Нед Виззини - It's Kind of a Funny Story

Plus there were extracurriculars. Other kids did everything: they were on student government; they played sports; they volunteered; they worked for the school newspaper; they had a film club; they had a literature club; they had a chess club; they entered nationwide competitions for building robots out of tongue depressors; they helped teachers out after school; they took classes at local colleges; they assisted on “orientation days.” I didn’t do anything but school and Tae Bo, where I hit a plateau. They humored me in class, letting me fake-fight and do my not-that-form-fitting pushups, but the teacher knew it was something that I didn’t really enjoy. I quit. That was the only Tentacle I ever cut.

Why were the other kids doing better than me? Because they were better, that’s why. That’s what I knew every time I sat down online or got on the subway to Aaron’s house. Other people weren’t smoking and jerking off, and those that were were gifted—able to live and compete at the same time. I wasn’t gifted. Mom was wrong. I was just smart and I worked hard. I had fooled myself into thinking that was something important to the rest of the world. Other people were complicit in this ruse. Nobody had told me I was common.

That’s not to say I did terrible in high school—I got 93’s. That looked good to my parents. Problem is, in the real world, 93 is the crap grade; colleges know what it means—you do just well enough to stay in the 90’s. You’re average. There are a lot of you. You aren’t going over the top; if you’re not doing any extracurriculars you’re done. You can change things in later years, but with 93’s your freshman year, you’re going to have a lot of dead weight.

In December, three months into Executive Pre-Professional, I had stress vomiting for the first time. It happened with my parents at a restaurant; I was eating tuna steak with spinach. They had brought me out to celebrate the holidays and talk with me. They had no idea. I sat there looking at the food and thinking about the Tentacles waiting for me at home, and for the first time the man in my stomach appeared and said I wasn’t getting any of it; I had better back down, buddy, because otherwise this was going to get ugly.

“How’s biology class?” Mom asked.

Biology class was hell. I had to memorize these hormones and what they did and I hadn’t been able to make flash cards because I was too busy clipping newspaper articles.

“Fine.”

“How’s Intro to Wall Street?” Dad asked.

A guy from Bear Stearns had visited our class, thin and bald with a gold watch. He told us that if we were interested in getting into finance, we had better work hard and smart because a lot of machines were able to make investment decisions now, and in the future, computer programs would run everything. He asked the class how many of us were taking computer science, and everybody but me and this one girl who didn’t speak English raised their hands.

“Great, excellent,” the guy had said. “You other people are out of a job! Heh heh. Learn comp sci.”

Please die right now, I mumbled in my head, where more and more activity was taking place. The Cycling had begun to develop, although it hadn’t hit hard, and I didn’t know quite what it was yet.

“Wall Street is fine,” I told Dad across the table. The restaurant we were at was one of the ones in Brooklyn that was featured in a Times article I had yet to read for current events. I didn’t think we could really afford it, so I didn’t get an appetizer.

The spinach and tuna mulled in my stomach. My whole body was tight. Why was I here? Why wasn’t I off somewhere studying?

Soldier, what is the problem?

I can’t eat this. I know I should be able to.

Get over it. Eat it.

I can’t.

You know why that is?

Why?

Because you’re wasting your time, soldier! There’s a reason the U.S. Army isn’t made up of potheads! You’re spending all your time at your little horn-dog friend’s house and when you get home you can’t do what you have to do!

I know. I don’t know how I can be so ambitious and so lazy at the same time.

I’ll tell you how, soldier. It’s because you’re not ambitious. You’re just lazy.

“I’ve got to be excused,” I told my parents, and I walked through the restaurant with that fast-walking gonna-throw-up gait—a run aching to get out—that I learned to perfect over the next year. I came to the chrome bathroom and let it go in the toilet. Afterward I sat, turned the light off, and pissed. I didn’t want to get up. What was wrong with me? Where did I lose it? I had to stop smoking pot. I had to stop hanging out with Aaron. I had to be a machine.

I didn’t get out of the bathroom until someone came and knocked.

When I went back to my parents, I told them: “I think I might be, y’know, depressed.”

The first doctor was Dr. Barney. He was fat and short and had a puckered and expressionless face like a very serious gnome.

“What’s the problem?” He leaned back in his small gray chair. It sounded like a callous way to put things, but the way he phrased it, so soft and concerned, I liked him.

“I think I have a serious depression.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It started last fall.”

“All right,” he took shorthand on the pad on his desk. Next to the pad was a cup that read Zyprexa, which I thought was the craziest-sounding medical name I’d ever heard. (It turned out to be a drug for psychotics, I wondered if maybe a psychotic person had called a doctor a “zyprexa” and that’s how they came up with the name.) Everything in Dr. Barney’s office was branded—the Post-it notes said Paxil on them; his pens were all for Prozac; the desk calendar had Zoloft on each page.

“I got into this high school, and I had every reason to be the happiest guy in the world,” I continued. “But I just started freaking out and feeling worse and worse.”

“Uh-huh. You completed your sheet, I see.”

“Yes.” I held up the sheet that they had given me in the waiting room. It was a standard sheet, apparently, that they gave all the new recruits at the Anthem Mental Health Center, the building in downtown Brooklyn where this brain evaluation was taking place. The sheet had a bunch of questions about emotions you had felt over the past two weeks and four checkboxes for each one. For example, Feelings of hopelessness and failure. Feeling difficulty with your appetite. Feeling that you are unable to cope with daily life. For each one, you could check 1) Never, 2) Some days, 3) Nearly every day, or 4) All the time.

I had run down the list, checking mostly threes and fours.

“They like to collect these sheets every time you come in, to see how you’re doing,” Dr. Barney con tinued, “but on yours right now there’s one item of concern that we should discuss.”

“Uh-huh?”

“‘Feeling suicidal or that you want to hurt yourself.’ You checked ‘3) Nearly every day.’”

“Right, well, not trying to hurt myself. I wouldn’t cut myself or anything stupid. If I wanted to do it, I would just do it.”

“Suicide.”

It felt strange to hear. “Right.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“Brooklyn Bridge.”

“You’d jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.”

I nodded. “I’m familiar with it.”

“How long have you had feelings like that, Craig?”

“Since last year, mostly.”

“What about before then?”

“Well . . . I’ve had them for years. Just less intense. I thought they were, you know, just part of growing up.”