How could I just sit there obediently pinning a butterfly’s wings to a lab tray or memorizing prepositional phrases? When the other boys in the locker room were showering and talking about their weekends playing soccer, what was I supposed to say? “Oh, I had a great time. My thirty-three-year-old boyfriend said he wished they could package my cum like ice cream so he could eat it all day.”
Bookman was the only person who gave me attention, besides Natalie and Hope. My mother certainly didn’t. Unless I was holding a spare typewriter ribbon or standing next to the record player when she needed the needle moved back to the beginning of a song, she had no use for me.
And my father wouldn’t even accept my collect calls.
As I was picking the paint off the windowsill I saw an unfamiliar station wagon pull up in front of our house. The engine was killed but nobody stepped out. I watched for a few minutes until the passenger window opened and a pink helium balloon escaped and rose up into air. I wondered where he got the helium, and if he had any left over.
The doctor had made a house call.
My mother called me downstairs and Dr. F shook my hand. He said, “You have a fiercely independent spirit, young man.”
My mother said, “He certainly does.”
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Ready for what?”
He cleared his throat and rubbed his hands together. “We need to take a little drive. We have to pick up some supplies from a friend in order for this to work. In the car, we can talk about what we’re going to do, what the plan is.”
My mother kept glancing back at her typewriter, like it was calling her. I knew it was hard for her to be separated from it for even five minutes.
“You’ll need to come with us,” the doctor said.
My mother looked alarmed, like she’d just been diagnosed with a disease that would prevent her from ever being able to talk about herself again. She hesitated, then she said, “Okay. I just need to get my bag.”
Finch drove, my mother sat in the passenger seat and I was in the back, my forehead pressed against the window. I was beginning to worry about what, exactly, I had agreed to. As soon as we were out of Amherst and onto the highway my mother opened her bag and began searching for something. She pulled some typed pages out and arranged them on her lap. She cleared her throat and turned to the doctor. “Would you like to hear some of this new poem I’ve been working on?”
He nodded. “Certainly, Deirdre. If you’d like to read it.”
“May I smoke?” she asked, sticking a More between her lips and poising her lighter.
“By all means.”
“Thank you,” she replied almost flirtatiously. I half-expected her to stick a dogwood blossom behind her ear.
For the next half hour, I endured a mandatory poetry reading. She read in her melodic, Southern voice, enunciating perfectly, each inflection practiced. I knew she must have wished there were a microphone clipped to her shirt collar or a camera pointed at her profile.
I couldn’t help but think, This car is taking me to a mental hospital and my mother is treating it like open-mic night at a Greenwich Village café.
We drove to a farmhouse in the country, surrounded by pastures. Dr. F pulled into the half-circle gravel driveway and stopped the car. He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “It’s very important,” he began, “that you not ever tell anybody about this.”
I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and agreed even though I didn’t know what I was agreeing to.
“I could lose my medical license,” he said.
What was he going to do? And why were we at a farmhouse? The mystery was scary. I wanted to know right then what was going on, but I also felt like I couldn’t ask, I had to wait and see.
My mother straightened her papers and put them back in her bag. She looked out the window. “This is a lovely house,” she said. “What a beautiful old barn.”
“I’ll be back momentarily,” the doctor said. “You both just sit right here.”
After he left my mother said, “Well, you certainly have created quite the adventure for yourself.” She rolled down her window and inhaled deeply. “The air is so clean out here, so fresh. Reminds me of when I was little girl in Georgia.” Then she took a More from her pack and lit it.
The doctor was gone for about half an hour. When he returned he was carrying a small paper sack. He slid into the car and started the ignition. I was expecting him to pull out of the driveway, but instead he turned around and handed me the bag.
I took it. It contained a pint of Jack Daniel’s.
He then reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, removed a prescription bottle, opened it and shook a number of pills into his palm. “I want you to take three of these pills,” he directed, “and wash them down with some of that bourbon.”
I tried to hide my shock. I was getting pills and liquor, for free, from Natalie’s dad. Although it sucked that I had to take them with my mother and him in the car. I wanted to save them for later, wait and take them with Natalie and then walk around the Smith campus, gooned out of our minds. Instead I placed the pills in my mouth and washed them down with a few sips of the liquor. At first it was like fire sliding down my throat but then I got this incredible warm, soothing sensation throughout my body. Until then, I’d only had beer and wine. This was much, much better.
Again, Dr. F said, “Now you need to promise that you won’t ever tell anybody about this. The story is that you tried to kill yourself and your mother found you and took you to the hospital. Have you got that?”
I nodded my head. “And I don’t have to go to school?”
“Not for awhile,” he said.
“Okay.” I lay my head back on the seat.
*
When I woke up, it was because a sweaty woman with yellow hair was trying to stick something down my throat. This seemed to be happening to me a lot lately.
She was a nurse. This registered when she said, “I’m a nurse. You’re in a hospital. We have to get those pills out of your stomach. You don’t really want to die, do you?”
