by Samuel Shem
‘Using the SPERT.’
‘What’s a spurt?’
‘Sub-Protocol Explaining Rapid Tranquilization.’
‘Which drugs?’
‘I … I’m not sure. The SPERT drugs.’
‘All right. I know him. I’ll take care of him myself. No SPERT.’
‘Yes and I’m using the SPERT—’
I grabbed his stretcher and wheeled him into the Quiet Room to talk.
It was impossible. Thorny’s mind was racing, driven by a big motor, without much regard for whoever it was running at:
‘Toxic Henry Solini’s gone Zoe’s gone to Ecce Schl-homo! Basch’s in it for cash when I was up on my daddy’s refinery tank down in Paradis Loosiana I heard God say “the Dickheads Shalt Inherit the Earth.”’
Staring into his eyes, I saw myself unseen by him. As he continued to blast along, thrashing against the restraints, I sat on the floor, my back strangely comfortable against the harsh smooth white wall, and read his chart. He’d been arrested in Shreveport, Louisiana, after a fight in a music joint in the poor section called Ledbetter. His family had been after him ever since he’d been seen splashing fake blood on his father’s refineries near Paradis, Louisiana, on the Mississippi south of New Orleans, and then had shown up at his trust-fund executor’s house in the Garden District, badgering him for cash, having spent forty grand in ten days on a car and clothes and, they guessed, though Thorny denied it, on drugs. He’d broken into the Strand Theatre in Shreveport, a national historic opera house on whose facade was carved the motto ‘Progressive Amusement for Progressive People,’ and had recited from the stage the storm scene from King Lear. His father had been called, and had gotten a court order to commit him back into Misery.
While it wasn’t clear what had flipped Thorny out – Zoe’s abandonment of him, maybe – it was clear that he needed meds. If, as he swore on the Bible, he had not used drugs or booze on his manic trip, I knew from Malik that I had to be careful not to give him any drug that would rev up his addiction. At the minimum he needed Thorazine to cool down the manic engine, Cogentin to counter the side effects of Thorazine, and lithium. Of all the drugs I’d used in psychiatry, I had the most faith in lithium. It was a safe, natural salt that had been used for almost fifty years, and worked miracles with manics.
‘I’m going to give you lithium carbonate,’ I said to Thorny.
‘Toxic sweetheart I’m still clean and sober so don’t fuck me ober!’
‘Lithium’s not toxic. You need it.’
‘No Department of Defense babies volare that killed that sweet lady Mary Megan Scorato?’
‘No, none of them. Will you take the pills by mouth?’
‘Only from a fellow dickhead check out them shoe-zers?’
I followed his glance to his feet. His Reeboks were tied tight, the rabbit ears lying peacefully across their double knot.
‘You taught me that so I’m your patient you red-hot dickhead red on the head like a dick on a dog – deal?’
‘Deal.’ He took the pills by mouth, and I left.
* * *WELCOME TO THE* * *
* * *
* * *BEAT THE IRS PARTY* * *
* * *
* * *YOUR EXPENSES ARE TAX-DEDUCTIBLE* * *
* * *
* * *DOOR PRIZE IS A ZEPHYRILL-POWERED CHEVY NOVA!* * *
This sign greeted Jill and me at the entrance to Errol Cabot’s seaside estate. The long winding driveway through the lumpy red-streaked rocks was lined with cars, and we squeezed my old Mustang in between two tattered, seasick bushes. Loud drumming got louder as we walked toward the house, which, appearing suddenly against the empty sky, seemed as huge as an ocean liner, all wings and porches and decks and dormers and gables, shingled perfectly even over the tough angles, in classic New England fashion. The huge old mansion had been newly renovated, and the inside was less classic New England than postmodern Los Angeles. There was already a crush of people there, and Jill and I were greeted in the vast foyer by Errol and Win and two women, one a teenager of heart-wrenching beauty – Errol’s newest girlfriend – the other a plainly dressed fortyish woman whose face spoke of many battles with kids and the laundry – Win’s wife. Errol wore a baseball cap that read: MY WIFE RAN OFF WITH MY BEST FRIEND – AND I’LL MISS HIM!
