Electroboy Read online

  Growing up in the Jersey suburbs was like playing Color-forms. We all had the requisite vinyl pieces—the house, the yard, the trees, the fence, the lawnmower, the patio, the picnic table, the grill, the mother, the father, the son, the daughter, the golden retriever, the martinis, the hamburgers—you could put them together any way you wanted and make a suburban dream life or fuck everything up by putting the mother on the grill and the golden retriever underneath the lawnmower.

  New Jersey is a strange place. It never seemed like we were near the center of anything or were extraordinary in any way, and I longed to be extraordinary. I wanted to do things differently from everybody else, better than anyone else. And I wanted to be famous. Even though we lived eleven miles from the city, it might as well have been Omaha. I longed for the big city, more opportunity and excitement and adventure. Sometimes I’d wonder what it would be like to have to live on the opposite side of my map, in a mud hut in some Third World African nation, and eat grain that had been drop-shipped on the village by the Red Cross. Maybe I was spending too much time reading back issues of National Geographic at 4:00 A.M. when I couldn’t sleep. Visions of women nursing starving babies, men with bones through their noses, and children with distended bellies filled my mind and kept me up devising plans to save the world. I imagined rescuing all of the starving and homeless people, building enormous feeding centers and shelters for multitudes.

  Politically, my family always seemed to be on the wrong side of popular opinion. My parents were liberals who took my sister and me to protests against the Vietnam War and to a McGovern rally in 1972. Toward the end of the war, on a cold and snowy night in December 1974, my mother took my uncle and me to huddle around a bonfire on the lawn of the Episcopal church in town. We held candles and sang Christmas carols with the minister, his wife, and some other people from the church. I was holding my mother’s hand, and I remember her tears and the warmth of the fire.

  Although my parents encouraged me to get involved in all kinds of after-school activities, school was the main focus of our lives, and in the truest sense of the Jewish tradition, a tremendous emphasis was placed on our academic achievement. In addition to being “the smart one,” I felt even more important because I had a slight speech impediment, difficulty with my S’s, that got me separated from the rest of the class for one-on-one instruction. I had very little self-control and was loud and liked to incite trouble. My competitive drive forced me into the limelight by the time I reached junior high school, when I became both student council president and yearbook editor, a rare feat for a thirteen-year-old. I worked compulsively and around the clock, a perfectionist who was very accomplished academically and extremely popular. I walked around the halls of River Dell Junior High School with meticulous notebooks and clean book covers. My locker was orderly, supplied with extra notebooks, pencils, and pens. I was the master of rewriting notes into new notebooks and retyping term papers when I found the slightest error. My student council campaign posters featured my superb graphics, painstakingly executed in my basement headquarters. I spent hours drawing my simple election message, “Elect Andy Behrman President,” making sure each letter was the same size and perfectly aligned with the next. I went through sheets of colored oak tag and numerous Magic Markers, and ended up with magnificent-looking posters that put my opponent—who had just scrawled her name on some white cardboard—to shame. But inside I was suffering from a combination of anxiety and depression, dogged by uncontrolled obsessive behavior, relentlessly, repetitively cleaning, organizing and aligning objects so that they were symmetrical, constantly washing my hands, counting and checking. Filled with doubt, I needed to touch things repeatedly to count them or check them—pennies in a coin wrapper, a light switch, or the knob on my door. Nobody noticed. It was my secret. When I was sixteen I started pulling out my hair. I have always had a very full head of hair, and one day I noticed, as I was twirling it with my fingers and around a pencil, that I was actually yanking it out by the root, one strand at a time. Sitting in my classroom, listening to my sophomore English teacher lecture, I would pull hairs off the side of my head, over my right ear; then I’d examine the root and scrape it onto a piece of white paper to study the stain it left. Each time I plucked a hair from my scalp, I would put myself into a deep trance; the excitement was intense, like an orgasm. I often looked around to see if anybody noticed what I was doing. Over a period of a couple of months, during school and late at night when I couldn’t sleep, I pulled hair until a four-inch patch of my scalp was bald. Unlike a girl in my class with the same condition, who had to wear a bandanna to cover her baldness, I had enough hair on top to cover the bald patch. The smooth, hairless spot felt pleasurable to touch. My parents thought the bald spot was a dermatological problem, and so did the doctor they took me to see, a top-notch dermatologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, a man nearly in his eighties. I remember driving across the George Washington Bridge thinking how silly this whole thing was because I knew why I was losing hair. The elderly doctor in his white lab coat and white hair examined the naked skin on my head and stared blankly at me. “Son, I don’t know what this is,” he said. “But I’ll give this a try.” He swabbed the patch with a solution that burned for hours. It was supposed to promote regrowth. It felt like I was being punished for ever pulling a single hair from my head. I was so frightened by the severity of the treatment that I never touched my hair again and probably replaced this habit with squeezing blackheads. Fifteen years later I learned that I had trichotillomania, a disorder in which one pulls hair from the scalp, eyelashes, or eyebrows and often plays with the root, to relieve tension. The act results in tremendous gratification and humiliation.

