Long Past Stopping (28 page)

“Yes. Everyone knows why you were in the movie, Stacy,” she said condescendingly. “And you know as well as I do that that has nothing to do with why you're here. The reason you're still here is that when someone tries to take their own life, we are required by the State of California to hold them until we see evidence that they are no longer a threat to themselves or others.”

“Oh, that's great. Now tell me how losing my daughter is going to give me a reason to live. I'll die without her.” She started crying.

“What are you implying by that?” the counselor asked, totally unfazed by this display of emotion.

“See what I mean?” Stacy said, turning toward me.

“You can't even open your mouth without them interpreting it as suicidal. It's fucking evil!” she screamed, turning her attention back to the group. “I bet that bastard's paying you to keep me here till after the court date. Is that what he's doing? I should have just kept my mouth shut like this guy…You'll probably release him right away! From now on I'm not saying anything!”

“That sounds like a great idea, Stacy. Let's move on,” the counselor said without even taking a pause. “Brian, how are you today?”

“Fine,” said the guy sitting next to Stacy. Brian was wearing a robe, indicating he had a
real
problem.

“That's great, Brian. Can you tell me what ‘fine' feels like?” she asked.

“Like okay,” he said.

“That's a very good start. Now can you elaborate on ‘okay'?”

“Jesus Christ,” Stacy interrupted. “He said he was fine. How come when someone's fine you try to get them to talk, but when someone isn't at all fine you just want to shut them up? It's so obvious you're just trying to get him to say something that you can use to keep him here longer.”

“This isn't helping your case, Stacy.”

“Since there's obviously nothing I can say to help my case, I might as well tell the truth……What? Are you afraid the other patients are going to get wise to your plan, too? I'm going to tell everyone. Then see what happens.”

“…And that's more important than seeing your daughter?”

“You fucking bitch! You have no right to bring her into this!” she yelled hysterically.

“Okay, group. Stacy and I are going to have a chat in my office, and I hope to see the rest of you this afternoon. That will be all.”

 

I
SAT IN THE CIRCLE
awhile longer by myself, staring into space, wondering how the hell I had ended up here. It was almost as if Stacy had held up a mirror for me. Did I sound that crazy at my first rehab? I, too, had been convinced that I was right, and no one had come up with a single argument that didn't reinforce my various theories about AA, rehabs, and God all being a huge conspiracy to get people into their cult. Even when someone said something vaguely sensible, I thought,
These people will say anything to get me to join up with their bullshit.
Although I still wasn't convinced that I was wrong about them or nearly as crazy as Stacy, I did see a glimpse of my own paranoia through her, and it scared me. I needed to get the hell out of there now. I only had one more day before I would no longer be faking withdrawal. I'd be going through it for real. I struggled out of the chair to look for the doctor.

I
NEVER THOUGHT
I would look forward to school, but after the worst summer ever, I couldn't wait to go back to Arizona. I had been fired from a job and kicked out of summer camp for smoking cigarettes, and Mom and I did nothing but scream at each other once I got back to Berkeley and had to face the consequences of admitting I took acid. For the first time in my life, Mom started treating me like a kid, and our interactions often escalated into yelling matches within twenty seconds. She wanted me to tell her where I was going whenever I left the house. Whom I was going with. What I was going to do, and when I was going to be home. Stuff normal kids had to deal with their whole lives, but, as far as I was concerned, it was too late to all of a sudden start treating me like a fourteen-year-old.

High school didn't end up being much better. We came back to a new headmaster, various new teachers, a crop of new kids, and a staggering number of new rules. The only good thing about this, if there was one, was that it was easier to make friends under the new regime because nothing brings people together like a common enemy. The common enemy was Joe, the new headmaster. Joe had no business whatsoever at our hippie school. He had come from a stuffy East Coast prep school and, at our first assembly, went on and on about the life lessons he had learned playing rugby and how it was his honor to pass these virtues on to us. He
then explained that the tie he was wearing was given to him by his former headmaster as he lay on his deathbed and told Joe he was passing the mantle on to him.

Joe was hell-bent on purging the school of its bad apples, but enrollment was already down. The costs of losing more kids were being passed on to us in the form of fewer activities, crappier food, and a new air of paranoia as supposedly people called “finks” were walking around, collecting data on everyone and reporting straight to Joe.

 

O
NE OF THE NEW
rules Joe instituted was that we were no longer allowed to smoke on campus. The campus itself was huge, and the nearest place to smoke was behind the girls' dorm, which was built only twenty feet from the barbed-wire fence that separated the campus from what was officially state property. Any other direction and it would have been a fifteen-minute walk to get off the grounds, plus this new smoking rule was my only excuse to go anywhere near the girls' dorms. The dorm had a big courtyard that we walked through in order to go to Cow Pie, a huge rock formation/smoking patio that looked exactly like its name.

