by Adam Haslett
I took my first pill as soon as I filled the script at the CVS in Copley, a few blocks from Dr. Gregory’s office. By the time I’d reached Newton Centre on the Green Line, I couldn’t stop smiling. The kind of big, solar smile that suffuses your whole torso, as if your organs are grinning. Soon I began to laugh, at nothing at all, pure laughter, which brought tears to my eyes, no doubt making me appear completely insane to the other passengers. But happier I have rarely been. For that hour and the three or four that followed, I was lifted down off a hook in the back of my skull that I hadn’t even known I’d been hanging from. Here was the world unfettered by dread. Thoughts came, lasted for whole, uninterrupted moments, and then passed away, leaving room for others. The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency. In fact, it seemed almost uneventful. Down the tramcar a gaggle of high schoolers snickered at my lunatic ways and I wasn’t even ashamed. It was as if their derision moved too slowly through this new atmosphere to reach me with any force. I neither envied nor despised them. Who was I? Steve McQueen? When I saw my used Cutlass turning into the parking lot at Woodlawn—Caleigh coming to pick me up—I waved to her sitting behind the wheel. She too looked at me like I was a sociopath. Since when do you wave? she said. Since I found out you could tear down the Berlin Wall with a Q-tip.
Dr. Gregory had told me to take one pill in the morning and one before bed. I slept that night like a baby lamb on sedatives, and woke unafraid. Morning after morning this miracle repeated itself. I began to run experiments. I would summon my worst fears—that I would never get back to school, that I had already ruined my chance to do my larger work, that I was a burden to Caleigh, that she didn’t love me even as a friend but put up with me only because she was depressed and needed company—and I would dwell on each in turn, summoning the images that came along with the fears: being stuck in the house forever, Caleigh living thousands of miles away in love with someone else. And yet, lo and behold it, I couldn’t worry. I imagined this terrible future, I rehearsed the story lines, but my breath wouldn’t tighten, and thoughts moved through me as frictionlessly as a weather report.
I told Caleigh she had to try it, but when I dosed her one morning after breakfast she fell into a six-hour coma, and woke with a hangover, cursing me. Turned out she didn’t have an anxiety disorder. That was the thing about Klonopin: it didn’t just void my anxiety, it diagnosed my state like the X-ray of a fractured bone. The muscles of my face became so relaxed I expected to look in the mirror and see a basset hound. I’d never known a body could be so free of tension and still remain upright.
That fall I went back to school. I read by the hour, wrote papers, sat exams, and initiated my listeners into acid house. Caleigh and I spent all our time together, in our rooms, at the radio station, in the library, I imploring her to enter therapy, she resisting and putting me off, though still allowing me to make love to her. If I had hoped that my guilt about sleeping with her might dwindle with time, I was wrong. It only intensified. It wasn’t just about being a man who might repulse her, or cause her pain. It was being white, and yet free to touch her, to kiss her lips and breasts, to put my finger inside her, when twenty minutes earlier I’d been reading aloud from Andrea Dworkin or Sojourner Truth. This didn’t stop seeming wrong. I tried my best to focus solely on her pleasure, to ignore myself entirely in deference to her. But the political isn’t so easily banished. Yes, I wanted to abdicate myself, to give up my own person, because why else be in love if you can’t leave yourself in the dust? But it was more particular than that. Soon my deference had morphed into something more loaded: the desire to physically reverse racial privilege by becoming her slave. Where else could this transposition occur with any real force but in the trauma of sex?
One night in bed that spring, too consumed by the urge not to confess it, I whispered words to this effect into the porch of her ear. “Oh, Flipper,” she whispered back. “What do you mean? Some plantation thing?” My horrendous silence allowed the implication, Yeah, maybe, inverted? She placed her long fingers on my cheek and brushed my hair back with her other hand, as you might pat a child’s cowlick. She loved me enough by then, if only as a friend, not to be shy in my presence. For that, I’ll always be grateful to her—that she showed me who she was. “I get it,” she said. “I do. But not for us, Flipper. Not for us. Okay?” She shushed the stream of apologies that came out of me for even asking, holding a finger to my lips, and then, to my amazement, raised her head up off the pillow and kissed me.
