TITLE: Microchip Man - Chapter 1 By Jacob Drollinger 09/18/09 |
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Chapter 1
The First Disease
An alarming lack of temperance had always been his most significant trait. It was the most influential factor in his life and predestined many of his days for grief and frustration. And as far as he could remember, it had been with him since the beginning. It was a malignant growth that had been removed from his soul numerous times, only to return eventually in a more ruthless and deadly form.
During his early years, his life might have appeared to be typical and predictable to the outside world. Mark Religand had what most people would consider to be a normal childhood, and apart from a few relatively minor mistakes, he was raised adequately with a solid moral foundation. He was born into a middle class family with no congenital defects and both parents present. All signs pointed towards a happy and prosperous life. But all along the anger was present, like a volcano seething with poison lava on the verge of erupting in a burst of wrath and vengeance.
He would sometimes blow up over the most inconsequential things, like having to be taken into the ladies bathroom while he was out somewhere in public with only his mom. He didn’t understand what a dangerous place the world was, and that he could have been abducted in a split second. All he knew was that he wasn’t a girl, and that he should be using the bathroom with the door with the figure of a man drawn on it. He would act as if somebody was gashing his eyes out before he would enter the ladies’ room. This was when he was five years old.
A major, unavoidable transformation was to be made when he was still rather young (nine years old and in the third grade). All of the elementary school placement tests he had taken put him in the highest level classes. He was not at all interested in school, however, and it showed in his class-work.
Mark, like many boys his age, was obsessed with sports. Nearly every waking hour was spent either playing or meditating on football, basketball, baseball…etc. The only major sports that didn’t appeal to him were soccer, because soccer had yet to achieve its full measure of popularity in the U.S., and hockey, because he was incapable of remaining upright while on ice skates. He and a neighborhood friend would play all kinds of games until the sun went down at night, summer and winter, weekends and holidays. He was also an obsessive fan of all the local professional teams. Watching the three major sports teams in his area took up a good portion of his free time. He was a devoted reader of the sports page of the city’s two major newspapers. Most important to him were the statistics: the numbers that each of the star players put up during both the most recent game and the entire season.
His class-work started to become noticeably unremarkable in the first month of school of the third grade. His English teacher was a no-nonsense woman of considerable stature, and she was the one who called him out and called his mother with her concerns. She invited him and his mother to an informal and unscheduled conference to discuss his lack of progress.
“Mark is a very smart young man, but he is giving little or no effort,” the giant woman said, handing his mom a folder of the work he had completed during the first two months. There were three sheets in the folder. Then she pulled out the folders of other kids in his class, and they were overflowing with papers, about fifty altogether. He was so ashamed; even he didn’t know he was doing this poorly. He could catch a football like his hands were made of masking tape, but he hadn’t worked hard enough to finish half the assignments that his classmates had.
“Mark, what have you been doing all this time?” his mom asked him.
“I’ve been trying mom,” Mark whimpered. Of course he was lying. He had not been trying at all. He was the consummate slacker, and his lack of effort was finally catching up with him.
“If you put forth all the effort that you are able to, you would be at the top of this class, Mark. You would probably have all of the work done, plus some extra credit,” the teacher said while putting the folder back in its place.
“Ms. Anchoring, we’ll be sure to have a talk with him at home, and he’ll start trying harder and doing better,” his mom assured her.
“Good,” the teacher replied. “Because if he doesn’t start doing better, we’ll have to switch him to a lower level English class.”
Shame turned to anger now, and Mark said to himself, “Just who does she think she is? I’ll show her. I will show everyone.” And he did, improving on an almost daily basis, until his was the largest folder in the class and the quality of his assignments was outstanding.
This would be the path that he would follow the rest of his life: shame followed by anger, and most of the time the anger was followed by overachievement. Unfortunately, years later this tendency would also lead to total disaster.
When his education suffered he would become ashamed, almost implode with anger, buckle down and bring his grades up. When it came to competition, when he lost or was in the process of losing he would either get mad and get even, or when a poor outcome was inevitable, he would simply quit. This applied to all forms of competition, from intramural sports, to games with his friends, to board games with family members.
At the graduation ceremony from elementary school, the man who had been his gym teacher for the past seven years stood at the doorway to the gymnasium where the ceremony was being held. When Mark stopped at the door to wait for his turn to enter, the eyes of the incredibly strong man he had known since kindergarten began to well up. It was as if he knew, as if he could see into the future to what would become of Mark. This man knew of his propensity for quitting when he was behind during competition as well as anyone. He had seen Mark stomp off the playing field in misery at least a hundred times in the seven years he had taught him. Then at the end of the graduation service, when certificates of completion were being handed out, the principal leaned over and whispered, “Never give up.” This innocent statement, intended to be an encouragement, would end up being more foretelling and foreboding than any words ever spoken by any fortune teller.
By the eighth grade he was performing at an astonishing level. That year he received nothing but straight A‘s. It was a good thing for him there were no competitive sports in middle school, just some games in gym class. He could still catch any pass that was thrown to him, but his skills had now broadened to include basketball. Somewhere he had learned how to shoot a jump shot instead of the flat footed set shot most of the other boys in school were using. He was also an impressive free throw shooter; one estimate put him at about 75% from the foul line.
Mark wasn’t what you would call a heavy boy. He was far from obese, but he had always had a little tummy. This aspect of his life didn’t sit well with him either, as he put up with inconsistent and unpredictable insults from his fellow students. “Mark, why are you so fat?” they would ask him. Obviously, they either didn’t know what fat was, or they just saw him as an easy target. Although it should have been more demeaning to him, considering the fact that he despised feeling ashamed, it didn’t truly provoke him and he never really said, “I’ll show them, I will become so lean and muscular.” He did feel a sense of shame when he was teased about his weight, but not enough to make him want to start counting calories. As with most pre-teens, he was growing like a weed in the garden’s corner. He loved snack cakes, cookies, and sugary cereal way too much to think of cutting back.
In 1984 he was to start high school. All of the pressures of adolescence were upon him now. Initially, he handled it reasonably well. Even though good grades were still his primary concern, he was very nearly as enthused about the freshman football program. Playing high school football had always been a guaranteed thing and not just an ambition of his, and it was going to be a fantastic four year career. Even though he wasn’t especially large, he was unusually strong for his size and deceptively fast. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would be either an all-state tight end or a great running back. However, somehow he was not informed that he needed a simple physical exam to be eligible to play; practices began without him, and the chance of a lifetime just sort of slipped by. How this happened would remain a mystery. He could have started practices late, but something inside him prevented him from doing so. His father had played football in high school, and consequently once again he felt disgraced. Although he could have tried to make the Junior Varsity team his sophomore year, he ended up never having tried out for football. This was just the beginning of an endless series of instances where he would give up on something when it didn’t begin as he had planned. He was going to have to find something else, another sport to compete in.
