by Anna Berry
I should just get the hell out of here while I still can.
As I gather my things to leave, Dr. Chatterjee offers one last tidbit of advice. “Anna, I’m only telling you this because I believe that you don’t want to change. You’re in a bloody rut, Anna. And I can’t help you unless you help yourself. Nobody can.”
I stop seeing Dr. Chatterjee. Not necessarily because I want to stop seeing him, but because two weeks later, when I show up for my regularly scheduled session, the receptionist tells me that Dr. Chatterjee unexpectedly moved back to London, and the free program won’t take any more patients, so I’ll either need to start paying someone else to talk to me or stop going. So I stop going. And even though Dr. Chatterjee has abandoned me just like all the other men in my life have, I decide to take his advice and get out of my bloody rut in my own bloody way.
For the next year or so, my life goes roughly like this: I max out seven different credit cards in rash spending sprees on clothes, shoes, expensive dinners out, makeup, cable TV, two trips to Amsterdam for pot and hashish, and lots and lots of booze. I spend the money because I’m depressed; I feel guilty about spending the money and subsequently get more depressed; and I then spend even more money just trying to keep up with the bills that pile up from all the money I spent before, which makes me even more depressed than I ever thought possible, which makes me apply for more charge cards that I max out too, and then—
Then I file for bankruptcy.
I quit my library job and go to work for a dot-com firm downtown for a higher salary and stock options. I blow the extra salary on booze and partying, the stock options are worthless, and I get laid off a year or so later, so financially speaking, it’s kind of a wash.
But in that year or so, I also manage to get laid. A lot.
I have so many one-night stands during those eighteen months or so that years later, when my husband-to-be asks me how many men I’ve slept with, I say I can only give him a ballpark estimate. Every single weekend, I have at least one one-night stand, sometimes even two or three when I stretch the weekends out from Thursday to Tuesday. I dress in skimpy halters and tight miniskirts (with nothing underneath either) in the dead of a Chicago winter, strut in stilettos to clubs and bars even through a foot of Chicago snow. At the end of a booze and popper-filled evening, I make out in taxicabs with the unknown men I pick up at the clubs; they plunge their hands down my blouse and up my skirt and I don’t stop them, even when the cabbie threatens to throw us out onto the curb. Some of those men end up back at my apartment (or theirs), and we have sex on hallway rugs and bathroom counters. I sleep with these men in a vain effort to feel loved—or even just to feel something—but I end up feeling nothing at all. With each one, I grow more and more icy, more and more numb.
I don’t remember all of those one-night stands, but I do remember at least a couple of them involve me waking up drunk or stoned in the middle of the night in a strange apartment to find an equally strange man I don’t remember meeting before on top of me, grunting and sweaty as a lame horse in July. And what is strangest of all, I don’t think that there is anything wrong with this—even when I’m standing in line for a free HIV test at a charity clinic in a bad neighborhood because I don’t want to risk claiming an HIV test on my health insurance.
At a certain point I decide that I’m still in a bloody rut, and I make up my mind to get out of it—and life itself—for good. I contemplate suicide, but don’t bother to actually try to off myself—not out of fear or laziness so much as because I just don’t know how to go about it, at least not in a way that isn’t too messy or expensive. I just can’t quite bring myself to buy a gun to shoot myself, or to mix up just the right cocktail of booze and pills to send me off the planet on a permanent vacation. Besides, I have plenty to keep me occupied here on earth. There’s always another man to seduce, always another expensive dress to charge on Visa, always another throbbing club to visit on Saturday night. I’m starring in my own personal version of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and it’s literally the only thing keeping me alive.
So I keep right on shopping, and boozing, and screwing random people until 9/11 happens and puts a freeze on the gaping black hole in my brain and everything sort of just grinds to a standstill when in a final, fabulous finale, the gaping black hole in my brain collapses and then turns inside out.
1. Not his real name.
2. Name changed.
3. John Bateson, “The Suicide Magnet That Is the Golden Gate Bridge,” Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/29/opinion/la-oe-bateson-golden-gate-bridge-suicides-20130929.
