The first time Bashful was dosed with Spravato, Happy was sitting cross-legged on a couch across the room and began hallucinating the exact same moment Bash did. We all took it in stride. Happy is the most… what’s the word… sensitive? susceptible? impressionable? empathic? of the girls. She “picks up on vibrations,” as they say. No surprise then that when Bashful took two doses and skyrocketed into her psychedelic netherworld, Happy followed. Simply because she’s Happy.

 

We were all there as a group to show our support for Bashful in battling her crippling depression. Since childhood she’s been moody and reserved, so when she quietly slipped over the edge into a state of enervating desolation and despair, none of us, to our shame and regret, recognized for months that she had tumbled down a rabbit hole. To be fair, Bash was the sister who always strayed off by herself rather than joining group activities, read in a corner instead of watching TV with the gang, sat under headphones in solitude and floated through the shadows at the periphery of gatherings rather than mingling like the others.

 

I’m not excusing us. We, and especially me, Pinky Tourette, in my role as manager and overseer and troop leader for the band, simply missed every single one of the clues as she became more withdrawn than usual, losing her luster and her drive.

 

With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to pinpoint the trigger incident that launched her descent: the ghastly death of Thee Tourettes’ friend and collaborator Anime Wong. You probably already know that Bashful is the one who takes the skeletons of Thee Tourettes songs as conceived by Doc and Dopey and fleshes them out into full arrangements. Completely self-taught on the keyboard, she’s a natural with orchestration and dynamics, turning vague sketches into fully composed art. Bash was the one who brought in Anime to play cello on a handful of Thee Tourettes studio recordings and to join us live in that famous Unplugged appearance.

 

Unlike Bash, Anime was classically trained, a young prodigy on cello and violin, capable of breaking your heart or sending your pulse racing with a stroke of her bow. As a member of Brooklyn band The Grateful Wrath she opened for Thee Tourettes on numerous occasions, becoming tour buddies with the girls. When Bashful decided certain songs needed strings, she naturally reached out to Anime for session work, and the results were bliss.

 

The two became friends, inasmuch as Bash has friends, although it certainly seemed like they argued more than they agreed. That’s how some friendships work. Anime was a proud carnivore; Bash a strict vegetarian. Anime was loud and self-confident, a creature of impulse, and my guess is she appreciated Bash’s thoughtful side. Bash, reserved and deliberate, clearly admired Anime’s risk-taking, musical and otherwise, and her general outside-the-boxness. Their relationship was based on mutual respect, challenging each other to be better, more creative and daring musicians, resulting in truly remarkable productions. They often talked of collaborating on a suite of songs under the umbrella title “Aviatrix,” based on their mutual fascination with Amelia Earhardt. Nothing but heated discussions ever seemed to come of it, but the girls and I were delighted just to see Bash connecting with a peer.

 

It was in the fall of 2019, October or thereabouts, when Anime reached out to Bashful to play on a Grateful Wrath song. Bash was happy to oblige, contributing a majestic Hammond B3 track to the ballsy rocker “Casey Joad.” It was the last time she saw Anime alive.

 

In February of ’20 we got word of her death in a parachuting accident. Anime had long been a devotee of skydiving and slotted in jumps in Long Island, Jersey, and Connecticut whenever possible, in addition to international locations while on tour. It was no secret that she pushed her band to play in certain exotic locales specifically for the local skydive experience. We were all shocked to learn that on vacation in New Zealand her chute failed to open and she was killed horrifically on impact. It was a mystery to everyone how this could happen to such a seasoned skydiver.

 

A mystery to everyone except Anime, that is. In her mind there was no doubt that Anime chose not to pull that ripcord, instead embracing her last, greatest freefall, sacrificing herself to the sky and the earth. At their last recording session together, Anime chatted excitedly about her upcoming trip and how much she was looking forward to the freefall over Franz Josef Glacier, universally recognized as one of the two or three most scenic sites in the world for skydiving, surrounded by rainforests, mountains, and the Tasman Sea. It was the only site left on Anime’s bucket list that she hadn’t yet jumped.

