Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  I walked out into the living room. Something big smashed into me.

  ‘Outta da fuckin’ way, Jack,’ someone shouted in my face, ‘don’t ever get between a man and his beer.’ Stench, of sweat and beer breath. A bloated flesh balloon with yellowing skin and puffy red slits for eyes. A drunk, wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed: GOD MADE THE IRISH NUMBER ONE. He walked away.

  I realized why I had been so reluctant, with Geneva, to go along with all this smarmy hope, this AA propaganda. In my medical training, drunks and addicts were the worst. I’d learned to hate them. They were admitted deathly ill. We fought tooth and nail to take care of them. When they were better they said ‘Fuck you!’ and went out to drink and drug again. Drug addicts, in addition to being unreachable, had learned a hundred ways to dupe you, to get drugs out of you, one scam after another. The feeling is that you are working flat out using all your years of education and all your mental discipline and manual dexterity to help people who will not help themselves, who in fact seem hell-bent on destroying themselves and making you and their families suffer in the process. Eighty-five percent of violent crime is committed by people on alcohol or drugs. Every morning’s newspaper tells another horrific tale. Ask any doctor: these are not human beings; these are monsters.

  Watching this cretin assault the coffee, I was filled with loathing. I drank too, and I’d taken some phenobarb, but I had stopped. I wasn’t driving boozed up full-speed down the interstate the wrong way, smashing into good folk doing everything right, killing whole innocent families like the Bumblefucks and walking away with a few scratches, soon to drink and drive and kill again. If I could control it, why couldn’t they? Because I had some moral fiber, and because they were the scum of the earth. So don’t give me this ‘I’ve got a disease’ bullshit. You’re still responsible. Me, help them? You must be joking. Where was the touch of the Divine in this shitbag?

  I fled, driving down the hill with the windows open to the chill daffodil breeze, directly to The Misery. My detox from the phenobarb had left me feeling shaky, and two vodka tonics in the comfortable ‘morning in a barroom’ ambience put me right. I bought some sugarless breath mints and drove back up the hill to Misery to see my patient Zoe.

  * * *

  Who did not show. I sat there waiting, sucking one mint after another, staring out the window down to the tennis court. Finally, with only a few minutes left, Zoe arrived.

  Ever since she had shown up that night at my house, she had avoided meeting with me. Now I saw her with new eyes: tall, slender, straight-nosed, light brown hair cut short – all tending toward boyish. She looked like a young Lily Putnam. She was dressed in rumpled jeans and a bulky sweater. She was embarrassed to be there.

  We spoke like slight acquaintances, about the weather, about her concern for Thorny, who seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. ‘It’s hard to see me again,’ I said, ‘is it?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Can we talk about it?’

  ‘Not much time left.’

  ‘I can stay later.’

  ‘Oh great,’ she said sarcastically. ‘That’s how Schlomo started out too. Gave me extra time one night. Because I was “special.” Puke City. Look, I know that you think I should do something about him, but like it’s not that easy. I’m a big girl. I can take responsibility for what I did.’

  ‘You were incredibly vulnerable, after what happened on Thoreau. A. K. Lowell made us all vulnerable. For my part, well, I want to tell you that I’m sorry. I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Accepted. Time’s up.’ She got up and went to the door. ‘Everybody makes mistakes,’ she said. ‘So Schlomo made one. Big deal.’

  ‘Not just one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Since we talked, I’ve talked with another woman patient who told me that he sexually abused her.’ Zoe stared at me, her mouth open in a little O. ‘Will you meet with her?’ I asked. ‘I’ll be there, if you want.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t believe you’

  I took out a notebook in which I’d written down what Lily Putnam had said, and started to read. ‘“Schlomo told me, ‘It’s your WASP upbringing. This analysis will free you up. Affairs are good, a good good thing. Get in touch with your grief, your tsouris—’”’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Will you meet with her?’

  ‘No way,’ she said. ‘If I can’t feel even a little special, with a little self-respect, I might as well be dead.’

  She walked out. I sat there feeling defeated, staring at the tennis court covered with billowing curtains of rain. I glanced down at my junk mail:

  Sanctuary of ISAAC and RACHEL for Above-Ground Burial

  Act Before July 1 and Avoid the Price Increase

  ‘If not now, when?’

