Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  “With da white?” She didn’t seem to have a clue what she was looking for. “White? Blue?”

  “Smurf? I don’t know.”

  “You kind of look like Papa Smurf with your barbe.”

  “Barb?”

  “Beard. Big beard. Skee? What’s da skee called? All da blue. It’s easy…”

  “Sky?” I guessed.

  “Sky. I’m an idiot monkey.”

  I wondered if it would ever get old trying to understand each other. In the best way, I was suddenly feeling like I didn’t have enough years left to live.

  After the City Island jaunt, she basically moved in. I got the story of how her dad died: brain tumor when she was only a year old. After that, her grandparents lived with her and her mom. They slept upstairs on two twin beds pushed together to make one. She considered Bon-Papa her dad. He took her to feed the ducks and did all manner of absurd amateur science experiments with her. He loved to smoke le pipe and watch le football on their tiny TV.

  She was nine years old when Bon-Papa died. She still can’t stand the smell of eucalyptus because, when he was dying in the hospital, the nurses put eucalyptus in the humidifier in his room. Shortly after he passed, the doctor said it would be good for her to come into the room and say goodbye. She did, but even at that age, she knew he couldn’t hear her. When people are gone, they’re just gone—her mom had never told her any differently.

  Then her mom got cancer. Aurélie was sure she’d die too and soon she’d be all alone—no Bon-Papa, no ducks, no Dad, no Maman.

  We both smoked like hell; we drank a bottle of cheap champagne and smoked a pack of Marlboro Reds together almost every night that summer while we talked until bedtime. I talk too much, but I loved hearing her voice so I tried to make myself shut up so she’d talk more. I loved her accent—French with a little Kermit the Frog mixed in. We spent so much time together and her English was so new and impressionable that soon this little frog-voiced Belgian developed a rather salty vocabulary and picked up a slight Wichita drawl. When she’d tell her friends back home she was dating a guy from Kansas, the immediate response was usually “Is he a cowboy? Like Walker, Texas Ranger?”—apparently Chuck Norris is huge in Belgium. When she’d add that my name is Zack—not a name they have there—the follow-up became “Like Saved by the Bell?” “Yes, exactly like dat,” she always said. “I tell dem you are a pretty blond high school cowboy.”

  On Saturday mornings she talked to her Maman in the loudest, fastest French I’d ever heard as she paced back and forth on my deck and burned through half a pack of cigarettes. When I’d ask her what they were fighting about, she’d say, “Nothing. She was just telling me dat Victor was rolling in his shit in da garden again and killed a bird and brought it into da house.” That was usually the extent of the news from Belgium. Forty-five minutes yielded a dog report with a few crime statistics peppered in for good measure. She insisted that crime in Brussels was on a level that I failed to appreciate and that they rob old people there. She worried about her mom all the time. Worried she’d get robbed. Worried she’d get sick again. Worried she should be back in Belgium with her.

  Like most have-not lovebirds in New York, our weekend dates defaulted to aimlessly walking around the city. It was on one of these epic walks that I had a dizzying and semi-disturbing realization: I had a grand Oedipal complex. We were walking by one of those $19 bottomless brunch places when Aurélie just went in on the clientele: “Drinking in da middle of da day. Brunch is not for drinking. Who are dese people, getting dressed up like dey are going to da discotheque for brunch? You aren’t supposed to put on makeup to go eat da pancakes; you’re supposed to be in your pajama. It’s da girls dat lose dere shoes at night.” I recognized this attitude immediately. I was dating a young, foreign, misanthropic granny.

  I was afraid for her to know about my condition too soon. How do you explain to the woman you’ve fallen in love with that you have a little secret it’s time to share, and then casually toss off that you’ve spent some portion of your life in a state of manic psychosis? Hey, Aurélie, I think you’re incredible and you’re my new favorite person on the planet and, by the way, sometimes I’m psychotic.” “Bipolar,” “psychotic,” “insane”—it’s still 100 percent okay to use these words as pejoratives; they are our go-to labels to describe dangerous people. I’ve never heard anyone be chastised or corrected for flippantly describing a person as “fucking crazy.” There’s a consensus in our society that the mentally unstable are to be avoided if at all possible. What would any well-intentioned friend advise her upon hearing that she was falling for a manic-depressive who in the recent past had involuntarily spent well over a month committed to four different psychiatric wards as a result of a disease for which there is no cure?

