Head Case (19 page)

I wordlessly get out of bed and into the bathroom, closing the door with an embarrassing amount of force. This was a new twist on the same old argument. I take some deep breaths, splash water on my face, and walk back out. He's made a nest for himself out of blankets in the corner where the bed meets the wall.

“I've changed my mind. That was inappropriate. I mean not inappropriate. I should say what I feel. I want you. I want to do this. Not … that.”

We go round and round like this all weekend. In the pit of my stomach I know that I have to be the one to put an end to it, but I don't know how to. I feel as if I have nothing left without him. Without a job, school, friends, a boyfriend, I don't know how to build my identity on my own. Again, I'm learning how to become who I already am.

In my first semester of grad school I took a class called Autobiography, for which I read a book called
Sylvia
, about a turbulent relationship set in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. The professor referred to the book as “an example of heterosexual bathos.” I asked my dad what she meant by this phrase. He cackled, “I don't think you heard her right. I think she must have meant
pathos
. Heterosexual
pathos
. But bathos, pathos, what's the difference?”
Pathos
is a sentiment of compassion or pity;
bathos
is an anticlimax, a sense of disillusionment. Through these circular fights with Charlie, I was learning the difference.

*   *   *

Living in this town is like living beneath a mossy rock. It's moist and dark and a good place to grow drugs or write a book. Kick over the rock, and you find a population of almost six hundred thousand people, loping away from the light. Many will be plugged into headphones; a surprising number will be clutching a cigarette between their lips; some will be holding a paper cup of coffee. If you're in the southern part of the city, many people will be white. If you are in the north, many people will be black (although this is becoming less true as the tendrils of gentrification creep up Mississippi Avenue). The north is already unrecognizable from when I lived in the key lime green house a couple of years ago. Back then the closest restaurant was a strip club with paint peeling off the walls, and our house was broken into regularly; when we called the cops or the local pawn shops to try to track down our stuff, we were met with amused disinterest. Now there's a strip of stores with cruelty-free clothing and a sushi place.

If you're in downtown Portland from nine to five, a variety of races will be wearing suits or blazers or barista smocks. After five (it gets dark at 4:30 p.m. in the winter), a ghost army will be pushing shopping carts containing their life's possessions through the streets. Portland has a fairly large homeless population given how difficult it is to find a dry bench. Portland is nowhere anyone goes looking for trouble. It's a place where trouble grows slowly, in dark crevices, if you stay still for too long.

There is no hard alcohol on grocery store shelves in Oregon, a fact that I alternately curse and raise up as my salvation. In 1846, William Johnson, the former “high sheriff” of Portland, was indicted for the “retailing of ardent spirits.” According to the indictment, Johnson, “being moved or reduced by an evil heart, did sell, barter, give or trade ardent spirits.” Though I haven't been able to prove it, I like to think that my street, Northwest Johnson Street, around the corner from several bars, is named for this man.

Portland is home to a variety of migratory tribes, the most well known being the twentysomethings who drift into and out of town. It's late April when I move back, and the swifts, tiny sparrows that make up Portland's other migratory flock, are swooping in and out of the chimney of the elementary school by my apartment. The dark swarms remind me of video I've seen of the bats living under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, another home to migratory twentysomethings.

I refer to my new upstairs neighbor, whom I've yet to encounter in person, as Hooker Boots. When she isn't clomping around upstairs in what sound like leaden stilettos, she's hammering away at building what can only be some sort of depraved Rube Goldberg device. Her other hobby is to loudly practice her gymnastic exploits. I can see her now, in her patent leather tool belt and little else, like the beginning of a bad porno. “All of this hammering just makes me
so horny
…”

Parallel play
, a developmental psychology term used to describe two- to three-year-olds who play side-by-side with other children without interaction, perfectly describes my Portland life. Because my parents moved here when I was already out of school and I've shifted living in and out of town, I don't know anyone here very well, and every time I come back I'm of course older and it feels harder to meet people than the last time I was here.

My friend Allison suggests that we meet at the Burnside Skatepark, the concrete bowl under the Burnside Bridge. Neither of us is a skateboarder, but she told me that she comes down to watch the regulars skate whenever she's feeling down and finds that it helps.

We stand to the side of the park and watch the skaters, mostly men in their early twenties and late thirties and a couple of women, swoop and occasionally tumble. Allison tells me about her friend Grant, who lives in one of the industrial-looking brick apartment buildings overlooking the park and comes to watch the skaters with her sometimes, comparing watching the skaters to watching the migration of the swallows of Capistrano. Grant is in a wheelchair, due to a degenerative disease.

I have been thinking a lot about home, how for some people it is a fixed point, a North Star in the astrology making up their personal narrative. For others, like me, it's a destination that I chart and rechart, less any brick-and-mortar place than a sensation that I chase after and then find or misplace or let go of and then chase again.

I meet up with my friend Delores after her shift at Vowel. Delores was my next-door neighbor when I first moved to Portland. We catch up about the graphic design work she's been doing more seriously lately, about her boyfriend whom she now lives with. She's been helping him learn to cope with his mental illness, which has begun to shake her faith. “The only thing that would make me not believe in God is schizophrenia. To have no control over your own mind. How could you do that to someone?”

Schizophrenics use stories to make sense of feeling paranoid, will internalize narratives to explain to themselves the overwhelmingly inexplicable. We all crave context. I've become increasingly obsessed with narration, story, how we organize and contain an overwhelming life.

Writing about my world feels both like willing my truest myself into being while inevitably obliterating that same self. Writing is the connective network between my body and my brain; it tells my body what to do. It's also a preemptive defensive strike. The only way that I know to try to keep my poise is through my vulnerability, but in the process of explaining I risk losing that which I'm striving to keep. I write to connect with a disorienting and sometimes indifferent universe.

