by Rob Roberge
You get up. You walk through the rooms, still filled with packed boxes against the walls and hastily arranged furniture. You walk out onto the porch. There’s a fog coming off the ocean, ten blocks south, and the air smells like salt and your skin beads with moisture as you sit on the porch under the orange glow of the streetlight on your corner.
You think: Ten years ago I was sleeping in my car.
You feel like Gatsby. You own a house. You are clean and sober. There are no collection agencies after you. You don’t have to be afraid of a cop if you walk past one—although you still are afraid of cops. You have a career. You teach college classes. You are happily married.
Ten years ago if someone had told you that you would be sitting on this porch, you would never have believed them. You don’t even recognize your own life.
You smell the air. The streetlight hums. You stay where you are. On, you remind yourself, your porch.
—
2013: Your parents will not talk about either your addictions or your mental illness, and haven’t in more than twenty years. They seem ashamed that you’re an addict. You don’t really know your mother’s reasons and you never will. Your father was a narcotics officer and must be embarrassed that his son fell in with drugs.
But their silence about your bipolar bothers you more.
When you have had five episodes this year, you decide to try again and talk to your parents about your brain. When your father asks you how you’ve been, you answer honestly and tell him you’ve been having some trouble with your bipolar. He doesn’t say anything. When you try telling your mother, you are even more honest, telling her you’ve had a really tough year and that you’ve had “a couple” of manic episodes. You are careful to not say the word psychotic. She changes the subject.
Your parents are good people. They are generous. They have constantly helped you, in more ways than you can count. And where they haven’t helped, they have done their best. You don’t hold any anger toward them. You defend them to friends who are really blunt and harsh when they talk about how your parents ignore something so central to your existence.
You also make apologies to yourself for them. If they knew how bad it could be—if you told them everything—they would have to talk about it. They love you. They give a shit. But the way they handle it becomes a gulf between you.
You know you’re done talking about it with them. It’s not something they want to hear, and it’s no longer something you will try to talk about.
—
1993: You and Gayle have been living together about six months when she complains about how messy you are. You don’t think you’re that messy, maybe a little cluttered, but you come from two generations of people who never throw shit away. There’s your hoarder grandmother, of course. And your parents’ house, Gayle will later see, is an embarrassing mess. When she does see their house, she will actually tell you that you are surprisingly neat, given what you’ve come from.
But this day, she says, “You have to be neater. I like my house the way I like it.”
You remind yourself that Gayle has never had a roommate. She lived at home during college and has lived alone her whole time in grad school. You have had more than fifty roommates, not counting the tweakers in the commune in Winston-Salem. You think about all the slobs you’ve lived with, the addicts and thieves and people whose lives were falling apart around them. You are amazed at her life. She has a bank account and pays bills on time. She’s organized. Everything has a place. She doesn’t leave her books all over, several at a time, their spines cracked on every flat surface.
“I’ve lived with a lot of people,” you tell her. “Really. I’m not that bad a person to live with.”
But you are afraid maybe you will be too tough to live with. And she will want you gone. You love her and she feels like your last chance. You tell her you’ll try to be better.
—
2007: Your hands grow sore from massaging Gayle every night, but you have run out of other ideas. Nothing works. At this point, you are only weeks away from starting to steal her pain medication. Within the last year, she has tried acupuncture, Ayurveda healing, various exercises; she has joined support groups only to find that the people in support groups drove her crazy and to realize that she didn’t want to live a life defined by her illness. She can no longer lift weights. She can no longer do any exercise that breaks down her muscles or she goes into a pain flare that puts her in total agony from head to toe. The only thing that helps is swimming in a heated pool.
There is no way you can afford a heated pool in Los Angeles County, so you end up moving to Desert Hot Springs, three hours from your friends. Three hours from your work and your life—from any readings or shows or events in LA. It’s a town of twenty-five thousand people. You have never lived anywhere with fewer than half a million people since leaving home at eighteen, except when you were alone in your grandmother’s hoarder house. You love cities. But this is for your wife. You love her. You think of all she’s done for you over the years. You’re no cakewalk, with your depression and brain. Marriage is a partnership. Plus, if this makes her well, it’s a choice you would make a hundred times out of a hundred.
So you don’t think twice about leaving Long Beach. Maybe you should, but you don’t. You find a house the first day you look in Desert Hot Springs. You are leaving a 1912 Arts and Crafts bungalow that you two have restored, a home that you both love, for a cookie-cutter house that you can’t stand the sight of.
But you don’t really think much about this. You don’t even consider that it could send you into an unfixable depression. Instead, you think that this might put Gayle in remission. This could be what cures her. Anything is worth that.
You move in October, months after you have already relapsed, though Gayle is unaware of this. You surprise yourself twice, if only because you don’t tend to cry over things:
You cry when you take a last look at the interior of your Long Beach house.
And you wake up teary-eyed the next day in the new house, wondering what you have done to end up there.
