Head Case (6 page)

“Thanks, man.”

I leave the campus with my acceptance letter in hand. I can't believe that someone's actually going to let me go to college.

 

2000

Redlands, California

The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies was founded in 1969 by a group of young college professors who went into the woods to be greeted by a vision: an intentional academic living and learning community where each participant would be responsible for his or her own education. At the beginning of each semester, all of the students would write contracts between themselves and their professors for the semester, stating their individualized goals and intentions for the class, as well as any part of the professor's previously established syllabus they wished to substitute or tweak. Students and professors would also have the opportunity to propose classes to be taught. Grades would be banished in favor of written evaluations. In turn, at the end of the semester each student would write a written evaluation for the professor. Students would come together once a week to discuss any living conflicts in the two adjacent dorms that would come to house them. These conflicts would be hashed out and resolved via consensus. No one would leave until everyone agreed.

We hold community meetings once a week to decide on everything from the alcohol policy to how best to get rid of the rats in the shared kitchen. I write out a contract stating my academic intentions and how I plan to fulfill them—classes I plan to take on writing and theater, independent studies, special projects. My self-constructed degree is in “integrating writing and performance.” I contract to write and perform a solo theater piece as my thesis. Since I'm also in the University of Redlands Creative Writing Department, I'll have to put together a poetry collection as well. Redlands is the host university. Johnston students are an independent entity, generally feared and loathed by the larger population of the university, but they are permitted to take the more traditional offerings of the larger university as they like.

My contract goes to a committee of teachers, who meet with me to decide if it will pass. They make me add a science class, but otherwise I'm given the green light. Three years later, we will meet again. I receive written evaluations from each professor, and in turn I write a class evaluation for each of them. There is no structured math requirement.

Redlands is home to a highly regarded music school, where I take so many music history courses that by the beginning of my junior year one of the professors pulls me aside to tell me that I'm already halfway to fulfilling a music minor. All that I'd have to do to finish it is sign up for music lessons; she suggests singing because it doesn't require renting an instrument from the school. I'm a terrible singer, but I enjoy singing and I'd like to get better at it, so I sign up. I get along well with my voice teacher, an Austrian opera singer who only wears black. After my first private lesson with him, he says to me, “I sense that we share a certain aesthetic.”

Despite singing “My Funny Valentine” over and over for several months, in the coed Johnston showers, in class, and in private voice lessons, I don't improve much. Nevertheless, I rack up enough credits to earn the minor. This is a technicality, since Johnston doesn't recognize minors, but it still feels like an accomplishment to me. My best friend, Matt, a natural musician, and I contract through Johnston and a Johnston-sympathizing music professor to make an album together. We call it
Palm Fronds and Piano Wire.
I don't sing on it; I mainly talk and scream and bang on things.

It's difficult to let you between my headphones. Something here must remain mine. I don't want to believe that what I can hear is the same as what you hear. I don't want to know about anyone else needing music on such a carnal level. I need to believe that this is uniquely mine.

In middle school I met a boy my age on the online message board service Prodigy; he sent me his tape of the Sonic Youth album
Dirty
after he got it on CD. Until then, I'd only heard my parents' music—the Beatles, folk singers, jazz. At first, I didn't know what that pealing sound was through my headphones; I just knew that I needed more of it. He told me that it's called feedback; it's what happens when you put a guitar close to an amp.

Music is a basic staple. I need it to get up in the morning, to write, to navigate the world. It's my main coping strategy because it helps me to move. Time collapses and with it any time-related anxiety, and my body is just a hanger for headphones and not a set of limbs to be negotiated through space. Music pushes me mercifully forward through what I need to accomplish.

I don't have an instinct to move my body in space in a beat, to dance, especially while navigating my body around other bodies. I can slow-dance with a partner because it's not all that different from following someone else across a crowded intersection. However, my connection to music is deeply physical. The texture of sound travels through my internal circuitry, tumbles through my veins, and fans out to all of my limbs. It's an out-of-body experience, yet this hyperawareness of my physical being as a conduit for sound is also the greatest sense of my own physicality that I have ever felt.

