Prozac Nation (20 page)

But no one really cared. I managed to meet all my deadlines, my work was always good, and, they figured, she's young, she's from up north where people chatter, no harm done. Even after everyone else left the office at 6:00, I would still be there for hours getting my pieces done since it was impossible for me to work when there were people around to talk to. Between so much writing and so much chatting, my weeks were too packed for me to notice my emotional state at all, except in passing blinks of fatigue.

But on weekends, with no exigencies of the moment beckoning at my head, I realized that I was all alone in the great state of Texas and all alone in the world. Even the brief, two-day gap in activity was enough time for that old ugly feeling, that familiar black wave, to start creeping up on me, threatening to drag me away. Since I slept so little Monday through Friday, you'd have thought that I'd appreciate the days off to catch up, but I could barely sleep anyway, and my nights passed fitfully. I was tired all the time, but unable to find relief. It was like being on cocaine after the trippy effect has worn off and all that's left is a wired feeling that keeps you staring at the ceiling all night, unable to doze. The only difference was, this was not the aftereffect of some coke—this was me. So I filled up the hours as best I could. No one else wanted to surrender a Saturday to cover a day of heavy metal that was known as the Texxas Jamm, so of course I expressed my willingness to review Poison, Tesla, and the rest of the motley assortment of bands that would be playing at the football stadium. No one else wanted to spend July Fourth in Waxahachie at Willie Nelson's Picnic, so I did my civic duty and accepted the assignment. Pain in the ass though I was, who could really fault a girl who'd saved them from having to cover these tawdry and embarrassing bits of Texas culture that only a Yankee could appreciate?

To a certain extent, anyone who's alone and new to an area would be inclined to do a lot of running around, and at first I thought all my manic energy was the result of simple curiosity and the novelty of Dallas. But I was hardly a stranger in a strange place: I'd spent a lot of time in Texas when I was growing up, I'd traveled from one end of the state to the other, I had family in Dallas, I knew the town pretty damn well, and I could very easily have spent weekends in the peaceful company of my relatives, eating barbecue and going to the mall. Sometimes I did do that. But it was never pleasant for me. I was so nervous all the time, always feeling like there was something I should be doing but wasn't, always feeling at the mercy of something that felt like a hive of bees buzzing in my head.

Once I woke up at three in the morning, but without my glasses on I mistook the three on my digital clock for an eight. In fear of being late for—for whatever—I charged out of bed, jumped in the shower, dressed, made myself up, drank coffee, and ate Cocoa Krispies, and only as I grabbed my handbag to walk out the door did I notice that the sky was dark, it was the middle of the night, there was no need to rush. And it's not exactly like I had to punch a time clock. When I got back into bed, I laughed to myself a little bit, and then I just thought, This is crazy. What's happening to me? I've got all this energy, not the refreshing, delightful kind but the edgy anxious type, and not a damn thing to do with it. If the editors of the
Dallas Morning News
decided one day that I had to write the entire contents of the newspaper by myself, I still wouldn't be busy enough to satisfy this enormous, deleterious need I have to keep moving. There will always be this deficit, this flabby remainder of self hanging over me, demanding more attention than I and seventy-two other people put together could possibly satisfy. What I wouldn't do to be Alice climbing through the looking glass, taking one of those pills that makes you small, so small. What I wouldn't do to be less.

And I started to think, Damn, I need medicine. I need something reigning in all this thinking. Because I'm going to go crazy like this. I was almost twenty years old, which is often the age that people with bipolar illness experience their first manic episode, so maybe that's what was happening to me. When I wasn't working, I was out partying, dating sixteen different men at once, never sleeping at night, gulping Jolt cola and snorting speed for breakfast so I could get through the rest of the day. I figured out that I could manage my moods fairly well if I stuck to a rigorous chemical routine of beer and wine in the evenings, followed by mornings of major uppers.

