The Children of Hamelin (22 page)

“I’m saying that therapy
is
your relationship with a man,” I said. “Instead of taking your troubles to your lover, you take them to group; instead of opening up your soul in bed, you puke it up here.”

“Are you suggesting that a healthy relationship between a man and a woman must be based upon her...
puking her troubles on you,
as you put it?” Harvey said primly.

“I’m suggesting that no real man can put up for very long with a woman who gives her cunt to him and her soul to someone else. I’m suggesting that no real man wants some other cat making it a threesome when he’s in bed with his chick.”

“And who is this other man you seem so paranoid about?” Harvey said.

“You are, Harvey,” I told him.

Pow! Harvey’s face froze into a featureless mask. Arlene looked straight at Harvey instead of at me. Rich, Charley, Linda and Ida rolled their eyes and groaned silently in various degrees of exasperation. But Doris—Doris stared into space as if I had triggered some cosmic flash in her head. What could that—?

O wow! Yeah—Ted gibbering about homosexual fantasies; not making it with her; no more chicks on the side either. Doris was seeing a strange new lover between herself and Ted—but this “other woman” was Harvey Brustein. Did she think it was a psychic fag thing? It wasn’t—what Ted and Arlene and the rest of them were getting off Harvey was deeper and dirtier than sex, was what I had gotten off smack when I was with Anne. Yeah, Harvey was the Other Man and the Other Woman to all of them—the way smack had been the lover that slept between Anne and me.

“You don’t think you might be projecting your own insecurities onto
—”

“Can it Harvey!” I told him. “Look around this room. Arlene can’t have a healthy relationship with me; you’re the other man there. Ted can’t get it up for Doris because you’re—”

“Are you suggesting that I have sexual relations with my patients?”
Harvey fairly shrieked. His gray pudding-face had a hint of redness in it; his eyes flickered heat for a second.

“That fag thing got you going, didn’t it?” I said. Harvey’s hands actually balled into loose fists. “Well cool it man, I’m not talking about anything as healthy as a little harmless nooky for the shrink. Dig: you and Rich and pot are the same twisted triangle. Likewise you and Charley and booze. You’re an emotional vampire, sucking it all in and putting out nothing but void. What I’d like to know, man, is the breed of monkey
you’re
feeding with all this shit.”

The color left Harvey’s face and his hands relaxed. “An interesting delusionary system,” he said. “Quite consistent with your history of heroin addiction.”

A middling-good try, but it wasn’t working. I could sense the group fissioning into factions: Doris and Rich and maybe Charley were eating up what I was putting out; it hit a chord in their own guts; Ida and Linda looked like they were ready to claw me to pieces in defense of their therapist-Man; Arlene seemed to be hanging high and dry on the fence.

“Come on, Harvey,” I said, “let your hair down. You’re a human being. A human being has needs. No one does anything without personal reasons. You’re got a personal reason for this Foundation scene; it’s
your
scene, you put it together. What’s your brand of junk, Harv?”

“The therapist must stand outside the group and maintain an objective viewpoint,” Harvey said woodenly. “Of course I have personal motivations like anyone else, but I leave them outside the Foundation. If I were to enter personally into the emotional dynamics of a group, my usefulness as a therapist—”

“Cut the shit!” I snapped. “You spend your whole life listening to people baring their souls in front of you. You’ve got scores of twitches so hooked on you they won’t take a piss without group discussion. Don’t tell
me
you’re not getting anything off it! That shit’s for the birds and we both know it.”

“I will not discuss my personal life in a group or with any of my patients,” said the Great Stone Face.

“Okay Harv. Just answer a simple question: are you married?”

“I see no point in
—”

“Aw come on, Harvey,” Doris said in her best both-feet-on-the-ground Earth Mother voice, “that won’t kill you. Tell us.”

“Yeah,” said Rich, “why the hell can’t you tell us that?”

I had the wolf-pack baying: Arlene looked puzzled at Harvey making such a big deal over nothing; Linda, true to her paranoia, looked suspicious; Charley looked more cynical than usual; even Ida seemed to be waiting for a straight answer.

