The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  He said he’d been given horrible dumplings and puddings to eat in the homes of the Slovenians.

  “They watch you every second, every bite, to make sure you’re eating the dumplings and puddings. One day I couldn’t stand it anymore and I left. I walked to the nearest hotel.”

  “How far away was it?”

  “About four hours. I’m on these dusty roads with donkeys and mules, I’m carrying my suitcases and raincoat in the blazing sun. I’m breathing sand and dirt and passing by bandits and beggars the whole way. I have no water. I get to the hotel and they don’t think I have money for a room, I’m just a kid. So I give them my American Express card and finally they take me to a room they’ve hastily cleaned out from the last guest, who departed one second before.

  “There’s an ashtray with a cigarette butt still going in it and someone’s jacket on the chair. Maybe it’s the owner’s room, who knows. I opened the window and went to sleep for a few hours.”

  “You were brave to do all that,” I said. I was impressed. “Did you get a bottle of water?”

  “Yes—an inferior brand. I called my parents to inform them, and they’re, like, ‘Okay, go meet the tour back at the hotel and fly home with them.’

  “The teachers were, like, ‘We’ll report you for this behavior,’ and I’m, like, ‘Fine. My parents didn’t know we’d be in Slovenia for ten days when they sent me on this expensive trip.’”

  “Why don’t you report them to the principal? Do they still have principals?” I pictured a free-for-all school system and society, the signs of which I saw everywhere.

  “Sort of. Not the way you think from your high school. We talked about it. We all said we’d do it when we got back. But then you get back, you have to unpack, you get back into your life, gradually you forget about it.”

  “If it happened to me, I’d be composing letters and making phone calls for weeks afterwards,” I said.

  “What’s the point? It’s more time wasted.”

  “I keep telling you I’ve wasted my life. Now you see how,” I said.

  “Not really,” he said. “That’s not an example.”

  DRUGS PRESCRIBED BY AN ADDICT

  IN THE SPRING, during that last year of his attempted drug rehabilitation, the boy had begun prescribing medication whenever we spoke on the phone. I told him I took double the maximum dose of Saint-John’s-wort during the day and valerian at night to sleep.

  “Does it work?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “In the beginning, yes, but then the life situation continued on and the botanical remedies couldn’t keep up with the pace. I was given samples of real drugs.”

  “Like what? What did you take?” he asked with too much sudden interest.

  “Nothing. I took the samples home but couldn’t get myself to take the pills.”

  “Like which ones?” he asked.

  I rattled off all the names like a professional user of medications. “I stared at them. I read the tiny print of the pamphlets inside. One had two-tone pink granules in a gelatin capsule and a thirty-seven-percent rate of bad side effects.” Another one was turquoise blue with a smile-face printed with letters of the drug’s name. When I saw that, I threw out the whole batch.

  Sometime later I came across the New York Times obituary of the man who invented the smile face. I had never known such a thing had to be invented by an actual person. It seemed more like the work of an idiot or some of the other feebleminded—work done in their spare time while waiting for psychiatric help in an institution. Still, I could feel only sympathy for the man, and sorry about his demise.

  “I know a kid who took that pink one. It changed his life,” the boy said.

  “Kids are different,” I said, thinking about those with decades of time ahead of them to get straightened out.

  “I’ve taken it with no effects—good or bad,” he said.

  Then we got on to the anti-anxieties.

  “Xanax and the benzodiazepines are addictive,” he said with authority.

  “I forget all about taking one unless a panic comes on,” I said.

  “How often is that?” he asked.

  “Not that often. Just when I think about the future and the past and the present,” I said. This was still before the new world situation.

  “They produce euphoria, which causes the addiction,” he said.

  “I never felt any euphoria. If you take it for anxiety, you just get back to normal.”

  “Kids take it to produce euphoria,” he insisted.

  “Why can’t they get euphoria from life?” I said as a cliché, but didn’t wait for the answer. “Have you tried Xanax?” I asked.

