by Rob Roberge
In the picture, you have a three- or four-year-old boy on your shoulders. You don’t remember who he was, how he was related to you or anyone else in the photo, but you remember liking the kid. You are smiling—as are your mother and father and sister and an old woman named Hazel who you think is your cousin’s grandmother. Everyone seems to be having a good time.
Later that day, when the park is closed and you are in the parking lot walking toward your car, you must say something that pisses your mother off.
She says, “You little son of a bitch,” and takes a backhanded swing at your head. You are, at this point, an athlete. Quick. Too quick for her as you duck beneath her swing.
You have no idea when the picture was taken or why anyone was smiling.
You also have no idea what you did to set off your mother, but you figure it is your fault.
You will never forget the look of hatred in your mother’s eyes. She later says she’s glad that you were too quick to be hit, but you don’t care so much about whether she hit you or not. You remember that look.
—
2013: After only one really bad psychotic episode in nineteen years, you have five in eight weeks in the spring your fourth book comes out.
It really starts the previous July, when you are having fifteen- and twenty- (and one epic seventy-two-) hour manic phases while finishing your new book. You never really sleep very well again after that summer, averaging maybe four or five hours a night, and start cycling in and out of manic episodes and end up depressed enough that you go days forgetting to eat.
On the good side, you lose thirty-plus pounds, and you get your junkie body back without actually having to be a junkie. Your body has only ever looked decent to you if you were using heavily, or when you were doing triathlons for a few years. You only like the way you look when you are treating yourself very well or very poorly.
After seven months without much sleep, things get worse quickly.
After the AWP conference in Boston in early March, you have a thirteen-day stretch where you get two hours max a night, and nothing at all on some. You start having psychotic episodes in clusters.
The first happens on April 1 at the University of Connecticut. You and Gina, who edited your new novel, are doing a gig where you’re supposed to give a reading and be guests in a class talking about the writing and editing process. They pay you a decent amount of money to show up and read and not sell books and do your dog and pony show for the students, who seem to enjoy it. You get put up in the hotel on campus. The faculty takes you out to dinner. There are worse ways to spend a couple of nights.
The last night you are on campus, Gina is in your room, watching Dig, a documentary about the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols. You feel tired and catch yourself falling asleep.
The next—and last—thing you remember is that your legs are restless, very restless. It’s worse than the normal leg trouble from your brain stabilizers. This restlessness happens sometimes when you sleep. But it usually happens long after you’ve been asleep and you wake up shaking and sweating. This time all you will remember is that you are kicking your legs and you can’t seem to get comfortable.
Gina asks if you are all right and you are embarrassed and angry at yourself and say, “This always fucking happens to me in new places.” And then, you are gone.
You will not remember the next several hours. Gina will tell you about them.
Apparently, you are answering interview questions. But no one is interviewing you. Gina is there, listening to you going on answering questions—questions that, if your answers are any indication, are about music. She says the answers are almost coherent—they seem to gesture at context but don’t really have any. Later, you are enormously grateful that Gina has seen this kind of episode. That she grew up with a father who had them. That she understands what is happening. Someone else might have called a hospital and you would have been locked up. Few things are worse than that.
Later, you try to go out for a cigarette and she will not let you leave your room. Again, you will not remember this.
You start to come around six or seven hours into the episode. You don’t remember anything after your legs being restless, but now you are answering questions that Gina hasn’t asked you but you think she has.
She later tells you that she made sure you were all right, relatively speaking, and that she drifted asleep and woke up off and on, while you sat at the desk, talking to yourself and unable to get your headphones working with any consistency. She woke up often to check on you, and you didn’t sleep all night long.
It’s morning by the time you hear yourself answering what you think is a question she has asked, and this time you catch yourself.
You say, “You didn’t say anything to me, did you?”
She’s very calm. She tells you, no, she didn’t, but that everything’s okay.
You walk into the bathroom.
You walk back out and ask, “Why is the coffee table in the bathroom?”
“You put it there,” she says. “I didn’t want to interfere unless you were doing something dangerous.”
You are slowly coming back to yourself. You have lost hours. You have no idea what you may have said. You are horrified at how broken you have shown yourself to be—even to your closest friend.
You apologize, repeatedly.
And she tells you, repeatedly, that there’s nothing to apologize for.
Eventually, you must seem to not be a danger to yourself, because she lets you go out for a cigarette. While you brace yourself against the predawn cold in this state where you were born, you start to shake with fear and the realization that this episode could have hit during your reading. At dinner with the faculty. In the Q & A and lecture with the students.
You best friend just saw that you are not always in control of your brain, and that frightens and embarrasses you. The fact is, there is no way this could have been anything but worse. You are horrified that Gina saw you like this. And you are lucky.
—
1935: The Dutch painter and draftsman Herman Kruyder kills himself in a psychiatric hospital.
