Chapter 1
December 2015
I stood in the cold, waiting for the elevated train, looking at the boxes and the crushed tall boys spread amongst the stones and the granite beneath the rails. As the train approached the platform, I dreamt about falling onto the tracks, interrupting my fate, and felt an ephemeral, injudicious release from the strain on my body and my mind; like a sedative in alcohol. This was a thought I held at most times of my life, unwillingly and unconsciously, just below the limits of my awareness. It became explicit whenever it could be manifested in a traitorous impulse, such as in this moment, or on many moments on the platform just before the train’s arrival. It was my boogeyman of the mind; it came out sometimes when I looked at the knife in the kitchen drawer or the stack of pills on my dresser. I could have done a better job of confronting it, but avoidance was a pillar of my upbringing.
Not that I would ever act on this impulse, but it was there, and as the train came, I leaped gently away from the edge towards the center of the platform, cheerfully and easily despite the despair of the act. Like a microcosm of my life after I actually gave a damn about living it.
My mind was a great, unrelenting bastard, and as a consequence of that, I lived in defiance of my demise. It deemed no memory good, no moment too innocuous to avoid the wickedness of the beast. No statement was too meaningless, no matter from whom or in what context, not to be somehow turned into a condemnation of my existence. For that was the craft of the beast: to turn everything into the perception of hell.
After that leap backward, I smiled and exhaled. The absurdity of living while always wanting to die was on occasion funny to me, probably for the same reason that some old philosopher said that the harshest truths could only be expressed in jokes. My breath fumed ahead of me in the December night, along with the breaths of the others waiting for the train. In the sky above the gloss of the train, isolated snowflakes fell in and out of the light. I rested my weight against my right foot; my heel pressed into the crevice between two uneven piles of wood; my bag sagged over the side of my shoulder over my hip and my left leg bent into a thin contrapposto pose, like the statue of David; my books as my sling and stone to fell my American Goliaths.
I was the last to get on the train and took a seat alongside the wall. Mine was the seat adjacent to the pole, and I dug my shoulder into the metal for rest. I opened one of the flaps of the bag to retrieve a text on the psychiatric survivor’s movement. It was deep in the bag, pinned between the fat protrusion of one overstuffed pocket and a handful of other books I keep for my spare moments. Amongst them: a frayed copy of the constitution and the federalist papers, the edition of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto with a wrist cutter on the cover, a political science study about the rise of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, and Notes From Underground.
I was heading south through Evanston after meeting my old friend Lammie for a sendoff dinner before she moved to Colorado for a new job. The train was at half capacity, containing some Northwestern students and a few straggling passengers. The nearby corner reeked of urine, and the heating system’s industrial hum droned in passenger space. At a stop, a loud, physically activated man entered the train and started talking to the train doors. He had a bunch of crap in triple-bagged grocery plastic, and I could smell him from my seat seven feet away. He shouted, in a rhythm all to his own, “God BLESS the U-S…of A! God BLESS the USA! Civil liberties WITHOUT the social re-sponsibility! Yes ma’am, civil liberties without social responsibility! Give me diplomatic immunity or give me death! No prisoners here! Aw yea!” His odor was pungent and dreadful, as though he had crawled out of a trash fire, and I let him be, as I usually do when these types come on; that being said, I could neither ignore him nor help myself from bursting with laughter at his next statement. “Just whip it BABY! Just whip it RIGHT! Just whip it BABY! Whip-it alllll night!”
The lights of the trains swept across one another with the impression of spontaneous inertia, as though this ordered system had the quality of working in nature, like strange fish in motion, deep in the ocean. There was a brisk, routine transfer at Howard; everyone crossed the platform routinely, and nobody turned their heads towards the other commuters as they did so. The passengers boarded a sitting train on the other end of the platform and returned to the same positions as before, some lounged with their arms over the seats, and others with their heads tilted downwards at their phones or the floor. The percussive confrontations of the train against the rails grew louder than the indoor hum. The homes we passed in Rogers Park were adorned with seasonal bulbs, providing a light performance through the windows, with red, green, and white slurring across the glass.
Whatever musings I had to myself in the car ended as a man entered while talking brashly into his phone. He spoke cheerily about the details of his afternoon at his retail job, details that I would only treat with trite, formal significance in my own life, or with no consideration at all. It reminded me of something the poet Szymborska wrote about her sister, who could talk and talk and talk about what happened in her day as though the future of life rested on it, and it needed to be recorded and put into an encyclopedia. I always found myself around people who found energy and amusement in the littlest of things, and I regularly viewed them with drab contempt. I have also admitted, however, that this characteristic in others was what made them light and happy, and my lack thereof was a key component of why contentment eluded me interminably. My next thought about the man on the train was that he was high. He was certainly young enough for it, and glib enough. That was another thing that put my friends at ease that I could not enjoy: weed. I used to be able to spend an evening sharing a joint with a friend, watching a dumb film, or listening to rock music and being superficially awed by it. In the past few years, however, smoking marijuana had provoked dissociative experiences and audio hallucinations. I both resented and envied this passerby for his appearance of ease before a world that I had grown to find excruciatingly burdensome.
The train had rolled on, and I absentmindedly missed my home exit, riding the train one station further southbound than I had intended to go, to the Argyle Red Line. I did this a few times over the summer, unaware that I was too far off until I was hard on the street. Once, I wandered east of the stop and saw an intoxicated woman, stumbling and unresponsive to the Chicago police who were harassing her. I was younger then, and still in a more neurotic and innocent state of conflict between my home and reality. It was a burning hot Chicago afternoon—one that made the concrete boil in the air like heat over desert sand. A friend of the woman, a man perhaps in his late fifties, was trying to escort her home. The cops stood casually along the roadside, thumbs tucked into their belts and waistbands, jeering and chuckling. “Look at ya, you’re blitzed in public!” one of them said in a piercing, amplified Chicago accent.
That was in Uptown, a hardscrabble neighborhood where the world changed with each block. It was one of the only melting pots in a city that otherwise claimed entire neighborhoods according to one ethnic identity. Uptown before my time had been marked by homelessness, deinstitutionalized mental patients, Latin Kings, poor blacks, and poor Appalachian whites. The Wobblies also had a headquarters there, and while elements of this old Uptown remained, they were now constantly under threat of being displaced by a conservative alderman, the type of man who was at once a friend to real estate developers while also being a scourge to homeless people. “Don’t feed them, you’ll only reinforce their bad behavior!” he once addressed his ward.
The part of this mysterious Uptown that I was most interested in was the informal psychiatric community that inhabited the neighborhood after the fall of the asylums. When America emptied its hospitals, patients were given often only given a bus token before being sent on their way without a plan for them to go anywhere specific. In Chicago, that bus took them from Reed Hospital to Uptown via the Montrose bus. This practice was common in the US. To solve the madness problem in New York, politicians would put it on a bus and send it to New Jersey, and vice versa. Centuries earlier, the artist Hieronymus Bosch had painted the Ship of Fools: an iconic, proverbial boat of what were then called idiots, morons, and madmen, who had no captain and sailed nowhere.
