“But Dad, what I don’t get is, if I know more than I think I do, why don’t I do better in school?”
My father was pleased I’d asked that question. “Maybe you’re mad at me.”
“Why would I be mad at you?”
“You tell me.” Like I said, you had to be careful of my father on dry land.
My brother had his driver’s license now. In a well-meaning attempt to bribe Willy into befriending me, my father gave our now old Pontiac Skylark wagon to my brother and bought himself a fuel-injected Volvo with leather upholstery. Perhaps if he had kept the Skylark for himself and given Willy the Volvo, my brother might have been more cooperative.
What I knew was, Willy liked to say no. And my father, like all fathers, liked to hear yes from his children. Willy said no to accompanying my father on his search for a house, and no to fly-fishing; even when he ate Oreos and cocooned himself in fat and beat off, he was telling my father no.
When you said yes to my father, he’d get close to you. At first, it’d make you feel special and safe. You’d tell him your problems. But once you told him, they became his problems, not yours. He swallowed you up.
I remember on Sunday night when Willy and I were fighting over what to watch on TV, my father changed the channel on us and made us watch a new show that had just come on the air called 60 Minutes. There was a shrink on who he was friends with and who had been to our house, talking about antidepressants, and even mentioning my father’s name. Which seemed impressive and cool to me, even though Dad put it down with a shrug. “It’s not going to change my life.”
But hearing my dad mentioned on TV got me thinking, What could I ever do to get my name mentioned on television? And that worried me, because I knew that’s what he expected. At dinner that night, I asked my father, “What could I be great at?”
My mother was quick to answer for him, “There are lots of things you boys could be great at.” But I wanted to hear from Dad. Even Willy was interested. We looked at my father for a response.
He cleared his throat and sighed. “I could have been more successful, famous, if I didn’t have children. But I enjoyed having them. It was important to me.”
It wasn’t what my mother wanted to hear. “Zach was asking about himself, not about you.”
“I want them to learn from my mistakes.”
Willy excused himself from dinner and went for a run. I was left at the table to digest it. My father never mentioned the fact that they’d interviewed him for that 60 Minutes show, but in the end, he’d been cut out.
Every few months my parents would suddenly remember they were parents, and try to throw Willy and me together in what my mother called “outings for the boys,” whether it was a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a bonus stop on the way to see medical oddities preserved in the Mütter Museum (Grover Cleveland’s tumor, the skull of a man with a horn coming out of his forehead, midget skeletons, and my favorite, the world’s largest colon), or a long weekend at the beach house Lazlo now owned but rarely used out on the tip of Long Island. Willy would say no by saying, “I have a race to get ready for.” Saying no, like running 10K in 35:40, made Willy feel like he was in control. It gave him the last word and freed him from the tyranny of wanting and waiting to be loved.
I, at thirteen going on fourteen, was a people pleaser. Trouble was, I was better at pleasing adults than teenagers, and I was lonely now that my semiadult sisters were out of the house. It was not so much them I longed for; it was having somebody around who I could make laugh, for distracting others was my way of distracting myself. Adults were blind to my neediness. Kids my age could smell it a mile off. Worse, I was not content to be liked. I wanted to be loved by everyone, even my brother, Willy.
Willy and I had all sorts of reasons not to get along—the age difference; the explosive mix of teenage male testosterone; the years of jokes I’d made at his expense to feel the afterglow of making my sisters cackle cruelly; his being punished with another year in high school to keep his baby brother company. A psychologist once told me it was obvious that after Jack died, Willy enjoyed being the only son and resented my intrusion. Maybe. But when I look back on it now, it seems like saying no to me was just a new kind of no for my father.
If he had openly bullied me, flicked my ears, bruised my kidneys with rabbit punches, or called me “dickhead” or “maggot” or “dogbreath” like other kids’ older brothers did at St. Luke’s, I wouldn’t have minded so much. But Willy knew the biggest torture of all for me, the one thing I could not bear, was to be ignored. Running marathons gave him the discipline to ignore me completely. I felt like I was being erased. Mostly by my father, but Willy did his share.
We rode to school in silence in the station wagon he did not want. If I asked him a question he didn’t feel like answering, he’d turn on the radio. And as was my habit from day one, when we were halfway down the drive and I had realized I’d forgotten something I needed—homework, textbooks, term paper, note from a parent excusing me from gym because I had pinkeye, or a permission slip to attend the class trip to the Benjamin Franklin Institute and walk through its gigantic rubber heart—he would of course say no, and then give me a thin-lipped smile.
“Why?” I’d plead.
“My car, my rules.”
“But it’s important.”
“Well, maybe this will teach you to grow up.”
Once we arrived at St. Luke’s, I existed even less. In the halls he’d walk right past me without so much as a nod. When I’d say something about it over dinner to my parents, Willy would swear he hadn’t seen me. Then I’d shout, “BS,” and Willy would give my father the grimace that passed for a smile and say, “Dad, what other possible reason could I have for not saying hello to my own brother?”
Calling him a liar only made it worse. “He’s being paranoid,” Willy would say. And my father, knowing something about paranoia himself, would look at me with sympathetic suspicion. Might he have passed that on to his younger son, along with the cowlick and high arches?
