Hank Michaels sat across the U from us. I knew his name because it was embroidered on his jacket: Hank Michaels, the Signing Balladeer, only I think it meant Singing. He sat there drinking coffee, drumming his fingers, and mumbling to himself. He tipped back his felt cowboy hat, pushed the glasses up his nose, chewed on the stub of a cigar, and stared at the ceiling.
Miss Teaspoon looked at the menu photo of a BLT. Two triangular sandwich halves, three stacked pickle chips, a small pile of french fries. She said they really could have used a snake in the picture. “One of those thick, sleek green ones.”
“An eastern smooth,” I said.
“Newberry’s ought to have someone like Hieronymus Bosch doing their menus. Still Life with Corned Beef and Cobra. Banana Cream Pie and Jackal.”
Hank pardoned himself, apologized for the interruption, and asked us what rhymed with “so heroic.”
Miss Teaspoon said, “Paregoric.”
Hank squinted.
She said, “It does if you sing it right.”
When I told Miss Teaspoon that I was nervous about talking to Dr. Reininger, she said then I was in the right place at the right time—who better to talk to about my anxieties than a psychiatrist?
“So do I tell him I don’t think he’s a normal person?”
“He might take offense.” Miss Teaspoon wondered if Mom was not crazy at all. Maybe she had just opened some other doors of perception that we were too dim-witted to understand. “All that we can think is not all that we can know.”
I looked at her.
“Just a theory, mind you.”
We stopped by the pet department to say hello to Mynah White, this talking bird they had in an enormous cage. He said, “Awesome, dude,” and “Excellent,” and then he rang like a telephone. And that got me thinking about why they do that—why some birds will repeat the song or the speech that they hear. Are they lonely? You make a noise, you get attention. Are they desperate for any kind of company? Does the chatter help them survive somehow? Miss Teaspoon thought they do it because they can’t not. And that made me think about Dr. Reininger and his hand-washing.
THE DOOR to Dr. Reininger’s office opened and a heavyset young woman with a bit too much lipstick on stepped out looking dazed or drugged or sleepy. She looked at me and at Miss Teaspoon, turned to Dr. Reininger, and said, “Is this your bitch?”
Dr. Reininger said, “This is inappropriate behavior, Betty.” He opened the waiting room door, showed her the hallway.
Betty said, “Because if it is…”
“I’ll see you next week, Betty.”
“And the week after that,” she said.
Dr. Reininger nodded to me, told Miss Teaspoon we’d be fifty minutes, turned on a white-noise machine on the floor by the office door, and closed the door after us with a hankie over the knob. He went to the sink and washed his hands. He had told me once that he washed his hands in warm, not hot, water for fifteen seconds, the time it took to recite the Lord’s Prayer, because to wash for fewer seconds would not kill the bacteria. I’d been to the office before with Audrey and my mother and noticed then what I noticed now—that you could look around the office and not learn a thing about the man who worked here. No family photos, no diplomas, awards, or commendations, no tchotchkes, no magazines, no artwork, no knickknacks, no drawings by kids thanking him for visiting their class at Maureen Powers Elementary School. I wondered what he was hiding or what he was hiding from. Did the anonymity of the furnishings comfort him? The fringe on the oriental rug beneath the coffee table was perfectly straight, like it had been combed.
Dr. Reininger wiped his hands with a paper towel and said, “Let’s get going, shall we?” I sat on the cozy black leather chair. He shook his head. “You sit there.” In the smaller but still comfy upholstered chair. I told him the joke about the morbidly depressed obsessive-compulsive who wanted to kill himself but couldn’t get the gun clean enough. He asked me if I thought illness is funny. I said it can be.
He sat with his clipboard on his lap, closed his eyes, and said, “What goes on between your mother and I in our sessions is confidential.”
“Me.”
“What?” The eyes opened.
“Your mother and me.”
“My mother?”
“Your grammar.”
“My grandma?”
“You need the objective case. ‘Between your mother and me.’”
“You’re not one of those obnoxious pedants who gets their kicks by correcting other people’s grammar, are you?”
“His kicks. And no, I’m not.”
He clicked his ballpoint pen four times and then four more times. He said, “Do you always slouch in your chair like that?”