  It helped that she’d told me about Bon-Papa and her dad’s death and her mom’s illness. I knew she understood trauma, and I had a pretty good read on her level of empathy and open-mindedness. I’d never seen someone throw a dirtier stank eye than when she witnessed a handful of people cover their noses when a car-clearing homeless man, reeking so strongly of piss and shit that I had to suppress my own gag reflex, boarded the train. She’d also become obsessed with prison documentaries and—after she learned about the prevalence of wrongful convictions, coercive interrogations, police brutality, and “lifestyle crimes,” such as taking up two seats on the subway—took to hating the NYPD nearly as much as I do. “Da fucking pigs on da train harassing dis homeless guy who is just standing dere not bothering anybody,” she’d begin. “It makes me sick. I want to just hit dem. And da stupid foreign tourists taking pictures with dem.”

  So I sensed she could handle heavy stuff, and even though we hadn’t said it yet, I knew she loved me. There was no way to tiptoe around the subject, so one evening on my deck, halfway through our champagne and cigarettes, I just laid it all out there: the hospitalizations, the psychosis, the depression, the PTSD, and the permanence of it all. I explained that it’s something I have, not something I had. I told her about my medication regimen and how, if I don’t get enough sleep, I freak out that I’m going to have to go to the hospital again. I told her that I take pills every morning and that I’ll have to for the rest of my life. I told her about just how terrifying the whole thing can be when I get too close to the ledge. Not just for me but for everyone around me. I told her about Gregory and Monk Monk, and Osawatomie, and Bellevue, and Gracie Square. About how the depression that follows the manic, like night follows day, put me on a lawn chair in my mother’s garage for two months and put a six-pack down my throat nightly, and about how it had me listening intently to oncoming subway trains. About how it nearly ended my career as a lawyer and definitely ended my career in comedy. I told her about how bipolar disorder had very nearly fucking broken me and might yet still.

  She teared up a little and held my hand. I teared up a little. It was the first time I’d ever told my story to someone who I needed to accept me. The moral of the story was clear: if you’re with me, you’re likely signing up to go through some shit.

  “I don’t care at all. It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t change anything. Nothing,” she said. “I care because it happened to you, but I don’t care dat you have dat. You’re you.” I was relieved by her reaction, but I was also aware that I couldn’t take this as her final answer. You’re you. How could she know what that meant when she hadn’t seen all of me? When she hadn’t seen my disease.

  Chapter 25

  Three months later we were standing in city hall waiting for a judge to approve our expedited marriage license and assign us an officiant to swear our sacred oath. We’d known each other for five months and seventeen days. It was a Thursday.

  She went first to the kiosk where the bride and groom have to fill out their pedigree information, punching in “Aurélie” in the FIRST NAME field. Then, in the adjacent field, the screen asked for LAST NAME. She looked up at me. “Hagen, right?”

  “Yeah, Hagen.”

  When th
ey finally called McDermott-Hagen, we were ushered into Chapel 4. The officiant, a round man with a dark moustache and a heavy Brooklyn accent, was resplendent in a boxy khaki suit with a dress shirt the color of a secluded Caribbean bay and a tie the color of Sunkist. I asked him if he’d mind if I set up a camera.

  Judging by the pace of the turnover in the courthouse chapels, it was his fiftieth ceremony of the day, and he was well into his opening remarks by the time I had the angle right. But what he lacked in patience he more than compensated for with a snake-handling, speaking-in-tongues level of secular fervor. “FROM THIS DAY, TO YOUR LAST, SHALL YE SWEAR OFF ALL OTHERS…BY THE POWER VESTED IN ME, BY THE GREEEEAAAT! STATE OF NEW YORK…” The man had stage presence. Aurélie and I practically had to stick our fists into our mouths to avoid full-on cracking up.

