Eleven
“So you would have sex with her?”
He shifted uncomfortably on the
couch. He wasn’t lying down, but he was
rather sprawled out. It had been
fine. The conversation had been
fine. And then it had turned to this.
He had never really been one to brag about sexual details to his
friends. He would tell Trace, but that
was it. He really didn’t think that was
something you should share with people. It
was something private. And even though
the past month had brought him and Dr. Baitman closer together, he wasn’t ready
to let him know his favorite position.
His favorite position. Hell, he liked them all. It had been so damn long since he had had
sex, real or imaginary. He got horney at
the mention of sex now, and it was embarrassing for him. He had always been able to control himself,
at least partially. But now he was
lonely, and he had no one to be intimate with but his hand. And he hated his damn hand. Trace kept asking him to come out and pick up
a girl with him at a club. But it had
been four years since he had last been single.
It had been four years since he had last gone out clubbing to pick up
chicks. And four years ago he had been
18, a virgin, and most of the girls that he met at clubs wanted to talk to JC
or Joey and made fun of his hair. He didn’t
know how to pick up chicks. Plus, he wasn’t
over her yet.
Or her.
“Well…”
He looked over at Dr. Baitman who
was staring at him over his reading glasses.
He was sitting in his chair, a legal pad propped up on his leg that was
crossed over on his other leg. His pen
was in his hand, ready to write his response.
He had gotten over the whole security and press fear factor after the
first couple weeks. He actually didn’t mind
therapy now. It was kind of nice to talk
to someone about everything you had going on in your head. And he sort of enjoyed the questions Dr.
Baitman asked him. It really made him
think and evaluate some things he had never really dealt with before.
But they hadn’t talked about sex
until today. He bit his lip and looked
down at the table in front of him to his Sprite can that was starting to sweat
onto the table. “No, I mean yes, but it
was different. We’d make love.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Hell yes there’s a difference!” He
nodded and looked at Dr. Baitman strangely.
He wanted to spout out something back to him about him being married. What about him and his wife? Shouldn’t he know the difference. But he realized that’d be stupid and
unprofessional. Dr. Baitman wasn’t in
therapy. He was.
“What’s the difference then?” the
doctor asked with a sly smile.
Justin licked his lips and looked
around, trying to find the right words to say.
Finally he sighed and said, “You can make love without having actual
sex. Making love doesn’t require any
type of, ya know…release. At least, that’s
what I think.”
“So what consists of making love?”
He shrugged, “I think it differs
from person to person. I mean some
people might have to have sex to do that.
Me, I think you can make love with a person and not even be touching
them.”
“So in your dreams you wouldn’t touch
her?”
He felt the blood rush to his
face. Shit, he was embarrassed. He looked down to pattern on the couch, away
from the doctor. He quieted his voice
and stuttered, “Oh, I’d ya know. I mean
yeah, we’d do it, but I-I don’t know. It just always seemed different.”
He heard Dr. Baitman shift and saw
him uncross his legs and lean forward a bit.
He had taken his glasses off, and they were now dangling around his neck
with one of those “old people glasses necklaces” that Justin liked to call him. He had cracked a joke to Dr. Baitman about it
a couple weeks ago and the doctor had just cracked a joke back about doubling
his fee.
“Let me ask you something,” the
older man started. “I looked over your
journal earlier. You haven’t had a dream about her since I asked you to keep it. That’s been about a month. And you say the last time you remember a
dream about her was the week before your first appointment. That’s five weeks without a “visit”, as you
call it.”
“I’ve gone longer without
one. I think the longest time was three
months,” he responded. Dr. Baitman had
asked him to keep a journal by his bed and every morning write in it the date
and the dreams he had had the night before.
He had forgotten to do it a couple times, but he was pretty good at remembering
it. He remembered last night’s dream,
which was him and Trace throwing rocks at these giant bugs but the bugs would
eat the rocks thrown. And then the bugs
turned into a tidal wave and they surfed on it.
He felt stupid writing it down.
“Why do you think you’ve stopped?”
“I don’t think it’s me. I think it’s her. I think she’s scared.”
“You still think she’s real.”
“I think…” he started and then he
sighed. He knew she couldn’t be real, at
least, he thought so. He was starting to
come to terms that she was something he made up or something….hell, he didn’t know
what she was. “I think I want her to be real.”
“I know it’s hard, but think
Justin. Do you remember any one in your
life that could be the basis of these dreams?
Perhaps a girl you dated when you were younger or a girl you had a crush
on? A friend?”
