Hyper-chondriac (2 page)

My palms started itching even more than pre-Tamm. And the itching was inching up my forearms, approaching my elbow. I grabbed a container of fresh-squeezed orange juice, popped that little blue pill in my mouth and it slid down my throat like a prepubescent on a waterslide. Then I took a nap.

 

Miraculously, after a couple of weeks, I began to notice significant changes. For the first time in my life, the world seemed calm and pleasant and I had no urge to rush. I felt truly at peace, as if I had died and was staring at myself from above with a fresh perspective, finally behaving as I should. I looked forward to the minutiae of the wedding plans with Nancy, insisting on helping in every phase—even the flowers, though I still believe blue asters are a big waste of money. Road rage wasn't a passenger when I was driving. Unreturned business calls were shrugged off. Other people didn't bother me as much, if at all. I was actually slowing down my life and savoring it. I was finally healthy—three-dimensionally, not just on paper. That delightful drug sent messages throughout my body that gave me the revelation that perhaps
I
was the problem in my interpersonal relationships—not necessarily every other human I interacted with, as I had long suspected.
I
was the bull in a china shop.
I
was out of control. When Nancy noticed a Zoloftesque difference in my behavior, I attributed it to deep breathing, not something smaller than a Skittle that I kept in a bottle hidden in the back of my sock drawer.

I wanted to put all my money into Pfizer, the maker of Zoloft. I believe had Ron Artest been on Zoloft, he never would have gone into the stands in Detroit and punched those people; I believe had Milosevic been on Zoloft, there would have been no Bosnian conflict; I believe had Jeffrey Dahmer been on Zoloft, his freezer would have been stuffed with Omaha steaks instead of people's heads.

I wish I could have told my secret to everyone on the planet. I'd have done an infomercial with Tony Little. I'd have broadcast the cure for hyper-chondria on satellite TV to uptight, ill people in foreign lands. I could be the poster boy for Zoloft! I would work for them for free in gratitude for their outstanding product. But I had promised Dr. Tamm that I would keep my mouth shut. And he was my new hero.

So things were going pretty great for me and my serotonin modified brain. I got married, shook my non-itchy hands with people who gave us wedding checks and went on a lovely erectile dysfunction–free honeymoon.

 

About a month after our wedding, I decided to tell Nancy. I couldn't keep making up reasons for the new and improved me. Besides, it's better to lie to your dermatologist than your wife.

“Nance, I have something to tell you.”

“You've cheated already?”

“No. My dermatologist gave me some…”

“Retin-A?”

“No. Zoloft. I've been on it since March.”

“Oh. I had no idea skin doctors could give out non-skin stuff.”

“They can.”

“Good for you!”

She was verging on jubilant about my newfound chemical reliance. My new spouse already had a commanding lead on me in calm and wouldn't have minded if I caught up a little. “Let me know if I can do anything,” her Joyce DeWitt face and petite nonconfrontational frame offered. “I can even pick up your pills when I'm getting my Starbucks.”

 

For eight-twelfths of a year, life in Los Angeles was good. Nancy and I had both left
Blind Date
and discovered the joys of writing sentences that didn't fit inside thought-bubbles. I broke into magazines and she got her dream job of writing on a sitcom, which came with my dream—better health insurance. Though, ironically, I wasn't getting sick anymore. The only side effect I had from Zoloft was calm.

Then one autumn afternoon, life got a lot less good.

I was driving along some curvy hillside roads when a guy in a Honda Accord coming from the opposite direction drifted into my lane, nearly forcing my car into a telephone pole. He then stopped his car and fervently displayed his middle finger to the apparent delight of the sneering collie in his passenger seat. I should have just returned the gesture and kept driving, but I couldn't. Instantly, it felt as if my Zoloft had lost its power. I was on my own again, in charge of navigating my sea of rage.

I pulled a U-turn and tailgated Honda-man, determined to make sure he was never again able to make one of his fingers very tall. I stayed inches behind his car until it stopped at a dog park, then I got out and chased that fucker across a soccer field while simultaneously telling him I wanted to rip his head off his neck. I was quite the multitasker. With my face two inches away from his face, I could feel the words from my threats bounce off his skin and ricochet back at me as the veins in my neck and forehead popped out like a series of cuckoo clocks. I was bordering on an aneurysm. The scary thing is, it probably wouldn't have mattered who was driving that car with the collie; it could've been Mike Tyson and my reaction would have been the same. Because I hadn't been in a fight since high school (which I lost), I spared the quivering collie owner and his devoted pet. Then I went home and collapsed in bed for the next fourteen hours. Meltdowns are exhausting.

