But I do know, yes! That was the slap he always gave himself. “They’re fucking with me constantly!” he would tell Dorothy. “I know it, I know it!”
Dorothy was always unconvinced. “How do you know? You’ve never seen them do these things. You’re just paranoid.”
“I know I’m paranoid. But I’m still right,” he once said after some research data disappeared. “Those guys are trying to break me.”
Dorothy’s rosy assessment would not be challenged. “Oh, please. You just have bad luck sometimes. We all do. Life is full of these little things.”
And “little things” they were. Occasionally they were bigger, but mostly they were just little things. And oddly, the smaller they were, the more annoying: keys lost, phones unplugged, notes and books misplaced, bookmarkers changing locations, clocks changing times, oddly coincidental misinformation, half truths, misunderstandings, and confusion. Bigger things generally meant less trouble. Crawford discovering a flat tire or that an important book was missing was an end in itself. But the small things always came at a bigger cost: distraction, loss of focus, schedules not kept, late work, late bills, people pissed off, more work, and (worst of all) more drinking.
And thus it went on for the entire duration of Crawford’s college years with Berry and Scott. Always there. No pattern, no consistency. Never ending. Never resolved. No closure. And Berry and Scott were responsible for all of it. Crawford was sure of it. And it never went away until graduation.
Apparently it never went away at all. Apparently.
Crawford put the note down and grabbed the second one from the larger package. Crawford again read aloud. “To Dorothy from Happy Pappy. A little something for your self-esteem.”
“Fuck it,” he said, tearing open the smaller package. He was right: a videotape. Crawford had resolve. He wasn’t drunk this time, and he was going to look at this thing square in the face. He clicked on the small TV next to his desk and shoved the tape in the VCR.
“It’s the fucking Happy Pappy Show,” he said, shaking his head. The video the night before wasn’t just the drunken nightmare he had hoped it was.
The insidious theme song plays and the title scrolls across the screen, but it looks different. The puppets are in the background, but they aren’t moving. Then the head pops into the screen: Crawford’s monster, Happy Pappy.
“Yesssssiiiiirrrrreeeee. Good morning, Dr. Crawford! We’re moving right along with your self-esteem!”
Berry and Scott wouldn’t go to this kind of trouble.
The ghoulish marionette holds up a new hardback copy of Self-Esteem just to the left of his head.
Would they?
“Time for stage two!”
Crawford felt a jolt of adrenaline course through his body. Happy is smiling at the book like a proud father admiring his infant child. He opens the book like a sacred text and begins to read. “The second stage is to eliminate the harmful things that are destroying our lives.” He turns to the camera. “That’s good advice, Dr. Crawford!” Mr. Pappy moves away from the camera to reveal a woman tied to a chair. She sits flush next to a table, almost like a child in a highchair ready to be force-fed. There is tape around her mouth, and it’s stained.
Crawford leaned toward the screen slowly. He could see it was blood. He could also see that the woman was Jenny Harper.
“Oh God,” he said.
Happy Pappy slowly tiptoes with exaggerated movements toward Crawford’s mistress. Her bound and motionless body is in strange contrast to her tormentor’s bouncing, overjoyed face. Then he speaks again, looking at the camera with the book tucked safely under his arm, his head bobbing grotesquely. “We all know that fucking someone besides Mommy is really naughty. It’s really bad! That’s why a little cocksucking whore like this one needs to be eliminated before she destroys our lives!”
This can’t be real. Jenny, is it you?
Happy Pappy holds up the book again. “It’s time to read some words of wisdom.” He leans in. “That’s Dr. Crawford’s wisdom, boys and girls,” the masked head barks.
He turns behind him and whips the tape off the woman’s mouth, making a screech that rivals the woman’s awful scream. She gasps for air.
“No,” she weeps.
“What?” her captor says, his right hand to his ear.
“Please mister,” she gasps, her eyes filling with water.
“My name is Happy Pappy, you little fancy pants.” He lets out a great laugh then puts the book in front of her.
“Now you’re going to read the word. The word! You’re going to read some Crawford,” he says.
“Please, please,” she whimpers.
“You don’t have to say please,” he says, shaking his head.
She turns away from him, almost as if she is looking over her shoulder. He puts the book just under her chin, then his yellow-gloved hand points down like a plane crashing into the page.
“I said read, you little bitchy witchy.”
She cranes her neck, turning away as if this would end the nightmare.
The corncob pipe jutting from the left of Happy’s mouth swivels in tandem before he strokes her trembling face.
“Okay. Okay,” she gasps. She looks down at the book then back at her tormentor. She looks at the book again, and her mouth shakes as she tries to speak. “People,” she says, struggling. “People usually recognize right away,” she coughs, “when they’ve created a relationship with bad things or bad people.” She swallows painfully. “But many times we continue these relationships…” She starts to weep. “We continue…” She breaks down sobbing.
Happy Pappy strokes her hair. “Yes. And why is that?” He brings the book to his chest and reads. “Because we’re afraid to eliminate them from our lives!” Then he turns to the camera. “Not unless you’ve got self-esteem,” he yells, his head nodding slowly.
