Swish (7 page)

So when I read about a New York–based study of a new technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, I was intrigued. This was shortly after I started to lose my enthusiasm for cheerleading; maybe I could get it back, I thought, if I recalibrated my brain.

In many people with psychiatric problems, goes the idea behind TMS, certain areas of the brain are sluggish or hyperactive, but by aiming electromagnetic pulses at those areas, you can speed them up or slow them down. This is not electroconvulsive therapy, in which doctors anesthetize a patient and then send an electric shock through his or her entire brain strong enough to induce a seizure; TMS is much less drastic and more targeted.

The only problem was that I didn’t actually have the illness the study was investigating. The doctors were looking for people with major depressive disorder—the kind that can prevent you from feeding yourself and sometimes from bathing—and whatever was going on in my brain, it wasn’t that. Furthermore, people with OCD were specifically excluded, and though I didn’t have classical OCD, what I did have was certainly close enough to disqualify me.

However, I had exhausted all my other options, so I just signed up and lied through my teeth. True, they would be aiming the magnets at parts of my brain associated with a disorder I didn’t have, but hey, I thought, it’s not as if I can get any
worse,
so what do I have to lose?

At my entrance interview I therefore exaggerated my depressive symptoms as much as I could and left out my obsessive ones entirely. One of the first questions they asked, for example, was whether I woke up earlier than I needed to and whether, if so, I could go back to sleep. I did in fact wake up earlier than I needed to, generally at around eight or nine, which for people in the theater is the middle of the night, but I didn’t think that would be convincing enough, so I told them I usually woke up between four and six and was unable to get to sleep again. There were about thirty of these diagnostic questions, all of which I answered as haltingly as I could, dulling my affect and crying the first chance I got. That night they called me and said I was eligible for the study and could I start on Monday and I said yes definitely.

This turned out to be a bad idea.

First of all, TMS was very boring. I went every weekday over the course of two and a half months and sat in a chair for forty-five minutes with a machine the size of a large stereo component at my back. A flexible tube connected the machine to a little plastic hat, which sat just above the hairline on the left side of my head. Twice a minute, electromagnetic pulses from the plastic hat would poke at my scalp like a manic woodpecker for several seconds. The pulses were slightly painful for the first few minutes of the first day, but after that my nerve endings got used to them. The study protocol forbade me to read or fall asleep, and my head was immobilized, so I ended up staring at the Monet print on the wall and contemplating my own existence. This was not fun.

And what’s more, it didn’t do me any good. In fact, showing up every day and lying only made me exponentially more anxious. Compounding this anxiety was the repeat interview I had every two weeks; with each one it became increasingly difficult for me to keep track of my previous answers.
Crap,
I would think,
did I tell them last time that I had spent less than three hours a day in productive activity the previous week, or that I had spent more than three hours a day in productive activity but had had thoughts or feelings of incapacity, fatigue, or weakness?
Soon enough I
was
waking up between four and six every morning and unable to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t figure out whether to say that I was waking up between four and six every morning, which now had the virtue of being true, or that I was waking up between two and four every morning, which had the virtue of indicating that I was getting worse, which was also true. I ended up deciding on the latter, in case they could turn up the voltage or use a secret backup protocol that would
really
fix me, though I did worry that if my trajectory didn’t change I would soon have to claim to be waking up at eight-thirty in the evening. Unfortunately, they did not turn up the voltage, and if there was a secret backup protocol they never used it on me.

Before long the anxiety I had previously felt was as naught; I was filled with such terrifying dread every time the phone rang or someone asked me a question or I picked up a spoon that I became almost incapable of speech. Every morning, after sitting bolt upright at five with my heart pounding and unable to breathe, I cried for an hour and a half before waking my boyfriend up to comfort me—he
loved
this—until one day the understanding came crashing onto me in an instant that he wasn’t good enough for me (a medical student and a painter, he regularly said things like, “I can’t decide whether I want to join Doctors Without Borders after I graduate or run a gay community health center”). Since I couldn’t bear the guilt of keeping secrets, I faithfully reported this understanding and all its permutations to him. For a month and a half I would call him and he would say “Hi, how are you?” and I would say something like “I’m really anxious because I met somebody today I was very attracted to and I think you and I shouldn’t be together and that I should be dating a millionaire who speaks eight languages” and he would say “Okay, well, can we talk about that when we see each other tonight?” and when we saw each other that night I would sit in silence and watch episodes of
Law & Order,
not new ones because I couldn’t pay enough attention to take anything in, but old ones I’d already seen, but not old ones with Benjamin Bratt or Jesse L. Martin because the OCD was haunting me with a vengeance and I preferred to avoid situations that would fill my brain with racist slurs, and then my boyfriend would say “So do you want to talk about what you said earlier?” and I would say “No” and pace around the apartment hitting myself in the face and then I would fall asleep and sit bolt upright at five the next morning with my heart pounding and unable to breathe and start the whole thing over again except for the time when I decided the reason I had felt a little better after my last TMS session must have been that beforehand I’d taken a Benadryl at two in the morning and so I stayed up until two in the morning again and took another Benadryl and stared at the ceiling wishing I had never been born until it was time to get up.

