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Teddy Holland, Graphomaniac

K.D. Alter

    “Look, I agree that your husband may be a sick individual. But the policy doesn’t cover mental illness. No one wants to touch that anymore. In the end it’s an actuarial problem. Mental illness is the new tooth decay. Everyone’s losing their minds. And graphomania? Did you see the article in the Times saying that 81% of people think they have a book in them? What if we had to pay out medical for all those crazies—pardon my French—how would we make money? Hm?”
    “Can’t you make a distinction between major clinical and mild graphomania? My husband is refusing to go to work. He’ll soon be out of a job,” Mrs. Holland pleaded into the phone.
    “I wish I could help you, Mrs. Holland. Try Writer’s Anonymous. I understand they have a twelve hundred word program for breaking the habit.”

    The last person Mrs. Holland wanted to call for help was Teddy’s older brother, Charles Wilcox Holland. Charles Wilcox was Chief Marketing Officer at Goldman Sex, the largest purveyor of pornography on the internet.
    “Charlie, you know I hate asking you, but he’s your kid brother.”
    “Last year it was root canal. Two years ago it was plane tickets to Dad’s funeral. Now this? Where is this going to end? I’m cash strapped. I can’t keep propping him up. He should have thought of this before choosing to become a—hard for me even to say it—a teacher.”
    “You’re right, Charlie. But you have to help. There’s risk involved. Now it’s just a visit to the psychiatrist, but if this goes on he’ll be howling at the door for food—your door, Charlie. He’s been missing work. This can end badly.”
    “Christ Jesus! This is why I vote Republican.”
    “You’re a man of true compassion, Charlie.”
    “Five hundred dollars. After that you’re on your own.”

    “I would prefer not to,” Teddy said.
    “This isn’t a joke. D’Arcy called to warn me that Pilsner is already recruiting for your replacement. You’ve got to go back to work, and you must get medical attention.”
     “I’m not sick.”
    “Well then why aren’t you at work? Who’s going to pay the baby, feed the rent, meet the insurance? We can’t on my income. You’re not being reasonable. It’s enough you ignore me and slink away to your computer to write god knows what all night and every weekend. But when an obsession gets in the way of making money, that’s mental illness. I Googled it. Please!”
    Mrs. Holland wept.
    “Don’t cry, sweetheart. I love you. I just—”
    “You just what? Teddy, I’m frightened. Please go to the doctor. Just once. For me and for Ethel.”
     “I prefer not to...but I will. You’re right. I am fixated, and I suppose I must be unhappy. I wouldn’t want to harm you and Ethel.”

    The psychiatrist wore a lab coat. He had a fake tan.
    “My checklist confirms it. You are suffering from Type II Graphomania. Fortunately, there’s a new medicine approved to treat it. You’re a lucky man, Mr. Holland. This pill will work so well you’ll not only stop feeling the urge to write, but you may even be relieved of the desire to read. Not bad, eh?”
    “Are there any dangerous side effects?” Mrs. Holland asked.
    “No, no, this medication has been around for 25 years and there are no reported side effects whatsoever.”
    “I thought you said it’s a new medicine,” Teddy said.
    The psychiatrist looked up from his adding machine.
    “You weren’t listening. I said the medicine is newly approved for this condition, not that it’s a brand new medicine.”
    “How long will it take to start working? My husband’s been refusing to go to work.”
    “Oh, I didn’t know that. School Refusal Syndrome, hmm, let me see...”
    The doctor turned to his computer and typed in a few words, clicked the mouse.
    “Let’s add a mood stabilizer, shall we? I’ll sign a note to the principal. Anything else? Teddy?”
    “I’m not so sure there’s anything wrong with me. I mean, I’ve wanted to write ever since I was a boy.”
    “Ah, well, there you have it. It’s now confirmed. You’re suffering from two syndromes at once. It’s chronic, and you’re in denial. Trust me, Mr. Holland, you are a very sick man. Take these pills and you’ll be just like the rest of us, I assure you.”
    “How long will my husband have to take the pills, doctor?”
    “First we invent a cure, then we label it a disease, then we publish research, and finally we encourage compliance. The brief answer, Mrs. Holland is, for life. Call my nurse every three months to renew the prescription. Anything else? That’ll be six hundred dollars.”

