“Your paperwork states that you are a psychologist.”
“I am,” I responded matter-of-factly.
“It also said that you only recently acknowledged that you are an alcoholic, and you have come here primarily because you are being troubled by dreams of the devil and a ghost that knocks twice but never comes in.”
“That’s right, Doctor.”
“That’s quite a heavy burden for you to be carrying around these days, isn’t it?”
“It has been lately. But I think I’m doing the right thing now by attacking the problem head on.”
“I think you are too, Robert. But I must tell you that it is not often that I have a person who comes to me with their main complaint being dream terrors. And I have never heard of such a unique ghost as your two knock entity.”
I didn’t respond because he didn’t seem to be finished, and when he continued, he unknowingly proved me right.
“I read your paperwork the evening you completed it and subsequently, because of the unique nature of the Two-Knock Ghost, I’ve pondered your case at some length in the days between when you expressed your thoughts and this meeting. I don’t usually do this with clients, but I have come to a bit of a conclusion about your Two-Knock Ghost.”
“What is it, Doctor?” I asked while thinking that what Dr. Banderas had said about the Two-Knock Ghost was highly unusual, especially for a psychologist who had only spoken with me for a couple of minutes.
“I was fascinated by the concept of the entity you described. I had never heard of the Two-Knock Ghost. I tried, probably like you, to figure out what this entity was. I used every bit of logic I could apply to the situation and because I had never heard of anything like your ghost, I concluded that the Two-Knock Ghost belongs to you alone. It is your ghost, and it has probably not revealed itself either because you are not ready to know what it is, or you have been using the wrong approach in your attempt to communicate with it.”
I didn’t know I had an approach to communicate with the Two-Knock Ghost. Wow! He had dove right into my stuff and he was wasting no time letting me know what he thought. I remained silent. He did not.
“We’ll talk a great deal about the devil dreams, I’m sure. But I’m positive that the key to the Two-Knock Ghost is getting it to reveal itself. Of the strategy to accomplish that, I am not certain, but we’ll work on that together. Okay, Robert?”
His voice was soothing. And the way that he spoke was both intuitive and well thought out. I could not help but contemplate what he had said. The Two-Knock Ghost was my personal dream. And I sat there considering how the human psyche feared deeply that which we knew existed but remained secretive about its true nature.
We continued talking. Dr. Banderas completely backed off from talk of the devil or the Two-Knock Ghost and spent most of the remaining hour getting to know me. I shared my childhood in Chicago with him and he showed genuine interest in every detail that I expressed. I told him of my profound love for Christine and my children. Eventually, I told him about the crash that killed my parents and my grandparents. He was more compassionate than anyone but Christine had ever been with me. At one point, after I had expressed what I felt when I found out that four of my most deeply loved family members had been killed in one horrendous crash, he responded with the following statement.
“Robert, the depth of loss after an event like what happened to your family, is unfathomable. The impact on a person’s soul and psyche is immeasurable and the rippling effects of pain and feelings of devastation continue to haunt you throughout your entire lifetime. Because of the severity of the loss, a hole has been created in your heart that may never be filled.”
Again, he had hit on something that had been bothering me my entire life—that unfillable hole in my heart. As soon as he said that, I spoke up because I wanted to clarify something.
“Dr. Banderas, you are absolutely correct about that unfillable hole in my heart. But I feel like I’ve had that my whole life. Even as a small boy, I would go to my bedroom and play with my Legos, my baseball cards, erector set, Fort Apache. But I’d always feel lonely when I’d first go into my room. I’d feel emptiness, longing. It would wear off after a few minutes, after I’d get into whatever it was that I was playing with, but that feeling of yearning for something and not knowing what it was, plagued me my whole life, long before my family was decimated.”
“We have a great deal of searching of self to do, Dr. McKenzie. There are many closed doors inside you. But behind them are the answers you are seeking. Together, we will find the keys which will unlock those doors.”
I enjoyed talking with him. I loved listening to his nearly mellifluous voice, and our first session proved that not only would we share camaraderie but he would look at my realities from completely different angles than I would. He would go into my history with intensity and sophistication. I was looking forward to our next session before this first one ended. I also thought how really odd it was that a person would lay themselves bare before a veritable stranger, telling that person countless deep problems and expect that person to help them overcome those problems. Going to a psychologist was a daunting task for both the patient and the psychologist. Yet it’s done thousands of times throughout the world every day. The results of these mixings of usually random pairs are truly unknown at each beginning. I wondered what the results would be between me and this short, unhandsome, but caring gentleman.
When I left our introductory meeting, I felt good, buoyed by the fact that a man I had only met an hour before, had acknowledged that he had already thought deeply about me and my most profound terrors. It was only 8:42 p.m. If I cut across town, I could probably make most of the meeting at the Serenity Club.
As I drove across St. Pete toward Clearwater, I did not think about my Thursday clients. I thought about Dr. Antonio Banderas, the physically diminutive man who had become my new ally in combating the ugliest and most threatening of my enemies.