Errol greeted us with enthusiasm, running his eyes over Jill’s body, and saying, ‘Women are good for two things, and one thing is for lying to.’
The place was packed, the drumming so loud that the talk had to be louder. I couldn’t hear Jill very well, which was just as well, for the drive over had been rough, emotionally. Ever since my ‘weirdness’ at her party, Jill had been more wary of me. My impotence had continued.
‘Know what really bothers me?’ Jill had said in the car. I asked what. ‘You seem so sure of yourself. You always have an answer for everything.’
‘I don’t feel sure of myself at all.’
‘You know, Roy, most people aren’t like you; they’re like me – unsure of themselves, feeling, deep down, that they deserve better than they’re getting in life, feeling that their life is a failure.’
‘Your life’s not a failure, mine is.’
‘Look, I kind of love you, but I keep getting myself into these jams with guys, these incredible love nests that empty out in the most bizarre ways.’
‘Have you thought of antidepressants?’
‘Yeah.’
‘If you want, I’ll write you a prescrip—’
‘But instead I’m going to the Galápagos. I leave tomorrow.’
‘What?’ Even with my Prozac on board, said to block the brain receptors for Rejection Sensitivity, some receptors must have still been working. ‘With that guy?’
‘Eduardo, yeah. It’s a great place to see them.’
‘The aliens?’
‘Just a bunch of rocks in the sea, and sky all around. Everywhere you look! And no-one yet has been “up” from there!’
‘Don’t go! I can’t stand it, everybody going!’
‘How sweet!’ She took my hand and slipped it up her thighs smooth as a baby’s bottom up and up to her panties but there were no panties and the tangle of welcome stuff was like an oasis and I flashed on how once in Morocco, south of the Atlas in the high Sahara, Berry and I had chanced upon an oasis called Source Bleu du Meski, all palms and shade and blue water that tasted of copper.
The drumming was coming from the living room. There, at least ten men, big and small, were crouched over drums, big and small, beating the shit out of them. Some men were barechested, some wore feathers. A few I recognized as the muscular mental health workers of the West. Against the panorama of an ocean leading all the way to Casablanca, these men seemed savage, their beating these long things between their legs a savage masturbation ritual. Coming of Age in Heidelberg? Why not?
‘Robert?’ shouted someone in my ear. I smelled perfume. Gloria, the head nurse of the West.
‘No, Roy!’ I shouted back over the drums.
‘No, Robert Bly! He says men have gotten too “soft”! They need to become “warriors.”’ Her hand was on my chest. ‘Robert says men need to get hard.’
‘By drumming?’
‘That’s one way. Want to take a look around the house?’
‘Yeah.’ I searched for Jill, but she was lost in the crush of bodies. I was pulled along by Gloria room to room, a lot of body contact between us.
The house was incredible, looking out on and being looked in at by sea horizon and reddish rock. The party was not incredible at all, more frat bash than anything else. There were a lot of men in uniform – what seemed a whole destroyer full of sailors who were ripping at the women as if they hadn’t been ashore for a year. The drug company reps were out in force, not only the lackeys passing out pills and pens and even condoms with the Glücksspiel Apotheke logo – a rose and two pointy-nosed dogs biting a crest – but also the corporate bosses, sacks of flesh with those fatty jowls and ears and blubbery necks and slits for eyes. Arnie Boz
er was there with Blair Heiler, the latter with his new flame, a red-haired young social worker. The pitiful Nash and the cute Jennifer were there too, sticking close together.
I followed Gloria upstairs and then upstairs again, the old steep stairs and her short steep skirt giving me full view of exactly what she wanted me to see. We stopped a few times to get drinks and eat things, then we stopped in the attic to catch our breath. A few others were there – several men and women were on the padded floor, embracing. The drumming, funneled up and bouncing around the sharply canted walls, was deafening.
‘Want some chocolate cake?’ Gloria shouted.
‘Whose?’
‘Union Carbide. It’s good!’
