Without swimming, Dana had little left but her identity as a druggie. “Senior year I just said, ‘Screw it—I’m going the whole nine yards,’” she remembers. “I sort of said good-bye.” She got high at school almost every day and began using hashish and mescaline as well as marijuana. She cut school at least once a week, forging excuses from her mother, and spent the day in bed sipping vodka and watching reruns of Jeopardy!, I Love Lucy, and The Brady Bunch. If she went to school, she would come home in the afternoon and drink and sleep until her mother arrived. Sometimes she would just put on a sad record and smoke pot. Without swim practice she spent nights in front of the TV, drinking. “I knew every single show from six o’clock until eleven,” she says. “I was like a walking TV Guide.” At parties she got drunk or high as quickly as possible. “There was no such thing as stopping when I got a buzz on—it was ‘Go for it.’ My big worry was that other people would drink too much, because the more they drank, the less there was for me.” At the beginning of a party she would hide a few bottles of beer to make sure there would be enough for her to get drunk. “At school on Monday morning, people would tell me what I’d done that weekend,” she says. “Even good friends told me I drank too much. And I knew I drank too much. But I knew I had to. I had to take a break from life. I was depressed when I wasn’t drinking, and I thought drinking would save me, I thought it was like my best friend. But the drunker I got, the less fun it was.”
Although it seemed everyone around her had a boyfriend, Dana had never had one. Occasionally, a friend would include her in a double date, but Dana wasn’t much interested. “I thought I must be a lesbian ’cause I didn’t like guys. I didn’t like girls either, though. I thought maybe I was asexual.” She tried not to think about it. “I just hoped it would all go away, that I’d grow up and everything would be fine. But I figured that even if I ended up liking guys, there wasn’t much hope since I wasn’t pretty. Dating seemed like a big pain in the ass anyway. First you have to explain yourself to somebody and get to know him, and then you gotta get closer, and then you fight, and then you stop seeing each other, and you both get really hurt.”
Dana talked to no one about her sexuality, her depression, her drinking, or about anything else personal, not even to Tammy, a classmate who came to live with the Evanses when her own parents moved from the area. Dana and Tammy would gossip for hours, but Tammy did most of the talking, primarily about boys she was interested in. Anyway, thought Dana, with her silky hair, perfect figure, and steady boyfriend, how could Tammy understand what Dana was feeling? “We were like two different grades of people—she was like large Grade A, and I was . . . day-old bread, twenty percent discount.” Even if there had been someone to talk to, Dana wouldn’t have talked. The last thing in the world she would admit was that she felt scared.
Dana knew she was depressed, but in the back of her mind she expected things to get better when she turned eighteen. “I thought that adults had it infinitely easier than kids and that the day I turned eighteen and became an adult, my whole life was going to magically fall into place.” On the night of her eighteenth birthday Dana had a party at her house. About twenty people came, most of them druggies. To celebrate that Dana was of legal drinking age, Mrs. Evans bought the beer. Among her friends’ presents were an enormous joint and a silver mug inscribed with Dana’s nickname. Dana made full use of both gifts, and long before the party was over, she passed out. “The next day I woke up hung over. Nothing had changed. It was just . . . Sunday morning. I thought, ‘Well, here I am, I’m eighteen, but I still don’t know what I want to do with my life. If anything.’ “
Dana had long been fascinated by the subject of suicide. “I used to read everything about it I could get my hands on,” she says. “I wrote a paper in eleventh-grade English on suicide—the statistics, men versus women. I got a B-plus.” Dana had never consciously considered it as an option, but about two months before her birthday she started carrying a razor blade in her wallet. She had found it in the family toolbox, where it was kept for scraping expired registration stickers off the car windshield. At first it was a kind of toy she was fond of playing with, carving patterns on desks, but gradually she began to think of it as a means of escape. “It was my security blanket: ‘Well, if it gets too bad, I’ll just bail out.’ “
About a month after her eighteenth birthday Dana knew she was going to kill herself. “I didn’t know what it would be like to be dead, but I knew it would be better than this,” she says. “I wasn’t setting a date, but I knew it would be soon. I was walking around thinking, ‘Hey, it doesn’t matter what happens ’cause I ain’t going to be here!’ I was just waiting for the right time.” Even now Dana is not sure how she chose the day. Later she told people it was because she had an English test the following morning, but “that was just to give them an answer they’d understand.” By the time she used the razor blade she felt so angry at herself and at the world that even after she slumped to the white tile floor of the bathroom, she continued to hack away insistently at her wrists, her arms, and her legs until she slipped into unconsciousness.
