by Edward Lee
“Tell me about this problem of yours,” she said.
««—»»
Barrows’ suit cost more than the average resident of Seattle earned in a month. As an investment banker for Jenkins, Harris, & Luce, he could afford it. He could afford the Aston Martin Zagato with the turbo’d 5.3-liter V8, he could afford the Movado gold watch, and he could afford the waterfront penthouse suite on Alaskan Avenue.
One thing he could not afford, however, was to allow anyone of import to see him—
Well…
Better to put it this way. If Barrows made $500,000 in one year—that was a bum year. Investment banking involved a certain alchemy of which Barrows possessed the cabalistic necromancer’s wand. Objectively, his profession entailed moving clients’ money from one bank to another, which sounded simple. In truth, though, knowing where and when to move the money, and for how long, was what made his clients and himself preposterously wealthy. In other words, William Barrows had a reputation to maintain, a reputation upon which his financial solvency depended.
Already out of place in the Armani suit, he walked slowly down the sidewalk past the county courthouse on Third Avenue, right alongside the bums and drug addicts wandering in their plight to a stinking nowhere. Yet Barrows scarcely saw them. He walked steadily onward, his eyes roving the sidewalk’s cement for…
His heart jumped when he heard the sound…
The sound of a man clearing his throat and expectorating loudly.
The ever-familiar splat on the sidewalk came next, and next after that came Barrows’ nearly full erection. Up ahead, he saw it. A derelict in filthy beard and rotten clothes had coughed up a wad of phlegm from his homeless-roughened lungs, and spat it on the sidewalk.
Oh, God, Barrows thought just as a normal man would think upon entering the bedroom of a beautiful woman for the first time, or watching that risky bond fund skyrocket and split.
Barrows caught the glint: a lumpen gem. It lay there waiting for him, freshly green, savory and mystical. Barrows’ Guccis clicked up and stopped, and now he was standing there, feet apart, over the treasure.
He was discreetly protecting it from haphazard trample.
For someone to walk on it would be vandalism. It would be yanking the needle from an addict’s vein and cruelly emptying the syringe out the window. Barrows was guarding it, in other words, while at the same time trying to appear normal.
He glanced at his watch, frowned like a Straussberg method actor waiting for a bus; he was Hitchcock in a phone booth. He had to be careful. He could not allow himself to be seen doing what he was about to do.
He waited, calmly tapping his foot. Eventually the pedestrian traffic broke: no one coming down the block from either side.
Oh, God…
Like magic, then, Barrows produced the two index cards from his suit pockets. He knelt very quickly, scooped up the lump of phlegm in the cards, then turned and walked briskly back up the sidewalk.
He ducked behind one of the courthouse’s high brick pillars. No one was there.
Thank you, God…
Then he licked the hock of phlegm off the card, sucked it around in his mouth like a delectable raw oyster, and swallowed it whole.
He closed his eyes, stood as if paralyzed. He felt the still-warm phlegm sink to his gut, and then he signed in bliss, similar to the bliss felt by a crack addict after the first hit of the day off the pipe.
This was Barrows’ rush—not cocaine, not heroin, not sex nor drink nor gambling.
It was phlegm.
Hence was his plight, the macabre curse which had held him captive for most of his adult life. Barrows was a phlegm-eater.
««—»»
He couldn’t help it, and he never knew why.
This is so wrong, he thought every time he scraped up a lump and ate it. What seemed even more wrong was what followed after he swallowed: a titan sexual surge. Most times he was able to contain himself until he got home, other times no. Other times he’d slink into a urine-fetid alley or between a high bank of bushes, to vigorously masturbate.
Seeing phlegm on the street lit a oracular fire in him. It nearly stripped him of all sanity, of everything that could be called healthy.
Barrows had to have it.
He had to eat it.