Drinking in Dallas was a lot more fun than it had ever been anywhere else, although I couldn't say why. Perhaps it was because I took to hanging with some hard-news reporters who tended to hard-drink with relish. In fact, to talk to them, you'd almost think that alcoholism was the sign of a journalist doing his job well, a sign of someone who'd seen the blood, the white outlines, the body bags, all the gore of a triple murder, and drank to clear his head of all the ugly he was forced, and perversely delighted, to see. But the variety of alcohol-related experiences also excited me. At the time, Corona beer was available only in the Southwest, and having a bottle with a lime squeezed into it was such a novelty to me, a brilliant admixture of a real drink and a simple brew. Boilermakers—a shot of bourbon, preferably Maker's Mark, quite literally thrown glass and all into a stein of beer—were another new discovery. Getting a hold of some speed—whether it was methamphetamine or Dexedrine or Benzedrine—was a pretty easy task because the drug scene in Dallas was so clean cut. It seemed like everyone lived next door to some nice collegiate dealer who was putting himself through Southern Methodist University selling plants, pills, and powders, or knew someone else who did. But usually all it took was all the caffeine and sugar provided in Jolt to get me through the day, so the cycle of up and down could be maintained cheaply and legally.

One night, I planned to interview the Butthole Surfers after they played a gig down in Deep Ellum. As it happens, they were leaving for a European tour the morning after they played Dallas and decided that rather than get only a couple of hours of sleep after the show, they'd just not sleep at all. So I stayed up with them, smoking their weed, sipping on Coronas with lime, hearing stories about their pit bulls, hearing about how they had an indirect sexual encounter with Amy Carter by rubbing their private parts on her suitcase when they played at Brown University, hearing about how one of their former drummers is now a bag lady living in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, hearing about how they got the name the Butthole Surfers, and realizing that these guys were the real-life embodiment of the movie
Spinal Tap.
I learned that they had once been called the Winston-Salems and now occasionally played local bar gigs under the name the Jack Officers.

I was so amused that I just kept getting more and more stoned and drunk, and the last thing I remember before I went home to shower and change my clothes so I could go back to the office is standing behind the club, in a back alley, talking to the guitarist, who was, I thought at the time, the cutest thing alive, with sweet brown eyes and a compelling smile, the combination of which, when he looked at me so directly and soberly even though he'd smoked even more pot than I had, made me want to do anything, anything for him. Never mind that I was feeling stoned and sensual and dying to take all clothes off, even back there, standing next to the junkyard, the site of new construction, part of the gentrification process, and surrounded by nothing but the night. We started to kiss, his shirt came off, and pretty soon his hands dug under my blouse, rubbing my breasts as his finger made circles around my nipple. And I reached into his pants, touched him, touched his half-flaccid penis that got harder as I held onto it, and suddenly I realized that I didn't want to do this.

It hadn't even been a year since I lost my virginity to a recent Yale graduate who I'd met at the
Rolling Stone
College Journalism Award luncheon. It hadn't even been a year since I decided that my mouth was getting tired and chapped from giving so many blowjobs, that it was time to start having sex like a normal nineteen-year-old. It hadn't even been a year since my complete initiation into sexual activity, and I was not ready to start screwing around with a virtual stranger—with whom, I might add, it was unethical for me to be carrying on—in some Dallas back alley. Somehow, I had this moment of truth, and I felt certain that I didn't want this, didn't want to live this life, had to get out of there right then. So I pulled my hands away from his fly, pulled my shirt back on, and started to run, but the thing was, I couldn't run anywhere. I had to call a taxi first. And I thought to myself, You know this sucks. It sucks when you can't make a clean getaway.

