Zig zag boy, p.1
Zig-Zag Boy, page 1
Z I G - Z A G
B O Y
A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood
T A N Y A F R A N K
For Zach and the elephant seals
“Insanity—a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
—RD LAING
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
BIRTHING SEASON
Winter 2017
ONE
The Break
TWO
Psychosis Nos
THREE
Formidable
FOUR
Pretty Boy
FIVE
Transplant
SIX
Renaissance Man of the Year
SEVEN
Shifting Diagnoses
EIGHT
Crash
NINE
Año Nuevo
TEN
Stranded
ELEVEN
On the Streets
TWELVE
Home
THIRTEEN
The Swaff
FOURTEEN
The Langham
FIFTEEN
Yorkshire
SIXTEEN
Cranworth
SEVENTEEN
Pulled Over
EIGHTEEN
Lockdown
NINETEEN
Lesson
TWENTY
Home
Acknowledgments
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dear reader,
Zig-Zag Boy is a love story, an urgent tale of a fierce battle a mother wages for her child. I worry about telling such a personal story, one that isn’t just my own, but I hope that sharing it will help others to feel less alone, to give those of us who contend with psychosis a collective voice. Families like ours live on the edge, in a no-man’s-land, our voices often stifled or ignored by bureaucracy and archaic laws. Despite being the closest witness to Zach’s suffering, I came to realize that I was often unable to advocate for him, to break through the barriers created by current mental health systems.
Psychosis is often thought to be genetic, or a symptom of brain chemistry gone awry, yet no disease markers show up in brain scans or blood tests. It may well be caused or triggered by the interplay of various factors we are just beginning to understand, from epigenetics to trauma to culture and environment.
For many years I despised Los Angeles, because that was where Zach’s psychosis first presented, but now I know that LA didn’t cause this experience any more than I did. Psychosis is more complex than this.
I hope that the simple idea of being with someone and not doing to them, of asking what has happened and not what is wrong, will resonate and proliferate. I firmly believe in the privilege of supporting each other in this way and will continue to advocate for such a basic philosophy, which will conserve money as well as lives and help to promote a more compassionate world.
Tanya Frank
February 2023
Z I G - Z A G
B O Y
BIRTHING SEASON
WINTER 2017
I walk out to South Point. It is wild and desolate; the air smells of molted seal fur and guano. I take my binoculars so I can see her more clearly—the first elephant-seal mother to haul off. She is lumbering and clumsy as she heaves her body over the dunes and past the willow.
Early winter is birthing season at Año Nuevo, the elephant-seal sanctuary in Northern California where I am training to be a docent. My fellow volunteers are eating lunch in the barn. I am alone out here. Walking helps. I make new footprints in the sand, my skin tingling in the salty air. I clench my fists and release them.
Out on Cove Beach, the surfers in their black wetsuits carve up the face of a wave. My boy used to surf, raising his limber body onto a shortboard. That was when he trusted the water and its purity. I didn’t suspect that anything could get in the way of his dreams.
The mother seal dives into the water when the beta males aren’t looking. She knows that if she is caught they will try to mate with her, just in case she hasn’t been impregnated by the alpha. It doesn’t matter that she is spent and famished.
Somehow, she isn’t spotted. Her skin shimmers like silver foil as she dips into the surf. She heads out into the deeper, darker water where she moves more easily and only has herself to think about. She doesn’t look back at her pup, who lifts up his head and chest from the beach as he searches for her. This is the first time she has left her baby’s side since his birth. She has given him all of herself, even when the tides were wild and threatening, when the huge elephant-seal bulls rose around her, roaring and fighting violently for the alpha position, when she was empty from birthing and had lost one-third of her body weight from lactating and fasting.
Now something tells her it is time to leave him, to ignore her pup’s cries that carry on the breeze. He continues to call the way he has done for the last month, the sound that had always worked to keep her close and protective of him. But she is far away now, hungry for fish and squid, deep-diving, alone. Her blubbery pup is still too fat to swim, and his buoyancy would attract the sharks. He must slim down and learn when to take the plunge himself. I stare at him, stranded, rejected.
The pups have a fifty percent chance of surviving their maiden voyage, and even if this pup one day makes it back to Año Nuevo, to the very same breeding ground where he was conceived and born, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that he and his mother will ever reunite. The mother will forget the scent of her pup, his cry and the bond they forged during their early days together; she will mate again, give birth and propagate. She is all instinct.
As I stand on the bluff I think about Zach, my youngest son, lying at home, curled up inside his sleeping bag, hands over his ears to shut out the voices only he hears.
My eyes prick with tears behind my sunglasses, and then I am crying more freely, fiercely, and it hurts my throat. I want to climb down to the beach and pick up the seal pup, to feed him myself, but the laws of nature govern here at the reserve. There can be no human intervention.
