Viewmaster

by Ferdinand Stowell

After saying goodbye to Celestine late that morning, I went upstairs and began tidying up her room. She had made her own bed as many guests, usually female, do. For some people making the bed is a ritual they are unwilling to cede to anyone else, even a professional like myself, but I always undo their handiwork because for me it’s a control issue and I need to keep subtly reinforcing the fact that I’m the one in control. I undid what Celestine had wrought and gave her new sheets and pillowcases even though she’d only be here a total of two nights. Usually I only change the bedding for a week’s stay or longer, but I wanted Celestine to come home to fresh sheets and I considered the possibility that I might be sharing them with her that evening.

  I dusted all of Mimi’s surfaces including the marble fireplace and spritzed the mirror above it with a popular, inoffensively perfumed blue liquid that I’d just purchased at the supermarket, before wiping it clean to that high pitch of squeakiness promised in the product’s advertising.

  I quickly vacuumed the rug and prepared to empty the waste basket. Celestine had set all recyclable materials beside it. She was a heavy juice drinker and therefore probably quite regular. Such things are of some interest to me as they are predictors of future bathroom use and abuse. I slowly tipped the basket, letting its contents reveal themselves as they tumbled into the trash bag. I found a gauzy cloud of grey-blonde hair shot through with sprinklings of yellowed finger and toenails. A severed plastic ring from one of the juice bottles rested precariously in the middle of it. The layer below the hair consisted of cotton balls and cleaning pads smeared with waxy yellows and blushes of tawny pink. Below this, on a bed of yet more hair, I hit pay dirt – handwritten notes.

  The notes people leave behind can often be quite revealing and Celestine’s were no exception. They were long lists of grievances and names of friends and family members all committed to the pages of one of those pocket sized spiral binders and they made my stomach sink. They were disturbing. ‘Why should I be treated like that? Like she was?’ they wondered. ‘Mom and Dad had no time. Does that mean Jonathon was lying?’ ‘When did Debbie start backstabbing me?’ ‘I was such a good child, why has everyone turned on me?’ ‘Why can’t people just be nice?’ And on and on they went. Poor Celestine, I thought, she’s damaged. I felt sympathetic and superior and relieved that I would have to stop this unsavory sexual attraction for a woman old enough to be my mother. I panicked briefly, recovered, then started panicking all over again, thinking it would be difficult to extricate myself from our advancing flirtation.

  I saved Celestine’s little book of sorrows and emptied the wastebasket into the large trash bag in a rush, because it now seemed best to detach myself from any remnant of her existence. I hurried downstairs and called Tip to talk about Celestine’s mental health.

  “So, Celestine, who’s staying in Mimi? – I found something really weird, all these bizarre psycho-babble notes in her trash. Really creepy.”

  “Ay, Carumba,” Tip says, in character as Clemente.

  “Tip, this is serious. I mean these notes are crazy, certifiably crazy. Listen to this, ‘I won’t do it. I won’t do it. I won’t do it…..’ written twenty times on one little piece of paper. And this, ‘I’m a big girl, I can play with sharp knives, daddy doesn’t care anymore.’ Look, I know I have to be at the house this evening to meet the people in Jefferson and Aldaric, but I’m going to keep all the lights off in back and just sit there in the dark while I wait for them and just pray Celestine doesn’t come home while I’m checking them in.”

  “Is that really necessary?” Tip asks me.

  “Tip, I think Celestine is expecting me to sleep with her.”

  “Eeewww! Grody. So what gave her that idea?” he asks belligerently.

  “I was flirting with her, you know, just to be friendly and make her feel good. I think she’s ready to take it to the next level.”

  “Oh, you mean like stabbing you repeatedly in the shower?”

  “Don’t even joke about that. Don’t!”

  “Ok, so you’ll be home sitting in the dark, I can deal with that.”

  “Good. I’ll have some stuff to do on the computer. Don’t call me on the house phone; call me on my cell, I’ll have it on vibrate.”

  “Ooooh,” he says, and I detect a hint of Clemente in the reaction.

  “Meanwhile, I’ll be out doing some errands in the neighborhood.”

