Spitting Off Tall Buildings (11 page)

DOCTOR GROMIS HAD thick eyebrows and brown stains on his teeth from smoking cigars. He was skinny and smaller than me. His specialty was working with Viet Nam vet cases; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the more modern ailments they’d come up with like my VSD.

Both of us knew why we were there: (A) for me to pad my case, and (B) for him to bill my insurance company the hundred bucks an hour. Gromis said there were three rules: I was to show up on time for my sessions, not leave early, and not miss more than two in a row. At the end of our meeting he stood up, shook my hand, and said it would be okay for me to call him Harry.

My appointment time was 11 a.m., Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There were four other guys in my group therapy sessions; Olivers and Watkins, who always came in together, Doyle Kopek, and Lance Arvidson with his racing bike with the broken spokes. Plus Harry. All VA guys except me.

Kopek ‘shared’ the most and monopolized the sessions. Nonsense, predominately. To me he was a wack and a blubberfuck with the need to go on for half an hour at a time about boring idiot minutiae like the details of an argument with an old woman on a subway or a cheesedick beef with his mother regarding the correct divvy of his VA allotment checks.

Then there was Olivers. A completely bizarre person. He
either owned three blue tee-shirts with the same hole in the sleeve or never changed the only one he had. He kept his hair long in cornrows and wore sunglasses to all the therapy sessions. His weirdest and most annoying characteristic was his continual rubbing and clutching at his penis. When he did talk it was to bitch about his medical condition or discuss something he’d seen on TV.

Lance Arvidson was quiet too. A nodder. He’d sit for whole sessions without speaking. Sometimes he’d mumble something or snicker at something stupid Kopek had shared but his main system for communicating appeared to be head movements of the Yes or No kind.

The last guy, Watkins, had been a guard at Riker’s Island. A big, mean-spirited weightlifter prick. Always going off at someone for something; jumping out of his chair, intentionally misinterpreting everything you said if you were white, talking shit and getting in people’s face every chance he could.

One week into the deal I hated them all. Except for Harry. To continue showing up but to keep from going crazy I was back on the booze again full time. Several times I came in drunk and dozed off during the sessions.

Harry called me into his office to inquire what was going on. I told him that it was clear to me that I had nothing in common with his astronauts. He wanted to know what else so I told him. I was honest. I said that I was back at the point again where I didn’t give a rat’s dick whether I lived or died.

He wanted me to quit drinking and said that he’d had some luck treating Viet Nam vets through hypnotism and wanted to know if I was willing to give that form of therapy a try.

I thought about it and said no.

Harry gave me a choice: I could go back to attorney Duffy and get hooked up with a new shrink and return to square
one with the Workman’s Comp deal or I could try the hypno sessions.

The day I arrived for my first treatment, the office receptionist and nurse, Ms. Venable, put me into a room I had never been in before; it was small with no carpet and no windows. The only furniture in the room was a vinyl-covered tan reclining chair against one wall. When I touched one of the arms, it felt sticky. Ms. Venable gave me a blackout patch for my eyes and a set of earphones. I put the stuff on and pushed back in the recliner. As she was leaving I heard her flick off the light switch.

A few seconds later, from somewhere remote, she must have hit another button because a voice in my headset started talking. It was Harry recorded on tape: ‘You are going deeper and deeper,’ Harry’s voice said. ‘You are more and more relaxed. All tension is being released while you drift further and further onto a flat, tranquil, blue sea…Deeper and deeper.’

Different sessions had different themes. Sometimes Harry’s voice had me on an airplane, looking out at a perfect cloudless sky listening to the humming of the jet engines while I experienced increasing drowsiness. Sometimes I’d be in a train watching the sunset and listening to the clacking of the wheels…clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack. Once, in one of the clack-clack recordings, I saw a large fat bird flapping away into the distance. A big, noisy crow.

I never heard any messages of indoctrination coming through the headphones because after the first five or ten minutes of listening I was completely unconscious. I would wake up an hour later with Ms. Venable tapping me on the arm.

I WAS SURPRISED when the hypnotism suddenly worked. It took two weeks. There was one small seizure the day after I stopped the booze, and a shaking fit the next but, other than those, I was fine. After my fourth week in Harry’s chair with the earphones, in an evaluation, I told him that #1, I had lost all desire for alcohol (which was true), and #2, I seemed to have given up most of my thoughts about killing myself or anyone else. Harry was pleased but insisted that we continue with the hypnotism treatments.

