by Jeff Bell
A listener. Wouldn’t that just figure? I knew this was a bad idea. I’m supposed to emcee the Sacramento Ballet’s matinee this afternoon, and I’m already uptight about that. I don’t need this added anxiety. I want to bolt. Unfortunately, a quick assessment tells me that’s no longer an option.
Integrity. Initiative. Generosity …
“And you must be Carole Johnson,” I finally say, opting to acknowledge this woman before I become the one who looks like a freak. “Wayne speaks very highly of you.”
Wayne Manning has been after me for months to get together with Carole. “She’s written a book you might find interesting,” he’s told me, hinting that Carole shares some of the quirky habits I’d copped to during our sessions last spring. What made me finally agree to meet her today, on Day Six of my project, though, I can’t imagine.
Church is letting out, and the two of us are standing in the foyer, midstream in a rising tide of people.
“How ’bout we find someplace quiet to talk?” I whisper to Carole.
Walking down the hall I remind myself how carefully I’ve kept my secret, how I can still count on my fingers and toes the total number of people who know about my little problem, and how this built-in cap seems like the perfect limit for such private matters. I think about all the years I spent paying for expensive therapy out of my own pocket to avoid a health-care paper trail, how I slithered into and out of one shrink’s office after another to escape getting caught. Why on earth would I now risk my entire radio career on a stranger, no matter how much that stranger and I might have in common?
We find a place to tuck away, and Carole hands me a copy of her self-published book.
“It’s an autobiography,” she says. “But there are a number of local tie-ins you might be interested in.”
I stare at her, confused, for a second or two before it hits me: she thinks I’m meeting her to arrange an author interview for my show. That’s how Wayne must have pitched it. She hasn’t a clue. I’m home free. My secret is safe. I open my mouth, prepare to give her my producer’s name and phone number.
But then something happens, something I’m entirely unprepared for. Our eyes meet and lock, and I see in hers a reflection of my own. The pain. The fear. The embarrassment. The desperation. All the indescribably debilitating by-products of a life spent chasing the demands of a hiccupping brain. All of it right there, hidden in a pair of sparkling brown eyes fooling the entire world except for a select few like me, who from years of shared horrors, can somehow see clear through the façade.
It’s all so overwhelming, standing here face to face with another member of my rare and unspoken-of species. People are squeezing by us now in the narrow hallway. I should say something, move us off to the side. But I can’t move.
“I … I do what you do,” I hear myself stutter as Carole wraps her arms around me. Quite clearly, I need not explain what I mean by my confession.
“I know, Jeff,” she whispers in my ear. “I know. And now that we’ve found each other, we’ll never again have to suffer through all this alone.”
Something about the intimacy and vulnerability of the moment scares me. And yet at this same moment, I know this: every bit as much as my index cards and my mission statement and my pyramid model and my dog tag and Jackie’s regular guidance, Carole Johnson is going to play a huge role in my project. That she’d prove to have invisible wings and a halo, I’m not sure I yet knew.
twenty-one
fast-forward 4 days
Day Ten, 6:55 p.m. Kitty and I are about to wrap up the KFBK Afternoon News. It’s been a good show. Good news mix, good guests, good call-in segments. After two years together, the two of us are really meshing as an anchor team. Solid shows like today’s are now routine.
I love this job. And as I look around the studio, I realize what a refuge this little room has become for me. No matter how horrific the day’s OCD episodes might be, if I can just make it into this studio, I’m always home free. Here I am what I am paid to be: poised, confident, in control. The guy our listeners ride home with is as normal as normal gets. Even Kitty is still oblivious to the many ramifications of my malfunctioning brain. I suppose that in fooling all of them day after day, I’m somehow managing to fool myself in the process.
Tomorrow is a big day. The station is cohosting an international speakers’ symposium called Perspectives ’97, and Kitty and I are scheduled to introduce legendary television anchorman David Brinkley to the crowd. Brinkley has long been one of my news heroes, so the prospect of meeting him one-on-one has me counting the minutes to the end of the show, when I can head home and begin prepping for our chat.