  Consumer Price Complex

  I was soon out the door and onto the sidewalk. Having lived here for almost two years now, I know every individual rectangle of concrete, each delineated by score lines drawn to relieve the force of pounding, skipping, shuffling feet; I’m familiar with all the contractor’s names and their emblems cast into concrete seventy, forty or just five years ago – the diamonds of DiPetro Contracting and the shamrocks of O’Donnel Stone and Concrete, etc. I could map out for you all the tight little nooks where the wind deposits all the trash and yard debris it has whipped up elsewhere and the crannies that purse cigarette butts and pennies.

  Sometimes when I’m walking on the sidewalk I feel like I’m getting shorter and shorter, my legs are telescoping down into the ground, the opposite of those graphic images of evolution, The Ascent of Man, seen in children’s encyclopedias with creatures crawling from the sea, gradually finding their legs. No longer looking like things of the water but unable to progress to the air, they stop stooping and claim the earth underneath their feet. That’s just the way I feel in reverse, as I’m walking down into the sidewalk: I begin erect, then fall to stooping, hands dragging the ground, breaking through the crust to the sneaky streams and smothered wetlands biding their time: They swallow me.

  Thanks to the civilized art of accumulation, my devolution is stayed and my feet remain firmly planted on the ground. Shopping in the neighborhood used to be a pretty straightforward, uncomplicated affair before I actually lived here. I would stop to do my business in one place then move directly on to the next. The shopkeepers didn’t know my name and I didn’t feel compelled to force a smile when I greeted them.

  I’m not the kind of person who has much sentiment for Mom and Pop stores. Sure they can be sweet sometimes, but they also beg the question – Would I want to shop at a store run by my mother and father? There are people who get nostalgic recalling some collective memory of small stores run by generations of one family, though they may never have experienced such a phenomenon themselves. Some even get enraged at the proliferation of those large national warehouse chains and look upon them as abattoirs that kill and process our souls.

  Please.

  Intelligent consumers realize that shopping requires a more holistic approach. A good shopper is forged in the fires of price gouging. Once you’ve paid too much for something, you vow never to let it happen again. Your senses sharpen; your blood cools. Discipline is essential – you buy only those products that previous experience has taught you are the best value when bought at location ‘A’, for instance. You don’t buy them anywhere else and you don’t buy anything at your location ‘A’ that you can get cheaper at another store.

  When Mom and Pop stores offer the best value on something I’m happy to shop there. And of course sometimes you do, for logistical reasons, have to buy something from them that forces you to part with a pint of blood. But this should only be a rare, isolated instance of weakness. Don’t substitute convenience for conscientiousness. I will always remember the brazen attempts to rip me off perpetrated by the shopkeepers at my local bodega when I lived in the Mission. They didn’t even try to disguise the fact that every time I went in there they shorted me on change. ‘Oh, sorry about that,’ they’d say. It always gave them a good chuckle but I had the last laugh; they lost their store to a condo development and there’s now one of those faceless, ubiquitous but honest chain coffee shops there on the corner where they used to be. When I patronize it, I choose one of the tables located just about where the cashier register used to be in the ol
d Bodega Rip-offeria.

  Now that I have lived in North Beach for a while, the local shopkeepers know me by name and I have to say, it’s made running errands a lot more complicated – so much so that I sometimes long for the anonymity of big chain stores. As I’ve come to learn the hard way, small retail establishments can be a bit too personal.

  I’m only half way through my first errand and already there’s trouble up ahead; a customer is arguing at the cash register. I’m waiting in line at the hardware store, watching impatiently as the proprietors torture an English language that will never tell them or anyone else what they want it to. I pray the next transaction will pass quickly without incident and that I’ll be allowed to pay for my purchase before cobwebs start forming around my feet.

  The shopkeepers are from China and have the harsh materialism of immigrants arisen from abject poverty; they have known hardships I will never experience and shoo the various sad souls who wander into their establishment, a beach-head on the shores of prosperity, out the doors like they were rabid dogs. I dislike the wife and commiserate with the defeated husband. Due to my antipathy for her, I have off-shored most of my hardware needs to the big box retail store on the edges of the city. When I make large purchases there, I think of this woman and all the money she won’t be getting from me.

  “Hello, how are you,” the wife says to me with a buttery smile that turns into a whip when she addresses her husband in a dialect of Chinese that is dissonant and hard on my ears. She practically bows when I hand her the money, obviously more to the currency in my hand than to my person. “Oh, thank you very much, eh. You come again, thank you, please, you come again.”