In the summer of 1984, he spent a lot of time at a lake house his parents and a group of aunts and an uncle had bought some five years earlier. That year the Olympics were held in Los Angeles, and all he did while he was at home was watch the competition. He marveled at the strength and endurance of the swimmers, and although he had never had a swimming lesson, he started to imitate the athletes in the lake water. He even taught himself how to do the most difficult stroke, the butterfly. A lot of the power in the butterfly comes from the kick, which makes the swimmer look like a dolphin, using the whole body to thrust them through the water. He just couldn’t seem to teach himself the proper butterfly kick, however, so he would just let his legs drag lifelessly through the water, and use his arms to pull him from one point to another, usually from one pier to the next. He would never correct this defect, and from the beginning to the end of his swimming career he was the object of amazement of fellow swimmers and coaches. He made up his mind that swimming was going to be his sport. He made sure that he had documentation of a complete physical before the season started.
It was far more than he had bargained for, because competitive swimming was incredibly demanding on the body, especially for someone with a deficiency of talent. With little God given ability, Mark got to where he did in swimming because the schools in the city conference were not stacked with young men wanting to be swimmers, and from working like a barbarian. He would end up as a varsity letterman all four years, but the first month and a half of his freshman season was exhausting and painful. Strangely, Mark never really cared for competitive swimming. Practices were a living nightmare: back and forth up and down the pool, the drills, the timing of each and every lap. He had to try to keep up with the boys who actually had some ability, and the pounding he put himself through continually resulted in a condition where his arms felt as if they would fall off, and his lungs like they would cave in. As bad as practices were, however, meets were far worse. Swimming at the top speed possible anywhere from 50 to 500 yards (depending on the race) was inhuman torture and produced a disgusting feeling in his stomach. The gasping for air when a breath was taken and attempting to finish with a final burst of energy made him wish he had chosen baseball.
The Christmas holiday had been spent at his Aunt and Uncle’s house for the past three years, and so it was in ‘84. Mark was blessed with a tremendously generous family. As a young child he was an ungrateful brat, and whenever he would open a gift that turned out to be clothes, he would say, “More clothes?” and infuriated, he would toss them aside. He had, however, grown out of the stage where toys and games were all he wanted as gifts and most of what he asked for and received that year was clothing. After dinner, he gathered up some of his new apparel and took it upstairs to his cousin’s room where there was a full length mirror on the closet door. While he was trying on the clothes, he noticed something: muscle where there hadn’t been muscle before. In the past month and a half, he had tortured his body to the point where new, lean muscle had grown without him even knowing it. He had hardly noticed that he wasn’t being harassed about his weight anymore. There was no belly there to speak of. He went back downstairs a much happier young man.
Mark hadn’t developed any strong, loyal friendships yet, just a few guys on the swim team that he hung out with at school, but nowhere else. On the day after his birthday in September of his junior year he took his driver’s test. He was a very sound and reliable driver, and he passed the behind-the-wheel test with just one minor error. In fact, the man who administered the test claimed that he had never seen such a confident and capable sixteen-year-old take the test before. Now that he had his license, everybody wanted to be Mark’s friend. Never having been a part of the more elite “popular” crowd, he had an adamant disdain for them. Therefore, the young men he chose as friends were a group of three of the most eccentric characters in school. They were alternatives to the popular crowd, and thus they were called “alternative.” They didn’t smoke; were not on any drugs; didn’t drink; didn’t curse habitually; the music they listened to – although sometimes dark – didn’t have any homicidal, suicidal, or satanic messages in or behind it. They were, in most respects, what you would call “good boys”. The things he and his friends did for fun in no particular order were: sit in a booth at any randomly chosen fast food restaurant and talk about the popular kids, watch movies and stay up all night hyped up on Mountain Dew, and harass a certain girl named Jill whom all four would eventually end up dating.
From the time he turned fourteen until he was eighteen, Mark attracted females left and right, wherever he went, there is no simpler way to put it. His self-esteem was so low, his level of insecurity so high, however, that he never made the first move. He would never even talk to a girl until a third party told him that she was attracted to him. So, while the more aggressive boys were forced to flirt and generally be outgoing, all Mark had to do was sit back and wait for an acquaintance to tell him, “Hey Mark, I heard ‘so and so’ likes you.” Then and only then would he muster up the courage to talk to her. The truth was that Mark’s ego was so fragile at this stage that any punch thrown at it, any little jab that hit it, felt like a sledgehammer being slammed into his heart. There was no way that he was going to put himself out there enough to just ask a girl out on a date, particularly one whom he didn’t know was attracted to him beforehand. Frequently, the female would even have to initiate the first conversation. This was how unsure of himself he was when it came to the opposite sex.
His junior year in high school would be the most difficult so far; not academically – because he continued to be an honor student – but emotionally. The end of swim season had always been a huge letdown. Going from working his body to its limits, to coming home, kicking his shoes off, and snacking until dinner, caused his life to unfurl. Not only did he begin to see some of the belly that was so disturbing in his early childhood, but because of all the free time he now had, every aspect of
his appearance began to bother him. Particularly troubling to him was his nearly acne-free
complexion. This point is most vital to the story and must be reiterated – for a sixteen year old pale
skinned white boy – he had exceptionally clear skin. Some aspect of his personality caused him to
lose his sanity when anything even resembling a pimple would arise on his face. In a perverted
Shakespearian manner of speaking, this was his tragic flaw.
The first time it got the better of him was in March of his junior year. On a night of mischief with his friends he felt something bubbling up on his chin. When he got home, he went to bed already feeling the anxiety of the next day. In his mind, the thing on his chin was a disgusting boil, three inches wide if it was a half a millimeter. He managed to get up and go to school anyway, but he didn’t even get through third hour. He told his English teacher he wasn’t feeling well, and called his mom to come and pick him up. Although the music he listened to didn’t have any suicidal suggestions, killing himself was the only thing on his mind. When he arrived home, he headed straight for the bathroom and the medicine cabinet where his father kept all of his high blood pressure medications. Without thoroughly considering the reality that this might just be the final hour of his life, he began to indiscriminately shove pills into his mouth until he felt he had taken enough to end it. The flood of repressed feeling that brought about this action was a long time in the making, but this attempt at suicide was not preconceived. It was not at all as if he had been planning to kill himself for an extended length of time.
The act of suicide, depending on the mind-set of the person, can occur in two entirely different ways. First, there is the preconceived suicide, where premeditation always preludes their attempt. Planning, sometimes for days, weeks, even months the action (and reaction) they want to carry out and generate. In a way, preconceived suicides are similar to the action of serial murders, even in respect to the repetition; as most attempts of this nature are repeated later. Then there is the crisis suicide, in which a certain event or trauma triggers the emotion that causes the helplessness which ultimately leads to the suicide attempt. Mark’s suicide attempt, much like his illness, was difficult to categorize.
It must come as no surprise by now that Mark was, for the most part, a true quitter in every sense of the word. While it is odd that a person with a rage disorder, who desperately felt the need for redemption whenever he was humiliated, would be a quitter, except for a few aspects of his life he had always just quit when things got bad, or even when things didn’t go just as he had planned. Except for the exceptions that have already been mentioned, he blew most failure and impending failure way out of proportion.
