As they waited for a couple of orders of steamed mussels, Ray could see why his old friend missed the song. Al was troubled over the young prostitute that he had lightly called his “latest thing” only a month ago.
“This is really getting to be a drain on my finances, Ray,” he said. “The thing is really getting to be a pain in general.”
“How much of a pain?”
“Large amounts.”
“You see her every day, or something?”
“Six days a week. A couple hundred at a time.”
“You mean a couple hundred every time you see her? Christ, Al. That’s twelve hundred a week.”
“It’s been more than that. And the time. It’s taking too much time from what I should be doing. And her boyfriend is a real pain in the ass.”
Al told him about the tattooed pimp named John. But Ray wasn’t surprised that a character like that was around. Al’s interest in street types went way back.
Ray remembered a time in high school when Al always had the latest information on neighborhood thieves, con artists, and motorcycle clubs. Al thought a few of them really had a lot on the ball. Ray remembered one in particular named Harold. Harold could take an Oldsmobile and refit it with a Cadillac’s body, turning the cheaper auto into an imitation of the real thing. Al studied under him to learn the switch. Al bragged how Harold also showed him how to snap a padlock. Then one night, he went with Harold on a gas station burglary on Jefferson. Al engaged the attendant in a conversation while Harold picked the safe. They got three hundred dollars.
Al was attracted to psychopaths, even before they discovered the personality disorder in college textbooks. They had quite a few discussions about it. As Freudians, they believed the psychopath lacked development of the superego. In layman’s terms, the psychopath didn’t have a conscience.
Ray Danford sometimes wondered about Al’s superego as well in those days. When Al drove, he ignored red lights and other traffic laws. Once he deliberately turned the wrong way down a one-way street in front of a squad car. He handled that cop as he did the others. First he wouldn’t roll down the window. Then he’d crack it, and the line was always the same.
“Well, my dad is Al Canty. You know him. He works at the psychopathic clinic.”
The name often got him off. Then Al laughed wildly as they drove away. Later Ray would learn that Al, as a teenager, accumulated scores of traffic and parking tickets. His embarrassed father paid some and got others dismissed. Finally one judge suggested to Al Sr. that they let him serve five days in the county jail. Al did the time but continued amassing violations.
Al liked attention and often emulated people who were at the center of it. In high school, he spent one summer imitating a classmate popular with the girls at the YMCA dances. Al worked for weeks rehearsing all his moves—his lines, his physical mannerisms, his pattern of speech—and ended up looking foolish on the dance floor.
Ray sometimes wondered why Al didn’t just be himself. Then he wondered if there really was an Al Canty. He was always posing back then. Al had dozens of theatrical postures he could summon at will. When he was still, he sat or stood, holding a cigarette between vertical fingers, his elbow resting on his waist. When someone in the old gang told a funny story, Al would lean back in his chair, toss his head way back, and cackle. It was a hollow, unconnected laugh.
Then, in his early twenties, Al discovered James Dean. He was intrigued by the actor’s search for his own identity, in his lives on the screen and off. Dean could very well have suffered from an Oedipus complex, they decided as young Freudians. His deep attachment to his late mother was well publicized. Dean only made three films, and all of them fascinated Al.
Al thought the actor was brilliant as the young man trying to win a demanding father’s love in East of Eden. The character finally received it, but only because the father discovers the real nature of love on his deathbed.
Al decided Dean stole Giant from Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. He played a self-condemning oil tycoon who had it all—except the woman he wants. The self-destructive character ended up disgracing himself in front of a national audience.
When Rebel Without a Cause hit the screens, Al bought a red jacket like the one Dean’s lead character wore and began dangling a cigarette from his lip. For months they analyzed Rebel Without a Cause from the first scene to the last. It was high Freudian drama, and brain food for the two of them.
They agreed that Dean’s awkward and shy hero, Jim Stark, was filled with confusion about his role in life. The movie introduced Stark drunk and curled in the fetal position in the street, clutching a toy monkey he wouldn’t give up.
Stark was both an infant and an adult, lost in his own hidden fantasies. He couldn’t find direction from his mother, who complained how she suffered giving him birth, or from the father who bought him everything. In one scene Stark’s smoldering resentments drove him to nearly choke his dad to death.
Sometimes, out of the blue, Al used to grab his temples and recite Stark’s classic line to the film character’s bickering parents:
“You’re tearing me apart.”
Al knew all the dialogue. In one early scene the troubled Stark found some empathy from a police officer named Ray. Al had a lot of fun with that one. He used to turn to Ray Danford, hit a Dean pose, then say Stark’s line from that scene:
“You can see right through me.”
In the film, Stark met the teenage tramp Judy, played by Natalie Wood. She was promiscuous in order to punish her emotionally estranged father. Stark’s alter ego is Plato, played by Sal Mineo. He was a weak, neurotic teen, too unstable to survive an adolescent society dominated by bullies. He was an only child with an absentee father and a mother always away on trips or at social functions.
