Both a psychiatrist and a psychologist informed me that I was suffering from bi-polar disorder. Back in the old days, they called it manic-depressive but I think they changed it to bi-polar to make it sound less demeaning, less stigmatizing and more politically correct. Say, maybe they should call people who are bi-polar serenity challenged. Because I guarantee when you’re flying in the manic phase there ain’t much serenity between your ears. There’s a lot of energy and you don’t need more sleep than a couple hours a night. Great ideas zoom around inside your head. Like fantastic fireworks inside a tornado. I’ll talk your head off when I’m on a high. But then, during the worst of the depression part, the world is pointless and bleak and darker than a shadow on Pluto. Feeling like a neon sign missing so many letters I can’t make sense of it.
The shrink gave me my first pills a decade ago. But I wouldn’t take the fricking medicine unless they practically forced it down my throat. It was just as bad as being in the depressive phase. And anyway—I like the manic phase. At least for the first several weeks, sometimes even longer. Like being a high-voltage rock star on coke. I have charisma when I’m manic. I could talk you into almost anything because I’m so enthused about it myself.
The psychologist tried to do behavioral/cognitive therapy on me. He was a true believer. Although I don’t know how he managed to get the state to pay him for his services. Even though he fine-tuned his strategy over the months, it never worked. Not efficacious. There were new studies and updates in the medical journals. But hey, I’ll tell you what, when a manic is on a fast and hot roll, cognitive therapy ain’t going to do squat diddly.
The thought that follows the activating event is going too fast to get intervened on, plus who can concentrate when you’re flying at light speed. Plus all that talking therapy went in my left ear and flew out the right. In the end, I figured it this way: Dude. Just say it out loud—I’m one crazy gaggle of geese and that’s that.
There’s no cure for what I got and the medicine turns me into a zombie. Maybe with enough time my illness will burn itself out. Or maybe I’ll get even crazier. Hang myself or something. Like being pond scum with eyeballs. Bi-polar folks have it tough plummeting down from the manic high to the lowest depths. The realm of futility and linear time out of control. Trapped in the abyss with the existential void and the hopelessness of being in nothingness.
I know about this. You can believe I know. But I won’t let fear run my life.
It all started in my late twenties. Although I remember when I was a kid, my dad used to say, “Slow down, Gordon. You’re too jacked-up.” So the foundation was set early on. Hell, when my mom was pregnant with me she was a chain smoker, drank coffee by the pot, took Valiums and was on her way to being an alcoholic. Once out of the womb the first thing I experienced, aside from the doctor cutting off the end my pecker, was nasty drug withdrawal. Cold-ass turkey. Maybe having too many chemicals in the womb made me bi-polar. The shrink said it’s genetic. Who knows for sure? Probably nobody except God and God ain’t talking.
Not knowing any better, I figured my first major manic attack was halfway between benediction and a revelation. Hoo-ah! The spirit was upon me! That is until about a month later when the cops came around. But then once the cop problem resolved itself—me doing 35 days and paying a fine—I met Deesha Rose Green. What a great name. She’s mixed race, ebony hair, flashing dark eyes, wild like a gypsy, untamable, promiscuous, slender and gorgeous. Magnetic. Details about how we met? Too complicated.
The pivotal factor at the time was that she was probably bipolar, too, but for reasons unknown I didn’t really see it. Maybe I was blinded by the total package. If you see my point.
Within a couple weeks after we met, I was rolling on my hypo-manic mode, not crazy but feeling like I was ten feet tall and had important plans. Always have plans when you’re on the way up. Yes, yes. So I drained my back account (I work construction and make good money), cashed my last check and we blew town for San Francisco. I had a Dodge van so we didn’t have to spend money on motels. It was about a 1,400-mile drive. Deesha had pills, Vicodins and Ritalin, so we were feeling fine the entire way. Plus I was taking nips off a 200-millileter vodka bottle. Deesha didn’t drink but she didn’t mind me drinking. I could handle it. No DUIs.
