Notes on a Banana

by David Leite

  “I’ll get it,” I said, turning back up the street.

  “No, that’s okay.” She laid her hand on my arm. “I’ll get it next time.” Even though my hopped-up brain was whirring, constructing magnificent homo-bejeweled bridges between us, I was shocked. She knew exactly what she was doing and what this meant. She had never offered to come visit before. It was her way of saying, “I accept, I approve.” I thought of offering to bring it to her on our way to Martha’s Vineyard the next month, but I didn’t want to wrest the moment away from her.

  37

  TWO THOUSAND PINK PILLS LATER

  A year after graduation, the anxiety and hypomania were gone, but I was still often depressed. But the kind that doesn’t prevent only impedes. So I was never too ill to have a dinner party, but I was ill enough to not enjoy it. I was never too sick to bake, though—one of the few activities that grounded me when I felt rootless. And with each cake or pie or brownie, my spirits rose, but only imperceptibly.

  Tired of the ineffectiveness of Bercoli’s approach, I made a suggestion during one of my appointments. “What if next time Alan and my shrink come with me, so that they can report what they experience. Maybe I’m not giving you a full picture.” What I really wanted to say was, Why the fuck am I not getting any better? During those two years, I’d ingested bottles and bottles of his pink crazy pills, and I was still limping through life. There had to be something I was missing, I figured, and if I brought in Alan and David Lindsey, perhaps they’d say something that would prompt a flashbulb pop of insight, and he’d try something different. Anything different. A blue pill, or a yellow pill, or a green pill. Where’s the medical logic in offering a patient the same course of treatment—more than two thousand pink pills—and, even though they weren’t working, holding out for a sudden change for the better? And I’m the one who’s supposed to be mental.

  Bercoli bristled. “I don’t think we need to go to that extreme,” he said. Then, smiling, “You’re a very good reporter, David.” A nod of his head, then he leaned back in that bored way, as if to let me take in his compliment.

  “I want them to come.”

  “David—”

  “Dr. Bercoli, please? It might just help.”

  Next time I had both of them in tow. “Dr. Bercoli, this is Alan, my partner; and Dr. Griffin, my therapist for ten years.” They shook hands. We three crowded on one side of the desk, Bercoli on the other. I could practically smell his disdain.

  As Alan answered questions, I felt a gush of gratitude. To have both of these men, two of the most important men in my life, in this one room together for my sake was humbling. When it was David Lindsey’s turn, Bercoli grew more uncomfortable. Unlike with Alan, now it was David Lindsey who did the questioning. He grilled Bercoli on my moods, the arc of the illness, other modalities that might help me. And then the big question: “Do you think psychotherapy can help David get better?”

  This was Bercoli’s trump card. To a medical doctor like him, who parsed patients by neurotransmitters, therapeutic blood levels, and side effects, mental illness is nothing more than a fifteen-car pileup in the brain that can only be fixed by someone trained in the mysteries of medicine.

  “This is a chemical issue, not an interpersonal one, Mr. Griffin. All psychotherapy can do is help David deal with the illness.”

  Bercoli didn’t catch it, but David Lindsey had dismissed him. On the spot and completely. For the last few minutes of the session, he sat there, palms tucked between his knees, a smile plastered on his face, nodding obsequiously. Bercoli seemed pleased.

  In the taxi on the way home, David Lindsey let loose. “I hate that pompous motherfucker. First he’s patronizing to Alan, then he thinks psychotherapy can’t help you? I’ve been in practice longer than that little shit has been alive.” I looked at Alan and waited. Three, two, one: “And who the hell does he think he is, calling me Mister Griffin? I wanted to take that desk lamp and shove it up his ass.” All three of us busted out laughing, and suddenly Bercoli didn’t seem like a problem anymore. It wasn’t just me; they saw exactly what I’d been dealing with for two years.

  At the end of my next appointment, after Bercoli’s usual volley of questions about dosage and side effects, I said, “Tell me, Dr. Bercoli, will I get any better?”

  He looked up from his notes and leaned forward, like we were finally going to cut the crap and speak the truth. “This is as good as it’s going to get.”