At seven I crack the mic one more time and close out our program: “KFBK, Sacramento. It’s … seven o’clock.”
ABC takes over the airwaves with the network’s hourly newscast and Kitty and I pack up our stuff. We make plans to meet in the morning just before the symposium. We’ve got our scripts. Everything is in place.
Heading for the door, I hear someone in the newsroom shout, “Hey Jeff, your wife’s on line one.” I don’t know why, but I get a knot in my gut.
“We have a problem,” Samantha tells me as soon as I pick up the phone.
“Oh?”
“Remember all those notices Nicole has brought home from school over the years warning us that ‘Your child has been exposed to head lice’?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, guess what?”
“No. No, no, no,” I whisper into the receiver. “Do not tell me this, Sam. Not now. Nikki can’t have lice. I can’t handle—I’ll never be able to get through—”
“Listen, I don’t want you to panic, but I think she’s already spread them to Brianna and me.”
Don’t panic?! I want to shout back at her. Do you have any idea what this is going to do to my life? Years’ worth of contamination concerns pale in comparison to the new images I’m already conjuring up. Bugs crawling everywhere. People screaming, B-movie style. I can’t even begin to fathom all the havoc that I, and now my entire family, can wreak on the world.
Twenty minutes later, I rush into the house to find Samantha crouched over Nicole, a bright lamp propped just above their heads. Nikki’s in tears. Brianna is also. Samantha looks frazzled.
“Well??”
“It’s Mrs. Hansley’s first-grade class,” Sam says with her eyes still locked on a handful of hair she’s holding up to the light. “A whole bunch of the kids have wound up with them.”
“And you two?” I ask, afraid of the answer.
“I’ve already found a few nits in Brianna’s hair, and, well, I am itching like crazy. I’m guessing Nicole brought the bugs home a few days ago and that we shared a brush after that.”
“Damn it!” I bark, then demand that Sam drop what she’s doing and come inspect my hair.
I check out clean. Sam jokes that the little critters are far more interested in the girls’ shoulder-length hair than in my near crew-cut. An hour later, I beg her to check me again. I know she must have missed the lice colony taking up residence on my head.
It’s getting late, but our night is just starting. Sam’s been to the store for special lice shampoo and has treated both girls’ heads. Now she’s picking through their hair ten to twenty strands at a time, looking for lice eggs, or nits as they’re called. The bugs themselves, she tells me, are generally too small and quick to be caught alive.
Sam takes a break and Nikki walks over to me. “I’m scared,” she whispers, reaching her arms out my way for a hug.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” I say, backing up one step and then another. Nicole’s a sharp six-year-old, but I can see in her eyes that she just can’t process why Daddy won’t put his arms around her. How could she? What kid—or adult, for that matter—could ever understand the paranoia that would keep me from being a father at a time like this, when I’m most needed as one?
At about midnight, Sam finishes going through both girls’ hair. From what we’ve l
earned on the Internet tonight, we’ll have to do this nightly for weeks.
We put the girls to bed, and Sam tells me I need to check her now. I insist that I can’t. She says I have no choice. Finally I give in, but curse her under my breath with each nit I find. The plastic gloves and shower cap I’m wearing are hardly enough protection to quell my fears of becoming contaminated, and, worse yet, of becoming a launching pad for these bugs to attack everyone around me. “Lice can’t jump and they certainly can’t fly,” Sam assures me. I don’t believe her. What does she know about insects or, for that matter, about my uncanny ability to harm everyone around me?
When we finish for the night, I force myself outside. I don’t want to talk to the stars tonight. I’m pissed at them for letting this happen. As I write on an index card a few minutes later, This isn’t fair. I’m not ready. I’m on the edge now. Very afraid.
