Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  ‘You look all Freudian!’

  Two seconds. ‘I had a consult with Schlomo Dove? He said I had to drill down to the roots of my “gay-latent” and the only way to do it was to go under psychoanalysis? I started last week with Dr Edward Slapadek?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Primo. ‘Is he outta jail now?’

  Solini jumped.

  ‘Just kiddin’, Doc.’

  ‘Hannah’s therapist?’ I asked. ‘What is this? Is Schlomo getting a kickback?’

  Two seconds. ‘“Kick … back”?’ Solini said, his brow furrowing like a schnauzer dog’s. He was taking my joke seriously. Often before he’d seemed to space out by focusing past me onto a scene in the distance, but now he seemed to have turned inside out, and focused on a scene somewhere in a vast inner distance, shutting out me and the real world entirely. It made me feel as if I didn’t exist.

  Two seconds. ‘It’s like an A-bomb has exploded in my belly? – what an association?’ He reached into his inner suit-jacket pocket and whipped out a small, leather-bound notebook with the kind of brass clasp you see on a girl’s first diary, unclasped it, slid a Cross pen from its leather loop in the binding, turned the point out, scribbled down the association, turned the point back in, slid the pen into its loop, closed the notebook, reclasped it, and whipped it back into his inner pocket. Noticing me, he asked:

  ‘You got an analyst yet?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, walking away, ‘I hear he’s pretty good?’

  Nine

  KEEPING IN TOUCH turned out not to be Cherokee Putnam’s strong suit. Since the day almost a month before when he’d told me about confronting Schlomo Dove, I’d only heard from him once, an e-mail haiku:

  Mountains misty,

  Kids nifty,

  Wife nasty.

  Cher, Gstaad

  I had pored over this, trying to decipher his emotional state, as one tries to unpack a love letter. There was a certain airy lift to the message, a Heileresque health in that ‘nasty,’ and a startling new intimacy in that ‘Cher.’ And yet the ‘nasty’ was nasty, and the overall compression, however poetic, seemed a shadowed resignation to ongoing pain, like the throb of a toothache with your dentist still dead.

  A few days before Christmas he had called me at home, something he’d never before done. The family had just flown in from Europe, and was just about to fly out the next afternoon to Aspen. He wanted to see me the next morning. ‘She’s seeing … seeing him,’ he said bitterly, ‘so I might as well see you.’

  ‘I’d be glad to.’

  When I saw him, the torment in his eyes made my heart hurt, and hurt all the more for his appearing so healthy. Winter-suntanned, every hair in place, navy-blue sweater framing his face like a Brooks Brothers ad for a handsome face in a crew-neck sweater, he was gorgeous. He said he felt like shit.

  ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Not talking was hell. The only way we communicated was in bed.’

  ‘Bed?’

  ‘Yeah, do you believe it? The sex was … animal.’ He stared at me, and in his eyes was a terrific abjection. ‘It wasn’t making love. It was fucking. Made me think of … of him.’ He sighed. ‘And here’s the worst part.’ He gulped for breath. I waited. Nothing. ‘Ah, the hell with it. I’ll just go.’

  ‘What? You can tell me.’

  His eyes shifted – he wasn’t about to tell me. ‘Christmas is a bitch,’ he said. ‘Ever since I can remember.’ He went on to talk about the Putnam Christmas ritual, where every December in Europe his father would move the clan to the Alps and conduct a series of drunken visits to drunken friends, all the terrified blond kids sent off with German nannies to run the gauntlet of the ski slopes until sundown when they’d run the gauntlet of the family dinner. Sensing that we were off track, I asked him how he’d first met Lily. He was startled, suspicious. But then I saw the startle reverse, back past his anger and suspicion, and as it moved all the way back past the birth of the first child, Hope, back to the real hope of Lily and him in love, it softened, and he smiled.

  ‘It was an arranged meeting,’ he said. ‘I had finished Yale and was living in Boston, doing Harvard Law, bored and floating. Her mother’s sister-in-law, Happy Borgmann – two n’s – knew my father’s Final Club roommate. I hated those arranged things, they never worked out, but …’ He sighed. ‘When I saw her, I was awed. She was so … innocent. Innocently lovely. Lily. Like a moist orchid.’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘Someone had given me tickets to Symphony. That night, I knew she was having the same intense attraction to me, and all the way downtown we talked and talked and we went into Symphony Hall and the lights went down and these four men in referee shirts and twirled moustachios came out and started singing four-part harmony. It was “Barbershop Quartet Night” at Symphony. With anyone else I’d’ve been mortified, but with Lily it was exactly right – we laughed and laughed, talked about what a hoot it was, how unacceptable it would be in both our families. Magic. Like a dream.’

