During my brief stint as a seminarian, I wrote a suicide poem for English class. Someone showed my mom. Or maybe I showed her myself. It was no big deal. Writing was all about expressing feelings, I figured. That was what you did when you wrote. You were honest, but you were allowed certain liberties. You could exaggerate, and it was understood you were exaggerating. My suicide poem rhymed. It was in code. Heavy symbolism. All that crap I thought made poetry. I understood that you read and wrote to test out ideas you weren’t sure about acting on. I never thought for a second that someone might worry about what I wrote.
Not long after she read the poem, my mom drove me to see the shrink in Oakbrook, a rich suburb of Chicago near middle class Downers Grove.
He had a cool office. I’d just seen “Ordinary People” which I’d decided was The Masterpiece of All Time. I wanted to be the character in the film. Maybe it was my crush on Timothy Hutton, or maybe I was seized by the drama. Anyway, I was all ready to pour out my soul to some sexy hunk of doctor who was going to let me cry on his shoulder, telling me it was okay to be depressed sometimes. I would run to his office in the rain, tears streaming down my face, having barely stopped myself from putting the razor blade to my wrist…
Of course, how I was going to run the five miles to Oakbrook in the rain was another problem, but none of that would matter once I met my handsome savior… Well, damn it if he wasn’t an ugly old bald thing, his three remaining hairs plastered over a waxy dome. He was probably pure Freudian, though what did I know about psychobabble back then? All I could think about, even at that early age, was, “How can someone who tries covering up chronic baldness with three strands of hair and Brylcream be dealing other people’s problems?”
Nevertheless, I figured I’d get my mother’s money’s worth out of that session. I knew I was starting to think about guys’ bodies and that I’d already begun my independent library research into the subject of homosexuality. I wanted to stick my big toe into these waters and see at what temperature they would eventually boil me.
He started with my poem. I had two choices:
1.) Lie.
2.) Tell him how often I’d thought about killing myself. About how the only real relief from this miserable planet would be to do the same thing the writers and heroes of so many of my favorite works of art had done.
I figured a declaration like that would only create more immediate problems, making my dreary existence even less tolerable while eliminating the choice of suicide if I should ever really need to fall back on it. For the moment, life was shitty, true, but I could more or less cope (on my own, thank you). Anyway, this guy had no pill to make things better or he’d have cut off those wispy spider legs he had glued to his head instead of shrouding himself with them like a corn-fed, Midwestern vampire.
I translated all of that into: “Yeah, I thought about suicide, but I think everyone thinks of it sometimes. I wrote the poem to get rid of those feelings. When I write something it’s like it’s not a problem anymore.”
Which sounded probable enough once it came out of my mouth, though I thought about how I’d see through those sentences if it were me who was seated behind the desk. Even without a PhD, I couldn’t possibly be so stupid to believe me. I mean, there I was, internally taking inventory of every sleeping pill, razor blade, rope, and gun at my immediate disposal, even as I dished out what any fool could see was a stream of bullshit. How could he not have gotten that?
He made me want to kill myself more than ever. That he never said the slightest word about the style or quality of my poem (even to criticize it), and that he never even hinted at a second level of meaning under its surface was enough to infuriate me. It was exactly that sort of superficial stupidity, which made life so hideous. I rattled off some more touchy-feely stuff about feeling a bit lost sometimes though I tried hard nonetheless to get by because that’s what life was all about… He sucked it all right up in about ten minutes and decided (you could tell from the distance in his eyes) that I was all normal, healthy, together—Hell, even mature.
I tried dropping in a little reference to sex to see if I could get anywhere. I wasn’t sure where I was going exactly, but I wanted information. I was hungry, not just for sex, but for knowledge about the process that was taking place in my hormones, in my body, in my mind. “The one thing I have been a little confused about lately is my feelings. You know… about… sex… I heard it’s pretty normal to think about… well, other guys and stuff… at my age, I mean… like a stage I’m going through or something, but I was wondering if…”
“Oh, sure. You mean masturbation and that kind of thing?”
“Well, yes, I mean…”
“You’ve started to, uh, masturbate then?”
“Um. Well, yes.”
“Yes, well that’s totally normal at your age.”
“But I was wondering if thinking about… well, uh, other boys is okay…”
“Oh, sure. This is a very early period, and your body is going through a lot of changes right now, which creates a lot of mental activity. It’s quite common for boys to masturbate together at this age, but eventually you will develop into a full man…”
Oh really? Which boys were masturbating together and how did I get myself invited? This “doctor” was obviously less informed about this subject than I was, so I nodded my head vigorously and got the fuck out of there. He hadn’t even asked me if I’d fucked another guy (which I hadn’t done, unfortunately, though I might have) or if I’d been raped (which I hadn’t been, fortunately, but might have) or what I thought about when I masturbated (like getting lost in the big furry arms of some upperclassman at the seminary, for example). I think he simply didn’t want to talk about sex because he was probably either turned on or repulsed by the subject and didn’t want to get involved with sticky minors’ business.
My mom asked me over an ice cream in the nearby shopping mall how it had gone. “Just fine. It’s like I told you. No big deal mom. I just wrote the poem to get something off my chest.”
I think I saw the shrink once more. I’m not sure how long the sessions lasted. Half hour, tops. How did we fill even that much time together? What exactly did he tell my mother?