Problems (18 page)

When I get off the phone, I feel sadder than I did before I spoke to him. I looked forward to things like phone calls, and now the call came and went and it wasn't much of anything. I try to call him back, but it goes straight to voicemail. Seven minutes is the exact amount of time he will allow you to waste with your bullshit.

He approached friendship like it was something to check off the list. Call Maya in the loony bin. Take out the garbage.

Some of these broken women talk in whispers about changing their lives. Some of them act all tough and defiant. They are young, and I want to tell them there is no one they are rebelling against.

Keisha writes like a school kid. She is trying to write a letter to a judge to get her daughter back. I sit down at her desk and take out a piece of paper. Her daughter was taken away because someone called Child Protective Services when Keisha's boyfriend was slinging weed out of their apartment, but he's gone now. Keisha tells me she's been clean and sober for five years. She couldn't take living without her kid, though, so one night she got in a fight with
her mother and threw a bottle and then used the shards to slice her arm open. I can't imagine her doing this. She seems like the type to eat and lie around on the couch, like she lies around in bed here, just looking at magazines. They get on her for not showering, but she says she likes baths.

I've never seen her cry. I've seen everyone else cry. I have heard her laugh. She has a great laugh.

I offer to write the letter for her. I spend days on it. I write it and revise it a million times. It feels good to be useful.

Give me new problems. I'm tired of the same old problems.

Why can't someone interest me in my own life?

She tells me I wrote an awesome letter. It makes me feel good to see her smile and look like she has something to be excited about. I wish I could do more. She shows me pictures of a little girl with ribbons in her hair. This, she tells me, is the only reason she has for living.

Keisha and I stay up in the dark. She tells me about how her uncle had molested her. I feel like I can help her. I talk to her about getting her
GED
. I say I can tutor her.

There is liberation in being in a loony bin. There isn't anything else to fear. Hello, bottom, nice to meet you. Sometimes it feels exactly right. When there is a tray of food in front of me, I eat it. I wear boring, clean clothes. I listen more than I talk. I let the structure lead me through the day. I don't use my brain. I don't focus on my emotions. I am a blank slate. Everything begins here. And if I get to read a book, it will be a good day. To be able to lie in bed with my bare feet swaying.

I don't want the nurses and the doctors to know, but in my head, I begin to make plans. I want to go back to school. I want to do everything exactly right. It isn't fear of coming back here so much as I don't want my life to stop again. No more time-outs.

At night I get used to screams just as I got used to sirens in the city; the noise registers but fails to alarm anymore.

I no longer feel that crazy sense of empathy every time I hear the metal door to the quiet room close, primarily because I've witnessed enough insane temper tantrums that made me want to throw people in there myself. How hard is it to shut the fuck up while people are trying to sleep?

At least I left everyone alone. At least I was quiet when I was doing my dying.

Sometimes a tiny little scream rises inside me, and I muffle it with a pillow. I tell myself I have to be the sane one in here. I have to fold my clothes. I have to shower every morning. I have to put all my books in alphabetical order, be steady, and act like all of this is very much beneath me. No, I am not crazy. My secret fantasy is not about the day I can have my own fucking bathroom where I cut up my arms as much as want.

The woman who lost her son. I have to act like she doesn't have all the reason in the world to be fucking nuts.

After three weeks, they let me go home for a weekend.

My aunt and my mother pick me up. My aunt says, “Look at you. You've lost weight since I've seen you. You look like a boy.”

I just shake my head. Then she grabs my wrist and says, “What did you do?” Her face changes from a smirk to a nasty look of
disapproval. “You know your mother cried?” She doesn't seem to care about the nurse sitting right across from us, who looks up as my aunt's voice rises. I understand the way people view this: me fucking with my mom.

The weekend consists of going to different relatives' houses, eating a lot of food, and lying about all the positive things I'm excited about. I talk about finishing my thesis. I talk about getting my
PHD
. Everybody is so encouraging; I almost kind of start believing in this future too. Nobody brings up Peter. Do they think it's not a big deal, or is it because they think it's too big a deal?

Back on the ward, more of the same. They finally tell me that in a few weeks, I'll be released. I don't feel like I'm ready.

I'm not sure why they are releasing me. It's been almost two months. I stopped trying to get points long ago. I feel comfortable in the routine. I no longer lie in bed wide-awake all night crying. I have stopped thinking of ways to torture my mother forever for putting me in a psychiatric ward. Each morning I look forward to breakfast and then breeze through group therapy (which is more like taking attendance in elementary school than actual therapy), sometimes offering a story from my childhood but mostly letting other people talk. I tried and failed to start a journal, but I enjoy reading again and love the hour before dinner. The nurses are no longer evil bitches controlling my life; they're part of the background, daily annoyances I've learned to put up with. I have started hating the patients who won't fall in line. I look at them in the same way I remember other patients had looked at me, like, “It isn't that hard. Just shut up, and do what you're told.”

