My psychotherapist once told me I was nuts. He didn’t say it that way, that would be unprofessional. He alluded to it with scary, dare I say crazy words. Words like delusional and psychotic. He was one of those straight-laced dorks who do medicine as if people could be put together like lego. I didn’t choose him, he was assigned to my case. For better or worse, we got to know each other pretty well. For example, I know he is a moron, got his M.D. at Harvard, and plays Lego with his son. What he knows about me is irrelevant, I made it all up.
At some point during our forced acquaintance he stated with utmost confidence, as if he had found the Holy Grail, that I invented my best friend, Max, which ironically is the only thing I didn’t make up. Apparently, he existed but in my mind. I disagreed with the first part - that I invented him - but couldn't dispute the second because Max indeed lives in thoughts, he is an alien that travels from psyche to psyche like a globetrotter of the mind.
My shrink loved Harvard. I know this because he only referred to it three times on our first interview. He also wore a Harvard sweatshirt on casual Friday’s. Inside his office there was a Harvard seal on everything he touched except for a bust of Freud which he used for paper weight. His name was doctor Klepfish, a name Max found hilarious.
“Where exactly does your friend live?” Dr. Klepfish asked on one of our encounters.
“Clearly, I can’t tell you which neuron. But this,” I said pointing to my forehead, “is his resort.”
“Your head?” He asked.
“My mind,” I answered. “Max is an alien being that lives in thoughts,” I explained. “He hops from psyche to psyche like an American tourist from one all-inclusive resort to another.”
“Does he control your thoughts?” Dr. Klepfish asked.
How irritating, I thought. “Not anymore than a tourist controls the waves on a tropical beach,” I retorted. To clarify matters, I added, “Max and his own are very careful visitors, they try to be as inconspicuous as possible.”
I failed to mention that unlike his co-aliens, Max has a big mouth. For instance, Max told me his people love mind traveling so much that as soon as they figured out how to do it, they all left their home world. Their planet is all but empty now. Max chose to spend his Summer vacations in my mind, and even though it wrecked my life I still consider it a compliment. I’ll come back to this later. Suffice it to say that thanks to Max I spent a sabbatical in a mental institution. An experience I highly recommend to anyone in search of their inner child.
Allow me to introduce myself. I was born in an affluent neighbourhood of Toronto eons ago, a neighbourhood green as a Bavarian forest and peppered with old mansions well past their prime. The area was and still is called Rosedale. I was raised in a red brick home resembling a life-size gingerbread house. This was very important to Mother because I was home-schooled and as she used to say, schools are to education what shoes are to a gentleman. She didn’t explain it further, and now that I am of gentlemanly age I should know what she was referring to, but I’m not sure. Status comes to mind.
Our life was perfect by the way. We lived in the prettiest house. It had five ample bedrooms, a dining-room surrounded with wainscoting, floors covered with Brazilian cherry wood, and a spacious attic which was converted into a miniature school which I attended, of course alone. It was as cozy as a wasp’s nest, especially if you were one, which was our case.
In those days, the heart of the family home was not the kitchen, like it is today, but the library. If you didn’t have the means to have one, a living room would do. People read books and if you didn’t like them there were magazines. Short stories were a big hit. This difference, by the way, may explain why people then were so cultured and now are so food fixated. Anyway, we had just such a room in my childhood residence, a library. Not any library but one with built-in bookshelves that reached all the way to the ceiling. One of the walls was filled exclusively with first editions. All our books were leather-bound until mother got hooked on Harlequin romances, you can’t bind those. She bought the complete collection even though there was no time on Earth to humanly read them all. The breadth of the purchase was made purely on the basis of symmetry. They occupied the two walls on either side of the door into the library as well as the pony-wall above it thereby encasing it entirely with books. Father approved wholeheartedly.
The two things he treasured the most in his entire universe were his wife and his Jaguar. I was more of a hobby. For their fortieth anniversary Father had the shelves custom fitted to accommodate the complete Harlequin sub-collections. In gratitude, mother gave him a set of Peruvian chamois to stroke his automobile with. My parents loved each other so much, they planned on spending eternity together and so they are! After they died in a freak car accident, I had them cremated and placed them in two Louis XIV urns on the mantelpiece in my living room.