 

Bashful also remembered Anime telling her in confidence that she was thinking of quitting, which Bash assumed meant quitting the band, but now…? When Anime said she had gone as far as possible and accomplished as much as she could in these circumstances, had she meant something far bigger than simply moving on from her musical partners? And was it a horrible, unforgiveable mistake for Bashful to say she fully supported Anime in whatever decision she made?

 

We knew none of this at the time. When we drove out together to the funeral home on the outskirts of Chinatown in Flushing, Bashful joined us in quietly paying respects to the family and bandmembers. She stood before the closed coffin for an uncomfortably long time while others silently waited their turn. Then she disappeared. While the rest of us muttered soft cliches to one another and nibbled on Chinese pastries on the second floor of the funeral parlor, Bashful walked through Chinatown to the Long Island Railroad station and hopped on a train back to the city, calling us on her cell to say she had already left.

 

Fools that we were, we accepted this as her way of grieving, and left her alone. Gave her space. Oh, we offered the usual: If you want to talk, if you need an ear, if you’d like a shoulder to cry on. Blah, blah, and blah. The fact is this: she had been infected with a parasite and we stupidly stood back and allowed it to eat her alive.

 

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Within weeks, the world, or at least our portion of it, was in lockdown. March hit. COVID-19 exploded throughout New York and New Jersey, where we were staying while laying down tracks at Atlas Studios in Emerson. Our upcoming tour was canceled, which seemed like a monumental personal tragedy until the scale and scope of what was unfolding truly hit us. Stores closed everywhere. Restaurants shuttered. Schools locked their doors. Businesses went belly-up. Jobs were lost. Savings accounts dried up. Friends got sick. Friends died.

 

It was a sobering, frightening period, filled with existential questions, and the underlying political turmoil didn’t help. Holed up in our home base, a two-story house in Rising Gorge, NJ with a makeshift studio in the basement for recording demos, prevented from touring – the lifeblood of the Thee Tourettes – the band was, like it or not, forced to adopt a “domestic” lifestyle, living day to day within the same four walls. Into this square hole our amorphous peg did not fit. So yes, there was tension, there was turmoil, there were tears, there was anger, there was sadness, there was anxiety.

 

And there was depression. We all saw it; we all dismissed it. We all knew Bashful was feeling morose. We chalked it up to the pandemic. Everybody was down, right? Buck up, kiddo. Idiots were we.

 

I can’t tell you whether Bashful was drafting a suicide note or a cry for help. I can offer an opinion, but why bother. Opinions are like assholes; they’re full of shit. Bashful had taken to journaling on her laptop, something we all encouraged and hoped would help her cope as the virus raged through society destroying everything we took for granted. If Bash was too private to share her thoughts out loud, she could at least express herself with a keyboard.

 

One night after her usual scroll through social media and whatnot, Bash spent an hour typing in her journal, drank a Diet Coke, and climbed into bed, leaving the screen illuminated. Rooming as she was in the dormered attic room with Sneezy, it was entirely predictable that her sister would immediately sneak to the computer to read her last entry. The one about ending her misery with a bottle of pills washed down by alcohol.

 

Taking a snapshot of the screen on her phone, Sneezy tiptoed downstairs to rouse Doc and Dopey, who corralled me. You couldn’t have shocked me more with a cattle prod. Bashful – suicidal? How was that even possible? She was the deep thinker, the one who looked at a single puzzle piece and saw the big picture. For all her isolation and eccentricity, she was rational, firmly grounded, stable. Wasn’t she? The kind of deliberate, disciplined soldier one simply took for granted.

 

And that, in the final estimation, is the part of this little treatise that I most want you to take to heart. Don’t take her for granted. Whoever she is, whoever you feel you know so well you can always count on and assume is safe and content and weathering whatever storm the fickle gods of fate may choose to throw your way – don’t do it, don’t take her for granted, don’t step back and “give her space” and leave her to fight the demons alone… because the demons will win. Trust me. The demons are smarter and trickier and far more seductive than you give them credit for. They will win precisely because you underestimate them. This is their goal; this is their strategy. Don’t fall for it.

 

The four of us talked late into the night, struggling at first to accept the truth, then scrambling to assign blame, finally recognizing our own blind complicity and moving on to next steps. Together we clustered around a computer until long past dawn scrolling through sites offering insights and suggestions and remedies and cures.

