Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions
Blues for Beginners
Stories and Obsessions
Judith Podell
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Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Judith Podell
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Table of Contents
Blues for Beginners
Smokescreen
Ground Zero
Industry and Simple Gratitude
Blues for Advanced Beginners
The Sphinx of Margate
Unmentionable Acts with Shoes
Animal Behavior
Vikings
The Ad Man’s Dutiful Daughter
Death of the Blues
Blues For Beginners
Woke up this morning
cat threw a hairball on the bed.
Said, I woke up this morning
cat puke all over the bed.
Went to the kitchen
Mr. Coffee was dead.
‘‘Post-Graduate Blues,’’
by Memphis Earlene Gray
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Most blues begin ‘‘woke up this morning.’’
“Gotta good woman’’ is a bad way to begin the blues,
unless you stick something nasty in the next line:
“Gotta good woman— with the meanest dog in town.”
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Blues are simple. After you have the first line right, repeat it.
Then find something that rhymes.
Gotta a good woman
with the meanest dog in town.
he got teeth like Margaret Thatcher
and he weighs 500 pound.
The blues are not about limitless choice.
Blues cars are Chevies and Cadillacs.
Other acceptable blues transportation is Greyhound bus or a southbound train.
Walkin’ plays a major part in the blues lifestyle. So does fixin’ to die.
Teenagers can’t sing the blues.
Adults sing the blues.
Blues adulthood means old enough to get the electric chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.
You can have the blues in New York City but not in New Jersey.
Hard times in Vermont or North Dakota are just depression.
Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City are still the best places to have the blues.
The following colors do not belong in the blues:
a. orange
b. beige
You can’t have the blues in an office or a honky-tonk. The lighting is wrong.
More good places for the blues:
a. the highway
b. the jailhouse
c. the empty bed
No one will believe it’s the blues if you wear a suit, unless you happen to be an old black man.
Do you have the right to sing the blues?
Yes, if:
a. your first name is a southern state.
b. you’re blind.
c. you shot a man in Memphis.
d. you can’t be satisfied.
No, if:
a. you once were blind but now can see.
b. you’re deaf.
Neither Frank Sinatra nor Meryl Streep could ever sing the blues.
If you ask for water and baby gives you gasoline it’s the blues.
Other blues beverages include:
a. wine
b. Irish whiskey
c. muddy water
If it occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack it’s blues death.
Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is a blues way to die.
So is the electric chair, substance abuse, or being denied treatment in an emergency room.
Some blues names for women:
a. Sadie
b. Big Mama
Some blues names for men:
a. Willie
b. Joe
c. Little Willie
d. Lightning
Persons with names like Sierra or Sequoia will not be permitted to sing the blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis.
Smokescreen
Psychoanalysis is the ultimate dead end for self-improvement junkies. The practice is elitist, intellectually suspect, and inherently demeaning to women. Your basic model shrink is a middle-aged bearded man, usually Jewish, supported by a pyramid of female misery, much of it Jewish as well. Nonetheless I have a standing noontime appointment with Dr. Freundlicht Monday through Friday with Thursday off.
.
From the voice at the other end of the telephone, I imagine Dr. Lee Freundlicht to be a 60 year old woman with a two pack a day cigarette habit and modern art on her waiting room walls, so I make the appointment for an initial consultation. I turn out to be right about the modern art—one large Miro print of copulating amoebas in primary colors and a small Paul Klee of stylized pastel clowns in profile.
A man sits across from me in the waiting room, his head buried in the latest issue of Time. He’s wearing a pin-striped suit and a guilty expression.
An honest lawyer, or maybe he works for the government.
I’m a government lawyer. I work the Department of Labor. Most days I feel like a dish mop, a nothing, a fraud.
At 11:45 A.M., he looks up from his magazine.
“Do you have an appointment with Dr. Freundlicht too?” My voice is full of false brightness to mask the trepidation.
“My appointment’s at noon,” he says.
“Today’s Wednesday, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s Thursday,” he says firmly.
I reset the calendar on my watch to Thursday, and put my raincoat back on, prepared to leave.
At 11:50 A.M. a crying woman comes out of Dr. Freundlicht’s office.
At noon, Dr. Freundlicht’s door opens again.
He looks like a tenured professor, the sort who serves sherry to sophomores.
No beard, but a brushy brown mustache. His brown suit must be twenty years old, and he’s wearing hushpuppies.
No cigarettes either.
.
The office is a low ceilinged white room with a view of the parking lot. The backless brown leather couch is wide enough to accommodate the world’s most obese analysand and looks like the text book model. A small red and black Bokhara rug the size of a bathmat lies next to it. I spot only one ashtray, a tiny one carved out of petrified wood.
