by James Rhodes
I took seven of them out with my bare hands, threw myself through the door using sheer strength, splintering wood and emerging chrysalis-like into the cold air where I outran the entire security team, boosted over the front barriers and barrelled into a passing cab which screeched off Jack Bauer-style into the night.
Shut up. I lasted about twelve seconds before being pinned to the floor, carried into a secure room, given something awesome to swallow and hurtling down into nothingness.
When I came to, I paid the price. Giant cocktails of drugs, deep and meaningful conversations with the head psychiatrist, room and body searches, no contact with other ‘residents’ (inmates), meals alone in my room, showers monitored.
You cannot imagine the rage. I didn’t know such anger could exist. A constant, cold fury, building up for thirty years and then finally allowed to be unleashed.
I wasn’t done yet. Something happened to me. Someone entirely new took charge whose sole mission was to get the fuck out of there. As long as it took, whatever lengths I had to go to. Getting ‘well’, whatever the fuck that meant, was not going to happen. I could not kill myself in that place and I knew I had to get out of there and find somewhere else to do it.
A few days later I was being taken to see the psychiatrist. There was an office refit going on and he had moved down to the ground floor near the main entrance. Which meant I was escorted (by an even bigger male nurse) out of the locked ward and downstairs. And, remarkably, while I was waiting to see the doc in his sterile but comfortable waiting room, my escort went back up to the ward, leaving me alone. I’ve no idea why. If it was a communications breakdown, laziness, or simply him needing a smoke, but this was my one chance to get out of there and I didn’t hesitate. I walked calmly, confidently, to the main doors, pushed them open and walked out into the sunlight. It really was as easy as that. I reckoned I had about a seven-minute head start before anyone clocked what had happened, I flagged down a cab and asked the guy to take me to Sloane Square tube station.
I paid the driver (I had the princely sum of £80 in cash ostensibly to be used only for buying cigarettes and shit from the hospital ‘gift shop’), bought a travel card, jumped into the Tube, went all Jason Bourne by getting on and off trains, taking a bus, changing direction, playing spy for a while, and then ended up in Paddington.
I got razor blades from Boots and wandered around until I’d found the kind of hotel that would make you want to kill yourself even if you were perfectly happy before checking in. It cost me £40, the last of my cash, for the night.
I ran the hottest bath I could bear, laid out my razor blades and towels, undressed and sat on the bed. For the first time in months I could breathe. I was alone, no one knew where I was, I felt quieter than I had in years. I slept for a few hours. Proper, restful sleep, not induced by chemicals, just peaceful, fully clothed, muscles not in spasm, head not in a Magimix.
I knew that I needed to say goodbye to my son. I was fucked, but not so fucked that I could simply exit without him hearing my voice or vice versa. A kind of anchor for him made sense in my mind, so that as he grew up and thought back to when his dad killed himself, he could have some small comfort in knowing he had said goodbye. Such is the narcissism of suicide.
I called his mum’s mobile and she answered. Important to note that by now I had basically had a complete break from reality. I wasn’t aware of that, but clearly I was functioning on a different operating system from anyone else within a square mile or two. Of course I could call her up, let her know I wanted to speak to my son, had been let out of hospital as a trial to see if I could be trusted to leave for longer periods, and was just checking in. It did not occur to me for a minute that the police may have been contacted, that she had been fielding calls from the hospital and Matthew, all trying to figure out where I was.
And there was still kindness and some kind of love inside her. I don’t know why either. But she didn’t give me the slightest impression that anything was wrong. She simply said that she would love to see me.
‘How about it, Jimmy? I could come meet you anywhere – we could have a quick ten minutes together and then you can either come home for a bit or not. Up to you.’
And I figured, with the kind of fucked-up, egocentric nobility that can only come from a psychotic break and the heinous amount of meds still in my system, that yes, this was an excellent idea. I shall see my wife for a proper goodbye, kiss her one final time and then come back here and do what needs to be done. Because that is the right thing to do. The right thing to do.
I left everything as it was, laid out OCD-style on the bed, evenly spaced, correctly angled, checked and double-checked, and wandered out of the room towards Paddington station where we’d arranged to meet on the main concourse.
I got there and stood watching the harried, drunk, lost and busy commuters rushing around for twenty minutes until I saw Jane. And Jack. For some unimaginable reason she had brought him with her. A real-life, 3-foot-tall surprise on her part, albeit with the best of intentions. He was tiny. A little bundle of Puffa jacket and impossibly small denim jeans, holding her hand. As I walked down the escalator towards them I could feel something in my heart thudding and pounding and cracking. And on I walked until he saw me and ran towards me. That hug was every bit as memorable and important as the one I gave him when he was first handed to me in the hospital moments after he was born. And before we even had a chance to say anything, I knew something deep down had shifted.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Matthew coming towards me. He had spoken with the police, I was going to be back in hospital within half an hour. And I wasn’t even angry. Relieved, perhaps, more than anything. Because there was a new feeling way down at the bottom of things, trying to get heard. Something happened when Jack’s tiny, sweaty hand grasped mine and squeezed it harder than I’d thought possible. When I smelled his little head and felt him barrelling into me shouting ‘Daddy’, it was a primal, lizard-brain biological imperative along the lines of ‘Well, you’ve abandoned yourself, but it goes against the fundamental nature of things to do the same to him, and you know it.’ He was an extension of me. A part of me. If the host died then the rest of the organism would also die, and he wasn’t strong enough to exist without me at that point.