Another undesirable part of his personality was cowardice. Anybody who knows anything about people with suicidal tendencies knows that suicide is the ultimate act of cowardice. All it really amounts to is a person with no courage trying to escape life’s many snags, snares and consequences. This time the lack of courage in Mark would save his life. After about a half an hour he told his mom what he had done. His family as a whole didn’t know what had been bothering him, and up until that point nobody would have suspected him of wanting to kill himself. His mom nearly had a heart attack when he said, “Mom, I just took a bunch of pills. I was trying to kill myself.” They got in the car and raced to the nearest emergency room where he would have his stomach pumped. This was a truly nasty procedure. First, they tried to snake a tube down Mark’s throat, but his gag reflex was too strong. Next, they placed the same sized tube in his nose, and attempted to enter his esophagus that way. This was an uncomfortable feeling, like aspirating water while swimming, except this thing was not a liquid, but a solid pipe. They kept asking him what and how much he had taken, but he didn’t know because it had been such a haphazard and unsystematic overdose. He had basically taken three bottles of medicine out of the cabinet, removed a handful of each pill and stuck them in his mouth. After they had removed whatever was left of the pills, they flushed his stomach with a charcoal-like substance.
His father arrived at the emergency room, and it was finally time to come clean with the man he revered and respected the most.
“Mark, what could be so bad that you would try to kill yourself?” his father asked, uncharacteristically calm.
He wasn’t going to play any games and he came right out and told him. “It’s my face, dad.”
“What’s wrong with your face?”
“Acne, I can’t handle…getting a pimple,” Mark replied painfully. “I don’t know. I know that… I don’t think I’m too good to get pimples. I think it’s just the opposite – because I believe any flaw in my face is going to make me grotesquely ugly.”
His dad’s mood suddenly changed. “My God, is that what this is all about, a pimple? All teenagers get acne to some extent, you know. I would say that you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ve gotten off pretty easy!”
“I know, dad. I know.”
“I think it must go a hell of a lot deeper than your complexion,” his dad considered the obvious, disregarding what Mark had just explained about his self-image.
Mark turned away, not wanting his father to see the swelling bulge on his chin. Apparently he didn’t because he kept on talking. “When I was your age, I had a chin full of blackheads. Sure, I was upset about it, but not so upset that it made me want to commit suicide!”
A chin full of blackheads was something Mark could deal with, something he actually had dealt with before. He felt like turning to his dad and asking. “Did you ever have one of these?” pointing to his chin and the ugly cyst which was still swelling up there.
“I just don’t understand it,” his dad paused. “You’ve always been a self-centered boy, but not in a really bad way. You have never been selfish, though, as far as I could tell. I mean, you’ve always been terribly insecure with yourself, but I wouldn’t think that would cause this either.” His father was now pondering to himself the possible reasons for the “depression” as if Mark wasn’t even in the room.
Mark’s mom and dad were in the waiting room anticipating the release of their son. “I don’t know. It has got to be something more than a pimple. I mean, to want to kill yourself because of a zit, it’s inconceivable,” his dad paused. “Did you even see what he was talking about?”
His mom responded, “You mean acne? His face is as clear as it was when he was ten.”
“I didn’t see this coming. How could any of us have known that he was going to try to kill himself?” his dad asked rhetorically.
“I know that he has been spending a lot of time in the bathroom, but I was in the bathroom a lot more than he is when I was sixteen.”
“I never noticed any difference when he would come out, in his mood I mean. Like I said, I really doubt that it’s just acne. Now, he has always had low self-esteem, but I didn’t think it was that bad, that his self-image would take such a beating when it came to this.” His dad was still trying to make sense of it.
“Has anybody really taken the time to sit down with him and try and find out what he’s thinking?” His mom questioned. “I guess we haven’t been paying enough attention.”
“Well, it’s too late now. It’s over. I hope they find out what’s wrong with him or put him on the strongest antidepressant they have.”
“But except the overdose, he hasn’t really acted depressed, has he?” his mom asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous, only severely depressed people try to kill themselves.”
It is a common misconception that the only emotional illness that can cause a person to attempt suicide is depression. It can be so many other things: obsessions, anxiety, frustration, anger, fear…etc. In Mark’s case it was shame, anger and then depression. At first it was the shame of having the smallest of physical flaws, but most of all it was the anger, with nobody to direct it at, that drove him to depression. He could always find someone to blame for his problems – someone to be the object of his outbursts – except this one.
Mark’s illness was certainly not bi-polar disorder, which had become the “in” disease. Everybody who was anybody had manic depression. But plainly this was not Mark’s illness because Mark didn’t have a manic state in which he thought he was invincible, and he was always vulnerable.
He would then go to a different hospital where he would undergo treatment for “major depression” in the adolescent psych ward. He could not believe that his parents were just going to leave him there, and he trembled and had a fit like he did when he was young when they were about to abandon him. “Don’t leave me here,” he screamed. “I don’t belong here.”
“Obviously, you do belong here,” his dad sternly argued. “Do you realize that you just tried to end your life? You need treatment for whatever is wrong with you.”
Then Mark’s attention turned toward his mom. “Mom please, I shouldn’t be here. Please don’t leave me here.” It took all they had to break away from their son, who was now squealing like an infant. “We’ll see you tomorrow, okay. We love you,” his mom said while a torrid stream of tears continued to spill down his cheeks.
The first thing they did for him was subject him to a battery of psychological exams, which tested him for major depression and stupidity. He tested positive for depression and negative for stupidity. Despite the results of his tests for depression, he clearly wasn’t the normal male teenage patient in the psych ward. Not one of the experts in the study of the mind that he saw there was able to classify his illness as something they had observed before. It was not bi-polar disorder, normal depressive disorder, or seasonal affective disorder. He was far more troubled than anyone thought, or that anyone would conclude. His mind was a battlefield, and there were many land mines lying under the ash hidden by a thick cloud of smoke.
After careful evaluation of his symptoms, he was assigned a psychiatrist. He was foreign, as are many psychiatrists. He was from an Asian country, but Mark couldn’t tell exactly which one. The doctor’s English, although somewhat broken, was at least recognizable as English. Mark wondered to himself why so many foreign people, particularly from Asia or the Middle East, came to the United States and studied to become adolescent psychiatrists? What made them think they could understand the confused, convoluted minds of American teenagers? “Why you want to kill yourself?” he asked Mark.
“I don’t know,” Mark answered predictably.
The doctor responded, “I think you do know.”
“I guess when I look in the mirror; I don’t like the person I see.”
“I think this is normal, for a young man your age to have question about who he is, about his place in the world,” the doctor took a few seconds to look at Mark’s chart. “I can see that you a very smart young man.”
“I guess so,” Mark said. He had never, in all honesty, thought of himself as being above average intelligence, just a devoted student and a person who enjoyed learning.
“Well then, you must recognize your depression is something more than, ‘I don’t like the person I see’.” The doctor was uncertain of what he was going to say next. “I think it go much further than the way you see yourself. Think for a few second, what it is that you don’t like about you?”
Mark replied meekly, “The way I look. I mean my physical appearance.”
“What is it about your appearance you don’t like? From what I can see, you a handsome young man.”
“My face”
“What about your face?”
“When I get a pimple or blemish or something, I get filled with anxiety.” Mark was starting to provide the doctor with at least some selected honesty.
“Okay, now we getting somewhere. Why you think you panic when you get acne?”
“Honestly, that’s where I think my problem is, I just don’t know. That’s why I said in the beginning that I didn’t know why I tried to kill myself.”
“You feel ashamed?” the doctor asked.
“Yes, I feel ashamed.” Mark answered excitedly, as if he was having a breakthrough.
“Why you think you feel ashamed?”
