by James Rhodes
AMERICA’S ALWAYS A BIT BIGGER, brasher, more in your face than anywhere else. The same is true of their mental health industry. Having successfully navigated their landing card (I don’t have affiliations with the Nazi party and haven’t yet participated in genocide or nuclear weapons manufacturing, but the drug addiction and mental illness questions were treated with some poetic licence). I was met at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport by two stupidly big dudes in Stetsons and driven to what looked like a prison. Security guards with Tasers, truncheons and mace patrolling around, obligatory Ray-Bans and failed-cop-attitude as much a part of their uniform as their lack of compassion and steroid-induced biceps. Which was like a red rag to a bull for me. I was instantly aggressive, full of piss and vinegar, provocative, obtuse, violent. Bizarrely, I felt these guys could handle my misdirected anger, being armed and all, and I just let go. It all came out. I gave them everything I had and then some.
Intake, in fact the whole admissions process, was harsh – it was like boot camp for nutjobs. I made it harsher. Everything was taken. And I mean everything. Books, music, phones, cash, keys, passport – all removed. Strip-searches, blood tests, urine tests, psychometric evaluations, endless questionnaires, interviews, interrogations. I was given new meds (no idea which) and told that before I would be allowed to join the rest of the patients I would spend the usual three days in a room by the nurses’ station, with a bodyguard for my own protection within arm’s reach of me at all times. This was standard procedure that everyone underwent upon admission. Only it wasn’t the usual three days. I spent seventeen days in that room (a record, they’ve since told me), howling, yelling, raging, trying to fuck myself up in every way I could. It got so bad (certain things, certain levels of violence and dysfunction I cannot bring myself to write about here) that after a couple of weeks of this they were willing to say goodbye to Bob’s yearly donations and involve the police. I was to be picked up, arrested, and taken to a federal psychiatric institution where there was ‘an outside chance you’ll make it out within a year or two’.
Handy hint – should you ever want someone like me (a petulant, lost, frightened, psychopathic egomaniac) to cooperate fully and immediately, simply mention the words ‘federal’ and ‘institution’ and bring a straitjacket into the room and lay it out on the bed. I have never snapped out of something so quickly.
I genuinely hit my knees and begged them not to take me. I talked as fast and as honestly as I could in between sobs, and finally was granted a twenty-four-hour reprieve. One last chance. A one-shot deal. Any hint of being a dickhead and I would be lost in the system, away from anyone and everyone I knew and out of commission for a long time. They could do that with one phone call.
A couple of days later they could see they’d got through to me. Whatever resistance I’d had left had been ripped out of me and I was allowed to join the others. The weirdest, most motley crew of individuals imaginable, and all of them were completely lovely. Some were wearing stickers saying ‘men only’ (raging sex addicts who were not allowed to speak to any women, ever); some were stupidly young (seventeen-year-old boys and girls who were part of the OxyContin epidemic); some were decent, handsome, wealthy businessmen and women; some were broke, homeless guys off the street; all were kind, all seemed to be open to the idea that they could get well.
And so it began. I listened for a few days without joining in or speaking in any of the group meetings or therapy sessions. I watched and waited and looked for the trap, the con, the reason why this wouldn’t work for me. I had had no hope for so long I just couldn’t see things differently. But ever so slowly, something began to lift and there was a creeping sense of safety emerging each day.
And that is where things finally, miraculously, began to turn around.
I don’t know if it was osmosis, or simply tiredness. Perhaps it was that they had weaned me off all medication except at night time. But, with honest and decent motives, I began to open up a little bit, participate in therapy, talk to other patients and staff. And the staff were brilliant there – well trained, empathic, kind, insightful. There was a lot of work to be done, a lot of writing, reading, exploring, digging, discovering and talking. There was meditation every day, group therapy, one-on-one therapy, new US-centric therapies with awesome names such as ‘somatic experiencing’ and ‘survivors’ workshops’. I hit things with giant plastic batons, talked about what had happened when I was a kid, and saw that it was met with horror and compassion rather than disbelief and blame. I cried, wrote hypothetical letters to the gym teacher, Mr Lee, found some way to let myself off the hook for being so promiscuous and slutty when I was a pre-teen boy, began to understand how the wiring in my brain had been broken and re-soldered at a young age, how I’d been in survival mode for decades, how although I was responsible for my life, I was not to blame for it.
