The thing about doing radio is that you can’t stop and think. That’s what they call “dead air.” Radio artists of old – Jean Shepherd, Fred Allen – knew how to pause and let a moment hover, but you don’t ever stop. I had stopped. I was being interviewed in a dingy Pacifica station in Studio City. Dingy is dingy, I don’t mind it, but suddenly that day (some years ago) I minded a lot. I noticed the little broadcast booth was dark, and there were coffee stains on the table by the mics, and the carpet was worn almost through, and it was dirty, there was stuff around – stuff, scraps of this and that … a used paper cup by the trash basket (someone missed the throw?), a stapler on its side on the table (why hadn’t anyone put it right, how long had it been like that, an hour, all day, days?). A man was interviewing me, and I’d been talking. Can’t remember about what. And I heard Lady Brett, in The Sun Also Rises, say clear as a bell, “Don’t talk rot, Jake.” And I stopped. The interviewer was quick, he filled in, continued my thought, asked another question. I began talking again, apparently making sense – anyway, he seemed interested. I had no interest at all, wasn’t even listening, just talking. What I was really doing was watching.
The person I was watching was me, and that me was huddled by the trash basket, shaking, trembling, trying to crawl into himself, weeping, wanting it all to stop, just stop, just everything stop. That me was trying to say the word “help” – a word I’m not very good at, in fact I’m lousy at it, and now I was hearing Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life: He’s Gauguin (my favorite painter) and he’s telling Kirk Douglas’ Van Gogh (my mother’s favorite painter), “To say, ‘I love you,’ would break all my teeth.” To say “help” would have broken my teeth. But, oh, that me on the floor was losing it royally, trying with all his might to say “help” and at the same time trying not to. Me-me, the guy sitting at the microphone, was still apparently making sense. The broadcast was being taped, I heard it later when it aired: sounded OK, not my best but OK – level voice, decent diction, complete sentences about something or other. No hint that by the end of the interview I’d sweated through my shirt and my hands were trembling ever so slightly and I’d lit a cigarette even though I wasn’t supposed to and the interviewer didn’t seem to notice. I think I lit a cigarette, that’s what I remember, but who knows? At the time I wasn’t paying attention to the me that was talking and doing stuff. All my attention was fixed on the me that mattered, the me trying to crawl into or out of his skin by the trash basket and struggling mightily not to say “help.” He wanted so much to say it and he knew he could not, must not.
The cliché is that if you really need help you ought to ask for it – and that’s usually true, especially for the young. But best be careful whom you ask. If your consciousness has sort of left your body and all you want to do is huddle in the corner of a radio studio among strangers and cry, “Help!” – well, folks would like to help, they really would, but they don’t know you and they don’t know how and there’s the insurance to think of, so it’s, “Call 911!” – and then you’re fucked. People come to take you. They don’t mean you harm; they’re trying to stop you from hurting yourself; they’re trying to take you where you can get what they think is help. I know the drill. I’d seen them take people I loved, and take them fairly often, take them to places where caregivers did the best they could, kept them safe (after a fashion), but in those places there is no help. Better than the street. Better than driving your family crazier than it already is. Better than letting you go totally out of control. But no help. Just time. Until one day you’re ready to leave, but there’s always a little less of you than when you went in. Sometimes you can get back what’s lost; sometimes you can’t. I saw it happen to people whom I loved with my very bones, and it wasn’t going to happen to me.
They wouldn’t want that. They wouldn’t want what happened to them to happen to me. Some alloy of their pride and mine got me through that hour. Somehow, I got myself home – which, at the time, was a dingy apartment in North Hollywood, a dinginess of my own, where I played my upright piano (and didn’t answer the phone) for two days. Not that I can really play, but it sounds OK to me when I’m alone.
That day was the worst of it, not because it was the scariest (it wasn’t), but because it was the day I really, finally, almost gave up. For even when I was suicidal I didn’t feel like I was giving up, I felt like I wanted to do something and end the nonsense; in that radio booth, more terribly, I wanted not to be me. That’s very different. I’d been having a walking nervous breakdown for about four years and it went on for about another four, but that was when my breakdown – a very long walk indeed – almost turned into the other, locked-up, medicated kind of breakdown. Which, for one hour in a broadcast booth, I really, really wanted. I wanted not to be free. I wanted to beg not to be free. In that context, in that radio booth, that’s what “help” meant.
It’s not like I hadn’t asked for genuine help, through the usual channels. I was constantly in therapy, and that helped me understand a great deal, understandings I’m thankful for – but the understandings didn’t really help. My friends helped with their love (sometimes of the “tough” variety), their insight, their fun. The women I loved tried to help, but in those days I couldn’taccept their help. (Fucked up, I know.) And this shit had been going on in spasms, a month or so at a time, all my life – especially all my professional life. (Took me many years, many essays, several books, and a couple of produced screenplays to realize I was deep down frightened of being a writer! Once I realized it, I could live with it, and now I’m fine with it – though that fear never quite goes away.) But analyzing my walking breakdown is not the point tonight.
The point is that this happens to many, and it hasn’t got a name. I call it a walking nervous breakdown. You can function, sometimes function really well at this and that. You can get through the day and through the night – often being a pain in the ass as you do so, but you can do so. You can even have fun. There’s no time in my life when I haven’t had fun, one way or another. You’re not depressed (except sometimes), you’re not in despair (except now and then), you may fall into bleak moods for weeks on end (but you come out of them). Now and again (for me it was often) you “act out,” as they say. For me, acting out was, oh, a more than usually destructive affair, a terribly embarrassing drunken binge, or (still my favorite) getting into some sort of dangerous fix and having to finesse or luck my way out … though I was never in so much danger as in that radio booth.
Every temperament has its own style. Some folks just get progressively more dull, and no loved one guesses (because they don’t want to) that what’s behind that dullness is a pretty interesting din of turmoil. Some folks get more or less, well, not there – they speak as they’ve spoken (just as smartly!), work as they’ve worked (just as efficiently!), fuck as they’ve fucked (not quite the best anymore), do what they’ve done, but they’re not quite there and sooner or later that gets noticed, and usually it’s decided that it’s no big deal. At which point such folks lose the battle and the light goes out. (Horrible, when your agony is not even noticed.) Some years later those folks die and at the funeral people say vaguely pleasant, vaguely troubled clichés, under which is the question “What happened?” Some folks get gaudy, do stuff utterly “unlike” them, create messy dramas, or they quit their jobs, or they decide to have a baby … something.
Most folks just hang on. Like I did. Best they can. They don’t know what’s happening except that it’s all wrong. Their lives are not their lives. Not really. And that knowledge tears them quietly apart. You can hear it if you like – go to a quiet place and slowly tear a page of paper in half. That’s what it sounds like inside, and it goes on for years. For some folks it never ends, they just hang on until hanging on becomes their definition of life. Walking nervous breakdowns. Multitudes of walking nervous breakdowns. Happens all the time, to all kinds of people. It’s so “normal” it’s barely noticed.
And some folks get through it, as I did some time back. If you’re fortunate enough to get through your walking nervous breakdown to a life that is honestly yours, you slowly come to realize that there’s no one to blame and no one who can live your life for you. You live it for yourself – as a wise friend says, “You take it a step at a time and watch what you step in” – and you’re thankful for every moment, thinkingthat maybe all wisdom comes back to what the gypsies say:
Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.
This article appears in February 1 • 2008.