Detritus In My Junk Drawer

Well, kids, I thought that since I'm not writing anything new, I'd give you something to chew on a little...

Detritus In My Junk Drawer

“Did you know that a human head weighs eight pounds?”

The woman in the pale yellow dress lowered her copy of McCall’s and stared at me as I sat across the waiting room from her. “What?” she asked, as much in astonishment as truly questioning.

“I asked if you knew that a human head weighs eight pounds”, I replied, holding up the copy of AMA Journal.

“That’s what I thought you said,” yellow dress replied and raised the magazine to its original position. Moving slightly sideways in her chair, she demurely re-crossed her legs, staring daggers at me, making sure that I didn’t mistake her adjustment to be a come-on.

“That’s about three-and-a-half kilograms in Canada or Great Britain,” I continued, a grin now starting to emerge.

Again, the magazine lowered. “Well, isn’t that fascinating? A man who can do arithmetic conversions in his head and then spout them indiscriminately as though anyone in the whole wide world might give a damn. I think I’m going to swoon…”

Before I could respond, the attendant opened the sliding glass door and spoke. “Mr. Church, the doctor will see you now.”

“Well, duty calls…” I quipped, tossing the magazine back onto the pile. “Listen, I’d love to stay and chat, but you know how it is when you’re crazy… just know that I’ll always cherish our little unconsummated seduction…” Getting up, I leaned forward, took her hand in mine and tried to kiss it, causing her to yank it away in disgust. Feigning astonishment, I then walked to the door and turned the handle. Glancing back and seeing that the woman still insisted upon frying me in the oil of her eyes, I blew her a kiss and half-whispered, half-spoke, “I’ll still respect you in the morning…” and disappeared into the inner sanctum.

Eat shit and die, creep, Teresa Terwilliger thought to herself as she raised the third finger on her right hand towards the door, just eat a whole bag of fucking shit and die of a fucking shit-hemorrhage. Teresa’s unconscious tic even now caused her to sneer and shake… her anger management session promised to be challenging, if she made it that long without tearing up the waiting room and running out the door, screaming like a banshee.

The therapist’s room more closely resembled a law library. Not a single sink blemished the décor, and had there not been a posh leather sofa next to the desk with the prominently displayed plaque announcing Doctor James Wyrick, MD, one might not have been able to distinguish the psychiatrist’s office from the member’s lounge at any first-rate country club.

James Wyrick, a large gaunt man wearing a brown herringbone tweed jacket and silk bow tie, bounded to the door, right hand extended, to meet me. “Hello, Bob”, he said, pumping my hand like the handle on a poorly responding pump handle on a cold winter’s day. “It’s good to see you again. Please make yourself comfortable.”

Sitting down in the large captain’s chair behind his desk, Dr. Wyrick put his bifocals on and turned a page on his yellow legal pad. Glancing at his watch and writing the time in the upper left-hand corner, he asked, “How can I help you today?”

“Jesus, Doc, you sound like the clerk at Home Depot. ‘Uh, let’s see… I’ll take a sack of eight-penny nails and one of those nifty five-pound sledges’.” I stopped and held my hand up. “Wait, you don’t need to write that down, do you?”

Doctor Wyrick fished a tamper out of his pants pocket and began cleaning the bowl of his pipe. “Bob, your attempts at wit aren’t impressing me at the moment. How much time do you figure we’ve spent dancing around the issues? Let me re-phrase my question, hopefully in a form that will impress you enough to allow you to get on with it. Is there a particular condition or occurrence that you don’t understand and would like to discuss?”

He didn’t light the pipe, but puffed on it as if he had, his attention once again focusing on one particular spot on my forehead, invisible rings of nether-smoke mingling with the thoughts, the perfect antiphony to conversation yet to come… hopefully.

“Make it go away.” I responded.

“Pardon me? Make what go away?”

“The undertoad. Make the fucking undertoad leave me alone and go bother someone else.”

“I see… the undertoad…” James Wyrick coughed, stalling for recognition yet to come.

