Epiphany Junkie
Tears for Fears came to the Miami Arena in the summer of 1990. I had spent four weeks that summer in Kansas, at Lovewell, a young creative arts workshop that I attended with fifteen other New World students. Looking forward to my return, Liz bought two tickets for the concert. When I came home, I told my mom why I needed to borrow her car that Friday night.
“Absolutely not.”
“Liz already bought tickets, Mom.”
“I don’t care,” she said, unaffected.
“Well, that’s great, Mom.”
“Shut up. You know, save it. You’ve had your fun.”
The truth was that she had already booked me for a doctor’s appointment on the same Friday. She told me I was being tested for a chemical imbalance, but then this wasn’t true either. When the doctor read from her report that there were no drugs in my sample, I realized: Mom had only thought I was high.
To make matters even worse, on this visit, I was prescribed a tranquilizer—a “mood stabilizer.” Like it or not, I was another B.J.
I argued against it. I didn’t want to take drugs. I said I didn’t need drugs, and got upset about it. Mom began to point to my agitation as the reason for them. “Don’t you want to have better control of your emotions?” She was being patronizing. “Try it. See how it feels.” What she was presuming was such an insult that I could not express my anger. Truth was, my being sedated would only make her more comfortable.
Mother said it was mandatory. I had to take the drugs, so I did. I took one pill with a glass of water and slept for three days. I fell into dreams that dovetailed into other dreams indefinitely. I went from one world to another like I was falling backward down a set of stairs. I slept until I didn’t know if I was thinking or dreaming, or just coming up with new things to do in this vast, unformed space where anything could appear or disappear, a place in which all things, once forgotten, again became easily available. I slept through the Tears for Fears concert, but as groggy as I was I couldn’t leave the house anyway.
Bruce was grateful for the ticket. He picked up Liz in his 1966 Cutlass Supreme, and they had a great time. What else are good friends for?
I stayed home, dreary, seated on my waterbed as though on a magic carpet ride, when it dawned on me: I had no reason to fear my own thoughts. I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t have a chemical imbalance. I remembered the purpose of my journal, the original purpose: to account for my own feelings, to know them, to be able to own them, and yet, in this awkward moment of my life, I wasn’t so sure of what I was feeling. Irritated, aching from too much sleep, I grabbed my old journal and I saw right through the pages in my hand.
I thought about the thickness of the pages, and I remembered what Mrs. Leone had said about books. I leafed through the unused pages before me, and I knew they meant a future. No matter the obstacles ahead, there would be pages to recount exactly how I passed through them.
Finishing the first page of a third journal, I could be confident. There were days ahead, and days behind. I would have the ability to think, to write, and to express myself every day of my life, even the last.
The next batch of pharmaceuticals was gentler, I thought, but my view was still obscured. It felt like mood swings, but in truth I think I was open, susceptible to suggestion. I went with my environment, meandering down sidewalks as though I were the first pure consciousness to perceive them.
Even with the new drugs, I could seem to access the voices in my head easily. They walked with me. Like with a radio receiver, I could tune in to this voice or that. I could turn voices into music simply by providing them with a few instruments and assigning them positions in the band. Some were available only for counsel. Some would never play.
My senior year began in a state of high anxiety. Liz had flown off to Otterbein University only three days before school began. I was a wreck about this. She’d left me here with all of my troubles. We couldn’t be sure if we’d ever see each other again. She knew that my concerns were too immediate, my focus too close at hand to expect lengthy reminiscent letters. I was about to begin my last year of high school, and I could hardly think through all the changes that were taking place.
Juries had been scheduled for the second week of the year. I had four monologues to prepare. My eyes were saturated with the lines of characters. My head was full of my mother’s new antidepressants.