“Because it’s ugly, I guess. I don’t know,” Mark paused for a moment. “I guess I feel angry too.”
“This is good, very good. Now, you must feel angry at somebody, anger is never just present in a man. It must be directed at someone or something. You think. Are you angry at your mom or dad, possibly female who has rejected you in the past?”
Mark thought about the last one. It couldn’t be just one female, because all the females he had ever touched had rejected him. He laughed at his thought process.
The doctor suddenly switched gears. “You have a higher power, some God you believe in?” “Yes, I believe in God.”
“Do you think maybe you angry at God?”
‘Angry at God’ Mark again laughed on the inside. “Why would I be angry at a loving God?” “Maybe you think he doesn’t love you so much? Maybe you think he gives you pimple because he doesn’t love you? You think he has something against you, that you are being punished for something?” the doctor was actually asking a question. It was hard to differentiate between his questions and statements, because his intonation rose at the end of both.
“I don’t think so.” Mark hesitated to ponder his next move, because to Mark it was just a chess game, and he wasn’t about to give up his queen. “If he was punishing me for something, then what would I be mad at him for, for being fair and just?”
The doctor was becoming baffled. “I’m not sure your anger directed at your God, maybe your anger really directed at your parents.”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
This was the way the sessions normally went: in depth probing of Mark’s belief system and relationships. In the end, this game came to a stalemate, with nothing of consequence learned about Mark’s psychological problem except that he was angry at something, or everything.
A small group meeting of his parents, the psychiatrist and two of the therapists that worked on the floor wouldn’t reveal much more.
“Mr. and Mrs. Religand, you know that your son a very sick young man?” the doctor asked the couple.
“Well yes, obviously,” his dad replied.
“But before this happened,” his mom interjected, “he seemed to be just fine.”
“I’m sure he did. Because most teenager are good at hiding depression very well.”
“He’s always been a perfectionist when it comes to the way he thinks things should be,” his dad said, introducing the topic that he had discussed with Mark.
“You are talking about his face?” one of the therapists asked him.
“No, not just any acne that may or not be there,” his dad paused. “I’m talking about every aspect of his life.”
“But he is not obsessive when it comes to organizing things,” his mom remarked. This was the only kind of obsessive behavior that she knew anything about.
“No, but he is obsessive about just about everything else,” his dad argued.
“What are you talking about?” the doctor asked. “What else is he obsessed about?”
“Well, his grades, everything to do with school, for one thing.” His dad was just getting started. “And sports, whenever he doesn’t win, he becomes very angry. Even when it comes to the sports teams he’s a fan of; whenever they lose he has a meltdown. Then there is the way he looks. I mean my God, my son is a good looking boy, but just as soon as something comes up that makes him not look right, he flies off the handle!”
“Considering the way he reacts to acne, that is not at all surprising,” the other therapist commented. “He’s got to be compulsively neat. Maybe you’re just not seeing it.”
“Not at all, in fact, he’s one of the most disorganized people I know,” his mom stated.
“That so unusual,” the doctor commented. “So, he is like some mad scientist, disorganized but obsessive about outcomes. Tell me, he had any problem with his weight.”
There was a long pause. Nobody knew if he was finished with his question.
Mark’s mom had to clarify, “You mean being overweight?”
The doctor nodded, and his mom remembered something. “Yes, when he was six, his pediatrician said something about Mark needing to go on a diet.” And this insistence was rather upsetting to her son. “You don’t think that has anything to do with his face, do you?”
Mark’s dad was a cynical man who didn’t trust the world of psychological medicine as a whole, but especially now that his son was involved in it, his blatant mistrust was ready to be exposed. “Dang it, I am so sick of childhood events needing to be dug up. My son just took enough of my medication to kill himself three times over, and all you can talk about is how much he weighed when he was six. He might have been affected a little back then, but when he says that he tried to end his life over a pimple, I have to conclude that it is something that has happened recently or something that is happening now. I mean, kids don’t get pimples when they are six!”
“That might be, but usually…”
“No, not usually,” his dad interrupted. “My boy is a unique case. You can not lump him in with other teenagers. He is sensitive and smart, and although you might be tempted to classify his illness as something normal, I know that it is an abnormality, and I am positive that it isn’t because of something that happened ten years ago.”
“Dear, you’re not making sense anymore,” his mom told her husband.
“I’m making more sense than these people. All of this psycho-babble crap. You’d better all be careful; you may do him more harm than good.”
There was a teacher at the hospital who tried to keep the young patients there caught up with their class-work. She often asked for Mark’s help in assisting with the other teens’ homework. “This must be one of those passionate and brilliant, yet emotionally troubled minds you always hear about but only see on TV or in the movies,” the teacher said to herself. They are, in fact, all over the place, troubled souls with unique gifts. They are not necessarily mentally impaired, but more often than not, life and how to live it is a riddle to them.
So Mark was a model patient, and he was always cooperative; but he only seemed to make progress with his depression. He was put on a fairly powerful and extremely sedative antidepressant, and was released after only ten days.
The problem with his quick release was he was just that smart. He knew what to say and how to behave in order to win favor with the staff and the psychiatrist. As a rule, Mark didn’t watch TV shows about nut houses. He had never even seen “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” Yet he recognized what it took to be released from the funny farm. And unfortunately the pimple on his chin had disappeared after day one. So he left the hospital never having revealed anything beyond what he consciously could, anything more than what he wanted to, and so doped up on antidepressants that he could barely hold a thought in his head. He went back to school and life went back to its normal state.
The paranoia would leave Mark alone for a little more than a year. In April of the next year virtually the exact same thing occurred. This time, he felt a little more hopeless, so he washed the arbitrary amount of his dad’s medicine down with a couple of swigs of bourbon (he had seen this done in a movie). Also, he did this at about midnight, while the rest of his family was asleep. He climbed into bed and waited for the cold hand of death. While he was lying on his back in bed anticipating a rapid drop in his blood pressure, an image of a bearded man flashed in front of his eyes. Although Mark had been raised Catholic until he was about twelve, he wasn’t what you would consider a Christian. However, there was absolutely no mistaking who the bearded man was. The image made him climb out of bed, enter his parents’ bedroom, and shake his mom awake. It was back to the emergency room to have his stomach pumped. Unlike the first overdose, this time he actually felt his blood pressure dropping, and he became cold and clammy.
When it came to committing suicide, Mark was a blundering, bumbling idiot. Each of the two attempts was surely a cry for help, which is why the potentially lethal dose of pills was pumped from his stomach before it got entirely into his bloodstream. It could have been nothing but God that made him tell somebody, or the Son of God in the case of the second attempt. The past three quarters of his senior year of high school had been so very good. He had finally been dating a girl for more than two weeks. He had, in actuality, been seeing the same girl for more than two months, an unprecedented feat for him. Also, swim season had been, to date, the best ever for his school’s team. It was a tremendous surprise to friends and family that he would attempt suicide again, because he had the world at his feet.
Another suicide attempt meant another visit to the adolescent psyche ward. Even though he didn’t find any help there, he would go through the motions again. Every patient there was assigned a staff member to keep in contact with throughout their shift. A certain young nurse developed a strong, strange relationship with him; a relationship the management felt became too strong and she was no longer allowed to be his contact person. After that he felt wounded and alone. He was close to making some kind of progress, but now he withdrew back into himself once again.
