“I can keep my shoes on, baby,” Alexei said, grinning at her. “I just need to drop my trousers.”
Shannon was so clearly aroused by this idea that there was practically steam rising from her head. She was writhing in her chair in such a way that Amelia wondered if she was going to get up and do a lap dance on the giant Russian’s groin, but Dr. Carroll burst in, his hands held up in supplication.
“I apologize, I apologize,” he said. “Mea culpa. Nobody’s perfect. A fact which if you’d internalize, would make your own lives much more tolerable and less tormenting but then hey, I’d be out of a job and where’s the fun in that? You all carry on being neurotic and I’ll carry on trying to unscramble your tangled wiring.”
He sat down. “We lost Gino,” he said matter-of-factly. “He managed to hang himself in his private room. I wanted him in a dorm where it’s not so easy to self-harm…. I take that back. You can self-harm, but generally not to the point of self-extinction. So, sayonara Gino, and we will meditate on that for a while later. Now today—”
“Aren’t you accountable?” David interrupted, incensed. “Sayonara? That’s all you’ve got to say? How can you be so callous! You are our healer and because of you, Gino killed himself! What the fuck! Somebody has to take responsibility! Somebody has to take the blame!”
“Not so, David, not so. That’s a very antiquated way of looking at cause and effect. There are myriad causes for every event. So many, in fact, that we can’t account for them all. We can’t even find them. We can’t track down the root cause of anything because for each individual that is different. For one person it was good that his mommy tucked him in tightly at night while for his brother, it was hell. And what causes that? Genetics? Who knows anything about genetics really, except that we don’t understand it. Gino was a crockpot stew of bubbling disturbed identities. He had the misfortune of having a mother who wanted a little girl, so he never stood a chance. Throw in peer group pressure and the devastating undertow tug of loneliness, add to it the onset of adulthood — adulthood! Man! Life’s just too hard for some people.”
Dr. Carroll paused for breath, cracked open a bottle of water and drank it in a series of loud glugging swallows. “The period of adolescence,” he continued, “gets the primo attention. We have pity on the poor, suffering, hormonally-confused adolescent who is packed to the gills with the explosives of crazy rage and burning lust and incomprehensible desire. But it’s okay, we understand what’s going on, because they’re adolescents. Everybody agrees they are allowed their teenage dose of craziness. But, and here’s the biggest but of all … why, and I truly do ask why — and I ask you to consider it with the utmost seriousness that you can muster — why do people expect all that crap to suddenly vanish when we reach the age categorized as adulthood?”
He looked around with an imploring expression on his face. “What, like some magic switch is flicked and your neuroses, your unrequited love affairs, your pathetic crushes, your wars with your parents and siblings, are going to vanish, because you’re wearing a spanking shiny new adult suit? Look at you, hot off the production line, Model Adult, virgin pure, no clicks on the mileage. But that’s not true and you know it. Your gears are already stripped, your engine overheats and your accelerator cable snaps when you’re on a deserted road. You enter the Nascar race of adulthood fundamentally flawed and ruined. Your engine is shaky, your body work is weak, and yet you’re expected to be the best you’ve ever been — these are your days. Mr High School Quarterback is injured and out of play, he’s yesterday’s glory-boy but YOU, adult you, you are the hope of the future, you beautiful flawless specimen of adult imperfection.”
He paused and looked around. “And how was it for you?” he asked, stabbing a finger at the group. “How was your foray into the world of being a bright and shiny adult? Were you the conqueror of offices? Were you a king of industry, a man with a shooting star? Were you the next big thing? Tell me, how many of you rode into adulthood upon your trusty steed and found this gleaming shining fairytale to be the reality of your life, your happily-ever-after? Instead, what you got feels more like an interminable life sentence, I am sure.”
