“I’ve never gotten Ricked in the suburbs,” she said. “Not in public, anyway.”
I was sitting on the edge of my bathtub, my feet in the basin, my face between my knees. Tell stood behind me, working the clippers in single strokes from the back of my neck to the front of my head. She wasn’t using a guard, and the metal kept warming. Blood was throbbing inside of my ears. The hair she’d used the scissors on lay in a pile in the tub beneath my eyes and I watched it get sprinkled with dead flakes of scalp and thousands of shorter hairs, hard, like wire.
I said, “Can I sit up for a minute? I’m about to pass out.”
She turned off the clippers.
There was a burning cigarette on the edge of the sink. I nodded at it and she handed it over.
I told her, “I don’t think I want that to happen again. I don’t like it. The idea of it… I think it’s bad for you.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “And you do like it. You just don’t know it yet. It takes some time.”
I said, “I don’t think you’d be into it if your mom wasn’t so… I mean, if you hadn’t, when you were a kid or something, suffered some kind of fucked-up—”
She held the little cutting machine in her fist and struck the front of her head with it.
“Hey!” I said.
She did it again. I took it away from her. “Don’t start playing with my mind,” she said. “I enjoy getting Ricked because it feels good. Don’t be jealous.”
“It’s not jealousy, Tell. It’s guilt.”
“That’s worse than jealousy.”
“It makes me fucken scared,” I said.
“It, it, it,” she said. “Fuck fuck fuck. Enough with all the curses and pronouns,” she said.
“You fucken know what I mean by fucken context,” I said.
She gave me a laugh and kissed me on the cheek. She said, “Don’t be scared.”
“What if you get killed?”
“That’s sweet,” she said. “There’s no need to worry, though. They don’t want to kill me. They just want to Rick me.”
She flipped the clippers back on and I lowered my head.
A couple days later, Tell answered my phone. “Hello?” she said. “Jane Tell,” she said. “Well, it’s nice to hear your voice, too. One second.” She handed me the receiver. “Your father,” she said.
He said, “Jane Tell, eh? This explains a lot. We’ve missed you, been worried, haven’t seen you since the trial. We were starting to think you were avoiding us. We are no longer worried about that, or you. At least I’m no longer worried, and your mom won’t be either, once I tell her we’ve spoken. We wrote down a list of things to say to you, though. We worked on it for two afternoons. Ready? Okay.
“One: don’t be ashamed about the drugs. Two: we love you. Three: you’re either our first- or second-favorite person in the world, depending on the day, because sometimes we like Leah better. Four: we’re glad you’re not in prison, glad that you’re safe, and we trust you not to put us through anything like you’ve put us through ever again. Five: things like that happen once, and it’s excusable, colon: you’re young and this is the first time. A mistake was made. You made it. But everyone makes mistakes.”
I said, “You’re giddy. What’s up?”
“What’s up? What’s up is I just sold a ten-million-dollar term-life policy to an eighty-year-old woman. Biggest single premium I’ve seen in two years. It fell into my lap, and the world seems like a lucky place today, boychic.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you, but I didn’t call to brag about that, though I might have, had we been on normal, or even semi-normal terms. There are still other things I have to say to you, things that aren’t bulleted, things your mom and I decided I wouldn’t say to you if you were sad when I called. Now that I’ve heard your voice, the ease in your phone manner, I’m guessing you’re involved with this Jane Tell, the evidence being that she answered your telephone—she has a pretty contented-sounding voice, herself, by the way—and so now I’m thinking you aren’t sad. I’m thinking you might even be in love, or falling therein. So. Are you ready to hear what you need to hear? I’m saying you’re as ready as you’ll ever be, and I’m starting.
“You fucked up,” he said. “Know that you’re someone who fucked up. But know that doesn’t make you a fuckup. The difference is a matter of repetition. We will always love you. That is out of our hands. But if you repeat your mistake, we will know you have become a fuckup, and we will not respect you, and not respecting you will be painful for us, more painful than you can possibly imagine, and our pain will be on your head all the way. One hundred percent. Okay?” he said. “Okay,” he said.
