SO I'M SAD. OKAY. It happens. A neuron misfires, a synapse jumps the track, and a little picture in my brain that should bring joy instead brings sadness. Depression, in a clinical sense. Diagnosed and deliberated over, discussed and dissected, finally handed down and absorbed.
You can't help but be what they tell you to be. Which is bullshit, of course. The secret is that you can choose your affliction as easily as you can choose what clothes you wear. Your insanity — well ... my insanity - is nothing if not a lifestyle choice. Of course, you can't choose to NOT be crazy. No, that's not up to you. But, you can channel it.
The depression gets to be too much and, in a fit of self-preservation, I tell the psychologist that I'm noticing some funny, reoccurring thoughts. I tell her that I can't stop checking the stove.
"I know it's turned off, because I haven't used it today," I tell her. "I know it's off because I checked it five minutes ago, but then my brain skips, and it's like, what if? What if it's not turned off? Not that the thought of a house-fire bothers me, but it's more like, just the thought of being wrong about it being turned off. What if it's on?"
She, my psychiatrist, she writes with a pen. It drives me crazy because she'll write something wrong, misspell something or just write the wrong word down and, instead of erasing it as she would with a pencil or crossing it out, she just keeps writing. She leaves the wrong word on the page with no attempt to fix it.
"These thoughts are persistent?" she asks.
"I'm thinking them right now," I say.
"Do you notice any pattern to their emergence? Do they occur at specific times in the day or in your routine?"
"Not that I've noticed. It's just something that pops into my head. Or, like sometimes they get turned on because I'll be leaving the house. So, there's that. I guess when I leave the house, you know, when you do a check-list to make sure you've done everything you have to do before you leave? Lock the door, keys to house and car, money, wallet, ID, coffee off, stove off. So, I'll have the keys in my hand, I just locked the door. Then I'm thinking, well, maybe the stove is on? What if the stove is on? I know it's off because I checked when I turned the coffee off. Did I really check, though? I didn't actually touch the knob to make sure it wasn't just almost turned off. What if it's just on the cusp of being turned off, just barely on. Just enough to be on? What about that?"
"Do you feel compelled to check?"
"Yeah. I'll go back inside. Check the stove, touch the knob to be sure. Check the coffee machine. Push the 'off' button just in case. Then I'm good to go. Go outside, get in the car. Start wondering if I locked the door. I know I did the first time, and I think I remember doing it again, but what if I'm wrong about that? Maybe I'm just thinking of the first time, thinking of it twice. So, I'll get out, check the lock. It's locked. The stove is always off, the coffee is off, the door is locked."
"When did this start?"
"A few months ago, but it's just been getting worse and worse," I say.
And that's it. That's the transformation. The depression, it's not gone and it's not going anywhere, but it isn't as deadly. Who has time to feel hopeless when there are knobs to touch, counters to disinfect, repeated actions that need repeated again? Everything that used to take five minutes now takes twenty because a job done just once is only half done, at best. When the world works in circles, when the synapses repeat their pathways, when you can't be sure about anything, you only do the same things over and over again.
And it sure beats being so hopeless and static.
The psychiatrist, she puts pen to paper and starts writing. Her words have no spaces between them and, with her habit of writing the wrong word, it's almost impossible to read her writing. Sitting across from her, trying to read it upside-down, my eyes start to hurt. She flips the page and starts a new one.
"Has this impacted your job performance?" she asks. The phrase "Worldwordwork" is written in a tight little jam across the top of the page.
I work in a stockroom. This seems optimal for my condition because I am very careful to make lists, check the lists, put everything in its place. Wrong. It seems that rechecking the same thing you just put in space 23-C five times really slows down your job performance. If a stack of boxes don't all face the same way, I feel horrible. If a package is out of place, I might not be able to sleep. If everything isn't just perfect, I might go nuts.
"It's a hindrance," I admit, with a shrug. She scribbles down the word 'Hindenburg'. I don't know what's wrong with her, not really, but I've been to enough psychiatrist/psychologist/counselors to know that you don't get in the mental illness profession without a mental illness of your own.