  My hardware experience steels me for the inevitable tussling with the rude customers and salespeople at my next stop, the local Goodwill, a virtue one assumes the organization possessed at its founding but which it now seems to have goodwill-fully shucked off. I guess you could say I have issues with Goodwill. Admittedly, I’ve never quite gotten over the store’s switch from straightforward and easily detached price stickers to the more complex ones with Zorro-inspired incisions. It used to be so easy to lift a corner with a fingernail grown long for that purpose, then work it off one cheap item and place it onto another more expensive one. The stickers would bunch up, so extra care was needed to burnish them with the flat of your fingernail so that nothing looked suspicious. Who knows how many hundreds of dollars I saved this way, dollars I then promptly reinvested at the Painkiller, that loathsome bar near my old apartment.

  I cross the street and as I approach the door to Goodwill, I’m accosted by this grizzly white guy asking for money. He hasn’t bathed, shaved, cut his hair or washed his threadbare clothing in a very long time.

  He has replaced the more personable black gentleman who is moving on up several blocks in the world to the higher-end stores up the hill. Sometimes I give him money because he always smiles and says something nice as he opens the door for me, but this guy with all the hair and the old over-coat is a bit menacing and I give him nothing.

  He doesn’t appear to be doing very well, I can see that his cup is empty in more ways than one. Clearly he’s going about this the wrong way. I briefly consider coaching him but decide against it. All I would have said to him was that commedia trumps pathos when it comes to the pocket book, that’s why beggars who know what they’re doing look for the laugh. Misery only works outside a church where it seems preordained and part of the natural order. We all have to sing for our supper, whether you’re Barbara Streisand or the bum on the corner or the Queen of England for that matter. Oh, Sorry.

  I have my method of thrift store browsing down to an art, my danse de débris. After entering Goodwill, I first circle the roundels of clothing racks as though I’m waltzing with the stale air; I’m passing judgment on every stitch of knit polyester leisure wear and cotton stretch tee shirts burdened with grotesque impasto decals. My hand sweeps along the clothes hangers like the tongue of a roulette wheel searching for tasty little numbers. I really don’t need any more clothing, I think. Several shirts catch my eye, but at eight dollars each, I think they’re too expensive.

  That’s increasingly been a problem with charity run stores; they aren’t just unloading things at rock bottom prices anymore; they’ve gone upscale and want shoppers to treat them better. They want you to regard them as boutiques with corresponding prices, but they still smell the same and have the same disinterested workers who do little more than mope in the back rooms where you’re not even allowed to so much as stick your head in.

  Next I scan the rows of bookshelves, the books lining them like some slovenly conscripted army. Sometimes one can find serious literature and even the rare art book but most of the collection is textbooks, religious tracts, finance high and low, romance novels, etc. I scan the shelves quickly but run into a snag in the form of a man in a trench coat standing squarely in the center of a bookshelf. He’s been brooding in this same spot ever since I got into the store and in that he’s typical of the clientele; on any given day you’ll always find people milling about, holding down their patch of borrowed turf as they inspect album covers or old electronic devices. Their movements are slow and insect-like. I glance over his shoulder and notice a good novel that came out a few years ago, sandwiched between a volume of Chemistry II and a copy of ‘God and Your Money: Six Easy Steps to the Top of the Divine Heap.’

  “Excuse me,” I say. He affects great surprise and mumbles something unintelligible. “Could I just get in there to take a look?” He moves over about three centimeters. I roll my eyes then thrust my arm in front of him to snatch the book from the shelves before he has a chance to sense my interest and grab it for himself.

  Book in hand, I then move over to the household utensils department. I’m rather thorough, I like to dig, and this requires some extra precautions. Many of the pots and pans and silverware are finely coated with a sticky residue that is un-pleasurable to touch, so I bring out a pen from my satchel and needle the items in each bin, taking care not to touch anything with my fingers. I feel like a surgeon poking around the Tin Man’s innards. Again, some items of interest that are over-priced and not much else so I move on to the cash register where no one awaits me. I wait, looking around rather noisily to make my needs obvious to all around me and finally a young woman appears with arm-loads of apparel that she stuffs under the cash register. She’s a peroxide blonde with hair that looks like it’s been cut with a food processor. She has chubby cheeks, a black zip-up sweat shirt with the name of a musician who died from a heroin overdose several years ago spray-painted on the back, a random distribution of piercings that have price tags hanging from them and a gut that squeezes out of her tight jeans and tee shirt like tooth paste out of the tube. She’s one of those punk rockers whose harsh exterior is at odds with her personality; she’s very polite and gentle. Bye, thank you, she says softly as she hands me change that looks like it has passed through someone’s digestive system.

