My Wild Love

There were several befor her; there were none like her. Trish and I first met in a mental hospital, after I'd broken my feet in a suicide attempt. At that point there had been no one. Yet we were not fated to come together quite yet. I returned to Invisible City with casts on my legs while she was committed to the State Hospital for a year. We met again briefly at a Mental Health Conference where I'd walked all over town to meet a pen-pal, I'd lost my sense of direction and walked for hours trying to find the apartments. I also spent some time there visiting with Deep-Space Dan's pretend-girlfriend. Unfortunately, I had to use most of my spending cash to catch a cab back to the motel.

I didn't see her again for several years, following some flings with Kolleen, my Kute Korean Kompanion; me Bonnie--she's my best friend's girl; and Jungle Jill, my Transvestite Tease.Then I received a phone call out of nowhere from Trish. We'd met once more at Tournaments, a gala affair for clients of the mental health system in North Dakota held annually be New Directions, the Mental Health Center there. . The one in which I'm a member is Bear Paw House, the original Perky Pam Layout.

Tournaments is mostly just people playing pool, cribbage, checkers, chess foosball, and a dance in the evening. I usually compete in cribbage but this year (May 2000) went to MisCon instead, the annual Science Fiction Convention in Missoula. I was severely disappointed as one of the pros showed outright hostility to something written in academia.

Trish and I danced the night away, then left New Directions, a fond memory so unlike Jill walking out with another man.during the last dance. It was a dying relationship, anyway. We'd met in a bar when my brother and I were visiting a mutual friend. She wrote me every day, culminating in a visit which left her vastly disappointed with me. I'd fallen off the pedestal she'd put me on.

So it was that one day shortly after Tournaments I received a message on my answering machine from Trish. She asked me to call back, I did, one thing led to another and I arranged a visit down to Capitol City to visit her. We commenced a series of visits and long-distance phone calls. Our first visit was me going down to visit her. The phone calls were too numerous for me to catalog here. She also came up for Christmas one year. Visiting, though, was irksome due to the bus schedules. The bus back from Capitol City left at 5:00 in the morning with a 12 hour lay-over in the City of Electric Light.

One evening we spoke and I proposed marriage. I invited her to come up to Invisible City. However, she had to stay in Capitol City to finish a Vo-Tech course in WordPerfect. She was retaking the course to raise her grade. But when she took the final, which counted for half the grade she became nervous and, instead of using spell-check and saving she went and re-typed the whole manuscript. This probably wouldn't have happened if she wouldn't have entered the Crisis House. At this point she was running wild, running scared.

Her incipient schizophrenia eventually manifested itself after Biggie and I drove down to Capitol City in his pickup to move her belongings. (Note: schizophrenia is NOT "multiple personalities." Psychologists have a word for multiple personalites. They call it "multiple personalities.")

For the first two months of living together everything was divine and idyllic, apart from her fear of spiders. She has overcome this and is now known as Trisha, the Insect Slayer. Then one day we were discussing whether she should use over-ripe bananas in her fruit dehydrator. This resulted in an angry outburst from out of the blue. It became so heated that I had to call the Center's Crisis Line so the therapist on call could calm her down. This was the first inkling that she was once more reverting to the behavior that had put her thru anger control before.

Then the eye problems started. I'd first been diagnosed with glaucoma at the end of my first year of college. I'd had one set of surgeries then; another set a dozen years later by Dr. Ramesh Tripathi, a well-known researcher. The earliest stages of what developed here was iritis, or inflammation of the iris. It occurred during a camping trip by the Center out to the Gates of the Mountains. They have boat rides for tourists as the illusion is not present from the land. When you sail down the Missouri from there what looks to be an impasse breaks apart.

Trish and I were sharing a small tent and I had to use the bathroom. I'd been simply going on the ground outside the tent when it was dark and no one could see. Nearly peed in this one guy's face, too. So I woke up with a full bladder and wanted to start looking for my shoes.

I couldn't find them.

I'm legally blind in my right eye and have severe tunnel vision in my left. This, however, looked like a patch of fog that heightened the tunnel effect.

I finally took off for the bathroom with only my socks on. I asked directions saying "I can't see" but apparently that didn't register on the jerk I was asking. He simply said, "It's behind that building there" and I had to stumble around trying to find it. I finally stumbled over a wall. At that point I was seeing well enough to understand the difference between "boys" and "girls".

On returning to Invisible City I made an appointment with my eye doctor who finally cured the inflammation with some injections on the eye-lid as close to the eye as possible. I became despondent, though, when the iritis cleared up and I still couldn't see. He explained that it had aggravated a cataract which had been forming over the years. Then the cataract made my old glaucoma surgeries fail. I needed surgery urgently. However, I developed an infection after going to the Sleeping Buffalo hot springs so the surgery had to be delayed. Finally, I went to a doctor in Electric City who did an excellent job.

