—and in jets bound for the paradise of television dreams and twenty-four-hour sun and Buddhist biker gangs and drive-thru tattoo parlors and top-heavy bleach blondes in bikinis. As these lunatics progressed westward, they brought with them to California headshrinkers of all varieties, Lacanian analysts and Rorschach devotees, partisans of Melanie Klein and self-styled gurus, pill pushers and LSD pushers and holistic repatterners—all committed to rejuvenating the psyche. But along the way to paradise in the Hollywood Hills, the migrants too crazy to continue fell by the wayside, many of them right here in New York City. And since most psychiatric disorders are highly genetic, these crazy migrants sired and bore crazy children . . . but all of the psychiatrists had gone off to California for the higher reimbursement rates and the year-round sunbathing. As a result, I fear we have an overabundance of deranged people here in the Big Apple, yet a desperate shortage of providers fit to treat them.
Millard realized he was playing somewhat fast and loose with his definition of “crazy,” as only a small fraction of people whom one might describe in this way genuinely suffered from a mental illness, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, that might yield to treatment. Many others were merely kooky, folks you might not want to sit next to on a Greyhound bus or invite home for Thanksgiving, but who also didn’t meet DSM criteria or belong in a padded cell. He thought of his father’s cousin, Irving, who’d run a letterhead organization that lobbied Congress to ban television advertisements depicting werewolves—because these ads fostered a negative opinion of real wolves in the public consciousness. Crazy, sure. But not mentally ill. Or his neighbor’s daughter who insisted—with intense sincerity—that she was “a dragon trapped in human form.” The planet teemed with balmy buggers denying the moon landing, chasing the Loch Ness Monster, protesting fluoridated water in tinfoil hats. Nothing that medication or psychotherapy might cure.
In practice, many of our patients here on the consult service are so sick that they require not one psychiatrist to treat them, but often two or three. And a few psychologists and social workers wouldn’t hurt. So if one estimates that about half of New Yorkers are truly crazy, and each of these lunatics needs, on average, 2.5 headshrinkers to care for them, then our city could use approximately six million psychiatrists. As St. Dymphna’s Health Network accounts for approximately 20% of all patients seen in the five boroughs, our current staffing demand is for 500,000 board certified psychiatrists by year’s end—with a suitable number of psychologists, nurse practitioners, and social workers to support them. I realize this assessment may appear somewhat on the high end—even excessive—but I remind you of the promise draped across the central pavilion: You Get Better Because We Are Better. What are a few hundred thousand extra providers when the public’s health is at stake?
MK SALTER, MD
He gave Lauren Pastarnack’s recommendation to Miss Nickelsworth to mail and dropped off the report at Dennmeyer’s office on the way to the cemetery.
9
Hailing a taxi outside the hospital was an easy endeavor, especially if you were Caucasian, and able-bodied, and appeared capable of doling out a fifteen percent tip. Persuading a New York City cabbie to carry you to suburban New Jersey, even at twice the meter beyond the city limits, was another matter entirely. Millard stepped to the curb and surveyed his options: a veritable yellow armada of Dodge Caravans and Nissan Pathfinders and Toyota Highlanders, all equally nondescript and interchangeable, greeted him from the avenue, punctuated intermittently by an apple-green “boro taxi” headed uptown toward the thankless Bronx. What the occasion really called for—after all, it was possibly his final cab ride ever—was an old-style Checker cab, a broad-bumpered Packard or Marathon with its phosphorescent “on radio call” sign protruding like a stylish tuft. That was the automobile of his prime, the muscular, unflappable sedan that had carried him and Carol to myriad cocktail parties and graduation banquets and premieres at Lincoln Center. He’d ridden home from Art Hallam’s engagement bash on the jump seat of such a vehicle, pleasantly drunk, while that frond-fixated coed from Barnard, Judy Bell, squirmed in his lap; not until the following morning—or, rather, when he awoke, bloodshot, early the next afternoon—did he realize that she’d leaked urine onto his gabardine slacks. And once, on a frigid winter evening, he’d flagged down a cab at a stoplight outside Carnegie Hall . . . or thought he had: When he’d pulled open the rear door, there were Mary Martin and Janet Gaynor, long past their primes, nuzzled like teenagers in the backseat. “His service light’s broken,” he’d said to Carol, shutting the taxi door quickly, without mentioning what he’d witnessed—treating these fading stars to the same discretion that he’d have afforded a psychiatric patient. And who today remembered A Star Is Born? Or had seen Peter Pan on Broadway? Or gave a damn if starlets and pop singers made out with each other on television or the National Mall? The prospect of a Checker cab recalled for Millard whatever innocence he’d once had and so insensibly lost—of Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton warbling of a time when “girls were girls and men were men”—but he’d read somewhere, probably in the Times, that only three of these heirloom conveyances remained cruising the asphalt among the more than eleven thousand medallion taxis trawling the five boroughs, so he’d likely have died of natural causes before he found one. With an irrational twinge of regret, Millard flagged down the first passing cab.
