True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness

by Christine Lahti

  We all begged him to see a psychiatrist. He’d insist that nothing was wrong. Finally, after years of pleading, he agreed, but reported back that the doctor had diagnosed him as “only” having “borderline personality disorder.” None of us knew what that meant. I remember feeling relieved. Well, at least he’s only borderline! He’d found his defense. “See? Like I’ve been telling you! Nothing to worry about!” He insisted that it was meaningless and that no therapy, treatment, or medication had ever been recommended. His well-honed gift of denial kept him from seeking professional help.

  He adamantly refused to find employment, except for the occasional house-painting gig. “I’m not the type who can work for someone else,” he would say. Instead, he supported himself through the “barter system,” by mooching off others, and by manipulating people.

  At this point, I didn’t fear him anymore. Instead, I just felt responsible for him. Not only was I the sole person who could “lend” him money, I felt the need to protect my parents from him. I hated the pain he’d caused them, especially my mother. She had her hands full enough trying to cope with my younger sister, who’d developed severe bipolar disease during this period. I can still picture Mom sitting alone, in the dark, in the refuge of her immaculate, all-white living room, while her world outside crashed and burned.

  For years we implored Ted to stop harassing them, to quit lying, to go to rehab, to admit he needed help and see a therapist. Time and again these confrontations, fueled by my naive arrogance that I somehow had the power to change him, proved futile. Many nights I’d be unable to sleep, my throat raw from having spent hours trying to reason with a drunk, as if my anguished pleading could ever have penetrated his tequila-sodden skin.

  He never ended up getting a job, but he spent decades working on archetypes for a solar train and an eco-village—brilliant, innovative ideas that mostly stayed trapped inside his overflowing notebooks. For years, before computers, he’d send me letters: long, single-spaced handwritten missives blaming others for everything that had gone so wrong in his life. Drawn with multicolored Sharpies, his intricate drawings and frantic plans could never escape from their pages.

  Except for the checks I’d send him, our communication devolved into only his steady stream of e-mails, which detailed his current conspiracy theories and the latest, definitive dates of the end of the world. He warned us over and over again that we should buy gold coins, purchase guns, get out of urban areas, and find underground shelters. I finally begged him to stop. I’d had my fill of the apocalypse.

  During this same period he sent me a home video that crushed me. He’d filmed an “interview” with Mom and Dad during a visit to our family cottage. In it, Ted asked them if they were happy he’d come home, why specifically they were glad he was there, and whether they loved him. He repeated the questions over and over again. He was around fifty years old at the time.

  I didn’t hear from him for quite a while after that. But whenever I saw an emaciated homeless man on the street in Santa Monica, I’d have to look away, fearing it might be him. They all looked so much like him. They still do.

  The last time I saw him, I had invited him to stay with us for Thanksgiving out of a sense of familial obligation. He arrived with his thinning hair greasy from not having showered, wearing smelly clothes, with holes in his shoes. Instead of a suitcase, he carried a wrinkled trash bag. He’d told us he’d been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and that it had spread into his back. We couldn’t tell if that, too, was yet another lie. Barely saying a word, he spent the entire three days laying on the couch, drinking Coors, reading trashy magazines, and watching soap operas.

  He’d periodically write to me, calling me his “angel,” his “only friend.” But by that point I wasn’t his angel or his friend. “Chrissy, thanks for being the only one who cares. Love, Teddy.” I knew he just needed more money. At nearly seventy years old, always knowing there’d be someone to bail him out, he remained a child. Even at the very end, I felt obliged to support him, to keep him from having to live in his car as the very real cancer ate away what was left of his bones.

  In one of his last letters, he wrote, “I don’t know how my life ended this way. I feel like I was a good person.” I know he had goodness. But mostly I remember him as a person crippled by mental illness who couldn’t be rescued.

  He died alone, in a rented one-bedroom condo with a busted coffee table and a stained mattress. His only possession was Dad’s old beat-up Mercury, filled with cans of tuna and green beans, cases of water and a gun. A survivalist who couldn’t survive. A scam artist who got away with nothing. A con man who, in the end, tried but failed, to con his sister out of caring.

