Procedural

SCENE 1: THE SETUP

At the beginning of most creative nonfiction essays, you will find one of two things: a personal anecdote or a statement of research or fact. Both of these things should lead you to intent, to motivation: why the author insists on telling this story. Because by the time an author is working in memoir, they are past “in this essay, I will.” They have figured out the only universal truth, that something is wrong with them, just like something is wrong with everybody. Like any procedural, there can be a twist or a change-up in the order. The cast varies from episode to episode, but likely, you’ll have a protagonist who shares a face with the actor in the byline.

The word “procedural” can be used as an adjective that describes the steps of solving a problem, usually in a situation where there is only one correct method of discovery. We usually use the word, though, when talking about TV programs that, as the dictionary defines it, are characterized by “detailed, realistic treatment of professional procedures, especially police procedures.” This is an incredibly popular genre: people love to be able to care about characters, follow a mystery, but not have to think too hard. If you’ve ever watched Law and Order, you know it’s not hard to guess what part is coming next. I often say, “Oh, man, that guy wouldn’t have gone on that ledge if he knew it was the first three minutes of Law and Order,” or “It’s the first half of the episode, dude, so likely they’ll figure out you are innocent, be patient.”

I’m going to start this with an anecdote, if it’s not too late to do so. I didn’t mean to start with a fact, so I take that introduction back. Let’s talk about my freshman year of college. I’m from Dallas, Texas, and I made the decision to move twelve hours away and go to school in southern Indiana. It’s true that the first semester I was in Evansville, I tried desperately to transfer home. It’s also true that during that time, I met a professor who would eventually be my boss when I began my career as a professor: his wife Tiffany was my boss at the college’s writing center when I was still an undergraduate. I’m known for being more than a little intense. I have obsessive compulsive disorder and I view it as a superpower. I started acting when I was eleven, and for the next eight years, I was in at least one play at a time— sometimes onstage, but if I couldn’t find a role, off-stage. A short list of activities I had performed at a high level include as a catcher on a softball team (and a power-hitter who could bat left or right to ice a pitcher at the end of a close game), horseback riding, debate, extemporaneous speaking, improv, Academic Decathlon (where I was one of the captains), and competitive theater (which is absolutely a thing in Texas: ask your Texan friends about UIL). I’m only mentioning the things I competed and did well in. That’s to say nothing of the voice lessons, dance, gymnastics, ice skating, swimming— if it existed, I wanted to try it and I wanted to crush it. I also graduated from high school with an International Baccalaureate degree, which is what enabled me to graduate from college with two degrees in three years.

I was, again, more than a little intense. (Sometimes, I reiterate things, and I’m not sure whether or not that’s part of my personality or if OCD is my personality.)

In college, everything kicked into hyper-drive. I took 24 hour semesters. I laminated notecards to study in the shower. I was the editor-in-chief or a section editor at two journals, an intern at another, and I started one more with a friend of mine. I was on the Honors Program student advisory board. This was just my first year. I also began working at the Writing Center. If you’re beginning to wonder, “When did she sleep?”, you’re ahead of past-me. I kept forgetting to do so. I’d be busy, then suddenly it would be dawn and I’d have to start a new day’s to-do list.

One night, it snowed during my Writing Center shift, and I could see the big puffs littering the sky as though someone balled up tiny cobwebs and threw them from heaven. I thought I would love snow, but it just seemed to make my joints ache and my head hurt. Some people left early that night if I remember correctly because no student is going to drop in the Writing Center if they don’t have to. Someone else has to have been there that night, though. I had been up nearly five straight days. This is the only detail in the story I know is completely true, as I kept a record in my journal at the time. Besides that, I never drank and I wasn’t even comfortable taking Tylenol, so I took everything that happened that night as total fact. I wasn’t in an altered state, so it must have happened, right? Even this:

Detective Bobby Goren (who is played on TV by a real man, Vincent D’Onofrio) came into the Writing Center, decked out in his long pea coat and his knit-cap. In his frustrated-yelling vocal range, he said, “Why are you keeping her here?” He came right up to me, and I was completely starstruck. I loved Detective Goren. I slept with the TV on all night because I found his voice comforting (and as this was 2004, there was no such thing as “Chris Noth on Law & Order CI” yet). It was warm and cautious, measured and always with a memorable fact or understanding of humanity. “Katie?” he asked, reaching for my hand. He was wearing leather gloves, and I was surprised they were cold to the touch. “It’s late, and you need sleep.” He helped me up from my chair and— I am barely 5’0”— enveloped me in his warm embrace, one arm around both of my shoulders like a beloved uncle. I folded into his 6’4” frame as he shouted one last phrase: “Leave her alone.” Then he muttered, “You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”

I’m not sure who that was aimed at. Tiffany wouldn’t have been in because it was at night. I don’t remember who my co-workers were that night. In the snow, I watched as the cowboy boots I performatively wore to signify my Tex-pat status made strange, tiny diamond patterns. “Thanks,” I said, not looking up, watching my feet press the powder as we moved. It was as though my own shadow was following behind, catching each footstep exactly.

