Bent, To the Very End (II)

I’m so scared that I’ll never get put back together

Good to see you landed safely …. Enjoy!

[Note: You’ll have so much more fun reading this if you know what happened in the first part. You’ll find it here.]

While I am wondering how I am going to control my flight across the room, I find myself veering sharply to the right, the room seeming to tilt precariously as I approach the bookshelf. With a collision imminent, I stretch out my arms to ward off contact and feel the warm, faintly breezy sensation of my arms, head, and upper body penetrating the bookshelf and floating cleanly through it. I am in a stockroom, a small stockroom, barely five feet wide, and before I have a moment to take in anything I am through the opposite wall and in a restroom.

There are urinals and while I am wondering whether ghosts ever have to take a leak, I am through that wall and in a sort of waiting room. I think it is Doctor Leitner’s waiting room. I soar by a young lady, the receptionist, sitting atop a tall stool behind the counter, a phone pressed to her ear, a finger maneuvering a wad of gum over the surface of her teeth. No one else is in the room and she does not see me as I sweep past her, not six inches from her face.

Not gaining much control over my flight, I am pondering how I am going to get back to the doctor’s office, to my chair in front of his desk. No sooner had the thought come to me than I am sailing through one wall then another and finally, the bookshelf and I find myself settling back down into the chair as a helicopter would settle on its pad.

The doctor is still turning the pages of his notebook, still fingering his armpit with his other hand. He looks up at me, smiles. “Well… Okay… Not thirsty? For water or knowledge? Well… So, I suppose I can begin if you want. Are you sure you want back your life?”

He didn’t even know I was gone. “Let’s get on with it, Doctor.”

“Okee-doke. Here it is, all here in my book. But, tell me, Johnny… Where do you want me to begin? We can start with your birth, 32 years ago, but that’s not always the most fruitful way to pursue your past.”

“Whatever.”

“I’ve found it more effective, Johnny, to begin close to where we are, right now, and once we have a handle on that, you can effectively swing backwards or forwards. You agree?”

“Let’s go, Charles.”

“This Betty seems to figure prominently in your life. Let’s start with her.” He turns his eyes to me suddenly, curiously, watching for my reaction. “If anything strikes a chord, jump right in to fill in the details. My records are nothing more than an outline. You remember when you first met Betty?”

“No.”

“It was college.” He looks long into my eyes. “Nothing… Hmmmm. Okay, you came from a small high school in California. Though very bright, you were not a particularly industrious student — that is, you didn’t ride into college on the back of a scholarship. You weren’t an athlete, either. Not very popular in high school — a little on the shy side. Not a very good mix for predicting an entirely satisfying academic or social life, wouldn’t you say? Kind of invisible.”

“Yet visible enough for Betty…”

“Apparently. Betty was an art student. You met during your sophomore year. She had transferred up from Los Angeles and knew no one at Cal Poly. At least no one in the student population. She had some contacts — some referrals, if you will, from Los Angeles who would be instrumental in both your lives. They were her drug contacts.

“It wasn’t until your junior year that you were introduced to drugs. By then, you and she were an item. All indications were that her drug use had been minimal at that time. She may have even been trying to quit. Who knows? Intellectually and artistically, you were, together, more alive than you had ever been.

“While Betty worked on her abstract canvasses, you pored over obscure books of poetry and even wrote some decent verse yourself. You had a lingering feeling that something more was needed, though, to crack through your creative ceiling. You called it ‘searching for the matrix of metaphor, the birthing bed of creativity.’ Betty said she thought she could find something that would turn that ceiling to fragile glass. Are we getting anywhere with this?”

I tell him to go on, that it’s like I’m seeing the taillights of a car in a dense fog. Sometimes it’s brighter, sometimes gone completely. Maybe the fog will lift. Really, though, nothing has connected with me. I’m lying. Something in me wants to please him. There are no taillights at all. I am alone in this fog.

He makes a little nod, frowning. He lifts his cap off his head from the bill and rakes the fingers of his other hand across his hair. He leaves little furrows. “Just a moment,” he says, popping his cap back on his head. Sighing, he cradles his chin in his palms, his fingers fanned up either side of his face. He peers down into his notebook.

