Fucked-Up Men

Women have always been characterized as being more prone to mental problems. Hysterical. Emotional. Irrational. However, my experience with fucked up people does not bear this out. I’ve been going to various therapy groups over the last 4 years and if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that when men are really fucked up, they’re pretty much a hopeless cause. At least the straight ones. I suspect gay men are a little more in touch with their emotions and are able to talk about them better, but this is all conjecture; I really don’t know because somehow I’ve never been in a therapy group with gay men.

But yeah, fucked up straight men are really just the most fucked up people you’ll ever find on this earth. They don’t seem able to confront themselves or even want to understand themselves. They attend group meetings but don’t really participate and, if they do, they only give feedback to other people’s problems without ever exposing their own. When they see their shrink, nothing is ever really examined closely and the sessions just become lazy chat sessions, not unlike talking to a bartender. They go in endless circles analyzing their own lives, but since they are afraid to actually confront what is really going on, the analyses are nothing more than empty, superficial theorizing. They’re the same today as they were 10 years ago. There’s no progression. If I were a therapist, I’d pretty much ban all straight men from my practice and concentrate on women and gay men. At least they’re learnable, changeable, and brave.

This one guy, Phil, I met when I attended these group sessions over at Lutheran Memorial Hospital. At first things were fine. We’d go out for sushi or hang out at the dog beach. Sometimes we’d just spend time in his room and surf the internet. I made him a George Michael CD which he liked; he described the music as “sexy … very, very sexy.”

Then I found out certain things about him. Stuff he either told me or stuff that I intuited. He had some kind of nervous breakdown some twenty odd years ago when he was in college and since then he’d been living at home in his mother’s attic, usually unemployed. He worked briefly as a cab driver, but that was a long time ago and he hasn’t received a paycheck since. Basically, life is just passing him by. He doesn’t seem to mind this at all. He spends much of the day emailing his various friends from high school who put up with him because they pity him and don’t know how to get rid of him. He’s never had a girlfriend and I’m almost positive he’s still a virgin. He sees a shrink who’s a Republican and has never told him what her diagnosis of him is – and he’s never asked. All he knows is that he’s on Lithium. When I told him that Lithium is to treat manic depression, he said that he wasn’t bipolar and that the Lithium was for something else. Whatever. He goes through phases where he’s very edgy and confrontational and unpredictable, even mean-spirited. So then he shoots off a bunch of crazy emails and within the hour all the female friends respond expressing concern. Are you alright, Phil? Do you need to talk, Phil? As if he were a little boy, which I guess makes sense since emotionally he’s still about 14. He’s in denial about being bipolar but then, funnily enough, exaggerates his bipolar behavior very consciously to get a response from people. And it usually works.

One time he called me and I was depressed about something I can’t remember. Then I said something like, “Well, I guess I shouldn’t complain and feel sorry for myself. I mean, there’s people in Somalia that don’t even have clean drinking water and …” He TOTALLY BLEW UP and started ranting about how the world doesn’t understand mental illness and the sheer hell of what we go through and how the towel-heads (arabs) should all be deported and so on. This went on for a good seven minutes. I didn’t say anything because he was yelling nonstop. When he finally calmed down he said, out of breath, “Well, that was good. I needed to get that out.”

Another time he came over to my house, agitated and frenetic. Out of nowhere he goes, very exasperated, “You never wear high heel shoes. You always wear flats.” Apparently, he’d been toying with the idea of us becoming a couple, but was bothered by my shortness. I ignored the comment and we went out for a drive in his car. He goes, “I know all of these people’s secrets.” He was always talking about his mother and how influential she was. So I go, “What secrets?” And he replies, with this mischievous grin on his face, “I can’t tell you. They’re secrets.” That was the last time I hung out with him. Several months later he called me out of the blue, very friendly and calm and “normal.” I could tell he was really lonely and realized he better be on good behavior. My guess is that his old high school friends weren’t responding to his emails anymore. He was working up to ask me if I wanted to go the movies when I cut him off and said, “Well, it was nice hearing from you. Take care.” Then I hung up.

This other guy I met in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy at Masonic Hospital. His name was Peter and he used to be addicted to opiate prescription medicine but got off it and was in recovery. On the way to DBT, he got on the same train as me and we struck up a nice conversation. As it turned out, we even lived in the same neighborhood. We started hanging out that summer and he tried to turn me on to Charles Bukowski. We’d also go to these these poetry open-mic readings where he would recite these morbid stories he wrote. They were all about children and porno magazines and cat litter and filth. Just really twisted shit. Everyone put up with it because he was a nice guy, but he always went beyond his 5-minute mark and would often have to be ushered off stage. He actually assumed people would want to hear his stories for more than five minutes. He thought he was original and visionary; he thought he was talented.