Giant things started to happen inside me. Huge shifts in thinking and reasoning began to take shape. These guys really got me. They met my crazy with total understanding and acceptance, and they offered me solutions to problems that had seemed insurmountable. We spent weeks going back over my life, looking at my part in everything. Seeing where I had been responsible for things – where I had been selfish, self-centred, dishonest, self-seeking, manipulative, scared. Why I had acted the way I had, who I had hurt and how. I wrote everything down and made a list of everyone whose life I had impacted on negatively. It was a long one. Then we figured out all of those people to whom I owed some kind of apology or amends. Again, a long one.
There were institutions like schools and universities and workplaces I’d stolen from (stolen not just tangible things like money, but also time); places and people I’d gossiped about (apparently this is not OK, no matter how trivial it had seemed to me at the time); property I’d destroyed or vandalised; friends I’d ignored or damaged; relationships where I’d been self-centred or manipulative (everyone I’d slept with, basically); my family whom I’d caused to worry, whose lives I’d disrupted, whose peace of mind I’d stolen; friends, colleagues, acquaintances whom I’d hurt. Anyone at all who, were I to see them walking towards me would make me want to cross the street to avoid them, went on the list. The rule of thumb was that unless making amends to these people would cause them further distress (‘I slept with your girlfriend/wife/daughter, sorry about that’) they needed to be approached and action taken.
The hospital gave me a phone and a computer and I wrote to or called every one of the people on my list apologising, owning up to my part in things, asking if there was anything I could do to make amends. Most of the people involved were simply pleased, if slightly bemused, to hear from me. Some of them didn’t want to talk. A few of them were really happy to get things off their chest. This was not about inviting punishment or blame or recrimination. It was about making sure I could sleep well at night. About knowing that I could have contact, intentional or accidental, with anybody from my past without my stomach being gripped by shame and fear. And so, where appropriate, I apologised, donated money, paid back money, offered to do anything and everything I could to make things right.
There was a slightly Bible-Belt slant towards religion in the work we did there, but they dressed it up believably as spirituality and I figured who the fuck was I to deny the existence of something bigger than me that somehow made things function. It was a bit of a relief to allow myself to resign as general manager of the whole fucking universe and simply wander around as a part of it for once. I think they call it ‘humility’.
I was there for two months in total. By the end of it I had, miraculously, stopped hating myself quite so much. I’d put on weight, cleared away a lot of the wreckage of the past, repaired some relationships and found a way to live with myself that, most days, left me relatively calm and composed.
I’d been speaking with Jack a couple of times a week and was hungry to see him. I was finally able to show up now. And maybe that would be enough to rebuild things between me and Jane and create a proper little family
unit the way we’d both wanted to way back when.
It was a feeling of surrender. I’d somehow got enough clarity and self-awareness to know that I was able now to do all I could to get well, that I had the tools necessary to slowly move forward without destroying shit. And I also knew that there was no guarantee that those around me would believe that. I was going home to an unknown entity.
It was terrifying and exciting all at once. Time maybe to have a cup of tea and have a listen to Chopin’s greatest nocturne – the one in C minor Op. 48/1 (YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, SoundCloud, take your pick). That’s what it felt like: full of trepidation, longing, stormy emotions, uncertainty, restlessness, surrender and hope. All the things I imagine Chopin himself must have felt when, as a twenty-year-old, he left his home in Warsaw to go and explore the world.
He ended up in Paris because he couldn’t get into Austria (his first choice), caught a dose of something from a hooker, was violently homesick, a bit of an asshole, uncertain and unsure. He wrote his first piano concerto aged nineteen, and in the following twenty years he changed the world of the piano forever.
