Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (18 page)

“I told Sally that we had to break up.”

“
You
broke up with
her?
” I asked.

“It’s too much. I can’t keep lying to my mom.”

“I’m impressed that you can turn down all that sex, considering your terrible reputation on the Internet.”

I’m trying to make light of the situation. Again.

“Did you steal money from the pizza shop?” he asks.

“Huh?”

“The register was off by a bunch on Sunday night. Flip’s been crazy all week trying to figure out what happened.”

“Oh.”

“I told him it was his nephew. But Flip says you were all sorts of weird on Sunday.”

“Huh.” I have reverted to monosyllabic communication with the hopes that I will be found incapable of going to trial. (“He’s a caveman, your honor! He can’t testify or be tried by a jury of his peers. Unless you can find more cavemen, that is.” Laughter, freedom, etc.)

“I want to know what kind of ‘weird,’ but you and I have larger issues to discuss.”

“I broke down crying.” This comes out surprisingly easy. It’s as if confessing to Dr. Dora loosened up my tongue.

“Crying?” Derek hasn’t looked me in the eye since sitting down with his lunch. But suddenly he’s looking at me. I have never given him credit for being a thoughtful guy. Now I realize that he’s always been thoughtful. He got me out of my house by getting me a job.

“Do you know what my house is like, Derek?”

“A little,” he says. “You tell me stuff without telling me stuff.”

“I did steal the money.”

Derek pounds his fist against the white table and curses, loud. People at the surrounding tables look at him.

“I’m sorry, man, I just—my parents wouldn’t pay for me to go see a therapist. I’ve been seeing one secretly and I have to pay her when I go.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me you needed money? I could have lent you some. Why did you have to steal from the job I got you?”

“Flip said he was going to get rid of me once his nieces are old enough to run the register. It pissed me off!”

“He doesn’t have nieces, man! It’s a joke! He says that to everyone—haven’t you noticed that?” Derek is amused and pissed. I envy his ability to mix those emotions.

I say that I didn’t notice. I don’t pay attention to those things.

“Man, you need to return that money. I’ll give you money for therapy. Even though you’ve fucked me on multiple fronts lately.”

An apology starts to form, but then Dr. Dora rears her stern head in my mind. I tell her head that an apology here is appropriate. She doesn’t speak. Am I supposed to do something other than apologize? She doesn’t speak.

Why am I having an awkward exchange with an imaginary version of my real therapist? Where is Dr. Bird for stuff like this? Suddenly Dr. Bird appears. It’s the back of her; she wobbles away from me, then circles. When I see her little black eye, she stops, cocks her head. She wants to ask me something but doesn’t. I want to ask her what’s happening, but then I recognize that a silence has been stretching itself out like bubblegum in the real world where birds don’t talk and my therapist is more than just a head and Derek sits there waiting for me to say I’m sorry.

“I’ve been having a hard time.” I scratch my cheek, my nose, above my eye. I’m trying to hide behind something. “I’ve been really depressed. I am depressed. Really bad. I think about killing myself.”

Derek shifts in his cafeteria chair.

“I haven’t tried, but I have thought about it. For months and months. I wake up and fall asleep with the same thoughts. Then I stopped thinking about it. But after this weekend, I’ve been thinking about it again.”

“Shit.”

There are lists of things on the Internet about what you shouldn’t say to someone who admits to depression and suicidal thoughts. “Shit” is probably the wrong thing to say. However, it seems right. If it’s the
only
thing Derek says I will probably lose faith in him as a friend.

“What do you need me to do?” he asks. “I mean that—I don’t want to pretend that I know what it’s like. But this sounds like
for real
depression. Like one step from one of those slow-motion commercials with blue-tinted shots of people who sleep all the time.”

“It’s hard to describe.” I look around the cafeteria. I wonder how many people in the room would say that I should just
think happy thoughts
or
get organized
or
decide on a college and career.
I wonder how many of them cut themselves. I see girls laughing with guys. I see guys moody and alone. I see girls checking their faces in small mirrors. I see girls not eating. I see guys waving around iced teas as they tell dynamic jokes. I see teachers mope through the room. I see the cashier and the food service ladies smile for some kids, frown at others. I see smirks, behind-the-back points and laughs. I see all these things and I wonder what these people see in me? In Derek?

