Electroboy Page 2

  Manic depression, or bipolar disorder, is a disease that crippled me and finally brought me to a halt, a relatively invisible disease that nobody even noticed. Its symptoms are so elusive and easy to misread that seven psychotherapists and psychiatrists misdiagnosed me. Often the manic phase is mild or pleasant and the doctor sees the patient during a down cycle, misdiagnosing the illness and prescribing the wrong medication. One doctor treated me for severe depression with antidepressant medication that drastically increased my mania, turning me into a high-speed action figure. Another believed that I was just under too much pressure and needed to find myself a less stressful work environment. Yet another suggested group therapy as a way to improve my interpersonal skills and to draw me out of my depression. I was so entrenched in the manic-depressive behavior (or was it my personality?) that I was certainly in no place to make a judgment about my own condition. Today I can diagnose my moods and behavior, differentiating between extreme happiness, too much caffeine, and mania.

  More than two million Americans suffer from manic depression, usually beginning in adolescence and early adulthood; millions more go undiagnosed. It runs in families and is inherited in many cases, although so far no specific genetic defect associated with the disease has been found. Manic depression is not simply flip-flopping between up and down moods. It’s not a creative spirit, and it’s certainly not joie de vivre. It’s not about being wild and crazy. It’s not an advantage. It’s not schizophrenia. My euphoric highs were often as frightening as the crashes from them—out-of-control episodes that put my life in jeopardy. Contrary to what most psychiatrists believe, the depression in manic depression is not the same as what unipolar depressives report. My experience with manic depression allowed me very few moments of typical depression, the blues or melancholy. My depressions were tornadolike—fast-paced episodes that brought me into dark rages of terror.

  Manic depression for me is like having the most perfect prescription eyeglasses with which to see the world. Everything is precisely outlined. Colors are cartoonlike, and, for that matter, people are cartoon characters. Sounds are crystal clear, and life appears in front of you on an oversized movie screen. I suppose that would make me the director of my own insanity, but I can only wish for that kind of control. In truth, I am removed from reality and have no direct way to connect to it. My actions are random—based on delusional thinking, warped intuition, and animal instinct. When I’m manic, my senses are so heightened, I’m so awake and alert, that my eyelashes fluttering on the pillow sound like thunder.

  I could tell you that I had the most unhappy childhood of anyone I know, but that wouldn’t be true. I know someone whose mother’s boyfriend, in daily alcohol-induced rages, forced him to eat his dinner from a dog-food bowl underneath the kitchen table. True story. Although the torment of my childhood pales dramatically in comparison, there was still a curious misery, one I haven’t yet totally deciphered. But the subject of childhood angst is so tedious and commonplace, I’ll spare you the specifics and just share the highlights with you.

  Actually, I was presented with a rather enviable deal: the Deluxe Male Progeny package. This included an intact set of two relatively sane Jewish parents, a pretty older sister, Nancy, a comfortable split-level house, orthodontics (I removed the braces myself with a pair of pliers after two torturous and humiliating years of hiding my metallic smile), a bright orange ten-speed Schwinn Varsity bicycle, Little League baseball, tennis and indoor swimming (at the local Boys Club), tutoring, Hebrew school, summer camp, a visit to Washington, D.C., and Disneyland, skiing trips, winter breaks to see the grandparents in Florida, a summer in France, and a high school exchange program in Japan. A manicured lawn and well-landscaped property (for which upkeep I was luckily not responsible) skirted our house in Oradell, New Jersey, a picture-perfect suburban town with pretty street names like Laurel Drive and Amaryllis Avenue (and, later, streets named after local boys killed in Vietnam). Oradell was a staunchly Republican and predominantly Christian town (did it matter that we were Jewish?) eleven miles from the George Washington Bridge—11.6 miles if you were watching over your dad’s shoulder on the odometer. I pretended our house on Spring Valley Road was my spaceship and that I, of course, was the commanding astronaut. At night, when I was about seven or eight, I would press my nose against the cold glass window and watch the snow falling, feeling incredibly safe inside our split-level Apollo spaceship. It was warm and we had plenty of supplies in the kitchen for our mission, enough milk and Mallomars to last at least through high school.

  Curiously, my parents had planned to name me after John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth and whose Mercury space mission was delayed on January 27, 1962, the day I was born. My parents figured that naming me after an astronaut whose mission had been postponed and could have ended in disaster would probably not be the most auspicious decision. Growing up, I naturally assumed they had great expectations for me. I identified with John Glenn and fantasized about orbiting the earth or traveling to some distant planet. I remember looking at an old copy of Life magazine that my father had saved, with black-and-white photographs of Glenn inside the Friendship 7, wrapped in a bulky spacesuit, his eyes just peeking through the glass of the helmet covering his crewcut. Here was Glenn, orbiting the earth three times solo—it echoed how it was to grow up inside my own suburban spaceship, for eighteen years, isolated and alone.

