The Lexapro Diaries

I'm taking medication because my mother won't. 

Last year around this time, I was dragging my mother to the doctor, hoping to get her medicated again. After a few months off her meds for Multiple Sclerosis, a disease she's managed for the past twenty years, she was wobbling and reeling enough for her to accept my help, after my ten-year near-absence from her life. She'd stopped paying for her health insurance, as she was facing bankruptcy and foreclosure; she, her fifth husband, and their twenty three cats, stood to go homeless.

The next six months were a book nobody wants to read ("Too dark." -- Major Publisher). They were an over, over long episode of Hoaders, where the crazy old person is still living in feces at the end, and the (oxymoronic) adult child combusts with sadness and rage until they give up. In the end, I got her back on her MS meds. I never got her back on Haldol.

Oh, the halycion days of Haldol! Back when I was in high school, after the group home and before I left to live with Sebastian, my mother was on an "anti-anxiety" drug called Haldol. She'd got it from a shrink she was seeing, someone she saw on Tuesday evenings, while I babysat in her Park Slope apartment. Haldol was one of the things that helped her finally leave her psychotic fourth husband (and I don't use psychotic as an insult, just a descriptor, so you understand what he was going through); it was one of the reasons I was able to come back and live with her again. It was how she was able to sit, night after night, placidly knitting in front of the TV after her toddler was put to bed, instead of pacing, biting her lips ragged, making calls. Haldol saved us both.

One day, Sebastian was over at her/our place, and he cornered me in a bedroom. Who's on Haldol?, he wanted to know.

My mom, I said. It's for anti-anxiety.

No it's not. It's for schizophrenics. That's the shit they give you when you take too much acid. That's some hardcore shit.

Okay, I said, shrugging it off. Well, she takes it for anxiety.

Years later, at my own shrink's behest, I look up "Haldol" online. It's for schizophrenics. What does that tell you?, she asks.

That she needs to take it. That she was better off when she was taking it. That I don't know when she stopped taking it, but it's pretty clear that she should probably start again. 

Right. And: that your mother is schizophrenic.

The last six months have been about swallowing that bitter pill, and more recently, taking my own. I haven't taken an anti-depressant in thirteen years, unless you count marijuana, in which case I have taken anti-depressants pretty much my whole life since I was fifteen. But it was time to start again. This summer was tough, dealing with last summer's trauma; I completely fell apart during acupuncture for my arms, and was diagnosed with PTSD. Is that why I sat up bolt upright at 4 a.m. every night for thirty-eight days during the Gulf oil catastrophe? At the time, I thought that was the rational thing to do.

So, meds; the shame that comes from taking meds; the conversations with friends you didn't know were on them too; the thanking god for being able to treat your first-world problems with drugs while the people who suffer the most don't get them (see, it only works up to a point; I'm still kind of watching, as David Foster Wallace called it, "The Suffering Channel.").

It is sane to be sad in this case, as in most cases in life. I think the appropriate response to most of life is sadness, horror, grief, and fear -- a lot of fear. But it's also sane not to want to suffer. I wish my mother would take steps to alleviate her own suffering, but she won't. So I will.

To Sergei (by Kadidia Adula)

To Sergei:  

Forgotten on the ground of some street,
A faded black and white photograph.  
Pick it up, dust it off and you see  
The world she is living in:       

I can’t erase you but I have buried you well.  
At this exact spot,    
The remains of my feelings for you rest.    
I need you below so I can stand above    
This brittle earth.     

Inexplicably I am still seated by your grave.
I talk to you about the meaningful and the mundane,  
Just to stay close.  
Time passes by; I forget if we are today, tomorrow or yesterday  
Until a visceral tearing reminds me I can still feel.     

A young girl finds an exit out of me  
And she is dripping living colors.  
Echoes of her sweet laughter fill my ears, calling.  
I follow polymorphic, colorful foot prints  
With each step I am closer to the living  
And you become something that is forgotten. 

