Stay with me. Chapter Two was all heady stuff, and I may have lost or bored some readers. But it was necessary to set up the fact that I could not hold two ideals, the material and the spiritual, at the same time. It was either all one or the other, and I wildly swung back and forth between the two. I believe this, as much as anything genetic or stress related, led to the full onslaught of bipolar disorder that I still experience today. Chapter three returns to the story, and documents when I fully collided with mania and psychosis.
I landed in Richmond and immediately took off again. There was a country, and competitors to conquer, and while we arrived in Virginia in October I saw little of the city of Richmond, or the office, or Debra for the first couple of months.
Soon it was Christmas. I’d been traveling so much, and Debra working so many hours, that we’d barely unpacked. So on Christmas Eve we gathered between our boxes and began removing objects, pots and pans we’d always wanted, wrapped in newspaper and tape; all strewn about the living room as if kids were in the house and rummaging through all that Santa had left. As evening came people in the neighborhood lit luminaries along the sidewalks leading to their houses and we watched out the window as families left in vans and station wagons for church.
The holidays brought a break from travel and I spent most of my time in the office. At work people talked about pastors and stock car drivers, and generals from the War Between the States sat astride Monument Avenue. In Richmond there’s a road called the Powhite Expressway. I asked an old Richmonder how to pronounce it. In a very proper old Virginia accent he said, “It’s Pow-hite. There are no Po-whites in Richmond.” Coming to Central Virginia from South Florida in 1992 was like walking into a cage, all repressed and constricted, but I was impressed by the consistency of the snobbery. The office was of two factions: Those who moved in from New York as the company relocated to Virginia and those who were native to Richmond and were still suspect of all Yankees. The Founder, President, and Executive Vice President were all from New York and Jewish, and an undercurrent of anti-Semitism bubbled up when they weren’t around.
At Access America the business was simple. People traveling could lose money on things like health emergencies, lost bags, or a need to cancel. We sold insurance through travel agents to offset that risk. Debra had been hired as Access America’s Director of Marketing and managed a small overworked staff. As Director of Retail Sales my personnel consisted of a telemarketing department in cubicles around my office, and a field staff strewn across the United States, waiting for me to visit. And visit I did. The jetting about and seeing so much of the country excited me, and I took my staff and customers to expensive restaurants, drank California wines, and managed to squeeze in a bit of culture between sales calls. My appetites were huge, and I’d visit and buy at high-end shops and end many trips back in the hotel with a massage. I pulsed with energy and inspired those around me to achieve. I hired a cadre of young, good-looking, ambitious salespeople and what we did to the business in just a few months was amazing. We pushed almost all of our competitors aside and added millions to our products’ revenue.
As a boss I was open, engaging, and a bit of a prick. The sales rep who called on my mother’s travel agency was involved in a claim that came to pieces, and I judged him either guilty of insurance fraud or too stupid to continue on and fired him. Mom thought me heartless. Another rep in NYC became my foil as we spent hours arguing politics and motivations – me Buckley and him Vidal – but his revenue lagged and he was soon gone, too. I could be a poor delegator, yet I believed in giving my staff the freedom to sink or swim on their own. Some took this liberty to excel, and others, I’m sure, took my loose style and limited check-ins as a license to just go out and play tennis. My unit became the cash cow that funded the other projects the company was working on. I was an exuberant force let loose on a growing and rapidly changing business. I had never so directly applied myself with such energy, and my success and philosophy led me to believe that I could do anything.
One thing I did very well was spend money. I’m told I was unpretentious, alluring, and funny, although I remember being a bit more status conscious. I dressed in Cerruti and Armani and made copious use of my expense account entertaining while traveling. However, the results were so great that I was never questioned about the money I spent. As for the money I earned, I had begun acquiring art in Florida, but now added much more expensive works to my growing collection. I drowned in books, and the thought of a library card seemed silly as I devoured hard backs and first editions. Summer settled in, and I unexpectedly parted with my Ford. I was driving down Broad Street when I saw it, a black, gleaming Acura, sitting on a riser at a dealership as if it floated above me, just out of reach. I had no plans to buy a new car, but, just like that, I had to have it. I pulled in and told the salesman I wanted that car. He said he would pull one up from the lot for me to test drive. No, I told him, I want that car, the one on the riser. He told me he had another that was the same – black with black leather, identical. But I was insistent. I needed no test drive. I’d accept no substitute. I wanted that car. He had it pulled down and I bought it with my American Express card. I was so excitable and nervy that I’m not even sure they gave me a trade-in value on the Mustang. I proved over and over again that I could impulsively spend huge amounts on a whim.