The next morning, my neck hurt, my jaw throbbed and I felt as if I had an ulcer: the first signs of body malfunction since my hands stopped itching. My hyper-chondria was back.

I returned to my Zoloft dealer and Dr. Tamm immediately doubled my prescription. I would now be assigned to the light yellow 100 mg pill. (Which made it much harder for dining companions to read the word “Zoloft.”) But the downside: the maximum recommended dose is 200 mg per day, so after a little less than a year, I was already halfway there. I did some quick math and realized that in another couple of years, I'd be immune to this entire selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor family—unless they developed a pill the size of my head. Then what the hell would I do? Switch to another stopgap drug like Paxil or Lexapro? Have kava root injected into my medulla? Maybe my podiatrist would prescribe electroshock therapy?

On my way to the pharmacy to pick up my new and improved prescription, a guy cut me off without signaling and I flipped out again and tailgated him through five traffic lights. Is this how insane I had been for the first thirty-nine years of my life? If so, it was a miracle I was a fully functioning adult with dozens of friends, girlfriends and now a wife. I needed a Zoloft IV on the way to get my Zoloft.

 

After being bumped up to the 100 mg pills I quickly noticed I wasn't twice as calm as when I was on the 50 mg pills; nor was I a hundred times as calm as in my pre-Zoloft days. Because my body had gotten used to the drugs, the double dose was now merely the equivalent of the single dose—way back when I first started taking it almost a year ago. Although my days on this stuff were numbered, it bought me time to look elsewhere for a more permanent, drug-free solution. The only trouble was, not a lot of time.

Since I finally knew what feeling peaceful and relaxed actually was like—and that it could be achieved within the confines of my body—I wanted to get back to that state. I was going to get to the bottom of this. I had to hurry up and calm down.

1In 2005 a group of Australian scientists from the Garvan Institute in Sydney discovered that a hormone released into the body during times of stress, neuropeptide Y (NPY), destabilizes the body's immune system, which makes one susceptible to illness. Don't worry, there won't be many of these. I hate this tiny font as much as you do.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Jesus Christ yourself!!!!”

My parents yelled “Jesus Christ” at each other a minimum of fifteen times a day despite the fact that we were Jews.

It hadn't always been like this. Before my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis my parents didn't fight much. But when I turned ten the house became a war zone. The screaming coupled with the constant barrage of doors slamming might as well have been gunshots.

“Sam! This isn't the jacket I wanted! I asked you to get me the
red
one! You do NOT listen!”

The disease had transformed my mother ostensibly overnight from an independent, warm, thoughtful first-grade teacher to an angry, frustrated woman who couldn't get her shoes on without assistance. Before MS invaded our household, I'm not sure there was a better mom on the planet. My mother, who looks like a Sheepshead Bay version of Audrey Hepburn, was beloved by her students and worshipped by our family. She wrote and directed new plays combining pop culture and fairy tales for her first-graders every year. She would read to my younger sister and me each night in a smooth, melodic voice reminiscent of radio commercials one would hear in the 1950s. She'd take us to arts and crafts shops weekly so we could do little projects (such as making hippopotamuses out of mini pompoms) and drive us to Marsh's or Macy's and let us pick out clothes for school that were far more expensive than what we could afford. But the MS took all of that away, and more.

Since she felt helpless and relied heavily on my father for simple tasks like getting out of bed and using the bathroom, her pride took a hit. Even as a child, I could sense the embarrassment she felt at losing her independence as I was gaining mine. To compensate, my mother managed to package the endearing troika of being very demanding, very impatient and very irritated. And not only did she yell a lot, but objects were flung around as if we lived in an arthritic Foley studio. She had just turned thirty-seven.

 

For some reason, I always seemed to be in the thick of things. My brother, Mark, had the room adjacent to my parents, but because he was seventeen he wasn't around much. He had just become an Eagle Scout and happily spent much of his time sleeping in the woods with his troop. My sisters shared a room downstairs, but the older of the two, Debbie, had just turned fifteen and discovered the glamour of dating boys with driver's licenses. She preferred to be driven around in a Trans Am by a guy with a mustache and Black Sabbath thumping from a half-dozen speakers than to be exposed to the unmelodic shrieking of angry Jews. Meanwhile, my younger sister, Stacey, six, could be found huddled in the corner of the top bunk bed rereading
The Phantom Tollbooth
with cotton balls stuffed into each ear.

