Chapter 4 Therapy for Garrreeeeeee!

By Gary O'Brien



Before you file suit you should have a couple of visits to the shrink under your belt. But don’t be lulled by these bastards enough to actually get healed. That’s bad. That’s what happened to me and it resulted in a whole string of complications and bad dreams and I will get to that.
The strain of your building insanity needs to be written on your face. You need to come into the courtroom as damaged goods, managed and handled by a concerned team of attorneys who are out to collect for you. The picture is this; with your last shred of sanity that these bastards had not stolen from you, you did the right thing, you went and got an attorney, who told you to see a shrink. Method acting ala Robert Deniro is the way to go. Don’t come in ‘doing’ damaged, or ‘acting’ damaged. BE damaged. That means don’t make the mistake I made and go for brains in the selection of, nor get all fruity-expressive with, your shrink.
Seeing how Lyzanne played up her heritage angle as way to trip me up, I of course, opted for the most Jewish-sounding psychiatrist I could find: I am blind to heritage or religion, I announced in this choice. I am completely without prejudice.
Me, racist? On the contrary, some of my best friends are Jewish. Hey, my shrink is Jewish. Great guy. Played golf with him last week, shot a 68. He might even be GAY for all I know. His mother was BLACK I think. I am one hell of a progressive white man, so I am. Not guilty about a damned thing.
Dr. Myron Nedza played me like a fiddle, and that was my fault all the way. I didn’t see him coming and I should have. Nedza would have made a great newspaper reporter. Get a guy flowing like a busted scab, then sit back and wait for the pus.
I don’t know precisely how he did it, but he lulled me into believing he was a bit of a dumb ass, maybe even a quack, which set me at ease. I think it was his use of awkward pauses and the stop-start delivery of his questions. Then that tittery little “…yeah, yeah, yeah,” thing that trailed off wistfully at the end as I answered. It’s called hypnosis and I should have seen that too but I didn’t.
After our first visit and he let me believe I was getting over on him, he said I showed signs of depression and mild paranoia. Adult rytalin might help, he said.
I got sweaty palms. Dollar signs were whirring on the dial of a one-arm bandit in my head. When the signs on the wheel lined up “depression and paranoia”, I saw green, heard the bing-bing-bing, followed by sounds the machine of fate makes when she urinates cash into buckets of gold….borne on the backs of dwarfs.
So he asked me to give him the name of my local pharmacist for a trial prescription. He would call the guy and set it up. He scribbled onto a pad and made sure I went to the fellow immediately.
As I drove to the pharmacy, I had an ubber-chilling thought: The sad fact was, I knew that I could well be insane or close to the edge of irretrievability, and yet this new doctor’s very quackery, mixed with a little bad luck, bad chemistry, or by some mysterious alien plot to destroy me could further thwart me askew. This might send me into some unknown altered state masking itself as an acceptable reality. Once there I would nestle into a womb of inactivity from which I would never find rebirth, only stasis. No good to my family or myself.
No, whatever it is he has given me, I must feign taking it, then I must feign getting better for his benefit, I decided. To do that I needed to find out the symptoms of what he said I had and the effects of the drug he had prescribed. A couple hours on the Internet and I would be in business.
Over the next month Dr. Nedza and I visited once a week. I was struck with how personable and how intelligent he was. This person emerged from the earlier version like a sausage slips from its skin at the butcher shop. The new individual was shinny and engaging, different from the dull veneer he projected at the beginning.
Toward the end of our third session, he asked me how I was doing with the medication and I spat out some of the material I had read on the Internet. I said I felt like I was concentrating a little better than I had in the past, able to focus a little longer each day.
“Hmmm, textbook case,” he said with a wry smile.
Suddenly the floor dropped out of the room and I was left hanging, sweating. Shit. I had been “placebo-ed.” They were likely sugar tablets and I hadn’t even been taking them. Thirty seconds passed.
“So Gary, did you even take them?” he asked after our little game of “Battleship.”
