Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (3 page)

Dr. Bird bobs her head while she does a circular walk.

“It makes me feel like she misses me.”

Dr. Bird pecks something on her notepad. I imagine the notepad filled with important scratches and claw marks.

Dr. Bird asks if I sent a picture back to my sister.

“I didn’t. Should I have?”

Do birds have shoulders? Dr. Bird seems to be shrugging hers.

She asks me what I would photograph.

This, of course, is a trap. She’s going to use her highly intelligent pigeon brain to interpret my answer. (Don’t laugh— pigeons are smart.)

“I don’t know. I have these weird moments when I see things—ordinary things—and I just find myself staring at them. Or just part of them. I stared at the lower left part of a stop sign one day. It had a dirty handprint smacked into it, but no one would see it unless they stood just where I was standing with the sun just where it was floating. It was about time and light and perspective. And dirt. I want to take pictures of stuff like that.”

Dr. Bird says that this is interesting. She’s wants me to be interesting, to have interests, and to be interested in staying alive. I do not tell Dr. Bird I want to kill myself sometimes, but she knows. She’s up in my head. She perches on the power lines of my thoughts.

“Why not trees?” she asks. “That way you’re capturing the happiness of the trees that you feel and doing something other than hugging them.”

“It’s not
happiness.
It’s
calmness,
” I correct. Making a distinction between happiness and calmness is the closest I can come to admitting that I never feel what I assume is happiness.

“That’s right, I’m sorry.” She jams her beak into the crook of her left wing, going after a bug or the perfect wording for her advice. “But I think if you took pictures of trees and put them in your room, then you would fall asleep and wake up with trees. That might help you combat some of the late-night anxieties you feel.”

Dr. Bird is a damn genius. I tell her so and she coos.

DEREK PICKS ME UP
at my house and says I have to accompany him to the drugstore out on route 38.

I agree but immediately question why we have to drive to a drugstore so far away.

“So I get to drive more.” Derek loves to drive his ’99 Honda Accord with the custom dents and brand-new sound system.

He spends at least seven minutes looking for a song on the radio.

“Radio?” I say. “How quaint!”

“I left my CDs at home.”

“What are CDs?”

“Dick.” He laughs.

Inside the store, I ask about our purpose.

“I need to buy some condom-ents.”

He is not funny.

“You are not funny,” I say.

“I need you to be my prophylactic wingman. Distract the pharmacy girl so I don’t have to do the snatch-and-grab.”

The snatch-and-grab: whereby a man, or Derek, walks past the condoms and grabs a box without looking so as not to attract unwanted attention from drugstore employees, many of whom are old women or young women with bad teeth. The downside of the snatch-and-grab is accidentally ending up with condoms that do not fit one’s lifestyle.

“What do you need condoms for?”

“I’ve been seeing this woman.”

“Woman? How adult-sounding.”

“She’s twenty-one.”

“Shut the hell up!” I yell in the store, causing the elderly man dusting off the register candy to smirk at me.

“Serious. We’ve been doing it for about a month. I want to spice things up by using protection. Maybe even try the ribbed or swirly kind.”

“You haven’t been using protection?”

“Hell no! You know that method where you pull out?”

“I am not familiar with that method.”

“Of course not, because you haven’t even kissed a girl where she pees.”

“Pulling out is a method for knocking a girl up and, on a more minor note, making a bit of a mess. It’s not helpful for avoiding pregnancy,” I say. “Also, what if she has the Herp?”

“She doesn’t have the Herp! She’s engaged.”

“Your logic confounds me.”

“If she had some kind of disease, she wouldn’t be engaged.”

“Yeah,” I say, “that makes no sense.”

“You’ll get to meet her at Mike Redman’s party.”

“Do I know Mike Redman?”

“You don’t?”

I know Mike Redman by name, reputation, and haircut. He tends to lead a pack of athletes around school. They all have faux-hawks and started growing beards in unison recently. He’s not an asshole, as far as I know. He could be. I’ve never had any interaction with him whatsoever. He’s never randomly locked me in a gym locker and neither has he wedgied me, knocked my books around, or, in a more contemporary bullying stereotype, stabbed me with a toothbrush shiv carved during Home Economics then posted a video of the assault on Facebook.