The trick was to ask about the destination after entering the vehicle. He’d learned this technique from Carol, who, if denied a trip to Queens or Riverdale, merely folded her hands across her purse and said, matter-of-fact, “Oh, but you will.” Once, needing a lift to her cousin’s baby shower in Astoria during a stormy April rush hour, she’d kept the aggravated driver waiting for nearly twenty minutes before he finally yielded. When the fellow, red-nosed under a wool scally cap, had appealed to Millard’s sensibilities, he’d replied, “It’s above my pay grade.” He’d later tried the same “cab-napping” approach with Isabelle, but she’d refused to play along. The city is full of taxicabs, she’d said. Why give anyone a hard time? But Isabelle was dead and Millard needed transportation to Montclair, New Jersey, the “Jewish burial capital of the Western Hemisphere,” so he was willing to impose some minor inconvenience on a hack.
“Where to?” asked the driver.
To Millard’s surprise, the voice was female. It belonged to a wispy young creature with highlighted hair and braided hoop earrings, passably good-looking too, with black eyeliner ringing her large brown eyes—in short, everything seventy-five years of experience had taught him not to expect in a cabbie. He didn’t have any objection to a woman driving a cab, of course. (He recalled a flight to Miami, back in the golden era of Pan Am and TWA, when the couple seated in front of him, upon hearing a decidedly feminine welcome from the cockpit, had insisted upon deplaning.) But female cabbies were still novel to his dated sensibilities, like male flight attendants and African American rabbis, and he suddenly felt regret for dragging this girl miles into a neighboring state. It didn’t help that she looked to be younger than Maia.
“Montclair, New Jersey,” said Millard. “Mount Hebron Cemetery.”
“That’s twice the meter over the bridge,” replied the girl. Her accent was far more Scarsdale or Chappaqua than Brooklynese, bereft of the “fuggedaboutit” and “whaddayawant” of the lionized cabbies of yore. “You’re going both ways, right?”
That question—obvious as it was—hadn’t yet dawned upon Millard. “Round-trip, I guess, if you’re willing to wait thirty minutes.”
“You pay. I wait,” said the girl. She plugged the destination into her GPS. “I’m not driving anybody one way to a cemetery. I don’t need that hanging over my conscience.”
“Excuse me?”
“Think about it. Why would anyone want a one-way fare to a graveyard?”
The girl adjusted the rearview mirror—he could see her perfect orthodonture—and they eased into traffic. She proved ginger with both the accelerator and the horn. Turnin
g onto 98th Street, she nearly clipped a parked ambulance.
“I don’t know,” said Millard. “Maybe they were meeting friends with a car.”
The driver eyed him through the mirror. “That’s a good one. Meeting friends with a car.” She pounded the horn with her clenched fist and sliced across three lanes. “A one-way fare to a graveyard is like a one-way airline ticket. You don’t plan on coming back alive.”
Millard ran his index finger between his collar and his neck, and tried to sound incredulous. “You don’t mean suicide, do you?”
“You said it,” said the driver. “Not me.”
“Heavens. Do I really look like I might kill myself?”
He half-feared her answer. Maybe he was wearing his destiny on his sleeve, or giving off a scent of premature demise in his perspiration—the sort of “death sweat” that allowed well-trained cats to ferret out doomed residents in nursing homes.