I paid for almost everything. She supplied the pills and of course her sweet patch of hairs, which was to my limited way of looking at things back then the perfect deal. Symbiotic … right? I know big words, lots of them. I may be nutty as hell but I ain’t stupid. In fact the shrink tested my brain and told me I had an IQ of 147. Which is way up there on the bell curve. He said I could be college material if I could stay on an even keel. Even keel? Yeah right, me and republicans and Jesus and family values and all the little niceties that accompany the good life. White-picket fences and retirement plans. Boring! Popeye is my main man. I am what I am. The existentialists took it another step: I am what I’m becoming.
God said I am that I am. Or something along those lines.
Back to Deesha. Maybe the reason I didn’t figure out she was a manic was because she was taking Ritalin, which is what they give hyperactive kids. And I know that sounds paradoxical but somehow the Ritalin kept her in what I call the upper-middle zone. Flying pretty high but not high enough to melt your wings. Like old Icarus. Greek mythology. See? I know some shit, more than you likely think.
So by the time we made Reno, Nevada, she started rationing the Ritalin. Just one pill with my morning jolt of fog-lifter coffee.
“Can’t you get more pills?” I wanted to know.
“No baby, I don’t have a script. I bought these from my neighbor whose kid gets it but she don’t give the kid the pills and sells them to me instead.”
“So we’ll find a walk-in clinic and you tell them you’re on vacation and lost your pills and need a refill to tide you over. Just pretend you got ADD.”
“What’s that?”
“Attention Deficit Disorder.”
“But I’m twenty-seven, I’m too old.”
“No. Adults have it too, not just kids. Trust me.”
“Do you trust me, baby?”
“Of course I do.”
“Okay.”
So … after we’d settled in a motel—we needed hot showers and some television time—we found a clinic. Forty-five bucks and you walk in without an appointment. Deesha looked nervous. I told her to take a Vicodin or two. She took three. I waited in the van hoping she’d be cool enough to pull it off. I’d given her a list of things to say, symptom sort of stuff, things I’d read about on the internet. Seemed like it took an hour before I saw her come out the front door. She waved a piece of paper at me. Score!
“How many?”
“Only sixty, baby, a month’s worth. He wasn’t a doctor. He was a PA. What’s a PA?”
“Physician Assistant. They pay some chump a quarter of what they pay a real doc and that’s why you can walk in for only forty-five bucks.”
“How do you know so much?”
“Brains sweetie, I got brains. Give me a couple, I’m dragging.”
“I need these more than you. You get two a day for four days, then it’s back to one.” She winked at me and stroked the back of my neck. We drove back to the motel, stopping first for a pack of Kools for Deesha and a bottle of vodka for me. Vicodin, Ritalin, vodka. Heaven. I’m sure you can guess what we did after we got good and high.
But then I felt it. Felt it when I couldn’t get to sleep even though I’d polished off nearly a pint of vodka, felt it at three in the morning when I was starting to bounce inside myself. Oh, shit, I’m heading out of the middle zone into the stratosphere. What I’d come to figure out later is that although Ritalin somehow kept Deesha evened out, it was sending me into a manic major high. But here’s the catch. It’s like telling a faulty computer to analyze what the problem is that’s making it faulty. It’s like the observer is the observed and so I knew I was taking off but I didn’t see it in the same terms I would see it once I’d crashed. I know it’s tough to get it unless you’re like me or any other true manic. It comes on you like a spell. Part of you fears what’s coming but the bigger part of you says: Oh yeah baby! Let’s blast off!
From Reno we drove into central east California and hit a highway called 395 and Deesha was studying the road map. “Let’s take a short cut and go up to Yosemite. The turnoff should be south a ways.”
“First we got to hit another clinic. Where’s the nearest town big enough to have one?”
She traced her finger along the map and said, “Bishop looks pretty big.”
When we arrived we started looking for a walk-in clinic, but we couldn’t find one until Deesha finally spotted a doctor’s office that had a sign saying walk-ins welcome. Turned out they expected a hundred dollar administrative fee on top of the seventy-five they wanted for the appointment. Fricking rip-off goddamned doctors. So I got out the map. We needed a bigger town, and there it was a ways north on 395. Mammoth Lakes. And by God and by Jesus they had one. Sixty bucks and walk right in and there were only two people in the waiting room. Deesha went inside and did her dog and pony show but the nurse wasn’t keen on handing out a script.
