Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (11 page)

I didn’t see the Mercedes turn into the crosswalk in front of me. The guy driving didn’t care that I had the right of way. He leaned on his horn, stuck his head out his window and yelled at me, “Stupid little pisher!”

I flipped him off, but it was too late. He was long gone. My fantasy had gone south too. Best-case scenario: I’d get a free ride to UCLA, live at home, and work at the Chevron. Eventually, I guess you got used to the fumes.

New York, 1994
. I don’t remember coming back from shock this morning. I know it must have happened. I must have awakened, heavy-headed and confused and no doubt nauseous in the ECT suite. That’s what they call it—a suite. Someone in the hospital’s PR department must have spent quite a while paging through a thesaurus in search of that gem. That euphemism. There are no expensive little soaps in the ECT suite; no minibar stocked with Stoli and Perugina chocolate and six-dollar cans of Coke. I’ve spent a lot of time in hotel suites over the last decade, but not one of them had a bed made up with rubber sheets or came with an in-room defibrillator or a guy in the next bed who thought he was Jesus.

I wonder if I am the only ECT patient who’s noticed. I’ve come to realize lately that if you’re really crazy most people assume you’re also really stupid. They either speak to you in a quiet, slow voice as if speaking to a retarded child or enunciate and yell as if addressing a hard-of-hearing, demented senior. Either way, I resent it. True, I can’t always remember who’s president when they ask me after I wake up in the suite. Or what day it is. Or the name of my doctor. But is that really a fair assessment of my mental acuity? I don’t think so.

I think that when I have the energy I will put a slip of paper into the suggestion box at the nurse’s station. I will suggest they change the word “suite” to “lab” or “chamber” or “electric fun house.” Just to let them know I know.

Somehow I got from there to here. My room, my bed. My head feels dull and thick—like the time I tripped on bad mushrooms in Yemen. Only, then, I awakened next to a naked girl. I can’t tell you who’s president, but I remember every detail of that blow job like it was yesterday.

I lie back on my Styrofoam pillow enjoying the memory, recalling the fine points that might be gone tomorrow. Heat, sweat, scent. I feel myself getting hard and try to locate my dick inside the complicated folds of the hospital gown and the oversized paper pajama bottoms I’m required to wear to ECT. You’d think the scavenger hunt would be enough to lower my flag, but if anything, I’ve gone from half-mast to full. I don’t know, maybe it’s the residual electricity floating through my bloodstream, but ECT always makes me horny. So much so that I’ve taken to hoarding tubes of the good lotion and hiding them in my night table. I have a feeling Milton, the Jamaican orderly in charge of the linen cart, knows what I’m up to. Lately he’s been handing me two or three tubes at a time and winking at me. Milton knows a man has his needs. Even when he’s locked up having his brain lit up like a Christmas tree three times a week.

I have managed to pull the enormous tent-like pants off and toss them onto the floor along with the sheet and blanket and have hiked the hospital gown up onto my chest. I am treating myself to an expert double-fisted hand job.

I am in Yemen, in Thailand, in Santiago. I am remembering—girls with skin the color of coffee, of saffron, of cinnamon. I am remembering how they smelled and tasted and felt as my dick slips and slides up through my left hand and circles down through my right in an endlessly delicious loop.

And then there is a sharp knock at the door, followed, without pause, by the swift banging of the door opening against the opposite wall. And then Milton is backing into my room, pulling a wheelchair.

“Mr. Greyson Todd, please to be meeting Mr. Tyrone Washington, your new roommate,” he says before he turns around. And when he does, turning the chair with him, he is rather stunned by what he finds. The kid in the chair—tall, skinny, black, catatonic with depression—does not even register what’s in front of him. His wet lips and slack jaw hang slightly open. His hands, palms turned up, sit curled in his lap, looking like sick birds. His ECT shunt sticks out of one wrist. And still, I am hard as a goddamn brick.

And having worked fucking hard to get to the exquisitely painful point of eruption, I have no intention of stopping now.

“Milton,” I say through gritted teeth, pumping myself once or twice to show him I will not be intimidated, “a moment if you wouldn’t mind.”

Milton looks from my face to my dick.

“Please,” I plead.

