Electroboy (36 page)

November 27, 1997
.

Thanksgiving Day. My parents pick me up at my apartment to drive to my aunt and uncle’s in Connecticut. Dr. Fried has taken me off Risperdal, the antipsychotic, as an experiment, because of the severe muscle stiffness, shuffling, and nonblinking. I’ve gone four days without it. Before I get into the car I warn my parents that I’m not feeling well and that my mood isn’t going to improve too much. I don’t talk at all during the ride. When we arrive in Connecticut, I sit by myself in the living room staring at the football game on television. I eat very little. My family is concerned about me but knows not to make a fuss over my condition, since that will only upset me. Everybody figures I’m having a bad day, I’ll go home, get some sleep, and be fine in the morning. By the end of the evening, I’ve taken so much Klonopin because of my anxiety (much more than the recommended dose) that I can barely get into the car. I sleep the entire way back to New York. That night I’m lying in bed watching television and I look down and see that my torso, my arms, and my legs are covered with graffiti—script handwriting, numbers, drawings, nothing I can quite make out. I realize that as I process thoughts, they get written on my skin, by an invisible hand, until finally there’s no room left. I jump into the shower and start scrubbing my body with a sponge and Clorox, trying to rub off the hundreds of words, sentences, and drawings covering every inch of my skin. They start blinking like Christmas lights. After about an hour of scrubbing, I rinse off my burning skin and I get back into bed, but I’m frightened it’s going to return. I don’t know what to do next. I call my friend Bobbie, who lives ten blocks away, and tell her about my panic. She rushes over at 4:30
A.M.
and assures me that there’s no
graffiti on my body. She sits with me to try to calm me down, then calls Dr. Fried’s pager number, which I know like my Social Security number. While we wait for Dr. Fried to call back, Bobbie stands me in front of the mirror, but I see the intricate designs on my skin. Dr. Fried instructs me to go back on the Risperdal right away. It takes about two days for the medication to take full effect, but I do recover, and Dr. Fried tells me I must stay on it. Plainly, I will never be able to stop taking these medications. Am I more myself on them or less? There’s no sense in trying to determine which me is the real me—in the end, I need the medications if I’m to lead a balanced life. I have a chronic illness, and I can’t survive without them.

January 27, 1998. New York
.

It’s my thirty-sixth birthday. I meet my friend Jen Copaken for breakfast at the French Roast on Broadway, and over eggs and toast she tells me about a great idea for a screenplay. It’s a love story that takes place in Shanghai during World War II; a population of twenty-five thousand European Jews flees the Nazis and resettles there with the help of a courageous Japanese consul in Lithuania. It’s 9:30
A.M.
and for the first time in years I’m fired up by a creative idea. I’m finding Jen’s telling of the story fascinating and her enthusiasm infectious. She’s given me something to grab on to. We decide to start researching right away and we work on the screenplay every day for a year. I see Dr. Fried at noon for my monthly appointment, which I had purposely planned for my birthday as a thirty-six-year checkup. It’s a playful session; the tone is light. How’s your energy? Good. Your sleep? Six to seven hours. Appetite? Normal. She asks me to rate my mood on a scale of one to ten. I tell her eight point five. “Not bad,” she says. She checks me for muscle stiffness from the Risperdal. Not great. She examines me for tardive dyskinesia, which can be a side effect of some of the antipsychotics. It usually starts out with a wormlike movement of the tongue, and later it can develop into involuntary
movements of the head, neck, trunk, and extremities. Once it takes hold, it’s permanent, even if you stop taking the medication. But I’m fine. I passed the test. Maybe I should increase the Benadryl because of the muscular stiffness from the Risperdal, she thinks. “Yes, take another at bedtime,” she tells me. I ask her about dropping the Depakote, the mood stabilizer, to see what happens. The less I’m on the better; it blows me up like a balloon. “Not now,” she advises me. She wishes me a happy birthday and reminds me it’s been four years since she started seeing me. I’m amazed it’s been so long and impressed she’s been able to handle me this whole time. So many appointments, crises, and daily phone calls. She sits down and writes me prescriptions and warns me not to stay out too late or do anything crazy. I leave feeling I’ve had the 25,000-mile tune-up. After making an appointment to see her in February, I spend the rest of the afternoon having a massage and getting a haircut. At home I answer phone calls from family and friends wishing me a happy birthday. I feel like it’s a happy birthday for the first time in many years, maybe since I turned thirteen and had my bar mitzvah celebration. My friends Brian and Joe take me to Vong for dinner, and I’m glad to be out. Brian, who enjoys good wine, orders a Pomerol Guillot and a St.-Estèphe Château Haut-Marbuzet; I’m hardly drinking, but I taste both, and they have more richness than any glass of wine I can remember. I remind myself that I’m sober. I leave the restaurant feeling satisfied, get into a cab, and am under the covers by 12:30
A.M.
, thinking about the twenty-five thousand Jewish refugees in Shanghai.

