Notes on a Banana

by David Leite

  “Hey, what are you doing?” I said, trotting down the stairs. “We just pulled in.”

  He pointed to the parking sign with his pen.

  “I know what the sign says, asshole, I can read.” He tore the ticket out of his book, lifted the windshield wiper, and, while looking at me, let it snap back.

  “Fuck you!” I screamed into his face. Then I thought better of it and ran to the top of the stoop, in case I had to duck inside. Distance steeled me. “Fuck you!” I yelled louder, as mothers with strollers looked on, stunned. The cop kept walking. “Yeah, fuck you, you fat fucking pig!” He raised his hand and waved without turning around.

  I was yanked back into the building. Alan slammed the door. “Are you crazy? Do you want to get arrested?”

  I ripped my arm away. “It’s not my fault. Did you see what he did?”

  “I don’t care what he did.”

  “He gave you,” I said, stressing the word you as a way of implicating him and pulling him to my side, “a ticket for double-parking.” I was certain he’d see the logic of my actions and start running down the street to talk the cop out of it.

  But instead he said, “God, what’s wrong with you?” He was unaware of it, I was sure—he’d never be so intentionally hurtful—but he looked disgusted. It was the same look he had in my dreams when he walked out on me.

  In the car on the way upstate, I lolled my head against the window. The vibration was soothing. I was too tired for conversation; I just made sounds in response to his occasional questions. That was the problem with veneta—afterward, sometimes, you’re wiped. When we arrived it was after dark. I didn’t even bother unloading the car. I just unlocked the front door, plodded down the hallway, and slipped into the bed in the guest room, where I slept until Saturday afternoon.

  On Sunday, I sat on the counter and watched while Alan prepared his roast chicken. He carefully wiggled his fingers beneath the skin of the bird to loosen it.

  “It’s going to be okay, mon cher, you’ll see,” he said, hugging me with his elbows, his hands up in the operating-room-doctor position because he’d touched the raw chicken. I wrapped my legs around his waist and kissed the top of his balding head. “And,” he added, “that cop was probably an asshole, right?” He mixed chopped rosemary and thyme with butter and smeared it under the skin.

  “I don’t care how hard you fight me,” he said, “I’m making your favorite potatoes.” I started to laugh. “Nope, sorry. I’m making ’em, and that’s that.” He knew I love cubed Yukon Gold potatoes that have been tossed in oil and roasted with the bird, so they soak up all that flavor and their sides turn the color of bronze tourmaline.

  “You’re a good man, mister,” I said.

  He looked square at me: “Damn right I am, and don’t you ever forget it.” Then he kissed me and slid the chicken into the oven.

  For weeks, I couldn’t shake this funk. It went beyond the run-in with the cop; that had just been a footnote. The narrative itself was sad, bereft. Things were spinning out of control again. I didn’t want to be me anymore. I smiled through meetings with my advisers, the dutiful straight-A student who would make the department proud. I didn’t give a rat’s ass for them, or what I was learning. As long as it looked good on paper, no one had to know how miserable I was. The only book I wanted to stick my nose in was a cookbook. By now, one wall of my office was lined with them, and every night, instead of learning about dementia praecox or schizoaffective disorder, I was reading about Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s journeys in Emilia-Romagna, and getting lost in Paula Wolfert’s exotic and strange Morocco.

  And then it happened. I was bored, so I slumped on the floor and watched a documentary on World War II. A film clip of Hitler and Eva Braun in the bunker flashed on the screen, a clip I must have seen a million times; nonetheless, that familiar nuclear blast erupted in my chest. As if back from vacation, all the attendant insomnia, pain, panic, and dissociation showed up and punched in for work.