“Do I have to lie on it?” I ask, meaning the couch.
“I prefer initial consultations face to face,” Dr. Freundlicht says.
He motions to the twin brown club chairs, also in leather.
“The man in your waiting room thinks it’s Thursday,” I tell him.
Dr. Freundlicht looks perplexed.
“You’ve got another patient out there.”
“Would you excuse me?” he says.
While he’s gone I contemplate the bathmat Bokhara, its agitated paisley medallions barely held in by a border of more frantic paisleys. Hundreds of knots per inch, the product of a land where human life is cheap and child labor unregulated. When Dr. Freundlicht returns he apologizes for the inconvenience.
.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
Maybe I’ve come a long way, but men in suits can make me feel like a trespasser. The
face I see every morning in my bathroom mirror still belongs to a cipher. There is no alternative to boredom except anxiety.
“I’m an American girl and not the product of a broken home,” I say. “It’s supposed to be better than this.”
.
After our second session Dr. Freundlicht deems me a suitable candidate for psychoanalysis. This is meant to be a compliment. Suitable candidate means an articulate, self-absorbed, nervous wreck with good health insurance and no immediate plans for leaving town. By the third session I climb onto his brown leather couch like it is home, and place the tiny petrified wood ashtray on my chest for ballast.
“The aim of psychoanalysis is to transform misery into ordinary unhappiness,” he says. “This is not a joke. I suspect you will find ordinary unhappiness a distinct improvement.”
I empty the ashtray twice.
Our fourth session I ask for a bigger ashtray.
“Would you mind very much not smoking?” he says.
He might as well ask if I mind not breathing.
‘‘I smoke three packs of Merits a day, four if I stay up late,” I explain. “That’s an average of five cigarettes per waking hour, more if I’m actually talking. Analysis is known as the talking cure, isn’t it?”
“If you feel strongly about it,” he says in a reasonable tone of voice,
‘‘I’ll withdraw the suggestion. Please watch out for the rug.”
.
Dr. Freundlicht is a gentleman. A trifle absent minded, but mild mannered and thoughtful.
If I don’t watch out we’ll have transference. Women patients always fall in love with their shrinks. The ones who don’t have self-destructive affairs with them trot off to grad school to become psychiatric social workers so they can run encounter groups for a living. Psychoanalysis is such a werewolf profession.
He’s starting to show up in my dreams anyway.
For instance, he’s climbing a long flight of stairs to find me. My father, holding an aluminum snow shovel, blocks his passage and I hide in the closet of my childhood bedroom, terrified of blame. I don’t tell Dr. Freundlicht about that dream nor the nightmare about getting stuck in the freezer chest of Friendly’s Ice Cream Parlor. Instead, I feed him something safe, the dream where I watch my hair turn from black to gray and back again.
“What color is my hair?” he asks.
“Salt and pepper?’’
I’ve been lying on the couch long enough to forget what he looks like.
“You could call it salt and pepper.”
I am instantly furious.
“That dream was about me, not you. You must think you’re the center of my universe.”
He just laughs.
“I would, if I didn’t know it was only transference.”
After that comes one of those pauses that feels like an afternoon. The silence is almost unbearable except talking would be worse.
“What aren’t you saying?”
“Oh, nothing,” I say.
You’d think license to talk about yourself for an hour would be delightful but it’s not, not if he actually listens.
“You’re thinking of something.”
“Nothing important.”
Nothing is unimportant in analysis, no matter how lame, inane or picayune. Nothing is too dumb for words.
“I shouldn’t be smoking in here,” I say, flashing suddenly on a recent article in the Post about the effect of secondary cigarette smoke on nonsmokers. “I’m probably giving you lung cancer by proxy.”
“That last statement is an excellent example of how you frequently make yourself feel guilty,” he says. “I’m also touched by your concern.”
I burst into tears.
.
It’s been months since I’ve looked him in the eye. In memory now his face is an amalgamation of Walter Cronkite and Walt Disney. This relationship is certainly meaningful but also perverse, since it violates basic laws of social intercourse. I’m supposed to tell him anything that comes to mind without fear or censorship but he is not allowed to retaliate. I never attack directly. Instead I sneer at his office furnishings.
Why is so much of it brown? Why only National Geographic and Time in the waiting room; is he afraid of People?
Sometimes I trash his profession.
“Any English major could do you job. English majors know all about symbolic interpretation,” I tell him.
I am usually nasty at that certain time of the month, the time when he bills me.
.
The remark is intended as disinterested sociological observation, not reproach.
“One pays an analyst for the same reason one might prefer paying for sex,” I tell him.
“You’re calling me a whore,” he replies amiably.
I see him in pasties, a G-string and those awful hushpuppies and my face burns with shame.
