Authors: Terri Cheney
I hadn’t planned on being manic. For months,
I’d looked forward to the writing workshop I was scheduled to attend at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. David’s death had convinced me that it was finally time to get serious about my writing. But first, I’d get a long, deep massage, soak in the hot tubs, slow down, and rejuvenate. Work had been particularly hectic of late, what with back-to-back trials and screaming studio bosses and a cocaine-addled client who couldn’t keep his hands off the phone.
Esalen was the perfect place to find my breath again. Picture twenty-seven acres of wild wood, green lawns, and gardens, bounded by cliffs that drop off into the sea. A carefully cultivated quiet nourishes thought, a silence disturbed only by the boom and crash of the ocean.
Silence: my least favorite sound when I’m manic. I wanted to talk, I needed to talk, words pressed up so hard against the roof of my mouth I felt like I had to spit to breathe. One doesn’t spit in Paradise; and it doesn’t make a very good impression on the first day of a workshop. I desperately wanted to connect with these people and belong to this place, to pass as a writer among writers. So I managed, by clamping my jaw shut and sucking on my tongue, to get through most of the introductory small talk with responsive nods and a tight-lipped smile. By the time we finally turned to writing, my pen was frantic with all the things I’d left unsaid.
I made it through the night. I even made it through the next morning and three-quarters of the afternoon, at which point I excused myself after a violent fit of coughing. By then the words were backed up so deep in my throat that even tongue-sucking couldn’t keep them down. I ran to the edge of the cliffs, where the boom and crash were loudest, and howled. I howled like a moon-sick dog until the sky finally turned black and every light in every window was extinguished. Then I crept back into my bungalow and pretended to sleep.
My body rebelled the second my head hit the pillow. Colors kept exploding behind my closed eyes. Words and numbers glowed and pulsed like neon signs, unintelligible but urgent. I hadn’t slept in five days. I had forgotten how.
I fled at the first pale glimmer of light. In my rush, I had left my leather jacket behind. Although my new peach sweater was lovely, it was merely a light silk blend. My socks were simply cotton. Within ten minutes I had lost all sensation in my toes and earlobes, and the tips of my fingers were alarmingly white. But I couldn’t go back to the bungalow. Someone was bound to see me. There was nothing left to do but jog in circles, fast as I could, round and round the beautifully manicured gardens with their neatly tended rock borders, tight little fussy lines of rock that squeezed my feet like tiny stone pincers. The last thing I needed was a bordered edge telling me where I shouldn’t go.
I had to keep moving. Carmel was only an hour or so up the coast, and class didn’t start until much, much later. There was still time—for what, I didn’t know. For more.
The ride up the coast was eventful only because of the increasingly heavy rain and the red light flashing on my dashboard. The brake, it said. What about it? Was it on? No. I slammed my open palm against the glass. Not a flicker. If the brake wasn’t on, and the light wouldn’t go off, then I’d let the guys at Zipper Porsche back in L.A. figure it out. It was the wrong car, anyway, too big and muscular for me. Girls should own Carreras, not 928s, but at least it was a good car to be driving on a day like this: a road warrior against the wet, winding asphalt, where every curve drops off into a rain-shrouded abyss.
The damned brake light stayed on all the way to Carmel. There was a funny smell coming up through the floorboard, too, like charcoal smoldering on a rubber grill. I pulled over at the first sight of town, cursing the stupid car and the stinging rain, and opened up the hood. Smoke and fumes everywhere, overcoming the rain. Maybe the light had meant something after all.
There weren’t any Porsche guys in Carmel, just a 76 Station that didn’t have time. I hadn’t reached the obnoxious stage yet; I was just on the edge, but it didn’t show. I simply expected you to do what I wanted you to do, because of course that’s what you wanted to do all along. You just didn’t know it yet. Very, very charming, with a lawyer’s bite and a couple of twenty-dollar bills to back up my smile.