Harvey paused for a moment, seemed to be studying the situations; he probably realized that if he carried the Great Silent Buddha Act much further, what their imaginations would read into it (maybe a Bluebeard number) would be uglier than any truth could be.

“I am legally married,” he said evenly. Then, more slowly, haltingly in fact: “However... my wife and I are... separated... we have a boy and a girl....” But strangely, instead of relaxing now that the Deep Dark Secret was out, he seemed to get tenser, began rolling the fingers of his right hand around an imaginary cigarette. He was afraid of something else coming out. I could smell it. What...? A sudden flash: he had been awfully uptight about admitting he was a San Franciscan.

“You were married in San Francisco, right?” I said.

Uptight! Uptight! His eyes looked like the eyes of a trapped animal. “I... I believe I told you that I’ve lived most of my life in San Francisco...”

“And the wife and kiddies are still there, aren’t they?”

“I... I... that’s really none of your business,” Harvey said. He glanced with far-too-plastic nonchalance at his watch. “Well, er... I see our time is about up,” he said. “I’ve got a session with Rhoda Steiner next hour, so we’ll have to cut it short. It
has
been a... er... most interesting group....”

And that was that. I deserved two ears, at least. You could argue about the tail.

Arlene and I, as if by some, unspoken arrangement, had let the others leave the room while we sat there exchanging strange stares. Now that we were alone, we both got up and faced each other down in the middle of the room.

“Well what do you think of the little brass Buddha now?” I said.

“You were cruel to him,” she said, without much conviction. “Yeah, but what if it was the truth?”

“I don’t know if it was the truth,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “I know you think it was the truth, so I can’t be mad at you for saying it—that’s the way a group should work. But—”

“But if that’s the truth, you’ll take vanilla?”

“I... I don’t want to think about it now. Look, I don’t want this to sound like a put-down, but please don’t ask me to go home with you tonight.”

I smelled it coming, but I was still kind of disappointed. I had socked it to Harvey according to the script, but I had hoped that the conquering hero would ride off into the sunset with the fair maiden. That’s the way they’d shoot it in Hollywood.

“Who said I was planning to?” I lied, deciding to leave
her
off-balance.

“You’re not—?”

“No, I’m not mad,” I said blandly. “I just got other fish to fry tonight. Later.”

And
I
left
her
standing there and wondering.

Ole!

Ordinarily, I can do without TV dinners. Plastic peas, library-paste mashed potatoes and a few slabs of well-rotted shoeleather drenched in diluted motor-oil are not exactly my idea of food for the inner man. However, making it back to my pad from the Foundation and determined to blow the accumulated muck out of my mind in the far East Village coffee-house scene, I was in no mood for restaurants and even in less of a mood to cook real food.

So I threw a turkey TV dinner into the oven and by the time it was as ready to eat as it would ever be, I had convinced myself that I wasn’t really hungry anyway. The TV dinner itself did nothing to change my mind.

Well, anyway, the TV dinner
had
taken care of my hunger, one way or another, and after I threw the aluminum foil tray into the garbage, I was ready to see what the night would hold. Except...

Except it was
really
November outside: temperature barely goosing 30 and a wet wind blowing. What I really needed after that Foundation scene was a nice June night when everyone and everything pours into the streets and you don’t have to think about going anywhere in particular. I had a yen for the street, but I knew that once I stepped out of the steam heat and into the cold sullen November street, I’d quickly end up making for Stanley’s or the Blue Goo or the Id or some other downer dive and the kind of crowd that had started to get pretty boring in the last few months. Cold weather in New York does that to you—kills the urge to wander.

But I had no intention of brooding around my pad, so I changed to Levis and a heavy flannel shirt, put on my warm black toggle-coat, pulled up the hood to protect my ears and ventured out into the dingy hallway. As I reached the stairwell, I heard a girl’s footsteps on the tin stairs about a flight below me.

I started down the stairs, but on the first landing down, I met Robin puffing her way up from below. Her ears and nose were bright pink from the cold—which made going outside seem a crummier idea than ever.

She frowned when she saw me. “Oh shit, man,” she said, “you’re going somewhere?”

