I’d managed to pick up an evil combination of pneumonia and strep throat from running around New York in the middle of winter - although my mother had convinced herself I had tuberculosis due to the fact that I was coughing up a lung - even though there are no Mexicans at our school, but I probably shouldn’t say that. My kid sister Jo-Jo told her it was Smoker’s Cough, which it wasn’t - although I do smoke. I gave it up for a while about a year ago - but then I got started again. I have no fucking willpower, me.
My sister didn’t mean to drop me in the shit when she said I was a smoker, she just wasn’t thinking. She’s only nine. You gotta love kids. They just come right out and say what’s on their mind. She didn’t mean to kick me in the balls.
Anyway, my parents sent me to California to recuperate, which is a long way to go just to get over a cold if you ask me. The Kane Center was a regular nuthouse - but of course they didn’t tell me that. Don’t even ask me how they knew about the place. What I do know, it cost a shit load of cash to put me there. Mental health doesn’t come cheap these days. Not that the old man is exactly poor. Our house has five bedrooms. And the master bedroom has a Jacuzzi in it.
As soon as I got to Kane, they made me fill out a ton forms about what shots I’d had and whether or not I was feeling suicidal right then - also if I’d ever tried to kill myself.
“Say, kid, tried ripping your veins out today? No? How about hanging? Ever suspended yourself from the bedroom light fixture?”
I told them I was fine but I had to roll up my sleeves and show them my wrists anyway. You can’t trust kids these days.
After the wrist-inspection, I got the official building tour - the one where they introduce you to every bean counter and pen pusher in their nauseating world, including the janitor, Old Man Clayton they called him. The only person who said “Hi” like he actually meant it. What he actually said was “Howdy” which would normally make me puke, but like I said, he seemed like he meant it so in the end I didn’t puke.
Finally, I met the person who was supposed to fix my head, my personal shrink, Dr. Wendham. She told me she’d meet with me again once I got unpacked and “settled in.”
Sweet.
The place was pretty fancy for a nut house and the window in my room overlooked the grounds. But not fancy enough for a flat screen TV. The TV was on the wall, on one of those swivel brackets. You have to have the TV on the wall in places like Kane. You can’t just put it on the armoire like you would at home. It’s an institutional thing. It took me around half an hour to find the remote because it was in a metal sleeve that was locked to the side of the bed. Like I was going to steal it.
The other thing I wasn’t thrilled about was that the curtains and bedspread were this nasty orange color. Sort of like vomit. No doubt designed to get you all warm and all “sunny” inside. Because the second you wander into a place like Kane, the bastards start trying to get inside your skull. They think you won’t notice that the curtains and bedspreads are orange. They think you’ll just start feeling “sunny” and never realize why. They think that because you’re crazy, you’re automatically a moron too.
It was a private room so at least I didn’t have to put up with some pig cutting his toenails on the bed next to me. And I had my own bathroom. Like I said, not cheap, but of course it wasn’t exactly what I had planned for myself. I was supposed to be snowboarding in Vermont with friends, not stuck in some quasi hotel where they staple the remote control to the bed.
After I unpacked my suitcase, I stuffed the orange bedspread into one of the drawers and fell asleep on the bed. Eventually a nurse knocked on the door.
“McCarton? Dr. Wendham is ready for you.”
The first session lasted about an hour. According to Wendham, apart from having pneumonia and strep throat, I also experiencing “nervous exhaustion” from school, with some “post-traumatic stress disorder” thrown in from my younger brother. He got hit by a car the year before last and never made it off the operating table.
Dr. Wendham said I’d be fine once I got rested and started counseling. Which of course is what everyone wanted to hear - especially my parents. That I was ok. They never wanted to believe there was anything seriously wrong with me. Not that I blame them. I didn’t want to believe it either. Even though I’ve secretly suspected since my grandmother’s funeral that I was one pancake short of a stack. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly amusing about it - but they dragged me out of the service all the same.
I found out later that Wendham also suspected that I might be suffering from ADHD. Give me a break. I just had ants in my pants that day and spent most of the session looking around the room and vibrating my bony leg like a stick insect on meth. Apparently, that made me a candidate for some sort of medication which was supposed to calm me down and help me stay “focused.” Luckily for me, Wendham went on medical leave herself a few days after I got there, and I never saw her again.
Some twat called Carl Sodowski replaced her. He was more of your classic shrink - white lab coat and little perverty half-moon glasses perched on his blackheaded nose. He’d mosey around all day just like they do in the movies, peering over his goggles, brow all crumpled up. Took himself very seriously, the old fart. He didn’t take much of a liking to me either. He gave me a bunch more paperwork to fill out and got all apoplectic on the fourth day when I refused to fill out any more “questionnaires.” He said they were personality inventories and as such, they contained statements, not questions.
“Questions require answers,” he explained. “Statements do not.”
Sodowski was a smart ass.
I was supposed to say whether I “agreed” or “disagreed” with each statement. Like I said before, any jerk can become a shrink, just so long as you can find out how people feel about the garbage in their lives.
