I sat down on the man’s couch between the cats and immediately got cat hairs all over my slacks and the back of my shirt.
“Irene, you and Sparkle leave the room, please,” the psychiatrist said to his cats. Not only did the man keep cats in his apartment, where they could get cat hair all over everything, but he had named them “Irene” and “Sparkle.”
The psychiatrist looked a bit feline-like himself; he was thin and had beady eyes. We began by talking about my childhood. I told him about my parents’ divorce and the fact that I was having problems staying married.
“Did your mother give you a lot of attention as a child?” he asked.
Yes, I answered.
“How about affection?”
I said yes to that, too. Once my mother came to school to pick me up in the third grade and she kissed me, and my friends saw her do it and made fun of me the next day at school. I didn’t tell the psychiatrist that, however. He looked as if he had been a big sissy when he was a kid, so I didn’t want to offend him by telling him how much I tried to avoid being connected to that description in any manner.
“Did your mother read you stories when you were a child?” he asked.
Sure, I said. “The Little Engine That Could,” “Billy Goat Gruff,” and “Little Black Sambo,” because it wasn’t considered racist and you could even name a restaurant chain after it in those days.
“Did she put her arm around you when she read you those stories?” he continued.
I honestly didn’t remember.
“Don’t you think that would have been a warm, pleasant memory if she had?” asked the psychiatrist.
He was getting fairly personal. I asked him his point.
“Perhaps,” he began, “you have been looking for someone to share an intimate relationship with, and because your mother never put her arm around you when she read you stories, you never felt an intimate relationship with her. So now you aren’t able to construct one with anyone else.”
How could I overcome this obstacle, I asked the doctor?
“Perhaps we could start now,” he said. “How would you like for me to read you a story?”
Whoa, Jack, I thought to myself.
The psychiatrist reached into his bookshelf and pulled out a book. “May I come sit on the couch with you and read you a story?” he inquired.
Okay, so I was a little nervous about the way my first psychiatric session was coming along, but I figured I might as well get my money’s worth. The doctor sat down on the couch with me and got cat hair all over his slacks and the back of his shirt, too.
Then he began reading me a story. It was a story about a couple of rabbits — I remember that. It might even have been quite a good story, but I was having a difficult time concentrating. Sitting on a couch covered with cat hairs, listening to another grown man read me a story about rabbits was a unique and somewhat unsettling experience.
About halfway through the book, the psychiatrist asked, “Do you want me to put my arm around you while I read you the story?”
He had dialed the wrong number this time.
“I think that’s about all the therapy I can take today,” I said as politely as possible as I stood up from the couch.
“But we still have fifteen minutes left,” he said.
“If it’s all the same to you,” I replied, “I think I’ll be leaving.”
“But you haven’t heard the rest of the story,” he insisted.
“Heard all I want to hear.”
“When will we see each other again?” he asked.
I was halfway to the door by then. I threw a couple of twenties and a ten on a table and tried to figure out what was happening. The man wanted to put his arm around me and read me a story. I wondered if somebody had tried to do that sort of thing to Tyrone Gault in Milledgeville. He might have talked to cows, but I was willing to bet that Tyrone was sane enough to avoid this sort of thing.
“Probably never,” I answered belatedly.
As I opened the door to leave, Irene and Sparkle appeared in the hallway. I made barking sounds and growled at them, and they ran away. If I didn’t get anything else for my fifty bucks, at least I got that.
I never went back to another psychiatrist. What would the next guy want to do? Put a pair of diapers on me and make me suck on a pacifier?
* * *
I suppose I was thirty-one, nearly thirty-two, when I left my apprenticeship and became a full-fledged adult. That’s how old I was the day Elvis died. After Elvis — whose music had launched my generation into another direction from our parents’ — got fat and died, I realized that adulthood was squarely on me, whether I liked it or not. I was growing old and the world was driving me toward the grave. I was convinced it would be a short trip.
Although my childhood was filled with nothing more than the usual maladies — chicken pox, mumps, measles, etc. — I became a hypochondriac at a very young age. For example, since I was eleven years old and found a wart on the side of my wrist, I’ve been certain that I have cancer. It was a big, ugly wart, and when I heard that a change in a wart or a mole was one of the danger signals of cancer, I never took my eyes off it.
When I was fourteen, the wart suddenly went away, but then I worried about a mole on my back. I made the mistake of mentioning my fears to my mother. She suggested that when my uncle, a doctor, came to visit, we should have him burn it off.
Burn off my mole? You mean, set fire to it? This is modern medicine? I had seen witch doctors perform the same procedure on television. Cancer or no cancer, I wasn’t about to go through anything like that. When my uncle came to visit, I hid in the pump house. Later, somebody told me that the way to get rid of warts and moles was to rub them with a dishrag and then bury the rag.
I followed those directions to the letter. The mole still hasn’t disappeared, but you have to give these things time.