I leave South Point and make my way back under the low sky. The marine haze is still heavy on the northern side of the reserve. The other docents gather and take their seats in the old horse barn for the afternoon session. We are going to watch video footage of great white sharks, filmed by researchers at the University of California. I keep my sunglasses on and stand by the door, trying not to panic about the fact that there is no Wi-Fi or cell service here on this remote part of the California coast. I wonder if my son has woken up yet, frantic to reach me, if he will remember to call his older brother instead. I wonder if it is helping at all, me being here, trying to distract myself, trying to become a woman who isn’t solely consumed by looking after her son, trying to put him together again.
The shark expert starts his commentary about shark feeding habits, their evolution. It is hard to concentrate, the lecture sounds muffled and the room is airless. I hear something about the bad reputation that great whites have, how it is our responsibility to explain to park visitors why they don’t deserve to be feared and hated. It is important to him; I can feel it in the urgency of his delivery and the quiver of his Adam’s apple. I recognize that desperation to set the record straight.
1
THE BREAK
Autumn 2009
“This is how they’re monitoring us,” he whispers, his face stricken, his breath sour. “We have to cut some stuff out, change the receiver. I can do it.”
“Who?” I ask. “Who is monitoring us? And why?”
He puts a finger to his lips to quiet me and begins rifling through the toolkit, although he doesn’t seem quite sure what he is looking for.
“What’s going on?” I whisper.
And this is how it begins, in the laundry room in the late hours, when I find Zach, my nineteen-year-old son, tracing the wires of our defunct telephone circuit board.
He has never rerouted wires in his life, and besides, we suspended our landline service half a decade ago.
I stare at him, his slim body tense, the muscles of his neck straining, fists pumped as if ready to swing at the punching bag that hangs in the basement. His pupils are big. He navigates the familiar space awkwardly, like an intruder, knocking against my mud-splattered bike that leans against the wall. I don’t recognize him: his expression, his movements, his demeanor.
“Did you take drugs?” I ask. He shakes his head.
I shiver in this forgotten room. Its concrete floor numbs my bare feet. I’m a Londoner by birth with a tolerance for damp, so I know it’s not the cold that has me shaking. I am scared of what is happening to my child.
My partner Nance is in San Francisco for work. My eldest son Dale is in Santa Barbara for college, and we—my younger boy and I—are in Los Angeles, a metropolis of over twelve million people.
Outside it is autumn, the season of turning inward, of gray skies and dormant leaves.
“Sit down,” Zach implores. He slides to the floor and props his strong back against the washing machine. I join him, moving a mound of laundry out of the way.
He is taller than me at 5 feet 9 inches, with thick chestnut hair and gold-flecked eyes like mine. His face, forearms and calves—the parts his wetsuit doesn’t cover—are still tanned from a long, late summer. He is wearing a nylon t-shirt and football shorts. At close proximity he smells of Axe deodorant spray and garlic.
He had stayed over last night, rather than returning to his shared apartment in Westwood. I’d made him spaghetti with marinara sauce, prepared the wa y he likes it, with grated Parmesan. He ate every bit (which always pleases the Yiddish mama in me), then retired early to what used to be his room, to work on a mid-term paper for his history degree at UCLA. He was a little tired and withdrawn—which I had put down to the pressures of his studies, or girlfriend troubles—but other than that he appeared fine.
Fine. The very notion seems absurd now, as we sit side by side with his mouth against my ear.
“I’m scared the bad people will hear me talking to you.”
A strangled laugh rises in my throat, in part because his hot breath tickles, but mostly because it is my default reaction when I’m nervous. I don’t know what to say, what to do. There is no protocol for this new territory. I feel sweat break out on my palms and the back of my neck. When he lunges forward to grab his rucksack, I’m startled.
I watch him take his notebook and a marker pen from his bag. As he zips the compartment back up I see the tip of our large, serrated kitchen knife, the one that went missing last night. Adrenaline courses through my body. My son would never hurt me. I know he wouldn’t. It’s Zach, for God’s sake. My gentle, soft-spoken boy with an easy smile.
I sit on the floor in silence, my breathing shallow. He focuses intently on the task he has assigned himself. His wavy hair falls around his face as he leans forward to write:
Mike and Josh are not really my friends.
They are members of the Russian Mafia out to harm me.
UCLA is a network set up to spy on me.
Our computers and cell phones are bugged.
Everything I know about how to parent is tested in this moment. I place my hand on his forehead, which is warm but not overly so. “Stay here,” I instruct him firmly, as if he is a dog that might dash out the door. I grab the thermometer from the bathroom and place it under his tongue, praying that he has a fever-induced delirium that will pass with a dose of aspirin, but it reads 98.6. Normal. Dread swells in my chest.
“Come on, Zigs,” I encourage, helping him up. “I think you’re tired out.”
I guide him back to bed with my hand on his shoulder, the way I used to do when he was little. His old room, in the basement of our three-story house that clings to the Old Hollywood hillside, is a far cry from the council flat in East London where we used to live. It has always been a surreal pleasure to live here, but suddenly the steps are too many, the house too big, daybreak and Nance too far away.