“Shh,” he said, and ruffled my hair. “You need to conserve your energy.”

I remember he tucked me in when we got to my dorm. The next morning, I had slept through my classes. I must have been out at least twelve hours. I was still fully clothed, down to the cowboy boots. Of course I was. Detective Goren is a gentleman and he only wants to help.

I would battle sleep— first not enough, then too much— for the rest of my life, or at least until the time of this essay. So is this what the essay is about? Sleep? Is it about my brain— or my body?— being sick? Is it about my intensity, either when I was acting or just in general? I’m telling people it’s about Vincent D’Onofrio. He is, after all, what I want it to be about.

SCENE 2: A SUSPECT

In Season 5 of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Vincent D’Onofrio took a step back. I never knew “why”— that was before every choice was interrogated ad nauseam on 24-hour entertainment networks and social media. I just knew that he and his partner, brought to vivid life by Kathryn Erbe, were only in every other episode. I have not seen the episodes without him and if I’m honest, I still don’t plan on it. My husband Andy and I were re-watching recently upon remembering that, on one of the first nights we met, over thirteen years ago, I admitted to him that I loved the show, and he immediately agreed, both of us stumbling when the other immediately said, “Vincent D’Onofrio—”

We laughed. I don’t know if we were going to say “is the best” or “is brilliant” or “makes acting a sport” (that’s the one I was going to say). We knew, though, that his performance made the show feel less like a procedural.

As we’ve rewatched, I’ve been dreading when they start moving the cast around. Tonight when I Googled to find out which episodes he was in for Season 5, I saw that the reason cited for him stepping back was exhaustion: he passed out twice during the filming of Season 4, once at home and once on set. I paused the TV to tell Andy.

Andy is beautiful. When I met him, I called him “Hot Andy” at work to my friend Anna, and to this day, she’ll ask “how’s Hot Andy?” This nickname drives Andy a little crazy, because he doesn’t care about physical appearance and also doesn’t see himself that way. But I’ve spent almost a decade and a half studying his face. That’s like going to medical school in micro-expression. He hesitated before speaking softly.

“Oh, given your history with— well, exhaustion and Vincent D’Onofrio— that’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” he asked.

I nodded. “We still have half of each season except 9 but apparently, he and Erbe go at Season 10 alone,” I said, eager to get back to the Sherlock-esque episode we were watching. I didn’t want to think about the fact that my incident with exhaustion and his were both in 2004. That’s a step too weird, right?

But Andy only said “kind of weird” because he’s gotten used to the fact that nothing about my life is ever less than ‘kind of’ weird, and because for some reason, I seem to always have connections come back around and mean something.

Andy is more prone to research than I am. He does things like read every page about Medal of Honor winners on Wikipedia when he can’t sleep. While I wondered what could have happened behind the scenes, apparently it struck enough of a chord that Andy was looking things up. Later that night, he showed me a video with one of the writers, Walon Green, talking to the Screen Actor’s Guild about how the show moved forward after D’Onofrio began starring in half of the episodes:

“Vincent was having a hard time carrying the show just because of the weight
of the show, and that’s totally understandable… this guy is going to be in every
scene. He’s going to be working all day and every night, week after week,
month after month. So they thought maybe they could split the show… I was
against the decision of not bringing Vincent back. I thought Vincent was the
show. Even if he was half the show, he was the show. And frankly Jeff
[Goldblum] felt the same way…”

I’d forgotten that Jeff Goldblum also steps in after the Chris Noth years. And yet, neither of them managed to capture quite the same energy and atmosphere that D’Onofrio did.

So what made him so damned special? And why did it matter so much to me?

If you type “Vincent D’Onofrio” into Google, it auto-populates to ask how tall he is. (Tall. If you remember in SCENE 1: THE SETUP, I actually note how tall— I was one of the people who had to Google it.) Mark Kozelek (Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters) actually has a song called “Rest In Peace, R. Lee Ermey,” where upon he finds out R. Lee Ermey has died because he Googles D’Onofrio upon realizing he can’t remember how to spell his name while watching Full Metal Jacket. (By the way, if you say Full Metal Jacket in a room full of people who have watched it, they all look like they’re coming out of a shared anxiety attack, and they say one of two things: “Oh God, the scene with the jelly donut,” or “Jesus, the bathroom.” Both of those scenes are hard to watch because you absolutely believe Vincent D’Onofrio is Private Pyle, not some kid in his twenties making an early-career movie, much less doing so with Stanley Kubrick.) He is my choice for the only actor— really, person— who could star/direct/storyboard a Western (The Kid, 2019), write a book of poetry about what happens when it finally gets quiet in his head (Mutha: Stuff and Things, 2021), transform himself into very-real bad guy Jerry Falwell in an Oscar-nominated film (The Eyes of Tammy Faye, 2021), and continue his brilliant turn as the best comic book villain of all time, Kingpin (first Daredevil, 2015-2018; then Hawkeye, 2021) in the course of just a few years— most of which we’ve all spent more than a little stressed. He’s also a devoted family man and he keeps up active, engaged— kind— social media feeds.