“No.” I said at last.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah….I sort of figured it would go that way,” he said.
“See, Gary, you had mentioned all this back and forth between you, your agent and your publisher and your animosity; and I detected right away that you were not the sort of person who naturally opts for therapy.”
“Correct.”
“And while you certainly have been through a rough time with them, I understand it was pending litigation that brought you here, but that’s okay, that’s fine. Without divulging too much I can tell you that happens all the time, and people who are in serious need of help find themselves right where they need to be because of the way our legal system works. But that’s a good thing. Consider in some societies where there is no such thing as psychiatry, or a legal system that compensates you for mental damages you have sustained. Christ sakes, Gary, look at the third world for examples on what not to do.”
“So you’re saying I am in serious need of mental help?” which is all I could focus on at that moment.
“Well, yes and no. But I will say that coming to me as duplicitous as you were at first you have likely ruined your own case against your agent and your publisher using mental stress. I say, likely, as I often serve as an expert witness in such cases.
“In your narcissistic attempt to thwart real diagnosis you have proven to me two things. Would you like me to share them?”
“Go on.”
“For starters you have shown me how old, or longstanding your condition is, in that it likely predates anything that may have happened to you with regard to this bitchy agent or this incompetent publisher. Secondly, you have clearly demonstrated how highly functioning you are,” he said.
I was lost and he could see it.
“Using your terminology, Gary, you are extremely fucked up. Yet your drive and your innate abilities more than make up for you psychological difficulties and certainly they more than compensate for whatever these people have done to you. Your means of compensating for your problems are extravagant and entrenched, you have been at this a while and that much will be very clear to any expert hired to defend these people in court. Suing on the grounds of mental stress will come off like a cynical ploy for cash on your part, although I am not party to your legal problems and you do what you must. My overall evaluation of you is good, though.”
“But you just said how fucked up I am.”
“Indeed, in addition to your depression and your paranoia, you are also a bit delusional and highly narcissistic but as I said, your elaborate compensatory regimes are fascinating and hint to a voracious strength in you that more than counterbalances. Because of this you’re operating well above the plus side of the equation when it comes to recognizing reality and dealing with it.”
Like an idiot I confided to him that I had plans to kill these people and this was contradictory to his assertion that I was sound.
“Your reaction is natural enough but I wouldn’t place too much faith or heart in it, Gary.”
“Why not?”
“It isn’t in you. You don’t have the temperament. You live vicariously through your characters in your stories and experiment with darker, primitive urges but you don’t partake in them; especially the more serious ones like murder. Oh, sometimes you stray from who you are, from your core being or moral spine. But you know deep down that doing murder would be such a departure for you, you’re not about to even attempt it. Infidelity was one thing, maybe a little recreational drug use, which you say you stopped, but murder would not only kill another person, it would kill you, who you are. And you are far too self-absorbed to let that happen. In fact, you would sooner commit suicide as you said. It was your first reaction, not to hop a flight to New York to kill someone, but in your worst moment you thought of that first, as a means to prevent yourself from doing something more reprehensible as in killing another, thereby ruining your core person and your good name. You would sooner die than go on living having destroyed who you are.
“Do you understand what I mean by that?”
I said nothing and he took that to mean that I did.
“I also realize you’re too egotistical to believe me right away, Gary. But I am confident that whatever plans you begin to hatch you will see the error of it and opt out. Either that or they will skew into something more constructive. You’re a creator, not a destroyer, Gary.”
A long moment elapsed as I thought on it and he continued. I was amazed when he clacked open a lighter and was firing up a cig. Bastard. Not only that he didn’t offer one, having correctly assumed I had smoked my share and was trying to quit.
He pawed the air with peace signs.
“You know Gary, often we “shrinks” as you call us, feel very little joy in what we do because there is very little in the way of resolution for our patients. Patients come in here all the time and flounder around for years to get to know themselves as well as you do. Which, again, is a function of your narcissism and how much time you have to explore yourself and how expressive you are.”
