In 1991, Ed had no idea he had OCD, but he knew there was something different about the way he thought and his need to do things a certain way. But seeking medical help wasn’t even a consideration, because thinking differently, to Ed, didn’t constitute an illness. He was putting himself under a lot of pressure to try and make a bid for Clemson, and didn’t have many cheerleaders to support him, so he decided to get away-head back to South Carolina where everything seemed brighter and he, ostensibly, had a plan. On his own, he decided he would take the classes he needed to fulfil Clemson’s academic requirements for admission locally, then enrol as a full-time Clemson student, make the team, and play the following year.
To start, Ed figured if he showed up at the athletic centre every day with his buddies to attend team workouts he would continue to be noticed and evaluated in a positive light, and that he would prove his value as a potential member of the team.
He certainly wasn’t disappointed on his arrival. Rudy, Coach Wade and the guys on the team seemed happy to see him, and acknowledged his dramatic physical change. His plan was to stay in halls with his buddy while he tried to get classes worked out at the local community college, and hang out with the team as much as possible. And since his buddy Rudy carried a lot of weight as one of the Tigers’ star players, Ed was given more latitude to hang out on the sidelines during practice, and occasionally throw the ball around with the other players.
‘Not everybody liked him being on the field,’ says Rudy, who would later go on to play in the NFL for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Washington Redskins. ‘But we’d put on our pads and he would be out there throwing the ball with us. He had a great arm, and the coaches were watching him.’
Rudy knew Ed was still struggling emotionally with the loss of his mother, and because the two were ‘like brothers’ as children growing up in Stoughton, and he regretted the fact that he hadn’t been around to help Ed through it, Rudy was determined to use the small amount of influence he held within the Clemson football programme to help Ed get a shot as a walk-on the following year. ‘I was trying my best to help Ed, but it’s really hard to play as part of the team if you’re not there on scholarship.’ Rudy knew it was a long shot.
If nothing else, Ed is persistent-so, regardless of his unofficial student status, Ed was practising with the team and hanging out with the players after practice was over, and he would use every opportunity he could to spend time talking to Coach Wade. But no matter how much access he was granted, or how many heartwarming conversations he had with Wade, there would be no happy ending to this part of Ed’s story-not at Clemson, at least. As the OCD quickly metastasized, unbeknownst to Ed, he found himself unable to attend the local community college where he was trying to earn the grades that Clemson would find acceptable.
With increasing frequency, Ed would see flashes of himself as a young boy, standing in the hallway, watching his mother pass, and be so consumed that he found it hard to concentrate. And these visions led to his incrementally intensifying obsession with protecting his father, who was healthy and happy living back in Cape Cod.
The turning-point came one day as he walked across campus from halls to the athletic field. He came to a fork in the path and was suddenly gripped by an overwhelming fear when he looked to the left-and saw the image of a skull and crossbones. He panicked and froze, shook his head, and looked to the right. Now he saw images of his father getting killed in a terrible car accident. Back and forth, he looked at the two spots. Left: skull and crossbones, right: fatal accident. Ed couldn’t move, stricken with terror that if he stepped forward, even an inch, someone would die.
These vague, unsettling feelings, and the harrowing moments when nothing ‘feels right’, are elements of OCD that defy logical explanation. They come in varying degrees to victims of the disorder, and in Ed’s case were extraordinary and severe. But the torment in not knowing why the thoughts are occurring, and the fact that there is nothing tangible on which to hang them, is sheer anguish for sufferers.
For more than two hours, Ed stood helplessly frozen in place in the path of a rush of students, forced to detour round him as they headed to class. The embarrassment of not being able to move was dwarfed by the terror that any move he made had the potential to affect the life of his father.
‘OCD is like having your head in a vice…it keeps cranking and turning, getting tighter and tighter, and the only way to relieve it is to do its bidding,’ says Ed. ‘At the same time, you’re rejecting the thought process because you want to function properly.’
Closing his eyes and rocking back and forth, trying to soothe the wild beasts in his mind, Ed began trying to think of happier moments to distract him from the painful vision that consumed him, and the humiliation of standing statuelike in the middle of campus. He finally became ‘unlocked’, he says, by thinking of Star Wars and recalling the first time he saw The Empire Strikes Back. Ed seized that fleeting moment, turned around and ran back the way he came to find a pay phone and ring his father to confirm that he’d made the right decision.
Bob knew Ed’s concern over his health and well-being through the years was extraordinary, but he remained sympathetic because he knew it stemmed from the loss of his mother. Still, this call was a signal to him that things were not going as smoothly as he’d hoped they would for Ed at Clemson, and he worried about what Ed’s next step would be if Clemson didn’t work out.
Of course Ed found his father was alive and well, so he returned to the hall of residence where he was staying with friends, and collapsed on his bed. The strain of feeling he’d been carrying his father’s welfare on his shoulders for those two hours left Ed in such physical and emotional distress that he spent the next three days in bed with a migraine headache.
‘Logically I knew that the odds of anything bad happening to my father were slim,’ says Ed with regard to his OCD conviction. ‘But if I walked to the left, instead of walking to the right, and something did happen to my father, I would be responsible for his death. I would, in essence, have killed him.’
When Ed complied with OCD’s demand to move right, left or not at all, he was momentarily relieved from the anxiety caused by his obsession with his father’s safety, or whoever else was on his mind-his siblings, aunts, uncles, friends. Ed equates the adrenaline rush of relief to that of the hero in a movie who has just saved someone from impending death. In reality it is an action that, by the pure nature of OCD, meant Ed was reinforcing the cycle. The more he indulged these sorts of compulsions, to get relief from the obsessions of OCD, the greater the intensity of OCD’s demands.
Ed knew it was time to go home. He could no longer handle the stress of getting everything together academically to make the bid for Clemson, and he was consumed with worry that something bad would happen to his father if he stayed there any longer.
When Ed returned home to Cape Cod, though, his father was angry that he had not been successful. It was devastating for Ed to have to admit to his dad, a man who’d spent time as a Marine during wartime, that he didn’t understand what was happening to him that made it impossible to continue.
Bob doesn’t recall himself expressing or even feeling any such anger, however. In fact, he suggests that Ed was just on overdrive, setting himself up for disappointment by expecting too much. ‘I think he just overburdened himself by trying to do too much,’ remembers Bob. ‘Eddie went off the deep end.’
Bob tried putting his son to work in the plumbing business with him, but the two fought vociferously during their drive to work together. ‘I would drive and when we’d get to the roundabouts, Eddie would say, “Dad, let me out here.”’ When Bob refused, Ed would start yelling,