I am partner in a successful  psychiatric practice, though my partner, a  certain Dr. Guest, is on leave for a few months due to severe dehydration, approaching true dessication.

I came in the office door quietly, and snuck past Rena’s diswomaned desk, where she ran the technicalities of this Healing Practice of mine. She was in the copy room. Making copies of some highly confidential documents, squinting at them before putting them in the machine. I watched for a while, and said, “Learning any interesting private information you think I should know about?”

She smiled and said, “There are a few matters I am concerned about. “

“Like?”

“Like the number of patients who’ve  made overt threats to dear Dr Guest!” she guffawed.

“How many?”

“Seven, maybe an eighth…”

“And these patients are?...”

“In your care, bub. One is coming in in 10 minutes. The good reverend.”  There was a light that flashed in Rena’s eyes as she described him: a brilliant poet who works in advertising, depressed because of a diminishment of his creative capacity, for one thing, and his addiction to drink , which was either a cause or an effect of his depression, I forget which. I hope it doesn’t matter.

Rena sat back in her swivel chair, hands behind her head, thrusting out lovely bosoms under a ‘’block island” black t shirt . I always adored how tiny sleeves are on women’s tshirts than me. Nice…she smiled at me, and winked.  “He is not someone to be taken without preparation, I would advise.”

This was code for her saying I should get high before the session. I trusted her judgment. Fuck preparation. I am not gonna be tied down to the banal world. Not when healing!

I smoked two nice buds in a crackpipe a patient had surrendered to me.

~

This was serious stuff. Time became very very slow. I was reluctant to pick up the guy’s file before I was high, but now I am intensely curious about this ‘’reverend”. Turns out he wrote a note calling God’s  judgment down on Guest for his bad advice. It was a literate note, I gotta say…

The reverend knocked at my door, as I sprawled comfortably in my spacetime position, fleetingly fluttering in my chest and head. I saw and heard everything as an expression of Beauty. This reverend was a beautiful white bearded slim rich resident of this town, charisma to hypnotize you.

Lucky I  was stoned.

“I find, doctor, “ he said, slim legs crossed, “that the pride in me is what keeps me down. What do you think?”

“Maybe..but where is your pride located, primevally? I mean fundamentally…in the source of sources….

That kink. The gut clench. What is your pride about? Being skillful, or correct in information, or a loving man, or a degenerate antihero even!”

“It’s in my chest . ah I cant feel in there? ! “

This unclenched the knot in him. I looked discreetly at my watch and saw we had twenty minutes left…I wanted a celebration of this insight of his…

I offered him a beer and smoked up in front of him. We were two men doing it the Old Way. We laughed.

“I feel like f-ing Tommy Lee Jones” he says.

I mused and said, “I am a hip Walter Cronkite.”

Men of honor, we imagined ourselves as them and did decent imitations and got laughing and I sent him on his way.

Cured again.

~

“He’s not dangerous,” I told Rena over coffee.

“Not to you. But to women.”

“I don’t think so.”

“So what cured him?”

‘The feeling of emptiness in his chest.”

“How?”
“I hypnotized him back to childhood to when he had a heart, right before he lost it..

And gave him the comparison.

Men today don’t acknowledge loss of innocence with anything but contempt.

To make them relive it is the goal of the Therapist, the Actor in Chief, the Lord of the Dance, the inheritor of the Great Psychologists like William james who says, “act as if everything you do is important”

~

A dreamlike way to live life, but I adore dreaming..