5
We are holding hands. We are having sex. We are each becoming the other. She wears my shirts. I wear Her. We are spending late nights sitting in booths, watching the wind whip down the street. Blow, wind, blow, we are safe and sound. We are holding each other in bed, I am stroking Her hair, she is falling asleep on my chest. We are buying each other used books at Quimby’s (I am The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, 1970, featuring DeFord Bailey, the singing shoeshine boy; and John Wesley Ryles; and Charley Pride, “the first Negroe Country star.” She is a tattered Glory & Praise song-book, with its Penitential Rites and such lines like “For love is stronger than death, stronger even than hell”—I underlined that bit). We are way symbolic. We are driving to the edge of the city and talking in vague-yet-resolute certainties about our dreams and our futures. We are leaving things in the medicine cabinet. We are falling in love.
This is the good part, the beginning, when everything is new and exciting, when every avenue is clear, every shop open, even though there is a parade in town. Life is endless, limitless. I haven’t even thought about taking my medication in months; she is every pill I need. I am going in hard, I am putting it all on the table. I am casting off pieces of my past without hesitation. I am becoming who she wants me to be, even though she doesn’t want me to do it. I am giving up the late nights; I am keeping my eyes forward on the street. I am saying good night to insomnia, saying good morning to the sun. I am everything I hated.
And what’s more, I am writing new songs—better songs, the best I’ve ever made. “I love the way you have with words,” she says, looking over my shoulder, but somehow replying “Thanks” after something like that just doesn’t seem like thanks enough. I want to give each word a bit of vindication. But I don’t, because each line is about Her, even if she doesn’t know it yet. There is no magic formula, no deep well from which this flows. I am pouring my love for her into spiral-bound notebooks.
I could throw modesty Her way, but modesty never looked too good on either of us. So, I just nod my head absently. My pen was a life raft in the middle of the ocean, it was the only place I could ever be free. Grammar and punctuation were just someone else’s ownership of my words, so I raged against them, blew through borders, made them mine. I would keep all my secrets inside parentheses. I would hold my breath before every period.
Now I’m writing Saturday-night words. I’m not dying with the words on the page, I am living for them. They give me strength. I don’t worry about what will happen when the inspiration stops, because as long as I have Her, it never will.
• • •
We are in the studio now, a tiny space in a squat, corrugated office park outside Chicago. It’s a by-the-hour kind of place, with egg cartons nailed to the walls, and a vending machine in the lounge that is never refilled (someone has written Why bother? over the Sunkist button). The matted carpet has cigarette burns, and the recording booth reeks like old coffee and powdered creamer. “The Bill W. smell” is what they call it.
• • •
I am sitting on the curb outside the studio now, watching cars idle at the stoplight. Their mufflers rattle, spitting out blue clouds of exhaust. Their wheel wells are caked with salt from the street. The drivers are wearing hats and scarves behind the wheel, smoking with the windows cracked. Someone is listening to the Bears game on the radio. Across the street in the 7-Eleven, the guy behind the corner is reading a magazine. I am pushing around puddles of slush with my sneakers, watching the tips get soaked, waiting for Her to call.
The snow is falling again, tiny flakes that flutter from the gray skies, land on the ground, and quickly disappear. I watch them stick to the arm of my coat, then blur away into nothing more than dark spots. Wet wool. I feel the flakes land on the back of my neck, melting, sliding down under my collar. I drop my feet squarely in an oily puddle, feel the icy slush ooze into the soles of my shoes. My socks get heavy with the dirty water. An old man emerges from an office across the parking lot, glances at me for a second as he lights up a cigarette, his hand shielding the flame from the falling snow. He pulls his coat tight and looks up at the sky, eyes squinting, then brings his head level with mine. We both stare at each other across the icy asphalt, me with my feet still in the middle of a puddle. A part of me thinks he’s jealous.
The light changes again, and more cars huddle at the intersection, shivering, making the air heavy with exhaust. Piles of snow are on the sidewalk, the peaks black with dirt. The breath is steaming from my mouth, the snowflakes collect on my eyelashes. I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket, and I fish it out. It’s Her. I answer it with “My feet are soaked!” and she laughs. I hop up out of the puddle, duck back under the awning. I listen to Her voice and watch the old man toss his cigarette onto the ground, coughing and spitting phlegm onto the ice. She’s talking about Her exams as the cars rumble away from the light. The snow is starting to fall heavier and faster. It’s beautiful. All of it. Everything is happening.
