The Name

"You can't believe you've been fooling anyone."

"No. Of course not."

"Then why do you act like it?"

"My foolishness. My inexactitude. My inability to say one decent thing about or to another person unless..."

"Say it."

"You say it. I pay a hundred for fifty five minutes of your time each week."

"Rates going up next month."

"Big shock."

"What do you say?"

"Won't."

"And why not?"

"Well, doctor, it's like this. I don't feel I should have to put down money I don't have in order for you to sit there in your smug suit that cost more than what I make in six months.."

"Or seven..."

"Right. Or seven. Or more. And for this money I can ill afford, I get to have you charmingly, leaning back in your softly upholstered chair, with your hands clasped behind your head, and sticking out your holier than thou goatee at me, and listen to me ramble, vapidly, as you have oftentimes said, thus disabusing me of any ability to think I am worth one shit in this crazy world, and then in the process of making me impotent at the same exact time. It would appear to me that I could get my brain stapled and my dick cut off for less money than this in some back alley at midnight where you really should be doc. Money can't hide.

"Okay. Sit there. Nice diploma. Good hair cut. Halfway between well we used to be shaggy but now we're middle aged. The protein in my sperm is depleted because there is no sperm, and for that I thank you, Herr docktor. Isn't there some prison camp you should be at, devising fun new ways of torture? You seem to have developed some rightly keen examples here with me, and I doubt, as the song says, I am the only one."

"Joel."

"I know. I know the word, the name, and the sobriquet often and always in my mind and that is the problem. You know it. I know it. What the hell am I doing here with a clam like you?"

'Roughing me up verbally, it appears."

"Do you know there is actually a film called 'Tit to the Moon,' Herr docktor?

"Well, that pregnant pause will cost me at least fifteen bucks.."

"You aren't a whiz at math either."

"No. Guess not. But there really is a movie with that name. Foreign. That's the translation. It's about a boy with an obsession with female breasts. Supposed to be both deep and charming and humorous and lots of tits I suppose. I don't know what the moon has to do with it, unless he develops a need for gandering, and perhaps more, at women's backsides as well. Could fly a tit to the moon, too, I guess."

"Well, there was a segue. What does it mean?"

"Well, it may be the world's greatest movie ever. I don't know. Maybe it'll turn up on IFC sometime. The thing is---let's say it's a bad movie—I mean watching some kid mooning—maybe that's the moon in the title, sort of—over female tits—if that's what the thing's about—you can find the damndest things on the web—anyway—but if that is what it's about, then how in the hell did someone get up the money and the people to make it? Man, I'm putting my whole life stakes into this thing. Me too. Count me in also.

" I mean, come on everybody, let's make a movie about a boy obsessed with tits—not the most original idea, but maybe there are some unexposed tits in the film. Hot damn, let's go for it. I mean once on IFC, I saw fifteen minutes of a French Canadian film about parents who were obsessed with their children's bowel movements—honest to God, I watched fifteen minutes one or two in the morning, and I suddenly come to my senses—what am I, nuts?—don't answer that—man, bet there was a rush on to be in that cast or crew—where did they get the money to make this thing? I ask you. Bet they had to fight that mob off with a chainsaw-- and flip over, relieved, to Bill O'Leilly who is a bowel movement waiting to happen---"

"You are rambling."

"And ambling, Docktor, the thing of it is, why couldn't Joel have loved me? Someone makes a movie of a kid ga ga over tits and someone else makes a movie about bowel movements and Bill O'Leilly is sitting there with his sweat bee face in the screen, all, especially Bill, apparently making money of some sort—so why could not Joel love me? It's not any more far fetched. People saw these movies. Maybe only one or two. But somebody's let's face it somewhat bizarre dream came true, such as it was, and I can't live one more second with these nightmare horrors of ethereal beauty that puts James Mason's excellent character of Humbert Humbert, cartoon that he is, to shame---Humbert, not Mason—"

"So you pretend everyone you love is Joel."

"Well?"

"You guessed it two years ago, Herr docktor."

"Could you kind of knock off the Herr docktor thing—it..."

"It—what?—

"Well, man, speak up. That space above my line is filled with another of your pregnant pauses."

"Nothing."

"Irritates you, you started to say. Or rather it irritates 'me.'"

"Look, they all know. You are wasting your money."

"And you know I am dependant as hell on you, kind sir."

"Joel."