Silence rushed into the room, collecting everything into its mouth and holding it inside, huge eyes of wonder staring at the world.

“You don’t know what I mean, do you?” I said.

“Haven’t the foggiest notion”, Dr. James Wyrick admitted.

A snort emerged from my mouth as he nodded his head, “Yea, that’s what I thought. I must admit, though, it’s nice to hear a medical professional admit that he doesn’t know everything.”

“You’re an intelligent, intuitive man, Bob, I’ve long known and acknowledged that much. Why don’t you try to explain it to me.”

“Well, James, have you ever read The World According to Garp?”

The doctor took off his spectacles and reached for the handkerchief in the lapel pocket of his jacket. “No, I’m afraid that I haven’t… and please, don’t refer to me as ‘James’; you’re my patient, and I prefer to keep our relationship professional.”

“Okay, then you call me ‘Mr. Church’, then. I prefer to think of you as a pompous dickbreath who doesn’t give a flying fuck about anything except the $400-per-50-minute-hour fee that he steals from people who mistakenly and laughingly expect to get something for their money. Only my friends call me ‘Bob’.”

“Go with that, please… why are you so antagonistic toward authority?”

Grinning, I shook my index finger at the doctor. “Oh, I’d almost forgotten—you’re good. I’m going to have to watch out for you. Anyway, the undertoad, according to John Irving, is a concept of perceived anxiety, I think, towards some unseen force that threatens to take over someone’s life. In the book, a five-year-old boy living near the ocean was warned by his parents to be careful of the water’s undertow, which would pull him under the water and out to sea, and he would never again see his family. Being five, he conceived of a giant, green, amphibian beast living underwater with huge frog’s eyes and mouth capable of swallowing a small boy in a single gulp. Thus, the undertoad was born.”

“Very interesting… please tell me more.”

“I need you to kill the motherfucker—or at least make him get off my back and go play with someone else.” My arms were now on my knees as I sat forward on the sofa, wringing my hands as I spoke.

“Why do you feel the need to curse?”

“Why? Does it offend your virgin ears? Why don’t you curse? How can you listen to problems all day long and not curse? Honestly, doc, I think you ought to be seeing somebody about that.” After pausing, I looked directly at the man sitting across the desk from me and replied, “Shee-it.”

“Mr. Church, whatever my psychological problems may be, they have little to do with helping you. Could we stay focused on you, please? As you so eloquently pointed out, you’re paying for my assistance.”

“Touché… my bad.”

Leaning back on the sofa, I extended my right leg and reached into my pants pocket, pulling out a pack of Marlboros. Tapping the bottom of the unopened pack several times with my finger, I adroitly spun it around and removed the cellophane wrapper and tore off a small section of the foil. Again turning the pack upside down, I tapped it, allowing one cigarette to protrude from the end. Taking it into my mouth, I suddenly noticed no ashtrays visible. Worse, the doctor merely stared at me disapprovingly, reinforcing my hatred for society’s prohibition of smoking. Putting the cigarette back into the pack, I sat back on the sofa and folded my hands in my lap.

“Thank you, Bo—er, Mr. Church, I very much appreciate your help in my never-ending crusade to avoid any reoccurrences, on my part, of a habit that I now find repugnant.”

“Sure thing, doc, anything to help a guy out.”

“Let’s talk about the smoking a bit, shall we? How much and how often do you smoke?”

“Well, given the fact that damned near everyplace forbids it, not nearly as much as I’d like, that’s for sure.”

“Do you hold out any hope of quitting?”

“Well, about the same hope as I have of playing pick-up-sticks with my butt cheeks or watching a one-legged ballerina at the Bolshoi dancing to Swan Lake.”

“Do you see any possibility that smoking may be your undertoad?” The doctor didn’t look up from his pad as he wrote.

“Actually, I think the undertoad makes me smoke, so he can kill me faster.”

“I see… tell me more of this undertoad. You seem as fascinated by his presence as you seem afraid. Could it be that you’re substituting nicotine as a curative for some undefined pessimism or angst?”

