Electroboy

by Andy Behrman

  Even though physically my sense of balance is quite off, emotionally I’ve never felt more stable. It feels like there’s an equal amount of cells on the left side of my body and the right. An unusual calm and quiet reverberates throughout my body. I can hear my voice and other people’s voices more clearly. The ECT dulls my ability to feel depression or mania. I feel somewhere in the middle, functioning at a normal pace, a pace that seems unusually slow to me. Everyone seems to talk and move slowly. I also feel like my speech has been slowed down considerably, and sometimes I catch myself doing things in slow motion—I’m a calmer version of myself.

  But this process is demeaning. I have no real curiosity about my treatment because I’m too confused to ask the doctors questions and don’t know what I would ask them anyhow. I have no idea what’s really going on once they inject me with Brevital. All I know is that I keep having these shock treatments every other day. I no longer have the capacity to be anxious. I hear everybody around me saying that they hope I won’t have to have more than five treatments (five is somehow the magic number) and that I’ll be pronounced well enough to leave the hospital and get into a cab and go home. My condition is supposed to be stabilizing more and more after each treatment, but it’s difficult for me to assess because of the confusion. My memory worsens with each treatment. I often wonder where I am, what I’m doing here, why people are coming to visit me, and where I live. I’m afraid they’re going to keep doing this to me endlessly. Maybe it was a big mistake to sign myself in.

  After my third treatment I walk into my bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror. I wonder what the inside of my head looks like by now, if the ECT has actually changed the shape of my brain—really shaken up neurons like the doctors told me it does. I imagine the neurons bouncing around like in one of those big bingo tumblers.

  My brain feels like a piece of Silly Putty. I feel tempted to take it out and play with it and think it’ll come out my left ear or out one of my nostrils and I’ll roll it around in my hands and make some adjustments to it and then reinsert it and correct the manic depression permanently. I believe that this is called do-it-yourself brain surgery. Maybe this is something I should suggest to one of the doctors the next time I go for a treatment. A treatment, singular, sounds like a massage or facial; treatment, by itself, sounds like chemotherapy.

  Many of my friends visit me at Gracie Square, including Annike. One afternoon she arrives wearing a brown skirt and blouse, bringing a small gift for me, a drawing of hers, and a candy bar from Germany. She is glad to see that I am feeling better but doesn’t like the course of treatment or the hospital environment for me. “You’ve got to get out of here,” she says. “I’ll be out soon,” I tell her. “You don’t need to be in here,” she says. I ask her about the D.A.’s office. She tells me that she seems free from any prosecution, and I’m relieved that they’re not pursuing an indictment. I didn’t think they would. Our meeting is very brief, but it is good to see her. I don’t think she realizes how sick I am.

  There’s not much to do in the hospital. I talk a lot on the phone to friends and otherwise lie in bed and think of stupid things like how many chickens were used to make all the chicken salad sandwiches I’ve ever eaten in my life and how many eggs were used to make all the egg salad sandwiches I’ve ever eaten and how many tea bags were used to make all the iced teas I’ve ever drunk. I write the numbers down on a pad. Very important. And maybe someone will give me a dollar for each one of those chickens, eggs, and tea bags. Or maybe someone will send me to a mental hospital just like this one.

  Sometimes I lie in bed wondering if putting my head in the microwave for thirty or forty-five seconds wouldn’t do the same thing as the ECT. I guess it’s my fault for not asking enough questions about exactly what’s going on in the operating room with those electrodes and that voltage. But no, I’m hopeful that I’m making progress, that the depression is leveling off and I’m on the road to recovery.

  Michael and Amanda, my friends from the ward, come to my room to visit me. They look like a happy couple on vacation in hospital gowns. But just this morning they were hooked up and jolted with 200 volts. It’s amazing. They ask me if I want to play backgammon. I tell them I hate backgammon. I hate the name. I hate the triangles. So we don’t play. They pull up some chairs. “Cool sweats,” Michael says. “My sister gave them to me,” I tell them. Michael’s a lawyer. Amanda’s a senior at college. There’s a long silence. We all just stare at one another and start laughing because we’re sitting around in our robes with nothing to do. “Let’s play backgammon,” I say.

  My parents have brought me a huge stack of books and magazines, but I have difficulty reading and can only look at the pictures. I read a paragraph and then forget what I’ve read, reread it, and then forget it again. The fashion layouts and the advertisements are easy for me to digest. My poor memory frustrates me, and I don’t know when and if it’s going to come back. I only remember who has visited or called or who has sent flowers because I keep a journal I’ve brought with me because I’ve been warned that I will probably forget everything.