“Now I want you to respond to these statements as honestly as you can,” he said, slapping down another stack of paper. “There are no right or wrong answers, so don’t think too long about any of them. Your first response is usually best.”
I stared at the fat wad like it was used ass paper.
“There’s fifty thousand questions here,” I protested. “I’ll be here till Christmas.”
“Four hundred and seventy-eight,” he replied. “Statements. And you may take until Christmas if you wish. Unless you have plans to be somewhere else?”
The whole crazy exercise was designed for raving lunatics. Half way down the first page was a question - a statement - which read, “I sometimes hear voices in my head”.
Agree / Disagree.
Now call me a cynical son-of-a-bitch, but I say you’d be pretty unwise to admit to something like that in a crazy house. Then again, you’d probably be two hookers short of a brothel if you were in a crazy house. Which I was. And if you were crazy enough to be in a crazy house and you did hear voices in your head, then maybe, just maybe, you’d be crazy enough to admit it too.
Not me though. I may be nuts, but I’m not an idiot. A couple of months ago, I’d have checked the “Agree” box just for kicks - although usually it just makes matters worse. I still get a kick out of doing juvenile stuff like that once in a while - don’t ask me why. I’m a horse’s ass.
There was more crackpot bait half way down the next page: “Sometimes I think people are following me.”
Agree / Disagree.
Page three, “I like to watch fires burn”; page seven: “I often wish I were born the opposite sex.”
I’ll tell you something for nothing. It’s hard to take that kind of s shit too seriously.
Half way through the second hour, it got less amusing. I have a low tolerance for bullshit. Sodowski stuck his fat head in the door just as I was about to abandon ship.
“Finished?” he enquired, with his perverty smile.
“Umm..”
“Don’t tell me you’ve had enough already?” He really was a very witty bastard.
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s very stimulating. I can actually feel the blood circulating in my brain.”
“Wonderful,” he replied. “I’ll leave you to it then.” He slid out again, leaving a slimy trail behind him.
I answered a couple more questions but I was so nauseated. I wanted to exfoliate my face with a cheese grater. The dumbest part of the whole warped exercise was that after you were about half way done, the questions just started repeating themselves, only in a slightly disguised way. Because in the twisted mind of a psychologist, if you ask the same question enough times, in enough different ways, you can eventually get anyone to admit to anything.
So I started randomly checking boxes. In the ten minutes that followed, I probably admitted to a catalog of psychoses I don’t even have. But I didn’t care.
In the end, the only wacko question I deliberately “Agreed” with was the one about fire:
“I like to watch fires burn.” But only because it’s true. I didn’t mean people’s houses of course. I just meant fires in general. And why not? If it’s good enough for cave men, it’s good enough for me.
“So,” says Sodowski, flicking through the doodle-spattered sheets, “McCarton likes to watch fires burn, eh?” He was examining the hole at the top of the paper where I stabbed it with my no.2 pencil.
“Sure,” I tell him.
”I see. Could you tell me about a time when you particularly enjoyed watching a fire burn?”
“Actually, I don’t get to watch fires burn very often these days because we don’t have a fireplace in our new house. I think the last good fire I saw was on CNN. I think it was a forest fire, out here in California.”
“I see. So that would be a good fire?”
“Not if you had a house in the middle of it I guess. What I meant by a good fire was that it was a big fire.”
“I see. So a large fire is better than a small fire?”
“I don’t know. Who cares? I like all kinds of fire. Fire is fire, right?”
“I don’t know. Is it?” Sodowski was the kind of bastard who could get on your nerves pretty quickly. I already regretted checking that “Agree” box. You take a guy like Sodowski and it doesn’t matter what you say, he’ll eventually find a way to make you admit you’re partial to the occasional deep fried baby.
“Look, all I’m saying is, if you were just watching a fire for fire’s sake, then I’d rather watch a big fire than small fire.”
“Ahh, so you like to watch fire for fire’s sake…” He’s looking over the top of his half-moon glasses at me. Very perverty.
“No. What I meant was, big forest fires are the only real fires you get to see these days.”
“I see,” said Sodowski. I decided right there that if he said “I see” one more time, I would break my chair over his fat, balding head.
I continued digging my grave while he scribbled furiously in the margins of his notebook.
“I mean the fires you see at the movies don’t really count, do they? They’re not real fires, after all. It’s just Hollywood. At least the ones on the evening news are real. But you still can’t feel them - if they’re just on the screen. You can’t feel a fire unless you’re right there, next to it. You’ve got to be right there if you want to experience it properly.”
I knew right away I shouldn’t have said that last part. Sodowski stopped scribbling and looked up at me, brow furrowed.
“Do you like to play with matches McCarton?”
It took me the rest of the afternoon to convince the sick bastard that I never have, and never would start a forest fire, a house fire, or any other sort of fire for my own viewing pleasure. I should have just skipped that whole section.
By the time Sodowski was through with his interrogation, he still knew squat about me. He did get one thing right in the end though. He said I had low self-esteem and he said I was depressed. He was right about the depressed part. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out. But only because I was stuck in his human zoo.
Chapter: 3
