My Decade on Broadway
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I snuck back onto the hospital grounds and wandered the property, smearing my blood over the statues and buildings. There was a large, ornate, porcelain fountain with cherubs reaching skyward. I climbed it, hung on and screamed into the blackness. It was hellish but also gave me a phenomenal rush. I felt as if I were in a swirling, twisted dream. I know that sounds crazy—it was crazy—but it was the best feeling I’d ever had at that point in my life, and it was what I was shooting for each time I hurt myself in the future. Carry me back to that fluidity of the dream, I used to muse. Get me back there! 
I was overcome by racing thoughts about self-harm and my blood—the texture, the thick, sticky richness of it. I spent months lusting after a simple straightedge razor. Commercials for Gillette blades—the best a man can get!—would send me into a frothing panic. A year later, after being discharged, I got a room in a swanky hotel in downtown Hartford and brought in two small paint brushes, a plastic drop cloth, some hermit bars, a liverwurst sandwich, and a half-gallon of skim milk. Then I spent five hours slicing and smearing across the bathroom. I wrote giant bloody phrases to amuse an invisible audience: I bleed therefore I am and This thing cuts like a knife! I took breaks and watched Entertainment Tonight and the news throughout my evening. 
At around two in the morning, I panicked, calling my old therapist at his home. 
“Christ!” he said. “Are you bleeding badly?”
“Not as severely as before,” I said.
“Just walk out the lobby and go to the Civic Center and I’ll have an ambulance meet you there,” he said, “Goddamnit, David. You’ve got to stop this or you’ll die. You’re out of control.” 
I left twenty dollars and a note on the tv for the chambermaids: Don’t worry, I’m basically okay and do apologize for this childish mess. Sorry for scaring you—take care. 
During those severe incidents, I chose to get help, to phone my doctor or walk toward the security guards on the grounds of a hospital when I felt as if I were going to pass out. I didn’t let myself drift away. I never intended to die. There’s a difference between insane self-harm and pining for that total, annihilating blackness, isn’t there? 
But why did I save myself? I’m not sure. It seems a kernel of hope lingered after every incident, some hope remained. Was that spark divine? Did God save me? Did she reach down and deliver me for some reason, some infinite purpose, or is that just my ego expanding the sad melodrama into a Hollywood epic? I mean, who would play me in the movie? 
By the time I arrived at PFTL, I’d already had too much neo-Freudian therapy, shock treatments, and meds. Eventually, I morphed into what I call a professional mental patient, a not- incredibly-rare breed. A careerist. When I was in the role of chronic guy, it was sad and bloody and depressing, and sometimes psychotic, but there was comfort in it. I knew what was expected of me, and I became quite skilled at it. 
My early years were good and relatively carefree, save for a physically abusive older brother, but who doesn’t have one of those, right? As an eleven-year-old, I also watched my dog get cut in half by an Amtrak train—I remember being shocked, fascinated, and a little obsessed by the lack of blood on Jiggs. Truly, though, the years were good ones, playing little league sports and even being labeled the “friendliest” of my 1984 class in the high school yearbook. I left for Skidmore feeling excited and anxious about school. Unfortunately, at college, I snuffed my intellectual curiosity with disaffection, marijuana, cocaine, and a little LSD. Hemingway and Updike and Roth rescued me at the end, but by the time I graduated in 1988 with an English degree, I was clinically depressed and predictably cynical. I worked at a paper outside Boston for nine months after graduation, writing about holiday decorations, aldermanic play-by-play, gargantuan potholes, and vandalized rose bushes. Just before the paper went bankrupt in 1989, I wrote obituaries, an ironic portent of things to come.