Spitting Off Tall Buildings Part 10

'...I'm very sorry, Mr. Dante...I'm sure that was difficult news. May I please have the name and telephone number of your attending physician? Full name. First name first, please...'

'I don't have an attending physician, Mike.'

'...Name of hospital or facility and room number, please?'

'I'm not in the hospital or in a facility.'

'...I see...Mr. Dante, I'm sorry for asking this at such an uncomfortable time, but could you tell me the nature of your illness?'

'Okay...sure...I refilled my prescription for Valium today. I took a handful before I called you, about twenty or so...'

'Wait...You just took pills?' pills?'

'About five minutes ago. I was on hold listening to the music. I'm drinking too...I'll be taking the last thirty - they're ten-milligram Valium - and twenty-five Fiorinal, after we hang up. I'm going to kill myself. So...I guess my illness is an overdose. To be safe, if I were you, I'd just put down heart failure. That'll cover it.'

On the other end Mike had stopped reading from his telephone script.

'C'mon sir,' he said, 'you're not serious?...You're kidding, right?'

'No. I'm being serious. It's checkout time.'

'Look...Bruno. It's Bruno, right?'

'Right.'

'Look Bruno. This's like...absurd. You seem to be an intelligent person. I mean, you sound a little stoned and all but...did you really take twenty Valium?...Hey, wait; is this Robert? G.o.dammit man, don't screw around!...'

'I took pills, Mike. Ten minutes ago. I'm about to take some more. I haven't got much time here...'

's.h.i.+t!...Okay, look...Bruno, Mr. Dante...let me get my supervisor. I don't know what to say. This is an exceptional circ.u.mstance. I'm going to put you on hold a second, okay?'

'No. Don't do that. I need to know now.'

'...Jesus...Look, I mean, you're absolutely positive about this?'

'Yes...Correct.'

'Well, s.h.i.+t. Jesus...You're really going through with it?'

'It's a done deal.'

'...Okay...Mr. Dante...Okay. Well...I didn't mention yet that there's an additional bonus discount of ten percent off our TV special if you pay right now over the phone with your Visa or Mastercard? Did you want to take advantage of that discount?'

Chapter Twenty-one.

IN NEW YORK State there is a law that says that they are allowed to lock you down in the squirrel ward for ten days when you attempt to take your own life. It doesn't matter if you ate pills and cut your wrists, drank drain cleaner or injected 200 ccs of nail polish remover into your carotid artery. If you live, they've got you. The rules are the same for everybody. Dylan, my high-strung f.a.ggot neighbor across the hall who always hears everything anyway, heard my end of the phone call to SEA-MATION SEA-MATION at five o'clock in the morning. I found out later that he's the one that called 911 after I'd gone back to my room and locked the door. I don't remember any of it. Not the ambulance. Nothing. at five o'clock in the morning. I found out later that he's the one that called 911 after I'd gone back to my room and locked the door. I don't remember any of it. Not the ambulance. Nothing.

In New York Hospital they a.s.signed me to Jack Bratter. A shrink. Jack's job was to bring me in twice a day for private sessions, ask a lot of questions and determine if I was crazy and a danger to myself. He would evaluate whether or not I should be let go or placed in a rubber condo somewhere. I didn't care. I didn't give a rat's d.i.c.k what they did with me.

Jack was a good guy. Older, but smart. He had been a desk sergeant in Manhattan South for twelve years before retiring from the police. He'd gone back to school at Hunter College, then taken up shrink as a profession. He liked that I was a writer. He had read some of my father's books. We talked a lot about plays. His theatrical interest was in cla.s.sic theatrical comedy; Moliere, guys like that.

I told Jack the truth. Mostly. I said things had come to a head after the hold-up. The despair, et cetera.

Jack was more concerned about my drinking than anything else. Also about my anger fits while I was drinking and sober. He was curious to know the kinds of things that set me off; what I thought about this and what I thought about that: 'What did you think then, Bruno?...After that happened, how did you feel?...You must've been upset.' Blah, blah, blah...Blah, blah, blah.

One week into the deal, after the individual sessions and twice-a-day in group, Jack gave me some news. 'Good news,' he said. He had determined that I was not crazy. That the twenty-four-hour-a-day voices in my head and my behavior were, to him, symptoms of alcoholism.

According to Jack, being an alcoholic is a mind disease like manic depression. It describes the way an alkie's mind has come to work. Sober or drunk. He said that my depressions and rages and disgusting degenerate behavior and the other stuff were by-products of my alcoholism.

Alkies, Jack says, are characterized not only by their drinking, which of course is the main big symptom, but also by their craziness while they are sober. After a certain point in the progression of the disease a person's perceptions change. There is an automatic mental distortion of information; damaged, f.u.c.ked mental software. With and without a drink.

