My favorite dentist said, “We still need to discuss your work detail. Each person in the unit has to clean an area. We have you down for the bathrooms this week.”
“I don’t think so,” I sputtered. “Starting tomorrow there’s gonna be maid service in this joint. You can talk to her about it.” I walked into the bedroom, slammed the door, and dialed Alan Lipsky to tell him about the very insanity of the Talbot Martians. We laughed for a good fifteen minutes and then started talking about old times.
Before I hung up, I asked if he’d heard anything from the Duchess. He said he hadn’t, and I hung up the phone sadder for that fact. It had been almost a week now, and things were looking grim with her. I flicked on the TV and tried shutting my eyes, but, as usual, sleep didn’t come easily. Finally, sometime around midnight, I did fall asleep—with another day of sobriety under my belt and a raging hard-on inside my underwear.
The next morning, eight o’clock sharp, I called Old Brookville. The phone was picked up on the first ring.
“Hello?” said the Duchess softly.
“Nae? Is that you?”
Sympathetically: “Yes, it’s me.”
“How are you?”
“I’m okay. Hanging in there, I guess.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I…I called to say hi to the kids. Are they there?”
“What’s wrong?” she said sadly. “You don’t wanna talk to me?”
“No, of course I want to talk to you! There’s nothing in the world I want more than to talk to you. I just didn’t think you wanted to talk to me.”
Kindly: “No, that’s not true. I do want to talk to you. For better or worse, you’re still my husband. I guess this is the worse part, right?”
I felt tears coming to my eyes, but I fought them down. “I don’t know what to say, Nae. I…I’m so sorry for what happened…. I…I—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t apologize. I understand what happened, and I forgive you. That’s the easy part, forgiveness. Forgetting’s a different story.” She paused. “But I do forgive you. And I want to go on. I want to try to make this marriage work. I still love you, in spite of everything.”
“I love you too,” I said, through tears. “More than you know, Nae. I…I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how it happened. I…I hadn’t slept in months and”—I took a deep breath—“I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s all a blur.”
“It’s my fault as much as yours,” she said kindly. “I watched you killing yourself and just stood there and did nothing. I thought I was helping you, but I was really doing the opposite. I didn’t know.”
“It’s not your fault, Nae, it’s mine. It’s just that it happened so slowly, over so many years, that I didn’t see it coming. Before I knew it I was out of control. I’ve always considered myself a strong person, but the drugs were stronger.”
“The kids miss you. I miss you too. I’ve wanted to speak to you for days now, but Dennis Maynard told me I should wait until you were fully detoxed.”
That rat fuck! I’ll get that bastard! I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down. The last thing I needed was to lose my temper with the Duchess on the phone. I needed to prove to her that I was still a rational man, that the drugs hadn’t permanently altered me. “You know,” I said calmly, “it’s a good thing you got those second two doctors to come to the hospital”—I refused to use the words psych unit—“because I despised Dennis Maynard more than you can imagine. I almost didn’t go to rehab because of him. There was something about him that just rubbed me the wrong way. I think he had a thing for you.” I waited for her to call me crazy.
She chuckled. “It’s funny you say that, because Laurie thought the same thing.”
“Really?” I said, with contract murder in my heart. “I thought I was just being paranoid!”
“I don’t know,” said the luscious Duchess. “At first I was too much in shock to pick up on it, but then he asked me to go to the movies, which I thought was a bit out of line.”
“Did you go?” The most appropriate method of death, I figured, would be blood loss through castration.
“No! Of course I didn’t go! It was inappropriate for him to ask. Anyway, he left the next day and that was the last I heard of him.”
“How come you wouldn’t come see me in the hospital, Nae? I missed you so bad. I thought about you all the time.”
There was a long silence, but I waited it out. I needed an answer. I was still struggling as to why this woman, my wife—who obviously loved me—wouldn’t come visit me after a suicide attempt. It made no sense.
After a good ten seconds, she said, “At first I was scared because of what happened on the stairs. It’s hard to explain, but you were like a different person that day, possessed or something. I don’t know. And then Dennis Maynard told me I shouldn’t come see you until you went to rehab. I didn’t know whether he was right or wrong. It wasn’t like I had a road map to follow, and he was supposedly the expert. Anyway, all that matters is that you went to rehab, right?”
I wanted to say no, but this wasn’t the time to start an argument. I had the rest of my life to argue with her. “Yeah, well, I’m here, and that’s the most important thing.”
“How bad are the withdrawals?” she asked, changing the subject.