He was, of course, also royally fucked by his incredibly dysfunctional relationship with George Sand, broke, sick, miserable, and died, in agony, of consumption at the age of thirty-nine.
Me, I was slightly less broke, monumentally less talented, perhaps just as sick, not quite as miserable and not yet coughing up bits of my lungs.
I said my goodbyes, thanked the staff, packed my bag, and flew back to London. No bodyguards this time. No meds. No hidden razor blades. It felt like a new beginning, and it turned out that’s exactly what it was, just not in the way I had imagined. Not in the way anyone could have predicted.
I walked through my front door to my wife and son. They’d put up ‘welcome home’ signs and made cakes. I felt like I was properly back home then. I knew I’d be a better dad to Jack from that moment. That I would be present and available and strong. I knew I would have to prove that to him over time. That after so many months of being away with only occasional contact it would take a while for him to learn he could rely on me again. Five-year-olds are sentient enough. I had to earn his trust again and I was fully prepared to go to any lengths to do that.
And so I did. I spent as much time as I could with him. And the truth was that we had spent so much time together during his first three or four years on this Earth, I had spent so many nights and days feeding him, walking him, soothing him, we had had such a deep bond back then, that it wasn’t long until it started to come back. That’s the weird thing about kids – they have a capacity for forgiveness that most adults can only aspire to. He had always loved me – it was inbuilt and immutable – and I him. After a few weeks of playing, singing, hanging out, we felt absolutely connected and back to normal. I dropped him off and picked him up from school each day, took him to the park, built Lego and took him to Starbucks for treats, read to him, watched TV with him, fed him, hugged him, generally let him know I was there.
I felt like the biggest amends I had to make were to him, and the only way of doing that was by showing him he could count on me. And stupidly, perhaps naively, I didn’t do the same with Jane. All my attention was on Jack, and things between his mother and me were slipping away a little more each day.
There are a few things I know about love today that seem to have only become apparent after thirty years of total stupidity and a few shorter years of intense self-searching and examination. Unfortunately love is always a practical exam, never theoretical, and all the thinking in the world is ultimately pointless. It’s like learning to play the piano by reading a manual. You might think you know what to do, but until you’re sat at the keyboard and discover how immensely, overwhelmingly complex it is, how much effort and concentration is required, you know nothing.
I hate the expression ‘falling in love’. It’s bollocks. You don’t fall anywhere. Falling in love implies you shoot down the mine shaft and end up alone and smashed up at the bottom, half dead. Everything today has got so immediate, so big, so much harder and faster and wilder and shinier than it used to be. Inspector Morse used to seem fast-paced and edge-of-your-seat. Nowadays no one in their right minds would dare to commission a mainstream TV show with titles lasting longer than seven seconds. So today, ‘falling in love’ doesn’t mean courting, dating and spending weeks getting to know one another, going on a journey together and over time realising you are both deeply in love. It means it’s exactly as it is in the movies – your eyes meet (or you see her Twitter avatar), you exchange a word, text, email or two and then BANG, you’re in love. Urgent, immediate, explosive, hot. You tell all your friends, post it all over Facebook and act like a giant fuck-nugget. It’s Disney on crack and it’s fucking dangerous. Nothing can be sustained like that. There can never be any truth in it. It is simply addiction, brain chemicals getting you higher and higher before the inevitable crash. But we all play along because that’s how it works in movies and on TV and in the papers and it’s alluring and immediate and frisky.
My marriage was, in effect, a dress rehearsal for the real thing. And it came at an astonishing price. Despite not having a proper foundation from the get-go and being emotionally retarded when Jane and I first met, I thought I’d fallen in love. But in hindsight perhaps I’d just fallen. Fallen into the fantasy of love, ignoring the reality, buying into the whole bullshit make-believe of romance and adventure. Today I much prefer the idea of walking beside one another in love, rather than falling. Of keeping my eyes wide open, not masked by cynicism or closed by fear, but looking for and offering qualities that I’d never deemed terribly important before now. Kindness, compassion, depth, patience and so on.