When I eventually returned to the correct stop, Berwyn, I observed that the neighborhood just one CTA station removed from Argyle was notably more tranquil. The story of Chicago, city of broad shoulders and underground abortions, is a story of adjacent inequality. This fact is both homicidal and suicidal, for the same core reasons, though these take on vastly different forms of social ills, none of which are desirable, all of which are potentially fatal. I remember this each time I crossed Uptown’s tent cities and its homeless citizens on Broadway or read about the political pressures of gentrification, only to then return to Andersonville, flourishing with its residential avenues, cobblestone alleys, and its single-family homes, which in the springtime have gardens so lush you can only see fragments of the individuals sitting in the yard through the leaves, and in the winter can rest just as picturesquely in the nature as snowfall. No CPD vans were sitting at the roadside, and the quietness of the neighborhood was quickly made apparent as I walked alongside a small, scattered crowd. For a moment, I had a creeping paranoia encroach upon the back of my head as the people behind me paced a step closer to me than I was comfortable with. I clutched my key tightly and tensed my arms in a preemptive defensive posture, and then loosened once again as the crowd disseminated into their buildings or streets.
In the blocks remaining on my walk, my disorientation intensified. I was at a point beyond fatigue and beyond sanity, and I saw distrust and threat in all things. The inanimate architecture of the city—the trees, the buildings, the gates, and the harmless little animals—stood before me as a mere façade, concealing deeper, more wicked truths. All of this acted in a conspiracy against me, looming towards me, ready to condemn and attack. My balance went off, and I felt my equilibrium veering toward my side. It was a struggle to maintain any sort of a center, physically, mentally, or otherwise. My consciousness became more vicious and I could not evade the thought that the truth of the universe was that I existed only to feel and be degraded, and this communicated itself through the happenings of everything around me.
In a moment of pseudo-solitude, I looked at the light-polluted sky through the anemic December branches, and the clouds, which were thin as exhaust from traffic. The miasma comforted my paranoia, and I felt more at home. When I was growing up, I spent many nights looking out through my bedroom window at my parents’ house in the northern suburbs. The sky above the city was colored in a broad, murky orange, and faded into black about thirty degrees above the horizon, like a vast panorama of a Rothko painting.
That night in the city, with the silhouettes of trees and their naked branches pinned against the gray of the winter, the sky was gloomy and sick, and I felt more poignantly in tune with the time and place in which I was living, more cognizant of what it meant to exist at the literal end of times.
The doorknob to the lobby of my apartment building almost broke in my hand as I pulled on it, extending from its hinges so as to fall out of place altogether. I had been meaning to tell the landlord but never quite got around to it. Instead, I jimmied it back into a normal position and left the maintenance call for another time, or another tenant. My mailbox was full, but I never opened or read my letters. The building was old, and the stairs had a must like old tavern walls that had inhaled years of smoke. The woman below me had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and at times my noise at night would wake her from a sleep that she could not regain without a midnight display of rage. Once she had chastised me viciously in the early morning when I did not realize that my delicate shuffling above her had the power to trigger an episode that powerful. I’d thereafter been careful each time I passed her apartment. We had never resolved the confrontation, and our basic pleasantries as neighbors always made me cautious, like one of us might snap.
I opened my apartment and dropped my backpack on the floor. It thudded into an otherwise silent room. I had left the heating off earlier in the day, and there was a chill in the unity, which suited the general array of the place. Most of it looked fit for a widow or a shut-in: I had, for instance, piles of old mail on top of one of my grandmother’s hand-me-down tables, the ones she had obtained in a French market, and which I had damaged while moving in. I had collected over 500 books, stacked by genre—mainly mental illness, disability theory, gender, race, Palestine, history, political science, and literary essays—in the corner of the room. Lastly, there were a few sparse pieces of furniture, and I flung my limber body like unfolded laundry onto the form of the couch while I resigned to my depression.
I plugged in an old set of Christmas lights that I had arranged across my ceiling. I considered reading a book, but lacked the endurance for any sort of labor, and laid with my right arm pressed against my forehead. At some point, pressing my hand into my forehead became my response to depression when it was too thick and too foggy for me to respond to the world as quickly as I would otherwise be able. I didn’t imagine it accomplished anything but a placebo effect; but then we had long operated with a system of drugs that did the same. My father, who I found unexpectedly compassionate to my plight, never understood why I did this every time I got bad. “I don’t know, Dad, it helps me get by,” I’d tell him. Other nights, Dad would suggest a positive-thinking exercise, or to get back on drugs, as though the only thing between myself and sanity were self-help exercises and a pill. Once I had gotten a diagnosis, I had been subjected to volumes of unsolicited advice from the people in my life, very little of which was worthwhile.
With these lights, these books, this exposed brick wall that I gazed at, and this little space I kept to myself, I suppose that was the same rationale for how I lived. It helped me get by.
Near midnight I went to my room and flipped on night music before bed: Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman, a composer and piece I had been listening to a lot. My sheets were crumpled and cool, and I sat with legs folded on my bed while I broke fifty milligrams of Seroquel in half and swallowed it. After thirty seconds, I took the second half, just to take the edge off. The pills were contained in small, orange pharmaceutical capsules on the dresser beside my bed, stacked alongside old papers, cards, and envelopes, like a skyline over snowy ground. One of the exposed papers had a dark pencil sketch of tattoos that my friend Sally designed for me: one, a fire flower, a desert plant that blooms after fires; the other, a willow tree, like the one in my parents’ backyard, both sad and majestic. Next to the designs was a draft of a suicide note I’d once written on a torn half-sheet of journal paper during a 3:00 A.M. madness. It simply read, Sing Tavener at my funeral. Love, Boo.
I bundled into my sleeping pose, ensconced in several layers of sheets, with frozen glass at my window as the sole incubation between myself and the outdoors. Again I thought about suicide, but only passively, as the thought came and went amongst other brusque, disheveled ideations. I grabbed the edges of the sheets tighter and curled my knees into my chest, cringing occasionally as a point of shame or insufficiency from my life came to mind.
I did not sleep for some time, and as my waking hours prolonged, a mental nihilism dominated me. First, it was in the form of great despair and vexation; then it became physical, throbbing through my veins and urging me to throw myself into a violent fit. Eventually, the convulsion settled, and I slept, but only for a couple of hours. During this rest, I had brief, lucid dreams of demons and mythical creatures, and in the middle of one of these nightmares, I woke into sleep paralysis and was immobile with fear and hallucinations of the very dancing, writhing creatures that I had in my dreams moving before me in my room. My walls were pulsating in red and blue colors, and the paralysis kept me contained in my bed until the visions wore off. Liberated once more, I plugged in my Christmas lights and stayed awake into the early morning.
Between dawn and 8:00 A.M. I got light rest. In the morning, I felt frail in body and spirit, like the delirium of a sick child home from school. The days after a night of that kind of tumult always felt like a branding iron after it’s cooled in water. There was a resting period needed to return to normalcy, and it could take a lot of time. My phone alarm rang, disturbing my anxious silence. I turned it off, remained in bed, and focused my breathing deep into my diaphragm, slow and solemn. The back of my throat was dry, and my nasals were congested with crusty winter illness. On my windows, the morning light gleamed into the ice of the glass, and against my instinct, I got up for the day.
