Prozac Nation (19 page)

I began with the beginning. I told her about my mother and father, I told her about coming to Harvard and all that it meant to me, I told her about my writing. Mostly I told her how lucky I was, how wonderful my life really was on paper, and how I would fall into these spells of depression for no reason, at the least likely times, times I ought to be happy. I told her about the black wave, that the feeling was literally physical, that the sensation was palpable, as if I'd drunk a bottle of tequila “and taken some shitty windowpane and just lost my mind, that I was sure it was chemical. I wanted psychotropic drugs, I told her. I wanted her to prescribe me something that would make the rushes of misery stop. I wanted to break the black wave.

“Elizabeth,” she said, “there is no pill in the world that's going to make you feel better. We have no way of measuring whether you have any sort of deficiency or not. The way we diagnose people for mental illness is purely anecdotal, and then we prescribe medications that we believe will suit the patient best by trial and error. Since there's not a blood test to detect depression or schizophrenia, we just have to figure out what works as well as we can. I see from your record that you've been here several times this year”—she said this while looking down at green and blue pages that seemed to be my file—“so I would love to help you if I could. But I assure you from what you've told me, and what I'm reading here, that your problem is not chemical.”

“But isn't there some drug I can take so I can stop feeling unhappy at the most unlikely times?” I asked.

I was ready to scream, Give me lithium or give me death! “I mean, I have every reason to be really happy and I'm not, and to me it seems that I must be chemically deficient. It's not normal to have these feelings for no reason. And I have violent mood swings too. One minute I'm ecstatic and the next I'm miserable. Maybe I'm a manic-depressive and maybe I need lithium. I keep thinking that. I keep thinking about all those famous manic-depressives like Anne Sexton who weren't diagnosed until late in life, so they suffered with these horrible highs and lows like I do, when lithium could have helped them all along.” I was waiting for her to say something like, You're no Anne Sexton, but she didn't so I continued. “I just, Dr. Saltenstahl, I just don't want to end up a tragedy, and I think that's where I'm heading and I need help.”

“Look, Elizabeth,” she said, and her voice was telling me, My patience is infinite and unrelenting, and yet, it is still somehow limited, so just listen to me and understand what I'm saying. “It is not atypical of your generation to look for the chemical cure for everything. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all take happy pills and make the bad go away? We live in a drug culture, both legal and otherwise. But I'm not going to lie and tell you that some pill would help you when I know it wouldn't. From what you've told me about your parents, especially about your father, you've grown extremely detached over the years, as a defense mechanism. You don't need drugs, Elizabeth. What you really need is close, caring relationships. You need to trust somebody. You need to think people are okay.”

“How can I think anything is okay when everything seems so horrible?” I started to sniffle. “I need help.” Drugs! Please!

“I agree,” she said, shaking her head. “You are obviously a very troubled person and it's going to take a lot of therapy to work through your problems.” Deep breath, as if from exhaustion. “It takes a long time and a lot of thinking. It's hard to change your life patterns. And you've been reinforcing your negative relationship habits for a long time now. You say you've been depressed on and off since age eleven, and you talk about the impact your father had on you by leaving when you were fourteen. But I think the roots of your depression go a lot deeper than the last eight years. They start at early childhood and just get worse.” She shook her head in dismay and then smiled as a comforting afterthought. “Look, I really am sorry that people over the years have hurt you and turned you into a very depressed young woman, because like you said, you have a lot to be happy and grateful for. And I'm sure you will be eventually, but I'm afraid you've got some hard times coming up. It's going to take a lot of work for you to get better, and I don't know of any quick fixes. It's going to be difficult.”

“I know,” I said. I started to cry, and she handed me a Kleenex. “I really know.”

