Jan Canty could visualize herself and Al as a good pair of marriage counselors. Al would counsel the husbands. She would see the wives. Then, she thought, who knows? Perhaps we could even write a book together.
She anticipated some good changes soon in their lives.
9
A thirty-four-yearold undercover vice cop named Jeff Renshaw was working the day rotation in the Cass Corridor December 7 when he saw the young brunette wave at him from the corner of Second and Charlotte.
The bearded cop was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a neck brace behind the wheel of a department surveillance car. He’d also been known to use arm slings, eye patches, and foreign accents in his line of work. He was never quite sure why prostitutes went for such covers. Either it played on their sympathy or made them think they had the upper hand.
Renshaw recognized the girl as she walked from the corner and got into his car. It was 1:45 P.M. He’d seen her before, but obviously she didn’t remember him.
“You wanna go out?” she asked.
His nod was restricted by the collar brace.
“What do you wanna spend?”
“I have $30, but I need some of that.”
“Could you spend $25?”
“Yep. What for?”
“How ’bout a blow job in the car?”
That satisfied the statute: a price and an act. He produced his badge and arrested Dawn Spens on a charge of accosting and soliciting, a misdemeanor.
She gave Renshaw what he already knew to be her real name. She’d been arrested a half-dozen times that year, three times by Vice. Most hookers had a half-dozen or more aliases. That could make an arrest a real pain in the ass.
The ID hassles, Renshaw once quipped, would cease if the hookers were required to carry Screen Actors Guild cards. Most were natural actresses. Through twelve years of police work, Renshaw never heard more convincing stories or saw more tears than those that came from whores about to be locked up. Their scripts ranged from sick children at home to reservations in drug treatment programs. He had a policy: Don’t believe anything a hooker says. Absolutely nothing. He’d been conned one too many times.
Dawn, however, was silent as he took her to Detroit Police Headquarters. When he ran a warrant check, he found she was paid up. Most prostitutes ignored their court dates. They repeatedly jumped bond and worked the streets with anywhere from $200 to $5,000 hanging over their heads.
When Renshaw delivered Dawn to the lockup, she was given a $200 bail. If somebody showed up with cash, she would be out by sundown. Or she could get lucky. When the holding cells got too crowded, judges sometimes turned the whores loose on personal bonds to make room for more serious offenders. By the time a turnkey showed Dawn her cell, Jeff Renshaw was already back on the streets in his neck brace.
Early that evening John Fry watched from the window of the secondfloor apartment for the black Buick. He was waiting for Dawn’s new customer who always had a pocketful of cash.
Dawn was right about the sugar daddy business. In the past week, the trick named Al had called her three times for dates. Each time he’d picked her up in front of the Homewood, the two of them driving off to nearby motels. Each time she’d returned with $100 or more. One time, John met him in front of the Homewood. She introduced John to the trick as “a good friend.”
“It’s a fucking pleasure to meet you, John,” he said, grinning.
People without the proper credentials shouldn’t use that word, John muttered later. The man was out of his element. He had a word for assholes like that. He was a “goof.”
“With each cussword his eyes seemed to say, ‘I said it,’ ” he said. “And I’ll tell you, he don’t look like no fucking doctor.”
But that wasn’t an issue Wednesday evening. Money was. Dawn had called John from the pay phone in the Police Headquarters lockup. Get the bail money from the trick named Al when he showed for his date, she said.
The Buick announced its arrival in front of the Homewood with a blast of its horn sometime between six and seven. Fry scurried down the stairs but fell into a relaxed gait as he approached the car.
“Dawn’s not here, mon,” Fry said, his dialect taking on a Caribbean quality. Sometimes that happened when he was feeling exceptionally smooth. “She’s in jail. She told me to tell you she needs $400 to get out.”
The trick reached into his pocket and handed Fry $150 wrapped in a Comerica Bank envelope.
“John, I was going to give this to her tonight, anyway.”
John said he probably could raise the remaining $250 himself, but the trick was eager to come to Dawn’s rescue.
“I can’t get any more money tonight, John,” he said before driving off. “First thing in the morning when the bank opens I’ll bring the rest.”
John could wait. He had $150 and knew one way to put the cash to good use.
10
He didn’t even know the woman very well. He was just excited about how he would feel that night during the candlelit dinner. He was infatuated, not in love, and when you talk about infatuation, you are talking about yourself.
—W. ALAN CANTY,
Detroit Magazine; Modern Bride Magazine
The bleat of a General Motors horn the next morning sent John Fry into the street to pick up the bail money. Words of gratitude crossed his lips as Al slipped $250 into his hand in another Comerica envelope. John had to resist a smirk.
Not only had he inflated the bond amount. That scam had been replaced by a better one. Dawn Spens was already upstairs in apartment 202, probably watching from the window. A judge had let her out on a personal bond late the night before.
“I’ll have the girl out of there by noon,” John told the trick. “You can probably reach her after that.”
If Dawn Spens had any doubts that she had latched onto her first sugar daddy, they disappeared when he called that afternoon. He wanted to take her shopping.
