The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  “Did you know that women had to use vegetables before other, better things were invented?” he said.

  I had heard Dr. Ruth Westheimer mention this on David Letterman’s show, a decade or so ago, before Dave was used to the new crude society and civilization, and he appeared to be embarrassed.

  “Were they at least organically grown vegetables?” I asked.

  “They washed them first,” he said. “Or peeled them too, maybe.”

  “But what about…,” I said, and then I couldn’t say anything else. I looked at him and he looked at me. He was cleaning the stove and packing up the chopped ingredients and sauces. We both knew there was nothing else we could say.

  The waiter passed by and said, “What are you two talking about?” Since he was almost forty, he still had some sense of decorum.

  “We’re talking about someone pierced,” the sous-chef said.

  “Which one?” the waiter asked. It could be any one of dozens, even on this tiny island.

  “The one who went out with the boss,” the sous-chef said. “The piercing was bothering someone. I’m training her to get over it.”

  “What a way to train someone,” the waiter said as he continued in a merry way to the kitchen. Later on, I was told that the waitpersons liked to polish off the wine left over in all the bottles on the tables.

  THE SMOKING chefs wanted us to come into the alley and talk to them on their nicotine-alcohol break. When I said, “But I can’t breathe with the smoke in here,” they took it as a joke.

  “It’s rough in there,” the younger chef said about the un-air-conditioned restaurant and his work area behind the counter, where diners could watch the chefs cook and learn their fiery tricks. He said he needed to smoke to calm down.

  “Isn’t there some new drug medication that replaces nicotine?” I said.

  “It’s just some old thing like Prozac that the drug companies remarketed with a new name to get more money,” he said, taking another puff and blowing the smoke up the alley.

  “I heard that it works,” I said. “And also the other stuff, the patches,” I reminded him as he took more puffs and lit another cigarette right from the last butt.

  “I need immediate relief,” he said, inhaling. It was hard to watch.

  “Why don’t you do the yoga breathing, or take Xanax, or anything instead of nicotine?” I said. “Each puff does more damage.” I was so tired of this conversation, I could barely say the words. I’d read that nicotine was more addictive than heroin.

  “Do you have any Xanax?” the sous-chef asked.

  “Of course I do,” I said.

  “What color?” he asked.

  “Peach,” I said.

  “Peach is weak. I need blue,” he said.

  “Two peach equal one blue,” I said. I saw that I was discussing colors of drugs and pills like an expert, in a back alley. But not exactly like that, because outside the alley were window boxes filled with white flowers, including white roses and trailing verbena.

  “Do you have any Xanax with you?” he asked. “I’ll trade you some baby vegetables we just got today.”

  “I don’t carry them with me,” I said. This was before the Event of September.

  The chefs weren’t surprised when I told them the story of the boy. They acted as if it were one of millions they knew. They feigned a bit of sympathy but continued with their competition to see who could do a better Sean Connery accent.

  One sat on an empty vegetable crate, the other on top of an air conditioner. A six-foot-long carton was leaning against the brick wall. I’d seen it there for two weeks. A piece of cardboard with all colors of paint splattered on it was standing up next to it behind an old paint can.

  “The last person who objected to our smoking is in this carton,” the chef said.

  Then they laughed. We laughed, too, even though I knew we were in a scene of depravity.

  YOGA FOR THE HANDS

  AFTER THIS INTERLUDE we walked to the bookstore. It was the only entertainment in the town. Even though there weren’t many books, there were all the necessary books, and the manager liked to criticize the covers of the new ones. “Look at this, they’re all dark brown! Why would they think they should be dark brown?” she’d say, pulling one out. “And last year they were all black. What’s wrong with these art departments?”

  I noticed a whole corner set aside for yoga books. They were serious books, not the new and fashionable ones which had been speeded out recently. A most unusual-looking and intentionally exotic woman dancer was on the cover of one of the books. She held her hands up in the air, thumb and index fingers touching.