Everything else was essentially the same as it had been the first time, dancing around the major problem and talking about his relationship with his parents. However, for the first time, he was coerced into discussing his sexuality. Mark was an emotional, sensitive young man, and although he was still a virgin, in all other ways he was just like most seventeen year old males: in no uncertain terms, hard wired by hormones to nail just about any decent looking, clean female without thinking. The therapist/psychologist that had been assigned to him was positive that Mark must have been a closet homosexual, otherwise, why would he have been so obsessed with his complexion? She was convinced that he had to be hiding something, so she poked and prodded with no luck. Much to her disappointment, Mark was a flaming heterosexual. “So, Mark, what happened to you?” asked the wicked witch.
“Well, you know, the usual. Things got to be too much for me again, and I tried to kill myself,” Mark answered rather nonchalantly.
“No, I mean, what happened to you as a child, that would make you want to kill yourself?” she prodded.
“I can’t think of anything.” Mark wondered why everything had to be about an early childhood trauma.
“I mean, it says here,” she checked her notes, “that you were here last year as well after a suicide attempt. It also says that you were unnecessarily concerned about your complexion then. Is that what happened this time too?”
“Yeah,” Mark responded with hesitation. He had to think if he agreed with the word ‘unnecessarily.’
“Well, most of the boys we’ve seen here who are obsessed over their appearance have experienced some sort of trauma in their past.” She was hinting at something, and Mark knew what it was.
“What do you mean, like being beat up?” he asked ambiguously.
“No, I mean more along the lines of,” she paused for effect, “sexual trauma.” This woman was just like millions of therapists around the world, obsessed with the ideation that any psychological problem had to do with something sexual, probably because they all had been deprived of sexual intimacy throughout their adult lives. They would become restless and unnerved when a patient would not admit the problem (or solution) was something explicitly sexual.
“No, I was never molested or raped, if that’s what you mean.”
“You’re sure about that? Because you’re exhibiting some behaviors that would indicate that you are not being honest with me.” She was looking at him like a frustrated old teacher who was trying to get an answer to a math problem.
Mark looked down at his thumbs. They were twiddling. He immediately stopped them from moving. It was the subject of sex that excited Mark. As a seventeen-year-old virgin, Mark was understandably fascinated with the idea of the whole thing. It took every ounce of his willpower to keep himself from forcing his sexual urges on his girlfriend. “What do you want me to do, admit that I am hiding something from you?”
“Not at all, Mark,” she hesitated, choosing her next words carefully. “I just want you to try to search your earliest memories. Was there somebody, an uncle perhaps, who touched you inappropriately?”
“The only uncle I have who I am close enough to, to even have the chance to try something like that, is not that kind of guy.” Mark was getting noticeably annoyed. “And I can remember every minute that I spent with him growing up.”
“Okay then, maybe it wasn’t a family member,” she continued. “Think back, were you ever approached by a man, or a group of men, and violated?”
“No, and I should have stopped this a while ago. This problem with my complexion has nothing to do with being ‘violated’ in any way.”
“How do you know that for sure? I mean, memories can be repressed.” She kept right on questioning him.
“I just know, okay. I know that my problem has nothing to do with being molested.” Mark readied himself to leave the room by rotating in his chair.
“Okay, okay. I hope you don’t mind me asking this,” she wasn’t done with him, and Mark rotated back around, “but have you, yourself had any homosexual thoughts or fantasies.”
“No, I haven’t,” Mark answered emphatically.
“Wow, that was quick,” she noted.
“I’m sure that you’re going to take the speed of my answer as a sign that I’ve wanted to have sex with my best friend.”
“Nope, just as an indication that you might have repressed feelings...”
“Hey, I’ve got an idea. Maybe you’re a lesbian, and you’re using this line of questioning to confirm your belief that it’s okay to be a homosexual.”
“I am not! I’ve got a husband.” He was shrinking her head now.
“And I’ve got a girlfriend, so I’m not gay,” Mark proclaimed.
She was very confused now. “Wait a minute, hold on. The fact that you just used that statement tells me that…”
“What, that I want to have sex with you?” Mark asked quietly. “Ninety-six is a little old for me…I might break you in half.”
“Okay, we’ll pick this back up at our next meeting.” She didn’t know what else to say.
When she had left the room, she stopped and wrote in her notes, “This is either a certified genius, or a certifiable borderline personality.”
It was another ten day stay, and then back to school and the status quo. While he was in the hospital this time, he had received a card from one of his friends, a boy named Shaun. If he would have considered any of his friends to be his “best” friend, this would be the one. On the day he returned home, he took Shaun to the mall (the normal hang-out spot). It was there, sitting in a booth at a fast food restaurant that he finally confided in his best friend. Shaun happened to have a poor complexion, so it came as a kick in the teeth when Mark, with almost flawless skin, told him that he became paranoid when one blemish would emerge. Shaun, too, argued that it must have gone a lot deeper than his skin, given the fact that he never appeared to have acne. Of course, Mark didn’t know how deep it went; only that even when his skin was clear, he worried himself senseless about where and when the next pimple would be.
“Oh, my gosh man, you have the best skin of any dude I know,” Shaun said sincerely. “I mean look at me, if anybody deserves to be upset about acne, it’s me. Look around for a second at school, you see all of the dried out skin of people trying to control their acne. And you know what the strange thing about them is? Right there in the middle of all that dry skin, are big fat pimples!”
“I don’t know why I got to that point. I just know that whenever I feel a pimple coming on, I get…I don’t know, scared,” Mark confessed.
“Scared of what? Scared that you’re going to be ugly? Scared that people are going to laugh at you? Scared that you’re not going to be perfect? Man, you’ve got it made. I am actually jealous of you, you know that don’t you?” Shaun asked him.
“I didn’t know you were jealous,” Mark said in sincere amazement. “Why would you be jealous?” Mark was, in all honesty, jealous of Shaun. Shaun had the most amazing sense of humor and vibrant personality of anyone he had ever known. Compared to Shaun’s caramel – chocolate swirl with sprinkles and nuts, Mark’s persona was as minimally vanilla as they came.
“Mark, you know I’m not gay, right?” He kept asking questions. Mark knew the answer to this one.
“Yes, I know that you’re straight. You’re a little weird but you’re not gay, at least I hope you’re not. I mean, I would be stunned and a little nervous to find out my best friend was gay,” Mark replied.
“Okay, then I feel okay saying this. You are the best looking guy I know,” Shaun stated bluntly.
It didn’t mean much coming from his best friend, and it wouldn’t have meant much coming from anybody. It wasn’t how others saw him; it was about how he saw himself.
The conversation ended with a request: “Tell me you’ll never do that again.” Shaun was asking Mark to assure him of something that was impossible for the disturbed young man to promise.
Also during the week of his return from this visit to the hospital, he went to visit his guidance counselor, not because his grades were poor, but because he wanted to be on the golf team. Another of Mark’s sports was golf; he had been playing since he was ten-years-old. The golf team’s practice infringed on eighth hour class, but his argument was convincing. He had just come back from another stay at the psych ward, and nothing was better for depression than sunlight. So, could he please drop his eighth hour class and join the golf team, whose season was already well underway?
“Oh, of course you can Mark,” was the answer. Later on he would tie for sixth place at the conference championship.
