Ferment Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Patrick Dobson

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  The chapter “Prelude: Diagnoses” appeared May 18, 2018 in The Furious Gazelle (www.thefuriousgazelle.com) under the title, “Why I Hate Spring, or How I Almost Hung Myself but Went to the Nervous Hospital Instead.”

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Cover photo credit: Getty Images

  ISBN: 978-1-5107-5731-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-5732-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is for Josef and Marlies Frick and the men of the Gemeinschaft Glas und Glaube.

  CONTENTS

  Prelude: Diagnoses

  Chapter One: Taking Flight

  Chapter Two: My Escape

  Chapter Three: The Old Country

  Chapter Four: Ivo and Martin

  Chapter Five: Coming Home

  Chapter Six: A Lost Friend

  Chapter Seven: The Fricks

  Chapter Eight: Saarburg and Trier

  Chapter Nine: The Last Resort

  Chapter Ten: Into France

  Chapter Eleven: Guedelon

  Chapter Twelve: Hotel du Commerce

  Chapter Thirteen: The Waffle

  Chapter Fourteen: Andrea

  Chapter Fifteen: Days of Rest

  Chapter Sixteen: Love and Loss

  Chapter Seventeen: Leaving Home

  Epilogue

  PRELUDE

  DIAGNOSES

  IN JANUARY 2011, my good friend and soul mate Joachim Frick was dying. He had been diagnosed with glioblastoma the previous October, and I arranged to visit him in Berlin during my semester break. His diminished state stunned me. He was closer to me than my own brother, and I took his illness personally. After I returned to Kansas City, I plunged into the depths of despair. My usual spring downturn, combined with increasing grief over Joachim’s condition, turned into unchecked agitation and deep depression at the same time. At home, I barely talked to my family. I hid in books and read with hungry ferocity. Activities with my eight-year-old, Nick, felt obligatory and difficult. I could hardly function, much less be a father to a boy rife with all the energy and curiosity kids his age possess.

  Soon, I wanted nothing to do with the outside world. I couldn’t sleep. It felt as if fierce wind and booming thunder washed over my consciousness in wave after wave. I hoisted myself out of bed solely because the alarm clock told me to. My impulse was to burrow in, turn off the world around me, and try to sleep. I went through my community college teaching responsibilities as if under robotic control. Everything moved in slow motion. Even walking to my car was like slogging through warm mud. I dodged my students and didn’t talk to my colleagues.

  Around the end of February, I found myself devising how I’d string myself up in the basement so Nick wouldn’t be the first to find me. These suicidal thoughts seemed rational. Of course, I reasoned, there was one way out of my despair. The weight of life pressed on me, as it should, since I have always done penance for being me. The end of a rope was a reasonable way to deal with the darkness and fear.

  I hove out of bed at 11 a.m. Sunday morning, March 13, 2011. My T-shirt and jeans hung on me as if made of lead. I could feel my face, heavy and sagging. I obsessed over which rope I would use to attach my neck to the beam in the basement. I went down, found a piece of nylon cord I use when canoeing, and started tying the knot in the receiving end. As I worked, hands shaking, Nick called me from the living room. I ignored him. He called again and again. Rage welled up inside me. I raced upstairs and encountered a smiling child who took all the wind out of me. He asked what we were doing that day. I stood there, empty. I didn’t have an answer.

  I sat with him, brooding and calculating for about an hour. He was watching cartoons, jumping around like he does when he’s in front of the television for too long. Suddenly, something inside me broke like a watch spring wound too tightly. Even in my addled state, I knew something was seriously wrong. I dragged myself into the bathroom, knees weak and body trembling. I stuffed my medications into a sandwich bag. My voice cracking, I called friends and made arrangements for Nick for that evening and night. I woke Virginia, who was sleeping before another night shift at the hospital, where she worked as an oncology nurse. She lifted her head and opened a sleepy eye. I told her, “I’m going to the mental hospital.” I told her not to worry, Nick was taken care of. She looked up and told me whatever I needed to do, I should.

  With Virginia’s blessing, I took that bag of pill bottles and drove, as well as I could—even stoplights overwhelmed me—to the psychiatric facility attached to the hospital where Virginia worked. I remembered that Karl Childers, the main character in the movie Sling Blade, called the mental hospital the “nervous hospital.” I liked that. My chest buzzed as if filled with electricity. My head spun. I was anxious, nervous, and upset, using all my energy to walk across the parking lot.

  I walked up to the counter and shoved my medications at the clerk. “I’m here to check in,” I insisted, not looking at him. When these episodes occur, I don’t make eye contact. I look at the floor.

  “Yes, well . . . uh . . . people usually call before they come in,” he said. He looked confused and held the bag of medications as if he didn’t really know what to do with them.

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “I’m not leaving.”

  “Well, uh . . . yeah, fill this out and take a seat.” The kid looked scared. “Someone’ll be right with you.”

