HALF A GRAPEFRUIT

I don’t know. (Have I mentioned that already?) Maybe it’s not guilt. Maybe it’s just because I have one simple question that interior design, say, or home economics, can’t answer: Why’d he do it? Maybe I’m just the kind of person who hates mysteries. Who would rather try to figure things out than beatifically accept their impenetrability. It’s true, I despise so much of what psychology is about these days, the flakiness of it, the arrogance of it, the expense of it, the lack of it, the stigma of it, the joke of it, all that shit. But then again I know for a fact that I lack the imagination to even conceive of a different system. Maybe I can be a half-assed psychologist within the system, but creating a new one? Not likely. It’s kind of like the day I came home to the news that my dad had killed himself. I had been watching Owen’s baseball game and towards the end of it my head started to ache like never before. I thought I was going to die. I felt like someone was trying to squeeze my cerebral cortex up through the top of my head. I thought for sure my eyes were popping out of my skull. I wanted to scream. And I’d never even really had a headache before in my entire life. (I’m more of a stomach stress person.) So, anyway, I left the game before it was over and asked my mom, who was also there, to take Owen and Georgia home after the game. On my way home I stopped at the seven eleven to buy some Tylenol and a bottle of water. I was only a few blocks from home but I started ripping open the package in the car, desperate to get those damn pills inside me and working. I still hadn’t managed to get them into my mouth by the time I pulled up into my driveway and then I kind of stopped trying because I immediately sensed that something was not right. My sister and her boyfriend and Richard, an Anglican minister friend of my mom’s, were sitting on my back deck. I got out of the car, holding the two little tablets of Tylenol in my hand, and walked into the back yard. What’s going on? I said. And I looked at my sister and she just kind of stared at me and so did Sean her boyfriend and Richard got up and came over to where I was, standing on the back steps, and looked at me, and kind of paused for a second, and then said: Your dad’s dead. He walked in front of a train.

And then I said no, no, no, I kind of yelled it actually, and I remember thinking what a useless fucking word that is, no, and then, for whatever reason, I threw my two tablets of Tylenol at Richard and went into the house and slammed the door.

A couple of hours later, I was back outside sitting on the steps and I saw, even though it was getting dark, my little white Tylenol pills lying there on the ground and I thought: Well, I think I’ll take them now.

That’s my analogy right there, as lame as it may be. That’s what I compare psychology to. When Richard said those words, your dad’s dead, he walked in front of a train, the idea of taking Tylenol seemed ridiculous. Then, I guess, later on it was like well, there’s the Tylenol. What else is gonna get rid of this awful headache? I may as well take them and see and hope for the best. Taking the Tylenol won’t bring my dad back, but at the very least my head might stop hurting.