  A tsunami of veneta began gathering, and I did nothing to quell it. I stood up, placed both fists on his desk, and leaned over him. He clearly didn’t like the submissive position I was putting him in. “Let me tell you something, Dr. Bercoli,” I said slowly. “Fuck you. You hear me? I will get better, and I will lead a productive, fabulous life. And I don’t need you to do it.”

  On my way out, I slammed the door for dramatic effect—I am my mother’s son, after all. I walked to the subway, feeling the lightest I had in years. It wasn’t mania or hypomania or medication-induced euphoria. I was feeling powerful. I’d reclaimed my ability to take care of myself in a way that felt right for me. I had no idea what I would do next, or whom I would see, but I knew, more than anything, that at that moment I wanted a big, thick, bloody steak. A victor’s dinner.

  38

  I AM HERE

  For a while something had been scratching at the underside of my defrosting brain, demanding attention. Writing. Until then, it had been something I did for others, for their benefit, for their gain. Now I sensed it wanted me to turn inward, to find expression there. I thought of that little kid kneeling at the side of his bed, determined to write a story about pirates—something he knew nothing about. The subject that insisted on itself this time I knew intimately and missed terribly: Vovo Costa. The continental drift I had set into motion that separated me from my heritage felt almost unnavigable, and I needed to do something declarative and permanent to close that gap.

  I wrote for weeks about growing up in a Portuguese home, about our huge, raucous dinners, the dishes my mother and aunts would stake out as their own, and about how when Vo died, so did a lot of our heritage. Her food had been the embrace that kept us close. I surprised myself by how much I longed for what I had forgotten. As I kept writing, trying to give shape to this new insistence, I decided to turn it into an article. To my surprise, it was accepted by the Chicago Sun-Times and ran on the front page of the food section. With a byline. Although I’d worked on ad campaigns that had appeared in national newspapers and magazines, and on television, my name had never been associated with them. The idea of creating my own work about subjects I cared about—and having my name appear on it—was almost too easy of an answer. Without any more consideration than that, I left advertising and became a food writer.

  More of my articles made the front page of the Sun-Times, one of which was a six-thousand-word treatise on the foods of the twentieth century. In February 1999, I started a website called Leite’s Culinaria as a way of posting my writing, hoping editors would see it. My first food essay was for Bon Appétit, in which I wrote about my eight-year search for the perfect stove—our beloved Viking range, which we installed in the Washington Depot house and nicknamed Thor. Eventually, I added the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Saveur, and Martha Stewart Living to my résumé.

  I’d found my niche, with the help of modern chemistry. After Bercoli, I rooted out a psychopharmacologist who added a white pill, an anticonvulsant that also works as a mood stabilizer for manic depression. I don’t remember exactly when it kicked in, but it didn’t take long. I was sitting in the dining room of our new apartment, just one street south of the triplex, which Alan had made sure included a swinging kitchen door with a round window in it. He’d bought it for fifty bucks from a neighbor who was throwing it out.

  I was writing when it struck me that something was different. If depression was a deficit, a debit that kept draining my resources, I was no longer in the red. I was a perfect zero. It may so
und odd to be so happy about feeling nothing, being on the fulcrum of negative and positive. But it was this lack of depression, which had burrowed so deep, it was crowding out everything as it grew—a tumor crushing organs—that allowed for other emotions to rush in and take its place.

  A slow state of delicious forgetfulness descended. I’d lift my head from my computer and see from the light, low and slanting across the apartment, that it was late afternoon, and I hadn’t even thought about my mood. Or I’d be cooking all Saturday with Alan, only to be waving goodbye to guests near midnight, and it would dawn on me I hadn’t once felt depressed. And then there was the hysteria on the morning of the Great Conflagration, up in Washington Depot.

  Wrapped in the thick blue terry robe I had gotten him during our first few months together, Alan was standing at Thor, stirring a skillet of homemade corned-beef hash and chatting with me about our agenda for the day. Alan likes agendas; they make him feel productive on what are supposed to be lazy Saturday mornings. As he reached over the stove, the front of his robe went up in an enormous burst of flames.

