Eureka (5 page)

OB GIDNEY HAD
called it about how Sally would react to Otis’s buying a Cushman. She theatened Otis. He either voluntarily went to talk to someone at the world-renowned Ashland Clinic about his problem or she would force the issue directly, through Bob and other doctors, or by some other means—gunpoint, if necessary. A
real
gun, not some kid’s BB thing.

She went completely over the edge upon his return from his hour-long Sunday afternoon ride, which he had taken off on without any discussion while she was working in her rose garden in back.

And she didn’t even know about his Buck-like spin with young Sharon.

“Corporate CEOs do not ride around on forty-year-old motor scooters wearing football helmets and carrying pop guns named for comic book cowboys,” Sally said.

“Maybe more of them should,” said Otis gamely. He laughed, trying to make a joke of it all.

Sally wasn’t buying. “You go to Ashland Clinic tomorrow, or I will get it done through Pete Wetmore and the board of KCF
and C if I have to. They may not want an untreated lunatic running their company.”

“Pete wouldn’t have the sense or the courage or the guts or the smarts or the balls or the energy or the heart or the soul to do a goddamn thing,” said Otis.

“He’s going through the same thing you are—a midlife crisis of some kind,” she replied quickly. “It has hit him a little earlier in life than you, and it’s turned him to mush, that’s all.”

“He was born mush.”

“Go to Ashland!” she screamed.

So he went to the world-renowned Ashland Clinic the next afternoon.

THE CLINIC WAS
housed in a large mansion and several smaller buildings in a fourteen-acre wooded setting on the west side of Eureka. It resembled a rich man’s estate or the campus of a small private school, both of which it had been in earlier lives. One of the founders of Eureka who had made and then lost great sums of money on the huge natural-gas fields of central Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma had built the original house as a monument to himself. His name was Sam Gulliver, and the house—a three-story twenty-seven-room brick replica of an English country home—was still known as the Gulliver House, a fact that often got kids and naive tourists thinking it was where the Gulliver of
Gulliver’s Travels
lived. The place and the land had been taken over by a small Catholic girls’ boarding school after World War II. They had added several buildings, and when the school went out of business in the late 1970s, the Ashland people bought it at auction for their clinic.

The Ashland founders were eight doctors and researchers from the Moran Foundation, the first of several well-known and
well-regarded mental health institutions in the Midwest. The eight had a joint falling-out with the Moran leadership over Freudian theory as well as what they called “ego development” among the clinic’s older establishment. They moved as a group 140 miles west from Moran, Missouri, to Eureka, Kansas, and opened Ashland Clinic, the name having come from the obscure fact that Freud had once stayed in a British country hotel named Ashland.

Dr. Clyde (Knothole) Norton was the last of the Ashland founders still alive and, at eighty-seven, continued to exercise overall control of the clinic and the foundation that ran it. Legend was that his very private nickname had been given him years ago—as a young man, he had resembled a knothole in a freshly cut cottonwood tree: small, round, woody, grainy.

Otis thought about putt-putting out to Ashland on his red motor scooter but figured that would be truly throwing a red flag in the face of the bull. So he went instead in his tan Explorer.

As arranged, Bob Gidney met Otis at the front desk and took him directly to Dr. Russell Tonganoxie, the psychiatrist Bob had touted before. Bob said Tonganoxie was known worldwide for his studies, writings, and travels in pursuit of truths about what he called “The Mature Male in Crisis.”

Otis’s first impression of the fifty-year-old-or-so Tonganoxie was that he had to look no further than in a mirror if he wanted to see a mature male in crisis. Russell Tonganoxie’s long dark brown hair came down over his ears, and he wore his khaki chinos at least a size too large and barely pressed, as well as a gray sweatshirt with
PACKERS
on the front.

“Don’t be put off by the way I look,” he said immediately, as if he had been reading Otis’s mind. “We all have our situations.”

He pointed at a leather chair for Otis to sit in. The office had
probably been a master bedroom in its life with the Gullivers. Lavish moldings framed the room, the ceilings were high, and a huge fireplace and mantel covered most of one wall, tall French windows another. Tonganoxie’s desk was a long pine table covered with books and stacks of stapled-together papers—reports of various kinds, presumably.

Tonganoxie said, “When I came here from Johns Hopkins six months ago, I negotiated a deal. Not only no white coat but no coat of any kind, no tie. It’s in my contract that I can wear to work anything I want. That was my little Eureka.”

Otis said nothing.

“You
do
know what the name of your—our—town means?”

“Yes. It’s Greek for ‘I found it,’” said Otis matter-of-factly. “The chamber uses the phrase a lot in its promotion stuff, as do the other ten or so towns in America named Eureka.” Otis was not interested in engaging in small talk with this guy. So he didn’t even mention the idiot city councilman who had tried a few years back—unsuccessfully, thank God—to add an exclamation point to the official name of this Eureka, thus making Eureka!, Kansas, the only city or town in America—maybe the world—with an exclamation point in addition to a comma between its name and its state.

“What about Archimedes? Do you know a lot about Archimedes?” Tonganoxie asked.

Otis shook his head. He didn’t know a lot about Archimedes.

“Well, sir, as an important citizen of this Eureka, you must surely know that Archimedes was a Sicilian-born Greek mathematician who coined that word, ‘eureka,’ in about the year 230
B.C.
He said it after discovering for the king how much of the crown was pure gold. ‘Eureka!’ he yelled. ‘Eureka! Eureka! I found it! I found it!’ Meaning he had found the answer—”

Tonganoxie stopped talking. And when he resumed a few seconds
later, he said, “All right, all right. Let’s get on with trying to determine if you’re sick or simply a guy hit by a routine run-of-the-mill bout of Motorcycle Syndrome.”

