Whenever I see a payphone, I'm back in 1993 and pulled over on a stretch of I-89 where it cuts through the White Mountains in New Hampshire. The U-Haul trailer hitched to my Jeep holds everything I own. A payphone, which sits on a rise with a hard green spotlight above it, glows down on me eerily like a derelict monolith. All I can see beyond it are the faint dark lines of the mountain range and still more darkness after that. It's cold out there, and empty. It has started to snow. The thin flakes look like the ash that spits out of a volcano after an eruption or a sacrifice. The flakes hit my windshield, melt, track down. The payphone blurs. As I sit there, looking through my wet tempered glass, my legs twitch. I'm restless. I'm bothered. Here's a hard fact: I have a hard-on that I can't seem to tamp down. Here's another hard fact: I have eighty-four cents in my checking account.The reason I am sitting in my Jeep by this payphone is that I need to call my grandmother and ask her to go to the bank, preferably first thing in the morning, and put money into my account. If she doesn't refresh my cash flow, I will soon be stranded somewhere out here in this wilderness. My Jeep is at half-tank now, which might push me through Vermont and into Massachusetts—and I could possibly even make a run for the New York state line—but along some unfamiliar stretch, I'll surely run out of gas. I'll be stuck. Perhaps I should have called my grandmother days ago, when I was pretty certain my money was going to run out, but I knew that a last-minute ask could work to my advantage. My grandmother won't choose not to help me. Think about it: Her favorite grandson is busted flat at a roadside payphone in the Live Free or Die state. You might say I am playing a game here and you would be right. I am playing a game, a dangerous game—although in the moment I'd have a hard time telling you what that game is. I am twenty-two.I am on the road with all my belongings locked in a U-Haul trailer because I am leaving my first full-time job out of college, at a school in Winchester, New Hampshire (pop. 4,048). I am not just leaving this job. I up and quit without notice. Like that. I don't recall the reason I gave for why I needed to leave, any more than I remember the reason I gave my grandmother for why that night I found myself standing at a roadside payphone and asking her for a cash infusion. In fact, all the sensory details of the call are a blur: from punching the zero on the twelve-buttoned keypad, to pressing the cold black receiver against my ear, to running my fingers over the segmented metal cord while waiting for the operator to come onto the line. I'm sure I talked to an operator because I would have had to call collect. I knew my grandmother would accept the charges but, again, I don't remember her doing so. After she saved my ass, I can't remember hanging up or even sticking my finger into the coin return to see if any change was there. This is something I nearly always did, even when I didn't drop a quarter into the slot myself, a post-call tic that added a lottery-like thrill to end of every payphone conversation. An extra quarter would have pushed my total proceeds to over a dollar. You can buy things with a dollar.I do remember getting back into my Jeep and driving down the highway as the thin flakes turned to thick flakes. Gusts of wind burst from gaps between the peaks. My Jeep's frame shook. There were soon a couple of inches on the ground and a couple more after that. I slowed down because it was getting hard to see. While the weather service began warning people to get off the roads, I shifted into four-wheel drive, which used up more gas. A plough barrelled through, forcing me to the shoulder. I idled for a moment and looked out. Even through the snow, I could see the bold outlines of the dark mountains. Every dark mountain is dark in its own way.I'm going to tell you here that I'm afraid to drive on highways alone and it has nothing to do with snow falling on mountain passes. Very few people know this about me. My grandmother certainly didn't know this when she accepted my call. It may not sound like an unusual fear, as fears go. In fact, there are probably a great many people who don't like driving solo on those dark arteries that branch from place to place across the lower forty-eight. They never feel secure pushing through at breakneck speeds alongside other vehicles that often refuse to stay in their lanes. They are squeamish merging onto the on-ramps of interchanges. They don't actually understand “flow,” or the general movement of traffic at any given time. There is good flow; there is bad flow. Many blanch when making long hauls on empty roads because they know that an empty road can end with flat tires and emergency flashes and flagging strangers for help. Some are fine driving the highways during the day, but once it's dark, oncoming headlights play tricks with their eyes. Objects that are far away appear close, and vice versa. These aren't the reasons I don't like to drive on highways alone.The reason