This is an excerpt from "Snapshot of a Warped Man," my memoir. I currently have a campaign going on Kickstarter for funds to be able to self-publish it. I'm sharing another piece of it here as part of this campaign.
HYATTSVILLE (Md.) HOUSE
In the last year of college, the house I shared with roommates sat on a corner in a neighborhood where the numbered streets tangled around each other. 40th Avenue intersected 40th Street, and then intersected a different numbered street elsewhere after looping around the block—confusing if you didn’t live there. The houses all looked small on the outside and sat close together to each other. Most were partly red brick in front. The house had two floors, but you couldn’t tell from the outside, except for two windows jutting out of the slanted roof.
Stepping inside, wall-to-wall grubby brown carpet covered a big main room. To the right, we had a dining room table. I kept my stack of eight or nine Washington Posts on one end of it, and my roommates had odds and ends over the rest of it. On the left wall, toward the back of the room, a 20-inch TV sat on a beat up set of wooden shelves, with a VCR on one of those shelves.
Turning left at the front of the main room was the kitchen, where piles of dirty dishes would sit, all the way up to the top of a deep sink. A set of stairs behind the refrigerator led up to three bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor. Going up the stairs, mine was the one on the right that had windows overlooking the front of the house.
I graduated early, but still finished out the school year living in this house, while looking for work in D.C. This wasn’t good for me mentally. I’d convinced the inter-departmental copy center where I worked part-time on the campus to increase my hours to full time. But I wasn’t a student anymore, so I couldn’t continue with the student activities groups I enjoyed. So that isolated me. It didn’t occur to me to reach out or do something socially to fill that void for my mental health.
Just six months after my time in L.A. being friendless and isolated, I was in the same boat, and that’s a dangerous zone for me. I’d stopped getting along with my roommates in the house, which worsened my isolation. I would burrow inside my own head. I fixated on finding magazines with pictures of women for jerking off, having learned how to do it from the massage girls in L.A. Even this took some effort, because there wasn’t yet Maxim or Stuff each month, and I didn’t want to buy porn in person.
One night I remember coming back to the house after creeping around a local convenience store looking for magazines. I was back to being my 14-year-old self at my hometown Quick Chek, trying to be invisible while looking for what I wanted. I brought home a GQ that had a picture of an actor with a few sexy women (in swimsuits) vamping around him. In my room, laying in bed, gazing at the pictures, I get worked up and start pressing my erection into the bed. Then something stopped me.
I could hear a couple of my roommates, who I hadn’t been getting along with, whispering outside my door. “I think he’s masturbating again,” one said. The other replied, “He’s doing that all the time. He’s such a fucked-up creep.” I could hear them and it stopped me mid-stroke, but it wasn’t as bad as being Alex in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” with mom knocking on your door, yelling, “what are you doing in there?”
Once the spring semester ended, I was still on the lease through the end of the summer, and I had the campus job, so I stayed there. The roommates all left and sub-let their rooms. Then I got paid communications internship in D.C. for the summer, but I realized once that ended, I’d move back to New Jersey, since nothing else had clicked for me.
In the mental state I was in, I didn’t reach out to the new roommates either. I don’t remember their names all these years later, after only being in the house with them for about three months. But I took the opportunity to move to a bigger and better room on the first floor. A couple moved into the other first floor bedroom. They were somewhat “crunchy” people. I haven’t remembered their names. The guy was big and heavy set and his girlfriend was also a little heavier, and also busty.
I wondered about her, daydreamed about her sexually, maybe even pictured her while masturbating. Later, once I had a real job, if I liked a girl in the office, I’d picture her just like that. Anyway, at times I’d be in the house alone and everyone else would be out. So I’d creep into the couple’s room and look at her bras in their dresser drawers. I didn’t go beyond that, but I definitely got a charge out of doing that. I was more of a bra guy than a “panty sniffer.”
AVOIDANT PERSONALITY
For four or five months after graduation, I’d hovered around campus, trying to get my life started. That doesn’t seem like a long time now but it’s a much greater percentage of the life of a 21-year-old. Depression was getting to me and I didn’t even know that’s what it was. So I went to a psychiatrist just off-campus, whose office was in a plain, anonymous, tan one-story building.
The psychiatrist was a short, thin, balding, bespectacled middle-aged, Jewish man. He seemed meek, but like he might be very smart. He asked about my situation and circumstances. I told him I worked on campus even though I'd graduated.
--What do you like to do when you have free time? It sounds like you have a lot of free time now. Do you see friends?
--Not really, I shrugged. I’m kind of on my own right now. I’ll go to movies, maybe go into D.C. for the smarter movies. I can’t go around the Hoff anymore since I’m graduated.
--Do you see any of your college friends?
--Not really. I’m in a house with roommates but I don’t get along with them. I don’t talk to them or hang out with them like I used to.
--Why not, the doctor asked.
He started checking some boxes on a prepared worksheet, but the print was too small for me to see the details of it. Each line had numbers preceding a few words, likely diagnostic codes.
--I don't like the roommates. We had been friends, but they don't keep anything clean, and I can't get them to do it. Now they leave me out of whatever things they're doing.
With his pencil, the psychiatrist tapped a few of the codes on the worksheet, and said, “It seems like you have an avoidant personality disorder.”
I couldn’t respond, but I did think, in my head, “That’s a disorder? There’s something wrong with me?”
--What should I do with this, I asked.
--You could come back and see me again, but first you should start talking with a therapist. There's no medication I can prescribe.
Other than that, I didn’t even know enough then to ask for help finding a therapist, or a recommendation. This psychiatrist was cold and blunt. His head was in the paperwork. Feeling lost and numb, I paid the fee, asked if I could get a referral and trudged out of the office.
This psychiatrist caught me right when avoidant personality disorder first develops – early adulthood. I've read that this disorder keeps people from pursuing work or educational opportunities, but it seems like the reverse was happening. Being out of the loop of school or a career-track job caused my avoidant behavior. At that time, in 1993, the labeling of this as a disorder was less than 15 years old, having first appeared in the DSM in 1980. The psychiatric profession didn’t grasp the dimensions of this "disorder" yet.
Still, that phrase, “avoidant personality,” stuck in my head for a very long time. For years, I’d feel inferior and uncomfortable in social situations because of this “avoidant personality.”