“These are a class-II drug and I’ll need to verify this with your regular doctor. Do you have the telephone or fax number?”
Deesha is street smart as hell and she says, “I’m actually from Canada. I’m visiting my cousin and we’re going to Yosemite. Canada has public healthcare and I see a different doctor every time I go into the clinic and so I can’t really remember which doctor said I was ADD.”
“We can’t honor Canadian prescriptions anyway, so you’ll have to make an appointment and see the doctor and then he can give you prescription if he feels it is necessary. He’ll be here tomorrow from noon until six. See the receptionist and we’ll get you in for tomorrow.”
“But then I have to pay for another visit and we’ll have to pay for a motel.”
“Sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”
Damn. Sixty bucks right up the flume. So we drove to Yosemite, which cost another twenty, but the vacationing hordes invading from the cities and hinterlands had taken all the campgrounds unless of course you had a reservation. So we drove all the way to Modesto and got a cheap motel just before midnight. What a day. Desha relented and let me have an extra Ritalin. What a piece of work she is, I mean it. She’s cool. And Yosemite was a sight to see, especially Half Dome and one of the high waterfalls. Deesha being a big city girl all her life was talking a mile a minute and flying around inside the van like a mongoose on steroids.
Guess maybe it was worth it after all.
The next day we got lucky and found a walk-in in a Mexican part of town and Deesha got us another sixty pills and we were on our way to Frisco. San Fran. “The City,” as the locals call it. The snobby bastards give you a look if you say Frisco. Go figure.
That night we slept in the van to save money, in a rich neighborhood not far from the yacht harbor. Parked in a place where we wouldn’t call attention to ourselves, although my van is clean and looks good so it didn’t stand out too bad from the other cars. I had to drink almost a pint of vodka so I could sleep for a couple hours. I needed something to put the brakes on but the idea of going to a walk-in and getting anti-manic pills didn’t appeal to me. The fricking drugs turn me into a walking zombie. The only other thing that would help slow me down a little is Valium, about thirty or forty milligrams a day, but the docs are real stingy on handing out sedatives. The only other thing is the big H, but I knew if I went there—hey, forget the hard part about having to score—it’d be trouble in the long run and plus I didn’t want to see Deesha get a taste for the shit. It’d be the end of her. I have a feeling she’s one of those types that tries heroin a couple times and then she’s on for the entire cruise. You know, the cruise ship leaves the dock and you’re going with it. Bad news. Like walking into slippery quicksand on a pair of skinny stilts. But hell. The other way of looking at it would be that my ship left the dock a long time ago and I’ve been on that wild cruise ever since.
Because you see what genius really means is a person who can see the future. A genius brings something into the present that up until that time only existed in the future. Like E=MC². Even though nobody understood that at the turn of the 20th century, I guarantee that somewhere in the future someone other than Einstein figured out the exact same thing.
What Einstein’s mind did was to know the future and then bring that knowledge back to the present. Like if I went back in a time machine to 200,000 years ago and showed a bunch of Neanderthals how to make fire, hell, they’d have made me head shaman or chief, and as word spread every Neanderthal in Europe would have known me as a genius, the man who made fire! It’s all about perspective. Linear time is just one way of looking at things. Maybe time is all in the same spot at the same time. Geniuses are the only ones that can see past the illusion of now. Some kind of quantum physics thing.
But I digress. I digress a lot when I’m flying out there at the edges. What can I say? Like I said, the cruise ship left the dock a long time ago and I’ve been riding that sonofabitch ever since. Hoo-ah!
I can’t sit still. Nope. Too much electricity flying through my head. The city looks like a tangle of steel and concrete woven together in a weird pattern, emerald blades and strings of lights sparkling and blinking and people scurrying around like patterns of blurred motion.
