Agonizing Grace

“DO YOU FEEL you’re a danger to yourself or others?” Dr. Lyman G. Glandy, head psychiatrist at Fairview Psychiatric Hospital, wants to know. He’s interviewing me for the first time since my arrival here three days ago. We’re in my room, a small, Spartan, dimly lit chamber with all the charm of a prison cell.

It’s a good question. A few weeks before the drug overdose that got me here, I woke up one early morning in my car outside my favorite bar with a bow and several arrows in my lap and no idea what I was doing with them.

I’m a blackout drunk. Of course I’m a danger to myself and others. But I’m not about to admit this to Dr. Glandy. I’ve seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This is a locked ward, and they’ve taken away my shaving equipment. Sure, this is 1983, not the 1950s, but I’m probably going to be here as long as Glandy wants to keep me. Best to say as little as possible. The harder a man tries to convince someone in authority he’s sane, the loonier he’s going to appear.

“What do you think brought you here?” Glandy asks in his annoying monotone after I finally mumble “no” to his question about being a danger. He keeps glancing at his notebook, giving me the impression that he’s reading from a list of questions. He knows as well as I do what brought me here: an overdose of Xanax that I can’t say for sure was an accident.

“Overdose,” I say. “Accidental overdose,” I add with too much emphasis.

Glandy’s large, lumpy head and bland features put me in mind of a potato. I know what he’s thinking: This guy tried to off himself as sure as we’re sitting here, and I’d better give him a nice long rest.

All my adult life I’ve lived in fear of being locked up and at the mercy of cruel and stupid people — “cruel and stupid” being defined as anyone who tries to keep me away from drugs.

“Well, let me ask you this,” Glandy says, his washed-out brown eyes doing nothing to lessen the potato impression: “How does one take a whole bottle of pills by accident?”

I can tell he thinks he’s got me. Would it do more harm than good to try to explain that I’ve been eating Xanax like candy for years now? And I mean that literally, just popping them into my mouth by the handful and chewing them like so many Good & Plenty. With all the booze I was drinking that day, I could have lost track. It could have been an accident. On the other hand, why, if it was an accident, did I wake up on the bathroom floor feeling even more ashamed than usual?

Of course the first thing I did after getting off the floor was reach for my Xanax. No matter that I’d just taken enough to kill most people. Finding the bottle empty, and with no prospect of getting any more until my regular psychiatric appointment days later, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: I’d call the fire department. Isn’t that what people generally do when they’ve overdosed? It’s not that I was worried about dying. Since I hadn’t died yet, I figured I probably wasn’t going to. But running out of Xanax — that was a five-alarm emergency. I needed my meds, and for that I needed a doctor. Where better to find one than in a hospital? Naturally I wasn’t thinking clearly, as the last thing any half-sane physician was going to do was give me more pills.

After I made the call, I guess I passed out again. All I remember is being carried out of my apartment on a stretcher.

They must have gotten my girlfriend Rhonda’s work number from my wallet. She came barging through the doors to the emergency room — where I was busy puking up what was left of the Xanax into a metal basin — and wailed, “Oh, my poor baby!” I was more embarrassed that people would realize this loud, melodramatic woman was my girlfriend than I was about my overdose. “I’m with you right down the line, baby,” she said, sobbing, “right down the line.” 

I’d like to leave Rhonda. I really would. I often can’t stand being in the same room with her. But I just can’t do it. At times, seeing me waver, she’ll use her tall, skinny body like a weapon, running her purple fingernails up and down her snow-white legs and fondling her tiny breasts while telling me all about the women she’s slept with, how pretty they were and what she did with them. Helpless and half sick with desire and self-hate and the suffocating odor of too much Shalimar perfume, I’ll bury my head in her crotch.

But her real power lies in the drugs she’s always bringing home like treats from the bakery: Fiorinal and Darvon for her migraines; Percodan for her chronic jaw pain; Seconal for her insomnia; and, wonder of wonders, tincture of opium for her autoimmune disorder. I slurp down Rhonda’s drugs until I’m a burbling idiot, then sometimes lie on the couch for entire weekends while hallucinating little animals hanging from the ceiling. If I’m lucky, I eventually descend into astonishingly vivid opium dreams, spectacular epics that have all the depth and narrative complexity of Russian novels. Where do they come from, these magnificent dreams? In between trying to figure out a way to leave her, I thank God every day for making Rhonda so unhealthy.

DR. GLANDY ASKS ME to list all the “illicit substances” I take on a regular basis. I answer truthfully, figuring he already knows anyway from the urine sample I’ve given. The list is long, and Glandy writes as quickly as he can, trying to keep up, his tongue showing between his teeth — as if, when put together, the information might add up to something important.

“And how do these drugs make you feel?” Glandy asks when I’m finished.

“Feel?” I repeat. “How do you think they make me feel?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.” Glandy sniffs. “Why don’t you tell me.”

“They make me feel . . .” Even as I start the sentence, I don’t know how I’m going to finish it. It’s like asking how air makes me feel. Without drugs I cannot live. If I ever doubted it, three hellish, Xanax-deprived days at Fairview have settled the issue once and for all. Despite the medication they’re giving me to ease my withdrawal symptoms, I seem to be getting worse by the hour. Every few minutes I get an adrena­line shock in my chest so powerful it makes me wince. My hands are shaking, and my balance is off. I can’t take more than a few steps without worrying that I’m about to fall over.