“Derek, what can I do to un-fuck your world up?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he laughs. “I’m not sure I can be un-fucked at this point. And you’ve got your own shit to deal with.”

I say that I’ll give the money back to Flip and apologize and quit. I’ll make sure Flip knows that Derek didn’t have anything to do with it. Or his nephew.

“You can’t quit if you need therapy money.”

“I’ll get my parents to pay somehow.”

He tries to object and brainstorm ways for me to keep my job, but I insist that
my
plan will need to be
the
plan. Not because it’s the best idea, but because I’ll feel guilty otherwise.

In my mind Dr. Bird says, “Good good good good.”

I SOUND MY MORNING YAWP!
I blast out my inner glow at the sunshine to try and shout it down. To have it lift me up. For someone, somewhere, to see me!

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,

If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me!

I care not what clothes I wear today. I care not about my hair. I linger on the smells I’ve accumulated overnight in my warm bed. I consider letting the beautiful fragrance of my living, breathing self speak for me, but then I shower and shave and brush my teeth, remembering that the world has moved past the nineteenth century and into a world of germs and deodorant.

Still, though, I feel an energy in my body electric. I feel the blood in my veins; the marrow in my bones pulses and my very bones glow.

Did someone slip me drugs in my dreams? Mayhaps!

I ignore my mother and father, saying nothing, not even a yawp. I find it best to keep my mouth closed and my mind racing to get out of the house without worries. My father does not consider me for more than a moment—I am the strange thing that came from him. My mother seems perturbed by my silent hand gestures, shrugs, smiles, waves, but I’m out the door before she can complain, before I can crumble and be the sullen boy that absorbs little comments about how I should compose myself and how my clothes are wrinkled and how I have four hundred stupid chores waiting for me when I return from hours of school.

I burst out my front door and greet trees in my mind, zagging to touch trees that rarely feel my palm on them. I am in a rush but without true direction. I jump into a backyard to touch a crabapple tree because I’ve never touched one of them before. A dog comes barking after me, a little yap-yap that I barely escape. It jumps and throws itself in a tight 360 spin with each little bark. I laugh and laugh!

At the park across from school I hug trees, pressing my cheek against the trunks, wrapping my arms as far around them as possible. My fingertips twitch to reach each other.

I look at the red marks on my inner arms and decide this does not count as defiling. I even absolve Jorie because she did not intend to ruin her body; she sought peace through pain. I do not condone the method, but the method didn’t destroy her. It only helped her from being destroyed.

“Walt Whitman, I’m sorry for cursing you out. I don’t think you would punish Jorie for cutting because you would see her suffering. You saw suffering and cared, you cared for the strangers, the soldiers, the women, the lonely. You cared and just wanted people to see the joy in themselves both in their souls and their bodies. You would do the same for Jorie, and maybe me.

“So, I apologize, Walt Whitman.”

I walk on, feeling less manic but still bright. I’m not falling flat on the face of misery just yet. It might approach me quietly, but I’m not going to wave it in. I’m going to let it approach me face-to-face.

I weave my arm through a huge bush. The leaves tickle my arm hairs.

As I get to the sidewalk and prepare to cross, I see Beth walking. She’s not checking her phone or distracted by friends. She’s alone, walking slower than normal. She’s not sad, yet she doesn’t seem lively. She normally bounces when she walks. Today she looks like she wants to blend in with the plain walkers. The people who don’t like poetry. Who don’t want to look other people in the eye, or deep into the eyes of others.

Part of me still burns embarrassed for my assumptions. Part of me hopes that she dumped Martin. Part of me thinks back to how I broke my arm trying to impress her. That poor little Tastykake wrapper. That poor bus driver.

I look both ways and cross the street. I swoop up next to Beth and say hello with the kind of ease I never thought possible.

“Hey, James.” She smiles and it’s not the best smile she’s ever given me, but it’s real and not about happiness or love or anything abstract.
It’s nice to see a friend in the morning,
it says.