I use the time to practice my new art. I think about raising six inches out of my chair and feel myself hovering there, rocking ever so slightly, as a boat would on a pond. I’m studying his face, watching for even an inkling of realization, and seeing none, I consider sitting back in the chair, and simultaneously feel the familiar weight of the cushion below me.

“Yes, Johnny,” he says, “I was checking it out, and clearly, yours and Betty’s drug use didn’t start intensifying until you both moved off campus into a tiny two-room house. You continued with your classes for about a month, got behind, then dropped out. Betty stayed in college a few weeks longer, then quit to take an entry-level position at Mervyns. Because of your age and some information you dummied in on the employment application, you latched onto a management position at Burger King quite easily. Your salaries pooled together took care of the rent with a modicum left for food. The rest went for drugs. Before too long your pooled salary paid for drugs and if there was anything left it went for food and a good-faith offering to the landlord, along with a promise of the rest in a week.

“You had the good fortune, Johnny, to get a job — I guess you call it a gig — at the Ball and Lumber Bowling Alley Lounge (called Bal-Bal by the in-crowd), where you played the guitar and sang your own compositions. Did you know you played the guitar, Johnny?”

“No. Go on.”

“Well… So… The two of you began a brief phase of easy days melding into easy nights and back into easy days, those days when drugs were plentiful and money was easy to come by. You had the clarity of purpose enough to have written half a dozen songs that you performed Friday and Saturday nights at Bal-Bal. You played a mean acoustic guitar and your voice could bring women and men, alike, to tears. It’s a shame you can’t remember that. Anyway, no one knew you were flying high as a kite the whole time. At first, Betty was in the audience and gave you quiet support, but that didn’t last long.

“Betty was not a good social druggie. She found it next to impossible to be around people (except for you) while she was high — and her non-high times were becoming less frequent. Poor, poor Betty. She couldn’t sing nor play a musical instrument. Even with the fresh infusion of cash from your gig, your combined habits were getting more expensive. For a time you could handle your portion of the escalating costs and even some of hers. But when she lost her job at Mervyns (for undisclosed reasons), it plunged her into depression; she refused to leave home, and so her drug use suddenly spiked.

“Even in your heroin-baked haze, a part of you recognized a crisis coming on. No! The crisis was careening down on the two of you. Too wasted to dodge it, it hit you square on. You were tapped out. Every penny you earned managing Burger King and your weekend gigs had gone into the rent on this furniture-less hovel you occupied, your meager diet and, of course, drugs. And, now Betty’s reinvigorated appetite was eating into your rent and food money. You were two months behind in your rent. Something had to be done.

“Anyone who has spent even an hour’s time investigating Hollywood’s answer to this dilemma knew what Betty had to do. In fact, it was the only thing a woman of limited abilities and one whose fear and hatred of others was exceeded only by her own self-loathing, as well as a simultaneous hunger that gnawed at her soul — a hunger that both sustained her and killed her — had to do.

“Trouble was, her clientele was limited at the outset. Betty was not a pretty woman. She — “

“Betty was beautiful!” I hear my own voice seething, totally to my surprise.

“In college, yes, Johnny boy, but now she was butt ugly.”

I find strange emotions churning in me as I look across the desk at his smiling face. I know he’s trying to get a rise out of me, trying to shock me into remembering. Not only do I not remember, but I have an awkward welling from some primitive depth in me to defend to the death someone of whom I have only fragmentary memories, and I add that emotion to the growing number of unknowns.

“Yeah,” he repeats, “she was butt ugly…”

“Well…” I give him my best smile. “You gotsta work with whatcha gots.”

“And, she did. Boy, did she! Like the song says, ‘She worked hard for her money.’ And, being butt ugly, scarred and malnourished, not to mention massively misanthropic, she worked a lot harder than most. Her clientele, as I mentioned, was severely limited. While it’s true that derelicts, other addicts, the winos on skid row, and nameless other riff-raff, have their sexual appetites just as voracious as the rest of us, the sad truth of it is that they have less ability to pay. Yet this was the clientele into which fate cast Betty’s lot. It was a less than profitable enterprise.

“At this point, Johnny, you very gently and humanely interceded. I think you loved her in your own way. Too bad you don’t remember.”

“Okay, okay, go on, Charles.”

