# Brattleboro Stories > And to this day, the events that followed all seem like a distant dream. But the dream was real and was to change our lives forever. I kept asking Clarence why our world seemed to be collapsing and everything seemed so shitty. And he'd say, “That's the way it goes, but don't forget, it goes the other way too”—Quentin Tarantino in *True Romance* ## Brattleboro, Vermont *That's the way life is. Usually, that's the way it goes, but every once in a while, it goes the other way too* Things had been going a certain way for me since I was born—I had a neglectful, abusive father and I massively did not fit in with the kids from my school. Then, around the tenth grade, things went worse—I had figured out how to survive the social experience of school, and how to thrive in terms of grades, but I hadn't figured out my own emotions..I broke down crying in computer class and when my teacher asked me why, I didn't know. *Because everything is so meaningless?* I sobbed. He told me I needed therapy. And around the time I was twenty-seven, things got worse still—I stayed awake for one week, terminally high on my own mind, programming, watching *The Truman Show* on repeat, undulled by massive amounts of potato vodka, until, sleepless, my mind crashed, I called a suicide hotline, and cops came to my house and handcuffed me and drove me in their police cruiser to the psychiatric ward of a hospital on the outskirts of LA. Doctors monitored me for a week, interviewed me for eight, ten hours, and finally told me they didn't think alcohol was the root of my problem. No. I had to stop drinking of course, but according to this panel of psychiatrists, the root of my problems was I had a major mental illness that reduces your lifespan by a full decade, that kills one in five people by suicide (that's *twenty times* the rate at which people kill themselves generally)..also, an illness that's *incurable*, and that this disease is why my entire adult life was *fucked* (my word) socially, financially, and at work. This disease, they told me, *doubles* my risk of dying early from "natural causes" (their words)—things like heart attacks and strokes and aneurysms and just about any other thing that can go wrong with your body *and kill you*—if you're bipolar all those things are twice as likely to happen to you. Not only this, but I'd have to take medicine the rest of my life to help manage this disorder. They let me out of the hospital. I still thought I got taken there because I drank too much—if I hadn't been drinking I wouldn't have called the suicide hotline. It didn't occur to me that other people I knew drank at the same level and it never caused *them* to feel suicidal. But I stopped drinking, took my pills, went back to work, and forgot about everything those doctors said. And forgetting that I had that illness, and running out of my mood stabilizer due to the insurance companies, my life sank. It sank *like the Titanic, baby!*—and for my sinking I had lots of guests and fancy tablecloths and cupcakes and candles and dancing and drinking and drugs, and it all sank way down to the bottom of the ocean. Almost everyone at my sinking party died. I tried to kill myself—literally tried to *take my own life*. I haven't worked a single day since that suicide attempt—I'm no longer a brilliant software developer, at least not practicing. I lost all but a couple of my friends. I destroyed relationships with just about everyone in my extended family. I haven't had a girlfriend in years, so I'm no longer a brilliant lover of women, either—at least not practicing. Everything normal and good and happy went away. And all that's left now are the relics that I'm putting in this book. - - - - But even though usually *that's the way it goes*, in 2011—as Tarantino had promised me when I watched *True Romance*—sometimes things go the other way, too. And in the kernel of my suicidal catastrophic *collapse* of a life, from the tiniest spark of myself that was left among the ashes, slowly, slowly, over a period of years, things started going the other way for me, too. I had never heard of Brattleboro, Vermont, until I was living with my mom in Buttfuck, Pennsylvania. It was ok at first, then we started getting in meaningless fights. I wrote three books at her house. I lost twenty pounds. I got over the stress of the latest in a decade-long series of jobs that to me were a cross between a monster truck race and every medieval torture device ever invented..rolled into one. The people working in these places may as well have been eating lysergic acid and watching Looney Tunes while they typed their computer programs. I was in LA; Ohio; New York; Tucson; Buttfuck, PA. Then, instead of moving for a job, I decided on a change of location to help cure my ills. In 2011, I move to Brattleboro, Vermont, population 11,765 (plus one). I live there a year. This is what happens. ## 2 The first thing I saw was a Craigslist ad for a house in Vermont. No, go back further. I did a search on "places that are good to live for writers" and *Burlington*, Vermont came up. Something about the isolation and horrible weather and gobs of coffeehouses were supposed to make Burlington one of the top 10 best places for writers to live in the US. But there was something before that. I saw a filibuster in 2010 of lone Bernie Sanders, standing in the halls of congress, talking, and he was one of the first politicians who made sense to me in my life. So I was predisposed to like Vermont, to think Vermont was filled with people who made enough sense politically to elect this nut job. Then I saw the list of best places for writers to live. Then I researched Vermont. Then I found Brattleboro. Even thought it only has eleven-thousand people in it, Brattleboro is the second-largest city in Vermont, after Burlington. The Wikipedia page said nudity was legal there until recently. The people were liberal. They had more bookstores per capita than any city in the country. There was a picture of a waterfall right in the middle of town. Craigslist revealed a listing that stood out for being the only one with pictures—and the pictures were just of a cracked and peeling porch—but I looked at that porch for hours and imagined myself sitting on it and getting a job in town and walking the less than a mile walk the ad promised in blistering cold into Brattleboro, working some meaningless job, going home, and loving every minute of it because I'd be in a place my family had zero access to me, where I could finally get some peace, where the harshness of the weather would keep random crime to a minimum. (If you've ever lived in a major city, you know the first nice day of spring always comes with a rash of homicides.) I wanted to be, like I imagined I was in Tucson, somewhere so out of the way that no one was likely to visit me—ever. That was my first introduction to the house on high street—the Craigslist ad, the photos of the porch. It was the porch that really sold it for me. Walking along the side of some state highway into town to work my job, waiting tables at some restaurant, and walking the two blocks back in blistering Vermont winter cold—that's the kind of thing that gets me excited, living somewhere that requires more fortitude than found in the average person, hence the average person would be less frequently encountered. I bookmarked the Craigslist ad with those pictures of the porch and looked at it five times a day, just feeling how right it felt, in my intuition, in my bones. It was right. I wrote the people in some Ft Collins, Colorado house I was considering and told them I'm was going with the house in Vermont. - - - - I guess I ought to tell you that I had lived with my mother for a couple of years after—I hate the word breakdown—but after having gotten to a point in Tucson where I couldn't take another step forward. I had stopped drinking and eventually got eleven months sober at my mom's house, but I couldn't find a job back in Tucson, the IRS was taking money out of my account, my job had put me on half pay because they lost their funding, and I couldn't pay the rent. The mail carrier had some problem delivering my mail to the mailbox in the lobby of my apartment—sometimes I let it get too full and instead of being persistent, the mail carrier stopped delivering mail to my box altogether, even when it was empty. It was my fault—I just don't think about things like checking mailboxes as a normal course of mind—and because of this I missed an unemployment application, which, if I had gotten it and filled it out, would have provided me enough money to pay my rent temporarily while I continued to look for a job in Tucson. But I never got that mail until months later. I was stuck: I couldn't go any further, I couldn't move another inch—I couldn't take care of myself. A mentally robust person, an adaptable person, would have bought some nice clothes and found a job as a waiter (as my mom suggested) but I had no experience with that and to me, to my mind, every idea was impossible. As I have done many times—as I have had to do because I am maladaptive—I gave up my home voluntarily and became someone else's guest..or, one time, I became homeless. I explained all this to Mom over the phone while I was in Tucson and she was in Pennsylvania and I mentioned the idea of me coming to live with her. "Well," she said, "that sounds like your only option." - - - - I drive to Mom's house, changing a flat tire in the desert. The boot was underneath all my stuff which was packed neatly in the trunk, so I had to unpack all my possessions on the side of an Arizona highway, get the boot, hunt around for a tire iron—I think that's the first time I ever changed a tire. It was Sunday so there was no place open to get new tires. I stayed in some 100-person town in a little hotel for one night, fantasizing about working at the grocery store and living in my car while I saved money to rent a room in one of the family houses there. But the next morning I bought four new tires and zipped through LA to empty my safe deposit box, which I had stopped paying for. I tried to sleep in the parking lot of a casino in Vegas but it was too bright and I felt too exposed. I drove all night into Utah and saw scenery that blew away even New Mexico. I got out of my car and read a plaque about settlers trying to live in this river valley and even they had found it too hard, so they moved on. I'll never forget the sign at the trailhead of that overlook in Utah with its text that clearly suggested one "STAY ON DESIGNATED PATH." A human being, one of the most intrepid explorers in the known catalogue of living creatures, standing before a valley of infinity beauty, with some hardly visible path cut into it, and a sign that suggests that when you walk, you walk in this *tiiiiiiny* little footpath cut into the vastness. I understand it from a conservationist point of view—and if that's how you're viewing this sign, I suggest you switch over to my analogy because it's a lot more fun. A human being..who *stays on the designated path*..is dead. Please look at that picture. If the absurdity is not clear to you, stop reading now. This book is not for you. I'm serious. Go watch *Chopped!* or HSN or something. On my way across the country, I sleep in the back seat of my car at rest stops and become quite comfortable with it. The first few nights I fear getting killed by assholes but several nights in I feel safe as a baby in her crib. My axles, which had been a problem since between San Diego and Los Angeles, are now so bad they're lurching me into the next lane as I drive outside of Cleveland. So far I haven't lurched into another *car*, but once the lurching is so severe that I can't control my vehicle I pull onto the shoulder and call a tow truck. A state trooper stops, uses the opportunity to run my plates, and, finding nothing, makes himself completely useless by small talking with me about where I'm going and where I'm coming from. I know, sitting between Bub on one side and Bob on the other side of the tow truck cab, that once I pay for the tow I won't have enough money to pay for whatever is wrong with my car. They tow me to a garage—a guy they say is the best in the city. I call my sister Joanne in New York and she wires me the money. I pick it up in a convenience store filled with liquor—I mean not just a little liquor..this store is like the Cadillac of liquor stores—but with four months sober I didn't drink, I used the money to fix my axles and drove the next day to Mom's house. - - - - The first two months I was at Mom's house I slept and watched cable. Mom said I was in bad shape. I was. I had so much anger built up at the last twelve years of my life, which I viewed as wasted time doing software for criminal corporations and getting nothing of substance in return, culminating in my last job, where I had the most freedom and did some of my most interesting work, but for a company that fell apart due to a friendly but fraudulent boss. My mom suggested I write a novel. I had written one seven years before but I took her suggestion and wrote a character that on the outside was an eleventh-grade girl with a highly stylized tongue and a hatred for her life and classmates, who on the inside was a thirty-one year old, bitter, suicidal, murderously hateful ex-computer programmer who had a lot to vent about how jaw-droppingly stupid had been the corporations he had worked for and the people they were made of. I had a lot of anger right at my fingertips and I funneled it into *Things Said in Dreams*. I wrote three books while I lived with Mom. After I wrote the second, a story about camp counselors *Camp Lake*, I didn't think I had any more books in me, so I moved to New York to be homeless. I packed a bag and abandoned my car in a Manhattan parking garage. My plan was to find a homeless shelter to live in while I found a job—within a year I would be programming computers again. That's not what happened. What happened is that within an hour of being in New York, I relapsed on 11 months clean (by drinking) then found myself doing subpar coke in Washington Square Park, then crying uncontrollably into a payphone to Joanne, who rescued me again, coming to the payphone where I was still bawling, yelling at people who passed by, just: broke down. Joanne let me sleep on her floor, took me for a nice picnic lunch in Central Park, and I drove back to Mom's house. Oh yeah Joanne had to give me money to get my car out of the parking garage because I spent it all on coke. Why did my mom allow me to attempt this? Let her son move to New York with the intention of being homeless? Does that sound like a safe and reasonable plan to you? Maybe when your flailing adult son is living with you, different kinds of plans start sounding reasonable. She took me back in. - - - - I applied to Cornell's architecture program because I liked the architect character in Chris Nolan's *Inception*. The ridiculous mismatch in my admissions essay and general thinking about architecture and what Cornell's typical student is and wants and what role Cornell plays in that was like the difference between an ant and an elephant. This is me in the architecture building, talking with one of their professors: "I think of architecture as *interface*, especially visible in a kitchen or a bathroom. The environment specifies buttons you can push, and those buttons change your reality. People are a species who *massively* change their environment. We don't live in forests anymore, even though our houses may be in forests. We are a species who looks around us, at sticks and snow and beetles and snakes and says: *I'd like to have a jacuzzi right there.*" This architecture professor sets his pen on the table. "Let me tell you something about the average Cornell architecture freshman. They just got out of high school. What they want to do is *build a skyscraper*—that is their goal in life. They want to design a skyscraper. For the eighteen-year-old mind who comes in here, that's what they're looking forward to. This is a five-year program. They spend five years in that wood shop downstairs building models. That's what the program is. And at the end of that five years..*maybe*..if they're lucky, they get an entry-level position at a New York firm. But I don't think you would be happy with an entry-level position at a New York architectural firm, no matter how prestigious." "I would never take such a position." "Right. I just think there's a quicker or a more direct route for you to take to get to where you want to go." The professor leans in. "And these kids—who want to build a skyscraper?—they're never going to." "No?" "No. Their whole lives will be spent in that New York architectural firm *wishing* they were the one building the skyscraper, but for almost all of them, it will never be the case. But it's important for them *to believe* that they will..or else they would never finish the program, they would never work in the company, etc." "So you take kids who want to build skyscrapers and allow them to labor under the lie that they're going to get to do that once they get this degree when actually that is nowhere near the truth." "Right." "I think this meeting is over." Lol. Fucking Cornell. That's almost the exact conversation I had with this guy and that's how the system works, kiddies, in a lot of professions. ### 3 I got some of my spirit back after my New York failure and my sobriety failure and my failure to find a program at Cornell where I could use my skill and intelligence to learn to do something useful. And eventually I set up my unemployment (which I could have had going for a long time if I had just done the paperwork) and I researched cities that would be good for writers. And I found Brattleboro. And I found those pictures of that porch on the house on High Street. I email the contact on Craigslist and someone rather amazing writes back, someone named Tooler. She was pretty concerned that I was on the same side or at least sympathetic to her side of the Israel-Palestine issue. I assured her I was, and we left other details by the wayside. I scheduled a trip to meet Tooler and her partner. From New York I take The Vermonter, which I'd always wanted to take because I mean it's "The Vermonter"—it's gotta have like the coolest train name ever. Just like QT in *Four Rooms*, "When you're drinking champagne, you say you're drinking champagne. When you're drinking Cristal, you say you're drinking fucking Cristal." Well when you're on a train, you can say you're riding a train, but when you're on The Vermonter, you say you're riding the fucking Vermonter. Anyone can take some commuter train to Jersey—only certain people ride The Vermonter. Here's what I see out the window: the trains and car lots of New York, houses, open fields, the tall white building with gold towers looking like something from another century, then increasingly snowy, half-land half-water fields, then it gets dark, and there is more and more darkness between smaller settlements. Most people get off the train, then I make my *Brattleboro.txt* journal entry—riding and writing on the Vermonter—Amtrak's train, as they say, "to Vermont and points north." Here's what I write: > **December 15, 2010, 4:52pm** > > I'm in a new place now, seeing land I've never seen. On the train to Brattleboro, Vermont. Reminded that the past is only stories we tell ourselves. Ready to embrace my life, ready to not be poor, ready for my books to sell. Ready to walk, live, meet, love, explore. Ready to let myself let go of the past, of what I might remember, of the stories I and we have told ourselves about family and country and company and success and failure and school and everything we've known. Ready to feel there is great time and space before me, to know that my life will be long, that I am young, and will be now for a while! That every time I thought, and think, that this has been the end, I have been wrong. Ready to forget the past and carry only a very small set of packages forward, just a few people, just a few abilities, just a few expectations—simple ones. To be itinerate, to fall in love, to fall in love with the people I meet and the work that I do. To allow myself to heal and move on, and most of the healing has already happened. To let myself grow healthy physically, to love company, to allow my beauty to be, to do what I want for my own sake. Learn one thing about life every day, not more, not less (usually). Trust, enjoy, simplicity. Stop trying to know the meaning behind, stop being afraid, stop worrying, stop holding back, stop trying to pretend something other than what is (when it comes to the truth). Forgive myself for everything that has come before, bless myself with oblivion..quiet, distance, presence, simplicity of now. I don't need to tell anyone anything I don't want..don't even have to tell myself anything I don't want, about the past especially. I am an adult, I am alive, I am ok. Bless myself, in this moment, on a stopped train in Massachusetts, with the freedom to live in the now, to forget about the past, to feel ok and present and to love myself and love the moment as if I were the lightest being in the world, new, owing nothing in the way of karma, owing nothing to anyone's ideas of me, including my own. I don't have to explain anything, I don't have to remember anything, I don't have to delve into anything, I don't have to return to anything. Change, oblivion, peace. And then I allow myself the ability to actually love. Change, oblivion, peace. And then I allow myself the ability to love. I am new, here now, nothing need have come before. And then the conductor is announcing Brattleboro as our next stop, and saying to please move to the *front of the car, people—front of the car*. I close my MacBook and put it in my bag. All I'm traveling with is a backpack. My hat, my gloves, my coat—all insufficient for the cold that sinks into me as I step off the train. - - - - I meet Tooler and Issa at the house on High Street. Tarps are everywhere, ladders. "Abby's still painting," Tooler says, pushing out her hand, which I shake. "This is Issa." Issa shakes my hand. Tooler puts her hands on her hips and looks around. "We don't really like the colors..do you?" I look at the living room, walk into the kitchen. "No," I say. "Is she colorblind?" Issa cracks up. "I mean these colors are like..almost..but not quite..right," I say. "Like that salmon color..if it was the deep orange color in the girl's bedroom in *American Beauty*..have you seen that movie?" "Yes but I don't remember that color..but I know what you mean. Issa and I were thinking of going into town and getting a beer, do you want to come with us?" "Yes," I nod. Yes. I've got a good feeling about these two right away. We sit at the only table in this bar in downtown Brattleboro. And we *drove*—even though it was only two blocks away—Tooler wasn't about to stay in that cold any longer than she had to. Her car was a Subaru station wagon, old as sin, fucking..cassette tapes everywhere..a giant hookah apparatus. "I only smoke shisha out of here so if the cops ever stop me there's no pot residue. Do you smoke shisha?" "I never have, but I'd love to try!" Issa squeals, "We have ourselves a shisha virgin!" "I just think," Tooler says, "driving..and smoking shisha at the same time..is—" "The height of luxury?" I say. And she says, "Basically, yes." So we're at this place called I think the City Cafe, at a table in the window and we all order different sandwiches and trade them around so everyone gets a taste. We talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict most of the meal and they seem satisfied that I am sufficiently informed on the subject. The girls drink beer. I drink pineapple juice—such a transparent sign of an alcoholic: I won't drink around you at first, because then you'll know I'm an alcoholic. But you can't hide it: the inability to drink one drink and stop is just as sure a sign. "So that's a nice haircut," Tooler says, of the strands of hair that are sticking out of this scarf/hat thing that I fashioned on the walk to the house. "It's more of a lack of a haircut," I say. "I haven't had a haircut in like..years?" Anyway, she reassures me she likes it. I start to loosen up. These are not people who are gonna judge me for looking like an animal who just stepped out of the motherfuckin' bush. "So is Zha your real name?" "It's my legal name. I changed it from Matthew Temple to Inhaesio Zha about ten years ago." "Cool. Tooler is also not my original name." "Nice, nice. Are you gonna tell me what your other name was?" "Maybe when—or if—we get to know each other better." But it was a *when*. It was already a when. I could tell they liked me and I knew I liked them. Everything from here on out was formality. We laughed. They each had a second beer. One day, months into the future, I saw Tooler's legal name on a piece of mail but I forgot it almost instantly—she was always Tooler to me. After dinner we stand awkwardly on the street saying our goodbyes and talking about the house, guardedly, because they haven't made their decision, but it looks good for me. They tell me they met with someone else but didn't like him—got a bad feeling. Then we all admit it's too cold to be standing here talking and we wave goodbye and Tooler and Issa go their way, back to paint the house, and I go mine, back to the Latchis Hotel. I see the bar below the hotel, see it crowded with women and men, and there's an empty seat at the end of the bar. A brown-haired female bartender even sees me standing in the cold and holds out a hand to the seat, inviting me in. But I smile and wave and walk the other way. I had been mostly sober for eighteen months and I didn't want to start drinking again so I waved and smiled at the bartender's invitation and walked away. I crossed over Main Street, down a hill, across the railroad tracks, and walked halfway across a bridge connecting Vermont to New Hampshire. My hiking mountain—one I had seen on the map and gotten excited about—this mountain was in New Hampshire, just across this bride. I stopped halfway across and put my hands in my pockets. Up there, it was the kind of cold that burns the skin. Fast wind across the path of the river, blowing right through me, through every article of clothing I was wearing. I'm standing on the bridge reflecting and a guy walks by. "Is there a bar up here, I think it's called the Red Room." "I have no idea," I say. "This is as far as I've been in that direction." It was like *Gatsby*, even though I couldn't give him directions, now "I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood." I was no longer the newest person in Brattleboro. The difference, of course, is that I had no idea where this bridge would take him. He continued on, already drunk, lit with spirits and the illusion of warmth they carried. I don't know how long he walked, but from what I learned once I moved to Brattleboro, it was a long walk that way before you got to anything at all, and what you got to was a GameStop and a Walmart—there was no bar up there. ### 4 The next day I tried to leave Brattleboro and go back to my mom's house. At the tiny Amtrak ticket counter I spoke with a stationmaster. "I'd like to buy a ticket to Stamford." "Do you have a reservation?" "What do you mean, a reservation?" "You need a reservation." "I never needed a reservation before. In New York when I buy a ticket I just buy the ticket and that's it. No reservation." "Well that's New York. This is Brattleboro, Vermont." I smile. "What do I need to do to get a reservation." He sets this old-style phone on the sill between us." "You can call 'em. But you ain't gonna get a reservation." "Well, should I call them, then, or not?" "I mean, you can *try*. You might get one." "Do you have the phone number?" He hands me a card with the number on it. No luck. I call them, but I can't get a reservation. See, in New York, this train might have 10 cars on it..plenty of seats for everyone. But by the time the train gets to Vermont and *points north*, it has two cars..not enough seats for everyone. So you need a reservation and a ticket. I put up with some stereotypical northeast gruffness from the telephone operator and made a reservation for the next day. My ticket was still good. And now I'm stuck another day in Brattleboro. With limited cash. A hotel that made me leave a hundred dollar deposit because I wasn't paying with a credit card. I only brought so much cash with me so I did some quick figuring in my head and figured out that I'd be ok. I could make it to tomorrow morning..and then I'd have the hundred dollar deposit so I'd have, as my sister says, "a little walking around money." "So when did this whole reservation thing get started?" I ask the stationmaster as he's shitting his chihuahua in the Amtrak parking lot. "You used to be able to just buy a ticket and get on a train." "If you want to know what it really is," this guy told me, "it's some post-9/11 bullshit, Department of Homeland Security, you know, terrorists on trains..it's just a bunch of bullshit. Know that no-fly list?" "Yeah." "They got a no-train list, too, it's just so low key it doesn't make the news. That reservation..that's just a chance for the Secret Service to check up on your social media accounts and make sure you ain't havin' no rooftop parties with Mohammad Al Jazoo, you know what I'm saying?" He's laughing. "What's your dog's name?" "Oh this is Empress—'cause she my little empress." I pet his dog and walk off. I guess I'm naive, but I didn't think Amtrak and the *Secret Service* were checking my social media accounts when I made a reservation to ride a train. I went with the theory that this was a small town with a small train and it filled up quickly because there was high demand for the seats. Amtrak's reservation system had nothing to do with 9/11 or The Patriot Act. It was just, you know, supply and demand. But I'm probably wrong. I rented my room for a second night at the Latchis hotel. I got a haircut—one of the best haircuts of my life. This woman at a ten-dollar Genericuts made me look like a skater from Orange County—everything but the tan. I looked way cooler than I actually am. Feeling good, go back to my room and use my MacBook and the hotel's internet to work at getting an online job. I'm in chatrooms and some collaborative programming environment showing off my stuff but the former/marginally famous CEO (of a domain name you would have heard of) turns out to be fraudulent..just like the last remote supposed superstar CEO I worked for at Mom's house. I get hooked up with this guy who talks the talk and makes it sound like we're going to take over the universe together as father and son. Then I look at the code. It's *unworkably* messy—worse than even what I'd seen at Mead Research. I had to test an audio signal coming out of a speaker at his house in Nevada, while I was in Pennsylvania unable to hear what I was testing. I finally quit, he never paid me..just another in a long string of CEOs and businesses that were not exactly above board, but not quite criminal enough to get noticed by the law. No one cares about billing fraud or payroll fraud or not paying employees anyway..they're just part of business. Anyway this interview for a purportedly sweet software job with this millionaire boss over chatrooms in my hotel room went as usual with these sorts of things. The guy wants me to do the work for free..saying he'll have a bunch of guys do it, submit their work, and he'll pay whoever does the best job. No thank you. He probably never pays anyone. - - - - I figured doing programming work for free was more expensive, net-net, than drinking my ass off, so I went downstairs to the bar next to the Latchis. I sit on a stool at the bar. (Let's just cut forward about four hours.) There's a guy named Will sitting next to me. We're talking about smoking crack. Will is saying things like, "You *have* to smoke crack every once in a while." And I say, "But then stop." And Will and I would look at each other and laugh and point at each other. *You can't smoke crack all the time.* (Then you're a crackhead.) *But you have to smoke crack from time to time.* This was the essence of our conversation. The bartender was looking at us and shaking his head. "You want a cigarette?" "Yeah." So me and my new friend Will, the artist's assistant, go outside in sub-arctic freezing fucking cold temperatures. He assembles rollies in fingerless gloves, sharing with me while we each catalogue all the drugs we've done and how much each one fucked up our lives, with a special emphasis of respect for this last aspect. Some hot girls bum rollies from Will. They're like fifteen. We keep them at a distance. We talk to them, but we keep our little space separate from their little space. Contrary to the shit guys talk, every thirteen-to-fifteen girl is not out on the town scouring the sidewalks for old men to fuck. But contrary to *that*, you do have your fifteens who wanna get fucked and they don't care if you're thirty-three or thirty-*eight*. Will and I stayed away from those girls. But we looked and we talked shit, and they talked it right back, about going up to my hotel room and could we get them some alcohol and they were all dressed for Florida—fishnets and short-sleeved shirts and Will and I were like these girls must be from out of town. But that's not it—girls dress like that in any weather just to get your attention. It's a life-threatening occupation. I tell Will about this jackmonkey who was refusing to hire me earlier because I didn't know Ruby and I was like: *Did you read my résumé?* It doesn't say Ruby anywhere on there. "The guy's like: It doesn't make much sense for you to lead our Ruby team if you've never done Ruby before. And I'm like: Read my fucking résumé. I'm not a Ruby programmer. I'm not about to *become* a Ruby programmer. And the guy's like well you're the most experienced developer in my résumé pile so I want you to lead this Ruby team. And I'm like: *Read my lips. No new taxes.* I'm not learning Ruby for you. Fuck Ruby. There's too many programming languages now anyway." "Ready for a drink?" "Yeah." And that was pretty much our night. Drinks. Crack. Cigarettes. Dope-looking fifteen year olds in miniskirts hanging by the door to a bar they can't get inside. Will had a certain night he stopped in Brattleboro on the way home, so for a while I'd always meet him for drinks on that night. "So where are you girls from?" "We're just passing through." "Anyway tell me about the bear." "Right," Will says, flicking this sparking rollie cigarette butt across the street. "That's why I have the gun. My wife and I drove here from fuckin' California, man. Now our house is—up that mountain—" Will is panting telling me the story. The air is so cold it's hard to breathe. "So we're at the end of a very end of a..very very end of a street..it's not even a street..it's just a dirt road..it's not even really a road..and one night I come out on the porch to smoke and there's this bear on the porch." "Black or brown." "Black. There's no brown bears around here." "So wha'd you do?" "After I shit myself?" "Did you have your gun?" "No I hadn't *bought* the gun yet. I bought it after this incident. So I look at this bear..and he looks at me..and we're both like: this could be a situation here. The screen door was still open. I backed the fuck up as slowly as humanly fuckingly possible and I pulled the screen door. Then I pushed the wood door. And I locked that fucking shit and went back to bed!" "Have you seen him again?" "No, I bought that stupid gun and that is the first and last time I have seen a bear in Vermont." "He prob'ly knows you bought the gun." Will laughed. "One more drink?" "Sure," I say. He's the one that's gotta drive. I had read somewhere that David Mamet lives in Vermont, I assume when he's not in California, and I remember this stately picture of him sitting in an old house, at a wooden table, smoking tobacco from a pipe. I imagined that David Mamet and Will were neighbors, and that Will's bear showed up on Mamet's porch from time to time. We drink, Will leaves, and I'm sitting at the bar pulling out a crumpled piece of paper from my pocket and flattening it. It says: > (vt trip) > > $500 > > 11:33 am > > 51 new york >> brattleboro > > 88 latchis hotel >> (802) 254-6300 wed > > + 100 deposit > > $40 dinner > > $60 brattleboro >> stamford 12:31 >> 5:28 > > $700 > > Ross .. apartment > > Bobby .. xx > > 2:00 > > he's the guy I have the application for > > Will > > *[email redacted]* The next morning I got sushi as a special meal—talking with the server about dance since my sister's a dancer..she knows the exact train I'm catching and the exact time it comes without me ever saying a word..she can just see it on me. "The 12:31?" (Smile.) "Yeah. Don't worry, your order'll be ready on time." She laughs. I do the same thing. "I mean you gotta have train food. And the craft cart—it's a joke, right?" "No," she says, "I do the same as you, get a box of spicy salmon or maybe a rainbow roll and I sit by the window—do you sit by the window?" "Always. Planes too." "Good, or else we we gonna have to stop this conversation." "Yeah, you just sit there and watch Vermont go by and eat your sushi and then before you know it, you're in a different world." "You like New York?" she says. "Love it." "Me too." "You gotta have both, don't you?" "I mean for a full person—which I can tell you are—you gotta have the city..but you gotta have the mountains too." I smiled, and I nodded (the genuine kind) and I thought, I could marry this girl. I mean how high of a bar are you gonna set for yourself? Someone who's pretty and can carry on a conversation with a stranger, someone who sits by the window and loves the skyscrapers of Manhattan as well as she loves the mountains of Vermont?—That's good enough for me. I could be happy with that. And for the few minutes we shared before I left her for the Amtrak station, I was. ### 5 I went back to Bowmanstown, where I'd been living with my mom. We drove to Philadelphia and met up with my sister Joanne. On the drive to Philly, Mom thought she saw a UFO in 4m sky. It looked like a star to me but we later found out it was Saturn, or some planet, that had come close to the Earth that weekend. The three of us flew to New Orleans, where we met with my little sister Leona, and I got to see her holding her baby, my nephew Daniel (I'm an uncle!!) for the first time. That's a beautiful sight, friends, seeing your baby sister holding her baby boy. It kind of gives you an idea of one of the things that's going on down here on this planet. Then we went through a grueling process of Leona lecturing the car rental company on having the wrong kind of car set—she had called ahead and requested a safer model of car seat for her baby. I can't argue with that. But it did involve hours us of sitting in the car rental parking lot having occasional conversations with employees who basically told us it wasn't going to happen. My littlest sister Leona got mad at them for not doing their jobs (and you don't want Leona to to get mad at you—she was diagnosed bipolar because when she took prescribed antidepressants she went ballistic (she went manic) and going manic when you take antidepressants is an automatic diagnosis of bipolar disorder, because people who don't have bipolar disorder don't get high or manic off SSRIs, they just get less depressed). Anyway you don't want Leona to get mad at you because she will tell you off in a very cruel and creative style only shared by my mother. And by me. Also, that night, we did this thing that is sort of a family tradition, which is to get caught up in some intellectual or logistical problem and forget to eat, thus lowering all of our blood sugars and making us all less able to solve the problem we are working on—in this case, locating a safer car seat for Daniel. I think ultimately Leona just sat in the back seat and held Daniel rather than use the inferior car seat. Totally less safe than using even the sucky car seat, but none of us questioned her. It's her kid, she's the mother, and, yes, she gets to set the rules. We drove for at least forty-five minutes trying to find an acceptable restaurant. Mom was driving. Joanne in the front passenger seat, me and Leona and Daniel in the back. I was just looking at this child, this infant, and he was so beautiful—I was easily caught up in the miracle of this new life who was related to me and would someday talk to me..it's just overwhelming. When we did find a restaurant that fit all current diets (gluten free, meat only, omnivorous, and others), the restaurant was a disaster. The waitress spilled a whole pitcher of water on our table. Daniel was thrashing around and knocked over my pasta (which I had added extra chicken and other extra ingredients to). As the waitress was cleaning that up, she kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," and we felt bad for her and said, "It's ok, don't worry about it," and then she left and like an hour passed and they never brought me another dinner. I finally asked and the waitress said she thought when we were saying, "It's ok," that we meant *Don't bother making another one.* I went without dinner and they gave us a coupon for a free entree for the our next visit—by that time the kitchen was closed. I took the coupon for a free entree from a restaurant that I knew we would never be coming back to and I was like: *This is going to be a hell of a family get together.* We stood in the parking lot for half an hour while Leona tried to get Daniel to stop crying before we got into the car. Mom wanted to get to Baton Rouge as soon as possible so that everyone could get to sleep, and she said she didn't mind us being in the car with Daniel crying. Joanne agreed. I agreed. But Leona insisted on getting him quiet before we got into the car. Leona, I love you, but you should be aware that you are a very bossy person, not really a team player, more of a drill sergeant. But hey, I respect what a mother wants to do with her child. It doesn't have to make sense to me, you are the expert on how you're going to treat your child. And Leona, like us all, now, years later, as you approach thirty, you're cooling off. We drove to Baton Rouge, said hi and goodnight to my aunt Susan, and all went to our respective rooms. - - - - For days I sat around my grandmother's house, occasionally visiting with my grandmother, aunt Susan, uncle Bob, my immediate family, and a lot of the time I sat on the back porch looking up through the lattice at the sky. Even though it was bone cold in Brattleboro, it was warm in Baton Rouge. We didn't do much. Watched movies, ate out, and everyone sat around and marveled at the baby Daniel!! We each held him. A week later Joanne, Mom, and I were back in Bowmanstown. Leona and Daniel were back in Portland. And my grandmother, aunt, and uncle were left with their quiet house once again. When I was sitting on that back porch in Baton Rouge, one of my favorite places at my grandmother's house, I thought about my creative life and what I wanted to do. And, as is typical of me, I wrote down my thoughts. > Things I want to do in my life. > > (Make worlds, yes; we've settled on that general paradigm) > > I want to make a book that's so sick in the way that it draws you in, in the way it affects you. Probably I will have to do this several times, to satisfy myself that it's done. So at each point, make the most diabolic one I can, the most beautiful one, the strangest one, the most horrible one. > > I want to make a game that people give up their lives to play. A game that's so intoxicating, that creates such bliss in the players, that they spend their whole lives playing, and have made a good trade. > > + Maybe start with a diabolical RPG > > + Then make ^% > > That's what I want..ridiculous is an adjective I use sometimes, but right now the appropriate word I think is "sick". I want to make stuff that when you read it, when you play it, when you go into it, it's—and not in a moral way, not in a values-oriented way, but in the sense of its construction, I want to make stuff that is very far down [up/along] the scale of "what the fuck"..stuff that is sick. That was me in BR, spinning out sick, ridiculous fantasies about my future, writing it all down for you to decipher decades later. - - - - And this was me in BR, escaping the family, needing a minute of my own, borrowing a vehicle and driving to the closest bar to the house. There's a bar right there, a two-minute drive from where my grandmother lives. I go into the darkness, buy a pack of cigarettes, and drink gin and tonics until my alibi of finding some taco dinner won't hold up. I try to drive back to the house and find it's much more difficult than driving to the bar. I drive forever in both directions on the main street, turn around, repeat, and I finally find it, the side street that leads to my grandmother's house..and the street is right next to the bar I was drinking in, Ms. G's. I mean right there. I didn't have to go anywhere. This is a good illustration of family dysfunction, trivial though it is. Everyone in my family thinks that bar is called Mr G's, even though they've lived three blocks from it for fifty years and it has a huge sign over the door that says Ms. G's. My aunt Susan and I have even drank there together, walked under the sign that says Ms. G's to go into the bar and walked under it again to go out. And yet, if I refer to that bar in conversation, and I call it Ms. G's, someone in my family will correct me. "You mean *Mr.* G's?" I used to correct them and say, "Please, look, the next you drive past that shopping center, and see what the sign above the door says." But no one feels the need to do that. They stand their ground, remind me that they've been living here for fifty years and assure me that as long as they've been here, that bar has been called Mr G's. I told you it was trivial—but I think it's a good example in the way people's thinking is essentially flawed. Sometimes when we feel completely certain, certain enough to correct someone who suggests an alternative, we are actually wrong—and we have absolutely no idea. - - - - Back in Bowmanstown, my stuff had been packed for weeks, from before we went to Baton Rouge..everything I owned in a couple of Rubbermaid tubs and a few cardboard boxes. Mom says that when Joanne and her and I got home from the Philadelphia airport late at night, I was like, "I want to just drive right now, all the way, through the night!"—my Mom's point being that my life is filled with plans like this, surprises, feelings, and wild executions. Instead, Joanne and I chilled at the house for a few days and watched TV. I showed Joanne some movies she hadn't seen that I thought were must-sees, notably *The Edge*, which David Mamet describes as his script about "two guys and a bear." Joanne had read this article in Vanity Fair about the making of the movie and I realized, when she was summarizing the article for me, that she was talking about *The Edge*, which everyone, including Mamet, seems to regard as a colossal failure. And while I understand that it's not a masterpiece of a film, it has a pretty good survivalist story and I knew that Joanne would benefit from watching that story, as I had—her uniqueness, like mine, automatically casts *living in the world* as a story about survival of the individual, of the individual's mind and what it contains. We watched it and she said, "Thank you for showing me that." I knew she needed to see it. And I'm always up to see it again. We showed our mother *Blade Runner*, which she didn't get. She said she could see why others considered that a great movie but it wasn't for her. We also watched *Dark City*, one both Joanne and I like. In general, we lazed around the house, ate food, watched movies, watched *Ancient Aliens* on TV (which sent my mom into a miniature fit every time they suggested that archaeological finds might put a new spin on the history found in the Bible). Mom is a minister, and pretty cool theologically (so cool that if I said *how* cool, she'd probably get in trouble with some of her churches) but she does not like anything having to do with UFOs, aliens, and especially not the idea that what we call deities might be the same thing as what we call aliens. She tolerated us watching it while she typed her sermon in the next room, but after a while we switched to Bear Grylls—we didn't want to frustrate her, especially in her own house, our own mother—but she finds Bear Grylls ridiculous too. I mean, who wouldn't—the guy is like, "This is one of the most venomous snakes in the world," then he picks it up and eats it. - - - - We waited a couple days and then I drove Joanne to New York (Harlem). I dropped her off at her apartment and picked up some old drawings of mine. I made trips around the block in the snow while pedestrians cussed at me for not moving quickly enough. "Honky motherfucker, can't you see this is a sidewalk?!" Stuff like that. One example is probably sufficient. Joanne ran up and down to and from her fifth-story apartment to bring down framed drawings and a see-through green tube which held many more drawings I had done with graphite sticks. There was nowhere to park. A homeless man shoveled out a spot so I didn't have to keep making the block. Joanne and I hugged goodbye and I told the homeless man I didn't have any money but I gave him the sandwich I had planned on eating on my way to Vermont. He looked happy, and I was happy too—the last few times I tried to give homeless people food when they asked for money, they declined, fucking up my innocent view of homeless people actually being hungry instead of just wanting money for drugs. When I was homeless the only food I wouldn't eat was food that had a sermon attached to it. Like: sit here and listen to our pastor preach while you eat this meal. Or: sit at this table in the park and eat while we try to stuff Christianity down your throat. No thanks—I'd rather starve. Being an atheist is not why I'm homeless, asshole. And if you think "following Jesus" is why you have that eight-thousand-square-foot house in the suburbs, the swimming pool, the Mexican maid, the power job, and the seven-figure income, then you are mistaken—Jesus is not your god, but rather Anthony Robbins. I wave goodbye to Joanne on the streets of Harlem, fumble my way back to the highway, and head north. This is me driving to Vermont, to live—this will only happen one time in my life, my first drive to Brattleboro in my busted-out Toyota Corolla. I mean even with the new tires and the new axles (which were two years old at this time) that car had radiator problems and problems I can't even describe except in the company of a mechanic but it's mine and it's been with me since Los Angeles and it's wonderful. Beautiful, beautiful, the freedom of driving alone. Up through the small states. Night falls. And eventually I get there: Brattleboro. It only has two exits, it's that small, and I didn't know which one to get off on so I took the first and winded through basically the only road and soon I was in downtown, excited beyond excitement to park my car in the municipal garage and think: *I am in Brattleboro. I made it.* I was so excited. I thought of how wonderful my life would be here. Standing in the parking lot, I called Tooler. "I'm here, I'm downtown, I can't believe it, Tooler. So, look, is there sometime tonight that would be best for me to meet you at the house?" "Well I'm still at work, but Issa's home. She can let you in and I get off at seven so I'll see you in a little bit!" "Alright!" "Welcome to Vermont!" Tooler says. When I ring the bell Issa is out beside me and with a few words, in the dark, we're moving my things inside with military efficiency. Issa was no dainty girl—a real worker. We unloaded that car in less than five minutes. Of course, the cold and the dark was a factor—we didn't want to be hanging around outside that time of night. Once Then Issa disappeared into her room. I looked around my room. No curtains. Spare wood planks with nails sticking out of them strewn on the floor, and my six boxes of stuff, including an inflatable mattress my mom bought as a present for me and had delivered to the house on High Street. My mom has taken care of me so much. I looked at my hand weights. I was gonna do it in this room, work on my body, write my books, be independent, be healthy; I was going to make my life work here. - - - - I'm starting you out slow, but some of you might be mad about this book, especially if you're in it. You might not think I represented you fairly. You might think I'm wrong. You might be mad. You might be mad about my Tweets, my speech, my language, my dialogue. Because in this book when somebody gets fucked, we're gonna say *somebody got fucked*. And especially in dialogue, look, you're saying it, I'm just writing it down. So you might want to put this down if you're squeamish. But you know what, I spend so much energy adjusting myself to you all, and it's wearing me out. So from now on I'll be doing less adjusting to you and you'll be doing more adjusting to me, if you want to interact with me at all. ### 6 Tooler got off work. She came directly to the kitchen and was uncorking a bottle of wine with her scarf still on. She leans across my door. "We doin' this?" Tooler and I sat in the kitchen and split a bottle of red. Issa was not in the mood or too tired or scared or whatever. But Tooler and I had a grand old time. The fridge was full of whites. The counter was flush with reds. "Where did all this come from?" "My dad owns a bar," Tooler said. "Drink anything here. It's all community property. You do drink, don't you?" "Yeah I drink." Tooler gives me a look. "Yes, Tooler, I love to drink, I just didn't want to look like a lush when we first met because I really wanted this place." "Oh I know. I can read you like a drink menu. I could probably guess what you drink just by talking to you." "Ok. Guess." "We have to talk more first." "You're gonna be sorry you offered me all these bottles to drink." "Why, are you gonna drink 'em all?" "The red ones, yes!" Drinking with Will had opened me back up to the good life of drinking with strangers in bars and making friends that way. I had some wine with my sisters at the Christmas trip to my grandmother's in Louisiana, and of course I made my secret trip to Ms. G's, getting completely fucked and meeting a couple who tried to convince me not to move to Vermont, but to stay in Louisiana because they were under the impression that the friendliest people in the world were in the south, especially Baton Rouge, and that no northern state, even venerable Vermont, could possibly compete in friendliness. I didn't have the heart to deflate their infectious local pride (which Baton Rouge has in spades) by telling them that I'd been all over this country and, even though everyone has a different style, the whole country is filled with friendly, loving people. Even New York City, which gets the worst rap about rude and unfriendly people, is filled to the brim with totally friendly, totally conversational people. I have to admit that *I* am a part of the equation here. I can find friendly people in a graveyard, buried in their tombs. Everyone is friendly person who I decide to be a friendly person—who I decide to be friendly *to*. And I'm friendly to everyone who a) I don't know yet, b) respects me, and c) isn't trying to hurt me or work against me. I can count on one hand the people I'm not friendly to: my uncle Perish, my tenth grade math teacher, Joshua French, the so-called Chief Software Architect from Optimistic Solutions, and..I think that's it. You've got to be a serious dedicated full-time professional antagonistic fuck-up to get on my bad side. Even my dad, who has hurt me with his neglect and abuse and total absence from my life, I don't put on this list. He's doing his best. His best just sucks. But he's not *going out of his way* to hurt me—that's the kind of person I can't be friends with. I think that's rational. I'm telling Tooler about the night at Ms. G's. "So I get a call from my sister Leona and leave the bar, and once I find my way *home*, I then then totally irresponsibly drive my pregnant sister and my cousin—" "That's totally irresponsible." "—I know!—and my other sister to Walmart." "Did you tell them you were drunk?" "No! I hid that shit. I was like focusing twelve-thousand percent of my energy on driving within the lines and not inciting any police encounters, because these days, you're not worried about a DUI." "No." "You're worried about getting your head blown off." "Even if you're white." "*Even if you're white.* These motherfuckers these days..it's like they're *trained* to kill as many people as possible on each call. They used to have quotas for parking tickets. Now they have quotas for skulls!" "Want more wine?" "Mmm hmm." And Tooler and I worked our way through a bottle of wine and broke any housemate ice there might have been but there wasn't because Tooler was cool as shit and she didn't seem to mind me too much either. "I gotta take a piss." "You want to split another bottle." Standing, I smile at Tooler. "Another time, housie, this has been great though." "Alright. I'm gonna check on Issa." Tooler went to the master bedroom and closed the two of them in. I went inside the bathroom, which (as with all Vermont houses) was off off the kitchen. They keep all the pipes together to help prevent freezing. About the first half of the time I spent living with Tooler and Issa, I peed sitting down because I was mortified that one of them would find my pee drips and decide they didn't want to live with me. This is was ridiculous. Tooler was a total dudebro. Back home she had a man cave. Still, there was the box of maxi pads somebody had left out on the counter, a reminder that there were vaginas nearby, though probably not vaginas that wanted anything to do with me. I wanted to fuck Tooler. She described herself as genderqueer which is kind of like someone asking you what kind of vehicle you drive and you saying you drive a truck—it could mean practically anything. I didn't know if she was straight, lesbian, bi. I imagined scenarios where we were in the bathroom at the same time, one of us come in to get the Swiffer WetJet and we end up with her on the counter with her legs spread and my hands between them, kissing her pale neck and her grabbing my cock. I didn't think these things in a *predatory* way, but I did think them. Tooler's an electric human being—how could I not be turned on? - - - - That night I went to the coffeehouse (this was before we had internet at the house) and I Tweeted about a cute girl I saw, wishing I could meet her, or someone, anyone. I sat there, lonely, surrounded by lonely people, all on their laptops, and somewhere in all the tragedy and chaos of my twenties I had lost my playfulness, my innocence, my fearlessness who can say hi to a girl and not be so delicate that I fear the consequences. The next morning, fresh snow blocked in the cars—that would be Tooler's Subaru and the upstairs neighbor's car. I came out of my room to see, in the background, landlord Abby and upstairs neighbor shoveling snow so our neighbor could get to work and, in the foreground, Tooler and Issa slunk down below the window line so that no one would know that they were there. My housemates were in their early twenties. I was in my early thirties. I laughed and they giggled and I put my boots on and went outside to help shovel. I introduced myself. Our neighbor's name was Maggie. We shook hands with our gloves on. Abby handed me a shovel. "You shouldn't be out here. Isn't your car parked downtown?" "Yeah." "Are Tooler and Issa in there?" "Yeah, there in there." "Well I don't want *you* to have to do this work?" "It's ok. It'll help me wake up," I said, and I slammed a shovel into some enormous pile of snow. That day, Tooler bought us a couch and the three of us moved it into the house through the new snow. I spent the evening sitting cross-legged on the wood floors helping Tooler and Issa make posters for their Palestine protest in Amherst the next day. In the beginning it was fun and games between us all, sitting in the living room coloring in posters for the right side of the Israel-Palestine conflict, drinking, telling stories of our youth—which was kind of funny 'cause the two of them had a lot more stories to tell than I did, I think because at 23, all your wild stories are fun and wild, and by 33, you've had a lot more time for a lot more life to happen to you, and your stories are still wild—in fact they're even wilder—but they're not all fun. ### 7 It just massively snows the next day and undoes all our work shoveling the driveway. I start to see Tooler and Issa's point. As Issa hysterically laughs: "It just keeps coming!" And she's right. I've been in Vermont two days and I can see that. Maggie wants us all out there as a shoveling crew each morning shoveling the snow that is just going to fall again the next day? Forget that. Also, this isn't just snow. I thought I had seen winters in Pennsylvania, Ohio—these are on a different scale. There's a huge block of ice that fell right outside the front door—I'm talking two feet long on each side, solid, clear ice. Thankfully no one was there when it fell. Six-foot-long icicles hanging from the windows and the roof. The front steps were completely covered with six feet of snow. To leave the house I had to put cardboard down over the snow to go *over* the front steps to the sidewalk. I mean that block of ice—if it had hit you when it fell—it would have killed you instantly. - - - - And I guess I'll tell you this, not because it's lewd, not because it's lascivious, but because it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. That second day in Brattleboro, late afternoon, I was lying in bed not sleeping, just resting, and I hear the distinct sounds of a woman's pre-orgasm grunting and cooing and abortive moans. And I quickly realize that what I'm hearing is Tooler get off in the next room, with Issa, in their bedroom. They have forgotten that they took on a roommate and that he might be home, and they've left their bedroom door open. Tooler's cumming sounds excite my brain. I'm wondering how they could have possibly forgotten I'm in the apartment with them—my door is open, my light is on. There's no way for me to leave without embarrassing them and so I do the best I can think of—pretend to be asleep. I'm lying in my inflatable bed hearing Issa make Tooler cum, and hearing Tooler cum from Issa fingering or licking her or whatever she was doing made my dick hard but I didn't masturbate right away. I might have that night—I don't remember if I did. But if I did it wasn't to any image of the girls—it was to Tooler's sound, the sound she made when she came. I repeated it over and over in my head so I would never forget, and I never have—it was like a bird cooing in heaven—withholding, building, releasing—that most excellent exhale. I wish I could feel the pleasure she felt, as a girl, the very *female* shape of it. But I was privileged to hear her cum—the sounds were so quiet and simple and true. Sometimes I wonder if Tooler knew I was home. I fantasized about having sex with Tooler, trying in vain to figure out by myself what queer or genderqueer meant in her case, and if it meant she liked dick, too..and I knew at her age she wouldn't have fucked that many people and I hoped it would have been *soooo* long since she had fucked a man. - - - - I came to Vermont to hike. That's part of why I picked Brattleboro to live in, because right across the river in New Hampshire there's a little mountain called Mt. Wantastiquet, and beyond Mt. Wantastiquet is a tiny body of water called Indian Pond, and ever since I saw that on Google Maps, I thought: I could live there. Live in the city, yes, but have my retreat to the woods. I love to hike, it calms me. Soon after I arrived in Brattleboro I attempted to climb Mt. Wantastiquet. I wanted to cross it, see Indian Pond, come back—that was going to be my regular hike. But my first few times going over there I couldn't even find the trailhead! Eventually it turned out I was staring right at it but these weren't trails like in Ohio, with a nice big sign telling you where to go. There was a path there, but you had to find it yourself, and with snow covering everything there was no way for a newcomer to know what to do. I managed to have an all day hike anyway, across the side of the mountain, creeping through the woods one step at a time, without snowshoes, looking out for bears, eating my snack intended for Indian pond, drinking water and reflecting. I climbed down the side of an icy portion of a lower mountain when I knew it was a very dangerous decision, but I didn't have money for equipment or a friend to hike with—I've done solo camping in mountains, woods, desert, urban areas, many times for the same reason: I don't have anyone to camp with. I had friends when I was younger—a few times I had a real crew—but now we're scattered to the wind. We used to talk on Facebook, but I deleted my Facebook to avoid the drama, so now we just don't talk. Maybe in text or a call, twice a year, with at most two of my old friends. Now I don't have any close friends, so I hike in areas with bears, poisonous snakes, and worse. I've climbed to the top of Arizona mountains and slept there alone, looking down on the fighter jets cutting through the sky. Solo camping in Arizona is limited to one day due to the water you have to carry. I am sweaty, bruised, cut, and euphorically high by the time I get home from my first day hiking in Vermont. Tooler sees me as soon as I come in the door. "Where have you been all day?" "Climbing the mountain. Well, I couldn't get to the main mountain, so I climbed a side path. Still, some interesting formations. It's not too bad if you stick to a path where someone else with snowshoes has been before you." "You don't have snowshoes?" "Nah, but I got these." I tap my boots together. A pair of Skechers sold at the mall, one-inch tread, zipper insoles. Made strictly for fashion but the best pair of boots I ever owned. Still own them. Still hike in them. "Where I want to get is Indian Pond. It's over Mt. Wantastiquet. You should come with me sometime." Tooler shakes her head and slowly backs away. Issa comes in the room. "Hiking?" Tooler says. "Yeah," I exhale. My cheeks are still red. Issa says, "Tooler doesn't hike." "No?" "Well, it's not about hiking. Neither of us like nature. We're more city people, you know?" I say, "Is this true?" Tooler smiles, shrugs, and Issa breaks out laughing. "So you like to hike?" Issa asks. "Yeah. That's why I moved here. So I could have a place I could hike to from my apartment door. Nature makes me..well it calms me down about fifteen minutes into being in the woods. I used to hike and camp all the time in Ohio. One time my friend Shringara and I, we went on a Shamanic journey—that's what we called it anyway—and I guess it *was*, you know, I thought less of it at the time than I do now, but we fasted for a week, we didn't camp in a campsite, we went way up into the woods near Athens, Ohio far away from any paths or roads. We didn't see anyone the whole week we were there. And we fasted." "For the whole week?" "Yeah. Five days. Well, we had a box of raisins." "You lived for a whole week on a box of raisins!" "Yeah! And we drank tea every day. We got into a routine: sleep, wake up, go to the lake, get water for tea, bathe in the lake, bring the water back up to our campsite, make a fire, make tea, and then we'd sit and talk all day. It was amazing—of course we missed our friends—but it was amazing to be away from *the expectations of others*, even others we loved. There's an oppression, created by all the mundane and unseen expectations of every person around you, and sometimes you have to get away from your mom or your dad or your lover to feel what's really *you*, apart from them, you know?" "Sounds deep." "Hah. I guess it was. We learned a lot of lessons. Then we did mushrooms on the last day!" "I bet that was intense after not eating for a week. It was. It was the first time I ever did mushrooms." "Was it scary in the woods?" "We weren't scared, no. It wasn't the *safest* thing to do, but no, we weren't scared—we felt connected to everything." On our first night together in the house, when we split that bottle of wine, Tooler and I talked of so much cooking we would do (to impress each other, naturally) but Issa finally came into the kitchen and smirked. With one hand she covered her mouth so we couldn't see her laughing and with the other hand she pointed at Tooler and through her laugh said, "Tooler doesn't cook!" Then Issa doubled over, laughing, out of control. It was true, for all our first-night wine-drunk cooking intentions, neither Tooler or I were any good in the kitchen. Issa made up for both of our good intentions with a handful of meals throughout the year that the three of us had together. We always smoked shisha and drank and had a good time when we did this, we just rarely did it. Tooler says, "Do you ever drink beer?" "Not really. But I used to sit at this awesome hamburger place in Tucson—Lindy's—and they'd lock the doors so it'd just be me and the two waitresses and the cook and we'd watch *Superbad* and eat hamburgers, chili tots, and I'd drink PBR." "Ewww!..PBR?" "What's wrong with PBR?" "It's nasty. Why did you drink it?" "Because it was the cheapest beer they sold." "Come on, I can tell just by looking at your hat that you have more style than that. Matthew Temple..buying something because *it was the cheapest* option available. Bullshit." "What? It was on tap, and it seemed like a local-type beer, like what the locals drink?" Tooler shakes her head at me. "You don't think it's a beer of the people?" "I think it *was* a beer of the people..that's been co-opted *by hipsters* who want to be part of the local scene, and by doing this, they've made it no longer a local beer." I exhale. I wish I wasn't being politically analyzed by my housemate right now. "Are you calling me a hipster?" Issa laughs. "You?" Issa says. "No, you're not exactly a hipster." "But somehow I co-opted this beer..maybe I just like the taste of PBR or the logo or something? Is everything a class struggle or can I just be someone who drinks Corona and PBR because they're light and they're the only beers I can stand." Tooler comes close to me. "I'm sorry, did I hurt your feelings?" she asks. "No," I say, but it's a lie. I go to my room and sit down on the inflatable bed. I start to cry. Tooler is at the door. "Oh no!" she says. "Matthew, I'm sorry. I'm just explaining my theory on why white culture takes over a local spot or a local drink and then suddenly more tequila is being sold in the US than in Mexico." "I know," I say, wiping my tears. "I'm just very sensitive. I'm used to being criticized and you're right, it is co-opting for me to drink a beer just because I perceive it to be the local beer. But when do I cease to be a tourist and *becom*e a local? I'll never be Latino but I've lived in Tucson three times, Lindy's is like a *home* to me, I mean I've dated both their waitresses, been over to their house— "They're *housemates*?" "No, they're sisters." "You fucked a pair of sisters???!!" "Well, I liked them both." Issa is standing next to Tooler now, laughing. "Did you like one of the sisters better than the other, in bed?" She cracks up. She's clutching Tooler's shoulder to keep from falling over. "I bet you liked the younger one because her hoo-ha was tighter!" Tooler pushes Issa off her and Issa falls on the floor, hysterical, pointing a finger at me and covering her mouth with the other. Tooler says, "Matthew, I'm sorry—" "No, you don't have to be, I'm overreacting. I'm just very sensitive today." Silence. Then Issa says: "Let's go down to Whit's, and we'll all drink PBR, and we'll all be happy again!" "I'm not drinking PBR," I say. And Tooler says, "I'm not drinking PBR, either." "We'll all have whatever we want, and everyone will be happy, happy family, then we come back here and smoke shisha!" I can't help but laugh. Tooler grabs my hand and pulls me up from the bed. "I'm drinking gin," I inform her. "Which I'm pretty sure is from Europe so I'm going to be co-opting someone." I look at her to see if I hit her too hard. "Oh it's ok. I like a man with a little bite. I'm going to be co-opting the Walsh myself." "And we'll all be like family," Issa says. And we were. For a while, we were. We cared for each other like brothers and sisters, except that the sisters were lovers. And slowly they learned that too much wine was no good for me, and that I cry at the oddest remark, and that it had nothing to do with them, and they learned pretty much everything about my mental state, which was even then best described as fragile. - - - - Issa cooked this, Issa cooked that, Egyptian specialties mostly, always amazing flavor. I was shy about eating with them the first night we had family dinner—I made dumb excuses like I didn't want to disturb their dinner together, but they were so friendly and nice to me..more friendly and nice than I can be when I'm in my worst mental states..they came to my room and told me I had to eat with them. It was just the generosity I needed to have shown to me, to remind me, after many terrible years, how to do it myself. After two bottles of wine between the three of us, they ask: "What did you and your friend..Shringara?..learn in the woods?" "Shringara, yes. It means love and laughter and sometimes I just call her Hasya which is the laughter part because that's a part of her we like to say I know better than anyone else. That I *know* that she *is* laughter. But what did we learn? Well, we learned the story of the fire." "What's the story of the fire?" Tooler says, pouring herself and I more wine. "In the woods," I say, "every day, we did two things. We went to the lake to get water and we made a fire so we could boil the water and make tea. And then we sat there all day and talked. And like I said before we came to many realizations about our friends and expectation and how sometimes if you want to change you have to leave your home town. A prophet is never recognized in his home town—have you ever heard that?" "No." "Well that's kind of a common saying. A prophet is never recognized in his or her own town. But the real realization we had was about our fire. So we spend all day building this fire so it can heat us in the dark and boil our tea and all this time we're thinking *we need our fire*. That camping trip would have sucked without a fire—any camping trip would. But then, after a while of looking at this thing that wad the center of our whole world, we realized that yes in one sense our fire is serving us—heat, light, safe water—but that in another sense *we are serving our fire*. Look at us: all day we roam around the woods gathering sticks and feeding them to the fire. It is an entity, that because of what *it gives* us, has convinced us to *give it* all it needs. We feed our fire and our fire and our fire feeds us. We need our fire and our fire needs us. Without us, there would be no fire. And without the fire, after a while, there would be no us! So you see it's not so simple as you needing me and me not needing you in return. We feed each other so we can feed each other. That's a different kind of connectivity than either of us was thinking about before." I take a drink of my wine. We all share a moment because these beautiful people appreciate my story and I appreciate their listening, and taking me in even though I'm a guy, and feeding me food I've never eaten before. Issa says, "I'm having a cigarette." "I'll go with you," I say. "You will??!! Tooler *hates* cigarettes." Issa and I go outside and smoke in bitch-insane Vermont cold. We're both shaking but I feel at home. With my free hand I pretend I'm smoking and when I exhale the steam from my lungs comes out looking almost exactly like cigarette smoking. I do this regally. Issa cracks up. "Vermont smoking," I say. She laughs. "These motherfuckers don't even have to buy cigarettes." I Vermont-smoke once again. Issa follows suit, acting silly with me and then she's going in. "Can I have another one?" She gives me one and I smoke a second, alone, thinking, ruminating, letting it all echo around inside me as deeply as possible, as I am wont to do. - - - - One time the two women came home with a large package, obviously meat of some sort. "Guess what this is!" "You'll never guess." "He'll never guess." "Just tell him what it is." "Well it's what we're having for dinner tonight so I hope you like it." Tooler laughs. I stand from my laptop, which is at my "desk" on the floor. "I'm interested, Tooler—you've got me interested." "Yeah I know I've got you interested." She gives me a definite look. "But back to the subject at hand!" I say. Issa opens the brown paper wrapper, then a clear plastic bag. She reaches inside and pulls out something red and beefy and places it on top of the brown wrapping paper. "I still don't know what that is." "It's—ready—one, two, three—cow heart!!" Issa cracks herself up laughing. "We wanted to know something about you, Matthew." "Yeah," Issa says, "we wanted to know something about you." "What." "HAVE YOU EVER HAD COW HEART BEFORE??!!" I laugh sardonically. "No! Where did you buy that?" "The grocery store. Welcome to Vermont, man. They just sell this shit in the meat section. You wouldn't believe what else they had." "Please don't tell me." "So are you up for it?" I look skeptically from Issa to Tooler. "Can we open a bottle of wine to go with this?" "Oh yes. Issa will take care of the..heart..and you and I will drink wine. Is this arrangement *ok* with everyone?" (It was.) Tooler and I got tipsy and chatted up the motherfucking stars—we were great talkers. That night I ate cow heart with Tooler and Issa. It's quite wonderful—just a tough beefy flavor with the added joy of knowing you're eating an animals's heart. After cow hearts T+I got out the hookah and we smoked shisha. I had never done this before, but it was pleasant. They had a method of chilling the hookah water with ice cubes so the smoke you get is cold..divine. Tooler holds up her glass of white, I hold up my glass of red, and Issa holds up her water. "A night of firsts," Tooler says. A night of firsts. ### 8 Issa escaped Gaza through a tunnel to Egypt..or something like that. It was this claustrophobic, hours-long climb and crawl through a tunnel in the Earth. She had to pay to go through, and that was a lot of money..but along the way, inside the tunnel, there were children with Uzis asking for more money..and she had to give them more money if she didn't want to die in the tunnel at the hands of an 11 year old. Luckily she did have some more money on her and she was able to pay her way all the way to Egypt, which is where she met Tooler, an American on a study pass. From Egypt, Issa escaped to the United States with a fake passport, which she showed me proudly. I hugged her—'cause hey—she was lucky to be alive. Tooler went through a year of work taking Issa to meet with New York lawyers and getting her classified for political asylum. At their request, I wrote a letter of recommendation for Issa to be used in court. Tooler got Issa asylum, and as soon as she did, Issa broke up with Tooler and moved to New York City—Queens—met other Egyptians who owned blocks and blocks of property and shops and because she was Egyptian, she got a sweet job at a restaurant/coffeehouse the first day she went there. They even gave her a sweet apartment of her own that was only one block away from her job and told her not to worry about the rent—she could pay that later. See? It is possible to live in New York, to find affordable housing—you just have to know people. ### 9 Brattleboro has less than twelve thousand people. The town is circled by a long road which goes up into the mountains and down again back to the river, intersects a bridge that crosses into New Hampshire. The whole of those thirteen thousand people live within that circular road, that you can ride your bike around in less than an hour. There are various neighborhoods: there's the area with the hospital at the south end of town, then the shopping center with the Dollar Saver—when I first get to Brattleboro, the first full day I'm there, I went shopping at the Dollar Saver and thought: I could get a job here, it'll be perfect. Then there's the prestigious High Street, where Tooler and Issa and I lived. Then Elliot Street. If High Street was quiet, Elliot Street was loud. If High Street was calm, Elliot Street was wild. If High Street was legal, Elliot Street was illegal. Even though they were just a block apart, rents were cheaper on Elliot, it had most of the bars in town, most of the drugs and drug dealers and homeless people using restaurant bathrooms. In the summer, Elliot Street had all the high school kids and junior high kids hanging out bumming cigarettes from adults (like me) and dressing as provocatively as the law allowed. When day drinkers came outside of their bars for a drink, underage girls who couldn't drink would bum cigarettes from men twice their age—more than twice—and they didn't take them for free. They flirted and stood way too close and rubbed themselves on you and didn't even care—I would have given them a cigarette for free but if some sixteen year old wants to step into my personal space (and do a special move where she steps to me and her breasts touch while she looks like she's kissing me but really she bites the burning cigarette *out of my mouth*, our lips touching, while she stabilizes herself by grabbing onto my arms) just to get a cigarette into her mouth, not minding if her fucking half-visible butt cheeks rubbed against my cock..well..so be it. She wasn't psychologically hurting me and I wasn't psychologically hurting her. But Brattleboro, other than having an overflow of hot teenagers who mostly disappear to other states by the time they're twenty, has has three grocery stores, one Burger King, one sushi restaurant, one Thai restaurant, one burger cart, one yoga studio, one massage and acupuncture center, one pizza place. When Joanne came to visit, she said it looked like a movie set: like those fake streets they have at Universal Studios that get used over and over in movie after movie, but everything dressed up and shot at a different angle so the same set looks like a hundred different cities. I guess the one thing Brattleboro has more than one of is book stores—when I moved there, the word on the street was that Brattleboro had more bookstores per capita than anywhere else in the US, including every college town in existence. And that might have been true. There were five or six within the very center of Brattleboro, each one with its own character and specialty. It may be true that Brattleboro had more bookstores per capita than anywhere else in the country—but if it was true when I moved there, within a few months it was longer true, because the fire came, and burned out large parts of downtown, including three of the bookstores, so I'm sure that pushed us down on the list of per capita bookstores. - - - - I called my sister Joanne walking down High Street just after moving to Brattleboro and just after a phone conversation with Dad that just devastated me in his lack of care or belief in or understanding of me. "I've been so hurt by him for so many years and I've given, now that I count back, five years telling him that I want a relationship with him, and him just dropping the line. He never calls me, I always initiate, his email communications (as you know) are never about feelings or people, they're always about his job and where he's moving to take a new job and how the job is going and what he's doing for his job. You remember that time he picked up the phone and didn't even recognize Leona's voice and when he did figure out it was her, he didn't have time to talk to her because he was busy with work stuff? He was expecting *another* Leona—not his daughter, but a *work* Leona." "Yeah, I know," Joanne says. And I said to Joanne, "I always trick myself or blame myself into thinking that *I'm* cutting off contact with *him*—when the reality is that he cut off communication with *me* a long time ago. And I say I'm thinking of stopping reading his emails because they always make me feel bad about myself and there was that therapist, when I was living with Rishi, who said I had some very complex ways of determining whether I should be around such-and-such a person, and my therapist suggested this metric instead: look at *how the person makes you feel*. How do you feel when you're around Rishi? Around Dad?" "Well that answers it right there," Joanne says. And I say, "It does, doesn't it." We talked for a long time more as I slowly walked down the steep hill of High Street, leaning against concrete walls, taking a few steps, trying to keep warm as we examined our childhood, the idyllic period with Mom when it was just the three of us and we took weekly trips to the library, everyone treated each other well, and that was a heaven of upbringing until about the third or fourth grade when we realized *almost no one* else lived that way—the world was full of not only large-scale war, but that on a small scale, everyone was sick and lying and cheating and didn't even experience *joy* within themselves. Our lives had been joy and bliss from the moment we were born. And, as such, we were perfectly ill-prepared to live in this world. And we are both at odds with it to this day. We also saw that we had the perfect upbringing for artists: one parent (Dad) who, no matter what we did, would always disapprove or ignore us. And one parent (Mom) who, no matter what we did, would approve and pay attention to us. It's the perfect family system for producing artists: as a kid, we internalized Dad's hate and disapproval, which was perfect for enduring long periods of mass disapproval from people about your art—our dad had inadvertently given us an innate immunity to hate and criticism. We could survive our whole lives never getting published, hired, awarded, galleried, approved, paid, or in any way loved for our art and we had the stoicism to continue doing our art with absolutely no encouragement until the day we died. Equally important, we had internalized Mom's unfailing, sometimes baseless, love for anything we did. So right next to Dad's disapproval, inside of each of us, was Mom's voice telling us she loved us *no matter what*. It created a personality that at least Joanne and I share that truly doesn't give a shit if you try to break us down with negativity, and which has an unending, internal source of self-love and approval for whatever we do. Way more than most people, Joanne and I a) truly don't modify our action based on hate and b) are happy with ourselves and what we make, innately, based on a trust of our own internal barometers. No one can tell an artist what to do—the expression of a highly-developed point of view is maybe the most central feature of what makes an artist, an artist. I felt better after my conversation with Joanne. I had cried a lot. But I felt lighter with a commitment to a new position with respect to Dad. Joanne said, "Did I ever tell you something?" "What was it?" "I was maybe two. No, I had to be older than that. But it was in the Dallas house. You know that game where a little kid counts to a hundred..and the adult keeps track for them because it's too much for the kid to remember?" "Yeah." "Well I played that game with Dad." I hear Joanne crying now, my little sister somewhere in New York City, telling me this story, crying. "I remember I had already said 17 but I asked him anyway and *he said I hadn't said it*. So I said 17 and then asked him if I had said 17 and he said that I had not said the number 17." "He was fucking with you." A sniffle on her end. "He was fucking *with a little kid*. What kind of mentality?" "I don't know, Joanne—he's a sick person." Sniffle. "Yeah." I say, "Joanne?" "Yes?" "Do you remember the end-hall closet?" "What closet was that?" "Smell of leather, shoe-polishing cabinet with brushes and varnishes and maybe some kind of box in the back, beyond the coats, with something unknown in it, something we couldn't know at that age even if we looked at it—" "Matt." "Yeah." "I remember it." "Yeah?" "I just don't want to talk about it." ### 10 I walked to Abby's office and met her for the first time formally. She worked as an accountant. I went to sign the lease. We shook hands without gloves. "Nice wall colors," I said. "Do you like the ones at the house?" "Oh yeah, they're great," I lied. But the statement about her office wall colors was not a lie. She told me she had picked those, too, and my mind twisted at the fact that she had chosen such deep jewel-tone greens and grays for her office and such cheesy carnival-circus colors for the house we were renting from her. I sign the lease. "Do you want any references?" "No." "Do you want a deposit? I brought cash." "Just pay Tooler, she already took care of it." "Do you want to know anything about me? My work situation? Anything?" "No," Abby said. In LA you could never get an apartment like that. In the frontier lands, places like Vermont and Arizona, there's still more freedom, computers and records don't control every interaction, and basically a smile and a handshake will do ya. But after what Abby put up with from me, I'm sure she does background checks now, application fees, proofs of employment, all that. Because eventually in this story will come a time when I'm unable to pay the rent, and it will kill Abby's finances for a short time. She'll need to pay for oil for the house so everyone living there doesn't freeze to death, while she and her daughter live in a hut, basically, that doesn't even have running water. Yup, people like me—people with mental illness—we mess up all the normal people's lives, who are just trying to work and make money. And what's wrong with that? If Abby could somehow extract the two thousand dollars I owe her, out of my body somehow, she'd want to, and I'd let her! But, I mean, without unemployment benefits, without a job, without disability, where does this mystical quantity called money come from? Work, obviously. But when you've got a disorder—a misshaping of your brain—that makes you try to kill yourself, work is not an option. You can't work while you're in a mental hospital, and if you tell anyone you're suicidal, or swallow a bottle of pills, that's where you'll be. And whether it's legal or not, after you get out of the mental hospital, if you tell your potential employer in a job interview that you spent time in a mental hospital..most of those motherfuckers aren't going to hire you. Of course you know this so you make up lies for the gaps in your employment history: your dad was sick and you had to take care of him, you were writing a book..or you just flub the dates of your surrounding jobs and make that gap disappear. If you're mentally ill and you have no family or friends generous enough to just *pick up the tab* of your life, you will be homeless. Some people get disability. As of now, five years after the events of this book, I have been trying to get disability, in the various states I've been living in (depending on which family members could stand to endure the infinite difficulties of having me around). I'm moving again soon, because I live with my Mom and she's moving, and I go where she goes. So I have to transfer my disability application to a new state, and hope that someday I am approved. And let's be clear: that money will not be enough for me to live on. I'll still be a dependent of my mom for the rest of my life, I guess, unless I go live in a tent in the desert. But I can't take care of myself. I shake, due to psychiatric meds I've been prescribed. I clench. I can't cook safely—I can barely screw the cap for the laundry detergent back on. So if I "get disability," it's not like I'll be buying Lamborghinis or a house or even renting an apartment. That'll just be money so that I can pay for my own medical expenses—instead of Mom having to. When you live in a society that had use for you for most of your life, from the time you were born until you were maybe thirty, and all of that time you were genetically predisposed to having a major mental illness, and around the time you were twenty-three a catastrophic life stressor (according to current bipolar theory) kindled the disease within your head, and in addition to being smart and weird and fun and an infinitely employable programmer, you become really weird and an alcoholic and you quit jobs for no reason that anyone else can understand, you do a lot of things that no one else can understand, like mail your entire spice rack to a New York art dealer along with tons of original artwork—no note—just *fuck it* I'm having fun I'm sending art to an art dealer hahaha! Then your life becomes a series of "flying leaps" as my mom calls them. Moving to a new city with no money. Quitting my hedge fund job to living in a tent in my friend's back yard in Arizona. Getting back into the work world for a few years, then getting out. Getting fired for the first time—before that I had always quit. Becoming homeless—which if you're romanticizing it, don't—it's almost completely a dead end in this country if your bank account goes to zero. I mean that's the basic game. Everyone does it. Almost everyone talks about the glamour associated with your bank account being at the high end. Hardly anyone talks about what happens when you are not just living paycheck to paycheck, but when you actually have zero dollars and zero cents. Everyone dumps you. You get evicted (the first time is the most exciting). You come home one day and the locks are changed and there's yellow caution tape all over your door and a neatly typed and printed notice that says the property has been repossessed, then it lists your name and the amount of money you owe the apartment complex so that all your neighbors can judge you for not being a movie star or a famous director yet. Then that's it. You live in your car until your car gets towed because you can't pay the parking pass, or you move into a crack motel—a weekly rate motel with bed bugs, roaches, giant cracks in the wall, a prison-quality cage that encloses the manager, who you pay in cash, for the right to feel like a degenerate for living in a motel where ninety-eight percent of the occupants literally are smoking crack with their disability check, which somehow they were able to get—while you are quickly understanding the end of the bank account game that nobody talks about. When you actually stop drinking because the thought of being homeless is harder than facing your emotions without alcohol. And eventually comes the day—the zero dollars and zero cents day—when your mind is clear as a glass bell about the entire spectrum, now, of the bank account game. You've made one-hundred k as a software consultant for Mead Research—you had that experience, you know what it's about. Now you are walking down a desert sidewalk looking for a homeless shelter (see my other memoir) and you know what it's like at the bottom of the game. The homeless shelter won't take you. You're sleeping in parking lots. It becomes clear (as the glass bell, previously mentioned) that *if you have no money* and *you're not working to make money for someone else, someone who does have money* that society wants you dead. That sounds extreme, but it's the absolute truth. Many these days say that the US isn't a society at all—it is solely an economy. They are right. Those are the people that when I was twenty-four working at a hedge fund toting my copy of *Atlas Shrugged*, I thought were crazy. I thought their liberalism had corrupted their rationality but once you've played both ends of the bank account game you realize *those motherfuckers were right*. We are not a society. We don't have room for everyone. The French overestimated us when they put Emma Lazarus' poem on the Status of Liberty. We are not a society, we are merely an economy, and if you, for whatever reasons, are not working to make the rich richer, this economy *wants you dead*. Yes. You read me right. The US is not a society of human animals, it is an economy controlled by superhuman, nonhuman entities—at the very least our corporations—and when you cease to serve those richer than you, the economy prefers that you quietly die. And I have huddled freezing in the middle of Tucson nights, thinking that if I can never be reconnected with the economy, that it was rational for me to kill myself. And I have reveled, in my own idiotic drunkenness, by sleeping in the most urban areas of Los Angeles *even when I had an apartment*, *even when I had a job*, because I had reached the saturation point of my disillusionment with all the jobs I'd worked for and bosses I'd made rich, and no one's opinion of me was worth a grain of sand. *I* would be the one lying under ferns in Hollywood as sexy date couples passed me and looked at me, drunk, in ratty clothes..and *I* would be the one laughing at *them*. - - - - I liked to dress as casual as possible and scandalize upscale bars like The Hungry Cat by making their door girl with her little black dress look me up and down and tell me with her hardened LA eyes that *you've gotta dress up to come here* and she would open the door for me and I'd inform her I'd be sitting at the bar and I wouldn't just *sit* at the bar, I'd *hold court*. I'd make friends with every bartender, every server, every patron—even the door girl was smiling and laughing and stopping by every time she passed the bar to make sure I had everything I needed. Fucking right I had everything I needed. I'd spend five times what anyone else in the place was spending, buy two-hundred dollar bottles of wine, drink one glass, and give the bottle to my server to take home and enjoy with his girlfriend. I don't think I'd call that *having fun*—I think I'd call that *disgust*. Disgust with the fact that one year I could be homeless and one year I could sit at a bar and collect phone numbers on napkins, meet a girl on Christmas Eve and wake up with her in bed, both of us making stupid jokes about being each other's Christmas present while my cock slowly fucked her on the morning of the twenty-fifth and while her cunt hugged me so warm and tight like only a girl can do. Walking into The Hungry Cat in sandals and capris which all my super-straight friends were not shy in telling me they thought they made me look gay..that was disgust. Sometimes when I went in there I had spent the night outside, in a secret place between the Cinerama Dome and the ArcLight Cinemas. I'm sure I looked horrible, by Hollywood standards. The door girl would never date me, for example—I would need to drive a car costing at least seventy-five thousand dollars and wear suits when I went out to drink. Bitches like that don't move to Hollywood to become movie stars—they move there because the men have money. They want to live in a house with a pool—and their high-school sweetheart from Oklahoma is never gonna be able to provide that. But if she has a decent body, then that's what she provides. And arm candy is worth a lot of money in LA. But to me it was just a childish game where I *forced* The Hungry Cat to let me sit at their bar because I spent a lot of money and I was making the point (to who?) that as long as I raised the amount of money high enough, they would let me do whatever I wanted in The Hungry Cat. Two years earlier I had been homeless—zero dollars and zero cents homeless—and now, because I walked into an office certain days of the week and listened to a foolish, hurting man (my boss) display his ego, daily, with as much spectacle as Cirque du Soleil (but with none of the beauty)..because of this odd sort of counseling function I performed for our self-proclaimed Chief Software Architect..and because I did some programming that was as easy for me as wiping my nose..I had enough money not to be homeless, and to obliterate my delicate bubble of higher consciousness with a constant stream of alcohol and other drugs. Anyway I signed that lease in Abby's accounting office in some tiny town in Vermont and was glad I was through with all that LA bullshit. ### 11 This is how the first few months went, taken from some forgotten blog. > **March 20, 2011, 1:33am** > > I need a plan, > > a general template for what I'm doing now, with fixed parts and variable parts. I'm living in Brattleboro, I'm not moving from here until I'm rich from books. I'll find a grocery store job, exercise, get low-income assistance for health care if possible, and I'll slowly write books and submit books and live and stand self-respectingly while I let my authorship develop. And I will commit to being able to write, whether I "publish" or not, and I'll joy in writing, at the rate and in the ways that I joy. > > **March 1, 2011, 6:32pm** > > Trying my hand in a combination of computation and psychology, in person, at the Spirit MeetUp in Brattleboro, Vermont. Setting up the room now, making posters and diagrams, meeting Mike, Michelle, and Cat, and generally trying something new! If you're in Vermont stop by, starting around this Friday, and for a small price you'll get something that functions like a tarot reading, but that under the hood, is all computers and math. *[This job never worked out, by the way. If I told you exactly why I'd probably get killed. Let's just say my bosses behaved erratically due to consumption of exotic substances. Fuck it. They were meth freaks.]* > > **February 19, 2011, 4:42pm** > Hiked Indian Pond > Six hours overall. Had a little conversation with god, and god with me, atop Wantastiquet. Wind blowing, me screaming at the wind, that sort of thing. We made demands of each other: each told each other what we need. I need reminding, because I forget. I need money enough to travel whenever I want, pay my debts, have a house, have tools for doing what I want to do, and money to pay people to help me with my projects. God needs me to do the work: hike, go to NA meetings, eat right..whatever it is that I know will move me, I need to not be complacent about those things at all: I need to do them. > > Some thoughts from today: No one is with me. No one is on the same journey as me. I'm the only person who hiked Indian Pond today. No one came with me. No one else from Brattleboro hiked that today, or I would have seen them on the trail. I sat by that lake alone, I walked there alone, I came back alone. But more than just literally: there is no one on my path with me, there is no one writing the books I'm writing or living the thought life I'm living. There is, hence, no one qualified to give me advice on how I walk my path, because there is no one else who can or will walk it. So don't take advice from people who don't know about me, and don't sway onto someone else's path for their benefit. I have my own path, my own way, and I am on that path and in that way for unique reasons and due to unique hungers. We can occasionally keep each other company, for a moment, but I am separate, I am by definition the only me, the only one on this path, and it is sensible for me to cultivate and maintain and fully inhabit my own, as no one else can. The scope of a day is the appropriate scope in which to think, as a human. I learned this profoundly a few months into recovery in Tucson, then somewhere I forgot. You can plan a day. You can live a day. You can not-drink for a day. That's all you can do, pretty much. So live within the scope of the day. In a day, live that day, plan that day, schedule that day, and get that day like you like that day. Then stop. And when you have the chance, do the next day that comes. Anything outside of that is inappropriate, and crazy-making. Don't plan five months from now, and decide that I'm going to be rich, or decide that I'm going to be homeless. Plan today, the time that I am awake, and live that, do that, and don't do a thing else. This is a recipe for sanity. Whatever is your church, spend time there. Wherever it is that you worship, spend time there. If that's in front of a keyboard programming, then be in front of the keyboard, programming. Spend your time worshipping. Whatever is worship to you, spend your time in the corresponding church. For some that may be a stock exchange. For some it may be a church. For me, today, I am reminded, it is outside. It is in nature. That is my church. That is why I came to Vermont. Spend time in the place that gives you cause to worship. That's a recipe for seeking your spiritual self. And also: maybe a little RPG thinking would help me. Like, today I earned the "Hiked Indian Pond" badge. My character did. By doing something. No one else earned that badge today. No one who doesn't hike Indian Pond ever earns that badge. Those badges, whether I think of them that way, whether I post them on "Minutiae" or not, are real. Maybe thinking of them that way a little more would help me to quantify and understand what I am doing, to put a finger on the work I do that goes into the changes I want to see. > I'm incredibly thankful for this day. That mountain is beautiful. From a certain point, walking, I was talking aloud, thanking god for allowing me to live today, for giving me the chance to do so, and I get some credit for living it the way I did =) > > **February 9, 2011, 1:35am** > > It's 10°F > > Cold walk from the house to downtown Brattleboro. I bundled up. The new wool coat did well, but in this cold my arms were getting chilly by the time I got to the church. Been sitting at the homeless shelter about every other evening. Today I'm doing the 1am-7am shift. I'll reward myself with breakfast from the deli in the morning, english muffins with sausage, egg, and cheese. And for whatever reason, my computer is working with the church's internet tonight, so I'm posting from there. > > Selfishly, this is a great job for a writer, at least it was while the internet wasn't working. There's nothing to do—or very little, usually—and you have to sit here for six hours. That's *ass in chair* right there. Most nights I've come here I've written. I probably will tonight, after this post. I took the last day or two off from writing, from doing anything productive, and just relaxed. I needed to give myself a break. Feedback I got about my last volunteering made me realize I was being too hard on myself. I'm volunteering at a fucking homeless shelter: you can't do that wrong. So what if it isn't a holistic solution; I'm not Superman, I'm not even the director of this shelter, I'm just one hand making one cup of coffee at a time. I don't have to feel bad about that. In fact, it's inappropriate for me to, for my sake. I need to beat myself up less; not at all if I can swing it. > > I'm going to work the days I signed up for in February, then re-assess. I need to get a job, myself, sometime in the next..I don't know..while. I've got to take care of myself, so I don't end up in here. Have been putting out feelers, submitted a résumé last week to a fairly local tech business. We'll see. > > I was on Twitter there too much for a while. I drank some, after not-drinking for a while—and when I drink I drink too much. I was feeling beholden to my family, like I owe certain people a return email or a proactive birthday wish at a faster rate than they give to me. It was wearing me out, so I stopped. I don't owe my parents a check-in. They're doing fine, in their lives, and I'm doing fine in mine. It's uncertain how tomorrow will unfold, and that uncertainty was getting me down more than it needs to, in light of that other quality of tomorrow: that it's not promised. Imagine how my dead friends would encourage me: do you think they'd think it was wise for me to use a single one of the days I am given—days more than they were given—to worry, to feel sorry for myself (or angry with myself?) because I don't have a paying job and am not fully actualized as an artist, as a scientist, as a thinker? I don't think they would think that was a good idea, or the most grateful way to approach today—a day I've been given, a precious thing. > > So I'm giving myself a break. Not drinking—it's better for me this way. Not beating myself up for not having satisfied societal demands on my own servitude to capitalism. I mean: anyone who's paying attention knows that our world is *fucked up* at the moment. Ten years ago I could make middle-class money doing software consulting in the US. Now..not so much. I feel in my own mind that the projects I've done recently are significantly more valuable, they better use my gifts, etc. than projects I did in my early twenties. That I've made less and less money along that same string of time is, I don't think, entirely dependent on me. I don't want to be 100% nihilistic in every moment of every day, but I think a touch of nihilism is needed, to be *realistic*, in this day and age. It may be the case that things I do make me enough money to someday be able to get out of debt, buy a house, feel secure enough to decide I am capable of responsibly having children, etc. etc. I hope that's true. I'm open to that; I think I'm ready for my life to go better. Or it may be that in six months, I'm sleeping on the floor in this church, because I never found a job. But you know what: I'm going to give myself a break. I'm a person, a valuable life, I happen to be wildly creative and industrious in a few different ways, and whether I deserve to (or just get to) self-actualize as a fuller expression of a human being, or whether I don't, I deserve not to hate myself in the process. > > **December 27, 2010, 7:29pm** > > Moving on > > Going to Louisiana tomorrow with my mom, both my sisters, and my nephew Daniel. I'm looking forward to meeting him in person for the first time..so far our relationship has been over Skype. > > When we get back from Louisiana I'm moving to Vermont. > > In Louisiana it will be my grandmother, my aunt and her husband, and maybe their son. We will eat crawfish if they haven't been damaged too much by BP. I hope they're ok to eat as that's a family tradition. I'm looking forward to seeing my grandmother, and everyone. It's a treat that so many of us will be together. > > I miss my dad. He's out of the picture. He's still alive, but he just does other things now. That's hard for me; really, at 32, that's the hardest relationship for me to ponder. I love my dad, I know he loves me. Our love, somehow, at this time in our lives, doesn't translate into civil contact. He is estranged from his ex-wife and 2/3 of his kids. Dad: you're a mystery to me, a painful one. I am sending you love and wishes and, yes, shaking my head a little. If I had kids I wouldn't treat them like you do. I respect you and wish you the best. And I miss you. > > In Vermont I'm renting a room with masters degree students/political people. They seem cool. We have a house close to town in Brattleboro. > > I'm looking forward to Vermont. I'm going to write at first, then find a job, probably, and settle in. Work has been dicey for the last year—I haven't had any. Lol. Jobless recovery. Well, I don't need anyone's permission to be productive, and I always am. Going to work at finishing my NaNoWriMo novel, and continue looking for a literary agent. I can write, and you should do what you can do, so I'm doing that. > > The thought of a week with extended family stresses me. Of course everything will be fine, and we'll all enjoy each other's company, but it's always stressful too. I don't have as much anxiety about it as I would have had 5 or 10 years ago, though, so that's a blessing of age. I think I know now that connections between people are limited, so more and more I can accept their limited—and wonderful—but limited—and wonderful—nature. We're not here for all that long anyway so you just forget about perfection and enjoy the communion that exists. > > I think 2011 is going to be a great year for me—2010 has been. I want to write, meditate, meet new people, and hike. And eat. I walked through the grocery store in B-Boro and the beef and cheese selection looks amazing. Here's to a year much like this one—creative, connected, and happy—with these mods: thinner, published, and richer. I waste so much money in restaurants. If I'm not careful—or even if I am, I might end up homeless in Vermont. And even knowing that, I took myself out for a nice dinner and drinks before I came here to volunteer. What the fuck? If I volunteer here when I have money, if I ever do someday, I'm still going to eat out..I'm not saying that I don't deserve to eat in restaurants just because these people are coming to us at this desk asking for weak sandwiches. But maybe I should give myself a better chance..not spend so much, spend slower, spend smarter, while I am poor, living off unemployment. A handful of times since I came here, I've blown too much money on a meal or bar excursion. Being here is so depressing, it makes me want to drink when I leave. It really does. And I might do that. My hope is basically to solve my own money problems by making more money. But I could be more frugal, in this time, could live simpler and cheaper, for sure. I do that kind of spending to address some hunger within me, that I don't know how to quell. If I came here to volunteer a lot, this might be excellent writing time. It might be. I could write my book here, which I had considered before ever seeing what the actual volunteer experience was like..but it's true, being here and seeing it, that I could write my book here, in the night. I look at my own life and I see (for example) a laptop that I have no means to replace if something goes wrong. To me that seems like lack, like tenuousity, like scarcity. Because I would like MacBook Pros to be disposable, so that I never have to worry about losing mine, or something going wrong. But the fact is I have a working MacBook Pro..tonight. So I should use it tonight. And I am. But that's the thing. We are doing something useful for these people, even though it's not permanent, it's not at the root. But still: one night of not freezing to death is worth something. It is. As is, in my life, one day of writing. One day to live: what a privilege! Can I see it that way, see it that way every day? I think I mostly do, but I could see it that way more. I don't have to work out tomorrow today. But I can do what is possible today. I mess up there, a lot. I worry about tomorrow, today, and I don't do what is possible, today. I could do better, there: don't take on tomorrow. Take on today. I could leave tomorrow alone more, and address today better. My spending and drinking are symptoms of this, are wrapped up in how I do this: I could manage my time and my energy and my expenditures, today, much better..and part of that is leaving tomorrow alone, today, and doing today better than I would have otherwise. I'm afraid to do that, sometimes. And it messes me up. Because really I'm making tomorrow much harder by not living today in the better ways that I know how. I have a bank account here. I don't need to fuck that up. I have the lack of stress and recent history of not-drinking that I need in order to quite easily not-drink to any degree that I want. My life isn't really tragic right now. It's not perfect, it's not even stable, it's maybe even tenuous. But it's not tragic, and it's not in immediate crisis. It's maybe one step away from crisis, from devastating financial ruin, but it's not there right now. And I don't have to help it get there. It might go there anyway, or it might not. But I don't have to help it, today, to get there faster. I definitely don't want to fuck up my bank account. I don't want to be drunk all the time. I don't drink responsibly, I don't. Sometimes I can do it to a fun level, but sometimes I go too far. And I hate myself for it later. I don't have to do that to myself. It's actually a choice. I can totally choose never to do that, never to feel that way. And it's that Gene logic *[this girl from Tucson](#)*: Why am I feeling this? Because I want to. Because I want to feel this way. Because there's some part of me that lacks that experience, and wants it, misses it, requires it. I think I'm ready to require something else. To receive something else. I think I'm not needing to explore anymore the need for self-hatred or self-loathing due to terrible acts. I did need that, I did want that, I did require that. But maybe I require something else now. Maybe I'm ready to receive something else now. I hope so, I think so, but it's hard to let go of your self, but you need to, to make room for the new self to come into. And I think just like with other people, you have to make room first, then into the empty space, only once it's empty, can new things come. - - - - With the drinking thing, one of my main things is I just need to further develop my other activities..so that I tend to think of other things to do. I've made some progress along these lines with some hiking..but like today..I just went for a drive, for no reason, around B-boro and outlying areas. It was great. Sometimes I just need to do something like that..just take a walk for no reason or just call someone, or drive. > make room first, then into empty space, once it's empty, may new things come ### 12 Vermont equals snow. The streets and sidewalks are taken care of for you, but you've got to shovel your own driveway—as discussed. We continue our pattern of Maggie angrily shoveling the snow all by herself or sometimes with my help while my housemates who actually have a car in the driveway hide inside slumped down on the couch so Maggie wouldn't see them and they didn't have to shovel the snow. Maggie would even bang on our door and no one would answer it. We'd just leave her there in her own fury about no one helping her shovel. Even I got tired of Maggie's insistence because she had such an angry work-ethic attitude that frankly it reminded me of my dad. Most of the time I hid in the first-floor apartment with T+I and we let Maggie work out her demons with a pair of shovels and a driveway of waist-high Vermont snow. Oh that's a funny thing about Vermonters that if I don't mention here I'll forget to mention at all. You know how they Eskimos have like a thousand words for snow? Well, Vermonters have at least thirty. After it snows, locals stand around in front of their houses talking about the snow..like..its characteristics, it's deviations from the predictions, and the estimated time to get back to normal. This is not a short conversation. I'm talking, like, two grown people having a half-hour conversation about the snow. Where was I? Oh. Yes. Maggie getting mad because we never helped her even though she was shoveling like every day. I shoveled with her like seventy-five percent of the time, basically because I wanted to fuck her (let's not start lying to each other at this point—we have a long way to go). Anyway you know, I imagined scenarios where I shoveled out her car and she offered me a cup of tea before she went to work and we fucked. Basic, simple stuff like that. Maggie had that kind of purity that someone like me wants to *corrupt*. I mean I want to make the bitch *blush* when we fuck. But part of it was I am a genuinely empathetic person and I can't stand to be around people who are doing work when I'm not, so my instinct to help had me going out there picking up a shovel and helping that girl get to work even though I knew Maggie and I were never going to fuck. Still I am a very sexual person and I can sense things about people's sexuality (and other aspects about them—it's not just a sexual thing). Maggie was no virgin, but she looked like she'd never had an orgasm with someone else, and I wanted to be the first to give her one. I really can tell a lot about a person sexually just by spending a few seconds around them—even perfect strangers. Maggie was definitely the repressed type, but just through cultural training, not abuse—she was a girl that if you said the right things to her in the right order and did the right things to her in the right order, she'd hatch from her downy chick shell and grow into a full-fledged freak in a matter of about six minutes—My fantasies about Maggie were always in her apartment: stepping inside the door, kissing her, and putting a hand up her shirt and a hand down her panties. But I'm a simple type, too. Just collaboratively shoveling Maggie out of the garage and waving at her as she headed down High Street to go to work..that level of satisfaction is enough for me. You know? The idea that we're not all individuals but really an interconnected web, one giant organism—I believe all that. - - - - Setting up a bank account was difficult. I needed to get money orders to send to Wells Fargo so I could open a bank account (I owed money to my California bank, had overdrawn it with fees for lots of money) so I was in ChexSystems and I told the woman who was acting as the representative for the Brattleboro Savings & Loan that I was trying to turn things around, be right with all the appropriate systems, and she said she could see I was sincere..as if what she thought of me mattered. It was like this exchange of approval where the bank gets to give me the nod that they recognize I'm trying to live within the system, and they make a value judgement on me that that is good, in a good and bad sort of way. I am trying to get out of ChexSystems: I am now a good person. I was in ChexSystems: all that time I was a bad person. So I had to get money orders to mail to my bank in California before I could set up an account in Brattleboro. I drive to the Walmart right across the bridge to New Hampshire in terrible raining ice to get my cashed unemployment check turned into money orders. "I've had a hard time of things. I'm trying to turn it around. I'll mail those money orders as soon as I can get them. I really want to have an account here." "Well, we should get a notice from ChexSystems in thirty to sixty days, so keep checking back and we'll see if we can open that account." It's funny how when banks and other companies need money from *you*, they need it right away, but when they owe *you* money, it's going to take them thirty to sixty days. Somehow their computers run at different speeds depending on which direction the money is flowing. - - - - Standing in the post office filling out my unemployment claims with lies about jobs I'd applied for. At first I gave the truth about where I'd applied, but after a few times, I'd applied for all the places to work within walking/driving distance of my house, everywhere in Brattleboro that would possibly hire me. You have to put down three jobs a week that you applied for—there are only about thirty businesses in Brattleboro. And almost all the stores there are mom and pop stores or one-owner stores and they can't afford to hire anyone. I had assumed Walmart would be my surefire place of employ and I applied there the second or third day I was in town. But, as Walmart does, they abandoned that location and moved farther down the road..away from Brattleboro..and there was no longer a Walmart just across the bridge into New Hampshire where Brattleboro people could walk. It was only a matter of months before my car was undriveable. The Walmart was a real blow to my survival. The critical item that I could only buy at Walmart were the prepaid phone cards that worked with my particular piece of shit phone. I never drove to the new Walmart in my own car—I think I was just afraid to drive that far into New Hampshire, that far away from what I knew. A normal person would have just driven up there and got a job, but to me it was a cataclysmic event that the Walmart moved. It scared me. I felt like my world had fallen apart a significant amount. I didn't have appropriate tags on my car (and hadn't for years) so I didn't like to drive places that were far from home. Getting Vermont tags was on my list of things to do but I was scared to do that, too. I was scared they would deny me the tags or that transferring the title or insurance or whatever would cost me more than I had and they would confiscate my car at the DMV and I'd lose my car earlier than expected. So I just let my tags stay, and stay, and stay, and the likelihood of me getting to my DMV todo list item got smaller and smaller. I think it's inertia. Anyway it affects me real bad sometimes and I just have to stop walking—like I literally stop walking in the middle of the sidewalk and I can't proceed. Does anybody out there understand? Anyone? Before the Walmart moved, I went there and bought a writing desk for thirty dollars, a folding chair, a lamp, some candles that were on clearance, toilet paper, and refills for the Swiffer that Tooler had gotten for the house. The weather on the way back was the worst weather I've ever driven in. I rolled down my window so I could scrape the ice that was accumulating while I was driving. It was sick. - - - - I hiked around the base of Mt. Wantastiquet but I still couldn't find the entrance to the trail that went to the top of the mountain—even though later I realized it was staring me in the face. So I hiked along a trail that cross-country skiers used—flat and along the base of the mountain, gentle ups and downs, half-frozen waterfalls six feet high flowing down the side of textured rock faces. Evergreens. Moss growing in near-freezing water. Half an hour on that path was enough to clear even my mind of every single one of its worries. ### 13 Tooler was a student. Tooler had friends from school. Tooler invited about 20 of her friends over one night while I was—as usual—in bed early. They were drunk and tried very graciously to invite me to their living room party by banging on my door and asking if I was awake. I was listening to the Wagogo soothing song on my laptop, but even that wasn't enough to get me to sleep with this party going on right outside my door. And—tell me this—why do drunk people talk louder than normal? All I had was the universe of their voices, and you could tell there were some cute girls out there. I debated going out there, jumping into it, drinking with them, flirting, talking loudly, but I don't know I was 33 and I didn't want to party with a bunch of 23 year olds. I just wanted the Wagogo soothing song to put me to sleep so I could get up early and hike. This is how their party went: "Let's say when you get your line busted you have to take a hit of shisha. An extra-large hit. Do you have any alcohol in the house? *Real* alcohol?" "We have wine," Tooler says, nonplussed. Actually, no, blissfully. She's like perfect two-beers drunk. "I want shots," says the cute-sounding girl. "I'll walk you to the store and we'll get you shots," Tooler says. "I don't want to walk in that fucking weather. How about every time you get your line busted you have to lick.." "Whoah!" "..no hold on! Hold on! I'm not finished yet." "Ok, what do you have to lick?" "The unspecified body part of the person who busted up your line." "Why don't we just play the game with regular rules." "No, bitch, I wanna get *laid*." "You're welcome to have a threesome with Issa and I." I can imagine Tooler raising her beer along with this invitation. "No offense, Tooler, but I want *dick*." Remarks like this make we want to leave my room. But in the end, I don't care if whoever that is out there wants dick or shots or what she wants. I'm a curmudgeon. I'm a decade older than her. I want to sleep. I want to hike. I've had tons of pussy and I hope I have tons more, but it's really not the motivating factor in my life right now. I thread in and out of sleep, always waking to the party in the living room, which consists of drinking more beer and adding bizarre sexual rules to some board game that I don't think I've ever played. The next day Tooler says, "I hope we didn't keep you up with your party." She's watching me get on my hiking gear. "Oh, no, I went to bed early, I said." "Have you ever played this game ZibbleDeeZurk?" she asks. I say no. "You should play it with us some time." "That sounds like fun." "Yeah?" "Yeah." Tooler looks me in the eyes. I look her right back. Whatever. I'm sure Tooler knew I was lying—she was just polite enough not to press me on it. - - - - When I left the house, I went to church, just because I thought that would be a way to meet people—even though I'm an atheist who hates church with all his heart and soul. I was also scoping out the church that houses the homeless shelter that I would soon be volunteering at. I don't really hate church with all my heart and soul—I've just been so many times that it's become pointless to go any more. This church had about six people in worship. I felt bad for them. They gave their pastor a special gift—an envelope—and I was like: I don't even think this bitch is getting *paid*. I was kind of lost with the hymnals so I just looked around the sanctuary during the songs. There was stained glass everywhere except at the top of the wall that faced the street, where there was a huge round area covered with plywood. I figured they were doing some sort of construction. The youth choir sang and I couldn't take my eyes off this one young teenager who was singing. She sang louder than the other three kids like she felt the need to carry that whole motherfuckin' choir even though they were only singing to six people—she just had that kind of energy I'm wired to pay attention to, and to reach out to. At the fellowship time afterward we ate nasty sugared cookies and drank sour coffee. I sat at a table by myself and this young teenager from the choir sat down across from me and was flirting with me hard core and some of the adults tried to rescue me (or her, I'm not sure) by sitting next to us and trying to draw her fire (yeah, like in Star Wars, motherfucker) but I mean this little Lola was all over me, asking personal questions like why this was my first time at their church and where did I live and when was the last time I kissed a girl. Not *do you have a girlfriend?