by Joseph Glenn
“I do have a small office at the infirmary,” Dr. Waldren said, as he stepped closer and rejoined his group, “but it’s half this size and I share it with a psychiatrist. I’m not, of course, really on staff,” he explained in a manner bordering on embarrassment, as though he were acknowledging a great shortcoming. With what Meredith detected as false bravado, he said: “And that’s fine with me: I prefer to see most of my clients here at home where I am able to make them a little bit more comfortable.”
Alex emerged from the back of the ensemble and produced a clipboard with questions. He passed this to Austin who began to jot down Dr. Waldren’s responses on the attached question sheet. This exercise was presumably in preparation for the interview Meredith would conduct with him when the filming began. Meredith made a note to herself to disregard all the prepared questions they presented to her. Austin began by asking about Dr. Waldren’s fees (he did not charge his clients; Austin was then treated to a lecture about how the residents did not have access to money); his hours (he worked part-time, but also had a routine job at the hospital processing prescriptions; a tedious job that was necessitated by the closing of the former on-sight pharmacy); and his license (he had none, as it was impossible to maintain a license as a resident of one of the parks).
Meredith looked to the woman on the facing couch, still unsure if this was Dawn, unless the man to her right was Don, in which case this was possibly Terry (Teri?). She was a woman of striking, rather theatrical appearance with black-red hair, darker at the roots, dark eyebrows, and teal scarf. “How long have you been seeing Dr. Waldren?”
Alex had wandered over to them by this time. Meredith suspected that Austin had sent him away. The intern produced a second clipboard (how many more were there, Meredith wondered) and began taking notes of his own.
“Almost two years,” she offered with a tone suggesting pride.
“Wow,” Alex said, never taking his eyes of his paperwork as he continued writing. “Two years,” he said aloud as he transcribed the words. “Still no end in sight?” he asked the woman.
Meredith ignored him and trusted that the others would do the same. “Don’t listen to him. Do you find the support group to be beneficial?”
“Oh, extremely!” the woman exclaimed. She took a breath and continued in a more restrained manner. “We’re sort of outcasts here at the park. The camaraderie we get from group is essential. It keeps me grounded, keeps me sane. It certainly makes life easier.”
“What is the goal of the group?” Meredith asked.
Morgan answered this: “I think we have a lot of goals. Certainly the most important is building a support network. When we get together, we remember that we’re not alone. I think our take is a little different from the gay—the purely gay people. We share our experiences, our impression of this whole, for lack of a better word, experience. It can be quite cathartic at times.”
“Kind of like AA, right?” Alex butted in. His question was posed with shocking sincerity. His pen was upright as though he believed his question would receive an answer.
“Don’t pay attention to him,” Meredith told the men and women as they stared at him with what she read as disbelief. “My albatross,” she explained, “but by no means yours. Please continue.”
Morgan picked up where the conversation had been interrupted: “We help each other work on the issues we’re struggling with: anger, loneliness—the isolation can be overwhelming. Depression,” the theatrical woman said. “We draw strength from each other.”
“Sometimes it’s just a big gab fest,” Morgan added. “But that’s important, too. That’s part of establishing the bond we have with each other. That’s necessary—vital—if we’re going to connect and, ideally, achieve a degree of trust.”
A woman held her hand up slightly, almost coyly, with a hesitance out of sync with this semi-casual setting. Everyone else’s silence suggested this was de rigueur for her, that she was following protocol by requesting to speak and the others were expected to give her the floor. “This is my story—and I think my friends will say that they have had similar experiences: it all began with a simple test. One simple test determined who I am, where I’ll live—and how I’ll live. I prefer women, the test told me, and that came as no surprise to me or anyone else who’s ever known me. None. Don’t get me wrong,” she added in a hasty manner, “I was hardly what you’d call promiscuous.”
Alex, writing furiously up to this point, paused over his clipboard and mouthed the spelling of this last word.