• • •
We finished the record just before Christmas, and right after, we shot the cover.
6
We have a new drummer now, a masher from Milwaukee. He’s got more tattoos than the rest of us put together, is a militant, straight-edge vegan, and is always ready to fight because of that. He has a shock of red hair, and when he gets going behind the kit, he reminds us all of Animal, which is what we start calling him. Needless to say, our shows get a little more interesting.
• • •
Finally a major label has taken notice. We get a little bit of money from the deal, start to realize that, hey, maybe we really can make a living at this, so we decide to say good-bye to our ordinary lives once and for all. I drop out of Columbia one semester short of graduation. My parents are pissed. I’m not. I tell them someday they’ll give me an honorary doctorate from the place, or at least spot me the twelve credits I need for my diploma. Those kinds of details seem trivial when your life is opening up, when the road is unfurling before you, when the future is yours for the taking.
There are, of course, roadblocks. When I tell Her that I’m leaving Columbia, she responds with silence. Then she asks, “But you’re coming back, right?” I tell Her probably not, that the band is starting to do well and I was never really into political science anyway, so this is the right thing to do. I can tell right away that she doesn’t believe me, and that, for the first time in our relationship, she has doubts . . . about me, about us, about the future. She didn’t sign on to be the wife of a rock star, she didn’t contemplate that she’d be left behind while I went off on my adventures. Most important, she thinks this is silly, some foolish children’s crusade. She doesn’t actually say any of this, but I can tell just by looking at Her that it’s what she’s thinking.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Her, even though I already know the answer.
“No, nothing. I’m happy for you,” she says, adding emphasis to take all joy out of the word. “It’s just . . . I don’t know, you know? Couldn’t you just wait until you’re finished at Columbia? I mean, it’s only a couple of months, and maybe we could get a place together in the meantime, so when you come back, we can—”
“But I don’t want to come back,” I spit. “I don’t ever want to come back here again. This place has nothing for me anymore.”
It was probably the wrong thing to say. I didn’t believe it anyway, but I didn’t care. Something in the way Her voice sounded, something in Her tone, something in Her throat . . . I’m not sure what it was, but it signified doubt and had flipped a switch inside me. It made me want to hurt Her. So I swung for the fences, I let the uppercuts fly. I blew this entire issue out of proportion. Such is the way with these things.
“Oh, nothing, right, I forgot. I guess I’m nothing then, right?” Her voice wavered just a bit. “You think I want to just sit here and wait for you? You think I want to be your dutiful f*cking girlfriend? You think I’m okay with doing that? That’s f*cking unbelievable.”
This is going to be a disaster. The goddamn plane has crashed into the goddamn mountain.
“I thought you’d be happy for me,” I mumble. “I thought—”
“That’s right, you thought about you, not me. Not us,” she fires back. “I’m really f*cking happy for you. Is that what you want me to say? Okay then. I’m really f*cking happy for you. Leave school, leave me here. I’m fine with it.”
“You know, you can just come out and say you think this is a stupid idea,” I say, for reasons unclear to pretty much everyone. “You can say you don’t think I’m good enough to make it. Go ahead, I know it’s what you’re thinking anyway. And that’s f*cking bullshit, and it’s not fair, because if this were you making this decision, I’d support it.”
“But it’s not me,” she says, her voice trailing off. “It’s you. And you wouldn’t.”
The air in Her bedroom is heavy with smoke, but the fireworks are over. We sit on opposite corners of Her bed, and she leans forward, burying Her face in Her hands. I watch Her shoulders rise and fall with each breath, first in slow, measured cycles, then building into more pronounced, irregular jerks. She begins sobbing, and there’s nothing I can do to pull Her back to me, into my arms. Her face is flushed and the tears are pouring out of Her eyes so fast that I can’t wipe them away, so I just sort of rock Her back and forth, kiss Her forehead. I want so badly to tell Her it’s going to be all right, that I’ll leave the band and forget this silly crusade. I want to tell Her that I am ready to settle for this life, that she is all I will ever need in the world, and that we’ll never be apart. I want to tell Her that I will protect Her forever. But none of that would be the truth. So I don’t say anything at all.
The silence is the worst part of any fight, because it’s made up of all the things we wish we could say, if we only had the guts. And the unspoken truths here are plain: For the first time, I am thinking of me instead of us. For the first time, she is worried about our relationship, about whether it can survive the tyranny of distance (and what does that say about our relationship anyway?). And, for the first time, we’re both wondering why we’re doing this. It was a bad fight, it got out of hand quickly, and it was all my fault—seriously, go back and reread the transcript if you don’t believe me—but it was by no means a pointless one. If anything, it was too pointed. This is how your heart gets snagged, like a balloon on a barbed-wire fence, this is where pieces of you get torn away.
