal with this new blast of depression over Karissa’s engagement.
I book an appointment with a psychiatrist up near the Columbia University campus. He’s a youngish doctor, personable, and in a few minutes I feel more comfortable talking to him than I ever have with my therapist. After listening to my story, he agrees that I need some meds. He prescribes a low dose of something called Celexa, an older version of Lexapro that apparently has fewer side effects.
“I think this will definitely help you with your transition to Portland,” he says. “But more than that, it might change your life.”
Nothing much changes at first, but after a few days I feel a new kind of edginess, like the way I imagine an alcoholic or a chronic smoker must feel after going cold turkey. The shrink warned me that the transition onto an antidepressant is often accompanied by some anxiety, so he’d also prescribed a tranquilizer called Ativan that I was to take “as needed.” I’m in some serious need, so I start taking an Ativan every night to help me sleep. I’m amazed at how a tiny white pill can make me feel so much better, a wave of automatic serenity that puts me fast asleep, until I wake up at three or four craving another.
The first weekend in October breaks sunny and crisp and warm; under any other circumstances I would’ve gone surfing, but now all I want to do is sit at home, watch TV, and take Ativan. Things progress like this for a few more days, until I start to worry I might end up like a pill-junkie version of Basquiat.
I visit the psychiatrist and tell him what’s been happening. He looks concerned when I explain I’ve been taking the Ativan in the afternoons and every night to help me sleep. He suggests that if I’m having trouble sleeping, then what I really need is a sleeping pill.
He writes a prescription.
On the way home, I pick up the grenade-sized bottle of Ambien.
I’ve never done hallucinogens, but what happens to me that night is comparable to a really bad trip. I have a terrible reaction to the Ambien, and combined with slight withdrawal from the Ativan and my difficult adjustment to Celexa, I nearly lose my mind. I can’t sleep; all I can do is lie in a fetal position, my whole body trembling, held under by a heavy pharmacological crush, probably looking and feeling a lot like Martin Sheen having a nervous breakdown in a Saigon hotel room at the beginning of Apocalypse Now.10 When I close my eyes, I see dark, endlessly transmogrifying shapes behind my eyelids, like an evil game of Tetris that you can never slow down or shut off, a kind of hideous phantasm that no amount of conscious will can terminate. The Ambien also causes an awful chemical taste in my mouth, as if I’d polished the Pfizer laboratory floor with my tongue.
I feel like the human version of Newtown Creek, flooded with bad chemicals.
On top of the shadow shapes and tastes, I have severe anxiety and self-destructive urges—three years in New York and only one accomplishment. At the very height of it, the dark, shifting shapes morph into obsessive visual hallucinations.
Vision: the Manhattan skyline surfer.
Vision: an epic bail, washed over the falls.
Vision: a plunge off the Williamsburg Bridge.
And Melville’s in the room with me now; I can hear his ragged breathing, can sense his bitterness and gloom emanating up from under my bed, his body directly beneath mine, like a shadow print burned into the floorboards. This time he’s accompanied by his son Malcolm, who, at the age of eighteen, climbed the stairs of the Melville family home, locked his bedroom door, and shot himself with a pistol, perhaps the result of growing up in the thick fog of such failure.
I somehow endure until dawn and call in sick for the third time this month. After my roommates leave for work, it’s all I can do to get myself from my bed to the couch. I flip through the channels until I find The Gods Must Be Crazy playing on AMC. I’m still shaking, feeling sicker than I’ve ever felt, but somehow I’m able to laugh at the movie—the less-than-PC story of a misguided little Kalahari tribesman who ventures from his homeland to the big city just to return an empty Coke bottle. In one scene, he gets locked in prison for poaching a goat; he finds himself trapped in a tiny, dark cell, having no idea how or why he ended up there.
“Poor little bugger,” one of the main characters says, “if we don’t get him out of there, he’s gonna die for sure.�
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1 This friend eventually dismantled the signature Basquiat cabinets and sold them for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He made a lucrative, set-for-life, never-work-again career out of them—his kitchen cabinets.