I did not speak at the meeting, but I enjoyed listening to the alcoholics who did speak, revealing their struggles with alcohol. I thought at that meeting that it was true we were alcoholics. But there was something inherently different about us. My decline into alcoholism, though similarly long and insidious, never saw me raise my voice to or hit my wife or kids. It did not keep me away from home in bars. It did not make me have a sense of bravado and pursue other women to conquer. Although I always felt available to and easily approachable for my wife and children, I might not have been, in their eyes. Though I was only a few feet away from my family when I was in my bedroom drinking, it might as well have been a million miles. My closed bedroom door meant to my family “do not knock, do not come in, do not even think of disturbing the man behind the closed door.” I was like untouchable gold behind the impenetrable vault door at Fort Knox. Tonight, during that meeting at the Serenity Club when I did not speak, I realized that my great sin was that I’d neglected my family due to my duel compulsions of going into my bedroom to drink my precious rum and Coke, and for the betterment of my clients. It also became clear to me that instead of calling my children and asking them if there was anything I had done to hurt them while they were growing up, I needed to call each one of them in the next week and admit to and apologize for the sin of neglecting them the way I had all those countless hours when drink and God knows what else, lured me to that bedroom.
About 10:30 p.m., near the end of the meeting, at a moment when I got out of my head enough to look around the room to see the faces of who was there, I noticed Toby’s face. He was looking right at me as if he had been looking at me for a long time and was glad he caught my attention. When he was certain our eyes interlocked, he made a small but significant gesture with his right hand for me to come over to where he was.
I first nodded my head to let him know I got his message and then rotated my head in a way I hoped he would understand that I would join him at meetin
g’s end. When he nodded after my gestures, I figured he understood what I was trying to suggest.
There would be only one more speaker, a slew of announcements and the finale of the entire group’s recitation of the Serenity Prayer and the Our Father.
One minute later I met Toby in the lobby. He looked tired and intense.
“Can we go to the tree and talk for a few minutes? I have some news for you.”
“Absolutely,” I said excitedly, believing the news he wanted to share had to be about Mary Bauer.
We went to our cars and drove the three minutes to our majestic live oak. We parked, with him in front of me. When he was finished parking, he did not waste a second before his hand was opening his door and his body was heading for me. He crossed in front of my car casting a small, sly, smile on his drawn face. He entered my Electra and sat in the passenger’s seat, groaning ever so slightly as he did.
“Good news,” he said. “And you are partly responsible for it.”
“I am?” I said curiously.
“Do you remember the time we were talking about recurring dreams and you told me that for most of your life you had only three?”
“I do,” I said, but he wasn’t nearly finished.
“But then you said that other dreams occurred that made you realize over time that you had about 30?”
“Yes,” I said sincerely, curious where he was going with his story.
“I listened carefully to what you said about dreams and I’ve figured out in the months that I have been seeing you that I have about 20 recurring dreams.”
“Interesting,” I said, still wondering.
“After you asked me to help you with Mary Bauer’s case, I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew I had three snitches around town that I had used regularly over the past few years. I called all three of them within a week of our talking about Mary, with absolutely no results. For two days I went to sleep wondering what to do next. On that second night, I had a dream. In the dream, my partner, Patrick, said to me: ‘Why don’t you ask me? I have snitches too you know.’ And what he said next, sounded as if it was actually you speaking it to me. He said, ‘And just like those recurring dreams, you may have a lot more snitches than you’re consciously remembering and I may too. Maybe we can dig deep into ourselves to find those other snitches. Then we might have a better chance to get the answers that we’re looking for.’ His words woke me on the spot. I got out of bed and went directly for my address book. Believe it or not, I had not thought of this on my own. Patrick, who was probably you in my dream, told me to expand my thinking. Sure enough, I had a slew of names in there who had been my snitches years ago, some of them as far back as fifteen years. It was easy to pick out the names because I printed capital S before their names. Dr. McKenzie, I swear there were twenty-seven more snitches and confidential informants that I had forgotten about. That made a total of thirty, the same exact total as your number of recurring dreams.”
“Wow,” I said, reflecting on the wonder of how as a psychologist you may help someone in one area and that reasoning will bleed off and aid them in something entirely different.
“The day after my dream I started calling my old snitches and reestablishing relationships. I also asked Patrick for his list of snitches and, like he had suggested to me in my dreams, I asked him to dig deep for any of his old snitches that he might have forgotten. We put our heads together and came up with a total of forty-six names, fifteen of those names we had in common. Over the next several days we made over thirty contacts by phone and by actually visiting some of the old snitches at their last known residences. We had no luck. That’s why I haven’t talked to you about this until tonight. We were beginning to lose hope. Then finally we came to the name Eddie Green. Eddie is a skinny little black fellow. You’d think he was a crack addict. He’s really a fast talking, very pleasant, poorly educated, dog track gambling addict, who does pretty well there actually. He’s lived his whole life in South St. Pete. He knows all kinds of people. His father was a carpenter and he used to drag Eddie with him wherever he went to fix anything that was broken, or needed to be built from the ground up. Thankfully, Eddie learned the trade well. He got into some trouble about ten years ago, nothing serious, and I met him one day at headquarters on Thirteenth Street. Because he was so affable, I asked him rather casually, ‘Do you have your finger on the pulse of St. Pete?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I most definitely do.’ The more I spoke with him I realized that this diminutive carpenter might become a valuable asset for me from within key segments of the community. I taught him what it entailed to become a confidential informant, and for the next two or three years he proved extremely valuable for me.”