“So is this like confession?”
“Excuse me?”
“The session.”
“Like concession?”
And I was thinking, yes, like con sessions where lies are sold, but I wouldn’t have been attending to the surface of the conversation if he hadn’t made a big deal about my grammatical corrections. “I’m here about my mother, but if you can’t—”
“I can tell you this. Your mother is in a lot of pain.”
“She says I’m not her son.”
“I know she does. She may have a rare condition we call Capgras’s syndrome. But the tests aren’t conclusive. But here is my considered, my professional, opinion. Frances does know you’re her son, but because of this…this disease, let’s call it…in her head, she feels no emotion for you.”
“She does so.”
“And that is a cause of great distress to her. So she denies that you are who you say you are. She couldn’t live with herself otherwise.”
“What am I supposed to do about that?”
“What would you like to do?”
“Audrey needs her mother.”
“Does Johnny?”
“What’s wrong with your foot?”
He uncrossed his legs.
“The big shoe,” I said.
“I have a clubfoot,” he said. “So did Byron.”
“Byron who?”
“Lord Byron.”
“The wrestler?”
“Poet. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night or cloudless climes and starry skies.’ Byron swam the Hellespont.”
“How bad is she?”
“Bad. That’s an interesting word choice.”
“I’ve got a mother and a father who don’t want to be my parents.”
“It’s not always about you, Johnny.”
“If the Welfare gets involved, then they’ll separate Audrey and me.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“I can’t let that happen.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
I drew a tissue from the pop-up box, blew my nose until it honked, dropped the tissue on the coffee table. I sniffled, wiped my nose on the heel of my hand, and wiped the hand on the thigh of my dungarees.
Dr. Reininger stiffened, bent forward, stared at the tissue like if he averted his eyes, it might leap at his throat. “The basket,” he said.
“What?”
He pointed his chin at the side of my chair. “The tissue,” he said.
I flipped the tissue in the metal wastebasket.
Dr. Reininger told me that sometimes what we call mental illness, insanity, is actually a creative response to an incomprehensible and frightening world. It’s self-preservation. “She’s a woman of enormous courage.”
“How can you make her better if you think she’s healthy?”
“Perhaps she only seems confused to you and me because we don’t understand her personal symbolism, her peculiar syntax. She is speaking metaphorically, and our job, our duty, is to try to understand her metaphors.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
YEARS LATER—I may have mentioned my lost years already—I was in therapy myself, thanks to Blue Cross, with Dr. Nandadulal Ghosh, Ph.D., MSW, who had some difficulty
with the pronunciation of English. All of his f’s were p’s. What are your pears, Johnny? Why do you all the time peel pustrated? (I conjured an unpleasant image there of pustrated that has stayed with me. In it I see my seething self pounding my fists against my knees until a fetid, sulfur-colored liquid bleeds from the scabs on my hands, the oozy debris from my necrotic emotional tissue.) Are you, in pact, apraid to pail?
When I felt anxious in a session, I might inappropriately lash out at Nandadulal. (“Call me Dr. Ghosh. We are not priends.”) “Doctor,” I’d say, “I frequently feel fearful, fretful, full of frenzied, unfocused fantasies.”
“This is punny to you?”
“Sorry.”
“Pace the pacts, Mr.—”
“Call me Johnny.”
“You are an emotional slattern.”
Worse than his pronunciation, however, was his inability to understand me, the Requiem accent, I suppose. So I’d often have to repeat to him what I found loathsome to say in the first place, what I found humiliating and shameful. “You what your pather?”
“When I was a kid, I shot him.”
“You tried to kill your pather. My gosh.” He sat forward in his seat.
“I didn’t want to kill him.”
“Just wound?” He scribbled in his notebook. “Splendid!”
Which naturally led to a discussion of my manhood.
“How do you peel about your penis?”
“My fenis?”
“Your cuckoo bird. Your plonker. What do you call it here? Your organ?”
“We call it a Hammond.”
“Do you admire your Hammond?”
“It’s useful.”
“Super. Do you ever play with it?”
“If you’re asking am I Ham-fisted…”
His smile told me he was.
Or if I said, “I want to be good, and I want to be seen as good, and that’s not good. I’m weak. I’m afraid that people will see that and leave me.”
