The Demon Box

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from an unknown man in Canada. This fellow had bumped into a copy of a newsletter I had written for NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) in 2009 called “Suicide is an Illness.” (How he obtained a copy, I will never know.) In the article, I honored an old friend of mine from my undergraduate years at UCSD, a man named T.C., who was named outright in the original article. It turned out that the Canadian fellow, D., was roommates with T.C. in graduate school. D. spoke of T.C. in glowing and loving terms and brought back a host of dormant emotions.

To me, T.C. was all that and then some. I met him in my Latin class in 1990; he was the class superstar. His genius was apparent to everyone as the Latin phrases would slip effortlessly off of his tongue, and his translations were as fluent as English.

His other area of appeal besides his Latin acumen: he was an asshole. His ego could fill the Coliseum itself. He had something to say about everything, pop culture, classical philosophy, music, sexuality, politics, social dynamics, etc. No topic was too obscure for him to weigh in and slaughter any opposition.

He was also striking. Tall, broad shouldered, with a Roman nose and piercing blue eyes.

Then there was his sinister laugh. It often reverberated down the hallway in front of Latin class, authoritative and mocking.

I resented him at the outset, and then my distaste turned to fascination, and my fascination to infatuation, and my infatuation to love.

T.C. and I became fast friends. I’m sure it had something to do with my hero-worshipping ways, but it I’m sure I held some sort of attraction for him. At that time I needed saving, and I don’t think he minded being a savior. He also liked to have someone listen to him talk, read his poetry, and hang on his every word. We spent a lot of time together on the Revelle College campus, hanging out at a stone sculpture called Stonehenge talking until the early morning hours.

T.C. excelled academically. He would take 20-24 units a quarter and get straight A’s. He was in the hypomanic phase of his bipolar illness much of the time and was incredibly high functioning in the academic arena.

I would often ask T.C. about the bipolar condition. He once referred to a metaphor by Ken Kesey who said that the human psyche could be called a Demon Box. It was designed to filter information in such a way that it kept certain things in and certain things out. In a person with bipolar disorder, this filtration system, this Demon Box, was broken, and the individual sufferer could not separate positive and negative information in a functional way. Bipolar people suffered from an influx of demons. T.C. elaborated that once these demons came into play, that they would interact with one another, making the condition even worse. The challenge, he said, was to kill off the demons before they killed you. This metaphor struck a chord; I always appreciated T.C.’s imaginative way of conceptualizing the world.

Eventually, T.C. got a full scholarship to Stanford for a PhD program in classical philosophy.

Our lives diverged, although I would see T.C. when he came home to LA, where we were from. Incidentally, we grew up 2 miles from one another, so his parent’s house was a stone’s throw from my mother’s.

T.C. did well at Stanford at first, and then over a period of years, I noticed that his mind was beginning to fray. Our phone conversations were increasingly alarming. The philosophizing had turned to ranting, and his narcissism ran high. He was becoming paranoid and delusional. The demons were coming to roost, and he was powerless to manage them.

After a dramatic drop out from Stanford, he was moved to his parent’s house and made two unsuccessful suicide attempts until he succeeded on the third.

Before T.C. died, he left a box of his poetry on my mother’s doorstep with a note that he wanted me to publish his work after his death. The following piece that I share is one of his tame, introspective pieces that I feel demonstrates his alienation. He was perhaps 20 years old when he wrote it.

Sophocles

I’m tracing strange tongues
Down the page
Trains bound for the center of
Nowhere hoot in the
August air
It’s a hot, dry day
Here on the edge of the land
The theatres are crowded
With eyes seeking
A cheap vacation from the
Sun

The devil is a psychiatrist
And the city noise is
His voice
He wants to know how I feel

How do I feel?
His question coils in the void above my head

I feel like the lower
Half of an iceberg
Staring down into
Depths

I feel like a doll in a box
Hanging of the rack at the
After hours toy store

I feel like an umbrella
Discarded at the beach
Flapping in the wind at
The vacant endpoints of
A day gone by

I feel like a wheat field rolling
Before a scarecrow hung
With beads and knucklebones
That rattle when the wind
Rises

I feel like a locked
Steel file cabinet
Locked up in an
Empty office.

I feel like a fan
Rattling in a window
Above two naked
Sleepers

I have become silence
I tell the Devil
That is how I feel
I turn back to Sophocles
But he’s not there.

# # #

So, here I have discharged a tiny portion of my duty, to share T.C.’s work, as he wanted. Until now, I have kept his work in a shoebox for over ten years.

I'm still hoping to have a meaningful connection with the gentleman in Canada; his contact certainly brought up a lot of memories for me. I’m relieved that I’ve been able to air out some of my feelings, so for that I am thankful, though the process has been a painful one.

I’ve decided that if I ever have a big chunk of money when I die, I’ll have a bench at Revelle College campus, near Stonehenge, dedicated to T.C. so that generations of students can debate, and hold forth, and recite poetry, and carry on as we did.

As the treatment and awareness of mental illness improves, maybe the T.C.’s of the future can be saved from these deadly illnesses.