Yet all this while Trish's temper was becoming more and more out of control. She'd been leading me back and forth to the Center by hand. While we were there, as at home, she'd be constantly angry, or at least so it seemed to me. I realize now some of my trepidation was caused by my own fears but this was because I was constantly walking on eggshells, afraid of being yelled at any time.

Then there she began a series of trips to the Invisible Hospital for suicide threats. At one point she was released after a few days and turned around and went right back in. What happened was that, when Trish was in the Hospital my brother cleaned the place, all except the basement bathroom. When she found out that Biggie had left the basement to do, she claimed it was her job and spent hours working on it.

Then while we were at my Mother's house for Sunday dinner she barely was in the door before screaming, "I cleaned the bathroom. Don't I get any credit for it?" My Mother, as usual when attempting to solve a dispute, started regaling us with the story of how Trish had let the shrub in the front yard die by not watering it. Mother, as usual when her stories are interrupted began telling it over again. There was so much screaming the dog ran off into the living room with her tail between her legs. We sent Trish home without a meal and she called a couple hours later claiming she felt like suicide. I called the copz and she was admitted shortly after that.

My Mother was finally able to see clearly the situation I was in. She'd been trying to argue, "So what if the girl has a little temper problem?" Now, however, everyone in my family agreed, she was going to have to move out. I deliberately avoided calling her at the Hospital but she finally reached me at the Center. She called me there and I told her I had something to tell her. She asked, "Is it bad?" I said yes, she had to move out. Meanwhile, I was blathering to everyone at the Layout about her behavior. Yet then when she was finally back we sat together on the love seat and commenced kissing. One thing led to another and soon we were blissfully entwined.

Yet the peace didn't last as her illness once more ran amuck. My eyes could see clearly now even as the relationship continued to break down. Some of this was due to what I was going thru; my psychosis was reactivated by drugs.

Legal drugs. It'd been 420 daze since I sailed a submarine or chugged a brewski, since I'd fried on Vitamin A or done some lines of whatever Aladdin Zane proffered. No, it was Zyban which freaked me out. This is a new med to stop smoking that can also be used in conjunction with the gum or the patch. In 2% of the population, though, it causes psychosis. This was unexpected as it's the same ingredient as Wellbutrin but in a time-release form. I'd been on Wellbutrin before, back when Dr. Midnight had been treating me and before Dr. Eisenstein put my on Clozarel. Now, I wonder if the psychosis he was vainly trying to defeat with navane wasn't in fact caused by the Wellbutrin.

At this point, having quit OOBE-doobies, I was trying to shake the cigarette habit. I smoked my last cigarette when Trish and I disembarked the bus in Electric City. After that I went thru a hellish nightmare of withdrawal symptoms which I combatted with nicotine gum. This was exacerbated when Trish's stereo burned out and we had to take it back to Kame-Apart. Deep-Space Dan gave us a ride up there while deliberately smoking a fag, My schizophrenia went wild even though it was not the cigarette itself which caused yet another breakdown, it had merely aggravated the situation.

I took a cab up to the ER and, when the doctor asked what I wanted her to do I said that I'd undergone the same problems before and they'd given me a shot of haldol decanoate. This is an injectable form of the strongest antipsychotic known to man which is metabolized more slowly than it's pill form. From there there followed a number of crisis situations in which the haldol was repeatedly raised. I didn't want hospitalization, told them so and that I'd rather just have the shot. Dr. Lockwood agreed, even until I was taking twice the normal dose.

As all this transpired not only did Trish's temper grow out of control but her anxiety also became aggravated. Not only did she have problems eating but started making physical complaints about her health. She frequently called the ambulance over the problems she felt herself having. Finally she was hospitalized when the ER doctor saw how much weight she was losing. They put her on a high dose of Atazan to bring her out of it fast. Certainly when I went to visit her she seemed a little descoobied.

Yet the anger persisted. Finally I told her she had to move out. When that happened she became so angry that, when I offered to at least warm up some canned raviolis, she shouted, "Fuck!" and threw the can onto the edge of the garbage can so hard that it left a huge dent. Karen, our mutual caseworker, found her a room at a hotel up to the point where she moved into her own place.

Yet I told her I wanted to remain friends but not lovers. She never gave up hope, though, and when the Center went to summer camp the next year we danced a slow dance. I'd had yet another surgery, this one on my arm for a compressed nerve, so we couldn't dance a slow dance. We moved to the rhythms of Savage Garden and from that point our relationship was renewed.

Since then she's changed and matured. She found a job as a maid at Town House Inns. She won the "Maid of the Month" award awhile back. Now she is planning to study to be a paralegal.

Love reigns over us, at least until the tides of death sweep us both into the Ocean of Being.