A Fig, a Red, Red, Rose, and Eggs Benedict

200,000 PILLS: THE SACRED WHORE

2013-01-05T20:44:00.005-08:00

Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Greenwich Village (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A view of the park showing the Washington Square Arch and the central fountain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Parish church in the community of Wolfsberg - Sacred-heart-altar - Aaron Deutsch: Pfarrkirche Wolfsberg in der Gemeinde Wolfsberg - Herz-Jesu-Altar - Aaron (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1180 Raymond Blvd., Newark, NJ (Photo credit: SheepGuardingLlama)

At fifteen, in Greenwich Village, he was discovered by a woman whose prominent husband, Raymond, had a sexual predilection and member of a clandestine network. Those with intimate knowledge of what occurred in these private clubs, had to adhere to a code, insuring that those involved would remain anonymous. These were often successful members of society and they had to conceal their esoteric sensual souls for fear they would lose their position in our social hierarchy. They required the indoctrination of young men, and some women, who had to perform compositions the members of this collective had created from the compost of screen reminiscences. These performers had to possess certain physical attributes but more important than their look was their empathy, tolerance for the macabre, and without flinching in the heat of the most inspired execution of the character they were hired to assume.

Given the joys of gossip, it was difficult to refrain from discussing their clients uncommon behavior, and if hey could not control the temptations inherent in gossip, they faced the most dire consequences that based on my own harrowing experiences, included death. The actors embodied roles scripted according to those who paid them to realize their most idiosyncratic sexual scripts. Most patrons devised these performance with consummate attention to detail. In those days, many unenlightened and rigid members of society would have deemed their associates sexual appetites as malignant flowers in the bouquet of human sexual behavior. Personal physical allure was dependent on its correlation with the roles those who paid Aaron and others as disposable objects, performers, and disposable surrogates.

Since paraphilias, abnormal loves, or erotic hatreds are almost the exclusive territory of men—and heterosexual men in Aaron’s case—physical beauty was less important than in more traditional sensual fantasies. A client’s compositions often had complex roles and they had to remain interred and gaffes in decorum, it bears repeating, often had lethal conclusions. If the toxic winds of human gossip exhumed these intimate tales this breach in etiquette provided their less enlightened competitors, enemies, friends, and even lovers with what they might have considered perverse, or a weakness they could exploit. At best, they would appear odd, leading to disastrous personal and financial consequences.

Such unconventional behavior in their social strata made this form of exploitation, blackmail, and or worse, and were the very reasons that necessitated the creation of this surreptitous network. Aaron soon learned of these dangers subsumed beneath the giddy mask of sanity many wear to conceal the malignancy of their pathological sexual desires.

This world was so alien to the façade of pristine virtues in suburbia where the boy lived that the cultural transition was a profound emotional shock. All the concomitant acts of violence a player learned, either too late or not at all, were instances was an agreed end game by those that had seduced children to perform on this underground stage in the theater of the most absurd.

None of these perils occurred to a fifteen-year-old kid from Great Neck bedazzled by his roiling hormonal squall, making him incapable of passing on an invitation from a woman, named Lana, whose comeliness elicited in him a most profound visceral hunger. Prior knowledge would have failed to make him hesitate when she had proffered him an invitation to dine at her home with her and her husband. Aaron had thought he knew and had become habituated to the shock of the Village in comparison to the suburbs would learn the false illusion of youthful immortality made fools of us all.

If he was concerned about his existence, and what fifteen-year-old child could ponder the stench of senescence while blinded by the odd paradox inherent in youth that despite the biological conclusion of our lives, Death had failed to seduce him into thinking he was anything but inviolate and he belived, while all evidnce led to the contrary, that he was shielded from the erosions of the flesh, plaguing those less fortunate. If not for that delusion, Aaron’s precocious sensual soul, like many boys his age, manifested itself as a form of madness.

The thick cords of Lana's hair formed a diadem atop her crown. When worn without pins, the red highlights of her auburn mane tickled her sacrum as she sat in her chair at one end of the table that night. Across the mahogany divide, her husband, Raymond, the hulking owner of a famed Village bistro, sat in his purple velvet smoking jacket, and a matching eye patch over his right socket. The interstices in the weave of her black chemise permitted Aaron a glimpse of her silken flesh. He had met her in his parents’ beauty salon where he worked every Saturday. Lana’s green eyes, or Aaron’s jejune sense of the world, had failed to reveal any reason for anxiety and not a dissociated tickle of dread foreshadowed the intimate nature of his implausible postprandial audition.

In their russet-colored townhouse near Washington Square Park, he thought they’d invited him because Lana was a kind and amiable customer, and her gratitude for the consideration she had received was handed down to Aaron in the form of this invitation to dinner. Chicken Kiev—served by their Japanese houseboy—while the simplistic overture for the modest play that initiated him into the network. Raymond was an intimidating presence whose palpable sense of menace was enhanced by his eye patch. Aaron wondered if Lana’s beauty was worth the sense of horror and foreboding he had begun to perceive once he was seated.

Dapper in his ascot and monogrammed smoking jacket, Raymond began delving into Aaron’s precocious sexual history. Raymond’s fascination for the details of the boy’s juvenile amatory journey struck Aaron as bizarre but inherent in this situation, it triggered Aaron’s need to please and he divulged the maddening details he etched in the slim volume of his life devoted to the feminine somatotype and sensibilities.

As Aaron spoke, he saw his sexual longings as if an aberrant erotic prison, and whether his disclosure increased his perturbation and desire, he could not say, given Lana’s beauty and presence that served as an unguent and if it did not diminish his angst it provided an unguent. She induced in Aaron a mental stammer whenever he noticed her wry smile eliciting the slight tremor of her upper lip, a wink, whose image violated him, causing his heart to slice extra beats especially when he noted a corresponding smirk ruffle Raymond’s lips. His quest for the nuances of Aaron’s affection for girls continued to inspire Aaron’s account. Aaron believed, an accurate appraisal, this voyeurism aroused his host whose seat squawked while enduring Raymond’s mass and the childish pleasure he derived from each stroke as Aaron’s verbal brush clarified his erotic self-portrait. Whether, or not, Raymond’s patch was a conversation piece, or a necessity remained a disturbing mystery, a shroud draped over the rendering of this pseudo plunge into his premature historical intimacy.

Describing his avarice for every pretty girl or woman Aaron increased the unsettling force Raymond projected. He drew the boy into what Aaron conceived as a vortex his cloaked eye concealed and for what purpose remained unknown. His patch struck Aaron as irresistible and the thing’s insistence for him to return and stare at it with the same attentive visual caress as Lana had inspired. As if it existed on its own, the patch throbbed and Aaron found this force drawing him ever closer to something unspecific and Aaron needed a substantial conscious effort to suppress a maniacal scream. Aaron’s hands demanded an equal exertion to restrain from ripping the thing off the furtive wound, in his fancy, it cloaked. The more he spoke, the more compelling the impetus to grab it, and the restraint needed challenged his endurance and his will.

The patch its unknown but iconic meaning, amplified the pressure in Aaron’s chest, making him strain to breathe, and to control his sweaty hands. This feeling of sustained fear, and the curiosity regarding their invitation, caused Aaron to vacillate between mild approbation and terror. Yet, he found his confession as if drawn from the nexus of his soul by Raymond and it forced Aaron to dig deeper into the nadir and depths of his brief sensual life.

Raymond smiled then slapped the table and, “I knew it. I mentioned it to Lana and she thought I was nuts. You see darling, I have an eye for such things. Why the moment I saw you I knew you were perfect for…” His lips seized and silence reigned, the boy couldn't think but thanked his hosts as Raymond’s smile widened, and this demonic puppeteer with his huge head and oversized lone eye horrorified Aaron. He asked Aaron to tell him about the first time he had sexual intercourse. He chastised Aaron for skimming over details, and Aaron had the sense that if he did not tell him everything that happened it would… well, he did not know, but he knew he was in some initial stage of jeopardy.

Aaron’s impropriety registered in the swelling of Raymond’s concealed socket that defied reason and grew with every word until it had a slight but discernible gravitational pull, growing more robust and tumid with the explication of every disgorged detail, transforming the purity of Aaron’s lost virginity into an obscenity, and he could have sworn the fabric cloaking his empty orb had pulsated faster in his imagination with a dim auditory thumping. Yes, he would have sworn to all that violated reason and the laws of physics that the thing issued a clunk, an embryonic heartbeat whose volume escalated with each detail Aaron disgorged. He had the horrifying sense that it had a simple nervous system energized by Raymond's vicarious thrill in Aaron’s vivid composition. He tried to concentrate on Lana’s comeliness, but the lure of the bizarre organism breeding in secrecy was then in control of his consciousness.

Was the patch covering an injury? Was a new replacement being sized and prepared? Was its alternate soaking in their bedroom like dentures in a glass, or did the piece of cloth hide an empty socket. Given what ensued, Raymond might have had a miniature camera placed behind that curtain. Raymond despite his visual limitations, and advanced age, could've torn Aaron apart if events dictated the need for an aggressive response, and his dread in concert with his modesty soared.

We sipped Irish coffee and nibbled on pastries, and Raymond decided to step out for a bit of fresh air, and Aaron knew with disconcerting certitude that Lana and he had another destination. Anxiety and discomfort he perceived as a sense of physical and mental compression as Raymond’s departure defined his destiny. He had the brief thought his pelvis would crack while his scrotum contracted and expanded like a ragged accordion.

Lana clasped his hand and escorted him upstairs in silence and into a Victorian bedroom with a marble fireplace, a walnut bureau, mahogany bedside cupboards, a cheval glass, a four-poster, and paintings. Within an instant now, but an eternity then, they were on the bed as lone single hermaphroditic entity, and her exquisite face and body, despite the erosions of memory, her comeliness made him shiver, more in the future, then on that night. Tumescence was almost a constant in those testosterone-driven days—a car ride induced an erection—so short of severing his brainstem its painful and often embarrassing protuberance did not defer to dread and had he been older, given the alchemy of desire and awe, he may have disappointed his hosts.

Melding in oneness with Lana, a defiant crash usurped their combined greed, when Raymond, Aaron later learned, had dropped his camcorder, which was then the size of an air-conditioner. The clamor made both Aaron and Lana stifle a nitrous oxide laughter, but given the occasion, as if in the midst of a eulogy, they managed to contain their hysteria while the comfort he found in Lana’s laugh and subsequent smile caused but a brief interlude in their avarice. Despite Raymond’s muted groans and ham-handed destruction of his cinema verite’ composition, the show did indeed continue until the curtain descended.

Aaron wondered if Raymond screened his work for an upcoming family circle meeting. Aversion became joy, as he stared into the glaze of Lana’s eyes, and her smile, which contained a serene air of stoicism that concealed her mood. Aaron imagined the big pirate with cock in hand, seminal spew dribbling on his slacks as if an exclamation point to his catastrophic gaffe and ludicrous attempt to salvage his night's effort like a botched vaudeville act.

The less than fantastic denouement—to this routine script by the standards Aaron would portray in the circumscribed world of perverse loves whose rocky terrain he had surmounted when Lana’s silken thighs cuddle his head while his knees indented the velvet ottoman as if he had eaten a ceremonial wafer. Aaron’s behind, if Raymond regrouped to frame the scene for his camera, had to have been an appropriate concluding shot. Yet the humdrum events that transpired, the scotophilia enjoyed by a man of means and sophistication, and the odd sensation Aaron felt while falling in love with Raymond’s gorgeous wife was incomprehensible.

At the evening's conclusion, they sat in the library drinking brandy and eating pastries. Imbued with a sense of surreal disorientation, Aaron felt vertiginous. Based on Raymond’s recitation of the virtues of the brandy, Castello Banfi Grappa, Aaron decided it was a tad more expensive than a small nuclear device.

Raymond held a snifter up to the light. “Well, my friend, did you enjoy the evening?”

He swirled the brandy and sniffed it while staring at Aaron, and he wondered if under his eye patch, Raymond had winked.

“Yes, I did.” What would have transpired if he said he was bored?

“Did you enjoy the meal?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Good. My wife is a beautiful woman, isn’t she?”

Lana had a whimsical smile on her face throughout the night, and appeared to have interred her thoughts and feelings. She decided then to excuse herself to freshen up. Aaron considered that he might have misinterpreted Raymond's tone, its sense of menace as he slashed his words with a resonant baritone scratched by his heavy smokers’ corrupted larynx. Lana’s vaginal ambrosia mixed with semen in Aaron’s Jockey's, as he stuttered, “She's gorgeous.” His words were discharged as if buckshot as he vacillated between losing consciousness and mania.

“Then maybe we’ll see more of you.”

The temptation was torture as he choked back his splintered words. Unless you’re planning to give me a barium enema, you've seen just about all of me. “My calendar is open.” Sweat exploded from his every pore.

“Excellent.” He sipped his brandy, and Aaron followed suit.

He again sloshed his brandy studying it in the light, “This has a splendid waxy nose of fruits and lanolin.”Was he referring to laundry detergent? “It’s light, very ethereal, and crisp on the attack, with a fruity, light-to medium-bodied, perfumed green apple jam flavor. Am I right, Alan?”

I hesitated but corrected him. “Aaron.”

“Oh, of course, I’m dreadful with names. Ask Lana when she returns from dawdling. She has a cleanliness fetish. Did you know she douches several times a day?”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“That was a joke. How could you possibly know?” He stared at his brandy. “Arno...David, uh, Aaron, take a sip. Notice the palate-tingling wave of peppery heat. It’s a nice fruity grappa without a bitter note in the entire symphony.”

He looked at Aaron, who was petrified, staring at this imposing Cyclops. Raymond asked if he wanted to preview a movie, he had shot. Before he could answer, Lana returned with an envelope. Inside was a check for two hundred dollars, a fortune. “For your trouble.”

“If this was trouble, you may…” His unarticulated thought was ‘if that’s trouble you can disembowel me with a Bowie knife.’ Lana heard, “Trouble me at your in … your convenience.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Lana winked which underlined his absurd comment. “You’ll have to leave now. Raymond wants me for himself now.”

His brain produced yet another inane comment, “What a hog.”

Lana escorted him to the door and kissed his fervid cheek. This mundane script had far more fantastic variations before its abrupt conclusion. Raymond and Lana introduced him into a labyrinth of wealthy and respected members of Manhattan society, many of whom were philanthropists, devotees of the arts, involved in television, film, theater, and business moguls who needed to maintain their mask of sanity.

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200,000 PILLS: PANIC AND THE LOST WEEKEND

2012-12-31T09:30:00.000-08:00

Panic-attack (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We become habituated to our idiosyncratic experience of anxiety, but when it mutates into another variant ti becomes more than disconcerting and it can have dire and interminable repercussions. If one is in therapy the psychiatrist is often the worst person to be your guide. Trying to describe an abstract emotion or sense of apprehension to doctors often leads to confusion and misdiagnoses. In a previous post called Driving Into the Line of Fire, I had a gun placed against my head and my life was at stake. However, in this post, I began to experience panic attacks and they were much more intense than when I was robbed. The difference is that I was able to exert a modicum of control during the robbery. It was real and I was able to effect a change. True panic is so compelling that it is almost beyond comprehension for those who have never had this sensation. My predicament was complicated by Dr. Pascal's absurd reasons for my experience of dread, and when you give a person an antipsychotic you often can induce a psychotic reaction. For a psychiatrist t miss the pseudo-Parkinson's that he induced is almost incomprehensible in retrospect. At the end of this post, I will tell you what Pascal had missed.

Welcome to my life…

Present Imperfect

Past the witching hour, I pounded the asphalt for seventy minutes. A bottle heaved by a passenger in a Mercedes missed my head. The car circled. From that window a gob of spit, found my face. A chorus of laughter led to a top of the morning Fuck You! I turned onto Maple toward the russet brownstone and they sped away.

A fissure scarred the throat of the building where a drug deal had gone right or wrong, leaving seven dead. The last was a child who had run to greet her father with his evening newspaper when a stray bullet located her heart. As they gazed into each other’s eyes for the last time, his newspaper, soaked with his daughter’s blood, slipped from her dimpled fingers to the floor.

The window shades bore a cat’s cradle of bullet holes whose shards and splinters of glass sparkled on the moonlit cement walkway. Fragments stuck in the mud-collar of the foundation, while other pieces landed in the bushes and in window boxes and played catch with the moonlight.

Standing by the third floor window, I saw a woman who existed for a second before she vanished, and I wept for the child fate had taken, and for the father who would never recover from his loss. The blood of those who had died in the old building’s embrace sloshed around its windows eyelets and dribbled down its face and mine. Garroted by curiosity, and by the gerbil at its wheel in my brain, I circled the block to watch the suits and uniforms, walking in and out in a variant of what struck me as musical chairs, to see what I had seen before.

The Night Candy Died Three Times to Marry Me or to Murder Me

Candy had to be dead. Cadaverous blue she lay on the bed where our last kiss had dried and died. Demonic, bright orange, it seemed, the electric heater had turned the room into a kiln, sucking moisture from the air, it shrink-wrapped my skin, and tattooed Candy’s pastel blue skin with an orange cast. I corkscrewed of my forefinger down her throat to trigger her gag reflex. Nothing. Her heart lay silent. Her pulses dumb; her blue skin indicated severe oxygen deprivation. She had to be dead.

Candy's ex-husband, Ethan, ran in from the den and said, “What are you doing? The doctor gave her something to sleep!”

“Forever! Have you ever seen anyone with blue skin before! She’s Dead! Don't stand there call 911!”

Her head bobbled from my grasp, jabbing the wall. Her deadhead toppled her. Her weight compressed her Death Mask into a caricature. Her right eye like glass stared at me.

Present Imperfect

I circled the block, and watched the detectives and uniforms moved in and out, sipping coffee as my mind jumped rope and time from the present to the past, the past to present, perpetuating psychological time’s redundancy and images I could not outrun.

Past Imperfect

The details had faded the way the sun steals color from the couch’s arm nearest the window, but the horror quickened my pace unable to separate me from the Thing forcing me to review without surcease the words imprisoned in my mind, “Would you like me to kill you?”

Memory is almost as cruel a master as the whiteout of madness. The gerbil at its wheel refused to free me from what It had sealed in my mind for we must forget what torments us as we must remember the edited versions of what beguiles and enthralls us. Time jumped rope, from the present to the past as my respiration led back to the night Candy Evan’s suicidal rage had changed the lives of those who knew her forever. I was incapable of forgetting what I could not bear to recall that led to the three hundred thousand pills I had swallowed.

Past Imperfect

I pulled Candy’s hair, twisting, yanking, down to their roots, to elicit pain, and life from death. Lifting her up against my skittish heart, hoping to escape what no lover could endure, I ran toward the front door as our mass caused me to wobble. With each step, she slid from my embrace. Her head smacked my chin, her foot my shin, her arm my nose and I clung to her for dear, dear life.

Present Imperfect

In the rhythm of my exhalation, fifteen breaths to five compressions, in the mad hope to save the life she had forfeited, my mind jumped rope, and time, from the present to the past, past to present, present to the past I circled the block to see what I had seen before.

Present Imperfect

In the rain, the wind, and the cold, breathing for two, six years earlier, I now quickened my pace, as my mind jumped rope, and time. Watching the detectives my mind jumped from the present to the past held hostage by the scene of my crime and the seven murders on Maple Street to see what I had seen before.

Past Imperfect

The doorknob spun and opened; her leaden body dropped in increments through my arms onto the ledge of my knees, and grazed the cracked tiles. I hoisted her up, pressing her head to the wild bleating thing in my chest, trying to escape the unendurable and to outrun Death. To shock Candy, to decrease her metabolism, we staggered through the portal…into the cold, the wind, and the rain.

Placing her on a soaked grass bed, a yard from the lamppost, the wind churned the heavier mist into pins. With the care of a butterfly collector, I peeled back her eyelids to examine her pupils hoping the light would extract a glint of life. Her choked pupils checkmated hope. Gravity tugged her brown eyes, dead in their sockets, toward me—two of a kind in a pair of shot glasses. Breathing for two, the burden of my own carbon dioxide toxicity reconfigured my perception. Between breaths, as if they sensed the dreadful, I scanned for witnesses, for the usual clot of cars inching over the pockmarked street, for the gaggle of children, for their parents who had deserted us when solemnity and a communal sacrament was proper etiquette.