  Her hair was brown, pulled tight up and back, in an old-fashioned upsweep. Her penciled eyebrows were done in boomerang arches and she had a dramatic and all-knowing look on her face. In the pictures throughout the book she wore a series of crazy-looking dance outfits.

  I had to pick up this book because of the six offers listed underneath the cover photograph. Number six, “Align your spirit and give yourself peace.” The first one—“Eliminate fatigue and burnout”—seemed equally urgent.

  Then, two through five: “Stop anxiety and depression,” “Protect physical health,” “Increase love and abundance,” “Improve mental clarity and intuition.” It was a need-all kind of invitation, like those horoscopes where everything applied to everyone.

  Inside the book, the photographs of the dancer-author were more exotic. In some she’d let her long hair down, but all hanging on one side. Maybe the photographs were actually from the 1950s and she’d been doing the hand yoga the whole time, before it had caught on like wildfire in recent years. And since now there were more wildfires in California, she must have needed to add a quick new healing mudra for this kind of natural disaster. Listed in the table of contents was “Mudra for Healing After Natural Disasters.”

  On the first page of the book was a title, “Mudra for Healing a Broken Heart.” That was my first priority. Then came “Overcoming Anxiety.” That was my first priority, too. “Stronger Character”—if that were in place, the others wouldn’t be necessary. “Healing the Mind”—that should be first.

  The mudras started coming together in rapid succession. I’ll buy the book and read it when I get home, I decided. The walk will calm everything down. But I couldn’t make myself leave, and I stood in the bookstore under the hot bright spotlights in the track lighting, where I kept reading.

  When I read the sentence “Rein in your wild thoughts and master your mind,” I tried to disregard the appearance of the dancer in order to take her more seriously.

  “Help with a Grave Situation,” “Overcoming Addictions”—too late for that. “Pressure of the thumbs on the temples triggers a rhythmic reflex into the central brain and cures any addiction in thirty days.” This had to be accompanied by “a short fast breath of fire.” But I read on.

  The next chapter was “Healing a Broken Heart,” which would be needed in case the thumb pressure didn’t work. I bought the book and ordered another one for the boy’s father. I hoped he’d laugh when he looked at the photographs. But the boy himself would have had the time to go through the book discussing each costume and mudra.

  The boy’s father told me that he’d received the book. He laughed for a second. But then he asked, in a deep voice, without any expression, “Did you do the one for a broken heart?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I haven’t mastered the technique.”

  “Did you do the one for grief?” he asked.

  “I tried them all,” I said. “They were all versions of the same thing.”

  “Well, did they work?” he asked.

  “They help you breathe and press the right spots for tranquillity.”

  “So, that’s it—they don’t help.”

  The truth was that the exercises were so complicated that when you tried to do them, while taking in the bizarre demonstration photos and costumes, you’d forget to think about why you were doing them. That was the cure. />
  THE WAY LIFE IS

  WHEN WE WENT to Maine for a few days I heard a bit of philosophy that was the highlight of the summer.

  I heard this when I went to the hardware store to buy a new fan to bring back to Nantucket. There were no fans left in any store on the island. We had seventeen fans in the rented house, but the square box fan lasts only one year before stopping—you plug it in one day and turn it on, nothing happens. You try different outlets, different speeds—nothing but silence and stillness and heat.

  During the many heat waves, it was important to get to the hardware store the day the fan shipment arrived. Late at night you could go to the all-night supermarket, where you might be told, “The fan season is over for us. Next is the back-to-school season.”

  It’s supposed to be cool in Maine, but it was hot. In the hardware store, there was only one fan going and it didn’t keep the place cool enough for customers to stay there and buy more fans. Their one old fan was in operation on the counter. The grille of this fan was covered with thick gray dust. Longer pieces of the dust were hanging from the wires in a few spots.

