Madness (14 page)

The fact of the matter is that Jeremy likes my drinking. And he likes the fact that I'm crazier than hell. This pattern is now an old one with the guys I get involved with, most recently, before Jeremy, with Julian. For one thing, when it's good, life with me is a constant party. We drink all the time. He fills my glass as fast as I can empty it. I'm excited, exciting, full of ideas and energy, great to be around. And then I go too far—I drink too much, he holds me up, laughing, as I stagger, go into deep funks, and he comforts me and makes it all go away. My drinking and my crazies are my weakness. He exploits this to the hilt. It gives him something on me. When he comes home after work to find me lying in bed,
Oh, honey, are you all right?
And he strokes my hair.
Why don't you have some Klonopin. Here.
Even better, when he's not playing the savior, he's playing the saint: whenever we fight, it's my fault. I was drunk, or I was crazy, or both. He's untouchable. He screams at me until I'm a crumpled mass on the floor. I give in. He's right. I'm a fuckup.
I'm sorry,
I say.
I'll get better,
I say. And suddenly he's all care and kindness, bent over me, picking me up, rocking me in his
arms.
There, there.
I cling to him, pathetic, humiliated, grateful that he's still there. I don't deserve him. He's too good.

I put my head down on the table and cry. Because it's happened again. I'm found out. I'm damaged. Fucked up. Broken. A fraud. I knew he would figure out sooner or later that I was impossible to love. And now he has, and I love him, and I'm certain he has tried, really tried, to love me back. But trying to love me is too much for any sane person to bear. I watch their backs, one by one, as they walk away.

Right now — here in the middle of an endless breakup, close to deadline on a book that isn't half finished, soaked in booze, partying all the time, taking off on sudden cross-country trips without telling anyone where I've gone—right now is the perfect time for me to go back to college.

I never graduated during those years I was studying in Minneapolis and Washington. I was working too much, and spent too much time crazy. I'm embarrassed by my lack of a degree, and I hear about a tiny little school with a degree in poetics. Perfect. As weird and obscure as possible. And it's all about books.

If there's one thing that mania is good for, it's school.

Racing off to the funky, rundown pink building in the Mission District every morning, I'm happy as can be, clinging to this lifeboat, something that shakes me out of my creeping afternoon torpor, evens out—at least a little bit—my careening moods. I can bury myself in centuries of poetry and philosophy, I can write hundreds of papers, do research, I can pour out poetry, I can argue and debate and critique. Given the fact that I've been in college for about a hundred years, I'm taking all graduate classes, and they hire me to teach a few undergrad classes. Here, outside the terrifying San Francisco
scene,
it doesn't matter if I'm playing the player well enough. There is no
kiss kiss.
I can just be a crazy writer. And I can get caught up in the drunken, roaring, arguing, fucking,
scribbling bunch of lunatics who go to this school. Out with the martinis. In with the bottle of whiskey, no glass. In with the day full of lectures, workshops, writing, the evenings spent at dive bars where we get plastered, shouting and laughing and pompously quoting at length, in with the all-night weekend parties, the tumbling conversation, the impromptu poem, the fucking in the back room, whoever's nearby, the empty bottles that litter the place, the promising writers, the next generation of poets passed out on the floor.

I love it. I love the school, the work, the way it's making my poetry better, the piles of reading I carry home every night and spend hours poring over in my closet, the pages stained with ashes and red wine. I work like mad. I spend less and less time with the old shiny scene or even my close friends. I work so hard I think I'll die. My brain physically hurts at the end of the night. It's an incredible high. This is how it should be. Once again, I have a future. The hours writing and in school let me ignore, for a little while, the lifelong feeling of failure. Because, no matter what other people might think when they look at my life, I can't see, have never been able to see, anything like success. It doesn't matter what I do, what I publish, what the critics say, what people tell me. None of it feels like mine. Nothing I've ever done feels real. It's as if books and articles have just sprouted up in my house one morning, someone else's, mistakenly bearing my name. That's one of the reasons I've gone back to college. Finally, maybe I'll believe I can really do something. I want a degree.
Then
I'll feel real.