  18

  Monster

  “Excuse me, but there’s a really creepy guy wandering around, and I think he’s stalking me. Would you mind if I just hung out with you guys for a minute?” asked a visibly frightened young woman, approaching my husband and me as we unlocked our storeroom.

  “Of course. Stay here with us,” we whispered back as we peered up and down the labyrinth of spotless corridors, trying to see who the hell she was talking about.

  I’d never been in one of these huge storage facilities before. It looked like a mausoleum, with endless hallways lined with thousands of padlocked garage doors. The only light came from long tubes of fluorescents that buzzed on as you entered a particular aisle.

  We didn’t see anybody. I thought for a split second that maybe this woman was just paranoid. Then suddenly we heard it: the scraping of shoes on cement, the kind you imagine in your worst dark-alley nightmares, from the next hall over, getting closer and closer. The beast emerged, then galumphed past us, staring straight ahead, stone-faced.

  He looked like Frankenstein, a very low-budget horror-movie version. His features seemed stuck on with paste, the kind I used to eat in first grade. Unevenly placed, his ears hung uncertainly from his massive head, upon which teetered a too-small Dodgers cap. One of his eyes was looking at you. The other was looking for you. The expression on his face told of the recent terror of having just chopped up his parents, put their body parts in plastic trash bags, and stuffed them into the family freezer in the basement.

  Well over six feet tall and leading with the backs of his hands, he lumbered away slowly, like a zombie in a Saturday-morning cartoon. His arms grazed his knees, and his feet dragged as though trying to escape from the rest of his body.

  “Ahhh. Okay, yeah, I get it,” I said quietly. “If you want, I can stay with you while you get your stuff out.” Instinctively, I wanted to protect her. This woman couldn’t even accomplish a simple task like getting camping gear out of her storeroom because of this menace. I started thinking about all the streets I’d avoided, the elevators I’d let go by, the words I hadn’t been able to speak, because of my own man-fear. When we first entered this place, I’d told Tommy it should be called a House of Hoarders, but now it seemed more like a House of Horrors.

  Grateful, she led me to her room, only a couple of rows away from ours. I stood guard while she unlocked her door and found her sleeping bags. I felt strong, even a bit heroic. Of course, I owed my bravura entirely to Tommy’s close proximity.

  I knew better than to think my presence alone would in any way discourage this man. I thought of college, when my girlfriends and I brazenly hitchhiked through Europe, utterly impervious to any danger. Three women strong, we assumed no one would dare mess with us. However, the middle-aged, pudgy German who picked us up proceeded to grab our thighs and grope under our skirts while driving too fast on the Autobahn. Finally, after whacking his insistent, entitled hand away from our bodies and screaming, “Stop, auto!” over and over again, we convinced the audacious motherfucker to pull over, and we all escaped. That night we slept in a field, only to wake up to an irate farmer bounding toward us through the tall grass, yelling and wielding a shotgun.

  The nervous woman and I made small talk about her planned trip to Joshua Tree while she pulled out her tent and f
oam pads. Then, without warning, the creature rounded the corner and plodded toward us again. Heart instantly galloping, I dropped my calm facade faster than you can say “coward” and called out to my husband, my voice rising a few octaves higher than Minnie Mouse’s, “Ahh, Tommy! Would you come here for a second, please?” I instinctively looked down, avoiding any eye contact, like I’d read you’re supposed to do when encountering a bear. Tommy hurried over just as the man shuffled by us once more.

  “Jesus, talk about right out of central casting!” I said under my breath, trying to laugh it off. But that familiar dread crawled up my spine, gripping the back of my neck. Still, I decided I would accompany my new friend to the elevator while Tommy stayed alone with our stuff.

  As we followed the exit signs through the tangle of tunnels, she thanked me. “I’m not usually such a scaredy-cat,” she said. “But a few months ago, at a 7-Eleven, a guy walked by me on my way in. I didn’t pay any attention to him. But as I headed back to my car, he came up behind me and slugged me in the back of my head, sending my glasses flying. He screamed, ‘Now you know who I am, bitch!’”