When Dana woke, a blur of policemen and paramedics hovered over her, asking her name, wrapping gauze on her wrists, reaching for the razor blade in her hand. Dana said nothing but squeezed her fist tighter, as if the blade were a jewel they were trying to steal. When they carried her downstairs, she fought and kicked, breaking the dining room window. They tied her down on a stretcher and loaded her into the ambulance. On the ride to the hospital a medical technician tried to soothe her. “Everything is going to be okay,” he said softly. Dana thought, “How the fuck would you know?”
In the emergency room Dana received seven stitches on each wrist. Afterward, as she lay tied to a cot, she dimly recognized Tammy, who had come home early from school to find Dana in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor, and her mother, who had arrived home from work just after the ambulance had left. Dana kept moaning that she wanted to go home, but the doctors had signed ninety-day commitment forms. The doctors suggested the state hospital, but Mrs. Evans refused to consider it and chose a private psychiatric hospital in Westchester County. Dana was put in a straitjacket, loaded into an ambulance, and driven to the hospital, where a nurse made her strip, gave her a hospital gown, and told her to get in bed. “These are going into the garbage,” said the nurse, holding up Dana’s bloody jeans. “Don’t fuck with my pants,” snarled Dana, frightened but determined to be tough. Her mother came in to say goodbye. “When she leaned over to kiss me,” says Dana, “one of her tears dropped on my face. I said, ‘You’re dripping on me.’ “
For the first few days in the hospital Dana refused to talk. Even after she gave in, she stared at the floor as the doctors administered a battery of psychological tests. Three times a week she met with a psychologist. “Therapy was a joke,” says Dana. “He’d ask me how I felt and I’d talk about how I hated hospital food, and he’d tell me stories from his college days.” The psychologist prescribed Mellaril, an antipsychotic, but when Dana gained weight, she refused to take it. He recommended that she attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in a nearby town. Escorted to her first session, Dana wore a Yukon Jack whiskey T-shirt—though when she realized the other people were serious about not drinking, she folded her arms across her chest so they couldn’t read the logo. But she was skeptical. “I didn’t think I had a drinking problem,” she says. “I didn’t think the problem was me—I thought that things around me had to get better. I thought if only my mother were happy, then I’d be happy. Or I’d think if I fell in love and got married, I’d be fine. Or if only I went to a good school. Or if only I found some friends.” She shrugs. “I didn’t think I belonged in the hospital because a hospital was for crazy people, and I wasn’t crazy. I thought if someone would just fix my life, I could go home, and everything would be fine.”
Dana came to like the hospital. She made friends with three girls her age, and they smuggled alcohol, drugs, and boys into the girls’ ward. I
n many respects her life was no different from the way it had been at home except that she didn’t have to go to school, cook meals, or clean up. “All in all, once I learned the system and how to get around it, I had a ball.” She even found her first boyfriend, a young patient from Pennsylvania. One night when they got permission to watch TV together, they turned out the lights and made love on the ward floor—Dana’s first time. The boy was discharged not long afterward, however, and after a few brief phone conversations, he stopped calling.
As time went by, however, Dana grew anxious to get out. She told the doctors what she thought they wanted to hear—that she was getting better, that she would stop drinking, that she didn’t want to hurt herself anymore. In July, after four months at the hospital, Dana was discharged.