* but *When was the last time you kissed a girl?* Then she accidentally kicked me under the table and even though on a desert island I would have behaved differently, in real life, I excused myself. She asked if she would see me next week and I started to think maybe this wasn't flirting but the best new member outreach team in the history of the church. I told her I'd see her next week but I never saw her again. - - - - I go up the street to a restaurant that serves breakfast. Check out their menu outside. Go in and unwrap myself from my scarves and hats and neck warmers and set my hand weights on the floor next to a bar stool. I sit down. This big guy, big belly, tall, gray beard, looks down at me with this smirk like he knows I'm new to Vermont if I need all that gear to go outside and go to a restaurant for breakfast. But he doesn't say anything about that. He says, "You want a drink?" "Sure, how about a glass of wine." "You wanna see a list?" "Nah, just something red." He brings me a glass of wine and the breakfast menu. "Your Philly omelette looks good." "Out of Philly steak." "Ok, how about any other kind of omelette." "Out of eggs." "You're fucking shitting me." "No. Wild series of events. I can tell you all about it if you want." And some woman in the corner, walled off with a toddler playing, says, "Don't tell him about it." "That's my wife," this guy says. "I figured that out," I say. "How about just the best thing you can make with whatever you've got back there." "I can make a burger." "I can eat a burger." "You want blue cheese on it?" "Oh, I have walked into the right place *today*," I say, knocking on the bar. "How do you want that cooked?" "As rare as you'll make it." "We'll make it as rare as you'll eat it." "Good, 'cause some restaurants have you know like limits and they won't make ground beef rare." "This is Vermont, son, you can have your burger any way you want it." "Ok, extra rare?" "Extra rare it is." The guy goes back to his computer and types it in. "You don't seem like a bartender." "I'm not. I'm a restaurant owner. And I'm thinking of getting out of that." "You don't seem like a restaurant owner, either." "Well I used to be a psychiatrist." "That's more like it." I sip my wine. "How can you tell?" "Just the way you talk." "Well I gave up that shit!" The woman in the corner says, "Calm, Butchy. He's a customer." "Well he doesn't *seem* like a customer," Butchy says, peering at me. "Why did you get out of psychiatristing?" "I got out. Because I was tired of hearing people's stories." "Now you're a bartender. Same thing." "Ah! Ah! See!" he says to his wife. "This motherfucker walks in here and *you are the only person to get—he is the only person to get*—my *wife* doesn't even get that. We're selling the bar, baby. That. Is. It. After this guy eats his hamburger we're selling the bar. What's your name?" I reach out to shake. "Matthew." "Butch." "Is that your real name?" "Who are you, a real-deal mindreader?" He tells me his real name but at this point I've forgotten what it was. "So why do they call you Butch?" He puts one elbow on the bar. "You're not gonna believe this, but when I was a kid I was a bully. I used to beat up kids and they called me Butch. Then even my mom started calling me Butch." "A bully. Who became a psychiatrist. Who became a restaurant owner." "Former." "Hey!" says the wife. "Almost former," Butch whispers to me. "You want another glass of wine?" "Yeah." "So what about you, you always drink wine with breakfast?" "No, but I'm looking to start." "What's your story?" "Ahh..computer programmer trying to be a writer." "You've come to the right place. This is a good place for writers." "How'd you find Brattleboro?" "I Googled *good cities for writers to live in*." "No shit." "Yeah, Google's got your number." "Are you afraid a million other writers will do the same search and come here and flood the market?" "I think the weather will deter most people of any profession from coming here." Butch nods. "That's part of why I like it," I say. "Not a lot of riffraff." "Oh we have riffraff. But I know what you mean. And you're right. It takes a certain..fortitude..to live up here. It's almost too rough for me." "How so?" "My ankle! Slipped on this fuckin' ice!" "Butchy!" "What? He don't care. He's not a customer. He's a cool guy. Shut up. We're talking, me and Matthew. This guy is a computer programmer—he ain't no idiot. He knows how to put together all the ones and zeros to make your iPad work so give this guy some respect, ok? And all I said was I slipped on that fuckin' ice!! For what it did to me I wish there was something worse I could say about it. Anyway." "What happened?" "What happened?? I told you what happened! I slipped on the ice coming out of our house now I got pins here, here, here. It's still bruised! And I slipped *two* winters ago. What kind of shoes you got?" I was about to tell him but fortunately a guy came out with my food. "See that blue cheese? This is Chad. This is Matthew. Chad I can trust with anything in the restaurant and he's an *excellent* cook so I can guarantee you're gonna like that burger." "Thank you, Chad." Chad nods and leaves. "You want another glass of wine? After that one?" "Sure." "I'll go ahead and pour it. New glass, new glass." "No, no, bring the bottle, I'll finish this one. I don't want to waste a glass." "Listen, Matthew, this is my restaurant and if I want to bring you a new glass, that my business. Am I right?" "Yeah. But we're friends now, and I'm asking you, please, to use the same glass. If you use a new glass it makes me feel like you're keeping me at a distance." Butch looks at me sideways and nods. He brings the bottle over, pours me a glass of red, and sets the bottle by my plate. "The rest of that is on me because you, young man, have made my morning." His wife yells from the corner, in a heavy east coast accent: "Now let him eat, you've been talking his ear off since the kid walked in." I eat. I drink. We talk some more. I see that he's still wearing a brace on his ankle and walks unevenly due to his slip on the ice. Butch talks about how sidewalk ice is one of the principal dangers of living in Brattleboro and I later learn this is true. He asks me about my weights and I tell him I carry them while I'm hiking to build my arms. More drunk than I'd intended to be when I started my hike, I reluctantly left Butch and his wife and their baby and their cook and I went back to Wantastiquet. But I still couldn't find the trailhead to go up the mountain, so I walked the trail that followed the river, used my hand weights, alternately walked and ran, and by the time I was done I had that cardiac high that I always associate with the hour after soccer practice as a kid. - - - - The next day, determined to hike Wantastiquet, trunching over the bridge in deep deep snow hardly walkable because my car insurance and registration had expired. They were expired before but I no longer wanted to risk it. On this insane walk across the bridge in snow simply too deep to walk in without snowshoes, me thinking I'm doing ok but actually this being a mentally ill, financially poor person going through extraordinary measures just to spend some time in nature—I couldn't legally drive to the base of the mountain, I had to walk there from town. One out of a thousand people would have taken four steps across that bridge and turned around. I'm not trying to impress you by saying this. It wasn't bravery, or skill, or composition or talent that made me keep going. It was a resounding "FUCK IT" that ran through my brain, that didn't care if it took an hour to get to the base of the mountain—I had nothing else to do. Also, I've believed since I was young that I deserved to suffer, and because of that, I am able to endure avalanches of pain that would make most people simply pass out and die. So I made it across that bridge. My feet and my legs from the knee down were soaked in freezing water. I kept hiking. I hadn't even made it to the base of the mountain. Part of the reason I moved here was to hike Mt. Wantastiquet and I was going to hike Mt. Wantastiquet. And on this, something like my fifth attempt, I found the trailhead. It was right next to where I had been hiking all along, just impossible to see because the entire trail was covered in snow!! But I found some snowshoe tracks and used them as my guide, and in a matter of hours I was on top of that mountain. Now, maybe mountains do nothing for you. And I'll admit, the ocean, the desert, these are more powerful geographies for me. But even if you're not a mountain person, you've got to feel the glory of standing atop even the smallest of mountain/hills. This one gave beautiful views looking south, west, and north along Vermont's mountain scape. I stood on some rocks at the top and believed, for the first, time, that I was really in Vermont. I was exploring like I planned. I was doing it. I took a picture of myself in a warm hat, happy, happy as I'd been in ages. To see the look on my face, in this one picture, is a gift to me every time I look at it. To see me happy, hiking, smiling. I look content, I look at home, I look..right. When I look at that picture the feelings come back to me and I think *what a gift..what a gift* to have felt that way for a few seconds or a minute. Thank you so much (whoever, whatever) for this gift of life. At the top, I was peaceful, alone—I finally felt like I had got some quiet—something my mind desperately needs. I see a bird—a hawk maybe. I call out and it swoops down to check me out. I think, at the top of that mountain, after my hike, after my brain has had an hour or two to clear itself of noise. Later, when I hiked Wantastiquet, I didn't always hike the trails. You learn when you go to Vermont that snowy places have a fifth season: they don't just have winter, spring, summer, fall—they have a season that comes between winter and spring, and that season is called *mud*. Everything melts and all that snow is no longer snow, it's water and dirt and mud. So I hiked in the snow. I hiked in the streams, walking atop the rocks. Those were the best trails because the real trails were all *mud*. I sprinted down the mountain through the forest off the beaten path, saw people below me on the trails, stopped, hid from them, went again, stalked the other hikers, controlled my breath, waited, ran, hands moving with the trees and feet befriending the ice—and at that point I was no longer human, but a creature of the mountain. - - - - Maybe it was a bad omen that it happened—maybe it was way more than a bad omen—but a huge fire broke out in the center of Brattleboro in a building that was apartments on top and about half the walk-in businesses in town on ground level. Everyone came out to watch. People lost their homes. A firetruck soaked the entire building from the top and let the water flow down though the apartments and shops—water damage ended up costing more than the fire. You couldn't walk downtown—Main Street was closed off. The while town stood there while half of Brattleboro burned. A guy I would meet later, a drinker who lost his apartment in the fire, fell down some stairs after a night of heavy drinking that followed his apartment being destroyed. He suffered head damage—his thinking was affected, he was in the hospital. The husband and wife owner of the bar where he had been drinking did everything they possibly could for him so he wouldn't sue them for letting him drink too much, and because they cared, limiting him after that to two beers a day. It was a mess. A third of the town's apartment dwellers displaced..bookstores, restaurants (including Butch's)..all destroyed. And you know what the cause of the fire was? Someone in one of the apartments was putting up decorative lights—a string of lights like for Christmas—and they used a staple to attach the lights to the wall. ### 14 Tooler and Issa went to California for the weekend. I went out drinking. Some guy behind me shouts: "Because it's your birthday!" I turn around. There's like five guys. I say: "Tequila shots on me." "Seriously?" "Seriously. Is it seriously your birthday? Then I'm seriously buying tequila shots for you and your friends." "You wanna see my ID? It really is my birthday." I'm tapping on the bar. "I don't want to see your ID. What if you show it to me and it's not your birthday? Then we won't get to do tequila shots. I have absolutely no interest in this not being your birthday." This guy puts his arm around me and yells: "THIS IS MY NEW BEST FRIEND!!" He sits on the stool next to me. "Your logic seems to be fucked up on the surface but when you follow it to the root it makes perfect sense. In other words, a paradox. I'm Aaron. I'm a quantum physicist." I shake his hand. "A quantum physicist. What does that entail?" "I could explain it to you, but you wouldn't understand," Aaron says. I take five minutes to explain the work I've done to him and his friends are going crazy waiting for us so we can all do Aaron's birthday shots together but by the time I'm done explaining the outline of what I know about the world, Aaron is clinking his shot glass with mine and saying: "I *knew* this guy would understand!" We all do our shots. "Now let's *go*," his friends are saying. "We can't go *now*." "Why not?" "Because. It's not every day you meet a computer scientist who understands the fundamentals of quantum physical interaction. You guys, this guy *has invented* quantum systems that demonstrate the emergent properties I try to explain to you *every day* but here finally someone comes along who actually knows what the fuck I'm talking about." "I thought you wanted to meet that girl..Darling Nikki?" "Darling Nikki can wait," Aaron says. "Unless you want to come with us to Inferno." "Why not," I say. I slap a card on the bar and soon we're trunching up Elliot Street in the *goddamn freezing cold* and I meet Darling Nikki and Darling Nikki is nice in a weird angular but very sexual way. Every look from her oozes sex and she calculatedly doles these out to me, Aaron, the bartender, everyone in the goddamn motherfucking place. We get smashed, everyone buying shots for everyone and it's as if I knew these people for years. "I want to smoke," Darling Nikki says. At that, the hive of gentlemen following her organize to construct or locate a place for Darling Nikki to smoke pot, because if Darling Nikki gets to smoke pot, then whoever made that happen might get laid by Darling Nikki. That's just the way it works. Well, that's the way the hive of guys perceives it works. Aaron has weed but no pipe. Someone has rolling papers but they're at his house in another town. The convenience store is closed. No one even has a place we can go to smoke. "We could go to my house," I say, remembering Tooler and Issa are in California. "Yes. *Yes*," Aaron says, grabbing my arm. "Do you have a beer can, a straw, a hot glue gun, and a washer like from a bicycle?" "I don't know about the glue gun but I can hook you up." "Yes!" Aaron shouts—a crazy motherfucker even crazier than me—I know it's a bad idea already. Aaron talks the three blocks up High Street and we are all *freezing* our asses off—this is a painful journey even with the promise to smoke weed and a one-sixth chance at boning Darling Nikki's angular little pussy. He talks about quantum physics (which he knows nothing about, by the way). Everything he says is generalities, stuff you'd pick up from a 3rd grader's introductory pamphlet on quantum physics. I hate myself for inviting these people to my house and the Vermont/arctic temperatures are sobering me up faster than a DUI. We get to the house. Everyone but me Aaron and Darling Nikki splits instantly because the house isn't well apportioned enough. "You only have one couch?" "Pull up that bed from my room," I say. "There's plenty of room." But they make up excuses for why they suddenly have to go and they must have really wanted to go bad because that meant walking back down those three blocks of High Street in mean-ass temperatures. One of Aaron's friend's actually says, "I don't believe you only have one couch." I look at the guy as though I'm holding a gun to his head. "Just sit on the floor if you're so disappointed." The guy is über offended. "Nobody else offered their place to come and smoke," I say. "Yes," he says. "Thank you. But I do have to work tomorrow." "Alright, well, nice meeting you," I say, mentally cataloguing him for execution at the next possible interval. - - - - So those guys leave. It’s just me Aaron Darling Nikki. Aaron tells me he knows a tech place up the road who's hiring. He'll get me their info. It's a done deal. He never sends me the info. It's all just talk to get down Darling Nikki's pants. He wants to come across as the guy with connections, the guy with the upper hand—*he's* getting *me* a job. I wouldn't even be able to live without Aaron the quantum physicist holding my leash. Then he attempts to construct a bong from an empty beer bottle, a straw, and Elmer's glue. It goes horribly. Darling Nikki and I start making eyes at each other. Then Aaron gets his bong going and the bong may have been weak but his pot was not. It was what my friend Tatiara might have called the *bomb-funky hallucinogenic weed*. Weed that'll knock you off your *ass*. I mean you'll be trippin' off one hit of this shit and then you realize you've had like 15 hits. Aaron Darling Nikki and I stood in front of this poster of Tooler's for like an hour. It was in the kitchen and I can testify that that shit was trippy when you were stone cold sober. But tripping, especially on this weed, you had a tendency to convince yourself that this poster was *meant to be looked at* on this particular strain of weed. There was all kind of body positioning between me Aaron and Darling Nikki which I let Aaron win. As I said before I was 33 and I truly didn't give a shit if Darling Nikki spread her angular legs and let her cunt be fucked by some crook-dick wannabe quantum philosopher or whatever the fuck this tooth-chipped asshole was pretending to be. I wished I had never bought that birthday shot because I just wanted to be in bed, sleep off the tequila and Wicked Witch weed and do something simple tomorrow, like hike Indian pond. The three of us stood there looking at Tooler's picture, torrentially stoned. Darling Nikki leaned into me. "Is this this interesting when you're not high?" "Yes, sometimes I can't even leave the kitchen because I'm tracking down all the subtle references built into its intricacies." Darling Nikki gave me a special look and I thought she wanted to fuck me and in retrospect probably the only reason we didn't fuck during my year in B-boro was that I was psycho. We all started to sober up so we drank Tooler's white wine. I got so drunk off so many different things I had to duck into my bedroom closet and throw up in my boots. I found myself lying on the wood floor of my closet unable to move. I heard the sounds of Darling Nikki leaving and Aaron futilely trying to keep her there and me knowing that he was an amateur because anyone could tell that she was leaving that house *no matter what*. Their conversation and Darling Nikki leaving and the satisfaction that Aaron didn't get to fuck her are the last thoughts I had that night. - - - - I woke up the next day under the most unfortunate of circumstances. Aside from the fact that I was face down in a pool of my own vomit in my Skechers. No. The circumstance I refer to is that when I left my bedroom, Aaron was still there, sleeping on the couch. I wanted this motherfucker out. Last night was a mistake. Aaron was the lynchpin of that mistake. I showered, hoping the motherfucker would hear me and get the idea. When I came out of the shower Aaron was sitting straight up on the couch trying to smoke some more of that crazy weed out of what I now saw was a soda can. Poor Tooler. Not only was her white wine wasted on me and a bunch of Brattleboro degenerates, but we used an entire can of her girlfriend's Coke to make a bong. "You want a hit?" "No." "You have anything else to drink?" We drank Tooler's last bottle of white wine. Totally useless: I wasn't going to get a buzz of a half bottle of wine and I don't even drink white. This fucker just wanted to get a buzz before he left. Yeah, how horrible it would be if he had to walk home sober. If you were careful it might kill you. I kept waiting for him to leave but this braindead asshole just kept talking and talking and I just waited and waited and said nothing and tried to be as boring and as least interactive as I could be so he would just *leave!*..which that asshole finally fucking did. When Tooler and Issa got back from San Francisco they told me, excitedly, that they had smoked some pot. I told them that, symmetrically, I had had some people over while they were gone and we had smoked pot too! We all decided that Maggie probably couldn't smell it so it was probably ok that I had smoked in the house. I was flush with anger at myself that I might have endangered our living situation. I apologized to these fine women, my friends and housemates, and they both comforted me and said don't worry. But I don't think any of us were really into pot—I only remember one time, later, when they were smoking pot and I was freaking out (naturally) because I was brainwashed by AA to think that if I inhaled some second-hand pot smoke I would have to re-instate my sobriety date. AA tickles my OCD. It's not good. - - - - Walking to my shift at the homeless shelter in the middle of the night. There being ice and snow and no one being out and it being very quiet. Me appreciating the features of my Woolrich jacket, which was already one of my favorite possessions I had ever owned. I volunteered at the homeless shelter at that church I went to that one time with the flirtatious new member outreach committee. I learned that that plywood-covered opening at the top of their sanctuary's front wall was what used to contain a Tiffany's stained-glass window that the church sold to keep its doors open to offer service to the community..hosting AA meetings, renting space to Brattleboro Pastoral Counseling, and mostly, running this homeless shelter. Oh yeah: running the homeless shelter meant sitting at this desk in the room where all the homeless people slept on the floor, refilling snack foods, making coffee, and that's about it. Officially. But once you're there a while you learn the people, and you learn that there's more food in the kitchen than your trainer told you about, and then maybe your job involves heating up some leftovers for somebody who gets hungry at three o'clock in the morning. The men sleep downstairs. The women sleep upstairs. Them's the rules. But you tell me what you would do when after lights out a wife from upstairs comes downstairs to cuddle with her husband on a cold floor for most of the hours of the night. They're not having sex—they're both fully clothed! They're not even kissing. They're just some 40-year-old mentally ill homeless people harmlessly spooning because in this marriage, there is no marriage bed. Well I had a position on that and my supervisor disagreed. She said, "You're not suited to work there because you care too much about the clients." (Instead of holding them at a distance like the others who worked there did, calling them "they."—"They're usually pretty good."—"They usually keep to themselves.") In my fantastic mind, volunteering at the homeless shelter would be a perfect job for me. But it's a terrible mismatch because I am too sensitive for it and I am unsatisfied with the level of care we were providing. I wanted to solve the problem..when the purpose of the shelter, I learned, was just making sure people didn't freeze to death *tonight*. That mission did not paint a picture of the world that I was happy with, even if it painted a picture of the world that was true. I broke the cardinal rule: I made friends with the clients. I can't help it—I make friends with everyone. I started going there drunk, going outside to smoke with the patrons. And yes, I let that married couple sleep together even though it was against the rules. I knew, every night I volunteered at the homeless shelter, that if Dagny Taggart lived in Brattleboro she would be among them. If she lived in the real world outside of *Atlas Shrugged*, here in Brattleboro where there are no corporations to rise to the top of, where almost every business is owned by a married couple and they have one employee..she would see that this is a very hard town to even get a job in—and no one would have a need for someone with Dagny Taggart's skills. Dagny sometimes walked me to the shelter, down High Street, snow swirling in the streetlight. I used to say that I didn't have a girlfriend, my girlfriend would be Emily Brontë, and mostly that's still true. But while I lived in Brattleboro, if I had had a girlfriend, my girlfriend would have been Dagny Taggart, and she would have frozen to death if me and the church who sold their Tiffany's window weren't watching over her. See, Dagny Taggart would have no power if she lived in Brattleboro in 2011. All her upstart-ness and get-up-and-go would have been worthless and she would be freezing her bones off in the cold, smoking rollies with fingerless gloves, shuffling inside the church and coming up to my desk, embarrassed to be homeless and hating herself for having to ask my help to get a cup of coffee. I write a blog post about what a shitty person I am for not single-handedly saving all the homeless people in Brattleboro, about the futility and short-sightedness of what we're doing at the shelter. My friend Eglentyne pointed out: (in my words) how self-disparaging I am, I even give myself a hard time for volunteering at a homeless shelter. She said there's basically no wrong way to do that. But even helping the homeless, for me, is an opportunity to beat myself up. That's messed up, man, and totally unnecessary. I don't need to give myself such a hard time. I'm ok, I'm an ok person, I'm not horrible. Here's an excerpt of the post: > I think what bothers me about this is that we're not helping, we're not solving a problem at its root here.  We're doing exactly what that damn flyer said: we're just helping people not freeze to death tonight. I can't say I find that very satisfying, but I guess I'm not here for my own satisfaction, am I? And here's what my friend actually said in reply: > I wish I could say something to help with your sadness, Matthew. Living one more day, helping people survive one more day, that's not a trivial thing. We don't know what will happen on that next day, but being there to breathe, to have an opportunity or to make a choice is a good thing. You just being there, being you, that's a good thing too. ### 15 Whit's. Whitman's was a bar on Elliot street. There could be no Whit's without the Professor. The first time I went there I was looking for a place to drink by myself, where I wouldn't meet anyone or see anyone I know (which is straight-up impossible in a town this size). I went as far up Elliot Street as I could before the shops ended and it went dark (which was three blocks). The last bar on the street was a hippie bar and than turned me off infinitely. So I went back one bar. And that bar was Whit's. And that was fate. I went into Whitman's—a play on the owner's first name, Whit, and of course the poet Walt Whitman. And the bar had a literary theme: ancient books on high shelves and placed behind the bar where the would create atmosphere while being out of reach of drunk people who would likely destroy them. The full name of the bar was Whitman's. But I was telling you about the Professor. The first time I walked into Whit's, I case the long three-sided bar with booths around the outside of the building. A large handwritten sign over the register that says, "CASH ONLY." I sat at the farthest end of the bar, farthest from the door, in the very last seat, by a video poker machine that no one was playing. The only other person down there was an old man looked about 70 or 80 years old. A redhead bartender about 45 comes up to me and she's got this smile like a game show host. She's the only one working this rather large bar and she's like a sniper picking off unarmed muskrats—I mean, she owns the place. She literally owns the place but in terms of *control*, she *owns* this motherfucker—you can just tell, from the first time you meet her. "Whatcha havin' honey?" "I'd love a gin and tonic." "If you're drinking gin," the guy next to me says, "you might try one of these." "What is that?" "An anemic martini, but with vodka. Gin is such an American drink. Vodka is much more..international." "I'll have a gin and tonic." The bartender goes to make my drink and this relic next to me continues talking. "You know there was no vodka in America before the First World War. Or was the Revolutionary War? I can't remember. But gin is the quintessential American drink, while vodka is of course from Russia. Before the Civil War, Americans only *drank* gin. Only after, when the trade routes were modified, was vodka imported to this country. And now Americans mostly drink vodka—a Russian drink—and you have to look far and wide to find a gin drinker like yourself." "I wouldn't say you have to look far and wide." "Yes but would you not agree that vodka is more popular here? I mean, just look behind that bar. Sixteen flavors of vodka—only five or six gins. You're not having well gin, are you? Jill, hold that drink. We want to upgrade his gin to something real." "No," I say. "Well gin. Well gin. I'm drinking incognito tonight." "Well you're not doing a very good job of being incognito." "No?" "No. It's Brattleboro, Vermont, my son. You *can't* be incognito." He holds out his hand. "I'm—Well, it doesn't matter—" Jill is back with my drink. "We call him the Professor." I pay her in cash. "Nice to meet you, Professor. I'm Matthew." "But of course you are." And the Professor turns straight ahead in this seat and sips his martini. I drink and I hope that my conversation with the Professor is over. I just want to get drunk and be alone—I mean, honestly, is that too much to ask? I exist, and I am aware—hyper aware—and I would like to dull this hyper awareness for a few hours before I go to sleep. That is the sole content of my objective. But no. The Professor keeps talking. "I'm pretty sure it was the Civil War. Or Prohibition. Which is your country is pretty much the same thing." "Where are you from?" "Romania. Or Slovenia. I'm too drunk to remember." "How many of those have you had?" "Two or three." "He's had *six*," Jill says. "And if he bothers you, let me know." "Gin was a nigger drink, at first," the Professor continues. "As soon as vodka came in, only the higher classes drank vodka and the blacks drank the old American drink—your drink, gin—because it was considered *low class* one vodka came in. All the Americans—I mean the white Americans—switched from gin to vodka like rats swimming from a sinking ship to a seaworthy one." "It sounds like you're insulting my drink." "Not at all, Matthew. I am saying that gin is the original *American* drink." "Well you have a funny way of saying it." "Let me ask you something." I dread whatever this is going to be, but I say, "What." "I noticed you used the restroom earlier. Did you wash your hands?" I laugh. "Yes, I washed my hands." "Before and after?" "Just *after*." "You must wash before *and* after," this old man says. "The reasons are obvious. I surely don't have to go into them with someone of your intelligence." "You don't really know anything about my intelligence." "*Au contraire!* I know you're not the typical Brattleboro *trash* that walks in here." (He whispers "*trash.*") I'm starting to really wish I was sitting somewhere else. "What do you *do*, my young friend?" "I'm not really in that talkative a mood." "I've offended you. I'm sorry. I am a very offensive person, I know. I apologize. Drink your drink and I'll leave you alone." So we both sit there in silence and sip our drinks. The bar is full of couples mostly, mountain-looking people with hats and beards and newspapers and tattoos. It's like Tucson, where a beautiful woman will be with a rough-looking guy, not LA, where everybody has to be shaved and smooth and rich as simple precursors of love. "So what do you do?" the Professor asks. I laugh. I look at this guy. "I'm an out-of-work computer computer programmer, if you must know." "What type of computer programming?" "Genetic algorithms, AI stuff." "Oh so you really are smart." "No, I just had a lot of practice." "Bullshit. You aren't programming *genetic algorithms* if you don't have a good head on you." "Well, technically, you could teach a stupid person to program a genetic algorithm," I saw. "Yeah, technically. But we're not talking technically, we're talking *actually* about you. What do these genetic algorithms do?" I set down my drink. "Let's say you're on BestBuy\.com, and you click around looking at a few items. These algorithms—these systems—decide what to suggest to you over on the side of the screen. They figure out what you're likely to buy along with whatever you think you're looking for." "That's an interesting way to put that: whatever they *think* they're looking for." "Well, yeah, the most interesting search result, if you think about it, isn't what you know you're looking for, it's what you would love to find but never knew existed." "Mmm." "So these things are used in search engines and Nielsen ratings and shit like that." "'And shit like that.' Why do you do that? Make yourself sound stupid so you fit in? You're talking like a nigger now." "Hey!" "You don't like my use of the word? 'Nigger' was a perfectly acceptable word to describe what you call 'black people.' So was 'negro.' " "Well it's not acceptable now." "In some subcultures in inner city black neighborhoods it's acceptable between black people." "That's a long way from here." "There's nothing inherently racist about the word. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger." I hold my hand up. "Jill. What is up with this guy." She says: "Professor. You're driving away my new customer!" "Fine, I was just making one of the finer cultural points." "His thesis is that 'negro' is acceptable language in twenty-eleven." "Professor, you want to move over a seat? You want another drink?" "Yes, please. Same glass." "Same glass." "If you don't mind." "*I* don't mind," Jill says. The Professor says he'll have another as well. "You're cut off. I never should have served you that one." I'm thinking, as I drink my second G&T, that I'll leave after this one, but I don't even make it all the way through my second drink because the Professor, now with a seat between us, continues talking about the role of slaves in gin production and rare strains of viruses carried by the juniper berry and how when these strains of virus came in contact with human skin they created snail-like patterns in the backs of negroes that were considered a distinctive mark of beauty among American slaves. I leave my drink on the bar and walk out. I mean that guy made me so uncomfortable I almost never went back to Whit's, thinking I could avoid him. But suddenly every bar I walk into, the Professor is there. I close each door and walk out and find another bar but then he comes into *that one*. For me the Professor is like *Visa—he's everywhere you want to be*. Eventually I suck it up and do go back to Whit's because it's my favorite bar in town. I like Jill. I like the shape of it. I like the vibe. And I learn to take the Professor's constant admonitions to "wash your hands before and after" I go to the bathroom. The thing about the Professor is he plays a killer push/pull game. He says the most horrible things that you think *I can't be associated with this guy* but then he gets under your skin and you start to like him because he isn't standard Vermont mountain fare—he is actually a multi-educated former college professor and you can actually carry on a decent level of intellectual conversation with him (if he'll let you.) I hated the Professor the first time I met him. I kind of liked him the second time we talked. Then I hated him again. Then I saw that within each conversation with the Professor, I would go through periods of hating and loving the man—and that's how we all felt about him. - - - - Introducing Jill: this motherly figure—half-hot, half your mom—super friendly, just welcoming as hell, but she had this look, and when she gave you that look, it meant you had one toe over the line and you best back that toe up before Jill backed it up for you. Only twice did I see fights in Whit's, and I wish you could have seen Jill and Whit jump over the counter and *shut those motherfuckers down* in the span of seconds. You don't fuck around in Whit's. You just don't. Everyone knows it. They even have this strange rule: there are candles spaced evenly all around the bar. They're at the back, farthest from the customers, but they're still on the bar. And you don't notice this at first, but there's a sign on each candle that says *Don't touch the candles*. And if you touch the candles, and Jill sees you, you quickly learn that this isn't a just-for-fun rule, it's a hard-and-fast rule: *Don't. Touch. The. Candles.* What happens if you touch the candles? You don't want ti know—just *don't touch the candles*. "Jill, why can't we touch the candles?" I asked one day, when I had made friends with her and we were close enough that I could even ask the question. Jill stops pacing the bar. She looks straight at me. "It's because sometimes drunk people like to play with the wax and they knock the candles over and burn themselves and they could start a fire, etc." "Oh, I thought it was some mystical thing like if you touch the candles you drain the life energy out of them and that drains some of the life energy out of Whit's and then the bar wouldn't be as cool or something." Jill puts her hand on mine. "Matthew, I'm not sure what world you're coming from, but no, it's because if drunk people spill wax on themselves *through no fault of mine*, they *still might win a law suit* and then there would be no more Whit's for you to come drink your gin and tonics in." I smile. "Oh," I say. "I thought it might have something to do with an ancient spell cast by a black mage—" Jill cracks up. "Are you just fucking with me?" "Yes," I say. "Good. 'Cause if not we do have the Refuge right down the road I can send you there." "No, I'll stay here and drink." "Good." She touches my hand again. "We like you here." Jill and I talked about lots of things 'cause I like to talk and Jill had nothing better to do. I remember one time she was telling me why it was so empty that day. "No," she said. "Again, you're associating this with some cosmic phenomena. This isn't the weather. Are you listening? Let me tell you something. Today is the thirtieth. Are you following me?" "I might need another drink to keep up with such detail." "I'll get you your drink. Anyway. Today is the thirtieth. That means that all the people on checks" (disability, retirement, unemployment) "are out of money 'cause they drank it in here the first three weeks of the month and *tomorrow*..all these seats will be full again because everyone will have money again. Uncle Sam!" She makes my drink. As she sets it in front of me she says: "See, you've made your money." And I kept quiet about being on a check—the only reason I was drinking here was my unemployment check. I hadn't *made my money*. I couldn't even find a software job—I gave up on that back in Pennsylvania. I was just eking it out like everybody else—but don't tell Jill. She assumes *I made my money,* I'm set for life, just because I obviously don't work because I'm in here drinking seven days a week..but also because of my demeanor: I don't look like or act like I'm on a check. I'm gregarious. I'm proud. I own a MacBook. I make my money last all the way through to the end of the month. And, generally, I look like and act like I'm king of the fucking world, which as long as I'm in a good mood and have a hundred dollars in my pocket—I am. To Jill, I'm entirely different that those people she talks about being "on a check" even though that's exactly what I am. - - - - This is at Whitman's: A couple who looks like they just met for a drunk fuck; at a bar. That's what they *look like*. It's like they're doing all the flirting and tentative finger touching that works up to a first fuck, with shots and drinks to help them along. But the observer of this little play (of which I am only one) quickly finds out they're married, and this is what they do: come to Whit's and re-enact their first meeting. It's a whole thing. Playing Billie Holiday on the jukebox. They way she was sitting, the cigarettes she smoked; her old-ass blue panties and dress. On a napkin I write: > interesting idea: the rate at which compression, reduction, elimination, leads to clarity, concentration, benefit, value..versus the rate at which nothing can be contained in something less, at which reduction loses meaning..there must be some common factor there which reflects the optimal rate of a syntax, of a medium I raise my hand to Thomas. "Can I get you something?" "Yes," I say, struggling to get my ideas down. "Another napkin?" - - - - The first time I day drink at Whitman's. I'll never forget. I'm the only one there and Whit is tending bar. I drink six gin and tonics, one per hour, on the half hour, and Kip and I talk, I write poetry on my computer on Twitter, and everything is nice and orderly. I even say something to Whit about how I'm trying to manage my own drinking and he says it looks to him like I'm doing just fine and he doesn't have anything to say to me about it. After a while Jane is there, too, for part of it—my other day drinker, partner in crime. I met Jane the first time Tooler and Issa and I went out for drinks, at some underground bar that closed. I saw Jane working, cleaning behind the bar, then she and I were smoking in a stairwell, and we talked right away. She was beat up, deep wrinkles, missing teeth, but my kind of girl right away 'cause she could smile and she didn't mind talking to a stranger. Then I would see her around, at Whit's and other bars. She drank like me, like I always had in LA and in Tucson, moving from bar to bar throughout the day so no individual bartender would know how much I'd had to drink. Jane was my little Dagny Taggart—what DT would have become in Brattleboro—a model who everyone, when she's not listening, says was beautiful in her day, then a hooker, now an alcoholic on a check who sleeps in her car, paying for a permit in the six-level parking lot in downtown (smart, maybe that's what I should have done instead of renting a room in a house..maintain my car and live in it, pay a parking permit instead of rent). Yes, in secret, in my mind, Jane was Dagny Taggart—but not the fake one from the book—the real one, what Dagny Taggart's spirit would have become in real life. - - - - I was a newbie at Whitman's for a while. Flash forward to months later: Drunk off Scotch, carrying a snifter out of Whit's, drunk off *my ass*, launching the snifter over a three-story balcony drop so far I never even heard it crash. The next time I went in (which was the next morning one minute after they opened) Kip asking me: "Do you remember walking out with a snifter last night because I saw you?" And I almost said no but then it all slowly came back to me. Kip said, "Look around your apartment to see if you find it." And I said, "I'll look." But I just left an extra twenty on the bar to pay for it. And Whit never guilted me about it. I felt bad and didn't mean any disrespect (and I told him this) but he said, nah, forget about it, you paid for it. I wanted to punish myself with guilt and think about how Whit might have possibly interpreted my actions. Whit just wanted to even the books and move on with business, which, of course, was the business of drinking, cahooting, smoking, playing music on the jukebox, meeting people, hooking up, and drinking some more. ### 16 I kept working at the homeless shelter, drunk. I'd drink wine at my desk at home from 8pm until 11:45, when I had to leave to make my midnight shift. In the afternoon I wrote. I wasn't in any kind of productive book cycle, but one day before I started drinking (with drinking as my reward), I wrote the introduction to Penny's book and shared virtual cigarettes with her across the pond through email exchanges, coordinating our cigarette breaks while we both wrote. She's a poet I had admired for years, and a fledgling friend, and it was an honor to write her introduction. In it, I said things like: > Penny Goring is fearless. > > It was in PUSH BUTTON PUSH that I first noticed her lists. That whole piece is a list of call/response or prompt/response pairs. The prompts could be auto-generated blog prompts, or questions on an admitting test to a psych ward. To present such a thing is a bold move. We're always trying, in writing, to invent forms clever enough to elude our audience, such that the audience will, for example, receive the arc of a three-act play without our ever saying "Here begins Act III." We're trying to hide the form—we don't need to. A beginner learns the list. An amateur tries to distance herself from it. A master uses it unashamed. And I said things like this: > For some, Penny's language may be too frank, too sexual. If you're bothered by the idea that poetry might mention cocaine or tell you "How to get a tampon inside", as in Darklings, then you're probably still living in the 1800s, and Emily Dickinson will frighten you. I take for granted that contemporary poetry, as with contemporary anything, doesn't cater to those squeamish about reality—about the realities of contemporary times. So: if you need moral hand-holding, fuck off. > > Otherwise, turn the page and read some of the best poetry I know of. From the technical Thus Spake Nebuchadnezzar to the graceful, simple, loving House, Goring is real subjects and bright words. PUSH BUTTON PUSH is daring, and a personal favorite. Darklings deserves a whole introduction itself—and all the attention we can give it. Marc Nash calls it "astonishingly brilliant"; I echo that. To write these poems took a mind whose language I can begin to speak about and the experience of a life I couldn't claim to, but I feel certain that you will not find poetry this good, from another writer, for a long time. Yeah, I hyped that shit 'cause it deserved it. Then, with Penny's intro written, and with my bottle of wine just outside the frame, I'd video chat with my friend Ashley on Google video and help her and her friend write their haunted house screenplay. I had difficulties with this, I think because by that point my writing had become so much a part of me and had become such art for me that spending time writing a genre piece, even for my best friend, was no longer something I could feel good about doing. My involvement in the project fizzled. But look at me: writing an introduction to a poetry volume, helping my friend with a screenplay..I was like a productive human being or something. And around 11:45pm I'd walk through empty snowy High Street in my Woolrich jacket, always snowflakes visible in the street lamps. I'd do my 12am-8am shift at the homeless shelter. I was drunk during the first hours of my shift and all night I wrote the beginning of what I thought would be *HARD*, my next novel. I thought about levels of drama, levels of story. For instance, like a sitting at a desk (versus sitting on the floor) there is a level of art which is there, which is required, which functions, to make you forget about a whole level of questions..so that your consciousness takes on this other set of (desired) problems. Do you know what I mean? It's like, instead of thinking about your back, and your body, once you have a chair, your consciousness thinks about a whole other set of things..that is the purpose of a chair. And in art there are similar functionaries whose purpose is to elevate you so that you can safely, mindlessly, and comfortably consider a different set of problems. I thought about feedback I had gotten from literary agents on my previous books, specifically *Things Said in Dreams*. I tucked all these thoughts neatly away in a document titled *journal.txt*: > I think Gina Panitierre is wrong about TSID having an unsympathetic narrator. "I don't want to die today. I don't want to die," she says. There is a high degree of real victimization of her. She talks rough about it. But that insane world that GP thinks is too much..that is realistic, that is the normal, a quite real/real-world normal..this narrator is just the reaction to it. That warping, her warping, is normal given the circumstance. > > Plus, I don't think it would be right to tell a story about bystander evil without the main character being the bystander. Without that, how is there an issue to *present*, that can then be discussed? The evil has to happen in order for there to be a reaction. Otherwise, nothing happened. Right? > > The only other, or the primary other, option that comes to mind, is to have a story where the character encounters many small bystander evil situations, where others are the evil, and then she herself makes the right choice on a larger bystander issue..I think that's an acceptable route, in general, but I think of the two main options (my way in TSID, and this option described here), my way is stronger. I had my own cigarettes and went out to smoke with the clients and they spoke of a revolution that was coming because Americans (like them) had been pushed too far. They weren't about to organize the thing, but they seemed certain it was coming. Jane was with them, this fellow day drinker from Whit's and every other bar I went to, was homeless, I learned. After a few hours I sobered up and it was extremely difficult to stay awake. Most of the time I wrote through it. Several nights I asked my partner if I could leave early, if they could take the rest of the shift by their self. It wasn't long before I emailed the director of the program and told her I was very sorry but I was an alcoholic in the middle of a relapse and I couldn't work the homeless help desk anymore. It was weak to email her instead of calling but I didn't have enough self esteem to call her with that message. I couldn't think about homeless people anymore. I was excited to meet friends at Whit's, especially Justine. And I wasn't about to try to stop drinking. ### 17 Justine. I wanted to have her. I wanted to undress her. I wanted to push her down on my bed, her bed, any bed, anywhere, and smell her and bite her and rub my lips and my fingers and my cock over every inch of her body. Then I wanted to fuck her, cradle her head in my hands and overwhelm her small body with smells and tastes and touches until her eyes were looking up at me pleading me to make her cum. I wanted to hold her there and see and hear her at the height of her feeling, know my cock was inside her when her whole body felt..I don't know..let's just call it the enlightenment of the gutter. And I wanted to rub my cock inside her vagina until the rough walls and textures of this small-bodied young woman made me shake and shoot and grab her tight—her head against my shoulder—as I came inside her. That's what I wanted from Justine. That's all. - - - - I met her at Whit's. She was sitting with her boyfriend and she went out for a smoke and I *shamelessly, idiotically, forwardly, absurdly* just got up from my bar seat and followed that female human being outside and said: "You look like someone that I'd like to get to know." And she laughed and said: "Do you want a cigarette?" And I said: "Yes." And Justine blushed, and, blushed, and blushed, and I was glad she got the idea. I wanted to unzip her jeans and suck on her pussy right there. I was crazy about that girl. She was *so* feminine, *so* sexual to me, and I didn't really care who knew it, her, her boyfriend, anyone at Kips. Every time she went outside to smoke a cigarette I interrupted whatever conversation I was in and followed her. Sometimes we smoked her Parliaments, sometimes we smoked my Kamels. Justine would always ever only smoke a half a cigarette. She'd tuck the second half into the beams supporting the awning covering Whitman's door. I went from being a potentially creepy male who totally fucking insinuated myself into her situation, to being her smoking buddy. When she went outside, she'd stop at my seat and put her tiny hand on my shoulder and say, "You wanna smoke?" Then we went from being smoking buddies to being friends, and I met her boyfriend and we became friends, but if Justine needed more cigarettes she would leave her boyfriend at the bar and I would walk her across the street to the convenience store. We would both be be drunk—me and her and her boyfriend drank together, bought each other alternating rounds—but there was trust there enough that her boyfriend trusted me to leave the bar with his girl and she trusted me enough to make a cigarette run together. But Justine had a boyfriend. And they were tight. My only real chance was that Whit and Jill were swingers and Justine's boyfriend had a thing for Jill, so if he and Jill hooked up, that would give Justine a pass to go outside the relationship and I hoped if she did, it would be with me. But unlike some parasitic fuckers who make themselves a nuisance because unless they have actual sex with someone they don't even see the point of a relationship, I was happy to be friends with Justine and her boyfriend and special smoking friends with Justine. Spending a few minutes with her smoking in front of Whitman's was time spent in heaven for me, I admired Justine so much. - - - - Let's put my Justine obsession aside for a second, though, and paint a fuller picture of Whit's. The music. You had to play the right music at Whit's. Nina Simone's *Sinnerman* was played at least once a day in Whit's—it was the song of the bar. Then Billy Joel—because Thomas liked Billy Joel (especially *New York State of Mind*). If you put on the wrong music, people knew you weren't a regular. Like one time I put on some Fatboy Slim and I was nearly kicked out of the bar. It just isn't done. Whitman's customers are very particular about their music. Thomas, Whit and Jill's only bartender, had a remote control and if someone played something too offensive, he would just skip the jukebox ahead a song and restore peace to the galaxy. Thomas invited me to play chess once. I beat him the first game, but he never stopped smiling. He was just sizing me up. We played a second game and he beat me in like ten moves. Thomas told me about his parents. About how they died in a fire started by his mom's cigarette. He got insurance money and wandered between Brattleboro and New York City for a while. He tells me his dreams of New York, his memories of times there. He makes it sound like he grew up there but I later learn he's really from Brattleboro, born and raised, Brattleboro High, the whole nine. He says his mother "gave" him New York City by taking him on a trip there once. (And, I fill in the dots, that's why after his parents died, he spent so much time there.) Thomas invites me for a whiskey-drinking night, a gentlemen's trip around some of the better whiskeys Whit's stocks, in his opinion, and we do it. We take our whiskey tour nice and slow, talk at length about Thomas' obsession and love for New York City, down to the bars that he drinks in and the streets that he goes to. A bar isn't just a bar to Thomas, it's the poetry of the carved wooden decorations above the doorway, inside, on the walls, above the bar, below the bar where nobody ever looks. And I fall in love with Thomas a little bit that night—he's a writer, a drinker, and a poet of life, someone who, like me, isn't just there for the main event. Someone who sees the intricacy of whiskey or wine or making love with the woman you love. He tells me of a time he passed out drunk in the Amtrak station in New York and woke up without his bag—now that's a setup. No money, no ID, in Penn Station, New York City, you don't know anybody—you're fucked. He tells how he got the job at Whitman's: he just showed up and didn't take no for an answer. Jill later tells me the same story. Says she didn't want to hire him but he had decided he was going to be the bartender at Whitman's and he just started coming to work every day, helping out, tending bar, and (as Jill put it) "We had to start paying him!" Then I guess it was my turn to share and I openly cried at the bar when I told him about my girlfriend who died when we both took ecstasy. I don't tell everyone that story but I kind of figured I owed it to Thomas since we shared the experience of having our favorite people up and fucking *vanish* into the dust of the universe. So Thomas and I had that in common, and maybe that was one of the reasons the universe threw us together. I told him I had been to a mental hospital in Los Angeles. That I might have bipolar. We covered a lot of ground. "I'm glad to be on *this side* tonight," Thomas says, grabbing the bar. And Jill is serving us. And when I think about Rebecca I just let the tears flow. I look at her, I look at Thomas, through wet eyes with no embarrassment and no apology. Because, no offense, but when you've been what I've been through, there is no embarrassment and there is no apology. We're way past that. - - - - One night I ask Thomas: "You know where I could get some coke around here?" He nods at a guy in a booth. I won't describe him further so that when he reads this he won't freak out and come scouring the globe trying to kill me. But when this guy gets up to leave I go outside Whitman's and as he's putting his hat on I say: "I heard you're the guy to ask if I wanted to buy some cocaine." He flips out. "Where did you hear that?" "Well I can't tell you that, can I!" "*Never, never* approach me like that. That is so uncool." "Ok, I'm drunk. I'm looking for some coke. If I'm asking the wrong guy, then that's that. Have a good night." I start back inside Whit's. "Hold on." "Uh?" "You're talking to the right guy. You just freaked me out, with the way you said it. You know. Get to know someone first." "I'm sorry I scared you. Ok. I'm sorry. But if you play a risky game, expect to take some risks." "You're freaking me out again." "Hey, you got freaked out because people know you're the guy to ask. No offense, but that's either a function of how you operate or of how fucking small this town is." "Yeah, probably the latter," he says. "I'm gonna give you my card. I'm a manager. Talent?" "Ok. You're a talent manager in Brattleboro, Vermont?" "Shut up. Just email me sometime." "Alright. Thanks, man." And he's off. And I'm hopeful. Maybe get some coke sometime. - - - - One night, sitting with a skeleton crew at Whitman's—in a snow so huge that only the hardest of the hardcore drinkers were out, and only the hardest of the hardest core bars were open—all watching some huge machine that even natives had rarely seen: a huge chute that pumped snow off the street into the open-top boxcar on an 18 wheeler. This thing was equipped with huge lights so the crew could see what they were doing, and it worked like a motherfucking charm: they scraped the snow right off Elliot Street and vacuumed it into this boxcar. We stood amazed. We really become a family, those of use who went to Whitman's every day. I was there when Thomas and his girlfriend announced their wedding. They pulled out a huge photo album of each of them as children that one of her aunts had put together and Thomas and I thumbed through each page together, not even just for his girlfriend's satisfaction. Sometimes I'd be keeping Thomas's girlfriend company while she waited for him at the bar, waited for him to get off work. Thomas's girlfriend doesn't drink, and I'm not attracted to her, I just can't stand to see my friend's fiancée sit alone at the corner of a bar drinking waters. I bought her lemonades and milk while I drank my G&Ts and I even slowed down a little so her company wouldn't be drunk while she was sober. I 'd just talk to her about things—anything—ask her about her life, shit like that. I can talk to a stranger on a bus for three states before there's a moment of silence, so I sure as hell could keep Thomas' girlfriend company while she waited for him to get off. Thomas thanked me later for keeping his girl company, saying that he trusts me and me saying yeah, me keeping her company is really something I'm doing for you—not me, not even her—and Thomas holds my face in his hands and says he knows and that I'm a beautiful person. - - - - And then there was the day Thomas demonstrated to the Professor how many shots were in six martinis. Thomas felt he needed to show the Professor how fucking drunk he was, visually. So Thomas begins setting the appropriate number of shot glasses on the bar and I think it was something like three shots per martini so Thomas had the whole of Whitman's watching while he lined up 18 shot glasses across the bar and said: "From now on you're limited to three." "Three martinis? Then I won't come in here anymore." "Then don't come in." "You don't have the power to do this. Wait till Jill finds out." But Jill and Whit backed Thomas up. They said he had the right to choose who he served and how much he served them. In fact, when Jill and Whit heard about stunt with the shot glasses, they were thrilled—they didn't even want the Professor in their bar. Sober, he was an ok guy, but one *sip* of one martini in him, he instantly turned sexist, racist, even certain kinds of *-ists* that I'd never before witnessed. He is to this day the most offensive person I've ever met. No one wanted to sit next to him once he started drinking because no one wanted to be associated with the remarks he made. This man's speech and opinions were unimaginably despicable. They were erudite and fascinating, grotesque and unbelievable, and yet insulted every slice of humanity that was sliceable, especially the slice of class. The Professor was absolutely the most classist American I've ever met. ### 18 Here's a major event, and the fact that it's a major event will tell you a few things about me. One time right when I moved to Brattleboro I drove drunk to go get Wendy's after drinking at Whit's. Driving in ice and snow to get there just to feed munchies. Feeling terrible about it and swearing I wouldn't do it again..and I don't think I did. That wasn't the event. The event was mostly walking home up the icy hill after a night of drinking, a walk I took many times to pass out in my bed, Tooler and Issa long sleeping in their room. But here it is, here's the event. Here's the thing I still think about after five years have passed: one night, coming home hungry because I didn't drive drunk to go to Wendy's and there was no food to buy in Brattleboro, I ate a slice of Tooler and Issa's pizza, totally standing in front of the refrigerator, totally drunk. I debated it before doing it, but was overcome by hunger and my conscience was dulled by drink. I ate that pizza and went to bed. I felt super guilty about it afterward because of who it meant that I was: imperfect, stealer, out of control..an alcoholic? I didn't feel horrible about eating one piece of pizza—I felt horrible because I went against my morals. Issa didn't know where it went but Tooler said I bet Matthew had the drunk munchies. "You're right, D, I had the drunk munchies and I fucking couldn't help myself. I was like compelled to eat a piece of your pizza. I'm sorry, dude." "I don't give a fuck. You're welcome to my leftover pizza anytime." "Yeah, but I took it without asking." "I fucking know I don't want you to *wake me up* to ask if you can have a slice of freezer section pizza! Do *that* shit and I'll be pissed as hell." I felt like I was on the executioner's block and I couldn't get my executioner to drop the blade, and I'm kneeling there looking up and the ghoul like: *Drop the motherfucker!* And my executioner is like: *It's no problem, dude!* But I stole. In my mind, and in actuality, I stole, and I felt awful because I took without asking..and it was an indicator of my alcohol problem—that was the real pinch of the thing. That was five years ago, and I still feel guilty about it. Tooler and Issa have laughingly forgiven me, years and years ago, and they probably haven't thought about it since then. But I still think about it like it was yesterday, and I still hate myself for doing it. Maybe it's even more twisted than stealing *or* being an alcoholic. Maybe I know that one piece of pizza doesn't matter, to Tooler Issa or me..but I'm *using it* as a way to hate myself, to think I'm a piece of shit, to think I'm a loser—because *that* is the true underlying need. - - - - Stray memory of a psycho. I saw this thing recently on your chances of meeting a serial killer. Forget what the answer was but I think one of the closest times I've ever come is meeting this guy in Brattleboro who just wasn't right. His name was Vic. He just gave off this vibe. He seemed to be helpful, like I met him in the bar and when he found out I didn't have a job he offered me snow-cleaning work with him. But it was just going to me and him. Like we would hand out flyers and hope people called us back. But whatever, that's good work in Vermont, so let's give him a pass on this one. Then he'd invite me to his apartment to eat a rotisserie chicken he was cooking, but I never took him up on it because something didn't feel right. He starts a rotisserie chicken, leaves the house, goes to a bar for some drinks, then goes back to the chicken? I couldn't tell if he was gay or just weirdly friendly..or..most likely..a stray motherfucking serial murdering motherfucker. I was pretty sure it was the last. Like if you went into his house to get a whiff of that rotisserie chicken, you'd never leave with your brains intact. That was just the feeling I got. I know I'm imaginative—some would say psychotic—but I'm also very intuitive and I feel extremely good about my decision never to go with Vic to his apartment. I'm sorry. There was just something about his face. Something always seemed suspicious. Something always seemed wrong. Something always seemed off about him, so I deleted his number and never ever took any calls from him. I avoided him in the bar as much as possible. I was hoping the borough of Brattle would add those little safety kiosks like they have on college campuses but these would be for reporting a possible serial killer. But even though to my mind Vic seems like a possible serial killer, really, he was most likely just not socialized the right way and this meant I had to stay away from him. He seemed like just the type to start a successful American business—just enough of a sociopath, just enough disregard for the human—to be successful here. - - - - I saw the upstairs neighbor, Maggie, out with her boyfriend on Valentine's day. Let's just call her boyfriend Larry..or Frank. Which do you prefer, Larry or Frank? We just need a name to indicate he was a dumb football-loving all-American piece of shit. How about Mick? Maggie and Mick—that works. Anyway Maggie had Mick up to Brattleboro from wherever but she had to work so somehow it fell to *me* to babysit Mick while Maggie was off organizing tours for National Geographic or whatever she did. So he's a guy, right, I figured he couldn't say no to *hiking a mountain* and he didn't. He had come the day before and I was fucking glad for Maggie as this was the first company she'd had in a month and a half of me living in that house. So I hiked Wantastiquet with Mick's boring ass. I would have rather hiked alone—no—I would have rather hiked with a Roman slave walking behind me chanting, "All fame is fleeting," and showing a slideshow of my dad verbally abusing me as a child. But I was stuck with Mick. He was one of these quick hikers who don't stop to look at the newts growing in the little streams you cross. He stepped right over snakes that he never saw. When we got to the top I had my usual spiritual moment while he droned on about some trivial bullshit which I'll be getting to *in a second*. But trust me, this guy was a bore. Perfect for Maggie. So I return Mick to Maggie when she gets home from work and I go out to dinner. I wanted a steak so I went to the only place you could get a steak after the fire and what do you know, Maggie and Mick are at the same restaurant as me. I saw the look on their face like *how sad, Matthew's dining alone on Valentine's day* and I was like *don't feel sorry for me, I'm going to have a much more enjoyable dinner than either of you tonight*. I sat, I ate my steak, I drank my wine, I talked with my waitress, I wrote in my notebook, and I didn't have to impress anyone or please anyone and I didn't know of anyone nearby who would make better company for me than myself. There were no games, no expectations, no disappointments. True, there was no sex after, but there were still surprises—in general I make an excellent date for myself..especially on a hyped-up day like Valentine's Day. I was thirty-three years old at this time—impressing someone else for sex was not on my list of things to do. Enjoying an extra-rare steak, a glass of chianti—much higher on my list of things to do. And if you think it bothered me being the only table of one on the ultimate date night in a restaurant packed with tables of two..well..then you don't know me at all. Couples looked at me with pity—the men did—disdain even, perhaps as a defense, like underneath they were threatened by an unmatched male. Their women made eyes at me and I politely smiled and nodded, then looked the other way. I do what I like and I flirt with who I like. I'll tell you a story. I was once at dinner with my friend Ashley and I sent a note to a teenager having dinner with her parents—the girl was looking at me and I was looking at her and there was obviously some connection. The note said, in crayon, on a piece of the paper table covering, *You're cute*. Her parents were obviously disturbed (I was twenty three at the time, she was maybe sixteen) but the girl wrote me back and sent it by the same waiter who had delivered my note to her. Hers said, *You're cute, too*. And we left it at that. We didn't fuck. I didn't ask her for her *number*. But Jesus Christ, if a post-pubescent girl is flirting with me, and I like her, you better believe I'm gonna flirt back. Flirting is safe when you're with safe people. I agree we shouldn't violate underage kids, but it's silly to deny when there is sexual energy across the eighteen-year-old line. Maggie and Mick arrived after I was seated and left before I was finished with my meal. Days later, Maggie confided in me that she'd had a horrible time. She'd had the steak, too—it was horrible. She'd had a glass of wine—it was horrible. I didn't say what I was thinking, which was that both of those probably had less to do with the food itself and more to do with the person sitting across from you..and even more they had to do with the person sitting in the same seat as you, breathing with the same lungs as you, and thinking with your same brain. If there was any flirtation in her telling me her Valentine's date went horribly, I didn't care—I'd fantasized wild encounters with Maggie but when she got up close and personal, she was just..boring. Back to Wantastiquet. The hike to the top. Maggie's dull-as-bone boyfriend talking about all sorts of unreliable sports minutiae and waiting till we got to the very top of the mountain and I was having my spiritual experience to ask me if I heard them fucking. He didn't phrase it that way. (So timid, so young, so sensitive and embarrassed..believe me, friend, in ten years you won't care if anyone heard you fucking, it won't even be worthy as a topic of conversation. But to you it's still like you think it's some big secret that you stuck your dick in Maggie on Valentine's day—*hello!, you're her boyfriend, that's what we're all expecting you to do!*) Anyway so he says something like: "Matthew?" "Yes?" "Are the rooms arranged the same on the first floor as they are on the second floor?" "I don't know 'cause I've never been in Maggie's apartment." He explains the layout of Maggie's apartment. Where the bedrooms are. Where the kitchen is. Where the bathrooms are. I'm like looking over the sweeping mountainscapes of southern Vermont and this 20 year old is sneaking around the edges of a question I could see coming before we started our hike. "So..did you..hear anything last night?" "What like an intruder?" "No." "Like what? Was some homeless person sleeping in the foyer? Sometimes they come in for warmth when we forget to lock the outside door." "No. Did you hear..so wait..is Tooler and Issa's bedroom under the front right corner of the house?" "The front right corner as you look out, from inside the house?" "Yes." "Yeah, their bedroom goes across the whole front of the house." "So where's your bedroom?" "Um, you know the stairs that go up to Maggie's apartment?" "Yeah." "My room is underneath that. I mean my closet is literally under the stairs." He didn't seem to understand so I said: "Like in Harry Potter." "Oh, good," he said, exhaling heavily. I thought we were done and I was back pondering the hugeness of the space when Mick is like: "How thin are the floors? Do you ever hear Maggie moving around or walking?" "No. The only thing we ever hear is when she vacuums." Which was a total lie. The floors were paper thin and we could hear every step Maggie took, every flush of the toilet, every onion she chopped—every time she wiped her vagina with a square of single-ply toilet tissue we could hear it. But this guy was going to freak out if I told him that and I was enjoying the quiet of my mountains. "Tooler and Issa are out of town by the way." "They are?!" "Yeah they're in like California doing some political action that's going to make it harder for police to murder black people." That shut him up. - - - - I had fantasies of fucking Maggie but she was so straight laced she would never go for me and in the middle of the fantasy she always did something so incredibly boring and neurotic (even for me) that I had abandoned trying to get off to Maggie long ago, at least semi-realistic versions of her. I hardly ever saw her but I did knock on her door once to smooth things over between her and the downstairs apartment about the snow-shoveling problem. She was quite angry and I tried to sooth her. I often used her laundry detergent when I was poor (read: spent too much money drinking at Whitman's). I never flirted with her—in actuality I just wanted things to go well at the house. Issa and Tooler were indeed out of town, but each evening Mick was in attendance at the house—once the night he arrived, once the night of Valentine's Day—I heard a thumping coming from Maggie's apartment—and it didn't sound like vacuuming. It sounded like Maggie getting her uptight pussy fucked by her no-frills boyfriend who could hardly carry on a conversation with me during an hour-long mountain climb. But the thumping continued and went harder and louder and then was the sound of Maggie cumming—a heavy-duty orgasm from a woman who hadn't had dick in a long time. I was glad she came. It was a pleasant sound, but controlled, like the rest of Maggie. I wanted to buy her a vibrator, the really nasty kind with the pronged clit stimulator and the rotating anal beads. Maggie seemed like a nice person, a sane person with a degree and a good job and a much more stable mind than the one I'm operating with. But she didn't seem like she was exactly sucking the marrow out of life—you know what I mean? Whatever. It's not my place to judge. ### 19 I made a commitment against driving drunk. I made a commitment against stealing Tooler's pizza. I settled on getting steak grinders from a pizza joint called Frankie's, which was right across the street from Whit's. The first time I went in there I asked for a cheesesteak. "What's a cheesesteak?" That's what the register person said to me: *What's a cheesesteak?* Honestly I was speechless. I thought about going into a history lesson on how not too far from here there was a city called Philadelphia and in that city a common food was.. But the owner/cook stepped in to help. "They don't call 'em cheesesteaks up here." "What do they call them?" "A steak grinder." "Oh! I'd like a steak grinder, then." "It's weird, I know," says the cook, the owner, Frankie. "No," I say. "Different places, different names." "You'll like ours," he says. "If you like a real Philly steak." "Alright, that sounds like a challenge." Frankie smiles. Frankie lives across the street from me. I learned to love Frankie real fast. The register girl, who is like a young 15, says: "One steak grinder, then? You want a large or a small?" "Large." "Anything else. Chips? You want a soda?" "Nah I'm good." "What would like to add?" "I just want steak, grilled onions, provolone, and banana peppers." "I can tell you're from Philly by the way you order," Frankie says. "I used to live there." The register girl half-turns to Frankie. "What's a banana pepper?" "You mean a pepperoncini," Frankie asks me. "Yeah." "We don't have any." "You got jalapeños?" Frankie smiles, nodding his head largely. Old guy. Bald. Gray beard. He's already making my sandwich. "Can you make it double meat?" I say. Frankie gives me the thumbs up. "So what's your name?" I ask this little register girl. If I was fifteen I'd totally be all over her. "Clear Waters." "Nice name." "I have hippie parents." "I guessed." "You look like you've done drugs," she says. Then she looks to Frankie and shrugs. "What? He does." "I have." "What ones?" "LSD. Mushrooms. Ecstasy. Mostly I like hallucinogens but I've done about every regular drug there is." "Like what else?" "Heroin, coke, crystal." "I would *never* do crystal meth." "Good idea. I used to say the same thing myself." "I know. But it's different once you get out in the world. I'm planning a road trip." She looks at Frankie. "It's ok! The job is temporary! I know you're leaving!" "No, I just didn't know if you minded me talking about drug shit with customers." "Of course, is good, you make friends, you talk about whatever customer wants to talk about." "Well I guess it's ok since you brought it up," she says, raising herself off her seat by leaning on the counter. "I'm pretty sure you brought it up," I say. "No it was you." "I would never bring up a hardcore drug conversation with someone half my age, trust me." "You don't look bad for being *twice my age*." I laugh. "Thanks. Anyway we're prob'ly gonna do drugs on my road trip. Can I have a cigarette?" I'm playing with a pack of Kamels. I hadn't realized it. "Frankie, do you mind if I take Clear Waters outside for a minute and I'll come back and get that grinder?" "Just bring her back in roughly the state that you found her." "She'll be pristine. We'll be right outside your door." When I was a kid, Nintendo had this saying: *Now you're playing with power.* And, when a 33 year old talks with a 15 year old, you're playing with power. You both are. And most people are too coarse and too eager and not specific enough in their thinking to figure out the difference between *playing with power* and *abusing power*. The 15 year old is going to abuse power: that's ok. It's not ok for the 33 year old to abuse power. But it's ok if you can find moments where two people in a potentially dangerous situation can safely *play* with each other. Clear Waters and I had a cigarette, talked straight-up about all the drugs she had *really* done that she didn't want to talk about in front of Frankie, asked me about the drugs I had tried that she hadn't, listened to my grand revelations and my brief warnings, then she said: "I've heard sex on ecstasy is the bomb." "It is." "You've done it? With a guy or a girl?" "A girl." "I heard it just like blows all your senses." "That's pretty much right." And we talked more. It doesn't matter. What matters is that she gave me her perspective and I gave her mine. Then we put our cigarettes out and went inside. That's the last and only night I ever saw that girl. I hope it's because she went on a road trip and never came back. - - - - I held up my steak grinder, wrapped in brown paper, as I left Frankie's, as my way of saying goodnight and thank you to Frankie and Clear Waters, and I walked my steak grinder up a back street, crossed over to High, and got home to eat alone in my Harry Potter apartment. I was prob'ly watching some movie on my laptop—that's all I ever do. It was a lonely ritual for me. I did write this in my notebook that night: > something else I don't often consider, that I should: > > if I have, in all likelihood, youth on my side > > that: I am fairly young and attractive..that I have time as an asset I'm not saying I could have fucked that girl who was the cashier at Frankie's. I'm just saying: teenagers will still talk to me as though I'm in their realm, and through some serious American brainwashing, that makes me feel better about myself. Mostly, though—and if you know me you know this is true—I don't give a shit about the teenager working as a cashier at Frankie's. I would never even try to be with her because she's uninteresting to me (as a mate). But what is interesting to me is having time to write—living long enough that I get to write my books, to tell this world what I think about itself. *That* I care about. And that was how I felt at 33. I'm 38 and I still feel the same way. Talk about an obsession. I shun the larger part of life to sit in front of a computer and try to make tapestries out of the web of sin and life that I know so little of. > And maybe this, as a goal, for writing: > > Write something that causes someone else to fall more in love with the world > > As a goal, for life: > > Myself, to fall more in love with the world - - - - Let's go back a little, before Valentine's Day and Maggie's no-frills pussy getting fucked by her no-frills boyfriend's no-frills dick, before flirting with that little 15-year-old road tripper at Frankie's. Rewind a little, back a few drinks, back a few *nights* of drinking, and to this text entry where I try to talk myself out of drinking altogether and psych myself up to write another novel. > **February 7, 2011** > > I need to give myself a break. Get in touch with my spirit, with some esteem-able acts. I have to stop drinking again. Haven't gone so far back down the drinking path that that will be difficult—not too difficult. But I definitely have started drinking again, and done it too much, done it to the point of making myself feel bad. I'm going to take the next few days and months and just live simply again in that way, just don't do it, don't drink. Take a walk around the block instead, if I feel like drinking. Hike instead. Or get out the weights and work out my arms. I want to be thinner, I want to lose weight so my body does less work on a moment-to-moment basis. I feel better when I'm sober..and I am a worthwhile person, I deserve to feel better. And, simply, oddly, amazingly, and confoundingly, I am the person who can make that happen. That needs to be a basis of my hierarchy of needs and accomplishment. I have so many things going for me, and I have challenges, too. I don't want to spend my life struggling with that; I want to spend my life in other domains, learning and struggling with other things! Make room, Matthew, make room Zha, the space of sobriety in which my mind has a chance to think and feel and explore in peaceful ways. I am more optimistic when I'm sober; my mind has a better chance to imagine how wonderful my life could be. Do that, please; have some foresight and some broad vision into how I can be happier, simpler. > > Consider, my self, my friend, my family, that you are in a unique position to do something—and do that. That I am uniquely created, suited, to write the book I'm writing now..that there is value and meaning and purpose and ok-ness in that. Feel good about myself. Cut myself some slack, but do the right things. Take right action. Make right action. Love myself, like I would love the person I cared for most in the world. > > It's ok to be serious. To be fun, yes, but I'm a serious dude. Thinker, worker. Remind myself that they way I am is ok—it's good! I don't need to dumb myself down with alcohol so I can fit into social situations, so that I can meet people and talk to people. It's ok to be myself, my true self. Remember that, Matt, Zha, and be ok with..me. > > Here's what you do: for February, just write 2k/3k/day on HARD, get back to not-drinking, not-smoking, and give yourself a break. Pay March rent, and in March, look for a job. In February, do the overflow shelter days I've committed to, but don't necessarily do this again in March. I may need to get on a regular sleep schedule, for myself, and work on my own life during that month and months beyond, so that I'm in a better position to help. > > And: give yourself a break on writing. This isn't public NaNoWriMo drill. Write in private, don't pressure yourself to show what you're working on to anyone, ever. Make your life so that it sustains itself through work that I can do (non-writing work) or already-written work, and write for pure joy, for the foot of a lamb *[my way, since high school, of saying]* for no reason, at my own specification (none other) and at my own pace (none other). Don't rush, don't expect that it will be shown to anyone else, ever, just do it for my own sake, with my current/new projects—give myself the peace and freedom and simplicity of that. > > And give myself a break with Twitter, and blogging, and Dad, and even Mom. I don't have to report shit. I don't have to check in. No one is watching, and no one needs to watch. I can do my life without telling anyone about it. Talk with Joanne on the phone, keep up with Leona, but I can give myself the peace and privacy of just living my life, being in my own space, etc. > > (I don't have to report in =) > > Yeah, and I like this: getting in touch with creating for my own sake, for creation's sake. Forgetting about publication and showing fellow writers and readers my work. Think of writing a book as an activity that a single person does with himself, for his own enjoyment. Hold it that way as long as possible, maybe until I'm done writing books, maybe for years..store up multiple book projects before I ever re-enter the showing-stuff-to-people mode. That's a happy, creative place to be. Maybe I stay there forever, and periodically release an animal from the playpen..look at writing more as a general project I do for myself, from which a book escapes once in a long while, not as the main thing having been done there, but as a small portion of what has been. That might be fun. And now let us consider how I failed, and how many times I have failed. How many times have I written myself notes like this, and how many times have I gone back to drinking? For reasons that the current version of our narrator doesn't understand even as well as I do now (which is not that much), I always return to drink, to drug, to maniac behavior. I am insane. I have few friends. And it has been that way a long, long time. - - - - I stopped drinking for my sister's visit. That, at least, I could do. Joanne came up from New York for the weekend. We pretty much watched *The Deadliest Catch* the whole time, which was pretty much perfect. Perfect speed. Perfect level of mental commitment. Perfect level of immobility. We ate sushi. It wasn't as good as Monster Sushi in New York or sushi in LA but it's fucking Brattleboro, what do you expect? Just be glad you have sushi at all. Joanne and I got coffee (for her) and orange juice (for me) and breakfast sandwiches (for both) at Walmart when it was still at the base of Mt. Wantastiquet, sat for a long time talking, then climbed the mountain in deep snow via the short path (that would be the more vertical path with fewer switchbacks). I let her choose. Joanne, years later, when I was retelling this story in some family setting, admitted that to her it was less like *hiking* and more like *mountain climbing*..but we did it, and not unexpectedly, Joanne's stoic self did not complain once as we hiked that mountain. It was priceless to enjoy the view as brother and sister. Joanne had to pay for everything that weekend since I didn't have my unemployment check yet—I felt horrible, just one more data point on the already-full *loser older brother* graph. I enjoyed the break from drinking—once I stop I don't miss it. I enjoyed the break from random bar company to spend time with one of the few people in this world who truly loves me. For a moment in time, I wasn't so *out there*—alone—*Banished to the Moon*, as I had felt in my two quarters of college, many an age ago. When I think of Joanne I think of rain, of the sudden rains in Philadelphia where we used to live together. Random guys who jump out of nowhere to sell you an umbrella that's so cheap you end up with twenty or so of these semi-disposable umbrellas thrown down just inside your door. And yet, when you leave the house you never take one with you, and you end up buying another, just to keep dry for a few minutes of a sudden rainstorm. But deeper, I think of rain, when I think of Joanne. I think of rain when I think of siblings, best friends like Mike or Rebecca. And I think of rain as a symbol of grief. Mike and I developed a whole psychology of grief embodied by rain one night on ecstasy and I will never forget that night or the things we said. I go back and back and back to the symbol of rain for grief, watching those men on *The Deadliest Catch* in constant rain, freezing their asses off and the *cold* part never comes through the laptop screen adequately. But the wet does. Joanne and I, as children, sleeping in a tent next to Mom and Dad's tent. Camping in some woods in the south somewhere. Louisiana or Arkansas. Dad checked on us once in the night with a flashlight and asked how we were. We cheerfully said we were fine. Did he just take our word for it? Did he *open his eyes* and take in the actuality of the situation? They checked on us the next morning and a *river* was running through our tent, our sleeping bags were right in the middle of it and we were totally soaked. But that's how stoic we both were, even then, how cheerfully indestructible we were. We wouldn't have complained if there had been a dinosaur in our tent or we were sleeping on a bed of snakes. We grew up the child of an eternal optimist (Dad) and do you know what happens when you are so closely influenced by an eternal optimist? You become post-optimistic, you don't even pay attention to the evidence anymore. You could be piloting a two-by-four through the Bering Sea with a cloth napkin and a cigarette lighter and think everything is fine. We also grew up knowing that any misspoken word from us could cause the Wrath of Mom and we had to comfort *ourselves* during our childhood. Our parents were emotionally unsafe. We knew when we could speak and when we couldn't—and, in some metaphorical tent, throughout our childhood, Joanne and I were clinging to each other for dear life..not from rain, but mostly to protect us from our parents. ### 20 Tooler asked me about the cats. "I know you're allergic, but.." "I'm not *that* allergic," I say. "So can we get them?" She had her hand locked in a clasp and was jumping up and down like a little kid—what could I say? "Sure," I said, "as long as they're *your* cats. I don't want to have a bunch of extra work to do. I mean, I'm focused on my writing. Not that I won't help *some*..I will, I just—I'm not some creepy bastard that's gonna refuse to feed the cats when they're *hungry*, but—I'm sorry, I'm sounding like a real asshole right now. I'll help, ok. I'll do whatever has to be done." "I understand," Tooler says, and in the same breath tells me she and Issa are going on vacation for Issa to meet Tooler's parents, so I'm going to be with the cats during some of the of their first days on the planet. At first it was wonderful. Tooler and Issa named the cats Bongo and Bola—which Issa only much later told me means *cock*. And then, after it was wonderful, it was just shit-smelling fatness from a litter box that Tooler and Issa never cleaned. Issa insisted they were *Tooler's* cats and she didn't do anything to help with the litter box. I don't know why they smelled so bad except to say that other houses where the cats really stank were houses where the rest of the house wasn't clean. We didn't take out the garbage often enough so Bongo would drag trash all over the kitchen. They didn't even use the litter box—that could have been part of the problem. One night I woke up to piss and when I stepped on the mat in front of the toilet my heel squished right down into three logs of cat shit neatly laid there like a gift. Bongo was a very sexual cat. He would sniff Tooler's underwear (only Tooler's) and he would drag them into the living room to play with. That wasn't a problem *per se* but it was just the general added chaos of the house. I couldn't live like that. And at the beginning it was wonderful—they were so small they needed us to feed them from bottles and it was sickly how they could hardly walk..but the smaller, sicker one (Bola), after months of beating by the gray kitty (Bongo), the small one ended up being the alpha kitty, crazy, always attacking the gray one, doing parkour-like acrobatic moves involving the wall, leap-frogging Bongo so that suddenly Bola was attacking from the front instead of the back. This seemed like some kind of omen or lesson or warning to me: that the cat who is beat up most in the earlier parts of life will grow up to become the much greater bully in later life. I mean at the beginning they were so tiny we all thought they might not survive. We were feeding them just drops from a bottle. Oh and that panty-sniffing cat, Bongo, reminds me of that night when Aaron and Darling Nikki came over? Remember when asshole was trying to make a bong out of a soda can? Well the other three who left because I didn't have enough couches and someone was going to have to sit on the floor or god forbid an inflatable mattress..right..those three..before they left they went into Tooler and Issa's room after I told them not to. I said, "That's my housemates' room." But they went in almost *because* I said this and picked up the girls' dirty panties from the floor and danced around and I thought: what is this? Disneyland? You think this is a movie set created for your enjoyment or do you think *two real people* live here? And it came back to me: finally, after asshole left and it was just me, putting the furniture back in place and washing my boots in the shower. Washed the vomit right out of those motherfuckers. Anyway, we got cats. - - - - And one of my clearest memories, one of my key memories from Brattleboro, is sitting on this one bench in front of a public office building just down from the post office after a night or more of drinking and debauchery, deciding to stop drinking, not actually stopping, and going all the way to the edge with my funds and making it just to when my next unemployment check came and making it through not drunk driving and not getting arrested or dead from doing some illegal drug and now I had money in my account again—enough for a reasonable person to live on—and feeling safe and relieved that I made it through one more episode of self-imposed chaos..I survived myself! Sitting there after coming from the post office and getting another unemployment form I filled out (lying about searching for jobs because there *were* no fucking jobs) and mailed. Then going across the street to deposit my check. Then going to my bench where I sat there like an astronaut who had been to space and was back on solid ground, like a whole-self sigh of relief that I made it through to this point. Can I get to a place where I don't harm myself, where in the moment I can act in ways that are holistically healthy? Can I not *get* there—can I be there now? Maybe that's an angle of being in the present moment..that Buddhist idea of not-striving..of being here now..of not-hoping and not-trying for what I might become, what enlightenment I might reach..but being here now. Maybe I am here now =) I would think that on that bench, and with my continual resolutions not to be a maniac in my life, for a few minutes on the bench I had peace. - - - - I went drinking on St. Patrick's Day at Whit's just out of curiosity. Real drinkers quite vocally refer to New Year's Eve, St. Patty's Day, The Fourth of July..as amateur nights. Normally a real drinker wouldn't even go to a bar on those days. We don't like to see normal people drink—it's disgusting. I mean green beer? Beer in general. Serious drinkers drink liquor and we drink about six times the normal person drinks. Normal people don't get wild when they get drunk—they just get stupid—and there is a difference. When I walked in, Whit's was completely full of no one I'd ever seen before..a completely different crowd. Every seat was filled. People were elbow to elbow. There were *placemats* on the bar. Folks were having these ridiculous conversations about church and work and God—all the stuff a real drinker lives life to avoid. Kip controlled the jukebox from behind the counter and he was playing country gospel "hits"—if there even is such a thing. I ate a patty melt and drank a bottle of chianti in eleven minutes flat and I was out of that place like I was escaping a fucking nuthouse. I don't do New Year's Eve parties, either. I hate champagne, for one. If I'm at a New Year's Eve party and someone hands me a glass of champagne, when the clock strikes twelve I raise my glass and toast with the best of them—but when the glasses chink and everybody's kissing, I'm the guy finding a plant or a sink or a window to dump that shit out in. Normal drinkers don't *understand* alcohol the way serious drinkers do. You know those people who say, "I don't drink to get drunk." Yeah. You wanna avoid those people. Alcohol is a drug, and the only reason to drink it is to get drunk. Have you ever heard anyone say, "I smoke pot—but not to get high." No. No one ever says that. And you holiday drinkers, you people who don't drink to get drunk—take it from a real drunk—you're doing it wrong. Throw that glass of champagne out the window, get yourself a bottle of something strong, watch depressing movies on Netflix till you pass out, alone, face down in your bathroom—ringing in the new year. That's how real drinkers do it. My old girlfriend pegged me early as an alcoholic. She said, "It's pathetic that you drink alone." I said, "You drink just as much with your friends." She said, "That's different—I'm drinking *socially*." And I said, "*I* think it's pathetic that in order to drink, *you* need the validation of your friends. How sad is *that*?" As far back as my early twenties, I was an alcoholic. My girlfriend knew it—I did not. And I would not for many years. - - - - I kept trying to have the perfect last drink. There was a supermoon and I stared at the moon that night. I knew I had to get serious about my writing again. I changed my Tumblr picture to one that accentuated my aggressive bangs and I guess made me look like a writer. Back then, unless I was actually writing a book, I never had the feeling that I "was" a writer—in fact I never have that feeling now. It's just an accident that I'm doing this—I do it because it makes by mind feel good. Like Faulkner said, "Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing." Looking up at the supermoon, swearing this'll be the last smoke and the last drink before I got back to doing something useful. My air bed developing a leak..waking up in the night on the floor feeling like this is just one more thing..sleeping with my ass on the floor..by morning all of me was on the floor. Ordering a new bed and in the mean time sleeping on the floor on top of a couple of blankets. Then my piece of foam arrived..Tooler thought it was impossible that I could be comfortable on that thing but I have a long history of sleeping on slabs of foam and I thought I was living in the lap of luxury. This time I even bought one that was four by six instead of eight by six in an acknowledgment that I wasn't going to be having any female visitors over—I was officially celibate with the purchase of that narrow slab of foam. I get an email from the CEO of a top-notch company in Los Angeles *that I applied to like a year ago*. I really wanted to work for this company. They wanted a text-only résumé—which I thought was really cool—and I made them a sweet-looking text-only résumé with links to some amazing stuff I'd done and I sent it to them. That was back when I lived with my mom in Bowmanstown, Pennsylvania. But I never heard back. Then *a year* later, when I'm not even looking for tech jobs anymore—I've totally given up on that—this CEO emails me and says, *Our bad. We misplaced your resume. But I LOVE your skill set and the projects you've done and if you'll forgive our tardiness I'd like to video chat with you at your earliest convenience.* Uh-huh. *At my earliest convenience.* My earliest convenience was *twelve months ago*. But the company was so cool I Skyped him. Yeah. We loved each other. We asked each other all the right questions. We created that perfect balance of professionalism and comfort. But the conversation ended something like this: "I'd really like to join your team.." "I understand." "..but I just rented this house in Vermont and.." "..yeah, I would make the same decision myself." "..So I think I'm gonna stay here and work on my fiction." I turned down a job making one and a *half* times what I'd made before (and I'd made a lot) to bum it in Vermont and write my fifth novel on an unemployment check. In the past, I mean up until last year, I would have taken the job, but I finally learned something about those jobs, which is this: the money they pay you, goes away, and you're left with nothing. You don't own shit, except your valuable experience. With writing, I was working at something that resulted in *me owning something*—worthless as it may have been in a monetary sense—I was creating works for which *I owned the copyright*. I was doing something for myself. For the first time in my life I was doing this. And somehow, a copyright on a book that no one was reading, no one was buying, but that *I owned*, felt a lot better than working my ass off and giving of my considerable mind to companies who weren't even giving me stock. I ran a few errands. (Which for me meant going to bars.) I went to the Inferno and had a well gin, neat, my last drink for a while. Fifteen weeks later I went back in there and said hi to the owner and I was still off alcohol and he said: "Are you still not drinking?" He remembered that I had my last drink at his bar. There was something about doing this somewhere other than Whitman's. It was a private ritual of stopping and starting drinking that I can't tell you why, but I just wanted to do on my own, in private, and the Inferno in the daytime didn't have just a few customers..it had no customers. And the bartender stood in front of me and said: "Are you getting back into the game?" "I'm getting back into it," I said. And he said, "Good, I hear you're a tech guy. After this drink maybe you can help me fix that." He pointed to his 1980s jukebox. "I doubt I can help you fix that but I will take that drink." The guy smiled and he poured. ### 21 But that was fifteen weeks later. For the many weeks previous I had been writing. And when I write I don't drink a drop. I stop drinking completely. I write every single day. I write on a schedule. That had become my general practice starting with *Things Said in Dreams*. I drank when I wrote my first book. Since then, I always wrote sober, just because I happened to be in AA when I wrote *TSID*. There were exceptions: one extremely difficult day of strategic drinking during *mURdEr cLuB cANDy* to make one of the drug-taking scenes more realistic. What was extremely difficult about it was drinking that one day and then stopping, but I did it, and it made the scene—no way I could have written that scene sober. Brattleboro, Vermont. I write *HARD*. It's the only book I write in my year in Vermont. I had a manic breakdown after I finished writing. But boy was it worth it. Each day I make the next day's food so in the mornings I don't have to stop writing to cook. I think of that quote from *Walk the Line*. The record producer says to Johnny Cash, "If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing *one* song.. *One song* that people would remember before you're dirt. One song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth." *What song would it be?* I feel that's the question that one's work, that my work, that this particular book of mine, should answer—no question less. To answer that question with *HARD*, I am on a schedule for more than a hundred days where I wake up, shower, write, eat, write some more, am done by noon, and I meditate for the rest of the day. These are perfect days. I am hypomanic, which means just a little bit manic, but I control it with not drinking or doing any other drugs, maintaining a regular sleep pattern, and with writing itself. Writing several thousand words a day comforts my mind—it massages it into a peaceful state just like running relaxes the body—and it allows me to keep my brain from further escalation, but also maintain a little bit of the manic fire which helps me write two-thousand words—or three-thousand words—in just a few hours, for a hundred days in a row. I wrote HARD without a single break. My first idea for that story, for a story called *HARD*, was a story that's just a kid trying to get to school. I wanted to write this because people seem to think that things are great in this world, and I still have a bone to pick with that, an ax to grind..to me it seems like the perpetrators are the ones sitting around laughing and eating well, drinking, etc. and the people they're harming are the kids, the country, the outcast. I think people need to hear messages about how fucked up things are. Oh yeah: so in this story, it would be ridiculous, hero-style: like the kid has to fight tanks and stuff just to get up the street..he's got ridiculous elements in his way, and at the end we learn that all this fucking kid is trying to do is get to his classroom and open a book. It would be superhero, comic book-ish, totally over the top. But I discarded that idea. And I had even more ideas for that book that I threw away. I think a lot about a book before I start to write. > I will write true to myself. I will write what I want to be there. Part of my target is creating something that resonates with other people. To create crack. I totally disagree with writing to genres and especially marketing demographics in order to achieve this, but I am interested in choosing characters with the intention of placing them well, placing them such that they will be crack. With some distance from it, I think TSID's character does this well. Some literary agents may disagree. And I may be wrong. But so far that character seems to work for people..they read it, they say it's brilliant, they post sentences from it to their Twitter. I do think there is something magical about the narrative monologue in first person. It is a substrate appropriate for what Mamet talks about: showing [on the screen](#) someone that the audience member enjoys imagining they *are*. I thought about my old friend Julian. > Story of a musician who hasn't played a show in years, he stopped, and the people around him who swirl around, and finally he plays a show again > > travel story > > desperation > > homelessness in Austin > > call it: > > Up Against The Sky It would be: > part of a larger piece..The Reminding..aspects of people's lives > > finding what they lost > > reminded of what they forgot And someday later I would try to write that story. Or a: > story of a family with two adopted children > > and someone who commits suicide > > a serious story about a family, and a special child Maybe I should have thought more about that note, abut a special child who kills himself. It's all right there, always, the ending is buried in the beginning and it's so plain it's slapping you in the face with a large trout—but you have no idea. During this time when I was waltzing around with the idea of writing this book, it was so cold outside they had advisories not to go outside at all. It was 20 or 30 below. You couldn't stand outside—but I stole seconds here and there fully dressed in my baddest hiking gear standing two feet from the house, talking to Penny across the ocean and coordinating our cigarettes. I went to the back porch and at 20 below the cold didn't feel like cold anymore, it felt like death—like death and complete stillness and total utter absolutely motherfucking quiet. I was psyching myself up to write, building up my mind with other people's advice and some of my own. > Keep it guttah, keep it grimy. > > Don't ever forget that. > > Write for an audience of two: the lowest god and the highest devil. > > And keep it guttah. Keep it grimy —Busta Rhymes > > You haven't gone too far. > > You haven't gone far enough. And on day I was done psyching myself up, I was sober enough, and I started writing *HARD*, like a monk, no alcohol, only trips outside to the grocery store, meditating after writing, making writing a meditation, with my strict daily schedule which involved afternoon play sessions with the growing kittens, I stayed in the zone for a hundred and seven days or something like that. I rewarded myself for my every day writing with a weekly massage focusing on the hands. I started with chair massage but Libby talked me into a couple of table massages. It had been a while since I'd had a massage and I was afraid I'd get an erection while she had me lying on my back because I was attracted to this masseuse sexually, which is a little scary. But we talked and I discovered I was attracted to her holistically. Libby is one of those people who if all I could do was follow them around as their angel, and I got to be with them even though they would never know I was there and could never give back to me, I would do it, because I liked them that much. I liked Libby that way—she was a special person, a gifted person. She was a one-in-a-lifetime person, my massage therapist, Libby. I continued liking her as a man likes a women but mostly we had the most amazing and clear conversations about pain: pain that means something's wrong, like kidney stone pain—or birth pains, she says, which are hard but don't send signals to your brain that something is wrong. I always enjoyed the several types of pain she gave me when she massaged me. In fact, Libby was so good, the other massage therapists at their shop always had Libby do *their* massages. She was that good. I will say, with all the massage therapists I've ever met, which is quite a few, that Libby..well..it makes me glow to think of her skill. She sings, too, she told me. She may have other aptitudes. But she has mastered massage, and in her twenties or thirties, she's the most accomplished massage therapist I've encountered. In heaven, it will certainly be Libby who gives massages. I came back from a massage one day, easily walking the sidewalks which were no longer ice, and Darling Nikki was out jogging High Street. She acknowledges me with such a warm smile and wave that I have to examine my own head to see what part of her seeming-sexual welcoming is real and what is in my head—though it gave me a nice small-town feel just that the person I saw out jogging was someone I had met before. I waved back. And that continued to happen all the while I lived in Brattleboro—seeing familiar people everywhere—and that comforted me—it created the impression that the world was small. - - - - I only went out one night while I was writing *HARD*, and that was to go bowling with Tooler and Issa. They invited me in the morning and I declined, then later in the day I asked them if I was still invited. I wanted some sociality. We met friends of theirs, a couple, and the woman was so beautiful in this Winnie Cooper from *Wonder Years* sort of way..just..perfect symmetry of face, nothing visibly freakish or brilliant about her, but she was intelligent and constantly funny, kind of like she had a team of writers feeding her dialogue. She was married to this dumb-as-nails guy and she was pregnant with his baby and I had this feeling of disgust all night that someone so pretty and normal and caring and mother-like would choose to be with this guy whose obvious only strength was his education—a bunch of political theorists he had choked on like dicks. In reality, I didn't know much about him, but usually my intuition is spot on, even after meeting someone for a few seconds. I spent four or five hours with this guy and hated him—I thought he wasn't good enough for Winnie (or whatever her real name was) and I tried to put myself inside her mind to see what attracted her to him. To me he was undeserving, boring, rude, a simpleton with a stable job and a house and a Subaru and that's probably just exactly what all the Winnie Coopers of this fucked-up world really want. It's not sex and conversation—it's financial stability so they can have babies. And those kids are going to grow up with the dullest dads imaginable. Winnie Coopers never go for guys like me. To a Winnie Cooper, I'm an uncouth, unstable, insolvent wannabe artist who will fail at art and fail at life and she doesn't want to be stuck with someone like that when she turns forty. I'm too unpredictable to raise a family—me and Winnie Cooper agree on this one. Anyway I caught as many secret glances of her as I could all night and just wished and wished that some sequence of events would unfold where I would get to fuck her. I bet she wears plain panties—white with a white little gusset—and I wanted to fuck her in such a way that the next day she'd go out and buy some sexy ones. Even though most everyone was drinking, I stayed away from the alcohol. At one point, going to the bar to buy nachos, I saw Tooler and Issa looking at me and I wondered if they thought I was getting a drink. But I don't drink when I write. If my *wife* asked me not to drink, if *my first son* did, I'd probably tell them to fuck themselves. But for a novel, yeah, I'll sober up real quick and I'll stay sober till that fucking thing is done. - - - - When I finish writing the book—and back up the first draft in like three different places online—on the day of and after the last period of writing, I go downtown, my first time leaving the house before noon in months, I call Joanne and she is proud of me. I wander around downtown in a late snow talking with my sister for an hour. I'm happy. I even mention to Joanne the idea of continuing to write—starting a new project right away—just for the calming effects writing has on my life. But I don't do that. I lose control of the wave of hypomania that I wrote my book on, and without a rigorous daily schedule, mania takes over. It chips away at my mind bit by bit by bit. In six months my entire life in Brattleboro will be destroyed. ### 22 I start drinking again. And I get manic in the summers. I kept getting massages from Libby after I finished my book. Do you know what mania is? Well you can look up a medical dictionary definition, but, please, allow me to save you the trouble. Mania is the time I was so irate I flipped out at a Burger King drive-through because they wanted to *sell* me packets of ketchup. Each meal came with *two* packets of ketchup and I wanted *four*. So I flipped the fuck out and told the window operator, his boss, her boss, and everyone within earshot that their ketchup policy was *Texas rancher bullshit* and this Burger King didn't deserve to *stand*. I wished them *earthquakes, fires, floods, plagues of rabbits*. Yes, I *screamed* at them that I hoped *rabbits* fell from the sky and punctured the windshields of their cars, squeaked their business to a halt, and they all had to find other jobs working at *real* Burger Kings, BK's that just *give* people the condiments they need. Then I proceeded to lecture them on how giving people the condiments they requested was a way to build customer satisfaction and a regular clientele..all the while the store manager was politely asking me to, "Please pull forward so that you're not blocking the line, sir." Sir? I'll stick that *sir* up your motherfucking *ass*. You're not going to find that in the medical dictionary, nor in your Google searches for "mania"—but that's what mania is. I got my first drink from Inferno—a neat gin—and that guy's jukebox was still broken. I got a massage from Libby. And then, even though I could have kept it reasonable, had one drink, and gone on with..whatever people do when they're not drinking (I wasn't much sure about this quadrant of activity)..even though I could have done that, I didn't. I walked out of the new age massage dojo, turned left, and like a robot walked 50 feet up Elliot. I decided to try Whit's again. The decision to continue drinking after being sober for months was a child's puzzle in my mind. I may have toyed with it, but I knew what I was going to do. The weight of that decision, though, was not a weight a child could handle. Mostly I concerned myself with what my drinks would be, as if that would help me drink reasonably somehow. Maybe if I just buy one bottle of chianti. Maybe if I just drink G&Ts. But none of that mattered. I was stepping onto the edge of the well, and some dark spiral invited me to *take a step* and *take a step*. I didn't have to make the decision all at once—just one drink at a time. And as much fun as I had at Whit's before, Whitman's Act II was a much better show for me. Now, every day, there was a guy named Mike, drinking at the exact opposite of this long-ass bar to where I sat. He drank weird drinks consisting of mixtures of beer and liquor. We yelled at each other across the distance for a while, then eventually I moved my seat out of the dark corner by the video poker machine and right over to where Mike was, but where he was on the short end in the other corner, I was now just around the bend of the bar on the long end next to him. "You wanna smoke a butt?" was Mike's refrain—did I want to smoke a cigarette. I bummed from him for a while but eventually started buying packs of Kamel's again. "How do you smoke those things?" Kamel Reds. The most beautiful cigarette in the world. "I don't know. I just love 'em." "I notice you smoke Parliaments with Justine." "I'd smoke *dog shit* with Justine. I mean if a dog came up this sidewalk and shat right there I would lean down and smoke that shit with Justine." Mike and I were drinking buddies because we went to the bar at roughly the same time. I went when they opened—noon. Mike went as soon as he could possibly leave his job, which I understood from experience was a moving target that got earlier and earlier the more one hated one's job. At first he got to Whit's art four, then three, then two-thirty. That was when I could reasonably expect Mike to arrive at Whit's, at which point we would match drinks, alternate cigarettes, walk across the street to get more cash, and stay as long as Mike could possibly stay, this last variable being determined by how many times Mike's wife had called him at the bar asking where the hell he was and when the hell he was coming home. I mean, she knew where he was, but she asked anyway. I never, ever met Mike's wife the entire time I lived in Vermont. And also now there every day was a girl named Walsh. She had red hair, freckles, she was acquaintances with Mike and Jill and Whit and Thomas knew her, but she never talked to me. She sat next to Mike and drank like somebody who has a life they want to forget—just not as beaten up by life yet as Jane, the homeless former prostitute I told you about? Walsh kept me at a distance but she would sit there and let Mike and I buy her drinks while Mike and I chatted up the fucking *ceiling*. Walsh would roll her eyes at our old-man jokes (Mike and I were in our early thirties, Walsh was 25) but, you know, she knew the value of her smile and she would flash me one sometimes. Eventually the three of us arrived at a sort of equilibrium where no one was flirting with anyone and we were just there to drink. The three of us—me Mike and Walsh—became the day drinkers of Whitman's. Walsh was a pre-school teacher, by the way. And sometimes the Professor would grace us with his presence but with a hardcore day-drinking bloc like Mike Walsh and I, the Professor could never start the fire of one of his bigoted conversations—it would always be snuffed out by the drunk takedowns of one or all of the other three day drinkers there—and any one of us could take on the Professor, drink for drink—there were no lightweights there. "Walsh, I bet you don't know the history of the name of the country you were named after," said the Professor. And I said, "We're drinking—no history lessons!" "Anyway," Walsh said, "I wasn't named after a country. I was named after one of my father's high school girlfriends." "I bet your mother liked that!" the Professor says, raising his martini. "She *did!* They were all friends. Don't try to start a fight where there isn't one! They just liked the sound of the name." "Well I will drink to that," the Professor says. "You have a beautiful name." Mostly Mike and I controlled the conversation, with—the classic bar conversation—talk about work. When things got too heated between the Professor and Walsh, Mike would look at me like a Muppet and say: "You wanna smoke a butt?" - - - - And sometimes Walsh and this guy named Manny and I would go to Walsh's house and do cocaine, looking out over her windows at the river, and it was awkward because me and Manny both wanted to fuck Walsh, but Manny pulls me aside one night and says, "She's into you, man—you should hit that." Walsh must have had the best view of any apartment in Brattleboro. You could see the train tracks, the river, the bridge, the mountain. When I say I wanted to fuck Walsh, not only could she drink like a champion, not only did she not give a fuck about the rules and do coke and binge-watch *Simpsons*, but while I was packed away in my room writing *HARD*, she lost like ten or twenty pounds, so she was just the right amount of skinny now and wore shirts that showed her belly and her beautiful belly button, which was an innie. I wanted to fuck her without a condom then pull out and cum all over her belly, filling her belly button with cum. - - - - Mike and I stand outside chain smoking just to avoid the Professor and I would tell him stories about my old work in California: "I mean I yelled so hard at this guy that I never went back to that Burger King, even though before that it had been my everyday spot." "And why was this that you *yelled* at an innocent Burger King employee?" "It's the motherfucking condiments, man! They wanted to charge me *extra* for ketchup and barbecue sauce and I refused to pay it and I flipped out at them for not giving it to me." Gave them the unrighteous smackdown, for sure—totally uncalled for. "I'm going in," Walsh says. "You two can figure this one out by yourselves." "So?" Mike says. "So," I say, "like, this Burger King thing was totally insane. I don't know what happened to me. I might have *threatened* them. I was paranoid for weeks about them knowing my license plate or what my car looked like. I thought they were gonna call the police I was like telling them I hope they lose their jobs and their business goes under and a plague of rabbits cracks their windshields. Just shit like that, man." "Did you ever go back and apologize?" "I never went back *at all*. I never even took that exit on the highway. I might have made some death threats, I don't know." "You need to chill out, man." "Yeah, well that job sucked. I needed to get out of these. And after I drove through that BK window, I called Joshua—this fucking *faggot* who's supposed to be my supervisor and I gave him the unrighteous smackdown over the phone. I became the devil, man. He said come back to the office and let's talk about this. I said I'm not coming back to the office..go work it out with Peter (who was the boss) but I said Joshua you are *unacceptable*, your behavior toward me from day one has been *totally over the line* and you know it. You're technically unqualified for your job—" "You *said* that?" "Yes and I said Joshua, you know it. You won't use my expertise because you have an ego problem. Joshua is like, 'Matt—' and I'm like *Just shut up and listen.* You go downstairs, you work this shit out with Peter, but the way you treated me this morning is the last time that's gonna happen. Do you understand that? No answer so I'm like: *Joshua, do you understand that?* He says, 'Yes.' I say, 'Good. Now fuck you. I hope you heard that.' Joshua is like, Maybe you should calm down and think before you say anything else. And I'm like, 'No, Joshua, *fuck you*.' Fuck you for being such an asshole toward me from day one of this fucking company. And you can tell Peter I said that. In fact, *I'll* tell him. If I ever hear another unkind word from you I will fucking *hurt* you—don't ever forget you heard me say those words." "*Damn.