  My weirdness took many forms. I was obsessed with the scuffed soles of celebrity guests’ shoes on talk shows and riddled with fantasies of a half brother in Japan (my father had been stationed in Kyoto for two years). To test how long I could withstand extreme heat, I’d sit inside a car with the windows shut. On beautiful sunny days, I was in the dark basement mixing chemicals and powders from my Mr. Wizard chemistry set, hoping that by not following the directions I could create a disaster. My moods swung from happiness and pleasure to sadness and torment, and none of it was predictable. When I was about seven, my father caught me frantically cleaning my record collection with turpentine, and when I was about ten, he watched as I put lightbulbs in the dishwasher. He never yelled. I had no explanation for either act.

  Then, when I was about twelve, there was the special kind of crazies. Late one night, I accidentally discovered a huge burst of energy that I could access through my penis. It was tremendous. At first I was sure it was somehow connected to bedwetting. As a young child I had found the sensation of lying in a puddle of my own warm urine, feeling it on my genitals and thighs, to be very stimulating. Later I found out about pornography, coming across a stack of Penthouse and Club magazines atop my father’s closet. Penthouse was tame compared with Club, which featured pale British women, slutty Jackie Collins types, with bright cherry lipstick, big boobs, and garter belts, splayed out on deep velvet couches. I spent many afternoons and evenings studying these images, filing them in my memory and masturbating. I always returned them quickly to his closet when I was done with them, and replaced them exactly as I had found them. Soon I discovered that I was turned on by just about anything—I guess you could say that I was omnisexual from the very beginning. I was fascinated by looking at my own body in the mirror, at women’s bodies, men’s bodies, and particularly men’s and women’s bodies together. I had a recurring fantasy of a young woman in a sunny white bedroom undressing in front of a mirror, admiring her own body, with a stranger, sometimes a cowboy, watching from behind a half-open door. The woman touches her breasts, and finally he walks in and presses his body against her. She takes off his clothes and they lie naked in bed together. I imagine every possible position they can arrange themselves in, and they ultimately have sex. I enjoyed creating fantasies about friends, people I saw in
magazines, on television or in the movies, or just strangers in the street. I was obsessed with this private little sex world I could create and keep secret.

  Toward the second semester of my senior year I was feeling miserable. On weekends I would sleep into the early afternoons, and I was eating more than usual. I desperately wanted to graduate from high school and get out of the house. My obsessive-compulsive thinking was exhausting me, and I wanted some relief. It distressed me that I couldn’t overcome it on my own. I was planning on going to college in the fall, and I suppose I thought a psychologist could provide me with a crash course and whip me into shape before college started. So after dinner one night, sitting around the table, my parents were drinking coffee and I was folding a napkin into the shape of a fan. I told them I had something important to discuss with them. They both perked up. Was I okay? Well, I was fine, but would it be possible for me to make an appointment to see a psychologist? They didn’t seem shocked—my mother had seen a psychologist, as did many of my parents’ friends—but they were very curious as to why. Is it something that you want to talk about first? I told them I just needed to talk to somebody about some private problems. My mother agreed to get a referral through her psychologist. But they wanted to know more. What was going on? I just said that “I felt weird”—which was a perfect description for how I felt at that moment. And that was enough for me to explain to them for now. My mother drove me to see Dr. Paul Goldman after school one warm spring afternoon. We were both quiet in the car. She adjusted the radio to a Top 40 station, dropped me off, and told me she’d be waiting outside when I was finished. I think she thought I was independent enough to go inside on my own and let me handle the meeting myself. Dr. Goldman was in his thirties, with a big forehead and oily skin. He sat in a big brown leather highback chair. I sat across from him on a smaller version of the chair and tried to compress eighteen years of obsessions, compulsions, anxiety, and depression into fifty minutes and get $75 worth of answers on the first visit. He listened intently and said little. Sharing tremendous secrets with this man with the big forehead gave me a great sense of relief. He told me that my behavior was highly neurotic, but he never diagnosed me or referred me to a psychiatrist, and I never knew to ask about seeing one. I didn’t know about medications. Drugs like Prozac weren’t even available yet. I saw him for six months, until I went away to college, and we just talked ad nauseam about every detail and event of my childhood. I made no concrete progress in my therapy with him, except that I did start to trust somebody with my most intimate feelings. My parents never attended the sessions with me or asked me directly about what transpired, and they told me that they hoped my visits to Dr. Goldman were helping me with my problems. I think they saw him more as a coach, in a positive way, who was going to work out the kinks and get me in shape for college. And when our sessions ended in late July, college was only a month away.