February 3, 1998
.

Today, before she is executed in Huntsville, Texas, pickax murderess Karla Faye Tucker requests a final meal of a salad and a peach. What can she be thinking? The meal I had before my last ECT treatment—and I didn’t know for sure it was going to be my last—was two cheeseburgers, onion rings, and a Coke, followed by Entenmann’s chocolate-covered donuts and milk before bed. If Dr. Wallenstein electrocuted me I was going to die happy. That treatment
was a scary one—I saw myself as a Keith Haring figure, with flashes of energy shooting from my body and the sounds of loud drumming in the O.R. keeping my heart pumping and my oxygen circulating—and I was scared I wasn’t going to make it through this one and the image and the sounds wouldn’t disappear.

My friends Deb and Paul Kogan are the best matchmakers in Manhattan. They’ve made three matches that resulted in marriage and brought together a handful of couples who have stayed together for more than six months. Once they were even daring enough to set me up on a blind date with a friend while I was in the middle of electroshock treatment. Now they want to fix me up with Jody, a woman they met at a friend’s summer house and think I’ll like. Deb gives me all the necessary background: she went to a small school somewhere, worked in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan for two years, and is pretty and funny. Sounds interesting. This is my first real blind date in a long time. We decide to meet at Henry’s on the Upper West Side at 7:30
P.M.
I get there fifteen minutes early and drive myself crazy wondering if each woman walking by is Jody. No, too tall. No, too WASPy. No, too young. Maybe that’s her. We spot each other looking for an unfamiliar face outside the front door and introduce ourselves. Over Heinekens she asks me about what I do; Deb has only told her I used to be in public relations and in the art business and that now I’m working on a book. Unavoidably, the subject of manic depression and electroshock comes up. She has no negative reaction. Good thing, since it’s the only thing I think I know how to talk about after five years, with the exception of my brush with the law. Luckily these stories seem to entertain her. I definitely need another beer at this point but force myself to be strict and have a Diet Coke. But she goes ahead and orders another drink. I really miss how alcohol eases my ability to interact and converse. Jody tells me some great stories from Uzbekistan, like having to drink her neighbor’s awful homemade vodka every night to stay warm
and being bombarded by snowballs hurled at her by young boys as she walked through town. This is the first time in years I’ve socialized in such a normal way. When I get home that night, I’m so relieved and energized that I return to an old favorite habit: I make a list of things to do in the morning. The list seems so normal and do-able compared with my old lists. I can walk to the corner instead of hopping on a plane.

I even feel that I’d like to see Jody again, and we have dinner a few more times. But I let things go, I don’t call her back. I’m scared entering into a relationship, no matter how tentatively; I’m not ready to be intimate with a stranger. At the same time I realize I’m making a mistake by letting her go. And my biological clock is telling me I want to be married and carrying a kid on my shoulders. But this one will not make Deb and Paul’s wedding record list, and I’m a little pissed it didn’t work out. But I know that whoever the right woman for me is, she’s going to have to be incredibly compassionate, and I’m fully confident that it’s just a matter of time and will happen when I’m ready.

May 18, 1997. Galápagos Islands
.