(Kadidia Adula is a poet and a student at Brooklyn College.)

Like the Dickens

Besides the usual shit-ton of memoir (Foreskin's Lament, which is a really funny and horrifyingly accurate portrait of the type of mental torture I've been putting myself through for the past few years, and by "few" I mean "decades' worth"; also Portrait of the Addict As A Young Man, totally salacious but with beautiful writing), I've been reading a lot of Dickens lately, sort of going back and forth between the two genres. I'm into the less popular novels now, the Martin Chuzzlewits and the Dombey and Sons -- the thicker the better, I find. I like to see a longitudinal study of several intertwined lives over ten or twenty years; I like watching the kids, with their terrible parents or their wonderful uncles, find their way to adult personalities, systems of morality. It's like watching six seasons of a really good cable drama, one episode after the next. 

That's what I want to do in fiction; show characters evolving episodically over a long period of time. Let you experience everything the character does and thinks and feels as a kid, and watch how those experiences shape that person, understand every one of their thoughts and actions from the inside. But it's not children's literature, or maybe it is. I was at a picnic with a four year old not too long ago, and I showed her my copy of Our Mutual Friend, showing off how many pages it is. "Yeah," she agreed, "but it's got pictures."

Charles Dickens helped found Urania Cottage, a home for what they used to call fallen women. Then he put characters based on some of them in his books. Does that make him an exploiter? Am I?

The Ramble

I've been reading Stephen Elliott's The Daily Rumpus newsletter for the past few weeks, and I love it, it's so intimate, so aptly random; very dreamlike, which these days is lifelike to me. My own dreams have been even more vivid than usual (medication); the other night I had a dream about buying some Entemann's from a deli with Stephen and another author, who scoffed at me for having recently paid someone to paint my apartment. I painted my own apartment more times than I can count, I think now, hours later and awake, and I want to go back and tell the author in the dream about all the places I painted. Me and Sebastian even faux finished the wall in the bedroom in my first place in Brooklyn, it took seven different layers -- primers, alkyds, oils, glazes, some of them applied with sea sponges, all of which took hours to dry between coats. 

Speaking of faux finishes, "Sebastian," not his real name. But he's a real person, really exists. Really sends me emails: things going so well, corporate cars and trips; things actually going not so well, daughter in foster care, money tight. His dense, snaky blocks of text are dreamlike, wishlike, non-narrative, as they say, or as they also say, I'm not sure I see the arc here. It's kind of the same thing over and over, don't you think? Do you think you could add a little more personal growth?

Or, Can you make your mother a more likable character?

That's the challenge, isn't it. I thought you guys didn't want people to lie anymore. I don't want to lie anymore. I don't want to have to protect identities, especially my own. There is so much that I can't say. My throat is aching with it.

I just want to write in circles, if that's okay. I don't want it to have to be official. Like, I read Koren Zailckas' new book, Fury, and I was rapt when I was reading it and found it really salient, but I don't feel like writing a whole review-y thing about it. It was helpful to me, that's my review, as was the advance (because I am adfancy) copy of Stacy Pershall's Loud in the House of Myself, which I'll write about when it comes out in January, but for now I just want to say that I've thought about some of the things I've learned from it every day since I read it. I don't feel like going into what those things are.

Other: Bill and I went to San Antonio, just got back last night, feel like I'm still there, like it's right on the other side of town. Everything is right here.