*" "I hang up that phone and go to Red Robin, order drinks and appetizers and burgers and more drinks and I ignore all calls and texts from Joshua and Peter—and there were many." "Did they fire you?" "No. They needed me because I could program stuff that no one else there could program. But Joshua was a real moron: when I would go drinking with him on these pseudo-company outings, he would explain to me his theory that somewhere out there was the perfect appetizer that would 'soak up' the alcohol so that if you ate this mythical appetizer while you were drinking, you would get less drunk." Mike laughs. I continue. "This wasn't just a theory he had while he was drunk, either—he discussed this with me in the mornings when he was completely sober. I hate to be the one alcoholic in the room to suggest this, but: why not just *drink less alcohol*? Because that *will* have the desired effect of you getting less drunk." I shake my head. Mike's latest cigarette is done. "One more?" he asks. But you know what my answer was gonna be. He holds the door open and we go back inside Whitman's for another drink. ### 23 Libby seeing me outside Kips smoking on her walk home. About their whole naturalistic crew and how I fancied being a part of it, everyone who worked at her dojo of healing, to me they seemed like perfect friends, even though I was on a different path—the path of base culture, of cigarettes and alcohol and cocaine and learning what people say in bars so I could write about it. I wanted to be seen as pure by Libby, wanted to magically be part of their community, but I'm not pure—far from it. I developed a spiritual crush on my massage therapist. Didn't want to be with her..wanted to be like her..or what I imagined her as being. Wanted to live healthy and be spiritual, even though that's just not me. I always like people like that, though, who seem to spend their lives on a meditation cushion. I relished Libby's and my conversations about different kinds of pain—who else did I know I could have that conversation with? I had a crush on the whole crew who worked at that holistic healing center—in my fantasy world they were counterparts to all my old Ohio friends even though my old Ohio friends weren't spirit and health people, but druggies like me. Me and Libby were on entirely different tracks and it hurt me that it was so. Libby seeing me smoking outside Whitman's right after she had given me a massage and I felt like I was letting her down, showing her that I was really someone lesser than who she thought—though most likely that judgement was in my head and not in hers. She was an example of how *I* wanted to be—I wanted to be healthy, sober, doing something useful for the world and getting paid enough to live, rent, eat (because that is the only way this economy knows how to show that it considers you worthy to live). Libby smiled at me though and I nodded and she walked on by. - - - - I got sick (which is always depressing). I was still jobless. I had drank too much and had no money to pay the rent. Manic after writing *HARD*, I think about becoming a male gay porn video artist on the web, but I'm fat in the belly and skinny in the arms, my cock is not a cock that some stranger could fetishize. Me as a male webcam model would be like trying to jerk off to a misshapen starving turkey..like if a turkey was one of those Somalian kids dying with flies all over their body and only one eye still working—imagine some gay dude trying to get off to that and you have some idea of what it would be like to try to get off to me. I browse around. The opportunities for women abound—if I was a girl I'd set up a sheet as a background and a sexy-looking bed and stick cucumbers up my ass. Cash would be rolling in. In my spare time I could earn my degree. But I'm not a woman and my body's worth nothing to sell. I only have weird mental talents that require acrobatics of matching and placement to monetize—acrobatics that I cannot do at this time. A programmer is worth nothing in a small town—the only place my skills are worth money is in an especially large or especially innovative company. There are none of those in Brattleboro. And my writing? It's probably been saving my life mentally, spiritually since about the fourth grade—and starting five or six years ago, it's given me a sense of meaning and purpose in my life—which to me is priceless. But in terms of money, in terms of value to others, it's worth nothing. Fuck, maybe I'll stick a cucumber up my ass anyway—just for fun. - - - - One day at Whit's, drinking dangerously close to my rent money, I ask Mike how old he is. "Thirty-one," he says. "Why." "You're *younger* than me?" "Why? How old are you?" "Thirty-three. Fuck. This messes with my whole conception of the day drinkers—excluding the professor. I'm the oldest of the day drinkers?! *Shit*, I gotta get my life together," I say. "You thought since I'm balding that I was older than you," Mike suggests. "Yeah, I did. Fuck." "Nope," he says. "Only thirty-one." "I feel like I have to be all wise and shit now when really I'm just a degenerate drinker on a check, unpublished writer, loser, freak—" "Don't forget drug addict," Mike says. "Thanks, I won't." Mike has a wife and a house and two cars and tens of thousands of dollars in the bank. I'm destitute, in debt, living off an unemployment check—and by living I mean barely maintaining a few loose relationships and drinking everything but my rent money. Mike buys my next drink. "You've been a good friend to me," he says. "Thank you," I say, and I genuinely nod. After Mike went home, I acted like I was going home but instead I went down the hill, turned left on Main Street, and went to Butch's bar (which was re-opened after the fire—he only had water damage). I think I mentioned I used to do this in Tucson—drink at one bar, then move to another, then another. Do three to five different bars in a day, that way no one bartender knows how much you're drinking. And if they do know, they can at least pretend not to know. When I drank at LA, me and my film school buddy and apartment mate—whose name was also Mike—stopped driving to the nice convenience store and started driving to this ghetto convenience store that looked like you were going to get shot every time you went in. It was within walking distance—I mean it was about a two-minute walk from our apartment. But we drove there anyway, both of us together, each of us alone. Sometimes one of us would make up to three trips to that same convenience store in the same day and it was the same guy—the owner—who was always working..*always*. So this guy knew exactly how much we drank. Mike's girlfriend and my old friend Courtney noted when all three of us dropped the pretense of buying regular-sized wine bottles and just went for the big fat honking Sutter Home's—merlot, cab, we didn't care. We'd buy two big bottles. "Tastes like shit but that's only the first glass," was Courtney's wise philosophy. She was right—after the first glass it didn't matter what you were drinking—it all tastes the same. One time we found Courtney face down on the dining room floor sobbing and yelling at herself. There was an empty bottle of Hpnotiq on the kitchen table, which I had bought. After that we disallowed Hpnotiq from the house. One time Mike went to the convenience store right before they closed—his second trip of the day—and as the owner was wrapping Mike's bottle of Smirnoff in a brown paper bag, the owner just looked at Mike with a sad face and shook his head. So that's why I went to Butch's bar that night after Whitman's—I didn't want anybody shaking their head at me, thinking about how much I was drinking. Butch wasn't there, but his second in command was, a sober bartender prob'ly sixty years old with a shaved head and a wife and a plan one day to open a bar of his own. I hadn't been there in months but he remembered my drink and didn't even ask—he just made me a gin and tonic with Bombay original. We smiled and shook hands. The only other person at the bar was this guy singing loudly with one earphone in his head, mixing music on a MacBook he had propped in his lap. He was a wild drunk. We talk. Go out for a smoke together. Decide to hang out. Etc. Like every other single guy I meet in Brattleboro, this guy claims to be a DJ and I'm like, whatever, everyone with a MacBook is a fucking DJ just by virtue of the software that it comes with. "You wanna hang out?" he says. I'm drunk enough to say yes. So we walk through bone-drenching cold to this guy's house, which is only a few blocks from my apartment. We drink—I have no idea what. We do a bunch of pharmaceuticals—I have no idea what, I just wanted to escape myself, you know, and alcohol doesn't always do it but the company of some strange insane Vermont DJ starts to do it. Standing in the cold on his front porch smoking cigs on top of all the alcohol and pills and talking about moving in together—that starts to do it. And then I learn that this guy is a counselor at the Refuge—the mental hospital in town—and I'm like, wow, this guy is counseling little kids in the daytime and at nighttime he's just *monsterchomping* prescription pills and showing strangers (me) these wicked remixes of Charlie Sheen "winning!" > *I was bangin' seven-gram rocks* > > *That's how I roll*—*winning* > > *I have one gear: GO*—*epic winning* > > *Are you bipolar?*—*I'm bi-winning!* > > *Win here, win there, win win everywhere* It was like every drunken night with every drunken stranger: you go from being complete strangers to best friends in five minutes and then you hang out and maybe fuck for six hours, then the next morning you're strangers again. I figured after he got me blackout high and said I could sleep in his bed and told me the pills would make me feel, "real relaxed in a few minutes" that we were going to do something sexual like at least suck each other's dicks but I just passed out on in his bed while he was still putting together the world's next great Charlie Sheen mix. When I woke up there was no sign that anything sexual had happened, which was kind of disappointing even though I'm not gay. Dude was zombie state next to be in bed, so I left and walked the cold walk home. Tooler and Issa were all excited that I hadn't come home. "We figured maybe you hooked up with someone." "Well, I went to this guy's house—" "Oooooh!!" Now they were really excited at the fact that their housemate might not be 100% straight himself. "But nothing happened." "Awwww." "But we already decided that he's coming over here tonight—I hope that's ok." "Oh, yes!!!" They were more than happy to facilitate me possibly getting laid. When he did come over, the four of us sat on the house's famed porch and smoked shisha and drank a little and then Tooler and Issa disappeared into their room and dude and I hung out on the couch but nothing happened. He had even less of a gay vibe than me—fuck, I was just desperate for any kind of attention I could get. It wasn't even really sexual, what I desired—it was more like intimacy. ### 24 Hypersexuality is a textbook symptom of bipolar mania. It was me flirting with Jill, me seeking out a sexual partner that would be unusual for me (the Charlie Sheen DJ), it was me wanting to have sex with most every little piece of pussy I came across, whether they were straight or gay or what. Jill and Whit's had an open relationship. Justine's boyfriend flirted with Jill, and I flirted with Jill, too. Jill was telling me the story about how she first discovered that Whit was colorblind. I was so drunk I don't remember exactly what words I said to her but I know I asked her if we could think about arranging a time when we could spend some time alone together and—you know—fuck. Jill raised her eyebrows and said: "Yeah, we can think about that." That's part of what I mean when I say I get manic in the summers. Flirting with Jill was certainly a manic thing to do—Jill's old enough to be my *mother*. This is another part of what I mean when I say I get manic in the summers: meeting some drug dealer in Whitman's and making a commitment to buy, crazily, even though I didn't have enough money to buy from him since I had drank it all that night. I had to sneak out of Whitman's under this drug dealer's nose and take the back streets home so he wouldn't follow me and figure out where I lived. Then I avoided Whitman's for days. I'm a magnet for drug dealers. They can find me and I can find them. Instantly. Any town. Any culture. I can just look at you and tell if you can get me drugs. And the reverse is true. If you're a normal person, and you don't do drugs, you won't be able to tell that I do drugs. But if you're a drug dealer or a drug addict, you can just look at me and tell that I'm your customer. I can't explain it—but it is true, undeniably. Drug people can just recognize each other like animals of one species know what animals are of that same species. A few days later I get paid again, figure it's safe to go back to Whit's. First I get shitface drunk. Then I meet some guy in Whitman's and then I'm meeting him in the grocery store parking lot, crossing the creek bridge to buy "coke" and "ecstasy" from this shyster. Getting home and it not even being cocaine or at least it was the shittiest cocaine I've ever tried—worse than Washington Square Park cocaine—and the "ecstasy" doing nothing to me. I laid in bed feeling terrible, hoping the ecstasy would kick in, hoping my roommates won't knock on my door and see me sweating my ass off—the only noticeable effect these drugs had on me. Just pretend I don't exist. Just pretend I don't exist. Drug use is a textbook symptom of bipolar mania. The uninformed think that drugs give you mental illness. Buy by and large that isn't true. Those people aren't doctors. They've never read textbooks on bipolar disorder. Half these people don't even know what mental illness *is*. They think homeless people ("bums"), drug addicts, alcoholics, and anyone who acts crazy is all just one big entity of *fucked up* that they want nothing to do with. They don't know the difference between *schizophrenia* and *borderline personality disorder*. If they have a relative who's sick, they just hold them at a distance and "send their love." Fuck 'em. If you've ever done drugs in your life, they are *certain* that the drugs are what caused you to be "crazy." They don't have the imagination or the knowledge to see that it's actually the other way around. People think their politics are why they got to where they did in life—like if they're successful in business, if they're a millionaire, they think it's because of their republican "values." They never imagine the reverse could be true: you became a republican because republican values suit the life that happened to you. You're not sick, so you don't need health care, so why should anyone? Uneducated people think the same way about drugs and mental illness. Yeah, smoking crack for twenty years is going to fuck up your brain—but that's not the same as mental illness. Doing drugs doesn't give you bipolar disorder—bipolar disorder (by the current most popular theory) is something you are genetically predisposed to that is kindled by traumatic life events. So two twins, where one has bipolar disorder, the other one won't, necessarily. There's lots of science that says that bipolar people are more likely to drink and do drugs (especially alcohol, cocaine, and sleeping pills) than people without bipolar disorder. There's no science that says any drug *causes* bipolar disorder. It's genetic—you get it from your parents. But your dumb-ass sheltered narrow-minded white college-educated uncle who works for ExxonMobil—he doesn't *care about science*—unless it's petroleum science. All he cares about is pretending that he's more of an upstanding citizen than you because you're a crazy drug addict even though *he's* the one taking blood money in exchange for destroying the planet. The reason people are so attracted to the idea that illegal drugs cause mental illness is that if that were true life would be so much simpler: just color within the lines and nothing bad will happen to you. Ehhh..sorry..not the way it works. The rain falls upon the good and the bad equally—I think it says that in the Bible. - - - - And me seeking drugs when I'm manic isn't theoretical. It's me straight-up asking a girl at a bar if she has coke and her looking at me, nodding, saying yes, wondering how I knew that of all the people in that bar, she's the one who could get it for me. But I can just tell. That one girl asking for a ride at Inferno and me saying maybe but I was drinking, her being all flirty, then I gave her my keys to go pick up her friend and I'm walking home that night and see she parked my car in a different lot (one where I got a ticket). The handle to roll up the window is broken. The car smells like cigarettes. This is from some fat crackhead in Inferno promising me she could get cocaine if I drove her home. Somehow I gave her my keys to run an errand or something, she came back, I told her I couldn't give her a ride and when I left the Inferno I saw she had moved my car from the stacked parking lot to an open lot—that was where I got the ticket. And there was an open baby diaper with shit on the hood of my Toyota. Did that bitch *change a baby* while she was out here?? Or was that some random crackhead, unrelated to this fat crackhead, who was just walking by and said *I'm gonna change my baby on the hood of this car*. And I'm like *what was I thinking?* So I drunk drive the car across the street to the proper lot. She says she knows where to get cocaine, which I want, but she never comes through and I just spend all night waiting for something that never happens. I see her later at a drug dealer's apartment and then, much later, begging for change outside Whit's, looking like she has no place to sleep anymore. There's your quick arc of the crackhead. - - - - And thinking of LA, and mania, and that Burger King where I yelled at the window and that stupid job at Optimistic Solutions. Learning to drive the one- or two-hour drive home from work. First night I did it, I stopped in a parking lot somewhere and called Shringara, to help me cope. Second night I stopped at Red Robin and ate and drank to chill myself out, drove home drunk, slowly with the rest of the traffic, and finally made it home. After that, over a period of months and years, I learned to put the moon roof down on my old-ass BMW, smoke cloves, listen to my Wu-Tang, and chill the fuck out. When I got to work in the morning, I parked in the last row of the lot, as far away from the office as possible, turned my music up, and smoked one or two more cloves just to chill out before I went to work. That was *me* time. That was something I didn't know about before. ### 25 And I think of me and Thomas' whiskey tour, from cheap to expensive, each of us sharing these tragic stories and I realize that it's possible for a person to be so influenced by an event from their life that they define themselves by the story they tell themself about that event. And it makes no sense. And we don't have to do it. We can let go. Those stories don't define us—we're actually much bigger than that. I'm walking down High Street—it's fully summer now—and the street is filled with parked cars and I'm wondering and wondering why and then I remember—cow parade!!! It's actually called The Annual Livestock and Farm Machinery Procession or something idiotic like that but all the locals call it "cow parade" and I've been looking forward to this day for a while. "You mean they just parade cows down Main Street and a bunch of people watch?" "Yep. They walk cows down Main Street and that somehow constitutes a parade in Buttfuck, Vermont." "Are you gonna be there?" This is me asking Walsh. "Fuck no. I'll be as far away from that as possible." "Doing what?" "Washing clothes at my mom's house." "You won't come to cow parade with me?" I whine. "It's not the 'with you' that's the problem, just so you know," she says. "But fuck no. You won't catch me within a mile of downtown on cow parade. All these out-of-towners, Vermont hicks that want to come see a tractor drive down a street so they can check out the fucking tractor engine. One tractor engine is like another tractor engine. Am I right? Am I right?" "I have no idea. Maybe I could come with you to your parents' to do laundry." "No. Go. You've got to see it once." Well, I was going anyway. I ain't that pussy whipped by Miss Walsh—I actually have to *get some pussy* before I get pussy whipped. Cow parade is exactly what everyone said: a bunch of out-of-towners clogging up the sidewalks and grassy hills along main street for about four blocks while people literally parade cows and sheep and pigs and other livestock *and tractors* and other farm machinery. Yes, they drive farm machinery down the street and sixty-year-old farmers get hard-ons. Remember, this is Brattleboro, Vermont, population *eleven* thousand. I took one look at it and decided to move on with my day. I saw Abby, my landlord. She told me my check bounced. Fuck. It was only a matter of time with me. I told her I would get her a new one asap and she said ok and she didn't seem too worried about it and we walked on. But it made me feel like a piece of shit. I went from upstanding citizen, deserving of enjoyment, to penniless loser in 19 seconds. I hated myself for mismanaging my money, or just for not having enough, or whatever. I don't know. I'm not a money guy. I don't balance checkbooks—never have. I just spend and have fun—to me that's what money's for. Darling Nikki was there with her dad, serving sausages. Nikki had on a blue checkered apron and the way she was sticking this fork into these sausages..well..everything Nikki did was sexual. This isn't just my imagination—she designed it that way. Every body position, every inflection, every facial expression..designed to make you think you were in bed with her *right that minute*. You've hear the phrase *bedroom eyes*? Darling Nikki had *bedroom everything*. I went up to say hi and she leaned her head back and shook her hair like she was in a shampoo commercial. Then she laughed and put a fork in one of the sausages and I was like fuck this I have to get out of here. I didn't want her to have any power over me, and every second I spent imagining her having sex, she had power over me. I saw a guy walking a pig. But that was normal. He lived in Brattleboro and always walked his pig. I wanted to go to Whitman's after cow parade but they were closed that day and I found myself feeling mad at them because I couldn't drink in their environment right at that moment. Entitled much? I went into the convenience store across the street and stood there for twenty minutes looking at the alcohol options. Everything bored me. I bought nothing and went home. You know what it was? I wasn't going to Whitman's primarily for the alcohol. I was going for the party. There was no party, and I'm not saying I won't drink alone..but I didn't that day. Kips being closed depressed the fuck out of me. I had to deal with the sunshine and the house I lived in and all the facts of live in Brattleboro that Whitman's helped me daily to avoid. - - - - Then Whit's decided to close on Sundays in general. Every Sunday. As in: I couldn't drink at Whitman's on Sunday *at any time of the day*. Previously they had moved the Sunday open time from noon to three. Now there were zero Sunday hours. Motherfucker. Hell to those of us who drank at Whit's seven days a week. It was almost like they were trying to send a signal to the four of us that we needed to occasionally sober up. Me, Mike, Walsh, and the Professor. And Mattson. Fucking Mattson. As Jill called his type: bonus people. Because as long as someone would buy him a drink, Mattson would tag along, even when the ownership, staff, and regular day drinkers didn't want him there. Mattson ruined Whit's for me more than the Professor did. Both of them would talk your ear off, each in their own distinct style. But I was why Mattson was there—part of the reason anyway—because I would buy that bastard a drink out of pity (or the Professor would), so it was always worth it for Mattson to stop by Whit's to see if any of his patrons were there. - - - - Also I was majorly fucked up financially at this time. Picture this: me driving to the food bank and getting food, my car breaking down in their parking lot. Me, barefoot, feeding the engine coolant to get it started for a little longer, just enough to make it back to the house, unload the food, and park it in the cheaper lot I was using now. When you get food at "The Walk-In Center," you answer a bunch of their questions, about what services you're there for, then about your living situation, income, drug addiction, then (believe it or not!) if you're a vegetarian or have certain ingredients you can't eat. You go from feeling like a cultural degenerate to a diner in an upscale restaurant. I mean if you have a gluten allergy these people *are not* going to give you food with wheat in it..lol..also the experience of going there for the first time is a little rough. The other clients are hanging out on the porch looking like they just walked out of the Vietnam bush and they know each other and are all friendly with each other, but they don't know *you*. You're a newly-needy citizen. You still have a car so you imagine they think you're not really all that needy even though it's a beat-up car that barely runs. Anyway you walk the gauntlet of these guys hanging out on the porch and they are *not* friendly when you say hi to them. They're sizing you up, for what purpose, I have no idea—but I feel like a Nickelodeon character tossing cheerful greetings to the inmates as I walk jauntily down death row. - - - - Then, to make my bounced rent check situation worse, I see Abby, my dutiful landlord, out and about in bars a few nights in a row *when I have never seen her out before the entire time I've lived here*. I owed her money and I was still going out drinking. In my mind, I didn't have enough to cover rent, so I figured I might as well drink the rest. But Abby never gave me a hard time or even said hi: she was like the queen bee in these places, guys all over her buying her drinks and trying to get in a little conversation. By contrast I was always by myself, one guy on a stool, drinking to get drunk. What are the chances, even in such a small town, of seeing her out three nights in a row. I felt like a schmo. And here's how stupid I am: I even sent @slashleen partial payment for using her *Don't get aids!* joke/Tweet in my novel, even though the phrase has been used before and was so generic I didn't have to pay her money to use it. But her Tweet is where I heard the joke and I felt a duty to support the artist I was borrowing from. I wished I could send her more then but pledged to send more later when I could (and I recently did, five years later). And that's great, I'm supporting the arts, giving credit where credit is due, but it exemplifies how I was taking care of others when I didn't even have enough to take care of myself. But that's my style, I guess: another internet purchase I made the same day was for Eldon, a drawing of a unicorn from *Blade Runner*. I knew the artist, and I will cherish that unicorn forever. I was killing my bank account at the ATM to go across the street to Whit's and drink. This is how it went for me at Kips, I drank under some kind of compulsion. I would make as many trips to the ATM as my bank account could handle. That was the only thing that stopped my drinking—running out of money. Other than that, my unemployment money went straight from the government to a tiny ATM in a tiny town in Vermont then into my bloodstream. One day I switched it up from G&Ts and drank some kind of potato vodka (which I loved but had also gotten me in a lot of trouble in LA). I drank it because I knew, unlike any of my regular drinks, potato vodka would *fuck me up* after just a few drinks and that's exactly what happened. I paid my bill at Whit's, walked across the street and sat on the steps of an old fire station and called a suicide hotline. A similar thing had happened to me in LA. "So how long do you have sober," asked this suicide line operator. "A year." "Yeah, well you need to get back in touch with a sponsor if you're still having suicidal feelings with a year sober." I was sobbing my eyes out into the phone. I'm sure everyone inside of Whit's could see me with perfect clarity. I wanted to yell the head off of this stupid suicide hotline operator. They always think it's about substance abuse. And yes, today I am drunk but I feel even *worse* suicidal when I'm sober. They don't understand how hard life is to live for me. Because for them, getting clean and getting a sponsor is all it took for them to get over their suicidality. They don't understand mental health, these suicide hotline operators—some of them don't. They figure everyone's a drunk and a little help from the Lord above will help any good straight Christian feel the love of life again. But they have never met me. And I didn't understand me, either. So I sat there on those steps and bawled my eyes out and took some company from the guy on the other end of the line without saying anything that would make him call the cops. I thought of Thomas standing inside Whit's, watching me, wondering how he feels about his part in this little sickness..but it's me putting down the dollars and drinking the drinks, no one else. You might think that I had had enough drinking for one day. You would be wrong. I pulled myself together, wiped my tears on my sleeves, went back to Whit's, and drank some more. - - - - One of the many assholes who hung out at Whitman's was a guy we all called BTO. I believed Jill had coined the term: Big Time Operator, or BTO, because this motherfucker always had his bluetooth in and his voice filled *the entire bar* with whatever impossibly ridiculous "business" plan he was putting together. When you talked to him and asked questions about his businesses, you could never get a straight answer. There were no specifics, no concrete players, no events or products that ever came through. But that did nothing to dull BTO's enthusiasm for his work—whatever that was. It required constant telephone conferencing, table slapping, *"Yeah!"*s and other exclamations, and at the end of one of these ever-successful telephone calls, BTO came from his table to the bar to celebrate with a drink. "It's karaoke night at the Inferno!" BTO booms. "I'm going down there later on if anyone wants to come with me." "Hey," Jill says. "What?" "You trying to take people out of my bar to go to another bar?!" "I'm sorry it's just—you don't have karaoke here. Do you think maybe we could get karaoke here?" "No. We tried that and it didn't work." "Well," BTO whispers loudly, "karaoke at Inferno tonight." Jill shakes her head. "I'm gonna stop letting you do business in here." "But where would I do business?" "I don't know! Do what most people do: get an office!" "But I don't want an office. I want here." "Then behave!!" Many drinks later, when it was dark, BTO had made his way around to my corner of the bar and he elbowed me. "Karaoke?" "No thanks." "You know you want to." "BTO. I've never done karaoke before and I'm not gonna start tonight." "*You've never done it before?*" "No and I have no interest." "Well. But. It's so much fun. Promise you'll do a duet with me." "Ok." "Do you promise?" "Yes, I fucking promise." "OH LA LA!! We've got a virgin here who just *fucking promised* to sing a duet with me at Inferno later." Jill says, "Is this true?" I shake my head and my eyes at the same time which somehow equals a *yes*. "I hope you know what you're getting into." "I'm sure I don't." "I'M SINGIN' A DUET WITH THIS MOTHERFUCKER!!" "Ok, ok. Shut up. I'll meet you over there later." "You better show up." "BTO. My promise is good." Jill says, "BTO. I guarantee his promise. If Matt says he'll be there, he'll be there." "Thank you." Jill puts her hand on mine. "I've seen you. I know you," she says. "And you'll have a lot of fun. BTO is great at karaoke." - - - - I was almost out of money at Inferno so I bought this cute fat girl a drink and after that she bought me drinks, then her friends did, then the cute fat girl was like fighting her friends to make sure she was the only one buying me drinks. I made it through the night on the promise of sex with this big girl, which I had no plan of following through on. I drank so much the whole day, my first time singing karaoke, with BTO, a song from *Grease*, I can't say I had more than two seconds of fear before it turned into addictive enjoyment of this previously-untried thing called karaoke. We sang *Summer Lovin'* and as soon as I was done I wished we were signed up twice, me and BTO, my big teddy bear business man, blasting songs from a musical that, sober, makes me want to puke. "It's addictive," isn't it? "Yeah, BTO. Thanks." BTO went one way and I went another. And who was at the bar all friendly with my fat girl? It was my mystery friend who I can't describe further but he hooked me up and 29 seconds later I was doing a line of coke in the tiny bathroom. That was maybe the extra ingredient that turned me using cute fat girl for drinks into me walking hand in hand with fat girl to her home, the hand-in-hand part meaning that we were definitely going to have sex when we got there. She was talking about it like it already happened. "As soon as I saw you at the bar, I *knew..*" "What did you know?" "That you were different. You were funny. You were *new*—I've never seen you around here before." "I moved here in January." "How come I never saw you and got to take you home for bedroom games before?" "I've been holed up in my room writing a book." "Oh. 'Cause I never miss a karaoke at Inferno. I don't have a roommate by the way. And my son's with his dad this week. So we have all night to make all the noise we want." The fat girl squeezed my hand. "I've been looking forward to your pussy," I say. She turns and looks at me. "What is that supposed to mean?" "I knew when you bought me that first drink that you were gonna give me your pussy and ever since I've been trying to think: What is fat girl's pussy like? Is it the pug-nose bulldog type? Is it is the long, slivery, no-inner-lips pussy? Am I gonna have to get in there with a crowbar? That type of shit." "You're high." "Just a bit. But I am gonna fuck the shit out of you." Our hands were all over each other's genitals even before fat girl could get her door open. My cock was fully hard all the way through the kitchen where fat girl fed us both some wine out of an open bottle on her kitchen counter ("I was pre-gaming it."), all the way up the stairs, all the way into fat girl's bed and all the way through the undressing cycle (which went quick) and all the way through the condom-application process (which fat girl performed) and all the way into her hot fat cunt which I fucked and fucked and fucked. I buried myself in that cunt and took all the heat and wet and tight it had to offer. I held onto that fat girl's face and kissed her and looked into her eyes while I fucked her and she squeezed her pussy muscles together to make it even nicer down there between her fat thighs. I fucked her and I thought of all sorts of people with nicer pussies and bodies and personalities that I'd rather be fucking but I gave her good action in the actual fat pussy I was fucking and I wished I was fucking her without a condom but what the hell. I grew tired and pulled out and then the instruction began. She put her fingers inside her and touched the top of her cunt and she was like: "If you get your fingers in here like this..two or three even..and get me going..we can have me squirting and have all sorts of fun. Here. Just put your fingers right her and you can rub me just right and I'll be squirting all over the bed and you can fuck me after I squirt and I'll be *so* hot and *so* wet for you. Here. Give me your hand. Like this. Put one finger in there. And feel that? That's my G-spot—" "I know!" "And if you get this other finger in here, right next to it, and then..yeah..this third finger..fuck..rub me like that..like that! You know all the G-spot is, is a big knot of nerves behind the clitoris—" "I know what a fucking G-spot is!" "Don't you want me to squirt?" "I don't want to feel like I'm in an instructional venue, fat girl, I want to feel like I'm in your bed and you just picked me up—a stranger—from the bar..and we're fucking..and if you squirt, you squirt. Am I not being good to you? Am I not stimulating your clitoris? Licking your pink little nips? Didn't I kiss you like a lover and now *I* sound like an instructor! I was going to lick your asshole but now I'm not sure I want to because we've talked about it first! I just want to..explore..you know..not wordlessly..I know verbal communication is a key ingredient to great lovemaking. But, you know, we just met. Can't our first time be sloppy and off-center and a little unsatisfying to both because it's so fucking *lustful* that we don't *do* everything right? I don't know. With you I feel like I'm in a classroom." At least she didn't cry. If that fat bitch had cried after my lecture I would have killed myself. She pulled me down on top of her and I laid there with my dick softening and I ran buy fingers through her hair. "I like you, fat girl." "Matthew, I like you too." We fell asleep like that. - - - - In the morning fat girl took the condom off and with my morning wood I fucked her and fucked her for my purposes only and I came in that fat girl's pussy and I came deep inside that fat pussy and I kept on fucking her all the way through my orgasm and cum was pumping out of the bottom of her cunt and dripping across her asshole onto the bed. I felt her pussy *owed* me that orgasm. I walked home in the sunlight, feeling extra light, and when I walked in the house Tooler and Issa rushed up to me. "Are you ok? We were worried about you?" "I worried you?" "We just wondered where you were..we were a little worried." "I'm so sorry I worried you. I should have called! I'm sorry. I didn't even think of calling! Oh no, Tooler, I'm sorry I worried you?" I half-hugged her. "Where were you?" "I slept over at a girl's house. Got laid!" Then everything was awkward. I wasn't sure why, if it was 'cause I slept with a girl or if it was because it wasn't Tooler or if it sounded like I was bragging or if it was just because I was inconsiderate and didn't call. But the vibe went way awkward. I was cracked out from not having had much sleep. I touched my face. "What?" Issa said. "I lost my glasses." "Call your girl," Tooler said. Tooler and Issa left the house to go to Tooler's work. I was glad, I didn't want to deal with the vibe. And of course, being a little older now, with a little more time to reflect, I know where that vibe came from. It was that Tooler didn't like how I said, "Got laid!" which was basically a brag, and she was disappointed in me that I wasn't on the pedestal of a nice guy who would never brag that he fucked a girl. Well, I don't happen to view sex as a conquest, it was just an exclamation of joy that I had had sex. I should have kept it to myself. The other reason it was awkward is because it seemed like I was bragging about it to my bros, but even though those two women accepted me into their house, Tooler and Issa were not exactly 100% my bros. I took a shower and went to sleep. It's funny what you remember about relationships. You might think it's cruel that I call that girl *the fat girl*. It's not an insult—it's just how I think of her. I never had sex with Rebecca but I remember she was an awesome kisser. I was with Rishi the longest and I don't remember what her breasts look like. I just remember that she yelled at me. ### 26 I didn't really want the Professor as my company, but I'm lonely and I take what company, what intimacy I can get. Everyone else has to work or go to school or run their business. The Professor and I drive around all day to stores buying things on each of our lists, cases of Pellegrino for me, yard tools for him, a certain type of fan he wants. We drive to Massachusetts and drink wine while the Professor does the crossword puzzle, trying to involve me. He asks me for help on every question and only extremely rarely am I of any use. The professor is disappointed because he knows I'm smart and he thought this general principle would translate into magical crossword skills. "I don't do crossword puzzles," I tell him. My favorite part of the skimpy cheese-and-cracker meals are the two or three glasses of wine we each have with our lunch, and my second-favorite part is our cigarette breaks outside, standing partially under the awning and partially under the giant black umbrella that the Professor brought just for the occasion. To me it only points out the generation gap: a) that he checked the weather in the first place, and b) that he owns an umbrella. My generation would just wear a coat with a hood. But it's ok. When he's not badgering the staff or attempting to impress everyone with his crossword skills, when it's just me and him, he's kinder, and we're like brothers. I think the Professor knew from the the very beginning that I would tolerate his injustice toward others, but that if he ever insulted me, even in jest, I would cut him out of my life. He was right. And he never insulted me to my face, though I'm sure he made jabs about me with Thomas about my craziness..me and the Professor's wild dinners and escapades. On these outings the Professor always informed the bartender that I was driving so not to serve me too many drinks, even when I wasn't driving. But one day he took me to a particularly nice restaurant in Mass, told the bartender this business about me being the designated driver, then the Professor asking me if I would drive us home, and once I agree he proceeds to get drunker than I've ever seen him. At first I drink bubbly water but sometime during the extremely fancy and exorbitantly expensive dinner I ask the bartender if I can have one of those drinks the Professor is drinking. The bartender serves me two or three, so I *am* drunk when we drive back to Brattleboro, just not nearly as drunk as the Professor. That night he was reeling me in like a fish. Playing into my weakness for steak, cigarettes, alcohol, and fine service at restaurants. We get out of this restaurant that just looks like a house and I drive us both in his Range Rover—extremely carefully—as far as the new Walmart, where Jimmy insisted we stop and buy limes for some crazy drink he felt compelled to make for me—"You just must try this drink." Then the asshole stood by the Range Rover smoking, gave me his wallet, and told me to get the limes while he smoked. I bought three limes and stole twenty dollars out of his wallet, gave it back to him and proceeded to drive us both to his house—which wasn't a house at all but a library outside of Brattleboro that he had bought and was living in. Half of it was still stacks, book after book on Slavic languages, and in the rest he had carved out an office, a kitchen, a bedroom, a bath. You know I just remembered a story. He told me about his gardener, a female college student who after she was done working the Professor's garden, would take spare clothes into his bathroom and take a shower, come out smelling and looking all fresh and clean. I wondered why he told me this story. I half-expected him to bust out some surveillance tapes he had of the bathroom, like he was watching her take her shower. But he didn't. He was either genuinely enthralled with the youth and sexuality of this young female gardener—even though he was obviously gay—or (and I consider this a real possibility, knowing him) he was telling me the story to turn me on, so I could have something straight to think about while he made his moves on me. Jimmy tricked me into sleeping at his house. As we near Brattleboro with him very drunk and me drunk driving, he says he really shouldn't be driving and would I mind driving him to his library and we could have a few more drinks and talk and crash. So I drove him to his house. Oh yeah, he also tells me he doesn't like to drive when it's dark—which is a legitimate complaint as the man is likely in his 70s. Now I'm at his house, without my car, and I'm stuck at Jimmy's house till morning when he can take me back into Brattleboro. How foolish I was. We sit in his living room area, watching the news, talking, drinking, smoking cigarettes. I showed him my language systems I'd developed, and he got really excited (genuinely, I think) because he's a linguist. He took a thorough look around some of what I'd done and sat back in his desk chair, looking up at me standing beside him. "You really impressed me with that. You don't just come across people in Brattleboro who have developed stuff like that—especially not someone so young. That really knocked me over, my friend." "Well don't knock yourself too far over. I could go for another one of those drinks—what are you calling them?" "You're mispronouncing it anyway!" Then after many drinks and a trip around the garden (where I was so drunk I just left my glass on a stone bench and decided I'd had enough for the evening), the Professor and I got friendly on the couch in his cutout of a living room, touching each other's hair and faces. Then we moved to the bedroom, kissed and got undressed and the Professor fingered my ass and I masturbated but wasn't able to cum, probably because I'm not really gay—but we worked ourselves into a frenzy. I tried to touch his cock but he wouldn't let me so I didn't know if he had something wrong down there or what but I let him do what he wanted to do, which was play with my asshole—and that felt good for me while I jerked my cock in his face and he told me how beautiful I was and I held him and told him how beautiful he was and I meant it. We slept together in his bed and everything is chill until the next day when he asks me to stay hidden because he's having a carpet delivered and he doesn't want the delivery man to know he has a young man staying over. So I hide in the bedroom for the two or three minutes it takes for this delivery to happen, and I wonder at a man so traveled, so refined, so educated, who can't stand the thought of his neighbors knowing he's gay—which they must already since I'm sure I'm not the first fly to wander into this particular spider's nest. There must be a new boy driving the Professor home in his Range Rover every night. We hung around in the morning briefly and then he drove me back to my apartment in Brattleboro. As I'm stepping out of the Range Rover on High Street he asks me: "Are you sure you don't want to hang out somewhere." "No. I'm done for. I'll see you around." He speeds off. The night before he had showed me the room in his library, downstairs, recently renovated, that he said I could live in if I wanted. And his fabulous library palace: me, wandering the stacks with my drink while Jimmy watched the news that night and I checked out books in languages I will never learn to read. Then Jimmy sticking his finger up my ass. Wondering if the Professor put something in my drink, but I didn't care, I had fun and I always like getting close to interesting people, even if it's not my exact flavor of fun. And after such intimacy, I couldn't stand being at the apartment alone—or with Tooler and Issa sleeping—so I wandered down to Whitman's and who was sitting on a barstool but the Professor. I went up to him and said hi. Then I bought a bottle of wine with the twenty I had stole from his wallet the night before. I thought for a while, trying to figure if the Professor had put something in my drink or not. In the end, I doubted he did. I think we were both very drunk and I didn't mind being sexual with him—it was fun. I enjoyed him sticking his finger up my asshole. I enjoyed him briefly sucking my cock. I wish I could have cum—it would have been satisfying for us both. But I'm not turned on by sex with men, I don't have relationships with men. It's like my friend Caroline: she's a lesbian but she's married to a man. She has sex with girls because she likes having sex with girls. And she fucks her husband because *he* likes fucking *her*, and she loves making him happy. Jimmy offers me a seat next to him at the bar, telling his other friend to move over a seat. But I take my bottle of chianti back to booth number one and open my laptop. I write sections of *Of Bicycles and Boardwalks and Oceans and Ships* (which I won't finish for another two or three years), then get drunker and more psychotic and write many crazy emails, in my usual style. I write to my father. How I hate him. How fucked up his actions have been toward me and my sisters and mom. I write to my ex-boss in LA and inform him that I am putting a curse on his company (which seems to have worked) that will limit his success to spending top dollar on lakeside offices while never turn a profit. The sun comes out and I see drug deals going on all up and down Elliot Street and I write to the Chief of Police of Brattleboro offering to be an undercover cop in which capacity I will singlehandedly bust the drug activity on that one street. I don't have the actual email since I deleted to preclude one of my drug friends finding it in my Gmail and murdering me but I can say it included phrases like: "don't ask me how but I have an eye for drug shit." "I am willing to die to clean up the drug activity on Elliot Street." "I am willing to go *deep,* deep undercover" etc. He never wrote me back prob'ly because he saw right through me as a drug addict looking for a way to do more drugs and get paid for it. I hadn't thought it through—I was drunk and out of my mind (my usual state for about 18 years somewhere in the beginning of my life there). I had very little conscious control over what I was doing. And if you're some druggie in Brattleboro who is now gonna try to seek me out 'cause I would have gone undercover and turned on you: a) You'll never make it out of Brattleboro. b) Like Joe Pesci says in Casino, "In the end I had to put his fucking head in a vice." That's what I'll do to you. "You make me pop your eye out of your head" like a fucking grapefruit!!?? I'll eat the skin off your face like rainforest ants on a Fla-Vor-Ice. Then I'll make your teeth into a necklace and take it to jail with me as a souvenir. So fuck you. And fuck you too. - - - - At some point in the future, sitting at the bar with that one musician guy and him talking about the Professor and saying: "Just watch your corn hole. That's all I'm gonna say." (The Professor is a friend of their family and he's been to their house for Thanksgiving.) I start talking about being friends with the Professor and this musician guy asks if I've ever been to his house. I say, "I have but he didn't make a move on me." "You've been to his *house??* Did you *stay over*??" "No." "Just watch your corn hole." This led me to believe that musician dude and the Professor had been together. And the more I looked, the more I noticed that the Professor was always sitting with a different guy at a different bar. They were all in their twenties or thirties. They all claimed to be Jimmy's driver—or Jimmy claimed this. He couldn't see, so he needed a driver. He was too drunk, so he needed a driver. Yeah right. I think back to my first night drinking with the Professor versus what I know about him now. Even back then he was trying to get me to sleep with him. He was a master manipulator, though, and he excelled at projecting the most odious personality while still keeping people around. He would say just enough of the most horribly offensive things you'd ever heard, that you wanted to slide over a seat, away from him at the bar. But he was also the most intelligent person I'd met in Brattleboro—I could have technical discussions about languages and symbols and all sorts of other things that no one else in the borough had any interest or patience in. He was the only person I could really talk to..and also the only person whose mind and speech were so offensive that I couldn't stand to hear 95% of what he had to say. The Professor interleaved these poles intentionally because he enjoyed making people uncomfortable (it was a power he could exert over them) and he, like me, had a psychological need for the company of anyone near as smart as him. He was starved for conversation, and I gave him the best conversation he could find in Brattleboro. When we talked, he confided in me how others were of a lower intellectual class. Thomas, for instance, he insulted for his excessive talk of New York and inability to properly make drinks. But what was really wrong with Thomas, to the Professor, was that Thomas bored him. I did not. And that's why I ended up on so many outings with the Professor—with me he could have decent dinner conversation, and I was pliable enough sexually to allow myself to end up in his bed. Walsh was hardly interested in sex and mainly interested in drugs. Thomas was almost always working. Mike stopped going to bars eventually at the advice of his lawyer. Stripes (who you'll meet later) had a boyfriend and I was in too weak a psychiatric position to even stay in Brattleboro to see what could have happened between us. And Gretchen, Gretchen (you'll meet her later, too)—she was never my friend—she was only a fan. She bought every available book of mine online, read them all, and gushed to me in the basement of the new Metropolis that I had written things down that previously she thought had only been thought in her head, that I had somehow captured *her* individual experience even though we grew up in different states in different towns at different times. I hadn't the heart to tell her that the secret to that particular bit of magic is that people, everywhere, aren't all that different from one another. I could never talk with Gretchen as an equal because she was a fan of my books and my thoughts and me in general. She was obsessed. It was one sided. Therefore, we were never friends. Don't think I'm trying to make the point that the Professor was my best friend in Brattleboro. We used each other and had a good time doing it. We were adversaries more than friends. The relationship was constant manipulation on both sides. But he was the only person in town who I could be my whole self with, mentally, physically—anyone else would have glazed over if I told them about a language system I had invented with my sister. But the Professor pulled up my website and we looked at the system together. He asked questions, we had detailed logical discussions, and at the end he leaned back in his swivel chair and told me that was the most impressive thing he'd seen in decades. Then we got idiotically drunk and had sex, so maybe he was just saying that to get me to bed. But I don't think so. I think we were probably the smartest people in that 11,000-person town, and that made us a strange, strange set of friends. - - - - I stopped the relationship, though, or put it on pause, by just never calling him or calling him back. I didn't want us to be sexual. But one night I got lonely and the Professor was my only friend, I thought, so I called and asked if I could come over, he said of course, and I walked all the way to the cheap parking lot I had moved my car to and discovered that the battery was dead. I called the professor and told him I couldn't come over that night, hoping he would offer to pick me up but he didn't. And I walked back to my apartment and was sad and glad at the same time. My only friend was someone I couldn't stand to be around. And it had been this way my whole life, from kindergarten on up. I'm too judgmental, too sensitive, too attuned to others' faults. I can't just relax and have fun unless I'm on drugs. For a moment I really missed the Professor. I knew our relationship wasn't right, but I needed a friend. Also I wanted someone to drink with, and I knew he had booze. ### 27 The next time I was in the Inferno I was shooting the shit with the bartender/owner and I was like: "I sang karaoke for the first time in your bar!" And he was like: "Right on!" And I was like: "That shit is addictive!" And he was like: "That's what I've heard." And I was like: "Could'a had something to do with the lines of coke I was snorting in the bathroom!" Then he gets all serious: "Don't tell me that. You didn't tell me that. Seriously. Don't do drugs on my premises." He walks away. I guess my Matthew's SuperfunLand Tent rules don't extend to the entire rest of the world. Fucker. You own a bar. What do you *think* people are doing in your bathroom? I was mood quashed by the owner of this fucking place so I found the fat girl and was like, "You want to get out of here?" So I take her upstairs to Emo's apartment. Emo rents a room there while these other two guys just buy and sell drugs all day and play video games. We walk in. "Emo!" "Matthew Temple. How are you?" "Great. But I got eighty dollars I want to turn into some coke." "Right this way," Emo says, and he leads me to the man that can make it happen. "*Eighty* dollars??" "Yep." "Oh, man, you don't know how much this is really gonna help me out. We have like no cash. You can really do eighty dollars?" I nod. "Alright, get comfortable, my man, you wanna play some video games with my roomie, go ahead. I'll have this ready for you in two minutes." I give him the eighty bucks and soon fat girl and I are in the dining room (no table, no chairs, just a rolled up rug, an overhead light, a wood floor and a couple of cokeheads). Me and fat girl do some lines, share with Emo, and then I do a bunch more lines. Fat girl wants to leave and go fuck. "You like having your little pussy fucked by me, huh?" And ninety-thousand other dumb-ass things to say to a fat girl. I look over and the main guy has a needle—he's shooting it, and he must already be high because he's handling a fat shot of coke without much reaction. I thought back to LA. I wanted to shoot it even though there weren't any clean needles that I knew of. But I didn't even approach him about that because I knew if I started that again, I wouldn't be able to stop. I'm crazy, but I'm not that crazy. They were all partying down and all happy that I bought eighty dollars worth of coke—they needed the cash that bad. - - - - I remembered the last time I shot coke and h and crystal meth back in Hollywood. It is sort of exciting to load a syringe with a certain amount of heroin and know that three or four times that amount would kill you..so you double the amount to get a really good high, and you know you're in the danger zone, you realistically think: *this might get me high or it might kill me*. And you shoot it. Seeing that guy shoot coke, I knew I had to leave, so I packed up my sizable bag of powder and took fat girl's hand. I went home with her again, the one who would direct me in the bedroom to finger her pussy in a certain way. "You missing these?" she said, holding up my mangled glasses. "They were in the couch cushion." Must have been lost in there while we were having our monster pre-sex make out session—I did love kissing her. I loved it more than sex, with her, I just loved making out on the couch like teenagers. After a while we went upstairs. I had to speak to her: "During sex, telling your partner what you want is fine. But I don't want to feel like I'm watching an instructional video." "Ok." "I know where your G-spot is..right here, huh?" "Uhhhh.." "Now I'm gonna fuck your G-spot and touch your G-spot with my fingers any time I want. I don't necessarily want you to squirt. I might. I might not. But you know what I want to do now?" She shakes her head, eyes pointed up at me, hands on my bare cock, thumb rubbing a bead of precum in to the head of my dick. "I'm gonna fuck you like you've been a nasty nasty girl and I caught you fucking my coke dealer and now I need to show you who this pussy belongs to, ok? Do you think you need to learn a lesson?" Fat girl starts sucking my cock. I can feel her pussy wet. I push her head back. "Now turn over and press your face into that pillow 'cause what I'm about to do to you might hurt you at first, ok bad girl? Is this what you wanted?" She nods like the nasty bitch she is. "The turn over and put your face in that pillow." I held her neck with one hand and pumped her good like I was riding a camel or a donkey. The bed was like a Slip 'N Slide when I was done with her. She was grateful to fuck and jerk my cock until I came in her nose, all over her lips, in her eye. - - - - It was tough to get off with fat girl in her pussy though—it was a lot of work. It was the same with this fat girl from LA, the costume designer. And it wasn't their pussy. It was just that they weren't sexy to me and I that's why I had trouble cumming with them. I know they had trouble cumming with me, too—I was a little overweight myself and I don't have any kind of monster cock so it was second-class sex, sex between strangers. The LA girl said to me on Christmas eve that it was very intimate sex..yeah, I looked you in your eyes and held your face in my hands and pretended that your cuteness was the cuteness of Rebecca, who I never got to fuck. And that let me enjoy fucking your fat little pussy *to a point*, but it was never enough to get me off while I was drinking. Only once I sobered up and had my morning wood could I cum in these women. While I mention that I'm fucking fat girls, and it's the fat girls in bars that are approaching me, let me mention that at the height of my weight gain, I weighed 215, partly due to the antipsychotic Risperdal, which makes you extra hungry. But when I fucked both of those fat girls, I didn't have Risperdal as an excuse—I was just overweight. Not obese, but overweight, and yet through some form of reverse body dysmorphia, I thought I was my healthy weight and making a concession to fuck this woman who in my twenties I would never even considered a sexual object because of her weight. Back then I had choices—I fucked almost every woman who was my friend (and some who weren't). Etc. But they were all skinny and hot. Sex was always hot was when I was eighteen, nineteen—fucking Ashley the first time I fucked anyone, feeling like intercourse was *perfect*—like it was designed to feel this way. *Damn.* Fucking Charisma's perfect pussy so tight I couldn't help but cum in her the first time we fucked *and every time we fucked*. I would wake that girl up four times a night to cum in her. Deidre's perfect pussy, her perfect ass—we fucked twice a day for four months and then she dumped me because she "needed to be with herself." Maybe she was tired of cheating on her husband. Maybe it was because I was too crazy—that was the reason she told my friend, who later told me. But I don't care about any of that—I loved Deirdre and I always will. The point is Deidre's pussy was *perfect*—I'm not going to go into the details—but compared to the pussy back then, fat girl pussy, mom pussy..it's just never been the same. I don't think it's the pussy itself—it's the personality. I need that spark. The fat girl didn't have it. Walsh had the looks but not the spark. The only person in Brattleboro who I wanted in every way, who I would have done anything for, never expecting anything in return, was—I know you think I'm gonna say Justine, but it's not—it's Stripes, from the Refuge—my fellow suicidal—one of the few truly cool people in Brattleboro. And, yes, of course I would have fucked Justine—fucking little twenty-one-year-old minx—if I had ever got up the nerve to ask her, and if the wild part in her had said yes. Faith—bipolar Faith, from the Refuge—was a whole other thing. If I hadn't sold my car, I would drive up to Rutledge, collect Faith, then drive across the country with her, Rainbow and Clyde style. We might have sex—we might not—but we'd be totally crazy, totally wild, and totally bipolar. Back then girls were sucking my dick in the Burger King parking lot, sucking me off while I was driving. Now, it's probably been ten years since a girl made me cum with her mouth, or I really got to get a woman off with my mouth and my fingers so good she was grabbing my head and screaming and cumming in my face. - - - - Well a one day in ole Brattleboro I was strolling by Tooler's shop and I stopped in and I said: "Tooler, have you had lunch?" And she said, "No." And I said, "Me either, but I'm thinking of getting something good." And I left. And 15 minutes later I came back with sushi platter on top of sushi platters and I unloaded this sideways paper bag all over the sales counter and Tooler's face turned pink and she smiled and said: "You remembered." "Tooler, how could I forget?" So we mmm'd and aaah'd and ate our way through enough sushi for about six people. "This is fucking extravagant. How much did this cost?" "Look, I'm an extravagant person and I'm so extravagant, in fact, that I did't get a receipt so I have no idea how much it cost but I'd say let's enjoy ourselves before a meteor hits the Earth or something, eh?" Tooler and I cheers'd with a piece of sushi each and ate up. "You full now?" "I'm *stuffed*." "Do you require anything?" "Matthew, thank you, I'm fine." "I'll bring you anything you like, Tools, offer good one day only." "You've done enough," she smiles. "Alright," I say. "Well I have a full day of drinking planned and I have to leave—" (I check my nonexistent watch.) "—oooh! Five minutes ago! See ya!" and I run out the store, dump the trash in a street side can and head my little ass up to Whit's. "Matthew!" It's Tooler's voice. She's leaning out of her shop and she says: "It's a nice day." "That it is." "I was thinking shisha with you and Issa." "Like after work?" "No, like..now. Would you go get her and the gear and bring it down here?" "Yes I will." Tooler jumps up and down and claps. "Are you sure?" "Tooler, this is your day. Anything you want, we're making it happen." So I drag a grumpy Issa out of bed (this is 1pm or so) and we take the hookah, some blueberry shisha, a container of ice, charcoal, a decent lighter, and we huff it down the hill from our apartment to Tooler's shop. Then the three of us set up chairs and smoke ourselves up right in front of this t-shirt shop where Tooler works that never has any customers and people are slowing down their cars and going, "Right on, man!" and people are stopping on the sidewalk and asking us what that is and Tooler and Issa trade off explaining what shisha is (flavored tobacco) and we generally enjoy the weather and the fact that we survived Vermont winter and Israel security forces haven't come after Issa and she hasn't been deported and I finished my book and Tooler's masters program is going well and then the cops show up. One cop. He walks up to us. We all roll our eyes. He says, "What's in there?" We say, "Shisha." He says, "What's the flavor? It smells like.." "Blueberry," Tooler fills in. "It's perfectly legal." "Oh yeah, it's legal," the guy says. "But that doesn't stop people from calling into us and saying there's kids smoking pot on the sidewalk in downtown. You know these people, they got nothing better to do, they don't understand shisha—" "You want a hit?" Tooler asks. She holds the pipe out to him. "No thanks." "It's really good." "I can smell that. It smells incredible. Anyway, I'm not harassing you or anything, I just had to come down to check it out since we were getting so many calls." "This is my shop so we're legal sitting here, too," Tooler says. "I know. You're well within your rights and I say more power to ya. If it was me we would decriminalize everything." "Fuck yeah." "I mean look at the Netherlands," this cop says, and she and Tooler go off on a political discussion a mile wide and three fathoms deep. How deep is a fathom anyway? Do you know? I have no clue but it sounds deep. Anyway they go off on drug policy and human rights and the overcrowding of American jails and then this guy has to leave and the fact that the police came up to us while our fellow citizens were complaining *and he didn't do crap* made us feel like we owned Brattleboro—or at least ourselves, at least our little hookah and three squares of sidewalk, just for 30 minutes. Plus it always gives a true American a warm fuzzy feeling when a cop shows up and nobody gets killed. Tooler, Issa, and I all get cravings for junk food. I drive to McDonald's, we get food and drinks, then I drop the two of them at Tooler's work. I drive to our apartment and see they forgot their Cokes when I dropped them off. There's really no place to park around there so I walked those two Cokes into town so Tooler and Issa would have the appropriate drink for their junk food. That was my good deed for the year. - - - - What follows may be mania. I didn't have any money, but I went anyway directly from Tooler's work over to Whit's where I proceeded to order a string of drinks I could not pay for, hoping that the Professor would offer to pay. Consider that for a second. Ok, yeah, that's crazy. Mike is there, we're smoking it up and jabbing and Thomas is tending bar and I figure I'll just sneak out on one of my smoke breaks and pay Thomas next time I get an unemployment check. That was my plan. Then a certain mystery gentleman who I'm actually combining with a number of master gentlemen around Brattleboro who had their own personal coke for snorting or they sold it, or both. One of these mystery gentlemen comes into Whit's and makes a certain facial expression which I have no trouble interpreting. It means: *get up, leave your drink and these drunks and come with me to my apartment just down the road and we'll snort massive amounts of coke!* So I get up, I ignore Thomas yelling at me to pay my tab and Mike yelling at me that I have an open tab at Whitman's (a no-no) and ignoring the Professor inviting me to his place and then somehow the Professor is driving his Range Rover very slowly beside the four of us who were going up to an apartment for some sniff and the Professor is yelling at me that I had committed to go with him to his house (which was true) and this was no way to treat your friends (which was true, but I justified by saying the Professor wasn't really my friend—which was true too). I just walk out, completely drunk, ignoring all this yelling at me and I go do coke in the upstairs apt with people I hardly know. - - - - When we're doing introductions the main guy asks me what my name is. "Matthew Temple." He reels back on the couch and looks like satan himself just sat down on the couch next to me. "That's my old name," I say. "I changed it to Inhaesio Zha and I usually go by Zha now." "But it was Matthew Temple before?" "Yeah." "How long have you lived in Brattleboro?" "Like six months." "Are you an actor." "No," I say, confused. "Don't use that name. I almost just kicked you out of my apartment. There was a Matthew Temple who lived here before. He screwed a lot of people over and moved to LA to be an actor," this guy says. "Zha. Definitely go by Zha." And after this confrontation he finally offers me the wimpiest possible line of coke after everyone else has had two and three lines—everyone's big buddies with each other except me—so I do the line and go into his bathroom and take a nasty shit. If you want to take the nastiest shits possible, drink liquor and do cocaine—you'll surprise yourself. My drinking buddy Mike calls me from Whit's and is like: "What happened dude, you disappeared." And I'm like, "I don't know." And he's like, "You're doing coke, aren't you—decided not to go with the professor." And I'm like, "Yeah." And he's like, Wise choice. Anyway, bud, I thought I'd call you to let you know that you left an open tab at Whit's." "I did?" "Yeah." "And I don't know if you know..Whit and Jill are cool with a lot of things, but leaving an open tab is not one of them." "Ok, thanks Mike, I'll be over there in a few minutes to take care of it." "Uh..no you won't. You're high on coke, dude, you're gonna be *right where you are..all night long*." I was quiet. I really fucked myself up at Whit's. "Alright, well, cya dude." Mike clicks off. The guy whose house it is introduces me to his girlfriend. "Juliet." "Matthew." You're gonna recognize a pattern here but Juliet looks like someone I'd like to fuck and more to the point she is way to good for mystery man and I can't see *anything* about this hyperactive asshole that would attract a girl like Juliet while I was still fucking fat girls. They all do lines and completely ignore me—just don't offer me any when it would be my turn and I'm like: *I didn't come over here to* buy *coke, I came over here to* do *coke with my new friends—right?* I just sat there on the couch. No one would even talk to me. Occasionally Juliet would cut me a tiny little half-line and motion me to the kitchen to snort it. The guy said something about the stinky shit in the bathroom and I wanted to be like, *What are you, some high-class coke-doing motherfuckers because when I did coke back home in Ohio we were like doing it till our noses wouldn't* snort *coke anymore and we were snorting our phlegm all up our sinuses in front of each other—it was disgusting—am I among* high-class *coke motherfuckers in Brattleboro, Vermont?* Juliet was the only one who would give me the time of day except after a long while mystery man sat down on the couch next to me saying he wanted to hear about my programming stuff and he shoved a MacBook in front of me but soon the computer was on his lap and he was the one doing all the talking. He was a DJ, too—he played me all his mixes and I nodded and said they were all amazing. It got dark and Juliet was leaning over me to yell at people outside through their open window. We ran out of coke. I was so frustrated sexually and offended by these people's inability to integrate with a new person that I finally decided if there wasn't going to be any more coke that I was leaving. "So. Can we do some more coke?" I said. Might as well be forward and direct. "We can buy some if you have money." "I don't have any money." Apparently not a single other person in this apartment did, either? "I can call and see if my unemployment check came in. If it did I could get some cash." From the moment I said that, every motherfucker in that room was my friend..until the moment I called my bank and discovered that my balance was still negative. We went back to having no coke and I went back to being a nobody. I'm a guest in these people's house and they're bugging *me* for dough for more cocaine? That's how this shit works—everyone's a fucking taker. ### 28 One morning Tooler wakes up all chipper and she says: "Today I'm going to teach Issa to drive!" That night when I come home, Tooler and Issa are sitting on the couch. There's no Subaru in the driveway. "Where's your car?" "Well, we might need to talk about borrowing *yours* for a while." "What happened to yours?" "Ah..Issa..kind of crashed it." "Are you two ok?" "Oh yeah we're fine." "Oh, good, well that's the most important thing," I say. "But now we have no car." "You can use my car no problem—it's a piece of shit but..oh my god..I'm glad you two are ok!" Tooler and Issa stand up and we do a group hug. "It was kind of scary." "Was it?" "The car *rolled*," Issa says. "Like it rolled down a mountain," Tooler says. She has tears in the bottom of her eyes. "Oh, Tooler!" "Like..if it had rolled one more time it would rolled *off* the mountain." "Oh my god, Tooler, I'm so glad you two are here, safe. I'll give you the keys to my car—use it all you want, I never use it. It's got some problems and expired tags—" "But it's not totaled." "Oh, geez, you know, one thing happens and you can roll off the side of a mountain," I say. "I bet you weren't thinking that when you left the house this morning. Tragedy, you know, it's always someone else until it happens to you." "Well it could have been a whole lot worse." "I'm glad it wasn't." "There was a tree." Issa makes a pinching motion. "It was a tree this big and it was holding us from the mountain." I hug her, tiny little Issa. And I realize I love these two. Poor Tooler: she's just trying to give Issa a chance to learn to drive and Issa almost kills them. And Issa: poor her because she has to live with the responsibility. We all chilled out the rest of the evening and gave each other glad-you're-still-alive looks. The next day while Tooler worked, Issa and I went on a mission to put a new battery in my car. On the way to get the battery, I asked Issa if she wanted to get a drink. "Uhhh.." "Let's just get a beer, take a moment, reflect on the world as it is." "Alright, Matthew, if you want to get a beer I will get a beer with you." When we sat at Whit's she said, "That's not a beer!" "No," I said. "That's a gin and tonic!" We clinked glasses: her Guinness, my gin. Issa was quiet till the end of her first beer. Then she opened up. "There's this girl. She's in California. And when I went to California—Tooler does not know this, and you can't tell her, swear." "Ok." "Swear." "I swear I will not tell Tooler anything as long as you swear never to tell Tooler you told me, if this ever comes out." "I swear," Issa said. "I slept with her in California. This girl." "I see." "Yes. And I'm planning on moving to California to be with her after..after Tooler makes me a citizen." "What's she like?" I said. And Issa bloomed, telling me all about this beautiful girl from California and how with her and Tooler they didn't have the sexual spark but between Issa and this California girl..they had the spark. Issa told me that all day long, even when she's in bed with Tooler, she's chatting on her netbook with the girl from California, making plans and sexting and shit. "I feel bad," Issa said. "What good's feeling bad going to do you? Just do what you do, respect Tooler as much as you can, don't hurt her if you can avoid it—" "If I can avoid it." "Well maybe you can't. Tooler will survive." "Tooler will survive," Issa said. "Do you want another drink?" she asked. "It's on me." "It's definitely on you 'cause I don't have any money." Issa punched me in the arm. But she bought us drinks. - - - - We bought a new battery for my car, carried the heavy thing a few blocks from the automotive store to my car, borrowed tools from some Harley dudes, and installed the motherfucker. Hearing the car start was a relief: my piece of shit car wasn't quite a piece of shit yet: it still had life in it. After we got the car fixed, Issa and I stood on Elliot Street gawking at the high school girls. "We both have this in common," Issa said. "What's that?" "We both like pussy." I laughed. "And you like it very young," she said. "So do you!" "But I'm twenty-three!" "So!" "So you're ten years older!" "Ahh. Who cares. I don't fuck little girls, I just like to look at their asses." "And their vagina lips," Issa said. "With this Spandex, you can see their.." "I know! They show you everything. You can see the fucking outline of their vagina lips, you know practically everything about the girl and you're still on the street in broad daylight. You've got a perfect picture of her labia." "That's good, I guess." "Why?" I say. "So," says Issa, "you know what you're getting into. Maybe you like fat labia, maybe you like string bean labia—" "String bean labia! I'm going to tell Tooler you said that." "Don't you dare." She punches me in the shoulder, this time harder. Yeah Issa and I stood around Elliot Street for a while and discovered we had the exact taste in women: young, little titties, and fat labia. We congratulated ourselves on how sick we were sexually, and made up some fantasies about what the two of us could do to some of these young girls, tag team. It was pretty sick shit involving military-style torture and animals and..well..let's just say Issa and I were in the same gear when it came to what we wanted to do to the 13 year olds of Brattleboro, Vermont. - - - - I taught Issa how to drive, in my Toyota, in the days after we fixed the battery. We practiced on the top level of the municipal parking garage. Six levels up there weren't many cars, only some teenagers using the sunset to make hand puppets on a nearby building. I didn't figure practicing on the side of a mountain was a good idea (no offense to Tooler's method) so we just drove forward and backward the length of the parking lot over and over again. Issa quickly bored of this and our lessons ended. Tooler went back to teaching her on the mountain. On one of their lessons the engine started to smoke, and kept smoking even though they added antifreeze from the bottle I kept in the trunk. I said, "Well, that car's been through a lot. I used to drive it from Tucson to LA and back all the time and I drove it all the way across the country, so..I mean..it's on its last legs." "Do you think it's fixable." "Sorry, I know nothing about cars." One day it gets especially bad, smoking and lurching and they drop it off at the auto shop literally one house away from where we lived. The next day I walk over and without any identification say my housemate Tooler dropped my car off and he says they drove it around the block with no problems and he handed me the keys—no charge. That was good for me cause I still had no money. In fact the whole house seemed to be having problems in that department. I noticed that instead of two containers of laundry detergent beside the stairway washer/dryer, there was just one, and I figured Tooler and Issa were using Maggie's detergent, too. Actually there were more concrete reasons to think that none of us had money. Tooler and Issa started getting tons of free food from the government because Issa was a political refugee. I was getting food at the place where Brattleboro homeless people go to shower etc. (the Drop In Center). We all shared together, everything. One night I cooked for Issa and Tooler. They said they want to keep the house through their summer trip to Atlanta (first I learned of it). They didn't know if Abby would allow them to sublet. I said it will work out somehow. Issa spoke of the three of us going to Egypt together, and the two young women said *how would they ever find a housemate like Matthew* if they did switch houses at some point. I grabbed their hands and I think the sentiment was clear: it is mutual. - - - - Then in a very selfish move I sold my car for drinking money. I paid Issa back for the battery and Tooler for some fixes she'd made to the engine and I sold the car to Donald Mutebe (Darling Nikki's ex-husband) for $600. I drank that in a few days, buying drinks for Walsh of course. I said: "Walsh, from now on, as long as you and I are sitting in the same bar, you will never pay for drinks again." Mutebe was obsessed with the aesthetics of the car. His African eyes must have seen my junked-out Toyota Corolla as some antique cultural symbol. He had a job. The $600 was nothing to him. But to me, to have unlimited cash for a few days at Whit's, the cash-only establishment that I loved to haunt a thousand times more than my own bedroom, I thought giving up my car was a good deal. I wasn't planning on going anywhere. ### 29 Fully manic now, done editing *HARD*, no project to tie down my mind, I decided to dye my hair orange. I went into the salon and *took over*. I was ultra-friendly with *everyone*. I was assigned a stylist. And we had fun. Boy, did we have fun. It ended up costing three times what I expected but that was normal for my spending sprees. I wanted *the whole thing* dyed orange but they did this little *partial orange* thing which was way more upscale. What I wanted could have been accomplished in my bathroom for twenty dollars—this, with all the various services and pigments and whatnot was like two-hundred sixty-five dollars! But I was having fun. Great fun. Big fun! My own brand of insanity where no one gets hurt, everyone has a good time, and we all come away feeling more alive, and feeling more of what life has to offer—the joy that can be felt down to each particle. *That's* how I felt. I was talking to my stylist, asking her all about her life and her boyfriend. I was talking to the owners, where they were from and how they had come to start this business. We had so much fun doing my hair that day. I walked in saying, "Fix me!" (The haircut girl at the previous place I went destroyed what was left of my awesome shatter cut that I had gotten my second day in Brattleboro.) I felt like I was right there at the lake that my stylist and her boyfriend went to. On subsequent dates I would bring in my laptop with pictures I had collected, and I asked her to cut my hair to look like some movie star or Beckham, and I finally shaved my head that fall, which broke my stylist's heart. She was totally mad at me!—But that's what I wanted to go with my new diagnosis, my new fall lifestyle: no drink, no drugs, no hair, some kind of cross between a monk and a prisoner. But on the day of orange hair I was buying everyone (like me and three people) drinks at Whitman's. I guess something about this or my hair or my energy caught Walsh's attention but she didn't let on until later that night. A woman at the bar asks me if she can be honest with me and I say yes. She says my hair is "hideous." I say, "Well thank you very much for your opinion. That was riveting. Do you feel better having told me that?" "Yes, very," she says, and turns to leave (hopefully to pull the stick from her ass). I yell after her, "Glad to help!" Then I leave the bar, manic, buying zillions of used DVDs at the record store (too many to carry), a sex toy (artificial pussy), food, jewelry, drink—spending all my money in one day. Going out again that night. Seeing Walsh. Wow. Maybe seeing Walsh for the first time. Walsh wasn't a fat girl. She was a fine girl. We fucked after a night of drinking at Whit's, smoking out front, and smoking pot at her painter friend's house who was high and she and the other three female bartenders had quit the hippie bar *en masse* in protest of the owner making sexist and abusive remarks toward them. He would just sit at his own bar all day and heckle his own bartenders! So even though there were no other jobs in Brattleboro, these four women banded together and quit—it was a power move like no other. Walsh's ex-boyfriend saw us after we left the painter friend's house, drunk, high on nicotine and THC, as Walsh and I passed in front of Whitman's and this dull-looking ex-boyfriend said—I remember precisely: "Go get fucked." We went to Walsh's apartment and watched *South Park* while we did lines of the coke I had brought. We watched infinite episodes of *South Park* and smoked infinite amounts of pot and my mouth got all dry kissing her softly on the couch before we went into the bedroom. After Walsh and I had been sitting on her two-seater couch with her accepting my tentative kisses, Walsh gets up and says, "Well I'm going to bed." She moves into the hallway. I stand. "Can I come with you?" And she nods, raises her eyebrows, shrugs, like—*yeah!* And she goes into her bedroom. And I follow. And she says close the door. And she says turn the light off. And I get on top of her. And I start taking off her clothes. And my dick is instantly hard. And it gets down to that moment were the only piece of clothing left is her panties, where if those weren't there we'd be fucking, and we both know those are coming off and we both know we will be fucking, and in some weird way, that is the sweetest moment. She says, "There's something I have to tell you. It's that time of the month." "*Which* time, Walsh, you're cracking me up." "I might be a little..bloody. I don't mind if you don't mind." Pshffttt. "I don't mind." We fucked without a condom and she had a sweet pussy. I didn't come, and we were both making almost-cumming noises and buildup noises and I wanted to fuck her more but she said she was getting messy from her period and pushed me away. I got up so our faces were together and we were breathing and grunting together and our breathing and fucking and grunting quickened and it sounded to both of us like the other was going to cum, but we didn't. Her blood was too slippery and I couldn't get enough friction. I pulled out and later got back on top of her but she pushed me away again and said my dick was disturbing her period blood and breaking it loose and she didn't want to be messy. She put her panties back on with a liner. I wish we had cum together—it would have been to much better—but Walsh is a cool girl, and I'm glad we got the chance to fuck at all. And I'll come clean about a couple of lies I told so far in my so-called non-fictional memoir: I never came with those fat girls. I never fucked them with my morning wood. That one never sucked me off so that I squirted in her eye. I didn't cum with them and I didn't cum with Walsh so you might as well call this book A Fat Thirty-Something Man Who Can's Cum. I think Walsh decided that day at Whit's the day I dyed my hair orange, that she was gonna fuck me, because something of the manic in me attracted her. And I'll knew it was going to happen, too—I could tell by the way she was setting her drinks down on the bar. And I'll never forget the whole day os suspense, holding hands with her while we hung out with her pot smoking ex-bartender painter friend. Even the sweet moment of us holding hands while we waltzed past her ex-boyfriend outside Whitman's and him knowing even more certainly than me that I was about to fuck Walsh Killingsly and then eventually sleeping with Walsh—oh god, fucking my day-drinking friend without a condom and feeling her sweet and oh-so-bloody pussy. The sweetest part, though, was Walsh telling me she had seizures sometimes and not to freak out. And she had one after we fucked and I was lying in bed with her after sex this sweet little girl is convulsing and gripping and I wonder if I should call 911—the whole thing reminded me of Rebecca, when Rebecca went into a coma and died. She had seizures first. But I just held her (Walsh), feeling like I was caring for her, doing something useful and loving, imagining us in a relationship and finally having someone to care for who really needed me. But Walsh came through it in a few minutes and she said: "Am I ok?" She didn't remember a thing. "Did I have one?" "Yes." "Did I hurt myself?" "I don't think so." "It's ok," she laughed. "You don't have to be all worried for me or anything. As long as I didn't break any glass or fall off the bed or anything..that's all I'm asking you." "Then you're fine." But she let me hold her—which is strictly against fuck buddy etiquette. And if I had to write my nostalgia in one line it would be how I miss Walsh and cow parade and Whitman's and if I had money or a job I might have lived there forever. I was thirty-three. Walsh was twenty-seven (or somewhere in her twenties). Yes, the age difference was a minor part of the attraction. Mostly I liked her 'cause she's so damn cool: red hair, sexy body, day drinker, and one-hundred percent girl—but when it came to breaking the law, snorting coke, smoking pot, burning cigs, and fucking your friends, Walsh was always one of the guys. ### 30 Flashback to: one of the first nights I spent in Brattleboro, going by this bar called the Metropolis and having a glass of wine with the owner *because he was the only one in there*. The place was empty, and after I shared one drink with its owner I could tell why: this guy was King Sourpuss and was ready to sell the business and move on, he just didn't know it yet. Cut to: months later, meeting the owners of the new Metropolis: super friendly, amazing couple, Alan (who never failed, when I said my trademark *Thank you very much* to quip in return *You're welcome even more!*) and Alyssa, and their friend Stripes, the New York chef who's doing their tapas menu. Stripes isn't there, they just tell me about her and she's listed on the sign out front. There are signs of the mythical creature known as Stripes, but Stripes is like a puma in the wild—you never see them unless they're about to pounce. Now there was variety for the discerning drinker on Elliot Street. Inferno was a young kid bar, it reminded me of bars back in Athens, Ohio, college bars, bars where they pour twelve shots at once and half the liquor ends up on some matte-black surface which isn't even a real bar, it's just some plywood spray-painted black. Now it was Whit's versus the new Metropolis, and the clients started going back and forth. Metropolis had a better wine selection—they had a wine selection at all instead of Whit's: four kinds of generic wine I wouldn't buy in a grocery store. Metropolis had fusion liquors, which I had learned to love in LA, and (sorry Thomas) but Alan and Alyssa just made better drinks. This didn't mean Whit's was obsolete. Not at all! If I wanted to drink one really good gin and tonic, I went to the new Metropolis. If I wanted to drink six ok gin and tonics, I went to Kips and made a day of it. Kips had a bigger bar so when things got crowded you didn't feel like you were taking up somebody else's spot. Whit's had my people: Whit's had Mike and Walsh, though Walsh drank at Metro too. Metro was upscale. Whit's was hardcore. Metro was like New York. Whit's was like small-town America. So it wasn't an either/or. It was a great improvement for the street. I met Gretchen at the new Metropolis. This town was so small. This is how small this town was: Brattleboro was the kind of small where Gretchen and I are walking up Elliot Street and we see Alyssa waving from her car but don't even know it's her until we get the sun out of our eyes as we come across the street. And then Alyssa says she just saw Tom (Gretchen's husband) at Metropolis and Tom had asked where Gretchen was and Tom had said she's hanging out with her new boyfriend and Alyssa says Matthew? Ha! Small-ass town. Everyone knows everything, there are no secrets, just this extended family..and so small that I turn around right in that moment and it's Donald Mutebe standing right behind us, observing this whole interaction =) This town is that small. And did you ever think about the concept of falling half in love..or half-falling in love..of being half in love with someone because if you were all the way in love it would be a problem, so you stay halfway in love. I think I do that a lot. At the new Metropolis Gretchen orders us drinks while I write in my iPad. > I don't know if that's Brattleboro Stories or Columbia or something else, but I think I need to shoot for the stars..set out to do exactly what you want to do, exactly what you want to accomplish..I am capable of doing a theme-hot pillbox of a book, or an interlocking epic with many lines and many characters..believe it is possible, the greatest or the exact thing I dream of, that I want to see, and then use techniques and process and time to get from a to b. Decide the destination, then invent and find the tools needed to get there. > > *[See, all the way back then I was thinking of writing my memoir, before my memoir even happened.]* > > fear anger hate suffering > > Love .. Bliss Ecstasy > > Push the style and form envelope while maintaining ease of understanding..make it invent style and form, in terms of formatting, sequence, construction; but keep, create, maintain perfect easy reading, perfect simplicity of comprehension I didn't even know Gretchen was married. I didn't even know Gretchen. I just started talking to this person and even though she was a stalker vampire she was amazing to talk to at least compared to everyone else in Brattleboro and we struck it off right away, talking and talking and flirting and drinking and all the while I had no idea the guy sitting on the other side of her was her husband. How would I know? It's not like they *talked* to each other. That first day I met Gretchen, that was the day Mattson brought an underage girl to the new Metropolis. She wasn't actually ordering drinks, she was just drinking Mattson's and Mattson must have just got paid because he was slamming this bitch with alcohol and they were all flirty, but she was flirting with everyone, including me—just a dumb, random flirter who was throwing darts everywhere, never even hitting the mat. She had two drinks and then went fucking *craaaaazy* like the had the tolerance of a three year old or she had taken some other drug or something..but she went from seeming sober-but-silly to like..everyone in the bar, drinkers and owners, were like we don't care how tiny and cute and funny and sexy this little mousekrat is or how fucking *blonde* she is or how much she's turning me on bouncing her little ass in my lap *get her out of her and somewhere she can sleep this shit off*. I mean she was whirling around like she was at a motherfucking rave! Mattson came to the rescue with his bike trailer meant for carrying an actual *kid*, but this girl/woman fit right in that kid carrier and Matt Mattson drove her off down Elliot Street and we all took bets as to whether and how he was gonna fuck that fucked-up girl's tweeny little pussy. Alan was like, "I hope Matt Mattson's dick is small 'cause I know that little chipmunk's thing isn't any bigger than my little finger." Of course he holds up his little finger to illustrate. "She gonna wake up with three babies in a trailer park in upstate New Hampshire." "Fucking did you see how *drunk* that girl was??" "She only had like one or two drinks!!" (In all fairness, the one or two tall drinks she had were having roughly the expected effect on a person with a body that size, it's just that the rest of us were hardcore drinkers so the equivalent of two large Long Island iced teas didn't seem like much alcohol to anyone else in the building but that little blonde bitch.) "Is it rape if you fuck a 13 year old and she's so passed out she never knows it happens?" "YES!!" "What if you don't cum in her and after she wakes up you ask permission?" "YES!!" Alan hits my arm. "You dirty motherfucker." "What if—?" "SHUT UP!!" the entire bar says. "I was just gonna say what if he's chugging a PBR and he jerks it in her mouth then he shits a little and reaches around and smears the shit on her face so when she wakes up she has shit in her eyes and she's like, Mattson, why is there shit in my eyes and then he hits her in the face with a tire iron and fucks that little bitch's pussy *so long* that *she turns eighteen* while he's fucking her." "Then what?" "Then is that..like..ok?" "You are a sick motherfucker I'm gonna have to keep an eye on you." "Nah, I'm harmless." - - - - Gretchen is looking at me fascinated, head rested in her hand, elbow on the bar. She talks to me confidentially, quietly, like we're already in a relationship. I will say this about her: she actually listened when I talked. Then Walsh busts through the door like Kramer and announces she's been raped. "I know him. We used to be in a relationship together. He just kept going and going and I was like I think I'm gonna have a seizure if you force it and he forced it anyway I MEAN HE FORCED HIS FUCKING COCK IN ME. Fucking asshole." "Walsh. Are you serious?" "No, I'm trying out for a part on a reality TV show about girls who get raped by their exes YES I'M SERIOUS." "Here, here, sit here, I'll get you a drink." "I don't have any money." I look at her sideways. "Just get her a Guinness and a chilled Absolute Vanilla, neat—and have another one of those ready." She puts her arms around me, which makes me really uncomfortable. I don't want affection from a girl who just got raped because she just got the wrong kind of affection you know so it makes it like..confusing..I think it does anyway. Walsh sits at the bar and drinks her Guinness with both hands. She looks like a child drinking a glass of milk. Fuck. Roy raped Walsh. Motherfucker. Obviously that's not his real name. He's a Brattleboro famous ex-boyfriend of Walsh and I would love to print his real name here so his predatory ass would live in infLeona, in this book, and people would stop by his pathetic apartment when he was 80 and be like, "You're the guy that raped Walsh—we just read it in this book." And Roy would be like, "That's right. You boys want a beer?" And they'd be like, "No, we're here to rape your ass with a chainsaw." Or maybe a broom handle. That would be more realistic. Definitely a broom handle. The sad part is no one ever really believed Walsh that her boyfriend raped her. I mean even her girlfriends. To her face they'd be like, "Aww," and "Oh my god!" and all that shit but in their heart of hearts—and in conversations where Walsh wasn't present—people just thought she and Roy had sex and Walsh decided to call it rape to get the attention. Now—this is going to sound conceited but—if you're kind of smart like my fellow day drinkers and Walsh's little girlfriends, you might entertain that theory: that it was consensual and Walsh turned on her long-time ex (who she was friends with) and cried rape just 'cause she had a grudge or she was twisted on cocaine or whatever. But if you're a little bit smarter—yes, like me—you instantly see that Walsh had no reason to do that. She likes Roy. (Ooooh, I wish I could write his real name.) Roy is her best friend. Not her friend. Her *best* friend. And sometimes (have your kids leave the room) best friends rape each other. That's right, people who like each other as human beings and as sexual objects and are best friends sometimes get drunk and rape the shit out of each other. So grow the fuck up and accept Miss Killingsly's story at face value, ok? It's the smart thing to do. I talked with Gretchen. Walsh drank her drinks. Then I turned around on my bar stool and I said to Walsh: "So that fucker raped you, huh?" "Yeah." "Well, wanna do some lines?" She double takes. "Did you just say, 'You wanna do some lines?' " I smile like the Cheshire Cat. And I nod. Walsh grabs my arm and we get the fuck out of there. We go to her apartment and watch *Simpsons* and we don't talk at all. I just lay out line after line after line and we do every other one (with her doing two in a row every once in a while since she *is* the one who got raped and all). You should have seen Walsh's face when I asked her if she wanted to go to some lines. Excited like a kid going to Disney. As soon as the last line was done I stood up from her couch. I didn't even hug her. She said, "Thanks." And I left. By the time I go back to the new Metropolis, Gretchen is sitting by herself. I sit down next to her. Alan says, "Tell me you did not fuck that girl." "Hah," I say. "No. Not in a million years. Just spent some friendly company and left her to her thoughts." "I knew I trusted you," Alan said. And Alan was the kind of guy you cared if he trusted you. He was a smart man, an artist, and a human being. And he had a great sense of humor. Playfulness about life. Anyway, whatever—it sounds like I'm eulogizing him—he's probably still out there making infusion drinks and being charming and shit. I had been doing coke all night, since the bathroom at Kips, before I ever got to the new Metropolis and Matt Mattson strolled that little girl away in his bike trailer. Walsh's eyes brighting when I asked her to do some lines. And me gone as soon as possible. It was just a utilitarian thing—her high and me goodbye. - - - - My drinking buddy from Whit's bent my ear: "You *have* hit that, though." "Yes," I said quietly. "Be careful. Today she's going around saying her ex raped her. Next it'll be you." I told him I'd take his advice under consideration but that I wasn't worried for reasons given 20 paragraphs ago. Jesus Christ. When a woman says she got raped, *she usually got raped*. I'm a scumbag and I understand this. Then Gretchen and I got into it. We had our legs intertwined and we drank a couple bottles of wine. I was touching her nipples inside her half-unbuttoned shirt and by cock was hard as a bar of soap. But then she had to go. "Tom's going to be waiting for me." "Who's Tom?" "The guy? Who was sitting next to me? That's my husband, Tom." "Do you have an open relationship?" "No." "Well, Jesus Christ, Gretchen, at least let me walk you out." We kissed on the street and I pulled her close and that first goodbye, that first night I met Gretchen, is the closest I ever came to fucking her. I was saying in the poet's way everything a man can say to get a woman to come home with him. I didn't give a fuck about Tom. G and I had a good conversation, I wanted to fuck. And we held each other very close in the night of Elliot Street, but ultimately she detached and flowed south to wherever her apartment was. But then she stopped. And she came back. And she gave me Tom's business card, which she wrote her email address on. Then she went for good. But the night gets better (if you're thinking in terms of this story) and the night gets worse (if you're thinking in terms of what happened to people's lives). - - - - It must have been very late because Thomas got of work at Whitman's and he had his girl and me and Thomas and Thomas's fiancée and my drinking buddy Mike and me decided to head over to Inferno and knock a few back. I said I had to go to the bathroom. I went into the bathroom at the new Metropolis, I took the poster of the wall when I was *wery wery* drunk and high on cocaine. I rolled it up and stuck it down the back of my pants where my belt would hold it in place and no one would have any clue that I had it on me. It wasn't meant as a sleight against Alan and Alyssa—in fact it was a special torture the next day knowing that I had stolen it, and then a special torture on top of that knowing that if someone who had been to the New Metropolis came to my apartment and saw the poster, they would know it was me who had stolen it. I was weak. I threw it away on the Refuge grounds, in a closed-top trash can, the farthest place from the Metropolis that I could find. You have to understand, people like me, you can't be friends with. We're evil. You might see the intelligence and the creativity and the friendliness and love. And all that is real. But so is the demon we carry inside us, that will drop you off the edge of a cliff, camping, if we just happen to feel like doing it. I try to encapsulate myself, wall myself off, for years at a time, to mitigate the damage. - - - - There's not much more to tell about that night so I'll be quick about it. Thomas. Thomas' fiancée. Mike. Me. One non-drinker and three expert drinkers. You might think I meant to say *seasoned* there but I did not. I meant to say expert. These three expert drinkers fill a table with empty glasses. If you had looked at this table when we were done you would have thought it was a crime scene photo—something from *The Crow*. We drank. And drank. And drank. Then the night ended. Thomas and fiancée went one way, Mike and I went the other. And Mike said, "You want a ride home?" And I said, "Sure." And two blocks after we pulled out of the parking structure we got pulled over by the cops. And the cops said, "Have you guys been drinking tonight?" And we said, "Yeah, a little." And they asked Mike to step out of the car. And they gave him a field sobriety test. Which he failed. They breathalyzed him. He blew over—how far over I'll never know. Then the cuffed my friend, towed his car, and took him away. And I had the weirdest experience, standing there in the parking lot of the auto repair shop that was one house from my house. I had committed crimes that night. I had drank as much as Mike, maybe more. But Mike was driving and I wasn't. So they took Mike to jail and I stood there, free, chatting it up with the policeman. "You live far from here?" "I live literally one house in that direction." "Ok, well, have a good night," the police officer tells me, and he gets in his car and goes. And it's just me and my lonesome standing in this parking lot looking up at the stars and saying, *What world is this.* I was so drunk I knelt, then laid face down in the parking lot, weeping. I was drunk, yes, but also, I subconsciously knew that that could have been me, many times..weeping against my possible future, weeping for my many narrowly avoided pasts. I called Matt Mattson and we met on the lawn of the funeral home on High Street. He listened to my story and then told me how he's always wanted to walk on this grass, it looked so soft and thin, like a different type of grass than grows on the rest of the street, but he never had the chance until I called him out here in the middle of the night to talk about Mike's DUI. He had us both get barefoot and stand and sit and lie in the beautiful grass. "Did you fuck that girl?" I say. "Oh, yeah," he says, and he describes the inside of her pussy—in infinite detail—as relayed to him by his dick. "Thank you for calling me out here," Matt Mattson says, and he slips on his shoes and bikes away. That guy is some kind of a poet—too sensitive for this world—the kind of guy who can't work a normal job and gets strung out on heroin with his ex-girlfriend. I saw them on Elliot Street once, sharing a pizza from Frankie's, and within a few minutes I knew they were back on h, even though people on heroin always lie to you about it. I mean even if you've done coke with them a thousand times and sat barefoot in the fine grass of funeral parlors in the 4am dew, people will always keep it a secret from you that they're back on heroin. ### 31 The next night I had to drink. I was kind of looking for Mike, but of course Mike wouldn't be out drinking the night after his DUI—his lawyer would have instructed him not to go to a bar, not to be seen near a bar, not to buy beer in a grocery store. The town was too small. In fact, I would not see Mike in a bar the rest of the time I was in Brattleboro. I took a quick look at Whit's—"Hi Thomas"—then crossed the street to the new Metropolis and somewhere in the middle of a bottle of Syrah in walk two very interesting people: Gretchen and Tom, looking for me. They sit next to me at the bar. Gretchen introduces me to her husband. Then Gretchen proceeds to talk to me—I offer her a glass of my wine—and she completely ignores Tom, who talks with Alyssa, who's tending bar. Gretchen and I were never not flirtatious. It didn't matter if Tom was around or not. I remembered last night..following her onto the street to give her a hug and a kiss when she left, inviting her home with me..not remembering how much of a kiss we had had..I mean I'm drunk and high on coke, you can't throw married women at me. And why had Tom sat there, so unassuming I didn't even realize the man sitting next to Gretchen was not *a stranger to her*. And now this next gentle conversation with G. G who liked me. G who listened. G who acted as if I had something important to say. G who cared about me, as a person, something I couldn't say about Walsh. I mean G had her life set up—maybe not happily—but she got to know me, got to know—in general—where I had come from in life. And we had some nice times just drinking wine and learning each other's psychological surfaces. Skip forward to: Gretchen's and my gentle relations turn to the pretense of ownership and the carrying out of abuse. That terrible look Gretchen gave me when I was simply conversing with a woman whose husband had bipolar disorder and I was hearing her tales of how she'd had to support him but how he's the love of her life and a great artist and I was trying to learn something about myself by listening to her and G came by and gave me one of the meanest looks anyone has ever given me and I was like: *holy shit, Gretchen has to go. That shit is unacceptable. No one gets to look at me like that.* And after I was done with the woman with the bipolar husband Gretchen was like, "What do you think you're doing?" And I was like, "Having a conversation. You don't own me. This is not working out between us." I wanted to scream, so many times, "GRETCHEN, YOU'RE *MARRIED*. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME." But I never said that. I would like to say that it's because I'm too nice—but that's not true. I was lonely and I was taking whatever company I could get. See: previous 200 pages. I was so stupid. Gretchen blocked the possibility of other relationships—possibly with Stripes. And when I sat in the new Metropolis writing in my journal or writing on my iPad, I was always having more fun either bantering with whichever owner was working or just being by myself when the bar was empty or full of strangers than when Gretchen showed up. When Gretchen showed up, things got worse for me. She demanded all of my attention. She wrapped our legs together between our bar stools in a way that made me feel I was betraying Tom. Plus, I was only attracted to her two times, sexually—the first night we met, when I was drunk and didn't know she had a husband, and the night she came over to my house when I was super emotional after listening to Cat Stevens (*The Wind*, on repeat) all night and drinking two bottles of wine. Those were the two nights I wanted to have sex with her. Our conversations weren't that good. What seemed like an equal interest in the beginning turned out to be just an obsession on her part. I was some impossible way out of her marriage—which she wanted to get out of but wasn't ready to say by to Tom in. G would never cheat on Tom. She wouldn't divorce him, either. And it became *very not fun* for me to be the one she fixated on. I won't even say she was attracted to me. She was just fixated on me, like people whose lives are a mess buy a dog and fixate on it. It helps them to forget their life is a mess when they have this cute little thing to fixate on. So to me Gretchen became just an annoyance. She was just like Jimmy, really—I was in a weak position and these were the people who took advantage of me. Not fully, of course—they were somewhat-prudent predators—each of them gave me something I needed, and then took so much more from me. What's the lesson? Don't need things from others—the more you need, the less genuine your relationships will be. The less either of you needs from each other, the better shot you have at a healthy relationship. ### 32 Oh yeah so this whole time I had been looking for a job, knowing my unemployment would run out eventually and I wanted to keep living in Brattleboro. I found a company called Trash Can Inc. They sold trash cans. I figured it had to be better than my previous job: fraudulent billing, egos the size of Macy's Day Parade floats, technical idiocy. So they call me. We have a two o'clock phone interview that day. I decide to have two glasses of wine before the interview for my own entertainment..showing that I can talk to someone while slightly drunk and them have no idea. The interview goes excellently. It's me talking to their CEO, who I call (for reasons which shall remain private) Tiny Paul Bunyan. Tiny Paul Bunyan likes me, I like him. Mostly he drones on about how he's created the ultimate business selling trash cans, which I find profoundly interesting. Carl Sagan might as well be explaining the intricacies of the universe to me in the comfort of my own home, and afterward, on the promise of spending my life writing software to help sell trash cans, I finish that bottle of wine and drink a whole lot more. We set up another interview, the next one in person. The way this company works, see, is when a company like Google opens a new office building and needs trash cans, they buy them from Trash Can Inc. Trash Can Inc. doesn't make trash cans. No. They then call a company who *does*, and they order the trash cans and have them shipped to Google. It's called a drop ship company, and it basically means they don't do shit. Their entire value is in the fact that their web site shows up on page one of a Google search for "trash can." The Wikipedia definition of drop shipping cracks me up: > Drop shipping is a supply chain management technique in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer, another retailer, or a wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. It's a "supply chain management technique!" LOL!! It's a company that *does nothing*. They pick up the phone, a guy asks for a trash can, then they sell it to him, then they pick up another phone and buy it at a cheaper price and have someone else send it to the original guy in the mail!! It's a supply chain management technique, bro! Like so many other things in business and government, it's a big name that boils down to mean absolutely nothing. Anyway, that's what this fucking business was. But if it let me live in Brattleboro, I was willing to do it. - - - - The next day I went up on the mountain to try to quit drinking, after one last G&T purchased with change at the bar. I went in Whit's, went straight to the middle of the bar, and put down my change. "I want a gin and tonic." Thomas looked at my change and said, "Well, this is interesting." "Have you seen Mike?" "He hasn't been in once." Thomas gives me my drink. As is usual, when I need a drink to get me extra drunk, it does. I was as drunk as if I had drank four of those things. Thomas saw my gear. "Where are you headed?" "I'm going up the mountain. When I come down, I'm not drinking any more. I got a job. I'm going to be a straight man from here on out!" Thomas gave me a second drink on the house and I left, I huffed it up the mountain and I got off the trail and I hiked into a dense, mosquito-infested, thorny patch of land. This whole side of the mountain would be packed with mosquitos. If I went all the way to the top, or down the other side especially, there wouldn't be any mosquitos, but they were as lazy as I was so we all sat there together in the dirt and ate bits of food from Tooler and Issa's refugee stash. The Professor calls. "Matthew?" "Yeah, what, I'm detoxing, I don't have time for a phone call." "I'm worried about you." "Why, because Thomas told you I bought my last drink with change?" "That's part of the reason." "Well Thomas should keep his mouth to himself! That's part of what makes this town so impossible to live in..everyone flapping their cheeks all the time about the person who just left the room." "I want to pick you up, Matthew. I'll meet you on the road if you tell me where you're coming down." "WHY?! What are we gonna do? I have to make it in this town by myself, and another meal or another drink isn't going to help anything. It's just going to prolong the inevitable, so..I don't know..Professor..what are you offering, exactly?" "Just to be your friend." "Alright call me back in five minutes let me think about it." "Alri—" But I hung up. The Professor calls like three times and I do need help but I don't want it from him and I can't distinguish, with the Professor, whether he's trying to help me or use me—with him it was always a bit of both. But imagine the scenario from his point of view: he goes to Whit's and orders his anemic martini. While Thomas is making it, Thomas can't resist saying: "You won't believe who was just in here." (Etc. Etc. Thomas tells him I paid for one G&T with change, drank it like water, and said I was going up on the mountain to get sober.) For all Jimmy knows I went up there to kill myself—he had to call. But he knew, too, that I was vulnerable, and even though his desire to help me was genuine, so was his desire to use my weakness to get me to do exactly what he wanted. "You can stay at my house," he pleaded. "Just as friends." Yeah, right. But I do know he was worried about me. I sobbed as we spoke—I let him see that side of me. After a point he was just offering to drive me home. "Meet me on the street—where the Walmart used to be. Just let me drive you home. You can't stay up there. You're my friend and I'm not hanging up this phone until you agree to climb down that mountain and let me drive you home. Do you want to go to Whit's?" "No, no," I was sobbing. I told him how I had to stop drinking completely. I'm eating cans of pineapples and my skin is so hot, so dehydrated from months of alcohol, that I'm slurping every last bit of juice out of cans, licking my fingers clean, just fucking sitting in the dirt with bugs crawling all over me and this is where I was going to have my mental transformation (god dammit). But there are too many mosquitos, and I have to go home, I know. If I sleep up here I'll have so many mosquito bites I'd have to go to the hospital. Also, somehow, that last gin and tonic, mixed with the heat, became like this supermonster gin and tonic. I've never been that drunk off a couple drinks. Maybe my brain amped them up because it knew that I needed to be more drunk but didn't have the money. It could have been withdrawal, my body being fucked up because I'd had *less* to drink that day than usual. Whatever it was, I was thirsty, delirious, psychotic on that mountain. But there's no fucking way I was leaning on the Professor. But I had to leave. Fuck. I packed up my empty pineapple cans and huffed it to the trail, then skipped down that trail like it was nothing, jumping over boulders and landing with just the right slack in my legs that I could have jumped down twenty feet and never felt it. I came out of the woods. I walked along side streets in New Hampshire. Crossed the bridge into Vermont. Stayed far away from Elliot Street. If I saw the professor, it would be midnight before I left Whit's, drunk with the professor's money, prolonging the inevitable one more pointless day. - - - - Tooler sees me when I come in. She looks at me how she would if a literal zombie walked into her apartment on High Street. "Are you ok?" Our eyes lock. And they don't unlock for a long time. I open my mouth and I tell her the whole story, crying—tears streaking down my fucking face, ok?—helpless..how I had my last drink and I was going to go to the mountain to sober up but couldn't because of the mosquitos. Tooler hugs me and says, "Sleep here. Get some rest." So I break down my pack and return the rest of the refugee pineapples to our cupboard. I shower, drink about two liters of water, and fall asleep on my foam pad. I hardly had time to think before I was gone from this world, but in the minute or so before I went to sleep, as I laid on my side and sobbed alone in my room, I knew I had done something right: I was an alcoholic and I was just about to have made it through the day with only one drink—well, two. - - - - I wasn't the only one who moved to the mountain. Not a month later Matthew Mattson lost his construction job, was out of money, got kicked out of his place to live, and was talking to me about what kind of crime he could commit that would get him through the winter—as in, the sentence would put him in jail for just the right amount of time that he wouldn't have to sleep outside for Vermont's deadly winter, then release him in the spring or summer. "Maybe a really minor robbery." "What's a really *minor* robbery?" "Like stealing a screwdriver or something." "You're gonna steal a *screwdriver*?" "I'm just saying! Shoplifting! It's not that bad. Think it'd get me like six months?" "I doubt it. You wouldn't even go to jail for that." "Why not? Don't they need to punish shoplifters?" "Do you have a history of shoplifting?" "No," Matt whined. "You wouldn't even go to jail." "Well what, then? Like a simple kidnapping?" "What the fuck is a *simple* kidnapping? There's nothing simple about kidnapping and that'd get you a whole lot more than six months." "Fuck," Matt said. "Fuck fuck fuck." And later, seeing Mattson getting his pack together in Whit's and hearing Jill say: "He's living on the mountain now." Thomas' eyes widen. Jill is talking about Mattson in the bar while Mattson is at the door with all his things laid out in the entryway, and Mattson doesn't even hear Jill talking about him. "Did you hear he's back with Jenny?" "Oh that's good news." "Yeah they're strung out." Jill shakes her head. "It's sad," she says. " 'Cause a kid like that is on the edge to begin with. You know they have a kid." Thomas nods. "And then you put drugs into the mix. Heroin and losing your day job don't mix. I guess with construction he was holding it together." Jill goes on. She describes. She summarizes. She passes judgment. Jill is the town crier. ### 33 The day after my trip to the mountain, I start going to AA. I imagine myself working sober, living a great life in this beautiful town. I'd always been to Narcotics Anonymous before, but Brattleboro has more AA meetings so I made that my community. I went to a seven o'clock a.m. meeting the next day and I went to that meeting for all of its six meetings a week (every day but Sunday). I went every week, week after week after week until I began to get a little sobriety under my belt. I went to Beadnik's—this huge store that sold beads—and I made myself a bracelet to mark my cessation of drinking and initiation of other choices I made around that time..a bead to remind me of sobriety, a bead to remind me of my own brilliance, a bead to remind me to drink beet juice, a bead to remind me of eating pescatarian—my preferred diet. My morning AA meeting was just past Whit's up Elliot Street. Even though I used to go in Whit's every day, there was now this long period of time I just walked by Whit's going one direction and then walk by Whit's going the other direction, after my meeting, without looking at the building. And then eventually I didn't even notice I was going by Whit's—it didn't have any special meaning for me anymore, it was just another business on Elliot Street that was irrelevant to me. I'd see Justine in the mornings, going to my AA meeting early, seeing the rocks collected by the crossing guard on High Street and in the next block seeing Justine pooping her dog before 7am. She'd be dressed in sweats, hair frazzled, and I just wanted to lie her down and lick every inch of her petite little body. We're both up early..and wanting to fuck her so bad..and shy not? She's up early? I'm up early? What more do you need? Penis? Vagina? Let's get these two together and make ourselves cum! I waved at her politely and smiled and wished her a wonderful day. "Where are you *going*?" she asked. "To an AA meeting." We both smiled, then laughed, then were both cracking up. Justine looked down at her dog and shook her head. "No," she said, "it's true. The wheel goes around. You never know, one day you might see *me* at one of those meetings." "And you never know, you might see me at Whit's." "You never know," she says. And she goes back to pooping her dog. After the meetings, sometimes I went for breakfast at the Backside Cafe and Big Katie always served me. "You want something to drink?" she says. "No thanks." "You can get alcohol. The bar's open." "I'm not drinking right now." Big Katie turns her head sideways. She takes my menu. I think I hear her saying, "Huh," as she walks away. When she comes back with my grapefruit juice, she says, "Like not drinking at all?" "Exactly." "How did this come about?" I told her something that I stole from Justine about the wheel turning and I threw in some of my own mumbo jumbo about rotating the crops, "But the real truth is I'm just sick of it." "Yeah, I get sick of it sometimes, too. I mean there's only so much Jameson you can mainline. You want Vermont syrup with that?" "Yeah." Months later I would be sitting in the same booth in the same restaurant with the same server and the same meal and I would tell big Katie how I sabotaged my previous employer (Trash Can Inc.'s) web site while drunk, then woke up at the crack of dawn thinking I was going to go to jail for it, and promptly got myself to a 7am AA meeting where I told everyone I wanted to kill myself and bawled my eyes out during my share. On that day Katie would ask me: "So just pancakes this morning?" "Yes, please." "Vermont syrup?" "Of course! What am I? A fucking idiot?" " 'Cause it's fifty cents extra," she says. "Katie, Kate, big Kate, on the day when all the money I have is fifty cents I'll come in here and spend it on Vermont syrup." "You are a true Vermonter," she says. "Only a true Vermonter would say such a thing." "Thank you. And I'll have a gin and tonic." That's later, though. Right now I'm still going to AA and trying to be an upstanding citizen with a job and shit. - - - - I start seeing a substance abuse counselor named Carol. She advises me, among other things, to find one friend. I tell her I can't pay her until my job pays me and she says it's ok, your insurance covered it. I had state insurance from Vermont since I didn't make enough money to pay for my own. Just the fact that I'm able to pay for going to counseling is such good fortune for me, the way my life has been going, that I can hardly believe it. I had imagined all sorts of scenarios where to get a little mental help I had to put myself into debt that I would never be able to repay. But no. The universe gave me a pass. Going to AA meetings and getting really into the sharing and philosophizing. Some old-timer giving me his big book so I would have one to study when I was away from the meetings. That act, of some spritely sober drunk who could have been my grandpa, giving me his big book—even when I don't even really believe in AA—it fucking touched me, it really fucking did. But AA came with its own pile of bullshit and it was the real stinky kind. Like when whatever community center moved out of downtown into a strip mall outside of town because the building owner was going to make more money selling the building to a Chinese restaurant. So now you have a community center that people without cars and people in wheelchairs can't get to, and my 7am AA meeting scrambled to find a new place in town to meet—meeting at the community center in the strip mall outside of town would be pointless since most of us who went to that meeting didn't have cars. A lot of us who needed the services offered at that community center—like AA and NA meetings—were in phases of our lives where things weren't going so well..or places where we were just putting our lives together after they had fallen apart. And in phases like that, one tends not to have a car. Or is not allowed to drive. Or not able. Putting the community center in a strip mall far enough down the road that it was inaccessible for pedestrians, bicyclers, and those in wheelchairs was only the minor scandal, though. The major scandal was that the noon AA meeting, which rented a dedicated space in the First Baptist Church, would not let the 7am meeting use its space to have our meeting. Let's recap: the noon meeting rented a room from the church which was used for nothing but the noon AA meeting. The room was permanently set up as an AA meeting space and was only used from noon to 1pm, only, and that noon group refused to let our displaced 7am group meet in their space after we got kicked out of the community center which was being sold to make a Chinese restaurant. Shit like this is always when I lose faith in AA, the program, the people, everything about it, and I stop going. It's happened to me millions of times. In refusing to let the 7am group use their space *at a time when it was unused*, the noon group really showed their true colors. But to me they already had. The seats in that meeting were set up church-style, all facing the same direction in rows. There was a seat up front facing the group, designated for the moderator, which was a rotating position as in all 12-step groups. But there was also a table up front, set away from the rows of all the *regular* alcoholics, where a few old white guys who were too good to sit with the rest of us, sat. They were too far recovered, they had graduated, that they didn't have to follow the same rules as the rest of us. They didn't share about how they got sober—that was so long ago that they figured they had practically never even *been* drunks. Instead of using their share time—and they shared at every meeting, long shares that took up an inordinate amount of the group's time—instead of using that time to share their experience, strength, and hope (the basic formula for an ideal share), they shared *at* people, giving direct advice as though they were God, not mere recovering alcoholics and addicts like the rest of us. For some insane reason—I guess just because I could make the meeting often due to its time—I decided to make that my home group meeting. Making a group your home group just means you'll go to most or all of that group's meetings and help pass out the daily readings, make coffee, or clean coffee cups after the meeting. In this group's tradition, becoming a home group member simply involved writing your name and sobriety date in a book they kept on the front table. Before the meeting, one day, I made the difficult walk to that table and signed my name to that book with my sobriety date next to it. I sat down and watched one of these Godlike old-timers get up from his seat, go to the book, open it, and read my information. He didn't then come to me to welcome me, or say something comforting, or introduce himself, or anything kind and sensible like that. He read what I had written out loud, mispronounced my name, and said, "Been sober a week—good luck with that." Thanks, buddy, for announcing that to the other forty people in the room. Not everyone knew I had relapsed. That was *my* information to share as *I* wanted to. I felt so betrayed by this asshole that the day I joined that noon meeting as my home group was practically the last day I attended it. - - - - Once at that noontime farce of an AA meeting, this woman from a recovery house gives an amazing share about how she got deeper and deeper into pills, ultimately shooting Oxys and thinking she had found her way to cope with life, that shit was so pure. The story moving, talked about her recovery path, how she got into the girl house she's in now, how it's hard, which is why it has to be one day at a time for her. Then this asshole home group member thanks her for her share, saying, "This is an *AA* meeting, so a lot of us and I know I have trouble relating to the drug stuff, but we wish you well in your recovery and you're welcome here any time." *WHAAAUUTT??!!