The Same Caged Bird

—1973-75  

       On my twenty-first birthday, August 7, 1973, I sat on my parents’ back porch crying, considering suicide. My parents didn’t know what to do. They called Dekalb Memorial Hospital and arranged for an intake at the psychiatric ward. My father took me there at the appointed hour and I gave up all semblance of the outside world by turning over my personal effects.

         I don’t remember if my mother had packed clothes like she had for my stays at camp as a child. She must have. I remember shaking my father’s hand awkwardly, like this was some known rite of passage, entering a locked ward. I surrendered. Beyond this door, we are the same caged bird.

#

         I had come home from college to stay with my parents for the summer. My plans were to return for my senior year. This didn’t happen. Not long after arriving home, I saw my old girlfriend Sue. She’d visited me a time or two in Carbondale, one of the most notorious campuses in the country for partying and alternative lifestyles. In my eyes, our relationship was over. Sue attended a Bible college not far from where my parents lived and I visited her there. I sat in my Mustang telling her about my first time sleeping with a man. Her reaction was that it made me more intriguing. So that wasn’t going to work as a breakup line.

         I thought I had symptoms of an STI. As it turned out, I didn’t have one. They were probably psychosomatic symptoms due to guilt for my “sin” in the eyes of my ever-present Catholic God—sex before marriage, let alone with a man. I began to have symptoms of anxiety and depression—feeling I had to escape from where I was but not knowing how. I would often move to a different place, thinking it would ease my discomfort. Sometimes when eating I’d become warm, feeling a strange sensation of having to get out of there.

         Today I know they were panic attacks, but at the time I had little idea what was going on. I never mentioned what was going on inside me as I didn’t feel my parents could understand. There was no problem getting tranquilizers from my parents’ small town family physician since he supplied both of them.

         So began my introduction to prescription drugs for mental illness. These drugs also brought on a deep depression beyond the normal depressive episodes I had experienced in the past. I made many attempts to go on as normal. I had become withdrawn and quiet which brought so much attention to myself because this was not the usual me. My friends wondered what was going on and I didn’t know what to tell them either. I made many attempts to get nicely dressed to go out with friends but ended up feeling so drained from depression and sedated from medication that I ended up staying at home, usually going to bed.

         All my life I’d heard the term “nervous breakdown,” but had no idea what it looked like. I worried about it constantly and tried to understand in my mind what constituted one. Eventually, I just remained in bed. It didn’t occur to me that this was what a nervous breakdown looked like.

#

         I’ll tell you where I am. The Dekalb Hospital Psychiatric Unit. I shake my father’s hand. It doesn’t make sense that we do this. They lock the door after me. I don’t know how I ended up here but it feels inevitable. I have a room and a roommate. His name is Tom and his mind races. He takes Stelazine for it. He is lucky, I think, to understand, unlike me, what goes on in his mind.

         I hold a paperback version of the New Testament. I can’t recall where it came from. A dream of salvation washes over me like a wave that doesn’t move me. I dwell on when I told Susan I’d slept with a man in Carbondale. He, Bruce, not Susan, stays on my mind.

         I don’t know what to say so I don’t speak. If it’s going to be said by me, someone will have to pull it out. I’m married to the nurses’ padded shoes, the locked door. Poems cry in the night—in my head a jumble of words that will one day be thrown like dice onto a page. That is if my hands still know what to do with themselves. That is if I still have a thimbleful of understanding. This is what it means to be human: to pray when you have no other god to turn to, strangled by the things of this world.

         The community room frightens me and I avoid it. The people there have nothing to do with me. They are genderless and misshapen. They remove sharpness from our lives, prepare a narrow room for crafts: painted figures, copper plates of praying hands applied to wood. I cannot lift my feet enough so I shuffle in my socks. We are vacuum sealed. My boat is unmoored.

         My roommate, Tom, is a hippie type with long hair who meditates on his bed. Part of my mental illness reveals itself in muteness. Tom is a nice guy who tries to get me to talk about what I’m feeling. Some days I become totally introverted, not returning for an hour, even longer. On outings, people hurry by us, fearful one of us, spooked, will throw off a reined-in self. We take that institutional feel and smell with us to the movies, to the park—the blue ID band hugging our wrists. I remember during one outing, I become nearly catatonic, staring at the ground.

         Back in the ward, a screaming woman is restrained. Pills from tiny paper cups tumble into my palm like jumping beans. Blue Valium blooms. My roommate meditates.

         In dark, I imitate his breathing.