“There was a touching scene, worthy of any Hollywood production, where you laid out all the reasons why she couldn’t continue with her in-every-way unprofitable venture. If each of your arguments was like a scoop of ice cream that, piled one atop the other, produced a logically scrumptious sundae, her two arguments were the whipped cream and the cherry that topped it. ‘First,’ she said, ‘my pussy is my song, guitar, and voice all wrapped up in one. Second,’ she said, and here was where the tears filled her eyes and spilled out, ‘it’s the only gig I have. Don’t take it away from me, Johnny.’ This could have been the big final Hollywood scene where they tearfully embrace, swear their love for each other, and pledge to go this very moment into rehab and as they leave the room an arm reaches back to shut off the light and the scene fades to darkness.

“But, that’s Hollywood for you. You had another solution. Using your combined intelligence (and, did I fail to mention, Johnny, that each of you in your respective high school testing had blown the top off the Stanford-Binet Intelligence test?), your solution was to bring into a better balance the impersonal wealth of the mega-corporation with the comparative poverty of the non-corporate customers. Rhetoric. Double-talk. Bullshit! But, an effective.motivator.”

I smile at Charles and say, “I may not remember me, but I’m starting to like me.”

“I like you, too, Johnny. So, what you and Betty were looking for — what your plan needed in a corporation — were accessibility and liquidity. Together, you explored possibilities, scores of them, but it always came down to one entity: a bank. Being federally insured, the little guy wouldn’t be hurt.

“There were three conditions for your success: Rehearsal, timing, and sobriety.

“You wrote everything out, Johnny, it was perfectly scripted. Because of her art background, Betty diagrammed the bank. You looked at it and blinked, and then you both guffawed until she peed her pants. Her forte was abstract art. The diagram threatened to float off the page. It was the interior of the bank as seen through the eyes of a guppy. ‘But,’ you consoled her, ‘it is good, very good art.’

“Then there was the timing. That part was obvious: The second and the fifteenth, each the day after payday, when the bank was stocked and ready for paychecks. You had eight days until the second.

“You rehearsed hours at a time. As they say, time flies while you’re having a good time. You were both loose, relaxed. It was going to be a piece of cake. On the second, you would be ready. On the second you pledged you would be clean. You would be sober. Then, all three conditions would be fulfilled and your success would be guaranteed.”

“Okay, Charles, I get the picture. Don’t remember anything, but I get the picture. We were stoned while we prepared for the heist — “

“You preferred to call it the redistribution of corporate funds.”

“Whatever… Still, it didn’t bode well for our success. We had guns?”

“Gun, singular. Guns terrified you, so she was the gunslinger. She accepted the role gleefully, too gleefully you felt, but you never told her.”

“Can we jump ahead, Charles?”

“Sure. On Distribution Day, both of you had lost your courage. You hadn’t done any drugs for over 24 hours. You were shaky and nauseous. So, both of you shot up in the car in the bank parking lot.

“You entered the bank confidently, Betty even giggling, the gun tucked under the elastic of her jeans against her belly, with her blouse pulled over it. ‘It’s tangled in my pubes,’ she whispered to you and giggled while you tried to shush her. You noticed the bank guard eying you suspiciously, but you knew he couldn’t have suspected what was about to happen.

“You stood in one line, she in another. It was going according to your scripted plan, only the plan kept sliding in and out of your mind, and you could only suppose it did the same in her mind. The note was in her blouse pocket. She giggled again but didn’t say anything. She got to her teller before you got to yours. She giggled. ‘The note,’ you whispered.

“Ignoring you, she pulled the gun from her jeans. ‘This is a fuckin’ stick-up,’ she said, waving the barrel of her gun in the teller’s face. She giggled again. ‘Stick-em-up.’ The teller fainted dead away. This confused her. ‘Now… who’s gonna give me the money,’ she whined. She looked over to you, her eyes enormous and rimmed with tears.

“You had a profound need to comfort her. You wanted to tell her it was all right, to put down the gun. But, before you had a chance to do anything, you glimpsed a blurred movement out of the corner of your eye. You turned to see the guard positioned on one knee, his gun pointed at Betty, and perhaps seeing the same movement, Betty turned and in that instant, the three of you were facing each other. Betty raised her gun. ‘No!’ you shouted and made a clumsy, lunge toward her. A shot echoed through the lobby of the bank.”

Charles and I stare at each other silently for a moment.

“So,” I say to him, “I lunged at Betty, hit her arm and the gun accidentally — “

Charles shakes his head. “No,” he says.