I did, and it was good, and we shouted at each other for a while and then wandered out onto the widow’s walk, where only a few other couples were. The drumming was insistent but lower down, as if in the pit of my stomach, and the view of nothing but half-moon and half-moon reflection in dark water seemed to freshen me, lighten me, and then over-lighten me, for suddenly I felt light-headed and the banister seemed to become balsa wood in my hands, friable as dead skin, and the drop down to the rocks and water scary and I backed away and Gloria backed with me and I found myself, head spinning, entwined with her in a corner under the sharp elbow of a gable, her mouth an ocean her tongue a half-moon and her hands all over me and me all over her and I felt funny not funny ha-ha but funny high from the cake.
‘What’s that raccoon doing out in the daylight?’ I asked, finding myself in an overbright chilly morning, walking arm in arm with Glo along the main road of Misery. She was pressed tightly against me, and where she pressed, her body felt hot, like a feverish baby. The raccoon was stumbling along, stopping now and then to snap at something imaginary.
‘He’s an insomniac,’ she said.
‘Or rabid,’ I said. ‘Or psychotic.’
Like a hallucination, Lloyal von Nott, Erroll Cabot, and Win – with Beef Telly of Security protecting their rears – ran toward us, stared, ran past.
What had happened? I had only sensual memories, of Gloria stripping quickly her breasts seemingly pumped up like muscles with ’roids the nipples hard as if her spare job were as a wet nurse to a day care center and then before I could make a move she was rolling her leg over mine so that I was in her almost before I knew it was her – I had the sense that she had learned this as a preemptive strike against an impotent male since you’d have to deflate quick to avoid being in there – and the rest being bliss but for its lightness, as if it never made it to the engram stage of my biochemical memory. Where this lovemaking had taken place or how we had wound up in Misery I had no idea. I must have been slipped a drug, probably in the chocolate cake. Now my brain biochemistry was having trouble clicking back in, and I tried hard to remember who had just passed us and then said out loud, ‘Von Nott and Errol and Win and Mr Telly?’ and turned and saw I was right.
And where was Jill?
We came to the Heidelbergs. Glo, now demure, said, ‘Gotta go, Roy.’
‘I’m going home to bed.’
‘Sleep tight. Can’t wait till you come in.’
Suddenly there floated into my mind a bumper sticker I’d seen just a little while before when Glo and I had been driving up to Misery:
A TISKET, A TASKET,
A CONDOM OR A CASKET
Floating away from Glo, I realized that I had taken no pre-cautions with her. Then with horror I realized I wasn’t at all horrified about contracting AIDS and being dead.
Sixteen
ONE EARLY MAY evening, the kind of misty evening whose soft twilight and scent of moist earth and easing sky makes you feel that despite everything life is worth living, I was on call. Spring brought back memories of spring the year before, with Berry in Lago del Orta in northern Italy, and the memory challenged any notion that in a year I had made progress in my life. At this very moment lovers were rowing out to the island – the tiny island with its fairy-tale castle and cobbled lanes and no cars – but I was alone, and let’s face it, when I felt anything through my drug cocktail, I was feeling so lonely and isolated that I wondered whether death could be any worse than this washed-out version of life.
That night I was taking a shortcut through the basement to pick up my beeper at Viv’s when I passed STEREOTACTIC BRAIN SURGERY: KEEP OUT and noticed that the red light was on and the sign ‘Operation in Progress’ was lit. I eased open the door and peered in at the operating room in the tiled cube that had once been a chamber of hydrotherapy.
Win Winthrop was dressed all in green, but for a red forelock thrusting out from under his shower cap like a cockscomb on a cartoon rooster. He was drilling a hole in a skull. His lips were pursed, either in concentration or because he was whistling. I went in. The sound was revolting, both because of the volume at which it sang off the tiled shower walls and because it was drilling into bone. There was a smell of burning flesh and bone that reminded me of my father the dentist. Win Winthrop, doing brain surgery on people?
But no. There is a God. Twitching under the green sheet was a leg, a dog’s leg, with a raw lesion on it, licked down to bone, festering. A dog.
Win saw me and stopped drilling. ‘Go away.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Psychosurgery.’
‘On your nephew’s dog? On Van Dusky?’
‘Gonna make him better.’
‘But what does your nephew say?’ No answer. ‘Cutting into his brain?’
‘Stereotactic. You drill just this one little hole. Needles and electric current and gamma rays. No knife. No blood. No blood that you can see.’
‘But where did you learn how to do this?’
