CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A Line Drawn

When my father hallucinated at the window, he drew a line I could not cross. I couldn’t hallucinate with him to show my loyalty, and even if I could have hallucinated, I couldn’t go along with our enemy being black men. In that moment, he ripped from me the last semblance of any good father I thought I’d had.

Even now, so many years later, I hold onto that moment as a clear line of demarcation. That, I say to myself, that was the precise moment at which my father dove into the deep, went off the ledge, crossed the divide, that was the moment when he went crazy. As if everything that led up to that moment could be deemed sane. If no such moment existed, then I would have to acknowledge yet again that much of the reality I relied on as a child, much of what I believed about my mother, about the dangers of the world, even about the deepest, most interior workings of my own body was the product of my father’s delusions. I had made the mistake of aligning myself with the parent whose intensity I mistook for love.

Even as I chose not to buy into my father’s hallucination at the window, spending so much time with him had fractured my hold on reality. Unlike my grandmother’s cancer, madness was contagious. My father had given me a lesson in how to go crazy, and though the content of my delusions would be different, I would now proceed to do so, all on my own. The more I gave into my notting compulsion, the more the compulsion took over. Like my grandmother’s cancer cells, given an inch, madness had a propensity to metastasize.

Partway through tenth grade, Wendy’s mother became pregnant and her father got a position at a church in another city. With little warning, Wendy moved away. I felt completely alone again in La Crescenta. Alone with my family; alone with my crazy brain. Alone with the dead girl who wanted me.

To an observer, I might not have looked in as much trouble as I felt myself to be. I went to classes, wrote poems, tried out for plays and got parts in the chorus or company, did my homework. Then, in English class one day, we had to pick a book from a stack of anthologies so we could read Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The idea of the story already spooked me, and any time I had to pick anything at random, particularly a book, I got nervous. I looked over all the bindings, felt and then aborted impulses to pick one book or another from the stack, held my breath, shut my eyes, and finally chose a book. I opened it to find the dead girl’s name in it once again. This overcame my capacity to be rational.

Twice. I had gotten a dead girl’s book twice. And the second time, I’d gotten that dead girl’s book in association with a spooky story. This couldn’t be coincidence; this had to be a sign. The sign’s most likely meaning was that I was going to die next. I also figured it possible that she had to keep trying harder and harder to send me her message because I kept ignoring it, because I didn’t want to be getting messages from dead girls. This probably pissed her off and meant that she would have to keep trying harder and might never leave me alone.

I also considered it possible that evil demon forces had taken over her energy and were using it to drive me crazy. My father behaved as if he were possessed; maybe I was too. I was certain of one thing: someone or something wanted to take my writing away from me; something wanted to make sure that I never wrote again.

I couldn’t concentrate on the Poe story. Afterward, when we had to answer questions about it, notting consumed me. My paper looked like a spasmodic scribble of words written and revoked.

After that, nights became even more treacherous. With none of the day’s distractions, I’d not myself into mental contortions until, exhausted, I finally slept. Mornings, I’d try to tell myself that my fevered mental state of the prior day had been a bad dream that I needed to put behind me. Within a few minutes I’d see some number or sequence of words that led to some devious association; an odd coincidence would reveal itself to me, and the universe would become darkly loaded again.

While I notted myself into a state of limbo, my father’s mission to find the doctor who could save him continued. He finally talked a young, seemingly uncorrupted internist into admitting him into Glendale Adventist Hospital for a round of tests. By this time, he had nearly stopped eating, was hunched over trembling much of the time, and had lost more than fifty pounds.

After my father had been in the hospital for a week, the doctor concluded that he was seriously mentally ill. He told him that he would be admitted to the hospital’s psychiatric facility. My father began to get dressed, packed his bag, and called my mother.

“They got to him,” he told my mother. “This one’s in on the conspiracy too. Come and get me right now.”

He’d reached the limit of my mother’s endurance. She lied. She betrayed him as he’d always feared. She told Ira she would come down to the hospital and pick him up. Instead she went and signed involuntary commitment papers. I’ve always imagined my father’s passage through the halls of the hospital as crossing another line of demarcation. I see the orderly come, put him in a wheelchair, push him down one long hallway, and then turn a corner and enter another darker hallway that terminates in the locked doors of the psychiatric ward.

When Ira realized what my mother had done, he began to rant and rave. This confirmed his worst paranoid fantasies; she had con spired with the doctors to do him in. When they let him use the pay phone in the hall, he railed at her. “You traitor,” he said. “To my dying day, I’ll never forgive you for this; I’ll never forgive any of you.”

My father’s rejection saddened my mother even more than the prospect of living with an irremediably insane husband. All she’d ever wanted was his love. She had jeopardized her children, herself, everything we had, to try to hang onto that love. Now the situation had become so untenable that she’d had to risk losing that love forever to retain any sort of reasonable life at all.