They could fix it, they said, whatever it was, in about two hours. That was fine, it would give me just enough time to do a little shopping before I headed back. I would buy something for every person in my class. I didn’t really know them all yet, but it didn’t really matter. Something bright, something absurd, something to make the sky blue again…. And there it was, right across the street, a quaint hand-lettered sign on a small timbered storefront: High as a Kite. Perfect, perfect! They had every style of kite imaginable—Japanese kites shaped like huge paper lanterns, orange carp kites dangling long string tails, fighter kites that swooped and killed like falcons—all so colorful, so silly, so just what I wanted! I bought a dozen plus two more for luck, because you never know when a kite might come in handy.
Fitting fourteen kites inside my car was a bit tricky, but the service station guys gave me a hand. They had fixed the problem and sent me off with a warning about the storm coming due. Coming due didn’t mean here yet, and the brake light wasn’t on anymore. None of the lights that shouldn’t be were on. There was still time for more.
I think I was the only person on the road back to Esalen. It was quiet. Too quiet.
Serious cars have serious sound systems. I had the biggest bully of them all: a Blaupunkt. You could stick the Partridge Family in that sucker and it would come out sounding like heavy metal. And due to a postkite purchase, I had the perfect tape for the moment: Melissa Etheridge’s latest about love and despair and always wanting the wrong woman. Trapped in a storm, surrounded by fury, what could better match my mood? I pulled over to a rest stop, cranked the sound up, and let Melissa rage against the wind: “If I wanted to, I could do anything right / I could dance with the devil on a Saturday night…”
Almost perfect, but not enough. I lowered all the windows and let the rain lash my face. The wind whipped through the interior, rattling the kites I had stacked on the front seat and under the deck lid. I reached back to tie them down, and it struck me: what better time to fly a kite than in a storm? Why should anything ever be tethered? I unwound the fighter kite’s string and tied the end around my stick shift. Then I retracted the sun roof, angled the kite toward the sky, and set it free.
It flew. Maybe for only a minute or two, but oh how it whipped and oh how it soared and oh what a wild ride. More.
I tied two of the big carps to my wrists and got out of the car. The wind snapped them up in an instant. I could feel their protest, a moment’s writhing defiance, then sudden surrender. I could feel the wind tugging at me, too, whispering promises in my ear. If I jumped, I wouldn’t fall. I would fly with the carps and the fighter kites above the storm and across the ocean, to somewhere better and bigger and faster than this. I would dance with the devil any night that I chose….
But I had promised the kites.
It took me almost an hour to set them all free, and by the time I was through I was sick to death of Melissa Etheridge’s problems. I was cold and hungry and wet. It was miles still to Esalen, and hours after that until dinner. And they expected me to write in between. Write what. Write why. Thank God the car started and the appropriate lights stayed on and off, and nobody else was on the road to get in my way.
I must have been a scary sight at the Esalen gate, because the guard asked me for I.D. What the hell did he think I was going to do, anyway—crash a drum-beating class? He let me in without further argument. He even asked me if I was okay. Apparently nobody else had ventured off the grounds that day, because there wasn’t an empty parking space within half a mile of my bungalow. It was a long, dreary trudge, carrying those heavy shopping bags through the mud, in the dark, without even a firefly to light the way. What had happened to the rain? What once felt like electric kisses against my skin now stung like whips across an open wound. And all that shouting, that unbearable shouting going on—the wind and the rain and the tormented trees, and the ocean bellowing up from below.
I didn’t want quiet, but I didn’t want this. I wanted my own noise, with nobody around to disturb it. I’ll beat my own drums, I’ll fly my own kite, and this is fair warning: Stay out of my way.
Something tugged at me when I passed by the glistening, manicured rock garden with its neat and certain border. There are people out there who don’t want a wild ride on the wind, or to dance with the devil on a Saturday night. All they want is a careful garden that blossoms and withers according to season. For some people, there is enough. They don’t have to want more, when more is nothing but more and is never enough.
I left my bags outside the bungalow door and went inside. I sat by the fire and towel-dried my hair. Minute by minute, it was the best I could do: stay tethered and wait out the storm.
