My thoughts ran all together, veered and careened and strung themselves together in ways I could not control. I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't corral them.
I sat in class watching the instructor show us how to give shots.
“You do it firmly,” she said, grasping the syringe. “Don't hesitate. Pretend you are throwing a dart.”
“A dart. A dart,” my mind chanted. “Do it like a dart.” And then, as the lecture droned on, my mind was off in flight. “Do it like a dart.” The ultimate injection. A shot in the ass. Syringe. Cringe. To die in room 404. Dead. Gray plastic features. Cinema I and II. Last row. Row, row, row your boat. Don't be a cutthroat. Cut your throat. Get your goat. Go out and vote. And so I wrote. Topic: nonsense. Sense of none? The flying nun. Flying high on coke. Diet Coke. Ninety-nine cents. Two-liter bottles. Bottle it up. Seethe. Fester. Bubble. Explode. Ha! Ha! Ha! They're at it again …
To be sick. To be well. To wish in a well. Please let me be courageous. Another quarter in the fountain. Please let me be like everybody else. The outcast. Loser. Pitiful. Hate that word. Fighter. Winner. Delusional. False beliefs. Who am I kidding? Daffy Duck? Loony Toons. Deranged. Demented. Unbalanced. They're manic. I'm crazy. I'm crazy. That's insanity. It's cracked to be like Humpty Dumpty. Zcdera = crazed! Is a cuckoo clock wacky or just screwy (as in needing a Phillips screwdriver to be cured). What do I need to be healed. Will a wrench work? Maybe I can wrench my neck? Suicidal ideation seeping out? Too tense and nervous. SNAP! (and not as in “crackle, pop”). I'm suffocating as if a Ziploc bag has zipped my head off. That's witless; incredibly bugged out. It's like an overdose of Chinese mustard burning your brain beyond the Outer Limits of your nostrils. “You can pick your friends. You can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose.” I have no friends anyway. How about just a buddy? How about a Budweiser? How about a budding flower? How about a beer and a rose? How about a wedding? To love and to cherish forever and always. Isn't “always” a panty shield or a pregnancy test or tampon or something? Now I'm getting grosser by the minute. My second-hand first-hand Swatch watch's second hand is busted. Around and around the time goes, and where it stops, you may win a prize on
The Price Is Right.
Let's go to a club and eat cold cut sandwiches on club rolls, and bring clubs with us like we were in
The Flintstones.
Dr. Rockland is Fred's and Wilma's and the Rubble family's psychiatrist too. He goes way back to Stone Age times to give family therapy. Do you have the time? Does anybody know what time it is? Do you care? Sealed with a kiss. No valentines except from my daddy. Why can't I find a boyfriend? Why can't I find any friends? Maybe I'm a blockhead or a huge blackhead. No, I have a good complexion. I scrub my skin off. I will come to your aid with a Band-Aid. Fix me up. I want to be cured. No more schizo-affective disorder. Get it out of me. Not interested. Go to fucking hell. They always find their way into my mind. I'll show you assholes. All I want is a man and a family that makes it in this world. Please, dear God, I pray and pray for an advantageous kind of life. I promise to be a worthwhile contributor to this life and perhaps beyond. Crazy or just a bit touched? Either way, as they say, I'm my best buddy. High five, self!
Robin realized I was in trouble before anyone else did. Maybe she knew the signs because she had been there before. I started giving away things. I gave Deanna a photograph I had taken of a red bird that I loved. I gave away all my record albums, every last one, to the residents in Futura. I tried giving my stereo to the house. My dad would take care of my car. For several days I talked to Robin about wanting to kill myself. I was sick of the Voices. Sick of feeling depressed. Sick of feeling worthless. Sick of feeling hopeless.
She threatened me: “If you do anything, I'll kill you,” she said.
Ha! If I had my way she'd be too late. I had made the final decision. There was no other way out. This was to be my last night to plan, to think, to feel, to say goodbye to the Voices and to pray that I—and my parents and friends—would finally find some relief.
I had a plan. A real plan. This wasn't going to be another botched suicide attempt. This was it. After hearing about hell for so many years, I hoped that heaven would welcome me.