This interfered somewhat with my ability to be an effective cheerleader.

I could still plaster the simulacrum of a smile onto my face, and I could still yell “Go, New York, let’s go!” But it took all my willpower to do even this much. I was able to wrench about 5 percent of my attention to eating and bathing and gesturing with pom-poms—all of which activities now required huge expenditures of psychic energy—while the rest of my brain devoured itself like an ouroboros. How could I put any real effort into a half extension when my mind was torturing itself to death?

And it wasn’t just the impossibility of concentration and the wishing I had never been born that got in the way (and the fever pitch my OCD reached in the midst of such a multi-ethnic group as Cheer New York); physical obstacles began to arise as well. At one practice I finally threw a round-off back tuck, which I celebrated by throwing three more, falling, and breaking my left hand. This meant that I had to cheerlead in the Gay Pride Parade in a cast. I was delighted to have suffered an actual sports injury and, even better, to have physical proof thereof. But after the cast came off, I no longer trusted my body, and I was never able to tumble with quite the same élan.

And then something else unexpected began to happen: heterosexual girls started joining the squad. As a rule I adore heterosexual girls, but these particular ones were three feet tall and twelve inches around, so when they joined they became flyers. This meant that I sat more and more often on the sidelines, watching as Laura and Katie and then Melanie and then Jessica were hurled higher into the air than I had ever reached. I hated Laura and Katie and Melanie and Jessica for this. I hated them even more because they had all been cheerleaders in college.
You had your chance already,
I thought bitterly.
Why are you taking mine away?
I tried basing once or twice, so as not to feel completely useless, but since I was all of two inches taller and thirteen pounds heavier than the actual flyers, my efforts did not inspire confidence. On top of this, the new flyers were all engaged in noble, self-sacrificing pursuits, so eventually I spent my practices bubbling over with venom for cute girls who worked in extended-care facilities for the developmentally disabled and spent their free time volunteering at homeless shelters. I leapt into nobody’s hands and nobody cradled me. Flying was for other people; I was earthbound.

Meanwhile, I finally felt so guilty about my manipulation of the TMS study that I confessed the truth to the doctors running it, who were unfazed. “Oh, okay,” they said. “That happens all the time. We design the studies to take it into account.” I sobbed with relief for three hours and the next morning I slept until six-thirty.

I went back on medication, and my anxiety and OCD subsided somewhat, and I no longer felt as if my body might fly apart at the slightest provocation. But I was a broken man. I lay on the couch in a blanket all day watching television and eating chocolate and unable to motivate myself, no matter how hard I tried, to pick up the piece of scrap paper on the floor by the window. I turned down every invitation I received. I didn’t answer the phone. I gave up cooking, I stopped going to the gym, I wrote nothing. I tried to make a will so I could commit suicide, but the whole process required far more energy than I was able to summon, so I gave up; I was too depressed to kill myself. Then I decided my medication was actually making me feel worse so I stopped taking it but didn’t tell my psychiatrist or my boyfriend. My final effort to feel better had failed, and now the only choice I had left was to live the rest of my life in unceasing torment.

I took a leave of absence from the cheerleading squad. I couldn’t bear watching other people soar through the air while I was unable to stop falling. Princess called and e-mailed several times to ask how I was doing but I did not answer his messages. Finally he sent me an e-mail that said, “I thought we were friends and I am OFFENDED at your actions. I’ve tried to get in touch MANY TIMES and you have never responded, so I will assume you don’t want to be on the squad anymore and I am REMOVING you from the squad list!!!!! Love, Princess.” I felt a dull twinge somewhere deep in my small intestine that resembled the ache I get when I find out I have made somebody angry at me, but mostly I was just relieved that my life had become even smaller.

(Though when I complained to my friend Jen about being kicked off the squad, she said, “Well, you weren’t actually kicked off the squad. You were just mean to it until it broke up with you.”)

