“I’ll take fifteen.”
“Let’s do it.”
I am a used car salesman, but instead of cars, I am pushing bullshit plea deals. I’ll ask my manager, but I really think this is the best we can do. So what do you say, can I get you into a fully loaded fifteen-day jail sentence today? No money down, take it or leave it.
Next, Domestic Violence Guy. It’s a weak case, so the DA is willing to give me a plea to a noncriminal offense and an anger management program. So he’s going home. Probably home, which is a problem because there is still an order of protection against him to stay away from the missus—not to call her, text her, Facebook message her, or contact her via a third party. To do so will result in new charges, but they have a kid and she wants him back and no harm will come of him going home if the cops don’t find out about it—or so DV Guy and the missus think. I’ll most likely see DV Guy next week or the week after on a contempt charge for violating the order. Cops will come by to check that he’s not there, or more likely, the couple will have differences again and the neighbors will call the cops.
So I walk out of the courtroom with Santos, Prescott, and DV Guy on my mind—probably in that order—but happy hour is nestled somewhere between numbers one and three. Was Santos my fault? Could I have tried to run through the plea a few more times before the guards brought him out from the back? No, not my fault. I wasn’t the one who wouldn’t give the man ten minutes to understand the nuance of the guilty plea he was attempting to take. I wasn’t the judge who just wanted to get the fuck out of there. I wasn’t the court officer yelling at us, “Now, now! The judge is ready now! We have to move the docket along, Counselor! It’s already four fifteen.” Hadn’t I said, “Yeah, we just need another minute. I have to explain this to my client”? I didn’t have shit to do with the fact that he was a poor, sick addict. In that moment, I was the only soul left in the courtroom who ached for his predicament.
You can vent to a colleague, but that’s annoying as shit. “Yes, I know. I have the same job as you. I did that fifty times this week too.” Still, most of us can’t help it. That’s what makes the bar after work unbearable; no one can talk about anything but asshole judges, vindictive DAs who think our clients—and us too—are scum, and asshole clients who think we’re conspiring against them and yell at us all day: “You work for the DA! You don’t give a shit! I want a new lawyer!”
Let that shit go. Your presence alone must stand as proof enough that you care, that you are one of the good ones. Remind yourself that, pawn in the system though you may be, you are the only force pushing back against the police state, the indifference to the suffering of those who many people regard as subhuman. Let that empathy shit go. It pokes holes in you, and you will bleed out.
Idealistic ferocity may be impossible to sustain, but the dark secret is that morbid curiosity endures. Our profession gives us a front-row seat to our nation’s most sadistic horror show. And if you think that’s without appeal, I invite you to flip through your basic cable channels late on a weekend night and count how many “inside prison” reality shows are running back-to-back-to-back marathons. Whether these shows turn your stomach or not, there is an undeniable voyeuristic appeal to this barbaric institution. It’s mind-bending cruelty, but it’s mind-bending all the same. Maybe not all PDs feel it, but I’d be suspicious of anyone who denies it too forcefully.
When I was a summer intern at the San Francisco Public Defender’s office, the mornings were spent trying not to fall asleep in court, but in the afternoon we’d go to San Quentin. A place where I’d be committing a crime if I brought someone a Happy Meal. Handcuffs, ankle shackles, bars clanging, guards, guns, razor wire—all that shit. Each visit was different and you never knew who or what you were going to get: could be a speed addict with face tats who’d yell at the attorney for fifteen minutes straight while the attorney yelled back, me wondering the whole time if he was going to try to murder us both; could be a baby-faced drug dealer with limited cognitive capacity who couldn’t lift his eyes off the ground and clearly had no idea how much shit he was in; could be a stoic con who knew exactly how much shit he was in and, really, wasn’t even sweating it too hard. There were infinite variations and yet they all felt utterly the same. Everyone’s biography boiled down to: fucked-up enough.
