Two NYPD officers handcuffed him and hauled him to Bellevue, where his delusions persisted.
Even the homeless people were a little too attractive.”Īfter narrowly avoiding getting hit by more than one non-actor-driven cab disrupting a soccer game by shrieking in a Scottish accent and sprinting across the field and challenging a group of men to an impromptu corner rap battle, McDermott found himself barefoot, shirtless, and sobbing on a train platform. “I knew the people on the sidewalk were actors…. Marks and Avenue A… and I knew we were rolling,” he writes in Gorilla and the Bird‘s opening chapter. “I walked out of my apartment on the corner of St.
One day, McDermott woke up convinced that he was being filmed for a Truman Show-style TV pilot audition, with his entire East Village neighborhood – indeed, the entirety of New York City – in on the joke. “This is not a fucking game, you know?” he says. The systemic injustices McDermott witnessed each day were soul-crushing, and his grip on reality became tenuous as his job-related anxieties compounded. Despite his commitment to the organization’s mission, “I was dying there,” he says. In his job at Legal Aid, McDermott worked with some of New York’s most disenfranchised populations, and many of the people he represented were severely mentally ill. “We’re all pretty much bleeding hearts,” she tells me from Wichita. (“Uncle Eddie” was McDermott’s mother’s brother, who spent the final 15 years of his life institutionalized for schizophrenia.) McDermott’s mother, teacher Cindy Cisneros-McGilvrey, has no doubt that her son’s upbringing helped fuel his passion for social justice. An ambitious, do-gooding Midwestern transplant, he’d wanted to be a lawyer since childhood, in part to help folks like “the dregs, the castoffs, the addicts, and the Uncle Eddies” he’d grown up among in “lower-middle-class” Wichita, Kansas. As he writes, “Regaining sanity at a mental hospital is like treating a migraine at a rave.”Īt the time of his first descent into mania-induced psychosis, the then-26-year-old McDermott was in his first year as a public defender at the Legal Aid Society in New York City. But McDermott is at his most fascinating when he’s describing the odious routines and everyday indignities experienced during his handful of stints in locked psychiatric hospitals. His new memoir, Gorilla and the Bird, chronicles McDermott’s bipolar disorder and the extraordinary ways his sharp, stalwart mother (aka “the Bird,” who once dubbed him “Gorilla” because of his hulky chest and excessive body hair) helped him live through it. Though he’s joking, he’s not exactly wrong.
“It was quite a blessing for material,” he says drily.
Zack McDermott wrote the first words of his new memoir during his first stint in the psychiatric ward at New York City’s notorious Bellevue Hospital.
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