* Does this motherfucker not understand that drinking alcohol is just as badass a drug as shooting Oxys? That there's no real difference? Does he need to feel superior that he's never done "drugs?" WAKE THE FUCK UP!! *Alcohol is a drug.* Just 'cause it's legal doesn't make it *better than*. The real mistake these people make is trusting their government. Alcohol and cigarettes belong in the DEA Class I slot, but right before all those drugs got classified and made illegal, Congress passed a law that said *to exclude alcohol and cigarettes*. The reason they gave? Because taxes off those two drugs were *so much money* pumped back into the US economy that we were afraid of making them illegal for all the money we would lose. That shit is actually in the statute. Look it up on Wikipedia. A lot of people, even smart people, make the mistake of thinking their government has their best interest at heart. My mom, even—she's an educated, smart, even wise person. But when I start bringing up scientific data that shows that LSD, cannabis, and ecstasy are less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes, she checks out of the conversation. She can't believe it. I think it's because she can't believe what a horrible crime the government has committed against us by making alcohol and cigarettes legal, while demonizing LSD, weed, MDMA. Her dad died of alcoholism, so. I can see how that would be a hard fact for her to swallow: that the US knew alcohol was deadlier than ecstasy, but they excluded it from DEA classification and kept it legal because we were making too much money from the taxes on alcohol. That's evil. To make a calculated decision to keep alcohol and cigarettes legal, when cigarettes contribute to one in five deaths in the US, just for the tax money, while putting people in jail for holding pot, ecstasy, LSD—drugs we know are less dangerous than our two main legal drugs. That's when this saying comes into play: *Part of growing up is realizing that not all the rules are there to keep you safe.* Have you ever heard that one? Well, you've heard it now. - - - - When those holier-than-thou recovered drunks denied the 7am group use of their space, it solidified my earlier assessment that these old white guys who ran this meeting were more interested in having a lodge or a clubhouse than running an AA meeting that operated in line with the literature established by AA's founders. AA clearly states in writing that its primary purpose is to help alcoholics stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety. If that was really your primary purpose, then why would you deny anther AA group use of your unused space so they could continue to have their meeting after getting kicked out of their community center. It's one of the most fucked-up things I've seen happen in AA. And it made a group of three or four long-time Brattleboro AAers mad as a hornet's nest crossed with a blowtorch and these sober adults scheduled a special *meeting after the meeting* with the old white guys and this group of four recovering addicts who weren't even regular attendees of the 7am group politely and respectfully tore those old white motherfuckers new assholes. The most outspoken one in the group was this black woman who was like a cross between Melissa Harris-Perry and Che Guevara. I mean this woman could have taught at Princeton, taken over a small country, written poetry, sweet-talked her ass out of Guantanamo, what*ever*—you would not want to be on the receiving end of this woman's righteous smackdown, and that's exactly where the leaders of that noon meeting found themselves. I stayed for five minutes of that AA infight, decided it wasn't helping my recovery, and left. Fools will be fools. But on that day I saw a small group of principled, clear-headed people take to task a bunch of power/establishment control-hungry AAers who had lost sight of that organization's primary purpose, and even five minutes of it gave me chills *and* tears. I have rarely in my life met people who stand up for what is right, and even as I sat through my therapy session that afternoon, right down the hall in that same church, just knowing that group was over there speaking what was right and speaking it against evil..it restored a big chunk of my faith in humanity. *Big chunk.* ### 34 My phone is ringing and it comes up as Gretchen. My instinct says don't pick up. But I have this little voice in my head that is my counselor telling me to make just one friend. I think, I think, I think. I pick up. "Hello." "It's Gretchen." "I know." "I want to see you." "Well, I'm not drinking anymore, you should know that." "No problem. The only reason I was going out was to see you." "You're sweet, Gretchen, but—I mean—what about Tom?" "Tom is ok with it. Tom is standing right here listening to this conversation." "I need us to just be friends," I say. "I haven't offered anything else," she says. "Yeah but I mean like we can't be holding hands, having our legs entwined, kissing, and shit like that. Is Tom ok with that? I don't know. I don't know your relationship—" "I just want to see you. Will you please meet me..in the..you know that little glass thing? Meet me there. We'll talk for an hour. No touchy stuff." "Ok," I said, and I should have listened to me own voice and not my counselor's because we talked for *three* hours and there was *all kinds* of touchy stuff. I mean when you're sitting face-on and your legs are every other and sometimes when you grab my leg it makes my cock hard..I've been with married women before and I'm trying to raise my own bar a little bit. But my therapist said make a friend. So I tried making friends with Gretchen. And it did not work. I'll admit fault in the situation, but there are only certain people I can be friends with. That might sound weird. But that is the fact. And I can't be friends with needy people, potential stalkers, or anyone who isn't just *stellar*. I mean maybe this sounds egotistical to some of you, but I'm not here to be BFF with basic people. I only connect with *developed* people, people who have been through a lot and done a lot of work on themselves and are so extraordinary they're almost not still human. That might seem like a high bar—but that's the bar. We sat in this glass place downtown and she showed me *hundreds* of pictures of people I don't know—pointless, time-wasting interaction between the two of us. Maybe she was nervous. You know? Maybe I should be more sensitive to how *she* was feeling. She put me on a pedestal and that slideshow was just her way of filling the time with something that she knew how to do. But it offended me because not only did she show me *every* photo on her phone *and* tell me details about each one. I found that offensive because I viewed it as her wasting my time. Maybe she has nothing better to do. Maybe she would be hurt to find out that I didn't give a shit about *any* of the photos in her phone *or any of the people in them*. Is this how we connect with each other's families these days? Because we'll never meet them, we do slideshows with our friends as a way to say: *I'm inviting you in [to my family].* I don't know. Maybe mentally healthy people *like* to look at hundreds of pictures of strangers..maybe it makes them feel closer to the person who's showing them..but it doesn't make me feel like that. It makes me feel angry. Angry that you would misjudge me as someone who wastes large chunks of my day on non-productive activities. Angry that you would *impose*. Angry that you would *assume I care*. Angry that you're disturbing my peace? That might be it. I don't know. But I've had more than one person do this to me with the hours-long photo show and I'm sick of each and every one of you. I think you have no respect and no general awareness of other people and the difficult-to-grasp concept that *they might not want anything to do with you*. I might not give a shit about your life or the life of anyone you know. Is that *that difficult* to understand? Then she pulled out a copy of one of my books she had bought online (it was *Camp Lake* and I saw there were highlighted passages *on every page* and I thought *oh my sweet Jesus are we going to go through* all *of them?* And the answer, my friends, was yes. Gretchen was like a rollercoaster that I had reluctantly agreed to ride which I soon discovered actually ran the length of the entire *country*. I mean it was fun at parts, but would the fucker ever end? "I feel like you're inside my mind," she'd say. And I'd say, "I understand that you feel that way, and I'm glad—really glad—that you're connecting with my writing, but I'm not inside your mind. I have no special insight into you as a person or into your particular history. The only reason you feel like I'm inside your mind is that people all over the world are having similar experiences. We're connected—you know—like a web, and what's going on over here affects what's going on over there so there are all these youth groups or scouting groups or Outward Bound groups and they're all having the same experiences even though they're in different places and they've never met each other. It doesn't matter, because we're part of a universal consciousness. But that doesn't mean that I know anything about you. In fact, I hardly know you. I very hardly know you." But she'd say, "I think it's more than that." Gretchen felt connected to me deeply, but the connection was one way..there was magic in it for her but not for me. - - - - Once, many years before this, my therapist Kathryn suggested that part of the reason I got involved with Rishi (a verbally and emotionally abusive woman) is that I was so lonely and so desperate when I met her that I was more willing to enter into a relationship my intuition had told me *no* about from the first week of knowing her. Kathryn said: "Can you go out to clubs or bars and have casual sex so you're not so hungry all the time, so desperate?" I was offended. I said: "No, I don't think I *can* do that. It's not a moral thing—I have no objection to casual sex. But I just don't do that," I said. It was true at the time and even though it's not literally true now, it's generally true about me that I have no interest in casual sex. If there aren't sparks, the connection of at least a potentially meaningful friendship, I have absolutely no interest in or sexual excitement about a person. At twenty-three years old, I was more old fashioned than my forty-something therapist. Casual sex? I don't eat casually, I don't drive casually, I don't talk casually, I don't work casually. Why am I gonna stick my dick in someone casually? I honestly wish I was more into casual sex—that I had had more sex with more people, starting earlier. But I'm some type of Puritan when it comes to certain parts of life and I don't just fuck anyone—I have standards and there's something sacred about it to me (or at least there used to be)—I have fucked my friends, but I'm mostly not interested in fucking my friends..I'm mostly interested in falling truly, madly, deeply in love and if that only happens for me once in my lifetime, so be it. If it only happened once, at least what I did that one time would be true, would be deep, and would be love that went all the way. - - - - Here I was in a similar situation: having had no friends in years, I felt like my only choice was Gretchen. I knew there was only so much of Thomas I could take, ditto Walsh—she was no good friend for me. I don't think she liked me nearly as much as she liked the collection of chaos she was carrying around in her life. Mike, my drinking buddy with the shiny new DUI, would have been a good friend for me. In fact, earlier the evening of that DUI, when he and I were out front of Whit's smoking, he said the only reason he goes to Whit's is to see me and Walsh, and I said it was the same for me. Then he says, "I have canoes." And I say, "I want to stop drinking." Then he says, "Let's get together, you know, do some stuff outside of Whit's, outside of Bratt." "Yeah, why give Whit's all our money?" He told me his checking account was light because of Whit's. "Mine too, mine too." "So let's do a canoe trip or kayaks—I have kayaks too—and there's a regular lake me and Jenny go to..or say we do..but we never do." The we decide we'll quit smoking too because why not we're in an extra-New Year's New Year's resolution conversation anyway! "I only started smoking when I started drinking every day!" "I know. I know! Me too!" "We'll take out a canoe, look at the wildlife, have a couple beers in the bottom of the canoe—you know, no hard liquor, just a little somethin'-somethin' to take the edge off. I don't need to be doing *six, eight* drinks in here every day. And I know you must be doing at least that many," Mike tells me. We were going to save our wallets and hang out and enjoy nature and drink a couple of beers. Stop wasting our money at Whitman's. Stop inconveniencing ourselves to honor their ridiculous cash-only policy. Sober up a bit. Lose some weight. (Mike pats his belly.) But my heart sank as soon as he mentioned the "couple of beers" because I had been around this block a few times and I knew that people like Mike and I never drink "a couple of beers." I don't spew a bunch of AA dogma but I know enough to know that, even though throughout my life I've tried, I don't drink responsibly and I have never had "just one drink" or done "just a line," *ever*, in my entire life. And I never fucking will. And that was the night that me and Mike and Thomas and Thomas's fiancée went to the Inferno and by the end of the night the table was *littered* with glasses. I mean (and this is coming from a hardcore alcoholic) it was hard to conceptualize, looking at that table how four people had generated all those empty glasses, even considering Thomas's girl only contributed one glass. We didn't even know how drunk we were. And Mike said: "You want a ride home?" And I said, "Yes," not thinking: *we are drunk as fuck. No one should be driving.* Thomas and his fiancée walked home—they were one block away. I could have offered Mike my couch to sleep on. I didn't realize that till weeks later, when I ran into Mike at the post office. He's throwing junk mail away in a trash can near where I'm feloniously filling out my unemployment forms. "Mike?" "Matthew, hey." "Is this awkward, 'cause I can leave you alone and go back to my silly forms." "No, I've missed you, man." "What is going on? Is everything ok? I mean: are you ok?" "Well, a lot's changed for me since the last time I saw you." "Was that the company car?" "Yeah. I got fired." "I'm sorry." "I was mad at you for the longest time." "Because I didn't stop you from driving." "Yeah. Why didn't you?" "I was so drunk, Mike, I never considered it. I mean the thought that we shouldn't have been driving was never in my mind. I'm sorry. I wish I had." "No, no, you don't have to be sorry. It's on me. We drank a lot that night." "Yeah," I say. "Way too much." "If I'd only turned on those headlights." "I know." "It's just that we sat there, remember, listening to music. If we had got in the car and gone right away, I would have turned on my headlights just naturally. But sitting there with the music and the lights off, I just never..switched into..driving mode, you know?" "Yeah, I know, man, I felt horrible." "Yeah," he smirks. "Me too." "Have you been drinking?" "Haven't had a drop. I'm going back to school. I don't know if you know that but I never got my degree, but, Jenny and I have some money saved so I'm going back to school! I'm not drinking for one year..I figure after that, if I can make it that far, I'll see if I can handle it again, you know, start slow, just a couple of drinks a day." I zone out. Mike hits my arm. "Hey man, it's not your fault. If I hadn't been taking you home I would have been taking myself home and the same thing would have happened. I just wish I had turned those headlights on." *I know. That's how life happens. One more drink than you should have. Forgetting to turn on the headlights. A slip on the ice, and maybe you break your ankle, like Butch, or maybe you break your neck. You drive home a different way to drop off your drinking buddy and the cops catch you for a DUI (driving the company car), you go to jail, lose your job, stop going to Whit's at all, never see your fellow day drinkers again, perhaps. We didn't even have each other's phone numbers—we just knew we'd see each other every day at the same bar, sit on the same stools, tell each other the same stories. Yeah, the stories are different from detail to details, but it's the same old shit: unhappy with the wife, working on the house, job sucks, gotta get more cigarettes, fucked the cutie from Elliot Street—Wanna smoke a butt?* - - - - That's what Mike always said when he wanted us to go outside and smoke a cigarette. "Wanna smoke a butt?" "Yeah." So we went outside, he stood with his back against the Whitman's door and I stood facing him with my back to the whoring of Elliot street. Sometimes Walsh was there. Sometimes Thomas came out on a break. The Professor sometimes imposed upon us all with his left-field discussion of high-class England, fifty years ago, when he was sport-fucking young boys from the school where he taught Scandinavian languages, knew Winston Churchill, Hitler, Madonna, and all the other world leaders. But most of the time it was just me and Mike, and I know it sounds like I'm saying I was in love with him or something, but what I'm saying is that Mike is the one who mattered, to me, of the day drinkers. Of course I wanted to fuck Walsh, because she's a girl and she has a goddamn pussy and I feel special when my dick is inside a girl's pussy. I like the sounds women make and the way they move and the way they smell and they way they look and the way they think differently than men. And Thomas was special because he's a writer, and we could talk about that. But I went to Whitman's, every day for a while there, to see Mike. That was the central relationship around which the Whitman's day drinkers revolved. Before us it was someone else—that musician guy, probably, and Walsh. And if there are day drinkers today at Whitman's, it's almost certain to be someone else entirely. But for a while there it was me and Mike, and he would drink his weird half-beef/half-liquor drinks he designed specifically with the purpose of not getting drunk as fast, and I would drink a rainbow of liquor and wine—something different every day, from G&Ts to straight shots of vanilla Stoli to White Russians (ironically, to honor The Dude) to bottles of Whitman's chianti. Mike and I were like a couple of girls. We didn't go to the bathroom together because it was single occupancy but we did go outside to smoke together, go across Elliot Street to the convenience store ATM to get cash so we could buy cigarettes and be able to pay our bar tabs in cash. If one of us put ten dollars in the jukebox, we'd leave five dollars for the other one to pick songs. I made fun of his drinks designed not to get you drunk and it reminded me of Joshua French, of course, that dingbat programmer I worked with in California who believed that if you ate bread as you drank, it would "soak up the alcohol" and you wouldn't get as drunk. (For all his supposed brilliance, I don't think Joshua understood how digestion works. Except with very special substances, kept at emergency rooms and used on suicide patients, you generally can't *sneak* some of what you ate past your intestines. You certainly can't do it with bread. That guy told me one night he was, "on a mission to find the perfect appetizer to eat while drinking so that he could drink longer without getting drunk.") Mike tried to do the same thing by mixing beer and liquor in the same drink, a new combination every day, and it never worked. After six of them he was always drunk. It just shows you, even people who are really smart, are in some ways really dumb. In Whitman's, as I was drinking (I mean *as I had a drink in my hand*) Mike listened to me tell him a hundred times that I was stopping drinking. He lifted his glass to me and he said: "Good luck with that. I'll see you tomorrow." He was totally nice about it, totally respectful. He'd even say: "I've told myself a million times this will be my last day at Whit's and every day I'm back. But good luck. I fully support you and I hope you succeed." Then we'd both drink, and order another drink and another. And the next day, when Mike left work early as he did every day to come to Whit's, he opened the door and saw what he expected to see: me, sitting in my usual chair, with a G&T in one hand, Thomas adding a hash mark to my tab, the two of us talking it up loud about some obscure feature of literary theory, not a single other person in the joint. Also: Nina Simone on the jukebox, which Thomas had turned up to full volume with the remote control. Mike came all the way into the bar and felt exactly what I felt whenever I walked into that place: *home*. It's no accident that Nina Simone was host of our crowd of crazy personalities. We played *Sinnerman* every day and we didn't just like it, we didn't even just *love* it—we worshipped the motherfucker. Nina Simone is a god. - - - - And if you're wondering if Mike gave me hard time about saying I was quitting drinking one day, and then beating him to Whitman's the next—of course he didn't. Whether we were destroying our bodies, whether we were destroying our checking accounts—none of that mattered—Mike was as happy to see me (and I was as happy to see him) as two brothers—one lost, thought dead—would be to see each other after years of believing that they had been lost to each other forever. Then came the DUI. And not just a DUI. A DUI in the company car—instant firage. I didn't see Mike for a month or more. I stopped drinking and started going to AA on the regs. I met weekly with a therapist specializing in substance abuse. Then I ran into Mike at the post office. I was filling out my important paperwork, as usual, using a mixture of fact and fiction to convince the government not to let me starve this week, and I saw that the guy standing next to me shredding junk mail was Mike. When he said he was going to not drink for one year and if he could do that, he'd go back to it, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I said I hadn't seen him around Whit's—duh—and he said his DUI lawyer said this wouldn't be a good time for him to be seen around bars. After I heard him say that thing about going back to drinking after staying sober a year I immediately went to a meeting—I had been in and out of 12-step programs enough to know it doesn't work that way for an addict. You never get healed. You never stop. And every time you go back to it you just find new and unique ways to destroy your life. ### 35 In a future AA meeting, the same noon one I went to that day, Gretchen's friend, Castro was telling me about his coma experience after he learns of my suicide attempt from Gretchen. He pulls me aside before a meeting and tells me that there's nothing out there after life, "only blackness." He's trying to convince me to stick around. He told me before a meeting that he was in a coma for six days and that there's nothing outside of this life—"nothing there"—encouraging me not so subtly not to kill myself after I told him why I was in the Refuge. (Don't worry, you didn't miss anything. We haven't gotten there yet I'm just giving a sneak peek.) In another meeting I heard Castro's story—a speaker meeting—him ruining and ruining and finally fixing his relationship with his kids. That's what I would say the theme was. He would have been homeless if he hadn't been able to sleep on Tom and Gretchen's couch. He got evicted from like a million apartments. He and Gretchen play spy/guns on the street every time they see each other, hiding around corners and crowding behind trash cans, pointing imaginary guns at each other. Gretchen says she's always loved Steve—he's a good guy, but he's a bad alcoholic, and that is part of the reason she understands me. ### 36 I get incredibly sick and lie in bed listening to Eckhart Tolle's *The Power of Now* on iTunes, on repeat, for two weeks. It was sinus pain, ringing in the ears, a horrible cough. During this time, I think, I write in my journals, I meditate. I have epiphanies. When I get better, I look under my soaking foam pad I sleep on and there's black liquid there..I guess what my body got rid of when I sweated things out!? Jesus, I was filled with demons. While I'm sick, I try to eBay my laptop so I can pay rent for another month. I don't verify shipment soon enough (because I needed some of the money from the sale to buy postage) and the buyer backs out. This was probably fortunate since I've written a handful of books on this laptop since then—and I'm writing this book on it right now. After I get well, one day, setting up camp in the little town square in the summer with a little bit of food from the food bank and cigarettes, I sit for hours trying to figure out my life. I'm really low on money at this point..not sure I'm going to make it financially to the start of the Trash Can job, if I even get it. I'm acting like a homeless person already, anticipating that, and even people waiting at that bus stop there look at me eating package after package of pre-cooked bacon, sitting on the raised concrete squares, barefoot, under a tree. I can tell by their looks that I am exuding the down-and-out feeling. For the second time in that town, I apply for food stamps and health care. It's a twenty-page application so I relax, light cigs, and take my time. - - - - I have my at-the-office interview with the Trash Can Conglomerate. My hair was still orange. It made me self-conscious but I figure this is Brattleboro, where are they gonna get another web programmer? I meet the person whose job I'm taking over 'cause he's moving to Seattle. He subtly tries to tell me, with the boss present, that this isn't even a programming job, it's working with HTML templates inside some shitty shopping cart software..I mean like the shittiest of the shitty..but I don't see *boring-ass job*, I see *job that can keep me in Brattleboro*, so I give them my best answers on what I'd done before and what I would first do to improve their website. Personalities click, all around, and they ask me if I mind working in a warehouse. I say I think it's cool. They tell me the story of a previous employee, a marketing person, a woman, and how from the beginning they knew it wasn't going to work out because when she saw the office she turned up her nose and especially when she saw the bathroom she was totally uncomfortable. During the interview they laugh and say that it might not be an appropriate environment for a woman. I give a little *heh* and wonder what sort of boys' club I am (again) getting myself into. At the end, the boss, Tiny Paul Bunyan, asks Alex, his tech guy moving to Seattle, what he thinks about the fit. Alex again subtly states that because I've actually built software before, I might be bored at this job and he thinks that there isn't really much to do. Tiny Paul Bunyan asked me what I thought of that. I said it sounded like Alex was right, but my main thing was wanting to live in Brattleboro, so having a more low-key job than I'd had in the past was ok with me. We all shook hands and I left. All the time the sales guy was at his desk making phone calls—we never met. I coughed horribly through the whole interview. I ask what happened to the marketing person. They all laugh and say she quit at the end of her first week. Probably best for everyone. Haha. Then I have *another* in-person trash can interview at the bagel restaurant on Main Street. My future asshole boss re-explains the job, I say that sounds like something I could help you with. He says, "I've looked at your website, and I want you to know, this isn't glamorous work." I say, "Most of my working life, I've sat in a cubicle, doing very unglamorous work." He says, "But it looks like you're more into writing novels now, and you've got good reviews and you're selling books on Amazon. I just want you to know that the kind of work we do at Trash Can Inc..it isn't going to be like you're some star player..you know..there's no glitz." "My last book," I say, "and every book I've written, the glamour profile is much like programming: it's just you, sitting at a keyboard in a quiet room, doing a whole bunch of typing. So..when you look at my website, it might look like the novel writing I do supplies a lot of fuel for my ego—or is glamorous, as you say—but it's really just quiet, observant, constructive work. If I had to say one thing it's like, I'd say weaving." "So are you working on anything right now—do you think that's going to be a conflict of interest with your work for us?" "No, I just finished a novel and it was the longest I've done yet and I'm taking a break from writing and that's part of why I'm seeking this job." He says he has to talk to the guys—he wants them to feel they're part of the decision to hire someone they're going to be working with on a daily basis. "But yeah," he smiles, "you've pretty much got the job. We're like at an eighty-percent maybe," he says. And while I hate being drug along behind the boat like this—I mean it's totally unprofessional to tell someone they *maybe* have a job—I love that, despite Tiny Paul Bunyan's unwillingness to just offer me the job on the spot, I know I have it. I found my Brattleboro job. I can let my breath go. I walk out of the trash can in-person interview feeling bliss: I'm going to be able to live in Brattleboro, have a job, walk to work, stop at Whit's on the way home everyday, and have a life!! I tell Thomas this, my life plan for Brattleboro, and how fricking relieved I feel that I can actually do it now that I found a job. And, feeling happy, knowing I have a life, that I'm not in crisis, I drink reasonably that day—two drinks—and then leave for home. "Well, my literary friend, I'm heading home." "You want to pay up already?" "Yep." Thomas says, "That's a first for you—leaving after two drinks?" I lean in. "You wanna hear a story?" "Lemme take care of this couple, I'll get you your check, and I'll hear that story." Thomas comes back in a couple minutes, puts his elbow on the bar, and looks at me. He's drinking some kind of non-alcoholic beer. "So," I say. "They did this experiment with mice." "Ok." "Two cages. One cage has a single mouse in it. There are two spickets. One has alcohol. The other has water. They give him a bowl of food, a little bed to sleep on, but that's it—there's nothing else in the cage." "Alright," Thomas is smiling. "This mouse," I say, "at first he drinks from both spickets. But pretty soon he abandons the water one and just drinks alcohol." "My kind of mouse," Thomas says, raising his non-alcoholic beer. "Mine, too, unfortunately," I say. "But I have a feeling this story isn't over," Thomas says. "Of course it's not. There's a second cage. In *this* cage are a bunch of mice, and not only that, but the cage is filled with tubes and tunnels and running wheels and little mouse slides and pools of water and mirrors—" "Do mice recognize themselves in the mirror?" "I don't know—I'm thinking not. But suffice it to say, this second cage is mouse *heaven*. Mice in there are running and sliding down the slide and splashing in the pool and they're chasing each other and fucking each other—" "As mice are wont to do." "As *everyone* is wont to do. And this second cage, the *Disneyland* of mouse cages, has two spickets too—one with water, one with alcohol. At first," I say, "all the mice drink from both spickets. But after a while, even though there's still a choice between alcohol and water, *all the mice* in the second cage *drink only water*." "I think your story is going to put Whitman's out of business." "It might. *In theory.* But I promise I won't tell it to anyone. Anyway I think the Vermont climate alone will always guarantee the existence of bars in Brattleboro." "So we'll see you soon?" Thomas pushes my change across the bar. "Once I get this job, you'll see me every day!" "Two-drink maximum from now on?" "I never said *that!* I just told you an experiment about *mice*. I never said that experiment applied to *humans!!*" I take my change, Thomas and I bow to each other, and I leave Whitman's. I walk directly across the street to the Indian convenience store. I try to get more money out of the ATM but my account is negative. I look at the change I got from Whit's. This is what I'll have to buy groceries with for the week. I walk around the store. I pay for a whole week's worth of groceries with my pennies, nickels, maybe a lucky dime or two: eggs, English muffins, no cheese because it's too expensive, a carton of OJ even though it's deadly expensive..all to last for a week. The Indian clerk hated my guts for making him re-count all the change I set out as my payment. He looked at me like I was a degenerate, and I believed it, too. - - - - I formally get the trash can job through a poorly written email from Tiny Paul Bunyan. Things are looking up. I'm still coughing horribly from the most horrible cold in my life. It turns out show tunes boy has the same cold. First day, boss is late, show tunes dude and I stand outside on the stairwell and he talks and talks when I ask him questions, but he never reciprocates. In thirty minutes of talking he allows me to ask him questions and is all too happy to talk about himself, but he never asks me a single question about me. I know from the start he's a real piece of shit. He's a theatre director and an actor, big-time personality in the booming borough of Bratt, and was a boring person compared to me, but he never know that 'cause he'll never in his life think to ask a question about the people around him..to him, it was all about him. He was the superstar! He was the show tunes singer! But really I knew all that was about his insecurity. If he felt secure in himself, in his new job, if he felt secure around another person who happened to be me, he wouldn't have spent half an hour listing his theatre accolades. Someone who felt secure would have been capable of balanced conversation—or even more frighteningly, would have been capable of saying nothing about themself at all. My boss is crazy, though. He gets there after their posted opening hour and starts talking porn before he can show me where my desk is. Trash Can boss—aka Tiny Paul Bunyan—tells us that: "I was surfing a little porn—I don't surf a lot of porn because of my wife—I mean I'm a married man, it wouldn't be right—but I come across this one site, and it's these girls—and these girls don't look like porn stars—they look like the little girls you'd see on Elliot Street! Like little high school girls! Small-town girls! And I'm clicking in and they've got a little bit you can see without a credit card so I'm like ok and then it's like these little thirteen-year-olds getting tortured and raped on this boat off like Cape Cod and I was like *these are real*..this isn't staged..this is real-life torture and rape and like *Eyes Wide Shut*-type of shit! So I figured I might have to call a town marshal or the FBI or I don't even know if you could trust this type of information to the FBI—you know, they might be in on it—so after I put my credit card in I could see—" "You put your credit card in?" "—I had to because I had to see the extent of what was going on so I'd know if I had to call the authorities! And this is some *bona fide* fucked-up shit, guys, I'm telling you, the things they were doing to these girls." Tiny Paul Bunyan looks like he's about to cry. "I was torn because I was like I've got to call someone..this isn't right..I mean these were underage girls..I've got *daughters* the same age as these girls. But it was kind of exciting. And it makes you think..what if you were in Abu Ghraib, you know—what if you were really in that situation? Would you go through with it? Or would you be the one guy who stands up and says, This is wrong, you know. But I figure these Illuminati guys on these boats, they're not gonna stand up and say *nothing!* If they do—pack, pack—two in the back, you know what I'm saying? Throw your ass overboard and never hear from you again. But the things they were doing to these girls, man. The sick thing is, I got turned on by it! I'm no child rapist or anything, but this sick fucking shit is turning me on!" "They weren't real," says the sales guy who has gotten here somewhere in the middle of Tiny Paul Bunyan's story. "They certainly looked real to me?" "Do you think the Illuminati is raping and torturing girls and then selling them for twenty-nine ninety-nine on the internet? I don't think those two businesses exactly *mix*. You got off on these girls, didn't you?" Tiny Paul Bunyan blushes. The sales guy continues. "I don't believe you. You put your credit card in and jerked off to a bunch of thirteen-year-olds pretending to get raped on a boat. You are a sick bastard." "Please. We have new employees present." "You're the one telling us what kind of porn you watched last night." "I think these girls might really be in danger," TPB says, shaking his head and looking at the floor. There's a word I really like, and I'm going to use it here. Incredulous. See? I didn't even have to use it in a sentence and you know exactly what I mean. - - - - This whole time our sales guy is trying to tell us all something. He's looking at his computer and squirming in his seat like a little kid who has to pee. Finally Tiny Paul Bunyan stops telling us what he jerked off to last night and says: "What?" The sales guy says, "Somebody got shot at the Food Co-Op." "What??" says Tiny Paul Bunyan. The show tunes singer goes to the windows and looks out. You can see the Co-Op from our office. "Yup," the sales guy says. "The wine manager shot the general manager in the head." Tiny Paul Bunyan kneels almost, braces himself, stands up. "I know him," he says. "Which one? The shooter?" "Well I know both of them. They're family friends." Which probably means they met on the street one time and my boss just wants to feel connected to the event, pretend that he's really moved that some fifty-year-old shot some other fifty-year-old in the head at a fucking hippie Food Co-Op. I agree it's horrible, but Tiny Paul Bunyan didn't *know* those guys—like really know them. They might have had a bagel together *once*. The show tunes singer goes to lunch. He makes a point of walking up and talking to the police who are guarding the bridge that goes to the Food Co-Op—we can see this from our windows. I have a convo with Tiny Paul Bunyan about one of my concerns. I get up from my newly assigned desk and am pacing a bit, squinting my face. He's like, "This is really affecting you—is it? 'Cause I don't think you should go home unless you really knew the guy. I mean he was a close friend of our family, so." "No, I'm not asking to go home." "Does stuff like this really affect you?" "Not really, I mean it's a tragedy, I'm never happy when life is wasted." "Then what are you thinking about?" "Well, I just always, since Columbine, and all these school shootings, office shootings, I just think *I hope I don't die because some guy I work with goes nuts and brings a gun to work*." "Do you own a gun, he asks me." "No, I say, of course not. Do you?" Tiny Paul Bunyan shakes his head and smiles. "No," he says. And then he asks: "Are you thinking about the show tunes singer?" "That's exactly who I'm thinking about." "Why, do you know him from before? Do you two have like a grudge match or something?" "No, it's just a sense of intuition." "Intuition?" Tiny Paul Bunyan says, "Isn't that something only women have?" I look at Tiny Paul Bunyan and say, with absolutely no inflection, "No, men can have it too." "Just making sure you're not some kind of crossdresser or something," says my new boss. I just look at him like he's fucking crazy. Which he fucking is. "But yeah, I'm a little worried that in all the excitement my new coworker the show tunes singer might come to our office and do the same thing. We had a very weird conversation this morning before you got here, and you just never know when people are going to bring guns to work and start shooting." "What if you're the type?" says Tiny Paul Bunyan. "If I was the type, I wouldn't be having this conversation with you. Notice how I show my emotion in little pieces here and there? It's the type who are consummately smiling, who never let you in, who bottle that shit up while they're pleasant to you *every single day—that's* the type that comes into an office and blows everyone away. Don't you ever read true crime? FBI profiling manuals?" "No, Matthew, I don't have time to read FBI profiling manuals." I shake my head. "How can you live in America without reading FBI profiling manuals?" It's a serious question. "Well," Tiny Paul Bunyan says, "I gotta go check on Hipsta—that's my wife. Sorry to leave you guys like this but you can handle the office, right? Might have to take the kids out of school early. Hipsta will be beside herself, I mean she cooked her famous Vermont cheesecake for this guy, and, well, now that he has a hole in his head he's not going to be eating any more cheesecake! Can you imagine getting shot in the head *while* you're eating the best piece of Vermont cheesecake you've ever had in your life? I'd wanna go during sex, he says. What about you, Matthew?" I look at the guy like he's fucking crazy. Which he fucking *is*. "I don't know," I say. "Maybe in the woods." Tiny Paul Bunyan mutters something about picking up the kids and he's out the door. "Does he even know the guy that got shot?" I ask the salesman. "Never mentioned him before in his life." "I know Vermont *cheese* is a thing, but is Vermont *cheese*cake..like..a thing Vermont is known for?" "Not that I know of, the sales guy says." "*O-k.*" "I'll tell you what, though, this place has changed," the sales guy says. "I mean this sort of thing wouldn't have happened even five years ago, I guarantee it. A few years ago there were only a few of them up here..but now it's like a goddamn migration. They come up from New York 'cause it's cheaper to live, but they do the same things up here they do down there." "*They* who?" "Blacks. They're all smoking crack over there. You know that neighborhood by the Drop In Center? They call that BrattleBrooklyn 'cause it's just a bunch of niggers smoking crack." "Really?" I say. "Oh yeah. Trust me on this one. You want to stay out of that neighborhood." (Which, for my reader, keep in mind this is Brattleboro, so the "neighborhood" the sales guy is referring to as BrattleBrooklyn is actually just a block..one block..one street. Ok. Glad we're clear on that.) The sales guy says all this crap about niggers smoking crack ostensibly to support the reasoning behind or existence of this morning's Food Co-Op killing, when even *I've* been to the Co-Op enough times to know that both the wine manager and the general manager are *white*. They're not niggers. They don't smoke crack. They just have a grudge and firearms and a lack of social skills. The sales guy sighs. He says, "You expect this in the City..but in *Brattleboro*?" Him saying this makes me want to shoot *him* in the face. - - - - My second day at work with these jokers, I go up the hill to get a burger to bring back to the office to eat for lunch and I'm at the burger cart and while I'm standing back waiting for my food, Libby comes up and orders a veggie burger and she comes back and stands next to me as she waits for her food. "You haven't come in for a while. We've missed you." "Ugh. The truth is Libby I've been low on funds. But I just got a job." "Oh, good! How's your body?" "It could use some work." "Are you still hiking?" "Not as much. I've been so stressed." "It's a vicious cycle." "I know. I know. How are you doing?" "Me?" "Yes, you, Greatest Massage Therapist In the World." Libby laughs. "I don't know if I can live up to the title." "Alright well how about Greatest Massage Therapist I've Ever Met." She blushes. She looks at me. "I know you have a partner, Libby. I'm not flirting with you. I just think you're an amazing person and when I meet amazing people I like to let them know. Because amazing people..it's sad but amazing people are some of the ones who get the fewest accolades in this world. You know? It's like I wish the news all day would just show pictures of mothers walking their babies and fathers changing diapers and people shoveling snow so cars can get by and EMT's performing mouth to mouth on cardiac patients who are obviously dead..well..the last one might be a bit much but you know what I'm saying?" "I do. What we focus on affects what we produce." "Exactly. I mean one of the things I want people to realize in certain of the 'crisis' situations we're in in this country is that *the media is the problem*. No an exacerbator of the problem. But: The Problem." "You're a special person, Matthew. You're special to me." "You're special to me, too, Libby." And we stand there for a moment watching our burgers cook. "I wonder what that fried egg is for," Libby says. "Oh that's for me." "You're having a fried egg on your burger?" "Most definitely." We stand there a moment more. Libby says, "I wonder who that avocado is for." "Oh that's for me." Libby smiles. "What about the bacon?" "Half is for you, half is for me." "I'm having a veggie burger!" "*I* know! You can put bacon on a veggie burger! Trust me, I've done it..it doesn't explode or anything." We go on like this for a while until she's forced to ask: "How do you *eat* that?" "With a knife and fork," I say. "Did you know I sing?" she says. "No, Libby, I didn't." She gives me the information for her next show. My burger is ready first. "Have a wonderful day, Libby." "You have a wonderful day, too, Libby." We are both refreshed. I crave time around her, my spirit does, just like your body craves healthy things to eat. - - - - I take my burger back to the office and eat at the conference table. Everyone asks me what I got. I can feel that creeping office feeling of everyone being in everyone's business, and I hate it. With the last bite of burger in my mouth, I ask Tiny Paul Bunyan a question about the business. (We sell recycle bins too.) I ask him: "Are the recycling bins we sell recyclable?" He turns in his chair, crunching the numbers. "I have never thought to ask this question and I not know the answer to it." Yeah, ok. Even though he's the CEO of a business that sells recycle bins, he's never wondered if recycling bins are themselves made of recyclable material. That's a day one question. By the look on his face, by his body language, by the textual answer to my questions, he also does not know if I am asking him a serious question or if I'm fucking with him, and he is clearly afraid to ask. Tiny Paul Bunyan has a weird calculation-complete look for me on his face. I have black bile disgust for Tiny Paul Bunyan in my heart. I need to wash my hands after that burger, having greased-up every flimsy paper napkin the food cart had given me. When I go to the bathroom for the first time, I see why their marketing person quit—one reason anyway. The bathroom is third world. The show tunes singer sits at his desk singing show tunes at full volume while he's turned his monitor so only he can see it and he's surfing Facebook all day..reminds me of a guy at Mead Research who ultimately got fired for looking at porn at work. He had his monitor turned so that only he could see it..it's never a good sign. - - - - I went to therapy every two weeks at lunchtime while working for the Trash Can Place. Since everyone was so into everyone else's business, I made up lies about where I had eaten lunch, when asked. I hate workmates who do this—I have to interact with your idiotic ass eight hours a day, maybe don't ask where I ate my lunch, ok? In therapy I stole magazines from the lobby with permission from my therapist. I liked the one about Eminem and also the one about Leona Winehouse who did a lot of drugs and died. I could relate to them. I talked with my therapist about the show tunes singer singing show tunes at his desk and it irking me and my therapist said: "At least that noise isn't inside your own head." "What do you mean?" "When you go home, the show tunes singer doesn't come with you—unless you choose to bring him. At least that noise is outside of you, not something you're creating internally." I didn't understand what she meant. I didn't understand what she said because I *did* have a lot of noise in my own head back then. When my therapist told me that it wasn't the show tunes singer who was bothering me—and when people in AA meetings that year and many years later told me the same thing—they planted a seed in my brain. They said it wasn't the show tunes singer's noise that was bothering me, it was *me* who was bothering me. And that made me mad every time I heard it. They said I wasn't at peace within myself—if I was, then nothing outside would bother me. This made me even madder—I felt pretty at peace with myself. Who is so Zen at work that they don't mind when some dumb-ass kid who is getting paid to sing show tunes and look at Facebook while the rest of us are working—under a boss who was too chickenshit to say anything to the show tunes singer about the show tunes singing that he never said anything until me and the sales guy said something to this boss about it? Who is Zen enough to program a website knowing and hearing that bullshit right next to you? I wasn't. There was so much noise in me that I couldn't tell where the show tunes singer stopped and I began. I will have that level of noise (and more) in my head from before this book started until after this book ends. My therapist and those AA people were right. The person who was bothering me was me. I had and have a chaotic head due to the condition of being human. And also due to special circumstances inside my brain that I had long forgotten. And also due to being an addict. ### 37 As I write this I have 18 months clean and sober, as they say. It's taken all that time and it's taken a new living situation and it's taken a new diet and meditation and doctors and pills upon pills (upon pills) to get myself quieted a little. I live in a new city in a new state and many things have happened between Vermont and now that I'll never have time to put into books. Much has changed, but some things are still the same. I still go to AA meetings. I found a meditation temple with AA meetings and the podunk town of Baton Rouge, where I lived, got so much cooler when I discovered there was an AA meditation meeting held in a Buddhist temple. I didn't even know there was a Buddhist temple in deep-south Baton Rouge. And it reminds me, one of my favorite meetings, way back in Tucson, was a meditation meeting. So I started going to this one in Baton Rouge and it was way better for me than the Bible-thumping Wednesday night men's meeting. There was a woman at this meditation meeting named Glory, and the first day Glory I went, Glory stood with me on the steps of the Buddhist temple and talked, and listened, and let me cry. Our relationship isn't one-hundred percent healthy, but she helped me a lot. A situation happened last fall where I could no longer go to the meditating AA group that had so many friends and that had begun to feel like home and that had helped get me sober for longer than I've ever been sober before. They made a rule that we were no longer allowed to lie down during meditation because it offended the tradition of the monks whose space we met in. I have an illness now—the details are unimportant—but a medicine prescribed to me by a psychiatrists damaged my brain in a way that manifests itself like Parkinson's. I can't sit or stand very long without experiencing extreme pain. My muscles clench uncontrollably. The only relief I have is lying down. And that's why I was going to that AA meeting: it's half meditation, half sharing, for a total of one hour. I lied down during the meditation and sat up during the discussion, holding myself and shaking, trying to sit still, embarrassed and in pain the whole time. So *that meeting* was the only one I could really go to, physically, and this new no-lying-down-rule excluded me from the group. The day they made the announcement, I sat up through the meditation—the most painful meditation I've ever sat through. When the ending bell rang, while the lights were still dimmed, I quietly gathered my things and left. In the past I would have argued, I might have yelled, I might have told off the AA group and the monks and let them know how fucking stupid they were—according to me. - - - - I told the show tunes singer off one day at Trash Can Central. He touched my iPad—lifted its cover and had a look around—while I was at lunch. The salesperson told me this when I returned—it might not even have been true. But Tiny Paul Bunyan was gone and it was just the three workers. For a moment, a critical mass was brought together for me at that stupid trash can company, the show tunes singer singing at his desk, touching my personal computing machinery, and of course the sales guy playing one side against the other for his own entertainment. "Show tunes singer, did you touch my iPad?" "Uh, yes, a little, when you were gone I peeked under the cover just to see how cool it was." "So you touched my iPad." "Well." "You've already admitted you did. Can I get a yes or no from you? Are you capable of that? Just a simple, 'Yes, I touched your iPad.' " "Yes." "Yes you are capable or yes you touched it." "I touched it." "When you go to lunch, do you expect me to touch your personal property?" "It depends on what it is." "Well, let me inform you, when it comes to *my* personal property, it does *not* depend. If I bring a *paperclip* in from home, and set it on my desk, you are not to touch it, understand?" "Come on—" "Do you understand? *My* paperclip—you do not touch. *Company* paperclip—have at it. Tell me you understand what I'm saying." "But—" "Just say, 'Matthew, I understand what you're saying,' and this conversation will be over!" "I think you're overreacting." "It's my iPad so I can react however I want. It's my stuff and I don't want you touching it. Do you realize how low that makes you in my book? I'm not sure I can work with you anymore and as soon as this conversation is over I'm calling Tiny Paul Bunyan and we're gonna have a talk about *which one of us—you or me*—is going to keep working at this company 'cause I don't think I can work with a no-respect *motherfucker* like you." The sales guy's eyes are bulging. The show tunes singer's eyes are welling with tears. "Do you realize how unprofessional it is for you to speak to me that way?" I hit the ceiling. "*You* started this, you dumb motherfucker. Now that you invaded *my personal property* I can talk to you any way I want *to try to get you to understand* what it is the fuck that you just did to this office and all of our ability to trust each other as we bring our coats, watches, laptops, iPads, *whatever*, into this office. *You* have fucked that up." "But—" "YOU HAVE FUCKED THAT UP!!" "I'm going to tell Tiny Paul Bunyan you yelled at me." "*I'M GOING TO TELL HIM FIRST!* YOU DON'T REALIZE HOW SERIOUS THIS IS, SHOW TUNES SINGER!!" "Ok, I agree." "Just say you're fucking sorry, asshole." He struggles with it. "If I did anything wrong, I apologize." "*That* is not an apology." "Ok I apologize!" "Thank you." I sit down to do my work. Then I look over at the show tunes singer and he's smirking. "What's so funny?" He shakes his head. "You. This whole situation. I didn't do anything wrong." "Show tunes singer, you just undid everything good we accomplished before I sat down." And I laid into him again, worse than before, and I threw at him every word in the book. Called him a thief. Said he couldn't be trusted around company property. Re-opened the issue of him taking the company laptop home every night to surf porn. Told him Tiny Paul Bunyan and I were gonna have a talk that ended that little practice, too. Finally the asshole was about to cry, so he left the office with crocodile tears and to tell you the truth I was glad the vermin was out of my elevated sight. - - - - In short, I gave the show tunes singer a scolding unlike any he's likely to ever had in his protected, pointless, no-talent life. I've given a lot of those scoldings—sometimes in email, sometimes in person, vocally. My sister calls it "the righteous smackdown" and it's something I've done many times. I was trained by the best—my mother—when I was a kid. We used to argue, awful arguments, but not to make each other hurt or cry..we were arguing the issues..and we were arguing for the same of argument. At least from the fourth grade on we would do this, at high volume, with her at the bottom and me at the top of the stairs. As either of our positions strengthened, we'd move up or down the stairs. My position could push her down the stairs, her position could push me up and back into the hallway toward my room. It was like fencing..like fencing practice between the Wart and his brother Kay in *The Once and Future King*. I learned it early, and people who knew me between the age of eighteen and thirty-six, if you seek them out, will attest that you did not want to be on the receiving end of the righteous smackdown. I think of myself as a peaceful person—but that's not exactly true. People push, and push, and all the while I'm telling them, "Stop pushing me," but they never listen. Then one day they push me too far and I will tell you without pride that none of these people who pushed me *ever* imagined, in their wildest fucking *dreams*, the demon that lives inside of me, that comes out, that uses every bit of my verbal and emotional intellect to say things that crawl under the skin and sink like fingers into their brains. I can say things that a grown man will repeat to himself the rest of his life. I can drive a sane person to madness in a single speech, and I used to enjoy doing it. Just for misquoting Abraham Lincoln (oh and being a homophobe and a racist and generally a dumb fucking cracker), I said things to my uncle Perish that riled him up like a madhouse bull. That was 2010. It's 2016 and he's still snarling and scraping his hoof and aiming his horns at me. I'm reminded of a great interchange in Michael Mann's movie *The Insider*. Russell Crowe has a meeting with his former employer, played by Michael Gambon. Russell gets riled up and says: "So, what you're saying is: it isn't enough that you fired me for no good reason. Now you question my integrity? On top of the *humiliation* of being fired! You *threaten* me?! You threaten *my family*?! It never crossed my mind not to honor my agreement. But I will tell *you*, Mr Sandefur, and Brown & Williamson, too—Fuck *me*?—Well, fuck *you!!*" Russell storms out of the room. Some asshole lawyer says, "I'm not sure he got the message." And Michael Gambon, brilliantly playing this tobacco company CEO, says, "Oh, I think he did." I'll say the same of my uncle Perish. As recently as last year, he was trying to convince my aunt to kick me out of the house I lived in because he was moving to the area and was going to be spending more time around the family. *An uncle trying to get his nephew kicked out of the house he lives in?* Do I think he got the message every time I told his dumb ass off since 2010? *Oh, I think he did.* That's a bull with an erection he can't get rid of—and that's not the kind of bull I want to be around. All I said to Perish were truths about himself that I could see that he couldn't—and that *he did not want to*—see. That's how you get under someone's skin. That's how you create an itch that can never be scratched. If I laid the righteous smackdown on a literal bull, he would lie his huge body in the dust and cry his organs out through his eyes in place of tears—*that's* how good I am at fucking people up with my words. - - - - In this AA meditation group situation, I could have done that. If you had asked me then if I thought 14 months of sobriety and meditation had changed me, I would have said no, not much at all. But that day I learned by watching my own behavior that it had. When that painful meditation sit was over, after the announcement had been made that there would be no more lying down during meditation, with the lights still dimmed, I quietly gathered my things and left. And I haven't been back since. I didn't argue with anyone. I didn't even go out of my way to let the group know how it had affected me. I didn't feel angry. I still don't feel angry—I never have about the whole event. I just made an observation that I now had to jump through too many hoops to participate in that meeting, and I stopped participating in it. I hope to find another meeting that somehow works for me. The righteous smackdown didn't even occur to me—in fact, I'm retiring it. I love the people in that group. I love the monks who give them space to meditate. And after 18 months of sobriety and meditation, of feeding myself better, body and mind, there is a lot less noise in my mind than when I was sitting next to the show tunes singer at Trash Can Central. I even love the show tunes singer now. I hope he's sitting in an office somewhere, browsing Facebook, singing show tunes as loud as he can, asserting his right to do any fucking thing he wants to disturb everyone else who works in that office, that isn't so much it gives his boss the courage to ask him to stop. ### 38 The cats were stinking up the house 'cause Tooler didn't clean their shitbox, and that was the main reason I moved upstairs. At first it was just a little bit stinky as we made meals in the kitchen. Then the shitbox wouldn't be cleaned for *weeks*, and the smell hit you as soon as you walked in the front door. Then it was like Bongo was making these acrobatic shits on the side of our trash can. I would look at him do this, jumping up and shitting on a power bar wrapper that was sticking out of the trash can and I'd be like *how did he get that there?* He was amazing with his acro-shits, and nothing, not complaining to Tooler, not Tooler getting a hood for the shitbox..*nothing* seemed fix our stinky cat problem. But I peered into the letterbox a few times and my life wouldn't be happy if I had to shit in there, either. It got to where the shit was everywhere, and the stink was pungent—it was unsuitable for cats, much less people. I move into the upstairs apartment in the attic, above Maggie, above Tooler and Issa. I didn't tell them until like the day before because I wanted to minimize static between Tooler and I. Tooler was like, "*I* wanted to move to that apartment when Issa moved to New York." "I'm sorry, Tooler, but I just can't live with the cat smell." And the messy: I mean you could never even *see* the couch because it had trash, computers, protest materials all over it. There was no way I could *bring someone over* to this apartment. "The fact that you waited so late to tell is really hurt me," Tooler says. "I thought our house situation was going well." I felt bad for her. "It was going well—in the beginning." "I just wanted a friendly roommate situation." "I did too, Tooler." That was the last Tooler and I talked for days. We avoided each other. On the day I was moving, when Abby had finished painting the attic with a new set of hideous colors, when all my stuff was in the stairwell, ready to move, when their new roommate had already moved into my old room and I was homeless until Abby gave me the keys, Issa got me and Tooler together: me on the outside of the open first floor apartment door, Tooler on the inside. "Now make up," Issa said. "I don't know if I have anything to say to him," Tooler said. "Tooler," Issa said. And I said, "Tooler, I am sincerely sorry that the way I went about this hurt you. That is *not* what I intended. My communication was poor—" "Your communication was nonexistent!" "You're right, until a few days ago, my communication was nonexistent. I didn't realize that that would hurt your feelings and I should have, I should have know that. I think of you highly, I respect you, I even like you, Tooler, believe it or not. I just can't take the mess and the cat smell is too much for me." "The cat smell isn't even that bad!!" "It's too bad for me. I'm sorry. I have sincerely enjoyed all three of our time together and I wish it was the way it was in the beginning. I thought we had a lot of fun then." "Yeah, we did, before you became Mr AA, Mr I-Don't-Drink, Mr I don't smoke shisha, Mr Button-Up-Shirt-To-Work." "I can't drink like I used to!" "You used to be more fun!" "I know, Tooler, listen, everybody likes me better when I drink, ok, it's just one of the conundrums of my life. Sober me is a little too serious—" "A *little?!?!*" "—a lot too serious for most people's tastes." "Fuck! If this is how you are when you're sober, you might as well drink! You turned into a fucking asshole." Issa puts both hands on Tooler's shoulders. "Now hug, you two, hug," Issa says. Tooler and I hug each other like we're hugging a spider, Tooler leaves for her bedroom and Issa says: "She'll be better in a few days." But she wasn't. Tooler I and only spoke generously to each other once more, and we were never friends again. - - - - I suppose this deserves mentioning briefly. The new roommate, Krystal, was a slut. When I was helping her move into her new room (my old room), she would lie down on her mattress with her legs spread in these purple yoga pants. This happened when I was showing her the place and when she was moving in. Like as soon as we started talking about something Krystal would lie down with her legs spread to talk to me, just, showing off that yoga pant gussets and everything. I never saw a woman do that before, precisely, but I didn't make a move. I mean I wanted to fuck her—not her specifically—but any woman just on the strength of her having a vagina. But the fact that she was acting like a superho scared me. She smoked pot constantly (as in, she could not complete any other task without smoking pot at the same time). She often showed up at one of the doors to the attic apartment drunk and slutty (as in, flirting with me dressed in her underwear but she should barely stand up—hardly a fuck I'd want to entertain). And she always had her legs open. Like she'd be sitting in my comfy chair talking to me upstairs and she would have her legs spread *as wide as possible* given the limits of human anatomy. I say this without judgment, but that girl is a psychotic, alcoholic slut. - - - - Abby and I sat on the bed together while she gave me the key to the new apartment. Just sitting on the bed a woman made me want to fuck her—but she's my landlord! This is maybe something about what my old therapist Kathryn said about not being so hungry that I'd go for anything. Maybe I should have fucked Krystal, who knows. But no, no, I should not have fucked Krystal. I didn't want to fuck Krystal. I did want to fuck my landlord. What if we had? Maybe we'd be living together in Morocco right now, peaceful, nomads. But it's not likely. I bought all sorts of things for that apartment once I got my first paycheck from the Trash Can Cunts, went manic buying computer devices, an exercise bike, all sorts of kitchen equipment. I was on a TCC check and unemployment money. There was overlap there—I knew and didn't know. I was manic, I was crazy—it might sound like a simple excuse to some of you but it's not. It's actually a really dangerous and out-of-control condition and there's nothing fake or funny about it. I was going to make smoothies and juice all my ingredients for every meal, get super healthy, but it was really about *buying things*, having money and *spending* it, you know?—working at that trash can job and being on a spending spree with two forms of income, Trash Can and also monthly welfare on a VISA card..I didn't even know what I was buying or with what. I ate out and drank the most expensive juices I could buy..*at least I wasn't drinking!* was my excuse. Looking back I was completely manic—biking halfway across Vermont to have some *pancakes* someone recommended..way longer bike trips than my body was ready for. Manic, filling out these welfare forms with lies. I was only partially conscious about spending money and the rest of me had no reasonable conception that I was spending so much. I mean I just walked into Kips without drinking and proposed to Jill that we have sex sometime. She said maybe we could work something out. Oh yeah, oh yeah, and this! The burger stand! I sell a trash can the first day I worked for Trash Can Incorporated and it takes the bonehead owner of that deadbeat corporation three months to order it. When I finally bring it to the burger stand—that's the guy I sold it to—I gave it to him for free because it took so long for us to provide it that it had become a joke between me and the burger stand guys about how long it takes Tiny Paul Bunyan (who they knew—remember, town of eleven thousand people) to order a motherfucking trash can! It made it embarrassing to even say I worked for the company. I mean on the first day I got the job, the burger stand owner, Chris, was like, "Alright!" "Wow!" and "I'm glad you got the job!" but by the end of this debacle it was like neither of us ever, ever mentioned that I worked for that piece of shit company because it was a blight on me as a person. I never even put that company on my resume because I thought the fact that I had worked there would have a negative effect on my hireability. The drama with the assholes at Trash Can Consortium got even worse. I basically got played by the sales guy. He instigated problems between me and the show tunes singer, and I fell for it. I got involved where I should have stayed aloof. The owner sided with this no-talent douchebag probably because he was a family friend (that's not a supposition—he was a family friend) or the show tunes singer might have been sucking Tiny Pauly Bunyan's dick—that was just as likely. Show tunes singer kneeling on the warehouse floor while Tiny Paul Bunyan sat on our third-world toilet taking a shit with the show tunes singer sucking Tiny Paul Bunyan's tiny Canadian peen, the smell of shit wafting up to further stimulate the head bobbing of the show tunes singer, Tiny Paul Bunyan cumming in the show tunes singer's face, and them having no paper towels to clean him up with. That's right, Tiny Paul Bunyan barely kept us in toilet paper, but didn't seem to grasp that buying paper towels for the bathroom of his small business so his employees could dry our hands after we washed them was *his* responsibility. He never bought them. So we all just wiped our hands on our pants. - - - - I kept going to this one bar (and not drinking) but having lunch there to get a break from Tiny Paul Bunyan's idiotic monologues about saving young women from pirates on the internet when he was really just telling us about porn sites he visited. And I kept seeing Darling Nikki, because she worked at this bar. And we kept having these mini-conversations about social networking sites and what we wished they would do better, and after a month of lunches these mini-conversations had turned into an idea for a web business. We were always flirtatious but it never got to sex. If I'm sober, I never initiate sex unless it's someone who I truly feel it with—I mean I have to feel some butterflies, man—it can't be robotic for me. I'll have sex with a wider set of women if they push for it (and aren't quite as slutty as Krystal), but for me to be in pursuit I have to feel the sparks..intensely. Justine—yeah, full, 100% sparks. To a lesser degree, Walsh—80% sparks. Women from my past..whatever, there have to be sparks. You know, it has to get me psychologically, too, I'm not some grunt who's into any pussy he can get. Maybe that's because sex has been relatively available to me and it isn't for some guys. Darling Nikki had a great business idea. It was just ahead of its time. I programmed and it and she helped direct it and we'd make our meetings kind of like dates, where we'd get sushi and talk about our business then flirt with each other, talking about sex and shit, but while I'm tempted, I never make a move. I wanted to fuck her, I was just too out of sorts, too weak within myself, to function on any kind of advanced level. Our project was an anonymous talk site, and even when we were testing the thing, she would be flirting with me through text and I would be flirting back. She was in good shape, I'd heard from her ex-husband that she was great in bed, she just wasn't for me—I would have rather had a second chance to fuck Walsh, and marry her, have babies and fuck her till we were eighty then shoot ourselves in the head on some grand anniversary. Or at least day drink until we died. Back in the sushi restaurant. Darling Nikki clearly offering it up. The old me would have said, "So, you wanna fuck?" And she would have said yes. She was giving all the signs: also sitting with her legs wide open (but not as slutty as Krystal), pushing the tip of her finger between wet lips, smiling deliciously at me. She would have nodded her head slowly and we would have gone to my apartment and fucked. But the new me was too jaded, too scared, and too depressed to make the first move—if you haven't noticed, I was having some severe psychological problems at this point in my life. It wasn't even worth it, I thought—and that's depression speaking. If you had seen this girl, you would know that thinking it was not worth it to fuck her..was depression. Honestly I couldn't even conceptualize the desire for sex that day. I didn't even remember what it felt like. I didn't even care. So Darling Nikki and I became estranged because I kept missing more meetings with her as my mind fell apart. I don't miss meetings. But I started missing meetings with her. I just wasn't aware of my calendar. I couldn't tell you what day it was. Our project failed. We never fucked. We never even stayed friends. It was a disaster. I remember walking Darling Nikki back to where both our bicycles were parked. Hers was like this three-thousand dollar racing thing. Darling Nikki did biathlons, triathlons, she was self-sufficient, she had made her way in Brattleboro a long time by creating positions for herself at companies that had no positions. She was so functional, and I was so not. Fucking, not fucking—who cares. What Darling Nikki represented to me was a mentality that if I was honest with myself I felt was a) slipping away and b) never there. Darling Nikki rode off on her bike, head down, ass up, knees turning and thighs pumping—a picture of health. - - - - Sometimes I would see Matt Mattson, working a spare construction day, clomping up the stairs to the drug apartment, slinking down to the lake, living in a tent. And I felt it, because I knew that I was going to end up that way. I had been homeless before, and as a person with bipolar disorder, the chances are decent that I'll end up homeless again and/or will die by my own hand. Then again, fifty percent of the people that US cops murder each year are mentally ill—that sudden death is the best that some of us can hope for. ### 39 Journal entry from: > **J****uly** **30, 2011** > > Just ate lunch at Flat Street (chili and pineapple juice). Now sitting in the Latchis before watching Cowboys and Aliens. Vision of myself as a solitary, non-drinking, rich man. Stay sober, stay clear, and take the next step into having tons and tons of resources. Sell your books. Make businesses that make money. Make businesses to sell. Don't over-extend: focus on one thing at a time, but move out of working for someone else as soon as I can. Before this winter if possible. Use the internet to create interest in my books, to draw traffic to my blog, etc. And become a celebrity, in the literary world. Write amazing things. And enjoy a quiet and serene life. Watch movies, live simply, carry an iPad and a keyboard everywhere, treat people well, treat myself well, and don't suffer again. Be good to myself. > > Just watched Cowboys and Aliens. It was fun to watch. Getting sushi now at Shin La. Lots of imagination right now, about what to do with inhesion..to start with science fiction and work toward reality from there. To start off the map, in the middle of the open spaces, to start with Neuromancer and make things from there, possible. Control systems, organic. And I think tonight and tomorrow I'll program on TalkAnonymous\.com, get that working with multiple identities, and make the interface simple and uncluttered..it should be the simplest possible, with no credits or explanations, just bulletproof, then later, I'll take xtools and move on and make inhesion, become Eldon Tyrell, make stuff that people never thought of. I love this computer. It's incredibly light in my backpack, and soon I'll have another bag, a bag just for it. Hopefully it fits the keyboard, too. I like the modularity of a bluetooth keyboard and a screen, that you carry around. This could definitely be the future: components that are loosely coupled, such that you can mix and match, use any one of them or none, computers that are small, cheap, and multi-purpose. I have some inkling of creating a lego-like programming environment, that could work well on small screens and touch screens, maybe in tandem with dot oh languaging. Simple keys, small set of symbols, hierarchical software development happening on small screens. DSD: distributed software development. Make tools for that. Post-source control. The next day: > **July 31, 2011** > > Sitting in Bagel Works. Been playing Mahjong. Moving today. Abby said she'll let me know when she's done cleaning and fixing up the apartment, and I can move in today. So excited. Like: butterflies in my stomach. One of my Mahjong fortunes was "Don't be afraid of competition." or "Don't avoid competition." or something like that. I think the former. This, at work, in my ideas of starting a business. What makes me think that anyone could do what I decide to do, better than me? I could create an AI business, inhesion, that no one else in the world can create. Like that thing of the book you want to read, that doesn't exist, is yours to write. I think maybe that's true with business, too. If I have a vision, that's more than half the battle. Don't be afraid of competition. I am not inferior. I need not feel superior in ego, but in some ways, I am superior. I am superior to everyone else at being me, and so my vision, my desires, my ideas are perfect..perfectly mine. My desires, my wants, are such me, such a critical part of what I am and who I am, I should live by my dreams, by my imaginations for what could be. And another fortune I got this morning at the end of one of my games, was: "Well done is better than well said." Indeed =) Be the former: be one who does well. Leave the politicking to politicians. Be an executioner. Do. > > Went to the Sunday AA meeting. Now waiting in the Backside Cafe for my lunch. Getting grilled Monterrey chicken, spending some more time out before I go back to the High Street house. Writing on the iPad 2 is excellent. With iA Writer (program) and an external keyboard (bluetooth) I could definitely write a book or long piece on this machine. I like the idea of being able to write anywhere (and have it be typing, and stored electronically). Didn't share at the meeting. Listened, though. It was about consideration and balance. I'd like to move toward more of that at work. Though, I think this week, it was progress for me to 1) not drink over stressful shit at work and 2) not take shit from my coworker who was being an asshole to me. He touched my personal computer (opened the case) while I was away for lunch, and admitted to this after I relayed to him my coworker's relayal of this to me. I told him: Don't ever touch my shit again. And I think on the whole that was progress for me. It needed to be said, in our office—and I needed to say it, for me. Ultimately I want my effect there, and anywhere, to be that I do my work, do my job, do my part, etc. (Not that I spend my time arguing or opposing people or calling bullshit people on their bullshit.) It's a hard balance, I think. Because, as Joanne suggested when I told her this don't touch my shit story, to absolutely say nothing, to bend to, to completely ignore, such a person's behavior is enabling. I don't want to battle monsters, though, lest (as Nietzsche says) I become one. But to allow the monster to roam freely not just through your town, but past your gate and into your yard, is not to do your town a favor. It is to enable the monster. Where and how the balance lies seems non-simple to me. It seems to me there may be wrong answers to that question of balance, but that deciding on one, single right answer, might not be correct, or complete. I saw a nice-looking girl on the way to this restaurant. She looked like she'd have a sweet pussy, one I'd like to fuck. Maybe with my new apartment I will invite women over, girls, females, and have some sex. But I like my peace, and even a sweet pussy isn't worth too much chaos or trouble. Perhaps at some point I'll have a real relationship again, on all levels, with the likes of a Libby or someone of her caliber. ### 40 I was going to the 7am AA meeting every day they had it. I got several months clean. I liked the group except I always had a bad feeling about the veracity of my sponsor. He would get confused about his clean date in the middle of a share. He would say things like: "It doesn't really matter how much time you have, as long as you're living the life," which may be true but it led me to wonder if he didn't really have 20 years..or 17..of 15..or any of the different numbers of years he claimed to have in various meetings. My sponsor and I would talk every morning on the phone or in person after the 7am meeting, sitting by the creek sometimes where I always sat by myself and ate breakfast before going to work at the Trash Can Carnival. I remember seeing a drifter girl put on deodorant in front of the grocery store and being really attracted to her, in her self-reliant nature. I would never want someone who needed me. I have always been attracted to women who seemed like they didn't need anyone. My sponsor was so fucking narrow minded and judgmental..he's flipping out at my eating a beautifully fresh, raw piece of tilapia. He goes: "Matthew, I'm worried about you. You can't *eat* that." "Sure I can. Look at it. That's about the most beautiful piece of fish I've ever seen. It's perfect." "You're gonna get sick if you eat that." "No I'm not. I eat raw fish all the time. What do you think sashimi is?" "But that's in a *restaurant*. They know what they're doing." "It's the same thing. I know when they buy their fish. I wouldn't be eating this if it had sat on the shelf in there for five days but they *just delivered* this fish yesterday or today and it's *totally fresh*. Look at that." "It looks disgusting to me. It makes me want to hurl." What a boring person. What a limited person. In my mind, if this guy can't accept me eating raw fish, how's he going to be a spiritual teacher for me, on the larger issues?—it's a farce that this man is my sponsor, and I'm only keeping him as my sponsor because the other men in the group I go to are much worse choices. Like the man who hijacks the meeting to talk about Jesus Christ and people walk out when he shares but my sponsor defends him: "He spent two years in a French prison." What the fuck do I care? He's a Jesus-beating freak that's fucking up my AA meeting—we say we're not aligned with any religion or sect and then the group and the group moderator let this French prison survivor talk about Jesus for 30 minutes of a 60-minute meeting. It's wrong, it's hypocritical, and it turns people off who are there to recover from addiction, not get a poorly-assembled sermon. By the creek, the whole time my sponsor is spouting AA tritisms at me, I'm just watching the drifter girl, maybe seeing something in her that I wish was more developed in me. We're supposed to be having some sort of useful spiritual interchange during these morning talks, but mostly it's just yet another sermon from someone who thinks they have their life together when, when I look at their life, I think not. - - - - One day some asshole vegans come up to me and my sponsor while we're pretending to recover. This crowd is all decked-out in their hemp everything and they're coming to us from having just gone shopping at the Food Coop. This one guy comes up with his bag and holds it in our faces: "Look at that, man—do you know what that is?" I look at him in the face like *why are you interrupting?* He's like: "Beans. Beans are gonna save the Earth, man. Do you eat a lot of beans? I've been through so many diets. Vegan. Vegetarian. Pescatarian. Raw foodist. Diets you never even *heard* of, man." "I doubt that." "What was that? Don't be a hater, man." "I'm not a hater, I'm an alcoholic, this is my sponsor and we're having a talk here about things I can do to help keep from drinking." "Oh, drinking..that's just a willpower thing, man." "No it isn't." "Anyway, *beans*," he says, and smiles like Jim Carrey doing Andy Kaufman, then launches into this minutes-long diatribe about the advantages of eating a bean-based diet and how when he *smells* beans something in the universe tells him to eat them, like the whole cosmos is conspiring to move the people of Earth to a bean-based diet. And this isn't just good for you physically. A bean-based diet will stop war, because it's eating red meat which causes some people to be warlike while if you wear hemp and eat only different kinds of beans, you'll automatically be a kind and loving person—and it'll help you with your addictions, too. This guy obviously doesn't know this, but: *I've encountered* millions *of people like you.* I've encountered so many people like you I have a special term to describe you: *diet-only revolutionaries*: people who think that diet alone will solve all the problems of the world, and that philosophies don't matter. Now, these people don't realize they're *almost* preaching to the choir—I happen to be one of those people who think diet is *one of the most important factors* for world change. But I think it's stupidly simplistic to think it's the *only* fact we need to change. This guy's whole identity, apparently, was wrapped up in eating nothing but beans—and he would not shut up about it. I was also talking to an older artist from AA in that same parking lot before we were accosted by the bean vegans—you know, don't make the mistake of thinking that just because I'm standing out front of an overpriced organic *bullshit hippie grocery store* that I'm a vegan or I want to hear about your fucking *bean farm*. You're an intellectually-stunted garden gnome, to me, so find someone else to *radiate* and *glow* to and *magically gesticulate* to when all you're talking about is motherfucking beans. *I eat beans, too, motherfucker*—I just don't go around telling everyone about it. It's like being an evangelical for *air—everybody already knows* how to breathe! But this older artist invited me to her place, she had sage advice, she seemed like was a known artist, had made a career of it, was maybe even rich. She invited me to her studio, but I never went. I don't know why. She might have been a better friend than Gretchen, for me. Maybe it was because she was older. Maybe it was because in AA men and women aren't supposed to mix—antiquated tradition. She gave me her number but I never called it so I'll never know. - - - - But when that Jesus freak dude goes on a 30-minute share about his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and how if you don't have Christ in your life this program will never work for you, I'm so desperate for help at this point that I don't say anything. I don't get up and leave the meeting like I should have. I do, later, tell my sponsor that AA claims not to be aligned with any sect or religion and what that guy is doing goes against AA tenets, and he should be stopped, and the fact that he spent two years in a French prison is irrelevant. We've all had hard lives. But I mean when I see the French prison guy on the street I give him a hug, you know, we're both sober—we're drunks who are sober and that's a miracle so I at least give the guy a hug. I happen to think Jesus Christ was one of the towering fucking geniuses of all time—I'm a huge fan of the wisdom. I just don't want to hear about it in my AA meeting. There was a drug house right across the street from the community center where we held our 7am meetings and the guys who occupied those houses would look at us and intimidate us as we went inside for our AA meetings—I mean they would yell at us an taunt us and offer to give us crack for free and they'd tell us we'd be back out using soon (they were fucking madmen, riding tricycles around the street with no shirts on at 6am)—and we would look out at them during our meetings and say we were glad we weren't there. ### 41 I went to a meeting every day, sometimes two..riding my bike miles in the *pouring* rain to get to an AA meeting just outside of town. Everybody can tell, since I am soaked to the bone, that I really wanted to get to this meeting, and even though I'm so muddy and gross I can't sit next to anybody, it earns me a little respect that I wanted to get here *that bad*. Lady tells me: "I used to walk 20 blocks in LA to make the coffee and set out the chairs in my early recovery, and back then each day was beautiful no matter how far I had to walk." I nod. I don't feel exactly like that but I know what she means. "Those were the days, when I just had to get to that meeting *every morning*. And I was homeless at the time." "Been there," I say. And now a whole platter of topics opens up for us to feed off, and it's just me and her, me and her, talking across this room full of people before this meeting. I wasn't exactly sure I could relate to her at first..but then maybe I did because something deep in my mind *had* to get to that meeting that night and I was going to do *anything* I had to to get there. Like if I just halfway wanted to go to that meeting I wouldn't have been willing to show up *soaked* from a dangerous nighttime bike ride. No, I did feel her. I did feel what she was saying. I *had* to get to that meeting for my mental survival, for my spiritual survival, because AA had gone from being something I knew I had to do to stop drinking, to something I knew I had to do to save my spirit. On the way home it rained even harder..so hard that I couldn't see the road for the rain on my glasses. I was driving in a dream world, blurry lights, cars spraying me with waves of water as they went by. I had to get off my bike and walk when I got near the highway entrance. I took off my glasses so I could see enough not to get killed. It was a pretty shitty meeting, too—no shares I could relate to, a lotta jail shit, no hot heroin chicks. I had gotten used to seeing this ultra-hot heroin chick at some of the NA meetings around town and she would always flirt with me. When I say hot, here, I mean the type of hot I couldn't take my eyes off. And when she sat next to me she shared her Skittles and held my hand in hers while she poured them into my palm—she would do this all throughout the meeting and I craved the feeling of the hot blood running through her hand. But it didn't matter that the meeting was shitty—it was more about the intention. It was like climbing to the top of the mountain just for the sake of climbing to the top of the mountain, even if you didn't get to see the view. There was this one meeting with this virgin teenage girl. She disrupted the whole meeting with teenage girl shenanigans—her and a couple of their friends. I wanted to fuck her at every meeting. She flirted with me, and not just with me. She flirted with guys in their fifties at every meeting and it created a real split focus at every one of those meetings I went to. She was sexy as hell and just at the age when she knew it, she used it as a tool, but she was *so* young I just had to think she had no idea what the consequences of doing that might be. Middle-aged men shared about it in the meeting, how they knew we wanted the meeting to be open to everyone and we were all of course glad these fifteen-year-olds were at an NA meeting and not off shooting heroin, it made it difficult to focus when the girls did chants along with every step and every tradition we read, and generally turned every meeting into a screening of Adrian Lyne's *Lolita*. I agreed, it was a problem. But maybe one with no solution. I saw her waiting outside the AA meeting one time when I had gone to the NA meeting down the street instead of her AA one, and I turned my bike around and said hi to her before riding off into the night. I spoke to her as a fellow addict. I didn't flirt back at her, even as she flirted with me. We must protect people, often children, from themselves. I walked into an AA years later in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where grown men were doing the same thing..not the flirting but the sing-songy cutesy chants that go along with and make a joke out of the reading of the steps and the traditions. I immediately left that meeting and drove down the street, mad, sitting at a red light, and then instead of turning right to buy alcohol and throw away my clean time over some jackasses in an AA meeting, I made a u-turn, came back, and shared that I've been in many 12-step meetings throughout my life and that night I was going to collect a white chip but when I hear people making ridiculous noises during the readings it makes me feel like this group isn't serious about its primary purpose. "I'm not going to drink over this," I said. "And I sincerely wish you all the best in your sobriety." I walk out, some dude follows and says those guys are in the "no matter what" club and they have a lot of sobriety time between them and I say: "It doesn't matter. I understand laughing in your share, I understand being happy while sober..that's the whole point..but when you goof around during the reading of the literature, it sends the wrong message to the newcomer." I should have said to those old-timers that the last time I saw that kind of irreverence during the readings, it was from three fifteen-year-old girls with a year of sobriety between them, and you guys are displaying the exact same behavior. *No-matter-what club* my ass. ### 42 The next time I tried to go to a meeting I was on my bicycle circling this church where a meeting was scheduled, waiting for cars to start showing up. But none ever did. I kept riding circles around the block and about an hour later I remembered that the fellowship was having a camping retreat that weekend so there wouldn't be any meetings. Then I drove around a back street, fantasizing about owning one of the homes in this neighborhood, and I see a rainbow—an amazing, up-close rainbow that touched the ground on both ends and I stopped on my bike and took off my helmet and looked at it. > I got chills. > > This is why I came here tonight. > > It wasn't the NA meeting—it was this rainbow. - - - - I'm standing at the burger stand when my AA sponsor has called me and I've agreed to volunteer with him at the farm/theatre that he likes to volunteer at and see shows at every year. He picks me up on the side of the street. As soon as we're on the highway he turns on the music and it's some Christian stuff. He's all: "I'm really a Jesus freak and I'm going to try to convert you to Christianity. I mean, no bullshit, Christianity is what really saved me—that's what got me clean, not AA." If I had been smart I would have told him to turn the car around at the next exit, take me back to Elliot Street, and drop me off right where you picked me up. But I was not smart. I look at him like: *That was not cool.* He slaps my leg. "I'm just kidding, man! I'll leave the Christianity stuff out of it if you want me to." "Yeah, please." "Geez," he says. I have a monologue on the tip of my tongue but I hold it. I'm gonna give this guy a chance to recover from that bullshit he just said. He says, "Do you have a girlfriend?" "No." And I don't really want one, either. "Try online. You'll get a girlfriend right away," says this middle-aged dude. "I'm not an online dater." He doesn't say anything. "I don't try to force myself into situations where I'll meet women. I believe that if it's meant to happen, it'll happen." My sponsor says, "You know the ticket?" "What? What is the ticket?" "Yoga class!" he says. "You've got a yoga studio right in Brattleboro—did you see the Bikram Yoga right across the street from where I picked you up?" "Yeah, I know about the Bikram Yoga studio." "Well why don't you take some classes there?" "I don't really like yoga." My AA sponsor says: "I've been taking classes there and you wouldn't *believe* the women in that place! You don't have to *like yoga!* It's not about the yoga—you can do yoga at home. But these women, oh, Matthew, I'm telling you, you're standing behind one of these *beautiful* women—like *twenty* years old—and she's bending down in front of you and you can see her panty liner through those yoga pants. I was getting a hard-on right there in the class! I had to sit down and put a towel around me to hide it! You would fucking love it, buddy—I'm sorry, are you gay? We never really talked about it—" "I'm not gay. I like women. I just don't like to hear you talk about them like that. You're not really acting like a mature adult—you're acting like a thirteen-year-old boy and whether you think so or not, it *is* the case that your immaturity in this area erodes your credibility as a potential sponsor." "What do you mean, *potential sponsor*? I'm your sponsor, man." "No, we're rolling it back, based on your suggestion that I go to yoga class to pick up women. You're kind of a sex addict, don't you think? I don't know if you know that about yourself, but I thought maybe it would be kind of me to point it out." "I feel like you're insulting me while I'm trying to help you get sober." "I got sober without you, let's be clear on that." "You showed up later to vamp onto me to make yourself look like a successful sponsor. I think you should turn the car around right now, I'm not into this." "Matt—" "Matthew." "Matthew, I'm sorry, I promise, I won't talk about yoga any more today." "No, I think you better turn around and take me home." But somehow he convinces me to continue with him—or maybe I'm just kidnapped for the day since he has the keys. He continues to claims Jesus got him clean, not AA. He continues to womanize: every fucking skirt we see, he has to talk about. It's a horrible day for me but I put up with it because supposedly this guy is helping me stay sober. Supposedly this is "part of the program," "the AA community," or some bullshit. I tell him: "Yoga is breath—and breath is life. Your yoga is your breath—and your breath is your life. Where is the part about macking on women you heard in that? Pilates is about your core, your stomach, and your spine. Where is the part about macking on women you heard in that?" He didn't like that at all and I was very glad that he didn't. We were crossways for a few miles on the highway. Then we get to the farm. And I see why we're here. This is a program that has collected the most gorgeous and talented twenty-something men and women from around the globe to write and direct a play and build all the sets for it..so we are surrounded by the *crème de la crème* of these multitalented, international, nubile women. My sponsor spends all day flirting with them, trying to get their contact information, trying to get a date with them. And yes, I'll give you, these women were beautiful in every way..talented, monied, beautiful physically, and I wanted to fuck them too, but these girls were twenty-two and *I* was leaving them alone on the basis of being in my early thirties. My fifty-something sponsor—the fucking jackass—he shamelessly flirted with these women—he wanted to marry one of them (he told me that). We hadn't come here to volunteer, we were here to replace my sponsor's wife with a twenty-year-old Romanian girl named Ileana—who, by the way, was obviously the show's director's girlfriend, and *he* was the alpha male on *this* farm, not just the director but the *star* of whatever play they were putting on. My sponsor was leaning over Ileana like a gorilla. They could hardly carry on a conversation 'cause her English was so bad but my sponsor informed me that was a *turn on* for him—not a problem. He would turn around and whisper to me how fucking hot this girl was and I was like *this matters in which universe, exactly?* There's not *even* an alternate universe in which my AA sponsor fucks Ileana. You're wasting your time, dude. And this wasn't some cultural exchange: he was like a woodpecker, trying to get another piece of personal information out of her with each peck. Maybe I just don't like sexual aggression. We were totally out of place. All these people lived charmed lives..not like Mike and I: the recovering addict working his ass off as a masseuse with clients all the way from Vermont to New York City; and me, the recently sober recovering addict writer who when my sponsor went on my website and saw a few good reviews from readers, said: "Damn, man, you're like established and shit." And I was like *Not exactly*. (That was in my mind that I said that: *Not exactly.*) At a gas station on the way home, my sponsor positions his car so we could sit and stare at a woman's dress fly up in the wind. "Did you see under her dress? I don't think she had anything on!" She didn't have anything on. I watched in the rear-view mirror as her dress flipped up and showed me everything. And I'm not saying looking underneath a commando-going woman's dress isn't something I like to do. I love it. I think it's invasive, but that only half-bothers me. What bothers me all the way is doing this with my AA sponsor. He told me his marriage was on the rocks but it was clear from his actions that he didn't want to save it. He had fantasies about getting with some younger woman instead. And I began to see, as I became a regular at more and more AA meetings, how my sponsor would use meetings to flirt with younger women—in one case one I was interested in. He would act all interested in their sobriety but really he just wants to fuck twenty-somethings. I mean..who doesn't. I'm not the sex police. But I think it's wrong to use your power as an AA member who supposedly has decades of clean time to get close to 22 year olds who are struggling with a real problem in their life and are therefore vulnerable to unscrupulous guides. When he was with me in my High Street apartment he mentioned what I nice computer I had (my iMac desktop) and he said he really needed a computer. I was like: "Well I never use this one, I always use my laptop, so you can have that one." He's like, "Are you sure?" I'm like, "Yeah." And I box it up for him in the original box, keyboard, power cord, everything. Later on after I fired him as my sponsor he asked me if he had crossed the line by letting me give him my computer. I said no, even though he had. But I was like: "Don't worry about it, dude, I can only use one computer at a time, my laptop's newer, it's my preferred machine, and besides, without a computer, how are you going to send dick pics to all your sixteen-year-old girlfriends? It's much better this way, trust me." ### 43 While I was still in AA, I went to the Backside Cafe and had brunch. Mystery dude I had met doing coke sees me and sits across from me in my booth. "You don't mind if I sit here, do you? It's so busy, it's senseless for us both to take up a booth." "No, go ahead, I'm glad to have the company." "I've got the worst problem," he says. I'm thinking it's some sort of rash. "It's Juliet—remember that bitch?" "Your girlfriend Juliet?" "She ain't my girlfriend no more." "Why, what happened?" "What happened is I kicked that bitch out, is what happened. Now if you look out in the parking lot right in the middle you'll see that psycho bitch, fucking with her things, *which is all a bitch cares about! Her fucking possessions!!*" the mystery man shouts. I look out the windows. All the time, I'm eating my steak and jalapeño scrambler and this guy is telling me the full story of his and Juliet's break up and I'm watching this very same woman in the parking lot, in the middle of all these shops in the very center of Brattleboro. And it's a cold day and she's taking everything out of her car, rearranging it, scraping the windows, throwing shit out of her trunk onto the asphalt and I'm thinking: This is a pivot point in this woman's life..she's either going to have to re-ingratiate herself with this asshole DJ boyfriend sitting across from me by giving up some amazing and continuous sex, or she's going to have to suck his (or someone's) dick for gas money to get back home, Albany or Rochester or wherever that is..or..I could be watching someone's crucial moment in their life where they become homeless, and stopped being the hot high-class bitch with the drug dealer boyfriend, and becomes someone who first lives in their car and uses the bagel shop bathroom every morning to clean up..until her car eventually gets towed because she can't afford to park her car anywhere 'cause it all costs money. This could be me watching someone's descent into homelessness, which is something I've experienced for myself and I know just what it looks like—it looks like this, like standing in the parking lot taking everything out of your car and putting everything back in. That's everything you own. You're not even organizing it, physically, in the trunk..you're taking inventory, in your mind, of what little you have left of yourself—and the stuff is just a symbol, a reminder, that you haven't yet been completely erased from society, that there is still some weakling shred within you that thinks you can plug yourself back in to the normal world of people doing normal things: fuck, have kids, work, die. "You still a DJ?" "A DJ? When the fuck was I ever a DJ?" I squint my eyes at him. "*Oh!!* Right, a DJ, haha. I'm not a DJ, man, that was just a fake identity 'cause I didn't know you from jack and I wasn't about to tell you my real job." "Well you don't have to tell me now—I don't care." "I'm a mental health tech, dude—at the Refuge. I help take care of old crazy people." "Gotcha." "Say, I don't think my food's gonna get here anytime soon, you mind if I have a bite of your omelette." "It's a scrambler," I felt compelled to say. "Oh, a scrambler. No offense intended." "We both laugh. "Yeah, have a bite. Have all you want." "All she ever does is do all my coke and hang around the apartment. She doesn't even give it up anymore, which. I mean. When you're the bitch with no income shoveling all my coke up your nose, you have to give it up—you have to contribute to the household in some way." This guy is chewing my food. "Wouldn't you agree you have to contribute to the household in some way?" "Yeah in general I agree with that principle. But what happened? Did you fight or something? I mean, presumably, when she moved in, she was doing your coke then, too?" "She was doing *a little bit. A civilized amount.* An amount I could afford to support. But now she's doing approximately half the coke that's being done in Brattleboro—that's based on very good data my friend." "Why don't you send her to the Refuge—don't they have detox?" "Ahh, they do, but she won't go. She won't go. She doesn't think she has a problem. I'm like, bitch, when you yourself are snorting more coke than *the entire volume* I sell each day, *then you have a problem*. You want a mimosa? I gotta call this bitch—do you mind?" "No on the mimosa. Go ahead on the call." I watch mystery man dial some digits on his phone and then, seconds, later, I watch Juliet, in the parking lot, try to find her phone and ultimately it's tucked inside the elastic of her yoga pants. She picks up and I can see the silent silhouette of her movement combined with the 2-second delayed voice on my friend's phone: "What the fuck do you want?" "Juliet come upstairs and have brunch with me and Zha. We're at the Backside Cafe. We're having mimosas." "[unintelligible yelling from her end]" "Baby, you gonna eat. Then I promise I'll give you some more coke. But you gotta at least drink a mimosa first." "Fuck!" she says, and I see her put away her phone. "Fucking bitch won't even drink a little orange juice. If I told you how long she's been awake you wouldn't believe me." "I'm sure I would." "Oh. Been there yourself?" "Yeah. With meth, though, or a combination of meth and coke. But yeah, that sucks. The mimosa thing is a good trick, get her some OJ with the alcohol." " 'Cept she's hard to temp with alcohol. She prefers the hard drugs." "You know, for me, alcohol became a hard drug." But he doesn't hear me, he's ordering mimosas and another jalapeño scrambler and telling our waitress—who is slammed—to make it happen fast. I've seen her in here before and I think she and Big Katie are their only waitresses—I remembered this one because she has red hair. "You like Juliet?" "Seems fine." "I mean do you *like* her." "Yeah I guess so." "Well you can have the bitch, and believe me, I ain't doin' you no favors." About this time Juliet shows up. She sits in the booth next to mystery man. She's in her late twenties, he's in his late thirties, and I didn't just like her, I wanting to fuck her so bad. They're drinking mimosas and they're both eating off my plate 'cause the second scrambler hasn't arrived. "Juliette, what do you do?" She growls something and punches mystery man in the arm, one eye open, one eye closed. She's a mess but she's still beautiful. "What was that?" I say, like we're royalty in a high-class dining room. "I lost my job." " 'Cause you did too much fucking coke." "No." She looks at me with both eyes open. "I *was* a mental health tech at the Refuge, but they caught me doing coke in their bathroom so they had to let me go." She laughs, this eternal-seeming laugh that left no doubt that *she didn't care* and *the Refuge could go fuck itself* and so on. "For doing a little coke in the bathroom." "Yes, it's all very unfair," the mystery man says. "Nothing *you* could have prevented by *your* actions, right?" "Well you look over your your shoulder but shit happens," Juliet says, and I have trouble finding an argument to that point. But mystery man says, "That still leaves you sleeping in your car." "I *could* sleep in your bed," she says, all cooey. "Juliet, you'd have to suck so much cock just to get in the door." "You want me to suck your cock *outside* of your apartment?" "Don't be stupid." "I'm not." "Are you ready to suck some cock?" "I might be. It's fucking cold out there," she tells me. "I know." "He knows how cold it is, Juliet—you don't have to tell him." "I was just being polite." "Well be polite by not talking about sucking dick in front of our guest. You sure you don't want a mimosa?" "I'm good." I was so afraid he would ask me why and I'd be caught explaining that even though we met doing coke that I'm now in AA but he didn't ask why I didn't want a mimosa and I was lightened to remember that generally people don't give a fuck about each other and they don't ask why you're doing things or not doing things *because they don't give a fuck!!* Juliet totally flirts with me by putting her leg up on the seat between my legs. When the mystery man sees this he says: "Juliet, put your fucking foot down." She just laughs that infinite dry laugh again. She keeps her foot up there and she's looking at me with her head canted down like all intense and I'm about to be like *fuck this guy* and just get up with his ex-girlfriend and leave him with the bill and take her somewhere and fuck her. "Juliet, get the fuck out of here. Go the fuck back to your car." "Well," she says, "*you* don't want me, I'm on the free market again. The free market always comes to the right solution—right?—didn't you teach me that?" "Juliet, get out of the booth or—" "What? You're gonna withhold sex from *me*? *I'm* the one with the pussy. *I* call the shots on who gets pussy when and where." This is in the middle of a restaurant *packed* with people, by the way. "Juliet, I swear to *god* if you don't get up you'll be sleeping in your car again tonight." "You hear that? If one of his buddies needed to crash on his couch for a couple of nights, he'd say yes—of course he'd say yes. But no, you're gonna make me sleep in my car. I don't even think you *like* women. I think you resent them 'cause some girl in the seventh grade wouldn't give up her little seventh-grade pussy to your pathetic seventh-grade cock. And you're punishing the rest of us, just because of that bitch from back then. You prob'ly don't even remember her name. Was it Kristen? Or maybe Jennifer—" "Juliet. *Listen* to yourself. This is why I don't like you on coke. You're accusative, you're hyperactive—I just don't think it's a good drug for you." Juliet, based on looks alone, was too good for either the mystery man or me. I wanted to flirt with her the afternoon/night I was at their apartment (his apartment) and I wondered why she was with him at all. Obviously now I knew the answer was simple: coke. "I want you to come outside with me, we're gonna talk, then we're gonna get you horizontal where you can do some real good." The DJ/mental health tech/whoever he was holds up a finger as if to shush me. *Go ahead dude, far be it from me to stop you from fucking your fucked-up whore girlfriend. I was having a quiet brunch before this sexy girl put her foot between my legs to get* your *attention. Do what you have to do. Keep your bitch on a leash if you have to.* Then DJ dude pushes her out of the booth, drags her by one shoulder out of the crowded restaurant, a little time passes and I see them both outside, having a long talk in front of her car. Then they get in the car and presumably do coke, then both of them get out of the car and head in the direction of his apartment. On my walk home, up the hill on High Street, I called my sponsor and told him about my brunch. He said he thought it was a blessing, a gift to me from God to remind me where I didn't want to go. And I agreed. The next time I was at the 7am AA meeting, French Prison guy hijacked the morning meeting for the last time with a forty-five minute talk about Jesus. One guy stormed out of the room and there followed a verbal altercation like I've never seen in an AA meeting. It was scary. My idiot sponsor stood up for the Jesus guy, saying he spent six years in a French prison and he should be able to share whatever he wants and I finally had enough so I stood up and was like: "No, you're both religious idiots and you're not my sponsor anymore." And I left that meeting, too. - - - - I knew that my fortunes were going south with the Trash Can Consortium. Even though I was doing excellent work, according to my boss, and work that he said he was very happy with, I could tell that I was a short-timer there—I didn't fit in with the culture..when have I ever? So I decided to get a second job so that when they fired me or I quit—which I'm telling you I could just *feel* coming—I would be able to stay in Brattleboro. So I figured the Backside Cafe. I could be a server/bartender (not ideal for a sober person but that was part of the job). I floated this idea by Thomas. Of course he loved it—he saw us as twin servers/bartenders, each with a literary bent, fixtures of Brattleboro. I kind of liked the symmetry, too. My one and only day working at the Backside Cafe, the restaurant where I used to like to get burgers on my way home..the former waitress (the red-haired one) showing me the ropes..me feeling entirely foreign, feeling self-conscious about my fingernails when serving (bitten, picked nails). After close, the two owners talking shit about a former waitress, though they never said her name (that I heard)..they just said she stole and did this and did that and how they hated her the whole time and they were so glad they finally fired her..this is while I'm cleaning up their restaurant and I didn't snap on the meaning of this but it was like they were talking extra loud to make sure I heard what they said. I just cleaned up the restaurant to everyone's specifications, ignoring their conversation, and asked if I could go home. "You know who we're talking about?" they said. "I haven't really been listening..focusing on vacuuming the floors, you know?" "We're talking about Katie—big Katie—she's a friend of yours, right?" "I've seen her here and there." "Don't you two drink together at Whit's?" "I've drank with her at Whit's, why?" "Well I didn't know if it bothered you for us to be talking about her right in front of you." My face was burning. I wanted to tell them *fuck you* right then and I should have. Instead I said, "I need this job. I'm about to get fired from my other one and without this job I'm gonna sink beneath the cracks of this town so fast I won't have time to say bye to Big Kate or Thomas or anyone. So who you talk about is your business. I just want to help you at this one so I keep getting to live in the city I love to live in." Now at that point I didn't ask if I could go. I put away the vacuum cleaner and I walked out and didn't say another word to them or that redhead or listen to another word that any of them had to say. ### 44 Tiny Paul Bunyan is back in the office. He, show tunes singer, and I sit together to talk things over. "Yes, I yelled at show tunes singer for opening my iPad while I wasn't in the office. I really letting him have it. I told him—and I quote—"Don't. Ever. Touch. My shit. Again." Then this guy tells me I was being unprofessional in the way I was talking to him and I said *you* were unprofessional by touching my iPad and this is the way people get talked to when they mess with other people's stuff." "Well we're obviously going to have to make a decision about which one of you is going to continue working here," Tiny Paul Bunyan said. "Because it's obvious you two can't work together." "No let me make that clear," I said. "I can't work with *anyone* who doesn't have the sense going messing with my personal things that I may have brought to the office, like an iPad, a bag, an umbrella, or my MacBook which I'm doing all my work work on since you all never provided me a computer. That's my MacBook. Anyone who opens that and starts clicking around I've got the same problem with." "Ok, I think we understand." "But does show tunes singer understand?" Tiny Paul Bunyan says, "Show tunes singer, do you understand what Matthew is saying about personal property versus company property?" "Well what if I have Facebook up on my work computer, and someone is tapping around looking at my personal account?" "I think the point is you shouldn't have Facebook up on your work computer," Tiny Paul Bunyan says. "But let's take a break from that 'cause I can see that you two aren't going to see eye to eye anytime soon." So we break our meeting, the morning goes on, and around 11 o'clock I hear show tunes singer at Tiny Paul Bunyan's desk saying, "What about that thing we talked about?" "What thing?" "I need Photoshop to do my job." "What about that program Matthew recommended, Bring Out The Gimp or whatever." "The Gimp." "Right." "I can't really use that." "You can't use it like it doesn't do what you need it to do or you can't use it like you need to spend a few hours learning the controls?" "I need Photoshop." "Well have Matt get you a copy." "You mean get like *get* or like *get?*" Tiny Paul Bunyan laughs. "I ain't payin' six-hundred dollars for a piece of software." The show tunes singer goes back to his desk, checks Facebook, and a few minutes later he's standing behind me at me desk. "Matt." "It's Matthew." "Matthew." I turn around. "Yes?" "I need you to get me Photoshop." "Cool, just get me the credit card from Tiny Paul Bunyan and I'll buy you a copy of the latest and greatest." He doesn't go. "I need you to like *get* me a copy." "You mean you want me to pirate a copy of Photoshop for this company?" I say loud enough for the boss to hear. The show tunes singer doesn't say anything. "Boss," I say, "is this what we're doing here. You're asking me to steal commercial software for this company to use?" "Well actually the show tunes singer is asking you, but.." "I don't do that," I say, and I turn around and look at my screen. "I thought you were our computer guy," Tiny Paul Bunyan says, not looking at me, looking straight forward out the window into the parking lot." I stand up. "I'm going to lunch." The sales guy is hunching down in his seat making all kinds of reactive facial expressions, trying to involve himself in the scene. Outside, under a tree, I call my mom to tell her the situation and check my response which was going to be to say, *I will not participate in any meeting where you're discussing illegal activity but you have my cell phone so please call me when you're done discussing pirating Adobe software and I'll join you for the remainder of any such meeting*. Mom said that sounded reasonable. I go inside and everyone's sitting at the conference table—that's the boss, the show tunes singer, and the sales guy. "Matt," my boss says. "It's Matthew," I say. "We were just going to have a little discussion on this Photoshop situation." "Is the discussion going to involve your credit card plopping down the six-hundred or a thousand that our graphic designer needs to legally buy Photoshop or Creative Suite or whatever he needs?" "Ah..no. I don't believe in paying for things that I can get for free." "Well," I say, "I will not be present for that conversation. I'm going out. I won't be far away. You have my cell phone number and you can call me when the illegal portion of this meeting is over, and I will return." I head for the door. "You're not serious," Tiny Paul Bunyan says. I answer by continuing out of the warehouse office and closing the door behind me. *You bet your ass I'm serious.