Eventually I began to ease out of my despair, at least a little bit. I went to a birthday party for a friend and had a shadow of a good time. I switched psychiatrists, went back on medication, started writing again, returned a few calls. It took a Herculean effort to drag myself to the gym, but every once in a while I made it for my favorite aerobics class. I cooked my boyfriend dinner a couple times. I knitted a sweater for a collaborator’s newborn son. I bought a garbage can. Small accomplishments, yes, but when you are at the bottom of a pit, any movement toward the light is a victory.

A year passed, and my days were no longer the bleak emptiness they had seemed for a time. And I figured that, if I no longer wanted to throw myself in front of
every
passing subway train, then I had to be doing something right.

But I couldn’t go back to Cheer New York. One late October afternoon I sat down to draft an e-mail to Princess and explain the whole thing to him, but, as soon as I typed the salutation, the pixellated Garamond characters on my computer screen rearranged themselves to depict cheerleaders laughing and tumbling and sucking their teeth and the hateful Laura and Katie and Melanie and Jessica cheering altruistically and Andy and Gian about to throw somebody else into the air. I stared at the blank e-mail window for a long time and then I shut my computer off and went outside to get a Diet Mountain Dew.

As I walked toward the drugstore on the corner I looked up and saw several pigeons roosting in one of the trees lining the street. They looked at one another every once in a while but they didn’t coo and they didn’t fly anywhere. I stopped to watch them—according to the cashiers I was the only person who ever bought Diet Mountain Dew so it’s not like I was worried it would sell out—but they stayed put. I watched them for a long time and occasionally one of them took a couple steps or hopped a little bit but none of them left the tree, and I couldn’t decide whether it was because they didn’t want to or because they couldn’t. Eventually the sun set but I stood rooted to the sidewalk, looking up in the dark at the birds I could no longer see. Finally I went back home and went to sleep. I dreamed that I was falling, and in the dream my eyes were shut tight, because I didn’t want to open them and see that there was no one there to catch me.

O
N
C
AMP
C
AMP

O
ne afternoon near the middle of summer, the counselors at the Jewish Community Center Day Camp announced that the next day would be Backwards Day and that, in order to express our wild sides (we were six), we should show up dressed as unusually as possible. I could barely contain my excitement; I instantly began a mental list of funny ways to wear my clothing, and by the time I got home my parents had to talk me out of altering my mother’s wedding dress to make a pair of long, trailing socks.

I had thus far led a disappointingly typical camp experience—friends, rivals, crushes, just like everybody else—but I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with this state of affairs. I belonged in the center of attention. My attempt to get there by convincing my animal group to change its name from the Eagles to the South American Giant Anacondas had been thwarted by the other children’s cowardice, but I realized that with a striking enough Backwards Day ensemble I could thrust myself into the spotlight without needing to rely on anybody else. I got to camp the next day with my shirt on inside out, my hair disheveled and sprayed to immobility, my father’s shoes on the wrong feet, my mother’s makeup covering my face in bright geometric patterns, and my pants hiked up far enough to risk future sterility, only to find all the other kids wearing normal clothes. I’d misunderstood the counselors’ instructions; Backwards Day wasn’t until the next day, and today we were going on a field trip to the zoo.

The geometrically applied makeup almost hid the flush of my mortification. The other children didn’t act any differently than they usually did, but I knew that inside they were shrieking with laughter. At the bus’s first rest stop, one of the counselors helped me put my shirt on right side out and wiped the blush off my face. But my father’s shoes still dwarfed my feet, and my hair remained implacably stiff, and there was nothing to be done about the mascara. When we got to the zoo I gazed at the sullen hippopotamus and wished I could trade bodies with it in a feat of transmigratory sorcery, but the hippopotamus declined to cooperate, and when we went home at the end of the day I did not know how to face my parents and tell them what a failure I was.

One would think I had learned my lesson, but two weeks later I showed up a day early for Fifties Day, in a white T-shirt with a pack of my mother’s Merit Ultra Lights rolled into the shoulder and my hair slicked into a ducktail with an Elvis curl at the front.

Eventually camp ended and I went back to school, where I felt more at ease, because facts about the Paleolithic Era remained the same whether it was Wednesday or Thursday and whether I was dying inside or not. But even as the agony of Backwards Day began to fade I swore that before returning to any summer camp I would spend my vacation at a leper colony.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t counted on the stained glass.