  Why wait to go shopping on the worst day of your life?

  Shouts, screams, bangings outside my door. I ran out. Down the hall, Mr Beef Telly and another Security man had cornered Solini’s reggae man. He was huddled in a heap, one arm wrenched behind his back in a half nelson being tightened by Security. He screamed in pain.

  ‘Solini?’ the man cried. ‘Solini!’

  Little Hawk opened his door, took in the situation, looked at me and winked. We ran down the hall.

  ‘Let him go,’ Henry said to Mr Telly.

  ‘Trespassing. Eviction from Toshiba. I have my orders.’

  ‘He’s a patient of mine.’

  ‘No he ain’t.’

  ‘Henry,’ I said, ‘let’s go for it!’

  ‘Far out!’ the little dry cleaner said, crouching into a judo posture.

  We piled on top of Security, hitting at him and throwing him off Solini’s reggae man. I heard Mr Telly at my elbow calling into his walkie-talkie for reinforcements. I turned and smashed into his lapels with my two fists and lifted him up bodily and ran him across the hall and slammed him against the wall, knocking the breath out of him. His walkie-talkie fell squawking to the rug. I drop-kicked it down the corridor. Henry had karate-kicked out the other Security, who was lying there groaning, cupping his nuts.

  We raised up the reggae man and walked with remarkable slowness into the restless lively rain.

  ‘So what’s up, Carter-babe?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Doc Malik,’ he said. The smell of cheap wine on his breath hung in the moisture all around us. ‘The doc needs help.’

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Follow I.’ We did. Carter plucked his boom box. Out came Bob’s ‘Cornerstone.’ He sang along using his own translation from Psalm 118: ‘“The stone which the builders refused is become the main cornerstone.”’

  We walked into the Misery woods, and were soon sheltered from the hail of rain by the high spruces and cedars and pines. The wetness freshening the pine needles brought to my mind the image of the suburban Jewish bathrooms of my youth. Under our feet the dirt was springy and welcoming. Watching the tiny scion of Ideal Dry Cleaners jiving along in front of me, the gold earring back in his ear, his hands and feet rolling to the Marley, made me mimic him, and in my jiving I realized how dull and dead I had become in these months, renouncing dancing, denying mere life and mere woods and mountains pulsing with streams and rivulets. My obsession with shrinking and myself had been a weird denial of the act of living my life.

  We walked on, the trail that mossy and riverly flow over rock and roots embracing rock like claws, where fallen decaying trees nourished new red roots, spicy leaves, leafy ferns, and serious mushrooms, up hills I hadn’t known were there and through miniature valleys with streams overflowing their banks and even a waterfall, ionized and resplendent. I hadn’t realized Misery was so immense. Like settlers fearing animals and natives, I and other shrinks had stayed close to the buildings. Soon we were soaked through. Seeing Solini’s thinning black hair plastered to his bulging skull, his shirt plastered to his back so that his black hairiness showed through like fur, watching him sing and dance along happil
y, I joined in, feeling happy too. ‘“The stone which the builders refused is become the main cornerstone.’”

  We danced down the spongy path into another stretch of old-growth forest, and there, amidst the high spruce, was a dead campfire banked up with litter: empty beer and wine bottles, styrofoam cups and spoons, chicken bones, a Saran Wrap box, discarded empty bags of Korn Curls, Mars bars. Beside the campfire was a snappy bright blue tent with a Hebrew logo in white upon it.

  Carter the reggae man stood aside, nodding toward the tent. We went in.

  A stench of stale clothes, whiskey, beer, old vomit. Curled in a corner was Malik. He was wearing a filthy short-sleeve white shirt and jeans. One foot was bare and on the other was a muddy Nike. He was snoring.

  ‘Malik?’ I said. No response. ‘Malik.’

  ‘Yo, Malik!’ Henry said, louder.

  We bent to him and shook him, and with disturbing slowness he awoke. He stared at us as if in disbelief, coughed once, and closed his eyes again.

  ‘Come with us,’ I said to him.

  ‘Get out of here.’

  ‘Hey, man, you can’t do this.’

  ‘Get away.’

