Rewind, Replay, Repeat

by Jeff Bell

  “This is an epoch-making book. It is one of the most incisive memoirs ever written on the experience of mental illness, and by far the best first-person account available on life from the point of view of the OCD sufferer. Jeff Bell has scaled the heights of narrative memoirs, conveying the excruciating details of the inner life of a man whose brain is on fire.”

  —Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D., author of Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain

  “In a most sensitive way, Jeff Bell explains what it’s like to be inside of his own self-made prison and describes his efforts to heal himself. His emphasis on his own spirituality and his willingness to change his attitude will shine light on the road to recovery for the many people afflicted with this disorder.”

  —Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D., author of Love Is Letting Go of Fear

  Rewind, Replay, Repeat

  A Memoir of

  Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

  Jeff Bell

  Hazelden

  Center City, Minnesota 55012-0176

  1-800-328-0094

  1-651-213-4590 (Fax)

  www.hazelden.org

  Copyright ©2007 by Jeff Bell

  All rights reserved. Published 2007

  Printed in the United States of America

  No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bell, Jeff, 1963-

  Rewind, replay, repeat: a memoir of obsessive-compulsive disorder / Jeff Bell.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-59285-371-7

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-59285-932-0

  1. Bell, Jeff, 1963—Mental health. 2. Obsessive-compulsive disorder—Patients—Biography. I. Title.

  RC533.B45 2007

  362.196’852270092—dc22

  [B]

  2006050118

  Reprint permissions:

  “This Is It,” words and music by Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, copyright ©1979 Milk Money Music and Tauripin Tunes. Lyrics reprinted on pages 137, 209, and 232 by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. All rights reserved.

  Editor’s note:

  This book includes the author’s personal accounts of living with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In some cases names, dates, and circumstances have been changed to protect anonymity. While every attempt has been made to provide accurate information in regard to OCD, this book is sold with the understanding that the publisher and author are not engaged in rendering psychological or other professional services. If expert counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

  11 10 09 08 07 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design by Theresa Gedig

  Typesetting and interior design by Prism Publishing Center

  For

  Samantha,

  Nicole, and Brianna

  In a world of doubts,

  you are my certainty.

  Belief consists in accepting

  the affirmations of the soul …

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Foreword

  As best I can figure, I have logged some eight thousand hours behind a studio microphone: not an unusual stat, really, for someone who has anchored radio news programs for well over a decade. What might be construed as a little odd—okay, downright weird—is this: unlike any other news anchor I know, I have recorded nearly every one of my on-air hours and have played back countless segments for myself. Why? To understand that is to understand the complexities of a cross-wired brain that would also have me check and recheck doors, appliances, facts and figures of all kinds, wobbly chairs and other serious hazards and, well, everything I have ever seen, heard, said, or done.

  I myself don’t even pretend to understand those brain complexities. I’ve read all about the myriad theories offered up by the world’s top neuroscientists, who, despite their fascination with people like me, have yet to agree on an explanation for our many bizarre challenges. Faulty neurotransmitters? Frontal lobe abnormalities? Issues with our caudate nuclei? Beats me. I know nothing about neurology. Nothing about behavioral psychology. Very little, really, about the science behind obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the diagnosis affixed to “checkers” like myself and an assortment of others battling hiccupping brains. My expertise is in doubt—which I suppose is the perfect double-claim for a pathological doubter. On the one hand, I can say with great confidence that I’ve lived a life more steeped in uncertainty than anyone I’ve ever run across, and along the way have compiled a virtual compendium of each and every one of its debilitating components. On the other hand, who am I not to doubt this very expertise? I mean, how can I be sure I really know anything about doubt? Or for that matter, about anything at all?

  Reporters are taught to question everything, and perhaps this explains how and why I wound up in the news business. My biological predisposition to distrust and challenge has served me well in my professional life and has helped me get to the bottom of many a story. For this I am thankful, but not nearly so much as I am for the far greater gift my disorder has offered: endless lessons in the mechanics of be lieving. It’s the ultimate paradox, yet somehow it also seems to add up—in much the same way, I imagine, that the deaf and the blind learn to hone their remaining senses.

  I have all five of my senses, but tend not to trust any of them. Take touch and sight in their most basic functions. At my worst, I can be holding a parking brake in my hand, seeing it fully secure and feeling it locked and immovable; yet the moment I let go or look away, I lose all comprehension of its fixed condition. I can rattle, re-rattle, and re-re-rattle the handle, double back to my car a dozen times; and still there is no convincing myself, no means of storing my sensory input or warding off later doubt-driven urges to “replay” the whole sequence in my head, again and again. And so it is with far too many day-to-day challenges. Out of sheer necessity, I suppose, I have learned to believe beyond the limitations of my brain’s flawed processing, to trust in the certainty of something much bigger than myself.