 

Eventually we agreed on the one practical answer. Therapy. The question was: would Bashful agree? We decided that rather than stage a group intervention and blindside her, one of us would talk to her individually. In true egalitarian fashion, we drew straws, me and Doc and Dopey. Sneezy begged off, saying she couldn’t handle it.

 

I have to admit I was relieved when Dopey drew the short straw. We all split up to our respective bedrooms in the blossoming daylight, and I seriously doubt that Dopey slept a wink. That evening she asked Bash to join her for a trip to the supermarket to forage for supplies. This was the stage of the pandemic when many store shelves were bare, and Amazon was so overwhelmed with grocery orders that it was impossible to find basic items online or secure a delivery time. Instead we had to periodically stage runs on local stores, hoping we’d catch them when they’d just restocked. I remember at one point hitting Trader Joe’s and seeing the long row of freezers completely, nakedly empty, stripped of every last pea and noodle, a sight that scared me more than the ominous news reports of shortages, realizing for the first time that people were desperate enough to snap up every possible kernel of food in fear that even worse was coming down the pike. When the employees finally wheeled out pallets of items to replenish the shelves, shoppers descended like vultures, snatching up packets of fried rice and paneer and mochi indiscriminately before the employees could even fill the freezers, just to have something to stock their fridges at home in the face of the rapidly escalating tragedy.

 

It was hours before Bash and Dopey returned with a meager supply of perishables. During the trek Dopey had delicately broached the subject of therapy and after some discussion Bashful agreed to meet with someone to discuss her feelings. Hallelujah. The previous night we had identified a viable candidate, a licensed clinical social worker named Suzanne Delaney in Belladonna Township. Between us we guessed Bashful would be more comfortable with a woman.

 

For the first session, held in person at Suzanne’s office, Dopey sat in with Bashful to help her feel at ease. Apparently it was a hesitant start but not a complete failure. To me, “not a failure” was a stupendous success. As with all medical professionals today, Suzanne was part of a network, and she referred Bashful to a psychiatrist for medication. Long story short, Dopey and Bashful met with a Dr. Nyqvist at his main office in Paramus, where he ran a brain scan on Bashful. Based on the results a physician assistant named Jewel McCarrick prescribed a battery of medications, over the next few months sequentially running through stints of Prozac, Lithium, and Risperidone before settling on a combined regimen of Effexor, Zyprexa, Topemax, Dostinex, and a Vitamin D chaser – with a side of Klonopin as needed.

 

The good news was that once she found the right combination the medications worked to reduce Bashful’s anxiety, a problem that had quietly been shredding her life while the rest of us paraded past obliviously, and the meds even took some of the edge off her depression. Further adjustments to the dosage helped to center her even more. Only one problem. She still wanted to die.

 

Perhaps you know someone who was or is suicidal. Then you know the desperate, helpless feeling of the loved one grappling for answers that don’t exist. Part of you wants to deny it; after all, life isn’t that bad, they can’t really mean it, can they? Only the other part of you, the heart as opposed to the brain, understands full well that they do mean it, they look the world straight in the eye and believe that the struggle of day-to-day existence is simply not worth it; that oblivion is preferable to the sadness, the pain, the burden of fighting endlessly against a grinding pressure of depression they suffer like a cloak of lead, only to wake up the next day having to fight the same fight again. I can’t pretend to know what that feels like, the overwhelming gravity of depression dragging you down each day, whispering seductively in your ear that death is so much easier than life; I can only share the terrified powerlessness of the loved one struggling to locate a life preserver that will keep them from sinking permanently below the surface.

 

For us, that life preserver was Spravato. Jewel, the P.A., first suggested it, and honestly, we’d have been game for anything from chicken soup to exorcism. The problem was that Spravato was fairly new on the market as a psychiatric medication. Evidence strongly indicated it was helpful in preventing suicidal thoughts (with the usual caveat that among its possible rare side effects was, you guessed it, suicidal thoughts), but the government was very, very stringently restricting usage.

 

The reason for the strict oversight was because Spravato, or esketamine to use its generic name, is the upstanding twin brother of ketamine, aka Special K, the illicit party drug popular in rave culture. Imagine that: a drug that makes people happy and want to dance is good for combating depression. Only recently had the FDA and DEA greenlit the med for treatment of short-term suicidal thoughts.