  “They won’t give the drug patients benzodiazepines. They gave me Clonidine for a while. You should try it.”

  WHICHEVER DRUG he suggested, the busy doctor I consulted—distracted by his many psychotic patients—was glad to prescribe. But the doctor took a guess that the drug recommended by my friend was Klonopin.

  I reported to the boy, “Too drugged and dopey.”

  “Clonidine, not Klonopin! You got the wrong one,” he said. “You didn’t like that feeling?”

  “You can’t do anything in that condition.” I pictured some opium dens I’d seen in photographs and movies. “What’s the point?” I said.

  “You didn’t like it?” he asked with interest.

  “For surgery, not for daily life,” I said.

  “You should try Neurontin,” he said. “That’s what I have now.”

  “What for?”

  “Hypomania, supposedly. It’s an anti-seizure drug, now thrown in with everything to combat anxiety.”

  Even with that recommendation, I asked the psychiatrist for some. As he gladly wrote it out, I noticed his wastebasket filled with carbon papers from triplicate prescription forms. I had a feeling of revulsion at joining in with the basket of forms.

  I WAS thinking about the first time the name of a pill had come up in discussion between us. In early childhood, the boy had been stung by a poisonous jellyfish. He had told me this story when he was twelve. He’d been on vacation with his family. “My recollection is that I was six or seven,” he said. “When I came out of the water, my entire body was covered with stinging, red welts. My parents did nothing.”

  “What about your father, being a doctor and all that?”

  “He was the most callous one. ‘It’ll go away by itself,’ he said. Can you believe that?”

  “Didn’t they give you some Benadryl?”

  “Nothing. They all walked away talking to each other as if nothing had happened. I was left to tag along behind them. I was crying! They didn’t even notice.”

  I asked if they gave him some treatment when they got home.

  “Nothing! They put me to bed, where I lay suffering. Maybe they gave me a Benadryl then and left me while they chatted on. Finally I sank into a painful sleep.”

  “It doesn’t sound like your parents,” I said.

  “A father who’s a doctor means nothing in a case like this. It’s not his specialty. He says it’s nothing, whatever it is.”

  “Would he remove a splinter?”

  “He’s performed minor surgery on the kitchen table. I’ve learned not to show him anything. He uses no local anesthesia and keeps saying, ‘It doesn’t hurt.’ If I have anything requiring first aid, I tell my mother in secret so we can go to a regular doctor the next day.”

  THE SHORT PHONE CALLS OF JUNE

  THE LAST WEEKS of spring coincided with a series of surprise daytime phone calls from my friend the boy. Sometimes I tried to postpone the calls until later, when I’d have more time to talk to him about his two subjects: existentialism and the meaninglessness of life. Other times I spent an hour talking whenever he wanted to.

  “Later is hard,” he said. “It’s when I have to be with my father.”

  When I asked his father whether he’d rather I didn’t talk to the boy, he said, “He needs to talk to people his own age.”

>   “He talks to your oddball friends as practice for his real life.”

  “How is it practice?” he asked.

  “It gives him confidence,” I said.

  “Why doesn’t he have friends his own age?”

  “I thought he did. I heard him talking to various kids in the background when he was in New York in college.”

  “Which year of college?”

  “First year. Then I never heard from him again until last summer.”

  “Why did you think that was?”

  “I wondered why. Then I figured he didn’t need us anymore. I thought maybe it was a healthy sign.” Whenever I’d seen him before, the only times he’d acted happy or showed affection was with his dog. In this way he was like David Letterman.

  I remembered the last time I saw the boy, during his first year of college. It was at a dinner to celebrate the publication of a book of my photographs. About a week after the dinner, he and I reviewed the event.

  Since the one thing he’d respected most that I’d ever done—and maybe the only thing—was my purchase on sale of that pale peach Armani linen jacket, I asked him if he’d noticed the white linen Armani shirt worn for the dinner. It was fifteen years old and had been found for half price at the old Barneys on Seventeenth Street.

