“Volleyball is a very simple game. There are six people on a side. The court is divided into twelve sections, six on each side of the net. If you notice, if you hit the ball, say, far down to the left side of the court, the average addict will follow the ball. He’ll leave his square and follow the ball. They all will. We can beat them.”
We didn’t believe her, but she was so intent about it we listened anyway.
“If we just play in our squares, if we stick to playing the space assigned to us, we can beat them really, really easily. It’s simple. The first person on our team serves the ball all the way down to the right, they all run down there. If they get it back over the net, the next person hits it all the way down to the left. They’ll all run down there. Sooner or later, they’ll get tired out, and we’ll win. They’ll all be in one big clump, and they’ll get tired, they’ll run all over each other, they’ll get winded from all those Camels they smoke, and we’ll beat them.”
Meds were kicking in. We didn’t believe her, but the idea of winning at anything after so much loss and confusion was charming enough to send us to bed happy. Happy—450 milligrams of Elavil kind of happy.
Later, when I told my internist in the real world how much Elavil I was taking, he gasped. He just didn’t believe me.
The next morning, she had to explain it all to us again. It made sense. We weren’t athletic, we weren’t strong, except for the glass-room kid, but we were smarter than the redneck bikers. Smart enough not to get a tattoo or arrested for dealing cocaine to some undercover cop and sent to rehab to avoid hard time.
We played it her way. We hit the ball to the extreme edges of the court, over and over again, and they trampled all over themselves trying to get to it, leaving the other end completely unguarded. It was like a human demolition derby.
We beat them, and boy did it make them mad. We beat them again, and they started to get a really nasty look in their eyes, but before anything ugly could happen gym time was over for the day. We had done as we were told; even the glass-room kid had stood solidly in one of the front squares and sent the ball flying down to the left-side boundary.
We had beaten them, and we never lost to them again.
There was, of course, more defeat than victory in our collective story. There was more tragedy than triumph. Once I got out, I never went back there—it’s not the kind of place you go for some casual sightseeing—and I don’t know what happened to those people once I had spent my three weeks with them.
Maybe the psychiatrist did die. She probably did. People who want to generally do. Maybe the glass-room kid never came out of whatever it was that had put him so deep in the well. Maybe he saw the stars from the deep darkness down there. Personally, anhedonia, I have found, is not a passing phase.
I heard this old country guy say once, “I think you decide pretty early on how happy you’re going to be, and then you just go on and be it.” But I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot of the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.
There was so much we had done to ourselves, so much we said in our sessions that our hearts were rent with sorrow. There is so much that happens to the human heart that is in the realm of the unthinkable, the unknowable, the unbearable.
How most people carry on is a mystery. What they talk about at supper. How they can stand to sit in front of a TV from eight until Leno every night. How they can think bowling is fun. How they choose their neckties. How they bear the weight of everyday life without screaming. How a person can go through a whole life and never once contemplate suicide, like people who have never once wanted to be a movie star. How one young man can be handsome and strong and marry an heiress and work at Debevoise and Plimpton and retire to Nantucket to await the visits of his grandchildren, how they can be sailing in the bay while another young man, exactly like the first, can end up in a glass room in Lexington, Kentucky, on Haldol and Thorazine, without hope, without a girlfriend, without a future, and how easily the one can become the other. How one woman can take Gatorade to every one of her son’s lacrosse games and another can lie in bed all day weeping, popping generic drugs, watching Oprah as though waiting for the Second Coming, and piling her dirty dishes in the laundry room. How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep.
It’s a mystery, and there is no answer. But we beat them at volleyball. It didn’t make anything better. It didn’t change the course of our lives or keep bad things from happening, even the very same things that had happened before.
But we beat them at volleyball.
The Summer of Our Suicides
On my thirty-fifth birthday, August 4, 1983, I had dinner in a charming restaurant called Devon House with four women I liked. Then I went home, got in bed with the light on, and did what I had planned to do for a year.
On the morning of my previous birthday, I had awakened to the mess of my life and thought, If things don’t get better in a year, I’m going to kill myself.
The year had passed. I slit my wrist.
I didn’t weep. I didn’t think of anybody I knew. I didn’t think of revenge or feel remorse. I slit my left wrist with my right hand. I’m right-handed.
The skin gave easily, and the blood flowed down my arm into my cupped hand and onto the sheets. The pain was searing.
I could see my room in minute detail, the desk, the scattered papers, the phone, the dirty clothes thrown on the Thonet chair. I could see the pictures of my mother and father in their tarnished silver frames. I could see the building across the street through the dirty windows, through the orange glow of the street lamp. I could hear the rattle of the cheap air conditioner.
The blood was a rich red, redder than I had thought. It was a beautiful color. Crimson. Like the dark glossy lipstick of a beautiful woman. It glistened wet in the light. I was in love with my blood. The skin of my left arm was white and milky and pure, snow nobody had walked on. The cut widened, and I could see the meat beneath my own flesh.
This is it, I thought. Nobody can say this is a rash decision. I’ve thought about nothing else for a year. I’ve waited long enough. This is what I’ve waited for all my life.