“I’m not sure if I’ve been invited,” I say.

“Invited? Who invites people to parties?”

“People with manners.” I hold up a bottle of Perky shampoo and ask, “Do you think if you rub this on your man boobs it will make them perky?”

“You are coming to the party with me. It’s gonna be crazy! I was at one he had a few weeks ago—half the school went.”

“He had a party a few weeks ago, and he’s already having another? What’s he celebrating?”

“He’s celebrating being alive and popular.” Derek holds up a box of hair coloring. “You need to bring out the burgundy in your hair. Chicks love burgundy hair.” He holds the box close to his mouth and wiggles an obscene tongue at the fabulous and happy woman on the cover.

“I will go to the party with you as long as you promise never to do that in my presence again.”

“Agreed!”

We walk around trying to look nonchalant. It’s ridiculous. Derek makes a lap around the store to see if there are any employees near the condoms.

Like every other drugstore I’ve been inside, this one employs about seven part-time elderly people and two or three teenage girls. It’s basically the most embarrassing place to buy condoms.

“Okay, there’s a young Asian girl working the pharmacy counter, and the condoms are just off to the left. So I want you to talk to her so I can grab what I need.”

“You will owe me so big.”

Where Derek gets his ethnicity information baffles me: the so-called Asian girl is actually a Latina.

I go up to the consultation window and immediately blank on what to say. Derek needs at least twenty-five seconds to crouch down, get his condoms, and move on. So far I have killed four seconds.

“Picking up?” The girl—woman—asks.

“Um. Yes.” What the
hell
am I doing?

“Last name?”

“Walker.” This is not my last name.

“Walker?” She turns and begins looking at the various plastic bags hanging on the wall behind her. A whole wall of remedies, none of them mine.

She’s analyzing the names closely. Perhaps I’ve lucked out and there’s no one named Walker getting medicine here.

I look over to the left and see Derek
pondering.
Is he comparing brands?!

The woman comes back with a bag.

“Devin Walker?”

“Um.”

“For Viagra?”

I am outraged that she doesn’t whisper my name and my medicine! I should complain to the manager, but then I realize that I just have to tell her it’s not my medicine.

“No. That’s not me,” I say.

“Oh—that’s the only Walker I have over there.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely not me.” I laugh nervously like a guy in a beer commercial trying to hide shenanigans from his hot girlfriend.

The girl—woman!—puts the Viagra back. I shoot Derek a look and wave my arms frantically, but now he’s considering what looks to be flavored lubricant.

You don’t deserve flavored lubricant!
I want to yell.

The woman comes back and says I should check with my doctor for my prescription.

“Good idea.” I agree. “It’s allergy medicine. I have bad allergies. Viagra doesn’t help with allergies, does it?”

Derek is preparing for wild strawberry-flavored sex, and I suffer from fake postnasal drip.

I ASK DR. BIRD
if it’s normal to dread social gatherings. She says to be cool, but it could just be a “coo.” It’s not hard to tell; I just may not want a clear answer.

I am not good in crowds of people. The very thought of going to Mike Redman’s party makes me sick for three days. Not physically sick, exactly. The brutal tease of anxiety burns my stomach. Perhaps my stomach lining will dissolve completely. There’s no specific element of a party that makes me afraid to leave my house. But from the moment that I agreed to go—an agreement that came during a gleeful, carefree moment without the serious thought a party invite should inspire—I began to think of a dozen other things to do instead:

Clean room

Put winter clothes away

Rearrange books

Learn how to cook a soufflé

Learn CPR

Go see a movie alone

Try to contact Jorie and hang out

Only the last entry is really worth pursuing, but in the days that follow my agreement to go to the-party-I-was-not-invited-to, I come up with more and more stupid things (dust, buy new shoes, learn how to skateboard) to avoid being in a house that is not mine, surrounded by people I do not know, talking about things I do not care about, drinking copious amounts of alcohol that will make me barf.

