Chapter Forty-One
What can one possibly say to another who catches him in the act of trying to murder himself and saves his life?
“Sorry you had to see that.” or, “Get lost, you don’t want to understand.”
As matters turned out, I said very little, as could be my way when I’d crossed the line and harmed someone. When I was feeling guilty and depressed over “The Incident” those feelings showed themselves in the way I carried myself. The devil had me dead to rights and he wouldn’t let me forget.
Shoulders stooped, as though I was making a payment on a burdensome debt, I bought Brian a bottle. It was my way of saying, “Thanks, can you forgive me, can we pass the jug and forget about it?”
He was the one who’d found me, he was the one who, for reasons unknown to me, had ventured from his room in the basement where he spent most of his life and ascended the stairs, something he rarely did. When he heard me thrashing about, he looked in my room and was confronted by the problem I had with existence. He called the ambulance and was then forced to watch me convulse and bleed from the mouth while he waited.
For a long time after the incident, I felt very selfish. I felt wretched for having put Brian through the spectacle of my acting like a fish forgotten on a sandy beach by a fisherman who was over his quota. I imagined that he must have been afraid, wondering if I was going to die right there in front of him. I was a strong candidate to go away for good with nothing but a grunt, a sob and a malodorous mess in my pants left behind for him to ponder. I felt like a creep, for all the right reasons.
After a time the new antidepressant I had been instructed to take began to work. I started to forget or at least I lost the desire to continually lambaste myself. It wouldn’t be too long until I moved out of the group home, wherein I felt obliged to tiptoe around, cringing every time I made the floor creak.
I was embarrassed, but told myself that people do foolish things when they are mentally ill. Generally, besides being red faced I was feeling well. The medicine was working properly for a change and under its influence; I decided to try to find a job. I enlisted the aid of an employment agency that helped people like me, free of charge. I wasn’t optimistic; rather, I was convinced that they would probably be about as able as anyone else in helping me. To my surprise, despite the pungent ill will that radiated from me the first day I entered the job bank, the people who worked there weren’t half as bad as I thought they’d be.
I envied their normality. I was jealous because I was sure not one of them needed a daily handful of chemicals to help them fit in. I thought that they were lucky men and women.
My worker turned out to be a great guy to talk to. Over the span of a few weeks, we must have exhausted just about every topic that people usually toss around. I’d been missing someone like that. He helped me feel interesting and then he found me a job. I put away my animosity and promised not to tell anyone that he loved to smoke pot and was stoned at work most of the time.
On my first day at the delicatessen, my boss pulled me aside. “Did you hear about the guy in New York who tried to book a suite for New Year’s Eve 1999, in a hotel they haven’t even finished building?”
“No,” I replied, ready to laugh no matter how lame the punch line was.
“Good,” he said, “you’ll fit in just fine around here. Go back to work and don’t take any shit.”
I walked away thinking, what was that all about? Later when I thought about it, I had to admit it was all very funny, in a confused kind of way.
I worked hard at the deli. There was a butcher shop in the back and that was where I could usually be found, the head gopher by default. Clean the meat lockers, you forgot fresh sawdust, put that meat and those veggies on those skewers and don’t tell me about your crushed vertebrae and how your back hurts, grab that meat off the meat hook, that’s it, we’ll make a man out of you yet, oh, and don’t forget to sand the block when Joe leaves. I loved it; I thrived there and I had more money than I needed.
Gradually, day-by-day, work was giving me a pleasing sense that, in my own obscure way, I was useful. I’m like everyone else, I would think, except that I’m held together by pharmaceuticals. To think, I would muse, if I don’t take the medicine I’m no more than an animal who doesn’t even know his own name.
Eventually, having had more than enough of walking on eggshells, I moved into my own place, an apartment that was ridiculously low priced for what I was getting. I wanted to tell people that my apartment was someone’s tax write-off but I didn’t know what that meant and didn’t want to expose myself for the ignoramus that I was. In that apartment, I would live with a French woman for a number of weeks masquerading as a very long time.
There, in that apartment, I would eventually lose my mind and go on a long journey trying to find it and nurse it back to health. I would leave town in the dead of night with what I could carry and would throw it all away as I floundered and staggered my way to the highway.
“The voices are right,” I would speak aloud, as the icy wind blew spiky snow in my face, “I don’t deserve anything.”
