“I’ll go, but you can’t let them hold me! You can’t let them hold me!”
“I think you need to get in a cab. Go. Go now. I’ll call Beth Israel and see if they can admit you—First Avenue and Sixteenth Street.” He was silent on the issue of letting them hold me; of course it was a promise he couldn’t make.
I walked halfway down the block, hopefully out of view and earshot of any other attorneys, and screamed into the wind. I surveyed the downtown Brooklyn foot traffic: old lawyers waddling to court like penguins, a horde of mostly young African American men headed in the same direction. McDonald’s was packed, and the line at the Social Security Disability office that shares our building was already snaking around the corner. Take a good look; you might not be outside again anytime soon. I hailed a cab.
“Beth Israel, please.”
He hit the gas pedal like he had a gunshot victim in the backseat.
“You don’t have to drive fast,” I said. “I’m in no hurry.”
I called my mom as we headed over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. Even though she was at school, she picked up quickly. For three years now, she’d lived in fear of this exact call.
“What’s up, Gorilla?”
I was still crying but no longer gasping. “I’m headed to the hospital.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I haven’t slept for three nights. I’m having a panic attack. I’m afraid I’m going to be manic if I can’t fall asleep. I couldn’t sleep last night. I was going to take a Risperdal. But we have bedbugs.”
“Oh no. That’s not good.”
“No.”
“You know where you are? You don’t think you’re on TV?”
“No, not yet. I don’t want to fucking go to the fucking hospital.”
It was obvious she was now softly crying too. “I don’t want you there either. But if you have to go, you have to go. You’re doing the right thing.”
“I’ll call you when I can.”
“You don’t want me to stay on the phone with you?”
“No. I want to roll the window down and feel some air before they lock me up in there.”
“Okay.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you too. You’re a strong gorilla. Call me as soon as you can.”
I counted in my head how many blocks we had left when we exited the bridge: Canal, Grand, Broome, Delancey, Houston, then First through Sixteenth, and that was it.
“You okay?” the cabdriver asked me.
“Yeah, just fucked-up. You can take your time. Really.”
He gunned it again. I estimated I had, at best, seven more minutes.
“We are here,” he announced in five. “No charge.”
“It’s okay.” I began to pull out my credit card.
“No charge. You go.”
Chapter 23
I surrendered my clothes and changed into green scrubs—the uniform of the insane. It’s a small indignity but unquestionably degrading, the beginning of the infantilizing loss of autonomy. On admission, I was tranq’d up with two milligrams Risperdal and two milligrams Ativan and placed in a small white room. To a sane person, the room would have looked perfectly serene. But this seemingly serene room pulsed and banged, the storm in my head radiating an almost kinetic output of angst.
“I need more Risperdal and Ativan,” I told the attending nurse. “I can tell I am about to break. No question.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I just know. I can feel it. I just keep thinking about how fast my brain is. I’m terrified. I need to sleep.”
“We’ll call the doctor. Go lie down until then.”
Over the next hour, as I lay in bed waiting for the doctor, the room grew increasingly menacing. I became terrified that the thick rectangular light cover would somehow come loose and fall on me, creating a bloody mess. I couldn’t quit staring at it; it looked so unstable. Why do we trust the construction of buildings and fixtures so blindly? Why are we not constantly terrified that the walls will come crashing down? I was hanging on to that last grain of reason that told me these thoughts were irrational, that New York City has building codes, that Sheetrock is a tried-and-true building material, that the screws and nuts and bolts were installed by certified union carpenters. But that was of little comfort. Yeah, your train is headed off the rails. Wait for it—should happen any minute now.
The doctor knocked and let himself into my room without waiting for an answer. “So you can’t sleep yet?” he asked. “Not at all?”
“Nothing. No sleep. Can’t sleep. And I’m getting bad.”
“What do you mean?”
“Manic. Not psychotic yet, but I can feel it coming. The walls are moving.”
“What do you mean, ‘The walls are moving’?”
“The angles look all wrong, like it’s not a parallelogram. It’s askew.”
“But you know they’re fine, right?”
“Yeah, I’m sure they’re fine. But they don’t look fine to me. And I know I’m not fine.”
“What else makes you think you’re manic?”
“I can tell I’m starting to think I have better extrasensory perception than I know I should have. Like, I’m seeing things almost before they happen. But I know that I can’t be.”
“It seems you are anxious, but you still aren’t struggling to separate perception from reality.”
“That’s accurate. I don’t want it to start, though. You have to give me something else. I have to sleep.”
He instructed the nurse to give me the max Risperdal dose. It was a relief to throw some more pharmaceuticals down the hatch, but it also felt like we’d just fired our last bullet. Why isn’t this shit working already?
I was still awake an hour after the final dose. Then another hour. Then another. I tried repeating a mantra that made sense to me at the time: If you’re breathing, you aren’t dead. If you’re breathing, you can’t die.
I was trying to white-knuckle myself sane.
The same doctor came in to check on me the next morning. It must have been the end of his shift. “So how’d we do? Sleep?”
“No sleep.” I was near tears.