Because of track, Willy had instant friends. When I’d see him loitering with them, naked in the locker room or shower, flexing their muscles and soaping their hairy chests, and I’d approach, skinny and pimply, my towel hiding the few hairs I had on my balls, he’d say, “What’s up, little brother?” Or, “How’s it hanging, Tiger?” (That was the one I hated most.) I knew he was just pretending to be friendly because not to be so to his own brother would make him look strange, and my brother did not ever want to appear strange. But because of the discipline he applied to his normalcy, the total lack of irony in his voice when he addressed me in public as “Tiger” or “little brother,” and because I remembered the way my father looked at me when Willy accused me of being paranoid, it was not long before I began to wonder, Am I?
My world suddenly seemed like such an unpleasant place, I found myself chewing at the edge of the possibility that I was imagining all this emotional static. Soon I was wondering full-time what was really going on inside both my own head and my classmates’ craniums. Was I hearing them right? Did they really mean what they said? Before long, teachers were accusing me of daydreaming, of not concentrating on my work. It is difficult to think about two things at once, especially if one of the things you are thinking about is “Am I crazy?”
The more I worried about the realness of what I thought was real, the more forgetful I became. Lack of sleep and having an innate aversion to organization, I was unable to leave the house for school without forgetting something. And, of course, when I asked, begged, pleaded with my brother to stop the car and let me go back the answer was a friendly no.
A grade point was deducted for homework turned in a day late. When I’d forget it twice in a row, another grade point plus demerits, which meant I had to stay after school, which by the third day of forgetfulness meant coming in for Saturday morning detention and copying passages out of the King James Bible.
When my English teacher, Mr. Fagin, ga
ve me an F for a paper on Pride and Prejudice that had started out life as an A, he asked me, “Is there something wrong at home?”
I shook my head no, only because I did not know where to begin. Homer was crazy, even though my father called him “special.” Ida was a theosophist, which, according to my father, meant she was “certifiable,” and then there was the matter of Dad’s Sock Moments. What if what ailed me did run in my family? Mr. Fagin sensed I was holding back. “Maybe you’d feel better talking to the school psychologist about it?”
“My father’s a psychologist.”
“I see.”
I considered sharing my fears with my father. I went into his shelf-lined bedroom/office and waited for him and my mother to get back from the university. Looking at the giant pill in the paperweight, I wondered what they could give me that would make me feel less crazy. Then I wondered back to Casper. About where my father had put him. Not wanting to risk being checked into a place like Needmore, I borrowed the thickest medical textbooks I could find on his shelf and retreated to my bedroom.
An old copy of the DSM didn’t give me a lot to choose from. In fact, there were only four basic choices; imbecilic, depressive, schizophrenic, or psychopath—aka, criminally insane. I ruled out imbecilic, not out of arrogance or because I had gotten into St. Luke’s, but merely because my brother would have been nicer to me if I was a retard. I tried reading a chapter on adolescent schizophrenia in a much-thumbed tome from the 1940s by somebody named Dr. Gunderfeldt—“ambivalence,” “apathy,” “cries for reasons known only to self.” It sure sounded like Dr. G. was talking about me. But what sent me into a real panic was looking at Gunderfeldt’s black-and-white photographs of mental patients, identities hidden by a black bar across their eyes. Even though they were masked, I still saw pieces of myself in their grimaced faces.
I was just getting around to the idea that the reason Casper hadn’t drowned me was that he saw himself in me, sensed I was like him, smelled screwiness coming out of my eyes, ears, nose, and throat when my father opened the bedroom door.
“What are you reading?”
There was no time to hide Gunderfeldt between the boxspring and mattress with the beat-off magazines I had inherited from my brother. My father smiled and picked up his old copy of the DSM. “Like father, like son.” Dad didn’t get it. The fact that he was proud of me made it worse. “So, what do you think, Zach?”
“It’s no fun being crazy.”
Though I could not find anything in the indexes of either Gunder-feldt or the DSM-I on “eavesdropping, teenage,” I knew my predilection for putting my ear to locked doors and lingering in the hall outside my parents’ bedroom-cum-office wasn’t healthy. These and the other reference works concerning the norm and deviations from it that sagged my father’s shelves made it clear paranoids go nuts because they can’t stop thinking people are saying bad stuff about them. But I could find nothing about the mental disorders that arise when you think people are thinking worrisome things about you and you find out you were right. Once you’ve thought it, you’re already sick.
Two or three months into the unhappiness of my first year at St. Luke’s, my parents were, as usual, working late in their office bedroom upstairs in the hayloft. The barn, with its cracks and open spaces and uninsulated walls, made it easy to listen in on what transpired between them, especially when you did your homework at the kitchen table directly below their room.
My mother’s typing upstairs provided a staccato backbeat to the Cream album I was listening to on headphones. My parents didn’t like me playing rock ’n’ roll while I did my homework. I always kept one earphone off so I could stash the headphones if I heard them coming downstairs.
I was playing a track called “Sunshine of Your Love.” My father was dictating his run-on thoughts on the effectiveness of niacin on mood. Eric Clapton was singing into my left ear “I’ve been waiting so long/To be where I’m going”—my mother stopped typing.