On Friday, September 7, 1990, I was awoken by the voice of Henry the Fifth, doing “Once more unto the breach…” I drove to school in a boxy hand-me-down Chevrolet that my dad’s mother had passed down. The car was supposed to be for me exclusively, but Joe’s Camaro had died, no surprise, and now he and I were expected to be sharing this, driving each other places. We’d fought endlessly that summer about who deserved to drive and who didn’t.
It was a flat gold 1980 Caprice Classic with four doors and dome hubcaps. I kept the windows down, blasting Nirvana.
I have a number of entries from this day, and a number that would follow about this day. It was the moment in which everything really did seem to change. I describe having a headache. I imagined I had a marble, glass, implanted deep in my forehead. It was dense like a planet, and consumed by storms. To this planet, all other things were held in orbit. This could have been a side effect of the drugs I was taking—dizziness, nausea, dry mouth—but I was also at a peak of exhaustion. All of my voices seemed to be calling to the planet in my head, something like wolves to the moon. As I drove to school, I felt my body swirling. This magnet was pulling together the space between my eyes. I parked in the student parking lot and found the atrium of the new building on Northeast Second Street. I was home again, but I felt like I was in terrible danger.
Today, New World was celebrating the grand opening of its new building. Everywhere there were decorations and cheer. The nine-story building had glass blocks and yellow external stairways. The façade was a pink awning with a fat yellow pillar in the middle, nothing like the WPA-style mortuary where my story began. From the lobby, I stepped into an elevator that quickly became crowded with students from the school’s various disciplines. Some I knew and some I didn’t, but standing close to me were painters, musicians, dancers, and actors, all of whom were filled with excitement. That morning, I wasn’t one of them. I was a mix of emotional exhaustion, fascination, and panic.
In the building, each floor had been designated for a different purpose. Academic classes were held on the second, third, and fourth floors, administration was done on the fifth and sixth floors, dance on the seventh. The eighth floor housed a dance studio and two large performance spaces. The ninth floor was equipped with offices, a design shop, two movement rooms, a lighting lab, and three acting studios.
Because I’d failed Mrs. Clarke’s class, I was starting this year on academic probation. I could have no electives outside of my arts classes. For first-period American History and second-period Government, I was in the same room. Mr. Suarez was my teacher for both hours. After Government, I went one room over to Mr. Wimmers’s for Philosophy, and I delighted in the fact that I could take a course in “thinking.”
Mr. Wimmers was a more handsome Jean-Paul Sartre, and an encyclopedia of jokes. His lectures attempted to act as an overview of philosophy, but then, “What is philosophy?” he asked us. The discussion was always open.
There was no doubt, all of this thinking took place in language, but Mr. Wimmers asked, “What is language?”
Materials were assigned for every week of class, but he said frankly that we didn’t have to read them. “If they don’t interest you, don’t read them. If they do interest you, you’re welcome to look into them. We’ll discuss all of the ideas in class.” He began talking about Skepticism and Stoicism, then the difference between Sophism and Cynicism. He described Diogenes, the cur, who lived in a wine cask.
After fourth period, Science, I had lunch with Jorge Mejia and John Emerson in the parking lot. We found the hood and roof of my car to be sturdy enough to handle the weigh
t of all three of us. I told Jorge about the headache that I was having.
“What does it feel like?”
“Not good.” I could actually see through this planet, which seemed to bend my vision. In moments, I could see through things: oceans, hurried cloud formations, passing under my skin. I leaned back on the hood of the car and held my head, but the pain would not go away. Jorge and John were talking about some inquisition story in a book they were reading in AP English.
I looked off at the people coming up and down Second Street, alongside the old Cuban church. I saw a woman walking up the sidewalk, and then she was transparent. I saw through her: solids, liquids, and gases. By their arrangement, and in how she held them, or mixed them, I could see how this woman felt, where her thoughts were aimed. Voices emerged, in song this time, as the noon church bells rang.