Her roommate is washing dishes in the kitchen, clanging the pots and pans a bit too loudly, just so it’s clear she’s not paying attention to our fight. I hate her so much right now.
The tears have stopped flowing, and she sits up, sniffles a bit, rubs Her eyes with the heels of Her hands. She sighs. “How long will you be gone? Weeks? Months?”
I tell Her I don’t know the answer to that, even though I do. The plan, we have been told, is to load back into the van next month, do a run of shows around the Midwest, then head directly off the road and into the studio. And we won’t be recording in Chicago, either: The label has booked us into a studio in Madison, Wisconsin . . . a redbrick building owned and operated by the guy who produced Nirvana’s Nevermind (they even recorded some of it there). It is going to cost money. It is going to take a while. It is not going to turn out the way she wants.
Let’s just make it through tonight, worry about the rest later. I can see she is coming around now. I am pulling the wool over Her eyes. I am not the wolf or the sheep. I am another animal altogether. This is not dress-up.
“However long it is, I promise that when I come back, you and I will get a place together,” I lie. “And, if you want to move somewhere else—if you really want to go to Berkeley like you’ve been saying—we’ll go. Together. I promise.”
Smart girls always want to go to Berkeley. Most of them never make it there.
“I love you,” she says, sniffling again. “And I want you to be happy.”
She cocks Her head and looks at me with those big, sad eyes, still red from the tears. She’s waiting for me to say something. Anything. All that comes into my head is this bit of psychobabble she had once told me, back when we were first dating: Freud suggests that in order to love someone else, one must love themselves; it’s a classic “needs before other needs” argument. Unfortunately, no one really loves themselves. And, if they do, they need to get to know themselves better. Unfortunately, no one is really happy.
Of course, I don’t say any of that. Instead, I just mutter, “It will be okay. I promise,” and I rest my head on Her shoulder. We sit that way for what seems like forever, in complete, exhausted silence, neither of us daring to let go of the other. Her roommate is washing the dishes. The radiator exhales with a dusty sigh. We fall asleep sitting up.
We leave for tour a couple of weeks later, on a cold, gray morning, the van and a tiny trailer loaded and rattling. Unsafe. I kiss Her good-bye, hold Her tight, promise to call when we get to Davenport. As we head west on 88, it occurs to me that she never actually said she was okay with any of this. We press on anyway, Dekalb and Dixon and Sterling fly by, ghost towns filled with sad people who settled for what life offered them. The road unfurls before us. Everything is possible. I feel sick to my stomach.
7
Des Moines. Van Meter. Neola. I want to disappear with you forever. Omaha. Percival. Sonora. I want to run away with you and never return. Kansas City. Bates City. Wright City. I want to fold you and put you in my pocket and have you with me always. St. Louis. Teutopolis. Indianapolis. I don’t know what else to say except I miss you and I love you.
I write Her e-mails from the business centers of hotels. That’s the reason they’re there, after all. Sometimes we’re even staying at the hotel in question, though usually not. Most times the person at the front desk takes pity on me, lets me type messages to Her without much harassment. One time, this woman at a Holiday Inn in Iowa eyed me up real good and asked me, “Son, are your parents staying at this hotel?” and I lied to her and said, “Yes,” and then not only did she let me use the business center, but I got the free continental breakfast too. It was a highlight. It’s usually just me and maybe some business guy in there—it is a business center after all—and he’s always looking at sports or maybe reading some e-mails from his boss or wife or girlfriend his wife doesn’t know about. There’s always so much mystery in other people’s lives.
I write Her e-mails because I’m no good on the phone. Never have been. And that’s bad when you’re out on tour, and the only time you have to talk is after shows, or while driving to the next city, crammed into a van with three other guys who haven’t showered in a few days and make fun of everything you say. Needless to say, we haven’t been speaking much. When we do, it’s short, strange. A few minutes here and there, updates on Her classes and the latest drama with Her family. Tour is going good. I’m behaving. Gotta go, love you. We can’t get off the phone fast enough. It’s like talking to your aunt on Christmas morning, when all you want to do is dive into the mess underneath the tree. It feels like an obligation.
