Straitjacket

If it helps: this is fiction.

* * *

Four days ago I'll walk down that brick sidewalk round the bend in Mass Ave with a man in a suit an arm's distance from me to my left, half a step behind. He'll escort me but I'll know where I'm going. Through the goofy glass doors in the Holyoke Center, across the wide geometrical hallway and past the tables and the security guards and the picture of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon grinning about something stupid at this mediocre sandwich shop and then past the pharmacy on the left and through the other glass doors and into University Health Services, fourth floor, take a right off the elevator and head to the receptionist under the Mental Health sign.

God, this was going to be a long story. I had to skip most of it.

On the way, though, he'll make talk that sounds deceptively small.

"So is there anything about Harvard that has been good? How have your classes been?"

He'll have this sort of shy, reserved slant to his voice. It will remind me of early in high school when my friends' voices would suddenly turn deep and they would seem vaguely uncomfortable with the pitch.

I'll take a while answering the question because the voice is so distracting, but after maybe twenty seconds I'll say calmly:

"Actually, not really. Frankly it's been unimpressive. I think I liked my high school classes more, and that's saying something."

He'll be shocked but try not to show it.

"So, so what's been the problem?"

I'll answer straightaway. "The TFs aren't invested, the professors are aloof. They've been too easy and little more than irritating. Overall I think this whole year has been a waste of time."

He'll be quiet for a long moment and I'll practically be able to hear the cogs turning in his head. I'll recognize now just how brilliant he is--Harvard undergrad, Oxford doctorate, and a career spent dealing with schmucks like me out of the pure benevolence of his soul and all that--but it won't be that opaque brilliance everyone finds so fascinating in artists and physicists and schizophrenics, rather that transparent intelligence one perceives while watching an army of ants rebuilding their anthill in fast-forward.

What an interesting dude, I'll think. Too bad this is how I meet him.

All this will happen while we're still out on the street. People will pass by in t-shirts and tank tops wearing flip-flops and carrying bags from the bookstore. The sun'll be shining through a thin weave of white clouds and the ground flashes on and off in the yellow rays and the gray shades that click by like different lenses at the optometrist. I'll still be walking ahead of him, not looking at him. I'll seem contemptuous and I'll feel it, too.

"So if you don't come back next year, do you have any plans for what to do?" he'll say.

"Not really," I'll say. "Might work on the Cape. Might go out West. The important thing is to not be here."

He'll have no response. He'll remain in that loud silence you feel near someone searching for a thing to say until we get inside University Health Services.

We'll take the elevator up. He won't say anything.

At the receptionist he'll explain things. "I'm Dean Cooper here with Tim Lambert."

"Right," the old woman will say, "I fixed that up just now."

In the waiting room I won't pick up any of the literature. I'll have read it all before. I'll look straight ahead and not say anything until spoken to. And he'll speak to me.

"So, did, so have you spent summers on the Cape before?"

"Most of them when I was growing up."

"Oh."

There will be silence. It will drag on.

"You know, I've, uh, only been to the Cape once. It was, ah, I remember I had some oysters, or, I had to pass on some oysters. I didn't know it at the time, I found out later, maybe you know, something about not eating oysters in the wrong season. Something about the months with Rs. September, November, I guess it goes through April."

I won't know what the fuck he'll be talking about. So I won't say anything. He won't bother with words after that.

Ten minutes will pass and he'll get up and go to the receptionist. I'll have noticed the sign already that says "If it is ten minutes past your scheduled appointment time and you are still waiting, check with the receptionist." Now it'll be twelve minutes past. He'll say something to the old woman.

"She still hasn't seen you?" A pause. "Apparently she's running late and is on her way up."

"Ok, ok," the Dean will say, and come to sit again next to me.

The doctor will come in all flurried, wearing cross-trainers and a weird sun dress. Oh boy, I'll think.

She'll introduce herself and so will the Dean. I'll stay silent. She'll stick out her hand. I'll take it, shake it, stand up, and follow her wordlessly.

We'll all sit down in an office with walls covered in children's drawings. Dean Cooper will explain things, badly.

"So Tim here, we're worried about him and we thought we'd bring him in here and have you talk with him and hopefully help him with his problems."

She won't look at him. She'll keep her eyes on me. They'll be kind eyes. Only slightly patronizing.

"Another student came to us and told us he might be a danger to himself, so the College decided to intervene. He's been struggling with depression, and uh, we've talked about the possibility of taking a leave of absence."

"Ah, and how do you feel about that option, Tim?" she'll say.

"I'd like to leave today, if that's all right."

They'll both sit back.

