My Decade on Broadway
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“Hello,” I’d say in my formal voice, as I dialed neighborhood morticians. “I’m calling to enquire about the life of a current client of yours?” 
I started self-harming in May 1989 after living alone, losing a girlfriend and the job. Self-injury was something I’d never heard of and it came upon me quickly, a thrilling discovery. The first evening I did it, Michael Jordan was hitting a clutch jump shot against the Cleveland Cavaliers. I was watching it on television with the sound turned off. Fats Domino was singing “Blueberry Hill” on an oldies station and I was rereading an old break-up letter from an ex-girlfriend. There was butternut squash with Smucker’s strawberry preserves waiting to be put in the oven. Without much forethought, I sat down at the table and took apart a disposable Bic razor. Then I brought my right hand quickly down on my arms, shoulders, chest, and belly. I did it carefully at first, almost with civility. I didn’t want to cause any trouble. Then I started spastically moving around in circles to the music, wiping the blood onto the letter and speaking in a level voice to the invisible girl: “This one’s for you, hon.” 
Thirty minutes later, relatively at ease, I sat in the bathtub, watching the water grow rosy. My skin stung but I soaped away the mess, cleaned up, and went to bed. That evening, I dreamt of three dung snakes devouring my insides, but the next day, I felt calm, less tense. I can do this, I thought. I can keep this secret to myself. I wandered through Copley Square for a few days, going to matinees and then coming home and self-harming. 
I crumbled when I returned home to Guilford for a weekend visit two weeks later. After my dad asked me how life was going, I found myself trying to eat my parents’ couch in the living room. I remember thinking that if I could just get the whole couch inside my mouth, I could muffle the screams and stop that terrible sound from emerging. It’s peculiar what comes back, the tiny things, but for me it was the slightest touch of my nine-year-old sister Julie’s hand on my back. “Why is he so sad?” she said to mom. 
Later that night, I was in the emergency room at St. Raphael’s in New Haven and the doctor asked me to take off my shirt and soon my father was saying, “Okay, okay now.” I remember the silence, that long pause as they both checked out my body with the various wounds. From there, I was hospitalized for a month and a half at St. Raphael’s and discharged, followed by two inpatient stays in the summer and early autumn. 
With each razor spree, the wounds grew deeper and more serious and I grew more determined to damage. Incidents were followed by brutal shame and extra doses of self-loathing. For nine years, from Vermont to Kansas to Chicago, I tried halfway houses, top-tier hospitals, electroconvulsive therapy, and some mediocre clinics. Eventually, I tried to live on my own back in Connecticut, but only lasted two months. I felt doomed, stupid, and embarrassed that I couldn’t stop the self-harm, but at the same time, somewhere in my mind, it didn’t feel so far away from beautiful. I was young and sick and I thought I could handle it. 
I was wrong. 
The night before I moved to PFTL in 1997, I sat in a Branford apartment and removed eight cheap Black and Mild cigars from a plastic case. I had started burning a few months before—it was less messy than cutting, showed more control, I thought. (Now avail- able at stores everywhere: smokes! A new and improved way to wound without detection!) I hated smoke, even from pot, and felt the same about cigars, but I learned to enjoy the smell of my skin being singed. My burnt flesh smelled faintly of freezer burn, of danger and dead hair. I decided that ashtrays, generally, maintained decent attitudes toward the whole smoking process. They didn’t pull away but simply stood their ground. 
The next morning, with suitcase and sleeping bag in tow, I rang the buzzer at PFTL with my feet and toes smothered in blisters and Neosporin. I was thirty-one years old and a social worker had recommended PFTL to me, which was a good thing. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.