So I kept that longed-for defeat in check, not wanting to trouble her, holding it at bay as I have ever since. It would be much tidier if the negligible chipping away I’ve done at the edifice of white supremacy issued purely from a concern for justice. But the fact is my life has been all caught up with black women (romantically, I would have been a lot better off as a lesbian of color, that’s for sure) so there’s no use pretending to some fiction of principle. I never would have kept up my work if I hadn’t seen up close the depression and self-hatred that the women I’ve tried to be with have suffered but not wanted to discuss. To think that their states of mind have nothing to do with politics or history would be as pitiably ignorant as imagining that my pining for them—their bodies and mothering care—isn’t likewise haunted.
I realize I’m going on here a bit in answer to the question on work history, it’s just that listing dates of employment doesn’t really get at what I’ve been up to. My real work began during that first reprieve of Klonopin. Caleigh had met a woman named Myra, a grad student at BC who TA’d one of her discussion sections. They struck up a conversation after class one day and had coffee a few times. Myra had grown up in Atlanta, gone to the University of Chicago undergrad, tended bar in Boston for several years, and now DJ’d at an all-women’s night in Central Square once a month. I could tell by the way Caleigh looked at me out of the corner of her eye whenever she mentioned her name that she was testing me to see how I would react. It is a measure of the power of benzos on the virgin mind that I could listen to Caleigh, who meant everything to me, talk about having coffee with this woman and not end up hospitalized for jealousy. She clearly wanted permission. She had forgiven me my terrible need for her. She had let herself be swayed by my devotion, and eventually persuaded by it. She’d even forgiven me my guilt for desiring her. What was I going to do now? Stand in the way of what she was trying to tell me she wanted? Just a few months earlier, my ambient dread and my obsession with her had been so entwined I would have been reduced to pleading and threats. Instead, I found myself bewildered at the equanimity of my response. It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear. For a moment there, I was able to step outside that, to hear what she wanted to be.
When Caleigh suggested that the three of us form a reading group to make up for the paltry offerings in African diaspora studies, it seemed like a perfect solution, a way for Caleigh not to have to choose between us. Myra was wary of me at first, knowing Caleigh and I were still sleeping together, and finding it hard to believe a white man could have much to contribute to discussions of black life. I didn’t blame her for this. But with Caleigh to vouch for me, she eventually came around, and the three of us spent our first month reading that giant of postcolonial psychiatry, Frantz Fanon. Not the world’s leading feminist, but you could fit on a postcard what he didn’t get about the psychic half-life of colonialism. On his advice, so to speak, we surveyed the more recent clinical-psych literature for studies on the treatment of black patients (shockingly, there wasn’t much). But I did come across the study that helped set me on my path.
A British psychologist working at a clinic in Manchester had written a paper about his treatment of black teenagers with recurring nightmares of slavery. Some dreamt of being confined to the holds of ships amid the withered and dying, others of being publicly stripped and lashed. One boy, who evinced no particular knowledge of black history, had a recurring ni
ghtmare that he was being hung from a lamppost and dismembered. It was the transcripts that got me. The author had excerpted them in an appendix. One of his subjects, in language replete with Mancunian slang, described seeing blood run down his chest and realizing it was leaking from the cuts inflicted by the iron collar around his neck. Not knowing what to make of the phenomenon—none of the boys knew each other and they attended different schools—the psychologist had interviewed family members to see if there were stories of enslavement among ancestors that might have been passed along in family lore, giving rise to the boys’ nocturnal fantasies. But he found no such pattern. What the boys did share were symptoms of depression, which, as the author noted, were not unusual among black teenagers, though few came in for treatment. It was the press of these particular nightmares that had driven them over the barrier of pride and stigma to seek his help.