  I was waiting my turn to pay for the new fan I’d selected. I’d learned from past, hot experience that any fan on the shelf was the one to select. It was a short wait, because the store was well organized, with several cash registers and competent, well-trained cashiers.

  I noticed the cashiers. They were an unhealthy-looking two-some. One was overweight in a flattened-out style going all over the place, no longer in the shape of a woman. The other had a puffy, suntanned face and wore her brown hair in braids tied up with red ribbons. The suntanned one said to her coworker, “How’s your mother?”

  “Better,” was the answer, stated in a voice as flattened out as herself. “It’s that manic-depressive thing,” she explained.

  “That runs on my side, too,” the suntanned one said. “It’s a chemical imbalance, you know,” she added. Then she stopped a moment and said, “And also, the way life is.”

  AFTER THE SUMMER

  SEVERAL MONTHS went by before the boy’s mother left a message on my machine one day at seven P.M. It was only four P.M. in California.

  That afternoon I had taken one low-dose orange Klonopin and one medium-dose peach Xanax. I was planning to lie down for a few minutes, until the high or low point of these two wore off.

  If I fell asleep, I could wake up in time for us to go to the next town to see an English movie. But did I want to feel inferior to those upper-class English people and all their great stuff—mainly trees, hedges, giant bowls of flowers, flower-printed dishes, flower-printed upholstery—which they combined with their knowing how to be most cruel in a polite way?

  We had an obsessive-compulsive friend. The friend was a scholar of French and English literature and she shared some symptoms with my other friends before she narrowed it all down to extreme anxiety.

  “You need a drug to control this kind of thinking,” she said to me no matter what I told her, including the fear of seeing English movies and the BBC news. “I’ve never heard of Anglophobia,” she said.

  She didn’t mind taking what they call serotonin boosters, one after another, and also Klonopin, plus some other things she couldn’t keep track of, to keep the boosters from being too powerful. Every week she took a different group of medications. One week her medicines didn’t work and she spent a few days lying on her couch. While she was lying on the couch, I could walk a few miles.

  When I couldn’t find the camera I could plan for the next day’s light. The camera might turn up in the canvas vitamin bag. I could talk to the woman who also walked the conservation land and liked to stop to discuss her knowledge of all kinds of plastic surgery. Tighten this, inject that, peel the other.

  When the real terror happened, she’d discuss how she might still get to New York for appointments. “I’m afraid of the tunnel,” she said.

  “Take the bridge,” I suggested. “Then you have a chance.”

  “No, on the bridge, if it goes down your neck breaks,” she said.

  “But in the tunnel you can’t get out,” I said.

  “It’s the flood of water rushing in,” she said.

  “No, it’s the flames and smoke,” I said.

  “The water rushing in,” she repeated, and demonstrated with her hands.

  “The fire and the water,” I said as I tried to walk away. “It’s the end of the world.”

  “It was better when we discussed our faces,” she said as she waved good-bye and walked off through the October-colored field.

  BUT ONCE I heard the voice of the boy’s mother, I couldn’t fall asleep. She had such a lovely voice—young as a girl’s, calm as a well-bred woman’s—and to think that in a photo I’d seen of her as a teenager she looked like the teenager Justine who’d been a star on American Bandstand in 1961. She was prettier than Justine, and had a face as perfect as a doll’s face. I heard her calm, poised, and lovely voice, without an accent of any kind. She kept that voice even though she’d gone to the same high school as Chubby Checker and Fabian. And now all this had happened to her life, and she still had kept the voice.

  She had some questions. Had he ever discussed his drug use? No, only once, to say heroin was a good experience and that he’d do it over again if he could. And he’d recommend it to others. When he said that, I began to think he was still addicted. “I’d do it again”—that tipped me off. It was the day I told him about the unconventional, radical approach of the clinic in London where Marianne Faithfull stayed and was given heroin until she asked to be cured.

