Breakfast at Sally's

by Richard LeMieux

  This was more like the mental institution I expected. I spied a magazine rack in the corner and ambled over in search of something to read. There, between a three-month-old copy of National Geographic and the large-print version of Reader’s Digest, was a copy of Scientology. It occurred to me that someone was playing a cruel joke on this institution. I picked up a very dated copy of Arizona Highways from the rack and settled in for what felt like an interminable wait. (At least now I knew how to get instant service if I felt so inclined.) I had finished the article about the town square in Prescott, taken a flight to Phoenix, and was heading for the rocks of Sedona when I felt a presence standing over me, casting a shadow over the red-rock cliffs I was admiring. “Richard?” a voice asked.

  “Yes,” I answered, looking up.

  “My name is Rodney,” the man said. “Would you come with me?” He turned and walked toward a door that led to the inner realm of the mental institution. At his nod, the receptionist pushed a button that opened the door, and Rodney held it open for Willow and me.

  Rodney was my psychologist. He was not what I expected. Instead of a white coat, he was wearing earth tones—a green-and-black plaid cotton shirt and tan khaki pants, frayed around the cuffs. His brown shoes were well worn, even cracked on top from the weather. He wore two necklaces—one appeared to be a plastic whale on a leather cord, and the other was a small chain with some type of medallion, but I could not tell what was inscribed on it.

  I expected a couch. “Pull up a chair,” Rodney said, pointing to a brown metal chair along the wall. “I’ll be with you in a minute. I just need to fill out this paperwork before I forget what I’m supposed to do.” He picked up a folder and a pen and began writing.

  I looked around Rodney’s office while he was doing his work. There were two large buttons on the wall: one marked code red and the other code blue. I surmised that they were to be pushed when a client threatened one of the doctors—or the president—or began taking off his or her clothes. Rodney reached over and grabbed a Tupperware bowl containing a concoction of fruit salad, romaine lettuce, chunks of cheddar cheese, and pine nuts and shoveled in a few bites as he wrote. I noticed several framed pictures behind his desk. One was of a whitewater raft bouncing in the waves; another was of Rodney standing onshore beside the boat, holding an oar. “This is just my luck!” I thought to myself. While other patients were getting doctors in white coats with miracle cures, I was getting a tour guide.

  Rodney finished his paperwork, took one more bite of salad, and picked up a file folder with my name on the front. “Sorry that took so long,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I have no place to go.”

  “Let’s do a quick test,” he said, looking me in the eyes. “Will you count backwards from one hundred, by threes?”

  “97,” I said. “Uh, 94, uh, 91, I think. Uh, 88.” I began counting on my fingers. “Uh, 85... 82...” Rodney was urging me on as I struggled. “79... 76... 73, uh, 70, uh, uh...”

  “That’s good enough,” he said. “Would you do the alphabet backwards?”

  “Uh, Z,” I began. “Y, X... W—or is it U?” I asked.

  “That’s okay. I can’t do that either!” Rodney then scooted his desk chair back and wheeled over to a pile of papers on his desk and began shuffling them around. “Darn. I had them here just yesterday,” he muttered to himself and shuffled some more. “Here! Here they are.” He grabbed a file, picked through the papers, and pulled one out. “Would you please connect the dots?” He handed me the paper. “One through twenty,” he added.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You need a pen,” he said, reaching into his empty shirt pocket. He pushed his chair back again and began the process of moving the papers around to unearth his pen. “Here it is,” he said, picking it up and handing it to me.

  I quickly connected the dots as he asked, remembering I had done the same thing on the menu at Denny’s the night before. When I was done, I handed it to Rodney.

  “That’s good,” he said, putting it in the file. “That’s enough tests.” He leaned back in his chair. “I understand you are depressed.”

