I did have fun when I visited SUNY Geneseo, but then the week after I would feel sad that my friends were so far away. My first semester at SUNY Albany was a little lonely. I was living at home and had gone from having friends only a dormitory hall away to having to drive everywhere. I tried to branch out and make new friends, but it was always a difficult thing for me to do. I kept asking Randy if I could spend time in his dorm, but he said that Carmine wouldn’t let me. Randy did introduce me to other friends, though.
Randy could make friends easily and had no problems getting girls to date him. When I was walking with Randy on campus, we would often get stopped by many of his friends. If anybody ever asked how we knew each other, we would just say, “We met on a crowded subway.” Once, I remember Randy charming an older female student by explaining what to do when you’re eating soup and a piece of cheese gets stuck to your chin. Randy wanted to know if it was appropriate to peel it off or “just let the cheese wiggle.”
Randy made many friends when he joined IMPACT, the Christian fellowship at SUNY Albany. He was never into drinking or doing drugs. Randy was conservative and spent hours on Sunday attending church, but he was still down to earth and liked having fun.
Even though Randy was religious, I convinced him to go to a strip club called Nite Moves with a gift certificate I bought him for his birthday. When I was twenty, no one could ever be a friend of mine without knowing about Nite Moves. Many people are against strip clubs because they see them as exploiting women. However, most of the men in these clubs are lonely and just need someone to talk to. Prostitution is immoral, but having somebody to talk with can help ease depression.
In fact, by the time I was twenty, my biggest fear was that I was going to turn into the main character in the 2000 motion picture Pornographer. Paul, the star of the movie, is a twenty-five-year-old with an unhealthy obsession with pornography and strip clubs. He cannot find a close relationship and uses porn as a sexual outlet. I wasn’t obsessed with pornography as much as Paul, but I feared that by the time I was twenty-five, some of my friends would be married and I would be spending my nights alone in a strip club.
At Nite Moves that evening, Randy didn’t want any lap dances. Whenever a stripper came up to him, Randy said, “No, I bought a sandwich and have no more money.” Afterward, I thought that we’d really bonded. The day Randy and I went to the strip club was March 15, 2003. I wanted to go on that day since on March 15, 2001 I began to hear Eric’s voice and on March 15, 2002, I began to her Rich’s voice. Randy could tell I was very excited and in a great mood. He thought it was the naked women. It was more that I didn’t hear any voice in my mind on that day. On the way home we hypothesized about what it would be like to put “exotic dancer” on a resume and what kinds of questions strip club managers ask in interviews. Randy told me that we were close friends. The one thing that bothered me, though, was this: if we were close friends, why couldn’t I visit his dorm room?
Even though it had been a while since I heard voices in my mind, I was still convinced that I’d been communicating with these boys telepathically. Previously, during these conversations, the voices had told me that Randy knew everything that was going on in my mind. At the end of April, I decided I was going to open up and tell Randy about the voices and that I thought I had been talking telepathically to Carmine, Eric, Tyler, Gabe, Sam, and Rich. I was nervous to tell Randy that I heard the voices and that I actually listened to them. I came up with a clever way of disclosing this information. I told Randy that I read an article about a bunch of women in a retirement home who were talking telepathically. I made up a list of characters—Sophia, Tamika, Gertrude, Yvonne, Eunice, and Priscilla—and substituted them for Eric, Carmine, Tyler, and the others.
I began by saying that one day Priscilla (Carmine) wrote Eunice (me) an e-mail, and they formed an online friendship. In this way, I told Randy about the last two years of my life. Randy wasn’t stupid and started to catch on about five minutes later. I broke down and told Randy about how I was suicidal when I was eighteen, and how my mom cried with me and begged me not to take my own life. Randy really couldn’t digest all of this information. I was disappointed in the way my friend was responding. As I was working up to finally talking about my near-suicide attempt, Randy interrupted me and asked if he could have my bagel. My stomach was in a knot and I could hardly eat anything, since even remembering the day I saw my mother cry made me uncomfortable and sad. Apparently Randy didn’t want my bagel to go to waste. My life was very different than his.
