The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (4 page)

The images on the big screen were slowly oscillating, like runny
watercolor paints. At least that's what I saw; everybody was reporting
something different. For me, blue green was running into orange pink,
yellow was slowly colliding with green and brown, and the skin on the
actors' faces had started to look like stretchy Play-Doh. The car
windows were all rolled down, and the night air felt liquid on my arms
and face, as though I were floating in a warm swimming pool.
Outside, swarms of bugs floated dreamily in the shimmery lights.

"I want something to eat!" one friend said urgently. "Let's go get
something to eat!"
Hmmm,
I thought.
That seems like a good idea.
Slowly, I got out of the car and headed off in the general direction of
the snack bar, my friend walking a few feet ahead of me. Suddenly, I
shouted at her, "Watch out! Watch out for that fence!" She jumped a
little, looked around, then laughed. "There's no fence there,
Elyn—you're seeing things. I am, too, but no fences!"

When we got back to the car, we brought a second metal speaker
in, then watched one movie while listening to another. No one had any
idea what was actually going on in front of or inside us. It didn't
matter. The dissonance was astonishing to watch.

For the rest of the night and well into the next day, I saw bright
colors and changing patterns drifting in the air all around me—circles,
and strings, and some kind of rubber band-looking things, crystal
clear, and very intense, like shards of broken glass. The images, all
pulsating, seemed to have a kind of sound to them, as though they
were being heard from very far away.
Maybe this is what sound waves
look like
, I thought.

At first, I was fascinated, even comfortable, with all these different
sensations—everything around and inside me was so beautiful.
However, as the hours passed, it all began to change, to darken
somehow. Edges, where before there had been only curves. Something
impending, and not at all friendly. Soon, I just wanted it gone—I
couldn't turn it off, I couldn't turn it down, and it was exhausting me.
It was as though there were no room inside my head to see or hear
anything else.

By evening, the hallucinations seemed to have run their course and
dwindled away to nothing. My parents hadn't noticed anything amiss;
my brothers didn't pay much attention to me by then anyway.
Chastened, I promised myself that there'd be no more
experimentation with drugs like these. Being in an altered state was
no place for me. That was it.

And yet it wasn't. Even after the hallucinations stopped, I couldn't
seem to get my body and brain to work right. I'd never had a
hangover, but guessed that this was what one felt like. I was sluggish,
almost nauseated. I was out of sorts, even a little sad and down,
unable to work up much enthusiasm for school, social events, or
anything else. After a few days of this, I got scared. Very scared. Had I
damaged something inside me? Had something gone wrong with my
brain?

And so, with equal parts paranoia and bravado, I decided to tell my
parents about my drug use—just the marijuana, though; there was no
way I was going to confess to the mescaline. I don't know what I
hoped they'd do—reassure me, or calm me down, or maybe get me to a
doctor who would prescribe an instant remedy. I just knew I couldn't
manage feeling this way, and not being able to pick up a book without
getting dizzy looking at the sentences marching across the page. This
couldn't last; somebody had to stop it.

It was Thursday afternoon after school. On Friday, the family was
supposed to go to the Bahamas for the weekend (the trip from Miami
took less than an hour). My father wasn't home yet. I didn't know
when he would be, but I decided I couldn't wait.

"Mom," I said, fidgeting a little as I spoke. "I need to tell you
something, and you probably won't like it."

She looked appropriately apprehensive. "What's wrong?" she
asked.

"I...I used some drugs. In Mexico. I smoked some pot. I've used it a
few more times since coming home, too. I think it might have made
me sick."

Her eyes got very big. "What do you mean, sick? Pot? Marijuana?
Oh, dear, Elyn."

"Well, not
sick
sick. Just...not right, exactly. Not like I want to
throw up or anything like that. Just some weird feelings."

She nodded, a very concerned look on her face. I was surprised
that she didn't seem particularly angry. "This is serious," she said,
"and very upsetting. We need to talk further about it. But I think we
should wait until after we get back from the Bahamas to tell your
father. Let's have a nice family weekend, and then we'll face this and
discuss it when we all get back."