‘Got this book.’ He pointed the drill at a big book open on the dog’s back: How to Do Brain Surgery. Volume I: Dogs.
‘What does your nephew say?’ He fired up the drill. ‘Lobotomy,’ I shouted, ‘is a crime!’
‘The Nobel Prize!’ he screamed over the scream of the drill.
‘You think you’re gonna win the Nobel Prize for lobotomy?’
‘Somebody already won for lobotomy, in 1949. We’ll win it for Placedon and Zephyrill, you watch!’
Sitting with Viv behind the bulletproof, at eight-thirty that night, I was handling calls from the outside world, and talking. Rather, she was talking. I was too depressed to talk.
‘You are really really depressed, Cowboy.’
‘You should see it from this side.’
‘Hey, I have.’ She smiled and took my hand. ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a passing phase. Those bozos in drugs would make anybody feel depressed.’
‘What are you on?’
‘On?’
‘What drugs?’
‘None, Cowboy, why?’
‘’Cause you’re happy.’
She stared at me, those blue eyes under those long false lashes under that slick forehead and beehive bouffant seeming far away. This may have been a side effect of my new drug cocktail for the night: I’d added a hit of Ritalin to my Prozac. And one of those Placedon capsules big as the class ring on Errol’s pinkie. Everything seemed tropical.
Then, there he was, gliding along on the other side of the glass, like a fish in an aquarium tank. ‘Malik?’ I said.
He glanced at us. His eyes were red. ‘Got the flu. S’long.’
He looked pale and gray. His black hair was less slicked and less sharply parted than usual, his face was glistening with sweat, and his white tie lay loosely on his purple shirt. He seemed exhausted, and for the first time ever he was moving slowly.
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
He stopped and turned back to us. ‘Y’really know how to hurt a guy.’
‘C’mon in, Lucky,’ Viv said, ‘have a cup a tea?’
‘Tea?’ He licked his lips. ‘No thanks.’ He floated away, past the edge of the bulletproof glass. I thought about going after him, but he’d told me to burn his number. I was afraid I’d be opening up something too big to ever close down
, so I just sat there.
‘You two have a fallin’-out?’ Viv asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘What about?’
I tried to get my brain to sort this out so I could tell her but it seemed stuck in neutral and I just said, ‘Hard to even remember, right now.’
‘Yeah, well it’s a bad sign, Cowboy.’
‘My brain?’
‘I was thinkin’ more of Lenny. I never once saw him leave the Misery Loves Company meetin’ early. Never the once.’
The long night on call had been hard and easy both. Hard for the number of frantic people out there calling in who, like me, seeing the splendor of the year’s May, felt mocked, still stuck as they were in the hellish February of their lives. Easy because of my Prozac’d distance from their pain. To sleep, I’d added a couple of Valium.
At four-thirty in the morning I was beeped awake to suture up a cutter on Rokitansky, Geriatrics. I felt so fuzzy from the Prozac-Placedon-Valium cocktail that to start my engine again I popped two more Ritalins as I walked up the hill past Toshiba through the dewy promise of a dawn. The Ritalins snapped me to attention long enough to suture the facial gash of the fallen geriatric, but as I walked back to the Farben I felt really weird, as if in my high Prozac cloud an alien from the planet Ritalin were speeding along creating a turbulence. My attention was deficient, my perception askew and spinning, like at a carnival when you first get off the Tilt-A-Whirl.
I found myself approaching Schlomo Dove’s door and saw that it was open a crack. I looked at my watch: five-seventeen. What the hell was he doing here?
Ever since Ike White had died and Schlomo had taken over the prestigious position of Director of Residency Training, Schlomo had always told us residents that ‘Schlomo’s door is always open.’ It never had been, so this time I pushed the door all the way open.
Across the room on the analytic couch was a naked woman on her hands and knees, her breasts hanging down, her back arched like a cat, and behind her pumping away against her so that his belly made slaps against her rump, was a naked Schlomo Dove. For a second he didn’t see me. She turned her head. Our eyes met. It was Zoe. Seeing her turn her head, Schlomo turned his. In her eyes was horror. In his, rage. The two of them seemed frozen together, a pornographic ice sculpture.