The Trouble Boy, page 7
The group was led by one of the nurses. Toby wondered why it wasn’t led by a counselor.
“Today we’re going to start by discussing a goal we have,” the nurse said.
They went around the circle.
“I’m going to try to eat dinner tonight,” said an anorexic girl.
“Good!” the nurse said.
“I promise not to wake everyone up when I go to the bathroom,” said an old man with three days’ growth of beard.
“I’m sure everyone will appreciate that,” the nurse said.
“I’m taking all my meds,” said a thirtysomething woman in a sweatsuit.
“Wonderful!” the nurse said.
Some of the residents didn’t answer, because they didn’t understand the question. Sometimes the nurse prodded them for an answer; other times she just let it go. An old black woman seemed comatose when it was her turn.
“That’s a very nice sweater, Trudy,” the nurse said, referring to the woman’s red sweater decorated with a grinning Santa Claus. “Are you getting ready for Christmas?”
The woman had no response.
When it was Toby’s turn, he said, “My goal is to leave. My parents are coming tomorrow to pick me up.”
“Yeah!” shouted one of the patients.
“Now,” the nurse said, “is that a very realistic goal?”
“I think it is,” Toby said.
“But you just got here, didn’t you?” the nurse said. “Maybe after group, some of you could speak to Toby and welcome him to the floor.”
“I don’t need welcoming,” Toby said. “I’m about to leave.”
But no one heard him.
“Has anyone here seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?” the nurse asked. “Well, we like to think being here is nothing like that.”
But it was exactly like that. Sure, it was co-ed, and there was carpeting, and no one was getting the shit shocked out of them or having their frontal lobes removed, but the inactivity, the restlessness, the feeling of being trapped—it was all the same.
After group, a patient named Gloria sat down next to Toby. She was a mousy woman with short hair. “You’re a Yale student, right? Do you want to talk about why you’re here?”
“I’d rather not,” Toby said. He was sick of talking about why he was there to people who had no interest in helping him get out.
“I think you’ll find it’s not so bad. I’ve been here six weeks and I’ve found this environment very healing once I accepted it.”
“Why are you here?” Toby asked.
“Now, you’re not going to tell me, so why should I tell you?” she said with a triumphant smirk. “But you hang in there. I know you’ll be fine.” She gave Toby an awkward hug, and then went to sit with someone else.
Toby sat reading for a few minutes, and then Gloria came back. “You didn’t mind that I gave you a hug, did you? Because I’m just like that, you know, I like to show my feelings, and sometimes other people don’t like that, so I just wanted to make sure it was okay with you.”
“It’s fine,” Toby said. “Don’t worry about it.” Just go away, he thought.
A girl with hollow eyes ringed with too much eyeliner sat down next to him. She had a dancer’s body, and was wearing a skirt over a black leotard. “I heard you talking to Gloria,” she said. “I’m from Yale, too. The pharmacology school. I’m Cassandra.”
Toby introduced himself. Cassandra had been there for six weeks as well, and had been hospitalized for an attempted suicide. “I wanted to read the copy of the PDR—you know, the Physicians’ Desk Reference—that they have in the office, and they wouldn’t let me. I mean, I’m a graduate student; I need to have something interesting to read. They eventually let me go home and get my books.”
“You went home?” Toby asked.
“I told them I had to go home to feed my cat. If I didn’t, he would die.”
“Why did you come back?” Toby asked.
“I didn’t feel like I was ready to leave,” she said.
At that moment, the residents on the floor with smoking privileges were being marshaled together for their hourly trip outside. “My whole life revolves around cigarettes,” muttered a man waiting in line. Toby had been dying for a cigarette for the past eight hours, but he didn’t have smoking privileges, so it was useless to think about it.
“Last week there was a jumper during the smoke break,” Cassandra said. “Someone jumped over the fence into the parking lot and ran away.”
“What happened to him?” Toby asked.
“Nothing,” Cassandra said. “Everyone cheered.”
The time went slowly, as if life were going by at twelve frames per second. Toby was hungry, but he refused to eat the food given to him at lunch and dinner. He had gone to the bathroom twice, but all that had come out were long streams of diarrhea, as if the stress in his body had stopped him from solidifying his bowel movements. He noticed the bathrooms didn’t contain real hooks for towels and clothing, but safety hooks that could only support the weight of a towel or article of clothing before they gave way on their hinges. Toby thought about the ways he could kill himself in this environment. Surely the shower curtain could be twisted into a rope, and the doorknob could be used as a hook. He didn’t want to commit suicide, but the place made him think about it.
Toby knew he could not give in to his natural reaction to scream and sob and break things. If he did that, he would be here for six months. The people running this place were sick, sick people, he decided, nearly as sick as their patients. It gave them power to tell normal people they belonged in the lockup.
Toby realized he would have to fake sanity if it killed him.
At 7 P.M., Toby met with Dr. Steinberg, the head of psychiatry, along with Dr. Sexton and a few other doctors. Dr. Steinberg was a little bald man with glasses, perhaps nearing fifty.
This was the most difficult thing Toby had ever done in his life. He had to convince these people, these people who had every reason not to believe him, that he was sane and did not belong here.
