I’d been employed six weeks when my father, who’d spoken to a lawyer at the tavern, informed me that, if I continued to work, my disability status would change. The Social Security benefits he received biweekly on my behalf would either—depending on murky legal technicalities that even the lawyer didn’t quite have a handle on—be reduced by the amount that I earned at the theater, or be canceled entirely. In other words, unless I could make more working at the theater than what the government had been giving me, my financial situation would at best remain the same, and at worst become meaner. To earn at the theater what I already received from SSDI would require nearly double the salary and twice the hours Mal Vaughn had allowed me, which, even if he were able to offer them, I could hardly stand the thought of having to show up for. And all those extra hours would be to break even. My father said he was proud of me for giving work a try, and if I wanted to continue he wouldn’t stand in the way, but that he wasn’t a sucker, and he hadn’t raised a sucker, and if he were me he’d probably quit.
The meds, which by then had surely built up in my system, weren’t treating me any better than they previously had, and in the meantime I’d learned—just a few days before my father talked to the lawyer—that a small-circulation literary journal had accepted a couple short stories I’d sent them. It would be my first publication—my first and second publication—and it wouldn’t pay much, just an honorarium of $80, yet I couldn’t help but dream it might lead to bigger things. On top of that, I hadn’t, since starting the Risperdal, written one stitch of decent fiction. I didn’t have the energy. I’d sleep at my desk. So I rolled with my father’s suggestion—I quit. Both things at once: the job and the drug.
After that, I did with the Risperdal the same as I’d previously done with the Haldol: every six months I’d fill the prescription, flush it down the toilet, and tell the doc I’d taken it with no major side effects or change in my condition. Though we had our problems, my father and I, he never objected to my refusal of meds. Whether that was more because he wanted to honor the final wishes of my mother, who he hadn’t stopped missing, or because he figured the physical side effects of the meds would eventually render me a bigger pain in his neck than I was already is hard to say, but both considerations were likely in play. As for Dr. Bobbert, I have difficulty believing she believed I took the Risperdal; by our second appointment, she was already busy with too many patients, worn down and baggy-eyed, no longer hopeful, and since I didn’t live in a state institution, and there was little-to-no threat that I’d need to anytime soon (as I’d told Lotta Hogg, I’d never lived in one before), I imagine it was no less convenient for her than it was for me to just pretend.
* * *
—
Having said all that, there are those who would argue that I’ve spent the majority of my life using nonprescription meds; that that’s what nicotine is for me. Even I might make that argument. I’ve read that allowing schizophrenics to smoke can lower the frequency of their psychotic episodes by up to 60 percent, and I bet there are psychiatrists who’d attest to there being a fairly high probability that the frequency with which I conversed with inans was lower than it would have been, had I not been a smoker. Whether or not they’d be correct, I have no real idea. The studies I’ve seen, which look at people who are already smokers (prescribing nicotine to mentally ill subjects for the sake of research could never get past any ethics committee), fail to make clear whether it’s nicotine itself or the habit of using nicotine that lowers the incidence of psychotic episodes. That is, it might be the case that nicotine directly inhibits the kind of brain activity that causes psychotic episodes, but it might also be the case that the kind of brain activity that causes psychotic episodes is disinhibited (or even encouraged) by the stress a nicotine addict experiences upon deprivation of nicotine. Or both might be the case.
I can say with certainty that smoking decreased the sense of alienation that sometimes arose from the conversations I had with inans. (It decreased the sense of alienation that sometimes arose independent of my conversations with inans as well.) Although that sense of alienation did not, as previously noted, count as a symptom of my psychotic disorder not otherwise specified, it was the only aspect of my illness I’m 100 percent certain I’d have chosen to be 100 percent rid of. Had I the choice.
* * *
Did Lotta and Chad-Kyle really speak to you in the way you’ve reported, or have you taken liberties in reconstructing what they said?
Something about me, something inadvertent and perhaps uncontrollable, some quality, maybe, of my face or my posture—the spacing of my eyes, say, or the hang of my arms—encourages others to monologize at me, especially those who I’ve only just met. I’ve never been able to figure it out. For a while, during my early twenties, I’d ask this or that monologist some version of the question, “What about me is causing you to go on at length?” but doing so only provoked their defenses: they’d clam up, deny, or tell me I was rude. I understood their defensiveness—I’m not an autistic—but at the same time considered it reasonable to hope that one or another of them, since they seemed more than comfortable monologizing at me, would be comfortable enough to acknowledge they were comfortable monologizing at me, and would be open, in turn, to discussing what about me made them so comfortable.
Reasonable or not, my hope was never realized, and, eventually, it died. The monologues stopped while I was taking the Risperdal, and owing to the sizable number of people with whom I interacted at the Wheelatine Palace—a far greater number on any given day than I’d been used to interacting with over any given season since high school had ended—their absence (i.e. the monologues’ absence) was especially conspicuous. I began to miss the monologues, to miss them rather keenly, and I learned, as I missed them, to appreciate them more: not only were they excellent sources of material (of voices, dilemmas, and patterns of thought from which to develop my fictional characters), but they made me less lonely.
I came to figure (correctly, I believe) that the Risperdal had somehow taken from me that inadvertent certain something that got people talking, and in turn I expected I would get it back as soon as the drug was out of my system. Not knowing what it is, I’m unable to say when I got it back, but the next time someone monologized at me—in the checkout line at Pang’s, a bleary-eyed woman with a basket full of yo-yos, squirt guns, and bubblegum enumerated for me the lengths to which her ex had gone to turn her son against her—was four months after I’d quit the Risperdal, and although I was grateful for the dry spell’s having broken, and grateful to the bleary-eyed woman for breaking it, it wasn’t only gratitude that kept me from asking her what it was about me that caused her to monologize, but fear of the answer.
I feared that her answer would be correct.
The same way a child mispronouncing a word can be cute, whereas a child mispronouncing a word to be cute annoys, a lisping woman can be very sexy, whereas a woman who lisps to be sexy repels, and I feared that my inadvertent certain something, like the child’s cuteness or the woman’s sexiness, might be one of those qualities self-consciousness could ruin, or (put another way) one of those behaviors, like the child’s mispronouncing or the woman’s lisping, that, in order to produce its desired effect, must not seem deliberate, i.e. had to seem, and perhaps had to be, inadvertent. In short, I feared that, were I to find out what exactly my inadvertent certain something was, I would lose the power, as it were, to encourage others to monologize.