Wednesday, May 16, 2012

The Case of Erich H.



1.

I study him for months in the big building on the corner of Frigate and Espinoza Ave. where LA cedes to an endless stretch of beige bungalows and convenience stores. The distances in those parts are too great for foot travel, hence the hackles they throw up on the shoulders of the human psyche. Hence my patient Erich H.. I can see him now in my minds eye through the barbed wiring on the roof of the complex raising a homemade astrolabe to the blue evening sky.

As the things of my marriage vacate, including the man himself, my daily trip to Taft House remains. My job entrenches itself. I feel needed. It is a good feeling, and I am lucky to have it. My co workers express their need for me with beseeching, hungry eyes. As my thoughts coalesce into perspective, the things my patients say cut less. They are an assortment of drug addicts, psychotics and schizoid personalities down on their luck. You have to always be in the proper mental state not to care. You have to be free from clutter in your own life so that words can't get their hooks in you.

I see more and more my marriage in their own wild claims and assertions. I see the old self struggling to maintain its scaffold of control up until the very last gasp. And even after the point where functionality morphs into a padded room, they continue to act as if they understand how the world works.

Sick minds know everything.

2.

As things with Bradley work themselves toward a legal resolution, I receive a new patient, a typical advanced addict, paranoid, dug into his world view like a soldier in a trench. His name is Erich H.. What separates him from the start is the level of filth he has accrued. They needed to pry him out of his little back alley where he used and ate and shat and wrote on yellow note pads. After a while, I manage to piece together Erich H's life story.

"I just wanted to have a little piece of pleasure. A little something for me after all that shit had finally washed over. Is that too much to ask?" Erich H. asks as he picks his nose, his tobacco-stained fingers rooting through his nasal locks. "A little something for me?"

Mundane psychological suffering comes from the same common place. You learn this. There is real psychological terror, the kind that rips at someone like a grease fire, the pain of the amputee, the rape and molestation victim, the mutilated. But the other side of suffering is embalmed and ritualized self-propagating obsession stemming from everything and nothing. Such is the case of Erich H. as he explores his hallowed hall of self-built pain fortified by a wasting addiction. Although he doesn't see things that way. Erich H. says the world has wronged him, his family has abandoned him, his ex wives have discarded him for other men. Muddled attributions of guilt. Tales of grandeur, of how he was before being crushed by the indifference of strangers. Drugs are merely a side note in his own special story.

"I got up at 6 am everyday made the commute," he says. "All that, I was doing all that for them." He reaches under his shirt, picks some belly button lint and fondles it beneath his nose.

"What are you doing?"

"What? Oh."

The self, if left unchecked, can be a dictator and dictators and infants are all ego, self-oblivious and self-affirming. They are monads, like early, primitive conceptions of God. They revel in their own smells. They do not stomach down time, empty moments, self-appraisal. They require a cataclysm of sensation and cascades of drama. Every moment is an uncommon terror. Consequently, Erich H. views himself as highly original: he is a writer, a graduate. He has held a day job that paid well.

"What then went wrong?" I ask, trying to coax an admission out of him. Of course, he has already told me the answer, but I want to hear it from him. After several marriages, coming into a small amount of money, he embarked upon an epic narcotics binge which left him in penury. I want to hear an equivalent narrative of some sort, an admission. Sometimes, you don't get what you want.

"I gave everything. I loved them totally and lost everything."

"That's addiction," I tell him. "That's what it does to everyone, not just you. And they probably still love you."

His look of sorrow overtakes him. He is a man of looks. Sorrow, wrath, glee.

"You think?" he asks me, making me feel like he is in dialogue with me, like he isn't totally set against the process.

I learn the basics of Erich H's story through 3 hour-long consultations in early November. I read between the lines. Erich H. is kicking cold turkey. He weeps but he does not break. He rolls cigarettes with the tobacco I charitably keep at my desk for hard cases. I'm not supposed to do that. Therea are certain things you can't do in public buildings. Taft House is also a public building even as it seems like a private nightmare. Not my nightmare. I love its groaning foundation, its peeling walls and nonsensical layout. It's like an art project representing the unwell mind in the shape of a building.

