lycanthropia

So a friend (a friend! what a fucking euphemism) was admitted to the hospital this morning, and I have gone all to useless pieces. Just all useless. I pace, my stomach churns, I swallow convulsively, I all but wring my hands, I can’t settle down to anything, I carry the phone around the house with me and I still manage to miss the one crucial phone call, I’m a shivering mess, even while inwardly berating myself not to make it about me when it so plainly isn’t. And I can’t even really formulate language around why I am going all to bits, exactly. All I know is that I, who have been institutionalized four separate times—who usually act as the unofficial den-mother to my depressive younger writer friends—who am diagnostically perspicacious and a rock of stability and reassurance when my students encounter the inevitable sophomore-year epidemiological averages and peel off one at a time from their cohort, all mood-disordered and unwashed, hair hanging in their faces as they try not to cry in my office—that I who am supportive and brimming with wisdom about medication, therapy, and all things mental-hygiene related—I who always have pithy suggestions and encouraging bits of validation and phone numbers to call and DBT skills to try—all I know is that my friend called to give me this news (flatly, dully, in that pain-beyond-pain that is true uncaring) and my mouth went suddenly completely dry and my heart dropped to my stomach and I could think of nothing, nothing to say. I who always try to have something helpful to say, because it makes those wasted years of my life have some kind of meaning, if I can help anyone else because of them.

[Long moment with head in hands, telling myself how stupid I am being.]

Part of it is Jeremy’s death. Part of it is me sitting on his apartment floor across from him, all the phone numbers in between us as we called down the insurance lists and tried to find someone, anyone, who would see and medicate him without a six-week wait, and him saying to me I don’t know, Jen, maybe I should be in the hospital, and me just imagining him all sweet and poetic and gentle and redhaired, our Van Gogh, our emaciated yogi, only on the unit in Arizona, God he’ll only get worse there, and then my saying quickly, to stop him thinking about it: No, it’s such a hard place to be, let’s find a doctor, I’d rather spare you that if we possibly can.

And it turned out we couldn’t, though we didn’t know that. Though I might have known. Though forty-something suicidal men aren’t usually fucking fooling around.

And a couple of months ago a dear daughter-friend went into the hospital, which turned out of course to be the best thing for her—it is, it is the best thing, especially by the time you no longer care what happens to you (How do you feel about this decision? I don’t really care. I just don’t care anymore). And last fall after Jeremy died, another beloved daughter-sister-friend was actively suicidal, calling me practically with noose around neck, and I was terrified, and livid, and threatened to call the police if she didn’t give me her doctor’s number, and I wound up shrieking into his voicemail at like 3 am,—and, and I don’t know anymore, I honestly don’t know if I am helpful to these ones I love, with my shining example of recovered mental health, with my better living through chemistry—if I’m such a poster child after all, with my hey, I’ve been on the unit four times and look at me now, I’m dressed and everything! I like to think my experience is useful, but I don’t know.

I know that the unit is a good place to get your meds straightened out fast. I know it’s a place where you can sleep and wear no shoes and do nothing for hours, where you can cry messily and throw up without embarrassment and not care, and that doing all that is more or less okay, which is a relief when you feel so horrible. To not have to pretend you feel normal when you don’t, when you just can’t feel normal no matter how hard you try. I know I’ve always survived hospital stays by writing constantly, my best-friend-who’s-a-therapist and I joke about charting it, patient displays writing behavior—I know that jotting down the hilarious nutty conversations of the always far-sicker-than-I other patients has always made it all bearable: the TV room and the pathetic “group therapy” and the evil food and the grotty tile and the medications dumped on you in huge high doses that make your head feel swollen and inflated like a balloon, that leave you retching metallically while a nurse injects your butt cheek with Vistaril. I know that lying flat on the bottom of self-loathing, usually with one cheek on carpet, and noting that I’m thinking about myself clinically as an object, an inconvenient corpse only to be disposed of at the soonest available opportunity, I know that these are bad signs, I know that I stop being able to take care of myself at those moments, I know, whether I admit it or not then, that it is time to go on the unit. I know that on the unit, even if only for a blessed three days, people are finally embarrassed into stepping the fuck off when it comes to where is the article, where is the essay, where are the paper comments, you were supposed to write it, you didn’t write it, where is it, where is it, where is it. That even if your lovers are acting like bastards to you, they stop, miraculously, it all stops for a few days, everything speeds up really fast prior to and during admission but then it just STOPS, and there’s kind of an eye to the storm, where you can see everything swirling around but from a slight distance, and it’s suddenly quiet, just for a minute, and a minute, you think, is all you need, you think I just need a minute, I just need a tiny break from everyone screaming at me, I just need one day away from it, one reason to live, just that one reason, just that one hour of sleep, just that one block of energy, to make another push, to try again, to try to be alive—

It is the best place for this friend to be. And I pace uselessly, and berate myself for having not said all the things I should have said, for not having understood how serious it was, for not having done enough, for not having done what was right in front of me to do, for not making it clear how very much I need this person to be alive and in the world and writing and cracking us up and dishing out shit and being fierce and sentimental and broken and staggeringly smart and adorable.