Then, Jim Stark won over Judy. With Plato in tow and the bullies on their trail, they holed up in an abandoned mansion and acted out their own imaginary family. Plato found some temporary satisfaction in the masquerade. But in the film’s climax, Plato was killed, while Stark found his manhood.
Adults criticized Rebel for inflaming a teenage population into delinquency. For Al and Ray, the film was a tragedy about families paralyzed by hypocrisy and the denial of feeling.
The movie was Al’s favorite actor’s epitaph. Ray remembered them hearing the news on the radio on September 30, 1955. He was driving Al out to Clarkston for a session with his psychiatrist. James Dean was dead, killed in a car crash. At the time, the actor was writing a script for a film he wanted to star in and direct—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Was it a reckless accident or a suicide?
Like his film hero, Al Canty kept searching for something to latch onto well into his late twenties. Once Al complained about his inability to connect with himself. He described one of his earliest recollections, from the age of eight.
“We built a fort and I hit another kid with a snowball,” Al said. “The only thing that kept going through my mind was is this all there is? It was like the Peggy Lee song.”
Al always seemed to have only a peripheral interest in most things; his inability to get his hands dirty with his cars was a classic example. Psychology was the first and only entity that Ray Danford had ever seen bring total commitment. It obviously had served Al well on the material level. But now Ray could see that his clinical knowledge was little help with his attraction to the hooker and her pimp.
“Well, maybe you just better get out of this thing,” Ray said as they cracked their mussels.
“It’s pretty bad. You ought to see her. She’s yellow. She’s in the hospital now with hepatitis. She’s virtually killing herself with drugs.”
“That bad?”
“Yeah, if she died there my troubles would be over.”
“Well, that would be one way out,” Ray said.
Al thought the proposition was funny. The two old friends had a good laugh, but it provided only temporary relief of Ray Danford’s concern.
61
Christine Duchene Mes
smann was weary of the controversy over the twenty-year-old drug addict with the long medical history. By late January, Dawn Spens had become the most challenging case in the third-year medical student’s rotation at Detroit Receiving Hospital.
Messmann found much promise in the young woman who talked repeatedly of turning her life around. A resident of Harper Woods, she saw Dawn as a neighbor.
“Lookit,” she told Dawn. “Age twenty is young. But thirty comes up real fast. But if you don’t reform, I don’t even think you’re going to make it to thirty.”
They spent a lot of time talking, and Dawn spent a lot of time agreeing. Her friend John, she said, was a reformed addict and was going to help her get straight. There was the older man in tortoiseshell glasses who visited her as well. He also was concerned. Messmann assumed he was a friend of the family.
“It seems you’ve really taken an interest in Dawn,” he said once, taking her aside. “I want to thank you for that. That’s nice ’cause she needs help. She’s really a good girl.”
Messmann felt good about the holistic approach she’d taken with the entire case. She offered to refer Dawn to a drug program, but Dawn wanted to move in with her mother in Windsor. Messmann had talked to the mother twice and she seemed eager to have Dawn. Dawn’s father also had visited several times.
Messmann had a lot of hope for Dawn. The intern on her team, however, didn’t see it that way.
“You’re wasting your energy on an addict,” he said. “Nothing ever comes of them.”
They’d had a running dispute over the case. Messmann wasn’t naive. She could see Dawn had a knack for keying on people’s weak spots. One night Dawn had dropped Messmann’s name to get more Demerol from a compliant nurse.
Dawn’s pain—or lack of it—was the most debated subject on her team. Dawn complained of discomfort, though her chart documented a steady recovery from hepatitis. The intern wanted to cut off her Demerol; Messmann wanted to taper it.
“Yeah, yeah,” he’d say. “You know these patients are manipulators, don’t you? She’s a drug addict and shouldn’t get anything.”
Messmann put her reputation on the line against the senior team member.
“When we have an alcoholic suffering from pancreatitis you don’t just say, ‘Tough. You did it to yourself,’ ” she argued.
It came to a head the last week in January. The Demerol was discontinued January 25, while her subclavian line remained in for nourishment. When Messmann talked to her two days later, Dawn said she was finalizing her plans to go to her mother’s. On the morning of the 29th, Christine Messmann arrived for her rounds and found her patient missing.
Dawn had signed out the evening before against medical advice, then fled the hospital with her subclavian line still in place. Messmann knew what that was for. She already knew the value of a subclavian hit on the street.
“Did you hear what happened to our young patient?” the intern gloated.
Messmann felt as though Dawn Spens had kicked her in the stomach.
About four weeks later Christine Messmann was dining at the Blue Pointe when she saw the man in the tortoiseshell glasses again. She would see him there several times, always sitting with an attractive young woman. One Tuesday night she walked right past their booth. The man looked up and grinned. They exchanged a “hello.” His companion looked up.
Messmann felt like asking him about Dawn Spens, maybe adding what she’d gone through with the addict he visited so often. But she sensed he didn’t want to talk.
That’s fine, she thought. Why spoil a good meal with a bad memory?