“I suppose you could say I was uninhibited. Before I met Morgan and settled into a monogamous relationship, I did enjoy relationships with either gender. We found each other at the right time. Everything about Morgan suits me, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve chosen Morgan’s gender over the other.” Which gender Meredith was unable to ascertain, as Morgan was too androgynous to pigeonhole. “And pardon me for being so blunt, but I am not ashamed to admit that I did enjoy the physical side of it—with men and women.”
“That sums up the experience for all of us,” Dale said. “I like men, but I do like sleeping with women occasionally.”
Meredith tried to delicately phrase her next question: “Does the group help bisexuals, uh, find each other?”
“Absolutely,” Dr. Waldren told her. He had been listening to the last exchanges; his plans with Austin were presumably settled. He leaned over Alex’s shoulder and glanced over his notes. “No ‘k’ in decadent,” he told him coldly. “We don’t encourage or discourage ‘hook-ups,’” he continued, still looking down at Alex’s notes as he said this. He then smiled at something else that seemed to strike him as erroneous or possibly naïve. “They occur. We are all, after all, adults. Where but here would a man find a willing female partner, or vice versa?”
The woman Meredith now decided must be named Dawn jumped in: “But don’t misunderstand. Brad isn’t talking about orgies! We’ve found each other, thank heavens. We’re all close friends. And as a group we are able to share many things with each other. I mean information, conversation. We have the opportunity to share those things about ourselves that, up to now, have made us feel separate and different. Our circumstances are similar enough that we can feel ordinary, almost, and certainly understood. Sometimes it’s refreshing to feel blasé about yourself.”
“When Terry and I first met,” a group member standing to Meredith’s side interjected, “we danced around the possibility of becoming involved. But because we were friends—and have become more so as colleagues in this group together—it’s only been talk. We’ve never pursued it. I don’t know if that answers your question. My point is that we talk—all of us—and it’s a social experience in that respect. Our group is not a dating service or a meat market. Yet in groups like ours, um, trysts can occur. But when they do, be it a relationship or an afternoon trick, whose business is it? It’s rare when we even talk with specifics about encounters we’ve had. We’re a little too old for that, and this is far from a locker room setting; there’s very little boasting of conquests going on.”
“Bisexuals have always taken a beating,” Meredith observed with care. She found herself looking at her empty legal pad and then the ceiling to avoid any in the group thinking she was singling them out. “Straight people can’t relate. Gay people can’t relate. There was a time, most of you are too young to have witnessed this first-hand, when bisexuals were seen as gay men or lesbians who had difficulty taking the final step out of the closet.”
“That may have been true for some,” Dr. Waldren interjected, “but as you say, that was generations ago. Those bisexuals were hanging on to some semblance, some vestige of heterosexual identity, in part because they believed in doing so they were maintaining a degree of acceptance in society, a position or status they believed they would lose as an openly gay person. That world doesn’t exist anymore. None of the people in this room are saying, ‘I’m bi, so that means I’m still okay,’ or, ‘I’m practically straight,’ or ‘whatever ne
gative connotations you have about gay people should not apply to me because I’m not gay’.” He produced a pipe from his shirt pocket and clamped it between the teeth on the right side of his mouth. Meredith thought all he needed was a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows to make the picture complete. “There’s no one here in this room, in this park, who has anything to prove. The world—and by the world I mean those who remain free to move about—has largely forgotten about us.”
“Exactly,” Morgan said. “Any perceived benefit that existed for the bisexual or closeted gay person living as a straight person is obviously gone. So today, if I say that I consider myself bisexual, I should think people would take me seriously. What’s my incentive to lie? I have none.”
“But you think there are still people who don’t buy it?” Meredith asked.
“It’s too much for our cookie-cutter society now,” Dale said. “But I think Brad, Dr. Waldren, is right. There aren’t many people on the outside concerned about what they would probably describe as the hair-splitting we’ve been doing. For many Americans, none of us in the parks seem to exist.”