Jack says that I had developed this type of 'personality' over time. A new character. To keep my mind comfortable and under control, my disease required me to drink more and more because things in the world become more and more unacceptable with my type of alcoholic 'personality.'

Booze, Jack says, can work real well for years, like a pill, to treat this personality. But eventually it has to turn on you, stop working, and bite you on the a.s.s. According to Jack, that's what happened to me.

He said this: that there was nothing really he could do to help me stop the depressions or trying to kill myself. In his experience, still-drinking alcoholics like me, as a functioning, walking-around cla.s.s of people, are the furthest from any kind of emotional or spiritual peace. From G.o.d.

At the end of the mandatory ten days, on the morning of my release from the hospital, Jack said that if I continued with booze I would be like someone carrying cans of gasoline to a fire. He said there wasn't much hope.

I liked Jack. They were letting me out and they could no longer hold me for any reason so I was completely straight with him. I said honestly that I did not agree. To me I was chemically imbalanced. I needed some kind of medication; Prozak or Elavil or lithium. One of those. Other people on my ward who took mood stabilizers had my same symptoms. Jack refused to give me anything to help so I got up and walked out.

Chapter Twenty-two.

ME AND MY rooming-house manager, Bert, had always gotten on fairly well. Bert was part Indian. American Indian. Big and mean but he liked me because we both drank whiskey and we were both fans of the New York Mets.

He'd arrived in Manhattan five years before me with his old lady Angel-Lee and their two kids. At the time the couple met and started a relations.h.i.+p he was forty-one, Angel was nineteen. She had been a dancer, the prettiest black girl in Fort Smith.

For his first few years in New York Bert worked in construction a.s.sembly, steel framing on skysc.r.a.pers. Then, by chance, he discovered his real apt.i.tude; the one for insurance scams and welfare swindling.

One day at the job site he slipped on a cable spool, fell, and got a minor strain in his back. He decided to fake it a little and take a few days off to watch the end of the baseball playoffs on TV. His job foreman sent him to a doctor. There in the waiting room Bert ran into a guy he had once worked with. Another Indian. The guy had a limp and was walking with a cane but he was wearing a colorful Hawaiian sports s.h.i.+rt. In their conversation it came out that the fellow had been collecting $540 tax free every two weeks for the last year for his own back injury. Currently, he was spending his afternoons making bets and limping up and down the steps to the Club House at Aquaduct racetrack.

That was the beginning.

Three years later Bert was deep into a Workman's Comp lawsuit and opening his mail twice a month to find over a thousand dollars' worth of checks from the insurance company. His bogus back-injury claim had begun that day at the doctor's office. These days Bert spent his time drinking whiskey and Rheingold beer, watched the Mets on TV, and, as an under-the-table sideline, managing the rooming house where I lived.

He and Angel had never officially married so she was on welfare as an unemployed single mother. Her own second income came from a steady night gig, waitressing in a t.i.tty bar off Times Square. The girls, twins, Carrie and Connie, were now eleven years old. Nice kids. Sweet.

Bert knew about my hold-up in the taxi. It was he and my neighbor Dylan who had unlocked my door to let the police and the paramedics in after I tried to kill myself by taking the Valium and pain pills.

The afternoon I got back from the hospital and knocked on his door to get my mail and pay my back rent, Bert asked me inside. He always had beer, good and cold, so I stepped in.

During one of the commercials Bert smiled over at me and slapped his leg. He asked me if I had ever heard of Victim Stress Disorder. I said that I had not. Then he began to laugh. It continued for several seconds. When he stopped he was standing over my chair and pointing down. He said that to him, the second after I'd opened his front door, he knew. I looked like a man with incurable Victim Stress Disorder. For the rest of the afternoon we talked about VSD and drank and watched the Mets lose.

Bert's attorney was Robert Edward Francis Duffy. Duffy's office was on Twenty-third Street in the Flatiron Building. He practiced one kind of law only: work-related personal injury. Workman's Comp lawsuits.

Bert bragged that Duffy had an address book overflowing with the names of orthopedists, shrinks and miscellaneous personal-injury experts. He said that if he wanted to Duffy could have six doctors in a courtroom tomorrow morning at eight o'clock who would testify under oath and certify that I was unemployable and crazier than a blue chicken.