Shortly after returning from working at an orphanage in Oaxaca—my field trip that year—my friend Matt and I were having a cigarette during lunch break, and on our way back we staged a ridiculous fake fight in the girls' courtyard. I hardly ever used my circus skills, but I had been teaching Matt how to fall without getting hurt, and how to slap his thigh, and turn his head when I took a swing at him to make it look like he was being punched, and other slapstick tricks. Although neither of us would admit it, we were probably hoping to get some attention from the girls, and the fight escalated to where Matt was throwing me against the wall and kicking me when I was down. He then picked me up and gently threw me against a big window that looked out onto the courtyard from one of the girls' rooms. We had a crowd of about five girls watching who didn't know what to make of it all, and when I bounced off the window they seemed a little freaked out. We both started laughing.

“Wow, that was a good one. Let's try that one again,” I said.

This girl Caroline who Matt had a crush on walked in just then and Matt said, “Hey Caroline, you got to see this. It will freak you out.” He grabbed me by the collar and…

Climbing out of the window, I found everyone staring at me in total silence while Matt, who was sitting on the ground next to me, held his
head in his hands mumbling, “oh no,” over and over. I looked down and noticed an eight-inch gash on my chest and a flap of skin hanging down to my waist. It looked like an anatomy drawing from a textbook, as if the muscles around my rib cage had been woven on a loom.

Feeling something wet dripping down my fingers, I looked at my hand and saw a two-inch gouge in my wrist, all the way down to the bone. The gash in my side had been kind of fascinating, but the cut in my wrist and the blood squirting from it brought me back to earth. I figured I only had a few minutes left to live, and I decided to spend them running around in circles yelling, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” until this girl named Anna appeared out of nowhere, grabbed on to my wrist with her hand, and pressed herself against my chest wound.

Anna was a bit of an anomaly. While almost everyone else dressed in cutoff jeans, tie-dyes, and Birkenstocks, she always wore these amazing matching outfits. That day it was a white one-piece tennis suit with a white sash for a belt, white socks, and a pair of white Keds. All the other kids were standing around dumbstruck until Anna started barking orders at them.

“Matt! Run to the infirmary and tell the nurse what happened. Let her know we're coming, and tell her to stay there. Caroline, go get John. He's down in the music room. Tell him to meet us at the infirmary with a van. And Sarah, I need you to untie my belt.”

Anna wrapped her sash around my wrist as tight as she could, then grabbed onto it again, squeezing hard. With her other hand she reached around my waist and pulled her body against mine, applying pressure on my chest.

“Good. You're going to be okay, but we need to get to the infirmary. You ready?”

I wasn't so sure I was going to be okay, but I nodded and we awkwardly set out to find the nurse.

We ran into her, hurrying down the path holding a fistful of Band-Aids. At this point Anna must have looked much worse off than I did, with her white tennis suit completely covered in blood.

“Oh dear. Let me see what happened,” the nurse said, trying to peel open a Band-Aid.

“Don't let go of me,” I said.

“Those aren't going to help right now,” Anna said. “Go back and get your car started in case John doesn't show up.”

“But I need to see what happened,” the nurse said again.

“I'm not letting go of him. Get your car, or go find John,” Anna said with such authority that the nurse actually turned around and ran away. “Don't worry. I'm not letting go of you,”

“Thanks,” I said, continuing our slow walk.

When we got to the infirmary, John and Matt were already there with the van. We got in and John took off before the doors were even closed, only to slam on the brakes a moment later. The nurse was chasing after us with more Band-Aids and a bottle of iodine, which she handed to John. Anna, who had maintained incredible composure until this point, screamed at her, “You're not helping! John, go!” He took off for good this time.

John was driving as fast as he could, and I finally started feeling the pain as the van started bouncing all over the dirt roads. When I wasn't wincing in pain from bouncing up and down, I was morbidly reflecting on what I had accomplished in my short time on earth.
Not bad for a fourteen-year-old,
I thought, but Anna still hadn't loosened her grip on me, and I could feel her breath on my neck. As much as I was trying not to think about it, I couldn't get around the fact that I still hadn't done the one thing I wanted to do more than anything else in the whole world. It seemed totally wrong to be thinking about sex at a time like this, but I wasn't ready to die. Not yet.

I even started crying about it, which caused Anna to start whispering to me that everything was going to be all right. “I've got you. I'm not letting go,” she said, but this only made my dilemma seem even sadder.

 

W
HEN I REGAINED
consciousness after being sewn back together, I found out that I had cut two tendons and a nerve, had broken my wrist in the same place for the third time, and had an eight-inch open wound on my chest.

“The bad news is that you'll be in that cast for the next six months and will most likely permanently lose some of your muscles while the nerve grows back,” the doctor told me after the operation. “The good news is that you're lucky to be alive. You missed your artery by a centimeter.”

