Bethel's Meadow (2 page)

To which I replied: “You’ve made it abundantly clear that I’ve worn out my welcome here.” I slapped my hand on the phone books and said, “But do me a solid, and tell the good doctor that Mr. Smith said to shove these motherfuckers six feet straight up his ass.”

2

“
S
MITH, YOU HORNY BASTARD, keep that goddamn thing away from me!”

Those were the frenzied words of my girlfriend Caitlin before she sought cover beneath the bed sheets and a stack of pillows atop my king-sized bed. The “goddamn thing” to which she referred was my raging hard-on. But anyone within earshot would have thought I was pointing a loaded shotgun at her.

It was seven-thirty on a Friday March morning. It had been over three months since I had last visited the psychiatric office of Dr. Beady Eyes. I had exhausted my supply of meds two nights ago. Since I hadn’t taken any sort of sleep aid last night, I hadn’t slept a damned wink. I still don’t know what possessed me when I had made the decision to not find another doctor.

“Come on, baby,” I said, tossing the pillows overboard. I pulled the sheets back to reveal Caitlin’s bob of jet black hair. “I’ve got something special for you.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she yelped. “I have another hour before I have to get up and go to work. So go in the bathroom, or wherever it is you normally go, and take care of it yourself.” She yanked the sheets back from me while simultaneously thrusting her hips in reverse to slam against my crotch.

“Aw shit!” I cried as I grabbed my aching balls.

The woman was strong. She was only five feet tall, but built firm and athletic. She was the reigning Tinker Bell character at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, where every magical evening concludes with a display of fireworks. Amidst this fantastic show of light Tinker Bell flutters and flies from atop Cinderella’s Castle. She waves a wand sprinkling about pixie dust before eventually crashing into a thick rubber pad at the end of a very long wire that carries her from 180 feet high.

Despite the sometimes painful consequences that result from the rapid descent, it is a highly sought-after position. It paid Caitlin eight hours’ worth of wages for less than one hour’s worth of work. All she had to do was show up, put on the outfit, have the harness attached, and off she went. Some nights following her flight she would stop by my place and pop eight aspirin to help ease the pain from the crash, crying: “Those numb nuts at the end of the wire missed catching me again!”

I suppose Peter Pan already knows what a cranky bitch Tinker Bell can truly be.

“I believe you keep an icepack in the fridge that you can use to ice your balls with,” Caitlin said without any hint of apology. “Shut the door behind you and keep the damn mind sucker turned down.”

That’s what she called the TV: the mind sucker.

I grunted as I swung my legs out of bed. I instantly regretted not taking a more gingerly approach to my exit.

“You’re a cold fish,” I said. “You know that?”

“Fuck off, Smith. Get out of here before I go Lorena Bobbitt on your rude ass.” That whisky voice of hers had always turned me on, except for when she went into bitch mode.

When she wanted, Caitlin could actually be quite a charming gal. She possessed the social skills necessary to capture most any audience’s rapt attention. She was a social chameleon: in the presence of prim ladies and proper gentlemen you would have thought she was Amy Vanderbilt; in the company of rednecks and shit kickers her demeanor would have made Roseanne Barr proud. In her early thirties, Caitlin was of Irish heritage with the stereotypical disposition to match. Though she wasn’t pretty in the manner of a coquettish homecoming queen, I did think she was beautiful like a young Maureen O’Hara, with a similar elegant, fair complexion.

We had been together for almost a year. It wasn’t as though I was a sex-craved lunatic. I’d been quite patient, in fact—it was almost a month into our relationship before we’d first had sex. After our first time she had blamed it on me, saying, “When we started out by just necking on the couch, I told all my girlfriends that I just couldn’t believe how you didn’t even try to grab a boob. Hell, I would have let you do me on the first date.”

But only if that first date had been on a night preceding a day off from work. Caitlin always refused to have sex on what she called “school nights.” She didn’t even believe in having nooners, for crying out loud.

The reason I never tried to make a move on her in the early going was because I had truly adored her. It wasn’t just the way she looked; it was her sass and her brassiness. She was a ballsy broad who wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone, and when she dressed up no lady ever looked more beautiful to me. I’d been in love with that woman from the very beginning.

But I would soon learn that she wasn’t the most loving or affectionate person in the world. Her aversion to more frequent sex was a riddle I was never able to solve.

By the time I reached the kitchen I was still hobbling and hunched over a tad, but then I realized I felt okay enough to assume a normal posture. I stood up straight and grabbed a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator, then took it outside on the rear deck to enjoy the beautiful March morning. But it wasn’t beautiful at all. It was unseasonably cool for this time of year in Orlando, and right as I looked up into the sky it began to rain in buckets. And for me rain has always served as a good excuse to go back to bed or to take a long nap on the couch.

But on this particular morning I didn’t feel the least bit fatigued. I knew from experience that abruptly withdrawing from the meds usually sent me headlong into a manic phase, an adventure that can initially be quite exhilarating. Following weeks, months, or even years of faithfully adhering to my medication regimen, I find that in just one day off the pills that the engine transmission that is my mind no longer feels like it is stuck in neutral or reverse.

In college, for example, during times when nothing being taught to me made a damned bit of sense, as was often the case with calculus, I simply ceased my lithium intake, and within twenty-four to forty-eight hours I always experienced a dramatic intellectual turnaround. Instead of feeling ordinary and dull, my brain was soon able to retain and process mathematical formulas with the greatest of ease. Grades in all of my subjects improved markedly during my med-free periods. And when I felt myself beginning to turn in the wrong direction emotionally, I’d get back on the lithium.