Randy told me that the worst thing that ever happened to him was that he was made fun of in elementary school. Randy’s life wasn’t perfect, but he did have a lot of encouraging friends, which was something I envied. Randy ended the lunch by telling me that he would take what I had told him to the grave. I knew I had made Randy feel awkward, since every other time we’d hung out it was just mostly for laughs. Then I started thinking that if we were friends, why didn’t Randy just tell Carmine that it was his suite, too, and I could stop by. Randy would never do that, and it irritated me.
I got frustrated with Randy and decided to write him an e-mail calling him a liar, a hypocrite, and a snake. Randy didn’t write back, and for the next month, we had no contact with each other. I didn’t like to leave conflicts unresolved, so I asked to meet with Randy in person. We talked on the phone, and he acted like nothing had happened. He said he would stop by my house after he finished work as a painter.
Randy was wearing paint-splattered overalls when he arrived. I wasted no time confronting him. Randy said he didn’t get the e-mail, which I thought was strange because I had sent Randy over a hundred e-mails throughout the course of our friendship. I confronted Randy about Carmine and how I thought Randy was spying on me. Randy denied everything. Finally, I told Randy that he was extremely deceitful, and I was surprised that he could be like that when he came from such a deeply religious background. Randy left, and he was quite upset. It had always been extremely important to handle Randy’s faith delicately. When I called him a religious hypocrite, that was the end of our friendship.
Randy saw things in black and white; and he rarely apologized for anything. Randy had poor conflict resolution skills. Even when things got rocky with his girlfriends, instead of talking them out, he just called it quits. That was the last time that I would ever spend free time with Randy again. Our friendship, which dated back to our junior year of high school, was over. Randy didn’t seem to care, but I was upset. In less than a year, I went from having numerous friends at college and friends back at home to having most of those ties cut. I had to find another group of people. I wanted to start a life away from the voices and anything that represented them. Plus, when I was friends with Randy and away at college, I was always the one who had to call and pay for the long-distance charges.
By then, school was out for the summer and I began my new job at Home Depot, which I’d applied to because it was the highest-paying retail store in the area. At first, I hated being a cashier. There were so many different types of customers: contractors, construction workers, couples buying their first homes, retirees, even college students. As with any job that deals with the general public, you come across both mean and kind people. Unfortunately, the most aggressive and mean customers usually stand out. Once, during my first month, when I asked a woman, “How are you?” she screamed, “Bloated!” My coworker made me laugh hysterically after he said to a customer that was screaming in his face, “Sir, you’re an asshole.”
About a month after Randy and I argued, I once again heard Carmine’s voice in my mind. It was strange because I had thought that all of those voices were permanently gone. I had stopped taking Zyprexa in April of that year, and Dr. Roberts left it as “no news is good news.” I never went back to a psychiatrist after January 2003. Carmine was still there, and we were able to have clear, detailed conversations, just like two people in real life. The voice told me about Eric, Randy, and Carmine’s girlfriend, the same girl
he dated in high school. The episodes were happening infrequently, so I didn’t tell my mother or return to Dr. Roberts.
In the fall of 2003, I was apprehensive about going back to SUNY. I wouldn’t have Randy to spend time with in between classes. I had made a new friend who worked with me at Home Depot, and he was the complete opposite of Randy. Corey was a year older than me and was a sociology major at UAlbany. He had been raised in the projects of Brooklyn, but he didn’t have a gangsta attitude or crude exterior. He struck most everybody as an ordinary kid from the suburbs. During his years in Brooklyn, he had been in fistfights and been physically threatened. When he was twenty-one, he was robbed at gunpoint. Corey was quiet but had a dry and well-developed sense of humor. Besides knowing Corey from work, we also shared one class together, Sociology of Sexualities. The goal of the class was to learn about sexuality in American culture and to understand different sexual movements and how sexuality influences major American institutions, such as families, schools, and the media.
