One couple had run through all her money because he was a book salesman who couldn’t sell any books, and they were secretly selling her priceless possessions through an auction house in New York. She had real pearls, and emeralds. She had two dozen of the czar’s napkins, two feet square, embroidered with the Romanov seal. Sunshine’s husband had gone to the rehab place several times without success, and she had left him and was having an affair with a married local doctor. Men had beaten their wives, and their wives had left them. Wives revealed they had slept around during the war and their heartbroken husbands had gone away.
The life that happened when the doors closed was becoming more and more distant from the lives led in public, although the afternoon drinks went on, the bars were still stocked and ready, but my mother didn’t serve liqueurs or make pousse-café anymore. There was less to celebrate. For some, there was nothing to celebrate, only the monotony of making do, of going on with it, of boring themselves to death.
And maybe the green and blue dress stood for something that had existed long before any of that. Maybe the dress stood for a kind of perfection that was no longer attainable, even as an illusion. Youth fades. We are never where we meant to be, and it always seems hollow and stupid and a waste of time. We become, finally, the biggest burden we have to bear, the burden of our own known selves.
And maybe twirling for her children was something my mother realized was from another time, a place she couldn’t get back to, like the woman who realized she could no longer have seventy-five people over for drinks. Her house was simply too dirty, and she was simply too tired to clean it. And they couldn’t pay for it.
It was eleven o’clock. This harangue had been going on for three hours, and every one of my failures had been recounted. My mother finally asked, with steely sobriety, “Why did you write this book?”
I didn’t know. I mumbled something fatuous, something about how close we were as a family, and how we’d gone through a lot with my brother, and I wanted to do something that would heal the pain. I wanted to make you a diamond necklace, I wanted to say. I wanted to build you a boat. I pointed out that the book had a happy ending they hadn’t seen, a healing conclusion in which we were all perfect and perfectly happy. I don’t know if that was true, but I said it. My mother said she wouldn’t read another word of this trash.
“I was always happy,” my mother said. “I’ll never be happy again.”
I said that I had written the book because children needed to do something finally, to stand on their own two feet, to cut the ties that bound them so suffocatingly to the parents they loved.
“I’ll tell you why you wrote it,” my mother said. “You wrote it because you’re wicked. You were born wicked. You’re wicked now. You’ll die wicked.” And then she got unsteadily to her feet and went to bed. I can still smell the way she smelled as she passed, the face powder that never got taken off, only added to, the dirty bathrobe, the underclothes, the hard iron smell of a woman who isn’t clean, who had pulled a carpet tack out of her rib cage.
My father retreated into silence, smoking cigarette after cigarette. She was the whole reason for his anger, and she had gone to bed. I had nothing to say to him. I meant nothing to him.
I left the house and got in the car and drove twelve miles out to the river, where I sat on the rocks in the dark, the smell of dark soft pine and wet rocks, the place where I had been swimming and been so happy as a child, when we were all happy, sleeping overnight in Sunshine’s or Fran Pancake’s cedar cabins with no running water and no electricity, the children telling ghost stories by flashlight, while the grownups drank grease cutters by the flickering light of kerosene lamps.
I knew what I had done. I knew my mother was right. It was both a curse and a factual recounting of all I had been to her, of all I had been, and the night wrapped around me like a snake-skin I couldn’t shed.
It was just a dress. It was just a cigarette hole in the dress. But something had happened, something had been irrevocably lost, and I have never known what it was.
Playing the Zone
When I was in the loony bin, the hospital had two wings. One was for drunks. The other was for crazy people. I was in the ward for crazy people. The door was always locked, and we were constantly watched for suicidal behavior, but I found it comforting. It wasn’t so much that I was locked in; it was that everybody else was locked out. That was a relief.
Compared to the only other mental hospital I had seen, this one was kind of nice, considering you were a prisoner and everything. It was built like a college dorm, with neat hallways and an office at the end where you went to get your meds, and clean spare modern rooms with linoleum floors and two twin beds and a shower and bars on the windows. Nice.
We never saw the ward where the drunk people and the drug addicts were. I think they weren’t locked in.
I was kind of a star, because I had come all that way from New York, from a place, they believed, where anybody could get magical psychiatric help. Everybody there was depressed; we were a bunch of thin, etiolated neurasthenic possible suicides, and we felt very sorry for ourselves and we felt genuinely sorry for each other. Somehow, other people’s craziness had a more palpable reality than our own, and, as fucked up as we were, we were constantly moved at how irrationally pitiful other people’s lives could get.
I was also a star because of the viciousness and multiplicity of the cuts on my arms, cuts that should have been stitched, that were bathed in Betadine and swathed in bandages. They had all seen them, though. Right after I checked into the ward, I was sat down in the common room and a nurse started to draw some blood. I’m not sure what they wanted to know. I fainted, just as the whole ward got back from lunch and saw everything. Imagine, after all that cutting, I fainted when they drew blood. I couldn’t think of anything but my longing for the razor blade, and still I fainted. I couldn’t figure it out.