And I know, I know, this is how I’ve made friends feel. Helpless and wired and drained and helpless. I get that now. As I pace, pace, try to concentrate on anything, and fail. And wish I could be there—to bother the nurses at their station during shift change—to ask for Vistaril, ginger ale, more covers (it is always so brutally air-conditioned)—to insist on the night staff’s calling in a prescription for a sleeper, to demand a pen and paper, to demand to see the doctor, to demand to use the bathroom with the door shut—

But I can’t do anything. All my surviving-the-unit (if you’re poor) tips and tricks, all my how-to-work-the-system knowledge of health care, has any of it really done much good the last couple of years? From my psychotic student two years ago to Jeremy last year, to my three friends? When people are depressed can you really do shit about it, repeating like a robot ask for Remeron, ask for Effexor—you should try cognitive-behavioral, you should try DBT, you should try meditating—

This is electronic pacing. Back and forth. My stomach in my feet. Why am I so useless this time, when in the past I’ve been calm and able to summon information and be helpful? Why did I hear my friend’s voice on the phone and suddenly go completely nonverbal, washed up on a shore without language, beached and dry? Am I like the doctor who can’t operate on her child? Don’t I know I am not the doctor? Is it love? Does love make you incompetent? If you can’t do anything, what can you do?

I am being such a livejournal high school emo girl about all this. My friend is being so much stronger than I am being.

This post has no ending.

Because there are several really important things I’ve got to get to, in here.

So there were amends made, and a big romantic sad goodbye. But then—and this is maybe one of the smartest scheduling moves I’ve ever done—before our meeting I’d made an appointment and had my hair cut by the fabulous Chanel—and after it I immediately drove home, painted my nails turquoise and threw on my black velvet dress, and met 13 of my dearest friends at La Condesa for fish tacos and love. I even made a little speech, along the lines of how I’d thought this would be one of the worst years of my life, and it was; but it had also turned out to be one of the best, and it was all because of them. And we laughed and yelled and were the obnoxious gabachos in the taquería, and I had a giant horchata with cantaloupe and strawberries and pecans, which was all I could handle because I was too keyed up and had too big of a lump in my throat to be able to eat anything.

And then my friends drove me to the Cash Inn Country and bought me drinks and we all danced sweatily together and someone even mildly hit on me (“I just wanted to say, all that stuff you’ve got going on back there? [gesturing toward my ass] Um, it looks really great.”) (Beth, later: “And there wasn’t, like, a puppet show going on behind your back or anything?”). My friends, gallantly, were even prepared to leave me to this person, especially after he kind of publicly mauled the same black velvet dress and/or me in it (“I love the way this feels! I want to put you in the trunk of the car!”) but I somehow managed to catch Ebi’s eye and make the throat-cutting gesture, with eyes flashing amused but earnest warnings; so she and Scotty took me back to her place. I sat on the carpet and played Stringer Bell with Starla (Stringer Bell = a string with a bell on it), while we we had rum and Cokes and were witty and they kept me from crying, as people kept me from crying all night long, someone always jostling up against me kindly, or suddenly turning up with a gentle hand on my elbow, or a joke, or an alcoholic popsicle (cherry!) or dragging me out to dance.

And then Ebi brought me home and I told her I loved her and she said, I love you too, and then there I was sitting blankly with the cat in my packed-up living room with my black velvet dress all crisp with sweat, and my demolished fancy hair, and my completely, utterly, entirely broken-open heart that feels wrecked forever, because I have lost the love of my life.

But it’s okay. I can love him without needing him.

And I knew it then, calmly but right down through my spine: I’m ready to move now. I’ve done all the work there is for me to do here. I have passed my final exam. And I’m ready. I’m good to go.

Thus, gentle reader, I left Phoenix.