Dean Cooper will say, "Ah, well, then uh, if that's the case we can talk more about that later today and I'm sure we can make that happen."

"Great," I'll say.

The therapist will lean in. "How do feel about all this, the college stepping in and everything?"

"It's ridiculous. Not going to help. The only problem I have can only be solved through exactly the avenue they've closed off."

The therapist will look confused. Dean Cooper will step in: "I assume he's referring to talking with this other student. She's requested that all contact be severed between the two."

"Ah," says the therapist.

"I just asked that she speak with me so that we could sort out this problem, or at least acknowledge me so I can act like the problem is solved," I'll say, "but apparently she decided that was too much to ask, and instead is trying to get me kicked out of the school."

"Now--" both the others will start. The therapist will defer to the Dean.

"That's not--we're just trying to respect everyone's wishes and find a way to keep you safe and comfortable."

"You're saying I can't talk to her, and I need to talk to a shrink or you'll make me leave. That's what you said."

"Yes," he'll say.

"Now, why is it that you want so badly to talk to her," the therapist will ask. The deconstruction will have begun.

"Because she’s standing in the way of my functioning normally and comfortably at the College. The Dean's Office seems to think the best way to resolve this is to support her in this immature behavior and make me jump through these hoops so that I can lie down and accept her abuse."

The Dean will respond: "She has asked not to be contacted and we have to respect her wishes."

"Right," I'll say. "That's her right, not to be bothered even if she's bothering someone else. This is America, after all. And she’s a girl, after all. I'm just trying to sort this out in the most mature way possible, and that means actually having a dialogue with her, since she is the one causing the problem."

"Are you depressed now?" the therapist will ask.

"No," I'll say, too angrily. "Or if I am, so what? I'm not a danger to myself or anyone else. It’s my stone and I have to carry it, and it’s as simple as that. I'm just angry that I'm being forced to come here and miss class because someone else is trying to screw me over. I don't need this."

Dean Cooper will be clearly uncomfortable. He'll have places to be. He'll be a busy man, after all.

"Well, I'm going to head out now and let you talk, but first, I, uh, I'll need you to agree to a, ah, breach of confidentiality, that Dr. Gurier will, ah, be allowed to talk to be about what you say."

I'll be livid. "Sure, whatever," I'll say. 'Just get the fuck out,' I'll be thinking. 'Hell if I'm going to say anything important now.'

He'll stand up and leave, assuming the healing will commence.

* * *

Meanwhile back in that twisted hellhole of a mind I weigh my options. I find a striking lucidity flowing under everything and I can understand exactly what sort of behavior will lead to what sort of a result. I can rank all the possible moves in order of ease, self-interested rationality, clinical pathology, moral legitimacy, and visceral appeal. I can shuffle them. I can alphabetize them. I can juggle them. I can cut the deck and make one disappear in a puff of smoke and reappear behind your ear and then chew it up and spit it out and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Here's my first thought: say the hell with everything and hop a bus to New York. Get my friend there to put me up for a week, meanwhile shoot off an email that secures a leave of absence three weeks before the end of class, erase the past half a year from my record and the past year from memory, buy a ticket to Seattle and from there up to Alaska and fish for crabs.

Why crabs? It's the darkest, most isolated, least glorious job on the face of the earth to fish for crabs in Alaskan waters. It's dangerous as hell but somebody has to do it, and somebody will always do it, because so long as this world is filled with billions of greedy mouths there will always be a demand for any edible product, and whether or not somebody died (or missed the first seven months of his son's life and had his wife leave him for some nomadic environmentalist with a trust fund and too much time on his hands who just wanted to shack up for a night) while on that long thankless voyage in the ass-end ice-water seas of nowhere, you're still going to think it's delicious.

Here's my second thought: track down the bitch who is trying to get me kicked out of school, chew her out, tell her she can go fuck herself and then spray-paint on the front of her dorm that she puts out on the first date and has a dry, razor burnt cunt—which might be vandalism, but not libel. Then proceed with Plan A sans email to the Dean.

Third thought: stop going to class, hang out till exam period, and then tell the Dean I want a leave of absence, say my goodbyes to my friends, meet up with my woman flying in from across the country to see me, buy a one way ticket to follow her back out West, work at a restaurant or library or a national park for a few months and apply to her school for next year's spring term.

Fourth thought: play by the rules, put up with therapy, ignore Ms. Dry-Cunt, ask for a leave of absence and see how a fall on my own feels. Come back in the Spring and hope for the best. Sacrifice my sense of self-worth and disregard my abused sense of justice and accept that the world is a rotten place that favors rotten people and the only thing for it is to make enough money to live on an island in the sun until a long cancerous death undoes everything.

