you may listen to this chapter on youtube: dark thirty
Describing the zero is harder than you might think. It’s like a coming storm darkening and stirring up everything. Threatening slow-motion catastrophe. Each morning, my first word is, “Fuck.” Long, slow, drawn out, but spoken aloud, not whispered.
Have you felt this?
A heavy air, humidity and swirling air disturbing gulls in flight. It is another awakening. Not enough Ambien to kill myself, no courage to jump, less interested in other more violent attempts. It’s not real, this suicidal ideation of mine. It is not a game either—a conundrum. Jump or live. Wake up or die in your sleep.
All direction forward is lost in the first hopeless reverie of the morning. This is every day. The only way out is off. The mountain is not visible. I have no boat. Alone, ready for attack. The prospect of another Ambien at 9 pm is what I look forward to today.
It’s the part my son, today, at 23 will not own up to. No one wants to. Friends don’t really want to be involved. So you isolate. And if you do that enough, and suffer enough, and fail at enough beginnings, you might simply give up. But I give up all the time. When I’m at zero I have been trained to give up. Learned in some early chemical church from the old neighborhood when we all lived in the same house and my best friend and I shared a back fence.
I was back at my mom’s house. This time with less energy, less hopefullness, less patience for myself. I applied to be a grocery store cashier at a local fancy organic place. I wasn’t sure I could pass the initial screening interview, but I was invited back to the group interview in a few days. I didn’t know if I could do the interview, much less show up for work. I went in spite of my anxiety and “fuck” mornings.
It was a new-age sort of interview, get to know you, process with about twenty candidates for various jobs and three trainers. There was a collage project to create a visual resume of your strengths. There was a scavenger hunt with a buddy into the store to find oddly specific ingredients. This place was for “foodies.” I wasn’t a foodie. My mom was definitely a foodie. I got the job.
And then, to my dismay, it didn’t start for 10 days. I had to get my alcohol server’s license and wait for the first training shift. My pride, however, was just that I had done it. I didn’t know if I could do it. Learning the codes for all the fruits and veggies, seemed hard. I knew I could do, or fake, my way through the people part.
What I really knew, however, was I was waiting to die at my mom’s, no matter how good the cooking or how many science fiction ebooks I could download was not going to settle the storm of sadness. If I could stay upright, keep walking forward, never give up, I could maybe, just maybe, recover from this fall.
In a non-random meeting for lunch, we are at the restaurant of the same grocery store where I worked. He is just back from a run to Dallas with a girl. “Two girls, actually,” he says. This is a lie. Why the need to tell me a tall tale? Some fantastical story about a lesbian couple, both neuroscientists, one with record-smashing TikTok accounts, had invited him to come live with them in Dallas.
“Um,” I said, “What are they getting out of it?”
“I don’t know. I’m nice. Fun. They are both amazing. I almost didn’t come back.”
“Why did you come back?”
As nice as his story must’ve appeared to him, his fantasy, the reality is simpler. He was invited for a weekend in Dallas with his new hairdresser and her roommate. Not a scientist a cosmotologist. Big difference.
We reached a point in the conversation, he had not yet been back to his mom’s house. “There’s a board meeting at 2 this afternoon,” he said. I’m thinking about driving back to Dallas. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Well, what’s keeping you here, then?”
We reached the salient moment of the conversation. “I need a job,” he said. “I’ll do anything at this point.”
“No you won’t,” I replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s take this place for example. Do you think you could come to work here? Just to have a job?”
“No fucking way.”
“As I said, you’re talking like you want a job, any job, but you’re not really looking for a job.”
“I am!”
“And you look at this place and think this job is beneath me. You could be right. But in my moment of isolation and despair, I knew that just being alone with my demons was not healthy. I worked here for eleven months. It sucked. Christmas was one of the worst moments. But…”
“I’m not working here,” he said, showing the first hint of irritation at me.
“But, I got up every single day, took my shift, and kept going. I found ways to make it survivable. I learned a lot about myself. And mostly, I learned I could actually show up. That I could actually do it. I didn’t want to. I wanted to fucking give up. Like you’re giving up repeatedly.”
“Wait, what do you mean?”
“When you run away you are giving up. Metaphorically, you are jumping off the bridge over and over. And you seem to get some energy or arousal out of pissing everyone off.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, you get something or you wouldn’t keep doing it.”
“I’m in hell, man! Can’t you see that?”
“Oh, I see you and raise you one.”
“Fuck this!”
“That’s it. That’s the jerk reaction. The jump. The run. The moment you give up on the plan, the path, the hope, the future. You give up on yourself every day, over and over.”
He was stunned silent.
“There’s a power or high you’re getting from doing exactly the opposite of what is expected or asked of you. There’s a lot of “fuck it” in you.”
I paused and allowed his thoughts to catch up to the conversation.
“And we, your support team, keep fighting for you with you and on your team, and we get a plan of some sort and you bolt. Keep throwing shit at your mom and her husband, they are all you’ve got right now.”
Flashback.
I was working at this very store, I was on my way to work when I got a call from my daughter. “Jason is in the hospital. He stabbed himself.”
The call to my manager at the grocery store was short and unsweet. “My son has just been taken to the hospital, I’m not going to make my shift.”
“You’ll have to take a point,” he said.
“Can I bring you a note from the hospital or something? This is ridiculous.”
“You don’t have any points yet, so it won’t be a problem.”
“I think this goes under family emergency, don’t you.”
“I don’t make the rules. Sorry.”
My exes’ husband didn’t show out of courtesy to me. We sat in the waiting room, Mom, my daughter, and me. Hours and hours before we could go see him. He was just coming out of a frenzied fog of sedatives intended to counteract the LSD. He just kept pulling down the sheets and showing us his bandage, “I can’t believe I did this. What have I become? I can’t believe it.”
Somehow his mom argued her way into an overnight vigil. It was against hospital policy, but she’s that strong-willed, she just pulled up a chair beside his bed and wouldn’t leave. I drove my daughter back to the old house. I guess the husband was there.
My son couldn’t talk to me about the event for years.
“I’m the one, I’m the fucking one who would understand you!” I did not say this. He could never talk about serious things, divorce, money, whatever. I guess he’s got a bit of the give-up gene in him too.
It is vital that we turn and face the shame of our past or be haunted in some driven nightmare as we repeat the same behaviors. It’s like he’s stabbing himself in the gut again. And since he won’t fess up to any drug abuse, it’s just the neurochemistry that’s rigged against him. And a major defiance disorder of unexplained origin.
My skeleton hand points at the two parents who were providing OCD avoidance strategies about life. “If we can just make it through the holiday season, we’ll be good,” my then-wife used to say. She stressed about ten days during the holidays. It was her stuff of course, but it got on all of us, like a bleeding finger reaching out for comfort, providing more fear.
She and her husband, since my son was in middle school had assumed the primary role in his discipline and guidance by providing neither. How can a young man reach his second attempt at a senior year in college without ever holding a job? Not one. An internship a few summers ago.
It’s no wonder my son is avoidant about getting a job or taking responsibility for his inactions. It’s how he was raised. Avoidance is not a good adult coping mechanism. Anxiety will rise beneath the best self-medication until it is addressed.
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