My mother looks like Sarah Palin

Or, my mother used to look like Sarah Palin, back when my mother was forty and thin. She had the cheekbones, the wide, slightly open-mouthed smile, the big eyes behind the big glasses, and especially the hairdo, the one she'd been wearing since the early seventies, after she cut her long, flat-ironed Crystal Gayle hair; a betrayal, somehow, at which I'd cried and cried. The hair then became a Jiffy Pop bouffant in the back, and two sculpted swoops in the front, framing her gorgeous face, and it stayed that way until the mid nineties, when she gave up. It took hours; she had to shower the night before and spend half an hour with her curlers and pins and setting spray to put it in place. Then she slept with this acrid wire cage on her head; then it was another half hour in the morning blow-drying it, unrolling it, fluffing it, spraying it with Aqua Net, always with the Merit 100 burning on the edge of the sink, threatening to incinerate the apartment. Sometimes women on the street would stop and ask her where she got her hair done, and she would brighten -- "I do it myself!" The color and everything. She had naturally dark auburn hair which she brightened with dye, sitting in front of her heat lamp with her cigarette, her hair slathered into a purplish, sideburned mohawk. The women who asked always had lipstick outside the borders of their lips.

My mother looks less like Sarah Palin these days, though she agrees with her one hundred percent. I get into my mother's car, on the way to take her to the neurologist, and her radio is tuned to right-wing talk. The host is talking about "Obama," and his eyes are rolling so hard it almost gets gutteral for a second, "Obghama." He's making fun of the "way...Obama...talks sometimes...," which, truly, can be ponderous, but oh my god are you fucking kidding me? After that moron Bush, who couldn't spit out two words without mangling them and draining them of meaning, you're complaining about how Obama talks? This is the reality in my mother's car: Left is right, up is down, good is bad, and we have always been at war with Oceania.

At the neurologist, the doctor has her say the date, the year, count backwards from 30, spell her last name, identify the president, and tell her something that's going on in the country right now. "Well," says my mother, confused by this last one, "Obama's ruining the country."

The doctor happens to agree. They both look sideways at me like they know I'm one of them. Enough said; my mother is lucid, if not sane. 

Later, she tries to drive the wrong way down a one-way street, gets lost driving in the town she's been living in for eighteen years. She hasn't cut her toenails in months; I saw them in the doctor's office, they're gray and yellow and fungal. She has twenty-four cats and she doesn't always remember all their names. But Obama's ruining the country.

I really detest Sarah Palin. I hate her willful, blithe ignorance; I hate her arrogance; I hate her insistence that you don't have to be good at anything, or know anything, in order to be politically influential. You just have to keep that wide, open mouthed smile going and your hair plastered in place. 

Interview with Fiona Helmsley

(Interview by Marie Mundaca.)

In her book There Are A Millions Stories in the Naked City When You’re A Girl Who Gets Naked in the Naked City, writer Fiona Helmsley explores the tricky terrain of female friendship amid a real sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll lifestyle. Her tough vulnerability and lucid style may remind some of 1990s ‘zine writing. It’s conversational and friendly, and this is how she draws readers into her autobiographical stories about working at a “jack shack” — a seedy gentleman’s club -- and her disappointment with her well-endowed but impotent boyfriend. In the titular story, Helmsley writes about the manipulative and destructive Renee, a drug user who loses her job at a New York City rock club. After Helmsley recommends her for a job at the jack shack, Renee turns on her by stealing clients and starting fights. Throughout it all, Helmsley struggles to maintain her friendships and her clients. In the tradition of Michelle Tea and Lisa Carver, Helmsley’s stories about life on the fringes doesn’t titillate, but certainly illuminates. Her writing is naked in every way possible — these stories are storms of bare emotions and bad sex. 

Were you familiar with fringe writers who were sex workers before you started doing it? I was wondering if you had anyone in particular that inspired you?

I came from a punk rock background and at the time that I started working, in the mid-nineties, a lot of the female artists in that community were very open about their experiences doing sex work and were actually incorporating those experiences into their art and identities as artists. I think I had this idea of the sex industry as a sort of boot camp to becoming a better artist because it was something that so many of the women I admired had in common, women like Lydia Lunch, Courtney Love, Miranda July and Kathleen Hanna. I think part of me was seeking out whatever it was they had experienced in the hope that it would translate to making my own work better down the line. As for specific writings about sex work, I know at that time I had read Lisa Crystal Carver’s essay about being a prostitute in Rollerderby and Cookie Mueller’s story about go-go dancing in Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black.

