Sorry, That Wasn't Me

The mania raged non-stop for six straight months, a relentless euphoria. Decisions, if you could call them that, were made on a dime. Push the envelope and dodge the shrapnel. I was invincible. No kill switch and no boundaries, blurting whatever raced through my ticker-tape brain. I was in orbit, spinning into the abyss and everybody knew it, except me of course. When the mania kicks in, you’re just along for the ride.

I was in the moment, the toast of the town, on top of my game and nothing was beyond my grasp. Anything and everything was there for the taking. I wanted it all and I knew how to get it. Watch me work. I was the smartest, cockiest, wittiest, sexiest, most charming mofo in the room. Any room. Looking back on it now, I was a punch-line.

More bourbon, more weed, more whatever ya got and “Hey man, who’s that little red head over by the jukebox?” My temper was hair-trigger and if somebody got popped in the mouth, it was all in a night’s work. It was all about the action and life was a bowl of goddamn cherries.
Seventeen thousand miles later I’d blown 12 grand, lost my girlfriend, been fired from my 10-year gig as a writer for a racing magazine and gotten banned from a racetrack that had been my second home since 1972. In August I crashed my motorcycle and burned the hell out of my leg. Two days later, I blew up the engine. The good times kept right on rolling. By summer’s end, I’d been hit with two disorderly conducts, acquired more than $600 in traffic tickets, gotten tossed out of countless bars, spent nearly $3000 on a record that may never be released, slapped a club owner, gained 15 pounds and managed to lose both of my bands and most of my friends. My life was in shambles but I still didn’t see it.

My third manic episode in just seven years and exactly like the experts tell you, bipolar disease only gets worse with age. The cycles come closer together and increase in severity. Despite the danger, the onset of mania is a welcome reprieve from the black hole of the soul crushing depression. You think you’ve got the world by the nads and nothing can stop you. Never mind that it’s all a cruel illusion. The statistics speak for themselves. If left untreated, more than 20 percent of manic-depressives kill themselves and thousands more end up in prison. Happy endings are rare.

Six months of hard living had taken its toll on my health. I’m too old to withstand this kind of sustained physical abuse. My stomach burned constantly and I developed a sinus infection and a death rattle cough that lasted for over a month. I was throwing up blood almost every morning and had to endure a painful periodontal surgery that took six weeks to heal. I couldn’t get through a day without Advil and Rolaids by the fistful. I was a medical mess.

If you had the misfortune of crossing my path between last April and September, I more than likely pissed you off, scared you, insulted you, offended you or repulsed you. At least you could avoid me, block me on Facebook, not take my calls or throw me away altogether. I can’t say I blame you. The many people I’ve wronged don’t care why. You can’t expect to get a pass just because you happen to be in the clutches of an illness that you have no control over, but I still wasn’t quite ready to admit that treatment was the only option I had left.

When the inevitable crash hits, somehow it always sneaks up on you. You know what’s coming but you’re never quite ready for it. The reversal is all but instantaneous; you simply shut down. Fun-time is over until all I could see was the wreckage. The grayness surrounds you, pressing in from all sides, a bolt from the blue freefall into the darkest depths of hopelessness and despair. The word “depression” doesn’t even begin to do it justice. It’s far worse than that. Life is stripped of all meaning and beauty and simple daily tasks become insurmountable. You’re all used up, eaten alive by guilt, fatigue and anxiety. Self-esteem nosedives and you retreat into a world of sleep, isolation and television. When you take inventory and question whether there’s anything left to live for, you’re pretty sure there isn’t. Inside, I was already dead.

So now what? In mid-March, I started seeing a psychologist and to no one’s surprise, including my own, I was classified as a bipolar I, a severe case. I quit drinking, stopped smoking dope and reluctantly put my fate in the hands of medical science. Nobody wants to be defined by their illness but at least I’d finally accepted that the time had come to own up to it. Finding the proper combination of meds is an educated guess at best, a constantly moving target. It’s a process and you can forget about miracle cures. No matter how strong your resolve, manic-depression can’t be willed away.