Then things changed again.

One afternoon, on an off day from the chair and headphones, I was waiting in the lounge of the Oriental Massage in Times Square; waiting to spend an hour with Sandy, the pretty Korean hooker. The day before I’d cashed my second Workman’s Comp check. Another two hundred and thirty-two bucks. Having quit alcohol I was celebrating receiving the money by letting myself get a massage and a blow job, then going to the movies to eat buttered popcorn and watch the newest Clint Eastwood.

It was a few minutes past one o’clock. Sandy always started work at one. I knew that. I had paid my up-front massage money and I was sitting in the lobby waiting.

Time passed and I had to pee. The woman behind the partition with the plastic window was also Korean and spoke bad American. She let me know that Sandy would be along. ‘Pretty soon. Sandy come soon. You wait. Pretty soon.’

Some more time went by with me still sitting in the lobby and no Sandy. I returned to the plastic window and asked to be let inside to use the john. The lady smiled and nodded, but misunderstood what I was asking, so I went back and sat down.

Then a guy came in. An older guy in a dark suit and tie. Asian. But he didn’t sit down.

When the partition lady saw the guy in the suit she got up, left her stool, and disappeared back inside.

A minute later Sandy opened the door and came out into the lobby, which was unusual because I’d never seen any of the girls came out front. Like always, she smiled and looked sexy and beautiful. Like always, she was in her black silk robe with the black panties underneath. But my favorite thing with Sandy, the real turn-on, was her red red lipstick.

While the other guy stood there, she came over and sat down next to me on the couch, grabbed my hand, kissed me, and pressed the hard little nipple of her tit into my upper arm.

She was whispering. She wanted me to know how very happy she was to see me again. She giggled about missing me and my funny jokes.

Then she kissed me again, harder this time, deeper, sliding her tongue under my tongue. After the kiss she looked up at me - she had big eyes. Sandy wanted to know if I would mind coming back later that day, or maybe even later that night. She was sorry, she said, the man in the suit was a very big tipper. Japanese. He didn’t like waiting. If she didn’t take him right away ahead of me he would leave and she would lose a very big and impressive tip. Then she kissed me again and handed me back my massage fee - a twenty and a ten; ‘You come back later. Okay, baby?’

I looked up at the guy, standing there with his arms crossed
staring at the ceiling, impatient, like some spoiled jerkoff waiting in front of the Plaza Hotel for his limo.

My mind started talking. First it suggested that I act nice and just get up and leave. Be a good guy. Walk out. No problem. Sandy would be grateful and when I came back next time she would demonstrate her thanks by doing some special sexual favor for me. But that message was overridden by a second quick message. The new message said: ‘Fuck these cocksuckers! Fuck them for embarrassing you and treating you like a second-class piece-of-shit trick.’ Added to this message was the information that within a few minutes after I’d gone the other man - the rich Japanese guy - would be licking and kissing Sandy, fingering her pussy; maybe even feeling her tongue on his butthole. I began to experience a wrenching in my stomach accompanied by the bite of something sour in my throat.

I looked over at Sandy. Then at the face of the partition lady and then over at the big tipper. It didn’t matter any more. None of it. Fuck it!

I stood up and unzipped my pants and pulled out my dick. Sandy stood up too. They looked surprised but no one did anything because they didn’t know what to do.

First I urinated on the couch where I’d been sitting, then I twisted my stream to the floor by Sandy’s feet. She stepped back. Then I pissed on the coffee table and the magazines.

When I was done I zipped up and walked out, slamming the door behind me.

Two blocks down Broadway there was a ginmill off the corner of Forty-fifth. A spot where during the day you could get one-for-one until 5 p.m. It was hot outside and the Clint Eastwood movie didn’t start for at least another hour.

I went in, found an empty stool and put a twenty-dollar
bill face up on the deck. I ordered three shooters with a beer back. The bar guy had the Yankees on. New York at Baltimore. Third inning. The goddamn Orioles were already ahead six to one.

