Gray (6 page)

“Of course I have,” I fire back. “I’m not an idiot.”

•   •   •

I hadn’t thought about it at all. Not even in the slightest bit. I have no plan, no idea of the big picture. It makes me feel incredibly stupid that I was willing to ignore the facts and put so much stock in something as pointless as love. Maybe the scientists and admen were right. Love is just something that can be made in a lab or put on a billboard. It has no practical place in life; it serves no function other than tying us up into knots, making us chase fantastic ideals such as “happiness” and “hope.”

I end the Bed-In early. I’m a pretty lousy John Lennon. I take a shower, using Her shampoo because mine has mysteriously vanished. I was only gone for a month, and already she’s making me disappear from Her life. The smoking, the shampoo . . . the signs are everywhere. I’ve just been too blind to notice them. I dry off using Her
towel. Walk back into the bedroom and she’s dressed too. I tell Her I’m going to go home for a bit, to see my parents. She doesn’t object. We’re drowning in life. As I leave Her apartment, I notice that my hair smells exactly like Hers now. She’s following me everywhere.

I don’t go home right away. Instead, I drive around Her neighborhood, make my way past the last remnants of the Cabrini-Green projects, drift through the Gold Coast, with its fortified mansions and luxury condos. I end up down on Lake Shore, as I always do. I park and walk down to the river, stare out at the skyscrapers, now iridescent in the sun. I’m trying to keep myself from feeling anchored or weighed down, trying to keep my mind off thinking about what kids like me deserve.
Desperation
isn’t a strong enough word, but it will have to do. Life is going to get me. I’ve opened the box and let the Furies out. I dove into this headlong, went off to pursue this insane dream without so much as a map. I have no plan. I suppose it’s only a matter of time now.

The best gamblers aren’t the high-stakes players or the ones who can read the table. The best gamblers are those who know when to fold and walk away. Everybody gets it wrong. It’s all cards and hearts. Everybody either gives up way too early or holds on way too long. I should’ve folded a long time ago. My wrists are only black-and-blue because I’ve never had the balls to go all the way. I’ve got ringing in my ears, but none on my fingers. I’ve got sunsets on the insides of my eyelids.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. Someone knows I’m back in town. I don’t care enough to answer it, but I take
it out of my pocket anyway. For a second, I think about tossing the phone into the river . . . maybe I could even get it to skip a few times before it sinks to the bottom and gets washed out into the Mississippi River. But I don’t. I’m not sure why . . . maybe it’s because I
need
a phone. You can’t get through life without one. Any thoughts that you can are just fantasy.

I am torn. I don’t know what to do. I’ve always been a dreamer, have always believed in the power of love and art and loud, life-affirming rock and roll, but, for the first time, I’m starting to have doubts. Can a dream even exist in reality? Or does it turn to stone the second it leaves your mind? I can still see Her standing on my front porch, hands in the pockets of Her coat, rocking back and forth in her Chucks. I can see every single blade of grass in my parents’ lawn. Can smell everything in the air. I can remember Her jumping into my arms, saying, “Hiiii!”—and kissing me. That’s the dream. The reality is today, right here on the shores of the Chicago River and upstairs in Her apartment on the North Side, in Her empty bed. You can’t have it both ways. Everything has turned to stone, and it’s all sinking. I can’t even pretend it’ll float down the Mississippi and end up in the Gulf of Mexico, either. I know it’s too heavy, so it’ll just sit there, down in the muck and darkness, with the skeletons and the sewage, probably forever. That’s life, after all.

I don’t know who to call or what to do, so I just stand there, by the river, as guys who have it all figured out jog by in Lycra leggings and tops with patented Dri-FIT technology. They said good-bye to their dreams a long time
ago, they didn’t dare to stand up against the current of life, and they’re content. They’re not the ones fantasizing about skipping cell phones off the surface of the river, or thinking about the blood pooling in their wrists, just below a thin layer of skin, just waiting to be taken up into the light. They’re not the ones picturing the little blue Zolofts in their trembling hands. They have sex, not love. They have careers, not dreams. And they sleep soundly at night, they rise early and go jogging or throw on expensive suits. Sip coffee with confident, satisfied grins on their faces. Big board meeting today. Briefcases. Windsor knots.