More than a little insulted now I asked him if he was saying I was easy to read, an open book?
“That’s not quite accurate. You’re extremely complex. I wouldn’t even begin to get to the bottom of where all that anger comes from. I can say, however, you are your own salvation from it every day. In essence you are extremely screwed up and you are cured. You screw yourself up, then you fix yourself thousands of times a day, I would imagine, making it utter Hell for yourself, all the while.
“Furthering our relationship would only help to facilitate your fraud, I’m afraid, so I of course must decline to see you anymore. Even though that retribution may be warranted on some level, I am not in the business of exacting it for my clients, as it’s often unhealthy. What I am saying also is, seeing you as a patient would weaken and diminish a very strong mind, and I won’t have anything to do with that either. It goes against the Hippocratic oath. As fascinating as it would be to dissect your mind, to satisfy our mutual sense of curiosity, this would diminish both our abilities and lead to mutual dependency.”
“What? You just got through telling me how bent I was. Now I’m not?”
“Excellent, very nice. Bent is a perfect word to describe you. But many fine things in nature are bent and twisted, Gary. Take a good look at Florida live oak and you will see scars from lightening, kinks and bends in it from where storms have done their work on the shape of that tree. It’s these very storms and lightening bolts in our lives that make us who we are. I won’t tamper with nature when nature is obviously working. You are a very strong person. Be glad.”
“But what about my theory on the aliens? You said it yourself, that this was delusional,” I back peddled.
“No, no. You seem to be deliberately misinterpreting me here, and I want you to stop that. It’s childish and not very healthy. I said that the notion they are fixated on you, specifically, is delusional. That they are corralling and thwarting Gary O’Brien over all other writers, yes, that’s delusional not to mention beneath your skills as a writer. Whether they exist or not is a subject for scientific debate, of course, as well as a foundation for an international discussion of what to do if they do exist. But then, this is rational thought.
“Now, I think when you start theorizing that these advanced beings are having meetings about you, specifically, Gary; when you visualize them, for instance, sitting down around the boardroom table and the first item on the agenda reads “What to do about Gary?” in red marker, that’s when the ‘return to reality bell’ needs to chime and you need to listen to it.”
I looked at him like he was being a smart ass.
“Well, when you think of it, this is exactly what you’re saying. Not true? You said so yourself, these creatures mean to overturn us by interfering with the publishing business, and other forms of media, as a means to prevent complex thought in an increasingly passive populace and so on and so forth? Maybe so, but by your own theory that you, personally, are being targeted, you would have had to come up with some revolutionary concept for a book or a movie script that will change all of mankind. And there is nothing to indicate any forward movement toward this end on your part,” and he actually snuffed out the cigarette in the ashtray as he said this.
“How convenient, and more than a little bit sad for you, Gary, that aliens swoop down on you and steal your best thoughts from you before you can complete them. I mean, c’mon. Please.”
I hated this man.
“No. My only longstanding advice to you would be to exercise more, lose maybe ten pounds, and for God’s sake go easier on yourself. You’re only forty and you’re killing yourself with self-doubt and loathing.
“I mean, maybe such a work is inside you after all. But how are you going to listen to that inner voice if you’re consumed with anger, Gary? Let it go. Hatred only kills the vessel carrying it.”
“What about the medication?” I asked.
“If you must have something, I will fill out a prescription for mild antidepressants. There might be something to this manic depression business we talked about. Just might, but that would likely be a pre-existing condition to this problem you are experiencing with the agent and the publisher,” he said.
“And…?”
“ In other words, THEY didn’t cause it. Now, if I sign the prescriptions, will you take the medicine and see if it helps?”
“I will. I promise,” I said.
“I hear you Gary. I hear you saying you will. If you need more, advise your next therapist what I have given you.”
So I arranged payment with his dwarf at the front desk. Three visits, I was cured. I was angrier than ever and less sure of my cause. I muttered something to myself about quackery masked as brilliance and left.
