Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (16 page)

The next morning I was trying to get dressed, and I woke up in a puddle of spit not able to move. Maybe if I just drank more orange juice or gin, I could pull things together and my wife wouldn’t notice anything.

I read the chapter in Goodman and Gilman, the basic pharmacology text, about alcohol withdrawal and was amazed. Suddenly, alcohol went from being 0 percent of my problem and possibly the glue that was keeping me together to 100 percent of my problem. There was no evolution. But now that I knew what the problem was, everything was going to be okay.

“Oh my God, you’re a pig.”

I had dressed up a pig and put lipstick on a pig and thoroughly fooled myself and then taken a pig out dancing. Chilled mugs, imported beer, no more than six or seven a night, Bordeaux futures, never more than half a bottle of wine most nights, making a quart of Jack Daniel’s last a month—all lipstick on a pig. Drinking less than I did in college, blacking out at most once or twice a year … more lipstick on a pig. Having one or two reasons your drinking is okay is maybe okay. I heard someone at a meeting say that on her list of all the things that might be wrong with her life, drinking too much was number nineteen.

All that fancy wine in my basement was nothing but alcohol. What was I going to do about the couple thousand dollars’ worth of Bordeaux futures I owned? I cried tears of joy for having been such an idiot and having things now be so clear. It was also an enormous relief that, since I knew what the problem was, I wouldn’t have to do anything degrading like go to a hospital.

I went to an ATM and took out two hundred dollars. A man not sure of where he’s going or what might happen next needs at least two hundred dollars. I called my sister. She was seven years sober at the time, and I asked if she could take me to an AA meeting. We went to a meeting at the Kennedy skating rink in Hyannis. Amazingly, I won the raffle and was given a Big Book.

“It is a
big
book,” I remarked to my sister. “And blue. Do my hands look like they’re glowing to you?”

When I put a twenty-dollar bill in the collection my sister said I should have only put in a dollar. I said that if these guys were going to save my life, I should give them at least a twenty. I liked the meeting a lot. There was no mention of Bordeaux futures, but I did notice that people were trying to tell the truth and the point was to save their own lives.

At meetings I’ve heard people say proudly that they have no original thoughts, that everything they say they learned in meetings or from reading the Big Book. Wouldn’t that be nice? I have so many original thoughts I have to take medication for it.

Somewhere in there my psychiatrist made a house call. He was very comforting and reassuring. I told him that I was very afraid and didn’t know if I could make it through the night. He said everything was going to be okay and left me with a roll of one-milligram Ativan pills and told me to take one if I got nervous. I think there were forty pills in the roll. I called him again in the morning and told him I was nervous again. He seemed surprised
when I told him that all the little white pills were gone, and he thought maybe I shouldn’t go to work.

“Maybe I should go to another one of those meetings?”

I went in and out of being okay and would try to reassure everyone.
Don’t worry, I get it now. I’m really going to be all right
. But people were less and less reassured.

I was utterly cooked. I prayed a very simple prayer: “
God help me
.”

And something answered:
“Okay.”

Which I took as divine reassurance that things would work themselves out. I didn’t take my cousin Jim’s suggestion that maybe I should go to a hospital all that seriously. I had God’s word that everything was going to be just fine. Maybe I’d go to a hospital once I had things figured out a little better—I didn’t want to confuse people. I didn’t want to be overdramatizing my situation and taking up a space in a hospital that might be needed by someone who really had a problem.

Miracles are no one’s fault
, I’d think, and I’d be unable to stop laughing.

When the voices came back it was like they’d never gone. Fourteen and a half years, and it was like we picked up in the middle of a conversation that had been interrupted just a few minutes earlier.

Having music and art speak to you and move you to your core is a beautiful, beautiful thing, but whenever it happens I can’t help worrying that the voices and too much meaning are lurking around this bend or the next or the next.

“Testing testing testing. Mark, can you hear me? Mark, come in. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, I can hear you.”

“Thank God, we were afraid we had lost you. Don’t worry, everything is going to be okay now.”

“Could you please get someone else? I’ve served my time and am much too old for this crap. Can’t you let me be sort of normal for a while? Fifteen years ago I did a hell of a job standing up for righteousness, but it damn near killed me and took me a long time to get over. I just think you could find someone else.”

“You’re the best, Mark.”

I always assume that if I’m hearing voices, everyone is hearing voices. It’s not hearing voices that’s the problem. The problems come when you try to do something about the voices or mention them to others.

What made the police wrap me up in a straightjacket and sheet and take me to the hospital was an utterly sincere, full-force attempt to dive through a closed third-floor window. Without a moment to waste doubting, I had to run as hard as I could and do my very best to jump through the glass, or I would know forever that I had failed and at least one of my sons would die. I tried to jump through the closed window to prove that I was capable of faith and worth saving and not just a selfish little shit. Luckily most of the glass and sash went out and down into the bushes and I bounced back into the room.

God Himself had told me everything was going to be all right. My version of “all right” did not include chatting with the voices and being chucked back into a psych hospital. I was so
quickly in tatters, what was the good of all that overachievement? It should have taken longer for my proud crust of wellness to be so utterly gone.

I had no argument with the police wrapping me up in a straightjacket and taking me to the hospital. I had tried to jump through a window and was acting in an erratic manner. But they didn’t have to be so rough. I’m not very big and have never hurt anyone, and I had only tried to jump through the window to prove to God I was worth saving. I tried to explain: As soon as I proved my faith, all the bad stuff was supposed to stop. The voices and agitation and need to do things to stop worse things from happening was supposed to go away. It didn’t.

The most arrogant outrageous thought is that there’s a point in thinking.

There was a little sand in my gearbox.

A small thing wrong can make a big thing go completely wrong.

It wouldn’t make sense for God to set up a universe where He had to keep track of every sparrow and step in and fix things with miracles. Better to have billions of sparrows and check in less often.

Part of what happens when one goes crazy is that there’s a grammatical shift. Thoughts come into the mind as firmly established truth. There is no simile or metaphor. There’s no tense but the present. The fantastic presents itself as fact.

It would possibly be tolerable to feel
like
or
as if
one was on fire or
like
the CIA might be after you or
like
you had to hold your breath so that you could be compacted and smuggled to a
neutral site in Mongolia to wrestle India’s craziest crazy. But there’s no
like
or
as if
. It’s all really happening, and there’s no time to argue or have second thoughts.

Without prelude or explanation, I’m in four-point restraints in my boxer shorts on a gurney in a side hall of the hospital where I once trained and currently still work. I’m HMS alum, HMS faculty—I actually teach Introduction to Clinical Medicine and the Newborn Exam—and I didn’t even get into McLean’s?

“Don’t worry about me,” I explain to strangers passing by. “The police way overreacted. As soon as my doctor gets here they’ll undo these silly restraints. Do you know that in a well-run hospital, restraints are almost never necessary?”

Without being too self-centered and petty, I couldn’t help wishing that they had either let me get some clothes or not taken me to the hospital where I was on staff, or if they had to take me there, why couldn’t they have put me in a quiet little room somewhere, anywhere but the hall, please?

A nurse whose kids I had taken care of for years passed by looking afraid and like she might cry. “Don’t worry,” I tried to tell her. “This will turn out okay.”

It’s probably possible to gain humility by means other than repeated humiliation, but repeated humiliation works very well. Fourteen years earlier, I’d fought my way back from being crazy with a lousy prognosis to write a book and go to medical school, finish an internship and residency. Now I was married with two kids, locked up in a windowless room, again. I was being treated with Haldol instead of Thorazine and weighed about 180 instead of 130. Long run, short slide.