“Oh… Okay… So, I jump in front of the guard’s bullet?”

“Nope.”

I stare at him some more. “Then, how did I — “

“You didn’t. Check it out, Johnny.”

I slip a tentative hand up the inside of my shirt and searched for the wound that was there earlier.

Charles lifts his eyebrows, sniffs.

“The doctor said she shot me and then the guard shot her.”

“The doctor you remembered when you were dead?”

I don’t bother to confirm this.

“You dreamt of the doctor, Johnny, while you were dreaming of being in the morgue. Kind of a dream within a dream. Snazzy, huh?”

Something niggles at my mind, then comes to me. “Wait! Sue. One of the nurses mentioned the teller’s name. Sue something. Funny last name. Sue Latu, Patu. Something…”

“Zapu. Sue Zapu,” Charles says. He is blushing. Why is he blushing? “They interviewed her after she regained consciousness.” He lifts the folded newspaper on his desk and sets it down again.

“So, how did I know her name?”

“You could have seen her name tag. You could have read the newspaper before you lost your memory.”

“Or, I could be dead.”

“Do you want to be dead, Johnny?”

“Fuck you, Charles. If you’re so fucking smart why don’t you tell me what happened back there in the bank,” I challenge him, defiantly, with the same tone a child would use when he says, “I double-dare you.”

“Very simply, and in a few words, Johnny, when the guard shot Betty, you shouted, ‘No!’ and leaped over atop her, as though trying to shield her. Of course, she was already dead. And, for all practical purposes, you shut down.

“They hauled her off to the morgue and you to the hospital. You were catatonic for over a week and then you came out of it. For some reason, you were never connected with Betty as being part of the attempted robbery. Some incredibly good luck followed you. For example, the guard, who had seen you and Betty together when you entered, and who later killed Betty, was so badly shaken by the whole thing that he left town that night and they haven’t found him yet. The rumor was that he had something in his own past that he was afraid might be dredged up.”

Ah ha! I’m thinking, Now I’ve got you, you fucking fraud! “Wait, Charles,” I say. “Wait a goddam minute! How in the hell did you get all this shit about me and Betty in the first place?”

He takes off his cap and scratches his head, a slow smile spreading. “Well, you told me, Johnny.”

“I did? I did? When I can’t even remember where I took a crap yesterday?”

He laughs. “Or whether you did. And, if you did, whether you wiped.” He’s laughing harder.

That starts me laughing. This goes on for a full minute.

Then, Charles says, “Oh, Johnny, Johnny,” sniffing and interrupting himself with a chuckle, “I like you, Johnny. You bring out the child in me.”

“Good,” I say, the last of my smile leaving, “So, how could I have told you all that?”

Charles is recovered, now, and replaces his cap, the bill to the back of his neck this time. “You were released from the hospital under the condition that you have some psychiatric, um, help for a spell. I get a lot of referrals from the hospital. So, you came to me.

“I don’t think I’d ever encountered such an open individual, so eager to talk, to open up about your life. You seemed hungry for a human connection. You were never late for our sessions and seemed genuinely disappointed when they ended. At about the point in your chronology where you were entering college, you stopped to inquire about doctor-patient confidentiality, and with my assurance that nothing we talked about would leave this room, you carried on with uncommon energy — right up to yours and Betty’s decision to rob a bank. At that point I noticed you began to appear a bit edgy, eyes blinking frequently, crossing and uncrossing your legs, rubbing your palms together.

“You were physically sweating as you described Betty standing at the front of her line and waving the gun at the teller. At that precise moment, you lapsed into silence. I asked you if you needed to take a break, have a drink of water. Nothing. Silence. Your eyes were glazed, your mouth slack. I walked around my desk and stood in front of you. I waved my hand in front of your eyes. No blink. Nothing. I walked behind you and clapped my hands, watching you for any movement. None.”

“So, you’re saying I went catatonic again?”

“For no more than fifteen minutes. I was sitting at my desk when you blinked your eyes, made that strange, airy, whistley sound and told me about the doctors who pronounced you dead followed by your brief stint in the morgue. Seeing yours as the most complete case of amnesia I’ve ever heard about, and having the advantage of being with you before it came on, I hoped that by having an outline of your personal history given back to you, it might be enough to bring you back.”