I woke that day at 7 am and packed the last of the things, the movers came and loaded my stuff from 9 am to 1 pm, then I dusted, swept, mopped, scrubbed and dealt with the fridge and freezer until 6 pm, and finally Pyewacket and I, disorganized and crazy as we were, with dustbunnies in our hair and a weird collection of leftover items in the car, we at last hit the road (though at the last minute, as one does, I left behind my rainbow-colored Santa Fe patio furniture umbrella, which is sad, but I hope some happy Mexican family will love it as much as I did).

In her anxiety (having been yowling in the bathroom all day, completely terrified of the movers), my felid promptly peed in her cat carrier, so I let her out and she bounced around in the car, looking out all the windows while yelling expressively (I had the doors locked) and I just put pedal to metal and tried to get us out of Arizona. We slid through New Mexico in the darkness without pause, reeking of cat pee, and made the Texas border by around 1 a.m., thanks to those Starbucks frappuccino things you can get bottled. I planned to go through El Paso/Juárez without even stopping, and make Van Horn before calling it a night.

But suddenly outside the city around 2 a.m. I became dangerously exhausted. We got a fairly nasty (smoking) motel room someplace called, repugnantly, the Americana Inn, but I didn’t care; I parked between two semis, hauled cat and accessories into the room, and fell into bed immediately, while Pye lodged herself between headboard and wall to doze as best she could. I woke around 11:30, hauled her out by the scruff of her neck protesting, and we were on the road again by noon. I was still wiped out, mostly physically from the move and the vigorous house-cleaning, and thought maybe we’d get to San Antonio and then stop again for another night; no need to race to Houston to sit in an empty house.

But just as I started out, right past Ft. Hancock, TX, my passenger-side rear wire made the familiar WOMP-WOMP-WOMP sound. It was already well over a hundred degrees outside, so I wasn’t surprised to see that it was completely blown-out. Could I drive on it? Aren’t you supposed never to drive on blown-out tires? But I was just one exit past someplace with a gas station and motel. After hurried cellphone consultations (roaming rates! it was all so completely predictable) with father and BFF, I decided to drive 5 mph and get back to that exit.

It took about an hour. Crossing the overpass was fun.

Then my luck changed, for in this tiny armpit town was a llantera. I rolled up to the tire shop like I’d been driving up to get a pack of peanuts and Pepsi from the vending machine every afternoon of my life. Together the mechanic and I pulled out all of my belongings (two electric pianos! each weighing more than God) from the trunk, so he could get to the spare, and $20 later I was on my way, driving 50 mph on a donut.

Sometime around when she heard the pneumatic lug-nut wrench, though, Pyewacket officially decided she’d had Enough. When I got back in the car, she was in her covered litter pan with eyes tightly shut, trembling. That was it. She was done. She only ventured out one other time the whole trip—and almost as soon as she’d emerged, I had to roll down the window so a Border Patrol checkpoint guard could bawl in at us, “Are you a US citizen?” (Actually I’m not even sure that Pizzle is a US citizen; she might be Russian for all I know. Or Thai, or maybe Iranian.) She looked up at him disbelievingly and then hurried back to her litter pan, where she stayed until Houston.

And I decided, after the third tire store in Van Horn was able to replace the donut with a full-sized tire ($80) (and removing once again everything from the trunk) (two electric pianos!), that we should just do it. With every mile I put between myself and my old life I felt unexpectedly more invigorated. I was writing poems in my head, singsonging lines and weaving sentences; playing my favorite songs in my brain, excited and happy. I reached back behind me for the catty pan, and put my right hand on her, driving with my left, feeling her shiver. “Okay, kid,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

So we drove through San Antonio (passing without pause through Boerne, though I thought with fierce fondness of my beloved godsisters, and wished I could see Z and her two new beautiful babies—”I lived here! I’ve eaten at that Denny’s!” I told Pyewacket. I told her a lot of things) and then we drove through the night, all the way to Houston. A couple more frappuccinos, carefully titrated over the hours. I pulled the car into Montrose around 6 am, shaky and grinning and high on exhaustion. Couldn’t find the house for nearly an hour, until I somehow stumbled on the Menil and then oriented myself from there. And without ceremony, I lugged the cat inside (her little tub of guts, still cowering in her litter pan, which fortunately has a handle), spread out the sleeping bag, and we collapsed into dizzy day-sleep.

I don’t really remember the next couple of days that well, only that at some point I discovered it really is hotter when it’s humid; and that the Fiesta supermercado down the street is completely awesome (having both all my favorite Mexican snacks AND super-chichi white-person Whole-Foods comestibles like unsalted organic pasture butter and Greek yogurt).