My room was upstairs directly across the hall from the madness and because I didn't know anyone with a Trans Am yet, nor was I interested in learning how to tie fifteen different kinds of knots, I was always around. And, since frustration is easily transferable, I was especially susceptible. Every syllable of fury permeated my tiny skull and would be stored inside for later use.

As bad as I felt for my mom, I felt even worse for my dad. Although he always dropped whatever he was doing if my mother needed something, it never seemed to be fast enough—and as in a video game, one little mistake would wipe out everything positive that had been accomplished. If he brought her home a pastrami sandwich, picked up all her prescriptions and did her laundry but mistakenly handed her a Diet Fresca instead of a Tab, my mother would unleash her wrath: an onslaught of constant reminders of how unlucky she was, how much pain she was in and how she couldn't wait to die. I sometimes wished I would go first.

Despite this harsh treatment, whenever my father was out running errands he'd rush back to be at my mother's side in case she needed anything or an emergency arose. Or maybe he was just scared of the repercussions of returning “late.”

The owner of curly blond hair, a Fred MacMurray face and Popeye-sized forearms, my dad grew up in the Great Depression. His parents had emigrated from Poland in the early 1920s to escape the pogroms and had filled him with fear. He was never allowed to learn how to ride a bike or swim (both too dangerous) and even now he's scared to death to drive over bridges or at night, and forget about bridges at night. He's also afraid to shower or bathe and thus rarely does either. Whether this is symptomatic of his fear of water or of the prisoners' fate at Treblinka, or he just likes to be dirty, no one's quite sure. At the age of seventy-three, he still hasn't eaten a slice of pizza because my grandparents were convinced that any pizza parlor in Brooklyn would funnel the profits back to Mussolini in Italy who would then subsequently transfer the funds to the Nazis to be used against the Jews. Apparently this elaborate plan even included garlic knots. To this day, my father screams regularly in his sleep from nightmares of Nazis chasing him.

Perhaps because of all his fears, my dad immersed himself in the world of Golden Age comic books. When he was a kid he would run down to the corner store and buy every comic he could get his hands on: Superman, Batman, Action Comics, Plastic Man, The Star-Spangled Kid, The Flash, Captain Marvel, Captain America. If there was a guy with a cape on the cover, the comic would find a way into his bedroom. However, for some mysterious reason his collection peaked and then began to dwindle. No matter how many comics he bought, they continued disappearing faster than he could replenish them. Finally, he discovered the cause. Whenever my dad was out playing stickball, my grandmother would throw a few out. She had no idea he'd even notice; cleanliness was more important to her than the latest exploits of Clark Kent.

So whether to relive his childhood, feel protected or just ward off evil, my father was the only adult in town who still collected comic books and was obsessed with superheroes. He wore a Justice League of America jacket—even when it was way too hot for a jacket of any kind; a baseball hat with the Mighty Thor proudly displaying a large hammer was a fixture atop his head; and he always wore a large pewter Superman ring on his right hand with a giant
S
on it, decades before Hollywood started sinking its teeth into the comic book genre.

“Sam! Get up here! You forgot your Superman ring!” my mother would shout. (In later years they rigged up an intercom system so my father would transform into Pavlov's dog whenever he heard a buzzing sound.)

“Just a second, Rhoda!”

Then he'd charge up the fifteen stairs and enter the bedroom, crawling on the ground in slow motion.

“Too weak…need…ring…have…lost…all…superpowers!”

“You're an idiot, Sam!”

My mother didn't laugh a lot, at least in her current condition. So being called an idiot was the equivalent of a round of applause at a comedy club.

She probably could've used a drink, but that wasn't an option in our house. My parents have had a total of four drinks over the last three decades (two Old Milwaukees, a White Russian and a frozen piña colada). And cursing was nearly as rare. We probably had the highest yelling/squeaky-clean language ratio of any household in America. Four-letter words were prohibited under any circumstances. Approximately once a year, somebody would go absolutely nuts and spell “shit” aloud. “Your father is such an S-H-I-T!” my mother would say, in a cadence barely above a whisper.

Luckily, I didn't have to worry about too many of my friends being exposed to the tension emanating from each room, because it was rare that I had anyone over. I blamed it on Rufus, our Old English sheepdog, named after an innocuous character on
Sesame Street.
As a puppy in his pre-Frazer days, Rufus was cuddly and friendly, but he quickly transformed into a bona fide attack dog from living with our family. And one day he snapped. A cable TV man went into our backyard when we weren't home, ignoring both the leaping, overtly aggressive, loud-barking ninety-five-pound shaggy dog baring pointy teeth
and
the large-font Beware of Dog sign displayed prominently on the fence. Rufus tore him apart in about twenty seconds and my family had to go to court. Although we won the case, my mother blamed me for the incident, since I was the one who wanted cable.

