Therapy Mammals

by Jon Methven

  “She’s dead because I don’t know algebra,” Gus has concluded.

  We do this in Devin Brenner’s waiting room every other Saturday. Gus is convinced that the expense of his algebra tutor cut into our childcare budget, and we had to fire Tilly to make ends meet. Never mind she had been thieving from us for years. If he knew algebra, he reasons, we would not have felt the financial strain and fired Tilly, and she would not have had the accident, revenge dyeing my lagoon.

  “Gusser, not today. Tilly wasn’t your fault. Accidents happen.”

  “We’re an interconnected system of decisions and results. Every thought and action has a repercussion.”

  It sounds like Ray McClutchen dribble. “If anyone is to blame it’s me. I made the decision to let Tilly go.”

  “You’re the father. You had obligations. Work, house, food. You don’t realize it, but you have so little control over our lives.” Gus wears a caramel colored sweater, slippers, and a pair of twill pants with an adjustable waistband. “We’re in charge of our destinies. I should have cared more about the algebra. But I didn’t.”

  I check my watch and roll my eyes at another father, who reciprocates the eye roll, both of us with our fucked up kids waiting to be told how much it will cost. The healthcare in this country is shameful. Not the doctors and medicine and payment plans, but the waiting rooms. We have reverted to third world bus stations and pioneer caravans, our entire system of efficiency thrown off pandering to esteemed sorcerers. Who does Devin Brenner think he is? If anyone in another career brandished such arrogance, forcing customers to wait, the system would grind to a halt. If I decided to predict the weather on my schedule, I’d be out of a job faster than Whitman is already planning. Yet here I sit, my son dressed like a nanny of nondescript ethnicity, arguing over who killed who.

  Nanny withdrawal is a serious issue for a child Gus’s age, not only facing the pressures of teenage life, but also moving out of the parental sphere. Throw in a savage death and you get transgenerational twists of the psyche, my son wanting foot baths in the afternoon, tea, constant naps. Thirty minutes we’ve been sitting here, only nine in the morning, and Devin already backed up two appointments. The frustration overwhelms me and I decide to do his job here in the waiting room.

  “Listen, Gus. You need to snap out of this shit.”

  He looks at me with a mousy innocence, one I used to adore and I now want to slap. We do not slap our elderly in this society when they are slow to comprehend, the therapist has explained, we take them to buffets and buy them motorized carts. It permits old age an entitled sheen, incontinence and arthritic knees preferable to the rat race and pressure, and it saddens me that my boy is conceding. His transgenerational symptoms are a shelter, the therapist advises, or possibly a cocoon that he could come out of any day. But I know there are no guarantees. We do not all enter cocoons and come out butterflies. Some of us stay inside forever. Some of us die in there.

  “The sweaters, the stooped posture, the five o’clock bedtimes.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You’re not tired, damn it.” We are not supposed to shout at Gus. We are never to tell him he’s pretending. “You’re pretending to be tired.”

  “That’s strange,” he says. “I feel tired.”

  He will not fight me. He knows the best way to win is to let me shout and then wait for the apology. “Every other week I drive you here. The same mopey bullshit, Gus. These appointments take time.”

  “I enjoy waiting with you.”

  “They aren’t cheap, you know.”

  “I thought insurance covered it.”

  “Well, it doesn’t.” This is a lie. “And money is tight these days.”

  “Exactly what I said. I killed Tilly because I needed algebra tutoring.”

  I fidget. I itch my arms until they are raw with welts. I need my drugs which I must conserve until…. I don’t know until what. Other parents watch my lack of patience, my antipathy for the broken, my unkindness. But I am being kind. Millicent, Gus’s alter ego, is creepy and depressing. This is why he has no friends. This is why teachers do not like him, why parents do not invite him to his peers’ birthday celebrations. He embarrasses his sister and causes the Gopa community to look at us with dreaded compassion, as if we brood over a dead child and not just dead help. The wrestling coach has pleaded with me to find a suitable sport. The chess club coach suggested Gus quit, that he does not have the talent or speed to move plastic pieces around a board. Devin Brenner and Gopa administrators want to medicate him out of this phase, Prozac and serotonin and other illustrious chemicals that will dig out his youth from wherever it lurks. Only I know that when you dig for something that is not naturally forthcoming, other emotions surface, things that cannot be shuttered.

