Caca Dolce

by Chelsea Martin

  The only thing I noticed was that I developed new tics in my left breast and biceps. They ticced in sequence with my neck: neck, breast, biceps, neck, breast, biceps. An internal percussion that my body subtly but visibly swayed to. After a few days of medication, a tic in my left calf muscle was added to the progression, followed shortly by a tic in my left buttock. These additions were actually a relief to my neck, because it increased the time between each tic of my neck, which was becoming more and more strained from so much flexing.

  I could still stop the tics at any time, but it took all of my concentration. I could sit and not tic, but I had to think Don’t tic, don’t tic, just wait, don’t do it, and the second I stopped focusing on it, I would let go and the chorus of tics would begin.

  I purposefully conjured up the image of the hill man. Maybe now that I was on these drugs, I could get him over the rock and all the way up the hill. At the top of the hill I wanted there to be a precipice, which I would make him walk out onto before falling off to meet his everlasting death.

  I focused hard on conjuring these images. I was determined to beat him. But the man was trapped in the same old cycle. He walked up the hill. He didn’t seem to see the rock. He tripped over it. Stumbled down. Walked up again. Tripped on the rock.

  I keep slipping, I thought, just like the hill man. We are both destined to carry out the same meaningless activities eternally. It will never end because no ending exists. There is nothing after the rock except the beginning of the hill.

  I made a careful effort to watch myself tic, trying to find the root cause. I wasn’t telling my biceps to flex, the way I would “tell” my arm to move if I was lighting a candle or pressing a button. And it wasn’t quite like an itch: my muscles did not feel particularly unsatisfied before the tic, nor did they feel satisfied afterward. If I focused on not flexing my biceps, I could avoid ticcing, but once I stopped focusing, it would tic freely, like a child just waiting for its parent to look away to do something bad.

  Was my mind broken in two? Did I have a second mind that was at odds with the first mind? Was it the mind of a naughty child in search of new ways to be bad? How long had this problem been developing? Did it really just appear overnight, as it seemed?

  Maybe I had been ticcing and obsessively entertaining pointless thoughts for years, only I was too focused on other things to notice.

  Soon it was September, and I had to go back to school. My embarrassing and unexplainable tics disincentivized making friends, as without friends I did not have to hide my weird movements from anyone. In class, I would try to sit in the back corner, where no one could see me without turning around in their chairs. In classes in which I was assigned seating in front of other desks, I spent all my energy trying not to tic.

  For the first time in my life, I found it hard to concentrate at school. I was completely preoccupied with the length and nuance of my tics, and with hiding the visibility of the tics from my classmates, and, when I had all of that under control, on the hill man’s progress up the increasingly important hill. If I could just get him over the rock and up the hill, maybe I could regain control of my body.

  Because it had been so long since I’d had a friend, or perhaps because I had believed myself to be a freak for so long, someone who would never be understood by other people, I became more and more comfortable with being the “social outcast” type. I became depressed, and sort of enjoyed it. I listened to the Smiths and the Cure alone in my dark bedroom and counted all the ways I was alone. Night after night she lay alone in bed, / her eyes so open to the dark.

  The music and lyrics conveyed bleakness and depression and hopelessness, which were things I related to, but they did not express exactly what I was feeling, so therefore they represented yet another reason I was utterly alone in the world, which was perfect.

  In class I stared at all the people who weren’t as fucked up or complicated as I was, feeling superior for it. I also felt sick of feeling superior, and wasn’t buying into my own delusion anymore. What the fuck made me superior anyway? My childish disdain for anyone who didn’t automatically like me? How original. But what could I do? I was trapped in my malfunctioning body, whose only defense mechanism was to feel superior and shut everyone out. I recalled my favorite lyrics to make myself feel sad in just the particular way I was used to, and became calm: I’m running towards nothing / again and again and again and again.

  “Are there other treatment options?” my mom asked the neurologist during my next visit. “Chelsea doesn’t like the risperidone or however you say it.”