Of course I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to go back to sleep. But when I tried, she pinched me on the arm again and continued to shove what could only be described as a hollow plastic penis down my throat. I gagged, my eyes became blurry with tears as she attempted to empty the contents of my stomach.
I fell back asleep.
The next time I woke up, I was in a bed and there was nobody on top of me trying to cause harm. There was a window in the room, but it hurt to open my eyes because the lids felt so heavy. It was like the light itself had weight, and was forcing my eyes closed.
“Hi,” said a voice next to the bed. It was close, but not standing over me.
“Are you awake?” It was a man’s voice.
I turned my head in the direction of the voice and my eyes focused on a naked figure, sitting cross-legged on a bed and wearing a pointy green party hat. I was impressed with the realism of my dream. I could even see small black hairs sprouting from just above his kneecaps.
“I’m Kevin,” he said.
As more of the room came into focus—the fluorescent overhead lights, the gray metal dresser across from me, and bars on the windows—I realized I was not dreaming. I tried to sit up, but it was like there was a lead dental cape on my chest making it impossible for me to move.
The naked man with the pointy hat came over to me and stood next to me. His penis dangled a few inches above my hand and I had the brief temptation to grab it, as some sort of reality test.
“You tried to kill yourself, huh?’ he said. He scratched under his balls.
And then I knew. I must be in the madhouse. I vaguely remembered having my stomach pumped.
That had happened to me once before when I was six. I had eaten a wax Santa Claus figure from the Christmas tree and had to be rushed to the hospital in Springfield. This was the second time in my life that a Santa-like figure had caused me to enter a hospital for
a minor medical procedure.
“You want some water?’ he said.
I nodded.
He left my side and walked over to the doorway where he yelled down the hall, “The new kid’s awake and he wants some water!”
Within moments, a nurse appeared carrying a tray with a small paper cup on it.
“How are you feeling?” she asked abruptly.
“Tired.”
“No wonder,” she said. “You can’t take half a bottle of Valium and a quart of booze and not feel tired.” She seemed hostile. She handed me a small paper cup filled with lukewarm water.
I swallowed the water in one gulp. It tasted like rust. Then I said, “Where am I?”
She said, “For starters, you’re alive.” She wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around my arm and started pumping. “Of course, that’s the bad news, I guess. The good news is you’re in Memorial Hospital where you can get some real help.” She turned to Kevin. “And you. Take that hat off and put on some clothes.”
After she left and after Kevin had put on a hospital gown, he leaned in and said, “The nurses and doctors? They’re all crazy here.”
He caught me staring at the green party hat that was still on top of his head. He laughed, taking it off. “They had a little birthday party for one of the old wenches here. Something like her million-and-first birthday. Nurse whatever. Who cares.”
I was able to sit up though my head was pounding. “What is this place?”
“It’s the loony bin,” he said making a crazy face.
I wanted to go for a walk to clear my head. I needed fresh air. “How do you get out? Is there anywhere to walk?”
He laughed. “You don’t get out. It’s a locked ward, kiddo.”
At least, I thought, it’s not homeroom.
Kevin told me he was “in” because he’d tried to kill himself, too.
When I said, “Really?” he nodded.
“Why?”
“Because my life sucks,” he said. “My parents are pressuring me to go to a school I don’t want to go to, to marry someone I don’t want to marry. It’s like my whole life is already mapped out for me, at nineteen. I’m just so fucking sick of it. Of everything. You know? Fuck it.”
“Do you wish you’d died?” I said.
He thought about this. “Not right this minute.”
When he said, “What about you?” I felt a pang of guilt because he seemed so open and I couldn’t tell him the truth. Even though I wanted to. I said, “School. I hate school.”
“What are you, like eighth grade or something?”
“Seventh. I stayed back in third.”
“Christ, that’s not so bad. That’s junior high. It can’t be all that bad.”
I wanted to tell him about the perfect Cosby girl but suddenly, this didn’t seem like enough of a reason to be locked in a mental hospital. I wanted to tell him about Neil Bookman, about how much I love him and want to be with him and school is only in the way. And I wanted to tell him about how my mother is always going crazy and I have to worry about her all the time. I wanted to say, “Well, I’m only here for a sort of vacation.” But I couldn’t tell him how I got there. It had to be a secret.
For the next few days, I continued to live my lie, protecting my secret. In group therapy when I had to confront my suicidal feelings, I did my best to ad-lib. “I hate my life,” I would say. Or, “I just wanted it all to end.” I tried to recall lines from every TV movie I’d seen. I tried to picture Martin Hewitt in Endless Love after he burned down Brooke Shields’s house out of love. Instead of becoming depressed that I was in the locked ward of a mental hospital, I pretended I was playing a role in a movie, possibly on my way to an Emmy.
I missed Bookman. I wasn’t allowed to call and this whole thing had happened so suddenly, I was sure he was worried about me.
I imagined him coming to the hospital and standing outside, screaming my name up at the windows.