Fifth thought: pretend nothing ever happened, and pray nothing ever will.

Sixth thought: buy a huge bag of weed, light up, and don't stop until I find God or some greater or equal substitute. Accept that whether I'm insane or the world's insane, the fact remains it's much easier to shape my mind to fit the world than to shape the world to fit my mind, and whether I've lied and cheated myself out of myself in order to live in some facsimile of happiness, it makes no difference because I won't be able to tell the difference between the facsimile and the real thing, and that the truth doesn't matter and ought to be cast aside for its inflexibility given the fact that our beliefs are functionally identical and far more comforting if we make them pretty and invest ourselves in them. Call it all growing up and delete all evidence of thinking otherwise.

Seventh thought: stop half-assing self-obliteration and just—

Look at that.

* * *

I come back from all this. I look around the office. Behind me: a dollhouse with felt-covered dog figurines that shake their heads when you squeeze them. Children's pictures everywhere. I especially like one of an iguana eating a bee with its massive curling tongue. Sun's not coming through the window because this crumby place looks out into an alley. Doctor's waiting for me to talk. What has it been? Ten minutes? Twenty? When can I go?

"I'm fine," I say. I look her in the eye.

"Really?" she asks.

"You know I'd come back in if I weren't." I say.

"Would you?"

"Yes, provided I was the one making the decision. Or someone who knows me. Cares about me."

"And you have people like that?"

"More than I can keep track of."

"And what will you do about school? Are you still going to leave?"

"I'll finish the semester."

"And after?"

I sigh. "Ma'am, I don't know what I'm eating for lunch today. Talking about 'after' won't amount to much of anything in the way of truth or honesty. All I can say is that I'll be sure to think it all over."

"Good. That sounds good."

I don't say anything.

"I want you to come in later this week."

"Why?"

"Just to check in."

"Do I have a choice?"

She thinks it over.

"Never mind," I say. "I'll come in."

"OK. Friday at 11:30. I'll see you then."

I stand up. She hands me her card. I thank her. She wishes me luck. I leave.

Ten minutes later I'm in my room. My phone rings. I ignore it. I lie down but I can't keep still. I sit up. I feel sick. I stand. I pace. My phone rings again. I ignore it. The sun is shining through the window. I open it, light a cigarette, blow smoke through the screen. I throw it away after two drags. I contemplate the vodka in my drawer. I look at the clock. It's 1:30 on a Monday afternoon. Hours, hours, hours, hours. Shit.

Pills on my windowsill. I stopped taking them weeks ago. I remember what they did to me. To hell with it, I think, and pop two antipsychotics. Then I pass out and agree to forget how scary it can be living in this skull until the next time I really think about it. In my sleep I’ll wonder whether it’s the skull or the world outside that’s really the scary thing. And I won’t get anywhere at all. When I wake up I’ll still have to bite my lip and stand in line and listen to my sensible friends and grow up straight and narrow and never do anything more meaningful than living up to expectations. And when people ask me what I want to do with my life, I’ll have to say “This, that, and the other thing,” because nobody really gets what I mean when I say I just want to keep it.

Atari was so effing sweet.

Today, while attending my second General Chemistry lecture of the semester I witnessed an amazing thing.

In the middle of the lecture a life-sized Pac-Man ran screaming through the bottom of the lecture hall chased by a life-sized ghost. The whole thing lasted about 15 seconds and then the lecture resumed with no further interruption.

This ordeal got me thinking -- quite a remarkable development in itself. Isn't life just a gigantic game of Pac-Man? We are all Pac-Men. Arguably, some of us are Ms. Pacmen, but that really has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

We are all running from ghosts. All the time. Ghosts are there to consume us, to beat us down. Right now I'm running from the ghost of my exam schedule, the ghost of sickness, the ghost of me wanting to fucking sleep more than 3 hours a night but I can't because I have insomnia and I'm sick and my neighbor plays rap too loud. I guess what I'm trying to say is ghosts=bad.

But we are the Pac-(Wo)Men. We're just running through the maze of life trying to avoid bad shit. Sometimes we eat things. Eating things gives you bonus points and if you get enough of those you get an extra Pac-Man. I'm not quite sure what the real-life parallel to this is, but it probably has something to do with prescription drugs.

We also eat a lot of little white dot things. Some would call this a primal urge to make ourselves whole again. After all, someone did cut a huge wedge out of our faces. Why can't we be circles? Circles are aesthetically pleasing. Admittedly, if we were circles we would have trouble speaking, munching on little white things, and occasionally eating 8-bit fruit, but I'm relatively convinced that in a perfect world these would be unnecessary and forgotten relics of a primitive past.

