Christopher’s Naughty Habit

By Tim Ruane

She has the flattest butt I have ever seen, I thought as I followed her through the door.

White walls, nice tint or hue or whatever, good room for having sex in.

Black psychoanalytic couches all over the place.

The Japanese lamp, an inevitable thing in a psychiatrist’s office.

Calming sounds of rivers comin’ through the speakers.

Smooth stones on the table next to the red chair where I sit once a week and groan and moan and field questions about my anxiety and depression and my hallucinations and my medicine – Viibryd, Thorazine, Thiazanene, Bibratol, Ruben and Elevation, which some nut chemists made, thinking they could cure me.

Worry stones, I guess.

Two burning sticks of incense, that’s weird.  Reminded me of my dope-smoking days in 6^th grade when I first went crazy.

My father was a Woodstock hippie – got laid there in the mud all the time, he said.

Smelled like dope in the office, too.  I smoked a lot of dope when I was 10, had my first toke when I was 4; like I said, my father got laid a lot at Woodstock.

Good old St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where I met the guy who shot the president.

I tried to strangle him to death one night, but failed.  The big black guards in their white uniforms nabbed me and dragged me off to an empty rubber rubber room.

Rubber rubber rubber; green green rubber; rubber rubber rubber; green green rubber; on the ceiling too – I swear; I never lie; or exaggerate - synthetic something or another, carcinogenic – yes – I will sue the bastards, will leave orders in my will after I die of some dreaded cancer or another, $750,000 or somethin', make my daughter, Charles, a rich girl.

Left me locked up in there for 13 days, although I am not certain about that, since I never saw the sun - no windows, not even barred-up windows – or the moon, which I pray holy prayers to every night, except on the nights I can’t see the fine gray-white orb with cool craters.  On these nights I curse God, the bastard, got a strange plan for me, if you ask me.

I sat first; then her.

She pulled her legs up onto the foot stool - mattress plaid, an oddity - and I looked up between her thighs under her 1960s miniskirt.

Doc Jenny didn’t mind.  It was a test she put me through every week to see if I had gone gay, or had a healthy sex drive, and she actually liked it, got a big charge out of it, at 42 or 44.

Did the usual how-was-your-weekend? obligatory shit and asked her a couple of personal questions about her sex life – hee-hee – she always dodges these questions like bullets fired from a Magnum 45 or a Magnum 43 or a Magnum 36 or a Magnum 28 or what have you.

Then I bleated like a Billy goat:

“I can’t stop lookin’ at porn on my computers, doc; and my wife and girlfriends are getting’ on my case.  They say I love the girls in the porn movies better than I love them, which is true, of course; but I mean, I don’t see anything wrong with watchin’ porn.  It increases my sexual appetite.  Now, every time I see girls in a coffee shop or the grocery store, I imagine if they would do this or that to me; or if they would let me do this or that to them.  You know what I mean, don’t ya doc?  I mean, I don’t want to get graphic or anything, like abig upside-down realism painting by Chuck Close.”

“How many computers did you say you have, Christopher?” asked the doc.

“Six, doc. Don’t you remember?  All Apple Macintoshes.  Twelve screens in all, since all my computers are laptops and I attached 47-inch screens to them.  I can see good fine healthy dirty sinful honest wholesome true-love sex in my bedroom no matter where I turn my head – lyin’ down or sittin’ up or sittin’ down.  It’s ingenious, if you ask me; don’t you agree with me, doc? Don’t you agree?”