* - - - - The call me back in a few minutes, everyone smiling at sitting at their desks and working out the day. TPB makes a big show of going to the show tunes singer's desk, leaning over his shoulder, and saying, "So this is what you needed, huh? Our site's gonna look great from here on out?" "I just can't use that Gimp shit," the show tunes singer says. "Gimp can do everything Photoshop can do," I say, "for free. Just because you don't know how to use something doesn't mean it doesn't work." "Let's try to keep it peaceful between you two," Tiny Paul Bunyan says. I heard Tiny Paul Bunyan laughing as I left the warehouse that day. He thinks it's funny that I won't break the law with him? That night I went online and reporting TCC for pirating Adobe software. That night, I was so stressed I got a little treat for myself..a special secret..you want a peek? Look inside this brown brown paper bag: a bottle of wine! I had to split from that whole AA program—I was too stressed by the fact that taking a moral stand was going to make me end up jobless and probably homeless..and that predicament deserves a bottle of wine..does it not? I drank a bottle of wine. I drank two. I reported my job to Adobe for software piracy, knowing that would cost me my job, then I wrote a choice email to my boss (Dear Tiny Paul Bunyan of Trash Can Concern, etc—the actual email is below) telling him I'd reported him to Adobe and telling him if he fired me I would file a wrongful termination suit against him. Here's the actual email I sent to that wack factory: > **To:** the show tunes singer, Tiny Paul Bunyan, and the remote Co-owner of Trash Can Cocksuckers, LLC > > **Subject:** software piracy > > show tunes singer, > > This note is to inform you that I have reported your piracy of Photoshop and Illustrator products to Adobe, Inc. > > Tiny Paul Bunyan, Co-owner: if I am disciplined or unfairly terminated by you, in relation to this, I will take legal action against you. > > I don't like to be asked to participate in illegal actions as part of my job, as the show tunes singer has done by asking me to help him pirate Adobe software. > > Matthew ### 45 How about a little backstory. I've been part of corporate fraud—billing fraud, misrepresentation of the products a company I work for sells, lying about what our software does, lying about a company's capabilities so that we're advertising vaporware in order to entice clients—I've been part of that at just about every company I've worked for, and I just had enough. I had so say no or else I couldn't live with myself. I mean before I thought I *needed* the job, you know, so I just did what they did in Rome; but this time I was like thirty-three and I'd done enough fraud—for lots more money than this six-hundred dollar or two-thousand dollar set of programs and I was like *fuck it*, *fuck this shit*, *no*, I'm not going to steal another thousand dollars from Adobe! One of the principals at SXG—the options trading company I worked for—this VP actually says, and believes, that they have created technology and control the options markets so completely that, as he said, "An individual investor has no chance at making money in the stock and options markets." Hoping he's wrong would just be wishful thinking. *Of course* they've got it set up so the individual investor can't make money—that's the mission statement of their business. When I was twenty-three I just wanted a job. I put up with the dissonance between me and them—my value system wasn't as fully developed—but now, when I think of what that executive said, I think: *How can you live with yourself*, knowing that your business is based on you having access to stock prices and news a fraction of a second before the individual investor, and based on that advantage being able to take their money? I mean that's thievery, it's stealing, just like using Photoshop without a license. I think that sort of thing messed with my conscience all those years and is one of the sources of my anxiety. I'm not a fucking angel. I steal girls' panties and jerk off with them—I used to anyway. I drink and do drugs, smoke—I used to. So I'm not on some sort of moral high horse. But I think we need to make improvements, and when a software company says things on its website, describing capabilities that they don't have, that's a lie. I mean let's hold ourselves to a higher standard. That's what I'm trying to do. So I drink a little more and sent a second email: > **To:** Tiny Paul Bunyan and the remote Co-owner of Trash Can Cocksuckers, LLC > > **Subject:** software piracy > > I like working for you guys and would like nothing more than to never have been asked to participate in software piracy, but please know that if you terminate me wrongfully over my reporting the show tunes singer, I will sue you. I have no desire to do that, but I have a right to not be asked to do illegal things at my workplace, simply to keep my job. > > Sorry it's come to this, but I'm not about to take the fall for the show tunes singer's and/or Trash Can Cocksuckers' illegal action. > > Very sincerely, > > MT Then I drank quite a bit more and decided it would close things out nicely if I sent this third brief email: > **To:** Tiny Paul Bunyan and the remote Co-owner of Trash Can Cocksuckers, LLC > > **Subject:** software piracy > > And, actually, it might be best if when we meet next, we meet with lawyers present. Very friendly and businesslike, no? But I didn't stop there. No. Who do you think I am, Kermit the Frog? If I was a Muppet I'd be Animal—on my better days I'd be one of the Critics who sit in the balcony making fun of everything. - - - - The next day Tiny Paul Bunyan fired me over the phone. I was very pleasant with him over the telephone as I listened to him writhe and struggle through having to say those awful words ("We're gonna have to let you go.") that are the hardest words any manager ever has to say. You might think those people are total heartless slugs, but if you talk to them, you will learn that firing someone is extremely difficult for most managers. But Tiny Paul Bunyan mustered his tiny strength, hoisted his tiny axe, and cut my head off. When he was done I cheerfully said "bye" and hung up the phone on my iPad. It was a beautiful day, I didn't have to work, and I planned an afternoon of drinking at Whit's. I was glad they had internet, because I had one more email I wanted to write. Luckily—even—I was already seated on the bench right outside Whitman's! *Quel convenience!* I went into Whit's, ordered a gin and tonic, and strategized. Tiny Paul Bunyan was always bragging that he knew the owner of the biggest business in Brattleboro, and that this owner had nurtured Tiny Paul Bunyan on his way to becoming the booming CEO of a four-person company, Trash Can Cocksuckers, Inc. So I decided to write Tiny Paul Bunyan's mentor a little note: > **To:** Tiny Paul Bunyan's Mentor > > **Cc:** Tiny Paul Bunyan > > **Subject:** regarding your protégé/buddy, Brattleboro's Only: Mr Brattleboro Himself, The Infamous Tiny Paul Bunyan > > Owner of the Biggest Business in Brattleboro: > > During my recent employment at Trash Can Cocksuckers, in Brattleboro, I was asked by TCC to pirate Adobe Creative Suite. This was asked of me specifically, and discussed in meetings including Tiny Paul Bunyan, TCC CEO. I stated I was not willing to help pirate this software and that I did not want to be present in any meetings where such activities were being discussed. Piracy of this software continued anyway, involving a CD ROM sent to TCC by the remote Co-owner of TCC. I reported this piracy to Adobe, Inc., informed my bosses of this report, and was fired the next day, by Tiny Paul Bunyan, on the phone. > > My work at TCC was impeccable..I have proof of the website work I did while I was employed there. At termination, I was given the reason that it wasn't a "good fit". > > Clearly, being asked to do illegal things, as part of my employment, is a lose-lose choice. In this case, I chose to act within the law, and lost my job because of it. The general events, combined with the timing of my firing coinciding by a day with my report of TCC's illegal activity, combined with the impeccable work I did for them while in their employ, leaves little doubt that TCC terminated me wrongfully, and I am seeking damages, given that through no fault of my own, except for refusing to illegally pirate software for my employer, I have lost my livelihood, my ability to pay rent and buy food, and such meaningless and abrupt termination causes chaos in my life that simply doing my job and refusing to act illegally, does not justify. > > Trash Can Cocksuckers has added insult to injury by retroactively firing me..a notice posted August 31 claims to terminate my employment as of August 19. This is prior to my last day of work for them..they haven't paid me for the hours I worked. > > I don't know if you give a shit, but I want you to know that this has left a sour taste in my mouth about Trash Can Cocksuckers and Tiny Paul Bunyan. He's always talking about how you inspired him to start his business. I sincerely wish him increased prosperity—and I love playing the pinball game in your shop on Main Street, and am not going to stop doing so based on this! But Tiny Paul Bunyan was out of line in this way, in his recent employment of me. The fact that he and his co-owner came into the office smelling like pot, doesn't help me to feel I was being dealt with from a rational point of view. > > Smh, > > Matthew Temple I ordered another G&T. Then I forwarded *that* email to Tiny Paul Bunyan's *wife*. *Booyah!* You may be able to save face, but I'm gonna make you have to *lie* to do it. You might not think a drug addict and hardcore alcoholic would have scruples when it comes to stealing software..but if you get to know us addicts, we're actually very sensitive people and we have much, much thinner skin than the average American criminal CEO. One percent of the American population are psychopaths. Four percent of American CEOs are psychopaths. In fact, CEO is the profession in America that has more psychopaths than any other profession. These are actual statistics. Check TIME and Forbes if you don't believe me. I just think it's interesting that capitalism's most prized position is best done by those who don't care about other people's feelings. As someone who does care about other people's feelings, that makes it hard for me to fit into the working world, in which I have been privy to almost universal fraud, nepotism, failure to report dangerous conditions to a client purchasing a flawed product, theft, illegal discrimination in hiring and firing, wrongful termination, outright theft, and just more crimes than I can mention. I'm not perfect, obviously—but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying when I go to work, I do my best to make something that's efficient, modest, and true. But the people I've worked for, by and large, had different intentions: like: create the shittiest possible product that we can still sell and sell it for as much money as possible to someone who doesn't know how shitty it is. I'm just not down with that. This is what I thought as I got drunk on wine and felt hate for my boss for putting me in the position where I had to choose between my morals and my job. Pudgy-butt fuckhead. Paul Bunyan's midget cousin. I hope he gets trampled by a moose. *Mr.* Brattleboro: everything he said indicated he thought he was the Lord of the Land, that his business buying trash cans from one person at one price and selling them to another person at a higher price was so profound. It's classic American business—if you make a profit, you must be doing something worthwhile. Smh. *That's* your business, *that's* your legacy? You make nothing, you produce nothing, you innovate nothing, you just buy something cheap and sell it high—exactly like Wall Street. Doesn't anyone see that "making money" isn't *doing anything?* Period. It isn't productive, it isn't inventive, it doesn't make the world a better place. You can't "*make* money"—it isn't a thing, so you can't make it. It's just numbers inside a computer and when people look at them, nothing happens. A poem is just letters inside a computer, true, but have you ever read Walt Whitman? Maybe I'm the odd one out here, but I find reading poetry significantly more transformative than scrolling through my bank statement. I was not made for this world—clearly. Drinking at Whitman's, going over the call I had just been a part of. The trash can boss called me and I answered with the software on my iPad, going outside and sitting on the bench..his opinion was that since I threatened to sue him that he *had* to fire me so I was like *ok* and he was like *I guess that's it* and and I said, *yep! that's it!* and I hung up. - - - - Then I went to Fireworks pizza where I could get better drinks. The bartender asked me how my day was going. "Well, I just got fired from my job, so that means I have more time to hang out with you." "Why'd you get fired?" "I got drunk and told my boss in email that I reported him to Adobe for pirating their software..and I did make that report. Then I told him if he fired me over asking me to do something illegal I would file a wrongful termination suit against his dumb oakie ass." "So you've decided to come here and drink some more?" "That is correct." "I respect your decision, sir." Then he told me the drink specials. I re-entered Alice in Wonderland, where, drunk, I found myself randomly talking to an old couple—or lost myself talking to them. They were visiting the town as tourist and we made big friends and were going to keep in touch for the rest of our lives and I was going to visit their cabin in New Hampshire. We had it all worked out. Then I made friends with *everyone* and entertained *everybody*! I met a woman who biked a hundred miles to meet her ex and her kid at this very restaurant and I admired her independence. Unlike me, she stuck to one drink and moved to a table when her ex and her daughter arrived. "I have a new job," I told my bartender. "Already?" "Well yeah, I knew I was going to get fired." "If you knew you were going to get fired, couldn't you have prevented it?" "No without sacrificing my morals—were you listening to my story earlier?" "So what's this new job?" "It's at the Backside Cafe. I start at four." "Shouldn't you get going?" "No, I should have another glass of *wine*." I had two and with everything I'd had already was fairly drunk and my bartender said, "Are you going to be able to work?" And I said, "Ehhhh..I don't know if I'm going to be working that job." "Yeah?" "Yeah." "Want another drink?" "Nah, I better keep moving." ### 46 So I go up the street to Kips, it's crowded, Big Katie is there. I say, "I have this new job that I think you know about." She's all crazy and wild blonde hair and with this military boyfriend and Big Katie..she's like the ultimate host. If they put her on a gameshow the fuckin' world would explode and she's like: "How would I know about it?" And I say, "Because it's at the Backstabbing Cafe. It's the wait staff position replacing that redhead I can't remember what her name is." "Karen. That's my old job!" "I know. But do you want to know what you don't know?" She's holding a shot of Jameson looking all skeptical like, "Uhh..probably not. HEY THOMAS GET ME TWO MORE JAMIES AND COME PULL MY HAIR!!" She knocks back her shot, takes one of the new ones and hands the other one to me. "To whatever you're about to say," she says. And we drink. "THOMAS I TOLD YOUTO PULL MY HAIR!!" Thomas comes over, Katie leans down, and Thomas pulls her hair as hard as hair can be pulled by a sane human being or anyone who's not a baby. "Ooooh, I love it when you do that to me, baby." Katie likes to have her hair pulled—it's a thing. "So anyway these people—the owners—" Katie says their names. "Right. I'm vacuuming their fucking floor and they're talking about you—loud as can be—saying you got fired for stealing—" "I didn't steal nothin' from those motherfuckers." "I know. But here's my angle: they know we're friends. Why are they sitting there talking loud enough for me to hear..about you..on my first night of work there?" "That's fucked up." "I know it's fucked up." "They're fucked up people," Katie says. "You don't want to work for them." "I'm beginning to think the same thing." First, we do another shot of Jameson, because that's the most important thing in the world, then me and Big Kate and Kate's new military boyfriend go outside and I make a call on my iPad. I get their voicemail. I say, "I must politely decline the position we've so recently begun, because when I was there the other night you two trash-talked Big Katie in front of me, knowing she was my friend, and I just can't be a part of that soft of backstabbing, covert, behind-the-scenes kind of bullshit. So, good luck finding another server, but it can't be me." I touch the button on my iPad that ends the call. Then me and Kathy do shot after shot of Jameson (naturally). We get fuckin' wild at that bar =) Kathy says, "I can't believe you did that for me." "I did it for you, yes—but even deeper, Kath, I did it for me." Kathy hugs me. "I can't be part of that shit!" I say, and I slam down an empty shot glass. "THERE'S A MAN WITH INTEGRITY IN BRATTLEBORO," Katie shouts. "You're coming to dinner tonight." As we drank, Big Katie told me her side of the story of what had happened at the Backside Cafe and of course I'll never know what's true. Maybe Big Katie did steal from them. But you don't sit around talking about past employees in front of current employees. You know? It just lets me know that as soon as I'm gone, you're gonna be talking about me, whether what you're saying is true or not. But, really, it's a lot simpler than that: I won't work at a place that disrespected my friend. - - - - That Backside Cafe job is one of a handful of jobs I only worked for one day, and I believe quitting each of them was the right decision. That night I went to big Katie's for dinner. She cooked and she and I drank while her Marine boyfriend abstained. He had been to jail for things he did while drinking and never drank again. And it gave me a role model, even while I was drinking with Katie, of how it was possible for a grown man not to drink. I mean it probably helps if you went to jail for your part in a part fight where you broke an Absolut Peppar bottle over the eye of some kid in a wheelchair because the kid was talking shit about Marines and claiming to have once been an Army Ranger and you know they have all these little rivalries between the branches but judges don't take well to a Marine breaking an bottle of Absolut Peppar over *anybody's* head. The kid in the wheelchair couldn't see after that and he was never an Army Ranger, he was just a kid talking smack to a Marine with a short fuse but you know that Marine sat in jail long enough that he figured out the only crazy things he ever did were while he was drinking, and he made up his mind in that jail cell to stop. "That's nothing," Big Kathy says. "You've hear of the time a guy broke in my house and tried to rape me." "No." "You've *never* heard that story?" "I guess not!" "Well, it was this house. First of all. First of all, can I just tell you that this motherfucker eats such good pussy. Don't you, babe—don't be shy." The marine shrugs. "I like pussy." "See that?" Kathy says to me. "*See* that? A genuine *man* who *eats motherfuckin' pussy*. I need to get my shit *warmed up* before the main event, you know what I'm sayin'?" I nod. "*Anyway*, I wake up in the middle of the night." "When is this?" "This is like..two years ago. So I hear these sounds. And I'm like: that's my window opening! So I wait there in my bed and here comes this ex-boyfriend of mine and he's like gettin' in bed with me and shit and I'm all kicking the stuffed animals off the bed—" *[Katie is like 40 years old]* "—and I fucking dragged that fucking sex fiend out of my room, down this little hallway that's up there, and to the top of that set of stairs you see right there. Fucker was like, '*Ahhhhh!*' and I threw that rapist down the stairs. He yelled '*Ahhhhh!*' *before* I threw him down the stairs—I'll never forget that." "What did he say after you threw him down the stairs?" "He didn't say nuthin'. He was paralyzed from the neck down and he just made these gurgling sounds. I called 911 and they took his ass to the hospital." "What happened to him?" "He's still there, gettin' spoon-fed by nurses unable to move his body because *that's what happens when you try to rape Big Kate*. Motherfucker. I had half a mind when I went to the bottom of them stairs to put my foot on his neck and finish off that motherfucker." We're all cracking up. "Do you know how much this motherfucker likes to eat pussy?" The Marine puts his hand on Kathy's. "I mean, we didn't even *fuck* the first seven times we fucked." "Tell 'im, boo—tell him how you like to eat the bush." The Marine just blushes and smiles. "Don't get all shy on me. You eat pussy, don't you?" Kathy asks me. "Of course, Big Kate, I'll suck your tampon out of your while you're on your period." She pauses for a second, then cracks up, then says, "We'll have to try that!" We all exhale. "My man is so protective. He's not allowed in the Inferno anymore." "Why not?" "Oh, some guy was drinking with me—just a friend, like you—and he wasn't flirting with me or anything—nothing like that. But this guy leans over the bar to pick up our next round of shots and as he leans over that shitty pathetic bar of theirs, his arm grazes my arm, and my man here—he gets very angry—he reaches behind the bar before that fat Inferno bartender could do anything about it and he clocks the guy in the face with a bottle." "No," the Marine says, "that's not why. It's 'cause he kept bumming cigarettes and I thought it was disrespectful." "Like I'm bumming cigarettes from you right now, Katie?" The Marine says, "What kind of man doesn't have his own cigarettes?" And I say, "What kind of bottle was it? Did you hit him with an Absolut Peppar?" And we all start laughing. "That never happened," I say. Kathy and the Marine are falling off their chairs, looking at me, laughing. "Bitch," I say, "shut up and give me another cigarette." Kathy gives me one and we smoke, and drink, and even raise a glass for her ex-boyfriend who is eating blueberry cobbler through a tube down at Brattleboro Memorial as we fucking speak. - - - - Coda: A week later, at the restaurant she got fired from and that I quit on my second day, I saw Katie there, at the bar in the Backside Cafe, with her new new boyfriend—not the recovering alcoholic Marine, but a New Jersey fisherman. The redhead waitress who trained me (I think her name was Sarah) was back there working—she was like the only person in Vermont or New Hampshire who would work for such a shit wage and shit hours with such shit customers and such backstabbing cocksuckers for bosses. I mean except for Sunday brunch, the place was always empty. The only thing good about the place was the owner could make a mean hamburger. So this New Jersey fisherman—who did drink—was there with Katie and you could see in his eyes that he was trying to work out whether me and Big Katie had ever been sexual. I didn't care if he knew that or not. I paid all my attention to him and not to Katie to ease his worries that I was going to reel in his new girlfriend—which was *not* the case. He figured this out pretty quickly and me and Big Katie and the fisherman are all laughing about how fucking funny life is and I get to know the guy and then I really turn on the charm—I can really make people feel good when I decide to—I told him grandly that we would miss Big Kate but if she had to go, I didn't know a finer gentleman to take her away from us. Of course after that he *insisted* on buying me a drink. ### 47 I went out and got even more drunk for like a week. The first day of that week, which was the next day after my dinner at Big Katie's, Tiny Paul Bunyan calls me on the phone over and over and over. I finally pick up and say, "We've got nothing to do with each other stop calling me." Five minutes later he's knocking on the downstairs door of the house that I live in. I sneak down the stairs and see his pudgy butt standing there and I'm like *what is my criminal ex-boss doing at my house???* I make the mistake of opening the door and I discover that the only reason he came to my house was to yell at me..and even when I'm on your payroll you're not paying for the right to yell at me. If you're not paying me anymore *at all*, then you can get the fuck off my porch. He says: "That letter to my role model, that letter to my wife..that's out of bounds, man!" To which I precisely conveyed *these* words: "Fuck you, fuck your role model, fuck your wife..*you* asking me to pirate Adobe Creative Suite..*that's* out of bounds, so yeah, I let 'em know. Bet your wife made you sleep on the couch last night." He steps closer to me. "No sex for Tiny Paul Bunyan!" "You stay away from my wife!" "I've never been *near* your wife!" "Well don't email her!" "I'll do whatever the fuck I want. I'd email your fucking *kids* if they had an email address!" "You're fucking threatening my kids?!" "There was no threat there! There was no threat there. What you need to do is a) develop some critical listening skills, and b) Just fucking watch yourself when you're around town." "What is that supposed to mean? 'Cause it sounds a lot like a threat." "It's not a threat. See (a), above: develop critical listening skills." "So what *are* you saying?" "What I'm *saying* is this is a small town and if I happen to see you out and about with your friends or your lawyer or your stockbroker or your kids, I'm gonna tell 'em what Daddy does for work—fire people who refuse to steal software for his rinky-dink business." "You say a thing to my kids and you're gonna have an accident down by the railroad tracks." "Now *that's* a threat. You're gonna what? Kill me on the Amtrak railroad tracks?" I'm laughing. "Do you know how many people just heard you say that? You fucking faggot. All these neighbors around here..they're just sittin' inside waiting for this to escalate enough for them to call the cops. And when they get here you want me to have six, seven witnesses to you saying I'm gonna *have an accident* by the railroad tracks? Why don't you get the *fuck off my porch* before you say something else you might regret." Fucker is sweating. You can see Tiny Paul Bunyan's tiny heart pounding out of his chest. And I'm not proud to tell you that seeing him that way made me very happy. I yelled him off the porch and down the street (cussing the fuck out of his lingually remedial ass—cussing his pudgy butt back into his Subaru, continuing to cuss until he closed himself inside his little blue cocoon. Then I continued to cuss at that motherfucker because *I don't like it when ex-bosses show up at my door*. He starts his car and I figure I can get on with my day so I head back to the house in bare feet and then the next thing you know, trash can faggot is right behind me at my door. "Have you ever sued your employer before?" "*What??*" "Is this like what you do, move from job to job and file lawsuits? Is that how you make your money?" "*No!!*" "No wonder we had such a hard time getting a reference on you." "The reason you couldn't get a reference is my last boss can't set up his phones without help—he hasn't been getting voicemail for like six months! And let me remind you that *you* couldn't set up *your* phones without me, either! I gave you his fucking email address..did you ever try to *write* the guy? Of *course* you didn't. Because *you can't write*. You can't *write an email* that sounds like it was written by a grown-up. Go ahead: look back in your email. My old boss's email address is in there—I gave it to you when I gave you his phone number. Write him! Ask him if I ever sued him. You two have a lot in common, actually. Neither of you has the brainpower to write a coherent *sentence* in your native language. Yet you're both *big-deal* CEOs of five-person companies and you *can't even set up* your *own fucking voicemail*—*nor* retain employees who can! And please recall I worked *for free* for you *over the weekend* to get the new phone system working so that your piddly drop-ship company would be able to take orders on Monday. I worked, and worked, and worked until every aspect of that phone system was installed—voicemail, menu system, different ringer delays for different kinds of calls, forwarding to your goddamn cell phone—I did it all, and not even a thank you. Recall this: when you found out I had worked over the weekend you scowled at me and said, 'You know Trash Can Inc. doesn't pay overtime,' and I said, like a simple fucking human being, 'I just wanted to make sure we had phones today.' Because I wanted us to be able to *answer the phone* when customers called to we could *take orders* and *make money*. And you were all like, 'Ok, just so you know we don't pay overtime.' When I worked at Mead Research, I was sick one day, and I get a call from one of the VPs, Alan Huber, a guy who always had my back and I always had his—a concept you know nothing about. Alan called me at home one day and said a particular system wasn't working. I went into the office, coughing, in my pajamas, and sat at my desk for the five minutes it took to restart the system. I was sick *as a dog*. I didn't go in because I *had* to, I did it because I'm a team player—and you should know that corporate America rewards a team player like an mob enforcer rewards an errant gangster in *Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead*—by shooting a bullet up your ass. Are you with me 'cause you look a bit confused. *Hello!?* Tiny Paul Bunyan? Are you with me?" "Stop calling me Tiny Paul Bunyan!" "*Anyway*, TPB, there was bullshit that happened at Mead Research, sure, but never at any large company I worked for was there the level of bullshit present at Trash Can Inc. and the other small companies I helped. Alan Huber, highly paid Mead Research VP, treated me like a human being. You, Michael Asshole, aka Tiny Paul Bunyan, CEO of four-employee *loser company* Trash Can Inc., aren't even familiar with the words *please* and *thank you*." I clapped twice, like you would to a dog. "Good luck. Get off my porch. *Bon voyage*, motherfucker!" (That's what Al Pacino says to Robert De Niro in the movie *Heat* and ever since I saw it, I always wanted to say that to somebody.) Michael stood there looking like a camel with drool coming out its mouth. No response. What can he say? He has the lingual skills of a chimpanzee. And that's part of the absurdity of the fact that I'm still speaking: I'm like a cat playing with a mouse—I'm having a great time; unfortunately, you're dead. - - - - Tooler later told me she heard yelling on the porch and was afraid to come out of her room and all I could think about was how delicate Tooler's pussy must be, given her delicate face. She had cheeks that turned red when it was cold, or when she was embarrassed, and I imagined that same peach/pink skin on her inner lips and I wanted to run my fingers along it, lick it, kiss it, love it in every way. "I would lick your pussy for 30 minutes." "How about five?" And then I filed an order with the police saying TPB can't come on the property where I live, and the police hand delivered the order to him at work. You better believe I went to Whit's that day and drank all day. He rushed up to me like he was going to fight me when I answered "Are you really going to sue me?" in the affirmative..haha..that guy was really scared. I hope he gets hit by a bus. No wait, I'm channeling my Deepak Chopra: I hope he becomes a millionaire and feels more and more like a Lord of Brattleboro, served loyally by his minions, selling Trash Cans to Google while stealing Adobe software and feeling proud as fuck about it. I know why people don't like me—it's because I call them on their shit. And I had just started to live there, have my place there, meet people I like. But my job fell apart because I drank and reported my boss to Adobe for cheating, then my boss *came by my house* to have a yelling match? This is after the shooting at the grocery store..for all I know khaki-shorts-bunchy-butt Mr Brattleboro Himself is as crazy as those old fucks who shot each other in the head. "Drop ship"?—so, basically, that means you don't *make* anything (except phone calls). The police report was an order banning him coming within five-hundred feet of my apartment. My boss probably shit his Jordache jeans when the officer approached him *in front of his remaining two employees*, and I bet he threw something once the officer left. That's the kind of company I would never put on my résumé—I have a couple of those—they're such pieces of shit companies that if I were a hiring manager, it would look bad that a candidate ever worked for them. You'd only take a job there if you were really desperate. I wanted to kill that guy, and I told that to the admitting nurse at one of my Refuge stays, which were not that far in the future. She asked me if I had a plan and I said I would stalk him through the woods on one of his fabled hikes and shoot him. She asked me if I had a gun and I said no so they didn't worry about my plan too much. But I do think think this planet would be better off without certain people. My tenth grade math teacher. Some people I've encountered at work. But I would never actually kill anyone. I turn my anger inward, so the only person I'd ever get to kill is me. My general belief is that others deserve happiness but I do not—I deserve suffering. People who are CEOs of companies tend to believe the opposite. Anyway I'm glad I don't work in an office anymore—I can think of a handful of damaged, unmedicated people who have never been to therapy that I can easily imagine coming into the office with an assault rifle and doing that classic thing that we Americans do. Does anyone think of how our sicknesses are related? It seems obvious to me that sensitive, defensive, psychotic people like me exist because of lying, manipulative, borderline personality people like my father and many of my bosses. You know what I'm saying? I'm not crazy in isolation—my family, my workplace, my world is crazy too. And I'm as full of shit as Tiny Paul Bunyan. What about that night I went to the new Metropolis and got drunk, walking out with their bathroom poster rolled up down the back of my pants..just stealing it for the sake of stealing it and then throwing it away in a Refuge trash can. Or what about stealing that twenty dollars from the Professor's wallet? What about the many, many times I've driven drunk? I'm just as much a scumbag as TPB—maybe worse. - - - - That night I couldn't go to sleep because of abdominal/back/side pain. I knew what it was. The next day I calling Gretchen for help. "I have kidney stones. I'm passing one." "Oh, baby! I'm in Amherst. I'll call Tom to pick you up." So Tom, my weird crush Gretchen's husband, picked me up in their car (which was also a Subaru—everyone in Brattleboro drives the same Subaru!) and he took me to Brattleboro Memorial. Poor guy. He worked from home but still. He waited with me in the hospital until they took be back to the ER and was more than happy to wait even longer. I told the miniature saint: "No, thank you. I'll be alright." And Gretchen picked me up that night and took me to dinner at like a Peruvian restaurant or something. It was such a special occasion for her to be able to take care of me, and as codependent or whatever kind of sick we were, it was great to be taken care of—even by someone who truly scared me. Dinner was great, Gretchen was kind, she paid for dinner, and got me safely home. The things a friend does—maybe I just couldn't recognize it. The doctor, after he did an MRI or X-ray or whatever the fuck he did, said it was a small stone. It was not a small stone. I've had kidney stones before. A kidney stone is usually so small (the size of a grain of sand) that you don't even feel it coming out once it gets to your penis *but I felt this fucker* coming out of mine—it was a quick sharp feeling, something like throwing up a razor blade. Also, these "stones" are not smooth like a stone washed clean by eons of water bathing it in a Caribbean sea. No. They are rough like coral, their outsides covered with spiked protrusions that *don't feel so good* scraping along the insides of your urethra. So, no, it was not a small stone. And to the radiologist who said it was a small stone and to the urologist who didn't give me enough Vicodin to last until I passed it: *the next time* I pass a kidney stone, you two are getting on your knees and you are gonna *suck* that stone right out through my motherfucking cock. I hope I stated that in clear, unambiguous language. That night and the next night I took Vicodin to sleep and it worked—I slept all day. Vicodin is such a great feeling, almost like the beginning of cumming, but as you nap..that's probably what cats feel like all the time. Then days later I was barely able to walk to the Hotel Pharmacy to refill my prescription, the pain was so intense. And when I got my refill, I bought a bunch of cheap DVDs at the pharmacy counter, some entertainment mag, and I bought a bottle of water and sat in a chair at the end of one of the aisles, facing the pharmacy counter cash registers and workers, and they knew I had a kidney stone, and I took my pill as directed, and they gave me knowing looks, and I just sat there for a while hurting like hell, putting off standing up as long as possible. Gretchen drove me to the urologist for my followup appointment. The nurse has me piss in a bag and says: "You have A LOT of blood in your urine." And I was like, "Well, most of what you're seeing is beet juice." They don't give me enough Vicodin to finish the cycle of the stone and I know I'll start drinking again to quell the pain. Gretchen and I were standing side by side at the desk when they gave me the urine strainer and the cute little receptionist hopefully encouraged me to "Have fun!" using it! Gretchen and I both laughed. And of course everyone assumed we were together. Gretchen and I talked about this, and it bugged me that she was enjoying it too much. If you looked at the picture above, you know that no strainer was necessary to catch this stone. In fact it was months later when it finally came out and I had stopped straining by then but as you might imagine I had no difficulty in locating it. - - - - One day I was crossing Elliot Street and Alyssa (co-owner of the new Metropolis where I became a shithead for drunkenly stealing their poster)..anyway Alyssa stops her car and she looks like someone's died and she says: "I messed up, Matthew—I really messed up." "What happened, Alyssa?" "Oh," she breathes. She looks mortified. She's actually about to cry. "I was composing this text and I accidentally sent it to Gretchen. And it was about—and I hope you don't take this personally—but it was about how I think Gretchen like hangs on you..like too much..like..kind of stalks you. And I was going to send it to my friend but I didn't realize I was already in a conversation with Gretchen and I feel *terrible* and—" she puts her hand on her chest "—I don't want to be the cause of any problems between you two and I like you as customers *and friends* and you're *two of our most regular customers* and I just feel..I'm so sorry Matthew." "Alyssa," I say. "You're worrying way too much about this. One, it's not going to hurt me and Gretchen. That text is going to have zero effect on me and Gretchen's relationship." "Are you sure?" "I'm *absolutely* sure. Two, Gretchen and I are not going to stop being customers at your bar, ok—that's not going to happen. Because I'll be there—which means Gretchen will be there. So don't worry about that. And three—this isn't going to hurt your friendship with me, certainly—I happen to agree with everything you said." I laugh. "And Gretchen *is* stalking me, so that's good feedback for her to get." "But you don't think she'll stop being friends with me and Alan because of it?" "*No!* I tell Gretchen she's stalking me all the time. I yell at her to leave me alone. I tell her awful things like she behaves like a dog and she *doesn't give a fuck*! She's not going to change her relationship with you because of this because—and don't tell her I said this, but—she's clueless. In her life. She's still living like she's 16, or 24, or somewhere in there, and she's not even going to be consciously *aware* of that text message like you or I would be so I'm telling you, Alyssa, put your car in gear and forget this ever happened because you will never feel *any effects* from this except the ones you make yourself." "Ok, I just feel so bad." "Seriously, don't. You didn't break anything." "Are you sure, 'cause that's what I'm worried about." "I know. And I am sure. Everything is exactly as it was before. Trust me." "Are you going to the bar?" "Yeah." "Ok," Alyssa says. "I'm parking then I'll be right there." "Good, we'll have a drink together." "I'd like that," Alyssa says. "I'm glad I ran into you." "Me too. Don't worry!" I yell as she drives off. I am good for a thing or two once in a while. - - - - In therapy Eve Fox says: "I admire your integrity but I wish you had done what was best for *you*." "And you think that is?" "Keep your job so you can live." "Well," I say. "At the end of the day..at the end of my life..how am I going to feel if I steal *one more copy* of Adobe Photoshop. Who will that make me? And if I'm unhappy with who I am, then how is that what's best for me?" - - - - Drinking at Metro with my G&T and my bottle of Vicodin on the bar. Gretchen asks me if I'm taking those as prescribed. "Yes, of course." I pop another Vicodin. Swallow it with gin. Gretchen reaches for the prescription bottle and I slap her hand. Alyssa is tending bar. She gives me a look, then looks at Gretchen, then back at me. I give her a look that says: *See?* Gretchen brings her bag around the front of her chair and unpacks a whole special cheese and cracker plate she has brought to the Metro to please me. I'm like: "Alyssa, is this ok with you?" Alyssa's all: "Oh, yes, she cleared it with me." I hate when Gretchen controls the situation by serving me my favorite food, but I eat it anyway because cheese, crackers, Kalamata olives, and wine is basically my favorite meal. And Gretchen's taste is impeccable: she brings three cheeses and they're all amazing. I'm talking to a woman on the other side of me and she asks what I do. I say: "Oh, I lost my job, so basically..you're lookin' at it!" Gretchen gets worried. But mostly she gets *offended*—you know? She's concerned but more than that she's *mad* and *hurt* because I didn't tell her first, and we're supposed to be friends. I told a stranger before I told her—that's the problem. There were signs of passing of the rare creature known to you and me only as Stripes—text on the chalkboard outside that said *Coming Soon New York Chef Stripes Whoever New Menu By* and then Stripes is there behind the bar for a few minutes and I get to see what a Stripes looks like and it turns out that—in every movement, in every choice of words, in every efficiency of her dealings with Alan and Alyssa, in her body and in her face and in her expressions and in her voice and in everything she does with it—Stripes is the most wonderful thing I've seen in a year. ### 48 I kept thinking about applying at the City Tavern, this shitty bar at the end of Elliot Street—the bar where I had met Aaron, the quantum physicist *cum* organic farmer *cum* bong constructor—but every time I went to the City Tavern to apply for a job, they were closed..not a good sign for a potential employer. When I finally did catch them when they were open, I ordered a gin and tonic and bantered with the bartender until I got up the courage to ask her if they were hiring. She looked around. There were three people in the bar: her, me, and a guy on the wall behind me drilling holes and setting up tables and unwrapping new chairs like as if, suddenly, out of Nowhere, Goddamn Fucking *Vermont*, huge crowds of college-aged drinkers were doing to descend from the slopes of White Mountain and fill the City Tavern. "Who's that?" I ask the bartender. "That's Fozzie Bear. He's the owner." "Fozzie *Bear*? Like the Muppet?" The guy answers me: "Yes. Like the Muppet. As you can see, Candace—" Candace waves, with a bar rag in her hand. "—Candice makes the wraps, she wipes down the fridges, she pours the drinks, she operates the speed rail in a manner that Dagny Taggart would be proud of—" "Oh, you've read *Atlas Shrugged?*" I say. "Yes I've read *Atlas Shrugged*." He says it like I'm a pure fucking idiot asking an idiot pure fucking question. "Are you a fan?" I ask. The man stops drilling. "No, I am *not* a fucking fan. But I get your pun. Speed rail. Railroad. Atlas Shrugged. Dagny Taggart. So you've obviously read the book—are *you* a fan?" "No," I say. And it was his pun, but I keep that to myself. "You don't think it should be kept on the classics shelf?" Fozzie Bear asks. "No." "Good," he says. "Because if you had come in here asking for a job as a fan of that piece of shit book, I would have taken your fat ass out back and—see this drill?—I would have drilled a hole right there in the side of you fat stomach to remind you that Ayn Rand is a know-nothing piece of *shit* who basically wrote a thousand-page romance novel masquerading as the thinnest piece of propaganda ever to be called 'literature.' " I laugh. "I fully agree, actually." "Well it doesn't matter if you agree or not because I can't offer you a job. The day Candy leaves, you can make the wraps and run the speed rail and haul kegs up and down that stairway there. Candice, give him another G&T on me and get his information." "Thank you," I say, and Fozzie Bear goes back to his construction project. Candice puts a napkin beside my drink and then holds an index finger in the air, laughs at herself, and brings me back a pen. I write my information on the napkin, drink my drink, and leave, supposing that that was a Brattleboro job interview. That was the last day I saw the City Tavern open my whole year in Brattleboro. I heard Candace moved to Eugene, Oregon to study to become a shaman, so theoretically I could have made the wraps and run the speed rail, but the only problem was that the City Tavern just didn't have any customers. Also, if I had thought ahead, I would have known that bartender wasn't the best job for an alcoholic..but I didn't know myself that well at the time. I was still playing the game, the game where I pretend I'm in control of it, that I could work in a bar and not drink. It's sort of an insane optimism. 'Cause you need the job, and if you're in a town where half the jobs a guy can get are working inside a bar, you *have* to believe that somehow it's going to work—when the farthest place you need to be is a bar. When I applied to work at the hipster grocery store, the Co-op (the place where the wine manager shot the general manager in the head on behalf of everyone who ever worked for that GM on account of him being a complete asshole to everyone he ever came in contact with)..right, anyway, when I applied to work there, at the organic/hippie/peacenik grocery store, they had a question on their application. It said: "Can you commit, at the time of your hiring, to work at least two of these three: weekends, holidays, late nights?" Their form suggested I respond with a yes or no answer but I was not just some idiot who had never worked a day in my life. (I was a different type of idiot.) I wrote in the margin: > I will commit, at the time of my hiring, to work any hours you give me, including weekends, holidays, late nights, and any other hours you require, if you will commit to me, at the time of my hiring, that you will give me full time (40+) hours every week so that I will meet the requirement of being a full-time employee and be eligible for the benefits your company offers. Naturally they never wrote me back. They want some high school student who thinks (rightly, given the economic world they grew up in) that all they can ever hope to get, even from what claims to be an upstanding company, is twenty hours a week as a cashier-slash-janitor, with no benefits, in a work environment where the senior-citizen management shoot each other in the head, inside the store, over a personality conflict. It's so important to the middle-class patrons of every hipster grocery store in Brattleboro, Eugene, Portland, Tucson, New Orleans, etc. that they have *fair trade* coffee—buying it makes them feel like responsible consumers. How about refusing to shop there when the most they'll ever give *any* employee is thirty-five hours a week so they can say they offer health insurance for their employees. And they do. Their full-time employees get health insurance. It's just that full-time starts at forty hours a week. And no one *gets* forty hours a week. It's the same thing from the top politicians. Like your President will say, "No more boots on the ground in Syria." Then they do an air attack on Syria. O-*k*..uh-*huh*.. (*Wink wink, nod nod.*) Why not just say, "We're starting a war in Syria." Or: "We don't offer health insurance, punk, unless you're the CEO." Just say it. Just say what's true. Don't give me all this *yes, we offer xyz when certain unfulfillable conditions are met*. You don't offer it. You just don't offer it. And for a company to state their expectations of *you*?—perfectly societally acceptable. But for an employee—a person—to expect something from a *company*?—it's almost universally considered rude, irrational, an obvious mistake. *Of course* the hippy-esque-branded Brattleboro Food Co-op didn't call me for an interview. Because in the same context they were asking me to work weekends, holidays, and late nights, I asked them for full-time hours so I could make enough money to pay my rent. That type of action is unacceptable from an employee of an American corporation. I've worked at incredibly rich hedge funds on the east coast, I've worked at tiny diners in the Arizona desert. Corporations don't give a fuck about their employees—it's just one guy at the top trying to get rich off everybody else's backs. ### 49 Gretchen called, and instead of hanging up and running out of my third-floor apartment and hunting down Stripes like a dog, declaring to her that I could tell from one two-line interchange with her that she was the most interesting person in Brattleboro (besides me) and telling her we should fuck and become inseparable, be the best-matched couple in this odd town of eleven thousand. Instead I took Gretchen's invitation, because I am an idiot. I spent hours hanging out with Gretchen by the river in hidden areas by defunct restaurants (Gretchen mentioning the rocky area below the bridge saying she used to hang out there with her friends and take black and white photos). Then we sat on a bench in an open area where two roads joined together to make Main Street and there was tons of traffic and Gretchen remarked that someone she knows will see us, and it will be a scandal. I didn't give a fuck, and I thought: why do *you* give a fuck? If you don't want scandal, then don't invite scandal by sitting here with me. And if you do want scandal, then don't complain about it when it comes about from your very actions. I sobered up for a week or so. I went to see a lawyer about a filing a wrongful termination suit and I was riding my bicycle past crack houses with people sitting on the porches. They scared me, black and white, and I wondered if I had lost my edge—maybe my days of hiking up to Harlem to smoke crack with black guys were over. But I've spent enough time around drugs and drug dealers and drug users to know that a friendly encounter can turn into *you getting shot* over a minor misunderstanding—and minor misunderstandings are constant among people on drugs. Something in me wanted at least physical safety now. I knew that walking into a crack house was dangerous for anyone who had cash in their pocket—those motherfuckers didn't care, they'd rather rob you than sell you drugs, it was so much less tedious for all of us. I talked with the lawyer. He said unless another employee quit or got fired and was willing to testify with me, that we could never win the case. My Vicodin ran out and the urologist wouldn't prescribe me more (he just never returned my messages—I got his messaging service, she asked if it was an emergency and I was like *have you ever heard of kidney stones*—she was like well I'll see but he doesn't take calls on weekends—*How fucking* convenient *for him!* I say, and hang up) even though that kidney stone was in me for like two and a half months. It was the biggest stone I'd ever passed and I couldn't get appropriate pain medication—and if you think I'm just a drug addict seeking Vicodin then *you've* never had a kidney stone..It's mad pain, bro..I've read message boards where women who've had kids and kidney stones *overwhelmingly* say that kidney stone pain is worse. That's hard for me to believe, but that's the report from at least some women. And if you go back to Libby's theory of pain, it makes sense: childbirth pain normally isn't telling your brain *there's something wrong* where kidney stone pain *is*. The stress of joblessness and just every stress that I could conjure overcame me, and my side still hurt from the kidney stone, so I drank a glass of wine at Frankie's (voted best late-night food in B-boro!..no doubt..it's the *only* late-night food in B-boro). Jane is there drinking wine and I move over to her booth and we share a glass together. I talk about my writing. I say: "I'm going to publish a book." And Jane nods, half-aware, and we have another glass of wine and another and another just to kill the pain. See, yes, addicts are more likely to misuse pain medicine, but when we need it, like when we have a kidney stone, if you under-prescribe the medicine, or if we overuse it, we're going to manage that pain somehow, just as anyone would—and in my case, with kidney stone pain, that meant relapsing on alcohol, which for me is much worse than if I had been able to get more Vicodin from my urologist to get me through the passing of the stone. I don't drive on Vicodin, I don't write crazy emails to my boss on Vicodin, I don't buy Vicodin on the street when I run out of it. You know? You don't want to fuck with Vicodin if you're an addict, but for me, at least, it's much better to manage kidney stone pain with painkillers than alcohol. I left Frankie's and went to the upscale pizza place (Fireworks). There I had a glass of wine, and a glass of wine, and a glass of wine, reading *Jurassic Park* all the while—it's one of my long-time favorites, a comfort book for me. - - - - That night Gretchen came over and I was drunk. I was listening to Cat Stevens, *The Wind*, on repeat and crying. I was so drunk that I didn't want to tell her I was drunk and I didn't tell her and she either didn't know or pretended not to know. I got really friendly and physical with her, pulling her onto my lap and kissing her face and smelling her breasts and touching her body everywhere my hands could reach. She was trying to relate to me on the level of all the Cat Stevens music she had grown up with, when she got this certain album, etc, but all it did was remind me how much older than me she was. Later, she always referred back to this evening and how happy she was that I was so physical with her. I never told her the truth which is that if I wasn't drunk I would have never been that physical with her. I mean I wouldn't have had a married woman sitting on my lap and kissing her neck and shit. That was the alcohol. One night, holding hands and legs with Gretchen at the Central American restaurant while her husband was at the table. He was at the head, Gretchen and I were along one side. Gretchen was the drunk one that night. I tried to split up from them and go to a bar while they were supposed to go home but Tom must have let her go because next thing I know Gretchen's turning up at the bar without her husband. And me trying to hide my drinking from one of the cooks at the Central American restaurant—Gretchen's friend Castro. You don't owe your sobriety to those people, but there is an accountability that's broken when you start drinking again. I remember coming back from the grocery store with wine in a bag and seeing an AA person on the way (someone from the 7am meeting I used to go to all the time). We stood in the street talking and I hoped she didn't see the wine in my bag—I held it high against my chest to hide the bag's contents. Finally she went on her way and I got down to my new profession: drinking wine and eating cheese and smoking cigarettes by the front window of my apartment. I discovered one bottle of wine wasn't going to be enough for me, but when I got downtown I saw that there was no way to get to the Food Co-Op anymore. The whole street, the creek, the bridge, and multiple parking lots were now Noah's flood—full-sized tree trunks were flowing down a creek that was normally six inches deep. CNN was there. Brattleboro got its 15 minutes. And for all the wrong reasons. People died. Houses floated away. Businesses flooded. First the fire then this—it was a bad year for Brattleboro. That morning I walked to the Co-op at 11am for wine and cheese and when Gretchen called me back downtown, the way I walked earlier was flooded like a lake. I hung out with Gretchen, both of us in rain hear, and watched the flooding with the rest of Brattleboro from the top level of the municipal parking lot. We waded across an intersection and waved at her dad—who was her next-door neighbor—Gretchen's friends and neighbors seeing us and us both wondering if that would get back to her husband. The water was brown with mud—you couldn't tell how deep it was. It was hard to understand, since I hadn't been here watching it, how the path I had taken two hours earlier to the grocery store was now completely a river. The trickling creek where I used to meditate was now a Biblical-style river with cars and trucks and huge boulders and pieces of earth rushing down it. Now here's a sad story. An AA woman—an amazing speaker, a strong person—lost her son during that flood. He was around before the flood, and then, after the flood, he was just never around. Ever. Again. The theory is that he went into the woods and took hallucinogenic mushrooms, then couldn't get back home after the flood rose so quickly. He was never found. His mother worked at the Refuge and she was like a pristine spiritual master through it all. She's a person I'd like to be more like. I can't say I'm *in awe* of too many people, but I am in awe of the way that woman handled the loss of her son, at least the public side that I saw. When I want back to my apartment from seeing the flood, wineless, I saw a guy carrying an assault rifle and it took me a minute to remember that you can do that in Vermont. I took another way home because it scared me. I had specific fears that he was after me, and I didn't question the illogic of these fears until much later. One day, hiking to the top of Wantastiquet and looking over the view, looking at the tiny town, I thought: I can do this, I can be homeless here, I can eat meals and sleep at churches, climb this mountain daily, lose weight, and get to this mountaintop. That's all I need for my spirituality, to stand here and look over the peaks of southern Vermont, making a whistle with my hands, calling to a bird that's circling, circling, and it flies right over me to see where the whistle comes from. And it was like a premonition. Before I was ever admitted to the Refuge, I used to ride my bike around the grounds, just watching kids play and seeing people swim in the pool. The only reason I even knew the Refuge existed was that I'd applied for a security guard job there when I first arrived in Brattleboro. Now it was late summer turning into autumn and I was drawn to that place like a magnet—on the most subconscious level, I knew that was where I was headed. ### 50 Let me tell you something. Let me tell you about culture. Culture is one truth embattled by a thousand lies. The lies fight to keep the truth hidden. They are effective for a long time. Then one day in an epoch, that one truth takes hold and almost instantly transforms the culture, smoking out all the lies, clearing the room, then filling it with that one truth. Then that truth becomes the thousand lies. And another truth is born, and buried, within the thousand lies. Here's an example: One of the cultures in the United States is the culture of continual war. The truth is that we are at continual war. The thousand lies are the lack of acknowledgement of the true number of casualties *on both "sides,"* the policy of not showing photographs of the gore and carnage of war in mass media, the absence of declarations of war by congress, the outright lies justifying war in the first place—specifically, that some other country is an actual threat to our well-being. And pervasively, insidiously, the championing of *freedom* and *justice* to subtly program citizens to accept that *we are right* and *they are wrong* (because *they* want to take away our freedom and justice!). And the most unbelievable lie of all: that there is such a thing as *us* and *them* in the first place. If you speak the lie, you are absorbed and loved and encouraged by the culture. You are paid and given food and a house and a uniform to wear. If you speak the truth, you are fought by the bearers of the thousand lies. You are marginalized. People who love you will literally tell you to stop speaking—because if you continue speaking, they will listen, they will see the truth, and the whole floor of their existence will fall from beneath them. If you speak the truth, you will be systematically excluded by family, country, church, and state. The thousand lies are quite literally trying to *kill* the one truth..because the revelation of that truth will kill the lies. That is one example of one culture in one place. And in general, that is what culture is. - - - - I kept seeing my substance abuse counselor, even while I was using—I knew I had a problem and was reaching out for help. It was, though, as they say, too little too late. Before therapy with that woman, each time, I considering jumping out the third story window to kill myself while in the waiting room. The therapist gave me a logic toy to play with one day and that made me very happy and relaxed. There was a point where I was completely out of food except penne and mayonnaise—I ate my penne pasta with Tooler's mayo and cumin for a week straight. I learned to love the taste of this meal (you'll learn to love the taste of anything when you're as hungry I was—the day I got my unemployment check I went hog wild at the bars until there was nothing left to buy food, pay rent, utilities, do all those normal things that people do with money.) I was so lonely I sat at the bar with the professor one night, and that loneliness compounded with hours of listening to the hate speech from that man, subtly directed at every group that he and I were not a part of, was part of why I sought out a very different kind of company that night. All I wanted was some coke—some powder—and if I had found this *might* have turned into quite a different story—*might*. But I found crack instead, wandering outside the new Metropolis to seek action and company. There was a double door there, and one side let up to the drug apartment I had been to before. There was a random black guy who was sitting on the stoop, and I looked at him and I *knew*. I *knew* this guy could get me drugs. Drug people can recognize each other, remember? I sat down next to him and I said, "So, what's going on?" And he said, "What do you mean, 'what's going on?' " And I said, "I mean *what is going on*." And he said, "Can you get money?" And I said, "Yes." Boom. Deal. Done. Double doors. One goes into the Metropolis—high-class people. One goes up to the drug apartment—low-class people. And I was both, an artist, one of those dangerous people who mix with all classes. And in that moment, I switched tracks, walking out on the Professor and all that is high class and walking in with my new friend, who would take me on a journey I will never forget. I was already drunk, though at this point in my story that probably goes without saying. Black dude introduces himself. Let's just say his name was: "Kevin." "Matthew." Kevin makes a call. I hit an ATM that's right down the street. We get into a car. We drive to a hotel. I stay in the car Kevin's friend is driving while Kevin goes upstairs to a certain room and buys crack with the money I gave him. Naturally he divides it into two packs and holds back half in a certain pocket in his jeans, then he comes out, slaps me on the shoulder, and grins. "It's on." I smile. On our way to the next destination, Kevin and I have a discussion that reveals to me he didn't buy powder, he bought rocks, he didn't know I wanted powder and rocks are all they had anyway. "It's good," I say. Whatever. At this point I don't care what we do as long as we do *something*. Fuck it. - - - - The car drops me and Kevin off at yet another apartment and we walk up a zillion stairs to like a fourth or fifth floor apartment, some maze, then back to this door which Kevin knocks on. They let us in. It's two people in the house: a man who looks like Victor from *Se7en* lying face down under a thin quilt, sweating. As soon as he hears Kevin's voice he's like: "Whoah man, who is this." "This is Matthew. He's cool. Can we use your house?" Of course we can use their house—'cause all four of us are getting high off the crack I bought. This is just part of how it works. They get something for providing a safe house for us to do it in. The skinny guy—it's the skinny guy and his wife or girlfriend—he opens a box on the coffee table and he's got needles inside. He shoots up something—I'm not sure what—and he sees me eyeing his needles a little too fondly. Then we smoke crack. The four of us smoke crack all night. And Kevin pumps me for my money. He has way more crack on him than the retail value of what I supposedly bought earlier, so every hour or so we send someone out on a bicycle with my ATM card to get another two-hundred dollars. Then! Magically! Kevin has more crack! "So, Matt, what do you do?" "I write. Like novels and stuff." "Give me the address. Give me the address! I know you have it on the internet!" I give her the address to *Things Said in Dreams*. She prints out the entire thing. "It's easier for me to read things on paper," she says. "I'm the same way." Giving your ATM card and PIN to a complete stranger isn't something you'd do normally. It is something that you'd do on crack. Then later when it was me going out on this decrepit bike around 4am to empty my bank account, leaving my bag with my iPad with a bunch of drug people *who are on crack right this minute*..is not something I would normally do. I rode that bike in crazy circles thinking *what have I done* and being scared the cops would see me and question me..be sitting in their car somewhere waiting silently for someone like me to come along. I was hardly able to ride the bike I was so sore from clenching from the crack. And if you want to know what crack feels like..let's say you had a thermostat that instead of controlling the air, controlled your stress. The first hit off that glass pipe is like turning down the thermostat on your stress. Everything gets low..cool..quiet..all your problems have just gone away. That doesn't last. You get paranoid. Like skinny dude got paranoid about *me* in the early early morning and I had to leave because this motherfucker thinks I'm a cop. The genuine heart in these three felt bad I had emptied my bank account for us all to get high (and I'm sure they still had more for the three of them once I left) so they hatched a scheme where I would become a drug dealer with them so I could win all my money back. In their presence I was like: *Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Thanks for you consideration!* In my own mind I was like: *What the fuck?! That's never going to happen. I might be stupid enough to use drugs but I'm not stupid enough to become a drug dealer!!* I finally left when the sun came up and everyone is so sketched out about me because I'm a stranger that I figure I'm about to get shot. I walked back in the early dawn, sobering up. Oh yeah, sobering up off crack is not a pleasant thing. In fact it's almost impossible to do by yourself, that's why people start one day and then smoke continuously until they have no money, no car, no job, no house. I've smoked crack three times in my life, and every time it was followed by a breakdown—complete destruction of my job, apartment, city I live in. Crack is a very bad drug for me. And I hate crack. I'd much rather feel the effects of powdered cocaine, which by the way doesn't destroy my life after one night of using. Not saying it's good for me—but crack is worse. My normal paranoia was on red alert: when I left my bag at the crack apartment to get cash, I thought that they might look inside and see the iPad and—not steal it, but—think I'm recording them like I'm an undercover cop or some shit. They prob'ly never thought to look in my bag. They didn't steal my iPad. They didn't kill me for thinking I was an undercover cop. When I was at their house—at the beginning—it was like we were all friends. I felt like I was with people who understood me, who weren't concerned with silly rules like *crack is illegal* or *drugs are bad for you* or any of that bullshit. These were real people: they cared about my book, they liked art, and they understood that *every once in a while you've just gotta smoke some crack*. By the end of the night I felt significantly differently. Instead of six-hundred dollars in the bank I had zero. Zero dollars and zero cents. I had been here before. No money. No job. I called my ex-sponsor from the attic apartment, physically cramping, feeling like the inside of a skeleton, like not even sleep could cure this, and asked his voicemail if I should try to get into a detox program at the Refuge. He called back later and said yes, but I was already on my way down to the Refuge. My sponsor said, "You can get crack in *Brattleboro*?" "Yes." "I didn't know you could get it this far north." "Well, you can." "Was it good?" "If it wasn't *good* do you think I would have spent *my entire bank account* on it in one night? I fucking *hate* crack, but yeah, I guess, as crack goes, it was good crack!" Motherfucker. *Want me to call you next time I find some???!* I called the Refuge and their detox center barely wanting anything to do with me because I had only used crack one night and my alcohol relapse was like a week or two old. They didn't want to admit me because cocaine has no physical withdrawal—basically I could have slept it off with a short nap—and in their eyes, my recent alcohol usage was *nothing*. But I told them this was part of a much larger problem and there had been periods where I had drank or used cocaine for much longer. "I'm just not sure you meet the GAF for admission." "Listen to me. I need your help. I feel like I'm gonna die." So they admitted me, and I walked there that morning, sore at every step from the crack. ### 51 I was physically uncomfortable during the admitting process. A physician's assistant tirelessly asked me his million questions he had to ask me before the let me in the detox unit. "What day is it?" he asked me." "Wednesday?" "It's Sunday." I laugh. "Well, I'm recently unemployed, I have the luxury of not knowing what day it is." He didn't find that funny. "So you did crack last night and you've been drinking alcohol." "Yes." "We're gonna need a piss test." "The nurse already gave me one." "Ok..excellent." He checks it off his list. We go through a million other things that I'm not gonna go into. The actual detox process consisted of being on a 20-bed unit where they took your vital signs it seemed like once an hour. They measure your detoxification symptoms for whatever drugs you're detoxing from. They give you drugs to help you detox safely—in the case of alcohol, Librium. I only got one or two Librium because I did't display alcohol detox symptoms—I wasn't shaking, wasn't experiencing delirium tremens, and there is no physical detox protocol for cocaine, so..according to them I was well the moment I walked in the door. But I didn't *feel* well, and that's how I convinced them to admit me. They get all kinds of detoxers there—alcohol, heroin, opiate pills, but the most dangerous drug to detox from is alcohol—it's the only common street drug where stopping it suddenly can kill you. I learned that in one of my classes at the Refuge. We had art class, meals, but mostly we slept and went to drug abuse education classes, where we were taught how addiction works and what an uphill battle we were going to have to fight to overcome it. One doctor calculated, roughly, the number of times we had successfully taught our brains that using a drug would make us feel better. Then he said we were going to teach our brains roughly the same number of times some other ways to feel better—we each had a hell of a lot of unlearning to do. There was about one staff member per person. The staff were incredibly organized and efficient—one of the most well-functioning teams I have ever seen in any context. They were cohesive as hell—I was jealous I never worked on a team that functioned so well *as a team*. They were truly a crew, like a crew of sailor Everyone had everyone's back. Their paperwork moved from location to location like the cogs in a machine. Tyler 1 for me was classes, discussion, making friends..that's basically all you do in detox. Tyler was the name of the building. One was the floor we were on. Other floors were used for different categories of psych problems (and the Refuge considers addiction a psych problem). - - - - When I first got there I was put in a room with two other guys. One was this crazy kid (he was in his mid-teens so he was a kid to me). He was in detox yet had brought a bunch of drug culture books with him to read all day (he skipped the classes) and he was like reading aloud from them to me and the other roommate and he was so excited to read about celebrity drug use and celebrity overdoses. This detox was just a perennial trip for him, insisted on and paid for by his parents. After a day, the nurses asking me if I wanted my own room. I said, "No I'm ok for now." My roomie was like, "I'm getting high the minute I get out of here." He had pills *in his car* in the Refuge parking lot, he claimed—this fucker was going to drive home from detox high. On my multiple stays at the Refuge, I learned that for some families, this was just a high-cost way for the parents to feel like they were doing something about their children's drug problems. They didn't actually talk with them or check with them or spend time with their kids, they just paid shitloads of money to send their kid to the Refuge for a week—throw money at the problem. - - - - About the time I thought they were going to kick me out for not being toxified enough, they had me talk to a psychiatrist. Her name was Dr. Joseph. She took me to a small room with two chairs and a desk. We sat on the same side of the desk. Dr. Joseph asked me if I'd ever been in a psych hospital before. I said, "Yes." "You look startled." "I just..I forgot that I had been to one before. I haven't thought about that in a long time." "Did you receive any diagnosis there?" "Bipolar disorder." It was the oddest feeling. I received my diagnosis back then and then years passed and the idea that I had bipolar disorder faded away, until now. While meeting with Dr. Joseph, I recalled that I had been hospitalized in LA after calling a suicide hotline, and that I was diagnosed with Bipolar II. "Oh yeah, it's all coming back to me. I never thought about it all these years. I remember how I got there..I was manic programming..just left work and programmed on my own projects at home for about a week. I was drinking potato vodka with orange juice and watching *The Truman Show* on repeat for the whole week. Then I was in an overcrowded holding room with so many patients..so many..we were sleeping on the floor—they kept us sedated. I saw my friend Ashley through hurricane glass talking with a doctor." "What's hurricane glass?" "It's that glass that has crisscross wires in it so if it breaks the fragments don't fly all over the place." "Oh. Sorry. Please continue." "Then my friend Ashley leaves—we wave through the glass. The doctor comes to me and says you're all detoxed from the alcohol and you didn't even show any withdrawal symptoms (I never do) and—he says—we were going to let you go and basically you had us convinced you weren't really suicidal without the alcohol but your friend—Ashley?—told us that you're very smart and very good at manipulating what other people think of you..and she said you'd tell us whatever we needed to hear in order to feel like letting you go was the right thing..so..we're going to keep you here for some more observation. I was a little miffed to have Ashley in my business but even then I knew she had done the right thing, and that it was a true act of love. I was never mad at her. That was my first serious mania that I know of—probably just the first one I was hospitalized for. Horrible detox (even though I showed no signs). Diagnosis. Prescription—Lamictal. Calm period. Medicine runout. And spiral down. I played Yahtzee! in that hospital with a homeless woman and a young guy who was there voluntarily, waiting to get into a residential rehab. The homeless woman said she'd stayed in Valley Village—which is where I lived!—and we exchange info and I told her she could shower or stay with me or get food or water anytime. And we talk about getting drinks even though we're both supposed to be sober as part of our programs. She tells me a secret: she's not hearing voices even though that's what she tells the doctor..she just wants to stay off the street as long as possible, so she pretends she's schizophrenic. How fucked up is that? And I came out of there a week later with a diagnosis of Bipolar II—fucking *panel* of psychiatrists gave it to me. I didn't really understand how having bipolar disorder would affect my life until..actually I don't even think I understand it now." In fact it would take scores of psychiatrists, ten or so trips to the ER, seven admissions to the Brattleboro Refuge, three other inpatient psychiatric stays, one cry-for-help suicide attempt, many days crying in bed all day long, a lot of reading about bipolar disorder, and a detailed review of my past through the bipolar lens—all this over a period of about ten years—to start to admit that the diagnosis applied to me. I still don't believe it all the time. "Do you have problems with gambling?" "I know you're using that question to try to eliminate a diagnosis of bipolar disorder." (They say gambling is one of the signs of bipolar mania.) "I used to go to my meth dealer's house and play internet poker for three or four days in a row. We both had good incomes so it didn't matter if we lost ten or twenty thousand dollars. Sometimes we made money, high fived, and bought ourselves more meth (from ourselves). Does that count as gambling?" "I think so." "I thought so, too." "What else has been going on this year?" "Maybe," I say, "there's no place in this world for the words 'gay' and 'straight' anymore. Nor 'lesbian.' Nor 'bi.' Isn't everybody bi?" I remembered my meth experience with my neighbor in Hollywood, experience with the Professor, and waking up in Dayton one night, drugged, with Jimmy sucking my dick and forever taunting me that, "You had no trouble getting hard." "There was that scientist guy," I said, "from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base who was gay and I let him rub lotion on my back. Manipulation by older gay guys." "What do you mean, manipulation?" "Like Jimmy saying of me that anyone who shaves their head wants to be fucked by a man. Don't you find that an idiotic statement? I do. Then there's the Professor fingering my asshole and sucking my dick after getting me drunk and maybe drugged. "Who's the Professor?" "I drank A LOT at that time and I was never as cloudy as that night once the Professor filled me a new drink while he was in the kitchen and I couldn't see what he was doing..the point is I'll never know..and he asked me to hide in the bedroom while he had a rug delivered the next morning. He said if he needed help with the delivery man moving the carpet that he would come get me and I should just say I was his nephew." "Matthew, slow down!" "He was *very concerned* that someone would see me at his house. He was already pissing off his neighbors by bringing over young men every night. He fucked monks, college students, homeless kids—everyone. His pretense was that we were all his drivers—which technically we were." "Do you want a cup of water?" "I'll take a coffee if you're going out there." "I don't think coffee is a good idea for you right now." "No, I guess not." "Water then?" "No thank you." The doctor flipped a page in her notebook. "Do you have any family history?" "Family history?" "Yeah, any family members with mental illness?" "*Mental* illness? Yeah. All of them. I have two cousins, twins, and there's hush hush talk about them both having drug problems, maybe bipolar, but I can't get any information about it because it's a taboo topic in the family. A cousin, maybe. You can't get any straight answers. Plus my dad cut me off emotionally so I'm pretty much in the dark about that whole side of the family." "I understand. Let's start with with your immediate family." "Let's *start* with my immediate family! Let's do. Let's start with my dad, he's a key figure. Absent father, workaholic—absent emotionally. Diagnosis-by-proxy from my sister's therapist is conjecture of course but says he probably has borderline personality. That anything he ever got *right* with us was *by accident*. Um. Sent me to a shitty college and when I dropped out and came home my parents were divorced and it was just me and my dad, eating hot dogs for dinner and watching soft core porn shit like *Consenting Adults*—have you seen it?" "No." "Well don't bother, it's a shitty picture." "Anything more about your dad?" "Sure. He made us shower with him until we were..too old to be showering with your dad." "This is with you and your sisters?" "Individually, with at least me, and also with my oldest sister." "Any sexual abuse?" "Not that I recall, unless you count staring at your dad's cock while you're forced to take a shower with him sexual abuse." "Did he make you touch his penis?" "Not that I remember." "Did he touch you inappropriately?" "I don't think so. But he would do stuff like this: one time me and my sister—this is much later—we're driving in the snow on some highway outside of Dayton, Ohio, and the van breaks down. We can't restart it—we don't know shit about cars. So we huff it up the road in the snow, find some lawyer's office full of a bunch of really unhelpful assholes who we had to practically *con* into letting us use their phone. This is two high-school kids. Before cell phones. We finally get ahold of my mom on her pager number. They're at lunch with a bunch of church people. They eventually show up in the other car. My dad's like, 'Where's the van?' and I'm like, 'It's just back that way a little bit,' so we drive back the way we came and Joanne and I must have walked longer than we thought because the van is *not there*." "Maybe it got towed," I say. My dad's hands tighten on the steering wheel. His foot grinds the accelerator into the floor. We speed down this snowy highway, twenty miles an hour over the speed limit, but the broken-down van doesn't show. "Could you have walked *this* far?" my dad says. "I don't think so." Thirty seconds later: "Could you have walked *this* far??" "I don't think so." "Well *where* is this lawyer's office you're talking about?" "I don't know but if you let me drive, I can get us there." No response from dad. My mom, seated next to him, says: "Why don't you let him drive." My dad hits the brakes, the steering wheel, and his window at the same time. The Honda fishtails and comes to a stop alongside the highway. Everyone is quiet. My dad is in the driver's seat with his head leaned back, eyes shut, radiating stress like we just lost the Challenger. Mom is in the passenger seat, relaxed except that her chin is resting on the palm of her hand. She's staring out the window looking the opposite direction as my dad. Joanne and I are in the back seat. We look at each other and she makes a tiny shrug and an even tinier smile—it's so tiny it only involves the subtlest crack in one corner of her mouth. I know what it means. It means: *Well, bro, we could be here a while.* Now the argument takes place between my dad and mom, instead of with Dad and me. They decide to go home and call impound lots. Dad calls every lot in town and no one has towed a blue van. Leona—my littlest sister—gets home from a sleepover and sits on the second floor with her face pressed against the stair railing. She has gotten home just in time for the best part of the argument, in which my dad says to me: "Matt. Were you the one driving?" "Yes." "So you were responsible for the vehicle." "If you just give me the keys, I can take us back to where it is." "So you know where it is." "Of course." He hands me a scrap of paper. It's actually exactly one-fourth of a piece of paper, scrap paper with advertising printed on the other side, that my dad has rescued from the recycle bin..god forbid we *recycle* when we could have *re-used!!* "Write down how to get there." He hands me a pencil. "I can't write with this." My dad's face turns a shade redder. "Matthew, I want you to *write down* how to get to the van. Then I'm going to take you in the Honda and I'm going to fix the engine—" "I'm not getting in a car with you." "Why not?" "Because you're angry. I'm not getting in a car with you behind the wheel while you're this angry. It's not safe. I won't do it." My dad looks like he's going to shit a fucking *dinosaur*. My mom is in the kitchen, making something. I don't know. She's doing something to keep herself from getting involved, because she knows that if she, her husband, *and* their first kid ever got into a fight all at the same time, it would be very much like assembling a critical mass of plutonium. Joanne is upstairs with Leona. Joanne is doing insane ballet stretches where her legs form a straight line against the stair railing, one going this way, one going that way, and the whole of her is lying on the floor. "Matthew, get in the car." You can tell he wanted to say "fucking" but he censored himself. If he had said "fucking" to his son right there, Mom would have gotten involved. "Get. In. The. Car." "I already told you I'm not getting in the car while you're angry so if you want to cool down we can re-discuss this in half an hour or you can let me drive. Those are your options but I am not going to risk my life while you're driving angry." Dad starts to speak again, but instead he goes out the front door and *slams* it—which is difficult to do with a very heavy, 1920s wooden door in a tight-fitting door frame. I sit down on the stairs and do controlled breathing as I've noticed my heart rate's gone up. Dad comes back in not five minutes later. "Is it on highway seventy-five?" "I don't know." "Is it on highway seventy?" "I really have no idea." "Well is it on highway six-seventy-five." "Dad, I don't know." "How can you not know where it is if *you* were driving?" "I don't look at the signs." "What do you mean *you don't look at the signs?* How can you know where you're going if you don't look at the signs??!!" "I just know what things look like." "Well was it west of the lawyer's office?" "The van?" "*Yes!* Is the van *west* of the lawyer's office?" "I have no idea, Dad, I don't think in directions." "WAS IT SOUTH OF THE LAWYER'S OFFICE??!!" "Van." That's my mom from the other room. My dad's name is Van. "What?" my dad says to her. "Please don't raise your voice when talking to our son." "I'm just trying to figure out where—" "Just don't yell at our son." My mom said this very quietly, but even Joanne and Leona heard it in their perch, upstairs. My dad might have the loudest bark, but my mom has the sharpest bite. You really don't want to wake that sleeping dog. And I didn't know it at the time, but they were both forming me, in this argument and many like it, to be something of a dog myself—one with the looks of a chihuahua, the smarts of a border collie, and the bite of a pit bull terrier with rabies and AIDS. At this point I'm trying to unlearn all that dog knowledge I learned from my family and become a proper human being. But it's hard, you know, the earlier you learn something, to unlearn it. Dad decided to lower his voice to keep my mom in the kitchen. There are knives in the kitchen. But he does point his finger in my face when he speaks. "I want you to give me directions to the van so that I can go and get it." I speak to his finger, not his face, since he thinks it's so critical to point it at me. "I don't think we're speaking the same language about directions. I don't think of directions in terms of east, west, south, north—" "Weren't you ever taught to use a compass?" "I can use a compass. Ok? We've done plenty of compass exercises at camps. A compass is not going to get us to the van." "Well can't you at least tell me the name of the *highway*?" He sounds desperate, like a starving child asking for a single pea to salve his hunger. "I don't know what highway it's on." "Well Matthew, I just don't *understand* how you can be driving, and lose a vehicle, and not even know *what road you're on*." "Dad, I am trying to help you. But something you're going to have to accept, if we're going to make progress in this conversation, is that you think in east, south, north, and west and in names of highways and I think differently. I think about how it looks: I can drive you to the van—if you would just let me drive—or I might be able to give you directions like: go here, look for this, turn left, go, look for that, turn right. You know what I'm saying? We think differently." He whines again: "But *how is it* that a grown man doesn't know if the van is *north* of six-seventy-five or *south* of six-seventy-five?? How can you even *drive* if you don't know that? How do you reliably get to your destination?" "Because I just think about it differently than you, Dad." "But *north or south* is a basic fact!" "No! It's not!! It's a paradigm!" "Matthew, are you telling me *you don't know directions!?*" "It has nothing to do with directions!" I yell. Dad gets real close to me. "WHY CAN'T YOU TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW??" Now my mom is in the room. "Van." Dad turns to her. "He's right," she says. "It's not a matter of directions. He can get places—he knows *directions*. He drives all the time and he gets from here to there and back again. He doesn't get lost. I think if you just let him drive you to the van then you can call a tow truck and you can describe to *them* the location of the van however you like." "Alright, Matt, go get in the car." "Give me the keys." "What?" "I'm not getting in that car with you behind the wheel." "Matthew, *get* in the FUCKING *car*!!" "I don't think so." "Then go to your room. "I'm not going to my room." "I TOLD YOU TO GO TO YOUR GODDAMN ROOM." "You know what, fuck you." "Fuck me?? Fuck me?? Do you still want to go to the Christmas dance?" "The Christmas dance is not on the table just because you won't let me lead you to the van—" "Oh yes it is on the table." "Mom, is the Christmas dance on the table?" Mom answers. It sounds like she had her mouth full: "No. Not on the table." My dad looks like a slug that just had salt poured on it: he's trying not to be fatally turned inside out, but it's inevitable. He fucked himself in this argument. He wants to yell. He wants to hit. But we don't hit in this family, we use our words. They may not be nice words, but he knows if he hits me, I won't bother with hitting him back, I'll call the police and he'll spend the night in jail. I don't believe in half measures. It's either full patience..or the nuclear option. "Ok, fine," my dad says. He hands me the keys. "You drive." "Not while you're angry." "I said YOU DRIVE!!" He hits the keys out of my hand and they fall on the floor between us. "I'm not getting in a car with you while you're angry whether you're driving or not." "MATTHEW!!!!!!!" "It's not safe. I'm not going to participate in an activity that might get one or more of us hurt just to find the van. We locked it. It's fine. If you take an hour or so to cool down and I determine that you're in a decent state to ride as my passenger in the Honda, then that's what we'll do. Your other option is you can let me and Joanne take the car, we'll find the van, we'll either write down directions that are acceptable to you or we can call the tow truck from the lawyer's office. If they're still open. They might not still be open. What time is it now?" "Three-thirty," Joanne yells from upstairs. "Yeah," I say. "They prob'ly won't be open much longer." "Matt, if you're not outside in that car in thirty seconds then—" "Then *what*? What are you gonna do? You have no leverage in this situation and you fail to see that *I'm trying to help you*. Let's go back to zero. The van is stuck in the snow, broke down, engine busted—whatever. We all want the van back. Do you think I *want* the van to be stuck in the snow unavailable to us to go do fun things as a family?? No, I am standing here giving you *options* that will get the van back, and you are *refusing* those options because *you want to be angry*. I think you just like being angry. But you are accomplishing *nothing* by acting out your anger toward me—are you getting the van back? Are you forcing me to ride in a car with you while you drive angry? Are you preventing me from taking Nadja to the Christmas dance in that van? No. That van will be found and fixed and *I'll be driving it* to the Christmas dance and I'll be dancing with my girlfriend no matter *what you do*." I laugh. I kick the keys toward the front door and laugh some more. "So go ahead. Fuck you. You wanna hit me? Go ahead *and do it*. You wanna yell? Let's yell. Let's get good and mad and make *zero progress* at getting the van back. You know what I think about sometimes, Dad?" "What, Matthew?" "I think about the fact that you have a bachelor's degree in psychology and I wonder if you are applying anything you learned from your studies to this conversation—because it doesn't seem like it." Dad rubs his face. There's a vein in his forehead that's thick as a pencil. I wonder if he'll have an aneurysm. "You and your mother, you talk so much. Sometimes I can't take it. You talk and talk and talk and you can't give me *simple directions*! I just want to get the van and make sure it's ok! I don't want it sitting there on the side of the highway. It could get hit. People could steal it. Are you sure you locked it?" "Yes, absolutely—the van is locked." "Is it in the lane or did you pull off onto the shoulder?" "It's fully in the shoulder." "Was it smoking?" "No. There was no smell of anything burning. The engine temperature was fine—right down the middle. It's like a belt or a battery or something." "It wouldn't be the battery if you were already going." "Dad, I'm not a fucking mechanic." "I'm just *tired*," my dad says. "I'm tired of arguing with you. I'm tired of arguing with your mother. I don't have the capacity to go around and around just to learn that my son doesn't know basic directions." See? That's the thing about my dad. He doesn't want to solve the problem. He wants to make you feel bad. And at that point, I'm a senior in high school, I didn't have decades of experience dealing with self-serving assholes that need about fifty years of therapy before they can have a respectful conversation with their offspring. And, unfortunately, that person, my dad, was one half of my major role models, so my ability to deal with him was mostly *learned from him*, with what little intelligent twists I could put on it—which is to say, I didn't have the tools to be an adult in this situation. My dad didn't. I didn't. His insistence that my directional methodology was inferior to his really hurt my feelings. Of course I wanted his approval. I still do. I just finally figured out, sometime in my thirties, that I was never gonna get it. But back then, disapproval from my dad hurt a lot. Intentional, wheedling, proactive, hurtful disapproval of how I think about directions—what an arbitrary facade under which to attack your son. "Are you aware that women and men think about directions differently?" My dad leans against the bannister. "Typically men think in cardinal directions and women think in what you might call street sign directions. But that dichotomy is not completely accurate. Some people *feel* directions in a way that might seem paranormal to you but they're actually using one of the senses that isn't listed in the classic list of five senses. There are all kinds of ways to think about directions. I do it visually. I've never been lost in the woods. If I go to a place, I can always get back. I know what things look like. I remember specific trees. I remember *rocks*—a tiny little rock in a stream, I see it, I know I've been here before. I've never been lost in the city, either—I remember what everything looks like and *I never read the street signs*..they have *nothing* to do with my directional thinking, they help me *in no way*, they add *no information* to my directional knowledge and yet I never get lost. Joanne and I wandered around Philadelphia *all the time* when we lived there and we *never* got lost. Not one time. We took twenty-block detours to the main library, rode different trains than we were used to..one time I took the spur train by accident and ended up in Chinatown instead of Masterman, the Spring Garden stop. I came up the subway stairs into a part of the city *I had never seen* before. I was in the *fifth grade*. I just looked around and I *knew* which way to go. I was late to school, but I was never lost. I've never *been* lost. So you characterizing me as someone with bad directional skills is ignorant." "Wha'd you say?" "It's ignorant. It's ignorant of the facts!" "I just can't win with you, Matt—you or your mother." "That is because *you are in the wrong* and you are trying to defend *an indefensible position*." "Why do I feel like I'm always in a courtroom when I talk to you." "Well, I'll give you a hint." "What's that?" "I don't talk like this to everyone. I only talk like this to people who need to be disciplined, corrected, and punished for their wrongs." At this point my dad is a grenade with no pin. "Discipline! That's what we did wrong!! MY DAD BEAT US WITH A STRAP!!" "WELL YOU SPANKED US!" "MAYBE WE SHOULD HAVE DONE MORE!!" My dad rushes me like we're about to have a physical fight. I don't do physical fights. His hands look like they're going to my neck. He brushes my shoulder with his arm. "Don't the fuck you touch me!!! Do not fucking touch me. If you fucking touch me again.." "What?" My mom comes in from the kitchen. "What is going on in here?" "Dad, I am asking you to step back from me. You touched my shoulder in an attempt to grab my neck and you should know that physical violence is where I draw the line. Mom, I'm serious, if he touches me I will call the cops and it will be a long time before anybody sees that van again." My mom says, "Van, come over here." "And I'm going to tell you both something, while I have you here. Mom, this applies to you as fully as it applies to him. I'm tired of all the church hypocrisy that goes on around here and I am *instructing* you to stop the hypocrisy right now." Mom says, "What hypocrisy are you talking about?" I say, "When we managed to get ahold of you from the lawyer's office, and you returned the page, and I told you that Joanne and I were stranded in the snow, did you come right away or did you finish your lunch at J. Alexander's?" "We—" "It's ok I already know. 'Cause we waited at that lawyer's office for close to two hours. So I know you didn't come right away. You waited. You had your food. You answer, with your actions, what's more important: your kids or your church." "That's not fair—" "I'm not done. *We* should be your highest priority, not those hypocritical assholes who Jesus would *never* have lunch with. Do you think Jesus would have said, *Hold on, kids, we're going to order a ribeye and* then *we'll come rescue you from being* stuck in the snow *in the middle of Buttfuck, Ohio with a bunch of lawyers..those fucking assholes wouldn't even let us use their* bathroom*!!* Guess they thought we were gonna steal some toilet paper. If I had kids lost in the snow I'd be *right there*. You can eat at fucking J. Alexander's *any* day. It's not every day your kids have a car break down on them when one of them is a *new driver* and the other doesn't even *have* a driver's license! *Did it ever occur to you that we might be* scared*??!! Walking along the side of the highway in knee-deep snow without jackets 'cause we thought we were just picking up a pair of dance shoes, not going on a five-mile survival trek!! That we're doing the best we can to get the fucking* van *back!!!??* So *fuck you*." (That was for my dad.) "And fuck *you* for valuing your stupid church people over your own children. *We needed help.* *You weren't there for us.* That's a problem. It's a problem with your parenting and it's a problem with your value system and it erodes the credibility of your religion, when a pastor of a church has such a low estimation of her kids!!" "That's not right—" "I'M NOT FINISHED. Ok? So you two listen to *me* right now. One: I will not be going to church with you ever again. That means Sunday worship, youth group events, Thanksgiving dinners, small group Bible study *bull*shit..I don't care what it is, I'm not going. There should be no argument about this since Joanne already skips church events to go to dance practice, so you have no logical reason to try to force me to go, given the precedent of Joanne not going." "I'm not going, either," says my littlest sister Leona, from the balcony. Mom fumes at me. "Leona, can we talk about you separately." "Fine," she says. "But I'm not going." Mom tilts her head at me—not happy. I just shake my head..very slowly. "This is bullshit, what's been going on in this house. And you.." (I point to Dad.) "..are not in control anymore. You have shown yourself to be incompetent at controlling a household and being a father and at showing love so guess what, *I* am taking over control of this family and *you* will follow *my* rules from now on." "It doesn't work that way," my mom says. "Oh yeah?" I say. And I walk up the stairs yelling about hypocrisy and idiocy and paradigms of thinking about directions and how *fucking stupid* it is that lawyers are working on a Sunday—it shows what scum suckers they are. By the landing halfway up the stairs I smeared rhetorical shit all over the institutions of both church and law and by the time I reach the second floor where Joanne lies zen-like on the carpet doing her stretches, I have informed my parents that The New Rule of Law is here and anything they do, I will counter with even more drastic measures, and that there is nothing they can do which I cannot and will not outdo at the drop of a hat. "FROM NOW ON," I yell, "THE NUCLEAR OPTION IS ALWAYS ON THE TABLE." "Matthew, what is that supposed to mean?" "I'll show you." ### 52 So I go into my room, shut the door, and proceed to..well..show them the nuclear option. I break everything in the room, I break glass photo frames, I rip my precious black and white photos into unrecognizable shreds—photos I developed and printed myself, a painstaking process—I tore all my paperback books in half, even *The Once and Future King*, which is the thickest book I own. I destroy the metal mini blinds on my two windows, ripping them down, using the whole structure as some kind of accordion sword, beating the wooden frame of my bed, ripping my sheets to shreds, smashing the light fixture on the ceiling until it was shattered pieces on the floor, then broke the lightbulbs with what remained of the mini blind sword. Then I pushed everything off my dresser, a long, white, low dresser that had my boombox on it, my CDs, boxes of trinkets and necklaces, a can that contained Tuesday Walker's bra, a present from her. Boxes of letters from Anna Kiss. I beat it all to death with my sword and everyone downstairs was afraid to come upstairs. I imagined my parents huddled together at this common enemy but I doubt that was the case. My sisters went inside their rooms and closed their doors. I stopped hitting things with the sword and used my hands. I beat the door, the walls, pulled the metal cover off the heating/cooling vent. It was screwed into the wall but I ripped it out like it was held on with bubble gum. I broke my windows. And it was at that point that someone knocked on the door. "WHAT?!" Mom opened the door. I saw the look on her face—basically Ellen Burstyn's face from *The Exorcist*. She started crying. "What did we do?" She's sniffling. "Where did we go wrong?" "You two have no personal integrity." "Listen to yourself," my mom says. "You're yelling about hypocrisy but there's no hypocrisy. We left as soon as we got your page and I called you back. That's why I got this pager. It's not for work—it's for *you*. Your father and I *love* you. We want what's best for you." "Maybe you do but Dad doesn't." "Your dad.." She struggles. "..is doing the best he can." She take a step inside my room. "Did you do this?" She's holding my copy of *The Once and Future King* in her hands. "I guess so." I'm crying. "How do you rip a book in half?" "If you get mad enough it's easy." "What are you so mad about?" "The hypocrisy." "There isn't any hypocrisy." "You just can't see it, Mom—you're too close to it." "Well give me an example. Because I'm staring at a room that in the space of three minutes you've made unusable. And you're scaring everyone. Your sisters are in their rooms crying. Your *dad* is downstairs crying, asking him what he's done wrong as a parent." "He's done *everything* wrong! It's so obvious. Why can't you *get it*?" "What I do know is that you just destroyed all of your favorite things." "Things are nothing. You're too attached to things." "Me? *I'm* too attached to things? Who are you talking to?" "*Everyone.* Everyone. The whole world." "But we're not talking about *the whole world*, we're talking about *my son*, who seems angrier in this moment than anyone I've ever seen—except perhaps my father when he was drinking." "I don't drink." "I know. I know that about you. Are you on drugs? Is there something I should know about?" "I'm not on *drugs*, Mom." "Ok well I thought it was fair to ask." "Look I don't know. I don't know why I did what I just did. I am sad about it—yes—those are my pictures that I love of people that I love that took me *a long time* to set up and develop and print but I just felt I *had* to destroy them." "Are you angry at the people in the pictures?" "No. I'm JUST FUCKING ANGRY. I DON'T KNOW WHY, Mom. I have no idea." I'm bawling. My mom hugs me. "Just *breathe..ok? Just breathe.*" I'm crying so much I'm almost choking. I'm shaking all over my body. "It's ok," my mom says. "It's ok." Then she left. Closed my door behind her. I sat on the floor and wondered what the fuck was wrong with everyone. I thought that my response was appropriate—not too much..in fact not enough. I had to stop all the hypocrisy and punish my dad psychologically and I was the one to do it because *I had nothing to lose*. All these other people—people at school, people at church, my mom, my dad—they had things to lose: jobs, money, houses, children, husbands, wives. But I had nothing, and someone who has nothing can do anything..or so my wisdom ran at that time. *I* was on top, of at least Dad. I had his number. He could never fuck with me again. There's this line from *Casino* that I like: > *No matter how big a guy might be, Nicky would take him on. You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And if you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead.* For a while that was a pretty good summary of my relationship with my father. And my bosses I met along my twelve-year trip through the software engineering world. Basically people fucked with me and I fucked them harder. I had nothing to lose. These people who fucked with me at work—they wanted to keep their jobs. I didn't give a fuck about losing my job. I wanted to lose my job. The nuclear option was *always* on the table. If someone revealed a secret I had confided in them to the boss, I'd reveal a bigger secret that they had confided in me to the boss. If my boss fucked with me, I'd go directly over his head, make friends with a vice president, and pretty soon my boss was doing anything I told him to, because I was telling his boss what to tell him to do. I scared people. I negotiated the biggest raises anyone had ever negotiated by making myself indispensable, then showing that to the hiring manager in the form of two lists, side by side: a list of the things they hired me to do (short list) and a list of all the things I was actually doing for them since they hired me (long list). Then I let them know that I didn't give a fuck about having a "career" at their company, that to me, even Mead Research or Anthem health care was a dead-end job, that I wasn't learning anything new by working there and I was only there because I personally liked them and I was doing them a favor. They gave me the raises I asked for. I did the same thing in relationships, too. One girlfriend said I always put the break-up option on the table when we had fights. I said I didn't want to have constant fights with my girlfriend, and that's why the break-up option was on the table. I don't need you. You wake me up straddling me, screaming at me about some shit your friend told you about me that isn't even true..I'll cut you off like a five-dollar fishing lure stuck in the weeds. Friend is disloyal? Let 'em know this is the last time we'll ever speak. And make it so. That's the nuclear option. ### 53 "Do you have a lot of friends?" says Dr. Joseph. I smile. "No, but the ones I do have are awesome." "I bet." "Did your parents take you to see a psychiatrist?" "No." "Why not?" "I don't think they knew that was necessary. If it was nowadays, they probably would have taken me to the hospital, I probably would have ended up in a psych ward, been diagnosed as having bipolar, and the next ten years might have gone a lot differently for me." "Why do you say ten years?" "I was seventeen then, I was twenty-seven when I was first diagnosed with bipolar. I just didn't know. I lived most of my professional life trying to make something work that was never going to work. The technical work was easy—too easy, I was bored. But my personality and especially my personality as affected by my mental illness..was never going to fit into work teams at any software corporation." "Because..?" "Because people who succeed in those corporations are tools." "I don't think I understand the the sense in which you're using that word." "A *tool*? Is a person whose most-developed skill is software engineering..who remains an *idiot* at software engineering. And he's proud of the level at which he operates. Companies don't mind hiring and retaining people like this because *it's not really important that the entire team is functional*. A few people do the work for the whole. That's how it's worked everywhere I've worked. Software gets made *despite* the fact that eighty percent of the developers couldn't find their pee hole with a flashlight and a magnifying glass. These are people who think that reading geek magazines like *Slashdot* every morning will make them smarter—which it will not. They geek out over new computer programming languages that had no business being *invented* in the first place! Basically like a horse with blinders on—you know, an asshole who walks around with his hands in his pockets and his head watching the carpet directly in front of his feet for lost paperclips and shit—a tool." "A tool." "Yeah, like a useless person." "Who thinks they're useful." "Exactly." "Were there other incidents where your dad abused you?" "Yes there were." I say it tensely. "Will you tell me about them?" "Yes. Do you want the Reader's Digest version or the Leo Tolstoy version." "Leo Tolstoy, if you don't mind." "Sure, but I'm gonna take you up on that cup of coffee, if you'll allow it." "I'll get it for you." Dr. Joseph leaves me in the tiny interview room. I think of how long if I've had this disease, and how I *forgot about it* after I got out of a *psychiatric hospital* in LA. I mean I just took my Lamictal and went back to work. My emergency insurance from the hospital ran out, I stopped taking my medicine because I could no longer get it with the way health care was back then, I saw a psychiatrist who was supposed to brilliant (and seemed pretty brilliant to me) who told me I was on the cusp of having bipolar disorder and that the "geniuses" (said sarcastically) at the psych hospital I had just come from were people he went to school with and they didn't know shit *about* shit and he gave me some Lexapro samples and told me I sounded perfectly fine and that "true bipolar" was the guy running naked down the Santa Monica pier shouting obscenities. In retrospect, that psychiatrist probably wasn't as brilliant as I thought. He presented well, though, and I was hungry for insight. Anyway how could I forget? How could I then go through five or six more years of life before I ended up in another psych ward (always a surprise to me!) and Dr. Joseph re-diagnosed me with bipolar disorder? And even *then* I didn't take it seriously! No, *worse* things were going to have to happen to me before I entered my current period where I know that I have to be aware of that disease, and others, every single day. Dr. Joseph came back with two coffees and closed the door. She placed both coffees in front of me. "Aren't you having one?" She shook her head. "I want to go back to the showers with your dad, him dancing around in his underwear in front of your mother's sisters, stuff like that. I want you to close your eyes and remember anything sex related that might have happened." "Between me and him?" "Between you and anyone. Between him and anyone. Between him and your sisters, maybe?" I cringed when she said this last. Made an open-mouthed expression like I was in a beauty pageant and had the Vaseline on my teeth but the only shape I could make was the shape a wolf makes before it eats you. I closed my eyes. And I did remember something. It was the end-hall closet in our house in Dallas. Either something had happened in there, or something was kept in there, and I was blocking out whatever it was. I had been going deeper and deeper into this closet all my life, but I could never get to the back. It was like the wardrobe in *The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe* except in this closet was no Narnia—only darkness, shoe polish, and the smell of leather. And as I went on about the secrets and fears and hidden things in the end-hall closet, I felt more *myself* than I had in year over year over year, since my first hospitalization, and it was because I was talking to a psychiatrist. I have complex things in my brain—a complex psychology. I need a psychiatrist like an addict needs a dealer—it's like I can't fully be myself without actively being the patient in a doctor-patient relationship. The psychiatrist helps define my identity the same way a dealer defines an addict's. There's a sense in which I can't *be* without a doctor, or a hospital—just like a novelist has readers, I have neurologists, psychiatrists, counsellors. "You know what I do remember?" "What?" "Bipolar isn't just high and low, it's fast and slow, it's clear and foggy, it's sharp and dull. They call it a mood disorder but it's not exactly just moods—it's all these other qualities, too." "I know." She touches my knee. "We're gonna get you some help, ok?" ### 54 Pretty quick I requested a room of my own because the dude in my three-person room was annoying the shit out of me with his 15-year-old self constantly talking about drugs and getting high and I guess I realized on day one or day two that I was there to recover. I didn't want to smoke crack again. I wanted to understand the conditions that occurred together to make me susceptible to smoking crack. I decided that was a level of crazy I didn't want to be. In one of our academic lectures on addiction, the teacher said something I'd heard before in NA: that breaking out of addiction is harder for smart people. Because smart people think they can solve their addiction by thinking. Why wouldn't we? We solved every other damn problem that way. But you can't think up a solution to the problem *how can I use drugs successfully?* because for some of us, there is no answer to that problem. We can't. We're addicts. That's what it means. We can't use successfully. There is no brilliant solution, no way to think your way through it. You just can't use. Which to a non-addict sounds *so* easy. To them they can't understand why you'd ever smoke crack in the first place. They don't understand that where they've learned ways to deal with universal problems like stress, the addict *uses* drugs to address those problems. Unsuccessfully, but hey, it's the best we've got. We didn't learn, growing up, how to handle stress in healthy ways. Or we did, but then we came across drugs and we learned a new way, a seductive, destructive way—but a way nonetheless. So I got out of that room with the insincere 15-year-old and I got my own room and I went to every group and met every person in there and I discovered that the ones who went to group were all sincere about their recovery. And I heard some of the saddest stories of my life in there—saw some of the saddest stories—people destroying their lives with alcohol and every other kind of drug. The worst was the old people. They didn't have much longer to turn around the ship, you know? And they had done what I had been doing—drinking and drugging—their whole lives. Except their whole life was 80 years. That was the thing: meeting those old people who were addicted to drugs their whole life, I mean if you have half a brain you have the same realization as everybody else in there..which is..if I don't make a change *now* I'm gonna end up like that guy. Eighty years old sneaks up pretty fast. And every one of those 80-year-olds was once a 33-year-old who could have stopped then. And didn't, and didn't, and didn't for another 50 years. - - - - I saw someone from my AA group at the Refuge. She worked there in the cafeteria and when she saw me, she said she was glad to see me and that I was in the right place. She even broke the rules and came out from behind the back of the serving area and gave me a hug—this old, frail, recovering alcoholic who would eventually fall and break her hip and lose that job at the Refuge, which job she always said she was so thankful for in our meetings. And that felt like home, like the small world, for this woman I knew and had struggled with in AA, both to stay clean—for her to give me a hug was meaningful—her hug was special. It wasn't all doom and gloom. I got to know each one of the staff by name, and they were so goddamn helpful it makes me cry thinking of it now. Here were are, a bunch of people with serious substance-abuse problems, people who had made all the *bad, anti-society* decisions in our fucked-up lived, and the Tyler 1 staff treated us with respect, with care..I mean they treated us like human beings, which was pretty amazing because, as substance abusers, we didn't even treat ourselves that well. And my fellow recovering addicts, I loved. I loved them for the same reason soldiers love each other. We were in a deadly situation and we were trying to help each other survive. Do you get that? A conversation you have with a fellow addict might contain the one thing you needed to hear to stop sticking a needle in your vein. People think of addicts as worthless, as losers—but we're real people with value just like everybody else, just gripped by an enemy that will take you to places, psychologically, that most people don't return from. It's a battle, alright. There's that Nietzsche quote I love so much: "Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster." Well, that's the problem with drugs. Trying to do drugs successfully is like battling with this type of monster. Not only can't you beat it, but in the process of battling it, it turns *you* into a monster. It turns you from a civilized person into someone who would steal or kill for drugs. That's turning you into a monster. It's turning you into someone who would lie to your family and friends about how much you're using. That's turning you into a monster. *That's* why drugs are fucked up. You don't fight them and win. You don't even get to fight them and *lose* with your dignity intact. No, battle with that monster and it'll do something far worse than let you win or lose: *it will turn you into a monster*. That's some tricky shit. - - - - After four days one of the nurses, Jack, came to me. He said: "Matthew." "Yes?" "This is sad news and a little bit of hard news but your insurance company won't pay for any more days of detox for you. We used hardly any Librium with you on the first day, and you've never shown any symptoms of alcohol withdrawal..which is good because it means you're healthy..but it's bad because it means we're going to have to plan on sending you back into the bad old world..like..tomorrow morning." "Ok." "Do you feel ok with this?" "Well, I have mixed feelings about it." "Do you feel like you can leave without using?" "Yes. I just wish I could have gotten some more of the classes here." "Do you want, we can do somewhere and talk about it." "No, Jack, thank you—but I'm ok. I'll be ok." "Ok, you know where to find me. I'm sorry. We're at the insurance companies' mercy more than we'd like to be." "I understand." "But be glad. You're fully detoxed! You are a clean man!" I smiled. That was a good thing. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (1)** > > Patient Admitted August 30, 2011—Discharged September 03, 2011 > > **Identifying Data** > > This is a 33-year-old single male who was working as a computer software engineer but recently lost his job *[was fired for refusing to perform job duties which included stealing Adobe software]*. He is living in Brattleboro, Vermont alone. He recently moved to Vermont from California in January of 2011 *[I omitted the move to Tucson and my stay at my mom's house for simplicity—you don't want these admission interviews to last too long]*. He also works as a freelance writer *[Heh. An unpublished novelist isn't exactly the same thing as a freelance writer, but whatever, admissions nurse, whatever]*. > > **Chief Complaint** > > "I'm here now because after seven weeks of being sober I started drinking again 10 days ago. Then a couple of nights ago I used crack cocaine." *[No,]* last night *I used crack cocaine. It's 8am now. Two hours ago I was smoking crack out of a glass pipe in some strangers' apartment and if I wasn't high on crack* right now *I wouldn't be in this hospital, seeking your help.]* > > **History of Present Illness** > > This is the patient's first Brattleboro Refuge and second lifetime admission. He was last admitted in the city of Los Angeles in 2008 for his depression *[No, for suicidal ideation with a plan—I called a suicide hotline, they told me to call 911, police showed up at my motherfucking house]*. He states at that time they diagnosed him with bipolar affective disorder though he does not give strong symptoms of mania *[doesn't mean I don't have bipolar, bitch!]*. He has had trials of Depakote which he stated gave him a headache *[No, it gave me splitting headaches that made me inoperable]* and he also had a trial of Lamictal which he was on for two months and feels like this was helpful for him. It was unclear as to why this was discontinued *[It was discontinued because the emergency health insurance they gave me at the hospital expired, my employer did not provide health insurance, and Kaiser Permanente, the local hospital, wouldn't allow me to purchase coverage due to my now having the pre-existing condition of bipolar disorder—hence the Lamictal was discontinued]*. He states he has a history of suicidal ideation although only when he is drinking. He denies having any plan. He has an AA sponsor currently *[who is a pervert Christian douchebag]* and has used AA as a resource for his sobriety. Patient has recently started seeing Eve Fox at Pastoral Counseling in Brattleboro. > > **Substance Abuse History** > > He has a history of IV drug use. He has a history of crack cocaine "a lot" *[No, not a lot, like three times bitch! This is very important to get right—a lawyer who I later asked to represent me for a disability claim declined to take my case because of this sentence in my medical records. "With this much drug use," she said, "a judge will never approve you." We still don't understand, as a culture, that drug abuse is a symptom of bipolar disorder—denying help to a bipolar person due to their drug use is dangerous and costly. They think: Oh, this person doesn't have a mental disability, they're just a drug addict. It's not that simple—anyway]*. Recently he has binged but is not using it regularly. He has a history of opiate use only recreationally and says he has never been dependent on this substance. He started drinking alcohol at the age of 23 and that for the last 10 days he has had a couple of bottles of wine and hard liquor daily. He was sober for seven weeks prior to this recent relapse though he does have a history of 11 months of sobriety. > > **Medical History** > > Recurrent kidney infections *[actually, kidney stones—quite different from a kidney infection]*. > > **Family Psychiatric History** > > A paternal cousin with alcoholism and a sister with alcoholism. A distant cousin on the maternal side suicided. > > **Laboratory of Admission** > > Urine drug screen was positive for amphetamines and cocaine *[When Dr. Joseph mentioned this to me in our first interview I was like: "Uh..yeah..oh yeah!..while we were smoking crack I snorted an Adderall." (No big deal.) "I wasn't trying to hide that from you all by not mentioning to the admitting nurse, I just didn't even think about it..I mean, it's Adderall, pshftt"]*. > > **Course of Hospitalization** > > Patient was admitted to Tyler 1 the dual diagnosis substance abuse treatment unit for alcohol dependence, cocaine abuse and mood disorder NOS *[Not Otherwise Specified—means they have no idea what the fuck is wrong with you]*. He was placed on the alcohol detoxification protocol and used minimal Librium during the first day of his stay *[You can die from alcohol withdrawal—Librium reduces those chances]*. No further withdrawal symptoms were noted warranting use of medications *[I felt like Lindsay Lohan—her doctors declared her not an addict because she didn't have any withdrawal symptoms—by that logic I'm not an addict, either]*. Patient was started on Lamictal at 25 mg daily while an inpatient and increased to 50 mg at discharge to address mood disorder. He denied suicidal ideation throughout his stay. Resources in the community were established with an outpatient psychiatrist *[The appointment was a month away—I never made it to that appointment or ever met that psychiatrist as my situation was to worsen before then. That appointment was intended for someone who could survive for a month on his own to keep a date with an outpatient psychiatrist—I heard she was excellent, by the way—but I wasn't that patient]*. > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Alcohol Dependence. Alcohol Withdrawal. Cocaine Abuse. Mood Disorder NOS. Recent Kidney Stones. > > **GAF on Admission:** 28. > > **GAF on Discharge:** 50. GAF is the Global Assessment of Functioning of a patient. It's a range from 1 to 100. It reflects a doctor's opinion of how well a patient is able to meet the challenges of life—how adaptive the patient is to this world. My 28 on admission means, by the book, that my "Behavior is considerably influenced by delusions or hallucinations or serious impairment, in communication or judgment (eg, sometimes incoherent, acts grossly inappropriately, suicidal preoccupation) or inability to function in almost all areas (eg, stays in bed all day, no job, home, or friends)." My 50 on discharge means, by the book, that I have "Serious symptoms (eg, suicidal ideation, severe obsessional rituals, frequent shoplifting) or any serious impairment in social, occupational, or school functioning (eg, no friends, unable to keep a job, cannot work)." I suspect there is a relationship between the GAF on Discharge, the hospital's insurance coverage, and the hospital's willingness to release a patient whose GAF is below a certain number—but I'm just guessing. > **Condition on Discharge:** Fair. > > **Prognosis:** Fair. They set me up with an outpatient group therapy program called Starting Now. It was houses in one of the Refuge buildings. A nurse does my final paperwork, unlocks the locked door which has been keeping me here for the last four days. I am no longer in detox. I am no longer in rehab. I am free to drink, or eat, or do whatever I want. ### 55 I walked out of Tyler 1, checked my bank account, which had one dollar in it, then I went to the church I used to volunteer at and begged their secretary for food. "Um, yes, hi, I just got out of the Refuge and I don't have any food or money until I get my next unemployment check, which could be two weeks or more, and.." I start crying at this point. "..I just need some food to make it to the next time I get paid, so is there anything you can do for me, some cans or anything?" This secretary led me around the kitchen—which used to be where I went to get extra food on the sly to give to extra-hungry homeless people when I worked at the shelter—and she gave me plastic bags and loaded me up with about four of them full of food, so heavy I could hardly carry them back to the house. "Do you know where the free meals are around town?" "I used to have a list, but I forgot," I say. She writes them down for me, one free meal per day, at various locations around Brattleboro—what an organized town. "Do you know about the Drop In Center?" "Oh yes, I've been there before—I forgot. I should have gone there instead." "It's ok, but they have food, too. If you run out before you get your check, go there, ok?" "Ok," I said, sobbing. I cried the whole time she was handing me stuff. That's the first time I ever straight-up *begged* someone for food. I left and asked her name again—which of course I forgot—and in my fantasy world I was going to become a millionaire and buy back their Tiffany window and volunteer at the church every day and do something special for the actual woman who gave me food when I was hungry. In reality, I never did shit for them. I carried the heavy bags of food up the hill. There was a guy sitting with a suitcase on the stoop of a building and when I passed him he said: "Don't worry about me. I'm just waiting for the homeless shelter to open up so I can stay there—my aunt couldn't keep me anymore." "Good luck," I said, and he repeated what he'd said about the homeless shelter. (He was fine, sitting on a suitcase with all his things, on a street corner—just needed the homeless shelter to open up.) He's totally fine. Don't worry. - - - - I snuck into the house on High Street, went upstairs quietly so no one would ask me where I'd been. But Krystal, the ho, came upstairs and knocked on my door. I was in the kitchen putting away my free food but I went to the door. "There you are!" she says all cheerful. "Hey." "We haven't seen you around in a while!" "Krystal, I'm kind of putting away the groceries right now." "Oh. Can I come in? I'll help you if you want!" I knew if Krystal came in we would end up fucking. "Thank you, but no, I'm fine." "Ok, well me and Tooler and Issa were just worried about you. What happened with your job?" "What do you mean?" "Well, you obviously haven't been going." "I got fired." "You got fired? For what?" "It's a long story." "I have time," she says. She's so sweet and I'm such an asshole. "That's very nice, thank you, Krystal, but..I'm a little overdone right now..with life..in general..so." Then I just close the door in her face. Slowly, firmly, close the door in this human being's face. I can still hear her voice through the wood. "We're having cow heart tonight!" Krystal shouts. "Tooler said you're invited. She said she wants to see you." "I doubt that," I say, and I don't think Krystal can hear me. But Krystal, saddened, says, "No, she really does." I go through a mini-recap in my own mind of "what my life is"..fucking drug addict loser who can't keep a job. Failed writer. Useless human being—hater of and pariah to society. To me, my life isn't a life where I can get invited to dinner to eat cow heart with some friends and sit alongside them as an equal and deserve to have fun just like they're having fun. I don't deserve happiness. I can't imagine myself as anything but an energy suck, a stumbling block and a burden and a monster who is always, ever, just about to ruin the moment. You're about to have a simple dinner of cow heart and enjoy an odd set of company totally blissfully—I'm getting out of detox after my crack smoking and having no money cause I spent it all on crack and going to a church to beg for food and crying the whole time while they were giving it to me—*that's* my life. Something about *a kingdom of isolation*, some future lyric to a musical that hasn't been written yet..the Ice Queen from *The Player*—archetypes of banishment and isolation, the person who feels most alone in a room full of fools. I wish I had company tonight, and it's right downstairs, three women of various qualities, including the unparalleled Tooler whose feelings I hurt by saying the apartment smelled like cat shit and beating her to the punch on moving to the third floor (and not telling her about it). I do this all the time—not just to Tooler. I'm with someone (friend, girlfriend, employer, brother, son, whatever), and they think we're doing something together, they think we have some kind of connection, and then they find out by *nasty surprise!