"What about your personal life?" she asks. Her eyes twitch as they scan her own writing. She never looks up at me during a session. She keeps her eyes away from me. She said that it was to let me feel free to talk without feeling judged. The implication being that she is judging me.
"It's about the same," I say, though that's not true. Because she's a woman, and because she's prettier than I would like, it's something I won't tell her. She has that black hair, thick glasses, full lips naughty librarian look. She's thin, pale, and ample. She also licks her lips too often. I'm glad she doesn't look at me because when she judges me, I get horny.
"Would you like to talk about your romantic problems?" she asks. "Do you feel like going into it?"
I do. But I won't. The thing is, I've got issues that I don't feel like speaking aloud. Some things you just don't say to a woman. The fact that right now I'm picturing her naked, for example.
I don't feel comfortable telling this woman how excited it makes me to think of how dirty she is. I don't want to think about how gross it is to be touched by people. While my genitals are very well groomed and as clean as possible, the thought of somebody touching them without first washing up is uncomfortable. And, I know that once I start washing, it would take forever to finish.
And, like, how can I tell my psychiatrist this? How can I tell her that my little pussy licking obsession didn't crop up until the other repetitive obsessions took hold? Because she's sure to figure it out. She'll know, and then I'll feel worse.
Because she'll know that I'm not imagining going down on her for some sexual pleasure. She'll know it has nothing to do with sex or power or love. She'll know that what I'm really doing is cleaning.
So, instead I just say, "No. The romance thing is fine."
"How is your daily life impacted by these repetitive thoughts?" she asks. She's so clinical and clean.
"Sheets," I say. "I have to wash my sheets a lot."
"What is 'a lot'?"
"Not that much, I guess," I say, making an effort to sound nonchalant.
"Which is?" she asks. This librarian beautiful brilliant woman. I wonder how dirty she is down there? I wonder about those small curls of skin, hiding the drying moisture, soaking in salty juice. I wonder how long it would take to lick her clean.
In my head, the images are impossible to stop, but I'm picturing a cat cleaning her kitten. And it's a little bit too true, because the purr is just a reward for a job well done. This has to be why it's called pussy.
"Once a day. Just once," I say.
"That's not too bad."
"So I wash all my sheets in the morning."
"All of them?"
"Oh, no. Sorry. No," I say. "Just the few I've used during the night. Like maybe two sets."
"And why do you use multiple sheets?"
"Well, if they get dirty," I say. "If they get dirty, I have to change them. Like, if I wake up sweating, I've got to change them. They're dirty."
"You can't sleep in dirty sheets?"
The way she says it makes me nauseous and excited. Her glasses are slipping down her nose and, instead of pushing them back up her face, she just leans her head back.
"Do you know how nasty sheets are? Pillows? Dust mites feeding off shed skin. You have them. Everybody has them. The worst part is they're shitting in your sheets. Seriously. You inhale bug shit."
"Calm down."
"I'm calm," I say. I take a breath. I blow it out. "Bacteria in your sheets. Staph and strep. Fungus and yeast and mold and sweat. All of this from skin. Skin and drool. How can a person sleep in that? And what about bedbugs? Or fleas, ticks, mites? Parasites."
"Calm," she whispers.
"Calm," I whisper to myself. "Calm. I don't want to talk about it. I wash them. Calm. I have to. Let's not talk about this."
"What do you want to talk about?"
"I don't know that I want to talk, really," I say, because paying to be agitated seems stupid, and sitting in silence for two-hundred dollars per hour just seems wasteful.
She shrugs, scribbles across the page. Three words pushed tight together. Takes a moment to look back across her last page of notes.
"Guess we're done," she says, looking up at me. She pushes her glasses up her nose. She smiles, just a hint of teeth showing through her tight lips. I have my shirt pulled over my lap, hiding me from her.
"Guess so," I say. But I wait because two-hundred per hour is fine when the only other option is to stand up with an erection. No fancy way of skirting that issue.