  We sat, still, the ‘click’ between us a third element in the room. What he couldn’t know was that I’d met Berry in much the same way. Our parents, golfing acquaintances, had fixed us up, each pair bringing their child with them to Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony. I had reluctantly agreed to this, as had she. Then, that first moment, well, it was love. That sheen of innocence, yes. Cherokee looked at me, and in his eyes I saw the cloud of all the years since – the kids, Los Angeles, the Disney Studio in godforsaken Burbank with a corner office in a grand sandstone-colored building with a facade modeled after the Acropolis, each of seven columns being one of the Seven Dwarfs, crowned by a gargantuan Snow White, and now this – all this loss, of all this innocence. I felt my own looming loss, of Berry, asking myself—

  A knock at the door. We both jumped. Another knock, and then we heard the outer door open, and then the inner, and standing there was a slender woman with light brown hair cut short as a boy’s, with one eye bruised and swollen shut and the other glittering with fear and rage. Despite the black eye she was radiantly beautiful, delicately featured, a girlish face, lined. She wore jeans and boots and a fashionably worried leather jacket. A string of opalescent pearls was around her swan’s neck, a riding crop in her hand.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Cherokee cried.

  ‘He hit me,’ she said to me. ‘Did he tell you?’

  ‘You have no right to just barge in on my therapy.’

  ‘You did it to me.’

  ‘I waited until after.’

  ‘And then spent an hour with him, with my therapist?’

  ‘Yeah well I’m not fucking mine!’

  ‘Oh God!’ she said, holding on to the doorknob for support.

  ‘Hold it!’ I said, like a referee, standing between them. ‘I’m Dr Basch.’

  ‘Lily,’ she said, holding out a hand with a diamond mine on it. Her hand was slight, tentative, lost. Brave but lost.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down with us,’ I said, ‘and talk?’

  She struggled with this. Then she shook her head. ‘No. I can’t.’

  ‘Come on, Lily,’ Cherokee said. ‘It’s a chance. Go for it with me.’

  ‘Dr Dove said it would pollute the transference. No. I can’t.’

  ‘That smelly little Jew is brainwashing you!’ He looked at me. ‘Sorry, Basch, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Before this gets still more out of hand,’ Lily said, ‘I need to say to you, Dr Basch, that I don’t mind that he hit me – his father hit him, with a belt, quite a lot actually – but I do mind what he’s doing with the children.’

  ‘What? I’m doing nothing with the children!’

  ‘That’s the point. You’re withdrawn from them. And that’s the way you were with me – more and more withdrawn – before you hit me.’

  ‘I would never – never ever ever – do them the slightest harm.’ He had tears in his eyes. ‘How could you possibly think that of me, Lil?’

  She looked at h
im, feeling, clearly, his moving toward her. I knew, as did they, that her slightest movement toward him, even the slightest sign of her intent to move toward him, might tilt their lives toward each other, maybe for a long time. Such moments can, and do. I was rooting for her, hard.

  She turned and left.

  Cherokee slumped down, hands over his eyes, as if to not see what he did see. I waited. He said nothing. I said, ‘OK. Tell me.’

  ‘I was drunk, she was drunk, we argued about – God knows what now – and I hit her. I hardly remember it. I’m totally ashamed. Father never really beat me, just whacked me once or twice with his belt.’

  My father too, more than twice. Talk about terror. To be at the mercy of an enraged dentist? ‘Did he hit your mother?’

  ‘When they were drunk, sure, some.’

  ‘And your children? Hope and Kissy?’

  ‘I swear to you, never. Never in this world. Lily’s the one who loses it with them, lately. She gave Kissy quite a shake, in Italy – that’s one reason she left to come back here for therapy. You do believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me about hitting her.’

  ‘I was afraid of what you’d think of me. I would have told you, before I left. That’s why I called. I want you to know these things, Roy. But you’ve got to believe me, about the girls? Never. Do you?’

  I considered this and realized I did. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank God. Didn’t I tell you Christmas was a bitch?’

  ‘I don’t think you should go to Aspen.’