I went to a pile of clothes (on top of old computer cords and bits of trash) at the edge of my room, and chose an arbitrary sweater, Pennsylvania State University across the front, from a selection of fabrics donning various other colleges I did not attend; a sweater I acquired while meeting someone in a blackout, previously belonging to a chest I do not remember and think nothing of. In my hallway, I turned the heat up to seventy-five degrees. I had little appetite for breakfast and felt repulsed by the idea of eating. In bad states, my stomach greets food with a feeling like a finger shoved down the throat, ready to regurgitate the intake on contact. I opened my fridge and peeked into the manufactured light. On the bottom shelf, I had a glass pan of pre-made oatmeal with crinkled foil wrapped over it that sat alongside several other foiled-over plates of half-eaten meals. I prepared a bowl of the oatmeal and warmed it in the microwave. Over forty minutes, I ate a single serving, and then set the bowl into my sink in a bath of water. That was the most productive thing I did in a morning otherwise spent traipsing, muttering, and staring into my apartment.
In the afternoon, I withstood a temporary panic and remembered that I had not taken my morning Effexor. Either that, or I had taken my morning dose and conceded to taking another dose to forestall the onset of vertigo, nausea, anxiety, and suicidal ideation that comes when one attempts to wean off of this manipulative substance. I continued to take Effexor not because it was of any benefit to me, but because I was scared of its withdrawals. In essence, I was addicted to it. My psychiatrist didn’t know that these withdrawals happened to people who missed even a single dose. He said he did not learn of these withdrawals from the research; he had to learn of them by giving me the drug. There were many days when I could not get a quick refill. Withdrawal would set in as an insatiable craving that occupied my chest, and I felt as though I could sprint down the center of the street until the jolt wore off. Then, later on, I would hear voices, or images would appear before me that did not exist in reality. I cared little for how that craving scratched against my skull and my throat, how the mind drifted into a flat place, and a hollow, fatiguing coat of air weighed upon me.
That evening I undressed, threw my clothes onto a pile on a chair in my room, and showered in preparation for Mark’s visit. He had been in graduate school in Washington for business, and I had not seen him since the day after Thanksgiving—a day I count as one of the best of my life. It was a simple day, but since I had never actually had a romantic relationship before, it meant a great deal to me. In the morning, I picked him up from his parents’ home in East Wilmette, and we drove to a bookstore in Evanston to get coffee and gifts for family. His presence was soothing enough to act through the cynicism I’d otherwise experience in hangover. I splurged at the store and got a collection of photographs from Uptown in the 1970s for myself.
Afterward, we fucked in my apartment three, maybe four times, virtually the only time I’d done that for hours. Towards the end, he was more spontaneous, unlike how he’d been before: gratifying, but conventional and risk-less, with all of the stroking and petting and positions that every American knows as routinely as a television lineup after dinner. And with a kiss afterward. By the third hour that afternoon, I positioned myself on top of him as I’d been many times before, and he grabbed my hips and pulled me forward, licking me while I grabbed my bed frame, unsuspecting, and now opiated in the moment. Then he stood, and I kneeled and did the same to him, and we flipped over and finished the act in one continuous, vigorous dance outside of time and thought. The trope is to have cigarettes afterward, but being a daughter of interior design, I cared too much for the stain that cigarettes would leave in the room. Instead, we shared an IPA from my fridge and listened to Blood on the Tracks in its entirety, all while lying nonchalantly, as people do while looking into the clouds in a field.
The thought of more of that invigorated me, but only momentarily. I brought my iPod speakers into the bathroom, played choral music, and fidgeted with the loose handle of my showerhead until the water reached a temperature in between the extremes. In the past, I’d made a point of intermittently applying water according to a principle of conservation. December in Chicago, however, is frigid, and so was my apartment, and I kept the stream of warmth running on the back of my neck, just at the point where the top of my vertebrae exposes itself, for nearly fifteen minutes. My gaze faded off into a point on the curve of my tub where some ugly bathroom spots needed to be rubbed out, and I tucked my arms around my knees, close to my chest, thinking the worst of everything.
I dried myself in the residual steam of the bath, with the rawness of the air just beyond the shower curtain meeting my exposed skin, and bringing me back into a chill. The music played on, and I hurried into slim corduroy pants and a black sweater in my room and shook the towel through my hair. I sat on the edge of my bed and browsed my laptop. The sun was down and the apartment was dim. My mattress squawked as I moved my weight around it. On social media, I saw a post from two nights prior that I do not remember writing, and could not decide if I agreed with upon revision. It read:
The root of sanism comes from the idea that civilization requires the absence of mental disturbances. As “mental illness” is supposedly the embodiment of these disturbances, it has been amongst our most neglected, feared, and ostracized conditions. There should be no doubt that this is reflected in our present society. There should be no doubt that appearances of insanity still invoke a sense of great apprehension, and that pretenses of sanity hold unmerited allure.
I had been reading Manning Marable at the time, who posited that the root of racism was in economic exploitation, and I felt compelled to make a comparable, grand statement about sanism, though without documentation. In lieu of any real Mad academic movement, virtually every idea I’ve developed on the matter had been borrowed from a parallel thought regarding American racism. Was this Facebook declaration true? Possibly. A bit histrionic perhaps, depending on the reading, but the climate lent itself to loose expressions of trans-historical outrage. It may well have been a quick restatement of Foucault and nothing more, and who knew if that man had the definitive take on madness and civilization. But then, nobody knew exactly what sanism was, or where it stemmed from. I could say with great certainty that the world of psychiatric disability was constrained by second-class standards. That not all of those standards may have appeared as a clear, belligerent form of social oppression to a secondary observer, they nonetheless interacted with the individual in such a way as to induce and sustain a lifeless, desperate, and marginalized role in this world. If this did not technically qualify as a form of oppression, at the very least it felt like something we would define as oppression, if not something much worse.
Like other matters in the US, suffering was a communal phenomenon made private. It ought to have been aired out and understood as something that existed amongst social relations— between parent and child, person amongst peers, women amongst men, white amongst black, boss amongst worker—and yet it was removed from of this context and rearticulated as a personal burden of genetically disadvantaged people. For lack of a better phrase, “just deal with it” was the governing mantra. Some could deal with it—that is, repress it—and did not speak to it outside of the trust of a few intimate confidants. Others had a more precarious, more vulnerable disposition to insanity, and the individualization of suffering came at a tremendous personal cost.
We were only at the tip of the iceberg with these ideas about madness, discrimination, and society, and it was beyond my authority to speak much more. We only knew a fraction of the depth of what has been done to Mad people in this world; what lay in the mass beneath the surface would have had Oedipus stab his eyes out a second time over. I had faith there were millions of other people who felt that way, but barring mass acts of bravery to make this a real point of social ferment, they would remain reserved, obscure, retraumatized, and detached from their collective potential to rewrite the culture they lived in. I tried to build something against that, Lord knows that I tried, but I found myself returning to where I started: solitary, bitter, separatist, psychotically depressed, and ready to die out of personal asphyxiation. I had to accept that the spiritual revolution was neither for me nor for my time.