  His ear-splitting six-year-old-girl scream filled the house. “David! I’m on fire! I’m on fire!”

  I froze. Not out of fear or shock. I was dumbstruck to see him running around the kitchen beating at his chest with the spatula. All I could think of was the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.

  When the flames died out, he leveled a dead-serious look at me: “I could’ve died, you know.” He said it as if he’d narrowly missed being hit by a falling chunk of concrete, or escaped a pack of pit bulls. I tried biting back laughter—the man needed his dignity, after all—but it was useless. “It’s not funny.”

  I nuzzled my nose into the lapel of the robe and took a whiff. The culprit? Although he was nearly bald and sported a hard top, Alan had a sartorial need to drench his head in hair spray every morning. Over time, the ridiculously flammable spray had built up on the front of his bathrobe; hence his human-torch act.

  “C’mere,” I said, bringing him into the light from the window over the sink. I pulled his face close and ran my fingers over his eyebrows. Tiny bits of frizzled hair dusted his cheeks and nose. That unhinged me. I looped my arms around his shoulders and pulled him close, as much to comfort him as to lean on him, so I wouldn’t topple. As my chest was hiccupping with laughter, he mumbled into my neck, “No, really, I could have died. And think how bad you would have felt not helping me.” I’d forgotten how long it had been since I’d lost myself in such gut-busting abandon.

  We began traveling again. We went to Lisbon on assignment for Bon Appétit, my first travel story, where I wrote about the burgeoning food scene in my newly adopted country. We returned to Paris and made our own food discoveries: Poilâne bakery, Pierre Hermé, Bistrot Paul Bert, the street market on Rue Poncelet, and a marvelous throwback to seventeenth-century France at the restaurant Aux Anysetiers du Roy, on Île Saint-Louis. In Italy, we stayed at our friends’ home in Trastevere in Rome, as well as in a villa a bunch of us rented in Panzano in Chianti. We ate fried zucchini blossoms, guaranteed to have been snipped no more than an hour before, followed by plates of hand-cut pasta, in sun-burnished piazzas; platters of rabbit and carafes of house wine in an out-of-the-way farmhouse in the country; and gelato everywhere. Oh, how I adored the gelato. Wales was all about pasties and Welsh cakes. Russia was a blur of borscht, pelmeni, and caviar and blini.

  As much as I begged my parents to come with us to the Azores, where they’d met, they demurred. My father couldn’t bear to be reminded of the poverty he’d left behind. When I insisted that things had to have improved over the past four decades, he said it would be just as painful to see what had disappeared.

  “There’s nothing left for me there,” he said, cupping my face in his hands. “My life is here with you and your mother. But go in my place, Son.”

  After getting lost several times one morning, Alan and I find the town my father’s family is from. Maia, on the north side of the island. We stand on the top of a street. Above us, set into a wall, is: 2a Travessa da Rua dos Foros.

  Second Lane of the Road of Privileges. The blue-and-white tile sign, yellowed and chipped like a smoker’s teeth, is inset high on the brilliant white of the stucco. Some careless painter, perhaps full from too much wine at lunch, or distracted on a hot Saturday afternoon by a young woman with full hips, had thwacked the tiles with a roller, leaving patterned splotches that mar the blue scroll design framing the neat serif letters. As Portuguese tiles go, it’s not a beautiful specimen. The lane, nothing more than a crossing from one street to the next, is named for Rua dos Foros, the road we’re standing in, which slopes down to the sea. But still, I’m moved.

  “What are you thinking?” asks Alan, nudging his chin down the road. I’m thinking of travel brochures.

  When I was in elementary school, my mother, in an attempt to rouse her depressed eleven-year-old, would stop by the travel agency in Somerset and pick up armfuls of heavy catalogs. In my room, I’d flip through them endlessly, having conversations with the models in the pictures. I knew it would be people like this man in sharply creased pants at a café; or that woman in a colorful dress and a hat that looked like a red bowling ball, waving from a double-decker bus, who would someday be my friends.

  “Who are you talking to?” my mother would ask through the closed door.

