by Jan Richman
He shook his head to clear it. “I’m not mad at you, Doctor. I apologize if I said anything wrong.”
“Mr. Richman,” the doctor said, “Look at me.” He rose from his chair, unfolding his tall body in stages, first the barrel-shaped torso straining against its vest and jacket, then the long legs that rose above his enormous, hand-cobbled shoes. He stood towering over the desk for a moment, his large white hands spread out at his sides as if to display his glory. “Do I look like a poor weakling to you? Like a man who cannot take a little bit of anger?”
My father smiled in spite of himself. “No, I just ...”
“You just thought it would be improper to yell at your psychiatrist.”
“Mmm ...”
The doctor sat. “From now on, Mr. Richman, you have my full permission to hoot and holler at me in protest whenever you feel the urge to do so. Please be assured that I will not break into pieces. Understood?”
“Sure thing,” said my father, laughing uncomfortably at the thought of punching Dr. Berger right in the pocket watch.
“Now, let us move on,” said the doctor, pulling at his vest. “Have you given any more thought to the behavior of the peacock? The bird whose colorful tail is displayed in order to court the object of his desire?”
“Well, I was thinking about what you said, about how he does that to show off for girls.” My father shrugged as if he were trying to shake water off his back, a shrug of dismissal, borne of incomprehension. “I don’t see how you can call it showing off. I mean, the way I see it, it’s not something he chooses to do. Those feathers are there, they’re gonna come out, it’s part of being a peacock. It’s not like he says to himself, ‘Hmmm, should I get her flowers, or should I show her my fancy tail?’” He mugged this last bit, this peacock imitation, and then rolled his eyes at the very idea of a “her” being that important in someone’s, even a peacock’s, life.
Dr. Berger sat staring at my father in silence for a long moment. “Well,” he said, “I must congratulate you for your scathing indictment of my profession, Mr. Richman. I myself am sometimes just as skeptical of the mind’s claims to omnipotence.” He gazed with respect and amusement at my father’s deadpan stare. “Do you know what this word ‘omnipotence’ is? It is all-powerful. So, perhaps we can agree that the mind of the peacock is not so all-powerful, that his body, his nature, shares some of the credit. How did you put it?” The doctor looked up at the ceiling, his eyes moving slowly across the arched molding. “Ah, yes. ‘It’s all part of being a peacock.’ No?”
My father shrugged. “Yes.”
“But perhaps we can also agree that there are certain things in life we must do—eating, for example. We must eat, or we die. But, unless we are starving to death, we have a certain number of options: we can choose when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat, etcetera. When you are sitting at a restaurant looking at a menu, do you let your body decide what to order?”
“I usually get a burger.”
The doctor’s eyes widened. “Interesting.”
My father looked up, surprised. “What’s so interesting about eating a burger?”
“Well, listen to what to you just said. ‘Eating a burger.’ What is my name, Mr. Richman?”
“Dr. ... uh ... Berger?” My father broke into a slow smile and laughed into his hand as though he had been told a slightly pornographic schoolyard joke. “Oh, I get it.”
“Do you? Do you get it?” The doctor clapped his hands in elation. “Do you understand your desire to devour me, to remove from your path any obstacle capable of assimilating you?”
The doctor had sprayed a fine mist of spit on the desk during his sibilance, and he looked down at it for a silent moment, confused, as though he’d wandered into an unfamiliar part of town. Then he removed and carefully unfolded a not-quite-white handkerchief from his coat pocket and mopped up the delicate constellation of spittle.
My father watched with mild astonishment. In all his weekly visits, he had never seen the doctor lose control. He didn’t want to eat the doctor in a sandwich with catsup and mustard, and he didn’t know what “assimilate” meant. But he recognized the look of panicked isolation on the face of this towering, brainy man, who was now pecking persistently at his brow with his handkerchief.
“Dr. Berger, are you okay?” asked my father with genuine concern.