• • •
The funny thing is, when I’m not sneaking into business centers, I barely think about Her. There’s no time. We are hitting the road hard this time out, something like twenty-five shows in thirty days, in big cities and college towns. We are sleeping on floors most nights, in people’s apartments, and I wake up most mornings with my head next to a litter box. I have an uncanny knack for this, it seems. One time, I woke up damp with cat piss. It was another highlight.
• • •
I read something in a magazine today.
They did a study and found that countless men would choose gambling over love if given the chance. Even more would choose pornography over love if given the chance. We are cavemen; and it seems like that will never change. I wonder if the men they studied have ever really been in love? I wonder how corporations will use this information to their advantage? “Hallmark cards and boxes of Fanny May chocolates will save humanity,” or something to the effect. It depresses me to think about it.
I am writing Her an e-mail from a Super 8 hotel in Muncie, Indiana (they don’t have continental breakfast, in case you were wondering), because I’m feeling guilty. Guilty for all the fun I’ve been having, guilty for the close calls I’ve had in darkened corners. Guilty for forgetting about Her and letting my life run free. Guilty for feeling good.
For whatever reason, it seems like we’re against love. Everyone. People think love equates to weakness, or gullibility, or an unwillingness to deal with reality, so they try to ruin it, the social scientists and the admen, with studies and lingerie shows and boxes of candy. They try to invalidate it, dirty it up, but they can’t, because people in love know the truth. They know love is good and pure and really the most beautiful thing in the world. They know love is greater than anything, greater even than God. At first, I didn’t believe it, but I do now. You have made me realize it. Being away from you has been the hardest thing I have ever done. I am shaking and sweating. I am going into withdrawal. I need you. You are my withdrawal. You are my blood.
I want to protect you from all of this. When it’s all over, I want to run away with you and never come back. I want to be buried in the ground with you. It’s the only way we can keep this pure and beautiful, I’m afraid. We have to stay away from this whole life. We have to be normal. We have to get married and move to Berkeley. Our love can’t survive like this, no matter how hard we try. I’m quitting the band. I’m coming home. I need you.
I stare at the e-mail for a while, then I delete it. We’ll be back in Chicago in a few days and she’ll never know the difference. My conflicts of conscience are about the only battles I’m fighting these days, and I’m willing to fight until the end. There is something freeing about this life, about living out of a single backpack and disappearing into the night. About smelling terrible and never remembering people’s names. About never having to say you’re sorry. We exist outside of society. We stay up late and sleep even later. We are bandits, pirates, serial killers. The dregs. Someone should lock us up and never let us out again. But instead, they give us their money, they offer us their beds. We are not going to pay for the beer. We are not going to be back here for a good, long while. We have prior engagements. We have the money in a duffel bag. We have no shame. F*ck guilt. Back to life.
8
We are reunion sex. We are a freeze-dried wet dream. That’s it, like an old song with a great chorus that never dies. Reunion sex is like Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It’s like AC/DC’s “Hells Bells,” only with foreplay. The hits last forever. It’s confidence. It’s an ego boost. It’s my best summer crammed into a stacked, five-foot-three-inch brunette. It’s old hat. I know Her better than I know myself. I know Her better than anyone should know anyone, ever. I whisper this into Her ear, and she moans. I push all the right buttons, watch Her rib cage jut out as she gasps. The hits just keep on coming.
I’m only back in Chicago for the weekend. Come Monday, we’re off to Madison to start work on the new album. But until then, we’ve decided that it would be best if neither of us left Her bedroom. We’ve turned it into a political endeavor: we’re staging a Bed-In, for love. We’re a modern-day John and Yoko, and Her tiny apartment on the North Side is our Amsterdam Hilton. All we are saying is give love a chance. We will strum guitars and sing. We will mail acorns to various heads of state. We might even invite members of the press, we’re not sure yet.
We are joking about it, naked, wrapped in sheets and each other, when I realize that this is the happiest moment of my entire life. I want it to last forever. I want to be fixed, but, for the first time, it’s not because I’m broken. I want to be fixed like a cat, so I never go and screw this up. She is all I could ever ask for, she is perfect, and right now, with those big, green eyes and pillowy lips and alabaster thighs, the idea of doing this for the rest of our lives doesn’t seem all that daunting. She’s the last reprieve. The stay of execution. She gives me hope.
But times are tough for dreamers. And even if my dream is a simple one—all I want is for Her to be in love with me forever—I know it’s still a long shot. Life ruins everything. So I’m determined not to leave Her bed, because in here, life can’t get at us. This is a restricted area. No trespassing. Which is why I don’t tell Her about the parties and the girls and the notes stuck beneath the windshield wipers. I don’t tell Her about feeling alive on the road . . . that’s all life, the bad, dirty, savage kind. The kind I don’t want spoiling this, the kind I have to keep separate from love. It’s apples and oranges. Zoloft and Ativan. Church and State.