I buy my first electric guitar for a hundred bucks from another Johnston student, using money from my summer job as a counselor at a theater camp. Learning is hard, and I have more than one built-in excuse to fail. At twenty-two, I already feel embarrassingly old to be awkwardly plinking and squawking away over an instrument most of my friends figured out in their teens. I am scared that I won't be able to learn, more scared of the responsibility of learning. I am determined to try, though, because it's hard for me to imagine that loving music as much as I do has nothing to do with actual musicianship, which is like thinking that I could be a great chef because I love to eat.

I never learn guitar, and when I graduate I give the instrument to Matt. Three years later, Matt calls to tell me about collaging the guitar with magazine cutouts. “It looks great! You'd really like it.” I feel a twinge of jealousy, but I know that the guitar is in its real home.

My senior year, 2003, I take a class in alternative medicine to finally fulfill my science requirement. As part of a class demonstration, I'm hooked up to a biofeedback machine for the first time. Looking at my brain waves on a computer screen, the professor furrows her brow.

“Do you have a history of depression in your family?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Why?”

“Well, there are all of these spikes—we call them rabbit ears—in your brain waves.”

I'm already seeing a local therapist and trying to blunt my moods with prescription antidepressants, sleeping pills, and antianxiety prescriptions. I am twenty-three; it would be easy enough to say that I don't know my own mind yet, but with my brainwaves on full view I feel as if I've blown a secret by exposing instead of protecting my darker self. I have no way of knowing that my brain is keeping a bigger secret from me.

By the end of senior year, graduating students at Johnston choose a committee of professors and peers who decide if their graduation contracts have been fulfilled. Upon completion, the students are granted a diploma in their own self-titled emphasis. Alumni have passed down to us that a colon in the title of your degree will help on grad school applications. Otherwise, anything goes. One graduation, I watched a woman receive a college degree in the supercalifragilistic world of art. Amy, my freshman roommate, graduated with a degree in global domination and went on to receive a masters in political theory from the University of Virginia. In May 2003, I graduate with a degree in integrating writing and performance.

I approach the postcollege world delicately, like a bomb technician.

 

2004

Portland, Oregon

In 2004, after living with my parents for a year—they moved to Portland when my father started teaching philosphy again while I was in college—I have saved enough money to move out on my own.

The city of Portland is laid out in a grid; the streets are in alphabetical order or they are numbered. Neighborhoods are divided neatly into quadrants: Southeast, Northeast, Southwest (downtown), and Northwest. I start my tic-tac-toe game of moving from neighborhood to neighborhood in a run-down house in Southeast Portland. Last year, the inventor of the MRI won a Nobel Prize. It will be three years still until I lie down inside of one.

Out of college for a year and a half, after four years of believing that we are each special enough to merit degrees as individual as snowflakes from the Johnston Center, my college friends and I are all working retail. I work as a barista in the caf
é
section of a Borders Books and Music store in the suburbs, where I meet a bookseller who lives with several roommates in a house on Southeast Belmont Street, close to the Fred Meyer supermarket on Hawthorne Street. The house next to hers is empty; she writes her landlord's phone number on a caf
é
napkin for me.

My former college roommate, Miranda, drives up from her parents' place in southern Oregon to take a look at the house with me. The beige paint is peeling, and the carpeted floor looks like the matted fur of a rabid animal in its final mouth-foaming death throes, but we decide to take it because it's in walking distance of a grocery store and a coffee shop, and it's dirt cheap. On moving day Miranda and I sit down together on the crooked front steps. “I can't live here,” she says. “This place is falling apart.” She agrees to stick it out for the first month until I can find someone to replace her.