“I’m disappointed to hear that. I’m afraid that we’re going to have to move you.”
“Not Bellevue. Please, you can’t send me to Bellevue. I can’t go to Bellevue.”
“Not Bellevue. We’re going to send you to Gracie Square. They have a bed for you. It’s a private hospital.”
I was strapped to a gurney and loaded up by two EMTs.
When it comes to loony bins, “private” does not necessarily mean “better.” Gracie Square looked like a dystopian government facility where the patients are experimented on. There weren’t old metal buckets catching water drops from rotting ceilings or live electric wires snaking along the ground, but it felt like someone would be along any minute to install them. I would have switched my lease over to Bellevue without a second thought.
The clientele was even worse. They were all angry—hateful, even. I needed a good cry, but not in the hall. I was still fresh meat.
I felt twenty sets of eyeballs on me while the one staff member on duty showed me around. It was on him to keep pace with thirty or forty severely mentally ill patients, and he was flailing. I saw him break up three fights in the first hour; he had to make a snap decision each time on who to tackle and restrain, and then hope the other person would voluntarily back off. It was unclear whether he went for the aggressor or the easier person to subdue; the latter seemed like a more prudent strategy. I bet the guy didn’t make $40,000 a year. What is the backup plan if someone incapacitates him? Inmates running the asylum?
“What is this place?” the tiny young girl sitting next to me in the cafeteria asked me. Her face was beet red and splotchy like an old drunk in his fifties. Her nose seemed to be growing sideways. I imagined her breath didn’t smell good, even after brushing. It looked like she’d been crying for days, and it was obvious she w
as terrified to be here.
“Psych ward.”
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here.”
“Well, if you need to be here…”
“I wanted rehab. I’m not crazy.”
“So why here?”
“I don’t know. I went to the hospital; I had my stomach pumped for the third time. My parents won’t talk to me unless I go to rehab.”
She lifted her legs so her feet rested on the cold metal bench, pulled her knees to her chest, and burrowed her head as far down as it would go. I could feel where Red was coming from. She didn’t have that hard bark on her. Plus, she was tiny.
“Look,” I told her, “get out of here. Whatever your problem is, this is not the solution.”
“I just wanted help and they put me in this hellhole!”
“It is a hellhole. This is the worse one I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m scared I’ll get drunk. I’ll leave and go get drunk. I want to be locked up somewhere. I’ll drink otherwise. I know I’ll drink.”
“Know what I think? I think the longer you stay here, the greater the odds you are going to go get fucked-up when you leave. This isn’t going to straighten you out. Call your dad, tell him you’re sorry, tell him you’ll sew your mouth shut, tell him anything. But you need to leave.”
I was released four days later. The antipsychotics they gave me had pushed me into a semi-comatose state. Friends made visits I don’t remember, but eventually the drugs knocked me out fully and I was able to string together two nights of good sleep.
It was unseasonably warm for February when I stepped back into the world. I decided I’d walk the seventy-eight blocks home from the hospital. I was dazed and relieved to be out, but I was also pissed. It was just over a year since I’d left Osawatomie. I was following the rules: making sure I slept enough, taking my meds every morning, and smoking zero pot. And yet, I was once again walking out of a psych ward. My mind had violated the pact.
I called Singh on my walk home to let him know I was out and to schedule a follow-up appointment. He asked me how I was doing. Pissed. Annoyed. Embarrassed. Defeated. I told him I didn’t know what to do. That a yearly crisis of some magnitude seemed to be inevitable; that it’s terrifying that one little ill-timed bedbug incident sends me straight to the ER. Basically, what the hell am I supposed to do, here?
“If there’s one thing we know with you,” Dr. Singh said, “it’s that once an acute manic or psychotic episode starts, it becomes wildfire incredibly fast. And we missed it here. The Risperdal early keeps everything nice and wet. No fire.”
The world was eating lunch and headed in every imaginable direction. It was reaffirming to be back in the gen pop, and my talk with Singh helped me begin to shed some of the antsiness brought on by my confinement. He was right: while it was hard to celebrate a small victory when the “victory” was four days in a psych ward, four days really was a victory of sorts, maybe even a huge one. I’d managed to avoid psychosis. No fire.
I found myself smirking at the BP. You tagged me again, but you only landed a glancing blow. I’m figuring you out.
Chapter 24
She was standing on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette and laughing with her friend. That girl is too beautiful to be here, I thought. And you probably have about five seconds to get your moxie up before another guy does. She had a natural pout that kind of made her look like a French bulldog—adorable but a little grumpy.
Bumming a cigarette was my obvious entrée. But it was her friend who gave me the cigarette, leaving me with the task of keeping them both entertained while simultaneously making it clear that it wasn’t her friend I was trying to talk to.
I could tell she was foreign by the way she gestured and held her cigarette like she couldn’t be bothered. No fake smiles or exaggerated laughs. And once I got closer, the French accent. She introduced herself as “Michelle from Texas” and I pretended to believe her.
“Oh yeah? What part?”
“Da middle.”
“Mmmm, the middle’s nice.”