“What do you want?” I ask Her.
“I want this,” she answers.
Exactly.
I’m a lifer, sweetheart, I’m here till the bitter end. I’m the floor covered in trash after the last dance, the remnants of the night that was. I’m real, I’m the tangible part of the memories. I’m the proof. You make me want to be this way. It would be easy to disappear into the darkness, to pile into myself and sail on to the next port. It would be easy to not give a f*ck. But our love isn’t easy because it’s not meant to be. It requires work and sacrifice and protection. And I wouldn’t want it any other way, not right now, with the morning sun making the curtains glow and Her arms around my neck and the sounds of the street so far away. I’m in it for the long haul, I’m not going away. Not until Monday, at least, when we must go on, when we are required to let life back in. Not because we want to, but because we have to. Life always wins.
“I don’t want to go to Madison,” I tell Her. “I don’t want to leave you again.”
“You don’t have to go,” she whispers, as she begins kissing my neck. “You can just stay here with me. Nobody knows you’re here, not even the guys. You can disappear. We can hide out. Stay with me. . . .”
She keeps whispering stay as she kisses my body. She whispers it as she slides on top of me, wraps Her thighs around my waist. Stay . . . Stay with me. It’s not fair, and she knows it. But I’m not going to object, at least not right now. She moves Her body up and down slowly, and things go electric. Neurons fire and pop. We play “More Than a Feeling” again. It’s a great song.
After, we lie in Her bed and she asks me if I care if she smokes. I’ve only been gone for a month, and she’s started smoking. It’s because of school, she says. The stress. I laugh and tell Her I don’t mind, even though I do. She fishes a Marlboro out of the pack, lights it up. I watch the smoke rise to the ceiling, drift over to a corner, and hide there. My mom smokes. The girls who hang around after shows smoke. The room feels different now, as if there were a window open, and life were pouring in through the crack. Things have already changed, just as I feared.
That’s the problem with all of this. No matter how hard I try, I can’t make it perfect. I can’t keep it in a bottle, can’t ignore reality. Chemicals are involved, the kind scientists try to synthesize and put into pill form, and they’re making tremendous advances every day. They’re winning the war against love. It’s probably inevitable now. There are only two ways to see the world: either no one and nothing is connected to anything, or we are all a random series of carbon molecules connected to each other. Tell me if there’s room for love in either of those scenarios.
I suppose there’s no point in even trying anymore, so I let life back into our bed.
“I have to go, you know,” I say, watching Her eyes for a reaction. “I can’t stay here. We’re booked in the studio and there’s money involved and—”
“Oh, no, I know,” she lies. “I was just kidding when I said you should stay. You can’t after all.”
She added emphasis to that last bit just to let me know how ridiculous she thinks it all is. Suddenly, life is lying between us. She rolls over and lights up another cigarette. Here we go.
“You can’t just say something like that, it’s not fair,” I sputter. “I mean, do you think I want to leave you again? Do you think I enjoy doing this?”
“Of course you do,” she sighs, blowing a column of smoke skyward. “Why else would you be doing it?”
“I’m doing it for us, for our future.” I sit up. “I want to do this so I can take you away from here. So we can go to California and be together.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. How are we supposed to stay together if you’re gone all the time.” She laughs. “How are we ever going to move to California if you’re not here to begin with? I mean, you’re not even living here, really. You just blow into town from time to time. And that’s now. What’s going to happen six months from now? A year from now? Have you even thought about any of this?”
“Of course I have,” I fire back. “I’m not an idiot.”
• • •
I hadn’t thought about it at all. Not even in the slightest bit. I have no plan, no idea of the big picture. It makes me feel incredibly stupid that I was willing to ignore the facts and put so much stock in something as pointless as love. Maybe the scientists and admen were right. Love is just something that can be made in a lab or put on a billboard. It has no practical place in life; it serves no function other than tying us up into knots, making us chase fantastic ideals such as “happiness” and “hope.”
I end the Bed-In early. I’m a pretty lousy John Lennon. I take a shower, using Her shampoo because mine has mysteriously vanished. I was only gone for a month, and already she’s making me disappear from Her life. The smoking, the shampoo . . . the signs are everywhere. I’ve just been too blind to notice them. I dry off using Her towel. Walk back into the bedroom and she’s dressed too. I tell Her I’m going to go home for a bit, to see my parents. She doesn’t object. We’re drowning in life. As I leave Her apartment, I notice that my hair smells exactly like Hers now. She’s following me everywhere.