I’m snorkeling off the coast of San Cristóbal Island, in the warmest water I’ve ever swum in, skimming about fifteen feet below the surface. I follow a school of bright red and black fish—there must be three hundred of them—until they dart quickly behind a rock and I can’t keep up with them any longer. Then from the corner of my eye a school of neon blue fish, about five hundred of them, come swimming past me, looking like a flag waving in the wind.
It’s so quiet and bright down here. I come to the surface and spot my dad floating twenty feet away. His nose and cheeks are getting sunburned, and I warn him for the second time to put on more sunblock. I guess that’s my job as the overprotective son on the trip. It feels good to be looking after him for a change. We swim to the beach and crouch down to watch shiny black sea lions huddling on the rocks, thousands of wrinkled iguanas lounging in the sun, and boobies doing their awkward mating dances. These animals have no fear of us. The sea lions lollop right up to us and roll over on the beach, eager to play, covering their slick black coats with grains of sand. Then they swim into the ocean and come back out, glistening with a fresh shine. We’re thousands of miles from Manhattan, in the middle of the Pacific, and the beach looks exactly like it must have looked when the HMS
Beagle
landed on San Cristóbal in 1836 with Charles Darwin aboard. This trip to Ecuador to see the Galápagos, the Amazon, and the Andes was a birthday gift I had promised my dad seven years ago, but we had to postpone it, first because my passport was being held by the U.S. government during my legal troubles and then because of my hospitalization and illness. This is the first time I’ve been out of the country in five years, and although I’m nervous about being away from both of my doctors, I’m also thrilled to be traveling again. And I’m with my dad, so I feel shielded. I’m also armed with a knapsack full of medication, which I keep with me at all times. My dad is having the time of his life, photographing multicolored butterflies in the middle of the Amazon jungle and the crazy Galápagos cacti, which look like wind-twisted sculpture. After exploring the sea and the pure clean beaches, we return by
panga
to the
Parranda
, to sit on deck, have a drink, and wait for the sun to set. It happens too quickly for me each day. Afterward, we eat dinner with two young couples: a poet and a cardiac resident on their honeymoon and a pair of neurologists. Conveniently, there are three psychiatrists on the trip as well, and I feel reassured, like all these doctors are on call for me in this extremely remote place. But I’m also reminded of my illness. I’m dead tired tonight from the sun and snorkeling. My dad looks over at me to
see that I’m feeling okay. He’s been keeping a close eye on me ever since we left New York, and I’ve been watching every step he takes, not because of his age—he’s in excellent physical shape—but because I’m concerned about him, too. I’m aware that my manic depression has changed my relationship with my father; it’s an enemy that we have to battle together. It’s brought me closer to my mom and to Nancy, too, but at the same time it’s made me more dependent on my family for support at a time in my life when I thought I’d be independent, with a family of my own.

It’s about 11:00
P.M.
, and I go down to our cabin and take out my pills for the evening. I pour them out of their vials into the palm of my hand. Three peach Depakote. One white Risperdal. One brown Symmetrel. Three amber Topamax. Three blue Klonopin. One white BuSpar. One orange Propranolol. One pink Benadryl. One white Ambien. They look like SweeTARTS. I put all fifteen pills on my tongue and take a big gulp of water. The Propranolol, the tiniest pill, the one that keeps me from shaking and trembling and dropping glasses, the one that makes me able to sign checks without slipping off the signature line, gets stuck under my tongue, and I have to maneuver it back onto my tongue and swallow more water to get it to go down. It tastes bitter. I climb into my bed and look out the porthole, and all I can see is ocean and sky. I hear the engines of the ship starting up. As I lie in bed, I’m soothed by the rocking of the ship. I am almost one thousand miles away from the closest continent on my National Geographic map. My father walks in and turns on the bathroom light. The light spills out into the small room.

“Did you remember your medication?” he asks.

“Yeah, thanks for asking, Dad,” I say.

“Just checking,” he says. “I’m going back up to the deck for a while. See you in the morning.” I feel safe in the cabin; it feels like my spaceship has returned from space and is floating in the middle of the Pacific.

June 5, 1997. New York
.

The return to the city from the pure fantasy of escape in the Galápagos is not as difficult as I had imagined. I still love the smell of hot tar and bus fumes and enjoy the comforts of air-conditioning, the telephone, and television. Comparing the beauty of the Galápagos to Manhattan is like comparing a gorgeous naked woman to one who is wearing layers of clothing in the winter; there is a certain beauty and mystery to the latter. And both San Cristóbal and Manhattan seem like such absolute islands to me. Each has order and structure and is easy to navigate. You can take a boat around Santa Cruz or the 1/9 downtown to the West Village. I feel very safe in Manhattan.