My plan was simple. During the day I would drive home. Mom and Dad would be gone for the day in Manhattan. I would put my car in the garage filling the empty space where Dad's car belonged. I would close the door to the garage. I had already noted that the garage door hit the driveway all the way down, and I wouldn't need blankets or sheets to fill the space. I would turn on the keys to my car, and also to my mom's car for good measure. I knew where the keys were always kept, hanging in the kitchen.
No one would be home for hours. The car fumes would fill the garage. I decided to play “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd in the cassette deck of my car, and I decided to play it loud. I imagined putting the seat back listening to this mood music and going to sleep painlessly and forever. I felt confident that I could carry out my blueprint this time for sure. This was really it.
I was anxious to fall asleep. Tomorrow was the big day. I lay in bed, tossing and turning under my covers. I popped my head out. I buried it in my blanket. I turned on some Cat Stevens music. I got out of bed and paced around. My heart was pounding big-time. I tried taking a hot bath. I went back to my room and started staring at the ceiling. And then the tossing and turning started all over.
I needed to sleep. I needed to dream. I needed to prepare for tomorrow. I went to my supply of tranquilizers. I took one. I took two. Then four. I had to sleep. Five. I'm going to die in the morning. Six. Seven. I can't fall asleep. Eight. Maybe if I walked around enough I'd get tired. Nine. Ten. It was getting late. I couldn't keep track.
I thought about watching TV. I had to get out of bed, but I was feeling fuzzy. I tried to make it to the living room, but the walls knocked into me. I felt uncomfortably wasted. I could barely walk. How was I going to make it till tomorrow?
Robin intercepted me in the hall. She had been worried about me for a week, she told me. She had been keeping an eye on me. She helped me back into my room, where she saw the near-empty tranquilizer bottle. She begged me to turn myself in.
As clearly as I could, I explained to her that that was impossible. I needed to die. But that was okay, I told her calmly. This time it was going to work.
Robin was crying. She was frightened. “Lori, I love you,” she sobbed. She didn't want to rat on me. But she didn't want me to die either. She knew she had to act quickly. Finally she turned me The counselor on duty took one look at me, called Deanna and then a taxi to take me to the White Plains Hospital emergency room. I don't know how much time went by, but very quickly, it seemed, both Dr. Rockland and Daddy were there to meet me.
I was still very groggy. I tried with my slurred speech to beg them to let me die. I had to die. I dozed on and off. I seemed to fade in and out of consciousness as I recounted my lovely plan, my strategy to end my life tomorrow.
All of a sudden, I woke up. It was tomorrow. I didn't like being awake. I wanted to go back to sleep. Wait a second. Where the hell was I? It wasn't hell. I was in a bed. It wasn't heaven. Too many colors. Some obscure, undefined being was sitting in my doorway eyeballing me as if she had nothing better to do with her time.
And then I realized: I was back in the fucking hospital.
The 9925 Key
Lori New York Hospital, White Plains, New York, May 1987-June 1988
On Tuesday, December 15, 1987, I arrived on 3 South—one of New York Hospital's long-term units—in time for lunch.
But even though I was starving, I refused to eat. Instead, I went straight to my room. I didn't want to see anyone. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was tense and upset and on the edge of tears. As I walked through the halls on my way here, I had seen the other patients staring. I knew that they were laughing at me and relishing my discomfort.
In my room, I unpacked my belongings. I covered my single bed with the pink comforter my mother had brought me. I put the boxes with my three hundred cassette tapes on the floor. Into the closet went the tons of clothes—in three sizes—that had been bought to accommodate my increasingly porky figure. I lined my windup toys on my desk. My parents were always on the lookout for new ones. They knew that I could fill hours of my empty day fiddling with these little children's playthings. I had a lizard with a wagging tail, a set of teeth that chattered, a walking pig that wiggled its tail and ears and snorted, a walking hamburger, a cackling witch and a psychedelic slinky.
But even the sight of my familiar possessions didn't reassure me. Everything about this place frightened me. This wasn't just a new hospital unit. I had seen plenty of those. No, this was the end of the road. This was the place I was going to learn to live— or die.
Months earlier, when I had awakened from my suicidal slumber on that first night in the hospital, I had begged to be allowed to go back to sleep. I wanted to sleep forever, I told everyone. Let me sleep or let me out, I ranted. I wanted to finish the job. 1 wanted to die.
