Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  But Hannah was staring at Solini now. She took his hands, and, eye-to-eye, in a high, Joan Baez voice, she sang to him from Bob Marley’s ‘Trenchtown Rock.’

  Henry used to lead off his act with it.

  ‘I hear you, H-babe? I’ll be thinkin’ of you in Wyoming, and we’ll see which way it goes?’

  Like thousands of others before me, I went to Schlomo Dove the next day to make a match for me with the right psychoanalyst.

  We met in his office in Misery, just down the hall from the office of Lloyal von Nott. Seeing him in person, so runty and ugly, dressed in a rumpled old suit and stale shirt and no tie and wearing a big button that read, TRUST ME I’M A DOCTOR, I felt more certain about what I realized I’d finally settled on in the Cherokee matter: there was no way that Lily Putnam, the tall, auburn-haired, and beautiful WASP princess, could have allowed herself to be fucked even once by Schlomo, in therapy or anywhere else, the confirmation of this being the way that Cherokee’s paranoid obsession was playing out exactly as Freudian theory dictated, at its deepest level being simply the repression of homosexual desires for the penis of Father and the fantasized penis of Mother and of the screen memory of catching Aunt Vic and Uncle Hap going at it on a tattered rug in the servants’ quarters of the Putnam chalet in St Moritz at age six, which happened to be the exact same age as little Kissy, when Cherokee first wandered into Misery last July. It was like in golf when, once in the middle of a miserable round, you hit a shot dead-solid perfect.

  ‘It’s about time!’ Schlomo said, putting down the watering can. ‘Nu, Schlomo is putting down the watering can, and Schlomo is not smoking the cigar. Place your money nice on the desk and let’s kazatsky!’

  I plunked down $150 cash for the twenty-minute session, sat across from him and told him about myself, my impotence, and my father’s death.

  ‘And what do you feel, Roy G. Basch?’ Schlomo asked, picking up a rather black-skinned banana and starting to peel it.

  Rather than feeling what I was feeling and telling Schlomo, I found myself watching him peeling and then looking away at all the other bananas in the room, bananas at all stages of ripeness, from a green bunch on the windowsill to perfect yellows on his couch to some yucky black-splotched babies on the floor under his desk like the one he was messing with.

  ‘Tell Schlomo Dove what you feel, hmmm?’ He took a bite. It was obscene.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I feel scared you’re gonna throw that banana in my lap.’

  ‘Ho ho,’ he said, ‘ho ho. No, no, Roy Basch, for to build the therapeutic alliance, Schlomo will now put his banana on his desk. See?’ He did so. ‘Nu, so let’s do some feelings?’

  I tried to come up with feelings but came up dry. ‘I’m coming up dry.’

  ‘Not even Roy Basch sad and lonely? Tell Schlomo, about sad and lonely? You can tell Schlomo.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You’re like the sun, giving out your warmth to other people, leaving yourself cold.’

  This sounded good, but I remembered that it was word for word what he had told Hannah at her consultation with him.

  ‘For this,’ I said, ‘I’m forking out a hundred and fifty bucks?’

  ‘Oy, do you have Oedipal!’ Schlomo said. ‘You got early infantile up the wazoo! And does Schlomo Dove have the guy for you!’

  ‘Please, not Ed Slapadek. I can’t take the Slapper!’

  ‘No, better.’

  ‘Tougher?’

  ‘Tenderer. Adolf Zement Shaper. Former head of the Boston Institute. You’ll love him. Then hate him. Then love him maturely and terminate. Have fun. And watch that erotic transference! Here’s his number. Bye-bye now!’

  Despite everything revolting about Schlomo, I left feeling a little sad. Unlike Arnie Bozer, unlike Lily Putnam, Schlomo had not offered to keep me for himself. Compared to Arnie Bozer, I’m a reject? It was surprisingly hard to take.

  A few days later I found myself on the couch on the top floor of the institute in Boston, talking about my dick and my father – my not having feelings in one, or about the other.

  Adolf Zement Shaper was a roly-poly old man with a round face and hair so white it looked like a photo negative of what he must have looked like as a young man. He greeted me warmly with a dynamite silence and motioned me to a couch. I lay down and started free-associating. Suddenly I heard him clear his throat. My eyes hit my watch: only fifteen seconds left? Where had time gone?

