Chapter Eleven - Tyler
“Thanks again for the help.” “Thanks AGAIN for the help.” Was she thanking me for the sex? Handling the guys chasing her? Both? Does it matter? She dismissed me. I can’t blame her. I do that shit to women all the time. I wonder if it’s because she knows that I’m gonna burn her Heaven down. She may sense that I’m bottled lightning. Of course she does. She’s an angel. They’re omnipotent. I think. Are they? They gotta be. They’ve got that great vantage point from up there in the clouds. I wonder if—
“Has the Klonopin helped at all?”
Oh. Right. That’s Dr. Eldridge talking. It’s… some day of the week. I’m just not certain which. Or what happened since the other night. Which is something I’m getting used to. I only know I haven’t stopped thinking about the alley and Scarlett. But other than that? Shit. I mean, I literally couldn’t say how I got here today.
But I am. Here. I’m sitting in front of the doc in her gorgeous office that somehow manages to always feel sunny. I’ve been to some other places—y’know, the ones where some dipshit shrink gets together with a bunch of other dipshit shrinks and they all buddy up to share a space, everyone with their own little room? Blech. Dr. Eldridge don’t play that shit. She bought a HOUSE. An entire house just to see patients like me. The fucked-up and rich kind. (I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that I’m rich. But I am. So fuck it. I’ll see a fancy shrink in a fancy shrink house.)
I do know that I’ve blown off my last couple appointments with her, but decided to keep this one because… I’m not sure. A bunch of reasons, I suppose. Because I can’t stop thinking about Scarlett (even though I’m not gonna talk about Scarlett and what happened in the alley with the gun and the fight and the fucking). Because Halloween is this weekend, and Scotty died on Halloween (even though I’m not gonna talk about Scotty and how even though Evan says it isn’t, it still feels like it’s my fault). Because I’m really, really fucking lonely and feel like I’ll always be that way (even though I’m definitely not gonna talk about that).
But I guess mostly I’m here now because Dr. Eldridge is nice and I feel like I owe it to her to show up every now and again so she’ll feel like she’s helping me. Kinda the same way I wanted to give the doctors in the hospital what I felt like they needed when they showed me my scars. I don’t know what it is with me and wanting doctors to feel OK about themselves. Maybe it’s because med school is expensive and they should all think the money they spent was worth something. Who knows?
But if I’m being honest with myself (and fuck it, why not be?) there’s another reason I decided to come today. It’s because Dr. Eldridge is what I imagine my mom would be like if she had lived. Well… lived longer. She did live for a while. Long enough to have me, after all. And on that level, I guess I’m kinda glad my mom isn’t alive and I’m talking with Dr. Eldridge instead. Shit. That’s not right. That isn’t what I mean to say. Fuck. I’m not glad my mom is dead. That’s a fucking stupid thing to say. But I didn’t. Say it. I’m just kind of thinking all this. So why am I apologizing? And to who? The universe? I dunno.
Point is simply that I’m grateful my mom doesn’t have to see the fucking basket case her son has become. But then I suppose there’s a real possibility I wouldn’t be the way I am now and things wouldn’t be like they are if she hadn’t died when I was a kid. Hard to say. Nature/nurture and all that. Maybe I’d be this fucked-up weirdo no matter what. She used to call me her “favorite son.” I was, of course, her only son, so we both knew she was making a joke. And I appreciated that. I appreciated that even as like a five-year-old, my mom didn’t treat me all precious and shit. She just treated me like a regular person who just happened to be shorter than she was.
I know I got my sense of humor from my mom. She was also the smartest person I ever met. And even though I was thirteen when she died, thirteen years with somebody is enough to get to know whether or not they’re smart. And cool. And irreplaceable.
God knows what the fuck she saw in my dad. I think it’s possible that maybe he wasn’t the way he is with everybody else when it was just the two of them. I think maybe she was the magic panacea that temporarily remedied his chronic asshole-i-ficatiousness. (Not a clinical term, but the right one.) And when she died, there was no counterweight anymore to keep him from turning into what he turned into.
Anyway.
What I’m trying to say is… I’m pretty sure I kept this appointment with Dr. Eldridge because I could really use a mom right now.
