Instrumental (12 page)

And now I was determined. I knew this place wasn't the right place for me. I could not get well. Not with so many meds, so much madness, so much daytime TV and boredom. I needed to get out of there properly, once and for all. Get released, find some space, get home to my son. I needed to get well. But first I needed to show them I was well enough to leave.

And so I did. We did. That cold, ruthless, patient, clever fucker who controlled some part of my mind took charge. Happily. He was born for this shit. We started cooperating, not too quickly to make it unrealistic, nor too slowly to miss my self-imposed deadline of a Christmas release. I cried on demand, hugged my inner child, drew appropriately angry pictures in art therapy, participated in group sessions, came across with just the right amount of concern, remorse, anger, hope, contrition in my individual therapy. I sat through hearings and interviews saying the right things and then backed that up with doing the right actions. I helped others, cracked jokes with the staff, started whistling happily within earshot of the doctors, took my meds, got up early and meditated in the garden in full view of the night staff. I did everything I needed to in order to get to that Monday afternoon two months later in mid-November when they sat me down, basically told
me I was a poster boy for mental health treatment, they were delighted with my progress and were very pleased to tell me I had been given the all-clear. I could leave in three days, as long as I agreed to a vigorous outpatient follow-up course and maintained my medication routine.

My grateful, solicitous, faux-humble smile was Oscar-worthy. I even included the obligatory ‘Are you sure I'm ready for this?' routine, voicing my concerns. I got them to actually convince me to leave. Mark Rylance would have applauded my performance. I was stupidly proud of what I'd accomplished, and three days later strutted out of that hospital, ditched my meds and went home to bed.

A quick aside about the rather nonchalant ‘ditched my meds' bit. Do not, under any circumstances, do that. Not ever. Imagine squeezing a giant dollop of properly homemade mayonnaise onto a piece of raw chicken, leaving it out in the sun for four or five days and then shoving the whole thing into your mouth, lying down in bed and waiting. And you will come close to what it's like to come off psychotropic medication cold turkey.

It took around twelve hours before the brain shakes started to come. Everything began to feel very surreal, slightly drunken, not quite concrete. Over time that turned into hallucinations, muscle spasms, puking, shitting, heaving, sweating, aching, shaking, retching. I was out of commission for three days before feeling vaguely able to walk, talk, function.

I'd had such high hopes that I would get out of hospital, return to a home filled with love and support and that all would be well. That the lightning bolt of hope that my illicit music stash had brought me
in hospital would persist and flourish on the outside. But of course that didn't happen. I was a fucking liability, there were bills to pay, paperwork to organise, shit to deal with. My piano had to be sold for a fraction of what we had paid for it so my one potential lifeline was out of the window. Things felt tense, hostile, scary, uneasy and uncertain at home. We were all in the hole with no idea how to get out of it or whether that was even possible. Things had gone so wrong, so quickly, it felt like there was no way back.

Just because I had slowed my life down didn't mean the real world had slowed down for one minute. It had been zipping along while I was totally oblivious and I was trying to play catch-up without any of the skills necessary to do so. It was the first time I truly realised that good intentions were no longer enough. Even out of hospital, off meds, physically present for my family, I was a ghost.

Despite wanting one, I didn't feel a connection to my wife any more, no optimistic future binding us together or hopes and dreams to talk about late into the night. I had sleepwalked into this relationship, had a perfect, beautiful and amazing child and no idea how to bring him up. They say marriage is hard work. I had no idea just what that meant until I looked around and realised I had absented myself from it both emotionally and physically for the better part of a year, was floundering about like a sick fish out of water and now, having been kept alive in hospital but not given the skills necessary to do the same for my marriage, I needed to find a way to repair untold damage.

And then a friend of ours offered me a lifeline. A one-shot deal that could possibly mend things.

This guy was rich. Stupidly rich. Homes around the world,
private-jets-and-submarines rich. He knew us well, had been in close contact with my wife, seen what was happening. He'd had his own demons to battle back in the day and had gone to some place in Arizona that had helped him. He saw that I wasn't getting well, whatever that meant, that I hadn't even begun to deal with the stuff that had put me in hospital to begin with, that I was still a ticking bomb. And he offered to pay for me to go to that place he had gone to.

