Vengeance is #1
By Robert Chazz Chute
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Robert Chazz Chute
ISBN 978-0-9877807-8-2
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Vengeance is #1
Fact: Most shrinks—like 99% of them—are nuts. Psychos are attracted to the profession. Here’s how I think it happens: Neurotic parents breed and send their kids into therapy so they can become more like their parents. At first, nobody wants to talk to some useless stranger about why their parents hate them, but why else would parents send their to a psycho therapist? Then the kids start talking and get used to the taste of their bathwater. I, I, I. Me, me, me! Who can resist that?
After all that scab-peeling—once the hate is really ingrained—the little patients notice that their therapist has a pretty sweet job. Psychotherapists listen to them go on about how fucked up their parents really are for fifty-five minutes at a time for a whack a cash. What real skills are required besides patience, doodling and the ability to speak the magic words, “How does that make you feel?”
The psychos on the couch eventually become the psychos in the chair with the notebook, finally and officially cured because they are fixed, better than you, the healer. Turning patients into colleagues: That’s the greatest success the fields of psychology, psychiatry and social work are likely to achieve.
I know. I’ve sat in enough of their waiting rooms looking at old magazines. When I started out, none of the waiting rooms needed new paint jobs. Mama started me on the shrink treadmill early. When the best and most expensive didn’t work out, she hunted through the phonebook. I’m into the Ps now.
My mother doesn’t understand the therapeutic process. For instance, we’re standing in the kitchen. Mama’s in her PJs with a coffee cup holding her up even though it’s four in the afternoon. Mama is big on appearances when she goes out the door but inside the house it’s housecoats and the fuzzy grizzly bear slippers she gave me for Christmas. She decided they were warmer and cuter if she wore them. Mama’s looking at me with this perpetually surprised look on her face. It’s hard to figure out what she’s thinking because she always has that bat-out-of-the-fireplace look since she tweezed her eyebrows so much they don’t grow back anymore.
She’s standing there with her bare face hanging out saying, “Oh, Georgie! I was just talking to Mrs. Whositz at Sobeys and she said her Tanya’s psychotherapist really helped her with her anorexia.”
“Damn it, Mama! You were talking about me in the goddamn Sobeys!”
“Don’t swear. And perhaps you could supply me with a list of places where I’m allowed to speak about my daughter.”
“Sure. It’ll be a fuckin’ short list.”
“Don’t swear.” Mama always says that in a low tone—“well-modulated” Dr. Three-Therapists-Back called it—which makes me think Mama’s back on the Valium. If you take Valium for a long time—I googled—your lungs someday don’t work anymore. So maybe it is a long-term solution. “Well-modulated” is supposed to calm me the fuck down but it doesn’t work. Or maybe it’s supposed to keep Mama relaxed, I forget. We’re both supposed to “self-monitor” but I don’t want to look at her and I sure as hell don’t want to look at me.
Anyway, back to my for instance: “I don’t know what you’re so upset about, Georgie! I wasn’t blabbing about your mental health. We were talking about Tanya’s success!”
“Tanya’s a bitch.”
“Yes, but you can be, too, dear.”
“Goddamn it, Mama! What does Tanya’s anorexia have to do with me? I don’t have anorexia. I wish I did. I tried it and it made me hungry.”
“Well, eating disorders are all on the same rainbow, Georgie.”
I should just get tips on puking from Tanya but she’s got a thing about fat girls. Can’t really blame her for that. I mean, everybody’s got a thing about fat girls. Especially me. I read that if you have fat friends it makes you feel like it’s okay to be fat, too. There are people who want us to accept ourselves or even love ourselves no matter what. That seems unreasonable to me. The people who say that are old fat broads who are tired of trying to lose weight and just want to drop out. Or they’re so-called experts, skinny bitches who have somebody else do their makeup. I mean, experts are ridiculous, you know? People with good genes need to shut up when they feel the urge to give weight-loss advice to the terminally fat.
I know. I’ve been over 200 pounds since I was thirteen. I don’t even know what I weigh now. I decided when I turned fifteen that I wasn’t going to look at the scale until I felt like I’d be happy with the numbers. That was almost two years ago and every time I go to the bathroom, I feel like the scale in the corner by the bathtub is looking back at me.
