The Quiet Room

by Lori Schiller

  When I approached him with the idea of being my shrink, he was surprisingly enthusiastic. I didn't know the doc real well but I liked that he seemed to be the epitome of a descendant from the world of Freud, a cigar-smoking professional from the old, traditional days of psychiatry. He was bald, in his fifties, with a great sense of humor. He reminded me of ray dad.

  I wanted Dr. Rockland to help me but none of our sessions ever seemed to make much sense. What did I have to say to a psychiatrist? I was fat and felt kind of fuzzy, but otherwise I thought I was just like everyone else. The Voices were bothering me, of course, but I thought everyone knew that. I even thought most people heard them too. They were a normal, if troubling, part of existence.

  I tried explaining that to him. The Voices had been around for quite a while, I told him. Even though I despised their presence, they had nothing to do with an illness. I was really quite sane.

  He listened respectfully to my explanations without saying anything. When I had finished, he would rise from his chair, and go to his dusty textbooks filling up the shelves above his chair. Then, from the fat maroon books, he would begin a lesson in psychiatry, telling me how the brain worked, how thoughts worked, and what so-called normal people did and did not hear in their brains. I felt as if I were on an operating table. He was going to dissect my brain and insert logic into it. And that was just what I did not want him to do. I wanted help. I didn't want him messing with my brain.

  So week after week, for a fifty-minute hour three days a week, I put all my energy into combating any help he might have to offer. He tried to get me to talk about my thoughts and feelings. I tried to keep away from just those topics. We shared jokes we had heard over the week, and laughed together as if this was therapy. We spoke about medication and the human body. We discussed the difference between the way tricyclic antidepressents and MAO inhibitor antidepressants worked. We discussed the dystonic reaction and the anticholinergic effect. He must have explained to me a hundred times how certain medications caused certain side effects, like a dry mouth. I always felt these were safe topics. When we talked about medicine, I didn't have to verbalize my feelings, my thoughts, my symptoms, or why the hell I was even seeing this man.

  Sometimes we talked about my day-to-day life. Once when I admitted to him that I didn't know much about sex, and that I wasn't even sure exactly how it worked, he was very comforting. Once more he reached for his textbooks—only this time, they were anatomy and physiology textbooks. He sat down next to me on his couch adjacent to my chair, and explained everything to me in a low-key and comforting way. I found this session interesting, and was grateful for his help.

  But mostly, I just stonewalled him.

  “I don't know what to say, Doc,” I would say over and over again.

  “Just say whatever comes to your mind,” he would encourage me.

  “I have nothing on my mind.”

  “Is your head empty?”

  “No, in fact, exactly the opposite.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. The stuff I always have on my mind.”

  “You mean the voices?”

  Silence.

  “What do they say?” He tried to coax it out of me.

  Silence.

  “You know, Lori, if you give me a chance, maybe I can help you. If you don't open up, though, I won't be able to help you.”

  “Leave me alone, Doc.”

  “Lori, just talk to me, work with me, and together we can at least try to overcome these horrible symptoms. They're obviously so painful to you.”

  Silence. A long, long silence. And then I tried, a little bit.

  “The Voices are telling me not to trust you, and that you'll make me die.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  What a jerk! “Of course I do, or I wouldn't have said it. What kind of games are you playing with my brain?”

  “I know the voices seem real to you, but they are actually a part of you deep down inside coming out in the form of hallucinations. Do you understand that?”

  How could someone like that help me? He was supposed to be a professional, the best. But my Voices knew more than he did. He didn't know anything.

  He didn't even know enough to be concerned when there was danger. Once sitting in his office, I became aware that the room was filling up with floating paisley shapes that were out to murder both of us. They were sucking up all the oxygen in the room, and he and I were both going to suffocate. It was terrifying. I felt like a murderer. I had to warn him. But when I told him of the danger we both were in, he didn't seem concerned at all. He just sat there as if nothing was happening.

  What could I learn from a guy like that?

  So mostly I just sat there. Hour after fifty-minute hour, week after week, I sat there, silent. There he was, sitting in his chair, puffing on his cigar as if he were Freud himself. I sat adjacent to him in a big woolly chair, session after session, smoking cigarette after cigarette in silence. I wouldn't talk, and he wouldn't prompt me. So often we spent the entire session in silence. All I would do was pick the arm of my chair to shreds. It seemed like my project to destroy the chair before sitting in it somehow destroyed me. I stared at the clock ticking away in slow motion. I often fantasized about smashing that clock, or him.

  My brothers didn't offer any help. Basically they kept their distance.

  They had their own lives to live. Sometimes I would catch sight of Steven in the family room where his friends were drinking Coke and watching TV. He was all wrapped up in his job selling produce at Cherry Lawn Farm, and making his plans to go to college. I didn't resent him going on with his own life. I had been to college. I had had that experience. This time it was his turn.

  I did resent Mark though. It was Mark who was living the life I wanted to live. He was graduating from college, going to graduate school, moving to an apartment in the city, living the young, single life-style that was supposed to be mine. I wanted to live Mark's life. I even wanted to be him. It certainly would be better than being myself.