I look over, the three tight words, and all of a sudden, the erection isn't a problem. Three words. DepressionanxietyOCD.
Because, really, how hard can I stay when I've just been diagnosed with the same three diseases as my mother?
I quit my job at the warehouse. I've got to manage these symptoms, find a way to make them work for me. My first attempt is hotel management - housekeeping. Bullshit work for bullshit pay. This works out horribly because you don't know how long I could stay in one room cleaning. These sheets need more than just a quick warm rinse. The carpet has sticky spots even after vacuuming.
Don't get the walls wet, ever. The streaks of water falling down the wall are brown with nicotine stains. Nicotine, if you're lucky. The television screens have gobs on them.
And I know what you're thinking: it's all about sex with you. That's true. But there's more to sex than just sex. Right now, I'm telling you the truth. Everybody likes fucking in strange rooms. Sometimes you're alone when this urge takes place. Sometimes you get a hooker. Sometimes you jerk off dry. But sometimes you get inventive.
It is no joke that the worst thing a maid will find in the hotel room is a melon. The partially hollowed out melon, sometimes duct taped to prevent it from splitting apart. Citric acid is a great cleaner, though. Still, it's acid, and it has to hurt a little.
Microwave that melon, tape it up good, cut a little hole, slightly smaller than the width of the penis, and you have a great time that is easy to dispose of. Why don't they just throw them away?
I can't believe that cops ever find the right DNA in a hotel room. This place is crawling with cultures and swabs and gobs of strangers, all mingling and touching.
Which wasn't why I quit, but it was certainly a factor.
I pull the door open by hooking the toe of my boot on the edge and pulling toward me. My hands are full of wet sheets, held out in front of me so that I don't stain my white smock yellow. I leave the smell behind me, but the scent catches the wind in the hall and wafts out.
"Mr. Thompson, again?" Gwen asks when she sees me walking toward the laundry shoot.
"Yeah. Room 316," I answer.
Gwen sits in a closet-sized room, leaning over the counter that faces the elevator. She's picking out wedding dresses from a magazine. She isn't even engaged. She's locked up with the meds and the phone, so she never has to deal with pissy sheets, only pissy people.
"Do you think it's lame to have a blue wedding dress?" she asks. "I just don't think I can do white."
She can't do white. Not really. I've been down on her twice this week at work, and she isn't the 'white' kind of girl. She has huge labias, an oversized clitoris, and smells like sweat and dryer sheets.
"Light blue, maybe," I say, sniffing at my hands. "But still, pretty 70s. Disco wedding dress."
She shrugs. She flips a page, then pauses. "You stink."
"I know," I say. Gwen is lucky behind that counter because she never has to deal with 316 everyday. A nursing home is a horrible place to work; a nursing home is an even worse place to live. "316 was a sprinkler today."
"What's that mean?" she asks. Gwen has met 316 one time. Early morning, she was the only one on the floor, and she walked in to find Mr. Thompson's sheets tented at the crotch. 316 sleeps in the nude. 316 might be in his late 60s, but in the morning he's hard. And big.
Gwen asks, and I feel obliged to tell her that 316, Mr. Thompson as she calls him, is also an occasional bed-wetter. He usually pisses in the early morning. Sometime last night, he must have gotten hot because he kicked the sheets off the bed. Sprinkler.
"I thought you guys couldn't pee when you're . . . You know, up," Gwen says.
"Some can," I say.
Gwen frowns and wrinkles her nose. "Gross," she says. "Mr. Thompson?"
"Yeah," I say.
"Sorry," Gwen says.
"Yeah," I say. "At least here it's an accident."
"What's that mean?" Gwen says.
I don't answer her. Gwen doesn't need to know how bad a hotel room can be. I don't want to know.
The sheets in the linen closet are still wrapped in plastic covers - they come that way from our cleaning service. I grab a top and bottom sheet combo. My fingers fidget the sheets out from the cover. I drop the plastic into a bin near my feet and shut the door.
I pause. I open the door back up and grab a blue plastic sheet to lie down beneath the cloth sheets.
"Going back in?" Gwen asks.