He raised his hands and then
dropped them down in his lap. He stared
off into the space in front of him, thinking hard and saying, “I’ve never seen
anyone like that. I mean I’ve seen girls
like kinda sorta look familiar but no one that’s her twin. I mean, I know what you’re getting at. I read over that section in that book you
told me to read. As far as I know I’m
not trying to make sense of anything in my head. Ya know, I’m not trying to take stored
information and be creative or whatever the hell that dude was talking about in
that book.”
He reached forward and took a sip
form his Sprite can and then sat it back down.
“I’ve had those weird ass dreams that everyone else has where you’re
friends and family are there and you’re living in your old house and the
doorbell rings and its Snoop Dogg carrying a couch.” The doctor laughed and Justin continued with
a smile, “And you’re trying to get away from him. And it’s all because before you went to bed
that night you were watching something on MTV that was about Snoop. I mean I’ve had those dreams. But…but God, Dr. B.” He sighed and fell back on the couch, looking
up at the ceiling. “Every time, every
damn time I’d dream about her I’d wake up either shocked that it wasn’t real or
still thinking that she WAS real. And it
was only until after I had been awake for about ten minutes did it really
register that what I just experienced was a dream.”
“I had a case like this a couple
years ago, but then again it was so different.
The guy was about 38, not married, had been dreaming about this girl for
two years straight. It turned out to be a
girl he wanted to ask to prom when he was 18 and never did. He was compensating. He was 38 and single and she was a
fantasy. It just puzzles me.” He sat up a little and looked at the doctor
who was looking back over some notes he had written down, his glasses back on
his nose. “You had a girl friend. You’re only 22, you’ve been having these dreams
for 4 years on and off and you claim
to have never seen this woman before.”
Justin let out a deep breath and
closed his eyes. “So I’m crazy or
possessed.”
“No, that’s the thing Justin. In the other case, the man was a little
overweight. He was on medication for depression
and had an anxiety disorder. He was in
and out of jobs, in fact I don’t know how the hell he paid for therapy. So I look over the notes I have here and I
ask myself: what is it you’re
compensating for?”
It was quiet for a moment, and
Justin thought about what Dr. B had said.
He chewed on his bottom lip and then said, “You think it has something to
do with who I am?”
“That’s another thing.” The doctor
looked at him over the edge of his glasses and pointed his finger in the air
before bringing his hand to his fist to his mouth thinking for a moment. He then started talking with his hand, “I’ve had celebrities come in here. Most of them are a little wacky in the
head. Some of them are fairly normal,
and you’re one of those normal ones.
Yeah, you have to have Mike with you always and you can’t do some simple
things without a camera in your face.
But from what I can tell you’re not…abnormal. You think rationally and respond and act like
a normal human being.”
“That’s what you think,” Justin
laughed at himself.
Dr. Baitman laughed for a moment
and then got rather serious. “Ha. I
think everyone looks in the mirror when they’re at home alone and says to themselves,
I’m weird. It’s those people who think ‘Nothing’s
wrong with me, I just like to have sex with dead people…or animals’ that have
problems.”
Justin turned dup his nose and
started to gag. Who the fuck would wanna
fuck a dead person? That’s just stupid
and disturbing. “Gross.”
The doctor shrugged. “Necrophilia.
I was going to go into that field.
In college I was fascinated with mental sexual disorders. See, we’re all a little weird.”
He looked away with a disgusted
look on his face. “I’m glad you changed
it. That’s gross.”
“Let’s go back to what we started
with: you’re girlfriend.”
Justin sat up again on the couch
and moaned out, “Ex girlfriend.”
They had spent the first part of the
hour talking about Britney. It was a
hard conversation, but he was able to get through it. It really made him miss her, though. She had called him a couple weeks prior and
seemed really, really distraught. He
felt bad for her, but he didn’t give in.
He was impressed with himself and how strong he was. He thought when she asked him to come see him
he would have flown out there. But he
had said no. He had turned her down, and
he thought maybe that was a good step forward.
“We talked about the good things
earlier. We talked about how much you
loved her and all that. What didn’t you
love about her? What annoyed you?”
He thought it was a little odd
that Dr. Baitman was asking him. It kind
of sounded like he wanted dirt on Britney.
He didn’t really think that was his place to bad mouth the girl, even
though she did sleep with his best friend.
“What’s this matter?”
Dr. B cleared his throat. “Well, maybe “Darcy” was your answer to what
Britney didn’t have. Were they
different?”
He chuckled slightly, “Yeah, very
much so.”
“Ah ha!” The doctor smiled and shook his pen at Justin
and then began to write. “How so?”
“Darcy was into lady-like things.”
