When Melissa got home from restructuring The Second Act (her clothes consignment business) for the autumn season, we sat in their living room discussing the various pharmaceuticals we're on, or had been on, or wanted to go on. Kent and Melissa's bathroom closet looks like something out of Kelly Lynch's suitcase in Drugstore Cowboy; the sheer diversity of pills has a candy store appeal. Kent had gone on Celexa for a while, but it gave him a pot-like hangover every morning; Melissa's on Effexor, and seems to like it, although I've heard a few disappointing things about the drug recently.
The interesting revelation, however, is that Lucas has been on Zoloft since he was in 2nd grade, experimenting with its efficacy off and on until now (he starts 8th grade in the fall). Melissa has had her share of dirty looks from meddlesome Iowa mothers much like those chicks on the radio who breastfeed their daughters until the age of four – but Melissa is unrepentant, and I'm beginning to see why.
I've always been afraid for Lucas, because he is just smart enough, just surreal and brilliant enough, to be abjectly vilified at school. He's a big dude, runs into stuff like Kent did, has a hummingbird-quick sense of the absurd, and is just plain weird. As a young kid, he had to be the most hilarious li'l squirt on God's green earth. He once had me teach him the "boi-oi-oi-oi-oing" noise for two hours until he perfected it. Once, while he was going to bed, he asked me to tell him a "ghost story." I thought he said "gross story," so I recounted the tale of a fictitious man who kept eating his own body parts and barfing them up. He thought this was the coolest thing ever, and for years, I had to keep making up stories that were ever more and more disgusting.
Now, if he had grown up in the 1970s like I did, the first day of school would have brought forth a pack of dirty-boogered 5th-grade thugs, roving in packs, waiting to pounce on him and beat every last vestige of humor out of his soul. But he had a small dose of Zoloft on his side, and started school not caring what anyone thought of him. Can you imagine what that might have been like? His unwavering commitment to his own personality, along with his gregariousness and surrealism, has made him the most popular kid in school.
Lucas still has incredible anxieties from time to time, and being a sensitive kid, things still really get to him. And I'm not advocating the full-scale drugging of every maladjusted nine-year-old, since there are plenty of problems for which the drugs offer little respite. But I think to my own childhood, which was riddled with anxieties, abject fear, self-loathing, jealously and fits of uncontrollable rage, and I wonder how much more adjusted would I be to the world now? I invented such a labyrinthine web of obsessive-compulsive game-playing in order to keep my "magical thinking" world afloat that it turned me into a tangled control freak that had to wait 19 years to kiss a girl, and 22 to make love to one.
When I found out that Tine Buresh had a crush on me in 1979, I rode my Huffy home, ran to the bathroom and threw up from the unbelievable weight and responsibility that it had foisted on me. Is that much different from the stomach disaster that I wreaked on myself in January? If I had walked into Grant Wood Elementary in the third grade, with a head full of red hair, a cassette player that wafted Shostakovich, and a violin tucked under my arm and said "what the fuck are you looking at?" to the first person that questioned my cool, it would have set me on a completely different course, one with friends, sleepovers, and an active summer lifestyle. Instead, I reacted with fear, tried to hide everything that was special about me, then lashed out in rage whenever the bullies got close. I didn't have a true friend until I was 14, and even then, I was barely integrated as a person until well into my 20s. Even now, I find myself getting furious when it seems as though I'm being second-guessed or judged, especially by Tessa, who more likely just wants to know something innocuous.
Would a little bit of an SSRI made the difference? I don't know, but sign me the fuck up. In 1975, when I was in Miss Norton's class, the only options open to a misfit dork were frequent trips to Miss O'Banion's counseling closet, and the option to skip a grade - I did both. Neil and Bill were right about one thing; I grew up in an interesting age for kids. Too modern to be beaten, yet too close to the sexual revolution for the parents to notice much; we were largely left to our own devices. It's a sharp contrast to the Millenial kids of today, being fetishized and coddled by their hyper-attentive Boomer parents.
I suppose I have enough room in my heart to feel some sorrow for the intensely-scrutinized kids of our present time bereft of some major issues, will they ever have something to write or sing about? Will Paxil rob us of a great future novel? Do I remain interesting on these pages you read right now because Greg Hyder forced me to eat potting soil in Miss Kasparek's social studies class?
Posted by at July 23, 2002 08:47 PM