2 In his memoir Schnabel writes, “Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.”
3 For instance, casting his actual parents to play the part of his character’s parents in the film. Schnabel also put heavy emphasis on his own obscenely successful career and his cozy family life—one scene depicts him waltzing around his Versailles-sized studio with his lovely young daughter—which, contrasted with Basquiat’s downward spiral and lack of real human connectedness, seems sort of, well, cruel.
4 Schnabel is famous for wearing silk pajamas pretty much everywhere, from his outdoor painting studio to televised interviews with Charlie Rose, and word on the street is that Oldman’s wardrobe consisted of pajamas straight from Schnabel’s armoire.
5 Schnabel apparently pulled his weight at the Warhol museum and scored the deceased painter’s wig and glasses for use during filming. It’s hard to imagine a more hip and/or creepy tableau anywhere in cinematic history: David fucking Bowie wearing Andy Warhol’s wig.
6 Coincidentally, when del Toro originally moved to California, he was much more interested in becoming a surfer than an actor.
7 The filmwork is vintage footage by Herbie Fletcher, at what looks like Sunset Beach on Oahu.
8 The story of a Connecticut suburbanite who tries to swim his way home from a cocktail party by linking up a series of his neighbors’ backyard pools. In the beginning he seems good-natured, robust, adventurous, but slowly the reader begins to understand that he’s despised or pitied by most of his neighbors, that he’s embroiled in at least one extra marital dalliance, and that he’s actually been kicked out of the home he’s swimming toward, so that in the end he finds himself naked and lost and cast out of his suburban Eden.
9 After I watch it a year and half later, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly becomes one of my all-time favorite films, further warming me toward Schnabel as a director.
10 The scene was apparently culled from footage of Martin Sheen having an actual nervous breakdown.
BELLEVUE
In the wake of the commercial failure of Moby-Dick, Melville wrote the novel Pierre, the story of a young writer whose creative ambitions are crushed by New York City. While railing against Christian taboos and toying with bisexuality and an incestuous relationship with his sister, he becomes increasingly unhinged. According to Melville biographer Laurie Roberston-Lorant, the book reads “like a narrative nervous breakdown.”
The bizarre story concludes with the main character’s Hamlet-style suicide, followed by this nihilistic passage:
Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the shaft.
Whereas Moby-Dick earned the author only a few hundred dollars, Melville ended up actually owing his publishers close to that amount after the publication of Pierre, mainly because, while Moby-Dick received somewhat mixed reviews, Pierre and its author were positively crucified by the press—one New York journal ran a review beneath the headline “Herman Melville Crazy.” The sentiment was often shared by Melville’s family and friends. A neighbor, Sarah Morewood, wrote, “the recluse life he was leading made his city friends think he was slightly insane.” His wife, Elizabeth, grew increasingly alarmed by his “ugly attacks.” In response to a fellow artist’s suicide, Melville himself remarked that “This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him … For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire.”
The Melvilles’ Manhattan residence was just uptown from the original Bellevue Hospital—one of New York’s longest-running psychiatric institutions, having housed a number of the city’s troubled literary minds, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Eugene O’Neill among them. Given that Melville’s in-laws once conspired to effectively kidnap Elizabeth from his abusive household during this post-Pierre darkness, it’s not a stretch to imagine that they might also have considered having him committed.
The evening after my Ambien reaction, I call my mother and tell her what happened. Clearly distressed, she asks if I’ve considered hurting myself.
I tell her the truth.
Early the next morning she calls my therapist and the psychiatrist who prescribed the medication. My therapist is unequivocal: if I pose a danger to myself, I need to be hospitalized. When my mother relays this information, I picture Bellevue looming there on the banks of the East River. Part of me wants it: to give up, check in, change into pajamas. But I also worry that it might make things worse, fuck up my life beyond repair.
My psychiatrist takes the more practical, pharmaceutical approach, although his blunt statement—“For God’s sake, don’t take any more Ambien”—brings his overall competence into question. But while I’m still clenched in the jaws of deep depression and anxiety, dumping the bottle of sleeping pills down the toilet does help me finally get some rest.