  “We can try something else, sure,” he said. “Oh, and before I forget, I wanted to recommend you both read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. It’s really great.”

  “Oh yeah. You mentioned that last time,” my mom said. “We haven’t read it yet.” It was like my neurologist had a particular strain of obsessive-compulsive disorder that caused him to recommend The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat to his patients repeatedly.

  “The man who has Tourette’s syndrome in that book tries medication, but he ultimately finds that the medications dull his mind and leave him a shadow of what he was with the Tourette’s, so he stops taking meds and lives with Tourette’s syndrome.”

  “It dulled his mind?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to read the book,” the neurologist said.

  “I’m in control of what I’m doing,” I said, trying to be assertive. “The tics, I mean. I’m physically doing them. My muscles aren’t just spasming on their own. I can stop doing it if I really concentrate on it. So is that Tourette’s still?”

  “Yes. Sometimes patients with Tourette’s syndrome are able to suppress their symptoms, but will usually feel a build-up of pressure or need to perform the action of their tic,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He was describing my exact experience, but I still felt unsure about my diagnosis, hesitant to believe him, convinced that I had not expressed myself clearly or conveyed my experience accurately. And the drugs weren’t working. So clearly there was some kind of problem.

  I developed a new tic in my abdomen. This tic was superior to all previous tics, because it didn’t need to be a part of the chorus of other tics, sustained itself for up to thirty seconds at a time, and could be performed at the same time as any of my other tics. It would be neck, breast, biceps, calf, buttock, neck, breast, biceps, calf, buttock, and all the while my abdomen would be flexed. Soon, the quick flexing of my other tics wasn’t satisfying either, and they became sustained as well, and huge areas of my body flexed simultaneously for up to ten seconds at a time.

  The abdomen tic evolved to include a small, controlled exhale that sounded like hut, which transformed into a series of small, controlled exhales that sounded like hut, hut, hut, hut. It was the first time I was doing something audible, and, though it was pretty quiet, it couldn’t easily be covered up.

  I know what you’re doing, I told myself, not knowing at all what I was doing and not sure who I thought I was addressing, and it’s not going to work.

  I believed, or wanted to believe, or thought it would be most indicative of good mental health to believe, that I was doing all of this to myself. That I was trying to get attention. That I had nothing to offer the world so I was making up symptoms to seem more interesting. That I had successfully tricked my mom and the neurologist into believing I had a disorder, even though that disorder was previously unknown to me, all the while, deep inside, knowing that it was all a game. A sick, weird, mentally unstable game. If anything, my disease was being able to conjure symptoms of a disease I’d had no idea existed, and convince everyone that I had that disease.

  “Have I told you about The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat?” the neurologist said. I looked behind me as people do on sitcoms to mean Are you talking to me? / Is this some kind of joke? Maybe recommending the same book over and over was
some kind of subversive method of treatment. Maybe I was supposed to become so perplexed that my body would reroute the energy it spent on tics toward rolling my eyes and moaning in agony.

  “I think so,” I said. “And I think I want to go off the meds.”

  The neurologist stared at me, and I imagined he was trying to gauge how dull my mind had gotten.

  “We could try a different prescription,” he said. “There are lots of options.”

  “I don’t know. It’s not getting any better,” I said. “And I don’t like being on drugs.”

  My tics were, in fact, getting worse, more numerous, harder to control, and increasingly impossible to hide. I seemed to be developing new tics weekly, the most recent of which was to open my eyes very wide and look quickly to the right and left, as if I felt a sudden bolt of surprise and paranoia approximately eighty times per day. I had begun waking up with aching muscles. It was becoming more and more difficult to imagine that I had any power over the tics at all.

  I wanted it to stop. I wanted it all to stop.

