Don't Go Crazy Without Me: A Tragicomic Memoir

By Deborah A. Lott

A woman recounts coming of age in the shadow of her father’s mental illness in this “candid, unsettling portrait of madness and enduring love” (Kirkus).

Deborah A. Lott grew upina Los Angeles suburb in the 1950s, under the sway of her outrageously eccentric father. A lay rabbi who enjoyed dressing up like Little Lord Fauntleroy, he taught her how to have fun. But he also taught her to fear germs, other children, and contamination from the world at large. Deborah was so deeply bonded to her father and his peculiar worldview that when he plunged from neurotic to full-blown psychotic, she nearly followed him.

Sanity is not always a choice, but for sixteen-year-old Deborah, lines had to be drawn between reality and her own “overactive imagination.” She saved herself through an unconventional reading of Moby Dick, a deeply awkward sexual awakening, and entry into the world of political activism as a volunteer in Robert F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign.

After attending Kennedy’s last stop at the Ambassador Hotel the night of his assassination, Deborah would come to a new reckoning with loss. Ultimately, she would find her own path, and her own way of turning grief into love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781597098144

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Present, UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, Tuesday, 1:00 p.m.

The three psychiatrists and I sit at the conference room table writing trauma case studies. My job, as the professional writer in the room, is to smooth out the prose, prune the jargon. We’re writing about children to whom awful—sometimes unspeakable—things happened. The psychiatrists would say these case histories are factual, but I know they are stories and, like all stories, have inciting events, climaxes, and resolutions. As readers, we all long for epiphanies and revelations, redemption, and happy endings. But shift a few words or reorder paragraphs and epiphanies can evaporate, redemption erode to reveal darker currents.

As I write these children’s stories, I wonder which of them will grow up to be memoirists, compelled to put down their own versions. I also can’t help but think about my own story, and all the various ways I could skew it, and what I will inevitably leave out. I can’t help but wonder why I feel compelled to tell it—as if I could still get it right. As if I could fix my childhood firmly in the past and not feel haunted by it. As if I could achieve clarity.

But the truth is, I don’t want only clarity. I also want to slow down and relive the best glimmering moments, to wash the terror out of the bad parts, to get it all back—only better this time. To feel some kind of pure love again.

What I can’t tell the psychiatrists is that down the hall from this room lies another room that holds a critical piece of my own story. Though it’s a cliché that people go into this field because of less than idyllic upbringings of their own, these psychiatrists never talk about their own histories, at least not here, not to me. I am the one who knows she is passing.

The renowned head of the center, a brilliant, charismatic man in his sixties, leads the discussion. Strict hierarchies are observed in medicine, still largely patriarchal hierarchies. His colleagues defer to him. I try to appear as if I’m deferring to all of them.

The clinicians in this room identify with the doctors in these case studies—protagonists in these stories. I identify with the children, standing in for them with an empathy that feels a little too raw. Did you hear what the child actually said? and Isn’t this therapist sounding awfully preachy? and Yes, but . . . and what if? Are you sure the emperor was wearing clothes? Because I can’t stop seeing his nakedness. I repeatedly interrogate these experts’ basic assumptions. In much of my life, I have become the interrogator of basic assumptions.

The director’s shouting over his colleagues now, using his clout to shut down some minor controversy. Does my ire rise because he reminds me of my father? Maybe I’m overly sensitive to markers of blinding paternalistic narcissism. The truth is I’m simultaneously attracted to and allergic to them. I try to hide my allergy because it can get in the way of my deference. But it’s too late, I’ve been caught rolling my eyes again. I make amends, look down at my notepad, write furiously, nod.

Do these doctors see the signs of my childhood history in my incessant interrogations, in what they call my provocative questions? Can they feel my reflexive skepticism at war with my hunger to believe? Can they perceive all the ways my past reverberates in this room?