We walk a bit and I have many urges—to apologize, to explain myself, to say we can start over . . . or at least jump backwards, prior to our Fillmore’s dinner. But time travel isn’t possible, and an explanation doesn’t seem necessary and an apology seems dramatic.

Instead, I ask about her week and tell her about some poems I’m working on and we make a plan to meet this afternoon to finish the website. It’s like we’ve gotten past weirdness without even worrying about what the weirdness means.

I guess sometimes life can be easy if I let it.

AFTER DINNER, I SPEND
a while staring up at my photo tree. It seems dusty and the photos’ corners are curling, ruining the illusion of connectivity between all the different limbs and trunks. I should get more tape, but I just stay on my back, afraid to disturb the relative peace I’m feeling.

Of course, my phone starts buzzing.

“Yo!” I say with both mock and genuine enthusiasm.

“
Get away from the window!
” Derek yells to someone on his end. “Dude. I need a favor.”

He sounds very concerned but also like he wants to laugh.

“I need you to come over and help me get Sally away from my house.”

He explains that Sally showed up on his front lawn ten minutes ago and started throwing clumps of dirt at his bedroom window.

Derek yells at his sisters and they yell back. Accusations, threats, dirt clumps knocking against the window. Laughter, too.

“Dude, if my mom comes home or the cops show up, I am screwed!”

“What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Anything!”

I tell him I’ll be over as soon as possible.

I grab my camera bag and hop on my bike, feeling like a weirdo journalist off to cover a big story.

I haven’t biked to Derek’s since last year, and I feel like I haven’t really enjoyed riding my bike since eighth grade, when pedal-powered travel dominated my outdoor movements. Still, I remember sidewalk buckles and low curbs I can jump over with ease. All the old muscle memories return vividly, almost as if the smell of the moving air, the sound of the tires on asphalt, and my bending knees spark a part of my brain back to life.

This is happiness.

As I approach Derek’s house, I see someone on his front lawn, peeking in windows, banging on the front door. If the cops don’t show up in seconds, I’ll be shocked. I start taking pictures. I’m not sure if I’ll have the balls to do anything else, but I figure I can take a few pictures and see what happens.

I get a shot of Sally lofting one of Derek’s mom’s plants over the roof of the split-level. I get a shot of her screaming at the front door. I get a shot of her ripping grass out of the yard with both hands. Video would be more appropriate, but that is not a function on my camera.

The pictures suggest but do not capture the
pure
crazy
spewing from Sally’s mouth. This must be what I sounded like the other night in the restaurant.

Sally yells that Derek has betrayed her heart, that she was willing to give up the world for him, that he will never get another woman like her, that she would tear down the walls of the house to be with him; that he is being brainwashed; that he didn’t know what he was doing with a woman.

I feel bad for Derek and particularly his sisters, who are witnessing a meltdown that cannot be blamed on love and emotions. Sally probably needs therapy too. Because who throws a plant and tears out grass from the lawn? And who risks getting arrested for not only creating a disturbance and vandalizing property but also statutory rape?

“Sally!” I call out as I approach, dropping my bike and cradling my camera. “Sally, why don’t you talk to me?”

She recognizes me immediately.

“Oh, his little boyfriend? You mad that your butt-buddy wants to be with a woman?”

“Sally, I’m sorry about what I pulled at the restaurant the other night.”

She curses at me and balls her fists up but doesn’t storm off or assault me.

“Sally, you’re really upset. But Derek isn’t worth going to jail for.”

“I’m not going to jail, you tool!”

“Sally, he’s
underage.
His sisters are in there watching you trash their front lawn. You should leave now and maybe talk with Derek privately another time.”

She curses me out again. I’m impressed by her ability to call me a “fuckputz” without laughing.

I hold my camera a little higher.

“Sally, I have some pictures of you from today. Here on the lawn. Throwing things. It would be bad for you to get arrested and for these pictures to be in the hands of the police.” I see her start to breathe and think. She looks at the house, squints. I feel really bad for her. I tell her that I know how it sucks to be mad at someone. I tell her that I see a therapist and that I deal with depression and anxiety.