About a week later my mother pushed me into a large office in a medical building near the hospital, and I came face to face with Dr. Joy Guarisco. She introduced herself to me and professionally told me to sit down on a rather comfortable sofa adjacent to the large office window. Joy was on the sixth floor of the building and had a rather nice view of the hospital across the street. Her office was well-organized and quite fun for a shrink, but everything in me loathed the idea of being there so I hated every inch of it.
Joy was about thirty and extremely different from my view of normal psychiatrists. She wore her long blonde hair down and styled to perfection. She had violet eyes, but upon close inspection I realized they were colored contacts. She wore a tight beige sweater and brown pinstriped pants which accented her figure quite nicely. She looked all in all very stylish but mostly unprofessional. She was skinny and tall, but still shorter than me. She looked like she belonged on a runway instead of an office.
I didn't look at her when I sat down, but scanned the office. She had her diplomas (from Harvard and Stanford) on the wall along with personal photos of her and what I could only suppose was her daughter because of the resemblance. She had the required medical texts that filled half of the built-in bookcase that took up the entire west wall. What surprised me, however, was the large stereo and CD collection that filled the rest of the west wall. It only reiterated how young she was.
When I looked at her again I noticed she didn't wear a wedding band or any sort of jewelry at all. She was waiting for me to say something, although I had absolutely nothing to say to her. She waited a few minutes as I looked at her blankly, not uncomfortably, and decided she might as well start the conversation.
"So why are you here, Zac?" she asked me, her voice soft and collected. I grew immediately confused by this question.
"Do you not know?" I asked. She smiled.
"I know what the hospital gave me," she said, gesturing to the manila folder that lay on the table near her. "But I'm not at all interested in what they have to say. Why do you think you are here?" I fidgeted with the clean bandages wrapped around both of my wrists. My cuts had been stitched the first day I arrived in the hospital, but to keep sanitary and such, they wrapped both of my wrists with loud, white bandages. I didn't find them necessary; I also believed it drew attention to what I had done, which is why I continued to wear long sleeves to hide them.
"They think I tried to kill myself."
"Who is 'they?' " she asked, crossing her legs. I looked down at her legs and saw a pair of three-inch stiletto heels now visible. I sighed and looked back at her eyes, staring intently back at me.
"Does it really matter?"
"Yes. Yes it does."
"The doctor. My parents. My brothers. The media."
"Do you have a bad time with the press?" she asked. I nodded but didn't respond in any other way. "Did you really try to kill yourself, then?" I shook my head. "Then how did this happen?"
I was about to say, "Does it matter?" again, but I realized that she wouldn't accept that as an answer. I didn't know how to respond to her question. I didn't want to tell a complete stranger why I cut myself when I wasn't even quite sure myself. So, instead of lying or being sarcastic, I kept silent. She nodded at my lack of response.
"Would you like me to tell you why I think you did it?" she asked. "And bear in mind I did just meet you, so I very well could be wrong."
"Sure, whatever," I said, although I really didn't care.
"I think you did it, and probably still will continue to do it, as an escape from the problems you've been facing lately. With one of your brothers engaged and having a child, and the other one with a serious weight management problem, you're fearing for the band and for your relationship with them and this is the only way you know how to solve that." I bit my lip as she told me her story in her cool manner, hiding my discomfort that she had gotten so close to the truth. "But I don't think you know all of this yourself, at least consciously."
"How do you know about Taylor's weight problem?" I asked.
"I have anorexia. It's something that, even though I have normal eating habits now, never goes away. You don't devote most of your time and energy into controlling food without learning how to see it in other people. I've never met your brother and I know." She sat back and waited for me to comment on her analysis.
"He's bulimic...or at least I think he is. I don't know how the whole thing works, but he knows it. He refuses to get help for it," I said, and although I was worried about my brother, I began to understand why he pushed for me to go into therapy. "Otherwise, you're almost right," I said weakly. "I don't care what happens to the band. I would actually be pleased if we never tour again."
The way her eyes lit up told me I'd hit something crucial. I immediately shut my mouth and refused to answer any of her follow up questions. She tried a few times before she realized I had shut down, and then stood. "Where are you going?" I asked immediately.
