ON CRACKING UP
72 Hours in LA County
Word Count 1946
The glaring overhead fluorescents are never turned off, making sleep all but impossible. We are confined to metal beds in a long row, about eighteen inches apart. Some of the other detainees are continuously moaning. And the staff, predominantly from the Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, are speaking in their native dialects.
There’s a guard posted near the door and a camera above the doorframe. I am calculating the average time it takes for the guard to leave for his bathroom break. Ten minutes, if I’m lucky? Then I could sprint from the bed through the door, the alarm blaring, the camera documenting my escape. And then what?
No, I am not in some third-world prison. I am in the Los Angeles County Psychiatric Holding Facility.
Mad Cow
Word Count 829
During the worst of my adolescence, I would often appear at my mother’s bedroom door where she and my little sister were sleeping. “Mum,” I would say, “I’m disintegrating, disappearing, I don’t exist.” In truth, I didn’t have the words to describe what was going on. Sometimes, I did feel like I was disintegrating, at other moments it was like being in a maze of panic, as if the features of my face were unfamiliar. Usually, she told me to go back to bed. But one night she sighed, got out of bed, and marched me into the living room. I think she was getting fed up with my brain. I certainly was. It was doing all sorts of weird things, which is probably par for the course when it comes to adolescent girls. And, I should add, menopausal ones.
Sister’s Keeper
Word Count 1716
My sister comes to visit me on the bus every Saturday morning, 40 miles down the interstate, looking forward to it with the relish most would reserve for a Bali vacation. She loves the bus ride, the fact that, as she proudly tells the other group home residents, she’s going to visit her big sister. This makes her special; few of the others have any diversion from the sitting and smoking that comprises their days.
She was the smartest in a family of brains, student body president, a gifted pianist who could sit down at a lobby piano and play the Moonlight Sonata or Bela Bartok even after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia at eighteen. She battled addiction to meth, then alcohol, married a disturbed man who knocked her around until our father and brother threatened to beat him up if he ever touched Kathy again, struggled with the weight gains and losses of anorexia nervosa and, her last decade after losing her husband, walked at least three and often six miles a day to quell the voices in her head.
This is Not a Eulogy
Word Count 3062
When Casey and I got together, we’d get drunk and tally up our points, in this order:
Who’s getting fucked more?
Who’s getting fucked up more?
Who’s more fucked up?
And who’s just more fucked.
She usually won the first three, so I’d claim the last one by default. With anyone else I knew then, I’d have won hands down. Easy.
It’s Easier To Get Locked Up Than You Think
Word Count 1828
On February 7th, 2020, I did not attempt suicide. That much I know. The rest is a puzzle.
It was past midnight on February 11, 2020. I sat on the floor of the “Comfort Room,” in the Acute Ward of Gracie Square Psychiatric Hospital, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The room was padded with mats in primary colors. Plastic, or maybe vinyl—like the kind used in preschools; cracked with age. Some of the cracks were partly covered in silver duct tape—dull metallic bandages that peeled off, exposing the wounds.
Against my will, two attendants from the New York Fire Department had strapped me to a gurney and taken me here. My eighty-eight-year-old father was dying a mile away, at Weill Cornell Medical Center. Blood clots riddled his body and choked off his lungs.
A nurse with long blond hair brought me a cup of lukewarm tea, not hot enough to burn myself or to use as a weapon.
“Do you want some sugar?”
The Worst Dream Ever Dreamed
Word Count 1178
Your death wasn’t real. I knew you’d come back, that it was, all of it, a bad dream. The worst dream ever dreamed. After the first days of shiva, after I laughed and chatted, served cake and coffee, after the people went home to their lives, it became real and I thought I would never laugh again.
I couldn’t hear, the silence was so loud without you. Those tickets to a comedy show bought long before, now felt so wrong, but just months after you died, we went, meeting up with friends we seldom saw. I don’t remember the show. I fixed my face into a grimacing grin, a fleshy calavera, and tried to laugh with the crowd but I don’t think it sounded gleeful. Laughter was not a part of my world.
