Sometimes I Think About It

by Stephen Elliott

  It was closing in on Halloween, and the weather was getting colder. I kept thinking about suicide, but I didn’t know who to talk to about it. I had a therapist. He was still in training and was therefore affordable, though I never actually paid him—at least, I hadn’t in a while. I had some friends, but I didn’t see them very often, and it didn’t seem appropriate to burden them. What I wanted was a conversation, so I could consider the options, just talk it out:

  “So the thing is, yesterday the sadness came on big, the way a breeze becomes a squall, and I cried for two hours and started looking up methods of suicide.”

  This is the part you’re afraid to talk about.

  “Yes. This is where it gets real: when the depressed person starts figuring out how they are going to do it. I was on Wikipedia, researching the different ways. You know, in the U.S., the most common way to kill yourself is with a gun, but in Hong Kong people jump from the tops of buildings. Very few people jump from bridges, even though it seems romantic. Almost every way of killing yourself is either very painful or you risk surviving with a serious impairment. And, as you know, I don’t have a life that would work very well with a serious impairment. No one would take care of me.”

  The loneliness is part of your justification.

  “Yes, but it’s also true.”

  Go on.

  “There is this one method: It’s called a suicide bag. It’s just a bag with a Velcro strap and a helium container or something. Basically the gas knocks you out, and you suffocate. It’s what right-to-die groups use when helping the terminally ill end their lives. This is clearly the right way to do it, but where do you get one of these bags?”

  That would be the next step. Finding the bag.

  “Yeah. And a canister of helium.”

  The body is a heavy thing. When I think about suicide, I think about the tagline from the director’s cut of the Coen brothers’ first film, Blood Simple: “It’s very hard, and it takes a long time, to kill a man.”

  I called my old friend Chellis, who had been rock climbing for five days in Yosemite with her fiancé. She lived in California, south of San Jose and not far from the coast.

  Sometimes talking to people on the phone can make you even lonelier. It’s like being hungry and smelling a steak.

  Chellis asked who I was hanging out with these days, and I realized I hadn’t been hanging out with anybody.

  She said, “You sound sad. Are you sad?”

  And I said, “A little, but not right now. Earlier, maybe.” Earlier, of course, was when I was writing about killing myself. The whole situation was just shit.

  After thinking about suicide all day, I went out to a club. I put on cartoon-colored tights under my jeans and bicycled into the city with my heels and slip in my backpack. I was supposed to meet Leila at a bar where she was dancing.

  Winter had arrived, and the air was sharp. I went over the Williamsburg Bridge, which is peaceful after 10 on a weeknight, and I sliced through the traffic on the Lower East Side. I sent Leila a text saying that I was nearby. She told me not to arrive before 11:15, and to bring her a Red Bull energy drink.

  I went into a convenience store and bought a Red Bull, and at exactly 11:15 I entered the club. Leila was wearing boots and knee-high black stockings and high-waisted, lacy underwear. We stood there awkwardly, my fingers occasionally brushing against her leg or ass cheek. The place was empty and dark, with a cement floor. The event organizer was walking around in white face paint and black lipstick and a black sweater. I had my girlie clothes in my bag, but I didn’t see any point in putting them on. Leila said she wished she had her equipment—a flogger or a cane. I said, “Why don’t you just use your hands? It’s the same thing, really.”

  She introduced me to her boyfriend, and we chatted for a minute about James Franco, who was producing a documentary about Kink.com. I’d introduced Franco to Kink.com, I said; he was also playing me in a movie based on my memoir. It was all true, but I immediately wished I hadn’t said it. Leila’s boyfriend didn’t seem to care. He just walked away. I felt like a comedian doing a set while the audience eats dinner. Leila asked me how old I was, and I told her forty-two, her age inverted. She said I looked good. She said I was so handsome, which was amazing to hear. She smelled like flowers. I was sure she was on some kind of drug, and I hoped it wouldn’t wear off too soon, but then she walked away and climbed the small stage and started dancing.

  While she danced, I stuffed five dollars into her underwear. She smiled.

  I’d been in this situation before. Sometimes it was just a matter of waiting someone out—in this case, her boyfriend. He was so pretty in his torn clothes: tall and skinny, with a flap of blond hair covering his eyes. She was obviously in love with him. It was hard to tell if he cared about her at all. It wasn’t going to end well for them, but I was doing fine, and happy to be out of the house.

  I got distracted, and when I looked up, Leila was gone. After maybe twenty minutes, I texted her, and she said she was outside; she had to take a phone call from a director.

  But I’m a director, I thought, and I’m right here.

  Finally she came back. She stumbled slightly, leaning in close to me, and the five dollars I’d stuffed into her underwear fell out. I bent down to pick it up. She didn’t notice.

  “Hold on,” she said, and went to get herself another whiskey. I saw her looking around for something. She stayed gone so long that I put the five dollars in my pocket.

  Leila came back and sat next to me. I put my hand on her knee, and we talked about sex. I told her I didn’t like sex. She asked if I was a submissive asexual. Yes, I said, but I’m full of desire. It must be hard, she said, to be male and submissive. I shrugged.

