WaterBeds and the Spins
jasmine banks
Trauma incurred through intimate violence teaches you that you are an exception to the rule.
Where were you the first time you tripped off of ketamine? Three weeks ago, two weeks after I forced a hand full of Gabapentin down with some alcohol, I sat in a small nondescript room while a nervous registered nurse searched my arm for a suitable vein. My wife Mo (they/them) paced outside the small room, “What else do you need, babe?” Later, when I was more lucid I’d recognize that look on Mo’s face. How many times had I overlooked this expression, this energy Mo carried? It was the expression of a partner who was fully convinced they were actively watching one of the loves of their life slip away. That night I failed to succeed at suicide, another stain of an uncompleted project which would weigh heavy on my Virgo natal chart, Mo sat powerless outside the bathroom door. Please Jasmine. Please stay here. Please stay with me a little longer. I sent hateful messages to people I loved which was extremely out of character for me. In my tormented state there was some kind of feverish dedication to provocation. I wanted someone to give me a reason, maybe? Fight me so I can stop fighting. Feel pain, maybe, so I didn’t have to feel all of this pain alone. A left over bottle of Gabapentin was all I had because despite the unrelenting desire to utterly self-destruct from all the trauma fused to my body, I was still an Earth sign who was into that organic shit. Can you overdose on CBD oil, Tea Tree oil, or whatever other tincture I’d purchased to balance the motherfucking unbalanceable chakras? I thought maybe the alcohol and Gabapentin combo would mean I’d slip into unconsciousness, finally free from pain. All I did was unlock the bathroom door to let Mo in and then spend the rest of the night vomiting until I passed out from exhaustion.
I responded to Mo that the weighted blanket would be helpful. My body buzzed with anxiety. The rumination, which I’d lived with since I was 6 years old, were loud today. I’d read anything and everything you could read about ketamine. Despite the evidence-based journals, the medical overviews, and the anecdotal accounts I was still thoroughly convinced that I would be an outlier. Trauma incurred through intimate violence teaches you that you are an exception to the rule. You are meant to feel special. You are special in the good way and in the bad way. You are blamed for the abuse visited on your body because you are especially bad, in need of punishment, you brought this upon yourself. You are blamed for the abuse visited on your body because you are especially good, attractive, deserving of this attention. So of course I arrived at the conclusion that I would either became a ketamine addict or schizophrenic as a result of this treatment I was consenting to. It would be my fault that it went wrong. The doctors would puzzle at why I was experiencing this rare response to the single ketamine infusion. Or maybe I’d just die during the whole thing… which didn’t seem like the worst possible outcome.
I pulled the black mask over my eyes and forced my body to recline into the oversized leather chair. My psychiatrist gave me headphones connected to an iPad playing spa music. I shimmed underneath the weighted blanket a bit more. Then I just laid there waiting. How would I know when the ketamine hit my system? The waves of my mind rolled the thought over and over again. The obsessive thoughts: trash caught in a wave, churning over and over, eventually littering the abandoned beach shore of my mind; too many fragments of glass and waste to be picturesque or inviting.
Do you know what the spins are? The spins happen when you’ve had too much to drink. There isn’t a set serving amount of alcohol that illicit the spins. The baseline criteria is that you have to be drunk, which I most certainly was the first time I experienced the spins. When the spins happen you feel nausea and vertigo and the room won’t fucking stand still. It is like being on a waterbed. For years I was wary of drinking because of the spins. The sequence looked like this: drink some alcohol, feel fine, drink some more alcohol, experience the spins, start vomiting, have a violent panic attack on the floor, disassociate. This experience happened several times over the course of three years. The first few times my wife called for an ambulance. Mo had never seen such a violent panic attack. My body would constrict and contort and my eyes would roll back in my head. I wouldn’t be able to slow my breathing. I would drool. I would vomit and shit and red hot pain would surge through my body. I would become incoherent and sob. Can five glasses of wine really do that? Every single emergency room visit my wife would explain my anxiety and I’d leave after a bolus of anti-nausea and anxiety meds with a pamphlet about alcoholism in hand. After the fourth trip to the emergency room where I got a compassionless lecture on being an alcoholic (I’d only had three glasses of wine) we stopped going. I spent years secretly wondering if I was an alcoholic or drug addict. I’d only smoked cannabis once and did no other drugs. I drank wine regularly, but there was no diagnostic or anecdotal evidence of an addiction outside of codependency and sugar in my life.
My psychologist, Dr. Clemons, would often become frustrated. After seven years she showed signs of growing tired at my weekly self-interrogation during my therapy sessions with her. “Have I fooled you? Am I really a sociopathic alcoholic and maybe also just a really bad person?” She and my psychiatrist, who’d spent nearly the last ten years coordinating my care, would just roll their eyes and dismiss me toward the end. My neurotic rumination about my possibly hidden pathological nature, the deep fear my mother programmed into me about her alcoholic mother, and the judgmentally dismissive nature of a medical system that doesn’t know how to treat traumatic disassociation of complex post traumatic stress disorder make quite the cocktail. Pun intended. I’d spend years and years sorting out if maybe I was an alcoholic. Being an alcoholic, it seemed, would be easier to focus on— something with a clear framework for how to behave, how to respond, and what to avoid.