  But more than wanting it to stop, I wanted to stop thinking about it. Between having tics and thinking about my tics and hiding my tics and trying to stop my tics and blaming myself for having tics and accusing myself of fabricating the whole tic situation and going to the neurologist to describe my tics and taking little pills that did nothing for my tics, I was doing little else. I simply wanted it to stop.

  Maybe I couldn’t stop all of it, but I could stop some of it.

  I bought The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat years later, after I’d had my abdomen tic so long that I was maintaining six-pack abs with zero effort. I loved the book, and it opened my eyes to the subtleties and complexities of the brain. There were a massive number of things that could go wrong, so many unknowns, so many strange connections. It is strangely comforting to realize that science is so far from identifying all the things that could go wrong in just one part of the human body.

  I realized the hill man was gone one day. I hadn’t thought about him in weeks. As soon as I stopped making an effort to obliterate him, it seemed, he started to go away on his own.

  The hill man was replaced by other meaningless unwanted thoughts. For example, a boring loop of a dull conversation I had with a friend ten months before and suddenly remembered. Mentally listing every present ever given to me by my grandpa. Rolling and rerolling imaginary Yahtzee dice and never getting Yahtzee.

  Over time, my tics got better and then they got worse and then much better and then much worse, a cycle that promises no end.

  7

  goth ryan

  My first thought when I met Goth Ryan was that he looked like the corpse of Macaulay Culkin, only skinnier. He was pale and wore a black trench coat and talked about The Crow a lot, and, though it might seem like a contradiction, he was also blond, smiley, and outgoing. He had sickly, sunken eye sockets and a high voice that broke when he became excited. Listening to him squeak through a conspiracy theory about the death of Brandon Lee, I realized I was attracted to him.

  I mean, of course I was attracted to him. I had encountered very few male teenagers that I hadn’t entertained perverted thoughts about. I was at that age, I guess, when even corpses made me horny.

  But there were so many obstacles to our love. For one: he professed his love for me several times, very soon after I met him, which I saw as a red flag as well as a sign of questionable taste. Secondly: once, I saw his ex-girlfriend in Walmart and she screamed at me to stop fucking her boyfriend, and, though I was excited by the idea that anyone would assume I was fucking anyone, she kind of terrified me. Thirdly, and maybe most important: Goth Ryan was having some kind of secret sex affair with my best friend, Marcy. (It was secret because she had a boyfriend.)

  Marcy had picked me to be her new best friend a few months earlier. The prior school year I’d had no friends or friend prospects and figured my sophomore year would be the same. Then one day in gym class, Marcy ditched her until-then best friend to walk laps around the field with me. We discussed the merits and flaws of Hot Topic, our current favorite bands (mine was Smashing Pumpkins, hers was Dashboard Confessional), how much we missed Napster, and the many idiots we went to school with. She invited me over to her house that night, and we dyed our hair pink with Manic Panic. She was not like me; she was loud and made offensive jokes and lived comfortably in the assumption that everyone found her charming. I immediately loved her.

  I abandoned my desire to be alone at all times to do everything with Marcy: spending my lunch period in the snack bar next to her, filling Cup Noodles with hot water as a favor to the snack bar lady, who was a friend of Marcy’s family; going to her house after school to make dinner with her grandma; staying up all night to console her about her tumultuous relationship and fight about which stand-up comedians were funnier.

  Marcy’s boyfriend introduced us to Goth Ryan, and the four of us hung out almost every weekend and on many school nights. Goth Ryan and Marcy’s boyfriend were eighteen and had cars, so we would drive around blasting System of a Down until we found a quiet park with no tweakers in it to sit and drink. The three of them were almost certainly taking drugs of some kind, but I was never told what drugs, and somehow had no curiosity about it.

  Alcohol, on the other hand. Big fan. Marcy’s boyfriend and Goth Ryan always picked us up bearing disgusting bottles of Watermelon Schnapps or Hot Damn that I would never have picked out but that I drank greedily, often becoming blackout drunk. Once I was completely debilitated, Goth Ryan would wrap his trench coat around me and melodramatically promise me that everything would be okay, and that he would take care of me.