“Tyler?” Dr. Eldridge interrupts my mental ramble. Again.
“Sorry. What?” I’m sitting in my shrink’s office thinking a bunch of stuff that I’m paying her to talk about, but then not actually talking about aloud. Maybe I should talk with someone about that.
“The Klonopin. Has it helped your anxiety at all?”
“I think so? I’m not sure. I took some with a bunch of booze last week and may have punched a hole in my wall. But on the flipside, if I did, I don’t remember it so I don’t feel anxious about having done it. So that’s good, I suppose.”
She does this half-smile, half-frown thing that is accompanied by a sigh. I get it. I exhaust me too.
“Have you been getting out more? Like we talked about? Seeing people at all?”
“I dunno. Kind of,” I say. “I’m sort of seeing a girl, I think.” What the fuck? I just told myself like two seconds ago that I wasn’t gonna talk about Scarlett. Jesus.
“How’d you two meet?” she asks sweetly. Hell. I gotta lie. Right?
“Strip club. She’s a stripper. At Pete’s. That’s where she strips. Pete’s strip club. You know it? It’s just off the Strip.” OK, that was an absurd sentence, but it seems I have no control over my mouth, so to hell with it. Let’s see where this goes…
She smiles and laughs a little. “No, I don’t know it. So you met her there? At the strip club? Where she strips?” She smiles wider. (Goddamn, she reminds me of my mom.)
“Yeah,” I say, unable to keep from smiling myself.
“OK. Well, that’s terrific,” she says.
And that’s it. That’s all she says. No prying. No cajoling. No judgment. She just lets it sit there. I’ve been made to see a few therapists over the years and Dr. Eldridge is, no question, the fucking tits at this job.
“So what else?” she asks. Which is genius. Because now she knows I know she’s not gonna try to manipulate me and shit, which means that she’s created a safe space for me to say more, and figures that I’m ready to open up. Sometimes I’m too smart for my own good, I’m afraid. Because since I know that’s what she’s doing, there’s no fucking way I’m gonna fall for it.
“The anniversary of my best friend Scotty’s death is this weekend.”
Oh, come on, Tyler!
“OK. You wanna talk about that at all?” Her brow is furrowed almost imperceptibly.
“Shit. I dunno.” No. I do know. Hell with it. Dam’s open. So I say, “I guess. Sure. Ok.”
She nods and waits politely while I decide how to begin.
“Fuck. I don’t… Me and Evan—you know Evan.” She nods. “Me and Evan and Scotty were best friends since like kindergarten. And you know how kids will become close and then, y’know, like get fickle or whatever and stop being friends?” She nods again. “We didn’t. We just stayed best friends. All through elementary school, middle school, high school. We were brothers. None of us had brothers, and we wanted them, I guess, so we became them for each other.”
I pause to consider what parts of the story are important. We only have fifty minutes together and some of that time is gone. So I decide just to cut to the chase.
“But so, after high school, Evan joined the fire department because that’s what he had always wanted to do since we were kids. And by the way, Evan had like a 4.0 GPA. Could’ve gone to Stanford or an Ivy or something, but the guy just really, really wanted to be a firefighter.”
(That part isn’t actually important to the story, but it is important to distinguish Evan’s trajectory from my own. I barely finished high school and it would be easy to think that Evan’s a fucking wash-out like me and had limited options. But he isn’t and he didn’t. He’s just an honestly noble motherfucker. Or father-fucker, as is a more accurate designation. No disrespect intended. That’d be one lucky father. Anyway.)
“But I needed to get the hell away from here, so I joined the Navy, right?” I pause to make sure the doc is still with me.
“Right. Yes.” She is.
“Yeah, right, so, Scotty. See, Scotty always, well, he always kinda looked up to me and Evan, I guess. I dunno. I mean we were the same age, but he was always a little smaller and a little more… boyish… and just like super-eager to, whatever, to prove himself, y’know?”
She nods again. And I suddenly realize that I haven’t talked about Scotty in kind of a long time. It feels good and terrible all at once.
