Loud in the House of Myself (14 page)

On a Sunday, after the final matinee, our stage crew began to tear down the set. I watched the walls that had held me safe dismantled before my eyes. Burke, my deity, walked out into the parking lot, got into his brown Nissan, and, just that easily, my latest God was gone. I walked home alone, carrying the wilting flowers that had adorned my dressing room table. They seemed sad, so I didn’t want to throw them away. I thought I’d dry them and hang them over my bed like an upside-down shrine.

At home, I left the vases on my bedroom floor while I ran a bath. It wasn’t until I saw the sticky fake blood redden the water that I realized I couldn’t get clean enough. I wanted anything that would remind me of the show off of me. I wanted to wash away Burke’s last hug and admit to myself that he was at home right now without me, that I wasn’t really going to be his lover. I felt stupid for having had such a crush on him. He hadn’t taken me home that night to hold next to him in bed, hadn’t even hugged me any longer than he’d hugged Mother Miriam or Dr. Livingstone, hadn’t said any special goodbyes. I turned on the shower, clutched my knees to my chest, and cried as the bathtub filled. I could scald my skin, pelt myself with hot-needle rain, abrade my flesh with all the loofahs in the world, it didn’t matter, I wasn’t Agnes anymore.

I turned the shower off. I opened the drain. My fake blood whirlpooled away like spilled jewels. I left soggy footprints on the bedroom carpet because drying off seemed like a ridiculous waste of time.

I made a ring of flowers around me and fell asleep hugging my script. When I woke up, some of its blue cover had rubbed off on my breasts, there was turquoise morning light, my teeth were chattering, and the blooms all around me had turned to brown. But I still hadn’t let go.

Burke never cast me again. There was always some new girl; he picked us like hopeful daisies. When it was Polly’s turn—when she was cast in a Neil Simon play, offered a role to which Dana had insisted on referring, for weeks beforehand, as “the Stacy Pershall role”—I seethed for days. I
knew
I was better. After all, Polly’s voice cracked and squeaked from her constant smoking, she couldn’t enunciate, and she wasn’t an actress anyway, she was a
playwright
. But what really killed me was what Burke said to me just after the audition.

I was bouncing around in the hallway, trying to burn off some excess energy so I could be focused in case he asked me to read again, when I felt his presence behind me. I smelled him first, Old Spice and Marlboros. I tried to turn around coolly, not to let him see that when he stood so close it made me shake.

“Stacy,” he said, “who would
you
cast?”

ME
, my brain screamed,
me me me, because I love you and I need another chance to make you fall in love with me
. But I knew he was telling me he’d decided on someone else. “Polly?” I choked.

He nodded. “You and I have had our bond. With
Agnes
.”

He walked away to write the cast list.

For the next six weeks, as they rehearsed, I swallowed furious tears when I saw him call Polly into his office. I ached to know what went on behind that door. One day, I saw her follow him inside, and because there happened not to be anyone else around at the moment, I crept up to the door and pressed my ear against it.

Behind a closed door, a man old enough to know better proved that he did not. And on the other side, I learned one of life’s most important lessons: When you find your gods are fallible, the best thing to do is forget.

ON MY LEFT
calf I have a tattoo of an old-timey telephone made of bones. Around it, in elaborate four-color curlicue script, it says,
Wait! Don’t answer it!

This one came about when Denise became obsessed with the “missed connections” section of Craigslist. One night she called me and said, “Listen to this one. This girl moved into an apartment where an old man died. Now when she comes home at night, her underwear is scattered all over her bedroom, and she thinks his ghost is responsible. So her ad says, ‘Me: girl who pays $1,500 a month to live here. You: guy who answered the bone phone and needs to move on.’” Denise, being easily entertained, is always up for a new euphemism for death.

For the next several months, whenever she calls me and I don’t answer, she leaves messages in a voice I think is her attempt at an impression of Vincent Price: “Fiend! It’s a good thing you didn’t answer, because this is the bone phone! If you had answered it, you would have turned into bones and died! Or died and turned into bones! Whichever!”

I was sick, and getting sicker. By the spring of 1993, the end of my senior year, I was existing on peanut butter Cap’n Crunch and blue Kool-Aid, exercising several hours a day, barely sleeping, and still living with Polly in our wood-paneled house saturated with the smell of cigarette smoke and, on rainy days, the previous tenant’s dog. I was completely nuts, and had long since stopped getting cast in plays—as Burke said, I was “too volatile.” I had stopped seeing Phil sometime in my sophomore year, because I knew I was going
really truly crazy,
and since he had described me (actress me, when I ran into him once in an up period) as one of his “success stories,” I knew I couldn’t bear to let him down. I stopped seeing the one person who was perhaps best equipped to help me, because I didn’t want him to know I needed help.

The theater department consisted, at that point, of a few people who somehow, inexplicably, liked me, and a lot who, with good reason, thought I was a narcissistic anorexic brat. In truth, I was needy, desperate, and hyperactive, utterly terrified of slowing down and facing the emptiness inside me. Those who counted themselves among my few friends (bless them) became my emergency support system by default. They, like my parents, were exhausted by my constant flitting into and out of therapy (with a string of frightened psychology grad students at the university counseling center, who largely just sat there while I rattled off my Brilliant Plans at breakneck speed or wailed inconsolably about my latest breakup), my total refusal of all psychiatric medications after a bad experience with lithium, and the constant drama that surrounded me everywhere I went.