  I am so irritated with my elderly juvenile, with the state of my boy and his inability to fight, that I shake and sweat, tempted to take his half hour for myself, one on one with Devin. I pop one of my remaining pills in the car.

  Fucking Annihilate the Pawns

  Wrestling practice was a joke. We missed warm-ups at the chess meet, Gus insistent on accompanying me to the cryobank to drop off his little sister. “Someday she’ll sense it—that her life was our priority on the chore list,” he says. I fall in love with him all over. Sharon Li, the mom with the prosthetic leg, stands at the entrance of the gymnasium handing out fliers for her annual gala Limbs for Love. Everyone takes one not because they care, but because she hobbles on the obviously fake leg that makes us feel badly about running away from her. Sharon has an implausible peppiness, an irate happiness that causes me distress, and to look at her is to witness the energy that, as a parent, I am meant to possess. She has a stack of the pages and whether it happens or not, I conclude she avoids handing me one, thus disinviting me to her event.

  Despite her faux niceties and handicap, Sharon is a Gopa bully, organizing the other moms to sign a petition asking that Gus be removed from the chess team, a petition she does not think I know about; Josey Mateo tells me everything. Gus is slow at chess, his grades deficient, so that he brings down the team average giving the squad the third-highest GPA of all athletic units, behind boys’ fencing and girls’ tennis. As if it matters. As if anyone outside of gimpy Sharon and her child Whisper and the other chess nerds too inadequate to play actual sports care about grades. Picking up Gus a few weeks earlier at one of these events, I watched the other kids bullying him, the hypocrisy that a chess dweeb and his pimpled posse turned the tables on oppression and were issuing my son a dressing down for his algebra failures. I let them finish, hoping it might do some good.

  I snatch a page from Sharon Li. She has no choice but to choreograph Gopa’s patented triple kiss and hand touch, after which we share dabs of sanitizer and small talk.

  “Oh, so nice to see you…”

  “Tom. Tom Pistilini. Gus’s dad.” She knows who I am. She has two nannies, one for each of her terrifyingly dull children. I read the fucking weather, forty-eight days without a fail. I matter. “Laura’s husband,” I say.

  She moves in for an affectionate shove of my shoulder to convey a secret, her voice low and dainty, a wild transgression she cannot tell even her own husband who must hate her. “I love those pancakes,” she says, winking, the closest we will ever come to fornication. “I can’t stop eating them.”

  “Missus Li. Naughty, naughty.” I put a finger to my lips, our secret, you fucking animal you. I tap the paper. “You should get some for your event. I’ll have Laura call you.”

  “That would be essential.” A political junkie, Sharon Li knows every angle of the Gopa faithful and has purposefully shunned all of Laura’s attempts to get her pancakes in front of a new ethnic populace, knowing it is little advantage to herself. I laugh out loud, thinking it was the prosthetic leg that allowed me to snare her in my trap, wondering if this will earn me favor with Laura. But it is only a mild victory as
I realize Sharon Li used the word essential, and now my tribe has grasped the letters, unraveling the meaning, the Luderica summoning the creatures who do not appreciate the word essential. She did not say yes. She did not commit to purchasing pancakes.

  “You know what else is essential?” I lean, dry mouth returning, my hot breath in her tiny ear, my stench in her realm, other voices. “That we fucking annihilate these little preppy Highline bastards.” I hang on the F in fucking so the spit I do have bubbles near my teeth. “That we fucking shove the pawns in their sweaty assholes and let them know who the real chess kings are.”

  She pulls away, an awkward smile, trying to understand if I am unhinged or if this is how athletic fathers talk. “Yes, it’s a rather important match.”

