Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions

Judith Podell

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Judith Podell

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Blues
for Beginners

Smokescreen

Ground
Zero

Industry and Simple Gratitude

Blues
for Advanced Beginners

The
Sphinx of Margate

Unmentionable Acts with Shoes

Animal
Behavior

Vikings

The Ad
Man’s Dutiful Daughter

Death
of the Blues

Woke up this morning

cat threw a hairball on the bed.

Said, I woke up this morning

cat puke all over the bed.

Went to the kitchen

Mr. Coffee was dead.

‘‘Post-Graduate Blues,’’

by Memphis Earlene Gray

.

Most blues begin ‘‘woke up this morning.’’

“Gotta good woman’’ is a bad way to begin the
blues,

unless you stick something nasty in the next
line:

“Gotta good woman— with the meanest dog in town.”

.

Blues are simple. After you have the first line
right, repeat it.

Then find something that rhymes.

Gotta a good woman

with the meanest dog in town.

he got teeth like Margaret Thatcher

and he weighs 500 pound.

The blues are not about limitless choice.

Blues cars are Chevies and Cadillacs.

Other acceptable blues transportation is Greyhound
bus or a southbound train.

Walkin’ plays a major part in the blues lifestyle. So
does fixin’ to die.

Teenagers can’t sing the blues.

Adults sing the blues.

Blues adulthood means old enough to get the electric
chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.

You can have the blues in New York City but not in
New Jersey.

Hard times in Vermont or North Dakota are just
depression.

Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City are still the
best places to have the blues.

The following colors do not belong in the blues:

a. orange

b. beige

You can’t have the blues in an office or a
honky-tonk. The lighting is wrong.

More good places for the blues:

a. the highway

b. the jailhouse

c. the empty bed

No one will believe it’s the blues if you wear a
suit, unless you happen to be an old black man.

Do you have the right to sing the blues?

Yes, if:

a. your first name is a southern state.

b. you’re blind.

c. you shot a man in Memphis.

d. you can’t be satisfied.

No, if:

a. you once were blind but now can see.

b. you’re deaf.

Neither Frank Sinatra nor Meryl Streep could ever
sing the blues.

If you ask for water and baby gives you gasoline it’s
the blues.

Other blues beverages include:

a. wine

b. Irish whiskey

c. muddy water

If it occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack it’s
blues death.

Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is a blues way
to die.

So is the electric chair, substance abuse, or being
denied treatment in an emergency room.

Some blues names for women:

a. Sadie

b. Big Mama

Some blues names for men:

a. Willie

b. Joe

c. Little Willie

d. Lightning

Persons with names like Sierra or Sequoia will not be
permitted to sing the blues no matter how many men they shoot in
Memphis.

Psychoanalysis is the ultimate dead end for
self-improvement junkies. The practice is elitist, intellectually
suspect, and inherently demeaning to women. Your basic model shrink
is a middle-aged bearded man, usually Jewish, supported by a
pyramid of female misery, much of it Jewish as well. Nonetheless I
have a standing noontime appointment with Dr. Freundlicht Monday
through Friday with Thursday off.

.

From the voice at the other end of the
telephone, I imagine Dr. Lee Freundlicht to be a 60 year old woman
with a two pack a day cigarette habit and modern art on her waiting
room walls, so I make the appointment for an initial consultation.
I turn out to be right about the modern art—one large Miro print of
copulating amoebas in primary colors and a small Paul Klee of
stylized pastel clowns in profile.

A man sits across from me in the waiting
room, his head buried in the latest issue of Time. He’s wearing a
pin-striped suit and a guilty expression.

An honest lawyer, or maybe he works for the
government.

I’m a government lawyer. I work the
Department of Labor. Most days I feel like a dish mop, a nothing, a
fraud.

At 11:45 A.M., he looks up from his
magazine.

“Do you have an appointment with Dr.
Freundlicht too?” My voice is full of false brightness to mask the
trepidation.

“My appointment’s at noon,” he says.

“Today’s Wednesday, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s Thursday,” he says firmly.

I reset the calendar on my watch to Thursday,
and put my raincoat back on, prepared to leave.

At 11:50 A.M. a crying woman comes out of Dr.
Freundlicht’s office.

At noon, Dr. Freundlicht’s door opens
again.

He looks like a tenured professor, the sort
who serves sherry to sophomores.

No beard, but a brushy brown mustache. His
brown suit must be twenty years old, and he’s wearing
hushpuppies.

No cigarettes either.

.

The office is a low ceilinged white room with
a view of the parking lot. The backless brown leather couch is wide
enough to accommodate the world’s most obese analysand and looks
like the text book model. A small red and black Bokhara rug the
size of a bathmat lies next to it. I spot only one ashtray, a tiny
one carved out of petrified wood.

“Do I have to lie on it?” I ask, meaning the
couch.

“I prefer initial consultations face to
face,” Dr. Freundlicht says.

He motions to the twin brown club chairs,
also in leather.

“The man in your waiting room thinks it’s
Thursday,” I tell him.