The doctor laughed at him and he
felt kind of silly that he had used that terminology. “You’re gonna need to elaborate on that.”
He sighed. He thought about her. He thought about her white gowns and long
hair and perfect smile. He thought about
her knowledge on certain subjects and the way she’d kiss him and make love to-
he had to stop this. “She listened to
classical music and had long beautiful
hair and drank wine and wore silk and walked barefoot in the rain and sometimes
would talk like she’s from the 1700s or something.”
“How do you know what language in
the 1700s sounded like?”
Justin rolled his eyes, “You know
what I mean Dr. B, she’d sound eloquent.”
“How would Britney sound?”
He started to chuckle but it
turned into a full blown laugh. He let
his own accent flow when he said, “’Bout as country as ‘bacca field. But I liked that, ya know? She kept me to my roots.” He licked his lips and smiled, thinking back
on all the good times they had shared.
It really, really sucked that she had to fuck it all away like she did. “Like man, Christmas and Thanksgiving at her
family’s house or my grandma’s. Man, it
was like, Justin Timberlake who? Nsync who?
I was me again, ya know? The kid from
“Do you get tired of your fame?”
“Yeah. I mean doesn’t everyone? I think everyone gets tired of their job.” He stopped himself and turned to look
directly at the other man in the room, “ I mean I love what I do, but there are
definite downsides.”
“So you liked Britney keeping you
grounded, but you liked the sophistication that came with your dreams.”
He shrugged and watched Dr. B
write some more. “I guess. Britney did
stop keeping me grounded. Soon she
started to want to go partying all the time, and she started buying all this
expensive clothing and stuff. And I mean
I do that, too. But, I don’t know. And then she’d change how she’d act. When we were at home or with her family she
was normal, but once we went outside she would become miss pop star diva.” He rolled his eyes.
“What about you? Do you change your face for the crowd?”
He bit his lip. Shit. He knew
he did it. Trace had cracked on him from
time to time. The guys had too. Hell, critics had called him on it. But hell, it was so hard to be genuine in
such a fucking fake business. No one
cared who you really were, and if
they said they did, they were lying.
People only wanted to hear what they wanted. They wanted him to be whoever they
wanted. If
He rubbed his forehead and stared
at the portrait of the man he had seen but didn’t know that first time he came
to thisoffice. It was Sigmund Freud. He knew who that was. He was the dude that made everyone feel like
they were sex freaks. Dr. Baitman had
given him a short little psychology lesson the second session they had had,
mainly because Justin had asked.
He remembered that conversation
and remembered what the doctor had said afterwards. He thought it was interesting that Dr.
Baitman talked so respectfully of Freud and had his picture in his office. Bu then he had said, “but the main reason I
have his picture there is to remind me that this might all be bull shit.”
He had been shocked to hear Dr.
Baitman cuss. That just didn’t seem like
something he would do. He had kept on
saying, “I’ve read almost everything Freud wrote and it blows my mind. I’m impressed and it makes so much sense in
my head. But at the same time, I think,
hell, I’m Catholic. I go to mass every
Sunday. I ask myself all the time, maybe
Freud was searching too much. Maybe he
went too far. Maybe I go too far. I keep Freud on my wall and a cross in my
pocket.” He had pulled out a hand from
his pocket and shown Justin the small silver cross.
He continued, “It’s all about what
you think and what you believe. Are they
the same? Are they different? I’m here to help you Justin. I’m here to help you get through this and try
to find a source or a reason behind it all.
But keep in mind there are some things in life that can’t be
explained. I can sit here all day and
tell you the psychological reason why me and my wife have made it 30 years
together and are still as happy as ever.
I can sit here and tell you the psychological reason why my brother has
been married three times, is 50 years old, has no children, and just moved to
He hadn’t really known what to
feel when Dr. Baitman said that. What he
was really saying was, its up to you to figure all this out, I might not be
able to help. But for some reason, that
gave him hope. It was probably the wrong
kind of hope, though. It was the hope
that he wasn’t making her up and that somehow, fate was involved.
“Justin…” He snapped out from the
memory. “Do you?”
He sighed. “I try not to. But I mean, I’m sure I do sometimes. I mean, I know I get criticized for, ya know,
acting different around certain people.
It makes me feel insecure. I mean
yeah, when I get around a crowd that’s mainly urban or African American or
whatever…I guess I change how I talk.