•   •   •

There’s nobody who thinks like us—Her and me—anymore. And it’s probably for a good reason. We are dreamers. We worship love, we hope against hope and toss practicality out the window. We believe in magic and ghosts and lies. We wear each other’s clothes. We huddle for warmth. We were made for fashion, not function. We have a lot of growing up to do.

And suddenly, I realize that I’m sweating. Or maybe crying. Or both. I haven’t felt this way in years. I’m standing there shaking when I decide it’s time to call my parents and tell them I’m back in town for the weekend. It’s time to tell them that I’m crashing, and I need help. Call the doctors. Bring on the meds. If I’m going to limp through life, I might as well use a chemical crutch. Like I said, times are tough for dreamers.

T
he
meds take two weeks to saturate my system. Even the US Postal Service works faster than that. In the meantime, I spend my days in the waiting room of my old psychiatrist, leafing through the same magazines, staring at the same framed print (a reproduction of Seurat’s painting—the one from
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
—touting the 1984 Chicago Art Expo) on the wall. The waiting rooms of psychiatrists are the most depressing places on earth, and they’re always identical, no matter where you go. Old magazines, leather couches, muted color schemes. Coatrack. Potted plant. Vaguely tribal sculpture/Persian area rug. Occasionally there is also one of those machines that replicates the sound of waves crashing or fills the room with the hushed fizz of white noise. The only thing that changes is the name of the city where the art expo has been held, but even then, the image behind the glass is always the same . . . Monet’s
Water Lilies
or a Cézanne still life or van Gogh’s
Starry Night
(because, hey, he was crazy too!), something swirly and soothing,
meant to put the patients at ease, but instead just makes them want to rip the thing off the wall and smash it and slice their wrists open with the shards and get blood all over the sofa set. It’s amazing to me that psychiatrists the world over haven’t realized this yet.

At the far end of the waiting room is the door to the psychiatrist’s inner sanctum, and behind it, someone is currently spilling his or her guts. As my session gets closer, there’s a rush of anticipation, because I can’t wait to see who will emerge from the room. It’s usually a kid my age, and he never makes eye contact with me, just keeps his head down and beats a path to the exit. He’s like one of those criminals you see on the news, trying to cover his face with his hands as he’s being led away by the cops. I like to imagine what he’s been talking about in there, what sins he’s hiding, what’s devouring him from the inside. I pretend that maybe he’s more screwed up than me, and that, when I go into the room, the psychiatrist will look at me and crack a joke, something like “Boy, you think
you’ve
got problems,” and we’d both laugh.

Today, though, it’s a girl who comes out of the room, maybe a few years younger than me. She’s got red hair pulled back tight on her head, and she’s wearing a pink sweater. You can tell she’s been crying. I turn my gaze to the Persian rug beneath my feet, pretend to be incredibly interested in the patterns of the thing, as she fumbles for her coat. I don’t want to look up and see her face. I don’t want to know what’s devouring her insides. So I hold my breath and keep my head down until I hear her leave the office. There’s a brief silence, some rustling of papers
on the other side of the door, and then the psychiatrist emerges and asks if I’m ready. He doesn’t skip a beat, doesn’t even take a moment to compose himself. On to the next tragedy.

The psychiatrist is wearing khakis and a wool sweater. It looks itchy as hell. His neck gathers at the top of it, folds of pink flesh with a gigantic head perched on top. It makes him look like a snapping turtle. He sits back in his chair, crosses his left leg over his right, and asks me how I’m feeling. His pants are too short, and I stare at his white socks while I search for the correct answer. Fine, I tell him. I feel fine. Haven’t felt anxious, haven’t stood on the banks of any bodies of water and contemplated jumping in, haven’t felt as if life were gripping me and squeezing the air from my lungs. I think the medication is working already, I tell him, even though we’ve both been down this road enough times to know that it’s way too early for that to be happening. But, hey, there’s no harm in trying to bluff my way through this entire process. He nods and scribbles something on his notepad.

