Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,7
I had to arrange them in order of clearest image to least clear image.
“You like this, don’t you?” Dr. Milton asked.
It’s okay.
“You like being creative.”
I guess.
“Do you want to write things, like your dad did?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
Dad wasn’t happy.
“How do you know that?”
I thought about it for a while but couldn’t come up with a good answer. I just knew. I think kids have a knack for detecting happiness, but they lose it as they get older. They have to. Otherwise they’d notice how unhappy everybody else is, and they’d never be able to be happy themselves.
I don’t know.
“Are you happy, Parker?”
That was a tough question too. I glanced up at the banana, which curved upward at both ends, like a big yellow smile. It made me want to cry. So I cried.
Dr. Milton didn’t give me a diagnosis that day. It would be a few more months before we’d start discussing my problems by their Christian names—complicated grief disorder, trauma-induced psychogenic aphonia, social anxiety. What he did give me was a project. He said that he thought that the reason I didn’t want to leave the house was because I didn’t want my life to go on without my dad there. He said I should start writing a journal, to keep track of all the things that happened to me during the day, as if I were writing letters to my dad. It seemed like a pretty stupid idea to me, but it worked. Within a couple of months, I stopped being afraid to leave the house. Another couple of months after that, and I was willing to go back to school. Of course, the journaling thing wasn’t supposed to be a permanent fix—more like a brief stop on the transcontinental train ride back to mental health. Only my train never quite got moving again.
Dr. Milton said the only way to fix my speech disorder would be to see a specialized therapist, so he set me up with Dr. Joondeph. Dr. Joondeph gave me this exercise to do, where I would try to hum my way into a word, because humming is supposed to relax the vocal cords. He told me I could get better, but I would have to apply myself. It could take months, maybe even years, to recover.
I’ve kept seeing Dr. Milton—once a week for almost six years now—but I refused to go back to Dr. Joondeph after that first session, and I only tried his exercise a handful of times.
Mom says that when I was a little kid, I liked to pick these red berries off a big bush in Golden Gate Park. Apparently, I could spend whole afternoons out there without talking to anyone, filling up a bucket with berries, carrying it over to the ivy to dump it out, and then starting all over again. She says my dad found the whole thing hilarious. “Our son’s going to grow up to be a migrant worker!” he would say.
This was long before the accident, long before “psychogenic aphonia” became a part of my vocabulary, but I still preferred activities that didn’t require a lot of conversation. They say that God gave us two ears and one mouth because listening is twice as important as talking. That makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, God also gave us two nostrils, one butthole, thirty-two teeth, and ten toes. So I’m not sure where that leaves us. All I know is that I’ve never really minded my disorder. Dr. Milton says I might even like it now, because it’s become such a big part of who I am. And it is pretty great not to be expected to answer every idiotic question a teacher asks me, or laugh at every idiotic joke a classmate makes, or sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at sporting events. Besides, it’s not like I’m the only one with problems. Sometimes it seems like half the kids at school have some kind of ADD or ADHD or Asperger’s or whatever. I think most of them are just a little stupid. I’m not stupid; I’m just dumb.
(That’s a joke.)
COMPUTER GAMES AND INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY
“YOU CAN’T SPEAK?” THE SILVER-HAIRED girl asked.
I shook my head.
“So you just write in this, I suppose.” She flipped my journal open to the first page: Journal #105. Return to Parker Santé, [email protected]. Do not read. And yes, I realize that probably only makes you want to read it more, but don’t. Seriously.
“Does this mean you’ve filled out a