  I had nothing to do and nowhere to go. I spent the rest of the summer lounging by the pool at my parents’ country club. I was extremely self-conscious. I had gained so much weight since I had gone into the hospital. I felt like everyone was looking at me. I didn't fit in anymore.

  It wasn't just in my head. People didn't know how to act around me. I could hear the chatter of my parents’ friends as I strolled to the pool.

  “Is she hearing voices now?”

  “Does she remember who we are?”

  “Can she still talk and carry on a conversation?”

  “Is she going to change into another personality?”

  “I think even though they let her out, she still may be crazy.”

  “Can you believe she's actually had shock treatment?”

  “Poor Nancy and Marvin. What a tragedy …”

  It almost made me long for the hospital. At least in the hospital I was just another patient, and not a freak.

  12

  Lori Scarsdale, New York, September 1983–May 1984

  I was never without music. I'd wake up in the morning to music that had been playing all night. I drove my car flipping stations until I found one that I liked. When I came home, I made a beeline to my bedroom and immediately, like a reflex, turned on the stereo.

  Sometimes I'd listen to music just to cover up the sound of the Voices. I'd turn up the music and focus on it instead of on the sounds in my head. Sometimes the Voices tried to shout over the music, and sometimes they succeeded. But often I could drown them out with tunes. Sometimes the music from the stereo was enough. But often, when the Voices were energetic, I'd have to do more. I'd plug a Walkman in my ears, turn the volume up to full strength and blast the suckers.

  Music was a great mood bank. It was a kind of drug for me. It enhanced and tempered my moods. Just listening to the introduction of a favorite song was enough to make me feel some kind of exclamation-point emotion. Give me a dose
of Al Jarreau and it picked up my spirits. Add a double dose of Neil Young to temper my feistiness. To get revved up, I popped a Pat Benatar cassette. Then I'd need a song to counter the wild state, so I'd play “Bridge over Troubled Water.” And then I'd chill out in the early morning with the song “Easy” by the Commodores:

  Everybody wants me to be

  What they want me to be

  I'm not happy

  When I try to fake it.

  Stevie Wonder's music was upbeat and exciting. I found myself playing “Golden Lady,” swirling around and dancing with exhilaration and excitement alone in my room, feeling high as the Milky Way. Elton John, on the other hand, was in a category by himself. He was always the master of emotions, at both passionate ends of the musical spectrum. There were songs with powerful titles like “Funeral for a Friend.” There were wild songs like “Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting.” Elton John was my lithium. Elton Lithium John. We'll bottle him and keep him in the medicine cabinet, take as needed. Music is the doctor, as they say.

  But if music was strong, my moods were stronger. More often than not I found that it wasn't the music that controlled my moods. It was my moods controlling the music. My moods would whirl around me, and seep out into the world, selecting the songs, filtering the tunes and lyrics not to alter my moods, but to harmonize with them and enhance them.

  I never thought the songs or singers were speaking directly to me the way back in high school I thought Walter Cronkite was. Nonetheless, my moods sharpened the words and tunes like a knife, so they seemed to cut directly to my brain. The songs talked to my experience, shared my feelings. It was as if through music the world outside became a mirror image of my own inner world. The borders between the music and my mind would fade. As I became engrossed in the words and melodies, I often became captive to the mercy of the music.

  One of Pink Floyd's songs seemed to be about my own obsession with time. I kept clock after clock in my room, and was always preoccupied with figuring out exactly what time it was. The song began with the clang of dozens of different alarm clocks, then the repeated sound of a heartbeat, then the din of drums and chimes. It felt just as I would feel when I would compulsively compare the analog dial on my watch with the digital clock and then, trusting neither, call 976-1616 to hear the comforting electronic voice intone the correct time, down to the right second.

  I would hear Billy Joel's driving beat. Sometimes as he sang, he asked questions in his lyrics and then answered them himself. It seemed to me a lot like the conversations my Voices would have with each other when they were being relatively tranquil. Sometimes when Billy Joel sang about madness, depression or exhilaration he seemed to share my terrifying inner chaos. When he sang about loneliness, he seemed to understand the isolation I felt.

  When the group Steely Dan sang “Any Major Dude,” I could hear the song speaking to me, speaking of a woman, maybe me, hovering on the edge of a breakdown, trying to pull the pieces together again. Everyone seemed to live in a world of madness.

  Crosby, Stills & Nash knew all about the terror I felt when a private reality consumed and became more real than the outside reality:

  Now I'm standing on the grave of a soldier that died in 1799,

  And the day he died it was a birthday, and I noticed it was mine.

  And my head didn't know just who I was, and I was spinning back in time…

  How wonderful it was in my depression to pop in a Jackson Browne tape, and roll around in his preoccupation with suicide. My own obsession became his obsession, and his became mine. I could internalize and heighten my feelings with his. I could feel someone else's suicide as if it were mine.

  Though Adam was a friend of mine,

  I did not know him well.

  He was alone into his distance,

  He was deep into his well.