* that I am not with them—not because *I don't want to be*, because I *can't*, I just *can't feel that way* about another person anymore. I'm closed, off, I'm not open. But if I ever eat cow heart again, Tooler, it will be with you. - - - - I hear Krystal descend the stairs and I grab my laptop. I write my family this email: > **From:** Matthew > > **To:** Joanne, Leona, Sharon, Van > > **Subject:** I need support > > Family, > > Last week I checked myself into a hospital to get help with alcohol and drug abuse, and bipolar disorder. I'm out now; I didn't have any phone numbers on me or I would have called you. > > I need your support. I don't need you to learn as much as I have been, recently, about the diseases of substance abuse and bipolar disorder; I don't need prayers, gossip, judgment, or advice. > > What I do need is contact. Since our family is not in one place that I can go to, I need you, I am asking you, all, to call me, sometimes, maybe once a week, and just talk to me. This will make a huge difference in my ability to feel ok in life, to not feel alone, and to feel like I'm connected to some sort of family or community. > > Thank you, > > Matthew My mom writes back: > My dear son, > > No judgment at all here, just so thankful that you did what you needed to do for yourself. > > I love you, > > MOM Mom's email, her calls, were precious to me. She is the only one who called me or emailed me or ever mentioned this hospitalization in future conversations. No one else even responded to my email. And maybe it was because they were scared. And maybe it was because they didn't know what to say. But Jesus *Christ*, have the *strength* to help someone out who has fallen to the ground and is reaching up for your hand. - - - - And sometime that day, getting out of detox, I find this journal entry in my computer: > Driving around Brattleboro, I feel blessed. Being on the mountain, the same. I feel fortunate to be here, to be alive, to be able to be alive here. I can't predict the future and I can't control anything in the world but me, but I am opting for hope, now, that things will be wonderful for me. That I will not be my own downfall, but that I will live healthy and happy and published and rich, and that I will get healthcare and a car and maybe even love someone again. I would love for life to go amazing for me, for me to be someone who gets to be truly happy, fully happy, deeply happy..who gets to live large. > > And part of what I hope is that writing books can be my way of being rich..that I do continue to write things that people love, and that they love more and more, such that I have a bounty. That is motivation to write, alongside the idea of creation and exploration of human nature..the idea that when I write, I am writing something that will bring me further bounty because of the love it inspires in someone else..in many many many someone elses. > > With alcohol, it just has to fall away. I'm not going to do clean dates, I'm not going back to NA/AA. I'm just going to be oblivious to it as an option, given that it doesn't tend to improve my state..and so, based on that same criteria for choosing relationships (the criteria that you only spend time with people whose company you enjoy as much as or more than your own)..based on that criteria, alcohol is less useful to me now than it ever has been before. > > Write books that people love to read. Make them happy. Make myself rich. Hike. Eat. Love. Meditate. Create new things: books, movies, and then my game/world. Maybe a restaurant or two for fun, if/when I'm able to do that comfortably. > > Believe that what I have written, and what I write next, will be the ways that I get to live in Brattleboro..that that creativity and the effort of love that I give to my writing, to my stories, will give me bounty to enjoy this place, and the places that I love, in this world. Oh god, oh universe, oh everything, how far I fall, and fall, and fall, and continue to fall. ### 56 There was a woman Laura, who I saw at almost every AA or NA meeting I went to, was in a wheelchair and wore wheelchair gloves. I was always friendly with her and she was a good person to talk to. Then one day I saw her while I was sitting outside the Metro on the steps and I had come out to smoke and enjoy and sun and I felt guilty that she was seeing me outside a bar, and normally I would never explain myself to someone, but I thought with all the 12-step meetings we'd been to, she deserved an explanation. "I'm just drinking water," I said. It was true, I was hanging out at the new Metro just drinking water—but even then, I knew I was going to drink again, even after detox I would relapse again on alcohol, maybe even that day at Metro. Things like that kept happening. I saw the Refuge meditation guru, Drew, at a show at Metro again I felt like I had to explain to him that I was only drinking water, even though I was sitting at the bar, just so he wouldn't think I relapsed. We both enjoyed the music and he took my seat at the bar after I left not long after talking with Drew because I didn't want to drink and I knew the longer I sat at that bar the greater chance I would order a drink. For me, part of AA and the Refuge outpatient programs wasn't just not drinking, it was feeling I had to prove to all these sober people and program administrators that I wan't drinking, which was a burden to me, not completely placed upon myself—I mean they were piss testing us. So I'm sober, I'm over my crack excursion, I'm doing Starting Now at the Refuge every evening and my bartenders know I'm sober and then I'm crossing Elliot Street and Walsh, headed into Whit's, shouts at me across the street saying: "YO! TEMPLE!! My birthday gathering..you know, as in I'm going to be a year older?" "Right, I'm with you so far." "We'll be at kips *to*morrow and DAY DRINKERS ARE REQUIRED TO ATTEND." Meaning she expected me and Mike to be there. She goes into Kip's with a boyfriend. I never went to her party because of my not drinking at the time and I knew if I was around Walsh I would drink—I would do anything she wanted me to. Then, some days after her birthday, I saw her and her same boyfriend and she was like: "Why weren't you there?" I looked at the guy she was with. Short, short hair, looked like a church boy. "Why I wasn't there," I said. "I'm not drinking right now, Walsh." She made an open-mouthed, what the fuck-type expression, she didn't know how to process this information. She was so confused she didn't even ask why. "Alright. I guess I'll see you around then." "Yeah, I'll see you around." The two of them turn and go in the direction of her apartment. - - - - Ok. Let me tell you about this outpatient substance abuse program goofily named Starting Now. It was at the Refuge in the evenings. This is late summer. Sometimes when I ride my bike down there it's warm, sometimes it's becoming the cold of winter, sometimes it's raining so hard I just walk my bike back in the dark, after the program ends, up the hill, through town, then up the High Street hill back to the house. The program is from six to ten, four nights a week, with no food or drink allowed, which really sucks if you're somebody like me who needs to each and drink little bits throughout the day to maintain my sugars. I mean it's part of my mood management that I *have* figured out, and my mental health program is interfering with my mental health. I explained this to Drew and the other program letters and they were like: Refer to rule a) NO FOOD OR DRINK. Ok, whatever. I thought we were all adults but I guess not. They gave me tons of personal history forms to fill out and some of my answers qualified me for a joint Princeton-Refuge study on PTSD. Having carried around almost unbearable guilt for all these years about doing ecstasy with my girlfriend Rebecca and her dying and me living, I guess they thought that I was still feeling PTSD effects from that. The PTSD study was done by the perfectly professional, sympathetic, sexy/cute but always right and proper Cleo. I wanted to fuck Cleo, for her to be my mate: the perfectly sane with the perfectly crazy. I would just get up from my chair where the two of us sat in a closed-door room, say, "I know this will disqualify me from the program but," and then touch her tit in the naughtiest, freakiest way, thumbing her nipple and pulling her onto the floor all in one motion. She wore this perfectly pressed white blouse that I wanted so bad to see wrinkled on the floor. But I didn't do that. I answered a million questions about PTSD experiences and took sixty dollars from her while I fucking smelled her like a serial killer. One night instead of all strangers I saw Matt Mattson's mom at Starting Now! It took us both a while to figure out who the other one was, then we realized we had done drugs together at her house..when we realized this we looked at each other and laughed. I guess she wanted to quit, too. After the program she drove me downtown where I had last locked my bike, and that was the last time she went to Starting Now. Maybe it just wasn't for her. Maybe seeing me there was fucking with her anonymity. Either way she split and decided to get clean on her own..or went back to using. I had a week between when I got out of detox and when I was due at Starting Now, so I had time to drink and still leave three days for the alcohol to leave my body before I went to the outpatient program that did piss tests. I was always doing this. Piss tests during the outpatient program were always known, so for a while I drank during the days where I knew I had at least three days before a piss test. I was trying to get sober. Sometimes I made it a whole week. Sometimes I drank on Thursday night, knowing that all the alcohol would leave my body in 72 hours—I knew this, of course, because they taught me this at Starting Now. The classes at Starting Now were completely useless. If I had to pick an actual class that I liked more than all the rest, I would say, strangely, the diet class. The teacher's name was Paula. She was wacky like an 80s dance teacher. Or maybe like an 80s pop star, like Tiffany, with crimped hair and pink leg warmers. Tiffany always makes me want to drink cognac. Anyway. This is the woman who in the first class I took with her said, "Does anyone want to hear my five-second poop talk?" We all looked around the room at each other and no one said anything. Paula goes: "Ok, here it is: Munchkins bad, crawlers good." She smiles. "That was it," she says, and moves on to the rest of her material. I talked for at least twenty minutes with the nutritionist after class. There are two things I remember from her class: This thing about calories versus calories from fat and the acceptable ratio between the two. And her poop talk. She has us all captive in this Starting Now classroom and she says, "Do you want to hear my ten-second poop talk? Yeah? Yeah? Anyone?" I mean what could we say? We *had* to listen to her poop talk. It was more like a two-second poop talk, but like any good wisdom, it's packaged in a way that's impossible to forget! - - - - I hated small group. I hated listening to other people share. I thought it was pointless for me to share..and I'm a small group kind of guy. I used to love camp and church study groups when I was a teen. I even worked as a peer leader at a national Christian youth conference. I *led* fucking small groups. But in this group I just wanted to jump across the circle and choke whoever was speaking. That's not a metaphor or some kind of literary device. *I wanted to jump across the circle and choke whoever was speaking.* It did occur to me that, unlike some people there, I wasn't being required by a court to attend these meetings, and many, many times I almost walked out. *I'm 33 years old, I'm paying to be here, just like film school, I can walk out any time I want. Nothing is holding me here but me.* That's how my thoughts ran much of the time. I try to think of the very first small group I was ever in, and I think I get it. When I was in the seventh grade, my homeroom teacher got to pick five students from the class to attend a once-weekly stress-relief group. It was like stress management techniques. The teacher picked me, Joseph Pollard, Lindsay Krey, and two other people I don't remember. On Friday morning we got to skip homeroom and part of our first class to go to a little room off the side of the library. It was full of old, broken overhead projectors and film projectors and the librarian had cleared out a space and set up six chairs with no desk part to them—just regular chairs for sitting. The person who ran the group was college aged and I don't know if her knowledge and kindness or her brown hair and symmetrical face were what attracted me most, but I liked her in a multidimensional way. She started by acknowledging that Masterman was a difficult school (it was a school for smart kids) and how pressure from our parents or our teachers or even pressure from within ourselves could cause us stress, and she said she was there to teach us methods we could use anywhere—on the bus, in our classrooms, in our beds at night—to relieve stress. And that is what she did. She taught us progressive clenching/releasing relaxation, where you start with your feet and clench every part of your body as hard as you can, then relax it as much as you can. She taught us thought exercises kind of like a precursor to Anthony Robbins, where we could use funny symbols in our brain to represent something scary, how we could learn to be more realistic about the impact of negative situations—basically asking ourselves *What's the worst that could happen if I fail this test? If my father hits me. If I don't live up to my own expectations.* The class was very helpful, it didn't last for more than about ten weeks, and I liked it because of the stress exercises which were new to me and also I liked it because, when we didn't have our eyes closed, I got to stare at Lindsay Krey (who I had a crush on) and I got to look at this teacher of ours who I had a much deeper kind of crush on. I liked being in a small group of five and I felt special for having been picked to be in that small group of five. My thinking about *why* we were picked didn't go very deep. I just had a vague idea that we were the five most special kids in the class and by being special and smart we had earned the right to be in this special program. But that didn't make sense. Joseph Pollard, though he was one of my closest friends, was not exceptionally smart and he was extremely undisciplined—the next year he wasn't even in Masterman, he was in a military academy at his parents' orders. I must have been an adult looking back on that experience before I realized why Mrs Tedesco chose that particular set of five children for a stress management class—it was likely because we were the most high strung, stressed out, neurotic people she could identify. When I first went to the Refuge, I was thirty-three. I didn't know what the word *anxiety* meant. The first day I was in Tyler 2, head nurse Michelle handed me a book called *The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook*. I was like: *I don't have anxiety. I'm suicidal.* Michelle said: *Talk to your doctor.* But apparently I had anxiety by the seventh grade. And I probably had it a lot earlier than that. In my thirties, I told my mom I had realized that I had a lot of anger and that I thought I might have had it for a long time. She said: "You've been angry your whole life." Not that anger is the only emotion I've been feeling my whole life, but that since her earliest memories of me, even as an infant, I've been mad. Mad at my father. Mad at her, because she didn't understand what I was saying. Even the story of my first word: I was lying on the floor pointing under my crib saying, "Ball! Ball!" and for a long time my mom said, "What are you saying? There's no ball under there." She didn't even think I knew what a ball was, so she assumed I was just making some random sound that just happened to sound exactly like *ball*. I got angry and she finally looked under the crib, and "Lo and behold, your favorite ball that you loved to play with, had rolled under your crib, and you were asking me to get it for you, and I was standing there getting frustrated with you because I thought that what you said wasn't making any sense. But it made perfect sense! You were saying 'ball!!' " And, my mother says, "I learned something that day. I learned two things. And that is that when someone is saying something that you think is nonsense—even though *it may be* nonsense—you can *never, ever* assume that it is. I took a huge step as a mother that day." "What step?" "Humility," my mother says, with wet eyes but she's laughing. "That's a good general lesson. But the other thing I learned, and this is true about your sisters but it may be especially true of you..is that..and this is a hard lesson to learn as a parent, but..I learned about you something that I don't think your father ever has, and that is that *your kid may be smarter than you*. Even with twenty years of life experience on you, that ball situation, as silly as it may seem, has been one of the defining moments of my life. I can't assume, even of a one-year-old, that I know more than someone. Age is tricky like that, and it hurts. When you're a sixty-something-year-old pastor with multiple degrees, *many* varied life experiences, and I would like to think I've picked up a thing or two along the way, but I don't know when a twenty-year-old who is *editing my article* for publication on the web, is going to *offer me advice* on what I have written..and that *I won't disagree* with what she said!" "I know, Mom. I know. I've felt that in AA and NA. I was in this meditation meeting in Tucson and I was thirty, thirty-one, and this woman shared, who got clean when she was seventeen, and now she's twenty-two or twenty-four or something—she couldn't have been older than twenty-five—and she says one of the wisest things I've ever heard, and I'm just sitting there, with this *humility*—like you mentioned—at the *golden* drops of wisdom coming out of this young mother's mouth. I had to re-evaluate my whole world the night that woman spoke, just like you said..I mean wisdom could come from a motherfucking *rock* if you listen hard enough." "What was the piece of wisdom she shared?" "That whatever you're feeling right now, you're feeling *because that is what you chose to feel*." "Wow." "Yeah. Yeah. Aside from some technical difficulties related to people with mental illness, that's one of the most profound things I've heard. I think it's a *very* hard thing to realize, because admitting that that statement is true involves *taking responsibility* for our own emotions and our own minds, admitting we are not always *reactive* but sometimes *proactive* and that the wiser we are, the more proactive we are likely to be about our own mental state..which is something I think generally people aren't all that in touch with." This is the kind of conversation me and my mother have. I love her. - - - - (As I write this, Mom just said, "What are we gonna do tomorrow?" and I said "Blow up the house?" It's some kind of serendipity but this is a good example of the nihilistic, depressed, gave-up things that I was saying in the Starting Now group meeting that caused the meditation master, Drew, to ask me to see his teaching partner, Lisa, the counsellor who suggested that the things I was saying in group were what they called "suicidal ideation" and asked me how I might feel about spending some time inpatient.) So yeah, not only was I hating small group and wanting to kill the other people in group with my bare hands, but this one trip to the Refuge for group, the Starting Now workers finally fucking caught on to this—they thought I was saying suicidal things in small group. Which I think is a little extreme..I have no idea what I said in those groups..all I know is I didn't say anything mean to anyone else but I really didn't give a shit about anything and I felt nothing satisfying, especially that group, and I'm sure I raised questions about the usefulness of me being there. I mean the guy sitting next to me..what's wrong with him? He had six drinks, he got a DUI—but look at him, he's perfectly happy, he's willing to do his classes so he can get his license back, get back to his girlfriend and his drinking and his pointless fucking life. When asked for a few words to describe how he felt, over a period of weeks being in class with this mentally resilient construction worker, he only ever answered one word to describe his feelings: "strong." The last night I went to that meeting, the night the facilitators pulled me aside to suggest I might be suicidal and inpatient care might be appropriate for me, I might have responded to this construction worker. I might have said said something like: "Strong isn't a feeling." "Matthew, it's Chris's turn and he can answer however he wants." "Ok, well, I'm just saying, we're talking about issues of the mind and Chris—no offense, you know I like you and you and I agree on lots of things and I support you in your recovery and all that, but you don't seem to be answering the question that's being asked of you. You feel 'strong.' Like what? Your biceps feel strong?" "Yeah," he said, and he rolled up one sleeve and flexed a bicep." "You got a pair of guns there, no doubt, my brotha, but I don't even think you need to be in this class. Based on what you've shared, you're not an alcoholic or drug addict, you're not mentally ill according to the DSM..I don't even think you should be here." "I agree," Chris says. "Wanna wrestle?" I say. "Sure," Chris says. "Just be sure you break my neck at the end," I say. Chris and I hugged and wished each other the best at the end of the meeting—it was his last, he had graduated to return to being a chronic drunk-driving citizen again—but I guess what I said about him breaking my neck is why the leader of the meeting, Drew, the meditation guru of Brattleboro, said he wanted to me to talk to Lisa, the other teacher, in her office when the meeting as over. It could have been that. Maybe. It could have been other remarks. Like when Ronald, this 60-year-old with an alcohol monitoring bracelet was droning on, taking up 20 minutes of an hour-long sub-session with his incessant talking about *nothing*, I might have said something like, "I hope I die before you finish this story." "Matthew, let Ronald talk." "He's talking, he's talking—no one can shut him up." "Ronald deserves his time." "Ronald deserves *his* time. Which is about five minutes. So now he's eating into Chris's time and my time and Ellen's time—" "Why don't you focus on you—" "I was! That's why I said: I HOPE I DIE BEFORE THIS FUCKING ASSHOLE FINISHES HIS STORY. That's an *I* statement. I was talking about *my* feelings." This whole time, Ronald keeps talking. He has no conception of this interaction going on around him. "If he hits the thirty minute mark, I'm going to end that motherfucker." "Right on." Chris bumps my fist. "This guy is disrespecting the group. Ellen deserves her share." "I will fucking end you," I said, in a real nice way. Ronald never heard a thing. But Drew did. ### 57 And that's how I found myself Talking with Lisa after a Starting Now night was over. Drew was very nice about it. He said, "How would you feel about talking with Lisa for a while?" "I'd feel good about it," I said. "I don't think I'm getting much out of small group." "That's what we'd like to talk to you about," Drew said. So I was in Lisa's office. She started out with basics. "Are you still going to AA?" "Yes, sometimes." "What do you think of the people in your 7am AA meeting—I know you go to that one pretty regularly, right?" "I'm kind of hit or miss on that group right now because they don't know how to separate religion from AA which demonstrates that they don't even understand their own text." "How do you feel about the people in the meeting?" "How I *feel* about the AA people in meeting? I have a very bad attitude toward them. I feel like I would hate picking up a one-year chip someday, that somehow it would be a failure on my part. I always felt that about jobs." "Really?" "Yes. I thought they were such a repugnant waste of time that doing well at them, even working with certain companies, was an embarrassment to me, a defilement of me as a human being. Some companies I worked for, I don't even put on my resume because I'm too embarrassed to have worked there—I feel that my association with them is a blight on the quality of my life." I cried when Lisa asked me if I wanted to go inpatient and I said, "That feels like a good idea." She said, "What you might be feeling isn't sadness, but relief—a friend of mine who has lifelong depression says she feels relief when she gets so suicidal she needs to go to the hospital." Lisa calls reception and tries to get a bed for me that night in Tyler 2, but they're full. She gets a bed for me for Friday. She says, "Can we make a safety contract that you won't hurt yourself before then?" "Yes but I'm not guaranteeing that I'm going inpatient on Friday?" "Why not?" "I'm just not ready to make that commitment." "If there was a bed ready tonight would you be more willing to make that commitment?" She was good. She kept me talking. She sat there and long time and listened to my mixed-up bullshit. That woman—Lisa Whatever Her Last Name is—is one of the key people who've helped me in my life. "You were in detox before Starting Now, weren't you?" "Yes. I was released from detox after four days because I had no withdrawal symptoms and my insurance would no longer pay for it. I stayed clean and sober at times, went to meetings at time, and now of course this outpatient treatment, but when I stop drinking my problems get worse. I know that sounds like a cop-out—" She touched my knee. "No. It does not. It sounds like you have another mental illness, besides addiction. Ok? That's what it sounds like." "Well I do! I had forgotten I had been diagnosed bipolar years before." "When was this?" "About six years ago LA. I recognize that you and Drew have pulled me aside and I realize that I was irate defiant suicidal or something—" "And homicidal." "Oh really?" Lisa nods. "Gosh. I didn't even realize the suicidal part until you pointed it out to me in your office." "I think you'll feel that sense of relief I was talking about earlier when you go in, because you'll know you're safe because somebody else will be looking after you. I think you have stress around *what you might do*." "To myself??" I was choking up big time on that one. "To yourself or others." "I do feel a kind of relief." I was crying my eyes out. "How did you know?" "We just thought some of your remarks in group were alarming." "What remarks were alarming?" "When you said..that everyone—" "That everyone should just blow their fucking heads off? That remark?" "That one and others. It falls into the category of what we call suicidal and also homicidal ideation." "Maybe it's not suicidal. Maybe it's just boredom." "Boredom with what? With your life?" "How about with that motherfucking *group?* Bunch of fucking *dotards*. No reasonable person can be expected to sit through that group four times a week. It's bullshit. I'm not going back to that group, by the way, just so you know, that group is bullshit." "You said that." "Well, it's true. Sometimes I like to emphasize things by repetition. Like Mr Snakeskin Boots back there. He's here for drunk driving. He's legally required not to drink for a year since his conviction, which is parole, and going to this group. You know what he told me? He said the *minute* that year is over, he's gonna drink again. I just can't be in a group like that, with fake-ass motherfuckers. I think if he blew his head off it'd be better than the lie he's living. I know you can't tell someone else they're an alcoholic, but do you know how many DUIs this motherfucker has?" "Matthew, I'm not concerned about Chris—" "Mr. Snakeskin." "Chris, Mr Snakeskin, whatever. Chris isn't making death threats during group." "I didn't make a *death threat*." "Technically, you did, when you said you were gonna blow everyone's fucking heads off." "No, I didn't say *I'm going to blow your fucking heads off*. I said *Everyone should just blow their motherfucking heads off*. That's just friendly advice. To end their suffering." "Are you suffering, too?" "To end *our* suffering." "I have a responsibility—legal as well as a conscientious one—to make sure you're safe before you leave this building. Drew was concerned by some of the things you said in group, not just tonight, but other nights as well. Drew is a good friend of mine. We care about you." This woman turns her chair so she's facing me, eye to eye. "I want you to commit to spending some inpatient time here. Friday or tonight if I can get them to let you in *tonight*." "Why?" "Because I'm concerned you're suicidal." "Suicidal. Hm. Suicidal. Well, I've been suicidal in the past." "When?" "Since the tenth grade. I bought a book on suicide and my parents paid for it and my mom was the only one who showed any concern, and I told her not to worry, it was just an academic interest and she didn't bug me any further." "You think she should have been more proactive?" "I think when a tenth grader buys a book on suicide, his grades go from A's to F's, he's skipping school when he never did before, he shows up at his girlfriend's house—not fucking her in the basement—but because she's the only one who can comfort his deep soul cryings, emotional breakdowns, whatever. I just needed a friend!" "How often have you felt suicidal since then?" "Constantly!! Constantly. I mean what is the point of this life? If you *think*, then you *must* be suicidal. Only people like Mr Cowboy Boots who shoot for the lowest rung on the ladder are *happy*. He's not thinking of *the meaning of life*—he's just gettin' while the gettin's good." "But we're talking about you. And I think you're in danger." "Danger?" "I think you may be a danger to yourself." I laugh. "Yeah, I am. I'm the most dangerous person I know." "Do you have a gun?" "No." "Do you live with someone?" "No." "So you're going home tonight to an empty apartment?" "I guess so, *yes*." "Right now, how are you feeling about spending some inpatient time here? You said you were comfortable with it earlier." "I just got out of Tyler 1." "Have you drank since you got out?" "Yeah like once or twice. But mostly I've been sober AND IT IS NOT WORKING." "Tyler 1 is detox. Tyler 2 is a psychiatric unit. Tyler 2 is where I'd like you to go." "In Tyler 1 they taught us that addiction is a psychiatric problem." "Everyone has their ideas on that. I view addiction as a disease, like the flu. Anyone who's exposed has a chance of being infected. You know what the difference between a drug addict and a non-drug addict is?" "What." "The drug addict has tried drugs." "You don't believe in the whole 'addict mind' thing?" "Uh..no. Not exactly. If you want I can call down to admissions again and see if Tyler 2 can take you even without an empty bed. They may be releasing someone in the morning. Would you like me to call again and see if I can get you in there tonight? That way you don't go home to an empty apartment." - - - - Let me point out something here. Lisa is being extremely lenient with me here. She is catering to my will to a degree that shows how deep her humanity runs. We are in a psychiatric hospital. At any time she wants, Lisa can call for the guys in the white coats to come to her office, give me a shot of Benadryl, and take me *somewhere*—they've got places they could stash me. In fact, as Lisa referred to earlier, she has a legal obligation not to let me leave the hospital if she thinks I'm suicidal. So she is being extremely respectful with me and giving me a truckload of patience and leeway. - - - - "What is Tyler 2 again?" "It's mostly a psychiatric ward. A good portion of people who go there are suicidal. You'd be safe there. They check on you every fifteen minutes to make sure you're ok." Something about this mechanical fact starts me crying. Lisa offers me her tissue box but I won't take it. She sets it on the table next to me. "I just— I just—" I'm saying. I shake my head and sob. "I've been keeping myself going *so long* on *nothing*. In college it was vapid. It was vapid before that. *Everyone* is vapid, have you noticed?" "Yes." "I don't know why I'm crying." "You started crying when I mentioned that you'd be safe in the hospital." "I did?" She nods. "Tell me the story again. About your friend." "You wanna hear that story again?" "Please." I am broke down, eyes flooding, shaking with release. The counsellor leans in to me. "I have a friend. I've known her since we were little girls. And she's had to go into the hospital..during various periods..throughout her life. You might imagine..that she feels dread..she feels shame..because she can't trust herself..she can't be safe around herself. But you know what she tells me?" I'm sniffling, saying, "What?" "She says what she feels is *relief*." I nod. "Wow," I say. She is describing exactly what I'm feeling: *relief*. Relief that I wouldn't have to be the only one taking care of me, looking after me. Relief that someone else believed not just that *I had a problem* but that *Life had been difficult for me*. Not just regular difficult—like good days and bad days—but difficult like "*I have to constantly control myself to not do things that scare other people* and *I have to convince myself to stay alive even when I have absolutely no reason to do so, even when I feel useless no matter what a good job I do, when I am unmotivated by things that motivate anyone: money, sex, love, reputation. I don't care about any of those things. I'm like a chess player who will sacrifice his queen—but not because I'm Bobby Fischer and have some seven-move combo that's gonna kick your ass with superior intelligence combined with superior creativity. No. I'll sacrifice my queen because I don't give a fuck about losing—losing everything. If I had a grenade I would have no hesitation punishing myself and everyone else in that remedial therapy group by blowing all of our heads off at the first utterance of a phrase from Mr Snake Boots. I'd kill us all just because* I don't fucking care. I've been pushed to the limit so many times that I don't believe in anything—sex, love, money, security—I don't believe in any of it. To me, a job interview isn't an opportunity to get a great job and make money and contribute my creative and technical skills to an exciting company. I'm thirty-three. I've been around that block way too many times to get excited about a job interview. A job interview isn't an opportunity—it's a waste of my fucking time. Fuck the paycheck. Fuck the apartment. Fuck the car. I don't even care about your sex: women, you can take your pussy elsewhere. Play your games with some twenty-three year old who still has the energy, who's still willing to put up with the drama and the games and the bullshit just to cum inside you, just to hold you on his arm, just to mentally get off on possessing you momentarily. Those are things I don't care about anymore. I don't care about anything anymore. In fact my whole life has been a process of stripping myself down of everything that's unnecessary. And now I've stripped myself down to nothing." "We're gonna get you some relief." "That's what I feel," I say. "Just talking about the hospital. Relief." And I go into a major cry, and Lisa gets on the phone and sees if she can get me a bed in Tyler 2 tonight. ### 58 Lisa couldn't get me a bed. We talked a lot more and she believed my safety contract with her—which was genuine—and we agreed on a Friday admit date to Tyler 2. This was Thursday. Friday was tomorrow. On Friday, Gretchen stalked my bicycle. I don't know how else to put it! The crazy girl put flowers on my bicycle when I wasn't around and my bike was locked to a street pole. I came back to my bike and first thought, *Wow, some stranger put flowers on a stranger's bike, how nice*. Then I realized it was Gretchen and she was straight-up stalking my fucking bicycle!! I unlocked my bike, placed the flowers on top of a trash can for someone else to enjoy, and rode to the Refuge. - - - - First trip to Tyler 2. I ate lunch standing in the Refuge lawn with my bike propped against a tree just to have someplace to eat my Subway sandwich before I went inside, where I was sure they would take my food away. I walked all around the square between the buildings, hugging the trees and seeing as much nature as I could, knowing I'd be inside a locked ward for as long as they wanted to keep me. I videoed these pinwheels the children patients had made..they were in two circles in front of the main entrance to the hospital. They spun in the wind and had messages written on them. I took a long ride around the Refuge on my bike, knowing I was going to be admitted, knowing I might not see outside for a long time, parking next to my favorite tree and hugging and kissing it, then locking up my bike and going inside to be admitted. I cried uncontrollably in the lobby and the meditation guru came up to comfort me. He knew what was going on because he talked to the woman who pulled me out of my birches class to check on me and me just saying, "I'm sad," and bawling. The meditation guru sits with me. When he sits I cry even more—I am destroyed. He puts a hand on my knee and just sits. "Are you going inpatient for a while?" I cryingly nod yes. And we just sit. Why? Because that's what fucking meditation gurus do. - - - - The intake process is just you, bleeding your soul out, while you do a bunch of insurance paperwork..piss test..interview with the physician's assistant where he tries to determine what the fuck is wrong with you..stripping your clothes off..body search..they note all your tattoos..you put on Refuge sweatpants and they put all your real clothes and your stuff in a paper bag for the Tyler 2 health techs to sort out..being led upstairs by the physician's assistant, turned over to the Tyler 2 desk..getting a toothbrush and shampoo..skip skip skip..etcetera..etcetera..skip..etcetera..skip skip..then it's late at night and you're in the snack room, tricking out the vent on the microwave to melt the icing on your Pop-Tart and some sly girl with a baseball cap comes in, hiding her face, and then she's standing in your face, saying: "Do you remember me? Do you remember me?" And I do. It's Stripes, the most interesting thing in Brattleboro (besides me). "What are you doing here?" she asks. "I'm here because they said I had suicidal and homicidal ideation." "Oh!" she says, and she lays a hand on my chest. "*I thought you worked here!!*" "No!" "And I was like, fuck, this might mess up my customer relationship." I'm quiet. "Do you remember the time you came in and drank all night and you left me a twenty-dollar tip? Or were you too drunk to remember?" "I..yes..of course..I was drunk but it's coming back to me. I remember we had a conversation and I thought I had found the only person worth talking to in Brattleboro." "Well the worst part—no ego, but—you probably had," she whispers. "I'm sure of it." "Fuck, so you're here as a *patient*?!" "There's one more thing. I wanted to make love to you, that night, because you were the most beautiful thing in Brattleboro. Did I say that before?" "Yep, you said the same exact thing when you came in that night. I'm surprised you remember." "I don't. I thought I just made that up just now." "No you told me before." "What did you say?" "You'll have to find out," she says. "I wasn't sure if you really liked me or if you were just drunk." "Well if I left you a twenty-dollar tip then I was trying to get your attention, so that means I really liked you." "Uh huh." "I was probably trying to make sure you didn't forget me." "I already would have never forgotten you after the conversation we had..which I'm guessing you don't remember either." "Hah. Not really. I just remember you were brilliant and a spark and I wanted to fuck you." "What's a spark?" "You know..someone who hasn't lost the light in their eyes..someone who's still alive while situated in the wasteland." "And you..you still have the light in your eyes?" she asks me. I say, "You tell me." She says, "You have a bonfire." And she turns and goes, leaving me in the Tyler 2 snack room, by myself, with a melted Pop-Tart and my loneliness. - - - - Ok so Stripes' name wasn't really Stripes. It was some other name that we'll leave aside. See, Stripes and I had art class together, and one day I drew this funky, punky-looking zebra with mohawk hair and these broad, stylized, unrealistic black and white stripes and when [this exceptional specimen of a human being I call Stripes] saw it, she loved it, and I gave it to her, and she hung it in her room, and from then on I called her Stripes. She gave me something in return: her personal copy of *Girl, Interrupted* which I read at the Refuge. Watching *Girl, Interrupted* the movie on my computer between visits to the Refuge became tradition for me. I don't just do something. I do every aspect of it, I study it, I master it, I go deeply into to—and I found it comforting, while making this series of visits to the Refuge, to immerse myself in psych ward culture. And I'm so pretentious. Like I'm somehow proud that I read *Girl, Interrupted* while *in* a psych ward. I think that's cool—I do. I do *research* on my disorders. I'm all *meta* about it. So I don't just have this straight idea of being in a psych ward—to me this is like *a literary experience*. I make up my own worlds. When I was getting my MRI, I wasn't getting an MRI. I had a whole *other* experience going on there that's a secret so I'm not going to explain it. But I'm not just living life—I'm *playing a game*. So *what you think we're doing*, from your perspective, is not *what I think we're doing*, from mine. To me this interaction is completely different from how anyone else would describe it, but I map my reality onto *the shared reality* with metaphors, so I can still participate in *your* world, when really my experience is that I'm in mine. *Isn't everyone doing that?* *Are they? How would I know?* Those are just parts of my imagination I'm conversing with. Don't try to keep up. Just keep reading. - - - - Just keep reading about eating steak with your hands at the Refuge. It's easier than trying to use a plastic fork with no knife. Because there's no silverware in a psych ward—lol—there's not even a plastic *knife* on a psych ward. So you have your two basic choices: 1) use the edge of your plastic spoon as a knife, which works pretty well, or 2) just pick the motherfucker up and eat it with your hands. The more times you've been in a psych ward, the more comfortable you become with choice #2..because after enough time spent in psych wards you start to realize there's a much larger problem to be solved (YOU'RE IN A PSYCH WARD) and that eating steak with your hands is *completely minor* compared to this larger problem. But it's a transition, yes, the first time you give up with the plastic utensils and pick up a steak and eat it with your hands—you start thinking of yourself in a different way. And you stop giving a fuck what other people think about you in a way that may never go away once you leave the ward. It's kind of like soldiers who have trouble transitioning back to civilian culture after they've lived war. Once you've been to a psych ward, do you ever, really, truly give a fuck about normal culture ever again? I'm not sure I ever gave a fuck about it in the first place. After you get out of the psych ward, you'll be in a restaurant. The person sitting next to you screams: "There is a *hair* in my corn!" And you look at them sideways like: *I've eaten steak with my fingers.* Hey, newbie—deal with it. I don't see what's so gross about a hair in your food anyway. Don't you taste your lover's hair, don't you take her in your mouth? But you know, hair isn't for everyone. Some use the edge of the spoon for a knife. Some eat steak with their hands. You meet all kinds of people in the psych ward. ### 59 Like The 17 year old I met in Tyler 2—suicidal chick they were sending home. Her name was Olivia. She had been in hospitals for the last two or three years, starting with a suicide attempt. She couldn't get into the outpatient program she wanted because she had a suicide attempt within the past 30 days. Believe it or not outpatient and even inpatient programs for suicidal people have limits on the number of past suicide attempts and how recent they were. This girl, poor Olivia, she was too suicidal to go to any psychiatric program in America—she just wanted to kill herself too damn much and when people actually kill themselves in mental hospitals, it's very traumatic for everyone who works there and all the patients and also it's a big problem for the hospitals' insurance coverage. Yeah. So Olivia had to stop going to hospitals and go back home to live with her parents, which she was obviously nervous about. She was just waiting around at the Refuge to go home when her family was ready for her. Do you believe that shit? No mental hospitals would take her since she had too many recent suicide attempts!! This is the person who needs help the most and no one will take her because she's an insurance risk. Taking her as a patient is basically saying: you will kill yourself in our facility and it will fuck up our insurance so—sorry!—go kill yourself elsewhere. Notebook entry: > seventeen-year-old girl with a skin condition..she was—if you can believe this—too suicidal for a psych ward Or the young guy—Ross—who used to walk the halls of Tyler 2 imitating the catatonic body positioning of that young woman who had seizures and came in with police, handcuffed to a wheelchair. When she came in we were all asked to move into the TV room and they closed us in there to give her some privacy—you know, so we wouldn't make fun of her for being brought in by the cops. And we all wondered from the next room what kind of monster was being admitted that she was *brought in* handcuffed to a wheelchair. We didn't know if she was a boy or girl at the time and I think we were all pretty much thinking Hannibal Lecter was being admitted to the ward—which wasn't a scary thought, we would have been delighted to have Lecter with us. Turned out it wasn't Hannibal Lecter but this cute, smart, totally nonviolent girl named Liliana. Anyway Ross—who was there because his parents caught him eating mushrooms—he would walk around with his neck crooked and his hand held up like Liliana, even talking with mental health workers and claiming he had the same conditions and had taken the same seizure medicines as Liliana. Classic Munchausen—GTFO MF. - - - - A more sympathetic character was Chad, who was one of the patients who was present in Tyler 2 every time I went that fall and winter—Chad will be a permanent resident in some psychiatric facility for the rest of his life. I don't know what was wrong with him, in terms of an illness, but he was one of my friends on the ward. I always took time to talk to Chad and be of use to him when I could. Mostly he needed the company. Any he got it. He was often on one-to-ones, which means one staff member to one patient—there was one staff member whose constant, 100% job was to pay attention to Chad and make sure he didn't hurt himself or anyone else. With Chad, either was possible. He didn't want to hurt anyone, he was just easily triggered—if something stressed him, he could go from laughing and jovial to repeatedly stabbing himself in the wrist (deeply) with a pen that somehow made its way onto the unit and that Chad had somehow stole. He was constantly masturbating in his room even though he was on one-to-ones—he didn't care who was watching. Poor guy..his doctor probably never explained to him that he wouldn't be able to cum on his antidepressant. And his one-to-one had to sit by Chad's open door watching him masturbate. I recall this one woman saying, "Maybe it's not gonna happen, Chad. Maybe you should give it a rest for now and try again later." But Chad was a determined sort of dude. A favorite activity for Chad was rapping in the middle of the residential hallway. He would stand there and do rapper hand movements and do his best to make up raps: "I'm Chad and I'm bad. I'm even so bad I'm totally rad. You never heard a rapper who had my badness. In fact I'm known for my antics. Yo, Matt, he's a crazy cat. He might seem like a normal Jack. But underneath his skin he'll never let you win. Behind your back he'll prob'ly cut you with a razor blade." "Hey!" says his one-to-one. "That's not cool!" "It doesn't rhyme, either, I say. Chad, Chad, he's so bad, he'll take a patient and make 'em smile when they sad." "Yeah!" Chad would say. "Tyler 2, I don't mean to be rude, but we gotta do something about this food." "Yeah! You're a rapper!" "I heard back in the day the food was fun to eat. But that's before it got taken over by a consulting company. The staff, they do the best they can, but their hands are tied..by the man." "That's it, Matthew let's be rappers together." "We *are* rappers together, Chad, we're the dopest rappers in Tyler 2. They used to have Marshal..but now all they got is me and you!!!" I slap Chad's hand. "Hey! No touching!" says the one-to-one. "Alright, Chad, keep rapping, I got to go talk—" "To your bitches!" he yells. "No, that's extremely rude. Don't say bitches." "Ok, you gonna go get with your *females*," Chad says. "That's still rude. They're *young women*. That is the preferred term." "Oh, is that the preferred term?" Chad asks. "Because for me the preferred term is bitches." I leave him there, standing in the middle of the hallway, and he goes back to rapping. His one-to-one works a Sudoku. - - - - Then there was Arlo, who tried to kill himself by jumping off a highway overpass. But all the cars slowed down and he ended up just breaking his legs. Arlo ate five ice cream sandwiches every day when the unofficial quota for the ward was like two per delivery. - - - - On the way down the hallway I come across Rainbow, the pink-haired med nurse who I fell in love with. "Come here. I owe you meds." "If it means I get to talk to you, Rainbow, I'll take cyanide." "Don't say that—I'm gonna have to report that!" "It's ok, Rainbow, we'll do it like Romeo and Juliet. You won't have to report shit." She was safely cordoned from me by a half-height door. I had fantasies of hooking up with her and her being the stable side while I was the wild side of our relationship. A med nurse living with and supporting a psych patient..and me making her so happy. Rainbow once said she hoped to see me around town sometime and this was fuel enough for my imagination to see us hooking up and living together, a med nurse and a graduate of the ward she worked on. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing. I would lick her pussy every day and fuck her until she came 12 times and her pussy would be throbbing for me each time she handed out a med cup to a psychiatric inpatient and she'd be running to get home to me and I'd be lying in her bed like Prince with a half-unbuttoned shirt and like furs everywhere and a real tiger. (That's what I was thinking anyway.) She did, though, she did flirt with me my first day every time I came back to Tyler 2 after being out in the world a while. She said she knew I lived in Brattleboro and she kept hoping that she might run into me at In the Moment (record shop) or the Food Co-op or something. Me too, pink-haired med nurse, me too. I was like, "Oh yeah, I shop there..In the Moment..uh huh..Food Co-op..yeah, yeah." She says, "If you weren't my patient, we could do something together, like.." "Oh yeah, I'd love to get together and do something with you. I think I know what you mean. I think I know what you mean. We could *get* together." "Exactly," she says, "*Get together.*" *"*It's fun," I say, "when two adults find a private place where they can get together and *enjoy each other's company*." "Alright. You're gonna get me in trouble." Rainbow leans out of the med station window and looks both ways. She hands me my medicine. "Now take this, before you get me fired." I take my medicine, swallow it with a plastic cup of water, and throw away the tiny paper thimble the med nurse hands you your pills in. "If you got fired, that would make you a bad, bad girl," I say. "And what would you do about it." "I'd pull down your pants and spank you till your butt was as pink as your hair." "Seriously, you've got to get out of here. I'll see you for your ten o'clock meds." I lean in and whisper, "Is your pussy wet?" And Nurse Rainbow says, "Go," in a way that means she wants to be taken seriously. And out of respect, I go. But I can't get that pink-haired freak out of my mind, and I wonder what I did so wrong in life that *that's* going to be the extent of my interaction with her—verbally crossing the patient/caretaker boundary—instead of *actually* being at Rainbow's apartment and *actually* spanking her white ass and a*ctually* making her butt cheeks turn the color of her hair and then turning her over and fucking her pussy so good and licking and biting and sucking every part of her body that her *face* turns the color of her hair. *Damn*, if I wasn't a mental patient me and Rainbow could be having *so* much fun. - - - - Then there was Sadie. Sadie I met on the the couch, both writing in our journals in the group room waiting for evening meditation—there was electricity, we could both feel it, sitting in sock feet and pajamas, two of the more cogent residents of the ward. We hardly spoke, but gave each other the space to be non-objects the way men and women rarely do. I viewed her, and it was clear she viewed me, as a healing person in a healing place—and neither of us was about to shatter that peace and protection by behaving with respect to the other as a sexual thing. I didn't view Sadie as I view a sister—nothing like that. It's just that I could see that Sadie's mind was a deep pool, the kind of pool that must be approached slowly and with a certain ceremony. We sat for an hour and spoke nothing, and I loved it. Just to know someone else was reflecting at the level of journal writing was enough to be said between us. And women aren't the only ones treated as objects—I bloomed in the safety, with Sadie and with others, that we couldn't touch each other. There is something so human and respectful about that, reminding those of us who have spent time in psych wards and other no-touch spaces that—hey, wait!—you can't just touch me. That there are rules, that I can set limits, about who touches me. That I don't belong to anyone. I felt—I felt it in the air—that Sadie and I were respecting the brokenness of each other. I'm an empath—I feel other people's feelings so deeply that I *take them on*. This is very dangerous..for me. Because I can't be happy when someone I love is hurting, distraught. And combined with a role I learned in childhood—please all the adults so they don't get mad at me—I am left, as an adult, with some just *impossible* relationship goals. I don't understand the boundary between you and me (as well as I could) and because of this I spend a lot more time than necessary feeling, *experiencing* other people's angst, when on my own I'm pretty much fine. They say there is a thin line between genius and madness. But after 11 stays in five different psych hospitals, I can definitively say that there is not "a thin line between genius and madness." Madness does not imply genius—but where genius is found, madness often is too. Check this out: If there *is* such a thin line between genius and madness, why can't I choose which one I want to be? - - - - I suppose I should tell you about my doctor. My first stay in Tyler 2 I had horrible Dr. Criminal who released me early (while I still had suicidal thoughts). During my release process, Stripes said: "Look, you're clinging to the bed. Look at your body language. You're not ready to go and you'll either kill yourself or you'll try to kill yourself and you'll be back in two days." The releasing nurse also had a problem with me leaving, as I was bawling and sniffling and she said she wanted my doctor to talk to me again. Dr. Criminal came back in. "Are you suicidal?" "I don't know." "Do you have a specific plan?" "I guess..no." Dr. Criminal determined I was ok to go. Didn't even put me on an antidepressant. Initially I was discussing with another patient about who my psychiatrist was. She was incredulous. "Dr. *Criminal*. Like a criminal..like one who breaks the law..and that's your *psychiatrist*?" "Yeah, that's my psychiatrist. Dr. Criminal. And yes, that's his real name." The head nurse, after speaking with me, thought I was unsafe and left and had the doctor come and do a third evaluation of me and he let me go, even though the head nurse was shaking her head the whole time. Dr. Criminal (who all the staff called "the old-school psychiatrist" even though he was the youngest one), treated a depressed, suicidal patient with two previous diagnoses of bipolar disorder, with no medicine, just a suggestion to go to an outpatient program. I'm mad about that. I wasn't at the time 'cause I wasn't all that aware of what was going on back then, but the more time I have to think about it, the madder I get. I walked out of that hospital and tried to kill myself. And after that, when he and I saw each other on the ward and hospital halls, we shared a special kind of look that not many people get to share: the *maybe if you had believed the bipolar diagnosis, I wouldn't have attempted suicide* look. We never said a word. - - - - There was this guy Mark who was in the Refuge after going psychotic from some bad ecstasy. I was friendly to him at first, then he was in ALSA (the Adult Low Stimulation Area—basically a higher level of security—ward within a ward) and while he was in there he yelled constantly, banging on the ALSA door when I was staying in the room right by ALSA for my suicide attempt. He seemed ok before they put him in ALSA, then he flipped out and became Captain Caveman, then they let him out and he was always weird after that, like the kind of guy if you passed him on the street you would just hope he would keep walking..forever. Then I was checking out and Mark was hovering over me while I was at the contraband closet collecting all my street stuff and he saw that I had an iPad charger in my bin. "Say, man, can you loan me that?" "What?" "Your iPhone charger, mines's broke." "I don't think this will work with your iPhone. It's for an iPad." "That's not what I asked you, is it?" The nurse I was with called for help down the hallway: "Uh..Mark's ramping!" "So is you going to loan me the shit or is you gonna puss out?" I didn't answer. It was just me, the nurse, and this guy whose brain got fried by—whatever drug?—and he's standing over me. I put all my stuff in my bag and I was real ready to get out of there when Mark's facial expression: Jack-O-Lantern smile. He holds out his fist like an invitation to bump the rock and I put my fist out and this motherfucker *punches* my hand so hard it needed an ice pack. "I see how it is," this wannabe thug says. "I'll see you around town." "Ok," I say. "Yeah. We'll do that." "Is he making fun of me?" "Just don't say anything to him," the nurse tells me. "I can't tell if this guy is making fun of me or not." The nurse says, "He's not. Just go. Mark, go meet me by the med station." So I went to my first group at Birches with an ice pack on my hand and a story to tell of how it got there. My social worker-led peer group asked me why I had an ice pack on and I told them some brain-fucked asshole punched me in the hand on my way out the door. "He did the bump the rock thing and when it was his turn he punched me instead!" That added mystique to me. These people had never been to Tyler 2. They were living in a peaceful house, watching TV every night with their only stipulation that if they drank they would be kicked out of the house. They weren't living in a place where somebody might punch you for any reason, ever. On the last night of my Dr. Criminal hospitalization I wrote all these cards about it being like trying to sail a paper boat across the ocean—as in *life: it's* *like trying to sail a paper boat across the ocean*—and I put those cards all over the unit: on top of the TV, in the freezer, on the nurses' station desk, everywhere. That was a cry for help. Someone could have picked up on that..Stripes did..did she show it to the nurses? I don't now. But someone distributing that message all over the ward on his last night should not have been allowed to go. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (2)** > > Patient Admitted September 23, 2011—Discharged September 29, 2011 > > **Identifying Data** > > This is a 33-year-old male with bipolar disorder NOS, alcohol dependence and stimulant abuse abuse admitted September 23, 2011 for depression, suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. > > **Chief Complaint:** "Depression." > > **History of Present Illness** > > The patient was recently discharged from the Refuge after completing alcohol detox. He has been depressed and irritable and states that he drank once since his last admission. When not drinking he has experienced mood lability and irritability. He describes a good response to Lamictal in the past and this was recently restarted. He does not believe that it is helping him yet but he reflects that he is not yet on the target dose. He describes homicidal ideation towards people who have hurt him in the past including his ex-boss, people who disrespect him in general and people who treat him lower than others. Specifically he reports significant anger towards his ex-boss who he believes fired him without cause. He denies any history of auditory or visual hallucinations. *[On the entrance interview one time, into the Refuge, they asked about homicidal and suicidal thoughts and I had both, I wanted to kill my ex-boss and I wanted to kill myself. Do you have a plan for killing your boss? Yeah, I would stalk him while his pudgy butt was hiking and fucking shoot 'im in the head!! Do you own a gun? No. Then how are you planning on shooting him? I would buy a gun. Obviously!! And your plans for killing yourself? I would do it in a bathtub. Do what in a bathtub. Cut myself, deeply. And then there would be no more me, and no more problems, and my family wouldn't have to deal with me. I'm sure your family would be very sad if you killed yourself. I'm sure that some of them would be, I say. And I'm sure that some of them would not.]* > > **Course of Hospitalization** > > The patient was admitted to Tyler 2 on September 23, 2011 *[Tyler 1, where I was before, is mainly a detox unit—Tyler 2, where I was admitted this time, is mainly a psychiatric unit.]* Urine drug screen done on admission was negative. Screening physical exam was unremarkable. Treatment during his hospital stay consisted of medication management and group therapy *[There was no group therapy—Tyler 2 has excellent classes on medication, coping skills, art classes, yoga, meditation, but I never did any group therapy in Tyler 2.]* Medication changes made during his stay included: increasing his Lamictal dose gradually to a final dose of 100 mg at bedtime and starting hydroxyzine for sleep. He tolerated these medication changes without any adverse events. Over the course of his hospital stay he reported a gradual improvement in his mood. He was without any reported or observed psychotic or manic symptoms throughout the duration of his hospital stay. On the day of discharge he denied suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation and he convincingly contracted for safety. At the time of discharge he did report significant ambivalence and anxiety. However after careful reflection and conversation with several staff members he concluded that discharge was a safe and appropriate decision and that although the thought made him anxious he realized postponing facing this would not help. > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Bipolar Disorder NOS. Alcohol Dependence. Stimulant Abuse. Kidney Stones. Social Isolation. Financial Problems. > > **GAF on Discharge:** 50. > > **Condition on Discharge:** Stable and improved. > > **Prognosis:** Good *[Well, I guess they fucked that one up because the next time I came back it was in an ambulance after a suicide attempt].* ### 60 But they did release me to the Birches program. Sadie was there and we exchange numbers and hug, we say, "It's good to see you." She says she'll drive us to a meeting sometime. I hope Sadie is sober today. As I write this, after some years have passed, I hope that woman did better than I did and has been sober all this time. I know it's hard—if it wasn't hard I wouldn't fail at it so often. I just want to believe that that woman's life turned out fine, and that she's arranging the chairs or that she's tonight's speaker at a speaker meeting somewhere. I guess I just liked her. I know I'm getting all teary, but seeing Sadie in Birches on my first day was a wonderful sight, wonderful eye contact—my misplaced hope for myself is on some woman named Sadie that I hardly knew..that's fucked up. I follow my same pattern from Tyler 2 and before—of my entire life—of getting mad at assholes. This dudebro guy in small group who liked to brag about physical violence during his share time, the mushroom-addled schizo dude who thought all his doctors were crazy and that he was connecting with beings from another universe. And I started seeing Sadie around town, on the street and at AA meetings, and I desperately wanted to, but I was in no place to fall in love. - - - - I'm grocery shopping one day—after the events of this book—and it's me and my mom. And *I'm* paying, this whole mega shopping expedition is courtesy of my food stamps. I'm pushing the cart, and I see some carbonated blood orange juice in glass bottles—*beautiful*. I grab a couple of those and a couple of the grapefruit, too. I put them in the cart, and as I look up, my mom has gone ahead—she didn't know that I had stopped—and I saw her watching me pick out juice, and I saw the expression on her face..and..it was..an expression of pure *disgust*. It said: *Who do you think you are to pick those out? What do you think* you're *doing?* Like I don't even have a right to put something in a grocery cart without her permission. The message is total disapproval. Like her telling me when I was a kid, about my writing. What she said was: *Don't show this to anyone or else they'll think I raised you wrong.* She thinks that my creativity (which is sometimes viewed as oddity) reflects poorly on *her*. Sometimes I think we had a disapproving parent and an approving one, but other times I wonder if it's more realistic to say we had two parents uninterested disapproving unloving, who don't show love, don't *do* love..they don't *admire* us, *hug* us, *love* us. - - - - And I'm in this morning social group in Birches, at the Refuge, and someone is talking about hugs and I simply say: "My parents didn't hug me. I mean *occasionally* they hugged us, but they never showed their love through touch, with a hug, you know, just the touch of a hug." This fat-bellied bodybuilder wrestler wannabe dudebro says: "I'm sure your parents love you." He's all dismissive and he starts to go on talking about his bodybuilding schedule, which in my mind is irrelevant to this group therapy session, so I don't feel bad interrupting him. "But what I'm telling you..is that my mom..never hugs me." "I was talking," this bodybuilder says. "Well I'm talking now. I don't think you understand what I'm saying. *My mom never hugs me.*" "I'm sure she loves you, dude, don't worry about it." The social worker jumps in: "I think what he's trying to say, Frank, is—does your mom hug you?" "Yeah, we hug all the time. We's real tight." "What Matthew is telling you is that his mom doesn't show love through touch." "You wanna be touched more by your mom, dude? Where do you want her to touch you?" "Frank, don't mess with me. This is group therapy, not a place for you to tell us how many reps you do to work out your glutes or whatever. This is an emotional discussion. The fact that you just brought up sexual abuse says more about you than it does about me. If you want to tell us where your mom touched *you*, ok, but share about yourself, don't respond to my share, you got that?" "*What* did you say to me?" "I said: 'You got that?' " Frank is sitting next to me in this group. He's huge, everything about him worked out except his flabby belly which I guess is from him losing weight. He turns his body to me and starts getting close to me, trying to intimidate me. I say: "Frank. Sit back down in your chair. This is a group therapy session in a mental hospital. It's not a wrestling ring. You're getting all hard and aggressive like you're gonna fight me or something? Yeah? You're gonna throw a punch in a mental hospital? If you hit me, I'll just sit here and take it, I won't do a thing and about five minutes later, some nurses who can bench a lot more than your faggot ass are gonna give you a shot of Benadryl and carry your limp dick to a locked ward with a padded room and you'll share that ward with a guy name Mike whose brain got fucked up on some bad ecstasy and if you think *I'm* crazy..or if you think *you're* strong..well, you haven't met Mike." "Are you *threatening* me?" "No, I'm just telling you what happens when you punch someone in a mental hospital. So sit your faggot ass down and don't ever get in my face again. I'm in this group to heal. I'm not gonna let you or anyone else get in the way of that. This is a *group therapy session*. I don't know if you know *how dumb you are*, but if you just wanna come in here and talk about your workout routine and how all women are 'bitches' and act like you're some kind of gangsta in Brattleboro, Vermont, then fuckin' leave. Just fuckin' leave." "Mrs. Scalliano, you're gonna let him talk to me like that?" Mrs. Scalliano, the social worker says, "Everyone gets their turn to speak here." Frank jumps up and stands right in front of his chair. He's like flexing his muscles and tightening his fists and doing all this faggoty-ass bodybuilder stuff. He starts hitting the palm of one hand with the fist of his other. I laugh. "Why are you laughing, punk?" "Because it's a *group therapy session*, and you're trying to start a *fight*—like a fucking fist fight. That's all you ever talk about in here, is how you kicked this guy's ass and you kicked two guys' asses at the same time. That's your solution out there, that's your solution in here. I just think you're funny." "It's not gonna be funny when I beat your motherfucking face in." The social worker says, "Frank, leave the room." "Oh, no, go ahead," I'm laughing, "beat my motherfucking face in! I welcome it!" "You're sick, you know that?—Like truly fucking sick." I'm cracking up so much I can hardly breathe. "I'm in..a mental hospital..*of course* I'm fucking sick!!" Frank fake punches me, suckering, pulling the fist. Mrs. Scalliano stands up and puts her hands on Frank's shoulders. He instantly, reflexively, turns to her. It looks like he's gonna hit her. Kelli, this little borderline girl that I desperately want to fuck, stands up. She looks like she's been in a fight or two. Mrs. Scalliano helps Frank out of the room. All the while, Frank acts like she's the only thing holding him back from kicking everyone in the room's ass. I look around. Nobody looks scared. Melissa rolls her eyes. Courtney says: "I'm glad he's leaving. I'm tired of that punk calling women 'bitches.' " Frank breaks free of Mrs Scalliano and comes back into the room and he's like: "ALL WOMEN *ARE* BITCHES. NOBODY'D WANT TO FUCK YOU, YOU ALCOHOLIC WHORE!!" Now Mrs Scalliano is yelling down the hall: "Need help!" The program nurse says, "You want me to call it?" Our social worker says, "Yes." Frank is intimidating Courtney now and I'm finding myself surprisingly calm. My pulse is normal. My anxiety is low. Maybe all this time spent in Tyler 2 is paying off. The PA shouts: "Code gray, Birches short hallway!! Code gray, Birches short hallway!!" Frank is up in Courtney's face like: "I'LL CALL YOU A BITCH ANYTIME I WANT!" And I'm like, "No you won't." "Wha'd you say, you fucking psychopath?" "Frank you can call me a psychopath all you want—actually I enjoy it. But if you insult anyone else in this room, if you call women..that word..again—" "Then what you fucking psycho?" "If you actually thought I was a psycho you wouldn't provoke me." "Yes I would, because your Hannibal Lecter bullshit is no match for my guns." He holds up his arms like Popeye and flexes his biceps. "Actually, Hannibal Lecter bullshit beats your guns any day." "Oh yeah, and how is that, if I kick your ass?" "Because, you flabby-belly fucktard—oh, don't you think we all notice that? Don't you think we all don't know that you used to be Fat Frank, and all your bodybuilding bullshit is just your way to distance yourself from the days when you were just a *fat motherfucker* that girls didn't want to fuck and guys didn't want as part of their crew. You can build up those guns pretty quickly, can't ya? But that extra skin on your belly, from when you were fat—that's gonna take a long time to go away, I'm talking years. And for the next two years, when you look at that belly fat, when you feel it between your fingers, you're gonna think about me, in this moment, and how Courtney, and Kelli, and all those other girls you wanna fuck—including your ex-wife—will never fuck a fat-ass aggro motherfucker like you who calls women *bitches* and you're gonna wish you threw a punch, got me somehow, some way, but you never will." He steps right to me. "You'll never lay a finger on me, and when I get out of this hospital, I'll spend maybe ten minutes thinking about you, ten years from now, when I write my memoirs. But your ass is gonna spend the rest of your life being needlessly pissed off at me for telling you off *like a bitch* in front of all these girls I see you staring at every day. I'm daring you, you fucking meathead asshole, *lay one finger* on me. But you can't. You're not a tough guy. You're just a fatty little kid with no friends who doesn't get laid because you're fucking disgusting—physically, mentally, every other way. Look at that fatty belly, fucking loose skin. You've got more camel toe right there than any of the fat bitches you ever talked shit about in small group." "Brattleboro's a small town," this guy says. "I look forward to seeing you on the outside." "Yeah you and everybody else." "I'm serious, I will fuck you up." "Good luck with that, 'cause you'll be in jail, faggot." "Why is it ok for him to call people 'faggot' when you all won't let me call bitches 'bitches?' " Frank whines. But before anyone could answer his question two super-huge Whopper-style dudes came in, popped a needle in Frank's neck, then just stood there holding him by the arms for about the three seconds it took Frank's eyes to roll back in his head and his whole body to go limp and he was still awake, still talking about bitches and how all his earthly problems stemmed from evil things they had done to him, right back to his mom, but now he was doing it real quietly and bubbles were coming out of his mouth. The nurses put Frank in a wheelchair and took him away, I assume to Tyler 2, where he could see what the definition of crazy really is, and find out that he fit right in. ### 61 It saved me a little to see Sadie every day in Birches. Even the colors she wore. Like this burnt orange turtleneck for fall. And she was such a peaceful person. Sadie was number one on my list of people who would never hurt me physically or psychologically, and you have to love a person for that. She seemed well and solid. But you can't see these things from the outside. She was prob'ly freaking out inside. I know I was. Maybe I wanted attention. Maybe I needed more attention than I was getting. I was just going on gut. For me that meant freaking out wanting to bite through my own tongue to make myself bleed—that was how the idea occurred to me. I went to the birches program hallway but skipped classes to lie on a pale blue couch at the end of a line of staff offices (including Dr. Criminal) and I laid myself down on that couch and attempted to bite through my own tongue. Tongues are very strong, it turns out, but I was able to give myself a great deal of pain and aggravate my TMJ to the point that it still bothers me today, five years later. Then I pulled a pushpin off the message board at Birches and I took it into the bathroom with me. I thought: if I poke myself in the arm enough times, along vein lines, I can kill myself with this little pushpin. I was so excited that they had forgotten to remove all the deadly weapons from the area. I mean I was in a different kind of place. Birches was a place for people who were pretty much stable, to learn some techniques about how to deal with your life. I wasn't sure I wanted to live mine. When I came out of the bathroom, Lisa, the counselor, was there and she looked at my face and she looked at the pushpin and she said I think you should give me that and I did and she said you're looking worse than the last time I saw you and I said I am worse and she said do you want to talk about it and I said: "No, I don't want to take up any of your time." She said: "I have time." And she let the group she was in go on to their next meeting and she sat with me in soft chairs right outside the main room of Birches that due to its windows everyone called "the fishbowl." Every question Lisa asked me I just sobbed. I was unable to make myself speak. I just looked at her face and her kindness made me so open to everything in the world that I *hurt* more than everything in the world. If you're bipolar, you're probably like *Yes, he gets it!* about that last sentence and if you're not, you're probably like *What the fuck is this dude talking about? Isn't he overreacting?* I'm bipolar. Of course I'm overreacting. Lisa took me to my social worker. The three of us sat in my social worker's office and the two of them talked. "He had this," Lisa said, cupping the pushpin in her hand. "What's he going to do with that?" Mrs Scalliano said. "I think he's suicidal," Lisa said. My social worker came to me and it was like was interrogating me, where she should have been dealing with an emotional being. She said: "Are you suicidal?" I just shook my head and cried and bowed my head. "Why don't you take your medicine? What's your PRN" "Clonidine?" "Yes, that's seemed to help you in the past." "Clonidine doesn't do a single goddamn thing for me. It's just that time passes and you think the pill did something." "So you just need some time to pass." "If I meditated, that might help." "I think he needs to go back inpatient," Lisa said. "I'm his social worker. We're handling things here just fine." "That's why he's hiding out in the bathroom considering self-harm with this!" "How could he possibly hurt himself with that?" my social worker laughs. "Do you want me to show you?" I asked. "See," Lisa said. "I don't think he's safe enough for Birches." "Well, I'm sorry, but I do. We'll release him back to Tyler 2 if we think it's necessary." Lisa threw up her hands. She knelt to me. "Come find me if you need me. Ok? You know where my office is. You have my card. Promise me." "I will, I promise." Then Lisa left the room and my social worker was like giving me a hard time for involving someone else from the Refuge in a supervisory manner and I didn't have time for her ego bruises so I just walked out in the middle of her talking. Lisa had insisted that I was in trouble, and I was. There were more pins on that board. I was going to impress us all with the amazing damage I was going to do to my arms, wrist, and neck with one of those tiny little pins. That could be a whole lot of puncture wounds and a whole lot of blood. And in my wrist, in my neck, it could be as deadly as a knife. When I was on that couch, I bit all the way through my own tongue trying to make myself bleed enough to be admitted to the hospital. I had fantasies of being taken care of. I knew I needed to be in the hospital and wanted to do whatever I could to make others see that. My suicide attempt was the same thing—begging for help—trying to demonstrate to others how severe my situation was. To make them pay attention to me. But I also wanted to die. Like when I sent my suicide "threat" (notification) email to my family, and was thinking of cutting myself in the bathtub, I wasn't trying to get into the hospital, I was looking for a way out of my life..a way to end my life..a way for this to be the end—of suffering, yes. Wanting to punch myself in the arm with a pushpin, meditating with my iPad timer and going crazy biting through my tongue on the couch at Birches, seeing Lisa and she took me to my social worker and they argued, each, for how sick or well I was at that particular moment. Lisa was right, though, even though my pushpin idea was silly from a certain point of view, the key element, which Lisa got and my social worker didn't, was that I was ready and willing to hurt myself at any moment—exact reason unknown. But I could do it with a pushpin—I could do major damage—I could do it with a pair of scissors or a shoestring or a plastic liner from a trash can. Remember cutting off the wart. I had other late-night excursions in the bathrooms of our family..like the night I first shaved my head in the tenth grade with nothing but a pair of scissors and a disposable razor..no clippers. Both nights were just a lot of night and a lot of quiet, locked in there, with a lot of clock to think about my life and (in the case of the wart) all the female attention I wasn't getting because of that wart—overcoming that was worth a lot of pain right there. See, the pain was not going to be a problem. I could have killed myself with a stapler or a piece of dental floss. We had status reports at the end of the day in Birches. Everyone else was putting 4s and 5s on a scale of 1 to 5 of how safe you were, and I'm putting 1s and 2s. My answers to questions on the reports disturbed the program nurse who led the end-of-day class and she often asked me to stay after to talk about my safety "Right here the question was, 'Name one thing you learned in the DBT class with Nathan Jennings.' " "Right," I said. "And your answer is, "If you want to waste your life, then listen to what other people say." "Asterisk," I said. "What?" "There's more on the other side, an expansion of the initial text connected from one place to another on the leaf of paper by the sign of a star." She turns over the paper and reads what I have written very quietly, under her breath: "I am sorry I was ever born. I am sorry I was ever born. I am sorry I was ever born. I am sorry I was ever born. My parents did not know me then nor do they know me now. It's unfortunate (for them) when people don't understand me in conversation. I am capable of anything because I am not held back by anything. People have no idea what's about to happen. What does that mean?" " 'People have no idea what's about to happen?' Well, it's true: people, in general, have no idea what's about to happen." "Do you know what's about to happen?" "I'm in the dark as much as you. But you never know when someone might be in small group and they might have their larynx ripped out." "By who?" "By any type of animal that rips out larynxes, I guess." "What does this mean?" The program nurse points to the covering I have applied to the entire form, front and back, in tiny writing—my Birches daily summary sheets were always the best. "I can't even tell what it says, it's so small." In a bored, protective voice I say: "You can't imagine it away..and you can't imagine it there, either." The program nurse leans back and looks at me, trying to figure me out. "That's what this says?" I nod, a tear lingering. "You must have written it two-thousand times." "It was worth it," I say, and get up. "I'm just going to the water fountain. Don't worry, I'll be back in a minute and we can discuss my safety." - - - - My social worker and her multi-PhD counseling intern spoke to me about my daily summary sheet from the day before. Her PhD intern said, "This writing is so small I can barely read it, and I've seen your handwriting, and it is small, but it's never been this small before." "There's so much of it. How could you have done this all in one day?" "Well I skipped all my classes so I had plenty of time." "This is so small I can't read some of it." "Do you think you were manic when you wrote it?" I'm quiet. "Do you think you're manic now?" "Actually," I say, "I don't think I know what that word means." They gave my summary sheet to the program psychiatrist, Dr. Le, and she called me in to talk about it. "This is a very unusual check-in sheet." "I haven't seen as many of them as you have but I suspect that's true." "Are you manic?" "You know what I figured out recently?" "What?" she says. "I figured out that I'm not a psychiatrist. You know, I've done my own reading so I think I know what I'm talking about, but I don't. I can't diagnose myself so from now on I'm just going to live my life and let you all handle the diagnoses and such." "Do you think you're safe off the ward?" "Yes, I am able to perform all normal functions without help." "Are you suicidal." "No, not specifically. But I am having some meaning of life issues." "There's someone I'd like you to talk to." "Ok. Who is it?" "The director of the Birches program. His name is Dave. I just want you two to chat, ok? Are you amenable to that?" "Sure." "Great. I'll see you later." ### 62 "Dave"—David Something with a very long German name met with me that day at 11 o'clock. His office was filled with plants. This is how our conversation went. "Hello." "Hello." "Tina asked that we talk a bit. Is that ok with you?" "It's fine. You have a beautiful office. I love all the plants." "Thank you." "Did you bring them in all at once or collect them gradually." "Ahh..gradually. Actually I just started with one plant and then one of my colleagues assumed that meant I liked plants especially and he brought me another, and this action repeated itself until you see the jungle I have the privilege of taking care of now." I laugh. "It is a jungle." "So why do you think Tina and I wanted to speak?" "I think she thinks I'm suicidal and she wants to cover her ass by having the program director talk to me." "Actually I wanted to speak to you anyway. I like to have a brief conversation with all of our clients who start the program and then talk to them a little later to see how things are going. But yes, Tina did specifically mention you to me and she is worried about suicidality." "Well I don't know what to tell you. The most helpful thing I can say is I don't specifically want to die—which is what I understand suicide is—but I do want out of my current life as I see no way forward in it so I do I have suicidal thoughts even though I don't think of myself as suicidal. I'm not sure I'm organized enough to actually kill myself." Dave laughed. "You know? I'm so confused about how I feel it's like jumping off a merry-go-round—my chances of completing anything with much intention seem fairly small to me at the moment." "You're very disarming. That's what Tina said about you." "Isn't that what we try to do in relationships? Disarm the other person, friend or foe, so that we can intellectually/emotionally/physically/spiritually have our way with them?" "What would it mean to spiritually have your way with someone?" "You might want to inspire them." "So you would disarm them first so that they would be pliable to your inspiration?" "Yes." "Do you find it easy to disarm the staff here?" "Yes. Except for you." "You don't have to say that." "I'm not. You're on point. I would never want to disarm you." "Wouldn't want to, couldn't, or are you just disarming me with that remark?" "I don't think that's how it works. For me, at least, there aren't people I can disarm and people I can't. There are people I can disarm and people I wouldn't want to." "And the ones in this latter category. They are.." "People I like." "Do you like many people?" "No." "How many would you say?" "Five." "I think you're doing pretty good," Dave smiles. "Yeah, the world is a lonely place." "Is it, for you?" "Yes. Isn't it for you?" I ask. "Yes I suppose it is," Dave says. "Most of the time." "What's your purpose in life?" I say. "Helping people who need help," he says. "And you?" "I don't know. I don't seem to have much use to this world." "But what use do you have to *you*?" "Is that the way you're supposed to think about it?" "It's one option." "I'll have to get back to you on that one." "Ok. Dr. Le says you're a writer." "Yes, I'm a failed novelist." "Why failed?" "Because I want to hit my head against that wall until there's a purple spot on my face the size of a basketball." "That's what I want to help you with." "Yeah?" "Yeah. You've been diagnosed a few times—by a few different psychiatrists in different clinical settings—as having bipolar disorder. Do you think this is accurate?" "How would I know?" "I'm led to believe you're well read on all the common psychiatric diagnoses. You have your own copy of the DSM—is that true?" "I have a stolen PDF." "And do you think bipolar is the correct diagnosis?" I look this guy straight in the eye. "Yes. The diagnosis fits like a glove. And I don't see any other diagnoses that fit any better." "And you like cocaine?" "What's not to like?" "I agree," says "Dave" the program director of Birches. I look at him and he smiles. "Aren't you afraid I'll tell everyone the director of Birches has done coke?" "No," he says. "Fuck," I say. "Which is it? You're not afraid I'll tell or you're not afraid of anyone finding out?" "I'm not afraid of either. This whole conversation you've indicated no desire to hurt me. I don't believe you will suddenly start being someone who is out to get to me. And I don't give a fuck if anyone knows I've used cocaine." "Sucks to be so easily read." "Not when what is being read is such a complimentary fact." "What fact is that exactly." "Your kindness." I start to cry. "Why did you cover your daily summary report with tiny writing that says that you can't imagine it away nor can you imagine it there?" "I'm trying to communicate with them in language they'll understand!!" "I'm sorry you don't find our staff very smart." "Dr. Le is. But my social worker..she's so basic. It's hard to get a good evaluation from someone who's far less intelligent than you. You know what I mean?" "Yes, unfortunately, I do." "From personal experience?" "I think you know the answer to that question is yes." "You know, this is simultaneously one of the most depressing and comforting conversations I've ever been in, so I'd like to congratulate you for that, but I have to go now. I have to deal with some petty business—the mail—applying for Social Security—all this junk my social worker wants me to do over lunch. Will you forgive me if I leave now?" Dave holds out his hand. "It was a pleasure talking with you." "With you, too," I say, and I leave his jungle of an office, closing the door behind me. - - - - My social worker did want me to start my Social Security application at lunch, but I had more important things to do. I went by the post office and picked up a box of copies of my own book, *Things Said in Dreams*, that I had made for myself on some website. I had said I was going to publish a book so—fuck, there, boom!—it was published. I also looked for my next unemployment check—but it wasn't there. I took my book to local book stores to try to get them to carry it. Of course none of them would. For all the *buy local* rhetoric that's so fashionable these days, no one was willing to put a book by a local author on their shelf. Of course they had *whole shelves* for local authors, but after one glance at the opening page of *my* book they *definitely* weren't going to carry it. Their local authors shelves were for Vermont housewives writing novels about apple pie—shit like that. On the way back to the Refuge I saw the Birches program director and as we passed each other, crossing the same street in opposite directions, I could see in his eyes a genuine look of appreciation for our conversation earlier, and I gave him the same look, and it made me feel like a human being for the first time in a while. ### 63 Killing yourself is a funny thing. Well, it's not funny. If you're unsuccessful, and you live, no one in your family will understand you for the rest of your life and it will will mar your family history forever. That's a best-case scenario. If you're successful, and you die, you will destroy some part of everyone who was close to you, forever, people will end up being mad at you instead of sad for you—they had their selfish reasons for wanting you around. Plus, if you're like me—and like a lot of people—the final act of suicide is an impulsive one. Some people plan for months, yes, or years—but for me I was just walking innocently down a hallway of a psych hospital when I realized I had all my prescription medicine in the pockets of my cargo pants. I walked past the receptionist. I sat in the waiting room. I knew I had prescription sleeping pills with me and I felt compelled to kill myself. Nothing was going my way. I had lost my job and so was about to be homeless in the winter in Vermont. Plus the humiliation of losing your apartment, which had happened to me once before in Los Angeles—it's just not how your life is supposed to go. So I sat in the waiting room of the Brattleboro Refuge, knowing what I should do: hand over all my pills to the receptionist and say, "I'm not safe with these right now. Will you please take them for me before I kill myself." Instead I walked out the main double doors, said goodnight to the woman behind the desk, took a whole bottle of pills without water and then handed the bottle to the security guard and suggested he call an ambulance. So, I mean, no, suicide isn't funny. But there's an element of chance that permeates all of life—and this element of chance comes into play with suicide as well. If I had more money in my bank account and could afford to pay my rent, I might have been just depressed, but I might not have been as suicidal, because I would know that each night after my classes at the Refuge, I was going to have a home to go to, where I could at least have the dignity to sleep in a bed and bathe, shower, shit in a civilized way. And the mind itself is a maze of elements of chance..there's no telling, with someone like me, what kind of chemical tide occurring in my brain will push me to elation..or will push me to despair. With bipolar, often there's no external reason we feel the way we do. The best way to explain it is to say that our emotions are like the weather—there's no *reason* it rains, it just does—there's no *reason* for a beautiful day, they just happen sometimes. Bipolar people seem irrational to neurotypicals—with good reason. People with normal brain chemistry don't feel sad *for no reason*. They think there must be some iron-clad, logical *reason* for killing yourself, but that's not the case. Something like 90% of suicides are carried out by people with a major mental illness (bipolar disorder, major depression, or schizophrenia). Yes, stockbrokers sometimes jump out of buildings when they lose all their money, but most of the people who kill themselves have mental illness. One of my Vermont psychiatrists, when I told him I liked to write, brought up Ernest Hemingway and said, "Matthew, as a person with bipolar disorder, you *can't afford* to drink. Alcohol is not only a depressant, but as I'm sure you know it's a disinhibitory agent. Think of Ernest Hemingway. If he hadn't been drinking, do you think he would have killed himself?" "Maybe not." "Maybe not," Dr. Sbarro said. "Why risk it? One out of five people with bipolar disorder successfully kills themself. For the general population it's one out of a *hundred*. You need all the inhibitions you can get, and that means no alcohol, no drugs, get regular sleep, and *don't get angry*—anger is a killer for bipolars, trust me, I see ten people a week with your condition, and you need to do everything you can to live a calm, measured life." Dr. Sbarro trailed off to me—well, I stopped listening. I was thinking about Hemingway. What if when Hemingway put that shotgun in his mouth, he missed, chipped a tooth, had to go get an emergency crown and forgot to kill himself. I'm just saying: there's a tragic element of chance to all this. Or if your person is unsuccessful at suicide, maybe that element of chance isn't only tragic, but also glorious in the worst possible way. I left that small group that night feeling *so low*, seeing only dead ends, knowing I shouldn't drink but not knowing how else to console myself. And I wasn't drunk—I had stopped buying wine, stopped going to bars. Sobriety was a requirement of Starting Now, and I was giving it a try. But when I stopped drinking, things got worse. After a few days sober, I get a little bump, physically—I feel better for a second. And when I'm sober my body feels better, no doubt. But there's a reason I've been drinking all these years—past the early days of experimenting with and enjoying feeling tipsy—alcohol calms my mind. And I have a very busy mind. It's too busy for it's own good, actually—ask anyone with bipolar disorder. I remember the first time a psychiatrist asked me if I had racing thoughts. I said I didn't know what racing thoughts were. I didn't—because mine are always racing. You mean there's another way than *chaos brain*? *Yes*, they told me, but to this day, even on lithium, that's just how my mind is—I overthink things to a *paralyzing* level. I'd heard horror stories of people turning into zombies on lithium, being unable to create. Not me. The therapeutic level for me is twelve-hundred milligrams a day and that shit doesn't slow me down *one bit*. Alcohol, however, *does* slow my brain down, and it's a magical substance for me. It frees me from the burden of *too much thought*. I really can't socialize with normal people unless I'm drinking, and no, it's not because sober me is too afraid of social contact without alcohol to *bolster my courage*, as AA's brilliant theory goes. It's because *people like me better* when I'm toned down a little, when I'm not as sharp, when my thoughts are slow enough that we can tolerate each other. Also, alcohol helps me sleep. I remember times, in my early twenties, before I really started drinking, when I would wake up for weeks in a row at 1 or 2am with my girlfriend lying next to me, and the only thing I could think to do was quietly go to work and move some pointless project forward—but it gave me a sense of loyalty and it gave me something to do on those sleepless nights. When I stop drinking, I stop sleeping, I'm even *less* inhibited in some ways, I am completely out of control socially—a general terror. But when I made my suicide attempt, I was completely sober, completely clean off drugs. That was part of the problem. When I'm drunk or using and I get depressed, I drink or use more and it gets me through it. When I'm clean and sober and I get depressed, I look for ways to kill myself. Drinking and using was a way to not kill myself—and I'm glad I had that cushion for as long as I did. I lied down on a picnic table and looked up at the stars and thought about those sleeping pills and then I thought: *Maybe tonight is the night.* Maybe I'm ready to let go to my present—my future is empty. Better to die here in a place that I like than die freezing as a homeless person somewhere in the woods. And maybe they would save me. And maybe they would help me this time, realize I had something really fucked up about me and not just send me out in the world like Dr. Criminal. I knew I should have handed my sleeping pills over to the receptionist because of what I was about to do, but I didn't do it. I sat right next to her in the waiting room, borrowed her phone, but I didn't know who to call. My Brattleboro Refuge emergency card had a list of numbers on it, and the first one was the Brattleboro Refuge, which is right where I was sitting, and I still couldn't ask for help from them. It was embarrassing. I mean admitting to someone that you're about to kill yourself unless they help you..that's a little weird. I had such a strong impulse to take those pills—and a slightly weaker one to ask for help. So I took the pills. I sat on a picnic table and I took the pills. I took one, dry swallowing it. I knew one would have no effect on me. Then I took two. I knew two would put me to sleep in 20 to 30 minutes. Then I took three, then four, and I knew that there was a threshold here where if I took enough, I wouldn't wake up. So I kept taking, and taking, and I took until I thought I was across that threshold. Dry swallowing them became easier and easier, as my intention strengthened. I mean if you have trouble dry swallowing sleeping pills when you're trying to kill yourself, you've got problems. Are you trying to kill yourself or what?? I took enough that I was sure I would die without a trip to the emergency room then I tossed the rest of the bottle in the grass. In fact I hadn't made up my mind about whether those pills would kill me but I was prepared to die if that's what happened. I just dried up, came to the end, felt so alone, so cold, so empty. I rolled the dice, thinking this was a way to get the attention I needed (after not being taken seriously by my last psychiatrist on my last visit to the Refuge). Then I got off the picnic table and walked up to the security guard. I handed him the empty bottle and said, "You might want to call 911." I started walking away from him while he called 911. He came after me and had me sit on a bench by the front entrance and wait and while I sat there I wondered if I would die. ### 64 There it is, the ugly truth. My suicide attempt wasn't really a suicide attempt. It was a cry for help. And I'm worried people in my family who read this will take me less seriously now that they know. Because I do have problems. And they need attention. And I could have died, even though I didn't want to, I was that close. In my suicide attempt I didn't want to die. I wanted to get back into the hospital, because I knew I needed more and better treatment. So I took a risk. I took some pills that could have killed me—but not too many. Just enough to have my attempt taken seriously and get me admitted back into the Refuge. I could have messed up and taken too many pills and died. But it was worth it..to have the chance that I would get into the hospital and have a serious psychiatrist treat my bipolar. Someone like me can't just walk up to the admitting window at the Brattleboro Refuge and say, "Hey, I'm suicidal, please admit me." They would admit me, but they wouldn't take me seriously. I needed them to take me seriously. That's the problem with looking like you're ok on the outside, being well spoken, being intelligent: you don't fit the picture of someone who is in extreme distress, sometimes not even to trained psychiatrists, even after they've interviewed you extensively. But I got what I wanted. A three-week stay in a mental hospital, with a good doctor this time, and someone prescribing medication for my bipolar disorder. One thing I think is telling about this whole situation which I haven't explicitly mentioned yet, is this: when I went out, I didn't tell any of my family or friends. I didn't leave behind any justification nor did I feel the need to explain myself or even reach out one more time to say *I love you*. I didn't write a suicide note—I think that says a lot right there. Other people's thoughts and feelings were of zero importance to me at that moment. My problem isn't between me and some people running around this planet like ants. My problem is between me and the stars. I wasn't trying to make a point to anyone I knew. I didn't want to connect with my family through my suicide. I didn't have any last words I wanted to share with anyone. All those relationships were severed or meant nothing to me at that point. There was no one to talk to, not even to say goodbye. Although I'm asking you to see this as a cry-for-help suicide—because it was—you have to know that I was in a suicidal state performing a suicidal act. In the movie version of Michael Crichton's *Sphere*, Dustin Hoffman plays Sharon Stone's psychiatrist. He's discussing Stone's character with their mission leader. Hoffman says: "It was a passive attempt." The mission leader: "A passive attempt?" Hoffman says: "Yes. People who really want to kill themselves get a gun and shoot themselves—or go over a bridge. They don't call up their boyfriend and say: 'I just took twenty Nembutal..help me.' " That's what I did. I took twenty Vistarils, which had been prescribed to me for sleep. I took them in the courtyard of a mental hospital, with a security guard visible to me at all times. I didn't take the whole bottle of pills. I guessed at a high number of pills that would put me in the hospital with [whatever effects] without taking enough that I thought I couldn't survive those effects. Then I emptied out the rest of the bottle, sprinkling the pills underneath a tree, certain in my paranoid mind that someone would find them—that they would scour the grounds like the crack team from some police procedural. I worried about that for days, that in the ER some doctor would come up to me holding my prescription bottle and say, "We found half a bottle of Vistaril scattered under a tree at the Refuge. You want to tell me how many of these you *really* took?" But I dry swallowed at least twenty of those pills and in the ER doctors did all kinds of blood tests. It was late and there weren't many people on staff, so they took my blood twice—once when I first got there and once many hours later, in the early morning. When they came back with the results, some doctor walked up to my bed and he did question me about how many pills I took. "The whole bottle?" "Well I was using them normally for a while, so it wasn't *the whole bottle*, but I took what was left of the bottle." "How long had you been using these normally before last night?" "I don't know..two weeks..one week? I really have no idea." "The problem is," this doctor said, "we're not seeing high levels of Vistaril in your blood, so.." "I don't know what to tell you," I said, hysterically. "I took what was left of the bottle." "Was it like..forty..fifty pills?" "Something like that. Maybe the charcoal got it out of me, I don't know, I'm not the doctor. Obviously I wasn't thinking clearly if I'm trying to kill myself with my sleeping pills! I wasn't exactly *counting them out* one by one. It was dark. I was outside. I couldn't see how many pills were left in that bottle. I took what was left of the bottle. That's all I can tell you." The doctor stood there looking at me skeptically, holding my Vistaril bottle up at the level of his head. If he had stood there one second longer I was going to bring up the fact that somewhere in this dinky hospital's process, there had been a breakdown by which a suicide patient's initial blood draw had been *lost* (the second nurse who took my blood told me this) so the data he was looking at was based on my blood after they had made me swallow a bunch of charcoal that binds with poison in your stomach in a way that your intestines can't digest it, and after I had been lying awake all night drinking water and having a fucking IV drip clearing up my blood for hours and hours and hours while I awkwardly tried to make the security guard who was assigned to watch me, laugh. He was friendly, but he didn't laugh. He just sat in his chair and made sure I didn't try to kill myself again. Anyway the blood this doctor was looking at was taken seven or eight *hours* after I swallowed those pills—of course the levels are going to be low, don't give *me* a hard time about it. The doctor lowered the prescription bottle, looking at me doubtfully. He walked away. It made me want to kill myself right there in his hospital. While Dustin Hoffman's psychiatrist character in *Sphere* has a point: taking pills is one of the least lethal methods of suicide (jumping off a building, hanging, and shooting yourself in the face are much more effective), attempts by overdose are by far the most common way of trying to kill yourself, so even though suicide by overdose fails most of the time, it still results in a huge amount of deaths just because people do it so often. - - - - When I was in my first interview with Dr. Meggs, my psychiatrist at the Refuge, she passed along to me this information from the ER doctor at Brattleboro Memorial that there was very little Vistaril in my blood, but unlike the ER doc, she did it in a non-threatening way. She wasn't accusing me. She was completely neutral. We were just discussing facts. I told her that his data was based on a 5am blood sample, that they had lost my blood taken when I first arrived at the ER, and, with her head lowered, looking at my chart, she shook her head—but not at me, at Bratt Memorial, and I finally felt I had someone on my side. She gave me some different medicine for sleep, but told me we were making a deal. "I'm only giving you this if you'll promise not to..try to kill yourself with it. You have to assure me that you will not do that or else I won't give it to you. While you're here, you'll be getting it from the med station, but when you get out, I'll only give it to you in one-week prescriptions. So it's going to be a pain for you, you're going to have to refill it every week, but I have to make sure that you don't do what you did before. Understand?" I nodded tearfully, and sniffled. "Do you want a tissue?" I shook my head and wiped my nose on my shirt. "Oh and another thing," my doctor said. "You can never abuse this. I'm saying this for your own good—not because we don't want you to die (that's one thing)—but I want you to be able to sleep and if you try to hurt yourself again, and you use this medicine, no one will ever prescribe it to you again. Ok? I want to help you *create* options, not cut them off." - - - - An implicit statement here was that no one would ever prescribe Vistaril to me again, since I used to to try to kill myself. And that's true. No one ever has. In fact, when I got out of the hospital, and moved to different cities, there were about five years there where I couldn't even remember the name of the sleeping pill I had used to overdose. Doctors would ask me and I just couldn't remember. I think my mind was protecting me—why would I want to remember the medicine I used to risk my life to get back into the hospital? I think my brain said, "No, we're going to keep this from him for a while, until we think he can handle it. He's not ready to think specific thoughts about the specific pills he used that night, used to manipulate a security guard into calling 911, manipulate an ambulance to drive my half-conscious self to the emergency room, manipulate two nurses to make me swallow two big glasses of this charcoal mixture that may have saved my life. Or maybe not. Maybe if I had been able to go home after I swallowed those pills—or if I had been able to refrain from taking them—I could have woken up in the morning feeling horrible or beautiful. But I couldn't have gone home that night. I was never going to leave the courtyard of that psych ward. Something was going to happen. I might have slept in the grass and forced the security guard to call the cops and come arrest me or kill me, but I wasn't leaving that courtyard that night. Something in me, starting during my outpatient class, was slowing down, not making sense. Something unavoidable and fatal was rising up in me. When I went to the bathroom downstairs I knew I had those pills in my cargo pocket—I had all my pills with me. I looked myself in the mirror and just as I used to lie to myself so deeply when I would get in my car and say: *I think I'll go for a drive. Maybe to the grocery store. Maybe back to work*..when I knew just underneath my lies that I was going to the bar..just like that, when I stared in the mirror of the Refuge bathroom I told myself the lie that *maybe I'll just go home and try to sleep off this depression, maybe tomorrow I won't feel like giving up*..I knew right then, when I realized I had sleeping pills in my pocket, that I was going to take them. When I walked past the receptionist, enclosed in glass in the Refuge lobby, I knew that the smart thing to do was to go up to her, give her my pills, and say: "I don't feel safe with these right now. Will you hold them for me?" I knew that. But I was on a track, my actions were determined. I sat in the lobby and meekly asked the receptionist if I could sit here for a while. She said fine, if you need to use the telephone or anything, let me know. I said I'd like to use the telephone. She slid open a window and pushed an old-style telephone out for me. I thought of who to call. I had been in the Refuge, inpatient, twice before—right?—once for pointless rehab off a week of drinking and one night of smoking crack that was too much for me to get over alone. I reached in my wallet. I had my Brattleboro Refuge emergency card with me, with the twenty-four hour emergency number on it (which would ring the woman who had given me the phone, sitting right next to me). The card also specifically reminded me that in an emergency I should call 911. I imagined an EMT crew busting through the front doors of the Refuge—thirty feet from where I sat—and them finding me huddled in a corner with the wire stretched from this phone into the receptionist's cube. *You called 911 from a psychiatric hospital..because you're suicidal? Why not tell the woman at the front desk?* The admitting door to the psych units was just on the other side of that desk. I was exactly where I needed to be. I knew what I needed to do to avoid a suicide attempt. I just couldn't do it. I thought of those times in the tenth grade when me and my best friend were walking together in a long hallway, approaching a place where you would have to go either left or right. And his class was to the left, and my class was to the right, but we'd talk about free will and wonder if we had any. Could I actually go either way I chose, or was *choice* an illusion, was everything determined? It seemed at the time that there was no way to know, but even then, the more we both thought about it and discussed it on our way down that long hallway, the more it seemed like choice *was* an illusion—just a feeling you had, mostly after the fact, that was there to torture your mind with major and minor regrets. You ever do the wrong thing when you know what the right thing is? Ever cheat on a monogamous relationship? Make a totally unnecessary dangerous move on the highway? Take a drug you know is dangerous, just because you're curious? I've done that a lot. And maybe I'm stupid. Or maybe I'm smart, and exploratory. Or maybe it all is determined, and there's no such thing as choice, and we're just watching a movie that none of us can change. Free will is a metaphor. It's useful to us to organize the complex reality we're experiencing. But that's all it is—a metaphor. It's totally false, but we need it as one of the little pieces of magic by which we construct an identity—also a false but useful metaphor. There is no way I "could have done" anything, that night, but feel low and tired in my outpatient class, feel my stomach sink like a block of ice, feel like a baby without a blanket—too cold and neglected, alone. That Brattleboro Refuge card, the emergency plan written on it, a collaboration between me and Michelle, the head nurse, was useless to me. The emergency numbers of people who loved me and I could call in an emergency? 1) I didn't feel any of them loved me. I was suicidally depressed! Love was not something I was feeling for anyone and it was not something I felt I deserved. If anyone said they loved me, they were pretending. What if I do call my old friend Ashley, my mom, my sisters? How do you discuss that with them? *Hi, I want to kill myself. Can we talk?* That is not a discussion people prepare to have. Maybe we should. I was too ashamed of my feelings anyway—if for no other reason, I didn't pick up the phone and dial one of those numbers. I didn't leave a note—what is there to say? If I kill myself, *that's* the statement. Ending your own life? That says pretty much all there is to say. I gave the woman back her phone. I left her and said, "Good night!" "Good night," she said. I feel so cut off—so alone. *And I've felt this way forever.* I hate myself. I feel like an idiot, like everything I do is wrong or displeasing to my parents. Maybe to me. I don't know. I can't even get a job anymore. It felt good to a small degree to do useful things for Mead Research or Anthem, even though it was meaningless work, unchallenging work. At least I made my bosses smile. My bike was chained to the rack at the bottom of the stairs. The security guard was doing his rounds in the parking lot, right where expected. He was part of my plan. I went to a picnic table and fumbled in the dark to figure out which of my bottles was Vistaril. I could see by the light coming from the double doors of the Refuge, barely, and I opened the bottle and started dry swallowing pills. Like I said, I knew with the first few that I was just putting myself to sleep. But I kept taking them. And I knew that with each pill I took, the chance of this being a cry for help and this being the last night of my life, increased. I took another, and another. Dry swallowing pills is hard but I made it work—I needed to—just like when I was in high school, embarrassed by a wart and my parents would not or could not afford to take me to a dermatologist, I got up in the middle of the night and I used a pair of scissors that almost broke with the force it took me to cut through human skin. It was pain beyond pain, but I could not take one more day of the girls at my lunch table looking at my hand and seeing a wart on my finger. That wart made me feel untouchable, and that was pain for me much greater than the pain of cutting around the skin, deep enough to take out the root, in the bathroom with the door locked and my blood running into a porcelain sink. But I did it piece by piece, I cut that wart out of me, with disgust so visceral I can still feel what it's like to use a pair of scissors to cut off the side of your own finger, to cut through your own skin, removing the prints such that they'll never grow back, such that to this day I have a scar on my right index finger. But there's no wart there. And it's a reminder. That I can walk through almost unbearable pain. That I can do what is necessary. That I don't need anyone else to solve my problems—I can solve them myself. If not with an injection or dry ice at the dermatologist's office that I could not get to, I would handle it myself, the old way, with willpower and a pair of scissors. Inside the little bio of Emily Brontë at the end of *Wuthering Heights*, it says that she was once bitten by a rabid dog. It then says that Emily used a "red-hot iron" to cauterize her own wound. She didn't tell anyone and no one knew until someone saw the scars. I don't have a girlfriend—but if I did it would be Emily Brontë. - - - - I took my pills, I looked up at the clear sky, the stars. I thought how many people throughout history and probably tons of intelligent creatures on other planets had looked up at the stars as they killed themselves. With each pill I cared less, and with each pill I wanted to die more. I wanted that to be my last sight, so I lied down on the top of the picnic table and adjusted my glasses, and I looked at all those tiny little stars. I was on the edge, you know? I didn't know how to proceed with my life—I didn't know how to take the next step. And I confused that with death, or I considered death a solution. I didn't have a job. I was losing my apartment. I didn't have friends anymore, since I stopped drinking. I wasn't having sex. My family was far away. My dad had chosen, long ago, to ignore me, and I was just now catching up. Man, if I had a kid who was homeless (as I had been once long ago), or if I had a kid who was up in Vermont (and he was just in Delaware), and my son had called me or emailed me weeks prior to say he had been in rehab, then in a psych ward because mental health workers in his outpatient support group thought he was suicidal, I would have flown my ass up to Vermont, or gotten on a train, or *walked* up that motherfucker until I got to my son, and I would have held him, and rocked him, and I would have cried for us both. Because the world is rotten, but without somebody to hold you, it's impossible. The stars grew blurry with my tears. I didn't even wipe them away. I just took my pills. And I didn't know if I was the manipulator or the manipulated. I didn't know if I was in control or if I was being controlled. But I remembered, somewhere within me, that I didn't want to die. If I twisted around the definitions, I wasn't suicidal, I was actually just lost. So I took my last pill and there were like eight of them left. Or maybe twelve. That's just an estimate from the sound they made when I shook the bottle. I got off the picnic table, went to my favorite tree, watered that monster with Vistaril, and went to the security guard. I think my tree slept well that night. The guard looked uncomfortable as I approached him but I knew he didn't carry a gun so I wasn't worried. I handed him the prescription bottle. It was open, empty, without the cap. "What do you want me to do with this?" he said. "Well, you might want to call 911," I said. And I was laughing. I was laughing and crying in this poor guy's face. He pulled out his phone. Dialed 911. "Yes, this is Mitchell Anderson. I'm with Akai Security Consultants and I've got a young man here who—No, Akai, A-K-A-I. He came up to me and handed me a prescription bottle, it's a big bottle—No, *Akai*, alpha, kilo, alpha—*Listen*, I need an ambulance at the Refuge *right now*. This guy took, I'm assuming—how many of these did you take?" I'm hysterical now. I'm grabbing the guy by the collar of his jacket. "*What does it matter? Hahahahaha!!*" Then I'm burying my face in his jacket and crying and snotting all over him. He firmly pushes me away. "See that bench? I need you to go sit on that bench." I look at the bench. "Yeah, that's him. Right. The Refuge. We're right at the main entrance. You won't miss us." He clicks off. "Would you please sit on that bench?" I go to the bench. I sit. The guy comes and stands in front of me. I bend over and cover my ears and my face with my hands and I start weeping—tears, uncontrollable breaths. I look up and see the stars are still there. I look up at the guy and I take a huge breath in. Huge breath out. "Why do you want to die?" he says. "Because *everything* is a huge farce," I say, and I raise my arms as if to include everything..everything..the security guard, the Brattleboro Refuge, my outpatient class, myself, and all those tiny little, huge little stars that are raining down before me. ### 65 Sometime in the night they switched security guards on me. They didn't handcuff me to the bed or anything, but at first they had this guy—literally the hospital security guard—sitting in a chair watching me. We talked some, mostly me making wild jokes that he definitely did not think were funny: "What happened to the guy who tried to kill himself by taking 100 pain killers? After two he began to feel better." No laugh. "Ok, you'll like this one. I can tell you're a smart guy. So there's this physicist walking across the Golden Gate Bridge. He sees a man about to jump. Just before the man jumps, the physicist yells: 'Don't do it! You have so much potential!' No? Not into the physics jokes, o-k. Hmm. Ok. Ok. This one's good. You can't not like this joke. If you don't like this joke, there's something wrong with you, and I don't even like jokes. Here goes. Why did Hitler kill himself? Because he saw his gas bill." Fuck. "That went over like a lead blanket. Do you mind if I talk." "No. I don't mind. I'm here to keep you company." "And make sure I don't kill myself." He shrugs. "I have a lot more suicide jokes that are much sicker but I'm sensing you're not into the whole suicide joke thing right now, so I'm gonna leave those alone..you're welcome." The guy smiles with one side of his mouth. Then somewhere around 3am that guy had to go fill out security guard paperwork or something so they sent in the janitor. Guy looked like he'd lived in Vermont forever. Coveralls (Dickies), boots that could cut through a *lake* of ice, a hat that covered most of his face. He asked the security guard if I'd been any trouble, the security guard said no, and then this Vermonter sat in a folding chair by the door of the room where my bed was. He put his head down, his hands cupped over his forehead where I couldn't see his eyes. He sighed. "Long night?" I asked. "Yeah," he said, not looking up. "You always work nights?" I asked. He looks up at me. "I used to work days. Fifteen years I worked days. Then my wife died so I don't have anything to really do when I go home, so they needed someone to work nights and I said, 'What the hell.' Now I like nights better." "Nights *are* better," I say. "Because of the people?" he asks. "Exactly. Day people are aggro—" "What's aggro?" "Aggressive. Slang they use out west. But night people—customers and workers—it's a whole different vibe." "It's a whole different speed!" he says. "I know, man. Day people'll run you over just to get to work five seconds earlier. To a job they fucking hate." "Exactly right," this guy says. "Exactly." "You get many suicides in here?" I ask. He sighs heavily. "Two or three a year." "Got any advice for me? Like words of wisdom past suicidal victims have passed on to you, that you could pass on to me, so I can live my life better?" He looks at me for about nine seconds and then says: "Don't kill yourself." Don't kill yourself! That's his advice! That's why I love these fucking Vermonters: they're so down to Earth, so simple, so practical. I mean, yeah, what else is this fucking custodian going to say? He's no psychiatrist. It's like telling a drunk: *Don't drink alcohol.