One night, our secrets about Burke still unspoken, Polly sat at the kitchen table smoking and reading a magazine. I had developed a habit of tensing one calf muscle over and over again, or both calf muscles like
right left right left right,
or tapping the floor with one pinkie toe and then the other. I imagined that my taps were drawing figure eights on the floor, then I imagined the figure eights catching fire.

Polly kept looking at me.

“What?”

“Stop shaking the table.”

I huffed, got up, poured myself some blue Kool-Aid, sat back down, tried not to tap. She looked up at me again.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“I’m reading something that makes me think of you.” She paused, studying my face as if trying to determine just how far over the edge telling me what she thought might push me. “Have you ever heard of borderline personality disorder?”

As a matter of fact, I had, and when she said it I felt something in me plummet. I read psychology books all the time in the campus bookstore, instead of going to Western Civ, and tried to figure out what was wrong with me. I had practically memorized the entirety of the Axis I and Axis II diagnoses in the DSM. I knew about borderline personality disorder, and I know it couldn’t be cured. I knew that psychiatrists often refused to treat borderline patients because they were hopeless.

“Nope, never heard of it,” I said. “What is it?”

She read me the diagnostic criteria. “I’m just saying,” she said, trying with all her might to put it gently, obviously afraid of my reaction, “that it sounds a lot like you.”

“Hmm,” I said, and continued tapping. “I don’t really think so.”

“Okay,” she said, though I knew she thought it was not okay at all.

In the spring of 1993 everyone was watching me fall apart. Part of me, shamefully, liked it. It seemed such a natural thing to do, finally attempting suicide. The time had come, and I knew it. All I needed was a definite preceding event, a point in the drama in particular need of punctuation.

Given that my life was, by that point, constant, high-pitched drama, I didn’t have to wait long for the big moment. Having filled the void where a self should have been with one acting role after another, I auditioned with a desperation that led to my not getting cast at all. I was seen as the talented but deal-breakingly unstable girl, and none of my professors or fellow students wanted to work with me. My careening moods, which caused very real pain and anguish—often evidenced by frequent and inappropriate crying fits in class, over such travesties as not being able to learn lines for an assigned scene—were seen as cries for attention, something over which I had control. I had a job waiting tables but was abysmal at it, too overstimulated, frantic, and distractible to keep up with refilling water and turning orders in to the kitchen.

The one thing I was living for, my last semester in college, was my move to Ohio that summer. I had auditioned at a regional festival in the fall and been selected as one of ten acting interns for the ’93–’94 season at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, which I viewed as The Big City. I wanted to believe that as soon as I got out of Arkansas everything would be fine, that my mental illness was due solely to being misunderstood by rednecks, which they certainly would not have just across the river from Kentucky. I struggled in vain to keep it together enough to finish my last few classes and function well enough at my job to save money for my move.

The downfall: I couldn’t control my temper. Having inherited my father’s white-hot rage, I did two things within a week’s time that gave me ample reason to attempt suicide: I yelled at my boss, in the middle of a full dining room, that he was a jackass, and was justifiably fired, and I tried to run over a group of student parking attendants for giving me a ticket I didn’t feel I deserved. One of the things I’ve read about borderlines is that we alternate between a sense of entitlement and the belief that we’re lower than the dirt under people’s shoes. I felt I should be allowed to park in a no-parking zone because it was in the theater lot, and I was a theater major. Angry that these freshmen with ticket pads didn’t see my logic, I swerved at them as I drove out of the lot. Brought before the university disciplinary committee the following day, I argued that I didn’t really intend to hit them, I was just going to teach them a lesson. They told me they would have to discuss whether or not to expel me, and let me know that, had I not been two credits away from graduation with plans to move out of the state, they would not have needed to discuss it at all. When, the following day, I was fired from my job—my boss did not hesitate to use the word “crazy” when telling me why I was being dismissed—I went home and started taking pills.

I burst through the door and realized Polly wasn’t home, as evidenced by the fact that there was no smoke billowing from her room, and had a brief moment of hesitation over the fact that there was no one there to rescue me. It meant, however, that I could eat all her pills, all the antidepressant samples stashed in her kitchen cabinet (Polly, who also had a history of depression had a habit of seeing shrinks—M.D.’s who could prescribe drugs, not clinical psychologists like Phil—getting drugs, and discontinuing them at the first sign of side effects). Even though the thought of medication terrified me, I grabbed a box of Pamelor, popped out the capsules, and chewed them, tasting the bitter sandy grit as they turned to gelatinous goo in my mouth. I figured they’d hit my bloodstream faster that way; none of that time-release shit. I ate every pill in the cabinet, and as I stared at the pile of boxes and foil packs scattered at my feet, my vision began to blur. Dizzy, I stumbled toward the kitchen table, thinking that if I just crawled under it, if I just curled up in a ball, I would have a heart attack and die in peace, a compact little package Polly could tie up neatly and set by the curb with the rest of the garbage. I closed my eyes and floated, only vaguely aware of the front door opening and closing.

