Great Day for a Breakdown

The last time I sputtered—that’s what I’m calling it—was two years ago and tears—the fibrous heart-kinds and saline face-kinds—but not as chilly or cerebral, at least how I’m remembering it. I never got around to writing about the incident (I will) because there are a lot of supercilious details: non-FDA approved caffeine pills; Mets at Cubs, seven rows behind dugout, soundly believing one in 42,000 spectators had to be a doctor; sitting on the shower mat for hours, warm streams reviving nothing and waiting for vultures; riding to the hospital, straddling a forgotten quart of tom yum soup in a slow-moving cab; EKGs and IVs and residents’ pens scribbling, reducing me to an incident that happened 11 years earlier; midnight sedation and afternoon revival and dropping my cell phone in a glass of water, the first motion—the first test—of my groggy new life.

Tell me—what sick clown runs into somebody they know in the emergency room? I was inexplicably self-conscious that this patient, this acquaintance—an alcoholic gay sex columnist from my college newspaper, remembered for such headlines as "Barebacking is Whack", and presumably admitted for the same anxieties or overdoses and looking just as shitty and unhygienic—saw my nipples peaking through my gown. More self-conscious about him than the tattooed, hetero-anesthesiologist pricking me four, five, six times and making frustrated jokes about uncooperative veins, unmistakably gawking at my splayed and shivering chest.

No, I’m not going to talk about the last time. It wasn’t an artful trough. The latest sputter might’ve been, as far as breakdowns go. It began:

“Manager, I’m not coming into work tomorrow,” shaky, but so are sailors, at times. “I’m very much freaking out.”

It continued like this:

“Boy I Slept With Two Years Ago, do you want to buy me a Manhattan? If I don’t have bourbon and bitters, I might die.”

Repeat times four. (Rejection, from even the girls.)

Then tears, strictly saline face-kinds. Those all-familiar goosebumps; wobbly and wavering and blinded, and I sit naked for hours, nowhere to go, renewing my predilection for memorizing nuance of ceiling, cracks, without something tactile (necessarily).

I stare off into atoms. They found my brother naked—a grisly, unmentionable detail—and I regret revealing my own blatant exposure to my mom the next day. I spend the better part of morning trying to convince her, “No, I’m not depressed. This is exhaustion. This is a sign of loving life with every ounce of being, and being let down. I’m your happy kid.”

It goes:

I can’t sleep so I text Ricardo to ask if one-year expired sedatives are passable—he is in law school, not medical school—and he prescribes only one. I take two. Potency undergoes a half life. He expects good things for my 89 years and I shall not disappoint.

I try:

To play it cool. I go to a pizzeria-brewery, the daytime talisman for ‘back to normal,’ considering the stay-at-home dad clientele, my usually stabilizing bacon-mushroom-clam order. I can do this. I am an object of interest. I switch to the charcuterie-whiskey bar, the early evening harbinger of hope. I write 12 pages of notes, mute and right-leaning, like drugged ants crossing a page. I read all cuckoo’s nest.

And:

In a stupor, I try going to my job the next morning, a fish with wings. I feel obtuse and duckling, like I’m jutting out and spilling over. Revolving doors and minutes after my security badge takes me past the last portal, I’m ushered into an accusatory ambush—a peer mediation meeting with someone I didn’t even know I had a problem with?—and I erupt and quiver and make pet sounds.

This is highly unlike me. I am sent home with pay.

Then:

Naked, again. On a bed without sheets. I ask Cait what her favorite Audrey Hepburn movie is of three. “Sabrina,” she says. And I vow to watch Sabrina, because I can never sit and watch a movie; I can never give myself time to myself; to rest wringing hands or tautological thoughts, for even two hours. I can never do what regular people do, even though I promise, my leisure isn’t spent any less self-interestedly.

I watch Sabrina. By that I mean, I eyeball the DVD case, still shrink-wrapped and balanced on its centimeter spine next to a horizontal me, still very naked in bed. I don’t open the case or view the movie. But I watch Sabrina, next to me, upright in compendium with Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Roman Holiday, simply there if I want those two hours, or four hours, or six. I pay for my time.

At dusk, the last shiver dissipates—a smoke ring, a fugitive pall. I could handle this any number of ways. Another bath, where I run the chance—rather, penance—of having to look at myself. A resignation letter. Pills with more potency and less half life.

If:

I sunk too low, I wouldn’t have stories.
If I rose above, I wouldn’t have pride.
I never knew either to make a distinction;
That’s why the coroner will find me alive.