Giving Up the Ghost (26 page)

The deal my parents offered was pretty simple. I could stay at their house until we determined what was best long-term. During that time, I could borrow my mom’s car to go to work and a limited number of activities. I had to sign my paycheck over to my parents, who would, in turn, give me an allowance. Even if I wasn’t using the car, I had to let my parents know where I was going when I left the house and when I’d be back. I also needed to keep myself out of any flavor of trouble.

For some reason, which I was thankful for yet didn’t understand, my parents were open to planning a move up to Kent State’s main campus in the fall so I could take another stab at classes. I’d start out on academic probation, but by some miracle
or legal requirement, Kent agreed to give me another chance. Given what I’d been through, it was a risky move, but I think everyone, including my parents, realized that if I stayed in Canton, I’d just end up in the same cycle. I needed a change of scenery, a chance to be around different people. Plus, when I moved up to Kent, I’d be out of their house. Though they would never have said this out loud, I imagine that they were happy to see me be somewhere else for a while. Most of all, the idea of moving to Kent was a goal, something to aspire to and work for. In a life still filled with smoldering embers from my efforts to torch it, I was happy to have anything to look forward to.

“Dude, they told us you had bronchitis, but I knew it was bullshit,” Todd said, trying to make conversation as I swept up in the Housewares Department Saturday night. “Nobody goes into the hospital with bronchitis for weeks and comes out alive, man. I figured you got busted and went to jail.”

I told Todd there really wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the hospital and jail.

“So, did you nail some crazy bitches while you were in there?” he asked.

I just shook my head.

Todd kept following me as I brushed the dust balls toward the stockroom doors.

“Oh, and by the way, if you need anything to help you reacclimate to society, just let me know, I can set you up,” he said.

I told him no thank you, I had plenty of drugs at home that I was trying hard to avoid taking as it was.

“If you ever want to unload any of that stuff, that works, too,” he said.

After Todd went back to the Housewares Department, I saw Annette standing by the women’s fitting room. She leaned to her left and said, “Okay. What’s the password?”

She leaned to the right. “You got it.”

To the left. “Got what?”

To the right. “The password.”

I think this new
Purple Rain
dialogue was her attempt to cheer me up. Though I’d been back at work for a week or so, it was the first time we’d been scheduled together. While I was given a job, I was back in Receiving—sweeping, mopping, and taking out trash. Despite assurances from the managers that my “medical situation” had been kept in confidence, it was quite clear that word of where I’d been and why had spread throughout the store. I’m pretty sure it was the managers themselves who did the gossiping, as no one else would have had any idea where I was. Now even some of the regular shoplifters seemed to have gotten word.

I really wasn’t concerned with who knew what, but watching everyone try to cheer me up all the time quickly got old. I mean, what else would you do for a depressed and suicidal drug-abusing co-worker but bring a smile to his face by reenacting a scene from
Purple Rain
that wasn’t all that funny to begin with?

Annette leaned to the right. “The password is what?”

“Exactly,” she answered herself, forgetting to lean in the other direction.

“The password is exactly?” she said, realizing her mistake, and then leaning to the left briefly, before leaning to the right.

She burst out in laughter when she finished. I applauded for her.

“That was great,” I said. “What did you do, write down all the parts during the movie?”

“Yeah, I took shorthand,” she said sheepishly, instantly realizing that it sounded a bit weird.

“Well, good for you,” I said. “That was very nice.”

Nice. I was trying to be nice. In a strange moment of synergy, both Laura and Blumfield had given me the exact same advice, on the same day, about dealing with people.

“Okay, so you say that when you talk with people, you assume that they judge you or don’t like you or have other negative impressions of you,” Blumfield summarized.

“That’s correct,” I said.

His real-world office was filled with even more crap—piles of books, files, stuffed bookshelves, and yellowing photographs. Why would one person need all this, I wondered, let alone be able to find it or use it when he needed it?