I cannot over-emphasize how hard, and how much, we worked. Debra and I, as marketing and sales, made a great team. But every hour, in and out of the office, was Access America. I was spending the spoils of our achievement while still managing to save a bit, and life was full of stress, everything intertwined with travel insurance. Yes, life was good, but not near as good as Florida had been, where I was away from the hustle of headquarters and Debra was with the cruise line and our time was our own. No, Richmond was all work, and it was hard.
The ethic at headquarters was near abusive. The Art of War was all the rage for business leaders at this point, but if our leader read it she missed the point about art and went straight to war. Overwork and constant criticism sent manager after manager screaming to the street, and those who stayed sat with backs hunched as they kept their heads down and their eyes on their desks. Nothing anyone could do was ever good enough. Deb and her department were especially beaten down, logging long hours and pushing against impossible deadlines.
Somehow, I stayed in a sweet spot of fortune and favor. I’d always managed up well, and the sales force was pulling in more than what was demanded of us, so I among all others was given free reign. Working so hard leaves little but money and time flying by – the garden I once more tried to plant that summer in our rented house in the West End remained a dug-up pit with nothing alive in it - and soon it was Christmas again. I commissioned Louis Briel to paint a portrait of Debra and we sat as we did the year before and watched the luminaries lit along the sidewalks; this time more stunned by the negative turn the year had taken than enchanted by the holiday rituals of Richmond.
A certain numbness layered on exhaustion and there was little external validation other than the money paid. All my life I had quit when things became difficult, but here I resolved to continue. While in truth I was just the sales guy bringing in cash, I felt a sense of ownership and, doing well, wanted to do better. I insulated my people in the field from the negative gyrations at headquarters and felt a strange, almost paternal, sense of duty to make things better for them as the company and its mission became confusing. I took too much on myself, still loathe to delegate, and possibly exaggerated to myself how bad things really were. Surely, I was taking on characteristics of others at work more ill-treated and floundering than I was advantaged. Debra was downright distraught at the poor treatment received by her and her staff, and I surely projected some of the stress at home onto my own situation and took sides with the suffering instead of the successful, even though I had long been one of the winners.
Things suddenly changed from a startling upswing to a heart-wrenching fall. I feared I’d burned out too early, yet didn’t even consider exiting. The year had begun with so much promise, and here at its end it just felt as if all was over. My optimism crumbled before demands greater than I could muster the energy to counter. But again the energy surged, and I stuck with it.
There was little sense of joy in the season as my mood darkened. The travel that so excited me was now beating me down and when home the negative attitude throughout the building infused me. The days grew very short, and I spent more time surrounded by black than bathed in the light of energy and accomplishment. It had been my most successful year, but the chimes of doing well began to ring hollow. Given quotas and cost budgets for the coming year, I was unlikely to repeat and win in 1994. Instead of rising to the challenge, I surrendered to defeatist impulses and resolved to tear down all I had built up.
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This time when I was so adept at driving revenue, making money, eating out, and failing at gardening clouded my fundamental assumptions about life and business. Tacked to my wall were notes of Hayek’s concept of unintended consequences, and I saw the solution to every problem create two more problems that needed to be solved. This would be the engine of my work and my legacy, and the genesis of my doubt and despair. In a moment, to merely grow seemed pointless, and the problems solved and opportunities created were more nagging than essential. Inside my old black canvas bag, carried around for years, was a photocopy of papers from Schumpeter laying out his doctrine of creative destruction, which I, in my heady ego and creeping, excitable irrationality, all of a sudden completely misunderstood. My focus slowly shifted from the creative to the destructive, and I set about breaking things apart with no thought of a reasonable replacement, and no identifiable problem to solve.