Later that semester, another problem arose. Mark had never taken a final mathematics exam; he had always earned an exemption in math. That year he had taken Calculus, and he had no idea what he was doing. Mark had missed three weeks of school that semester, and at the city’s public high schools, you could only be absent five days and still get exempt from two exams. The policy was: if you maintained a B average in a class, you did not have to take exams in that class, with a maximum of two exemptions. Mark actually went to the highest power in the school, the unapproachable principal, and informed her that he had just spent two weeks in the hospital, being treated for major depression, so was there any way he could be given his two exemptions? The principal was much less of a push-over than the guidance counselor. She wanted to know all about his psychological illness, but eventually the answer came forth, “Of course you will get both of your exemptions, Mark.”
Mark graduated seventh out of a class of 400, with a cumulative grade point of 3.79, and was the only male to graduate in the top ten. He was also voted most likely to succeed by his fellow students. If to be successful in being unsuccessful and self-destructive is what they meant, then they would have been justified in choosing him.
An odd event took place right after the graduation ceremony. Mark and Shaun were walking through the first floor of the school in an area adjacent to the lunchroom, when a girl Mark had went out with one time during sophomore year called his name and came running up from behind them. He knew that he had come on way too strong on their first and only date, a problem he had with most of the girls he had went out with. The physical attraction was so strong between them, if he wouldn’t have forced his hopelessly romantic character on her, it probably would have turned out to be a long term relationship. Now, they embraced for about five seconds and she whispered, “Congratulations.” This was strange because they hadn’t really spoken at all since sophomore year, and to catch him coming out of their graduation ceremony to hug him, well…it was just bizarre. This seemingly trivial occurrence will be of more relevance later in the story.
Just as with football freshman year, Mark had missed another important deadline in the winter of senior year. The deadline to enroll in his college of first choice had passed a month before he even realized it. Shaun had already been accepted there, but the largest state college was so crowded that Mark could not use even his capacity for persuasion to influence the powers that be to let him in. Therefore, he was forced to enroll in the well accredited state college in his home town, and they were more than pleased to let him in. Plans were made to enroll the following spring at the more prestigious school that Shaun was attending in the fall. But as someone once said, the best laid plans…
Since the middle of junior year, Mark and four of his best friends, including Shaun, had been planning the ultimate senior trip. They were going to drive halfway across the country, and stay in
San Diego for five days. Mark and his friends had never even seen the Rocky Mountains, and now, with no parental supervision, they were going to drive through them, or over them, or however you get past the Rockies. Mark couldn’t believe that his parents were really going to let him go. Here were five boys, the oldest having just turned eighteen, and their parents were going to let them drive 2000 miles to a strange city in a van that a friend of one of the boy’s family was going to let them borrow. The United States was a different country, in a whole different world in 1988.
Mark had been saving his money for the trip since June of ’87. He had been working for $3.15 an hour at a restaurant where Shaun was a busboy and another one of the group of friends was a fry cook. He had been promoted from dishwasher to fry-cook during the previous winter and he was now making $3.30 an hour. The best part about his job was the fact that he got to work with his friends. It was a fairly simple job, and Mark was pretty good at it. Including the almost $500 he had been given as a gift from various relatives for graduation, he had about $900 saved up. He could only imagine what the trip would be like. He was going to spend seven days with four guys that made him laugh so hard that he frequently lost the ability to breathe. It would be a true adventure that would he would remember for the rest of his life. He held on as long as he could, but a blemish on the side of his nose drove him back to the hospital. The day for departure was June 26th. Mark’s dad was with an uncle and cousin on the annual fishing trip to Canada. Mark was not with them, of course, because of the overlapping California plans.
The psych ward had become a shelter for him. Now, whenever he was even feeling panicky or depressed, he would inform his mom, and she would take him there. On the night of June 23rd, he couldn’t take the anxiety anymore; he woke up in the morning and told his mom he was feeling suicidal. All she could do was take a deep sigh, and say, “Okay, let’s go.” At this point Mark was truly sick, and only a divine intervention was going to save him. It might be argued that he had never been completely in his right mind. However, what are the criteria for sanity? And how close does anyone ever come to meeting them? He probably could have been permanently committed if the correct steps had been taken.
Mark had all he could ever want, a loving family, friends, a girlfriend, physical health, but something was missing. Day and night he was in a panic driven state. He needed peace. He wasn’t going to find what he needed in the hospital.
This stay was a little different. His friends left for San Diego without him on the 26th, but unfortunately, they never made it there either. On the morning of the 27th, he received a phone call from his girlfriend, (the same one he had been dating since February). “Mark, I’ve got some bad news. The guys were in an accident. The van tipped over just South of Springfield.”
“Oh my God, are they okay?”
“Yes, everybody is okay. The van was a complete wreck though. It was a miracle nobody was killed.” Yes, they had left without him, but he didn’t blame them for that. What really hurt was that no one got to experience the thrill of the adventure. He truly loved his friends and felt badly for all of them.
Something about his release felt unlike either of the previous two. Although, again, he couldn’t find anything of consequence to divulge about his emotional problems, he left with a calmness that he had never felt before. But nothing had really changed, and the demons he was battling were still just around the corner.
The guys felt as if they had to spend the money all had saved on something frivolous, and it had to be a vacation in order to have the feeling of freedom they wanted. It was determined that a shorter road trip upstate would be sufficient. One member of the group of friends wasn’t allowed to go, because his parents were too spooked by the accident in the van. Not one of the remaining four had a vehicle to use to travel the 100 miles to their new destination, so they asked another friend who actually owned his own car to come along. Another one of the four had a relative who rented out a small place on a river in the middle of the state, and split among the five of them, it was a steal.
Long story short, it was the most amazing and uninhibited week of Mark’s life. It was just as they had all imagined and more.
Included in the trip was a visit to Mark’s grandma’s house. His grandma still lived in the small town where his father had grown up. It was a town on a majestic river that over the years had become a tourist trap for summer sightseers. But during Mark’s childhood the town went through a metamorphosis every year in the early autumn, just after school had started, and it was this time that Mark remembered most about the dot on the map which was his father’s home town. The area was very important to the Native Americans, who had held a festival there during the second weekend in September for at least a hundred and fifty years. The white man had more or less stolen nearly everything else from them, so why not the festival as well? They eventually turned it into a celebration of excess and drunkenness rivaled only by Mardi Gras. But for Mark the early part of September here had retained a nostalgic atmosphere and emotion about it. The smell of bratwurst, beer, and grilled corn was jogged from his memory whenever he would visit his grandma at any time of the year. The memories of the vivid lights of every shop, restaurant and bar in town glowing into the early morning hours, and their brightness, making what should have been a sky full of stars, void of any illumination except a pale moon, and the stench of perhaps a thousand cigarettes being smoked at the same time, all made Mark long for a far less complicated period in his life.
Also included in the trip was an ingenious “capture the flag” type game played with water guns on a secluded island. During the game Mark got to show off some of the skills he had learned over the nine years at the lake house, where he and his cousins would play games in which being able to “hide” in the lake water was a necessity. Here he would appear to his friends to be an expert in guerilla warfare. He crawled along the muck and mire of the bottom, with nothing showing but the top of his head from the nose up, amongst branches of trees that had fallen into the mosquito infested water. When he had to move to deeper water, he would remain submerged for a minute at a time, only to pop up with his water rifle and start shooting at the shocked opposition. This would be one of the finest hours of the first half of Mark’s life, a highlight that not even the harsh days that would follow could erase.
