Scream (22 page)

So I called the psychiatrist I'd seen before, Dr. Sandor F—. He had seemed . . . kind. I remembered he was expensive, and it had cost me a lot to hear his life story, but I was so upset I booked back-to-back appointments, one for Willow and one for me, the day after she got back.

Willow was back? I had had my summer planned: there would be house-sitters staying to look after my dogs. I would escape, after a year of total unending torture, a mom crapping all over the house and my having to find her a nursing home, and a kid who wanted to move to high school here and then found herself miserable because eleventh grade is not an easy year to switch schools and who then got a boyfriend to smoke pot with. After all that, now she was home only two days after she left. The scholarship to Jordan was a big deal! I took her to the shrink. When her appointment was over, I went in for mine. And the room . . . well, it smelled like pot. And Dr. Sandor F—, who I remembered as a nice guy, intelligent, on my one brief visit some six months prior, said, “I met with your daughter and I told her: ‘WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO GO TO JORDAN! Those Arabs are crazy! They are bad people!' ”

“Oh,” I said.

“So why are you so upset?” he asked.

“This was a big-deal scholarship! She doesn't have very good grades or PSAT scores, it would help her get into college, they offer jobs to the recipients, blah-blah-blah.”

“Okay, so I am going to tell you something,” said Dr. Sandor F—. “It doesn't matter.”

“Huh?”

“That's right, it doesn't MATTER.” He launched into the history of cognitive behavior therapy, which I think he had told me before. This time the story went something like: “There was this very ugly guy, Eckhart Tolle, and he was so plain and ugly and he had no money and his parents were horrible. So you see, Willow not taking the scholarship—it doesn't matter.
She's
fine.
You
should come back for further appointments.”

Right. It was true, he was right: it didn't matter. Nothing matters. But is that comforting? No. Not to me at the time. I understand you don't look to a psychiatrist for comfort, but still. Yes, sure, I would “get over it,” but to me, it mattered.

“I am troubled by her marijuana smoking,” I said. “She gets nasty after she hasn't smoked.”

“And what is your problem with marijuana?”

I told him about my father, and how his long-term smoking had made him . . . if not addicted, then just unpleasant if he hadn't smoked in more than a few hours. “Look, if someone wants to smoke once in a while, it's not a problem!” I said. “But usage like that, it's no different than alcoholism. And even smoking once in a while, it's kind of like getting drunk, the people end up with hangovers!”

The doctor nodded thoughtfully. “I don't know anything about long-term usage like your father's,” he says. “But in my opinion, it is not harmful.”

So after my appointment I said to Willow, “Listen, were you smoking pot with that shrink?”

“No, why?”

“Just because . . . the place smelled like pot.”

“Well, I wasn't,” she said. “He seemed nice! He used to be a neurosurgeon. We talked a lot about brain function. And he said it would have been nuts to go to Jordan and that I didn't need to come to see him again. I'm fine.”

A couple of weeks later, she was hanging out with her friends when she said, “You know what, Mom? I don't know why you are so upset with me smoking marijuana. There's this kid, at my school, Gandolf F—. He and his parents
grow
marijuana, in the yard, and they
smoke
it together. He started smoking when he was
seven,
with his parents.”

“
What?
WHAT did you say his name was?”

She repeated it.

“That's the psychiatrist's son!” Not only was it an unusual last name, but Dr. Sandor F— had told me he had a kid in Willow's school. I was in total disbelief. I mean, Doctor—do what you want, smoke marijuana with your kid starting when he's seven years old, if you feel that's okay—but MAKE SURE you tell your kid to keep his mouth shut about doing it! You're a DOCTOR, for crying out loud, it's your REPUTATION! Not to mention he previously worked for the state, so was he oblivious to the fact that anybody could call Child Protective Services . . . or the police . . . for growing marijuana? Were all these psychiatrists similar? When Willow was a toddler my dad wanted Tim to take a few pounds of marijuana he had grown, so Tim could sell it for him in the city. I forget what split he suggested.

“Dad!” I said. “Do you know what happens if you get caught dealing marijuana in that quantity? They don't just put you in jail—they take away everything you own, including your kid!”

Dad didn't care. Fortunately Tim didn't go through with this plan.

I was alone on this damn planet, not only suffering from repetition compulsion syndrome (or whatever it was called), I was out another $250 apiece for our appointments.

leaving ithaca

I
f I was going to look after my mother as her condition deteriorated and she got kicked out of one nursing home after the next, each time demoted to a higher level of care, I would have to head to a place where I didn't have neighbors, even if it meant abandoning my shrub.

So this is how I actually got to Schuyler County, where they had advertisements for events such as this:

A Holy Ghost tent revival
and
unlimited pizza buffet.

Yes, I would miss my shrub, and hearing things about my neighbor's biological daughter's grandfather's murder-suicide spree. Yes, I would miss many of the very wise recycling rules of Tompkins County and I would be sorry not to display my paper bags with fortitude to the garbagemen—by now I had learned to tape and strap them so well, they would last for thousands of years in the landfill. But it was time for me to go.