Downward on my online feed, I saw an article about prisons, jails, and mentally ill people in Illinois. The state had reached a consent decree with the department of corrections, and the headline declared Cook County Jail, “The New Asylum for the Mentally Ill.” The article opened, “Lawyers representing 11,000 mentally ill inmates in Illinois prisons have reached a settlement with the state in a long-running class-action lawsuit that alleged inadequate treated amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment.” It carried on with the details of solitary confinement, and further into the article, there was a video interview with a survivor of that treatment. He spoke in a hasty, eerily dispassionate rhythm:
Mental health therapy consisted of…(expletive), there was no therapy. They’d chain you to a cement stump in a small rectangular room, with your arms tied to your feet so you’re stretched back like a bow and arrow. You’d be on one end, the psychiatrist would be on the other, and an officer would sit in between and stare at you the whole time, and then, later on, he’d call you a (expletive) and things like that. 25 years, half of my life. On release, I was given no medication, no medical card, no nothing. I had to go cold turkey on those years of meds they were giving me. But I did have to get a rehabilitative evaluation for my parole, which entailed the possibility of civil commitment if they deemed me too mentally unstable. They were going to commit me to an institution for what they did to me. The PTSD I have right now is so bad that the whole thing comes back to me as I talk about it. The taste of the cell rolls over my tongue. I have the same nightmare every night, of trying to break my neck while I was in that cell. It’s always like this. I sit and pick at my fingers until they bleed. I can’t be around other people. I don’t belong out here. I don’t understand it. Everybody keeps offering me medication out here, but I don’t want to be on medication. I want to figure out who I am. I want to go back to that cell and scream at it.
As I was watching the video conclude, my apartment doorbell rang suddenly and cantankerously. I went dumbstruck and grasped to find my bearings, as one does after a fire alarm. I went to my door and buzzed Mark inside. The stairwell leading up to my unit was thin and narrow, like an enclosed watchtower. I stood at the top of it and heard his steps against the fabric of the stairs in a drawn-out silence. I saw him more clearly as he lugged up the last flight, dressed modestly but handsomely. He wore a black rain jacket over a few other layers of clothing and carried a big paper bag with seasonal shoelace handles. He didn’t look at me until he reached the top of the flight, where he stood before me, slow to embrace, and looked at me quietly. He lifted his arms at his sides, like light, open wings. I looked up at him and pressed my hands against his cold cheeks, and kissed him. “Hello, dear,” I said. We then stepped back into my unit. The row of lights hanging across the ceiling pointed indiscriminately across my wooden floor, leaving patches of shadows and dull shade in between the spotlight on the ground. On the couch against my exposed brick wall, I sat next to him. My legs twisted towards him, and he sat squarely and reclined.
We exchanged gifts with one another. I placed a brick of a wrapped gift onto his lap and oophed. He made no guesses about what it might be and tore it open to see the glass casserole dish and cookbook I prepared for him, with recipes that were mostly plagiarized from a family cookbook. He seemed nonplussed or underwhelmed. Or perhaps I was reading into it. My parents always told me not to take gift-giving seriously, though I still felt I had disappointed him. He then offered me a crinkly, soft bundle with an envelope. I opened the wrapping to get a green scarf and opened the envelope to get a thumb drive. “It’s some of the music I’ve been talking about,” he said as I pinched the object and looked at him. It came with three printed pages from Microsoft Word, containing a list of artists and album titles. “Haas, Holliger, Ives,” I read, looking over the list. “And I’m the depressed one, Mr. Mitchell?”
“You’re welcome too, Boo.” Then I kissed him, though his lips were tucked into his mouth.
“How was Evanston last night?” he asked.
“Good.”
“And Lammie?”
“She’s excited for Denver.”
After a few minutes, I felt fretful and suggested we leave my apartment for dinner, so we left and walked to the L. The weather was moist, autumnal, and many degrees warmer than the day before. Some of the trees had leaves on them still, and the streetlights illuminated a coat of fog running through the branches just above us. We walked at a formal, busy pace, and Mark asked if I was excited to see my family.
“Yes, it should be alright,” I said. Then I let my resentment get the better of me, and added, “Though my brother has of course gotten more racist the longer he has stayed at Notre Dame.”
“Ah yes, Tea Party Kevin,” he laughed.
“Being around him really pains me. I just can’t do it without rolling my eyes and fighting with him. I ought to be able to get over it, but I can’t.”
We crossed Broadway Avenue after an ambulance ran a red light before us. The train station was a block ahead. “He’s become even more swaggering and reactionary,” I added. We entered the station, paid the fee, and stood at the platform.
“Boo, your brother was always that way,” he said.
“Not to this extent. About a year and a half ago he made this weird announcement at dinner that he was a libertarian, almost like he was coming out as one, and ever since he’s been going out of his way to talk about government and markets. It’s like he takes whatever my father says, internalizes it, and bumps his chest with it. And when I visited his house in South Bend, he and his friends kept going off with all of these n-word jokes. It was all they knew how to talk about. I don’t know what it’s all about.”
“The racist jokes?”
“No, the whole schtick. That whole campus is stuck in 1952. South Bend, God, what a great choice I made not to attend. And the sad thing is that he and his friends will all do well for themselves and get 100k jobs right off the bat, do seventy hours per week as consultants, and wind up in cocaine parties in River North. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re racist. They’ll advance all of the same.”
“Sounds like a fun life, I must say,” he said.
“Except for the part where he’ll use it as leverage to talk down to me all of the time, and where it destroys any faith left in God,” I corrected him.
At Jackson, we got off the Red Line and sidestepped our way through the subway station. A young man played a sophomoric guitar for bus money in the tunnel. He sat on his shoddy amp and jammed to the pentatonic blues, bending the high note of each of his phrases and sighing on the way down. The electricity of the instrument curved through the air of the tunnel, and in it, I heard all of the amateur rock fantasies of my old friends from high school. It made me smile lightly.
Mark was a few steps ahead of me and nodded at me from the stairs of the underpass to the Blue Line. I skipped my gait up to his place, and we walked downstairs beside one another. I paid almost no attention to the people we passed. The tunnel to the next train was unkempt, with stained, scratched walls of graffiti and McDonald’s paper advertisements. Weathered homeless men sat against the tiling beneath the ads. We did not wait long for the Blue Line to arrive and entered a nearly empty car going west. Inside, there was a man across the car from us with a thick red beard and a heavy jacket, and next to him a thinner man with a sixteen-ounce can of Half Acre beer. The juxtaposition of these strangers looked quintessentially Midwestern to me, and I felt that I could imagine exactly where they would be going, and what their personalities were like.
Mark and I had not said anything to one another in minutes, but I was not bothered by this. We arrived in Logan Square, a neighborhood I did not usually frequent. This was partly because I had no life when Mark was not in town, and partly because my madness had distanced me from the people I knew who lived there. Additionally, it felt like a desperate extension of college: gentrified, alcoholic, chain-smoking, and homogeneous in age and taste. I went insane in this setting before, and I did not expect a different outcome for myself if I tried it again.
The restaurant we walked to was close to the L station. It had a five-dollar pasta and beer special that Mark had taken me to once over the summer, and which we wanted to go to again, though we arrived to learn that it was closed. I raised my fist aimlessly to the air, and shouted, “Those bastards!” while Mark scratched his head sheepishly, embarrassed about taking me to a date that did not exist. Instead, we went to a nearby wine bar. It was a modish venue, or tried to be, as too much of that superficially edgy neighborhood did. The cheapest glass of wine on the menu was seven dollars, which we both ordered, and then we squandered another twenty dollars on chocolate dates and rigatoni.