#

         There were forgettable sessions with a shrink. A couple of times he invited my parents to a session, where I would break it to them that I was homosexual. I was in such a sorry state that they said little other than ask the psychiatrist how he could help me, a way to avoid accepting what I’d just told them or sure that I could be “cured” of this too. What would the neighbors think?

         I would frequently take staff aside and ask them if they could help me, but I was trapped within myself with no words to express what I was feeling. They would ask typical clinical questions—Did I hear voices? Was I having thoughts of self-harm, etc.—but I didn’t fit any of these categories. I should have at least said, “I am trapped,” as that would have come closest to what I was experiencing. I was so confused and disturbed I couldn’t think straight and whatever feelings I had were immobilizing me. I was so withdrawn I didn’t know whether I would ever come fully back to the land of rational beings who went on with ordinary life.

         The sedative effects of my meds caused me to shuffle when I walked the hard floors in hospital slippers. I was so outwardly calm, no one imagined the panic I felt inside. I left the ward with one of the crafts I’d made, a wooden plaque with a metal imprint of praying hands glued to it. That and drugs. In the ward, I learned what Sexton truly meant by “begging for dope.” I’d done that unabashedly. Valium became my tiny, beautiful blue wafer. And there was Mellaril among many others.

         The parade of psychotropic drugs began and has never ended.

#

         I was able to stay out of bed all day.

         At the time, this didn’t seem like much progress but it was. I was doped up and functioned slowly. The hospital hooked me up with a social worker, the first in a long line of therapists and psychiatrists. He started me on a form of sex-surrogate therapy. It utilized something from the ‘50s called systematic desensitization. I preferred drugs. I never mentioned to my parents anything about what was going on in therapy.

         I needed a woman who would be willing to go through this partner therapy with me. I had become close with my friend, Frank’s sister Lois, so I asked her and she agreed. I don’t know what this process was supposed to do for me; I assume make me straight.

         Lois and I were not permitted to linger or vary the prescribed progression. First, light hugging repeated a couple of times. Then our first kiss. Again and again. Later, some caressing of breasts. We did this at her friend Joanne’s place in front of the fancy-scrolled bathroom mirror. Why the mirror? In any event, it made both of us feel creepy and we discontinued it.

         Now I can’t imagine why I didn’t speak up to the therapist who assumed that no one could be happy being gay. I yearned for someone to acknowledge that homosexuality was okay. I was terrified of ever having sex with another man as I associated it with having a nervous breakdown, willing to try anything to avoid going through what I had just gone through.

         In retrospect, after reading about such therapies, it’s likely the therapist was using techniques for treating phobias. I did not have a phobia of the female body, for I’d been sexually involved with a woman before. The relaxation was supposed to kick in as I progressed to further physical intimacy with Lois. The assumption was that I would become comfortable with the female body.

         I stopped seeing this therapist and moved on. I don’t remember how this decision was reached, but I don’t think he knew what to do with me and was content to terminate our work together. The order of therapists is a blur, but I know I went to Dr. Frank, one of a couple of psychiatrists in my parents’ town. My parents also arranged for me to see a young priest named Father Hermes who hailed from their hometown. They were hopeful he could set me on a “straight” path more in keeping with Catholic doctrine or help ensure I would get over this troubling “phase.”

         I was sexually attracted to him (not what my parents were praying for); his black mustache giving him that romantic desperado look for which I was a sucker. We met one day in his office and had an awkward conversation. I was looking for help; in what form, I didn’t know. I brought up my homosexuality and he dodged it.

         “I tried therapy here in DeKalb but it didn’t really help.” I described a very modest, edited version of my groping Lois in the bathroom.

         “Perhaps there are support groups you could attend.”

         “What would those look like?”

         “Something along the lines of AA. I’d try calling the county mental health line. Do you come to Mass regularly?”

         “Yes, but I still can’t seem to move on.” I was hoping he would say something that would support my being gay, but I was barking up the wrong tree. He held to the Catholic party line. Did there exist anyone in authority of any kind to tell me that I need not live a disturbed life because of my orientation? Could I find someone to be open with about my sexual preference? I was so isolated living at home in a conservative small town. The topic of being gay was not discussed. My closest friends at least accepted me or so I believed. I searched for any evidence of gay life. The closest I got to it was finding talk shows that dealt with the topic. One time my father caught me watching one and laid the guilt on saying, “You don’t need to be watching that.”

         I didn’t even know about the concept of “coming out.” My parents and therapists treated my involvement with a man as a one-time aberration from the norm. My mother did have an inkling of what all this could mean as she said to me once: “I just hope this doesn’t ruin your life,” an acknowledgment that such a reality doomed me to despair and sin.