Picture a person stumbling across the desert. This person has not drunk water in days. Suddenly that person, close to death, happens upon a clear cold babbling brook…
To Barrows, the babbling brook was sputum. The dirtier the better. The more catastrophically disgusting, the more he’d need it. Homeless bums were best, the people literally rotting in the alleys, hacking up clumps of respiratory discharge from soiled and emphysematic lungs. Virtual wads of congestion. Sometimes the chunks were coppery with blood, or uniquely textured by bits of cancerous lung tissue. Sometimes the clumps contained mysterious grit.
All the better for Barrows.
He had to have it. He had to scrape it raw off the sidewalk and eat it, hoping no one would bear witness. He could imagine the reaction of an associate partner walking down the street one day and seeing Barrows scarfing bum phlegm. He could imagine what the firm’s president might say upon hearing of this. With every day that went by, and with every chunk of some rummie’s hock that he ate, Barrows knew he was living on borrowed time.
Once a Seattle cop had seen him, and though Barrows could not conceive that eating phlegm off the sidewalk violated the law, he was grateful that the constable had received a call on his radio at the same time. Barrows did not want to have to explain what he was doing. A number of homeless had seen him too, but he needn’t explain to them.
Sometimes he paid the dregs of the local prostitutes to cough into his mouth. Sometimes he’d walk right up to paralyzed bums rotting in alleyways and pay them $100 to drag up a giant loogie and hack it up into his hand, after which he’d eat it like a culinaire savoring Nicouli ossetra caviar off of toast points. Once he’d paid an obese homeless woman on Jackson Street to cough up a big one into his mouth. She’d smelled worse than anything Barrows’ olfactory senses had ever experienced, but she’d obliged and then some, hacking up a blob of phlegm the size of a baby’s fist. When Barrows had rolled it around on his tongue, he’d found a rotten tooth, which he’d swallowed with the rest of the prize.
Bums and whores and Seattle’s constant human street detritus were one thing, but he knew he had to be careful, more careful than he’d been in the past. He couldn’t have people on the street recognizing him, oh no, not with his picture constantly in the state market news, not with his picture in Forbes and the financial trade magazines. But too often it seemed that the longer this grotesque curse went on, the more he became lost in it.
With every glob he slurped down, he realized how wrong it was, how demented and abnormal. And for the two decades that had transpired since his first indulgence at age twenty, he’d always assumed that his sickness was so remote, and so insulated, as to be totally exclusive to himself.
What could he say to his doctor? What could he say to a shrink? I have this problem, see? I have to eat phlegm.
No, no. He could not say that, because he couldn’t believe that anyone else on the surface of the earth could be stricken with such a bizarre and filthy addiction.
Barrows, in his curse, felt alone in the world. Until—
««—»»
He’d been hunting for a fresh wad, after work as usual, stalking the most rank warrens of Third and Yesler—the “Bum” district. Damn it! came the desperate thought. He itched, junkie-like, when he saw the droves of people milling up and down. The Kingdome loomed, reminded him that baseball season was in full swing; the extra pedestrians would make his travail all the more difficult.
Wait, he thought.
No other choice.
Barrows ducked under the pillared cover of the King County Courthouse, amongst a coterie of employees out for a smoke break.
He stood there for hours.
Waiting.
&
nbsp; By eight p.m., he was cross-eyed in his need. His fingernails had dug crescent gouges into the meat of his palms, and his face felt was slicked with sweat. He watched the whores flit by across the street, each of whom would be grateful to hack into his mouth for a C-Note; he watched the bums straggle, spitting their precious wares onto the sidewalk.
Too far away for Barrows to claim.
The sun sunk. He came close to chewing a hole in his lower lip as he waited. Then—
An obese, bearded man in a wheelchair (wearing a plaid dress, of all things [but this was Seattle]) rolled by and hacked loudly. A wad of blackish phlegm landed only feet before the place where Barrows stood.
Barrows’ heart picked up.
He ducked out, an index card in each hand. Anxious glances up and down the street showed him meager pedestrian traffic.
He scooped up the wad, walked to the big brown garbage can behind the bus stop, then knelt as if to tie his shoe.
He didn’t tie his shoe.
His lips pulled the fresh lump off the card. He sighed as his tongue squashed the briny lump between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He savored and swallowed.