I wouldn’t blame Marie, the woman I was to live with but her ways certainly didn’t help. A master of understatement would say she was a little off the wall. A straight shooter would say that she was a poison, to me.
Desensitization through drugs didn’t appeal to Marie, nor did the anesthetized world of the drunk. She liked to shoplift here and there. It gave her a kick. She had an enormous sexual appetite; so big and robust that one man couldn’t possibly satisfy her. Her needs were so great that, after I had been with her awhile I began to find her unattractive, though she was physically, a fetching woman. Of course, as luck would have it, at some point during the time I fancied myself in love and Marie was still desirous, I found myself engaged to her.
Marie had introduced herself to me at the hospital. She asked me to come and visit her and I agreed. We talked – she had a son, had given birth when she was sixteen. She had manic depression and was being stabilized after having quit treatment with lithium.
“I’m a schizophrenic,” I told her as though that was all that defined me. I saw a pretty face and heard an accent that made me stupid with yearning.
“What’s your name, what should I call you?” she asked.
“I’m Carmen,” I told her and smiled a smile that seemed to just keep growing.
“Come back tonight,” she said, and I, stupefied by enchantment, feeling the holes loneliness had dug in my person filling with possibilities, agreed to do so.
That night we walked around the ward. There wasn’t much to see there but we were stuck. She could go no farther than the locked door at the end of the hall that needed either a button pushed or a large key inserted to let anyone on or off. She was confined to Ward 15 until her doctor said otherwise.
Going past her dormitory, she looked in. It was empty. “Wait here,” she whispered, and walking in she left me at the door. When she’d gone a short distance, she turned around and pulled her shirt up.
“What do you think of these,” she asked.
What could I say – “Not bad but I’ve seen better – “ I’m not sure, could you turn sideways?” - “Well if it wasn’t for all the blue veins…”
I said what any young, red-blooded, heterosexual male would say when confronted by an attractive woman’s breasts. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen nicer breasts in my life.”
At this point, I didn’t know where our little friendship was going, but I know where it nose-dived and exploded – in my apartment where I found myself holed up with a mad woman. If on that first day I’d had half a clue as to where it was all going, I would have started running and never stopped. I seemed to do a lot of running, I know, but in a not too distant future, a while after Marie, I would finally turn and face the biggest problem I’d ever encountered – my sickness.
Around the time that I’d first met Marie, I was offered full time employment at a store that sold carpet, paint, wallpaper and the like. After mulling it over, I accepted and gave two weeks’ notice at the deli where I only worked fifteen to twenty hours a week.
My boss followed me around singing, “You’re gonna miss me lover.”
Oh well, I figured, I suppose Greek men are like that, emotional and all. Sometimes I could have sworn I’d hurt his feelings while at others I thought I’d probably offended him.
At the deli, you were always busy; something always needed to be done. At my new job I sat around half the day listening to some crusty old guy who worked there and managed to heap scorn on just about everything that happened after 1950. He was missing half of his fingers and I figured that was what made him so sharp and discourteous. That didn’t make him any easier to listen to.
I sat there and pined for the industrious atmosphere of the job I’d left while the old guy jabbed a nonexistent finger at the air to emphasize his point about the laziness of youth and the total lack of respect they had for just about everything, the poor quality of modern day automobiles, the evil of television, stoned drug addicts lounging in doorways, the way the weather had changed for the worse, how you couldn’t get a decent tomato anymore, the cheek of Wayne Gretzky, single mothers and so on until I learned to tune him out, grunting and nodding when appropriate.
The days passed and I became increasingly convinced that I had been hired to listen to one of the boss’ mildly senile relatives. At any rate, whether the old man was related to the boss or not, I ended up as his sounding board all too often.
Marie and I had been together about a month. She’d been deemed ready to take on the big, bad world. They were getting set to discharge her from the institution. We were both sad that she would be going back to the northern town from which she hailed, sad that is until she realized that the tears of sorrow we were set to tread water in would dry up if she moved in with me for a while. I thought it over for five seconds before agreeing. I you could elongate those five seconds and give them a voice I’m sure they would have said clearly and with some force; bad idea, abort, abort, abort. However, who pays attention to five seconds. We were in love.
It was agreed then. As I carried her suitcase, I looked at Marie shaking everything God had given her as she made her way to the taxi. God had been kind to Marie.
