Rewind, Replay, Repeat

by Jeff Bell

  Then at once there’s a woman’s voice. A familiar voice. It is my mother’s.

  “What on earth are you doing? How would you like it if someone did that to you?”

  The tape ends here. But another one picks things up many hours later in the middle of the night. In this one, I am hiding beneath my covers, fighting off a persistent image of some elephant-like creature tearing my body in two. Mom’s sweet voice is providing a soundtrack, with her words looping like a toy train on the smallest of tracks: How would you like it if someone did that to you? How would you like it if someone did that to you? How would you like it …? I am at the same time ashamed and terrified.

  The two tapes offer few details beyond these, but reviewing them as an adult, I always needed more. I wanted to back up the first tape to the schoolyard scene and verify that someone else was leading this cruel and unusual experiment. Was I really only following their lead, or was mine the twisted mind that invented the idea?

  I would replay the sequences again and again until, out of frustration, I’d switch to another time in my life and yet another tape I couldn’t stop myself from reviewing.

  Physical Checking. This is both the most common compulsion of an OCD checker, and the one that my normal friends tell me they can most relate to. “I’ve doubled back to my car to check the parking brake,” one of them will say.

  “Yeah, but have you ever walked back for a second look? Or a third, fourth, or fifth?” I’ll ask them.

  And that’s when the inevitable raised eyebrows confirm for me the difference between people like them and people like me.

  As is typical with OCD, a good many of my checking drills quickly morphed into checking rituals—that is, especially repetitive and predictable compulsions. By the time of Jackie’s exercise, I had compiled quite a long list of these: inspecting my car from bumper to bumper after every trip; returning to the location of nearly every pothole I hit; diagramming on paper every problematic lane change, turn, or other driving challenge; checking and rechecking every door and appliance at home before leaving for a weekend; and combing the papers for crimes and accidents I might be responsible for. (Pretty ironic for a guy in the news biz, eh?)

  Reassurance Seeking. “But are you sure …?” Good God, did I use those four words ad nauseam! But are you sure we locked the front door? But are you sure that was just a pothole? But are you sure I had nothing to do with the sirens?

  The questions were usually directed at Samantha, often over the phone in one of so many embarrassing calls from work. “I’ve already told you I think it’s fine,” she’d tell me, trying to walk that fine line between helping me cope, and counterproductively enabling my checking. “Yeah, but are you sure?” I’d plead. One assurance was never enough. I can think of no checking compulsion more shame-producing for me, or more tiring and challenging for Samantha. Jackie would later guide us both in bringing this under control.

  Confessing. I’m sure Freud and his colleagues could offer plenty of explanations as to why OCs like me always feel so compelled to confess; all I know is that, at the time of this logging exercise, I could seldom stop myself. My confessing was a compulsion in every sense of the term, and it mattered not how inconsequential my “wrongdoing” might have been, or how convinced I might have grown that the other party really wouldn’t care. Confessions always offered me quick, if only temporary, relief, since they robbed Doubt of an opportunity to suggest I would need to come clean. Take the dripping umbrella incident I noted on my log during this week: I’d been in a supermarket checkout line when I’d happened to notice two or three dime-sized drops of water by my feet. This was my fault, and people could slip and die if I didn’t tell someone, so I apologized to the checkout clerk, who thanked me for telling him and called for a “Code seven in aisle three.” Things got pretty embarrassing, as I recall, when the cleanup guy couldn’t even find my “puddle.”

  Fixing/Reporting. Close cousins of confessing, these two particular compulsions have always been the domain of my alter ego, Captain Hazard, doing his all to save the world from itself. A real crowd-pleaser for those lucky enough to see this superhero in action.

  In the early days, I was only responsible for those hazards I’d actually created, like the supermarket umbrella puddle, or the dangerous “chocolate mine” I’d set that same week, when I dropped a piece of my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup while walking through downtown San Francisco. (I kid you not: I spent five minutes hunched over in pouring rain, combing a busy street corner, determined to find the remnants so no one could be hurt by them. Just how, even I can’t begin to fathom.) But somewhere along the way, Captain Hazard expanded his scope to include any possible trouble spot with which he’d had contact. From then on, if I’d step on a single shard from a broken bottle, I’d need to get a broom and clean up every other piece up and down the street. Glass is usually easy enough to avoid, but twigs and rocks are also potential hazards—a bike tire could always hit one and lose its traction—and this meant dealing with just about everything I’d step on, short of the concrete itself. Sadly, walking soon presented almost as many challenges as getting behind the wheel of a car.

  My direct-contact criterion also lead to my responsibility for every wobbly or broken chair I sat in—and man, did I have a knack for finding the one chair in a theater with half its hinge missing. Restaurant managers and theater ushers heard from me frequently.

  And then, when I got too damn good at avoiding contact with even the smallest of hazards, I managed to begin obsessing about those I just happened to spot. I mean, who was I to pretend I didn’t see that nail lying there? So now I’d have to fix these potential dangers too—or at least report them to someone.