Miranda just started the first week of training for a waitressing job at the Applebee's downtown. To nurture their enthusiasm for corporate dining, she and her fellow trainees play a game where the word
apple
serves as a prefix in every sentence, the more often the better. I take no small joy in saying, “Miranda, dear, would you please apple-pass me that apple-pen? I must apple-write an eloquently worded apple-letter to your apple-employer thanking them for the margarita where they put olives in it.” This usually gets me Miranda's classic death-ray look, a look that could grill a rack of chipotle honey-glazed baby back ribs.

Somehow, Miranda and I manage to convince our college friend Kristy to come up from her mom's place in Sonora and move into our house, sight unseen. This is a testimony both to her loyalty and to her insanity; one hand washes the other. Kristy barely humors the existence of other humans on this planet. She is also the most dedicated friend I have ever known. She manages to find work pretty quickly as a dishwasher at a local caf
é
. “Works for me; I don't have to talk to any customers.” Kristy and I each take downstairs bedrooms; Miranda takes the wide loftlike area upstairs.

We furnish the house with cast-off items from my parents' garage and thrift-store finds. A month later, when Miranda moves in with her boyfriend into an apartment in Northeast, we manage to replace her with another Johnston alum, known to most as Jolly Clown Boy. Jolly sleeps in the living room, since we ceded the upstairs area to two nattily dressed male members of our next-door neighbor's church youth group. We're not really sure how they got here. The house is becoming its own organic being, taking hostages. The house wants what the house wants. It gets bigger and bigger, collecting more people and incorporating them into itself, like a snowball gathering weight and speed just before an avalanche. Months go by in strings of days turned to weeks, and none of us outwardly notice the rate at which our descent from peak to valley is accelerating.

Kristy and I try to keep peace in our home, but the gentlemen upstairs begin to test our patience. As much as we try, they cannot seem to forgive us our sins (Kristy's: being queer; mine: being Jewish), and I cannot forgive them for dressing like the pro-life love children of Paul Bunyan and Oscar Wilde. “Hipster Christians!” Kristy hisses in whispers in the kitchen as she and I take turns warming our hands over the stove. The damp Portland winter has seeped into the house; we wear our coats inside because the heat is unreliable and if you plug in more than one space heater at a time the electricity goes out. “We are open-minded,” I intone solemnly, like a monk's chanted prayer.

I change my tune when one of the Hipster Christians is obliged to explain to me that all Jews have money. “Look at this fucking place!” I scream on the front porch. “Do you think I
choose
to live here out of
charity
?”

“Well, the Jewish guy who told me this was on the bus with me.”

I cannot speak. No words.

“The bus,” he repeats, for effect. Most of his recent conversations with Kristy have begun with “I've got nothing against gay people…”

Not much later, they're both gone.

Unable to garner the essential employment to fund his insatiable hunger for organic vegetables and marijuana, Jolly soon resorts to openly using everyone else's shampoo and toothpaste on a rotating system, “for fairness.” At first, we make a pact to return to the communal ethics ingrained in us by the Johnston Center, the “community living and learning environment” that we hail from. Eventually, however, Kristy and I become noticeably worn down by Jolly's apparent inability to prioritize financially independent self-grooming over whole-wheat take-home pizza dough. Unable to find local employment, he eventually leaves of his own accord, at which point we're unable to replace him with another alum from our college commune. Ill word must be spreading of our ravaged estate.

Kristy and I struggle to split the rent for a couple of months while hunting for replacement roommates. We take solace in half-price bags of Cool Ranch Doritos from the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne and fuzzy reruns of the medical procedural drama
House
on a previously abandoned TV set. We find comforting stability in the sameness of each episode. “I have to pee,” I say, and excuse myself from the lumpy futon couch to wipe Doritos dust off my jeans. “Dude, you can't go now,” Kristy reprimands me. “Five minutes until this guy's going to go into seizure. Pee during the seizure.” Begrudgingly, I sit back down to await the inevitable fulfillment of her premonition.