“When someone comes up to talk to you, they not only want to express an idea or feeling, they want to express it to you,” Blumfield said. “That means that you have value to them. They are interested in having you hear their thoughts, and they value your opinion. I think that’s implicit in the gesture.”

“The other day when I was sweeping up in the Men’s Department a woman kept staring at me,” I said. “I asked her if I could help her with anything, and she told me that she prayed for my soul.”

“Did you ask her why she wanted to pray for you?”

“No, I didn’t have to,” I said. “She told me I was going to hell.”

“Why did she feel you were going to hell?”

“Because I was wearing earrings.”

“Earrings?” Blumfield repeated.

“Yeah, so I asked her about this,” I said. “She just looked me up and down and said, ‘Yes, those faggot earrings.’ ”

“I’m not sure what that story means to our conversation,” he said.

“I don’t think she was very interested in my opinions,” I said. “I don’t think she felt I had value, implicit or otherwise.”

“Eric, you probably interacted with a hundred different people that day,” he said. “And you are allowing your experiences with one to determine how you react to everyone. Doesn’t that strike you as unfair to the dozens of other people who
do
think you have value and find pleasure in sharing their thoughts and experiences with you? I think you’ll find that when you stop assuming a defensive position that you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

“You are such a compassionate and curious person by nature, Eric. You spend a lot of time and energy fighting against it, trying not to be compassionate. Just be with them, acknowledge their interest in you, and let your natural curiosities go.”

Laura’s fourteen-word version of the same speech, delivered while sharing a Frosty in a Wendy’s parking lot later that night: “Just don’t be a dick. Listen to people and realize they are trying, too.”

Despite thousands of dollars spent on counseling and medication and hospitals and tests, the best therapy I received happened late at night, in parking lots, cheap restaurants, and driving around town with Laura.

Just don’t be a dick.

I don’t think there was ever a time that the staff of Timken Mercy was convinced that I could live without doing drugs. They really didn’t know what advice to give me. One counselor suggested that I attend NA meetings after I left, if for no other reason than to learn from other people’s experiences. (I never went.) Another stressed that I needed to avoid any narcotic,
powerful stimulant, or mind-altering substance for life, or I’d just end up back in the hospital again. But it was actually Blumfield who, kind of off the cuff, came up with the solution that I’ve tried to live by ever since. He suggested that if I could enjoy something without it making me high, fine. If it was impossible to enjoy something without becoming inebriated, then avoid it. In other words, it is pretty difficult to “enjoy” pot or pills without feeling something. But a beer or two beers? Shouldn’t be a problem, he suggested; don’t think of it as a problem. But I was still scared to test myself. My challenge was just keeping it to those two beers. No one other than myself had any faith that I could actually pull it off. Except Laura.

She decided that we should put Blumfield’s theory to the test on one of the first nights I was allowed out. We went to the College Bowl, just a few blocks away from my parents’ house, and ordered a draft.

The bartender sat it down in front of me. It was golden and cold and looked perfect. We stared at it for a few moments. It was the first alcohol I’d seen in over a month.

“Should I drink it?” I asked Laura.

“Sure, why not. What’s the worst that can happen, right?”

I picked up the draft and downed the whole thing in about six seconds.

Pause
.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel good,” I said.

“Do you feel any different?”

“No.”

“Are you angry?”

“No.”

“Are you sad and upset?”

“No.”

“Do you see any dead children?”

“That isn’t funny,” I said.

“Great,” she said, grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the door. “Let’s go.”

We had a new hangout spot: a gravel pad surrounding a natural-gas well hidden across the street from the Sportsmen’s Shooting Center, way out of town on State Street. It was one of those large pumps that looked like a giant bobbing bird toy. One of the pieces of advice I’d been given when I left the hospital was to find new routines and avoid places and people that always led to trouble. Lake O’Dea was a great place, but it was time to move on. Laura seemed to like the gas well. We never actually saw it move or pump anything. It seemed to have been randomly plopped down in the middle of an open field. The gravel path leading from the road curved off behind a ditch and small mound, making it easy to pull in and be completely hidden from the view of passersby. We’d often lay a blanket on the gravel and stare up at the sky, sit around and talk and smoke cigarettes, or just sit in the car and listen to music. There was no one around, or any reason for anyone to be around, for a long while in either direction.