A girlfriend once asked me how I had grown to be so callous. The explanation is very simple. I was raised in cotton. As an only child I had the exclusivity of my parent’s attention, feeling like I was the centre of the world was never a problem. The problem lied in the exact opposite, the problem was escaping their caring and controlling tentacles. I’m proud to say that I did manage to grow into a scholar in my own right. After an education worthy of an Arabian thoroughbred, I moved to Nova Scotia and took a professorship in Halifax where I remained until I was defrocked, a dozen orbits ago. At around the same time I also managed to lose the family fortune and that is when I spent a few months in the loony bin. More about that later, a promise is a promise. In any event, thanks to the meanderings of life I’m a rich old man again. I am also harmless as a hamster, and happy too. Upon leaving the bin, I took the oath of sanity which is to never take life for granted. Every evening at twilight I stroll by the ocean, tilt my head back and thank my lucky star. I pick a new one every evening, there are over two hundred billion stars in our galaxy. How’s that for choice?
I owe my own release to my wife. She and I moved across the country and now live in a mansion in the Uplands, a select neighbourhood of Victoria, an anthill located on the Pacific side of Canada. We spend our time chatting and going around the Sun. And lest I forget, I am a pedant, the name is Gordon Sprout, Junior.
According to my wife, I should have turned Sprout Senior when Father died. But friends of mine had changed their name’s appendix to Sr. upon the passing of their own fathers and they all regretted it. So I opted not to upgrade. Remaining Junior makes me feel like I’m still a daddy’s boy, which is somewhat comforting at my old age.
As far as I know I have no children of my own and so I shall remain Gordon Sprout Jr. all through the orbits that I have left. And father will always remain Gordon Sprout Sr. which he would have appreciated.
As of this year, I have completed sixty-eight orbits around the Sun, far more than most astronauts. All this traveling has given me a great sense of perspective and inspired one great truth about myself which Max suggested I share in my writings.
Max has no gender, by the way. I have and shall continue to refer to Max as he, just for all times sake when it was all right to smoke and assume the masculine form as the grammatical default.
According to Max, this great truth of mine applies to all intelligent life-forms he’s come across during his inter-planetary vacations which, again according to him, qualifies it as a universal truth. It is as a matter of facts enshrined in the minutes of my release hearing which I happen to have right here in front of me along with a glass of Chardonnay. My wife had illicitly made a photocopy before signing and returning the original. She had to sign it because she sat on the review board.
Also on the review board were a psychiatrist, a sociologist, plus a friend of Max spending Christmas holiday in the psychiatrist’s mind. Psychiatrists are in high demand. They are a choice tourist spot, a bit like the Niagara Falls of the mind tourism industry. Of course, for the purpose of keeping mind tourism a sustainable industry they must remain unaware they are being visited by an alien in their head. How is that for irony?
Included in my file is a letter from my Harvard-trained psychiatrist erroneously stating that Max had disappeared thanks to a cure of Haldol. Haldol is a drug so effective for treating people being visited by mind tourists that doctors refer to it as vitamin H. According to these same minutes, another of the humans on the board, the sociologist, asked me how I could reconcile teaching with being so anti-social. I addressed this profound contradiction by revealing to him and to the entire board my universal great truth.
I said, “I hate people but love their company.”
The community representative, Patty Dos Santos, snapped back, “Don’t we all?”
Ms. Patty Dos Santos is responsible for getting me out of the bin. The rest is history.
Gravitation, according to Max, is another great truth. Humans are stuck on this riding horse by an invisible bungee cord we call gravitation. And it’s universal, each riding horse, however small, has its own invisible bungee cord. In fact , I have often suggested to my students, when I had any, that people were like planets. Our souls are stuck to our bodies by an invisible bungee cord, each soul thinks it is the center of the universe, but in the end we’re all going around in circles.
I’m not a religious man. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing at the center of the circle we call Life. Except vacuum, of course. Max on the other hand is a profound believer, which I find surprising in an alien. I once asked him what he thought God might look like.
“A purple sphere,” he said.
“Yes, but is it good?” I asked, “Is it benevolent?”
“Does it matter?” he asked back.
“You bet!” I said. “Because if it is, you’ll have to explain why it allowed the slave trade, the Holocaust, famines and gang rapes. To name but a few deeds to be discussed.”
“I can’t answer any of that,” Max retorted, “but whatever it is, it’s all powerful and it’s everywhere.”
“What’s the difference between that and Gravitation?” I asked.
He said he’d have to think about it, but since then he has taken to replacing the word God with the word Gravitation to see if it fits. Just the other day he woke me up in the middle of the night.
“Oh my gravitation!” he yelled and I jumped almost touching the ceiling.
“What happened?” I asked fearing the worst.
“I forgot something on my planet,” he said.
“Did that warrant waking me?” I was furious.
“Fine!” he said.
I could see I’d hurt his feelings so I asked, “Can’t you go get it and come back?” I asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he sneered back. “It would take too long. By the time I got back you’d be dead.”
