This post follows on from a previous post "My First Psychotic Episode" and I suggest the reader have a look at that one first. I hope it was well written enough and that this one will be well-written enough. I didn't quite say all I could say in that post and I won't be able to say everything I could say in this one, about what happened to me over the couple of months in 2006 and 2007, that provoked the psychotic episode I suffered for all of 2007. Mostly this compression is for reasons of brevity. I can, though, say a little more.
First, I need to say something about my parents' divorce when I was seven. I have intimated elsewhere in this blog that I believe this divorce, the trauma of it, engendered a psychological vulnerability and that this vulnerability was what made me susceptible to psychosis later in life. The reader may rightfully wonder – what connection could there be between a child's experience of divorce and a psychotic episode experienced by a twenty-seven year old, revolving around the idea of a conspiracy of closet homosexuals? In 1986, the year of my parents' divorce, homosexuality was decriminalised in New Zealand, and there was I imagine much talk of it in the media and in the air. I believe I probably picked up on the fact that there were these people called 'gays' in the world and that my father, elder brother and his friends didn't like them much. Not that my dad and brother were vehemently homophobic but rather that they possessed the kind of vague prejudice shared by almost all ordinary heterosexuals. When my father left my mother, I decided, as is not uncommon among young children of broken families, that I was responsible for the divorce. I was in fact emotionally wounded for many years. I even saw a child psychologist briefly which I think made me feel even more to blame. I believe, and have a shred of a memory to support this, that I decided at seven that the reason my father had left was because he thought I was gay. Even then I knew I wasn't – although of course a seven-year old has no understanding of what homosexuality actually is, but I must assume that I did in fact believe this or something like it. This false belief nestled in my subconscious mind like an undetonated hand grenade until I was twenty-seven when events in my life caused it to explode.
As I grew up, this deeply buried trauma manifested itself in the following way. Like most ordinary heterosexual men, I didn't much like associating with gay men but, politically, and in principle, I strongly supported gay rights and opposed homophobia. In this I resembled Kurt Cobain. In 2001, at the age of twenty-one I wrote a short film, a gay spy film, for a paper I was enrolled in. In this film an American spy and a Russian spy play a kind of cat-and-mouse game but, at the end of the film, they kiss, and we realise that they are really two gay men playacting spies, play a sex-game. I wrote this film because I was fascinated by John Le Carre spy novels, with the idea that both sides of the Cold War were mirror images of each other. The twist in the film is that the two men, who seem to be enemies, are really lovers, reflections of each other, narcissists. I didn't think at the time that this film would haunt me for years to come but I think it did. People made assessments of who I was because of it. Of course this is stupid. Was Nabokov a pedophile because he wrote Lolita? Is Bret Easton Ellis a serial killer because he wrote American Psycho? Was David Foster Wallace a drug addict because he wrote Infinite Jest? I was straight but, at the time, other students in my orbit knew only I think that I had written a gay spy film and didn't know that I had broken up at the beginning of the year with a girl I'd been dating since I was seventeen. I had fouled my own reputation.
In 2006, I decided to volunteer for the radio station bFM, a station I had listened to and loved since I was a teenager, as I have described in the other post. I should say something about this station. bFM is a student radio station that then had a tremendous cachet among the cool, young crowd. Unlike other radio stations, the DJs would pick obscure current songs apparently of their own choice and apparently based on their wide and deep knowledge of many musical genres. At the time I went to work for bFM the Breakfast Host was Mikey Havoc. My New Zealand readers will know something about Mikey but for my international readers I should say something about him. Havoc was and is a very big man with an imposing presence and forceful personality; he was then and still is a divisive and controversial figure. He had made his fame working at bFM in the late 'nineties and had returned to it in 2005 or 2006 after his TV career had faltered. He was then married to Claire Chitham. The station suited him. It was then and ostensibly still is a student radio station but, at the time I worked there, some staff at bFM were paid and the rest were volunteers; the young volunteers, who wanted to be cool, were willing to work for free to be part of the elite that was the bFM community. They were essentially being exploited by the paid staff for their free labour. I was unaware of this until I stated working there. That this dynamic existed at bFM, this cultish exploitation, only gradually occurred to me over the course of several months as a volunteer. It also became apparent to me that bFM was really a commercial radio station masquerading as a community service station, that all the music was selected by the Music Programmer Jason Rockpig. In 2007, at the station sometimes, I began to hear "Strawberry Fields Forever", with its refrain, "Strawberry Fields, nothing is real" playing on repeat in my mind; bFM was marketing itself to its devoted audience as something it wasn't. The station and its core staff were engaged in a kind of conspiracy, a kind of lie.
