Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  The woman, like Malik, was wearing orange-tinted sunglasses. She carried a red-tipped cane. I answered Malik with silence.

  ‘Dr Roy G. Basch, meet Dr Geneva Hooevens, and her dog Yoman.’

  She was the blind woman who, at the meeting after Ike White killed himself, had stood up bravely and asked Lloyal von Nott why he was denying that Ike White had killed himself. Geneva was a large, broad woman with rich chestnut hair in braids. In her handshake I felt a delicate, iron sensitivity.

  ‘Geneva,’ Malik went on, ‘practices in the community, and also has an office here, as a member of the Attending Psychiatrist Staff. She saw one of our Thoreau patients a few times in therapy, until the parents heard how terrific the Family Unit was and stuck the girl here against her will. I was just going over her impressions.’

  ‘Yes, won’t you join us?’ Geneva asked.

  I did, and in silence listened to them discuss the case, thinking that they were talking much too pragmatically, about the manifest symptomatology – promiscuity – rather than the deeper developmental arrest around the pre-Oedipal Mother, who I knew, from family therapy, was engulfing and intrusive. I drifted downstream on my associations, until Geneva got up to go.

  ‘I guess her family saw me as not high-powered enough,’ she said. ‘And maybe they’re right. Out there in the community, in daily practice, you’re just flying by the seat of your pants – theories don’t matter much. A girl like this, well, I start to feel I’m not doing it right, just stumbling along, and that I should be reading more – but what seems to work best is just trying to create a kind of friendship. Seems to help some of them, even though it’s not in the books. The books are always written by the analysts.’

  Startled by her humility, I asked, ‘Have you been analyzed?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ she said, laughing. ‘I trained here in the sixties – it was all the rage. I even became an analyst myself. Funny you should ask. Just yesterday my husband and I went to our periodontist for some gum work. And who should I meet in the waiting room but my old analyst? And he didn’t remember me! Seven years with him, five days a week, and he has no memory of me! I was drinking at the time, but still. And as I’m lying down in the dentist’s chair – like on the couch – my mouth full of blood, I think: “Geneva, you’ve finally found something that’s more painful, less effective, and costs more than psychoanalysis!’” She roared with laughter, as did we. ‘When I was in your shoes, analysis was like the final merit badge: you had to do it, to prove you were really serious. But when I saw the analysts in action I said to myself, “Geneva, this is ridiculous. They must be joking!” But then, I found people here, good people, who believed in these theories. So I started believing in them. You have to believe in something, right?’

  I looked into her blank orange glasses. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now I see it as “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” There are good therapists who are analysts, but they’re good in spite of being analysts. The good ones unlearn it all. But you’re luckier than I was. You’ve got Malik. Good-bye.’

  ‘Are you available for supervision?’ I asked.

  ‘Me?’ She seemed surprised. ‘What have I to teach? I just try to keep it simple now. But sure. Call me if you like.’ The dog led her away.

  ‘She’s amazing,’ I said to Malik.

  ‘Terrific person, terrific therapist. How’s it going?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said guardedly, not wanting to open myself up to his criticism.

  ‘You haven’t been to the gym. You avoiding me?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘OK. Listen up. You gotta stop doing this bullshit “regression” on Zoe. She’s going down the tubes.’

  ‘No, she’s going back to her childhood—’

  ‘And she may never come back out! You don’t play around with people’s heads!’ He coughed, sneezed, blew his nose. ‘A.K. is a mindfucker. Period.’

  ‘You’ve been making a lot of mistakes yourself lately, Malik. Double-booking patients, forgetting appointments – the time you locked yourself and your patient inside your office so it took Primo half an hour to pry you out? You’ve got a few little flaws too, Malik—’

  ‘Flaws? I got character defects up the wazoo! I may be one of the most defective kids who ever tried to do this shit! I mean look! Look at me! Would you trust a guy like this with your mind?’

  I looked. Slicked-up black hair, orange glasses, sharp features – he seemed even more tight and wiry lately, sneezing and coughing, unable to shake his winter cold and yet even in winter wearing a golf shirt with a polo player with raised mallet over his heart, jeans and black Nikes. The fire was still there, but so, I associated, were the ashes. Oedipal, yes. ‘No way I would trust you with my mind, no.’

