Prozac Nation (7 page)

I explain the same thing to everybody: It all seems pointless in light of the fact that we're all going to die eventually. Why do anything—why wash my hair, why read
Moby Dick,
why fall in love, why sit through six hours of
Nicholas Nickleby,
why care about American intervention in Central America, why spend time trying to get into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me I'm already gone.

No one seems willing to ask what I mean by that, which is a good thing because I don't know. It's not that I'm fixing to die any time soon, but my spirit seems to have already retreated to the netherworld, and I figure, Hey, how much longer does my body have? People talk about the way disembodied spirits roam the world with no place to park themselves, but all I can think is that I am a dispirited body, and I'm sure there are plenty of other human mollusk shells roaming around, waiting for some soul to fill them up. At any rate, I don't really explain what I mean when I talk about death, but I am keenly aware that I am frightening people more than a little bit, and I realize that this is the only small delight I get anymore: knowing that others worry, watching them get this sad, discouraged look on their face, like, Shit, bring in the professionals. I take pleasure in the pain I cause others: My life has become a tearjerker movie, and I am glad to be having the calculated effect.

My mother cries when she sees my report card. Ellie, what's happening to you? she asks. She cries some more.
My baby! What's happened to my baby?
She calls Dr. Isaac and asks why he can't make me better faster. She goes to see him, and pretty soon she's so crazy from dealing with me that she's a patient of his too.

By now I have an entire secret life that my mother either doesn't know or doesn't want to know about: Several days a month I wake up in the morning and get dressed to go to school, but instead I take my knapsack and head over to the local McDonald's, drink tea and eat an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, wait until my mother has left for work at 9:00, and then I go back home and get into bed for the rest of the day. Sometimes I go to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and read old articles about Bruce Springsteen on microfilm. I am particularly proud that I've found the stories from the week of October 5, 1975, when Bruce had appeared on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
simultaneously. But mostly I watch the ABC lineup of soap operas, from
All My Children
to
One Life to Live
to
General Hospital,
lying blissfully under the covers in my mother's bed the whole time.

Sometimes I lie in my own bed and listen to music for hours. Always Bruce Springsteen, which is weird, I have to admit, because I'm becoming this really urban punked-out kid, and he is kind of the spokesman of the rumpled, working-class suburbs. But I identify with him so completely that I start to wish I could be a boy in New Jersey. I try to convince my mother that we should move out there, that she should work in a factory or as a waitress in a roadside diner or as a secretary at a storefront insurance office. I want so badly to have my life circumstances match the oppressiveness I feel internally. It all starts to seem ridiculous: After all, Springsteen songs are about getting the hell
out
of the New Jersey grind, and here I am trying to convince my mom that we ought to get
into
it. I'm figuring, if I can just become poor white trash, if I can just get in touch with the blue collar blues, then there'll be a reason why I feel this way. I will be a fucked-up Marxian worker person, alienated from the fruits of my labor. My misery will begin to make sense.

That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

The idea that a girl in private school in Manhattan could have problems worth this kind of trouble seemed impossible to me. The concept of white, middle-class, educated despair just never occurred to me, and listening to rock and roll all day was probably no way to discover it. I didn't know about Joni Mitchell or Djuna Barnes or Virginia Woolf or Frida Kahlo yet. I didn't know there was a proud legacy of women who'd turned overwhelming depression into prodigious art. For me there was just Bruce—and the Clash, the Who, the Jam, the Sex Pistols, all of those punk bands talking about toppling the system in the U.K., which had nothing to do with being so lonesome you could die in the U.S.A.

Maybe I could have picked up a guitar myself and written some rants of my own, but somehow the Upper West Side of Manhattan as a metaphor for lost and embittered youth was not nearly as resonant as Springsteen's songs about hiding in the back streets or riding the Tilt-A-Whirl or the sound of a calliope on the Jersey Shore. Nothing about my life seemed worthy of art or literature or even of just plain life. It seemed too stupid, too girlish, too middle-class. All that was left for me to do was shut down and enter the world of Bruce Springsteen, of music about people from somewhere else, for people doing something else, that would just have to do, because for the moment, for me, there was nothing else.

I think to myself: I have finally gotten so impossible and unpleasant that they will really have to do something to make me better And then I realize, they think they are doing all they can and it's not working. They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am. They will have to do more and more and more. They think the psychiatrist ought to be enough, they think making the kind of cursory efforts any parents make when their kid is slipping away will be enough, but they don't know how enormous my need is. They don't know how much I will demand of them before I even
think
about getting better. They do not know that this is not some practice fire drill meant to prepare them for the real inferno, because the real thing is happening right now.
All the bells say: too late.
It's much too late and I'm so sure that they are still not listening. They still don't know that they need to do more and more and more, they need to try to get through to me until they haven't slept or eaten or breathed fresh air for days, they need to try until they've died for me. They have to suffer as I have. And even after they've done that, there will still be more. They will have to rearrange the order of the cosmos, they will have to end the cold war, they will have to act like loving, kind adults who care about each other, they will have to cure hunger in Ethiopia and end the sex-slave trade in Thailand and stop torture in Argentina. They will have to do more than they ever thought they could if they want me to stay alive. They have no idea how much energy and exasperation I am willing to suck out of them until I feel better. I will drain them and drown them until they know how little of me there is left even after I've taken everything they've got to give me because I hate them for not knowing.

