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5. Suicide - Spring 2007
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
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Spring 2007 So there I was, a week or two later, howling on hands and knees on the terra-cotta tiles of my globe-trotting friend’s West Village apartment, finally ready to die. Jumping would be the easiest way to go; I wondered how hard it would be to unlock the floorto -ceiling windows of the ninth-story penthouse. I lifted my head from the tile on which I had been banging it and brushed enough tears from my eyes to see the little iron railing outside the windows. A balcony. That meant the windows were designed to be opened, that if I could crawl from the kitchen area through the dining area to the living room area and make my way behind the couch, I could open them and throw myself out. Nine stories should be enough. And the sky was warm and blue and empty. I could almost feel myself falling through it. I had waited so long to let go. I never much wanted to live. Wait, that isn’t true—but, since English offers only one gender-neutral first-person pronoun, it’s hard for me to make sweeping statements about my life. I never wanted to live as the male I was, and I never wanted the male I was to live, and, as long as I was living as a man, the I who could say “I want to live” didn’t exist. When I was a child, the only “I” I had was always hoping aches and illnesses would blossom into something terminal. 62 5 Suicide Alongside the usual childhood longings for bicycles and Barbies, I longed, in a childish way, for death. Death, I thought, would solve all my problems—not just the problems I struggled with but the problems I could feel radiating out of me, turning my nuclear, lower-middle-class family into a shadow-puppet theater of smiling fear and good-humored misery. My parents didn’t seem to notice, but something was terribly wrong with us, and I knew it was me. Sometimes death seemed close. An atypical reaction to a new measles vaccine landed me in the hospital for a few feverish weeks. Laying the ground for what I hoped would be a heroic demise, I joked through every pill and poke—and, to my disappointment, got better. No doubt there were other children on my ward, children who wanted to live, who were actually dying, but it wasn’t going to be me. Once I passed out at a county fair—but it turned out to be dehydration. When I was nine or ten, though, things looked up. I began to suffer from headaches so severe I had to leave school early most afternoons. I would get dizzy, my head would throb, the blackboard would pulse closer and suddenly slide away. Space and time rang in my ears; my schoolmates raised their hands in slow motion, behind air that had thickened into glass. Nowadays I would ascribe such symptoms to gender dysphoria. Then, my heart quickened at the thought that life was becoming unlivable. My hopes for a tragically early exit received a boost when my pediatrician, an elderly German man who typed so fast with two index fingers that the prescriptions he banged out on his manual typewriter sounded like mass executions, referred me for an electroencephalogram—which meant, I decided, that I must have a brain tumor. Of all the childhood deaths I’d heard of, that seemed the most fitting, because death would grow in the same space, out of the same tissue, in which my strangely twisted sense of self had formed. As they hooked the contacts to my skull, I was sure that any minute I would hear the wonderfully ghastly news. The technician, I imagined, looked worried; no doubt he could tell I had a tumor just from the shape of my skull. The pens tracing the electrical activity in my brain scratched and whispered like the fingertips of death. Suicide 63 [18.208.172.3] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:44 GMT) Though my brain obviously wasn’t, the electroencephalogram was completely normal. Twice I tried to take matters into my own hands. The first time, I was six. I was trailing a gang of older kids who lived on my block. We ran through yards and houses, starting and stopping according to rules I could never fathom. The frantic parade paused in someone’s mother’s...