Dirty, emaciated the spectral drunkard of my lunacy—noted by Pascal when he peered into my mind—leaned against the lamppost, exhaling bourbon salted words, 'You know she's dead cocksucker! Dead! She enjoyed the pain when you spread the cork. You murdered her but she gave you crabs. She never loved you motherfucker!' He flicked his cigarette toward my face; its orange embers flared as he dissolved, but not his laugh or his words, ‘I’ll be back. I will be back, Killer!’

The rain’s teeth drew blood. I screamed for Ethan; I gave him a crash course on breathing for two. “Don't compress her sternum!” Afraid to leave, I was more afraid to stay, and forgo another 911 call.

Holding the kitchen phone as if a dead crow, a dispatcher answered. I demanded an Ambulance! She demanded decorum; I yelled, “Put down your fuckin’ Coke, or whatever is in your mouth, and get me an ambulance! A girl is dissolving in the rain, oozing toward the sewer SO GET ME A FUCKIN' AMBULANCE!”

Ethan, lost, smiled, when I shoved him aside and resumed. The gold eyes of a cat hooked mine. It scuttled under the arm of an evergreen holding my tears or rain. A minute, an hour, a lifetime later the clatter of an ambulance rattled down the steep incline of pitch macadam. Over the curb, it rocked, its cab doors flew open, two paramedics eased out, tugging their belts, yanking their wedged slacks. I screamed; they ran. On their knees, working in tandem, Candy’s dumb heartbeat locked their eyes in an insufferable code.

“Give her oxygen!” I screamed.

“I can’t.” The medic shoved words through his zippered lips. “She’s dead.” His copper hair was a roll of pennies slipping one by one down his face. He broke eye contact.

“She can’t be dead!” I grabbed his throat, “Give her oxygen!”

“I can’t.”

“Is it against some law? Give her fucking oxygen!”

“She’s dead!”

“No!”

The wind shattered chimes. The white quartz lamp had draped its violet veil of light over her cadaverous blue flesh; we remained frozen by death, frozen in communion, frozen in the cold, frozen in silence, watching Candy Evans, a mother, a girl by the clock, and a woman lay dead at twenty-seven.

Her brainstem launched the lizard of her tongue toward her nose to state in death what she had interred in life, ‘Fuck You!’

“My God!” screamed the penny-haired medic. He shoveled Candy into his arms, ran toward the ambulance, disappeared into its dark maw, and ignited the interior lights. I cranked the VW. The arthritic transport’s amber and red lights flickered in time with the frenetic tempo of my heart and it began rolling, tottering right, and left, stumbling down the road while its rear doors clapped slow and steady. The driver’s arm stabbed the grab handle and slammed that door shut. Ethan sat next to me and the irascible taillights burned through my tears and vanished into night’s curtain and the rain.

Past Imperfect

The Day of the Night Candy Died Three Times to Marry Me

Eight hours before she ate a lethal dose of sleeping pills, Candy lay on her son’s bed masturbating to one of her dog-eared romantic reveries whose final spasm concluded moments before I entered the room. Hiding from intimacy, she drew the blanket to her throat. Her distorted smile, yanked as if she’d swallowed a fishhook, betrayed her secret. Bending to kiss her fervent cheek, I dipped my tongue into the tears her eyelashes held. As my hand descended toward the damp sheet near where she delivered the infant of her fancy, her sticky fingers cuffed my wrist “I masturbated; we’re breaking up.”

She had often tried ending our affinity by beheading her lust. Having short-sheeted her craving, she was less apt to revise her decision and I laughed. To celebrate her breast reduction mammoplasty, Candy longed to go dancing at The Electric, Electric Eel. Candy said, “I can’t be as happy as you are. I want some company.”

“I’m here.”

“Thats not what I mean; I want to go dancing.” A weird smile had replaced her smirk and her features, despite reality, slid from her face leaving it blank.

“You must rest or you will tear your stitches. You are reacting to a metabolic imbalance from the operation. You just got out of the hospital.” I recalled that a brief psychosis, due to the metabolic changes induced by anesthesia, often flourished for a few days after a procedure, and disappeared. “You just got out of the hospital.”

The cranky wind whipped the incessant drizzle into sheer veils. The electric heater on the floor had transformed the mausoleum-sized room into a sweat box. A clubfooted clump of leaves mauled the screen through the gap left by the raised window. From the living room, came the chatter of her six-year-old son, Rick, her ex-husband, Ethan, and the garbled voices of the Fonz and Mr. C, a rerun of Happy Days, and intermittent bursts of pleasure they, in turn, screamed, Yahtzee!

The day before, I had picked Candy up at Winthrop Hospital. She seemed numb, her glazed eyes fixed, dead ahead. I called it her Easter Island face, suggesting the war between emotion and logic sometimes initiated by the anesthesia and causing a temporary psychosis. A year earlier, Dr. Vine’s dexterous scalpel had recreated her now elegant nose, and no reason to consider he had achieved anything less than a satisfying result. During gestation, Candy’s hormonal squall had soared and her breasts postpartum manifest destiny had approached the absurd. Her hypertrophic breasts had evoked strangers’ covetous eyes, increasing her shame, and transforming Candy into an ambulating sideshow freak, and a caricature of the Victoria’s Secrets model of perfection etched into Candy’s and our communal psyche. To evade her unwanted attention, she had returned to Dr. Vine.

Avoiding her bandaged breasts, I placed my lips on hers. With the scent of her skin and the taste of salt from her tears on my lips, I watched my miniature stretch over the pupils of brown eyes like buttons sewn into the luminous skin beneath her knotted brow. Was it then I had inhaled the spores of her dread, her existential sickness, and the lure of self-destruction that evolved into an incantation in my mind? Staring back through the distorted lens of reminiscence, I had not only learned about her ominous conceits that were alien to my unbridled Eros, they enslaved me. My love of life, my ecstasy, the crackling electric energy that inspired my fervor, my laughter, and the fluid language of my body were gifts Candy envied and longed to share with me. She said I derived more satisfaction from life than she could, and I was too sexy for her.

Exhausted by blind rage, and a need, analysts have explained, to explode, in hope of feeling nothing, she slumped back into the pillow. Her eyes moved beneath her sealed lids, as if fluttering moths, and she said, “I want some company.”

“I’m here.” Then for some inexplicable reason, words that haunt me to this day as if fused, I imagine scarves a magician tugged through my lips, I said, “Do you want me to kill you?”

Death was a dreaded enemy, and while I did not believe in necromancy, she seemed to have composed and extricated my odd question. Even as I spoke, the inherent danger of that comment was incomprehensible to me; yet, her blush had indicated a significance I could not quite comprehend. “If,” she said, “it won’t hurt.”

“There are ways.” I had told her I’d hidden my roommate’s Placidyl in rolled up posters of Romeo and Juliet and Bob Dylan. Suicide, again, was an unfathomable abstraction to me, and her question foundered in a mind incapable of apprehension, and I said, “Fifteen will extinguish my lights and you weigh less than I do. You’re reacting to a physiological imbalance from the anesthesia.”

As the wind and rain threw a tantrum that afternoon, she would walk four miles to get the pills needed to end her misery. In my innocence, I could neither anticipate nor imagine what demons demanded she sacrifice her life but I would learn.

A temporary postoperative psychosis, I repeat, was not an uncommon occurrence. Even now years later, Candy's magical act of pseudo death, and transfiguration, thinking I had fertilized the black flower of Candy's magical belief in death as metamorphosis, and those words I had shuffled as if cards in her face remain etched in my mind and continue to whip me. “Do you want me to kill you?”

Hunting for any malicious motivation that bore my remark, I’ve turned the pockets of my sadistic conscience inside out. “Do you want me to kill you?” The question I’d coughed up rings in my mind in a redundant refrain as if a form of ‘psychological tinnitus.’

The wretched wind filled the silence between our words and the rain splattered the cedar shingles like the Devil’s exhalation. Perhaps her altered physical form was the psychological and physical correlate to the ache of an amputated limb. Had I heard in her post-masturbatory state she considered altering her body a crime? Unable to manifest her rage in a male-dominated culture, and the loss of the promotion her manager had promised her, had played a role in Candy’s wrath. Candy’s aunt had referred to Candy as good and brilliant, “Thank god because she’s homely.”

Her aunt had authored her comment while Candy blew out ten birthday candles. In a world that worshiped beauty, how could she forget her aunt’s comment? Freud had called beauty a mild but useless cultural necessity, but isn’t it the gold standard in contemporary society while money is the silver? When we had met, Candy could not summon the requisite energy to shower as often as personal hygiene and propriety demanded. Beneath her desperation, I had discovered a woman who needed someone’s permission to have the rhinoplasty that enhanced her beauty, dismissing her aunt’s directive to remain a docile and unattractive girl.

Doctors had ended my roommate Gavin’s Placidyl detox, releasing him while he was in the vise of organic brain syndrome. Gavin alone watched an infant vanish beneath the dense snowdrift in a crowded subway car. While I provided Gavin with enough Placidyl to evict his phantasms, I confiscated and hid his remaining pills like a loaded gun.

Candy loathed Gavin and asking me to drive her to my apartment, based on my ignorance, and interred her intent. She continued stroking me with her voice, and her next appeal for me to deliver her to her final solution never registered on my cerebral seismograph. I reminded her she needed to rest or risk tearing Dr. Vine’s sutures, and I would return that night after work with lasagna.

An argument with my employer led to my early departure, and I stopped to shower. My apartment had the eerie murmur of sound waves hitting objects, an imprisoned whisper, and with this odd feeling, I dialed Candy's phone number. No answer; I redialed. The phones interminable ring led… to the surreal, conscious dreams cape of Freud’s symbol laden sense of the ‘uncanny,’ as I dialed her parents’ number. Her mother said Candy had stayed home to rest, and Rick’s laughter in the background seemed ominous.

I ditched the phone, dashed down the hall Gavin had smeared with peanut butter like shit on the walls; his bed was empty. Across the hall, my room was dark but chaotic, a shirt draped the fan my lampshade wore a sweater and open drawers were rotted teeth dangling from their bloodied roots. The decapitated vial of Placidyl lay empty on my dresser and the drug’s noisome stench that had oozed through Gavin’s pores suffused the space. Grabbing my VW keys, I raced down the stairs, tripped, skinned a knee, hopped into my Beetle, and raced toward the dreadful. Swerving around a student driver, I blew red lights, and I sped by and almost removed the posterior of a man bagging his Greyhound’s shit.

Candy was pastel blue. Slivers of concrete separated the small houses crouching on the bank of the road; my cataract of tears yanked them into hands pressed palm-to-palm, and I cannot erase the medic’s words, “She is dead!”

At the scene of my crime, Queens Hospital Center’s ER, Candy, naked from the waist down, lay on a metal table. Tugging the blood-splattered curtain across the battle scene, a nurse gave me ‘a fuck you stare’ as if I had murdered my creation. A code blue initiated a second wave of doctors and equipment. A cart collided into its twin, its implements clanged on the bloodstained tiles. The drape, a living mural, flowed in bulges, elbows, behinds, three conjoined heads, dancing body parts, broadcasting the war in sign language, and in tongues.

Driven by a neighbor, Candy’s rotund father and mother arrived. Her father, dressed as if he were fly-fishing in a sewer, tore his remaining hair, a halo of cotton tufts, from their roots. He collapsed against the wall, slid to the floor; I took his hand and helped him to his feet.

I headed home at five a.m. and wrestled with sweaty sheets I had mangled into pythons. Dr. Pascal returned my phone call four hours later. He read from the PDR about a man who had eaten ten times more Placidyl than Candy and regained perfect health. Pascal’s forecast had the precision of a fortune cookie. However, he stated, my ‘adult behavior might have kept her in this world.’ According to Pascal, acting like an adult rather than a child in need of a diaper change was the apogee of emotional health, and he gave me a psychotherapeutic gold star.

Still, the prospect of her death and the hypnotics she stole from my room coalesced with the withdrawal of her interjected essence within my mind, leaving me nauseated. Desperation turned me into a religious fundamentalist, and I had to believe in a prime mover who would sustain her. I wore her coat as a talisman, a chrysalis containing her marrow as if keeping her ‘substance’ close to my heart would keep her alive.

I ran up four flights and fought the need to retch. With each step toward the ICU, my heart swelled until it found my uvula, and I could not breathe. The adult, blood wailing through his carotid arteries, with each step worried that she had died, and I pushed the door open. From there Candy’s Wedgewood blue flesh had become a sallow green, and still thinking she had died, bile crept into my mouth. Fear driven superstition forced me to step on the white squares of the checkerboard tiles, and a misstep onto a black tetragon would’ve killed her! The floor whisked backwards as if an escalator, I nearly lost my balance, and ‘killed’ her.

They had propped Candy's head on pillows, and I walked toward her not knowing if she was dead or alive. Fingers stroking her face, tears on my lips, and her hideous white/green skin. Sheets formed a tent, covering the child of inverted wrath. Her head appeared withered. Her skin made me scan for Death who in my new ‘faith’ often disguised himself as a man from housekeeping with hairy forearms dragging a bucket with a mop. A doctor had inserted an intubation tube down Candy’s throat affixed it to a clock faced respirator, it delivered oxygen via a lucent snake every few seconds. A bag of dextrose and one of saline like two hanged men on an aluminum pole supplied her snap, crackle, and pop neurons with sustenance.

An ancient woman, an artisan had formed from the detritus found in a vacuum cleaner bag, screamed. “Doctors smear shit on me. All things considered I’d rather be married!”

For the next week, I visited the hospital two or three times each day. Before I went home after work, I called the nurses station at 4:00 a.m. from the hospital to find out if Candy was still alive, and if so, was she progressing? Early Thursday morning, while I had visited her, she had almost jerked the intubation tube from her throat. Candy waggled her fingers in some unintelligible code. I reported this to a nurse who gobbled fistfuls of cookies with a two-handed piston pumping action. Glancing up at me, as if she wanted to throw me through a window, she stuffed another handful of Milanos, her favorite, she stated, into her mouth. Slowly, crumbs cascading down, she got up, adjusted her girdle, her stockings, and said I only eat these when I have PMS. She appeared to have chronic PMS. She sashayed from behind a metal wall divide to adjust Candy’s tube. From then on, they had taped Candy's hands to the beds side rail.

God, what if I hadn't been there? What would happen while the nurses were gorging themselves? Who would make sure Candy didn't rip the intubation tube out of her mouth? Had I not been there, Candy would have removed the intubation tube and her oxygen supply.

Cruising for love or sex, I had spotted Candy at a desk in a library, and she became my prey. Crouching close to her naked legs she had entwined them like two puff adders behind one of the chair’s legs, she cloaked her face with her textbook. My fingertips floated up to stroke her fiery cheeks and she accepted my kiss. “You have beautiful skin; I’d like to get to know you. Meet me here next Tuesday.”

From behind the lorgnette of her book, she nodded, and what had begun in innocence died on the night her inverted homicidal rage forever changed the lives of all who knew her.

Cockroaches crunched beneath my Frye boots. She stood as if a woodcut framed in her doorway down the hall. The ceiling fixture was a graveyard for dead moths. I met her ex-husband, Ethan, who’d watch their son, Ian, asleep in a playpen in the living room she had painted a lurid yellow and a noisy orange like a bowling alley. Candy had excused herself to answer the telephone. The caller irritated her.

We held hands, ate Milk Duds, and saw Die Hard on a screen with what appeared to be spiders running across the screen. After Ethan left, Candy served coffee and crumb cake before she gentled me into her naked bedroom. A mirror mottled by Rorschach blotches swung on a wire too long for its purpose. Newsprint tinged yellow blinds masked her drafty casement windows; a torn panel of wallpaper waggled in the cold draft.

We ripped through the requisite pre-copulatory resume’ with the passion one exudes while filling out forms at the DMV. We kissed and discarded our clothes like tissue paper. She projected a tincture of romance and distress that demanded a primal coupling, and I became the beast she required. Post coitum triste, she spun to face the wall. Her renegade tears found my wrist and what she’d unveiled was not sorrow, but an arcane facet of joy derived from one’s own Indian burned affect. Candy’s ‘erotic hatred’ was a penchant I had discovered as a boy skulking through Manhattan’s after-hours clubs whose members had created an exclusive subculture who gathered before sunrise in a quasi-secret network. They were often wealthy people who had a need to enact various sensual compositions, and Candy had a proclivity for the delights of dacryphilia where pleasure and gratification were orphans spawned from the wounds she resurrected in detailed compositions from the degraded memories of her childhood fantasies. Somewhat like the reveries populating Candy’s masturbatory fugues—they and Candy enjoyed mild psychological pain while avoiding physical agony.

The knell of her phone cleaved her tear-stained narrative. The open bedroom door honed the knife of the hall light, and I watched her naked silhouette recede and it crept up the walls, stretching into an elongated shade on the ceiling. Candy grunted to a man’s cloying plea while she wrapped the phone cord around her naked torso. She mumbled and dropped the receiver. The twisting noose of the cord and the spinning receiver held her suitor’s voice until it snapped his neck. Her insulin shock character, its overt patina of pain, was as covert as leper on a nude beach. I recalled that Melanie Klein had considered Candy’s ostensible masochism as the crucible in which Candy had stuffed her grandiose desire to dominate those who had populated her enchanted world.

Her Dalkon Shield’s lasso almost lynched my head; her choice of contraception, approved by her gynecologist, Candy said, though linked to fatal infections and banned, was a crab-shaped broach she’d pinned to the cervical door leading to her womb. A symbol that corresponded with Candy's internal script devoted to courting misery by shooting craps with fate, and perfect for a connoisseur of pleasure evoked by her own sorrow. Her game’s potential for grave danger, I believed, was an attempt to induce her own murder by a scorned lover.

Candy had sex with a swarm of men, and her propensity to discard them as if Kleenex, with an absence of evident fear, re-enforced my notion regarding the pleasure she derived from mild psychological suffering. I dismissed her as a woman with the substance of lint found in one’s pockets while she confessed to having sex with men she despised so she could lie, or die, within their arms. She enjoyed the warmth of their flesh until sunrise when she had hoped they would dissolve.

Soaked in perspiration, holding hands, and catching our breath I saw the spectral outline of her comeliness, a puzzle with a few missing pieces, and I provided her with the support she needed to self-actualize, enabling her to enhance what her genetic endowment had failed to beget. My imperative to remodel her was a mystery I assimilated into my desire to purge this one dissonant note in the symphony of the universe, and I began to help Candy dismiss her aunt’s and her mother’s mandate.

Exhibit number one: Despite her ninety-seven point high school average, she chose to major in home economics, a symbol as potent as her Discarded Dress Disorder syndrome. Her chocolate irises held a double helix of gold flecks in her almond-shaped eyes that culled images of sunflowers bent and beaded by rain but why had she the need to conceal them beneath an awning of ragged bangs. The slant of her nose was a sundial bent at the bridge was the single flaw on a face the creator had abandoned. Her depression was as covert as the penis Picasso painted on one of his muse’s portraits.

I gave her a geometric haircut—I was a hairdresser—and I either bought or accompanied her whenever she selected new clothes. Her adroit math skill—with my encouragement—led to her mastering COBOL, FORTRAN, DOS, and into a career as a systems analyst.

Fear of her mother, fueled Candy’s Gogol nightmare of her nose becoming gangrenous and leaving a triangular void in her forehead. Her mother, who had rejected Candy’s feminine essence, transforming Candy’s inclination to self-actualize into an attractive and intelligent woman into a tawdry pursuit comparable to prostitution, and Dr. Vine unbuckled the joint below her bridge into a felicitous line and transformed her face. The night I had picked her up from her rhinoplasty, with her pretty features pinned by her soft cast into a sprite’s seductive smile; her appearance belonged to a stranger, and her metamorphosis renewed our love and in our evanescent inseverable bond, sleep carried us through the night.