"Yes. Joel. You have told me this so often, I fear the name has been rubbed almost through. And I have told you, you are right and you don't puff up like a pouter pigeon, because of course you are right and who the hell gives a shit what I think anyway, right? Well, herr—ah Dr. Spittengruber or whatever, see? you can't get angry. That would make you human—but enough ridiculous charges leveled against you—I have half lied. I have half truthed you as your glorious leader would say. And I have half-lied you. At the same time. To kind of pay you back for dispiriting me and deballing me at the same time. One stop shopping for me. One stop shopping for you.

"Ah yes, put your steepled hands to your chin and lean forward, but not pensively, for we don't want to break that image of stone granite and brick dry wall façade—let's just say you were half-right. Let's just say you were half-wrong."

"Well..."

"He said ominously as he pulled out his note book and pencil to go over past sessions with me...."

"There was Jimmy. There was Julian. There was Randy. There was Daniel. There was and was and was and was..."

"Don't get apoplectic doctor, it doesn't clash well with your anemia. The thing is, my noble deity, you got it partly wrong. And in truth, not till you and your little screwings of my brain and hurtings of my heart and popping what few balloons of little achievements I might have ostensibly accomplished, for my own goddam good of course—that's always your excuses--even if only in my own tired fretting little brain, did I finally realize where you came a cropper.

"Pregnant pauses, Herr—ah-sorry, Doctor-never produce anything. People like me and your other impatient patients have to fill them up with words. Well, I was wrong. They produce nervous words from the other person. How many boats have you bought with the nervous words of others?

"One of your little tricks. So you will look sharp and one eyebrow raised as in a quiet smoke signal of whispered ah ha...Daniel got it—wrong---he was the first to notice it half right and half wrong. It stunned me...so after that, well, I didn't do it on purpose really, but it helped me maintain a distance, as if Joel was my emissary and took the body blows instead of me—and how could I let the only person I ever fell for in the whole fuckin' world take the raps for me? —No, doctor, as a favorite writer of mine would have said, of the lower depths, we are closing in on it—let me lead you—I did not pretend they were Joel. Neither did I pretend that Joel was my emissary. My puppet. My shield."

"Intriguing."

"Oh bullshit, doctor Gus or whatever the hell—I pay tons of money to insult you and you sit there with those gleamy eyes and steel balls—anyways, I always was Joel. They were always in some way me. How do you love someone? I mean, really love someone? I don't mean just sex and body and hormones and scent and all of that—I mean when you love someone, you love them from the heart out. And if they don't love you back, you have to become them. I had to become Joel. The puppet was not him. I was not the puppeteer. We became, we humans, in our frail, mad human world, in my mind and spirit at least...people supposedly do that when they fall in love. To keep the fear of their separateness, that we can only imperfectly pretend with each other to nullify, a pace away—

"I loved, not them, but I loved with Joel, images of me. Shards of me. Pieces of bright dangerous glass that was not the collective shadow even of Joel imperfectly captured for a moment in a fun house mirror. But images of me...so you see, Herr docktor, I'm paying the bill, I'll fuckin' call you what I like—all these people all my life who made me feel what you made me feel too, only they charged a helluva lot more than you do, doc, a helluva lot more, they worked for me—rather like you do—they made me nothing—and in doing so, to my surprise and delight I see now—I was Joel and I made them nothing---Joel can't be hurt—Joel is forever—like diamonds—they were clowns, the Daniels, the Julians, the Jimmys, and whatever, I've become fond of that word 'whatever' that I could not stand for so long, for it was directed distractedly at me often as not—

"And because they were the clowns, Joel, I, let them dance their stupid heads and butts off--- and since I saw them as me, I got to have the fine old masochism I let Joel put me through in the first damn place—this one stop shopping could catch on--and because you now know my secret, my little game plans, as they said in the movies, I shall have to kill you."

"Well, that was a really long pregnant pause. Got a light, doc? Thanks."

"See you next week at ten, Barry?"

"Sure, doc. wouldn't miss it for the world. Hey, before I head out the door, can I ask you something if you didn't sleep through this session too?"

"Go ahead."

"You don't believe me for a minute do you? Just a last gasp to win some corkscrewed way somehow or somewhere, right?"

"Of course."

"Be amazed. So long, Julian. Get used to it. I've developed this curious brain and eyesight power. Stoke up that British accent, you supercilious S.O.B. You're going to need it."

"Right ya ar' guv'nor."

"Don't be a smart ass."

Door opens and closes.