It didn’t feel tragic. It felt brilliantly mesmerizing. It felt astute.
I had written notes. To my parents. To my lovely sister. I had, of course, said it was nobody’s fault. The notes were lyrical and winsome. One note was written to a friend of mine. He had once given me two thousand dollars in cash when I had no money. I was so poor, I had to walk to his apartment to get it. Nothing in the bank. No credit, nothing left on my credit cards. I had seven cents left in the world. Seven pennies. He gave me twenty one-hundred-dollar bills.
He had been a bartender when he was young, and he once said to me that the only real money was cash money.
Earlier in the summer, he had tried to kill himself, but that wasn’t the reason. That wasn’t at all why I did what I did. His story was altogether different. There is no suicide except your own. The rest is just sad and terrible stuff that happens to somebody else.
He was a bookie, a bookie who could quote the sonnets of Shakespeare, who loved the theater but would only go alone and sit on the aisle because he hated crowds, a bookie who drank more than a case of Heineken a day, so many that his wife kept the empties in the downstairs bathtub until the boy could come take them back to the store. He was a bookie who had a secret life, led late at night. Drug dealers and bars and after-hours clubs where gay boys danced with their shirts off. His wife didn’t know where he was half the time.
He was a bookie who was generous beyond belief with the amazing amounts of cash he carried with him at all times. His wife was beautiful, a model, and he had a one-year-old baby.
He didn’t find killing himself an easy thing to do. He had a generous and forgiving nature. He tried once and couldn’t go through with it. His kindness and intelligence argued against it, but when he did it two days later, he did it with a precis
ion and a viciousness that was astonishing.
I talked to him on the phone the night before he did it. He sounded fine.
He got into his green Mercedes on a warm summer afternoon and drove from his apartment on Beekman Place to Connecticut, where he checked into a cheap motel. He went out that night, to a restaurant that happened, he noticed when he looked at the menu, to have the same name as his baby daughter. He couldn’t eat. Then he went back to the motel.
He was a big man, and like a lot of big men in the summer, he was always hot. Before he went to bed, he turned the air conditioner to its highest setting, so the room would be cold enough.
When he woke up, he got dressed in a pair of khaki pants, a clean white shirt, and a Bill Blass blazer with gold buttons. Then he took out a razor blade and cut his wrist so deeply he severed the nerves. Then he took the razor and slit his other arm from the elbow to the wrist. He had left no note. Not a word.
He hit an artery. He bled profusely. He bled on the bed and the cheap thin rug and the bathroom tile; he bled until he fainted. Ah, this is it, he thought. This is the end.
Then he woke up. He was dizzy, and he was still bleeding, but he was alive. He took the razor and cut his wrists again, and he bled and passed out again, thinking, Ah, this is it, and then he woke up again. So he took the razor and he slit his throat. There was blood everywhere. He was bathed in his own blood.
He lost consciousness one more time and one more time he thought, Ah, this is it. But he came to, and he went to the phone, and he called the front desk.
“There’s something wrong with the air-conditioning,” he said to the desk clerk. “I’m freezing to death.” He didn’t know what he was saying anymore. He had lost focus.
The maid who found him threw up and fainted. He was still alive. He was conscious. He could talk. The air-conditioning had saved him. The room had been cold enough to slow his circulation, so that, as massive as his injuries were, they had not been enough to kill him. The cold had congealed his blood.
He was stitched together. He was brought back to the city. He was hospitalized. He was near death. Only three people besides his wife knew he had done this. I was one of them. This was in June, right after the Belmont Stakes. It was three days after his daughter’s birthday.
The official story was that he had gone to visit his sick father in Georgia. He owed half a million dollars to some really bad people.
The reality was that he was heavily sedated in a locked room in a locked ward at Payne Whitney, under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance by burly thugs. I went to see him.
The hospital was like a Victorian nightmare, full of drooling lunatics, slobbering and muttering and screaming. It was dark. It was dirty. It was loud.
His condition was a shock. He had cut himself so deeply that one arm was in a cast. His face was as pale as his hospital pajamas.
His other arm was bandaged to the elbow, his neck was bandaged, and he barely knew where he was. When he spoke, he didn’t make sense. It was only later he told me the whole story.
What do you say? What would you say? I was terrified of him. There was no way to make conversation of any kind. I told him I was glad he was alive. I told him he was my best friend, that if I had lost him I would feel bereft for a very long time. You say anything in a situation like that. Anything to pretend it isn’t happening. You want to believe it isn’t real.
He told me he just couldn’t stand the mediocrity of his life anymore. He talked like a man underwater.
“It’s not anything else,” he said. “It’s the mediocrity.” He moved in slow motion. He was glazed with sweat and drugs.
The ward was filled with crazy people, schizophrenics, people who had just lost their minds for no reason, men and women whose hearts and spirits were china plates, broken irrevocably, people for whom there was no world outside the doors of the ward, would never be, no sustenance more vital or soothing than the medications they were being given. They went to a special window to get them. The pills were in little paper cups, like lemon ices.