Candy lay in a coma, and I stroked her arms. I whispered in her small green/yellow ears, hoping she would respond to my voice. Shriveled people surrounded her like old bouquets playing musical beds with Death. Every time I visited, nurses were changing the sheets where Death had plucked a corsage and they tossed the next dying patient onto fresh linen. My affection, perhaps even love, for Candy evolved when I swiped her from Mephistopheles arms, adding libidinous butane to the flagging power of our too familiar expression of lust. Death’s specter, the odor of its proximity, awaiting its next victim, as if they had chosen numbers to queue up in a bakery, sharpened those scissors and knives.

Standing at the end of her bed, one night, when the room was as dark as shallow grave, I stripped and left my clothes in a heap at the foot of her bed. Nurses and doctors floated in a zigzag across the room and smiled. Then I climbed up, moved the sheet covering her, and slowly, avoiding the matrix of tubes, made love to her. A blond nurse, whom I would have liked to fuck, tapped me on the shoulder: “You’re not the first to do this you know. We allow it because it sometimes helps.”

The act was not a form of incipient necrophilia, it was an attempt to kick start Candy’s heart, but as I pulled back to examine her young bloodless face, I realized my lips had not found those of a pretty girl but a cancer-riddled crone. This apparition was missing segments of her jaw and she cackled in my ear through her stoma.

I found myself outside of the ICU tucked into a fetal position on a bench in front of a TV. A man in a plaid flannel robe with a catheter and pole holding a bag of urine asked me for a cigarette, cleaving my post somnolence fatigue. He smacked the television whose horizontal hold had failed and the picture rolled insistently with Olivia de Havilland alone in the Snake Pit.

“I can’t wait to get this tube out of my dick,” he said, “and use it.” He turned to the metal wall and the glass door leading into the ICU. “You got a wife or someone in there?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. You were moaning. You’re not the first you know.”

“Not the first to do what?”

“To dream; It’s common. Keep an eye on them.”

“Whom?”

“The doctors and nurses don’t know shit, and they don’t give a fuck. I’ve been here for six months. I had a motorcycle accident. It opened my head, broke a leg, and punctured my spleen. That’s why I’m pissing in a bag. Can’t even jerk off, and they have pretty nurses here. Not the fat ones but the blondes. I like nice tits. How about you, or are you a fag?”

“I like women.”

“My man, I’ll shake to that?”

He extended a hand with long encrusted nails that I could barely touch.

Instead of going to my apartment, I slept at Candy’s house. It was tantamount to walking into a synagogue or church and a form of prayer, a regression to a child’s magical thinking. The empty rooms puzzled me, a subtle echo resounded with a weird hollow sense. With Candy all but dead, and with me unable to do anything, but wait for her to climb out of her coma and most likely as a vegetable given her degree of oxygen deprivation and having flatlined three times. I decided to try, and conjure some necromancy to aid her cause. Looking around it seemed to my sleep-deprived mind that her essence existed in her personal effects, the objects she had touched.

Next to the club chair, in her bedroom, where I had often worked until sunrise was the white plastic satchel she had taken to the hospital for her procedure. Inside, I found scans of yarn, pinking shears, crochet needles, and across the room, next to a matching chair was the paisley overnight bag she had also taken to the hospital. Inside I found two books of short stories, her housecoat, baby oil, and underwear, polka dot bra with a safety pin to conceal her cleavage, a nail file, Emory board, and toothpaste.

For some reason, beyond I could not articulate I opened her bed, where we had made love and where Ethan, rubbing his eyes, had walked into the room and saw his mother tied spread-eagle to the bed. On his way to the bathroom, appearing far more composed than the two adults, scurrying to undo the ties that bound, while he requested a glass of water.

I dumped the contents of both bags on her side of the bed, and lay down next to them and tumbled into a profound sleep.

Candy and I dated other men and women( people sounds odd). I wasn’t jealous, but she might have been. High on my list of behaviors that I loathe are deception, dissembling, and lies. Especially at a time when my focus was changing and the ground beneath me, had turned to the thin cellophane clear ice that is guaranteed to fling your legs from under you and deposits you on your behind.

Candy lied to me while I worked late on a Saturday night, and I decided to leave earlier than usual at one a.m. I always stopped at Candy’s home before I went to my apartment no matter what the hour. Since I had a key, and had access to her house at anytime, she set me up that night, with a passive-aggressive act that betrayed our compact. Here’s how: She had a date, and lied to me when I had called her earlier. Candy, I believe, had wanted me to catch them fucking. (Candy was rather promiscuous and often balled a guy in their first date.) I stopped at her place to eat and to make love. After I parked, a blond man crossed the street. He said hello, had what Eric Berne had called a two- stroke interaction, and we continued on our divergent paths.

Using my key, I opened the door and saw Candy standing in a film noir shadow in her bedroom. Candy was in a black cashmere sweater and her blush, when she saw me, was visible even in the dark. When I mentioned my brief encounter, she spoke from the corner of her mouth with a funneled tongue, which is how she spoke during overt prevarication, and told me she had been with that man. Then she giggled and ran toward the lit kitchen, I caught her, which was the essence of her game and noticed that her bra remained unhinged. She laughed as both a defense against my emotional cataclysm and the desire to provoke me. From the kitchen she flitted into the shadows–a strip of light from the full moon cut a swathe of pure silver across her bed and hid behind her bed to prod the flame of my ire. She had seen my rage and wanted me to vent it in her, to fuck her with bile in my mouth, and she had directed me to throw her bed across the room and I banged her. If you recall she used an IUD and because I thought I had my stem in the blond’s semen, I fucked her in the ass collecting some profound orgasms and shit.

At some level of her descent toward nonbeing, she lingered. At some layer between death and life her personality changed and the world literally, especially mine, was altered. My insanity sprouted in the soil, the loamy earth of mistrust.

Seven days after eating the Puff the Magic Placidyl Dragon, without a trace of overt brain damage, Candy emerged from her coma. A nurse had swept Candy’s hair into a pompadour, and Candy ensconced within a light of such radiance the room had a surreal nacreous effulgence. Candy sucked ice and sat on her throne of pillows battling the rasp the intubation tube had scratched into her voice. “They say women always botch it up.”

For the remainder of that visit, I had never seen a woman as beautiful as Candy, but my concern switched to when, like many who had attempted suicide, she would try again. Candy exhumed her motives: she was angry with me for not offering her a gold band, and now she held the axe of a marriage proposal over my head. Evan was happy and he loved Ethan more than he loved her and the promotion she had earned but hadn’t received were her overt reasons.

Candy had made death as rebirth her lover, and moments after I departed that Saturday, her parents had arrived to pickup Rick. Candy waved goodbye, donned her coat, and pranced into the rain and the cold she loathed. The blood in her ears surged in waves, her heart was a canister in which a lead ball kicked about, her mind played pickup sticks with inchoate ideas that turned to dust before she realized those thoughts and became a throbbing abscess.

When I mentioned the pills, she saw it as an opportunity. It was then or never, and even the taste of the rain thrilled her. Her eyes scanned her old bedroom window, across the street from my apartment, and her home when we had fallen in love. She saw the parade of men she had known in that room a formless pile of bodies.

Candy told Gavin I’d left a book for her in my room, and she scurried into my room, tossed my clothes, tore the sheets from my bed, and uncovered her ticket through the circles of hell behind my bureau. She emptied fifteen capsules of Placidyl into a napkin, tucked them in her pocket, and skipped, splashing through the puddles home. When her excitement waned and she had caught the zephyr of her breath, Candy called me at work and told me she had taken a walk. She said, “If I knew what she meant, it meant that I loved her.”

Doctors had transferred Candy from the ICU to an open ward where she jousted with pneumonia. A floating cotillion of Jehovah’s Witnesses waltzed around one hundred beds wearing the weird smile of those who’d achieved an inviolate sense of conviction and peace. You can dump boiling oil on Witnesses and they would expand their ubiquitous smiles, and don’t they all have incandescent tusks for teeth? They spun from one bed to the next, followed by a trio of nuns—whose faces seemed to have sprouted from within black carnations. They decided that Candy’s recovery was a miracle. I saw no reason to argue.

Wearing slacks secured by a safety pin, waiting for me, a fortnight later, she sat on a chair and downed a high-calorie protein and vitamin concoction. Mrs. Evans, as if on skates, pushed me aside with an elbow, spat on a hanky, and performed the innate maternal pattern of wiping off Candy’s chocolate mustache, and two layers of epidermis, as Candy recoiled in horror.

Post-suicidal guilt often triggered a need to complete the aborted act, and Candy’s hunger for self-murder plagued me; I wondered each time I opened her door, if I would find her alive or dead. Her parents let their fingers tickle the Yellow Pages, searching for a psychiatrist. If she were to receive appropriate treatment, I had to take charge, and I brought her to the Genius.

Candy had attempted suicide three times before we had met. She’d stood in a bathtub filled with water, and was about to drop a radio, as Nat King Cole sang about a lazy crazy summer, but fearing a painful death her sweaty hands placed the radio on a dry towel. Her next defeat occurred when she stuffed a mattress in her kitchen doorway, braced it with a dresser, and plugged towels into the cracks. She turned on the oven and lay down for eternity but awakened with a headache and thorns in her heart. She then rented a motel room, feasted on three boxes of Contact, woke up, retched for several hours before taking a cab home, and wallpapered her son’s room.

Her history of suicide solutions exonerated me to some degree, but according to her, I was number one among her reasons for her latest flirtation. Many people who are not successful, have a much higher rate of completing the task predicated on the lessons learned from their abrogated attempts, and I this scared me enough to create a constant palpable sense of anxiety. How could I erase that string of words Candy seemed to have drawn through my lips? “Would you like me to kill you?” The refrain haunted me and refused to vacate my mind.

Candy the Reckless

Dr. Pascal had wondered with me, since it seemed he could never wonder alone, why I had cared for a promiscuous woman, who tossed her body at any stranger. When she had become his patient, he forgot his misgivings, and he wondered why I had no desire to marry her. Her four suicide attempts had made her the perfect candidate for my wife. For me marriage meant procreation and not the childless castration by monogamy she wanted, and she did not want another child. This conflict was a necrotic infection festering below the flesh of our affection.

Since I was the prime mover in her latest attempt, and the culprit who’d given her the loaded ‘Colt’ she had used in her suicide interruptus it was the fulcrum she used to manipulate me, and I was scared. How could I erase or comprehend why I said, “Would you like me to kill you?” My constant self-examination became as annoying as a melody residing in your mind and resides until it dissipates on its own, but with death as its goal.

On the night, she had died three times to marry me, I considered that she had an unconscious need for punishment for enhancing her body’s symmetry and altering her physical boundaries. She had not only revised her physical and emotional identity, making her happier, but in doing so, she had disobeyed her familial dictum to linger in mediocrity as a homely sweet girl. Perhaps her transformation had augmented her guilt and her disobedience increased the demand leading to her suicide.

While some depressed people kill themselves because they find the world insufferable, others end their lives because they cannot tolerate themselves. Suicide is often revenge, psychological murder, or a transfiguration through transient death to rebirth and the beginning rather than an end. Candy was angry enough to destroy her mother, her aunt, and me, and I wondered each time I opened her door if I would find a warm or a cold body.

As Candy lay dying, I had garnered A’s, acquired a literary agent and professors compared me to Kafka, Poe, Melville, Thomas Wolfe and others, and they demanded that you did not squander your talent. My insomnia combined with my escalating catalog of phobias preceded a leaden torpor combined with a more malevolent variant of my childhood OCD filled with cleanliness rituals, the sacrament of my private religion, and precursor of the psychosis awaiting me. This new form, the evolution from a washer to a checker was a demon that exacted its due in myriad acts of self-abnegation. The integrity of our ecosystem, in this world of the absurd, relied on me to remove or neutralize anything I perceived as dangerous to any member of society. In my heightened awareness, I saw the interconnection between every imaginable disparate phenomena and the devastating potential for turning the mundane into incredible hazards. The horror of this is the knowledge these ideas are absurd, but I had to capitulate or my anxiety became intolerable.

Psychosis is the Prognosis

By late May, I was so weary I felt as if a circuit breaker in my nervous system had overloaded and tripped, initiating an intense form of inertia, and I found myself in the office of a physician who had resided within a Norman Rockwell portrait. His grave robber's black coat flapped and with his every twitch dust rose. Spider veins laced his cherry-tinged cheeks. Tears dripped from blue eyes buried in the suet around his eye sockets; his sagging brow, dropping lids, and his accumulated fat almost obscured them. As I described the night Candy had and my current lethargy, he cocked his head as if a dog to see through the oculus this mass of suet had caused. His breath bore the stench of sour scotch. His cheeks, each a crones change purse, heaved with his shifting facial lexis, and he concluded I was depressed. An old maxim, he said, ‘he, who knows syphilis, knows medicine! Now depression is the great masquerader.”

Around midnight, July 4, I stood in catatonic fixation staring at my stoves’ gas knobs, chastising them aloud. The pilot light didn't work but I thought, while knowing how ludicrous this idea was, but predicated on my OCD rituals, the stove had the capacity to grab the matches, I’d hidden, ignite a flame, suffocate my neighbors, or explode. Despite the laws of physics, I was the servant of this nonsense, and doubt’s prisoner. “No, I didn’t mean you're bastards, it’s an expression.” I was placating a fucking stove! This supplicant faced each knob, with the solemnity of a man facing a firing squad, and counted to fifty while saying, OFF 1, OFF 2, OFF 3 to fifty! I repeated this absurdity four more times.

If not for Candy, who had accompanied me that night, and relieved me of my responsibility for the stove’s possible antisocial behavior, I’d have stared in a freeze-dried gape, eyes tearing, and counting aloud, turning away, but drawn back unable to escape from the inexorable thing wringing my brain of coherent thoughts. I could have stood there, counting and talking to the stove’s gas knobs and until death intervened.

Driving to her home, I had the image of her scissor-locked limbs around my hips and the demand to return and to disinfect my lobby for another two hours, but Candy, dear sweet child of death and rebirth, had borne the weight of my punitive conscience that night. She’d quashed my fear of spreading the ‘dangerous toxins’ I had dragged through the lobby. In my fancy, our sexual overture became a surreal representation of Candy and my cock swelled until its vertical eye stared at my navel. Vacillating between sex and my toxic lobby, a few drops of blood mixed with my saliva, and I spat it out the open window, and saw a blinding white flash, a light bulb’s moment of death and it painted my world pitch black. “I’m dying! Don’t Look At Me!” I screamed at Candy for I could not bear the stimulus of her presence.

My brain had turned cold, slush dripped behind my eyes while blood gushed through my nostrils, my urethra, my anus, and I made a U-turn, convinced of certain Death and sped toward Booth Memorial Hospital on a red sled of light, as I dissolved. In my rearview mirror, I glanced as thick ropes of blood catapulted over my lips. The crimson river, a monstrous snake, uncoiled, masking my face, corkscrewed down my body, down into my lap, down into a tumid whorl of red cobras mating in my basket, down it seeped through the threadbare carpet, and the holes rust had eaten in the floor.

My horn barked at a man, ass upward, to bag his poodle’s turds. Parking in a spot reserved for an ambulance, I ran into the ER screaming, “I’m dying! I’m having a stroke!” My body a Slinky™, stretched over the chrome triangle above the clerk. Two residents said, “If you had a stroke, your face would be drooping.”

They were right! My reflection, along the waiting room windows, inspired me, and I danced in precise bursts. “Hey, everyone, I’m alive, and I’m dancin’.” My mis-perceived hemorrhage was absurd and the antithesis of human biology.

We drove to Candy's to consummate our hunger. The scratchy Blaupunkpt™ spewed the Allman Brothers' Ramblin' Man, and I danced while seated as she smiled. Whatever she had witnessed stirred Candy’s sensual hunger as fear and death often do among the young. My sensual craving, augmented by having faced ‘Death,’ transcended any sexual craving I had ever known. I envisioned my cock as doorknocker appended to the imagined door at her cervix, and I watched it, now a turgid hook, sink into the split fig beneath her ass, as she faced my toes, until my cock disappeared, obscured by Candy’s bottom and within her pendulant arc.

Home at last, in my fervent embrace, I cut her lips with my serrated tongue, I tossed her onto her bed, took a long draft of her warm biscuit aroma, and the wave of our combined gluttony drowned the world. Her legs, straddling my pelvis, slid down until her damp glove’s descent slapped bone against bone and her sway devoured our combined libidinal distress. Why I saw a crone open her change purse, remove her last coupon that fluttered beyond her talons, as paramedic’s red hair turned into pennies that struck the cement like xylophone notes and carried me back to his statement, “She’s dead!”

Candy lay on her side; her suggestive simper required a kiss. Her abdominal muscles twitched as my tongue slithered over her hips depositing a trail of salivary bubbles along the outermost curve of her hip, down her thighs before skating over the satin flesh of her stomach, leading to the salt lick along the soft mound surrounding her labia. The burden of our flesh could endure but a momentary stay of sensual execution, and I stared into the brown golden-flecked irises of the child of my design and began our rapacious encore.

That morning with Candy’s body and mine entwined, I had the fleeting fear my mind would become blank, cognitive white noise, and I drifted from the nagging hunger of our incomplete sexual satiety to the black days and boredom of my croup-stricken childhood. My screen memories, culled from the incessant funereal days when my grandparents had watched me while my parents worked, I wandered, lost and alone through the deformed world consumed by odd notion that every appliance my parents had purchased, every piece of furniture, everything in our home was defective. Despite those traumatic years, I evolved a psychodynimic state in which every millisecond of life thrilled me. They coalesced that morning with thoughts of having plucked Candy from the teeth of non being, while I had made so many positive changes in her life that she was now my ‘child.’

I ran to extend the life I loved. My habit superseded the morning’s post-coital delirium and its cacophonous encore, and I ran three-miles. A persistent urethral tickle, accompanied by an STD alarmed me as I jogged, and later voided cola-colored urine. Consumed by terror I dressed as if a child incapable of aligning their buttons, and I sped to Queens Hospital Center’s ER where a doctor expressed this medical opinion, “Holy shit, that’s a lot of blood.”

Bloody urine, a real symptom of pathology fueled my dread, and in the open ward where Candy battled pneumonia, I ate a hypnotic from a hand reeking of alcohol. Tests failed to disclose the etiology of my bleeding. Candy's internist analyzed my urine in the afternoon, which he said was clean enough to drink. He stated my distress was unfounded. “Doctor, if blood poured out of your penis, it wouldn’t bother me either.”

My organic pathology, suggesting complete exsanguination, fueled my dread. It took on a quasi-human form. Despite its disguise, I noted a smile that struck me as Dr. Pascal’s, and this doppelganger appeared to share other genetic traits with Pascal, too, but this entity was also the gaunt somatic opposite of my corpulent psychiatrist. Its scratchy voice was barely intelligible but it articulated its goal and design by forcing me to perform one denigrating compulsion after another until it transformed me into nothing more than a hand puppet, it controlled, while It denied me a moment’s respite. It demolished my immediate plans, made writing impossible, and culled the exhaustion, already described, but a more intense variant as if my cerebral circuits had overheated and melted into one and in its antipodal form I became energized by the most intense and chronic trepidation. The spectral drunkard from the night that changed so many lives forever had returned disguised as Dr. Pascal, and reverted into its initial spectral form, all dictated by its precise intuition.

By mid-summer, I suffered from a perpetual sense of anguish, but I still functioned in this perpetual state of the uncanny. Candy and I did not have an exclusive relationship and we were free to date others. The only rule in our game was for us to be candid and we could not dissemble—a tenet Candy would break. In fact, Candy had a standard means of retribution demonstrated in her treatment of the man who received her promotion. She had dinner with the man and had sex with him so she could reject him.