62
A former topless dancer named Linda Sue Stennett was wondering whether it had been such a good idea to give her third cousin John Fry a place to stay while Dawn Spens was in the hospital. Since Dawn had left Receiving Hospital, the scene in her southside house reminded her of an ex-husband’s nine-hundred-dollar-a-day heroin habit.
Not that Sue didn’t like to party. She’d do a little coke or smoke some weed if it came her way. But she had four young daughters in her southside home. The thirty-year-old welfare mother didn’t want any trouble, and she thought it might be brewing with Al, the physician John sometimes called The Doc.
The way Sue understood it, Al was trying to get Dawn off the streets, and now off drugs. When Dawn was in the hospital, he sometimes came in with his thermos of coffee and chatted. Al was going to refer both Dawn and John to a methadone program.
John had treated Sue pretty well while Dawn was in the hospital. He bought groceries with money from Al. He played a lot with her two youngest. John always did have a way with children. Her six-year-old, Tonya Sue, adored her “Uncle John.”
Al, too, had tried to help out. One day her nine-year-old, Tony, had pains in her stomach. When The Doc dropped by, John asked him to examine her. He pressed on her stomach and her side.
“To be on the safe side, you better have her examined at a hospital,” he said. “She could have appendicitis.”
It turned out to be a bad case of gas. Despite his missed diagnosis, she still liked Al’s demeanor. Sue couldn’t understand why he provided Dawn with so much money, considering she’d once said they didn’t have sex.
Sue Stennett knew that Dawn and John were curious about The Doc as well, and that they weren’t satisfied entirely with only daily support. Lately, Dawn and John had been talking about ways to cash in. Dawn brought it up one night as they were sitting around her kitchen table.
“Al knows more than he lets on,” Dawn said. “I’d like to know exactly what he’s into.”
She and John tried to pinpoint it, speculating he was involved in a drug ring or “something big.”
“We know he’s married,” Dawn said. “But there’s something else he’s hiding. There’s something he’s into and something he knows. I think we could get a lot of money out of him if we knew what it was. We could blackmail him. We could blackmail him good.”
Dawn was excited by the proposition, and John was all for it too. What people do is their business, Sue thought.
But by late February, John and Dawn were making her uncomfortable. She felt as though the two of them were taking advantage of her. John no longer bought groceries or even an occasional six-pack. She suspected Dawn got money every day from Al when he came by and picked her up for a lunch hour drive, but all of it was going to dope.
One morning Sue woke to find Tonya Sue wrapped in a bath towel and standing with wet hair in the living room.
“Tonya, what are you doing?”
“I was taking a bath and Dawn and Uncle John chased me out.”
Sue wondered how the two of them could even find room to use her tiny bathroom together. But when she opened the door, three dope fiends, as well as Dawn and John, came out. They’d all been shooting up.
“John, I’m not going to live the way I did,” she said.
John said it wasn’t his fault. Dawn had gone out to score drugs that morning and brought the three men back.
“I don’t give a damn who did. I’m not going to put my kids through this garbage. You and Dawn are going to have to find someplace else to stay.”
They left later that day.
63
As soon as she saw the icy look on Gladys Canty’s face, Jan wished she’d never brought up the new office furniture.
“Why, Bus, I was never informed of this,” Gladys said. “How in the world can you afford that?”
Jan asked herself, what business is it of hers, anyway? Al’s fifty-one years old. Mother doesn’t have son on an allowance. Jan couldn’t understand why Gladys was acting as though her husband had been tapping his mother for regular handouts.
“Buster,” Mrs. Canty continued. “Why, that furniture you already have is perfectly suitable. I don’t see why you need to buy new furnishings.”
He wasn’t buying it, Jan thought. I am, damn it.
Al hung his head. He was stammering, struggling to change the subject. Jan was glad when they left.
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br /> “Even if you were paying for it, why does she care what you do with your money?” she asked Al in the car.
“Well, Jan-Jan,” he said, “you know how Ma is.”
Jan had saved for three years to decorate her office the way she wanted it, now that she was hanging out her shingle with Al’s. She knew the limits of her own budget. She wished she could say the same for her husband’s. Instead of learning about their holdings as Al had promised many times, she felt the money mystery was deepening. Once she asked him if her doctorate tuition had put them in bad straits.
“Oh no, Jan,” he said. “Therapeutic Peers is in its seventh printing.”
But she suspected the book hadn’t done as well as he claimed. Recently, she proposed they get a full accounting of the book’s sales. Al said he didn’t have time. She’d also suggested they combine a vacation with visits to some of the ten hospitals where he said his videotapes were being tested.
“Let’s do an update and see how they’re doing,” she said.
“No, Jan, this is not a good time for that,” he said.
She couldn’t understand why he was being so evasive about the financial and research aspects of the project. On the other hand, he was opening up more about what inspired the book. He admitted to her one night it was somewhat autobiographical, that he himself had experienced some of the parental conflicts and childhood anger he documented in the book.
There were other signs of financial stress. Recently she’d opened a letter mailed to their home from the state treasury department. Al was delinquent for about five hundred dollars in estimated tax payments for 1984. She handed him the notice.
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