I know I can be happy for the rest of my life with the woman I am with now. I know it on a cellular level. I also know that men always want to leave. We are conditioned to. And so we will always question things, usually to ourselves, occasionally to our friends, rarely, and stupidly, to our lovers. That little voice will always believe there is someone cuter, less needy, dirtier in bed, more independent, nicer-smelling, cooler, whatever the fuck. Just like the new iPhone feels redundant after three months. The TV after five years. The suit, job, car, house. Everything needs to be better all the time, and if we realise that our wife isn’t going to defy the laws of biology and physics and get prettier, more streamlined, faster, newer, upgraded we freak out.
And then we have affairs, start drinking, pick fights. There was no cheating or drinking, but my behaviour around Jane became more destructive and more critical over time. It became, in my head at least, a near constant state of conflict, arguments happening not just at times of stress but at the drop of a hat. Needling, whining, judging. And then, finally, the killer blow – indifference. The vile apathy of ‘Who gives a fuck?’ And even when it gets to that advanced stage of shit in a relationship, most of us men are too much of a pussy to up and leave and so we try and get our women to do it for us. We become intolerable in the hope that they will file for divorce and we can go on to do the same thing with the next woman. No wonder couples therapy is such a fast-growing business.
Jane and I agreed to a trial separation and I moved out.
It didn’t matter that separating was the right course of action. That, long-term, it was most definitely for the best. I’d become one of those men. Quitters. The ones who bail when it gets too fucking real. I rented a little basement flat, got a shitty upright piano in there, made sure I had a spare room for Jack to sleep in, woke up early every morning to collect him and take him to school on the bus (we’d sold the car by now). I did all I could to be the best dad I could be for him. But I was still a quitter. I could fast-forward in my head to a few years down the line when my therapised son says to me, ‘Dad, you abandoned me’, and find nothing to counter that.
Things started to get more and more wobbly. It wasn’t helped by my going to the police to try and exorcise some of the past horrors. They have a child protection unit in Earl’s Court. I went
to make a statement about Mr Lee and see if they could track him down and make him accountable. I did it for closure, for justice, to try and make amends to the little me and to continue the healthy start I had made in Phoenix. It was hopeless. And excruciating. I spent about three hours in front of a video camera giving details no one should have to give. Diagrams of the gym, what happened where, how often, where he came, when, what kind of sex, what positions, what implements he used, did I swallow, what did it taste like (seriously) and on and on. It was brutal, shaming, vile. And after all that they told me that they had got in touch with the school and that they had no record of someone of that name ever working there. The police assumed it was a false name, they couldn’t find him and nothing could be done.
Any progress I had made from my stay at Phoenix seemed to vanish at this point. I bought blades again and started to cut. I stopped eating. By this time, Bob seemed to have had enough of my descent into victimhood. He asked me to pay him back every penny he had spent on the hospital in Phoenix (a bowel-loosening amount that decimated my bank account and gave me another reason to feel sick with worry and self-hatred). I did anything I could do to punish myself. Which, again, is lovely in a selfish way as the pay-off and feelings of self-hatred are glorious, but the knock-on effect is often disastrous.
One ray of sunshine: I had a new psychiatrist called Billy. A tall, softly spoken, kind and easy-going Irishman. The first time I saw him, shortly after returning to London from hospital, he said to me, in his awesome Cork-drenched voice, ‘Ah James, honestly it’s fifty-fifty if you’ll be here in a year. I know that and you know that. Some people make it and others, well they don’t get to come out the other side. That’s the way it is. Let’s see what we can do to boost your chances a bit, eh?’ And right then I knew he was perfect. To acknowledge what I’d always known and what no one had ever voiced before, to do it so matter-of-factly and calmly, and to not go down the whole ‘inspire through psychobabble’ bullshit routine was so refreshing I almost applauded. He’s done more than I could ever have hoped to keep me well (he still does), but it was, is, a long process. And back then the allure of the razor blade was still so fucking strong.