I had it in mind that if I disassembled the competition first, and then the very company for which I worked, then something much better for consumers, the owners, the employees, and me would emerge. But first, much had to go. I began slashing costs and reorganized the sales force and applied new technologies to replace people, and it worked; sales continued to increase. I thought only I could see this, and only I could pull this off. I’d do it alone or leave it destroyed, like one of Ayn Rand’s heroes would do. I noticed too late the rift that opened up between the material and the metaphysical – the quest for knowledge that led me to a space where I knew I was right, despite anything contrary anyone else had to say.
I was a person with deep spiritual yearnings that had been left bereft for a few years and I became craven, needy of something to follow. But my objectivism, which had been like a religion, left me suspect of all leaders. I entered my 30s more anti-authoritarian than ever, yet realized that by poo-pooing all who placed themselves above me, and by lambasting all teachers, I ended up in a place where I was over my head, unwilling to thrash about on the surface begging for help. I thought I could know it all, and I couldn’t.
This is the curse of the overconfident self-taught.
I fell back on a philosophy that either I had failed, or had failed me, and found myself corralled by writers and thinkers who were humorless, childless, and, with minds so irrefutably made up, ruinous to the diversity of opinion and compassion necessary just to get by. In my inflexibility I broke, and the shattered pieces reassembled into something negative and ugly, bent on disruption for disruption’s sake. Little good could come of what I was thinking.
Either I could not be the man of my ideals, or those ideals were wrong in the first place. In the grip of much success I felt only failure as destruction infused all I thought about, all I touched. All I could do was take things down with me, for a mixture of grandiosity and depression left me convinced that what I knew was best, and what was best was that all had to be destroyed. I leaned on a philosophy that sets man apart as an end in himself, holds selfishness as a virtue, denies the existence of any god, and declares altruism evil, and entrenched all that in a sinking, blackening mind. All that was left was nihilistic emptiness. Vacant of spirit and shorn of goodness, I returned to the occult leanings I’d explored before objectivism took hold and imagined myself an agent of the antichrist, bent on exploiting the weakness I saw in others, overcompensating for the weakness I saw in myself.
Deep within, too, I was breaking things. Debra and I fell into a rut, and I let it deepen as we drifted apart. In the fall of ’93 we went to Cairo, and tinny speakers ripped by too much treble echoed the words of the prophet across the dusty city. Eyes of coffee taunted me: “Your science, your philosophy, your ethics, your business. So many details and you have them all figured out. You know nothing.” As night came the features fell off the face of the sphinx, and for a moment in the city that crept right up to its sandy paws we felt settled. Too settled. Our lovemaking, which had had the electricity of a thunderstorm, became merely electric as Debra introduced a vibrator to every act of intimacy. We had nothing to talk about, and I kept going away. The nights out, travel, and passion we had shared were easily and temptingly relived with others on the road. I began an affair with a sales manager of mine named Kelly, a fiery redhead with a lust I’d lost with Debra. She was in Ohio and I devised market tests and sales experiments to be carried out in that market just to get back to her. Her husband came home early one afternoon, just as I was getting out of the shower, but Kelly explained that I had to check out of the hotel early and was just cleaning up before boarding a flight back to Richmond. She could sell ice cubes to an Eskimo. I fell for her hard. Real hard. Her husband was bigger than me, rode a Harley-Davidson, and bought the entire story. Kelly and I went at each other again in the car at the airport, and I returned home to set all ablaze.
All I saw I wanted to tear down. I began reading Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno and often threw the tarot cards that Debra and I once read, just knowing evil would be the result. Debra may have been troubled, may have noticed my darkening outlook, but if we discussed it I don’t remember. I was too busy redecorating my office.
I placed gargoyles on the credenza and wrought iron candelabras on the cabinets and on the floor. If only I could have replaced the large window with stained glass… No one said anything, no one expressed concern, as the money kept rolling in. Debra and I travelled to Paris and I saw only the superstition of the middle-ages, pain chocolate, and espresso. There, in my dreams, and on the street when we returned home, I began to see demons. The alleys of Monmarte and the streets in The Fan in Richmond were rife with vampires and banshees, and I was up to the fight, or the merger, with the unreliable unknown. I threw the cards again and again and it seemed they always came out Death.
