With a Little Help from My Friends

Dr. Michelle Monahan was cautious of me lying down on her couch. Dirt was rubbed all over my clothes. The bushes I slide behind must have been watered recently because some of the dirt was mixed into mud. It was drying in clumps on me. Dr. Monahan first spread out a blanket on her couch then let me recline on it.

I have only been to a psychiatrist’s office twice before this visit. My mother had to see one when she was divorcing my father for the second time. The psychiatrist wanted my mom to bring her kids with her to see how we felt about the divorce. I was silent the entire session. I think I almost broke down crying. I don’t like talking about things. Me? I am a ‘bottler’. The psycho doctor labeled me this. Everything, like emotions and feelings, is stored within me like a Genie’s bottle. But rub me three times and…

The office was extremely dark. The walls were a dark red, and there wasn’t much lighting. I am not sure why. It made me sleepy. The dark atmosphere didn’t want me to explain myself to her, to gush about myself. There was a low chandelier dangling in the middle of the room. Crystal beads glinted and shook as Dr. Monahan shut the door behind her.

Her dark brown hair was up in a tight bun. Small glasses were perched on her pointed nose. The woman looked tense and aggravated. I was always under the impression that psychiatrists were supposed to be relaxed, inviting, and warm. Michelle Monahan looked like an uptight bitch. ‘Listen broad,’ I wanted to say, ‘if you want me to talk you need to get that fucking stick out of your ass… Bitch.’

“So…” Her aged voice holds the ‘o’ sound for a few seconds as she tries to find my name on her file. “Spencer,” she finally says. “Mister, Spencer James Smith. We have already met over the phone, so introductions aren’t necessary.” Her eyes glide over the file and land on my face. She lowers the file. A grim smile is on her face. The file rises back to my pleasure. This woman was starting to scare me, like my mother.

I stare at the ceiling. It was beige to offset the maroon walls. “I don’t want to be here, Dr. Monahan. The only reason I am here is because it is the only way I can get back on tour. If I can‘t get back on tour I will be disappointing a bunch of people. So let’s get through this bull shit.”

“If you want, I can lie to your manager. I understand he is the one in charge. He did call me in the first place. I can tell him that you went to all your schedule meetings and are in a better mood. It won’t fix anything, though. At least let me try to help you.”

I roll on my side. “Yeah, doc, fix me because I am fucking broken. You know, I fucking hate that word. ‘Fix’. I tried to fix things, Monahan. Wanna know where it got me? It made me a fucking lunatic! And now I am here. So fuck off with this fixing shit. Fuck fixing things. From my experience it makes things worse. I fix something and make it more useless. I just screw shit up.” What the hell am I doing? I am letting it happen again. I am running my mouth. The ‘bottler’ has fallen off the ledge and has cracked. “I can’t fix anything. I make it worse. Worse, worse, worse. I am not a fucking saint!” My stomach heaves. My body limps forward. I feel sick and weak.

Since my head is bent forward I don’t see the satisfied smile on her face. “We are getting somewhere. Can we start from the beginning? When did you first feel like you had to fix things? When did you think things around you were broken?”

Things were broken when my parents foolishly had children. “It starts with my parents, but doesn‘t always start with them?” They were teenage parents. She was sixteen while he was nineteen. The idiot married her when she was five months pregnant. I was born. My father, my namesake, cheated on her. She divorced him.

“My parents were a little messed up. They married young. My mom lost her sanity.” Jenna McHale married Spencer Smith on May Day. She turned seventeen two weeks later. The woman was already kicked out of her house by then, though. They kicked her out the second she explained why Spencer Smith was marrying her. Even to this day my mom’s parents don’t talk to us. Their daughter is a harlot to them.

My dad’s parents let my mother stay in my dad’s room and moved him to the basement. This arrangement lasted until my mother graduated high school early; she was bright. But she didn’t go to Yale, even though she was accepted. Since she got knocked up her parents took away her trust fund. She didn’t even have enough money to go to community college. Jenna McHale could have been a great lawyer.