In addition to my parents' behavior, I was aesthetically ashamed of my house. The common areas were all exceedingly messy and the carpets threadbare and stained. And, unlike any of my friends' homes, ours consisted solely of antiques. I made all my phone calls from an old 1943 rotary pay phone inside a 1927 phone booth with a glass accordion door that shut for optimum privacy. I watched television lying horizontally in a 1902 red vinyl–covered barber chair and checked the time on a 1936 neon bank clock that was the size of a small desk. There was a giant movie poster for
Down to Earth
starring Rita Hay-worth from 1947 above a Woolworth's Five & Ten sign from 1931; velour movie theater seats from the 1940s sat next to a Ringling Brothers' drum from 1908. On the extraordinary occasion when we had any guests or relatives over, my dad would plug in the 1938 Wurlitzer jukebox, deposit a nickel from a nearby 1920s pickle jar and we'd hear the Andrews Sisters singing “Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree” or Peggy Lee crooning “Rum and Coca-Cola.” I know, it may sound pretty cool now, but when you're growing up you just want some modern shit in your house like everybody else.

My mom's main joy in life had been reduced to buying antiques through mail-order catalogs, but she may have been even more gleeful when yelling at my father while he attempted to hang the nostalgia on the wall.

“It's not straight, Sam!”

“It is straight, Rhoda. I measured it.”

I would always take my father's side. He'd gone to college on an art scholarship and began his career teaching it. He also made money on the side doing calligraphy and transforming wedding and bar mitzvah photographs into pen-and-ink drawings. When it came to hanging things he had the magic eye.

“Cool Yer Pitz, Ma!”

This was Debbie's method of restoring order, but her proclamation just got everybody more riled up.

“Don't you DARE tell me to cool my pitz!” my mother thundered. “You cool
your
pitz!”

“No, you cool
yours
!”

“Deb-bie! I am
not
speaking to you anymore!” And my mother and Debbie would ignore each other for the next month. The silent treatment was actually far more intense than any bellowing because you can't fight silence with more silence. So whoever had initiated the silence held all the power. It was, in fact, a brilliant tactical maneuver, albeit a destructive one.

“Sam, I am
tel-ling
you”—my mother would break even the simplest of words apart to emphasize her point—“it is not
straight
!”

“What part of it isn't straight?”

“The
who-le
thing.”

And on and on the argument would go until he'd moved the piece around on the wall like a pointer on a Ouija board, eventually circling back to where it had originally been hung. Only now, my mother would take the credit for its perfectly symmetrical position.

“Now it is
strai-ght,
Sam!”

Besides arguing with my father about minutiae, my mother's main source of solace was shopping. However, she rarely left the-house and going to a store to try on clothes was out of the question. Practically every other day the UPS man would be at our door requesting a signature, and every other day my dad would be at the mall returning or exchanging merchandise my mother had charged through catalogs. Her purchases were based solely on a two-inch photo on glossy paper, so inevitably, 90 percent of them wound up being the wrong size, a poor fit, of inferior quality or exactly as the catalog advertised but she had changed her mind. As my mother's condition worsened, her catalog shopping increased dramatically and my father's trips to the mall exponentially. Our “family” trips to the plethora of indoor stores weren't exactly relaxing either. But when you're ten or eleven years old and you still don't drive, you're at the mercy of whoever has car keys.

When David Sywak's parents drove us to the mall, they'd give us a minimum of an hour to look around and then meet them back at a designated spot. Mr. Hastings even gave us two hours. My dad: fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes? In a friggin' mall?!?! You've gotta be kidding! But he wasn't. “But Mr. Frazer,” my friends would plead, “there are over a hundred stores here!”

“Yes,” replied my father, in his deep monotone schoolteacher voice. “But some of them sell things that won't interest you.”

Since we had little choice but to obey the rules, my friends and I had to run around like prepubescent madmen to Spencer Gifts and that store that just sold purple things, and no matter how much we rushed, we always seemed to be at least a minute late, which irritated my dad. And forget about trying to buy anything. Unless there was a combination of no line
and
a cashier who was actually lucid and competent, no matter how fast we ran around, there was little chance of having any transaction take place and getting to our red VW bug on time.

With all his rushing and stress, why didn't my father have hyper-chondria? Maybe because he
couldn't
get sick. If he did, we'd all die. Or at least starve, since he did all the food shopping.