4. Not his real name.
5. Not his real name.
6. Not her real name.
7. Richard A. Sherer, “Personality Disorder: ‘Untreatable’ Myth Is Challenged,” Psychiatric Times, July 1, 2008, www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/personality-disorder-%E2%80%9Cuntreatable%E2%80%9D-myth-challenged.
Chapter 3
Chicago: October 2001–April 2002
I am walking up and down Ashland Avenue, cell phone in hand, carrying a backpack with two bottles of Alberto VO5 Shampoo (on special at Walgreens, two for 99 cents), a toothbrush, a change of underwear, and a one-liter bottle of Diet Coke.
I am twenty-eight years old, and I am in the early stages of a brief psychotic episode.
I am calling Jacey Wills,[1] one of my theater friends. She’s a costume and set designer originally from Missouri. She lives in an apartment filled with costumes and bags of retail overstock and sewing machines and stage flats and moldy old props. Jacey works on indie films for peanuts, on theater productions mostly for free, and she doesn’t have a day job. Drawing upon survival skills she learned growing up extremely poor in a large rural-Missouri family, Jacey finds clothes and props for her design gigs in Dumpsters and alleys, buys expired groceries at bodegas and flea markets for pennies on the dollar. She’s always somehow dressed at the height of fashion in clothes she’s either found in the garbage or made herself. I’ve never known how she pays her bills, but she always manages it, and she also manages to help out her struggling theater-artist friends with cash and food whenever they need it. She’s kind of like a junkyard saint that way.
Jacey is my last resort. She’s not my best or my only friend in Chicago, but she’s the only one I trust to get me out of the situation I’m in, the only person I know who won’t judge me, or think that I’m acting crazy. Even when I am. Because Jacey is just a little bit crazy herself.
I have only about ten minutes left on my pay-as-you-go Verizon calling plan (my credit’s too bad to get a regular calling plan), so I’m praying as hard as I can to a God I no longer believe in for Jacey to please, please pick up her cell.
“Hello?”
“Jacey, it’s Anna. I need a place to stay.”
“Anna, I can’t talk to you right now, I’m right in the middle of a shoot—”
“Jacey, this is an emergency. I need a place to stay.” My voice is breaking. I’m pacing up and down in front of a shopping center on the corner of Ashland and Barry streets, in the midst of a neighborhood that is fast becoming too expensive for me to afford. My hands are shaking, my heart is racing, and my mind has an electric buzz that I know only means a panic attack is coming. I’m dancing up and down on the sidewalk, trying in vain to keep warm against the bitter, cutting Chicago wind. Yuppie women on elliptical trainers inside the shopping center’s Gym-n-Tan are staring at me through the frosty window. They probably think I’m one of the strung-out, teenage-junkie runaways who inhabit the corner of Clark and Belmont day and night, that perhaps I’ve gotten lost and wandered too far west into their sacred territory.
It’s cold. Too cold for April, even in Chicago. And I’m not wearing a coat. I left it back in my apartment. I forget why. I’m having trouble thinking straight. All I know right now is, I’m scared, I’m nervous, I had to leave my apartment in a hurry, and I need a place to stay. Now.
Now. Right now.
&nbs
p; I forget why.
“Anna, you sound really weird. What’s goin’ on, hon?” Jacey’s Missouri twang thickens as she lowers her voice. “I’m on a shoot downstate right now. I won’t be back in the city for three more days. And Tim’s not home right now either—he’s back home visiting his mom, otherwise I’d just tell you to take the el up to Evanston and wait for him on the doorstep. Can you wait three days?”
“No. No, that won’t work. I need somewhere I can go right now.”
I hear Jacey sigh. She and I are a lot alike—poor theater artists with Southern-Midwestern roots living in a big city and struggling to get by between jobs, poor theater artists with Southern-Midwestern roots who always help each other out. I helped her get her last three paying stage-design gigs, so she owes me. Big time. “Anna, where are you right now?”