With my father gone and my mother in charge, events in our household proceeded in a quiet, orderly, and affectless slow motion.

“I’ve been sucked dry,” she said. That was how she seemed, like the undead victim of a vampire. Always stoic and held-in, she now rendered herself militantly denuded of all feeling. She was going to cope, she said. She was going to keep the business running, and the house payments made, and no one had better get in her way.

In the days following my father’s hospitalization, my mother and I circled around each other cautiously. I thought she might seek payback for my Oedipal excesses. I thought she might cut me off from the enemas on which I still depended, and force me to go on one more noxious and ineffective laxative regimen. Whenever I started to tell her about my fear of the dead girl, she stopped me.

“I don’t have patience left for any more mishegoss,” she warned.

“But I got her books twice,” I said. “Twice. And other weird things keep happening.”

Paul proposed calling in a medium. “These energies around you aren’t necessarily bad, but we should find out what the ghost wants. After all, she chose you.”

I put my hands over my ears and screamed. “Make him stop saying that! It scares me so much.”

“If I could make anyone start or stop saying anything, I wouldn’t be in this mess,” my mother said.

My mother arranged for my appointment at UCLA’s Neuropsy chiatric Institute (NPI). It was there that a young, austere European clinician awarded me the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. And I must have seemed psychotic, for when I got very anxious, as I had been that day, I would lose the border between what was inside my head and what was outside. A thought about the body would instantly turn into a sensation in my body. That day in the psychiatrist’s office, I believed that I’d dreamed his face the night before, believed that the dead people were after me, believed the doctor was part of some nefarious scheme to drive me even crazier.

Yet, even that day, some rational part of me always watched from a distance, analyzing, weighing the evidence, considering alternate hypotheses. The psychiatrist’s words, and my mother’s sadness at hearing them, gave me a jolt. I decided that I had to marshal all the forces of reason I could muster. Whether outside demons were trying to make me crazy or I was doing it to myself, I needed to do whatever I could to stop it. I had to fight back. I didn’t want to wind up like my father. My mother was right. If I did not get a grip, I would soon be in the hospital in a bed next to my father’s; if I did not resist, I could go crazy for real. I could already feel how close I was.

When the urge to not arose, I resisted it. I shut my eyes when numbers presented themselves to me, so that I would not make too much of their sequences and relationships. I refused to draw the connections. I used a test: if anyone else would see a particular string of numbers or events or words as unrelated, then I had to regard them that way too. If I was the only thing connecting them, I had to conclude that the connection wasn’t true. When my compulsions said, “Do this or something bad will happen,” I defied them. Trying to fulfill them had proven exhausting. Like a blackmailer in a B movie, their demands kept escalating.

I was still afraid to think of the dead girl’s name, to think of so many words, but I tried to just put them out of my mind rather than getting stuck in an endless loop of doing and undoing.

“I dare you,” I said to the universe. “Give me proof, not these ambiguous presentiments of meaning, give me proof. Tell me exactly what you want from me, and if you can’t give me proof or show me what it all means, please just leave me alone.”

I would have to battle to take my writing back too.

In English class, we read Melville’s Moby Dick, a novel whose opening words are a bold assertion of self: “Call me Ishmael.” I was to write a paper about “Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale.” Under the pressure to produce, the compulsion to not kicked in. I tried to ignore it. Although notting fatigued me, resisting it sapped my energy too. But I saw the paradox: I felt as if I had to perform an act of self-negation in order to save myself from dying, and yet by doing so, I was actually annihilating the most vital part of myself.

In “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishmael, the book’s narrator, takes a break from the action of the whale hunt to provide a disquisition on the paradoxical meanings of whiteness. Whiteness represents the blank, featureless plane of nothingness, of the self blotted out. Whiteness also represents the oceanic merger with something larger, grander, greater than the self. Driven by Ahab, the monomaniacal captain of the Pequod, the crew is torn between conflicting drives. They aim to conquer the white whale, to prevail over it by destroying it. They seem equally attracted by the prospects of being subsumed by it in some final act of orgiastic surrender.

I could relate. I understood obsession. Compulsion. Monomania. Delusion. My father’s. My own. Like the crew members, I was terrified of dying and being reduced to nothingness. But I was also attracted to the prospect of being subsumed and merging with something larger than myself. After years and years of holding on, I longed to just let go. Ishmael’s description of escape through some glorious immersion in the All thrilled me. It reminded me of the girl in my poem who runs into the sea and drowns herself, only to have her consciousness continue in some amorphous, merged-with-the-ocean form. Before my notting compulsion had taken over, I had been able to achieve that sense of immersion and oceanic release through my writing.