  “Absolutely essential. Embarrass the little shitholes until they’re crying snot bubbles to their mommies. Fucking spirit signs over there, dig? Who puts up spirit signs at a chess match?” I know virtually nothing about chess, nor if the spirit signs belong to our side or theirs. “Make it so…so…so they don’t even get any of our pawns. We don’t just tap their king. We pick it up and snap off the head, light the plastic corpse on fire, and gather around and sing the Gopa anthem. Slam the board with two fists, yes, check mate, bitch, then kick them”—I actually make a karate kick in the air, which sullies my hamstring—“argh, shit…right at the top of their bony frames so they fall over the back of their chairs. Maybe then the parents get involved in the bleachers and tear the spirit signs into confetti and piss all over them, and piss on the decapitated king so it doesn’t cause a fire.”

  I am sweating, unconscious when I finish, fairly certain from Sharon’s facial expression that this time was verbal. I am the cadaver representation of Tom Pistilini, Channel Fourteen weatherman. I am a furious land of starving creatures ready for harvest.

  “Whoo! Put it there, Sharon Li.” I make her high-five me as other parents quietly stream in, nearly breaking off her tiny limb with the force of my slap, another prosthetic that makes me laugh viciously. I shout a few additional curses, then ball up her flyer and put it in my pocket. “Fuck you, Highland,” I say, two middle fingers extended toward the quiet bleachers, sweating. “See you in hell.”

  I join the chess fathers for warm-ups, kids complaining about the lighting in the gymnasium, that it’s too cold, moms arranging inhalers and bottled water and mid-match snacks so they do not pass out at the chessboard. I have friends in this crowd, parents who do not have children on the lacrosse team and who know of my recent altercations. I am somewhat of a cult figure with the fathers, happy to have a near-celebrity in their ranks, though I have not showered in a week and am eventually squared off with a Pakistani father who has his own dental practice and gives me a business card for a half-off whitening procedure.

  “Unseasonably warm, piano lessons, poor bunnies, dead bunnies, Gopa this Gopa this, speaking of lacrosse did you catch the website last night, the mom who posted the accusations,” the Pakistani father asks me, his accent over-pronounced.

  “Oh yes.”

  “Why in the fuck? Am I correct?”

  “Terrible,” I recommend. “Dark times at the Gopa Academy.”

  “Yes, Mister Pisser, well sentiment.” He pulls me close, offers himself sanitizer and then me. “It is not just me. Indeed these are dark times. Parents fighting for places in this program.”

  “It is not just you,” and then I add, “sir” because I don’t know his name. He’s a good dad, a caring protector, his bushy mustache the centerpiece of a friendly face, a friendly world. I like this man. His daughter is Mahjeek or Mahbrude. I know because even in her junior year, she already has scholarship offers from the Ivy’s, which possibly adds to her father’s contentment.

  “These lacrosse parents,” he confides. “Out to get us.”

  This makes me laugh insincerely at my friend’s concern, his pompous suggestion that the lacrosse parents even know he exists. I put a hand on his shoulder so he knows he is not alone, leaving a trail of liquid, having forgotten to rub in the sanitizer.

  “It’s me they’re out to get,” I say. “Do not worry, my friend. They deserve whatever comes.”

  Something Good This Way Comes

  Deciding on the Gopa mascot was a bareknuckle brawl involving parents, teachers, administrators, coaches, lawyers, and a team of ethicists hired specifically to ensure that no entity would be offended by the moniker. Parents refused to name an animal mascot. Personifying an animal was deemed unethical. Anything weather related, such as the Hurricanes or the Tornadoes or the Gopa Volcanoes, was considered cruel to victims of natural disasters. The Gopa Thunder and Gopa Wind were a few alternatives that made a final list, but they were shot down by the ethicists for being unpredictable. We settled on the Gopa Worthy, a term that denoted principles and high-mindedness and respect. For all the good it did in hiring ethicists and not offending other people, we should have called ourselves the Pampered Elitists or the Uncircumcised Redskins. Other schools despise it. Annual newspaper editorials accuse us of elitism and white privilege, even though white students and parents make up only fifty-seven percent of the Gopa tribe.