And finally, here at this weird little school, with these people who fancy themselves mad geniuses, I'm not about to be exposed as a fuckup, a hopeless crazy freak.

High-functioning
is a qualified term. At school, sure, I'm functioning at a very high level.
Nonfunctional
would better describe the rest of my life. By now, Jeremy has moved out, and left to my own devices, I've completely devolved. I haven't done laundry in a month—scared of the laundry room, for some reason—and the
pile of laundry in the closet towers over my head. Cleaning products are scary lately, so can't clean the house. The overdue bills pile up on my desk, unopened. I am afraid of all grocery stores except one, so I skulk through that one to the deli, buy two kinds of pâté and several kinds of cheese—eating anything other than these two things is somehow complicated and intimidating—and then rush out to the parking lot, dive into my car, and drive home as fast as I can. Often enough, though, I get lost in a city that's not even fifty miles square and just not that complicated, but my mind starts racing, repeating street names in a singsong in my head, the stoplights and flashing
W
A
L
K
signs confuse me, one-ways confuse me, and I wind up crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and back several times before I shut the door behind myself and pour myself a drink, shaking, wild with relief. Jeremy comes over every now and then; we fuck, fight, part screaming and are broken up again. I cry, laugh my head off, race around the apartment, organize my books by color and size, reorganize them by genre, try on all the clothes in my closet and throw them on the floor, jet into my closet-office and pour out a furious poem, laugh with triumph, shred it up in despair—I drink heavily throughout—write again, whipping open the books I'm supposed to be reading and flipping through the pages until I find the
one quote,
the
perfect quote,
and, crowing with glee, e-mail it to a friend, who writes back,
Where the hell are you? Where have you been?
But I'm currently occupied by studying the grain of the wood floor on which I am lying, face-down, consumed by a fog of self-hatred. All is darkness and desolation. Drunk as a skunk, my mood swinging down fast, I stumble to bed, crawl in fully dressed, and squeeze my eyes against the parade of bloody images that fills my head until I fall asleep.

I still haven't made the connection between my drinking and the maniacal swings of my mood. I don't see the chaos around me as moods. I see it as a chaotic life that I'm simply too weak to manage well. And, for that matter, I more than welcome the highs, and
the fact that the alcohol makes them even higher. And the lows, the screaming fits that morph into deep despair and back up again, the terrifying flights of fantasy, the inability to control my impulses? That's all just me being my usual fuckup self. I think the alcohol is
helping
me manage my life.

Still, I'm a little
stressed.
So when I finally decide to see a therapist, bipolar hardly crosses my mind. I want a therapist who can help me deal with all this stress and tell me how to manage it. Maybe I have
low self-esteem.
Maybe I'm not finished
working through my issues
with my parents. What I want is to become the kind of person who can pay her bills, do her laundry, clean her house,
and
go to school full-time,
and
teach,
and
do research,
and
publish,
and
write a spectacular novel,
and
have a perfect relationship,
and
be the life of the party, and, okay, maybe not drink
quite
so much,
and, and, and.
I want to be superwoman, and the fact that I'm not makes me hate myself and constantly wonder why I'm such a waste. The problem is that my life is chaotic. If there were no chaos in my life, there'd be no chaos in my head.

So I look up a psychiatrist in the phone book, and off I go.

Another waiting room, this one in a ritzy office in a wealthy part of San Francisco—tree-lined streets of little boutiques, bistros, salons, crowded with people in excellent shoes who have nowhere better to be in the middle of the day. This psychiatrist charges a mint and doesn't take insurance. Her office is a study in expensive furniture and fabric; soothing tans and creams prevail. The first visit, she puts me back on a hefty dose of Depakote, the med
Lentz had me on in Minneapolis, and she also gives me a generous prescription for Klonopin, the tranquilizer he gave me to "take the edge off" the anxiety.

"I'm telling you I'm losing my mind. I can't take this," I say, pacing in her sunny office, tapping my nails on the walls, playing with the plants.

