Why I'm Like This

by Cynthia Kaplan

  I am not exactly sure when, but at some point during the third year, I began to get the impression that R was unraveling. She popped more pills and made more phone calls, sometimes asking me to wait in the waiting room, which was getting almost too disgusting to sit down in. Magazines and newspapers were piling up and animal hair was everywhere. And her office looked like the spot under a tree where you heap your belongings after your trailer has been overturned by a twister. I didn’t want to touch anything there or have it touch me. I felt hemmed in, claustrophobic, during our sessions. The place had acquired a new mustiness. No longer content to be merely dank, as it had always been, it had become dank’s evil twin, rank. I tried to maintain a forward focus, so as not to get grossed out by something I might notice on the table next to me or on the floor. As I remember, R once claimed to have an office downtown. Could it be possible that this nightmare was replicated somewhere else? The subject of R’s own apartment, which it seems was in flux and which was why, ostensibly, so much shit had found its way here, came up during one session and then became a staple of subsequent ones. She told a roundabout and ever-changing story about money paid to a landlord before a promised renovation, some sort of swindle, a safety-code violation or mismanagement—I still have no idea exactly what happened. It didn’t dawn on me that she may actually not have an apartment until one day when I saw into the other room in the office, the door of which I had never seen open, and witnessed what could only have been a storage job subcontracted to the Beverly Hillbillies. Sometimes I still think it was a vision I saw in a dream—furniture piled to the ceiling, clothing and suitcases and maybe even cats. R occasionally mentioned that she and her six-year-old son had spent the night, “for fun,” at the office. Yikes.

  During one session R actually fell asleep, sitting up, while I was talking. Her eyes got heavy and her mouth became lax, so much so that a gleam of saliva appeared on her lower lip and I was terrified she was going to drool. Finally her head dropped to her chest. I stopped talking, stared at her in amazement, feeling like I was in a movie, and then said her name sharply. She bolted up, mumbled an apology, and we continued. Some instinct told me not to try to discuss what had just happened. Can you imagine anything scarier than opening your therapist’s Pandora’s Box? And then, with a shock, I realized it was already open and I was sitting in it.

  Obviously, something was going on, had been going on, with R for some time. It was not like I hadn’t noticed, it was just that I was more interested in how I felt than how she felt. That is how it is with doctors. We go to them because we have a problem and it is very inconvenient if they develop one that is bigger than ours. Best to just ignore it as long as possible. Which is what I did, and may I say not for nearly as long as some others, but I’ll get to that later. I am more assertive now than I was then (thanks, R) and these days I wouldn’t stand for any of that nonsense. But six or seven years ago, well, I was in transition and I didn’t want to have to start all over with a new therapist.

  Rule number four: Always leave before the party’s over.

  Especially when the party moves to a hotel room.

  One day R called to tell me that she was moving offices and would, in the interim, be seeing patients in the living room of a suite at a hotel near Fifty-seventh Street. It all seemed perfectly respectable, yet I was suspicious. Where was all her shit? The hotel room was immaculate—just me, R, the requisite chairs and curtains, a desk, a coffee table. That’s when I knew I had to get out while the getting was good. R looked fidgety and ill at ease. Like a dog on a waxed floor, she couldn’t get a grip. While I was there some food arrived; R often ordered food during my sessions and then ate, messily. Then her son, who I didn’t know was there but was in the bedroom, spilled some water while jumping up and down on the bed and called, guiltily, for his mother to come. I felt bad for him. It was the middle of the day. Why wasn’t he in school?

  What little was left of the session after these interruptions was devoted to me, but still, I had to think up things to say. I found R and her mess so distracting that I just didn’t feel that much like talking to her. She had become the friend you no longer like enough to confide in so you feed them little drips and drops of your life. Just enough so you don’t have to go through the bother of actually ending the friendship. Also, she was so obviously worse off than I that it would have been like telling a starving child you’ve got a hankering for a cup-cake. I always felt relieved when I had an excuse to skip a session, like a trip or an audition or if I was sick (a migraine, hooray!). All spring I kept trying to figure out how and when to end it.

  I finally got the break I was looking for when I was invited to be in an intensive and time-consuming workshop at a New York theater. I paid one last visite à l’hotel and at the end of the hour I told R that I was feeling strong and happy, that I wouldn’t have time to see her for a while, and perhaps this would be a good opportunity to take a hiatus. She did not rejoice in my wellness. In fact she was pretty nasty about it. I told her I’d call her when the workshop ended, but I left secretly hoping never to see her again.

  I didn’t. Which leads me to Part Two.

  Part Two

  Three months and a few extra weeks of procrastination later, I telephoned R, only to find her number had been disconnected with no forwarding information available. I was mostly relieved but vaguely alarmed, although not enough to pursue it, or rather, her. I was curious, though, and a few friends slash fellow patients confirmed that while R had fallen off the radar, she had not disappeared entirely. Evidently, she had so insinuated herself in the lives of several of her patients that not only did they continue to see her, but they allowed themselves to become entangled in her own disastrous affairs.