  I filled in the blanks in the admitting form. My script looked forced and arthritic. I returned, gave the form to the clerk, and hid in the corner as best I could from the other people, probably families waiting to visit inmates. A security guard took up a position opposite me in the room, watching me, immobile, hands crossed.

  After an excruciating hour, a woman came out from behind the counter and asked me if I was Patrick Dobson. She ushered me to her office. During the admitting interview, she asked about my medications, what doctor I was seeing, and if I had any medical conditions the doctors should be aware of. She asked if I struggled with depression. I said yes. Then she asked a series of standard questions about mental illness, probing to see if I really needed to be there.

  “Have you had any thoughts of suicide or hurting yourself?” she said finally.

  “Of course,” I said. “What’s a good depression without them?”

  She stood up quickly, waved me over with a weapons wand, and led me into the nervous part of the nervous hospital.

  A doctor showed me to my bed first and then around the facility. I shuffled behind him with my eyes to the floor. When he left, the other patients gathered around.

  “Doctor,” a woman in a gray, faded gabardine jacket said. “When’s my appointment tomorrow?” I glanced up for a half-second. Her face twitched all over.

  “Doctor?”

  I said. “You mean
you’re staying?” the woman asked. A group of people had gathered around me.

  “Sure. I’m staying,” I said. I shoved through the crowd and made for my room.

  “But, wait,” a man in T-shirt and jeans and slippers said. I stopped and faced him. “You’re not a doctor?”

  I don’t know what would have given them the idea that I was a psychiatrist. I was dressed in jeans and a black, long-sleeved pullover shirt. Maybe it was my demeanor, aloof and distant, I thought.

  “No,” I said. “I just checked in.” I stood there a minute, looking at the floor. Then, I went off with the crowd shambling behind me to my room. I squinted at the hopeful faces as I closed the door and thought, wow, I’m really in it now.

  That evening was a long one. I didn’t turn on the light or leave the room. Though there was another bed next to mine, I had no roommate. When I peeked outside, the halls of the institution were white and fluorescent. Even tiny noises echoed through the place. Plastic covered the mattress underneath the sheet. Bedwetters, I thought. The bottom of the bathroom door stood a foot and a half above the floor. The top of the door was cut at a steep angle, I supposed, to keep people from hanging themselves, which I found ironic. They told me at check-in that I’d only be allowed to shave under supervision. They took my shoestrings.

  I spent eight days in the nervous hospital. I met with a doctor every mid-morning for about two hours. After a couple of these chats, he thought the treatment I’d been receiving for depression was flawed. I had been on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for about ten years. He determined that I was bipolar depressive with chronic monopolar characteristics. This meant, in effect, that I was always depressed, sometimes worse than others—when I wasn’t in exaggeratedly high spirits. Bipolar disorder is often hard to diagnose, he said. Manic-depressives often talk about depression with their doctors, but rarely report elevated moods or hyperactivity. This made sense. I experienced days and weeks—and even months—when I felt fantastic and that I could do anything, and, in fact, took on and managed more than most people. As I spun out of control, I alienated friends and family. They just couldn’t keep up and too bad for them. But I’d always crashed into chin-jarring depressions. The doctor said I likely entered the hospital in a dysphoric state, suffering from a combination of depression and intense mania, exacerbated by seasonal affective disorder. Most people who suffer seasonal depression have it in the dark of winter. I belonged to a significant minority who experience the depression in the spring.

  The answer, he believed, lay in a drug from the 1960s called oxcarbazepine, an anticonvulsant first developed for epileptics. The drug’s side effects eased problems of anxiety and mood disorders. This combined with lamotrigine, another anticonvulsant implemented as a mood stabilizer for bipolar disorder, might solve my chronic depressions and even out my mood swings. On any medication, he said, I might do very well but still suffer “breakout” episodes of mania or depression. It would depend on many factors, not all of which he could predict. A psychologist, he added, “might help you with your feelings of inadequacy and this strange feeling you have of being a fraud.”

  While I was in the hospital, I began eating again. I’d lost a lot of weight in the weeks leading up to my almost-suicide. The psych ward food was surprisingly good and plentiful. Three times a day, inmates lined up at the cafeteria door. The staff laid out all kinds of wonderful things in hotel pans. Since we—there were about twenty of us in the facility at the time—were the only customers, the food was always fresh, with piles of fruit and vegetables, beautiful desserts, and, I supposed, since I don’t eat meat, plenty of tasty animals.

  In addition, two refrigerators stood in the nervous hospital day-room, where people milled about or watched television between smoking cigarettes. The fridges harbored healthy juices, yogurts, and fruit. Cabinets between the refrigerators were stocked with granola bars and cereals. Between meals, talking to doctors, and attending group therapy, I grazed in the dayroom, eating just because I could.

  Nearly everyone in the place smoked but me. Here’s how I found out: The first time I went out to the tiny, sad, worn courtyard surrounded by a tall privacy fence, the other patients shuffled in the door quietly like I had a disease. Then, they stood with their faces at the windows until I went inside, at which time they filed out and lit their cigarettes. This was disconcerting. I finally asked one of the smokers what I was doing wrong.

