Electroboy (2 page)

We’re flying at 35,000 feet, and the sun beats down on me through the window. I’ve slipped into the Land of Stiff Neck and Drool, a warm and sunny place. I’m just about to start kissing and sucking on my ex-girlfriend Allison’s breasts when the stewardess bumps into my left shoulder and I abruptly straighten up in my seat. Dream ruined. Is it a dream? Is it day or night? My contact lenses are dry and I’m thirsty. I take two Prozac, two more Klonopin, one lithium, and one Anafranil. I try to squeeze my feet back into my boots, but I think I’ve gained some weight on this flight. I flip through
Vanity Fair
for the eleventh time. I do not care for Demi Moore. I sample all the scent tabs. Descent. Seat backs in their upright position. I walk off the plane with my carry-on bag and canvases and wait for my luggage at the baggage claim. Then I make my way through customs after my long and rehearsed explanation that I am carrying my own paintings and that I’m an artist. I am. I take a cab to the Akasaka Prince Hotel. I don’t know if I’m exhausted or wide awake or hungry or horny. I phone the concierge and ask them to send up extra towels. I take a half-hour shower. I check out the view from the thirty-eighth floor onto Akasaka—tons of bright neon and Tokyo Tower. For a minute I think I can see H&H Bagels in the distance. That must mean I need to get something in my stomach. The last thing I really ate was a hot dog at the airport. God, Manhattan is fourteen hours away. By plane.

Manic depression is about buying a dozen bottles of Heinz ketchup and all eight bottles of Windex in stock at the Food Emporium on Broadway at 4:00
A.M
., flying from Zurich to the Bahamas and back to Zurich in three days to balance the hot and cold weather (my “sweet and sour” theory of bipolar disorder), carrying $20,000 in $100 bills in your shoes into the country on your way back from Tokyo, and picking out the person sitting six seats away at the bar to have sex with only because he or she happens to be sitting there. It’s about blips and burps of madness, moments of absolute delusion, bliss, and irrational and dangerous choices made in order to heighten pleasure and excitement and to ensure a sense of control. The symptoms of manic depression come in different strengths and sizes. Most days I need to be as manic as possible to come as close as I can to destruction, to get a real good high—a $25,000 shopping spree, a four-day drug binge, or a trip around the world. Other days a simple high from a shoplifting excursion at Duane Reade for a toothbrush or a bottle of Tylenol is enough. I’ll admit it: there’s a great deal of pleasure to mental illness, especially to the mania associated with manic depression. It’s an emotional state similar to Oz, full of excitement, color, noise, and speed—an overload of sensory stimulation—whereas the sane state of Kansas is plain and simple, black and white, boring and flat. Mania has such a dreamlike quality that often I confuse my manic episodes with dreams I’ve had. On a spree in San Francisco I shop for French contemporary paintings, which I absolutely love, and have to have on my walls. I spend the next two days in the gallery obsessing over the possible choices. I am a madman negotiating prices with the dealer. I’m in a state of euphoria and panicked about the prices, but I go ahead and buy them anyway, figuring I’ll be able to afford them somehow. Two weeks later the paintings arrive, in huge crates, at my apartment in New York. I’m shocked. I really did buy them. I own them now. I could have sworn that weekend was a dream.

Mania is about desperately seeking to live life at a more passionate level, taking second and sometimes third helpings on food, alcohol, drugs, sex, and money, trying to live a whole life in one day. Pure mania is as close to death as I think I have ever come. The euphoria is both pleasurable and frightening. My manic mind teems with rapidly changing ideas and needs; my head is cluttered with vibrant colors, wild images, bizarre thoughts, sharp details, secret codes, symbols, and foreign languages. I want to devour everything—parties, people, magazines, books, music, art, movies, and television. In my most psychotic stages, I imagine myself chewing on sidewalks and buildings, swallowing sunlight and clouds. I want to go to Machu Picchu, Madagascar, Manitoba. Burundi, Berlin, and Boise (Berlin wins—I absolutely need to watch the Wall come down—CNN coverage isn’t good enough for me). When things quiet down in the slightest, it’s hard to lie in bed knowing that someone is drinking a margarita poolside at a hotel in Miami, driving 100 miles per hour down the Pacific Coast Highway, or fucking at the Royalton Hotel. I have to get out and consume. Those are the nights I might end up hailing a cab to Kennedy Airport and boarding a random flight. Once I found myself in St. Louis, once in Vienna. (It’s better to end up in Vienna.) I want to be a chef, a model, an architect, a surgeon, and an astronaut. My mind consumes information at an incredible rate, and I organize this overflow using an intricate system, printing images in my head as I take in the data, laying it out visually in my mind, and later transcribing the images to notes. For example, I can visualize an image of letters, memos, calendars—even portions of dialogue. It’s like having a photographic memory, except I am consciously aware of processing the information.

