Scream

by Tama Janowitz

  He printed an angry letter in the paper: he had seen me in the restaurant, sent his wife to delay me in the women’s room while he ran home and got his manuscript, and gave it to me—only I was so rude I never responded.

  the search for help for willow

  Days went by when I spoke to no one except the teenager. The teenager was sharp, smart, and charming, but she also knew she was living with a nincompoop. I knew that according to Mark Twain, when he was twenty, his father was the stupidest person on the planet, but when he got to be twenty-five his father got very smart. Willow was unhappy and she needed some advice but she didn’t want advice from me. Against my better judgment I booked an appointment for her with the local psychiatrist of her choice, not the man with the hat but another who she had found, specializing in child psychiatry.

  Willow was seventeen. She was in eleventh grade, and now she and I were living together, alone, in upstate New York. She was in high school here and every day I was going to see my mom in the nursing home and trying to pack up that thirty years of stuff in her house. I was trying my best, and my kid wanted to see a psychiatrist.

  Sure, why not? If you hadn’t grown up as the child of a psychiatrist, why wouldn’t you want to see one? A kindly, sympathetic soul, interested in listening to you and exploring your issues? Willow researched online and found Dr. Leonid. She was proud of her discovery, so we booked an appointment. This guy was going to see her briefly, then he would meet with us both.

  We went to his house, which was also his office. A woman sitting at a desk introduced herself as Mrs. Leonid; she was the doctor’s wife, office manager, secretary, whatever. You have never met a more seriously depressed woman. Her aura—the atmosphere—reeked of potential suicide. The doctor came out, a small, wizened fellow with preternaturally bright and angry eyes, and we introduced ourselves.

  He looked at me suspiciously. “Tama! I have never met a Tama.”

  “That’s okay, I have never met a Doctor Leonid.”

  “Ha! Touché!”

  He took Willow in.

  A few minutes later I was called in.

  “Sit down!” He is gleeful. “Did you know that your daughter smokes marijuana?” Willow winces. Maybe she wasn’t expecting him to betray her, at least not so brutally, so immediately.

  “Um, yes, I knew.”

  In my opinion, you might want to give a couple minutes’ chitchat before you break your patient’s trust, but, whatever, you could see the disappointment in his eyes. “Your daughter is in serious need of psychiatric help! She is seriously depressed! She started crying when she came in here and she told me she cries every day!”

  “Oh, so did I at her age. I cried every night.”

  “That’s not normal! Your daughter is not normal!”

  “Um, Dr. Leonid, do you have any daughters?”

  “What?” A sizzling coil of rage, some kind of . . . I don’t know, demonic entity? A dybbuk? He’d just shrunken in hate.

  “Any daughters. Got any teenage daughters—or girls?”

  “. . . No.”

  “Do you have any sons?”

  “No! But that’s not the point. Your child says she hates school and she has ALWAYS hated school. I am going to prescribe major medication for her, antidepression, anti-anxiety, sleeping pills. BUT I WILL NOT GIVE HER THESE MEDICATIONS UNLESS SHE STOPS SMOKING MARIJUANA. Willow, will you do so?”

  “Um, I don’t think so.”

  “For today, the fee will be two hundred and fifty dollars. From now on I would like to see her four times a week at two hundred dollars a session. I will also need to see you, and Tim as well. Then after that, if necessary, any or all of you can call me—for fifteen minutes—and that is ninety dollars. Do you have any questions?”

  “I have a question,” said Willow. “What are your thoughts or opinions about the meaning of life?”

  “For me?” He looked angry. “I am here to help people. That gives me pleasure.”

  We departed. I wrote a check and handed it to the depressed sodden mass of tissue that was the doctor’s wife.

  “Mom, I don’t want to see that guy again,” Willow said.

  A short time later she got a boyfriend and a bicycle and didn’t mention therapy again.