“So I started reading Verbal Behavior,” he said, “and I know this Skinner is your new guiding light, and I really do want to understand what you find so intriguing about his work, nor am I saying that I think the book was anything other than an excellent birthday gift for a father to receive from his only son, but I just can’t read it anymore. All those terms! Not that they don’t make sense. They do. So far, at least, the book makes a lot of sense. It does. But it also gives me a headache and makes me feel a little powerless, which I guess most truths about the world do, right? Maybe that’s how we get the sense that they’re true? Because they hurt? Because despite our desire to deny or ignore them, they’re compelling and we can’t look away from them or something? Listen to me yammer! What do I know? I’m just a humble salesman who loves his wife. How’s the car running?”
“Car’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about the book. I’m glad you gave it a shot.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted you to say about the book, but you probably knew that. It was a disguised mand, right? Is that what he calls it? Yes. I elicited your approval without asking for it directly. See? I know what a disguised mand is. I’m your father, after all. We share DNA and I’m smart like you. Like a genius. But listen. We love you. Don’t be afraid of us. Don’t be ashamed. Just don’t fuck up again. We’re going to give you back to your new girlfriend now. And you know the two of you are welcome in our home, which is your home, any time you want to come by. Okay? Good. Enjoy yourself, sonnyboy.” Then he hung up.
I said, “That was my dad.”
“He sounds like a nice man,” Tell said. She kissed my hand.
We did not again fuck as well as we had at SuperTarget, but there were two more Ricks in as many weeks. One was the AAA guy who towed Tell’s truck from the hospital lot to mine. He didn’t hit her. He held her by the throat and dug in his nails. I didn’t know it was happening. She leaned in through the window on the passenger side and I thought she was tipping him. Once she hopped off the running board, though, I saw her neck—the five blood-beaded crescents, a black smear of grease—and hurled a chunk of gravel at the receding rear windshield. It bounced right off. The Rick stopped and got out.
He said, “You got a problem, guy?”
“You’re an ape is my problem! Why don’t you—”
“What!”
“He doesn’t have a problem,” Tell said. “Go away now.” The guy did as he was told. Tell grabbed me through the fabric of my shorts—I was hard. She pulled me toward my car, got in, and we fucked. The backseat velour was grimed with old coffee spills and rubbed-in ashes that glommed on my skin and stank like a punk-squat. When we finished, our knees and elbows were gray.
Then Tell wanted ice cream, and we got in front to drive to the mini-mart. I turned the key and the engine turned over, and the thermostat needle was leaning, though it wasn’t. I knew that it wasn’t, but every time I looked away from it, I sensed it creeping rightward. I laughed a little. Tell said, “What?” I said it was nothing and put the car in drive, and Tell said I was weird and I laughed a little more, and she said I was crazy, and I wondered if maybe that was true, if, more specifically, I was being driven crazy by a tumor in my brain, which seemed highly unlikely, though certainly a lot more likely than usual—why else would I continue to sense
the needle leaning? And how could I even “sense” it was leaning if my eyes weren’t on it? I couldn’t, yet I did. I looked through the windshield and “sensed” the needle leaning, then looked at the needle and saw it wasn’t leaning, and then I thought that maybe I was having a premonition; maybe I kept “sensing” the needle leaning because some hidden part of my consciousness, some part that having sex with Tell had unlocked, “sensed” that the car one day—maybe one day soon, even that very evening—that the car would overheat and… what? Blow up? Overheat and blow up.
Right about then’s when I noticed I was panicking, that I had been panicking, that my heart was in my ears and my stomach my neck. I remembered I didn’t believe in premonitions, and I didn’t believe any “hidden parts of consciousness” could be “unlocked” (I was a good Skinnerian). And it occurred to me that my “sense” the needle had leaned hadn’t caused my panic. Neither had my fears of having a tumor or my death premonition. Those things were only symptoms of my panic. The panic preceded them.