But that didn’t stop me from plotting. I meant to go right on doing so.
That night I had a monstrous dream. I was back in therapy again but Dr. Nedza wasn’t there.
In walks Graham Greene. Navy blue blazer, pale pin stripe shirt, red tie, khakis, leather oxfords, no socks. He looks like he’s been to a Caribbean resort. For some reason he’s unlocking the door; the way a janitor at a high school has to fight with a heavy chain of keys when he opens a classroom for a teacher.
“Graham?”
“You know the bastard’s right don’t you? You can’t go killing your agent.”
Greene crossed to a little hutch on the wall that hadn’t been there during my visit to the office. Opening it, he retrieved two square glass tumblers, gin, tonic, cubes from a Plexiglas bucket, a dash of peppermint, a twist of lime.
“I see you’ve spruced up from the last time we spoke,” I said to him.
“Never mind that, Gary. All this pissing and moaning is getting you nowhere and the quack is right. Only, he’s likely phoning the police in the morning to report you.”
He spoke over his shoulder as he got to work on our imaginary drinks. This was a nice touch, something he would have used in The Quiet American.
He handed me my drink.
“What the bloody hell do you think you are doing? Didn’t our little chat back in ‘91 have any affect on you? I mean Holy Christ, dress up like a woman, or run naked through your neighborhood, get good and shit-faced drunk if helps, but do not, I repeat, do not kill your agent. Difference between yours truly and your doctor is, Gary; I know you ARE capable of it. I know you could well do it! It wasn’t the only thing you were able to conceal from him.
“Hey, subway trains are some heavy sumbitches, Graham; they move fast too and can make a mess of you,” I said very non-committal.
“We have work to do, Gary. Honestly I cannot have you getting thrown in jail.”
“Fine work has been done from jail, Graham. Some mighty fine work.”
“That bullshit about the noble, jailhouse writer, is it? I’ve got a clue for you, my son. It doesn’t work these days unless you’re a black musician or a corrupt bond trader and you’re neither. That’s just the market. It has been this way since the eighties and will go right on being that way for a number of years. So get that bloody idea right out of your head.
“Well, friend, I have bupkiss going on for me now.”
“You see Gary, this is what I have been talking about. It’s your vernacular, your verbiage, your usage it’s simply become atrocious. A middle-schooler should be prouder of his speech than you. Bupkiss? Is this how we’re talking now, bub? Bupkiss and so forth? Are you a fucking taxi driver now? Is that what you’ve got up to?”
“Easy for you to say.”
“You think being dead’s a lark? Well let me clue you in, sunshine. It’s not. No one bloody listens. It’s worse than being married with children. It’s like the whole bloody world is leaving the light on in every room and no one will turn the damned thing off.”
“Whatever.”
“Yeah, whatevah; whatevah! Christ. Stupid Americans,” he said taking a sip.
“You know what absolutely infuriates me about young yank writers?”
“No.”
“What’s in it for me? What’s in it for me? Always that, first. My agent, bla bla bla, my bollucks, bla bla bla, my asshole bla bla bla…”
“Your elocution is brilliant these days, as well, Graham.”
“I mean so you got a bad agent. So what? So your publisher fucked you, so what. Move on. And all that pisswater about the aliens and that, Jesus, Louise! Where did you come up with that drivel?”
I wanted to answer him but I couldn’t.
“You keep mouthing that nonsense and at a stroke you’ll find yourself crowned captain underpants of the fucking loony bin.”
“Have you seen Hemingway in your travels on the proverbial other side?” I asked.
“That bloody plodder? I wouldn’t be caught dead with the man.”
“You are dead.”
“Precisely. But on to your case. Can’t you see there is potential here; infinitely more potential than you’re using?”
“Why me?” I asked.
“Why you? You mean, why are you and I talking?”
“Exactly.”
“Because contrary to what everyone said about me in the ‘50s I actually love Americans and most of my work about them was a tribute to their enterprising spirit.”
But I was having none of this. “That’s pure horseshit. Tell me the real reason, Graham.”