—
EARLY 1990S: You will lie to your parents that you need money for your student loans or your rent, or for some collection agency that’s after you—you forget. The money is really for your brain meds that you can’t afford because you don’t have insurance. You feel bad for lying to them, but you think there’s no way to be sure they would have given you the money for the meds (looking back, they probably would have), and you definitely need them, as you have had a couple of psychotic breaks and you are afraid of your brain.
Already you are sick of being the science experiment you will be for the rest of your life. The drugs start with small dosages and build up to the dosage they think may work. Then the drugs make you fat or stupid or they kill your cock, or they simply don’t work, and you have to scale back on the ones that don’t work and start the process over with some new drug.
—
2006: Your band, the Urinals, is opening for Yo La Tengo at the Fillmore in San Francisco. You can’t believe it. Fifteen years ago, your life was in a shambles. Even ten years ago, sober, you’d given up on playing music with other people. This moment feels miraculous.
You know yourself. You know that you spend far too much of your time regretting your past or worrying about your future. You tell yourself, all night long, to pay attention. To appreciate this.
You are standing under the same chandelier that Jimi Hendrix stood under. On the same stage that Janis Joplin sang on. Pay attention, you tell yourself.
When Yo La Tengo has your band join them for the encore, you look out at 1,400 people dancing. Remember this, you tell yourself. Stay in this moment as long as you can.
—
1972: Your father is a pharmacist at Fairfield Hills State Hospital and for some reason he has taken you to work. You’re bored. You end up crawling around on the floor and take a red pill that looks like candy. Before too long, you feel better than yo
u ever have. Your brain and body float. It’s like gravity has been defeated. You curl up in a blissed-out ball in the back corner of the pharmacy.
Another pharmacist—one who insists you call him Uncle Phil—finds you on the floor. You can barely make out words and images, but you are as happy as you have ever been. Everyone around you seems so concerned and you wonder why they couldn’t have just left you where you were, feeling so good.
2013: You don’t remember how you get a lot of your scars. You wake up for years from drunken and drugged blackouts with deep bruises and gashes and cuts. Friends tell you how you got some of them. Others still remain a mystery. You have told a lie about almost every one of them—whether you remember how you got them or not—to friends, to people at parties and in bars, to lovers who see you naked. Sometimes you tell the truth. Someone will ask about one of your scars and you will say you have no idea where it came from, and you feel better for having told the truth, but worse and deeply regretful that it is the truth. That you have wasted so many years of your life. That for years you only knew what you had done the night before because a friend or lover would tell you.
You find scars—yours or anyone else’s—beautiful. One of your biggest and, you think, prettiest scars cuts across three inches on your left calf. This one you get accidentally while using a metal saw on a construction/destruction site when you work labor-pool jobs in Florida. It is seven in the morning. The day’s yet to get brutally hot, though it’s still so humid it feels like you’re breathing through a damp blanket. You’re drunk and you slice the jigsaw with the metal cutting blade across your calf.
There’s a newer scar—a deep white line, red at its edges. You know how you got it, but have only told your best friend, Gina.
It’s from swinging a heavy twelve-inch kitchen knife aimed at your left knuckle. You miss slightly, and the scar sits about a centimeter closer to the wrist than you’d expected. You do this in 2013. You easily could have severed a tendon that would seriously fuck up your ability to play guitar—one of the most important things in your life. You are totally sober. It’s four and a half years since your relapse. You haven’t been sleeping much for weeks, but you are not in an episode. You are not hearing voices. You are not seeing things. You have no idea why you do this.
You are still, for some reason, a danger to yourself at times. You are still capable of frightening yourself. After the knife hits, you are calm and it feels good as you bleed steadily onto the wood floor.
You think about Vic Chesnutt and his muscle relaxants and his conversation with Terry Gross. You think of all the times you have tried to kill yourself and that you were probably, in the end, chicken. But so was he and he finally did it. Who says you won’t get there too? You’re afraid of your own brain—but mostly you’re afraid of the absence of that fear, because when it’s gone and you’re feeling in control, that’s when you’re in trouble.
For years you will wonder why you didn’t kill yourself in your lowest, most desperate moments, and the best answer you come up with is: I don’t know. This scares you and makes you wonder if you’ll have a better answer if a next time comes around. Maybe you just got lucky. Maybe it’s just that all living things have a drive to live. To adapt. From bacteria to viruses. Maybe you’re no different. But it must be something more. You don’t want to kill yourself now. Now you could make a list of things to live for. But what about the next time it gets unrelenting and you don’t have that list, or the list is empty or meaningless? Then what? You need a better answer—that much you know. This part of the story is never over. You never know when or if you’ll go back to that place again.
—
SPRING 1990: Even though you hate the bipolar meds, what you do to self-medicate is working less and less. Maybe not at all. Sometimes you can still stay up three or four days and nights writing or fucking or playing guitar, but less often than before. Various meds don’t work. Some make you crazier. Some, when they do work, have terrible side effects.