  What follows is my story: one of some four to six million OCD stories unfolding right now in the United States. Like most, it’s a tale of fear and torment and agony and shame. But unlike far too many, it is also a story of triumphs, breakthroughs, miracles, and hope, and for this I can thank what I’ve come to call my “crash course in believing” and the remarkable “faculty” of professionals, friends, and unseen strangers who rescued me from the depths of my own looping hell.

  Funny, but for a guy who’s made a career of reporting on everything from floods and fires to he roes and crooks, I must confess that telling this story—my story—has challenged me like none other. In the end, I’ve decided there’s only one way to share it, and that’s by replaying on paper those well-worn segments of virtual audio and video I keep archived in my head, “tapes” much like my cassette recordings—“airchecks,” as we in radio call them—of the eight thousand hours I’ve logged behind a studio microphone.

  one

  rewind to start

  I am seven years old, maybe eight—it’s hard to tell from the only fuzzy images I still have of this night. All I know for sure is that I’m an anxious young kid lying awake in bed, that my eyes are squeezed shut and my head is pounding, and that this is where the “tapes” begin.

  It is sometime back in the early 1970s, this particular night, and I am passing its long hours deep beneath my covers, trying to make sense of the pictures I keep looping through my mind. There’s a moving gray car, and a boy in the backseat leaning out the window, shouting something to me as I walk with my mother and sister down San Mateo Avenue. And then there’s a shot of me stopping cold in my tracks, ratcheting my neck a full ninety de
grees as the mysterious voice whizzes by. Over and over again, I am replaying these sequences, along with a looped track of the boy’s “Heeeeyyyyyy” trailing off like a train whistle as the gray car disappears down the street.

  I am doing all this because I have no other choice. Two days have come and gone since the scene with the passing car played out for real, and I have filled them with every possible effort to determine just who was trying to get my attention, and why. I have grilled my mother and sister, but neither even noticed the car or the voice on San Mateo Avenue. I have asked all my friends, hoping one of them might have been the boy in the backseat, but each has assured me he wasn’t. So now I’m left with no viable option but to try to re-create for myself the ten or so seconds that hold all my answers.

  The pictures come without effort for me, probably because of all the practice I’ve had. The Vietnam War is playing nightly on TV sets everywhere, and at bedtime for months now I’ve taken to conjuring up and playing back the haunting black-and-white war footage my parents watch over dinner. Soldiers marching through swamps. Bombs dropping, sending everything on our tiny screen flying. I hate the vivid images and the what-if questions they always raise when I’m trying to fall asleep: What if I have to go to war? What if I have to kill another human being? What if I die—what happens to me then? Still, I’m certain that all kids must battle this problem, so I learn to work around the moving war pictures night after night.

  The passing car images are different, though. They aren’t violent like the Vietnam ones. They don’t even scare me. But for some reason, they have even more power over me than the worst of the combat scenes. It’s just something about how they taunt me, promising me the answers I’m looking for, if only I will take the time to review them carefully enough.

  I can’t see a reason not to, so I squeeze my eyes even tighter and I play back the whole scene yet again.

  And again.

  And again.

  There are footsteps in the hallway now. Mom must be turning out lights and locking up our house for the night. This is my big chance.

  “Mommy?”

  The footsteps stop. I can tell my mother is standing in my doorway. “You’re supposed to be sleeping,” she whispers. “It’s nearly eleven o’clock.”

  “I still can’t figure it out,” I mumble from beneath my covers.

  “Figure what out?”

  “The boy in the car.”

  Mom says nothing, so I pull back the blanket from my head and look up at her. “San Mateo Avenue? The kid who yelled something?”

  “Sweetheart, we’ve already gone over all this,” Mom says.

  “I know.”

  My mother stares at me for a second or two, then tilts her head a bit to the side. “You’ve run out of things to worry about again, haven’t you, sweetie?” It’s the standing joke in our house: Jeff gets worried when he has nothing to worry about.

  “You don’t understand,” I throw back at her.

  She shakes her head. “No, honey, I guess I don’t. Are you afraid that someone is going to hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “That someone was out to scare you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why can’t you just accept that someone you know was trying to say hi?”

  “Because I neeeed to know who that was.”

  “But why?”

  She has me there. I don’t have an answer. I don’t know why. I look away in silence.

  “Honey, I’m sure this isn’t what you want to hear,” she finally says, “but chances are you will never know.”

  No! Don’t say that, I want to yell at my mother. Tell me anything about the boy and the car. But please, I’m begging you, don’t tell me that I’m never going to know.

  “Okay,” I mutter instead and kiss my mother goodnight.