But over time I have learned a few more things about my new home, slowly, slowly, as I venture out a little bit farther each day, like Pye sitting in the doorway leaning out to see if the orange cat is there (she doesn’t like the orange cat, who is a large, aggressively friendly neutered tom—but why does he even want to be friends, when all she’s ever done is hiss and growl and spit at him?).

This is where the “Dear Houston” part should really start. Maybe that’s the next post. Because for every loss, every strange new not-so-pleasant surprise, there has been a correspondent reward:

• Mysterious dying Africanized honeybees that turn up in the living room and bathtub? Giant flying tropical cockroaches? No matter—a block away from my house, the best Tex Mex enchiladas I’ve had in maybe twenty years.

• Discovering there’s no tub stopper at midnight when I finish unpacking the car and want to bathe? Pas de problem: Walmart’s open all night and they also have Blue Bell peach popsicles and praline ice cream, as I wallow happily in the dairy products of my native land.

• Terrible sulphurous smell that comes from the hot water tap, along with enough fine black metallic grit to turn the bath water dark gray? Another block away is an outlet of my beloved pink Taco Cabana, open 24 hours—meaning I can go to the drive-through and get crispy bean and cheese tacos with extra guacamole and sour cream for $1.85 each IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, BITCHES.

• Jawcracking residential potholes (which my ex and I used to pronounce to rhyme with posole), inexplicably numerous in a city where there’s never snow or freezing? But also hilarious effigy gigantism on the outsides of restaurants—a huge saxophone, a house-sized smoothie cup, an enormous red crawdad (and, even better, one that lights up at night).

• Carriage house floorboards vibrating with the loud bass of club music until 1 a.m. on weekends? All is forgiven, because the same dance place is also a killer mariscos joint in the daytime, with $2.50 mojitos. I can literally slip through the back fence and walk about twenty steps to said mariscos, from whom I am also currently thieving the broadband to post this.

So you see where I’m going here. You lose some, but also boy howdy do you win some.

I’m trying to say that life is still lifeing along, beautiful and tawdry and annoying and hot and humid and yes it has large flying bichos del mar and exploding tires and yowling cats, but also cheese enchiladas in a tangy cuminy ranchera sauce so good I want to put my head down on the table and weep, but I don’t, because then I would have to stop eating.

One more thing. This is a big one. Life lifeing with both barrels.

So when I finally was able to raise my head from the floor and look around me and fetch my laptop from the car the next day, I had an email from my ex. I immediately knew it wasn’t about our grief-racked leavetaking because of the bald subject line: “Georgia and stage 4 carcinoma.”

This is Georgia. Some of you know her better as Alabama.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Isn’t she beautiful? You’d never guess this sweet grandmotherly lady would have a mouth on her like Jane Cannary’s.

And, of course. I mean, goddammit; and, of course. She’s seventy and has been smoking, what? two, three packs a day for decades?

This is what my ex quoted her as saying to their home group:

I looked in her eye after she told the whole Wednesday night meeting and she is alive with joy. Her announcement basically was, “I have stage 4 carcinoma. It’s terminal and has spread all over my body. Listen up! This is one day at a time, motherfuckers! I trust you all to keep this meeting going. Do not fuck with this old lady. I am ready to go home, but will need your help taking care of things until that happens. Now let’s go smoke.”

Since then, Ms. Georgia has started a blog. In case the thought ever crossed your mind that she might be my fabrication, or that I might be embellishing or exaggerating her personality in any way, please dispel all doubts by reading her journal entries. As my ex used to say, you can’t make this stuff up.

She is real. And she may be here for a few more months or a couple of years, but she knows her life purpose is being of service and that makes her even more real, a twelve-step bodhissatva. I wrote her a card thanking her for her pushes and shoves over the last year, some gentle and some quite violent (but, per Petruchio, “Amid this hurly I intend / That all is done in reverend care of her”), and I mailed it to my ex so he could pass it along to her, making it the first piece of outgoing mail from my new home. From my new home. Where the cat folds her paws and stares intently out the bay window all day long, and I start girding my loins to teach first-years and write poems and papers and tussle with administrators and laugh with colleagues and make new friends all over again.

You heard the lady. One day at a time, motherfuckers.

Every day—indeed, every moment—is a new face of God—every ache and longing, every grief, moments of sheer bliss, moments full with death, pregnant seasons, the fruit and the bee, the new child, the wind stirring the water, the sparrow at seeds and the circling hawk—all the beauty of God.