  Here’s what I know. Actually, for legal reasons, let me revise that. Here’s what I heard: R borrowed a total of approximately eighteen thousand dollars from three of her patients. One would have to surmise she borrowed more than that from patients I did not know, presuming there were any. She had neither an apartment nor an office and moved from hotel to hotel, including, at one point, the Helmsley Palace. Sometimes she had her husband call patients to ask for money or groceries. One night they asked a patient, a friend I’ll call Howard, to pay their hotel bill so they would not be evicted. Another night R asked a young woman who had already lent her thousands of dollars to bring food to a hotel, claiming that she and her son had nothing to eat. When the woman asked R—through the closed door of the hotel room, as R would not open it—about being paid back, R threatened to call the police if the woman did not stop harassing her. Another patient I knew who was particularly dependent on and devoted to R, let’s call him Mark, not only loaned her money but became actively involved in an effort to keep her and her family afloat. She preyed on his vulnerability, on his good-heartedness, entreating him to not let her “fall through the cracks” as so many do when they become homeless. On the face of it, this is not an unreasonable request. People get into trouble sometimes, their lives succumb to some sort of fatal disarray and they need help. Well, this wasn’t that. Had it been, from all accounts the aid she received from her patients should have buoyed her for some time. Rather, the money was obviously disappearing as fast as it was coming in. When Mark was tapped out both financially and emotionally and had finally cut himself loose from R, he brought her up on malpractice charges with the appropriate body politic, the Office of Professional Discipline. In the course of this process, he actually discovered that R was not, at present, properly registered as a social worker. She had her credentials, she was licensed, but she had not kept up with her registration fees for years. Unfortunately, the Office of Professional Discipline so bungled the case that it is still unresolved. Something, Mark tells me, about their process server not dating a summons properly.

  I wanted more information than seemed fair torturing Mark for, so I called the Office of Professional Discipline. I identified myself as a journalist (why shouldn’t I?) but after giving them R’s name was told th
ey could not confirm there was any action pending against her. “But you are not denying it?” I asked. The woman understood what I wanted. (If I sneeze twice and you don’t say gesundheit…) She went to talk to her supervisor and then came back and repeated that she could not confirm it. That was good enough for me. Besides, even though I didn’t learn anything, it was fun to say I was a journalist.

  I called Howard. He was still being treated by R through a good bit of this, and he confronted her several times regarding the money she had borrowed from him and from fellow patients. She told him variously that the money was not a loan but a gift and that she was not expected to give it back, that the money was an advance on future sessions, and that it was owed her because for years she had undercharged her patients. Howard’s own therapy finally ended when the check R gave him to repay him for paying the hotel bill bounced. He never saw her again after that but he kept up with her by e-mail for quite some time. He was worried about her and although he was annoyed to hear from her that she had bought a PowerBook with money borrowed from her patients, he continued to try to help her. In response to his queries about her well-being he received lengthy rants detailing her precarious circumstances. Sometimes R wrote messages all in caps that would trail off into non sequiturs or end abruptly, midword, as if she had just passed out at the keyboard.

  What can we take away from all of this, I wonder? I spoke to Howard again recently and he told me a hair-raising saga about how R once encouraged, if not abetted, a romance between himself and another patient, only to destroy it when it blossomed by revealing each patient’s confidences to the other. I find that the years have not mellowed his anger and confusion. John and Sarah, the couple who had originally recommended R to me, will always wonder how much she may or may not have manipulated the ups and downs of their marriage to suit her own purposes. And there must be countless others whose stories I do not know. My boyfriend heard a strange but not unlikely tale from his own therapist about a patient of R’s who may have, as it turns out, unwisely, loaned R her credit card.

  God only knows what has happened to her young son.

  As for myself, well, I am philosophical. I liked R quite a bit in those early years. She commiserated, which is something I needed, still need, perhaps more than therapy. Justification as Cure, that’s me. You will remember that I didn’t much like the idea of being in therapy in the first place. Considering R was not properly registered, I think it stands to reason that if all I did was pay a crazy lady seventy-five bucks a week to chat with me about myself, it may have been stupid, but it wasn’t therapy. Hey, look at that, Justification as Cure really works.

  Who was R? A lost soul or a manipulative user? Or both? A dedicated healer or a quacksalver? (Means charlatan—I found it in the computer thesaurus.) Perhaps all those phone calls she made and took, which I’d presumed from R’s discreet one-or two-word responses to be patient emergencies, were actually drug communiqués. It is impossible to know. Whatever the case, I am sad and sorry about her dissolution. She helped me through some tough times by laughing with me at my oppressors, which gave me validation and built my confidence. I am a stronger, though not necessarily a nicer person for it, but I am working on that last part. Sometimes, now, when I am low, when I feel misunderstood or ill used, I think of what R might have said to me, had I arrived for a session thus. We would have had a little therapy, talked about the new Alice Munro collection, and then maybe together we would have subtly put down a colleague or friend of mine, just enough to lift me out of my slump. And, of course, she would have suggested I put on a pair of dangly earrings. When R was good, she was very good. And when she was bad, well, she was sort of good, too.

  waiting

  EVEN if you are a waiter for a very short time, you are doomed to have waiter nightmares for the rest of your life. You go into work and your uniform is missing or you can’t figure out how the tables are numbered or you’ve suddenly developed a limp. Your dead aunt Rose, who was always impossible to please, pops up at one table or someone you made fun of at camp or an ax murderer is demanding their appetizer. You miss your wedding because no one will cover for you.