“Or at best, we’re a nuisance,” Morgan said. “An enormous drain on the U.S. taxpayer. As if hiding us away isn’t enough. They should have to pay for ‘God’s little mistake?’ Thank God for the Jack Harbours of the world.”
“Must every session deteriorate into a celebration of the great Jack Harbour?” Terry asked. The quick smile that followed the question suggested that Terry was no more than slightly exasperated, not genuinely angry.
“He is a vibrant force,” Dale said. “All of us are more than a little in awe of him. Most of us are, anyway—including yourself if you’re honest about him. Some of us believe he’s a great man. The risks he takes, and the success he has had shaming this country. He is a master at playing on the embarrassment factor. He used to live here, you know.” Dale added with self-importance. “He lived in my building.” This statement was followed by knowing looks at the fellow group members and a smile indicating pleasure at establishing to the visitors this special status.
This prompted Austin to step forward and presumably impose his control as the director, but before he could interject, Meredith raised a hand like a crossing guard. “Please, let’s not take issue with anyone’s opinion,” she scolded him. “People are free in this environment to express how they feel. Besides, we’re not filming yet; you don’t have to be concerned about deleting anyone’s words yet.” She turned to Dale. “We were talking about Jack Harbour.”
“We take a certain amount of local pride in him, what with his being one of us,” Dr. Waldren said, picking up the conversation. “Local escapee makes good. Some of us,” he said in a lowered voice, “have a bit of a crush on him.”
“Brad is talking about me,” Morgan said. “I admit it. He’s so self-assured. And such an imposing figure. I think it’s because he’s on the run. Staying a step ahead of the law is exhausting work, I should think. That’s my theory as to why he’s as lean as a long-distance runner.”
“He’s actually not that tall,” Dale cut in, apparently unable to pass on the opportunity to offer an insider’s perspective. “Maybe five-nine, five ten.” To Meredith, in a whisper, as though presenting a treasured confidence, Dale added: “He’s actually shorter than I am!”
“I’m equally guilty,” a previously silent participant, now reintroduced as Parker, offered. “Of course, a lot of people are in love with him on some level or another. He speaks so eloquently. I wish I knew his educational background. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s self-educated. That fits in with my perception of him as a renaissance man.” Parker was taken with this thought and took a pause before adding: “Maybe we do talk about him too much.”
“You’re the worst culprit,” Dale said in a tone now sharp and accusatory. “Did you or did you not, at the very last meeting, speculate about the possibility that he ‘swings both ways’?”
“If I did,” Parker said, “I’m sure I only said that if he were bi, he’d be the last to hide it. He doesn’t care what people think about him. He’s got the self-confidence to say ‘fuck you’ to the world and pursue his own agenda without concern for convention or conformity—or persecution.”
“That’s about all I can stand for,” Austin again interrupted. “If your park director is to be trusted, this Harbor fellow isn’t going to be making too much of a splash for very much longer. If he actually exists, I mean. Which we’ve been told he doesn’t.”
Austin’s role was diminished by Meredith’s earlier scolding; she expected the group understood his words, at least before the cameras started rolling, were inconsequential.
Parker continued, and in doing so reassured Meredith that Austin’s attempt to quash the conversation was being disregarded: “Jack Harbor is like the gay men you used to hear about from the nineties and the turn of the century. He has that willingness, or better put, that need to be in people’s faces. To me he’s like this bright, shining hope. I am grateful he’s out there. I do believe he’s very conscious of us in here—not me specifically, I never met the guy when he was here—”
“I did,” Dale reminded the circle.
“—but all of us collectively; and if I fantasize that he’s into both genders like I am, who am I hurting?”
“Jack Harbour aside for the moment,” Meredith said, thinking it might be best to redirect the group before Austin called a halt to the meeting, or worse, placed a call to the Administration Building and brought Dr. Makepeace or one of his representatives running, “what more can you tell me about your sessions with Dr. Waldren? Are there recurrent themes or daily topics you explore?”