  One afternoon, about a week into my stay and a few hours after I have rested following a treatment, my father takes me for a walk outside the hospital. I’m wearing my Ralph Lauren sweatpants. I have been indoors for about five days, so I have to adjust to the street noise and the bright light. The city smells wonderful compared with the mental-hospital odor, and I breathe in the smell of hot dogs from the cart on the corner. It’s a beautiful day. I shuffle across the streets, not paying attention to red lights and stepping in front of cars. My father pulls me back several times. We go to a gardening store and find a flat, gray, smooth stone with the word create engraved in it. It fits into the palm of my hand. Create. I guess I think it will somehow inspire me to write in my journal, or think, or dream, or maybe just recover more quickly. I’m not exactly sure what I think. But it means “do something while you’re here.” Or maybe it just means “I’ll get better soon.” I like the smoothness of the stone. My father buys it for me. It is my good-luck charm for my hospital stay, and I put it on my night table. That night, before I go to sleep, I rub it between my hands and pray that I will get better quickly. The following morning, after I wake up, I realize that the stone’s missing. I can’t find it anywhere. Since I am horribly confused from yesterday’s ECT, I assume that I have misplaced it and begin looking all over the room but can’t find it. I am particularly disturbed because my memory is failing me and I’m not even sure that my father left the stone with me and think that he might have taken it home. I call him to check. No, he’s sure that he left it on my night table. Maybe I threw it in the garbage by accident. No luck. Finally, at lunch hour, when all of the patients assemble in the dining room, I see Rosie, a black schizophrenic patient in her thirties, carrying the stone around with her, showing it off to other patients as if it were a new diamond ring. She’s smiling as she shoves it in front of each patient’s face. I approach her and ask her where she found it. On the ward a few days ago. I tell her that, coincidentally, I have the same one and I suggest that the one she has might possibly be mine. She refuses to give it back to me, and I ask the nurse to intervene before I attempt to get her to return my stone by force. After all, this is my good-luck stone from my father and I just want it back. I’m not angry at her. She’s sick. This is the stone that is going to get me well and get me out of this mental hospital. Rosie refuses to return the stone and barricades herself in her room. It takes three nurses to get her to come out, and they finally make her return it to me. But this game of cat and mouse goes on for days. No matter where I hide the stone—even underneath my pillow—she steals it, and the nurses have to search her room for it. Even when she is caught with the stone, Rosie claims victory, jumping up and down. It ends up being a fun game to kill time on the ward.

  I’m looking forward to my fourth and final treatment, because if all goes well, I’ll probably be discharged the following day, and I’m not really
enjoying my stay at Gracie Square Spa. I’m also hoping that this will be my last ECT treatment ever and that I can be put on a program of medication that will stabilize the manic depression. In the operating room I thank Dr. Wallenstein and tell him I’ll be in touch with him. The final ECT is a breeze. I’m already a pro. I feel great the next day and spend it watching television, and packing up my things, and saying good-bye to my shock buddies and the nurses. At lunch Lena asks me if I feel I am cured. Her question surprises me because she’s been ill for so long and it seems as though four electroshock treatments have done the trick for me. I tell her that I am feeling better than when I came into the hospital. “That’s how I felt,” she tells me. This worries me. Will I be coming back soon, too? I’m feeling guilty for leaving the group behind, but there’s no reason to hang around. The next day, when it’s time for me to leave Gracie Square and one of the nurses escorts me down in the elevator, Rosie stays behind, watching me as I leave the ward, the stone clutched in my hand.

  My father brings me home and I reacquaint myself with my apartment. I’m not really sure it’s mine. It feels as if I’ve been away on vacation for a few months, and I have a very vague memory of where I’ve been and none of the actual ECT. I’m completely exhausted. I unpack my bags and try to make myself comfortable but feel incredibly out of place, as though I’ve crossed a few time zones and just returned from Tokyo. Ten days in the hospital seems like it was crammed into one afternoon. I spend the entire weekend in bed, unable to move my body. On Monday I drag myself out of bed to go to work, and the crowds of people on the subway overwhelm me. I’m suffocating. Going back to my job at CASES feels like a huge mistake. There’s no way that I’m ready for this. When I walk into the office, everybody looks at me kindly, and I just smile. They all know that I’ve been hospitalized, and the director had no choice but to allow me the time off. I sit down at my desk and just stare at “Page Six” of the New York Post until I’m called into my boss’s office. He asks me to have a seat. He looks concerned, and I assume he’s going to give me a pep talk, but instead he gently lets me know that he has to let me go because things aren’t working out. I’m relieved. I know that I’m barely even capable of sorting paper clips from rubber bands. I stand up, thank him, and walk out. I go back to my office and organize my Rolodex, some files, and my briefcase and say a brief good-bye to the friends I’ve made in the last couple of months. I go upstairs to Human Resources to take care of the details of my departure. I’m thrilled to be leaving. I get into the subway and head home. When I get into my apartment, I fall onto my bed and drift into a deep sleep until one in the morning.

