No one, that is, but Deanna and Robin. The two women couldn't have been more different. They were like my good angel and my bad angel. And yet somehow I came to rely on them both.
Deanna, my assigned social worker at Futura House, seemed like a goddess to me. She was older than I—maybe in her late thirties, with long blonde poodle-like hair. She had a lively, free-and-easy attitude toward life. She took courses, vacationed in interesting places. She had a neat husband, a man who owned an art gallery. She swam all the time, and was fit and relaxed. I wanted her to like me. I wanted to be like her.
Somehow we clicked in a way that Dr. Rockland and I never did. Every Monday at 4:00 P.M. Deanna and I had our weekly session. We met at the Futura House office and talked for as long as I could last.
I felt safe with her. She wasn't going to judge me, or reprimand me, or laugh at me. She wasn't going to send me to the state hospital if I said the wrong thing.
And I didn't feel bad if I didn't come up with heavy stuff to talk about. I didn't have to bring into sessions stuff about my childhood, or sexual experiences, or what I felt about my parents. We talked about day hospital, about my friends, about my lack of friends. I was still so restless from my inner turmoil that I needed to talk about it. Deanna opened doors of emotions for me to explore.
I guess I understood that I could have done this with Dr. Rock-land, but somehow sitting in his office with him smoking his phallic, Freudian cigar, I felt that if I didn't talk about sex, or my father, then I was being a bad patient. With Deanna I could just talk about whatever was on my mind at the moment.
She was supportive, always encouraging me to keep fighting. And I believed somewhere in my heart that she really did like me. That notion kept me going.
Robin, on the other hand, was clearly a bad influence on me. A resident like me, she was tall and blonde with hair down to the middle of her back, and an acne-scarred complexion. The only thing we really had in common was our diagnoses, both schizo-affective disorder. Still, we were pretty much inseparable. We spent a lot of time together smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze.
Our pasts were completely different. Her parents hated each other; she couldn't believe mine were so close. She barely spoke to her mother; even when I was angriest at mine, we were still friends. I talked to Robin about my relationships with men. She talked to me about hers with women, for Robin was gay. I found speaking with Robin easy and comfortable. I hadn't had a buddy like her in a long time. Like Deanna, she was easy to talk to.
Unlike Deanna, she liked to egg me on into getting in trouble. Robin was into shoplifting in a big way. It scared me, but it was kind of exciting too. She always went for the challenge. We went into a college bookstore and she spirited off the biggest, fattest textbook she could find. Once we were in a Hallmark store and she spotted a coffee-table book on unicorns that she wanted. I didn't want us to end up in jail, so I dug into my own pockets for the money to pay for it. But before I could say anything, she had lifted it right out of the store. She was fast!
She urged me to try it. I didn't really want to. I was scared. But she was daring me, so I made an attempt. My heart was pounding and I was moving fast. But when Robin and I reconnoi-tered, she was completely unmoved by my efforts.
“Is that all?” she said when I pulled from my pocket a little green fluorescent marker, the first and last thing I was ever able to bring myself to swipe.
Robin and I worked out another little scheme we found mutually beneficial. I was prescribed a tranquilizer called Xanax, a kind of high-tech Valium, to take four times a day. I got into the habit of skipping a dose here and there to build up a reserve fund for emergencies. Then I got the bright idea that they could be a kind of currency.
From then on, I paid Robin in Xanax to do my household chores. We worked out an elaborate system. Different doses of Xanax were different colors. One color would be worth cleaning out the refrigerator. Another color was to do the bathroom, and a smaller dose for vacuuming and dusting. I'd sit in front of the TV with my feet up while Robin, high on tranquilizers, mopped the kitchen floor.
It became a kind of a game. Quietly, just as in the hospital, I was trying to push the edge, just skirting the danger zone.
Then that summer I tipped over the line. Once again I decided to stop taking my medicine. Despite my growing new awareness of my illness, deep down I still equated taking medicine with being sick. If I stopped, I thought, I'd get well.
Of course I didn't get well at all. I got much sicker. At first I just began to feel a little weird. Then the voices started dancing about, popping in and out more and more. They got louder. I started to panic. The staff at the day hospital began to sense my agitation and question me. I told them I was fine. I wasn't.
Then one day the Voices became too strong to resist. Inside the day hospital were pots of blooming roses. The Voices ordered me toward them. “Take that fucking rose plant and kill yourself with those thorns. Now!” I didn't feel like I had a choice. I followed those directions, and tore up my arms with the rose thorns.
When the day hospital staff found me, bloody among the blooming roses, they summoned the doctor in charge. He felt I needed to be rehospitalized. He tried to convince me to sign myself in—to move from being a day patient downstairs, to an inpatient upstairs.
“It will only be for a short while, just long enough to adjust your medication,” he said.
Ha! I had heard that one before. No way. I wouldn't do it. I had the doctor in a bind. I had tried to hurt myself. I was clearly in a mood to do it again. He couldn't let me go. But I wouldn't check in.
He sat me down outside his office, under the watchful eye of some mental health workers. From the doorway, I could hear him trying to solve the problem. He tried Dr. Rockland. No luck. Dr. Rockland was on vacation and couldn't be reached. He tried my parents’ home, but there was no answer. My dad was on business in Chicago. Finally, many phone calls later, he did track my father down.