On my way to visit Danielle, my terror mixed with my lust, reaching a level that bordered on insanity. After pausing to check my pulse, pat my pockets for my vial of Serax, my malignant sexual desire propelled me to drive into the city. On the Ed Koch Bridge, zipping over the East River, this sense of terror escalated. Of late, I had dreams about spans extending over bodies of water. They rose higher as I drove toward their apex, and when I reached the end, I plummeted into the estuary below. Pascal had suggested that these dreams implied my connection with Candy, and exemplified my fear of commitment. “Nietzsche,” I said, “ said man is bridge not an end. I’ll place my money on the dude with the handlebar mustache. Why does unmitigated devotion sound like a death sentence?”

“Aaron David you are hereby committed to Sing Sing where you will be put to death for unsanctioned fornication and a fear of commitment.” Have I thought with my dick? I haven’t completed a single thought without it determining the course I had to follow. One weekend, several years earlier, I had a friend drive me to Boston for a particular blowjob, and for that moment of pleasure, I knew I would despise her before she had whisked my seminal cargo down her esophagus. (By the way, why isn’t a blowjob called a suckjob?)

As I drove perspiration or blood dribbled from my eyes, and I thought of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta’s broaches. Now something commands me to leave my car, run to the railing, and dive into the East River. For years, I’ve heard an impish voice in my mind demanding that I harm myself, and it was almost irresistible. Why don’t you take the knife and slit your throat? Get it over with already! Take the pot of boiling water and pour it down your pants. Go on pour the water over your balls!

My mouth was burlap, my eyes covered with soot, and cinders settled beneath my contact lenses. In Manhattan, I sucked oxygen from air as dense as rubber. Several blocks from Danielle’s, I called her. It was noisy, and I struggled to hear Danielle’s voice over the demon’s screams, and its demands. Now listen to me! You see that plate glass window…Well, dive through it. Before you jump, take those scissors, and cut off your prick!

Danielle was happy, “What are you doing in the city?”

“You told me you needed me. Didn’t I call you?”

“No. That was yesterday.”

The background discord is impenetrable, and the wicked mandate to dive through the plate glass window of the Chinese restaurant is almost beyond compelling. “I had to see you.”

“Come up. I was about to go to sleep, but.”

I walked quickly; my testicles congealed into tiny steel balls. The door leading to her apartment opened. Is my vial of Serax in place? Perhaps I should take some, but, again, it will ruin the erotic interlude by dulling my muscular contractions. Serax like all the benzodiazepines are muscle relaxants, and they inhibit smooth muscle contractions, causing retrograde ejaculation but not that night.

I’m claustrophobic, her elevator isn’t an option, and I ran up the stairs to the sixth floor and the worn marble landing. I knocked on the door, which had a cartoon dog voiding on the corpse of a small female child etched into the paint’s dermis. Ah, Danielle’s bare feet padded toward the portal. Hurry, dear, before my catatonic heart exploded and its springs, coils, and wheels infiltrated my lungs. She opened the door standing with the Cabernet glimmer in her brown eyes.

My cock had assumed a painful arch, twitching, tugging me through the minefield of my phobias toward the object of my lust, Danielle with her perfect ass and body. The majority of women I’ve known want a paradox: a beast with a slow hand.

Her seductive power, which drives others to their knees, demanded I take what I wanted. Women abhor weakness, and adore strength. My refusal to accept anything less than what I wanted was a potent aphrodisiac. My sexual wantonness fit into Danielle’s romantic pathology and she needed to be the other woman in a triangle. By accepting defeat as her primary goal in the compact, she avoided pain. Once all is lost, she can no longer be hurt and Electra ruled. Men groveled at her feet; they stared up and asked her, “Can I lie down next to you and with our clothes on?” For a man to turn Danielle on, you needed to pull her hair, throw her on the floor, push her face in the carpet, and fuck her like a buzz saw. Sensitivity was commensurate to a gravity ride and that approach nauseated her.

Danielle took my sweaty face between her fingers and drew me close. I grabbed the black hair at her nape, bending her head forward in submission, bit her lips, shoving my tongue as stiff and articulate in and out of her mouth.

The long pea green hall was dark. “Christ, this tunnel is narrow. Will I be reborn? It’s taking long enough to get to the delivery room. Feel my heart.” I grabbed her wrist, as we banged hipbones together while walking, and pressed it against my engorged aorta. I sat down on her twill couch. She took out a cigarette lit it and paced. Her eyes, without makeup are nude, provocative. She wore a sheer yellow slip. On the pill, her breasts are swollen, her nipples engorged, she floated through the dim light cast by aromatic candles, her form was visible beneath the Japanese paper-lantern thickness of her slip and it branched into her soft cleft.

Danielle said, “God. I hate you! I can’t keep my hands off you.”

“If you don’t put your hands on me, I’ll break them. I want to cannibalize you. I want delirium. Nothing else will do. Sit. Talk to me while I look at you.”

“I have to get off the pill. These aren’t my tits.”

“They’re swollen. They hurt. They are melons!” God, this prick torments me with his manic energy, his laser wit, his hairy chest, and those eyes. Fucking weapons and I need more wine. A cigarette, too, and why can’t I have… I hate him. “Oh, shit my nipples hurt. Whose tits are these anyway? I must get off these pills. These aren’t my fucking tits!”

“They fit you.” I said, “I don’t understand men who walk into a butcher shop and divide women into fetishistic segments. ‘I’ll take three pounds of breast, one left leg, a derriere, and a pair of thighs.’ I leave with the entire package.”

She refilled her glass with Cabernet and brought me an iced tea. She accentuated the pendulum motion of her ass. It took enormous restraint to resist cannibalizing her.

We kissed searching… but my mind drifted to the sound of my heart in my eardrums. Why am I so frightened? Is Candy okay? Why, Christ, I need a God to love. My face, even in my relative youth, is evolving into a caricature. The transformation was slow, but the essence of my mortality, my nonbeing, man’s fate, has been my constant companion since childhood.

Two months ago, I told Danielle, I played basketball when my opponent’s elbow opened a wound above my left eyebrow, and the flow of blood streamed down my face, and into my eyes, but I played on with abandon. My blood congealed like Jell-O, and I went to my doctor’s office and he stitched the wound. Now, if a ping-pong ball hits my head, I ran to an emergency room for a series of skull X-rays. “I’m beginning to glow in the dark, I’m losing my mind, Danielle, it’s melting like a glacier while my center is crumbling, and I can’t make it hold.”

My story disturbed Danielle; she needed more wine, and a cigarette to extricate my curse from her own reactive nervous system. I said, “If all animals are sad after coitus, having symbolically filled the demand for procreation, my sorrow is perpetual, and the feeling is obliterated only during sexual arousal.”

Holding her glass, she said, “I was pissed off when you called to tell me you couldn’t see me last night.”

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid Candy will do something irrational, and I’m missing classes because I worry about her. She’s my latest obsession, but unlike my other fixations, this is real and too close to my marrow. She told me I’m too sexy for her, and I should see other women, but I am. She said, then fuck some more! Okay. Have it your way.

“I almost didn’t make it into the city. Something weird is happening. My anxiety, or whatever the fuck it is, is mutating into an alien form of dread. You know how you live with a sense of disquiet, and you become sort of used to it, but then after years of therapy, drugs that unearthly strain of angst evolves into a more virulent form of horror. On the bridge, I wanted to turn left and drive into the oncoming traffic or right and go over the rail and plunge into the river.”

I sat on her sofa while Danielle paced, smoking cigarettes, and sipping wine. She turned to me and said, “I don’t know why I find you so exciting?”

She’s close enough for me to grab her hair, throw her on the ground, kiss her, and fuck her like an animal, and my humanness dissolved into hot vapor.

Breathless, she stared up at me, and said, “Guys come up to me, on the street, and beg for my phone number- a guaranteed rejection. I get dressed for a date, we go out, and I have a shit time. One guy told me he didn’t feel good enough to go home. They try to fuck me. Sometimes they sleep on the floor and whine when I kick them out. God, they’re schmucks.”

She placed her lips on mine, and then leaned away, “Your madness is beautiful like crystal.” Danielle laughed, “Guys will beg me to just lie next to them on the floor. Then they want me to take my clothes off; I need a gun.”

“You’ve turned our relationship into a Jeanne Moreau flick. It’s your template for love. The life of the other woman is exciting.”

Danielle has trouble having orgasms. “I think about you and burn out the batteries in my vibrator. Masturbation is supposed to help you have orgasms. Why can I have orgasms with you and no one else?”

The night ended in her bed and she hated herself for caring about me, but not as much as I loathed myself. I ran to my car worried about Candy and thinking she had died.

The stress of working, writing, maintaining a high academic standard for the fellowship CUNY had promised me, and caring for Candy were the precursors to my budding insanity. It came with bizarre dreams that overlapped from my sleep and oozed into a chaotic jumble of images while I was awake. My eerie mood, my dulled affect, my fatigue given my usual energy, my abundant sense of joy dissolved into the sensation I now inhabited an alien body that appeared to be mine yet this mass was somehow different.

I became compelled to examine this strange entity in the full mirror covered with Gavin’s clouds of talc. From a sequence of spontaneous neural triggers, a film of repetitive ideas bundled with sensations of unmitigated despair, horror, and fatigue continued to evolve. My lexicon of phobias had begun to increase, encompassing every bodily function, and many disparate phenomenona from the external world.

Not only was I afraid of dragging toxins into the lobby, an encounter with a neighbor’s dog, Stumpy, ratcheted up my rabies phobia the primal fear that had begun when I was eight. The integrity of our planet began to rely on me to neutralize all I perceived as dangerous to society. In my hyper-acute awareness, I observed the interconnections between separate phenomenona, turning the ordinary into hazards.

This escalation of angst transferred to our pet malamute, Eric, who had eaten almost my entire Castro convertible couch one weekend and he grew to 120 pounds. Candy couldn’t walk Eric without him dragging her on her abdomen. Eric was so gregarious, he jumped on everyone and slathered their faces with his tongue irrespective of their desires, and he was as finicky as he was affectionate. He took an hour to sniff out the appropriate location to void and longer before disgorging the remnants of his last meal of pencils, crayons, sofa cushions, and Alpo. Not only did I have to remove his excrement, I had to wash the area. I filled a bucket of hot water, added a detergent and disinfectant, and used a bristle brush, before rinsing the area with several buckets of hot water. This diabolical mandate spread to the neighbors’ car tires he voided on, and I had no choice but to wash their tires often at 4: 00 a.m.

My rabies phobia was among the most evil forms of horror because it presented a most hideous problem. Unless I received immunization, rabies often remained dormant for years, making the potential wait intolerable. Rabies name of hydrophobia was a misnomer. Rabid animals are afflicted with incredible thirst but if they drink, they trigger muscle spasms of such severity they bite down with enough to crack their jawbones.

Stumpy often loitered in my lobby and the nature of my anxiety was such even if I was certain his saliva—but perpetual doubt was an essential component of my malady—had not infiltrated any laceration on my body it did not end my horror for reality had no bearing on the symptoms of my predicament. Walking near Stumpy, or any other dog, elicited my fear. I began by calling poison control; they transferred me to the State Board of Health. I had called so often they recognized my voice and knew me by name. This failed to obliterate my horror, and I began calling every veterinarian in the phonebook, and then the CDC in Atlanta every Friday afternoon.

Amid this nonsense—I thought back to the moment years ago when I had reached to shake Dr. Pascal's hand. He withdrew it, pressed it against his ribs like a rusted one-armed bandit and proffered his fingertips for me to shake instead. My phobias continued to spread like a pyromaniac’s accelerated fires and my phobias surged to encompass the dread of choking to death on a bolus of food, forcing me to chew each bite forty times, and eat by a sink with the tap running, and this was just the beginning.

My hide felt like a brand new shirt with cardboard left under the collar and a lone pin bit me. In a forest of black trees of pristine beauty amid wind-swept snowdrifts, I was lost in a mind that seemed more like a tangled skein of yarn where sequential ideas and logic dissolved. Nothing could account for my circumstances except for the madness Pascal had observed. Insanity exploits our brain’s plastic perception. It dragged me into a world evoking cerebral vapor lock, a brain cramp similar to the riveting cold transmitted by your cranial nerves after having eaten ice cream or slurping down a cold beverage.

Candy showered and shaved her legs on the wet-on- wet anniversary of the Bastille and her birthday. She posed in a towel as if for her Playboy shoot. In her post-coma persona, she stared at me with her, I got you grin. You gave me death and life, you fucker, now you have to watch over me forever. Her demonic facade, interred prior to her coma, came with whimsical expressions, her fourth failed snuff film produced a marriage of her magical, I think therefore it happens, desire to kill me in order to coerce me into a childless marriage. Coma had altered Candy’s mordant nature, providing her with a hypomanic boost and her torpor leeched through my skin in an alchemy fusing joy, her hyperglycemic character regenerated by her suicidal transmogrification had the life, mine, appended to a giggling nymph. When she had emerged from her semi-opaque shroud of vapor from the bathroom, congealed bloody dollops on her shins transfixed my gaze. She dried herself, and her slow towel tease, her erotic awareness of tempo, rhythm, and timing, her grace, and élan entombed preceding her descent into proximity of her nonbeing and her resurrection struck me then as demonic creature that amazed me while it wanted to marry or destroy me.

When a person commits suicide, they never kill themselves as an independent creature. They murder in effigy those they identify with and depend on, or want to coerce, and her murderous fantasies lingered beneath consciousness and if suicide is the unconscious killing of one’s self, then it’s a psychological homicide used to manipulate its target.

Candy now possessed similar electro-chemical rhythmic surges of psychic energy that had inspired my paroxysms. A sliver from the broken mirror of a dream placed us on adjoining tables in an operating amphitheater where a surgeon exchanged our sap from me into my creation. I did not mind sharing, but Candy had usurped more than her share of my energy in an inexplicable phenomenon and had I doubted my sanity before, I was now certain of my propensity to develop states of mind that are assumed to belong to interior aspects of a lunatic.

Those who have not achieved their ‘suicidal’ goal have learned from aborted attempts and they conclude what fate or happenstance had thwarted. It was a constant refrain in my mind and perhaps her blasé attitude defined her revised plan, or the odd symptomatology known as la belle indifference—the appearance of having little concern. Did the Tofranil (antidepressant) and the amphetamine, Dexedrine, Dr. Pascal prescribed enable her to access resources that lay fallow prior to her pseudo-rebirth? Had Candy’s figurative appropriation of my body’s chemical ambrosia evince my tainted view of the world and my strange torpor?

The crippling OCD whose command for my abject humiliation reconfigured almost everything into hazards with the potential to demolish the delicate balance of life and the prospective destruction of the planet, and I had to remain vigilant given the incredible array of scenarios. Imagine! My metamorphosis into this eerie state came with a bizarre reconfigured body. My brain fired a sequence of spontaneous impulses, evoking sticky repetitive ideas whose disconcerting sensations came bundled with my discord and my new evolving physical presence that necessitated careful observation, and I scanned my evolving transmogrification while naked before a the peeling talcum smeared mirror. The face it wore was similar to mine but a fake nonetheless but as soon as I arrived at that uncertainty reared its head.

Was I dying? YES! Seconds from death, blood again, spouted from my every orifice. Thus, I drove to the ER as my flesh crinkled into cellophane while my blood spewed from torn arteries and each orifice as slush poured down into the shafts behind my eyes. Death sharpened its incisors on my femur, and I shouted as I slid twenty feet on the polished floor in the ER: “Something’s wrong with my brain. I AM HAVING A STROKE!”

My lunacy, obliterated doctors' confidence, augmenting their impotence as is common when ‘experts’ confront the unknown. Their fear and dread made me intolerable unless they dehumanized me, but in doing this, they increased my terror and I could not be certain what I might do next. The trepidation of contagion, for nothing is more communicable than a psychological blight, incurred their laughter until hysteria and loathing possessed them, and they ran from the rat who had wandered into their colony from another brood covered with alien piss. They sent a nurse, with a cow’s udder for a nose. She grabbed an implement large enough it could siphon an oil tanker, to shove up “your ass! They outta shoot your ass full of Thorazine and a straitjacket. He’s bleeding from the brain!” Everyone shrieked with laughter.

I ran from that ER, hopped into my VW, and fled while their mirth echoed in my ears. I found no exit, no means of excising the abhorrent entity within me, and those who hated me because of my illness. The essential horror of insanity is its ability to devour your identity and induce loathing. Driving down Main Street with the world’s most powerful sedative slurping at the trough of my synapses, leaving its residue, my deepening dissociation spun on a seal’s snout, it then crawled about the ramparts within my skull inducing vertigo. The blood-orange sun was a colossal bling-bling pendant pinned to the purple vest of some seventies pimp’s vines. God said he was color blind, incapable of putting together a matching ensemble and my Thorazine-saturated mind crammed with aberrations and stick figures while steel beams extruded through brick walls and cluttered my vision. The streets they, the government, had composed from small mirrors. A maze of abstract shaped buildings morphed into Dali’s molten timepieces and my world now filled with photos in antique gilded frames increased my terror.

Compressed in traffic, I watched cars meld into a massive sculpture commissioned by the city, resulting in the usual discord. Raising my left hand, I studied my thumb’s recent inexorable twitch, or had I imagined it move? Yes, it had stirred of its own volition despite my desire to control what it had denied. I extended my fingers in the cotton candy light, watching its tremor in time with my rebellious thoughts. The radio bulletin stated the cops wanted me dead or alive. A tuxedo rental chain demanded I return, or pay, for my prom outfit. The nerves in my left leg were ablaze, but I knew I couldn't die before returning my stash of overdue library books and pay the fines! I blew a gear whose teeth cracked. My thumb had begun twitching and my body was no longer mine?

Sweat soaked, my Thorazine enriched blood encircled lights in a nebulous iridescent halo. Bloodied tears drizzled down my shrunken cheeks and found my mouth. The setting sun, a suppurating chancre on the flesh of a mother-of-pearl sky led me to a beautiful girl dancing in her Corvette. Snapping her fingers, bouncing, she waggled her head, a jack-in-the-box as if she were my anima. In my benumbed state, I did not neglect her beauty but fear diverts desire even in the most ribald satyr. 24KNFAST's vanity plate subverted her loveliness in its tawdry attempt at wit. Why not lick through 24KNFAST’s vagina into her womb in a complete regression to be reborn. Why die in a traffic lanyard when a rebirth, an escape between the silken drain at the apex of her legs could reverse my converse entry into this world? This time I would eat through the cord, headfirst I plunge through those silk curtains into delivery room lights. A baptism of applause, I heard, but this child needed a woman of substance so be gone whore.

In the ER, where Candy had died three times, I slid on the floor and screamed about a stroke in evolution, the staff and the patients laughed at me, and they sealed me in a coffin-sized room with a desk, chairs, and a sink, and I heard them all shrieking with laughter at the sick bastard despite the closed door. A Dr. Schmuckler, unnoticed before, lurked behind his spectacles, an insect with the eyes of a mantis. “My brain is melting. Blood is gushing through my eyes, nostrils, and rectum. Grab the fucking mop, or gauze, at least! Can you spare a Band-Aid? I’m spouting absurdities, but I can’t control my legs.”

Nerves lanced my flesh in tensile streamers, fluttering in the gasp of an asthmatic AC. My mouth was burlap; my legs continued their fandango. Schmuckler’s grin, a rusted mail slot, screeched open. He became a python with a human head in its rictus.

“Do you want to kill yourself?” His eyes jerked. His serpentine lingua burrowed along his cheek. I reiterated my preference to live. The insect wondered if I was strong.

“I chew conglomerate rocks; my farts melt Kevlar. But I’m bleeding to death!”

“Can you walk on water?”

“If I could, do you think I’d be here!”

“Can you fly?”

“Only facing south while Judy sings Somewhere Over the Rainbow©.”

“What was he thinking?”

“You think I’m insane.” He was delighted to inform me I had schizophrenia that caused my thoughts to be blocked and then snatched from my brain's slack grasp. Was he sure? Yes. His hair was black licorice. A jackhammer pounded in my Thorazine-rich terror-riddled mind, and if Daffy Duck said he carved me out of cheddar cheese, I’d have believed him.