It was late and I figured they were leaving, but her friend said we should all go inside and get another beer. “Where are your friends?” Michelle from Texas asked me.
“I was just trying to figure that out. Somewhere—they’re here somewhere.”
“You don’t have any friends, do you?”
“That’s what I’m starting to worry about.”
An obnoxious future Wall Streeter did me a huge favor by overaggressively flirting with Rachel, her friend. “You ever heard of NYU Stern? It’s one of the best MBA programs in the country.” While he ran down his CV for Rachel, I did my best animal impressions for Michelle from Texas: Gila monster, killer whale, camel, giraffe (very similar to camel), and bald eagle. She loved the story I told her about a client who was arrested for walking the Coney Island boardwalk with a boa constrictor wrapped around his neck; he claimed to be famous and said, “Been doing this for twenty years, man!”
She told me, “You’re a bullshitter. King of da bullshit is what I would call dat.” I liked being King of da Bullshit—couldn’t ask for a better title. But then she said, “You should kiss Rachel so dat dis fucking idiot will go away.”
“Me go away?”
“You seem like a good idiot. You can stay.”
No way I was kissing Rachel. I had her laughing, and this idiot was staying. I left the bar with her number—I think I sealed the deal when I correctly guessed how to spell her real name. “A-U-R-E-L-I-E with an accent over the first e?”
“Thank God you don’t make me play da monkey and ask me seventeen times how does it spell. Dat’s why I have to be Michelle from Texas. Everybody plays da monkey.” She asked me where I thought she was from.
I had no idea, so I guessed: “Not France.”
Belgium.
Twenty minutes into my first date with Aurélie, I was making would-you-rather deals with the universe: If you tell me right now that I have to marry this girl or never see her again, it’s forever and it’s not even close. She said I sounded like a cowboy, that I must come from “L’Amérique profonde. Da real America.” She called all insects “flies”—except butterflies, which she called “lullabees”—even the wasps that made her scream in terror. “It’s a fly! I am scared of da flies!” She was so gorgeous I could barely swallow it. She had these little curls at the top of her hairline and she wore a thin red headband a few inches past her forehead. I figured that people had been telling her they loved her little angel hairs her whole life and wondered if she was self-conscious about them.
It had been four months since I’d walked home from Gracie Square. As far as psych ward hospitalizations go, it had been a relatively speedy rebuild. But could I have imagined on that mid-February walk that by Memorial Day I’d be sipping a beer in the sun closing out a first date to end all first dates? Nah, not really, and fucking A.
She proposed a beach day on City Island for our third date. Shit. With back hair thick enough to comb, this gorilla is more at home in a temperate climate. But it was a ninety-degree June afternoon and I couldn’t think of a plausible reason to turn her down, so I resigned myself to lying on my back and keeping Aurélie in front of me at all times. Our collective ignorance of the Bronx really bailed me out—it’s an island with no beach! We walked around for hours, her bummed that we couldn’t find any sand, me secretly thrilled and saying, “Jesus, what kind of an island…?” like all I wanted for Christmas was a beach volleyball game. Instead, we passed the day people-watching and perusing gift shops that somehow stayed open peddling sterling-silver dreamcatcher earrings.
Aurélie and I spent an inordinate amount of time envisioning the woman who would happily receive this jewelry as a gift and pop them straight into her ears as soon as she opened the velvet cube. “Well, bless your heart! These are going to go so well with my amethyst.” Her name is Tammy, there are quite a few aqua-colored knits in her wardrobe, and she wears her hair in what might be called an “i
nverted spiky bob.” A few long, asymmetrical strands hang down the side of her face, the top of her head is a teased-out nest of controlled chaos. Her stylist has trimmed it shorter down the back of her head to her neckline, which has been roughly squared off with electric clippers. No fewer than four earth-tone hues were used in her streaky highlights, but yellow is the dominant color, no doubt.
“It’s like da—who is da guy dat’s made of straw dat you put in da countryside?”
“Scarecrow.”
“Yeah, like da scarecrow—because it’s yellow like da straw, but it’s all da colors of da fall, because da farmers dress da straw man to look like da leaves.”
By midday I was pretty sure her dad was dead. I could tell she was having fun, but even as we expanded Tammy’s bio over the course of the next few hours, there was a melancholy that tagged along behind her. Over beers at sunset, when I asked her what her parents did, I sort of knew what was coming.
“My mom is an accountant and my dad is dead.”
“Sorry.” That’s all I said.
“I don’t remember him.” That’s all she said.
I wondered how her experience of not having a father had differed from mine, if it hurt worse to have never known him than to have known him and then have him leave. Probably pros and cons to both.
Either way, the question didn’t sink her mood. She was enraptured by the boats on the water. “I gotta get a boat, man. How do you get a boat?” she said. “Dese people on dese boats don’t know how lucky dey are.”
I made a mental note to get her a boat.
She spread her arms wide and asked me, “What do you call da, oh Jesus…all da…everywhere? All da blue?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. She was gesturing at the water and the heavens and the bar and the boats.
Gorilla and the Bird Page 24