Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was two in the morning. The varying tones of gray of which the shadows indoors were comprised and the sleepy hush from the street, made it seem like four. Someone spoke out loudly in his sleep. I couldn’t log any Zs myself and so was sitting at our kitchen table, a piece of furniture that had come to us by way of a government grant. It was a handsome table that the manufacturer had no doubt made with four, maybe five hungry people in mind, folks eating, talking about their days, laughing and passing the salt. Its designer may have imagined children coming home for lunch and leaving cookie crumbs and puddles of milk behind on the easy to clean surface. Now and then someone’s mother would sit there with her head in her hands, crying softly because the kids were growing up too fast. In our home, it was a sad table, misused. No two people ever seemed to sit at it at the same time. There was a radio on the table, which was why I was there, that and the close proximity of table to kettle. I was smoking, drinking coffee and quietly cursing my luck.
All of a sudden, I stopped and listened hard. In a rush the silence of the house and night intensified and became a steady ringing in my ears. After a minute or so, as though coerced by an unseen force, the ringing stopped. The words of a song on the radio caught my attention and I inclined an ear. What a goddamned melancholy song, I thought after awhile, hoping that my eyes weren’t in the mood for a downpour. I knew though that however warranted, bawling just wasn’t possible. A trickle yes, but the cascades that had once upon a time drenched my cheeks, leaving me with a nose full of snot and barely breathing were long gone. Sometimes I wanted to muster up a good cry; something I thought I needed to in order to enact the old adage, have a good cry and you’ll feel better. I really wanted to feel better.
I started listening to the next song. It reminded me of the way music was when I was a boy in the sixties, when I had loved to run and play and never dreamed of anything but good things, of always fitting in, having friends and of course being very normal. The combination of the song’s melody, its lyrics and the feeling it evoked of life in the sixties had an effect on me, so much so that it brought on a few droplets of eyeball rain. Yeah, I thought, wiping my eyes, you got it; the lyrics had been right, they had talked about things never being the same. You’ve really gone soft, I thought and turning off the radio I went back to my muttering, smoking and cursing.
It seemed that I was depressed from that night on. I began to feel as though I was alone in the world. I thought I was a letdown, a misfit who chronically came up short, another nuisance who would have to be taken care of from the cradle to the grave. I started sleeping too much or not at all. The world that rejected me has now entirely forgotten me, I thought. I grew bitter and my depression crystallized.
My head shrink concurred. He said I was clinically depressed and that he had seen it coming. I wanted to ask him why he had let it happen if he was so smart, but I knew he’d have a lot of nonsense ready to spew and more if needed. I didn’t feel up to deflecting any self-exculpating long-windedness and kept my peace. Actually, I felt guilty, believing that I had brought it on myself. To his credit, my doctor told me that feelings of guilt were often part of being depressed. He prescribed an antidepressant medication and lithium.
I had the script filled and mindlessly downed some pills when I got back to the home, wondering what they would do to me. Just more drugs, I thought, to pick me up, make me numb, make me sleep, make me hungry, restless, horny, dead or at least have a dead feeling or wish I was dead. I lay on my bed, choking on bile that often ravaged my throat when I felt defeated. I started thinking: this sucks. That doctor can’t cure me. I’d probably feel better if I didn’t take anything, hell, I’d probably be better off dead, but then with my luck the afterlife will be worse.
That night, as if I hadn’t learned anything more in life than how to tie my shoelaces and where food goes, I skipped my dose of anti psychotic medication as well as the pills for depression. I was gearing up to do my imitation of a speeding train without a driver. If I wasn’t thwarted from traveling the treacherous paths I was poised to locomote, I was going to crash.
The difference between a runaway train and me was that trains are made of steel and I possess a soul and am of flesh. Humans have feelings and we think. When someone came up with the authority and method to stop me dead in my tracks I wouldn’t be like the train, which, when its fit of lunacy ended, would be cold and remorseless, then recycled and fashioned into something of practical use. I didn’t consider it when I quit my pills that night, but it was possible that I could end up damaged beyond usefulness.
My reckless behavior made me believe I was taking charge and the depth of emotion present during those first medicine-free days excited me. At times, I would feel uncomfortably strange though, and when I did, I would wonder if I wasn’t going to just up and die. I spent a lot of time hoping that I wouldn’t, as the state I was often in was oddly sweet, somewhere in between madness and my brand of subdued, peculiar, but harmless normalcy. When things got a little dicey, I would lie on my bed, bracing myself for something to snap. I rode out these storms of weirdness that were, at times, excruciating. After weathering the storm I began to think if that was all I had to do to stay medication free, it was a small price to pay. When I wasn’t panicking life was as clear as the thin, early morning ice on a puddle in late October. I wanted to believe that this time everything just might play itself out differently, this time I might be okay. After a while longer without any medicine I became prone to confusion. I started to believe I should get a job, which, in my state would have been disastrous.