  ‘You come in with seams,’ he said, ‘and you go out seamless.’

  Thirteen

  CIVILIZATION AND ITS discontents presents a bleak vision of human life. Freud says that we humans are beasts, driven by sex and aggression. These bestial libidinal drives are barely and poorly sublimated to ‘civilized’ life. Bestiality is the best we can do. Bleak, yes, but accurate. Read the newspaper, see what birds of prey we are. I now understood the depression I saw on the faces of those in psychoanalysis. Bleakness demanded it.

  Henry took Hannah’s departure hard. He was completing his rotation on Toshiba, the Admissions Unit, and he was deeply depressed. He walked around with the kind of trudge that I’d noticed in the schizophrenics medicated to their eyeballs in the Heidelbergs. He now had tics in both eyes.

  ‘Isn’t Ed Slapadek helping?’ I asked one day.

  ‘The Slapper’s digging into my gay-latent, but I don’t feel gay – don’t feel nothin’ below the waist? I’m digging into gay-latent with all my patients?’

  ‘What? You think they’re all gay-latent too?’

  ‘Why not? They’re all very terrified of gays, having me as their therapist?’

  Was Henry going crazy or just going through a normal psychoanalysis?

  One day he exploded. He assigned each of his twelve Toshiba admissions a DSM diagnosis from the section on ‘Psychosexual Disorders,’ starting with 302.50, Trans-sexualism, through 302.10, Zoophilia, and 302.90, Atypical Paraphelia (‘Telephone Scatologia – lewdness’), ending with 302.00, Ego-Dystonic Homosexuality. Nash Michaels and Jessica Tunaba found him diagnosing a Saudi prince, reading back to him as he copied out from the DSM:

  ‘There is a sustained pattern of homosexual arousal that the individual explicitly states has been unwanted and a persistent source of distress …’

  Primo brought Henry to my house. We drank and talked all night long. I said that in my own analysis I too was feeling depressed.

  ‘Yeah, analysis kills your health, physical and mental?’ he said. ‘I’m hangin’ on by a threat?’ He stopped, and stared inward, in horror. ‘Holy shit what a slip? Man, I am deeply deeply depressed?’

  In the morning he insisted I drive him to Slapadek’s house for his regular appointment, to – his words – ‘fight fire with fire.’ I waited in the car for him to come back out. He never did. I rang the bell but no-one answered.

  The next day Henry did not appear. Lloyal von Nott met with Win, Arnie, and me. We assumed it was to talk about Hannah’s and Henry’s being gone, but he ignored this and talked about the Misery Capital Campaign Luncheons. Later we got a memo from Schlomo Dove, Director of Training, saying that Henry Solini and Hannah Silver were both taking leaves of absence and we three would now be on call every third night, to fill in.

  Soon I was exhausted, even more irritable and vulnerable. But my patients continued to respond to my psychoanalytic method. I continued to see Zoe and Cherokee five times per week. Like me and as expected, they were both deeply depressed and following A.K.’s predictions perfectly, though they refused to regress from Genital Stage to Oral Stage, clearly a problem of my technique, not Freud’s theory. A.K. said that it was because I was still so neurotic and only beginning my analysis that they were still stuck, holding on to their genitals: Cherokee not being able to get it up, and Zoe not being able to give up trying to seduce me. In general they were doing Freud. It was Oscillator City, and I’d begun to think I’d started to understand it a little. Listening in the ‘material’ for my patients’ unconscious perception of my father’s
death, I heard all kinds of referents. It was astonishing to me, just how clearly they unconsciously were picking up my unconscious.

  My sessions with Christine, only once a week, seemed shallow, skimming the surface of Cherokee and his flaccid penis.

  A.K. was warming to me even more. She talked about her own work with Oly Joe Olaf, using it to give me helpful hints such as, ‘If, for a long time, you don’t say anything at all, then when you actually do say something, you have incredible power.’

  ‘Slashing in like a Cutlass Supreme?’

  She smiled and nodded wisely. ‘With Oly Joe, I am trying to build up a stronger baby version of himself. I send him fond letters and write him nice notes in children’s books like Goodnight Moon and Where’s Spot? She took down one of her dozens of leather-bound ledgers, opened it and took out a Hallmark greeting card, with a note in it:

  ‘An analyst is like a mom,

  Read this over and you’ll feel calm.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘Very creative.’