  About six months later, Willow got this big-deal scholarship to learn Arabic in Jordan for the summer. It was very prestigious and had been a real bitch to get; letters of recommendation had to be obtained and interviews arranged and essays written. I was so proud and excited. She went to Washington, D.C., for two days of orientation. On Sunday night, when the group was scheduled to leave, first for Frankfurt and then on to Amman, the director of the program called and said, “Willow was crying, so we asked if she really wants to go on this trip and she said, ‘No,’ so we pulled her out and sent her to a hotel. She’ll fly back to Ithaca tomorrow.”

  “What?” I said. “Where is she? Put her on the phone right now and I’ll tell her to get on that plane with the group and shut her trap.”

  “Oh no,” the director said. “The rest of the group is boarding and Willow has been sent back through security.”

  If there had been an issue, at least give me a chance to kick the child’s behind and talk some sense into her; it was eight thirty and the flight was scheduled for nine. What could I do with that amount of time?

  I could not stop crying. This scholarship would have meant her acceptance into college. The State Department offered internships and jobs to those kids. I had found her an Arabic tutor to assist her prior to the trip (the kids, all high school juniors and seniors, were supposed to teach themselves basic Arabic before the journey). I had bought presents for the host family she was staying with and got her a hijab, which, believe me, was not the easiest thing to find in upstate New York. Our neighborhood in Brooklyn would have been different. We had a lot of hijab shops, believe me, a subway stop or less away.

  So I called the psychiatrist I’d seen before, Dr. Sandor F—. He had seemed . . . kind. I remembered he was expensive, and it had cost me a lot to hear his life story, but I was so upset I booked back-to-back appointments, one for Willow and one for me, the day after she got back.

  Willow was back? I had had my summer planned: there would be house-sitters staying to look after my dogs. I would escape, after a year of total unending torture, a mom crapping all over the house and my having to find her a nursing home, and a kid who wanted to move to high school here and then found herself miserable because eleventh grade is not an easy year to switch schools and who then got a boyfriend to smoke pot with. After all that, now she was home only two days after she left. The scholarship to Jordan was a big deal! I took her to the shrink. When her appointment was over, I went in for mine. And the room . . . well, it smelled like pot. And Dr. Sandor F—, who I remembered as a nice guy, intelligent, on my one brief visit some six months prior, said, “I met with your daughter and I told her: ‘WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO GO TO JORDAN! Those Arabs are crazy! They are bad people!’ ”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So why are you so upset?” he asked.

  “This was a big-deal scholarship! She doesn’t have very good grades or PSAT scores, it would help her get into college, they offer jobs to the recipients, blah-blah-blah.”

  “Okay, so I am going to tell you something,” said Dr. Sandor F—. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s right, it doesn’t MATTER.” He launched into the history of cognitive behavior therapy, which I think he had told me before. This time the story went something like: “There was this very ugly guy, Eckhart Tolle, and he was so plain and ugly and he had no money and his parents were horrible. So you see, Willow not taking the scholarship—it doesn’t matter. She’s fine. You should come back for further appointments.”

  Right. It was true, he was right: it didn’t matter. Nothing matters. But is that comforting? No. Not to me at the time. I understand you don’t look to a psychiatrist for comfort, but still. Yes, sure, I would “ge
t over it,” but to me, it mattered.

  “I am troubled by her marijuana smoking,” I said. “She gets nasty after she hasn’t smoked.”

  “And what is your problem with marijuana?”

  I told him about my father, and how his long-term smoking had made him . . . if not addicted, then just unpleasant if he hadn’t smoked in more than a few hours. “Look, if someone wants to smoke once in a while, it’s not a problem!” I said. “But usage like that, it’s no different than alcoholism. And even smoking once in a while, it’s kind of like getting drunk, the people end up with hangovers!”

  The doctor nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t know anything about long-term usage like your father’s,” he says. “But in my opinion, it is not harmful.”