I had told my psychiatrist about this strategy just a few months following graduation. With a look so grave I’ve never forgotten it, he said, “Manipulating your condition like that is a
very
,
very
dangerous thing to do. A time will come that when you tempt fate by deliberately inducing mania, you could jeopardize all that is important to you, and you risk losing the most precious thing you have:
your life
.”

And so it was on this March morning that I was once again tempting fate. On a daily basis for the past several years I had subjected my mind and body to the soporific and stupefying effects of the two pills I’d been taking: the white pill for manic depression, the green pill to combat anxiety. Although I felt nauseated and had a rather annoying headache, I was ready to hit the town. I had places to go and things to do.

There was one problem, though: it was still before eight o’clock in the morning. Orlando isn’t like New York or Chicago. Orlando is a city that goes to sleep every night at a reasonable hour, and when it finally wakes up it does so with the doldrums. It needs a strong cup of coffee or two to get it going for another day. But I had lain awake all night counting the short dark hairs on Caitlin’s head. Just a few hours after missing my last dose of meds I was a live wire, the liveliest goddamned wire in the entire world. I was ready to roll.

…

Caitlin showered while I was getting dressed. I stepped out of my walk-in closet and saw her undergarments and pink medical outfit spread across the bed. To supplement her Disney income Caitlin worked as a medical assistant for an urgent care walk-in center (a doc-in-the-box). A few years ago she had gone to a trade school to gain certification in the field. She had often spoken of wanting to become a nurse, which would have required even more training. I was amused when I had first heard her express this desire because I knew she’d have a terrible bedside manner. If I were to have sought first-aid from her because I had a limb hanging loose from its socket or if I had been damn near bleeding to death, she would have just said to me: “Quit crying, you big sissy. Rub some dirt on it.”

I heard the shower cut off just as Caitlin began to curse the burst of cold water she’d received while washing her hair.

“Sorry, baby,” I said, “but I had to pee.”

“You’re a lying sack of shit,” she yelled. “You flushed the commode on purpose.”

I was guilty as charged.

“Quit your bitching,” I said. “I fixed your lunch for you: brand new potato chips and the tuna salad I made yesterday. You know I make the world’s best tuna salad, right? I don’t use inferior tuna product—only white albacore, baby!”

Caitlin slammed the bathroom door open and glared at me like an angry hound.

“You didn’t open a brand new bag of chips, did you?” She was standing naked in the bathroom doorway—she’d let the towel drop to her feet. She had both hands on her hips. Damn, I loved that little fireplug body of hers. Her firm and medium-sized breasts still defied gravity. I noticed that her hot pink nipples were erect and pointed in an upward trajectory. Not bad for a thirty-something.

I stepped forward to kiss her.

“Are you turned on, baby?” I asked flirtatiously.

Caitlin glanced down at her breasts and then quickly back at me again.

“It was cold as a well digger’s ass in there, you rotten son of a bitch.” She brushed past me on her way to the bed. As she slipped into her panties, Caitlin said, “Smith, there’s a quarter bag of perfectly good potato chips in the pantry. You’re such a wasteful person.”

We always argued about the potato chips. And also about which way to place toilet paper on a dispenser: I argued it should come from the bottom; Caitlin preferred that it feed from the top.

“Well, you know, the chips that are whole—”

“Don’t start that business again about big potato chips tasting better than broken ones.”

“Cait, when you start buying the potato chips in my house, then you can start eating all the damned potato chip crumbs you want over here.”

She had her own apartment that she shared with two other Disney employees. She kept a drawer full of panties and brassieres at my place, as well as a little space in the closet to hang her work clothes.

Caitlin scowled at me as she snapped on her bra. “You always sleep until the cows come home. Are you off your meds or something?”

I ignored her and walked out of the bedroom.

“Smith,” she called out. “Don’t you walk away from me when I’m expressing concern about your well-being.”

I stopped halfway down the hall, took a deep breath, and then returned to the bedroom. I was now ready for a fight, if that’s what she wanted.

“Cait, if you cared so deeply about my well-being,” I said, “then why did you rack my nards just a while ago? Huh?”

“Oh, you big baby. You’re so damn horny all the time. I have to defend myself somehow from your rape attempts.” Her concern for my health had vanished; she retreated to the bathroom. “Besides,” she shouted, “you need to learn that when it comes to sex, it’s all about quality over quantity.”

“Quality over quantity?” I shouted back. “That’s absolutely the lousiest thing I have ever heard any human being say about the physical act of love. Whoever came up with that cynical and asinine bullshit was a much colder fish than you.”

Caitlin stepped out of the bathroom as she ran a brush through her hair. She shook her head in frustration. “You’ll just never understand, will you?”

“I don’t know why you can’t give it up more than twice a week,” I said. “What’s wrong with showing a little love to your partner between the sheets, where it really counts?”

Caitlin poked me hard in the chest. “You know what it is about you? It comes from your being an orphan. You confuse sex with intimacy.”

“Well isn’t that a brilliant assertion, coming from one orphan to another.”

Caitlin continued to poke me in the chest. “I at least had a drama coach who took care of me growing up, Smith. I wasn’t bounced around from foster home to foster home like you were.”

“That drama coach of yours must have been a spinster with padlocks on her knickers,” I said.

“Well,” Caitlin said while dismissively waving her hands, “you’re always welcome to venture out and pay your respects to the town pump. But the town pump will never love you as much as I do. She’ll never give you what you really need. I’ll be with you until you’re old and gray, when no one else will take you in.”

Caitlin was trying to disarm me. She knew I was a manic-depressive and she had always said she completely accepted me for it. There really aren’t many women that are that understanding. But Caitlin’s sexual frigidity and lack of spontaneity were beginning to amount to a great source of frustration in my life. I am just a man who needs to have frequent sex. Why should a man ever have to be ashamed of that? But I wasn’t in the mood to argue the point with her.