After eight weeks of drinking and smoking in a garage in Wichita, I knew I had to go back. In some way, I missed bearing witness to the barbarity of the whole damn thing: the callousness with which an old fat white man can send a skinny black crack addict to Rikers. The judge probably doesn’t give it a second thought on his way to the parking lot. He probably brags about it: “I’ve handed out more than a decade of jail time this week alone! I bury people under the jail.” In his mind, he’s a bourbon-swilling-in-chambers learned sage, not a grown man playing dress-up in a $24.99 Jostens graduation gown, banging his gavel like every order-in-the-court cliché he’s seen on network TV. He probably loves it when people call him “Judge” at barbecues. I was not ready, but I couldn’t stay in Wichita any longer. If only for Bobby Prince, it was time for me to participate once again in the sick joke of a justice system we’ve come to accept as the only logical way to deal with poverty-induced crime. To bang my head against the immovable wall of bureaucratic indifference again and have my heart broken on a loop as poor black men in cuffs were cycled through the courthouse on a conveyor belt all damn day while quietly dreaming of ripping off my boa constrictor of a necktie and running through the halls of criminal court screaming, “This is fucked! This is all fucked! This whole damn court is out of order! Attica! Attica!”
Burn it down.
Chapter 10
In the cab from LaGuardia to my new apartment in Williamsburg, I remembered the familiar and uniquely New York sensation that with every second you are alive, money is rapidly draining from your pocket. Twenty minutes and $50 later, I arrived at my latest Craigslist find on the corner of Manhattan and Metropolitan Boulevard. It looked like an old warehouse from the outside.
For the sixty days I’d hid out in Wichita, I was incapable of confronting the full weight and force of the fallout. Before the psych ward, I was pretty sure I was the best damn trial lawyer in the office, the next Dave Chappelle, and the coolest dude in the Village to boot.
But now that I was back in New York without the benefit of a manic episode to boost my self-esteem, I had no choice but to confront the facts. And they were bleak. A madman had raided my checking account, committed malpractice on my behalf in the courtroom, and alienated anyone who had been paying attention. Didn’t much matter that the madman was me. Corporate America wasn’t too sympathetic to my plight: there is no overdraft protection plan that covers I was extremely manic and purchased $800 worth of novelty T-shirts from Urban Outfitters—can you let this one slide? You can’t accuse yourself of fraud. And it’s not like I had money to begin with. I made $1,400 every two weeks. My rent was $1,200 and student loans were $700 a month. An unlimited metro card ran me another hundo. By the time I shelled out for utilities, internet, and cell phone, I was left with about $18 a day to make it through the month. It was always fingers crossed that the rent check didn’t come out before my paycheck went in. Most of the planet has it worse, including anyone in need of a Legal Aid lawyer, but I did think it over before I bought ChapStick.
That first week back, I swung by my old apartment in the East Village (the one I’d covered in red Sharpie from floor to ceiling) to pick up a trash bag full of bills and delinquent student loan notices. Rather than risk a paper cut, I took a page from the Bird’s pre-bankruptcy days and tossed the sack into the wire mesh can on the corner of St. Marks and Avenue A. When I was a kid, if bill collectors called the house, the Bird would hand the phone over to me to let me polish my British accent. “Don’t worry, they’ll call back,” she’d say. A model of financial responsibility she was not, but when you ain’t got it, you ain’t got it. And I ain’t got it. I assumed my cockney rhyming slang would get a bit of practice
in the weeks ahead.
I had to reacquaint myself with adult life, but I still didn’t much feel like moving. Without Granny there to cook for me, breakfast became $1 coffee from the bodega across the street. Lunch was a ham sandwich from the bodega across the street. Dinner was a frozen burrito from the bodega across the street. Dessert was my one daily indulgence, in the form of six Budweisers from the bodega across the street.
The bodega guy became my primary source of sustenance and 90 percent of my social life. Which was tough because his English wasn’t great and my enthusiasm for idle chitchat was low. I don’t know if he nicknamed me “Budweiser!” or if that was just his way of saying “The usual, boss?” but that was his standard greeting. My standard contribution was Yup. Or, if I was feeling particularly gregarious, Yup, how’s it going? I had a few weeks left on my medical leave of absence from work, so I spent my days in bed.