“Why do you think they will?”
“Because they have.”
“What have you done to them to make them leave?”
“Not given them enough.”
“Hmm…”
“I’ve grown tired of them.”
“Excuse me, what?”
“They can sense it, I think.”
“They can sense…”
“That I don’t need them.”
“And they leave you.”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t left them.”
“Correct.”
“Convenient.”
“What?”
“You heard me, Johnny. Loud and clear.”
“I’m afraid to be alone.”
“And yet you’ve managed to do just that.”
“Why am I so afraid of not being liked that even when creeps turn away from me, I’m upset, angry, and obsessed with wanting to know why?”
“Yes, why is that?”
“I’d like to beat them.”
“Would you like to explore that anger?”
“Even you, Nandadulal, you don’t act like a human being with me.”
“Would you like to beat me?”
“Do you care about me?”
“Do you think I do?”
“Puck you, Nandadulal.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Beauty
MOM HAD TAPED her eyes shut with Audrey’s zebra-striped Band-Aids and then tied a silk kerchief over them. She stuffed her ears with cotton balls, swallowed a Benadryl with a glass of warm milk, leaned back in bed, and pulled up the covers. I sat on the stoop with Blackie, waiting for my father to show up and make everything all right again. Deluxe stretched himself out under the hedges by the front walk and watched Audrey play hopscotch with her invisible friend AbracaDebra.
Blackie asked me if I’d noticed how you never see a nun alone in public. They’re always in a pack. A waddle, he called it, as in, A waddle of nuns clogged the canned vegetable aisle at Iandoli’s. “They are women of mystery, Johnny.”
Audrey said, “Your peever’s on the line, Little Debbie, but you get a do-over.”
Deluxe twitched his tail, chattered, and clicked. He’d spotted the white-eared squirrel beneath the mountain ash.
Blackie said, “She’s a cute one, that Sister Godzilla.”
“Casilda.”
“I’m willing to bet she has a bitchin’ little body under that habit.”
“You shouldn’t be talking like this.”
“Most of them are dykes, you know.”
Deluxe waggled his fanny, crouched, and slunk across the brown patch of lawn. That’s when the mockingbird swooped in and pecked him on the noggin. The squirrel climbed the tree and barked at Deluxe, who pretended the recent insult had not occurred.
Blackie said, “I’m going to ask her out.”
“No, you’re not.”
“To the movies, maybe. And then, who knows?”
“You’ll go to hell.”
“I plan to take her to heaven.”
“What about Miss Teaspoon?”
“I’ve told you we’re not…not romantically enmeshed. We’re not embrangled in an amorous way.”
“Does she know that?”
“I wonder what Casilda would look like in an angora sweater.”
Deluxe walked over to the hopscotch court, plopped himself down in heaven, and licked his paws. I looked up O’Connell Street, hoping to see my father’s truck cresting the hill. Sargie Galvin stumbled out of Charlie’s and leaned against the plate-glass window. He seemed to be reasoning with himself. He couldn’t get his cigarette lit.
I said, “I’ll pray for you, Blackie.”
Sargie zipped his baseball jacket—HARP HILL POST 323, ZONE 4 CHAMPS, 1954. He slipped his hands into his pants pockets and summoned the resolve to walk his drunken self home up O’Connell. Three o’clock and his day was done. Sargie lived on Emerald Street with his mother, slept in the only bedroom he’d ever slept in. His father, Ace, had died of liver cancer, and his sister Helen was a Carmelite nun in Danvers. Mrs. Galvin worked part-time as a receptionist for the bus company and sang in the St. Simeon’s choir. Blackie waved to Sargie as he passed our house. “Monsignor Galvin!” he said. Sargie stopped and blessed us, making a sweeping sign of the cross. “Bless your asses,” he said. His right eye was bruised, a front tooth was missing, had been for as long as I’d known him. He’d pissed his pants. His face was ruddy; his blond hair was just fading to gray at the temples. You could see beneath the swollen features that he had once been a handsome guy. Blackie told me that Sargie had played center field like an angel—he didn’t run, he glided; every spectacular catch was effortless, every throw to the plate, on the money. He could have made the Bigs—even got a phone call from Tom Yawkey—but then he fell into the bottle.