3.

Bradley Sucomb's gorgeous, crisp shirts and the way he had of always smelling OK - his lack of flowing, untamed body hair - invited me into his company. From there I discovered that once a certain line was crossed, I was in love.

Bradley Sucomb was the first well-maintained man I met after 15 years of UCLA. Unlike the men I dated as a student, candidate, whatever, he did not speak the language of double entendre wherein one's every word suggests a desire to be elsewhere. His silence was not, as they say, fecund. It was just well-groomed silence smelling of designer aftershave, imbued with the sound the wind makes as you glide down the coastal highway. He worked at a bank. He regularly slept with two other women as he married me. He continued to see them because he was a common garden-variety self-justifying sociopath.

"I didn't know what to do," he told me as he paced our flat, picking up his possessions - a glass angel, a wicker basket. He picked them up and put them down again. "Can't we go away from here for a while?"

"Going away isn't an answer."

"Then what is? What can I do to fix this?"

I often see my ex husband Bradley Sucomb in my patients, in particular, in Erich H.. They both have an addict's tendency to take a lie deep into its end game before scattering the formation beyond accurate recall. They both drink a bluff to its dregs until the bluff seems like the bluff. Men like this are good at turning your words around and making you feel like you are insatiable and demanding. Haven't they done enough for you? Haven't they given their life's blood? Did not the inmates of Taft House, that fine flawed Panopticon erected during the presidency of Howard Taft, also function as providers, consolers, and husbands? Were they not always there in some form? Did you not abandon and betray them even as you made it appear that they abandoned and betrayed you? Weren't they thoroughly fucked by destiny?

"I gave them everything," Erich H. likes saying. "You wanted money? Here, take it! You wanted to go on a trip somewhere? Go! By all means! Everything I did, I did for them!"

Erich H. rolls cigarettes spicing his morning phlegm sack which he relieves in my waste basket. I think it took him many years to evolve that, like a toad climbing out of his ancestral sea. Like with Bradley Sucumb's cigars, the way he can identify their special smells. They are men of secret olfactory interest. Erich is an artist; Brad is into cash and sex; Erich begs; Brad buys; neither has a clue why it isn't working.

4.

Taft House is five stories. It used to be a little country asylum back in the 1920s when the neighborhood was still orchard land. The bottom floor is intake. The men live on the 3rd, the women on the 2nd where it is marginally cooler. The hard cases, the one's that involve blood, shouts, and random alarming nudity, go on the 4th; isolation is on the 5th floor. In the basement of our little tower there is a recreation area with a ping pong table, some weights, a rowing machine and a television set embedded inside a wall behind plate glass. There is a little garden in the back. The unit houses 50. It should be shut down, closed for good. My favorite part of it is the roof where there's this little seating area. It's like the crow's nest. You can even see the ocean from up there on days when it's so hot the idea of the sea doesn't make sense.

I once met Dr. Hamm up there for vodka-spiked lemonade. We made a plan of it: I would bring the lemonade and he would risk smuggling in a flask of vodka. We used our ordinary coffee mugs. When he gestured out toward the horizon, mentioning the pollution of the coastal waters, the permanent demise of reef life, I felt a deep sadness well up. I asked to change the subject. This flummoxed him. He turned away, his delicately bearded profile catching the city light and embossing upon the meager, hazy distance like a souvenir photograph. That is how I knew that he had some emotional demand that I didn't want to know anything about.

At lunchtime, I walk down the street to Diego's convenience store where I buy something microwavable. Diego keeps all the meals in the same ice chest. There's a great variety of pot pies and turkey dinners and dishes people ate during the 50s as they watched Leave It To Beaver. The ice around the walls is permafrost. And then I return, running my little circle jerk in the afternoon or on alternate days doing one-on-one counseling for men and women who will not admit defeat.