Red lights—Green lights—Yellow lights. The moments caught in a vortex of linear time and me watching sewer pipes spit out sapphires and rubies and mud.
I looked at Deesha. She lit up a Kool and blew a jet of smoke into the air.
“Fuck time,” I said. “I got to get out of this. What say we head to Chinatown? Maybe we find what I need.”
“Sure, baby, let’s go to Chinatown.”
The shrink gave me my first pills a decade ago. But I wouldn’t take the fricking medicine unless they practically forced it down my throat. It was just as bad as being in the depressive phase. And anyway—I like the manic phase. At least for the first several weeks, sometimes even longer. Like being a high-voltage rock star on coke. I have charisma when I’m manic. I could talk you into almost anything because I’m so enthused about it myself.
The psychologist tried to do behavioral/cognitive therapy on me. He was a true believer. Although I don’t know how he managed to get the state to pay him for his services. Even though he fine-tuned his strategy over the months, it never worked. Not efficacious. There were new studies and updates in the medical journals. But hey, I’ll tell you what, when a manic is on a fast and hot roll, cognitive therapy ain’t going to do squat diddly.
The thought that follows the activating event is going too fast to get intervened on, plus who can concentrate when you’re flying at light speed. Plus all that talking therapy went in my left ear and flew out the right. In the end, I figured it this way: Dude. Just say it out loud—I’m one crazy gaggle of geese and that’s that.
There’s no cure for what I got and the medicine turns me into a zombie. Maybe with enough time my illness will burn itself out. Or maybe I’ll get even crazier. Hang myself or something. Like being pond scum with eyeballs. Bi-polar folks have it tough plummeting down from the manic high to the lowest depths. The realm of futility and linear time out of control. Trapped in the abyss with the existential void and the hopelessness of being in nothingness.
I know about this. You can believe I know. But I won’t let fear run my life.
It all started in my late twenties. Although I remember when I was a kid, my dad used to say, “Slow down, Gordon. You’re too jacked-up.” So the foundation was set early on. Hell, when my mom was pregnant with me she was a chain smoker, drank coffee by the pot, took Valiums and was on her way to being an alcoholic. Once out of the womb the first thing I experienced, aside from the doctor cutting off the end my pecker, was nasty drug withdrawal. Cold-ass turkey. Maybe having too many chemicals in the womb made me bi-polar. The shrink said it’s genetic. Who knows for sure? Probably nobody except God and God ain’t talking.
Not knowing any better, I figured my first major manic attack was halfway between benediction and a revelation. Hoo-ah! The spirit was upon me! That is until about a month later when the cops came around. But then once the cop problem resolved itself—me doing 35 days and paying a fine—I met Deesha Rose Green. What a great name. She’s mixed race, ebony hair, flashing dark eyes, wild like a gypsy, untamable, promiscuous, slender and gorgeous. Magnetic. Details about how we met? Too complicated.
The pivotal factor at the time was that she was probably bipolar, too, but for reasons unknown I didn’t really see it. Maybe I was blinded by the total package. If you see my point.
Within a couple weeks after we met, I was rolling on my hypo-manic mode, not crazy but feeling like I was ten feet tall and had important plans. Always have plans when you’re on the way up. Yes, yes. So I drained my back account (I work construction and make good money), cashed my last check and we blew town for San Francisco. I had a Dodge van so we didn’t have to spend money on motels. It was about a 1,400-mile drive. Deesha had pills, Vicodins and Ritalin, so we were feeling fine the entire way. Plus I was taking nips off a 200-millileter vodka bottle. Deesha didn’t drink but she didn’t mind me drinking. I could handle it. No DUIs.
I paid for almost everything. She supplied the pills and of course her sweet patch of hairs, which was to my limited way of looking at things back then the perfect deal. Symbiotic … right? I know big words, lots of them. I may be nutty as hell but I ain’t stupid. In fact the shrink tested my brain and told me I had an IQ of 147. Which is way up there on the bell curve. He said I could be college material if I could stay on an even keel. Even keel? Yeah right, me and republicans and Jesus and family values and all the little niceties that accompany the good life. White-picket fences and retirement plans. Boring! Popeye is my main man. I am what I am. The existentialists took it another step: I am what I’m becoming.
