Chapter 4
90s – Start of the Nightmarish Descent
“The lunatic is in my head
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade
You make the change
You rearrange me ’til I’m sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me” – Brain Damage, Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

The first chill of autumn was biting hard at Killington, Vermont, a stark contrast to the lukewarm shame that settled in my gut. 1990. The decade stretched before me, a blank canvas I was already splattering with my brand of self-destruction. I was working at the ski resort, a faceless cog in a machine designed to extract money from vacationing flatlanders. My job was insignificant, but my hunger, both literal and metaphorical, was not.
I was caught stealing food. Not a heroic larceny born of desperation but a pathetic act fueled by a craving I couldn’t articulate. It was the taste of something forbidden, something that filled not just my stomach, but a deeper, emptier space inside. That space, I was beginning to realize, was bottomless.
Killington wasn’t the start of my downward spiral, but it was a significant marker. It was a place where the gnawing feeling of wrongness, of being fundamentally flawed, solidified into something tangible. It was also where I began to receive messages.
I know how that sounds. Crazy. But that’s the thing about borderline personality disorder; you don’t always know where the line between reality and delusion blurs. The flickering screen of the television became my oracle. I was obsessed with Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s surreal masterpiece of small-town secrets and cryptic clues. Laura Palmer’s tragic fate, the enigmatic dialogues of the Log Lady, the unsettling pronouncements of Killer BOB all resonated with me as if Lynch had somehow tapped into the chaotic wiring of my mind.
It wasn’t just passive viewing. I felt like I was deciphering a secret language, a coded message meant only for me. The show validated my sense of inner turmoil and amplified the unsettling feeling that I was somehow different, an outsider looking in. And it spoke to a burgeoning identity crisis, a growing awareness of a female persona that had been silently developing since my adolescence. I would watch the show and find myself identifying not with Agent Cooper, but with Audrey Horne, her seductive charm a reflection of something I felt stirring within me.

Then there was the music. A cassette arrived from a music club, a promotional copy of Velveteen by Transvision Vamp. The title track, a haunting ballad about a young woman grappling with the trauma of sexual abuse, burrowed deep into my psyche. Listening to it, I felt a visceral connection, as if the vocalist was singing the story of this hidden female self, a narrative of vulnerability and violation that mirrored my own internal experience.
Looking back, I see it all for what it was: a desperate attempt to find meaning in the chaos, to make sense of the fragmented pieces of my identity. But at the time, it was all-consuming. The TV, the music, and my distorted perception; formed a feedback loop that trapped me in a spiral of self-loathing and increasingly reckless behavior.
The food-stealing was just the tip of the iceberg. I was lashing out, acting out, pushing boundaries, and generally making myself a pariah wherever I went. My antisocial behavior was a self-fulfilling prophecy, a desperate cry for attention masked as brazen defiance. I was lucky I didn’t end up in jail. Instead, I ended up back in Cape Cod, or ‘I ended up back on the cape,’ tail between my legs, another failure etched into my already bruised ego.
But even Rock Bottom has a basement. Mine was paved with good intentions and shattered promises. The realization that I was heading towards a life of unemployability and financial ruin was a harsh awakening. I knew I had to change, to somehow pull myself out of the abyss. So, I decided to go to school. I transferred from Goddard College to The Emerson College Honors Program (Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts).

The move to Boston was supposed to be a fresh start, a chance to reinvent myself. But the lewd, demons: Jenna Jameson, Asia Carera, Devon, Alexis Texas, Melissa Hill, and others followed me wherever I went, the suicide of Karen Lancaume and others should’ve and most probably did tell me that nothing was what it seemed, behind the glamorous cum shots and cream pies, it was, and still is, worse than a nightmare for the women working in the adult entertainment industry.
I remember watching a ménage à trois once, where it turned out to be not a ‘house of three’ but a house of 201. After the men were done taking turns, making a Russian salad outta Lisa Melendez, who passed away after contracting aids, for you see, one of the 200 men was Marc Wallice. After a few years, I watched a BBC documentary where they showed the same scene and also the BTS for it, where Lisa was merely handed, no, a towel was flung to her.
“Wipe that sperm donation off’a you, Lisa. You’re filthy, go shower,” said a man in huge glasses and a tight tee with bell bottoms. He ‘looked’ like the man in charge.