Most hypochondriacs enjoy going to the doctor. It gives credibility to their belief that they’re seriously ill. But I’m a weird sort of hypochondriac. Although at various points in my life I have had (or thought I had) tuberculosis, leukemia, malaria, and several strokes, I always have avoided going to a doctor. I simply have chosen to sit in a dark room somewhere brooding over the possibility that I might be seriously ill.
Doctors and doctors’ offices spook me. I hate sitting in a waiting room — not only frightened out of my wits that I’ll soon find out I have only weeks to live, but also nervous about catching whatever the other people in the waiting room have.
That’s another of the health problems I’ve had. Whenever anybody else has a disease, I automatically presume that, with my luck, I soon will have it, too.
A guy at work came down with kidney stones.
“He was fine one minute,” somebody said, “and then he was in terrible pain.”
I began to feel gnawing pains in my back and stomach and stayed out of work three days drinking beer (for medicinal purposes only) to flush out my kidney stone. I’m not certain if I got rid of the stone, but for three days, I felt absolutely no pain, save a severe headache that disappeared somewhere in the middle of my second beer of the day.
I knew another man who was having trouble with his prostrate gland. He said it hurt when he went to relieve himself, and that the biggest problem was he couldn’t always finish, which resulted in a terribly embarrassing circumstance each time he wore khaki pants. “All men begin to have problems with their prostate after they get older,” said my acquaintance.
All men? Older? When I was thirty-two, I had managed to avoid doctors for years. But maybe the odds finally had caught up with me. Maybe I had it, too. I decided it was time to get a professional opinion, so I looked up another doctor in the yellow pages and made myself an appointment.
I was quite proud. I had made my own doctor’s appointment without anybody forcing me to do it, and I would walk in there and face whatever medicine the doctor dished out. I thought of cancelling the appointment no more than two or three hundred times, the last
of which was when the nurse stuck her head into the waiting room and said, “We’re ready for you now.”
I could bolt away from here, I thought to myself. It’s not against the law to run out of a doctor’s office and refuse to take an examination. This was something I had to pay for.
The nurse sensed my hesitancy. “Be a big boy and come on in,” she said.
Women do that sort of thing to you. They question your manhood in tight situations. If I had walked out of the doctor’s office, it would have been a sign of weakness, so in I went.
Did you ever notice that the doctor is never ready to examine you when the nurse says he’s ready to examine you? After you get out of the waiting room, there’s another wait in a tiny cubicle they call the “holding room.”
It’s always very quiet in there, and everything is made out of cold metal, and the chair you have to sit and wait in is very uncomfortable, and I always have the feeling that I’m being watched.
“Watch him through the two-way mirror, nurse,” I imagine the doctor saying, “and see if he does anything weird.”
That idea, of course, makes you even more nervous, and if you have to scratch your privates, say, you’re afraid the nurse might be watching you. So you just sit there in that quiet room, in that uncomfortable chair, nervous and frightened with itchy privates.
The doctor finally came in. He checked everything, including my prostate gland.
“Bend over,” said the doctor.
I bent over.
Oh, God.
“Do you feel pain or pressure?” the doctor asked me.
“Both!” I screamed.
“Is it more pain or more pressure?” the doctor asked again.
“Pain! It’s pain!” I shrieked.
“Are you certain?” asked the doctor.
I was certain by now. It most certainly was pain, the worst I had ever felt.
“You can straighten up now,” said the doctor.
“That’s easy for you to say, doctor,” I replied. “You haven’t just had an intimate experience with the Jolly Green Giant’s first finger.”
After finally conquering my fear and going to the doctor, I decided I ought to try to do something about my problem with dentists, too. I gathered all the courage I could muster and went to have my teeth checked and cleaned.
“When was the last time you went to a dentist?” he asked me.
“I was fifteen. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” replied the dentist. “It’s just that I’m going to have to use an acetylene torch to get down to where I can clean these things.”
The dentist asked if I wanted gas.
“I woke up with it,” I answered. “I always get gas when I’m nervous.”
“I mean nitrous,” the dentist explained. “It’ll help relax you.”
I didn’t know what nitrous was, but if it would ease my terror, I would take it.
“How much do you want?” was the dentist’s next question.
I said two shoulder tanks should do nicely.
When I came out of my trance, the dentist said he was through cleaning and checking my teeth and that I needed seven fillings, two caps, four extractions, and a root canal.
“Soon as my prostate clears up,” I said, “I’ll be back.”
* * *
I remember that as a child I would read things that said, “By the year 1980....”, and the “1980” would look so strange to me.
“How old will we be when it’s 1980?” my friend Danny Thompson, not exactly a mathematical whiz, would ask when we were boys together.
“Thirty-four,” I would answer him.
“Think we’ll ever really be that old?” he would ask.
“Not before 1980,” I would say.
I had a feeling even back then — and the feeling grew with each passing year — that the 1980s might be somewhat traumatic for me. The sixties were turbulent, the seventies disillusioning, and what on earth would the eighties bring?
I got married again in 1980 ... for the third time.
In 1981, I went to Europe for the first time. The trip cost me a lot of money, and I saw a lot of cathedrals and concierges with their hands held out.