And I felt, that something was very, very wrong. What had I wanted from that guy, anyway? Why had I led him outside in the first place? This seemed to be a routine for me, getting started on sexual encounters and not only stopping them, but actually fleeing from the room as if in shame or in danger, realizing that
I just don't want to be there,
that I felt trapped and cramped. I wanted so badly to lose myself in sex, to be thoroughly slutty and have one zipless fuck after another. I wanted to be a wild thing. But in the end, I couldn't ever go through with it because it's never like that, there was no pleasure for me in being an easy lay. Fast, cheap sex was no fun at all. My body and mind are just too complicated. I'd seen movies like
9 1/2 Weeks,
and I envied the Kim Basinger character and the way she could achieve a full—even multiple—orgasm while standing in the rain with her back against a brick wall in a dark cul-de-sac as street thugs chased after her and Mickey Rourke with knives and guns as a stray cat strutted by with a dead rat in its mouth. How I would have loved to be one of those women who got excited over such excitement. But frankly, given that same situation, I'd be wanting an umbrella, I'd want to get indoors, I'd want to dry my cold, chafing feet and hands, and sex would be almost unthinkable.

I had tried so hard for so many years to turn all my despair into sexual abandon, I wanted so much to stop being me and start being someone else's toy, but I didn't have it in me. Those early encounters with Abel when I was twelve were the best experiences I'd ever had. He'd been so sweet to me, and he'd taught me about the ways my body could give and receive pleasure, he showed me so much, and he made me so happy. When I was with Abel, I felt like ice cream in a bowl, melting away, knowing that soon I would be completely gone, but if it made him as happy to lick me up as I felt being consumed, that was just fine. It hadn't ever been that way again.

My God, I thought, as I waited in Deep Ellum for a taxi. My God, how I need a drink.

 

When I finally drift off to sleep, time disappears. I can't remember if the Butthole Surfers interview was yesterday or the day before or today, if the Suzanne Vega story was written last week or last month or last year or just yester
day, or when the hell I went to the rap concert, because it feels like ages ago. Is tomorrow Saturday or is it Monday? Do I have to get up in the morning or can I sleep? Will anyone even know the difference? I can be as fucked up as I like, it seems, as long as I get my work done, and I always do, so everyone writes everything else off to hormones.

No one in Dallas really cares about me. I'm a stranger in town and on earth. No matter how I tell myself I am familiar with this place, it isn't true. I'm a stranger wherever I go because I'm strange to myself. My mind just goes off doing its own thing, never consulting me at all about whether it's all right to feel this way or that. I am constantly standing several feet away from myself, watching as I do or say or feel something that I don't want or don't like at all, and still I can't stop it. The closest I get to keeping myself in line is when I drink. With enough wine, I can even sleep at night. I wonder what I will have to do to convince some medical doctor that I am really and truly imbalanced, that there's no other explanation for the way my head feels all the time, for the way I feel like one of those souvenir plastic domes that are full of glitter which you get at Disney World or at truck stops, the kind that makes snow when you turn it over. That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts—blizzards, cyclones. I am the fucking Wizard of Oz. I can't go on like this much longer. Why won't any of the doctors help me? I've gone to so many, and they all say,
You need love.
Or,
You need to talk this through.
Don't they see that all their advice may be well intentioned but in the meantime I'm falling, I know it, I am.

 

By the time my mother came to visit, it seemed perfectly normal to me to spend the whole week boozing around and giving over entire weekends to unwinding by the pool at my cousins' house. I stopped noticing that I often forgot about eating. When my mother was shocked by how skinny I'd gotten, I was shocked to find out this was the case.

I was even more surprised to find out that she wanted to throw me a birthday party at my cousins' house. It all seemed like an okay enough idea to me, although if I had thought about it, I'm sure I'd have realized that it was a big mistake. My mother, consummate mother that she is, would be incapable of keeping it simple, would inevitably spend hours making the right marinade for the barbecue chicken, her own special honey mustard sauce for sandwiches, and the perfect pear tarts and apple crisp and birthday cake for dessert.

She would, in other words, go through hours and hours of trouble, when the truth was that I probably would have just as soon spent my birthday with my friends, all of whom lived near downtown like I did and never went to far North Dallas, where my family lived, for any reason. And as it turned out, I had so much trouble giving people directions to my cousins' house, that after a while I just decided it would be a small affair, I could catch up with my pals later.