The needle wasn’t leaning, my brain wasn’t tumored, the car was not about to explode—it just seemed they were because I was panicking.
These thoughts, which took only seconds to think, didn’t make me feel better, though. They seemed to actually make me feel worse. My breath was too audible. The seat-smell too sharp. The grime on my knees and elbows too… grimy. I was nauseated, pounding-hearted. I put the car in park.
“What’s up?” Tell said.
“I’m tired,” I said.
“Let me drive,” she said.
We climbed over each other.
Riding shotgun was better. My pulse slowed a little, and though my chest was still swimmy, I knew it wouldn’t get worse—I knew that I wouldn’t actually be sick.
The members of the anger-management group were angry at Tell, who had not returned after the first meeting. They said they felt rejected. They said they felt deeply scarred by the rejected feeling they felt and powerless to do anything about their feelings of rejection since she wasn’t there to be confronted. I kept as quiet as I could for three straight meetings and, at the fourth, they began talking about how they felt rejected by me and my silence.
The therapist smelled progress. He encouraged them to express. They expressed. They didn’t like that I smoked alone during the break. They didn’t like that I didn’t address them by their names when we greeted one another at the start of group. They felt like they didn’t know me, like they were spilling their angry secrets to an uncaring stranger. Sally, the woman who’d called Skinner a monster at the first meeting, complained that I hadn’t seemed happy when she complimented me on my haircut at the second meeting. She said, “It made me feel like I shouldn’t have said anything at all. Like in being nice, and showing you that I noticed something about you, I had somehow crossed a line.”
“Notice,” said the therapist, “that you just said, ‘It made me feel like I shouldn’t have said anything at all.’ Does anyone see anything confusing about that statement?”
Jake said, “It’s not a feeling. It’s a thought. You can’t feel like you shouldn’t have said something. You can think you shouldn’t have said something, though, and then feel sad or mad or glad, or any of the other ones there.” He pointed at a new poster depicting forty cartoon faces, each a circle, each expressing a distinct emotion, with a label beneath it, like
“Exactly,” the therapist said. “And I want to expand on that: it is truly positive to unpack the sorts of thoughts and feelings that Sally just unpacked. If we don’t unpack the thoughts, we soon forget we have them, and all we notice are the feelings, and the feelings make our negative attitudes stronger, only we can’t challenge them and make ourselves better people, because we can’t point at them and say, ‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have felt sad.’ Because we can’t argue rationally with feelings. Because feelings aren’t subject to rationality. Feelings come after thoughts, which are subject to rationality. And the good news, of course, is that we can argue rationally with our thoughts. We can say to ourselves: ‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I didn’t cross a line. Maybe Ben was having a bad day when I told him that I liked his haircut. Maybe it even made his day better that I told him I liked his haircut, but he was unable to express. I should explore this further. I will explore this further. There are so many possibilities.’ And by doing that, we can argue ourselves out of feeling sad. We can make our negative attitudes that much weaker! And that’s good news.” He nodded his head.
Everybody agreed it was good news. They nodded their heads.
The other Rick I met was a sales clerk at Pep Boys, where we’d gone to buy whatever part it was Tell thought she needed to replace to get her truck running. He wore his glasses on a chain around his neck. I was in the seat-cover aisle when I saw her follow him to the garage at the other end of the store. I ran after them and, as I came through the swinging doors, I saw him palm-strike her chest. Tell crumpled into the wall behind her and slid to the floor. The guy turned and saw me. He was shrugging.
I swung on him so hard. When I missed, I fell.
He said, “It’s alright, buddy. Just take it easy.”
He walked back into the shop proper, rubbing the lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief. Tell brought me to the employee bathroom and lifted her skirt in the grease-smudged sink.
“I hate this,” I said in her ear.
She said, “It doesn’t feel like you hate it.”
Still, after that, Tell quit getting Ricked in front of me.