  ‘Got to. There’s a party at Eisner’s house, all my old Disney friends. Remember Eisner? Three hundred fifty million, in one year? His house is incredible – perfect – looking up a valley into the mountains, all hand-hewn wood, a mix of Adirondack Lodge and Rocky Mountain. The best house ever. The man has taste.’

  ‘This isn’t about houses, it’s about your life. And your family.’

  ‘Yeah, but Aspen is Aspen. It’s only another ten days. I’ll be back.’

  We parted with a sense of the tenuousness of our link, as if all this talk were well and good, even a serious dalliance, but Aspen is Aspen, Gstaad Gstaad. He may be getting easier to read, I thought, but – and maybe even for his sense that he’s being read more easily – he’s getting harder to change. Like us all. I was scared to let him go, to let him out there, but what else could I do, lock him up? Against his will? Fat chance.

  Christmas ads for Misery were running daily in the Crier and on TV – late at night or early in the morning to catch those with the buzz of high anxiety preventing sleep, or those with the fuzzy early-morning awakenings of the depressed. Each ad ended with ‘Our operators are standing by.’ The weather was a gold mine for the hospital. As if to mock the TV image of Christmas – those soft pillows of snow, that squeaking of new boots on the packed roadbeds, the crisp chill wishes for Peace on Earth Goodwill to Men – it was unseasonably warm. Primed for temperatures in the twenties and thirties, we got forties and fifties. It was screwy. The big banks of November snow went all runny. There were floods. Things pretty much turned to mud.

  At Misery, Buildings and Grounds were confused, splashing through the muddy lawns to hang decorations on droopy, overheated pines. With the weather so crazy – and with the ad campaigns suggesting that it was a person’s right if not duty to have a Happy Holiday – people were having a harder time staying sane. Global warming was in the air. The snowcapped peaks of the impassive shadowing mountains seemed to mock the foothill dwellers, for snow lay only on inaccessible slopes. The nearby ski areas were barren, but for a trail or two of fake snow, as tattered as the pots of pooping poinsettias in the malls.

  People flocked to Misery. The number of admissions, already high, went higher. My daily admissions moved up from an average of seven, to nine, then to eleven. In response, health care insurance denials of health care payments went higher still. Protocols were altered, loopholes in policies appeared. The daily discharges moved up from an average of eight to ten, and then to twelve. Like a parasite in the bowels of the hospital, health care insurance was making sure that, no matter how many of the mentally unhealthy were fed in, many more were purged out. A voracious animal, Misery needed constantly to be fed.

  Nash and Tunaba fought back. They spent hours huddled over the big Toshiba in their shared office, reading from right to left – from the dollar amount of the latest health insurance payments to whichever DSM diagnosis was now bankable. If suddenly insurance was paying top dollar for, say, 301.13, Cyclothymic Disorder, the big Toshiba would be reprogrammed to reprogram all the little Toshibas, so that for data I typed in that previously had led to my sweet little Toshiba laptop spewing out, say, 302.90, Atypical Paraphelia, now it would spew out, time after time like a run of luck at craps in Vegas, 301.13, 301.13, 301.13, and – wait for it – 301.13: Cyclothymic Disorder.

  On the day of Christmas Eve, I was sitting behind the bulletproof with Viv – they’d built a new bulletproof for the holiday season in the Toshiba lobby – looking out at the crush of people trying to get into Misery. The lobby was packed with people fleeing the normal world, seeking asylum. Primo Jones was doing some serious nothing, standing around, trying to control the crowd.

  ‘I ain’t so sure Christ died for this, Doc, y’know what I’m sayin’?’

  All day long, tormented by nonstop Christmas carols on the Muzak system, I had been clicking along, admitting patients to McMisery as efficiently as a kid flipping burgers at McDonald’s, making diagnoses spanning the ‘Slee-eep in Heavenly Peace’ sky from 313.21, Avoidant Disorder of Childhood, to 293.82, Organic Senile Hallucinosis; from 302.72, Inhibited Sexual Excitement, across the street to 302.75, Premature Ejaculation; and from 295.70, the dire Schizoaffective Disorder, over to the strangely enticing 312.33, Kleptomania.

  Now, with Primo for security, I interviewed a violent middle-aged Italian bricklayer with a Chief Complaint of ‘I am God.’

  ‘How do you know you’re God?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I was chosen.’

  ‘Why were you chosen to be God?’