I ran to my car, and sped toward another ER swilling the liquid Thorazine Pascal had prescribed for my free-floating anxiety. How fucking dumb! My brain was slush now, slapping against both sides of my skull, and I raced back from the third ER to the same ER, and death, I had just left. Convinced I was having a stroke, I made the same absurd entrance and I dove on the floor, slid to a stop, four feet further this time, and seized at the feet of to two healers. Ordinary objects, trashcans, chairs, and stethoscopes fused with my body. The physicians leaned over the lunatic, speckling my face with sweat, tears of joy, and saliva burst from mouths contorted by mirth and found my face and other body parts. “I’m sick, get me a doctor!”

Their hysteria, caused by my remark, catapulted them to a nitrous oxide laugh while their salivary squall continued to rain down and dappled my face. Another doctor strolled by, and I said, “It’s impossible, but my brain's decomposing.” This healer’s face coiled into the knot of his rage, and he screamed that he would exam me after his other patients! He slumped against the wall; the patients who had needed his immediate attention resided in his nostrils. With his index finger inserted into his proboscis up to his second knuckle, he yanked out two specimens, which he doubtless sent for a biopsy. Assured they were benign he tossed those delicacies into his mouth, smiled, ignored me, and walked away. Dr. Lumpkind, Schmuckler’s associate, scanned my chart with his frog's eyes. Dr. Pascal had returned from his two-month vacation, and Lumpkind phoned him. I told the Genius, “I’m going to die.”

Dr. Pascal said I had a feeling and was entitled to a neurological examination. That's fuckin' magnanimous of him. The resident who did my neurological workup exam referred to a textbook; never a good sign, especially while he held the book upside down, and spent a great deal of time squinting and scratching his head in the expression of absolute confusion. He dropped the textbook and the Playmate, he had glued over the twelve cranial nerves, faced us. The doctor was considering, it seemed, specializing in gynecology.

I interpreted the words he didn’t understand. “These are her breasts.” I said, and the doctor smiled. “Tits! They are Beautiful, yes?”

“Yes, you have excellent taste and are a quick study, you devil, but that was easy.” I interpreted neo-cortex then deep tendon reflexes for his pupil and then I described the spinal cord and its function. This doctor said he never realized how important the spine was.

His command of English inspired my suspicion, but he wore a day-glow green shirt with iridescent orange slacks under his white coat, and I felt reassured that I had an accurate workup. I sprinted from that ER to my VW and sped from one ER to the next until I arrived at North Shore at sunrise wearing Candy’s coat and hoping to receive a competent evaluation. Doctor Combover Kinkman was half-asleep and didn't find anything organic, and he suggested a psychiatric consultation. I had a laugh-in with a female Indian doctor; a human beach ball wearing flippers who blushed while scribbling her dot matrix methane commentary.

Wittgenstein decided philosophical dilemmas arise from misperceptions due to the nuances of language and language games that varied in local idioms and dialects and she laughed and he analyzed the logic of having an Indian woman who knew three words of English, counseling a terror-stricken Jewish man, and I asked Dr. Pilates D. Ball to telephone Pascal. If a lion could talk we would not understand him except if he spoke fluent flatulence. She squinted and leaned closer and closer to my mouth, as if her proximity to my voice would enable her to decipher the strange sounds. I repeated myself five times then I seized the phone. “I’m going to die!”

Pascal, who channeled God’s voice, said, “It’s a feeling. You know, Aaron, in the past you have had feelings about my being on vacation. Perhaps you’re using these feelings to see if Dr. Pascal still cares about you after my vacation.” I waited for his rendition of Feelings©, which had become illegal in the USA, after inducing a rash of suicides and killed, according to one man, his diabetic spouse. Pascal told me to swill more Thorazine, sit in the waiting room, and allow my head to clear. My head contained a dark cloud of detritus. Thorazine failed to quell my agitation, or clear my overcast brain, so I zipped over to LIJ Hospital where Dr. P. had me swallow another fifty mgs of Thorazine.

Each dose increased my agitation and failed to clear the debris in my head. What is happening to me? I cannot eat, I have chills, sleep is a mirage, and I watched a voodoo priest stab a doll. Pascal’s notion that I wanted to test his love for me as the prime mover of my distress suggested he seek work in a different field perhaps fashion. Losing your mind is a bit more perplexing than misplacing your glasses, but nothing compared to the trauma of losing your keys. Unable to control my body, combined with the most profound terror I have ever known, I returned to North Shore and my tenth psychiatrist of the weekend. Placidyl Gavin checked ER registers and found me during my second visit to LIJ. I fell into his arms in the parking lot, and said, “No one should be this sick!”

North Shore, late that night, after three earlier visits that day, standing next to an ambulance driver with long sideburns who resembled, a sixty-year-old Elvis Impersonator, and a rookie who would transport the madman to Nassau County Medical Center. Elvis looked at my complaint of insomnia, smirked and stared at me waiting for an excuse to beat the shit out of the loon wearing a woman’s jacket. On the road, seated in the back of the ambulance, I reached a level of anxiety that I feared the wax and cotton earplugs had used at night had damaged my brain. It was absurd but the level of my terror accommodated any reason for my confusion.

Another Indian psychiatrist, at Nassau County Medical, asked me if I wanted to kill myself. No! It says you want to kill yourself. I want to live! I cannot admit you! It is against the law! You must want to kill yourself or murder someone! Talk about the rising cost of healthcare! Do I choose my victim or is it up to the hospital’s discretion? Do they have a hit list or wealthy patients needing an organ who’ve made a large endowment? Okay, I refuse to break the law. I want to kill myself, a few hundred people, and while I am in the mood, you. You want to kill me. No, I just didn't want you to feel rejected; I'm joking, relax. For some reason, I frightened her.

The sari-shrouded doll admitted me, I had my fourth series of head X-rays of the night and day, and I could have generated enough electricity to run the entire hospital. If you can induce a stroke in a patient, it is an opportunity you might not want to miss. A SWAT team, wearing Kevlar, helmets, and armed with Glocks, transported me up to a secure unit. “I’m not Hannibal Lechter no matter what the chart says. Did a war break out, or are you afraid of me?” They told me to shut the fuck up in four-part harmony; I demanded to see the concierge.

They had me strip and heaved my belongings into a garbage bag. A nurse gave me a cup of liquid Thorazine to clear my smog suffused mind. A male nurse with cystic acne, named appropriately Mr. Boyle escorted me to my suite: a bed in the hallway near a garbage pail. “If you are expecting a tip, forget it.” He insisted I call him mister. The metal door slammed shut, and I lay in the darkness. I walked to the water fountain, and drank a warm stream that tasted like disinfectant. A man who had slashed his wrists danced with a garbage can and had a woody from dry humping her. He screamed for more Valium three feet from my pillow until I asked him to hump his woman ten feet further from my flat pillow.

Rumbling down Route Thorazine, I had slept for ten minutes in two days; I got up, and strolled down the corridor. A man who seemed to have been composed from strips of crisp bacon sat in a nook. He revealed his naked body from beneath a large diaper. “You like?”

“You are irresistible.” He cackled and said my wife douched with water from the Ganges. “It could have been worse; she might have used sulfuric acid.” He said, she had that's how he got this. He revealed his shriveled penis that bore an uncanny facsimile to a miniscule anteater.

My terror, and upon reflection for your sake dear reader, I cannot, as much as I try, cull but a faded replication of the hideous state I’d experienced. For example, along with the distinct sensation that I was going to dissolve in a protoplasmic blob or become a smoke signal, my tumultuous restless body syndrome felt like a demonic apparition had tied and knotted my anguish with the inability for me to stop perambulating. I imagined I was an android controlled by some man sicker than I was and who had rewired me to enable him to manipulate me from a control module. This excessive uncontrollable promenade was, and probably still is a means of torture where they tied the victim to an immovable object, and I did not know this then, to prevent him from walking or moving a limb. Locked up, and I had to refer to the aide, whose cystic acne was such he should not use his rage over his Rocky Mount Range complexion and concomitant rage to assist the behavior of the insane.

A shadow trickled through a rectangular window bisected by a shadow it splashes the tiles in a nook adjoining the one occupied by Mr. Crispy Bacon. The gears and pulleys in my mind slipped and squealed. I watched my blood cells pulsing through the veins in my arm. A human hand, palm up, rested in my lap. It could be my mine, and I can control it at times. This hand is small, eloquent, with long fingers; the delicate carpal and metacarpal bones of my wrist form the hinge that attaches it to the ulna and radius. The more I watched my bodily functions, the more my state of confusion and perturbation escalated. During my ten-minute sleep, I had a reverie that a doctor severed my claw, replacing it with this baby. My real hand had more precise movements than its proxy, I think. We still treat the insane, bemused, addled, and brain injured with loathing, fear, and the dread of contagion so we are ready to laugh at what many perceived as some communicable horror an attitude that even those who are sick have created a hierarchy.

With each ‘mind-cleansing’ hit of Thorazine, my macabre state of indecision and cognitive murk became more dreadful because the most potent tranquilizer we have, capable of turning a sperm whale into Rip Van Winkle, did the opposite to me, and it made me meander without surcease while this lack, my agitation instead of tranquility, amped my terror. How could I know if I existed in this world, or if I had stepped into a hologram? All my visual images and cues my mind perverted, down the hall translucent heat rose from a stretch of hot asphalt, and I was stuck between floors in another reality, or stuck in the present and pure insanity. Pascal told me it's because I wanted to know if Pascal still loved me! It might have shocked him but I did not give a shit if he loved or hated me. If I wanted feigned love, this world had an abundance of fraudulent adoration.

Banks of fluorescents torched the hall; good morning, the janitor pushed my bed ahead of him as he mopped. Sir, they are serving breakfast now, in the main dining room. Seated at the dais in the day room, I tried eating desiccated sausages resembling turds a poodle had pinched. A young man named Henry shadowboxed but he quit and paced with me since my uncooperative body continued to force me to skate through the halls. Henry epoxied to my side called me J.C. He begged me to speak to my Heavenly Father. In Henry’s tortured psyche, I was Jesus according to Paul’s concept of Christology. Dad was the thought behind the Son, in my form, and the Word. I could emancipate Henry by conversing with the Spirit putting in a good word for the young man and I obliged him. The Son nearly chipped a tooth on a chunk of lasagna at lunch that merited illegal weapon status.

Later, I called a taxi and fled. For three days on Thorazine, I’d slept now for forty minutes. Candy asked Pascal what was happening to me. Pascal said I had delusions, but the medication would alleviate them. She told Pascal I was deteriorating. Pascal insisted I was on the mend. This is the converse of the placebo effect. In this case, the physician perceives improvement because he has prescribed a drug. Thus, in a therapeutic relationship, whatever that might be, both patient and doctor responded to the ersatz healing properties of the medication and they both noted an alleviation of the sufferer’s symptoms. The drug heals the patient because he believes in the scientific method of his doctor healer and the psychiatrist believes he has accomplished something related to medicine because an army of pharmaceutical company representatives, two hundred thousand or so, and they were as zealous as those Hare Krishna fanatics were.

This acute surveillance introduced a morbid, compulsive desire to examine all my metabolic processes. The exchange with Candy had to have begun on the night I had breathed for two while she snagged my vital force, my qi. I not only kept her alive but I poured my soul into her body as water finds a drain. My acuity, often diminished by anguish, seemed augmented, and I had the insane notion physicians in a covert government operation had rewired my brain, or filled it with curious maggots. As this implausible scenario degraded, I stood naked before the talc dusted glass gazing at my reflection, that of a malformed shame-ridden pretender. My twin’s nude form, every facet of my substructure, my circulatory system, every enteric physical function, taken for granted prior to my highjacked perceptions demanded clarification. My penis had an embryonic protean network of veins and arterioles that had sprouted anew each day, replacing the familiar labyrinth.

Drying my naked body nauseated me, and I purchased a red bulb for the bathroom I used every time I showered as I had a few years earlier because I had fallen short of my mother’s quest for perfection, and I was an outsider, a stranger; a visitor in a borrowed body bag, stuck in a ludicrous world. My protuberant veins were on the verge of tearing through the flesh of my forearms, eliciting a macabre game in which I placed my finger along a the blue-violet rhizome of an embossed vein, pressed down to stop the blood flow, and then I lifted my finger, to observe my sap re-infuse that vein. I considered the articulation of my bones, especially the intricacies of my hand in a child’s incredulous wonder. I waited to combust, or crack into pieces, a glass figurine. I traced my carotid, brachial, and femoral arterial pulses and tried to synchronize them with my heart’s rhythmic throb, and my hacking croup cough that dominated my childhood, returned when I spoke, catapulting words from my mouth like buckshot. My heart swelled filling my ribcage like a heavy bag.

I focused on my liver’s performance did it detoxify my blood, did it exude the proper amount of enzymes for digestion, and protein synthesis, and what prevented my heart from seizing or going into a deadly arrhythmia, and where was my incipient cancer hiding? Within my skull, the ashes of those I had loved and lost to the infirmity of my androgen driven enslavement gathered. My eye sockets where empty. Even my eyes had abandoned me; I located my blue orbs, ripe with tiny capillaries, on the backs of spiders creeping into the night, so afraid of the stranger wearing the mask of my face. Prolapsed sacks of vitreous humor, my eyes had returned post spider in that condition to ooze down my sunken, shrunken, shriveled cheeks, and my optic nerves, voids, that served as a flute that whistled with each draft of wind.

I choked down fifty mgs of Thorazine, and cowered in bed hiding in the warmth distilled by Candy’s body, shivering beneath a mantle of malaria-like sweat, and staring at a nightlight. My world was a mess of double-exposed photos, a tunnel of revulsion in a world of warped prisms, and inverted reality. Early one day, as the sun replaced Candy’s body heat, I drove to the library. In the Physicians’ Desk Reference, I discovered Pascal’s Thorazine brain dusting had not only failed to alleviate my beclouded mind but it had caused my pseudo-Parkinsonism muscle decontrol syndrome called akathisia. This is one profound adverse reaction to antipsychotics and the old KBG had, if you guessed right you win, used Thorazine initiated- akathisia to torture political dissidents.

Pascal never considered akathisia and the role Thorazine played in my intolerable restlessness; His inability to accept his mistakes needs no comment. The Genius then supplied me with Haldol and Cogentin, which negated drug-induced motor problems, turning me into a somnambulist with a mouth full of dry sand.

In his ethereal voice, Pascal declared that my latest siege of terror had begun precisely when Evan had returned from camp Poke-Eye-Out. According to Pascal, this episode centered on my anxiety and the composition of a novel, a tutorial, with New York Times book reviewer, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Dr. Pascal decided I was depressed, an observation commensurate with an odd smell while waist deep in shit, and he prescribed Etrafon-forte, a combination of an antipsychotic Trilafon and the antidepressant Elavil. The apocalyptic terror that made me think I was turning into a thing with the density of smoke and a lifespan of seconds, despite potent sedatives, remained undiminished. Living in horror, I dragged my mattress into Gavin’s room, wore my clothes to bed, left the overhead lights on, and kept my car keys in my shoes, which I placed next to my head in case another blast of inexplicable dread struck.

My malady reconfigured my perception into a surreal landscape and shredded my cognition, cleaving my erroneous perceptions and my mood that is the sine qua non of madness. I waited for the elevator, clutching its rail, until my knuckles blanched making my ascent from the cave into the midday sun, blinded by silica embedded in the concrete. Populated by a mutable mélange of objects, reality stretched, shrank, and reversed in a continuum compounded by the macabre glow of transcendence induced by the antipsychotics that had failed to clear my smog-laden head.

I inhabited a lopsided world where objects on the left side of the street my psychosis compressed into miniatures while giants roamed ten feet away as if I lived in a massive Ames room used by psychologists in experiments on the plasticity of human perception. A dense olfactory nimbus encased me in a cloud with a stench comparable to rotten fish. This perceptual deformity evoked my earliest memories and I imagined my face pressed against a subway car window, watching my grimace flinch across the panes of a car rushing in the opposite direction. Pascal admitted I had a psychosis, a dictionary of phobias, and said, “You have so much psychopathology. In my opinion you have pseudo neurotic schizophrenia.”

His latest nostrum failed to alleviate my terror, and Pascal prescribed the first drug he had fed me, Stelazine. It failed and had I eaten the debris in the cuffs of old slacks, it might have evoked the same degree of tranquility; he then prescribed the antipsychotic, Trilafon, which turned me into a drooling catatonic sculpture for three days, and to corral my insomnia he added the hypnotic Dalmane. His drug blitzkrieg failed to cauterize the bizarre world I had inhabited. Pascal drowned me in a chemical swamp and after serving my brain cells as canapes for months, he discontinued Trilafon. Pascal replaced it with a Librium/Valium knockoff, Tranxene. He prescribed a dose three times the maximum for an adult. He continued drubbing me with the hypnotic, Dalmane, along with yet another antipsychotic Surmontil to control my psycho- pathological prestidigitation, and while going to the bathroom one night I almost fainted from orthostatic hypotension.

Lunacy reconfigured reality into a surreal world, a painting whose colors ran together. I waited for a train that never arrived and my blanched knuckles led to the discovery of blood beneath my nails. One night I emerged from Plato's shadowed cave, my apartment building, into painful sunlight, yes, at night; the ground was inconstant, motile, and I walked through a Boschian swamp. Populated with a melange of objects, reality stretched, shrank, and reversed in a continuum, compounded by the macabre glow as if I were a figurine in a bottle. The antipsychotics that failed to clear my cluttered head before achieved my state of intractable despair.

Two years post Candy’s latest flirtation with Thanatos, Pascal’s bunker bombing drug approach led to the idea that if I could not shed my OCD mandates, I would kill myself. Life was no longer worth the pain and the horror, I had to endure, and I was unable to compose fictional narratives, and had begun skipping classes to care for Candy. The city’s fiscal crisis led to cuts in the program I was taking, called the CUNY Baccalaureate, and the adjunct professors were not rehired, and my fellowship was no longer a certainty or a priority.

In February, before I had begun to think of suicide as a solution, while Pascal was away for a week, I saw a doctor in the outpatient clinic at LIJ/Hillside Psychiatric Hospital then considered among the best facilities in the country. A young doctor had interviewed me and prescribed Vivactil, which was the most stimulating tricyclic antidepressant available at the time. In my ignorance, and predicated on my faith in Pascal, I questioned his choice. Doctors prescribed antidepressants for many people suffering from one of the many manifestations of schizophrenia but they always prescribed them with an antipsychotic because they increased the symptoms of schizophrenia and without the proper balance, they could incur a dangerous psychotic break, and I did not take the Vivactil for fear it would make my illness worse.

A year earlier, another doctor, a kind man, Vladimir Piscacek covered for Pascal. Piscacek also saw a different facet of my mental anomaly and treated me with benzodiazepines and antidepressants. His approach predated the young doctor I saw at LIJ/Hillside by more than a year. However, once again, my faith in Pascal remained undiminished and Pascal began treating my schizophrenia with the antipsychotic Trilafon.

Pascal had obliterated my identity, and the voyage through the maze of my insanity had begun. Every night I ran twelve miles to mitigate my OCD imperatives, ate several bowls of cereal, and went outside and ran until my eyes closed but this failed to alleviate my compulsions. Blind faith is blind and a man with acid in his eyes has one concern, but I persisted while knowing we are savages beating a mantra on metal washbasins, all nonsense given our communal arrogance.

***

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200,000 pills

2012-11-28T18:18:00.002-08:00

English: Zyprexa (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Clonazepam tablets Klonopin 0.5mg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The biggest mistake I have made in my life was walking into the office of a psychiatrist's office as a means of continuing education. Given the nature of communication, and how words often annihilate ideas and lead to confusion, it was almost inevitable that Dr. Pascal, although the fall guy for the profession, would reach for the prescription pad and the result led me into a quagmire of muddled diagnoses and the consumption of approximately eighty different medications. I have listed seventy-five here put I'm certain I have missed a few. I apologize for the formatting problems of the listing of the drugs I have taken in accordance with the prescriptions.
   I began 200,000 PILLS looking for the right drug for me and it was during the many drafts and delays that I came to realize that an empathetic listener was the best medications. I did however suffer from a debilitating disorder but it was missed by all of these psychiatrists and the harm to my personal life is incalculable.