 

It took us months of paperwork and logistical bullshit to battle our way through the red tape and get Bashful approved for treatment. That was my job, and it’s a job I’m proud to say I’m very, very good at. Ultimately we got the approval, and so there we were, the girls and I, COVID masks on our faces, crowded onto a couch inside a medical facility in Hemlock, NJ on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, lights dimmed, candles and incense burning, full retro ‘60s vibe as Jewel tested Bash’s temperature and blood pressure, gave her a pill to combat the potential nausea, then sprayed two 28 mg doses of Spravato mist into each nostril.

 

Within minutes Bashful was tripping. I was more than a little on edge and spent the time babbling nervously to Jewel about various trivial topics. Small talk. Bashful later told me she heard my words as if from the end of a long, echoey tunnel. She drifted into a cozy hallucinogenic haze, imagining herself a beautiful, complicated timepiece, filled with gleaming components all working in unison, counting eternal seconds, establishing order, allowing the world to proceed in fine and honorable fashion. We listened to her moaning and laughing and expressing her wonder, and we all held our breath, hoping for the best. The trip itself lasted about an hour, and it was only when it was over that Happy told us that she, too, had been soaring along with Bashful.

 

None of us had noticed. We were too intent on watching Bashful while pretending we weren’t watching Bashful. When Happy told us she’d left her body to merge into a sea of gears of all shapes and sizes working in spiritual unity toward a common ideal, we collectively chuckled and assumed she, the infinitely suggestible young nugget, was enjoying the fanciful delights of a contact high.

 

To our relief, Bash was noticeably less tense the following week. I caught her singing quietly to herself on one occasion, something I hadn’t heard since I can’t tell you when. The song was the Broadway show tune “Tomorrow,” only she had changed the words to “Spravato.” Go, drugs. In her weekly FaceTime with therapist Suzanne, Bash still copped to feeling periodically depressed with occasional “suicidal ideation,” as Suzanne put it, but to me there was definite, if slight, improvement. A little of the shine was back on the apple.

 

Spravato treatments were scheduled for every other Saturday afternoon. The second visit was dramatically different from the first. The pandemic’s second wave – or third, depending on how you looked at it – had slammed the region, and its Cthulhu tendrils had seeped into every aspect of society, leading to even more acute shutdowns. Jewel’s medical office was closed so we made alternate arrangements. Instead of allowing us inside the office, Jewel came out to us in the Annie Oakley, our leased van, and administered Bashful’s nasal spray, now increased to three spritzes per nostril: 84 mg total.

 

This time it was just me and Bash. We had collectively decided it’d be more comfortable for her without the crowd of spectators. Plus we didn’t have to worry about Happy wafting away on another contact high. While I joked with Jewel about the cop watching us from a cruiser parked under a gnarled, shady tree on the other side of the lot – she told me he was suspicious of illegal activity and had examined her license and documentation and questioned her extensively about what exactly was going on in the four vehicles parked side-by-side, their occupants leaning back in their seats, eyes closed, smiling beatifically – Bash morphed inside her mind into a train, with passengers boarding her, becoming her, bound for destinations unknown and infinite. At one point after Jewel headed back inside her office, Bash suddenly shoved open the Annie Oakley’s door and vomited on the tarmac, then leaned back in her seat and giggled. I’m sure the cop enjoyed that.

 

The trip was slightly shorter this time. Perhaps 50 minutes from liftoff to splashdown. Bash was all smiles throughout, and afterward insisted we stop by Burger King for an Impossible Whopper and fries, making me circle back through the drive-thru again for a second helping.

 

Back home in Rising Gorge, Doc cornered me immediately for details. Seemed to go well, I told her, despite the police voyeur. When she asked if I knew whether Bashful hallucinated, I filled her in. What time did was the Spravato administered, she wanted to know.

 

Something was off. Doc was jittery, which doesn’t happen often. I told her Jewel gave Bash the spray about 12:50, why? Because, Doc told me, at a little before one o’clock she herself had felt lightheaded and was visited by a vision. More than a vision. She described it as a sort of lucid dream: she knew it wasn’t real yet she was whisked away, quite luxuriously, quite deliciously, to find herself deposited in a soft train en route to nirvana.