1968, UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute

In the waiting room, a young man with stringy hair and a dirty poncho paced back and forth and muttered to himself. The young woman with him, seated in a chair, leaned forward and whispered loudly enough for my hyper-vigilant ears to hear, Was it just acid? Are you sure it wasn’t laced with something? I could smell his acrid sweat from across the room. I was sixteen; I didn’t know anyone who had taken acid, though I’d seen my father pace in agitation and mutter under his breath this same way.

My mother read a magazine, oblivious to the crazy people around us. I sat there, incubating a sick foreboding as one dark-suited male clinician after another appeared and walked patients back to their offices.

Finally entrapped in a closet-sized consulting room across from my assigned psychiatrist, my immediate problem was his face. A bad-omen face. Too many sharp angles, the edges of his cheekbones threatened to pierce his own skin. His dark eyebrows overhung his nearly black eyes, disguising his intentions.

Can you tell me what’s been troubling you? he asked.

What I needed was a joke to break the ice, or some fatherly comfort. Oh, for some fatherly comfort, the blessing my father used to deliver with his hands outstretched over the congregation at Sabbath services: may God shine his countenance upon you and grant you peace.

With his heavy Hungarian accent, my young psychiatrist seemed like a man from a grainy, black-and-white Holocaust documentary; had he been a victim of the Nazis or a collaborator? A wave of premonition passed over me, stomach, throat, head, and then infused my whole body with a queasy heat. Then it escaped my body to suffuse the atmosphere in the room. Or had it come into me from the room? Telling what was inside and outside had gotten harder and harder.

Something awful was about to happen, I knew it. Something even more awful than what had already happened: my father locked up in the Glendale Adventist Hospital psych unit and me losing it too. If I wasn’t going crazy, then the dead people really were after me.

I’ve been upset, I said.

Tell me more, he countered.

I tried not to bite my decimated nails in front of him but couldn’t stop myself from picking at them. Premonition shifted into déjà vu; I knew what he was going to say an instant before he said it. I’d be right on the cusp of being able to recite his words along with him, then remain a frustrating beat behind. And then, I remembered his face. I remembered his face.

I saw you in my dream last night, I said. Your face.

He raised an eyebrow, and I saw a flash of alarm or incredulity which he hid by looking down. That little beat of rejection made my stomach fall out.

What about before last night?

Weird things keep happening, and they all seem connected. I can’t stop seeing the connections and they scare me because I don’t know what they mean.

He kept taking notes, pulling his body farther away from me, erect in his black leather chair. He was arrogant. Just like my father said, psychiatrists were arrogant, self-righteous, moralizing, bourgeois pricks.

What exactly scares you?

Everything?

The whoosh of the air ventilation system made a dissonant song play in my head. The metallic odor of ozone filled the air, like the scent that precedes a thunderstorm. Or was it more organic? Maybe the smell was coming from him? More likely me. I pressed my legs together. Whenever something smelled rank, I assumed the odor was coming from between my legs.

I had to get out—of the room, of the place, of my head, of my body. If only there were some way other than death to get out. The idea of dying terrified me but so did feeling trapped by my body.

What’s been going on at home with Mom and Dad? What about with your friends at school? Frames from one of our tenth grade health education films flashed before me: wholesome teenagers cheerfully eating lunch together on a school bench, singing hymns at church with mom and dad, playing baseball in the park. How could I bridge the distance between those scenes and my life?

You see, doctor, when my grandmother Rebecca died, my father got depressed, and every night he’d stare out the window and speak to her in her grave. Then he started believing that Mom and my Uncle Nathan were trying to kill him. I spied on them for him. Now my mother’s committed him and some friendly doctors like you are running bolts of electricity through his brain.

When my grandmother died, I couldn’t stop imagining her in her coffin. Then a girl at school died and I got textbooks with her name in them, and these strange coincidences kept happening, and now I’m afraid she wants something from me, that she and my grandmother want something from me. The dead miss the living; they envy us. My father told me.

I felt a compulsion to confess and an equally powerful prohibition against it. I wasn’t allowed to say the dead girl’s name out loud, though I had to repeat it in my head a million times a day to make amends for living.

