I'll preface this post by saying that I feel like absolute crap. I had my injection today and my brain feels swaddled in cotton wool. I also found out this afternoon that my latest review, carried out by a psychiatrist called Nick Hough, went against me. I am still considered legally insane. In tonight's post, however, I intend to repeat two true stories I have told elsewhere in my blog, from a slightly different angle – specifically I want to describe who knew what and when.
There is a song by Queens of the Stone Age with the chorus, "Whatever you do... don't tell anyone." (It goes with the song "Nobody Knows".) I hated this song in 2009 because, although I understood what it was talking about, I had no secrets of my own to tell and I hated its imputation that th. However, dear reader, you might consider this song, like "Nobody knows" the soundtrack for this post. I would also point the reader to an excellent essay on the net called "Why psychiatry is evil" (http://www.wayneramsay.com/evil.htm) and the Youtube clips by Robert Whitaker.
In the post "Definitions of Sexuality" I described something that happened to me when I was about twenty-two or twenty-three, I would guess in 2003. At this time I was working at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron as a waiter/barman/ functionary. When work finished, the other bar staff and I would sit around and have a few drinks. In 2003, sometimes these drinking sessions that I had with the other workers would last until dawn. In 2003, we had a new barman called Stefan. He was a little older than the rest of us, and was a reformed methamphetamine addict. He liked, when he was at home, to smoke pot and try to solve the Cryptic Crossword. Stefan I would describe as straight – in fact, during the time I knew him, he embarked on an affair with my female boss Moana. They would go to motels, smoke pot, and fuck. I didn't know Stefan well – in fact, I was intimidated by him. He scared me a little.
One time, a few of the other workers and I were drinking and smoking pot all night. I didn't smoke pot much, by the way. In fact, I disliked cannabis; it made me too paranoid. I only smoked it as result of peer pressure. At about four in the morning, Stefan asked me if I wanted "seconds". I thought he was going to exhale pot smoke in my face but what happened was that he put his lips against mine before exhaling. I didn't like this. I didn't like this intimacy with another man. I neither wanted nor enjoyed it. As I've been in pains to point out in this blog, I am heterosexual, which means not only that enjoy heterosexual experiences but also that I abhor homosexual ones. It was shortly after this 'experience' that I formed a relationship with my second girlfriend Maya, perhaps partly in self-defence.
Although my colleagues at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron saw this 'kiss', it didn't mean much to them or to me. But this was the closest I'd ever come to a homosexual experience. When I became a patient of the Mental Health System in 2007, I knew that the people treating me thought me a homosexual with secrets to hide. I don't feel I need to prove this anymore. I can remember in late 2009, after I had been put on Olanzapine, I went to the wharf where the Squadron is based with my key worker – I knew that the stupid bitch thought I was homosexual and I felt like saying, "This is the closest I've ever come to a homosexual experience. And it didn't even count." I never talked about it though. In 2013, I re-entered the Mental Health Service because I thought there was still doubt about my sexuality in the public arena and I wanted to get it on the record that I am straight. I thought that by doing so I could help my friend Liz, who I've called Jess in this blog, that I could prove her straight as well. Obviously, I find it difficult to say that with both my ex-girlfriends and the occasional fling with a girl, I'd had sex a lot in my life. But I tried to say this. Around the middle of the year, I was listening to Radio Hauraki and heard Jeremy Wells describe an unpleasant experience he'd had– he'd been cajoled into kissing an old woman by his mates, something that had been seared into his brain as an unpleasant memory. I decided that, not only did I have to at least allude to the fact that I'd had numerous heterosexual experiences, that I also needed to say that I'd had a lack of homosexual experiences. I wrote a short essay describing what happened with Stefan that I gave to my psychiatrist. From her body language, I don't think she believed it. In fact, at the Independent Reviews I've had since being put under the Act in early 2014, she has repeatedly tried to imply that I was homosexual. At the last she tried to imply that I often cruise K Road looking for homosexual encounters. Obviously, the bitch is stupid. Why would I mention the experience with Stefan if I was trying to hide a secret homosexual lifestyle?
I remember in mid 2014 talking with my then Key Worker Josh Brasil. I said, "I've had two homosexual experiences in my life." He said, in tones of incredulity, "At the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron!" I said that the second was with Jon Stewart, specifically in early 2010. He had no idea what I was talking about, although I'd given the shrinks an essay describing my entire life shortly after being put under the Mental Health Act in early 2014.
I now need to describe a second experience I had. I have described this experience before in the post "Date, Dosages, and Other Matters". At the beginning of 2006 I moved into a flat called the Big House. I had twenty flatmates. During my time living there, we had one openly gay flatmate (he tried to get on New Zealand Idol); all the rest of my flatmates, as far as I could tell, although hippies, were straight. About a fortnight before I went to work at bFM, a German backpacker came to stay at the flat. I made friends with him and we went out clubbing. The next morning I drove him into town so he could catch a bus; my car ran out of petrol and I pulled into the bus stop by the Civic. I helped the German get to the bus station, went to a nearby petrol station to buy some petrol, and then went back to the car to fill it up. I had a bus hooting at me while I did so. A young street kid appeared and decided to help me. Out of a slight feeling of elation and excess of friendliness occasioned by the situation, I said to the street kid, "Do you want a ride somewhere in my car?"
You need to remember that I was a lot younger then; it was also about 10am on a weekday morning. The kid agreed. We went to a petrol station so I could finish filling up the car; I noticed that the street kid had a school bag full of cans of bourbon and coke. I was already regretting my impulsive offer. I said, "Where do you want to go?" He said that he had friends in St Helliers, so I drove there. On the way, he asked if he could use the bathroom and I stopped at a public restroom near Mission Bay. I half thought he expected me to follow me in. We drove on to St Helliers and it turned out that he didn't have friends there, so I drove back to town. I asked him, "Where do you want to go?" He said, "I want to go with you, Andrew!" I arrived back at Fort Street and, because he refused to get out of the car, I pushed him out.
