You Can't Sleep in Restaurants: (What Happened the Week David Fun England Went off His Pills?)

By Ron N. Wallace

What happens when a young man makes a very joyful, but very bad decision, which catapults his life into ecstasy and sorrow? Yet what if you too thought it logical to write your resume big on the living room wall, charge two full baskets on a shopping spree at L-Mart, think buying a rocking chair will save the relationship with your cousin, and actually believe you can get away with it all; outsmarting the medical community, employers, family, and even yourself?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781449095529

Ron N. Wallace

Born in Stamford Connecticut, after two years at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Ron achieved a BA in English from Kalamazoo College in 1976, with emphasis in Creative Writing. His trade has been writing Advertising. His novel, 17! Is a fun story of high school students on Halloween 1971 – far from the backdrop of the Vietnam War. 17! Placed high in a National Writers Association novel contest! Also now available for preview and $9 ebook online at authorhouse.com, or in big paperback from AuthorHouse at 888-280-7715, or from your favorite bookstore, you can order and enjoy his “unappreciated wife runs for President” novel, titled, Sheila For President?

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© 2010 Ron N. Wallace. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  03/19/2021

ISBN: 978-1-4490-9551-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-9552-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010903277

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

1. Off Your Pills…

2. Why?

3. Feel Good!

4. To Lance’s!

5. Sunday Afternoon?

6. The Lounge…

7. Monday!

8. Writing Night 1?

9. Wednesday…

10. Writing Night 3 –

11. Writing Night 4 –

12. Black Friday!

13. Allison Asher!

14. Sheila

15. L-Mart…

16. Sister C.

17. The Birthday Party?

18. Strike One!

19. The Crash!

20. Strike Four!

21. The Party?

22. You Can’t Sleep In Restaurants.

23. The State!

24. Springwood?

25. Coffee Again…

26. It Takes A Friend…

Afterword

After, Afterword

More From Ron N. Wallace

Much the time I can’t be too deep in thought, because you can’t sleep in restaurants.

    For Sandy…

                                D.F.E.

FOREWORD

YOU ARE ABOUT TO read a wonderful book! You Can’t Sleep In Restaurants is not a humor book, although you will find yourself chuckling. It is not a sad book, although there are parts that will bring you very near tears.

This is a novel about one of the most misunderstood illnesses out there: schizophrenia. The author of this book is a schizoaffective-schizophrenic. But unlike other books on this subject, this is not a depressing read. Rather, it is a wild roller coaster ride, written by an author who isn’t dangerous, but did occasionally lose control.

When I first met the author of this novel, I had no idea I would become so enmeshed in trying to understand this difficult but fascinating illness. Everyone with even a remote interest in psychology should read this book. The author is a brilliant writer who takes the reader through the difficult days of a schizophrenic episode. When the last page is turned, you will know for certain why – You Can’t Sleep In Restaurants.

Sandy Whelchel – author of Hide & Seek, a thriller novel, her Check & Mate novel, and six nonfiction books. Plus, she’s Executive Director of the National Writers Association!

1. OFF YOUR PILLS…

I’M LOSING HER FOREVER! From one look I’ve never been so much in love. Yet I don’t even know her name. I must say something before she walks out – HEY, WHERE YOU GOING SO FAST? you desperately exclaim, too loud for the restaurant, but you don’t care. There. You’ve said something. You’ve given it your best shot.

Now you think, Oh my God. That stopped her. She’s even smiling and happily walking back to me…. You glance – don’t see a ring. So you have to jump out of yourself to find the energy – the sale to see if she’ll give you her number. Your shrink says, If there’s eye contact and they give you their phone number, then they’re interested. And there’s been eye contact. In the last five seconds she’s directly glanced with you a couple times, while she smiled and did not hurry to put on her coat. You read her interest is more than just curiosity, as if she’s advertising to open the door into her life, saying – I’m available!

How could you not have noticed the back of her long blond hair two booths down? Are you that withdrawn? Are you that depressed? In a split second the Plan runs through your mind: Just get her number. – Then, deliberately go off my pills.