Oh yeah, sometimes in real life we also have to put quarters in things so they work, just like a Pac-Man game. Some examples of this include washers, dryers, pool tables, juke boxes and Tim's genitals. Sometimes we run out of quarters. Then we can't play Pac-Man anymore, or we just have to walk around for weeks with dirty clothes because I'm just not gonna hand-wash all this shit.

Then again, life might not be like Pac-Man at all. I may have just taken way too much cold medicine. I suppose we'll never know.

In Harvard, nobody can hear you scream.

Of all the crazy statistics Harvard manages to post year after year, one of the craziest is it's freshman retention rate. It's up around 98%. And if I'm not mistaken, the number of students who graduate within six years is around 90%.

Have you ever wondered what happens to that 2%, or that 10%? They don't all steal code worth billions of dollars and become successful entrepreneurs overnight. Maybe half do, but that still leaves dozens of kids from every entering class who simply fall off the map.

But I actually know where some of them go, for a while at least.

My mother works with mentally ill people. She doesn't mind telling me that most are fairly young, all are affluent, and at any given time, several of them are Harvard students. She gets people from Brown, too, and once in a while a girl from Columbia. Columbia only sends girls for some reason.

So I'm slowly coming to the full realization that within a few years, if my mother keeps this job, she will end up working with one of my classmates, perhaps even one I'll know.

All three of the people in this triangle will be completely ignorant of the situation. My mother only reveals her first name to her patients, and she is professionally bound not to divulge to anyone any details that might let one of her patients be identified. I'll never find out about it. If my best friend here ends up hanging himself in her presence, I'll be told a lie about what happened. If some girl I sleep with goes crazy because she finds out, too late, that I'm an emotionally corrupt, morally vacuous bucket of human waste, and ends up telling my mother every grotesque detail of our meeting, I will not find out. My mother will just be furious with me and be unable to communicate why.

Imagine if every time your mother was angry at you and wouldn't explain why, you had reason to suspect in the back of your mind it was because she met one of those souls you senselessly crush on a weekly basis. This is my now my life.

Now, you're probably thinking: "Gee-golly-shucks! It sure is egotistical of this guy to think he could single-handedly cause someone to lose her marbles. Huh-yuck!"

Tell me I don't have your internal monologues down pat. It's almost eerie.

If I were so inclined I could tell you more than one story that would cause you to, among other things, stick your own foot in your mouth directly. But I am not so inclined. Suffice it to say that I have reason to feel guilty for the rest of my ridiculous, inescapably Catholic life. And next time you're feeling sentimental, direct a moment of silence towards the all the sweet, gentle girls in this world who will always be ruined by the endlessly cunning evils of childish men.

But this piece isn't about all that any more than everything I ever write will be--which is to say, only subconsciously, maybe sorta--and this sentence isn't really any good. Skip over it.

This piece is about people going crazy at Harvard. I know how supposedly we're all enterprising sons-of-bitches. We've got all our ducks in a row, which is why we're here. We're motivated, intelligent, competent, and assertive with our lives. Or we're legacies. Or we have Asian parents.

But if all of that is true, why is it that we're given a whole team of advisers to look after us and help us pick out what classes we take? All week that's been what we do: meet with this adviser, that adviser, go to this lecture on what level of class to take, hear this guy give us advice on the college experience, and once in a while, sleep and try to not go crazy. But if even we fail that, we're reminded that Harvard University Health Services supplies comprehensive psychiatric care to any student seeking it. So no worries, right? There's always someone to turn to in the unlikely event that you wake up one morning and are completely overwhelmed.

It's like how the government told us to duct tape our windows in case of a biological attack, or hide under our desks when the alarm sounds.

You know, so we feel safe.

I never was bothered by all the bullshit the government fed us. Even after September 11th I never seriously thought I, or anyone I knew, might be killed by terrorists. But all this good-intentioned advice is scaring the shit out of me. I'm actually worried I'll just go nuts, suddenly, without warning, because apparently it's a Harvard epidemic. Maybe I'll brush up against someone at a party or share a glass with the wrong person and that'll be it: I'll have caught the crazy.