Now, this story could sound bad to some people. I made a mistake offering to give this street kid a lift and I knew almost immediately that it was a mistake. However, the difficulties that I suffered later didn't result from this experience but from the fact that I told people without being clear about what happened. At this time, I was living with hippies who have a looser idea of social convention than other people; I also had arrived at a point in my life where although I was totally heterosexual (by definition – I was only sexually attracted to women), I saw signs of homosexuality everywhere. When I got back home, I told my flatmates that I had accidentally picked up a male prostitute. When I first went to work at bFM a couple of weeks later I told Jose Barbosa the same thing. It was a bad experience and I wanted to tell people because it was upsetting. I suspect that I also told my brother, although I can't remember doing so.
Now, people who hear this story may suppose that my decision to give the street kid a lift and my subsequent interpretation of what happened was an early warning sign of the psychotic episode that I experienced the next year. I prefer to believe that this error contributed to the episode I experienced later, was a cause rather than a consequence. If you want a better explanation for why I became ill in 2007, you need to go back to 2001 and the film I wrote (which I described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" and described the consequences of in the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia"). I felt in those early days and since that I was in the grips of a malevolent fate. As I said in other posts, when I volunteered at bFM, I vacillated between thinking everyone at the station thought I was gay and thinking that everyone else was gay. In order to fend off these fears, I wore a Gryffindor t-shirt which had been given to me by the mother of my first girlfriend Danielle. I wore this shirt in the hopes that it would prove a kind of magic charm or talisman – I knew I was straight even if others didn't and the shirt was my good luck charm. One day I was in the side-room and saw on the internet a story on Stuff news about Daniel Radcliffe's role in the play Eques. I followed the link and was presented with a picture of Daniel Radcliffe near naked. It was precisely at this moment that Mikey Havoc walked in from the main studio to see me looking at a near naked picture of Daniel Radcliffe.
I would now like to venture into more obscure waters. I lived in the Big House and worked at bFM – both the Big House and bFM were incredibly cool among my peers, people in their twenties. (I wrote a story inspired by the Big House called "Starlight" which can be found in this blog.) The main reason I went to work at bFM is because I thought it would be cool to do so. Of course, and this did not seem obvious to me when I was young and is not obvious to most young people, although the word 'cool' has positive connotations and the word 'gay' has negative connotations, it is often difficult to draw a line between the two. Lou Reed, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Kurt Cobain, Anthony Kiedis, Mike Patton, and Josh Homme, among many others, are cool but only one simple step away from being gay – they have never really come out. (Although Kiedis identifies as 'queer'.) A part of the reason I became unwell is that, although I was something of a bohemian, I had internalised some reactionary prejudices. I knew people might think I was gay simply because I lived in a large hippie flat, and I knew people might think I was gay because I had chosen to volunteer at bFM. A major cause of my psychotic episode was that people at bFM themselves thought I was gay, although in my madness, I turned it around and decided they were gay. In fact, for much of 2007, I decided that the word 'cool' was code for 'gay'.
In this blog I have talked a little about Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. I myself never have believed that sexuality was performative but I have realised over the last ten years that many people, typically women but men as well sometimes, do regard gender and sexuality as performative, as what you do rather than who you are. Straight men enjoy rugby and cricket, get real jobs like being barristers or doctors or tradespeople, get married and have kids; gay men read poetry, watch ballet, listen to pop music, wear skinny jeans and have relationships that can be difficult to categorise. Of course, this is all bullshit. Sexuality has nothing to do with lifestyle and everything to do with who one falls in love with and who one wants to fuck. But Bohemians nevertheless get a bad rap, particularly by psychiatrists who don't understand this culture. A couple of songs which spring from the Bohemian culture and say something about it are "Bohemian Like You" by the Dandy Warhols and "K" by the New Zealand band The Tutts.
In the post "Why I Am So Clever" I talked about my first girlfriend Danielle and I want to say a little about my second long term girlfriend. I started going out with her when I was about 23 and didn't finally break up with her until I was 29, in late 2008. In fact, although I often talk of her as my "girlfriend", our relationship could be better described as being a relationship between two good friends who often had sex. I was actually in love with her best friend Sara, and Maya knew this. When I travelled to Europe in 2004, I cheated on her. (I wrote a little about this trip in the post "Stolen Kisses".) I found out in the interval between leaving the Big House and being put on drugs, when I was close to well, that she'd unsuccessfully tried to cheat on me. Our relationship was destructive, both to her and to me, and both of us had difficulty getting out of it, although I tried in 2007. It is difficult to categorise my relationship with Maya; for obvious reasons when I have talked about her in this blog and to my psychiatrists, I have described her as my girlfriend but she might have categorised our relationship in a different way. In early 2009, when I became psychotic again, I had a consultation with a psychiatrist called Nick Hough (the only time from early 2007 and until January 2012 I saw a psychiatrist other than Tony Fernando); I told him, "I wish I hadn't broken up with my girlfriend!" He repeated the word "girlfriend" in evident surprise. I leave it to the reader's intuition and guesswork to find some explanation why he found it surprising that I said that I'd broken up my girlfriend. The obvious explanation is that she didn't feature in my notes at all. I still have mixed feelings for Maya and don't know whether to hold her partially responsible for my illness or to excuse her. She would often say around me, "Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen!"
This post has wandered over a number of different subjects. I don't know how to bring it to a conclusion. So I will leave it there.