I was ready for Schuyler County, where—riding my horse through the Finger Lakes National Forest and surrounding farmlands—I could always find my way back to the farm, simply by remembering the various bathtubs that local residents had discarded along the trail. (Also, the horse knew the way.)

Bathtubs, sinks, sofas: if you had something you didn't want, that's what you did with it out there in the wild. And that was going to be my next destination, as long as my mother was on this earth, a place where seldom was heard the term
deer repellent
. Instead it was a realm where at the local convenience store you could buy deer
attractant
, made out of the urine of does in heat, in order to attract the male deer to shoot them while they were searching out the female deer in heat and distracted by the hormones in the scent. That was what fair play was considered to be in the region. And, in my opinion, it was just as fair as contacting a lawyer to tell your neighbor to remove a bag of mulch from the sidewalk.

At the end of the time I was in my mom's house I had been so scared of living there, with the legal threats and accusations and having to sit in a sex chair when I didn't want to. But then—just before I had everything 100 percent packed and gone—I was nervously cleaning up the yard, hoping I wasn't going to get the meditation command, when a car drove by on the far road and slowed.

At first I didn't know who it was, but then I saw, looking tired and peevish, a ponytailed guy, maybe in search of local overgrown shrubs or barking dogs, but anyway just weary, and it all made me a bit sad.

in search of lost time

T
ime passes, I end up there—that indefinable place called “Revisiting the Past.”

It's not an accurate place. You can't go back and visit it in a documentary. Your mind doesn't remember it perfectly. You want to look back and think you did well. You want to believe people are basically good. You know, too, we all try to improve. We hope to change.

I find myself, once again, in that same supermarket.

Look, the sign has been changed!

Oh no. It's changed, but it's not an
improvement
. Don't get me started. Don't get me started. So, in my head, I revisit. I revisit my time growing up. I revisit my life in New York: growing up—after my parents' divorce—in a tiny tract house, falling apart, alongside the big eight-lane highway 128 looping outside Boston. Rats in the back, neighbors throwing rocks at the car—once they broke my mom's windshield. It's a contagious disease, that place you came from.

Don't get me wrong; I did get to have plenty of fun, strange, and interesting experiences in my life. I did not particularly like being semi-famous, which I was for a while, after
Slaves of New York
was published in 1986.

The thing is, if you are a writer, and that's all you do, you have a pretty isolated existence. What experiences are you getting to have? You are sitting at a typewriter (well, to start, it was a manual, then a used electric, and finally a Mac) and that's your life.

Flannery O'Connor said that a writer has enough life experience to draw on by the time she is twenty years old to write for the rest of her life. She died when she was thirty-nine. The Brontës, they had plenty to write about, and they seldom left the moors.

But is that really a fun way to spend your life, all the time—unless you have to?

Writing, to me, was a living death. You are not “doing” anything while you are writing. You are not painting a picture or filing papers or trying a case. You are not in a meeting. You are sitting totally alone with a screen or paper in front of you and nothing is happening. You are making up stuff in your head, but that is not the same as something really “happening.”

I did not write books to be liked. I was not interested in writing likable books. I was not interested in providing the reader with a hero or heroine with whom she or he could identify, who had to overcome obstacles and in the end triumphed. I wasn't writing about “nice” people or people who were redeemed.

I found rotten people to be more interesting. What made them the way they were? Thankfully, I found that even nice and decent human beings are pretty rotten as well.

I was in New York. I could take the subway and look at people. I could go to art openings. I could go to clubs. But it's still not easy to speak to people. I was always the observer, and it became harder and harder to leave my apartment. It was the same as a dog taken to an animal shelter and left in a cage for years. I couldn't make the transition out of my cage. And I was always so broke.

It wasn't fun being jeered at, when I started doing advertisements and that sort of thing—which I did, not only for the money, but for fun and experience. I looked upon any invitation to do anything as an opportunity to
do
something I would never have known about otherwise. For me, my activities were my substitutions. I could not be Hemingway, running with the bulls in Pamplona or fishing for marlin off Cuba.

I always had a sense of guilt, though. I mean, a writer in our society is looked down on, pretty much. If you tell people you are a writer, unless you can say your name is Stephen King, the first thing you will be asked—always with a certain patronizing sneer—is: “And have you published?”

“Yes.”

“What's the name of your book?”

“Um,
American Dad
?”

“Never heard of it.”

With my next book I was able to say, “
Slaves of New York
?”

But still, 99.9 percent of people could say, “Never heard of it.”

It seemed like a joke to me when I went to movie premieres and the photographers, lined up as you entered the theater, started shouting at me, “Tama! Tama! Look this way! Over here, Tama.”

I wasn't a movie star. I wasn't trying to get my photograph taken. I wanted to slink in, unnoticed. Didn't they get it?
I was a writer!