I don't like to drive on highways alone is because, when faced with the hard pavement and dashed lines and all those reflective highway markers and the roadkill (and sometimes, the human-kill), I fear I will snap, veer into oncoming traffic, and off myself and others. I not only see myself turning into traffic, but I also hear a voice in my head commanding me to “Crank the wheel into that Ford F-150!” I hear other commands too: “Slash your wrists!” “Bludgeon your left eye with your Bic pen!” “Drink antifreeze!” These are nagging directives that whine with the insistence of a blood-hungry mosquito at a county fair. I tell you that I hear these directives, but they are not exactly auditory. Which is to say that they come from somewhere inside my mind, but they don't seem to be coming from me, not the real me anyway. Does that make any sense? It's as if there's another “operator” inside my brain, some rogue double working against me and my best interests. The disrupter of disrupters. Why won't he—for the voice-that-is-mine-but-not-mine is emphatically male—just go away? I don't know.You may ask yourself what emboldens these intrusive thoughts. I ask myself that same question all the time. According to reliable Internet sources, some causes of intrusive thoughts are obsessive-compulsive disorder, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, Tourette's syndrome, anxiety, and depression. Of course, when you ask that question, when I ask that question, we are not necessarily looking for the disease that triggers these intrusive thoughts. No, we want to understand what's psychologically going on in our brains—inside of us—when something or someone tells us to shove the baby in the freezer or pull our pants down at the Piggly-Wiggly or rub our nipples against the car's antenna. The research into causes naturally centers on the brain because—and I hope we all agree on this point—the brain is where these thoughts come from.So I find myself reading that people with intrusive thoughts show “alterations in brain structure” and “an increased metabolism and hyperactivity in several brain regions” and “a tendency toward smaller grey matter volumes.” I read that sufferers get stuck in thought loops that share a “language format,” and that the brain responds “too much to errors and too little to signals.” There is “less” of a neurotransmitter called “hippocampal GABA” in those prone to intrusive thoughts. Evolutionary biologists hold that our brains come “into contact with violent and sexual instincts that have been passed down to us over millennia,” which ties into Freud's theory that, despite our being civilized citizens, our psychic apparatuses are forever wrangling with libidinal desires. You may wonder, as I do, what the developmental point would be of having these desires/instincts turn against ourselves, often at our most vulnerable moments. Is it a primeval death wish or simply a crossed wire? There is no definitive answer. Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Imp of the Perverse,” says: “We perpetrate [intrusive thoughts] merely because we feel that we should not. Beyond or behind this there is no intelligible principle.” Perhaps no one need say anything more.To hear a horrible command issuing audibly from the sacred center of the self is to snap immediately into flight-or-fight mode. Because there is nowhere to go (flight) with an intrusive thought—after all, it's occurring inside the brain—you have no choice but to fight. Fight in the only way you plausibly can fight—mentally. That night, the first tactic I tried in my Jeep was to counter each intrusive thought. I told myself that I didn't want to turn into that oncoming Ford F-150. I told myself I didn't want to slash my wrists. I even told myself, after hurling my Bic pen out the window, that I didn't want to bludgeon my eyes. And, for God's sake, why down a tart antifreeze? When this ruse didn't work, I told myself what my grandmother would tell me when I was scared as a child: “Everything will be okay.” An infantilizing statement all the sadder because, as an adult, I know—know for sure—that everything does not always turn out all right. The reality principle in action. In my deepest throes, I'd remind myself that if anything really went wrong, I could charge toward the nearest hospital where I could be sure that they'd inject me with a drug that would knock me out. Oblivion: the preferred endpoint, safe space, Coleridge's Xanadu with padded walls and sugar cubes and, hopefully, a gorgeous orderly with a rock-hard ass.As you may imagine, these mental gymnastics made for gnarly psychic work. The nerves frayed. The brain pricked. There came a point around Columbus, or was it around Cleveland, when I could no longer keep my eyes open. I saw a sign for a Days Inn, but the idea of lying in a double bed beneath a polyester bedspread at midday in a cheap motel (God, it was already noon!) could only amp up my anxiety. I knew that. I chose instead to pull over in a truck park. My hard-on was back. Sex was the one diversion that could