The Quiet Room

by Lori Schiller

  Soon I began to get friendly with the people I knew who did the drug. Often I would see a big-time drug dealer, a man I knew had been in and out of jail for dealing drugs, sitting at the bar. Often he'd call me over from across the bar and invite me to do some lines in the bathroom. I liked it when people shared. It was cheaper and easier than getting cash. When a customer tipped in cash, I just mentally calculated it for my cocaine fund. When one passed me a quarter gram, however, it was much more valuable. I got to do more of the stuff, and I got to do it right away.

  All I was trying to do was to feel better. Those medications they gave me in the hospital were useless. I took them because people told me they would make me better. But lots of times I didn't know why I bothered. The only thing those fistfuls of stupid pills did was make me feel fuzzy and disoriented, as if I were at the bottom of a swimming pool. And the Voices still raged away at me, mocking the drugs, the doctors and me.

  Cocaine, on the other hand, helped me ignore the Voices. For as long as it lasted, cocaine made me feel alive. It made my senses feel sharp and clear again. When I did a line, I felt good, I felt real, I felt vital in a way I hadn't since long before the Voices entered my life. Cocaine directed my attention outside of myself. As long as I was high, I had enough strength to ignore those Voices calling me back into their world.

  So for a while I found the relief I wanted. When the crash came as it always did, I went back for more. When the crashes came closer together, the search for relief began to consume more of my time and my life. Before too long, the search for cocaine— and of ways of getting it—began to be the single-minded focus of my existence.

  Eventually, it was cocaine that brought me to Raymond. Then Raymond brought me cocaine. Then Raymond and cocaine became so intertwined with each other that I could barely tell them apart, and I couldn't do without either one of them.

  I met Raymond through one of my fellow waitresses who lived in his building. Nicole and I had become friendly, and liked to hang out with each other. Raymond was her friend. At first I would go over to see Nicole. We would talk, listen to music, and I would watch her put on her globs of makeup. And then we would both go down to see Raymond. Raymond always had cocaine. If he didn't, he knew where to get it.

  For a long time, we had a friendly threesome. Nicole and Raymond and I would all get high together. But as time went by, I slowly found myself bypassing Nicole and going straight to visit Raymond.

  Like drugs and music, Raymond took me away, for a little while, from all the pain. For before too long, he fell in love with me. And I guess I fell in love with him. He wasn't exactly the kind of guy my parents would have picked out for me. But I liked him. He was cute, a black man with light brown skin the color of chocolate milk. He was over six feet tall and had a smile that would melt a brick. He had a great in-shape body, not rippled and bulging like a bodybuilder, but just nice and toned all over. Even without the cocaine, he turned me on.

  He was an emergency medical service technician. He had a girlfriend he lived with. Or maybe she was a wife. He wasn't clear. But that kind of made it more exciting and romantic.

  For a while, Raymond gave me something fun to look forward to. He was a bright spot in my life that was otherwise nothing other than miserable. My head was full of pain. I was confused and lonely. There was something wrong with me, and I didn't know what. I worked so hard at dating, but the guys who were interested in me were geeks and creeps. The ones I liked never called back. Most of them thought I was too porky. Raymond thought I was perfect, cuddly and beautiful. He told me so all the time. How could I resist?

  Mom and Dad were trying hard to help me. But being around them wasn't fun either. Dad wanted so much for me to be well. He was always lecturing me, questioning me, pushing me, encouraging me. I wanted so much to be well for his sake that being with him was a constant effort. I had to hold myself in, watch myself, control my actions and impulses. It was hard work.

  And I was so consumed with self-hatred that it was hard for me to do anything with my mom. How could I go shopping with her when looking in the mirror made me sick? How could I go to the country club with her when I knew I was so fat and ugly. I couldn't stand to be around my beautiful, trim, outgoing mother. Raymond never wanted to hear about my illness. Whenever I started trying to talk about my symptoms, he would cut me off or change the subject. To Raymond, I was as normal as the next person, and that was that. So we talked about him. I liked that. To me, he was someone outside the system, and especially outside my system. We talked about his work, about his mother, his house, his little son, Ray Jr., his girlfriend.

