Missing the Big Picture (20 page)

My favorite beer is my third.

—Las Vegas Comedian Linda Lou

O
n New Year’s Eve, 2002, I spent the holiday with my entire family because it was also my grandmother’s birthday. My mother’s ex-boss, Jeremy, was recently divorced and had no plans for the holiday, so she invited him over and told me they were just friends. The weather was so horrible that Jeremy stayed overnight and slept on the couch. The next day, he didn’t go home. He asked my mother if he could stay until he found an apartment, and she agreed. In exchange for lodging, Jeremy would have to help around the house because my mother was sick and just out of the hospital. My mother had suffered from Crohn’s disease all her life and was in the middle of a flare-up when I transferred home.

Most nineteen-year-olds would be apprehensive about having a man they only met once come and live at their houses. At first, I thought stuff like that only happened in 1980s sitcoms like
Who’s the Boss?
or
Perfect Strangers
. But Jeremy fit in just fine. In April 2003, the two officially started dating, even though they had been living together for 3 months. He could spend hours watching Lifetime movies, which was a requirement for having a good relationship with my mother. Jeremy was the total opposite of Anthony, my mother’s ex-boyfriend. He had no desire to control her; all he needed was a beer and some potato chips to make him happy. Instead of telling her that she shouldn’t go out with her co-workers to happy hour, Jeremy would go with her and sometimes even pay for it.

Due to Jeremy’s presence in the house, for the first time in my twenty years, I could honestly say that my mother was happy. She had no more burdens; her mother was living in a retirement home, and she had a boyfriend who was open, flexible, and easy to get along with.

As the spring semester approached, I wanted to visit Randy’s suite at SUNY Albany just like I did at Geneseo with Diana, Vanessa, and Denise. SUNY Albany had twelve thousand undergraduates, and I would need to make new friends. At first, Randy said I could visit, and then he told me that Carmine just didn’t like me. I thought that it was strange that Carmine had such a hateful opinion of me with the little contact that I had with him in high school. I never really talked to Carmine in real life, only through e-mails. To ease the tension, I decided to write Carmine an e-mail and attempt to put the past behind us. He just deleted it.

On January 22, 2003, I went to my first day of classes at UAlbany. I was worried that if I ever ran into Carmine, I would hear his voice in my mind again. To ease my mind, I reminded myself that there were so many students at SUNY; the chance of randomly seeing Carmine was small. However, on that first day, I ran into him at the campus center. He put his glove over his face so he wouldn’t see me.

The classes were bigger, almost twice the size of SUNY Geneseo, and most of my instructors were graduate students working toward doctorates. However, I thrived in this environment. The atmosphere was less competitive and intimidating. There was less pressure—and I always did well when there was less pressure. My final grade point average for the semester was a 3.68, while my overall grade point average at Geneseo was barely over a 3.0. During my last two semesters of my undergraduate career, I would obtain a 4.0 GPA.

I also started working out at the local gym by my house. As part of my membership, I was given two personal training sessions. During the second session, I almost passed out from exhaustion. I thought it was important to exercise to improve my mental health. December 15, 2002, was the last time I had a cluttered mind, and I was willing to do anything to keep my mind free and clean. Plus, I was back on Zyprexa and had been taking it semi-regularly since April 2002; I didn’t want to gain a bunch of weight. I had previously put on fifteen pounds, which is a common side effect of the medication.

During my spring break, I decided to visit Geneseo. At the time, Denise was trying to break up with Rodney, but he was acting possessive and had a whole fraternity behind him. He would call her repeatedly, and once told her that she was either going to get back with him or he was going to throw himself in front of the next passing car. If Rodney called Denise and she wasn’t there, he would usually call Jody or Vanessa next and ask where Denise was.

A couple weeks after their breakup, Denise became interested in a senior named Tony. Soon Rodney found the number to Tony’s townhouse and started calling and asking Denise to visit him. Then, when Denise started to stay overnight there, Rodney would stop by. When Denise came to the door, the incidents became physical. Rodney would hit Denise and Tony would not do anything. He was too scared to intervene. Denise didn’t know what to do. She was told to document everything, so she kept a written diary of events. Eventually Denise’s father called Rodney’s parents and threatened Rodney with a lawyer. He even wanted his daughter to come home for a week to clear her mind. Despite Denise’s father talking to Rodney’s father, nothing changed, and Denise decided to file a report with the university police against Rodney.