  ‘And that’s why I’m trustable.’

  ‘Because you make mistakes?’

  ‘Because I hang in with the mistake after the mistake. Things go wrong in therapy, so?’

  ‘So mistakes pollute the transference.’

  ‘Oh jeez. Things go wrong in life, kid. Remember “life”?’

  ‘Therapy isn’t life.’

  ‘In therapy or in life, it’s not just what you do, it’s what you do next. It’s not the screwups that screw up a life, it’s what happens around a screwup. We never get it right, first shot outta the box, but gettin’ it wrong and hangin’ in, we get so we care about each other. Like ballplayers on a team? Those Columbia High Fish Hawks? Blowing a big lead, and hangin’ in, hangin’ in, and then, like magic, startin’ it rollin’ and beatin’ ’em at the buzzer?’

  ‘Therapy’s different. The doctor has the experience; the patient comes for that experience – even, that wisdom. You taught me that.’

  ‘I taught you that what works is gettin’ in touch, feelin’ that “click”—’

  ‘Freud says we can never really get in touch. Because of the unconscious distortions of childhood, we’re always shouting across an unbridgeable gap.’

  ‘There ain’t no gap, kid, and you know it. You ’n’ me have “clicked,” a lot. Theory creates a gap, theory is that gap. A.K. uses the idea of a gap to justify the gap her analysis created in her – she’s a shit therapist. All her patients have terminated, except Oly Joe – who I’m trying like hell to save.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about anymore, Malik.’

  ‘Hey, Roy, I’m your buddy, remember?’

  I tried to remember, to focus on what he was asking and respond, but my mind veered and filled with a dream fragment – standing there in front of Zoe and Christine and Cherokee, totally naked, a giant erection in my hand, and—

  ‘OK,’ Malik said, ‘we can’t do this anymore. You’re gone.’ He left.

  I stood there, feeling a pain in my chest, and coughed. Malik came back.

  ‘Look. I’m having a lotta trouble lately, in this bullshit environment. Seeing you go through this, after all we’ve been through together, is rough. I’m gonna protect Zoe from you. You’re gettin’ totally into yourself, kid, you’ve got a taste of that psychoanalytic joy at being miserable, you’re thinking you ought to go under analysis yourself, and …’

  Total selfishness my mother said Roy you’ve become totally selfish and you don’t have any idea how much it hurts your father and me and she turned away weeping and my father snapped me up by the nape of the neck with an iron grip and wrassled me down to the basement smelling of rats dead for a while under the woodpile and with a rat-trap grip on my neck ripped down my pants and started to whack me with his open hand which stung but didn’t hurt all that much and my mother on the cellar steps cried out and down, ‘Not with your hand, Stu, you’ll ruin your hand for your dental practice!’ and so he whipped out his belt and whaled away and that hurt like hell like fire and despite myself and through gritted teeth I screamed and cursed him which made him whale away harder and part of my screaming was with pain and part of me was drifting off away to a place past where the clouds were to a sense of something else …

  When
I came back from my associations, Malik was gone. If we’d talked about Cherokee Putnam, the talk was already repressed.

  ‘Yesterday with Christine I couldn’t get it up!’ Cherokee was saying an hour later, in therapy. ‘All your talk about castration has ruined me. You understand? I couldn’t get it up!’ He stared at me, as if I could get it up for him. ‘She was great – “Happens to a lot of men,” she said – which made me feel worse, thinking of all the men she’d had, who I couldn’t measure up to. She tried to help – her hand, her mouth, her vagina – it just made it worse. Finally she fell asleep with her cheek on my belly. I was mortified. Staring at my limp dick lying there across my thigh and every once in a while I’d look at her – her tits, that curve where her ass rolls into her vagina?’

  I nodded, as analytically as possible.

  ‘And it would wiggle a little, like a drunk trying to get up off a sidewalk. But if I tried to do it? Soft as an old banana. “He’s fucking her in therapy,” and I can’t get it up. Makes me want to kill myself.’