It wasn’t hard for me to admit I was depressed—sixteen hours of sleep nightly is conclusive on that issue—but it was hard for me to give myself permission to be depressed. Sure, I had just experienced a psychotic break that had resulted in involuntary confinement in a mental institution, lost what I believed was a real shot in comedy, lost an apartment, and lost the confidence that comes from knowing my mind wasn’t going to walk out on me at any moment. But I couldn’t help thinking about what Bodega Guy’s life looks like when he takes his apron off after an eighteen-hour shift at Best Price Grocery. I had to assume ringing up Now & Laters hadn’t been his idea of the American Dream. To him—or, really, to me when I imagined the world from his eyeballs—my life probably looked pretty decent: $1,200 for a room in a trendy Brooklyn neighborhood with a TV and a Wii. I wasn’t making weekly trips to Western Union to send remittances to Islamabad, wasn’t worried about my family’s physical safety, wasn’t worried about my legal status. Long-distance calling cards weren’t a part of my life’s necessities. Sleep and beer—that was the cross I bore. What right did I have?
And what about my clients? What about all the poor brothers and sisters across the city and the shit they had to deal with? Fuck, what about all the poor brothers and sisters in Syria for that matter? They sure had their hands full. What do you even call depression in a refugee camp?
Depression felt as much a luxury as veganism and fair trade coffee. Shut the fuck up, you whiny, ungrateful bitch constantly pinged around in my head. No matter how many doctors or Birds say it’s okay to be depressed, that Wichita boy in me says No. He says fight. Fight through it, fight through your self-pity and your tears. Fight through the daddy-sized hole in your heart. At least you’ve met him. Fight through it literally if you have to. Punch someone, drink something, drink something then punch someone.
I needed a psychiatrist.
So I got one. Standing on the 2 train platform on my way to meet Dr. Singh, I watched a rat zipping through the puddles in between the tracks and discarded bags of Cheetos, empty Snapple bottles, old gum, and other delicious rubbish. He was a busy boy. Trying to get a few crumbs here and there, looking for Mrs. Rat, or at least Mrs. Rat Now. Dodging poison, ripping it up in the dark tunnels. Taking small delight in the terror he inflicted in the hearts of children and grown men alike. Being a rat didn’t look half bad.
I’ve never stood on a subway platform and not thought about what it would be like to throw myself in front of what’s coming. But I found myself standing a few inches closer to the edge, listening a little more closely to the question that the train was asking of me. I knew I wasn’t going to stick my neck out on my own, but what would I do if a kid on a scooter bumped me from behind? I was pretty sure I would tighten my core and push back with the full force of my hamstrings at the first brush of contact. But I was less sure than I’d ever been. So I guess I was approaching something like fairly suicidal. But do you get to claim that if you’d never cut, jump, or load the gun? Feels a bit dramatic.
I made it up to Harlem and across the Columbia campus to Dr. Singh’s office. I thumbed through an old New Yorker as I waited. Dr. Singh opened the door at 11 a.m. sharp; he looked dapper in a charcoal-gray suit, blue shirt, and purple tie. “Zachary? Come in.”
I took a seat on his faux leather couch and surveyed the room: Don Quixote print on the wall, box of tissues to the left of the couch, and three shelves of scholarly tomes.
“So it’s nice to meet you. Your mother called me and made an appointment—you were just in, is it Wichita, Kansas?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re a public defender in Brooklyn.”
“Yes.”
“That sounds like a stressful job.”
“It can be.”
“So the limited information that I have on you is that you recently had a hospitalization at Bellevue. And the preliminary impressions are that you are possibly bipolar one with perhaps a dual diagnosis of marijuana and alcohol abuse.”
“That’s correct.”
“And the police found you on the subway with very little clothing on, you suffered a psychotic break, and for nearly a week were under the impression that you were on a TV show?”
“That is all also correct.”
“Has anyone explained to you in detail what exactly bipolar one means?”
“I read the DSM-IV description and I read a little bit of An Unquiet Mind. I can probably describe what happened to me, but no, I don’t really know what it means. Before all this, I thought it just meant you had high highs and low lows.”
“It’s a bit more nuanced than a high high.” He told me bipolar disorder used to be called manic depression and then ran through the symptoms for me:
1. Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity (ranges from uncritical self-confidence to a delusional sense of expertise)
I think operating under the presumption that Larry David ain’t got shit on me as a comedian suffices for this one.
2. Decreased need for sleep
Four hours max per night for an entire summer. Sometimes none.