Dr. Freundlicht looks perplexed.

“You’ve got another patient out there.”

“Would you excuse me?” he says.

While he’s gone I contemplate the bathmat
Bokhara, its agitated paisley medallions barely held in by a border
of more frantic paisleys. Hundreds of knots per inch, the product
of a land where human life is cheap and child labor unregulated.
When Dr. Freundlicht returns he apologizes for the
inconvenience.

.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

Maybe I’ve come a long way, but men in suits
can make me feel like a trespasser. The face I see every morning in
my bathroom mirror still belongs to a cipher. There is no
alternative to boredom except anxiety.

“I’m an American girl and not the product of
a broken home,” I say. “It’s supposed to be better than this.”

.

After our second session Dr. Freundlicht
deems me a suitable candidate for psychoanalysis. This is meant to
be a compliment. Suitable candidate means an articulate,
self-absorbed, nervous wreck with good health insurance and no
immediate plans for leaving town. By the third session I climb onto
his brown leather couch like it is home, and place the tiny
petrified wood ashtray on my chest for ballast.

“The aim of psychoanalysis is to transform
misery into ordinary unhappiness,” he says. “This is not a joke. I
suspect you will find ordinary unhappiness a distinct
improvement.”

I empty the ashtray twice.

Our fourth session I ask for a bigger
ashtray.

“Would you mind very much not smoking?” he
says.

He might as well ask if I mind not
breathing.

‘‘I smoke three packs of Merits a day, four
if I stay up late,” I explain. “That’s an average of five
cigarettes per waking hour, more if I’m actually talking. Analysis
is known as the talking cure, isn’t it?”

“If you feel strongly about it,” he says in a
reasonable tone of voice,

‘‘I’ll withdraw the suggestion. Please watch
out for the rug.”

.

Dr. Freundlicht is a gentleman. A trifle
absent minded, but mild mannered and thoughtful.

If I don’t watch out we’ll have transference.
Women patients always fall in love with their shrinks. The ones who
don’t have self-destructive affairs with them trot off to grad
school to become psychiatric social workers so they can run
encounter groups for a living. Psychoanalysis is such a werewolf
profession.

He’s starting to show up in my dreams
anyway.

For instance, he’s climbing a long flight of
stairs to find me. My father, holding an aluminum snow shovel,
blocks his passage and I hide in the closet of my childhood
bedroom, terrified of blame. I don’t tell Dr. Freundlicht about
that dream nor the nightmare about getting stuck in the freezer
chest of Friendly’s Ice Cream Parlor. Instead, I feed him something
safe, the dream where I watch my hair turn from black to gray and
back again.

“What color is my hair?” he asks.

“Salt and pepper?’’

I’ve been lying on the couch long enough to
forget what he looks like.

“You could call it salt and pepper.”

I am instantly furious.

“That dream was about me, not you. You must
think you’re the center of my universe.”

He just laughs.

“I would, if I didn’t know it was only
transference.”

After that comes one of those pauses that
feels like an afternoon. The silence is almost unbearable except
talking would be worse.

“What aren’t you saying?”

“Oh, nothing,” I say.

You’d think license to talk about yourself
for an hour would be delightful but it’s not, not if he actually
listens.

“You’re thinking of something.”

“Nothing important.”

Nothing is unimportant in analysis, no matter
how lame, inane or picayune. Nothing is too dumb for words.

“I shouldn’t be smoking in here,” I say,
flashing suddenly on a recent article in the Post about the effect
of secondary cigarette smoke on nonsmokers. “I’m probably giving
you lung cancer by proxy.”

“That last statement is an excellent example
of how you frequently make yourself feel guilty,” he says. “I’m
also touched by your concern.”

I burst into tears.

.

It’s been months since I’ve looked him in the
eye. In memory now his face is an amalgamation of Walter Cronkite
and Walt Disney. This relationship is certainly meaningful but also
perverse, since it violates basic laws of social intercourse. I’m
supposed to tell him anything that comes to mind without fear or
censorship but he is not allowed to retaliate. I never attack
directly. Instead I sneer at his office furnishings.

Why is so much of it brown? Why only National
Geographic and Time in the waiting room; is he afraid of
People?

Sometimes I trash his profession.

“Any English major could do you job. English
majors know all about symbolic interpretation,” I tell him.

I am usually nasty at that certain time of
the month, the time when he bills me.

.

The remark is intended as disinterested
sociological observation, not reproach.

“One pays an analyst for the same reason one
might prefer paying for sex,” I tell him.

“You’re calling me a whore,” he replies
amiably.

I see him in pasties, a G-string and those
awful hushpuppies and my face burns with shame.

“That’s not what I meant. What I meant was I
like paying because I need to feel in control.”

“Except you hate to pay me. Look how your
hands shake! I’ll bet you got the date wrong again.”

This time I’ve filled in the correct date,
only I wrote the check out payable to myself.

“It’s just the amount. Writing checks this
big gets me flustered.”

Even with Blue Cross reimbursements the
amount seems hard to justify. A month of psychoanalysis could feed
a third world village.