“Terrible,” I say, assuming that’s what he wants to hear. “The drugs make me feel terrible.”

For the first time Glandy gives me a cold little smile of approval.

We addicts tend to believe we’re smarter than everyone else, but of course we’re not. Dedicated to the ruinous proposition that feeling good for a little while is more important than our health, our families, our liberty, and our very lives, drug addicts are the stupidest people in existence.

And yet, toss a suffering addict like me into the most impossible situation imaginable — say, the locked ward of a mental hospital — and if there’s any conceivable way to obtain his drug of choice, he just might find it.

Marshaling what I have left in the way of resources, I admit to Dr. Glandy that I have a drug problem. I see that now. I tell him that I’m grateful, but I’m also prone to anxiety attacks for which I legitimately need Xanax. I honestly don’t see how I could even get to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting without it.

I realize this is like asking for more bullets right after I’ve tried to shoot myself in the head, but I want to hear what he has to say. Besides, like every active addict, I’m adept at believing my own bullshit. I do suffer from anxiety. But I also shamelessly abuse the medication for it, taking far more than I’m supposed to, mixing it with other drugs, including alcohol, and even going so far as to crush the pills and snort them for an added jolt. On top of all that, my tolerance is so great by now that I need to take many times the usual dosage to get a noticeable effect.

Glandy looks at me with what I take to be incredulous contempt, as if I were some sort of talking insect. But just when I’m certain he’s going to laugh in my face, he says something that fills me with wild hope: “It’s far too early to talk about such things. Let’s see where we are in a couple of weeks.”

IN MY DARK and oppressive room at Fairview, my heretofore long-snoozing neurotransmitters, at last freed from the soporific effects of Xanax, are donning party hats and dancing mad jigs. It’s a state of hyperawareness unlike any I’ve ever experienced before. The slightest noise — someone coughing, Glandy’s pen scratching in his notebook — is physically painful. I think too fast. I talk too fast. I have the feeling I’m not controlling my eyes properly. Physical movements like brushing my teeth or reaching for a comb feel abrupt and jerky, as if my limbs were attached to a puppeteer’s strings. Sleep, of course, is impossible.

Dr. Glandy stops by every morning. I can’t decide if his obtuseness is genuine or some sort of perverse gambit to infuriate me. He keeps insisting that I’m angry, which I guess I am. (Just what was I doing with that archery equipment?) But his relentless hammering away on the subject serves only to turn any anger I started with into a boiling rage. 

“So,” Glandy says at one point, his lips parting in a creepy, vaguely sexual way, “do you want to hit me now?”

WHEN RHONDA COMES to visit, I’ve never seen her looking so good. She’s even washed her hair. I grab her around her waist, suddenly convinced that I love her with all my heart. The life we had together, as sordid as it was, now seems like a paradise. How could I have been so blind?

“I’m dying in here, Rhonda,” I say. “I just can’t stand being locked up. Maybe you could find a lawyer to help spring me.”

“Do you even have the money for a lawyer?” she asks.

“Well, I was hoping maybe you could lend it to me,” I say.

She grows strangely distant and tells me that money’s tight. But since I signed myself in, she explains, I can leave anytime. All I have to do is sign myself out “against medical advice.” They could go to court to hold me, but they never do that. (Rhonda’s no dummy. Although she works as a janitor, she’s got a ba in philosophy.) 

It’s true. I did sign myself in. I was still so high on pills, I’d have signed anything. But I didn’t realize I could just turn around and sign myself back out.

For the first time I see that Rhonda’s customary purple nail polish has been replaced by hot pink. “What’s going on, Rhonda?” I ask weakly.

She looks at the floor for a long time. “I’ve met someone,” she says. “I’m sorry to tell you about it in here. You know: with you being locked up and in crisis and all.”

So much for all that Oh, my sweet baby and I’m with you right down the line.

“Met someone? How could you have met someone? I’ve been gone a week.”

“I know, I know,” she says. “It seems longer, though.”

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT being locked up in a mental hospital that induces a man to take stock. One thing’s entirely clear: the way some are born to music or art or mathematics, I was born to addiction. It’s in my dna, as fixed a part of who I am as my frizzy brown hair and short, fat fingers. By the time I was nine years old, I was already dreaming about one day taking drugs, trying to imagine how they’d feel, and wondering whether they could ease the loneliness and anxiety I couldn’t recall ever being without. I’m not sure how, at such a young age, I made the connection between taking drugs and the relief of psychic pain, but I did. I loved reading about drugs and drug addicts and watching movies about them. These were often just propaganda intended to scare kids away, but I wasn’t fooled. The scarier they tried to make drugs sound, the more I wanted them. Obviously anything that could cause a man to endure so much trouble must be pretty damn good.

Interestingly enough, the way I imagined that drugs would feel — I mean the narcotics that have been my lifelong passion — was mostly accurate. The first time I snorted Demerol (a strong painkiller a friend had stolen from his dying grandmother), it was a kind of vindication. “I knew it,” I said to my friend. “I just knew it would be this good.” But it was more than that. I’d not only known that it would be this good; I’d known that it would be this good in pretty much just this way. My first thought was: Please, God, make this last.

The temporary nature of a high is the addict’s essential torment, the existential quandary he can’t outrun. I’ve never had a high, no matter how intense, that I haven’t at least partly ruined by checking my watch: I feel great at this moment, but for how much longer?

How long now?

How long now?

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