He chuckles and slaps the Formica table. “Lord.” Then he whips Tyrone’s chair around. “You got five minutes.”

Later that night, I look over at Tyrone lying in a fetal position—all six feet three inches of him curled into a ball—in the bed next to me. He is nineteen and wears a hospital gown and his basketball sneakers. He is a child.

I can’t sleep and it occurs to me to jerk off again. I wonder if he would notice. I know he wouldn’t say anything. But that is not the point. I don’t want to be rude. There are rules of etiquette, even here.

SIXTH

I have never been into being tied down. Until now. Lately I am so anxious to be restrained that this morning I actually grab an ankle strap out of the orderly’s hand and start buckling myself to the table. “Aren’t we the eager little beaver this morning,” says Florence, perennially cheerful. But it’s not so much that I can’t wait to be zapped. If anything, it’s the feeling that being bound and gagged is the only thing that will stop the sensation—that I am the third rail; that I am filled with a kind of buzzing, humming energy that keeps my knees bouncing and toes twiddling. I am chewing the insides of my cheeks and yanking out strands of hair. And so, while God knows I’d much prefer my first voluntary experience playing the M in S&M to be shared with a highly experienced, leather-clad dominatrix—the kind who makes house calls and comes equipped with her own bag of tricks—I have resigned myself to the fact that my first priority is ridding myself of the feeling that my flesh is about to come flying off my bones. So hospital-issue restraints, a paralytic and generic knockout drops will have to do. When I am finally, completely strapped down, the relief is immediate. The restraints provide a kind of counter-pressure I have not been able to give myself. In being secured I finally feel secure. I haven’t told anyone about this, though I admit it’s been hard to hide. I just tell them I’m nervous. If I told them how I really feel they’d think I was out of my mind
.

Tarzana, 1965
. When I got to my parents’ house Pop was in front of the TV—where he’d been since my mother had died. He didn’t look up when I walked through the living room, and I didn’t say anything. Without her in it, the house itself felt like a coffin. I wanted to do what had to be done and get out. I felt what was becoming a familiar fermenting anxiety begin to roil around the worries I was normally able to handle with ease.

I was acutely aware of the beating of my heart in my chest. I felt as if some giant hand had wrapped itself around my throat and squeezed until I was choking. Eventually I did what I’d been doing since my mother had suddenly stopped existing at the age of fifty-three, having expired in the stacks of the Tarzana Library without even making it to the hospital. I wrenched myself free, swallowed the fear, and did my best impression of an acceptable version of me.

I found Hannah sitting in the back of my mother’s closet. The floor was littered with empty black plastic garbage bags, labels, and markers. She looked up at me with puffy, red-rimmed eyes and smiled.

“What took you so long?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Traffic.”

Hannah looked up into the clothes hanging over her and tears began to fall. She threw her arms around my legs and buried her head in my knees.

I stroked the back of her head. “I know. Well, I’m here now so let’s get this over with,” I said, smiling. “They’re just clothes, right?” She looked up and nodded halfheartedly. My heart was racing. I felt dizzy and nauseated. I smiled again.

There wasn’t that much—dresses, pants, the same simple skirts and blouses my mother had worn to work year after year. It was mostly crap from Sears. The Salvation Army would get almost everything.

I went to the shelves where Mom kept her sweaters neatly folded and began looking, but I couldn’t find what I wanted. I started tearing through them.

“Greyson, stop it. What are you—?”

Hannah, on her hands and knees, tried to collect the sweaters as fast as I threw them to the floor.

“The blue one she wore on Thanksgiving … the blue cashmere sweater I—”

“Relax.” Hannah shoved an armful of acrylic and wool at me, reached over the top of the shelves, and brought down a box.

“She kept it hidden up there.”

“Hidden.”

Hannah hesitated. “Well, Pop always had kind of a thing about this—”

“Stop. You know what, I don’t think I want to know.”

I didn’t make much more working as a summer law clerk in San Francisco than I had working afternoons at the Chevron station when I was in high school. Ellen was basically supporting us by working as the executive secretary to the president of one of the fancy department stores in the city, and she got a thirty-percent discount, so we managed to bring my mother some little present every time we came to visit. A light-blue cashmere cardigan warranted a special trip down to L.A. Ellen said she’d never forget the look on my mother’s face when she first touched that sweater. What I remember, what will never cease to give me pleasure, is the look on my father’s face. It was a perfect mix of anger, humiliation, and the desperate attempt to hide both.