We laughed over the pretentiousness of the restaurant, and about how we would never be convinced to eat there with better knowledge. Mark lost himself in thought as he chewed one of his dates, of which there were only a few, despite the price. His mental presence seemed to be drifting from our table, and then he shook himself. The walls were decorated with international photographs, and after some light discussion about them, Mark started going off about how he wanted to go “off-the-grid” and open a coffee shop in a different country. I entertained his fantasy with suggestions regarding cannabis and amateur poetry for his shop. “Oh, but I wouldn’t want it any other way,” he said with a grin, bent with his elbow over his knee so I could catch a smell of his cologne, and feel, without actually touching him, the warmth of his chest.
We finished our wine out of monumental yet fragile glasses and took the train toward Daley Plaza. Each year, German merchants set up shop there and sold wooden carvings and knit sweaters at Christmastime. Mom brought me, Kevin, and our cousins there every December as a tradition. She’d grouse and talk to herself on the drive while she struggled for parking, and we all shouted childish things at her from the back seat. In the windows of Marshall Fields were displays of literary Christmas scenes. A Christmas Carol in one, The Nutcracker in another, and both had puppets moving within them like the Disneyland boat rides. I think Mom liked the idea of taking us to see the windows more than we enjoyed it ourselves.
That night with Mark, much of that innocence was absent. Picasso’s iron sculpture stood forebodingly over this miniature town of convivial food and merchants, brooding like the heartless Chicago machine it symbolized.
There was a tent with steam coming out of the top where people went to be warm, and families huddling for pictures just outside of it with drinks and sausage in their hands. We went inside and bought spiced wine served in a small glass boot. After kicking the toes together, we drank. The tables were made of massive barrels with countertops, and I put my elbow on them for support while we sipped wine and talked. We soon got restless staying still, and perused the market. I bought a stein for Kevin, an effortless gift, and we meandered through the plaza a bit longer. There were sparse flurries of snow, and the warmth of the spiced wine and the homeliness of the food aroma put me into a mawkish place of mind, along with the Salvation Army bells and the saxophone jingles coming from the street corner.
We left and passed a woman in a wheelchair panhandling with a Styrofoam cup. The organization I was working with at the time technically worked on the homelessness system, but I knew nothing about it and had only recently made a point of stopping to talk to homeless people like I would anyone else. Generally, I made quick discussion, and gave the person a few dollars, sometimes a five or a ten, and then went on my way. The privileged were always a bit contrived when they first made a principle out of treating others as equals. The woman asked us for money and Mark said, “No,” and walked ahead. My inertia followed him, but the gravity of my conscience pulled me to the woman, and I almost tripped as I awkwardly pivoted and turned my body toward her. I decided to give her charity and removed a wad of bills from my pocket that I had earned from my restaurant job. I seldom carried this much money on me, and I realized instantly that I only had tens and twenties—too much to give to someone on the street. Pocketing the wad, I returned to Mark and ignored the woman. Behind me, I heard her outraged voice, “Oh, look at all those tens and twenties, you shallow bitch.” Her voice faded, and I forgot about her half a block later.
It was a bit after ten when we arrived back in Andersonville, an old person’s night out. The weather was vaguely warm, and dirt was piled into the cracks of the sidewalk where snow and ice would usually be at that time of the year. Mark bent his arm and I put mine through it. My arm pressed into his ribcage, and I could sketch an outline of his bones through his fleece jacket. We went to a Belgian craft beer bar on Clark Street, that beautiful strip of life, and settled at two open seats at the counter. It was a bar I went to often, a thoughtful abode, unlike the obstreperous sports bars and clubs that the few friends I still saw spent their time in.
We ordered seasonal beers and joked about what it would be like to work there, and about the supposed beer acumen and pallets required to do so. Mark seemed more relaxed and gregarious, as if he was five drinks deep and joking with old friends at a bar. It consoled me, and I disclosed that I suspected that my seriousness as an individual discouraged him from behaving naturally, and was doing its part to drive him away. “No, your intensity is a good quality,” he assured me, and for a moment my doubts were relieved.
After one drink, we walked the few blocks back to my apartment. We shuffled in front of one another while making trite conversation. The light above the door was on, the rest of the apartment was dark, and Mark put on string music from his library—loud, terse, profound music. It was a notch too loud, and I asked him to lower the volume, and we embraced one another again, then slept together in my bedroom. In our climactic motions, he pressed on top of me and tucked his face into the crevice of my neck and shoulder, and reached his arm through my hair to buffer my head as it bumped into the bed frame. Afterward, we reclined with my bedsheets spread clumsily across us. I looked outside the window at the shades of the trees against the sky over the neighboring rooftops. There was a sole candle lit on my dresser amidst all the mess I keep on top of it, and we made shadow animals in the glow of the wall next to us while we fell asleep, my two-fingered rabbit devoured by his five-fingered monster. Then I blew out the flame and fell asleep.
I spent Christmas day in post-alcoholic, decaffeinated ennui; the hangover of college, with my muscles wrapped into one another, my throat dry, my piss yellow, and my mind clamped into a tight and whiny place. The night before we hosted my father’s side of the family, all fifty of them. On Christmas, we hosted my mother’s side of the family, all fifty of them. I referred to the Harveys and the Vandenheuvels as Stoics and Epicureans, respectively. The Harveys were a family of Midwestern businessmen who saw work as life’s foremost necessity, and who were prepared to emotionally counter any possible tragedy and then show no feeling when it occurred. Their sense of humor was oriented toward cynicism, brevity, and acerbic putdown; my father excelled in this craft. The Vandenheuvels were the Epicureans, known for the extra glass of wine and for leisurely if not longwinded talks that went nowhere. Both were heavy drinkers, and on Christmas Eve, as with every holiday, we got drunk.
I went for a jog after we opened gifts and had Christmas breakfast, and I wore only a light sweater and running shorts. Nobody else was outside, and the atmosphere was still, open, and unimposing. There were long, green lawns in front of the homes, without even a patch of snow, and the golf course behind my parents’ house appeared to be in spring condition. In a generation’s time, December will be the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire of Christmases past. I indulged in some of that longing as I ran, nostalgic and remorseful for a less corrupted and infinitely more naïve place and time, with a sparkle in my eye for Northwestern, Georgetown, and, when really delusional, Princeton. I was younger then. To be forgiving, I understood how the allure of a neighborhood like this could encourage one’s view towards grandeur. These homes had a halo effect that could last for generations. Children who had done close to nothing for themselves would be hanging around the country clubs they were brought up in, and their children would have access to them, too.
But I got older, far too old. I didn’t see the shine like I once did. I saw the world of Gatsby, inhabited by people who were so deeply a part of the problem that they did not even know a problem existed, like Midwestern Louis XIV’s and Marie Antoinette’s singing modern variations on the theme of “Let them eat cake.” The oligarchical comparison was no joke, either. Throughout my youth, my family got Christmas cards from the Bush family and the Romneys, which was nice. Art Laffer mentored my father in his formative years, and my father stood by his political influence for the entirety of his life, even as much of the world’s future has been compromised as a direct result of it. To this, my father said nothing, because he denied its reality. I grew up going to parties with the man who obtained the Lewinsky dress onto which Bill Clinton ejaculated. He boasted about it at my parents’ cocktail party before the story ever went national, when I was only six years old. My family went to dinners with the lawyer who represented George W. Bush in the Supreme Court case of the first stolen election of the new century. Being a lawyer, he insisted that everything about the election was clean. Being a Republican, my father believed him.
