The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [33]
I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought—after all, who would do such a thing?
This one fleeting error of judgment would leave me shackled to a rank character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. Less than twenty-four hours later I would find myself reading aloud a passage from my “autobiography” describing a period of my father’s life when he quit clowning to hand out fliers in a Fudgie the Whale costume outside a Carvel ice cream store:
I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat, and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man’s hands.
Again no reaction from the group, aside from an affirming nod from Jose at the last part—his eyes said to me, I know what you mean about those fins.
Anyway, on that first day I eventually tied up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my mid-twenties—at least that much was true—and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father’s passing from cirrhosis.
It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment. Our group completely lacked chemistry. No one person in it had a natural affinity for any of the others.
Jose, the big Mexican, was a sensitive guy with a temper problem and a history of drug use who was trying to make his marriage work after a rough childhood that involved some pretty serious parental neglect. Joe, the white suburban son of a badgering, emotionally unavailable mother—he’d put the dishes away in one place, and Mom would tell him that he was supposed to put them somewhere else—was struggling himself with being emotionally unavailable in his relationships.
Dennis claimed that he had recently been made aware of recovered memories of some truly horrific childhood experiences. He spoke to us through a whisper, through a haze of psychiatric meds, and when he was finished with the group work drifted right back to his deeply concerned-looking wife, who was with her own group somewhere else in the building.
I got the strong sense that Dennis was panic shopping for psychological miracle cures and that this had not been his first stop. He looked like a man who had already reconciled himself to suicide and was here only as a last favor to someone, probably his wife. Everyone in the group seemed afraid of him.
There was no bringing us together. An ethnic barrier separated Jose from the group; I was a fraud; Aaron didn’t really have serious problems and was really too “normal” for the rest; and Dennis was painfully adrift from all humanity, not just us. The group’s dysfunctionality was hammered home at the end of our first meeting.
When each person had finished telling his tale, Morgan tried to ask a few perfunctory questions (“So when your father called you names, Matt, how did that make you feel?”) and then move on to the next person.
But some of us—Jose and me in particular, at first—tried to get into a little more detail, to show that we were at least listening. For instance, when Dennis told his story, we each asked him about his hospitalization, what kind of therapy he’d been in, what medications he was on. Our coach, meanwhile, seemed to be staring ahead with his eyes glazed over even through Dennis’s Dickensian tragedy.
But when Dennis finished and Aaron casually mentioned that he had come to Texas to hunt, Morgan snapped awake.
“Really?” he said. “You hunt?”
“Yes.”
“Wow, I love hunting,” Morgan said. “What’d you get?”
Aaron shrugged. “Well, I got a