He does something, when playing a villain, I’m not sure many actors pull off: he makes sure they love something at least as powerfully as whatever their goal is. In Daredevil, he’s playing an unstoppable murderer and criminal, someone who wants to eradicate ‘undesirables’ from Hell’s Kitchen. Over the course of the show, though, he falls in love. “That’s the writing,” you’re thinking, and that’s fine— but he made me believe he was in love. Enough that when he started choosing her over his final plans, I bought it, even though I don’t believe most people choose to be less selfish when their dreams are finally in grasp. Worse? Everyone is in agreement: he made the audience care about Kingpin. And it’s not because he’s not evil. D’Onofrio’s humanity-in-art extends beyond people who made a mistake but are basically good people, and it even moves past people who have lived bad lives but finally make a good choice. He’s so invested in playing complex roles that he can rub your nose in someone’s awfulness and still have you understand, at your core, that this person is human.

I’m rambling. I was talking about Law & Order and why he’s so effective in this particular role. In these rewatches, my first thought is that it’s the calculated whimsy with which he approaches the environment. He’s an imposing person, physically. (People Google exactly how imposing!) I, by the way, am not. I am short and slight, and I was, until very recently, on a cane. I’m blind in my left eye. I’m very much the weak antelope in the herd. But I mentioned I was from Dallas? And that I do everything I can to make sure people know it? Something about my origin makes me feel like I could be dangerous, and I want people to think of me as such. I’ve got visible tattoos. I talk about the punches I’ve thrown. I’ve got a hell of a mouth. When I was on my cane, it was spray painted to say “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.”

But cultivating an intimidating personality when you look more like Skipper than Barbie and more like Barbie than G.I. Joe is difficult, and then negating it is even harder. When I teach, I willfully allow myself to spin into joyful mania so that I don’t have to remember I’m basically doing improv for an audience that doesn’t always want to be there. The mania is part of the OCD superhero package. This strange energy culminated with me writing on windows in a classroom that had no chalkboard or whiteboard: that became what I was known for. I teach in unconventional places. I yell, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” when a student disagrees with me. All of these things have happened since I got Big Sick. I used to be a lot more traditional, but honestly, I am too exhausted to keep up the momentum if I’m traditional, now.

I also write essays about Vincent D’Onofrio instead of how being obsessive compulsive impacted my recovery from my stroke, which is what I think a real memoirist would write about. I don’t even know whether the OCD changed the recovery, honestly. Or what it means to “recover” from a stroke at thirty-one years old. And I’m far less interested in that than I am in the way Vincent D’Onofrio’s intensity on screen apparently took a toll on him as a human, off-screen, and how despite all that, his show is where I went for comfort.

When Detective Bobby Goren is somewhere that there is a prop available— a toy, a sports item, magic tricks— he plays with it in the background of the whole scene. Sometimes he actually uses it to help build the intimidation factor; there’s a memorable episode where he shoots toward a man with a toy gun while interrogating him. In one episode, they go several places where people are playing sports, and he plays with a baseball bat for most of one scene and is visibly distressed when no one will give him a tennis racket at the courts. This playfulness: it controls the narrative. Am I sick? No, look at my shoes. Are they not covered in purple glitter? Am I intimidating? Of course, do you not see the tattoos, the Dallas Cowboys tumbler I carry everywhere? Am I OK? Sure, did I not clearly have a lot of fun writing on those windows?

Am I sick? No. Don’t you see? I painted the cane. The stroke is in the past. I’m just going to lie down for a little while, until this headache goes away. I’m just going to put the eye patch on until this passes.

SCENE 3: METHODOLOGY

For weeks, we watched Law and Order: CI every night, and I studied it with the rabid fervor of a true believer. I knit and crochet while watching TV so that I don’t miss a single movement. I took this habit up six or seven months ago, but it became most pronounced when we started watching Succession and I became obsessed with Jeremy Strong’s performance as Kendall Roy. I can’t tell you how many times I’d pause, go back, and say, “Look at his eyebrows, what he’s doing with his fingers.” Strong is absolutely all-in, and it’s being hailed as a brilliant performance for a reason, but he’s also taken a few hits in the media because of what the public thought was his penchant for method acting— in the Daniel Day-Lewis school of actually becoming the character. By the time I was twelve, I’d read Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting and Stanislavski’s ABCs and started making choices about what kind of actor I would become— that is to say, a Very Serious one. I find actors like Jeremy Strong to be powerful because of that intensity? I oscillate between admiring it and being exhausted by it, myself.