Summer’s coming. There’s a misery, but at least I won’t have to suffer it at school. Everybody’s been to school so you know the drill: You’re either the moose or the hunter. Guess which one I am? Yeah, fat and in high school is like walking around with those huge moose horns that don’t fit through doors.
Hey, maybe if that bitch Tanya is cured, she’ll go from skinny bitch to moose, too. We could be friends for awhile there while she’s just overweight. Then when she gets to be too moosey, I’d have to stay away from her and laugh at her in gym class and bitch her out in the cafeteria for eating something. Like I said, I can’t have fat friends. They’d make me bigger by osmosis and I can’t get any bigger.
Last week I had a different kind of counselor—the stupidest species. The newbie guidance counselor scheduled a meeting with me (in my free period without even asking. Even math would have been much better.) Anyway, this guy who used to be the phys-ed guy before he got arthritis starts asking me about my goals.
“Supermodel,” I said, just to watch his face work through it. He couldn’t help himself. He glanced down at my belly and made a face like he’s got gas or something. Bitch.
Then he asks me what I want to be when I grow up and I say, “I dunno,” and he says “Me, too,” and smiles like that’s clever instead of pathetic. He was probably relating to me at my level or some shit that 50-something guys try to do, thinking they can still be cool at their age. Lame.
The phys-ed teacher (I now officially refuse him any title with the term “guidance” in it) talked about safety schools and showed me a few glossy brochures to get me hot and bothered. I wonder what I’m supposed to do because there aren’t any fat girls in the brochures. There are pretty, happy black girls and smiling Asian girls with glasses and all the guys look like they’re on The Basketball Team of Vacant Smiles. No dweebs, goths or fat girls need apply, I guess.
Lame-o says if I write some essays, I’d have a shot at some kind of scholarship because my marks in English are so high. That doesn’t seem all that impressive to me. It should come easily. Everybody speaks English here. I swim in it. If your language is whatever they speak in Malaysia and you get good marks in English, that would be worth something.
I think about my options. I’m good with a camera. That would have been cool since I could have assistants and look like a photographer all the time. Draped with enough cameras, like a whole store’s inventory, I’d have some fat camouflage.
I quit photography, though. I was getting some good action shots for an in-class assignment, taking photos of these two lanky girls who probably will end up as models snorting coke off each other’s ribs. Anyway, I was kneeling in front of them (it makes them look even taller) when some assholes—my so-called peers—made fun of me because my ass crack was popping from my jeans. Then I had trouble getting up quick and the boys were just howling mean.
The teacher, Mr. Call-Me-Mike Sandling was a good guy I guess, saying “Alright! Alright! That’s enough!”
When I looked up at him with my big, watery cow moose eyes, we both knew I wouldn’t be coming back through his fuckin’ door.
I wondered later if that’s why I got scheduled to see the guidance counselor. Maybe Call-Me-Mike thought I should get some attention from the crippled up phys-ed teacher, get some guidance and maybe some diet advice so I don’t come into school one day with home-made pipe bombs strapped across my moose belly.
I thought about the pipe bombs hard when the former phys-ed bonehead put his twisted up hand on my shoulder and says (real soulful) “You’ll figure it out, Georgie. Everybody’s got something.”
Is the Psyche 101 textbook actually called Useless Platitudes? I’ll figure it out. Everybody’s got something. Ha!
“Yeah,” I replied. “I can see you’ve got it all figured out.”
He grimaces, but says nothing. Then he goes back in his office, shuts the door, takes out the pistol he keeps in his desk drawer to protect himself from the black kids and hockey goons he’s scared of and puts the muzzle in his mouth. He pauses to roll a tear and feel bad for talking to me just before he blows his brains out. The back wall of the guidance office will always be art no matter how many times the school custodian repaints. Well, I imagine that’s what Lame-o should do.
I would if I were him.