  Suburban Refugee

  The summer after I graduated from high school, I worked as a lifeguard at a nearby pool club. It wasn’t the most demanding position; the club was on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson River, so at least I had an incredible view of Manhattan. I sat high up in the lifeguard chair in the hot sun, staring at the Empire State Building, counting down the hours until the big day when my parents would drive me to college and I would finally be emancipated from suburbia. One day, about halfway through the summer, after a long shift up in the lifeguard chair, I announced to my twenty-year-old boss that I was quitting. I had made a snap decision a few days earlier to have some plastic surgery. I had always been insecure about the size of my misaligned nose (I had broken it when I slipped on a marble coffee table when I was five) and kids had often teased me about it. It seemed like a good idea to get it fixed before I went away to college—to make a clean start with a new nose and a whole new me. Early diagnosis: narcissistic personality disorder. But I had the classic deviated-septum alibi. I did some quick research on several doctors at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and made an appointment for a consultation to see one who had been highly recommended by a family friend. With my parents’ hesitant permission, I was admitted to the hospital about a week later. I had taped to my chest a picture from People magazine of the nose that I wanted to have superimposed on my face. It belonged to the not very well known actor Hart Bochner, who made his debut in a major role as the macho frat boy in 1979’s Breaking Away, and was perfectly straight and narrow, coming to a very fine tip. I’m not sure if the doctor thought I was kidding, but he told me that he “understood generally what I was looking for.” I spent only two days in the hospital and the actual procedure was painless, but the bruising was a disaster—I looked like I had been beaten up by a street gang. For days I sat inside the house with ice packs on my face and cotton swabs shoved up my nostrils, spitting up blood clots, checking my progress in the mirror, and vowing I’d never do anything this stupid again. But the new and improved nose was an incredible work of art that looked pretty similar to the Hart Bochner model. I no longer saw my nose right in front of my eyes, and it seemed to be in perfect proportion to my face. I didn’t have to be obsessed with it anymore. After it was healed, I drove to my friend Allison’s house—the same Allison I’d fallen in love with in second grade. She had always been critical of my nose and fantasized about my face with a perfect nose. She was shocked and thought I looked incredibly handsome. Mission accomplished. Now all I had left to do in preparation for college was to pick up some khakis and button-down shirts.

  At the end of August, complete with updated nose, I left the tranquil suburbs for the frantic pace of college life in placid Middletown, Connecticut. I ended up at Wesleyan because I didn’t get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Of course, I was crushed when I was rejected, but relieved that Wesleyan wanted me. Middletown is on the Connecticut River smack in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut, which is only the most happening part of the country if you happen to be Martha Stewart. The campus was exactly what I imagined a small liberal arts university to look like—old stone buildings covered with ivy, rolling grassy hills, and, of course, a row of fraternity houses. I had been waiting for this for years.

  Clark Hall is the oldest dormitory on campus, and during my freshman year I lived there in a single room, attached to a room shared by two grinds who studied around the clock. I was never there—I spent hours in the freshman dining hall or the library meeting people, obsessively learning names and matching them with faces. I saw myself as conducting a political campaign, the year as a chance to prove that my popularity wasn’t just a fluke. I was exposed to all types of new stimulants, and I quickly came to crave more and more of them: alcohol, drugs, sex, and staying up all night. After a two-month energy binge in which I met hundreds of people, went to parties, drank, and experimented with drugs, I lapsed into my first real depression. One morning I had a Japanese exam for which I had spent the night studying, but when my alarm clock rang at 8:00 A.M., I went back to sleep and slept through the exam. I couldn’t move from my bed. I was paralyzed, exhausted. I stayed there all day. When friends from my hall stopped in to see if everything was okay, I just said that I was feeling under the weather. I had lost my appetite and just wanted to be under the covers. In the morning I was well enough to get some breakfast, but then I returned to bed. This became my new pattern for a month. I missed all of my classes and summoned friends to my bedside by shouting out their names or by telephoning them to come visit me and to bring me food and drink. Getting myself to class was impossible, and I joked with my friends that I could take notes from bed and arrange for take-home exams. I finally decided to seek help from the university’s mental health services department.