It’s hell to admit it, but it’s a war you can’t win. At 57, I’m starting from scratch. For the rest of my life, I’m stuck with taking ever-changing doses of anti-depressants and mood stabilizers to save me from myself.

To be continued….

To Catch a Serial Killer

Gano Smith had just shot and bludgeoned his entire family to death. I was 9, staying with my paternal grand parents in Sigourney, Iowa when the news broke that this blood-thirsty madman was running rampant in our area. Gano had always been considered a harmless and gentle man by those who knew him; a 24-year-old dullard who had been adopted at birth by this family of God-fearing farmers. Then, in the summer of 1962, he came unglued and took out the only six people who had ever shown him any kindness. The papers said he was armed and dangerous and that there was a $5,000 reward for his capture. I was thrilled. Nothing ever happened in Sigourney and God did I hate that town. The only fun I ever had there was when my older cousin Jon would come to visit and we would go to the salvage yard and look for blood and pieces of smashed skulls on the dashboards of freshly wrecked cars. Back in those days, when a TV bulletin interrupted regular programming, you could bet it was a big deal -not like today where every little thing is considered breaking news.

My grandfather owned a shotgun, but he was so stricken with emphysema by then that even I knew he was no match for an off the deep end fugitive. Grandma McCuen was an imposing woman of German descent who could throw down world-class, made-from-scratch noodles and mince meat pies, but she wasn?t gonna be much help if Gano showed up lusting for more blood, either. Her idea of a rockin? Saturday night was knitting a sweater while she watched Lawrence Welk and Billy Graham on their 10-inch black and white. So it all came down to me. Even though I?d never even seen a gun, I decided to borrow Grandpa's 12-gauge and go looking for Gano myself.

This was my first experience with sheer terror and while I couldn't explain it at the time, I relished being in the clutches of absolute fear. It made me feel alive; a welcome reprieve from the daily drudgery of this shell of a town where time itself seemed to stand still. The frequent bulletins only added to my excitement. "GANO STILL AT LARGE?MAN-HUNT CONTINUES," screamed the headline. I spent an entire day gathering weapons for my arsenal and hid them under the hand-made bedspread that my grandmother had fashioned with her chronically arthritic hands. If Gano decided to come calling in the middle of the night, I had everything I would need to stop him in his cold blooded killer tracks. As Grandma led me in my nighttime prayers, I couldn't wait for her to go to bed so I could survey my inventory. I had a bag of oranges, a butcher knife, a Louisville Slugger, a sack filled with roofing nails and my ace in the hole: a pair of golf cleats. And there was always that shotgun, which I knew was loaded. I lay awake all night, listening to the freight trains rumbling by a mere football field away. I was banking on Gano being on one of those trains and he was gonna get his this time.

Sometime around sun up I must've drifted off to sleep when suddenly I was startled awake by someone shaking me. A large, menacing figure was standing over me, mumbling indecipherably. Without hesitating, I reached under the covers and whacked Gano right between the eyes with a golf shoe and followed up with a shot to the back of his head with the oranges. He stumbled and fell to the floor with a dull thud and then started to moan. But it wasn't Gano after all. It was grandma, and she'd gotten up at the crack of dawn to make me homemade sugar donuts.

Jumbo Jets and Cigarettes

When Iraq invaded the Kuwaits in 1991, the almighty USA was so caught up in our bully on the playground imperialist giddiness, we failed to deliver the knockout one-two that would have driven Sadaam to his sorry-ass knees. "Okay dick-weed, here's the deal: We'll stop pummeling you with our arsenal of smart bombs if, and only if, you agree to take over the daily operations of Kuwaiti Airlines." That's it, you delusional prick.ÿ A no strings attached gift from your American brethren and this time, no tricks up our diabolical sleeves.