Samantha’s in bed and suggests I come join her. I can’t do that. Can’t get that close. I roll out a sleeping bag on my den floor and rock myself to sleep.
When morning arrives, I fire off an e-mail to our entire staff at the station, explaining that my daughters have head lice. I almost always use my own headphones at work, but every now and then I’ll put on a station pair, and I can’t remember whether or not I did yesterday. I’ve already spent hours playing back my virtual tapes of the day. But as usual, they’re of no help at all.
“Better to err on the safe side with a note,” I explain to Samantha, when she asks what I’m doing.
“But you don’t have lice,” she snaps back at me, not understanding that this is an assumption my what-if thinking couldn’t possibly accept. “If you don’t have lice, you can’t spread them to anyone else.” Six hours worth of hair-checking last night has left Sam less than sympathetic to my OCD paranoia.
I show my compassion by waiting a full ten minutes before demanding another inspection of my hair.
Time is ticking away, and I’m in a panic over the David Brinkley introduction. I don’t want to do it anymore, not when it will place him and so many others in imminent danger. I head into the station early and plead my case to our station manager. I tell him about the whole lice thing, how I’ve been up all night, how I feel like shit. It would really be better if Kitty did this alone, I insist. But he says it’s too late, that everyone’s expecting the two of us, together. I kick myself for not having invented a better excuse. Before I know it, it’s two o’clock and I’m in the VIP waiting area for Perspectives ’97. Kitty is approaching now and my scalp is itching like crazy. I can feel all those little bugs Sam insists I don’t have: they’re jumping with excitement, waiting for the perfect opportunities to spring off my head. I want so badly to scratch my scalp, but I’ve made it more than an hour now without touching my hair. My hands are clean, or at least as clean as I could get them in the station bathroom just before I left. Hand-scrubbing strikes even me as a silly solution to head-lice concerns. But it’s what I know, so it’s what I do.
Soon Kitty and I are ushered into the luxury trailer serving as a green room for the symposium’s keynote speakers. There, sitting right in front of me, is the host of ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley. Introductions are made. We’re told it will still be some time before we’re needed on stage, to take a seat and make ourselves comfortable.
Help. What am I doing here? How selfish of me to even risk sharing my family’s plague with an American icon!
Now I’m sitting just inches from this legend I’ve watched on TV for years, making small talk and shaking inside like an electric jackhammer. This should be a highlight of my career; I’ve worked hard to get to the place in this industry that would put me in the same room with a guy like David Brinkley. I should relish this moment. Instead I want to dash for the door.
The hands on the wall clock are moving in slow motion. I wish there was a way for me to confess, for the topic of lice to come up in conversation. Ever so coyly, I scope out Brinkley’s thinning hair. Is there enough of it for the bugs to be interested? I hear Sam insisting that I don’t have lice, that I can’t give them to anybody if I don’t have them myself.
Irrelevant, Doubt fires back. Entirely irrelevant.
The trailer door opens and in walks Brian Mulroney, the former prime minister of Canada. It seems he and Brinkley know one another and begin chatting. I do my best to disappear in my seat. Finally someone tells us it’s time to go on, and in a fuzzy blur I follow Kitty to a lectern on a stage in front of an audience of thousands. This would be the part that might frighten most people. For me, it’s a breath of fresh air. The sea of heads out there is a safe distance away. If I can just keep my nonexistent bugs off the microphone in front of me for the next two minutes, I know I’m home free.
Our voices give way to thunderous applause. Brinkley walks on. We exit. I beeline it for the bathroom and wash my hands.
October 31, 10:00 p.m. Whoa, baby, that
was close. I wanted to quit when I got
home tonight—not just slack off on the
Project for a little while, but formally quit.
I’m off the OCD scale. 10-plus.
A good five hours have now passed since the Brinkley introduction, and still I am shaking with fear as I write the words on the index card. It’s Halloween night, and the kid who interrupts my journaling with his knock on our door reminds me of the irony.