I’m not an alcoholic, I don’t think. But that isn’t the point of this. The point is that when you get the spins it feels like you are on waterbed. So when the ketamine hit and I watched 9 year old Jasmine on a tire connected a long rope in an old tree in Enid, Oklahoma I knew where the fuck I was and I knew I’d end up on a waterbed. I don’t know how long I’d been under the dissociative state of the ketamine, but I knew before entering into the vision I’d attempted to will my mind to “a happy place”. I’d read about how folks trying ketamine under medical supervision or otherwise went back to trauma memories. One forum instructed that you should think of calming and happy things and then you are likely to “have a good trip”. Since I tried to kill myself the week prior, I don’t know why I thought that my first psychotropic trip would result in a vision of me in a sex den with Janelle Monae and Stacy Abrams and Monica Calhoun from The Best Man. I’d never even been to a sex den or met Monica Calhoun.
I heard him call me inside. His voice broke the sustained gaze I’d set watching the rope against the backdrop of the sky. I picked my backpack up from the dirt, abandoned as soon as I stepped off the bus in front of that house. I had an after school rope swing ritual. I grabbed my navy Keds and ran toward the small house at the back of the lot.
My mom left us in Enid at his house while she went to Tulsa to find a new place to live. He was her boyfriend. He’d cheated on her with Angelina Hailey. I knew Angelina’s kids. We all rode bikes and chased rabbits by the railroad tracks and snuck into Bass Heart Hospital’s lobby to steal free lemonade from the patient waiting room. My mom went to Tulsa to find a place to live because after my father’s deep infidelities and abuse, she was clutching on to hope that moving Glen to a new city might keep him faithful. She knew she couldn’t be alone. Being unwanted was excruciating for her, for any of us, I suppose. I remember the fights and her begging Glen to not leave her. So she left me and my brother with him, so we could go to school and things could remain normal until she found a place. What she didn’t know was that nothing could be normal for two children placed under the care of a pedophile. The first time that Glen sexually assaulted me was the first morning I met him. I woke up to a strange man in mother’s bed. He told me that my mom wasn’t home because she was at work. “Go get me some vanilla ice cream,” he instructed. I did as he told me to and brought a bowl of Bryer’s Vanilla Bean ice cream to the strange half naked man in my mother’s bed. He slowly stirred the ice cream while he asked me questions. I don’t remember a single question he asked me save for one: “Do you know how to properly eat ice cream?” After he gave me a primer on how to properly stir ice cream until it softens to a soft serve consistency, he asked me if I wanted to taste it. “It tastes better once you stir it…” and he spooned some ice cream onto his nipple. I wavered and stepped back. He told me I had to taste it and assured me he was just playing. He put the bowl down and slide his hand under my the sheets that belonged to my mother. He was a half naked man, a stranger, in my mother’s bed. I quickly licked the ice cream off of his body and giggled. I was eight. That was the first time I left my body.
And this time I wasn’t in my body, but back in that place, that house, inside a vision fueled by ketamine and a lackluster desire to live. The transition of the vision from the rope swing to the only bedroom in Glen’s house was quick. Parts were missing. He made Isaiah and I dinner and forced me to shower despite my protest. The vision fast forwarded through that part and I was laying stiff on my belly staring at the closet. My adult consciousness was standing in the half-open accordion closet watching what was happening to the younger version of myself. There were many strange things about this vision; this replaying of a traumatic memory. One of the most chillingly strange things that I remember about that night was laying there feeling afraid that someone was standing in the closet watching me. I’m sure it was my adolescent mind finding something else to fixate on as Glen ran his hands over my body. I was leaving again. I always left when he’d contort and bend my body to fit his penis inside me. I stood in the closet and watched myself be raped. As I watched him rape me the me in the closet felt the waves of vertigo and nausea. I could feel the movement of the water bed. I wanted to throw up. I was going to throw up. Acrid. I wanted to spit in his face. I held back the impulse. He will hit me if I spit on him. I felt the red hot pain in my abdomen. My body tensed as he made a noise I’d learn my first year of marriage that men make when they ejaculate.
It was over. I followed the younger version of myself into the bathroom. Was there a thunderstorm outside in my vision or was that a drum in the spa soundtrack in the ketamine infusion center? I watched her sit on the toilet and sniffle. Resolute not to cry, she winced as she wiped her vulva. She stood up and washed her hands and found her underwear, though I couldn’t figure out where they’d appeared from. She struggled on shaky legs to pull on her strawberry shortcake underpants, a small body too exhausted from weight it was never meant to bear. She stumbled and before she slammed her elbow on the side of the porcelain sink, I caught her. I sat on the floor with her and I held her and we sobbed. I felt the heat of the tears and the weight of her body, or maybe it was the blanket, and tears slipped beneath the mask and rolled down my cheek as I lay in the leather chair.
I held her and brushed her hair away from her face, her impossibly wild curls refused to be tamed. I looked at her face. It was me and then suddenly it was my daughter Addison. She too had survived a father who sexually assaulted her, the man I couldn’t leave because it was too excruciating to be alone. I tightened my grip around me, myself, and Addison and the room faded into black. It disintegrated. I felt a rush of heat and my mouth salivated. Orange sand materialized beneath us. Did I rescue her? Was I rescuing myself? Did I save Addison as well? Did I save us all? I didn’t know where we were, and I felt relief to have been spirited away from that house in Enid.
I felt the blood pressure cuff inflate and the registered nurse lifted the tear soaked mask. “Jasmine,” she asked hesitantly, “ your blood pressure spiked by 10 points… do you need to stop? Is this too much?” I shook my head no and placed the mask back over my eyes.