CHAPTER 5

CLEAN NEEDLES NOW, ASPHALT VOLLEYBALL . . . NEVERMIND

ONCE I AGREED to take the meds, my urgency faded. My obsessions broke. My plans and paranoia still felt real but less frantic, like I made this bargain with myself and with NPI and with Dr. DeAntonio. I would pretend everything was fine. I would participate reluctantly—in group therapy, in individual therapy, in occupational therapy, and in recreational therapy. I would stop whispering in doorways and worshipping ghosts. I would take the Dixie cup full of pills and actually swallow them. I cooperated and engaged and as a result, I got better. It was just the easier thing to do. The ward’s enforced daily structure was hard to resist—my hip hurt and was still bruised. I did not want to be tackled again. I did not want to be in a padded cell again. And so I relented. And relenting was easier than I thought. It might have been time passing, it might have been the meds, it might have been the ward, but I agreed to go along with the program, to pause on heroically stopping the gas massacre, to stop thinking about my telepathic connection to Michael Jackson. My two rabbis from Temple Isaiah—Rabbi Gan and Rabbi White—came to the hospital to see me during visiting hours. I still felt ever-so-slightly touched by God, but I now knew their visit did not mean I was a messiah, it just meant they were concerned. I was getting better. My friends Hana and Sarah J. came to visit me in the dining room, and we sat on folding chairs, pretending to be normal teens.

Occupational therapy was less of a struggle. I could paint. I took amber, ochre, umber, sunflower, and brown and made a painting of a deciduous, broad-leaved tree in the shape of Christmas. It was made with the colors of fauvism and stroked impressionistically. I made moccasins, sewing the suede pieces together and striating them with blue-lake-like paint strokes. I made a ceramic vase from a mold and refused to cut off the irregular lip. At night a nurse would hand me a Dixie cup with three pink lithium capsules. The Dixie cups were endless. I was told to swallow the 900 milligrams. I did. I would open my mouth wide and stick my tongue out and flip it over to prove it. I followed the routine and the rhythms of the ward. I woke up at seven a.m., had breakfast with TeeVee Dude and the eating-disorder girls. I had no restrictions on my food. They wanted me to eat more. (I had pared my diet down to essentials over the summer and lost about 15 pounds before I was admitted—I had wanted to be lean and ready for disaster.) But now, I reluctantly picked up my plastic utensils (no knives) and would eat the square meals. My mom, on my request, brought a homemade pasta dinner to the hospital. I missed the tomato sauce she made monthly in a witch’s cauldron. I did all the things I was supposed to do. I even played volleyball.

And I continued to get better.

There were still moments of rigidity on the ward that made me anxious and angry. One morning I put on my favorite concert T-shirt. It was black and long-sleeved and showed the outline of a man, with his veins and musculature and organs on the front. On the sleeve was a syringe with a needle and the words free works. The shirt was from a benefit concert for AIDS research and the word works signified the needle that heroin addicts use to shoot up. The concert itself was a social triumph for me, and I clung to the memory of that night, especially in the hospital as I was missing the first month of my senior year of high school.

Two years before I was hospitalized, in 1991, I switched from an out-of-zone magnet middle school (that I was bussed to) to my local high school, University High, a turn-of-the-century brick building that was originally built to feed students to UCLA. The campus was vast and sprawling, with a natural aquifer and a rambling stream that was once a sacred site for the Tongva people. Uni had been used as a set for everything from My So-Called Life to Party of Five, and the main brick building was even once blown up, thanks to passable post-production special effects, in an after-school special that I think our principal, in retrospect, regretted renting out the facility for. Students at the continuation school ate lunch by the stream; the friends I made ate on the grass by the administration building. I had pictured reinvention with my first day of tenth grade, but I just felt like an alien. The outcasts in Some Kind of Wonderful or Pretty in Pink were always full-lipped and glamorous and wore ugly hats that improbably looked perfect, their problems coated with cinematic sheen.

My tactic for making friends was to list music. “What do you like,” I’d say; “what do you listen to?” We traded stories about the alterna-rock-funk scene curated by KROQ. The on-air DJs felt more like friends. We’d listen to Poorman and Dr. Drew. Morning hosts Kevin and Bean got us to school by arguing and shouting through our pop-off stereos. I was armed with a ready-made answer of who I’d listen to—The Smiths, Fishbone, Talking Heads, U2, Peter Gabriel, Indigo Girls, Cyndi Lauper, and sometimes Tom Waits for extra eclectic points, plus Madonna, always Madonna, forever Madonna. I worshipped her and would never let go of preteen choreographed pantomimed dance routines in my garage. With this arsenal of talking points, I made friends with a group of dark, smart alterna-girls who, like me and my friends from junior high, wore overdyed jeans, old dresses that fit like potato sacks, overalls and white V-neck T-shirts borrowed permanently from our fathers’ drawers. We were a small group in size and stature—Alicia, Rebecca, Mara, Robin, and a token dude named David. We made mix tapes, we were good students, we drew winding doodles on Trapper Keepers.