  Rachel from the bar stood next to Aurélie, and two expats—Gaelle (BEL) and Benjamin (FRA)—rounded out the bridal party. Rachel and Gaelle cried; Benjamin very much needed to get back to work. I’d met each of them once.

  On my side, Omar stood next to Ryan—two friends who had started as Craigslist roommates. Among all my friends, they probably understood my illness the best. Omar’s father is BP1 and he doesn’t take the best care of himself. Ryan’s brother is schizophrenic; his whereabouts are unknown. Both had visited me at Gracie Square. Omar had brought me socks and underwear, and Ryan had given the Bird daily updates. I gave the best man nod to Jonas; he’d seen me shove my hand up my ass as he drove me out of a frozen cornfield. Safe to say he had a pretty good grasp of what my disease looked like.

  The decision to get married had been made so quickly that there was no chance for the Bird to join. Besides, given the emergency flights and motel bills she’d racked up over the last three years, coupled with the ever-present possibility that she might need to jump on a plane at a moment’s notice, there wasn’t much room in the budget to travel for happy occasions. The airfare fund was for emergencies only.

  Once we got through the preacher’s theatrics, it was a quick “I do” and “I do too.” Omar took a few pictures on his iPad. Aurélie’s dress was from Forever 21 and cost $20. “If you have an eye, you can buy some stuff dere and you won’t look like a simple tramp,” she informed me.

  The wedding took place one year to the day after she moved to New York. I was twenty-nine; she was twenty-eight. We didn’t know it was day 365 until after the fact—or at least so she claims. When she noticed the coincidence, I told her she might have a New York Times bestseller on her hands: How I Got My Green Card in 365 Days, and You Can Too!

  The proposal had been lackluster. During the weeks leading up to what would be our wedding day, we had conversation after conversation probing for a solution to the problem of it being illegal for her to stay in New York indefinitely. One day, standing in my bedroom, I just said, “Let’s do it.” She didn’t look that pleased or convinced. “No, for real. Let’s do it. I’ll do it. You want to do it?”

  “Yeah, fuck, I guess,” she said.

  “What else are we going to do? Not be together?”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, we’re not going to not be together. Ever.”

  The night before the wedding, we ate cheap ramen in the East Village and bought our wedding rings—$45 for the pair from a St. Marks incense store. The gentleman wanted $50. I set $45 cash on the table and asked him to kindly let me know before I crossed the threshold if I was shoplifting.

  And so we were married. Joint tax return and everything. Aurélie could go to the doctor now and stay in the country. If we decided we didn’t like each other so much after all, there would be paperwork to fill out, but we tried to tell ourselves that this hypothetical paperwork was the only thing that had changed. We were fake-real married. Fake because we didn’t believe in it and real because I loved her so much that it felt like there was an actual energy field binding us together.

  It wasn’t only the Bird’s two divorces that put me off the institution. The relationship between marriage and love had always struck me as tenuous at best, and Aurélie and I shared a deep revulsion of what marriage had become. Namely, bullshit. “You could feed all of Africa with da money people spend on weddings in a year,” she said. “You have to spend all dat money so you can stand around and pretend to be a goddamn Disney princess for a day in a ridiculous costume dat you will never wear again, and all your friends are supposed to buy you a present. Fuck dat.” But the United States of America insisted that I make an honest woman out of Aurélie or they’d send her packing back to Belgique. Couldn’t have that.

  In her accent, “I’m going to cook a bird” sounds like “I’m going to kooook a bird.” She found the phrase amusing enough to repeat ad nauseam. “Kooook a bird. Kooook a big bird.” Of course we didn’t need a big bird; our first Thanksgiving together, the first Thursday after we got married, was in my Lower East Side apartment, just us. For two people who claimed to find marriage absurd, here we were, trying to create a Rockwellian experience.

  Except nothing was going according to plan. I was not doing well. For weeks my arthritis had been making it difficult to sleep. I’d spent substantial portions of the prior three fall/winters in mental institutions, and aching joints, which flare up as soon as the first New York cold snap hits, had become an unwelcome reminder that madness season was upon us.