He could never explain himself very well. Very evasive and mysterious. He admitted to me that he was having trouble in his support group because he never talked about himself when everyone else was bearing their soul and being very open. This eventually became an issue in the group because it was uncomfortable for everyone else to be sharing around a guy they knew nothing about. I mean, it wasn’t very reciprocal. When I asked him why he didn’t talk, he claimed he really had nothing to say.

I tried to help him out. I set up an email account for him because he didn’t have one and typed up his resume. This last part was like pulling teeth because he whined the whole time. He was always whining. Very self-absorbed and baby-like. I gave him my old laptop because I couldn’t stand how he was so removed from technology. He kept calling lap tops “lab tops.” I kept correcting him but he insisted he was right. He also referred to women as “chicks” and when I told him how annoying and antiquated that termiology was, he was almost incredulous. Like Phil, he was really only 14-years-old. A lot of cynical posturing.

Peter once told me he had 20 sessions of electric shock therapy. With a smirk he said, “Some day people will look back and see all the horrible things sick people had to go through.” But I had no sympathy for him whatsoever because he volunteered for those treatments repeatedly rather than confront the issues in his life. He wanted a quick fix (drugs or electric shock therapy), but never actual understanding.

At the end of the summer, Peter told me that his sister-in-law wanted him to work for her business, a doggie-daycare center right in our neighborhood. She wanted him to buy a van and pick up the dogs in the morning and take them to the center. But he didn’t want to. For some strange reason, he didn’t feel comfortable telling her this. We talked about it and at one point he said that his sister-in-law was in therapy and was slowly eliminating certain people from her life. “And I’m one of the last people to be eliminated,” he said cryptically. I asked him what he meant and he just repeated it, saying he didn’t know how else to explain it – as if I was dense or something, as if it should have been perfectly understandable. Finally I asked him if he was having an affair with her or did in the past. He denied it.

In October I was student teaching, doing my internship at a high school, to become an English teacher. They wanted me to attend a football game so that I could learn more about the school’s culture and see the students in a different setting. The football stadium was right in my neighborhood so it was really convenient. I called up Peter to ask him to watch the game with me. I figured it was a simple enough request and since I had done so much for him, maybe he could return the favor. I mean, it’s not like he had anything better to do, being unemployed and on welfare. So I called him and explained the situation and he started whining all over again about how he wasn’t up for it, etc. So then I TOTALLY BLEW UP and said he was a selfish bastard and not much of a friend. Then I hung up.

About three weeks later I decided to give him a call and there was a strange message on his answering machine: “If you are trying to reach Peter B., please call …” So I dialed that number and it turned out to be his sister-in-law’s number. I said to her “What’s going on? There’s this strange message on Peter’s …” Then she told me: Peter had committed suicide by jumping in front of a fast-moving Metra train at two o’clock in the morning. “He knew the train schedule and we think it was something he’d been planning for a long time,” she said in her strained voice. Apparently, she had the unenviable task of explaining this to everyone for days and giving them funeral information. Obviously, there was no open casket so he was cremated and stuffed into an urn.

Going backwards, I’ll end with Tad, the chronically homeless guy. We met because we were both volunteering at a dog shelter and struck up a conversation. I’m too tired to explain his fucked-up-ness but basically he could never be employed for very long and was constantly living in a shelter because his mother kept kicking him out of the house. He was about 33. I offered to help type up his resume since he didn’t have access to a computer, but he declined my offer. His dream was to become an artist like Picasso; he attended a second-rate art school but never graduated. He clearly had low self-esteem and so I told him that it was important to always love himself and put himself in the way of good and then he TOTALLY BLEW UP and screamed for 10 minutes about how nobody understood him and that self-esteem was the least of his worries and that I had no idea what he really needed. Which was not true. It was obvious that the first thing he needed was a job, but he never seemed to really be looking for one. I mean, he was volunteering at a dog shelter when he could have been signing up at an employment agency or whatever. The others things he needed were less obvious but even more important. He needed to love himself and to demonstrate that love by taking care of himself in the most basic ways. But he never gave himself a chance and would subconsciously fuck up the few opportunities that came his way. It didn’t take a psychic to see he was filled with this intense self-loathing and anger toward himself. Anyway, I’m almost positive he’s still homeless. Once I saw him at a busy intersection, holding up a sign "HUNGRY, NEED MONEY" and standing in the middle of the road at the red light. I just drove on and pretended I didn't see him.

So that’s the fucked-up-men trilogy for you. Now I’m in a women-only support group. Thank God.