“And like I said, we were best friends, and I think he saw Evan becoming a fireman and me becoming a bomb tech and whatever, and… look. Scotty never really wanted to do that kind of thing. Like, he was fascinated by it—fire and explosives and stuff, I mean—but I think he really kind of wanted to figure out WHY things burned. Or WHY things blew up. Or WHY this chemical interacted with that chemical or whatever. Like the dude shoulda been a scientist or physicist or something, but…” Holy shit. I realize that I haven’t, in fact, talked about this next part to anyone. Ever.
“Yes? But what?” She has this warmth in her eyes that just fucking sucks me in.
“But… I gave him shit about it. Like all the time. I just like constantly gave him a hard time about the fact that he was gonna spend his life in a lab or a classroom or wherever instead of out there DOING shit. Like I was going to. Like Evan was going to. And I told him shit like…”
I take a long breath, thinking about what an unconscionable cocksucker I can be. Dr. Eldridge waits patiently.
“Just shit like, not everyone can be a hero. Some people have to carry the hero’s jock. Blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Just dumbass fraternity talk and shit like that.”
“OK,” she says. Still no judgment. Which is making this harder. Because I don’t even have the choice to be defensive.
“And Evan used to tell me to ease up on him. But I thought that I was just doing what brothers do to each other. Giving each other a hard time.”
“I’m sure you were,” she says.
“Yeah, but… Fuck. But I wasn’t. Or, shit, I was. I mean that’s what I was trying to do. Trying to be. But like, I didn’t know how. If that makes sense. So basically I think I was just channeling my fucking dad. Just saying the kind of mean-spirited, putting-somebody-else-down bullshit that he does. Y’know. Being a fucking prick.”
Dr. Eldridge nods her head, takes a calming breath and then asks, “So how did Scotty die?”
“Fuck. Um, yeah, right. So… so I’m in the middle of my second deployment, or… I think it may have been my second… My third? Shit. I dunno anymore. Doesn’t matter. I was gone. And I get an email from Scotty that he’s moving to Colorado for firefighter training. ‘What? Firefighter training? Colorado? What the fuck? And why Colorado?’ I ask him. He tells me… Do you know what hotshots are?”
“Hotshots? Like…?”
“They’re firefighters,” I interrupt. “Specially trained firefighters who work in what’s called ‘wildfire suppression tactics.’ In other words, when there’s a fire raging out of control because some fucknut forgot to put out their campfire or dropped a cigarette in the forest, these dudes are the crews trained to put that shit out.”
“And so Scotty was going to Colorado to become a hotshot?”
“You got it.”
I think she expects me to say more. But I don’t. I’m starting to feel like maybe I’m all talked out.
But then I get a second wind.
“So yeah. So he’s moving to fucking Colorado to become a fucking hotshot. Oh, and by the way, don’t think the fact that they’re called ‘hotshots’ is lost on me. Only thing that would be more on the nose is if they were called Big-Dick Badasses Who’ll Show Fucking Tyler Morgan Who’s The Man. I think they actually tried that for a while but it didn’t fit on the back of the jackets.” I pause for a beat to give the good doctor a moment to take in just how goddamn clever I am. She grins, tightly. It makes her eyes squint.
“So anyway. So, you know. You know me. I can’t just let anything be without being a smartass or making some fucking joke, because then I might risk actually having a genuine emotion and that doesn’t sound fun. So know what I did? No, seriously. Know what I did? Guess.”
She continues to just eyeball me with compassion and lack of judgment and it’s tearing me completely in half.
“No? OK. I’ll tell you. I gave him shit about it. I gave him shit about were they only gonna let him put out fires in flower gardens and would the helmet fit his tiny head and shit. And his head wasn’t even that tiny! He had a totally normal-sized head! It was a stupid joke! Fuck!”
I’m starting to get a little emotional now. I’m worried it’s going to freak her out.
“And what happened?” she asks calmly.
“Whaddayou mean?” I say. “He told me to go fuck myself.”
“Sure,” she says, “but I mean what happened that caused him to die? You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.”