  I could guess what he was laughing at,

  But I couldn't really tell

  Now the story's told that Adam jumped,

  But I'm thinking that he fell …

  Toward the end of that first summer at home, I began to look for a job. I realized I needed something to do. Much as I loved music, I couldn't sit at the other end of my headset forever. I couldn't lie around the pool for the rest of my life. So I began scouring the papers for something I could do. Late in the summer, I saw an advertisement in a local newspaper for a new restaurant opening in Scarsdale. They needed waitresses and bartenders. I decided to apply. My parents were very encouraging. “It's a great way to meet people,” my father said.

  I was determined to land the job and I did. With all my waitressing experience with Tara and Lori at Mug ’N Muffin in Harvard Square, I thought I'd be perfect in the job.

  So much had changed since then. For one thing, this was a much more complicated restaurant than Mug ’N Muffin, which was little more than a two-coffees-one-black-with-Sweet-’n-Low-one-extra-light-with-sugar-and-two-blueberry-muffins little breakfast bar. This restaurant was one of those darkly lit trendy places where working people stopped by for lunch, yuppies dropped in in droves to hang out with their friends after work, and older people—people in their thirties—went out for prime rib in the evening. Sometimes—usually on Friday or Saturday night—it was so crowded that it seemed all I did was say “excuse me” all evening, and the only way I made it through the night was by ignoring about half my customers.

  I had also overestimated my abilities. Whatever waitressing skills I had back in college had been lost in the chaos of the intervening years. Here I was a lousy waitress. I couldn't keep up with the work. I found the pace terrifying, and the world of the restaurant chaotic. Everything about the job was strange and difficult, everything seemed to slip out of my grasp. I wasn't fast enough dishing out cole slaw and pickles during setup. I was too fat to fit into my uniform. When the dinner hour began, I could handle couples, and the occasional single who came by for a solitary supper. But when four friends came in for an evening out, I panicked. My thoughts were so scattered that I couldn't remember orders. Who ordered the steak teriyaki, and was it a baked potato or French fries to go along? Not only could I not remember orders, I couldn't even read my own writing when I wrote them down. My hands shook, so I couldn't carry all those plates at one time, which meant I had to make extra trips. When it came time to total up, I was constantly making mistakes. The cash registers were computers, and I never could master them.

  To make matters worse, the Voices in my head kept up a steady roar of commentary about everything I did. Between their shrieking, the pace of the work, the thundering din of the crowd talking all at once about the Mets, their Saturday night date, that jerk Rodgers in marketing, the last movie they saw and the next movie they were going to see, the last guy they dated and the next guy they wanted to ask them out, sometimes I would want to scream.

  After a while, I switched to working downstairs in the cocktail lounge on Friday and Saturday nights. The pace was just as fast, but the job was a lot easier. There were fewer things to remember. With ice. Straight up. Frozen margarita, with salt, without salt. Nothing to it.

  Still, there were a lot of creeps down there, and sometimes it was hard to keep my temper. Sometimes I came close to losing it. Once I actually did when a particularly rowdy group began to tease me and laugh at me and make fun of me. There were both men and women in the group, and they were all getting off on the wisecracks of one particularly obnoxious guy who was the ringleader.

  As I tried to ignore the taunts, the Voices were taking over. They were yelling orders at me. They were telling me all kinds of vile and violent things to do to that jerk. I served the customers as quickly as possible, and tried to keep away. I was afraid of what I might do. But the restaurant was crowded, the tables nearby kept ordering, and those people themselves kept calling me over. There was no way I could escape their ridicule.

  I took it as long as I could, long enough to get their orders, go away and fill them. But when I came back to pass out the orders, and this guy started
in on me again, I decided it was time to strike back. I gave all his friends their drinks, saving his for last.

  “Did you say that you wanted that on the rocks, sir?” I asked him demurely. Then I poured the whole thing into his lap.

  I couldn't blame that one on the Voices. That was all me, and I loved doing it.

  Still, despite the hassles, I stayed on. They apparently needed me. I needed the money. I liked the company. Before too long, there was another big attraction: It was here that I got turned on to coke.

  I had dabbled in drugs in high school, smoking pot with some friends, sorting out the seeds from the leaves on the fold of an opened-out record album cover. In college, I had tried cocaine with friends at parties. And when I found myself really strung out I tried Quaaludes. I couldn't drink. Something about alcohol just didn't agree with me. Even when I just tried some beer at a fraternity keg party I'd always throw up. Those little pills or a quick snort on the other hand could make me feel incredibly relaxed when the Voices were making me tense. But drugs had never been a big part of my life until I got out of the hospital.

  By the time I left the hospital, though, cocaine seemed to be everywhere. In fact, I rarely had to seek it out. It came looking for me. I found that plenty of people coming to the restaurant were into cocaine. In fact, every so often I found that some regular customers would offer to tip me, not in cash, but in cocaine. At the end of the meal, the happy customers would simply ask me to share some lines with them.

  At first I was cautious. It was a pretty public place, after all, just down the road from my parents’ home. But gradually, as time went by and no one tried to stop us, I became more and more relaxed. Just as I had begun to recognize the good cash tippers, so too I began to know who did coke and who didn't. There seemed to be so many who did! First it was an occasional line just for fun. Then it became a daily event. Then gradually cocaine became a regular part of my life.