He looked around. “David, that you feel such angst and personal failure and crippling fear is not your fault. You were presented with a Disney myth of the prince you were going to be. You were going to carry your princess bride off into the sunset and then what? The curtains closed and the audience rose in a standing ovation at the happy prognosis of your rosy future. Meanwhile, you trudged up a hill, leading a horse in the fading light, and in reality, your trusty steed was a stubborn hungry mule carrying a wife who wanted nothing more than a hot meal, a softly-quilted bed, and a night of uninterrupted sleep. How on earth could you not feel anxious, given the unspeakable pressures you faced of having to eternally provide? It’s hardly surprising that your behaviours became more furtive. You fears burrowed into your belly and into the arteries of your brain, and they flowed like liquid poison among the pulsating blood and they brought terror with every breath.”
Amelia noticed that the group looked stricken. They were frozen, impaled on the vitriolic spear of Dr. Carroll’s rant. She knew there had to be an upswing in the making and she was not wrong.
“But!” Dr. Carroll shouted, and he cracked open another bottle of water. “But you have the power to make the torture stop! You can be the instrument of change in your dismal present and your even more dreary future. Yeah, sure that may be your life now. It is a hundred thousand million peoples’ lives, but none of them has stopped to say hey, I don’t want this, who cares what my peers think? How happy are my buddies anyway? They’re mostly cokeheads, neurotics, potheads, and drunks. Their marriages are failing and killing them and their wives. So what do you do in order to save your own life? You do the opposite thing! You say: I choose to NOT care about what people think or say about me. I will simply do my job. I chose this job or it chose me and I will do it, but it isn’t me, it doesn’t define me. People let their jobs define them, therefore I choose the opposite. I define my own being in accordance with my truest self.”
An air of skepticism greeted his epiphany and most of the group looked disappointed and uninterested. This was not the solution they were hoping for.
“The trouble with you lot,” Dr. Carroll said, “is that, regardless of what I tell you, you’re still looking for that magic pill. And I’m not saying that this is easy but if you start slowly and you keep at it, eventually you can create utopia in your life. Mind you, I’m not going to tell you that you deserve utopia. I don’t think anybody deserves anything. Life’s not fair. There is no balance between hard work and success, input and reward. You can work twenty hours a day, work your heart out, do a great job and then, someone — he can even be your arch enemy — trumps you at the eleventh hour. Because that’s life. It’s unavoidable. So it’s not about getting what you deserve because none of us deserves anything. We get what we get and we choose our reactions from there.”
“But I want to be a big shot,” Mike spoke up. “I want to be the next Steve Jobs. There, I’ve laid it on the line, that’s what I want. Deserve it or not, that’s my dream.”
“At least you’re taking the first step towards realizing your dream,” Dr. Carroll said. “Bravo! You have realized your shortcomings and you are addressing them. You have more chance than the rest of them. But there’s sacrifice involved. Like the gods of old, success wants its virgin blood, its crucifixes, its buckets of pain and sorrow, dashed like rainwater to hallow the ground and make fallow the seeds of your desire. And that sacrifice will hurt. You, for instance, young Mike, might be called upon to break up with your high school sweetheart, the slim-hipped, large-breasted, cornflake-pure golden beauty who guided the cheerleaders in ritualistic chant and war cry as you carried the football team to unparalleled heights of success. Together you were king and queen and you reigned in glory and you both thought it would go on forever. But now, she�
�s a dental hygienist and you’re a wanna-be hot shot I.T. boy and she wants a house in the suburbs and babies while you want money, power, success, and blow jobs from your secretaries.”
“First,” Mike replied. “You don’t refer them secretaries any more. They’re executive assistants. And Jane is a law clerk not a dental hygienist. And doesn’t everybody want babies and a nice house?”
Jane. Miss Perfect is called Jane. Sweet Jane. How nice. And no, I don’t want babies. Amelia looked at her hands and wished she was alone so she could cry.
“You’re missing the point,” Dr. Carroll said. “And I can’t make you see it. I can’t. It’s up to you.”
“Enough about Mike. What about me?” David asked plaintively. “I’m trying to realize my dream but I’m going to bring it down, I’m going to destroy it.”