I don’t go home right away. Instead, I drive around Her neighborhood, make my way past the last remnants of the Cabrini-Green projects, drift through the Gold Coast, with its fortified mansions and luxury condos. I end up down on Lake Shore, as I always do. I park and walk down to the river, stare out at the skyscrapers, now iridescent in the sun. I’m trying to keep myself from feeling anchored or weighed down, trying to keep my mind off thinking about what kids like me deserve. Desperation isn’t a strong enough word, but it will have to do. Life is going to get me. I’ve opened the box and let the Furies out. I dove into this headlong, went off to pursue this insane dream without so much as a map. I have no plan. I suppose it’s only a matter of time now.
The best gamblers aren’t the high-stakes players or the ones who can read the table. The best gamblers are those who know when to fold and walk away. Everybody gets it wrong. It’s all cards and hearts. Everybody either gives up way too early or holds on way too long. I should’ve folded a long time ago. My wrists are only black-and-blue because I’ve never had the balls to go all the way. I’ve got ringing in my ears, but none on my fingers. I’ve got sunsets on the insides of my eyelids.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Someone knows I’m back in town. I don’t care enough to answer it, but I take it out of my pocket anyway. For a second, I think about tossing the phone into the river . . . maybe I could even get it to skip a few times before it sinks to the bottom and gets washed out into the Mississippi River. But I don’t. I’m not sure why . . . maybe it’s because I need a phone. You can’t get through life without one. Any thoughts that you can are just fantasy.
I am torn. I don’t know what to do. I’ve always been a dreamer, have always believed in the power of love and art and loud, life-affirming rock and roll, but, for the first time, I’m starting to have doubts. Can a dream even exist in reality? Or does it turn to stone the second it leaves your mind? I can still see Her standing on my front porch, hands in the pockets of Her coat, rocking back and forth in her Chucks. I can see every single blade of grass in my parents’ lawn. Can smell everything in the air. I can remember Her jumping into my arms, saying, “Hiiii!”—and kissing me. That’s the dream. The reality is today, right here on the shores of the Chicago River and upstairs in Her apartment on the North Side, in Her empty bed. You can’t have it both ways. Everything has turned to stone, and it’s all sinking. I can’t even pretend it’ll float down the Mississippi and end up in the Gulf of Mexico, either. I know it’s too heavy, so it’ll just sit there, down in the muck and darkness, with the skeletons and the sewage, probably forever. That’s life, after all.
I don’t know who to call or what to do, so I just stand there, by the river, as guys who have it all figured out jog by in Lycra leggings and tops with patented Dri-FIT technology. They said good-bye to their dreams a long time ago, they didn’t dare to stand up against the current of life, and they’re content. They’re not the ones fantasizing about skipping cell phones off the surface of the river, or thinking about the blood pooling in their wrists, just below a thin layer of skin, just waiting to be taken up into the light. They’re not the ones picturing the little blue Zolofts in their trembling hands. They have sex, not love. They have careers, not dreams. And they sleep soundly at night, they rise early and go jogging or throw on expensive suits. Sip coffee with confident, satisfied grins on their faces. Big board meeting today. Briefcases. Windsor knots.
• • •
There’s nobody who thinks like us—Her and me—anymore. And it’s probably for a good reason. We are dreamers. We worship love, we hope against hope and toss practicality out the window. We believe in magic and ghosts and lies. We wear each other’s clothes. We huddle for warmth. We were made for fashion, not function. We have a lot of growing up to do.
And suddenly, I realize that I’m sweating. Or maybe crying. Or both. I haven’t felt this way in years. I’m standing there shaking when I decide it’s time to call my parents and tell them I’m back in town for the weekend. It’s time to tell them that I’m crashing, and I need help. Call the doctors. Bring on the meds. If I’m going to limp through life, I might as well use a chemical crutch. Like I said, times are tough for dreamers.