He put ray dad on the phone with me. Daddy pleaded with me to admit myself voluntarily.
“Lori, it's for your own good,” he said. “You need help.” I didn't believe him. Hadn't he and Dr. Rockland convinced me before to go back to New York Hospital for a “short” stay that stretched on for months? I left him with no choice, Dad told me. He gave the approval to commit me involuntarily.
And involuntarily it certainly turned out to be. I put up a hell of a fight. Immediately, as soon as the decision was made, mental health workers appeared to carry me from the day hospital, and the freedom of the outside world, to the locked inpatient hospital upstairs. I struggled, and yelled, and writhed, but nothing worked. They stripped me down, gave me an anti-crazy shot and put me in seclusion.
Another hospital. Another Quiet Room. And not even surroundings I recognized. St. Vincent's was so different from New York Hospital. It was grungier. The rooms were different. I didn't know any of the staff. The protocols were all different too. We weren't allowed to receive phone calls directly, for example. All calls had to come through the nursing station. And patients weren't even allowed to handle matches. Staff walked around with lighters hung from their necks to light patients’ cigarettes when they asked.
As soon as I had quieted down, I began telling everyone around me that I was leaving soon. The patients all laughed at that. They had heard that before. But I meant it. And this time I knew how to do it. With medication newly running through my blood and my brain I calmed down enough to carry out my plan. I followed every rule, obeyed every order. And every time anyone asked, I said the Voices were gone, I felt better, and had no intention whatsoever of killing myself.
It worked. I was in and out of St. Vincent's Hospital in nine days flat. Back I went to the day program as if nothing had happened. Still, I stayed furious at my parents for a long time afterward. I was mad at my father for committing me. I was mad at my mother for a different reason: She was so upset and angry at me for this latest hospitalization that she had refused to vis
it me even once.
Once again a suicide attempt had blown the lid off the seething bubbling kettle that was my brain. And once again, the Voices placated, I was visited by a strange calm. It was in this calm that I decided to make another go at nursing school.
Suddenly and without any warning, I quit going to the day program at the end of August, and enrolled instead in Pace University's School of Nursing. I didn't want to go back to the school where I had failed before. I thought of this as a new start. Besides, Pace had a terrific reputation. I even decided I'd go directly into a special master's program they offered, but my entrance scores were too low. What a joke! I could hardly believe I was the same person who had graduated with honors from Tufts just five years ago. Tufts University? A real grind school? Impossible. These days I could barely put together two consecutive thoughts.
Still, my scores were good enough that Pace undergrad accepted me, and I began work with a vengeance. I used every bit of guts I had. I forced myself to concentrate. I pored over the lecture material, over and over again. I must have done something right. I passed the first semester with a C plus average. It wasn't my old A self, but at least I wasn't failing.
Still, the attempt was taking its toll. The effort of fighting back my symptoms was weakening me. The temporary calm was ebbing. I was holding back the Voices by dint of superhuman control. But they wouldn't be contained for much longer.
You can only hold your breath for so long.
19
Mark Schiller Chicago, November 1986
Every time I came close to bringing Sally home to meet my family, we broke up. Sometime near the scheduled visit, I would start to back off.
“You know, maybe we should start dating other people, just to make certain … ”I would begin. Sally would react in horror. What had she done? What was wrong? Then we'd have a big fight and storm apart. We'd stay apart until the danger of the visit passed, and then make up. Because my father traveled to Chicago often on business, Sally had met him. But we had been dating for almost a year, had pretty much decided to get married, and she still hadn't met my mother and I still hadn't brought her back home to Scarsdale.
I wasn't deliberately sabotaging things. It's just that I had been running away from home for so long, it was hard to run back. I finally had this nice life, a nice job and a nice girlfriend safely far away in Chicago. I didn't want anything to mess it up.
My mother finally did manage to meet Sally—but only when my parents took matters into their own hands. My mother flew out to Chicago with my father. When I showed up alone at the restaurant—announcing that we had broken up yet again—my father demanded Sally's number, phoned her himself and ordered her to get dressed and get downtown, and then yelled at us both for being so silly. The rest of the meal was uneventful, and the ordeal I had been dreading was finally over.
Now Thanksgiving was coming, and another ordeal was about to begin. Sally and I were about to announce our engagement. This time she really was coming home with me for the holiday. And I was scared.
For this time, Sally was about to meet Lori. And I realized that for a long time one of the things I had been running away from was Lori.
Growing up, I never felt I was good enough. I was a typical middle kid, I guess, always feeling like I never got enough attention.
Steven was the baby, and Lori was perfect. She was a straight A student. She was popular. She was a great dancer in the discos, a great writer. She had a great sense of humor. My parents just reveled in her accomplishments. My parents were always telling me what a great kid I was, and how bright and how accomplished. But it was Lori who was always getting all the kinds of attention that I wanted.