  “The shoulders seemed puffy,” he said.

  “You mean the shoulder pads?” I said. “They were small ones.”

  “Something had a puffed-up look,” he said.

  “I took them out and hastily sewed them in at a better angle, but they still looked too high,” I explained with regret at the thought of the whole situation. A person at my station of life should have a seamstress for small sewing jobs. But in the small crazy town where we lived, the one seamstress lost whatever people gave her and took four months to obtain snaps.

  “Were you crying when the champagne came?” he asked.

  “Crying? Of course not. Why would you think that?” I said.

  “I thought I saw some trembling in the shoulder area,” he said.

  “Those must have been the shoulder pads bobbing around. I didn’t have time to sew them in right. Unless I was trembling with fear that people would be drinking more.”

  “I thought maybe you were crying.”

  “It wasn’t the Academy Awards,” I said. “You were in L.A. too long.”

  “I was there for the one summer. You think it could happen so fast?”

  “If you’re into the crying thing,” I said. “Remember Sammy Maudlin on SCTV?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, almost laughing. I realized that I’d never heard him really laugh. He loved John Candy the most and once said with grief, “How can John Candy be dead?”

  I knew exactly what he meant, so I said, “I know what you mean.”

  “By the way, everyone was drunk at the dinner. Did you notice?” he said.

  “Except for you and me. I drank Pellegrino, you drank Coke. By the way, aren’t you too old to order Coke at the best Japanese restaurant?”

  “No, but I meant the alcohol—your cousin had eight sakes.”

  “You were counting?” I said.

  “Yes. And his wife had almost as many,” the boy said accusingly.

  “How about my husband?” I asked.

  “He had a lot. Wine, beer, sake, everything.”

  “I told you about this. Now you see my predicament firsthand,” I said.

  “Everyone’s drunk. You have to face it—you don’t like alcohol, you have no choice…. You could socialize with non-drinkers only.”

  “Yes, but I can’t find any. Except from AA.”

  “They’re in their own partition of the world,” he said. “You couldn’t join anyway.”

  I had noticed something at the dinner: The boy’s father fell in love with my cousin’s wife; my close friend, an intoxicated landscape designer, fell in love with the boy’s father even though he was acting and looking like Rick Moranis as a Hollywood producer on SCTV; the art director fell in love with the landscape designer even though, or because, she wore no makeup; my cousin’s wife continued to love her own husband; he in turn loved whatever he was saying; my husband was in love with the wine. With all this going on, I couldn’t feel love for anything, not even the publication of my photographs, because I knew those shoulder pads weren’t quite right, and the vestiges of my past narcissism had been whittled down to a place where I had no self.

  Love was all around in all the wrong places—a typical dinner downtown in New York City a few years before the new world circumstances.

  The room was overheated and the diners were dressed in black—like the bellhop in Heartbreak Hotel—and they were talking in loud voices. And there was the degradation of the knowledge of how the reservation had been made: calling one month in advance, but not a month plus a day—that was too early; a month minus a day—that was too late.

  We’d chosen the restaurant for the shiitake and maitake mushrooms and the no-smoking rule, but the tension, heat, and noise probably canceled out the immune-boosting properties of the delicious mushrooms.

  Worst of all was the sight of the boy, who was stranded and more alone than anyone, because he had no delusions about love or himself. He could only watch, hunched down in his chair, excruciatingly socially uncomfortable, in a completely separate state from all other beings.

  THE DAY after I mentioned the word “confidence” to his father, the boy called from outside, somewhere in Beverly Hills.

  “Did you tell my father I had low self-esteem?” he said. I pictured him walking along saying this sentence into his phone.

  “Certainly not.” I told him what I’d said, summing it up as “I said it was good practice for you to talk to his friends. But never mind. I won’t ever discuss you with him again.”