The city, with its anonymity and its undercurrent of vice, became my playground. The late nights, the cheap apartments, and the constant pressure to keep up; all fueled my anxieties and reinforced my sense of inadequacy.
It was in Boston that I discovered the adult video arcade in Lowell. A dark, grimy haven where flickering screens offered a momentary escape from the crushing weight of reality. It was the perfect drug, readily available and endlessly customizable. Between the arcade and the Combat Zone, Boston’s infamous red-light district, I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into addiction. Pornography wasn’t just a vice; it was a lifeline, a way to numb the pain and silence the voices in my head.
The 90s trudged on, a slow-motion disaster unfolding in real-time. I managed to hold down jobs, mostly in the healthcare field. I was functional, at least on the surface. I paid my rent, kept a roof over my head, and maintained a semblance of normalcy. But behind the facade, my life was unraveling. My addiction was consuming me, warping my perceptions, and poisoning my relationships.

Hey Jude
I had a girlfriend, a woman I genuinely cared about. But my addiction, my psychosis, my inability to connect on an emotional level – it all drove her away. Her departure was a turning point, a stark reminder of the damage I was inflicting on myself and those around me.
The latter half of the decade became a blur of cheap thrills and escalating compulsions. Phone sex became a new obsession, a disembodied intimacy that only deepened my isolation. Video arcades, DVDs, late-night internet searches; my life was organized around my addiction, a relentless pursuit of fleeting pleasure that left me feeling empty and ashamed. I was a functional addict, a high-functioning disaster.
As the decade drew to a close, I found myself in Somerville. The address changed, the faces around me blurred, but the underlying pattern remained the same. I was still chasing the same high, still trying to fill the same void, still running from the same demons.
The 1990s were ending, and I was no closer to finding peace, understanding myself, to escaping the darkness that had taken root within me. The messages from Twin Peaks had faded, replaced by the incessant drone of my own self-loathing. The female persona remained; a silent observer trapped inside a body that felt increasingly alien.
I stood at the precipice, staring into the abyss, wondering if it would ever end. The food stealing, the TV messages, the filthy but necessary pornography (something like retrieving a wedding ring from an unflushed toilet), the lost relationships, all symptoms of a deeper malaise, a fundamental brokenness that I couldn’t seem to fix. I was Andrew Jacobucci, a man lost in the labyrinth of his mind, condemned to repeat the same mistakes, to chase the same illusions, until the very end. I was living a horror story, and the scariest part was that I was the monster.