 

I
WASN'T FEELING
too lucky. Everything I did relied on that hand: ceramics, painting, guitar, writing, masturbation. On top of that, my ceramics teacher, Jeff, warned me that Joe was trying to figure out a way to kick me out.

“For what?” I asked, as if I wasn't already going through enough hell.

“He says you were on drugs.”

“You've got to be kidding me. I was just messing around with Matt.”

“Don't tell me. Tell him.”

It was ludicrous, but sure enough I was called into Joe's office.

“So, what happened with Matt? Why don't you tell me the real story,” Joe said.

When I told him what happened, he said, “Yeah, I know that part. But before that, you guys were smoking pot, so I have to suspend you. I know you're going through a lot, so I'm willing to just let you take the rest of the semester off to recover instead of an official suspension.”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “First of all, I have no idea what you're talking about with this pot thing. I was smoking a cigarette, and as far as I know there's no rule about getting thrown through windows. At least there wasn't a few days ago.” I had only smoked pot once at the beginning of the year, and there was no way someone could have seen me getting high.

“Why do you insist on making everything difficult? I'm offering you a reasonable way out of this. Why don't you take it?”

“Because I have nothing to get out of. I have no idea where you get your information or whether you're just assuming I was high, but I wasn't. How can you suspend me for something you have no proof of?”

“I know for a fact that you smoke pot, and I can get proof if I need it. But again, it would make things easier if you just went home to recover.”

All of a sudden my mouth just started stringing words together on its own, like the time I had gotten into it with Mr. Lutkenhouse. As scared as I was, I said, “It was that fucking doctor. What the fuck? He told me that was confidential information. This is total bullshit.” The anesthesiologist had asked me a whole bunch of questions about drugs before he shot me up with Demerol.

“Where'd you learn to talk like that?”

“It doesn't matter where I learned it, unless you've got a new rule I don't know about. I can't believe that fucking guy. But how can you get proof if it's confidential?”

“It's not. You're a minor.”

“Good, then when you get the paperwork you'll see that I told him the last time I smoked pot was three months ago, which was during summer break.”

“Really? That's not what he said.”

“I don't care what he said. Look at the file.”

“Okay, I will. If you're lying, I'll do my best to kick you out. If I can't find proof, you can stay, but we're going to give you random drug tests. That's the deal.”

“No. What happened had nothing to with drugs, and to prove it, I'll make you a deal. You can test me once. If I was high, it'll still be in my system. You can't punish me for something I didn't do.”

“Who taught you to talk to authority like this? When I was a kid, I would have been slapped around if I acted this way.”

“I'm glad I'm not you,” I said, storming out.

 

J
OE'S TERM AS
headmaster was a dark period in the school's history. He'd kicked so many students out, and enrollment for the next year was only half what it had been when I started. We weren't told whether he was fired or if he resigned, but we all celebrated when we saw a moving truck in front of Joe's house. A few days later he drove away without even saying good-bye.

 

B
ACK IN BERKELEY
for summer vacation, I was in desperate need of a job. Coffee and cigarettes cost money. Food was also an issue if I didn't want to eat my mom's nightly meal of boiled broccoli and zucchini with soy sauce. Not only had she been cooking the same exact thing for as long as I could remember, but she had also recently changed the rules so that if Kyle or I didn't help her make the weekly batch on Sunday nights, we weren't allowed to have any the whole week.

It may have been a valid rule, but the consequences of not helping her outweighed the benefits as long as I had a dollar to go to the Chinese restaurant around the corner. If she had enough broccoli and zucchini left on Friday or Saturday I could usually get some out of her whether I had helped or not, since the shit was so soggy and old by then it was almost inedible. Wednesday and Thursday were out of the question since that was when it had reached her favorite consistency. Other than a bloody rare steak once a year to get her folic acid, she had survived for at least the last fourteen years almost exclusively on zucchini and broccoli.

I needed money, and getting a job spared me both from having to help her make the same dinner we'd been eating for years and, more important, having to eat it. I went through the want ads calling about any
jobs I thought might hire a fourteen-year-old. The only place to call me back was a silk-screen company down in Emeryville who needed someone to fold shirts for ten dollars an hour.

The manager, Brigitte, showed me around the place and told me that my job was to fold the shirts as they came out of these gigantic heat-setting machines. It seemed easy enough, but I wasn't aware that I would be working on all three of the heat setters. The machines were fed by a motley-looking cast of punk rockers who were printing the shirts way faster than I was able to fold them. All day long I ran back and forth, folding as many as I could in one area before the boxes that were set out to catch the others overflowed and started spilling onto the floor. The work was great physical therapy for my hand, which was still healing from my accident at school. But, as the doctor warned me, a few of my muscles had atrophied and would never recover.