My final drink was the stale last half of a two-dollar bottle of red wine I’d hoped might taste more like a ten-dollar bottle, guzzled and gulped through chopped cork fragments left behind by a paring knife when the corkscrew failed to get the job done. I had rules that guaranteed I would never get into trouble with drinking. If I broke a rule, I had to stop drinking for a week to prove there was no problem. Finding myself drinking the bottle I had recorked after dinner violated both the half-bottle-of-wine-per-night rule and the no-alcohol-after-Xanax rule as well as the not-being-pathetic-and-desperate rule. All the trouble that followed that night could have been avoided if I had just taken an extra milligram of Xanax and stayed in bed where I belonged or if I hadn’t had so many stupid rules.
When I stopped drinking the next day, I threw in the Xanax as a generous gesture. The first twelve hours went well. “If you do something every day, you won’t be able to figure out what it’s doing to you unless you stop doing it,” I kept repeating. I was an almost-forty-year-old, home-owning, married father of two boys who was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and who coached soccer.
Time started stretching in unpredictable ways. Maybe orange juice would help. My first appointment that morning after slugging down a quart of orange juice was a mother who wanted to talk to me about her son’s alcoholism. Once your moorings come a little loose, that sort of thing happens and happens and happens until you just can’t pick yourself up off the floor anymore. Snowflakes hit with the force of Mack trucks. The floor and ground got a little springy, sort of like I was walking on a trampoline.
The next morning I was trying to get dressed, and I woke up in a puddle of spit not able to move. Maybe if I just drank more orange juice or gin, I could pull things together and my wife wouldn’t notice anything.
I read the chapter in Goodman and Gilman, the basic pharmacology text, about alcohol withdrawal and was amazed. Suddenly, alcohol went from being 0 percent of my problem and possibly the glue that was keeping me together to 100 percent of my problem. There was no evolution. But now that I knew what the problem was, everything was going to be okay.
“Oh my God, you’re a pig.”
I had dressed up a pig and put lipstick on a pig and thoroughly fooled myself and then taken a pig out dancing. Chilled mugs, imported beer, no more than six or seven a night, Bordeaux futures, never more than half a bottle of wine most nights, making a quart of Jack Daniel’s last a month—all lipstick on a pig. Drinking less than I did in college, blacking out at most once or twice a year … more lipstick on a pig. Having one or two reasons your drinking is okay is maybe okay. I heard someone at a meeting say that on her list of all the things that might be wrong with her life, drinking too much was number nineteen.
All that fancy wine in my basement was nothing but alcohol. What was I going to do about the couple thousand dollars’ worth of Bordeaux futures I owned? I cried tears of joy for having been such an idiot and having things now be so clear. It was also an enormous relief that, since I knew what the problem was, I wouldn’t have to do anything degrading like go to a hospital.
I went to an ATM and took out two hundred dollars. A man not sure of where he’s going or what might happen next needs at least two hundred dollars. I called my sister. She was seven years sober at the time, and I asked if she could take me to an AA meeting. We went to a meeting at the Kennedy skating rink in Hyannis. Amazingly, I won the raffle and was given a Big Book.
“It is a big book,” I remarked to my sister. “And blue. Do my hands look like they’re glowing to you?”
When I put a twenty-dollar bill in the collection my sister said I should have only put in a dollar. I said that if these guys were going to save my life, I should give them at least a twenty. I liked the meeting a lot. There was no mention of Bordeaux futures, but I did notice that people were trying to tell the truth and the point was to save their own lives.
At meetings I’ve heard people say proudly that they have no original thoughts, that everything they say they learned in meetings or from reading the Big Book. Wouldn’t that be nice? I have so many original thoughts I have to take medication for it.
Somewhere in there my psychiatrist made a house call. He was very comforting and reassuring. I told him that I was very afraid and didn’t know if I could make it through the night. He said everything was going to be okay and left me with a roll of one-milligram Ativan pills and told me to take one if I got nervous. I think there were forty pills in the roll. I called him again in the morning and told him I was nervous again. He seemed surprised when I told him that all the little white pills were gone, and he thought maybe I shouldn’t go to work.
“Maybe I should go to another one of those meetings?”
I went in and out of being okay and would try to reassure everyone. Don’t worry, I get it now. I’m really going to be all right. But people were less and less reassured.
I was utterly cooked. I prayed a very simple prayer: “God help me.”
And something answered: “Okay.”
Which I took as divine reassurance that things would work themselves out. I didn’t take my cousin Jim’s suggestion that maybe I should go to a hospital all that seriously. I had God’s word that everything was going to be just fine. Maybe I’d go to a hospital once I had things figured out a little better—I didn’t want to confuse people. I didn’t want to be overdramatizing my situation and taking up a space in a hospital that might be needed by someone who really had a problem.
Miracles are no one’s fault, I’d think, and I’d be unable to stop laughing.