The first semester went okay. But by winter break I started getting weird. I would call my older brother, Matt, late at night and speak in small, squeaky, little-girl voices. Like I was a character from The Shining. I couldn’t sleep, I was haunted by Bob from Twin Peaks, the clown from Stephen King’s It, and the Night Stalker, by men who lurked in mirrors, gutters, and alleyways. It was Matt’s first year at Berkeley and I was stuck at home, on my own for the first time. I would also call Dr. G, the therapist I’d been seeing since my assault, during off-hours just to hear her calm, caramelly voice on the answering machine. She had a soothing, matronly, slow way of speaking. I called Dr. G a thousand times in a row, sometimes every hour on the hour all night long, just to hear her outgoing message. Our sessions became so fraught with stress that they almost always ended silently, eight or nine minutes early. I would fall asleep midsentence, to take a nap in her pink plaid chair surrounded by pastel wallpaper and the quiet, quiet, still, still, motionless, silence. Her office was like a pretty, feminine cocoon that I could curl up in. I wanted to stay longer than the fifty minutes, to hibernate. The frequency of my sessions with Dr. G increased to four times a week. When my symptoms first started, they were limited to anxiety and insomnia. She referred me to a meds-only psychiatrist and I would leave his office with refills or a scrip. There seemed to be a gap between my talk therapy and meds; my parents noticed it more than I did.

During winter break of my tenth-grade year, I was catatonic, confused, doped up on meds. For a brief period, I was basically on what my dad called horse tranquilizers. My tongue was so swollen from meds that when I spoke I could only feel a wall of flesh. I could articulate nothing. I spent a lot of time lurking on the bottom bunk of my brother’s bunk beds watching our black-and-white TV and sleeping. I had eight weeks to recover—the school system was on a year-round schedule that year and I used my eight-week winter break stuck in an ad hoc asylum state. After eight weeks, I came out of it. I don’t remember how. It seemed like lost time or a medicinal straitjacket. I made it back to Uni for my second semester of tenth grade with an amended schedule. I would take journalism after lunch.

My second semester was defined by—what I thought was—optional attendance. I did some normal teen things. I had crushes, wrote for the school newspaper (op-eds that were pro gun control, pro over-the-counter RU-486 birth control, and a very strongly worded piece on how the student body management reeked of fascism for enforcing “gang attire restrictions”). I wrote, I went to ceramics class, I competed on the tennis team, and I picked when I wanted to go to school. On April 29, 1992, I was at school when the verdict acquitting the four police officers in the Rodney King beating came in. I sat on the front lawn waiting for my mom to pick me up; the traffic going back to our apartment was so gridlocked I got out of the car and bought a frozen yogurt. My dad picked me up from my mom’s around dusk and the traffic had entirely dissipated. As we drove east, the streets were empty, the city was on lockdown, the billboards and storefronts about to be on fire. I was outraged; the city was outraged. Dad’s neighborhood near Paramount Studios was populated by older folks who felt the looting encroaching from Crenshaw or Western. When we turned left on Beachwood one grizzled old white dude stood at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and Beachwood Drive with a shotgun.

Tenth grade turned to eleventh. I took an SAT class with Urkel and Fred Savage and we learned how to game the results. The Princeton Review helpfully pointed out that the College Boards and standardized tests were developed as a way of measuring intelligence of World War II soldiers, in other words a test engineered for white men. (“The SAT will only measure how well you take the SAT,” the tutors told us.) Our tutor rewarded us by playing a Beatles record backward at the end of the course—“Paul is dead, Paul is dead,” the vinyl sang in a harsh alien monotone. Or not, it might have been something different. Some days I’d watch movies at the mall, two in a row. One afternoon, I bumped into a kid I knew at the discount department store Ross Dress for Less—he was looking for giant raver clown pants, something to buckle a pair of psychedelic rainbow suspenders on, and I was looking for cheap bras. We talked, we walked to his parents’ apartment and smoked weed. We went to Subway, where he taught me about the munchies.