  No rest for Captain Hazard.

  Avoiding. Technically, I suppose, this is not so much a compulsion as a consistent by-product of many of them. An OC grows to hate his obsessive-compulsive cycles so much that he’ll do anything to steer clear of them. So while a trip to a McDonald’s Playland might have made my daughters, and therefore me, very happy in those days, it usually wasn’t worth the price I’d have to pay if I had to get near other kids I might harm. Stay away and I could avoid the inevitable What if I hurt the kids? thoughts and the various mental and physical checking drills that would surely follow. Unfortunately, avoidance is what psychologists call a negative reinforcement. Flee at the peak of fear, and you can’t help but reinforce its power.

  Good avoidance, I learned, takes a great deal of planning. Certain bad things are bound to happen in the future. Things like homeless people’s deaths, unexplained accidents, and mysterious fires. Ironically, in my chosen profession, I hear about, and often report on, a great many routine tragedies. The odds are pretty good that a fair number of them will fall within the geographic and time “proximities”—many blocks and several hours, respectively—of my various car trips, thereby making me a possible suspect.

  But wait, there’s more. Like potential hazard issues, these issues managed to grow in breadth and scope, and it wasn’t long before they extended far beyond driving. Soon structure fires on a block I’d walked down could become the result of my negligence (perhaps I’d kicked a gas main by accident). Heart attacks within a building I’d visited might later prove to be the result of something I’d said or done. No situation was outside my ability to have brought about harm, and reasonable association was all the proof I’d need. Bottom line: it was always best to protect myself from future trouble by avoiding the homeless and high-crime areas, and by checking on any situations that could become news down the road. Best possible approach: leave the house as seldom as possible.

  Looking back, it’s hard to say just how much of all this I managed to put together for myself during the seven days of my logging assignment. I do know that the whole thing had the sobering impact of a hot shower gone cold, and that it would prove the perfect precursor for the exercise Jackie had waiting for me next.

  twelve

  fast-forward 2 weeks

  T
here’s a sound BART trains make as they wend their way through the myriad curved tunnels that comprise the Bay Area Rapid Transit grid. It’s a shrill, high-pitched screech. Metal rasping and straining against metal as unyielding steel rails and the wheels of one train car after another engage in a ferocious battle with the centrifugal forces of nature. For years I never even noticed the sound, but now, in early 1995, it’s all I can hear every ride—the whistling, the whining, the visceral protest that cries out to the world. I know this ugly wail. It’s the same one that bellows in silence from some tortured place deep inside of me.

  It’s mid-January now, and I am all but living on BART trains. I take them to my writing shifts at Channel 2. I take them to my air shifts at KCBS. And I take them to my weekly visits with Jackie. I have, for all practical purposes, given up driving, though I tell myself this is only temporary, that I’m only doing it to concentrate on the many non-driving OCD challenges I still need to tackle. This is a ludicrous argument, I know, and I don’t dare share it with Jackie, who continues to assign me exposure exercises that I write down every week and then do nothing about.

  Giving up driving has presented a whole slew of new challenges, not the least of which is my ability to cover street reporting shifts when asked by KCBS. Unbeknownst to my bosses, I’ve begun ditching our official news vehicles blocks from the station and hailing taxis to get out to my assignments. Hard to make money when I’m paying a cabbie to shuttle me around town, but at least it allows me to hang onto my job.

  The harshest of all the consequences of my self-imposed license suspension, however, is the contribution it’s making to my growing depression. If going on meds was a concession to my mental illness, then giving up driving is an all-out surrender. I am, it would seem, no longer part of mainstream society. No longer capable of assuring my own survival.

  I think about all of this, and the familiar cry of the BART trains too, as I sit in Jackie’s cramped waiting room, working my way through the so-called “Beck Inventory” she has me fill out every week. In front of me on a clipboard are twenty-one sets of scored personal statements, and I’m supposed to choose the ones that best describe my feelings over the previous week. It’s that damn second set that skews my score upward every time:

  0 points: I am not particularly discouraged about the future

  1 point: I feel discouraged about the future

  2 points: I feel I have nothing to look forward to

  3 points: I feel the future is hopeless and things can’t improve

  Week after week, another two or three points conceded.

  I used to tally my Becks just for kicks. But then one day I asked Jackie about the scale and learned that my scores routinely exceed the standard threshold for clinical depression. So now I figure, why add to my funk by confirming its existence?

  Jackie ushers me in to her office at 10:35, and I notice right away that something is different from our usual setup. It’s a tape recorder—a cheap Radio Shack model—perched on the small table between our two chairs. It takes me a minute to remember why it’s there, but when I do, all kinds of permanent-record issues start putting me on edge.

  “We’d talked about recording an ‘imaginal exposure’ today,” Jackie says, her eyebrows lifted just enough to invite a response.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I tell her dismissively.