  At 12:50, I told Leila I was leaving. Her boyfriend was already gone. She hugged me, and I handed her the Red Bull. “It’s too late to be drinking Red Bull,” I said, and she laughed.

  I bicycled home along Second Avenue, past the all-Asian dungeon, and took the Manhattan Bridge instead of the Williamsburg. It was completely empty on the cycling path, and the whoosh of cars and trains felt calming. The weather was perfect.

  In my apartment I thought about masturbating, but I didn’t. I thought about writing down everything that had just happened. I was certain there was meaning in the five dollars I’d given Leila that had come back to me. It was funny but poignant. It also felt like theft. Leila didn’t have any money. She was just a kid in her twenties getting high and dancing and enjoying life in the city. She had big plans for herself. She drank too much, but then, every body has a different tolerance. Maybe she drank just the right amount.

  I woke in the morning and started writing. I kept circling around the meaning of the five dollars, coming back to it again and again. In the end maybe it signified nothing.

  Having no one to talk to, I went on talking to myself.

  “Yesterday I thought, I’m not sad anymore.”

  How’d that come about?

  “It had been almost a week since I’d felt really sad. I thought, I’m not clinically sad, but objectively I don’t know that my life is worth living. Like, on Tuesday I felt better. And on Wednesday I woke with this headache, but it was OK. I get headaches sometimes. People say they’re migraines, but I think they might be sinus related. I’ve been getting them for years. But then today it was Monday again, and I thought about suicide. It’s always like this: first the thought, then the sad feelings. Am I making myself sad, or am I realizing that I was already sad? That’s an important distinction.”

  Do you think this is related to the videos you’ve been watching? An overexposure to violence?

  “I think it might have started there, but I’m not doing that as much anymore. I’m starting to think the videos are just a wall I am trying to maintain against these other thoughts. It’s like being in a city under siege: There’s Genghis Khan and his army outside the city, and there you are, holed up inside, slowly starving to death as the seasons change. Eventually you just want t
o open the gates to the Mongol hordes and let them slaughter every body. It’s going to happen eventually.”

  So you’re saying addiction is like a wall surrounding a great city?

  “I don’t know what addiction is, but I know that what lies beyond it is unspeakable.”

  Maybe you should go to an NA or AA meeting.

  “Yesterday I thought about my housemate from when I was in graduate school. I was shooting heroin in that house, and I overdosed, and the firemen came and carried me down three flights of stairs. When they asked for my parents’ contact information, I had just enough presence of mind not to tell them how to reach my father. An accidental overdose would only have confirmed everything he wanted to believe about me. He could have told everyone about his rotten junkie son.”

  You were talking about your housemate.

  “Yeah, the guy across the hall: I remember only one conversation I had with him. It was about a cheap sushi place on Clark Street. We both wondered how they served such good sushi so inexpensively. We decided it was because they were doing a high-volume business. I never saw him talk to anyone else. He studied all the time. He was from China, I think. He lived an austere, lonely life. Or maybe none of that is true. Maybe I’ve just created a story about him. But even if it isn’t true of him, there are people who are lonelier than I am—or just as lonely. People whose lives are harder. What’s so special about my sadness?”

  Why is it so important that your sadness be special?

  My father was my age when he quit writing. He went into real estate and did pretty well.

  “Writing is hard,” he said to me once. “Any idiot can make a million dollars in real estate.”

  I wanted to talk to him now about his decision to stop writing, but our situations weren’t the same: My father never had any success as a writer, even though he was a professional for years. My father wasn’t walking away from anything. Still, he had some knowledge of the struggle. He’d lost hope, and then he’d made a change. Which isn’t to say he wasn’t a miserable person. He had a violent temper, and he would weep like rain. But our parents know something. I’m sure of it.

  My father and I hadn’t talked in years. The last time I’d seen him, we’d discussed real estate. I didn’t want to talk about real estate. I wanted to talk about suicide.

  “Yesterday I met Angela and we went to see Kill the Messenger, starring Jeremy Renner, about the journalist who uncovered how the CIA smuggled cocaine in order to fund a war in Nicaragua in the 1980s. The whole thing was terrible.”

  Ronald Reagan was a fucking asshole.

  “The worst. After the reporter broke the story, the CIA started a smear campaign against him. He was discredited and never able to work as a journalist again. In 2004 he committed suicide, though by then evidence had been released essentially proving that all of his articles were true. But the movie itself isn’t very good. His character is the only real person in it. There’s mention of an ex-girlfriend who committed suicide, but nobody else has an interior life, except as it relates to him.”

  What did you do after the movie?

  “We walked down Metropolitan to the water, in front of the new buildings, and we looked across to Manhattan as the sun dipped below the horizon. It was the golden hour and very beautiful. The river might as well have been a painting. The breeze wasn’t strong, but it was cold. I told Angela that I’d been sad. ‘Don’t be sad,’ she said, as if it were a choice. She pointed out all of my achievements, which sound better than they are: Like, I’ve made two movies, but they didn’t do very well, and I doubt I could raise money for another. And I’ve written seven books, but I don’t feel capable of an eighth. And, honestly, where are all my friends?”