One day a couple of years ago my friend Jennifer opened a drawer in her bureau and produced a stunning multicolored window and told me her girlfriend Lisa had made it at Camp Camp, a weeklong summer camp in Maine for gay people (and lesbians and bisexuals and transsexuals). I had not forgotten my leper-colony vow, but the stained glass ensorceled me; the integrity of my word was no match for the shiny colors. I would have done anything to be able to make such a window. I would have eaten dirt; I would have spoken to a child. Going to summer camp, therefore, was a burden I was happy to bear. Nevertheless, a part of me remained wary. Twenty-four years had passed since my JCC debacle, but what if the nightmare simply repeated itself? What if it was worse? Furthermore, this was sleepaway camp, so I didn’t even have the option of coming home and crying and putting on a brave face the next morning; it would be one continuous horror.

Jennifer tried to allay my fears. “We’re totally going back,” she said. “It’s a little bit like a cult. A warm and fuzzy cult. Everybody is incredibly happy to be there. It’s so supportive and positive.”

These words filled me with dread. In intimate conversation I am as supportive and positive as the next man, but gatherings of happy people make me miserable. I long to share in the collective joy, but instead I am racked with anxiety; this makes me feel with an exquisite keenness my sense of alienation from my fellow human beings and from the universe itself. It also makes me feel fat. Set such a gathering in a place with no air-conditioning or cable television and what you have is something akin to the burning wheel on which Ixion turns forever in Hades. But I figured that with enough Ativan I could get through anything, so I filled out the online form, sent in my fee, and crossed my fingers that everything would be all right.

Upon my arrival at the campsite, I made my way to my cabin, which was an actual log cabin that I had to walk through actual nature to get to, and saw a sign on the front that read
BARNEY FRANK
. All the Camp Camp cabins were named after famous homosexuals: Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Audre Lorde, Xena (technically not a homosexual), Tom Cruise (technically not a—oh, wait). I had not entered a log cabin for a quarter of a century; this one featured three-inch foam mattresses resting on slats of plywood. I claimed a bed, the bottom of a bunked pair, and was sorry to see that its previous (adolescent) occupants had not scrupled at graffiti. “Jenny thinks Bianca is cool!” one girl had scrawled in black marker. Next to it I read, “Emily thinks Bianca is cool too!” Another girl had written, “Bianca is hot sex in a bottle!” and despite the bubbly circle dotting the
i,
I suspected that here was someone who might grow up to be a Camp Camper herself. Off to the side I saw, in a different color, an understated “Ashley slept here.” I pictured Ashley, trying to fall asleep at night, listening to Jenny and Emily compete for Bianca’s favor and wondering why she had been fated to be the outsider. I hoped she would end up running a Fortune 500 company and that Jenny, Emily, and Bianca would take to drink in a vain effort to preserve their fading looks.

Other men began arriving at the cabin. The prospect of meeting them frightened me, so I pretended to be asleep. They introduced themselves to one another—I quieted my feigned snoring enough to hear their names—as Steve, Steve, Michael, James, David (also a first-time camper), Steve, and Michael. (I am not making this up. Everyone at Camp Camp was named Michael, David, or Steve.) Their easy banter soon gave rise to the following exchange:

MICHAEL:
I need a pillow.

DAVID:
Didn’t you bring one?

JAMES:
Where would he have room for a pillow in that bag? He wouldn’t have been able to fit his costume for the square dance.

DAVID:
There’s a square dance? Did you bring a hoop skirt?

MICHAEL:
(
lisping
) I’m
so
much butcher than that.

Nothing in their words or manner was at all intimidating, and yet I hated David for dropping himself into the conversation so easily while I was paralyzed, like a stroke victim unable to move but still torturously aware of everything going on around him.

Before long Steve, Steve, Michael, James, David, Steve, and Michael left for dinner. Released from my state of suspended animation, I spent ten minutes agonizing over what to wear before realizing that every sweater I had brought looked terrible with my shoes. I gave up and ran to join the others in the main lodge.

I had a good time through most of dinner, actually; I sat with Steve, Steve, James, Michael, two other men named Kerry and Bryant, and two women named Eden and Clink. In between bites of salade Niçoise—this was gay camp, after all—I said many funny things at which they all laughed appreciatively. Then I saw Steve (or maybe it was Steve?) get up to go look at the desserts on offer, and I got up with him. After a few yards, however, he turned and I realized that I had misread the situation and that he was in fact on his way not to the dessert tray but to the bathroom. I blushed hideously and looked back and forth, helpless, between the desserts and my table. I understand that for many people this situation would not have presented a problem, but I felt as if my life hung in the balance: if I went one way my faux pas would rest eternally undiscovered and if I went the other way no one would ever care about me again—but I couldn’t figure out which way was which. Finally I stumbled back toward the table, sat down, and hoped that my companions would fail to notice my mistake until enough time had passed that they could no longer reasonably hold me in contempt for my stupidity, or at the very least that anybody who did notice would immediately choke on an anchovy and die.