  Incredible case. I proceeded to explore his impotence, his associations, fantasies, and dreams leading back through castration anxiety to oral rage at Mother and his sadness at seeing a just-issued postage stamp with a cowboy, in his words, ‘riding a stallion hot and heavy, a whip in his hand next to a covered wagon with his wife and kids to commemorate “the Cherokee Strip Land Run.’” Such was the intensity of our work that time ran out without my offering an interpretation. I said, merely, ‘Time to stop.’

  ‘But what about my limp dick? My manhood? What should I do?’

  ‘Your limp dick is a symptom of your deep conflicts. We’ll analyze them out and your symptom will vanish. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘But I never had a problem with my dick, before I met you! I’m obsessed with his dick, my dick has finked out, and I’m a worse failure than ever! Now I’m not even good enough in the saddle! If it stays soft, I’m sunk.’ He sighed. ‘You sure this is the way to go?’

  His question hung on a hook in the air, like a magician’s hankie on a finger, or a penis why not? as my own number 2 number four slid to the right.

  After he had gone I wrote on the right-hand side of the ledger:

  ‘Finked out in the saddle’ equals homoerotic oral transferential sadistic rage at distant/sadistic Father and engulfing/intrusive Mother, both.

  * * *

  Oly Joe Olaf was a kid on a mission, the only problem being that none of us knew what that mission was. Since his disastrous family therapy where Faith Baltsburg first made the mistake of telling the father and mother that there was ‘hope’ and then wouldn’t tell anybody where the bathroom was, his parents had refused to come back to therapy, and in fact had been petitioning to have him released from Thoreau, claiming that his being curled up in a fetal position was a sign of his being hurt by therapy. A.K. had used all her Freudian authority as a professor at the BMS to argue that Oly Joe’s being curled up in a fetal position was a clear sign that the therapy was working and that it would be a crime to interrupt it at such a crucial stage. Furthermore it would be impossible to let him leave Thoreau, for how could anyone survive out there in the world curled up in a fetal position? The court had awarded temporary guardianship to Misery, and A.K. was continuing her regression of Oly Joe.

  On call that night, I was paged at about eight to Thoreau, where Oly Joe Olaf, uncurled and furious, was standing at the door, threatening to run away. He looked somehow both frail and dangerous, his blond hair tentatively in a ponytail, his pasty face pimply, ugly but for his eyes. Everyone has beautiful eyes, and his were exquisite: the light blue-green of a Caribbean sea. His stocky, powerful body was ready for action, tight with Oral Stage Rage, ready to bite the breast that fed him. The door to Thoreau was never locked, which at first had seemed strange to me, since the one thing these hyper-spaced adolescents needed was clear limits. But after a while I’d seen the wisdom in A.K.’s insistence that the limits had to be set inside their heads, not outside.

  ‘I showed up for therapy with Dr Lowell.’ Oly said. ‘She said I had the wrong time. I checked – turns out I was right – she had the wrong time. But she wouldn’t admit it. She wouldn’t like say anything! And even though she didn’t have another patient then, she wouldn’t see me. She just blew me off! She’s making me crazy! Gimme one fuckin’ reason I should stay here?’

  ‘What are your fantasies about why you should stay here?’ He stared at me, and then said, quietly, ‘To wait for my ammo to arrive.’

  ‘“Ammo”?’

  ‘Fuck it. I’m out of here!’ He turned to the door, but before he could run downstairs and away, he was met by Malik.

  ‘Yo, Oly Joe!’ Malik said happily, as if meeting a long-lost friend. Malik was wearing a stupid red and black lumberjack cap with the earlappers up like Sherlock Holmes and carrying that same old basketball. ‘Runnin’ away?’

  ‘Yeah. This place sucks!’

  ‘Sucks bad!’

  Oly Joe seemed startled to hear this from Malik. ‘Y’think so too?’

  ‘Wicked bad! Fuck it’s cold out there! Cold as a witch’s tit in a brass brassiere! Got a place to stay?’

  ‘Nope. Kin I like stay with you?’

  ‘Nope. The cops would kill me for that. How ’bout we shoot some hoops?’

  ‘How’s that gonna help?’

  ‘Helped me when I wanted to run when I was your age. We’ll talk.’

  ‘I don’t wanna talk, I wanna run.’

  ‘Good idea. This place is for shit!’

  ‘Yeah. But I got no place to like go?’