"What, precisely, can't you take?" She's very tall, extremely well dressed, and exceptionally poised. Her poise makes me a little insane.

"I can't take these fucking
mood swings!
It never stops! I'm all over the fucking map!" I fling myself onto the couch, then fling myself up again and pace some more, gripping my head in my hands.
"Aaaagh!"
I yell under my breath, keeping my voice down, trying to hold still. She makes me incredibly nervous, sitting there smiling her mild smile. "And I can't take the anxiety. It feels like something is wrapping around my chest and squeezing. I can't breathe. My heart's racing. My thoughts are spinning. I can't keep up with them. It's all right when I'm writing, or when I'm at school. But the minute I'm alone again, the thoughts start up. I can't
see
for all the thoughts. I'm terrified all the time."

"Are you taking your Klonopin?"

"
Yes!
It doesn't help!"

"Maybe you aren't taking enough of it."

Klonopin's a benzodiazepine, and those can be very addictive. I used to love it, when it still worked. It was like mainlining a drink, the mellow calm instantaneous and complete. Now I have to take handfuls for it to even make a dent, and the last thing I want to do is run out. If she says I'm not taking enough, by all means, bring it on.

"How much can I take?" I ask, perking up.

"Take as much as you need," she says, waving her hand. "I'll write you a prescription for more."

"But it doesn't seem to matter how much I take," I groan. "It
wears off too fast. As soon as it wears off, the thoughts start up again and I get all panicky." I want something that will knock me flat and keep me there until the world goes away.

"More should help. Just take it whenever you feel the anxiety coming on. And it's important that you don't forget to take it. If you miss a dose, you could go into withdrawal. It acts on the same neuroreceptors as alcohol," she says.

"So I might as well just have a drink," I say, finding this a little odd.

"It won't be as strong," she says. "Take the Klonopin."

"Speaking of drinking." I sigh and fall back on the couch. "I went to an AA meeting the other night."

"Why?"

"My friends talked me into it. They keep telling me I'm an alcoholic." I click my nails against my teeth. "Obviously I'm not an alcoholic," I say, rolling my eyes. "But I'm drinking an awful lot." Not that I want to stop. I have, however, begun to notice the vast difference between the way I drink and the way everyone else drinks. And everyone else in my life drinks quite a lot.

"I don't think you have a problem." She dismisses this with a sniff.

"I got alcohol poisoning again the other night," I say. "I was still drunk when I showed up to give a lecture. And I still wasn't sober when I got to the AA meeting."

"So you had a little too much to drink. It happens. How much did you drink?"

"There were four bottles of wine in the trash the next day. And I'd already been drinking before I started in on the wine."

"Well, you don't
always
drink that way," she says.

"Yes I do."

"Really, how often do you drink?" she says.

"Every day."

"Lots of people have a drink every evening."

"That's true," I say, reassured. "So you don't think I have a problem?"

"I think that's a little melodramatic," she says, raising an eyebrow at me. "Listen, I wouldn't work with you if I thought you had a drinking problem."

"Well,
that's
good," I say. "I knew my friends were just overreacting."

"So what else is going on?" she asks.

"School is great. Everyone is completely brilliant. The classes are brilliant. The professors are brilliant. I'm sleeping with my professor. He's brilliant."

"You're sleeping with him?"

"Jeremy and I broke up. I can sleep with whoever I want."

"Who else are you sleeping with?"

"Oh, a few people here and there. No one in particular."

"These are one-night stands?"

"No," I huff, "I wouldn't call them that." I am dropping into beds left and right. I'm juggling half a dozen sometime-lovers and it's not enough. Periodically, I dismiss the entire cast of characters and start looking anew.

"Well, it sounds like things are going really well," she says, looking at her watch.

"They're not." I suddenly feel very small. I gaze at the expensive cream-colored carpet. "I can't deal with it," I nearly whisper. "It's too much. It's going too fast."

"What is? What do you mean?" She sighs. She has that here-we-go-again tone.