Increasingly, it wasn’t just my future we might talk about.

Laura had always been a stellar student and had great grades. There was no doubt she could go just about anywhere she wanted for college, yet she wouldn’t commit herself to anything. She would wonder aloud whether she should go to school or stay home for a bit and save money. Maybe she’d go somewhere far away to school, or maybe she’d go to one of the Kent campuses. Who knew?

As time went on, I found her lack of clear decisions increasingly hard to believe, and I’m sure it was evident in my tone.
By now, in June, every time I’d bring up the subject, she seemed visibly uncomfortable.

“Who knows, I guess I’m going to have to figure something out soon, huh?” she’d say. “Hey, what are you doing on Saturday? Wanna go see
Rocky Horror
?”

The Rocky Horror Picture Show
is something that people rooted in the modern world of YouTube and Twitter can never appreciate. It isn’t that things like
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
couldn’t happen today, it’s that they can happen too easily. Viral videos, photos, and websites become sensations, get millions of hits, and are forgotten in the course of a week. We have no patience for organic phenomena today. There was no email or Internet when
Rocky Horror
became what it was, no cell phones, no VCRs or downloads, either. It took years to formulate and spread, one person at a time, until it had morphed into a Saturday-night ritual for freaks and weirdos across the entire country. Instead of building organically over years, today something like
Rocky Horror
could spread in hours, if not minutes, and burn out almost as quickly.

I’m always surprised by the number of people who think the audience participation and gags in
Rocky Horror
were always meant to be there. They weren’t. It is a horrocious film. All the talking back to the screen and throwing stuff and squirt guns were always a way to make fun of this terrible movie.

The closest place that showed
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
was a dive movie theater in downtown Cuyahoga Falls, which was an absolute ghost town late on a Saturday night.

I had never seen
Rocky Horror
before but knew a group of older kids who had all gone a bunch of times when I was still too young to get in. I’d picked up on all the routines and audience
antics vicariously through them. I also had a copy of the soundtrack album, so I knew all the songs already.

All of this led to me hitting the ground running. I did a lot of ritualized screaming, singing, and dancing on my very first viewing. Laura seemed to have a lot of fun, though she wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic about it as I was. Participation, especially group participation, really wasn’t normally her thing. For me, it was probably the most I’d ever smiled in any ninety-minute period in my life. It was being in a place with a bunch of people, being ridiculous and loud and having fun. The sense of joy and freedom was infectious. The people there didn’t give a fuck if anyone understood them or not—they got one another. They were a group of people sharing some unbridled joy over something that they all had in common but the rest of the world didn’t get at all. There was a clear sense of purpose—to have fun and let go.

A guy in full makeup and wearing a corset, fishnet hose, and insane pumps had been sitting next to us all evening, jumping up and down with us every time. After Riff Raff sent Dr. Frank-N-Furter to say hello to oblivion and the movie ended, he turned to us and extended his hand.

“Hi, I’m Jamie,” he said. “You’re new, right? Well, a bunch of us get together every week afterward at the shit-stain diner down the street for breakfast. You two bitches are welcome to come if you like.”

“This is my Vikki,” Jamie said later as we joined the group for our first diner visit.

“I’m his fag hag,” she chimed in.

“Vikki works at the dirty-book store,” Jamie said hurriedly. “If you’re ever in the mood to spend a quiet intimate evening with a large black rubber penis, Vikki is your connection.”

Vikki waved her hands whenever she burst out in laughter,
which seemed to happen several times a minute. Having an awful job myself, I tried to bond with Vikki over her work.