  “No one!” I’d shout, shooting up from the bed and shoving the catalogs underneath, as if they were Playboy.

  When the pages were dog-eared and the ink smudged from too many greasy fingers, I cut out the pictures of Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the Coliseum, the Eiffel Tower, and taped them into a spiral-ring notebook. There was not one picture of the Azores.

  In the intervening years, as I visited each place in that secret notebook—standing in front of soaring arches, meticulously painted fences, crumbling ruins, and sweeping steeples of iron—I would whisper over and over again to myself, as a way of marking the moment, imprinting it on some neural pathway, so that years from now the memory of once having been there would be as powerful as the act of standing there: “I am here, I am here.”

  “I am here,” I say to Alan. Here is the street in the old part of the tiny town where my father’s family lived for generations, where my parents honeymooned, their bed a pile of hay with a sheet on top. Here are the whitewashed houses, their windows painted with thick eyeliner of blue, green, or gray; impossibly narrow sidewalks—twelve inches at their most gracious; a flow chart of grass sprouting between rows of basalt cobblestones in the street, so infrequent is the traffic. Beyond, the ocean that I no longer use to separate me from myself. Standing here marks the end of running, of hiding, and the beginning of inching toward something worthy: my identity.

  I knock on the door of the house once owned by my family. Voices inside, then shuffling. The sound of a game show. The door opens slightly; a white face with floating wisps of gray peeks around it.

  “Sim?”

  “I am David Leite,” I say in Portuguese. “The son of Manuel and Elvira Leite.” The woman looks toward Alan, then back to me. Then, recognition.

  “Ay, Da-veed!” she screams, yanking me down to her bosom, even though she is a good foot shorter than me. She is Elvira Tomás, my father’s cousin, who bought the house from my grandfather, Vu Leite.

  She pulls us inside and introduces us to a man sitting in front of a huge wide-screen TV. We shake hands, and he nods, then goes back to his show. The room is nothing like I imagined. I have heard of dirt floors, exposed rock walls, the simple loft above where my father and his four siblings slept. The wall oven in the kitchen and the pigsty right outside the back door. The outhouse where chickens would peck at your ass while you did your business. But now sleek white tiles with a scroll design cover the floor. The walls are plastered a pristine white. In the kitchen, a yellow electric range, sink, cabinets, appliances.

  In no time, the house is filled with family. Señora Elvira has called her two daughters, F�
�tima and Teresinha, who speak English, and from there the phone tree sprouts. Outside the two windows, neighbors gather. The stern-faced old man who watched our car go down and up the hill as we looked for the town pokes his face in the window. He, it turns out, is a distant cousin.

  I ask Teresinha, “Does the wall oven still exist?” She translates for me.

  “Sim,” Señora Elvira says proudly. She motions for Alan and me to move the range forward and remove a metal panel. I clasp a hand over my mouth and begin to sob. There, cut into the wall, is a hole, charred black, where Vo Leite made do with so little for so many years.

  “That’s where she made everything, your grandmother,” says the daughter. “Breads, meats, fish, stews. Everything.”

  And as the defenses I erected so long ago against my family, my hometown, my heritage, my identity, lose their grip, I’m overcome with regret. I whitewashed myself so much, ethnically cleansed who I was, that I am ashamed. I never afforded my family and all Azoreans back home the respect and dignity they deserved. I thought of them as uneducated, ignorant immigrants with at best a second-rate culture. Yet it was in this room, this house, that humble, honest people beat the odds and survived, and by going to America, with my father leading them, thrived. They searched and worked for decades for a better life, to surmount the obstacles thrown in their way, just as I did. If it were possible for roots to sprout from the soles of my feet and curl their way into the volcanic soil and rock of that tiny island, they would.

  I am here, I think. I am home.

  39

  AN ASYLUM TO CALL MY OWN

  In December 2006, we moved from Washington Depot and bought a large home one town over, in Roxbury. As much as we loved our sweet little Dutch colonial, our neighbor Danny had moved, and Pete, on the other side, had a bad habit of dropping in, oftentimes without knocking. The day he surprised me while I was in the shower was the day we put the place on the market.