“Oh yes, yes, I am quite fine, thank you,” said the doctor, revived from his sudden transformation by the slightly hoarse voice of the boy, which now lacked any hint of ironic contempt. The doctor smiled wearily at my father, a smile like a white flag, crinkling at the corners and wavy, windswept in the middle. He refolded the handkerchief and tucked it away in his coat pocket. “I’m afraid that concludes our time for today,” he said.
For two years my father was paraded to an array of specialists: orthopedists, masseuses, physical therapists, and speech pathologists. Each specialist claimed that my father’s particular problem was slightly peripheral to his field of expertise, and referred him to another specialist, someone more capable of diagnosing and absolving, someone who would return my father to the normal, lithe boy he was before this urgent dance overtook him. A nutritionist suggested more iron in his diet, and so my grandmother snuck spinach and brussel sprouts into his lunchbox in various guises, chopped up in tunafish sandwiches, layered with potato salad. The rabbi who lived down the block stopped by the house one evening to wonder aloud if my father’s episodes were not a cry for spiritual guidance, a vigorous plea for increased moral structure. My father’s teachers wished that something could be done; they admired my father’s diligence and consented that his schoolwork was always neat and timely, but his constant thrashing was disruptive to the class. The other kids had begun to curse and shout and bounce up and down at their desks, paying more attention to my father as they tried to anticipate his next outburst than to the subject matter at hand. Finally, my father’s Aunt Jean, a boisterous woman who would often stand up from the table in the middle of dinner to publicly adjust her girdle, slipped them Dr. Berger’s telephone number. “He’s an Upper East Side mensch,” she said. “An Austrian Jew, an intellectual.” She lowered her voice to a stage-whisper, “He helped Harry with his premature whatsis.” Everyone in Hackensack, New Jersey, right down to the mailman, who was far more startled by a barking boy than he’d ever been by any savage dog, wanted my father to act right, to be restored perfect and whole and still as a turtle, as still as his brother, as still as any boy could be expected to be.
“Look, I know you think I don’t get it, but I know why I’m here,” my father announced as he settled in to his spot on the couch. He sucked in a large breath, aware of the burning that was saturating his cheeks and forehead. “And it’s got nothing to do with peacocks or hamburgers.”
“That is true,” said the doctor. He looked pale, and his eyes seemed even more troubled than usual, the skin around them raw and pendulant, like turkey gizzards.
“I’m here because everyone thinks I’m a freak,” my father began, reciting the speech he had practiced while he pedaled through the neighborhood early that morning. “I’m a freak who should charge admission, shaking and strutting and hitting the walls all the time. And you think I’m doing it on purpose, and you think you can talk me out of it with clever stories about peacocks. Well, I’m here to tell you it couldn’t be massaged out of me, or punished out of me, or anything else. It probably couldn’t be cut out of me with a hari-kari knife. It’s sure as hell not going to be conversationed out of me!”
The doctor sat still, watching closely the effulgent, clear spume that had blown out of my father’s mouth during this tirade—an almost invisible thread that had flown all the way to the arm of the doctor’s old-fashioned swivel chair from the mouth of the boy on the worn leather sofa, like a line drawn between two similar objects.
“I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose,” the doctor said, his voice lower than usual, w
orn down to a candid shine, as though he were talking to a colleague. “I have always felt that the body’s complex systems are infinitely wise, they pull the strings that control the marionettes of what we call our ‘decisions’ and ‘preferences.’”
“All right,” said my father, who wasn’t used to being agreed with.
“Your body wants you to experience something that your will cannot induce. I have no intention of talking you out of it,” he said, shaking his head pensively. “In fact, in a certain way I envy you.” Dr. Berger rolled his chair slowly around the desk, a loud, steady rumble of wheels on wood that sounded like summer thunder. He pulled up next to the sofa where my father sat. “Do you understand that there are some mysteries that terrify most people?” he asked, in a low whisper. “Mysteries that cannot be solved by flipping to the last page of the book?”