He gave them a lot of money every year, which was lucky because he had called them and they had unanimously voted to not accept me. They had read the medical notes and felt I was much too high a risk for them. But Bob, my rich friend, made it clear they would not get another cent out of him unless they admitted me for as long as it took. And money trumps everything in the psychiatric profession.

Bob called me up. He said to me that without this place in Phoenix he wouldn't be here, that no matter how much I wanted to be well and happy and healthy, unless I did the work it just wasn't going to happen, and that going to this hospital for a few weeks would be a springboard back into life for both me and my marriage. He said I was unwell, and that without help it was only going to get worse. I'd spent the previous afternoon holding an ice pack to my groin for an hour, attempting to summon up the courage to castrate myself, so he had no argument from me.

And so, once again, I packed my bag, left my family and boarded a plane to indulge in a little US-style therapy in Phoenix.

TRACK TWELVE

Mozart, Symphony No. 41 (‘Jupiter'), Fourth Movement

Sir Charles Mackerras, Conductor

The world's most famous composer. It's quite an achievement and yet somehow one feels Mozart wouldn't have given two fucks. Bringing a whole new definition to the word ‘genius' (composing from the age of five, touring from six, able to speak fifteen languages, writing forty-one symphonies, twenty-seven piano concertos, numerous operas, chamber music and sonatas etc etc), the depth of Mozart's monumental talent was only matched by the length of his name, Johannes Theophilus Amadeus Gottlieb Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Sigismundus Mozart.

Three years before he died at the age of thirty-five, Mozart composed his greatest and last symphony – his forty-first (it was christened the ‘Jupiter' twenty-six years after his death in a piece of marketing spin that had nothing to do with Mozart himself). He composed it in sixteen days and it represents the sum total of his mastery of composition. At the same time he wrote both
his thirty-ninth and fortieth symphonies; three enduring masterpieces written within days of one another and in such a short period of time gives us an idea of the outrageousness of Mozart's skills.

Right at the end of the last movement of the forty-first he opens the final coda with a five-part fugue – an astonishing, miraculous piece of orchestral writing that has never been bettered. Imagine the same theme being played five times over but with each one entering after a delayed start, and all of them need to combine together to make perfect harmonic sense with a hundred musicians playing at full pelt. He waits until the last forty-five seconds of the whole symphony before doing it (because it's the musical equivalent of juggling fifteen chainsaws and any longer is just about impossible) and it's the reason I could never play an orchestral instrument – I would literally piss myself with joy and collapse if I were ever to play that on stage.

There are two quotes that are apposite here, the first by Schumann, who said of the ‘Jupiter': ‘There are things in the world about which nothing can be said, as Mozart's “Jupiter” Symphony with the fugue, much of Shakespeare, and pages of Beethoven.'

And regarding that bloody fugue, which is still just about the most exciting thing I've ever heard an orchestra play, Sir Donald Francis Tovey wrote:

‘Each movement of the “Jupiter” symphony is a powerful and surpassing creation. The capstone of this towering symphony is of course the fugue-finale, wherein the polyphonic workmanship of the old fugue is used, with other material, for the perfect consummation of the composer's thought, and the eternal glory of art. There is indeed no match for this movement in the literature of the symphony. There are other compositions – a few equal to it in interest – but
there are no others like it, even in Mozart. That is his symphonic apotheosis – the fugue-finale of the “Jupiter” symphony.'

AMERICA'S ALWAYS A BIT BIGGER
, brasher, more in your face than anywhere else. The same is true of their mental health industry. Having successfully navigated their landing card (I don't have affiliations with the Nazi party and haven't yet participated in genocide or nuclear weapons manufacturing, but the drug addiction and mental illness questions were treated with some poetic licence). I was met at Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport by two stupidly big dudes in Stetsons and driven to what looked like a prison. Security guards with Tasers, truncheons and mace patrolling around, obligatory Ray-Bans and failed-cop-attitude as much a part of their uniform as their lack of compassion and steroid-induced biceps. Which was like a red rag to a bull for me. I was instantly aggressive, full of piss and vinegar, provocative, obtuse, violent. Bizarrely, I felt these guys could handle my misdirected anger, being armed and all, and I just let go. It all came out. I gave them everything I had and then some.