  But mostly we did cocaine, or talked about it. Where were we going to score? Whose car were we going to take? Who was going to drive? Do you have any? No, do you? Was there any stashed? Who's got money?

  Together, we got high on coke every single day and night. When I got off from work, we would go off together in search of a place to get high. We couldn't go to his place; we certainly couldn't go to my parents’ house. So our relationship was filled with cocaine and endless hours in cheap motel rooms. We took the four-hour special and spent the time watching the Playboy channel and sniffing coke. I was so desperate for the drug that I let him do anything he wanted with me, just short of having sex. But when the coke was gone, so was I. No coke, no Ray and Lori.

  As I became more and more consumed with the drug, just getting enough for the day became a major focus of my life. Raymond was doing some buying and selling, and often shared some of his with me. But that wasn't enough. I was working long hours at the restaurant, and still getting some tips in lines. Nearly all my wages were going to purchase cocaine, too. Some days, when I didn't have enough money for that day's hit, I would even steal small amounts from the restaurant.

  Staying high became my entire goal. I did coke everywhere. In an elevator. In Grand Central Station. Walking down the street. I even did coke in Dr. Rockland's waiting room. I was continually high, continually fighting the Voices, continually feeling rotten. I hid cocaine in my pockets, in my socks, in my sneakers, in my room and in my car, for emergencies. The one thing I was afraid of was of being without coke when I needed it.

  Cocaine was definitely a form of self-medication. My mind began to obsess over getting as much as I could, more than my body actually craved. I was literally consumed with everything and anything having to do with the drug.

  I even began to hear my own cocaine-filled life reflected in the music I listened to. Eric Clapton sang about cocaine. Neil Young sang about Raymond and me:

  I love you baby,

  can I have some more?

  I always needed more. For when the fall came, it was horrendous. It was a tremendous crash. Coming down from an artificial high was like riding down a roller coaster dramatically spiking down, and then derailing off the track. I couldn't sleep because I was so coked up. And without any more to bring me back up, I just got into bed and lay there with my mind racing, trying to fight off the bad thoughts entering my brain, the bad thoughts telling me to kill myself and end all this misery.

  Once when I crashed and I was out of cocaine—including everything I had hidden away in all my secret stashes—I panicked. I had to have something. So I decided to snort a lithium capsule. I broke it open and sniffed the white powder inside as if it were coke. It was horrible. My entire face burned. I felt like my nasal passages were on fire. I tried shoving water up my nose, but nothing worked, and it was hours before the pain subsided. I thought the walls of my nose were going to cave in.

  Need for the drug began taking me deeper and deeper into a world that I never knew existed before. To get coke, I went with Raymond to places I would have been afraid to go otherwise.

  One of our favorite cocaine stops was in the South Bronx, at a store about as big as a table. Upstairs was one of the most disgustingly filthy bathrooms I have ever seen. There was also a little room with a TV and a bed—and lots and lots of coke. It was piled up on a mirror. We would go there. I would wa
it. Raymond would do his deal. We would do a line, and then leave with enough to keep us satisfied for a while.

  It was a frightening, dangerous, awful place. Once when Raymond took me there, there was a rifle in the upstairs room. When he left me there, and went off with the dealer, I became wild. I was so wired that I didn't even go for the pile of the stuff sitting right there in the open on the mirror. Instead, I went for the rifle. I would end this fucking horrible existence right then, I thought. I would blow my brains out, splatter them on the wall. I tried to put the gun to my head. But I couldn't manage it. I couldn't maneuver the rifle to my head with one hand, and reach the trigger with the other hand. Besides, I was shaking so hard I could barely keep the rifle still. I could hear Raymond and the dealer coming back up the stairs. I put the rifle down, and waited for them, trembling all over with fright.

