1991, Chicago and Aurora, Illinois

By J.D. Smith

An Old Testament narrator might have said, “Now this was in the days when Freud and his heirs still prevailed, before it came to be known in the land that man’s synapses must be bathed in serotonin for him to know joy.” Or something like that.

And in those days I had applied to join the Foreign Service. That way I could obtain and exert some small measure of power in this world, maybe even use it for good, and get to travel for free in the process.

Having somehow jumped through the flaming hoops of the written exam and oral examinations, I was investigated by the gun-and-badge who interviewed neighbors, friends, and high school administrators who may or may not have remembered my name. They must have backed up what I had told him — that I wasn’t somebody else, hadn’t run drugs or guns, and hadn’t advocated the violent overthrow of the government when I wasn’t bolstering my G.P.A. or bagging groceries.

All that remained was medical clearance, and I enjoyed outstanding health, aside from a history of depression. Once in the Foreign Service, I could avail myself of all the talking therapies and pills I wanted, whether I needed them or not; the taxpayer’s investment was at stake. In short, I could have lied on the medical background form and proven myself sane, or at least rational.

But as drill sergeants and coaches know, training comes out under pressure, and mine was Midwestern. I was no saint, just not slick enough to lie well, no more than I could speak Chinese or pair the right wine with cassoulet, if I’d known what that was at the time.

Thus following my upbringing, fearing the reach and sovereign powers of the government of the United States of America as much as an omniscient God, and still believing the two were joined in purpose, I read, above two or three columns of minuscule type, “Have you ever been diagnosed with or treated for any of the following:” The sentence never really ended, because no question mark came after the list.

I marked a placid symmetry of checkmarks in the “no” column next to allergies, alcoholism, diabetes, goiter, hypertension, incontinence, insomnia, and menstrual disorders. I was ready to bypass the entire alphabet of disease when I read one line further. My hand wavered just long enough to make me ashamed, like a monk tempted to masturbate, and I nicked a small, nearly sheepish check in the “yes” column before “mental and emotional disturbances.”

Faust wavered before signing away his soul, even though he had short-term gains coming. To save mine I was putting at risk the chance to do some good, or have a job; the alchemist drove a harder bargain. But in for a dime is in for a dollar. I provided, as requested, the applicable dates and details of the appointments for which the insurance had run out after six sessions, and the free trial of a medication that had cleared my head and softened my member — not that it had been getting much work.

My checkmark, and the narration in its shadow, rattled the iron cage of bureaucracy. The State Department’s medical office sent a request to appear at a psychiatrist’s office in Chicago. The day and time, like the psychiatrist, were assigned.

How this psychiatrist was chosen eluded me. Perhaps State took sealed bids for subcontractors. Maybe he had to jump through some hoops of his own. He could be someone’s brother-in-law or the donor of substantial kickbacks. When we met I planned to address these questions with the delicacy befitting the diplomat I was entitled to become.

Again, I steeled myself to answer honestly. Whatever made me cringe to talk about would, I was sure, come up, and I would jump into each topic like a cold lake in spring — ready to swim after the initial shock. I would only need a little time to explain myself; that’s what diplomats did. I could also spare him most of the details. If the psychiatrist wanted to know whether I’d contemplated suicide, I would simply say, “Yes.” I would not add something like I once rank-ordered methods.

When I reached the psychiatrist’s office there was only time to notice that the waiting room magazines were current and the marble tiles unscratched. A heavy door opened, and the doctor led me in. In every detail he seemed “normal,” the gold standard of his profession.

The office was lined with bookshelves and the customary diplomas. The only decoration was a Mondrian print. My gut clenched. My future would be decided by someone whose idea of art was bastard graph paper, and there was nothing I could do about it.

His bedside manner extended to saying, “Have a seat,” before the battery of questions. I came to understand the term.

“Have you ever experienced a hallucination?”

“No.” Not that I knew of. I was only depressed sometimes, but I wasn’t nuts, and there seemed to be a difference. The question itself was suspect — if a hallucination were any good I would have considered it real. It seemed impolitic to bring that up, though.

“Do you ever hear voices?”

“No.” Except when people talked, for instance. Or that time my ears wouldn’t stop ringing after an Elvis Costello concert. I heard “Pump It Up” for two days. I chose not to bore him.

“Do you like tall women?”

“Sure.” Why not? He was pulling out a gnarled chestnut from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, where responses were compared to the “average” answers of Scandinavian farmers. I had no idea how they’d field this question. Tall women got the benefit of the doubt.

“Do you ever think that someone is controlling your thoughts?”