  ‘Yes. In those locked-up binders are my notes on the case. Six hundred seventy-one pages of process notes so far. Sex and aggression. Understand?’

  ‘Do I ever,’ I said. ‘I am one sick puppy.’

  ‘Good. Last weekend I myself went to a Tavistock workshop in the Allagash Wilderness and …’ She paused, then said, with pride, ‘I was psychotic!’

  ‘I’m half psychotic all the time! And now I’ve got all these symptoms too.’ I told her how, after only a few weeks of analysis, I had developed scary psychosomatic symptoms: exhaustion, splitting headaches, recurrent flu, a booming flatulence, and night terrors. ‘I’ve never been so depressed in my life.’

  ‘Good, good,’ she said, nodding wisely. ‘You’re getting warm.’

  She invited me to come as her guest to the annual New England Regional Defense-mechanism Congress – NERDCON – held every April in Boston and always on the same topic, ‘Me, Myself, and I: Psychoanalytic Theories of Yourself.’ A.K. would be presenting a new paper, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the Oedipal Oscillator.’ We also made a firm date, at the end of the month, during my last week rotating on Thoreau, for tennis and dinner at her home.

  Most incredible to me was not her warmth and openness in our supervisory sessions, but rather how she still treated me like shit in public, with silence and contempt. Our secret was being kept within the four walls of her office, held by us both. No-one knows what goes on behind that therapist’s closed door.

  My own analysis with Adolf Zement ‘Poppa Doc’ Shaper – my nickname for him – was going like gangbusters. I would come in, he would nod me toward the couch, I would lie down and begin to free-associate and fantasize. He would say nothing until the end. Then he’d utter soothing phrases like, ‘We are all messes, trying to help bigger messes,’ or ‘It’s amazing how many people go home and cry into their pillows at night.’ I looked forward to my sessions and felt incredibly worse when I left them. Things were going extremely well.

  Poor Blair Heiler. All those months chasing around the world to be at a conference where Renaldo Krotkey would actually show up, and now while Blair was off in South Africa – ‘Black and White Borderlines After Apartheid’ – listed on the program just below Krotkey himself, Renaldo was sitting right here on Mount Misery, watching a Family Analysis on Thoreau.

  He had appeared by surprise, a short fireplug of a man with a head like a bowling ball covered with shorn red hair, and a horribly pocked face. He wore a European-style suit with a bow tie that made him look like a waiter in a kosher deli, and he had a German accent. He had come with a European-style woman whom he referred to as ‘My amanuensis, Pensilena Teiche.’ She wore a short black leather slit skirt and matching leather vest over a bare chest. Her hair was as blond as my hysteric Christine’s. Despite the prominent No Smoking signs, both chain-smoked Gitanes from black and silver holders.

  There was an electricity in the room as Lowell greeted Krotkey, a jolt, I associated, much like the moment Freud met Jung. I felt nervous as hell, for Krotkey would be observing my Family Analysis of Zoe. Malik was there too. A.K. herself would be taking the place of Faith Baltsburg, who, regressing hard, had been found the day before weeping hysterically in the safe-deposit vault of the Rank Bank. A.K. now had a lot of free time, for all her therapy cases had left AMA – Against Medical Advice – except for Oly Joe Olaf.

  Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

  A.K. and I entered the room and took our seats at either end of the semicircle of Zoe’s family – father, mother, and, for the first time, her siblings: older sister Marion, a mother of six married to someone at Morgan Stanley and living in Darien; and older brother Butler, a senior vice president at Chase, living in the East Eighties, and still single. The first part of the session went well, as her sadistic father joined her engulfing mother in saying how much worse Zoe was. She wore her petite flowered dress, and was rocking seductively in her chair.

  A.K. had been puzzled by Zoe’s not regressing from the genital. Finally she solved it. Zoe’s old friend Thorny was visiting her every day after work. They talked about – in Zoe’s words – ‘everything!’ including what was going on with me in her therapy. A.K. said that my allowing Thorny to visit her on Thoreau was diluting the transference and I had to prohibit their meeting. I had mixed feelings about doing this. Thorny was doing well, going to AA, working at a recycling plant. All year long they had helped each other out. They were best friends. But A.K. had insisted, and had written the order herself that prohibited Thorny from entering Thoreau. Ever since, Zoe had been enraged with me – which A.K. pointed to as a glimmer of movement toward the oral, the ‘tit tucked away.’

