Loud in the House of Myself (17 page)

THE TATTOO ARTIST
inflicts pain and I take it. With each breath I count to one again. Each inhale, each exhale, time passes in the smallest of pieces, and pieces still smaller of those.

This is how you count a life. This is how you go through it. Each second of hurt is a second that’s already passed, one you never have to go through again. I have counted in pieces that small, when walking from the bed to the fridge seemed an insurmountable goal. I have counted my breaths, my steps, my eye-blinks, my hiccups, the tiny pulse in my thumb. And when I started getting tattooed, two of the things I used to need were gone: to write on myself, and to find irrelevant things to count. A second of intense pain is the most profound thing you can live through. And another, and another, and another, and then you know what it is to feel, and to struggle through that feeling one small agonizing increment at a time, and if you know that, you know what it is to live with mental illness.

I know I went into the bathroom, took all the pills from the cabinet, filled a big cup of water, and sat down on the floor. I arranged the bottles around me: Depakote, Celexa, Wellbutrin, and Seroquel. Just for good measure, I took out everything else in the cabinet too: Advil, St. John’s wort, valerian root, Viagra. I began to swallow them, one at a time, then by twos and threes, then by the handful. I knew that if I thought about it at all, if for one second I let myself look up at my cats, I wouldn’t be able to finish. So I just kept gulping them down.

I remember that I emptied the Seroquel bottle first, and that it scared and thrilled me to see the pills disappear.
I’m really doing it,
I thought.
It’s really going to work this time
. I shook the bottle to make sure they were really all gone. Then the Wellbutrin, which can in and of itself seriously fuck you up if you take too much. Thirty pills? Too much. Top it off with thirty Celexa and you just may end up seizing and puking and passing out with your face in the toilet, which I did, on the Internet, forever and ever amen.

The bathroom camera (of course there was one) recorded it all, sending out an update every thirty seconds, old faithful. A woman named Terri who was writing a book about the camgirl phenomenon just happened to check in. She immediately called 911 and hopped in a cab. The ambulance was already there when she arrived, the webcam having broadcast the medics breaking in.

They took me to Long Island College Hospital, where the ER doctors put a tube down my throat and pumped me full of activated charcoal to neutralize the drugs. Terri sat in the emergency room all night, beside me, watching helplessly as the twin rivers of black sludge flowed into my nostrils. She watched as I thrashed on the stretcher. She told me later that every few minutes my arms and legs shot straight up in the air and shook, like a struggling overturned turtle. Between seizures, I vomited ebony streams.

At some point they pulled the tube out and I sat up and screamed. It felt like someone was ripping my intestines out through my nose. Then I slipped again into the muddy cave of unconsciousness, where black velvet bats brushed their wings against the insides of my eyelids.

A dirty drop ceiling with its pinhole constellations was my first clue that I had, unfortunately, made it out alive. The wall opposite me was one big window, through which I could see the blurry nurses floating. Beyond their station was another room just like mine. The nurses were in the middle of a circle of windowed cells, so they could see everyone at once. I had landed in Foucault’s Panopticon, and we prisoners were patients in the ICU.

Probably the worst thing about waking up in a hospital, especially a psych ward, is that it’s the ugliest place on earth. Long Island College ICU is the standard against which all other ugly things should be judged.

I needed to pee more than I had ever needed to pee in my life. I looked for the bathroom off my room, the kind they had at Methodist and Charter. There was none. I looked across the hall to see if it was there. It wasn’t.

And then I saw the shabby yellowed shower curtain hanging to my right. It seemed to be blocking off the corner of the room. I pulled it back, and there, folded up in the strangest modular configuration I have ever seen, tucked away under a sink, was a stainless-steel toilet.

I am not kidding when I say that you had to pull the whole toilet down and sit on it quick before it smacked your ass on its way back up. I held it down with my knee, which is no easy feat when you have an IV in your hand and electrodes on your chest. With my left hand I clung to the bundle of wires attached to my body. Somehow I managed to scooch my underwear down, and saw that they were black. It looked like a pen had exploded. And then I remembered: the charcoal. After they give you the charcoal, they give you a laxative.