“That’s a trick question,” said the girl. “Like: Have you stopped beating your wife yet? My philosophy is that we all live near the edge—and it just takes a little push to send us over.”
“Now that’s a cheerful outlook for a young lady.”
She flicked her hair. “It is what it is.”
“And may I ask where you developed such an uplifting view of the world?”
“Art school,” replied the girl. “I’m a grad student at NYU.”
“And a cabbie,” said Millard.
They shared the same alma mater, which made him feel closer to her—irrationally, because so did thousands of other people, strangers he passed on the street without notice. Besides, his NYU wasn’t her NYU, any more than his New York was Peter Stuyvesant’s or Jimmy Walker’s. The assortment of stickers plastered to the dashboard confirmed this. One read: “Men Have Feelings Too, But Who Cares?” A second asked, “With So Many Boys, Why Test on Animals?” A postcard of Rosie the Riveter, biceps flexed, guarded the glove box—as out of place beside this cute suburban kid as she might have been sipping cognac at the Yale Club. Yet there were also decals for radio stations, and bubble gum, and a photo of three schoolgirls—the driver flanked by a pair of older sisters with nearly identical cleft chins—posing behind a muddle of overfed guinea pigs in a wire cage.
“And a cabbie,” echoed the girl. “Better than being a toll collector or a sex worker. Conceptual art doesn’t go very far with the bills. Not yet.”
Her casual mention of prostitution silenced Millard. He’d reached the age where the sexuality of young women either made men lustful or nervy, and he’d unequivocally entered the second camp, perennially panicked that busty nursing assistants and almond-eyed checkout clerks might mistake routine kindness for romantic pursuit. In his day, cash-strapped coeds had paid their way as tutors and babysitters. Or maybe working the summer as a receptionist in the dental office of a well-off lantsman.
“I’m Konrad, by the way. With a K,” said the girl. “But you should call me Konnie.”
“Konrad with a K? Like Adenauer?”
The notion that the musty German chancellor and this ethereal young art student might even share the same planet struck him as somewhat implausible.
“Who?” she asked. “I’m named for my great-uncle.”
Millard considered telling her who Adenauer was, but checked himself. How could one understand the statesman in a vacuum—without a working knowledge of the Potsdam Conference and the Marshall Plan and the origins of NATO? What was required wasn’t a brief mention of the Wirtschaftswunder or Heimatrecht, or some contextualization for the Petersberg Agreement, but rather a broad survey of postwar European history, well beyond the scope of a cab ride. “Your great-uncle?” he asked.
“My parents had been planning on a boy. The obstetrician fucked up reading the ultrasound, but they’d already chosen a name—and even told my great-aunt.”
The cab snaked its way along an elevated stretch of the Henry Hudson Parkway, leaving a chorus of irate and befuddled drivers in its wake. Beyond the guardrail, the embankment dropped steeply down to the river.
“A girl named Konrad,” said Millard. “Like a boy named Sue.”
“Hey, you’re a weird one, aren’t you?” observed the girl. Her knowledge of Johnny Cash was clearly limited. “And yes, a girl named Konrad. It’s ironic, too, because my folks don’t want me driving a cab. Not a job for a girl. According to my dad, I could get raped and murdered.”
You could, thought Millard—but he didn’t say this. The expression “raped and murdered” made him think first not of sexual violence, but of CNN anchor Bernard Shaw asking presidential candidate Mike Dukakis, If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you support the death penalty? And how much he had cared—loopy as it now seemed in hindsight—whether Bush or Dukakis were elected president, although today it mattered to him, and possibly the world, about as much as the face-off between Warren Harding and James Middleton Cox. And then, on the subject of rape and murder, and of women named Connie, his thoughts drifted to crooner Connie Francis being victimized in a Long Island motel room. He vaguely recalled that Francis died recently . . . but it just as easily might have been Patti Page or Doris Day or even Rosemary Clooney. In any event, someone this girl named Konrad had never heard of.
“I like driving a cab,” said Konnie. The girl’s eyes met his in the mirror—curious, almost taunting. “I meet lots of interesting people. Some even stranger than you.”
