The Quiet Room (24 page)
After college Chicago became another place for me to start over, just as New Orleans had been. I did well at my work. I was clearly going to be promoted. And then in a small neighborhood bar in November of 1985, I met Sally, a girl I had known vaguely at Tulane. I had been in Chicago since August. I had had a few dates since I had arrived, but Sally was different.
She was attractive, she was funny, and she was smart and easy to talk to. Since we had gone to the same college we had something to talk about on our first dates. We went to blues clubs and to bars. We went dancing. She fixed her friends up with my friends and we all double-dated. We went out on our first date in early December. By January we were seeing each other four or five times a week.
Early on in our relationship I told her about Lori. I was worried. I didn't know how she was going to react. But Sally was great. She was sympathetic, but not too sympathetic. Interested, but not too curious. Willing to listen, but not too eager to pry. I was relieved.
Nonetheless, as Thanksgiving and the trip home rolled around, I got more and more nervous. Sally had only met my mother once, and she had never met Steven. I was worried that my family was going to come on too strong. I was worried that Lori was going to do something strange. I was worried that Sally would think Lori was weird, or be frightened of her or hate her. I was just plain worried.
As it turned out, I needn't have worried for Sally's sake. The Thanksgiving table was loaded with wonderful things to eat— turkey and stuffing, my mom's homemade ambrosia and homemade pies. There were fresh rolls filling the house with the smell of baking and pitchers of cider. Little turkey and Pilgrim and Indian figurines were scattered about the beautifully set table. What's more, there were guests there, and that relieved a lot of the tension. Our friends the Mossbergs had come with their two daughters, who were close to the ages of me and Lori and Sally. Having other young people around helped a lot.
Lori herself was more quiet than anything else. She seemed to be on a lot of medication. She slipped off fairly often to take quick naps. She and Sally chatted briefly about her halfway house and about nursing school. The whole thing was no big deal.
And on the way home Sally surprised me.
“Don't you think Lori should be a bridesmaid at our wedding?” she asked.
Sally's reaction surprised me. It wasn't that it was kind—I knew that Sally was a good-hearted person. No, it was that it was so matter-of-fact. Sally had simply seen Lori and taken her for what she was. I, on the other hand, had been devastated by what I had seen. For it was at that Thanksgiving dinner I really realized for the first time that Lori was terribly sick. And that realization was jolting.
My own experience with depression had made me less, not more, understanding of Lori's illness. When I learned Lori was seeing a psychiatrist my reaction was: Is that all? So? That wasn't anything to worry about.
My parents didn't know it, but when I was in high school I had been so unhappy that I had gone to see a psychiatrist myself once. I poured out to him all my woes, my fears about being unpopular, my thoughts of death, my need for attention. Nothing had come of it. Psychiatry had seemed like such a scam. I talked. He listened. And I paid to have him listen. Big deal. Anyway, now that I was older I wasn't so unhappy anymore.
When Lori tried to commit suicide and was hospitalized, I just thought it was a transparent plea for attention. And I felt the beginnings of a little tug of annoyance. Here she was, the main attraction once again.
Even when my parents told me Lori was hearing voices, I was skeptical. Hearing voices? Sure, I thought. Sure you're hearing voices. It just seemed too weird to be true, and just weird enough to be made up. It was something no one could see, no one could prove, and that would scare everyone. A perfect ploy for attention, I thought once again. I was actually angry that she was so smart that she could make up an illness that no one could disprove.
Lori was perfect. Lori was everything. Nothing could ever happen to Lori. I had had Lori on a pedestal for so long, it was nearly impossible to topple it and accept that something was seriously wrong with her.
When I had first seen her in the hospital several years ago, she had seemed sick, but she had still seemed more or less herself.
This time at Thanksgiving, however, she seemed like a different person. She was lethargic, and goal-less and aimless. Her weight was up, her skin was broken out, and her lips were all shriveled up. Her attitude toward me had changed too. Before, she had seemed depressed, but still accessible. I may not have liked what she was saying, but at least I could talk with her. Now she was refusing to talk, withdrawing completely, acting hostile.