There were bruises all over my legs. I had never seen bruises like that before: huge black-and-purple blotches with irises of yellow. I had a vague memory of having fallen with great force, and would later learn I’d knocked over my computer chair having seizures. My limbs throbbed. My face felt bruised and swollen too. The toilet seat whacked my hip on its way back up and I doubled over, wincing.

Here I was, the girl Jeremy had once thought he wanted. The girl he would have continued to want if this cursing, crying, black-shitting thing hadn’t taken over. All I knew was that I had two choices: either call him right then and there, and convince him to take me back, or get myself the hell out of this horrible place and go home and kill myself correctly.

The only problem was, there wasn’t a phone in my room, and so Plan A was going to be difficult to accomplish. I thought about it for a minute and then yanked off one of the electrodes that connected me to the EKG. The machine went into a beeping, nurse-alerting frenzy. A woman in blue scrubs came running.

“I need a phone,” I said.

She brought me one. She went out to the nurses’ station and came back right away with one of those plastic see-through eighties Princess phones, the kind with a long tangly cord and bright, primary-colored electronic guts. She plugged it in for me and told me she’d be back in five minutes to clean me up.

What the hell kind of phone is this?
I thought.
What the hell kind of hospital has folding stainless-steel toilets and Max Headroom fucking phones?

I called Jeremy at work.

“It’s me,” I whimpered. “I’m in the hospital.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s all over the Internet.”

The thought hadn’t even occurred to me that it might be. Who cared about me and my stupid boy problems? Who gave a shit if I lived or died? All over the Internet? What?

“I love you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He was quiet while I sobbed. Finally he said, “I think it’s best if you don’t call me again.”

“What happened?” I pleaded. “Why are you doing this to me? What did I do wrong?”

“I really can’t talk about this right now,” he said, annoyed, the voice that loved me gone. I was only a gnat again, buzzing around his head. He had seen the Bad Dog, and because he was a smart boy who lined up his shoes and paid his bills and brought his lunch from home, he wanted nothing to do with it.

“Please,” I begged, “please, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m going to get out of here today and I’ll come to D.C. to see you. We’ll work it all out. Everything is going to be fine.”

“I don’t want you to do that. I really have to go back to work. I can’t talk about this here.”

“Can you talk about it later?”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“But—”

“Listen to me,” he said. “I am never going to date you again. I’m being called by everyfuckingbody—the
New York Post,
Montel Williams, every goddamn blog, and I’m about to lose my job. Please do not ever speak to me again.”

I dropped the receiver and howled. Oh my god, it was everywhere. For the first time the gravity of what I had done sank in: I had tried to kill myself on the Internet. I had made history I never wanted to make, and nothing would ever be the same.

Glenn had dropped off some clothes from home: my favorite cotton pants, a T-shirt, and clean underwear. I just wanted to get dressed. I wanted to wear my own clothes, to no longer have my ass hanging out. They had taken away the gray shorts and Velvet Underground shirt I assumed I was still wearing when I came in, and had dressed me in a horrible hospital gown. I was freezing. I couldn’t get the T-shirt around the IV, but at least I could change my underwear and cover my legs. I had managed to pull my pants halfway on when the nurse came back to bathe me.

“That’s against the rules,” she said.

“To get
dressed
?”

“Don’t get smart with me. You came here because you tried to kill yourself. You’re not going to run off and try again.”

I couldn’t believe it. Here I had just been told I could never speak to Jeremy again and now I was being told that I couldn’t put on my own pants.

“How the fuck am I going to run off with a fucking IV and a fucking heart monitor? I’m cold. I just want to PUT ON MY FUCKING CLOTHES.”

“I tell you what, missy, you just better watch that mouth of yours.”

I had had enough. I was too furious to cry. I took off my pants and threw them at her. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” I said. “Fuck you. Go fuck yourself. Fuckity fucking fuck.”

The response of my crackerjack treatment team, their humane and soothing reaction to my mental distress, was not to listen to me or try to comfort me or even bring me an extra blanket. Instead, they got an armed guard to come and sit outside my room.