  So after my appointment I said to Willow, “Listen, were you smoking pot with that shrink?”

  “No, why?”

  “Just because . . . the place smelled like pot.”

  “Well, I wasn’t,” she said. “He seemed nice! He used to be a neurosurgeon. We talked a lot about brain function. And he said it would have been nuts to go to Jordan and that I didn’t need to come to see him again. I’m fine.”

  A couple of weeks later, she was hanging out with her friends when she said, “You know what, Mom? I don’t know why you are so upset with me smoking marijuana. There’s this kid, at my school, Gandolf F—. He and his parents grow marijuana, in the yard, and they smoke it together. He started smoking when he was seven, with his parents.”

  “What? WHAT did you say his name was?”

  She repeated it.

  “That’s the psychiatrist’s son!” Not only was it an unusual last name, but Dr. Sandor F— had told me he had a kid in Willow’s school. I was in total disbelief. I mean, Doctor—do what you want, smoke marijuana with your kid starting when he’s seven years old, if you feel that’s okay—but MAKE SURE you tell your kid to keep his mouth shut about doing it! You’re a DOCTOR, for crying out loud, it’s your REPUTATION! Not to mention he previously worked for the state, so was he oblivious to the fact that anybody could call Child Protective Services . . . or the police . . . for growing marijuana? Were all these psychiatrists similar? When Willow was a toddler my dad wanted Tim to take a few pounds of marijuana he had grown, so Tim could sell it for him in the city. I forget what split he suggested.

  “Dad!” I said. “Do you know what happens if you get caught dealing marijuana in that quantity? They don’t just put you in jail—they take away everything you own, including your kid!”

  Dad didn’t care. Fortunately Tim didn’t go through with this plan.

  I was alone on this damn planet, not only suffering from repetition compulsion syndrome (or whatever it was called), I was out another $250 apiece for our appointments.

  leaving ithaca

  If I was going to look after my mother as her condition deteriorated and she got kicked out of one nursing home after the next, each time demoted to a higher level of care, I would have to head to a place where I didn’t have neighbors, even if it meant abandoning my shrub.

  So this is how I actually got to Schuyler County, where they had advertisements for events such as this:

  A Holy Ghost tent revival and unlimited pizza buffet.

  Yes, I would miss my shrub, and hearing things about my neighbor’s biological daughter’s grandfather’s murder-suicide spree. Yes, I would miss many of the very wise recycling rules of Tompkins County and I would be sorry not to display my paper bags with fortitude to the garbagemen—by now I had learned to tape and strap them so well, they would last for thousands of years in the landfill. But it was time for me to go.

  I was ready for Schuyler County, where—riding my horse through the Finger Lakes National Forest and surrounding farmlands—I could always find my way back to the farm, simply by remembering the various bathtubs that local residents had discarded along the trail. (Also, the horse knew the way.)

  Bathtubs, sinks, sofas: if you had something you didn’t want, that’s what you did with it out there in the wild. And that was going to be my next destination, as long as my mother was on this earth, a place where seldom was heard the term deer repellent. Instead it was a realm where at the local convenience store you could buy deer attractant, made out of the urine of does in heat, in order to attract the male deer to shoot them while they were searching out the female deer in heat and distracted by the hormones in the scent. That was what fair play was considered to be in the region. And, in my opinion, it was just as fair as contacting a lawyer to tell your neighbor to remove a bag of mulch from the sidewalk.

  At the end of the time I was in my mom’s house I had been so scared of living there, with the legal threats and accusations and having to sit in a sex chair when I didn’t want to. But then—just before I had everything 100 percent packed and gone—I was nervously cleaning up the yard, hoping I wasn’t going to get the meditation command, when a car drove by on the far road and slowed.

  At first I didn’t know who it was, but then I saw, looking tired and peevish, a ponytailed guy, maybe in search of local overgrown shrubs or barking dogs, but anyway just weary, and it all made me a bit sad.

  in search of lost time

  Time passes, I end up there—that indefinable place called “Revisiting the Past.”