  Fortunately, I qualify for unemployment and disability through my employer, which covers a significant part of my monthly bills. My parents continue to pay my psychiatric and psychotherapy bills. That week we have a family meeting with Dr. Marks to discuss a strategy for my post-ECT and post-firing situation. She recommends that I see a career counselor named Dr. Valerie Pincus, and I set up an appointment for the following week. Continually hopeful that somebody will have the answer for me, I never turn down a suggestion.

  Dr. Pincus’s office is down in the Village, a brand-new part of town for my mental health care! She is in her midforties, a Bohemian type with long graying hair that she wears pulled back. We spend some time testing my skills and discussing the right job situation for me. “What is it that you like to do?” she asks me. “Well,” I say, “I’ve just had four electroshock treatments. I had to stop five or six people on the street to ask for directions just to get here. What I like to do best is counterfeit paintings, so I think I’m the ideal candidate for just about any job.” She laughs. How can anyone imagine that I can return to work now? This is fucking ridiculous. Why didn’t the doctor warn me that processing information would be so difficult? Remembering names, numbers, directions, addresses, and details is utterly impossible. I could hardly mop floors at a McDonald’s. It’s humiliating. What can this woman possibly suggest for me? All I can hear coming from her mouth are terms like “communications,” “language skills,” “media,” “journalism,” “creative”—none of this crap means anything to me. They’re just words floating in space around her office, around my head, and superimposed across her face. I need to recuperate from this manic-depressive illness. I need bedrest badly. I need to lie underneath my sheets and blankets for weeks. Please just let me sleep this off.

  I keep up my doctors’ appointments for the next few months and start making a dent in my 250-hour community-service requirement at St. Clare’s Hospital. I help plant a roof garden for the patients, an extremely gratifying project that also allows me to be outside; run errands to the deli and the newsstand for them; and do office work for the program director. St. Clare’s is a refuge for me, allowing me to escape my home detention for up to eight hours a day. The AIDS ward is very old, and I go from room to room, asking if any patients need any errands done or want any magazines or food from the store. Tanya, a very heavy black woman in her forties with AIDS, with close-cropped bright red hair, is lying on her side in her bed, smiling at me. “Blue eyes, come here,” she says. “Could you get me some Doritos or Cheez Doodles, please, okay?” she asks. She reaches into her wallet and takes out $2. “Do you want anything to drink?” I ask her. “No, thanks,” she says. She is watching the television, which is six inches from her face, and I tell her she is going to go blind looking at the screen. She motions me out the door. At the corner bodega the Doritos are $1.69. I want to buy her the Cheez Doodles, too, so I chip in the rest. When I return Tanya looks surprised. “I bought one and stole the other,” I tell her. Then I sit down in the armchair and tell her I’m a criminal and that’s why I’m doing volunteer work here. “Check out my ankle,” I say, pointing to my bracelet. When she sees this, she starts laughing. She pushes the television back, props herself up in her bed, and says, “Now you’ve got to tell me, honey, what a nice boy like you did to get yourself in such a mess.” “I’m not quite sure,” I say. “C’mon, you can tell Tanya,” she says, munching on the Doritos. I explain that a friend and I made copies of original paintings the artist didn’t even paint himself and sold them to galleries in Japan for full price. “And can you believe, all he did was sign the paintings?” I say. “Shit, I could do that,” Tanya says, and she laughs like she hasn’t laughed in years.

  Electroshock Addict

  May 22, 1995.

  This morning I stepped on the scale and was shocked: 245 pounds. I’ve gained sixty-five pounds in two years. I’m lazy about cooking for myself and rely on ordering in takeout food—Chinese, Mexican, Thai, Indian, pizza, and stuff from the local diner across the street. Luckily I can afford it on my disability payments (I have qualified for monthly support) and help from my family. Having my meals delivered to my front door makes me feel like a prisoner having his food pushed through a slot in his cell. But maybe the scale is wrong.

  June 2, 1995.

  I’m very comfortable living on the inside and don’t even look forward to the four-hour breaks. In fact, I find myself becoming a bit agoraphobic on the streets, preferring the safety of my apartment.

  June 14, 1995.

  Distance and time run my life. I fight depression by aggressively scheduling activities and allow myself to venture as far as Soho for dinner. Coming back, the cab gets stuck in traffic and I’m thirteen minutes late. The phone rings when I get in the door—the ladies in Boulder nail me. Luckily I only get a warning from my P.O., but after this my fear of being late is transformed into neurotic earliness—I’m constantly looking at my watch and leaving places excessively early to get home in time.

  June 30, 1995.