I’m not saying that being that intense is an easy way to live. It’s not. I’m not sure I’d want someone I loved to choose to go through life like every moment is an Olympic sport. But it makes for a hell of a performance.

So of course as I’m rewatching, all I can think is what made this so different, because anyone who has seen an episode of Law and Order knows Criminal Intent transcends the episodic formula somehow. An awful thought hits me: just because I didn’t read about Criminal Intent while it was going on doesn’t mean there aren’t interviews about it.

This might seem like good news, but it’s not. I immediately realized that this essay— yes, the one you’re reading— was dependent on me not knowing things about the actors outside of the world of the show, and now I knew a few things— D’Onofrio and I were both having some, likely intensity-related, exhaustion at the same time, and that I had an entire world’s worth of information at my fingertips, and suddenly it hit me: I am writing about a real person.

I think I am, at least. I had to stop and think: am I talking about Bobby Goren or Vincent D’Onofrio? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Because I’m also talking about me and the legend of myself that I taught people about how tough I was, how smart, how capable— and though I was different than the legend, we looked the same and were imprisoned in the same body, the one I somehow knew was a time bomb. (Honestly, sometimes I think I used to sleep so little because my brain knew eventually, I would have no choice but to sleep too much.) Bobby Goren is, for all intents and purposes, not real; neither is The Legend of Katie Darby, the girl I convinced myself I was in college, the multi-hyphenate writer-actor-scholar who never slept and ran every room she was in.

I cannot talk about one legend I built without the shadow of who I actually am stretching out behind me, or vice versa. The same goes for him, either Goren or D’Onofrio. No matter which face is center stage, the other is quietly in wait, ready to be acknowledged.

I decided to split the difference. Instead of looking for articles about D’Onofrio leaving the show or even talking about it, I googled one specific thing: “Is Vincent D’Onofrio a method actor?” It led me to a video interview he did with the Actor’s Dialogue Panel in September 2011, and it talks about perhaps the defining characteristic of Det. Bobby Goren: his strange, angular movement. Upon watching a real person talk about the fake person he created, I decided that was enough research. Besides, why create more cognitive dissonance than I had to?

You should know what I found, then. When asked about how he created Goren, he explains that when it comes to acting, “Everything is story. So that’s your mindset… then in your head starts to form your participation in telling that story. How your character helps tell that story… because I didn’t know better for television, I thought you could act on television like you did on film. So I started a speech pattern for Goren that was… unlike what they were used to doing in television— because I got notes from the studio about pausing too much, that dead air on television is not something that’s done, you don’t stop talking mid-dialogue, it’s harder for the editors to cut it if you’re going to stop talking mid-dialogue, and stuff like that, and I was told this stuff. I just ignored it.” Then everyone laughs, and they should, because the artfulness with which he recounts that blowoff is brilliant. He addresses, though, the physicality here:

“You know, the enunciation of words… or would somebody actually bend all
the way over, does that really happen? (Though he’s seated, he bends almost in
half, and the audience cracks up: this is, of course, one of the defining
hallmarks of the character, so iconic it is on (and stays on) the title cards for
the entire run of the series.)… The fact is, that came from a character— the
character I was interrogating, his actor kept putting his eyes down at the
table. So I just went down (he bends again, this time to more laughter), and
that’s how that lean started. So what happens is stuff like the lean…”

Simply, the most recognizable movement in the whole series came from another actor’s choice and D’Onofrio— Goren?— disallowing them to look away. There is a distinct air of look at me in this choice, but it is in reaction to something another person was doing. To borrow a song lyric from Harvey Danger, he “based [his] whole identity on a reaction against somebody.” But throughout the series, there are moments where D’Onofrio seems to be protective of Goren, almost like he understands that the world thinks he’s “quirky” or “weird,” but he allows that to build. In fact, Goren judges himself so harshly, it’s almost like D’Onofrio can’t allow anyone else to. Sure, the dialogue helps, but some of it would be so easy to play maudlin, and he never does. In one episode (“Rocket Man,” Season 6, Episode 19), Goren has a heated chat with the captain:

Goren: Well, he’s obsessive and angry.

Captain: So am I, so are you.

Goren: …Do you think I’m angry?

It took a full five minutes for me to laugh and realize he didn’t question his obsessiveness. He wouldn’t realize he actually was angry until a good two or three episodes before the end of the series— or if he realized it, he kept that truth hidden, even from the audience, especially from himself. I think D’Onofrio always knew Goren was angry, though. In the dark when I can’t sleep, I admit that the real Katie always knew The Legend of Katie Darby was very angry.