God said I am that I am. Or something along those lines.
Back to Deesha. Maybe the reason I didn’t figure out she was a manic was because she was taking Ritalin, which is what they give hyperactive kids. And I know that sounds paradoxical but somehow the Ritalin kept her in what I call the upper-middle zone. Flying pretty high but not high enough to melt your wings. Like old Icarus. Greek mythology. See? I know some shit, more than you likely think.
So by the time we made Reno, Nevada, she started rationing the Ritalin. Just one pill with my morning jolt of fog-lifter coffee.
“Can’t you get more pills?” I wanted to know.
“No baby, I don’t have a script. I bought these from my neighbor whose kid gets it but she don’t give the kid the pills and sells them to me instead.”
“So we’ll find a walk-in clinic and you tell them you’re on vacation and lost your pills and need a refill to tide you over. Just pretend you got ADD.”
“What’s that?”
“Attention Deficit Disorder.”
“But I’m twenty-seven, I’m too old.”
“No. Adults have it too, not just kids. Trust me.”
“Do you trust me, baby?”
“Of course I do.”
“Okay.”
So … after we’d settled in a motel—we needed hot showers and some television time—we found a clinic. Forty-five bucks and you walk in without an appointment. Deesha looked nervous. I told her to take a Vicodin or two. She took three. I waited in the van hoping she’d be cool enough to pull it off. I’d given her a list of things to say, symptom sort of stuff, things I’d read about on the internet. Seemed like it took an hour before I saw her come out the front door. She waved a piece of paper at me. Score!
“How many?”
“Only sixty, baby, a month’s worth. He wasn’t a doctor. He was a PA. What’s a PA?”
“Physician Assistant. They pay some chump a quarter of what they pay a real doc and that’s why you can walk in for only forty-five bucks.”
“How do you know so much?”
“Brains sweetie, I got brains. Give me a couple, I’m dragging.”
“I need these more than you. You get two a day for four days, then it’s back to one.” She winked at me and stroked the back of my neck. We drove back to the motel, stopping first for a pack of Kools for Deesha and a bottle of vodka for me. Vicodin, Ritalin, vodka. Heaven. I’m sure you can guess what we did after we got good and high.
But then I felt it. Felt it when I couldn’t get to sleep even though I’d polished off nearly a pint of vodka, felt it at three in the morning when I was starting to bounce inside myself. Oh, shit, I’m heading out of the middle zone into the stratosphere. What I’d come to figure out later is that although Ritalin somehow kept Deesha evened out, it was sending me into a manic major high. But here’s the catch. It’s like telling a faulty computer to analyze what the problem is that’s making it faulty. It’s like the observer is the observed and so I knew I was taking off but I didn’t see it in the same terms I would see it once I’d crashed. I know it’s tough to get it unless you’re like me or any other true manic. It comes on you like a spell. Part of you fears what’s coming but the bigger part of you says: Oh yeah baby! Let’s blast off!
From Reno we drove into central east California and hit a highway called 395 and Deesha was studying the road map. “Let’s take a short cut and go up to Yosemite. The turnoff should be south a ways.”
“First we got to hit another clinic. Where’s the nearest town big enough to have one?”
She traced her finger along the map and said, “Bishop looks pretty big.”
When we arrived we started looking for a walk-in clinic, but we couldn’t find one until Deesha finally spotted a doctor’s office that had a sign saying walk-ins welcome. Turned out they expected a hundred dollar administrative fee on top of the seventy-five they wanted for the appointment. Fricking rip-off goddamned doctors. So I got out the map. We needed a bigger town, and there it was a ways north on 395. Mammoth Lakes. And by God and by Jesus they had one. Sixty bucks and walk right in and there were only two people in the waiting room. Deesha went inside and did her dog and pony show but the nurse wasn’t keen on handing out a script.
“These are a class-II drug and I’ll need to verify this with your regular doctor. Do you have the telephone or fax number?”
