light drizzle kept icing my windshield.
After forty-three years on the planet there was only one person I had to see before stepping to the edge. I picked up the phone and dialed Matt Hollander at the Austin Grate Clinic twenty miles north in Rowley.
Hollander and I had trained together in psychiatry at Tufts. He had been a year ahead of me and was assigned as my mentor when I started the residency. It was a good match. I had a stronger tendency then toward arrogance (a synonym for low esteem), but Hollander's remarkable ability to understand even the most bizarre emotions and behaviors convinced me immediately that I had a lot to learn about human nature and that I was in the right place to learn it. I started to talk less and listen more, a way of being that American Indians and Buddhists may come to naturally, but the rest of us have to strive for. Woody Allen once said that 90 percent of life is about showing up. Ninety percent of healing people in psychological pain is shutting up — at least long enough to let them bleed the truth. That sounds easy, but it isn't.
Since residency, while I'd opened and closed my psychotherapy practice and started chasing forensic cases, Hollander had used his family fortune to acquire a string of premier psychiatric hospitals.
Neither of us could have predicted when we met at Tufts that, fifteen years later, I would have asked him for a favor that had put us both at odds with our professional ethics and with the law.
The attendant answered. I gave my name, asked for Hollander and waited.
"It's been a long time," Hollander said.
"I wondered whether I could come by."
"Where can I meet you? How about the Agawam? Right down the street from here, on 1A."
I figured he might not want me on hospital grounds, not after what we'd done together. "I know the place. I'll be there in twenty-five minutes."
"No rush." He hung up.
* * *
The Agawam is a diner in the old tradition, with acceptable food, loud help and a mystical resonance that draws customers two and three deep at the counter. Hollander was already waiting for me in a six-man booth toward the back. He waved me over.
I sat down. A half-finished plate of corned beef hash and boiled potatoes was still steaming in front of him. "I'm glad to see you, Matt," I said. "You look..."
"I look big." He shrugged his meaty shoulders and smiled, swallowing my hand in both of his. He was dressed in an oversized white button-down shirt and khakis, but I could tell he was all of the three hundred pounds he'd been the last time I'd seen him, about six months before. His hair, prematurely gray, was wet and combed neatly back. His sapphire blue eyes gleamed. "I keep getting bigger and bigger, and I feel better and better."
I nodded. During residency Hollander had shared with me his theory that fat molecules grease the ‘wheels’ of the mind. He had defended it by citing examples of great large men, like Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, ‘Minnesota Fats,’ and H. L. Mencken and Luciano Pavarotti. Bums, thieves and killers, he had argued, are almost always thin as a rail. "I needed to touch base."
"You could have gotten in contact sooner. I think I told you to let things cool down for a month or so."
"I figured the longer the better."
"Why?"
"Just safer."
He dug into his hash, swallowed a forkful, then nodded. "I can buy that — if you mean emotionally."
"Huh?"
"You didn't want to go near your feelings."
"C’mon. Save it for the paying clients."
"You weren't scared of the police. You were scared of your heart."
I leaned toward him and dropped my voice. "Matt, what we did could get us twenty to life. That's what I was afraid of. I didn't want my heart — and the rest of me — locked up at MCI Concord."
"Bullshit." He flagged down the waitress.
"I don't need to eat."
"I do."
I looked and saw that most of the
After forty-three years on the planet there was only one person I had to see before stepping to the edge. I picked up the phone and dialed Matt Hollander at the Austin Grate Clinic twenty miles north in Rowley.
Hollander and I had trained together in psychiatry at Tufts. He had been a year ahead of me and was assigned as my mentor when I started the residency. It was a good match. I had a stronger tendency then toward arrogance (a synonym for low esteem), but Hollander's remarkable ability to understand even the most bizarre emotions and behaviors convinced me immediately that I had a lot to learn about human nature and that I was in the right place to learn it. I started to talk less and listen more, a way of being that American Indians and Buddhists may come to naturally, but the rest of us have to strive for. Woody Allen once said that 90 percent of life is about showing up. Ninety percent of healing people in psychological pain is shutting up — at least long enough to let them bleed the truth. That sounds easy, but it isn't.
Since residency, while I'd opened and closed my psychotherapy practice and started chasing forensic cases, Hollander had used his family fortune to acquire a string of premier psychiatric hospitals.
Neither of us could have predicted when we met at Tufts that, fifteen years later, I would have asked him for a favor that had put us both at odds with our professional ethics and with the law.
The attendant answered. I gave my name, asked for Hollander and waited.
"It's been a long time," Hollander said.
"I wondered whether I could come by."
"Where can I meet you? How about the Agawam? Right down the street from here, on 1A."
I figured he might not want me on hospital grounds, not after what we'd done together. "I know the place. I'll be there in twenty-five minutes."
"No rush." He hung up.
* * *
The Agawam is a diner in the old tradition, with acceptable food, loud help and a mystical resonance that draws customers two and three deep at the counter. Hollander was already waiting for me in a six-man booth toward the back. He waved me over.
I sat down. A half-finished plate of corned beef hash and boiled potatoes was still steaming in front of him. "I'm glad to see you, Matt," I said. "You look..."
"I look big." He shrugged his meaty shoulders and smiled, swallowing my hand in both of his. He was dressed in an oversized white button-down shirt and khakis, but I could tell he was all of the three hundred pounds he'd been the last time I'd seen him, about six months before. His hair, prematurely gray, was wet and combed neatly back. His sapphire blue eyes gleamed. "I keep getting bigger and bigger, and I feel better and better."
I nodded. During residency Hollander had shared with me his theory that fat molecules grease the ‘wheels’ of the mind. He had defended it by citing examples of great large men, like Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, ‘Minnesota Fats,’ and H. L. Mencken and Luciano Pavarotti. Bums, thieves and killers, he had argued, are almost always thin as a rail. "I needed to touch base."
"You could have gotten in contact sooner. I think I told you to let things cool down for a month or so."
"I figured the longer the better."
"Why?"
"Just safer."
He dug into his hash, swallowed a forkful, then nodded. "I can buy that — if you mean emotionally."
"Huh?"
"You didn't want to go near your feelings."
"C’mon. Save it for the paying clients."
"You weren't scared of the police. You were scared of your heart."
I leaned toward him and dropped my voice. "Matt, what we did could get us twenty to life. That's what I was afraid of. I didn't want my heart — and the rest of me — locked up at MCI Concord."
"Bullshit." He flagged down the waitress.
"I don't need to eat."
"I do."
I looked and saw that most of the
Similar Books