What would life on the outside be like? Fear. Dread. I've been a mouse in a cage. A girl taking a time-out. I don't trust myself. The world and the men and the drugs. The way the whole day would be
free, not broken up into mindless activities for me to navigate. I could start out slowly: doing my laundry, keeping my room clean, writing at night, making myself part of the world again. I would look back at this as the nasty ending to a bad patch. I would make myself breakfast. I would make my bed. I would talk to my mother daily. I would go to job interviews. I would spend a few hours a day working on my thesis at the coffee shop. I would be one of those women at the coffee shop, sipping a coffee, laptop open, looking serious and productive. I would take meds every day that would keep me steady, and have a quiet, simple life. Or I wouldn't. I would get out and just fuck everything up again. I run my hand against the wall. Keisha laughs at something in a magazine. The bed suddenly feels comfortable, and I curl up in a fetal position. Dear world, I'm sorry, but I don't know if I will ever be the kind of person who can live with you.

* * *

Back in the city, I listen to Lou Reed. I write, drink tons of coffee. I stay up all night because I don't need sleep, don't need food. All the weight I put on at the nut house has fallen off me. Not long after I came back, I got lonely, and now Elizabeth's friend Val stays at my place. He gave me two hundred bucks. He said he would give me a hundred a week but is full of excuses and barely pays me. But he does clean and that's nice.

After a while, I stop taking my antidepressants because they make it so I can't come. What's more depressing than that?

My mind races. My body is shrinking. I walk to the train. Hear the
National Geographic
narrator,
Human beings do not procreate as much as other species, but their ability to use tools and adapt to their environments, coupled with their long lives, make them one of the worst types of existing infestations. It's nearly impossible to get rid of them. Look
at this one here; he's made a nest out of a bench other humans have made for sitting. Look at this one mama human with her two little chicks, all clothed in the feathers of dead birds to keep warm during the winter months. Humans have a slight fur covering their entire bodies, long silky hair on the tops of their heads and around their pubis. They sustain themselves on animal protein from the farms they house to grow and breed their prey
.

Mania is fucking amazing. I talk forever.

I go on craigslist to get another date.

The john dresses like a hipster and claims to be a musician. He's cool. Maybe in his forties. I am three hours late, and he doesn't even care. “I had to see how that movie
Flight
ended,” I explain. He laughs. We go walk around. As a way of checking him out, I had suggested getting something to eat. He says there's a twenty-four-hour diner nearby, but I feel good about him, so we go back to his place. It's the first apartment in the city I've been to with wall-to-wall carpeting.

“I feel like we're in a hotel somewhere in the Midwest.”

“Ouch!” he says, pouring a glass of wine.

“Oh my god!”

“What?”

“We have the same towels!” I realize that I come off way too excited about this.

“Target?”

“Yup.”

He sits down next to me, and we talk forever. We talk about how
BBC
shows are better than American
TV
. We talk about how in England they don't feel the need for every character to look like a model; the actors there look like real people. We talk about how he's never been married or lived with anyone. He talks about how
unfair it would be to have a girlfriend when he's always on the road. We talk about moving all the time and being an army brat. I like him. It feels easy.

Is it awful or not that a dude who pays me for sex is easier and more enjoyable than any date I've been on?

I'm getting sweaty, and I start feeling a little sick. I did two bags in a hurry before I left home, and I can't tell if it was not enough or too much. Now I'm drinking wine on top of it. Careful, this is how people
OD
.

I let the conversation lull. I should get the sex over with soon. It feels like that fairy tale where the girl turns into a pumpkin at midnight. I can tell I only have a few hours before I will need more dope or be sick. I put my hand on his leg. He says, “We don't have to rush it.”

I can tell he is lonely. I never get lonely when I'm using drugs. Obviously he wants someone to talk to, and it makes me feel bad that he is paying me to have a conversation with him. I kind of fall in love with how pathetic and sad and human that is.

I let a few moments pass before I kiss him.

I tell him how nervous I am because I've never done this before. How I had been scared of him being a nut. He says, “Well, I still could be.”

Will I be able to tell when a real sicko wanders into my life? Will I end up chained to a pole and raped over and over for, like, ten years? Will I end up on Oprah? Find God? Will I write a book about my experiences? I would definitely write a book if I lived through something like that. I'm actually interesting, and I would have a story people would love to feel sick reading. Most people who are
abducted or survive some harrowing, life-threatening experience are pretty boring, but everyone calls them heroes. Would it be heroic to save yourself if it was your own fault for being in that bad situation in the first place? Like, what options do you have, other than to try and not die? And if you do die, does that make you a loser instead of a hero?