My father nodded his head hard, up and down. He did undersand this, though he’d been raised to believe in rationality above all else. He knew, though this was not rationally acquired knowledge, that Dr. Berger would never be able to help him, no matter how many strange afternoons he spent watching the doctor’s sad, red-rimmed eyes and listening to the old swivel chair squeak. He knew, also, that there would be very few more sessions like this, and so he tried to enjoy the feel of the burnished leather and the quiet click of the wall clock behind him. The nods began to come rapid-fire now, each more exaggerated than the previous, his chin jackknifing off his chest with a dull, hollow thump. His hands were splayed, slapping the sofa cushions, eliciting a loud popping noise, double-time.
“Motherfucker!” my father fumed joyously. “Ass-biting, shit-loving son of a bitch!”
Sidesplitter
The only roller coaster in Houston is a tiny one in Koreatown, a teeming two-block-square neighborhood north of downtown. It is crowded. At least, it is on this Saturday early evening. I am several inches taller than almost everyone here, but my aerial view does not help me navigate the bustling sidewalks and plazas; I keep tripping over children in bright purple and green parkas and zigzagging old people and wheelie carts filled with bulbous vegetables and bottled tea in pink plastic sacks. Finally, in the midst of a ring of colorful shops and markets, there is a parking-lot sized clearing, and I look up to see something even taller than myself: the Kukwa-dan.
The Kukwa-dan, a roller coaster with gleaming, compressed humps and dives, is barely more than tot-sized, and is painted fire-engine red. But no tots, apparently, are allowed to board the Kukwa-dan. There is no YOU MUST BE TALL sign, but I notice that the orderly queue is filled with poker-faced adults. I appear to be the only non-Asian in the zip code.
I scan the crowd around the ticket booth for Buffy, the teenager that Betty arranged through Houston Craigslist to be my ersatz tour guide. Betty didn’t give me a more detailed description, and somehow I’d assumed Buffy would be easy to spot. How many Korean American teenage girls can there be in Houston, Texas? Ha! Betty liked the idea of my treating Texas as a foreign country, with a cultural interpreter in tow, but I’m starting to realize as I look down at the sea of shiny black heads that Koreatown is the real enigma. I check my watch, and notice that it’s not seven o’clock yet; I’m a couple of minutes early. To pass the time, I lean down to the elderly man in the ticket booth and ask him what “Kukwa-dan” means. He stares at me and holds up his hand, fingers spread like a starfish. “Fife,” he says, and nods to the sign above his head: $5 per ride. I re-form my question. “No,” I say, pointing to the roller coaster and shrugging dramatically. “Kukwa-daaaaan?”
“It means ‘Sidesplitter,’” says a cute girl with a blue fauxhawk and a Peggy Hill accent. She is almost as tall as I am, thanks to red patent-leather boots with towering platform heels. I thank her, but she shakes her head to show that her translation duties are far from over. “You’re Jan?” she says, and reels off a string of lilting syllables that makes the man in the booth open his lips, suck on his teeth, and chuckle asthmatically. Then, glacially, he pulls two red tickets from a giant roll on the side counter. Handing me a ticket as we turn away from the booth, the girl says, “I’m Buffy.”
“Nice to meet you,” I squeeze her daintily proferred hand. Her cupid’s mouth is lined with purple, an orchid laid against the white backdrop of her face, and her fine eyebrows streak across her forehead to her temples. Her eyes are long black fish, flipping their tails as they swim.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking,” she says, “but, like, what the hell are you doing here?” Before I can answer, she goes on, “I mean, I answered that ad because my grandpa works in the ticket booth, and I hang around here anyways because, like, sometimes he needs a break or an iced coffee or something. Plus, my parents are afraid he’ll keel over and croak if no one is here to look after him on Saturdays, but he refuses to give up the job! He loves it. He’s a real people person. I’m kinda hoping they don’t tear the thing down for at least another year or so, for Crawdaddy’s sake.” She tilts her head toward her grandfather in the booth, then takes a moment to smooth down her ruffled pink-and-white checked crinolined mini-skirt. Her outfit is clownish but adorable: black-and-white striped over-the-knee socks, platform boots, a ruffly Victorianesque blouse. She doesn’t seem to notice that I haven’t answered her question.