What was it that brought you to a place where you were looking to do sex work? It’s not a choice for most women.

There were a lot of reasons. I had just moved to NYC and was going to college, so in a practical sense, the work paid the most amount of money while taking up the least amount of my time. I could also do my schoolwork in the downtime between sessions. I did use drugs, but it wasn’t my drug use that led me to seek out the work -- though because I was making so much money, my drug use did increase and I developed my first serious heroin habit while working at the place I call LUV in my book.

But mostly it was my own sexual curiosity and lack of confidence that inspired me to look through the job listings in the back of the Village Voice. I came from a background where sex and the expression of sexual desire were considered bad, shameful things. I didn’t know how to process my own sexual desires because I viewed them through the filter of that shame. The first sexual fantasy I remember having involved Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees essentially raping me on the beach after we had played volleyball together. I mention in the book how my primary sexual fantasy to this day involve force -- and that’s connected to the shame I felt as a young girl first experiencing sexual desire. If someone’s forcing you, you are not culpable for what’s happening. If I’m not culpable, I’m not to blame and I’m still a good girl.

I had also just come out of physically awkward stage that had stretched from most of my adolescence into early adulthood. I was not a classically pretty girl, but I was smart and funny and those two qualities got me guys, but it was never instantaneous. For so long, the men in my life had related to me as the smart, funny friend and then, all of a sudden they were seeking me out as this actually desirable sexual partner based on my physicality, not my personality. It fucked with my definitions about myself. Why did all of these hot guys suddenly want to fuck me? Was I really sexually desirable?  I think part of my motivation for seeking out sex work was to find out how complete strangers would react to me as some kind of reassurance that I had actually made the switch from not to hot. And would these strangers want me so badly they would be willing to pay? It’s really fucked up, but I think I was seeking out some kind of validation through retail value.

Later, I would come to realize that success in the sex industry really has nothing to do with your physicality. Of course men have their physical preferences, but financial success at a place like LUV had the most to do with your ability to project confidence and make a client feel comfortable with his own sexual desires. If that Jennifer Love Hewitt movie “The Client List” got anything right, it was that. Over and over, I saw women who were not conventional attractive make money because they could do those two things.

I remember seeing those ads in the Village Voice that you mention in your book, about just being “your fun, playful self.” Once you called them, how was the job described to you?

I met with Allison, who was the phone girl in one of the session rooms for an interview. She had told me nothing over the phone. She had me fill a little card of my job-related experience and checked my ID. I think I said I’d been a stripper, I hadn’t -- but I had gone with a friend when she had interviewed for a job dancing so I knew what it was like in case she asked. She didn’t. She was very cryptic as to what the job actually involved, but she had to be, in case I was a cop. She did say there would be dirty talk and some light S&M.  I found out about the wank part when I did my first session with another girl -- but I wasn’t naïve. I knew for almost $300 an hour there had to be more than dirty talk going on.

How much pressure was put on you to do more? 

Girls really set their own limits, though I can say for sure the majority of the girls there did not have sex, they was a camaraderie and we did talk. The girls who were having sex had their own clients who did not see other girls and never met with us in the meeting room.  There were two girls working there while I was there who made their own hours and only came in to work when they had clients to see, then left when they were done--unlike the rest of us who had to stay and work full eight hour shifts. We were really sort of segregated, based on the freedom they enjoyed that we didn’t. We all knew they were fucking their clients, but it was sort of hush-hush and you really got this vibe you weren’t supposed to talk about it. It was some sort of arrangement those girls had made with the owner, who owned in-house escort services in other parts of the boroughs.