The first night I was there, I had to hand in any sharp objects I had, the razor blade, the razor, which I could get back for ten minutes every morning to shave, and any medications I had with me. The only thing I had was Afrin nasal spray, to which I was severely addicted.
When I went to bed, I found in my suitcase a short, sharp penknife. It looked to me like something I had never owned, like somebody had planted it there. I debated, then walked down to the nurse’s station and handed it in. When I got out of the bin, weeks later, they gave it back to me, and I gave it to my doctor as a present, as a promise, a small silver Tiffany penknife with my initials on it I had never seen before.
The first night I couldn’t breathe. The Afrin rebound kicked in, and I spent the night trying to get one clear breath through my nose. The guard would look in on me every now and then, and there I would be, sniffling away.
The next morning, my doctor asked me why I’d been crying all night. I told him the truth, but I didn’t get the Afrin back. He told me I’d get over it and I did.
We had to get up at seven in the morning. We had to get dressed, no shuffling around in bathrobes for us, drooling. We had to make our beds and shower and look as much like normal people as possible.
Most people had roommates. I didn’t, because I had said I wouldn’t come if I had to have one, and because I was, as I say, sort of a star.
We were let out of the ward three times a day, to go eat, in a large cafeteria where we ate enormous amounts of food. The first week I was there, I gained ten pounds. We lived on starch and carbohydrates, and the food wasn’t very good, but there was very little to do, so we ate a lot. And most of the drugs most of us were taking made you gain weight, too. We were led to meals by kindhearted guards, and we were never made to feel ashamed about our various states of despair.
We had group therapy twice a day, once in the morning, and once after dinner, before the meds kicked in. We also had individual therapy once a day. My own doctor was the head of the hospital, and he was brilliant and kind. I wasn’t in much of a position to judge, but that’s the way he seemed
. He asked to see my arms. He told me which cuts should have had stitches. He told me how many stitches.
It wasn’t my recent behavior that interested him as much as the causes of my recent behavior, and like a lot of people who are locked up, I was glad to talk, especially about myself.
When you’re in the bin, you feel the need to justify yourself. You feel the need to prove that you really do need to be there, and so you’ll say anything so that they’ll keep you. That’s how glad you are to be locked up.
The other thing we had to do was go to the gym every day. It’s amazing what a few endorphins can do for even the most terminally depressed. We were led through exercises by young men and women who looked like something out of a poster for young men and women like that, the kind of people who taught you physical education in grade school. They were strong, they were beautiful, and they were, unlike the ones in grade school, infinitely kind. They didn’t look like they were about to have a heart attack at any minute. They seemed like grownups to us, because we seemed like children to ourselves.
When we were in the gym, we got a good look at the drunks and the addicts. They were a scary-looking bunch. They could bench-press four hundred pounds. They could do one-armed push-ups. They were poster children for Guns N’ Roses, a bunch of beefy, muscular, tattooed, mean-hearted Kentucky biker rednecks, and they could probably bite the cap off a beer bottle.
We felt a kind of gratitude for the safety of our locked ward. This was not a sentiment shared by the drunks and the drug addicts who wanted in the worst kind of way to be out drinking Jack Black and shooting crystal meth. They were not happy. They looked at us and laughed. They sneered, showing yellowed nicotined teeth.
We were too thin, too wan, and didn’t have enough tattoos to command anything other than disdain. And we were, comparatively, so small. Most of us couldn’t even do a chin-up.
The worst part was volleyball. After we had finished calisthenics and the exercise machines, we had to play the drunks and drug addicts in volleyball.
They roared with aggression. They were, every one of them, enraged. They attacked the ball. They attacked the net. They would have attacked us if we in any way had cramped their style. But we were much too intimidated to do anything that might aggravate them. One look at them, and we had already lost the game.
Even with the hearty exhortations of the physical instructors, we couldn’t beat them. We couldn’t even score a point. We would walk back to the ward after every session, disconsolate with defeat. “You can do it,” the instructors would say. “You’ll get ’em tomorrow.” We knew these were hollow words meant to get us through the slow hours from defeat to meds. We knew we would never get them.
On the way back from the gym one day, a woman said to me in a gentle drawl, looking at my arms, “Boy, you really did some kind of job on yourself.” She smiled. Southerners are always cheered at the sight of somebody else making a spectacle of himself. I felt something like pride.
I took a Rorschach test. I never knew you went through the blobs once, and then again, to see if you said the same thing you said the first time around. If blob number 34 suggested to you your father’s hands, it was somehow important that, when you saw blob number 34 again, it still reminded you of your father’s hands and not, say, a cypress tree in a drought. It seemed kind of like going to a psychic, but I have to say that the woman’s diagnosis was uncannily accurate, like the psychic who tells you you have trouble with money or difficulty with commitment.
She said I suffered from anhedonia, from the Greek, meaning an inability to experience pleasure. Oh, really, I felt like saying. Oh really.