—Jeremy Spohr (1971–2010)

Suddenly the blog is too small for all the things I want to say, all the words that are burning in me—suddenly the piece of paper is too small for the poem, I drive down to the college town for therapy and stop at a drugstore to refill my psych med prescriptions—$90, my co-pay having mysteriously gone from $25 to $45—and I also buy poster board, I am going to write my new poem on the wall with markers, try to visualize it, try to make a bigger space, to use different colors, to say different things. Suddenly there is all this sparking creativity and I have to grab a pen while driving to catch the words as they zoom past, suddenly things seem enormous and yet possible, suddenly, suddenly.

Is this a bad thing? Is it an insignificant thing? Is it hypomania? Is it relief that I don’t teach again until next week? Is it a symptom, is it pathological, or just a natural part of being a person and therefore creative, this sudden uptick in mood, this sudden expansiveness? After buying meds I spend more money I don’t really have, I buy organic strawberries, a lovely new lip balm, mineral water, socks. (Though I need socks, mine are all growing holes and I don’t know how to darn socks as my mother did, putting a light bulb inside one of my dad’s dress socks and threading black thread carefully up and down through the warp or weft of the knitted heel.)

I go to a poetry reading, Jeannine Savard and Cynthia Hogue, both with new books from Red Hen Press, and afterward browse the bookstore and buy Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White because all my friends are reading it and it suddenly seems I must read it too. Suddenly I remember, music! music exists! and I drive around the college town listening to Tori Amos and Eva Cassidy and belting out songs along with them, driving past my ex’s house and refusing even to turn my head to look at it. On my cellphone I call friends, leave messages sprinkled across the continent. Suddenly my solitude seems thrilling and filled with information, rich with meaning. Suddenly.

The thing to watch for is the collapse, the charred despair that sometimes follows these periods of excitement, the deflation and the accounting for. Today is also my late friend’s birthday, or it would have been his birthday, and I still don’t know what to make of the fact that I can remember him so vividly, his soft percipient laugh, his thin voice, the angle of his body in a blue cotton shirt and jeans; and that he isn’t here anymore, and yet is still so very here in my mind, is confusing. It is confusing. And I don’t know why he did it. I mean, I don’t really know why; I mean I do know in some way, I have made attempts, essays on my own life, essayer as in to try, to try very hard; but in the end my fear and my dumb animal survival instinct won out both times, Plath’s old brag of the heart, I am, I am, I am.

I don’t know. I know I am obsessed with this image of the nest, the nest with eggs in it. I am going to paint it tomorrow, draw it and paint it, I am obsessed with blueberries and the color blue, rich soft crayon blue, I am obsessed with the fragrance of vanilla and with playing the piano, with trying to reproduce vanilla and blueberry on a keyboard. I can’t play the piano right now because the casita is too small so both electric pianos are in storage under my bed. Instead I am sitting here eating strawberries and playing this keyboard. Each letter has a color and each number, like each musical key. I never have thought anything about this, I always assumed that was the case for everyone. I don’t know, perhaps it is.

The best thing to do is to put myself to bed at a reasonable hour, the influenza of this particular star can cause a body to think she can stay up all night working, writing, playing and doesn’t need sleep, and not sleeping is the worst thing for it, hastens the crash. So to bed with me, soberly. And regular meals, not just grazing but “food off a plate” as my BFF and I call it. I am also obsessed today with celestial maps, constellations, representations of galaxies and stars. I want to write a book called Celestial, or, no, a book entitled Constellate. I want the cover to be a rich dark blue shot through and riddled with scattered stars. I haven’t ever before attempted a public prose representation of what it is like to have all the ideas and words and possibilities multiplying combinatorily in my head, factors intersecting and cancelling each other out but then replying with new iterations of themselves and ghosts of those selves refreshing and multiplying again.

If that makes sense which I rather doubt.

So instead of trying to figure out what I’m wittering on about, watch this about-to-go-viral video. For some reason with my current mind-ground I think this is the funniest thing I have ever seen, a giant baby trashing a bar drunkenly. Is it because toddlers do so often seem like tiny belligerent alcoholics? (Thus the wry designation in AA, “King Baby.”) Is it because my ex and I have seen similar persons inebriated in Mexico so many times? Is it the tiny wristwatch, fanny pack and touristy hat with which the baby has been outfitted? I don’t really know. I just know I generally start cry-laughing around the point when she stands up unsteadily and knocks over the palm tree behind her table. I guess this is what MFK Fisher thinks headwaiters are worried about when she writes with pride about being able to hold her liquor. Babies are all little tipplers, as this video plainly shows.

And I’ll try to write more coherently or anyway less hysterically tomorrow.