“Is it really pessimism if it comes to live with you and refuses to move out, if it takes over every reality in your life and leaves your refrigerator empty, never once paying for any groceries? If, in a jealous rage it strangles any joy that might happen to knock on your door, dragging it into the basement and throwing it into a dungeon where it butt-fucks that joy every day while it cries out in pain and agony, is it still undefined?” No emotion accompanied my words, causing Doctor James Wyrick to stop writing and stare at his patient.

“Why do you think I have the power to kill him? Don’t you think that’s your job?”

I sighed. “I guess it’s a little like hiring a hit man. I’d love to kill it myself, if I could, but it’s too tough for me. That’s why I’ve hired you.”

“Talk to me about joy, Mr. Church. Give me your definition of the concept.”

“Joy… for me, joy is the feeling you get upon hearing that somebody you hate just died… preferably prematurely and after a prolonged period of unendurable pain and suffering.”

“Okay, now define ‘contentment’, please.”

“Oh, that’s easy, doc… that’s when you find out through the grapevine that the good-looking girl who won’t go out with you has never had an orgasm and can’t afford a good shrink, so she decides to become a nun.”

“Would you say you’re a relatively happy guy?”

“Who, me? Of course I am! I’m only here because I have way more money than I’ll ever need and while walking by this morning, I noticed that your Mercedes needs new tires.” I no longer looked at the doctor. Picking up James Wyrick’s letter opener, I leaned back and cleaned my fingernails, outwardly contemptuous of all I surveyed.

“Mr. Church, I can’t help you until you at least acknowledge you have a problem. It is not enough for you to walk in here, time and time again, and berate or belittle me and everyone else you contact. You express the desire to lose your anxieties but you don’t seem to understand the causal relationship between your attitude and your appearance to the world. Or, if you do, you choose to ignore it. Frankly, I consider you far too intelligent to continue your self-destructive habits without full knowledge of what you’re doing.”

The pad and pen, apparently useless and returned to their place on the desktop, functioned as a pretend ashtray as James Wyrick, MD, dumped a shadowy pile of ashes from his pipe. “You’re at war with the world, Mr. Church, and since you insist upon being a one-man army who doesn’t listen to the generals you’ve commissioned, it is my opinion that you’re headed for defeat. Your enemy is both vast and powerful, and is using weapons you’ve provided. No one could ever dislike you nearly as much as you dislike yourself. Once I treated a woman who felt she was undesirable and unattractive, so she took very small doses of rat poison on a daily basis, in hopes that she’d eventually just fail to wake up. Meanwhile, she receded further and further into her own little world and eventually ended up in a long-term care facility, suffering from irreversible coma.

You seem intent upon committing suicide one day at a time, but instead of taking the poison yourself, you’re trying to feed it to a rat-resistant public. Once they get a taste of it, they reject the provider. Could they point it out to you? Yes, they could and probably do, but after awhile, they just assume that you don’t intend to stop, so they just shut the door and ignore your presence. You see, Mr. Church, most people will meet you half way on many issues, but you can’t punish them for it.”

“So you’re suggesting that I invented the undertoad and I’m feeding him and providing him a place to sleep?”

“No, I’m not saying that you invented him, but does it matter? He’s real and he’s got you convinced that joy and contentment can only be accomplished as the result of other people’s misery. You’re feeding his insatiable need for power, and until you either kill him or find a cell to confine him, he’ll continue to ruin your life and the lives of those closest to you. I can’t help you, Bob, but I can show you how to help yourself.”

“Oh, yea? You can kick him out?”

“No, you have to do that… but I can show you how to drain the swamp.”

“Okay… it sounds feasible, I guess, but if it doesn’t work, do I get my money back?”

Shaking his head in despair, he sighed and threw both arms on his desk. Without looking up, he pointed at the door. “That’s all for today… and please try to avoid speaking to Mrs. Terwilliger as you depart. I’d consider it a personal favor.”

Some people are so touchy…