  Now, Zoe’s brother and sister, Butler and Marion, joined the happy chatter of the family, which all of them, laughing, described to A.K. and me as ‘just us Cranky Yankees.’ They chatted and laughed as if they were sitting not in a mental hospital but a private club, laughing and chattering easily in those polite shallow deflections of thousands of cocktail parties and balls and benefits the family had absorbed to make sure that nothing deeper or even deep ever got said. A.K. and I held to a tight, top-drawer silence.

  Finally Zoe said, ‘Butler, you fucked me when we were kids.’

  Butler’s hand went to his neck. ‘What?’

  ‘You fucked me – first under the dock, and then all over. Don’t deny it.’

  ‘You’re crazy. You are nuts.’

  ‘What’d she say?’ asked Father, who’d forgotten his hearing aid.

  ‘Nothing, darling,’ said Mother. ‘Children? Quiet.’

  ‘Prick!’ Zoe shouted. ‘You ruined my life! There’s a child buried in our backyard up in the Adirondacks! Dr Basch? Tell them!’

  All eyes were on me. Pressured to speak, I was terribly conscious of the great Krotkey and the awesome Pensilena and the rest of the team watching from behind the mirror. I glanced at A.K. She was glaring at me, sending a clear message to me: Don’t Say Anything. I gritted my teeth and crossed my legs.

  ‘What’s wrong with you? You never stick up for me anymore? You prick!’

  ‘What’d she say?’ the father asked. No-one said what she’d said. ‘Dr Lowell?’ he said, turning slowly toward A.K. ‘Might you not give us some advice, on the method to best handle her, at this time?’

  ‘She won’t say anything, Daddy,’ Zoe said. ‘She’s the biggest prick around!’

  A. K. Lowell cleared her throat. I glanced at the clock: eight seconds to go!

  ‘And is it not possible that Zoe’s rage at you is your rage at her?’

  ‘What?’ the father asked. ‘I didn’t hear. Could you repeat th—’

  Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

  I followed A.K. out. Zoe screamed, ‘Cocksuckers! Assholes!’

  ‘What?’ Father asked, and then, louder and louder, ‘What what what?’

  I felt good about my not saying anything, and about A.K.’s saying only one thing. I sat next to A.
K. in the conference room, expecting to be showered with Krotkey’s praise. Sure enough, the little fire hydrant rose immediately, his face red. He shouted:

  ‘What the hell were you two doing in there?’

  My heart went ga-thunk. I looked to A.K. Her face was ashen.

  ‘You have to intervene with these people, you have to interpret everything, at every juncture. You can’t let them get away with that kind of aggression. Gott in himmel!’

  ‘They are here,’ A.K. said, voice trembling, ‘to listen to each other—’

  ‘The hell they are! They are here to listen to you. Like you are here to listen to me. You can bet that Professor Blair Heiler wouldn’t have sat there like a … a …’ Krotkey’s eyes went back and forth between us, and then settling on my own eyes, he said, ‘like a weich putz! Blair Heiler would have confronted them, gotten all that anger out sooner, worked it through better!’

  ‘Are you telling me,’ A.K. said angrily, ‘that there are empathic breaks in my therapy?’

  ‘You betcha!’ Krotkey seemed to have only one volume setting: high.

  ‘Have you been talking to my ex-husband?’ A.K said.

  ‘Cunt,’ Krotkey averred. One of his famous crudities. He handed his spent Gitane in its holder to Pensilena Teiche for reloading.

  Others now joined in. To my surprise there was no talk of the Oscillator but a lot of talk about our failure to confront the aggression. Heiler Theory of Confrontation was held up as a model of what we should have done.

  ‘Dr Krotkey?’ It was Malik, standing up. Krotkey swiveled his bowling ball head, like the turret of a tank. ‘I wanted to ask you about the abuse?’

  ‘Speak!’ Krotkey shouted, rising to his feet.

  ‘Zoe says she was sexually abused by her brother. In private, her sister has corroborated this to me – she witnessed it, and the sisters talked about it years ago. Studies by Judy Herman, Diana Russell, and others show that over seventy percent of female inpatients have been sexually and/or physically abused.’