 

Moreover, the other girls experienced it as well. Not exactly the same, but close enough. A little before 1 p.m. they all left their bodies behind, drawn into an ethereal netherworld, engulfed in a welcoming presence spiriting them someplace fine and sacred.

 

So much for Happy’s contact high.

 

Families are strange things. Siblings share more than just DNA; that much is obvious. They are literally molded from the same flesh, the same tissue, the same bone and brain. They share the same historical lineage and genetic predispositions. Many have identical circadian rhythms. Some are so aligned in thinking they finish each other’s sentences.

 

We’ve all heard stories about siblings communicating telepathically over long distances. In the tales it’s usually twins, and more often than not there’s danger involved, or injury. A feeling of sudden foreboding overcomes one and she quickly reaches out to discover her twin has fallen or had a heart attack.

 

Thee Tourettes are closer than most. They live together, travel together, work together, play together – constantly, no vacations, no breaks. They’ve been a compound organic unit since… well, since birth. Longer, technically. Critics have noted their tight instrumental interplay onstage and more than once referred to their “almost psychic” musical chemistry.

 

So when Doc told me she and the others had hitchhiked on Bashful’s high, even from two counties away I had no doubt it was true.

 

She and I were still standing in the kitchen, solemnly discussing the situation when something happened that neither of us paid any attention to at the time. Something minor, something mundane and everyday and insignificant. Sneezy called out from the living room asking where the hell was the TV remote. Bash yelled down from upstairs that it was in Sneezy’s jacket pocket.

 

And that’s exactly where it was. End of incident. Only how had Bash known where it was? She and I had been sitting in the Annie Oakley an hour ago. That was when Sneezy took a break from binge-watching “Orange is the New Black” and headed out for a walk around the block to stretch her legs, absently slipping the remote in her pocket. Had Bashful simply made a good guess where to find it?

 

I only remembered the incident a day later when I was walking up the stairs and I heard Bash shout from her bedroom for Happy to close the damn refrigerator door. Hap was halfway into the living room couch carrying Doritos and soda and turned around to go close the fridge in the kitchen.

 

Bash had known. From upstairs in her bedroom she had known. Maybe she heard something that made her think the door was left open. Maybe. But something had been planted in my brain. A seed of suspicion.

 

There were other things. At dinner one night Bash spontaneously said the name Guy Peellaert and Dopey shouted Yes, thank you! A few minutes earlier we had been talking about possibly covering a T. Rex song, and Dopey’s train of thought had drifted from Marc Bolan to David Bowie to “Diamond Dogs” and she got stuck trying to remember who painted the cover art. She never said a word about Bowie or the album out loud; Bash just knew.

 

Sure, sisters think along the same lines. They share a sense of humor and secret jokes, enjoy the same music, follow the same sequence of mental connections from point Bolan to point Peellaert. Maybe that’s what happened… but I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now, and I could tell by Doc’s face that neither did she. Bash, we both recognized, was inside their heads. Not maliciously, not intentionally, but there nonetheless. Hitchhiking.

 

That opened up a Pandora’s box of questions. Bashful’s treatments had to continue – at least for the time being. Maybe forever. That much was a given. Jewel had explained that without them, Bash would relapse to the same desperate feelings of futility and suicidal ideology. That simply wasn’t an option.

 

After the last Spravato experience the other girls were strangely excited, anticipating that every other Saturday they would be invited into Bashful’s hallucinations, into her mind. They hadn’t yet realized it was a two-way connection. I wasn’t sure what would happen when they did, and I wasn’t eager to find out.

 

For the next treatment, Doc and I worked out a system. She and the other girls would find comfortable positions in the house and await the onset of dreamland. Doc would text me the moment they felt something. I’d see how closely it aligned with when Bash took the drug.

 

Bash and I parked in our usual spot in the lot and let Jewel know we were there. A few minutes later Jewel joined us with her BP monitor, pills, and spray. There was no cop watching this time, I was relieved to see.

 

Jewel administered the three sprays at 12:47:02 by my watch. Doc texted me exactly 18 seconds later, at the precise moment Bash exhaled deeply and sank back into her seat. Doc’s entire text read: “!”