“Then, would you have dinner with me tonight?” he asked.
Dawn covered the phone with her hand and turned to her boyfriend. She had been working the streets for six months but still sought John Fry’s guidance when it came to business.
“John, he wants to have dinner with me. Is it all right?”
“It’s better to get paid $100 to eat than get paid $100 to fuck.”
John was feeling good. His supply of heroin was already assured for the night.
They went to a mall in Dearborn. She picked out a full-length quilt coat, with matching hat, gloves, and boots. He paid nearly $300 cash for the ensemble. Later she would wonder why he never used credit cards.
“Only cash,” he said. “I don’t believe in plastic. That created problems for me once.”
That wasn’t so odd, but the trick did have some quirks. While most dates couldn’t wait, he had a spotty sexual appetite. He shunned other forms of physical contact. He never kissed her or even held her hand. The only urgent request the date had made was that she not smoke in his car. He said he was allergic to tobacco.
Now he was paying her to go to dinner. The small Cantonese restaurant was only a few blocks from the Homewood. They sat in a booth under a Chinese lantern, its dragon-lady panel changing colors as a light inside spun around.
Dawn eventually brought the subject up. Heroin glazed her eyes and slowed her speech into a low whiskey voice. Sometime during her vegetable egg fu yung and his pepper steak, she explained how she’d developed a drug habit.
“I had to tell him I was using,” she later told another addict. “I figured anybody could tell anyway.”
The trick said he knew all about drugs. She listened as he unfolded an elaborate story.
Al said that he had been married, and they had a little girl. His wife was a prostitute. She was working when they met, but she quit after they got married. After their daughter was born she developed a cocaine habit. She began working the streets again to support her habit. He put her in drug treatment centers, but she never stayed straight for long. One day s
he and their daughter got into a car accident, and his little girl was killed. His wife survived the collision, was on a life-support system for three weeks, then died.
“I still owe a big hospital bill for that,” he said.
Later he embellished the story. He didn’t use credit cards because his wife ruined his credit rating. He said he still owned the house in Grosse Pointe where they once lived, but he couldn’t live with the memories he associated with the home. He rented it out, staying in a doctor’s residence near Detroit Receiving Hospital, where he worked in the emergency room.
Before the evening was over the trick named Al wondered if he could see her from now on in her apartment. John had already advised Dawn that might be a good idea as well, considering the cash he was spending. When he dropped her off at the Homewood, the trick said he would drop by the next day around noon.
Dawn wanted to know his last name. She complained she didn’t have his phone number, that she didn’t know how to reach him when she was in jail.
“Miller,” the trick said. “Dr. Al Miller.”
11
Although psychotherapy is often referred to as a treatment, as though it were some sort of remedy to be applied or administered to a passive patient, it really should be described as an interaction in which both therapist and patient take a very active role.
—W. ALAN CANTY,
Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy
China red seeped into the dark eastern sky over Lake St. Clair as John Mosey piloted his black Jeep past the mansions on Windmill Pointe Drive. Mosey knew something was changing in his life. He was changing. Here he was up before dawn on a Saturday—not only up, but looking forward to psychotherapy at such a brutal hour.
Mosey owed it all to Al Canty. When he told Al that his unpredictable work schedule made it difficult to make sessions during the day or weekday evenings, Al had suggested Saturday mornings.
“Well, Saturdays are not a problem, but every other weekend I see my daughters,” John told him. “I pick them up at 10:00.”
“Would you be willing to meet me at my house at 6:45 A.M.?” Al said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mosey complained.
But he wasn’t joking. Al Canty already had a patient booked at 7:30 A.M. on Saturdays.
“If you’re willing to be there at 6:45,” he said. “I’m willing to get up and see you.”
By winter, Mosey found himself getting up even earlier. He took time to drive through the most opulent neighborhoods of the Pointes. He liked to imagine himself lord of one of the castles along the lake. He could picture what they looked like inside. He could see himself in a private library, sitting among books, mahogany, and the stained glass. He could envision himself sipping coffee and reading fiction or Albert Ellis well into the night.
But sometimes that fantasy depressed him. He decided to tell Al about it as they began their session in his den.
“I know these people,” Mosey began. “I mean they’re buffoons, but they got money. The only thing they know how to do is make money, despite themselves. So why do I feel they’re successful, and I’m not?”
“Sounds like your definition of success is an unrealistic one,” Al said.
“Each generation should do better than the one before it,” Mosey continued. “When I think that, I’m a loser. I mean, I come from a successful family. There are expectations involved. My uncle is a vice-president at General Motors. I have another uncle who is a judge. My father owns his own company. Here I am at thirty-three working for somebody else and living in Royal Oak. My dad is brighter than a cat, and I’m certainly no dummy. But I sure feel like a dummy when I’m around him. I mean, for chrisake, I grew up in Birmingham. How the hell do you top Birmingham or Grosse Pointe?”
Al said they came from similar backgrounds.