“Maybe he’ll crawl out,” I said.
“He made a choice. Some choices you don’t get to do over.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy.”
Sargie stopped in front of Charbonneau’s Shoes, leaned against a station wagon, and puked into the gutter. Steam rose from the vomit in the cold air.
“I was with him when he had his first drink,” Blackie said. “It was my idea. He was a star; I was a fuckup. We tapped a Harry outside Mulcahy’s Package Store and got two fifths of Gilbey’s gin. I drank mine that night and slept in the schoolyard. I saw Sargie the next day at the doughnut shop, and he was still drunk. And he had a half a bottle left. He told me the secret was, you drink a glass of water every hour, and it keeps you drunk. And he’s been drunk ever since.”
I couldn’t have known it then, of course—on the stoop there watching Audrey hop on her booted foot—but there would come a time in my life—a rattling, but not toppling, bump in the road is how I prefer to think of it now that I’m behind the wheel again—when I behaved as wretchedly as Sargie Galvin ever did. This was after Alice (we’re calling her) and I had separated. This was also after I
’d lost my counseling job (I was finally using my head) at the Crisis Center, Inc. Because why? Because I’d told our glib and swinish director at a staff meeting that I did not approve of the bureaucratic direction our agency was taking, and he told me the obvious, that I had trouble with authority, and I told him to fuck himself, and he asked me did I want to take it outside.
I lost my way after that. No wife, no cozy lodgings, no money, no ambition, no dreams—just what I’d wanted. I took a studio apartment in a bleak little rooming house. I waited, as Kafka advised, for the world to offer itself unmasked, to roll in ecstasy at my feet. I rolled my own cigarettes, stole toilet paper from public restrooms. I applied for food stamps. When the unemployment checks ran out, I took day-labor jobs on landscaping and house-painting crews, spent my pay on cocaine, which was fun but expensive, so eventually I gave up the studio, bought a used sleeping bag at the Salvation Army Thrift Store, and slept in parks, in the weeds by the railroad tracks, on the floor at friends’ apartments, in movie theaters, and at the library. And it was at the library that I ran into an old friend on even harder times. Katie Cullen and I had acted together in college—in a production of Ionesco’s Exit the King. Katie played Queen Marguerite—she was beautiful, elegant, and appropriately high-strung, perfect for the part. I played the Guard, the army of one, with bearskin hat and halberd. “Recollections of recollections…we invoke you.”
After graduation, Katie moved to New York to try her hand at professional acting, but was unable to land any significant roles. Mostly she ushered at small off-off-Broadway venues. And then her parents died within weeks of each other, and Katie returned to Requiem. We left the library and walked to Moynihan’s Bar. She swallowed a Tuinal with her peppermint schnapps. She told me she’d had a breakdown and had lost her parents’ house, her house, to the bank. She had been staying at the battered women’s shelter until today when they found out she hadn’t been battered at all and had, in fact, been stealing from the other women. She fell asleep in the booth. We began to keep company.
The worst thing about living in public is, of course, that you have no privacy. Let’s say you’re having a tiff on the Common with your manic-depressive and melodramatic girlfriend (because, let’s say, she snorted all the toot you were saving for after a hard day’s work). Everyone walking by your bench now knows your abject business. What might, in the privacy of your living room, pass for normal if somewhat belligerent behavior can seem outrageous, dangerous, even psychotic on the street. Especially if your sweetie enjoys an audience. Especially if she yells out lines like, “What is it with you and my asshole, you sick fuck?” Or if she conjures a role from memory and screams, “There was a second back there, yeah, there was a second, just a second, when I could have gotten through to you, when maybe we could have cut through all this, this CRAP. But it’s past, and I’m not gonna try,” but nobody catches the Albee allusion, and you squeeze her shoulders to try to calm her down, but she blubbers and asks you not to beat her again. All of this can erode a relationship rather quickly. That and the abrupt, uncomfortable, and furtive sex beneath the rhododendrons at Tommy Heinsohn Park or in the dank and fetid bathroom at the public inebriate shelter. What might have passed for thrilling at sixteen was, in fact, clumsy, dopey, and unpleasant, not to say embarrassing and sordid.
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