I lied. I found one other resource about Vincent D’Onofrio and whether or not he’s a method actor. Someone asked him on Twitter, and that’s the easiest place to see his honest response to things: he’s actually a great follow on Twitter. He writes micro-poems and wishes people happy birthday. He’s politically minded, but always toward whatever helps the most people. He responds to fans with kindness in a way that has to be time-consuming. On December 16, 2016, “@VintageRose1990” asked about his performance and style. He said, “I’m a Method actor. Most people don’t know what that truly is. Most people think it means u become the character&live it constantly. Not true.Diff. [sic]”

It’s been a long time since I was onstage, but I can tell you this: if you ever saw me tell someone I loved them onstage, I truly meant it, and if I seemed despondent, I was. I knew those emotions and could access them, slipping into someone else’s words and applying my emotions to them. Of course I’d tend a little more Vincent D’Onofrio and a little less Jeremy Strong. Of course I watch them both with the same rabid passion, curious as to every choice they make and how it takes them a little further from the human they are and a little closer to another creature, equally human and somehow not real. How do you build a person using only the lines of dialogue that you’ve been given? Or in real life— how do you build a person using only the lines you know people want to hear?

Both ways, you have to be obsessive about the details. You have to watch your movements and the movements of everyone else in the room. You don’t have time to sleep. You watch human interactions and memorize what micro-movements mean to each person you love so that you can anticipate their needs. You learn what questions—

Can you be a method actor in your own life? Slip into a character and stay there? I don’t want to think about that anymore.

DELETED SCENE

Should there be a scene here where I try to throw you off about what the essay is about? Something I didn’t list in the first paragraph? Intensity or brain or body or Law and Order: CI— or is it something else? Maybe this essay is where I finally write about running. But would I write about the day I fell and I was so afraid it was because I hadn’t come as far from the stroke as I thought?

Probably. I wouldn’t write about how I’m becoming good at it because I’m so tired of people treating my body like it’s an inspiration. Worse, like I am an inspiration, when really my body has been a separate animal from me for so long that I cannot even recognize it in the mirror.

Besides, it’s not fair to reduce this to ‘inspiring’ because I don’t remember ever having anything I loved purely like I do running; I have never, in my life, loved something enough to not make a competition of it. Plus, being in motion is more addictive than any other substance I’ve ever been around— and I was on a cane just seven months ago— but no. How would running play in here?

(You know how. It’s the rain. You haven’t been able to stand water on your face your entire life, to the point where you used to put a washcloth over your eyes when your parents bathed you as a child so that it couldn’t touch your eyes, and you’d hold your breath, and later, people would say ‘that sounds like literal Chinese water torture,’ and maybe it was, but it was better than the water touching you without a barrier, and you get breathless even thinking about it. Later, a doctor tells you that your aversion is an obsessive compulsive tic, and you ignore him out loud, but privately you realize this is one of those tics that is very real, even as you refuse medication. Later still, after you’ve pulled your shoulder out of socket so many times they think you’ll have to replace it but before you start running, your husband has to wash your hair. Everything about the process is sweet and caring and makes you want to die if a single water droplet touches the wrong place at the wrong time and you don’t always know which one that is. And now, you’ve been running for months, and you’ve built up strength in that shoulder, and you don’t even know where your cane is, and a few days ago, you had the choice between going on a run in the rain and not going at all and you, yes, the same you writing this, the one who fell and the one who is running, you forgot that you hate the water on your face and you didn’t remember until you got home and you are still confused that something that wrote the script of so much of your life just… dissipated, because running was more important. Because suddenly the thing you loved outweighed the goal.)

That story doesn’t make it easier to tell if this is about my brain being sick, my body being sick, or my intensity. This doesn’t fit. Plus, where is Vincent D’Onofrio? He’s who the essay is really about. (You know why this fits. You were running because you’d just watched Full Metal Jacket again, at least up until that scene with the M-14 in the bathroom. That’s why you had to run in the rain. Because you were working on this essay and then that scene—)

SCENE 4: MORE EVIDENCE

There was a pretty clear “beginning of the end” where D’Onofrio was concerned on the show, but I hadn’t seen it telegraphed until our recent binge. I could point to a place where, whether the actor or the character was the one in the situation, it was painful to watch because it was so real. Toward the middle of Season 7, there’s an episode called “Untethered.” Goren gets himself committed to try and prove that a prison is corrupt and killing people. It leads to an incident where he is forcibly restrained for hours at a time. I watched through split fingers as he had a panic attack that felt too close to home for me. At one point while restrained and begging for water, he keeps saying “OK, OK.” He’s trapped in a room alone where he can’t move and he’s locked in with his thoughts. He eventually promises to do anything to get out of the situation. Crying and counting backward. Panic attack avoidance techniques. Earlier in the episode— when he is forced to take a break from his job, one that he didn’t ask for and one that makes him feel like people are judging him, a very familiar feeling to me— he keeps muttering, “There’s nothing wrong with me,” like a mantra.