  I’m here.

  “You’re a figment. You’re not even a single person. You represent a variety of people I wish I could talk to. In truth, you’re not even that. You’re just a stand-in for an antagonist, except real antagonists have their own wants and things they’re willing to do to get them.”

  You’re reading too much into everything, treating every molecule of oxygen like a fortune cookie.

  “Anyway, Angela and I walked along the water, and after a bit she had to go home. Every Sunday she has dinner with her family. I took my bicycle on the train and went over to a friend’s to watch the Giants–Eagles game. They’d made salad and chili and cornbread. It was fine. I stayed until eleven at night and then headed home. I thought I was feeling OK, but on the way I started to think about the suicide bags.”

  I can’t keep having this conversation.

  In December I told my therapist I was thinking about suicide.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “Quite a bit,” I said. “But not seriously.”

  He gave me his cell phone number and told me to use it only in an emergency. Then he asked me to sign a “no-harm agreement” and list a friend I could talk to. “Have you thought about how you would do it?”

  “I’d use an exit bag. But I don’t know how to get one.”

  “So you’ve looked into it.”

  Yes, I said, but just out of curiosity. The bags weren’t readily available. There was one company selling an obvious scam version that wouldn’t work.

  “Maybe you should go to the hospital,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I’m feeling better.” I’d read about the strain it puts on a therapist when a client becomes suicidal, and I apologized to him for that. Of course he said I didn’t have to apologize.

  I was hoping he wouldn’t have me hospitalized. I felt pretty sure he wouldn’t.

  And in the days after that, I began to feel much better.

  I told my friend Alex I had listed her name on the care document my therapist had asked me to sign. She knew right away what that meant.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know.”

  Alex is a good friend but not my closest friend. The others, though, I couldn’t use. Ben and Kay and Nick have been through this with me before. And though they would all have said without hesitation that they were willing to go through it again, I didn’t think that was quite true. Would anyone ever come out and say, I’m weak from carrying you all these years?

  Over the next couple of months I wrote a television pilot about the early days of fetish porn on the Internet. It wasn’t particularly good, but it wasn’t terrible either. At least I was writing again.

  I attended a party in Boerum Hill with a friend who had created a television series that was now in its third season. He’d liked my pilot script and had forwarded it to his manager. I was also with an editor of a literary magazine. When I told her that my publisher wanted to bring out my essay collection, she said what a great press they were. Then I told her how much money they’d offered me.

  “You can’t sell your work for that little,” she said.

  I didn’t want to talk to her after that. When she decided to leave early, I didn’t try to talk her out of it. I stayed at the party and talked to people who were young and ambitious and familiar with the web magazine I’d launched more than five years ago.

  I had been doing pretty well for a month or two, but I still felt fragile, like a glass that has been dropped but doesn’t appear to be broken.

  I’ve heard that a goal without a plan is just a wish.

  Since I started this essay, I have found a relationship of sorts and taken a job with a magazine that some friends started. The difference between a happy ending and an unhappy ending is simply the place you decide to stop telling your story.

  When you come out of a depression, it’s hard to recognize yourself. You go to sleep one person and wake up someone else. Where did the depression come from? When will it be back?

  For almost a year I’d been unable to write much of anything. I’d barely left my apartment. I’d often gone a week at a time without any human contact other than by phone. When I did write, I could document only the misery. But there’s some value in what I produced, simply because it was wri
tten while I was inside the tunnel. Anybody who has been through that tunnel knows it’s very hard to take a picture in the darkness.

  It’s the end of winter now. Spring is the best season, no matter where you are.

  When you’re so depressed you want to die, it’s hard to muster the energy to kill yourself. Then, when you start to feel better, you have the energy, but you no longer have the desire. Maybe this is a survival mechanism. Who knows? All I know is I feel better now. I feel quite a bit better.

  —New York, 2015

  An Interview with My Father

  You were born on kind of the tail end of my writing career, when I started investing in real estate in Sheffield. We were doing wonderful business. I would take big old houses, convert them to apartments, and sell them to investors, making a fortune. Then the Labor Party came to power. We couldn’t make ends meet, so we decided to go back to America. I went back ahead of you and your mother and sister. In her letters, your mother wrote that whenever you got caught doing something, you would say, “Daddy did it,” even though I was thousands of miles away.

  I went back to live with my parents in Chicago in a two-bedroom apartment. To save enough money to bring you all over, I went without a car. I had a hard job as a warehouse manager in a place where the elevator didn’t work. I’d come home so tired, weeping from overwork, but I was doing it to bring you over because I missed you desperately.

  Then, when I had sufficient work, we started over again in America.

  I was starting to build my real estate empire again. I bought a three-flat on Albion, where we moved to. Your mother didn’t like living with my mother. Two women cannot share a kitchen.

  We sold the three-flat, then got a six-flat. Sold that for a profit. I was still working as a driver for the water department. That was a good job. From the thirteen apartments I went to twenty-six apartments. Then I turned those over for a profit.

  After I sold the twenty-six apartments, I got apartments on the South Side and held those for quite a while. We were living on Coyle Avenue, which is where we had all our bad luck.