Because she’s so cool, I have to be at my utmost best. I need to be witty, charming, entertaining, funny, all the things I’m not when on the brain chemical pills, Navene and Lithium, if I have a chance of establishing a relationship with her, especially to make it last.

What are you? A writer?

What’s your answer? Quick. You’re not going to lie or stretch the truth, but coming right out and saying, until she knows and really likes you, I’m a schizoaffective-schizophrenic, isn’t going to sell her.

Sure, you casually respond, because how do you happen to have all this stuff on your restaurant booth table? See? Here’s my portfolio. I must run the best pieces under her eyes. – Here’s my front page interview with the Governor! You hand the magazine to her, pointing out your by-line name. Then you pull out the page from the Mayor. And here’s a thank you note from him, for the piece I did on the Mayor. I know I’ve got to get it right the first time. There’s only time for one more. And here’s the letter from the advertising agency President who says I’m one of the country’s best young creative minds.

Count four. That’s the close. Shut up now and let the customer react, one way or another. You wait. You wait. Three. Four….

"I’m impressed!" she warmly states, holding the three, like waiting for the fourth ace.

As you look up, her sea-green eyes destroy you. You did it. At least you got initial acceptance. Hi! I’m David England, you say extending your hand. Don’t stand up. Play it cool….

She shakes with a small hand of business strength. I’ve noticed you here, David. You seem so engrossed. I’m Allison Asher.

What the heck? I might as well come right out and say it. – Let’s have coffee sometime.

She thinks, like she too has been looking for this moment and coolly answers, Okay!

It worked. The number. The number! You pull out your business card case and say, Here’s my card.

She studies. The England Agency. What is it?

I’ll give her my standard answer I fall back on when I have to be part of society, as if it will work for even the bum on the street, when asked what he does: I’m in Advertising. – Now what? I’m so close. Do you have a card, Allison?

Oh, do ya have another one? I’ll write my number on the back.

Cool, you say, not believing you’re over the hump – made it this far. Here.

She writes with the card on the table, gently hands it back to you, and enthusiastically says, Call. I’ll meet ya somewhere.

Great, you speak, trying not to act overly happy, as if you get girls’ phone numbers all the time.

See you, she happily concludes, walking off. "Thanks for getting my attention!"

As you’re feeling so in love with her, outside the window she smiles and waves to you with expression. Then she’s a dream….

You understand what you have to do. Here’s finally an opportunity for your drag-of-a-life to be enriched. Because she’s worth so much, due to the dull cloud of the pills you take, you can’t be brilliant, or interesting enough to keep Allison through coffee, much less start a great lifetime relationship. If you are going to keep her attention and have something happen, you feel you must go off your pills – to not be drugged down, rather, have enough personality to engage her. You’re really sure of this now with the new fact presenting itself out of the blue: You’re holding both her home and office numbers!

2. WHY?

WHEN COMING OUT OF your prolonged spaced-out stare, she has long been history.

Alone in your head again, you feel the retrorockets lose pressure, down, down, down inside your whole self. You sink lower and lower as you sit here feeling compressed back to the negative energy you began with. Like a black hole in outer space, all the chemicals are being pulled to the center of your depression, despite the experience with this woman. Yet the scene has made you reach out of yourself to find a positive, up feeling you rarely experience. If you hadn’t put out so much energy, you don’t think you would have captured her interest.

Now you have to recover and make a concrete plan. It feels right to not be too young; not be too eager, though you guess you’re like seven years younger than Allison. You’ll call her in a week or so. You’ll call her next Friday! – That will give me time to be off my pills and develop the extra oomph to rock us. – To really get the start of our relationship going!

Like gazing at pure gold two feet away – or with the sun shining producing a rainbow – or with the attention of a sudden safe driving stop – or emergency TV news break coverage – or Niagara Falls – you’re looking at dramatic possibility which didn’t exist before. The chance this girl could pull you out of your doldrums is a kiss from Heaven.