He set up my beer and whiskey and I tried my first sip in almost three weeks. It was awful, like the taste of cigarette ashes in an inch of water at the bottom of a glass. Stale. Stabbing. Heinous. A taste completely unlike any whiskey of any kind.

I knew it was the hypnotism. Some fucked saboteur reprogramming message Harry had pumped into the depths of my brain through the earphones.

I didn’t know what else to do so I hammered the rest of the shooters and gulped down a swig of the beer. It was rank shit too. Disgusting. Like kerosene or liquid rat poison or dwarf piss. Awful.

I waved for the guy and when he came over I switched to vodka shooters, plain water back.

He set me up again and I hit the first sip hoping the vodka would at least taste different from the whiskey. But it didn’t. It was the same. I tried the water. Only it seemed uncontaminated.

When I’d finished the drinks I ordered more. My head pounded and my heart raced like the way you feel when you’ve just mainlined half a gram of coke.

The second vodka shooter wasn’t as bad as the first. Like before, like rancid wet ashes but not quite as bad.

It took another fifteen minutes and two more sets of shooters until the stuff tasted halfway normal.

Then I was okay again.

I continued going to the hypno because I had to in order to stay qualified to receive my Workman’s Comp checks. But I kept on with the booze too. I just didn’t tell Harry. The adjustment
was simple: on the days I had my sessions I’d hold off getting drunk until after I left his office.

I STARTED TO become a more frequent visitor at Bert’s downstairs manager’s apartment. We were both sports fans and his most recent and prized possession was a big-screen TV - a forty-six-inch job he’d confiscated in lieu of back rent. Sometimes it happened that when a roomer got locked out or vacated suddenly, Bert would procure his belongings: a racing bike, boom-box radios, a computer. Sometimes he’d sell the stuff if it was electronic, sometimes he’d give it to one of his kids, and sometimes he’d lock it in his storage room in the basement. Bert excelled at fist fights which helped if the ex-tenant returned for his stuff and began complaining regarding who was entitled to what.

Angel-Lee was working nights waitressing at her titty-bar job and Bert knew I followed the Yankees and Mets and liked boxing so I had an open invitation to drop in. I was okay. We’d sip Bert’s beer and watch the game on his monster TV. Sometimes during the commercials he’d mute the sound and dispense advice about my case and brag about outsmarting the Workman’s Comp people and the welfare department.

It would be me and Bert and the twins, Carrie and Connie. After the girls fixed dinner and did the dishes they would confine themselves to their big bed in the rear area of the apartment. They had learned to keep a low profile around their daddy when he drank, which was mostly day and night.
He could easily become a mean-spirited and belittling prick when it came to criticizing his wife and kids.

The twins liked having me around. I’d make up preposterous yarns about their favorite TV actor or rock star and say he was my cousin or I went to school with him or I’d once driven him to the airport in my cab. When they would challenge me I’d concoct a personality characteristic or a tattoo the guy had and go on about it until they were convinced that I was really telling the truth. Then I’d make a face to let them know that I’d fooled them again. Then too, me being in their apartment made it easier with their dad because it took some of the heat off.

Bert’s three-year Workman’s Comp lawsuit finally got settled and the amount came out to be forty thousand dollars. Robert Edward Francis Duffy took his one-third off the top which was the agreed split but Bert was left with almost twenty-seven K, which, according to him and Bob Duffy, was a decent hit.

He celebrated by staying drunk and snorting coke and vanishing from the building for seventy-two hours. After he sobered up and got contrite he bought rollerblade rollerskates for his girls and a pearl necklace for beautiful Angel-Lee.

One morning several days after the check was safely in his bank, I accompanied Bert to the OTB on Broadway. It was not yet 10 a.m. but he was half drunk and snorting crack again.

He wasn’t much of a gambler and due to his coke and booze problem his relationship with his family had gotten worse. The next day when he came to with a new hangover he discovered that Angel was gone and his savings account was at zero balance.

She’d had enough. It turned out that her and Tall Jimmy, the bartender at her job, had been having a thing and what was left of the settlement cash had provided them with the motivation to relocate together to the southwest.

Bert stayed drunk and high on coke for another week, ignoring his manager’s job and his kids. When he was completely broke and his credit was gone, he started in on wine. The girls, in fear of their dad, came up to my room. At night they slept on my floor in their sleeping bags.