She had not asked for his name, he realized, and he had not offered it.
“Celebrities too, especially downtown. Guess who I picked up last week. I couldn’t even believe they were really in my cab . . . .”
Or maybe Peggy Lee had died recently, he thought. Did it matter? Five decades beyond their heyday—and his—these fallen divas all seemed interchangeable. He knew it couldn’t be Eydie Gormé who’d died, because she’d passed away the same week as Isabelle.
“Seriously, mister,” said Konnie. “Guess.”
“I have no idea. Connie Francis and Kitty Dukakis?”
The girl rolled her eyes. “Famous people,” she said. “Try again.”
He glanced out the window. They were halfway across the bridge. To the south, Lower Manhattan wilted under the midday sun—the Woolworth Building peeking through the caverns, and beyond that the gulf where the towers had stood. They crossed the state line and the girl pushed a button on the face of the meter to record the double rate.
“Come on. Guess.”
She sounded peeved—like a child denied a toy. It was hard to imagine Rosie the Riveter pleading with him to play a guessing game.
“Mary Martin and Janet Gaynor?”
“What is wrong with you? Don’t you know any celebrities?”
“All the celebrities I know are dead,” said Millard. “Give me a hint.”
“Fine. They’re stand-up comedians.”
“Got it,” said Millard. “Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor.”
Konnie with a K scrunched her nose with displeasure. “Z-Cube and Snogg,” she announced. “Right here in my cab. Isn’t that awesome?!”
“On the tip of my tongue,” agreed Millard. “Z-Cube and Snogg.”
“I even took a selfie with them,” said his chauffeur.
“Lucky you,” said Millard. He wasn’t certain if Z-Cube and Snogg were male, or female, or possibly non-human. The idea crossed his mind that they might be ventriloquist and dummy like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Or animals with a trainer in tow. Now he knew how Lauren Pastarnack had felt when he’d grilled her on the Seven Sisters and Tin Pan Alley. And it served him right.
“You have heard of Z-Cube and Snogg, haven’t you?”
“I’ve seen them on TV,” he lied. “Once or twice.”
“See. Even you’ve heard of Z-Cube and Snogg,” she squealed. He tried not to take her remark as a slight. “They were working on their routine—the one about the Confederate flag at the pope’s birthday party—you know that one, right?”
“I’ve heard of it,�
�� said Millard.
He hadn’t.
“So at first they were practicing lines, going back and forth and—I don’t know if I should be telling you this . . . .”
She paused. To his surprise, Millard was curious to learn the punch line of her story, even if it involved celebrities of unknown gender and species. “Who am I going to tell?” he asked. “Who would believe me?”
That seemed to assuage her. “So they were going back and forth with the lines—and then they started making out. Right in the back of my cab!”
“Amazing,” said Millard. “Z-Cube and Snogg?”
He wondered if she understood that he was making fun of her.
They’d reached the New Jersey side of the bridge; Konnie cut short her story to navigate a constellation of ramps and merges. Not too long ago, at least by geological standards, all of this had been farmland. His mother’s brother—the one who’d survived WWI—had managed an orchard out here on Route 46. During the ’20s, affluent “automobilists” skippering Pierce-Arrows and Duesenbergs dropped in to pick their own berries. Later, after the market crashed, families in Hoover carts came scavenging for windfall apples. Millard’s own parents had visited once, shortly after their wedding, taking the Dyckman Street Ferry to Englewood; they’d returned two days later with a year’s supply of preserved quinces. Now, luxury condominiums dappled the Palisades and the fruit trees had given way to office parks.
Konnie failed to yield at the merge and came feet—possibly inches—from ramming a tanker truck. Millard braced himself against the back of her seat. “Do you know what the most amazing thing is about Z-Cube and Snogg?” she asked.
“Their names?” ventured Millard.
“They don’t exist.”
“What do you mean? I thought you gave them a ride.”
“I lied,” said the girl. “It’s part of my master’s thesis. I make up stories about things that don’t exist—stand-up comedians, sports teams, best-selling books—and then I get men like you on tape pretending that you’re familiar with them.”
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