I’ve never liked the telephone. It’s a noisy, shrill
intruder. If it were up to me, I’d ban all phones and bring back visiting days, like in Jane Austen and Edith Wharton novels: “Ms. Cheney shall be in on Tuesday afternoons, from two to four o’clock.”
The entertainment lawyer is always in; it’s part of the job description. With the advent of voice mail, I lived in fear of the blinking message light. It was always there, at the edge of my desk, in the corner of my eye. But I just couldn’t pick up the phone. If I picked it up, I’d have to talk. If I talked, I’d have to care. I was too depressed to pretend that I cared, too worn out even to try.
Sick of playing hostage to a machine, I finally committed an unthinkable act. I stepped off the fast track, leaving my high-profile entertainment law firm to work part-time at a lesser known, though highly respectable, firm downtown. I’d like to say it was an act of courage, and maybe in part it was. But it was also an act of desperation. I simply couldn’t take big-firm life anymore: the relentless pressure of the billable hour, the endless jockeying for favor, and most of all the scrutiny. I felt like I was being watched and judged every second of every waking hour, to see if I was partnership material.
Africa had changed me far more than I knew. I looked around at all the excesses of my Beverly Hills lifestyle and could no longer see them as badges of honor. I had so much, and yet I wanted more. I wanted to pursue that lifelong dream I’d confessed in my late-night talks with David. Crazy as it sounds, I wanted to write: a novel, not a screenplay, thank God, but still.
I was never happier.
Six months later I received a phone call from a lawyer I knew from the old days who was putting together what he called his “All-Star team” for a new sort of litigation specialty: Hollywood meets Silicon Valley. How could I resist? I was offered less hours for more money, at a firm I never dreamed would accept me as an associate. Once again, my business card would gain me entree into the hottest restaurants and the coolest clubs. I would belong. I looked over the hundred-plus pages of my beloved novel. It was nowhere near as compelling as that business card.
The new job wasn’t so bad, really. It wasn’t even such a bad life. It just wasn’t
my
life, not anymore. I belonged again, but to everyone except myself. I sat at my nice, shiny mahogany desk all day, staring at the screaming phone. The six lines flashed in constant fits of impatience, and all I could do was stare back. What could they possibly want from me? Why couldn’t I move? I managed to keep my condition a secret by coming in late at night and returning all the calls I hadn’t answered that day. Sometimes I didn’t even turn on the lights. I just sat in the dark, wondering why the next breath was necessary.
And then the Big Case slammed into my life, and I had no choice but to start acting like a lawyer who returned phone calls.
In every lawyer’s life, there is a Big Case, maybe two. The bigger the firm, the bigger the case. But each is unique in the level of blood it sucks from your life. This case was a blood-sucker of the first magnitude. I knew, because it was the same Big Case I had escaped from when I’d left the fast track to go part-time. I had sidestepped this killer case by changing firms, only to have the client switch firms himself.
So here they all were again, Michael Jackson and the rest of the gang: the same agents, managers, lawyers, producers, record execs, and assorted starfuckers who had almost succeeded in drowning me before, with their constant demands and conflicting interests and relentless, unending, inexorable phone calls. Naturally, since I was intimately familiar with the cast of characters, I was assigned to the case, only a month before it was set for trial. Big celebrities almost never go to trial, but all attempts at settling this dispute had failed.
And so it began. One phone call had to be followed up by three, each of which required a fourth to confirm, with the message slips piling up exponentially. When a court date looms, every call is urgent. I couldn’t return these phone calls from under my desk in the middle of night. It was trial time, and there was no day or night. Only deadlines.
I made it through the night. I always do. We won. We always do. When it was over, I took ten days off and stayed in a four-star bed and breakfast. I returned to the office knowing that my desk would be clean, the mahogany visible again, the telephone quiet. I smiled as I walked down the hall toward my office, confident that the insistent jangling I heard was for somebody else, some other poor slob caught up in the next Big Case.