  Life spun very fast on my spaceship. When I was about eight years old, I sat on my bed at night in the control room, my National Geographic map hanging on the wall, monitoring the imaginary controls and counting the cars whizzing by while my parents and sister slept soundly in their cabins. I would promise myself to go to bed when fifty cars had passed in either direction. Police cars counted double. The rare ambulance counted triple. Then I changed it to one hundred. One hundred fifty. I would keep myself up all night. This was the beginning of what I began calling the crazies.

  I spent hours imagining what was hidden beneath the striped carpeting of my control-room floor—great treasures, tons of money, and classified documents—but I never actually investigated. Instead I vacuumed the carpeting endlessly and opened up the vacuum bag to see how much dust, hair, and junk I could collect, sifting through it for the odd paper clip or coin. I hoarded change, counting and wrapping it methodically in coin wrappers, storing the rolls in a secret box in my desk. I washed my hands at least a dozen times a day. My parents once brought me into the backyard and rubbed my hands in dirt to try to break my obsessive habits. I used to sit by the washing machine and dishwasher and watch them while they were running, opening the lids at different stages to check their progress. Digging huge holes in the backyard and burying things fascinated me; I buried books, food, garbage. My parents encouraged me to play with other children, but mostly I kept to myself. When I did consort with neighborhood kids, I charged them a nickel to visit my house. I was more interested in geography than football and wanted to travel to every country on my National Geographic map (I also had a globe with an atlas), swim in every ocean and major body of water, climb every mountain range, and try every native food. I devoured information, obsessed with numbers and statistics, comparing and memorizing them—state and world capitals, population figures, election returns, and stock quotes. Most significant, I cleaned, organized, and polished the control room daily, so that every item was in place and every surface glistened. There were days when I was about thirteen or fourteen when I would be home alone, and I would remove everything from my bedroom, even emptying out the closet, the bookshelves, and the desk drawers, and put it in the hallway. Then I would vacuum and immediately put everything back into place. I remember feeling tremendously cleansed after this ritual. Clearly, I wasn’t an ordinary kid. I was obsessive-compulsive and neurotic from the start. Often I was frightened, lonely, and exhausted. From the time I was seven, I felt different, uncomfortable, out of place. Yet there was never a doubt in my mind that I was a special child. I had a heightened sense o
f self-importance—I felt larger than life, too creative, too smart. My grandiose thinking was reinforced when I was separated from the rest of my class for special instruction in creative writing, reading, and art.

  I was fascinated by Mrs. de Lime, my first-grade teacher, a two-hundred-pound woman who wore a tight houndstooth dress that hugged her stomach and rear end, and she was even more curious about me, her “gifted child.” I was reading at a fifth-grade level, was extremely verbal, and was interested in exploring the world. I needed the answers, was more interested in what lay underneath and behind things. Thoughts raced through my head, which was crammed with wild ideas and colorful images. I was obsessed with keeping it all in order. One afternoon Mrs. de Lime took me to lunch downtown, which was only a block from school. I had a piece of pizza and a Coke (she had two pieces, maybe three), and I remember other kids from my class looking at us and my feeling ashamed to be seen eating with her. After we ate, she took me to the hardware store and bought all kinds of flower seeds for us to plant on the windowsill of the classroom, our own little project. Over the year she devised other special projects; we explored weights and pulleys, we visited a bank, and she bought me an ant farm. She had me read to the kindergartners. As the first male child, I also filled a unique place in my family. Everybody—my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles—made a huge fuss over me. Somehow I completed the family. With all of this attention came the pressure to achieve and succeed.

  When I was in second grade, I was standing on line at the bottom of the stairs waiting for the school bell to ring. A girl named Allison stood at the top of the stairs, her skinny legs clad in a pair of wrinkled white tights, her feet stuffed into a pair of black Mary Janes. I was tremendously curious about her. That night I told my father that I had seen a girl’s legs at school that morning. I know now that this was my first certifiable crush, and I held on to this image for quite a while.

  My parents met as camp counselors in the Berkshires in 1958. They married soon afterward and had my sister, Nancy, followed by me two years later. My father was a professor of physical education at the City College of New York and later director of athletics. He became the director of Camp Mah-Kee-Nac, a beautiful boys’ summer camp on Stockbridge Bowl in Lenox, Massachusetts. This is where I spent my summers. His father, who had died of pneumonia when my father was a teenager, had been an attorney who kept odd work hours and was known to have mood swings and quite a temper. My father worked long days, and I always waited up at night for the headlights of his car to project a pattern on my walls and ceiling as he pulled into the driveway. He had an extraordinary sense of humor and was a pro at crossword puzzles (he used a pen), cleaning, folding laundry, paying bills (I used to watch in amazement as he wrote out each check, marked it off as paid in a special notebook, and did the calculations in his checkbook in pen), doing odd jobs around the house, smoking Chesterfields, and drinking Scotch. As I recall, we were the best of friends and did everything together. My mother thought I should have friends my own age, but other kids didn’t interest me. My father played all kinds of games with me—word games, quiz games (I knew the capitals of all fifty states by the time I was six). We went on outings to the hardware store, made repairs around the house together, and invented our own language, which was more of a tonal dialogue, emanating from the throat. My sister spoke it, too. When I was ten he let me drive around parking lots in his VW bug.