Dale accepted her challenge to change the subject: “We live in a world where it’s too easy to make gay people, bi people, transgendered people go away. I think a prayer seems in order just now. A moment of silence, of quiet reflection, is called for, that we may remind ourselves of all we should be grateful for, all those things we hold most dear, including Jack Harbour,” he added with a wink.
“Amen,” Terry said, ignoring the called for moment of silence. “It’s too easy to focus on those who have oppressed us, and,” Terry added with a knowing nod, “those who continue to. Now I’ve brought the conversation around to my particular peeve: the position, or behavior if you will, of straight bisexuals. They haven’t helped any.”
“Straight bisexuals?” Meredith asked.
“My own term,” Terry clarified. “There were some people who identified as bisexual who did not test positive for gay genetic make-up. I knew a lot of them. Such loving, open-minded people. We thought. Traitors, now—the whole lot of them.”
“Did any of you—”
“Oh, no,” Morgan jumped in, cutting off Meredith’s question, “those people don’t live in the parks. Those people live as straight people now. Twenty, thirty years ago, when the homophobia started reaching epic proportions, those people privately renounced their interest in their own gender. Tests told them they were straight and society, this culture, gave them plenty of reason to live exclusively as heteros.”
“And that’s just what they’ve done,” Terry added. “But I’ve talked myself blue on this one. I’m sure my colleagues would appreciate it if I spared them another recounting of the betrayals I’ve known, the loves I’ve lost.”
“Yes, please,” Dr. Waldren jumped in, seeming quite ready to agree with Terry’s concession to table the diatribe of betrayals and injustices brought on by the “straight bisexuals.” “We’ve covered that territory pretty well in recent sessions. It’s my understanding that Mr. Green is ready to begin filming whenever we are. Why don’t we break at this point? Those who have chosen to sit out the filming can take their leave. Those who are staying may take a moment to refresh while Mr. Green and his associates set up the room.”
Self-awareness, Meredith acknowledged, was a frequently awe-inspiring thing, but frightening, to meet on such an intimate basis. While she liked Dr. Waldren’s group, she ca
me to understand that each member’s frankness and utter lack of inner turmoil or conflict about their sexuality was a bit off-putting. There was a sad resolve to their understanding of their misfit status. And as a group, she noted, they weren’t trying to change the world, only to figure out how to cope within the narrow parameters of the world they currently occupied. Understanding. Legitimacy. Acceptance. They did not seem to be seeking these things, and it was as though they understood that as reasonable as those goals would seem to be, they were beyond their grasp. It was a juxtaposition of the individual’s courage and will to survive coupled with a discouraging sense of defeat. And she decided it was an utter unwillingness to be drawn into a losing battle, but based on strategy, not cowardice. Tyler and Carl had been the same, she now realized. They did not suffer from an inability to engage in the conflict; they simply saw no value in wasting the effort.
Chapter Ten
As it turned out, none of the support group chose to stay for the filmed scene. An unwillingness to be held up to the scrutiny of an audience that did not understand them, or a sense that Dr. Waldren preferred that they avoid a potentially exploitive depiction, Meredith was unable to determine. When the last of the group, Morgan and Terry, had taken their leave, the crew set up lights and placed two cameras: one directed at Meredith, the other at Dr. Waldren. Body microphones were placed at their collars.
Doctor Waldren was composed, but seemed a bit taken back by the activity around him. Meredith leaned forward and told him, “If you get emotional, if you feel the need to emphasize a point with a gesture with your hands, don’t pound yourself on the chest. Even the slightest brush against the mike is picked up like a loud boom.” Despite his apprehension, Dr. Waldren was every bit the prepared guest he needed to be. Austin Green persuaded him to abandon his pipe, and the tweed coat with patches Meredith imagined him in was never produced, but he was nevertheless the picture of the clinical psychologist. Maybe it was the glasses? They certainly gave him a distinctive look. This she decided was due to the visible bifocal line. Higher end lenses must be beyond the park’s means, she surmised. The picture was all the more complete because the upper portion of the lenses were of such a high prescription his eyes appeared distorted behind them.