I know something broke in him, there, because by the time you start trying to convince yourself of that, you already know there is definitely something wrong with you. Do you want to know what I said when they admitted me to the hospital while I was having a brain stem stroke? “No, I can’t. Tomorrow is Nirvana day.” I was teaching a class called “How to Write About Music” and I didn’t want to miss grunge week. Worse? That’s not even the most ridiculous thing I did. I’ve been in pain almost my whole life, and I don’t trust doctors— at least before my stroke. I was, in the month before, diagnosed— after seventeen doctors missed it— with Ehler’s Danlos Syndrome, which has an alphabet soup of other comorbidities. As far as I can tell, OCD isn’t a part of the bundle, but can be part of the coping mechanism. In too much pain to get out of bed? Nothing wakes you up quite like a repetitive thought.

“I’m fine, it’s a migraine,” I said 48 hours before I went to the hospital. Then I drove to school. It was January, and I used to be cold no matter what time of year it was, so my first sign that things weren’t normal should have come when I asked a friend to cancel my first class, but told her “I can teach the second one.” When she found me in my car, I had the air conditioner on blast and I had taken off every piece of clothing that would be allowed by law enforcement. She drove me home.

The next day, I woke up, threw up, took some Excedrin, painted sets at my daughter’s school, threw up in the weird middle school toilets, met with a friend for lunch because I felt I’d canceled on her too many times already, threw up at the Mexican restaurant, and went home, where I threw up until my family realized something was really, really wrong.

Then I went to the hospital. Then I begged to go home because I wanted to go to work the next day. Because if you tell someone for decades that there is nothing wrong with them, don’t be surprised when they believe you and parrot that back.

But remember what I said? Memoirists wouldn’t even bother writing if they didn’t already know there was something wrong with them. Keep up. This is a procedural. Small tokens from the beginning will be the key to getting out of this. Your body might be tethered, but you can’t let them have your mind. (Who am I talking to? Method actors? Law & Order fans? People watching only Vincent D’Onofrio’s scenes in Full Metal Jacket?— there’s nothing wrong with me.)

At one point in “Untethered,” Goren very quietly says to the prison guards, “I’m going to arrest you all,” and because they have no idea he’s a cop, they laugh it off. It’s a moment that haunts me, honestly, because I think of all the times I’ve been explosively angry, how quiet I get in that space. It is truly like the pin being pulled: you don’t hear the grenade until later.

Not every grenade goes off. Sometimes you pull the pin and the thing is busted, impotent. After years of running on three to five hours of sleep a night, post-stroke, I had to go on a cocktail of medication that made it almost impossible for me to be awake longer than eight hours. It’s gotten better, but I still need to crash— sometimes for days— but at least sometimes, now, I can’t sleep at all. Worse, if we’re being honest (and I’m trying to, because there are places I’ll have to lie and then admit the truth), I’m happy on the nights I can’t sleep, because even though I know The Legend of Katie Darby isn’t real, I miss the lack of self-awareness to believe I could be her, and when I can’t sleep, I feel closer to her than any other time. She was a more successful, more perfect version of myself.

At one point, the only person Goren has shown his true self, the only person he really has respect for— his partner, Eames— tells him that all his wounds are self-inflicted. Of course they are. He’s protecting himself from everyone else. If you are useful to people but you never let them get too close, how can they hurt you?

In SCENE THREE: METHODOLOGY, I shared my favorite moment from the episode “Rocket Man,” but I lied. It was only a small lie. It’s part of my favorite moment. The thing is, later in the episode, the captain and Goren have another, similar exchange:

Captain: At the very least, she’s an intensely Type-A personality under
enormous pressure.

Goren: So am I, so are you.

D’Onofrio delivers this line as an almost under-the-breath blowoff, fast and rooted in masking the discomfort he felt when the captain called him out on being “angry and obsessive.” Clearly that early barb stung. This smart-assed response, this is the defiance that is twisted so deeply in my core that I cannot find it and I cannot excise it, know it is dangerous to excise it— and I wouldn’t recognize myself without it.

And even though he says it quietly, with no agitation? It’s absolutely angry, and confirms that the captain was right in the first place. Was D’Onofrio playing it that way on purpose? This is a season before he’s strapped to a table having a panic attack. But as is always the case with Goren, he’s intimidating loud, but he’s terrifying quiet.

I hope that is the truth about me.

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SCENE FIVE: THE CLIMAX

And then, there it was. Season 9. We knew Goren was about to be gone. I held my breath, anxious to see what they did to write him off. And then… Goren has a stroke.

No, he doesn’t. That wouldn’t make any sense. It didn’t make any sense when it happened to me, either.

What happened doesn’t matter. In fact, it doesn’t matter so much, that despite Goren and Eames being written off in the second episode of the season and Jeff Goldblum’s character finishing out the season, when it was announced there was going to be a final, tenth season, it was a capsule season: only ten episodes, and only Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe.

Sometimes the true version— and I believe Goren and Eames to be the “true” version of Law & Order: Criminal Intent— is only possible if you make sacrifices. Fewer episodes. Less time spent. More sleep. More intentional interaction with the people around you, more self-reflection and fewer sleepless nights in the service of people who don’t know you, even if it’s because you haven’t allowed them to.