  ‘Bummer. Hey – you can always run from the gym, right?’ Oly Joe nodded. ‘And I gotta shoot some hoops – this place has got me nuts! ‘Kay? C’mon!’

  They left.

  Shortly before eleven I was sitting with Viv and Primo behind the bulletproof in Telecommunications, communicating with them through silences and interpretations.

  ‘Nice suit and tie, Doc, y’get me?’ Primo said.

  ‘You have some feelings about this suit?’

  ‘Toldja,’ Viv said to Primo, as if I weren’t there with them. ‘Used to be fun too, this one. Lotta fun, Primo, remember?’

  ‘They start out fun,’ Primo said, ‘and they fall for Freud ’n’ wind up with the personality of a platypus.’

  ‘This one was such a great cowboy too! Holy cow – Hannah?’ Hannah Silver was walking slowly past on the other side of the bulletproof, looking lost and sad. ‘Why, hello, dear! What are you doin’ here at this hour?’

  ‘I’m just, um … catching up on some paperwork?’ Hannah said.

  ‘Jeez, you look down, Hannah, y’get what I’m sayin’?’

  ‘I am down.’

  ‘Love life or life itself?’ Viv asked.

  ‘Both.’ She looked at me. ‘I feel so alone.’

  ‘Cup of tea, hon?’ Viv said. ‘I’ve got herbal.’

  Hannah shook her head no and started to walk away slowly.

  ‘I’ll walk you to your car,’ I said.

  We walked along in silence. The night was brutally cold, the north wind a jillion invisible sabers, slicing up our bodies through our coats.

  As we passed the gym we looked in through the old wire-mesh windows. Malik and Oly Joe were playing basketball, one on one. Oly was awkward, Malik graceful, but the game, clearly, wasn’t about the game but about the invisible threads spinning chaotically between the two of them. Oly threw up a wild shot that missed everything and then crumpled to his knees and started sobbing. Through the window his sobs were silent. Malik retrieved the ball and came back over to him with it. Then he knelt with the boy and put his arms around him. The boy leaned against him and then into him, sobbing, like a son finally connecting with his dad, as if a big hand had drawn all the invisible theads together.

  I felt touched, but conflicted. It felt ‘right,’ but would it hurt the therapy? Was Malik acting out of his own need as much as the boy’s?

  Hannah turned and looked up
at me, her dark eyes despairing beneath those ridiculous bleached brows. ‘That’s what I need, Roy.’ She bowed her head. I put my hands on her shoulders. ‘Blair broke up with me today, for good. Said he never wants to see me again. Never. What should I do?’

  ‘Want to talk about it?’ I asked, but then my beeper went off:

  ‘Earth to ex-Cowboy, call home.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to talk, but you’ve got to go.’

  ‘Yeah, I’d better. What about your analyst?’

  ‘Ed Slapadek?’ She stood still, and I could see the struggle in her eyes, between wanting to ask for his help and fearing his response to that asking, his telling her to take responsibility for her SELF. ‘No. You better call home.’

  ‘And you go home, Hannah, y’hear?’

  ‘To nobody? Yeah, I’m going … home. You’re a good guy, at heart.’ She kissed me on the cheek and then clutched me and started sobbing.

  ‘Platypus, call your mom in Florida.’

  Hannah pulled away and fumbled with the keys to her new BMW with a bashed-in front light, making it look like a woman with a black eye.

  ‘What about calling Solini?’ I shouted.

  She stopped, thought, shook her head no, started the engine, and drove morosely down Mount Misery toward the river valley sprinkled with the lights of villages, which, in the clear arctic air, seemed like jewels in a twisted necklace.

  I ran to the on-call room, where Jill answered my knock. I was about to call my parents in Florida when she, in her peach-colored bra that held up her boobies like eggs in satin baskets, encircled me with her arms and slipped her tongue into my mouth. My fingers slipped in under the thong of her matching peach bikini. I was about to enter her when the first thing that came to mind was Cherokee’s soft dick and the second thing was A.K.’s voice saying, ‘You’re not enough,’ and the third thing was Lloyal von Nott’s voice saying, ‘If you’re not impotent yet you will be’ and my penis plummeted as if shot, a dying quail.