“I’m on Ashland Avenue just north of Belmont, right across from that big shopping center.”
“Hang on a sec.” I hear Jacey tell someone on the set of the low-budget indie film she’s costuming that she’s taking a break. “There’s nowhere else you can go?”
“No.”
Jacey sighs again. “Is something weird going on with you and Dean? He’s not—beating you up or anything?”
“No! No, it’s nothing like that. It’s—complicated.”
Jacey clucks. “But it is something with you and Dean, isn’t it? You need to move out of his place?”
“I dunno. Maybe.”
Although Jacey doesn’t say so, I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking I shouldn’t have moved in with Dean after only knowing him for two months. Hell, everybody thinks that. Even me, sometimes.
But Jacey doesn’t judge me. She doesn’t judge anybody. “Look, if you’re in some kind of immediate danger, Anna, go to a shelter.”
“I’m not in danger, Jacey I promise.” But I’m not entirely sure about that. I don’t need other people doing things to me to be in danger. I can be a pretty big danger to myself sometimes.
“Okay then. If you’re not in danger, just sit tight until I get back in town. I should be back on Thursday. You can come stay with me if you haven’t figured something else out by then. Tim and I will get you taken care of. Is that OK?”
“Yeah,” I sigh. It’s obvious I’ll have to go back to Dean. For a while. It could be worse, I suppose. At least Jacey didn’t ask why I need a place to stay, or why I need to leave Dean’s apartment, which I share with him and another couple, although the situation there is fast becoming untenable. The fact is, I don’t know exactly why it’s becoming untenable. It’s just a feeling I have. An intuition, something that borders on ESP.
I’ve always had a keen ability to sense doom in a relationship just before it happens. Either that, or I hallucinate relationship doom to cause relationship doom to befall me. I constantly second-guess the relationship, wondering why anyone would willingly choose to be with someone like me. I’m too skinny, I’m too fat, I come from the wrong side of the tracks, I don’t have a good enough job, my hair is wrong, my eyes are wrong, he’s probably dating somebody else, surely he must be embarrassed to be seen with me, and so on. These kinds of self-defeating thoughts boil and bubble in my brain, and even if I never speak them aloud to anyone, their effect on my outer behavior is still unmistakable. I’m distant, irritable, and foggy. I blow up or snap at the slightest provocation, or I puff myself up and try to act “bigger” than I am—giving terse orders to my subordinates at work or during theater productions, making petty complaints at restaurants, or holing myself up in my room all weekend, not talking to anyone. With such bitterness and self-loathing eating me up inside, I alienate boyfriends without even trying. And then, once the damage is done, I freak out, get whiny and clingy, cook fancy meals, desperately beg them to take me back. I write lovey-dovey cards and e-mails, I send gifts and flowers, I agree to do kinky things in bed. Sometimes these gestures work and the boyfriends come back, and the cycle repeats for a while. But mostly it just hastens the inevitable.
One of my many psychotherapists (I forget which one) once called it my unique “self-fulfilling sexual prophecy” neurosis. It makes me needy. So needy that I just end up driving away the people I need the most. And now, with Dean, it’s happening once again. I still don’t have the insight to recognize my destructive relationship patterns, but I can feel the impending doom approaching deep in the pit of my stomach the same way a seasoned sailor can feel approaching storms in his very bones. The “why” doesn’t matter to me yet, just the “how.”
“Jacey, I know you’re out of town and all, but can you help me? Now? Please?”
Jacey sighs again. “Give me a couple days, Anna, I gotta go. We’re doing a big group shot tonight and I have thirty extras to costume. I’ll call you Thursday on your cell. Bye.”
Jacey hangs up. Of course, I know that I’ll be out of prepaid cell phone minutes by the time she gets back to Chicago. There will be no way for her to reach me. The whole conversation has been a waste of time.
I shrug my shoulders and head back to the apartment.