“And if you do, so what? You wife might hate you but that’s her issue not yours. Your peers might think you failed but what’s their definition of failure anyway, and who makes them the oracle of light and wisdom? Even if they’ve reached the pinnacle of exclusive golf clubs and private schools for their kids, you can choose to NOT let that matter. You can choose to believe the opposite thing. You can take responsibility for who you are and do what makes you happy and that might see you end up being an alfalfa farmer in the prairies.
“You have to ask yourself this: What is my dream? Am I achieving my dream? What is not achieving my dream costing me? What would I lose if I changed my dream? And, does losing those things truly matter to me?
“Anyway, enough of that,” Dr. Carroll said, and he changed the subject abruptly. “There was a lot of violence in this room last week…. But wait, where are Whitney and Joanne?”
“Having sex in the toilet,” Alexei said, morosely. “I was nothing to her. I was just a fuck that meant nothing. And look at her, a fat housewife, and me, I have such beauty.” He growled to show his manhood and his displeasure.
“They’re still in there?” Dr. Carroll looked at his watch. “Who’s going to go and get them this time?”
“I will,” Alexei jumped to his feet but Dr. Carroll leapt up and blocked his path.
“Not a good idea,” he said. “Time for you to do the opposite thing. I am sure you want to hit them—”
“I want to kill them!”
“So you are going to do the opposite thing. You are going to sit down and forgive them and love them and wish them happiness. Look at it like this: you’re a spectacular specimen of manhood. You could get any girl you want, why get hung up on a middle-aged neurotic woman?”
“Because I love her! And she loves me! I thought she would leave her husband and be with me and we would fuck each other six times a day and have babies and be happy.”
“You can be as happy with somebody else,” Dr. Carroll insisted.
“Six times a day,” Shannon murmured, and she sat up straighter in her chair.
“The only trouble is,” Alexei said pointedly to Shannon, “I like blondes. Be a blonde next week and maybe we can try.”
Shannon looked like she was ready to leave right then and there to go to the nearest hairdresser’s.
“Sit down, Shannon,” Dr. Carroll said tiredly. “I’ll go and get them. Please, everyone, sit still and wait, preferably in silence.”
Mike took hold of Amelia’s hand again and they sat there, contentedly silent.
Alexei gave a few low growls now and then while Ainsley told Persephone about how worried she was that someone would cut off her finger in a McDonald’s in order to steal her ring.
“Any luck with the hoarding?” Shannon asked Angelina who sighed.
“I tried to gather a tiny bag — just one little plastic bag and fill it with junk and throw it out. It took me two days to get the bag filled. And then I couldn’t throw it away. I put it in a corner of my bedroom and left it there.”
“It’s good that you tried.”
“That’s nice of you to say so, honey, but it’s not the truth. I’ve done that before and in fact, even better. I can package the stuff up but I can’t give it away.”
“What do you think will happen if you do give it away?”
“I feel like I will go crazy unless I get it back.”
“Angelina, we don’t use the expression ‘go crazy’,” Dr. Carroll said, returning to the room with Whitney and Joanne in tow. “We say ‘experience a psychotic break’.”
“Yeah, that’s got a much more sympathetic ring to it,” Persephone said. “Certainly reassures me.”
“Deconstruct the term ‘go crazy.’” Dr. Carroll said. “What do you think it means? It means that your psyche loses touch with reality. In other words, your psyche experiences a breakdown. Going crazy is such a loose phrase. It can encompass so many of the mild and ordinary sins of daily life.
“Now,” he said, “I do want to check in with all of you, but first I’d like us to meditate. We need to lower the anger level and lower the testosterone in the room. We need try to dispel the feelings of blame and self-hatred. To this end, we shall empty our minds and hearts and we shall focus upon a lowly piece of fruit. We will engage our energies in studying this mild-mannered unsung hero: the crone of the vineyards, the wrinkled doyen of the magisterial court; behold, the raisin!”
“I hate raisins,” Mike spoke up, and was soon supported by David, Shannon, and Persephone.
“Come now,” Dr. Carroll raised his eyebrows. “Are you not open to new experiences albeit it with old partners? Do not make the mistake in life that each encounter with an individual will be the same. Give your friendships with food and men and women more credence than that. Each time you meet a person, or a dish of food, or even a book you’ve read many times before, say: ‘Hello new friend, what lessons can you teach me today?’”