  The more drugs I did, the more suspicious people around me got. Dr. Rockland was beginning to question me more. Early in my therapy sessions I had told Dr. Rockland I was doing coke but I made light of it. I never told him how much I was really doing, or how important it had become to me. I told him it was just an occasional thing, a line now and then with friends simply for recreation. I could tell he was beginning to realize that wasn't true. By now, I was sometimes consuming nearly $1,000 a week worth of cocaine.

  Gail Kobre—now Gail Kobre Lazarus—was growing concerned. Even with her new husband and her new house, she still tried to keep in touch with me. It wasn't the same as before, but still she would occasionally drop by. I had told her I was doing drugs. I even tried to get her to share a line with me. She indignantly refused. One afternoon she and I were together in the backyard of my parents’ house. I was lying on the hammock, and Gail was sitting on the rocks by the roses.

  “I'll always be your friend, Lori,” she told me. “But I can't stand by and watch you ruining your life like this.”

  As for my parents, I had tried hard to conceal it from them, but they weren't stupid. They were hoping they weren't seeing what they were seeing, but they were beginning to catch on. Raymond and I called each other as many times a day as we could. I called him at his work. He called me at home at midnight, and teed my parents off. I'd have to lie to my folks, that it was a wrong number, or else that it was my friend Nicole calling. I knew the lies weren't working.

  13

  Marvin Schiller Scarsdale, New York, June 1984-August 1984

  At first, Nancy and I were delighted when Lori got herself a job. We didn't have any problem with our daughter working as a waitress. It was honest work, and we knew she would be good at it. She seemed to like it too. After a very short time, it seemed that she was spending most of her time there. Just about every evening she worked a shift, and most weekends too. Many weekends the only way Nancy and I saw Lori was to go over to the restaurant for dinner.

  That was all right with us. We would head over about dinnertime and wait for a table in her section. I would order a burger or spare ribs and Nancy would get a salad from the salad bar. To my eyes, Lori was doing pretty well for someone who had just been locked up for almost a year in a psychiatric hospital. I would sit waiting for my food and watch her moving briskly through the crowds. She was lively and efficient, and she knew she was in the service business. I would watch her laughing and chatting with the customers, keeping up a cheerful repartee as she took orders and made change.

  Sometime the previous fall she joined a video dating service. That seemed like another good sign. Even though Lori was living at home, Nancy and I thought she ought to be making a bigger effort to make friends with people her own age. She paid $500 for a subscription to the dating service, and I told her I thought it was a good investment.

  Very seriously, she explained to me how the service worked. 1

  “There was a lady off camera asking me all kinds of questions! about what kinds of guys I like, what kinds of things I like to do,| how I feel about different things.”

  It seemed that she was given the chance to see similar videotapes! done of men, and select the ones she felt she'd like to date

  “So if I pick Andrew and Scott, then the service calls them in and tells them someone's interested. They come in, see my video, and decide if they're interested in meeting me too.”

  Lori was, like me, old-fashioned. She liked the idea that if the attraction was mutual, the woman's phone number was given to the man to call. The attraction must have been mutual a good bit that fall, for men were always showing up at the door. One man showed up with a big bouquet of roses. On another evening she returned home laughing: She had just had dinner with a magician who had performed his tricks over the meal.

  All through the winter I loved to hear the phone ring. It meant to me that our Lori was back.

  I was so grateful she was back, so grateful she was out of that hospital.

  Now that she was out, I felt my job was to encourage her, to shepherd her along, to make sure that she didn't get stuck in the hospital system. I embarked on a program to encourage her. Marshal your forces, Lori, I told her. “You are in charge of the way you present yourself to others.” She was a fighter, a winner. She could pull it together and hasten her own recovery.