Although you completed your E.D. Gopher animal novel, political satire manuscript draft, last December, you don’t know what happened over Christmas. Now, it’s January 24th. Night after night you come here after your part-time fast food and advertising writing jobs, and sit drinking coffee until bedtime. You don’t have a creative bone in your head, and it’s taking you the longest time to get into another novel. You don’t know if you’ll ever write again. It scares you. You’re back to desolation. No purpose. No way of having big publishing success, because despite the dampened thinking on medication, the novel is so good. You want that more than anything.

So you’re just hanging on with the milestone of achieving your longest time record on pills, as your doctor says, "You’re not a schizophrenic when you’re on the pills." Therefore, with the pharmaceuticals, you aren’t experiencing schizoaffective energy, and are accomplishing the very basic goal of staying out of, and not needing the expensive hospital psych ward to bring you back to reality and reorganize.

The goal is to be healthy! informs Dr. Banks, I don’t care if you do get published. I want your schizophrenia to stay in remission with you functioning to your potential, and not falling apart. Have good ‘B+,’ if not ‘A’ weeks in your reports to me. I want your life to be good enough by focusing on what would give you, I say the global term – ‘gratification.’ Not be focused on ‘the drag,’ as you say.

What happened, or didn’t happen? You were going to write your great novel to get out of this predicament – out of this mess. Yet you are still nowhere, working alone, without an agent or someone to write for, who can pull you through. Plus, the manuscripts you’ve been able to create have to be tightened, and edited to marketable standards. You wish you knew of and could afford someone with the necessary insight to do so, or to at least teach you. Also, you still haven’t come up with your number one marketable novel idea, even if you could somehow write, and sell it big time, launching your career.

At least back in high school you used to have promise, say, Halloween, 1971 when you were 17. And you wrote all about it in your novel, 17! Halloween 1971. Yet your first hospitalization was at the time they say the condition typically begins, at age 19. Your very own personal neurochemicals gunned you down in New York City, interrupting college experience. After five months there in the psych ward on 2000 milligrams of Thorazine, you managed to get it together to receive your B.A. in English/Creative Writing on time from a top college, four years after high school graduation, but now the creative writing success dream is dust. – Am I simply dreaming I’m creative? I sure don’t feel that way.

That New York summer of 1974, your awareness went so far within you. You walked and walked all over Manhattan for six weeks. You absolutely don’t want to remember the utter desperation trying to do that summer observational-trainee job in the advertising agency.

Then the hardest part in the beginning on the psych ward in New York City, was seeing the pain on Dad’s face. He, as Executive Vice President of a big corporation, and Mom, would fly in on the corporate jet, and stay at the company’s Fortune 500 suite, to attend his over-the-counter drug industry meetings, and to visit you in the psych place. The high points were when Mom and Dad would be smiling, buying you a piece of New York cheesecake upon taking you on pass out to dinner. The two rock concerts at Lincoln Center were especially enjoyable, and your New York City friends, especially Paul and Heather, were great when visiting you in the psych ward.

Now, a long way from there, all you can do is recover from Allison, and relax while the divorce, back in 1980, comes to mind. Among other things, you spent weeks up all night trying to write a book in iambic pentameter. Because you completely de-compensated, your wife had to give you back to your parents, who could afford the continued psychiatric care. Committing you was the hardest thing I ever had to do! said your father.

So after achieving four years of marriage, and then with three mental health hospitalizations that 1980 summer, a couple years later you got stressed-out from a girlfriend breakup, and had to cool-out and recoup on the private psych ward again. In time, after an episode at the State hospital, you made progress. And now, although you’re hoping the advertising agency writing job turns into full time, you’re still cooking French fries without either employer knowing of your brain chemical imbalance.