“I think it was that Honduran bird you had such trouble leaving, what was her name?”
“Esther, and that hurts.”
“You reminded me of myself when I was younger in Indo China.”
“Incidentally my breakup with Esther happened before you died, so how exactly you witnessed all of that is beyond me,” I concluded.
“It’s not like you get on an elevator to heaven and have a look down on everyone as they go about their day. Is that what you thought death was?”
“Oh, I am losing my fucking mind.”
“Is that what you thought?” he demanded.
I looked over and Greene was dressed as Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson at the battle of Trafalga.
“Stop that,” I said.
“That’s not me what’s done it, that’s you. And give me my right arm back! Christ, my eyeball’s gone bad as well.”
“You can write with your left hand. Nelson learned to, and so can you.”
“Well Nelson didn’t have to bang on the keys to a Royal. You need both hands and both….there that’s better.”
“This is weird, Graham.”
“Then I suggest you stop mixing Irish mescaline with red wine.”
“Irish mescaline?”
“Guinness. You’re in for a whopping hangover my friend. The concoction brewing in your gut is worse than taking malaria medication for giving bad dreams. And control your mind. I don’t know what you saw in that tome about Nelson, anyway,” he said, dusting crumbs of sea biscuit off his coat.
“On the contrary, I thought you would have liked Nelson, in that it really was a study on affairs and infidelity.”
“That woman was a cow. Nelson was a madman when it came to her, although a damned fine sailor, there’s no doubt of that.”
“You mentioned something about me?”
“Yes, more pissing, what’s in it for me? What I had been trying to impart, Gary, is the fact that we’ve work to do. Important work that touches on corporate imperialism and its effects on the mind of man. We can’t get to work like that it you’re throwing your agent under a subway train, now can we? You might need her to open a door for you. Hell, WE might need her.”
“What do you mean, we?”
“All of us, we writers. We haven’t a place to go anymore. All our great ideas, and no one’s listening to us!”
“I’m not tracking,” I said.
“Imagine my fucking surprise. You think some of those marvelous ideas you’ve had are actually yours? No, you’ve just rented them, or exchanged them for time at your chair, in front of your instrument, or as you call it, at your computer. They’re not yours anymore than that Guinness you consumed was yours. It flows through you. It comes from somewhere and goes somewhere else. When no one’s listening to pass these ideas on, ideas don’t happen. They don’t make it out of my world and into yours.”
“So in effect, you’re my guardian angel and I’m your mouthpiece?”
“Something of that nature, I suspect. How should I know? All I know is that this is the arrangement for now. Consider me your tutor.”
“But you were a Communist weren’t you?”
“Oh good God, as with all yank journalists, and now here we go again. No, I was not a Communist. I was perhaps the first anti-Imperialist who also had a popular following in America. That I was devoutly Catholic also was misinterpreted. Catholicism was a pagan ritual that I found esthetically pleasing. I also found that it contained a notion of discipline that was stabilizing. I also feared Hell immensely, but I was unaware of the arrangement God and nature had constructed.”
“Which is?”
“That Hell lurks in the shadows, my son. Summon it, and it will come to you and surround you, strait away. All you have to do is ask. The same goes for Heaven, or at least our misguided concept of it. But follow the bouncing ball, and try to concentrate for a split second on what I am telling you, Gary. We have a deal, a contract, and I am asking you to honor it. I will guide you but more often then not you will have to honor my guidance and trust me. Otherwise I will dissolve our arrangement and go away.”
“You’re asking me again, not to kill my agent.”
“Precisely.”
Suddenly the room faded and I was in bed. My wife’s head was on my shoulder.
The words, “summon Hell and it will surround you. The same goes for Heaven.” ringing in my ears.
I was in Heaven. My children were sound asleep. Leslie’s trilling little snore was comfort itself, her head resting there so easily, the definition of trust and warmth. Was I going to summon Hell now at this moment? Was I going to continue down the course I had embarked on?