He sets the book down on the table next to Jenny’s chair then leisurely picks something up — a large kitchen knife.
Crawford felt like he was choking. “It’s a hoax,” he said, his right hand coursing through his hair. “It’s a hoax.”
If it’s a hoax it’s a first-rate job, by golly.
Jenny peers up at Happy.
Crawford saw a look in her eyes that he thought he’d seen before. This isn’t acting. Holy Christ, this is real!
Happy Pappy stands in front of Jenny, blocking her from view. Then he turns back to the camera.
“Stage two, Doctor!”
He turns back around and slowly brings up his right hand, the knife facing downward.
“No,” she cries. “God, No!”
“You don’t need God when you’ve got self-esteem!” he roars. “You are God,” he giggles, then thrusts the knife into her neck.
He turns to the camera one last time. “Yes, boys and girls,” he screams, the mask sprayed with blood. “Stage two complete! Stay tuned for Stage three!”
The screen goes blank.
Crawford couldn’t move. He gripped the side of his chair to make sure he wasn’t asleep, staring into the broadcast snow, which reached out and engulfed him.
He turned to his left, where his cocktail would have been sitting the night before, but nothing was there. His fingers scraped the surface of his desk as if he could summon Scotch from its smooth surface. He undid the top button of his shirt, feeling a cold sweat around his neck, then sat back in his chair looking at the snow on the TV screen as if it might hold a clue to the source of this madness.
“It’s a hoax. It’s just a hoax,” Crawford said.
It didn’t look like a hoax.
Crawford picked up the phone.
I’ll call the police. Just call the police.
I’ll tell them about the tape. Tapes? Do I tell them about the tape last night? He was about to punch 911, then he paused. Or I’ll tell them I’m being harassed. But then you have to tell them about the tape. Both tapes. Or I’ll tell them to check on Jenny Harper. I’ll just start with Jenny. I’ll see if it�
��s a prank first. Then he looked at the empty box on his desk. He grabbed it and looked inside. Nothing — just empty. The other package. The package addressed to Dorothy. He tore off the anonymous wrapping. It was a picture frame. A cheap frame. He turned it over. A black and white photograph. One of Crawford and Jenny outside her apartment. Crawford’s face became a furious grimace. Jenny’s mouth was open, apparently firing back. Her eyes were filled with despondency and fear. When was this? There was a note tucked inside the frame and Crawford opened it. It was typewritten, like on an old typewriter.
Dear Mrs. Crawford,
A little something for your self-esteem.
“God damn it!” Crawford yelled out loud.
The amount of work a prank like this would take was beyond the level of Berry and Scott. But who was it and what did they want? If it was a hoax then Jenny would have to be in on it, which would be very unlikely.
Or would it? Do I know her? Do I really know her? She was angry, very angry. And what do I do now?
Crawford looked at the phone again. He looked at the numbers 9-1-1.
“They’ll think you did it,” he said to himself. “They’ll think you’re cracked.” You’ll have to tell them you’ve been having an affair with the woman in the video. There’ll be some big guy who blows smoke in your face and wants to know where you’ve been the last several days. And you’ve been drunk the last several days! You saw her when? You can’t remember. You had a fight. About what? I was ending the affair. I think I was ending the affair. I need to get sober. My wife is going to leave me.
And you’re the guy who wrote them books that tell people how to live? this hulking brute of a cop asks before he goes out into the hall grinning like a panting dog and calling his drinking buddy who writes for a small-time tabloid.
And what do I do?
Crawford couldn’t even trust himself to make a decision, especially not without a drink. Impulse. Crawford grabbed the tape and photograph and went upstairs. He couldn’t risk waking Dorothy, so he retrieved some clothes that were in the guestroom next to his bedroom — a pair of dark, pleated slacks and a white Oxford shirt that had been retired because of the sweat stains under the arms. He got dressed quietly then grabbed his briefcase from the downstairs hall closet and put the tape and photograph inside.
What am I doing? I need a drink. Without one…
When the previous night’s alcohol started to ebb in his system, Crawford would feel like his soul was being taken away from him and he would have none of that now.
“There’s comfort in accomplishment,” Crawford had written in Self-Respect. “It’s soothing to be doing. You have won when you are done.”
During the last week of his last year in the master’s program in clinical psychology, Crawford was tired, having stayed up for five days straight writing and rewriting his thesis. He’d stayed pretty drunk the whole time — sipping from a flask of bourbon as he typed — but was still able to write a pretty decent paper. Back in those days, he had an old manual typewriter that he’d inherited from his Uncle Jerry — a little appliance Crawford favored over a fancy-shmancy electric job. As he put it, “I have a lot in common with this thing. We can both take a shot of whiskey in the gut and still dry out and keep working.”
Crawford often said his thesis had taken two years to research and write, but the truth was he had researched many topics on and off for two years — writing countless notes and endlessly reading journals — without having written a single sentence of submittable text. The reasons for his procrastination were many: time spent studying for the comprehensive exam (that was the excuse he gave to others, though he rarely studied), frequent changes in his argument, general laziness, drunkenness, and more drunkenness and laziness. The biggest problem, he knew, was fear.