“I thought the speed of thought was instantaneous,” I said. In fact, I had never really considered it.
“Not at all,” he said, “it’s about an inch per millisecond. You go from thought to thought like Tarzan on vines, so it takes time. But speed’s not the only problem,” he went on, “you can also get lost. If you get on a wrong thought, you can end up light-years from your intended destination.”
“What was it you forgot anyway?” I asked the out of curiosity.
“My camera,” he answered.
“Is this a joke?” I said, feeling my anger mount again.
“You’re no help,” he said frustrated.
Another great truth, friendships are built on arguments.
Back to my wife. A long long time ago, when global warming was still a theory, I had an affair with a student attending one of my classes. I had a rule against dating students, of course. But at the time I thought this student was mature enough not to confuse me with her father. Wrong. Anyway, one morning we had just made love and feeling a surge of intimacy I revealed to her my great truth.
“I hate people but love their company,” I told her rather proud of my insight.
“Old news,” she said. “Matter of fact, all the students hate you.”
“Hate me?” I said. “Hate me? I was voted teacher of the year two years in a row!”
“That’s because of your classes,” she said, “everybody loves those.”
“This is preposterous,” I exclaimed. “How can everybody love my classes and hate me at the same time!”
“Don’t take it so personally,” she said. “Students love your lectures. They just can’t stand you.”
“How could I not take this personally?” I asked her.
Here is what she responded, “Hatred is rarely a personal matter.”
You guessed it, her name was Patty Dos Santos. I would not see her again until two decades later during my review for social reinsertion and did not recognize her then.
“Thanks Gravitation, she did!” Max yelled when he heard this.
I would marry Patty on her birthday and she would confuse me for her father ever after. I had reached the tender age of sixty-five and gotten a sudden urge to settle down. It’s been three great years since our marriage and the urge is still with me.
Patty Dos Santos, who changed her name to Patty Sprout then back to Dos Santos because she got tired of people calling her Mrs. Sprout, saved me from the loony bin. I mentioned this earlier but I didn’t say how.
This is what happened. When they were deliberating about my social reinsertion, the sociologist expressed rather strong reservations regarding what he called my social aloofness. He sure hated my guts. According to the minutes which I still have in front of me, he found me evasive, which I take it as, little boy was hurt not being validated.
He said, “Did you notice he never looks at you straight in the eye?”
No one seemed to have noticed, and after a well-timed pause this is what my future wife said.
“His eyes were buried in my cleavage along with yours. Didn’t you four meet?”
Patty had and still has an amazing pair of breasts. They defy the universal truth called gravitation.
I love being married, at least to my wife. I find it lulling. Patty told me settling down is a last ditch attempt by my subconscious to deny the inevitable, that someday I too will croak. Patty, on the other hand, has come to terms with her own mortality, she has looked at death straight in the eye more than once. She is so young, she might take another peek yet. When we got married she was just completing her fiftieth orbit around the sun, which to me makes her a baby.
Most of my male acquaintances are either divorced, widowers or marrying young women. A millionaire friend of mine did just that when he turned eighty, he married a twenty-five year old barrista. He knows she’s counting on him to croak and get his money, but so what? You can’t take your dough to Heaven. He told me she was his birthday gift to himself. I asked him what it felt like, sleeping with a woman almost a quarter his age.
He said, “It’s like Stem Cell treatment.”
“And you find that appealing?” I asked, in a rather sarcastic tone.
“You’re the one who should talk,” he snapped back. “Your wife’s a fetus!”
Old people are always arguing.
It’s hard to imagine that old foggies have full lives. Young people especially cannot imagine that past a certain age there’s more to living than just memories. Then again, they still think their soul is heading straight to Heaven instead of circling vacuum. In dorm rooms you find posters with Einstein smoking a pipe, disheveled white hair, and his most misunderstood quote, ‘imagination is more important than knowledge.’
Upon learning of my marriage one of my students made a remark in class at the start of a lecture. I had announced I was getting married and as soon as the applause died down I asked, as I always do at the start of a class, if there were any questions. A hand went up at the back of the auditorium, attached to what looked like an athletic full grown baby.
I could hear the smirk in his intonation. “Are you gonna have any kids?” he asked.
The entire auditorium burst into laughter. I waited for the clamour to subside then answered with utmost calm.
“I know it’s hard for you to fathom,” said I, “but old people have sex too, you know.”
The laughter redoubled.
“What’s it like?” asked the overgrown baby, still smirking.
After a little cogitation, I said, “It’s like making love in an airplane at high altitude.”
That shut him up for a while. He had no idea what it’s like to make love in a jumbo-jet at thirty-five thousand feet.
Of course, I do.