  My manic depression rages out of control; I’m staying awake for two or three days straight, having sex with prostitutes (financed by my disability income), drinking heavily, and experiencing paranoid and suicidal thoughts as well as visual hallucinations—mostly sharp knives and razor blades slicing my tongue but also imagining all types of strange objects in the
apartment. I watch a shirt button grow to the size of a tire and roll out of my apartment down Broadway. I see people standing in my bedroom with perforations around their outlines.

  I have been cooped up in the apartment all morning until noon, when I have my official four-hour period to spend outside. At twelve on the dot, I rush over to Zabar’s for a bagel and lox, which I wolf down while I stare out and watch the crowd on Broadway, contemplating how I’m going to spend the rest of my time out. Nobody seems to be in a particular rush to get anywhere. I thought I had a million things I wanted to do, but now I can’t think of a single one. I’m convinced I’ve become just as happy being a prisoner indoors. But I take a walk down to Riverside Park, because everybody tells me it’s a good idea to “take a walk down to Riverside Park.” I see all the mothers and nannies playing with their children and their charges, imagining when my day will come to have kids. Then I come home. I’m much happier here. I have my kitchen, my bathroom, my bed, my telephone, my stereo, and my television. And nobody’s watching me. I’ve been under house arrest for almost three months, and it’s getting tedious. I’m lonely. And constantly horny. I just want to be touched and to get off. It’s a pretty compulsive urge. I usually can get away with watching a porn video or looking at a magazine and jerking off, but today I’m in the mood for something live. It’s like being hungry and captive in the jungle, surviving on plants and leaves and knowing that you’ll be dining on a steak dinner when you’re finally rescued. There is the sense that the urge needs to be satisfied immediately; it’s got to happen within a half hour. Most of the pleasure is in the mystery and danger of the experience. I want to hire a masseur/escort to come give me a rubdown. I check the classified sections of Next and HX, the local gay magazines, and a few ads with photos look pretty good. A few porn stars, but that will cost $300 or so, and with disability as my only income, I’m just looking to spend $150. I see an ad for a guy named Rex, with a black-and-white photo of a shadowed smooth torso that looks nice and the words “AUSSIE, MASCULINE, HANDSOME, HUNG, BI.” He also includes his measurements, height, and weight (six feet one, 190 pounds), and his phone number. I call the number and start leaving a message on his answering machine when I hear him pick up. “Hello, this is Rex,” he says with a strong Aussie accent. “Rex, I’m calling about your ad. Are you available today for a massage?” I ask him. “At about five. Were you interested in coming here? I’m in midtown on the West Side,” he says. “No, I’d rather you come up here. I’m at 81st and Broadway,” I answer, tugging on my ankle bracelet and hoping he makes house calls. “It’s a full-hour massage for $150,” he says. “I’m very good-looking, well-built, blond, twenty-seven years old, and have been doing massage for five years in Sydney.” “Sounds great,” I say, then I give him my address and wait. My buzzer rings at exactly 5:00 P.M., and I wait for Rex to come up. I open the door, and he’s great-looking. He seems a little out of place in New York—he definitely looks Australian. I take his jacket, show him around the apartment, give him the money, then lead him into the bedroom. Then I deal with the issue of the ankle bracelet. “I should show you this,” I say, pointing to the ankle bracelet. “Do you know what it is?” I ask him. “No, can’t say I do,” he responds. “Well, I’m under house arrest, which means I can’t leave this apartment. It’s a step up from being in prison. I just didn’t want to frighten you, okay? And don’t worry, I didn’t kill anybody. So just massage around it.” I strip naked except for this small black box and strap on my left ankle and lie down on my stomach. I can see him from the corner of my eye; he has a solid body. I feel his hands on my neck and shoulders. He’s got a great touch. This is just what I need. “You are my prisoner,” he says as he squeezes my shoulder muscles. I don’t say anything. “You are my prisoner,” he says again. “What are you talking about?” I ask him. “I thought you might want to get into a prisoner fantasy,” he says. “I just want a massage,” I respond. “I definitely don’t want to fantasize about being a prisoner!” I laugh. He goes into the bathroom and comes out wearing a white towel. He is carrying a bottle of baby oil and looks like he’s been photographed by Bruce Weber. I’m waiting for him to take off his towel. “Not so quickly,” he says. “This is my pool-boy fantasy.” He’s massaging my lower back and then works his way down my butt to my legs and turns me over. “Now take the towel off your pool boy. That’s good,” he says. “Do we have to do this fantasy thing?” I ask. “No, not at all,” he says. He drops his towel, and standing in front of me is a very hot-looking Aussie. He walks around the bed and lies down next to me, and we jerk off in tandem. And then comes that horrible feeling of guilt and shame because I’ve paid for this experience with this man who is a complete stranger and totally wasted my money. Quickly, I escort him to the door making small talk, wishing I had never called him.