  It’s not an accurate place. You can’t go back and visit it in a documentary. Your mind doesn’t remember it perfectly. You want to look back and think you did well. You want to believe people are basically good. You know, too, we all try to improve. We hope to change.

  I find myself, once again, in that same supermarket.

  Look, the sign has been changed!

  Oh no. It’s changed, but it’s not an improvement. Don’t get me started. Don’t get me started. So, in my head, I revisit. I revisit my time growing up. I revisit my life in New York: growing up—after my parents’ divorce—in a tiny tract house, falling apart, alongside the big eight-lane highway 128 looping outside Boston. Rats in the back, neighbors throwing rocks at the car—once they broke my mom’s windshield. It’s a contagious disease, that place you came from.

  Don’t get me wrong; I did get to have plenty of fun, strange, and interesting experiences in my life. I did not particularly like being semi-famous, which I was for a while, after Slaves of New York was published in 1986.

  The thing is, if you are a writer, and that’s all you do, you have a pretty isolated existence. What experiences are you getting to have? You are sitting at a typewriter (well, to start, it was a manual, then a used electric, and finally a Mac) and that’s your life.

  Flannery O’Connor said that a writer has enough life experience to draw on by the time she is twenty years old to write for the rest of her life. She died when she was thirty-nine. The Brontës, they had plenty to write about, and they seldom left the moors.

  But is that really a fun way to spend your life, all the time—unless you have to?

  Writing, to me, was a living death. You are not “doing” anything while you are writing. You are not painting a picture or filing papers or trying a case. You are not in a meeting. You are sitting totally alone with a screen or paper in front of you and nothing is happening. You are making up stuff in your head, but that is not the same as something really “happening.”

  I did not write books to be liked. I was not interested in writing likable books. I was not interested in providing the reader with a hero or heroine with whom she or he could identify, who had to overcome obstacles and in the end triumphed. I wasn’t writing about “nice” people or people who were redeemed.

  I found rotten people to be more interesting. What made them the way they were? Thankfully, I found that even nice and decent human beings are pretty rotten as well.

  I was in New York. I could take the subway and look at people. I could go to art openings. I could go to clubs. But it’s still not easy to speak to people. I was always the observer, and it became harder and harder to leave my apartment. It was the same as a dog taken to an animal s
helter and left in a cage for years. I couldn’t make the transition out of my cage. And I was always so broke.

  It wasn’t fun being jeered at, when I started doing advertisements and that sort of thing—which I did, not only for the money, but for fun and experience. I looked upon any invitation to do anything as an opportunity to do something I would never have known about otherwise. For me, my activities were my substitutions. I could not be Hemingway, running with the bulls in Pamplona or fishing for marlin off Cuba.

  I always had a sense of guilt, though. I mean, a writer in our society is looked down on, pretty much. If you tell people you are a writer, unless you can say your name is Stephen King, the first thing you will be asked—always with a certain patronizing sneer—is: “And have you published?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the name of your book?”

  “Um, American Dad?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  With my next book I was able to say, “Slaves of New York?”

  But still, 99.9 percent of people could say, “Never heard of it.”

  It seemed like a joke to me when I went to movie premieres and the photographers, lined up as you entered the theater, started shouting at me, “Tama! Tama! Look this way! Over here, Tama.”

  I wasn’t a movie star. I wasn’t trying to get my photograph taken. I wanted to slink in, unnoticed. Didn’t they get it? I was a writer!

  Thanks to my success, however, I got to see, do, and witness an astonishing number of things. I became friends with Paige Powell, who was at that time the advertising director of Interview magazine, and because of her I was invited to go on the Concorde to Sweden. Michel Roux was the first distributor of Absolut vodka in the United States, and by way of thanking his distributors he hired the Concorde and took about forty distributors and their spouses and a number of artists on this private trip.