When I played girls’ soccer, Bobby Kennedy’s son coached my team, dressed in his Nantucket chic, with his rolled-up sleeves and his flowing hair. Although many people in the North Shore spoke with complete acrimony about the Clintons and the Obamas, the truth was that the same men who sat at the board during the British Petroleum spill, who surveyed its consequences and said, “So what?” were private equity and country club partners with the very couples and bankers who sponsored the rise of Barrack Obama at every moment of his career in Illinois. That was American capitalism: the subsumption of all things political to an exponentially opulent financial sector, defined simultaneously by a high capacity for cataclysm and an equally extreme lack of conscience or sense of personal accountability in disaster. As I grew, I had to let go of the belief that these putative progressives of the Democratic Party represented a real challenge to the slow death of the world, for these elites for the people were a mere extension of timeless class circles and were always susceptible to being a launching pad for the agenda of the Right. Comparatively, disdain for Democrats amongst conservative elites was little more than a petulant, partisan, and hypocritical matter of the culture wars, as the Obamas and the Clintons were more on their side than anyone else’s. None of these figureheads opposed their foremost goal: the accumulation of private wealth and influence. They only offered a flavor of that goal which conservative elites found distasteful, as it did not center them in the fable of American exceptionalism.
And yet, eccentricities of the wealthy aside, none of these people were bad people. You would not think so if you stepped into their home, where you were welcomed, fed, served, and treated with careful manners. They were ordinary people, only with more breathing room to mistake untruth for truth and be rewarded for it. How, one might ask, could my father be both a decent man and one who sat at our kitchen table, mocked environmental science, and conflated activists with terrorists? The simplest and correct answer was because of money, the virus propelling this whole ordeal. Having realized all of that, I grew out of the values of my home and learned to see the world of Zelda Fitzgerald, lost within the cloud of wealth, whose words were taken by her husband and accredited to him, and who was later institutionalized and died in a fire. The foremost distinction between her time and posterity was that we stopped keeping our psychiatric institutions out in the open anymore. The asylums of our times were more diffuse and much harder to identify. People died due to similar states of madness, but in softer ways.
Through it all, I questioned, like a cursed daughter of the Old South, the depth and profundity of the contamination, whether or not I ever stood a chance to live without the ghosts, and whether or not a true reparation of the spirit, of mine or anyone else’s, was even possible.
I jogged for about three-quarters of a mile and then walked with my hands hanging over my head and my legs chilled by the air. My balance fell off, and I dropped toward the side. Here and there a leaf scattered, then left in silence. I could hear dogs fighting in the distance. My mind was otherwise still, without a single thought to disrupt the walk on Christmas afternoon.
On a sudden turn, however, I became self-aware that I was at ease, and neurosis took hold. I became consumed within myself, over matters and irrationalities that had nothing to do with the run. I twitched my shoulders and ticked my head; I grimaced at the side of my face until it strained. I pinched my fingers together and gestured my forearms back and forth, talking to myself. To get out of this I sprinted, as though desperately running away from something, and then stopped because I looked like a fool. I did this every few minutes in spurts that lasted for a block, and finished each blast with my hands in my face, breathing cautiously through the navel, hoping to reestablish composure.
The remainder of the walk home felt defeated. I strolled the rest of the way back, entered my parents’ home through the back way, from the far side of their yard. The sky remained overcast and windless. There were pellets of deer droppings along the pavement, and the dog was exploring the other corner of the property. The soles of my feet, feeble after the running, rolled against the sodden dirt under the sparse autumn grass in the yard.
Inside, Mom was at the kitchen sink in her morning robe, her hair parted like she had not slept and her facial expression as plain as any other day, cleaning the wine glasses and dessert plates that the party the night before had used after the dishwashers were sent home. Her eyes were fixed on scrubbing the dishes, and while working, she said, “Oh, Boo, Aunt Mary wants to take you aside and talk to you tonight.”
“About what?”
“She emailed this week about Claire. Apparently, she isn’t doing so well in New York, and when Mary pressed the issue, Claire pushed back and got nasty. She brought Joan to talk to her once when things had gotten bad in college, but she thinks it might be better if you got involved.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that, but I’m willing to talk.”
I pulled a pint glass from the cupboard for water. As I cupped it in my palm, I reflexively thought about breaking it in my grasp and envisioned my blood flowing out of me. A moment later I was filling that same glass with water at the faucet.
In the family room, Dad and Kevin were watching Christmas Vacation. I fell gracelessly into the couch just in time to watch Randy Quaid and his timeless holiday pronouncement, “Shitter was full.” A crass pleasure, but an important pleasure nonetheless. On the commercial break, my father and brother flipped between sports documentaries and professional basketball so I took my glass and left. While I did so, Kevin made a snide and useless comment about being “above” the pleasures of television with the family. I almost turned to berate him for it, but Dad interrupted, and said, “Guys, please. It’s Christmas.” I could not blame him, either, given last year’s Christmas fight about the non-indictment of Darren Wilson, which made Kevin feel as proud and vindicated as I’d ever seen him, and the previous year’s blow-up about the Notre Dame girl who had killed herself after football players assaulted her. She was bipolar, you can’t say definitively say it was the rape that made her do it. My brother was as free to entertain his delusions as I was.
I walked upstairs to my childhood bedroom. The stairs squeezed as I climbed them, and the dog scurried upstairs beside me and darted toward my room. The floor of my bedroom was disorganized with clothes, gifts, and wrapping materials, though on the whole things were far cleaner than in my apartment in the city. I still had to prepare gifts for the evening, yet I had used all of the masking tape the day before. I looked for a second roll in the drawer of my bed stand. It was full of old ticket stubs from high school and, underneath those, old psychiatric prescriptions, along with an empty bottle of Heineken.
My head started to ache and I lied down, covering myself in my old sheets. I put early sacred music on and fell into a half-sleep. An hour, perhaps ninety minutes later, I woke. It was hard to tell through the grogginess. I showered and dressed, and it was evening by the time I was ready. Downstairs, the lights were on during an hour of dwindling winter darkness. The marble shined in the kitchen, revivifying the Francophile décor in the room. My parents’ home had high Victorian ceilings, broad rooms, more televisions than people, tightly ordered spaces that I was anxious to disturb, trinkets and miniatures from street markets across the earth, unopened wine from private investment parties, and a stately, removed ambiance that I coped with mainly through media entertainment and alcohol. It could host an art exhibit or a political fundraiser, given the proper arrangements, and it would feel completely appropriate.
The evening outside became black, and my mother’s family began to arrive in small crowds. Dad greeted them and offered drinks, and they mingled through the first floor of the house. I had half of a Manhattan and talked with my relatives in a huddle beside the isle in the kitchen. My feet were warm on the marble tiling; my parents had a heating system installed so the floor would be warmed in the wintertime. When I finished the Manhattan, I poured a chardonnay and walked to the living room, where a fire burned at the end of the room and a polished grand piano stood. My cousins’ toddlers were palming their hands on the keys, with spritely, three-to-four note clusters thudding and clanking from the piano.