But I can’t go in there talking like I’m a white boy from
Dr. Baitman smiled to himself and
cocked an eyebrow. “But you are a white
boy from
“But that’s not all I am. I guess I just wanna fit in, ya know? I’ve always wanted to fit in. I think we all have multiple personalities to
an extent. Like the weirdoes you treat-”
“Please Justin…”
He rolled his eyes. That was one problem he had come across. Whenever referencing other people with “problems”
the doc made him be more sensitive. “Ok
ok, the patients you see that really have multiple personalities, they just can’t
control them. But I mean, there are
times when I feel like being a prep, or a rebel, or a
hick, or down with my black friends, or sensitive, or or sexy or whatever…”
“But who is Justin? Who is the real Justin?”
He shrugged and pouted, not really
liking the turn of this conversation.
Sex was awkward and embarrassing, but now, now he was starting to feel a
little critical of himself. “Depends on
who I with.”
“Who are you right now?”
“Sarah, the transvestite from the
Dr. Baitman didn’t seem too
amused. “Nice one.”
Justin licked his lips and leaned
his head back on the couch, looking up at the ceiling. He didn’t know who he was right then. He didn’t like being asked that. “I don’t know
man. I the freak in therapy, I
guess. I’d guess I’m...hell, I don’t know…”
“You’re acting rather normal
now. Don’t seem to be a
prep, you’re not acting rebellious, I wouldn’t know about the ‘down’
comment. You don’t seem to be too sensitive,
and sorry, but you aren’t really turning me on.
I can hear your southern accent a little bit, but I wouldn’t call you a
hick. So who are you now?”
“Justin, I guess. What does this have to do with anything?” He didn’t know where they were going. This was supposed to be about his dreams, not
about his self image or his insecurity.
“Who were you with her, when you
were with Darcy?”
He nodded slowly, a little bit of clarity
coming to him about this conversation. “Sensitive,
sexy…man, I don’t even know. I just…I just was…” He smiled, thinking back on
her. Dammit, he wanted her back. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be trying to get rid of
her. She made him happy.
But she also made him miserable.
“Maybe…maybe you created someone
in your mind that you could really be yourself with. You didn’t have to put on a front with her. You didn’t have to be ‘down’ or be rebellious
or any of those other stereotypical labels.”
He thought about it. It made sense to him. He tapped his thumb against his knee and
nodded slowly, “Maybe…”
“Well, our times almost up.” Justin looked up shocked. He felt like he had just gotten there. It was always like this. They had an hour and half meetings at
The older man reached in front of
him to the table, picked up a leather book and handed it back to Justin. “Here’s your journal back. Do it each
morning. Everything you can remember
about your dreams the night before. If
you wake up in the middle of the night from a dream, get up and write it down, then go back to sleep. If you have time read some more of that book I
let you borrow. I’m here to help you
figure this out, but I’m hoping we can do it together. Give me all the insight you can,
alright? If you get an idea, tell me.”
Justin stood up and
stretched. He reached to the can on the
table and drank the last bit of his Sprite.
He smiled at the older man saying, “I think I’ve figured it out. You don’t know what the hell is wrong with
me.”
The other man stood up and reached
a hand out to Justin. The man was
obsessed with hand shakes. He shook Justin’s
hand every time he entered the door and right before he left. It made him feel all business like. He’d shake hands with Jive execs but not like
this. Most of the Jive execs you’d come
to know after a time and then a wave or a light hug, if you were close to them,
would be fine. But this guy you had to shake his hand. Justin shook his hand with the older mans and
as he said, “Not yet, but I think I’m narrowing it down. I mean, I’ve crossed necrophilia off my list.”
Justin shook his head, picked up
his can and walked to the door. “You’re
crazy.”
“It’s why I’m so good at what I
do.”
Justin turned at the doorway,
tossed his can in the trash that was by the door and waved, “Alright, see ya
Dr. B.”
The older man smiled and had a
seat at his desk. “Have a good week,
Justin.”
As he made his way out of the
office he waved at Cathy and blew a kiss to Sondra, who turned up her nose at
him with a smile. Sondra was the girl at
the front desk he was deathly afraid of the first time. What he had failed to notice was that Sondra
had a diamond ring on her finger and a small little belly. She had a month left before she would be on
maternity leave. She was only a year
older than him, but she seemed happy as ever.
He knew it was probably the pregnancy but she really did have a glow
about her. He wanted to be that
happy. He wanted people to be able to
look at him and just say, “damn he’s a happy guy, he must have it all.”
But he didn’t have it all. He was working through his problems and he was
getting better. He no longer drank
himself into a stupor or cried himself to sleep at night. But he was still lonely and he so desperately
wanted to be with someone again. Maybe,
just maybe him and Trace would go out that night.
Maybe…