“No, no. I do. I mean I DON’T, but…” I take a deep breath. Sigh it out. “So he’s up in Colo-fucking-rado, and it’s Halloween, and… and look, I don’t know all the details. Obviously, I wasn’t there. But as I understand it some goddamn kids—they think—are out in the woods getting high and shit and they start a fire somehow, and it gets out of control real fucking fast because it was like a weirdly dry October or whatever and Scotty’s crew is the first deployed to try to contain it, and…”
It’s very clear I don’t need to say more. But I’ve come this far.
“And one of the other hotshots was standing in the way of some falling timber or something and Scotty pushed him out of the way and the tree fell on him instead and he fucking died and it was Halloween and Evan says it’s not my fault but it is pretty much my fault because he was trying to be a hero and I know for a fact that he was trying to be a fucking goddamn motherfucking hero because of all the fucking years that I gave him shit so fuck me and fuck Halloween and fuck God and fuck everybody and Scotty’s dead the end.”
Silence. Can. Have. Weight.
And the silence in the small room after my big outburst is intensely heavy.
“I swear too much, don’t I?” I ask after a few thick moments pass.
“As compared to who?” she responds. Bless her heart. Then she commences again. “Do you mind if I say a couple of things or do you have more?”
I shake my head no. I don’t want to say more. If possible, I’d like to un-say everything I just said.
“So you don’t need me to tell you this, but Evan is right. Your friend’s death is not your fault. That’s the first thing.” She bends her head down to seek my eyes because my gaze is now pointed directly at the floor.
“Also,” she continues, “I know you’ve been diagnosed with PTSD. You got that from a military psychiatrist, yes?”
I nod. Slightly.
“Ok,” she says, “I’m gonna go ahead and say that I do agree with that. But I’m gonna add something… I think you’ve probably been living with it since long before you were in the military.”
Well, that gets my attention. I look up.
She finds my eyes. “I think you’ve been battling post-traumatic stress since you were a child. Because I think you’ve been dealing with trauma since you were a child.”
I bite my bottom lip a little. Isn’t fifty minutes up yet?
“And…” Nope. Still some time to go. “And I think you might look for reasons or situations that help keep you in a state of trauma. Not because you want to, but because it’s familiar. Because you need to have something to fight against.”
I feel like punching something right now, that’s for sure. I feel like walking out of here, finding the first drunk group of frat boys I can find—all giving each other shit and joking with each other in careless and hurtful ways—and ripping off their arms and beating them to death with them. Not to teach them a lesson. Just because it’d feel good.
“But, hey, just my opinion. I have three degrees and have seen hundreds of patients, but let’s be honest… nobody really knows what’s going on inside anybody else. Maybe you’re fine and it’s the rest of the world that has PTSD. Could go either way.”
She smiles again. It doesn’t make me want to punch things any less, but it definitely makes me not want to punch her.
“Do you have any plans for Halloween?” she asks. “Are you seeing the girl?”
“Fuck. No. I wanted to ask her to a carnival at the firehouse that they do for charity, but I didn’t get a chance.”
“Why don’t you call her and ask her? I think it would be good to start replacing this particular association you have with one that’s more positive.”
“I can’t call her,” I say. “I don’t have her number. Or her name. Or like a real clear understanding that she’s an actual human being and not just a fantasy that I created.”
Now it’s the doctor’s turn to bite her lip. “Well,” she says. “Um. That feels like it’s worth talking about, but we’re out of time.”
“Oh,” I say. Just a few minutes ago I was praying for this to be over and now that it is, I’m kind of sad. Which is surprising. Or else it’s not at all. She reads my face. It’s not hard to see, I imagine.
“Or,” she starts, “I don’t actually have anyone right away. If you want to talk some more… we can.”
She tilts her head. It occurs to me all of a sudden that… I’m paying her. That ‘talk some more’ means pay her for more of her time. And that, on some level, this is what my relationship with Scarlett is about too. Paying for the illusion of something I want. Something I need. In Scarlett’s case, it was about paying her for the illusion of desire. No, not desire. Salvation. I was trying to buy salvation. Right here, with the doctor, it’s about paying for the illusion of what it would be like to have someone who gets me. Who understands me. Who cares at all. Paying for a surrogate mother.
And realizing this is just about the most sorrowful, most desperate thing I can imagine. So…
“Tyler?” she asks. “Would you like to talk some more?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I would.”