  Down on the pharma

  Next stop is the pharmacy to fill my prescription for yet another psycho-tropic drug, (my doctors treat my head as if it were one of those kiddie chemistry sets they used to play with as kids,) written for me by a psychiatrist recommended by my narcoleptic psycho-therapist. She was a trip.

  Her name was, I’m not kidding, Jack (short for Jacqueline) Spratt and true to form, she was neither too lean nor too fat. I’d been wanting to see a therapist for some time because I suspected I was boring and I needed to talk with someone about it, though not with anyone I knew because they were all terrible at keeping secrets.

  Jack lived in the Upper Haight in a prim little Edwardian home that also served as her office. She looked like Peppermint Patti’s younger sidekick, both having the same haircut (though Jack’s was mostly gray) and the Edith Head eye glasses and the same dogged attraction to tough-minded women. She was an expert on transference, a phenomenon where the patient acts out their emotional torment
s, using the therapist as an amalgam of all the people in one’s life that one has issues with. I liked her enough to agree to see her every week on Tuesday evenings but no more.

  Her office was furnished like a child’s play pen, toys strewn about; she even asked me if I wouldn’t be more comfortable sitting in the sandbox. I told her that even as a child I never played in sandboxes because I worried about kitty poo. She gave a wan smile and nodded and instead directed me to the couch. I was in the clutches of an unrepentant Freudian, but I didn’t let it bother me; I really wanted to make this work. Her enormous cup of coffee (a significant clue, unrealized at the time) was always at the ready. She silently slurped from it at the beginning of each session before addressing me with her signature phrase – ‘So, What else?’ – that signaled the start of my soliloquies. I told her first off how hard it was for me to smile and the problems this had caused in my relationships and work-life and she just smiled and nodded her head, in such a way that I couldn’t tell whether she was sympathetic or merely amused and mocking me.

  Things went along like this, me baring my entrails, she smiling silently in response, for our first four weeks or so but during one session, while I was in the midst of relating yet another sad tale from my childhood, she fell asleep. I hadn’t at first noticed this and when I did, I stopped talking, waited and eventually started coughing gently. She came to and I continued at an earlier point in the narrative, recovering ground I guessed she had missed when she’d fallen asleep. I did however mention to her that I thought she might have drifted off for a few seconds or so and that I was feeling a bit insecure.

  “Was I boring you?” I asked.

  “No, you’re transferring,” she reassured me and it reminded me of that classic exchange on an old TV commercial: ‘Dishwashing liquid?” the horrified housewife asks. ‘Relax,’ says the matronly manicurist, “it’s Palmolio, it’s mild.”

  This happened several times over the course of the next five or six weeks and it was beginning to unnerve me. Was she doing this on purpose to draw out a reaction from me? Was this cutting-edge therapeutic psycho-drama that forced me to confront the boredom I inflicted on others? My insecurity was turning into annoyance and the next time she fell asleep, I waited till she revived and then asked, “Why did you fall asleep?”

  “Oh, did I nod off?” she asked, “That was silly of me. Go on, I’m listening.”

  “No, wait a minute, you’ve done this half a dozen times over the last two months.”

  “Well, I guess I was a little sleepy.”

  “A little sleepy?” I charged. “You’re falling asleep in the middle of my sessions. Why?”

  “When I feel a patient checking out then I check out, it’s empathic; that’s really my strength as a therapist.” That comment brought a period of silence, during which I stared at the carpet with its remnants of silly putty and regurgitated candies. I was getting uncomfortable at the silence, so even though I hadn’t sorted all of this out in my head, I mustered a bit of gumption. I pointed out to her that she was counter-transferring, a phenomenon whereby the therapist acts out her issues, using the patient as scapegoat.

  “So, basically you’re telling me that your inability to stay awake is my responsibility.” I said forthrightly. She gave a little sniff of disapproval.

  “If you must know, I’m narcoleptic,” she admitted.

  “And you don’t see any conflict here? You’re charging people – me! – a lot of money to listen and recall details and offer some observations and solutions based on that. How can you be a good therapist when you’re falling asleep all the time?”