Most times, you want to kill yourself—you think seriously, sometimes every night on the way home, about driving off the bridge from Turtle Bay in Sarasota, Florida, where you work. You frequently call in sick to work. You stay in bed for a week. You end up quitting a lot of jobs because you can’t work steady hours, and have to start getting up at—or staying up until—five in the morning to work the labor pool. You try to find a new job, but it’s becoming harder and harder to explain why a bright, educated person like you has no references or job history from the last two years.
Generally, men and women about five years older than you interview you for a job. They say things like, “And why do you want to work at TGI Fridays?”
And you think about saying that your last job wasn’t humiliating enough and that you aren’t thinking nearly often enough about killing yourself and you think working at TGI Fridays might push you over the edge. Instead you say nothing. Or you lie.
Most afternoons you wake up to friends’ phone calls telling you what you did the night before. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s horrifying and embarrassing. Sometimes it’s frightening and you wonder how you survive these nights. One afternoon, the night after your band plays a show at some enormous loft that used to be a sewing-machine factory, you wake up unable to form most words. The ones you can say are incredibly slow, and inside your head it sounds like an air-raid siren is going off six inches from your ear. Your elbows are bloody and swollen and your clothes are covered in solid crusty puke. When you smell yourself, you throw up on the floor.
“You’re cleaning that up,” your roommate Mel says.
You gently touch the back of your head and your hair is bunched and hard with blood and you wince when you touch the bare, bloodied skin. You close your eyes and see stars.
—
2010: An autopsy conducted on the brain of Owen Thomas, a twenty-one-year-old junior lineman at the University of Pennsylvania who committed suicide, showed early stages of CTE, making him the second-youngest person to be diagnosed with the condition.
—
1986: You have just come back from Holland and you want, desperately, to return. You have hated most of the years of your life and it is the only place you have ever felt at home. You tell your parents you are taking a semester off and going back to Amsterdam.
Your mother says they will not help you with tuition if you go now and try to come back in the fall. You have taken out a ton of student loans, but they have cosigned for some of them and they are paying a fair amount of your tuition. You like college. You cave in and go back to school.
But you totally fuck off. You rarely go to class. In Holland, you discovered opiates and now spend three or four months nodding off on your couch or your dealer’s. One of the only things you will remember about this semester is being terribly dopesick when the Challenger explodes in the sky. One minute you are watching it explode, the next minute you are puking and shitting in your bathroom, where you spend hours.
You drink, you fuck, you get loaded and high all semester. Late in the term, you go to your professors and say you’ve been hospitalized, that your grandmother has died. You tell one of them that your mother has died and you feel awful for even saying it, but it works.
Some of them let you slide. They give you withdraws. One gives you an F. Another gives you some lousy grade. They all seem to think you’re lying but don’t seem to care.
Because your parents are on the loan and are paying a lot of your tuition, your grades get sent to their address. For years you will tell people that you had a 0.85 semester that spring.
Your father says, “Well, you wanted to take a semester off and your mother wanted you to stay in school. It looks like you both got your wish.”
Your friends will hear about your 0.85 semester. Many think you are making this up. That you are full of shit.
Then, in 2007, you are hired to teach at a university that requires your undergraduate transcripts. To your amazement, it turns out that in the spring o
f 1986, you had a 0.57 semester. Even worse than you remember.
—
2013: A friend tells you that in twenty-three of the last twenty-seven ring deaths in professional boxing, the father was the cornerman.
It makes sense. A fighter in trouble would never quit on his father—no matter what kind of relationship they had.
And a fighter unable to protect himself is too far gone. By the time a punch can kill you, you’re not even conscious enough to quit. The fighter is helpless. Only the cornerman throwing in the towel can save him.
Twenty-three fathers didn’t throw that towel.
—
SUMMER 1979: In what is probably your third concussion, you are knocked out in the first half of a basketball game at summer camp. You are playing one of your best games. You have more than twenty points in the first half—most in the first quarter, and when they start doubling you, you’re getting assists by the bushel. On a steal and fast break, you go up against Malcolm. He has nicknamed you “Tom Pitty-Patty” because out of uniform, you mostly wear your Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers T-shirt from the Damn the Torpedoes tour. You’re one of the only white kids at the camp and, not surprisingly, Tom Petty is not well known among the other campers, who tend to sport Earth, Wind & Fire and Ohio Players shirts and have posters of Isaac Hayes’s glistening bald head on the walls and doors of their dorm rooms. You’ve known Malcolm for years—he’s taken a liking to you since the fourth grade, the first time you met in a summer league camp. He protects you from other kids.
That doesn’t mean, however, that he’s going to let you score some easy layup over him. It’s 1979. Coaches at this camp take the “no layup” rule seriously. If you don’t throw a hard foul on a player when he’s close to the hoop, you’re going to end up yanked and screamed at by the coach.
You’re not thinking of any of this. You’re only thinking that you’re in a sick zone, that it seems like the hoop’s as big as a swimming pool and you can guess what everyone else on the court is going to do.