I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on, the doctor coaxed. Have you been taking drugs? Smoking grass? He elongated the last word’s single syllable and smiled as if congratulating himself for his hipness. I was more naïve than he realized; I didn’t even know any kids in La Crescenta who took drugs, only a poet with a bottle of whiskey in his glove box.

I saw myself in a long tunnel, exiting my body from the back of my head. No, I shouldn’t have asked to leave my body. Please God, just let me get back into my body, let me get back into my body, and be a normal high school girl.

There’s something going on at the very back of my head, I said, like my brain is too big for my body. I feel it stretching behind me.

My voice sounded remote, even to me. The psychiatrist would say my affect did not match my words. It was the same erudite tone my father employed when cajoling doctors into giving him the drugs he loved—Butisol Sodium, Seconal, Percodan, and his favorite, Tuinol. He sang out their names as if even forming the words with his mouth delighted him.

I have an unusually high tolerance, he’d say. I don’t react like an ordinary man.

My father and I were not ordinary; oh no, we had formed an alliance around being extraordinary.

You can trust me, the doctor said and that small gesture towards empathy released me. I told him everything.

After our session, the doctor ushered my mother into his consulting room. He showed her my diagnosis written on the top of an intake sheet, Paranoid Schizophrenic.

After my first brief appointment with a psychiatrist, I carried a more dire diagnosis than my father, whose doctors couldn’t agree on what to call what was wrong with him. Schizophrenia, with its onset in adolescence, was likely to progress. Treatments were limited.

My mother came back and sat down in the waiting room next to me, her hazel eyes wet. After all her years of living with my father, my mother still seemed so innocent, so taken off guard by what was happening in our family.

What did you tell him? she said. "What kind of crazy mishegoss did you tell him? Nobody understands how suggestible you are."

My mother was right; the doctor had misdiagnosed me. The clarity of her gaze snapped me back into reality. The dissonance stopped. I re-entered my body. All I wanted at that moment was to be normal. Well, not ordinary-normal, of course, but special-normal.

You’re too smart a girl for this. You’ve got to get a hold of yourself.

I flinched. That was my mother’s usual advice—get a hold, shut down, don’t feel. I could never get the grip on myself she thought I needed. I’d never figured out how to be more like her.

Do you want to wind up in the mental hospital in a bed next to your father’s? They can give you a matching straitjacket too.

MEMORY LESSONS

CHAPTER ONE

Gotchernose

Isang in my four-year-old voice: Carrots grow from carrot seeds, I planted them, I grew them, I watered them, I pulled the weeds, carrots grow from carrot seeds. My father’s sudden entrance interrupted my music. He limped in, barefoot, fat stomach preceding him, one hand twirling his thick black curls. Tummel , my mother called the psychic commotion that attended him. The Yiddish word for turbulence, energy, chaos, excitement. Noise and hilarity, noise and calamity. My mother trailed in his wake, a head taller, broad-shouldered, long-necked, dignified, her light brown hair pinned back from her pale and tender face. Underneath her modest shirtwaist dress, the boned girdle that kept her, she said, from falling apart.

You remember Roy? my father’s black eyes flashed and bore into me.

"Ira, zug gornisht, my mother said. Shah. You never know when to leave well enough alone." She was worn out from years of serving as my father’s missing censor.

My ears pricked up like a dog’s; my heart began to race with agitated excitement. I was a tuning fork resonating to my father’s pitch.

Roy was the counter man at the La Crescenta post office that played a crucial twice-daily role in the running of The Business, the insurance agency my parents operated out of the third bedroom of our house. At the beginning and end of each workday, my mother took me with her on her runs.

I’d hang on her slippery, stockinged leg until she’d pick me up and seat me on the worn wooden counter, where a panorama of sights would open before me: men in bluish-gray uniforms wheeling massive bins of mail. A medley of scents: Vitalis, sweat, and tobacco; ink, glue, paper, and paper dust. Then Roy—bald but for a few strands of hair, his face craggy but sweet. He looked like Jimmy Durante to me. They seemed the same person, or rather iterations of some common breed, in the same way the cocker spaniels in our neighborhood looked mostly alike.