  Then I began to tell my story. I told him how my business had failed, how deeply I was leveraged, and how I couldn’t pay back loans. I told him about the bankruptcy. I told him how when my loans were called, the bank took all I owned. I lost my rented home and all my possessions. I told him about the shame and despair, about how Sandra had left, about how my friends had rejected me, about my eventual eviction. I told him about the debilitating depression, about the burden I became to my children, and about how they, too, had had enough of me.

  With every word, every sentence, every paragraph I became more depressed, until I was weeping uncontrollably.

  It was then that Rodney stood up, pulled me close, and hugged me.

  He held me until I felt a sense of peace, a sense of quiet come over me. It seemed like an hour.

  A hug—the elixir for the human soul.

  When I quit trembling, I knew I was lucky to have found this tour guide. If I was ever going to get out of the raging rapids that were tossing me about in this part of my life, he might be able to lead me back to shore.

  I felt Rodney’s arms beginning to release me. “Hey, Richard,” he said. “Sit down for a moment while I make a couple of notes to myself. And I’d like you to meet someone.”

  I sat down again, and Rodney grabbed his yellow notepad and began writing. After a minute or two, he reached over and picked up his bowl of food and took another bite. When he finished his paperwork, he reached for the phone and pushed a button. “Bob? You got a minute? Good. I’ve got somebody I want you to meet. We’ll be right down.” He stood up and looked at me. “Let’s take a walk down the hall. I want you to meet Bob.”

  I followed Rodney out of the office, around the corner, and down the hall to another small office. The door was open, and a man was sitting at a desk, writing.

  “Bob,” Rodney interjected, “I want you to meet Richard.”

  The man stood up, extended his hand, and smiled. “Good to meet you,” he said.

  “Bob is our psychiatrist,” Rodney said. “He might have some ideas that will help you. I’ll leave you two alone.”

  “Have a seat.” Bob motioned to a couple of chairs against the wall. He then picked up a box of cookies from his desk. “Would you like one?” he asked, holding the package out to me.

  “Sure,” I said, taking the box from his hand.

  “Take all you want,” he said as I dug in. “Would you like some coffee to go with them?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll get it for you and be right back,” he said, getting up from his chair and backing out the door to the hall.

  I took a bite of cookie and surveyed Bob’s office. He had three Monet reproductions hanging on the walls. I stood up and examined each one as I took bites of the cookies. “Fuzzy flowers; fuzzy boats; fuzzy people,” I thought as I looked at the paintings.

  “Here’s your coffee,” Bob said, reappearing at the office door.

  He handed me the cup and I sat down in the chair.

  Bob slowly backed into his chair, an old high-back leather chair with wheels—a comfortable chair. “I spoke with Rodney at the coffee machine and he told me a little bit about you while I filled your cup,” he said, rolling his chair forward and leaning toward me. I knew I was going to have to tell my story again—the depressing story—the story I was so trying to escape. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  And so I began again, trying to be objective. I focused my eyes on the Monet painting on the wall behind Bob’s mahogany desk, wishing I could somehow slip into that serene pastel world. I could hear my voice telling the story of loss again, but it was as if a kind narrator had stepped in to help out this time, and I just listened. I listened to the sad story, wanting so much to help the man, but I could not.

  The narrator explained that some of my advertising clients had gone bankrupt and others had
left my company to invest in the Internet, taking with them what was left of my business. He told him that my three children had once worked for me and that they had once admired me, depended on me, and believed in me. But when I could not pay back loans from banks and from friends, I hid in shame. I refused to answer telephones and prayed for a miracle. I went from being someone admirable to being someone terrified that I would be accused of fraud. Now my children saw a different father, one shrouded in misery. I was the dependent one now. I could no longer help myself.

  My companion, Sandra, had loved me, loved my confidence and my wry smile. Now she saw a fearful, angry stranger with slumped shoulders. She would not stick around and watch my demise, and so she packed her possessions into a moving van and left to start a new life. Depression became my constant companion.