Everyone was running. In my eyes, one person appeared to be filled with a pale liquid, their limbs solid like blocks. In another, I saw shoulders and crown spinning in a light gaseous cloud. They were lost. It must have been the drugs, I thought, causing this peculiar transparency. I pointed to my third eye and asked for aspirin. The next person to come into view was a businessman in a light gray jacket, brown leather shoes, striped shirt, and pants that fit him imperfectly. He seemed to be an uncomfortable assortment of corporate formalities. He looked at us, and looked away. Without the time or the space to acknowledge us, he seemed to consider us of little importance. Right then, I could see through him. He had one half of a solid head, and a rigid back. His face was full of worry, and he seemed to float with every step he took. From the waist down, he was mixed up and gaseous. He didn’t know where his feet were going. To me, it seemed his stare was made out of a small collection of rocks. I rubbed the marble, having finally attained super-vision.
“So Alyosha is right,” Jorge advanced.
“No, Ivan is right,” John objected.
“Does God suffer when children become the victims of injustice?” Jorge asked.
“There is no God,” John said, quoting the character Ivan.
“Yes, but God doesn’t know that,” Jorge mused. “He only thinks that.”
God doesn’t suffer. He doesn’t feel anything, I thought to myself.
I kept watching people, and I realized that if other people were constituted as I saw them, then I was constituted as they saw me. I imagined how I could begin to direct the constitutions of people, strangers or anyone, like I was directing a play. I could change their internal makeup by drawing or repelling their attention. Knowing my constitution as a performer, and their constitution as receivers, I could draw them wherever I wished by setting heavier things in place, like channeling water. Gas could only be captured or lost. Solids grew imperceptibly. I thought I could simply open a window in my mind and make other people look out of it.
Then it was time for class. I sat up and got my book bag. We took our separate paths. As I walked, a radio was on in a nearby storefront, and from it a voice emerged: “Travis.” I turned around. No one was behind me. But whose voice was this? I recognized it. Was someone playing a trick on me? Then, Marta turned the corner, giving me every sign of recognition. She strutted up beside me with a cigarette.
“Marta, did you just call my name?”
“No.”
“You didn’t?”
“Are you hearing things?”
“It’s Vance I’m hearing.”
“Who?”
“He taught me how to crack my knuckles in the third grade.”
“Are you okay?”
I wasn’t sure. I felt like my feet were swinging in place, my toes dangling above the sidewalk. She looked me right in the eye and double-checked me like I was high. “C’mon, I’ll walk you.”
I spent five minutes in the third-floor hallway drinking from a water fountain and tasting nothing. When I came into English, with Mr. Remis, I was already late. He shook his hair at me and had me sit down. Remis was something of a flamboyant guy, but it was only a pretense. I found him to be a construction of imbalanced stereotypes. He wore wooden clogs, a scarf, and a thin belt. He maintained his curls to match his mustache and beard. He lingered on ambiguous words like pet and ought. Litra-ture—he said these words like they were his special domain. I wrote out my unraveling thoughts. I let my hair hang over my eyes and kept my nose in my journal.
In the afternoon, the elevator opened onto the ninth floor, and a pack of theater students emerged: Marta, Dacyl, Adam, Valerie, Marc, and me. We walked into a freshly painted hall with polished marble floors and new lockers. The studio was complete with new lighting equipment, curtains, and wooden floors. The space was divided into an acting area and an audience area, and today, we were the first senior class in the building. We assembled for a special seminar called the Forum. Most of the kids sat in cushioned chairs that had been set about haphazardly.
Once the room had filled with students, the associate dean, Dr. Richard Janaro, came in and gave us a little slapstick. Before he began he seemed to forget his big surprise. He gave a wink and went back to the door as though to close it, but he couldn’t close the door without dropping his folder. The latches didn’t make sense. “Could you hold my folder?” he asked Avi, but he handed Avi a set of keys. They traded the keys for the folder. While our teacher thumbed the keys, the door closed—leaving him in the hall. We heard a knock on the door. It was Dr. J.