Many of my other cousins were sitting around a table by the bay window overlooking the yard, which my mother had adorned with candles and plates that we only used for holidays. The temperature outdoors dropped, and you could feel the chill seeping into the room from the side of cracks in the window. I went and stood with my cousins; my wine glass four-fifths full. My cousin Marty approached with his hands in his pockets. “Drinking tonight?” I asked.
“I don’t need alcohol to have fun, Boo.”
“So that’s a ‘yes.’”
“Yes, eventually.”
My older cousin Tina followed behind us. I hadn’t seen her in years. She’d missed previous holidays while doing dissertation research in Western Africa, or the South of France, or somewhere. I was honestly not sure exactly what it was she did. She greeted me, and said, “Boo, my dear. How is life?”
I wanted to say, “Life sucks,” but instead I said, “Life is good,” reiterating one of those little white lies I go along with to prove my sanity to others. Tina then asked, “What are you doing with everything?”
I discussed tidbits of mental health policy with her, unable to wrap all the conceptualization on the issue that I had been developing into a straightforward pitch. Tina nodded while I talked. As I blathered, I forgot that I was even talking. My contemplation extended across the faces in the room, the cacophony of the chatter, the children giggling, and Count Basie’s string orchestra playing Christmas carols from the speakers in the kitchen.
Then I found myself rambling on to Tina about what exactly it was I wanted, partly out of intimidation. Tina had spoken in conferences at some of the country’s most renowned schools and was more poised than the rest of us. She crossed her arm at her torso, rested her other elbow on top of it, and held her glass of wine just under her chin while looking into me in a penetrating, intellectual way. I dipped my head and said, softly, “Well, what I want is very grand. I want the kind of networks for resistance and organizing for people diagnosed in psychiatry as we have for, say, young women, queer people, or people of color, if that makes sense. A new institution to catch people before they fall off, or feel that they must be silent and passive. A political platform and consciousness to join.”
“Ok,” Tina nodded. I felt she was analyzing me. “So, what do you have to do to get into that?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know,” I said. “I could be an organizer. I want to see people in the streets. I want to see people with psychiatric disabilities thinking and acting as a class. I want to see a whole library of knowledge created and made accessible to the average person. I want every type of scholar, artist, civic engager, and person to be asking about it. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, writers, just with an emphasis on the mind. I need people to understand it outside of the context of, say, psychiatry and psychology, not that those things are totally, um, totally unimportant, but I want to see recognition of the fact that the human mind is a machine of amazing experiences, even deeply oppressive experiences, and that we have to ask the questions about how the world has formed around this diversity of the mind, and what it has done and continues to do to those who aren’t, how shall I say this, mentally acceptable.”
Tina nodded again, ambivalently. I could not tell whether her look was confused or if she was gradually understanding me.
“And why not psychology?” Tina asked.
I was drunk already. “From my experience, psychology programs are a modern-day M-R-S. Degree. Too many bougie girls who don’t really care about crazy people. Besides, they aren’t asking the same questions I am.”
“Come on now, I think your experience is a little jaded,” she said.
“It certainly is,” I said, taking another sip. “Yes, you are correct. I’ve just been disappointed by too many people who clearly don’t care two shits about the people they’ll be studying or treating. The field has earned my distrust.”
At that point, I retreated from my austerity to speak to a related point. “Anyways, as I was saying, what I really want is something very grandiose, like a major social movement. It’s just, catalyzing that, even articulating the need for it, is a very difficult thing. I don’t think the right questions have been asked, I don’t think the right organizations have formed, and I don’t think that the lefties who typically ask these sorts of questions have crossed that boundary yet. In fact, they’re often disdainful of it. I’ve gotten used to saying, ‘The same people who would geld a man for a racist transgression would say that he is mentally ill for being a racist.’ And they say this and they have no concept of the contradiction at play. They don’t really give a damn about the crazies, those hypocrites. Disability, especially psychiatric disability, is a dirty area to a lot of people, an unknown point. I haven’t yet figured out what to do about it, and of course, I’m just one person who has no audience and no formal position, and who knows nobody who even talks about it. But I’d like to see something large, something that confronts our system of values as well as our social order and our politics. I just don’t think the networks for doing that are there quite yet. Nor the consciousness, for that matter. There’s potential, there’s enormous potential, but galvanizing it is a very tricky thing. I think the best route for me at the moment is to continue to study and get out there in whatever way I can.”
My brother approached the table. He too appeared several drinks deep. “What’s up, family?” he announced in his young, commanding voice.
“Not much,” Tina said, and then looked at me. “She was just telling us all about these brilliant ideas about mental health and society.”
“Ah, yes,” Kevin smirked. “How is your revolution coming, Boo?”
My brother, the great denier, the great agitator. The man who would readily write off the words, Give me your poor, your hungry, your huddled masses, and slap a massive bumper sticker over it: America: Love it or Leave it.
“Not now, child,” I told him.
“Oh, please, tell us all about it again,” he said.
“I’ve tried explaining things to you and you willfully brush it away each time. Piss off and go back to Notre Dame if you don’t want to do anything but make people feel wrong, even when you’re obviously the one in the wrong.”
“What, shouldn’t I think it’s peculiar that you insist on these theories that you have no evidence for? Please, tell me how you’re being held back, here in Winnetka, because people hate the mentally ill?” I looked at him with a restrained face. He continued in a mocking tone, “Psychos of the world unite!”
I took the bait, for I truly could not help myself. “Oh, why do you keep up this obstructionist shit on Christmas, of all days? Firstly, what theories? Secondly, the only reason you see no evidence to it is because every time I defend myself, you shift to a different subject entirely, or laugh and pretend it doesn’t matter.”
“Well, you make these comparisons to civil rights, when in fact there’s no equivalence between any of that.”
“I’m sorry, since when did you give a damn about civil rights?”
“There’s nothing about having a mental illness that was anywhere near as bad as black people had it during the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a preposterous claim.”
“What claim? What are you going for here? I’ve never said that they were the same. I look up to past movements as a model. They’re all I’ve got.”
“That’s not true, you say you want a civil rights movement for mental illness, but it’s not the same thing at all. The two lots are apples and oranges. You’re making the comparison to amplify your cause.”
“Kevin, we are talking about people with rotten apples and rotten oranges. Whichever you’d get, you’d want to throw away. Exact parallels do not negate the point, especially not when coming from a private racist such as yourself.”
There was a moment of conclusion. I was distressed, and part of the party around us had grown quiet, tentative, or agitated. I sat upright, breathed into my stomach, and tried to forget about it. Bing Crosby was singing O, Holy Night somewhere in the background.
“I just don’t understand why you are so resistant to things you have such little exposure to,” I said to him, with better holiday manners this time, but my brother had already moved on to a different subject with my cousins. He stepped aside to a circle of my male cousins, his chest open, to tell them his college stories. My cousins were thinner than Kevin, dressed in tweedy vests that my aunts had selected for them, and all held green beer bottles of St. Pauli Girl, Heineken, Stella Artois, and Rolling Rock. They laughed with their heads back at his impressions of the drunk guys that he was mimicking.