I tuck him in, hoping he will go to sleep and wake up his old self—with the kind eyes and strong Jewish nose like mine, the boy who still belly-laughs his way through old Simpsons episodes, who loves to surf overhead waves at Malibu Beach, and can play anything on the piano by ear. The son I am so proud of.
My hope is futile. He can’t rest. Los Angeles has insomnia too; it is perma-young and edgy, a city on steroids. Police sirens drift up from the flatlands and the coyotes howl in response. Zach gets up and peeks out from under the blinds at the window. In the distance, news helicopters whirr above the Hollywood Walk of Fame for the debut of Avatar.
“See, I told you,” he whispers, so quietly that I have to strain to make out the words. “I’m under surveillance. They’re reading my mind. They’re coming for me.”
There is a hitch of pure terror in his voice that I haven’t heard since he was a child, when, after catching a few scenes of Frankenstein on television, he had had terrible nightmares. They seemed to stretch on for weeks, and I would wake up with him next to me in my bed. It is as if we have traveled back in time. His fear is all-consuming. He won’t let me leave his side.
It is only when our Bedlington terrier, Belle, settles at our feet and Zach reaches out to touch her that I let out my breath. It is a good sign, finally—a boy and his dog. He had begged for her when he was eleven, paying her adoption fee from the sale of his Pokémon cards and never looking back. He was an earnest kid with Harry Potter glasses—and smart too, a chess whizz, when the rest of us didn’t even know the rules. In my mind’s eye I can still see the look on his face, that shy delight when he came home with the trophy.
I leave him with Belle while Suki, our other dog, follows me to the toilet. I pee and call Nance. Her voicemail kicks in. “Honey, it’s me. I need to talk to you. It’s urgent. There’s something wrong with Zach.”
Zach knocks on the toilet door and my heart jolts. I flush the chain and try to squeeze the fear from my chest, straighten my mouth, relax my jaw where I hold the bulk of my tension. I wonder how much he heard. I don’t want to do anything to worsen his distrust, to fuel any fear that we will join ranks, his two mothers, against him.
“Can you stay with me?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say. I follow him, holding my phone with a tense grip, checking the battery level surreptitiously and switching it to vibrate.
Zach crawls under his blankets and pulls them up over his face. I sit next to him, resting my hand on his shoulder, trying to soothe us both.
I stay until the sun begins to climb above the palm trees and the blue jays chirp as if everything is right with the world. My phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s Nance. I move stealthily from the room to talk to her in private. I hear her getting ready for work. Nance is a commercial producer. Her day will be full of studio or location commotion, actors, video crews, camera equipment, and now this. She is not panicky by nature, and her steadfast, unruffled tone calms me.
“Maybe give it a bit longer,” she says. “He might just be having a bad trip.”
“But he’s been here the whole time,” I say, as if bad trips only happen at raves and in the company of one’s peers.
“Well, if he doesn’t seem better by tonight,” Nance says, “then perhaps you should take him to the hospital, just to let them assess him.”
I hang up. My stomach is roiling. The day slows as I focus intently on Zach. He doesn’t eat breakfast, or lunch, or dinner. He looks out of the basement windows onto the cul-de-sac as if he is expecting someone. He stares at himself in the mirror with a curiosity that is novel and perplexed. I ask him again if he has taken drugs, if he has a headache, if he fell in the night, but he says no, and I believe him.
As the night closes in, I think about what Nance said. I feign conviction and tell Zach we need to go to the emergency room. He looks at me with wide eyes, scared and doubting, as if I’ve announced an imminent betrayal. I feel myself recoil. I’m his mum. But he nods and swings his legs out of bed. I shuffle him upstairs and into our Volvo, buckling him up in the front seat and activating the child-safety locks. Just in case. As we head west toward the ocean and the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, his eyes dart from billboards to people on the sidewalk to car license plates. I drive slowly, focusing on my breath.
“What’s happening to me?” he says. “What did I do to make me a target like this?” I tell him he must be exhausted, maybe suffering the stress of exams, and that I hope they will give him something to help him sleep. I can’t tell whom I’m trying hardest to reassure.
The emergency room is quiet, with just a handful of people dotted around on the vinyl seats. A television screen, the sound off, dances in a corner. We are ushered promptly into a private cubicle, temperature-controlled and sterile, where Zach is asked to don a blue gown and plastic ID bracelet, and to vacate to the bathroom so he can urinate in a specimen cup. Back in the cubicle, a nurse takes his vital signs. Pulse. Temperature. Blood pressure.
“All normal,” she confirms.
“That’s great, Zigs,” I say.
But instead of being directed to another department for further tests, or to the pharmacy to pick up medication, we are asked to wait, which we do. Machines blink and bleep, and staff in pale-blue uniforms and sensible shoes race along the brightly lit corridors. The chaos that exists behind the calm façade of the reception is unsettling. It is everything that we don’t want to see at such a fretful time: the skid of carts on linoleum, scurrying bodies, the clatter of clipboards, bright lights and hurried, half-caught conversations.