  The wedding itself had caused some semi-sleepless nights. Even though she couldn’t have been a better match for me if the Good Lord had crafted her out of my own rib, getting married was still a fairly seismic turn in how I’d seen my twenties shaking out.

  Whirlwind romance aside, we had plenty to be stressed about. Due to her immigration status, Aurélie’s work visa would expire at the end of the month. On my salary, there was no way we could afford our own place, so we were living with two roommates and would be doing so for the foreseeable future. Naturally, it wasn’t much appreciated that she’d become a nonpaying fourth roommate, so in an effort to keep tensions low, we stayed out of the common area for the most part and she left every morning when I went to work, even if she had nowhere to go. She didn’t dare leave a pink razor in the shower. We were, understandably enough, unwelcome guests in “our” home.

  What little sleep I was getting came in weird intervals and at odd hours. I was desperate for every minute. Our whole schedule was dependent on when and for how long I could fall asleep. Add it all up, and it was enough to put mania in the starting blocks, waiting for the pistol.

  So, on Thanksgiving, the roommates were gone and Aurélie kooked the bird by herself, taking breaks to come into the bedroom to rub my back while I tossed and turned and fought back tears. I hadn’t fallen asleep until 7 a.m. the night before and was wide awake by 10. We ended up carving the turkey at midnight—I was napping at dinnertime, and even though she’d spent the whole day in the kitchen, she knew she couldn’t wake me up. She put out quite the spread: sweet potatoes, green beans, mashed potatoes, turkey and gravy. L’Amérique profonde would have been proud. Our table was the ottoman in the middle of the living room. We both put on happy faces and snapped a couple of pics together—one of me carving the bird—but the smiles were pushed through gritted teeth.

  By this point I knew my condition well. I knew the warning signs, I knew I had to deal with it at the first sign of trouble, and I knew what would happen and how quickly if I didn’t. But knowledge is not prevention. In my case, knowledge only heightened my fear: the stakes were known. I’d done my best in the days leading up to Thanksgiving to work my medication and sleep regimen, but it didn’t help that New York City did not give a shit about my bipolar disorder. The cold was indifferent to the arthritis it inflicted; 6 a.m. garbage trucks didn’t care that I had been awake at 5:30 a.m.; the upstairs neighbors weren’t about to inquire after my current sleep patterns before throwing a massive rager; and the fellas on the block still needed their Boricua music at the volume to which they were accustomed.

  In a sure sign of troubl
e ahead, the most inconsequential nothings began to tie me in knots. Like Black Friday. Black fucking Friday. After we ate our bird and got into bed, I found myself staring at the ceiling, absolutely consumed with anxiety that I was going to blow my opportunity to buy the perfect pair of black leather Chelsea boots—“dancing shoes,” I called them—at a substantial, once-a-year discount. We were throwing a not-a-wedding-reception party the following Saturday at my apartment, and I absolutely needed dancing shoes. Never mind the guest list was fifteen or so and the playlist would mostly consist of five-year-old indie rock tracks played at a reasonable volume.

  These dancing shoes soon kicked off a Rube Goldberg–worthy anxiety sequence: Isn’t it okay to buy a little something for your own wedding party? Isn’t it fucked that I, after not spending $100 combined on clothes within the last calendar year, am ready to throw myself out the window over boot angst? How much should I spend? Should we even have this goddamn party? My brother is coming to town—how high is he going to get? Should we get a photographer? Should we get a few? Can we get a DJ? Who do I know?! A DJ! Fuck, I hope my brother and I don’t fight. We could have a red carpet! A fucking real bash! Fill the bathtub with champagne, and a trash barrel on the deck with cold beers! BBQ! Should we just cancel this thing? I’m not good. Can’t cancel—what would we tell everyone?

  With all this pinging around in my head, I hardly slept. But I was jazzed the next morning anyway. A little dizzy, sure. And shaking a bit from sleep-deprived adrenaline and you-know-what’s-around-the-corner-threat-level-yellow dread. My plan was to just get on with the day and go down for a nap as soon as I hit the wall. I didn’t have to go to work and it was sweater weather outside—a perfect day to go tool around Manhattan with Aurélie. And get those boots.