The class didn’t go as expected. When we were at work, we usually discussed Melissa Featherman, the graduate student who was teaching the class. From the minute that Ms. Featherman stepped into class, she intrigued her students. She was in her late twenties, overweight, and always dressed in tight clothing. She wasted no time in explaining sexually explicit topics, especially insights from her own sex life. She talked about how she hated waiting in line to buy condoms when two old women were starting at her. Many of the students didn’t want to listen to an overweight woman talk about sex. But as the semester evolved, we learned that traditional vaginal sex wasn’t all that Ms. Featherman was having.
Before classes began, I had met another graduate student who told me that Ms. Featherman had once attempted to start an S-M (sadism and masochism) club at the college—unsuccessfully. I first chalked it up as a rumor, but by the middle of the semester, Ms. Featherman was bragging to us about her extracurricular interests. She told us that she was the president of the Power Exchange, an S-M club that she unsuccessfully tried to start at the college. One day she sat outside the campus center looking for people to join. Nobody did, she said, but some girls stopped by and asked her where they could find dildos. Next, Ms. Featherman told us that there were a lot of misconceptions about sadists and masochists and that everything she did was safe and consensual. Through her experience with S-M, Ms. Featherman found that some individuals were hard core (they used whips and chains), while others preferred using more pleasant objects, such as feathers and ice cubes. During another class, Ms. Featherman said that a lot of people she knew said that S-M wasn’t about the sex. To them, she said, “Bullshit.”
Toward the end of the semester, the class watched a movie titled Fetishes, which documented this phenomenon. In the movie, a naked man crawls on all fours as women whip him and beat him. Another time, one of the women (a mistress) smokes a cigarette and uses a man’s mouth as an ashtray. She later puts her cigarette inside the man’s mouth and he swallows it. Many scenes showed women whipping naked men, some of whom found it so enjoyable that they climaxed.
One student asked Ms. Featherman if we were going to be tested on the video, but she told the class, “I wouldn’t know what exactly to ask.” Some girls walked out because they were so offended. Another boy joked, “Well, I’m going to have to rub one out after that.”
After the movie, a discussion about the film took place on the classroom website. One girl, Fija, responded that even though S-M behavior is deviant, it is important to remain nonjudgmental. The same girl made a comment earlier in the semester that Playboy was wrong and evil because it degraded women. So, according to Fija, we shouldn’t be judgmental about women hitting men with whips until they leave scars, but photographing a naked woman is wrong and immoral. Even though Ms. Featherman made some eccentric comments, she also made comments that were conservative and pro-abstinence. She told her students that she waited a long time to lose her virginity and that she was glad she did. I could not have survived this class without my friend Corey. I think I would have been too afraid to go class if he wasn’t in it.
We frequently would have to write research papers about music and how it defines sexuality in society. A large majority of the students chose to write about Christina Aguilera. Ms. Featherman joked that the students in the class loved her. She even suggested that in order to fix our grammar mistakes, we should print out our papers and read them to our Christina Aguilera posters that she assumed everybody had on his or her wall. One day as I was waiting for class to begin, a girl asked me if I had finished my upcoming research paper. I said, “Yup, I just have to read it to my Christina Aguilera poster now.” She looked at me very odd, as she was absent the day Ms. Featherman talked about the students reading their papers to Christina Aguilera posters.
As 2003 came to a close, I started to spend more time with my friends from work, and my high school and Geneseo friends became more of a memory. During the middle of my junior year, I began volunteering at the Crime Victim and Sexual Violence Center. I wanted to learn more about sexual abuse, domestic violence, and domineering relationships.
