knocking back my meds with a beer. I'm working twenty-four hours a day. I'm having parties, going to parties, staying up all night. I'm acting exactly as I did before.
You may be asking at this point, Why? Or more to the point,
What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you completely dense? Are you—ha ha!—insane?
Ladies and gentlemen, yes I am.
Tour
January 1998
I'm standing in front of a crowd of people in New York the first time it happens: I'm on book tour, giving a reading from my book
Wasted,
and suddenly I come to, as if I've been away, and I don't know how I got here. I'm terrified, and I hear myself talking, and then people clap and praise my book, which I have apparently been reading from, and then they take me to a hotel and I stand in the middle of the hotel room, paralyzed and confused. Where am I? Where am I going tomorrow? What if I fuck up? What if I make a fool of myself? What if I just go crazy and start to scream? That's what scares me, because I feel as if I'm just about to do it, every minute of the day. I sit in television studios, in radio studios, the crazies welling up in my chest. I sit in coffee shops with reporters and recite the correct answers (What are the correct answers?), still feeling it. And then, at night, the switch trips and I am
on,
in front of a crowd,
questions, more questions! Bring it on! I'm on top of the world!
My speech comes out in rapid fire, I fling my hands around in sweeping gestures, my brain races along at the speed of light, and I love it, the heat, the crowds, the way I get so fucking high each night I think I'll never come down.
At first, it's just mania, which isn't so bad when you're on book tour. You're flying from one interview to the next, guzzling coffee, off to a reading, to a dinner, back to the hotel for a few hours of sleep, and up early to get on a plane to go do it again. I keep going as fast as I can. Day after day, I have endless energy. I'm always
cheerful, never get tired, never need a break, will take any number of interviews; the publicists who drive me around are amazed. And, okay, I'm a little nuts, and they laugh at my constant stream of chatter, my loud laugh, my wildly gesturing arms. But no one mentions it because I'm a writer, and everybody knows writers are crazy (or maybe she's on cocaine?).
Might as well be. I hardly sleep. That in itself is enough. But I've forgotten everything Lentz told me about sleep, and everything else—the bipolar body clock is readily startled, he told me over and over, trying to get it through my head that I can't just go careening around all night. He warned me that the tenuous balance that exists in my brain is easily set off kilter, but like everything else he said, that has slipped my mind. I've thrown myself into the insane schedule of book tour, possessed with the need to do it perfectly, I have to do it
right,
what if I fail? I can't say no, I can't slow down, I have to keep going or they'll find out I'm a little kid in grownup's clothes and a fraud. The lack of sleep is one thing, and the airplane rides and time changes another, the erratic, unpredictable daily schedule, the back-to-back events and interviews, the poor nutrition, the continuous state of heightened awareness, the fact that I'm drunk almost around the clock—if Lentz were here, he'd tell me yet again: there's no way my system can maintain the homeostasis it requires to keep my chemistry on course. My brain becomes highly "brittle," thinks it's in a fight-or-flight situation. It's primed for collapse.
I fly back to Minneapolis for a weekend break from the tour. I get in around midnight and collapse into bed. I have forty-eight hours to get some sleep into my bone-tired body. But it's in these forty-eight hours, by some freak chance, that the worst that could happen does.
At five o'clock in the morning, the phone rings. It's just getting light. I pick it up.
My beloved cousin Brian is calling. I knew this phone call would come one day.
You may be asking at this point, Why? Or more to the point,
What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you completely dense? Are you—ha ha!—insane?
Ladies and gentlemen, yes I am.
Tour
January 1998
I'm standing in front of a crowd of people in New York the first time it happens: I'm on book tour, giving a reading from my book
Wasted,
and suddenly I come to, as if I've been away, and I don't know how I got here. I'm terrified, and I hear myself talking, and then people clap and praise my book, which I have apparently been reading from, and then they take me to a hotel and I stand in the middle of the hotel room, paralyzed and confused. Where am I? Where am I going tomorrow? What if I fuck up? What if I make a fool of myself? What if I just go crazy and start to scream? That's what scares me, because I feel as if I'm just about to do it, every minute of the day. I sit in television studios, in radio studios, the crazies welling up in my chest. I sit in coffee shops with reporters and recite the correct answers (What are the correct answers?), still feeling it. And then, at night, the switch trips and I am
on,
in front of a crowd,
questions, more questions! Bring it on! I'm on top of the world!
My speech comes out in rapid fire, I fling my hands around in sweeping gestures, my brain races along at the speed of light, and I love it, the heat, the crowds, the way I get so fucking high each night I think I'll never come down.
At first, it's just mania, which isn't so bad when you're on book tour. You're flying from one interview to the next, guzzling coffee, off to a reading, to a dinner, back to the hotel for a few hours of sleep, and up early to get on a plane to go do it again. I keep going as fast as I can. Day after day, I have endless energy. I'm always
cheerful, never get tired, never need a break, will take any number of interviews; the publicists who drive me around are amazed. And, okay, I'm a little nuts, and they laugh at my constant stream of chatter, my loud laugh, my wildly gesturing arms. But no one mentions it because I'm a writer, and everybody knows writers are crazy (or maybe she's on cocaine?).
Might as well be. I hardly sleep. That in itself is enough. But I've forgotten everything Lentz told me about sleep, and everything else—the bipolar body clock is readily startled, he told me over and over, trying to get it through my head that I can't just go careening around all night. He warned me that the tenuous balance that exists in my brain is easily set off kilter, but like everything else he said, that has slipped my mind. I've thrown myself into the insane schedule of book tour, possessed with the need to do it perfectly, I have to do it
right,
what if I fail? I can't say no, I can't slow down, I have to keep going or they'll find out I'm a little kid in grownup's clothes and a fraud. The lack of sleep is one thing, and the airplane rides and time changes another, the erratic, unpredictable daily schedule, the back-to-back events and interviews, the poor nutrition, the continuous state of heightened awareness, the fact that I'm drunk almost around the clock—if Lentz were here, he'd tell me yet again: there's no way my system can maintain the homeostasis it requires to keep my chemistry on course. My brain becomes highly "brittle," thinks it's in a fight-or-flight situation. It's primed for collapse.
I fly back to Minneapolis for a weekend break from the tour. I get in around midnight and collapse into bed. I have forty-eight hours to get some sleep into my bone-tired body. But it's in these forty-eight hours, by some freak chance, that the worst that could happen does.
At five o'clock in the morning, the phone rings. It's just getting light. I pick it up.
My beloved cousin Brian is calling. I knew this phone call would come one day.
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