  I touched her shoulder and held it for a few quiet seconds. Her fear fueled mine. After she had safely entered the elevator, I traveled back alone through the empty passageways to find our room. At every intersection my body stiffened with the prospect of this creep popping out right in front of me.

  “Tommy! Where are you?” I called again. He answered, and I followed the refuge of his voice. While walking to him, I remembered an incident in New York City when I was being stalked. It was late at night in a residential area. I sensed someone following me. I turned around and saw an older dark-haired man walking very close. I crossed over to the other side. He crossed too and came up right behind me. I did the only thing I could think to do: I started to act stricken with some horrible deformity. I dragged my foot. I shot my hands out spastically, murmuring to myself, “grnfmmmmmawaaahh.” This stopped him. He turned around and headed the other direction.

  My breath quickened as I traveled down another long hallway. Was I going to have to pull out my pretend-I’m-insane defense again?

  When I finally found Tommy, he informed me that while I was escorting the woman, he’d gone up to the guy and asked him if he needed help. The man had taken a step closer toward him, bugged out his crossed eyes, then walked away without a word.

  How the hell did Tommy have the courage to do that? To approach the man would not have occurred to me. Talk to him? Are you fucking kidding? And risk him (1) lunging at me, (2) raping me, (3) killing me, or (4) all of the above? I began to well up.

  While Tommy lifted our heavy boxes, he tried to reassure me. The man had to be just a mentally challenged adult, possibly homeless and disoriented. I found myself jealous of Tommy’s comfort level. He didn’t understand that my tears flowed not only from immediate fear but also from the acute realization that women just don’t get to feel safe.

  My husband didn’t have to live in such a constant state of hypervigilance—on subways, walking through parks, in bars, at work, in empty storage buildings. He’d never experienced even the more benign harassments that women are forced to endure on a daily basis—the lewd remarks, the unwanted touches. They all add up to a lifetime of little razor cuts. Tommy had never even been scratched.

  Few men I know have tales of assault. But us women are constantly wary; being female in a sexist culture means lower status on the food chain. I learned early to be on guard because of an abusive older brother and a predatory, sexist casting director. No wonder a fiendish-looking man lurking in a storage asylum freaks me the fuck out.

  My tears fell for my twenty-three-year-old daughter. She has to deal with some kind of aggression almost every time she goes outside. I had so hoped the world would be ready to welcome her power. But the looks and comments she gets from men on the street are hurled at her like weapons.

  I cried for my friend in college, who was raped at knifepoint. I found her, in shock, lying in bed, right after the man fled her unlocked, trusting home in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  I relived the beatings I’d endured growing up, at the fists of my older brother. I’ve never gotten over that powerlessness. Most women don’t. The violence inflicted on us lives in us; absorbed through our skin, then etched into our bones. Every time a strange man gets too close, it resurfaces and we flinch, detour, hide, walk faster, run, duck and cover.

  Standing near my husband, I maintained a vigilant eye out for the creep, certain that peril lurked merely a few feet away. Then suddenly we heard him whimper from the next hallway over, like the cries of a confused, wounded animal, more hopeless and heart-shredding than any I’d ever heard. My husband and I looked at each other. Holy shit. Maybe he was just an innocent, mentally challenged person who somehow wandered into this metal maze and didn’t know how to get out.

  My tears came back. This time for him. At the sound of his whimper, the prospect of his unmitigated loneliness gutted me. Every time he walked down a street, I imagined people scattering away from him, like from a pressure cooker found in a dumpster. Really, this helpless man-child, simply born into a permanent Halloween costume, needed my empathy, not my fear.

  The moaning stopped. We heard his footsteps scuff toward the elevator. We closed our door, locked it, loaded up our cart, and took the lift upstairs. As we exited the building, we found him again. One of the storage facility workers, who had a huge, goofy smile on his face, held his hand as he escorted him into the restroom. Jesus. Had he just been looking for a toilet this whole time?