  ‘Listen to us—’

  ‘Get outta here!’ he snarled, sitting up and throwing us both back so we wound up sitting on our butts, facing him, our shoulders curved in by the canvas of the tent, our heads close. He was a horrible sight: thin, dirty, his eyes bloodshot and his cheeks streaked with lines that may have been dirt or may have been the tracks of dried tears. He squinted at us, and coughed again.

  ‘You need help,’ I said.

  ‘“Help”?’ Malik stared at me. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word.’ He lay down and covered his head with his arms. Henry and I looked at each other, got up, and went out through the tent flap. We stood in the clearing.

  ‘Think we can like carry him back?’ Henry asked.

  ‘No. Not with him fighting us. There’s got to be another way.’

  ‘What, man?’

  ‘I don’t know. But Viv will.’

  With Carter as our guide, we walked back out through the woods.

  Viv knew to call Malik’s sponsor George, who called right back and came right over. George was Malik’s ex-patient who’d founded the Misery Loves Company meeting.

  ‘We’ve got to twelve-step him,’ George said.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Go get him.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and we got up to go.

  ‘But I gotta get someone else to help,’ George said, dialing a number.

  ‘Aren’t us three enough?’ Henry asked.

  ‘I need another drunk,’ George said. ‘You never go and try to bring back a drunk alone. You go with another drunk.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause if you’re alone with an active drunk, you may just join in. I’ll call Frankie. He’s workin’ on the East. He’ll come right over.’

  George called Frankie and he came right over. He was a heavyset man who looked like armies of bottles and cigarettes and frying pans and women and policemen and lawyers had marched across his face, for many years. George and Frankie popped up their umbrellas like popping open beer cans, and as the light was fading from the rain we all walked silently back into the woods, to the campground, and up to the tent.

  George and Frankie went in, and Henry and I waited with Carter. We waited so long that even the Marley got stale, and we turned it off. It got dark. We lit the campfire. Carter sucked at a bottle of Red Dog. Through the rain sounds we sat quietly, listening to the strangely gentle murmurs of men’s voices inside the tent and the songs of bedding birds and maybe even an owl.

  Finally, Frankie came out, and then Malik, and then George. Malik was unsteady on his feet, swaying and bumping up against the two big men, like a boy with tribal elders. He seemed surprised at the sight of the three of us sitting around the spitting campfire on our haunches like assimilated Native Americans trying to recall a few lost tribal rites.

  ‘How are you?’ Malik asked.

  ‘Not bad, man,’ said Solini, ‘and you?’

  ‘Not good. I’m dying.’

  ‘What?’ I cried out.

  ‘Shit!’ Solini said.

  ‘I’ve got lung cancer.’

  ‘How bad?’ I asked, knowing that lung cancer is all bad, just death, and goddamnit it wasn’t fair – Malik never even smoked.

  ‘Bad enough,’ Malik said. But then he smiled, he actually smiled, and went on, ‘But not bad enough to drink over. Let’s go.’

  ‘Where to, man?’

  ‘Heidelberg East.’ He took a step, and fell down into the mud. It was pitiful. We rushed to help him to his feet. He was too weak to walk. We carried him out of the woods.

  Insurance coverage for Misery residents-in-training reflected the hatred Lloyal von Nott had for having any residents at all, and was as bad as was allowed by law. With a DSM of 305.02, Alcohol Abuse, Malik would be able to stay for only eight days. If we could make up a few more DSM diagnoses and slip them past the flunky docs and pimply drones of insurance, Malik could stay longer. For a stay in a psychiatric hospital, cancer didn’t count. For a stay in a real hospital, cancer was a pretty good diagnosis to have. As Malik put it, crumpling into a chair on the ward that night:

  ‘I could probably stay till they treated me to death.’

  ‘Be with you in a second,’ I said, leaving to make up a chart for him.

  ‘Yeah, sure. You doctors are all alike.’

  As I put together his chart, I had a sense that something was terribly wrong: I would be Malik’s doctor? How could I make the shift from seeing him as my teacher to seeing him as my patient, and in a mental hospital that he had taught me was dangerous to your mental health? I stared down the hallway at the little group: Malik was sitting between George and Frankie, his head in his hands, his whole body shaking. From a chill? Fear? Could he be weeping? Solini was in motion before them, rolling and dancing, wiping his eyes as if crying. Something about the four of them, sitting there together in the dark lap of grief in a corner of that brightly lit hallway, helped me to move.