It’s so hard trying to work again and again. You want to come off as completely normal. Yet, you don’t have a good track record, and are like on your 18th job. So you’re not proud of your story. It seems since age 19, your whole life has been an attempt to recover. To be labeled a schizophrenic then, brought the worst-case scenario into your life, because it certainly does not imply success. No one wants to be one, although your particular brand does not hear voices or see hallucinations. Surprisingly, at this point in the course of your illness, you tend to experience too much pleasure off your pills, like an alcoholic or drug addict would. You can hardly say it to yourself – I’m a schizoaffective-schizophrenic. Off-pills your thoughts are not rational – they’re unorganized, illogical, and don’t track – schizo. And also, off-pills, your feelings get extreme and fluctuate; the affective term. In addition, your doctor says, People like you can’t handle stress. Stress causes your circuits to blow. So you have to live as stress-free a life as possible. But if you don’t tackle stress and try to combat it, you don’t receive the satisfaction of a paycheck, or a relationship with a girl!

As you ruminate on all this, despair sets in. You’re feeling as if the scene just now with Allison may not have happened at all.

If schizophrenia and recovery is a two-way street – out of reality, and in reality – like two football field end zones clashing, you do feel skiz, caught in the vast yardage between feeling low self-esteem in resigned identity as a schizophrenic, and therefore seemingly with no redeeming social value, stigma. – Versus, being this guy on-pills who can overcome the stress, put on a suit, interview business leaders, write articles and advertising, keep up with cooking the fast food French fries, put a funny novel together if in the mood, and try for a relationship with a woman!

It’s perhaps too much dopamine, dope in your brain, the pill particles block, but having not achieved greater success in Life by now, without a great deal of promise for the future, makes you feel low. Simple faulty brain wiring shouldn’t have anything to do with self-worth, and on the other hand, you may not have had further success without it. Nevertheless, a desire to achieve more success still drives you, though you really don’t mind feeling yourself as an unenlightened being. Yet, you want to be off-pills because it makes you feel capable. And yes, in this stage of your life, being off medication is enjoyable, and you can really party – even having too much fun!

Sadly, you recall the last time you were stressed-off the pills. For awhile you had a good time, but soon into the psych ward you went. So the Navene pills keep a lid on your erratic thought process, while the Lithium keeps you from being manic, and prevents extreme emotionalism. The meds do help you make better decisions, and curb impulsive action, but they seem to drag you down. Yes, they keep you straight enough to where you can cope outside the psych hospital on your own; though there’s the sticking point, it’s no fun just… coping. However, you really should take your pills because you mess up so badly off them! Taking your pills is far better than with the medical authorities looking down on you as if you are a hopeless case. You’ve never let yourself feel you are a hopeless case, because overall, in this last recovery, it’s been your determination to stay out of the hospital. You accomplished this due to the decision to take your pills morning and night, and the decision to get ahead as best you can in the working world. Those two decisions have worked since the last time you got out of the clink.

You know it all depends on what you can do, and the opportunity to learn what you can do. Yeah, if you were a normal person without this extra struggle, finding your niche in the career world would be hard enough. But you’re a guy who has to fight with his brain chemistry day in and day out. The medications don’t make it so simple that everything easily falls into place, even though you take them morning and night, hoping to be right, and as successful as you possibly can be.

So except for the relationship possibility with Allison, and mentally reviewing your What’s Good List, and what you do have, there’s not much feeling of hope, pure and simple. And you’re not fatalistic and throwing in the towel. Now, you simply have the hopeful dream of one more chance being okay off your pills, and terrifically enjoying your mind! The truth – only when off the pills, do I feel able to write a not depressed, highly original, fun – marketable kick-off novel – to achieve lifetime income, because it’s so hard for me to earn a living.

So you’re ready to do it without the pills. You think you can this time if you really concentrate and apply yourself to keep your act together. You believe by controlling your energy, due to a little extra focusing effort at critical times, you’ll get by the psychiatrist, succeed at work, and be cool and proper in your restaurant life, because you can’t sleep in restaurants. Too many times you’ve been politely told, due to appearing to sleep, to, Wake up!

For so long, you’ve felt you really can control this condition, and enjoy the good part, the pleasure, without the drugs governing your spirit. At least you want it that way. You really do, as you sit here feeling blown-out from being rocked by Allison’s vibration – nuking you!

You are making a firm decision – (though it feels like being stressed-out in your physical system, yet in a good feeling way; off track from getting hurricane-hit by Allison) – to go