  I closed my eyes to shut out the light, wishing I could just go to sleep, but the voice went on with the story. When I opened them again, I saw another man in the room who looked much like me. He was dressed in the same burgundy cashmere sportcoat I used to wear with blue dress pants. He wore a white starched shirt and a Frank Lloyd Wright tie. He interrupted the voice of the narrator.

  “He is a good man,” Mr. Sportcoat said to Bob. “He is just lost. First,” he said, holding up one finger, “he lost his job. Then,” he held up a second finger, “his companion—the woman he loved, the one who wrote ‘I love you’ notes and put them in his sock drawer. And then,” fingers three through seven went up sequentially, “he lost his home, his friends, his children and grandchildren, his identity, his belief in God, and then his belief in himself. It has just been too much! Right now he needs a place to get out of the cold, to take a shower, to sleep.”

  Bob lifted his pen from the notepad and looked off into space. The room was quiet. “We don’t have a place for him,” he said to Mr. Sportcoat. “He’s supposed to be in his prime right now; he’s not supposed to be here! He’s supposed to be investing in his retirement portfolio and planning his next vacation. He’s supposed to be playing with the grandchildren on weekends. If he had robbed a bank or killed someone, then the state would spend the money necessary to lock him up. We just don’t have a place—but we will find some way to help him, somehow.”

  “Well, do what you can do,” Mr. Sportcoat said as he adjusted his handsome tie. He got up and left the room.

  I remembered having three or four of those ties. I sold them one day for a dollar each at a secondhand store. I needed gas money; I always needed gas money.

  The sonorous narrator was coming to the end of my story when I felt two hands placed tenderly on my cheeks, gently tugging my attention back to the man I sat with in this small office. “Richard, you’ve lost virtually everything that seemed to give your life meaning,” Bob said, looking deeply into my eyes. “Most people could not live through that. You must feel like Job himself.”

  My narrator was gone.

  “You have every right to be angry, and sad, and depressed,” Bob said. “I am just happy you are here.”

  Tears filled my eyes again.

  “There is hope,” he continued. “We know that.” Then he, too, lifted me from my chair and gave me a hug. “I know it is difficult to believe right now,” I heard his muffled voice say through the hug. “But you are better now than you have ever been. You just need a warm place to live and some time to heal. Don’t expect miracles. It will take time.”

  Then Bob pulled away. I immediately knew he had other people to see and other places to go. He had patched me up as best he could.

  “We need to schedule another appointment,” he said, looking at his calendar. “How about next Wednesday at two in the afternoon?”

  “Okay,” I said. Bob wrote it down.

  I left the mental institution that day with a small glad bag of hope.

  I knew it would not last long.

  I needed a miracle. I needed lots of miracles.

  Chapter 11

  ANDY, THE BEAUTIFUL WEED

  It must have been sometime after midnight when I was awakened by a loud tapping on the van window.

  I was parked in the Methodist church parking lot that overlooks the city, tucked snugly into my sleeping bag. I ducked even deeper into the bag, covering my head, and put one hand on Willow, who had begun to growl. I figured it must be the police checking me out. I had been told by the guys at Sally’s not to open the door. “They have to give you notice,” Lenny had told me. “Don’t open the door or get out. Just say ‘I’m sleeping here,’ and they have to give you twenty-four hours to get out.”

  “Richard! Richard! Wake up!” a familiar voice called out.

  It wasn’t the cops. It was C. “It’s me, C,” he called out. “Wake up! Wake up!”

  I rolled over and opened the latch on the back hatch and pushed the door up. I was greeted by drops of rain and C’s face. “Hey! I need your help,” he said. “Andy’s in trouble. Jake told me he saw him lying in the alley behind the 7-Eleven. If I can, I want to get to him before the police do.”

  “Sure,” I said, sleepily. “It will just take me a minute to rearrange my stuff.”

  I quickly slipped on my shoes and tossed the stuff from the front seat into the back, and we took off to find Andy.