Predictably, in classic form, the illness started taking over, day-by-day, week-by-week. People were starting to look me over strangely, I fancied, as if I’d just fallen from the sky and landed on their planet. Or maybe I’d tunneled my way up from the bowels of the ball of water, dirt and precious metals that was sustaining us all, and had somehow managed to tolerate the light of day. It depended on my mood. I was either a creature sent from heaven, half-angel, half-human or a hideous hell-dweller.
Things got worse. I slipped right into a psychosis and it wasn’t like slipping on a banana peel and receiving a sharp, unexpected jolt, it was raspberry Jell-O between the fingers, so delicious, so all consuming. When what was left of the Jell-O that symbolized my sanity slipped through my fingers and landed on the floor, half liquid and full of dirt. I fell to my knees and ate. I was sick. I was alone. When I looked around from my place on the floor, I knew I had been lulled by my own foolishness into deep trouble. Then, I was acutely psychotic, grappling with the full-blown fall from grace that had crept up on me again.
I was physically sick, though not in the traditional sense. My problems were very much biological, though that would be a hard sell when you walked by me downtown and I bugged you, bumming change and smokes, conferring with myself and making you uncomfortable when I gesticulated wildly and without reason. It’s hard to believe that a disease could make one act like that. To most people who passed me on the street I was an idiot, a waste, an annoyance, a persistent mosquito on a warm summer’s night. To some I was an object of pity. I don’t think I was, to anyone, a man suffering from an untreated biological brain disorder. I was though, a man suffering from an untreated biological brain disorder.
One day Joseph showed up at the home. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, maybe twice in all the time since I’d moved. I figured we’d just drifted apart and I hadn’t had a problem with that.
He looked at me squinty-eyed for a while and then said, “What? What are you looking at?”
I smiled and responded, “Just like you to want to play with my head, Joseph.” I looked down though I didn’t want to.
“I hear you’re flippin’ out or something,” he said quietly, rubbing my shoulder caringly and giving me a light punch. I became alarmed for a moment because I didn’t want anyone punching me, however lightly.
“Hey, Joseph, forget about me, what are you up to?”
“Well,” he fished out his wallet and pulled two tickets out of it, “Phil Collins, Dec 6. It’s called the One Neat Guy Tour.” A pause ensued, then, “You know that’s what you used to be, a neat guy. Now you’re just being an asshole.”
“Hey wait,” I said as he started walking away, hands in his pockets.
“What.”
“Who’s Phil callin’?”
“What!”
“Who’s he callin’?”
“Phil’s callin’ the planet earth,” he responded, shaking his head, “he’s looking for you.”
I looked down at my shoes, dirty, greasy old shoes. I should get new ones, I thought, but right now I don’t know where I put my money.
“Thanks, whoever you were.” I said loudly, “You’ve made me feel dirty all over.”
Later, I sat and wondered. Then, abruptly, I asked the empty room, “Who was that finger–pointer who was in my driveway? He told me he was Joseph but he wasn’t. I know Joseph and that wasn’t him. I think that was the guy from TV, the guy I used to communicate with by using telepathy. You bastards, whoever you are out there, watching, screwing up everything. What did you do with Joseph?”
Joseph was somewhere else. Though I wasn’t overly fond of him, I began to sniffle a bit and there was a lament in my heart. I figured I had lost a friend and somehow it was my fault.
I ambled through the streets of my neighborhood. Why did it always become so horribly cold when I was without gloves? As time passed and I watched the sun slowly fall out of the sky, it got colder. I had pockets though, I was alright. I was going to find my friend. Well that was my intention but I abandoned the cause, gradually becoming absorbed in interpreting the street signs, what they meant and which way they would have me go. After going here and there until I was lost, I sat on a bench, not caring that it was snow covered.
I realized that I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in a long time. Looking at a streetlight, as I had become convinced that I was so close to heaven that the streetlights were stars, I prayed that I would find a cigarette somewhere. When I found a half a pack in my shirt pocket my belief in miracles was given a hefty shot in the arm. I didn’t get it at all. The fags had been in my possession all along but I believed that I had prayed to a streetlight/star and my prayer had been answered.
Eventually, beneath a deep, beautiful, dark sky, I found my way home and let myself in. I was laughing quietly. The house was still. Heaven had been fantastic, so full of warmth, wisdom and goodness. I would crash through the clouds though, Kingston’s answer to Wiley Coyote. I would fall and puncture the earth’s crust, my head in hell and my boots sticking out on earth, should some kind stranger cared to pull me from the heat and fetor.