Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  Aurélie was not jazzed when I unfolded my Black Friday plan, but she wasn’t about to turn me loose in SoHo alone. She wasn’t blind to the fact that I’d been pissing money away like a Qatari prince; I couldn’t go to the grocery store for a snack without dropping $100 on olives and cheese and cured meats. As I traipsed to the Ben Sherman dressing room, with no less than $500 in trousers and sweaters draped over my arm, Aurélie sank into the leather lounge chair, scowling. “Dancing shoes and you are rich now too? Dat’s good news.” I told her I wasn’t getting it all and that I only owned one pair of jeans, and, yes, I did need a new coat.

  Standing in the dressing room, staring at myself in the mirror, I suddenly felt a head rush that entered through my right ear and shook my brain around in my skull. The track lighting was swirling around me as if the roller-rink DJ had just announced, All couples to the dance floor for the last skate of the night! I had to urinate, and I found myself obsessing over one simple question: Why on God’s green earth can’t I just piss in the corner of this here booth? It seemed like a totally reasonable solution. How much different is it, really, than pissing in the woods? Both are technically illegal; neither prohibition is easy to enforce. I could just piss, march on out of here, and go home. I started unbuckling my pants, giggling a little as I slid them down. I just don’t give a fuck. Don’t give a fuck about nothing, I thought. And everyone else does. All these fucking Black Friday sheep. What the fuck are we all doing here?

  I caught a look at my face in the mirror: wide, dilated pupils and big black circles. I’d seen that face before. It was the face of the guy who stays up all night making home music videos of himself dancing in a sombrero and covers the walls of his apartment in red Sharpie. He’s supposed to have a Mohawk. His name is Myles. Myles ends up in the hospital.

  Why can’t you piss on the dressing room floor? Because it’s fucking illegal. And because it’s a dressing room floor. And because the floors are wood and it will run into the next stall, and because you don’t do that. You don’t do that. I had grabbed hold of my lucidity like a swinging vine and I needed to hold on. If there is a boundary line that separates Zack and Myles, I’d found it—toes hard against it. Piss over it and we’re officially tits up.

  I zipped my pants up and took off to find Aurélie. “I gotta go home—now,” I told her. “I need a Risperdal.” Then I dragged her to the register and rang it all up. She grabbed the receipt.

  That night I alternated from bed to couch to porch and from cigs to deli meats to beer; all the while my brain refused to turn off: How can people say that someone “belongs” in prison? How can a person “belong” in a societal construct? He’s not a fish. Jail isn’t water. He sure as shit won’t die if he’s not surrounded by iron bars. But what am I going to do to solve the prison–industrial complex? And what about third-world hunger? Why don’t I work for UNICEF?

  To call the Bird or not to call the Bird? In those moments, that was always the question. We’ll talk too long…and I’m sick of waking her up at all hours. The woman needs her sleep too. And I’m a goddamn married man, a few months south of thirty. I felt like a little boy, afraid of the dark, out of bed when he knows he shouldn’t be.

  Am I ever going to have a five-year plan or is my life going to be nothing more than a series of ad hoc attempts to stay sane? Should I just surrender? Buy the ticket and take the ride, go howl at the dark side of the moon for a while and see where I stand once I come out the other side?

  I snuck into the bedroom and snapped about eighty-seven pictures of Aurélie sleeping that I intended to turn into a photo slideshow at the wedding party.

  On Small Business Saturday, I woke up with a blazing sense of my own limitless creative potential. It had been well past dawn when I finally fell asleep, and as soon as I got out of bed two hours later, I absolutely had to write. I’d enrolled in a writing class that summer, and earlier that week the teacher had shown some interest in a piece she thought had potential to get published. It was called “A High-Class Hoops Feud at the Wichita Walmart,” and it centered on how the Bird “about had to throw down” with a Walmart clerk because he made a smart-ass comment about her UVA Law sweatshirt. This was it, I was sure of it. Big break time. Get this thing published and soon agents would come calling. Book deal, maybe TV—who knows? I started a Twitter account just to put it on @NewYorker’s radar—I liked my odds of making Shouts and Murmurs.