You’re just going to upset her, and who’ll be the one trying to calm her down when she’s running around the house tonight hysterical? Let her be a child, my mother said.

Eva, she’s no ordinary child. She’s very precocious—

"—and has an overactive imagination you feed. Shah! Zug gornisht."

What? I said. Daddy, tell me. Tell me! My mother was always trying to keep my father’s special secrets from me. I wanted to be in on everything.

You know, Roy, the man at the post office who fools around with you?

Roy would swipe his thumb, coarse and reeking of tobacco, its whorls embossed with the blue ink used to stamp packages, against the side of my nose. He’d make an abrupt snatching gesture and I would startle, just as I did when the striped clown sprang out of my jack-in-the-box at Pop! goes the weasel, the tension between predictability and surprise culminating in pleasure. Then Roy would display the same thumb poking out between two fingers.

Gotchernose, he’d say. Then he’d sweep his hand back across my face and reveal his empty palm to suggest no harm done! and put my nose back on. Roy’s trick said that even the most dire loss could be reversed. You could make time go backward.

My mother shook her head and gave up. She was deluding herself to think that any speech of my father’s once begun could be aborted. She sank into the quiet splendor of her own defeat.

Roy has died of lung cancer, my father declaimed in his faux British stage actor’s voice. His professorial mode—formal and at the same time, intimate—implied that the dispassionate imparting of knowledge constituted his highest parental obligation.

You’ll never see him again.

A rush of unease started at my feet and settled in my stomach. Never. The unease swam up into my chest.

He’s gone forever.

Forever? I held my breath, sensing the possibility of some monumental loss, and instinctively tensed every sphincter in my body to avoid it.

My father’s black eyes riveted on mine. I looked back with equal intensity. I had my father’s dark hair and eyes, his full lips, and round expressive Semitic face. We matched.

In a flash, my father’s mood shifted the weather again, as he revved back up to excitement. "This is your very first death, he said, the first person you’ve known who’s died."

I tried to take this information in. Death was what happened to my nine-year-old brother Paul’s fish when we found one of them floating in the bowl, belly up, bloated, scales sloughing off. With Paul crying in protest beside him, my father would snatch it with a net, carry it across the green living room carpet (my mother scolding him for dripping filthy fish water all the way) and flush it down the toilet.

If I didn’t comprehend fully that death could happen to people, my father’s words got my attention. First meant that other deaths would follow, and yours that Roy’s death belonged to me.

Whether through genes or upbringing, I was a child already overly attuned to loss. I grieved the duck’s head the handyman cut off my wooden potty seat to accommodate my growing legs; I felt sorry for metal railings gone to rust. If my mother disappeared from my sight even momentarily, I wailed, feeling like she had disappeared forever.

My mother saw the growing distress on my face and shook her head.

Ira! Will I ever get through to you about how suggestible she is?

At which point, my father repeated a typical pattern: after terrifying me, he rushed in to offer fatherly succor. Roy will live on in your memories, he said. You can keep him alive in your memories.

Great. Now I was a four-year-old responsible for keeping a dead man alive.

figure

Even before Roy’s death, my father had begun to instruct me in the marvels and burdens of memory. He was dressed in his usual outfit—Jockey shorts—and in his favorite position, on the living room sofa with an infant’s splayed thighs and bent knees, two fingers poised over his eyebrow as if to physically trap the thoughts that moved too turbulently through his brain.

"Debeleh, wait."

I startled and stopped.

Something about how you walked by me just now reminded me of myself one day when I was a child. It was an ordinary day just like this, and I was sitting in the kitchen of our apartment in Detroit. I decided to conduct an experiment. Could I will myself to remember a random moment? And out of the blue, that moment came back to me, clear as a bell. You can do it too; you can will your memory.

I wanted to be in on the experiment. Okay, Daddy, show me, I said.

Look around the room. Take everything in.

I panned the living room: the picture window that faced Teasley Street, the aqua walls, the deep green carpet, the red leather armchair, the open display shelves dividing the living room from the dining room. Their contents posed a challenge—all those figurines. My favorite: a painted ceramic squirrel that my mother brought down sometimes so I could touch him, and then put back on a high shelf so I could not break him.

