7. Where Tyson Gives a History Lesson

I KNOW, I know.

Tyson, you’re thinking. What in the blue fuck is going on? What’s with all the angst? The crazy voice in your head? The cliché standing in the rain on the beach and having a meltdown? Who do you think you are? Your brother?

The irony isn’t lost on me, trust me. As much as I told myself that things would be different for me, essentially I’ve turned into the former Bear McKenna.

Hysterical, I know. It’s like the people who say they’ll never be their parents and then wake up one morning thirty years later saddled with an upside-down mortgage, a rebellious teenager who alternates between hot and cold and says things like “You don’t know what it’s like to be me,” middle-aged, fat, and with thinning hair who wonder why there seem to be more and more empty wine bottles in the house because they didn’t drink that much wine with dinner last night, a cubicle job that is essentially a soul-sucking concubine thinly veiled as a necessary livelihood, and a sex life labeled as “do not resuscitate.”

I never thought it could get to be this bad. I never thought it would actually get this far. I don’t know how it happened. One minute I’m hearing Dom shout my name through the phone as my delusional, self-centered world comes crashing down around me, and the next, it’s four years later and I’m coming home for the first time. I haven’t spoken to Dom since, though not for his lack of trying. The daily phone calls went on for a time. He showed up in New Hampshire a few times, not that I ever saw him. He was always intercepted by Bear, who would come out with teeth and claws bared.

Therapy started up again shortly after that phone call. Getting an official diagnosis of panic disorder was both a relief and a disappointment. The relief stemmed from the idea that finally whatever was wrong with me had a name, because sure as shit it was something more than just panic attacks. The disappointment came from the fact that whatever was wrong with me actually had a name, that it wasn’t something I’d manufactured in my head or simply a product of my overactive imagination. No, I, Tyson James Thompson, am afflicted with panic disorder, which explains the panic attacks themselves.

If you don’t have these attacks, then it’s kind of hard to explain them so you can understand what exactly happens to me when they hit. The best way I’ve heard of describing them is that essentially it feels like you’re drowning in a vast ocean, and you can see the surface but it’s too far away and so you just drown, drown, drown.

Again, the irony of my life is not lost on me.

But it’s also the earthquakes. Times a billion.

With the therapy came the drugs, and with the drugs came Drone Tyson, the one whose eyes were slightly dead, whose thoughts were muddled and murky. Drone Tyson didn’t have the panic attacks, at least not as many and nowhere near the intensity, but Drone Tyson didn’t have much else either. Those are a hazy six months that I don’t quite remember, to the point in which pills started disappearing at a rate faster than they should have, because the high I got was better than the encroaching panic. Part of me knew what was going on, knew I was drowning in an ocean just the same, but I could find little reason to care. I woke up, took a pill. Three hours later, I’d take another. And then another. And then another.