I’ve been eating more pizza rolls since my chat with the phys-ed teacher. I think what a useless bitch he is and pop another one. I think about how, even if I get some kind of bullshit English scholarship, it’s like four more years of being stuck in a bigger high school. Then I eat another pizza roll. Nobody’s going to give me a scholarship for going to a cabin on a mountain so I can be alone to commune with my moose brothers and sisters, watch TV, order in pizza and read Twilight and The Hunger Games and graphic novels for the rest of my life. Then I think how all life is like being stuck in high school forever and I finish the bag of day old pizza rolls. I’m sick of pizza rolls, but that’ll wear off.
I guess I’m looking for a rescue helicopter to haul my moose ass out of here in a big moose net. That’s why I tell Mama to call the new therapist, the one down in the Ps. Look at me, so weak and young and full of hope, huh? I’ve seen a lot of helicopters but Moose Rescue never comes. I forget how many counselors I’ve seen. Dad lives with his new and improved family now but Mama says he’s got excellent insurance through work so I can go theraped as much as I want. You’d think they’d come up with a better title. Therapist spells ‘the rapist.’ Didn’t they even notice?
So back to the whole psycho cult thing where, if you become one of them, you’re cured. I refused to become one of them, of course. I’m not a joiner. Ever see more than one moose at a time? Me, neither.
I don’t know how they ever make moose babies. I think if you’re a guy moose, it’s pretty hard to even look at a cow moose so you close your eyes and think of fucking a pretty deer with slender flanks and long eyelashes. The morning after, Moose Girl and Moose Boy are off on their own again, pretending it never happened. Moose Boy doesn’t even look at the cow moose as he passes her in the hallway outside of history class.
Anyway, my psycho psychotherapists would see me once a week for awhile and then one day they’d sigh heavily and refer me on to someone else so I’d have to dump my guts on the nice rug of the next therapist all over again. And the next. And the next.
Sometimes they’d call me “difficult” or “combative.” That’s what they put in your file when you aren’t “cooperative.” One old Freudian called me “truculent and intransigent.” I had to look those words up, but when I threw a desk lamp at him, he got my meaning right away. Deeds, not words.
I’m just looking for answers. I wasn’t abused. I had a pretty boring and uneventful childhood. No uncles with big hairy paws lurk in my deep dark background. My parents didn’t even believe in spanking, though sometimes they couldn’t seem to help themselves.
I remember one therapist said it was hard to help me because she couldn’t bring herself to like me. She complained that I smelled bad and the clients who came into her waiting room were turned off by the smell. She was pretty fed up, I guess. She topped it off by saying she was just trying to help me. Then she told me I was terminated.
“Are you going to have me killed by a robot from the future?”
“It means I’m dismissing you.”
“Like in the military?”
“I’m firing you as a patient,” she said.
“That’s odd,” I said. “My parents pay you, so I thought you worked for me.”
“Goodbye,” she said.
“Can we discuss this? I’m not super fond of you right now, but I don’t want to start this all over again.”
“Get out,” she said.
So, yeah, she was kind of a bitch about it. We got a letter of termination later that week (together with a bill for the services she had failed to render) and a list of three other psychotherapists I could piss off next. (I assume she picked three colleagues she hated in psycho school.)
However, the next one wasn’t so bad. Her name was Circe, which I messed up when I tried to pronounce it. It turns out you say it, “sear-say” which is pretty cool. I liked this new one at first because we started with her name and ended up talking about mine.
“Georgie” is short for Georgette, which Mom chose because I was the cutest fat baby she’d ever seen. I was named after some character on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I’ve never seen it, but Georgette was really sweet and Mama hoped the name would make me sweet, too. Didn’t take.
I told Dr. Circe that it sounded to me like I was stuck with a fat girl’s name. She suggested I change it, just like that. We batted a few ideas around and I said, “What’s the thinnest girl’s name there is?” and without hesitation she answered, “Gidget.”
That’s what we accomplished in our first session. I came home and announced my new, improved name. Mom was so pissed I was sure I was finally with the right therapist and Moose Rescue was on the way. The important thing in judging someone’s intelligence is how much he or she agrees with you. If they agree with you a lot, they must be very intelligent.