“I haven’t really had any withdrawals, or at least any I could feel. Believe it or not, the second I got here I lost the urge to do drugs. It’s hard to explain, but I was sitting in the waiting room and all of a sudden the compulsion just left me. Anyway, this place is kind of wacky, to say the least. What’s gonna keep me sober is not Talbot Marsh; it’s me.”
Very nervous now: “But you’re still gonna stay there for the twenty-eight days, right?”
I laughed gently. “Yeah, you can relax, sweetie; I’m staying. I need a break from all the madness. Anyway, the AA part is really good. I read the book and it’s awesome. I’ll go to meetings when I get home, just to make sure I don’t relapse.”
We spent the next half hour talking on the phone, and by the end of the conversation I had my Duchess back. I knew it. I could feel it in my bones. I told her about all my erections and she promised she would help in that department just as soon as I got home. I asked her if she would have some phone sex with me, but she declined. I would keep after her about that, though. Eventually, I figured, she would break down.
Then we exchanged I love yous and promises to write each other every day. Before I hung up I told her that I would call her three times a day.
The next few days passed uneventfully, and before I knew it I had made it a full week without doing drugs.
Each day we were given a few hours of personal time, to go to the gym and such, and I quickly insinuated myself into a small cadre of kiss-ass Martians. One of the doctors—an anesthesiologist who’d had a habit of anesthetizing himself while his patients were on the table under his care—had been at Talbot Marsh for over a year, and he’d had his car shipped down. It was a piece-of-shit gray Toyota hatchback, but it served its purpose.
It was about a ten-minute car ride to the gym, and I was sitting in the right backseat, wearing a pair of gray Adidas shorts and a tank top, when I popped an enormous woody. It was probably the vibrations from the four-cylinder engine, or maybe it was the bumps in the road, but something had sent a couple a pints of blood to my loins. It was a huge, rock-hard erection, the sort that presses against your underwear and needs to be adjusted and then readjusted, lest it drive you insane.
“Check this out,” I said, pulling down the front of my gym shorts and showing the Martians my penis.
They all turned and stared. Yes, I thought, it looked good. Despite my height, God had been very kind to me in that department. “Not too shabby!” I said to my doctor friends, as I grabbed my penis and gave it a few yanks. Then I slapped it against my stomach, which created a rather pleasant thud.
Finally, after the fourth thud, everybody started laughing. It was a rare moment of levity at Talbot Marsh, a moment between guys, a moment between Martians, where the normal societal niceties could be stripped away, where homophobia could be entirely ignored, and men could be just that: men! I had a fine workout that afternoon, and the rest of the day passed uneventfully.
The following day, just after lunch, I was sitting in an astonishingly boring group therapy session. My counselor strolled in, asking to see me.
I couldn’t have been happier—until two minutes later, when we were sitting in her small office and she cocked her head to the side at a very shrewd angle and said, using the tone of the Grand Inquisitor, “So, how are you, Jordan?”
I turned the corners of my mouth down and shrugged. “I’m okay, I guess.”
She smiled warily and asked, “Have you been having any urges lately?”
“No, not at all,” I said. “On a scale of one to ten, I would say my urge to do drugs is a zero. Maybe even less than that.”
“Oh, that’s very good, Jordan. Very, very good.”
What the fuck? I knew I was missing something here. “Um, I’m a bit confused. Did someone tell you that I was thinking about using drugs?”
“No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “It has nothing to do with that. I’m just wondering if you’ve had any other urges lately, anything other than drugs.”
I searched my short-term memory for urges but came up blank, other than the obvious urge to bolt out of this place and go home to the Duchess and f**k her brains out for a month straight. “No, I haven’t had any urges. I mean, I miss my wife and everything and I’d like to go home and be with her, but that’s about it.”
She pursed her lips and nodded her head slowly, then she said, “Have you been having urges to expose yourself in public?”
“What?” I snapped. “What are you talking about? What do you think, I’m a flasher or something?” I shook my head in contempt.
“Well,” she said gravely, “I received three written complaints today, from three separate patients, and they all say you exposed yourself to them—that you pulled down your shorts and masturbated in their presence.”
“That’s a complete load of crap,” I sputtered. “I wasn’t jerking off, for Chrissake. I just yanked on it a few times and slapped it against my stomach so we could all hear the sound. That’s all. What’s the big deal about that? Where I come from, a little bit of nudity between men isn’t anything to write home about.” I shook my head. “I was just f**king around. I’ve had an erection since I got to this place. I guess my dick is finally waking up from all the drugs. But since it seems to bother everyone so much, I’ll keep the snake in its cage for the next few weeks. No big deal.”