  Aurélie and I had dinner plans, but that didn’t matter to me. I was on the precipice. I insisted on working on the piece until almost 11 p.m., telling Aurélie, “Ten more minutes, I promise,” the entire time. She’d hoped to have a calm meal, return to normalcy after all the Thanksgiving chaos, and finally spend some time together as newlyweds. But she’d thank me later, after this piece launched my career and we could finally afford our own place. As far as I was concerned, our pasta could wait.

  On Cyber Monday, the dam broke. After submitting my piece, I spent all of Sunday and Monday afternoon obsessively checking my email, smoking, and waiting for editors to get back to me. The New Yorker, the New York Times, McSweeney’s—they all had it in their inbox. I was not so far gone as to miss the parallels with my experience pre-Bellevue, and I knew that I was in bad shape. I could feel my brain burning white-hot, and if I squinted hard enough, I could see the molecules of solid objects start to bend—but fuck if I wasn’t connecting dots in ways and at speeds that were so beautiful I could hardly stand it. I did have a teacher encouraging me, didn’t I? She did give me the email addresses of her editor contacts, didn’t she? It was all just enough to allow me to consider that the two realities could exist simultaneously: I could be both in the danger zone and on the verge of running down a dream.

  When Aurélie came home from work, she found me on the floor in the fetal position, crying. I couldn’t move; I’d gone out onto the terrace for a smoke a few hours earlier, looked down the thirty-foot drop to the concrete below, and realized I was too impaired to stand. It wasn’t that I had been thinking of jumping, but I was legitimately worried that I might think it would be fun to try to stand on the railing. Things were safer on the ground. From then on, I smoked in the apartment, stubbing out the butts in an empty Papa John’s box.

  I told her I couldn’t get up. She said, “Den stay dere. You don’t have to get up, monkey.” She sat on my back and rubbed my head. “You don’t have to worry because you’re not going back to da hospital. You never go dere again. You don’t belong dere.” Then she cleaned the apartment, opened the windows, and lit some candles so it wouldn’t smell like smoke when my roommates got home from work.

  Even if you aren’t a girl who’s always dreamed of getting married, it’s gotta be pretty shitty to have your husband go crazy a few days after your wedding. She did the best she could to keep a stiff upper lip, but watching me inch closer to the sheer drop of psychosis must have been terrifying. As the night wore on, it was clear to both of us that the poor girl was in over her head: reinforcements were needed.

  So I called the Bird and handed the phone to my new bride. It’s not the ideal way to meet your mother-in-law, but ideal goes out the window when the guy you just married is on the verge of a psychotic break. Aurélie unloaded the details of our saga thus far. To her surprise, the Bird said calmly, “I think he’s okay.” She told her that she was doing everything right and that she had to keep me straight on my meds. “Write it down. He forgets when he’s tired.” They made a plan to speak the next morning.

  After another near sleepless night, I spent the better part of Giving Tuesday pacing the apartment, channeling first a wild and then a wounded animal. I tried to let the air out of the balloon on this writing bullshit. Who was I, to be expecting a personal email response from David Remnick within twenty-four hours? Hadn’t I been surprised when the professor thought the thing was any good in the first place?

  As soon as Aurélie got off work, Risperdal refills in hand, she came into the bedroom and told me she’d talked to my mom. The Bird had
schooled her on the BP playbook. “Make a list with him of everything that’s stressing him and then have him sort it into two categories: okay to worry about and not okay to worry about. Eliminate them one by one until his mind is calm enough to sleep.” It was a tactic the Bird developed after my first break. Ever since, when I called her freaking out, instead of starting with “Calm down,” she would just say, “Time to make a list, Gorilla?”

  The Bird and I had been to hell and back together. Now it was Aurélie facing down the flames with me, sitting on the bed in this room I’d been pacing for hours. I took great comfort from the thought of her and the Bird, two powerhouses, working together, but I also felt horribly guilty for the burden I was putting on both of them, especially my new wife.

  “Come on,” she said, leaning forward to touch my hair, “make a list.”

  Z’s List

  I spent money on clothes, like an idiot. Not okay to worry about. I have da receipt.

  I spent too much money on food and I can’t get full. Not okay to worry about. It’s already in your belly. Order da $7.85 pad thai lunch special from da place on da corner. Quit eating olives.