SCENE SIX: THE INTERROGATION

The final season explains that Goren and Eames have been invited back, but pending Goren’s psychological evaluation. He’s cagey and anxious about this. I understand. I’ve spent my entire adulthood being prodded and poked by doctors I refused to call by anything other than their first names because it felt like they already had an overwhelming amount of power over me. (In one scene with the therapist, as Goren tells the doctor, “My world is treacherous—” I grabbed Andy, pointed, and said, “That’s how I do it, too,” meaning that I also stand the whole time. “It’s about the power imbalance.”

“I need you to sit,” the TV therapist said as I was explaining the logic behind it.)

It takes Law & Order: CI until the tenth season before they interrogate why Goren is the way he is, and as viewers, we just accepted it. Of course we did. That’s how he was presented to us, so why would he be any different? But in real life, we constantly wonder why people are the way they are. I don’t think we would have ever noticed if they didn’t provide reasons— D’Onofrio was compelling before psychoanalysis. That doesn’t mean I didn’t trade my knitting needles for pens while I was watching. It was painful at times—the physicality in his therapist’s office wasn’t where the similarities between my visits and Goren’s ended. And suddenly, I was left with a weird parallel. I spent most of the essay thinking about me and D’Onofrio creating The Legend of Katie Darby and Bobby Goren, but then I had to wonder: was the real me more like Bobby Goren than D’Onofrio? Have I ever had control?

Of course I can’t know the answer. And that’s fine. But if this is the interrogation— which is usually where Goren puts the puzzle pieces together and gets a confession— my confession is that these scenes were hard to watch. The anger, the illness, the calculated playfulness, the desire to be useful above all else, the obsessive tendencies: they all get uncovered in that therapist’s office, episode after episode.

Goren is justifiably afraid of what’s under the anger. The therapist thinks it’s a fear of humiliation, but I think it’s something scarier. At one point he talks about his body like it is a broken car, but says that flushing the transmission of sludge can expose holes that the sludge was filling. So maybe I disagree a little with the TV therapist, even though she was just reading lines someone else wrote. The therapist, to be fair, didn’t spend as many hours with Goren as I did: I saw him on the job, with family, strapped to a table mid-panic attack. It’s less about avoiding humiliation and more wondering whether, if the anger goes away, there’s anything left.

Who am I interrogating here? Well, the therapist is interrogating Goren, so I’ll deal with interrogating me. You want to know a weird tic? I ask Andy if he still loves me, out of the blue— sometimes right after he has just said it. Sometimes his spontaneous expression is what reminds me to check again. Is that crazy? You’re thinking I’m crazy right now. (In that last season, Goren accuses the therapist of thinking whatever it is he is thinking. I’m not doing that, though. That would be too obvious. Right?) But the problem is I know all the fear and anger on the inside of my head. I know that when I’m running, I am running away from a cane that I’m desperately afraid I’ll need again one day. (Ed. Note: don’t refer to deleted scenes.) I know that I’m an intensely Type-A person under extreme pressure, but I also know I chose the pressure. I went back to work seven months after the stroke, even though everyone in my life worried it was too soon: most of them were more afraid that if I knew that, it would be discouraging, so they banded together to help me.

I’m tired of this interrogation. Let’s turn back to the therapist and Goren. At one point, he says the only true thing his father ever said was that ‘everybody lies.’

I actually had to pause the TV when the therapist said, “You think without the puzzle, you don’t matter— it’s a lie, but it’s the only one you’ve chosen to believe. Consider this: if everyone lies, that has to include you. There’s no way you can trust yourself. Not when you put the job before the man.” What about the job, the family, the friends, the students, the people you met years ago, the people you hate, the animals, the local business owners, the artists, the thieves, the sick— you get it. I would literally put an oxygen mask on a complete stranger before I would put on my own. Is that why I’m angry? There’s a much darker truth than that. I believe that if I’m that kind of selfless, it somehow negates my anger and makes me a net-neutral person in the world. I spend so much time trying to make my anger puff me up that I don’t allow myself to slow down and acknowledge how scared I am of it.

It’s not that I don’t think I deserve to be loved.

It’s that I don’t believe I deserve to be loved if I haven’t done everything I can at all times for everyone else. Do I sound like I’m exaggerating? Ask my friends. The closer they are to me, the less likely they are to know much about what’s going on in my life right now, save Andy and my other closest confidant, Charlie. I’m very good at the fadeaway when someone asks about me. My own therapist asked what I like to do and when I would say something, she’d say, “That’s part of your job,” or “That’s something you do for someone else.” I finally yelled at her, “What the fuck am I supposed to do, make something up? I don’t have enough hours in the day to do something I’m not being paid to do or that someone else doesn’t need.” She looked at me like I was supposed to have a breakthrough, and I’m smart enough to know what she wanted me to take away from that, but I’m not smart enough to implement it.

Recently, I asked her if running counted. She says it does.