Alexei gave a snort. “I sure was surprised last week,” he said, glaring at Whitney. “She gutted me like a fish, no mercy, no care. That was a new surprise. You got that right.”
“Let’s move on,” Dr. Carroll said. “One day, Alexei, you will thank Whitney for what she did. You embraced sex rather than anger and that was good. But then you got too attached to the specific host of the sexual experience as opposed to discovering that the sexual experience is a transcendent act that unites the yin and yang of our human selves. You need to let go of attachment and find the opposite of that, and the opposite of attachment is love and forgiveness. Both of which are the opposite of hate, anger, and violence. You see how everything is leading you away from anger and hate?”
“You talk so much!” Alexei moaned, his head in his hands. “I can’t listen to so many words, you’re killing me!”
“No more talking, at least for a while,” Dr. Carroll assured him. “Time to meditate and find new meaning in old things. Everybody, hold out your hands.” They did and they received, into the palms of their outstretched hands, three tiny raisins.
“I heard that a raisin is a worried grape,” Ainsley laughed. “Are we going to cure these guys and turn them back into their former plump juicy unworried selves?”
“You are in much better spirits,” Dr. Carroll commented. “Group, before we meditate with our raisins, let’s check in with Ainsley. What’s up, cheerful chickie?”
“What’s up is that I totally ignored you and went back to my fiancé. I told him I was sorry I’d let some nutcase screw with my mind and I asked him if he would take me back. He said yes, that he’d realized this was just some messed up part of your therapy, and that he had to be patient and let it pass.”
“But you are happier now than you were before, yes?”
“I didn’t know how much he meant to me before. If that’s what you mean, then yes, so what? Every relationship has wake-up calls.”
“But your panics are less, yes?”
“I wouldn’t ascribe that to you.”
“I would. I would state that you have realized
a sense of autonomy within the relationship, an autonomy that you never had before. You now have confidence in knowing that you truly love this man and that you are with him because you love him, not because your parents or his parents or even he, expect you to be there. This time, you are there for you.”
Ainsley shrugged. “Whatever rocks your boat, Doc,” she said.
Dr. Carroll looked disappointed. “It does lessen my joy when there is resistance to the internalization of the self-realization,” he said. “Oh well. Moving on to raisins.”
“Which are getting pretty sticky,” Mike said. “We’ve been holding them for a while now.”
“Raisins,” Dr. Carroll said, dreamily. “Now I will not be doing this exercise along with you because personally I hate the puckered up little prunes, but let that not detract from your experience. The key to this meditation is to totally let go of all that has come before in our sessions: the gun wielding, the weeping, the sex, the anger. And how do we let go? We meditate. I am going to guide you through a meditation and I want you to follow my lead. Okay, here we go.
“Ding! Bring the raisin close up to your face, and study the raisin. See the colours, the textures, the folds in the tiny dehydrated skin. Look at the areas of dustiness along the surface, look at the ridges, the valleys, the pillows and sheet-like folds of this tiny ball. Can you see a face in your raisin? What does it look like to you other than a raisin?
“Now, smell your raisin. What does the raisin remind you of? Summer days, raisin bran breakfast cereal, fights with your brothers? Could it be sex with a neighbour when you were little and experimenting and looking at one another’s tiny genitals?”
Mike and Amelia looked at each other and shook with silent laughter.
“Focus people, do not lose concentration! Now, close your eyes. Take the raisin and rub it against your lips. Don’t eat it but feel what it feels like. Is it rough, or soft, or how does it feel?”
Amelia took her raisin and carefully ran it against Mike’s beautiful, full soft lower lip. He half-closed his eyes and he started to lick the raisin with the tip of his tongue. Amelia took the raisin in her mouth, in between her teeth and he licked it, then he licked her teeth, and they both sat there clutching the other raisins in the sticky palms of their hands, not letting themselves eat the raisin that they were sharing, just licking it and one another.
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