All the better for Barrows.
He had to have it. He had to scrape it raw off the sidewalk and eat it, hoping no one would bear witness. He could imagine the reaction of an associate partner walking down the street one day and seeing Barrows scarfing bum phlegm. He could imagine what the firm’s president might say upon hearing of this. With every day that went by, and with every chunk of some rummie’s hock that he ate, Barrows knew he was living on borrowed time.
Once a Seattle cop had seen him, and though Barrows could not conceive that eating phlegm off the sidewalk violated the law, he was grateful that the constable had received a call on his radio at the same time. Barrows did not want to have to explain what he was doing. A number of homeless had seen him too, but he needn’t explain to them.
Sometimes he paid the dregs of the local prostitutes to cough into his mouth. Sometimes he’d walk right up to paralyzed bums rotting in alleyways and pay them $100 to drag up a giant loogie and hack it up into his hand, after which he’d eat it like a culinaire savoring Nicouli ossetra caviar off of toast points. Once he’d paid an obese homeless woman on Jackson Street to cough up a big one into his mouth. She’d smelled worse than anything Barrows’ olfactory senses had ever experienced, but she’d obliged and then some, hacking up a blob of phlegm the size of a baby’s fist. When Barrows had rolled it around on his tongue, he’d found a rotten tooth, which he’d swallowed with the rest of the prize.
Bums and whores and Seattle’s constant human street detritus were one thing, but he knew he had to be careful, more careful than he’d been in the past. He couldn’t have people on the street recognizing him, oh no, not with his picture constantly in the state market news, not with his picture in
Forbes
and the financial trade magazines. But too often it seemed that the longer this grotesque curse went on, the more he became lost in it.
With every glob he slurped down, he realized how wrong it was, how demented and abnormal. And for the two decades that had transpired since his first indulgence at age twenty, he’d always assumed that his sickness was so remote, and so insulated, as to be totally exclusive to himself.
What could he say to his doctor? What could he say to a shrink?
I have this problem, see? I have to eat phlegm.
No, no. He could not say that, because he couldn’t believe that anyone else on the surface of the earth could be stricken with such a bizarre and filthy addiction.
Barrows, in his curse, felt alone in the world. Until—
««—»»
He’d been hunting for a fresh wad, after work as usual, stalking the most rank warrens of Third and Yesler—the “Bum” district.
Damn it!
came the desperate thought. He itched, junkie-like, when he saw the
droves
of people milling up and down. The Kingdome loomed, reminded him that baseball season was in full swing; the extra pedestrians would make his travail all the more difficult.
Wait,
he thought.
No other choice.
Barrows ducked under the pillared cover of the King County Courthouse, amongst a coterie of employees out for a smoke break.
He stood there for hours.
Waiting.
By eight p.m., he was cross-eyed in his need. His fingernails had dug crescent gouges into the meat of his palms, and his face felt was slicked with sweat. He watched the whores flit by across the street, each of whom would be grateful to hack into his mouth for a C-Note; he watched the bums straggle, spitting their precious wares onto the sidewalk.
Too far away for Barrows to claim.
The sun sunk. He came close to chewing a hole in his lower lip as he waited. Then—
An obese, bearded man in a wheelchair (wearing a plaid dress, of all things [but this was Seattle]) rolled by and hacked loudly. A wad of blackish phlegm landed only feet before the place where Barrows stood.
Barrows’ heart picked up.
He ducked out, an index card in each hand. Anxious glances up and down the street showed him meager pedestrian traffic.
He scooped up the wad, walked to the big brown garbage can behind the bus stop, then knelt as if to tie his shoe.
He didn’t tie his shoe.
His lips pulled the fresh lump off the card. He sighed as his tongue squashed the briny lump between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He savored and swallowed.
Jesus…
It was all he could do, then, not to stick his hand right down into his pinstriped Italian slacks and beat himself off. His knees wobbled at the rush. He was
fixing
as the lump went down.
Jesus God…
When the rush lifted, and his vision cleared, he heard a scuff to his left.
The bus shelter,
he thought but hardly cared. Suddenly, though, the sidewalk was vacant, and in the bus shelter, he saw—
A tall, haggard man, another “bum.” Jeans smudged black with dirt, long hair, beard flecked with bits of food and boogers. The back of his dun-colored jacket read KING STREET GOSPEL HOMELESS SHELTER, and he was doing the most unusual thing:
He was—
What the…
With a piece of cardboard, he was scraping up a pile of vomit in the bus shelter; in fact, he was scraping it up rather meticulously.
The vomit looked like chunky pink oatmeal.
Then he flapped the granular puke into a plastic Zip-Loc bag. He craned his long neck, caught Barrows staring at him.
A snarl like an animal, then the man away, carrying his plastic bag full of bum vomit with him.
««—»»
“That’s when I knew it,” Barrows admitted to Dr. Untermann. “When I saw that guy—that bum—scraping up the vomit off the sidewalk and carrying it away…” He closed his eyes, rubbed his temples. “That’s when I knew—”
“That you weren’t the only one with a severe and incomprehensible problem,” Marsha Untermann finished for him. “Hmm. Collecting vomit.”
“Yes. Collecting it, putting it in a bag.” Barrows looked up at the comely psychiatrist. “I don’t even want to think what he does with it later.”
“He probably eats it,” Dr. Untermann bluntly offered. “It’s a form of dritiphily.”
Barrows’ lower lip hung down in bewilderment. “A form of—”
“Dritiphily, or dritiphilia. It’s part of the clinical scope of what we now think of as an OCD—an obsessive-compulsive disorder.” Her manicured index finger raised. “But it’s very rare, to the extent that it’s scarcely acknowledged anymore.” Her finely lined eyes blinked once, then twice. “I’m not quite sure why.”