But it was the realization that while she was in the hospital she had been mutilating herself that really got to me. Finally I understood. What she was going through and what I had gone through were not the same thing at all.
I had done a zillion things growing up to call attention to myself. Once I had even gone to school with Band-Aids all over me, hoping to be asked what was the matter. But underneath, nothing was the matter. Hurting myself had never been an option. For all my cavalier feelings about suicide the first time I heard she had tried, I always thought about it in the abstract. I couldn't really imagine people hurting themselves on purpose.
And then I got it: Lori was different, really different. There was something really wrong with her. In some ways the realization made everything much easier. I could take her illness seriously now. She wasn't just a kid like me going through some rough times. I could feel the sympathy and shock that my own disbelief had shielded me from before.
But in some ways it made everything much harder. It turned my world upside-down. The perfect Lori I had worshipped since I was a child was gone. In her place was someone I didn't know and didn't understand.
At that Thanksgiving dinner, my father did his usual thing, going around the table, asking each one of us what we had to be thankful for. When his own turn came he grew very emotional. We were family, he said, and family was all there was. We were lucky we had each other, he said, and we all had to stick together through good times and bad.
Lori had been a terrific big sister to me. She was always there when I was having problems. She helped me with my school-work, and listened to my woes. When I felt out of it in high school, and Mom and Dad were reassuring me with platitudes, it was Lori who consoled me. I couldn't face this new, odd, ill person.
When my turn came I mumbled the right thing, about how glad I was to have my sister home, and that she was feeling better. It wasn't what I wanted to say. It was what I was expected to say. What I wanted to say was: I can't take this. Get me out of here.
Lori Futura House, White Plains, New York, December 1986–April 1987
Things began to fall apart. My lungs were screaming for air. The Voices were screaming to be released. My control was becoming harder and harder to maintain.
Soon I began hearing the call of cocaine again. One of the first things I did was try to find Raymond. I found him, but something had changed while I was in the hospital. Raymond had never wanted to have anything to do with my illness. While I was in the hospital he never visited me, never even tried to contact me. Now that I was out and living in a halfway house, he couldn't deal with that either. I spoke with him sporadically, but he definitely did not want to make himself the man he was to me before I was rehospitalized.
I could still get cocaine. I had a lot of other sources around town. All you had to do is step into a bar, preferably one with a druggie reputation, and get friendly with the bartender. In that kind of bar they liked people like me scouting for coke. It meant good tips. Cash-and-carry was the name of the game.
And if I didn't have Raymond, at least I had Robin. She had her sources and I had mine. Together, we could always manage to stay high. When we weren't doing lines, we smoked marijuana in the stairwell at the halfway house, spraying deodorant around after us to mask the smell. It was good to have a buddy like Robin.
Still, I wanted Raymond. I was especially lonesome around the holidays. My mom and dad were traveling and I wound up alone in Futura House with two other residents and a counselor. I whipped us up a fancy lobster dinner for Christmas—years ago my daddy had taught me how to prepare it—so we had some festivity. But as New Year's rolled around, I began to pine for the comfort of a man.
Against all evidence, I had it in my head that Raymond and I would spend New Year's Eve together. So as the clock ticked in the new year, I sat in the pay phone in the halfway house, waiting for the good news that Raymond had some blow, and that we were going to see each other again.
The hours dragged on. No calls. So I began to call him. Once he answered, made some vague, uncomfortable excuses and hung up. The rest of my calls went unanswered. Over and over I dropped my quarter into the resident pay phone trying to reach him. The phone rang and rang and rang. Midnight came and went. I saw in the new year alone, sitting in a phone booth. By 2:30 A.M. I finally realized. I was alone.
Very shortly afterward came another disaster. Robin and I got caught. We had usually been careful about using drugs at Futura House. It was strictly prohibited, so we knew that if we did it there, we had to be careful, indulging only late at night when no one was around. But after so long without getting caught, we grew careless. We laid some lines right out on the dining room table. Of course someone saw us, and ratted.