  I stood in front of Malik and said, ‘I’ll have to admit you.’

  ‘Shhh,’ he said, holding his head as if I’d shouted at him. ‘Whisper, ’kay?’ I nodded. He paused. ‘I ain’t sure I’m gonna stay.’

  ‘Malik,’ George said, ‘you are gonna stay. Right, Frankie?’

  ‘Right. Turn it over, Malik. Right?’

  Malik grunted something that did not sound like agreement.

  ‘Where do you want him, Doc?’ George asked.

  ‘There’s no need to do a formal interview,’ I said, ‘just bring him—’

  ‘You gonna be my doctor?’ Malik said savagely. ‘Or you gonna fuck around? ’Cause if you’re gonna fuck around I’m outta here.’

  ‘OK, let’s go. Bring him into the examining room.’

  They hoisted him up. He stopped them. ‘Listen, all of you.’ He coughed pitifully. Solini blew his nose wetly. ‘I’m scared. My life is shit. I have no idea how to deal with this. I’m asking for help. From all of you.’ He looked from one of us to the other, his eyes, coming to me, seeming dull, low wattage, as if he’d been unplugged. ‘Forget I’m a doctor. Treat me as if I were someone you really cared about – a family member, or a good friend.’

  ‘You are,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, man,’ Solini said.

  ‘A good friend in shit shape. I’m turning my life over to you.’

  Alone with him in the examining room, I sat for a few seconds, trying to adjust my ‘set’ to being here with a new patient, but a patient whom I really cared about. Distance and closeness flickered back and forth, like one of those drawings that seen one way is an urn, seen another, two faces. I asked, ‘What happened?’

  In a quiet voice riding on bitterness, punctured by dry coughs that seemed to tear at my own chest, he talked about his desperation on Thoreau, trying to care for people who were being dest
royed by A.K., his desperation at seeing me being destroyed, the guilt he felt for not being able to protect Oly Joe or Zoe, his starting to withdraw from Bronia. ‘And from AA. Remember the night you saw me leave my meetin’ early? I was “budding.”’

  ‘“Budding”?’

  ‘Getting ready to drink. You missed it.’

  ‘Missed what?’

  ‘“The Malik Sign.” Talking to you that night, when you offered me tea, I thought of drinking, and I licked my lips. A drunk who’s gettin’ ready to drink will always lick his lips the first time in a conversation he thinks of alcohol – an addict too, with his drug of choice. I got isolated. Didn’t call my sponsor. Bronia went to Israel – again! Finally I went to see my doctor, got some tests. Coin-sized lesion, left lower lobe. Fingerprint of death. Had a long talk with my doc, going over alternatives. Then I went out.’

  ‘“Out”?’

  ‘Drinkin’. Took Bronia’s tent and headed for the woods.’

  ‘What about the cancer? What’d they say?’

  ‘C’mon,’ Malik said angrily, ‘c’mon! Stay with me where I am. I’m telling you I was trying to destroy myself, going into the woods!’

  ‘But I thought that was why you “went out,” and—’

  ‘There’s no “why”! I drink ’cause I got a disease.’

  ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘This isn’t about what I believe or what you thought, this is about life ’n’ death. Can you get with me or not? ’Cause if you can’t, if you can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, and I’m gone. I’m such a smart tough miserable sonofabitch that anything less than reality is gonna fail! Let go of the shrink bullshit and just reach! Be with me! Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, holding out my hand, palm up, to him.

  He stared at it, and then put his own on it, his hand filthy and raw against the clean pink of mine, dirt making black rings under every nail but one that was purple, half torn off, his hand trembling from the few hours without alcohol in it, his skin dry from dehydration, the tremor stirring up a sickly sweet scent of ketone and a flashback to the derelict drunks of my internship. I squeezed his hand, the watery thinness of it a shadow of our first handshake on Emerson last July, when the tendons had felt like wires and the muscles like pliant steel – an athlete’s hand.