Even though sales revenue had increased nearly 30% for the year, I was told to cut all costs even further. Things were happening at the company: New markets, new products, and entirely new lines of business. Exciting things, and I was left out. My sales group’s value lay in driving large amounts of revenue cheaply to fund the new projects. We cut commissions to travel agents and made more of my sales group’s earnings performance-based. Cost of sales was reduced 25%, and still the money kept pouring in. Each of my salespeople had the potential to make much more money under the new commission plan, if they kept up, but their base salaries and travel budgets had been slashed and discord fumed. My conversations with each of them became arguments, and I surely would have taken it home, if I were ever at home. I began to feel trapped by my success, and at 30 years old I felt my career stall.
I became moody. Deep into an affair with Kelly, as if I could love again, I sat numb as Debra’s stress levels at work increased to the point where she had to quit. She put all of her talents and energy into a job that gave little back, and she faced a breakdown of her own. I encouraged her to resign, if only to save one of us. Her leaving her role upset the long-cherished equality in our relationship and I became resentful of her freedom and her ability to take a break while I choked on responsibility and pressure. I became quietly resentful of myself because I couldn’t take it anymore and couldn’t live up to my ideals. I became even more irresponsible with my money and flew to San Francisco to buy a $10,000 painting of a nude with flaming red hair.
Then my travel budget was cut and I spent days pacing around the office, back and forth, like a big cat in a small cage trapped in the zoo. I had ideas about everything, and burst into meetings to solve problems, all sorts of problems, whether problems existed or not. Deep into January of 1994 the ground froze and the ice needed to be chipped from the windshield. In the night sky Orion, considered for an instant, was majestic. But over the hours he became a mere stick figure turning cartwheels toward the morning. I clung to any sense of majesty I could, as I was on fire and bursting forth, not content to stew in the depression that bubbled around me. I could only tumble on.
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When I was a kid we spent summer vacations camping on Civil War battlefields in Northern Virginia. While we never made it as far south as Richmond, I’d read a lot about the Siege of Petersburg and the battle at Cold Harbor, where so-called $500 men, paid by wealthy Northerners to take their place on the front line, and Irish immigrants pinned their names and letters to families and sweethearts to their backs so that they could be identified after the slaughter of charging the lines of the soldiers of the lost cause. The notions of effort in the face of sure defeat, or sacrifice for victory, are romantic ones in the American myth, and I felt a guilty, much less life-threatening kinship with the men wasted on the battlefield; fields now silent and cultivated for tourists and re-enactors. Victory at any cost, reward after the ultimate sacrifice, resonated in a stressed mind fighting on for gains, barely knowing what it all was for, but doing it well, lost in the fight and shattered like a limb before a cannon. I gave all I had to a job, and came up rewarded in things that didn’t matter; gave up what was important for things I didn’t understand. I neglected my lover and my family and my principles and forgot the goal of leaving business to study politics and liberty, law and decorum, markets and philosophy. Deep in the throes of commerce the spoils were only money, and I suddenly believed in nothing, and doubted the reason that led me to such sure-footed ideas as the creator-granted liberties of natural law. My intellect failed, and the cannon around the crater at Petersburg roared as I charged into the pit.
I was vulnerable to big, well-conceived ideas, whether they were good ideas or not, and as I became overwhelmingly agitated and overwhelmingly cynical I spent what time I could reading Yukio Mishima. I became so caught up in his ideas of honor and immolation that I even found a nearby dojo where I could practice Kendo, a martial art of fencing, his sport, featured in the novel Runaway Horses. Kendo and dissecting Mishima’s prose became the most disciplined acts I undertook, and I practiced assiduously with every rare, spare moment.