  I wait for the last light in the house to go out and the footsteps to stop. I pull the covers back up. Then I squeeze my eyes shut once more and, in my head, I back up the passing car yet again.

  two

  fast-forward 22 years

  It’s a shame, really, that I have to skip over such a big chunk of my life here. In so many ways, these were my best years, the ones I’ve come to think of as my “normal years.” The kid who lay awake night after night replaying one image sequence after another somehow managed to morph into a pretty typical teen. For reasons I may never understand, the need for certainty that plagued me in my earliest memories just went away, poof, disappearing as mysteriously as it had hit me. Precisely when I can’t remember, but by the time I’d reached high school I’d become your classic adolescent overachiever: captain of the wrestling team, editor of the school paper, vice president of the student body, valedictorian of our senior class, yada yada.

  Then came college. Southern California. Summer jobs teaching windsurfing lessons on Newport Bay. Samantha—my college sweetheart who would become my wife. And, in the end, a degree in engineering. Four wonderful years. Normal years.

  Grad school next. An MBA. The unglamorous but exhilarating start of a career in radio. Two more normal years.

  A wedding. Honeymoon in Greece. The birth of Nicole, our precious baby girl. A slow but steady climb up the ladder of commercial radio. Normal. Normal. Normal. Normal.

  I cherish these years and would love nothing more than to write about them, but, alas, their only real contribution to this story is the precise hour to which they led me, an hour I’ve come to think of as the very last one of my normal years, and one that begins, appropriately enough, with my full attention focused on an aircheck.

  K-S-F-O … San Francisco, Oakland, San

  Jose … News and information … It’s ten

  o’clock …. Good morning, I’m Jeff Bell.

  Yes. Yes!

  I am pounding my steering wheel and talking back to the familiar voice booming from the speakers of my Honda Civic. Just over two hours have passed since I wrote, produced, and anchored KSFO-AM’s ten o’clock newscast. Now, thanks to the cassette tape playing back in my car stereo, I am hearing it for myself, savoring the sound of my own words, cocky with the knowledge that a nearby tower recently broadcast these very words to some six million potential listeners in the Greater San Francisco Metropolitan Radio Market.

  I have put my entire life into this newscast. At least that’s how it feels as I make my way down the Bayshore Freeway toward Oyster Point Marina this blustery fall afternoon, reliving my finest few minutes yet on KSFO and taking a mental inventory of my six years in radio. What a road it has been. Just months ago, I was going nowhere at a struggling coastal California station in market number two-hundred-and-something, living from paycheck to paycheck, dreaming of the big leagues, and sending airchecks and resumes to every program director I could find.

  And now here I am.

  San Francisco.

  Market number four.

  My hometown to boot.

  … President-elect Bill Clinton is …

  The voice on my aircheck is talking now about the ’92 election. “A new beginning,” Clinton is promising. I know this big break at KSFO is going to be mine. Sure, it’s only nine hours of weekend airtime right now, but this is just the start. Weekends today, weekdays tomorrow. I’m certain that it’s only a matter of time now before KSFO or some other top San Francisco station brings me on full-time. Then I’ll be able to quit my overnight news writing job at Channel 2 TV during the week and focus all my attention on radio and getting—

  … and that’s the news. I’m Jeff Bell on

  K-S-F-O five-sixty…

  Whoa. Hang on. Too fast. I’m slurring the call letters. Aren’t I? I stop the tape, back it up, hit Play again.

  … on K-S-F-O five-sixty…

  No, I’m okay. The pacing is good. I sound fine. Better than fine. Downright good. In fact, hearing my name that close to those legendary call letters—the same ones Jim Lange spelled out for years before moving to television as host of The Dating Game—I haven’t a doubt in the world that
I am officially off and running, well on my way to becoming one of the biggest radio news stars this city has ever seen.

  And there ain’t nothin’ that can stop me now.

  My new radio gig shouldn’t mean so much to me, and I shouldn’t be so damn cocksure about my future. I know better. But then again, I can’t help it. At twenty-nine, I have everything I could ask for: the perfect marriage, perfect child, and now the perfect fast track to the top of the perfect profession.

  And then there’s the timing—everything coming together right here and right now in such a homecoming sort of way. Eleven years ago, my classmates at a high school just down the road voted me, a quirky, high-strung overachiever, “Most Likely to Succeed,” a title forever sealed with a sappy picture in the yearbooks they no doubt either stashed away in closets or lost within weeks. Never even once did I give it another thought until moving back to the Bay Area last December. But now, I can’t help thinking, I have finally earned my title.

  If they could see me now.

  Better yet, if they could hear me now.

  And, oh yeah, thanks to KSFO’s colossal signal, they can!

  Before I even realize it, I am pounding the steering wheel again, an arrogant smile stretched across my face. It’s still every bit there twenty minutes later as I pull into Oyster Point and see Samantha and Nicole waiting for me on The Boat.

  The Boat, capital T, capital B. It dawns on me that I should pause here a moment and share with you a few things you’ll need to know about my father’s sailboat for the rest of my story to make any sense.