* It's advice so simple it just might work. Don't kill yourself. Don't drink alcohol. *Don't take a selfie with a rattlesnake.* Life is hard—ok it's *really* hard. But along with being hard it's also simple. You *know* what you need to do. *Doing it* is the hard part. If you ever need advice, I recommend you skip the internet, skip the psychiatrists, and find yourself a Vermonter. They've gone all the way around the complex stuff and come back to the simple—and that's what you need when you're in trouble. You don't need a philosopher. You need a guy who works the night shift, knows what it's like to lose a wife, wears Dickies to work, mops the floors without comment, and when he sees a snake or a bear on his property, he doesn't ask it how it's feeling—no—he grabs his shotgun and blows the motherfucker's head off. *That's* the advice you need. ### 66 In the morning they put me on a stretcher and take me away in an ambulance to the Brattleboro Refuge. I feel embarrassed and stupid and the EMTs say, "No, you're getting the help you need." During the ambulance ride from the hospital to the Refuge, I felt like a schmo that I tried to kill myself and this is really my life situation. This shit here is real. Talking to the EMT in the back with me. He was like, "How do you feel?" And I was like, "Stupid." He was very encouraging. "How did you get here?" he asked. So I went through the whole thing in fast speed. "Suicide attempt in the Brattleboro Refuge lawn. Jump back a little. What had started all this was me getting stressed with work, starting drinking again, losing my job, getting drunk and lonely enough that I blew the rest of my already-failing bank account to smoke crack with a couple a strangers, coming out of it in the morning like: *Fuck, I have no money. No job. I'm going to get evicted. And being so mad at myself that I smoked crack again. I fucking hate crack. But that's the only way you can get cocaine when you're dealing with poor people!!* Next came a week of rehab, this Refuge outpatient program where they observed me and said I was acting suicidal. So I had a first hospitalization where Dr. Criminal didn't do a good job—his name is actually Dr. Criminal, yes, I'm not making this up..like there's a guy in the midwest who sells RVs, his name is Tom Raper, no lie..so Dr. Criminal didn't take my suicidality seriously, didn't even really pay attention to me to be honest, during a week-long stay in the fucking *hospital*. It's like, *you're a psychiatrist dealing with suicide cases*, you can't exactly phone this shit in. Now here we are presumably at my next admittance..after a suicide attempt..or was it?..maybe I'm just crazy enough to risk my life to get back into the hospital to get the help I *THINK I FUCKING NEED*. This *could be* my way of asking for help. I *could have* just *said* I was suicidal but when I did that *my doctor didn't listen*. He discharged me before I was ready to go and *without diagnosing me* or *giving me any medicine*. SO THAT'S THE BRIEF VERSION, SINCE YOU ASKED, MY DROOGIE!!" The EMT looked at me, totally calm, and said, "I hope you get the help you need this time." They admit me. The EMTs leave. The second I got on Tyler 2, I went up to the nurses' station and said: "I am requesting a doctor change." Michelle said, "Who would you like?" "I don't know I just need to try someone different this time. Stripes swears by her doctor, can I have her?" "Actually for you I'm going to suggest Dr. Meggs." "Great. Thank you, Michelle." "You are most welcome," she sings. That little event that just happened was one of the most fortuitous events of my life. Yeah there was transference and countertransference but in a way there *had* to be in order to have as productive a doctor-patient session as Dr. Meggs and I had over the next three weeks and beyond. I was a special patient to her. She was a special doctor to me. Given the circumstance, that was what was needed, and that was thankfully what I got. On every visit to the Refuge after my suicide attempt, I saw Dr. Criminal as we passed each other in the hallway. Those were always awkward looks! We never spoke. I wondered how he felt, and I always nodded at him respectfully. As I mentioned, one of the substance abusers counsellors tried to explain to me that "He [Dr. Criminal](#) is old school." That was supposed to mean he didn't believe in prescribing a lot of medication. I was never mad at Dr. Criminal back then. I was very pragmatic—I just wanted to solve my problems, I just wanted to get the help I needed. I wasn't into blaming anyone (but myself). But looking back at Dr. Criminal now—yeah I'm mad. A patient comes in on the recommendation of your own staff because he's expressing suicidal ideation in his outpatient rehab class. He's been diagnosed bipolar by two hospitals now—one in California five years ago (where he ended up after calling a suicide hotline) and then diagnosed bipolar *again* after being admitted to the rehab unit of this very hospital. At least throw a brother an antidepressant, you know what I'm sayin'? All he gave me was sleeping pills and a weak anti-anxiety med. - - - - My first interview with Dr. Meggs. My first interview with Dr. Meggs was incredible as a clinical example of doctor-patient exchange. I wanted to talk and she was ready to help me do it. I quickly found myself crying uncontrollably and this psychiatrist I had known for thirty minutes gets me to reveal something I'd never spoken about to *anyone*— doctor, family member, anyone. Part of the reason I never talked about it is I didn't realize it wasn't normal, but somehow Dr. Meggs asked the right question to unlock the fact that during my potty training period, my dad would humiliate me by making me clean my own shit out of my shitty underwear with my bare hands, rubbing my underwear in the toilet to manually clean them. Dr. Meggs told me that was an act of humiliation of me by my dad. She told me we learn how to relate to people from our first relationships and one of the first relationships I learned—thanks, Dad!—was humiliator/humiliated, and that she thinks ever since then, I've been playing that same game with others, only with me in the humiliator position because I wanted to make sure I was never in the humiliated position again. Best therapeutic lesson of my life. Right there. Dr. Meggs. Boom. Yeah, head nurse Michelle—thank you—thank you for picking that doctor for me. Holy shit. I started crying tears of catharsis that moment and I've been crying them ever since, right up to today as I type this fucking sentence. Right as I typed that period: tears of catharsis. Whoah. I'm been humiliating others because I was taught to do so before I learned to talk. I've been making myself humiliation-proof since *before I learned to talk.* In thirty minutes of talking she gets me to share something I've never shared before with anyone in thirty-three years of life and multiple years of therapy. In her notes she writes, "Patient is very labile" which means I was weeping like they do in the Bible, wailing, crying my fucking head off. I told Dr. Meggs that Dad used the bathroom (took a shit) with the door open in the first floor bathroom near the breakfast table where us kids were eating breakfast, that he's obsessed with taking a shit the same time every day and precisely manipulates his diet with fiber to achieve this. That he showered with us to a late age. That Mom tells us stories that he couldn't deal with us (his family) in the early days in Dallas, Texas and he would disappear to Florida for weeks at a time and write Mom letters about how he just couldn't handle the stress and responsibility of having a family. When confronted about this, Dad flatly denies it ever happened, even though, when scanning Mom's old stuff for her, I found the letters, written in Dad's hand, postmarked from Florida. Even in the face of me telling him I've held the letters in my hand, read them, seen the postmark, he denies that ever happened. My hate for putting together furniture, yard work, mowing the lawn, fixing things especially plumbing, and carpentry..I have strong negative associations of doing those things with Dad and memories of Dad yelling and cussing at inanimate objects that didn't do what he wanted them to do. To this day I have a strong, decompensatory reaction to lawn mowing, putting together IKEA furniture, any kind of house repairs..I was always the guy holding the flashlight while my dad did the real work. He never explained what he was doing or included me in it—he just made me hold the flashlight and yelled at me when it drifted into the wrong place. My mom had her sisters over to visit when my parents were newly married. Dad came out in his underwear and acted like it was completely normal and acceptable to be conversing with his wife's sisters in his underwear. Mom was like: "What are you doing?" Dad dances around a little so my mom's sisters can see the outline of his cock. "Nothing," he says. "Go put some clothes on!" "Why?" My mom's sisters squirm uncomfortably on the couch. Dad says: "What's wrong? Why is everyone so tight about human sexuality? It's natural. It's part of life. God made it. Anyway my dad put the down payment on this house so even though we're married I figure this house is at least fifty-one percent mine." He jumps up and down, in just his socks and underwear, and his penis bounces with him. *Fifty-one percent.* "Does anyone disagree with that figure?" After Mom and Dad divorced, Dad and his new wife had sex in the same tent where his daughter, my sister, was also an occupant. He didn't care for the effect of this on her, or was just so clueless and insensitive that he didn't think it would *have* an effect. After Joanne shut him out of her life for five or ten years, he stopped inviting her to Thanksgiving. When I accepted, and was at his house with Leona, I discovered that he hadn't invited Joanne and that became a pivotal point in my period of anger toward him. If you are the parent, you keep inviting your children—all of them—to holidays until you're dead or not doing any more holiday parties. Years later I sent email to my dad and his new wife making fun of her face and calling her a "chipmunk bitch" (which is exactly what she looks like). I told him in those letters [voicemail, actually] if he ever again failed to invite Joanne to a family event that I would kill him. Then I told him I was going to come to Delaware and kill myself on his porch so he'd never be able to forget me. He filed a restraining order. I was in California coming down off crystal meth at the time and felt much more reasonable when the drug worked its way all the way through me. But I have always wanted my dad's attention. I think I still do. But I know by now that is something I will never, ever have. - - - - Memory of squatting over the cooling vent in the floor, looking out the picture windows, and taking a nice warm shit in my underwear. Then Dad, gruff voice, yelling at me in the bathroom and making me wash the shit out of my underwear in the toilet. "Did you play with fire as a child?" "Yes, up to the ninth grade I made my own bombs, traps, explosives. I had my own mixtures of wax and rocket fuel that would burn and I set ants on fire with caps and a magnifying glass. My mom was terrified. These were large fires I was creating. My dad and I almost burned down a state forest playing with fireworks in the summer." "Did you wet the bed?" "Until the third grade, at least." "How often do you deal with thoughts of suicide?" "Every day." "Every *day*?" "Yes." "Since when?" "Since high school." "Well, we're lucky to still have you with us, aren't we?" "Uh..I'm not sure what modicum of luck that furnishes for you or what degree of unluck it rains upon me." "Well I think we are lucky you're still with us. Will you allow me my opinion?" "Yes, of course." "If you think about suicide every day, how come this is your first attempt? How have you overcome the desire—or the temptation—for so long..for years?" "It's a discipline. Mostly I just keep in mind that like any of us, I could die any minute, so why rush it? I mean the reality is that this may be the last conversation I ever have with anyone, so I might as well enjoy it. Obviously I'm of two minds on the subject—I am struggling, sometimes very intensely, to be able to enjoy life in this society, with the actual people who are present for me to interact with..but also I do find great joy in experiencing certain types of moments." "Like what? Give me an example of a moment you enjoy." "Anything. Like drinking a glass of water. Or..mostly..talking with smart people." "Sex?" "Yes, I enjoy sex, especially if it's with someone I love, or at least a friend that I'm sexually attracted to." Dr. Meggs is taking notes furiously. Our session lasts a full hour that day. It is one of the formative hours of my life. "I probably shouldn't tell you this—I could get fired for telling you this but there's a certain school of thought..well at least some people say that life starts after your first suicide attempt. *Don't repeat that.* But since you've already done it, you might as well think of your attempt in as positive a light as possible. That's what I'm thinking anyway. Anything else you want to tell me?" "Yeah. In LA I used to change my number every night. Sitting in front of a movie, eating enchiladas and drinking wine, I'd call my carrier and request a new number, any number, just something that no one I knew, had—to guarantee no one could call me. Paranoia? Need for security? Need for isolation? Not being able to trust people, in general..my dad." Dr. Meggs nodded like that made perfect sense. And I was glad it did, to her. "And you know what else?" "Tell me." "I have this memory, my last night in LA, talking to my dad on my cell phone in my second-floor room of Gideon's crack motel. And when we were done, even though I needed help desperately and my dad was the only person who could give it to me, I felt like such *shit* after my conversation with him, that I felt something that had been an undercurrent all my life, but had never surfaced until now—I wanted to kill myself. I can't blame my suicidality on my dad, of course. It's *my* psychology, it's *my* responsibility, as far as I can do anything about my psychology. But the fact remains, that after a certain point in my life, every time I had a conversation with my dad, the things he said, the things he didn't say, and the spaces in between, made me feel very clearly that my dad did not want to have a relationship with me, even a one-call-a-week relationship..and as I thought back, as far as I could remember, I knew something that was so harmful to my psyche that I could hardly let myself believe it—and that is that my dad and I have *never* had a meaningful relationship. The only thing he got right was taking me and my sisters to walk in Fairmount Park when we lived in Philadelphia. I loved playing with my sisters on rock formations. But Dad walked along behind us, probably thinking about his childhood and his dad. There was no relationship. We didn't play *together*. We didn't talk, except for when he told us it was time to go home. That was the only thing he got right. The rest of it was stuff like forgetting to pick me up from the SATs, when it was an hour after the test had ended and all the students and teachers had left and locked up and I was standing alone in an empty parking lot in the winter, in west Philly, doing breathing exercises so my body wouldn't shiver so much..*that's* when my dad finally showed up. He wasn't going to waste any of *his* time getting there early *to be ready for me* when the test ended. He got there when he knew *he wouldn't have to wait* on me. It was that way with every after-school activity me and my sisters did. He was always late, one-hundred percent of the time—and that sends a powerful message. "So I was in that crack motel realizing for the first time that listening to Dad talk made me want to kill myself. He let me know—and he has let my sisters know—over and over that we are not priorities in his life. Work takes priority over his kids. Sex takes priority over his kids. Home improvement projects take priority over his kids. His cats take priority over his kids. Once he called me, telling me Tiger, his cat, had gotten hit by a car and died. I couldn't find a honey drop of empathy within me. *How about don't leave the front door open when you have inside cats?* was the only sensible thing I could think to say. But of course I didn't want to suggest that he might have been partially responsible—that thought, with a cat, with his kids, would have been too much for him to take. "So I changed my number. I thought, why should I be accessible by voice to a man who, when he speaks, drastically increases the chance I will kill myself *tonight*." I told Meggs I spent my childhood trying to please my dad, to figure out what I could do that would make him happy. She explains to me that probably nothing I did would have ever made him happy. "But I think in general, my number changing didn't have as much to do with my dad or Josh from work calling me and pretending to have a relationship with me that they did not have. "It was *my* fear. "It was just *my* fear of being close to other people. "But, I mean, Josh, my dad..those weren't people who had any kind of benefit to offer me. They were leachers, manipulators, and I think M. Scott Peck would agree with me that both of those people were evil in the greatest sense of the word." And then later I was talking about how: "I hate strip clubs. Except the part where they spread their pussy lips and it's all red inside—I like that part. I mean this is LA, this is meth, and this is how motherfuckers like Josh English dream of (and talk a bunch of shit about) fucking strippers, but I've actually done it. But Josh took me to my first strip club I ever went to and had me drive even though he knew we'd both be drunk—obligation to the superior employee at the company (how could I say no?). I hate strip clubs and I pretty much hated what they had to offer. "But you know what I do want? "What?" "I want somebody I can talk to sixteen hours a day, fuck the other eight, and drive across the country in a pickup truck for the rest of our lives. It has to be somebody totally crazy, or I'd never be interested, so my best chance of meeting this person is in a psychiatric ward. Unfortunately I don't plan on spending too much more time in the psych ward, as it's not my favorite place to be, so I figure AA meetings or meditation retreats, those might be my last great hope for places I could find some beautiful, formerly crazy person who is currently in the business of getting well." I'm silent. So is my psychiatrist. So I talk some more. "What I never told anyone then, and what I'll tell you now, re: my suicide attempt, I just knew I needed to be back in this hospital, I knew I needed this kind of care, but better than I had under Dr. Criminal. I did what I needed to do to get back in this building, simple as that. I communicate well. I look ok from the outside. I seem smart. So it's hard for me to get the care I need. You know what I'm talking about, about how a doctor makes an assessment not just on symptoms but also on *class*? I did something that would make my doctor take me seriously and I made sure I had a better doctor than the one I had before. I needed help, and I was willing to risk my life to get it." "Next time just come to the front desk." "Would you all have known how dire my circumstances are if I had done that." Dr. Meggs looks at me deeply. "I don't know." - - - - "I want to say: *It's sad when the person in the family who's tried to kill himself and has been to two different mental hospitals and the most therapy of everyone seems (most of the time) to be the family member who has it most together, psychologically.* But it's not sad, it's not even surprising. When people don't seek help, sometimes it is because they don't need help—but sometimes it is just because *they aren't seeking help*. Ironically, the person who survives a crisis may end up with better help, better coping skills, and a generally saner mindset than those who cope on their own without occasionally leaning on the professionals. "It's just like alcoholism: if you drink in a way that causes you problems so small that you never become aware of them, you may ultimately find yourself in worse shape than the alcoholic who drinks to the point of crisis, has to face their problem, and stops drinking. A recovering addict in Tucson shared with me his theory that everyone is an addict, but that we all have our own trajectory of addiction. If your trajectory is low, you'll be causing yourself drug-related problems all your life without ever being forced to face the cause of those problems. If your trajectory is high, you'll either a) die, or b) you'll be forced to face the reality of the role addictive drugs have been playing in your life, and you'll have a shot—just a shot—at living without them. "I think of it as the pebble/boulder analogy." "What is that?" "If you're walking on a path, and over time all these little pebbles are getting in your shoes, but they're so small you don't notice them, you may be in worse shape at the end of the walk than a person who finds a boulder in her way, totally obstructing her path. She won't be able to ignore the problem. She'll have to address the problem of the boulder one way or another before she can continue on the path. Better to encounter a major obstruction than a minor bump. One you're forced to deal with; the other, ignored, causes more pain over time." During our talk, Meggs and I talked about the grand and the small, the abstract and the concrete. I told her that I feel bad for not paying my rent lately—that that was one of my biggest stressors—and Dr. Meggs literally responded by saying: "Shit happens." "Is that your professional opinion?" I laugh. She says, "Well, let's just say we have bigger fish to fry." This was a huge perspective shift for me. And it didn't just apply to recently. I've been making out the losing-my-apartment stuff as huge, and minimizing the mind-not-working stuff, all my life. My jobs have always been my #1 priority, even above my own needs—making sure everything goes great on the job has been my primary objective since my first computer programming job. Guess what? I learned that from my dad. That was the example he set: even when it came down to job versus family, with him, job won. And I became the same way. And it took many more visits to the hospital and many more years of my life to deeply understand this: that all these ages I have been sacrificing my life and my mental health to make *job* and *apartment* and *girlfriend* work out, when my priorities should have been *my mental health* and then all those other things. I shamelessly blame my father's influence in stressing the all-important work ethic..work at all costs, never let the mission fail, the job as a whole is more important than me as an individual. I'm expendable; the job is eternal. That kind of thinking almost killed me. But in the end, we're all building sand castles. You're going to die. How about live a *jaw-dropping* life on the way down. And to my critics, really, walk in my shoes: try to stay alive, with bipolar, even on lithium, without killing yourself. Try to live through psych hospitals, and mania, and depression, and see if you wouldn't make the exact same decisions I did. End of meeting with Dr. Meggs. ### 67 Then someone brought me my lunch in my room. It was Michelle, the head nurse, and I picked at my food. It was dry hamburgers and I had to apply all the ketchup and relish and mustard packets that came with them to make them possible to swallow. A girl came by, maybe 19, covering her mouth with her hands. Then she opened up a window in her hands so she could speak. "I'm Faith." "I'm Matthew." "You tried to kill yourself?" "Yeah." (I start crying.) "Don't feel bad," she says, and she shows me her arms. "I've tried to kill myself lots of times. You'll be ok." Patient info is supposed to be private, so how Faith knew I tried to kill myself is unknown. But she was the only patient who came by to comfort me. She was so accepting and comforting, and I found out we both have bipolar! We talked at the door (because you're not allowed to go into people's rooms) and an old woman from next door butted in and offered me her lunch but I said I already had one and that's the only time I saw her—that was her last day at the hospital—and by the time you read this she'll probably be dead. Faith was so matter of fact. There was no charge associated to suicide with her..she didn't have any stigma, any judgment. She talked about it like we were discussing basketball scores. How you did it, when you did it, did they take you to the ER, what happened at the ER, were the ambulance drivers nice? I was in a new world now, where suicide wasn't a hush word. Even in my family, as open as we are, it's not something people feel comfortable just discussing. I think that's because of the *why* question—in my family setting, there's always the question of why you would want to do that. It isn't understood. But in here, with Faith, it was understood: a) you were ill. b) life sucked. I mean, god, doesn't everyone understand how hard life is and how much life sucks for me? They probably don't. They're probably able to tolerate what me and Marlon Brando call, "The horror, the horror." And some of them are actually enjoying it. That is a truly horrifying fact to me—that some people are actually enjoying this world. Faith left, re-covering her mouth window with her hands. - - - - Then I thought I was all cried out and I found my hunger for that second hamburger and I went to the break room to get some ketchup for these incredibly dry hamburger patties and I was just standing there in front of the refrigerator with the door open and I started to cry silently, and then I was wailing like a dog who lost her baby puppy to a traffic accident, lost everything that was important to her in the world. I didn't care who heard me me, I didn't care that the refrigerator door was open, I didn't care about the ketchup or the hamburger patties or how anyone in my family would perceive my actions or if I died or lived, if I ever made another step forward in my useless, *useless* fucking life. And that is when I wailed the most—I sounded like an animal who was being tortured *right then*. The night before I had wanted help—so I cried for help. I did what I had to do to get back into this hospital. But now that I was here I knew something about myself that I hadn't even known taking those pills, rolling the dice with my life, looking up at the stars. And that was this: I may not have really wanted to die..but I *really* did not want to live. And those two things are a lot closer to each other than one would like to think when trying to figure out if you or someone else is *really suicidal* or "just" crying for help. If you are crying for help by rolling the dice with your life, then you really are suicidal. In the break room of Tyler 2 in the Brattleboro Refuge in Brattleboro, Vermont, standing in front of a refrigerator full of milk and juice and zillions of disposable condiment packages..that was my precipice. Staring at what I had come for—ketchup—I could neither grab a handful of ketchup packages nor close the refrigerator door and not grab them. I could not go back—I could not undo a *suicide attempt*, the scariest part of which is that I didn't take it all that seriously—and I could not go forward: I did not know how to live my life..*in this world*..*with these people*..everything up to now had been jobs that made me wish I had never been born and people whose talk and whose minds made me wish *they* had never been born..I deeply hated this world and thirty-three years of genuine and optimistic and energetic attempts to fit into high school and college and corporations made me want to die. It did. It always had. I had only endured for this long out of what I now know is an extraordinary sense of optimism. And maybe staying power, persistence, determination to solve a problem..that cannot be solved. I wanted to die when my mom dropped me off at preschool and I wanted to die every first day of school and I wanted to die when I met the young men I would be living with in my dorm at Ohio University and I wanted to die in every single job interview I've ever been to and I wanted to die on the first day of every job I ever worked because it was all these people running around doing things that *made absolutely no difference* to the world—it was all *empty*—and they were doing it anyway. Either they had gotten used to the emptiness, sometime in their lives, or *they didn't know* it was empty—both were horrifying. I could not move—literally and figuratively. That's why I was standing in front of the refrigerator in the break room with the refrigerator door open, down on one knee, then down on two, one hand on a flimsy wire shelf to stabilize myself, the other covering my face. I have been stuck before. I have stopped walking on the sidewalk and stood there for an hour, unable to move because I can't justify *moving on* in my life, until a friend came along and un-stuck me. I have been stuck other times, I have been trapped in mazes, chasing phantoms and running from them. But I have never been stuck like I was in that break room, not before or since, in my whole life. I was crushed, crumpling, threatening like some black hole to go supermassive, reach the size of the entire universe then disappear—nothing—a speck of dust collapsed upon itself, leaving no evidence of the torture it had been living under for three decades..just..gone. Then there was a hand on my shoulder, and I could see just what my tears allowed, but a gentle voice was there and someone closed the refrigerator door. And then this mental health tech—taller than me, taller than my father—wraps his arms around me and hugs my shoulders, holds me tight against his chest, and I can feel his breath, and I can feel my breathing, and we synchronize, and my breathing slows, and we are one animal, wrapped together in arms, two brothers become one brother, two cells become one cell, and my convulsions calm and my wail becomes a weep and my weep becomes a sob and my sob becomes a cry and, with the comfort of a stranger who has maybe never even felt what I felt, but who knows, simply, that I need a hug, my cry becomes a tear, just a single tear coming out of my left eye, small enough that I can wipe it away with my index finger. Now that I can see again, I see this kind man who took me into his arms when *I NEEDED A GODDAMN HUG!!* That's all I needed right then, was for someone who had some peace in them to give me a goddamn hug. And someone did, this mental health tech who I only had one short conversation with, days later—and when I say short I mean he and I have shared fewer than twenty words with each other. But that hug—*that hug*—was the hug that so far I have needed the most in this life. And someone gave it to me. A stranger—who like any good mammal will take care of babies it didn't even give birth to, babies of another *species*—a stranger gave me that hug. My own parents have never hugged me like that. My mom doesn't like to touch—the closest we usually get is a high five—and my dad gives that weak slap-hug that men do so they don't get close to each other. I'm not like that. I need *touch*. After the first night we slept together, my friend Astrea said, "I never knew how much I like to be cuddled." Yeah, that's how I do it—I want you to know all night long, through your sleep, through your dreams, that I love you. I want your *body* to feel that I love you. And when I give hugs to people I really love, I touch their heads. I put one hand on their back and one hand on their head. Now *that's* a hug. And that's the kind of hug *I* need..and that I have gotten so rarely in my life. Our conversation was impossible to understand, even by us—he said there are rules about mental health technicians touching clients, but that he thought this was a case where breaking the rules was a good choice and I said thank you. That hug is exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it, and I told him I was glad he broke the rule because that hug helped me start to survive again. And it is an event I will never forget, my entire life. - - - - The next day after my suicide attempt I didn't realize I had black chalk residue all over my face from the hospital and I knew how horrible I must have looked when David the RN took my vitals and right after that for Dr. Mary Alice Meggs's initial meeting with me, where I was wailing and weeping. But it quickly sunk in with me that I was in a place where, as Dr. Meggs had put it so succinctly, we had bigger fish to fry. - - - - My first night in Tyler 2 after my suicide attempt, I put a note on the outside of my door asking them to please kill me. I think I used the word, "execute." I'm not sure. Then I lied down to go to sleep. This mental health tech named Frank came in when he was doing his rounds and sat down on the side of his bed and said he wouldn't kill me. He had the note in his hands. "Why do you want us to kill you, Matthew?" "Because then it wouldn't be suicide, you know, but I'd be dead anyway. Don't you do executions here?" Frank laughed. "No, we don't do executions." I cried. "I heard you tried to kill yourself," Frank said. And I said, "Yeah. I guess I didn't try hard enough." Frank laughed. "See. That's good. You still have your sense of humor. A sense of humor can be like a flashlight in dark situations like this—believe me—I've seen it many times. People who are able to keep their sense of humor have a powerful tool that other people don't have. Because humor is a perspective..on life. You know what I mean?" I nod. "You can see a thing as funny, or you can see it as sad. Most things are both. But if you can *choose* which was you see a thing—even for a second—you're in a lot better position than someone whose perspective is chosen for them." And as Frank talked to me I remembered something. A me I used to be. I am at dinner. It is the first city I ever lived in. Someone says something funny, and someone else makes a play off of it. I feel my lips curling. And I put my fork down. There will be no eating for me for the next few minutes. My mom says, "Swallow." I swallow my food. Then I laugh. And I laugh. And everyone stops eating. And even my dad smiles. What is funny to everyone else is hilarious to me. My laughter is so out of control, the joke echoing in my brain, that I clutch my sides to try to keep it in, but it builds and builds until I am holding onto the table to keep myself from falling off my chair. But that's exactly what I do, as my family watches. They laugh tamely and I am laughing out of control, mouth open, hands on my cheeks and and the top of my head. Then I slide off my chair like some thick mixture of flour and water and I am rolling on the wood-slat floor, filling the dining room with my response to some tiny intellectual pun, or more likely some subtle piece of irony, and I roll on the floor, dinner to me forgotten, and my parents look at each other and they can't help but laughing, and my sister Joanne, usually the serious one, is looking around at everyone for cues that it's ok for her to laugh at me laughing—not even at the original joke, which everyone has forgotten. And my littlest sister Leona, in a baby chair that attaches to the surface of the dinner table in a way that never looked safe, is laughing and laughing and laughing and she throws her fork down, and it bounces across the table, and I can't see my parents, but I'm making eye contact with Joanne and Leona, and they are laughing purely because I am, Leona so young she can't even speak, but she gets in on the frenzy of the thing, and either my mom or my dad—I can't remember which—says to the other, "Well, there he goes," and takes a bite of their food. See, this was a nightly event. Because I could find something funny in every conversation. And the world wasn't just small-chuckle funny to me—it was fall-on-the-floor-laughing funny to me..every single night. That is a goddamn happy childhood right there. And I remember doing that as far as into the second city we lived in, even when at first the neighborhood was so scary to us that on the first night we ordered pizza in, huddled together in the living room, and listened, outside, to the sounds of gunshots and screaming. There were crack vials on the sidewalk, burning cars on the street. But I still fell on the floor laughing at dinner, and I laid there till I was all laughed out, till my sides and my cheeks hurt and my mind had fully comprehended just how fucking funny this world can be. Then I would climb back into my chair, straighten my placemat, and look at my mother's eyes—the only one to still be paying attention to me at that point in my laugh recovery cycle. She was taking in every detail, trying to figure out if this was something to worry about or if it was something normal. That's the analysis she would have been doing. And I don't know what conclusion she came to, but eventually she looked away, and I returned to my food—with maybe a little straggler laugh—and my mom suggesting I do one at a time, laughing and eating, so I wouldn't choke. So I exhale and return to the communal activity, but inside me I was full, and light, and clear, and bright. Humor has always been a way I tell someone's sharpness, and my ability to respond to it a way I keep grips on my own health. When I was a kid, some things were so funny to me that I literally lost control of my body, in my echoes and convulsions, and fell on the floor laughing. Like *Cecilia*: *I fall on the floor and I laughing. Jubilation. She loves me again.* As a fourth grader, and before, I had that kind of laughter, that jubilation that is spoken of in the Bible—trumpets, cymbals—a kind of laughter we don't think is possible today, that is reserved for the times when God spoke to people directly and Goddesses took their pleasure from men..times when there was real cause for jubilation and not a daily mass of horror on the television, which seems to have been invented solely for the spread of not just fear but *terror* into our homes every night we watch it. Only children, who have not learned yet to fear, can fall from their dinner tables at a puzzlebox of wit, convulsing and snorting and breaking up on the floor. - - - - That night I dreamed that someone was banging the back of my head against a bathroom counter, pink tile like the Dallas bathroom, as an infant—the tile was breaking like a dry cracker, my malleable little skull taking the hits and misforming itself to protect what was within. ### 68 Every other Saturday was sing along with David the RN who played the guitar and belted out the lyrics which were laminated and spread out on the floor and we each got to pick a song to sing and Faith sat next to me and maybe because we were both bipolar we belted out the lyrics and I liked her sitting next to me because she threw it all out there and didn't care what anyone would see or hear. And I was the same way, belting out the lyrics with Faith and David while all the other patients sat there meekly mouthing the words to the songs. You're in a psych ward, god dammit, if you can't let loose here then you can't let loose anywhere! Almost everyone you meet here will be gone in a week!! Do you care what they think? I picked *Brown Eyed Girl* and when we actually sang it, it made me cry so much I left the room. I loved Faith for the way she sang, and I thought she really got something right about life that way. And I feel like people outside of psych hospitals are so god damn *unemotional* and I think you're all really missing out on life—no less. Faith and were sitting next to each other when *Brown Eyed Girl* came around and she looked at me, scared, while for the first half of the song I was belting it out with her even as I had begun to cry. I sat there belting it until the tears were streaming down my face and Faith was looking from me to David to check and see if I was ok but David the raucous RN was jamming away on the guitar keeping the music going. I didn't care who saw me cry—if you're in a mental hospital, and you're that self-conscious, maybe you're in the wrong place. But eventually the emotion got too much for me, and I'm not sure which brown-eyed girl those lyrics were killing me over, if it was Rebecca, or if it was my sisters, or my Mom, or—more likely—none of the above, just a song of love and laughter and light hitting me so hard in my chest that I was beaming it out like a prism and I had to get up from that room and leave. And Faith will come after me, when the song is over, and check on me sitting in the cushy chair outside the social workers' office, and she'll break the no-touching rule for a second and hold my hand and tell me it will be ok. And I will lean forward, and really break the no-touching rule, and put my hand and my lips on that girl's head long enough for it to mean *thank you*. - - - - Now a week will pass, and a Saturday without a sing along will come, and it will be sad, and in the psych ward's slow way another week will pass—of washing clothes, changing safety levels on the nurses' giant whiteboard, going through the motions of changing clothes and taking a shower. And two weeks later it will be another sing along, and almost all the people will be new, except David the RN who belted the lyrics and blasted the guitar and me and Faith, the only two bipolar people in the place, and a couple other regulars. I won't care if they call me Lewis Carrol 'cause faith is *twenty* (or nineteen anyway, she's of age) and I'm not fucking her—not that I wouldn't—but in here she's my friend because we have the same disease, and we understand each other, we understand it when we cry and when we rage and when we hop around like bunnies and slam our hands on the desk saying "Yahtzee!!" scaring all the nurses. Faith is my friend because we both have bipolar disorder, and yes, that means we are attracted to each other, as whatever—as everything—but I do know that it's good to have a friend in a psych ward. Faith at the Refuge, the only place I ever saw her. I saw her there over multiple visits, at first gaining her trust after seeing her as an interesting person who was enemies with everyone. She had a ball or a stuffed animal or something and I asked her if I could hold it. She says "No," of course, "You're not gonna give it back." Finally I convince her to do it, with copious promises, and the instant she gives it to me I give it back to her—and from that moment on Faith trusted me. I loved her, with all her ODD and bipolar and violence and craziness..wanting to hug, wanting to fuck, even though she's crazy..but having a real connection with her. This one mental health worker brought a whole bunch of his own feelings to bear and compared me to Lewis Carroll for having an innocent thing for young girls. "But Lewis Carroll never *did anything* with Alice Liddell," he said, counseling me unnecessarily. "And I'm not going to *do anything* with Faith—but I do like her unnaturally," I admit. But it's not true: I would fuck Faith if she also wanted to. Why not? She's nineteen, not fourteen! That's of age. She's mentally ill but so am I! She has bipolar disorder—so do I! Does that render you unable to make decisions about who to have sex with such that you should never have sex in your life? Faith and I would have been as good a pairing as any..and we were good company for each other in a psych hospital, and it didn't really matter if we wanted to fuck or not because that wasn't going to happen in here!—Mostly what Faith and I wanted was a friend! But that guy honed in on me and felt it was necessary to give me a talking to—like I needed a talking to on how to interact with Faith! This mental health worker sat me down and basically accused me of something untoward, of being a pedophile, when we're talking about a thirty-something and a nineteen year old! Totally legal, totally above board—and all she and I ever did is talk! Besides, if anything, it's Faith who has a crush on me, not the other way around! Fucking bullshit. The one friend I have in Tyler 2, the only other bipolar person, and this guy is trying to drive a wedge between it, talking about Lewis Carrol and Alice Liddell and all that shit. *You* try being in a psych ward and having the staff tell you not to hang out with the person you connect with most! Sex? No sex? Who fucking cares! I'm talking about psych ward friendship, and that shit is rare and you take it when you can get it. Asshole. I'm not going home to a wife and a family and a town full of friends every night—I'm *living* here, not like you, working a shift and then going home. Don't fuck with my friends. And that's the funny part: of all the things this health tech thought Faith might be to me, it never occurred to him that she might be exactly what I needed most: a friend. Men in our society get a bad rap like the only reason we exist is to take advantage of people sexually. Well guess what, some of us are respectful, delicate, careful people who love other people regardless of sex and I think I speak for all of us when I say I don't appreciated being treated like a monster! Striped got it. I mean Stripes was on my level. I was flirting with Stripes. I was not flirting with Faith. Stripes said: "I get it. You two are friends. You both have the same brand of crazy and in a place like this how could you *not* be friends? I have friends like that—you know that guy Jon with Asperger's?—I like to talk to him doesn't mean I want to jump his bones. No, you need your Faith. And she needs you, too, in a way maybe I wish you needed me, but you and I share something different." "What, that I want to lick your pussy while I'm sucking on a lollipop?" "Well, that, and—" "That I want to stick a lollipop up your butt and then slather it all around my mouth?" "You don't even, know, boy. I would do things to you that would make your granddaughter blush." "I hope that's a promise," I say. "Oh. It is," Stripes says. If you can't see the difference between me and Faith, and me and Stripes, then I'm doing a really bad job as a narrator. - - - - I had more scalp dreams that night. This time it was a dream that someone cut my hair with a razor, and took off some of my scalp on the back right side—I woke up with that side of my head hurting. ### 69 I saw Donald Mutebe in the employee parking lot of the Refuge. I was out on a walk with patients and he was coming to work and he saw me and realized I was there as a patient and there was this moment on his eyes where he wondered what could possibly be sick enough about me that I was in the Refuge but then he just accepted this black box of illness and we approached each other and he gave me a loving and a strong hug and I loved that man, that African man who had a child with Darling Nikki, that man who had bought my car for drinking money, that man I had shared a few wonderful drinks with. We clicked from the start—good conversation between Mutebe and I—quality fucking person. - - - - I was telling Dr. Meggs.. ..about that time.. ..I had heard Mom and Dad arguing, when I was maybe four, and I went to them and said, "Are you guys getting a divorce." And my mom's answer was, "No, not right now. Your father and I have no plans to get divorced." And she looked sternly at my father. And she said, "But that is something that happens sometimes to people's marriages." My dad's answer was to look at me square in the eye—he from his great height up there to me at my lesser and lower place closer to the floor—and say, "No, your mom and I will never get divorced." Which was obviously—even to my four-year-old mind, not something he could know. It was not something someone could be certain about—so why was this adult (the big person) telling the child (the small person) something that was so obviously out of the realm of *what he could possibly know*..why was he telling me this as a fact when it couldn't *be* a fact, to him, to me, to anyone. I remember knowing, at that point, that my father could not assess what I knew. And most importantly—and this was scary to me as a child—he could not assess that in some ways I knew more than he did. Dr. Meggs says, "He was trying to comfort you." "I didn't need him to comfort me. He wasn't capable of it. I never felt safe around him so all I needed was the fucking *truth*." "How do you feel now?" "I feel like I'm *breaking down*." "Put it in more specific terms." "Ok, it seems architectural—like I'm a building whose pieces are falling off. Like my mind is beams screwed together with bolts, and those screws are coming unscrewed, and those beams are falling right out of my head. It's like my sanity and my culturedness are structural—like an uncompleted skyscraper—and the structure is coming apart. Does your mind ever feel like that?" "No." Then we meditated together. She asked me first if I wanted to. I said, "Yes." After some struggling with the plugs and the light switches and the relationships between them, we had her little music player working and a man was leading us through a guided meditation. The doctor sat in a soft chair, back straight, mouth open. I sat in a soft chair and did my best to focus on the meditative words. After a while I was able to focus on my breath at the point where it came in through the nostrils, one of the places the guided meditation suggested focusing on. My thoughts swirled, too. The meditation went quickly. "How was that for you?" my psychiatrist asked. "I was able to focus on the breath some of the time." "That's good if this is your first time meditating! Is it?" "It's one of my first..the first was a long time ago and I don't think I got it." My psychiatrist asked me how that went for me and the simple respect of caring about my experience got me teary again. I felt honored my psychiatrist would meditate with me. Even to take ten minutes out of an extremely busy schedule to lock us in this room that was all windows on one side and looked through fall trees and up into the mountains. I felt honored. You know, maybe that's a big part of the psych ward experience. Out there, you're the crazy one and you're disrespected, disregarded even by your family. But in here you're the client, and people respect you because it's their job—it's their job to feed you, to keep you safe, and to try against the odds to heal you. - - - - There was an autistic guy, Daniel, who wrote numbers all over newspapers and worked jigsaw puzzles and never talked to anyone, including his doctors. Well, his doctor was Dr. Criminal, and when Dr. Criminal would approach Daniel, Daniel would lead him to the Patient Bill of Rights which was framed on the wall which I suspect only Daniel had ever read, in the entire history of patients and doctors roaming the halls of Tyler 2. And he would lead Dr. Criminal to this tiny-print document and point to the relevant sections and explain, in indecipherable English, how his patient rights were being violated—and I'm sure they were. Daniel let loose a storm of verbs and adjectives and maybe threw some pronouns in there and according to everyone except Daniel it made absolutely no sense. Daniel insisted he was being held against his will—illegally. Dr. Criminal explained that he needed to take his medicine or he wasn't going anywhere. Daniel, like Chad, was at the end of the line. He had probably been arrested for some minor criminal act like an altercation with his neighbors, and through that altercation he was discovered by the Vermont mental health system, put here, and determined not to be able to live on his own. But one time Daniel did speak to someone else. I had been there three weeks and I always nodded to Daniel when I passed him and said, "Good morning," even though he never said anything back and apparently all those little gestures added up because one day at lunch I sat across from him at a square table and he opened up to me and spoke volumes. The only thing he ever said to his doctor was point to the patient regulations on the wall and repeat, "I have rights!" Everything else was unintelligible. But today I was in a conversation and it was like talking to John Nash—there were bits I could understand and I had to learn to talk all over again and listen quickly—but we made out a decent exchange about how the weather would be changing soon. Of course to Daniel, this was measured in exact numbers—the weather predictions he had read—where to me it felt more like a painter, like Degas, washing broad strokes to form a dress and then inciting a portion of the canvas with a concentration, a detail, to indicate a face. So our metaphors had a lot of room to cross, but we got them to cross, and I was speaking and he was hearing me and responding and I was hearing him and understanding a great deal of the words in his slurry and I think when you threw the whole thing together you could call it a conversation. When I got up from the table, when I eventually left the hospital, every time I left the hospital, every time Daniel and I said goodbye, came Daniel's refrain: "Good luck to you, sir. Good luck to you." Repeated. - - - - And speaking of refrains, for a while there was this crazy old T2 woman who is in a wheelchair and the staff were all confused as to why this woman had been transferred here and wasn't sent to a regular hospital. She had an oxygen tank and was old, old, old. When she get's going, she gets going: "My cats need their attention 'cause you can't just take people from their homes and leave twenty cats behind!" "You have twenty cats?" "Twenty-two to be exact. And the little ones can't reach the food basket so you see the problem there, don't you. You have a college degree, don't you?" "Yes, I have three." "My problem is I don't want to die in a hospital. That room back there is even shaped like a coffin—you shaped it that way on purpose, didn't you?" "As far as I know, none of the rooms were intentionally shaped like coffins." "Well take another look! That one you have me in is a straight-up coffin, you ask me. I want to die at home." "But there's no one at your home." "My memory of all my chirren is there!" "But your actual children..where are they?" "Oh they moved all over the place. They don't want nuthin' to do with taking care of no old woman and I don't blame 'em. They gotta wash me and I gotta wear diapers—do you know what that's like?—sitting there watching Family Feud and you shit your pants, gotta wait *days* for some home health worker to come along and change your drawers." "Well that's why you're here. I'm going to go now—" "No, Dr. Meggs, you're the only one who ever treats me nice in this place." De. Meggs smiles. "I will back to check on you in a little while. I have to check on another patient now." "IS SHE DYING?" "No but everyone here has problems." "Just transfer me out of here. My physician signed the forms. I just want to die at home." She never stops talking and that she is going to die soon seems to be actual fact and also a fact clearly known to her. No matter what she says, her closing refrain is, "I want to die at home." That's all this woman wants, in the whole world, is the dignity of dying in her own fucking home. I don't know, but that sounds pretty solid to me. ### 70 And that whole thing where I told Dr. Meggs about when I asked my parents if they were getting divorced and my mom respected me and gave me a real answer, while my dad treated me like a kid and gave me a bullshit answer..and Dr. Meggs said something I hadn't thought of, which was that he was trying to reassure me..but the point was *I knew more than he did* about the situation, and I'm not sure I ever got that point across to my doctor. I was four at the time..I might have been younger than that. And my doctor telling me during meditation..*we take our first breath when we are born; when we take our last breath, we die*..we meditate together in the sun room with a CD. Afterward she asks, "How was that for you?" Memories of Rebecca, the first time I meditated was probably in that stress-relief class in the seventh grade, the second time was with Rebecca. Dr. Meggs suggesting I think of guiding my thoughts back to the breath as if I were guiding a puppy I loved back to the training papers. "You're not angry at the puppy, you're just guiding him back to center." "Did you make that up in response to my shit story I told you about my dad?" (Like I was thinking she was that brilliant of a psychiatrist.) "No," she says, "I just stole it from something I read. So don't quote me on that, it's not an original idea." "I won't quote you," I promised. - - - - Seeing a young kid who had escaped his ward, his floor, and the building. And seeing him dragged back in by two security guards. Thinking about kids spending a significant portion of their childhood in places like this and that being a hard thing to think about, possibly because we see the kid inside ourselves as him, the real little boy crying as he's locked up again. He might not even understand why he's here or what's happening to him. On walk outside after it had snowed when it was only me in the whole ward who was on level green, so it was just me and the nurse who did my checkout the first time I left Tyler 2 and she had Dr. Criminal come in and do a second assessment because she thought I was unsafe to leave. Anyway the two of see that Gretchen has left flowers on my bike, which has been chained up in front of the institution this whole time and the nurse says, "How nice, do you want to bring them in?" And I say, "No, it's kind of an unhealthy relationship." Back in the Refuge it's me and Stripes in the window room. "Why are you back here?" she asks. "Suicide attempt. Why are you?" "Suicide attempt. You can talk to me," she says. "We're the same. You can say anything you want to say to me—we're in a psych ward. All the social rules are off. This is not a coffee shop conversation—you know what I mean?" We show each other our tattoos. She asks if mine is big and gangsta. I take my shirt off and she's like: "My god, it is big and gangsta. High five." "High five to you, Virgin Mary." (Which is what her tattoo is of.) Stripes smiled. Stripes and me make up our own refrain, which allows us to get out of any activity we don't want to do, once we leave this place. It goes something like: "Oh, no. My doctor said if I do that I might have to go back to the hospital." "Oh no. If I chew gum my doctor says I might end up back in the hospital." "I'm sorry. We can't have sex 'cause if we do, my doctor says I might have to go to the hospital." "Shhh—if you keep speaking I might have to go back to the hospital." Stripes laughs. "If you look at me for one more second my doctor might make me go back to the hospital." We decided that at least in our heads we would say things like this, that even if we didn't tell anybody, we would live like this. This is how a 3½-week visit to the Brattleboro Refuge goes. It's just minute after minute without your usual distractions. Minute after minute of waiting for the next activity, which will save you from the passage of time. Boredom followed by laughter. Not being able to touch anyone. Lunchtime. Art time. Substance abuse class. For level greens, outdoor play time. Going outside. Seeing Donald and being like, "What are you doing here?" and he was like, "I work here." In this huge grassy field, everyone kicked a ball around—except Stripes, who sat by herself far, far away from everyone—and except for me, who did handstands and cartwheels and somersaults and rolled around the grass making loud and joyful sounds. Matt the spineless substance abuse counsellor said, "Do you think you're a little manic?" And Stripes, from far across the lawn, yelled: "Maybe he's just happy to be outside." *Goddamn right, Stripes—why does everything have to be diagnosed?* The meditation guru, Lisa, and someone else who they worked with come and visit me in Tyler 2 (they find me coloring) at a table with Winehouse and friends) and they're looking at me like they're proud of me and I'm like: *What are these people proud of me for..trying to kill myself?* I was so callous about and careless with my own life, it didn't strike me that they might be happy that I was alive, that for them, this was a success story and they had seen others before me go the other way..leave their group and never come back because they were dead. We hugged. They smiled. They said I was welcome back in their program anytime I wanted and I said ok but inside I was like *Why would I ever go back to that program? It depressed the hell out of me. It's totally not where I belong, with a bunch of otherwise mentally healthy recovering alcoholics*—*I belong in here, with the people who are crazy even when they're sober.* Anyway it was nice that they visited but it made me feel like a failure. "What's wrong?" Winehouse said when they left. "I just feel like I let them down. They were trying to help me. Then I just walked out of their program and tried to kill myself. I feel like they don't know I care about them, that I'm thankful for their help." "They stopped by *because they like you*! Did you see their faces? They just missed you. They're you're friends!" I look at Winehouse skeptically. "You think nobody likes you." "I guess..I think that *is* true that *most* people don't like any particular person." "You think too much. They just miss you and they're glad you're ok. You have a hard time letting people in to love you, don't you? I do too, don't worry. We're fucked up." She cocks her head to the side. "Why do you think we're in Tyler 2?" she says, and laughs. I have a sick look on my face and I say: "That's more response than I got from my own *parents*." "Did you try to kill yourself to get your parents' attention?" "Not primarily, but that would been a nice side effect." - - - - I went for snacks on a break from Tyler 2 with Stripes. We both had green level and if you asked ahead of time, a mental health tech would walk you down to the Refuge snack shop as a way to get off the ward, buy some necessary supplies. I had money but Stripes suggested she buy me whatever I was buying that day with the deal that I would take her out to lunch "on the outside" for Indian sometime to make up for it. "Hold up, Stripes, are you asking me on a date?" She blushed, hard. Lynne, the mental health tech who did the morning meditation was there watching us. "Is this just payback for whatever you're buying me today or are *you* asking *me* out on a *date*, Stripey Stripes?" She looks at me like *Why are you making me say this out loud?* "Yes, Mr Temple. This is a loaded gun. If you play your cards right all kinds of things could happen." Now I was the one blushing. I picked out a whole bunch of stuff for Stripes to buy. We bought Faith dot-to-dot books because she asked for them..but she wanted ones with big dots so she could work it with her tremors..but all they had was ones with like a thousand dots per page. I looked twice for her but that's all they had. I got her some puzzle books in case those keep her occupied. "Mmm, I can't wait for my Indian food," Striped said. I went up to Lynne and put my arm around her and addressed Stripes: "Are you sure this is really a date?" "It's a live grenade," she says, "—no pin—fucking may happen." "How do I make *that* happen?" "You say the right things at dinner." "Well—" I start. "Yeah," Stripes says, "I know you, I know you'll have no trouble saying the right things. You know I live on Oak, we're practically neighbors." "This is excellent," I say. "Then my walk of shame will only be like two blocks!" "That's assuming I let you fuck me in my bed," Stripes says. I'm keeping an eye on Lynne. She's looking at us like, *Yes! I have just seen two high-functioning mental patients make plans to fuck the crazy right out of themselves. Score!* ### 71 Lining up by the ward's locked entrance/exit for art class or to go to lunch in the downstairs cafeteria always took twenty minutes because everyone had their own unique agenda that had nothing to do with leaving the ward, and this agenda must be followed before joining the rest of who were already lined up waiting. I took to eating every meal upstairs to avoid this problem, even though I had level green. A bunch of other patients did the same thing, so then the staff made a rule that if you had the proper level, you *had* to go downstairs to the cafeteria to eat. Now I'm going to tell you about something special, that happened on one of those trips downstairs to the art room. It was a simple thing. But you know how simple things are..sometimes they hit you in just the right way that they stick with you forever. And this was one of those. I was standing at a table drawing, and I looked over, and through a doorway into a smaller room, I saw Stripes working the pottery wheel with an apron on and I fell in love a little—with her beauty and her sadness. The old-fashioned-ness of the apron, the dirt-hands creativity of the potter's wheel. Like all true things I cannot describe it. All I can do is flail like a fish on a dock and say, "I fell in love with a girl at a pottery wheel." But that's what happened. I fell in love with a girl at a pottery wheel. And that would be the only time I fell in love in the ten years before or the ten years after my trip to the Refuge. I'd been so isolated, and would continue to be isolated—and the bar had been raised so high by past loves and past friends, and my own personality had developed so specifically and eccentrically that while meeting acquaintances became so natural that it was almost no work at all, meeting someone who thrilled me such that I could be *in love* with them became so rare that I stopped hoping it would ever happen for me again. I met girls I wanted to fuck—I fucked some of them. But as for being in love, I think it requires an extraordinary match and I may be far more fortunate than most to have found it once—or even twice—so long ago. I may have told you this in another book already but there was a realization of how at home I felt doing arts and crafts on the permanent-resident side of the first mental hospital I stayed in. This is in California. I specifically thought: I would rather spend my time making sailboats out of popsicle sticks with these so-called crazy people than spend another minute in a corporate office of my choosing. To me, the crazy people aren't the ones in the psych ward—that kind of crazy is usually a deficiency that makes people nicer than usual, because they have to appease mentally healthy people to get their basic needs met..they (we?) are dependent on others, which tends to break you down and make you more polite and caring—no, to me the crazy people are the ones who have developed enough underhanded, lying, snake-tongued illogic to run a company or please the sociopath who does. If it's between successful people and crazy people, I'll take crazy people *any* day. People at this crafts table said *please* and *thank you*—people at my job intentionally sabotaged my work to make me look bad even though *we work for the same company*. Somehow these depressed, schizophrenic, institutionalized, brain-damaged people knew something that my college educated, condo dwelling, engineer coworkers did not, and that is that *we're all on the same side*. And by *we* I actually mean the whole universe. - - - - "No but check this out, see what he's *saying*." That was Stripes. A bunch of us were sitting in the main room eating ice cream sandwiches, Stripes had grabbed my notebook, spun it around, and tapped on the page. "That's what *I'm talking about*, right there." She gives me back the book. "Read it," she tells me. I read: "*There is no prison / that can take freedom; And there is no freedom / because no prison can take it.*" "You see? You *see*?!" Stripes stands up and makes a whooping motion with her ice cream sandwich. Little droplets of vanilla ice cream splash around the room. The nurse tells her to sit down. "I'm sitting down. But I'm telling *you*, you better listen to this shit *this* motherfucker is laying down, because you got a rare bird up in this cage right now. Tell her what you're saying." She points at my journal with her ice cream sandwich and I'm lucky none of the drops get on my paper. "Oh I'm sorry! Did I drip on your philosophy?" "No." "That really scared you, didn't it? You thought I was gonna drip on your paper. Would you ever let me write on one of your pages? What if I take a pen and just do..this." She makes the tiniest mark on the edge of one of my notebook pages. "Are you trying to provoke me?" "Provoke you right into my pussy," she mouths the words so only I can see them. "Tell 'em your fucking theory." "It's not a theory—" "It *is* a theory. It's a fucking *brilliant* theory about freedom. And a *proof*. That it doesn't exist. Read that thing again. And explain it. Most of these mental health techs never went to college." "Actually," one of the mental techs who's sitting on the edge of this conversation says, "mental health techs have to have a bachelor's degree." "Marlboro College doesn't count," Stripes says. "Educate these motherfuckers." "Well I was just thinking about being stuck here, and I was thinking about people on the fourth floor or people in jail who are stuck behind walls for longer than *I've* ever been, and I was thinking about *The Shawshank Redemption* and Nelson Mandela and it hit me that if you are the kind of person who even walls can't imprison, then there's really no such thing as prison..because if it can't take away your freedom, then it isn't functioning as a prison. It's not doing its job. If it's not imprisoning your mind, then what *is* it imprisoning—we know from being in here that what matters most is the mind—if you can't imprison my mind then you can't imprison *me*. If in general you can't imprison people's minds then in general there are no prisons." "But tell 'em how you wrote it." "I'm stuck between two versions, but the main contender is: *There is no prison that can take freedom; And there is no freedom because no prison can take it.*" "Do you hear what this motherfucker just said??!!" Stripes flails her ice cream sandwich and a single drop of ice cream gets on my book. We have a two-second staring contest in which it is decided that neither of us will ever do anything to hurt the other, even if one of us crosses the other's line. Stripes leans over the table, dripping her ice cream sandwich all over Brigham's drawing, and licks the drop of vanilla off my book. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "I promise I'll make it up to you." "What got into you?" "New med. Dopamine. Makes me want to fuck." "*Jesus.*" My mind is flashing through fantasies of her licking a single drop of vanilla-flavored precum off the tip of my cock. "Tell 'em how you redefined freedom." "It's more of an obliteration of the concept." "Then tell 'em that." Stripes leans back in her seat. "Well," I start slowly, "if there are no prisons that can take freedom..because the mentality of the people is such that no prison can take it.." "Can take their freedom." "Right. Then a surprising result arises..which is that this valuable concept of ours..freedom..so important in history and class and race and gender struggles—" "You sound like a fucking feminist, I love it." "I am a feminist." "Fucking hot." Stripes is gnawing away at her ice cream, not even looking at me. "So if freedom is so strong in the mind of the prisoner that they functionally *cannot be imprisoned*, then the concept of *freedom*—as beautiful as it is and as much as we strive for it and think we need it—freedom *disappears*. There's no such thing as freedom *if no prison can take it*! Because what is a prison for? To take away your freedom. So if no prison can take it, then it never existed in the first place. There is no such thing as freedom if there is no such thing as a prison. They need each other to exist, see? For some people, there is freedom and that freedom can be taken away, via prison. For others, since prison cannot take away their freedom, then it means that there's no difference between being *in* prison and being *out* of prison..and hence—" "*Hence.* Love it." "And hence what they might have called *freedom* on the outside, really doesn't mean anything because no matter where you put them, nothing fundamental changes in their minds. If you can't be imprisoned, you can't be free—it's all the same. In a strange way freedom implies that you have something to lose. But if you are prison-resistant, in the sense that prison can't take anything away from you, then you must never have had anything to take away in the first place. *Hence* you never *had freedom* from the start." The room is quiet. Every patient. Every staff member. Health techs are perched on countertops. Nurses' pens have stopped writing their reports. Psychiatrists have stopped in the hall to listen. Stripes broke the silence. "That's my boy!" she bellows. "You see that book? Every *page* he's got *fifty* sayings like that, all worth a philosopher's weight in *salt*..pure..fuckin'..titanium *nitrate bath* melodies for a dream queen. *That's, my, boy.* Now watch him eat fifty eggs." I laugh. Some other people laugh—patients. "I bet none of you know what movie that's from," Stripes says. "*Cool Hand Luke*," John says, from behind the nurses' station. John is bald and compulsively wears rugby shirts to work and he's one of the kindest nurses on the ward. He's worked in prisons, actually. "Not *you*, motherfucker! Ever thought of giving *someone else* a chance to answer?" Some nurse says, "Change the language." Stripes says, "I ain't changin' nothing." This is Stripes craving her night meds. "Then your green level is gonna change to nothin'," says the nurse. "Nothin'?" Stripes says, and she looks like she's gonna do something stupid. That huge Virgin Mary tat makes me think Stripes on pain meds could be a tough customer. "Hey Stripes. Remember? *Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.*" Stripes turns her eyes away from the nurse, where they had turned into the eyes of some Brazilian gangster—containing the bile of poverty not even poor Americans could understand—and she turned her eyes to me, and I swear they did this reptilian move like Miley Cyrus on crack, some CIA replica designed to take over the world, and those eyes blinked once and all the alien evil was gone from her, and she was sad..Stripes addicted to pain medicine, Stripes whose mother was dead to suicide, Stripes who had no way out of her current relationship except to pack her suitcase with A-quality art supplies and come to the Refuge. She looked at me and knew that I knew why she was there. And she wiped a tear from her eye and laughed. Then she laughed and laughed and laughed, looking up at the ceiling and looking at me and she laughed like only someone who has tried to kill themself can laugh—really it's only at that level of self-hatred that life gets truly, deeply, insanely funny—and she laughed with all of that truth and all of that depth and all of that insanity, like she had just been exposed to an hour-long Anthony Jeselnik routine compressed into one second, and she was laughing at *that*. There was nothing funny going on in the room anywhere but inside Stripes' head. The laugh wasn't contagious. It was scary. It was unexplained. It was over the top. It was inappropriate for the situation. Patients started to leave. Philosophy and ice cream sandwich time was over, and by the time most people had left, Stripes' laugh had turned into a cry and she was sitting upright, brushing wet hair out of her face, looking into my eyes, and I could tell what she was doing. She was role-playing all her hate for her boyfriend, for her mother, for her father, with me, and I felt the hate, and was glad when bald headed, rugby-shirt John came and took Stripes by the shoulders and helped her up and helped her down the hallway to her room, all the way down at the end. I stood up and closed my journal. I started cleaning up Stripes' art supplies—hundred-dollar colored pencils, oil and chalk pastels of all sizes, pencil sharpeners which had somehow been allowed on the ward (they contain razor blades!), and her huge, off-white, eighteen by twenty-four inch drawing pad whose paper's coarse texture caught Stripes' gestures so well. She was drawing a goddess. But to me she was a goddess. It's like this: people who hurt that much, either hurt *so* much that they die..or, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, every time you strike them down, they become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. I was desperately hoping Stripes was one of this last kind, because I needed to know that somewhere in the world there was another like me. ### 72 Thirty minutes Stripes was back like, "Night meds let's party!" Yeah, hers were pain meds, so to her it was a party. And I was glad she had them, so she wouldn't be in pain and because I liked Stripes on meds a lot better than Stripes off. I'm playing Yahtzee with Stripes and two others. Stripes is yelling at me to stop mixing the dice and it took me a second, and another girl saying, "Stop! Stop!" to realize I was shaking the dice with a motion similar to the jerk-off motion. "Just throw the dice!" Stripes was saying, before I realized what my dice-rolling movement reminded them of. And I'm like, "Why?" and I make the motion again. Stripes catches my wrist in her hand to stop me. "You're in a psych ward with horny women just *roll the fucking dice*." So I roll. I get Yahtzee. I stand up, I run to the nurses' station and bang on the desk three times and yell "*Yahtzee!*" I sit down without looking. I ask Stripes what their reaction is and she says she thinks I scared the new girl nurse. - - - - At Stripes' request, we listen to audiobooks just the two of us in the sunroom, lying down and wishing she would touch me, feeling content. She was sharing something that was special to her with me—Stripes and I developed a relationship in the ward. I even told her how I felt about her and she said you've seen how I react to you—you can see that I feel the same way. I told Dr. Meggs that even Stripes and I, who know each other from the outside, are aware of making this a time to focus on our own selves, but I imagine if I was a psychiatrist of a suicidal patient that seeing him attracted to someone wouldn't bother me a bit. Stripes and I started meeting at certain times of the day to work on our web design business and talk about how its website will work and look. And every night we met in the hothouse room to listen to audiobooks on her iPad. I laid down close enough for her to touch me, but she didn't. We were in the wide window room. Stripes was so close—I wished she'd touch my hair, touch my head in a caress. We listened to a recording of one of her favorite books on her iPad and she was happy at the end of each chapter when she asked me if I was enjoying it and I said yes. I said, "I give you looks, and I think you can see in those looks that I like you, that I want more of you." And she said, "I think you know that I give you those same looks, too." And I did. The deadliest of those look exchanges had happened that day at lunch with the two of us sitting across from each other at a square table, coloring, with two others at our sides, and there were just two looks: one from me that asked a question..and one from her, held long and steady, that answered it. This is something Stripes wrote in my notebook that I've never showed anyone: > when she makes me cum my feet cramp > > or when she cums, her feet cramp > > "This is your personal piece of heaven. > > You can have it whenever you want." When the tally is taken at the end of my life, please no one claim that I was given a short portion of love. ### 73 I tripped inside the Refuge, flirting and talking with that one art therapy instructor. Tripping in the mental hospital, that first time I realized it in art class, talking to the art instructor and we found each other fascinating—she was totally into the weird things I was saying and drawing and I felt out of control morally like I would say or do something inappropriate. How I would trip every day, and make art at the height of my trip. That one time I felt it coming on sitting down on the floor in the med line talking to the old woman getting a hard on at the medicine and needing to hide it so I sat down. The poor sweet woman who was standing next to me in the med line when I had to sit down to hide a medicine-induced woodie—me sitting on the floor outside her room listening to her tell her sob story. She's an alcoholic who lives with her husband and they both drink together but she's obviously the one with the real problem because she's in the hospital (lol..designated patient, anyone?). And the medicine was getting to me, fracturing me—can you feel it? When I sat down in the med line because all these serotonergic medicines were getting me so excited my dick was getting hard. Talking with the old woman with the walker in front of me. I notice this woman—twenty, thirty—at a table eating breakfast. We've interacted before but now she has compassion in her eyes—probably because I'm sitting on the floor like a lost child. I call her Winehouse—something about the hair and general badassity of the two (her and Leona Winehouse) paired them in my mind. Then the med nurse (remember Rainbow?) leans out the window and looks down at me sitting on the floor and says, "Why don't you come up here and we'll get you fixed up." So I stand, trying to hide my erection, and take my meds. Winehouse slides out a chair with her foot and invites me to a table full of girls. She asks me questions and opens my juice for me because my hands are shaking. She cares for me like a mother and makes sure I'm ok before I leave her sight. She was brilliant to me. And how my art changed when I was tripping, to this very detailed almost technical muralistic form and how Dr. Meggs could see the change in my art when I pointed it out to her—and that fascinated her about me that I could see that. The first time I was tripping in the art room confiding it to a patient who was about to be released and telling him not to tell anyone because I wanted to keep tripping. And then leaving the room for the trippiest check-in ever with Lynne in the hallway, telling her I was seeing the shapes of words in my eyes and her saying I was saying some bizarre things, then getting passed of to Dr. Meggs, crying uncontrollably, the clock moving with one second taking like five seconds, her taking my pulse and walking me through breathing meditation: breathe out anxiety and stress, breathe in sky/I'm ok. For days then, chasing the sunlight with a piece of copier paper, sitting on the floor by the nurses' station looking at a blank piece of paper in a ray of sunlight, catching the last glimpses of my texture hallucination. What you would have seen if you looked at me was a thirty-three-year-old man staring intently at a blank piece of paper. But that's not what I saw. To me that paper was a petri dish in fast motion, a universe of movement and form, changing, growing, performing just for me. - - - - I see the dietician, Paula, and she's like: "How's it going?" And I'm like, "Great, I'm learning a lot of things about my mind." And she's like, "What?" And I said, "Like maybe a little psychosis isn't a bad thing for a writer!" "Ahh! There's a way to look at it! Think of all the psychotic people out there who have no idea. At least you're aware of it, you can manage it and even use it like you say!" "Exactly!" "You're just here for a checkup," she says. She obviously had no idea what I was here for or what had been going on with me (or maybe she did) but she treated me like a well human being who was capable of insightful talk with her. And we had in the residential hallway, paused, as she took another, newer patient somewhere, maybe to check in to the ward, and (as always in my life, and it's usually with therapists or psychiatrists) I felt like a human being simply by the action of having an intelligent conversation with someone. We talked a while about the somewhat random-seeming basis by which it is decided who is *in* and who is *out* of the mental hospital, and other fairly progressive thoughts. Paula and I just clicked. We'd say hi in the hallway and twenty minutes later we'd be standing in the same spot talking ardently, and she'd have a patient with her standing mostly silent while we talked up a storm and then she'd have to go—but I got the feeling that with me and Paula, the conversations were bottomless. - - - - I remember asking Dr. Meggs if we might talk about a release date. I was scared I was taking up too much hospital time, time that someone who needed it more could be using. And Dr. Meggs said, "I'm not even going to begin to talk about a release date with you until I understand the events leading up to that night [of my suicide attempt](#) and I feel sure that they won't happen again." That made me feel safe, like someone was looking after me in a way I had needed many times in my life but hadn't been able to get. You see? Sometimes I need someone *to protect me from myself*. - - - - There was a day I was walking to the fitness/game area with about five patients and the clueless substance abuse counselor Matt and we walked by the sober house where the Birches people stayed and the borderline girl who had flirted with me in social work group (even though she had a boyfriend) came over and hugged me and wished me well and I thanked her but I didn't remember her name. But I know you're out there somewhere, now a borderline woman, and you're reading this, and I want you to know this little paragraph is for you, because your hug meant at least enough to me back then to put a little paragraph in my book thanking you, now. - - - - Ready to get trippy again? Imagine yourself on like eight serotonergic meds with a history of psychedelic drug use. You're in art class—regular art class, on the ward. You are starting to hallucinate looking at a blank piece of paper and you turn and look at the guy next to you (who you've never seen before) and he says, "You're seeing things, aren't you?" And I said, "Yes but don't tell anyone because I think the medicine is causing the hallucination and I don't want them to take it away." Then I start drawing and writing this amazing stuff and the beautiful young art teacher comes over and we have this amazing conversation about art and Everything and she said, "What you're doing on that paper is amazing!!" And we connected so well and I told her: "I'm having some kind of medication effect that is affecting my ability to tell what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in action or talk and I am really enjoying this conversation but I am afraid that I might say something inappropriate to you without knowing it and I don't want to do that." She said, "Why don't we just enjoy our conversation and we'll deal with that if it actually happens." *(By the way,* *I definitely recommend that all future psychiatric care take place in art museums.)* She wasn't scared. I agreed and we went back to our wonderful conversation about art and humanity and life and I was saying all these brilliant things and she was recognizing and appreciating my genius and she was able to converse with it. And she was beautiful and I could see her and smell her and hear every beauty of her. Then Lynne came and said, "I can see you're having a beautiful conversation here but would you mind if I borrowed Matthew for a check in?" The art teacher said, "Sure, if that's ok with you." I said, "Yes." And the art teacher said you might want to tell Lynne about what you were telling me about what you're seeing on the paper, and the appropriateness/inappropriateness boundary difficulties you were describing. I agreed and went with Lynne. This was my most bizarre checkin with Lynne and my panic attack streaming tears thinking I'm going to die the clock seconds ticking away like minutes and Dr. Meggs staying by my side taking my pulse and helping me breathe out *fear*, breathe in *I'm ok.* She thinks it was a panic attack, I think it's a side effect of clomipramine. Dr. Meggs stays with me for what seems like a long time..I feel guilty for keeping her but I'm glad she's there..she takes my pulse with just her fingers and her diving watch, never uses her stethoscope..and she has me *breathe out panic*, *breathe in calm*; *breathe out humiliation*, *breathe in security and comfort*; breathe out chaos, breathe in a deep blue sky.. Then, while I have my eyes closed, breathing becoming more regular, she tells me a story. She says, "When I was in medical school, one of my teachers taught me a lesson. He said, let's say you walk into a triage situation, and you're in charge, and you have this kind of surgeon doing this and that type of surgeon doing that and everyone's running every which way and you don't know the state of the patient but there are five different monitors telling you gobs of information and you walk on the scene, and it's your job to save the patient's life. What do you do first? And do you know what this teacher said said to me? Don't answer—keep breathing. He said the first thing you do is *check your own pulse*." Of course she's making that into a metaphor for what I should do with my anxiety. And she tells me this while she's taking my pulse during my medicine-aided panic attack and while she knows that I have an OCD anxiety that is literally about taking my own pulse. I understood why Dr. Meggs told me that story, understood it in a basic way, right when she told me. But its meaning has deepened for me over the last four years or so and I have only recently come to understand it as a story about metacognition—you know that term? *Thinking about thinking*, *knowing about knowing?* What I was doing when in the fifth grade I marked my own test—I knew all the answers I had gotten wrong. I wasn't just thinking about the test, I was thinking about my thinking *about* the test. One of the painful features of bipolar is that you don't think you have it. Every doctor I see, I try to get a new diagnosis, genuinely believing that I might not really have bipolar, that somehow the twelve (or twenty) preceding psychiatrists I've seen have been deluded, that they've just based their diagnosis on the previous diagnosis and the first diagnosis was wrong. And going along with this is the even stronger effect of not knowing when you're manic. *Denying that you're manic* is a symptom of mania—that's a very weird thing to think about. And this is how I understand Dr. Meggs's triage story now. When I wake up in the morning, I have to notice my first few thoughts. This is kind of like meditation, too. Notice your thoughts and notice something about them. Is that a paranoid thought? Am I worrying? Am I having ideas of reference—thinking things have special meaning just for me? Do I feel expansive? Irritable? Grandiose? Are my thoughts spiritual in nature. Am I thinking things like, *I feel like I'm on a new plane of consciousness*—an example from the other day. Some features of mania I am unable to have metacognition about and I need to rely on those around me, which is very hard. And if mania is bad enough, you just *flat out don't know* that you're manic. It's like trying to know you're in a dream, as the characters in *Inception* are trying to do. Cobb says, "Well, dreams, they feel real while we're in them right? It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange." It is hard to realize you're dreaming, but there are clues. Same with mania. That's *metacognition* about your dreams, about your mania. It's a funny thing: Once someone tells you (or you read) that denying you're manic is a symptom of mania, it *creates* metacognition—at least it has in me. *Insight* is mentioned in three out of seven of my Refuge discharge reports. In my last reports, Dr. Meggs lists "relatively good insight into his mental health issues" as one of my strengths. And it is. Reading about bipolar does not cure me of my bipolar, but that metacognition, that insight, helps grease the rails for me to be an active participant in my treatment. When I meet a new doctor, I often understand *why* they are asking the questions they are asking, what they are trying to determine. I am more apt to do self-checks—for hallucinations, suicidal ideations—*I am taking my own pulse*. - - - - VINCIT QUI SE VINCIT is a Latin phrase which is carved into stone above the school where I marked my own test. I kept asking the teachers at that school what it meant, and no one knew. So (being that this was before the internet) I wrote it down and kept it with me, waiting to meet someone who could tell me what it meant. Then one Sunday a new couple came to our church. He was a student, and she was working to support his studies. "Studies of what?" I asked. "Latin," he said. So I pulled out this piece of paper and showed it to him. He translated it, and said: "Vincit qui se vincit. She conquers, who conquers herself." I have loved that saying ever since. I have it tattooed on my back. I believe it's a very important idea. Maybe it should say: *She conquers, who knows herself.* Or: *She knows, who knows herself.* I don't really think you can conquer. I don't really think you can *know*, either. But maybe you can know a little. I know once I saw *Inception* I became more aware I was dreaming. I think we all did. Because we thought about Christopher Nolan's concepts a lot. And I find now that I have more lucid dreams, and more dreams where I'm aware I'm in a dream, than before I watched *Inception* five times in the theater, countless times after. You know what my favorite thing to do is, once I realize I'm dreaming? I go up to someone, a dream character, and I say: "Guess what? You're not real. This is a dream. I'm dreaming!" And the person says, "Well I *feel* real. How do you know I'm fake?" And I say, "Because in a few seconds, I'm going to wake up, and all of this will be gone." And they say: "How do you know that I'll be gone? How do you know that I'm not really me, and that dreams aren't just a way for our minds to connect that science hasn't discovered yet?" And then I wake up. And I don't know. ### 74 Dr. Meggs, with her swimmer's watch and rugged shoes, looked more like she was a deep-woods camper than a psychiatrist. Twenty-four patients to the ward, maximum—and we were usually at the max—and only three psychiatrists among them. That meant each psychiatrist was seeing eight patients a day, and one of their requirements was that they actually meet with each of their patients face to face every single day. Sometimes you'd get five minutes, sometimes you'd get an hour, but if you got five minutes it was because those doctors were *smashed*—they had to do research on your condition and your past hospitalizations, communicate with your family in some cases, go to team meetings to coordinate your care with nurses, mental health techs, nutritionists, social workers..and they also had to deal with the occasional death, seizure, or fight on the ward—I would say working as a Tyler 2 psychiatrist is one of the most stressful jobs in the developed world, right along options trader and air traffic controller. Oh and trauma surgeon. Yeah. Working in the ER has to be extremely stressful. An ER doctor makes the difference between your physical life and death. That's hard. Of course if requires special knowledge. But I think a psychiatrist's job is more complicated. Diagnosis of a physical trauma can surely involve seeing past false indicators. But diagnosis of the mind..that, at its most difficult, must involve a great deal of doubt—greater than that encountered in the emergency room—because the system you are dealing with (the mind) is less understood than the body. It's loads more complex. We haven't really developed the proper tools to deal with it yet. And it's more subject to masquerading than physical problems—even though there are well-established textbook definitions for various kinds of bipolar disorder, bipolar disorder remains extremely complex to diagnose. As in: it takes an average of ten years to do so. Imagine if it took ten years to diagnose patients in the ER—by then they'd all be dead. It's just a lot more complicated to figure out someone has bipolar disorder than it is to determine if someone has a crowbar stuck in their head. ### 75 Me and Stripes sitting in the main room watching this woman Judy who was constantly falling over even with a cane and Stripes says, "She shouldn't be here." Stripes went around insisting to the nurses and mental health workers that Judy should be in an ER. And Stripes was right, because two days later Judy died, she collapsed in the main room by the nurses' station. Stripes tells me this later because I was out of Tyler 2 by then, but I saw it, too: I was downstairs in the cafeteria and heard the code blue and saw EMTs go in and come out with a stretcher with a dead woman on it and I knew it had to be Judy. - - - - On a Sunday, at the Refuge, I met with Michael Miller, who used to be the director of the clinic (like over the whole Refuge), who now comes back one weekend a month to meet with patients. "You're a smart person, aren't you?" I ask him how he knows that. He says, "By the way you answered my previous question, I can tell that you're articulate." I tell him my theory that cellular automata may have infected my brain and we both agree that it could be true. He says, "It sounds like something out of The Matrix." This conversation is the bright point in my day, the chance to speak to someone intelligent. So many of my conversation partners are so dull. I know I have some strange theories about programming and the mind, and when I'm manic I consider them more realistic. But they are theories—even when manic I am able to doubt them. And of course I'm more likely than the average Joe to think of ideas related to programming—I've been programming computers since I was a little kid. *And*, the concept of programming brains or "mind control" isn't a far-fetched idea, even among common culture of the mentally healthy variety—we as the public have at least been led to believe that governments have been working on (and may have achieved some successful results with) mind control. To suggest that my brain may have taken on the ability to operate a simple program suggested from the outside is not really a *crazy* idea. Right now, not manic, I don't believe that has happened, but even if I am less lucid than I think, I think I'm lucid enough to make the reasonable suggestion that a) brain programming is something we will see accepted widespread as reality in short order, and b) it may already be occurring on a very large scale, to a depth and degree hard for us to fathom, as we fucking speak. Mr. Miller shakes my hand. "Great talking with you." "Great talking with you, too." Lynne comes up to me. "How was that?" "It was great! That's a very smart man!" "That's great," Lynne says. "I'm going make a suggestion to you, that I just thought of." "Ok." "I think it might be good idea for you to spend ten minutes out of each hour lying down in a dark, quiet room." When she said that I was thinking: *How can I possibly manage a job while doing such a thing?* But Lynne continued. She said, of the psych ward we were standing in: "This is probably too much stimulation for you, even. You've got so much going on inside your mind, you don't need a bunch of noise and junk coming at you from the outside. Conversations stimulate you. Like the conversation you just had with Dr. Miller—whatever you guys talked about—got you running..ramping." "It did?" "*Yes.* You went in there calm. You came out *out of control*." "That's right!" I said. "I've had to stop working on projects before or thinking in areas that got me *far* too excited! I have to limit phone calls with smart people to half an hour. My brain is just like that!!" I have no idea how she knew I had a lot going on inside my mind—I didn't realize it was that *observable* to some people—but she was right. I also didn't realize fully until years later that Lynne's suggestion for me absolutely implied that she didn't see me going back to a work situation—what office is gonna let me lie down in a dark, quiet room for ten minutes every hour? At that point I still thought I had to work, I still thought I could. Who knows what the future will hold, but I know, today, at the time of this writing, there's no way I could work the jobs I've worked before. I hate the word, I think it's a misnomer, and I hate to say it about myself, but I am in some ways disabled. - - - - In a meeting the next day with Dr. Meggs, I show her the evolution of my art, as is hung on my walls and which creates a beautiful mural of color for anyone walking down the drab hallway of Tyler 2. I left my door open most of the time so people could see it. But what I showed Dr. Meggs is the break in style between what I was drawing before and after starting the clomipramine. Before the clomipramine my art was chunky and friendly—big lines, the zebra, Stripes—after clomipramine I started drawing these *incredibly* intricate abstract line art/word art things that were like they were done by the completely different mind of a completely different person. I explained to her the feeling of obsession and patience which I had now that I didn't have before, and when she looked at the art, she saw exactly what I meant. She titrated me down off the clomipramine to a very low level to address a possible allergy to clomipramine and the texture hallucination I'd been having. She was looking at me in a way I had never seen before. "What?" I said. And she said, "I'm just impressed as hell that you figured this out." - - - - The worst thing about being in a psych ward is waking up to go to the bathroom. The shock and fear and isolation and anti-homeness, strange-land-ness of waking up in the night to go to the bathroom and realizing you're in a psych ward..then you realize you are not leaving today, you will be here for days, weeks, months (this is one of the worst realizations I've ever had..waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and realizing I am in a locked psych ward and not cozy, home, in my own bed). Then you actually get to the bathroom. You open the door. You thought all you were doing was getting up in the night and going to take a piss—that would be adventure enough—but when I open the door, the whole space is flooded with fluorescents, Chad is leaned against the stone-block wall with one foot on the floor, one foot on the seat of a toilet. The curtain which would have kept that stall in privacy has been pulled back so the whole stall is visible. Between Chad's legs, on the wall, on the floor, on his hands, is shit. He is digging up his ass with his fingers, removing the shit from his ass, and it is falling onto the floor. When it doesn't, Chad smears it on the wall. Chad looks up at me in slow motion. He recognizes me. He knows I recognize him. There is no need to wave. Chad and I are closer than that. We're in a psych ward together—all formalities are waived. As Stripes says, *This is not a coffee shop conversation*. As I look at Chad and his array of shit, I know that's true—no politeness here. I let the door close behind me and walk to the stall opposite Chad's. I know what his problem is—he's constipated. The industrial food plus his meds make it so he can't take a shit. Half the patients in here are constipated. I have wanted to do exactly what Chad is doing—I have had that exact same impulse, have had such bad constipation that I've been sitting in a stall trying to shit and completely unable to do so that I have thought of sticking my own fingers up my ass and trying to dig the shit out of there. But I never actually did it. I either zen master meditated myself through the pain of squeezing that industrial-medicated log of psych ward poop out of my delicate little asshole, or I ate fruit for three days, or I asked the nurse for a laxative. Chad was one millimeter farther over the line than me, and he actually dug up his ass and pulled the shit out of himself. The man needed relief. I finished pissing and flushed the toilet—must maintain my own illusion of civilization. Said bye to Chad on the way out and he said bye to me. I thought about reporting Chad's situation to the night nurse but the conversation that would occur between us seemed like it would be either awkward, funny, or unbelievable, so I decided to do what everyone in the place had been encouraging me to do: I focused on my own healing and just went back to bed. In the morning, all the nurses on morning shift were talking about some "incident" that had happened at night—something that was so hush hush that even normally loose lips wouldn't speak a syllable on this one. I sat in the main room eating my breakfast, finding some humor in the psych ward staff keeping secrets about psych ward patients *from* psych ward patients. These first shift nurses were asleep in their beds when Chad was excavating the poop from his rectum, at the time when I was standing next to him taking a piss. The nurses with the hushed secrets that patients were not allowed to hear, learned about Chad's poop excursion at their 8am handoff meeting with the night shift. I was there, man, I was *there*—my own personal Vietnam. And let me tell you, soldier, after months of living in a psych ward, it would take a lot more than the sight and smell of Chad digging feces out of his anus with his own fingers to mess with my head—that shit was just business as usual. At night, too, trying to squeeze in a masturbation session, orgasm on Celexa between fifteen minute suicide checks..especially after what I had just seen Chad doing..impossible. Some nights I'd arrange all the furniture in the main room until it was perfect for me and then I'd sit in one of the gliders and rock away my extra energy or else sit at the round table using my special way of climbing into the chair (push the armed chair all the way in and then climb over the back) and I'd read, write, take notes in my notebooks. Some say that when a person is overly controlling of their external environment it indicates a chaotic inner life. I tend to agree. - - - - Dr. Meggs asked me to remember what and how I felt when I felt suicidal and to tell her next time we met. I said cold chills in my stomach and other things. She told me to get a heated blanket and combat the suicidal feeling on a sensory level. Only use that blanket when I feel suicidal. "I attempted suicide partially as a way to get people's attention, to get people to take my mental illness seriously. My dad never even called." Dr. Meggs said, "He's never going to." "Mom says I escalate my behavior to try to get his attention. And she says that nothing I'll ever do will get his attention." "Based on what you've told me about him, I believe that your mother is right. He is a sick person and he doesn't have the emotional capacity to relate to you in the way you want to be related to." "I think that's right. And I do pretty well when I forget about him and don't open up to him. I hadn't written him in four years till tonight. And I think I need to go back to that strategy of pretending he doesn't exist. It works the best. It's too painful to know that my dad is still alive, out there in the world, and he has no idea what's going on with me..and doesn't care." Dr. Meggs loaned me her personal copies of Pema Chödrön books—*Don't Bite The Hook*. This is what I would read late into the night in the main room with the night nurse John looking over me. I didn't just read them—I *studied*. I took notes. I read and re-read. And I remembered how I used to follow people to their house in my car if they cut me off in traffic when I was twenty. My psychiatrist and my mom both said I'm a very angry person. But the trick is to not bite the hook, of course, to *stay on your own trip*..when you follow someone to their house because you want to scare them, to kill them, you're no longer on your own trip. Staying in a mental hospital for a few months is good practice in staying on your own trip because in the hospital there is always someone trying to get you to go on *their* trip, to enter their psychological reality..and you need to decide if you really want to go there. Same with my dad: do I want to be on his trip? Do I want my trip to be modified by him in even the slightest way? The answer is no. I'm on my own trip of creation and sobriety and compassion, which I believe is the point of the 12 steps. - - - - Eventually Dr. Meggs lets me leave. Maybe she did keep me here longer than necessary because she liked my company. If so it was mutual—it didn't have to be sexual, it was never inappropriate, but, hey, there's nothing wrong with people enjoying each other's company once in a while, even in a psych ward, even between doctor and patient. But when we both felt it was safe for me to leave, my doctor set a discharge date and I prepared myself mentally for leaving the security of the Refuge. Some say life doesn't begin until after your first suicide attempt, and while I cannot recommend you attempt suicide, there is a sense in which this morbid phrase is true. There is nothing that can give you a stronger love of life than either *witnessing* death or *escaping* death—especially if *you* were the one trying to visit death upon your own head. It's a wonderful thing to fail at. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (3)** > > Patient Admitted October 5, 2011—Discharged October 27, 2011 > > **Identifying Data** > > This is the second Brattleboro Refuge third lifetime admission for this 33-year-old single white male *[loser](#)*. Patient is currently unemployed computer software engineer and a writer. Patient lives alone in Brattleboro, Vermont. > > **Chief Complaint** > > "Because I took a bunch of pills last night. I got angry yesterday and that's not a good thing for me because I go inward." *[Yeah, look, what I was trying to express is that anger is dangerous for me because I was raised not to hurt others, so when I'm angry with others, I point that anger at myself, and unfortunately for me that means removing myself from the situation..through suicide.]* > > **History of Present Illness** > > On admission the patient reported that on discharge from Tyler 2 last week he returned to his outpatient program. States on admission that yesterday "it went wrong for me." I had a lot of "rising energy and felt anger and rage. At times like that thoughts come to my head about suicide but I had not been planning anything. I had not been planning suicide during the week. However last night I took the pills." Patient feels helpless and hopeless all the time. "I can't make myself hike anymore even though that's the main thing I love to do." The patient does not know how many pills he took but he took the entire bottle. > > **Course of Hospitalization** > > On admission to Tyler 2 patient wrote "I'm mixed up. I'm lost. I have no idea what to do." *[Have felt this way most of my life btw]* Stated "I thought I was getting better but I knew I really wasn't. I don't know if I wanted to really kill myself. I'm just confused. I just don't know." On admission to Tyler 2 the patient reported extreme mood lability *[emotional instability]*, racing thoughts, and ambivalence with respect to the fact that he had not completed his suicide attempt. Patient was begun on clomipramine and Lamictal was increased. In addition the patient was started on clonidine for anxiety. Clomipramine was slowly titrated up with good effect however patient reported odd visual disturbances with the clomipramine and in the end the clomipramine was discontinued despite its having helped with his obsessive thought process. In addition patient was introduced to meditation and breathing exercises as a way of controlling his panic attacks and anxiety. *[I don't think I've ever had a panic attack, but my psychiatrist Dr. Meggs disagrees. When I first came to the Refuge, I didn't even know the definition of "anxiety," though clearly the word characterizes my behavior.]* Trazodone was added for sleep with good effect. Patient was also begun on buspirone for anxiety. Celexa was added for depression with intent to maintain a low dose secondary to the patient's bipolar disorder and concern about inducing mania. As we had to discontinue the clomipramine secondary to visual disturbances, the patient was begun on risperidone to which he immediately responded with good effect. Ultimately the patient began to feel well with decrease in obsessive thought process and improvement in terms of mood and was discharged to the Birches IOP Program *[Intensive Outpatient Program—five days a week, six hours a day—group therapy led by a social worker, classes on substance abuse and mood disorders, dialectical behavioral therapy, individual meetings with whatever psychiatrist was on duty, and an end-of-day evaluation and safety check (meaning, how likely are you to kill yourself tonight?—I tended to do poorly at safety checks and was often held late for an extended one-on-one discussion with the program's nurse, Ms. Irwin)]* > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Mood Disorder NOS. Alcohol Dependence in Early Remission. Cocaine Abuse in Early Remission. OCD. Nephrolithiasis, Recurrent *[kidney stones]*. Financial difficulties secondary to unemployment. Close relationships with his sister and his mother. > > **GAF on Discharge:** 40 *[By the book, a GAF of 40 means I have, "Some impairment in reality testing or communication (e.g., speech is at times illogical, obscure, or irrelevant) or major impairment in several areas, such as work or school, family relations, judgment, thinking, or mood (e.g., depressed adult avoids friends, neglects family, and is unable to work; child frequently beats up younger children, is defiant at home, and is failing at school)"—I think that's pretty accurate]* > > **Condition on Discharge** > > Patient is well groomed, cooperative, makes good contact. There is no psychomotor agitation or retardation noticed. Speech is within normal limits. Mood is described as "anxious but excited." Affect constricted. Cognition is intact. Thought process is logical. Content is non-psychotic. Patient denies auditory or visual hallucinations and no overt signs or symptoms of psychosis are noted. Patient denies suicidal and homicidal ideation. Denies cravings. Denies pain. Patient not deemed an imminent threat to self or others. > > **Prognosis:** Fair. Note: at this discharge I was on eight different psych meds. I'd always been resistant to taking psych meds, from the first time my therapist suggested I see a psychiatrist for anti-anxiety meds. If I had started taking psych meds sooner, I suppose it's possible I would have been less likely to try illegal drugs—who knows. But the first time I was locked in a psych ward in Los Angeles and formally diagnosed as bipolar, I became willing to try pharmaceuticals (Lamictal), and when I was locked up in a psych ward in Brattleboro after a suicide attempt, I was totally willing to take whatever Dr. Meggs, my psychiatrist, prescribed. The antipsychotic she gave me, I took for several years with positive effect. Unfortunately, it gave me tardive dyskinesia, which is irreversible brain damage to the dopamine receptors which causes uncontrollable muscle movements which hamper social interactions, cause excruciating muscle pain, and increase your chance of suicide. During our final checkout, Dr. Meggs sat beside me on the bed in my room. "I was trying to work these jobs, for years." "You were trying to push something that didn't fit." "I needed mental help so bad but I didn't know it. I would just park my car in a mall parking lot, take my sunglasses and wallet with me and start walking. As they say: I just couldn't. And I would never go back. I think I wanted to walk out for my life, for real." "Being alive is hard." "No shit girlfriend." "It's good to remember where our bad times were." I exhale. Dr. Meggs asked me if I was still seeing the texture thing. I looked at the wall. I said, "It's there but it's faint. I know you can't release me if I say I'm still hallucinating, but I'm not going to lie to you. I've been as honest with you as I can up to this point and I'm not going to start lying to you know." I didn't see what she checked on her form, but she let me leave. On her way out the door she leaned back inside my room and said: "Don't forget to breathe." My doctor, my best psychiatrist, saying that to me, making those her parting words, etched them into my mind more permanently than VINCIT QUI SE VINCIT is etched into stone over my old school. "Don't forget to breathe." *I won't*, I said to myself at the time. And for a single moment, since then, I haven't. ### 76 I got out of the Refuge on Thursday, was walked by a nurse directly to the start of day at the Birches program *because they release you directly from Tyler 2 to Birches*—there's no chance to just leave and go home or go out and kill yourself again. Later, though, I did get home after my three and a half week post-suicide attempt stay at the Refuge after going to the pharmacy and buying movies and getting Indian food to go, at Spark's suggestion, and setting out all my prescription bottles on the red carpet. There were eight of them. And I thought: *Is this what's going to keep me healthy? Is this going to prevent me from dying by suicide?* And they all had different schedules, once a day, once in the morning and once at night, sometimes with meals, sometimes with water. Sometimes it was two pills. Sometimes it was half a pill and I had to break it with a splitter. For the first few days, I wondered if I would have to do nothing else but stay home and manage my medication, watch the clock to swallow every little speck of medicine at the right time, in the right way, to keep myself alive. And I took a picture of them, all lined up like that. I posted it on my blog. I was proud of all that medicine, because it was proof that I was really sick. Your friends and family don't know what to think when you tell them you're feeling low or suicidal. But they trust a psychiatrist—a psychiatrist has been to school. And when a psychiatrist thinks you need eight distinct medicines to keep you alive and healthy, and you take a picture of those eight brown bottles lined up next to each other on the red carpet, it's imposing. When people see it, they start to think: *Oh, shit. My brother's really sick.* On my second day of Birches, I ate breakfast by myself in the large Refuge cafeteria. That's when I heard the code blue, then saw EMTs take the woman out on a stretcher, knowing it was the one from Tyler 2..Judy..and Stripes telling me about it later, how she just fell over and none of the nurses or mental health workers even noticed. Picture of Stripes standing at the nurses' desk saying again and again, louder and louder, "I think Judy is dead." I was pulled out of class right away to talk with the Birches psychiatrist, a rotating position now filled by Dr. Sbarro. He asked me if I was with anyone. "No." "Well if you do decide to have children, you might want to pick a partner who doesn't have bipolar disorder to lessen the chance that your kids will have it." And he mentioned Hemingway after I said I was a writer—remember?—and he said it's important for me not to drink because alcohol lowers your inhibitions, including the inhibitions that keep you from killing yourself. "None of the medications I'm putting you on will kill you by overdose..they would just make you really uncomfortable. And by the way that Vistaril you took wouldn't have killed you either." Thank you, doctor, for telling me that even my suicide attempt was ill-designed—thanks so much, buddy, for telling me I even suck at suicide. "I had a recent patient who you remind me of. She didn't have enough aspirin or any lithium or any sleeping pills. She said the antipsychotic she had she was sure wouldn't kill her because she had a psychiatrist who knew of her previous suicide attempts and he told her which pills she had would kill her and which wouldn't." Lol. Great psychiatrist, eh? I think he told me this little story to keep me safe, because he knew my suicide attempt was a cry for help type. - - - - My social worker found me meditating on the floor during break in the hallway and told me to go downstairs and eat with my classmates, that it would be good for me. I felt like the first day at a new school, but my classmates were instantly welcoming, waving me over and getting me a chair. It was like they already knew me, or assumed they did, assumed we were all alike (and we were). When I was outpatient in Birches, I stole cheeseburgers from the cafeteria because I didn't have any money. Grabbing them when staff weren't looking and leaving through the entrance of the caf, back to the table with my fellow birches people. As Bruce Wayne says, you cross a line the first time you steal food so you won't be hungry. This line is not completely described as a moral line—you are acting against your morals yet acting in accordance with a greater necessity. Yes. There is a greater necessity than being moral, than living in accordance with your particular values. It is the deepest need. It is the need to survive. But I stole hamburgers even when I was paying for them by fact of being inpatient. One night decades ago I rented a limo, stopped at a convenience store and stole Doritos right in sight of the clerk and security cameras. The point was *I can do whatever I want and you won't say shit*. And I was right. And I still am. Right is something you *take*. I snuck hamburgers from the the small cafeteria inside the Refuge inside empty Fritos bags inside my pockets..then showing Faith once we got back to Tyler 2, removing the Fritos bags from by cargo pockets and then revealing that each one contained a hot triple cheeseburger..*that's how it's done*..and her being impressed. Then polo shirt John seeing me chilling in front of the nurses' station eating a burger after they practically *patted us down* to make sure we weren't sneaking food up from the cafeteria. He's like, "*Did you sneak that up here?*" And I nod and take another bite. He just shakes his head and goes back to filling out some form. Everybody was always getting caught trying to sneak easy shit up there, like a piece of string cheese and they'd get caught..I could get a whole hamburger up her..times two..and not get caught. But there was this one dude who was like the master..he used layers of ice in a soda cup to keep an ice cream sandwich cold..it was like he built a mini-refrigerator and even I was impressed with the technique. That one girl (Winehouse) relapsed—I heard this after she hadn't showed to class for a couple of days..and Sue had relapsed with her. They were shooting coke and I wanted to relapse with them so badly. You know? You're eating lunch with the Birches kids..you get one happy moment and then that was the last time I saw half of them because after being in Tyler 2, after being in Birches, they relapsed to shooting *coke* into their veins—which sounded fine to me—but it's like, what are you doing? Are you getting clean or are you hitting the needle? - - - - I didn't particularly like Birches—for me, that program was a way for nurses to daily evaluate me as the highest suicide risk in the group and daily recommend that I see a Birches psychiatrist, who daily recommended that I go back to Tyler 2. In my medical records from that hospital it doesn't say "suicidal"—it says "chronic suicidality." That's right folks, I hate this world and everything in it, including you, everyone I've ever met or never met, the whole system, seen and unseen, every job I've ever had, every business I've ever come in contact with, and me—I hate me most of all, deeper than almost anyone can imagine. I hate my faults. I hate my strengths. I hate that I'm here. I hate that someday I won't be. I'm terribly maladjusted to this world, and I'm smarter than most people, and with that slightly smarter brain I judge every single one of you who thinks it's an accomplishment to do well at your job, succeed at parenting, fake-ass romance, rising through the ranks of corporate success..none of that is worth anything, not to me. I never found pride at making more than my dad when I was twenty-three—I was embarrassed to be wasting my time at such a lowlife position at a Fortune 50 company. That's right: lowlife. If you work at one of those companies you are a lowlife, no better than a used car salesman or an assembly line worker. I was embarrassed every day I worked at Mead Research—mostly embarrassed to be working alongside people for whom working at LN was the achievement of their lifetime. Most of them are still there. They have a house on a golf course and make three or four times the median national income. Most of them have zero talent. Maybe one out of forty programmers at that company can write code—and no one made it an art. Frankly, to see myself associated with those people, who to me were dumb, talentless, and spiritless—that was enough to make me want to kill myself right there. Of course I have bipolar, and that'll make you want to kill yourself for no reason at all. But bipolar or not, whether among children, grandparents, soldiers, or whoever, the less life sucks, the less people kill themselves. I mean look at Iraq: toward the end, more of our soldiers died from suicide than in battle—that has to tell you, coarsely, that their lives sucked. Most of us think that the idea they were fighting an unjust war maybe got to their heads a little. You know, killing foreigners even for the tenuous ideals of "freedom" and "democracy" is hard. But when you've killed people to protect your country for a threat of WMDs *that everyone knew didn't exist* before the war started..yeah..that might create a problem of conscience in a US soldier that can only be fixed by a bullet to the brain. At the very least it paints a picture for the soldier, for all of us, of a world that sucks. - - - - The Birches program really left me feeling alienated. In Tyler 2 you could cry whenever you wanted to, no one would even notice. Birches people were generally functioning on a higher level than that. They're outpatient people. Some of them have jobs and some of them have come here ten years ago and are just back for a "tune up." (That old guy who was all gregarious and happy and flirting with Ms. Irwin, the program nurse—I think that's the only reason he came back, was to have dinner and nookie with that beautiful redhead who was about his age.) The guy who sat in the corner and listened to music from his phone on earbuds the whole time. The young woman who was on disability and was taking time to figure out her mind and heal before she someday goes back to work, maybe, living with her mom and her cats. The violence meathead dude in Birches we met earlier whose every other sentence ended in how he just needed to kick someone's ass..body building freak..and he would refer to women as bitches, in groups containing men and women. We all complained and when confronted about it by program administrators bodybuilder dude decided he'd had enough of the program, he was above it, he didn't need it, he didn't like to be told not to call women bitches—so he left, like a fucking bitch. In drawing class, everyone said my picture was the best—they gave me compliments and I was friendly back. But I wanted to scream, to kick chairs over, to interrupt certain people when they were speaking and inform them of how dumb they were and that their words were a waste of time to my ears. And some people I wanted to fight. Actually just one guy. The mushroom/LSD guy, he was so disruptive and so disrespectful that I wanted to jump across the room and grab him by the throat and bang his head against the fishbowl window over and over and over. Fucking asshole. That's something that really irks me: someone who's crazy who doesn't know how fucking crazy they are. This guy is telling me that he's opened up a portal to inter-dimensional beings and he's incredulously offended when Dr. Sbarro tells him that actually he's just done *waaaaaay* too much mushrooms and LSD. Now look, I ain't no simpleton—the idea that inter-dimensional beings connect and communicate with us through hallucinogenic plant life is a perfectly reasonable theory in my world. But when you deal with multiple/alternate/psychotic realities, you have to remember *this one*, the one reflected by the cultures of the people on planet Earth. I'm not saying you're *not* talking to inter-dimensional beings when you trip. All I'm saying is—and this is what I say to myself—*I am sitting in a mental hospital,* and *they don't let people into mental hospitals who* aren't *crazy (in the sense understood by most humans)*. So that's why I wanted to kill that mushroom/LSD kid: because he was always disrupting Birches groups by unzipping and unclipping and unbuckling and re-buckling his backpack, paying zero attention when other people were talking. He had the loudest backpack in the world. That was the thing that bothered me most about this red-headed crackhead dude in Tyler 2 that I told the fuck *off?!