The oddity of it all—kids from the Midlands, not the old Confederacy, the uncanny exactitude of their descriptions—would have been memorable enough. But what lodged in me was an observation that the author himself made little of. Toward the opening of the paper, as he was describing the boys’ working-class social milieu, he mentioned in passing that each went regularly to clubs and that all were avid music fans. Alas, he didn’t get their playlists. But given where and when they’d grown up, it wasn’t hard to guess what they’d been hearing on the dance floor—and it wasn’t white punk. It was house and early techno, with some Kraftwerk and New Order thrown in. Of course, there were thousands of kids listening to the same stuff at the same time whose sleep went untroubled by the Middle Passage. And yet it turned out that what these kids had in common wasn’t great-grandmothers from West Indian plantations but black American dance tracks. No one doubted that the agony of slavery haunted generations of spirituals and gospel. Why not the latest twelve-inch? These boys weren’t listening to Mahalia Jackson sing about how she got over, but somewhere in the cut the same ghosts were being shaken loose. There was no empirical conclusion to draw from any of this, as if you could measure the pain in music. But spending my days reading the history of lynchings and race riots, and then playing my records at the station, I kept returning to the image of these boys dancing and dreaming through some dark repetition bigger than any of us.
I suppose, then, you could say that our little reading group was a success all around. Caleigh and Myra got to spend lots of time together, and began hooking up that spring. And I got the assignment that weighs on me still—my real work—to get down in words what doesn’t live in words. To track ghosts by ear.
Have you ever taken any of the following medications? If so, when, for how long, and what was your response?
Luvox
The trouble being that, after that one blessed year, the Klonopin stopped working. Not overnight, but gradually. I didn’t wake up convinced I was dying, just less unafraid than I’d been in the halcyon days. Morning by morning. Until I didn’t wait anymore until after breakfast to take the pill, but swallowed it as soon as I woke, hoping an empty stomach would let more of the drug into my system. That Caleigh had stopped sleeping with me and started having sex with Myra is what you could call a contributing environmental factor to my increased anxiety. But Dr. Gregory saw no problem—nor, for shit sure, did I—in simply increasing my dose. I’d responded to it once, why not again? And indeed, it did the trick. The second cut wasn’t the deepest, but there was relief in it all the same. I was able to see Caleigh almost every day without crying. And able to let her talk me through the losing of her, just as she had talked me through the loving of her in the first place. With enormous patience, she listened to me describe every facet of the pain she was causing me. How I lay in bed thinking of her with Myra, bitten by envy and loneliness; or about the hours spent listening to the records we’d listened to together, knowing I’d see her that same evening but not be allowed to kiss her. She would hug me, as she had before, telling me it was going to be okay, that she was the unlucky one for leaving me, even if she had to. And she’d assure me again and again that I wasn’t as pathetic as I felt, carrying on like I did, needing her to be the one to help me through it, and even help me accept her help, against the taunting voice that told me to show some “self-respect” and masculine amour propre when all I wanted was to be in the same room with her no matter what the conditions.
Through it all she kept calling me Flipper, and I called her Cee, and we even added new variations—Flipster, Flimmy, the Flimster, Ceedling, Ceester, Ceemer. It was this more than anything that made me realize with relief that she didn’t want to depart our cocoon of affection and commiseration any more than I did, regardless of who was sleeping with whom. It was as if we were becoming childhood best friends, siblings, and an old married couple simultaneously. If she took a trip home or away with Myra, I’d speak to her each day on the phone. We talked as we had from the start about what we were reading and listening to. After a few months, I could even tolerate hearing her speak about Myra, now and then offering her advice on how she could overcome her skittishness about being with another woman. I knew then we would never lose each other, no matter whom either of us became involved with. Our private world was too necessary to both of us to be replaced wholesale with another. I wanted to live with her. I didn’t mind if Myra lived with us too. I could be their roommate. It took Caleigh a while to convince me this would be a bad idea. That we could still talk every day, and that it would be easier for me to meet a romantic partner if I wasn’t always with the two of them. So they found an apartment in Allston together, and I moved in with Alec’s old high school friend Ben.
