sniffed in a Houston TGI Friday’s. My heart beat lumpily for hours. I cried. And just last month a pellet of red hash shared with a deadheading flight attendant in Portland. We partook while sitting up to our bare chests in a volcanic Homestead Suites hot tub, and when the stuff hit the chlorine fumes from the water whooshed up my nostrils and filled my vision with glowworms that fattened and brightened and wriggled when I blinked. I fled to the locker room for a cold compress, and when I tottered back out to the tub how many minutes later I couldn’t tell, my date and a bare-assed, crew-cut college kid were pressing their privates against the bubbling jets and toasting each other with pink wine.
I go to wash my face and on the sink board is a muslin bag of potpourri and a zipped-up leather toilet kit. I dare not look, but I do, and I find: pills. Ten or twelve brown bottles, most of them with that telltale orange warning sticker familiar from my high school days as a burglar of medicine cabinets. The sticker meant narcotics, pills worth stealing, so what do we have here? Xanax. Darvocet. Vicodin. Wellbutrin. All from different doctors in different cities. At one time or another I’ve taken all of them, but separately. Ambien. Dexedrine. Lorazepam. Names that are all connotation and assonance, Z’s and X’s for ups and M’s for downs. Is that where the poets have gone? To Merck and Pfizer?
The bellhop interrupts my inventory. He puts the bags in the closet, then produces one of those multi-function pocket tools that will rebuild our civilization if the bomb drops.
“My supervisor needs this back,” he says. “I’ll wait here while you use it, if that’s okay.”
“Did you help the woman who’s staying in this room?”
“Sure.”
“How was she? Her demeanor. Her vibe.”
The bellhop’s face cools and stiffens. He doesn’t rat. She made illicit requests of him, I know it.
“She was fine,” he says.
“Didn’t ask for special services?”
Standoff. Two male primates, taking stock. I take out my wallet, engorged with business cards I never look at and should probably paste in an album eventually.
“I don’t want to spoil anything,” he says. “Any surprises.”
“I don’t like surprises. I get enough of them just walking around.”
He takes my twenty and vanishes it, a petty-cash Houdini. “It’s not your birthday, is it?”
“I’ve lost track.”
“Well, lots more candles, for starters, and lots more flowers. And other sentimental stuff. Just cute stuff. The names of some stores. I think she’s planning a party. Nothing bad, though. And a shoulder rub.”
“You do that for your guests? Not a topless shoulder rub, I hope.”
He smirks.
“She’s not my wife. It’s fine to tell me.”
“I need that tool back. It’s like my boss’s right hand.”
I shut myself in the bathroom with the locked case, lay it on the sink, and start to pry, first at the lock and then, for better leverage, along the hinges. Something splinters, pops. I put the case on the floor and wedge a boot toe into the crack and grip the lid, both hands. I yank. It gives.
I leave the case lying open, its contents exposed, dismiss the bellhop, shut my eyes to think, then raid the mini-bar for three wee bottles of Johnny Walker Black that I empty into a cling-film-covered glass back at the sink. Gingerly, with my toe again, I prod the thing out of the case onto the floor and flip it over, fuzzy tummy up. It’s Mr. Hugs.
I threw the bear away years ago. He’s back. His forehead is punctured and over one soft ear white cotton puffs out where the bullet must have exited. Assassinated.
In CTC work they’re known as grieving aids, but the slang term is better: “squashables.” As in “The poor lady was hysterical, ripping out drawers from her filing cabinet, screaming, so I gave her a squashable and she calmed down.” They aren’t always teddy bears, or even soft. Brock Stoddard at Intersource who out-counsels high-finance types uses a baseball-size chunk of chalky rock that he challenges emotional ex-brokers to squeeze and squeeze and crumble into dust. Becky Gursak at K. K. Carrera offers modeling clay. Some counselors don’t use squashables at all, but those that do tend to favor stuffed animals—a plump brown puppy that sits there on the sofa, just part of the office scenery until one morning when some menopausal former manager who gave up on kids so she could pledge her all to International Hexbolt’s holy war for the South American market share suddenly—and I’ve seen it happen myself, it’s like a slasher movie—begins to spout red gore from her left nostril before the brave smile has even left her face. Stress is the killer, they say, and I believe it. I’ve seen the eruptions. I’ve Kleenexed up the fluids. It progresses nine tenths of the way in stealth and silence, until the tenth tenth, when it wails. It roars.
I remember the day the bear entered my life and I remember the client: Deschamps Cosmetics, which was almost entirely female—aging female. I was off to the airport in a company Lincoln when Craig Gregory leaned through the window and said, “For this job, Ryan, you’ll want to take along a squashable. Meet Mr. Hugs and his darling button nose.”
I demurred—too gimmicky, I thought—but Craig Gregory pushed, and he was right to. The Deschamps ladies crushed the toy shapeless. They mangled it. Mr. Hugs became a fixture in my practice. He burst now and then, but I always stitched him up. The more use he showed, the more willingly they embraced him, and the less likely they were to hurl him back at me. Then I couldn’t look at him anymore. Two years of rough handling had given him a soul, an expressive face and figure all his own. “Sad” doesn’t capture it. Help me, Verbal Edge. Martyred. Forlorn. Unconsolable. Woebegone. Baby Jesus left out in the rain.
I’d rather not touch him now. I withdraw my boot. I pick up the shattered briefcase and look around for somewhere to dispose of it. I stuff it between the jukebox and the wall, then realize I should search it for a note, drag it back out, and find nothing. I examine the tag again. My writing? The block capitals could be anyone’s. Likely suspects? Practically nothing but.
The scotch isn’t cutting it. I eye the toilet bag. How would one medicate this particular fright? I line up the pill bottles and play mad scientist. Xanax and Vicodin for drifty pain relief countered by the peppy Wellbutrin? Too
