Balancing Act

Muffin Spencer-Devlin is in the back seat of an idling patrol car, handcuffed, furiously trying to kick out the rear window.

It is the morning of Jan. 7, less than two weeks before she will start the LPGA season, and Spencer-Devlin is on 47th Street in Manhattan, around the corner from her new apartment. The handcuff around her right wrist is so tight that her pinkie is numb.

She has asked, nicely she thinks, that the two New York City police officers in the front seat loosen the cuff a little, and roll down a window.

But her pleas are ignored, her efforts to unlock the door are thwarted, and whenever she rolls a window down, one of the officers rolls it back up.

“I’m beginning to feel this is a cat-and-mouse game,” she recalls, “and I have no chance to win.”

Frustrated and angry, Spencer-Devlin tries to crush the officers’ caps in the back of the patrol car. Unable to gain satisfaction in that, she falls sideways across the back seat, flips her legs over her head and begins kicking the rear window.

She wonders if the cop who smirked when she rolled down the window will be smiling when the car’s rear window is lying in pieces in a gutter.

In seconds, she knows. Spencer-Devlin is out of the car and face down on the sidewalk, a knee across the back of her neck. She and the cops wait like that for the ambulance that will take her to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital.

Five days later, medicated and feeling better, she is released from the hospital. She is ready to play golf.

*

The first week of January was a tumultuous one for Spencer-Devlin, who was arrested for trespassing at the U.S. mission to the United Nations on Jan. 6, and the next day was picked up for what police termed “irrational behavior” at a Manhattan YMCA.

Spencer-Devlin, 46, is a good enough golfer to have won three LPGA tournaments and about $1 million in a career that began in 1979.

But she also has bipolar disorder, a mental condition that fosters alternating feelings of great elation and near-suicidal lows.

She has suffered from those severe mood swings since she was in her early 20s, when last she lived in New York City.

“As I was experiencing December and early January, I realized that coming to New York was kind of a full-circle thing for me,” she said. “Mania, for me, pretty much began here. So, being thrown into Bellevue was part of the beginnings of mania for me. I was reexperiencing it in a milder way, then flushing it, letting it go. My rationalization for not taking lithium [which controls the symptoms] at the time was, ‘Let’s let this play itself out, see what happens.’ ”

For months, Spencer-Devlin had felt the subtle euphoria, the disease’s “manic” side. She felt good about her golf game and was eager to bury the 1990s, a decade that passed without a victory for her.

“I won my last tournament in ’89 and I wasn’t a blip on the screen in the ‘90s,” Spencer-Devlin said. “I’m so happy that they’re over.”

She had been working with instructor Jamie Mulligan at Coyote Hills Golf Course in Fullerton for more than a year, and his method of simplifying her golf swing clicked.

Those who knew her, however, feared that Spencer-Devlin was nearing an emotional crash. Her periods of extreme happiness always led to inconsolable depression.

“The high is what gets you in trouble,” Spencer-Devlin admitted. “But the high is what feels great. And the low is where you come close to killing yourself.

“If you didn’t pay for mania with depression, then people would be clamoring to be manic.”

Friends and relatives arranged a sort of intervention to have her committed, and an amused Spencer-Devlin agreed to go along, but two doctors found her stable.

An “out” lesbian since 1996, Spencer-Devlin also was having problems with her partner.

“[She] said to me on the fourth of December, ‘I don’t want to sleep with you, I don’t want to socialize with you, and I don’t want to talk to you until I don’t think you’re high anymore,’ ” Spencer-Devlin said. “Meaning, manic.”

Spencer-Devlin soon met a Newport Beach businesswoman, who eight days later was moving to New York City. Spencer-Devlin quickly dissolved her previous relationship and moved with her new partner from Laguna Beach to New York.

On Jan. 6, after a morning of yoga, the events began that put Spencer-Devlin into the back of that squad car.

About 11 a.m., she walked along East River Drive, she said, “loving the world.”

A Cuban was standing in front of the United Nations. He wore a sign over his shoulders, which, in broken English, said something about a wife, who had died, and a son, who had been seized by the Cuban government.

Moved, Spencer-Devlin stopped to correct the man’s grammar. It’s the sort of thing she does. The man explained the situation and she rewrote his sign, so others would understand.