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder, is a disease that crippled me and finally brought me to a halt, a relatively invisible disease that nobody even noticed. Its symptoms are so elusive and easy to misread that seven psychotherapists and psychiatrists misdiagnosed me. Often the manic phase is mild or pleasant and the doctor sees the patient during a down cycle, misdiagnosing the illness and prescribing the wrong medication. One doctor treated me for severe depression with antidepressant medication that drastically increased my mania, turning me into a high-speed action figure. Another believed that I was just under too much pressure and needed to find myself a less stressful work environment. Yet another suggested group therapy as a way to improve my interpersonal skills and to draw me out of my depression. I was so entrenched in the manic-depressive behavior (or was it my personality?) that I was certainly in no place to make a judgment about my own condition. Today I can diagnose my moods and behavior, differentiating between extreme happiness, too much caffeine, and mania.

More than two million Americans suffer from manic depression, usually beginning in adolescence and early adulthood; millions more go undiagnosed. It runs in families and is inherited in many cases, although so far no specific genetic defect associated with the disease has been found. Manic depression is not simply flip-flopping between up and down moods. It’s not a creative spirit, and it’s certainly not joie de vivre. It’s not about being wild and crazy. It’s not an advantage. It’s not schizophrenia. My euphoric highs were often as frightening as the crashes from them—out-of-control episodes that put my life in jeopardy. Contrary to what most psychiatrists believe, the depression in manic depression is not the same as what unipolar depressives report. My experience with manic depression allowed me very few moments of typical depression, the blues or melancholy. My depressions were tornadolike—fast-paced episodes that brought me into dark rages of terror.

Manic depression for me is like having the most perfect prescription eyeglasses with which to see the world. Everything is precisely outlined. Colors are cartoonlike, and, for that matter, people are cartoon characters. Sounds are crystal clear, and life appears in front of you on an oversized movie screen. I suppose that would make me the director of my own insanity, but I can only wish for that kind of control. In truth, I am removed from reality and have no direct way to connect to it. My actions are random—based on delusional thinking, warped intuition, and animal instinct. When I’m manic, my senses are so heightened, I’m so awake and alert, that my eyelashes fluttering on the pillow sound like thunder.

I
could tell you that I had the most unhappy childhood of anyone I know, but that wouldn’t be true. I know someone whose mother’s boyfriend, in daily alcohol-induced rages, forced him to eat his dinner from a dog-food bowl underneath the kitchen table. True story. Although the torment of my childhood pales dramatically in comparison, there was still a curious misery, one I haven’t yet totally deciphered. But the subject of childhood angst is so tedious and commonplace, I’ll spare you the specifics and just share the highlights with you.