Concerned about my precarious mental state, Polly had come home between classes to check on me. When she found me unconscious, she crawled under the table screaming and shook me until I opened my eyes. I choked to her blurred image, in slurred sobs, that I had to die, that it hurt SO MUCH, that I could actually
feel
my brain and it was SORE and SURELY my nervous system would give out soon if she would just go away and let me stay there very still and very quiet. I told her I’d make sure to die with minimal noise and mess.

She said, “If you’re going to die, don’t you want to say goodbye to anyone? Surely you can stay alive long enough to do that. There must be someone.” I told her I wanted to see Burke.

In an act I will always view as one of the most selfless anyone has ever bestowed upon me, Polly drove me to Burke’s house. Maybe she called beforehand, maybe not. Maybe they lifted me into and out of the car. I do not remember walking. I wanted to be mothered, because my own mother would not do so. She was one of the people who thought I was behaving badly out of a need for attention, and we could no longer have a conversation without screaming. I lay my head on Burke’s lap in his dark, wood-paneled living room, pretending I didn’t know what I knew about him and Polly.

He was remarkably gentle. His hands were cool washcloths and Vicks VapoRub; his voice chicken soup and game shows. He wrapped me in a blanket and held me on the couch. I felt it was more than any doctor or hospital would do for me. Nonetheless, a hospital was exactly what he had in mind, and as I lay there apologizing and slipping in and out of sleep, Polly made the call.

They took me to Charter Vista, a private rehab hospital, the only place in town resembling a psych ward. I was the only patient who was not there to detox from alcohol or drugs. Charter was a veritable day spa compared to the hospitals I would see later, where incontinent schizophrenics flung wet diapers down the hallway and orderlies threatened shots of tranquilizers to make us behave, but it wasn’t equipped to handle a wailing, dissociating borderline under the influence of nothing stronger than coffee, sugar, and weeks of insomnia. Still, they were able to give me a paper cup of Navane, a powerful antipsychotic, and I spent the next eighteen hours passed out cold.

I came to and hit the ground running. I smoked up a storm, chatted up the addicts, bummed cigarettes, and elaborated upon the great novelty of the lighter embedded in the wall.
I can still stick my hand in there,
I said.
I can still burn myself
.
I can still do damage.
That afternoon, my hospital-issue shrink said to me, “Look, there is some belief around here that you’re manic.” This was fine with me. Being manic was way better than being borderline, which meant you were hopeless and incurable. I happily accepted manic. Years later, upon getting the records from that hospitalization, I saw that their diagnoses went like this: Axis I, Mood Disorders: Manic Depression. Axis II, Personality Disorders: Borderline. These words are written in the files of every psychiatrist I have seen since.

Here’s where the drugs come in. At Charter they commenced the fucking-with of the body chemistry, the advent of brown bottles and side effects. I stood on the edge of the diving board and the pool into which I would leap opened beneath me and its name was—deep breath—Ritalin. After a few days on Navane, I asked about the paradoxical effects of stimulants. In 1993, attention deficit disorder had just become a trendy diagnosis, so ADD drugs were fashionable as well. It was all over the news how stimulants could calm you down. They told me I could try it and know in an hour if it worked. I felt wired, but convinced myself I felt calm, in large part because I also knew that Ritalin caused weight loss. So I told my doctor I liked it, and he wrote me a prescription. This is how I, the manic girl, came to be given the drug whose generic name starts with
m-e-t-h
.

Because I had no health insurance, I couldn’t stay at Charter. After the seventy-two-hour waiting period was up, they kept me one more day for good measure, and then dismissed me and I was free to move to Cincinnati. Three days after that, armed with a fresh theater degree and a bottle of stimulants, I did.

ON THE WAY
to Cincinnati I hung my left arm, and occasionally my head, out the car window. I screamed Ramones lyrics into cornfields and I talked back to the late-night wackjob preachers. At 5 a.m., just across the Kentucky state line, I pulled over at a KOA Kampground and took a shower I had to pay for with quarters.

When my allotted burst of cold water ran out, I realized I’d forgotten to bring clothing or a towel. All I could do was run for it, across a damp field in the early morning, back to my Pontiac Sunbird with the overheating transmission, naked. Grass stuck to my wet legs and feet. The cows mooing in the nearby fields were not the same cows as the day before, and this made me delirious with joy. I clamped my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud and waking the campers. Water dripped from my breasts and my chin and the tangles of my hair. Back at the car I watered one little spot of the ground, changed it with my presence, while I dug in my backseat for something to cover myself.

I had just attempted suicide in Arkansas, and now it was four days later and I was standing naked in a field in Kentucky. I had left in my wake teachers, friends, and parents who were terrified for my safety. My mother, however, insisted it had all just been a bit of melodrama, and my father had been on the road driving his truck through the whole thing. I had slipped away before he could get Wal-Mart to let him come home.