It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Yeah?”

“To a tee.”

I leaned forward—our faces were two feet away from one another. “How did you fix it?” I begged.

He tilted the side of his mouth up. “Same way you will. On my own.”

What? What kind of answer was that? I scowled at him. I was here for help; I wasn’t here to figure this out on my own; if I wanted to figure it out on my own I’d be taking a bus tour of Mexico—

“We’re going to start you on Zoloft,” Dr. Barney said.

O-ho?

“It’s a great medication; helps a lot of people. It’s an SSRI, it’s going to affect the serotonin in your brain like you said, but you can’t expect an instant effect because it takes weeks to get into your system.”

“Weeks?”

“Three to four weeks.”

“Isn’t there a fast-acting version?”

“You take the Zoloft with food, once a day. We’ll start you on fifty milligrams. The pills make you feel dizzy, but that’s the only side effect, except for sexual side effects.” Dr. Barney looked up from his pad. “Are you sexually active?”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. “No.”

“All right. Also, Craig: I think that you would benefit from seeing someone.”

“I know! Don’t think I haven’t tried. I’m not really good at talking to girls.”

“Girls? No. I meant therapists. You should start seeing a therapist.”

“What about you?”

“I’m a psychopharmacologist. I refer you to the therapists.”

What a racket. “Okay.”

“Let’s take a look for one.” He opened up what looked like the white pages on his desk and started rattling off names and addresses to me as if they made a difference. Dr. Abrams in Brooklyn, Dr. Fieldstone in Manhattan, Dr. Bok in Manhattan . . . I thought Dr. Bok was a cool name, so we set up an appointment with him—I missed it, though, because later in the week I was doing a history assignment, and I was so embarrassed that I didn’t call to cancel with Dr. Bok that I never went to see him again. The next time with Dr. Barney we had to pick another shrink, and then another, and then another, among them the little old lady who asked if I had been sexually abused and the beautiful redhead who asked why I had so many problems with women and the man with the handlebar mustache who suggested hypnosis. It was like I was dating, except I didn’t get to make out with any of the girls—and I was also bi because I met up with guys.

“I like talking to you,” I told Dr. Barney.

“Well, you’ll be seeing me in a month, to check up on how the medication is treating you.”

“You don’t do therapy?”

“The other doctors are great, Craig; they’ll help.”

Dr. Barney stood up—he was about five-foot-five—and shook my hand with a soft, meaty grip. He handed me the Zoloft prescription and instructed me to get it right away, which I did, even before taking the subway home.

thirteen

The Zoloft worked, and it didn’t take weeks—it worked as soon as I took it that first day. I don’t know how, but suddenly I felt good about my life—what the hell? I was a kid; I had plenty more to do; I’d been through some crap but I was learning from it. These pills were going to bring me back to my old self, able to tackle everything, functional and efficient. I’d be talking to girls in school and telling them that I was messed up, that I had had problems but that I’d dealt with them, and they’d think I was brave and sexy and ask me to call them.

It must have been a placebo effect, but it was a great placebo effect. If placebo effects were this good, they should just make placebos the way to treat depression—maybe that’s what they did; maybe Zoloft was cornstarch. My brain said yes I am back and I thought the whole thing was over.

This was my first experience with a Fake Shift. Dastardly stuff—you do well on a test; you make a girl laugh; you have a particularly lower-body-simmering experience after talking online and rushing to the bathroom; you think it’s all over. That just makes it worse when you wake up the next day and it’s back with a vengeance to show you who’s boss.

“I feel great!” I told Mom when I got home.

“What did the doctor say?”

“I’m on Zoloft!” I showed her the bottle.

“Huh. A lot of people at my office take this.”

“I think it’s working!”

“It can’t be working already, honey. Calm down.”

I took my Zoloft every day. Some days I woke up and got out of bed and brushed my teeth like any normal human being; some days I woke up and lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and wondered what the hell the point was of getting out of bed and brushing my teeth like any normal human being. But I always managed to take it. I never tried to take more than one, either; it wasn’t that kind of drug. It didn’t make you feel anything, but then after a month, just like they said, I started to feel that there was a buoy keeping me upright when I got bad. If the Cycling started there was a panic button attached to my good thoughts; I could click it and think about my family, my sister, my friends, my time online; the good teachers at school—the Anchors.