“I understand you don’t want to be here, Toby, but you’ve entered into a system,” Dr. Steinberg said. “Now, why don’t you tell me your side of the story?” He had a nasal, slightly whiny tone.
Toby told his entire story. He was logical, penitent. This is the best acting job I’ve ever done, he thought. I want to scream and cry in rage at these people, but instead I’m coming off as clearheaded as the next undergraduate.
“Have you met your new roommate yet?” Dr. Steinberg asked.
“I don’t need to meet my new roommate,” Toby said. “Because I’m not staying here. I need to be let out, or at least be allowed to stay in the infirmary.”
“That might be a possibility,” Dr. Sexton said. Toby was surprised they hadn’t thought of this before.
“I spoke with your mother,” Dr. Steinberg said, changing tack. “I understand your parents are flying out tonight.”
We’re making progress, Toby thought. “Yes,” he said, “they’re picking me up. I’ll go anywhere until then, back to the infirmary, wherever, but I can’t spend the night here. I’m not crazy; I don’t belong here.”
“Of course, Toby, that’s a natural reaction to this situation,” Dr. Steinberg said, smiling.
Toby wanted to kill the man.
“Do you feel you can handle going to classes alongside Jim?” Dr. Steinberg asked.
“I have nothing against Jim,” Toby said. “I mean, I’m upset about what he said, but I know he did what he did because he was embarrassed.”
“Are you embarrassed, Toby? What are you embarrassed about?” The way he asked the question made it seem prurient.
“I know I shouldn’t have slept with Jim, ,and we shouldn’t have used the common room. I’m embarrassed that I had myself committed without knowing what it meant. And I’m embarrassed that I’ve taken up so much of your time and trouble.” There, that should be enough, Toby thought. I have laid myself down at your feet.
Toby sat outside the meeting room and tried to look as stable as possible while they discussed his case. He fantasized about the enormous lawsuit he would like to file, but he knew he would have no case, that he had signed his life away the night before. It was such a simple thing to do, as easy as signing a credit card slip. Now he feared that if he stayed one more night, this could become permanent.
In the hallway off the common room, a woman was screaming, and two aides were throwing a blanket over her to keep her quiet. Toby averted his eyes.
Dr. Sexton sat down next to him.
Oh, God, please, Toby thought.
“Do you have all your things?” she asked.
Toby nodded and exhaled.
“I’m taking you to the infirmary. Your parents can pick you up tomorrow.”
Toby’s parents arrived at the infirmary at eleven the next morning, fresh from their red-eye. His mother and father embraced him.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Toby said.
By the time they had checked into the Holiday Inn, it was nearing lunchtime. Toby didn’t want to be seen on campus, especially not with his parents. His father went out to get pizza for the three of them.
“I wish you could explain all this to me,” Toby’s mother said, as the two of them sat together in the hotel room. “What does this mean? Did you really rape this guy?”
“No!” Toby shouted. “Don’t you understand anything about what happened?”
“Explain it to me, then.”
Toby did his best. His mother started to cry.
“This is such a shock to us,” she kept saying, as she blotted her face with tissues and then attempted to repair her makeup. “I mean, you can’t just go around telling people you’re going to commit suicide.”
“I know that,” Toby said. “I’ll never do it again.”
That evening, a Saturday, they had dinner at the best restaurant in town, a restaurant students rarely dined at without their parents. Toby was terrified he would see one of his classmates. His parents were under strict instructions to say they had been passing through the area and thought a visit would be nice. No one could ever know the truth.
Lubricated by the wine, Toby’s father made a last-ditch attempt to explain the allure of the female anatomy.
“I just wish you knew,” his father said in a low voice, “how good it feels to put your prick inside a woman’s cunt.”
“Oh, Simon!” his mother said. “Just leave him alone!”
“I’m trying to get him to understand this. Maybe he doesn’t know about it.”
Toby’s mother turned to him.
“What I don’t understand is the whole bisexual thing,” she said. “Does this mean you might start dating a girl?”
“I don’t know!” Toby said. “Do we have to talk about this now?”
“We’re just trying to understand,” Toby’s father said. “Homosexuality is a very new thing to us.”
“He’s bisexual!” Toby’s mother shouted across the table. “That means he likes men and women!”
“If you both don’t shut up, I’m leaving and going back to the hotel,” Toby said. He never spoke this way to his parents, but they were getting out of control.
It took years before they ever understood.
Surely this wasn’t the best way to do this, Toby thought at the time.
But how else could he have done it?
On Monday, Toby met with the dean, the college’s shrink, and his three roommates. He hated them, but all he wanted was his freedom. Everyone agreed that Toby would move into a new room. Steve and Colin helped him move his belongings up to what was generously called a “psycho single” on the fifth floor of the dorm. Psycho or not, Toby was thrilled. He didn’t want roommates anyway, he decided, and he was happy to have a room of his own, though that didn’t quell his shame and embarrassment over what had happened.