  I was a waitress for almost four years in a restaurant in Soho I will call Mariella. Mariella was owned by a despot named George, who, when he was through screaming at us at staff meetings for our various and sundry infractions—spotted aprons and askew table settings and snide attitudes and tardiness and wastefulness and our overall failure as viable human beings—would then make the startling pronouncement that the greatest achievement of our lives was that we were working for him. There was some truth to this statement. Without a doubt, George was the most loathsome person I had ever met, and if somehow one could manage to avoid his wrath and last more than two weeks on the wait staff at Mariella, that was, indeed, an accomplishment.

  There was actually a “Mariella,” for whom the restaurant was named. She was a tall, thin, very attractive Jamaican woman known mostly for wearing tiny sparkly dresses, spike heels, and outrageous wigs. Mariella could be both funny and brutal—to call her capricious would be too flattering—and you remained in her good graces, or not, depending on whether you were a) keeping her amused and b) keeping people’s wineglasses full and dishes cleared. If they were going to drink, they could stay; if they weren’t going to drink, they had to leave, because the restaurant made most of its money on liquor. Or if they were having no appetizers, or appetizers as main courses, or splitting main courses, they had to leave. Or rather, you had to get them to leave by continually asking them if there was anything else they needed and then clearing their table until there was literally nothing left on it but the tablecloth. You couldn’t just put down the check, because that would have been rude. Mariella was also a relentless publicity hound, and you could count on a reasonably pleasant lunch shift if she had appeared that morning in a chef ’s hat and stilettos to make fried chicken during the food segment of some morning show, or if her name had turned up on Page Six of the Post.

  It is not as if there is a writ or edict, something on file at City Hall declaring that all struggling actors take jobs as waiters with no regard for the fact that perhaps their backgrounds or educations recommend them, in the opinion of their parents, to a more lofty purpose. Mainly, I needed a job that would have some flexibility so I could go to auditions and rehearsals. I also needed a job that would not require that I wear stockings, which I hate. Waitressing at a salad bar, as I had done in college, and which I believe is an oxymoron, unfortunately did not qualify as restaurant experience. However, as a testimonial to my acting school, at my interview I acted the part of a waiter and was hired.

  Mariella was, at the time, a very popular restaurant and therefore a very desirable place to work. It offered expensive Jamaican-ish food and was famous for its two deceptively strong frozen rum-and-fruit drinks, a red one called a Mariella and a blue one called a Montego. I would come to know these drinks well. I would serve several of them to a person and perhaps by the end of the meal the person would serve them back to me in a slightly altered form, most likely in the company of some half-digested onion rings or curried chicken or pecan pumpkin pie.

  The restaurant was also renowned for its raucous Gospel Sunday Brunch—perhaps the most dreaded wait shift in all of Manhattan. We would arrive at nine-thirty in the morning, cut a thousand bagels, and move all the tables and chairs around in order to fit 233 people, the exact number permitted according to the fire department’s Maximum Allowance sign. By eleven o’clock, the first clamoring horde—you’d think they hadn’t seen a bagel since the Carter Administration—was stuffing its collective face with challah French toast and Montegos while singing eighty-three verses of “This Little Light of Mine” along with an overmiked gospel group. Actually, the cacophony was produced by two main elements: the sizable black contingent giving it up for Christ and the equally sizable Jewish contingent screaming for their food. And, as always, Mariella would be following us around with the full ashtrays she’d picke
d up off of our tables, shrieking, “What is this? What is this?” Just when it seemed like All God’s Chillun had been fed and/or saved, the bagel cutting began again in preparation for the second seating. Sometimes while I was cutting bagels I would think about how once my grandmother told me that as a young woman she was courted by one of the Lender brothers. If she’d married him we’d all be rich now and I wouldn’t be here, cutting bagels, and even if I were here, Lender’s bagels are pre-cut.

  The brunch shift would finally end around six o’clock, just as the waning sunlight signaled the official demise of the weekend.

  I adapted well at Mariella under the tutelage of ten or so actor/waiter/homosexuals, who taught me how to open a bottle of wine with a pocket corkscrew, stack plates up my arms, and make cappuccinos. They also, in accordance with the laws of their people, taught me the original choreography from every Broadway show of the past fifty years, including Broadway Babies of 1925. In college, none of the people I knew to be gay were “out.” If they were not completely assimilated into the mainstream they were relegated to the small though vocal Lesbians and Gays at Penn, or LGAP, pronounced el-gap. I didn’t know anyone in LGAP. I’d had no gay friends in high school either; people in suburban Connecticut in the seventies weren’t allowed to raise gay children. But at Mariella, it was as if a dozen Rosalind Russells were starring in a never-ending Jacqueline Susann movie. The banter was smart and snappy, but it was all about sex and drugs and show business. And management. The general consensus was that the former were good and the latter was bad.