A young guy joined us on the ward, the first new person since I had arrived. He was kept in a room with glass walls next to the nurses’ station, and he was so sedated he could barely raise his head from the pillow. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, except that he was sad. He hadn’t tried to kill himself, at least not in any obvious physical way, but the fact that he was kept in the glass room must have meant that he might, at any moment. He was so depressed, he made the rest of us feel artificial somehow. He was so young and vulnerable and exposed, and his despair was mute and profound, and he made palpable and visible the agony of having a broken heart. It does happen.
We felt afraid for him. We felt for him a tenderness we didn’t feel for ourselves. He was probably twenty-four.
We went for supervised walks on the grounds of the hospital. The air was crisp, the weather beautiful the way it almost always is in the middle of tragedy. The way it was after Kennedy was killed. October in Kentucky is heartrendingly beautiful.
It was, I guess, like the first weeks of being at college. We sat together and told our stories, we clumsily embroidered the truth to make ourselves more interesting, like the guys who said they’d gotten into Harvard but had chosen Hopkins instead. The weight of our narrative had a lyrical beauty to it. Most people’s stories didn’t have a linear quality; their depression was diffuse and nonspecific and awful, just day after day of dread and fear and unquiet.
The doctors listened, and gently explained the causes of depression. They explained how it works on the system, how lassitude and manic energy both become self-fueling fires, winding us up and spinning us out of control, how we lose our appetites, our sense of place, our sense of where we belong in the world, of where it is we are meant to sit down.
I was taking 450 milligrams of Elavil a day, a kind of knee-walking drunk dose, if you don’t know. I could barely walk to bed at night. I could barely follow the stories that moved me so much. There was just this veil of human misery over everything, and it made the earthly landscape hard to see.
“How’s it going?” “How’re you doing today?” In a loony bin, people are always asking you how you’re doing, and they pretty much genuinely want to know, as opposed to the normal population outside, who couldn’t care less. And the answer usually is, not very well.
When you’re in a mental hospital, it’s OK to feel bad. That’s why you’re there. You feel worse, on the average, than the average person will ever know. You’re just generally, in the bin, not having a swell day.
I don’t think anybody was faking. It wasn’t the sort of team you could fake your way onto.
Some people felt like talking. A lot didn’t. I didn’t particularly want to go into the times and places that had brought me to this time and place. I felt the dozens of wounds on my arms were explanation enough, they stung and they itched and they were my statement that I had been to places lower and more terrifying than any of the rest of them could imagine, with their sad routines and their mundane lives. Measured out in coffee spoons. They suffered, I felt, not from a surfeit but a lack of pain, self-inflicted if need be, but real physical pain to counter the emotional pain. Somehow, even in the bin, you’re still competitive. You want to beat out the competition. You want to be the best at what you do, even if what you do is feel miserable and self-destructive all the time. Every minute of every day.
One woman was a psychiatrist. She was there because she had tried to kill herself for the third time. So I wasn’t the only one. She was less than thirty-five. She was pretty, and she didn’t seem particularly depressed, and she recounted the methods of suicide she had tried, the last being to stick her head in the oven and turn on the gas. Not very effective. She seemed determined that her next try would be her last. I never knew what was the source of her terrible anguish, because as cheerful as she was, she must have felt a great deal of pain.
She was so busy talking about methodology and her blueprint for the future we never got much of a grip on what got her in this state in the first place. She was hopeful for her chances of success on her next attempt, like somebody who’s training to swim the Channel.
On top of it all, she really was a psychiatrist. She was a woman who had trained for years to treat crazy people. She had actually, until she began trying to kill herself, treated crazy people, although she said a lot of them were just bored. And sh
e was crazy herself. Suddenly our doctors looked suspect, as though they themselves harbored secret insanities that could come out in various perversities, in the forty Seconal, in the amphetamine addiction, in the sudden break with reality.
The boy from the glass room got out and joined in group therapy. He never said anything. He was on Haldol and Thorazine and God knows what else, we figured, which gave him in our eyes an instant kind of glamour. These were not drugs for babies. As drugged as we were, we were practically perky compared to him.
He had such a sad, forlorn air about him. Handsome, dark, young, pale with grief—the kind of face you remember for a long time. A face that should have been having sex with a girl in the backseat of a car, out by the river, their shirts unbuttoned, their lips swollen with kissing. But his face at the moment was a kind of putty. He was pretty knocked out. He was too medicated to speak. But he listened; he watched us with his glittering eyes, and he slept in a normal room in a normal bed where you could turn the lights out. Now he, too, had to get up every day at seven and follow the regime, drugged and sad as he was.
He joined us in the gym. He was strong and had obviously seen the inside of a gym before. He wasn’t intimidated by the rednecks, but he was too blanked out to take much notice of them. Even our thundering defeats in volleyball left him no more fazed than he was already.
Then one night the psychiatrist who had tried to kill herself three times had a brilliant idea. She began, in group therapy, to talk to us about volleyball and addiction.
“The thing about drunks and addicts is they have no sense of limits, they have no sense of boundaries,” she explained. “That’s why they get to be alcoholics and drug addicts. They don’t know when or where to stop.” Not that sticking your head in the oven or slitting your own skin open with a razor shows much sense of decorum or control, it now seems to me, but at the time she had our attention.