  I can’t say this siege was any worse than the others, because it wasn’t. But what made this different, and therefore far more devastating and dangerous, was that it led to a crippling sense of hopelessness, like in those dogs that stand in a box getting shocked even though they can escape. Since age eleven, I’d built a Theory of Explanation that with each attack grew more fantastical, as I tried to encompass this mutating affliction. At first, I’d thought the cause was simply scary movies. Remove the cause, remove the symptom. False logic. After two years of not getting any better, I’d assumed therapy would root out these attacks. And relief had come, and I was guileless enough to believe I was cured. When I’d been struck down at Birch Grove and CMU, I’d thought that it might have been the stress of being gay, and that if I could turn straight, I would finally find peace. But that wouldn’t be the case. And so I’d embraced my sexual identity, wrapping my arms around it and hugging it close to my heart, and that had done the trick. I was finally free. Until a decade later at Hunter, when for no apparent reason, I had been cut down again. But after a few torturous months, I knew I had mastered it. All it had taken was a pair of titanium balls and the right shrink. Why else would I have rebounded in record time?

  But here I was, less than a year later, clear out of explanations.

  “I want medication,” I told David Lindsey the next morning, in yet another emergency session.

  He looked at me, confused. “You’re on medication.”

  I explained how I’d hidden them and then thrown them away.

  “Oh, David Leite, you’ve got your tits caught in the wringer now.”

  32

  BAD CHEMISTRY

  Stuffed animals, colored blocks, dolls with missing limbs, and miniature versions of the chair I was sitting in were strewn on the floor around me. I felt absurd and disproportionately large. As I waited, I nervously squished the decapitated head of a Barbie doll under my heel.

  David Lindsey was flabbergasted that I’d lied. For the past year, he’d thought I was popping pills that were giving me what he called a “floor,” a baseline I couldn’t fall below. Technically, it hadn’t been a lie. I’d never said I took the pills, just that I’d filled the prescription. “This time,” he said, “I’m calling Jack myself, and if you don’t take those fucking pills, I’m going to kick your ass up between your shoulder blades.”

  That was how I’d ended up here, staring at Dr. Orenstein’s diplomas in child psychiatry. Jack was away on vacation, and Orenstein was covering his cases. I’d have to endure an hour of questioning before I could get my hands on medication.

  “Hello, David,” she said. Then, after looking around the room, she tossed me a glance that apologized for the mess. “Occupational hazard.” I was expecting someone all pinched, with hard edges and points, wearing a Chanel suit. She came across more like a kindergarten teacher, slightly plump with billowy clothes. The pile of hair on her head looked as if she’d misplaced it. I liked her immediately.

  “Dr. Griffin didn’t tell me very much, just that he wanted you to be evaluated. If it’s all right, may I ask you a few questions?” She even sounded like a kindergarten teacher.

  “Sure.”

  She dragged over her desk chair, and we sat knee to knee. As she went through the evaluation, asking about family mental illness, suicide attempts, moodiness, odd behaviors, I kept looking at my watch. I was on lunch break from an advertising job. I’d had to drop out of school again, but unlike at CMU, I was determined to return.

  After I’d cataloged my history from House of Wax to practically that morning, she offered up her diagnosis—the same as David Lindsey’s: depression with anxiety features. I didn’t have the strength to fight it any longer. I nodded in agreement. She went on to describe the process of starting psychotropic medication, which would screw with my brain chemistry, in a way that made it seem like I was embarking on some grand and magical journey, like Huck Finn or Pee-wee Herman. Finally, she patted the top of her desk until she found a prescription pad.

&nbs
p; “This,” she said, scribbling, “is for Prozac.” The same drug I’d tossed in my sock drawer the year before and never taken. Could all of this have been avoided? When she saw my face, she misunderstood and gave me an empathetic pout: “Oh, David! Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world. I’m sure you’ll be back to your old self in no time.”

  She handed me the piece of paper and stood, a Buddha smile on her face. “It was a pleasure to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. I half-expected her to offer me a lollipop. “And good luck!”

  When I was almost out the door, I turned around. “Where’s the nearest drugstore?”

  “There’s a Duane Reade on the first floor of this building.”

  I waited in line at the pharmacy. If it was true that one in five people take drugs for mental illness, there had to be at least one other nut here, but they all looked normal. I was sure I had “MENTAL DEFECT” scrawled in fire-engine-red lipstick across my forehead. When it was my turn at the register, my face burned. I handed the prescription to the clerk who looked at it: the first person who would know my secret.