A lot of good knowing did. Thanks to my father, I didn't have the money to see a therapist—I was still paying off bills from the fall—and Dr. Saltenstahl, who I liked very much in spite of her refusal to prescribe any pills, was overbooked both in her Harvard office and in her private practice. Besides, as she pointed out, the people in the mental health department at U.H.S. were meant to help students solve short-term problems only, and to refer them to long-term therapists if necessary. That was all she could do for me. She strongly urged me to do whatever I needed to do to get into therapy with a rigorous, smart doctor. Once again, I had to explain that circumstances had conspired to make that just about impossible, unless I dropped out of school and worked full-time. In the meantime, she felt compelled to remind me that if I were ever feeling suicidal, I could go to the hospital emergency room and check myself in. It seemed that we were still operating with the same old rules: Once you feel desperate enough to be institutionalized, there is help available, and insurance to cover the cost; until then, you're on your own, kid.

7

I started out on burgundy

But soon hit the harder stuff.

Everybody said they'd stand behind me

When the game got rough.

But the joke was on me.

There was nobody even there to call my bluff.

I'm going back to New York City.

I do believe I've had enough.

 

BOB DYLAN

“Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues”

 

Summer of 1987. Dallas, Texas. The Oak Lawn section, to be precise. I have finished my sophomore year at Harvard. Somewhere down the road I managed to pick up the 1986
Rolling Stone
College Journalism Award for an essay I wrote about Lou Reed for the
Harvard Crimson,
and now I have a summer job at the
Dallas Morning News
as an arts reporter.

This is exactly where I want to be: I have been enchanted with Texas forever, or at least ever since I first visited all my cousins down in Dallas when I was still a little kid. To me, Texas is big strong men in cowboy boots, rugged Thoreauvian individualists, mining for oil as if it were gold, which it kind of was at one time. And Dallas is just the commercial center of all that wildcat fuel, one big country club in one sprawling suburb where all the boys play football and all the girls dream of growing up and having plastic surgery. Brawny brothers and silicone sisters everywhere. I'm not crazy about that part of the culture, all the materialism and wealth worship, but I go to Dallas thinking it will be good for me: Untrammeled capitalists are too busy making and spending money to be bothered with melancholia. Dallas, I believe, will be so vibrant, so spanking new, so urban-cowboy rowdy, so much the opposite of everything I associate with depression, so much brighter and shinier than all the dull darkness of the Northeast.

Of course the reality when I arrive in Dallas is quite a bit different. There is an oil glut, a concomitant real estate glut, the economy is depressed (not as bad as Houston, everyone points out optimistically), and Big D is in kind of a sorry state. Texas, in general, is
meant
to be rich, its entire culture is about good old boys making it big quick, and Texans, particularly those in Dallas, don't seem able to handle poverty gracefully. They still buy Baccarat crystal at Neiman Marcus on Saturday, even if they just laid off two hundred of their company employees on Friday. It's like watching a grown man who's too proud to cry, who is desperately stifling his tears, cry anyway.

Every house I pass seems to have a
FOR SALE
sign in front, every apartment complex has a
FOR RENT: ONE MONTH FREE
! placard posted at the entrance, and along the highways there are tons of half-completed skyscrapers, pink granite and silver glass affairs conceived in times of prosperity, which are never going to be finished. Cranes and rubble everywhere: They used to say that the Dallas mascot was a crane opening its jaw to the blue skyline. This is nothing like the city I saw when I was visiting my relatives who live in North Dallas during the Republican Convention in 1980.

Dallas in 1987 is depressed and depressing.

Still, I am mysteriously happy here, at least at first. I live in this grand and dreamy apartment that I'm subletting from a city desk reporter who is trying to cohabit with her boyfriend. From the first time I looked at the place—which is only $300 a month, even less than my weekly salary—I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, with French doors, a ceiling fan, a little porch lush with plants and flowers and greenery and a cast-iron and glass breakfast table, and the sort of vast, open kitchen area with blue and white Mediterranean tiles that made me want to put small spice plants and ivy by the sink and hang chimes by the window. The bathtub even had little feet, and its edges curved out like cappuccino froth overflowing a mug. I'd be living alone for the first time in my life, like a big girl, and I felt a certain joy at the idea of moving in. I kept walking through the rooms of this charming railroad flat, and thinking to myself, This will be mine, this will be mine, all mine. I felt like Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
the independent gal in New York beaming to be on her own, smiling all the time as she strolls down Fifth Avenue; or like Tyler Moore throwing her hat as if it were caution to the winds of Minneapolis.