  “How ’bout if I promise to give you the tape when we’re done? No one, including me, will ever get to hear it.” Jackie seems to understand my security paranoia.

  “Then why bother making it?”

  “Because I want you to listen to it—and often,” she says. “Remember, our goal with this is to create a detailed mental picture of your very worst fear and then expose you to it over and over again until your distress level starts dropping.”

  My first thought is: this woman truly missed her calling as a torture expert for some interrogation squad with the special forces. My second is: could this really be any worse than my own virtual tape reviews? I’m skeptical that an “imagery” drill could have any value, but I’ve come to trust Jackie, and after a second confirmation that the tape will go home with me, I agree to play one round of her game.

  Jackie smiles and gives me an approving nod, then reaches down and hits the Record button.

  “So … what is it that’s stressing you out these days?”

  “Believe it or not, the Bouncing Body is back,” I tell her, explaining that a recent hit-and-run story I covered has helped elevate this episode from its more dormant envelope status.

  “Good,” Jackie says. “Walk me through all your worst fears from this one.”

  “That’s a short walk,” I throw back at her. “The homeless guy is dead because I hit him.”

  “Is it really that simple?”

  “Yeah. I kill the guy. It ruins the rest of my life.”

  “Right. Okay, so the police come and get you and—”

  “Well, no,” I interrupt. “The police don’t know it’s me.”

  “But that’s good, right? Then you won’t have to spend the rest of your life behind bars.” Jackie is toying with me. She wants me to spell everything out.

  “Come on. You know it’s not ‘doing time’ that I find so fearful.”

  “Okay. Then just what is it?”

  “Not knowing whether or not I killed the guy!” I’ve got to believe my exasperation with Jackie is coming through loud and clear on the tape rolling between us.

  “So you’re okay with the idea that you killed this guy, as long as the cops know it was you?”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m saying that would be a great scenario—”

  “But it’s a better one than the possibility that the guy is fine but you’ll never know that?”

  “Right. No! I mean—”

  “Well, isn’t that noble, Jeff! I thought you said your worst fear was that you killed this poor homeless guy.”

  Jackie is in her element now, showing off her prosecutorial skills, taking me all this way so I’ll make the confession she knows will come next.

  “Okay, I get it. My worst fear is not that I killed some guy. It’s that I’ll never know for sure what happened to him.”

  “Good. Good!” Jackie is genuinely pleased with me, pleased with herself too, I’m guessing. “Now we can really get started. I want you to describe for me everything that happens because of all your uncertainty over this guy’s fate.”

  I start with the obvious: a detailed rundown of each and every one of the compulsive effects of my doubts running wild.

  Ten minutes into my litany, Jackie interrupts me.

  “Consequences, Jeff. We need to get all the consequences of those compulsions down on this tape.”

  “Consequences?”

  “Right. What’s the bottom line here?”

  I take a few moments to consider the question.

  “Okay. I spend so much time reviewing the whole thing in my head that I can’t focus at all at KCBS or Channel 2.”

  “Good. So what happens—do you lose your jobs?”

  “Yeah. I lose my jobs and my whole career.”

  “And Samantha has to work full time now to support the family?”

  “Right. But she can’t leave the kids home with me, ’cause I’m spending all my time going back to that fateful intersection to check things out.”

  “Does Sam leave you, Jeff? Is that what happens next?”

  I think about the question for a second or two. “No. She’d never do that. I’m the one—the one who …”

  “The one who …?”

  I need another second here to shiver away the prospect of losing my wife and daughters.

  Okay. I’m all right. I can do this.

  “I’m the one who moves out … to save the family.”

  Jackie sees my face getting wet. She hands me the box of Kleenex that’s near the tape recorder.

  “What’s next,” she whispers. “Where does it go from here?”

  I know the answ
er. But I can’t get it out of my mouth. I’m shaking too much from the crying.

  “Nuhhhh. Nuhhh. Nuhhht house. I’m in a nuthouse.”

  “Good, Jeff.” Jackie’s voice is barely audible. I can’t see her because my eyes are closed. “Keep going with it, Jeff.”

  “The images,” I babble. “I can’t stop myself from playing them back even here. I can’t stop …”

  The sound of my own wailing is unbearable now. I force myself to stop crying, but it takes all the squeezing pressure I can apply with my eyelids.

  And then there is silence. Dead air, as we say in radio, for at least thirty seconds.

  Finally, a loud click. I realize Jackie has stopped the tape.

  “Congratulations, Jeff. I think you got us precisely where we needed to go.”

  thirteen

  Okay, so here’s where telling this story gets tricky for me. Sharing my virtual tapes with you is easy; as I’ve said, they play and replay in my head to this day. But for all the extensive image sequences I have access to, there are also gaps, and one of these, I’m now convinced, is more significant than anything in my archives. It’s kind of like Nixon’s missing Watergate tapes, I suppose, except instead of having Rosemary Woods or anyone else to blame, I can only point the finger at fatigue or something bigger than me that I wasn’t meant to understand.