Cracking Up: A Memoir of Love, Drinking, Drugs, Poverty, Paranoia and Other Afflictions of a Life on the Road to Madness

by Eric Coates

The ward staff, having had time to regroup, had decided it was best to confront my behavior and by the time the cops appeared had corralled me in my room. Until then they had been talking with me too reasonably. Then the cops showed up; that is when they produced The Needle. A nurse appeared in the door of my room and asked me to lower my pants. The cops looked on — expressionlessly, it seemed to me. I tried to appeal to their humanity. You know this is wrong, I said to the woman cop. This is being done against my will! I might have been talking to stone. The nurse told me this time — no more pretense of asking — that I could lower my pants or they would do it for me.

Sure, I’d done plenty of drinking and smoked my share of weed. But this was my first experience with a major chemical.

It was only later that I learned from talking to the doctor how little idea they had of what was going on. Their diagnosis was left, it would seem, deliberately vague. Was it bipolar? Was it post-traumatic stress disorder? Was it this, or maybe that? They tried diagnoses like they were shuffling cards, throwing down whatever might fit.

And when it came to medication, we weren’t all that far out of the middle ages. This may give you headaches, they started, You may feel some thirst. My tongue swelled up like it was going to burst — I couldn’t drink enough water. This should help you rest, they said, and as I floated up to the ceiling, I knew what they really meant was it would help keep me still. I was no more resting than a man suffering gunshot might be taking a breather. I couldn’t move, and that part of me floating up next to the ceiling, looking out through my eyes as through some long tunnel, it looked down and wondered how it would ever come back, if the eternal minutes were a result of some new view of time or if this was the world I was trying to get to or if this were the world I just couldn’t escape.

200 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[jennifer l shockley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it! Wish he would write more books about not just mental illness but growing up male in our modern culture. Thought he did a good job not pulling any punches or making excuses for his behavior.

His observations on things are witty and clever.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantstic. The only things he's written that compare to that are on amazon.com, Eric's author page. See In Cold Type, Smoking, Death of a Psychiatrist, Hearing Voices: A Memoir of Madness and Other Works, Weed, and The Golden Ticket. And, of course, his poetry, of which more soon, but take a look at The Barbed-Wire Fence.