My friend Sarah J. would try to help mitigate my obsessive phone habits. I would call ten, fifteen, twenty times in a row to see if someone I had a crush on was home and hang up. Occasionally I would speak and crush-of-the-moment would speak back and we would have a cordial conversation. It was telemarketing style. Sarah would tell me when to stop, and most of the time I would. I spent dozens of afternoons at my dad’s office in Santa Monica. One time, a full year after my sophmore-year breakdown, we both took a ditch day to watch Cal play in the Sweet Sixteen. We sat in a cavernous, dark, whiskey-drenched bar watching college ball on a beat-down TV at eleven in the morning when I should have been in Precalc or running SAT drills. I loved March Madness because it was orderly. Jason Kidd could see the court and move the ball. He was selfless and fast and precise and clutch. I could see the virtue in wanting something, in having a goal. My goal in tenth grade was to get through the year, and then the next year, and then to get myself to college. But, really, I was just looking for a place to be. I volunteered at a runaway shelter for teens called Stepping Stones and I remember some nights wanting to stay there because I liked the company. I felt close to the kids, my age for the most part; there was also a comfort in the concept of one house.

By April, Robin invited me to a concert on a Thursday night—everyone from the lunch group was going. I didn’t have a ticket; they had had tickets for months. I scoured the classifieds, found a scalper, convinced my mom to go with me to meet him at a freeway off-ramp to exchange cash for one ticket—an amount that felt outrageous at the time, something like eighty bucks. I got the ticket and a ride to the Palladium and there I was, with a bunch of rock ’n’ rollers. The lineup: Primus, Porno for Pyros, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, Rollins Band, and the Beastie Boys. Lakers Vlade Divac and Michael Cooper were in the audience (the Magic Johnson Foundation was one of the charities benefiting from the proceeds of the concert). I didn’t see them, but I liked imagining their athletic bodies gesticulating in the mosh pit—the mosh pit that I had been in, running in circles to a throbbing and pulsating, loud, beat—their Laker heads ducked low like everyone else for once. We were all just a knot of limbs and frenzy, circling around nothing in particular, joined by forward motion and collision. We heard a live mix tape made up of every sweaty musician we could imagine, strumming atonal chords and bass lines plucked like roses.

Back in the hospital, a year and a half after that night, I gripped my needles T-shirt from the concert. I needed to be able to wear it; it felt as if I would lose the friends I had made—not because I was bat-shit crazy and institutionalized but because I was not allowed to wear the “free works” tee. It was more than “works,” more than body; it was a well-worn, faded reminder of what was past and what was coming next—I had to deal with people again. My friends, when they visited me in the hospital, made a get-well card on poster board with puffy paint and exaggerated lettering. Those girls were hard-won prizes—friends! They were people I tasted alcohol with! Slept in their houses! Studied with! Listened to music with! Made mix tapes for! In fact, I had listened to Nirvana’s Nevermind with them when it came out! That afternoon, when Robin showed us the CD and we listened on her Discman, all other music stopped. It was so guttural and base and fucked up. The guitars were reckless and chaotic and the drums just pounded persistently and primally. Kurt Cobain, unwilling tastemaker, brutal heartbreaker, old lady cardigan wearer, he was so deep and so dark and lazy and tired and he wore smudged eyeliner and was perpetually stuck in the darkest shadow of adolescent angst. He was manic onstage, depressed in his drawl, diagnosed manic depressive. He also wrote a song called “Lithium”—the flailing vocals, riotously emotional and insistent, paired with slow indifferent verses, pogo-ing between two emotional states, tethering and validating both frequencies. He was screaming what we were feeling as teenagers, validating my mind without naming it. He was prophetic—shouting about the medicine I would take. He would fight to wear the needles shirt too. Or maybe he wouldn’t, maybe he wouldn’t care enough to fight. Maybe it would fit in the category of nevermind.

But I did care, I would not take it off. I was well, I was getting weller with every day and every pink pill, every dose of lithium, but I would not give up my shirt. The hospital staff said this shirt was against dress code policy and insensitive and told me to change. I refused. I argued that it was against my First Amendment rights, and the nurses reminded me again that I had no rights. The ward had its own constitution and it did not include concert T-shirts glorifying heroin. I argued; I pointed to my dog-eared copy of “Handbook of Rights for Mental Health Patients.” I pointed to specific passages like You cannot be denied the right to wear your own clothes. I was standing at a precipice, dangerously close to jumping off. Was the shirt worth more pain, was it worth doing more time? I still had an apple-sized bruise—purple, yellow, gray, and green—on my left hip from the multiple needle punctures that the nurses administered when I had been tackled. It seemed ironic that they were so anti-needles now. I argued for the needles T-shirt because it reminded me of before, that I had friends. It reminded me of the normal me, the one who would argue over a T-shirt and the First Amendment and who would hang on to ideals and rights. But I let go of the argument because I could tell I was close to leaving this place. The T-shirt was an argument that made sense on the outside, but not in here. Not in this place where confinement is cure. Soon I would jones for these restrictions.