“My parents expected me to be on the honor roll,” he said. “There was lots of pressure. I couldn’t even take a shop class. My parents would have thought it appalling if I had gone into the vocational trades.”
Al told him he felt insecure for many years. He had wondered for a long time whether he would ever get through his university training.
“I seriously questioned whether I was capable,” he said. “But I was. I’ve also found it’s not so much what my parents said, but how I perceived them that was the problem. A lot of this pressure was my own perception.
“John, it all gets back to self-esteem.”
How often they had talked about that word. Al said there were a lot of symptoms of low self-worth: People pleasing. The inability to say no.
Low self-esteem was the catalyst for what Al called the rescuer-victim syndrome. What a perfect description of Mosey’s last relationship and every one before it.
“If I put ninety-nine women in a party, I’d find the one fucked-up girl and turn her into a project,” he told Al.
“And do you know she would find you, as well,” Al said. “Both the rescuer and the victim play their roles well. The victim can sense the rescuer, and manipulate him because of it. The rescuer, in turn, builds up his self-esteem as the savior. Many people, John, spend their entire lives in those roles.”
They would work on that, Al said. They would work together. And they did, every Saturday at dawn.
12
[The child] gradually develops likes and dislikes of his own which are based not only on his parents’ values, but on his own experiences with life as well.
—W. ALAN CANTY,
Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy
Jan Canty smelled the familiar aroma of Al’s coffee brewing in her little country kitchen. It was one of her favorite rooms, though one of the smallest. It made the big Tudor feel like home.
On idle mornings, she liked to sit in the breakfast nook and feel the sun penetrating the two leaded-glass windows overlooking the backyard. By December, virtually all the leaves had fallen from the elms. The few stragglers reminded her of hooked goldfish as they shimmied in the wind.
Al was already working on his second pot of coffee. Never had she seen someone drink so much of the stuff. It remained his only vice. He’d given up cigarettes years ago because she was allergic to the smoke.
Al’s addiction to coffee was as much ritual as habit. He bought two or three different kinds of beans, and his patients often gave him new varieties to try. He ground them meticulously, then experimented with various combinations. The mix was brewed, then transferred into a yellow thermos with a tan top. He was probably the only professional in the Fisher Building who arrived carrying a vacuum bottle each day.
Jan Canty had to admit it. Her husband had become somewhat of an eccentric in his prime, and the thermos was one of his most visible oddities. She sometimes wondered what was more important, the coffee or the container. He took it to his mother’s and on errands to the grocery store. He toted it on their dinner dates with her best friend, Celia Muir, and her husband, John. He sipped from the plastic cup en route, then set the bottle on the table in fine restaurants, asking waitresses to top it off with more.
Once, he lost the thermos top before a speaking engagement at the University of Michigan. He was so anxious he almost canceled the lecture, until she rushed out and bought a new thermos. It took some time, however, before he became comfortable with the new bottle. He preferred it looking very used and unwashed, and he never left the house without it.
“Al, you’re pretty attached to that thermos,” her friend Celia once kidded.
“You’re right,” Al admitted. “It’s my blanket.”
Jan was surprised when he began to fill the vacuum bottle. They usually waited until the afternoon before going out on his day off.
“Al, you’re going somewhere?”
“I have to go to the Wayne County Jail. They want me to do updates on parolees.”
“Parolees? This is your day off. Friday. Our day off.”
He explained that he’d made a series of psychological reports on prisoners some time bac
k. Now the parole board was adamant that the same psychologist evaluate the prisoners before they were released.
“They want that kind of consistency. I’ve worked it into my lunch hour.”
That’s just great, she told herself. And, considering the way he was working lately, she wondered if it was only the beginning. She hated to think what would happen if Fridays became full workdays again. Already Al’s clinic schedule was fashioned after a Ford production line, and it seemed to be speeding up. After finishing at 6 P.M. at the Fisher, he came home, ate, and then disappeared into his home office for more patient sessions. He had everything timed to the quarter hour.
“OK,” he’d say. “I’m leaving the office at 7:00 tonight and I have a patient at 7:45 at home. Can we eat between 7:15 and 7:30?”
She was beginning to feel like an airline stewardess. Several times Al wanted his dinner in therapy sessions at home. She thought that looked pretty unprofessional, and it wasn’t good for his health. She knew he often skipped lunch.
After he sped through a caffeine-driven day like that, she always marveled how Al could shut down, just as though someone had thrown a switch. He became a relaxed, deliberate man with his books and conversations. She wanted him that way on Fridays. And, she had to admit, she was a little hurt he was leaving.
“All right, I’ll go with you to the jail,” she told him. “I want to be with you. I’ll go with you to the jail, then we’ll do something together afterwards. I’ve never been there anyway. I’m sure I’ll find it interesting.”
Al screwed the cup onto his thermos.
“Jan, you don’t. You don’t want to go to the Wayne County Jail. It’s a crummy place and it stinks. It literally stinks.”
He also said he didn’t want her subjected to the catcalls from prisoners. The jail was a lot different than their other professional expeditions, such as his college lectures on autism.
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