“That’s not what I meant. What I meant was I like paying because I need to feel in control.”
“Except you hate to pay me. Look how your hands shake! I’ll bet you got the date wrong again.”
This time I’ve filled in the correct date, only I wrote the check out payable to myself.
“It’s just the amount. Writing checks this big gets me flustered.”
Even with Blue Cross reimbursements the amount seems hard to justify. A month of psychoanalysis could feed a third world village.
“So, to return to your earlier analogy,” he says, ‘‘We agree with the principle; now we’re just dickering about price.”
.
The times we run into each other in his lobby and share the elevator are always awkward, at least for me. I can make elevator small talk with anyone except Dr. Freundlicht. Even though I know he’s off-duty I expect him to know what I’m thinking at all times. I assume he has a wife, two children, a gray Volvo station wagon and a labrador retriever, along with season tickets for the symphony. He could be gay, drive an Oldsmobile, and have season tickets for the Redskins, but I’ll never know.
As he pointed out early on, if he wanted to talk about himself he’d be obliged to pay me.
.
It turns out Dr. Freundlicht used to be a smoker. He lets this slip out when I tell him about my blind date from the City Paper classifieds.
“We’re sitting at an outdoor cafe and he takes my cigarettes off the table. I wanted to smack him. He had this patronizing smile like he was doing me a big favor. Quitting smoking means giving in to those sort of people.”
“The surprising thing for me when I quit was how no one noticed anything different,” Dr. Freundlicht says.
.
I stare at the smiling duck faces of his brass bookends. For the hundredth time I wonder if the Modern Library edition of Freud in his bookcase are just props. I smoke one cigarette half-way down to the filter and stamp it out in the ashtray.
“What are you not saying?”
“I thought I heard a sniffling sound. Was that you?” I say.
“I’m afraid so,” he says.
The room is smoke gray from my cigarettes and I’ve just pulled out another.
“Maybe we should have a rule that I don’t smoke here.”
“Then you’d be going without to please me, which would make you resent me even more,” he says.
“Well, it would be extra material for when we run out of things to talk about.”
“Don’t worry,” says Dr. Freundlicht. “We’ll have plenty between us. There’s always enough.”
I can not bring myself to light the crummy Merit nor can I slip it back into its pack.
“What are you not saying?” he asks gently.
“I wish I’d picked a shrink who still smoked,” I say, “It’s too late now.”
.
I am still weepy when I leave his office, and it feels good. If the nun in the elevator notices the tears streaming down my face, she is too polite to say anything. We exchange pleasantries about the weather all the way down as if both of us are normal.
Gro
und Zero
The summer of 1981, Magazines were full of articles about professional women reaching career plateaus and finding themselves at dead ends with their biological clocks ticking. It was as though TIME and NEWSWEEK had turned into my mother, whose letters sometimes included free samples of the latest deodorants and feminine hygiene sprays. ( “Dear Lauren, This came in the mail and I thought of you. When will you bring that nice Meltzer boy home again?”).
.
My closest women friends were all married, some for the second time, with mortgages and serious furniture. I was 34, still single, still working for the Department of Labor and sleeping on a futon; a relic of the idealistic, if somewhat self-serving Carter era. Signs of the Reagan ascendancy were all over Washington. I was tired of friends asking ‘when are you going to leave government and get a real job?’ as though working for a federal regulatory agency was something to be ashamed of when you make more money in the private sector helping corporations circumvent the same laws you used to enforce.
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Fortunately, Government High Option Blue Cross paid generous mental health benefits in those days, which why I could afford psychoanalysis, the Rolls-Royce of psychotherapy. Not that I had much to show for it. Although I’d been seeing Dr. Freundlicht for more than a year, I was still hooked on cigarettes (three packs a day) and Jake Meltzer, a divorced lawyer who said we had a mature adult relationship.
Whatever that meant.
“What are you thinking?” asked Dr. Freundlicht.
Jake hadn’t called in two weeks, not since the night he’d dropped in for dinner, bearing Chinese takeout; kung pow chicken, shrimp with walnuts, and crummy fortune cookies.
Mine had read Your Mother Was Right.
.
“What are you thinking that you don’t want to tell me about?” Dr Freudnlich asked.
In other words, he wanted me to say whatever was on my mind “without fear or censorship.” Jake was off limits, as far as I was concerned. Too embarrassing. I searched for something safe as soap, yet sufficiently provocative so Dr. Freundlicht wouldn’t suspect I was holding out on him. He needed new soap in the bathroom off his waiting room. By now, the solid pink bar of Lifebuoy I remembered from the start of my analysis was a melted- down puddle of tan slime. For that matter, the office bathroom was dusty. I wondered what that meant, and what my noticing meant.