  Although she was up off the bottom, I knew she wasn't altogether well. I had only to look at her to know that. I could see it in her eyes. From the time Lori was a baby, I used to say that Lori had devilish eyes. There was mischief in them, and intelligence and sparkle and fun. These eyes were dead, their stare vacant. Her walk was different too. Her arms hung lifelessly from their sockets. She looked like a zombie, moving as if walking in her sleep.

  It wasn't the Lori we knew. But it was better than the Lori we had seen over the last several months. I figured that she was in the early stage of recovery. When she picked Dr. Rockland as her psychiatrist, we all agreed that what she needed was to be eased back into her own life. With work and friends, meaning and purpose, she would merge herself back into the life she had left behind.

  Lori herself seemed to feel that way too. In May of the year before, just after Lori left the hospital, Nancy threw a wonderful party for my fiftieth birthday. It was at a restaurant in SoHo in Manhattan, and about two dozen of our family friends were there. Mark and Steven were with us, so it was the first time the whole family had been together in one spot in a very long time. The boys were getting punchy, acting silly, calling for a toast and then passing chunks of browned bread around the table. Everyone was in a good mood.

  Lori, with a new, short and bouncy haircut, looked lovely that evening. And then, when the real toasts began, she did something that brought tears to my eyes. She stood up before our guests and thanked me for all the help I had given her while she was in the hospital.

  “I'm sorry for all the trouble I caused you then, Daddy,” she said. “Thank you for helping pull me through a rough time.”

  When you make a jump from a 1 to a 3 it's not like the 10 you had, but it's still progress.

  I tried to keep our relations simple and on an even keel. On Sunday afternoons, we walked on the golf course together. On Saturday afternoons, we did errands. We drove up to Central Avenue in Yonkers to pick things up for the house or the car or the garden. Sometimes we stopped at Caldor's and I would buy her a Diet Coke and a soft hot pretzel, which she seemed to like, and I loved. We tried to make some fun out of simple things. We had a little competition to see who could find the cheapest 93 octane gas in Westchester County. I found a station in New Rochelle; she found one in Eastchester. We'd compare notes and then go out of our way to fill up at the winning station. We probably spent dollars saving pennies, but I didn't care. It seemed to amuse her, and gave us something to talk about.

  Nancy was always troubled by my psychologizing. “Why don't you leave that to the doctors?” she kept saying. “Don't get involved in her therapy.” But when Lori returned home I felt I owed it to her to give her my best. I had good training. I would use it to try to help her.

  I tried to talk to her about her
voices, what they were saying, who they were, what they meant to her. I encouraged her to write down her dreams, and for a while she kept a paper and pencil by her bed. She was having such a difficult time communicating, talking to us—or to anyone—about how she felt, that I encouraged her to write down as much as possible. If she felt free to bring those feelings to me, then I would try to interpret them for her. Over and over I would say to her that it was important to remember how she was now, so we could all look back and appreciate how far she had come.

  One thing I insisted she talk to me about was suicide. She had already tried to kill herself twice, and many times in the hospital it was obvious that she would have tried again if she had been able. I tried to talk with her about how final death was. That if she attempted suicide she might actually succeed. That even if she weren't completely serious about the attempt, there was always the possibility that she'd make a fatal error.

  “It's not like so many other things, Lori, where if it goes wrong you can try again and do it over,” I told her. “If you make a mistake, you don't get another chance.”

  As the weeks went by, I kept asking her: “Are you planning on killing yourself, Lori? You have to tell us if you are.” I would try to drag it out of her. More often than not she would become belligerent.

  “Stop hounding me,” she would snap. “You're just trying to provoke me. You don't understand.”

  But strangely enough over time our relationship began to grow closer. She had always been my little girl. But these days it was clearer to me than ever before just how much she needed me. She needed my support and my reassurance and my encouragement, and she was actively seeking them out.

  She would walk up to me and say, out of the blue:

  “You're mad at me.”

  “No I'm not, Lori.”

  “Well, you're looking at me like you're mad at me.”