The snow in Killings, Vermont, was always the same shade of bone-white. Ironic, considering what the locals whispered about the place – whispers I hadn’t taken seriously until, well, until I had to. Back then, I was Andrew Jacobucci, ski bum extraordinaire, scraping by at the Killington resort, flipping burgers and shoveling snow. Life was simple, in a brutally cold, perpetually broke kind of way. That was before the first step taken into the dismal realms.
It started subtly, a creeping unease. A feeling of being watched, even when I was alone in my cramped, drafty room above the ski rental shop. Then came the dreams. Vivid (not the porn makers), unsettling scenes of twisted trees, faces leering from the shadows, and the suffocating sensation of being buried alive. I chalked it up to stress, the late hours, too much cheap beer. I was young, invincible, or so I thought.
Relationships were always a struggle. Even back in junior high (we always had an Alfred Kinsey lying around in the house), I found it impossible to maintain any real connection. I was told it was borderline personality disorder, a cluster of symptoms masquerading as a personality. Unstable moods, feelings of worthlessness, insecurity, impulsivity, impaired social relationships. Some ugly ass aliens had taken my brain and written it down on a piece of paper, in code. A perfect description of my everyday living.
My attempts at dating were disastrous. One girl, Sarah, lasted a whole two weeks before she ran screaming after I impulsively shaved my head in the middle of a dinner date, convinced my reflection was mocking me. Looking back, I see the pattern, the self-sabotage. The fear of getting close, of being truly known, was always there, lurking beneath the surface.
The nightmares intensified. They began to spill over into my waking hours. I’d be slicing onions in the resort kitchen, and suddenly, the blade would feel alien in my hand, the smell of the onions morphing into the cloying sweetness of decay. I started seeing things, too, fleeting glimpses of figures out of the corner of my eye, faces in the swirling snow.
One night, I was walking home from the bar, the air biting at my skin. The moon was hidden behind thick clouds, and the only light came from the distant glow of the resort. As I passed the old cemetery, nestled at the edge of the woods, I heard a sound. A low, guttural moan.
I stopped, my heart hammering against my ribs. “Hello?” I called out, my voice trembling slightly. There was no response, only the rustling of leaves in the wind and the creaking of the ancient gravestones. I told myself it was just the wind, that I was letting my imagination get the better of me. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched.
I hurried on, my pace quickening. As I neared the entrance to the cemetery, I saw something. A figure standing beside one of the gravestones. It was tall and gaunt, shrouded in shadow. I couldn’t make out any features, but I could feel its eyes on me, burning into my soul.
Fear paralyzed me. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move. The figure began to move towards me, slowly, deliberately. Its footsteps crunched on the snow, each step sending a jolt of terror through my body. I finally broke free from my paralysis and sprinted away, not daring to look back until I reached the safety of my room.
That night, the nightmares were worse than ever. I dreamt of the figure in the cemetery, its face now clear. It was a face of pure malevolence, a face that knew my deepest fears.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit my job, packed my meager belongings, and fled Killington. I told myself I was just tired, and that a change of scenery would do me good. But deep down, I knew I was running from something far more sinister.
I ended up in Somerville, Massachusetts, drawn to the anonymity of the city. I found a job at Massachusetts General Hospital, working in the records department. Pre-computer, everything was paper-based, a labyrinth of files and folders. It was tedious, mind-numbing work, but it kept me occupied, and kept the nightmares at bay, at least for a while.
The hospital was a world unto itself, a constant stream of suffering and hope. I saw things there that would haunt me for years to come. The endless parade of patients, the weary faces of the doctors and nurses, the hushed whispers in the corridors. I felt like an outsider, a ghost drifting through the halls.
I tried to build a life for myself in Somerville. Found a small apartment (shared, of course) and started attending a support group for people with mental health issues. But the feeling of unease persisted. I still felt like I was being watched, that something was lurking just beyond my perception. The Borderline made it hard to connect with people, and the fear of abandonment, always present.
One evening, I was working late, filing records in the basement of the hospital. The basement was a maze of dimly lit corridors and overflowing storage rooms, a place where the air hung heavy with the scent of dust and decay. I was alone, the only sound was the hum of the fluorescent lights and the occasional creak of the building settling.
As I was searching for a particular file, I stumbled upon a locked room. Curiosity piqued; I tried the handle. It was firmly locked. I peered through the small window in the door, but I couldn’t see anything, only darkness.
I went back to my work, but the locked room gnawed at my mind. What was in there? What secrets was the hospital hiding? After battling with impulsivity, I retrieved a crowbar from the maintenance closet and returned to the room. With a few forceful shoves, I pried the lock loose and pushed the door open.
The room was pitch black. I fumbled for a light switch, but there was none. I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight. The beam of light illuminated the room, revealing a scene that made my blood run cold.
The room was filled with shelves, stacked high with jars. Each jar contained a human organ, preserved in formaldehyde. Hearts, lungs, brains, all neatly labeled and cataloged. The sight was gruesome, horrifying.
Then I saw it.
In the center of the room, on a pedestal, was a single jar. Inside, floating in the murky liquid, was a face. A face I recognized. It was the face of the figure from the cemetery in Killington. The face of pure malevolence.
I screamed, dropping my phone. The flashlight went out, plunging the room into darkness. I stumbled backward, tripping over a box. I scrambled to my feet and bolted from the room, not stopping until I reached the safety of the street.
I ran back to my apartment, my mind reeling. What had I seen? Was it a hallucination? A waking nightmare? Or was it something far more real, far more terrifying?
I knew I couldn’t stay in Somerville. The figure had followed me. It was getting closer.