Jesus…
It was all he could do, then, not to stick his hand right down into his pinstriped Italian slacks and beat himself off. His knees wobbled at the rush. He was fixing as the lump went down.
Jesus God…
When the rush lifted, and his vision cleared, he heard a scuff to his left. The bus shelter, he thought but hardly cared. Suddenly, though, the sidewalk was vacant, and in the bus shelter, he saw—
A tall, haggard man, another “bum.” Jeans smudged black with dirt, long hair, beard flecked with bits of food and boogers. The back of his dun-colored jacket read KING STREET GOSPEL HOMELESS SHELTER, and he was doing the most unusual thing:
He was—
What the…
With a piece of cardboard, he was scraping up a pile of vomit in the bus shelter; in fact, he was scraping it up rather meticulously.
The vomit looked like chunky pink oatmeal.
Then he flapped the granular puke into a plastic Zip-Loc bag. He craned his long neck, caught Barrows staring at him.
A snarl like an animal, then the man away, carrying his plastic bag full of bum vomit with him.
««—»»
“That’s when I knew it,” Barrows admitted to Dr. Untermann. “When I saw that guy—that bum—scraping up the vomit off the sidewalk and carrying it away…” He closed his eyes, rubbed his temples. “That’s when I knew—”
“That you weren’t the only one with a severe and incomprehensible problem,” Marsha Untermann finished for him. “Hmm. Collecting vomit.”
“Yes. Collecting it, putting it in a bag.” Barrows looked up at the comely psychiatrist. “I don’t even want to think what he does with it later.”
“He probably eats it,” Dr. Untermann bluntly offered. “It’s a form of dritiphily.”
Barrows’ lower lip hung down in bewilderment. “A form of—”
“Dritiphily, or dritiphilia. It’s part of the clinical scope of what we now think of as an OCD—an obsessive-compulsive disorder.” Her manicured index finger raised. “But it’s very rare, to the extent that it’s scarcely acknowledged anymore.” Her finely lined eyes blinked once, then twice. “I’m not quite sure why.”
But Barrows still sat in confusion, facing this elegant, refined woman behind the broad cherrywood desk. What did she say? he thought. “Drit—”
“Dritiphily,” her lightly colored lips reiterated.
“There’s a name for it? There’s a…diagnosis?”
“Yes, er—there was. It disappeared from the diagnostic indexes in the late-sixties. For thirty years there was a listing in the DSM. That’s the shrink’s battle book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But Dritiphily, as a diagnosis, vanished once the later editions were released. Instead, it’s been sub-categorized into some of the newer disorders.”
Barrows felt rocked. “You mean there’s actually…a name…for my…problem?”
“Yes,” she quickly replied. “And you’re rather lucky in that my main office is located in Seattle. Besides myself, there are only two other psychiatrists on the west coast who deal in such afflictions. One’s in L.A., the other in San Diego.”
Barrows paused to look at her—this gracile and unique specialist who had agreed to see him at a rate of $450 per hour. The fee, to Barrows, was pocket change to a typical man. He’d pay anything—anything—for help.
Dr. Marsha Untermann was probably over fifty, sharply attired, graceful in manner, her face calm yet her myrtle-green eyes intense. The straight, shining dark gray hair—cut just above the shoulders—gave her an exotic cast, not an aged one; she was high-bosomed, strikingly attractive. Barrows thought of a Lauren Hutton or a Jacqueline Bissett. He’d found her simply by searching the Department of Mental Hygiene’s website; Dr. Untermann’s office address and number had been the only listing under the CRITICAL OUT-PATIENT/ABNORMAL PSYCHIATRY heading.
To Barrows, “abnormal” was putting it mildly.
“So it was this derelict, this vagabond, that impelled you to contact me,” she said more than asked.
“That’s right.” Barrows still felt tightly uncomfortable by all he’d confessed to. Nevertheless, something about her allayed him, like confessing to a nameless priest behind a screen. And he remembered what she’d told him earlier: I’ve heard much worse. Comforting words to Barrows but still…
How much worse? he wondered. It proved a terrifying question.