I was relieved; her plan made sense. We'd go to the beautiful white
sand beaches, swim in the beautiful blue ocean, and have a nice
relaxing weekend; by the time Monday came, maybe I'd feel so much
better that we wouldn't have to tell Dad at all.

But of course, it wasn't going to happen like that. No sooner were
we back home from our trip than my mother insisted that we had to
have The Talk, and she told my father why.

"Elyn, this is very serious business," said my father with a certain
urgency in his voice, the sort of urgency not unknown to come from
parents in the 1960s whose children they discovered were using drugs.
"Drugs are dangerous, they're nothing to fool around with. You have
no idea where something like this could lead. You must promise me
that you won't do it again."

By that time, the effects of the hallucinogen had completely worn
off. I was no longer scared or uncomfortable; I was sunburned, clear
as a bell, and in no mood for a lecture. And so I balked. "No, I won't
promise. Everything's fine now, Dad, really. It was just a little pot, no
big deal. I can handle myself."

He wasn't buying it. In fact, my attitude—the bravado, the casual
dismissal of his concern, the lack of respect in my voice—only added
fuel to the fire. "This is not acceptable!" my father said, and now he
was angry. "You clearly have no idea what's good for you. If I cannot
have your pledge that this will be an end to it, I will have to take steps."

For me, this had uncomfortable echoes of the diet discussion a few
years before—the vague threat of "steps" my father was going to take
to bend my will to his. And so instead of lying to him, or placating him
(or paying any attention to the growing look of horror on my mother's
face), I just stiffened my seventeen-year-old spine. "I can do whatever
I want, Dad," I said. "My grades are good, I don't cause any trouble
around here, and I'm smart enough to know what I'm doing. And if I
want to use pot, I will. There's not much you can do about it."

Understandably, all hell broke lose. Dad raised his voice; then
Mom raised her voice. Then I raised the stakes, by declaring that I
didn't even care anymore about getting good grades, it was all stupid
anyway.

This wasn't the sort of response that concerned parents hope to
hear from their child during the big drug confrontation, but in
retrospect I guess it wasn't atypical of a lot of kids—all bluff and
bravado, and no apparent concern for consequences. On the other
hand, it's not the kind of stance a girl with any common sense would
have taken if she'd truly intended to use drugs and /or wanted to get
her parents off her back. Besides, this was the late sixties; marijuana
had an almost mythic power to frighten and confuse parents. The
culture was imploding on so many other levels, and every magazine
and newspaper was running horrifying stories every day about the
effects of drug use.

Less than a week later, I was in my parents' car, sullen and nervous
in the backseat, my parents tense and silent in the front, all of us
headed for an open house at a place called Operation Re-Entry, a drug
addiction treatment center in Miami. It was Saturday night, and Don
McLean's "American Pie" was playing on the car radio. And I—well, I
was on my way to rehab.

Operation Re-Entry was run by "graduates" of the Synanon program,
one of the most notable "no-nonsense, tough-love" approaches to
substance addiction in the country. Synanon started in California in
the late 1950s, and was renowned for its success rate, although by the
late 1970s the original program and its founder, Charles Dederich,
had fallen into some disrepute. (Dederich had declared Synanon a
religion and had even been charged with a serious crime.) But that
didn't have anything to do with me, or with the place I soon learned to
call "The Center."

I couldn't quite believe how quickly my world had flipped upside
down. There was no bargaining, no wheedling, no reasoning with my
parents. The sad truth was, my own defiance had done me in, and the
subject was closed—no deals to be made, no recourse. The Center, a
nonresidential program, would be my after-school destination for the
next two years. I would go there every day at 3, stay until 8, and then
go directly home. During the summer, I would be there all day, every
day. And that was that.