  “It’ll be a half hour.” That was it. No judgment, no hooded glance to a coworker. Just annoyance that I didn’t step out of line quick enough.

  When I got the medication, I ripped out the bottle and tossed the bag in the garbage can on the street corner. Then I thought better of it and stuffed it in my pocket. I didn’t want to take a chance that anyone I knew would find it and know I was on Prozac. (As if I had friends who rummaged through Midtown trash bins.) My hands shook as I popped a pill in my mouth.

  I leaned against the wall and waited. I knew there was a six-to-eight-week ramp-up time, but there were exceptions. I closed my eyes and tilted my face to the sun, waiting for the drug to wash through me like an excellent Malbec, soothing my jangled nerves. I imagined that floor David Lindsey had talked about reassembling itself under my feet. “Three-quarter oak,” I remembered my father saying of the floors he’d laid down in our house. I wanted to be standing on a floor built by my father. The thought made me feel better, hopeful. Or was it the Prozac?

  It wasn’t. Nor was it Remeron, which replaced Prozac a few months later courtesy of a patronizing shit of a doctor, when I reported I wasn’t feeling much better. I think he had more of an issue with the fact that the dispensing doctor had been a child psychiatrist and a woman than the drug itself. Wellbutrin, Serzone, and Desyrel were also crossed off the list.

  While I waited for relief, my thoughts turned dark and violent. When I spoke to people, I terrified myself, imagining what a knife jabbing into their rib cage would sound like. When writing, I kept seeing my fingers being chopped off by a cleaver.

  I became fixated on my looks. I spent hours staring at myself in the mirror, like I’d done when I was a teenager. I was convinced a face-lift would make me feel better. I imagined my face slit open and peeled back. I curled my lips so that they didn’t look so full; I wanted a tight hyphen of a WASP smile, nothing too ethnic. Turning my head to the side, I ran my fingers over the bump of my Neanderthal brow. I wanted it smashed and reconstructed, so there would be just the slightest divot at the top of my nose. Speaking of noses, it would be whittled flat and pointy, something you’d see on General Hospital or The Young and the Restless. The widow’s hump would be snapped, and I’d have the posture of a sixteen-year-old ballet student.

  David Lindsey was worried, I could tell. During the eight years I’d been seeing him, he’d never seen me like this. I looked awful. I was getting too little sleep—not because it felt like my veins were pumping with quicksilver, like before, but because I couldn’t stay asleep. Even the sleeping medication didn’t help much. In the middle of the night, I’d slip out of bed and step out onto the roof deck. Standing there in my underwear, I’d look down and wonder if five stories were enough.

  Alan tried to help. As with my parents so many years ago, distraction was his tack. We went for walks through Central Park, which was stained with fear, as I’d had unrelenting anxiety at the band shell, by the boat pond, along the Mall while walking back and forth to work. He pulled out the Scrabble board. He surprised me by taking me to a foreign movie, which he hated, and forcing himself to stay awake. He even tried to get me to laugh by playing Joan Collins in bed. He’d fluff up a pile of pillows and lean back gingerly while holding a book and speaking with a proper English accent, calling himself “Joon Colons.” Nothing.

  One night over dinner, which he’d made, because I couldn’t focus in the kitchen anymore, I said, “I have to move out.”

  It was as if I had struck him. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because I can see how much this is killing you. You didn’t sign on to be with some crazy person.”

  “It’s none of your business what I signed on for,” he said, raising his voice. He then reached over and held my hand. “You don’t have to leave.”

  “I can’t do this anymore.” The words hung in the air between us. All these years I had imagined he would be the one to say them while ending our relationship, and in the end it was me.

  We had started couples therapy a few weeks earlier with, in a bit of irony, the niece of Julia Child. I had waved the white flag and admitted defeat. The relationship had been staggering for months, but the added stress of my moods toppled it.

  As I packed my bag, he sat on the bed, his eyes blurred with tears. I tried to explain that it was more painful to stay together than to split. What he didn’t understand was that activities that usually bring joy to anyone—a terrific meal, a funny movie, meaningful sex—only served as reminders of just how sick I was, because I derived no pleasure from them.

