Friday, October 06, 2000

An excerpt from the discarded first-draft of The Novel

I've stopped going to therapy.

I joke sometimes that the only reason I started seeing a shrink in the first place was so that I would finally have something in common with most of the people I meet at parties. But that's not true.

I started going to therapy because I honestly believed that I needed help sorting out my life. I honestly believe I still do, but I've stopped going to therapy.

Finding a suitable therapist was a chore in the first place. I've dated so many social workers and psychologists, and been friend to so many more, that managing to ferret out the last remaining mental health professional in the tri-state area who wasn't already intimately familiar with at least some aspect of my life was a major coup.

As a testament to their usefulness, I will cheerfully disclose that I found my prize in the Yellow Pages, "therapy" conveniently situated just a few pages south of "tanning." I had consulted the latter category first, having reached the conclusions that my pallid face needed color and that my addled mind needed professional psychiatric help almost simultaneously. The teeny-tiny part of me that is anal-retentive insisted on satisfying these needs alphabetically.

Besides, tanning is cheaper and requires somewhat less introspection.

I selected Dr. Linda Voller to be my guide back to Well-Adjusted Land on the basis of a time-tested criterion: she had the most tasteful and attractive advertisement in the directory. It was on this single qualification that I had chosen my last mechanic, barber and florist and I had been pleased with the results in all three instances. I was therefore not adequately prepared for Linda.

She greeted me at the door of her office wearing a pant suit that was impossibly pink, a shade of the color just this side of radioactive that left such an impression on my retinas that when I recovered sufficiently to examine my new doctor more completely, everything from her hair to her high heels (both of which were, I noticed, bright white) was bathed in a sort of rosy glow, an effect that was, at once, both comforting and disquieting.

Anyway, I've stopped going to therapy. The cessation of treatment has nothing (well, little) to do with Dr. Linda's dress sense. I've stopped going to therapy because Dr. Linda Voller has succeeded, if not in leading me to the Promised Land of Mental Well-Being then at least putting my feet on the correct path toward it and giving me a swift kick in the seat to send me on my way.

It took only two sessions.

Dr. Linda listened attentively to two fifty-minute monologues as I recited my litany of woes, took (as near as I could tell) only a page and half of notes, and then, at the end of our second meeting told me something so patently obvious that in retrospect, it was easy for me to miss.

All of my problems, on some level, have to do with either clothing or music.

Well, duh. I'm gay.