   200,000 PILLS

DRUG INDUCED COMA

US COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

Insomnia such as mine has driven many people insane, many have attempted suicide, and many have joined support groups, making their eventual suicide a certainty. Remorse over consuming hundreds of thousands pills has enhanced my omnipresent sense of guilt, hopelessness, and decay. To prevent me from ending the life I love with uncommon greed, I ate even more pills to excise these psychological demons.

For decades, I have tumbled down a chute into a synthetic coma. It begins like this: despite my toxic bloodstream, I sip from a glass of filtered water and mash three mgs of Klonopin, a potent sedative, with the pestle of my tongue, and then press the paste into the membrane lining the mortar of my mouth. I eat 100 mgs of Sinequan, a sedating antidepressant that has failed to raise the black curtain of my dysphoria. This old drug induces coronaries, strokes, and causes black tongue, always a party favorite. Next, I down 50 mgs of Benadryl, ubiquitous in OTC sleep aids, and 10/20 mgs of Vytorin, to ensure many more years impaled on the stake of my fiendish malady, and finish with 20 mgs of Zestril, to restrain my roller coaster blood pressure, while I hum, for some reason, the William Tell Overture. Dessert is Zyprexa an antipsychotic marketed off label as a mood stabilizer; it is the newest green algae pond scum cure Du jour. My stable dysphoria attests to its efficacy.

To speak with eloquence given my lethal drug cocktail amazes my doctor, but I cannot recall if his comment came before or after his stroke. My lethal medicinal meal inhibits smooth muscle contractions, so emptying my bladder is a contentious battle. I run a warm stream of water over my hand, and stare into the commode’s blue Cyclopean eye while some urethral tears fall. Either a few beads remain to taunt me, or I enjoy holding my penis. I refill my glass and place it on my night table. My pill-parched mouth with its cracked tongue remains Velcroed to my upper palate until sunrise and my drug-inspired snort and sexy ululation terrifies foraging raccoons.

Tormented still by my version of The Prince and the Pea, I slide to the carpet, and stumble forward to repeat my liturgy. The bedroom spins into a Tilt-a‑Whirl; hot flashes spew searing sweat needles through my pores, while the languid flutter of my eyelids, black wings tattooed with golden streaks, foreshadows my impending loss of consciousness. Lowering my head to prevent fainting, I allow blood to be reabsorbed into the blotter of my brain before toddling forward, locating the far bedpost with my forehead, smacking into the dresser, bouncing off two walls, the TV stand, stubbing my toe, and hop about doing the universal, ‘I-broke-my-fucking-toe dance,’ accompanied by the usual expletives. Undaunted, I stumble forward to stare into the bowl’s antiseptic eye to wring a single bauble from the dishrag of my bladder and I watch that forlorn drop plop into the ocular tarn while inducing a tingle rivaling an orgasm.

My drug-induced tarantella back to the rack of my bed is fraught with danger. Blasting off one object into another, and another, my forehead discovers the amoire, while I avoid a concussion, and crash onto the bed and grab the remote. What I need is a roller derby outfit with their phallus worshiping knee guards and elbow protectors.

I pause at an infomercial for a hairspray to conceal bald spots – it’s the identical substance used to simulate snow making the gloomiest Scroogean Christmas white. Click. An attractive woman in an exercise outfit is bound to a body-sculpting device. Her fixed smile suggests severe motion sickness. Designed for the country’s pandemic of bulimia, anorexia, or for any masochistic this electric chair spins her clockwise, counter-clockwise until the poor model is on the verge of hurling.

I click to Girls! Girls! Girls! Whose scrumptious faces and bodies make men lose control of their cars, miss mortgage payments, murder their wives, and stuff their sleeping children into wood-choppers, but these beauties are pinning for you Mr. Nowhere Man. Their gravity-defying breasts make me wonder who will lift off first while the Greek chorus sings, Pick up the phone! Let go of your tumid cocks, drop your semen-congealed tissues, and pick up the phone! The girls’ tone escalates into a demand, ‘You snot-picking nerds pick up the phone! Pick up the fucking phone! Another click finds John Wayne and James Stewart with welcome mat toupees sitting askew on their keloid dappled heads; during this scene, to me, they are wondering if they have benign prostatic hypertrophy or a cancerous walnut. I laugh before plunging into a hollow coma.

Dream or REM—rapid eye movement—slumber is essential for emotional health. The medications I gobble distort REM whose deprivation can induce a psychosis, launch the good ship despair, and years have passed since I have had a genuine dream. Inadequate delta five sleep forces the brain to compensate, freeing the chimeras of a mind deprived of nocturnal delusions to run amok in the sunlight, an eerie double-exposed wasteland engraved with hideous images.

Toward dawn, my polypharmaceutical nightcap wears thin; a mule kicks a can against my ribs, and I awaken from a black culvert, a child with night terrors. Drenched in a sweatscicle, and frozen by shame, you would think I was monster, a Hitler, oh, name any sociopath unburdened by a conscience, and I am tethered to the most intense remorse, but what have I done?

“Do you know how many suicides have been ruled as accidental overdoses?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Neither do I, but I thought you might.”

While each pill my drug-cocktail drags me closer to Death’s perimeter, I eat another two mgs of Klonopin, stuff silicon plugs into my ears. Daylight’s carnivorous glare enhances my dysphoria and one eye remains unzipped awaiting my enemy’s ascent; desperate, I scratch my way back into coma’s womb.

Serenity eludes me again, and I awaken in abject terror as the wasteland’s repulsive light dismisses the night and my heart is a metal noisemaker cranked in a drunkard’s sweat-creased paw. Thrust into the light from the darkness of my perpetual night, I taste the bile of my unfettered sorrow. The moon is my sun and the nocturnal shadows and ink that disheartens most infuses me with the pale recollection of my misplaced joy and obscures the charred soul of this murderer’s malady.

None of the drugs doctors have prescribed for my amorphous dis-ease has tempered my pain. What damage drugs have done to my brain remains unknown? Do these medications protect me from the stress of my illness or are they destroying my brain? Many psychiatrists consider psychotropic drug damage a more virulent transgression than physical rape. Since it cannot heal, they believe the destruction of one’s brain, is a more piercing violation than the desecration of a body with its ability to mend.

Early in my life’s journey, I had strayed from the true path into a black grove. Trying to find the way, I wandered through the thicket lost, until I pushed the wheelbarrow filled with the compost of my angst into Dr. Alan Pascal’s office. Hoping to mine the archetypes in my psyche, I dumped that pile of my intrapyschic distress on his beige carpet. A brilliant psychiatrist with a reputation for a conservative medicinal approach, he wrote my first prescriptions for psychotropic drugs, inaugurating the hundreds of thousands of pills to follow.

Pascal saw my judicious use of pot, speed, and barbiturates as a nascent flare, a sign of the incipient madness in the pith of my soul. Before I had entered his office, I had given up recreational drugs but

Pascal never remembered this fact, enabling him to blame subsequent conflicts on those forbidden chemicals. During thirteen years of prattle, his erroneous zones became blatant, and I learned we had never spoken the same language.

Ignorant, in effect illiterate, I saw Pascal as a genius, a paternal model who would teach me to endow my life with meaning. I envisioned psychotherapy as an integral part of my education, but beneath this overt inspiration, as I scan back over the mildewed pages of my life, I see the naked specter of my chronic misery with great clarity. Given Pascal’s purported gift, I recommended his therapeutic insights to my friends. All of them had experimented with amphetamines, grass, Quaaludes, and barbiturates, and he treated us all with the same medications I received. We were all, by his standard, teetering on the brink of insanity.

Two chairs stood opposite each other in his anteroom. A huge plastic plant sat in a bucket filled with fake soil. A network of cobwebs decorated the plant; behind a vinyl curtain blocked the windows that, owing to the building’s construction, were at ground level while his subterranean womb was a curious symbolic arena to study the runes of patients’ psychological histories. Dr. Pascal’s collection of magazines, due to his parsimony, were limited to two hepatic-yellow mildewed issues of The Vacationing Physician, a professional journal, and an ancient copy of National Geographic, which was so old the women of Nigeria wore pasties. His office was ample; it contained additional plastic foliage.

He greeted me in silence with his Jack-o-lantern smile, revealing a mouth with tiny seeds for teeth. His smile said I was a nerd but “I became a sagacious doctor in order to get laid or you are a nut.” He invited me in, and I sat in his Naugahyde dunking stool while he placed his albino-white ass on a leather chair in front of bookshelves whose tomes were the size of the Manhattan phonebooks, I dubbed it The Great Wall of Knowledge. Stacks of medical journals lined his desk, a Maginot line. During sessions, he slid my chair to the corner of his desk providing him with an unimpeded view of his patient who sat beneath a floodlight as if being interrogated by the CIA.

I waited for him to talk. He waited for me. He massaged his chin and readied his pencil. Then he tugged his earlobe and swiveled in his chair, and so it went . . . until I broke the sacrosanct therapeutic silence. Left-handed he hooked his arm around a tiny spiral pad, writing in a furor as I spoke, and I recalled that southpaws die nine year earlier and a higher incidence of mental illness than right-handed people have. I should have kept my mouth shut and run.

Could the Sheetrock support the Great Wall of Knowledge and the wall next to the patient’s chair covered with thirteen diplomas survive the weight of Dr. Pascal’s framed authority? His large head evoked images of observatories; seven strands of oily, black hair like a car’s detailing on the bright pink dome of a skull appeared too large for his body like a baby’s head, and as an infant, I suspect, he resembled a fifty-year-old man.

When my hairline began to recede, he led me to believe that losing my long, curly hair was pathological. It took commercials for Rogaine, The Hair Club for Men, and hair transplant mills to make me realize that most men were very concerned about losing their hair. Since he was bald, reducing my complaint to a sign of psychopathology was perhaps compensation for his own premature loss and a form, perchance, of projected mourning. In contemporary culture, personal beauty is the gold measure of human value, while money is the silver. During my youth, many thought I had a great deal of gold.

When a girlfriend had sprayed her hairdo into a lethal weapon, we broke up for a few days. Kicking his conservative-bent aside, as I sat tethered to my Naugahyde dunking stool, Pascal dipped me into the polluted lagoon of his fallacious reasoning, decided I was a tad blue, and he prescribed the first little blue pill, Stelazine, an antipsychotic used off-label for ‘neurotic’ anxiety. To annul my lifelong insomnia, he prescribed another antipsychotic, Mellaril, a medicinal choice commensurate to killing an ant with a sledgehammer. The drug hangover made speaking almost impossible while I either bit my tongue, or plied it from the roof of my mouth. Mellaril’s half-life made this condition last from one dose to the next. It was early one morning when I sideswiped six parked cars, making friend and passenger I had promised a ride consider an alternative means of transportation.

Eager to excise the tumor of my discord, perpetuated by what Pascal had begun, my ceaseless attempt to find a medicinal cure, found me in the offices of fifty to seventy psychiatrists, who can keep an accurate tally, who have prescribed each pill I have taken excluding a few recreational morsels, I had gobbled during my brief illusion of immortality. However, these noisome and dangerous medications have irrevocably altered my mind, my body, and my soul and though I’ve organized my neurochemical chaos as well as I could, my disheveled perceptions form a multicolored jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces no longer fit, and my own mind seems alien and damaged.

Who am I? I do not quite know, but I am without question a grunt in our army of doctor-induced drug addicts. Predicated on our morbidly obese, and gaining, lexicon of psychological syndromes, housed in the DSM, we now lead the world in mental illnesses. No one knows what incurred this epidemic of neurochemical deficiencies and excesses that has spawned the mind-bending desecration of brains and the masses of people suffering from them but immigrants who land on our shores soon become as insane as the rest of the population

Under the influence of 300,000 pills, that have failed despite their purported promise, I fell in love, again, again, and again… rented my body, selling it was absurd, and married, which brought me the wondrous gift of my daughter. My tale explores the stigma of mental illness, suicide, obsessions, compulsion, betrayal, squandered potential, our communal ignorance, and doctor-induced madness.

Here’s the mind-bending list of drugs doctors have prescribed to control my incurable schizophrenia, poverty, and as one of the fifty million grunts in the army waging a savage battle against erroneous misperceptions, and the universal dread of those with a mental illness or its concomitant anomalies.

1. Abilify 17. Dexedrine 32. Milltown 48. Ritalin 64. Trileptal

2. Adderall Capsules 33. Nardil 49. Ritalin-SR 65. Tuinal

3 Amytal Sodium 18. Dilantin 34. Navane 50. Seconal 66. Valium

4. Asendin 19. Effexor 35. Nembutal 51. Serax 67. Valmid

5. Atarax 20. Elavil 36. Neurontin 52. Seroquel 68. Vistaril

6. Ativan 21. Etrafon 37. Noludar 53. Sinequan 69. Vivactil

7. Benadryl 22. Etrafon-Forte 38. Norpramin 54. Stelazine 70. Wellbutrin

8. Celexa 23. Geodon 39. Pamelor 55. Surmontil 71.Wellbutrin SL

9. Chloral Hydrate 24. Halcion 40. Parnate 56. Synthroid 72. Wellbutrin XL

10. Clonidine 25. Haldol 41. Paxil 57. Taractan 73. Xanax

11. Concerta 26. Lamictal 42. Phenobarbital 58. Tegretol 74. Zoloft

12. Cylert 27. Lexapro 43. Placidyl 59. Thorazine 75. Zyprexa

13. Dalmane 28. Librium 44. Provigil 60. Tofranil

14. Depakote 29. Lithium 45. Prozac 61. Tranxene

15. Deseryl 30. Luvox 46. Remeron 62. Triavil

16. Dexedrine 31. Mellaril 47. Restoril 63. Trilafon

Welcome to my life…

bunsarenotcake.tumblr.com

TALES OF LOVE AND OTHER DISORDERS

aaronadavid.wordpress.com

Please see below an excerpt from Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond, by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain (Grove Press)

This Section is titled MAD SCIENTIST

The Mad Scientist is the late Dr. Paul Hoch

Dr. Pascal, a pseudonym, diagnosed me with a disorder that emanated in the mind of Paul Hoch in 1948 and appeared in medical journals in 1949. Although I consider Dr. Pascal as one of the best psychiatrists I have known it was Dr Pascal who began my consumption of a wheelbarrow full of pills. It was an egregious error and it has had a profound negative effect on my life. The diagnosis of pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia was a 'wastebasket' diagnosis that was compelling but never accepted by the psychiatric community or entered into the DSM in 1952. The problem with assigning a diagnosis predicated on my attempt to describe an abstract concept to Dr. Pascal is predicated on two main issues. In the first place, Dr. Pascal saw very few people with schizophrenia and he was making a guess predicated on my metaphorical description of panic attacks. True panic attacks are so profound that I felt as if I was dissolving and on the verge of death.

In an earlier post, I described being mugged. Though I had a gun placed to the back of my head, it was not as frightening as the panic attacks I tried to describe to Dr. Pascal and others. When I called Dr. Pascal, he knows that he has harmed me i ways that few can imagine, and he acts as one might expect from a doctor who had made a gaffe of monumental proportions.

What follows is the gist of what some journalists wrote about Dr. Paul Hoch.

Dr. Hoch, early advocate of the the theory that LSD and other hallucinogens drugs, performed numerous number of bizarre experiments for the army while also serving as a CIA consultant during the 1950s. He administered intraspinal injections of mescaline and LSD to psychiatric patients, causing an "immediate, massive, and almost shock like picture with higher doses." Aftereffects ("generalized discomfort," "withdrawal," "oddness," and "unreality feelings") lingered for two to three days following the injections.

Hoch, who later became New York State Commissioner for Mental Hygiene, also gave LSD to psychiatric patients and then lobotomized them in order to compare the effects of acid before and after psycho surgery. ("It is possible that a certain amount of brain damage is of therapeutic value," Hoch once stated.) In one experiment a hallucinogen was administered along with a local anesthetic and the subject was told to describe his visual experiences as surgeons removed chunks of his cerebral cortex.

In another study, Hoch gave mescaline to a thirty-six-year-old male diagnosed as a "pseudo neurotic schizophrenic." Afterwards Hoch reported: "He had some visual hallucinations. He saw dragons and tigers coming to catch him and reacted to these hallucinations with marked anxiety. He also had some illusions distortions of the objects in the room. The emotional changes were apprehension and fear at times mounting to panic, persecutory misinterpretation of the environment, fear of death, intense irritability, suspiciousness, perplexity, and feelings of depersonalization. He verbalized the feelings of depersonalization as 'floating out of space,' seemed 'between this life and the next,' and had the feeling of being born. The paranoid content concerned essentially, why the doctors were taking notes and fear that he would be attacked by them. He also expressed an ecstatic grandiose trend of having the feeling that he was God in heaven and then, however, had the feeling of being in hell...The mental picture was that of a typical schizophrenic psychosis while the drug influence lasted."

As an afterword, Hoch noted, "This patient received transorbital lobotomy and showed temporarily a marked improvement in all his symptoms, losing most of his tension and anxiety. Postoperatively he was again placed under mescaline. Basically the same manifestations were elicited as prior to the operation with the exception that quantitatively the symptoms were not as marked as before."

Dr. Hoch also used electroshock treatment on patients who had been given mescaline. "It did not influence the clinical symptoms at all," he reported. "The patients continued to behave in the same way as prior to electroshock treatment." On the basis of these tests Hoch concluded that electroshock "has no influence on mescaline-produced mental states." He might have revised his "objective" assessment if he had taken the drug himself and had one of his assistants apply the volts while he tripped the lights fantastic. But those who secretly funded his research required only that he dish it out to mental patients and prisoners.

Postscript: It is my understanding that Dr. Hoch had worked under the auspices of Dr. Eleanor Benders and many of the subjects in her CIA project were young children who were given ECT, were placed in matrazol comas, like insulin, LSD and prefrontal leucotomies, lobotomies. This experiment began in the early 1950s. Dr. Hoch said, "Sometimes destroying a little brain tissue is a good idea."

DRIVING INTO THE LINE OF FIRE

2012-11-28T18:18:00.000-08:00

http://catgotmthumbs.blogspot.com/2012/11/driving-into-line-of-fire.html
HOW I SAVED MY LIFE FROM ALMOST CERTAIN DEATH

Driving through the dense mist, I pulled to the curb in front of a Carroll's Pub on Bell Boulevard in Bayside, NY. The wind picked up and the drizzle became a squall as the late Frankie Lyman's sepulchral, heroin-stained voice cried from my Ford LTD’s raspy speakers. The pub door flew open at last and an umbrella, wriggling as if it had a nervous system, thrust through the heavy rainfall.

Behind what appeared like a rapier, I saw Pat, a regular, parrying and thrusting with the blade of her umbrella stumbling headfirst toward my cab. Whack! Pat's head hit the door frame with such intensity I winced from the heavy thud of bone on the unforgiving steel. I watched her distorted face–upper and lower lips compressed against the car’s window like a mutant snail contorted into an absurd clownish look as it left a trail of her crimson lipstick on the glass–as Pat's lips slid down the window, and Pat struck the sidewalk. On her feet, before I could assist her, I held the door as she plopped into the passenger seat. With her dentures slipping, she asked, “Do you wanna get laid?”
I heard her say, “Do you wanna get paid?”

Her muddled comment registered while I stared at Pat's lacquered hairdo. Dyed coal-black, it seemed as if her hairstylist had constructed it out by welding black wire hangers together into a hair sculpture. She asked if it was raining as the mist had become a deluge as if the water had become a solid pane of glass. The water clogged the four sewers on that corner and created a wave that curled across the street, the Beach Boys would have immortalized in a lyrical homage. With the surprising speed of a cobra, well, albeit a sedated one, her hand, flashing iridescent red acrylic nail spikes, landed in my crotch. She again asked if was raining as the rain and wind pummeling the white LTD seemed to move the car and the downpour was tantamount to a Malaysian monsoon.

