Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"But I never had & problem with my dick, before I met you\ I'm obsessed with his dick, my dick has finked out, and I'm a worse failure than ever! Now I'm not even good enough in the saddle! If it stays soft, I'm sunk." He sighed. "You sure this is the way to go?"

His question hung on a hook in the air, like a magician's hankie on a finger, or a penis why not? as my own number 2 number four slid to the right.

After he had gone I wrote on the right-hand side of the ledger:

"Finked out in the saddle" equals homoerotic oral trans-ferential sadistic rage at distant/sadistic Father and engulfing/intrusive Mother, both.

OLY JOE OLAF was a kid on a mission, the only problem being that none of us knew what that mission was. Since his disastrous family therapy where Faith Baltsburg first made the mistake of telling the father and mother that there was "hope" and then wouldn't tell anybody where the bathroom was, his parents had refused to come back to therapy, and in fact had been petitioning to have him released from Thoreau, claiming that his being curled up in a fetal position was a sign of his being hurt by therapy. A.K. had used all her Freudian authority as a professor at the BMS to argue that Oly Joe's being curled up in a fetal position was a clear sign that the therapy was working and that it would be a crime to interrupt it at such a crucial stage. Furthermore it would be impossible to let him

leave Thoreau, for how could anyone survive out there in the world curled up in a fetal position? The court had awarded temporary guardianship to Misery, and A.K. was continuing her regression of Oly Joe.

On call that night, I was paged at about eight to Thoreau, where Oly Joe Olaf, uncurled and furious, was standing at the door, threatening to run away. He looked somehow both frail and dangerous, his blond hair tentatively in a ponytail, his pasty face pimply, ugly but for his eyes. Everyone has beautiful eyes, and his were exquisite: the light blue-green of a Caribbean sea. His stocky, powerful body was ready for action, tight with Oral Stage Rage, ready to bite the breast that fed him. The door to Thoreau was never locked, which at first had seemed strange to me, since the one thing these hyper-spaced adolescents needed was clear limits. But after a while I'd seen the wisdom in A.K.'s insistence that the limits had to be set inside their heads, not outside.

"I showed up for therapy with Dr. Lowell," Oly said. "She said I had the wrong time. I checked-turns out I was right- she had the wrong time. But she wouldn't admit it. She wouldn't like say anything! And even though she didn't have another patient then, she wouldn't see me. She just blew me off! She's making me crazy! Gimme one fuckin' reason I should stay here?"

"What are your fantasies about why you should stay here?"

He stared at me, and then said, quietly, 'To wait for my ammo to arrive."

" 'Ammo'?"

"Fuck it. I'm out of here!" He turned to the door, but before he could run downstairs and away, he was met by Malik.

"Yo, Oly Joe!" Malik said happily, as if meeting a long-lost friend. Malik was wearing a stupid red and black lumberjack cap with the earlappers up Like Sherlock Holmes and carrying that same old basketball. "Runnin' away?"

"Yeah. This place sucks!"

"Sucks badl"

Oly Joe seemed startled to hear this from Malik. "Y'think so too?"

"Wicked bad! Fuck it's cold out there! Cold as a witch's tit in a brass brassiere! Got a place to stay?"

"Nope. Kin I like stay with you?"

"Nope. The cops would kill me for that. How "bout we shoot some hoops?"

"How's that gonna help?"

"Helped me when I wanted to run when I was your age. We'll talk."

"I don't wanna talk, I wanna run."

"Good idea. This place is for shit!"

"Yeah. But I got no place to like go?"

"Bummer. Hey-you can always run from the gym, right?" Oly Joe nodded. "And I gotta shoot some hoops-this place has got me nuts! 'Kay? C'mon!"

They left.

Shortly before eleven I was sitting with Viv and Primo behind the bulletproof in Telecommunications, communicating with them through silences and interpretations.

"Nice suit and tie, Doc, y'get me?" Primo said.

"You have some feelings about this suit?"

"Toldja," Viv said to Primo, as if I weren't there with them. "Used to be fun too, this one. Lotta fun, Primo, remember?"

"They start out fun," Primo said, "and they fall for Freud 'n' wind up with the personality of a platypus."

"This one was such a great cowboy too! Holy cow- Hannah?" Hannah Silver was walking slowly past on the other side of the bulletproof, looking lost and sad. "Why, hello, dear! What are you doin' here at this hour?"

"I'm just, um… catching up on some paperwork?" Hannah said.

"Jeez, you look down, Hannah, y'get what I'm sayin'?"

"I am down."

"Love life or life itself?" Viv asked.

"Both." She looked at me. "I feel so alone."

"Cup of tea, hon?" Viv said. "I've got herbal."

Hannah shook her head no and started to walk away slowly.

"I'll walk you to your car," I said.

We walked along in silence. The night was brutally cold, the north wind a jillion invisible sabers, slicing up our bodies through our coats.

As we passed the gym we looked in through the old wire-mesh windows. Malik and Oly Joe were playing basketball, one on one. Oly was awkward, Malik graceful, but the game, clearly, wasn't about the game but about the invisible threads

spinning chaotically between the two of them. Oly threw up a wild shot that missed everything and then crumpled to his knees and started sobbing. Through the window his sobs were silent. Malik retrieved the ball and came back over to him with it. Then he knelt with the boy and put his arms around him. The boy leaned against him and then into him, sobbing, like a son finally connecting with his dad, as if a big hand had drawn all the invisible threads together.

I felt touched, but conflicted. It felt "right," but would it hurt the therapy? Was Malik acting out of his own need as much as the boy's?

Hannah turned and looked up at me, her dark eyes despairing beneath those ridiculous bleached brows. "That's what / need, Roy." She bowed her head. I put my hands on her shoulders. "Blair broke up with me today, for good. Said he never wants to see me again. Never. What should I do?"

"Want to talk about it?" I asked, but then my beeper went off:

"Earth to ex-Cowboy, call home."

"Yes, I'd like to talk, but you've got to go."

"Yeah, I'd better. What about your analyst?"

"Ed Slapadek?" She stood still, and I could see the struggle in her eyes, between wanting to ask for his help and fearing his response to that asking, his telling her to take responsibility for her SELF. "No. You better call home."

"And you go home, Hannah, y'hear?"

'To nobody? Yeah, I'm going… home. You're a good guy, at heart." She kissed me on the cheek and then clutched me and started sobbing.

"Platypus, call your mom in Florida."

Hannah pulled away and fumbled with the keys to her new BMW with a bashed-in front light, making it look like a woman with a black eye.

"What about calling Solini?" I shouted.

She stopped, thought, shook her head no, started the engine, and drove morosely down Mount Misery toward the river valley sprinkled with the lights of villages, which, in the clear arctic air, seemed like jewels in a twisted necklace.

I ran to the on-call room, where Jill answered my knock. I was about to call my parents in Florida when she, in her peach-colored bra that held up her boobies like eggs in satin

baskets, encircled me with her arms and slipped her tongue into my mouth. My fingers slipped in under the thong of her matching peach bikini. I was about to enter her when the first thing that came to mind was Cherokee's soft dick and the second thing was A.K.'s voice saying, "You're not enough," and the third thing was Lloyal von Nott's voice saying, "If you're not impotent yet you will be" and my penis plummeted as if shot, a dying quail.