That fall, Dana enrolled as a freshman at a college on Long Island. “I was going to start all over again where no one knew me,” she says. “I thought, ‘This is it. I’m going to meet new people, maybe find a boyfriend, and live the good old college life. I’ll just be somebody different this time.’” Her first night at school Dana unpacked, arranged her clothes in her bureau, and studied the school’s catalog. The second night she went to a beer party down the hall, played a drinking game called Pass Out, went back to her room, threw up, and passed out.
Dana had drunk little during the month she had been at home, but once she had ruined her clean slate at the party, she figured, “Why not? I’ve already blown it.” Soon she was drinking every day again. Her bottom desk drawer became her liquor cabinet. Of the $50 weekly food allowance her parents gave her, she spent all but $3 on liquor; with the rest she bought a packet of bouillon cubes and a can of powdered juice mix. She rarely went to class, and though she opened the books on her desk every night, she never got around to reading them. Her roommate moved out to live with friends down the hall, and the two girls with whom Dana shared a bathroom were seniors she rarely saw. While her classmates lived “the good old college life”—flinging Frisbees across the quad, shouting conversations from dorm to dorm, aiming their stereo speakers out the window and blasting music throughout the campus—Dana spent almost all of her time alone in her room, drinking and watching television.
One Friday night in early November, Dana was in the laundry room when she ran into a boy from down the hall with whom she occasionally talked about sports. They ended up in her room watching TV. Although the boy didn’t drink, Dana did—“I don’t mind drinking alone, I’m used to it,” she assured him. Later that night she blacked out. When she woke up shortly before dawn, the boy was in bed next to her. “I assumed we’d had sex,” she says. “I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.” Promising that he would stop by and see her later that morning, he stumbled back to his room. Dana realized she didn’t even know his last name.
Dana spent Saturday staring at her textbooks, hating herself, hating the boy, but wanting him to come back. Saturday night, as rock music from the dormitory dance floated through her window, Dana stayed in her room drinking, watching TV, falling asleep, waking, watching TV, drinking.
When Dana woke up Sunday, there was a half bottle of rum on her bureau and the television was on. She spent the afternoon finishing the bottle and growing more depressed. “I had no friends. I wasn’t doing any work. I knew that even if I finished the semester, I would flunk everything anyway. I was thinking, ‘Here we are again. Everything’s just the same, and I managed to do it in two months.’ ” That evening she rummaged through the toolbox her mother had given her to help decorate her room and found a small knife with a two-inch blade. “This time I wanted to do it right,” she says. “I knew I had all the time in the world because no one ever came to my room. I could sit in that apartment for days, and nobody would come looking for me.” She sat down at her desk and began to slice into her wrists, just as she had done nine months before. After making repeated cuts she decided to try her jugular vein because she knew it would be quicker, but when she got up to use the bathroom mirror, drunk and weak from loss of blood, she fell back into her chair.
No one ever did come looking for her, but the dormitory’s resident assistant, looking for Dana’s roommate, knocked on the door, let himself in with his passkey, and found Dana instead. Five minutes later the police came into her bedroom. This time they were not gentle; they twisted her arm until she dropped the knife, tied her wrists and ankles tight, and strapped her to a stretcher. At the busy hospital, an orderly walked by and saw her cursing and struggling to free herself. “I wish you had died,” he said.
The second time around at the hospital was no more effective than the first. Although her old buddies were gone, Dana found a new pack of friends to party with. But as the months passed and her friends were discharged, and new patients entered and were themselves discharged, Dana realized she didn’t want to leave. “I wanted to live there,” she says. “I didn’t have to work, all my meals were made, and I had friends.” She didn’t tell anybody this—like the others, she bad-mouthed the hospital and submitted frequent requests for a discharge hearing, which she always ripped up before it was too late. When she was finally allowed to go, she ran through the ward shouting, “I’m getting out of this jail! I’m free!” But inside she was terrified.