There were clients who got off on testing girls limits and one time in particular is forever engrained in my mind because the client was a well known, bald Italian artist who had been good friends with Andy Warhol. He came to LUV all the time-meaning he knew what to expect and what to expect was not blowjobs. The girl was new and foreign and he somehow managed to stick his dick in her mouth. He slunk out mid- session, got into the elevator and left. A few minutes later, the girl came out of the session room hysterical. The owner came down and gave her a few hundred dollars and she never came back. The artist was supposedly banned but he was back booking sessions a few weeks later.

Now that you’ve worked straight jobs and non-straight jobs, do you see a difference between them?

Working straight jobs you have much more job security and protection. Like I just mentioned, the artist was allowed back after what he had done. In the sex industry, the owner’s profit is usually much more important than you are as a person and empathy and understanding tends to be non existent in the owner/worker relationship. In the straight world, you also tend to make some sort of hourly wage on top of any commission or tips you might make. At LUV, if you didn’t book a session you were given five dollars at the end of the shift and that five dollars was an anomaly for the industry. As pathetic as five dollars for working eight hours is, LUV was the only place I’ve ever heard of giving out anything besides what you made yourself.

The sex industry is a place where you can make incredible amounts of money one night and jack shit the next.  It really is in industry that demands fiscal responsibility if you are to survive because you can never predict when and even if the next payday will come.  Many girls worked eight-hour shifts and ended up with only that five-dollar bill at the end of the night. 

We also had to constantly be on alert for the police. The way you were supposed to get around that was by asking the client to ‘get comfortable’ in the session room- ‘get comfortable’ meaning ‘remove your pants’. There was this idea that if the client were a cop, he would be resistant to taking his pants off.  But I have heard plenty of stories were the client had gotten more than comfortable, then busted the girl anyway, so it was by no means a foul-proof system.

Did the managers foster competition? Was there anyone who was particularly nurturing? I just always think there’s going to be a house mom who’s really nice and brings cookies, but I’m probably delusional.

The phone girls were in charge when out boss wasn’t there, which was most of the time. Allison had been an escort, gotten busted and became a phone girl--which is sort of a strange move to make because its the phone person who gets in the most trouble when a bust occurs, so she was actually putting herself in a more precarious position. Maybe she felt she could control the likelihood of a bust happening because she was the one now screening the clients. She did play favorites and some girls would kiss up to her, but there really wasn’t much she could do in the way of punishing or rewarding you financially, because most clients met all the girls on staff in the meeting room and then made their own decision as to who to do a session with. So whether Allison liked you or not you could still make money. The other phone girl was a young African American girl named Veronica who also did sessions with clients. There were times the door buzzer would go off and no client would come into the meeting room. We knew that that meant Veronica had taken the session herself. When that happened, if the phone rang, she would have to run out of session to answer it -- which meant when she did sessions, sometimes the phone didn’t get answered at all, meaning we all lost money because she wasn’t booking clients.

You make a point of getting along with everybody and your friend ruins it for you. After she left were you able to get back to where you were? 

I always try to get along with everybody, in spite of what some people may think. I’ve always been more curious about people than suspicious of them, even when I was doing drugs. I like characters, so as much as Renee drove me insane, I did enjoy certain aspects of being around her, if only to see what she would do or say next. She was one of those people who are immensely fun to talk about but very hard to be around. It’s very easy for me to detach around people I do not like-but some people will not allow that, they demand that you react to them and will keep upping the ante until you do. It may be how they remind themselves they are alive. Renee was one of those people. But after she left, I was fine. Things went back to normal, as normal as they can be in a place where you are put into very intimate situations with complete strangers (I’m counting co-workers, too) within moments of meeting them--but a human can adapt very quickly.  I’m almost reassured that I was able to do the work, because I view it as a skill that I will always have. I know that if I am ever in a dire financial jam, I have a skill I can utilize that will bring me money quickly. Sex industry work is almost like a ripcord I can pull. 

You write about it in such a matter of fact way. You don’t romanticize it or demonize it -- it’s just a job. Was it like you thought it would be?