In the middle of the night I thought about Moby Dick and I thought about death. In my father’s absence, our house was quiet at night—too quiet. I could hear the refrigerator’s hum from the kitchen, and the furnace’s occasional ping. My mother went to bed early; no one prowled the halls or hunted for sedating substances. No one was there to show me the skulls among the haberdashery.

I’d lie in bed and suddenly become infused with the panic of imagining my own death. It terrified me to think that my consciousness could just be over, obliterated in a poof of flour as my mother had said. At the same time, being in my body with its dysfunctional bowel and overactive brain felt like torture. I longed to get beyond the body, or at least my body.

Another possibility beckoned. Perhaps I could achieve a form of escape through merger with another, better body, preferably that of some beautiful teenage boy’s. I’d form crushes on one after another of the boys at school. Thinking about them could always distract me from my obsessions. I would just imagine a gorgeous boy’s face, or one particular ethereal boy’s gorgeous face and slinky body. He often stood in the same place during Nutrition break, high on the school amphitheater’s steps. I would position myself on a lower step and try not to stare too conspicuously.

The immediate obstacle was that none of the boys in La Crescenta wanted me. When I tentatively allowed any of them to see my interest, I’d be cruelly rebuffed. Not even considered in the game. At school dances, I’d stand on the sidelines, staring at couples slow dancing, my yearning inhabiting every cell of my body. If the longing showed, it only repelled the boys I sought to attract. Did they reject me because I was Jewish? Too exotic? Other? Or just because I seemed too intense, too driven, too needy, too nuts?

No one ever asked me to dance. I would get dressed up and keep going, nevertheless. My father had always told me I was beautiful, that I looked like Merle Oberon, one of his favorite actresses. Joey and Wendy seemed to agree that I was cute. Though the boys in La Crescenta offered no encouragement, I had enough residual confidence in my attractiveness, and this driving need for acceptance, to keep me hoping.

At school, the gentle, sensitive boys who talked to me or enacted scenes with me in drama class, felt off-limits. I would not understand till years later that the boys who had been kindest to me were gay and had their own secrets to hide, having no choice but to remain closeted in late-1960s La Crescenta.

It was the end of the week and, as usual, I had procrastinated and panicked, flooded myself with information, made pages and pages of largely incoherent notes, copied multiple quotations, and notted my words. Then I’d resisted the notting by reversing it, and so notted my own negations, to the extent that the night before the paper was due, I had not yet written a single word. Gathered around me on my bed were library books and scattered sheets of my own largely incoherent notes. My cherished Olympia manual portable typewriter that my mother had bought me in eighth grade, stood on a desk nearby, waiting. Though my understanding might have been beyond my ability to fully articulate it at the time, I got Chapter 42. For Ishmael and his fellow crew members, Eros and Thanatos converged in the white whale’s slippery mass.

As Ishmael described the internal tensions, his frustration created by the pursuit of that big, white, slippery whale, I grappled with internal pressures of my own. To not every word, or to let them all out in a splendid release of creation. I chewed my pen, bit my nails, twirled my hair, felt as if the words might burst out of me, but also bore down on their emergence with a lock hold of self-doubt.

Another issue was getting in the way of my writing this paper. I felt Ishmael’s struggle between my legs. Reading chapter 42—in fact, reading all of Moby Dick—turned me on. Melville’s description of the whale’s “dazzling hump,” the “fleecy, greenish foam” in which he “thrust his mass,” the “tumultuous and bursting sea,” “spout-holes,” “sperm whales,” “hooded heads,” and “blowing jets” were all too much for me.

The later the hour and the more I became frustrated by the density of the text and my own inertia, the more sexually aroused I grew. I didn’t have time to stop and masturbate, so I’d try to ward off my arousal by simply crossing my legs or to serve both mistresses at once by occasionally compressing my thighs to reduce my arousal while I kept on reading. That only turned me on more. I’d read a passage, underline it with all my might, as if underlining were the equivalent to composing my own words, and then one hand would mysteriously make its way from the book to my crotch, and before long I would have shut my eyes, dropped the book, and found myself face down on my bed in full-on masturbation mode.

Orgasm didn’t help much; the more I came, the more I wanted to come, each orgasm only contributing to my wound-up state. I kept wishing for that ultimate culminating paroxysm, the event like the final confrontation with the whale, that would release me completely from, and yet into, myself.

You’re a nymphomaniac, I thought to myself, hearing my father’s voice. As if I needed one more diagnosis. Before Ira’s hospitalization, when we’d walk down the street in Hollywood on the way to the Ontra Cafeteria, one of Ira’s favorite weekend dining spots, he would apply the label to every woman who wore tight capris and high heels who sent even a remotely friendly look his way. It wasn’t exactly an insult; it wasn’t quite a compliment either. My father loved women, and he had contempt for women. He wanted them to take care of him and then rebelled against their control. The label he reserved for women at the other end of the spectrum from nymphomania—frigid—seemed even worse. Frigidity felt out of the question for me, and I was not yet capable of forging a sexual identity outside of my father’s categories. Yet to arrive for me was the second wave of feminism that would help me to do so.