Intake, in fact the whole admissions process, was harsh – it was like boot camp for nutjobs. I made it harsher. Everything was taken. And I mean everything. Books, music, phones, cash, keys, passport – all removed. Strip-searches, blood tests, urine tests, psychometric evaluations, endless questionnaires, interviews, interrogations. I was given new meds (no idea which) and told that before I would be allowed to join the rest of the patients I would spend the usual three days in a room by the nurses' station, with a bodyguard for my own
protection within arm's reach of me at all times. This was standard procedure that everyone underwent upon admission. Only it wasn't the usual three days. I spent seventeen days in that room (a record, they've since told me), howling, yelling, raging, trying to fuck myself up in every way I could. It got so bad (certain things, certain levels of violence and dysfunction I cannot bring myself to write about here) that after a couple of weeks of this they were willing to say goodbye to Bob's yearly donations and involve the police. I was to be picked up, arrested, and taken to a federal psychiatric institution where there was ‘an outside chance you'll make it out within a year or two'.

Handy hint – should you ever want someone like me (a petulant, lost, frightened, psychopathic egomaniac) to cooperate fully and immediately, simply mention the words ‘federal' and ‘institution' and bring a straitjacket into the room and lay it out on the bed. I have never snapped out of something so quickly.

I genuinely hit my knees and begged them not to take me. I talked as fast and as honestly as I could in between sobs, and finally was granted a twenty-four-hour reprieve. One last chance. A one-shot deal. Any hint of being a dickhead and I would be lost in the system, away from anyone and everyone I knew and out of commission for a long time. They could do that with one phone call.

A couple of days later they could see they'd got through to me. Whatever resistance I'd had left had been ripped out of me and I was allowed to join the others. The weirdest, most motley crew of individuals imaginable, and all of them were completely lovely. Some were wearing stickers saying ‘men only' (raging sex addicts who were not
allowed to speak to any women, ever); some were stupidly young (seventeen-year-old boys and girls who were part of the OxyContin epidemic); some were decent, handsome, wealthy businessmen and women; some were broke, homeless guys off the street; all were kind, all seemed to be open to the idea that they could get well.

And so it began. I listened for a few days without joining in or speaking in any of the group meetings or therapy sessions. I watched and waited and looked for the trap, the con, the reason why this wouldn't work for me. I had had no hope for so long I just couldn't see things differently. But ever so slowly, something began to lift and there was a creeping sense of safety emerging each day.

And that is where things finally, miraculously, began to turn around.

I don't know if it was osmosis, or simply tiredness. Perhaps it was that they had weaned me off all medication except at night time. But, with honest and decent motives, I began to open up a little bit, participate in therapy, talk to other patients and staff. And the staff were brilliant there – well trained, empathic, kind, insightful. There was a lot of work to be done, a lot of writing, reading, exploring, digging, discovering and talking. There was meditation every day, group therapy, one-on-one therapy, new US-centric therapies with awesome names such as ‘somatic experiencing' and ‘survivors' workshops'. I hit things with giant plastic batons, talked about what had happened when I was a kid, and saw that it was met with horror and compassion rather than disbelief and blame. I cried, wrote hypothetical letters to the gym teacher, Mr Lee, found some way to let myself off the hook for being so promiscuous and slutty when I was a pre-teen boy, began to understand how the wiring in my brain had been broken and
re-soldered at a young age, how I'd been in survival mode for decades, how although I was responsible for my life, I was not to blame for it.

Giant things started to happen inside me. Huge shifts in thinking and reasoning began to take shape. These guys really got me. They met my crazy with total understanding and acceptance, and they offered me solutions to problems that had seemed insurmountable. We spent weeks going back over my life, looking at my part in everything. Seeing where I had been responsible for things – where I had been selfish, self-centred, dishonest, self-seeking, manipulative, scared. Why I had acted the way I had, who I had hurt and how. I wrote everything down and made a list of everyone whose life I had impacted on negatively. It was a long one. Then we figured out all of those people to whom I owed some kind of apology or amends. Again, a long one.