But Barrows still sat in confusion, facing this elegant, refined woman behind the broad cherrywood desk.
What did she say?
he thought. “Drit—”
“Dritiphily,” her lightly colored lips reiterated.
“There’s a name for it? There’s a…diagnosis?”
“Yes, er—there
was.
It disappeared from the diagnostic indexes in the late-sixties. For thirty years there was a listing in the DSM. That’s the shrink’s battle book, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
. But Dritiphily, as a diagnosis, vanished once the later editions were released. Instead, it’s been sub-categorized into some of the newer disorders.”
Barrows felt rocked. “You mean there’s actually…a name…for my…problem?”
“Yes,” she quickly replied. “And you’re rather lucky in that my main office is located in Seattle. Besides myself, there are only two other psychiatrists on the west coast who deal in such afflictions. One’s in L.A., the other in San Diego.”
Barrows paused to look at her—this gracile and unique specialist who had agreed to see him at a rate of $450 per hour. The fee, to Barrows, was pocket change to a typical man. He’d pay anything—
anything
—for help.
Dr. Marsha Untermann was probably over fifty, sharply attired, graceful in manner, her face calm yet her myrtle-green eyes intense. The straight, shining dark gray hair—cut just above the shoulders—gave her an exotic cast, not an aged one; she was high-bosomed, strikingly attractive. Barrows thought of a Lauren Hutton or a Jacqueline Bissett. He’d found her simply by searching the Department of Mental Hygiene’s website; Dr. Untermann’s office address and number had been the only listing under the CRITICAL OUT-PATIENT/ABNORMAL PSYCHIATRY heading.
To Barrows, “abnormal” was putting it mildly.
“So it was this derelict, this vagabond, that impelled you to contact me,” she said more than asked.
“That’s right.” Barrows still felt tightly uncomfortable by all he’d confessed to. Nevertheless, something about her allayed him, like confessing to a nameless priest behind a screen. And he remembered what she’d told him earlier:
I’ve heard much worse.
Comforting words to Barrows but still…
How much worse?
he wondered. It proved a terrifying question.
“I suspect, by your appearance, that you’re a man of means?”
“I’m rich,” Barrows said with no enthusiasm. “I’m an investment banker.”
“Then you might appreciate this quite a bit. This derelict you saw, this precursor, this piece of human flotsam you saw whisking up vomit from the bus stop…you and he are essentially the same.”
Barrows calculated this.
“You’re rich, he’s homeless and poor. You have the best of everything, he has nothing. Yin meets Yang, the capitalist meets the
victim
of capitalism. The man plugged
in
meets the man cast
out
. The two of you couldn’t be more different from a societal standpoint.” Her lips pursed momentarily. Then she added, “But sickness, Mr. Barrows, is relative.”
Barrows found the point of little use—his selfishness, perhaps. His obliviousness in wealth. “I don’t want to sound callus,” he said, “but I didn’t make this appointment to have you make me feel guilty about being rich.”
“You
shouldn’t
feel guilty,” she replied. “You should feel accomplished. You should feel proud. You’ve done what most can’t do.”
Barrows found no use in this either, and he was not a man to beat around the proverbial bush. His voice roughened. “I usually make a million dollars a year but I have to eat
phlegm
off the street. That sounds crazy, but I’m
not
crazy. I need help. You’re the expert. Don’t patronize me. Help me.”
Her bosom rose as she leaned back in her plush chair. “You’re a dritiphilist, with erotomanic undertones. You eat phlegm and masturbate after doing so—that’s not quite the same as someone who’s an asthmatic or even a schizophrenic. There’s no magic pill for dritiphily.”
“Long-term psycho-therapy?” he frowned. “Is that it?”
“Possibly. But don’t scoff so quickly at behaviorilist science. Freud was quite right in many of his tenets. Most psychological anomalies have a sexual base. And Sartre was right too. Existence proceeds essence. It is our
existence
, Mr. Barrows, which makes us what we are. Conversely, the inexplicable trimmings of that existence are what cause our mental problems.”
Barrows sighed in frustration.
As the sun set in her Pioneer Square window, the shiny dark-gray hair seemed to glow from behind, like an angel’s aura.
But this is one cold bitch of an angel,
he thought.
“Let me guess,” Dr. Untermann posed. “You had a normal childhood.”
“Yes.”
“You were raised by loving and well-to-do parents.”
“Yes.”
“And you received an excellent education.”
“Private school and Harvard Yard.”
The woman didn’t seem the least bit impressed. “And this affliction of yours—it started in your late-teens?”
“I was twenty…”
“And your first sexual—or I should say
copulative
—experience came shortly before that?”
“Nineteen…” Barrows’ eyes narrowed. She was hitting each nail directly on the head, which made him feel better. “You know a lot.”
“Obsessive-compulsive disorders have many objective lay-lines.” She seemed casual suddenly, even bored. “They’re all different but they’re all the same in certain ways. You probably married shortly after college?”
“Immediately after.”
“But you didn’t love her, did you?”
Barrows stalled. At first he was offended that she make such an accusation, but then he remembered that it was true.
“No,” she went on. “You married her because you thought that wedlock—a
normal
incident—might guide you back to normalcy yourself.”
Irritated, he shirked in his seat. “Yes.”
Dr. Untermann lit another long, thin cigarette. A blur of creamy smoke appeared between her lips then vanished in a blink. “Tell me about the circumstances of your divorce.”
Barrows challenged her. “I’m not divorced,” he said. “I’m still happily married.”