From above I heard, “Nora, for the love of God, just type what I say.”
“I’m worried about Zach.” Her voice sounded a lot farther away than just upstairs.
“I was absent-minded when I was his age. It’s hormonal.” Jack Bruce’s six-string bass thundered into the left side of my brain. Da-nanh-nah-nah-nahn Duh-nuh-nuh-da-nuhn-nuh.
“I’m worried he’s getting like me.”
“If he was like you, he’d be on honor roll.” My father was trying to joke her out of wherever she was going.
“I mean, like the way I was. He’s drifting away from himself.”
“Our son is not suffering from postpartum depression. It’s a physiological impossibility.”
“You think that’s what I suffered from after all these years?”
“Yes, I do. I think recovery takes longer than anyone realizes.”
“My God,” my mother was almost shouting. “For an intelligent man, you sometimes say stupid things.”
“We both suffer.”
“I’m talking about Zach!” My mother was yelling at him.
“Zach is fine.”
“That’s what you said about me.”
After a long silence, my father sighed like he was surrendering. “I love you.”
“I know that.” She sounded as helpless as I felt.
“What are you thinking?”
“You don’t want to know.” I wanted to know. But instead of pressing my mother for a less oblique answer, my father came downstairs and prescribed himself a shot of Scotch.
Even though my father didn’t say it, he must have been worried about me, too, because he didn’t protest when my mother announced she was going to stay home instead of attending the American College of Neuropsycopharmacologists (ACNP) annual meeting in Puerto Rico with him in December. And a month later, she passed when they were invited to give a paper they had been working on at an international psychiatric convention in Tokyo. That winter, my mother threw herself into my life with the same ardor she had invested in Dad.
Instead of sitting up late at might making him smarter, she focused her skills on my dim bulb, correcting grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, crossing out words with a red pen; she laughingly accused me of inheriting my father’s weakness for the run-on and taught me to share her appreciation for the beauty of a declarative sentence. She did not teach me to love math, but at least she got me to write my numbers neatly enough, so that if I lucked out with the right answer, my teacher would be able to read it.
To combat the driftiness, she moored me to what would become a lifelong habit of making lists; she stood over my shoulder and watched as I wrote out everything I needed to remember each day before I went to bed on those same long legal pads she used to keep herself sane. And in the morning, she observed me closely as I checked my lists against reality to make sure I didn’t stumble upon a new way to mess up as I loaded books, papers, homework, clean gym shorts, etc, etc., etc., into the leather briefcase with my initials embossed with gold on it that she had given me for Christmas. As my mother put it, she was teaching me how to “keep your head screwed on right.”
Yes, my grades improved, but I was still flunking making friends. When I first started at St. Luke’s in the beginning of eighth grade, I was the new boy who forgot everything, i.e., loser on my way to being kicked out. But after my mother screwed my head on straight and my grades rose and teachers singled me out as a sterling example of what hard work could do, I became something even less worthy of friendship. I was now a list-making grind, a suck-up with an old fart briefcase who forces the whole class to learn how to make footnotes, because his mother makes him do it. And then, of course, there was my brother: lean, muscly, older, and cool, with a beard worthy of a five o’clock shadow and track trophies presented and held aloft to thunderous applause in the chapel. To my classmates, it was obvious: “If his own brother won’t say hello to the dork, why should we?”
I tried to convince myself that I didn’t care what the kids at St. Luke’s thought.
But I knew that really wasn’t true after April 4. That’s when Martin Luther King was assassinated. When the headmaster told everybody in chapel that school would be closed for a day of mourning, everybody clapped and cheered. I told myself they weren’t happy he was dead, they were just stupid, white, and happy to have the day off. But even so, just the fact that they clapped seemed so creepy and crazy, I went home feeling like I must have made it all up.
My days were hell, and my nights feverish. After the last list was made, I would pull Gunderfeldt from beneath my bed and ogle the snapshots of looniness with the same look I saw on my brother’s face when I had caught him beating his meat: repulsed, and yet attracted. By now my readings had extended beyond Gunderfeldt and the DSM. But I still could not decide which particular from of mental disorder I suffered from, since the symptoms of all the bad ones included phrases that applied to me: “has difficulty making friends”; “spends inordinate amounts of time doing repetitive and pointless actions” (casting, fly-fishing); “obsessive and compulsive behavior” (my mother had passed that one on to me); “violent fantasies of inflicting harm to himself and others” (every time my brother smirked a no on the drive to school, I thought about grabbing the steering wheel and driving us both into a ditch, just to wipe the smile off his face).
By the spring of eighth grade I didn’t know what ailed me, but I knew I was not well. Desperate to lose at least one of these symptoms, I sought out the friendship of the two most unpopular boys in my class—the Ortley twins. This pair of massive eighth-graders had already had to stay back, and would have been kicked out of school on numerous occasions if their mother had not been related to an aspirin fortune. Flakey with eczema, aggressively fearful due to lethal peanut allergies, I had nothing in common with the identically unpleasant brothers Chas and Peter except that I had a river and they liked to fish.
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