“Motor
scooter,”
Otis said. “I bought a Cushman motor scooter, not a motorcycle.”

“That’s too bad. There’s a lot in the neurosis literature already on men in their fifties, sixties, and seventies buying motorcycles. It’s quite common. As men slow down in real life, they want to do something that speeds them up. Nothing on scooters, though. Scooters—Cushman or any other kind—aren’t known for their speed, are they? I wouldn’t think running away from home on a scooter would work very well. I hope you’re not thinking about doing anything like that. You’d have to stay off the interstates, that’s for sure. The trucks would blow you off the highway. I’m a Jeep man, myself.”

Otis almost said, “Jeep?” but caught himself before there was engagement.

Tonganoxie answered as if he had said it anyhow. “My dad was an army officer, and I grew up with a deep and abiding passion for the Jeep, believing it to be the finest motor vehicle ever made. I own four of them now. They range in age from fifty years to fifty days.”

Otis found that interesting but still resisted a temptation to react, to participate.

Tonganoxie continued, “Wheels, there’s something about wheels that turns on males. They’re as much a part of our standard equipment as what’s between our legs. They’ve done serious studies about it. UVA did one five years ago with eighty-two kids of all ages—forty-one boys, forty-one girls, of ages two to fourteen. They were put into rooms full of toys and gadgets. The boys, no matter the age, went immediately to the cars and trucks and trains and buses or whatever there was with wheels. The
girls didn’t. A follow-up study done at Yale using bikes, cars, and pickups with college-age men and women had the same result. And there is good anecdotal evidence that the wheels thing continues right on through to the end of a man’s life.”

Otis, again, had no reaction. He knew from his own experience about the importance of wheels to little boys and grown men. He didn’t need a shrink or a study to tell him anything else about it.

“I have my wheels,” said Tonganoxie, moving on, “but I don’t own a toy fire truck or a BB gun. I used to have a baseball batting helmet, but that’s been a while. You’ve got one of those, too, is that right?”

“It’s a Kansas City
Chiefs football
helmet.”

“I grew up a Green Bay fan,” said Tonganoxie, tapping his Packers sweatshirt. “I can’t imagine ever rooting for any other team than the Packers.”

Then it was back to business. Tonganoxie asked Otis to describe that first moment—the Crack Moment, he called it— when Otis had seen the toy fire engine at the antiques show.

Otis did so in a few words, and Tonganoxie asked, “Did you feel something in you go ‘crack!’?”

“No,” replied Otis.

“A hot flash, a feeling of well-being, a sweep of nausea, a tear, a chest pain, a wham, a crash—anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Not even a little snap, crackle, or pop?”

“Not a snap, crackle, or pop.”

“Had you ever had thoughts before that day about someday— any day ever in your life—buying some of the things you couldn’t have as a child?”

“No.”

“So it just happened?”

“It just happened.”

Otis was beginning to seriously wonder how this guy ever got to be a psychiatrist, much less known in the world for anything special or important. Talking to him was like talking to the guy in line at the 7-Eleven.

That wasn’t quite right. There was a lilt and an authority in Tonganoxie’s voice that might have signaled some basic intelligence as well as a good sense of humor. But it was all very well disguised.

“At least you’re not a Silver Star,” Tonganoxie said. “At least I assume you’re not. You haven’t made up a phony daring bio about being a war hero or a football star, anything like that, have you?”

Otis shook his head. He had been tempted a time or two, particularly when having to explain to a room of men why a stupid injury in college had kept him out of the military.

“Silver Star Syndrome, we call it. A psychiatrist who did some work with the military borrowed the term from them. Some guys, as they age, get carried away with wishing they had done more when they were young or been braver or faster or whatever. Before they know it, instead of telling people the truth about how they spent the entire Korean War in a reserve unit at home, say, they’re talking about how they won the Silver Star or some other kind of medal for taking out a Red Chinese machine-gun nest at the Chosin Reservoir. Politicians and other public figures get caught at it all the time. I’ve treated several Silver Stars. They’re everywhere.”

Otis said that was not his problem, never had been his problem, and never would be his problem.

“All right, then,” said Tonganoxie. “Another common cause of the so-called Second Childhood Syndrome—no offense—is baldness. You got a problem being bald?”

Otis felt warmth in his face, which meant Tonganoxie was now seeing red in Otis’s face. “Not anymore,” Otis said.

“You’re offended—and embarrassed—just by the question. So that tells me you’ve still got a problem with being bald. When did you go bald?”

“It started in my twenties.”

“When did it end?”

“In my thirties.”

“You’re really pissed about it, aren’t you?”

Otis said nothing.

“You wonder why you, huh? You see me with all of this hair, and you see other people all around you—men twice your age— with full heads of hair. Was your dad bald?”

“No.”

“Either one or both of your grandfathers?”

“No.”

“So, with no warning and no expectations, you were picked out at random to have no hair on your head. Makes you really want to tell the god of hair or whoever to go fuck him- or herself, doesn’t it?”

Otis said, “I’m a bald-headed man. That’s what I am. Can we go on to something else?”

“Sure. But you ought to know that there could be reason to believe it’s your baldness that caused you to do the helmet and fire engine and motorcycle—scooter, sorry—bit. All of that stuff takes you back to a time when you had hair. Maybe you’re trying to build yourself a little time capsule. If so, you’re not the first. It’s quite common, in fact, among bald-headed men, particularly those who hate their jobs.”

Otis wanted out of here. Not in years had he wanted out of any place or situation as much as he wanted out of this one. He did not talk about being bald to anyone. It was something that
had happened to him, and that was that. It was like having a terrible accident that had left him terribly scarred or deformed.

Tonganoxie said, “It’s understandable, because you were robbed of some of your younger years. Being bald made you look older than your actual age. I’ll bet you looked sixty when you were forty. Right?”