3. Intensified speech (possible characteristics: loud, rapid, and difficult to interrupt; a focus on sounds, theatrics, and self-amusement; nonstop talking regardless of another person’s participation/interest; angry tirades)
How about writing said speech on one’s walls in red Sharpie when no one cared to listen any longer?
4. Rapid jumping around of ideas or the feeling that thoughts are racing
See above.
5. Distractibility (attention easily pulled away by irrelevant/unimportant things)
I spent entire Saturday afternoons filming passersby on the street. I watched a Mike Tyson documentary six times in a week because I thought I could create a blog centered around commentary of this single film.
6. Increased goal-directed activity (i.e., excessive planning and/or pursuit of a goal, whether social, work/school, or sexual) or psychomotor agitation (such as pacing, inability to sit still, pulling on skin or clothing)
Summer goals 2009: Ink deal for one-hour stand-up special. Sign contract to write in and star in TV series. Make contacts at New York Times. Help Producer get his record label off the ground. Get my own record deal on his label. Fifty pull-ups every morning, followed by two hours of soccer.
7. Excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high-risk consequence
I think I got a bingo, Doc.
Dr. Singh is an expert on dual diagnosis—those of us who run around naked on the subway and like our devil juice and pot too much. He explained that some people, even those who aren’t bipolar, can have psychotic episodes triggered by marijuana. Or I could be in the category of people who might not otherwise have had a manic episode but have a predisposition to those sorts of things, and pot might have been the tipping point. Or it all could have just happened anyway. No way to tell really, except not smoke and see what happens.
“But,” he explained, “I am not telling you to never smoke pot again. I don’t like to tell people what they can’t do; I haven’t found it to be very effective over the year
s. What I would advise, though, is that we have you abstain for a relatively short period of time—a year—and then if you experience another episode, we can know for certain that you are not one of these borderline cases, perhaps just more vulnerable to marijuana. Would you be willing to try that?”
I told him that it sounded hard, but I’d try. We talked medication and he told me he wanted me on as little as possible—that Depakote and Risperdal were heavy drugs and he thought we could probably get away with a mood stabilizer for now. Lamictal. Most patients have no side effects. And those who do usually get only a mild skin rash. No impotence. No hair loss. No weight gain.
For the first time in my life, I was excited to try out some psych meds. When I was diagnosed as depressed in high school it felt like a moral failing and taking pills felt weak. Yeah, I was happier on my Zoloft, and I no longer wanted to drive my car into the river, but it wasn’t “real.” What I was feeling now was definitely “real” and it was definitely awful. My only qualm with the new regimen was that the new meds wouldn’t kick in for two or three weeks. That sounded like decades to me.
As we were wrapping up, Dr. Singh told me about the Truman Show delusion. There’d been some recent media attention on people who, like me, in the throes of psychosis, become convinced that they’re the stars of their own reality TV shows. It’s not a separate diagnosis—it’s still BP1 or possibly schizophrenia. In any case, it’s a rare and distinctly modern phenomenon; folks in the 1800s couldn’t well imagine they were reality TV stars.
I couldn’t make it through most nights without calling the Bird. By the tone of my voice, she could always tell how I was feeling before I finished my first sentence. Those beginning few weeks back in New York, we didn’t directly discuss the state of my psychic health much. She just tried to pump my tire by piling on anecdotes from my childhood. How I used to run around in my underwear and my sister’s snow boots and play He-Man. How, when I was just out of diapers, I’d hold my breath until I turned blue and pound my head against the wall when I’d get mad, and she’d have to blow in my face to keep me from passing out. How she had learned to ignore the glares of strangers in the supermarket when I’d lie prostrate in the middle of the grocery store aisle, screaming and pounding my fists for an intolerably long time. How she used to have to lock herself in the bathroom and read her copy of The Difficult Child “so that I wouldn’t have to fight the urge to beat you.” How when I was five and the head of the PTA asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told him, “A faggot.” How I used to violently smack the ground any time I let in a goal playing soccer, and how inconsolable I’d be for hours after a loss, even at eight years old. How she “almost had to open a can of whoop ass on the parents who used to yell ‘Check his birth certificate!’ because you were a good player and so much bigger than everyone.”
Gorilla and the Bird Page 12