The school year ended and I got a job washing windows and cleaning gutters on the North Shore with a small crew run by the son of a friend of my father’s. They were good guys. They didn’t try to make me talk a lot. The job paid twenty-five an hour and it tired me out. If it wasn’t raining, they’d pick me up at six in the morning in an old Jetta with a ladder bungeed to the roof and drop me back at home around four. I started eating three full meals a day and I came to appreciate sleep. Tell mourned the scrapes and then the calluses on my hands.
In the week or so after the Pep Boys Ricking, I’d panicked in my car another three or four times. I didn’t “sense” leaning needles, think I had a tumor, or imagine I’d explode, though. Rather, I’d fear I’d have a panic attack, and my fear of an attack would itself trigger one. I determined pretty quickly that I had become motorphobic, and I knew that the origins of my motorphobia—the automotive-related occupations of the Ricks I’d met and the close proximity of cars to the Rickings I’d witnessed—were nothing more than what Skinner would call “accidental contingencies” of my behavioral shaping. I knew, without a doubt, that cars were not connected in any relevant, causative way to Tell’s getting Ricked or my post-Ricking sex with her, and I told myself so whenever I got near a car, but it didn’t really help. The panic’s irrationality was a fact the way that death is a fact: the more able I was to accept it, the more convinced I became that it wouldn’t go away, and, soon enough, as any behaviorist could have predicted, the act of noting the irrationality became, itself, a trigger of the panic.
One morning I would walk toward my boss’s Jetta, and five steps away I’d start thinking, “There’s nothing to fear, go make your money,” and the next morning I’d have to start from six steps away, and seven the morning after that. Overall, though, the Jetta was manageable; the panic was low-grade. Riding in the back of it wasn’t any worse than sitting shotgun in my car had been on the night we’d gone for ice cream. Once we started rolling, I’d get a little dizzy and have to crack the window and think about fucking to distract myself from the sickness in my chest, but I wouldn’t throw up or pass out or anything.
My own car, however, was much, much worse, and the panic it incited was anything but low-grade, especially when I rode with Tell—the attacks were at least as intense as the first one, and their increasing frequency lowered my tolerance. I panicked in the backseat, thinking about sitting shotgun where the last time I’d panicked while thinking about driving, and I fled the
car in under a minute. Then I panicked outside the open car-door, thinking about sitting in the backseat where the last time I’d panicked while thinking about sitting shotgun, and I fled the car in under thirty seconds.
Within two weeks of the Ricking at Pep Boys, I’d quit the thing entirely.
Tell couldn’t fix her truck herself, and even though I was making more money than I had when I was selling pot—more than enough to buy scores of new books I was too tired to read and a cell phone when there was no one I wanted to call—I didn’t offer her any money to pay for a mechanic. I wanted to help her out, but the thought of a mechanic got my heart banging and I’d hyperventilate.
She took a minimum-wage job at an art-supply store a couple miles from the apartment. She’d drive my car there on mornings she was running late. Otherwise she’d walk to work and I’d walk to meet her halfway at the tracks or the park at half past seven in the evening.
Sometimes I’d notice she had a new bruise or cut. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if it was new or reopened. The first few times, she’d say who’d done it to her: a bank teller, a sculptor, a plumber, a guy who contracted faux-finishing crews out to restaurants and hotels. I’d ask her to stop telling me about it. Then one evening by the tracks she showed up with a new gash on her shoulder she didn’t speak of and I asked her who did it.
“I thought you didn’t want to know,” she said.
I said, “I want to know it’s not happening.”
“You want me to lie to you.”
“I want you to stop,” I said.
She said, “I’m there when you come. I see you.”
“That’s what you always say, but I still feel guilty, Tell. I can’t help it.”
She looked around for something to hurt herself with, and when she couldn’t find anything, she let her legs go out beneath her and landed on the rail, hard, on her tailbone.
I didn’t move. I said, “I’m gonna leave you if you don’t stop.”
“You won’t,” she said.
She was right. “Then I won’t fuck you anymore,” I said.