The price: methoxy-psychedelic Disabilities, impairing O.C.D., and departure from E.T.A. at 17

pivotal · ~ages 16-17, B.S.

• When: the Disabilities' onset during the substance phase (~16); departure from E.T.A. at 17, before graduation
• What: Where Orin walks away from the substance phase intact, Bain does not: "a couple of really negative methoxy-psychedelic experiences" at what he calls a larval psychological stage leave him with capital-D "Disabilities that to this day make normal life an exceptional challenge." Orin's account to Steeply gives the clinical picture Bain's letter only gestures at: impairing Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder — countless washing and checking rituals, a T-square on court to verify his strings crossed at 90°, an inability to pass a doorway without feeling around its frame and then re-checking it, three-hour showers plus two hours to get out the shower door, hands washed until "the skin fell off," cotton gloves all the summer before he left — so that "We had to physically carry Bain out of the locker room, before tournaments." (The E.T.A. staff indulged the doorway pathology, Orin adds, because Schtitt's own mentor held that "you are what you walk between.") The upshot, in Bain's words: departure from the Academy at 17, prior to graduation, and withdrawal "from competitive junior tennis and contemporary life as we know it."