DECISION/INDECISION
Though I’ve verbally accepted the job in Portland, I’m far from making up my mind whether or not to actually leave New York. Since the nonprofit job in Oregon doesn’t provide health insurance, I apply for a personal health coverage plan through Blue Cross Blue Shield in Oregon. But because I’m now taking medication for depression, they deny me coverage based on a preexisting-condition clause.
This makes the decision even more agonizing. I want to get out of New York, but it seems almost irresponsible to give up a job with full benefits, especially at this point in my life when I need serious medical care. On the other hand, part of the reason I need this care is the fact that I live in New York.
I call Blue Cross in Oregon to explain the situation—that I’ve been through a traumatic event and the meds are helping me recover. But there’s nothing anyone can do for me.
So along with my laptop and rental car, the Denver gangsters also jacked my insurability.
And then, like a final kick to the gut, in late October thieves break into the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland. They steal the new staff computer and three expensive Mac monitors—and I know it’s because the organization is a captainless ship, in chaos without me.
THE SCRIVENER
But he answered not a word; like the last column of some ruined temple, he remained standing mute and solitary in the middle of the otherwise deserted room.
∼ HERMAN MELVILLE, Bartleby the Scrivener
After mixed critical reception for Moby-Dick and outright hostility toward Pierre, Melville descended into a period of hopelessness. From the wreckage of his career as a novelist, he escaped to short-form fiction like Bartleby the Scrivener, written for Putnam’s in 1853. Bartleby is a tale of the eponymous young scrivener, hired by a Wall Street lawyer to copy out legal forms in triplicate and quadruplicate, like a human photocopier. He’s a fastidious and productive employee, at least at first.
But as the story progresses, Bartleby begins refusing to carry out simple tasks. Eventually he gives up copying altogether.
I prefer not to, he says, over and over, a kind of haunting refrain.
Being a Christian man, the employer can’t find it in his heart to fire him, especially once he learns that Bartleby has been spending nights in the viewless office chambers—that he has no home or family—“he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic.”
Though Bartleby does nothing but stare out the window at an opposing brick wall, the lawyer allows him to linger for weeks. His spectral presence disturbs clients and the other scriveners, casting a dark pall over the office and tarnish
ing the good lawyer’s reputation. After begging him to leave and receiving the same response—I prefer not to—the bewildered employer sees no other option than to relocate his offices to a new building, abandoning Bartleby in his gloom.
In one unforgettable final scene, the lawyer returns to his old building, only to find Bartleby “haunting the building generally, sitting upon the banisters of the stairs by day, and sleeping in the entry by night.”
While toiling in the windowless Pit, I can’t help but think of the melancholy plotline in Bartleby. And though I don’t say it out loud, the refrain I prefer not to plays over and over in my head, especially when asked to edit yet another romance novel. But I’m never so Bartleby-like as when, after trying but failing to leave my job for a solid year, and then finally winning and accepting a new job on the opposite coast, I can’t find the resolve to actually give notice, to pack up my things and send out the obligatory farewell emails.
A few weeks pass like this.
Then a full month.
Then another.
But still I remain, a shadow presence in the Pit, a hazy apparition of my former self, haunting my cubicle.
THE WHITE DEAD
Philip Weiss, contributing writer for the New York Times and confirmed Melvillian, who, in his 1996 Times article, describes how after reading Melville’s exalted letters to Hawthorne, he found himself in a sort of Melvillian dream; who, in the same article, states I had lost my own mind to Melville.
Laurie Anderson, who claims that Moby-Dick is the strangest book she ever read; who hails Melville as a master of the jump cut; who spent the 1990s creating a two-hour performance art opera entitled Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick.
Elizabeth Schultz, who admits to being obsessed with the novel; who wrote the meticulously researched Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art, a work that documents the hundreds of American visual artists who have attempted to paint what Melville believed could not be painted.
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 19