         It was the age of all kinds of social liberation. I assume my parents thought I had control over such desires; at the same time being “this way” may have made them wonder why I had always been different. So “sensitive.”

         I got a job at a local restaurant but wasn’t much of a help to my employers in my drugged, depressive state. They continually looked at my haphazardly shaved face like I was some sort of zombie which I really was.

#

         In elementary school my sister, Emily, had become best friends with a classmate named Michelle who would chase me all over the school’s paved lot. It mostly annoyed me. In any event, as the years went by, the three of us became nearly inseparable. One afternoon we were at my parents. Emily was preoccupied with a puzzle while Michelle and I watched TV. We frequently hung out in this ‘70s TV room with wood paneling halfway up the walls and psychedelic wallpaper above. A two-piece sectional sofa sitting on cylindrical legs and my dad’s faux-leather recliner were like family.

         I don’t recall how Michelle put it to me, but the two of us disappeared upstairs to my bedroom and onto my bed. My heart and my body weren’t into it. I thought of her in a sisterly manner and was not at all attracted to her. We wrangled around on top of the covers and I clumsily removed her blouse and felt her breasts through her grey bra. She rubbed my crotch, which didn’t feel right. This whole thing felt too much like incest and led nowhere.

         She was yet another person whose message was that being gay was not acceptable. I know that she was, like that first therapist, trying to “help” me, but the message I got was that being gay was not okay. She’d always had a crush on me, so I knew she had feelings and that this attempt to set me on “the right path” came from a good, possibly selfish, place.

         And I did want to be saved.

         Help came from an unexpected source, my brother, Tony. He and his wife lived in Evanston and knew a Gestalt therapist. I began to go into their place on Sunday evenings and my brother would take me to see him the next day. During one session, there was a moment that began a kind of recovery. I was sitting in the therapist’s basement office with my brother somewhere behind me.

         I said to the therapist, “I think I’m homosexual.” I knew that I was, but having been not listened to so often I still struggled to even say the words “I AM a homosexual.” The world did not end, and he didn’t judge the statement or question its reality. Also, I felt somewhat accepted now saying this in front of my brother, someone who cared about my welfare, yet someone I hadn’t expected to be a much-needed support.

#

         During this time, when I was on hiatus from finishing my senior year of college, I began one of the most important relationships in my life and that was with pornography, sex shops, and theaters. To say my upbringing was sexually repressed is a big understatement. I had glanced at Playboys when I babysat neighbor children whose parents had them on hand and used to masturbate to my brother’s art appreciation book; it fell open like clockwork to this one Picasso print I frequently used as an aid.

         Paperback Grotto was an adult porn shop in DeKalb, the first in a line of such shops I’ve made home. The front of these stores is always the same: pornographic magazines lined up on racks along the walls catering to every fantasy along with all sorts of “marital aids.” There’s always a back room with video booths, where you can bring bodies alive with quarters. Some booths had glory holes where a penis could easily fit. I didn’t take part in sexual activity but got off on the whole forbidden and exciting aura of the place, including the arousing smells.

         I’d buy a couple of gay magazines and think I was in heaven, knowing this type of activity was celebrated in some circles, as seedy as they might be. Surely there was nothing wrong with being gay if people performed acts like this. Sadly, this was the only form of gay affirmation I had. I was allowed to be a sexual being here. That was most important. The rest of me didn’t exist. This began a split in my personality where this version of me cruising pornographic bookstores was an alter ego that had little contact with the rest of my personality.

         There was also the me who was still, in whatever sense, a Catholic. I remember one Holy Week being in a dirty booth at Paperback Grotto one minute and at Mass with my mother shortly after.

         Still on hiatus from college, I occupied the same room I’d grown up in. It had some things added to it over the years, including a desk my mother had once used regularly. One night when I arrived home, my father started screaming at me. “What the hell is wrong with you? Get in here!” I faced his enraged countenance not knowing what was going on.

         “How dare you bring those filthy magazines into this house? Your mother is beside herself. She found that garbage of yours in her desk. You’re disgusting.”

         “I’m really sorry. I had no idea—”

         “Get it out of the house, and if you ever bring anything like that here again, your bags are on the street.”

         I knew this was no idle threat; I believed him. I was shaking as I thought my personal world couldn’t get any more insecure and scarier, when, in fact, it could. The prospect of being homeless had never occurred to me.

         “That’s the thanks we get for trying to help.”

         “I’m sorry.”

