It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better

And you’ll be all alone.

That was my thought as I walked out of the psychiatrist’s office. I stepped out into the parking lot with two prescriptions and no optimism about the future. I’ve never been good with optimism, anyway. You see the glass as half full, and I wonder why you pulled out such a big fucking glass in the first place. The doctor—I was still wondering if I should really call him that,… I mean he may be able to prescribe medication, but I wouldn’t go see this guy for a bloody nose—explained to me that I should do some thoroughgoing price shopping for the mood-stabilizer,… it could be tremendously expensive in some traditional pharmacies. He mentioned one potentially good supplier (read: legal drug dealer): one of the national warehouse chains where you can buy two-gallon jars of mayonnaise and a six-month supply of mouthwash if you had a membership. “Call around,” he said, “you’ll be glad you did. And don’t forget to include the one place I told you about. You don’t need a membership to use their pharmacy.”

So, I moped to my car in the mid-May stagnation. It had been a particularly long and cold winter. Up until late March, the daytime high had been ten degrees lower than the average overnight low—it was a miserable season. Now,… with the temperature pushing ninety, and the air so thick you needed a towel after walking a few paces, I pined for the days so cold your sack needed a sweater of its own. (Welcome to Florida,… it’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.) I got home by sheer muscle memory. I don’t remember paying attention to the road—I do remember stopping to get another cup of coffee at the 7-11. Blueberry coffee. Now, normally I would tell you that fruit is the devil. But one day, after buying what I believed to be a French Vanilla flavored coffee and driving to work, I discovered,… in the middle of a seven-mile bridge,… that the moron who prepared the coffee at the store had put blueberry-fucking-coffee in the French-fucking-vanilla pot. I was furious. I don’t like fruit. I certainly don’t like fruit-flavored coffee. But I needed coffee and I was in the middle of a seven-mile bridge,… in a traffic jam,… and I was late for work already. So I drank the stupid blueberry coffee,… by the time I reached my office, I had a new favorite coffee. Okay,… so I’m pliable, kiss my ass.

I finally got back to the house. I still struggled with the diagnosis the psychiatrist had arrived at. Bipolar—one who had two distinct and diametrically opposed poles. “This guy can kiss both of my poles,” I said out loud,… for nobody but the dogs to hear. They didn’t know who I was talking about, fuck ‘em. I cried for a little bit,… maybe fifteen minutes (that was a walk in the park for me around that time), and then I checked my email and my facebook page. And then I cried a little more. I called my wife at work to tell her how my appointment went. She told me that she had considered the exact diagnosis to which the psychiatrist had arrived already,… several times. She reminded me that she had told me once that she thought I was, indeed, bipolar. She then reminded me that I had told her to fuck off immediately thereafter. “So,… what you’re saying is, ‘I told you so?’ You’re basking in the limelight of your prescient prognostication of my misery? Is that right?” So then,… she told me to fuck off.

I called around to the pharmacies as I had been instructed. (What an obedient puppy I could be.) The big drug store chain headquartered in Illinois quoted me a price in the mid $140 range. The big drug store chain headquartered in Rhode Island quoted me a price in the high $130s. The local Grocery store told me it would be around $130, and the giant superstore where all the locals with less-than-full-mouths of teeth shopped had a price of nearly $120. Finally I called the warehouse club that the Crazy Doctor told me about. I called the number I got from the website and pressed zero for the operator. She asked me to hold on for a moment while she prepared to look up the price for me…. And she hung up on me. I’m sure it was a mistake with the phone system or something,… but that just made me cry for a while. After fifteen minutes or so of bawling, I gathered up the nerve (with the help of a Xanax) to redial the phone. The same woman answered the phone and apologized profusely. She asked what the prescription was for, the exact dose and the quantity. After I told her, she asked me to hang on again. She didn’t hang up on me this time and instead got back on the line and told me what the cost of the medication would be: fourteen dollars and sixty-five cents. What a ridiculous discrepancy! I asked her why everybody else wanted so much for the same exact thing and her store asked so little for it. Her response was very enlightening,… “I have no idea.”

The warehouse club was a half-hour drive away. But to save over a hundred bucks, I’d push my grandmother out of an airplane or give a handjob to a moose or something else just as undesirable. I asked the woman on the other end of the line if she could fill the prescription while I was on my way up there so I wouldn’t have to wait. She explained that she couldn’t: they needed to verify the prescription on paper. I asked her long it would take to fill after I brought it in, and she informed that normally it would be about an hour, but they were short-staffed that day, so around ninety minutes. Super. Fan-fucking-tastic.

I listened to my favorite midday talk show on the way to the warehouse club. The guys on the program were castigating some celebrity over some egregiously bad behavior he or she had exhibited. It was hysterical;… I didn’t laugh;… I cried instead.

When I got there, I was stopped at the front door by the burly gatekeeper and asked to display my membership card. I told him I had been informed that if I were just going to the pharmacy I didn’t need a membership. This guy eyed me up and down—as if trying to determine what my ailment was. I was sure that he, seeing no outwardly visible symptoms, had figured it out immediately. I knew what he was thinking: “fucking bipolar motherfucker.” But all he said was, “okay.” The same woman who had answered the phone earlier was behind the counter. She remembered the conversation, and I was convinced that she had the same perception of me as the gatekeeper.

“Ninety minutes,” I asked.

“Ninety minutes,” she said, “at least.”

It was lunchtime. I wanted a beer. I found a real, honest-to-goodness dive bar. The kind with the windows blacked out so that you couldn’t tell if it was night or day outside. When my eyes finally adjusted, I asked the bartender for a beer. She scratched her ass and asked me if I wanted a draft or a bottle. “Both,” I said. I sat there for an hour and fifteen minutes and drank four beers,… maybe five. It was one-fifteen in the afternoon, and I felt nice and loose,… warm inside. And it was boiling outside. I got back to the pharmacy, and the woman behind the counter asked me if I needed consultation from the pharmacist on the medications I was picking up. “No,… I’m fine, thanks.” When I got in the car, I looked over the instructions. The potential side effects included dry-mouth and excessive salivation. It could possibly cause drowsiness or trouble sleeping. And then I saw the big warning on the side of the bottle,… “AVOID ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES.”

I needed to get home. I needed another beer,… or ten. I was going to keep drinking today,… and tomorrow,… and all weekend long.

Next time,… and even worse before it gets better, if it ever does.