“I walked away,” she said. “Then I thought, ‘You know, this ought to be cake for our government.’ So I loop over to the U.N. and I ask somebody at the information desk and they say, ‘You’ve got to go over to the U.S. mission.’

“So I walk over to the U.S. mission. I don’t even get a foot into the door before the guard says, ‘You’ve got to wait outside for my supervisor.’ ”

Spencer-Devlin refused to leave the mission entrance, despite several requests, according to police reports, then challenged the guard there to, “just lock me up.”

He did, then called the police.

At the 17th Precinct house in Manhattan, an officer said he found Spencer-Devlin to be a delightful prisoner. She gave golf tips to her captors. Though he asked that his name not be used, he did say that his golf swing had improved.

Spencer-Devlin spent three hours at the lockup and was released, thanking the officers and taking their business cards.

The next morning, police from the same precinct house were called to the YMCA.

After dinner Jan. 6, Spencer-Devlin said she went out on the town, expecting to stay out late, expecting to stay at a hotel so she would not wake her partner, who had to work early Friday morning. She had no credit cards, however, and when she eventually got around to looking for a room, the hotel did not take her personal check. It was 3 a.m.

Spencer-Devlin tried some other hotels, all of which were either booked or would not accept a check. Exasperated, she walked across Manhattan, where she happened upon the YMCA near her apartment. It was 6 a.m.

She tried to rent a room for the rest of the morning. Sorry, they told her, refusing to accept a check.

So, only a block from her apartment, she curled up on the floor of the YMCA and fell asleep. She awoke to her foot being kicked, and looked up to see a police officer.

She asked him to leave her alone for another half-hour, when her bank would open. Then she insisted. It was 8:30 a.m.

“We treated her as a mentally disturbed person,” the officer said. “She claimed she was on medication she wasn’t taking. She was disoriented at the time.”

*

“The moment when I decided to kick out the back window came as a result of the experiences that began with them rousting me outside the YMCA,” Spencer-Devlin said.

With her cheek pressed against the sidewalk, she heard that she would be taken to Bellevue.

“I don’t know that I knew consciously that I was going to end up at Bellevue, but I’ve been there before,” she said. “I was taken to Bellevue 25 years ago by the cops because I walked into the Waldorf-Astoria in the middle of the night to get a hotel room. I had no ID, no money, no credit cards, zip. I just expected them to give me a room. And, of course, I was loud and obnoxious about it.

“Then, I was really in a full-blown manic episode and I couldn’t tell the difference between appropriate behavior and inappropriate behavior. This time I was in control. I had a very fine awareness for how I was acting.”

Bellevue was as it had been before--the same wooden wheelchairs, the same drugs, followed by the same calm.

“I spent three days in, basically, a holding tank where raw public comes in, just whackin’ crazy,” she said. “It wasn’t like I was going to the emergency room with wounds or something, I was going to the whackin’ crazy part. So I spent three days with crazies coming in and out. I loved it.”

She arrived at Bellevue on a Friday, which, she said, meant a weekend stay.

“Mayor [Rudolph] Giuliani couldn’t get out of Bellevue on the weekend,” she cracked.

Eight days later, she was on a golf course. She flew to Florida, shot 79-78 and missed the cut at the Subaru Memorial of Naples, the first full-field LPGA event of the season. She intends to play the L.A. Women’s Championship this week in Simi Valley.

She seems eager to talk about those events in New York City that pulled at her compassion, then challenged her senses.

The complaint at the U.S. mission will probably be dismissed, according to one of the arresting officers. No charges were filed after the incident outside the YMCA.

“There was definitely mania going on, albeit mild,” Spencer-Devlin said.

The mania came this time, so far, without the depression. That she experienced it with some control, that she was able to look out from within it, that it did not suffocate her, was a start, Spencer-Devlin said.

“That, in a nutshell, explains the difference between this particular manic experience and every other one I’ve ever had in my life,” she said. “I had an objectivity that I never had before. That indicates to me healing and growth.”

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The Facts

* What: Los Angeles Women’s Championship

* Where: Wood Ranch Golf Club, Simi Valley

* Dates: Friday-Sunday

* Purse: $750,000

* 1999 winner: Catrin Nilsmark

* TV: The Golf Channel, Fri.-Sun., 1:30 p.m.