Unhinged

  Just as I’m handing the cash over to the show’s producer—Megan, a personal friend I’ve known for years—Mark makes a scene.

  “Has somebody been smoking in here? Because if somebody’s been smoking in here, I’m not staying.”

  I suck in my breath. I know what’s coming.

  Megan goes to greet my brother and his wife, all slick customer service. “We don’t allow smoking in the theater,” she says. “Chicago city ordinance prohibits that. But there’s a Korean barbecue restaurant next door—maybe you’re just smelling their cooking.”

  “Somebody’s been SMOKING in here!” Mark yells, and starts pacing. “Somebody’s been SMOKING in here! I can’t stay here if somebody’s SMOKING!” He paces, fake-wheezes, and then hits the wall with his fist. “Goddamn it! Goddamnit!”

  Mark stomps out of the theater.

  Megan’s jaw drops. Stephanie just looks helpless. “I’m sorry, Anna, but if Mark smells smoke in here, we can’t stay and watch the show.” She dashes out onto the street after her husband. Meanwhile, my own husband clearly wants to disappear.

  “Anna, I promise you, I don’t let anybody smoke in the theater,” Megan stammers, trying in vain to fix the situation. “That’s—that’s like, against the law.”

  “I know you don’t,” I reply with a sigh. “I’m really, really sorry about that. That’s my brother and he’s just—well, he’s mentally ill, and he just has a lot of problems.”

  Megan frowns. “I guess you’ll need a refund on the tickets then,” she says, and she hands me back my cash in a huff.

  I apologize several more times, but Megan is clearly upset. She held those tickets as a personal favor to me, and now she probably won’t be able to resell them. And all because a chemical imbalance in my brother’s brain insists there is smoke in a theater when there is, in fact, none.

  Since there’s apparently no entertainment venue in Chicago that will meet Mark’s asthma-safety criteria, we spend the rest of the evening driving Mark and Stephanie around Chicago’s most exclusive neighborhoods, pointing out interesting architecture and hot blues clubs through my cramped old Hyundai’s dirty windows. But Mark grows impatient with that after an hour or so, claiming his restless-leg syndrome is acting up. (That’s a new one; I’m sure he’s picked it up from all the restless-leg-syndrome pharmaceutical commercials that litter the TV airwaves.) Mark angrily demands that I drive him and Stephanie back to their hotel, which is on the other end of town. Stephanie gently reminds him that they’ve left their car parked in front of our condo building. He keeps quiet for the rest of the drive back to my neighborhood, but he makes a point to shift a lot in his seat, kicking my dashboard hard with every move he makes.

  As my brother and his wife head off toward their car without so much as a thank you for the expensive dinner I’ve bought them or all the trouble I’ve gone to, I slam my car into park and put my head down on the steering wheel.

  “Why the hell do you put up with him?” George asks, livid. “What a fucking asshole.”

  “He’s my brother,” I sigh. “And he’s not an asshole. He’s just very, very sick.”

  I would add one more negative schizophrenic symptom to the accepted list based on my years of observing Mark’s behavior: a high degree of suggestibility. My brother has fallen victim to religious cults, pyramid schemes, and borderline criminal enterprises, all promising to make him rich quick. The fact that someone as intelligent as Mark is should fail to see through the flim-flam and emotional manipulation of these kinds of organizations time and time again is only explained, I believe, by a profound lack of skepticism.

  Skepticism is a subtle emotional trigger that kicks in for most of us without our having to think about it at all. But when a person’s mind, however intelligent, is clouded with the incandescent firestorm of schizophrenia, any and all sorts of potentially life-saving emotional triggers and gateways simply don’t work.

  Scientists have devised several different tools to measure a person’s suggestibility (e.g., the Harvard Group scale, and the Stanford scale). I don’t think Mark has ever been subjected to one of these tests, but I believe he’d score high on them. Because of his schizophrenic tendency to “split” the world around him into all-or-nothing, black-and-white situations, Mark is particularly vulnerable to any scheme that promises fast riches and a tight-knit social network that will “take care” of him. (I’m actually surprised he hasn’t fallen victim to the Mafia yet.)