There were institutions like schools and universities and workplaces I'd stolen from (stolen not just tangible things like money, but also time); places and people I'd gossiped about (apparently this is not OK, no matter how trivial it had seemed to me at the time); property I'd destroyed or vandalised; friends I'd ignored or damaged; relationships where I'd been self-centred or manipulative (everyone I'd slept with, basically); my family whom I'd caused to worry, whose lives I'd disrupted, whose peace of mind I'd stolen; friends, colleagues, acquaintances whom I'd hurt. Anyone at all who, were I to see them walking towards me would make me want to cross the street to avoid them, went on the list. The rule of thumb was that unless making amends to these people would cause them further distress (‘I slept with your girlfriend/wife/daughter, sorry about that') they needed to be approached and action taken.

The hospital gave me a phone and a computer and I wrote to or called every one of the people on my list apologising, owning up to my part in things, asking if there was anything I could do to make amends. Most of the people involved were simply pleased, if slightly bemused, to hear from me. Some of them didn't want to talk. A few of them were really happy to get things off their chest. This was not about inviting punishment or blame or recrimination. It was about making sure I could sleep well at night. About knowing that I could have contact, intentional or accidental, with anybody from my past without my stomach being gripped by shame and fear. And so, where appropriate, I apologised, donated money, paid back money, offered to do anything and everything I could to make things right.

There was a slightly Bible-Belt slant towards religion in the work we did there, but they dressed it up believably as spirituality and I figured who the fuck was I to deny the existence of something bigger than me that somehow made things function. It was a bit of a relief to allow myself to resign as general manager of the whole fucking universe and simply wander around as a part of it for once. I think they call it ‘humility'.

I was there for two months in total. By the end of it I had, miraculously, stopped hating myself quite so much. I'd put on weight, cleared away a lot of the wreckage of the past, repaired some relationships and found a way to live with myself that, most days, left me relatively calm and composed.

I'd been speaking with Jack a couple of times a week and was hungry to see him. I was finally able to show up now. And maybe
that would be enough to rebuild things between me and Jane and create a proper little family unit the way we'd both wanted to way back when.

It was a feeling of surrender. I'd somehow got enough clarity and self-awareness to know that I was able now to do all I could to get well, that I had the tools necessary to slowly move forward without destroying shit. And I also knew that there was no guarantee that those around me would believe that. I was going home to an unknown entity.

It was terrifying and exciting all at once. Time maybe to have a cup of tea and have a listen to Chopin's greatest nocturne – the one in C minor Op. 48/1 (YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, SoundCloud, take your pick). That's what it felt like: full of trepidation, longing, stormy emotions, uncertainty, restlessness, surrender and hope. All the things I imagine Chopin himself must have felt when, as a twenty-year-old, he left his home in Warsaw to go and explore the world.

He ended up in Paris because he couldn't get into Austria (his first choice), caught a dose of something from a hooker, was violently homesick, a bit of an asshole, uncertain and unsure. He wrote his first piano concerto aged nineteen, and in the following twenty years he changed the world of the piano forever.

He was, of course, also royally fucked by his incredibly dysfunctional relationship with George Sand, broke, sick, miserable, and died, in agony, of consumption at the age of thirty-nine.

Me, I was slightly less broke, monumentally less talented, perhaps just as sick, not quite as miserable and not yet coughing up bits of my lungs.

I said my goodbyes, thanked the staff, packed my bag, and flew back to London. No bodyguards this time. No meds. No hidden razor blades. It felt like a new beginning, and it turned out that's exactly what it was, just not in the way I had imagined. Not in the way anyone could have predicted.

I walked through my front door to my wife and son. They'd put up ‘welcome home' signs and made cakes. I felt like I was properly back home then. I knew I'd be a better dad to Jack from that moment. That I would be present and available and strong. I knew I would have to prove that to him over time. That after so many months of being away with only occasional contact it would take a while for him to learn he could rely on me again. Five-year-olds are sentient enough. I had to earn his trust again and I was fully prepared to go to any lengths to do that.

And so I did. I spent as much time as I could with him. And the truth was that we had spent so much time together during his first three or four years on this Earth, I had spent so many nights and days feeding him, walking him, soothing him, we had had such a deep bond back then, that it wasn't long until it started to come back. That's the weird thing about kids – they have a capacity for forgiveness that most adults can only aspire to. He had always loved me – it was inbuilt and immutable – and I him. After a few weeks of playing, singing, hanging out, we felt absolutely connected and back to normal. I dropped him off and picked him up from school each day, took him to the park, built Lego and took him to Starbucks for treats, read to him, watched TV with him, fed him, hugged him, generally let him know I was there.