  ‘Because I was in hell. You want proof?’ He unbuttoned his shirt. On his belly was a magnificent tattoo of The Last Supper. Clearly it had been done many years before, when what was now his belly had been his chest, and when he’d been thinner, for now it had expanded, so that Christ and the Apostles were all wearing broad grins.

  ‘What’d you think, Doc?’ Primo asked after we’d locked him up.

  ‘298.80. Brief Reactive Psychosis.’

  ‘Youse don’t think he’s God.’

  ‘He may be, but it’s not reimbursable.’

  I went to see an adolescent carrying what seemed to be a vacuum cleaner – indeed it said ‘Panasonic’ – but it was covered with aluminum foil and had a fur coat on it. Instead of the standard attachments it had a huge metal funnel which the kid kept pointing at the ceiling as he jumped around. Primo came up and started standing around, to protect me. I asked what the thing was.

  ‘Orgone accumulator,’ the kid said. ‘To catch the orgone particles. It’s homemade, but it works. I took a welding course to make it. Lotta particles during Christmas. I carry it everywhere.’

  ‘And what do people say when they see it?’

  ‘They say, “Oh I see you’ve got your orgone accumulator with you.” What the hell do you think they say?’

  Primo and I rolled eyes, and Primo said, ‘I got the diagnosis, Doc. What you got there is a WEFT.’

  I asked, what was a WEFT?

  ‘Wrong Every Fuckin’ Time. What that kid needs is to stick ’im in a clothes dryer and keep feedin’ in the quarters.’

  In the waiting room was the kid’s shrink, a Reichian. I thought he might help me to understand what was going on, but he too was holding a vacuum cleaner, in this case with the funnel reversed, so that the narrow end was pointing at the ceiling like a gun. ‘It’s a cloudbuster,’ the man said. ‘Whenever I see that kid, my body armor tightens up. I’ve been get
ting Rolfed, myself.’

  ‘Now I can die happy, Doc,’ Primo said. ‘Now I’ve seen everything.’

  Not quite, for next was a dazzling young woman wearing a ‘God Made the Irish Number One’ button, dressed provocatively for the heat of summer, her Chief Complaint: ‘Insurance put a rider on my breasts but Jesus never fails.’

  I finished her up and headed off to the Farben for Lloyal von Nott’s Christmas reception. On my way out I was buttonholed again by the Woody Allen look-alike in the tweed sport coat and tie, the man named Sedders who didn’t know how suicidal he really was and who was trying to get in touch with the doctors of his HMO – Healthycare Inc. – to certify his admission to Misery.

  ‘I finally got through to a doctor!’ he said excitedly.

  ‘Great. I knew your persistence would pay off.’

  ‘I said that if he didn’t authorize my admission to Mount Misery before the end of the year – next week – that I was going to kill myself, and that my lawyers were aware of this fact.’

  ‘Good thinking. When you mention lawyers, doctors start listening.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, but then he said, “You’ve been saying the same thing to our allied health professionals for several weeks now, and you haven’t even made a suicide gesture, let alone an attempt. It doesn’t sound all that much like an acute emergency anymore.” I told him that it was, but he said, “I have to put you on hold.” I waited for almost half an hour, but he never took me off hold. Now what do I do?’

  ‘Call back, start out sounding rational and then start screaming.’

  ‘Okay. Merry Christmas! Oh God! Now I’ve offended you, I’m sorry!’

  ‘How have you offended me?’

  ‘You’re Jewish, right? You don’t believe in Christmas.’

  ‘Who does anymore, I mean really?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He squirmed and looked away, the way men do when they are about to try to make contact. ‘Dr Basch, you’re turning out to be my only friend.’

  Dixie ‘the Barracuda’ dove loomed over her man in the receiving line, her holiday dress and hat sporting such luxuriant fruits that she seemed a living advertisement for a Chanukah cruise up the Amazon. The Misery Christmas reception was traditionally held in the Danebiel Ballroom, named after a former chairman of the board of Misery who had the IQ of a paper clip and a fortune made out of nothing, in stocks and bonds. Lloyal von Nott had been his therapist, from midlife crisis and divorce through an Alzheimer’s so fierce that for years he referred to Lloyal as ‘Dear Uncle Caleb.’ Such was his love for Lloyal that upon his death he left a pile of stocks and bonds to Misery, on condition that his name be put on a ballroom.