It was a freak show, people in bathrobes shuffling blankly from window to window, a collection of tics. The bookie belonged in the green glow of the warm bar we always went to, telling stories, paying for everybody’s drinks with cash, doing cocaine in the bathroom. Giving drugs to whoever wanted them out of the goodness of his heart, and because he always had more of them than anybody.
A few years before, we had sat up all night, running from bar to bar, then to after-hours clubs, ending up in his study, doing drugs until his sleepy wife came and told him to go to bed and told me to leave. It was five o’clock in the morning. Her patience was exhausted.
I was supposed to fly to Virginia early the next morning for Christmas. He said the only way to make an early flight was to stay up all night. We believed that kind of thing back then. It was almost light when I got back to my apartment.
My father met me at the airport. I looked terrible, clean-shaven, perfectly pressed and expensive, loaded with bag after bag of presents from Bergdorf’s and Three Lives and Saks, but terrible. I looked like death on a cracker. I told him a friend of mine had tried to kill himself the night before, and I had sat up all night with his wife at the hospital. I was so hungover I would have said anything.
He’d be OK, I said. But it was close. I said he was just sad, and that I couldn’t go to a cocktail party I’d been to every year since I was twelve.
Once, at that party, a professor at the college sent a note over to me, written on a cocktail napkin. It said, “I had such hopes for you. When did you get to be so dull? Why are you so ordinary?”
I had sent a note back. On a cocktail napkin. I quoted Eliot. “I am not Prince Hamlet,” it said. “Nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord, one that will do / to swell a progress, start a scene or two.” I was nineteen.
I looked at my wounded, almost-dead friend and felt guilt. As though I had told a lie and caused it.
At first, I thought that he, in his terror and his failure, had saved me from my own suicide, with my birthday less than two months away. I had thought of it for a year. Now I wouldn’t have to think of it anymore. That’s what I thought.
I went to see him every single day, seven days a week, more than I could stand, and I saw him turn into one of the shuffling zombies. Tranquilizers. Antipsychotics. Anything given to the violent and self-destructive. He couldn’t bend the fingers of his left hand where the nerve was severed. The bandage on his neck made him look like he was about to get a haircut. The heat was excruciating.
It was a terrible thing to do, a terrible moment to have endured. To do that to his wife, in whom he delighted, whose charm and humor and jet black hair he took for granted, and to his baby daughter, whom he adored, the sheer desperation of it and the cuts and the endless sad and cruel details of the blue blazer and the khaki pants and the air-conditioning and the bandages and the drugs—these were all strong reasons to avoid the same fate.
But that feeling only lasted for a few weeks. I began to see what he had done as a necessary action that opened the door for me, a vision of my own way out, a harbinger, even if he had failed.
Even if he had failed, he had made his point. He had written his point in blood on his clothes and his body and the walls and floors and bed linens of a motel room in Connecticut. And I had no wife. I had no lovely daughter. It seemed, at the time, that I had no one in all the world.
He started shock therapy. In his six months in the hospital, he had something like thirty-seven treatments. He began to look forward to them, because they rendered him speechless and thoughtless for two days, and the blank hours were the hours he found the most bearable. He became addicted to the electricity shooting through his brain.
Nowadays, you can have it done in an office visit. They don’t call it shock therapy anymore. They call it electroconvulsive therapy. ECT. Much more modern. Stigma-free.
Psychiatrists tell you how easy it is. It’s a walk in the park. People, even famous
people, talk about it on television talk shows. They say how much better they feel, how much more cheerful, how it’s changed their lives. Anything’s possible now, they say.
It wasn’t that way then. After a month in the hospital, he was not merely depressed; he was crazy. Every day, I could watch him slip farther into a madness that wrapped him like a wet sheet.
He began to carry a small ball of Silly Putty. He was never without it, and he would form it into endless shapes. He called it his worry fairy, and when he slept, he stuck it on the wall by his bed. When he had his electroshock treatments, he clutched it in his hand.
I began to carry a razor blade. I got a dozen single-edged blades from the art studio of the advertising agency where I worked, the kind used for cutting mat board. I was embarrassed and scared even to ask for them. In the art studio, I thought they would know what I was going to do with them.
I carried one with me all the time. The same one. If I didn’t have it, I panicked. I carried it in my pants pocket, and I was always glad to be wearing a pair of pants that had one of those little watch pockets at the waist, or a coin pocket in the larger right-hand pocket. I called these razor pants. I slept with a razor in my hand.
I would find it in the bed next to me when I woke up. One night, I lost the blade while I slept. I looked everywhere. I never found it. I had to choose another one.
I carried it when I went to see the bookie in the hospital. I never told anybody. I tried to make conversation with him. I tried to get close to the terror and the madness and the mystery of the act itself, but it was beyond comprehension. I turned the blade in my hand as I talked to him, as I tried to nurse him back to sanity with compassion and kindness.
The razor blade I carried had a protective cardboard wrapping around it, so the sharp edge of the blade was covered. It was held shut by glue. I decided, as the cardboard got dirtier, stained by sweat and ink from my fingers, that when the cardboard came off the blade on its own, I would cut my wrists open.