I also turned thirty-five in 1981. I awakened in a motel room in Birmingham, Alabama, on my thirty-fifth birthday. I was alone. I called practically everybody I knew and mentioned I was alone in Birmingham — that’s why they hadn’t been able to reach me to wish me a happy thirty-fifth birthday.
“Please don’t go overboard on my gift,” I cautioned them all. They didn’t.
Turning thirty-five also had its ill effects on me. It depressed me a bit to know that I was only five years away from forty, but I was uplifted by the thought that I was now the age my father had been when I was born, and I could easily recall his vitality during my days on his knee. I figured I still had a ways to go before it was time to put on a baseball cap and go to the park and feed pigeons and wet my pants (an indiscretion society allows to old men with worn out prostates).
In 1982, when I was thirty-six, I made another of my infrequent trips to the doctor, and this time he did find something wrong with me. My hypochondria had been vindicated; I’d been telling people for years that I wasn’t well. I soon had heart surgery to repair a damaged valve.
I was convinced I was going to die, but I didn’t. So what if I don’t like Boy George, hair dryers, and airplanes? I’m impressed with medical science, and if there was any sort of computer involved in helping me live through my operation and making me fit again, then I vote that’s one we spare when we get around to destroying the others.
I got another divorce in 1983, and that sort of brings my confused life up to date. I’m single again. I live alone in a large house with my dog. My mother is still concerned that I can’t stay married and haven’t produced any grandchildren.
Aging in any type of world has its negative effects — the hair grays, the eyes and legs go bad, the back hurts, the hangovers linger, and the mind starts to drift. But aging in this modern world is even worse, I think, because the older people get, the more they tend to worry, and we have everything from the killer bees heading north from Mexico to getting wiped out by nuclear war to worry about.
Next to worry, guilt is the most obnoxious part of aging.
I have a friend named Billy. He is forty-two and feels guilty and gets depressed a lot, like I do. Sometimes, we visit each other and feel guilty and depressed together. This usually is after we’ve gone out the night before and done something to feel guilty and be depressed about that was a lot of fun while we were doing it.
Billy and I are both divorced; we feel guilty and get depressed about that sometimes. We feel guilty because quite often being single is a wonderful state in which to live, but it was instilled in us in a simpler time that we weren’t supposed to wind up in our middle ages still acting like we were nineteen. We get depressed because we tried to do what our parents taught us to do but failed, and damned if we know what to do about it now.
We feel guilty because we really don’t have all that much ambition anymore. We both have concluded that the best way to live is not to have a lot of things you worry about losing, but our parents wanted us to have it better than they did, and if we just hauled off and went and lived on a boat somewhere, we would be letting them down. We get depressed because we don’t know how to deal with those feelings, either.
Depression, says Billy, often takes the form of a tall man with a hat pulled down over his eyes and wearing a raincoat. Billy calls him “Mr. D.”
He starts on you in your thirties, according to Billy. “He’s the voice you hear in the morning after you’ve been out having a great time the night before. You never hear that voice when you’re younger. Your conscience is basically still clear then.
“But after you get a little older, he starts on you. You remember that Christmas song you used to sing when you were a kid — ‘He’s making a list and checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice�
�? Well, it isn’t Santa Claus making the list anymore. It’s Mr. D.”
I’ve had my own bouts with “Mr. D.” He gets me when I awaken in hotel rooms far away from home in the morning. He’s always peering around the corner at me when I’m doing something my mother and the old men at the store wouldn’t approve of. He’s there when I get involved in the Sunday Morning Academy Award Theater movie and don’t make church. He’s there after I drink too much, and he’s there when I eat animal fat, reminding me that it causes cancer.
He’s there whenever there is a dilemma in my life, whenever I don’t know whether to go or stay, whether to join or not to get involved, whether to use my heart or my head.
Dilemmas. Has any other generation ever had to face as many as mine has? Sometimes, in recent years, I have felt that modern life is like a giant ice cream parlor with innumerable flavors. Do I stick with vanilla or go for something more exotic? And if I eat tutti-frutti, will it make me gay?
My mother could have read me rabbit stories and hugged me until I turned blue in the face, but I don’t think it would have helped.
16
Maybe Someday, Rainbow Stew
FOR MOST OF my adult life, the only thing that has been perfectly clear to me has been the booze I’ve used to steady my nerves. You name it and it has confused me, because usually I was right in the middle of the issue, leaning towards both sides.
We could start with Vietnam. I was born a patriot of patriots, and I don’t give a rat’s tail for the Commies, but I also didn’t want to be sent off to get shot in some rice paddy, and I didn’t want anybody else to, either.
And drugs. There I was, standing off on the fringes, clinging to the cold beer in my hand while others sat in a circle and passed around a marijuana cigarette and appeared to be having a wonderful time. All I could do was seek refuge with my own kind in some beer joint, playing country music and the Bowl-A-Matic machine.
We’ve been all over the music. I took off after Elvis, but had I known where he and his music eventually would lead — there’s a rock singer today who bites the heads off bats as part of his performance — I likely would have stayed with Red Foley.
Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself Page 22