     Mrs. Holland stopped worrying and learned to love the pills. Within a week, Teddy was back at work, and he quit staying up late at night, writing. In fact, his lifelong insomnia went away. He flopped in bed soon after dinner and awoke only in time for work the following morning. On weekends he slumped in the couch and watched television.
    The best thing about the pill was that sex was better than ever, at least for Mrs. Holland. Not only was Teddy no longer distracted by his writing, but when they made love the pills turned him into a kind of priapic superman. In the past he’d always gotten too excited too quickly. Now he stayed so stiff that it took all that Mrs. Holland could muster to tire him out.
    She sent a handwritten thank you to the psychiatrist. She recommended the branded pills to all her friends. She called Charlie to thank him and she told him about the pills, too. He said he planned to start selling them through his website.
    “Glad we could take his mind off that damned book fetish of his,” he added.
    But Teddy was less convinced about his newfound happiness. True, he was sleeping better and had fewer obsessive thoughts about his failures as a writer. He’d written two novels, dozens of stories, a play, and a new libretto to “The Barber of Seville.” But he’d only ever published two stories, the ones that he thought were the silliest, and for these he received no pay and not even hard copies of the magazines that printed them. Those he had to buy himself. He kept them above his writing table as encouragement, but really they sat there and mocked him, more like.
    In that sense he was relieved from a burden. But as the weeks passed he began to feel empty inside, the way he did when he was twelve and his mini schnauzer, Mitty, ran into traffic and got run over. To take his mind off his sorrow, he wrote his first short story. He called the story “Traffic”. There were no dogs and no cars in the story, but the souls of children who had lost their pets, holding hands together and floating through the streets of Pittsburgh looking for them.
    He dared not tell Mrs. Holland about his decision to come off the pill, but he feared she might find out because he’d revert to his old habits of not sleeping and of becoming too excited too quickly when touching her under the covers. He solved the second problem by thinking intensely of sad things. Once she fell asleep, he’d get up and resume writing.

    “Teddy. I know you’ve stopped taking the medications,” she said late one night, coming into his study as he sat at his computer.
    “Oh? What makes you think that?”
    “I counted the pills in the bottles.”
    “I’m not a very good liar. That may be my problem as a writer.”
    “Why did you stop taking them?”
    “The pills took away my will to write but not the craving to express myself.”
    “Why can’t you express yourself to me? I’m here to listen to all your problems.”
    “I don’t write just about my problems, but about, about, I don’t know, just things running around in my head.”
    “I won’t push you to take the pills again, but will you at least sign up for Writer’s Anonymous? Teddy, I’m afraid of what will happen.”

    “Teddy Holland, graphomaniac.”
    Thus did each person in the circle introduce him or herself. Many had the same disorder as Teddy, but it expressed itself in different forms. Others confessed addictions to musical composition, painting, or attending poetry readings. Listening to the others, Teddy thought he must be a mild case. There were people in the room who had composed hundreds of works for the stage or orchestra that would never in a billion years be performed. One screwball wrote a 215,000 word novel about a whale. The first sixty pages, he confessed, didn’t even mention the whale but only described the fishing boat that the whale would later sink. The man lowered his head in shame.
     “Well at least yours was a whole whale. I wrote 30,000 words about an old man trying to catch a marlin,” someone else called out.
    Everyone laughed.
    There was a social worker at the head of the group who listened patiently to their introductory confessions. She handed out small notebooks of graph paper.
    “I’d like you write four words along the side of every page in your notebook. Here are the words: Fear, Love, Anger, and Pain. These are the four emotions. Every time you feel one of these, I’d like you to place an X in a box next to that word. I want you to try to do that instead of writing or composing or drinking or whatever else you’ve been doing until now to express your emotions.”

    Teddy quit Writers Anonymous and went back to writing. He kept his job teaching high school, but six months later Mrs. Holland divorced him anyway. She moved away from Pittsburgh and took their daughter with her. After this, Teddy wrote just one more story, called “Marriage.” He never married, or wrote, again.

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