  “How about if I don’t charge you for the time I’m asleep? I’ll prorate you for the other times it happened” she offered.

  My answer to that was a resounding no and goodbye, though I did finally insist that she reimburse me for the time during which she was asleep. Funny thing was though, after that I no longer worried about being boring. I was cured!

  Any-whooo, I’d been putting this trip to the pharmacy off because the employees are so tetchy, none more so than Susan the African-American lesbian. She is ample, vocal and jowly. “You don’t have to yell,” she says, making harrumphing noises that sound like sea lion sneezes, to an exasperated customer who only slightly inflected his voice to make a point.

  Not since I lived in my father’s house have I been so afraid to get on somebody’s bad side. She likes me and always smiles pleasantly, but then I’ve never been even the slightest bit demanding, not since I witnessed her once call a customer’s mother long distance to ask whether it was true that the customer couldn’t pay because his mother’s boyfriend was an addict who had smoked and snorted the customer’s inheritance away. He threatened to sue her but he never did.

  Care-Speak Pharmacy (“We speak the language of Caring” their advertising proclaims, though I often refer to it as ‘Don’t-Care-to-Speak Pharmacy’ because of the taciturn employees) is one of two pharmacies bearing that name, the other being in the Castro, where my doctor is. Due to all the gay men there with HIV, that neighborhood is the Elysian fields for drug store chains and pharmaceutical companies – their profit paradise.

  I’m next in line but the ringing phone draws all her attention. She picks up the phone.

  “Hello, Carespeak….You want to know if I’m Susan?….Do I sound like a Susan?….How many black people do you know called Susan?….I’m just playing with you honey; this is Susan, what can I do for you?”

  She clearly enjoys declaring loudly for all to hear the medication prescribed for patients treated for maladies that might gain them social opprobrium. “Are you aware that this particular anti-psychotic can cause severe cramping?” is typical of the sorts of questions she asks in a voice of great volume and clarity.

  My health seems to be in entirely female hands, these days. I do find them a bit less egocentric than your typical male medical professional.

  My doctor is a very attractive woman and young, which, sadly, today includes anyone under the age of thirty-five. I met her at the supermarket in the produce section. We were both testing melons for ripeness.

  “Does shaking these things really work to tell if they’re ripe,” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, delighted that this pretty woman was talking to me, a strange man. “I mean, what is it you’re supposed to hear inside there?”

  She laughed. “Yeah, exactly. It must be another one of those urban myths.” She picked up one of the cantaloupes and pressed her fingers into either end.

  “You do that like a professional, are you a masseuse?” I hopefully asked.

  “No, doctor.”

  “Really!? I need a doctor,” I lied. “Are you any good?”

  “Well, I’ve won every malpractice suit brought against me, that has to say something,” she said.

  “Oh, well, you go girl.”

  “I’m kidding, here, let me give you my card.” She reached into her purse and handed me a pretty little business card, lavender on one side and pale sherbert orange on the other, very girlie.

  “Great, thanks, I’ll call you.”

  She looked again at the cantaloupe in her hand. “These things are kind of weird looking aren’t they?” she asked.

  “You know,” I began, “I was standing in line at the checkout one time and there was this woman in front of me cradling a baby in her arms. All I could see of it was its head and I almost said out loud, ‘that is the ugliest baby I have ever seen,’ when she turns around, almost like she could read my mind and I see that there wasn’t any baby, it was a cantaloupe!”

  “That’s it,” she exclaims, “they look like little heads, like they’re aliens from outer space or something.”

  That’s how we met and I was so excited for the two-week period before my first appointment. I’d already worked out our romance in my head in advance and was trying to think of some complaint that would make it necessary for me to take my pants off. As so
on as I got into her office though, I noticed the pictures on the wall of her cavorting with a large sheep dog and another woman as attractive as herself.

  “Who’s that in the picture,” I asked nervously.

  “That’s Katie my girlfriend,” she said with obvious pride. “So what brought you in today?”

  “I don’t feel so good,” I said and at this point I wasn’t lying.

  Even though circumstances forced me to shelve my plans for trousers doffing and the whole grand idea of our romance, I stayed with her because she’s a good doctor and makes me laugh. (Unfortunately she has been unable to do anything about the pain I experience when I try to smile.)