My dad was already in college when they were married and then later had me. He became an architect. Little Jenna worked at a sandwich shop. It helped when they moved out of Spencer’s parents’ home. She brought excess sandwiches because they were poor when he started his junior internship at an architect company. Four years passed and Spencer sr. was getting up in the world. The company, Jacobs and Harmon, hired Spencer to design the new courthouse. His salary doubled; his ego tripled. The stupid fucker started shagging an intern. My father likes his women young. Jenna divorced Spencer even though she wasn’t making enough to support herself and me. Baby Spencer, that would be me, was only four years old at the time. A year passes. The two lovers kept in contact. They had an affair (he had started dating a cop named Summer Cuoco), which reignited their love. The woman must have lost brain cells while being with him because he impregnated her, again. They got remarried because of it. I am pissed at her for getting impregnated by him again after he caused her so much pain. This time they had twins, Maggie May Smith and Penny Lane Smith. They named me after my dad and named the twins after brilliant songs from the Beatles and Rod Stewart. Fucking twins get everything. From then on end I was gypped. When the twins turned five she divorced him. They never remarried. He never left her after the second divorce. They are madly in love. They are just madly insane to me. Because of my parents’ instability I am slightly off kilter. “My mom divorced my dad twice. They still live together even though she is no longer his wife. They are strange. I have daddy and mommy issues. You can write that down.”

Spencer sr. and Jenna are like any other couple, dysfunctional. He owns his own architect firm, Blu Prints. Jenna owns a hippie shop named Hollow Tree. She never got an education. I resent her for it. She could be completely independent. The woman confuses me by being partially independent. She needs my dad, but isn’t married to him despite the couple of times he tried to remarry her. I think that I am more like my mom. That probably relates to my current situation. I want to divorce myself from Ryan. I want that boy as far away from me as humanly possible, dead would work fine. But then again I need him to function. He is best friend, yet I hate him. And I can’t even recognize when I started to hate him.

Monahan chews on the end of her pen. She was, by now, getting tired of my extremely long pauses. I was getting lost in thought and not wanting to communicate. “What about your friends? Did anything they do set you off into your violent reaction on a mister Jason Reeve, the roadie for your band? You pushed Mr. Reeve down a flight of stairs and managed to not get sued by him.”

I turn my head to the side and stare at her fish tank. There were three fishes floating around. A big orange fish swam around like it owned the tank. There was a smaller light blue that followed the orange one’s path. The last fish, a meek yellow fish is hiding in a rocky cave. “You see those fishes,” I point out to Monahan. “There is a king fish and a follower.”

“Yes, Darwin is the bigger fish. The smaller one is Mendel.” Her pen points in their general directions.

The fish swim around aimlessly. The unknown little yellow fish sticks its head out from the underneath the rock. Darwin glides by and startles the yellow back into hiding. “That little fish, little yellow. That is me. Hiding from a bigger being. Scared into remission. That bigger fish, Darwin, is my best friend Ryan. The head honcho. The man with an ego big enough to fill the room. I am the shy yellow fish.”

“Alfred Wallace,” she says in an interested voice. “That fish is named after Alfred Wallace who also came up with the theory of natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin. But who is more known for their work, and who was snubbed?”

My lower jaw drops in shock. How can seemingly innocent fish relate to actual life and my exact situation? “Oh my God. Darwin. Darwin is more known for being the creator of the idea of natural selection because his work was more understood by common people. Alfred Wallace didn’t talk in a language the average person could understand. He wrote like a scientist. He was misunderstood, therefore snubbed even though he had the same idea.” My body sits up. “I am Alfred Wallace.”

A smile is on Dr. Monahan’s face. Then she glances at the watch on her wrist. “We have gotten through a lot in such a short time. But our hour is up. I want to get through progress like this next time, Spencer. I am proud.” The doctor escorts me out the door. A fidgety man rises from the bench and walks into the dark office with Monahan.

I stop at the receptionist and pay for my visit. The receptionist, a middle aged woman with jet black hair, takes my money and hands me a receipt. “I am sorry to bother you, but do you know the woman who had the appointment before me?”

“That strange little broad?” I nod. “Yeah. That is Abernathy Utivich, except she goes by the name Tiger Lily. She tried to kill herself.”

That is what I get for being nosy. “Oh, okay. Thank you.”