The more time I spent at the Sexual Violence Center, the more I enjoyed it. I learned that there were so many misconceptions about rape. I heard some stories that were truly shocking. One female babysitter molested two boys she was watching. Another one-yearold child was sold for sexual acts so that the baby’s mother could get crack. A man who came in for counseling had been raped in 1962 as an eight-year-old and still experienced trauma from the incident. Another male client came in for therapy because he was gang raped in prison. A freshman in college called the twenty-four-hour rape crisis hotline and said she needed to talk to somebody because her older brother used to molest her and she was afraid to return home for the summer.
The scariest part of my volunteering was that one day when I was entering client information into the computer, I actually recognized two names; they were two women I had previously worked with at other jobs. I never thought I knew any victims of rape, but given all of the people the average person works with in a lifetime, he or she is likely to know at least one.
In September 2004, I started my final semester of college. I was able to graduate a semester early because I had started with twenty-eight college credits. During my last semester, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I hadn’t spoken to Randy in over a year, and Carmine had graduated college in three years and moved to California. Randy was now engaged to an older woman. I had known a lot of college seniors who were still working at Home Depot because they couldn’t find jobs in their fields. I didn’t like working retail and the thought of working full time there just scared me. Jeremy my mother’s boyfriend, told me that his sister worked at the Center for Quality Living, (a pseudonym), an organization that provided an array of residential and day services to the developmentally disabled. I decided to apply there.
I started my new job as a residence counselor for a group home in the fall of 2004. At first I was apprehensive about working in a home with ten developmentally disabled adults. I didn’t want to wash anybody, tell somebody to wipe, or work with individuals who were violent. Thankfully, most of the residents were independent, and we had very few behavior problems. Within weeks, I loved my new job; it was the first job to which I actually didn’t mind showing up. I soon learned that the stereotypes about developmentally disabled individuals were mostly false. Most of the residents I encountered were witty and able to go out in the community; some even worked at the local grocery store.
I was excited that for the first time in years, I didn’t have any friends who knew Carmine or Eric or knew about the lies that they had told about me. On the first day of my job, I did notice that one resident, Anthony, had the same last name as Carmine. Anthony was very friendly and told me that his chore was to set the table. When I asked him if he was any relation to Carmine, he smiled and said, “So how do you know Carmine?” Turns out, Anthony was Carmine’s uncle.
Apparently, Carmine wasn’t totally out of my life yet.
There were ten people living in the group home at which I worked. Most of them were developmentally disabled and suffered from mental illnesses. The staff was paid slightly above minimum wage, and we were expected to give medications, learn crisis intervention techniques, cook, drive, and take care of ten disabled individuals. Due to the gap between pay and job responsibilities, the house was short-staffed and included some irresponsible and untrustworthy employees.
One college student spent spend most of her shift talking on the phone or listening to music in the room of a resident who was on a home visit. Another time I saw the same employee just dancing by herself outside. Many staff members were found sleeping on the job, and not even during the overnight shift. One time a family member of a resident was picking up her son for a home visit and found an employee sleeping on the couch. Another staff member was known for giving tarot card readings to the other staff members during work hours. One employee actually had a hit-and-run accident at the home. As she was pulling out, she hit another car and left, not even telling anyone that she’d hit her co-worker’s vehicle. I kept the job at the Center until June 2007, working part-time after I graduated college. When I left I had three years of experience; and I was the staff member with the most seniority. The high turnover rate did have devastating effects on the residents.
I ended up graduating from the University of Albany in the fall of 2004, but I was still lost. I had worked very hard when I was in college, dedicating myself to completing research papers and studying sociological theories. I ended up graduating summa cum laude with a grade point average of 3.85. Despite all my academic success, I had no direction. I was always living in the moment, the here and now, and even though I loved the university, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought about being an attorney just because I wanted to be financially successful. Ironically, after I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in sociology, I just wanted to work full time at the group home. I loved it so much, and it didn’t matter that I was only making a little more than minimum wage. I knew that I could not do it as my full time job, only part-time. I did have an attitude that I was not going to work at just above minimum wage after I worked hard in college for the past 4 years.
Missing the Big Picture Page 16
