Medical Masque
I remember when the Prozac first hit. I was in my grandparents’ kitchen doing dishes, looking out the window at the grizzled apricot trees, and in an instant, all at once, I felt it: good. The sensation was so foreign, I didn’t immediately understand it. It frightened me, feeling good. I didn’t trust it, but I ran with it, and I’ve been chasing that high ever since.
Before I felt good, I felt, well, not. My brain started shorting out shortly after my sister died, alternating between intense, incapacitating depressive and manic episodes. Therapy wasn’t presented as an option, but psychiatry was — my behavior was seen as a problem for which medicine was the only hopeful cure (never mind the fact that my father refused to take the Prozac that was prescribed to him after threatening suicide).
I was sent to the office of a bearded, genial man who wore bowties and was later found bludgeoned to death in the trunk of his own car, a fact my mother seemed to take delight in informing me a few years ago (the macabre gives her life — she also loves the collected works of Chuck Palahniuk. I pray she never discovers the existence of true crime podcasts). He diagnosed me as bipolar and started me on a revolving door of psychotropic medications. When one stopped working, another was prescribed. And they always stopped working.
As a result, for the entirety of my adulthood I never tried talk therapy in earnest but I tried a lot of pharmaceuticals independent of it, up to and including one that ruined my life with the taking and ruined it worse with the withdrawals. I gave almost the entirety of last year to an antidepressant on an ever increasing dosage which ultimately generated nothing but the inability to think or feel. Y’know that feeling when you look at your husband and ask yourself, “I know I love this person, but why?” Relatable stuff.
Therapy, it turns out (for me, anyway, someone who is not actually bipolar but was just acting out of grief after a traumatic event), is more effective than medication, as it does something about the root cause of my malaise instead of temporarily anesthetizing it. This is a fact I wish I had learned before the age of 40 but nevertheless appreciate the learning of now.
Which means it’s time to get off medication. The fifteen milligrams of Prozac (hello lightness, my old friend) I’ve been on since dismounting from the more intense, life-ruining antidepressant seem to do nothing but make me exhausted, so I’ve begun the tapering process, which means I am currently brain dead and have the runs. In the interest, however, of not stopping the momentum of releasing a newsletter every week, I decided I’d share some photographs I took a few years ago when I was granted access to the Hollywood basement that formerly housed the Masque, L.A.’s first punk club.
While it’s now used as storage for the production company that does Ru Paul’s Drag Race, said company has left it (mostly) intact as they found it, which rips. Don’t we just love when Los Angeles respects its history?
If only Prozac had been on the market before Darby Crash killed himself, maybe he wouldn’t have done it (or would have done it sooner, depending on how the SSRIs hit him).