 

While I am unraveling in the slow, tedious manner of a knotted, tangled ball of yarn that's been clawed and twisted and gnarled by a whole bunch of mean, feverish cats, my mom is pretty much refusing to acknowledge that any of this is happening. She's sending me to therapy and all, but she's still taking me along with her to family events like baseball games on Father's Day; she's still sending me to summer camp, drug overdose or no, she's still expecting me to behave myself at the dinner table; she's still treating me like her favorite prop or carry-on accessory. Anyone else can plainly see that it might be better if I were holed up in a hospital, somewhere where it wouldn't seem odd for me to walk out in the middle of
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
to slash up my legs, somewhere where no one would find it weird that every so often I would run out of the room and howl in a state of hysteria while all the normal people would pretend it wasn't happening.

In retrospect, maybe my mother did the right thing: By treating me like a normal kid, like her perfect baby, maybe she kept me from falling down further. After all, by forcing me to participate in real life, she might have prevented me from indulging and wallowing in a depression that might have been even more bottomless and intractable than the one I was experiencing. I have no way of knowing what might have happened had she viewed the situation differently. I'll never know. She was the kind of mother who believed in pulling a Band-Aid off fast, getting over the pain in a snap; but she seemed resigned to let this depression drag on for years, to let this particular bandage come off slowly. Of course, she would never see it that way: She wanted the pain to be over really quickly in this case too, but she seemed to think that ignoring it would make it go away (Band-Aids sometimes do fall off by themselves). So mostly I remember having this nagging, gnawing feeling that I wished she would just let me be as bad as I was. I wished she'd let me sink way down low in front of her, let slide the need to maintain appearances just long enough for me to bottom out and get the kind of help Dr. Isaac was never going to give me. It was as if my therapy sessions with the doctor were one big buffer zone, a dopey palliative that would keep me afloat but would never really allow me to land in the depth of my despair. And I was starting to want to know the worst, I wanted to know how bad it could get.

But she wanted to keep things as good as they could be. We'd always been a team, we'd always been so close, I'd always been her date for the kinds of occasions other women brought their husbands to, I'd always been her best friend—and it seemed that by cracking up I was letting her down. Failing her. I always felt a sense of responsibility toward her—I often felt like the oldest son of a recently widowed woman who is incapable of, say, programming her VCR by herself—and it made me feel extremely restricted in the range of negative emotions I was able to express. I could skip school, I could get lousy grades, I could hide in the girls' locker room for hours, but I could never completely drop out, I could never lose my mind to the point where they'd have to send me away to a loony bin or some place for juvenile defectives because
my mother would not he able to survive such a personal debacle.
She barely wanted to know about the extent of the despair I was able to experience. You should be telling this stuff to Dr. Isaac, she'd say every time I tried to talk to her about my depression. It's not that she was insensitive—sometimes she actually would try to talk to me about why I was like I was—but she just couldn't stand it when I'd explain that nothing at all was wrong, that it was just a matter of everything. She'd want me to be specific: Is this because your father and I don't get along? She'd want me to toss her some solution-oriented problem. She seemed to think I was like a quadratic equation, but the lack of a clear, discernible task to work with made her too crazy.

One night, very late, she walked into my bedroom to find me lying face down on my shag carpet with a set of big, bulbous earphones on, listening to a live bootleg of a Bruce Springsteen tune called “The Promise,” and bawling because everything about the desolation of the song seemed so terribly true (the last line was something like, “We're gonna take it all, and throw it all away”). She started screaming at me, telling me she couldn't stand any more of this craziness, demanding that I explain to her right now what exactly was wrong.
What what what?
I just sat there, crying, blank, nothing to say, and she kept demanding that I tell her something, and I think in frustration I might have just said, Oh, Ma, you're looking at all the trees, and I'm not even in the forest. And then she went to her room, smoked a cigarette, watched the eleven o'clock news, fell asleep with the blue light of the television still on, feeling completely helpless.

After a while, it was always like this: I'd be lying helpless in my room, she'd be lying helpless in hers, there was nothing we could do to make each other feel better, and the whole apartment seemed stuck in some miserable detente.

 

Does that make any sense? Is it possible that I didn't collapse, become incapacitated, a nonfunctioning mental case of the catatonic kind, because
my mother wouldn't let me?
I mean, when people just flat out fall apart, when they get into the kind of state where they think they're talking to angels and they sleep barefoot in the park in the middle of winter, it's not as if they
got permission
to be that way. They are that way because they can't help it. Had I been far enough gone, I'd have gone there too. Right?

Maybe. Maybe not. The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you're still at the point when you're even just barely going through the motions—showing up at work, paying the bills—you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge depression in ourselves or those close to us—better known these days as
denial,
is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out of a window, you don't have a problem. But this does not take into account the socioeconomic factors, the existence of guilt, of a disciplined moral conscience, or in my case, an understanding of my mother's precarious, delicate nature—which placed definite limits on how much rope I had to hang myself. My mother and I had switched roles so often—I helped her pick out boyfriends after the divorce, soaked her cigarettes in water so that she couldn't smoke, or told her, as she sat bawling in the kitchen because she had just lost a job and was scared we'd be broke, that I was sure everything would be all right—and I was afraid to abandon the parental responsibility I felt for her. I knew the limits of the people who were close to me, and in my worst downs, I was ever more attuned to them. Depression gave me extreme perspicacity; rather than skin, it was as if I had only thin gauze bandages to shield me from everything I saw.