  Perhaps in the future if I see someone who needs help, I will stop, take a breath, and try to figure out if my fear is justified or simply the bleeding of old wounds. I’d like to think that if I ever go back to Culver City Storage and see that man again, I might ask him his name, or even help him find his way. Maybe next time I won’t be such a monster.

  19

  Mamma Mia

  My daughter and I are singing, as we skip, arm in arm, down the aisle, “Mamma mia, here I go again. My, my, how can I resist you?” We’re about to see this Broadway musical together on a warm Sunday afternoon in New York City. She’s seven years old and recently played the lead role in her after-school children’s theater production, where she was so perfectly cast as Donna, the fortysomething, divorced single mother of a twenty-year-old.

  We’ve planned this trip for months, filling the dates on our kitchen wall calendar with stick-on silver and gold stars. Now, just minutes from entering the enchanted, promising world of the Greek islands, I’m about to turn off my phone when, out of the blue, my younger brother Jim calls me from Dallas. He informs me that our sister Linda ingested a huge amount of lithium last night.

  “They’re pumping her stomach right now, but they said if all goes well, she should be okay,” he says over the din of hospital bells and the urgent paging of a doctor.

  “But what happened, Jim? I mean, why would she take so much lithium?” I whisper, my level of denial breaking all previously set records.

  “Ah, well, I think . . . you know, I think . . . she tried to kill herself.”

  “ladies and gentlemen, welcome to mamma mia!” The audience erupts.

  “Oh shit, I’ve got to go Jim, I’ll call you back at intermission.”

  “please silence your phones, and why not unwrap that hard candy now?”

  The applause gets louder. The overture begins playing.

  Jesus Christ, this can’t be happening. I look down at my daughter; she’s spellbound. Of course I’m not going to tell her anything. I can’t. Not now. She looks up at me, and I flash her a smile, then try to focus on the stage. I can’t see anything but blinding lights. The music builds to a deafening crescendo. Wait, stop, don’t they understand?! My baby sister just tried to . . .

  “You can dance, you can jive . . . having the time of your life!” sing the actors onstage, having the time of their lives.

  Holy shit. One of the Lahtis attempted suicide? This isn�
�t supposed to happen to any of us. The Lahtis never give up. No matter how formidable the obstacle, we persevere! We wear “Lahti” like a badge of honor—my surgeon dad, my beautiful stay-at-home mom, six perfect children. I mean, it’s clearly displayed on our annual Christmas cards, all eight of us professionally photographed in our all-white living room, placed like perfectly arranged flowers, everyone in their red outfits, all of us beaming our orthodontically enhanced smiles—those smiles that safeguard all our secrets. Merry Christmas! We are the Lahtis, gosh darn it, and we are an enviable, happy motherfucking family!

  But now my mentally ill sister is in a hospital, struggling to stay alive. When we were kids, if any one acted “crazy” it was me, not Linda. Though the youngest, she seemed the most mature. She’d often go down our long hallway at bedtime, checking in on the five of us. I was the child who had the hysterical mood swings, the crying jags, hiding under our dining room table while the rest of my stoic family sat and ate their dinner. Between my wails, I could hear them snickering, making fun of me—everyone except Linda.

  One time I ran upstairs, slamming the door so hard my palomino china horse fell from its shelf. I heard a knock on my door.

  “go away and don’t ever come back.”

  “It’s Linda, Chris.”

  I let her in. My sister gently picked up shattered bits of horse tail and then sat on my bed, softly rubbing my hand. “It’s okay, Chrissy, it’s going to be okay.”

  I wish I was sitting on her bed right now, rubbing her hand saying, “It’s okay, Linda, you’re going to be okay,” instead of sitting here in the Winter Garden Theater.

  “See that girl, watch that scene, digging the dancing queen . . .”

  I look down at my daughter, who looks radiant, sitting up straighter than I’ve ever seen. I try to remember my sister when she was around Emma’s age. I can’t come up with much. Maybe because I was too busy trying to make her my “pal.”