“This is all bullshit, Charles. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but I know it is.” I can think of at least one ulterior motive: a book about my case might net him millions; then there would be the fame that went with it. It would get his name in all the psychiatric journals. Suddenly, Santa’s newly discovered avarice has given him a Grinch-like demeanor. “I need to sort some things out in my mind.”

“I see… Tomorrow, then?”

“Not tomorrow. The day after. What would that be?”

“Thursday. Let me see when I can fit you in. He punches some numbers in the intercom. He closes his eyes, rubbing them with his knuckles, waiting.

The time is right. I think about sailing to the bookshelf and find that I have risen above the level of Charles’ head and I angle off toward the bookshelf. I know I could go through the door. It would take me outside. But I am familiar with this route. I penetrate the bookshelf, enter the stock room, and through the opposite wall and into the restroom. It smells of citrus. A man is standing at the urinal, one hand planted against the wall. I give him the courtesy of not watching, and go through the wall into the waiting room. The receptionist is talking to the intercom. “Yes, I’ve got it down, Dr. Leitner. 9:30, Thursday.” She takes a wad of gum from her mouth, rolls it between her finger and thumb, then returns it.

Outside the large picture window with Charles Leitner, Doctor of Psychiatry on it and across the wide street where traffic buzzes both ways there is a park with acres of well-tended lawn and walkways that meander among dozens of maples and oaks and wind back to the playground with their slides and swings. I count two young women pushing baby carriages and one carriage unattended at the playground, the mother holding her child as she watches another climbing the ladder of the slide.

I want nothing more, at this point, than to be under a tree in the park and am skimming the tops of the chairs, heading toward the window.

Going through glass is like going through a waterfall. Its duration is an instant, but during that instant is the sensation of icy wetness, and I can only say, without explanation, there is a feeling of deep sadness that is just as quickly gone when you emerge on the other side.

I do and find myself sailing across the tops of cars and through one window and out the other of a city bus, across the expanse of lawn and settle lightly at the base of an oak tree, facing the street. I lean back against the trunk. I close my eyes.

How long my eyes were closed, or whether I slept, I don’t know, but all at once I am aware of incredible emptiness and aloneness; my eyes are burning and I know I have been crying. Who am I? Or, more essentially, am I? I keep my eyes closed, feeling the coarse bark against my back. Alive, without a past? Dead, in this interminable carnival of the present? When I tire of flying through things — what then? I feel a sudden infusion of rage. Rising, as though taking on its own entity, it rips through my throat: “Is anyone the fuck in there?” Then, I remember and start to laugh. And I can’t stop laughing, here in the cosmic darkness of my tightly cinched eyes.

“Here I am, Johnny.”

My eyes snap open. With the setting sun blazing in my face, I have to shield my eyes against the glare in order to bring into focus the most beautiful child I have ever seen. Her face is awash with caring. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it right away — just an instant ago — but she’s on a swing and no sooner has she spoken than she is soaring away from me, thirty or forty yards away, all the way to the street, before her swing starts moving toward me.

As she approaches I yell: “Where do you know me from, little girl?”

With one hand off the rope, she twirls a strand of hair around her finger. As she passes me, the swing’s ropes cutting easily through limbs and tangles of branches (which would carry her at least fifty yards behind me), she says over her shoulder: “You said, ‘Is anyone the fuck in there …?’”

“Oh! I’m — I’m sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t — I — “

The swing has vanished. Now she stands at my feet. She holds an index finger across her lips. “Please,” she says, smiling a most disarming smile, “speak any way that gives you pleasure.”

“Nothing much gives me pleasure, dear. I’m scared.”

“You’re scared…”

“Afraid I’m losing it — losing my mind.”

“You’re afraid you’re bent ….”

“What! Why’d you say that?”

She raises her little shoulders and then lets them drop as she stares at her feet. When she looks back at me, she has an ageless and haggard look in her eyes, her voice deepening: “You’re bent, Jon-Jon — I can’t help you. I can’t … fucking … help … you ….”

“What!” My heart is racing.

“No one can help you, Johnny. Don’t you see — you must do it alone?” She smiles at me enigmatically — the child again. “You have to wake … or you have to cross.”

“Don’t go, little girl,” I beg her, but she has already turned and is walking into the sun.

“Wake or cross, Johnny. Wake or cross.”

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