possibly deflect those unwanted thoughts. One primal urge overtaking another primal urge. But I did not have sex that day. The truckers at the rest stop didn't look as good in person as those in my fantasies. Where is the Harrison Ford of the Flying J when you need him? Even though I didn't have sex, just sitting in this parking lot thinking about the possibility of having it eased the shitstorm in my head. The knowledge that Chicago was drawing nearer also no doubt calmed me. I had less time ahead of me on the road, less time to endure the bombardment. I suppose no spell, even those cast by our own minds, holds for all time. I say spell here, but I might more accurately call it a hex. A gay man bewitched and bewildered by his inner djinn.Perhaps I should tell you here a little more about that job I was leaving in that small town in New Hampshire. I had been working at Thayer High School on a satellite television show broadcast to high schools throughout the United States. I directed and edited a monthly one-hour program that demonstrated the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools, which focused on low student-to-teacher ratios, on curricula tailored to students’ needs and skill levels, and on a tone of “unanxious expectation, of trust, and of decency,” and so on. Think of it as a pedagogical variety show for teachers and students, Carol Burnett crossed with Big Bird. The job came with lots of freedom, although the salary was meager. Teachers and community members listened to my ideas, even when my ideas weren't so good. I connected with students. At Christmas, there was even a Secret Santa who put great thought into making me, the “Video Guy,” a homemade series of VHS tapes with Blockbuster-like covers that spoofed the current box-office offerings.I'm not sure why I decided to jump ship after nine months. I could tell you that a lot of editing work had to be done after the students and faculty left the building, so I was alone for long hours. I could tell you that the equipment stalled and the tapes glitched. The room was dark and cold, unless the room was dark and warm. Ghosts and pumps rattled up and down the hallways. Sometimes, after leaving this building, I would spend the night with one of the special-ed teachers, a single mom who made blueberry muffins from scratch and tracked the Grateful Dead and thought a great deal about processed versus natural foods. This girl liked me and I liked her too, but not like that. I remember one night, lying with her warm body next to mine under the skylight, watching Mount Monadnock poke its limp tip into the star-studded sky, and not feeling what I was supposed to be feeling. My urges bunched up like a boy's sock in a laundry hamper. Because we were still in that getting-to-know-each-other phase, neither one of us talked much about what was going on. When we did talk, we slanted our stories for effect; at least I did. I told this girl that I went into Boston on the short weekends and New York on the long weekends, but I didn't tell her that I was having sex in clubs and gay bookstores in these cities. A live wire with loads of spunk. A cool cat with nasty paws. Need I go on?It comes to me only now that there were nights when I was not with this girl or in New York or Boston, but alone in my apartment, and those bad thoughts would break through. “Hurl your body through the glass window!” “Murder your neighbor!” “Drink Drano!” The intrusive thoughts weren't confined to the highway then. They were just more frightening on the highway because it was there that I was most adrift. Most alone. I remember one gray morning in my Winchester apartment, after a particularly hard night, the alarm went off and I couldn't get up. I lay prone under flannel sheets like a back-of-the-freezer fish stick. I don't know what got me out of bed that day or the next. All I remember is that around this time a friend from college paid me a visit and we drove to Walden Pond on a crisp autumn day. I remember having to go pee and the bathrooms being closed (off season) and turning my back and going right there behind Thoreau's cabin. I could tell you that I had wanted to live “deliberately” as the leaves flashed the skies with their rainbow messages, but in the moment I'd just wanted to empty my bladder. Still, things were okay after that, for a while.Then one day, when there were no more leaves on the trees, a man showed up at my door. He wore a mackinaw coat and shit-kicking boots and had one of those faces whose features fail to register. He seemed surprised to see me. I asked him what he wanted and he said he was looking for someone, although he did not offer a name. My eyes veered to the lock on the screen door. I'd latched it, although it wouldn't have taken much for him to force it open. For longer than a moment he stood there looking me up and down, and then he turned toward the mountains. I glanced to the street. No new cars there. I then looked toward where the man was looking. Had he trudged down from those white-capped peaks? Was there some message he was sent