Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,40
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 blubberfuck 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 cheesedick 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-shirts with the same hole in the sleeve or never changed the only one he had. He kept his hair long in cornrows and wore sunglasses to all the therapy sessions. His weirdest and most annoying characteristic was his continual rubbing and clutching at his penis. When he did talk it was to bitch 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 prick. Always going off at someone for something; jumping out of his chair, intentionally misinterpreting everything you said if you were white, talking shit 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 dick 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 button 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,