  I first note Mark’s high degree of suggestibility in high school when Dad’s soon-to-be-ex-second-wife Martha decides to take advantage of it and use him as a tool in her divorce battle against Dad. Somehow, Martha manages to convince Mark that Dad has stolen money from him (what funds exactly I have no idea since Mark is a teenager with no job, and the only money he possesses is whatever allowance Dad gives him). Martha encourages my brother to file suit against my father in small-claims court. He does, and the results aren’t what I’m sure he and Martha had in mind.

  I’m not present at the hearing, but what occurs there becomes the stuff of Evansville donut-shop gossip for years. Supposedly, Mark presents a case claiming that not only has Dad failed to pay him some kind of remuneration for his yet-to-begin college education, Dad has also physically assaulted him. Dad admits to the judge that he manhandled Mark during an argument, but only after Mark attacked him first in a fit of uncontrolled schizophrenic rage.

  Mark presents no corroborating evidence for the stolen money or the alleged assault other than my dad’s own admission that he was just trying to defend himself. The exasperated judge throws the whole case out, and he admonishes Mark for bringing private family disputes into his overloaded courtroom and wasting his valuable time. Mark reportedly then launches a string of shouted obscenities at Dad and the judge, and Dad manages to subdue him before the bailiff has a chance to throw both of them out.

  It was Martha and Mark’s goal to publicly humiliate my father, but the opposite ends up happening. I’m sure it will give Martha pause if she ever considers engaging an unstable schizophrenic teenager to do her dirty work for her in public again.

  My brother bounces around from place to place over the next several years. Most of what I know about this time comes to me third-hand through relatives since Mark essentially cuts himself off from me, Dad, and the rest of his immediate family. He attends college at the local research university for a while but abruptly leaves after he unsuccessfully sues a male psychology professor for sexual harassment. The university ombudsman dismisses Mark’s initial complaint as being without merit. I have no doubt whatsoever that the alleged sex harassment occurs only in my brother’s mind. I can’t say for sure, but I think Mark was only partly complying with his doctors’ antipsychotic medication orders during this time—if he was taking his meds at all.

  From age eighteen to twenty-one, Mark moves around constantly, sleeping on friends’ couches or getting kicked out of apartments because he doesn’t pay the rent. He holds no job, and he flunks out of whatever college he’s attending at the time. Dad dutifully pays Mark’s tuition bills even though Mark gets straight Fs and incompletes, but that is the extent of their relationship; they don’t communicate except through other relatives, like my Memaw and Papaw Jones.

  I’m in the middle of my college sophomore year when Mark manages to matriculate as a third-year freshman at a competing college nearby. He is only about forty miles away, but I rarely see or speak to Mark during this time other than the annual Christmas and Thanksgiving gatherings at my grandparents’ house. (While Mark stayed in Memaw and Papaw Jones’ basement for a time when he was still a teenager, they’ve mostly washed their hands of him too, except to serve as an occasional relay station for messages.) I only keep up on what he’s up to through my mother, whom Mark frequently manipulates for cash and favors.

  Mom calls me in my dorm room at least once a week with news of Mark’s latest shenanigans.

  “Anna, I’m very worried about your brother,” Mom says on
one late-night call during midterms week early in my sophomore year.

  “Yeah, so what else is new?” I’m wired on No-Doz, Mountain Dew, and chocolate when she calls well after eleven, while I’m cramming for an exam. Mom is up late studying herself—preparing for a test the next day at her mental health job-training program.

  “Anna, your brother just called me to say he’s about to get kicked out of his apartment.” Mom is snuffling and biting back tears. “He has no money! He had to sell all his school books to buy food!”

  “Mom, please don’t tell me you’re going to fall for this line of bullshit,” I say. “You know he’s just making it all up to get money out of you.”

