Running with Scissors (11 page)

In addition to calling each other standard names like
bitch
and
whore
, the Finches incorporated Freud’s stages of psychosexual development into their arsenal of invectives.

“You’re so
oral
. You’ll never make it to
genital
! The most you can ever hope for is to reach
anal
, you immature, frigid old maid,” Natalie yelled.

“Stop antagonizing me,” Hope shouted. “Just stop transferring all this anger onto me.”

“Your avoidance tactics are
not
going to work, Miss Hope,” Natalie warned. “I’m not going to let you just slink away from me. You hate me and you have to confront me.”

I glanced over at the grand piano and thought of happier times. Just last week, a chronic schizophrenic patient of the doctor’s named Sue had played show tunes while Natalie, Hope and I stood around the piano singing. “
There’s no business like show business, like no business I know
. . .” Sue would play for as long as we wanted her to, provided we didn’t use her name. She insisted on being called “Dr. F.”

“You need to talk to Dad, Natalie. Something’s wrong with you. I’m telling you this because I’m your sister and I love you. You’ve got to see Dad. Please make an appointment.”

I heard Natalie stomping and for a moment, I worried she would come into the living room where I was sitting. She would see me and know that I’d been eavesdropping and then somehow pull me into the middle of this thing. But the stomping wasn’t because Natalie was coming into this room. It was because Natalie had wrestled her sister onto the sofa.

“Okay, you bitch, say it.”

“Get
off
of me,” Hope said, and I could hear she was having a hard time breathing. Natalie was a big girl.

“Admit it!”

“Natalie, get up. I can’t breathe.”

“Then you’re gonna die.”

There was a thick silence and then a strangled-sounding Hope. “Alright, alright, I hate you. There, are you happy now?”

Natalie let out a belchy, “Fuck it.” She stomped out of the room and up the stairs. “This is all such bullshit.” From the top of the stairs she shouted, “You will never have any emotional maturity.”

Hope screamed back. “I’ll get a restraining order placed against you, Natalie. You’re out of control and I’ll do it.”

Natalie slammed her door.

The fight was over.

It had turned out to only be a four. Maybe a four-pointfive on a scale of one through ten; ten meaning police involvement or committal to a psychiatric hospital. The problem was, there was nobody else around to join in. I had encountered an interesting principle: the more people, the better the fight.

Usually, they started with just two people bickering over something small. Like what to watch on TV. Then a third person would enter the room and see two people screaming over the TV and they’d decide to moderate, only they’d end up taking a side. Eventually, someone else would get sucked in.

The most excellent fights involved five or more people. Eventually the fight would be resolved the way all disputes were resolved: Dr. Finch. He would be called at the office or the arguing group would travel en masse to his office, a hostile collective gang, and oust whatever patient he was seeing at the time. “Family emergency,” someone would say. And the patient, whether a potential suicide or somebody suffering from a multiple personality disorder, would be transferred to the waiting room to drink Sanka with Cremora while Finch solved the dispute.

Finch believed that anger was the crux of mental illness. He believed that anger, unless it was expressed freely, would destroy a person. This explained the constant fighting in the house. Since they were tiny, the Finch children had been encouraged not just to sing, dance and jump rope but also to vent.

Anger was like the ground hamburger of our existence. Its versatility was inspiring. There was Anger Turned Inward, Repressed Anger, Misguided Anger. There were Acts Made in Anger, Things Said in Anger and people who might very well die if they didn’t Face Their Anger.

So we screamed at each other constantly. It was like a competition and the prize was mental health. Every so often Finch would say, “Hope has been expressing a lot of healthy anger lately. I truly believe she’s moved up to the next level in the stages of her emotional development. She’s leaving the anal and moving into the phallic.” So then everybody hated Hope because she walked around being so smug and emotionally mature.

Although his peacockian displays of anger and his high decibel baritone voice prevented most people from directly confronting him, there were times when the doctor himself was the target of someone’s “healthy expression.” Usually Agnes’s.

The doctor and Agnes had been married for what seemed like hundreds of years. When she’d met him, he was a handsome, promising young medical student. She was an attractive and traditional Catholic girl. Surely, she could have had no idea what she was getting herself into.