By any reasonable measure, my parents' response to my confession
(or my "stupid little confession," as I began to think of it) was extreme.
Certainly, it was a huge stretch to claim that I was a drug addict;
besides, I'd already admitted, at least to myself, that I didn't much like
the effects of the drugs I'd used. But my parents were scared. And, in
the face of my adolescent bravado—my refusal to give up drugs and
my profession of countercultural values—they were perhaps right to
be scared, and right to look for a remedy. But an actual rehabilitation
center? Surrounded by people who'd actually used drugs? What had I
done!

Operation Re-Entry's name came from the early days of the space
program; the term described the process of a space capsule burning
its way through the atmosphere in order to get back down to earth. We
were told at that first meeting that most of the staff members were
former junkies themselves—they knew every single tactic, every lie or
con, that any of us might use to try to get away with anything. And by
the time they were done with us, they pledged, we were not only going
to be completely drug-free, we would never again do
anything
unlawful, not even jaywalk.

You'd think that being yanked out of my comfortable routine and
slammed into a rehab center's restrictive regimen would have brought
me up short—taught me a lesson or, at the very least, bred some
caution into my tendency to resist authority. But no. After only a
month in the program, in a group session, I had to confess ("cop to," in
Center terminology) that I'd once again tried pot; in the same group, a
boy named Matt confessed as well, and we quickly become closest
friends (a case of misery loving company, I guess).

Anyone who broke Center rules (and there were
many
rules) was
promptly brought up sharp with a "learning experience"—a public
punishment specifically designed to humiliate and humble the
offender, and edify the others. My punishment, and Matt's, was swift
and painful: We each had to wear a sign around the neck that read, "I
bite the hand that feeds me. Please help me." Matt also had to have his
head completely shaved. Fortunately, girls were spared that indignity;
instead, I was given an ugly stocking cap to wear. In those days, and in
Miami, it was not a fashion statement.

My mortification wasn't limited to the sign and the ugly hat: I was
also sentenced to scrub the Center's stairs—with a toothbrush—while
everyone walked around and past me. "You've missed a spot," a staff
member would snarl. "Go back to the bottom and start over. This
place has to be clean. Every single step. I don't want to see a single
speck of dirt when you're through." And, since a key component of this
punishment was learning to keep my mouth shut and do what I was
told, it was forbidden that I respond to staff in any way—no excuses,
no defenses. Down on my hands and knees, hunched over, trying
desperately not to be seen, if I could have somehow willed the floor to
open up and swallow me, I would have.

Perhaps worse than any of this, I was officially shunned by the
other members of my program as part of the punishment. They were
told to turn away from me, to speak quietly only to one another, never
to me, until such time as the staff instructed them otherwise. I'd
always been happy to have friends, happy to be one; now, I was a
pariah, an outcast, isolated yet on display at the same time—the sinner
locked up in the stocks in the town square. And it would stay like that
until the staff was convinced I'd learned my lesson. Then and only
then would I have earned the right to be "restored to the community"
of the Center.

This hell lasted two weeks, a nausea-producing time of going to
"regular" high school during the day, trying to stay focused on my
schoolwork, then abruptly changing gears to go to the Center to be
humiliated, then going home at night, exhausted and tense and
unspeakably angry at what my parents had sentenced me to.

Ultimately, of course, the learning experience did what it was
intended to do: I never used illicit drugs again. And the underlying
process (which I didn't understand then, but do now) of breaking my
spirit and rebuilding it to someone else's specifications had begun.

Although I was back in good standing, I grew somewhat quiet and
withdrawn—"in myself," as I came to call it when it had become much
more extreme. Unless spoken to, I didn't have much to say; I wasn't
sure I even deserved to be heard. I'd started to believe (or, perhaps
more correctly,
feel
), that speaking was actually "bad." At one point,
after I'd been asked to make a brief presentation and did so, a staff
member remarked that I had spoken more in those few minutes than I
had in months. Perhaps this was the beginning of my estrangement
from the world, the very first inkling of my illness, something I'd never
really experienced before, and a habit of mind that would
intermittently mark me for the rest of my life.