These are the rudiments of my life at Taft House. When Erich H. arrives I am 39 years old and in the middle of separating from my husband. I eat a frozen meal everyday from Diego's. I do not aspire to travel. I enjoy reading in cool, open spaces like museums, churches and City Hall. I like the idea of the 1930s and 40s. I like a man's hands. I like washing the dishes and watching birds make their nests in clogged gutters. I don't vote. I don't watch what I eat. I have stopped craving sex like they say you are supposed to crave it. Sometimes I take drives in the LA hills where, hunkered between golden, grassy mounds, I feel an indescribable sense of peace. I realize that I have been seeking this peace all my life. Sometimes I didn't know that I was seeking it, but I was, always.

5.

I met Bradley Sucomb at Jennifer's wedding. Jennifer married Ted who had this thing with his voice, with breath control and posture. He was often smiling, his mouth flung wide in delight, the saliva on the inside of his cheeks like the waters of a southern sea laughing up at the sun. He and his groomsmen wore different color silk cumberbunds that reminded me of the 1001 Nights. I imagined them on horseback riding out from the secret cave, out to rape and pillage. Ted enunciated his vows and as he did so, I felt as if the world congratulated him in inverse proportions to the way in which my patients perceived themselves punished.

The contrived nature of Ted's Alexander Technique and my own failed marriage made me briefly question if my patient Erich H. wasn't right. The World of Teds did not specifically seek to crush an Erich H.. Crushing Erichs is just what Teds do. But then I brushed aside my brain and saw that both Jennifer and Ted were weeping on the altar and there was an open bar. After that, everything happened quickly. I found myself swept up. In those days, whenever I drank I drank Stingrays, their rummy sweetness leaving me in need of sangria, beer, anything to wash away the tropical undertow, depositing me on firm ground waiting for a car somewhere or back at home again in the muffled, ringing silence.

As the day turned to evening, I found myself on the beach with Ted's groomsmen. Although, I was friends with Jennifer, I gravitated to Ted's old college buddies. They were silent like me. They undid their ties, unbuttoned their shirts, and in the remaining refracted haze marched down to the clammy sea entirely naked as if to prove a point, to remind themselves of who they really were beneath their clothes. My former me would have congratulated such audacity, but now in the gesture I saw them reveal their inner Erich H.. When they returned from their swim, cocks dangling, I felt like a spartan maiden cultivated by glossy nudity into the simplistic philosophy of live or die. It felt good. I did not like that it felt good because I knew I was repeating an old pattern. We passed around a bottle of Jack Daniels.

"It's not like you would die for each other, right?" I asked, inexplicably, drunkenly. "It's not like you would even put yourselves in that position."

"Maybe that's the secret," said James, his voice carrying the pretentious steel melody of a knife cutting lies as Ted spoke with the rounded fullness of an ancient Athenian orator establishing truth. "We don't allow each other to assume that posture."

"But you've never even experienced failure," I said, chortling in my booze. After all, were they not all Harvard business school graduates? White, male, handsome, the mold of man? What transitory, laughable form could such failure take or, rather, fake? They grew cold to me, or at least I thought they did. They read in my comment my own inevitable decline. I did not play ball. Although I was a woman, the one they selected out of a slew of women on the basis of my taciturn drunkenness, they circled their wagons. All their impulses seemed crystal clear. We lit a fire. Someone rolled a joint. The joint sealed the quiet, subtle sanctimony of the circle of those men.

6.

Erich H. cannot cultivate such postures. That is part of the problem. Once his inner dictator rediscovered early childhood's outrage, he could not process the accompanying series of events leading him to me today, his face raw from a new bic shave. He spits a wad of phlegm into my waste paper basket, tucks his finger into his nose, withdraws and glances at it as if unobserved. "People suck!" he raves. "They just suck! And once you've given them everything you have had they will throw you out like garbage."

"But what about the drugs? What about taking care of yourself?"

"A little powder?!" he says in askance. "It's only a little pleasure in a shit fuck world."

I dream about Erich H. I dream he walks on a conveyor belt designed to carry luggage. One side of the conveyance represents the baggage of his father and the other the baggage of his mother.

"There are other ways of getting pleasure out of life," I say.

"If there are, I haven't seen any of them," says Erich H. "Did you know that Freud hated women? That your entire profession is founded on German Jewish misogyny?"