  We were racing down the hill across the Warren Avenue Bridge toward the downtown 7-Eleven. “Jake stopped in at The Maple Leaf and told me about Andy,” C said. “He couldn’t do anything for him, so he walked up to The Leaf to get help. Then I walked up here. It’s been maybe a couple of hours now.”

  The windshield wipers beat their steady rhythm as we pulled into the alley behind the 7-Eleven. Andy was still lying there, with the side of his face in a mud puddle. The walker he had been using was flipped over on its side.

  “Damn!” C exclaimed. “Poor Andy!” We jumped out of the van before it had fully stopped, and C knelt down, lifting Andy’s upper torso off the ground. “You alive, Andy?” he asked.

  “Who’rrre you?” Andy slurred.

  “It’s C, Andy,” C said, wiping the mud from Andy’s face. “Damn, Andy! What are you doing here?”

  “I, uh—I don know,” Andy responded. “I’m jus—I’m jus here.”

  “Jesus, Andy! You’re all wet,” C continued. “And you smell! Did you pee your pants, Andy?”

  “I guessss. I don—I don know.” Andy was floating in and out of focus.

  C looked up at me. “Richard, have you got any clean pants in your van?” he asked.

  “I think so. I’ll get a pair,” I said, turning and heading toward the van.

  “Maybe a shirt, too,” C added. “It seems Andy threw up on himself as well.”

  I found a reasonably clean pair of pants and a wool shirt in the pile of clothes in the back of the van. C had already pulled Andy’s pants off by the time I got back. He lifted Andy off the ground. “Can you hold him up while I get the pants on him?” he asked.

  I grabbed Andy under the arms and attempted to stabilize him while C wrestled the clean pair of trousers first onto one leg and then the other. Andy was trembling from the cold. Once C got the pants up to Andy’s waist, he unbuttoned and removed the shirt, tossing the old clothes aside and slipping the clean shirt on. Then C undid the knotted handkerchief from his own head and wiped the vomit from the edges of Andy’s mouth. “Man! You got bad breath tonight, Andy!” he said, chuckling. Then C took off his coat and put it around Andy.

  “Let’s go, Andy,” C said, and we each grabbed him under an armpit and led him to the van. We were moving as quickly as possible, all of us now pretty well soaked from the rain.

  “Would you grab his walker?” C asked, as he settled Andy into the van. “Let’s take him back to my RV. He can stay with me for a couple of days.” We both took a deep breath as we started up the van. I turned up the radio as we headed back to the Armadillo, thinking that this last hour had been so “C-ish.”

  Andy was the classic alcoholic. He had been picked up by the police and taken to the emergency room forty-four times in a
year. They would check him out, let him dry out for four or five hours, then send him back out on the street. Everyone had given up on Andy... except C.

  Andy was what my psychologist called a “weed.” “We see them every month or so, because they are sent here when they get in trouble with the rules. How they live and how they survive in this society is amazing. Every time they leave, we wonder if we will ever see them again. We don’t really expect them to live. But somehow they just keep coming back, like weeds in between the rocks on a mountain trail—beautiful and persistent weeds.”

  My shrink’s analogy was a compliment of the highest degree. Others would have ended their lives long ago, with a plethora of pills washed down with a pint of whisky. But Andy never gave up on life. He was truly a weed. Every time something chopped him off at the roots, he would come back.

  Andy wasn’t pretty. He looked like a skinny Andy Rooney. He shook when he drank but shook even more when he didn’t. He was a querulous sort, complaining about everything when he was forced off the “sauce,” for lack of money or some other reason. “Things fell through,” he would often tell the few people who cared enough to listen to his story. For Andy, it was a whole lifetime of things falling through.

  The weather had gotten nastier by the time we arrived at C’s RV. It was raining harder and harder, and the wind had picked up. It slammed the aluminum door of the Armadillo against the side of the camper when C opened it. We scrambled to get Andy out of the back seat of the van and get all of us into the RV as quickly as we could.

  “Whew!” I said, slamming the door shut when we were finally all inside.