"Yeah," I say. "Work, work, work."
"I know what you mean," Gwen says, flipping another worn page.
The smell has evaporated from the room, but the oily scent of the nursing home cannot be erased. The room fits two comfortably, with two beds facing each other from across the room. A curtain splits the room in two to provide a sort of visionary privacy. There are five beds in the room right now, although two of them are empty.
Mr. Thompson stands at the window, staring down into the alleyway. He has managed to slip into the fuzzy, blue robe that he prefers. One of his roommates is asleep. One is watching game shows and guessing the price of things.
"Five dollars? For cookies? What type of cookies would be worth five goddamned dollars?" the voice behind the curtain asks. "I wouldn't pay fifty cents. Not fifty cents. Cookies."
"You washed up?" I ask as I come in.
"Yes, sir," he says, his voice shaking. He doesn't look away from the alley. I know the alley, and he has nothing to stare at down there except for garbage bags and sleeping homeless people.
The plastic piss cover unrolls across the bed easily. It is made to fit these single beds perfectly. The blue is creamy pale blue. The blue of a dead person's lips.
"You shouldn't have to do that," 316 says.
I throw the sheet out across the bed, snapping it as it begins to float down. The opposite end twists, preventing the sheet from spreading out. I snap it again, but it stays twisted.
"Gotta have the cover," I say. "It's too hard to clean a mattress."
I lift the sheet again and let it float down. Instead of twisting, this time it folds up underneath itself. I shrug and begin tucking the bottom corners in.
"That's not what I mean," he says. He moves his feet, like he's slow dancing with the window. "I don't mean the rubber sheet. I mean you shouldn't have to clean up for me."
"It's a job," I say, moving up the bed and pulling the sheet flat. I tuck in another corner. "I need the money."
"I used to drive truck," 316 says. "I hauled clear across the country in five days, one time. Didn't sleep hardly a wink."
"I know," I say, tucking the last corner in. 316 loves this story. Loves to brag about staying awake. Now he sleeps 19 hours a day. When he isn't asleep, he's staring out that window.
If he'd look up, he'd see the Seattle skyline. Long buildings pointing to the sky, ocean birds and black birds, and a soft drift of thin clouds. He looks down, though. He mumbles. I stop listening to him.
"Five dollars for bacon? This is ridiculous."
The third floor is home to the chronic. These people will never recover from being old. They are sleeping the day away in Fate's lap. The choices have been taken away from them. I tuck in the final corner, look up to see that 316 is still mumbling. His robe is hanging limp on his bony shoulders. Brown stains, the color of dried blood, are visible through the thin, white hair covering 316's head.
"Bed's ready," I say, turning away for the door.
I took this job because of one word: orderly. It sounded just right. Just like what I was looking for. Order. But it's not about order. It's about dying and sad sheets and old people and smells that linger.
"356 died last night," Gwen says as I walk past her station.
"No shit, huh?" I say.
"No shit," she says. "I'm sorry I forgot to tell you when you came in. I was supposed to."
"Don't sweat it," I say. I smile. "One less bed to check."
"That's cruel," Gwen says.
I sniff my hand again. Checking doors, the oven, the coffee machine are things I can't control; the smell of piss on my hand doesn't bother me at all in that OCD sort of way. Infection, contamination, proliferation doesn't bother me the way the thought of an open door does.
"You'll get used to it," I say. I pull a pack of smokes out the back pocket of my pants. The hardback case is crushed, but the cigarette has survived. The thought of a cigarette left burning in an unattended ashtray gives me the sweats, but inhaling that burnt air seems like a good idea. "How'd he die?"
"Choked," Gwen says. She's got blue eyeliner smeared down her left cheek, like an old scar. "Choked on his vomit in the middle of the night."
"Yeah," I say, because I can't think of anything to say. I'm just glad I didn't have to clean up that mess. I don't want to let Gwen know that my only concern is for the sheets that 365 dirtied.
Some people leave a mark on the world, some people don't. And sometimes that mark is more like a stain. A smell. A wet spot.
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