down to pass along to me? Did he carry with him a milkweed–mushroom potion that might cure a stormy mind? Was he medicine man or psycho killer? After what seemed like a very long minute, he turned back to me, said that he must have the wrong address, and walked away. After he left, I thought about the many stories that turn on a strange man showing up at the door. I never told anybody about how he'd shown up that day, but always thereafter he was on my mind. I felt certain that he would show up again and I would need to be prepared. I knew that I could never be the kind of guy who could prepare for that kind of confrontation. Was that mountain man another reason I up and left? Am I just looking for reasons now?There's perhaps an age, a brief stretch of years during which you can pull up anchor on the spur of the moment and leave whatever it is that you call your “life.” It's a stunt of the very young, of the reckless who don't yet know themselves and are possessed with demons. Anyone so touched spends great energy keeping their lives going. If they're inventive, if they have interpersonal and professional skills—what used to be called moxie—they can pull off the impossible feat of simply moving on. I suppose I had those skills and moved on. I crashed on the couch of that friend who visited me in New Hampshire and I spent many an hour at a new bathhouse in Chicago. I could rent a locker that cost eight dollars, unless it cost twelve dollars at peak periods, and walk through a maze of rooms among men who were just like me, or close. There was something easy about the bathhouse: bodies in towels, steam heat, no tomorrow.Of course, tomorrow did come and I got a job at an Illinois-based media-arts organization that went into public schools and taught that catch-all “media literacy.” Although the job was similar, in ways, to the one I left in New Hampshire, I felt like I was starting all over again. That was okay. I was a quick learner and soon found myself armored with a video camera, a tripod, and lesson plans, teaching classes in the most ravaged parts of the city. A guerrilla with what you might call a vague sense of mission: I wanted to do good—and also repent.It was around this time that I reached out to a woman who worked in the office at Thayer High School. She dunked doughnuts, laughed like a sailor, and dispensed what might be called “downhome wisdom.” She didn't use—or understand—hair products. I probably phoned her on some pretext regarding my W-2s or my New Hampshire retirement fund, but I think deep down I wanted to explain my sudden departure and be forgiven for it. That there was no way to correct the error I had made by leaving never crossed my mind. If you are a mystery to yourself, you are a mystery to others. It was soon clear I should not have called this woman. We talked for a bit, about what I do not remember. Then she had to go pick up her child or her car, which broke down a lot, and we said our goodbyes. We never talked again.It's been a long while since those intrusive thoughts have exerted their manic pull. I can't tell you I've overcome my affliction since I still at times hear blasphemous pronouncements and arch commands, but I'm not so upset by them. I'm thrown off track for shorter periods of time. You might even say that I react less, and I find—as others who struggle with this condition also find—that the less I react, the less “power” anything I hear inside my head has over me. Worrying about the thoughts themselves is, in fact, what keeps many sufferers in distress. A meta mind-game that pits true self against false self. According to the experts, relief comes, if it comes at all, only after a person finds the strength to face the fears that the intrusive thoughts don't allow you to ignore. If you are afraid that you will jump off a bridge, for instance, then you need to go stand on that bridge, first for five minutes, then ten minutes, then an hour, then two hours. This “exposure therapy” trains the mind, habituates it to the environment. Can't you hear Eleanor Roosevelt prodding you to “look fear in the face”? I can. Of course, I can't recall ever looking my fear directly in the face. At what point did I drive on those dark roads and not worry about the face reflected in that snow-flaked shield?Interestingly, evidence suggests that those who can't stop worrying about their thoughts were labeled “highly sensitive” as children. This term, perhaps not surprisingly, did apply to me, a redhead who internalized every minor slight. It's also been noted that highly sensitive children can have “a hard time expressing their anger toward others.” An astute therapist actually connected my obtrusive thoughts to my anger, which I'm apparently cut off from. Even now, I don't get angry. Well, I do, but I don't know when I am. So instead of feeling rage appropriately, the red bull turns in on itself—on myself—in unholy ways. This is just a theory, mind you. But it seems a pretty good one, as theories go.Of course, I may not struggle so much with intrusive thoughts on highways anymore