Chapter Fifteen

-- Late August, 1999

Bonnie Tyler – “Total Eclipse of the Heart”

I found myself wanting to fast forward time and get to someplace good. One day I’d like to be cool. But I don’t see it happening anytime soon. I had played everything wrong and there were no do-overs. I was out of friends. I was out of family. But maybe it was for the best. I couldn’t face anyone anyway.

When I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom and took off all my clothes. We didn’t have a working shower, so I got into the tub and sank down. The bath, the warm water, just made me feel coddled. I didn’t deserve warmth. I thought about not jerking off for a change, but that was unheard of. Who knew what might happen if I didn’t beat off? I might die. All I remember is that I was crying while I did it. I don’t recall what girl I thought of, just that there were tears in my eyes.

Drying off, I put a t-shirt and shorts on and headed up to my room. I tried to watch a movie, but I couldn’t sit still. I bit at my fingernails and the skin around my fingernails. When sweat appeared on my upper lip and lower back I stood up and began to pace. I had one mirror in my room and when I looked at it, I saw that my face was pale, but my neck was flushed. As the sweat spread around my upper body, I kept telling myself I was fine. But I wasn’t.

As the fear began to grab at me again, I realized I couldn’t stay in this horrible moment one minute longer. I hurried downstairs and out the front door. It was already pitch black out. I ran around the neighborhood, but it just got worse. My hands were shaking uncontrollably. I was afraid that soon I would truly lose control; that I would have a seizure or shit myself. I felt that I had crossed some threshold I could never return from. And there was no one to tell me that it wouldn’t last forever.

I returned home, passing Jesse and Janet in the living room without saying a word. I headed upstairs to the bathroom and locked the door. I slapped at my head, furiously, to get it to stop. When it didn’t, I opened the medicine cabinet and pawed at the bottles I found there. They clattered loudly into the sink.

One of the only things that didn’t fall was an extra-large bottle of Advil. There were at least 200 pills in there. We usually had smaller bottles and I knew exactly how it had gotten there. A couple days before, Mom had either needed an Advil and asked Susan Schmidt to pick some up or Susan had had an extra bottle. Either way, Avi’s mom was the one who brought the pills over. It made me think that everything was connected. That this was my punishment for what happened at his house.

I took five pills right away. Then seven. I was very conscious of the fact that too many would make me vomit, foiling my plan. I had seen as much in countless Lifetime movies. I decided I would take a couple pills, eat some food. Take a couple more, eat more food. I seriously thought that there was a secret ratio of junk food and Advil that if I hit just right, would float me off into dreamland.

By the time I took over thirty Advil though, I started to feel really shitty. It was as if I had swallowed detergent, something noxious I would soon succumb to. I rolled around in bed thinking about what a big mistake I had made. And there was only one way to fix it...

Mom was reading in bed when I knocked on her open door.

“I took some pills,” I said.

She nearly vaulted up from the bed when she heard this, reaching for the phone. “What?! How many?!”

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I hated that I started this. “I don’t know… thirty… forty…”

She cut me off because 911 had answered. “Hi, my son has taken some pills--” She listened and cupped the phone. “What kind?”

“Advil.” I said, barely audible.

Mom was quiet as the operator told her they were sending an ambulance. I still remember the way the wheels turned inside her head. Even then, she didn’t want a scandal. “Is it okay if I drive him?” she asked.

Five minutes later, we were in the Volvo headed to Overlook Hospital. Jesse had to be woken up and quickly dressed. She sat in the backseat. Mom drove determinedly, staring straight ahead as I wailed in the passenger seat begging for forgiveness. She never responded.

At the emergency room we were seen right away. They put me in the same room I had been in a few weeks earlier when Dean had gotten his stitches. The ER nurse gave me a charcoal smoothie to drink. It was supposed to coat my stomach to stop the aspirin from being digested. The first sip was so chalky and void of flavor that I immediately puked into the soothing, salmon-colored basin they gave me for just such an occasion.

I could barely sip the charcoal smoothie, but they made me finish not one, but two bottles of the stuff! I looked over at the other emergency room stalls to see if I wasn’t the only person having the worst night of their life. On the way in, we had passed a police officer standing guard over one of the patients. The guy had rolled up pant legs and was handcuffed to the railing of his hospital bed. Me and this fella were in the same boat, I thought. Trouble. Only he was passed out and got to sleep through most of it.

Mom called Aunt Lynn to pick Jesse up and take her to the cousin’s house. Before Lynn arrived though, Jesse was having a terrific night. The nurses put her in a room with a T.V. and she turned on Nick at Nite, which as an eight-year-old she seemed to enjoy somehow. She spent the most harrowing night of my life watching “The Jeffersons.” When the staff dropped off a dinner tray, she left the green beans but ate the brownie.

After I finished my delicious milkshakes, I was given a room in the pediatric ward so they could monitor me overnight. I was exhausted and fell asleep almost at once.

When I awoke the next morning, I noticed that Mom had spent the night sleeping on the couch next to me. She’d been crying, her mascara was smeared. She must have been even more tired than I was because she had managed to fall asleep sitting straight up.

A couple hours later, Lynn stopped by for visiting hours. I remember her bringing balloons and a “get well soon” card, but that couldn’t have happened right? It’s too perfect - sorry you tried to off yourself, now here’s a balloon! Still, she was the only representative the family sent. Which was just as well, I really was too ashamed to see anyone else.

She asked, “how are you feeling?”

“Not great,” I said.

“Yeah, I don’t like hospitals either.” I watched her knead the floor anxiously with her foot. I didn’t know how to act when she did nice things like this. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for her to pull the rug out from under me.

The doctors kept me another night because some of my blood work was off. It was about this time that I heard that not many people die from aspirin poisoning, but that it can do a hell of a number on your liver. I asked Mom what that meant and she said something about a transplant or an iron liver. But that was the worst-case scenario. I put it out of my mind.

Seeing as we were in pediatrics, there was a cart that went around with video games and movies. I picked three of each, which was overkill. My roommate had his own video game cart on account of having been there for months. He was black and kind of nerdy with glasses. His kidneys were failing, and he’d been on dialysis for most of the year. I couldn’t believe it - what luck! To have an entire staff seeing to your every need and doing nothing but playing video games?! This guy was living the life! I couldn’t understand why he looked so unhappy...

Then I remembered that Nick too had once been living the life.

When I got tired of playing “Donkey Kong 2,” I put on the Gerard Depardieu classic, “My Father, the Hero.” I knew I shouldn’t have, given the roommate situation, but I jerked it twice to teenage Katherine Heigl in a one-piece.

The next day, I was declared fit enough to go home. They wheeled me out to the parking lot in a wheelchair, which fed my victimhood quite nicely. I felt the weirdest sense of accomplishment, as if I had finally gone through something important. Something that could be shared with others...

Something I could write about.