She reminded me of a scatterbrained old Cadillac that had been driven into the ground but somehow kept on starting, without fuss. Normally, Agnes was just there in the background, wordlessly agreeing, endlessly sweeping, making herself invisible and generally staying on the sidelines.

So it was especially exciting when Agnes flew into a rage. And all her rages were directed at the doctor.

The problem was that the doctor had a mistress. Actually, he had three of them, and he called each his wife. He was fond of saying, “Agnes is only my wife in the legal sense. Emotionally and spiritually we are not married to each other.”

Agnes didn’t seem to mind this except when the doctor threw it in her face. And when he threw it in her face it was always with his favorite wife, Geraldine Payne.

Geraldine was the female equivalent of a diesel Mercedes sedan. She was, it seemed to me then, well over six feet tall. She was broad-shouldered and broad-faced. When she lumbered into the room, the word
mistress
did not come to mind.

Dr. Finch adored her. She’d been his muse for over a decade, traveling with him from motor-lodge to motor-lodge. Their love was no secret. Often we would joke, “Can you imagine her on top of him? She’d
crush
him.”

Geraldine seldom came over to 67 Perry Street, except under the protection of holidays and special occasions. Agnes would be chilly but polite, never forgetting that she was first and foremost
a doctor’s wife
.

And when Geraldine was gone, the screaming would begin.

“
I don’t care
,” she’d bellow from behind the closed bedroom door. Then something might crash against the wall. “I am your
wife
. You cannot do this to me.”

Finch would always laugh. He found her fury absolutely hysterical. His face would grow red and his eyes would tear and sometimes he’d call somebody into the room just to watch Agnes in the blind midst of her rage. “Hope!” he might bellow, “your mother is having a fit of hysteria. It’s spectacular!”

Agnes continued screaming regardless of who showed up at the door to watch. It was like she was in a scream-trance. And then, for some reason, she always ended up laughing, too. Somebody might point out how insane she looked, holding the nightstand above her head, and then she would catch herself and laugh.

It fascinated me how she tried to maintain her dignity as a Doctor’s Wife. She always spoke of him as “the doctor.” And she always wore lipstick, even if she was only cleaning turkey off the ceiling—something that needed to be done on a frequent basis.

When it was the doctor’s chance to be furious with Agnes, he could bellow and boom all he wanted but she ignored him completely. He stood in front of her in his loose Fruit of the Loom briefs, his black ankle socks and his black wing tips and ranted. But Agnes just hummed as she trimmed the wicks of her Virgin Mary votive candles with a nail clipper.

Sometimes fights took on a festive, holiday feel.

Jeff, the only biological Finch son and a resident of Boston, kept his distance from his more eccentric Western Massachusetts clan. But when he did come to town, all the Finches and many of the patients would gather—Poo’s mother, Anne; the oldest Finch daughter, Kate; occasionally Vickie would show up. Hope and Natalie, my mother, and sometimes the doctor’s “spiritual brother,” Father Kimmel, with his “adopted daughter,” Victoria.

If a ham had been baked or a chicken roasted, it wouldn’t be long before animal parts were hurling through the air.

“Yeah, that’s just because you think you’re too fucking good for us,” Natalie might shout.

“Calm down, Natalie. I’m busy in Boston. I’ve got a job out there.”

Hope would try and lay a guilt trip on him. “It wouldn’t hurt you to visit Dad at least. It’s not like you’re in California.”

“Yeah,” Anne would agree. “I’m a single mom with a son. Are you trying to say you’re busier than me? Because if you are, you’ve got. . .”

Long-buried resentments would float to the surface like dead fish. “Well, Mr. Boston Hot Shot, I seem to remember a certain five-year-old boy who
liked
creamed corn.”

To those of us who were not blood relations, the effect was something like watching a porn film. It made us want to try it at home.

“Yeah, well, you’re a lousy fucking parent,” I might scream at my mother later that evening.

“And you’re a selfish goddamn son.”

If he wasn’t physically sitting in the armchair clapping, the doctor was certainly mentally egging it on. “What a glorious expression of anger,” he might say, his voice rising above the cacophony. “Get it out, get it out, get it out!”