If anyone recalls, the summer of 1988 was incredibly hot in the Midwest, and all five of them became either heat-exhausted or had a minor case of heat-stroke, or both. It may have been the heat that caused what took place next. On the final night there, without warning, Mark’s little world fell apart once again. That night the air was so thick you could see it, lending an ominous feeling to the evening. Mirrors had become Mark’s worst enemies, and after showering he had to keep wiping the condensation off to see himself well enough to shave. He examined his face in the bathroom mirror. Upon close inspection, there was an almost microscopic tear in the skin just below the bridge of his nose. Of course he had to pull on it. Nearly the entire first four layers of skin came off; leaving what looked like a massive abrasion. He couldn’t believe it. What had just happened? His heart felt like it had been broken and his stomach fell into his lower abdomen as he left the bathroom. He managed to get to sleep that night, and on the ride home the next day he was lost in himself.
Something occurred to him as they approached the city. The times when he had struggled during the past two years had been those in which he had been dating somebody. The previous two instances he had been seeing the same cute blonde haired girl that he had been with for five months. The solution he came up with made little sense – he had to break up with her – or he was going to end up a very young corpse.
When he arrived home, the first thing he did was call her.
“Can I come over?” he asked her uneasily.
“Of course, do you need to ask?”
“Well, I’ve got something important to talk to you about.”
Her reply was hesitant and suspicious. “Oh, okay. I’ll see you soon then. I love you.”
“I love you too.” He didn’t know why he had said this, because it was just going to make the breakup that much harder.
On the five minute drive to her house, he kept checking his nose in the rear-view mirror. He could not stop the abrasion from leaking whatever fluid that leaks from abrasions. He went to her front door and knocked. It had been about seven days since she had seen him, and she greeted him with a long kiss. He took a seat in the corner of the living room, and started to speak. Female intuition must have told her what was coming, because tears began to fall from her eyes.
“But I love you so much.” She was adamant about her feelings for him. Most teenage “loves” are based on immature emotions, but she insisted that she loved him, and he just knew he loved her too. “Why can’t you open up to me?”
“You know I love you too.” He was becoming agitated. “But I can’t keep doing this!”
“I just don’t understand, Mark,” she wept. She was so adorable, and this was the most difficult thing he had ever done, “keep doing what?”
The thought kept going through his mind, though, “I can’t do this to myself anymore.” Her question was always “Why can’t you just open up?” Would it have mattered much if he had been able to share his feelings with her? Maybe it would have helped. Perhaps it would have saved him for a while at those times when he felt riddled with anxiety about something on his face. If he would have been able to share what he was experiencing with her, maybe it could have helped. But he was so self-absorbed, so altered by selfishness; he could never have disclosed anything about his illness, especially to her. Somehow he made it to the door and out to his car. A few seconds later, she ran out after him. He then realized that this wouldn’t be goodbye.
“I’ll be back,” he managed.
He climbed in the car and drove away, leaving her crying in the street.
The relationship was over for about a week. He went back to her with his nose still not healed. Her loyalty was both admirable and taken for granted.
Two weeks later he was admitted again to the hospital. Now his life was indeed in a downward spiral. He was going to turn eighteen next month and was supposed to be becoming an adult. Yet he felt so far from being grown. During the brief stay at home, he had taken the entrance exams for the college he was going to start attending in September. All outward signs pointed toward a bright future for Mark. He was absurdly intelligent; he tested into calculus and an extremely high level English class. His intellect was entirely intact, but psychologically he was a giant mountain of chaos.
When patients in the psych ward would become unruly or uncontrollable, they would be sent to the “quiet room,” which was a simple bedroom that was furnished with a bed with no sheets right in the middle of the room, and nothing else. Mark was sent there twice during this stay, not because he had become a problem patient, but because he was a danger to himself. Most of the staff was now aware of his trouble with his reflection, so they removed the mirror from the bathroom. Not being able to see his face drove him up the wall. Most of the hours he wasted in the quiet room were spent either crying or sleeping. This was obviously not meant to be a solution but a way to protect himself from himself. He should have been kept in this dark room for a year, at least, because it was the one and only place where he was safe. But both times he was sent there, after just one day in solitary, it was concluded that it was safe for him to come out to face himself again.
Other than the confinement, nothing about this time at the hospital was any different. He was put on a new antidepressant, (they were constantly trying new ones, but the medications never really did a thing for him except make him sleepy) and more of the same deep psychological probing. This time when he was released, the staff must have been muttering under their breath, “See you next time, you sick bastard.”
At this juncture, his ‘tragic flaw’ had turned his life into a tragic comedy. It was quite comical in a cruelly distorted kind of way. His entire sense of well-being was dependent upon the reflection of his face in the mirror, not on his relationship with anybody, not on another more visible aspect of his appearance, not even on his cloudless future. Everything that he did – or didn’t do – depended on the condition of his skin. He had been forced to the brink of madness by a few relatively tiny flaws in his complexion five times in the past two and a half years, and was walking through the valley of the shadow of death now due to something most people would consider to be a triviality. And it was indeed a triviality. Was it because he had too much time on his hands? Probably not, because there was always something he could be doing, or should be doing other than thinking about his face. It was illogical, though, that a man his age should have nothing better to do than to ponder his complexion. Perhaps if he had another, more serious life issue to think about, a drug problem perhaps. Or maybe if his family was clearly dysfunctional, or he had some other, more relevant physical illness to worry about, he wouldn’t have been that anxious about a small flaw on his face. Again, this was a more humorous manner of looking at it, in a jagged kind of way.
It was another ten days and he was let back into the world of the sane. After calling his girlfriend twice and being informed that she was out, he called Shaun and another friend to see if they wanted to do anything. By this time, all of his friends but Shaun had their licenses, and Mark wasn’t allowed to drive yet on the new antidepressant, so their friend picked them up. He had to stop for gas, leaving Mark and Shaun in the car. He told Shaun that he had attempted to contact his girlfriend, but she was unavailable both times. This was strange, because she never really went anywhere, except to her best friend’s house, without him. Shaun looked at him sympathetically, and said, “Mark, there is something you should know.”
“Oh, my gosh,” was all Mark could say. “She’s found somebody else.”
“Yeah, she’s seeing somebody else,” were Shaun’s exact words.
It didn’t really matter who, but Shaun’s next words were, “I’ll let him tell you who,” motioning to his friend. The friend got in the car. “I told him,” said Shaun. “But I said you’d tell him who it is.”
The friend uttered, “It’s my brother,” quietly, as if he felt guilty for allowing it to happen. It all made perfect sense now. Yes, she had always shown an attraction towards his friend’s younger brother. Although Mark had been dumped at least a dozen times before, he had never felt like this. It felt like a combination of the nerves he felt right before the biggest swimming race of his life, and being sucker punched in the gut by a heavyweight prize fighter.
The most peculiar thing was that he wasn’t angry or even jealous. He certainly wasn’t suicidal. Indeed, not even a broken heart could compare with a blemish on his face. He was, in a way, happy for the new couple. He was happy for her because she had finally broken free of the insanity; and for him because he was now with an amazing young lady. Mark mourned the loss of what was, until this point the longest romance of his life, to what would end up being a life-altering tragedy, and for a short time thereafter.
