The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [90]
He also phoned my mother, who suggested I speak with a psychiatrist. I agreed, if for no other reason than I simply wanted to be able to sleep: in bed at night I would imagine myself chained naked to a table, being whipped; instead of counting sheep, I would count the lashes striking my body. The images soothed me. From a phone booth on the Boulevard Montparnasse I gave an American doctor the answers I knew he needed to prescribe me some relief: “No, I cannot remember the last time I enjoyed something. Yes, I would much rather be dead.” He prescribed Celexa, and my dad brought a large bottle of the pills with him to France.
My father resisted treating his depression with prescription drugs. I had always done the same, in part because my father’s sadness had seemed noble to me when I was growing up, an indication of his compassion, his sensitivity to the pain in the world. During high school, when friends turned mean and history class painted a bleak picture of humanity and I got my heart broken for the first time, I clung to my father’s melancholic interpretation of life. My conversations with him felt truer than any interactions with my peers. Subconsciously I believed that taking antidepressants would mean acknowledging that the world was not better for the tears we shed over the news and the cruelty we encountered. Taking medication would have meant accepting that all our tears had been for naught. It took me a long time to learn that being miserable does not alleviate the world’s misery.
I was lying on my lumpy bed in Paris with my eyes fixed on the ceiling when my dad called to tell me his plane had landed. He would rent a car and come pick me up. I had to find the boardinghouse address on a napkin to give it to him. When he saw me outside on the sidewalk, thinner than normal and with puffy red eyes, he grabbed his CD case. As I dropped into the passenger seat, he handed me his music and said, “Your choice.”
I told him to take me out of the city. He followed signs that said Toutes Directions: all directions leading out of Paris. I had avoided talking for weeks, but now the words came out of me fast and sharp, like daggers I didn’t know I’d swallowed. I spoke so quickly—about the man who’d spit in my face in the street, the waiter who’d kicked me out of a restaurant because I’d wanted my salad without anchovies, the bombs that kept falling on Baghdad—that I was soon out of breath.
My dad told me I was hyperventilating. “Maybe it would be best if we just listened to music for a while,” he said. I chose sweet, familiar songs—Eva Cassidy and Nancy Griffith and Joni Mitchell—and I wanted it loud. My dad was more than happy to oblige.
There was a period in my elementary-school years when my dad and I listened to nothing but Billy Joel. His Greatest Hits was the soundtrack for the long drives when Dad took my sister and me to water parks or beaches or trailheads. Pat, our stepmom, didn’t like hiking or amusement parks, so my sister and I got our dad all to ourselves on these outings. I liked when it got dark on the way home but the music was still loud, the two of us singing along to “Uptown Girl.” My dad’s face would become serious and quiet when “Piano Man” came on. My sister used to ask us to turn it down. She didn’t understand how we could listen to the same songs over and over.
One time Dad planned a real vacation, just for the three of us. And even though he left his bag on one flight and our return tickets on the next, we made it to Arizona, rented an RV, and began to drive. We kept the minifridge stocked with ice cream and fudge. My sister and I made Pillsbury cinnamon rolls in the oven while our dad drove eighty on the open desert roads, singing along loudly to the Talking Heads. When we were