  “Where are you going to stay?” he said, wiping his face with his sleeve.

  “Alice’s apartment.” Becca’s mom lived a dozen blocks north of us, and she was spending the summer on the Jersey Shore. “Look, I have no idea how long this will be, or if it’s permanent. Just give me time to get back on my feet.”

  He nodded and reached around me, burying his head in the crook of my neck. I’d always complained to him that he wasn’t physically affectionate, but now he wouldn’t let go. So I stood there and embraced him, and let him hold me for as long as he needed.

  “I’ll see you in couples therapy,” I said at the front door. He had walked me down to the stoop.

  “I love you, you know,” he said.

  “I love you.” As I looked at him standing there, he reminded me so much of my father that day at Bradley Hospital, helpless and bewildered.

  I was reduced. When I was living alone at Alice’s, stripped of everything that held meaning or gave me comfort, my existence became circumscribed. It was about three things: work, food, sleep. Anything else was too exhausting to consider, and I knew I would collapse under its weight. A phone call pressed; making dinner crushed. I didn’t cook, didn’t feel the impulse. On my way back from yet another agency where I was freelancing, I stopped at the grocery store in the bottom of Alice’s building and bought packages of Buddig turkey and ham, Kraft American cheese, Pepperidge Farm bread, Doritos, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and Diet Coke. I’d watch TV for a bit, eating a sandwich and drinking from the bottle. I didn’t give a shit about my weight now. I’d managed to keep it under 190 for several years, but it began creeping upward, one or two pounds a week, because of the medication and my apathy.

  But again, there was Julia. After dinner, which was usually six-thirty, I’d take my sleeping medication and crawl into Becca’s childhood bed with my copy of From Julia Child’s Kitchen. Scrawled on the title page in a wobbly hand was “Bon appétit to David—Julia Child.” David Lindsey, who was friendly with Julia, had asked her for this favor years earlier. I would read the book over and over again while the summer sun streamed through the curtains. Just like when I was a child and watched Julia in The French Chef, and the pain disappeared for a half hour, I was finally calm. It was like Julia’s writing was tapping my brain like a keg and draining my head for a while. And I’d inevitably
feel a sense of relief, happiness almost, because I knew that in a matter of an hour I’d drift, the book slipping from my hand, and turn from the window, on fire with the evening sun, and slide into blessed, obliterating blackness.

  A few weeks later, I arrived at couples therapy early, and Alan wasn’t there yet. Rachel, our therapist, motioned to the sofa in the living room and told me to make myself comfortable. On the coffee table was a book, its cover divided in half horizontally, black on top, white on the bottom. But it was the small picture of a young woman that caused that old inversion feeling in my head, bumping me outside of myself. I felt sucked out of that room and down through the black-and-white of the picture. Her expression—pensive, detached, a faraway otherness—was so viscerally familiar. That was not her face, not her expression. It was me, my face, my expression. I knew this woman.

  An Unquiet Mind, shouted the title. I checked the author’s name—Kay Redfield Jamison—then settled back, losing myself in a page filled with phrases I could have written: “For as long as I can remember I was frighteningly, although often wonderfully, beholden to moods.” She described herself as I always had: “intensely emotional as a child.” Her words, her descriptions, wrapped themselves around me, tightly, supporting me, whispering fellowship and understanding—of me and by me.

  On the next page:

  My manias, at least in their early and mild forms, were absolutely intoxicating states that gave rise to great personal pleasure, an incomparable flow of thoughts, and a ceaseless energy that allowed the translation of new ideas into papers and projects.

  Suddenly I was back at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, thoughts pouring out of me like rainwater, the pen moving so fast I couldn’t keep up; riding the rush of energy from shift after shift at Windows on the World; gliding along DeKalb Avenue as a staggering and prodigious production of a Dvorˇák symphony unfurled in my head. I was so overwhelmed, I didn’t hear Alan walk in, or notice they were standing there, amused, waiting on me.