Okay, shut your eyes and make sure you’ve captured everything in the room.

I concentrated. Okay, Daddy, now what?

"Say it along with me: Remember this moment, remember this moment."

If innocence is freedom from regret about the past and worry about the future, I was innocent still, residing like a dog in a perennial present tense. The future extended no further than the next meal, or the next day, or the next birthday, or some vaguely imagined day when I would be grown up. What my father said thrust me simultaneously forward into my future and back into my past, and then even further back to the time when my father was himself a child, a yaw of time before I existed. Just realizing that I had not been there, had not existed, made me queasy. Hadn’t everything begun with me? Suddenly I realized: this moment, the very moment we were living, would soon be past, gone, lost. We were helpless to stop it. All we had was memory.

"Remember this moment, remember this moment," I chanted along with him, beginning that day to tell the story of myself in my head.

figure

One morning. I remember it as a time before my father’s lesson about death. I hopped from my single bed into my parents’ double and snuggled into the space between them. My mother wore her slinky, sky blue nightgown. I wrapped my arms around her neck and abandoned myself to the earthy sweetness of her just-waking body. Lush, hairless, porcelain. The hug only lasted a moment. I have things to do, she said.

My father held back, inviting me to play. Heavy stubble framed his fat cheeks, his full round lips. He held out his hands to me. He had been born with three fingers on one hand and two on the other, a short arm that did not rotate, and a short leg that required a built-up shoe. Although other children in the neighborhood sometimes reacted with skittishness to my father’s physical deformities, I did not find them disturbing; I found my father’s body wondrous.

I regarded the vast countryside of his chest and abdomen covered by a forest of soft black fur. Two hillocks of pink nipples protruded from the dark mass. He pushed a birthmark on his stomach and stuck out his tongue. Pfffft, he said. I laughed and examined the pinpricks of white on his enormous pink tongue that resided in a mouth cavernous enough for me to crawl into.

Pfffft, he repeated. I touched the whitish mole on the left side of his stomach and his tongue darted in; I poked it again, and his tongue darted back out. My father’s body had turned into another of my battery-operated toys, like the dog who barked and stood on his hind legs or the bunny who drank from a cup of carrot juice. Daddy’s body: personal funhouse amusement.

A sudden impulse sprang my father up from the bed and across the room. He turned back to me, now wearing his gorilla mask. Hunched over, he grunted, scratched under his arms, and hijacked my mother as she walked back into the room. She shrieked as he grabbed at her bottom, at her breasts, in between her legs. She jerked forward and back, batting his hands away.

Cut it out, Ira, she said, laughing at first. But he kept clutching, as if what resided between her legs was a small animal eluding his grasp.

Stop it already, Ira, she said, turning cold. You never know when to stop.

He turned to me, and I scrambled across the bed to escape him. He pushed his gorilla face next to mine and whimpered. We both froze for a moment, and then he began to bounce up and down and shake the bed. I scampered away to the wall, cornered. Enraptured. Afraid. One minute he was just my father wearing a mask, and the next, he’d turned into a gorilla.

That was the shape-shifting father I had at age four—would-be actor, teller of dark truths, funhouse amusement, sexy gorilla, and his favorite role: lay rabbi of the La Crescenta Valley Community Jewish Center.

In our overwhelmingly Christian, far-right Republican community, a motley assortment of families with varying degrees of Jewish identity built a modest cinderblock synagogue. Its walls became a target for swastikas; vagrants broke in and spilled the sacramental wine. Itinerant clergy performed brises, bar mitzvahs, funerals, and weddings. My father led Sabbath services, taught Sunday school, and officiated at Shivas, leading week-long nightly prayers at the homes of the bereaved. He’d learned the Jewish liturgy from his maternal grandfather, Abraham. When Abraham was struck and killed by a train shortly before Ira’s bar mitzvah, Ira declared himself an atheist. Thirty years later, he got on the bimah each week and dared God