Like Walt says:
A dread beyond, of I know not what, darkens me.

I tell Derek on Thursday that I’m not going to the party. I almost tell him I’m not feeling well, but realize feeling sick more than twenty-four hours in advance is not a reasonable excuse.

“Why not, man?” he asks.

“I just think my parents won’t let me go.”

“Tell them you’re going somewhere with me.”

“They’ll probably tell me to be home by ten or something. And I know you’ll want to stay out later than that.”

“Tell them you’re seeing a late movie. You can stay out past midnight.”

See, this is how
desperate
a multiday anxiety assault can make me: I construct complex reasons not to go somewhere, involving my parents, who probably wouldn’t even notice or care if I was out for an evening, and lie to my best friend, who wants to include me in something fun.

I’m on a streak of something like eighteen weekends of not going out.

“Whatever, dude. I’m not going to beg you.”

Derek walks off to class and I go to Physics, where Beth might ask me about Jorie’s writings, which I have not yet found.

But she doesn’t bother me in class. In fact, I am very aware that she doesn’t look at me at all, since I spend most of the class looking at her.

“Whitman!” Mr. Hobblestein yells. “Stop staring out the window! You’re not going to learn about the laws of physics by looking out there—it’s not a closed system.”

Some of the physics nerds laugh. And why not?

I blush, afraid everyone will know that the window is not my focus, but no one cares about my weirdness. Not even Beth, who looks grumpy or tired or bored.

After class, I purposely take my time loading up my books so I can walk out with Beth, but her lab partner lingers, so I decide to just
bolt.
I should go through the entire week without talking to her. I shouldn’t draw attention to my failure to have something to give her.

In fact, it’s probably my fault that she’s in a dark mood.

God! Do you see the ridiculous things my brain does? What would Whitman do? Loaf and ponder. Jerk off in a field and write a poem about it.

I need to hug a tree. I need to yawp.

In the hall I shuffle along to my next class but can’t help turning around a couple of times to see if Beth is trying to catch up to me. She’s not. But she is just a few yards behind me, so I stop to get a drink at a fountain and try to sense her pace to know when to stop drinking. The water misses my mouth and drenches my cheek, so when I stand up to talk to her—ready with a convincingly surprised voice—I have to wipe my face like a first-grader struggling to drink from a milk carton.

“Hey, Beth.”

She doesn’t hear me as she passes, so I make a bold move. I smack her book bag the way friends might. Playfully. We’re friends! We’re having fun! Huzzah!

She spins and takes a billion nanoseconds to recognize me.

“Oh. James! Hi.”

“Sorry. I’ll leave you alone if you want. Just thought you looked blue.”

“No. Tired. Tons of stuff going on. Just one of those weeks.”

“Yeah. I never really have
one
of those weeks. Most of my weeks are like that.”

“That sounds unfortunate.”

“You get used to it. Grimness, blobbiness, fogginess.”

We walk quietly.

“No luck on the search for Jorie’s graphic story,” I say.

“Bummer.” She’s about to dismiss me then and there.

“But I will keep looking. I have to make short forays in there.”

“Why’s that?”

“Parents don’t like me going in. I guess they’re pretending something.”

Beth’s about to respond but looks at her phone instead.

I agitate my brain’s detritus in search of a funny story. Something to cheer Beth up. I’ve got nothing! I don’t know enough about her to say anything witty and personal and funny.

So I go with the thing that’s one step above commenting about the weather:
asking about her weekend plans.

“Well, I was supposed to go to a party,” she says, “but I might not get there.”

“What party?”

“Mike Redman’s?” she asks. “You know him?”

“Oh. Yeah, I heard about his party.”

Yes, I’m the guy that fails to say,
I’ll be there! Let’s go together!

“Are you going?” she asks.

“One of my friends asked me to go. But.”

Beth waits for me to offer some explanation. I think of a few that won’t make me sound like a loser.

I try: “My parents are a little strict with the curfew thing.”