During my time at bFM, from I think around October 2006 until I think late February or March 2007, I worked in the side room finding and writing news stories, a couple of mornings a week. I was never on air or, I think, only ever on air once briefly. It is possible though that I garnered some fame or notoriety among the media for the stories I was writing – I can't be sure about this. My reasons for wanting to work there in the first place were threefold: to resuscitate an old friendship with bFM producer and Wire presenter Jose Barbosa, to feel part of some kind of community and, to a degree, maybe to work my way up into a paid media job. I never sought to become a newsreader or DJ however, because, having started working there, I totally lost confidence in myself. bFM's audience was bigger than I thought; bFM was bigger than I thought. Sometimes I would hear myself on tape when taking soundbites of interviews and I hated the sound of my own voice – I can't hear myself when I talk ordinarily. How could I go on air when I hated the sound of my own voice? I was offered an on-air role in 2007 but I declined it.The bFM staff may have been unsure why I was there in the first place.
It is worth noting that when I first rocked up to bFM I was given a job immediately, without interview or CV or even any conversation about what I wanted from the job. I think I was given it simply because of Jose's endorsement.
I need say something now about Jose Barbosa. Jose was, is, a short plump bearded man from Tauranga who pronounces his name with a hard 'J'. I had known him a little from my MA in English literature and I can remember, during that time, having a drink with him and him telling me of an important heart-to-heart he'd had with his grandfather in a fishing boat off the coast of Spain, without specifying any details of the conversation; I thought Jose might be gay but wasn't sure. Perhaps the conversation he mentioned was him 'coming out' to his grandfather. In the previous post "My First Psychotic Episode" I said that in the years since working in bFM I have wracked my brain looking for evidence one way or the other to determine Jose's sexuality; I am going to go out a limb now and say that I think Jose homosexual, although he never came out to me. I suspect Jose just tended to assume that other people could tell, even though he wasn't camp at all. In the same way that I was uncertain about him I think he was uncertain about me. I now think it possible that Jose was one of those gay men who falls for straight men but keeps quiet about his own sexuality when around them, and that this was the essence of his friendship, his relationship, at bFM with Mikey Havoc. (Jose was the producer of Mikey's show.)
Jose's sexuality is important to the story I'm telling and I do have some evidence that Jose was gay, particularly in terms of his body language and attitude towards me on the few occasions I met him outside bFM. He may have had a crush on me, as well as on Mikey. He must have known that Mikey wasn't gay even though I think he thought I was. I remember once at bFM when he was going in to check on Mikey, him referring to Mikey when speaking to me as his "blind man", and then changing his body language, mincing a little as he danced into the studio proper. During my MA my best friend was a blind man called Rene, I think Jose knew this, so the analogy was "Rene is to Andrew as Mikey is to Jose" – i.e. he was suggesting that in the same way that he was a gay man friends with a straight man, I was a gay man who had been friends with a straight man. Furthermore his reference to Mikey as a "blind man" suggests that Mikey himself didn't know that Jose was gay. I actually do think this the case, that Mikey didn't know, although I do think Mikey had suspicions.
So Jose was gay man working in a radio station, in a high profile position, who was not public about his sexuality and in fact hadn't even explicitly told all of his co-workers. I was working there because I was his friend. He may conceivably have told people I was gay, or it could be construed that I was gay because I was there because of him. I sort of knew this and sort of didn't know this, at the same time. The situation was from the beginning, and increasingly so as time passed, incredibly stressful for me. I knew stuff and didn't know stuff at the same time. I believe that Mikey too thought I was gay – for instance, he asked me once if I enjoyed the rave culture, not really in a friendly, interested way but rather in an attempt to put me in a box, because he thought I must conform to a particular stereotype. Some bad fashion choices and a willingness to run stories about gay marriage may have contributed to this misperception among the people at bFM.
As I said in the post "My First Psychotic Episode" by early 2007 I began to vacillate between thinking everyone in the station thought I was gay and thinking everyone else in the station was gay. You see, I knew what I knew and didn't know it at the same time, didn't want to know it. It was after I brought in the German girl, Caroline, a girl I was hitting on, a couple of times in early January that everything went to hell. (Jose, by the way, was completely oblivious to how cute she was although Mike certainly wasn't.) On the Tuesday after the Big Day Out (on January 17 2007) I had a complete meltdown in the news room– but it was that day that I think they decided to briefly put me on the air. Despite my meltdown I kept coming back. If the people running the station had been sensible they would have had a chat with me and said I wasn't a good fit for bFM but I think by that time I had accrued something like a fanbase and they couldn't get rid of me. I can't be sure about this.
A week or a fortnight later Mikey had his "in/out" rant on-air and I found the Hard News news item that the station manager wouldn't let me run with.