9
The meds take two weeks to saturate my system. Even the US Postal Service works faster than that. In the meantime, I spend my days in the waiting room of my old psychiatrist, leafing through the same magazines, staring at the same framed print (a reproduction of Seurat’s painting—the one from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—touting the 1984 Chicago Art Expo) on the wall. The waiting rooms of psychiatrists are the most depressing places on earth, and they’re always identical, no matter where you go. Old magazines, leather couches, muted color schemes. Coatrack. Potted plant. Vaguely tribal sculpture/Persian area rug. Occasionally there is also one of those machines that replicates the sound of waves crashing or fills the room with the hushed fizz of white noise. The only thing that changes is the name of the city where the art expo has been held, but even then, the image behind the glass is always the same . . . Monet’s Water Lilies or a Cézanne still life or van Gogh’s Starry Night (because, hey, he was crazy too!), something swirly and soothing, meant to put the patients at ease, but instead just makes them want to rip the thing off the wall and smash it and slice their wrists open with the shards and get blood all over the sofa set. It’s amazing to me that psychiatrists the world over haven’t realized this yet.
At the far end of the waiting room is the door to the psychiatrist’s inner sanctum, and behind it, someone is currently spilling his or her guts. As my session gets closer, there’s a rush of anticipation, because I can’t wait to see who will emerge from the room. It’s usually a kid my age, and he never makes eye contact with me, just keeps his head down and beats a path to the exit. He’s like one of those criminals you see on the news, trying to cover his face with his hands as he’s being led away by the cops. I like to imagine what he’s been talking about in there, what sins he’s hiding, what’s devouring him from the inside. I pretend that maybe he’s more screwed up than me, and that, when I go into the room, the psychiatrist will look at me and crack a joke, something like “Boy, you think you’ve got problems,” and we’d both laugh.
Today, though, it’s a girl who comes out of the room, maybe a few years younger than me. She’s got red hair pulled back tight on her head, and she’s wearing a pink sweater. You can tell she’s been crying. I turn my gaze to the Persian rug beneath my feet, pretend to be incredibly interested in the patterns of the thing, as she fumbles for her coat. I don’t want to look up and see her face. I don’t want to know what’s devouring her insides. So I hold my breath and keep my head down until I hear her leave the office. There’s a brief silence, some rustling of papers on the other side of the door, and then the psychiatrist emerges and asks if I’m ready. He doesn’t skip a beat, doesn’t even take a moment to compose himself. On to the next tragedy.
The psychiatrist is wearing khakis and a wool sweater. It looks itchy as hell. His neck gathers at the top of it, folds of pink flesh with a gigantic head perched on top. It makes him look like a snapping turtle. He sits back in his chair, crosses his left leg over his right, and asks me how I’m feeling. His pants are too short, and I stare at his white socks while I search for the correct answer. Fine, I tell him. I feel fine. Haven’t felt anxious, haven’t stood on the banks of any bodies of water and contemplated jumping in, haven’t felt as if life were gripping me and squeezing the air from my lungs. I think the medication is working already, I tell him, even though we’ve both been down this road enough times to know that it’s way too early for that to be happening. But, hey, there’s no harm in trying to bluff my way through this entire process. He nods and scribbles something on his notepad.
“Now, the last time you were here, we were talking about . . .”
He says “we,” but I did all of the talking. Psychiatry is bullshit. I know from experience. You sit there and talk and talk—about your feelings (“How does that make you feel?”) and about your childhood (“You mentioned your mother there . . .”), about your fears and hopes and all of that jazz—because you just want the hour to be up, because you don’t want to be sitting in an overstuffed chair in some stranger’s office, looking at the carefully calligraphed diplomas he’s hung on the wall behind his head, because you get the sinking suspicion that all of this is a gigantic waste of time.
But mostly, you want the hour to be up because at the end, the doc is gonna write you up that prescription, and everything will be okay. But the thing is, he knows that too, so he makes you work for it, just makes you keep talking and talking while he jots down notes and rests his head on his chin and tries to look interested. And if you’re not talking, he’ll just keep sitting there, staring at you, and the whole thing goes a whole lot slower, and you might not get your prescription at all, or, worse yet, he might refer you to another doctor, and then you have to start all over again. Like I said, I know from experience.
So, really, the best thing to do is just talk. After a while, you probably won’t even know what you’re talking about, you’ll just be looking at those diplomas while your mouth runs on and on, and suddenly, you’ve said something you don’t mean, and the psychiatrist will lean forward in his chair and say something like “That . . . go with that,” and you have no idea what that was, and all of a sudden you’re rambling on about problems you didn’t even know you had, or, worse yet, problems that didn’t even exist until you made them up and spat them out of the hole in your face. And then you start freaking out because maybe you’ve just uncovered something big, dredged something out from deep within your soul, and now you’re gonna be about fifteen times more screwed up that you were exactly one minute earlier.
