Francis Levy - Erotomania - A Romance

"And I wonder how Monica and Shapiro are going to handle it," I continued.

"Hey buddy, people are trying to sleep," someone yelled out the window.

"Sleep it off, you bum!" Now I had a real audience. I've always loved theater; fortified by the drink, 1 proceeded to give a performance that equaled Ray Milland in Lost Weekend (1945) or Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses (1962).

Luckily 1 made my way back to the bunker, but when 1 stumbled in, Monica was furious. I started to whistle the old disco song "1 Like the Night Life."

"You smell like you've been drinking."

"I have to talk to you about something." 1 was slurring my words. "Shapiro thinks we have to see him three times a week."

She went into the bathroom and slammed the door. Was this what it had come to? After traveling around the country to gratify Monica's need to fuck in the presence of abstract expressionist masterpieces, I was getting slapped on the wrist for a night of profligacy. The injustice made me want to drink.

"My father was a drinker," she said as she emerged several minutes later. She'd calmed down; her initial repulsion was gone. She'd obviously been giving my drinking some thought; her tone was rational and forgiving.

She immediately pulled up her skirt and sat on my prick, which was instantaneously hard despite the condition of the rest of my body. "And when he was drunk he always made me blow him. But I've been thinking about my art history. Jackson Pollock also liked to drink. In fact, he crashed his car into a telephone pole and died because he was DWI."

The therapeutic effects of a good fuck never ceased to amaze me. As Monica bobbed on top of me, my wooziness disappeared. 1 felt as if I'd undergone an exorcism. Plainly, the legendary drinking of the abstract expressionists had validated my drunken episode for Monica. Not only did it no longer disgust her, she was finding my alcoholism to be a turn-on.

I owed Shapiro a call. After all, he'd been of help. But besides calling Shapiro, I also had to start attending AA meetings. I'd only been drinking for 24 hours, but it was a day-at-a-time program, and my brief experience told me that booze had me by the balls. 1 was headed down a road of self-destruction that would make the busted waterbeds and fractured beams Monica and 1 had caused in our search for sexual oblivion seem like child's play.

1 bit the bullet and phoned Shapiro again. I knew I would get his answering machine, and I'd come to enjoy listening to his message as much as 1 liked speaking to him. This is Doctor Shapiro on an answering machine. Please leave your name, number, and the time you called, and I willget back tojou shortly. In its blunt drawl and its emphasis on the word answering machine, it exemplified everything Shapiro was about. It was obvious an answering machine was picking up, but he needed to state the obvious anyway.

"Hi, Doctor Shapiro, its James Moran. Say, I haven't really had the chance to discuss the three days a week with Monica because we've been tied up." Yes, if you call drinking oneself into oblivion and fucking your brains out being tied up. And no, if you mean being tied up like some of the guys in The Golden Cock were tied up. "Look, if it's okay with you, I think the two of us need to come in to discuss the three-days-a-week idea in person."

C13

I'll never forget my first AA meeting. The meeting was held in the basement of a church, and when the chairman asked, "Is there anyone attending an AA meeting for the first time-this is not to embarrass you, but to welcome you," 1 cautiously raised my hand and said, "I'm James-actually it's Jim." Yes, I was Jim, not James. How many years had I hidden behind James? I was a Jim, just another Jim like other guys were Johns, not some hoity toity James, a name that begged for an honorific. Having made this crucial decision, my voice became firm, strong, and decisive. "I'm Jim. I'm an alcoholic, and this is my first time at an AA meeting."

My first few meetings were really rough. I hated the constant repetitions of how grateful everyone was for being in the program. Sometimes newcomers like myself would arrive at the meeting and totally break down, crying about how they hated their marriages, their jobs, their children. These outbursts were met with the chant "keep coming back." The seemingly positivesounding "keep coming back," I would later learn, is the AA equivalent of an insult. Yes, it's nice to know you're wanted, yet when you're told to "keep coming back," it means you're wanted not for your knowledge, your wit, your intelligence, or your understanding; it means "keep coming back" because you don't know anything and you're an accident waiting to happen. Even though I didn't have too many meltdowns during my first meetings, I wasn't safe from the "keep coming back" crowd who told me to "keep coming back" every time I shared.

Like many close relatives of alcoholics, Monica had as much trouble with me being in the program as she'd had during the one day I was a raging alcoholic. In her case the normal problems of adapting to your partner being involved in a totally new world was complicated by the fact that she had come to like the idea I was an alcoholic. She didn't just like it, she was enthralled by it. The disgust she had initially felt disappeared when she realized that my disheveled appearance reminded her of De Kooning. Not only was she competing with my new program friends for affection and attention, she resented the program's results. She actually wanted me to come home smelling like a brewery. Now, seeing me in a sober state, talking about my feelings instead of acting out, made her feel uncomfortable. Sobriety can be as much a threat as active alcoholism, and that is what seemed to be occurring in our case. In order to make myself attractive to Monica again, I didn't want to do things that were bad for my body. When, after returning home from a meeting one night, 1 soberly asked Monica if we could go in to Shapiro for a consultation, to my surprise she said, "You better do it," which was her way of saying we needed help.

I had never expected to find myself in General Shapiro's office again. Shapiro kept pictures of all the couples he'd helped on the wall, the way hunters preserve their conquests. He even had a trophy case which displayed the many awards he'd received. He'd won the Interborough Best Couples Therapist Citation in 1971 and '72 consecutively, and he had runner-up ribbons for 1974 and 1978. He either stopped competing or training from the late 70s until the mid '80s because the next trophy was third place in the nationals, which he received in 1986, and which solidified his status. When Shapiro referred to himself as a world-class marriage counselor, this was obviously the period he was talking about. He'd entered the metros throughout the early '90s, receiving all sorts of awards, but after that, there was nothing. I suppose after all the years in Vietnam and then on the couples counseling circuit, Shapiro, like a fighter past his prime, had finally hung up his gloves-at least as far as the competitive couples counseling circuit was concerned. Still, as he frequently had reminded us, he only wanted to help.

"Do you really want to help us, or to show us how much you know?" Monica had asked some months before, at the end of what we thought would be our last session.

"Isn't it interesting how every time I offer to help, you try to figure out some evil motive?"

"I'm not saying you're evil; you're just like the rest of us."

"Out for myself, eh." And that's how we had left it. We were back again, and there was a surreal quality to it all. Shapiro looked as if he had aged, and I wondered now as 1 had in the past if the frustration of working with us was actually bad for his health. Shapiro liked helping people, but even more than helping he liked the feeling of success. And while I didn't aspire to join the gallery of legendary patients hanging from his wall, I didn't like seeing a gallant warrior like General Shapiro, whose office had been a war zone, crashing up against the shoals of a comparatively innocuous case. For a man who brought together husbands and wives whose jobs literally required them to try to kill each other during the working day, our case should have been child's play, but it wasn't. I knew we had become the mountain Shapiro sought to climb. We were his great white whale, his Moby Dick.