two years in Peru, wrote a book on faking land reform in underdeveloped countries, a book highly praised by everyone except the governments of Peru and the United States, and is now living in a cabin in Tennessee writing a book on the effects of advertising on underdeveloped minds. Whenever he's in New York he drops in to suggest I write a book about the underdeveloped psyches of psychiatrists.
My other successes were less obvious and immediate.
There was Linda Reichman, for example. She was a slender, young rich girl who had spent her last four years living in Greenwich Village doing all the things rich, emancipated girls think they're expected to do in Greenwich Village. In four weeks of treatment prior to my own emancipation, I had learned that this was her third analysis, that she loved to talk about herself, particularly her promiscuity, with indifference to and cruelty toward men, and their stupid ineffectual efforts to hurt her. Her monologues were occasionally flooded by literary, philosophical and Freudian allusions and as abruptly empty of them. Each session she usually managed to say something intended to shock my bourgeois respectability.
It was only three weeks after letting the dice dictate anarchy that I had a rather remarkable session with her. She'd come in even more keyed up than usual, swivel-hipped her rather swivelable hips across the room and flopped aggressively onto the couch. Much to my surprise she didn't say a thing for three minutes, for her an all- time record. Finally, with an edge to her voice, she said: `I get so sick and tired of this . . . shit. [Pause] I don't know why I come here. [Pause] You're about as much help as a chiropractor. Christ, what I'd give to meet a MAN some day. I meet nothing but … ball-less masturbators. [Pause] What a … stupid world it is. How do people get through their crummy lives? I've got money, brains, sex - I'm bored stiff. What keeps all those little clods without anything, what keeps all those little clods going? [Pause] I'd like to blast the whole thing … fucking city to pieces. [Long pause.]'
`I spent the weekend with Curt Rollins. For your info, he's just published a novel that the Partisan Review calls - and I quote - 'as stunningly poetic a piece of fiction as has appeared in years.' Unquote. [Pause] He's got talent. His prose is like lightning: cutting, darting, brilliant; he's a Joyce with the energy of Henry Miller. [Pause] He's working on a new novel about fifteen minutes in the life of a young boy who's just lost his father. Fifteen minutes - a whole novel. Curt's cute, too. Most girls throw themselves at him. [Pause] He needs money. [Pause] It's funny, he doesn't seem to like sex much. Wham bam, back to the old writing board. Wham-bam. [Pause] He liked the way I sucked him off though. But . . .
`I'd like to chop his hands off. Chop, chop. Then he could dictate his novel to me. [Pause] Chop his hands off: I suppose that means I want to castrate him. Could be. I don't think it would bother him much. I think he'd consider it gave him more time for his precious writing, his all-important fifteen minutes in the life of a little prick. [Pause] 'Stunning novel' - Jesus, it had the grace of late Herman Melville and the power of a dying Emily Dickinson. You know what it was about? A sensitive young man who discovers that his mother is having an affair with the man that's teaching him to love poetry. Sensitive young man despairs. 'Oh Shelley, why has thou forsaken me?'
[Pause] He's another ball-less masturbator. [pause] `You sure are quiet today. Can't you even throw in a few uhhuhs or yesses? I'm paying you forty bucks an hour, remember? For that I should get at least two or three yesses a minute.'
`I don't feel like it today.'
`You don't feel like it today? Who cares? You think I feel like spilling out my garbage three days a week? Come on Dr. Rhinehart, you've gotta like it. The world is built on the principle that all humans must eat shit regardless of taste: Come on, speak up. Act like a psychiatrist. Let's hear that faithful echo.'
`Today I'd like to hear what you'd like to do if you could recreate the world to suite your own . . . highest dreams.'
`Cut the crap: I'd turn it into a great big testicle, what else?'
[Pause] [Longer pause] `I'd . . . I'd eliminate all the human beings first . . . except . . . eh … maybe for a few. I'd destroy everything man has ever made, EVERYTHING, and I'd put - all the animals would still be there - No. No, they wouldn't. I'd eliminate all of them too. There'd be grass though, and flowers. [Pause] `I can't picture the humans. [Pause] I can't even picture me. I must have got wiped out. Ha! Woo. My highest dream is of as empty world. Boy, that's something. The little lays at Remo's would love that. But where are they in this world of mine? They're gone too. An empty, empty, empty world.'
`Can you imagine a human being that you would like?'
`Look, Doctor, I detest humans. I know it. Swift detested them, Mark Twain detested them. I'm in good company. It takes clods to appreciate clods, herd to appreciate herd. Whatever I am, I've got enough on the ball to realize that the best of humans is either weak or a phony. You too, obviously. In fact, you psychiatrists are the biggest phonies of all.'
`Why do you say that?'
`Your phony code of ethics. You hide behind it. I've sat here for four weeks telling you about my stupid, cruel, promiscuous, senseless behavior and you sit back there nodding away like a puppet and agreeing with everything I say. I've twitched my butt at you, flashed a little thigh, and you pretend you don't know what I'm doing. You acknowledge nothing except what I put into words. All right; I'd like to feel your prick. [Pause] And now the good doctor will say with his quiet asinine voice, 'You say you'd like to feel my prick,' and I'll say 'Yes, it all goes back to when I was three years old and my father…' and you'll say 'You feel the desire to feel my prick goes back…' and we'll both go right on acting as if the words didn't count.'
Miss Reichman briefly paused and then raised herself on her elbows and without looking at me, spat, clearly and profusely, in a high arc, onto the rug in front of my desk.
`I don't blame you: I've been acting like as automaton. Or, more concretely, an ass.'
Miss Reichman sat up on the couch and turned from the waist to stare at me.
`What did you say?'
`You feel you don't know what I said?'
But as I said this I put on a mock psychiatrist face and tried to grin intimately.
`Holy shit, there's a human being in there after all. [Pause] Well. Say something else. I've never heard you say anything
before.'
'Well, Linda, I'd say it was time to end non-directive therapy. Time you heard some of my feelings about you. Right?'
'That's what I just said.'
`First, I think we'd better acknowledge that you're outstandingly conceited. Second, that sexually you may offer much
less than many women, since you are thin, with, to judge by superficial appearances only, a smallish bosom necessitating falsies [she sneered], and you probably bring the male racing to a climax before he's got his fly totally unzipped. Thirdly; that intellectually you are extremely limited in the depth and breath of your reading and understanding. In summation, that as human beings go you are mediocre in all respects except in the quantity of your fortune. The number of men you've slept with and who've proposed as well as propositioned, is a reflection of the openness of your legs and of your wallet, not of your personality.'
Her sneer had expanded until it had nowhere else to go on her face and so spread to her shoulders and back, which writhed theatrically away from me in disdain. By the time I finished, her face was flushed and she spoke with an exaggerated slowness and serenity.
`Oh poor poor Linda. Only big Lukie Rhinehart can save cesspool soul from hardening into concrete shit. [She abruptly changed pace] You conceited bastard. Who do you think you are sounding off about me? You don't know me at all. I haven't told you anything about myself except a few sensational superficialities. And you judge me by these.'
`Do you want to show me your breasts?'
`Fuck you.'
`Do you have some essays, or stories or poems, or paintings that you can show me?'
'You can't judge a person by measurements or by essays. When I make love to a man they don't forget it. They know
they've had a woman, and not some fluffed-up iceberg. And you'll hide behind your precious ethics and fuel superior because all you see is the surface.'