But those moments never happen. I want to say something that will blow his mind. I want great epiphanies. I want him to leap out of his chair and thrust his arms heavenward and go “That’s it!” and pronounce me cured, or, if I say something really bad, I want him to drop his notepad and stare at me with wide eyes, his face going white as he stammers something all slow and drawn out like “What . . . did you say?” as he realizes that he’s sitting in a room with the next Ted Bundy. I understand that’s probably not how psychiatry works, but it would be nice every once in a while. Maybe I watch too many movies.
I’m thinking about all of this and muttering about something when he asks me what my girlfriend thinks about my seeing a psychiatrist. My mouth stops moving and my brain locks up. Panicked, I gather myself up in the chair, run my hands down my knees, cough a bit. I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve never had a moment like this. Maybe it’s an epiphany.
“She, uh . . . ,” I stammer. “She’s fine with it.”
“You know, because she’s studying psych at Columbia,” he says. “We talked about Her in our last session, but it never occurred to me to ask what she thinks of all this. You say she’s fine with it?”
This guy’s good. He’s actually been paying attention.
“The reason I ask now is because I wonder if you’re fine with it too,” he continues, failing to notice the gray matter of my brain that’s now splattered all over the back wall of his office. “I’m interested. Do you ever feel like she’s trying to pick your brain? Or maybe that you have to keep things from Her?”
He’s really making me work for it now. I sort of hate him for it.
“Because, obviously, as we’ve talked about before, you feel close to Her. I believe you said”—he trails off, paging through his notes—“you said you’ve allowed Her to get closer to you than you’ve ever let anyone get before. So, your relationship with Her is important to you. And I’m wondering how that makes you feel, to have someone so close to you—someone you’ve let your guard down for—who might also be trying to get inside your head. Someone who—by your own admission—has such great power to, as you said, ‘hurt you.’ How does that make you feel?”
He motions to me with his hands, opens them flat, palms toward the ceiling. I hate when he does this because it’s his way of trying to draw something out of me, when we both know that I’m just here for the drugs. But I oblige him because at least he’s been paying attention. Taking notes even.
“Well, I—” is what comes out, followed by “No, I don’t think that.”
“I didn’t ask what you think about it, I asked how you feel. There’s a difference between the two.” He scratches at his turtleneck with his pen. “I’m asking because I’m concerned that perhaps you have a challenge, and we all have challenges”—he never says problems—“but I’m concerned your issue is that you don’t trust people. You mistrust, and in doing so, you create, uh, challenges for yourself . . . you feel like you must control every aspect of everything, you must try to keep things perfect at all times.
“And we both know that nothing is ever going to be perfect,” he continues, downshifting his tone to Sympathetic Light. “We both know that we can’t do everything alone, and that it’s okay to let people in. Or, at least, we should know that. So, do you feel like you can’t let Her in, because that would be giving up some of that control?”
“Yeah. I guess that’s it.”
“Well, that must be exhausting,” he adds, ladling on the sympathy now. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
I’ll bet he is. We both sit there for what feels like ten minutes, just looking at each other. Then he does that motion with his hands again, and I officially mail it in. I’m not even listening to what I’m saying now, but if it’s any consolation to him, I now actually feel worse than I did before. I believe this is what’s known in the industry as “tearing down to build up.” Psychiatry is a waste of time.
But at this exact moment, I can also feel my mind making a U-turn. Maybe this guy was right . . . maybe I do mistrust people. Maybe I am denying myself happiness and true love because of it. Maybe life isn’t stacked against me, and everything can be okay if I’m willing to just let it be.
Mercifully, he glances down at his gold watch, sighs, “Well, our time is up for today,” and is showing me the door before I even know what hit me. I don’t even get a new prescription because he says the one he wrote me a week ago should be enough to get me through until the next time we talk. There’s always a next time because psychiatry never fixes anything. It always needs a next time.
I walk back out into the waiting room, and sure enough, some kid is sitting on the leather couch. We don’t make eye contact at all. I grab my coat off the rack and bolt for the door. Soon, I am sitting behind the wheel of my car in a half-empty parking garage. I think about running a hose from the exhaust pipe. Then I reach into my coat pocket and shake out a couple of Ativans, the ones that look like Superman’s logo, and I laugh for a second thinking of a dosed-up superhero (“Captain Lorazepam!”). I swallow them down and start the car. This time, there won’t be a next time. The train is gathering steam, it’s itching to leave the station. Next stop: Madison. Or madness. Whichever comes first.