His final argument was very simple, but it was also a great deal more unusual than those being presented by students (like himself) specializing in therapy and not assessment.
At the time, there were all kinds of new methodologies. Clinical psychology is all about method, and those who want to be pioneers try to forge ahead with a brand new method that will change the discipline, or they suggest revising an old one to make it more effective. If you had guts, you’d come up with a new therapy. Wimps went the interpretation route, or worse, emphasized procedure.
It was highly unusual for anyone to write a master’s thesis proclaiming a new therapy. This was something people did for their doctoral dissertations, and rarely ever then. Usually psychologists wrote about new therapies long after their PhDs were completed and then after years (and sometimes decades) of additional research. But for Crawford it was partly a joke and partly a fantasy to be the “father” of a new therapy. Besides booze, what gave Crawford the confidence to take such an intrepid jump was the inspiring attitude of his unorthodox, nonconformist advisor Dr. Tony Watkins. More of a die-hard evolutionist than a psychologist, Watkins hated unoriginality more than anything. The bearded old Southerner, looking a bit like Darwin himself, believed that as man progressed, so too must his approach to therapy. Crawford found it odd that Watkins never came up with his own therapy, just a few undistinguished papers on how to approach theory.
“When are you going to write your manifesto?” Crawford once asked him in class.
“Manifesto? That’s for you all to do,” he once said. “I’m just a teacher. I studied to be a teacher, so I’m going to teach. If I quit teaching, I’ll be an actor and do the great works of Shakespeare on the stage,” he joked. “The day I come up with my own therapy is the day I’ve lost my mind.” It was a humble edict for a man who held such high standards for his students.
Despite Watkins’ values he was surprisingly flexible. When Crawford requested to change his thesis topic, Watkins gave approval both times without a fuss. His first was called “Clinical Depression and the Benefits of Masturbation Therapy.” Crawford had once read an article claiming that frequent masturbation helps prevent prostrate cancer. The theory said the practice purged the gland of carcinogens and, perhaps, made the cells more resistant. Armed with only a gym sock and a Farrah Fawcett poster, Crawford did the clinical trials single-handedly and came to the conclusion that masturbation actually helps depression, which in turn helps the body fight disease. A problem popped up, however, when it came to suggesting the actual therapy. After brief consideration, he realized there was no way he could produce a 25,000-word document on jacking off. He also had trouble finding anyone willing to participate in the research. Watkins loved the idea, but didn’t complain when Crawford wanted to change direction.
His second proposal was called “Sanction Therapy,” a “pre-therapeutic therapy” that tackled the idea of whether or not a patient needs to give himself permission to heal before he goes through the healing process. Crawford never submitted a formal written proposal to Watkins, who later called his pitch “a pre-proposal.” But the idea was enough to keep Watkins hungry for more.
The third proposal turned out to be a charm. Watkins appeared to like the idea more than Crawford, but Crawford knew, at the very least, it was a more research-worthy topic than masturbation. In other words, it would be easier for him to bullshit his way through. The proposal was also vague enough to leave him breathing space on just about every aspect of the paper — structure, style, and (most importantly) content. Crawford was probably more surprised than anyone that he was able to write the 78-page document as fast as he did, especially since he made almost all of it up as he went along.
When he typed the last words on a Friday afternoon, it was time to celebrate. And celebrate he did, until his binge came to an abrupt end on Monday morning when he got an unexpected call from Jay Berry.
The morning air seeped through the crack Crawford had opened on the driver side window. The breeze and the passing scenery were just enough to wake his senses from his day-old hangover.
He grabbed the car phone and punched at the numbers.
The phone was finally picked up and rustled across
some unknown surface. “Hello?”
“Lee?”
After a sigh, “Who the hell is this?” He was still half-asleep. “What the hell time is it?”
“I have to see you.”
“Jim?”
“I have to see you.”
“You want to see me now?”
“I have to see you.” Crawford raised his voice just a little. “Now.”
“Now?”
Crawford was winding through the dark curves of the Valley-side Hills, an exclusive neighborhood notoriously populated by pornographers, rap stars, and B-list actors. Crawford felt his fear momentarily overridden by anger, an emotion that popped up every time he was within five miles of Lee’s home. It wasn’t that Lee was wealthier than he was or that Lee lived in a bigger and nicer home. It wasn’t that Lee lacked worries and personal problems. What angered him was Lee’s control over Crawford, including his nagging conviction that Crawford needed to get his shit together so he could make Lee even more money. Of course, Lee always used the word “we.”
“If you could increase your output a bit,” he once said nonchalantly, “we could be doing much better. Think about it.”
Crawford felt his publisher’s pressure to exploit the self-help obsessed public was one of his greatest hurdles in improving his own life. Lee, unlike Dorothy, wasn’t concerned with Crawford’s problems. And as Crawford saw it, he should be. Who the hell was he not to be concerned? Weren’t those the things a friend cares about? Then Crawford got in touch with his most rational self. He might just be jealous of Lee. Maybe he just resented Lee’s ability to let go of his fears and insecurities and just worry about getting richer. Crawford thought that Lee’s outlook might be something to aspire to. Maybe.
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