In the book, the white whale slips languidly and threateningly through the water, and I struggled to get something, anything, words or pleasure, to move through and out of me. As usual, everything felt stuck. Perhaps the years of constipation, the forced evacuations via enemas, had shaped my whole relationship to my body. Perhaps not being able to get something out had become the defining metaphor for my physical existence. Or maybe constipation was just one reflection of the way I was knotted up inside, unwilling to ever let go.

Moby Dick felt stuck in my brain, arousal stuck in my pelvis, the words stuck in my pen. At around midnight, when my hand and my genitals were finally so sore that I could scarcely write, when I didn’t have the energy to come one more time, when I could fully imagine the humiliation of not turning in my assignment on time, the paper finally came to me. In a hot white flash, in a flurry, in a frenzy, it dove and surfaced and finally blew its stack, nearly faster than I could type.

Three days later, our English teacher—a good-looking, intense, tortured man known for doling out censure and praise in such unpredictable measure that nearly every student in the class was invested in a sadomasochistic relationship with him—stood at the podium with one student’s paper in his hand. The other hand rested in between the middle two buttons of his dress shirt. The romantic story that students told about him, that no one could authenticate or deny, explained the posture. He’d survived stomach cancer and held his hand there to mark the site of his residual pain, and it was that pain that made him so mercurial.

We wondered whose paper it was and what he was about to say. He cleared his throat. “Debbie Lott,” he said, “has turned in the finest critical paper on Moby Dick by a high school student that I have ever read.”

I beamed with pride over what I’d produced for only a moment before blushing with shame over the method I’d used to produce it. I wondered if my teacher could tell how I’d written that paper; could my classmates? Was the evidence there for anyone who read it? I wondered if masturbation constituted my new key to fluent writing, if this other compulsion could replace notting.

By the time I’d written the paper, there had been so much pent-up energy behind it that it had overcome my usual fear of dire consequences for writing the wrong words. And there were no wrong orgasms; all orgasms seemed inherently right. As the words had burst out of me, I’d felt too full of my own life force to even think about dying. While I’d been writing that paper, I’d felt immortal. I’d written about the tension between Thanatos and Eros. For me, for at least that evening, Eros had won.

The psychiatrists called my mother in for an update on my father’s condition. They told her he lacked “insight.” For all his years of professed Freudianism and interpretation of others, he seemed incapable of the introspection required for psychotherapy. He was too far gone. Psychotropic medications in those days were limited. The doctors recommended electroshock treatment, a series of twelve. My mother procrastinated, and then agreed.

With the sun already beginning to blast through the window over the sink, I stood beside my mother while she counted out half the usual number of spoonfuls of Yuban into the electric percolator to make half a pot of coffee—just enough for herself.

“They say it doesn’t have any long-lasting ill effects,” she reported. “And you know, Sonia’s cousin Frank goes in for shock treatments every time he gets depressed, and he’s right back to operating when he gets out.” Frank was a veterinarian.

As my mother went on, repeating back to me the psychiatrists’ bromides about the relative safety of the procedure, all I could hear were my father’s warnings about my mother, that she cowered in the face of authority, that she was naive, that she was easily intimidated, that she consoled herself by assuming that doctors knew what they were doing.

“There may be some short-term memory loss, they said, but isn’t that a good thing? He’ll forget all his crazy obsessions.”

“How do you know what else he’ll forget?”

The doctors’ explanations sounded smug and evasive and self-justifying to me. I remembered the day when Ira had taught me how to remember a moment. All these years he’d held onto that mental picture of that single uneventful day in his childhood in Detroit. Could it be wiped out in a single zap to his brain? If he lost that memory, I thought, then the apartment he remembered in such detail would be gone for good. His childhood, already over, would really be gone. Poof. As if it had never existed. What if he forgot the Robert Louis Stevenson poems we’d read together? What if he forgot me?

“You are betraying him,” I said. “Just like he said you would.”

I didn’t understand how it could be good to run bolts of electricity through my father’s already disturbed brain. This would be his worst paranoid fantasy come true. Doctors not sticking objects in his penis or rectum but invading his brain. I’ll never get him back, I thought. He will never be the same. She’s taken him; she’s letting them take him. There would be no chance of recapturing the father of my earlier childhood, the father I had adored and respected and trusted.

“Betraying him! I’m trying to save him,” she said. “What do you want me to do instead, smarty pants? You got any bright ideas? Tell me what you think I should do because I don’t have any more ideas left.” My mother started to weep. She loved him; of course, she loved him.

“I don’t know what we should do instead,” I said. “Are you sure he’ll be all right after this?”

“He’ll have to be. We’ve run out of other choices.”