God, if You're Not Up There . . . (14 page)

“The baby’s crying,” I said, as though I heard the thundering hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. My wife had gone to the drugstore, and the baby started crying, so I had picked her up and left the apartment to find my wife, only to walk right past her on the street. I didn’t know who she was.

“Babies cry, Darrell. It’s not a big deal,” she said, taking my daughter from my arms and heading back to the apartment like nothing was wrong. And nothing was. I have many times thanked my lucky stars that my daughter has a good mom.

The sound of my infant daughter crying almost always triggered a flashback. My brain must have made an emergency connection to the sound of a child in distress and linked it to the demons I carried from my own childhood. The result was that I often overreacted. She might merely have been hungry or in a need of a diaper change, but I would be filled with the kind of adrenaline that a soldier needs to charge over a hill with a gun and bayonet.

On another occasion, my wife and I took our daughter to visit some friends in Orlando, and the baby began to cry in the night. I ran into their kitchen and grabbed a knife. I was certain that something was coming to get us.

My wife stopped me and said, “There’s no one here. It’s just us.”

It can’t have been fun to live with somebody whose brain was under siege.

T
hen one night while my daughter was still an infant, I got very drunk, and I sliced my arm open far worse than I usually did. Strangely, it turned out to be one of the best things I ever did. In the ER, a psychiatrist I’d never seen before came to examine me. After listening to my itemized list of psychological ailments for about thirty minutes, she said, “You’re not a lithium candidate. You’re not manic-depressive. You’re not schizophrenic. You’re not psychotic. You do not have borderline personality disorder.”

What?

She explained it all in a way no one had before.

There are three kinds of bipolar disorder. Type I means you’ve had at least one fully manic episode with periods of major unhappiness. This is the one they call manic depression. Type II is when you’ve never had full-fledged mania (and for that I’m sorry for you, because the highs are fucking high). Instead you’ve been pretty high, just not super high. And you get blue, too. The third type is something called cyclothymia, a mild form of bipolar that makes it burn when you pee and gives you tenderness in the testicular regions. You get it from unprotected sex with an infected person; a dose of antibiotics, and you’re as right as rain.

Schizophrenics are exactly what you think they are: they’re the real deal. They’re not a bit blue, or a bit wacky—this is a nasty illness, where poor bastards can’t tell what’s real and what’s not, have fucked-up reactions to just about everything, and can’t exist in a normal social situation. It’s not pretty, and I’m glad it wasn’t me.

Psychosis is just a fancy way of saying the patient doesn’t really know what’s going on—it can be part of bipolarism or schizoid behavior—it’s like the bloom on the flower of mental instability. Probably the worst part of psychosis is the hallucinations. You want spiders crawling up the walls? Sign up for psychosis. Again, thank you, God, for keeping me away from that shit.

Borderline personality disorder? You think in total extremes at all times day and night twenty-four/seven forever. Please don’t abandon me; I fucking hate you; wow, you’re the best; and then there’s the cutting, and the overdoses, and all that. It was the one closest to some of the things I was feeling, but still it didn’t seem right. Though I was “turbulent,” I was also often better than turbulent.

Finally, she said, “What do you think you would have to do to someone so that they couldn’t speak or hear? You’re a trauma patient. What brought you to this ER again was something that happened to you.”
We will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope
, as MLK said
.

For the first time in my life, the problem was going to be treated—the
real
problem. By this time, I had been to twenty-three shrinks, and none of them had been able to make the correct diagnosis; they had all simply gone back to their prescription pads and given me another kind of medication.

After I was released from the hospital, the psychiatrist began to see me as an outpatient. But in order to treat me, she said, I had to revisit the trauma that had made me sick. We started going back through my life. She knew what she was looking for as if there were a bullet lodged in me, and she needed to find it to identify the gun and the shooter. People who come from healthy homes don’t open up their veins.

That’s when the memories started to come back.

I
am barely past toddlerhood, and I wander out to sit on the wooden ties of the railroad tracks behind our house. I practice crying while hoping one of those eighty-car freight trains will run me over, flattening and distorting me like a penny left on the track. My mom stands by the door of our house, forty yards away, and watches me with a quizzical expression, as though she is curious to see what will happen. I suppose she’s close enough to grab me if she hears a train coming, but I don’t know.

S
ometimes I find myself standing in a swamp filled with water moccasins about a mile from our house. I have no memory of how I got there.