Over the next few months, Toby fell into a deep depression. Nothing in his freshman year had turned out the way he had hoped it would; he kept kicking himself for screwing up what was supposed to be the start of a new life: new friends, new experiences, a boyfriend. Toby’s fear—irrational as it was—that everyone knew what had happened with Jim made it difficult for him to be social, and the resulting solitude drove him further into his despair. He felt like he was being forced right back into the closet.
He started seeing a shrink who put him on Paxil, one of the panoply of antidepressants currently medicating the student body. Buoyed by the medication, Toby slowly made new friends, whom he appeased by spinning a tale of his own voluntary selection of a single room; he was tired of roommates, he explained, after four years at boarding school. He didn’t have a close-knit group that went on beer-drinking parties, but he found friends who occupied his free time with coffee at the Daily Caffé or drinks dates at the Anchor Bar. He adopted a cat at the pound that he kept illegally in his dorm room.
As the school year progressed, he thought about the lockup every day, though each time the memory faded more and more, like an outline of reality that is not the thing itself. Within a year, it was like something that had happened to another person.
In January of his freshman year, as Toby was traversing the icy flagstones in front of Branford College, he ran into Dr. Steinberg.
“How are you doing, Toby?” he asked in his nasal-tinged voice.
“Fine,” Toby said. “I still think about it sometimes, but for the most part, things are okay.”
“Just remember, Toby, you’re a normal student at Yale University. Totally normal. A normal student.” The doctor kept repeating it over and over like a mantra, even as he waved goodbye. Toby wished he would shut up.
As he walked back to his dorm room along the paths of Old Campus, Toby looked at his fellow students for hints, for clues. They were the best and the brightest, the smartest in the nation, right?
They know nothing, he thought. They know nothing at all.
4
That afternoon, when the mail arrived at the CityStyle offices, there was a large envelope with my name on it. I opened it and out slid a pair of cheap-looking magenta panties. I stared at them in horror.
“Fan mail?” Donovan laughed, as I blushed.
I held the sheer undergarment up to the light. Attached was a tag, inviting me to a “Naked Halloween Party” hosted by an important downtown designer, to be held at a club in the meatpacking district the following week.
“That party’s going to be amazing!” Donovan said. “The entertainment is sponsored by a site for hustlers that just launched—the boys will be really hot.”
Indeed, at the bottom of the invite was printed, “Entertainment provided by Rentaboy.com.” I was both mortified and intrigued.
“Hustlers?” I asked. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”
“You can look, just don’t touch,” Donovan said.
“Holy shit!” Sonia came running into the office with a copy of the Daily News. I saw Sunny, the office manager, behind her, glaring at Sonia’s exuberance. “Our article is in here! I can’t believe I didn’t find out until now. One of our investors called to congratulate us.”
She spread the article out on our work table. “Web Journos Dish Downtown Dives” read the headline. There was a large photo of us all, and quotes from every staff member.
“This is amazing,” said Sonia. “You can’t pay for publicity like this! Well, you can, but the point is, we didn’t, and we got written up anyway!”
One of the guys from finance ran out to get a bottle of champagne, and we had a mid-afternoon toast.
“This should definitely help the funding situation,” Donovan said.
“Let’s hope so,” Sonia sighed. She took a sip of her champagne and noticed the panties on my desk, draped across my keyboard like the remnants of an illicit fling. She flipped over the tag.
“You, my friend, will be covering this. I’ve been waiting for this invitation all week.”
That evening, I met up with Jamie and Donovan at Flash, a new lounge Ariana was representing. True to its name, the interior was all mirrors and plush black velvet. Ariana had given us a bundle of drink tickets and put us on the guest list for the VIP area. When we got there, however, we were told we could sit in the VIP room only if we purchased a bottle of something from the drinks menu. Since the cheapest item was a bottle of Absolut for $250, we settled for hanging out at the bar. Soon after we arrived, the lounge started to fill up with a crowd that was distinctively Ariana: girls toting cell phones and Gucci handbags, guys in Dolce & Gabbana suits smoking cigars and waving around money clips.
“This place is awful,” Donovan said. “I can’t believe what I just heard in the restroom. Some guy was going on about ‘faggot this’ and ‘faggot that’ to the attendant. I mean, this place is supposed to be A-list, but it’s breeder central already.”
“You know how she packs these places,” I said. “A sprinkling of celebs and society kids, and then it’s B-list all the way.”
As I looked toward the front, I saw the PR queen herself entering with Jordan Gardner and Cameron Cole. Trailing behind the three of them was a photographer Ariana had hired for the night. I waved to her, and she came over after arranging a photo op with Jordan and Cameron that would surely show up on the Post’s Page Six on Monday.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked, teetering on her heels. “No one parties out here.” Apparently, the throngs crowding the bar added up to no one. “Come to the VIP room.” She waved for us to follow her and her party, and this time we were whisked past the velvet rope that separated the plebeians from the elite. Jamie glared at the bouncer we had argued with earlier.
Ariana had a banquette waiting for her, and the seven of us crowded into it. A waitress began to pour champagne as Cameron, Jordan, and Ariana immediately got up again. Ariana said she had to check on some guest list details; Cameron and Jordan were headed for the restroom.