I wasn’t ready to go yet. And if I hadn’t called Jane, if she hadn’t played me, if I hadn’t seen Jack one last time, I would never have heard that inner shout loudly enough to pay attention to it.
I was driven back to hospital.
It felt like all the fight had been kicked out of me. I was floppy, pliable, indifferent. Shuffling around the ward, dribbling a bit, losing a few more brain cells and memories thanks to yet another cocktail of meds. And then on a visitors’ Sunday I was called in and told someone was there to see me. Which was odd because aside from a brief, disastrous visit from Jane and Jack a few weeks previously, I’d never had a visitor before.
It was an old pal I hadn’t seen in a long time. An awkward, slightly autistic, fragile guy. A piano fanatic (we’d met because we’d both shared a mutual hard-on for Sokolov bootlegs back in the day). He’d heard I was there and wanted to offer support. And music. When he’d called to arrange the visit he’d been told that no presents other than toiletries etc were permitted (I wasn’t allowed to have things delivered to me by this stage because I’d already had knives and razors intercepted). He offered me a giant bottle of shampoo and winked at me. Out of earshot of the nurses he told me to open it up when I was alone. Which I did. And inside this emptied bottle was a tiny plastic bag. And inside the tiny plastic bag was the brand new, recently launched iPod nano. It was the size of an After Eight mint. And the headphones were wrapped around it lovingly. He had filled it up with gigabytes of music. And everything changed.
Under the covers I went. Headphones on. Middle of the night. Dark and impossibly quiet. And I hit play and heard a piece by Bach that I’d not heard before. And it took me to a place of such magnificence, such surrender, h
ope, beauty, infinite space, it was like touching God’s face. I swear I had some kind of spiritual epiphany then and there. The piece was the Bach-Marcello Adagio – a work written for oboe and orchestra by a baroque composer called Alessandro Marcello that Bach loved so much he transcribed it for solo piano. Glenn Gould was playing his Steinway, reaching out from forty years in the past, three hundred years in the past, and letting me know that things were not only going to be OK, they were going to be absolutely fucking stellar. It felt like I’d been plugged into an electrical socket. It was one of those rare ‘Elvis moments’ that I will never forget. It shattered me and released some kind of inner gentleness that hadn’t seen the light of day for thirty years.
And now I was determined. I knew this place wasn’t the right place for me. I could not get well. Not with so many meds, so much madness, so much daytime TV and boredom. I needed to get out of there properly, once and for all. Get released, find some space, get home to my son. I needed to get well. But first I needed to show them I was well enough to leave.
And so I did. We did. That cold, ruthless, patient, clever fucker who controlled some part of my mind took charge. Happily. He was born for this shit. We started cooperating, not too quickly to make it unrealistic, nor too slowly to miss my self-imposed deadline of a Christmas release. I cried on demand, hugged my inner child, drew appropriately angry pictures in art therapy, participated in group sessions, came across with just the right amount of concern, remorse, anger, hope, contrition in my individual therapy. I sat through hearings and interviews saying the right things and then backed that up with doing the right actions. I helped others, cracked jokes with the staff, started whistling happily within earshot of the doctors, took my meds, got up early and meditated in the garden in full view of the night staff. I did everything I needed to in order to get to that Monday afternoon two months later in mid-November when they sat me down, basically told me I was a poster boy for mental health treatment, they were delighted with my progress and were very pleased to tell me I had been given the all-clear. I could leave in three days, as long as I agreed to a vigorous outpatient follow-up course and maintained my medication routine.
My grateful, solicitous, faux-humble smile was Oscar-worthy. I even included the obligatory ‘Are you sure I’m ready for this?’ routine, voicing my concerns. I got them to actually convince me to leave. Mark Rylance would have applauded my performance. I was stupidly proud of what I’d accomplished, and three days later strutted out of that hospital, ditched my meds and went home to bed.
A quick aside about the rather nonchalant ‘ditched my meds’ bit. Do not, under any circumstances, do that. Not ever. Imagine squeezing a giant dollop of properly homemade mayonnaise onto a piece of raw chicken, leaving it out in the sun for four or five days and then shoving the whole thing into your mouth, lying down in bed and waiting. And you will come close to what it’s like to come off psychotropic medication cold turkey.
It took around twelve hours before the brain shakes started to come. Everything began to feel very surreal, slightly drunken, not quite concrete. Over time that turned into hallucinations, muscle spasms, puking, shitting, heaving, sweating, aching, shaking, retching. I was out of commission for three days before feeling vaguely able to walk, talk, function.