“My real name isn’t Buffy, by the way, it’s Kyung-hwa, which no one in Texas can pronounce, big surprise, and I told my parents that on my eighteenth birthday I was going to the courthouse to legally change it. They laughed it off until I came home officially as Buffy last November, and then my mother cried and sulked for like a month, telling me over and over about how the Japanese made Crawdaddy change his name when Korea was a colony of Japan. Like, hello? We live in Texas. But I like it. I got it from Nick at Nite reruns, the girl in Family Affair with the freckles and the Mrs. Beasley doll? I know I don’t look like her, but still.”
We pass through the red gate, where Buffy nods to the white-gloved ticket taker, and take our places at the end of the line. Most of the adults in front of us are men, some of whom are wearing baseball caps with the words Korean Pride stitched on their fronts. There is no sign specifying penis ownership as a prerequisite for sidesplitting, but I entertain myself imagining the international icon that could be developed to communicate such an imperative—a vulva with a slash through it? An ink-drawn phallus with a thumbs-up symbol next to it? As I listen to Buffy explain her plans to start her own line of streetwear clothing when she graduates from fashion design school (“I’m gonna leave Juicy Couture in the dust, I’m gonna take goth Lolita to a whole new level! I’m gonna get one of those operations where they sew in a new eyelid crease!”), I am offered “neck candy” three times (I have developed a tedious, persistent cough, probably from the combination of quick climate changes and road food) by polite, smiling, lozenge-wielding older men. The Sidesplitter Jr. doesn’t look that daunting, especially not for a farm-fed Yankee raised on Six Flags and malted milks, but the thought of getting a hard plum-flavored nugget stuck in my esophagus as we peel down a fifty-degree curve is off-putting, so I decline. Buffy tells me that coughing isn’t really that rude, by Korean standards, although blowing your nose in public is probably the most disgustingly impolite thing you can do. But with every piece of neck candy I decline, I get the feeling that coughing into one’s own hand while waiting in line for the Sidesplitter might be right up there in the Top Ten Koreatown faux pas. I try to suppress the next few coughs, resulting in a series of Martha Graham-like full-body shudders that make Buffy giggle.
While she talks, Buffy hooks a chunk of her starch-sprayed blue hair from just behind her ear and twists it into a tight coil with her index finger and thumb. It is a gesture whose nimble, unthinking expertise calls to mind traditional handicrafts like crochet and piecrust-pinching. She winds a hunk of hair around her finger, the ends splaying out like a fan brush, and cranks it so tight I think it’ll fly her across the room when she lets go. I notice that she actually has an eggshell-white
bald spot above her left ear, an artifact of this compulsive twisting, a spot whose oddball defenselessness makes me want to grab a blue magic marker and fill it in.
A train of square, white-sided cars that look like teeth pulls into the station. We are moving now, almost to the head of the line as pairs of unsmiling men board the back molars of the tooth train. Similar pairs of unsmiling men have exited the cars twenty yards to our right, while white-coated assistants 409 the seats for a hygenic sidesplitting experience. Being herded is familiar and comforting, a skill grasped by anyone who’s ever been to an amusement park: the tiny, shuffling steps forward in rhythm with the shuffling shoes ahead, that are following the esoteric arm-gestures of a crabby carnival monitor; the focused waiting while the hydraulic bar springs up to reveal the plastic butt-shaped seat that will soon be housing you; the controlled lurching into the center of anticipation; the buckling up. We have already secured our valuables in tiny lockers at the gate (Buffy took out her retainer and stashed it in a pitted case that looked like it had come from the bottom of the sea). We’re stripped down and lo-fi, streamlined as Olympic athletes. It is nearly our turn to dive headlong into the Kukwa-dan’s polished and symmetrical jaws, and Buffy is in swimmer’s start-stance, almost crouched and steadying herself against my left elbow. We are next.