This tendency would eventually put me in horrible situations. It started with small stuff in high school, but eventually, I would become people’s first call in a crisis—and I’m not talking just about acts of God, though I was often called to consult on housefires or tornadoes—and I’m not just talking about divorce, though God knows if you think you’ve hidden something on the internet, no you haven’t, and I can find it, and your future ex can use it in court. The first Covid year, I had four different people contact me in the act of trying to die by suicide.

Would it be better for me to lie, here? Since we all lie? Tell you that I was honored to get to help them back on their path? Or should I tell you the truth: I’m a poet and the last person you should be going to for counseling about suicide, and one of my very dearest friends has fought with ideation— and I wanted to be there for them. These other four calls, texts, emails—they were people I barely knew, but who knew that I would pick up the phone. And that didn’t make me feel honored. It made me terrified. Would you believe that’s when I started to have a hard time sleeping again? They all four survived. They all four seem to have moved on from the incidents. I have not all the way, not yet, according to my therapist.

Camera pan to Goren. His therapist says, “You are exceptional at analyzing others. What is it you think will happen if you look at yourself?” Suddenly I got it. This is why he can’t have friends. A life. He is nothing but a vessel of utility for victims—but he’s seen the awful things people do to each other to get what they want, and he can’t take any kindness at face value. He can be kind. He can’t accept kindness.

I’m sorry. I’m guilty. I did it. I gave everything in me to everyone but me—and I wound up being less of a wife and stepmom and friend because of it. I became a ghost, possessed by whoever needed my knowledge or skills or just someone to listen to them. I erased myself until a stroke firmly threw me back into my body and then I had to limp just to get back to half of what I was. Now I’m different, and if I’m honest, I still really miss the person I told myself I was before. I admit it, OK? Can I go home now?

Do I have to admit everything?

Fine. I was kind of angry that people listened to me when I told them all I was good for was—well, whatever they needed me to be good for—and after the adrenaline of getting people through crises, when they go back to their lives, sometimes I’m a little angry. Sometimes I’m angry that I don’t know how to relate to them outside of the disaster. Sometimes I’m angry that they made their darkest moment a part of my life, but I’m not allowed to make that moment a part of my story. But I’m actually—I’m not “kind of” or “a little” angry. I’m just angry. Even when I know it’s my fault.

And God, it has made me so tired. I am so tired, I could sleep for years.

Cue Goren. Cue him crossing his arms. Cue him looking a little sad and a little satisfied. Cue Eames with a tight-lipped nod. Cut to title cards.

SCENE SEVEN: THE RESOLUTION

Not every episode of a procedural ends in the interrogation room. In fact, the last frame of Law and Order: CI is actually Goren and Eames driving off together, clearly as friends for the first time, even though they indicate that they’re about to try and get to an investigation before the feds do. It still feels right. Natural lighting, in a residential area and not a crime scene: there’s a happy ending here. It’s not all anger and isolation. Really, it’s a rejection of that, at least that story is. I teared up when Andy and I watched it. It was the first time either of us had seen it; we’d been newly-married by the time the tenth season aired, and I stopped watching once D’Onofrio wasn’t in the lead, not realizing he’d eventually come back.

So how does this end in the daylight?

Because despite everything, D’Onofrio has, with his art, created for me a safe haven. I tried to tell the story of my Bobby Goren hallucination to a friend of mine on Twitter one night. I changed a few details because, once again, the truth is blurrier and weirder than reality, so I changed it from five days to three, and from some weird hallucination to a ‘dream,’ though even in the telling of the story, it’s pretty obvious I was awake for all of it. But there used to be a 120-character limit on Tweets, and it seemed like hedging a few bets would be fine. Besides, it’s a silly story after all. Besides, I was telling my friend, not some stranger. Which is why when @vincentdonofrio retweeted it and, echoing what the 2004 Hallucination said, adding a hashtag, I was moved beyond words. Sure, it’s just Twitter, but— as Andy would say— it’s kind of weird, right?

“This is so sweet. #leaveheralone Hope you’re getting your rest these days
Katie. V” — Twitter, 7/11/2016, 11:52 AM.

See? I just wrote this essay because I really wanted to think about Vincent D’Onofrio, who has been really kind to me on the Internet—and in the recesses of the dark places in my mind, even if only via a character he created in Bobby Goren. I just needed the excuse to focus my intensity in a safe direction while, obviously, things in my life are still challenging, while I’m trying to learn I don’t have to be everything to everyone, while I’m fighting with my therapist, while I’m training my body to run instead of use a cane, while I’m telling myself that not everything on the checklist has to be done before I allow myself to go to bed. Because for four full seasons, four half-seasons, and ten final episodes worth of one-hour, procedural television, I didn’t have to worry which Katie I was at all. I got the lines I was handed, and brought my own emotion to the subject matter, all while giddily guessing along with my husband how everything was going to end.

Katie Darby Mullins