Dana was released on the Fourth of July weekend. Her mother was away with her boyfriend in Vermont. Dana and her best friend from the hospital spent the weekend cruising Dutchess County. “I drove around with a beer in one hand and a joint in the other,” Dana remembers. When her friend, out on a weekend pass, returned to the hospital on Sunday afternoon, Dana was restless and lonely. She decided to drive down to the hospital and see her friend. When she arrived, still drunk and high, the staff wouldn’t let her leave. They didn’t even bother readmitting her; they just tore up her discharge papers. She had been out only forty-eight hours.
When Dana called her mother that night and told her she was back at the hospital, she was surprised by her response. “Usually my mother came running down with clothes and cigarettes and money and sympathy.” This time Mrs. Evans said that she and her boyfriend were going to California for a wedding, as planned, and they would see Dana when they got back in ten days. Dana was angry. The doctors were also less tolerant. They allowed Dana no visitors or phone calls, forbade her to talk to other patients, and plotted her daily schedule down to the minute. Although this infuriated her, Dana had time to think. “I began to realize I was getting tired of it all,” she says. “I knew I couldn’t stay at the hospital for the rest of my life, but I also knew I couldn’t handle it outside.”
Dana’s mother and her boyfriend came to see her the night they got back from California. The three of them sat outside in the warm summer evening. Mrs. Evans asked Dana if she thought she had a problem. Dana surprised herself by saying, “Yeah. I do.” “Is it alcohol or drugs?” her mother asked. “Well, sort of both.” “Do you want to stop?” her mother asked. “No,” said Dana. “I like it.” Dana was surprised. After so many months of automatically saying she was getting better, that things were going to be different, for the first time she felt she was telling the truth.
Dana admitted to her mother that if she had any hope of improving, she couldn’t stay at this hospital—it made life too easy for her. Dana was discharged one day in August, and the following day her mother drove her to Four Winds, a psychiatric hospital in nearby Katonah.
From the very first day Dana realized that Four Winds was going to be different. At the other hospital there had been a few hours of therapy a week; at Four Winds there were more than twenty. At the other hospital it had been simple to smuggle in drugs and alcohol; at Four Winds the no-drugs/no-alcohol rule was enforced with urine tests and frequent hall checks. Transgressors were immediately asked to leave. At the other hospital Dana had controlled her therapy sessions; at her first Four Winds session, when Dana kept her eyes on the floor, the therapist, a young social worker named Terry, suddenly stopped talking and literally pulled her head up. Dana was scared. That night she called her m
other in tears. “These people are weird,” she cried. “You’ve got to get me out of here.”
At the old hospital Dana felt it had always been the patients versus the staff. Here, she realized, people worked at getting well. “At the other hospital, if you showed any sign of being interested in treatment, it was like ‘What’s wrong with you?’” she says. “At Four Winds, if you weren’t into treatment, you were on the outside.” In group therapy the staff leader would ask, “All right, who wants to work today?” The other patients raised their hands. Dana never did. She kept her arms crossed and her eyes on the floor. Sometimes she’d get dragged into the discussion, but she got out as soon as possible. “Dana, what do you think?” the leader would ask. “I don’t think,” she would say.
One day in therapy Terry criticized her for being cruel to the other patients. Dana felt herself begin to cry. She kept her head down until she was able to stop so that Terry couldn’t see her tears. “I couldn’t believe that he’d gotten to me,” she says. “No one was supposed to get to me. I was so pissed off at myself.” When the session was over, Dana ran back to her room and made light cuts all over her arm. “I was at the point where I knew that killing myself was not going to help, but I needed to release the pressure. Out in the world or even at the other hospital you could drink or get high or talk. At Four Winds I couldn’t drink or get high, and I wasn’t talking to anybody, aside from saying, ‘Fuck you.’ So I found another way.” About once a week, after she had verbally abused someone or when someone had penetrated her wall for a moment, she would feel guilty. “Whenever I felt upset about something, I always thought it was my fault. And because it was my fault, I felt I deserved to be hurt.” She would come back to her room and scratch her arms with a metal triangle she had cut from a soda can and hid in her drawer. They were superficial scrapes; the nurse would clean and bandage them, and Dana would roll her sleeves down as if nothing had happened.
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