  It actually is a good description of our school community, depending on the interpretation. We are worthy of one another. We deserve to be aggregated into the same class of people. We want the best for each other, until it might impact our children negatively, and then we want the worst. We are all worthy, but each of us is worthier. We undermine each other. We form cliques and team up against other cliques. We move through life with the chaos of an undefined cellular system, peaceful until a cancerous entity disrupts our ubiquity, our worthiness. Like a family, we share rumors and problems, but never with outsiders, other private school parents, the media. We may sometimes falter in our level of worthiness, but the hope is that we are always worthier than others. I am aware that my quadruple association—with the Gopa Worthy, with the gated community in Slancy, with white skin, with claiming to predict the weather—makes me one of the most defined bastards on the planet.

  By the time I pick up Jackson in midtown, my mood is in tatters and I am slightly hallucinating. He is not much better. The rehearsal was a disaster, his newest ensemble littered with musicians hired on the cheap to save money. Neither of us feels worthy.

  “As if anyone goes to a Broadway show for the acting,” he says. I could not care in the least but I appreciate his rage. A southern man with a love of barbecue, also a homosexual and classical music aficionado, his heterogeneity is why I appreciate America, why I adore living near New York City. I let him complain about his job, about Jason, about the kids and Gopa, even me. “Geezus hell, Pisser, you stink.”

  “I can roll down a window.”

  He sniffs the car. “No, it’s everywhere. On you, me, the pancakes. When’s the last time you showered?”

  “I bathed this morning. The Jacuzzi,” I remind him. “I’m off deodorant.”

  “It’s unbecoming of a father. What example does it send to our children?”

  That we are men, feral to the core, primal in our existence, savages at heart that do not require perfume to conform but rather meat and stain and loin. My savages scream it inside my head. I do not say this aloud. Instead, “Maybe you’re right. Sorry about that, Jackson.”

  “Eh, ignore me. I’m in a bastard mood.”

  We barely listen to each other’s grievances, both nodding and

  accepting imperfection, anything so we do not have to discuss Moveable Museums and our complicity in what will define our children’s college education, their inheritance, our retirement lifestyle for years.

  “Jason’s still down with the flu. Everyone has it. Several members of the lacrosse team, from what I understand.”

  “That Sharon Li is a witch. A real witch.”

  “Not sure Rhythm has the grades.”

  “I bet she has a vanity license plate on all three cars.�
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  “The grades. Everyone cares about the grades. What about the heart? What about Rhythm being a good human being?”

  “I have to be better in bed than Ray. Clutch my ass. I bet he’s more encouraging, but I have to be all-around better, more perverted, willing to take risks.”

  “It’s not like we’re made of money.”

  “I killed Russ Haverly. The nanny too maybe. Can’t prove it, but I did.”

  “There’s something about Spain this time of year. We can’t just pull the kids out of school, but I could use the break. From work. From Jason. I love him, but fucksake, he’s so tightly strung.”

  This marks the first time Jackson has opened up to me about the rumors, trouble in their marriage. Their physical appearance could not be more different, Jackson a large man with a deep, baritone voice, Jason thin and bony, effeminate, classically gay. I know Jason does not care for me. The only thing we share in common is that dogs hate us. But I want Jason to like me, and I want Jackson to know it.

  We exit from the Henry Hudson Parkway and merge onto the interstate, which gives us nearly an hour to bond, each other’s therapy animal. I enjoy speaking to my friend about his problems to take my mind off my own.

  “Things okay with you two?”

  He shrugs. “We have our issues.”

  “You can talk to me if you like.”

  “I appreciate that, Pisser.” He shifts to look at me. “It’s just marriage stuff. Raising kids. The pressure of…everything.”

  “I get it.” And I do.

  “I don’t want to change Jason. I just wish he were more…”