  We don’t have an apartment. We don’t have any money. Not okay to worry about today. We’ll figure it out.

  I can’t sleep. You’re going to sleep.

  I can’t work. Not okay to worry about. You’re lucky to have a job dat understands. You won’t get fired. Call your supervisor. Take da week off.

  Drugs aren’t working. Dey’re going to work. Dey are working.

  I’m going to the hospital again. No, you aren’t. I won’t let you.

  My back hurts. I make you a bath.

  My arthritis hurts. Take an ibuprofen.

  I’m dumb for writing. What’s done is done. Quit writing until you’re back to normal.

  It’s happening. It’s always going to keep happening. It’s not always going to happen. It’s getting better.

  You don’t deserve this. You shouldn’t have to do this. Dat’s nonsense. I do anything for you.

  Once Aurélie fell asleep, I snuck into the bathroom and called the Bird myself. Making the list with Aurélie had calmed me down, but I needed more reassurance. When she heard my voice, she said, “You sound like an old arthritic gorilla with patches of fur missing on his back.” I read her my list. “You got this,” she told me. “That girl loves and understands you. Not the easiest combination to come by. I know you’re safe with her.”

  “Why do I keep having to deal with this? I really wish this wasn’t happening again.”

  “Boy, as Pa always says, ‘You can wish in one hand and shit in the other.’ You got the BP.”

  “This isn’t my fault,” I told the Bird.

  “It’s not.”

  I started crying, hard. Of course intellectually I could latch on to the idea that I didn’t choose to be mentally ill. I could parrot my own bullshit about how no one chooses to be sick and about how the mentally ill are no different from diabetics or cancer patients, but did I really believe me?

  Sniveling and watching myself ugly-cry in the bathroom mirror, I laughed in my own face. I could either accept that I was suffering from random chance, a bad bounce, or continue to say these things about “random chance” out loud while privately considering myself a defective piece of shit.

  “No, but really,” I told the Bird, “it’s not my fault.”

  “It’s not, baby. It’s really, really, really not.” I could hear her heart breaking for me.

  I left the bathroom, made a cup of tea, popped another Risperdal, and recorded it in my little black medication notebook. Underneath 2 mg Risperdal 1:07 a.m., I wrote I am okay. I will be okay. This is hard. Hard is okay. I am not going crazy.

  I checked in on Aurélie: she was out cold. The week’s events had pushed her to the brink of her own sanity and that’s only a slight exaggeration. She was worn-out from staying up with me, worn-out from me snapping at her for suggesting that spending $100 on fancy snacks was unsustainable, worn-out from worrying that I wouldn’t be okay. She looked so serene there in the bed, clutching her filthy old one-eyed stuffed blue dog that she’d had since she was a little girl. Watching her sleep, I thought: if she had gone to one of the other thousands of bars on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that night, if I’d left the bar twenty minutes earlier, if NYU MBA students didn’t like talking about their accomplishments so much, if, if, if…I didn’t want to wake her, so I grabbed a pillow and headed to the living room.

  The solution to mania is so simple yet so hard to come by. Just sleep.

  The couch can be a nice refuge from the insomniac’s bed—a little less pressure. I put a little DVR’d English Premier League on the TV and let that beautiful grass and those calming witty Brits rock me back and forth at low volume. I used the game clock to track how long I’d been on my back, heavy eyelids but still conscious: seventeenth minute, thirty-third, forty-sixth, halftime. I focused on my breathing while the talking heads praised an overmatched West Ham’s grit against a loaded Manchester City squad.

  I still wasn’t asleep when the ref pointed to the center circle and whistled for the second half to start, so I tried a relaxation technique I’d read about: I started with my toes and imagined them filling up with sand. Only after the toes were completely full did I move on to my feet, then ankles, shins, thighs, waist. I prayed to be knocked out before I got to my torso, but every time I started to slip into something resembling sleep, my brain would catch on a dying ember of thought and roar back to life.

  Next, I imagined giant humpback whales gliding through the ocean, and I tried to become a whale myself—all fat and heavy, with those big ol’ eyelids slowly closing.

