All of which is to say that as soon as the anchors ceased to be a hindrance, I picked up the bat instead of the ax from a desire to maintain the integrity of the performance, as well as from a desire to give the audience what it might have come for.
There were writers who insisted in their Herald op-eds that the swingsets functioned as symbolic metaphors of juvenescence; that the children of Wheelatine had all gathered round to see them ruined, or “ritually murdered,” in order to “celebrate” or “mourn” “the end of childhood” or “the birth of empowerment” while “sating violent impulses through vicarious means.” And I don’t know—maybe. But to me, those explanations seemed overblown, if for no other reason than that I’d never heard them spoken by any kid who was there. I think it was probably all a lot simpler. I think the aesthetic pleasures of watching a boy destroy a swingset were vastly underrated by our town’s editorialists. I think those kids found the act to be beautiful—not its “meaning” (at least not so much its “meaning”), but what the act looked like, sounded like, felt like. A sky full of fireworks is no less thrilling on the seventh of August than the fourth of July. Not to me at least. And what I’m getting at is that while the “meaning” of a group of children standing around to watch a boy murder a swingset with a bat might not be much, if any, different from the “meaning” of a group of children standing around to watch a boy murder a swingset with an ax, the experience of seeing the boy use a bat differs markedly from that of seeing the boy use an ax. A bat requires greater effort from the boy, causing him to sweat more, color darker, groan; the impacts produce sounds of thumping and pinging and gonging and bonking rather than chopping and thwacking and slicing; the crowd has more time to get tighter, closer—to get more crowded—and thus more intimate; the swingset, rather than snapping, contorts.
* * *
—
A few swings into my attack on the crossbar, I seemed to disappear. I guess it was a fugue state. Fugue isn’t one of the symptoms of my illness; I hadn’t entered a fugue state before that night, nor have I entered a fugue state since. I’d imagine it was physical—rather than psychological—exertion that put me there; that all the energy I’d have normally spent on possessing a coherent sense of myself and my surroundings was being siphoned off to power my muscles. I didn’t feel as though I’d gone somewhere else—I just wasn’t there. At least not for the most part. I do remember that at some point a voice was whispering, ||Finish.|| I remember not knowing if the voice belonged to the swingset or the bat. And I remember deducing that, because I heard it only in those moments when the bat was touching the crossbar, it was likely the swingset’s.
I don’t recall standing the nearly finished-off swingset back on its legs, but I was told I did so. And I was told that after delivering the blow that finally M’d the swingset’s frame (I jumped from the roof of Feather’s toolshed, swinging both-handed, executioner-style), I collapsed in the arms of those who broke my fall, and was dragged to McDonald’s, hanging from their shoulders. And that’s the next thing I remember of that night: wanting a Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s, finding out I couldn’t have one, that the timing wasn’t right—it was summer, mid-August, Shamrock Shakes were sold only in March—and how, in the end, I settled for vanilla.
* * *
Are you prescribed medication to treat your illness?
Yes. Every six months or so, I visit Dr. Eileen Bobbert at Sheridan State Hospital, and we spend fifteen minutes together, during which she checks my vitals, asks whether I’ve experienced any new symptoms of my illness or troubling side effects of my medication, tells me a couple of pun-driven jokes, then writes me a refill prescription for an antipsychotic pill called Risperdal. At least that’s how it’s been the past fifteenish years. Prior to that, the doctor’s name was Emil Calgary, the jokes, though often pun-driven, were more scatological, and the prescriptions he wrote were for a pill called Haldol.
I’ve tried each medication. The Haldol I tried in junior high, but it kept me in a viscous, cotton-mouthed stupor, and terrorized my stomach. To say it left me feeling desperate could hardly be more of an understatement. When I wasn’t near-suicidal with boredom (nothing would relieve it—I couldn’t even focus enough to watch television, let alone read), I was clutching my guts to quell stabbing pains, or moving as quickly as I could toward a toilet. The inans seemed to speak to me a bit less often than they had before I’d started the Haldol, so from a certain point of view it probably looked like the drug was “starting to work,” but I was sleeping fourteen hours a day, my grades had gone to hell, and I just couldn’t find anything to like about being alive.
After nine or ten weeks, I quit the stuff with my mother’s blessing, which she said was conditional on my promise to do my best to never again destroy any property that didn’t belong to me regardless of how strongly I believed it wanted help. Even if I’d refused to make that promise, I doubt she’d have withheld the blessing, though. She’d been hesitant to let me take meds to begin with. Having read about the side effects, she’d feared that in addition to what ended up happening—transient zombiehood via chemical lobotomy—I’d wreck my liver. Or maybe it was my kidneys. At the same time, she was holding out hope that my symptoms would—as such symptoms sometimes (though rarely) did—disappear on their own once I’d gone through puberty. She died with that hope a couple months later.
* * *
—
Dr. Calgary retired when I was twenty-four years old, at which point I was assigned to Dr. Bobbert, who suggested I “quit” Haldol and try out Risperdal. Whereas Calgary, who’d worked at the hospital for decades by the time I was his patient, had always seemed resigned to merely doing no harm, Bobbert, who was youngish and infectiously hopeful, got me thinking: Maybe. Maybe the Risperdal would be different from the Haldol. Maybe it would allow me to work a steady job so I could make enough money to move out of the house. Maybe it would empower me to be my own legal guardian. Maybe it would even unweird me to the point that I could meet a woman to fall in love with. Maybe I still had a shot at being normal.
At first, my father supported my decision. He even got me hired at the Wheelatine Palace, a second-run movie theater owned by Mal Vaughn, a guy with whom he drank and sometimes played poker. The job itself—tearing tickets and pointing, righting tilted displays, sweeping spilled popcorn—was dull and easy, but owing to the Risperdal, which kept me as stuporous and desperate as had the Haldol (it wasn’t, however, as hard on my stomach), I struggled. I struggled not to slouch, not to sit, not to sleep. Nor did the host of old, neglected inans that occupied the theater incentivize wakefulness. Between the cracked marble tiles atop which I stood, the water-damaged podium against which I leaned, and the rope of rotting velveteen that hung between the podium and wall between shows, I heard a lot of complaints—complaints I couldn’t respond to without raising eyebrows, much less resolve without getting fired, if not arrested, and breaking my promise to my mother in the meantime. Nonetheless, I wanted badly to succeed, and I stuck with the Risperdal, telling myself that once it had a chance to build up in my system, it would quiet the inans, leave me less drained, and make the job feel as manageable as I knew it really was.