Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Startled by her humility, I asked, "Have you been analyzed?"

"Oh yes!" she said, laughing. "I trained here in the sixties- it was all the rage. I even became an analyst myself. Funny you should ask. Just yesterday my husband and I went to our periodontist for some gum work. And who should I meet in the waiting room but my old analyst? And he didn't remember me! Seven years with him, five days a week, and he has no memory of me! I was drinking at the time, but still. And as I'm lying down in the dentist's chair-like on the couch-my mouth full of blood, I think: 'Geneva, you've finally found something that's more painful, less effective, and costs more than psychoanalysis!' " She roared with laughter, as did we. "When I was in your shoes, analysis was like the final merit badge: you had to do it, to prove you were really serious. But when I saw the analysts in action I said to myself, 'Geneva,

this is ridiculous. They must be joking]' But then, I found people here, good people, who believed in these theories. So I started believing in them. You have to believe in something, right?"

I looked into her blank orange glasses. "Yes."

"Now I see it as "The Emperor's New Clothes.' There are good therapists who are analysts, but they're good in spite of being analysts. The good ones unlearn it all. But you're luckier than I was. You've got Malik. Good-bye."

"Are you available for supervision?" I asked.

"Me?" She seemed surprised. "What have I to teach? I just try to keep it simple now. But sure. Call me if you like." The dog led her away.

"She's amazing," I said to Malik.

'Terrific person, terrific therapist. How's it going?"

"Fine," I said guardedly, not wanting to open myself up to his criticism.

"You haven't been to the gym. You avoiding me?"

I said nothing.

"Okay. Listen up. You gotta stop doing this bullshit 'regression' on Zoe. She's going down the tubes."

"No, she's going back to her childhood-"

"And she may never come back out! You don't play around with people's heads!" He coughed, sneezed, blew his nose. "A.K. is a mindfucker. Period."

"You've been making a lot of mistakes yourself lately, Malik. Double-booking patients, forgetting appointments- the time you locked yourself and your patient inside your office so it took Primo half an hour to pry you out? You've got a few little flaws too, Malik-"

"Flaws? I got character defects up the wazoo! I may be one of the most defective kids who ever tried to do this shit! I mean look! Look at me! Would you trust a guy like this with your mine??"

I looked. Slicked-up black hair, orange glasses, sharp features-he seemed even more tight and wiry lately, sneezing and coughing, unable to shake his winter cold and yet even hi winter wearing a golf shut with a polo player with raised mallet over his heart, jeans and black Nikes. The fire was still there, but so, I associated, were the ashes. Oedipal, yes. "No way I would trust you with my mind, no."

"And that's why I'm trustable."

"Because you make mistakes?"

"Because I hang in with the mistake after the mistake. Things go wrong in therapy, so?"

"So mistakes pollute the transference."

"Oh jeez. Things go wrong in life, kid. Remember 'life'?"

"Therapy isn't life."

"In therapy or in life, it's not just what you do, it's what you do next. It's not the screwups that screw up a life, it's what happens around a screwup. We never get it right, first shot outta the box, but gettin' it wrong and hangin' in, we get so we care about each other. Like ballplayers on a team? Those Columbia High Fish Hawks? Blowing a big lead, and hangin' in, hangin' in, and then, like magic, startin' it rollin' and beatin' 'em at the buzzer?"

"Therapy's different. The doctor has the experience; the patient comes for that experience-even, that wisdom. You taught me that."

"I taught you that what works is gettin' in touch, feelin' that 'click'-"

"Freud says we can never really get in touch. Because of the unconscious distortions of childhood, we're always shouting across an unbridgeable gap."

"There ain't no gap, kid, and you know it. You 'n' me have 'clicked,' a lot. Theory creates a gap, theory is that gap. A.K. uses the idea of a gap to justify the gap her analysis created in her-she's a shit therapist. All her patients have terminated, except Oly Joe-who I'm trying like hell to save."

"I don't know what you're talking about anymore, Malik."

"Hey, Roy, I'm your buddy, remember?"

I tried to remember, to focus on what he was asking and respond, but my mind veered and filled with a dream fragment-standing there in front of Zoe and Christine and Cherokee, totally naked, a giant erection in my hand, and-

"Okay," Malik said, "we can't do this anymore. You're gone." He left.

I stood there, feeling a pain in my chest, and coughed. Malik came back.

"Look. I'm having a lotta trouble lately, in this bullshit environment. Seeing you go through this, after all we've been through together, is rough. I'm gonna protect Zoe from you.

You're gettin' totally into yourself, kid, you've got a taste of that psychoanalytic joy at being miserable, you're thinking you ought to go under analysis yourself, and…"

Total selfishness my mother said Roy you've become totally selfish and you don't have any idea how much it hurts your father and me and she turned away weeping and my father snapped me up by the nape of the neck with an iron grip and wrassled me down to the basement smelling of rats dead for a while under the woodpile and with a rat-trap grip on my neck ripped down my pants and started to whack me with his open hand which stung but didn't hurt all that much and my mother on the cellar steps cried out and down, "Not with your hand, Stu, you'll ruin your hand for your dental practice!" and so he whipped out his belt and whaled away and that hurt like hell like fire and despite myself and through gritted teeth I screamed and cursed him which made him whale away harder and part of my screaming was with pain and part of me was drifting off away to a place past where the clouds were to a sense of something else…

When I came back from my associations, Malik was gone. If we'd talked about Cherokee Putnam, the talk was already repressed.

"YESTERDAY WITH CHRISTINE I couldn't get it up!" Cherokee was saying an hour later, in therapy. "All your talk about castration has ruined me. You understand? I couldn't get it up!" He stared at me, as if I could get it up for him. "She was great-'Happens to a lot of men,' she said-which made me feel worse, thinking of all the men she'd had, who I couldn't measure up to. She tried to help-her hand, her mouth, her vagina-it just made it worse. Finally she fell asleep with her cheek on my belly. I was mortified. Staring at my limp dick lying there across my thigh and every once in a while I'd look at her-her tits, that curve where her ass rolls into her vagina?"

I nodded, as analytically as possible.

"And it would wiggle a little, like a drank trying to get up off a sidewalk. But if I tried to do it? Soft as an old banana. 'He's fucking her in therapy,' and I can't get it up. Makes me want to kill myself."

Incredible case. I proceeded to explore his impotence, his

associations, fantasies, and dreams leading back through castration anxiety to oral rage at Mother and his sadness at seeing a just-issued postage stamp with a cowboy, in his words, "riding a stallion hot and heavy, a whip in his hand next to a covered wagon with his wife and kids to commemorate 'the Cherokee Strip Land Run.' " Such was the intensity of our work that time ran out without my offering an interpretation. I said, merely, 'Time to stop."

"But what about my limp dick? My manhood? What should I do?"

"Your limp dick is a symptom of your deep conflicts. We'll analyze them out and your symptom will vanish. See you tomorrow."