E
ach night, my mother stands in the doorway to my bedroom and recites the poem “Little Orphant Annie,” written by James Whitcomb Riley in the 1880s. The poem was inspired by a young girl named Mary Alice Smith, whose father was killed during the Civil War. Riley’s own father was serving in the conflict when his mother heard about young Mary and invited her to come live with the Riley family in Indiana when James was a little boy. As was the custom, the little orphan “Allie” did chores around the homestead to earn her keep.

Thirty years later, Riley’s poem was published in the
Indianapolis Journal
under the title “The Elf Child.” It began:

Little Orphan Annie came to our house to stay,

And wash the cups and saucers up,

And brush the crumbs away,

And shoo the chickens off the porch,

And dust the hearth, an’ sweep,

And make the fire,

And bake the bread,

And earn her board-and-keep;

And all us other children,

When the supper things are done,

We sit around the kitchen fire

And have the best of fun

Listening to the scary tales

That Annie tells about,

And the Goblins will get you,

If you don’t watch out.

Once there was a little boy

Who wouldn’t say his prayers

And when he went to bed at night,

All the way upstairs,

His Mommy heard him holler,

And his Daddy heard him bawl,

And when they turned the covers down,

He wasn’t there at all!

And they searched for him in the attic,

And the cubby-hole, and press,

And they searched up the chimney,

And everywhere, I guess;

But all they ever found

Was his pants and round about

And the Goblins will get you, if you don’t watch out.

Once there was a little girl

Who liked to laugh and grin,

And make fun of everyone,

Her family and kin;

Whenever there was company,

And guests were sitting there,

She mocked them and she shocked them,

And said she didn’t care!

Suddenly she kicked her heels,

And turned to run and hide;

There were two great big Black Things

Standing by her side,

They snatched her through the ceiling

Before she knew they were about!

And the Goblins will get you, if you don’t watch out!

Somehow these terrifying stories of what happens to children who misbehave was transformed in the 1920s into the comic strip
Little Orphan Annie
and the Raggedy Ann doll. Later the stories were adapted again into the sunny Broadway musical
Annie,
in which the orphan girl cheerfully sings “Tomorrow” to her little dog Sandy. The show also became known for launching the career of a fourteen-year-old Sarah Jessica “Sex and the City” Parker.

In my mother’s version, the little boy and girl aren’t snatched up by goblins, they are butchered. All that remains are bits of blood and hair.

I
wake up in the middle of the night to find my mother leaning against my bedroom door, staring at me. She says nothing.

W
e are at the beach, and a boy is being carried out to sea. The boy’s mother is screaming hysterically, and people on the shore are shouting for help. There is no lifeguard in our area, but a man from farther down the beach hears the ruckus and sprints over. He dives in, swims out to the kid, and grabs him. He swims back with one arm, the other one holding the boy’s head out of the water. As everybody on the beach cheers, I look over at my mom, who is silently watching the scene play out as though she were waiting for a traffic light to change.

M
y mother speaks on the phone with one of her friends in this lovely lilting southern accent, and I think, She doesn’t talk like that. When she speaks to me, her voice gets deeper, and the accent disappears.

M
y mother walks into the living room nude. She knows I am home. “What are you doing here?” she demands, her face trembling with rage. “I didn’t think you were in here.”

She says the same the thing the next time. And the next.

I
am getting into the car to go somewhere with my mother. “Wait,” she says, holding the door open. “Put your hand there.” When I do, she slams the door.

M
y hand touches the electrical cord for the brown lamp in the living room. The cord has been cut, and I receive a fierce shock when my fingers meet the exposed wires inside.

I
am three or four years old, and my mother is holding me close to her with one arm. In her free hand she holds a serrated steak knife. Slowly, she sticks it into the center of my tongue, making an incision about one-quarter inch to one-half inch long. It is quiet except for the sound of the hibiscus bush thump-thumping against the kitchen window. I do not struggle or cry. Somehow I know that to do so will make it worse. The kitchen floor is red with my blood.

I
am four or five years old, and I’m in a park in Jacksonville, alone. When I get home, I am bleeding from my penis and my ears, and I have a 104-degree temperature. My abdomen is swollen and purplish. I will not let my mom or dad touch me. My father goes to get Myrtise so that I can be put into a tub of ice. Myrtise cleans the blood off and puts me to bed. My mom tells everyone that I had a reaction to penicillin.

M
y mother removes the safety plastic that covers the electrical outlets and sticks my fingers in the holes.

W
hen I am five, my mother hits me in the stomach with a hammer. She tells the doctors I hurt myself playing.

D
o you want to hit me?” I ask a kid on the first day of first grade.

“What?”