Avi gave him the folder and he proceeded to center stage, drew a page from his folder, and began. “Is this the right room?” There was laughter. We gave him a little round of applause. “As you can see on your schedule, every Friday we will be holding forum here in this room. Think of it as an hour, outside of whatever else is going on, to come together to talk. We will be summing up the events of the week, processing what we have gone through together, and getting news about what will be happening next. This is your hour. You will be able to set the agenda and ask whatever questions you like. I don’t claim to know much, but I’ll give you the best answers I have.” He looked down at a few notes scribbled on the outside of his folder and reset the spectacles on his nose.
“Did you bring your journals? Every student will need one. The journal is for the forum, and the forum is for you. There is no right or wrong way to participate, except if you do not participate, understand?
“I will be collecting whatever you want to write throughout the year. It can be for me or to me. It can be anything you like. Don’t view the journal like it is an assignment. It is mandatory, but nothing will be judged or graded. I will make a few general comments in the margins and then hand them back. There are no grades for this course, but you’ll never have another class like it. You are the subject of this class. That is what is meant by forum. You are being heard, so please try to show up.”
Dr. J began with a discussion about how we saw ourselves in the theater, and what we could expect looking forward from here. Students spoke their minds. Some wanted to be famous, others wanted to be playful. A few students spoke to wanting to find themselves. Some students admitted wanting to be other people, some felt trapped in this life, in what they were. I leaned up next to Marta, and pressed my hand to my forehead.
Emancipation
The next antidepressant made me all warm and fuzzy. They were these little pills and they were coated in a sweet hospital-green coating. “These are good! Are they placebos?”
“Of course they’re not.”
“But they’re sweet, you should try one.”
“Come on.”
Nothing softened my arguments with Mom. I wanted out of the house in which there was neither sanity nor freedom. She said that I was too crazy to be trusted on my own.
I scoffed.
Then, only three weeks into my senior year, I got the signal that my mother wanted me out. She’d had enough. It was Saturday morning, the twenty-second of September, and the day began with a gesture of kindness. Mom said: “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” I said, as though saluting
a passing ship.
Then she asked me if I needed to go shopping.
“Shopping?” I thought this must be a trick.
We went to the mall that morning and by noon were coming home with bags of new socks and underwear. Once we were home, Mom said that I needed to clean out my drawers and straighten up my room.
I asked why I had to “clean out my drawers.” It didn’t seem that she was aware of the meaning of her words.
“We are starting over.” That afternoon, Mom called the house from her office phone. My mother told me to leave, to get out of the house, that night. She was polite, but she was firm. “Go somewhere else,” she said.
“Are you kicking me out?”
“Doesn’t that relieve you?”
“Sure, Mom. Anytime.” I hung up the phone and was filled with an instant chill.
When Joe came home, he saw me packing a tote bag. He got upset and tried to stop me from leaving. I told him to talk to Mom about it, but he called our father instead. According to Joe, if I took the car, the Chevy, I’d be stealing the other half of it from him. He thought I wouldn’t know better. Joe handed me the phone. Dad was on the line: “Son, it’s your choice. Either you stay at home or you spend the night in jail.”
“I think you should call the police, Dad, so I don’t get too much of a head start.”
“Boy…”
“Have me arrested. Do you think I care? I would rather spend the rest of the year in jail than continue to live in this house, and can you blame me?”
“Suit yourself,” he tried to say, but I’d hung up the phone.
When I emerged from my room, Joe was at the other end of the hall. There was no point in fighting, and there was no point in negotiating. Our standoff had come to an end. Now only our portraits stood between us, his on one side, Joe calmly smiling, and me, a total maniac, on the other. Months ago, I had taken my mug shots out of these picture frames and replaced them with graphic, surreal self-portraits that I’d done in class. I planted my radio against the wall and walked down the hallway, knocking all of the picture frames to the floor. Joe stared, and I walked out of the cave with a journal, a tote bag, and a radio.
A Comedy & a Tragedy Page 15