When I opened my door, all six lights were flashing. Message slips were cascading off my chair to the floor. I picked one up: “Notice of appeal.” I picked up a few more. “Urgent.” “Appeal.” “Call immediately.” I swept the rest of the slips off my chair, sat down, and put my head on my desk. The lights kept blinking, the phone kept ringing, but I couldn’t move my hand to pick it up. I knew it wouldn’t make the noise go away. It would never go away. It would only be followed by the next noise, which might be even louder. Better just to sit there, quietly, my head on my desk, until it was time to go home.
The next day was the same, and the next, and the day after that—an intolerable accumulation, just like the papers piling up on my desk. I had one move left, the one I’d kept on hand in case of an emergency. One phone call. It was to Dr. R., the psychiatrist who promised that he could ease my pain if I would submit to a few months of electroconvulsive therapy—electroshock, or ECT, as it’s known in the field. The decision to allow electrodes to be placed on each side of my skull, which would then transmit enough electrical voltage to send my body flying two feet off the operating table, was calm, almost lawyerlike in its logic. I had no other options left.
Dr. R. was considered one of the top diagnosticians in the United States, maybe even the world. His curriculum vitae stopped at twenty pages and just said, “Please call for further publications.” Believe me, when he spoke, I listened. And all he said was, “ECT.” The only possibility left was to try to shock the hell out of the depression.
So I signed the fifteen-page consent form. Three additional doctors had to assure Blue Cross that the treatment was necessary. After talking with me for twenty minutes, each doctor confirmed the need for immediate intervention. Dr. R. wrote in some kind of quasimedical diagnosis, so that my firm signed off on a three-month leave of absence. We all hoped that three months, twelve ECT sessions, and many thousands of dollars later, I would be well again. Better than well. I would be cured.
I remember almost nothing of the actual ECT, except the straps that bound me to the bed. They were thick, discolored with sweat, and they hurt. They left bruises on my arms and ankles for weeks after each session. I’m not sure that I
want
to remember the experience, although it makes for great dinner conversation. But whether I want to remember it or not is beside the point. The main side effect of ECT is that it wipes out your short-term memory. Some of it returns later, but for the most part, there are vast gray gaps in 1994. Despite the general fog, I still catch glimpses now and then, which may be true, or may only be fragments of a dream.
Ironically, the act of forgetting itself is very clear. I remember not being able to remember simple things, things I never even realized that I knew. The meaning of certain useless words, for example. The word
cornstarch
seemed particularly strange to me, and I still can’t pass it in a supermarket without feeling a sense of dislocation. I also forgot the associations assigned to different colors. There seemed no functional distinction to me between red and green. (Fortunately, I was forbidden to drive while I was undergoing treatment.) I even forgot certain smells, like a snuffed-out candle, or Nivea hand cream—smells that had once been as familiar to me as my father’s face. Which I also briefly forgot.
But mostly I remember the psychotic break that took place after my eighth ECT session, triggering the most severe manic episode of my life. Previous episodes had lasted several days in a row. This one lasted weeks. I’ve since learned that ECT can sometimes cause mania, even in a person who has never been manic before.
I may never be able to pin down in words the events of that nonstop twenty-four-hours-a-day, eighteen-day odyssey I embarked upon. What little I know of it, I pieced together through the sales receipts. I vaguely recall shooting up the coast to Big Sur to spend two weeks and an obscene amount of money for a tree house suite at the Post Ranch Inn. The management still sends me postcards of thanks, to this day. What I didn’t spend on the Inn, I spent elsewhere, on anything that struck my fancy or satisfied my manic taste, which it turns out was very bad. I bought a dozen assorted garden gnomes, for example, even though I had no garden. By the time I came back home, I had not only gone through my entire savings account, I had seduced the husband of one dear friend and made plans to seduce another two evenings hence.