Actually, I was presented with a rather enviable deal: the Deluxe Male Progeny package. This included an intact set of two relatively sane Jewish parents, a pretty older sister, Nancy, a comfortable split-level house, orthodontics (I removed the braces myself with a pair of pliers after two torturous and humiliating years of hiding my metallic smile), a bright orange ten-speed Schwinn Varsity bicycle, Little League baseball, tennis and indoor swimming (at the local Boys Club), tutoring, Hebrew school, summer camp, a visit to Washington, D.C., and Disneyland, skiing trips, winter breaks to see the grandparents in Florida, a summer in France, and a high school exchange program in Japan. A manicured lawn and well-landscaped property (for which upkeep I was luckily not responsible) skirted our house in Oradell, New Jersey, a picture-perfect suburban town with pretty street names like Laurel Drive and Amaryllis Avenue (and, later, streets named after local boys killed in Vietnam). Oradell was a staunchly Republican and predominantly Christian town (did it matter that we
were Jewish?) eleven miles from the George Washington Bridge—11.6 miles if you were watching over your dad’s shoulder on the odometer. I pretended our house on Spring Valley Road was my spaceship and that I, of course, was the commanding astronaut. At night, when I was about seven or eight, I would press my nose against the cold glass window and watch the snow falling, feeling incredibly safe inside our split-level Apollo spaceship. It was warm and we had plenty of supplies in the kitchen for our mission, enough milk and Mallomars to last at least through high school.

Curiously, my parents had planned to name me after John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth and whose Mercury space mission was delayed on January 27, 1962, the day I was born. My parents figured that naming me after an astronaut whose mission had been postponed and could have ended in disaster would probably not be the most auspicious decision. Growing up, I naturally assumed they had great expectations for me. I identified with John Glenn and fantasized about orbiting the earth or traveling to some distant planet. I remember looking at an old copy of
Life
magazine that my father had saved, with black-and-white photographs of Glenn inside the
Friendship 7
, wrapped in a bulky spacesuit, his eyes just peeking through the glass of the helmet covering his crewcut. Here was Glenn, orbiting the earth three times solo—it echoed how it was to grow up inside my own suburban spaceship, for eighteen years, isolated and alone.

Life spun very fast on my spaceship. When I was about eight years old, I sat on my bed at night in the control room, my
National Geographic
map hanging on the wall, monitoring the imaginary controls and counting the cars whizzing by while my parents and sister slept soundly in their cabins. I would promise myself to go to bed when fifty cars had passed in either direction. Police cars counted double. The rare ambulance counted triple. Then I changed it to one hundred. One hundred fifty. I would keep myself up all night. This was the beginning of what I began calling the crazies.

I spent hours imagining what was hidden beneath the striped carpeting of my control-room floor—great treasures, tons of
money, and classified documents—but I never actually investigated. Instead I vacuumed the carpeting endlessly and opened up the vacuum bag to see how much dust, hair, and junk I could collect, sifting through it for the odd paper clip or coin. I hoarded change, counting and wrapping it methodically in coin wrappers, storing the rolls in a secret box in my desk. I washed my hands at least a dozen times a day. My parents once brought me into the backyard and rubbed my hands in dirt to try to break my obsessive habits. I used to sit by the washing machine and dishwasher and watch them while they were running, opening the lids at different stages to check their progress. Digging huge holes in the backyard and burying things fascinated me; I buried books, food, garbage. My parents encouraged me to play with other children, but mostly I kept to myself. When I did consort with neighborhood kids, I charged them a nickel to visit my house. I was more interested in geography than football and wanted to travel to every country on my
National Geographic
map (I also had a globe with an atlas), swim in every ocean and major body of water, climb every mountain range, and try every native food. I devoured information, obsessed with numbers and statistics, comparing and memorizing them—state and world capitals, population figures, election returns, and stock quotes. Most significant, I cleaned, organized, and polished the control room daily, so that every item was in place and every surface glistened. There were days when I was about thirteen or fourteen when I would be home alone, and I would remove everything from my bedroom, even emptying out the closet, the bookshelves, and the desk drawers, and put it in the hallway. Then I would vacuum and immediately put everything back into place. I remember feeling tremendously cleansed after this ritual. Clearly, I wasn’t an ordinary kid. I was obsessive-compulsive and neurotic from the start. Often I was frightened, lonely, and exhausted. From the time I was seven, I felt different, uncomfortable, out of place. Yet there was never a doubt in my mind that I was a special child. I had a heightened sense of self-importance—I felt larger than life, too creative, too smart. My grandiose thinking was reinforced when I was separated from the
rest of my class for special instruction in creative writing, reading, and art.