In another century, maybe Erich H. would be a bohemian revolutionary. Or maybe a court charlatan. Rasputin.

"There are many branches of psychology. Much of Freud's theories are now taken with a grain of salt."

"He thought all men want to fuck their mothers and kill their fathers."

Erich H. often puts things in the starkest terms.

"It seems like the things in your life have made you so unhappy."

"Not things, people. People suuuuuuck," says Erich H. elongating the word suck to emphasize an irrational certainty that reminds me of a prayer.

"Is there anything you can remember outside of people and writing that has made you happy in life, that provided you with any peace?"

"I don't know. Good question," Erich H. smiles upon me and a rainbow stretches from one mountain peak to another. That's the way it is with addicts. They pound your zone with rage and remorse until they lob a soft smile, opening you up, making you feel as if you have achieved something. "Let me think. When I was in college, I took some Astronomy classes. I really liked them."

"Why didn't you stick with it?"

"I don't know. Maybe I should have."

"Would you like some Astronomy books to read?"

"Get me some Astronomy books!" says Erich H. re-voicing my question in the form of a demand.

Erich H. does not come from an abusive family. As far as I know, whatever marriages he had collapsed of their own accord. His suffering is common. His error is common. the pain that fed it precluded the safety of decorous silence enjoyed by some. He is unstrung. I write "diagnosis: unstrung" in my Blackberry as I shop for Astronomy textbooks at the UCLA bookstore. He cracks open the first one I give him and starts to cry.

"It's so fucked up."

"What is?"

"Life."

It is 11:30. I release him to recreate and walk down to Deigo's to the frozen food chest. I root through the roaring cold. I select something and bring it up. There is a pleasant ease, a generous grace to this simple act. Tomorrow, Saturday, I have a meeting with my soon-to-be ex husband Bradley. That night I dream of the treadmill. It is the baggage carousel at LAX. I do not want to depart, but I must. I don't know where I am going. I have my tickets.

7.

"Can't we talk it over?" asks Bradley Sucomb my ex, phrasing the question as if further negotiation is only absurdly reasonable.

"We've already discussed this Bradley. There's nothing to discuss. We're meeting here today to agree upon the final details of our divorce. Pure and simple."

We sit in the outdoor patio seating of a TGI Fridays. The sunlight is too harsh and illuminates the gross foods too cleanly so that there can be little doubt of our own piggish appetites. I want Diego's frozen food chest, the echoing cleanliness of City Hall.

"Haven't I been good to you?" he asks me, his strong jaw hovering above the steak fajitas, pronouncing above the death of cattle.

"Brad, we aren't here to discuss what you are or aren't, but to simply resolve on these details."

"That is so like you! Clinical to the last drop."

I pause. The reason why I chose to meet in a public location was to avoid a scene. I understand the parallels. There is no reason to engage, and yet I prove human.

"Are you still seeing them?"

"No! No! I am not still seeing them. One! I am seeing one of them but only because she needs the support."

I lean back in my chair.

"Can't you see I'm nothing without you?" he asks. "I'm a mess. I need you to come home to. I need you to make love to."

I see the depth of his psychosis unfurl like a jumbo American flag at a used car dealership.

"Brad, you need help."

"I know, can you help me?"

"I can't help you."

"Dammit Sarah! Why do you have to be that way," he coaxes. "Can't you see, everything I did I did for you? I, look, I gave you everything! Even now, this, this. This is from me to you. I give you me."

Bradley Sucomb is Ted Lambert is Erik H. ad infinitum. I look around me, at the little Erichs and Erikas digging into their smelly platters. The only thing left is observation and very dry commentary. I boil down into an eye observing Bradley Sucomb shedding his vexatious tear. I love you.

"I don't think you know what that means," I say.

Our transformation into half lives completes itself among potted azaleas. He reaches out his broad hand from across the table.

"God damn it!" his facial expression betrays its underpinning of wrath, a wrathful inner tyrant. So, there you are.

"I mean, please! Please come back to me! Take my hand! Can't you just take my hand?!"