I don’t know if it was the exhaustion of my neurotransmitters, my funds, or my sleep-deprived body, but I literally crashed when I came back to L.A. Ran smack into the cypress tree in front of my house. I saw it, of course. I knew it was there. But I felt like I was the stronger life force. Without my consciously willing it, my foot pushed down harder on the accelerator. I felt irresistibly drawn to go closer, and closer, without reducing my speed, to see if the tree would yield. It didn’t.
My next ECT session—the ninth in the projected series of twelve—was scheduled for the following day. I unpacked as quickly as I could, laying out my clothes for the morning so that I could get an early start. I had to be at the hospital no later than five
A.M
. I remember only isolated parts of that morning. Dr. R. entered, and I started to tell him that things had been a bit, well, odd with me lately, but he was in his usual ultra-efficient rush. God, I admired that man’s ability to cut a conversation short. That morning he seemed even more hurried than ever, a man with a mission: get this business over with. I chalked up the weird feelings I got from him to my weird feelings in general, and bit down on the thick wooden bar.
And then my world convulsed.
I remember very little of what happened over the next few months. Only two things: first, Dr. R. was indicted for sexually molesting one of his patients, and his license was suspended; second, I tried to commit suicide. It’s rather strange that I hadn’t tried earlier, given the depth of my distress. But suicide requires movement, and depression weighs a thousand tons. I needed a spark of mania to quicken my step, to loosen my limbs, to fire up my resolve. Mania doesn’t just give you the desire for extremes, it gives you the energy to pursue them. Race today, recoup tomorrow, if tomorrow ever comes.
Tomorrow meant nothing to me. Just more electrodes, more flashing phones, and a body that refused to move. I had more than enough drugs on hand, more than a hundred that would probably work. I know now that it’s unusual for a doctor to allow a psychiatric patient to stockpile so many pills. But Dr. R., as always, followed his own rules. It turned out that in addition to molesting his patient, he was also indicted for flagrant abuse of his prescribing privileges. All the famous producers you’ve ever read about who overdosed on psychotropic meds—you can bet that Dr. R. was in their Rolodex.
I woke up in St. John’s Hospital three days after my attempt, in a private padded room on the locked ward. Nobody told me about Dr. R.’s indictment, so I wondered why he wasn’t there and hadn’t called. I wondered why I was strapped down to the bed, since this wasn’t the room where they did the ECT. Mostly, I wondered why I was still alive.
They tell me my exterminator found me. I love the irony of that. He comes once a month to spray for spiders. He has a key to my front door and enters at his own discretion. Instead of spiders, he found me, sprawled on the living room carpet, with blood and foam coming out of my mouth. I don’t know what the foam was all about, maybe all the plastic capsules dissolving in the tequila. But the blood I understand: I bit halfway through my tongue. You’ve never discovered how loud you can scream until they give you twenty stitches in your tongue without an anesthetic.
Who knows what went wrong during that last ECT session? I personally think it was some strange kind of gift from the gods. I emerged from that chaos a different person, with a different identity. No longer depressed, but bipolar. The label mattered. It made sense of my erratic life. I had never before understood how, for several weeks or months at a time, I could function at such a high level of competence, only to be followed by equally long periods of hiding under my desk, under the covers, in the dark.
To be honest, I’d never really been comfortable with the concept of “depression,” no matter how articulately I defended it to my family and friends. I had never disclosed my diagnosis to my colleagues. I still thought depression was something I should be able to control. God knows I’d heard it often enough—just pick yourself up by your bootstraps, or run five miles a day, or avoid all forms of sugar, and you could lick this thing. Everybody gets the blues.
But manic depression is just too crazy for most people to identify with, or have comforting platitudes for. There’s a certain liberation in being so out there, beyond the norm. The layman rarely argues with you: your conduct speaks for itself. So I am genuinely insane every once in a while, but at least it’s genuine insanity. It occupies a whole different space in the DSM-IV.
I’m still ashamed of having a mental illness. Perhaps I’ll always be ashamed. But now it’s mostly of the consequences, not the condition itself. I believe in this diagnosis. It’s as true to me as being a redhead. Despite the constant shifting of the earth beneath my feet, I feel grounded at last.