My mother announced dinner, and the family gathered its meals in a buffet around the kitchen island counter. My aunts had elaborate necklaces and velvet fabric dresses and my uncles had guts, fifty years in development, protruding at the bottom of their buttoned shirts. Each held my mother’s china plates in front of them in preparation for serving. On the island, there were mashed potatoes, asparagus, glowing rolls of bread, and beef tenderloin. I forked a couple of pieces of red beef and ornamented the plate with small portions of the rest. There were six tables set up throughout the house, with bottles of red and white patterned over green tablecloths. Seating was chosen mostly along generational lines. My sole remaining grandparent, my mother’s mother, sat in a wheelchair at the head of her table, where her grandchildren served her. She was plump in her age, with a soft white bob cut and a fur jacket. The foundation of her makeup seemed applied as thickly as crayons and her hands were bent at the knuckles with severe arthritis. When the Doc was alive, he would sit at the other head of the table, wearing a velvet jacket and an ascot and his big psychiatrist’s glasses. We’d invite priests from Saint Francis Xavier parish to eat with us, and in his last years, Doc would forgo prayers before the meal, and slap people on the back of the head while their hands were folded. Father Sheridan asked him one year, “Jim, is nothing sacred to you?”
“No, Father,” the Doc said. “Nothing at all.”
I chose a seat at a table next to my grandmother’s table, alongside a couple of my cousins and all of the toddlers and children in the family. We spent the meal asking the children questions about their lives, focusing all of the attention on them, and trying to make games out of their brutally honest and ridiculous answers. The Doc had once said about having children at the table, “We don’t know how to talk to ourselves, so we let the four-year-olds do the talking for us.”
Kevin and my uncles were at the next table over. They were talking about Notre Dame football and their bowl game results, as though the subject merited careful analysis. Damned, damned Notre Dame. It was the Midwestern Vatican, in the worst sense of both terms. When they were done talking about football, they talked about Kevin’s love life. “So, Kevin, why did you leave this girl Lindsey?” my uncle asked.
“The drugs made her less decent,” Kevin said with food in his mouth, “which I must confess was part of the appeal in the first place.” They laughed uproariously and high-fived him. It reminded me of the time when my cousins made the same response when they learned that not just one but two of my cousins dated the girl who got kicked out of my Catholic high school for getting an abortion.
I had a hilarious, albeit morbid, distraction a moment later when my cousin Charlie brought the Doc’s ashes around the table, provoking people to “pull my ashes.” The Doc loved that juvenile joke, where he’d offer you his finger, you’d pull it, and then he’d fart. And as for his ashes, the plan was to cremate my grandmother whenever she passed and then bury the two of them together someplace by Lake Michigan. Until then, the Doc’s ashes were kept with my parents, in a plastic bag in a white box that used to hold frozen sausages and just happened to be the right size for my grandfather’s cremated remains. Charlie’s mom Vicky scolded him for this joke. “Charlie! Show some respect for the Doc!”
“Please, mom,” he said. “He’d want it this way.
My aunt Joan walked around the table pouring more wine. She poured Sauvignon Blanc into my glass. “No, I’m alright,” I said as she did so.
“No, you’re not,” she said and poured it to the top. That was also a joke we picked up from my dead grandfather.
We finished our dinners and sat around the tables, candles lit and bodies warm with food and booze. I overheard my mom talking about an alderman from the Back of the Yards ward who had recently condemned gang violence in his neighborhood. “How brave is he?” she said. “Props to him for standing up to those gangbangers and saying, ‘Stop terrorizing our neighborhoods!’”
“Oh, the crime in the city,” my Aunt Mary added. “That’s why we should stay on the North Shore.”
My father and my aunt Joan had also devolved into a political discussion, on the shooting of LaQuan MacDonald. A month prior, the city had released a videotape of the shooting, bowing to public pressure to do so. It was a fuzzy dashboard recording that showed a hyperactive police officer shooting sixteen bullets into a shaking young man with a knife, who had been contained and was standing away from eight other officers who had arrived on the scene before him. Nobody had been talking about anything else for a month. “What we need to know is what the mayor knew and when he knew it,” my father said to Joan while I eavesdropped from the other table.
My unmarried uncle from Minnesota brought a date to dinner, and this was the first time she had met the family. Eager to hear more about the political situation, she cautiously asked, “So, what exactly is the problem on the South Side?”
My father responded, “It’s cultural. The problems are predominantly Black-on-Black, Hispanic-on-Hispanic crime. Nobody cooperates with the police, and it’s very difficult to make things better.”
I left the room and played with my cousin’s children, who were prancing around the house with the toys they had opened before the rest of the party.
Thirty minutes later, the family returned to the living room and the pile of gifts assembled under the pine tree. A massive grab-bag game was at play. Each family member drew numbers for the order of picking gifts. Mine was last. Almost every third gift was a bottle of wine, and the rest consisted of cultural gifts and gag presents. When my turn came, each member of the family had gone two drinks deeper and the party was much louder. The only gift left was a single sleeve wrapped in holiday paper, no thicker than a sheet of paper. I opened it delicately. It was a signed photograph of Brian Scalabrine, an obscure basketball player who once played for the Chicago Bulls, and who for some reason my male cousins were always talking about reverently. My cousin Jimmy, standing six foot three and large enough for me to feel his body a step behind me, laughed and apologized from behind me. “Yeah, it was about three bucks on eBay. I’ll get you something nicer later on.”
My cousin Robbie, with a thick build and a patchy beard, joked from behind him, “It’ll give you something to look at while you write Facebook rants.”
The party had entered its late stage, and everyone was drunk. A couple of my father’s siblings came over for drinks, the fire was still on, and my younger cousins went to the back garage to smoke weed and play drinking games. Some of my other cousins went to a town bar, Potato Creek Johnnies, an establishment I associated with needy divorcees, dad bands, and old faces from the high school football team. I did not want to be in such a place on Christmas, so I stayed and talked with my aunt Vicky, who only became more confident as parties proceeded, and who waved her arms in conversation to own other people’s attention. She was telling me about her life and her children and her children’s depression. “You know, I call him Eeyore, my son,” Vicky said. “He’s always moping around, seeing everything as glass-half-empty. Me, I don’t exactly look at things the same way. I often think my life is shit. And it is. My life sucks. My kids are a pain in the ass. My husband is a pain in the ass. I’ve got a million things to do between when I wake up and when I go to bed. But really, I’ve got a nice home in a nice neighborhood, and my life isn’t that bad. That’s something to be glad about.”
Afterward, I sat by the fire with my mom, who had tipsy eyes and was looking at me adoringly. My Uncle Harry, a short man with long, thinning hair, sat at the piano and played Elton John songs in arpeggios. He sang, too, in a pedestrian tone, “It’s a little bit funny, this feeling inside…” Miraculously, my cousin’s children were still awake and were tapping at the keys beside him. When the child interrupted the song too much, Harry stopped playing, and turned to the child and said, “Hey, do you want to see me play with my butt?” He turned around and sat up and down on the keyboard, clashing it with his ass. The child thought it was hilarious.
For better or worse, I felt at home.