It's gotten to the point where I spent my time holed up in my room flipping through the course catalog and choosing which 3468 of the 3500 amazing offered classes I'd least regret not taking. Occasionally I step out to our cathedral of a dining hall and binge on frozen yogurt and Spicy Thai Peanut salad dressing until my stomach turns into a jelly-filled beach ball and my face looks like a slice of Antonio's Red Tortellini pizza. Then I go back to my room, get drunk and belligerent, get written up by the proctor who lives directly above me, and try to figure out how I'll make it through the next four years surrounded by people who actually think they know what they want to do with their lives. And late at night when I can't sleep, partially because Mass Ave is just outside my window and evidently ambulance runs are very popular between 2 and 4 AM, and partially because I can't wrap my head around the way my life just got uprooted completely at a time when its roots were actually beginning to mean something, I'll wander out into the courtyard to chain smoke and throw sticks of deodorant at squirrels, or draw massive arrays of animalistic rituals with sharpies on giant pieces of cardboard and caption them with Latin and lines from early John Keats because those slowly become the only things that seem to make sense.

And then in that absurd time late at night between dialing a number and having the girl on the other end pick up I wonder where it is all the crazy Harvard students end up once my mom can't help them anymore.





This is a work of satire.

I'm psychoanal.

If you spend any substantial amount of time with me, you should already be aware of my habit to go around diagnosing complete strangers with obscure mental disorders. I haven’t done it too much lately because I gave it up for Lent, but the urge is still as strong as ever. I’ve taken a lot of flak for this lately, mostly because people assume I’m just being a jackass.

But I’m not. See, not many people know this, but I’m actually a certified psychoanalyst. I’ve never earned a degree or even taken a single class on psychology, but it turns out that in America very few people check your credentials before you’re cited on national news, and after you’ve done that, nobody really questions you anymore.

Ever since I received my certification last spring (the circumstances of which, incidentally, are quite Mexican and surreal), I had been spending most of my time reading the news, hoping for some small gap in the public’s understanding which I could exploit for the sake of furthering my supremely unethical career. An opportunity finally arose last week during Fox News’ unique coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre, and, needless to say, I took it without so much as a moment of silence...erm, I mean, hesitation.

If you find yourself compelled to read through the article I’ve linked above—and I recommend you just don’t—note the citation of Philip Zimbardo. It’s somewhere around the 27th sentence. Do you notice anything strange about the name Philip Zimbardo? That’s right: it’s an anagram for ‘Abhor Limpid Zip,’ which, as you’ve probably figured out by now, is my name translated from English, to Sanskrit, to Chinese, back to English, then to Japanese, and then back into English again*. I admit that it really isn’t a very clever pseudonym, but to my credit, nobody has managed to figure it out yet.

So, yeah, I’m Philip Zimbardo. I really did write the book the article mentions, too—but to be fair, I really just lifted all of the ideas from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and replaced all the archaic words with equally incomprehensible jargon that I found on wikipedia and in my copy of DSM-IV, which I really only use to hide my ‘tropes**. I was worried that people would figure me out, since I’m quite certain it’s the only book on psychology written entirely in Rime Royal—or to feature a plot—but, hey, turns out it’s still just our secret. Go figure.

Chances are that right now you’re quite disgusted with me. I think that’s warranted***. I’ve lied, conned, and cheated my way into the medical profession without any regard for the consequences of my actions. Much like Darwin, I’ve published a book that will probably be construed by fanatical religious leaders as scientific basis for their destructive dogma for decades to come—due entirely (again like Darwin) to my monstrous, all-consuming ego and my insatiable craving for falsehood.

I’ll admit I have a problem. I’ve actually diagnosed myself. I have Acute Reciprocal Identity Corrective Disorder. It basically means that I’m insecure in my own sanity and I strive to correct it by critically evaluating the mental states of others. Also, turns out I’m probably gay. I’m not really sure how this happened. I blame Albert Hoffman and that blue tint at the top of some windshields****.

But you really don’t need to worry about me. Many people with my disorder have been able to lead happy, productive lives*****. In fact, according to DSM-IV, approximately 93% of all Americans aged 15-49 have at least a mild case of ARICD. And every psychoanalyst has it. Every single one.

So in the end, I say whatever. Despite my possible mental imbalances, I’ve still a certified psychoanalyst, which means I’m really in charge of who’s crazy and who isn’t. I make up my own rules, break them regularly, laugh about them, and rewrite more nonsensical ones whenever I think it will help my career. Plus, I get to publish lies and be a source for Fox News.

It occurs to me now that I’m being paid more than the President for doing the same job. And isn’t that the American dream?******

-Tim

*This is true. And so is everything else.
**That’s slang for psychotropic substances, dumbass.
***But I still don’t care.
****I swear it’s growing.
*****J.D. Salinger notwithstanding.
******Yes, it is.