 

As the girls tripped together from 40 miles apart, I sat quietly in the Annie Oakley trying to scrape together a game plan. The girls are like siblings to me. I would do anything for them. But we’re not real siblings. We don’t have the blood bond. I don’t know what it’s like to have someone finish your sentences, menstruate in parallel, share your thoughts. To me the idea of someone inside your head sounded absolutely terrifying.

 

At the same time I had to wonder as their manager what this meant for the band’s future. Could they continue to function as a unit this way? And if not, what were the options? I was at a loss for answers. Jewel wasn’t going to be any help. This wasn’t a problem modern psychopharmacology was equipped to solve.

 

When Bash suddenly squealed and jumped in her seat, my heart jumped with her. Up until now, every trip had been quiet, serene. Groovy, man. I asked if she was okay and she moaned contentedly in response. After the initial physical jolt, she gently sat back, smiling ear to ear. Doc texted me a moment later, asking WTF just happened?!

 

I told her I didn’t have a clue and asked what happened on her end. The answer was they had all been abruptly kicked out of the shared dream and deposited back in reality – hard. From what she texted and what she told me later, I learned they had all been part of a great flying… call it an entity – part living creature, part machine. The girls were feathers and appendages and muscles and tissue in a marvelous steampunk organism of mechanics and flesh, soaring upward toward something otherworldly, something divine, something transcendent. And then: Bam!

 

While Doc and I texted, Bashful continued to murmur and squirm in her seat. She looked as serene as I’ve ever seen her. The girls may have been kicked out of the flying whatsit, but she was still soaring.

 

Exactly 53 minutes after it began, Bashful sat up and stretched like an awakening cat. I asked her how she was feeling. Instead of answering she jumped out of the Annie Oakley. I figured it was to vomit. Wrong. She danced merrily across the lot and stopped under the gnarled tree, speaking excitedly into her phone while whirling like a little girl in springtime. At first I wondered who she was talking to, then realized she was humming and singing. Recording musical ideas.

 

That lasted about 20 minutes. When she returned she guzzled a full bottle of water and answered my earlier question, saying she was feeling euphoric, absolutely euphoric. Her skin was flushed, radiant, her eyes shining. I asked what she had been doing just now.

 

Composing, she said. Collaborating. I thought about how she took the stark blueprints of songs from Doc and Dopey and fleshed them out into complete productions, and couldn’t help wondering what it would be like for her to work directly mind to mind.

 

Glowing like a child on Christmas morning, she told me she’d had a breakthrough, Learned something. Something wonderful. I asked what it was and she said it was about Anime Wong. That rattled me. I had hoped to put Anime behind us.

 

Instead, this is what Bash told me. On the flight carrying Anime 20,000 feet above ground level, just before she stepped out into an 85-second freefall plummeting 120 mile per hour toward the spectacular New Zealand landscape below, something stung Anime on the leg. A mosquito, a spider, something. Anime had thought nothing of it.

 

Until in freefall she suddenly felt her pulse grow weak and her air passages constrict in an allergic reaction. She became instantly dizzy and lightheaded. Even as she scrambled to pull the ripcord, she slipped into anaphylactic shock.

 

You realize what this means, Bash said, beaming with happiness. Anime didn’t kill herself.

 

I didn’t ask how she knew this. I didn’t ask who told her. I simply agreed that this was wonderful news and drove her home, my knuckles white on the wheel.

 

Since then the girls haven’t hitchhiked on any of Bashful’s hallucinations and Bash hasn’t intruded on any of their thoughts. She continues to get Spravato treatments every other Saturday and is doing much better, thank you very much. We’ve all seen it. She’s more relaxed, focused, engaged, present… even – dare I say it? – cheerful, as she hunkers under headphones at the keyboard night after night, recording, layering, expanding musical ideas brought back from her Saturday Spravato sessions.

 

Together we as a family have clawed our way back from the brink. For the first time in ages, Bash is facing the future and seeing an open road instead of a black hole. As for me, I am overcome with relief and anticipation – and just a sliver of dread as I await the impending completion of the “Aviatrix” suite she is pursuing so feverishly.