Which is when this second reprieve of Klonopin came to an end, only faster this time. Celia and Alec have since come to form a dim view of Dr. Gregory, seeing him as little more than a guilt-ridden pill pusher who sedated me to fend off his fear of losing another patient, rather than tackling the issues at hand. But frankly I still consider him a humanitarian. The increased doses are what I asked of him, and what I needed. When a physician ups a diabetic’s insulin there’s no question of indulgence or rectitude, just a condition and a drug it would be malpractice not to give. Which is hardly to say I have no regrets. I regret that the reprieves kept getting shorter.
Paxil
And it is not as if, in the years following that first blush of benzos, Dr. Gregory didn’t try anything new. He would sit in his Eames chair, all mild-mannered and bald, in pleated chinos and a V-neck, asking how I had been, nodding gravely as I answered, and every few months, along with the increase in Klonopin, he’d suggest a new drug we might add to the mix to help dampen the growing general fear.
Serzone
I’d taken to writing music reviews, not for the abysmal pay, but to bring to light the overlooked wonders issued from labels run out of bedrooms from Oakland to Eindhoven, kids sampling their uncles’ Run-D.M.C. records into an old-school hip-hop revival, or those unemployed Belgian pranksters turning out tracks hard enough to keep a warehouse of teens dancing till Sunday noon. I never went in for rave culture myself. I was usually in bed by ten. But before it collapsed under the weight of its own promotional shtick and became an ecstasy theme park for weekend punters, it spawned a number of ambient house masterworks that I listen to to this day.
Other than that, I worked in record shops. Not at the chains, which I couldn’t stomach, but various independents. I lasted about a year at a place down on Newbury before selling Nirvana albums to Armani-clad foreign students drove me to a storefront in East Boston frequented mostly by local DJs. I got paid even less, but at least the company was tolerable. My student loans had long since come due but I didn’t have the money to make the payments so I shoved the envelopes in a drawer to be opened at some point down the line when I’d gotten things sorted.
As long as I was in the store itself, talking to other people about music I believed in, ordering it from distributors or listening to it on headsets, my shakiness was kept mostly at bay. My distracted energy got absorbed into the pace of the
tracks themselves or driven into the necessity to convert others to their power. In Walter Benjamin, there is the concept of the vanishing mediator, the person or idea that travels between cultures, pollinating one with the other, before disappearing from view, the way black musicians carried blues and rock into recording studios and then vanished from sight and accounting, listening to their invention played out by white bands. If I could sell a hip-hop DJ on a reissued Dolly Parton album or place in the hands of some devoted European Industrialist kid from RISD a Pet Shop Boys aria and make him hear the kinship, then my job for the day was done. I’ve never made a piece of music in my life, which is another thing my mother considers a pity, but as long as I was inside it, passing it on into others’ ears, I wasn’t absolutely alone.
Still, afterwards, riding the T back to Ben’s apartment on the margins of the South End, wondering if Caleigh would be home when I called her, and, when she wasn’t, sitting on the couch with Ben nursing the first of the evening’s beers while he got high, I would sense the fear I’d woken with slink back in, accusing me of failing to pay it sufficient mind, mocking the day’s respite as an illusion.
Ben, a semiprofessional knitter, had taken me in out of the kindness of his heart and a need for rent money (and also perhaps as a favor to Alec). He ran a tight ship, insisting on extreme tidiness to make room for all his wool and mail-order supplies. He regularly updated the chore regime posted on the fridge, which left me in a state of suspense as to what I would be required to sweep or scrub in any given week. But once he had put down his needles for the day and smoked a joint, he achieved an enviable calm while cooking vegetables for us and watching Simpsons reruns. We’d become friends, of the sort men often are, in that we daily confirmed each other’s existence but pretty much left it at that.