because I finally fell in love, and, in 2011, got married. Now when I travel those dark arteries, I'm rarely alone. With my husband beside me, I feel confident he'd jump into action if I were ever about to obey one of those crazy commands and stop me from going through with it. He'd grab the wheel, hide the antifreeze, cap the Bic. That he's a doctor, versed in all fuckery of the mind, adds an extra layer of protection. I feel safe—or safe enough. The reason for this, the story I tell myself anyway, is that a man of significant size like my partner can easily handle me, snuff out my self-destructive desires before they have a chance to exact their toll. He won't allow me to do the things I don't want to do.I recall here, during my short tenure in New Hampshire, that there was another man who was bigger and stronger than me—I'm five feet seven inches tall, 145 pounds on a good day—who I believed wouldn't allow me to do what I didn't want to do: my boss. We spent a great many hours on the road getting to know each other as we traveled from school to school. I looked up to this man: he was father figure, mentor, buddy, a bud. The safety I felt with this man could not be ignored. I sometimes wonder if that feeling of safety got mixed up with feelings of love. And if that was the case, and there's good reason to believe that it was, I imagine I didn't then know what to do with those feelings. Not every pre-twenty-first century gay boy could manage the story of his misplaced desire. Is this one more reason why I quit my job and started on my dark journey?That journey began with me standing on that highway ledge looking out at those dark mountains as the snow was blowing all around me. A later poet with a sense of humour might respond with a poem called “Gay Boy Stalled by the Highway on a White-Out Night,” which would be a cheeky update to Frost's “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The narrator of the Frost poem pulls off to the side of the road to view a picture-perfect scene in the New Hampshire woods on “the darkest evening of the year.” He doesn't stay for long because “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep / But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep.”By this point, I've told you quite a bit about those miles I traveled before I found sleep—but not everything. I haven't told you, for instance, that I got lost in Pennsylvania and stopped at a roadhouse unfriendly to outsiders to ask for directions or that I spilled gas on my jeans at the pump in Indiana and got a little high on the fumes—which was both good and bad—or that by the end of the trip I had downed so much titrated truck-stop coffee, my heart shifted into a higher gear than the engine in my Jeep. I haven't told you that I've never officially been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder or that I don't like to ride elevators because I am scared I will get stuck in the “metal tomb” and be trapped with my thoughts—and you know by this point where that leads—or that if the volume on the TV reads 16 or 26, I have to nudge it upward or downward lest some horrible fate shall befall me and my husband. Sixteen and 26 are bad numbers, see? Are you starting to understand at this point how crazy this truly is? I haven't told you about my coming out, how it was gradual, one person at a time, and how I grew more and more comfortable with myself and my place in the world with every encounter. I think of it today as a kind of exposure therapy to my sexuality, to my “self.” I also left out that my grandmother died before I had a chance to come out to her and that, even if she were alive, I'm not sure I could have uttered the words. That there was a way we could connect and at the same time not connect. Still, the line was always open—and that's something, perhaps even more than something, perhaps love.Speaking of lines, I will note here that when I stood at that payphone on that night thirty years ago, or at any payphone around that time, I always flashed to that question posed in that old Jim Croce song: “Operator, oh, can you help me place this call?” It may interest you to know that there were 2,086,540 payphones in America in 1993. When you pressed “0” (OPER), the voice of an actual person came on the line and asked you what you needed. Today only about 100,000 payphones are in operation, and who knows how many are still in working order at any given moment. By contrast, there are 300,000,000 cellphones. There's connectivity everywhere and easier by the nanosecond, but perhaps no less panicking. Now when you press “0”—and this applies to all phones—you will receive an automated message: “In case of emergency, please hang up and dial 911.” After two rounds of this message, you hear a click and then the dial tone. Of course, if you are like me, you will redial “0” on your cell to reengage the line, and possibly again after that, so you can continue hearing the voice. It can give the illusion on those dark nights that someone is still out there, that I am not alone. This, at last, is reassuring.