When the voices came back it was like they’d never gone. Fourteen and a half years, and it was like we picked up in the middle of a conversation that had been interrupted just a few minutes earlier.
Having music and art speak to you and move you to your core is a beautiful, beautiful thing, but whenever it happens I can’t help worrying that the voices and too much meaning are lurking around this bend or the next or the next.
“Testing testing testing. Mark, can you hear me? Mark, come in. Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I can hear you.”
“Thank God, we were afraid we had lost you. Don’t worry, everything is going to be okay now.”
“Could you please get someone else? I’ve served my time and am much too old for this crap. Can’t you let me be sort of normal for a while? Fifteen years ago I did a hell of a job standing up for righteousness, but it damn near killed me and took me a long time to get over. I just think you could find someone else.”
“You’re the best, Mark.”
I always assume that if I’m hearing voices, everyone is hearing voices. It’s not hearing voices that’s the problem. The problems come when you try to do something about the voices or mention them to others.
What made the police wrap me up in a straightjacket and sheet and take me to the hospital was an utterly sincere, full-force attempt to dive through a closed third-floor window. Without a moment to waste doubting, I had to run as hard as I could and do my very best to jump through the glass, or I would know forever that I had failed and at least one of my sons would die. I tried to jump through the closed window to prove that I was capable of faith and worth saving and not just a selfish little shit. Luckily most of the glass and sash went out and down into the bushes and I bounced back into the room.
God Himself had told me everything was going to be all right. My version of “all right” did not include chatting with the voices and being chucked back into a psych hospital. I was so quickly in tatters, what was the good of all that overachievement? It should have taken longer for my proud crust of wellness to be so utterly gone.
I had no argument with the police wrapping me up in a straightjacket and taking me to the hospital. I had tried to jump through a window and was acting in an erratic manner. But they didn’t have to be so rough. I’m not very big and have never hurt anyone, and I had only tried to jump through the window to prove to God I was worth saving. I tried to expla
in: As soon as I proved my faith, all the bad stuff was supposed to stop. The voices and agitation and need to do things to stop worse things from happening was supposed to go away. It didn’t.
The most arrogant outrageous thought is that there’s a point in thinking.
There was a little sand in my gearbox.
A small thing wrong can make a big thing go completely wrong.
It wouldn’t make sense for God to set up a universe where He had to keep track of every sparrow and step in and fix things with miracles. Better to have billions of sparrows and check in less often.
Part of what happens when one goes crazy is that there’s a grammatical shift. Thoughts come into the mind as firmly established truth. There is no simile or metaphor. There’s no tense but the present. The fantastic presents itself as fact.
It would possibly be tolerable to feel like or as if one was on fire or like the CIA might be after you or like you had to hold your breath so that you could be compacted and smuggled to a neutral site in Mongolia to wrestle India’s craziest crazy. But there’s no like or as if. It’s all really happening, and there’s no time to argue or have second thoughts.
Without prelude or explanation, I’m in four-point restraints in my boxer shorts on a gurney in a side hall of the hospital where I once trained and currently still work. I’m HMS alum, HMS faculty—I actually teach Introduction to Clinical Medicine and the Newborn Exam—and I didn’t even get into McLean’s?
“Don’t worry about me,” I explain to strangers passing by. “The police way overreacted. As soon as my doctor gets here they’ll undo these silly restraints. Do you know that in a well-run hospital, restraints are almost never necessary?”
Without being too self-centered and petty, I couldn’t help wishing that they had either let me get some clothes or not taken me to the hospital where I was on staff, or if they had to take me there, why couldn’t they have put me in a quiet little room somewhere, anywhere but the hall, please?
A nurse whose kids I had taken care of for years passed by looking afraid and like she might cry. “Don’t worry,” I tried to tell her. “This will turn out okay.”
It’s probably possible to gain humility by means other than repeated humiliation, but repeated humiliation works very well. Fourteen years earlier, I’d fought my way back from being crazy with a lousy prognosis to write a book and go to medical school, finish an internship and residency. Now I was married with two kids, locked up in a windowless room, again. I was being treated with Haldol instead of Thorazine and weighed about 180 instead of 130. Long run, short slide.
In a totally unscientific survey of RNs done right around the time of my fourth psychotic break, I was named the number one pediatrician by Boston magazine. Truth is stranger than fiction.
I had prayed and God said things would be okay and I assumed it meant okay without my having another breakdown or having to go to the hospital. God was a lot less wordy than the voices. He also neglected to say anything about my marriage, which was unlikely to be improved by my hospitalization and not being able to work for a while.
I had a memory of throwing rocks that I had grabbed from an aquarium at my wife right before I tried to go through the window. That wasn’t like me. We had seen two marriage counselors at that point, and I should have had at least a clue that things might not work out no matter how little she or I wanted to get divorced.