"I was going to get a brush and brush my hair," she told me. "If you're going to sit here and waste my time, I might as well get something out of it." I felt so incredibly insulted that I didn't even protest as she walked to her desk and pulled out a brush. She sat at her desk in front of a makeup mirror and began to brush her long hair, adjusting the mirror with her free hand so she could see herself clearly.
"How old are you?" I asked inquisitively. She looked at me across the room from her desk, sliding the brush easily out of her hair and set it down on the desk.
"I'll tell you something about me if you tell me something about you." I seemed skeptical. "Come on, Zac, I'm a pretty girl who will listen to your problems." I cracked a small smile. "I saw that. Come over here and tell me about you." I stood up and walked to her, pulling a chair from a table so I could sit near her. "Why don't you care about the band?"
"Because it's ridiculous. When we started the band it was about making music. I was fine just playing it in the garage but Taylor and Ike had this grand scheme in mind of sharing it with thousands of other people. Then we got signed and suddenly it wasn't about music. It was about putting Taylor's face on magazines for lusty twelve-year-old girls and about what sold, not what we wanted to play. We never wrote music with other people until we were signed and suddenly these forty-five year old men were telling us about the right kind of hook for a song when all I just wanted to do was hit my drums for a while." She was about to speak again but I cut her off. "No, how old are you first?"
"I'm twenty-eight," she said. I didn't hide my blatant surprise. "Yes, I'm one of those smarties that graduated extremely early in life. I started my own practice just a few months ago. We all have to start somewhere, Zac." I nodded. "You seem like you do care about the band, you just don't care about what goes with it."
"I care about music. I've been in this band since I was six years old and I've been singing with my brothers since I could speak. Music is a part of who I am. They say that the rest of it is an added bonus, because now we have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of our lives, because it's the American dream or whatever to be popular. Fuck that, I would be pleased flipping burgers at McDonalds for the rest of my life as long as it's quiet."
"So you don't care that you're making thousands of people happy with your music? That you're speaking to people, sometimes in a way that nobody else can?" I eyed her and she began to brush her hair again, looking away from me.
"You're a fan, aren't you?"
"That isn't relevant," she said quickly.
"You are! Doesn't that make you a little bias?" She put down her brush and looked at me again.
"It really isn't relevant, Zac," she said, making sure to look directly at me. "I'm here to help you. That's all there is to it. It's up to you to make the time worthwhile. I know you want to be better. Perhaps that means not being in a band any longer, perhaps that means flipping burgers at McDonalds, but you look at yourself and you know that you don't like what you see, and you want to fix it. I'm here to make sure you find out how to fix it because this.." (she pointed to the bandage on my right wrist) "...this is not the way."
As I sat back to let it sink in, she looked at the time. "Our hour's up," she said. "I'll see you later this week." She stood up and I did the same. I followed her to the door to her office. I was about to thank her, but instead when she opened the door I just left.
I found my mother waiting for me in the lobby. I didn't say anything as the two of us walked out of the office building and to the car. "Did you have fun?" my mother asked, once we were in the car. I huffed and crossed my arms, looking out the window. "Well if you did or not, you're going to continue to see her."
"Fine by me," I muttered and didn't say anything else the entire ride home.
For the past week that I'd been in Los Angeles, I stopped eating almost altogether. I was alone, no one to watch me, no one to bother me, just the beautiful California summer weather and me lapping it up. I didn't have to eat anything. I didn't even have to try to fool people by eating then throwing it up again because there was no one to fool. It was amazing.
The only problem was the lack of energy I had. I spent most of my days in bed writing because I was too damn tired to do anything else. I went to the beach one day to check out the ladies, but nothing really special. There was nothing to do that I hadn't already done and I could care less about doing it again. I was enjoying myself. We could afford to have me stay in style while I was here, so I asked for a piano and there was a beautiful Steinway piano in the living room. It was a lot more fun because people actually knew me and I'd just show my face and say my name and bam! I had free stuff in my room.