I meet Dean Takahashi[2] in the fall of 2001. I’ve been laid off from my job as a proposal copywriter at the dot-com consulting firm since September 13, 2001, and haven’t been able to find another job since. The Chicago job market is in the toilet, flooded with thousands of layoff victims with skill sets just like my own. Writers and editors can’t even get jobs breathing. The temp agencies are turning applicants away, and all the waitressing jobs are already taken by all the other struggling writers and actors who’ve been out of work since the first recession hit in 2000. I can’t afford to move to another city to look for work either.
I accept long-term unemployment as a fact of life and decide to live on my meager savings and unemployment checks until something better comes along. The small women’s theater company I founded and have run on the side for the past couple of years provides me with no income and takes up a lot of time, but it has provided me with the benefit of a strong network of other poor, struggling theater artists, all of them trying to manage day jobs and expensive city rent and the performing arts all at the same time. I try my network of fellow actors and writers, some of whom have day jobs at employment agencies, but none of them have leads on where I might find a steady paycheck in the dreadful post–9/11 Chicago economy, which was already devastated a year earlier when Enron’s Chicago-based accounting firm Arthur Andersen imploded, saturating the job market with its thousands of sacked employees.
Someone in my circle of friends suggests I audition for a role in a community theater production just to get myself out of the apartment. An acting job, even a low-paying one, would give me the opportunity for creative expression and socializing without the stress of fundraising, ticket sales, and the liability insurance I’ve always had with the shows I’ve produced with my own small theater company. And who knows—it might just lead to a good-paying gig too.
I get the most recent issue of Performink, Chicago’s theater- and film-industry trade paper, and check out the audition notices. I gave up acting in favor of playwriting, directing, and producing theater years ago; with my size-twelve build, freckles, and wiry hair, I’m a character actress. And there just aren’t many roles in Chicago theater for non-Equity character actresses in their twenties. I’m thirty years too young for all the character parts that are available, and without my Equity card can’t get cast in them anyway. And as might be expected, all the week’s audition notices are calling for young, size-two ingénues, men of any age or type, or sixty-something women with Equity cards. I’m about to toss the paper aside in frustration when I notice a small ad at the bottom of the page.
JUNKYARD HEART[3] Uptown Performance Ensemble seeks actors of all ages and types. Non-Equity. Perform in an ensemble-created show at various venues in Chicago. Critically acclaimed; Chicago Tribune and Chicago Reader Recommended! No pay. Call 773-555-xxxx for audition.
The name of the theater company sounds vaguely familiar. I know I must have read
a review of one of their shows somewhere, but I can’t quite place where. A paying gig would be preferable, but this appears to be the only option if I want to get onstage and out of my apartment in the next couple of weeks. I call the number and a pleasant-voiced woman answers.
“Hello, thank you for calling Junkyard HEART! Can I help you?”
“Umm, yeah, I’m calling about the audition?” I flip on CNN with the volume muted; there’s a feature story running about mail-order anthrax.
“Yes! The first rehearsal is tonight starting at six p.m., at the Park District building on the corner of Marine Drive and Lawrence.”
Rehearsal? This doesn’t add up. “Umm, don’t I need to audition first?”
There’s a pause, followed by an easy laugh. “Well, you can audition if you like, but it’s not required.”
I turn up the volume on CNN. I can’t decide what’s more unbelievable—video footage of an anthrax-infected hand or a Chicago theater company that doesn’t require auditions for actors. “An audition isn’t required?”
“Oh no, dear. We give everyone a part who wants one. It’s very collaborative. But again, if you prefer to do an audition, you can still do one. Just show up at six and tell the director you’d prefer to do an audition. We’re very flexible that way.”
“Okay, but—”
The pleasant, calm-voiced woman laughs again. It’s a very musical laugh. “You’re a professional actress, then, I take it?”
“Well, yes. That is, I used to be. I’m more of a freelance theater producer and writer now, but I’ve kind of hit a dry spell, so—”
“Oh, wonderful! We especially enjoy having professional actors in our shows. You’ll be so inspirational to the patients and special-needs performers. Please, do make sure to come promptly at six. Would it be all right if some of the special-needs performers watch your audition?”