The following morning I went with Bert, who had ambitions of collecting a referral fee, downtown to see Bob Duffy at his office. It turned out that attorney Duffy had settled two prior cabbie hold-up claims using Victim Stress Disorder as the basis for the lawsuits. The first trauma case was similar to mine; a guy had been robbed at gunpoint, shoved into his cab's trunk and left freezing for twelve hours in a parking lot in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. Duffy'd won a juicy award from Workman's Comp because of permanent frostbite damage to three of the man's fingers and chronic VSD. The guy's name was Joseph Kallit. Eventually Kallit moved with his mother and his wife Louise to Florida, where they purchased a condo with their end of the settlement money and he took up playing the trombone.

Me and Bert sat in the two leather chairs in front of Duffy's desk while the lawyer ran down a list of Victim Stress Disorder symptoms. The three of us counted. Five of the symptoms applied to me. I signed up right there and became a client.

Before we left the office Duffy got on the phone and made an appointment for me to begin regular therapy sessions and counseling with a doctor - Doctor Gromis. The way it worked, he said, was that Gromis would immediately submit my forms and I could expect to receive my first Workman's Comp benefit check in a week to ten days. $232 a week. $928 per month. Indefinitely. Duffy announced that I now had a chronic, medically doc.u.mented case of Victim Stress Disorder.

Chapter Twenty-three.

DOCTOR GROMIS HAD thick eyebrows and brown stains on his teeth from smoking cigars. He was skinny and smaller than me. His specialty was working with Viet Nam vet cases; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the more modern ailments they'd come up with like my VSD.

Both of us knew why we were there: (A) for me to pad my case, and (B) for him to bill my insurance company the hundred bucks an hour. Gromis said there were three rules: I was to show up on time for my sessions, not leave early, and not miss more than two in a row. At the end of our meeting he stood up, shook my hand, and said it would be okay for me to call him Harry.

My appointment time was 11 a.m., Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There were four other guys in my group therapy sessions; Olivers and Watkins, who always came in together, Doyle Kopek, and Lance Arvidson with his racing bike with the broken spokes. Plus Harry. All VA guys except me.

Kopek 'shared' the most and monopolized the sessions. Nonsense, predominately. To me he was a wack and a blubberf.u.c.k with the need to go on for half an hour at a time about boring idiot minutiae like the details of an argument with an old woman on a subway or a cheesed.i.c.k beef with his mother regarding the correct divvy of his VA allotment checks.

Then there was Olivers. A completely bizarre person. He either owned three blue tee-s.h.i.+rts with the same hole in the sleeve or never changed the only one he had. He kept his hair long in cornrows and wore sungla.s.ses to all the therapy sessions. His weirdest and most annoying characteristic was his continual rubbing and clutching at his p.e.n.i.s. When he did talk it was to b.i.t.c.h about his medical condition or discuss something he'd seen on TV.

Lance Arvidson was quiet too. A nodder. He'd sit for whole sessions without speaking. Sometimes he'd mumble something or snicker at something stupid Kopek had shared but his main system for communicating appeared to be head movements of the Yes or No kind.

The last guy, Watkins, had been a guard at Riker's Island. A big, mean-spirited weightlifter p.r.i.c.k. Always going off at someone for something; jumping out of his chair, intentionally misinterpreting everything you said if you were white, talking s.h.i.+t and getting in people's face every chance he could.

One week into the deal I hated them all. Except for Harry. To continue showing up but to keep from going crazy I was back on the booze again full time. Several times I came in drunk and dozed off during the sessions.

Harry called me into his office to inquire what was going on. I told him that it was clear to me that I had nothing in common with his astronauts. He wanted to know what else so I told him. I was honest. I said that I was back at the point again where I didn't give a rat's d.i.c.k whether I lived or died.

He wanted me to quit drinking and said that he'd had some luck treating Viet Nam vets through hypnotism and wanted to know if I was willing to give that form of therapy a try.

I thought about it and said no.

Harry gave me a choice: I could go back to attorney Duffy and get hooked up with a new shrink and return to square one with the Workman's Comp deal or I could try the hypno sessions.

The day I arrived for my first treatment, the office receptionist and nurse, Ms. Venable, put me into a room I had never been in before; it was small with no carpet and no windows. The only furniture in the room was a vinyl-covered tan reclining chair against one wall. When I touched one of the arms, it felt sticky. Ms. Venable gave me a blackout patch for my eyes and a set of earphones. I put the stuff on and pushed back in the recliner. As she was leaving I heard her flick off the light switch.

A few seconds later, from somewhere remote, she must have hit another b.u.t.ton because a voice in my headset started talking. It was Harry recorded on tape: 'You are going deeper and deeper,' Harry's voice said. 'You are more and more relaxed. All tension is being released while you drift further and further onto a flat, tranquil, blue sea...Deeper and deeper.'