        “Sweetie, can I be a bad girl?” Pat asked. Her wig now fell forward, dangling from a single pin, and her head nailed my crotch.

         Politely, I told Pat it was busy and she could be a “bad girl” some other night. She lifted her head, her eyes jerked back and forth, and her head toppled forward again into my crotch hard enough for me to consider wearing a protective cup. Her destination was the Tip. The Tipperary Lounge in Flushing. We arrived at the Tip and Pat looked up from my crotch and asked, “You wanna get laid?"
          “Some other time, Pat, it's busy.”

She struggled to lift her head but banged it on the steering wheel, and her dangling wig, without her knowing it came loose and hit the floor. She poked me in my head with her umbrella. Pat lay on her back draped across the seat, her legs flailing away like a giant turtle, and she grabbed the dashboard in desperation but gravity helped her from my lap and the seat to the floor. She emitted an eardrum-bursting, emphysema-strangled wail. Screaming for assistance, her arms and legs flailed about. I opened my door and stood in the street for leverage, lifting her under her shoulders, I dragged her out through my door.

She hadn't realized that her wig was on the floor. Fastened with pins, her hair was a roll of matted curls. When she reached to straighten her wig, her shriek all but cracked the window before I returned the wig to her and she placed it on somewhat sideways like the way young boys wear baseball caps. For my trouble, she offered me one last shot at “bumping uglies.” She gave me a fin for my trouble and grunted, “Fuck yourself.” I watched her stumble toward the “Tip.” A man exited and Pat asked him, “Wanna get laid?”
          A comment that irritated his female companion and they exchanged raised middle fingers before I pulled away the curb, headed for my next call.

          I had a fever and as I drove to my next destination, I took two Tylenol and parked in front of an apartment house. I ran into the lobby and rang the customer's buzzer. She informed me she'll be right out, she's another regular and “Right out” means I have time to eat a slice of pizza, read The Odyssey, and lean how to perform open heart surgery.

          At last, The Lady in Black sat beside me but with a look on her face that suggested abject terror. She told me about her son, Sandy, and how what happened to him wasn't his fault.
          “They went into him,” she said.

          Is she a paranoid schizophrenic slouching toward dementia or suffering from alcohol-induced wet brain? She struggled through her pockets, as it was a straitjacket, and found her matches. With her tottering hand, with nails as long as baby's spoons she lit her cigarette. She stared at me. The Lady in Black smelled like a handful of candy.

          “I'll never forget your face,” she said. “Do you know what day it is? Good Friday. You know, don't you?”
          “Yes.”
          “You're him aren't you?”
          “Yes.” Convinced I was God's son. We drove to the nearest 7-Eleven for beer and cigarettes and a return to her building.
           “Is it two or three?" She waits for my response. “It's three, isn't it?”
           “Yes. How did you know?”

            “Thank you. I just knew.”
            I parked in front of her apartment, waiting for her to pay me. Tears dribble down her cheeks while she squeezed my hand. She thought she was going to die.
            “How much?" she asked, “A month, two months? You know, don't you?"
            “You have at least twenty years, probably more.”
            “My God! You've given me room to breathe.”

            Her hands search my face as if she was applying the finishing touches on a sculpture, “I'll never forget your face. You're God, aren't you?"
           “Yes.”

          Sighing,she kissed my hand, produced nine crumpled singles, and squeezed them into my palm. After eight hours of driving and breathing carbon monoxide, my double vision neatly folds the curtain of night. A soft wind combines with the image and I follow my fatigued eyes toward the black door sill of the horizon.
           It's one am., the radio is crackling and the sadist who was dispatching that night had barely enough time to distribute the calls. Behind the open mike, I heard the screeching of telephones and the breathless patter of drivers, stating their locations and driving toward their customers at a rate approaching the speed of sound. All of us choked up by the frenetic rush, all of us blinded by the sound, the delicious jingle of money. Then the dispatcher summoned me to the base for a call.

          I parked the white, Ford LTD on the gravel driveway A man in his early twenties dashes from the office and climbs into the backseat. He speaks with a deep voice, “113th and Roosevelt.”
Trouble. The address is near the Candy Box, which means he’s looking for crack.
            “Waiting long?” I ask, backing the car into the street.
           “Twenty minutes, a half hour.”

            The cab I drove had no interior lights. In the darkness, my passenger leaned in the corner as if hung on a hook, enabling me just to see his eyes pierce the shadow in the rear-view. Then, breaking eye contact, he slumped in the middle of the seat as if a hammock.
          "So how are you tonight?" I asked.
          "Tired."
          "How come?"
           "Drinking."

           My intoxicated passenger and we're heading toward a place that sells coke like chocolate ices, and that meant, based on a priori knowledge, he was going to rob, and perhaps shot me in the back of the head.This occurred during the height of the crack epidemic and forty or more livery drivers were murdered for four years in succession.
           How the fuck can I get out of this alive? My passenger's demeanor his closed posture, signal a sense of menace and danger alerting any experienced driver. Without Plexiglas, my passenger could use my unprotected skull to play croquet if he was so inclined.
           Contrary to what most people think, the most dangerous job in the city, is not a being a golf caddy, or a cop, but driving a cab. From 1985, on average, thirty livery drivers have gotten murdered, or assassinated, as one detective told me, in the five boroughs, which makes the cab driver’s job eight times more dangerous than fighting fires, being a cop, working at an all-night convenience store or eating sushi.

While I'm driving, the former national spelling bee champ in the back, can open my skull at his leisure. I think back to my college animal behavior classes for a possible solution to my current predicament.
              My opening gambit: "I'm feeling tired myself. Bad cold. I guess you can tell?"
My strategy is to emphasize our similarities. By doing so I will, according to ethologists, reduce what they call mutual repulsion.
            A mugger's translation of mutual repulsion: “I need product–coke, heroin, etceteras, and the asshole driving has bread. I might as well kill him because they'll never catch me. If they do happen to catch me, say before Diana Ross eats her next meal-- I'll cop a plea and finger my connection.”

He grunts in answer to my question, and I watch the top of his head drop from the rectangle of the rear-view as he slumps farther into the seat. I feel a chill, owing more to my apparently insensate companion than the onslaught of my flu. The images floating before me varied between Edvard Munch’s, The Scream! I imagined my body slumped over the steering wheel while the horn blared.
He catches me looking at him in the mirror and again breaks eye contact. The junkie's eyes switch back and forth like a metronome. Since I have been able to look into his eyes is a good sign. The car-- it seems a cage to me now--swerves around the curves of the Grand Central, down the ramp and into the dark heart of one of the most drug-ravaged neighborhoods in the five boroughs.

          Restrained by the responsibilities of my job, and the mores of society. I slip into a mode of calculated helplessness, trying to forge a human connection from the nexus of our combined anxiety. As we approached his goal, his agitation increased, and I had to defuse the pipe-bomb of his drug withdrawal angst or I was among the forty plus drivers killed that year.
           “One-thirteen and Roosevelt. Right near the Candy Box.”
           “Right.”
“I must have done about a dozen drug runs between Bayside and the Candy Box. You looking for some product?”
          As I speak, my companion leans forward, close enough for his elbow to touch my shoulder. I felt the heat from his body, sensed his arms, smelled the rank odor of fear emanating from his sweat glands.
        “Everyone gets ‘product there.’ He dribbled the words out and slumped back into the darkness of his seat, re-establishing an antagonistic posture. But I have made progress. He knows that we had a similar lineage. He grunted again, and his lethargic snort was less than enthusiastic enough to diminish our mutual repulsion. I needed him to snarl that implied: “When I first got into the car, I hated you, but now I see you in an entirely different light. We're obviously members of the same species, and, instead of hostility, I feel rather tender toward you my good buddy. People think I enjoy shooting helpless men in the back of the head. Most of the time it's just something people have come to expect. That's a lot of pressure. Anyway, I don't really enjoy it. Well, you caught me there. I love it, but I'm willing to change because we bonded.”

           “Get in the left lane!” He snarled. As the timbre of his voice registers his increased apprehension, my fear makes me giddy.
            “Make a left!”
             “Relax, you'll get your product.”

               I must match his antagonism and gain some control. His agitation is severe. I believe he's the man responsible for a rash of executions in Queens, and he’s on the verge of exploding. Under no circumstances should a driver, or anyone staring into the eyes of danger and apparent helplessness, give in to their fear. If you can stay calm, the thug might respect you.

             In the mirror, I watched him shift to the far corner of the cab. Now sitting up, his spine rigid and he's as motionless as though dangling on a hook. I began hyperventilating but used all the strength I had to control my ascending fear.

            On command, I made the left on 37th Ave. in Corona. A Continental rushed at us in reverse at about sixty miles an hour. I stomped on the brakes and checked the rear-view, as he shifted for his gun in his windbreaker, I thought it was a .22 automatic, he switched from his right hand to his left, and I needed to look into his eyes because without face-to-face contact, I suspected he would shoot me.
   On the Moluccas Islands, a head hunter kills his enemy only from behind. If he looks into his eyes of his victim before killing him, it's considered murder.
             “Park under the trees in front of that apartment house!” He was nervous, and his voice reverberated with a metallic twang.
             Night's embrace, a noose, encircles my throat as I stopped beneath an awning of branches and in the dark. Then I feel the hard barrel of the gun nuzzling against my skull. Aimed at my brain stem, he forces the warm metal into my neck driving my head forward into a humiliating posture. A .22 caliber automatic is the hit-man's gun of choice for in-your-face intimate jobs. The .22 rattles around your brain like a rat after some cheese in a maze. I was just getting back into shape. The thought of eighteen years of jogging, doing calisthenics, skimping on desert, ice cream and meat, hoping to live to one hundred, only for an agitated junkie to turn my head into a jack-o-lantern pisses me off.
           “Give me your wallet.”
           I struggled with my wallet and heard the jingle of my cardiovascular system pulsating in my ears.
           He barked, “Is that all of it? Muda-fucka, I usually hurt people.”

           Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him rifle through my wallet. He tossed it on the seat and my wallet landed like a bird with a broken neck and spread wings.

         “Let's have it,” he said. “All of it! You wouldn't do anything stupid for your company's money.”

          There was a handful of loose change in my right pocket that I might need in an emergency as if this was anything less , In the obscene quiet and freeze-frame of my dissociation, I imagined he heard the coins scratch each other.

            Turning slightly to the right, the gun tracked me, and I handed the coins to him, and stared into his eyes. By doing that I was taking a risk, but I knew the only way to save my life was to continue establishing our ancestry, making it much more difficult for him to murder me. The stench of fear suffused our cell. Good. The junkie's scared, too.

            He leaned over the seat, with the gun in his left hand, I saw his profile. The new tone of his voice reflected his dominance. As he leaned on the seat, I could smell his fear. Aware of the relative peace and quiet surrounding my death cell, I wondered what his agenda was? Was he going to execute me? Did he seek punishment for some imagined or real transgression? Driven by fear, or perhaps latent homosexual tendencies, did he want to go to jail. Or was this just a means of getting money for drugs?

           With my head bowed–a rat kills from behind by biting through its prey's neck–I heard him count each bill, sliding them back and forth in the dim light from a street lamp. I'm confused as if I observed the unfolding drama from a distance, and I looked out at the Grand Central in the foreground and the lights on Shea Stadium in the distance, I really didn’t want to die. I imagined the headline: CAB DRIVER'S HEAD SPLATTERED ON THE WINDSHIELD LIKE A JACKSON POLLACK KNOCK OFF. The coroner's autopsy report reveals enormous unblocked arteries like the autobahn.
          I DON'T WANT TO DIE!
         He had finished counting the money and said, “Not bad. Not bad at all. Now... I'm getting out and I want you to drive away very slowly or else.”

             I heard the door slam and I engaged the transmission and allowed the car to roll slowly beneath the canopy of branches. Rolled slowly waiting to hear the shot, rolling, and still alive, I picked up the microphone and called the dispatcher. “Car 42 is light, very light, I was just robbed.”

            I have little doubt that had I not engaged him in a conversation, had I not looked directly into his eyes, and had I panicked, I would not have lived to write this story. If possible please try to make it more difficult for a mugger to end your life by proving that we are all descended from the same progenitors and each of us represents one of billions of variants from the same lineage.

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QUICK-QUICK-SLOW:CONFESSIONS OF A DANCE INSTRUCTOR

2012-10-24T10:18:00.002-07:00

http://catgotmthumbs.blogspot.com/
Although this was written years ago, the current success of Dancing With the Stars, the joy of dancing, and the incarceration of Michael Pasquarelli, a thirty year stretch, and the death of his associate, David "Vic" Andrews, both of whom bilked men and women out of millions of dollars, has prompted me to post this story that is more relevant today than when it was first published.
All the names have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent.

Quick-Quick-Slow: Confessions of a Dance Instructor Who Could Not Dance

Aaron David ©

Registered US Copyright Office

Newsday published my story twenty years ago but predicated on the reality television programs featuring dance its contemporary relevance is more compelling now than it was. Ballroom dance studios owners have often seduced lonesome, awkward, or compromised, men and women into signing dance contracts and often in excess of of an unbelievable $250,000 to $1,000,000.

I was a slab of meat, dripping blood, dangling from a barbed hook by my greedy boss to beguile an innocent young woman into paying for lessons she could not afford. She was dying to obliterate the chain mail of suet she wore to insulate her from her myriad fears and hoped her dance lessons would transformed her. By dancing with me, she had hoped to replace doubt with grace and confidence, a metamorphosis, enabling her to live, and to love.

For months, I had looked for work and desperate for money, I became a dance instructor. The studio was located in the arcade beneath an apartment complex held together with duct tape and spit. The sun was an acetylene torch welding metal and chrome into bizarre configurations. A perverse sense of guilt, the nagging dreamlike notion I had murdered someone, overwhelmed me. But whom? What had I done? As I struggled to focus on this idea, it slipped away, leaving me confused and tortured. My face, framed in the side view mirror, was a bloodless white disk, and I knew I was the man I had murdered. For a moment, I sat in a sense of absurd detachment, watching the blood fill the minute capillaries, lacing my hollow cheeks.

People in a dither packed the arcade, pausing in front of the studio, by windows adjacent to the outdoor swimming pool I scanned photographs of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dangling on thick wires, giving the elegant couple the expression of dolls. A rain soaked Gene Kelly was kicking his heels while Singin’ in the Rain. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson rolled his eyes at Shirley Temple as they performed their stair step dance in The Little Colonel. A sign with large, red, block letters urged people to DANCE. Flinging my jacket over my shoulder, I stepped through the portal into a large dark void.

Greg Crain, the proprietor, sat in a glass enclosed office, jabbering on the phone. He acknowledged me with a raised finger, ending his conversation. We shook hands, exchanged introductions, and he examined me, a diamond cutter hovering over a precious rock. He stared into my eyes, cutting a prefabricated smile, and said, “Did you say you had experience?”

“I don’t. You said it wasn't necessary.”

“If you have talent, it isn't. Let's see what you can do.”

Crain had a lethargic gait, dragging his posterior as though it were a weighted satchel. Beneath a spotlight, surrounded by mirror as if encased in rhinestone he said, “Let's see if I can find something . . . ah . . . inspiring for you.”

A web of shadows crisscrossed the ballroom lit by overhead lights. The walls, mirrored from floor to ceiling, augmented the room’s preternatural effect. Mirrored columns transformed the space into a kaleidoscope, casting a network of funhouse reflections. The studio was a carousel, turning with every stride, making me queasy. Crepe paper ropes, stretched by humidity, shriveled balloons hanged like desiccated bats around the throats of the kliegs, crude reminders of a forgotten party. Standing in the sepia puddles, between white lights, the chamber’s tawdry magic enchanted me.

Crain’s eyes glimmered, penlights, poking glory holes in the darkness. A leer sliced Crain’s face, masked by a shadow. My gaze traveled from the deflated balloons to Crain who slid Michael Jackson’s Beat It on the turntable. The music detonated, I began to dance, and wondered: What am I doing here? Time seemed suspended; thickened by the latent sexual essence of the situation. Terror inspired me to capture the rhythm in a convulsive bursts interspersed with the fluidity of a marionette on speed. The absurdity of my predicament perforated consciousness, a spike through an inner tube.

Crain said, “That's enough. Let's talk in the office.”

He fell into a leather chair behind his desk. “I think I can use you. You move well, and I like your John Travolta act.”

I sat on a metal chair, a lurid crimson.

“You need discipline. You’re all over the place.” He gyrated, throwing his arms in the air, mocking him rather than his target.

“I'll learn.” Perspiration, rain on a car window, deposited salt and dirt on my lips.

“But you can’t dress as if you fell off a horse.” Crain knitted the syllables of each word into a song.

“I asked you if I had to wear my tuxedo.”

He laughed. “You're not an actor, are you? You remind me of someone,” Crain broke off a smile like a dry twig. “I invested in this guy, but he kept leaving to wait on tables.”

“Don’t worry. I'm very conscientious. It's my biggest fault.”

His voice poured over me like plaster about to harden; his eyes seemed to dangle, glass orbs; his pockmarked face resembled stucco; my voice sounded like a steam kettle. “I can't afford the shoes . . . maybe next week.”

“You need a professional look. The boots have to go because they don't bend. You have to feel the floor.” He paused, “I can use you. In fact, I can use you tonight.”

“Tonight! I haven’t learned anything.”

“This woman’s in a wheelchair. I’ll have to teach you.” Crain said as if thinking aloud.

I never met the woman in the wheelchair. Perhaps she existed in Crain’s fecund imagination. The next afternoon I returned to the studio. Leading me into the ballroom, he shuffled as if warming up to dance. I joined him in front of a mirrored wall. “There’s a distinct difference between a tap and a touch. A touch is like caressing a woman. When you tap, you slap the floor.” Crain extended his leg and tapped the floor, a show horse counting. “Together now!”

We both tapped and touched. Two show horses counting. Sweat burned my eyes. I thought, you are how you move. Differentiating right from left while trying to follow him was difficult and every gesture revealed a phalanx of images, all reflected pieces in a kaleidoscope, until we became microdots.

“Good,” said Crain. “Dance is the shifting of weight to music or beat.”

Crain crossed his right leg in front of his left, touching the floor, then reversing the maneuver. He added finger pointing to the routine; I imitated him, reduced to snapping my fingers in a poorly lit cavern with a stranger, two men searching of a chiropractor.

“Now the other way; this is contra body, one half, or side of the body moves in opposition to the other.” He stood, frozen, posed as if he’d slipped a disc.

During the next six weeks, Crain tried to transform me into a dance instructor. He placed me in a class with three kids with extensive dance backgrounds. Greg brought in a gold level dancer named Duane Scott to instruct us before classes every afternoon. My inability to execute the new steps caused the trio of young dancers did develop a sense of antipathy for me. Their overt disdain caused me to plummet further into a vortex of gloom. (The three levels of dance are bronze, silver and gold as delineated in a syllabus, and teachers had to acquire proficiency in both the male and female steps, which men and women execute in reverse. Men begin with their right foot moving toward his partner who retreats with her left foot.)

One day, Crain called me into his office. “You're slow, very slow.” He tried to make me feel as if I were a child who had urinary incontinence. “You remind me of me when I first started in this business. My thing was the ‘slop.’ I’d watch the dance instructors. Whatever they did, I'd repeat it. The next day, I'd be teaching it.”

“You mean you kept one step ahead of the students?”

He nodded, and said, “I'm disappointed. You came in here like gangbusters, then nothing. Still, you have the rap. There are different facets of this business: I need people for telephone work and for greeting customers. There are ‘front’ teachers and ‘back’ teachers. A front teacher takes a student when they walk through the door. The front teacher's responsibility is to sell them on dance lessons. The intermediate and back teachers work with them over the long haul.”

Crain had two back teachers: Joanne Soccorso and Achmed Hussein who’d reached the pinnacle of the dance business and was the studio stud.

“Achmed has long‑lasting charisma.” Crain said.

“Did you ever see the legs on him?” Crain asked.