  “Anna, your dad doesn’t send your brother anything,” Mom croaks. “The divorce agreement between me and him requires that he pays for you kids’ education, but you know how your dad is—he just won’t.”

  “Mom, Dad pays Mark’s tuition,” I shoot back. “Way more than he pays for my tuition, in fact. When Mark sends him the bills he does, anyway. Although I don’t know why, with how Mark just flunks out of everywhere. He’s probably going to flunk out of this new school just like he flunked out of all the others before, and then maybe he’ll sue some more professors on the side just for fun.”

  “Anna, there’s no need for you to be so mean.”

  “I’m just stating the facts, Mom. Can I go now?”

  “But your Dad doesn’t send Mark any money!” Mom is all-out crying now. “Just a few dollars here and there, not enough for Mark to live on! And he’s starving because of it! His roommates are going to throw his stuff out on the street tomorrow if he doesn’t pay them rent soon—”

  I laugh. “Dad doesn’t send me any more money than that, Mom. That’s why I have a job. Maybe if Mark just got a job he could afford to pay his bills.” I say this although I know that the more money Mark has access to, the more he will blow it on wasteful eccentricities like medieval mead-making equipment and handpainted Dungeons & Dragons figurines. Mark always has difficulty understanding the concept that one has to pay for rent and food before loading up on expensive hobby materials. I’m sure he’s in whatever situation he claims to be because of that, and not because he’s a starving victim of miserable circumstance.

  “Well, you know your brother has all kinds of learning disabilities, Anna. He can’t go to school full time and hold down a job at the same time like you can.”

  (Mom is in serious denial about my brother’s mental illness. What everyone else calls paranoid schizophrenia, my mother calls learning disabilities. She’s never been able to accept that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic, no matter how many times she’s been told by both clinicians and family members, even referring to Dr. Nickelback’s “schizo” diagnosis as nothing but bunk that he made up just to make money. No matter that other doctors agreed with the diagnosis—it’s just too much for my mother to take given her own constantly fragile mental state.)

  “Whatever, Mom. Is there something in particular you needed? I’m kind of studying for an exam right now.”

  “I was calling to see if you could afford to send Mark some money.”

  I scoff. “No way.”

  “You’re being selfish!”

  “No, I’m being realistic. I’m not going to fall prey to Mark’s lies and manipulation, and neither should you.”

  Mom cries harder. My heart goes out to her—I can’t imagine how horrible it must be to stand by, helpless, and watch your only son destroy himself and try to take everyone in your family down with him. At one level I can understand why my mother thinks sending my brother a few hundred dollars that he’ll just piss away on foolish junk will help him. But at another level, I don’t want her to become the latest victim of my brother’s mental illness, especially when she is fighting her own battle with clinical depression and anxiety disorders. “Mom, please don’t ask me to send Mark any money. He needs to learn to take care of himself.”

  “You know I can’t afford to send Mark very much out of my disability check!” she shoots back. “I need you to do just this one small thing for me. Send your brother whatever you can afford—fifty, a hundred dollars—”

  “No!” I scream into the phone, then sigh. It’s futile. Either I send Mark money to appease my mother and enable his manipulative schizophrenic behavior, or I hurt my already very fragile mother by ignoring her desperate pleas. It’s a no-win situation, one that any member of a mentally ill family faces on a near-daily basis.

  “I’m sorry Mom, but I can’t help you. I’m hanging up now. Good luck on your job-training stuff.”

  It’s the right decision for me to make, but that doesn’t make it any easier. It’s no wonder that I try to avoid every member of my immediate family as much as possible. There’s no point in admonishing Dad for continuing to pay Mark’s bills when Mom could just sue him for contempt of court for violating their divorce decree. There’s no point in trying to reason with Mom about Mark when she’s in total denial about Mark’s illness in the first place. These kinds of inter-sibling conflicts are hard enough to weather in a normal family, but when you add our family’s nutjob DNA to the mix, they become next to impossible.