For example, Lucy Grealy. Lucy Grealy had a deadly cancer as a kid and had to have her chin removed. After surviving the cancer and numerous painful reconstructive surgeries, she attended the best writing program in the country. Her book got great reviews. She lived in New York City. She was talented, young, and on the brink of mainstream success. Then she overdosed on dope. It was such a waste, I remember thinking as I read the news of her death. It was like she had beaten these extraordinary and unlikely odds, survived disfiguring cancer, and all for what? To throw out a life that had been such an ordeal to live through? How could she take life for granted when she had experienced how much suffering just being alive could entail? She had made it, in my eyes. Why did she have to be vulnerable to the same emotional suffering as everyone else? Was I mad at her for not providing me with a happy ending? Maybe the only thing suffering teaches is that suffering sucks.

My john listens intently. He says he understands what I mean, but who was I to know what her life had been like? Plus, she probably got addicted to dope from the years of being prescribed opiates after all those painful surgeries.

“I don't know why I'm talking about this. It's so depressing. I'm sorry.”

He laughs. “No, I like talking to you.”

Maybe this guy could be the love of my life. Maybe we'd end up together.

“I'm just nervous. I've never done this before,” I lie.

I can tell he gets off on the idea of me being nervous. He says, “You must be so nervous,” as his hand goes under my skirt. I spread my legs so he can rub my pussy. “It's okay. It's all going to be okay, honey.” He tells me I'm a good girl. Then he finger-bangs the shit out of me. And it fucking hurts. He should cut his nails. I moan, wondering how long I have to wait to fake having an orgasm.

He takes me by the hair and stands me in front of a mirrored closet. “I want you to watch yourself.”

There are trends in porn that become trends men want to try, or maybe it works the other way around. Like how every dude wants to come on your face; like, that probably wasn't something dudes thought to do back in the 1700s. Or maybe it was. Anyway, gagging porn is popular, and now it seems like every guy wants it. He wants to hear me gag. He grabs my hair and holds it while he forcefully fucks my mouth. I gag and gag and then spit all the mucous onto his cock. Then he smacks my ass and says, gently, “Is that okay? Tell me if it's not and I'll stop, okay?” I say okay. He needs my permission for a slap on the butt but didn't have qualms about being rough with my throat?

After making me gag for a while, he moves me to the couch. He goes hands free, letting me find my own rhythm.

As I'm sucking him off, my mind wanders. I think of how awful it was going to be walking by the train station so late. I wonder if he would let me crash there. But I need dope. Once I was high, what would I feel like eating? Nothing would be open. My jaw hurts. The “job” in blow job. I wonder what would happen if I just stopped. What if I bit his cock? Would he hit me? Would he grab his cock and scream, “What did you do?” Would he demand I leave? Would he call me a crazy bitch?

What if I start to cry and tell a story about being molested by my uncle? Keisha's story was she had been seven when it started. This guy has to pay me if I cry.

Finally, he lets out a sigh. “I'm going to come,” he says. Thank god. I don't want to swallow it, but once it's in my mouth, it seems weird to spit it out. So I swallow it. It tastes so gross it makes me instantly gag. When I sit up, he kisses me softly and puts his arm around me. I kind of wish he was my man. Maybe he would be. Maybe this was the way we came into each other's lives.

I ask him if he's vegetarian.

“Yes, why?”

“Your come. Vegetarian come is the worst. So bitter.”

“Huh,” he says.

Now he probably thinks I suck cocks all the time if I can so readily link a man's diet to his come.

He calls me a freak, so I call him a freak and he laughs. He has on boxers and a wifebeater. I'm fully dressed. I don't feel sick at all. I don't want to leave. I want him to ask me to stay. I want to cuddle. I want to wake up in his arms. I want him to nurse me off dope and to never have to go home again.

He points at the white envelope on the coffee table, then gets up and hands it to me. “Here you go, hon. Make sure you get home safe. Text me when you get home, okay?” I hope he doesn't notice how sad I am that he wants me to go. I tell him he can call me again. He nods like he will, but he probably won't. I am so tired of people, and how they get you to like them and then make it so hard to be close to them. He's the one who wanted to talk for hours. I was prepared to just get on with it and go, but he needed me to like him. He needed to be close to someone. His sink has one cereal bowl in it. I linger a little too long, but he doesn't change
his mind. We hug and kiss like we care about each other. I know he just kisses me because he doesn't want to be rude. He throws on a black
T
-shirt with the logo for some band he'll never play for me.