I stared at him. He stared at the wall.

“I’m not going to kill myself. I’m not going to run away. You can leave now, you know.”

He didn’t move, didn’t speak, just continued to sit there. I stuck out my tongue at him.

“Hey! Hey you! Look at me. I’m wearing a hospital gown. They won’t even let me cover my own ass. Do you know what this feels like? Has your life ever been so shitty that you tried to kill yourself? Do you have any fucking idea whatsoever what it feels like to be stuck in a hospital and denied your own clothing and told you can’t even get warm and to be guarded by a guy with a gun, just because you’re fucking SAD?”

Of course there was no response. He didn’t even look at me. To him I was just some wacko, someone he had been told was dangerous, someone he had been given permission to tackle and restrain and maybe even shoot if she so much as tried to get dressed.

“I know you hear me!” I screamed. “I know you know that I’m a human being! I know you know what it’s like to feel sad! You have skin and blood and bones and DNA and a brain, or at least I’m assuming you have a brain—”

A nurse came running. “What’s the problem here?” she said.

“I’m not trying to escape. I just want to wear my own clothes,” I sobbed. “If you insist on saving my life, then treat what’s wrong with me. Let me talk to somebody. Get a psychiatrist in here. If I were here because I had a heart attack, you’d have let me see a cardiologist by now. You’d have let me put my pants on. Please. Please call off the dogs and get someone who can help me to convince you that I JUST WANT TO GET FUCKING WARM.”

“I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do for you.” But she didn’t tell the guard to go away. He was on suicide watch.

It all just seemed so pointless. Here they had insisted on saving my life, just so they could punish me for wanting to end it. Exhausted and in pain, I sank into bed and cried myself to sleep, knowing for a fact that this was it. Things could not possibly get worse.

Sometime later I woke again, my eyes so swollen it took a minute to force them open. There were three shapes standing at the foot of my bed.

My mother said, “Hi sleepyhead.”

Things had just gotten worse.

She, my father, and my cousin Kendra had flown from Tulsa to JFK, checked into the airport Marriott, and taken a fifty-dollar cab ride to Brooklyn. Glenn had called them the day before to tell them what had happened. They had used up a large part of their savings to get same-day tickets to New York, to sit by my bed and wait to see if I lived or died.

Seeing them there was the absolute worst thing imaginable. The guilt was overwhelming. There I was, the biggest loser ever, at the lowest point of a life I had just tried to throw away. I was bruised and bloated and my bleached, fried hair was a puffy mess. I looked and felt like hell. The last thing I wanted to see was my teary-eyed mother and my gorgeous perfect cousin standing there trying to pretend like they weren’t in the most horrifying place on earth.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Shhh,” said Kendra, sitting at the foot of my bed and rubbing my leg. “How do you feel?”

Like hell. Like shit
. “I’m fine.”

They sat in the room and made awkward small talk while the bells and whistles of the ICU went off around us. The whole time, I tried to figure out how I was going to pay them back for the money they had wasted on plane tickets. Their awkward presence in my world was jarring, inappropriate, wrong. I had done something terrible to bring them through the mirror, and I was ashamed.

We were saved by the first psychiatrist I’d seen since I arrived. He came in with two students, younger than me, wearing crisp white coats and frightened smiles. If there is one thing I hate in the world, it’s psychiatry students. Especially after a suicide attempt. They stand there in their khaki pants and blue oxford-cloth shirts, creases pressed into the sleeves of their coats. The men have fresh haircuts and the women have perfect highlights with no root growth. They all look like they grew up playing soccer, with private swimming lessons and bright green lawns and Jeep Cherokees for their sixteenth birthdays. They go to the gym. They have never been depressed in their lives.

The psychiatrist asked me if I wanted an Ativan.

“Hell yes.”

“We want you to spend one more night in ICU before you go to psych,” he said. “We need to make sure your heartbeat is okay.”

“My heartbeat is fine. I’m fine. My family’s here. I want to go home.”