Different sessions had different themes. Sometimes Harry's voice had me on an airplane, looking out at a perfect cloudless sky listening to the humming of the jet engines while I experienced increasing drowsiness. Sometimes I'd be in a train watching the sunset and listening to the clacking of the wheels...clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack. Once, in one of the clack-clack recordings, I saw a large fat bird flapping away into the distance. A big, noisy crow.

I never heard any messages of indoctrination coming through the headphones because after the first five or ten minutes of listening I was completely unconscious. I would wake up an hour later with Ms. Venable tapping me on the arm.

Chapter Twenty-four.

I WAS SURPRISED when the hypnotism suddenly worked. It took two weeks. There was one small seizure the day after I stopped the booze, and a shaking fit the next but, other than those, I was fine. After my fourth week in Harry's chair with the earphones, in an evaluation, I told him that #1, I had lost all desire for alcohol (which was true), and #2, I seemed to have given up most of my thoughts about killing myself or anyone else. Harry was pleased but insisted that we continue with the hypnotism treatments.

Then things changed again.

One afternoon, on an off day from the chair and headphones, I was waiting in the lounge of the Oriental Ma.s.sage in Times Square; waiting to spend an hour with Sandy, the pretty Korean hooker. The day before I'd cashed my second Workman's Comp check. Another two hundred and thirty-two bucks. Having quit alcohol I was celebrating receiving the money by letting myself get a ma.s.sage and a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b, then going to the movies to eat b.u.t.tered popcorn and watch the newest Clint Eastwood.

It was a few minutes past one o'clock. Sandy always started work at one. I knew that. I had paid my up-front ma.s.sage money and I was sitting in the lobby waiting.

Time pa.s.sed and I had to pee. The woman behind the part.i.tion with the plastic window was also Korean and spoke bad American. She let me know that Sandy would be along. 'Pretty soon. Sandy come soon. You wait. Pretty soon.'

Some more time went by with me still sitting in the lobby and no Sandy. I returned to the plastic window and asked to be let inside to use the john. The lady smiled and nodded, but misunderstood what I was asking, so I went back and sat down.

Then a guy came in. An older guy in a dark suit and tie. Asian. But he didn't sit down.

When the part.i.tion lady saw the guy in the suit she got up, left her stool, and disappeared back inside.

A minute later Sandy opened the door and came out into the lobby, which was unusual because I'd never seen any of the girls came out front. Like always, she smiled and looked s.e.xy and beautiful. Like always, she was in her black silk robe with the black panties underneath. But my favorite thing with Sandy, the real turn-on, was her red red lipstick.

While the other guy stood there, she came over and sat down next to me on the couch, grabbed my hand, kissed me, and pressed the hard little nipple of her t.i.t into my upper arm.

She was whispering. She wanted me to know how very happy she was to see me again. She giggled about missing me and my funny jokes.

Then she kissed me again, harder this time, deeper, sliding her tongue under my tongue. After the kiss she looked up at me - she had big eyes. Sandy wanted to know if I would mind coming back later that day, or maybe even later that night. She was sorry, she said, the man in the suit was a very big tipper. j.a.panese. He didn't like waiting. If she didn't take him right away ahead of me he would leave and she would lose a very big and impressive tip. Then she kissed me again and handed me back my ma.s.sage fee - a twenty and a ten; 'You come back later. Okay, baby?'

I looked up at the guy, standing there with his arms crossed staring at the ceiling, impatient, like some spoiled jerkoff waiting in front of the Plaza Hotel for his limo.

My mind started talking. First it suggested that I act nice and just get up and leave. Be a good guy. Walk out. No problem. Sandy would be grateful and when I came back next time she would demonstrate her thanks by doing some special s.e.xual favor for me. But that message was overridden by a second quick message. The new message said: 'f.u.c.k these c.o.c.ksuckers! f.u.c.k them for embarra.s.sing you and treating you like a second-cla.s.s piece-of-s.h.i.+t trick.' Added to this message was the information that within a few minutes after I'd gone the other man - the rich j.a.panese guy - would be licking and kissing Sandy, fingering her p.u.s.s.y; maybe even feeling her tongue on his b.u.t.thole. I began to experience a wrenching in my stomach accompanied by the bite of something sour in my throat.

I looked over at Sandy. Then at the face of the part.i.tion lady and then over at the big tipper. It didn't matter any more. None of it. f.u.c.k it!

I stood up and unzipped my pants and pulled out my d.i.c.k. Sandy stood up too. They looked surprised but no one did anything because they didn't know what to do.

First I urinated on the couch where I'd been sitting, then I twisted my stream to the floor by Sandy's feet. She stepped back. Then I p.i.s.sed on the coffee table and the magazines.

When I was done I zipped up and walked out, slamming the door behind me.