The fencing was a revelation, to be so physical with such purpose: To leave the mind open to respond as trained, with no time to attempt to figure things out. Due to a knee injury from my teens, I couldn’t sit in the proper kneeling position, so the strict Japanese judges wouldn’t promote me in rank when I went to tournaments. But I became more adept the more I practiced. It was my first experience with any sort of meditation, and my mind opened. Unfortunately, my mind opened to the strange foreign code Mishima so painstakingly laid out in his novels. His world was one of severe duty, discipline, and service that was so unlike my freewheeling life that the books left me as confused as I was inspired. Nothing since Rand had influenced and aggravated me so much, and again the epistemology offered was completely open to misinterpretation when combined with my curiously made-up, yet roiling mind. I read Mishima and for the first time considered suicide as a sensible ending to a life fully lived.
The self-determination of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was perfectly countered by the self-immolation of Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility. My job was requiring more subservience and sacrifice, and things Japanese became more attractive as I began to see myself as the salaryman who worked until he dropped. Asia once again became a romantic, untouched place to me. Only this time, in a way, to touch it was toxic.
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Not content to be funding new initiatives while others gained assignments with greater promise, I felt cheated and left out. I had only been made Director 18 months earlier, but I felt my contribution required higher compensation and a better title, and if the company didn’t notice that some other company would.
I had eaten up the VP of Sales after I judged him inadequate and incompetent. A very nice family man, he came from IBM and wasn’t nimble enough to be the leader who could move me. So I resolved to be that leader myself. While he and another Sales Director sat and complained that marketing wasn’t giving them saleable products, I sold things. I was able to make my case to the Executive VP of Sales and Marketing, and ended up reporting directly to her. But she was the one who set the tone at the company and I just moved closer to the chaos and stress engine the company I gave it all to had become. I was still dissatisfied.
Reflecting larger ambitions, Access America changed its name to World Access. We had a conference on a cruise ship and the President of the company wanted to meet with me after dinner. Before leaving for the trip a headhunter representing a competitor who wanted to meet with me called. The job he described, running something on my own, sounded like everything I wanted, and I arranged an interview just after I’d return from the cruise. With this in my pocket I met with the President.
The ship was tossed in high seas and the wine poured freely at dinner. I overindulged and felt queasy for it. I sat with the President in the lounge and he presented a new role for me, better as he saw it. I wasn’t happy, and he took out his pipe and lit it to consider my reluctance. The smoke, the drink, the motion, and the offer all brewed in my stomach and head, and when he asked for a response I threw up in his lap. I bounded down a flight of stairs and tumbled down the last few right in front of some of the sales managers who reported to me. I bounced up, waived, and locked myself in my cabin.
I was made a Vice President, with a leap in salary and bonus.
I was still eager to meet with the competitor, but I’d begun hallucinating and I was full of dark thoughts that clouded my judgment. I accepted my new role in Richmond with equal parts ambition and resignation and cancelled with the headhunter. Just like that my office seemed smaller as the walls crept in a few inches. As I hung up the phone I had trouble getting out of my chair, its arms now clutching at my hips. I was forlorn, aggressively belligerent, and trapped.
I had been seeing a doctor. The consults began with a pain in my right shoulder. Since I was traveling all the time carrying my bag became difficult, so I started checking it, which only added to the time I spent in airports. Before cell phones this wasn’t a bad thing, as I found my only peace standing, waiting, at baggage carousels. The rest of the time I worked.
I needed to see someone about the shoulder and maybe someone about the depression, but I worked for an insurance company and knew that, in this time before HIPPA, claims information would be shared with HR at World Access and my weakness and its effect on me would be disclosed. That wouldn’t have been good for my career. The gnawing depression soon became the equal of the pain in my shoulder, which had spread to my neck, and I made an appointment with a neurologist instead of a psychiatrist. He set about treating the physical and psychic pain, used insurance codes for fibromyalgia, and wrote me prescriptions for Naprosyn and Prozac. The Prozac I paid for at the pharmacy in cash instead of through my medical insurance. No record would exist.