  “Can I kiss you?” he sometimes said, nailing a tone of wilted theatrical romance, his black lips and eyes already betraying the pain of expecting rejection. It was pretty cute.

  “Okay,” I would say, trying to summon the strength to lift my head. Depending on variables completely unknown to me, Marcy would give me either a sexy/approving look or a pissed/jealous look, and, depending on my fluctuating hormones and levels of patience with her, I would either care or not care about whichever look she was giving me.

  Marcy and I were impressed by the goth subculture Goth Ryan and Marcy’s boyfriend took part in: not just the black strappy clothes, black fingernails, and heavy eye makeup (which we immediately began imitating), but also the directness and openness about feelings of sadness and inner rottenness. I usually felt ashamed of my unhappiness, and always cried in the shower where no one could hear me or ask me what I was crying about or tell me to stop. But these people were cutting themselves in places that couldn’t easily be hidden, where others would see it and know that it was meant for them to see. There was something so powerful about that.

  If Marcy and her boyfriend were fighting, we would hang out with other boys: Gabe, the much older Incubus fan; Tyler, the dweeby boy who would sometimes find us between classes and awkwardly give us drawings of various Looney Tunes characters that clearly had been traced from coloring books; or Zach, the raver/gamer I was “in love with.”

  My crush on Zach was a rebellion against myself. I knew he wasn’t cute or cool or funny, didn’t have any hobbies I related to, didn’t seem sweet or nice, and never said anything interesting. But the lack of substance to my crush only fueled my interest in him. Logic doesn’t have

  any role in love, I thought. This funny feeling in my heart, which feels both very good and very bad, is the only metric of love I’m concerned with.

  I sat between Zach and Tyler in English, and they would lean over my desk to make fun of each other, which, being a sad virgin for whom physical proximity to boys was the only known pleasure, I really enjoyed.

  “Where’d you get those pants?” Tyler said, a sarcastic jab at Zach’s giant swishy parachute pants bungeed at the ankle.

  “PacSun,” Zach said dryly. The pants were clearly not from

  PacSun
.

  “Fuck you, dude,” Tyler said. The teacher heard this and sent

  Tyler to sit in the closet, a common punishment from this particular teacher.

  Without Tyler around, my attempt at conversations with Zach seemed stilted.

  “Tyler is so weird,” I said.

  “I hate that guy,” Zach said.

  I loved how angry and sarcastic Zach was. I loved that he hated things so openly. I wanted to hate things too, instead of feeling the detached resentment I felt about most things. I wanted to feel passionate about something. I wanted to hate Tyler if only to have something in common with Zach. But Tyler was a necessary lubricant in my conversations with Zach, and I liked him for that reason. Also he was funny and easy to talk to and had a cute center part and smelled a little like warm bread.

  “I hate him too,” I said.

  I had touched Zach’s penis once, on a road near a river. We were both very drunk, and he asked me to touch it, so I did. I had cupped and petted the flaccid thing for close to a minute, unsure of what was supposed to happen. My wrist was getting tired from being pressed against his stomach underneath the still-buckled silver studded belt that held up his gigantic denim parachute pants as we stood in the middle of a mostly unused dirt road a few yards away from our friends. Should I squeeze it? I thought. Should I milk it?

  “What should I do?” I said.

  “Never mind,” he said. “You’re drunk.”

  It was a relief to let go.

  One night, at Marcy’s house, Marcy tricked me into eating a significant portion of a pot brownie by telling me that it was a regular brownie that she had made herself and that it would hurt her feelings if I didn’t at least taste it. After I ate it, she disappeared into another room to argue with her boyfriend on the phone. I wrapped myself up in a blanket and breathed deeply in and out, convinced I was experiencing a panic attack. Goth Ryan knocked on Marcy’s door and when I answered it, he asked me to go outside. He wanted to talk about his feelings.