“I suspect, by your appearance, that you’re a man of means?”
“I’m rich,” Barrows said with no enthusiasm. “I’m an investment banker.”
“Then you might appreciate this quite a bit. This derelict you saw, this precursor, this piece of human flotsam you saw whisking up vomit from the bus stop…you and he are essentially the same.”
Barrows calculated this.
“You’re rich, he’s homeless and poor. You have the best of everything, he has nothing. Yin meets Yang, the capitalist meets the victim of capitalism. The man plugged in meets the man cast out. The two of you couldn’t be more different from a societal standpoint.” Her lips pursed momentarily. Then she added, “But sickness, Mr. Barrows, is relative.”
Barrows found the point of little use—his selfishness, perhaps. His obliviousness in wealth. “I don’t want to sound callus,” he said, “but I didn’t make this appointment to have you make me feel guilty about being rich.”
“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” she replied. “You should feel accomplished. You should feel proud. You’ve done what most can’t do.”
Barrows found no use in this either, and he was not a man to beat around the proverbial bush. His voice roughened. “I usually make a million dollars a year but I have to eat phlegm off the street. That sounds crazy, but I’m not crazy. I need help. You’re the expert. Don’t patronize me. Help me.”
Her bosom rose as she leaned back in her plush chair. “You’re a dritiphilist, with erotomanic undertones. You eat phlegm and masturbate after doing so—that’s not quite the same as someone who’s an asthmatic or even a schizophrenic. There’s no magic pill for dritiphily.”
“Long-term psycho-therapy?” he frowned. “Is that it?”
“Possibly. But don’t scoff so quickly at behaviorilist science. Freud was quite right in many of his tenets. Most psychological anomalies have a sexual base. And Sartre was right too. Existence proceeds essence. It is our existence, Mr. Barrows, which makes us what we are. Conversely, the inexplicable trimmings of that existence are what cause our mental problems.”
Barrows sighed in frustration.
As the sun set in her Pioneer Square window, the shiny dark-gray hair seemed to glow from behind, like an angel’s aura. But this is one cold bitch of an angel, he thought.
“Let me guess,” Dr. Untermann posed. “You had a normal childhood.”
“Yes.”
“You were raised by loving and well-to-do parents.”
“Yes.”
“And you received an excellent education.”
“Private school and Harvard Yard.”
The woman didn’t seem the least bit impressed. “And this affliction of yours—it started in your late-teens?”
“I was twenty…”
“And your first sexual—or I should say copulative—experience came shortly before that?”
“Nineteen…” Barrows’ eyes narrowed. She was hitting each nail directly on the head, which made him feel better. “You know a lot.”
“Obsessive-compulsive disorders have many objective lay-lines.” She seemed casual suddenly, even bored. “They’re all different but they’re all the same in certain ways. You probably married shortly after college?”
“Immediately after.”
“But you didn’t love her, did you?”
Barrows stalled. At first he was offended that she make such an accusation, but then he remembered that it was true.
“No,” she went on. “You married her because you thought that wedlock—a normal incident—might guide you back to normalcy yourself.”
Irritated, he shirked in his seat. “Yes.”
Dr. Untermann lit another long, thin cigarette. A blur of creamy smoke appeared between her lips then vanished in a blink. “Tell me about the circumstances of your divorce.”
Barrows challenged her. “I’m not divorced,” he said. “I’m still happily married.”
“Mr. Barrows,” she immediately sighed, “if you want to pay me $450 per hour to lie, then go right ahead. I’ll take your money. But that’s hardly productive now, is it?”
His smirk made his face feel hot. He felt like a naughty child. This ice-queen is a real piece of work. “Guess not,” he admitted.
“Your marriage did not return you to normalcy, did it?”
“No.”
“Your ‘affliction’ only increased, and you hid it from your wife until—”
Barrows loosened his collar. “Yes, until she caught me red-handed. She got the flu one week. She…”
