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I’ve had more therapists than meaningful lovers.
Therapy was introduced early into my Jewish education. By age seventeen, I was a weekly patient of Dr. Bob Brooks. Multi-degreed, world-traveler, and an early adopter using Ecstasy as a means to treat depression, he told me that jumping out of an airplane was equal to, if not better than, Heroin. Knowing my penchant for drugs, his strategy was good. I stayed away from Heroin and added skydiving to my must do list.
After Dr. Brooks, there was a revolving door of therapists. Their faces and names blur, yet the locations of their offices remain strangely vivid. There were two in Sherman Oaks, both within walking distance (I know, nobody walks in LA) to the Sherman Oaks Galleria. One was in Westwood close to Stan’s Donuts. Another was on Olympic Blvd in Santa Monica, eleven blocks from the ocean. Once in college, there was an endless stream of students-in-training at the mental health clinic on the fourth floor of The Hub. All of these before age twenty.
Then there was Dorothy Ungerleider, educational therapist and hobbiest of daring to keep kids off drugs. Recommended that I get tested for a learning disability, Dorothy and I found one another. We were the perfect storm. I’d come to sessions too stoned to focus on testing. She’d get frustrated, yelling and eventually crying about my wasted potential. Wasted, yes. Potential, probably. Her crying sparked huge resistance on my part. I was simply too stubborn to get it. No argument there.
Working 16-hour days in the music industry post-college and drinking heavily at gigs in the remaining waking hours, led to a brief therapeutic hiatus. Truly there was no time to process.
A move to New York City threw me into the lap of Woody Allen styled neurosis and again swimming in a stream of nameless facelesses. More memorable than them was their therapy attire that seemed related to the number of degrees on the walls. MSW’s had fancy socks, and lots of argyles. Ph.d’s wore trousers and button down shirts. Occasionally a blazer for that extra emphasis on the years spent in school.
With a bit of a Goldilocks complex, I tested out therapists like porridges and beds, looking for the one which would be just right. I landed with a therapist, and MSW, with a fondness for Quaker style. She wasn’t a Quaker just partial to prairie dresses and apron-like sweaters, black and white the predominate palette.
I had recently broken up with my first girlfriend, my beauté sauvage, the one who brought me kicking and screaming out of the closet. We were both in therapy; trying to heal from the pain we caused one another, the pain we learned in our formative years, the pain that made us do horrible things to each other. Violence. Disregard. Meanness, even though we were madly in love. She was in Analysis. She shared this as I packed up the last of my belongings from her East Village apartment. Three times a week she lay on the couch revisiting the trauma of us triggered by the trauma of her childhood. Her doctor, some kind of Freudian Ph.D who probably wore a sweater vest. I sat in an armchair in front of the Quaker with her degrees not yet hung on the walls. I wanted to lie on the couch. Mona was lying on couch.
“Would it be okay I laid down?”
She looked at me quizzically. Her office had a couch. It was covered with academic books, legal pads, and her Quaker like smock.
“I think I’d get more out of our time together if I was lying down.”
Her pause was long, a beat or two more than comfortable. I had to imagine she’d had stranger requests. At the time everybody I knew was reading David Sedaris. It doesn’t get much stranger than that.
Moving her stuff from the couch to another underused piece of furniture she said, “Go right ahead.”
For the next several months I stared at the philodendron in a hanging basket as it edged its way towards the windowsill and lamented about my single-ness.
“How am I ever going to meet somebody? Seriously. I don’t think there are any women out there for me. Where are all the hot women? All I see are big ol’ dykes. I’m not into big ol’ dykes. Am I destined to a life alone? Do you know any attractive gay women? I’m not attracted to big ol’ dykes. Is there anywhere else in this city to meet women besides Henrietta Hudsons?!”
Before dating Mona I had been an old maid. At least in my mind I had. I met her at twenty-five. Before her nothing memorable penetrated me.
Battling my internalized homophobia, I shattered our relationship. I was devastated to lose her even though I couldn’t stand having her. More than anything I was desperate to not be alone. Alone meant unlovable. Alone was how I spent my college years, obsessing over my girl friends while they were tape-recording themselves having sex with their madly-in-love with them boyfriends. I was also madly in love with them and they never tape-recorded me. I could be anything in this world, but I could not be alone. Seriously. Anything but alone.
Weekly the lament was growing in fevered pitch. By this time Mona had a new girlfriend. The old lady. She was forty. We were twenty-seven. I thought she was ancient. She carried a purse, an oversized cheap leather bag with straps that fit over her shoulder. We carried messenger bags. I hated her. I obsessed about Mona even more intensely now that she had moved on. I increased my therapy sessions to twice a week. I needed to lie on the couch talking about me for longer periods of time. Mona lay for three 50-minute hours a week. I needed at least two 50-minute hours. Maybe more.
The big ol’ dyke routine took at least 22 minutes a session. The lament of alone the rest of it. It was mostly a monologue with a bunch of scribbling, uh-huh and say more about that in the background. Until one day, when I was big ol’ dyking to the extreme and she stopped me and said, “Tell me again about the Bagel Dyke”.
“Whaattt”? I said.
“Tell me again about how you feel about the Bagel Dykes.”
I torpedoed off the couch. I looked at her realizing we hadn’t made eye contact in $2,225 worth of sessions. Grabbing my bag I said, “I have to go”. No explanation. Just the shock of realizing I laid on her crusty old couch for months on end, talking about my fear of not ever being attracted to a woman again and forever being forced to fantasize about the past as my heart and sex organs dried up into nothing, and she thought I was talking about Bagels, or Jewish girls, or girls with holes in the middle. Really, what the fuck did she think I was talking about? Was she researching Bagel Dykes? This was pre-Google so where was she getting her information? Was she asking her therapist group if they knew any Bagel Dykes? Was she frequenting gay bars hoping to catch a glimpse of a Bagel Dyke so we ‘d have something to connect about?
To this very day throughout New York City and Los Angeles there are swarms of people referring to butchy women (who, by the way, are absolutely entitled to look and act as they please, no criticism here, just not who I wanted to date) as Bagels.
After the Quaker, I swore off therapy. I was twenty-seven-years-old and I’d already broken up with 10–15 different therapists. I was exhausted by the letdowns and needed time to heal, time to figure me out by myself. The question was, would I? After all those years of seeking healing outside of myself, of believing other was expert of me, would I have the fortitude, the confidence, the guts, to tackle myself? Would I actually give myself the gift of me?
I imagine you know the answer those questions. I was a seeker in America — educated, privileged, and disconnected. The answer must lay elsewhere; on somebody else’s couch, or between somebody else’s legs, or in that extra drink, it must be in the job promotion. You know, the answer, that joyful thing called self-satisfaction; it was either behind door #1, door #2, or door #3. Clearly I had more doors to open. Many many more to open.