“You wanna buy a knife?” asked a voice.
I couldn’t get out of bed, so I went for a walk.
There weren’t many people in Emergency. An old woman kept rubbing her breast. A sunburned man staggered up to the desk and asked the triage nurse out on a date. She pressed a red button and he vanished. I looked at the button and thought, I could use one of those.
“Have you been drinking?” the nurse asked me.
I was having trouble putting the failure of my life into words.
“Take a seat,” she said at last.
I waited two hours, three hours. The room really filled up.
I hadn’t realized I was wearing mismatched shoes.
After four hours, I got up.
“What are you doing later?” another drunk asked the nurse as I walked out the door.
There’s a beautiful park across from my apartment that’s used mostly for selling drugs and sex. One sex worker pretends to talk on the pay phone in the middle of the park, all day. If a man approaches her, she hangs up. I’ve hardly ever gone past when she wasn’t on the phone.
I walk in the park when I’m depressed because I don’t care about the danger.
“You wanna buy a knife?” asked a voice.
I looked up. A young guy was holding out a hunting knife.
“Okay,” I said.
I pulled out my wallet. The young guy grabbed my wallet and took off.
The sex worker was watching me. I walked up to her. She hung up the phone.
“Did you see that?” I asked her.
She thought for a long time.
“No,” she said.
She picked the receiver back up.
“I love you too, Mom,” I heard her say as I walked away.
The funny thing about depression is that you forget everything that ever mattered to you. Work. Hobbies. Friends. Sex. They all float away from you like helium balloons. For a while, you wonder where they’re going and when they’ll ever come down. Then you just don’t care.
I guess it isn’t that funny.
I couldn’t afford a psychiatrist. A friend recommended a drop-in center where you could talk to volunteers. They weren’t qualified but they were good listeners.
The lady at the front desk looked up at me.
“There’s no one here right now,” she said. “But if you’d like to watch the video, I can put it on.”
I followed her into the Theatre. It was a closet with a television in it. She put a cassette tape into a VCR. I hadn’t seen a cassette tape or a VCR in years. I almost laughed.
“You think it’s hopeless,” said the woman on the screen. “Hopeless. But our love is brighter than a million stars, Gerome.”
“What is this?” I asked.
“It’s therapeutic,” said the woman, on her way out of the Theatre.
“That night in the tower, looking down at the sea… I thought about ending it all. Then, Beverly, I remembered your loveliness.”
After a few minutes, I pressed eject. The label on the tape said:
Melodramas for Depressed Persons, Cassette One
I laughed. I felt a bit better.
It was Friday night. The bars were all busy.
Emergency was busy. The line-up flowed out the door.
“Hey buddy, can you help a guy out?” asked the drunk in front of me.
“I’m a writer,” I said.
He turned back around.
It was after midnight when I finally saw a doctor.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
I tried explaining.
“Do you hear voices?”
“Just yours,” I said.
The doctor shook his head.
“Do you feel like hurting people? Or yourself?”
I didn’t at the moment.
The doctor sighed.
“Come back when you do,” he said. Then he pressed a white button on the wall and disappeared.
I looked at the button and thought, I could really use one of those.
Pills are unpredictable. Slitting your wrists is barbaric.
I jumped off a bridge.
A lot of people jump off Millennium Bridge. It’s so high that your spine shatters when you hit the water. You don’t have to worry about drowning. I thought that was a plus.
I climbed onto the cement column and looked around.
I had a lot of memories. I just couldn’t remember them.
I looked down at the water.
“What’s up?” asked the policeman. He didn’t get too close.
“I know things seem bad right now, but it’s not as bad as you think.
“Why don’t you come back down?
“Don’t do something you’ll regret.”
I smiled. Maybe I’d regret jumping to my death.
“You’ve got a lot to live for, probably.
“You want to tell me about it?
“Don’t do something you’ll regret.”
I laughed.
I jumped.
I didn’t die. I broke every vertebra, I think, and my left arm. But I paddled with my right arm long enough for the rescuers to get to me. I did it automatically, like a cat. I wasn’t thinking.
I was in the hospital for three months. Since I was there anyway, they gave me medication.
I started to laugh more. When I laughed too much, they lowered my dosage. “It takes a while to get the right balance,” the doctor said.
When they felt I was balanced enough, they gave my clothes back. And sent me home.
“This is the end,” said the woman on Cassette Two, sobbing.
“No,” said the man. “This is the beginning — of a glorious new life of love.”
I laughed. It really was therapeutic.
I was walking in the park one afternoon. Feeling a lot better. I carried a knife now for self-defence.
The sex worker was on the payphone.
I thought, Maybe I was pessimistic. Maybe it was the depression talking. That girl might really be talking to her mother. She just loves her that much.
You never know.
“I’ll be fine, Mom,” I hear her say. As I walked on.
This story was first published (as “Melodramas for Depressed Persons”) in The Saturday Evening Post.
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