I have no idea what the general Kuwaiti populace is drawn to. I do know that their work week runs Saturday through Wednesday and I have a pretty firm grasp on what they eat, the religion they by and large embrace and I know that they have more oil than Vegas has peep shows. They also seem to have more than their fair share of beautiful women; women who have rubbed themselves against the fabric of so-called western world sophistication without being sullied by its tackier elements. And I know one more thing: their airline might as well be run by the Keystone Kops, brain damaged division. The planes are cold, drafty and hopelessly outdated. Maintenance? Minimal at best. Nothing works. The toilets won't flush, my foot rest was sheered off at the base and forget about watching a movieÿ?ÿtheÿ electric motor that drives the screen to drop doesn't engage. There are no headphones and the closest thing to music was the non-stop wailing of over a dozen babies as they gulped for air through the purple-poison haze of 43 rows of chain smoking nicotine freaks.

My flight was scheduled to depart from Chicago at 7:15 in the morning and like a sucker, I arrived an hour and a half early as advised. I at least had the good sense to call ahead and was assured that Flight 116 non-stop to Amsterdam was right on time. At exactly 7:45, we were instructed to board for takeoff. I figure anytime you're stuck with flying out of the daily debacle that is O'Hare International, anything less than two hours behind schedule is a moral victory. Killer legal weed, the love of my life (or so I thought at the time) and 10 glorious days of pure European decadence were only an ocean away.

We take our seats and within moments, one of the battalion of baby brats right across the aisle from me burps up a lapful of gross-out goo that looks like something between bile and a liquefied Hershey bar all over his mother's white cotton pants suit. She's the world's most ill-prepared mother. She's got no towels, no baby wipes, not so much as a lousy Kleenex and she starts calling her baby names like "stupid little shit-head" and "worthless bastard" and airline personnel are nowhere to be seen, like vanished. By now, some of the passengers are gagging and puking too, and the baby is screaming like he's been dipped in boiling oil and still no sign of the crew in sight. There's a man with ping-pong sized growths all over his face sitting in the very rear corner of the plane trying to stay invisible and finally, reluctantly, when he can't stand another second of the shrieking and the piercing stench, he struggles to his feet and tries to hand a Kleenex to the near hysterical mother. She recoils in horror and yells with a voice that sounds like gravel in a blender; "You can keep your disease ridden tissues you filthy leper! Can somebody please help me here?" The man, this poor, frightened, sweet soul of a man who made the Elephant Man look like Paul Newman at his most dashing and was just trying to lend assistance, slinks back to his seat and covers up his hideous face with hands that look like shriveled bacon. Finally, a prim flight attendant with a Cleopatra haircut and an undisguised expression of disgust, emerges from her hiding place and tosses a soggy towel in the general direction of the mayhem. Wordlessly, she sneers and disappears again.

Two hours crawl by. No music, no explanations, not even so much as a crummy cocktail as a filled to capacity jet-liner perches on the tarmac like a giant, dead bird. Outside, the thermometer hovers at 25 below. Finally, a catering truck wheels up to the rear hatch and the door swings open. Arctic air rushes along the fuselage and three stewardesses scurry up the aisle like cockroaches, seeking warmth. A small army of expressionless catering employees begin their maneuvers, methodically loading tonight's meal of glorified TV dinners into several racks of warming ovens. The temperature in the back of the plane drops almost instantly to the near freezing mark and within seconds, you could see your own breath. Needless to say, Mickey Mouse Airlines Incorporated doesn't have a single blanket onboard. This is what you get for enlisting the services of the only airline left in the universe that still allows smoking during a flight.

At 10:45, a full three and a half hours after the scheduled departure time, the captain delivers a garbled apology in a thick Arabic accent but still doesn't bother with an explanation. The ancient aircraft shudders in protest as our fearless leader applies full throttle to the power source, an overworked Rolls Royce that has surely been in action since the Eisenhower administration. Something didn't feel right....ÿ I've flown enough to know when an aircraft ought to be achieving lift-off and this flimsy, vomit soaked beast clearly should have been in the air by now. I glanced at one of the flight attendants and could tell by the look on her perfect little face that I wasn't the only one who thought we were about to die. We barely cleared the fence at the end of the runway and almost clipped a grove of oak trees due east of the airport. Babies scream, the leper bows his head in prayer and 43 rows of nicotine junkies from all over the world simultaneously fire up their poison of choice.