Sunlight was pouring in the room from the balcony, the beautiful blue skies mesmerizing. They were beckoning me to come out and play, but for one thing I didn't have the energy and for another thing I kept myself really busy with my writing. I had a lot of really good songs that just poured out and I wasn't sure where they came from. I hadn't such a writing fit since I was on drugs.
I was hungry, hungry to the point of hallucination. I hadn't eaten properly in months. I didn't know how much weight I lost, and although it didn't look like I lost weight, my clothes were gradually becoming too big for me. There was more slack in my belts, less of an effort than before in usually skin-tight pants I always wore. Something was happening that I couldn't see.
I called home when I felt like it just to check up on things. Zac was seeing a psychiatrist. After his first appointment he came home and smoked a good half a pack of cigarettes before he let himself out of his room. Mom said he disappeared somewhere, it couldn't have been very far because he was walking, and still wasn't back when I spoke to her a few hours later. She said she didn't know what happened with the psychiatrist and I told her not to hound him about it because Zac was a very personal kind of guy. He'd do whatever he could to keep things secret.
I talked to Ike; he was staying at Rose's house. Her father must trust Ike enough to stay over there, but Ike said he sleeps in the guest room. If it were me, I would have sweet talked my way into her bed, but then again that was me. Ike was more of a gentleman than I was or ever would be. He actually respected Rose's parents as if they were his own. I wasn't that good of a person. I could win parents over real easy but I could ruin that trust just as quickly. If I'd knocked up Rose, they wouldn't let me around the place as much as they let Ike either.
All in all my LA getaway was pretty cool. I had time away from my family, which was long overdue, and I was able to cool down. If I had spent this time with Zac back in Tulsa, I would have killed him. Plain and simple, he'd be dead. Zac and I used to be the best of friends but we both changed so much that we clashed. All the people in the world to know that I had an eating problem, it had to be Zac. Why couldn't Ike find out? That would probably go over so much easier than Zac. If he really wanted to Zac could blackmail me. I know he'd think of it eventually, and once he did I was his slave until I either stopped or figure out how to get him back for it.
I got up and walked out onto the balcony that overlooked the beach. I was a couple of stories up so I could watch the people in peace. I couldn't see them clearly but it was relaxing to watch ordinary people with their ordinary lives. I was just so out of the ordinary, more so lately, that I felt the only thing I could do was observe. Sometimes I wanted an ordinary life. That would be so much more practical and easy, but I learned that the easy way out wasn't always the best way. I was doing what I loved and making money doing it. People knew me and people loved me, we had success that only a handful of people could see in their lifetimes, but it was times like this when I wished I wasn't such a hermit.
Sighing, I went back inside. Ordinary people could be so fascinating and it was too much for me. I walked to the grand piano that sat rather nicely in the oversized living room and put my hands down on the ivory. They began to tinker over various keys, the notes making music that I'm not sure if I'd already written down. I didn't recognize the melody from any of the songs I've recorded or written before, but it sounded vaguely familiar. Whatever it is, I let my hands take over, my mind thinking of lyrics for the song.
The experience struck me as very odd for some reason. I never actually paid much attention when writing, not since I started writing, but it was so weird. My hands had a mind of their own, punching away at keys. I decided that I was writing a new song. I'd never played this before but my hands knew exactly what to do. I wasn't even concentrating on them; I was concentrating on what I could put with these chords. As I kept going, words began to form in the back of my mind. Eventually I'd have to write all of it down but not yet. I was still marveling over my talent.
About five minutes later I stopped my hands on the piano and began to write down the lyrics that were still circling in my head. The words were just sitting there, waiting for me to pour it out onto paper, and every single time I had enough words to be completely coherent, I had to write them down because I was afraid if I let them fester for too long, I'd forget them. I never did but I always had this fear that I would.
I wrote down the lyrics, my left hand still playing the bass chords for the song. I found it amazing that I could do so many different things at the same time.
After a while of searching for the right words and right chords, I started to get tired. Maybe if I had a little bit more nutrition in my body...I shook my head. I had more important things to do than eat. I would think about that later. I decided to take a nap and wake up when things were better in the world.