  I told her everything he’d told me except things that might hurt her feelings. The fur coat was one of the things. It was a mink coat.

  “What about this coat?” she’d asked me when I was visiting them in Boston. “My severest critic tells me to give it away.” The boy had told me that she had traded something for it in an exchange with her furrier. A woman in my generation had a furrier and I was a supporter of PETA.

  “My mother doesn’t know what existentialism is,” he’d said once. “I can’t believe her not knowing these things.”

  “What color is her hair now?” I asked. I hadn’t seen her since they’d moved to the other coast. I knew that he’d influenced her about hair color when he was in high school.

  He thought for a second and said, “Red…blond…I can’t remember.”

  SHE TOLD the history of the drugs starting with the summer. “First we couldn’t find him for days,” she said. “We flew to New York. It was around Labor Day weekend. We got to his apartment and found him there. The apartment was a mess.”

  I thought she meant laundry and unwashed glasses and dishes.

  “You mean disorganized?” I said.

  “No. There was blood on the ceiling and blood on the floor! Splattered blood. He had blood on his shirt. There was no food at all in the refrigerator. He had track marks all up and down his arms. And he was acting as if everything was fine.”

  When she said “blood on the ceiling and blood on the floor” in her lovely, civilized voice, I tried to accept this in my mind as a picture, but I couldn’t.

  “You mean blood from injecting heroin?” I said. What did he think when he rolled up the sleeve of his perfectly pressed shirt? Right before that weekend, I had been talking to the boy, my friend, for all those hours. And now I knew what kind of room he was in at the time. Maybe during the all-night phone call, the yoga-ball call, blood was spurting all around the room in his amateur and desperate attempts to get a good vein. As I was pumping up the yoga ball, he might have been shooting up the heroin. I was an ignorant, naïve accomplice. I was a completely foolish person.

  Then she told the long story, the ins and outs of all the rehabs, the story of the year I knew about from listening to the boy’s father’s telling of it, and also the parts the boy himself had told me. Now I knew it inside and out, from each angle.

  The last two days of his life, she said, he cleaned up his room and washed his fath
er’s car. On the last night, they all three went to a Hollywood movie and out to dinner. Which movie? I forgot to ask. But his father had told me this movie detail before, with the name of it, and I thought that the movie might have been a contributing factor. When I said so, his father laughed. He laughed hard. But I was serious.

  “After dinner, when we got home, Arnold said, ‘I wonder why I haven’t gotten my credit-card bill. I’m going to call them,’ and he left the room. That was a signal. There was a second of silence. Then I heard the last words I’d ever hear from our son. He said, ‘I’m going to get into my pajamas.’ He went upstairs. I went to feed the dog and I folded some laundry. Then, when I didn’t hear him, I went upstairs. I saw the bathroom door closed, and once we had a problem there before with him…injecting cocaine…so I called his name. I said it three times, each time louder and more frantically. When he didn’t answer, I opened the door and he was on the floor.

  “I ran out to the landing and tried to call Arnold, but I couldn’t say his name. I tried to say it, but it wouldn’t turn into his name. It was only a scream,” she said. She gave a restrained imitation of a scream, three times, still calm, in her quiet, lovely voice.

  “He thought the alarm had gone off. He ran upstairs. He saw him on the floor and did CPR, but it was too late. Then he called 911 and I did CPR. But it was no use.”

  I tried not to picture my friend dead in his pajamas on the bathroom floor. I tried not to picture his parents. They were my friends, too.

  I felt these pictures going into my brain and changing the brain chemistry the way drugs were purported to do. In one of Andrew Weil’s books it says that thoughts alter brain chemistry as well as drugs altering thoughts. He believed in thinking good thoughts before resorting to psychopharmacology.

  “He was afraid of the credit-card bill and that he’d be found out,” the boy’s mother said. “He never stole. He never borrowed. He ended his life because he couldn’t stand that he was a heroin addict and what had become of him.”