8.

"I'm an astronomer now!" Erich H. enthuses. "You know what I do all day? I read about the stars and about planets and light spectra and nebulae, the cosmic wombs. How cool is that?"

We sit around my desk as we always do when I think back on us, Erich and I.

"Pretty cool," I say.

"Damn straight!"

Some may call him an inverted narcissist, but I like to think of him as a little boy.

"So, what are you going to do when you get out of here?"

"Get out? I don't want to get out! I want to stay here and read. It's a great reading place."

"Maybe you could study astronomy at the community college? Plenty of older people going back."

"Study? What do you think I'm doing here? I am studying. I read two or three of these books a week. You keep buying them and I keep reading them. That's what we've got going on around here. You buy the books and I read them. We're a team."

"But you know, Erich, my job is to help you with your problems so that you can rejoin society."

"Society? Who needs society? Listen, can't I have something? Can't I have this? All I want to do is to sit around, read about Astronomy and smoke cigarettes. What's so bad about that?"

"That may be the case, but we can't keep you hear indefinitely."

"Why can't you? I mean, things are going so good! I'm the model inmate! I help with the chores and in the kitchen. Why replace me? Why not get more of me to populate this fine Bellevue?"

"You know it can't be that way."

"Why not? Why can't it be?"

Reaching my hand into the ice chest, I am cleansed of his flame. He was but a little loved spark. Once years ago a mother loved his spark until it turned into a flame, and the boy became a proud man that took from life as he had been taught to take. And for whatever reason a part of his child self remained. The screaming part. The self is problematic. People are problematic. Not just some: all. I want someone with whom I can share the little delights of Diego's ice chest. I do not want to travel. I want to stay. I want to sit in silence.

"Maybe this is something you could pursue once you get out?"

"Don't you understand? I don't want to get out! I want to stay right here, OK?"

"Erich. Listen. You can stay here for the time being, but I'm not going to bring you any more books until we start having a conversation."

"Do we have to go through all of this again?"

"A conversation about your drug addiction."

"Oh, please, OK. What do you want me to say?"

"I don't want you to say anything."

"Do you want me to say I'm sorry? OK. I'm sorry. Write that down. I'm sorry."

"Your drug addiction took your life away from you. It took everything you had."

"My drug addiction," he mocked. "All the sainted platitudes of psychotherapy. Did you know that Freud hated women?"

"You've mentioned that before."

"He thought all men want to fuck their mothers and kill their fathers."

"Yeah, you've mentioned that."

"My addiction. It's just a little powder. Can't I have some pleasure? Can't I have something?"

"But look, here you are. You ended up here on your own."

"I know!" he shouted, his face assuming its expression of wrath. "What do you want me to say? I know! I fucked up, OK? Now, can we talk about something else? Can we please talk about something else?"

For as long as he was there, Erich H. did not crack. We released him, begging to stay. For a long time, he stood out on the street by his box of astronomy books pacing and cursing. He did not know what to do. I did not want to give him a ride to the shelter because I did not want him in my personal space like I did not want Bradley Sucomb in my personal space like I didn't want to know anything more about Dr. Hamm and his environmental worries. I felt that I had given everyone so much time and that I no longer owed anyone my company. I gave everything. All mundane pain is more or less the same tangled web of self-propagating illusion. The thing about giving is there is always more left to give; there are always different ways to give.

Finally, Erich H. migrated to the park up the street. Several weeks later, he waved to me up the little hill beneath the looming Cyprus trees. He smiled at me. I guess he had been sleeping up there, star gazing. I felt a crippling feeling of connection in that smile. I waved back. It was all I could do. I knew that he was in one of his generous moods in which he wanted to speak to me about astronomy. Perhaps my mistake was always using those moments to discuss his darker side. At which point Erich H. would always say, "Do we have to discuss this now?"

Do we have to discuss this? Many men and women ride that refrain through lives of disturbed monetary and social success. The ones who crack are both lucky and in danger. Seeing how things really work is not fun. It is illuminating. Not everyone is capable of processing the information. Not my ex husband and not Erich H..