  Finally, some combination of modern pharmacology, the Barclays English Premier League, sand in my toes, and the eyelids of great whales put me down. It wasn’t the most restful sleep I’d ever experienced, but when I opened my eyes, the sun was streaming into the living room and I had no recollection of the prior five hours. I was up before Aurélie and chipper when she woke. This did not please her.

  “Did you sleep at all? Why are you up? Should you get back in bed?”

  I told her that we’d landed a clean body shot to the BP. The twister was still visible but it was retreating into the distance. Sure, the lawn was fucked-up and a few windowpanes were shattered, but the roof was still attached and the car was in the driveway. “Let’s get food. I’m starving.”

  We took a walk through the East Village. On the way to our local coffee shop, we sidestepped no fewer than five severely mentally ill homeless people and we did exactly what everyone else around us did: ignored them. The level of need-blindness required to get an omelet in New York City is staggering; you’d starve if you stopped at every emergency in your sight line.

  “I think I made it,” I said. “I don’t feel great, but I feel safe. I feel like myself.”

  She looked unconvinced.

  “Are you mad?” I asked.

  “No, just stressed.”

  “It’s okay if you are.”

  “I know.”

  “I wish I could promise that this will never happen again. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t need to tell me you’re sorry. It’s not your fault you get sick. I’m happy you feel better, but it’s been shit for so long dat my brain can’t catch up. I never seen dat before. It broke my heart. And I never want to cry in front of you because you were so stressed, so I’ve been crying in da bathroom at work every day and trying to pretend everything is all right. I don’t sleep neither. I feel like I been to da war.”

  After breakfast, we grabbed a couple fancy lattes we couldn’t afford and sat on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, where three years earlier I’d galloped like a dog and nearly shot a round of H-O-R-S-E with Daniel Day-Lewis. Aurélie squeezed my biceps and rested her head on my shoulder. She seemed to be finally entertaining the possibility that her baptism by fire had ended, that maybe it was safe to exhale. We both just shut up for a while and took i
n the pigeons and the chess players and the marvelous number of seemingly unemployed New Yorkers who somehow had enough money to wander around the park in $1,000 Moncler jackets on a Wednesday afternoon. Of course there were an equal number of homeless people dragging shopping-cart jalopies with bungee-corded milk crates holding all of their worldly possessions. Luck of the draw.

  I knew we’d never have kids—not with the radioactive nature of my genetic material; I’d never risk passing this on. I also knew I could never withstand what the Bird had gone through with me in the psych ward; I’d rather be patient than parent any day. But maybe one day a sleepless night wouldn’t leave me terrified by the brittle nature of my own lucidity.

  After what felt like ten minutes of silence, Aurélie looked up at me with those big brown fearless eyes. “I teach you some French: Je suis un gorille bipolaire.”

  I am a bipolar gorilla.

  Acknowledgments

  Bird, Granny and Pa (miss you). Adam and Corryn, Alexa, Pete, and little Ellie. King Edward, Lala and Amelia. Grandad.

  Mike and Sarah Keenan, Elliott Klass, Andrew Kewley, Kent Russell, Eve Mattucci, Jerry Portwood, Bryan Sipe, Doug Bouton, Amy FitzHenry. Bobby Prince Jr., James Tichenor. Ryan Boyle and Ari Moore, Omar Agha-Kahala, Sian-Pierre and Joe Regis, Justin Milner, Mike Patton, Rob Lindsey and Colleen Herman. The Heyman Bros. Dr. Al, Rashad H., Mark Hitchcock, Jon Miller, Josh Grubaugh, Alec Zadek, Natalie Blazer, Jason Watson, Tom Slaughter, Jonas Jacobson. Jayson Haedrich and Amanda Hamann; Scott Ruplinger; Chele Behrens; Rob Howes; Lance, Bob, and Jana Hublick; Lisa Smith; Matthew and Michael Stewart. Kathryn Liverani, Matt Berman, Jacob Rolls, Greg Gomez. Chico “Hapa” Herbison, Professor Brendan Garrett, Dean Goluboff, and Dean Jeffries: “He was on the boat!” Coach Bribiesca, Jared Rhodes, Preston Brin, Desmond Johnson. Kiese Laymon, Carla Eckels, Sean Cole, Ira Glass. Kenny and Keith Lucas, Gad Elmaleh.