I love the apartment so much that sometimes I just want to roll around on the hardwood floors with rapt delight.

And much to my surprise, there's even kind of a counterculture in Dallas, a small one, but enough to entertain me for the summer. I end up spending a good deal of time in Deep Ellum, a warehouse district on the eastern edge of downtown where artists and musicians live in lofts with exposed pipes and whitewashed brick walls, where rock clubs are as spartan and vast as airplane hangars and all you can get to drink in them is beer in a can, where you can catch groups like Edie Brickell and New Bohemians playing outdoors at Club Dada once or twice a week. Deep Ellum seems so vital to me that it's almost corny. Here young people are trying to build a scene from scratch and live in an alternative way as if it were something brand-new. Which for them of course it is. Down in Deep Ellum, it's a bit like being lost in the sixties, not because all the kids who hang out there idolize or idealize that era and bring it back with retro touches but because the Kennedy assassination so paralyzed the city that the sixties are hitting Dallas twenty years late.

I could have been happy in Dallas. Except for the car problem.

Having grown up in New York, I never learned how to drive, and the lessons I took in Cambridge in preparation for the summer didn't end up helping much when I slept through my road test. Without a driver's license, without a rental car, and without access to anyone else's car, I was going to have to do a lot of transit negotiating that summer. The
Morning News
would pay for my cabs when I was on assignment, but otherwise I would pretty much be at the mercy of strangers. I would have to schedule all my activities around other people. I would always leave things I enjoyed early or stay somewhere miserable late because I needed to go with my ride. I could never just run home for five minutes to change clothes or grab something the way anyone with a car could, so I had to plan my days carefully.

It sounds like a small price to pay, but that summer I came to understand why teenagers all over America associate a driver's license with freedom. I understood that without a car, I was basically trapped in Dallas. And when the big bad downs started kicking in, as I should have known they inevitably and eventually would, I'd find myself scared to death, alone in my apartment, with no way out.

 

For all of June and a lot of July, I was convinced that everything was really okay for the first time ever. I even started to think that I had recovered from my depression, that all I had ever really needed was a satisfying job that kept me busy, that all this sitting around and intellectualizing and analyzing and hypothesizing and contemplating and explicating and prognosticating all the time was the source of all my problems. Semiotics, not a chemical imbalance, was killing me. I just needed to stop thinking so much and start doing.

I wrote like crazy, at least two or three reported pieces a week, sometimes more. I wrote like my life depended on it, which it kind of did. My editors were mystified by my productivity, thought I was mainlining copy or something. They rewarded me by letting me write odd and unconventional essays about art and feminism and Madonna and Edie Sedgwick, or anything else I could come up with, and then they'd stick them on the front of the Sunday section. They nominated me for awards from the Texas Newspaper Association and the Dallas Press Club. They paid for my overtime, which added up to so much money that I was practically doubling my salary (and it was costing them so much that after a while the assistant managing editor who oversaw my section of the paper suggested I take some comp days instead). My editors were pleased with work and I was extremely prolific and conscientious. So they kind of let it slide when I started to crack.

Cracked in little ways. Walked into work at three in the afternoon on the grounds that I had to do some reading at home. Or had been up all night watching bands at the Theatre Gallery and couldn't function on no sleep. All of which was perfectly legit, no problem, my editor would say, so long as I didn't have to be in to go over some copy that day. But then, when I did arrive at my office, I spent most of my time returning personal phone calls or telling the other reporters about the latest man in my life, an ever-changing array of cowboys, restaurateurs, musicians, and college sophomores. I'd tear through them with such alarming alacrity that after a while I was dating brothers, cousins, entire families, it seemed. I found this all very amusing. I'd just blab and blab. People would look kind of entertained but mostly bewildered as if to ask Why is this girl telling us all this stuff? This is an
office
people are trying to
work
I think they sometimes wanted to say.