“Now, the last time you were here, we were talking about . . .”

He says “we,” but I did all of the talking. Psychiatry is bullshit. I know from experience. You sit there and talk and talk—about your feelings (“How does that make you
feel
?”) and about your childhood (“You mentioned your
mother
there . . .”), about your fears and hopes and all of that jazz—because you just want the hour to be up, because you don’t want to be sitting in an overstuffed chair in some stranger’s office, looking at the carefully
calligraphed diplomas he’s hung on the wall behind his head, because you get the sinking suspicion that all of this is a gigantic waste of time.

But mostly, you want the hour to be up because at the end, the doc is gonna write you up that prescription, and everything will be okay. But the thing is,
he
knows that too, so he makes you
work
for it, just makes you keep talking and talking while he jots down notes and rests his head on his chin and tries to look interested. And if you’re
not
talking, he’ll just keep sitting there, staring at you, and the whole thing goes a whole lot slower, and you might not get your prescription at all, or, worse yet, he might refer you to
another
doctor, and then you have to start all over again. Like I said, I know from experience.

So, really, the best thing to do is just talk. After a while, you probably won’t even know what you’re talking about, you’ll just be looking at those diplomas while your mouth runs on and on, and suddenly, you’ve said something you don’t mean, and the psychiatrist will lean forward in his chair and say something like “
That
 . . . go with
that,
” and you have no idea what
that
was, and all of a sudden you’re rambling on about problems you didn’t even know you had, or, worse yet, problems that didn’t even exist until you made them up and spat them out of the hole in your face. And then you start freaking out because maybe you’ve just uncovered something
big,
dredged something out from deep within your soul, and now you’re gonna be about fifteen times more screwed up that you were exactly one minute earlier.

But those moments never happen. I want to say
something that will blow his mind. I want great epiphanies. I want him to leap out of his chair and thrust his arms heavenward and go “That’s
it
!” and pronounce me cured, or, if I say something really bad, I want him to drop his notepad and stare at me with wide eyes, his face going white as he stammers something all slow and drawn out like “What . . . did you say?” as he realizes that he’s sitting in a room with the next Ted Bundy. I understand that’s probably not how psychiatry works, but it would be nice every once in a while. Maybe I watch too many movies.

I’m thinking about all of this and muttering about something when he asks me what my girlfriend thinks about my seeing a psychiatrist. My mouth stops moving and my brain locks up. Panicked, I gather myself up in the chair, run my hands down my knees, cough a bit. I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve never had a moment like this. Maybe it’s an epiphany.

“She, uh . . . ,” I stammer. “She’s fine with it.”

“You know, because she’s studying psych at Columbia,” he says. “We talked about Her in our last session, but it never occurred to me to ask what she
thinks
of all this. You say she’s fine with it?”

This guy’s good. He’s actually been paying attention.

“The reason I ask now is because I wonder if
you’re
fine with it too,” he continues, failing to notice the gray matter of my brain that’s now splattered all over the back wall of his office. “I’m interested. Do you ever feel like she’s trying to pick your brain? Or maybe that you have to keep things from Her?”

He’s really making me work for it now. I sort of hate him for it.

“Because, obviously, as we’ve talked about before, you feel close to Her. I believe you said”—he trails off, paging through his notes—“you said you’ve allowed Her to get closer to you than you’ve ever let anyone get before. So, your relationship with Her is important to you. And I’m wondering how that makes you
feel,
to have someone so close to you—someone you’ve let your guard down for—who might also be trying to get inside your head. Someone who—by your own admission—has such great power to, as you said, ‘hurt you.’ How does that make you
feel
?”