  My father is also one of the most neurotic and obsessive-compulsive people I’ve ever met. Each night, before bedtime, he would coach me through hundreds of sit-ups and push-ups in a narrow hallway outside my room. He would hold my ankles and count each time I pulled my elbows to my knees, urging me on to do another. I think my record was once in the four hundreds. He was proud of these physical accomplishments. He was, after all, a professor of physical education. He kept the house spotless. Sometimes he’d get particularly revved up, racing around with the vacuum cleaner in one hand and a trash can in the other. “This place is a disaster,” he’d announce, removing vases, ashtrays, and knickknacks from the coffee table so that he could polish it. He’d massage the wood vigorously with Lemon Pledge. When the surface was shining, he’d replace the items exactly where they’d been—he has a photographic memory. He’d move into the kitchen and load the dishwasher, clean the counters and table, scrub the sink, and polish the hardware. Then he’d clean out the refrigerator. I would watch in amazement and feel helpless, cringing as he put the Sunday New York Times back together, section by section, making sharp creases at the folds. He relentlessly organized piles of bills and mail. As soon as something dirtied, he was there to clean it. He taught me the “proper way” to fold clothes, shine shoes, wash a car. Watching him shine a pair of shoes was thrilling. He would brush them off, hold them under the light, spit into the polish and rub the cloth into it in circles until he had the perfect amount on it. Then he’d massage the shoe with the polish until it was perfectly covered and lay it on a piece of newspaper to bake. After twenty minutes he would inspect the shoe and buff it with the brush until it shined perfectly.

  My mother was the epitome of the suburban housewife, but with a touch of the obsessiveness that marked all in my family. I used to watch her kneeling on the kitchen linoleum, happily scraping out the wax between the tiles. This comforted me because it relaxed her. So did watching her smoke her Winston cigarettes and drinking her coffee-flavored No-Cal soda. She always made certain that my sister and I had everything that we wanted—pulling things off even when times were lean. The product of a broken marriage, she grew up with a single mother whose parents helped support the family. Her father was a liquor salesman who passed on his competitive qualities to her. She went back to complete her college degree in her thirties, as she had dropped out early to marry my father. She passed on her sense of competition to both my sister and me and taught us both to “be tough.” It wasn’t until she was in her forties that she had the chance to apply her natural skills in business, becoming extremely successful in the field of executive recruitment. My mother didn’t give me much space for being different from other kids. I just wanted the freedom to do whatever crazy things I felt like doing—taking apart a telephone and trying to put it back together, connecting a Matchbox car to a wire and plugging it in and getting shocked, baking a frog in the kitchen oven. She was always encouraging me to do what the other kids were doing. One spring night after dinner, when I was about twelve, my father and I were in the backyard throwing a baseball around. It was an instructional session as opposed to a recreational one. “Don’t throw it like that,” my mother’s voice barked. I looked up and saw her head sticking out her bedroom window. Now I had the additional pressure of having two coaches. I held in my rage and kept throwing the ball back to my father as he threw it to me, but not as she wanted me to. She wanted her son to be like everybody else; she wanted him to be a baseball player, not a mad scientist.

  But even with their shortcomings, I thought my mother and father were the ideal parents, full of life, witty, attractive, and stylish, and I wanted to be just like them. I didn’t envy any of my other friends’ parents like I did my own parents. We were a close-knit and a relatively happy family. Nancy and I watched television together at the foot of my parents’ bed, and we had spirited political debates at dinnertime. Of course, there was some screaming, fighting, and hair pulling in our house, too, but no more, I imagined, than in the average American home. I often ended up serving as the mediator, the buffer, and the referee. My sister was often the target of my parents’ outbursts. My father even kicked her bedroom door in once, which was rather out of character for him. She was dating a boy from “the other side of the tracks,” a punk who had no plans to go on to college, and getting C’s in all her classes. The more my parents tried to control her, the more she resisted. One evening at dinner she told my parents that she was going to see her boyfriend that night. My mother forbade her to leave the house, and a huge fight ensued. My mother began screaming about what a �
�lowlife” the boyfriend was as my sister tried to escape the kitchen and climb the stairs to her room. I tried to keep the two apart, but my mother’s hostility was so intense, she looked like a heavyweight fighter getting ready to take a swing. Luckily, Nancy escaped to her bedroom. In general, Nancy seemed to run into more of the normal adolescent problems than I did and screwed up quite a bit. I was the one who followed the rules by the book and entertained and made jokes for my parents and their friends. I developed these defense mechanisms against conflict and gradually took on more responsibility in order to keep things running smoothly within the family.