Cracking Up

I stand at the conveyor belt in a lab coat and hair net, watching the lines of snack crackers come up from the oven room. I was supposed to pick up lines of stacked crackers and fill the metal box on a stand in front of me, over and over and over again. I was covered in cheesy dust and my feet were killing me. Standing on a production line for sometimes 12 hours a day was not how I was supposed to be spending my life, no matter how well it paid. Breathing faster, I felt like my heart was trying to leap through my chest, My co-worker across the belt from me shouted: “Lisa, are you OK?”  Only vaguely hearing her voice, I looked up at her concerned face.

“Oh my God, you’re white as a sheet!” she exclaimed. Suddenly, like a vertigo shot in a movie, my surroundings shot off into the distance; everything and everyone around me seemed very far away. Unable to catch my breath, I burst into tears and my supervisor led me away to the nurse’s office.
“Now we dolly back, now we fade to black…..”.

This had happened to me frequently in the six months I had been employed there: the panic attacks, the nausea, hyperventilating. I started working there on my 21st birthday, only because my mother worked in the office and she told me that I could make very good money working “on the line”, certainly much more than working at my beloved mall record store job. I loved selling records, but I barely made more than minimum wage, even as an assistant manager. I couldn’t afford to move away from home and buy records working at the mall, so I thought I would give the cracker factory a chance.

Big mistake. Chasing money put me into the psychiatric ward in a hospital for a month and started me on antidepressant treadmill. I had suffered from anxiety and depression since childhood due to traumas (that’s a whole book unto itself), but this was a very serious mental illness that had snowballed into major clinical depression. I started having intense insomnia episodes and then I didn’t sleep at all for almost a week. So, off to the psych ward I went.

That Saturday morning, my roommate and good friend Esther, my mom, and myself drove to Dallas to check me into the funny farm. We had lunch at Red Lobster where I tried to lighten the atmosphere by making jokes. My Mom was very upset and I was scared of going into the hospital, mainly because I had never been hospitalized for anything before, and now I had to go into the hospital because I was crazy. Being crazy was normal for me, but hospitalization was not.

We went into the admitting lobby and waited to talk to my psychiatrist, an older no-nonsense woman with a thick eastern European accent. My mom held my hand and I tried not to hyperventilate. I didn’t really start crying until my mom did, then the dam burst. A nurse came to get me, so I picked up my suitcase, hugged Mom and Esther, and left them behind in the shrink’s office.
The nurse and I got into the elevator to the top floor. The door opened and we were in the Locked Ward, where the patients were checked in, sedated and evaluated to see if they are a danger to themselves or others. I would spend a week in this ward and I don’t remember much about it at all. I do remember my first roommate, a small woman with short hair and very thick glasses. She was wearing an old-fashioned flannel nightgown and slippers. I sat on my bed crying, wondering what was going to happen to me. The nurse had gone out to get my initial medications. The other patients seemed like zombies and I was terrified that one would attack me. My new roommate was very heavily sedated and moved like a sleepy zombie. She came over, stood in front of me and said something unintelligible, which I thought might be her attempt to console me, then her head dropped and she started snoring. The nurse had not come back with my medication and I was afraid this woman would fall over and hurt herself, so I gently picked her up and put her on her bed. She was very petite and I come from a long line of big German farm girls, so it was easy. After the nurse came back and gave me some benzodiazepine tablets, I became a zombie too.

Esther and her boyfriend came for a visit a couple of days later, which I don’t remember at all. Esther told me that her boyfriend was so disturbed at my soporific condition that he suggested to her that they should kidnap me and take me home. My first memory after my first week in the locked ward was a visit to my psychiatrist. She asked me if I was suicidal. I told her I didn’t know how I felt about anything anymore. She told me matter of factly that I was so depressed, I would “have to cheer up to be suicidal”. I could go to the unlocked ward a few days later where I would have group therapy sessions with other patients, along with occupational therapy and of course, I would see her every few days.

My psychiatrist convinced me that I needed a more creative line of work that suited my interests. What I really needed was a job that would pay my bills. I had grown up poor, the child of a single Mom, and while I had no intention of working at a job I hated, I didn’t have insurance and now I would have a bill for a month-long stay inpatient stay at a hospital, plus meds and psychiatrist visits. I ended up staying at the cracker factory for another year and a half to pay my bill, but I also started college. My shrink told me I needed something positive in my life, so I enrolled at East Texas State University (now Texas A&M – Commerce) as a part-time music major. I drove to Dallas every Friday morning to buy records and steel myself up to drive back through the tall gates of the cracker factory.

I had met my friend Jimmy when he came in to shop at the Hastings Records store I worked at in my hometown mall. We had very similar tastes in music and he lived in Dallas, so we went to loads of concerts. I wanted to move back to Dallas more than anything, so I compromised and moved to a Dallas suburb while at the end of my cracker factory tenure. I figured it would be easier to find a job in Dallas if I lived close by and then I could finally get away from cracker hell.

I started working at Collectors Records in August 1989. Jimmy had worked there part-time for years and knew that I hated my job, so he suggested my name when a job became available. He introduced me to Dorothy, the owner of Collectors Records in east Dallas. I talked to her for a bit and she called over Chuck, the manager (and later owner) of the store to speak with me. They both seemed impressed with my musical knowledge, so I was hired.

My last day at the cracker factory was one of the best days of my life. I didn’t even stay until quitting time; I just threw my hairnet and my coveralls in the garbage and drove happily back to my apartment in Dallas, crying hysterically and whooping and hollering all the way. I started work at the record store a few days later. My life immediately got better.