In Session (22)

The Lay Psychiatrist diagnoses castration anxiety

An old wrestler, like an aging mob enforcer, hates to see the muscle turn to fat, the liver swell the belly like a bloated cow in the sun, the scrotum, an old Rottweiler slumbering in jowly dreams of a three dog night. “There are two kinds of men in this world,” the old mobster said. “There are lions and there are rabbits. You and me, Layman, we’re lions. Rabbits are chickenshits.”

He crossed his legs and I could see the garters that held up the silk socks, tastefull, delicate stripes of maroon on gray. I had complimented him on his expensive suit when he came in and he offered to get me one for a hundred bucks if he could find my size. He gets them from the dry cleaning trucks for his friends, he said.

He had long legs, especially the thighs, which made him taller than me by a couple of inches. He was maybe 6'6" and 270, his face wicked heavy with testosterone and decorated with bushy gray eyebrows and matching mustache. His eyes were slate gray, with the round, steady pupils of a tall predator. They focused like a drill bit and I was the x mark. I moved into trance and imagined myself as a knot hole. Psychic defense.

“Let’s talk about your mother,” I said.

“Stay away from my mother, you fat fuck.”

I could take him in a fair fight but who gets a fair fight from a guy like that? I could see the bulge of a shoulder holster under his left arm.

“I’m not fat,” I said evenly. “This is all muscle.”

“Yeah, well, it turns to fat,” he said, his voice weary, “especially if you’re Italian.”

He smiled and made a motion like he was absently tossing a balloon into the air.

“I was just jerking your chain, Layman,” he said.

I waited. “Your mother,” I prompted. “You’d do anything to get attention from her.” He sank back into the chair and delicately touched his forehead with fingertips, then the hand fluttered away like an indifferent butterfly.

“I loved her more than any woman I’d ever met up until I was thirteen. That was when I got married. Beautiful girl, younger than me of course. You got to think of the future.” Again the emotion paralyzed him and again the hand floated about with a life of its own.

“You lost her?”

“What could I do? She was wearing wire.”

It is remarkable how quickly emotional paralysis comes from hidden depths. A grown man or woman is suddenly unable to speak, overwhelmed by feelings they didn’t suspect were there, blocked by a facade of indifference. He again had to wait for self possession to return so that he could speak without his voice breaking.

“I craved mama’s attention,” he said. “I knew she wouldn’t really cut me, and so it felt like positive engagement, you know? She had noticed me, and I felt, well, validated. It was worse for the younger kids.”

“Younger kids?”

“We’re Catholics. She was teaching me to be a man. She wouldn’t have fed it to the cat even if she cut it off. I was too young to know that. I thought she didn’t pay attention because there was something wrong with me as a person.”

“She wouldn’t have fed what to the cat?” I sensed I was getting close to the root of the problem.

“She’d say, ‘Fuck off, Tony, or I’ll cut your dick off and feed it to Freckles.’ That was our cat. I knew she wasn’t really gonna do that, but I shot the cat, just in case.”

“Did your mother find out about that?”

“I didn’t make it a secret. I pulled out my little gun — I was a child you know, and the only shotgun poppa let me use was the 410 — Freckles ran and I led her about a foot, which wasn’t enough. All I did was bob her tail. But she never came back home again.”

I have a sixth sense about where the trouble in the psyche originates

“How did that make you feel?” I asked.

“To shoot Freckles?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of your mother threatening to cut your dick off.”

“Honestly, I was grateful for the attention, like I said. I tried to engage mama by being funny, setting things on fire, playing pranks on the next door neighbors. They were Jewish and didn’t even have guns. I told them right to their face that not having guns played into Hitler’s hands, so what did they expect to happen? But they just shook their heads with their mouths open, like they didn’t believe it could happen to them, in America. I found out later Freckles was living at their house, but they wouldn’t let her go outside.”

We sat in silence for two minutes, until I figured it was up to me to break it. “Do you think your relationship with your mother might have something to do with the problems you’re having now, connecting with women?”

He uncrossed his legs and sat forward in the chair. “I still do it,” he said. “I try to get attention, and they all tell me the same thing after a date or two. They say, ‘I’m exhausted, Tony.’ I can’t take it anymore.’”

“So, you’re saying you talk too much? Have you tried listening to a woman instead of trying to impress her?”

He shifted uncomfortably and glanced at his watch. He was avoiding something. Pointing to the Rolex, he said, “I can get you one cheap. One cheep is the name of my introverted bird. Won’t come out of the cage. I says to him, ‘Don’t be self-conscious, just wing it.’ He says, ‘Fuck off, I’m in a fowl mood.’”

I had my diagnosis. “Castration anxiety,” I said. “It puts you in bad humor.”

“Fowl humor,” he corrected. “I can cocka one gun but I can’t cocka two.”

“The hour, she is up,” I said.