“No.” Sometimes I was swayed by a frozen pizza commercial late at night, but I wasn’t giving up all my secrets.

“Have you ever attempted suicide?”

“No.” I didn’t have the nerve. This was embarrassing to admit.

“Have you ever been involved in a sexual relationship?

“Yes, I have.” It hadn’t been with a tall woman, though.

“And how was that relationship?”

“Very satisfying.” I was a man. How couldn’t it be?

“Have you ever experienced any sexual difficulties?”

“Sometimes I’ve experienced delayed ejaculation.” If I’d played my cards right I could have been the most popular man in the Great Lakes region — both American and Canadian sides.

“Are you currently taking any medication?”

“Imipramine, three times a day.” One of the first tricyclics, it lifted my moods about as much as aspirin.

“Do you ever change the dose?”

“Sometimes I miss a dose.”

“So you play with it.”

“No.” I thought we had already covered the sex questions already. The double entendre amused me for a moment, then the question stopped being funny. I wanted to say more, and I thought of how to tell this pseudo-Hippocratic sack that this was my ass, my whole career path, and I was not playing with one of the few ways I knew to get out of a life of eating my guts out in a tract house and farming a lawn on my days off.

I wondered if this gold-toed, North Shore son of a bitch had ever tried carrying around pills like an old woman and ducked away from his buddies to take them in the middle of the day or on a night out because there was still a stigma attached to it. Because people, maybe people like him, thought taking a pill was the same as being crazy.

I wondered if he knew how much his questions smelled like bureaucracy and piecework, or how his sense of symptoms came from the DSM-IV or lecture notes. His knowledge sure as hell didn’t come from trying to make something of himself in spite of carrying a weight on his back and for his efforts being examined like some kind of invertebrate in an office with no windows and too much air conditioning. So if he wanted to say that I played with my dosage, there was nothing I could do to change his mind. As I’d struggled to select the right words before, I struggled again and only said, “No.”

“I see,” the psychiatrist said, then stabbed a note on his pad.

Other questions and other answers must have followed, but they are no clearer to me than the night when, as a freshman, I’d insulted my brain with enough rum to black out.

A different order of insult had struck this time, beyond the help of rest and fluid, and for a month I waited for the other shoe to drop.

It finally did, in the form of an envelope thin and sharp as a blade. The redundant contents began, “We regret to inform you.” Someone who had thought he was Napoleon or Christ, or both, would have received the same measured wording, calculated to prevent any of our rejected lunatic asses from snapping or, worse, filing suit. I was ineligible for worldwide assignment and my candidacy consequently terminated.

I was cast into the State Department’s version of the outer darkness, with great wailing and gnashing of teeth, the functional equivalent of schizophrenics, pedophiles, and bipolars, with diabetics, unrepentant alcoholics, and sufferers from Crohn’s disease. They were now my colleagues, not the urbane, richly traveled consuls and attachés I was supposed to join.

I finished the superfluous rest of the letter and for a day let it lie in state, small “s,” before consigning it to the trash.

Its successors would include rejection letters for other jobs that could be done by someone who was broadly educated; its predecessors included a prom picture of the girl who had shed me in her first week of pre-med at the University of Illinois.

Depending on the day, my sour grapes crunch with rancor or yield softly in resignation. It may be just as well that my allegedly high IQ, wrapped in an unbalanced brain, did not earn my passage into the diplomatic corps. Hypotheticals compound on hypotheticals. It makes no more sense to ask what if I had been born a woman in 10th-century China, or if one of my converging ancestors had stayed in Europe. Someone else would be asking the question.

There’s a chance, though, that my most insightful reports could have been chopped into fodder for prolonging a useless embargo or expanding an alliance against a country already defeated. As my career leveled out in the middle ranks, my superiors might have called their decisions sad necessities, or well-calibrated measures, though they would have known as well as anybody that the tools of policy resemble less a scalpel than a meat cleaver.

The tools of private life are supposed to be more precise, but there is reason to wonder. I’ve served on a jury that may have kept a killer on the streets, and when I was teaching I’ve failed students who may have given up on schooling as a result. Near my place of work I now face another quandary. Give us this day our daily moral dilemma: Will the next quarter help a panhandler get a sandwich or buy him a bottle?

These are the typical days. Depending on what I eat and drink, and how well the air traffic controllers perform, I could have days like this for decades.

Even medicated and not quite right in the eyes of many, I hold a frightening amount of power.

J.D. Smith’s second collection of poetry, Settling for Beauty, was published in 2005, and he has been awarded a 2007 Fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional information is available at his web site, www.jdsmithwriter.com.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, May 4th, 2007 | Email This Post

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