You couldn't miss his legs if you were legally blind. Atop Achmed’s enormous Doric column thighs, sat the posterior of a centaur. His wavy hair, curly eyelashes, and chocolate pudding eyes, peering from his broad, flat face made him almost pretty. Crain had made a deal with me. He would let me participate in dance classes if I did “a little maintenance” around the place—mop the floors, throw out the garbage, and, oh, yes, you might begin by cleaning the bathroom and throwing out the cunt rags.”

Was he kidding? No. The next time I was in the studio, Crain asked me when I would stain the wooden trim. “Give me some money for the stain.”

“Lay it out; I'll pay you back.”

When I returned to the studio with the stain, I wore work clothes. It took hours to stain the wood. After I had begun to clean up for the night, Greg ran over and put his arm around my shoulders. “Now it’s your chance to do something for me. Two seal wobbled in, I’m guessing they’re female. You take one, and Eric will handle the other. Go over and introduce yourself. Have them fill out a D. A.”

The Dance Analysis form, or D.A., was a preregistration form, a means of eliciting general information about clients: where they lived, where their employers, their dance goals. Not only was I unprepared for my debut, I was wearing a torn shirt, Frye boots, and my cologne was eau d’ turpentine. The sophisticated dance instructor was controlling his panic. “My name is David,” I said, extending one turpentine-scented hand. “You are?”

“Patti Kelly.” Patti's hand dripped from sweat. Her eyes scurried along the floor, cockroaches in a flash of light.

“Renee Brent,” said the woman seated next to Patti.

“Well, what brought you girls here? What I mean is, what do you hope to gain from the experience?”

“We were curious,” said Renee, whose fractured left arm hung from her shoulder like had once belonged on a slot machine.

“Where do you work?” I asked.

A promotion in a local newspaper had lured them. For forty dollars, the mark got three half hours of instruction and a two‑hour practice party.

“Trico's,” said Patti. She had a brush of hair like a mink hat.

Greg glided over to me and begged the ladies' pardon. He grabbed my shirtsleeve, dragged me into his office, and slammed the door. “This isn't a fucking business meeting. They should be panting by this time, ‘YOU'RE MY INSTRUCTOR!’” Crain’s eyes bulged. He sucked in his cheeks like the vamp Theda Bara. He swung his hips for me, “They should be panting for Big David’s c$#k! Their queafs should be dripping their cum on my parquet!”

Walking back to the women, Eric came over and took the dance analysis form from Patti: “What dances are you interested in doing?”

“Waltz,” said Renee.

“Waltz,” said Patti.

Eric said, “How about the cha‑cha?”

“Okay.”

We lined up in front of the mirror. I swallowed hard and tried to follow but froze. Once I defrosted, I moved east as they headed west but they had failed to notice since Lisa's beauty enchanted them, and they stood as if they had seen the way. She danced a medley of dances with Eric, enabling Renee and Patti to select ones they liked. As they danced, I became a catatonic who managed to elicit the composure to babble, “Each dance has its own character. The smooth dances with long, graceful strides. The Latin dances are ground into the floor with a strong hip action. Each dance is done within the line of the hips.” No kidding, I thought, like a moron.

We divided into two groups, and Patti who had a predilection for men who exuded turpentine scented pheromones, selected me. She was one hundred pounds overweight and moved as if she were on a trampoline. I began teaching her the eastern swing, but the moment we stood in dance position, she drifted to her left. “Try to stay in line with my shoulders,” I said.

“Okay.”

“No, you're still doing it. Let’s start over.” I positioned her arms and placed my hand in the middle of her back, giving her a solid, if Jell-O is rigid, frame. “Don't look at the floor.”

She drifted, appraising the floor as if she expected a trap door to free her from this ordeal of this farce. “Try staying parallel to me. I know, but try.” Her fear provided me with courage, and I believed I could help her.

“Okay,” she said eyes, lasers, burning into the floor. I wanted to hug her.

In the fallowing weeks, something I projected hooked Patti. She said I gave a little extra. She had become obsessed her dance instructor and I believed I could help her.

Now watch, as Crain used me to extract $9,600 from this sweet shy young woman for dance lessons financed by a bogus company and cosigned by her elderly parents. In researching other studios, I’ve discovered verified dance contracts in excess of $250,000, and more often than you could imagine, and I heard of single contract for one million dollars.

While some of the people learned to dance, 90 percent of the patrons (an estimate I heard from an owner of an independent studio) were looking for a dramatic change in their lives, especially love, sex, and romance in every incarnation, and many instructors convinced pupils they would marry them despite an age difference of a half a century.

Before the women returned for a second session, Crain called Eric and me into his office to plan our strategy. He said we were preparing a psychological assault. He stressed the importance of looking into a woman's eyes.

“I've got a problem,” I said. “Patti wants to learn the underarm turn in rumba, but I don't know it.”

Crain got up from behind the desk and took the passive position, the female stance. Holding the lovable monster in my arms, I felt the heat of his breath, smelled the garlic of his partially digested meal. My spinal cord had turned into what was a large spring. After months in psychiatric facilities, thousands of dollars for endless vials of drugs, swabbing the toilets, cleaning ashtrays, and throwing out garbage, I stood in a cramped office holding this strange man, in the hope of charming a sensitive overweight kid out of her life savings.

“Do you know the arm position?” he asked.

“No.”

Patti wore baggy pants, and I taught her the swing with variations and the rumba keystep. Crain had told me to hold my students as though they were children and break dance elements into their simplest components. The key phrase is, “this is nothing more than,” and went like, “The fox‑trot is nothing more than walking.” An instructor often stood behind their students, guiding their movements like training wheels on a bicycle. Crain emphasized the importance of tactile stimulation as a primary component of removing money from hidden pockets.

Patti enjoyed her lesson. She was almost comfortable with me. We danced in the back room. She blushed and blotches of crimson covered her cheeks. Crain had warned me if I didn't sign her by the end of this lesson, we would lose her. “Do you want to continue with the lessons?” I blurted out.

“Yes . . . very much.”

Now–at the thought of her lessons ending–she trembled. My hand guided her back and her perspiration soaked shirt, fearing dripping through my fingertips. In order to continue, I told her, it would cost $680. Emotional pain and desire twisted her features into a smudge.

“Why is it so expensive?”

“The overhead is enormous. It costs a lot of money to run a place like this.”

“My friends told me not to sign anything. They warned me!”

I escorted Patti into Crain's office, where Carole had been waiting. Carole was responsible for signing new students in Crain’s absence. We sat around Crain's desk. Seated next to Patti, I draped my arm over her shoulders. Fondle your student whenever possible. Get the nerve endings to fire.

“All I can afford is 55 dollars a week,” she said.

It was a plea. She squirmed in the chair, rocking back and forth as if expecting the arrival of the executioner. “They told me not to sign,” she said, writhing as sweat bandaged her nose to her upper lip.

“Oh, this is nothing,” said Carole. “It just says that we keep 5 percent if you cancel.”

Then despite the admonitions of friends and family, Patti signed. She never had a chance. She had viewed the promised body; fell in love with life, and her fraudulent instructor. We had mugged her.

Crain was elated. “This is just the beginning,” he said. “I don't want any negatives. Do everything I say. You did well. I know I have something in you.”

I told Crain money might be a problem for Patti. He said, “If money were the issue, she would have gone for lessons in Jamaica.” He parted his lips, a crocodile’s mile. “I don't want any negatives.”

Before Patti's first private hour, Crain called me into the office and handed me a white manila folder with printed forms, lesson accomplishment sheets, homework, and the supervisor's commentary. “Listen to exactly what I say. Teach her fast. Tell her that you are trying to determine her absorption‑to‑retention ratio. You're going to see whether it's slow, average, or fast. Tell her how long it will take to be basic, intermediate, or advanced and give her a grade. Give her homework and book her Monday. Remember, no negatives.”

Crain jotted notes onto a legal‑size pad.

“Aren't you concerned that I won't be able to dance?”

“Yes.”

“How much sex is necessary?”

“You have to dance. If you don't know your craft, you resort to sex, but the sex comes with the ability to dance. An hour ago, Achmed sold Karen 165 hours of private dance. She just divorced her husband who left her in debt. But she needs what Achmed gives her.”

There was one goal: To get her to pay for dance lessons for life. I was the bait, and my cut came to $12.00 for an hour for instruction, plus a 5 percent commission on the sale.

“You got to get her in here at least three times this week. If you can't, then she doesn't like you.”

“Maybe she’s got other things to do?”

“What does she have to do? Sit home and play with her knob? How come you don't kiss her?” Crain made grotesque smacking noises with his lips, spittle clung the corners of his mouth. “Did you get her birthday?”

“Gemini.”

“How do you get along with Geminis?”

“You don't believe in that, do you?”

“No, but women go for that romantic crap. By the way, my wife said you've been doing a crap job of cleaning up the toilet. What gives?”

Crain imparted more of his philosophy: “The submissive ones, you have to take their hand and lead.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand, his fists clenched until his knuckles blanched a gesture worthy of any autocrat.

My first two private lessons with Patti went well. She liked me, and I told her to practice the underarm turn for the rumba. I gave her a homework, and exercises, and asked her to answer the question: “To help your teacher plan and personalize what you want from dancing, please answer the following question in paragraph form, “What kind of Dancer I want to be, and why?'”

Later, Crain read her answers aloud: “My aim is to be as good a dancer as I am capable of being. I have always wanted to be able to dance with a partner, to be able to follow with ease. I know that I need to build up my confidence personally and socially, and I am hoping that these dancing lessons will help me do just that.”

At the end of each sentence, Crain paused to reflect. His eyes glowed and his smile verged on demonic. Then he burst out laughing, “Soon you'll show her your @$%# She’s gonna be starving for big Davie’s @$%#”

Though nauseated by my role in his chicanery, I remained fascinated by Crain's sophistry. At times, I felt thrilled by my apparent power. After all, I was the bait, and the rabbit. Such ambivalence!

At the end of three sessions, Crain invited Patti to dance with me in the pro‑amateur competition. The mention of a contest made her skin flush. Despite her weight, her face was adorable. Crain told her she would appear on the dance floor with other contestants, she began, rocking in her seat, and my heart beat as if it had sprouted wings.

The following day Crain called me into his office. “It's time,” he said, “for you to write an intra studio memo.”

He handed me a legal pad and dictated the following, which he rattled off: “Rarely does an instructor have an opportunity to work with a student with the potential of Patti Kelly. I consider it a pleasure, a great source of satisfaction to work with such an agreeable student. Of all the students I've taught, never have I worked with someone with such desire, who practices so intensely and wouldn't let me down.

“Once you see the amount of material Patti has been able to absorb and retain, you'll approve my application for her guaranteed program, and you will agree with me that Patti will be an asset to our studio.”

“She'll like that,” I said.

“We'll find out how much money she has. Does she live at home with mommy? You must realize we're in a different era with her now?” Crain laughed.

“I don't give a @$%& about money! Piggy needs this more than food. Now, here's the pitch: After the lesson, you get me and say, ‘Greg, can we see you in private?’ Do it with enthusiasm. We sit very close. You put your arm around her. ‘We want to put in our application for Patti's guaranteed program. Could you make arrangements for a progress check?’ You're probably more nervous than she is.” He snorted; he cackled as if deranged.

That night, I asked Patti, “Have you done your exercises?”

“Yes,” she said, staring at the floor.

Patti had lost fifty-two pounds and it reaffirmed my contention, she had modeled herself after her lithe dance instructor.

“Rumba!”

I provided her with a good dance frame, but she gravitated toward the corner of the room, tugging me with her. She gulped air. Perspiration had saturated her blouse. Beneath her Sweet Ambience, rose the rank stench of dread. She was on the cusp of hysteria and her pain was exquisite. I shortened the lesson according to plan, and we met with Crain in the back room. I said, “I'm enthusiastic.”

“What kind of dancer do you want to be?” Crain asked.

“Advanced,” said Patti without hesitation. Crain's eyes twinkled in the dimly lit room, a pinball machine on the verge of tilting.

“And where do you work?”

“Tricos,” she said.

Crain underscored the importance of knowing just what you wanted out of life, plus the determination to stick with the program. Then he asked what her father did for a living. “Oh, he's a retired cop.”

“I don't want you to worry about the money,” he said, “It will be financed.

I said goodnight to Patti. Greg called me back into his office. “I didn't sign her big. I stopped when she threw in that business about her father w. We'll go small – maybe six or eight hundred. Then, later, we'll bang her. Years from now, she'll be doling it out.”

Crain shrieked with laughter, a high-pitched, frightening sound. He peeled bills from an imaginary roll. I reminded him that he had asked what her father did for a living.

“It’s important to dance with Patti in a competition. It's a little seedy dancing here all the time. “She'll have an opportunity to see hundreds of people from the worst to the best. Everyone gets excited. We come back to the studio, take pictures, and renew. We have the perfect product. They never get tired of sex and dreams; they are the levers that move the whole fucking universe.”

“You forgot to include money.”

After the progress check, Patti signed for an additional $1220 for eight hours of private instruction and 12 group lessons. In some macabre way, her signature gave me a sense of power. I brought Miss Patti Kelly to the next plateau, and scheduled her to dance the rumba and swing at the contest. Greg Crain's instructed me to make sure she was in the studio three times a week in order to ‘burn’ her hours, forcing her deeper in debt.

We danced the rumba ad infinitum, and I made numerous technical mistakes. We had now begun dancing in the main room and the mirrors confused me. Our images were stacked one atop another melding, shuffling playing cards. When we lost balance and nearly toppled, she looked at me with utter helplessness. She needed my guidance, the tutelage of a fake.

“When we dance in the competition, I don't know if I can handle it,” she said. “You don't know me in crowds. I stutter.”

“I'll be there for you.”

“What if I forget?”

“I'll lead you. Just close your eyes.” I led her through the swing. She kept her huge blue eyes closed and sighed. We danced and danced the same steps until the room spun.

Prior to the competition, Greg developed a strategy for extending Patti's contract. “It's time to bring Achmed in,” Crain said. “In her subconscious, she has to realize you're just a beginner. Tell her about Achmed’s training in Moscow, how as kid he toured the world. (Crain had told everyone that Achmed had toured with the Bolshoi Ballet for nine years. The idea that a man of Arabian ancestry toured with a Russian Ballet troupe was nonsense.) Mention he's a gold dancer. The idea is to tell her that Achmed is a friend of yours and that he helps you.”

I relayed the story to Patti verbatim. She was very excited about the prospect of extra coaching but only if I remained her teacher.

The night of the competition, the temperature was close to 90 degrees. Tables draped in cheap cotton cloth surrounded the dance floor. The air‑conditioning had died with an emphysemic gasp, and with 700 people, it turned the hall into a steel smelting plant. Most of the women wore sequin gowns in shocking colors, costumes you'd expect to see on circus performers. The men wore cat suits (jump suits with sleeves), bowties, and ruffled shirts. They resembled androgynous waiters on the first public space shuttle.

At the door, I a woman handed me a white placard with black numerals, “94.”

“The men are wearing the numbers today.” Her hair resembled been a chiseled chunk of flagstone. She sat at a table with a fish bowl containing buck‑and‑a‑half chances on “A Basket of Cheer.” Behind her, a peddler was hawking dance shoes.

The group from Crain’s studio was at the end of the room, near the podium. Patti wore a navy blue dress with white polka dots and puffed sleeves. Her cheeks had the usual crimson flush, and she clutched a program. She looked like a doll with its face hand-painted on a white glass bulb. When I kissed her fervent cheek, she sighed.

We would dance the swing in heat 35, and the rumba in heat 80. Patti pointed with pride to our names in the program. I handed her my keys and my sunglasses for her to place in her purse. Beyond the sexual symbolism of the gesture, it was quite touching.

The heat was intolerable. In the men's room, contestants were in various stages of dress. Men exchanged pills and cocaine. I straightened my tie, arranged my curls, and ate a couple of milligrams of Ativan. Then, with number 94 affixed to my jacket, I emerged from the lavatory, ready for the contest but cognizant of the reality: A man incapable of proper execution was going to lead an agitated woman through two dances in the presence of 700 frenzied strangers and judges.

It was time. Patti looked as if some entity sewed her eyelids to her sockets with catgut. Dew-like sweat mantle covered her. A judge called our names and we stood on the scaffold of the dance floor. Time inverted. The white lights and the heat were bearable because she needed me. Recorded music exploded from the amplifiers and engulfing us. Holding Patti close, I began the triple step of the swing. Caught up in the competition, I pushed Patti to her limit, prodding her as hard as possible until we almost met the floor. “Come on!” I shouted. She had a glazed look on her face; her eyes and the floor formed an invisible seal. “1‑2‑3‑2‑2‑3 rock-step,” I shouted. The hall was an inferno of noise.

Achmed wore a tuxedo and vest. His black, curly hair looked moist. After each of his heats, he removed his jacket, mopping his brow by a table conjuring images of Jackie Gleason in The Hustler. He danced in twenty heats and fared very well. He garnered several first place trophies, several seconds, and many thirds. It was time to introduce her to the king whose students he blessed with trophies. I sat next to Patti, leaned over, and spoke in her ear, “You know I'm not a gold dancer.”

My statement confused Patti. “I was trained to teach beginners. I'm just at the silver level. We have a great opportunity.” Then I told her all about Achmed and said he had agreed to work with her.

“Why?”

“He's my friend. It's a unique chance to get an expert to coach you. Greg charges another $205 an hour for coaching sessions, but for you it will be part of your program at no additional charge.” She looked to the floor. “I want to get you to the highest level possible,” I said.

Her innocence made all acts of deception despicable. I was in emotional quicksand. I went over to Crain, who stood near the podium. “She's primed,” I said.

“Make it spontaneous.”

“You mean, make it seem spontaneous.”

I led Patti to Achmed, introduced her. The King said, “I would be happy to coach you.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I'm glad.”

I felt as if I was watching a white pearl disappear into a vat of tar. She loved me the ineffable essence of transference that transcended sexual intimacy. We talked about confidence while I cradled her in my arms, preparing her to dance the rumba.

“I'm sorry, I'm so nervous,” she said.

“Never be sorry.”

“Will you give me a strong lead?”

“You'll know exactly what I want from you

We danced the rumba against a coterie of excellent Latin dancers. The following night, Patti and I sat at the table in Crain’s office, my arm around her shoulder. Greg sat behind his desk with a corkscrew for a smile. Patti with pen in hand, rocked back and forth, soaked with perspiration. She signed a guaranteed contract for $7,200, plus a $2,700 finance charge. As her dance instructor, I was glad she had signed. At first, I had deluded myself into thinking I could help Patti. However, I began to realize that she would have sold her firstborn for the privilege of giving Crain money so she could continue to dance with me or another instructor who provided her with ‘a little extra.’

End Notes

I had earned a total of seventy dollars, working for Greg Crain from late June through the following March. We changed all names and Jack Woolheiser illustrated the piece, capturing the comic aspects of the story. We took these precautions to avoid the inevitable lawsuit. The owner sued me, a woman who he had hired to manage his dying studio, numerous students, and his brother for approprating the familial genetic dance endowment. The lawsuit defended by Newsday for defamation and libel, came to about seventy million including punitive damages, and inconvenienced all involved in the story, the editor, my late mentor, who asked me to chronical the events, the magazine editor, who thought it worthy enough to become the cover story, and Patti. A Judge Hentel tossed it out at summary judgment as frivolous and without merit.

Patti made great strides toward her own independence while the studio remained intact. She had lost fifty-two pounds and had begun dating. Her coaching lessons with Achmed dribbled into the absurd. Despite Crain’s fears regarding her perception of my dance liabilities, she said, “I don’t know what your dance limitations are, but I only feel comfortable dancing with you.”

Patti and I remained friends for another five years. Once she contracted a severe case of Lyme’s disease with lost contact. My depictions of Patti, hurt her in spite of my explanations regarding a writer’s use of images, metaphors and other literary devices, and for having inflicted pain on this wonderful, young woman, I remain, as I write, sorry for having described her the way I had, proving the pen can indeed be mightier than the sword.

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