I was banking on the chance that, often, doctors with little training in psychiatry and no psychiatry credentials prescribe psychiatric meds. Doctors do what they’re qualified to do, and so many of them in so many different specialties feel qualified to write what they think is a simple prescription for an anti-depressant with no psychiatric consult. While this can lead to poor diagnoses and bad results, at the time this was a relief to me as psychiatry appeared nowhere on my chart. For all anyone knew I had back pain and a bit too much stress. I felt better. Then my ideas got bigger, my outlook dimmed, and soon I was seeing things.
I was climbing the walls at headquarters and itching to get back into the field, so I planned a working trip to Philadelphia where I could stay with my parents in South Jersey and work with the local sales manager. I spent some time with my parents and my sister, Stacey, but didn’t speak of where my mind was taking me. This was partially to not burden them with my far away suffering and partially because I still thought if I ignored it, it might go away.
The local sales manager and I spent one day visiting travel agencies that sold our products in New Jersey, and one day in Center City, Philadelphia. I convinced her to go to a bar or two on my old stomping grounds of South Street, and we stepped out way overdressed as two yuppies out of place amidst the punks that still prowled the street. Bacchanal was gone, but other haunts were still there and we began a bar crawl she soon tired of. She left me alone to dive further and further into the waste of my potential and, alone, I kept drinking until all the bars were closed.
I stumbled over a hose that a man was using to clean the sidewalk in front of his restaurant, and I began to throw up. He rinsed the spot and set the hose blasting on me, shouting, “Go get sick where you got drunk! Go!” I had no way to get back to New Jersey, and I didn’t really want to, yet I fell into a cab and told the driver to just drive.
Unable to speak where I wanted to go, I told him to cross the bridge and just cruise around. We’d find the house one way or another. Whenever he would complain I would throw cash into the front seat and tell him to just keep driving. Just as my wallet emptied angels guided us to park in front of my parent’s house, and I crawled up the steps and into the rising sun. On the way over the bridge I remember turning around to face the city. The skyline was so different than it was when I was a kid, and the crystal glass of the new towers reflected the lights of the squat old edifices, and the statue of William Penn now peeked from the forest of steel around City Hall. All over the city, the monuments erected far outlasted the ideals that inspired them.
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When I returned home I stopped trusting what I saw. At first there were odd tracers in my field of vision, distractions that seemed like something was there. But there never was. Then the decay began. People here and there had bones exposed and flesh peeling off of them. The clerk in the supermarket was dead, ringing up my groceries. The families in the mall, the people at the tables next to me in restaurants, the man pumping gas at the service station… They weren’t moaning and shuffling like George Romero’s zombies, they moved as anyone would and spoke clearly, yet they were dead, all of them, all turning into rotten, moving corpses. At first the visions were horrifying and filled me with terror. I’d stand wide-eyed and sweating, disbelieving the appearance of each new monster. They seemed so real I was sure they were actually there. I woke every morning into a nightmare that exceeded in fear anything my dreams could conjure up. But the visions persisted and soon became a normal occurrence as the days wore on and the dead still marched. I got used to them.
Then a man in customer service at the company, a man I’d seen now and again while getting coffee, was fired and took it badly. Escorted out with no time to collect his belongings, he returned to the building with a duffle bag and muscled past the receptionist. There was a large glass enclosed conference room off the lobby and the management team was gathered for a meeting when he burst in. Seeing only danger I judged the glass windows too thick to break and the conference table too heavy to push over. The HR Director was next to me, and judging her to be the most expendable I moved to grab and duck behind her. If this was really happening I wanted to live. If I was hallucinating the entire thing, I sure was no hero in the stories my mind made up. Anyway, the man just shouted something incoherent and left. The bag was full of watermelons that he smashed against the building. I learned later he went home and shot himself.
Days later, walking along a strip mall to get a sandwich, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was him, most of his face and head gone from the bullet. He leaned in close and told me, “Do it.” While I’d thought about it, I’d never considered actually committing suicide before, but it suddenly seemed the reasonable thing to do, and by the end of the week I’d filled out the paperwork for a gun permit. It was April, and the next Monday was my 31st birthday. Late on Friday I had a doctor’s appointment, and when I left the office I changed the message on my phone to: “Hello, this was George Hofmann. I can no longer return your call.”