He started college less than a month after the separation. His nose had finally healed, but of course he found a new blemish to occupy his mind. There was no way on Earth that he was going to be able to finish even one semester in his present state. He would sit in the student union and attempt to study, but found himself reading the same paragraph over and over again. Two of his friends and Jill were going to the same university, and they would meet almost everyday for lunch. Obviously, all of them blamed Mark’s lack of attention and enthusiasm on the breakup. Only Mark knew better. It must have been apparent to them that something big was going to happen soon, something very big and very bad.
It was the first week in October when he finally gave up. He asked his parents to check him back into the hospital, and grudgingly they agreed. However, he was now eighteen, legally an adult. He didn’t need their consent any longer, and it was the adult psych ward that he now checked himself into. His mind-set at this stage was so pathetic that all he wanted to do was lay down and go to sleep forever. In the adult psych ward all activities and groups were optional, and no one was going to come to his room and drag him out if he didn’t want to go.
In 1988, the antidepressant drug Prozac was just beginning to be administered to patients with depression. These days, they wouldn’t even consider placing an eighteen-year-old man in Mark’s emotional state on Prozac, but back then they weren’t aware of the increase in suicidal ideation among young adults on SSRI drugs. The well meaning psychiatrist that Mark had been seeing ever since his first suicide attempt quickly started him on Prozac. It made him feel very strange, like he wanted to kick something really hard. One thing was for sure; his raging hormones weren’t powerful enough to overcome the sexual side effects of the medication. It was impossible for him to even achieve an erection. “So, how you feeling?” the doctor asked him.
“What do you mean? I feel like crap.”
“This is strange,” the doctor admitted. “The medicine you are on now is supposed to make you feel better.”
“And what were the other drugs I’ve been on supposed to do?” Mark asked him.
“Well, they were mostly supposed to calm your nerves, make you filled with less anxiety,” the doctor explained. “This medicine is meant to take all sadness away.”
“So, is this a new drug?” asked Mark. “If it is, it should have been thrown out by the FDA.”
The doctor responded, “Yes, this is very new medicine. There have been very favorable results with it. Now tell me, what do you mean you ‘feel like crap’?”
“I feel extremely anxious, like I want to go out in the hall and scream as loud as I can.”
“What you want to scream?” This was a very odd question. All Mark meant was that he needed to vent some frustration. But he gave it some thought and replied, “I think I want to scream, ‘why am I such a failure’?”
“Why you think you are a failure?”
“Look at me. I have been in and out of this hospital…five times now. I had to drop out of college. I have failed everybody in my life,” Mark thought a little more. “I just feel like I shouldn’t have been born, like I am just wasting oxygen.”
“Well, we’ll give medicine a little more time to work. If it doesn’t seem to help, we’ll up dosages.”
Mark buried his head in his pillow. He couldn’t believe that this doctor was actually considering putting him on more of this crap. He could only imagine what he would feel like if he did. Now, it felt like his mind was in a tailspin. More of this drug would obviously lead to a head on collision with a brick wall.
“Oh, and one more thing,” the doctor added while standing up to leave. “If you are trying to masturbate and can not get erection, it is probably the medication as well.”
It would be the longest stay so far, nearly two whole weeks. When he was released, he had nothing to do. He had dropped out of college, obviously, and he didn’t have a job. All of his friends were now working at a pizza place in the vicinity of their old high school. He asked one of his friends about getting a job there, and given his fairly stable work history, and excellent personal presentation, he started as a delivery boy slash kitchen worker immediately. The delivery part of the job was the easier of the two - not undemanding - but the easier of the two. He started delivering pizzas the first night of work, and the manager of the entire place accompanied him. This made him nervous, and it was a distressing night given that anxiety was already his primary problem. But the next night he was able to go out on his own, making things a little bit less nerve racking. The most stressful and intimidating part of the delivery aspect of the job was taking orders over the phone. Everything he did now felt like a major struggle, and when he started on kitchen duty two days later, he could not keep up. He felt as if he had lost all sense of purpose to his life.
It was now the morning of October 31st, 1988, and merely a coincidence that it is Halloween. Mark had no date setting intentions. Maybe Satan had set the day for the catastrophe, but by no means was it set by man. The night before, Mark had felt a little something rising on his chin, so he caked on a couple of ounces of prescription acne medication. He woke up, took a shower, took a look in the mirror, and rubbed his chin. The result was another abrasion, and he finally determined that he had had enough. It was a combination of things that caused the final horrendous event, but ninety percent can be attributed to the fact that he was scheduled to work making pizza that morning. This fact alone might have suggested that it was more than his outward appearance that caused him to repeatedly try to kill himself. He was plainly unable to handle any pressure or mental strain in his life. Someone would later say that it was an adjustment reaction. He simply didn’t feel comfortable becoming an adult.
A close inspection of the mind of Mark Religand at this hour would have revealed a soul devoid of happiness. Nothing could calm his unrest, and no one could help him. He was now aware that he was never going to overcome the panic he felt whenever something difficult and demanding stood in his way.
He was such an angry young man, but just as he had always been as a child, a young man with no reason for animosity. Indeed, it did go further than anything anybody could conceive. He knew that he was not maturing, that his ability to cope with adversity was not where it should have been. Other young men his age could deal with difficulty, with life’s tribulations. His face was just one trial that he was not capable of overcoming, and he could no longer handle living his life.
There is something about a morning in late October in the upper Midwest. Even when it is cloudless, the shadows are lengthy and it has a somewhat eerie and empty feeling. All of the kids of summer are back in the classroom, and even though the sea of leaves that roll like waves upon the ground is a magnificent blend of red, orange, gold, and purple, there is always a distinct aura of death in the air. The most distinguishing and noticeable thing about an autumn day, however, is the wind. It is different from the wind of any other season. While spring and summer have breezes that are gentle, calming currents of air, and winter has more sporadic and bone chilling gusts of wind, the winds of autumn are continuous. They blow through the naked branches like streams of water down a river, cool and relentless. Probably the easiest way to see these winds at work is not to look up, but to look down at your feet. The brilliant colored leaves are constantly blowing over your shoes. As the winds keep gusting the leaves begin to bunch together at your feet. If you stand still, the breeze will eventually carry some of the leaves past you to no place in particular. The leaves that remain on the trees cling and spin on the branches like passengers on a sinking boat. There is forever a high school marching band practicing for a big football game in the distance; the pounding of the bass drum always barely perceptible, and jack-o-lanterns, with their fiendish faces representing the hollowness of lost souls sitting on the front step of nearly every house. Even for the more aged these things bring back memories that we would, at one extreme grab a hold of and never let go, or at the other more than happily block out, if we could. And hanging in the air are always the melancholy clouds of sorrows, risks never taken, and regrets of dreams unfulfilled.
Mark was alone at home on an autumn day such as this when he committed the most desperate, decisive and final act. He had no will to fight any longer. He had, in all honesty, stopped fighting a long time ago. He walked out to the garage, and opened the door, went to his car parked in the driveway and pulled it into the garage. He then closed the garage door behind him, climbed in the backseat, lay down, and slowly drifted off.
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