Traci Foust - Nowhere Near Normal: A Memoir of OCD

Nowhere Near Normal

This work is a memoir. It reflects the authors present recollections of (her) experiences over a period of years. Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

Excerpt from On the Maypole from Blinking with Fists by Billy Corgan. Copyright 2004 by Billy Corgan. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Gallery Books A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2011 by Traci Foust

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Gallery Books hardcover edition April 2011

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Designed by Jaime Putorti

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Foust, Traci.

Nowhere near normal :a memoir of OCD / Traci Foust.

p. cm.

1. Foust, TraciMental health. 2. Obsessive-compulsive disorderPatientsCaliforniaBiography. I. Title.

RC533.F86 2011

362.196'852270092dc22

[B]

2010047289

ISBN 978-1-4391-9250-4
ISBN 978-1-4391-9255-9 (ebook)

To Max
fr alles

You do not merely stretch rhino leather over your own fair skin, for that would deflect pleasure as well as pain, and you do not permit your being to turn stinking inside a shell, but what you do is swirl yourself in the toughness of dreams.

TOM ROBBINS, EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES

part one

Id rather tell you a story about someone else.

KURT COBAIN

1

then, us

Mixing blood with rose oil
we are leaving too soon,
To make new friends we shall not remember.

BILLY CORGAN, ON THE MAYPOLE

T he day my mother said we were moving out of my fathers house and not taking my father with us, I worried about two things: how many people in my family I would poison with the bologna in the refrigerator, and would we still be able to use the pool at our neighborhood swim club if we werent part of the neighborhood anymore?

But before any of these questions could be answered I needed to get all the way through Queens We Will Rock You while bouncing on my brothers pogo stick without making the record skip, without worrying about contaminating his favorite toy by the filth and neglect of my hands. Bologna sandwiches came from pigs who hung in a line, their innards hollowed and ruined. Id seen this on the tour of my moms work. She brought me to the San Jose Meat Company a few times, once to show me file cabinets and typewriters, once to show me how the animals dont feel a thing after the blood is drained from their bodies. I told my mom both outings were equally fun, but what I didnt tell her was that the shoe booties and hair covers I had to put on before I could follow one of the butchers into the slaughterhouse confirmed what I already felt to be truethe air around a dead animal is nothing to fool with. The germs can cause stomach viruses and send people to a watery diarrhea death, like in our Family Guide to Health and First Aid , where it said babies who are vomiting should be weighed every half hour and their skin should be pulled to check for signs of dehydration. Plus, there was also the National Geographic in my ENTs office with pictures of dry-lipped kids drinking dirty water from tin cupsand the next picture showed the rotting body of a bull or a wildebeest or somethingand the next picture was of a butcher slicing meat and smiling at a mom with her baby at his counter. I dont think the mom and the baby knew that they were connected to the decaying carcass.

I knew. Even when I tried so hard not to think about deadly bacteria, I knew it was still out there. If you dont stay on top of all the things that can rip a family apart, its the same as doing the ripping with your own filthy hands. Along with never missing an episode of Project UFO or 60 Minutes , I read a lot of stuff that other seven-year-olds (unless they were already declaring their ColecoVisions to be outdated) wrinkled their noses at or considered to be super retarded. I went on faith that the words I didnt understand in the article about the bad water would in no way contradict what the pictures were telling me. I paid extra special attention to sentences conveying how the government was unwilling to open its eyes and that it could be anyone, anywhere, at any time. But with my pogo stick and Freddie Mercury and my mom saying we all had to have a serious talk, I completely forgot to double wrap the lunchmeat after I made myself a sandwich. Maybe I got a little too into pretending I was onstage with Queen to care about my family getting sick. Maybe it wasnt me forgetting.

Is there a difference between careless and selfish? I knew never in a million years would Queen ask me to be onstage with them. I didnt really know how to play an instrument. My last year of piano lessons had been spent sitting around my music teachers house upset about something, a dull but persistent pressure in my abdomen every time I was asked to demonstrate how Id been practicing at home. And plus, even if Queen did kind of like my style and said come to Hollywood or wherever they lived, who would get to see me onstage? My family would be under the dirt at the graveyardwhite ribs and a little bit of back muscle like the picture in the magazine.

Because I didnt love them enough to check the bologna.

Because my mom said get off the pogo stick and turn that shit on the stereo down. She needed to talk to us about how we would no longer be living with my father.

What do you mean? I asked. Living here? I pointed to lots of wicker and a gold pleather footstool. Like living here with Daddy?

Thats right, she answered, like living here with Daddy. That isnt going to be us anymore.

My older sister had just started smoking and had developed his scary gag/cough reflex that sometimes made it hard for me to sit next to her without thinking about napkins. I knew it, she said. Gag/cough. She was also crying. Oh, I just knew it. I could see the signs. She looked past me and asked my brother, Didnt you just know it? Oh man, I knew it all along. Of course all of us had seen it coming. Some of us had even wanted it.

My brother shrugged. I guess. So where will we be?

Well be in our own place. My mom tilted her chin up and blew out the smoke from her cigarette. Were moving to the Apartments, she said. The ones by Luckys.

Everyone knew the Arbol Verde Apartments by Luckys supermarket. We called them only the Apartments. South San Jose wasnt big in the seventies for condos and high-rises. New cul-de-sacs and hilly old roads wrapped around mosaics of nuclear family tract houses with Spanish exteriors. Palm trees and rock gardens shared earthquake cracks with giant redwoods. Every corner of every road in our Silicon Valley neighborhood was a swirl of sacrifice and urgency. The Apartments sounded fine but I did have some recreational concerns. Can we still swim at the club? I asked.