Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

Me and Bert sat in the two leather chairs in front of Duffy’s desk while the lawyer ran down a list of Victim Stress Disorder symptoms. The three of us counted. Five of the symptoms applied to me. I signed up right there and became a client.

Before we left the office Duffy got on the phone and made an appointment for me to begin regular therapy sessions and counseling with a doctor – Doctor Gromis. The way it worked, he said, was that Gromis would immediately submit my forms and I could expect to receive my first Workman’s Comp benefit check in a week to ten days. $232 a week. $928 per month. Indefinitely. Duffy announced that I now had a chronic, medically documented case of Victim Stress Disorder.

DOCTOR GROMIS HAD thick eyebrows and brown stains on his teeth from smoking cigars. He was skinny and smaller than me. His specialty was working with Viet Nam vet cases; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the more modern ailments they’d come up with like my VSD.

Both of us knew why we were there: (A) for me to pad my case, and (B) for him to bill my insurance company the hundred bucks an hour. Gromis said there were three rules: I was to show up on time for my sessions, not leave early, and not miss more than two in a row. At the end of our meeting he stood up, shook my hand, and said it would be okay for me to call him Harry.

My appointment time was 11 a.m., Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There were four other guys in my group therapy sessions; Olivers and Watkins, who always came in together, Doyle Kopek, and Lance Arvidson with his racing bike with the broken spokes. Plus Harry. All VA guys except me.

Kopek ‘shared’ the most and monopolized the sessions. Nonsense, predominately. To me he was a wack and a blubberfuck with the need to go on for half an hour at a time about boring idiot minutiae like the details of an argument with an old woman on a subway or a cheesedick beef with his mother regarding the correct divvy of his VA allotment checks.

Then there was Olivers. A completely bizarre person. He either owned three blue tee-shirts with the same hole in the sleeve or never changed the only one he had. He kept his hair long in cornrows and wore sunglasses to all the therapy sessions. His weirdest and most annoying characteristic was his continual rubbing and clutching at his penis. When he did talk it was to bitch about his medical condition or discuss something he’d seen on TV.

Lance Arvidson was quiet too. A nodder. He’d sit for whole sessions without speaking. Sometimes he’d mumble something or snicker at something stupid Kopek had shared but his main system for communicating appeared to be head movements of the Yes or No kind.

The last guy, Watkins, had been a guard at Riker’s Island. A big, mean-spirited weightlifter prick. Always going off at someone for something; jumping out of his chair, intentionally misinterpreting everything you said if you were white, talking shit and getting in people’s face every chance he could.

One week into the deal I hated them all. Except for Harry. To continue showing up but to keep from going crazy I was back on the booze again full time. Several times I came in drunk and dozed off during the sessions.

Harry called me into his office to inquire what was going on. I told him that it was clear to me that I had nothing in common with his astronauts. He wanted to know what else so I told him. I was honest. I said that I was back at the point again where I didn’t give a rat’s dick whether I lived or died.

He wanted me to quit drinking and said that he’d had some luck treating Viet Nam vets through hypnotism and wanted to know if I was willing to give that form of therapy a try.

I thought about it and said no.

Harry gave me a choice: I could go back to attorney Duffy and get hooked up with a new shrink and return to square one with the Workman’s Comp deal or I could try the hypno sessions.

The day I arrived for my first treatment, the office receptionist and nurse, Ms. Venable, put me into a room I had never been in before; it was small with no carpet and no windows. The only furniture in the room was a vinyl-covered tan reclining chair against one wall. When I touched one of the arms, it felt sticky. Ms. Venable gave me a blackout patch for my eyes and a set of earphones. I put the stuff on and pushed back in the recliner. As she was leaving I heard her flick off the light switch.

A few seconds later, from somewhere remote, she must have hit another button because a voice in my headset started talking. It was Harry recorded on tape: ‘You are going deeper and deeper,’ Harry’s voice said. ‘You are more and more relaxed. All tension is being released while you drift further and further onto a flat, tranquil, blue sea…Deeper and deeper.’

Different sessions had different themes. Sometimes Harry’s voice had me on an airplane, looking out at a perfect cloudless sky listening to the humming of the jet engines while I experienced increasing drowsiness. Sometimes I’d be in a train watching the sunset and listening to the clacking of the wheels…clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack. Once, in one of the clack-clack recordings, I saw a large fat bird flapping away into the distance. A big, noisy crow.

I never heard any messages of indoctrination coming through the headphones because after the first five or ten minutes of listening I was completely unconscious. I would wake up an hour later with Ms. Venable tapping me on the arm.

I WAS SURPRISED when the hypnotism suddenly worked. It took two weeks. There was one small seizure the day after I stopped the booze, and a shaking fit the next but, other than those, I was fine. After my fourth week in Harry’s chair with the earphones, in an evaluation, I told him that #1, I had lost all desire for alcohol (which was true), and #2, I seemed to have given up most of my thoughts about killing myself or anyone else. Harry was pleased but insisted that we continue with the hypnotism treatments.

Then things changed again.

One afternoon, on an off day from the chair and headphones, I was waiting in the lounge of the Oriental Massage in Times Square; waiting to spend an hour with Sandy, the pretty Korean hooker. The day before I’d cashed my second Workman’s Comp check. Another two hundred and thirty-two bucks. Having quit alcohol I was celebrating receiving the money by letting myself get a massage and a blow job, then going to the movies to eat buttered popcorn and watch the newest Clint Eastwood.

It was a few minutes past one o’clock. Sandy always started work at one. I knew that. I had paid my up-front massage money and I was sitting in the lobby waiting.

Time passed and I had to pee. The woman behind the partition with the plastic window was also Korean and spoke bad American. She let me know that Sandy would be along. ‘Pretty soon. Sandy come soon. You wait. Pretty soon.’

Some more time went by with me still sitting in the lobby and no Sandy. I returned to the plastic window and asked to be let inside to use the john. The lady smiled and nodded, but misunderstood what I was asking, so I went back and sat down.

Then a guy came in. An older guy in a dark suit and tie. Asian. But he didn’t sit down.

When the partition lady saw the guy in the suit she got up, left her stool, and disappeared back inside.

A minute later Sandy opened the door and came out into the lobby, which was unusual because I’d never seen any of the girls came out front. Like always, she smiled and looked sexy and beautiful. Like always, she was in her black silk robe with the black panties underneath. But my favorite thing with Sandy, the real turn-on, was her red red lipstick.

While the other guy stood there, she came over and sat down next to me on the couch, grabbed my hand, kissed me, and pressed the hard little nipple of her tit into my upper arm.