HE WAS RAISED WITHOUT
A PROPER DIAGNOSIS

M

Y LIFE CAME COMPLETE WITH A FACTORY-INSTALLED BI
ological brother seven years my senior. All my life I suspected that he was missing some essential part. He didn’t require a constant diet of movies to stay alive and whenever I tried to explain my desire to own a beauty empire, he suggested I become a plumber instead. My brother, Troy, was like nobody else in the family. He did not share my mother’s wild mental imbalance or my father’s pitch-black dark side.

And he certainly didn’t understand my appreciation for all things unusual and/or reflective.

Some considered my brother to be a genius. And while it’s true that he could program computers the size of deep freezers when he was twelve and had read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A-Z the summer he turned fifteen, I did not consider him to be any kind of a genius. I considered him deeply lacking in the area that mattered most in life.
Star quality.

“But you’d look so much better if you just shaved your beard like Lee Majors,” I would whine, wielding my clippers.

“Huh,” he would grunt. “Who?”

My brother had a unique way of communicating through grunts and snorts like, one can only assume, our very distant ancestors.

When presented with a menu at a restaurant, he would glance up briefly from his technical manual and bark, “Bring me the meat lump and five iced teas.” He would say this the instant the waitress walked to the table, before she had the chance to even say, “Hel—”

My mother interpreted my brother’s uncommonly abrupt nature to be the direct result of my father’s lousy parenting. “Poor Troy,” she would say. “He’s just so heartbroken by that bastard he can’t even talk.”

My brother would look at me and grunt. “Huh. Do I seem sad?”

I would say, “Well, you’re not exactly perky.”

He didn’t seem especially sad to me. He didn’t seem to contain any emotions whatsoever except a sense of mischief and humor at the expense of others.

Once he phoned our father in the middle of the night to tell him I’d been arrested for drunken loitering in the town of Northampton and had to be bailed out of jail. My father was alarmed, but not surprised. After my father had gotten dressed and located his checkbook, my brother called him back and let him in on the ruse. “Troy, don’t play tricks like that.” My brother snickered and replied, “Huh. Okay then.”

Because he moved out of our home in Leverett when he was sixteen, my brother was never involved with any of the Finches. He had met them and considered them “freaks.” He also considered our parents “freaks” and remained as far away from them as possible. He was designing electric guitars for the rock band KISS at the time, so I viewed him with a remote sense of awe.

Once, he even let me hang out with him and the band like a groupie. They were playing the Nassau Coliseum in New York and my brother not only paid for me to fly all the way out there, but he met me at the airport in a white stretch limo.

I got to sit next to the stage and watch the band rehearse. I got to see them without makeup. I even got to watch Paul Stanley talk on a portable phone that was the size of an assault rifle.

At one point, Gene Simmons came over to me and joked, “Hey, little boy. Wanna see me without my clothes?”

I wanted to tell him, “Yes.”

He laughed and stripped off his jeans so he could put on his stage clothes.

I kept watching until he gave me a funny look and stepped behind an amp.

Sometimes my brother would drive by Sixty-seven and pick me up in his brand new Oldsmobile Toronado. I would slide onto the brown velvet corduroy seat and he would say, “This vehicle has quadraphonic sound. Do you know what that means?” When I would shake my head no, he would launch into a lengthy and highly technical explanation of the science behind quadraphonic sound and what, exactly, it meant from an audio engineering point of view. Then he would say, “Now do you understand?” When I again shook my head no, he would shrug and say, “Well, maybe you’re retarded.”

He wasn’t being mean. That’s the thing that’s important to understand. To him, I would have to be at least borderline retarded not to understand something so easily comprehensible to him.

Dr. Finch tried repeatedly to engage my brother in therapy, all to no avail. My brother would sit politely in the doctor’s inner office, his gigantic arms slung over the back of the sofa, and he would grunt, “Huh. I still don’t understand why I need to be here. I’m not the one who’s eating sand.” When Dr. Finch pointed out to my brother that conflict affects everyone in the family, my brother would grunt, “Huh. I feel okay.”