“Trick or treat.”
Yeah, that’s what my project is, one or the other. Maybe it’s the former and I’m wasting my time …
If I don’t start writing on this card now, I
know I’m done, for good. Let me just put
this down in ink: I am NOT quitting.
Over the next two days, Samantha and I spend virtually every waking minute at home going through hair. At three hours per head check—except mine, which takes roughly ten minutes to turn up nothing—we’re finding it next to impossible to keep up with the process.
Head lice, we’ve learned, are much more common than we’d thought. In fact, it seems every parent we know has either been through this ordeal before or, thanks to several outbreaks at our school, is going through it now. This is little consolation to me. As far as I’m concerned, we’re a bunch of lepers.
My OCD paranoia is reaching new levels. I want to quarantine our family, to put a fumigation tent over our house and never leave it. That, of course, is not an option; so instead, I add to the girls’ misery by doing everything I can to isolate them from the outside world. No friends. No trips to the store. No human contact.
Tensions mount sky-high at home as Sam struggles to hold things together. I all but move into my little den, eating and sleeping there and doing my best to hide from my wife and daughters, who are living in shower caps at my insistence. The plastic caps made me feel better for a while. But as always, Doubt found a way to intervene, prompting me to question whether lice might eat right through plastic or, for that matter, any other protective material we could think to use.
When I’m not obsessing about whom I might have contaminated with the bugs I don’t have, I spend hours on the Internet researching lice and their treatment, a process Jackie would warn me is becoming an OCD ritual. I pore over online bulletin boards dealing with lice, hoping for answers to my what-if questions. Unfortunately, very few people are as imaginative as I am with their particular queries.
And still I promise myself I won’t give up on my project. In between all the hair inspections and the research and the mental reviews and the pleas for reassurance, I force myself to fill up one index card after another with rambling notes, attempting at every step to capture all the OCD horror and make whatever sense of it I can relative to my new cardboard belief model that I carry with me everywhere. So much of what I wind up putting on the cards is downright depressing. Every once in a while, though, some illusory light bulb will turn on just above my head, and I’ll find myself thinking, Yeah, that’s the ticket. Such is the case tonight, just over seventy-two hours after all the nit-pic
king began. I grab an index card and scribble out what I decide is a whole new way of looking at this louse-y timing:
November 2, Day 13. Here I am cursing
this lice infestation, when instead I should
be thankful for the growth opportunities it
presents … Are there not wonderful les-
sons right before me? Lice are like bad
thoughts infesting my mind. It’s not enough
to remove those thoughts. I must also be
vigilant of the “seeds” or “eggs” they plant;
if not, they will go on to create additional
problems.
The treatment process is tedious, much
like my project. I cannot do it alone. I need
to take proactive measures. I need to re-
lease those elements not under my control.
Yes, clearly this challenge is a blessing, a huge opportunity to grow.
It’s nearly midnight again, and Sam is calling me to come get started on her hair. A blessing? Yeah, right.
Another week of hair-checking passes. Day after day I check out clean. Day after day my twisted OCD logic comes up with new ways in which I might contaminate everyone around me. I stop sitting in chairs for fear of transferring a stray nit-infested hair, and stop sending mail for fear of shipping off a bug looking to hitchhike. Doubt loves that one. That I might single-handedly bring down the entire U.S. Postal Service.
My den continues to be my safety shelter at home. In there, I can hide from Sam and the girls and their lethal ponytails. Unfortunately, the room offers little protection from my growing library of looped virtual videos, now showing just-out-of-focus recaps of my every encounter over the past two or three weeks.
Though I’m struggling to admit it, I find myself increasingly distracted these days. Even our listeners are beginning to notice. “Tell Bell it’s Wednesday,” a caller barks after I go through an entire hour referring to the Tuesday edition of the Afternoon News. It kills me to think that perhaps my studio safe haven is now part of the war zone.