I guess it could have been worse,
I thought as I picked up my fork.
This could have happened in front of Suzanne Hutchinson.

A few weeks before my seventeenth birthday I made the bold decision to throw myself a party. I had never thrown a party before, so when I mailed cards to all fifty-three of my high school classmates inviting them to my house two weeks from Sunday I felt a rush of excitement. We would eat cake and chips and watch movies and laugh and talk into the wee hours of the morning and I would finally have friends.

It wasn’t that nobody liked me. My classmates and I had not sworn vendetta against one another. But I did not spend time at their houses, nor they at mine; we did not call one another on the telephone except to ask about class assignments; I did not meet them on the weekend for spirited games of tag football. But now, with one dramatic move, I was going to effect a sea change. This party would celebrate not only my birthday but also my entry into the world of humans.

Or so I thought until the next day, when Matthew Gibson announced that he was throwing a party two weeks from Sunday.

I couldn’t reschedule, as the invitations had already gone out. So I simply spent the next two weeks pretending that Matthew Gibson didn’t exist. I didn’t ask people whether they would be at my party; I just willed myself to believe they were coming. I bought a backseatful of Tostitos and Lay’s and Coke, and on Saturday I filled a Tupperware container with chocolate chip cookies I baked from a tube of Pillsbury Dough Boy chocolate chip cookie dough, and used my mother’s Cuisinart stand mixer to make a Duncan Hines devil’s-food cake that I frosted painstakingly with a jar of Duncan Hines chocolate frosting. The afternoon of the day I had chosen I decorated the house and arranged the bowls of Tostitos and Lay’s in aesthetically pleasing configurations and sat down and waited, and three people came.

Three.

Julie, Allison, Kathy, and I sat around acting as if nothing were amiss. We ate cake and chips and watched a movie, just like I’d planned, but the stench of humiliation overpowered any impulse to laugh, and there was no talking into the wee hours of the morning because as soon as the movie was over they all went home, and I did not have friends.

Under the covers that night, I wept into my pillow until merciful sleep overtook me. The next morning, however, I walked into homeroom with my head held high, humming “Non, je ne regrette rien,” fiercely determined not to show the slightest hint of pain. I was wounded, yes, but it would take a lot more than the previous night’s events to strike the death-blow. And then Suzanne Hutchinson turned around and saw me and said, “Hey, Joel, I heard you had a really bitchin’ party last night!”

I am certain that she intended only an easy score, that she was not trying to sear a moment into my mind that I would never be able to forget. But sixteen years later I can still see the perfectly straight hair and little round glasses that made her look like a cartoon owl, and the desk she was in—back row, second from the left—and the angle at which her upper body was turned as she spoke. In a daze I sat down in my front-row desk, feeling like a dog whose owner has slammed the pet gate shut in its face to keep it out of the room, and pretended that Mrs. Chanson was the only person in the world as she began a discussion of the Blake poem we had read over the weekend. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour,” she quoted.
An hour already feels like eternity,
I thought,
when the palm of your hand holds nothing.

I would be surprised now to find that Suzanne Hutchinson had any recollection at all of the crushing thing she said that day. And this makes me worry about the crushing things
I’ve
said of which I have no recollection. I already worry all the time about the crushing things I’ve said of which I
do
have a recollection, like when I told Melissa Tsai in college that Adam Feinman was a human petri dish, and he found out and he was really hurt, when what I actually meant was that I was jealous of him for having lots of sex, or when I tossed a note to Jon Reeves in seventh-grade Latin about how Theo Moore sucked and Theo caught it and read it, and how do you recover from doing something like that to somebody, especially when Theo is one of the two total losers in your grade, the other one being Chip Safell, and you’re especially vicious simply because you know how narrowly you’ve escaped their fate? I went over to Theo’s house to hang out a couple times and his mother adored me because I was one of God’s Chosen People, and shortly after he submitted an original drawing of Zeus to the Latin Forum competition and won a prize I was in his room and saw that he had actually copied it from a magazine cover and I didn’t know what to say. Theo left school before too long, followed in short order by Chip, and I don’t know what happened to him, but thinking about him today makes me queasy because it reminds me that whatever was in Suzanne is in me too.