At the doctor I told the neurologist about the hallucinations and referenced my plans. He confessed that he was out of his league and urged me to get immediate psychiatric treatment. He made a call and all the arrangements for me to voluntarily check-in to Charter Westbrook Psychiatric Hospital. I told him I’d go home, pack a bag, and get a ride to the hospital. By the time I got home I thought that was a terrible idea and instead I took Debra out to dinner. I was at my fake it, normal best, and we’d celebrate my birthday, the one I planned never to come, early.
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White water boils in the James right along the south side of downtown Richmond, and kayakers careen around the rocks in these urban rapids. Like the best boaters, able to smooth out a line through the rough, I presented a consistent and calm front as my emotions jumped from up to down and back again, and my moods swung, and my mind became unreliable. I encountered the ghosts my psyche set before me with more curiosity than fear, and when I was around others I drew upon all of my sales skills to act as a perfectly normal guy, untroubled, confident, and sure. I became a master at faking it.
Confused about my condition and unable to share even with those closest to me, I appeared ever more assured on the outside while inside I seethed with inconsistent turbulence and the terror of a mind askew. I never knew who I’d be when I got up: Perhaps a cowering victim of some imagined threat, perhaps overconfident and reckless. But outwardly I always acted the same. George as a happy-go-lucky businessman driven to success, still stopping to have a conversation with the receptionist, still quick to buy a round, still interested in new ideas and opinions from diverse sources and qualified commentators, still up for a laugh.
The more I faked wellness the more isolated I felt. To confide in anyone would be to reveal the freak I had become, and lose the confidence and credibility I had spent a lifetime building. In my expensive suits and careful opinions I erred on the side of appearances and gave up any chance of human connection that could pull me out of my downward spiral. I pushed away those closest to me, lest I reveal the doom I felt and confess the hallucinations that beguiled me. I faked it well. Everyone bought it. No one saw the decay of a mind which thought it ranked pre-eminent, without equal, without doubt. In fact, I doubted everything, and the more I faked being OK the more the visions came to haunt me.
There were hallucinations I knew weren’t real, but I saw, heard, or felt them as if the event was actually occurring. Only I knew it wasn’t. There were also hallucinations that presented as real and I wouldn’t know things were fabricated by my mind and not really happening. I don’t know if I had any of the latter. I guess I wouldn’t have known as they would have been my reality at that point. I do know I had plenty of the former, and my life was rich with my brain’s displacement of the horror within. Yes, I was drinking here or there, but the only drugs I was taking were the ones prescribed. I read Listening to Prozac and promptly stopped taking that medicine, and the hallucinations held on fast. The evidence was in and I was going crazy.
I had this strange sensation of standing beside myself and watching myself decompensate. It’s as if there were three Georges. One within the hallucination, one hallucinating, and one observing events from outside, and each one commented on the others’ experience. Reality tripled, one set for each of me, and I stood awash in a canvas ever-changing of all that life, and now death, could offer. This should have been terrifying, but it left me passive and curious about what might be next. I was depressed and disaffected with little energy to care. Still, I appeared well to others, or at least must have, as no one ever took me aside to ask what was wrong. I was isolated in my own fantasy and couldn’t begin to see a way out that would end the pain and confusion. The hospital that night made sense, but so did the gun next week. As dessert came I waited for a third point of view to break the tie.
At home after dinner there was a phone call waiting. The doctor was concerned that I hadn’t checked in at Charter Westbrook, and he wanted me there now. All of this was a shock to Debra, who knew I felt lost and panicked but didn’t know I was psychotic and suicidal, and she broke down from the weight of not being fully confided in by the one who counted on her the most. If there were a few of me, every one had tried to keep everything from her, and in covering-up the affair with Kelly I became comfortable hiding emotional difficulties as well. She drove me to the hospital and on the way I told her what I could in the little time we had, still hiding what I thought would hurt her the most. I asked her to put some things together in a bag for me as I’d probably be gone for a few days. All I’d brought were some books to read. When we arrived at the hospital it was late on Friday night and intake took forever until I finally got a bed and slept restless into a weekend with nothing at all to do. Finally.