Whenever Denise was in the library or out on campus, Rodney or one of his fraternity brothers was present. She always felt like she was being watched, which made her nervous. In previous semesters, she enjoyed the freedom of walking into a fraternity party and saying, “I’m a girlfriend”—meaning she didn’t have to pay or have her ID checked. Now she was nervous about having twenty-five brothers always watching her.

After she went to the university police, things calmed down for a bit—except that Rodney ignored their warning and would still call her. Denise would say, “Well, you know you’re not supposed to call,” although sometimes she would talk to him in the hopes that he would get better. But he didn’t. Denise’s relationship with Tony ended; he said he really liked her but was too afraid of Rodney and his fraternity to be with her. Rodney kept calling Denise well into her junior year and kept staring at her in public until she graduated. One time in the middle of senior year, Rodney walked up to Denise’s friends at a bar and asked, “Where’s that slut Denise?”

Many battered woman stay with these men because they see things in them that others don’t. I never understood why Denise would give Rodney the time of day. He always made fun of her and her friends. One time while we were hanging out in Denise’s room, a friend told a story in which a girl gave a man a blow job in return for a single cigarette. “Does anybody know a girl who would do that?” Rodney asked, and then pointed at Denise when she wasn’t looking. Rodney was very mean, but for a long time Denise still wanted to be with him.

Denise entered into the relationship with Rodney because she wanted to change him and turn him into a nice, considerate man. That would have been impossible. After she broke up with him, Denise learned that a relationship in which one side has to change is not meant to exist.

I did have fun when I visited SUNY Geneseo, but then the week after I would feel sad that my friends were so far away. My first semester at SUNY Albany was a little lonely. I was living at home and had gone from having friends only a dormitory hall away to having to drive everywhere. I tried to branch out and make new friends, but it was always a difficult thing for me to do. I kept asking Randy if I could spend time in his dorm, but he said that Carmine wouldn’t let me. Randy did introduce me to other friends, though.

Randy could make friends easily and had no problems getting girls to date him. When I was walking with Randy on campus, we would often get stopped by many of his friends. If anybody ever asked how we knew each other, we would just say, “We met on a crowded subway.” Once, I remember Randy charming an older female student by explaining what to do when you’re eating soup and a piece of cheese gets stuck to your chin. Randy wanted to know if it was appropriate to peel it off or “just let the cheese wiggle.”

Randy made many friends when he joined IMPACT, the Christian fellowship at SUNY Albany. He was never into drinking or doing drugs. Randy was conservative and spent hours on Sunday attending church, but he was still down to earth and liked having fun.

Even though Randy was religious, I convinced him to go to a strip club called Nite Moves with a gift certificate I bought him for his birthday. When I was twenty, no one could ever be a friend of mine without knowing about Nite Moves. Many people are against strip clubs because they see them as exploiting women. However, most of the men in these clubs are lonely and just need someone to talk to. Prostitution is immoral, but having somebody to talk with can help ease depression.

In fact, by the time I was twenty, my biggest fear was that I was going to turn into the main character in the 2000 motion picture
Pornographer
. Paul, the star of the movie, is a twenty-five-year-old with an unhealthy obsession with pornography and strip clubs. He cannot find a close relationship and uses porn as a sexual outlet. I wasn’t obsessed with pornography as much as Paul, but I feared that by the time I was twenty-five, some of my friends would be married and I would be spending my nights alone in a strip club.

At Nite Moves that evening, Randy didn’t want any lap dances. Whenever a stripper came up to him, Randy said, “No, I bought a sandwich and have no more money.” Afterward, I thought that we’d really bonded. The day Randy and I went to the strip club was March 15, 2003. I wanted to go on that day since on March 15, 2001 I began to hear Eric’s voice and on March 15, 2002, I began to her Rich’s voice. Randy could tell I was very excited and in a great mood. He thought it was the naked women. It was more that I didn’t hear any voice in my mind on that day. On the way home we hypothesized about what it would be like to put “exotic dancer” on a resume and what kinds of questions strip club managers ask in interviews. Randy told me that we were close friends. The one thing that bothered me, though, was this: if we were close friends, why couldn’t I visit his dorm room?