  Dr. Andrea Logan welcomed me into her office and offered me a seat opposite her desk. She was in her thirties, blond, WASPy, and neatly dressed. Her manner was very straightforward. “How can I help you?” she asked. “Well, I’m not exactly sure,” I said. I told her that I had seen a therapist before coming to Wesleyan but I wasn’t sure what kind o
f progress we made. She wanted to take a chronological approach to my history, to learn about my background and family dynamics. But I didn’t feel like that was heading in the right direction. “I have current and pressing issues to deal with,” I told her, “issues that are interfering with my day-to-day functioning as a college student. I lie in bed for days at a time and can’t move.” I told her about my drug and alcohol abuse, sleepless nights, poor class attendance, my inability to focus, reckless driving, starving myself, and hyperactivity. She took notes and looked up at me while I spoke. “Well, that’s quite a bit you’ve got going on,” she said. “I guess we’ve got to get you functioning. Are you willing to work with me?” I was struck by her sincerity. “Yeah, I am,” I told her. That began our four-year therapist/client relationship.

  It was a perfectly clear day in October, and Wesleyan was playing Williams at home. I was sitting with a bunch of friends, a few girls and a couple of guys who could really drink, on the grassy hill behind Olin Library watching the game. We were passing around a bottle of vodka and drinking beer from a keg and getting pretty drunk. It was the first time I ever saw anyone with a Walkman. I wanted to have one of my own at that moment. Wesleyan easily defeated Williams, and we celebrated by going out to Peking House, the local Chinese restaurant that was a favorite haunt of ours. After dinner we went to a party at the DKE frat house. At about 1:30 A.M. Stephanie, one of the girls I’d been with all day, invited me to her room to do some coke. When we got there, two other friends, a guy and a girl I knew from a film class, were already sitting on the edge of the bed leaning over a pile of white powder on a mirror on the coffee table, snorting it up into their noses through a straw. We joined them and were up until about 5:00 A.M., spending half our time talking about how great we felt and the other half discussing our chances of finding more coke, since ours was almost gone. I was dripping water into each nostril with my pinky so that the coke would drip down my throat. I loved that numbing feeling. I drove to my bank machine with Stephanie, took out $200, and started cruising around campus in my red Kharmann Ghia looking for someone I knew at a frat house who had told me that night he had some coke to sell. We looked all over, and at 6:00 A.M. we gave up. I dropped Stephanie off, then I headed back to the bank to take out another $300, and drove over to Route 66 and into Manhattan because I needed to keep moving. I was still feeling pretty high, enjoying the drive and listening to the radio. I parked my car near the Port Authority and walked down 42nd Street looking for action, but it wasn’t even 8:30 A.M. yet, so I ended up at a diner on Eighth Avenue, drinking cups of coffee to try to keep myself awake and maintain a high. “Do you want something for breakfast?” asked the waitress, a woman in her late sixties with dyed black hair piled atop her head. “Yeah, I’ll have two sunny-side-up eggs, hash browns, and rye toast,” I told her. I ordered something because I was convinced she thought I was a drug addict who needed to eat because I looked so terrible. I went to the bathroom and pissed out a whole night’s worth of beer and cocaine and felt relieved. The coffee did its job; so did the eggs. I was alert and ready to go. I wandered frantically around Times Square, looking in porn shops, electronics stores, and jewelry stores. I didn’t know if I was looking for something for myself or a gift for Allison, who was now my girlfriend, or someone else; I was just on a shopping expedition. What did I come here for? But I found a combination pen and light that I liked for $20 so I bought that. I had a hamburger and fries at the same diner where I’d had breakfast in the morning, and the waitress recognized me. “How you feeling this afternoon?” she asked. “Just fine,” I answered. After lunch, I had about twenty minutes to kill before the start of a live sex show, which I had seen once before when I was in high school. I picked up a cup of coffee at a deli and walked over toward the theater, where I paid my $8 admission, walked through the turnstile, and found a seat in the first row. The fifty or so seats were plush but worn and shaky, and they surrounded the stage, which was raised a few feet from the floor. By 1:30 P.M., there were about twenty men in the audience. A few were young guys like me, but most were in their fifties and sixties, all carefully spaced apart from one another. I watched a man and woman have sex onstage on a mattress covered with a sheet for thirty minutes. It wasn’t a very erotic experience. Probably because they weren’t very attractive. He looked a lot like Charles Manson, and she was pale and overweight and in her forties. Afterward I drove uptown to Charivari, where I bought a pair of pants for $250. I decided it was time to drive back to school.