During my first break, the content of my delusions involved questions of human existence that went back to the beginning of time. This time it seemed largely about the advantages of free-market economies. Nuclear war would be averted and the Berlin Wall would come down if I emerged victorious. Anyway that’s what I was told. It boiled down to me against the Russian Bear. The hopes and fears of all the world are met in thee tonight.
Win or lose, the cover story would be the same: I was crazy of course, in a hospital of course. The department will deny all knowledge of your mission.
“I’m here to stop the war,” I explained. “I don’t really care that much about free-market economies.” It seemed like I was getting dragged into disputes of less and less caliber. Free markets? Next they’d be summoning me to settle zoning disputes.
The voice of God is in the wind.
There’s nothing in the world to be afraid of. There’s nothing that’s not in the world.
You are in the palm of God.
“Does that mean I don’t have to wear seat belts? What about saving for college or retirement? Could it all be just silly?”
Beguiled again, a child again, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.
I was on a quiz show again.
“John Coltrane was from South Carolina. High Point, I believe.”
Why aren’t there more questions about early Christianity?
It wasn’t so much the voices, but I wished everyone wasn’t dying and going away forever. I wished I didn’t have the feeling there was something I was supposed to do about everything. I wished we could go back to not having everything be so important. There’s always an earthquake somewhere.
Someone could no longer remind me of someone without actually becoming that someone. The difference between hearing something that sounded like my name and hearing my name was the difference between sleeping in my own bed and waking up in that windowless room where big people come and give me shots.
Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.
Why is there so much meaning when the mind breaks? Why isn’t it just static or nonsense? I became convinced that my being willing to wrestle the Russian Bear could avoid a nuclear exchange and save millions upon millions of lives, not to mention the planet, from nuclear winter. The content of the voices and visions constitutes a hazardous nuisance to someone like me who so likes to figure out puzzles.
The first time I went crazy I thought that good things might come out of it. I looked forward to learning whatever it was the voices knew and how they knew it. I thought it might be possible to acquire powers that could be used for good. I was asked to save human existence and wanted to do my part.
In the seclusion room I was riding a pendulum that would swing from the past through the present into the future and back again, though that wasn’t all there was to it. There would be times, very brief times, when I was okay and could understand and make myself understood and where it wasn’t all lurching gobbledygook. Before I swung out of the present and was really nowhere again, I wanted to wake people up and tell them I was okay so that they wouldn’t give up on me.
I was a late entry in a very complicated battle of the beatitudes, in lieu of war, where the poor the hungry the sick the naked the meek of all cultures and nations could settle arguments and avoid bloodshed. I didn’t argue as much as maybe I should have, but my capacity for faith and supposition and quick connections was a lot of why the job had fallen to me in the first place. I had handlers who packed me in cotton and foam and smuggled me across borders. It was important that I be very still and quiet and keep my eyes closed.
What do you have in there?
There were passwords.
“You don’t want to know.”
Where’s the princess?
“Okey-dokey.”
The eagle has landed.
The bear doesn’t want to talk about it.
“You want me to do what?”
They would put me next to someone else from somewhere else, and I, or they, would win. It had something to do with depth of human feeling. It was like we were in a stadium full of utterly quiet, meek, sick, poor, hungry people who decided to back either me or the other quiet, packed-in-cotton-and-foam person.
“So the meek really do inherit the earth,” I thought.
When I won, I went forward to the next round with the backing of all the people who had backed the person I had beaten. The losers went back to doing whatever they had done before after having their memory erased. Nothing bad happened to them.
I kept winning round after round. Having my m
emory erased and going back to whatever normal was would have been more than fine with me. All of China gave up without even trying.
“We have some crazy people here, but no one that crazy.” And it was on to the next round.
During this time the hospital billed Blue Cross Blue Shield for two thousand dollars’ worth of psychotherapy I don’t remember.
The thread that was to help me succeed in getting to wrestle and prevail over the Russian Bear was the joke about the courageous Indian brave:
There’s a young warrior who is told by the shaman that he can have a long, happy life and save his father from the loan shark, his tribe from starvation, whatever, if he…
1. Climbs an unclimbable mountain and brings back the tail feathers of an eagle from the nests on top of the unclimbable cliffs.
2. Wrestles a polar bear.
3. Makes love to a beautiful princess.
He climbs the mountain, scales the cliff, gets the tail feathers, then comes back to the village, his clothes and self bloody, torn, and tattered.
“So where is the princess I’m supposed to wrestle?”
Yip di mina di boom di za
What’s the white stuff in bird poop?
“That’s bird poop too.”
Explanations of what was going on and why were presented by the voices. You know that you are dead. You know the world is ending. You know it’s up to you. Package it up. Put a skim coat on it and hope people think it’s a wall.
There were five teenagers in the dayroom who threw things at me and called me doctor. I was an injured lion circled by Rhodesian ridgebacks. I hoped one of them would slip and get close enough for me to grab.
There are no grown-ups.
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So Page 9