I missed him so much that I had physical sensations of loss, all over my body. Like one minute I was missing an arm, the next my spleen. It was making me feel sick, like throwing up.
He wasn’t rough to me anymore, like he was the first time we “did it.” He was nice now, slow. He told me he was falling in love with me. That I was godlike and that he hadn’t known that at first. He said I was becoming everything to him, his reason.
I’d never mattered to anyone so much before.
When I finally broke down and confessed about my relationship with Bookman to my mother, she couldn’t have been happier. “I am very, very fond of that young man,” she told me, gazing off into a space beyond my left shoulder. “He’s always been very supportive of me and my writing.”
“So you’re not pissed?’ I said, wondering if the fact that I was involved with a man twice my age would be yet another thing she had to worry about.
“Look, Augusten,” she began. “I don’t want you to suffer from the same sort of oppression that I suffered from as a girl. Because I know”—she lit a More—“how difficult it is to reclaim one’s self. I’ll tell you, sometimes I wish I had been raised by a mother like me. You’re very lucky that I’ve done so much work, emotionally. And it makes me so happy to be able to support you.”
I said, “Good. I’m glad it doesn’t bother you. Because it’s a serious thing with us. He’s really insane over me.”
“And that’s what you want?’ she asked.
“Well, yeah,” I said.
“Then you have my full support in your relationship.”
I was stunned by her reaction. I’d been dreading the moment when I finally told her because I knew she’d somehow turn it into something that I was doing to her. I could almost hear the dishes smashing and the windows shaking in their frames from all the door-slamming. Instead, it turned out to be nothing. As if I told her that from now on, I wouldn’t be eating refined white flour anymore.
“Have you spoken to Dr. Finch about your relationship with Bookman?” she asked.
“Yeah, he knows,” I said.
“And what does he say?”
“Um, he’s, I don’t know. I guess he’s okay with it. Although it seemed like he felt that I could do better. But he’s not gonna try and stop it or anything. He said I should tell you and see what you thought.”
“Good,” she said, plucking a hair off her slacks. “I’m glad he was accepting and supportive.”
When I told Dr. Finch about me and Bookman, at first he seemed angry. I’d made an appointment with Hope to see him because I thought it was sort of a big deal and I shouldn’t just tell him when he was home, sitting in his underwear in front of the TV eating an old drumstick. When I walked into his office he said, “Well, young man. Take a seat and tell me what’s on your mind.”
It felt weird to be sitting on his psychotherapy couch, surrounded by all the boxes of psychotherapy tissues. I felt like a patient. “Bookman and I are boyfriends,” I blurted out.
“Boyfriends?” he repeated.
“Yeah. It started out as friends, but now we’re more than that. He’s in love with me and I love him, too.”
“And is this a sexual relationship?” he asked, sounding strangely professional.
I nodded.
He brought his hands up to his face and inhaled through his fingers. “I’ve got to tell you, young man, I went through this with my daughter Natalie.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s sort of similar.”
“While I don’t believe that it’s wrong for a younger person to be intimately involved with somebody older, I am concerned about your choice.”
Did he mean Bookman? His adopted son? “What do you mean?”
“Well,” he said heavily, “Bookman isn’t a stable man. He has a lot of problems that run very, very deep.”
But he was really good at giving head. “Yeah, but he seems okay,” I said.
“Well, I’m not saying that you can’t see him. Like you said, you’re already involved. And I know from past experience tha
t if a young person sets his or her mind to something, there’s really nothing anybody can do to stop them. But I would like you to keep me abreast of this situation. I want you to tell me if you sense that things are taking a turn for the worse.”
I felt like I was buying a used Ford Pinto and the salesman was telling me that as long as I didn’t make any sudden stops in the parking lot, it probably wouldn’t explode. But to keep an eye out for smoke.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be careful. But he really does seem okay now. Things are good between us.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” he said. Then he turned around in his chair and reached for a bottle on his bookshelf. “Would you like a few of these?” he said.
“What are they?” I asked, seeing the white bottle.
“Let me see here,” he said, sliding his bifocals up his nose and examining the label. “I just got these in the mail, so I’m not sure . . . oh, yes. Okay, these are just a mild anti-anxiety medication. They might make you feel a little calmer.”
I shrugged. “Sure, I’ll take ’em.”
He passed me the bottle and I stuck it in my shirt pocket along with my cigarettes.
Now, my mother glanced up at me and smiled. For a moment she didn’t say anything, she just kept smiling, like she was proud of me or something. “You’re a very independent young man,” she said finally. “And I’m proud that you’re my son.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking down at the hole in the knee of my jeans.
“Would you like to hear a poem I’ve been working on? It’s only a first draft—very rough—but it’s about my own journey inward, becoming truly connected with my creative unconscious. I think you might really find it helpful as you begin your own journey as a free and very wise young man.”
Maybe my mother and Dr. F were the only people I’d told so far, but I thought there might be some suspicions. Recently, Agnes had come into the TV room.
My head was on Neil’s lap.