She’s Come Undone
Word Count 1483
I answered the question without much thought. Work was busy, I had a mile-long to-do list, and I needed to dash off this application for TSA pre-check, a luxury I’d chided my family members about until I started traveling so much for my job I talked myself into its necessity.
Have you ever been found by a court or other lawful authority as lacking mental capacity or involuntarily committed to a mental institution?
I hesitated for a second. Should I lie? It seemed like a terrible idea – the stuff of dystopian novels – to lie to the government.
Yes.
Suicide in March
Word Count 115
For the Heaven’s Gate Cult, 1997
Crocuses open their mouths wide
to swallow sunlight
after a fierce Michigan winter.
Far away in San Diego,
thirty-nine followers
of Heaven’s Gate Cult
open their mouths
to swallow vodka and phenobarbital,
then wrap their heads in plastic bags.
The Laugh
Word Count 975
It was the laugh that did it.
Overly loud, with a hollowness behind it like a concealed room, it was always a sign things were about to get bad. It wasn’t viral like real hilarity; it had a duplicitousness that left you cold. I heard it so often growing up that eventually, the first few jarring notes were enough to trigger a Pavlovian unease, a deep-seated dread. Even before the bipolar diagnosis that rendered every aspect of my father’s behavior a sign to be interpreted—an augur in real time, it made the hairs prickle on the back of my neck.
That DUI Thing
Word Count 338
Rain today. They had to install that DUI thing in my car because my daughter doesn’t have her car anymore. She has the DUI. It’s an infuriating invention called Intoxalock and it stays in for six months. You have to blow into its mouthpiece to start the engine, and you have to be sober: three counts breathing out, two counts breathing in, three counts breathing out, then you wait for the verdict to appear in a little box. I’m an eighty-year-old woman who has smoked most of her life. TOO SOFT the goddamn thing reads time after time.
All My Friends are Nuts
Word Count 1504
The husband and I were having coffee in our cozy built-in breakfast nook. He was scanning headlines on his phone while I whined about a friend of mine having her second or third nervous breakdown.
Why do people reach out to me when they’re cracking up, I complained. And why is everybody cracking up? Is there something about me that attracts crazy people or am I just extra sympathetic to crazy?
He blinked.
It’s kind of true your friends are insane, he said, soberly. Not your acquaintances, but your closest compadres. He reeled off a list of my friends and the various ways they’ve been crazy, some of them certifiably so, like legit, you need to park your ass in a hospital crazy. My friends don’t just suffer from garden variety eating disorders or narcissistic personality or agoraphobia or the kind of free-floating anxiety a lot of middle-aged women experience best managed by a Xanax prescription. A surprising number of my friends are clinically depressed, suffer from manic disorders, are bipolar, have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, are or have been suicidal.
A Crack in the Floor
Word Count 746
My husband and I once owned a 1932 yellow stucco house in Jackson, Mississippi on what turned out to be a subterranean stretch of Yazoo clay. Neighbors and friends were kind enough to bring welcome muffins, a philodendron and—this being Jackson homeownership— the contact info of a church minister who did house foundation work weekdays.
When a bulge erupted in our front hallway oak floor and the sheetrock cracked in vertical rivulets, we telephoned the minister. Let’s call him the Reverend Gerald Sims, Junior. It turned out the Sims family had a trademark legacy. Like his father, the Reverend Gerald Sims, Senior, Reverend Sims preached on Sunday and repaired clay-cracked foundations throughout town during the week.
Possibilities of Repair
Word Count 436
“Do not go crazy a lot. It's a waste of time,” says Ron Padgett in a poem called “How to Be Perfect.”
The implication is that you could go crazy a little, or you could go crazy every once in a while. Not a great idea in either case, depending on your definition of “crazy.”
You tell me that you’re cracking up, joining others who have cracked up, lost it, gone crazy, heard the angels, or the devils, or God. Who have despaired because of the state of the world, or their marriage, or their ability to go on. Because things aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Because they have cracked all their eggs in one basket.