Even though it had been a while since I heard voices in my mind, I was still convinced that I’d been communicating with these boys telepathically. Previously, during these conversations, the voices had told me that Randy knew everything that was going on in my mind. At the end of April, I decided I was going to open up and tell Randy about the voices and that I thought I had been talking telepathically to Carmine, Eric, Tyler, Gabe, Sam, and Rich. I was nervous to tell Randy that I heard the voices and that I actually listened to them. I came up with a clever way of disclosing this information. I told Randy that I read an article about a bunch of women in a retirement home who were talking telepathically. I made up a list of characters—Sophia, Tamika, Gertrude, Yvonne, Eunice, and Priscilla—and substituted them for Eric, Carmine, Tyler, and the others.

I began by saying that one day Priscilla (Carmine) wrote Eunice (me) an e-mail, and they formed an online friendship. In this way, I told Randy about the last two years of my life. Randy wasn’t stupid and started to catch on about five minutes later. I broke down and told Randy about how I was suicidal when I was eighteen, and how my mom cried with me and begged me not to take my own life. Randy really couldn’t digest all of this information. I was disappointed in the way my friend was responding. As I was working up to finally talking about my near-suicide attempt, Randy interrupted me and asked if he could have my bagel. My stomach was in a knot and I could hardly eat anything, since even remembering the day I saw my mother cry made me uncomfortable and sad. Apparently Randy didn’t want my bagel to go to waste. My life was very different than his.

Randy told me that the worst thing that ever happened to him was that he was made fun of in elementary school. Randy’s life wasn’t perfect, but he did have a lot of encouraging friends, which was something I envied. Randy ended the lunch by telling me that he would take what I had told him to the grave. I knew I had made Randy feel awkward, since every other time we’d hung out it was just mostly for laughs. Then I started thinking that if we were friends, why didn’t Randy just tell Carmine that it was his suite, too, and I could stop by. Randy would never do that, and it irritated me.

I got frustrated with Randy and decided to write him an e-mail calling him a liar, a hypocrite, and a snake. Randy didn’t write back, and for the next month, we had no contact with each other. I didn’t like to leave conflicts unresolved, so I asked to meet with Randy in person. We talked on the phone, and he acted like nothing had happened. He said he would stop by my house after he finished work as a painter.

Randy was wearing paint-splattered overalls when he arrived. I wasted no time confronting him. Randy said he didn’t get the e-mail, which I thought was strange because I had sent Randy over a hundred e-mails throughout the course of our friendship. I confronted Randy about Carmine and how I thought Randy was spying on me. Randy denied everything. Finally, I told Randy that he was extremely deceitful, and I was surprised that he could be like that when he came from such a deeply religious background. Randy left, and he was quite upset. It had always been extremely important to handle Randy’s faith delicately. When I called him a religious hypocrite, that was the end of our friendship.

Randy saw things in black and white; and he rarely apologized for anything. Randy had poor conflict resolution skills. Even when things got rocky with his girlfriends, instead of talking them out, he just called it quits. That was the last time that I would ever spend free time with Randy again. Our friendship, which dated back to our junior year of high school, was over. Randy didn’t seem to care, but I was upset. In less than a year, I went from having numerous friends at college and friends back at home to having most of those ties cut. I had to find another group of people. I wanted to start a life away from the voices and anything that represented them. Plus, when I was friends with Randy and away at college, I was always the one who had to call and pay for the long-distance charges.

By then, school was out for the summer and I began my new job at Home Depot, which I’d applied to because it was the highest-paying retail store in the area. At first, I hated being a cashier. There were so many different types of customers: contractors, construction workers, couples buying their first homes, retirees, even college students. As with any job that deals with the general public, you come across both mean and kind people. Unfortunately, the most aggressive and mean customers usually stand out. Once, during my first month, when I asked a woman, “How are you?” she screamed, “Bloated!” My coworker made me laugh hysterically after he said to a customer that was screaming in his face, “Sir, you’re an asshole.”