Deanna called me into her office. There was no warmth in her voice.
“Have you been doing cocaine? ”
I was cocky. “What if I say yes?” I asked her.
No answer.
“Well, what if I say no? ”
Back and forth we went. Finally I confessed. Deanna was angry. As I left the office the first thing I did was make a beeline to Robin. I had to warn her what was in store. But Deanna was quicker than I. By the time I reached Robin, Deanna had already gotten to her and delivered the news: We were both suspended for a week.
Mom and Dad were livid. They let me come home for that week, but they weren't happy. Dad roared at me.
“So this is what you do with the money I've been giving you?” Mom just shook her head that I would be so stupid as to add drug addiction to my other problems. The week I spent at home was pretty tense.
Futura House accepted me back on one condition: no more drugs. I accepted the condition, but things got worse anyway. I was beginning to understand how sick I was. But I was far too overwhelmed by my secret symptoms. I kept encouraging myself to hang on a little longer but I didn't know how long I would last, and I didn't know how to communicate my suffering to anyone else. My anger was returning. I was screaming for help, but the language I was speaking no one seemed to understand.
I played sick games with myself. Late at night when it got warmer, I went outside Futura House in shorts and a T-shirt, but no shoes. I walked to the curb, put my Walkman on my head and turned it up full-blast. Then I closed my eyes and crossed the street, one foot in front of the other. Cars zoomed by honking. I imagined hearing the drivers yelling and cursing. Smiling slyly, I finished my crossing and opened my eyes on the other side. My record was six round trips. Then I got bored with the game.
My violence was escalating. I smashed a window. I punched in my closet door. At the Thursday weekly meeting, the staff made things very clear to me: one more incident and I was out.
At nursing school my performance grew more and more erratic. I wanted desperately to succeed. But no matter how hard I tried to stay in control, I found myself doing wildly inappropriate and even dangerous things.
I couldn't even handle bed making properly. My first patient was a woman who had had surgery just the day before. I went into her room, introduced myself cordially as a nursing student and asked her to please get out of bed, as I had to change her sheets. She didn't want to climb out of bed so soon after surgery. She resisted. I persisted.
I knew she had had the surgery. I knew she was in great pain. I also knew that I had to make her fucking bed if I was going to pass this part of my nursing rotation. I finally helped her out of bed and seated her in a chair nearby. I tried to make her bed as quickly as possible, but in my haste I caught my finger in the guardrail and blood oozed out everywhere. I never did get reprimanded for making the poor lady move. Instead, I wound up in the emergency room for bandaging and a tetanus shot.
I did all kinds of crazy things. Instead of washing my hands for twenty seconds as instructed, I scrubbed for two minutes by the clock. I went into a geriatric's room, and tried to cheer an old lady up by borrowing her cane and tap dancing like a fool around her room. I walked out of an anatomy and physiology exam because I didn't know where the parts of a dissected cat belonged. I faked patients’ blood pressure because the Voices were screaming so loud in my ears that I couldn't hear anything when it was my turn to take a reading. I was clever, though: I always wrote something close to the last reading on the chart. If the last true reading was 110/80, then I'd write 110/70.
In the first semester, I had just managed to pass my exams. This semester, I couldn't pass my exams, because I wasn't really taking them. I gave that job over to my Voices.
While I was sitting before my examination paper, I would hear the Voices whispering. “Pick B! Pick B!” they'd say. I believed everything the Voices told me, and knew that under their command I could do no wrong. I raced down the sheet answering question after question according to their instruction. I would finish a fifty-minute, fifty-question test in five minutes, hand in the paper and waltz out of the room confident I had aced the exam. Later when I got back a paper with a failing score, I was crushed. The Voices were fakes! They had deceived me and let me down.
Still, I couldn't study well enough to prepare for tests on my own. Was this really my brain? Was this really the same brain that had achieved for me a 3.9 average at one of the most competitive high schools in the country, and a 3.3 average at one of the most competitive colleges? Was this the same brain that learned to speak Spanish? That wrote papers the professors praised?