“Nowhere important.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She smiled, reached into her peacoat pocket, pulled out a little brass opium pipe and a tinfoil-wrapped cube about half an inch on a side, said: “Groovy. Let’s go up to your place and blow some of this hash.”

“Best offer I’ve had all day.”

My eyes were popping from the effort not to cough and my throat felt like a furnace flue. The civilized way to smoke hash, for my money, is ground up with pot in a joint. But it wasn’t my money or my hash, so we were smoking little brown chips of it in the opium pipe and it was pure murder on my throat and lungs.

A mule kicked me in the Adam’s apple and I coughed out a typhoon of blue-gray smoke. I coughed again and again—top of my head seemed to explode in a shower of sparks with each spasm. But when I stopped coughing, I felt a delicious hollowness inside, feeling of containing the universe, conscious of the sweet cool air pouring into my lungs like the kiss of the sea. That’s hash: if you’re not a heavy cigarette-head, it can go down like honking Ajax, but man, you
do
come up high!

Leaning back on the couch next to me, Robin blew a thin stream of smoke high into the air like a spouting whale, no coughing, just as cool as you please. My throat still felt like it had been napalmed, but after four tokes of hash, who gave a shit?

“Very nice...” I drawled.

Robin giggled. Ripples of giggle shimmered the blue smoke in the air.

“Vury
nice...” she said furrily. She knocked the residue out of the pipe into an ashtray and refilled it with a big chip that she worried off the cube of hashish with a fingernail. She held a match over the pipe, took another toke, and passed it to me.

Girding my lungs, I held the match over the little bowl and sucked. Closing my eyes, I felt the hot smoke coursing down my throat into my lungs; I
was
smoke pouring down dark passageways and fading into moist flesh. I was the smokeflesh interface writhing in a million subtle convolutions. From somewhere outside my being, I sensed a hot tickling and a spasm building. I fought back the pressure of the spasm, concentrated on digging the spasm till I
was
the spasm fighting to be born. I let myself be pushed up a long dark tube and whooshed out into the universe...

I opened my eyes. Wheel My body had no weight; I knew I could float up to the ceiling if I felt like it. But why bother?

“Hey man, what
is
this thing?” Robin said. I let some air out of my balloon and drifted gently back to earth, saw that she was looking through one of the fee manuscripts I had taken home from Dirk Robinson, Inc. Some mingy little part of me seemed to be pissed off at her intruding on my life’s work, none of her business, really. But what the hell, man, what the hell...

“That, my good woman, is a fee manuscript,” I said.

“A
which?
Man, is this thing weird! Uh... you don’t write this stuff, do you?”

“Hand it here, girl,” I looked at the title page: “Meat for the Monster” by Harry Carew West. Mmmm, she had lucked onto a tasty example—the latest science fiction epic by old Hairy West, the schizophrenic monster-freak who I secretly suspected of accosting basket cases in men’s rooms.

“This is the work of an aspiring writer,” I told her. “Leave us have some respect. It is my job to read it, decide whether or not it can be sold, and then write a letter full of wisdom to the creep that wrote that piece of shit.”

She recovered the sf masterpiece from my hot little hand.
“Dig this stuff!”
she said. She opened the manuscript at random and began to read:

“...strapped to the cool wet rock with fetid encrustations of rotten yellow moss and semi-congealed mortworm ichor, Kellerman stared up at Buglush, gibbering with a nameless dread. The huge Jupiteranian rolled all twelve of his obscene saucerlike eyes and a thin stream of blue spittle dribbled from between the creature’s pulsating lips. The touch of a wet tentacle on his bare chest sent a wave of horrid pleasure through his fibers. But when the huge tubular tongue snaked out of the grotesque lower orifice, Kellerman howled in torment. The drool-covered tube...”

Robin held the manuscript up between her thumb and forefinger like it was an old dead fish and dropped it on the table. “Phew!” she observed.
“That
is
sick!
What kind of job do you have, man?”

“I work for the world’s greatest con game,” I told her. “Freaks like that in search of fame and fortune send us their masterpieces, expecting us to sell them. Instead, we take their bread, we read the things and send them back a classy literary rejection letter.”

“What can you tell a creep like this?” Robin said, all wide-eyed innocence.