On bad days, I'm too overwhelmed by navigating the outside world to leave my apartment, which I refer to as the Fortress of Ineptitude. I read, I clean, I write, I mess around on the Internet, I test out new recipes.

On these rough days, I think about how it will happen: I will not see the car coming around the corner, from my left side. I'll be lost in my own thoughts, and then, suddenly, the air will be knocked out of me. I am tumbling over the hood, thinking,
Well, here it is
, or maybe if I'm having a really bad day I will think,
Finally
. In my head I am always frozen midtumble, over the roof of the car like a detective chasing down a perp in the opening credits to some cop show from the 1970s.

It won't be a surprise. Crossing the street, I often think,
Well, this could go one of two ways
. One day I will miscalculate how far, how fast, enough time, not enough time, and the car won't have time to screech to a halt and lay on the horn like the other times. The driver won't have time to be angry, and, ideally, I won't have time to be scared.

This is how it will happen: I will fall off the map. I will get lost again in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time. I am panicked but determined to get back on track. I run a groove in the pavement with my sneakers. My cell phone runs out of batteries. I stop at newsstands, where I attempt to translate wild pointing; I grip maps written on scraps of newsprint or cocktail napkins, follow the cul-de-sac of a stranger's handwriting down an alley and then across a bridge. I will sleep on a bench and then in a storefront when it rains. Undeterred, I will continue my quest. Eventually, concrete gives way to earth, the city to the countryside, and as I cross fields of corn and cabbage and disentangle myself from archaic, winding sprinkler systems, I begin to lose my mind. I solicit scarecrows, sleep in henhouses, until one morning I bleed into the horizon.

This is how it will happen: Slowly, gradually, they will erode me—kerfuffles, little misunderstandings, raised eyebrows. These are the little microbes of embarrassment that infect my dignity, the germs that attack and invade my sense of self. They ride in on the Trojan horse of other people's harmless assumptions and the pressure that I put on myself, as if when I miscalculate change or don't understand my own bills I am breaking an unspoken code about what it means to be an adult.

The most immediate form of relief is to put on an album, close my eyes, and allow my body to melt into nowhere and no one. With my eyes closed and the right album, I can sneak out of the rind of my body to become shapeless pulp.

There's a big brick hospital a few blocks down from my new studio apartment. On one especially rotten day, unemployed and watching my long-distance relationship crumble like a bad movie starring someone else, I realize that I could just walk into the hospital and ask for a stay in the psych ward. Nobody could stop me; I wouldn't need a ride there, unlike other times when I begged my parents to take me. It's still tempting to shake the temptation to walk into a hospital and say, “Hey, I'm exhausted. Why don't you take the wheel for a while?” I still want to believe in the authority of a hospital to heal me. I'm still afraid that I don't have the tools myself.

It's still difficult for me to shake the notion that anyone can walk into a hospital with enough urgency and be righted. Back here in Portland I am only starting to understand that learning how to be good to yourself
for
yourself is a painstakingly gradual one. It is a process that I don't yet have the patience or compassion for. I just want to be loved.

On good days, I am a goddamn mutant superhero. On good days, your planet, with its dependence on maps and clocks, is inferior to the homeland of my interior world. On good days, I maneuver the terrain of your world bemused by your customs.

*   *   *

“You know, you don't have to use that word—
disabled
.” My new Portland therapist frowns. She looks vaguely like my mom, but she's much meaner. I told her early on to give it to me straight; I can take it, I said. I've been on the proverbial couch since middle school—give me your best shot. “I know a man, whatshisname, he ran for office here … Roy! Oh, Roy, well, Roy has one hand, he lost the other in an accident, and he says, ‘I'm not disabled. Fuck disabled.' He has an artificial hand. He can do pretty much whatever he wants.”

It's important to me that the word
disabled
validates, in a very physical manner, my previously nebulous cloud of internal neurological symptoms. It is a very stable word; an assertive, clear word for
cannot
. As someone with an invisible disability, I use this uncomfortable word in part because it's difficult.
Disabled
says yes, this is real. It says you cannot see it, but it is here and it can see you. Identifying as disabled also means that I carry all of the connotations of the word, none of them positive: helpless, damaged, et cetera.

I'm looking for a word that doesn't exist yet. I'm looking for a word that unifies as it implies exclusivity. Having spent most of my adolescent and young adult life studiously, preciously, avoiding labels, I find myself in my late twenties on the hunt for one.

I have a word for the kind of person who I am not—
neurotypical
—which would imply that I have a word for the kind of person who I am—
neurodiverse
—but while it's incredibly broad (encompassing, as the term implies, anyone and everyone whose brain functions differently from the norm), it's also overtly clinical. Whether the word is coined, like
neurodiverse
, or is a more charged word reclaimed from its negative connotation (like
crip
or
mad
), words about disability are used to compartmentalize more than unify.

I want a word that is a home address. I am looking for a name that pushes the role of language about disability outside of the binary of
can
versus
can't.
How do I find a word that simultaneously communicates strength and weakness? A word that recognizes that they are not parallel traits but instead shaped more like a double helix? Ability and inability are two hands belonging to one person, each shaking the other. I read in my phenomenology class that when you shake one hand with your other hand, it's impossible to feel each hand individually clasping the other. You can see it, so you know it must be true, but you cannot feel the press of one palm independent from the press of your other palm. I am looking for a word for my body that articulates the intractable, invisible link between my weakness and my strength. I want to make it linguistically impossible for me to feel one without feeling the other.

 

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