It's Kind of a Funny Story

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

“How’s biology class?” Mom asked.

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

“Fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soldier, what is the problem?

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

Get over it. Eat it.

I can’t.

You know why that is?

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

twelve

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

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

“I think I have a serious depression.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It started last fall.”

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

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

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