She’s practically my wife, I thought, I mean we’re going to share the same bed, the same can. She’s going to cut her toenails at the supper table, I can tell that; she’ll probably use my razors too. The way she strutted her stuff was a bit disconcerting, not the least bit alluring because I knew it was meant for the benefit of the cabbie who leered while I struggled with her bag. As I heaved it into the trunk, you could say my spirits drooped or even, that my heart was sore. I could picture our life together being filled with greasy men knocking on the door and saying, “Oh, sorry, man. She didn’t tell me she was married. C’mon guys, let’s go.”
I’d never lived with a woman before, virtuous or otherwise and I tried to hide the agitation that plunging in head first with Marie was causing me. Would I be able to soak in the tub and read or would she be in there washing my back all the time. Would I be able to fall asleep on the couch or would she have the TV blaring? Would she insist on feeding me when I wasn’t hungry? Who would handle the money and who would do the shopping? What about the hockey games on television, would I be able to take them in, in peace?
Why am I doing this, I wondered? I hoped everything would go well, yet I knew almost beyond a doubt, almost as certain as gray skies bring rain, beavers dance when you sing to them and fluffy hair would be there to greet me in old age, that I was going to have my heart broken. She was just too damned loose. I should have clued in the first day when she bared her soul and then, bared herself. Still, I couldn’t let go.
We were in Woolworths a week or so later, Marie was looking at the costume jewelry and I was absently looking at her. I didn’t stare at her as though she was an exotic plant anymore, I just stared without knowing it, until she would laugh and ask me what I was looking at.
“Stand over here a bit,” she said.
“What?”
“Over here, over here, you’ll see.” I did as she requested and watched as she started dropping stuff into her purse – fake diamond rings, fake sapphire earrings set in fake gold, a fake silver bracelet.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I hissed through clenched teeth, certain that we would be talking to the police before too long and that she would probably try coming on to them.
“Let’s go,” she said, laughing.
“Yeah,” I said miserable, “I’m all for that.”
I was able to control my anger until we were out of the store. By the time we had walked a while and I was sure we were safe, I wasn’t mad anymore. I just couldn’t understand why she wanted to see life through the eyes of a petty thief.
Marie was never detected as a shoplifter, nor I her unwilling accomplice. I fast grew leery any time it looked like she wanted to enter a store and always tried to keep her from going into one to browse. I was starting to realize that her sickness was a little different than I’d thought. She was not some little puff of magic that needed my protection, no; she often made me feel as though I was the one who was utterly helpless.
Not only was she a shoplifter, she turned out to be a horribly aggressive flirt, a part of her nature that I had a great deal of trouble with. What, I wondered, is she up to when I’m at work? I started to get nervous whenever we were going somewhere. I started getting anxious at work as well, wondering who was sleeping in my bed. I was being held to my promise to marry her by her and her family, a group of people in which every second person seemed to have an identifiable form of mental illness. We had the marriage license and the rings were bought and paid for at Woolworths. Go ahead and laugh. May you never be me.
The big day approached.
We were expecting our disability cheques and figured on some time shortly after that for the surgery at the Office of the Justice of the Peace. There they were going to graft together two without anesthetic, making one that was part me, part Marie.
I decided, as I watched Marie all but copulate in a bus shelter with some poor guy who just wanted to catch his bus that the J.P. was going to have a hard time making one of two because there just weren’t going to be two. When I get my cheque, I promised myself, I’m out of here. My main problem, as I started to feel the sting of being next to nothing in her eyes, was that I had really loved Marie.
We didn’t talk much after that day. The way she’d been behaving towards a stranger, who just wanted to be left alone, was the last straw. I’d finally had enough. A few days later, I quit my job and thereafter spent my days at the hospital. I stopped sleeping with her and stopped taking my medication too. I guess, beneath any bravado I could muster, I was pretty shaken up. I had no idea just who she’d been with.
Once we argued and she threatened to have sex with a friend of mine who happened to be in our home that evening.
“You want me, don’t you?” she asked while he sat strangely stiff in one of our saggy, droopy living room chairs.
She knocked a lamp over and stormed out. He told just who she’d been with later that night, that she’d been with just about all of my ‘friends”, in the basement of the hospital of all places.
You name it she tried it; anything to rattle my nerves. I started to think that she hated me.