I was starting to unravel. It was that morning, the morning of the 'in/out rant' that the triggering event occurred which caused me to truly became delusional. I went into the studio proper after the morning show had finished. Mikey and Jose were sitting watching themselves on webcams; I can't remember precisely what they said to me, unfortunately. I looked at Jason Rockpig and he said, "I just play guitar." The station manager, who was there as well, sarcastically quoted the Hard News item – "If you let in a flamboyant homosexual, you might as well let in a Catholic!" I was in a situation I couldn't understand. I asked to have a word with Jose and he said, "When I've finished messing around with these dicks!" I couldn't comprehend what they were trying to tell me but I could sense that they were trying to show that Jose and Mikey were in the same camp, so to speak. I felt fairly sure by then that Jose was gay– so I could only assume that Mikey was as well. I thought they were both coming out as gay to me. In fact, I decided that they were having an affair.
On the way out of bFM I tripped on the stairs. I remember Jason saying to another core staff member, "Do you think he's alright?"
Briefly I thought I had been admitted to an exclusive club. But this wasn't a secret I could keep for long. I told my best friend, in confidence, in the Big House; I told my mother. I told my brother that there was "a conspiracy at bFM". I continued to work there for perhaps another fortnight but at last had to leave, doing so in the explosive fashion I described in the earlier post. The situation had become truly horrible. I thought that bFM had outed me publicly as gay even though I wasn't. Or that I had accidentally outed myself simply by going to work there.
After I stopped working at bFM I experienced some severe depression. I was prodromal. I thought that I had escaped the situation I had been in by leaving – but I hadn't. A scandal, and it was a scandal, follows a person. The psychotic episode didn't seize me fully however until after the Red Hot Chilli Peppers's concert (which I dated in the post "Dates, Dosages and Other Matters.") The episode, as it developed, was truly apocalyptic. I started to believe that the flat was bugged, that everything I said was being broadcast to a vast gay fanbase, that my flatmates were divided into angels and demons (which was code for straights and gays), that the media was made up entirely of closet homosexuals. I never spoke explicitly about sexuality at all (contrary to what my psychiatrists have said about me) but my behaviour must still have caused consternation among my flatmates. I started sleeping during the day and walking at night. I overheard one female flatmate one day saying to another, "Maybe he doesn't know!" and I have never been sure since precisely what she meant, what exactly I didn't know. Perhaps I had indeed been outed by bFM and this was what she was referring to. I have never been able to uncover what my flatmates knew but I didn't.
Eventually, after perhaps a fortnight, things reached a crisis point. A vicious circle was at work; the stranger I became, the stranger my flatmates became around me. Eventually I reached an absolute nadir: I decided that everyone in the world was gay except me – including my father. I went for a walk. All the anguish of my parents' divorce came back – because at another level I knew something closer to the truth. I had decided when I was seven that my parents had divorced because my father thought I was gay and now it seemed that everyone in the world thought I was gay. I truly believed I had been outed and the knowledge of this rejection caused me, that night, to realise that I was reliving the trauma I had experienced as a child. It was the end of the world. I considered suicide, walking into the sea up to my shins, and then changed my mind, deciding that suicide would only bring more shame on my family, came home to the Big House and said, "My father's gay but I'm straight!" I was wrong about my father (I need to say this) but the important thing was that I had finally said that I was straight. I had needed to say this, if indirectly, publicly, since the first day I rocked up to bFM.
Briefly I was well – and then I ended up a patient of the Mental Heath System. I still then possessed the delusion that my father was gay although I never talked about it. I didn't even talk about bFM at all and the Mental Health Service didn't know for years that I had worked there. Yes, I was sick – but if it had been put on my record that I 'identified' as heterosexual, if I hadn't been stuck with a gay psychiatrist, if I hadn't been put on the vile major tranquilliser Rispiridone and if the people treating me had put any effort into finding out why I had become ill in the first place and given me competent therapy, I might have got better in six months or a year, instead of the ten years it has taken me to fully recover. To say again something I have repeatedly said before, I didn't start hearing voices until January 2009, after I had been on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone for over a year and a half, and this was the result of my treatment. It has taken me ten years to talk about this, to "come out as straight".
I might finish by saying a little more about Mikey Havoc and Jose Barbosa. Mikey stayed on at bFM for the rest of the year and during this time his wife split from him. For years after, he was unemployed and living at home with his mother – I think he'd had something similar to a total breakdown. He had truly loved Clare Chitham. He worked at Radio Hauraki for a while and is now back at bFM. I don't know what Jose does now but in 2010 or 2011 I bumped into him. I was going to the Auckland Film Society for a screening (I was a member) and found him sitting on a wall as though he was waiting for me, as though he knew I was coming. He hopped up and made overtures. He may still have then thought I was gay. I brushed him away angrily, saying that I'd had a terrible time the last three years. I blamed him for it of course. He took the hint and disappeared, and I have never seen him since.
[Note: Since writing this post I have thought a little more about the moment where I formed the delusion that Mikey and Jose were having an affaire. It is possible that the people at bFM were simply, or at least partly, trying to tell me that they had "faces for radio" as the saying goes, but that I didn't have the voice for it. They might have 'tactfully' trying to get rid of me. If they were, there were probably better, more truly tactful, ways of doing it.]