Deesha is street smart as hell and she says, “I’m actually from Canada. I’m visiting my cousin and we’re going to Yosemite. Canada has public healthcare and I see a different doctor every time I go into the clinic and so I can’t really remember which doctor said I was ADD.”
“We can’t honor Canadian prescriptions anyway, so you’ll have to make an appointment and see the doctor and then he can give you prescription if he feels it is necessary. He’ll be here tomorrow from noon until six. See the receptionist and we’ll get you in for tomorrow.”
“But then I have to pay for another visit and we’ll have to pay for a motel.”
“Sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”
Damn. Sixty bucks right up the flume. So we drove to Yosemite, which cost another twenty, but the vacationing hordes invading from the cities and hinterlands had taken all the campgrounds unless of course you had a reservation. So we drove all the way to Modesto and got a cheap motel just before midnight. What a day. Desha relented and let me have an extra Ritalin. What a piece of work she is, I mean it. She’s cool. And Yosemite was a sight to see, especially Half Dome and one of the high waterfalls. Deesha being a big city girl all her life was talking a mile a minute and flying around inside the van like a mongoose on steroids.
Guess maybe it was worth it after all.
The next day we got lucky and found a walk-in in a Mexican part of town and Deesha got us another sixty pills and we were on our way to Frisco. San Fran. “The City,” as the locals call it. The snobby bastards give you a look if you say Frisco. Go figure.
That night we slept in the van to save money, in a rich neighborhood not far from the yacht harbor. Parked in a place where we wouldn’t call attention to ourselves, although my van is clean and looks good so it didn’t stand out too bad from the other cars. I had to drink almost a pint of vodka so I could sleep for a couple hours. I needed something to put the brakes on but the idea of going to a walk-in and getting anti-manic pills didn’t appeal to me. The fricking drugs turn me into a walking zombie. The only other thing that would help slow me down a little is Valium, about thirty or forty milligrams a day, but the docs are real stingy on handing out sedatives. The only other thing is the big H, but I knew if I went there—hey, forget the hard part about having to score—it’d be trouble in the long run and plus I didn’t want to see Deesha get a taste for the shit. It’d be the end of her. I have a feeling she’s one of those types that tries heroin a couple times and then she’s on for the entire cruise. You know, the cruise ship leaves the dock and you’re going with it. Bad news. Like walking into slippery quicksand on a pair of skinny stilts. But hell. The other way of looking at it would be that my ship left the dock a long time ago and I’ve been on that wild cruise ever since.
Because you see what genius really means is a person who can see the future. A genius brings something into the present that up until that time only existed in the future. Like E=MC². Even though nobody understood that at the turn of the 20th century, I guarantee that somewhere in the future someone other than Einstein figured out the exact same thing.
What Einstein’s mind did was to know the future and then bring that knowledge back to the present. Like if I went back in a time machine to 200,000 years ago and showed a bunch of Neanderthals how to make fire, hell, they’d have made me head shaman or chief, and as word spread every Neanderthal in Europe would have known me as a genius, the man who made fire! It’s all about perspective. Linear time is just one way of looking at things. Maybe time is all in the same spot at the same time. Geniuses are the only ones that can see past the illusion of now. Some kind of quantum physics thing.
But I digress. I digress a lot when I’m flying out there at the edges. What can I say? Like I said, the cruise ship left the dock a long time ago and I’ve been riding that sonofabitch ever since. Hoo-ah!
I can’t sit still. Nope. Too much electricity flying through my head. The city looks like a tangle of steel and concrete woven together in a weird pattern, emerald blades and strings of lights sparkling and blinking and people scurrying around like patterns of blurred motion.
Red lights—Green lights—Yellow lights. The moments caught in a vortex of linear time and me watching sewer pipes spit out sapphires and rubies and mud.
I looked at Deesha. She lit up a Kool and blew a jet of smoke into the air.
“Fuck time,” I said. “I got to get out of this. What say we head to Chinatown? Maybe we find what I need.”
“Sure, baby, let’s go to Chinatown.”