  “Good, because he misunderstands everything. I’ll call you when I get home, in five minutes.”

  A week later he called again from the street or whatever they have in Beverly Hills.

  “Did you tell my father I can’t love?” he said again into his cell phone.

  “Of course not. I said you were too cool to show any emotion. But forget it. I’ll never tell him anything about you again.”

  “Good. Because he doesn’t understand existentialism. He thinks he does. I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

  THE FIVE minutes went on for a few days. When I reached him on his cell phone, he sounded tired. “Were you sleeping?” I asked.

  “No. I was lying down on my bed and resting.” He had a new, weary voice I’d never heard, heartbreakingly weary. Even if he was still an addict, I didn’t care. It was just as heartbreaking.

  “Should we hang up?” I asked.

  “No. I’m just waiting for my mother to go look at some lawn furniture at Bloomingdale’s.”

  “That’s like what you used to do in junior high school,” I said. Once he’d told me about an outing: “I went with my father to meet two rabbis at Legal Seafood.” This was during the era in which everything he talked about made me laugh.

  “I know, it’s pathetic!” he said. “I have no life. When I think about my life in New York, it seems like a dream, and now I’m back to where I was before.”

  “It’s not so bad to go and look at lawn furniture,” I said. “People seek out your advice.”

  I couldn’t help thinking at the same time that I didn’t know there was a Bloomingdale’s in Los Angeles, the way I hadn’t known that everyone in Los Angeles originally came from Brooklyn or the Bronx. I thought people in California were really from California. I couldn’t see even the store’s name fitting into the city of Los Angeles. I had spent too much time in that store in New York searching for Armani shirts on sale before that block and neighborhood had become ruined in the 1980s. Something was wrong with me that I used to walk around Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue trying to find one Armani shirt.

  The last time I’d searched for an Armani shirt, something happened that made it the final time. The Armani sto
re had moved to a new, larger, and worse location.

  Since I could go to Madison Avenue only after dark, in winter, I’d been there without having to see the new building in daylight. The sky was always dark and all the buildings disappeared, with only their windows lit and visible. But I hadn’t been warned about the interior, a large meaningless space—several floors of spaces—with the clothing hidden away behind secret panels.

  I was dressed inappropriately for the Armani store, in an old olive green gabardine man’s-style coat and dark green walking boots. The worst part of my appearance was the worn-out tan canvas Danish book bag. It was overstuffed with books, papers, a camera, a glass bottle of Mountain Valley water, a small bag of daily cosmetics, and an apple. The carrying of this bag had caused permanent tendinitis in my shoulder, which could be helped only by acupuncture with a Chinese medical doctor I couldn’t get to because his office was in an overheated building on the most crowded Midtown street in the East Forties. On the same shoulder I carried a smaller canvas bag for important things: a few dollars, a credit card, Xanax, Tylenol, Kleenex, pens, sunglasses, and a bottle of echinacea. Even so, I was treated with decency and respect by the woman salesperson.

  On the way up the staircase to the shirt floor, I realized I was weak from not having eaten anything except for a small serving of steel-cut oats, several hours before. I took the apple out of the bag. I had cut the apple in half, and had wrapped it in a napkin and put it in a plastic bag. I thought I could take one bite unobtrusively in order to keep from fainting. But as I took the furtive bite of the apple while on the carpeted marble staircase, I immediately felt this was wrong—Jacqueline Kennedy wouldn’t have done it—and I put the apple back in its plastic bag before I reached the landing.

  The boy’s mother had once asked me to meet her at the Forbes museum when she was in New York. She wanted to see the Fabergé egg collection and I agreed because the museum was downtown, near where we lived at the time. While wandering around the gallery hoping to find something to see other than the eggs, I came across a sliver of an upper-class society woman all in black. The woman was standing still as a statue, except for one hand, which she was using to furtively comb her hair. I could tell that she was desperate, or insane in some way.