—
2008: You’re deep in your opiate relapse and you are stealing your wife’s pain pills and you haven’t hated yourself this much in years. Just as the lousy person you were came back when you relapsed, so too does your deep self-loathing. What kind of man steals his sick wife’s pain pills?
It feels like you have no control over who you are these days. You’ve tried to quit several times since you relapsed. You still are trying to hide it, but you are falling asleep mid-sentence and always nodding off in front of people. You think you’re pulling it off much better than you actually are. You’ve made it through dopesickness and quit at least four times in the four or five months you’ve been using. But your shame has kept you from going to meetings, and you can’t stay clean no matter how hard you try.
One night, while your wife is teaching an evening class, you look every place you can to find some of her OxyContin, but you can’t find any. You look through drawers in the bedroom, inside her vanity and her night table. You’re starting to get sick. You’re desperate to get high. You can’t stand what you’re doing, but it’s like it has a momentum of its own and you can’t stop yourself.
Finally, tearing into her office drawers, you find four OxyContin deep in the back of one of the drawers. At first, you take only two, trying to leave her with some, but you tell yourself she must have some on her and within the hour, you take the other two.
She gets home from work around eleven. You are nodding out at your keyboard. You’re supposed to be writing, but you are doing very little of that. You’re barely keeping up with a half-assed version of yourself at work. She goes upstairs. You hear her opening a drawer. Then another.
“Fuck,” she says.
“What?” you say, though you already know what she’s looking for.
“I could have sworn I had some of my pills in my desk.
”
“Are you sure you didn’t take them?” you say. You feel your stomach drop. You’ve stolen medication she needs.
Who could look at you and call you a good person? You have a history of being harder on yourself than others are on you. But not this time. This time you’re an asshole.
She is frantic. “I was sure I had them.”
“Sometimes you take them at night when you’re on Ambien,” you say. Which is true, in the strictest sense. This statement itself is not a lie. But it’s not true in this case.
You say, “Are you sure they were in the desk?”
“I thought they were.”
And you help her look. And you think of the saying that a junkie will steal your shoes and then help you look for them. You are a cliché. You are worse than a cliché for your wife. You are someone who hurts her. You are letting her feel terrible pain. What kind of person are you?
—
EARLY 1971: Your hoarding grandmother, who is taking care of you because you are very sick and both of your parents have to work, makes you eat Vicks VapoRub. Your fever is so high that you are hallucinating that there are worms coming out of the paint on your bedroom wall. A hundred and four degrees at its peak. You are five years old. When your mother leaves for work, your fever is a hundred and two. Looking back, you think that, as a nurse, if she’d known your temperature was going to hit a hundred and four and you were seeing worms, she would have taken you to the hospital.
But your grandmother has enormous faith in the healing powers of Vicks VapoRub, and reasons that if it’s so good to breathe in or apply topically, it must be even better if consumed. She makes you swallow three tablespoons of the thick menthol petroleum jelly. The menthol, so close to your nose, makes your eyes tear. Your tongue and throat begin to burn and you can feel it scorch a path to your stomach. Your head still feels like it’s on fire from your fever. You would still be seeing worms coming out of the walls if you weren’t looking at your thighs, doubled over in pain as your stomach burns like those fireball candies you put on your tongue. Only now the fireball is inside you and it feels as big as a soccer ball. You are in agony for another hour. Behind your closed hot eyes, you hallucinate wild colorful patterns that years later you will be reminded of when you see the psychedelic backdrops the Velvet Underground played in front of. Colorful circles are popping behind your eyes for three or four hours. Your grandmother, to her credit, does keep putting ice packs on your head and sits with you. She thinks she is helping, even when she isn’t.
By the time your mother is home from work, you are no longer hallucinating and your fever is down to one hundred and two again. Your stomach is killing you and you throw up the Campbell’s Chicken & Stars your mother heats for you, tasting hot slimy menthol when it comes up. Your grandmother never mentions what she has done. You have no idea it is wrong, so you don’t bring it up either. Your mother never finds out.
This story is another one you will tell for years. Every friend and girlfriend is amazed. Some say you could have died. All of them think your grandmother was crazy. A couple of them don’t believe you.
You start to wonder if maybe you’re remembering it wrong. She was crazy. She filled you and your sister with all kinds of foul-smelling and -tasting things like castor oil, and she would give you a shot of Scotch when you had a mild cold, which you loved. Vicks VapoRub and Scotch were your grandmother’s cure-alls.
Your sister is your fact-checker for your childhood. Whenever you wonder if something really happened, you call her and ask. Most times it did. Sometimes you are wrong.
You ask her, “Did Grandma Ament ever make me eat Vicks VapoRub?”
“Twice,” she says.
“Not just that one time when I was so sick I was seeing shit?”
“Once when you had the flu,” she says. “I was twelve. I told her not to and she slurred some drunk anger at me.”
“Twice?” you say.
“If I’d known how bad it was for you, I would have tried harder to stop her,” your sister says.
“That’s like eating a fistful of Vaseline,” you say. “That can kill somebody.”