         “I thought seeing Father Hermes might make you come to your senses. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

         Now I felt really guilty about my attraction to the priest. There was nothing I could say. I was shaking with fear.

         “Go to bed. I can’t stand looking at you.”

         I remember to this day the cover of that gay porn magazine: a very explicit scene of a blowjob. One guy is standing on a sofa and another is giving him head. A therapist later pointed out to me that I had subconsciously set this up, that there was nothing “accidental” about my mother finding the magazines.      

#

         That spring my mother had a helpful idea. Why didn’t I take a couple of summer classes at the local state university to get me back in the swing of things? I took her advice for once and registered for a couple of courses. The point was that I could occupy my mind in a positive way and clear away some of the preoccupations that clouded my thinking.

         Still anxious and depressed, I’d started seeing yet another new therapist, a psychiatrist at the same facility, Mercyville, where my mother had been institutionalized for post-partum depression. Several months after my birth, she had threatened to kill me. She had terribly neglected me and I’ll never know how else she mistreated me. Now she was weary of my problems, my spaciness. She’d never been able to stand it when people were not fully functioning. There was always that fear of breaking down herself. I think I reminded her of her own institutionalization. She needed to keep going and had to be around people who were also highly functioning. Even when we were children, she seemed annoyed when we were sick and couldn’t wait until things returned to normal. At this time, we didn’t discuss what being “put away” was like for each of us.

         I thought of my great grandmother who’d surrendered both her brother and her son to an Iowa asylum where both had died. Who took them there? Did anyone speak?  Did they imagine what tomorrow would be like? The day after? The day after that? Could I unravel the threads of insanity, the roots of our family tree binding me to earth?

         My parents didn’t trust my driving out of town while being so medicated, so my mother took me to therapy appointments at Mercyville. One afternoon I was on campus and forgot I was supposed to meet her to go to my shrink appointment. When I arrived home she was furious.

         “Where the hell were you?”

         “I’m really sorry. I forgot. I hurried back as soon as I remembered.”

         “You’re so goddamn strung out on drugs you don’t know what you’re doing! I can’t take much more of this.” Of course, it was about her. She was angry about trying to explain things to relatives, but more importantly, to neighbors. What the hell was wrong with her son?

#

         I told my best friend, John, about my breakdown as we swam in the humid summer air in the evenings. He had very little to say, which puzzled me. I had been in love with him for a while though he didn’t know it. Or maybe he did. How would I know? I did know he was also struggling with his sexuality. It’s amazing how much goes unspoken. Ideally, we would have supported one another, but both my gay encounter with a man and my breakdown frightened him, and I could tell he was not the same, that he was not able to be there for me.

         Like any college town, the main drag of DeKalb was lined with bars. One evening when going to meet some friends I hadn’t seen in a while, John had to pull over to the side of the road. I stepped outside to get some fresh air and fight the urge to vomit. The dizziness from mixing Valium with alcohol should have been alarming.

         After a while at the Uptown, he turned on me, making it clear to my friends that I’d had a nervous breakdown. It was a shocking and awkward moment. They couldn’t understand why he was being so cruel either. He said it in such a manner as to show his distaste for my weakness and vulnerability.

         He added, “I thought you were such a brilliant mind.” This revealed his jealousy at my intellectual bent. Evidently, John had resented me at some level for a long time and wanted to punish me for something. And he couldn’t come to terms with his own homosexuality. He was punishing me for being who I really was. What he really was. I never recovered from this betrayal.

#

         The two summer courses at the university provided me with some real recovery. I began to think about going back to school in Carbondale. I’d registered and withdrawn a couple of times that year from Southern Illinois University where I’d attended.  But I was getting an inkling that I could survive in that familiar environment. My parents, really surprised, felt I wasn’t ready, plus Southern represented the free-thinking environment that had led to my emotional collapse. And I wasn’t ready. But I would never be.

         I truly took a leap of faith. I’ve always believed in God, and still do, although the nature of this entity has changed over time. The strength I needed to make this happen did not come from me. To me it proved the existence of a higher being because something took over for me and got me back to school in Carbondale.

         I remember that early morning when I left home once again. My parents were still in bed when I said goodbye. They were really scared for me and didn’t have the faith that I believed I had. They told me to call when I arrived, and I said I’d find a pay phone and do so. My mother wished me the best through her tears.

         It was the hardest goodbye of my life. I headed downstairs, gathered my things and loaded my car. Soon I’d be back in the town that had been the scene of my crimes living in a tiny, tin trailer on the edge of town, an area designated as “tornado alley.”