  “N-n-nothing,” he said. “They d-d-d-don’t let us smokers outside with the n-n-non-smokers.”

  One woman in the nervous hospital with me wore bandages around her arms above the wrists. She was very beautiful and seemed sweet. She asked me how I came to be there.

  “I checked myself in,” I said. “I was going to hang myself.”

  She laughed and held up her arms. “Yeah,” she said. “They found me on the bathroom floor.”

  A tall, lanky, and jovial guy was in for alcohol treatment. We developed a kind of comradery over a couple of days. When he found out that I had not had a drink in two decades, he said, “Twenty years and you’re in the psych ward? What’s in sobriety for me?”

  “At least,” I said, “I don’t have to go through this thing drunk. I can’t imagine the horror.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s something,” he said thoughtfully. “I gotta sober up, but you’re not going to be my role model.”

  About the third day, the mental fog and psychic pain began to lift. I struck up a rapport with the hospital staff and my fellow inmates. Still manic, I led art therapy sessions where we worked with plaster, paints, and colored markers. In group therapy sessions, I wound up leading discussions. Every evening, I’d hide in my room and do pushups. I shoved against the walls and beds—which were firmly anchored to the floor—to get some physical exercise that eased my depressed emotions. A man came in late one night. He snored, moaned, and talked in his sleep. After he left in the morning, I never saw him again.

  Virginia and Nick came to see me twice that week. It reminded me of visits I’d made to my friends in prison. We sat at a round table and talked about little things—how Nick was doing in school, how did walking the dogs go, and so on.

  “Is this place all right?” Virginia asked. “Are they taking good care of you? Are you eating?”

  I asked Nick what he thought of all this. “You’re here because you’re sick,” he said. “I want you to get better and come home.”

  It was nice to have them there. When the visits ended, Virginia said I should continue calling home every night.

  One evening, I couldn’t stand any more of The Real Housewives of Orange County. I commandeered the television and turned to the classic movie channel. We watched Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman. At first, my fellow inmates groused about missing their reality shows. But I took control of the room and gave them a brief bio of Bergman and explained that critics considered this role one of her greatest. The other patients took an interest in the movie. Soon, people filled the dayroom. When someone came in and started talking, my mates shushed them. It was a night at the movies with popcorn and apple juice.

  After a week, the doctor told me I was good to go. I’d started the new drug regimen and was feeling relief at having taken a break from my own brain. I drove home. The stoplights didn’t throw me into anxious fits. The sun was shining, which irritated me, but I didn’t feel the need to hide.

  * * *

  I thought I’d told Virginia about my suicide wish when she visited me in the nervous hospital. In spring 2014, I explained I felt a breakout depressive episode on the way and things might be difficult for me for the next couple of weeks. Although I’m not always good at it, I try to tell her when I’m feeling significant changes in my moods.

  This time, I happened to say, “At least I’m not hanging myself in the basement like I did before I went to the nervous hospital.”

  She immediately began to cry. Why? What’s wrong? I asked anxiously.

  “You never told me you were going to kill y
ourself that day,” she said, raising her hands to her face. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  TAKING FLIGHT

  IN JULY 2014, I celebrated my twenty-fourth sobriety anniversary. In the three years since I’d been to the nervous hospital, I’d plumbed my insides but had barely begun to understand my mental illness’ effects on my drinking and sober lives. I made up with friends I’d alienated when euphoric and informed my closest friends of my difficulties with depression. Most of them just nodded and said something akin to, “That explains a lot.”

  The suicide attempt and new awareness of mental illness brought my relationship with Joachim and many aspects of my confused and eventful past into question. Over the years, I’d ditched jobs, apartments, and personal belongings to set out on journeys that changed the course of my existence irrevocably. The first and perhaps most formative of all was my attempt to start a new life in Germany when I was twenty-two. In 1985, I sold all my worldly possessions and left for the Vaterland on a whim and in the middle of a deep depression. The friends I made there would essentially usher me into a new existence. Every occasion I’d seen them either in the States or in Germany in the thirty years since my first jaunt in the country, we learned more about my selves—the person I used to be, the one I am, and the one I was becoming. Each new revelation transformed me a little. I grew more mature, became more patient with myself and others, and gained self-awareness.

  It was fortunate that this impulse to set mental illness into context came to me when it did. Virginia and I had been planning a trip to Germany for more than two years. Something always came up in the weeks before we bought our tickets—a death in the family, a wedding, schooling needs for Nick. We were determined this time. Leading up to our departure, no close relatives or friends died or decided to get married. We buttoned up all of Nick’s outstanding and future school projects.

  A journey to visit my German friends would mean far more to Virginia, Nick, now twelve years old, and me than a tourist romp through Europe. Our contact with the Germans through phone calls and emails sufficed no longer. We needed to see our friends in the flesh. They had become elderly or, like me, were on the edge of senior citizenship. Who knew how many years we had left, how many trips between continents, how long before we’d visit gravestones?