Once the intensity of my suicidal urges had passed, however, the staff offered me a different choice. I could be discharged immediately as I wished. Or I could sign myself into an extended care unit. There I could plan on a stay of at least a year, maybe longer. There, the doctors would make every possible attempt to find a medication that would help me. At the same time, though, I would have to learn to help myself. I would have to undergo intensive therapy. I would have to begin to acknowledge that I had an illness. I would have to begin to learn to control my illness on my own. No more in-and-out. No more revolving door. Go or stay, the choice was mine.
Everyone waited expectantly. I was well known at the hospital. Many of the staff had been around me during my first and second stays. They knew how vigorously I had fought each time to leave. No one could believe it when this time I chose to stay.
What no one realized—not even me—was that the hospital's ultimatum had spoken to a tiny gleam of insight that had begun glimmering in me. Even while I had been fighting my hardest, little cracks had begun appearing in the steely armor of my denial. Toward the end of my last stay at New York Hospital, their threats to discharge me had panicked me into realizing that I might need help. Those months living in the halfway house, spending lonely afternoons in a pastry shop watching the rest of the world live their lives, had convinced me that I was different from other people. The three-times-a-week lessons Dr. Rockland had given me for years were at last having an effect. Perhaps he was right, I admitted grudgingly. Perhaps I did have an illness. And if I did have an illness, perhaps they were right. Perhaps I did belong in a hospital.
I considered the first option. Down the road, I saw a discharge to a halfway house, another few months of misery and despair, another suicide attempt, another hospitalization—in other words the wretched half life of a chronic mental patient. I knew I couldn't take that. 1 realized what really lay down that road: death. Not the amorphous welcoming, relieving death of my sick fantasies, but real death. I had failed again this time but sooner or later I was going to succeed. This last attempt had come too close.
So when the doctors handed me the choice to go or to stay, something snapped inside me. This time, instead of trying to die, why not try to live? The last time I had been in the hospital I had fought their programs. This time why not go along with them? The last time, I had allied myself with the Voices. This time, why not fight them?
My decision seemed like a good idea at the time I made it. In fact, having made a decision gave me hope. If I had an illness, maybe it could be cured. If I was sick, maybe I could be made well. Maybe they could pull these Voices right out of my skull. Maybe I could have a real life. I agreed to transfer to the long-term unit.
Yes, back at that time it had all made sense. Now that I was here however everything seemed different.
It was clear that this wasn't going to be easy. This was going to be war, a war against the Voices. And the Voices weren't going to give up without a fight. They were going to struggle against me—and anyone else who tried to conquer them.
The Voices were yelling so loud I could barely hear over them when, later on that afternoon, I had my first meeting with Dr. Doller.
Dr. Jane Doller. Jane Doller, M.D. I had first met her on my old unit, during the months I was waiting to be transferred here to 3 South. She often came through to visit another patient on the unit where I was staying. Once I found out her name, I instantly became part of her fan club. For some reason, I got such a kick out of the pun in her name that I looked forward to her visits just so I could greet her.
“Hello, Dr. Doller!” I called out. “Hi, Dr. Doller!” I just loved saying that name. Dr. Doller. Dr. Doller. Each time, she returned the acknowledgment with a nod of her head, or a quiet hello.
I knew she was a psychiatrist. But she didn't look like a psychiatrist. She didn't look like any kind of doctor I had ever seen before. She wasn't angular and crisp like so many of the young professionals I had met. Instead, she looked like the Pillsbury Dough Girl, all pudgy and squeezable. She was always rushing and busy whenever I saw her, but somehow her manner was different from that of the other doctors. She wasn't brisk and businesslike like so many of the others. She was soft. Her face was soft. Her hair was a soft brown. Her manner was soft, and almost retiring. Her voice was soft. Her words were soft. Everything about her seemed soft. I liked her immediately, without knowing why.
Still, except for the several-times-a-week hello, Dr. Doller and I had nothing else to do with each other until I transferred over to 3 South. So when she came to my room, and gently steered me to a bank of chairs in the hall of the unit, I was nervous and apprehensive. I had just found out that she was not just any psychiatrist. She was one of this unit's bosses. She was staff psychiatrist of 3 South, and she was going to be the administrator of my case. I was impressed immediately.