  I slam the phone into the receiver, then cry for an hour. I’m not able to get back to studying until well after midnight.

  Despite all my best efforts to avoid it, I fall victim to my brother’s suggestive financial manipulation a few times myself. The combination of Mark’s spendthrift habits and his schizophrenic avolition—in other words, his brain’s profound aversion to work of any kind because it might put him under further mental stress—has always made him susceptible to pyramid schemes and dodgy, commission-only sales positions.

  The first time I fall victim to Mark’s seductive “sales” tactics is my junior year of college, when Mark has finally dropped out of college altogether and is trying in vain to find a job that will pay him as much as possible while involving little to no actual work. Mom has found him a part-time job doing entry-level case management at QCP to help him cover his rent, and they’re happy enough with Mark’s work to promise him a full-time position by the end of the year. However, Mark doesn’t see the low-paying, unglamorous world of social work as a viable career path. He wants money, power, and success. Mark wants more than anything to one-up our father, to be able to afford a better house and car than the man he views as the root of all his problems. Mark wants these things, but doesn’t really understand what it takes to get them—or at least, how to get them honestly.

  Desperate and naive, Mark starts responding to want ads in the newspaper that say things like “INSIDE SALES: $100K+ YOUR FIRST YEAR!” and “ARE YOU READY TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?”

  He tries a few of these questionable job leads, and most of them don’t pan out—some are even boiler-room-type situations that require he hustle unsuspecting customers for cash with empty promises when no actual product exists. Mark usually quits those jobs within a day or two.

  After several weeks of trying, Mark finally finds one inside sales job that looks promising.

  Mark is going to sell vacuum cleaners door to door.

  Mom is excited about this job. “I think Mark might have found his calling,” she tells me on the phone. I’m living off-campus by then, and I have a small studio apartment near the university. “You should let him do his sales pitch for you, Anna. He is really good. He’ll get that nasty carpet of yours all spic-and-span, just you watch. Your Memaw Jones was so impressed that she might buy one of his vacuum sweepers for her house.”

  “All right, but I’m not buying anything from him. I’m poor and those vacuums are really expensive.”

  “Oh hon, he knows you can’t afford one. They’re meant mostly for rich people. Your Memaw’s only gonna buy the cheapest one, if she buys one at all. Just let him do his sales pitch for you. You’re into acting and theater and stuff—maybe you can give Mark some pointers on how to be, you know, entertaining.”

  “Fine. Tell him I’ll be home all day Saturd
ay if he wants to come over.”

  Mark arrives at my building that Saturday at two, lugging a gigantic chrome upright vacuum up the three flights to my tiny studio apartment, a sort of triangular alcove carved out of the attic in a rundown Queen Anne clapboard mansion. The living-dining-sleeping room has hideous deep-shag carpeting that looks like a bad acid trip from Graceland on its best days; that day, it looks like dried-up, crumpled baby puke from all the dirt, dust, and snowmelt salt that I’ve trampled in. I’ve purposely refrained from vacuuming with my beat-up, secondhand Hoover all week to give Mark something to really work for during his demonstration. I’ve even tucked a full bottle of baby powder behind a bookcase, which I plan to sprinkle around to see if Mark’s machine can pick it up just when he thinks he’s “sold” me on his product. Like any good theater director, I want to make Mark’s performance as difficult as possible in order to make him a better performer.

  Mark gives his demonstration. I have to admit it’s impressive. Mark is organized, he proves knowledgeable and confident in his product no matter how much I pepper him with questions, and he explains the vacuum’s many features while vacuuming up every mess I put in front of him with grace and poise. He makes a few messes of his own—confetti, dog hair, even a box full of tacks—that the vacuum makes quick work of with barely a growl. He then detaches the main suction unit and clips it to a hand attachment, runs it over my mattress and loveseat, then shows me the filter full of something he calls “putrefied ash”—dead skin cells and dust-mite poop, he says. “You wanna sleep on a mattress full of dead skin cells and dust-mite poop?”