I sat huddled in the corner and carefully lifted the lid off the box. The original tissue paper lay over the sweater. I was taking this home with me.

Hannah laughed.

“What?”

“You look about as old as you were the night you hid in the closet and they couldn’t find you.”

I was seven. They were coming home from a party. I don’t remember why but I thought it would be funny to play a trick on them and hide. I didn’t realize how scared they’d be. And when they were, I was afraid to come out. I wanted them to find me. But I was too afraid to come out myself. Afraid I would get in trouble. For hiding. I started to cry. I didn’t want to hide anymore. I was tired. And I could hear my mother crying. I think I finally made enough noise so that my father came to look in the closet. He was furious. But my mother just wanted to know why I had been hiding. I said I was afraid everyone would be mad if I came out.

“You knew about that?” I said.

“Are you kidding? Mom was so panicked when they couldn’t find you she practically tackled me in my sleep,” Hannah said.

“I made her cry.” I felt a dull, empty ache.

“Oh,” Hannah gasped, “She looked so beautiful that night.”

Closed eyes brought shifting kaleidoscopic fragments—high heels standing in the closet doorway, full skirt silhouetted in the yellow light of their bedroom. A turned cheek, red lipstick, a smudge of black mascara.

Hannah jumped up off the floor and quickly rifled through my mother’s clothes.

“She wore this,” Hannah said, holding an outdated dark-blue taffeta dress against her. “I loved this dress. She made it herself. I remember going to Fairfax Fabrics with her to pick out the material.” Hannah held the dress tighter, then slowly lifted it to her face. Tears formed in her eyes and fell down her cheeks. As if it were a baby, she gently passed the dress to me.

“Go on,” she whispered, “take it.” When it was safely in my arms, I buried my face in it. At first I smelled nothing, maybe a little mustiness. But with the second and the third and the fourth breath, my head began to spin. Because the folds of that faded piece of cloth were replete with the ghost of my mother’s special-occasion perfume. An alchemy of gardenias and orange blossoms, of dances and bright red lipstick, of holidays and all my mother’s best Saturday nights.

For a split second, the anxiety receded and in its place there was just her.

And then suddenly everything—every last shitty housecoat—seemed important. Nothing was disposable. And nothing was the same. Nothing was ever the same.

The words roll around in my head. And eventually a red flag goes up. Nothing was the same. Is this where it happens? I think something bad happened. I think. I remember thinking: I’m guessing it was more than one thing. Who was it that said that? Who was that?

The words roll around in my head. Crazy. “Crazy,” they call me. Sure I’m crazy, sure I’m crazy … Sure. I’m. Crazy …

And that’s how it happens. Like a broken record, warped and scratched. Once I was music, now I am just noise
.

Palo Alto, 1965
. By then it was happening every day. The panic spread out like a late-afternoon shadow. I became aware of a dull ache in my stomach, of a thick metallic taste in my mouth that made it hard for my throat to open and close, of the irregular thrumming of my heart.

An air conditioner. A car with a flat tire. A refrigerator. A whirring. Usually soft at first, always low—almost guttural. Mechanical. It is safe to say the sound was mechanized. Safe to say. Relentless.

I left the apartment, the library, the student union to get away from it. The sound only got louder. I walked downtown and seemed to head straight into it. I ran in the other direction, and it followed me. And got louder still. As if I’d made it mad. By then it had swallowed all the other sounds outside. I fought against the tide of cheerful students, and mothers slowed to the pace of their toddlers. Stupid and naïve, they shopped for dinner and passed out political flyers and listened to the Raiders play the Saints on their transistor radios. All I heard was the air-conditioner–flat-tire–refrigerator whirring. Were they deaf?

I began to understand that the only way I could prevent the sound from swallowing every last synapse in my brain was to talk. To myself. Out loud. I had to scream to hear myself above the whirring. That’s when the people on the street stopped shopping for dinner and passing out flyers and listening to the game. And started staring at me. I stared back. They looked away. I took a step forward. A woman grabbed her child by the hand and yanked her out of my path. I had become a man who ate children.