I was unhappy in high school. I very much wanted to be part of the in crowd—the jocks and the cheerleaders—but I wasn't cool enough. I wanted to play sports, but I wasn't good enough for the varsity team. I wanted to be recognized for my brains, but although I graduated with a 3.7 average, I wasn't even in the first fifth of my class.
By late high school, I had worked myself into a pretty gloomy state. I hung around in my room writing poems about death. I thought about suicide a lot and got my parents all riled up. They tried to say all the right things.
“This is all part of growing up,” they said. “We went through it when we were your age.” But I didn't believe them. I thought I was a real loser, a real failure.
When I chose Tulane as my college it was my first assertive step away from my family and toward independence. Tulane, in New Orleans, wasn't exactly the kind of place kids from Scarsdale went to college. In Scarsdale, if you didn't get into Harvard or Princeton or Yale, then you went to Brandeis or Colgate or Tufts. Very few people ventured even to Chicago to go to Northwestern, or to the University of Chicago. And it was almost unheard of to go south as I did.
That was fine with me. I wanted something completely different. I liked the warm weather. I liked that fact that Tulane was a big school. I liked the fact that it was a major party school, and that accomplishment seemed a secondary consideration. I liked the fact that I could be at the top of the class here, and would be one of the smartest people. I wanted to start over. I wanted to have fun.
It worked.
I enjoyed Tulane. Out of the pressure cooker of Scarsdale High School, I achieved as never before. I got lots of As. I was elected to an honor society. I was a member of a fraternity. I was popular. People liked me. I liked being somewhere where I was only known as myself, and not just as Marvin's son—or Lori's brother.
After college Chicago became another place for me to start over, just as New Orleans had been. I did well at my work. I was clearly going to be promoted. And then in a small neighborhood bar in November of 1985, I met Sally, a girl I had known vaguely at Tulane. I had been in Chicago since August. I had had a few dates since I had arrived, but Sally was different.
She was attractive, she was funny, and she was smart and easy to talk to. Since we had gone to the same college we had something to talk about on our first dates. We went to blues clubs and to bars. We went dancing. She fixed her friends up with my friends and we all double-dated. We went out on our first date in early December. By January we were seeing each other four or five times a week.
Early on in our relationship I told her about Lori. I was worried. I didn't know how she was going to react. But Sally was great. She was sympathetic, but not too sympathetic. Interested, but not too curious. Willing to listen, but not too eager to pry. I was relieved.
Nonetheless, as Thanksgiving and the trip home rolled around, I got more and more nervous. Sally had only met my mother once, and she had never met Steven. I was worried that my family was going to come on too strong. I was worried that Lori was going to do something strange. I was worried that Sally would think Lori was weird, or be frightened of her or hate her. I was just plain worried.
As it turned out, I needn't have worried for Sally's sake. The Thanksgiving table was loaded with wonderful things to eat— turkey and stuffing, my mom's homemade ambrosia and homemade pies. There were fresh rolls filling the house with the smell of baking and pitchers of cider. Little turkey and Pilgrim and Indian figurines were scattered about the beautifully set table. What's more, there were guests there, and that relieved a lot of the tension. Our friends the Mossbergs had come with their two daughters, who were close to the ages of me and Lori and Sally. Having other young people around helped a lot.
Lori herself was more quiet than anything else. She seemed to be on a lot of medication. She slipped off fairly often to take quick naps. She and Sally chatted briefly about her halfway house and about nursing school. The whole thing was no big deal.
And on the way home Sally surprised me.
“Don't you think Lori should be a bridesmaid at our wedding?” she asked.
Sally's reaction surprised me. It wasn't that it was kind—I knew that Sally was a good-hearted person. No, it was that it was so matter-of-fact. Sally had simply seen Lori and taken her for what she was. I, on the
other hand, had been devastated by what I had seen. For it was at that Thanksgiving dinner I really realized for the first time that Lori was terribly sick. And that realization was jolting.
My own experience with depression had made me less, not more, understanding of Lori's illness. When I learned Lori was seeing a psychiatrist my reaction was: Is that all? So? That wasn't anything to worry about.
My parents didn't know it, but when I was in high school I had been so unhappy that I had gone to see a psychiatrist myself once. I poured out to him all my woes, my fears about being unpopular, my thoughts of death, my need for attention. Nothing had come of it. Psychiatry had seemed like such a scam. I talked. He listened. And I paid to have him listen. Big deal. Anyway, now that I was older I wasn't so unhappy anymore.
When Lori tried to commit suicide and was hospitalized, I just thought it was a transparent plea for attention. And I felt the beginnings of a little tug of annoyance. Here she was, the main attraction once again.
Even when my parents told me Lori was hearing voices, I was skeptical. Hearing voices? Sure, I thought. Sure you're hearing voices. It just seemed too weird to be true, and just weird enough to be made up. It was something no one could see, no one could prove, and that would scare everyone. A perfect ploy for attention, I thought once again. I was actually angry that she was so smart that she could make up an illness that no one could disprove.
Lori was perfect. Lori was everything. Nothing could ever happen to Lori. I had had Lori on a pedestal for so long, it was nearly impossible to topple it and accept that something was seriously wrong with her.
When I had first seen her in the hospital several years ago, she had seemed sick, but she had still seemed more or less herself.