I’d had such high hopes that I would get out of hospital, return to a home filled with love and support and that all would be well. That the lightning bolt of hope that my illicit music stash had brought me in hospital would persist and flourish on the outside. But of course that didn’t happen. I was a fucking liability, there were bills to pay, paperwork to organise, shit to deal with. My piano had to be sold for a fraction of what we had paid for it so my one potential lifeline was out of the window. Things felt tense, hostile, scary, uneasy and uncertain at home. We were all in the hole with no idea how to get out of it or whether that was even possible. Things had gone so wrong, so quickly, it felt like there was no way back.
Just because I had slowed my life down didn’t mean the real world had slowed down for one minute. It had been zipping along while I was totally oblivious and I was trying to play catch-up without any of the skills necessary to do so. It was the first time I truly realised that good intentions were no longer enough. Even out of hospital, off meds, physically present for my family, I was a ghost.
Despite wanting one, I didn’t feel a connection to my wife any more, no optimistic future binding us together or hopes and dreams to talk about late into the night. I had sleepwalked into this relationship, had a perfect, beautiful and amazing child and no idea how to bring him up. They say marriage is hard work. I had no idea just what that meant until I looked around and realised I had absented myself from it both emotionally and physically for the better part of a year, was floundering about like a sick fish out of water and now, having been kept alive in hospital but not given the skills necessary to do the same for my marriage, I needed to find a way to repair untold damage.
And then a friend of ours offered me a lifeline. A one-shot deal that could possibly mend things.
This guy was rich. Stupidly rich. Homes around the world, private-jets-and-submarines rich. He knew us well, had been in close contact with my wife, seen what was happening. He’d had his own demons to battle back in the day and had gone to some place in Arizona that had helped him. He saw that I wasn’t getting well, whatever that meant, that I hadn’t even begun to deal with the stuff that had put me in hospital to begin with, that I was still a ticking bomb. And he offered to pay for me to go to that place he had gone to.
He gave them a lot of money every year, which was lucky because he had called them and they had unanimously voted to not accept me. They had read the medical notes and felt I was much too high a risk for them. But Bob, my rich friend, made it clear they would not get another cent out of him unless they admitted me for as long as it took. And money trumps everything in the psychiatric profession.
Bob called me up. He said to me that without this place in Phoenix he wouldn’t be here, that no matter how much I wanted to be well and happy and healthy, unless I did the work it just wasn’t going to happen, and that going to this hospital for a few weeks would be a springboard back into life for both me and my marriage. He said I was unwell, and that without help it was only going to get worse. I’d spent the previous afternoon holding an ice pack to my groin for an hour, attempting to summon up the courage to castrate myself, so he had no argument from me.
And so, once again, I packed my bag, left my family and boarded a plane to indulge in a little US-style therapy in Phoenix.
TRACK TWELVE
Mozart, Symphony No. 41 (‘Jupiter’), Fourth Movement
Sir Charles Mackerras, Conductor
The world’s most famous composer. It’s quite an achievement and yet somehow one feels Mozart wouldn’t have given two fucks. Bringing a whole new definition to the word ‘genius’ (composing from the age of five, touring from six, able to speak fifteen languages, writing forty-one symphonies, twenty-seven piano concertos, numerous operas, chamber music and sonatas etc etc), the depth of Mozart’s monumental talent was only matched by the length of his name, Johannes Theophilus Amadeus Gottlieb Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Sigismundus Mozart.
Three years before he died at the age of thirty-five, Mozart composed his greatest and last symphony – his forty-first (it was christened the ‘Jupiter’ twenty-six years after his death in a piece of marketing spin that had nothing to do with Mozart himself). He composed it in sixteen days and it represents the sum total of his mastery of composition. At the same time he wrote both his thirty-ninth and fortieth symphonies; three enduring masterpieces written within days of one another and in such a short period of time gives us an idea of the outrageousness of Mozart’s skills.
Right at the end of the last movement of the forty-first he opens the final coda with a five-part fugue – an astonishing, miraculous piece of orchestral writing that has never been bettered. Imagine the same theme being played five times ove
r but with each one entering after a delayed start, and all of them need to combine together to make perfect harmonic sense with a hundred musicians playing at full pelt. He waits until the last forty-five seconds of the whole symphony before doing it (because it’s the musical equivalent of juggling fifteen chainsaws and any longer is just about impossible) and it’s the reason I could never play an orchestral instrument – I would literally piss myself with joy and collapse if I were ever to play that on stage.
There are two quotes that are apposite here, the first by Schumann, who said of the ‘Jupiter’: ‘There are things in the world about which nothing can be said, as Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony with the fugue, much of Shakespeare, and pages of Beethoven.’
And regarding that bloody fugue, which is still just about the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard an orchestra play, Sir Donald Francis Tovey wrote:
‘Each movement of the “Jupiter” symphony is a powerful and surpassing creation. The capstone of this towering symphony is of course the fugue-finale, wherein the polyphonic workmanship of the old fugue is used, with other material, for the perfect consummation of the composer’s thought, and the eternal glory of art. There is indeed no match for this movement in the literature of the symphony. There are other compositions – a few equal to it in interest – but there are no others like it, even in Mozart. That is his symphonic apotheosis – the fugue-finale of the “Jupiter” symphony.’