* He was constantly saying he didn't belong in Tyler 2 and he didn't need treatment, and the arrogance in that drove me *off a fucking cliff*. Same with this LSD/mushroom guy. He irked me to no end. I wanted to *shout* at this motherfucker: *You're in one of the world's best psychiatric hospitals. How the fuck do you think you got here? Remember the admissions process?—all those questions they asked you?? If you weren't fucking* crazy *you wouldn't be sitting here. Because, guess what, your ass in that chair is costing* somebody *a lot of money.* They say, though, that the people who really push your buttons are the ones that are a lot like you—but just a little different. The first time I was in a psych hospital, ten years ago in LA, I didn't think I needed to be there. I thought drinking was my problem. I didn't have any way to conceptualize bipolar disorder—that I had a mental illness that ran so deep in me that it had been affecting every aspect of my life probably for my whole entire life *and that all the while I managed to stay completely unaware of it, completely ignorant that I had one of the three "major mental illnesses" (aptly named) that make your reality so incompatible with most other people's that you really can't relate—it was a* miracle *that I had done as well as I had, for as long as I had, in the normal world.* So I felt a little compassion for mushroom guy. This was his first time in a psychiatric hospital. It was my fourth? Fifth? I didn't get this on the first try, and it was ok if he didn't, either. - - - - After getting out of the Refuge, on Megan's suggestion, I bought myself art supplies, a good meal, and some movies, taking it all to go, up to my attic apartment and enjoying myself..watching *Girl, Interrupted* while eating Indian food. The night I got out of the Refuge and like all such nights after Stripes suggested it, I treated myself to many purchases, sex toys (with a crazy manic sexual talk with the older woman who owned the store) and I bought a ton of movies, as always, used DVDs from the corner record store. One of the movies I bought was *Girl, Interrupted*, which I had always liked but now was obsessed with since I had stayed in a couple of mental institutions, and I still had the copy that Stripes gave me inside the Refuge of the book, which I took great joy in reading while I was within the confines of a locked ward of my own. In my attic apartment, I bought a membership to one porn site because I knew that on the Celexa I would need some serious help to get off. I fucked my artificial pussy and watched some of the cutest girls I've ever seen sitting on couches, fingering themselves and making themselves cum. But I couldn't join them. Everything I did felt good. The sensation of the pussy rubber was good. My brain activation was good. I was responsive to the teenage models. But I couldn't cum because of the damn Celexa. They say, "sexual side effects" on TV—*that's* the sexual side effect of antidepressants: *you can't fucking cum while you're on them!* Another time I got out of the Refuge, when I went to Whit's to get my special meal, Jill wrote a special message on my to-go food after I got out of the hospital. Donald Mutebe was there, drinking, and he said: "You know, with the Refuge, it's a business, and when they decide whether to admit you, if you're on the border, they might admit you even if you don't need the help, because it's money to them—you know?" "Yeah, I know what you're saying, my friend. I hear you." He was implying that I didn't need to be there—or might not need to be—and I wasn't sure if he was doing me a favor or harm by saying this. "I'm just saying don't let it determine your life," he said. Then Jill brings the food out and I read the message on the styrofoam container. It says something about hugs and kisses and I love it. Donald knocks his hand on the table. "I'll leave you to your dinner, my friend." "Thanks, Donald." "Just don't see yourself as a diagnosis." I nodded. - - - - I skipped my second day at the Birches program, left a crying message on my social worker's voicemail telling her I couldn't go back there. She eventually called me back and said she needed me to come in on Monday, they could help etc. I just lied on my bed sobbing. I wrote my family an email telling them that I had been in a psychiatric hospital and explaining the reason why (I thought they might want to know). I can't find the note note now but basically it said I was in the hospital for a suicide attempt and I'm fine now. The end result was that my dad never even responded—neither did a lot of the rest of my family. Those are those times when you reach out to the people who love you the most and they just shake their heads and refuse to take your hand. I thought I was alone before my suicide attempt—no—a suicide attempt is something a normal will never understand, and once you do it, you are not more welcome, you are less. After I left that message for my social worker, I went out to soothe myself with smoke and drink. They piss tested us on Monday when I did go back to the Birches program, and I must have had just enough time to clean out because my Friday drinking didn't show up and I hadn't drank the rest of the weekend. I didn't really care if they kicked me out of the Birches problem. Not that I'm a big rebel or anything—I follow rules that I think make sense. But trying to kill yourself is breaking one of the ultimate rules, and once you break that one it puts everything else in a new perspective. I was *suicidal*—I had bigger problems than displeasing my social worker by not showing up to group on time. ### 77 Gretchen's proved herself a true stalker when she went to the pharmacy to meet me there when I had mentioned I would likely be there, then she got mad because I didn't show up at the pharmacy—she met me there even though we never agreed to meet—I was just telling her about my day. I was like, "Gretchen, I don't need help picking up my medicine. If I make an agreement to meet with you in the atrium to talk, that's a date and you can be mad if I break it. If you ask me what I'm doing this afternoon and I mention I'm going to the pharmacy after my Birches outpatient class, and you show up at the pharmacy at a certain time because you know when my class gets out, that's not a date—that's you stalking me. You have no right to be mad about me not telling you that my plan to go to the pharmacy changed because my Birches class ran late! I had an evening class and there wasn't time for me to come all the way up here to the Hotel Pharmacy before my next class!" I started thinking Gretchen was part of the reason I was crazy—I actually had the thought: *I want to go inpatient again just so I don't have to deal with Gretchen's crazy stalking motherfucking bullshit!* And later, much later, very close to now, I occasionally return to thoughts of hiding in the psych ward. If I could hide in a nice enough psych ward—one with internet, where I could write my books—where I could hide from my dad and my mom and my insane aunts and uncles and grandmothers and cousins and neighbors and former coworkers and bosses..I would. Because I've been in the hospital and I've been out, and if we make the distinction between mental illness and *crazy*, all the crazy people are out here. ### 78 I went back to Tyler 2 for some reason. I don't know—maybe they thought I was suicidal. I got into the first fight I ever started. All the other fights I'd ever been in were like four guys kicking my ass on the playground because I was white. There was this guy—his name was Schizophrenic Mike—and he often looked like he was faking to me. Faking being ill. Like there was this gleam in his eye that the only reason he was there was because he wanted to escape being in jail or something. But I don't know—that could just be my misinterpretation. What I know for sure is he was walking up behind all the girls and standing there looking down at them and making them uncomfortable. So I told him to stop. And he didn't stop. So I provoked Schizophrenic Mike into starting a fight with me. I had laundry in the laundry room. Schizophrenic Mike was wandering around the ward—this is at like 6am. I kept telling him: "Don't touch my fucking laundry. Don't touch my fucking laundry," over and over and then, "Don't go into the laundry room. Don't go into the laundry room," and then, after he was in the laundry room, "If you open the top to that dryer I'm gonna kick your ass," real quiet, where I thought no one else could hear. In case you weren't clear on this, this is as scene where I provoke a deeply schizophrenic mental patient into starting a fight with me so he'll be blamed and I'll be the victim, helped by nurses and apologized to by psychiatrists—yeah, just wanted to make sure you had the picture. These aren't thing's I'm necessarily *proud* of. I'm just saying what happened. So I coax this fucking mentally twisted motherfucker into opening the top of the dryer and I had been taunting him all this time and I finally said, "Mike, that's it, I'm gonna have to [dialogue withheld because it's too awful] and he runs at me, like I knew he would, like I was preparing for, and before he can punch me I reach out and grab his throat and I squeeze like I'm gonna kill that motherfucker. Both our glasses falls off. His hands go for my neck. He sees what type of fight he's been drawn into. This isn't a punch you and make you bleed fight. This is a choke you until you die fight. I have to tell you I feel great—maybe not joy, but—satisfaction in remembering this. Because sometimes a man is a dog. And sometimes a dog needs to be put down. I squeezed, and squeezed, and pressed with my thumbs, and I shook his head back and forth like I wanted a grape to fall off the stem. I don't have any guilt about this fight to this day, even though he was schizophrenic. You don't go around making all the women uncomfortable. It fucks up the vibe of the whole joint. When you have a system, work system for instance, psych ward for instance, and there's a bad seed, that bad seed must be removed for the sake of the whole system. I've had bosses who didn't understand this, and that bad seed ate away at their company from the inside. I wasn't about to let this asshole mess with the peace of the ward. He needed to go to ALSA, and I did what was necessary to send him to ALSA. The fight was broken up almost instantly by nurses and mental health techs—the Tyler 2 fire crew works awesomely in situations like this. They instantly put Mike in ALSA and checked on me and apologized and soothed me and gave me my PRN for anxiety. They sat me in the vitals chair and took my pulse and all that. Fuck you. I win. You lose. That's how we do that. - - - - Stripes says she heard I got into a fight. I say yeah, I guess I did. "Did you kick his ass?" she says, nodding. "I don't know. I didn't do near as much damage as I wanted to. They broke it up pretty fast." "You kicked his ass," she laughs. "That's what everybody is saying." I am secretly overjoyed that Stripes thinks I won the fight. "So what is everybody *saying*, exactly." "That you're a badass psycho motherfucker and not to mess with you." "Oh, no," I say, "I wouldn't hurt a fly." "Unless you thought *he was messing with* the girls on the unit. You're a trip." "Is that really what people are saying?" "Scouts honor," Megan says, making the peace sign with her fingers. "They're saying you're a psychotic *unglued* motherfucker and that you never even punched him you just *went for his neck* and tried to kill him!" "Damn right," I say. "I was gonna squeeze the air out of that fucker's body." Megan screams, "THIS IS NOT A COFFEE SHOP CONVERSATION!! Woo-hoo! *Alright*, my friend, *right on*, you *kill* that motherfucker!" She has her hand out to bump the rock. So I bump the rock and her fingers go exploding all over the place. I do the same thing and our hand bump looks incredible, like we planned that shit, but all I can do is go back through all the times I got beat up in school and think that *this is the first fight* that I both started *and won*. It only took me till I was thirty-three. Being in the psych hospital does something to you. When I had my hands around that motherfucker's neck, there was no holding back. I was one-hundred percent trying to cut off the air supply to that fucker's head, which, I guess, could kill you or at least make you pass out. I did it just right, too, played every nurse in that room so that they saw Mike attack me and it looked like all I was doing was defending myself from a very random attack—all I was doing was standing outside the laundry room, pacing peacefully, waiting for my clothes to dry. (Quietly talking shit to him to make him come at me.) He ended up in ALSA, and I was given an anti-anxiety pill. The rush was incredible, though—I can see why people fight—the high was better than cocaine, my heart was beating a mile a minute. And when the nurses sat me in the vitals chair I was saying things like: "If you let him out of ALSA I'll *kill* that motherfucker!!" To which head nurse Michelle said: "You're not helping yourself." She was giving me this stern look. "Helping myself *what*." "You do want to leave, don't you? Language like that will only keep you here longer." "I don't *care* how long I stay here." Michelle goes back to writing in my chart. There are a lot of patients and doctors in the main room now. Guess they heard there was a show. Also it was shift change. "I'm sorry, Michelle." She looks at me. "I didn't mean to say I wanted to kill him. I don't want to kill him." Michelle makes a nice face. Maybe now she'll write that in my chart. "All I meant to say," I say for the benefit of the audience of patients who are sprinkled around the room, "is that if *any of you*, doctors, nurses, whoever the *fuck* you are, let that motherfucker out of ALSA I will beat that fucker's head against the wall until he's bleeding from the back of the head and they have to sew *tiny little fragments of bone* back into that motherfucker's skull *with dental floss*. I will fuck that fucker so hard he will—" "Hey! We don't need to hear this!" "Ok, that's fine, you hear what you want to hear and you see what you want to see, as the man says. All I'm saying is that fucker stands around the room looking down girls' pants, staring girls in the face, and I don't like the girls I'm stuck in a psych ward with to feel on edge, 'cause when *they're* on edge *they'll* be fighting and that's worse than any fight between two guys. *I don't like it* when people disrespect *women!*" "Ok, ok. Do you need a PRN?" "*Fuck* the PRN." "Do you need a shot?" "Hey, Michelle, I can be as calm or as wild as I want to be, any time I choose." "Do you believe that?" "Look, now I'm calm." "Please stay that way." "No problem. But if you let that fuckhead out of ALSA while I'm still in this hospital I will KICK HIS FUCKING ASS!!" Michelle stands up, comes around the nurses' station, kneels in front of me and says sweetly: "You already kicked his ass, the way I hear it. What do you really want?" "I want peace. He was making the girls feel uncomfortable." "That's *our* job, ok? Your job is to focus on your own healing." "Well you all are not doing your job." "You don't think we're doing our job?" "Not in Mike's case. Ask any girl in here. He's walking around, standing right behind people, staring people down." "Well you got your peace, didn't you. He'll be in ALSA for a while." "Good." "Maybe next time you can try talking to one of us about the problem." "I did! I told every fucking mental health tech in this motherfucker *about* that motherfucker—" "What I hear is that you need to calm down. Do you want me to get you that shot?" "That won't be necessary. I can calm myself down." "Then do it. And don't make any more death threats. The laws out there..?..apply in here, too." "Ok, I'll calm myself down. I can do it myself. I don't need help." "I know." "I'm going to my room to meditate." "That sounds very wise. Do you want me to bring your breakfast to you?" "No thank you. I'm eating breakfast with Stripes." Michelle blushes, smiling. "You have a crush on her, don't you?" "Well," I say, looking at Stripes, "if by crush you mean I want to strip her down and fuck her from behind while looking at that big-ass tat of the Virgin Mary on her left arm and imagine I'm fucking the *real* Virgin Mary then yes, I have a crush on her." Michelle stands up. "Thanks for that imagery," she says. "No problem. Our baby is going to be the prophet Jesus, by the way, but we'll treat him as our best friend." "Ok," Michelle says, going back behind the nurses' desk. "When is Michael coming out of ALSA?" "Don't worry, it won't be today." She looks directly at me. "And the way you've arranged it, he'll be on one-on-ones when he *does* get out, which'll probably be in about a *week*." "A week of peace," I mumble. "What?" "A week of peace!" Michelle shakes her head. She mumbles something. "What was that?" I say. She mouths the words to me: *Thank God.* She rolls her eyes and shakes her head. "Yeah, see, you motherfuckers'll be thanking me that motherfucker's in ALSA." "Go to your room. And stop using that word. Don't come out until you're calm." I get up from the vitals chair, make my way by Stripes, brushing my hand from one of her shoulders to the other, touching the bare skin of her neck at the top of her shirt. All the while I'm saying: "Yeah, everybody *does* and *says one motherfucking thing* while *thinking* and *doing another* motherfucking thing. And you're not allowed to talk about motherfucking *shit*. If *I* talk about motherfucking shit, I have to *stay* here longer. If *you* talk about motherfucking shit, *you get fired*. Isn't that weird? If *you* talk about it, you have to leave—if *I* talk about it, I have to stay. But it's *the same motherfucking shit*, either way. This ward is full of motherfuckers *writing shit in charts*—you would think they *computerize* this motherfucker. Get some *iPads* up in this motherfucker. That whole fuckin' records room down there?—You could fit that whole fuckin' room on a hard drive 'bout *this* big. Turn that records room into a spa/sauna thing, you know, with the hickory chips and and guy/girl showers that are *clean*—not like these fuckin' showers up here—I'm talking some guy cleans them out with *bleach* every day. And—*and—before you ask*—because I get this question a lot—you were gonna ask me *what does the guy who pushes the cart with the medical records do* now that the whole fuckin' *Refuge* is automated with heads-up displays and high-class electronics and shit. Well, I'll tell you. I have an answer for that. What he will *do* is..something more human. What's that guy's name who pushes that cart? Pedro? Well now fucking *Pedro* can sit outside painting paintings and maybe he'll be the next Monet *or Manet* or whatever. Or maybe he can be Diego Riviera—is *that* a painter? Right. But the point is, *Pedro who pushes the records cart* is doing a job below his human standing. Pedro—you might not know Pedro but I've *talked* to Pedro on many occasions—and Pedro happens to be a very talented and deep motherfucking human fucking being. I don't like for Pedro to be *pushing a records cart* when Pedro could be utilizing one of his more *human* talents. That's why I say we need to automate this whole motherfucker. From top to tip." I'm walking backwards down the long hallway to my room. The discharge nurse—I think her name is Sharon, like my mom—calls out to Michelle, who is still up at the nurses' station: "Should I give him the shot?" This Sharon has the shot ready, and she's right next to me. Back in the day (or in a shittier mental hospital) that would be Haldol but here it's just Benadryl—they're not trying to knock me out for *days*, just calm my motherfucking ass *down* a little, take a six-hour nap, wake up like a sloth, that sort of thing. They just want me docile and I'm not *docile* right now and I know Sharon and Michelle are thinking this, using that exact term—*docile*—so I say: "I'm docile! I'm docile!" I put my arms in the air like a black man about to get shot by the police and I turn around in a slow three-sixty like I'm showing them I have no weapons on me. Then I sidestep into my room, and close the door, leaving Sharon holding a shot of Benadryl that will now have to be thrown away, thankfully, 'cause that's no way for anyone to take a nap. I've never been given the shot. That's because, for an out-of-control person, I'm unusually interested in staying as in control as possible, especially inside psych wards. That is definitely a place where you want to stay on *top* of the game. I take a thirty-minute nap, then go back out into the main room. I refrain from using the word *motherfucker*. I sit down and eat breakfast with Stripes and she tells me that I won the fight with Mike and I just try to imagine Stripes' voice moaning while I eat her pussy out. Years before, when I was in film school, I told this guy if he didn't stop blocking my view of the screen where my movie was playing that I was going to "kick his fucking ass." I picked up a gobo arm—a big metal pipe used on film sets—and he's lucky he moved 'cause if he hadn't I would have beat him until he was crawling off the soundstage on a pair of bloody stumps. Oh and also with no head. I get mad sometimes. It's called irate bipolar mania, and you really don't want to mess with it. ### 79 I hate how now that I have this diagnosis of bipolar disorder, now that I'm "mentally ill," people think that somehow means I'm less capable than them. No. Even though my mind doesn't work correctly in this very specific way known to doctors, that does not mean your healthy brain is more capable than mine! Actually, I'm still smarter than you, I still see the situation more clearly than you (unless you're my Mom), and I can still do way more complex things than you. And I've read more than you. So don't try to act like just because I'm ill, suddenly *you're* the expert. My best psychiatrists don't even do that to me, and they have PhDs. They're smart enough to know that I'm smarter than them, and therefore they have to treat me with mutual respect or else I'll just start fucking with them. It sucks when one of your role models is Hannibal Lecter—I always say if Hannibal Lecter and Björk had a baby, they'd have me. You know the part in *Hannibal* where Agent Starling goes to see Barney at his apartment and Starling says: "So when you turned Dr. Lecter over to the Tennessee Police—" And Barney says, "They weren't civil to him. They're all dead now." "Yeah they only survived his company three days. You survived him six years at the asylum. How'd you do that? It wasn't just being civil." And Barney says, "Yes, it was." Well, I'm a little like Lecter in this way—I like to be treated civilly. And I don't claim to be unique in this way. This is a common meme or else it wouldn't have shown up in these universally famous stories about Hannibal Lecter. And unlike the fictional Lecter, usually us real-life Lecters don't actually *kill* people for their disrespect, for exasperating us with their dullness. But we kill you socially. We kill you emotionally. We kill you at your job. And some of us sub-serial killer psychopaths kill you *psychologically*, planting little seeds of doubt inside your mind where there they grow as tall and as immovable as baobabs. Not even the little prince can save you from this type of Lecter. And that's the type of Lecter that I am. I push, and I push, and I push you till you have to move. Which is unfortunate. Because that's the way I've been pushed. And I know better than anyone that if you get pushed *too* far, you never come back. - - - - You know how I got under my dad's skin? His new wife was disrespecting me, and neither of them were doing anything to try to blend the two families..it was just like Eva now owned my dad and he no longer had a relationship with his kids or his former wife, not even civil communication. So I told my dad that I predicted his relationship with Eva would end before his relationship with me did. Instantly, he ended his relationship with me, and I haven't heard a loving thing from him since. He probably doesn't even consciously remember me saying that, but somewhere deep in his mind he is trying to win, to prove me wrong, and he's doing everything in his power to stay with Eva and to never speak to me, so that my prediction will ultimately be wrong. I hope it tortures him, the pride of maintaining his rightness over me, but I never thought Eva was good enough for my dad, and I let them both know it. Eva has kind currents within her, but deep down she doesn't have the muscle for real love—and in that way, maybe she and my dad *are* perfect for each other. If my dad was a full, whole, complete, mature adult, he would have never let me get away with insinuating such a setup. But he has never acted like my parent, and so, functionally, he hasn't ever *been* my parent. I grew up with a certain lack of guidance from him, which my mom filled in as much as possible, but I am still unruly, untrustworthy of those I call *adults* (even though I'm thirty-eight I don't consider *myself* to be one). I never knew kind authority from my dad, and I have zero trust that there is kind authority now, in bosses, police, government. To me they're all un-trustable. And unfortunately that isn't just the way I color the world according to my childhood psychology—it's the truth about many of those who govern. I recently told my dad about my tardive dyskinesia, which keeps me lying down twenty-three hours a day—lying down stops the clenching. I sent him an email. And I heard back?—nothing. It would be unwise to try to interpret his lack of response, but doing as little reading between the lines as possible, I will say it hurts for my dad to ignore such an announcement from me. As far back as I can think, he and I had the push/pull of neglect and abuse. He would ignore me until he needed me to hold the flashlight for some project he was working on. Then he would yell at me for holding it wrong, and physically force my hands to the right position. He would never give me details of what he expected from me, and then he would get mad when I screwed up some plan that was only in his mind. On prom night he let me borrow the van. I drove my date and two of our friends to dinner, to the dance, to a cornfield where we all lay on the roof looking at the stars, and then to one of the girl's houses for the night. My agreement with my dad was that I'd have the van back by midnight. It was a Saturday night, church was the next day, and he planned to drive my mom (who was the pastor of the church), me, and my two sisters to worship, using the van as we did every Sunday. But I never planned to have that vehicle back by midnight. They had my mom's Honda that they could use to get to church and me not coming home that night was a calculated *fuck you* to my dad. He didn't respect me; I didn't respect him. That is how it's been for as long as I can remember. And lying on top of that eight-passenger van with my friends, looking at the stars, making out with a smart and beautiful woman, I imagined my dad getting madder and madder as midnight came and went. I never thought for a moment that he was *worried* about me, as my mom was—I knew he was *mad*. That's his primary emotion. He tries to control things—when they don't work out he gets *mad*—unfortunately I inherited that pattern. I really don't remember the kisses between me and my girlfriend that night. The thrill of disobeying my father, however, is something I will *never* forget. - - - - Living constantly with the ultimate option as a real option is difficult, but it also gives you power. Everything else is nothing compared to ending your life. I used to find myself in salary negotiations, and they'd be like we're going to give you a ten-percent raise, and I'd be like *twenty*. One piece of advice: don't ever try to bargain with somebody who doesn't give a fuck. With me, the nuclear option is always on the table. When you say: "We can't give you twenty." Then I say: "Friday will be my last day." See, you came into this meeting with some false assumptions. Like the assumption that I want this fucking job, that I'm as desperate as you to maintain a residence where I can impress my friends with the ultimate goal of getting them to take their clothes off and have sex with me. Fuck pussy. I've had enough sex to last a lifetime. That was your first assumption—that was where you went wrong. And faced with the new choice, in the new reality, they give me the twenty-percent raise. Like I said, don't ever fuck with people who have less to lose than you. When I'm living every day hating life to the point of wanting to die, words like "no" and "fuck you" and "this relationship is over" come easily to me. I had a girlfriend named Rishi. She always used to say, *You're too quick to play the break-up card.* That's right. When I find myself, day after day, in pointless, abusive arguments with my girlfriend, the break-up card is *on* the motherfucking table. Why? Because I don't want to spend *one more day* arguing with you. Hence the nuclear option. Life is too short for me to spend my time doing anything but the most exalted thing I can pull off. Most people, they'd rather settle for mediocrity. For me, it's either the brightest moment possible—or nothing. ### 80 There was a schizophrenic woman named Crack Bitch with stringy gray hair, shit-stained gowns, she never spoke and she was tall, long arms, and every once in a while she'd go ballistic, knock her dinner tray off the table, send everyone's food flying. She'd stay in her room all day screaming and banging on the door. The street borderline coke addict—Winehouse—who herself you'd never want to fight, said to me one day while we were eating, after Crack Bitch threw her tray, Winehouse said: "I heard that bitch heard screaming in the walls. She was ripping through drywall to save the people she thought were trapped in there. That bitch has that crazy strength. She could fuck up anyone in here. You see those arms? One swipe and that bitch would have you *on the floor*. That's crazy strength, you know what I mean?" "Yeah." Winehouse punches me in the shoulder. "Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. I saw you fuck up that Mike kid the other day." "He was staring at the girls." "I know, I saw." "He was making them uncomfortable." "I know! He was creeping the fuck out of me." "I didn't like it. I hate people like that. He was fucking up the flow of the unit." "Well you fucked that motherfucker up." "Did I?" "Oh yeah." "I don't remember. I was tranced out." "It looked like you were trying to *kill* him. You had your hands around his throat. You didn't throw a single punch. From *go*, you were trying to strangle that motherfucker." "I've never punched anyone in my life." "Really?" "Yeah, I was a straight-A student. Science fair and shit." "When did you go crazy?" "Tenth grade." "Well, I wouldn't want to fight you." "I wouldn't want to fight you either!" "For real?" "Yeah, you intimidated me for the first few days." "I thought you were stuck up," Winehouse says. "Everybody thinks that," I say. "Then I saw you sitting on the floor in the med line fucking rocking back and forth and shit, talking to that old lady. You remember I invited you to sit at our table." "Yeah. I needed that." "I wasn't sure you'd even remember, you looked *gone*." "The reason I sat down is because the meds they're giving me make my dick hard. I don't want to walk around Tyler 2 with my fucking dick sticking out. I know it's a fucking psych ward but Jesus." "Seriously?" "Yeah." "You think we could take her, the two of us?" Winehouse is looking at Crack Bitch, her stringy hair mostly covering her face. "Fuck no," I say. Winehouse laughs. I ask, "Do *you* think we could take her?" Winehouse leans forward. She uses a low voice. "That bitch should be in a *cell. I'm* afraid of that bitch and I ain't afraid of nobody." Winehouse drinks the rest of a milk. "Don't ever fuck with crazy people," she says, while still swallowing. "Because crazy people.." She puts the milk down. "..will fuck your ass up." "You don't seem crazy—you have borderline, right?" "That's the latest diagnosis." "Well you don't seem crazy to me. You just seem like..someone I'd like to hang out with." "Thanks. You're awesome." "Do I seem crazy to you?" Winehouse puts her hand on my hand. "I gotta be honest with you." "Ok." "I can tell you're smart—well not smart but I can tell you're a fucking genius, from your notebooks and the way you talk to people. You're a manipulator. But not the mean kind. I see how you work the staff, you get them to do exactly what you want. But you always have to be in control. You could prob'ly get any one of these motherfuckers fired if you wanted to." "I thought about it the other night. I was going to write a letter to the clinic director on this one health tech." "Why?" "He was glorifying guns and war." "Yeah, and that rubbed you the wrong way?" "Yes it did." "Did it make you angry?" "Extremely." "That's what I'm talking about. You're angry. You cut people off sometimes, don't you?" I nod. "You think of them as less than you if they cross a line you don't want them to cross." "I just don't like being disrespected." "But what are you willing to do to people who disrespect you?" I take my hand from under my fellow psych mate's. "Here is my problem," I say. "I shouldn't have had to deal with Mike. This place is crawling with techs and nurses and psychiatrists and of all those adults *no one* stood up for the women Mike was staring at, intimidating..*days* this was going on, *almost weeks*, and no one did a thing." "So you stepped up." "So I stepped up and I *restored order* and *safety* in a place where people need to feel safe so they can heal." "By strangling the person who was causing disorder." "I wasn't going to *kill* him, ok. It was a very controlled situation that was designed to send him to ALSA and give everyone—especially me—a break from that bullshit. I tricked him into attacking me first so he would go to ALSA and I would be viewed as the victim—" "And you would have the nurses fawning over you and giving you PRNs and checking your blood pressure and apologizing to you that he attacked you and guaranteeing you that he would be in ALSA for a week, so you could feel safe and not have to worry about being attacked. Yeah, I saw all that. I don't know if you remember but I was up early that morning and I was in here 'cause I couldn't sleep. I saw exactly what you were doing, even though you fooled just about everybody else in here. But I know your psychiatrist is Dr. Meggs, and I know she's prob'ly the only fuckin' ho in here as smart as you." I looked Winehouse in the eyes. She was looking back at me. I said, "In high school I had this girlfriend, Tuesday Walker. And once she said to me, 'Matthew, sometimes I don't know if you have absolutely no control..or entirely too much.' " Winehouse is nodding, picking up her dinner tray. She knows that I know what she's been talking about. "So you think I'm crazy." "Matthew, I love you. I'd hang out with you outside of here—I think we should do that. I think we should fuck—though I have a boyfriend so that has to be on the d/l. And I'd *love..*love love *love* to shoot coke with you. You seem like you'd be a lot of fun to do drugs with. But when it comes to crazy—straight up—I think you're the craziest person in here." ### 81 Those words were running through my head even after I got out of the Refuge. I was going to my stylist and all I could hear was Winehouse saying: *When it comes to crazy*—*straight up*—*I think you're the craziest person in here.* And then I would respond: "Yeah, well, if you think I'm crazy you should meet my family." Then Winehouse would say, again, *When it comes to crazy*—*straight up*—*I think you're the craziest person in here.* And I would think about that, and what it meant that she thought it, maybe even what it meant about me. I get out of the Refuge, shave my head (my hairstylist hates me for this, almost won't do it). "So what I've been up to?" she asks. "I've been going crazy," I say. "I'm a Refuge person, be scared." Etc. She shaves my head and is like, "Maybe we can do something fun with it next year," all pouty. I buy a Hermione Granger Time-Turner and some black-and-white checkered sunglasses. I'm sitting at Matt's food cart. He makes a burger to my specification and it's so beautiful he asks me if he can take a picture of it. "It's your burger, man—you made it." "But it's your idea—you're the creator behind the burger." Lol. We both take a picture with our phones. Then I eat the motherfucker, and it's so damn good..then look who shows up. I put my burger down, sourly, it's already ruined for me the moment I see Aaron step up from the sidewalk onto the concrete plate where Chris's food cart and this seating area have been arranged. "Do you two know each other?" "No." "Well this is Aaron, he's a quantum physicist." "Oh, nice." Aaron sits down. He and Matt are small talking. And it takes me a while to remember what had happened, when I saw him, because I was so drunk the night before..but eventually during this friendly conversation between him and me and the owner of the food cart, I remember that I had gone to Whit's and I was so drunk I didn't even remember that I'd blacked out, but I started to remember what this asshole had done to me, how he had treated me the night before. "Oh yeah," I say, stopping the conversation. "I remember now." I'm looking straight at Aaron. "I had a bit to drink to it took a while for it to come back to me but *I remember now*." Aaron is silent. Matt is silent. I tell Matt, "I was at a table with this asshole last night—at Whit's—and this condescending motherfucker was *telling me not to hit on girls he liked* in Whitman's, even when they were flirting back with me, saying *I was less than* him. Yeah. I remember now. If I hadn't seen you today I prob'ly would have never remembered that, because I had a lot to drink and I did black out—I'll be honest about my part—but, Aaron, what you said to me made me very angry. And thinking about it now it making me very, very angry and tell you one more thing and that is not only did you make me angry but you wronged me—as a human being—by indicating with your actions you thought I was less than you, and we're gonna work this out, right now. And now that I'm sober, I think you'll find me much *less* reasonable a person." Aaron gets up from his chair and walks away from the burger cart. I stand up. "Don't ever *treat* me that way again and don't let me ever *see* you ever again in Whit's I hope we're clear on that. I said I hope we're clear on that!" "We're clear," he says, and I just thirst for the day I get to beat a quantum physicist's skull in with my bare hands. Matt says, "I'm sorry for having him around. I didn't know he had offended you." "No, it's ok. Thank you but it's fine. I overreacted, I admit that—just 'cause a guy offends me doesn't mean I have to insert a poisonous caterpillar INSIDE HIS DICK!!! No, I'm sorry, you want peace at your burger stand and I want to be able to come here too so I'm going to leave—" "You don't have to." "No, I'm going to go calm down and when I come here in the future I will have processed my feelings about that little lying-ass vegan farm toad. Pot-smoking motherfucker. Fuck me if I see him around town again today. YO AARON: DON'T EVER SPEAK TO ME AGAIN AFTER THAT SHIT YOU SAID IN THE BAR." He was waiting to cross at the light and he gave a little head nod without looking me in the eyes. "GO BACK TO PERMACULTURE AND ORGANIC VEGETABLES." For his poor fucking sake the light will not turn green. I light a cig. "THAT GIRL IS NEVER GOING TO FUCK YOU BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE THE BRAIN. YOU'RE NOT A QUANTUM PHYSICIST AND YOU NEVER WILL BE. YOU'RE JUST A FUCKING POTHEAD. YOU WORK IN THE FIELDS. YOU'VE GOT DIRT ON YOUR HANDS FROM PULLING CARROTS OUT OF THE GROUND. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES YOU'VE BEEN AROUND THE BLOCK, BORN AND RAISED IN BRATTLEBORO? ABOUT ONCE. I'VE BEEN AROUND THE BLOCK ABOUT A HUNDRED TIMES MORE THAN YOU. DON'T EVER SPEAK TO ME AGAIN!! I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND HOW SERIOUS I AM ABOUT THIS AND I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND I HAVE THE CRAZY TO BACK THIS UP!!!" Fortunately the light changes. Then he comes back! The fucker walks back to the hamburger cart and stands there. I sit down and smoke my cigarette. "I *will* fuck that girl." "No you will not. You have a brain that will keep that girl interested for about five minutes. Whether I'm sitting at that table or not, you're never gonna fuck that girl. Know why? 'Cause you're an asshole. Girls don't like assholes, and neither do I. You know my friend Donald?" "Yeah, I beat his *ass* in chess the other day at Mocha Joe's." "No you did not. You know those two girls who were with Donald when you played him. Yeah. Well those two women are my housemates and when they got home the other day they reported straight off that you got your *ass kicked* by Donald. It doesn't matter whether you won or lost—what matters is you're lying all around town that you beat Donald. You're weak—that's why you lie. Now get the fuck out of here before I go ballistic on your organic produce asshole. I'm serious. Know your station. This is a table for me. You are a fucking mouse." You know what the crazy thing is? He turns out to be Gretchen's friend and Gretchen doesn't see anything wrong with him!!!!!! (Which indicates that..what, exactly?..is wrong with her?) And that asshole is so weak he didn't even deny anything I said about him..he just stood there with his head low and nodded at every insult I threw his way. I'd rather have someone argue back, even if they're trying to hurt me—at least they have a spine—I can work with that. But people who hit the ground when you're just starting to lace up your gloves..fuck..that's pitiful. But what do you expect—he's a fucking vegan. And you know what, Gretchen was vegan, too. That's prob'ly the only reason she liked him. If two vegans meet, and one is like a virgin church girl and the other one's Charlie Manson, they'll become soulmates because they're both vegan. That's all vegans care about, is if *you're* a vegan, too. If I handed a vegan a million dollars, they'd be like: *No, I can't accept this from a carnivore.* And I'd be like, *I eat vegetables, too, bitch—it's* omni*vore, not carnivore. I'm not a fucking* T. rex*.* ### 82 I called my dad. I asked him if he remembered the potty-training thing. He said, "That never happened. Bipolar people have something called fixed delusions." He said that I made it up. That the reason I thought it happened was because of my bipolar disorder. Now that I had a diagnosis, my dad had a whole new set of reasons to excuse his behavior, deny his behavior, say that his behavior was ok. And I thought: *Wow, this person really would use my bipolar illness against me, as an out so he didn't have to be honest with me, with himself, with future counselors, with the family, with anyone.* And that hurt. But he never was honest, even before he had my bipolar to use as an excuse, and I wonder how much his tendencies have affected me. How much am I a liar because of him? - - - - Remember when I wanted to apply to Cornell to study architecture?—a pipe dream since I'd never be able to afford it, nor was either parent offering me somewhere to stay between academic sessions. But I wanted the hope of just *applying*, and even though I was thirty-two at the time, Cornell still required tax information from both my parents. Mom gave me hers. The last thing I needed to complete this application was my dad's income. He wouldn't provide it for me. He wouldn't even reply to my emails or return my calls. Without him providing this little piece of information, I would never be able to even *apply* to go to school to learn something I was interested in. And my Dad wouldn't help me. But that's not the worst part. In order to induce him to call me back, I escalated the situation, cc'ing his sister Louise and my cousin Joel and asking them to put pressure on my dad to call me back, exposing his lack of support for me to his sister and my poor cousin just because they were related. I said in my email to them that I had called Dad a bunch of times and he hadn't called me back. You know what my dad said? He denied that I had called him *at all*. And his sister took his side, saying to me, "You better be careful what you say, we can check the phone records." And I was like: *Check the phone records bitch—your brother is a liar.* He went to all this fucking trouble not only to *not help me* apply for college but also to lie to his sister to make him look good and claim that I was lying, when in fact, he was lying. That shit is sick. That's the type of shit I want to have nothing to do with in my life. I should have just told that college my father was dead. So I told my on the phone, "I remembered you making me clean my shitty drawers as a kid with my hands during potty training." And he said, "Well, Matt, that never happened. It may be a fixed delusion of bipolar." Then I punched a hole in the vaulted ceiling and that's the last time I ever spoke to my dad of my own volition. (He visited my sister Leona's house while I was living there and we had minimal contact. Leona said she was worried about Dad's visit and I promised her I wouldn't say anything substantive or argumentative to him..a promise I kept *to the letter*. My dad was so rude and controlling with Leona and her husband that by the end of the trip they were literally *begging* me to tell him off. But I didn't, reminding Leona I had promised her her I wouldn't engage in any conflict with Dad while he was there. When he first arrived Dad and I hugged and Leona cried like it was some sort of reconciliation but based on his lack of communication since then, it was no reconciliation for him, and I can tell you that from my perspective it was just going through the motions..that hug didn't mean a thing to me.) I felt terrible and violent and hurt after having the conversation in the Refuge which revealed my dad's humiliation of me during potty training..and now that I confront him with it and said we have to deal with that and some other truths before we could have a real relationship, he denies it ever happened and says it's just a "fixed delusion" of bipolar disorder! "Dad," I say, sobbing, "I need help. I have a major mental illness that makes me want to *kill* myself." "Yes, bipolar disorder," he says. "Right," I say, "bipolar disorder!" Dad says, "Well, Eva and I looked up hospitals and one of the best mental hospitals in the world is right there in Brattleboro—it's called the Brattleboro Refuge—have you tried calling them?" "Dad. Have you been reading my emails? I've spent the last two *months* in the Brattleboro Refuge! How can you be this *out of touch* with your children? If you had read *a single email* I've sent you in the last two months, you would *know* that I've been in and out of the Brattleboro Refuge three or four times!" "Well, Matt, I get a lot of email." "But let's say you had a work colleague and they had been emailing you for two or three months about the same subject—I can't imagine you'd be able to do so well professionally if you spent as little time reading *work emails* as you do *reading email* from your children!" "I'm having tome technology issues on my end. I have this new iMac desktop, I think they call it, and my email's all screwed up—but this is a great system, have you heard of these..new..Mac..desktops?" "Yeah, iMacs are great. Did you get the email where I say I tried to kill myself?" "Matt, I've got a call on the other line. It's work. I've got to take this." "It's *eight o'clock at night*, Dad—do you really have to take it?" "Ok, Matt, night night. I'll tell Eva you said hi. Glad you're doing well. Gotta go now. And hey!—*Have a great time in Vermont!*" I call my dad on his potty training shit He denies that it ever happened *and* Blames it on bipolar delusions Then I punch a hole in the ceiling and start screaming and destroying stuff like I did in high school when I couldn't take my parents fighting anymore. I blame him and him alone for being in the position to make smooth the relationship between our two families, maybe not between Mom and Eva, but at least between everyone else, and him choosing instead to take his new wife and new child into the fold and *completely ignore* and abuse the rest of us. When it was his turn to watch Leona, he waited till my little sister was asleep, then left to go fuck his girlfriend at her house. Not his future wife, but someone he met through the personal ads in a local newspaper. So he's fucking tons of women that he met through personal ads *right after* he and Mom split as if he had been waiting to do this all along, as if he was only staying faithful to our mom out of rote—some rule learned through childhood religion. And the kicker: Dad denying his trips to Florida when Joanne and I were little, leaving Mom and us two kids in Dallas because he couldn't take it, couldn't take the fact that he had gotten married and had kids..the weight of it was too much for him. I learned about this only because I was going through Mom's boxes, at her request, scanning old photos and negatives and cards that friends had sent, family had sent, and I came upon this series of letters from Dad to Mom, as he was in Florida and she was in Dallas, revealing none of the content of what he was doing in Florida but they were outpourings of his admissions that he did not feel he could be a good father and that he did not want to be a father, how he felt this push/pull of loving my mother but not being able to be with her. He couldn't handle the emotional stress of being in a relationship. And when I confronted Dad on the phone about these trips and asked him what he was doing in Florida, he said it never happened. He had made an occasional business trip to Alabama maybe, but "I never left you children and your mother." I said, "Dad, I read many, many letters, five or ten, from multiple trips to Florida, in your handwriting, postmarked from cities in Florida, addressed to my childhood house in Dallas." He said I must be mistaken. I said how could I be mistaken, given what I've seen?? He didn't know, but he would never admit that he had written Mom letters from Florida, or ever left us to go on week-long trips there, which I had seen indisputable evidence of and had discussions with Mom about, so I think that lowers the chance of them being some wild delusion the likes of which I have no reason to believe I've ever had. I've asked Mom since then about us discussing those letters, me handing them to her when I found them, me reading them, and me making secret scans of them for my own later perusal. Those letters exist. I have to convince myself of it over and over, though, with the evidence, because of Dad's denial—his lying. - - - - When an authority figure lies to you, it makes you crazy. They call it crazy-making. Because how could your dad lie to you about such a thing? You take on the responsibility yourself: somehow it must be me that is wrong, even though all the evidence points the other way. It's like September 11th—you grow up expect you can trust your government but when the official story they tell you about what happened on that day *just doesn't make sense* with evidence agreed upon by tens of thousands of PhD scientists who are willing to risk their university careers by signing their names to petitions that say the government is lying, it's crazy-making. *Someone is lying*, and if it's between gobs of independent, educated, scientific researchers and a government who has every chance and history of lying, collusion, and breaking the law, then the only conclusion—which is brain-twistingly hard to come to to—is that your government really is lying to you. The one you grew up learning to trust—your government, your father—really is the one who's lying, and the only one you can trust is yourself. You have to come to strange conclusions like *my dad is either bald-faced lying or insane* and in the wider case, you have to admit ultimately that the government controls the media, that odds are even Rachel Maddow is bought and paid for by the CIA. You have to choose between the comfortable fantasy and the harsh reality and most people choose the first and it's understandable that they do. Because when you're holding a letter written in your dad's handwriting and the envelope is postmarked from Florida, and your father is telling you he's never even been to Florida..well..it's time to either comfort yourself with some extremely-hard-to-believe lies..or it's time to face what Marcellus Wallace might call "a hard motherfucking fact of life." And if Marcellus Wallace was here to further advise you, he might suggest that "it's a fact of life your ass is gonna have to get realistic about." ### 83 Then I'm in Vermont going to the ER in a cab vouchered by the Refuge who I called first. Them checking me for drugs and finding I was clean but hyper, making all kinds of jokes with the phlebotomist/admissions dude. And before that going downstairs and talking with the new first floor housemate (Krystal, the friendly whore) and me feeling like I'm tripping, on serotonin prescription drugs and mania. And when I told Krystal that I felt like I was tripping, she said she already knew. She could tell. And then the trippy part started to rub off on her! Then I told her in a minute I was going to the hospital and she was like *why* and I said I had bipolar disorder and she said she figured it was something like that. The call ends. I put the phone down. Then I started breaking things. I get so mad I punch a hole in the vaulted ceiling—freaking out and hitting the ceiling, throwing stuff around my apartment, as violent as I had been since that one time I was a kid and I destroyed my room. I was completely out of control, like a fucking mad dog. Hung up the phone and that's the last time I ever called him. Talking to him made me want to kill myself. On the camping trip we went on a few years earlier to smooth things over, on the last day I determined that if I was going to be in a relationship with this person, I would *have* to drink. I was screaming and yelling and breaking everything in sight and I remembered a time in tenth or eleventh grade when I did the same thing to my bedroom in my parents' house—ripped the mini-blinds off the windows, tore books in half, destroyed everything but my computer. My parents didn't know what to do with me—I wish they had sent me to the doctor. I'm only able to have this memory now that I have been re-diagnosed with bipolar disorder, this memory of ripping my room to shreds, tearing *The Once and Future King* in half, destroying the venetian blinds 'cause I was so irate with my parents' arguing. All my life, I've been trying to get my dad's attention..and even a suicide attempt didn't accomplish that. I escalated and escalated to get some positive attention (love) from him but nothing worked. And I gave up after that suicide attempt, because his reaction to that (discounting my childhood memories of potty training as fixed delusions of bipolar disorder) was enough to finally convince me that he doesn't care to have an authentic relationship with me. Apparently he feels good sending one email a year to his son. I read those letters for a while, but no more..I just archive them without reading them because they're all about him, how it's going with him..there has never been an "us" there. Remembering in conjunction with my dad's humiliating toilet training, my mom taking my temperature in my butt while I lay on my parents' bed—how it felt cool and straight and smooth going in. It wasn't sexual, it wasn't a violation, it was just easier than her getting me to hold a thermometer still in my mouth without biting it or moving it around such that she couldn't get a measurement. Thermometers had mercury in them back then.. Anyway after I punched the hole in my ceiling in the attic apartment in Brattleboro, I called the Refuge and the nurse took notes, then told me to go to the hospital. I called the Refuge and they asked me my symptoms. I lost it. Talking with the new housemate downstairs (Krystal—the whore?) and feeling like I'm tripping. I lost it. Like when I told her that I was feeling trippy and she said she was picking up on my trip energy. I went to the hospital in a cab with no money..but the Refuge called the driver so he can get a voucher. The hospital blood tested me for drugs, found none. Here's the check in nurse: "Are you psychotic?" (Laughing maniacally:) "How would *I* know?" I am laughing so hard it involves every muscle in my body. I point at the interviewer guy. "If I was psychotic.." (laughing) "..how could I possibly *know* if I was psychotic. Psychosis is a reality-testing problem. If I'm psychotic, I can't tell, to some degree, great or small, what is real and what isn't. So if I can't do that kind of testing, then how could I ever know for sure that I was or was not psychotic. I could think I was fine but that feeling of being fine might be a delusion..and a *delusion*..is something that you believe..that's false..that you continue to believe even once you've been presented with evidence to the opposite. I don't call that *delusion*, though—I call it *backbone*. You following me on this one?" "Yeah I'm following you." "So I think I'm gonna have to leave that call to you, on whether or not I'm psychotic, ok boss?" "Ten-four kemosabe." "Now you're speaking my language, Tonto." I shake my head. "I'm glad you're not a Native American or what I just said would *not* have been funny." "You think *Tonto* is racist?" "Have you *seen* the show? The whole fucking show is racist. This whole country is racist. I had a job—" I interrupt myself with laughter. My interviewer is looking at me, perplexed. "Yes, I know it's hard to believe, but I had a job." "Did you have to leave because of your bipolar disorder?" "I was *fired*. I don't know that it had anything to do with my *bipolar disorder*. Why would you say that?" "Just tell me about the job." "I forgot what I was going to say about it. My mind is like a glitterbox." "I think you were talking about racism." "Of course. Race-fucking-ism. The American pastime." "America's pastime is baseball, my friend." "No, America's pastime is racism, always has and always shall be. So I had this job. Are you going to argue me on the America's pastime point or can I continue my story?" This big guy shifts in his seat. "I think you should continue your story." "Ok, but you have to remind me what it was about." "Racism." "Right! It's a good thing we're here together 'cause I don't think I could carry this conversation on alone." "Did you get fired for your job for being racist or something?" "No. I got fired because my asshole boss asked me to pirate a copy of Photoshop and I first of all told him I wasn't going to do it and second of all I reported him to Adobe." "He fired you for that." "Yep." "That's wrongful termination, dude. You should get a lawyer." "I'm working on it." "Good. So where does racism come into it?" "Oh, just this guy I had to sit next to. Connecticut native. Lived in Bratt all his life. When it was just me and him in the office he *wouldn't shut up* about how when he moved here as a kid there were like eight black people in Brattleboro—which is a ridiculous statement, I mean *no one* knows how many black people there are in Brattleboro. Even the *census* doesn't know *exactly how many black people* are in Brattleboro—you know? What if a black person goes over to New Hampshire to buy some watermelon and fried chicken from the Walmart—*I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I was saying that ironically, trust me*, I've fucked Kenyan strippers, I've fucked other black girls, I *love* black pussy—but I'm *saying*, let's say a black person crosses the bridge into New Hampshire to go to the Walmart to buy..whatever..whatever a person of any color would buy, you know, fuckin' Slim Jims and shit..fuckin' 5-hour Energy to give them enough energy to get through the work day so they don't get that two o'clock feeling. Do you know how dangerous those drinks probably are?" "They must have gotten by the FDA." "The FDA. The FDA. Are you a nurse? "What do you mean?" "I mean like are you an LPN, RPN—" "RN—" "RN, LP, EP, EPA, I'm talking about..do you know..these experiments they do on people on mushrooms..people who eat hallucinogenic mushrooms..and, yes, the chemical in psilocybin mushrooms—or it's actually the chemical that your stomach turns psilocybin into, because psilocybin isn't what makes you trip, which is why you have to *eat* mushrooms..you can't smoke 'em or stick 'em up your butt or anything..you have to eat them so that the right chemical transaction takes place in your stomach and then you trip—and these scientists found that *while you're tripping on mushrooms*, yes, your brain does run a little bit slower overall, but in this one area of cognition or with this one type of cognition called leap-ahead association or multi-hop association or something..that's *increased* while you're tripping, and this kind of leap-ahead cognition is what allows you to, say I mention concept A, and concept A is related to concept B, and concept B is related to concept C. Well, when you're on mushrooms, if someone mentions concept A, you're more likely to make the association to concept C than someone who isn't tripping. So, on the one hand, that's psychotic thought, because non-tripping people are like *what the hell*? What the hell is this person talking about? But, on the other hand, it's *creative* thought and it's *inventive* thought. It's actually deeper and more complex than the thought being done by a non-psychotic person. The problem is, there are more non-psychotic people than psychotic people, so when someone says *A*, and you're the only person in the room who says *C*, when everyone else says *B*, everyone thinks you're crazy 'cause they didn't understand the leap you made. Which is an important lesson: which is..when you don't understand someone (or something), you can't logically conclude that it's because *the thing you're observing* doesn't make sense." I sit back in my chair. I'm sweating. My mouth is dry. I feel high as fuck. The colors are bright. The textures are crawling over the walls and the chair and the face of this admitting nurse. I say, "The only thing you can logically conclude, in a case like that, is that *you don't understand*." "So tell me about this theoretical black guy at the Walmart." "The one buying Slim Jims?" "Yeah." "Ok well here's what I propose." I lean forward again. "Let's have him put back the 5-hour Energy because that'll prob'ly give him a heart attack." "Alright." "And let's have him pick up some organic spinach and a shotgun." "Why?" "Because. I don't want this to be a typical black guy. I'm thinking organic spinach because it's a typically white item—people think of some rich bitch buying that shit, like my upstairs neighbor—well, my downstairs neighbor—but that's a different story, all I can say is don't you sometimes want to just go up to some strange woman and simultaneously put your hand down her skirt and inside her panties and play with her cunt while you kiss her on the mouth *and simultaneously* you take a hand and you stick that hand up her shirt and you touch that girl's nipple, I mean real nice, run your finger around it until that shit is hard as a diamond." "So that's the rich bitch that would stereotypically buy organic spinach." "Right. Are you with me?" "Yeah. Some of the details are a little fuzzy but mostly, yeah." "Good 'cause I'm working on my continuity. Is it improving?" "No." I laugh. "Well good luck to us both. I'll try to finish this up." "No worries. We've got time." "You're saying that because it's Thursday night in Brattleboro and there aren't any other patients and that's the reason you haven't kicked me out of your office yet?" "No, I'm gonna kick you out. We're waiting for the results of your drug test." "Oh. Is that what we're doing here?" The guy nods. "Do you remember me taking your blood a few minutes ago?" "That's was only a few minutes ago?" "About ten." "Jesus Effing Christ it feels like we've been here for hours." "Try to relax. You want to do some deep breaths with me?" "Yes." We do some. He breathes. I mirror him as much as I can. It's moments like this when I admit to myself that I have bipolar disorder. I'm manic. I've read the textbook symptom lists enough times to diagnose myself almost as well as my psychiatrist. There are tricky symptoms though. On the large scale: people who have bipolar disorder tend to disbelieve their diagnosis. Yeah. Bipolar affects some part of your brain in a way that makes bipolar people unlikely to accept that they are bipolar. That's diabolical, right there. And on the small scale: one of the symptoms of mania is that the person doesn't think they're manic. They deny being manic. That's insidious. But once you know this, once you've read about that symptom enough times, even your crazy manic brain has *a chance* of realizing, from within mania, that you're manic. I can't always realize it, but sometimes I can. It's kind of like realizing you're in a dream: very hard, but with practice you can do it more often. I exhale. I tell the nurse, in a much slower, much calmer voice: "The guy that sits next to me—who used to sit next to me, before I got fired—he used to say these ridiculous things like, 'When we moved here there were only eight black people in Brattleboro.' And that pisses me off from a couple of angles. First, I don't like fucking racists. I expect that shit in the south. I expect it from my uncle, my grandmother. But I guess I have unrealistic expectations—it's not rational for me to assume that because I'm in Vermont there won't be racists. I recognize that. One of my psychiatrists noticed that pattern in me maybe five, six years ago, and I've been doing it for a long time before then, I don't even know how long: I create an unrealistic expectation for someone, then I get mad at them when they don't satisfy my expectations. This guy who sits next to me, so what, he's a racist. But this is *at work*. It's a place I don't even want to be—the only reason I'm there is to make money so I can pay my rent and eat and not be homeless. We're not exactly saving the world. We make *trash cans*—actually that's not true. We—they—buy trash cans from *some people* and sell those trash cans to *other people*. So, I mean, we don't even *make* anything. We're just an unnecessary middleman. And I don't want to have this sales guy talking in my right ear about how when he moved here there were *eight black people* in town and now there are three-hundred and twenty-*six*. I mean, these are suppositions and guesses posing as facts and I know I'm the psychotic one but I don't like to hear *facts that couldn't possibly be true*. These are things that *cannot be known*. Yet this sales guy says them as though they are *bona fide* facts, exactly known, indisputable. It just messes with my sense of right and wrong." The door behind the nurse opens. A girl in scrubs hands the nurse a piece of paper and closes the door. My guy looks over the paper and sets it on his desk. "Your drug test is clean." I think about telling him off, or at least saying, "*I know.*" *I know* that I haven't done any drugs lately—*you don't*. So the purpose of this drug test is to tell *you* that I'm clean, not me. I already know that I'm clean, because I've been with myself this whole time. But I don't tell him this. He's just trying to be nice to me, and the fact that I knew what the results of my drug test would be, before they ever drew the blood, is not what's on his mind. He's just narrating his own discovery. He's not thinking about the situation from my point of view. And that's ok. He sat with me and let me talk a thousand miles a minute and he didn't get up and walk away, which he could have done. He could have put me in a room by myself when I had a desperate need to talk to someone. But he didn't. He listened to me create wild scenarios like the theoretical black man buying organic spinach and a shotgun from the Walmart in New Hampshire just to illustrate that my workmate's clairvoyant census of Brattleboro's black population was very likely inaccurate and therefore a waste of *my* motherfucking time. He did that for me, this nurse, and in doing so he helped me..and..also..he earned my respect. ### 84 I was looking at my texture pattern on the big, painted walls of Brattleboro Memorial. A crisis team member eventually came and cleared me as not a danger to anyone ("yourself or others"). I got a voucher-based cab ride paid for by the Refuge to Brattleboro General. They had a hard time understanding my behavior given I tested negative for alcohol or any other drugs—but they're not psych people..they don't understand bipolar disorder. I tell the nurse the story Dad told me, garbled now in my mind, of a bisexual he met at the sawmill when he skipped college for a year. Dad used to sing me *Edelweiss* as I was falling asleep or even say *The Lord's Prayer*, which at the time I didn't mind so much. But one night he told me the story of some interaction he'd had with a bisexual man who worked at the sawmill and I don't know if he told me details—I don't remember any details—but his conclusion, which I remember clearly, was that bisexual men were dangerous and to be kept away from, and that somehow God's law forbade it—though my dad certainly couldn't cite the appropriate chapter and verse. Nothing he said on this topic carried the seriousness for me that it did for him. Maybe he had a homosexual experience with this man—I'm not sure. I was five years old and sex wasn't a complete picture on my radar. It wasn't till much later that I was able to parse his story at all. But it was a terrible bedtime story, you have to admit. You're putting your kid to bed—this isn't confessional hour with your sex therapist. Stick to *Edelweiss*—which he sang beautifully and gently and caringly, and like it meant something to him at least—even say *The Lord's Prayer* if you absolutely have to. But Dad and I have been like that forever, from my childhood to the time he and Mom got divorced: he's the confessor and I'm his priest. I sit there and listen to everything that went wrong with him and Mom—heavily filtered through his lens, of course—when really he should have gotten counseling. But my dad is too afraid to go to counseling. He refused after three sessions to go to marriage counseling with my mom because telling the truth about his own faults is so painful to him that he will do *anything* to avoid it. I refuse to move on with him in a relationship until he and I have an honest conversation about some of the fucked-up shit he did to me as a child. But he won't have that conversation with me. Denies it ever happened. Blames my bipolar, says it's all a delusion—which is extremely manipulative and fucked-up in itself to use a bipolar person's mental illness against them, to try to convince them that the opposite of truth is true. But I know what happened. I understand, from hundreds of hours with psychiatrists, the nature and shape of my delusions and they're not that major. I need my dad to face the facts. But my dad is too weak to do that and odds are we'll go to our graves having said not a single word more to each other than we've said to this day. - - - - At the hospital, they put me in a white room with a video camera. I jumped around, I laughed, I hallucinated. I called my sister Joanne and told her my predicament. A Crisis Team worker released me after an interview in which I was determined to be not a danger to anyone, including myself. They called a cab and it was the same guy who drove me there. We talked: he used to be a programmer..moved here and couldn't find work..sound familiar? Being manic and going to the hospital. Going to the ER. The same cabbie on the way there and back. He used to be a programmer but moved and couldn't find work. I pay with a voucher both ways and apologize for leaving no tip. I go into the apartment feeling just as insane as when I left. Eve Fox calling me back on my home number from her home number: "I'm worried you're going to kill yourself." I must have left her a suicidal message earlier. "No, I'll be alright. I'm not going to kill myself tonight, I promise. I'm sorry I worried you." "And you'll go back to the Refuge tomorrow." "Yes, absolutely, those guys will take care of me. Really, Eve, I'm so sorry I worried you and I'm sorry for bothering you at home but I'm totally fine." Hallucinating my ass off. In a conversation where I think I have caused my housemate to begin hallucinating? Fielding voicemail from my therapist from a suicidal phone call I don't remember making? And you think I've lost my mind? I don't think you understand what that means. It's not a one-time deal. See, *e**ach day* I lose my mind, and at the end of the day I don't find it—I just lose it, and lose it, and lose it again. ### 85 The next day walking to Birches, I saw a yellow tree in snow. I went to my social work/group therapy thing but was immediately called to Dr. Sbarro's office. Dr. Sbarro, along with Ms. Irwin, the program nurse, did a few quick tests and diagnosed me with serotonin syndrome, then indicated my status was "grave" on his summary report. They sent me back to Tyler 2. I mean like they checked my pulse, tapped my knee, asked me a couple of questions and they were *sure* I had serotonin syndrome. Check in was more exciting than usual. This nubile physician's assistant did my check in with the usual guy present. It was a thrill to be touched by her and she had such a pretty face. She did the entire physical exam after the regular PA asked me if that was ok. I said yes, and at the end of the session I thanked them both and told the trainee I thought she was professional and caring—very appropriate in her interaction, asking me if it was ok for her to touch me here or there before actually doing so. I think that's a generational thing—young doctors don't assume, as older ones do, that they can just touch you wherever they want without asking. I like the new way. And even with some nubile trainee who I would allow to touch me anywhere because of my own sexual desire, I still like the new way. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (4)** > > Patient Admitted October 27, 2011—Discharged November 4, 2011 > > **Chief Complaint** > > Zha, as he prefers to be known, presented with a chief complaint "because I took a bunch of pills last night." *[I guess they must just copy and paste these forms—I only made one suicide attempt. Or maybe they just consider this event to be the crucial event at the center of my many hospital stays.]* > > **History of Present Illness** > > The patient had been hospitalized inpatient here at the Brattleboro Refuge and went out, but was quite depressed as a consequence of bipolar affective disorder, and made a suicide attempt. He was readmitted and then transferred here *[the Birches Partial Hospitalization Program, an IOP or Intensive Outpatient Program]* after stabilization. He sees Eve Fox at the Brattleboro Counseling Center on an outpatient basis, and has had a number of episodes of bipolar affective disorder and three previous psychiatric admissions. > > **Course of Hospitalization** > > Zha was admitted to the partial hospitalization program and continued on Buspar 30 mg b.i.d. *[twice daily]*, Celexa 40 mg daily, clonidine 0.1 mg one or two daily as needed for anxiety or agitation, Lamictal 200 mg at h.s. *[Latin Hora Somni—at bedtime]*, Risperdal 3 mg at bedtime, and trazodone 50 mg at h.s. p.r.n. for sleep *[from Latin Pro Re Nata—as needed]*, with a repeat in 1 hour if necessary. Matthew had difficulty adjusting to the partial hospitalization program. On one prior occasion he was close to meeting the inpatient level of care, but we maintained him on an outpatient basis. However, on November 3rd, he was seen by this author and by Ms. Irwin, the program nurse, as a consequence of increasing confusion, muscle tremors, and maladies. At that time his blood pressure was elevated in the range of 140/108, and his pulse was 100 or more. He had brisk reflexes, 2 or 3+ bilaterally. His speech was slightly pressured. He reported his thoughts to be racing and confused. His ability to distinguish between a dream and reality was diminished, in his opinion. In view of these changes, it was felt that this might well represent a serotonin syndrome, and we discontinued his Buspar, Celexa, and trazodone. He was instructed to take only half his usual dose of Risperdal at night. He reported this morning, November 4th, for admission to inpatient for observation for serotonin syndrome. > > **Final Diagnoses** > > Bipolar Affective Disorder, Most Recent Episode Depressed. Alcohol Dependence. Serotonin Syndrome. History of Cocaine Abuse. *[Everyone following this? This is not how your life is supposed to go.]* Renal Lithiasis *[yet another name for kidney stones]*. Severe (Health Issues [Serotonin Syndrome], Financial, Alcohol Issues, Living Arrangements). > **GAF on Discharge:** 28 *[In other words, after all this inpatient psychiatric care, outpatient programs, and medication, my GAF is the same now as when I first entered the hospital two months ago.]* > > **Condition on Discharge** > > Unstable, to be admitted to the inpatient level of care. > > **Prognosis:** Grave. So they sent me back to Tyler 2, and I went through the same admitting process as I had been through on three previous questions. Interview from the physician's assistant and his nubile trainee. Same guy I saw every time I went through that gauntlet except this time with a fucking cherub (but a skinny cherub) at his side. Questions about hallucinations, delusions, diet, bowel movements. Questions about drug use. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Orientation questions, like *What year is it?* and *Who is the President? Where are you right now?* "The Brattleboro Refuge." "What town are we in?" "It's a borough, and it's Brattleboro. Did you know that in the late eighteen-hundreds the Postmaster General declared that all location names ending in "borough" would be changed to "boro"—b-o-r-o—*to save ink?!*" The physician's assistant said, "Is that true?" "Well, it wasn't just to save ink, but yes, it was to save time and money in general and yes it's true." "So did Brattleboro used to be spelled Brattleboro-u-g-h?" "I don't know," I laugh. The physician's assistant says, "I'm gonna give you three words to remember—" "Cat ball string," I say. "I'll remember 'em in ten minutes when you ask me and I remember 'em from *the last time* you asked me. They're always the same—cat ball string. Why don't you give me a string of numbers and letters—upper and lowercase—about nine or ten digits long, and ask me *that* next time I see you." "How do you know there's going to *be* a next time?" I shrug and make an *Obviously there's going to be a next time* face. (It looks exactly like my *Am I a fucking idiot?* face.) "Can you really do that?" the young PA asks. "Letters and numbers—upper and lowercase—" the older PA begins. "For about a week, up to about ten characters, yes, but it'll probably be more than a week before I see you again—" "Only if your luck changes," says my normal PA. I love this fucking guy. If I was Joe Pesci from *Goodfellas* I'd shoot him in his fucking face. "Matthew, why are you here today?" "Well. *Ostensibly*, I'm here because Dr. Sbarro says I have serotonin syndrome. But you know *and I know* that I don't have serotonin syndrome." "I don't know that," the physician's assistant says. "Well *I do* know that." "How do you know that?" "Because *I've read* the diagnostic criteria for serotonin syndrome and based on the physical tests Dr. Sbarro and Nurse Irwin just administered to me fifteen minutes ago *I don't meet* the diagnostic criteria for serotonin syndrome." "You're saying Dr. Sbarro is wrong?" "I'm saying this is a *you see what you want to see*-type situation. My pulse ranges and twitch measurements were *high*, but they weren't within the range *needed to diagnose* serotonin syndrome. And he flubbed some of the numbers." The physician's assistant leans back in his chair, folds his arms behind his head. "Are you seriously saying Dr. Sbarro flubbed the numbers on your pulse, your twitch count? Are you recommending that I write that down in my interview notes." "No, my friend, I am *not* suggesting you write that down." "But is it *true*?" "Absolutely. He fiddled the numbers a little bit to fit me into the criteria for serotonin syndrome." "I'm under a moral oath to write down the entirety of what you say." "Then write it down. *I'm* not going to lose *my* job over this." "But you know *I* could. Are you playing a game with me?" "No. I'm telling you the verbatim truth as my senses report it. Take that with a grain of salt." "I do." "I do find it kind of suspicious that Birches keeps switching their psychiatrists." "What do they do?" "Every week you go up there, the program psychiatrist is a different doc. It's a rotating position for some reason." "And you find that suspicious?" "Well what's the utility? What's the positive reason they're doing it for?" "To give many psychiatrists a taste of the position? I don't know." "Let me tell you a story. Cat ball string. I'll make it quick. See if you can remember those words for me because at the end of this story I'm gonna ask you what they were. So. Five years ago. First time I was diagnosed bipolar. I stayed up for a week, drank potato vodka, programmed *the shit* out of some kick-ass cellular automata systems. Learning systems. AI. Artificial intelligence. Finds patterns in seemingly meaningless data." "You do." "*I* find patterns in seemingly meaningless data. Haha. Very funny. How come you're only a physician's *assistant* anyway—why are there two of you, both physician's *assistants*, but not a physician to be found? You're not assisting a physician. You work autonomously—" "Can we get back to your story?" "You think it's easy being psychotic around you people? Well it's *not*. Now go home and get your fuckin' shine box." "*Goodfellas*, good flick." "It's not a *good flick*, it's one of the *greatest movies* of all time. So I have this manic experience—or what I later come to believe is a manic experience. No sleep. Watching *The Truman Show* on a loop." The young PA is typing furiously. "I call *a suicide hotline*. They tell me to call 911. Then two *cops*—at least we're all meant to *think* they're cops—" "Why don't you think they were real cops?" "Because I forgot to tell you the most important part of the story. *Before* I call the suicide hotline, I call the NSA." "The National Security Agency?" "Yeah. I gave a talk there a long time ago and I knew a guy who worked there and I thought he might be interested in this new technology—" "This cellular automata stuff?" "This CA-like stuff, yeah." "To do what?" "To do what *everyone* wants to do, post-911—*to catch terrorists*, naturally." "Naturally." "You better go and get your fuckin' shine box." "So, what, you think these cops were really NSA agents *dressed* as cops and..what?..they put you in a psych hospital, give you a fake diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and use National Security Letters to keep you committed long enough for the NSA tech guys to sneak into your apartment and steal whatever's on your computer?" Now I lean back in *my* chair. "That's sounds like a paranoid theory spawned from the mind a truly delusional psychotic. I would *not* advise writing down in your notes that you came up with that." "*You* came up with it!" the PA says. "No, I didn't say any of that shit. But given a few details, *that shit* is—I won't say a logical conclusion, because that would make it seem like I was crazy—" "We'd hate to leave anyone with that impression." "I'm not saying *that's what happened*. I'm saying *if you don't ask the question: Is that what happened?* then you're not thinking enough in the *big picture*." "What were those three words?" "Cat. Ball. String. I'm not psychotic. I'm just inventive. People used to pay me good money to be inventive." "What happened?" "I guess I got too inventive. Can I go now?" "No. I have to check your tattoos—or, she does. We have to do the physical exam." "You *know* my tattoos, baby!" "Yeah but I always forget the English translation." "He conquers, who conquers himself." "You doing that right now?" "No, I'm pretty far afield from that one lately. But I did stop drinking." "Congratulations," the PA smiles. "Thanks, yeah. That's a tough one for me." "Are you hiding anything up your ass?" "Whoah, my man, major party foul. One, it's a complete non-sequitur. Two, it's like saying to your wife: *Have you thought about shooting me in the face with the shotgun while I sleep?* The bitch ain't never *thought* of that before. But *she's thinking it now*, I can guarantee you." Then the nubile PA completed my physical exam and it was like being touched by an angel. At first I was afraid of being aroused but *this wasn't like that*. It was elevated. I swear—it was like two holy beings communing in the most respectful way. Did I say holy already because this shit was fucking holy. We were actually emanating white light and there were some other things too but if I tell you you'll just classify it as a hallucination..so..I'll just keep that stuff to myself. ### 86 "I don't think you have serotonin syndrome." "Nor do I." "Uh—what is your diagnosis based on?" "I've read the literature." "What do you mean, 'You've read the literature?' " "I've read the diagnostic criteria for serotonin syndrome. I mean who hasn't—" "Since when did you become the psychiatrist in this relationship?" "Hey, anyone can become a psychiatrist these days. It's all on YouTube. iTunes. Princeton has their classes online now. You can piece together degree-level knowledge in three, four weeks internet time. There's eight-year-old kids know this stuff now. Not as well as you," I say. "Thank you. Now let me be the doctor, please?" "Ok. I'm sorry." "No, it's ok. I think you're right. I don't think you have serotonin syndrome but I am discontinuing all serotonergic medicines as suggested by the referring psychiatrist." "Even my antidepressant?" "Yes," she said gravely. "I—" "No, I understand. You have to based on Dr. Sbarro's diagnosis." "*Don't worry*, ok. You'll be here. You'll be safe. *I'll* be here with you." "Ok, I trust you." Dr. Meggs looks over her shoulder. "I wish I could say that trust was justified," she says. That's all she says. Then she leaves. - - - - The weekend comes and goes. I feel the effects of losing my antidepressant. Within a day I'm teary, defenses down psychologically. A week later, the next Monday, Dr. Meggs have the closest thing to a fight that we'll ever have. We sit opposite each other in the sunroom. "This was supposed to be just for the weekend but I've been up here..I don't know..five or seven days..or no..maybe nine days. Dr. Meggs, please when agreed to this, Dr. Sbarro said this was supposed to be just a med change—weekend trip—*that's* what was said when Dr. Sbarro put me here." "No," she stops me. "He put you here under my care and it is my job to make sure you are ok before I let you go." I'm crying when I say, "Yeah, that makes sense. It's just frustrating when one doctor says I have serotonin syndrome and it was supposed to be just for the weekend but I ended up back here for I don't even know how long..a week? It just seems like there's—if I may suggest a process improvement—there's a lack of continuity of care between Birches and here, I mean do you guys even communicate with each other?" "I read your discharge report from Birches. That's how we communicate." "Ok, ok, I respect that. When Dr. Sbarro put me here, he put me under your care and it's your job to make sure I'm ok before you let me go. I mean, yeah, that makes sense." I was happy to see Dr. Meggs as always. But for the first time, the sheen of going inpatient had worn off and I was irritated to be there. "I checked in for a *medicine change*. Dr. Sbarro told me it was going to be *over the weekend*. Now I'm on another Tyler 2 odyssey." "We have to do what we do regardless of Dr. Sbarro's intentions. We have a responsibility to do that." "I understand. I understand. It's just hard." The doctor put her hand on my knee. "I'm going to put you back on a low dose of Celexa." I sniffle and look at her, as she has stood up by now. "Thank you," I cry. - - - - We had some sensible conversations later. "One day I got out of the Refuge on a Friday. My bank account had two-thousand dollars in it. By Monday, when you and I spoke, my bank account was empty. I didn't even remember what I had spent it on!" "Yeah, well that's a bipolar trait." "Fantastic! What do I do about my two-thousand dollars?" "When was this?" "Weeks ago, but I just mean in general, how do I address this problem?" Skip ahead. "Now what's this thing about the spoons?" "Spoons?" "It's listed in your admissions report..thinks NSA is poisoning spoons—" "No it's the CIA that's poisoning spoons. Why would the NSA be poisoning spoons?" "Ok, tell me about what you think the CIA is doing." "I don't think they're doing anything! Not necessarily. But the *possibility* exists that they have created a model of the parts of my brain necessary to predict which spoon I will pick out of a drawer of spoons—like the drawer of spoons in the snack room—so that they can poison me in plain sight! Poison *just that one spoon* and then I pick it up and die and no one would ever think it's possible that it could have been a targeted crime *because how could they have known* which spoon I was going to pick? So I have so pick an unusual spoon every time I pick a spoon so I can surprise their algorithm. I have to determine which one they thought I was most likely to pick, then *out-think them* and pick a spoon they never would have guessed that I would pick." Dr. Meggs says, "Ok, that's a psychotic thought. What else comes to mind, along these lines?" "Just this childhood memory of Dad correcting me on how to fold the towels. I had gone out of my way to fold and put away the clean laundry, and instead of accepting the way I did it and thanking me, he took me to the towel closet and said this is almost right..but not quite. Then he proceeded to instruct me on how to tri-fold the towels instead of bi-fold them so that they would fit better in the shelf at the bottom of the stairs to the third-floor bedroom. They fit *just fine* my way. You could select any towel you wanted, take it, and go. The towels weren't bunched together. They weren't spread apart. But there was no way that was good enough *to fold the goddamn bath towels* unless it was my dad's way." "That's ridiculous," Dr. Meggs says. "My dad used to scold me for leaving a little orange juice in the pitcher after what I had done was pour exactly the amount I needed for my glass, then left the pitcher the way it was. In my mind, then, that was the proper thing to do. If the next person needed more than what was left, they could get a frozen orange juice container from the freezer and make more. To my dad's way of seeing it, leaving a little bit of orange juice in the pitcher wasn't forward-thinking enough—it was the job of the person who would otherwise have left less than a glass worth of OJ in the pitcher to make the next pitcher of juice. It's like the lint filter on a clothes dryer—" "How is it like that?" "Is it the job of the *next* person who uses it to clean out the lint caught by the *last* person's load of clothes, or is it the job of the person who *just washed clothes* to empty *their own lint* so that it's clean for the next person before they use the dryer? At this point in my life, I do some of those procedures differently than I did as a child. And we can debate and talk and improve on those processes all day long. But that's not the point. The point is I grew up with a dad who, for everything I did, he always had a correction. Nothing I did was good enough for him to simply say, 'Thank you,' or, 'Good job.' And I have learned that I can infer, from his behavior, that his mind has a drill sergeant in it, telling *him he's* not good enough..a constant voice in his head, learned from childhood, that tortures him with the idea that he will never be ok, that he can never let things go, that he can never be done working. My dad has a list, and he runs his life and the lives of everyone around him by that list. He is driven by tasks, and not in a fun way. In a way like slavery. The list is his master; he is the slave. He would say he just likes 'to keep busy.' I would call that *never facing reality*, *always distracting yourself* from what's really important. One time my sister Leona and I were at Dad's house for Thanksgiving—the year he didn't even *invite* my other sister Joanne. Leona and I really wanted to have an important conversation with our dad, and we asked him if he could spare ten minutes to talk some stuff over with us. He declined—he was too busy preparing the Thanksgiving feast with his new wife Eva, so that all the food would be ready for the guests they had invited over. He turned down an opportunity to talk with his kids so that the goddamn *buffet* could be ready for his and Eva's random friends. Leona and I had asked repeatedly what we could do to help with the dinner preparations—nothing, my dad said, everything was under control. Exactly. *He* was in control, he didn't want the *chaos* of letting his kids help prepare the meal, and he certainly didn't want the chaos of us having a serious conversation with him about how we all related since childhood. So Dad never talked with me and Leona about what we wanted to talk about, that day or any day. The food was ready for his friends. He and Eva 'entertained' their guests successfully. But let me tell you buddy—let me tell you, Dad—that ten minutes you could have spent with your son and daughter, talking about stuff that mattered *to us*, maybe having a group hug afterward..*that* was your life. And you missed it." I lean back. "Maybe you didn't come here for a medication adjustment. Maybe you came here to get that off your chest. What else bothers you?" "You wanna know what bothers me?" "Yeah." "When people misread the situation with me." "How do they misread it?" "They think they can push me, when actually, when it comes to the real power balance, *I* am the one who can push *them*—though I don't ever want to." The doctor listened. - - - - I don't like to be pushed, and I'm not scared of anyone. Nothing embarrasses me, and I don't respond to psychological threats. In high school, the year after I played Mr Frank in *The Diary of Anne Frank*, I played Uncle Arvide in the musical *Guys and Dolls*. I was slated to sing a song, but the director (the theatre teacher) neglected to schedule me for a single rehearsal with the vocal coach, neglected to give me sheet music or a recording of the song, and I kept waiting and waiting for the director to come to me to help prepare me for the singing part of this role. I learned my lines, and in a rehearsal when we got to my song the director asked why I wasn't singing. I told him I had never been rehearsed. He said *What?? Have you ever seen the movie?* No, I said. He scheduled me for an hour with the singing coach and it was clear that there wasn't enough time to prepare me to sing the song. The singing coach was disappointed. I reported back to the director and he seemed satisfied that I had been properly rehearsed. I told him I was not properly rehearsed after one hour of coaching and that I wouldn't sing the song during the performance so I suggested he instruct the orchestra not to play the music and we just skip to the scene that happened after the song. The director was so pissed that he threw his six-inch Subway sandwich into a metal trashcan with such force that the trashcan fell over. The veins in his head were popping out, he was pointing at me, yelling: "You *will* sing that song!!" I calmly reminded him that I had already told him what I would and would not be doing and the choices left to him had nothing to do with me, but with whether he would tell the orchestra to play the music or skip to the next scene. He was so fucking pissed that the co-star of his last year's success, *The Diary of Anne Frank*, was telling *him* that I wouldn't sing the song because he never scheduled me for rehearsals, that he left the room. He called my bluff (a terrible, terrible thing to do). The scene ran. The conductor lifted her baton. The music for my song played. The orchestra did a beautiful job. And during that song's music, I strolled around the stage of Colonel White High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, under hot white lights, in front of a packed house, and I thought about things that interested me, I accepted the possible consequence that my friends who were also in this musical might not be my friends anymore, I tried to imagine what my family (parents and sisters), who had come to watch the play that night, might be thinking, and I laughed—to myself—and I replayed that theatre teacher throwing his uneaten Subway sandwich into the trash can, storming out of the theatre classroom so pissed that *I* was telling *him* how it was going down, and I imagined him standing somewhere in the back of the theatre watching me stroll around the stage to that beautiful music, not singing a note, and I unemotionally hoped that the reality of *who was in control* was sinking into his stunted brain. In subsequent performances, the orchestra skipped the song and the show (as shows do) went on. Some fellow students hated me for what I did. My best friend, especially, hated me for what I did—but he got to know me better. And some people, a little vampire girl a grade younger than me, especially, respected my conscience, understood the situation, and invited me to her house when her parents weren't home and rewarded me for my stoicism with her affections. When my parents drove me and my sisters home that night, they talked about the music, the acting, the show in general. When they asked me what was supposed to happen during my orchestral stroll around the stage, I told them there was supposed to be a song there but the director never scheduled me for rehearsals, so I was unable to sing the song. There was no further questioning. No one argued with me—I think by that point they had learned not to. - - - - I had a boss once, Bruce McLaughlin. His lackey, Ray, liked to insult me. Ray thought it was funny to make jokes at my expense, laughing that anything that went wrong with our software was my fault, even when I hadn't even touched that piece of software. I was the youngest employee—I was eighteen or nineteen. Ray pushed me and pushed me and pushed me. I told Jim about these jokes. I said I understood that they were meant as friendly ribbing but that I thought they were in bad taste, inappropriate in a work environment, and that I would stop working with his company if the jokes continued. Two years later, after Ray continued to poke me and prod me and push me with his ignorance, his idiocy, his lack of a realistic grasp on the situation that existed between him and I..and after periodic phone calls made by me to the owner of the company saying: *Jim, if Ray continues this juvenile and disrespectful behavior, I will eventually quit working with your company*..one day Ray made one of his super funny, incredibly clever jokes blaming some failed release of our software on me, I went to the front desk where our secretary, Tina, sat, and I said: "Tina, it's been nice knowing you." And she was like: "Really?!?!?!?!?!" (She knew this day was coming.) And I said, "Yes," shook her hand, and walked out the door of that piddly little company. Jim calls me later that day, super calm, super executive, professional as hell. "So I hear some trouble happened between you and Ray today." "I've been telling you for two years, Jim, that if Ray didn't stop with the stupid jokes that I would quit. Today he made another one of his stupid jokes. I quit. End of story." Jim acted surprised—he was like, "I just didn't see this coming." And I said, "Jim, I've been telling you since week two that this was a problem. I told you it was a show-stopper. You allowed the problem to continue. And now we're done." He tried to get me to stay. He said that Ray didn't mean it, that being an asshole was just part of Ray's personality. I was his star programmer—I could program rings around Ray or anybody else who worked there. But I don't abide being treated disrespectfully. And I don't abide working for a boss who doesn't heed my warnings. And that was the end of my providing services to Softronics, Inc. Like I said: *Don't call my bluff*. "Why don't you want people to call your bluff?" "Because I'm not bluffing." ### 87 This admission there was a schizophrenic woman named Sarah who I thought I had met before around town—she looked incredibly familiar and I had déjà vu about a conversation with her—but she insisted it must have been her twin sister (I never knew if she had a twin sister or if that was one of her delusions). Sitting in a group with her everyone was saying all these normal things and then suddenly she says to me: "You like to hurt people, don't you?" Or maybe something even worse—I don't remember the exact wording. It disturbed me and everyone in the group and I got up and left the circle, and she kept saying things like that to others, and to me when I'd pass by, really disturbing me psychologically. I asked a staff member if they could keep her away from me. They put her in ALSA for a night and the next day we ate breakfast with each other and she said, "I'm really sorry if I said anything that made you uncomfortable. I was off my medication and was in danger of losing my personality." I didn't trouble her with what she had said. I moved on. We became friends and I liked her when she was on her medication. But schizophrenics can be very hard to deal with when they're in a reality that is highly different than your own. She would say things like, "What did you just say?" when I hadn't said anything, then she'd tell me what she thought I said and it was some horrible cruel offensive thing. *"You like to hurt people, don't you?"* When she said that, it was so out of place in the conversation we were having that everyone was shocked. But she had her finger halfway on the pulse of a truth about me. What allowed us to be such fast friends after this was that she was on her antipsychotics (which I was also taking). And I know now that I am the same way, that I publicize semi-private truths about people in an impolite, antisocial way. Why do you think I have so few friends and family who are still willing to talk to me? It seems funny to me, but the truth from their point of view is probably something like *I am too dangerous psychologically for them to be around*. Though I doubt many of them could admit to that aloud. In the morning when she apologized and told me she went off her medicine and that's why she was back in the Refuge and that she was in danger of losing her personality, I didn't understand what she meant about the last part and still it was a scary idea. I had yet another schizophrenic friend from Tyler 2 who I always made laugh—she was large with blond hair and her name was Karen—she says she's gonna miss me because I always cracked her up. It surprises me that anyone would be laughing at what I do, but since she did, it made me glad. She said she missed her kids and I said yeah, and she says do you have any kids and I joke about not having any because I don't want to change their diapers. "Oh, you wouldn't mind if they were yours," she says. And I say, "No, you don't understand, I hate shit. I hate it." "Why do you hate..shit..so much?" "I don't know." "Are you kidding with me," says my schizophrenic friend. "Sadly, no." "You really wouldn't have kids just because you wouldn't want to change their diapers?" "Well I have no way to support them, I guess that's the larger issue. I've always known I couldn't reliably keep a job. But, yes, cleaning up after other people's shit isn't something I'd relish." "What if your wife did it?" "I wouldn't want her to have to do it, either." "You're really not kidding, are you?" "No, Karen, I'm not kidding." Sometimes after I take a shit I wipe my butt so many times it's raw. You know when you keep getting that tiny brown spot and no amount of wiping will get you a clean tissue? I hate that. I keep going. I can't stop until I get a completely clean tissue. I'm crazy for clean tissue. - - - - On that admission, too, I saw the security guard who I told about the pills—who I handed my suicide pill bottle to—on the inside of the Refuge..he works as a mental health worker now. I managed to check my iPad out of the contraband closet from some tech who didn't know the rules. This security guard-*cum*-mental health tech walks by my room like an eagle—one of these paramilitary types. "Does that have a camera on it?" I take out one of my earbuds. I'm listening to glorious Mozart, and it is transforming the psych ward into pure freedom, pure lightness. The guy is right next to me, touching my iPad camera with his grody finger. "I have to take that away. No electronics with a camera are allowed on the ward." I wanted to tell him off but I make a point not to argue with people who have saved my life, so I just handed it to him and he said: "I'm sorry." And I didn't say anything or give him any foul looks about it. When I saw him at the nurses' station he said, "I'm sorry, man." And I just said, "It's ok. It's ok. Please don't worry about it." What worse could I say to the man who had called 911 when I overdosed on pills? Even though he had robbed me of the freedom of music which transformed my consciousness from bleak psych ward to glorious Mozart—a serious crime—I could not bring down any hammer on this man. I can't even say I like him, but I thank him, and I will give him any leeway in the world. I just said, "May I please have a sound machine?" And that particular guy leapt at the opportunity to get it for me. From that point on I was always soothing myself with the sound machine which I carried everywhere. I checked one out every morning and checked the same one in the next morning, checking out a new, charged one for the new day. I learned from the Refuge that music is my "coping skill"—actually it's the most powerful drug I can imagine and I use it all the time now like the sickest addict in the barest abandoned building—I mainline it to alter my state and without it I would die in this stale, stale world. ### 88 I'm doing laundry and I think of Schizophrenic Mike—who I incited the fight with? I'm flashing back. I'm saying all these reality-bending things about not touching my laundry and *You touched my laundry* and *Don't touch the dryer* and *I saw you touch the dryer* and *I'm gonna kill you if you touch my laundry*..just shit like that. Poor fucking schizophrenic, prob'ly has no idea what's going on anyway and I'm fucking with him saying all this contradictory shit like *I love you but I'll stop loving you if you touch my laundry* and talking about his mother and how she used to do the laundry and asking him *Where is your mother now? I don't see her. She must have left you here, you fucktard, and she's never coming back. Why do you think she left you in a psycho ward? Do you think your mother knows you're psycho? Do you think your mother made you psycho? I hear if a mother doesn't breastfeed her baby he can turn out to be a lifelong fucking schizophrenic like you, Mike. Did your mother feed you with her tits?* Just simple, evil, fucked-up shit like that designed to rile the motherfucker up, to *make* him attack me. And it worked. I pushed and pushed and pushed. I never looked away. I kept my eyes on his eyes so that if *he* looked away, when he looked back, *I* would be there. He was stuck in that laundry room and I set up the paradigm for him: he was the prisoner, I was the guard, and he had to take me down to escape the cell. What I did was evil. I mean, yes, it was manipulative, it was tormenting, taunting..it was *provoking* as the nurses wrote in my chart ("patient has a history of provoking other patients")..but it was evil. I mean let's call a spade a spade, even if that spade is me. To intentionally fuck with a mentally ill person, to make him attack me so that he would end up in ALSA and I would be viewed as the victim (my psychiatrist soothed me later and told me Mike had a history of attacking other patients, that it wasn't my fault, that I shouldn't blame myself, and I wondered for a second if I didn't really know what happened, if I hadn't, in my own ill mind, done anything to provoke him at all, and this really was just something *Mike* would have done to me anyway)..but then I knew that even if Mike did have a history of attacking other patients, that he never would have attacked me if I hadn't provoked him. It was a sick thing to do, especially if I had more presence of mind than him—which was probably the case, as psychotic as I may be. It was a horrible thing to do, and to this day, I feel no remorse about it, because Mike, whether he was doing it on purpose or not, was making the women in the unit feel uncomfortable by standing over them, staring at them. He was creating disorder, none of the mental health techs or nurses were responding to the female patients' complaints, and in a vacuum of power, I take over. I might not have run the ward, but I *could* run Mike, and I ran him out of the unit, into ALSA, for a week—a week during which no man was making all the women around me uncomfortable, a week during which no creepy schizophrenic was gonna fuck up the calm of *my* psych unit!! (Hear the irony, please.) Hear the irony of a drug-addicted suicidal alcoholic bipolar obsessive-compulsive disordered mental patient committed by the state to a locked psychiatric ward (that's me) who thinks it's his job *to bring order* to the unit. They say controlling people—people who attempt to overly exert *control* over their external environments, to bring order to *that which is outside*—are people whose internal environments (their minds) are chaos. All I have to say to that is that I've tried to control a lot of people who aren't me. And it hasn't done me a lick of good. - - - - I am best friends with chaos, but I think in some situations there needs to be order. And while my stepping in to fill a void of order, and imposing my order uninvited, is part of my illness..in some contexts it works. My sets in film school, for example. Now, there's an arena in which I was the designated leader—the director—so it wasn't like I was stepping in to fill a void. But my sets were quiet, my sets were orderly, organized, efficient, safe. And that safety came from establishing rules and enforcing them. No one but me was allowed to talk to the actors—this helped them establish the illusion that they were still doing exactly what we did in rehearsal, rather than have to face the fact that they were now in a soundstage surrounded by sets and lights and the camera and thirty strangers doing various jobs. One of the grips was found sleeping behind the set instead of doing his job. I asked my producer to wake him and escort him off the set—*one* strike and you're out—that's how I roll. We weren't mean about it, but the producer and I set a tone that everyone else paid notice to: we're here to excellently, respectfully, and quietly do our job. If you fail to do your job, you will not be on this set. The obvious result is that it sets an example that others learn not to repeat. The more subtle effect is that it creates *safety* in the form of expectation—we calmly set a pattern for how things would go on this set. That creates safety because people are operating in an environment where they know what to expect, not an environment that is or could become chaotic. So, as always, my weakness is my strength—they always are. Whether it's a gift or a liability largely depends on context. And—call me a narcissist if you like—but usually when I suggest an idea to someone, they hate it, then they eventually try it, then they come to me and tell me how great it is. I'm not saying I have all the good ideas or a psychological need to—I don't. I'm quite impersonal and cooperative in group settings. It doesn't offend me when people don't use my ideas (unless over a period of years my ideas are *never* used). It doesn't hurt me when someone comes up with a better idea than mine—it excites me. But on a film set, if I tell my cinematographer—who was usually Mike—to loosen the screws on the head of the tripod and let the camera drift a little for every shot in the film, his first reaction will be to think I'm crazy and resist like hell. But then he'll do it anyway, because every time I told him to do something before, it always worked out. And months later we'll be sitting in the theater in the Los Angeles Film School, and our directing teacher, Salvador Carasco, will say, "Wow, I love that fluid shaky movement you used. It works with the split screen and gives your film an edgy feel that works with the script." And Mike and I will look at each other and smile. And even though everyone will assume that was the cinematographer's decision, Mike will speak up and say, "Yeah, that was actually Matthew's idea. When he first suggested it, I was like, *'Whaaat?'*—I honestly didn't think it was going to work. But it works really well. He's a good director." And I'll compliment him in front of the whole class, and all will be well. And years will pass, and I will become a further irony—my sister Joanne says I have Midas' touch, that every project I touch turns to gold—and yet, I am thirty-eight, living with my mother, lying on the floor writing something like my thirteenth book, never having directed a film, my software career very likely over. When I was twenty-three, my cousin said I was the most employable person he knew. It was true at the time. He couldn't find a job as a baker and I was making amazing money for my age, programming computers for Mead Research. Now my cousin is a professor at Columbia University and I am an unemployed writer, disabled to the point that I can't live on my own, am banned by my psychiatrist from driving, can hardly pour a cup of coffee without spilling—and, after some pretty amazing years that came before, this has been *hands down* the greatest year of my life—because I am writing. - - - - Walking, on a trip outside the ward, I took pictures in my mind of that one tree with the circular bench around it and yellow leaves all around the base of the tree in a circle..wanting to never forget it, it's so beautiful. I stood there and burned it into my mind. And I never have forgotten it, to this day. And I was trapped, by a loop, something someone said twice, and thrown into a well of memory that made me think perhaps I did belong on Tyler 2, and not just for the weekend. It was this social worker who was on her last day of work at the Refuge before she moved to Austin and I guess she felt like doing her job because she pulled me aside and sat me in the sunroom and gave me a really nice and piercing speech on "emotional honesty" and I felt so good that she had spent some of her time talking to me, saying something specifically designed to help me, based on her observation of me and reading of my charts. I thanked her warmly, wished her well in Austin, and she left the sunroom. Five minutes later I hear her saying, to some other patient, "I think if you'll just be bold enough to have some *emotional honesty* around why you're here.." Giving *the exact same speech* using the *same exact phrases* to some other patient who had completely different issues and was in a completely different situation than me. And I was back talking to Daniel. And nothing made sense 'cause Stripes was there, too. Then a miracle happened. Well, it was a miracle within the context of Tyler 2. The autistic man, Daniel, opened up to me after all he ever did was yell at his doctor unintelligibly about the patients' bill of rights and ignored everyone else. I was sitting across from him doing a crossword puzzle, in a dream. Daniel, the severe autistic man, who only talked with me..he decided I was safe..after a long while..and one day around a square table we talked up a storm. When I told Stripes about it she said, "He trusts you." Then there was a picture of a girl I met on the internet with a tarantula on her back. Which is weird because I didn't meet her till five years later. But weird things can happen in the psych ward. Sometimes it's the medicine. Sometimes it's your mind. And sometimes, if you have psychosis, you just never know. I'm gonna restore you to peace now. When I count to three, you'll wake up and all will be normal. Are you ready? Ok. One.. two.. three. ### 89 You're gonna love this next one. > **Brattleboro Refuge Discharge Summary (5)** > > Patient Admitted November 4, 2011—Discharged November 10, 2011 > > **Identifying Data** > > This was the third Brattleboro Refuge and fourth lifetime admission for this 33-year-old, single white male *[I think it's my fifth Brattleboro Refuge admission and sixth lifetime admission—but whatever—I mean you all do know that these records are used in courts and stuff, right?]* The patient's occupation is an unemployed computer software engineer, he was fired in August *[Whoever wrote this clearly has some logic and writing problems.]* The patient is also a writer. The patient lives alone in Brattleboro, Vermont. His mother lives close by *[If you consider Allentown, Pennsylvania to be close to Brattleboro, Vermont, then yes, she lives very close.]* > > **Chief Complaint** > > "Dr. Sbarro says I have serotonin syndrome, unless they have other motivations for wanting to hospitalize me." *[Lol](#)*—*this is* not *the type of thing you want to say to the admitting nurse in a psychiatric hospital. Hahahahaha*—*oh shit.]* > > **History of Present Illness** > > This 33-year-old, single, white male presents on discharge from Birches Program for increasingly disorganized thinking. He also is having physical symptoms of muscle twitching, sweats, diarrhea, elevated blood pressure, restlessness and agitation. He reports that he went to a local Emergency Room a day or two ago for extreme anger and had his blood drawn but was medically cleared, although he does not recall specifically why. Symptoms started in Tyler 2 but then got better and then worsened a day or two ago. Current symptoms include chaotic thought process, increased paranoia, and increased anxiety but patient denies suicidal or homicidal ideation. The patient is having paranoid thoughts about the CIA poisoning milk and spoons, obsessing about being less predictable so that the CIA cannot poison him. He will not eat red or green Skittles together *[I would not eat red]* and *green Skittles together because they reminded me of Christmas, a time of screaming and tension and pain—actually I still will not eat red and green Skittles together and I do not think this indicates any mental illness at all. If color is there, and you do not pay attention to it, then* you *are the one who is missing part of life—if it is healthy to view color as meaningless, then why is it there at all?]*. The computer programming he was doing has been transferred to his brain. A lot of thoughts about the NSA profiling him. He reports having been there and working for them *[I said I went there and made a]* presentation *to them, not that I worked there]*. He feels like this is all a chess game and he wants to review his chart to see what others are saying. Reports that the NSA is messing up his life *[they very well might be—prove to me, in the age of National Security Letters, that any of us know if our interactions with a potential employer, for example, have not been tampered with by the NSA or an organization like them—you can't]*. Prior to admission to Tyler 2, the patient's trazodone and Celexa and Buspar were discontinued. His Risperdal was decreased, all of this in response to the notion that the patient was suffering from serotonin syndrome *[Read: I disagree with the referring psychiatrist's diagnosis of serotonin syndrome and taking this patient off half his meds was highly irresponsible.]* > > **Course of Hospitalization** > > The patient was put back on the Risperdal although we continued to keep him from using the trazodone, Celexa, and Buspar. The patient reports that he was also continuing to have some visual disturbance until the Sunday prior to admission. Throughout the course of his admission this time, he denied any visual disturbances. He also denied any symptoms of diarrhea, hallucinations, increased body temperature, loss of coordination, nausea, overactive reflexes, changes in blood pressure, vomiting *[Read: Referring psychiatrist, you fucking idiot, my patient does not now nor did he ever have serotonin syndrome.]* He did note some agitation and he was involved with an altercation with another patient which was not physical. The patient had accosted another patient about how loudly he was speaking and complained that the patient had awakened him *[This sentence hardly captures the essence of what went down. I wake up at four or five in the morning because some thick-neck, football-jersey-wearing, protein-shake-drinking, backwards-cap-sporting]* a-hole *is posted up by the nurses' station TALKING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS. Nurses present—no one doing* shit*. I walked up the hallway in my PJs and looked around as if to say, Are any of you fatherfucking* mother*fuckers aware that it's* five in the goddamn morning??!! *Finally this jersey-wearing asshole catches on that I'm standing there, looking straight at him, and he says, "What's your problem?" The nurses behind the desk stand up, on guard. I say, "*No*, it's* your *problem. It's five in the goddamn morning and if you don't* lower your voice *or better yet* shut your football-jersey-wearing mouth completely*, you're gonna find out that we have a hierarchy of crazy around here and since* you *just got here,* you're *on the bottom rung."*—*"Is this guy* threatening *me?"*—*"Call it what you want, just* shut your fucking mouth*." The guy stands up. The nurses tell me to go back to my room. I go back to my room, every step hoping that big motherfucker comes after me*—*I'm so keyed up I'd go straight for his eyes. He doesn't follow me, though. I stand in the hallway facing the nurses' station, my room light illuminating me. Come after me, fucker*—*come, after, me. One of the nurses suggests that I go back inside my room and close the door, as my waiting in the hallway waiting for that thick-neck loud-talking motherfucker is me being extremely aggressive. We want to* diffuse *the situation, the nurse says, not* escalate *it. But I'm thinking: Do we? Just now I looked up "altercation" in the* Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus*. One of the synonyms was "shitstorm." Now all I can think is: Matthew Temple, turning altercations into shitstorms since 1978. If you've been paying attention reading this book*—*and I've certainly been paying attention writing it*—*you'll notice a theme: I don't like to exist in a power vacuum. When control is absent, when the adults, the people who are supposed to be in charge, are doing nothing, I tend to step in to fill that void. So far the results of that strategy have been a dangerous and costly mix]*. Notes from staff suggest that the patient has a history of provoking other patients. The patient, himself, reported to me that he felt very threatened by the other patient and upset by him. In the afternoon following the incident the patient was able to acknowledge he had overreacted and he did ultimately apologize to the other patient *[Again, this hardly summarizes what went down: me and that thick-neck asshole were crying in each other's arms saying, "I love you man," and admitting our sicknesses to each other, fucking giving each other our favorite shirts as a sign of our new-found friendship, etc.]*—*We didn't just "apologize."*—*That fucker and I were like five steps away from a formula for* world peace—fuck*]*. The patient reports he has spent a considerable amount of time meditating and this has helped him to put the episode in perspective *[And let me say something else about this. At some point where I was causing or loving chaos, maybe when I provoked that schizo guy into a fight..or maybe later when I was standing in the hall outside my room looking to pick a fight with that dude who was yelling and cursing at like 5am..I remember a time in an AA meeting in Tucson, years ago, when I shared my realization that I wasn't addicted to the drugs—I was addicted to chaos. I wouldn't know what to do inside a normal life. Some of that's my actions, some of it's having bipolar disorder, some of it's the way I was raised]*. The patient noted that his OCD symptoms were returning, especially with respect to oddities in his writing and worrying about the number 178 now that he is no longer on the clomipramine. The patient also reported having vivid, intense dreams but was sleeping ok. There's really more I need to say about my tendency to taunt other patients..it's a thing I do in my family with my non-functional uncle as well..when there's no parental order, I instill it. Like this time we're gonna get to in a class at the Refuge where that young kid was being disruptive and the teacher just let him keep disrupting the class for all of us..*I* instilled order. I told the kid to get the fuck out. Same with the schizo kid who was disturbing all the girls..I'm not going to sit by and let someone make all the girls uncomfortable, so I did something about the situation. Same with the guy acting like he was the boss of the place, talking loud at night insinuating that dominating the sound environment of the ward was his right. I let that motherfucker know he was not in charge of this rathole. It reminds me of the bridge scene in *Apocalypse Now*. Climbing through piss and shit..muddy bunker with bombs exploding in the background..Martin Sheen finds a living soldier and asks: "Who's the commanding officer here?" Panicked, the guy says: "Ain't you?" Moments later, meeting a sure-shot zen motherfucking killing machine named Roach who's blowing up gooks with a grenade launcher, Sheen again ask