You sister sounds defensive. “I didn’t know.”
“I’m not blaming you,” you say. “I’m just amazed I remembered it right.”
—
2013: It’s only a month after your total break from reality in the Connecticut hotel room with Gina. You are flying home from the New York leg of your book tour. The tour is going great, but you haven’t been sleeping much and in the cab on the way to the airport, you start hearing voices. You are having the start of a psychotic episode at, of all the terrible places this could happen, LaGuardia Airport. There are thousands of people around and you are having auditory and visual hallucinations. You are scared shitless to get on a plane in this condition. You think that you can’t take much more of this and you are reminded of Virginia Woolf’s last letter to her husband, which began: “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again…” You wonder if your brain is ever going to fully bounce back this time. Every time you go crazy, it seems to take longer and longer to feel like you can trust your brain again.
People move around you in bovine scrums. You are scared. There are the real voices of the people around you. There is the PA system. And there are voices in your head. And you don’t know where one of them begins and another leaves off. It’s three hours until your flight. You are afraid to go through security like this. You will be acting crazy. Crazy people are carted away at airport security lines.
You walk out to the curb and light a cigarette and take a benzo and the Abilify you keep only for the start of a full-blown psychotic episode. The good thing about this medication is that it does help stop an episode. The bad part is that it tends to knock you out cold. You take your luggage and guitar and you lie down in the quietest corner you can find. Many hours later, you wake up on a floor in LaGuardia and realize you missed your flight and you are told that you will end up spending another twenty-one hours at the airport before you can get another flight home.
You go on Facebook and ask if any of your New York friends can put you up for the night. Soon, some old friends you would be excited to see under other circumstances volunteer. You tell them you accidentally missed your flight. You don’t mention that you are afraid you are losing your mind.
—
1987: You are home visiting your parents when their phone rings.
You say hello and on the other end, Grandma Ament drunkenly slurs, “You never loved me. No one ever loved me.”
You tell your mother that her mom is on the phone.
She sighs and takes the phone from you.
Your grandmother is right. No one in this house seems to love her, though it seems also to be entirely her doing. How someone can live almost eighty years on this planet and have no one who would miss them is a staggering thought to you. All she has left is to live in her house with its pathways through the garbage and to drink and to call her only daughter and tell her that no one has ever loved her.
—
1991: One morning, while your roommate Brad plays “Strychnine” by the Sonics too loudly—which you would not have thought possible until today—for your ice pick of a hangover, you shit blood for the first time in a while. You are drinking way too much since you went off opiates and are not remembering too many hours of too many days. You’ve lost track of how many times someone has said something like “We talked about this” when you have no idea what they’re talking about.
You mention to Brad that you are twenty-five years old and you wonder aloud how bad it is that you’ve bled out of every orifice you can think of.
“Really?” he says.
You nod, feeling light-headed and weak. These talks about how fucked up you are have lost a lot of their charm over the years and are starting to be frightening and real.
You say, “Nose, mouth, ears, ass, cock.”
He looks at you a moment. He’s as much of a mess as y
ou are, so he doesn’t lecture. You’ve admitted to each other that you both plan on being dead before thirty, anyway.
“Not the eyes?” he says.
You think back. Once after a car accident, all the blood vessels in your eyeballs ruptured. You didn’t bleed, but the whites of your eyes were as red as a glass of cranberry juice and vodka. You shake your head. “No. Not that I know of.”
He waves with his fork. “Then you’re fine.”
—
2008: You are six months into an opiate relapse and you’re spending many of your days nodding out. You tell people—your bandmates, your colleagues, your students—that you are beyond exhausted. That you’ve had three jobs, a writing career, and a band that records and tours for years now, and you are simply burned out.
And all of this is true, but it’s not the truth.
Your wife has only seen you drinking eighteen or nineteen years ago when you were friends who fucked—when you bounced among six East Coast states in two and a half years and she slept with other friends and couples in California. In the fifteen years you have lived together, she has never to her knowledge seen you strung out on opiates.
You have changed in these fifteen years. People trust you. You don’t spend your life apologizing for everything you have done. Well, you do tend to apologize—for just about everything, including being in a room—but you don’t have nearly as many valid reasons to apologize as you used to. People no longer grow sick of you and cut you out of their lives because you have disappointed them too many times.
And now you hate yourself again. You haven’t written in nearly a year. You nod off mid-sentence while sitting on your amp at a band practice.
You have to drive to campus for a faculty meeting. You’ve been dopesick for about twenty-four hours and you know from too much experience that if you can’t get anything, you will be in an increasing hell for the next forty-eight hours or more. Already it feels like someone glued sandpaper to the inside of your eyelids. Your shirt is drenched and you’re shaking and freezing from the cold sweat. Your car is a stick and your whole body is cramping, but your left leg on the clutch is the worst. Your head aches and you’re worried you’ll hit the cars in front of you or the cars next to you because you simply cannot focus on anything but your pain.