Going into it, I really had no expectations, only hopes. I hoped I would be able to handle the work and I hoped the clients would want my companionship. It takes a lot to freak me out and like I said, I’m very curious. If a man wants me to sit on the make shift toilet he totes with him to LUV every Wednesday and pee on his face, fine because if he and I end up with a rapport, I’m going to ask him why he wants me to piss on him and I’m going to get paid as I ask my questions.  That was one of the great things about doing the work, getting to ask questions, it was like doing investigative work in the field of human behavior while wearing a tight spandex dress and garter belts and stockings. (The man with the portable toilet had been held down and peed on by a female friend when he was nine years old and had his first real orgasm as it happened, forever linking the two events in his mind.)

There are some aspects of the industry that I do miss. There’s an almost refreshing honesty to sex work. Here’s what I want, here’s what I’m willing to give you to get it. The financial aspects of those relationships tend to negate the manipulations you find in non-paid, casual sexual relationships. Because money is exchanging hands, people are less likely to engage in douchebaggery and play games.

In retrospect, how do you think about your time there?

I met some nice guys and I met some uber assholes. I feel that I definitely gained insight into the male psyche. Men no longer intimidate me--it’s hard to explain, but I feel much more comfortable in a group of strange men than I do a group of strange females. And that’s because male manipulation tends to be sex-based, to come from the groin. Female manipulation, on the other hand, is a whole other can of unknowable worms.

(Marie Mundaca is a literary critic and book designer living in New York City.)

Haven't we all.

Cartoon by Lori Mocha.

Hayso

An especially treasured reader has submitted the following question for our group advice column, Help A Sister Out. This is from catmom, who asks:

"It's been over a year and I'm still not over my breakup. We were together for eight years, and the breakup was pretty unexpected, even though I know we were having problems. I've been doing all the things I'm supposed to be doing (like 'dating,' which is a drag and not producing any good results), but I thought after all this time I'd be over this. Any advice?"

Yes, but it's horrible, horrible news: You're not going to get over it. 

That was eight years of your life you spent loving this person, being their partner, expecting that love and partnership to continue indefinitely. Then suddenly you break up? And you're supposed to "get over it?" It's like a death, the loss of a primary relationship like that, and you will move past the worst of the grief in time, but the loss really fucking lingers. And what does "getting over it" mean, anyway? Being in a new relationship? Thinking of the ex without pain? I've been with Bill for eight and a half years now, and I still think of my ex with pain, because that's how we left things. You may fall in love again, but the pain of this loss will remain. 

Aren't you kind of sorry you asked?

There are, however, things you can do to mitigate the pain. Writing down everything you wish you could say to the ex is a good start. It will help get it out of your head, if you get it onto the page. Plus you will be prepared for any conversation that might happen to arise between you and your ex in the future. Your mood in writing this (ten or twenty page, at least, considering the length of the relationship) letter may veer from sentimental to homicidal, which is why it's usually best not to send this document to your ex.

Also, self care is primary. Fuck dating for now; if it's not making you happy, then FUCK IT. Go out with friends instead, or stay home and luxuriate in the comforts of your home and cats. What's that saying, "Friends is better than mens?" (I just made that saying up.) Trying to impress strangers with how lovable you are is maybe not what you need right now; you need the comfort of being loved for who you are by the people who already appreciate you. And, since I know you personally, I know there's a lot of them.

Finally, success is the best revenge. Nothing chaps a guy's ass like his ex succeeding professionally in her field, especially if it's his field, too. If you can channel your anger into activity (cue montage of you angrily learning to surf, vengefully woodworking at a lathe, furiously writing a screenplay), you will find it a lot easier to live with than if you channel the anger inwards against yourself. 

In Russell Simmons' eminently mortal words, "Do you." You gave a lot in your relationship, now give that to yourself. You're an awesome girlfriend, as you will discover.

Readers, any advice for catmom?