I was tired, but Toby’s story was interesting and I knew that he would soon get to the good part.
“I stopped at his old address a couple of days ago. Sure enough, he was still in his frame house on Fourteenth Avenue South and Twelfth Street. He was living alone but he told me that he had people staying there and coming and going all the time because the house was so big. What had started out as a small house had been added on to by Eddie’s father every time he had a new baby or a sick old relative needed a place to stay. Now it was a two-story, eleven-room, six-bedroom home with a huge den. When Eddie’s father died a few years ago, he left the house to Eddie, who was the first born and who had helped the senior Green build half of the house. Following Eddie in the family were five girls, none of whom were handy with the hammer. Eddie’s next four sisters were scattered over various parts of the U. S., having followed their men. Eddie told me that each of them had a saga, and not one of them was ever likely to come back to St. Pete.
“Of course, I had told him early on why I was there, but Eddie was glib and I might even say happy to see me, as well as a bit lonely. So the words poured out of him like a faucet on full blast. But Eddie’s baby sister, Natalia, had just visited him three nights ago for dinner and had brought her boyfriend with her. His name was Reubin Tatum. He was a bruiser of a man, Eddie said – about 6 feet 2 inches, 245 pounds and unusually hairy. Eddie said it was the first time he had met Reubin. Eddie had ordered out for pizza and during the meal, the conversation flowed smoothly between the three of them. There was no shyness between them. And their conversation passed from how good Reubin’s and Natalia’s sex life was, to Eddie’s compulsive need to gamble on the dogs, to what Reubin did for a living. He had told Eddie he preferred armed robbery over selling drugs because it gave him a bigger rush. He told Eddie as casually as if he were speaking about his computer programmer job at Jabil’s Circuit, about his last three robberies, how much loot he stole and how much fun and easy the jobs were. The last one was a convenience store at Sixteenth Street and Ninth Avenue North and the one before that was the gas station and convenience store on Ninth Avenue and Sixteenth Street South, where he agitated a pretty little married lady and got $95 from her purse.
“When I heard that, I nearly jumped for joy, but I immediately became nervous because my cop car was parked on the street in front of the house and I didn’t want anybody to put two plus two together and figure out that Eddie had anything to do with what I knew now would eventually happen. I told Eddie that I would take care of him financially in a few days, but I told him I wanted to get my car out of there right away and I did, heading immediately to headquarters.”
Toby’s barrel chest was heaving in and out as his excitement in retelling me his story increased. And though he was happy right now, I couldn’t help but think that I wouldn’t ever want to tangle with this guy, if I were a thug and he was upset.
I didn’t want to cause angst for anybody. On the contrary, I wanted to make a couple of investigators very happy. But with the politics of human nature, you never truly know how people are going to take your sticking your nose into their business. I found out who the detectives were who were handling the case and I made an appointment to meet them the next day.
They were two detectives that I’d seen before and had heard about favorably, but I didn’t know them personally. They were both your old school, hard-nosed, diligent investigators of nearly thirty years with the department, Larry Mills and Art Barclay.
I told them every detail that Eddie had told me. To my deepest satisfaction, they were both gentlemen and showed a tremendous appreciation for what I had done to help move their case along. Right now they are adding what I shared with them to the Minutia they have already gathered. They not only told me that they feel confident they’ll make an arrest in seven to ten days, but they asked me if my partner and I would like to be present for the arrest. I said yes, of course. And all of this is because of you, Doc.”
He used that familiar vernacular again. I liked it immensely.
“That’s incredibly wonderful news, Toby.”
“It’ll be incredible when that SOB is behind bars.”
“I agree,” I said, reaching out my hand to shake his.
“It should be I who is shaking your hand, Doc,” he said humbly.
“You are,” I said, and we both chuckled for a moment.
“How’s the not drinking going, Toby?”
“The challenge is no fun, Doc. AA says to take it one day at a time, but I feel at times that the struggle is breath to breath. How’s it going for you?”
“Right this moment, not so bad. There’s been so many good things happening in the last couple of days, including what you told me tonight, that I haven’t thought that much about drinking. But I feel I have to be wary of what’s lurking behind every corner waiting to push me into a bar or a liquor store. Is your wife doing okay?”
“We both definitely have to take that one day at a time. She’s had so many scares and treatments, one diagnosis and prognosis after another, that it’s a way of life for us now. It’s that way of life that’s still a challenge for me to accept because I love her so much. Seeing her suffer still makes me want to drink and numb my pain. But I think that everything will get better if she goes into remission. So, you see, I’ve got a lot to work on.”
The Two-Knock Ghost Page 17