Chapter 3

The 70s
Click, click, click. My footsteps echo down the neverending hallway to her office. The floor is always polished and clean. I don't want to go to see her or talk to her because I know she knows. She never says so, but she knows. She hears me coming every week, and her door is always ajar. "Come on in, honey" her calm voice seeps through the door with her name on it. "I heard you coming down the hall and it made me smile". I always believed her, I could just feel she wasn't lying. Her eyes told me so, and they always locked into mine for the first minute or so, as if she were trying to read my mind. So I alwys sat down in the "crazy chair", where I knew her other clients sat. The other fucked up people that paid her to listen to their problems, or to get her to help them with their problems. She knew things about me that others didn't know about me, but not all my weird ways. She knew 'cause my parents, Karen and Rich told her before she met me. When you're 13 you have no rights, and I just had to go with the flow. My parents always did that, like a dictatorship. My dad used to be called Dick by his friends and even has a dance trophy with "Karen & Dickie" on it. I call him Dick too, behind his back most of the time, and sometimes to his face when things go really bad. She asked me why I called him Dick, like she didn't know. I was honest though, and told her "because he IS a dick, ya know?".
She had the story I wrote in her hand. More ammunition from Karen and Dick. Had I known this would be read by strangers, I would have made it much less sleazy, and with better penmanship. Or I would have been real careful to destroy it after I copied some of the passages out of the book called "Them" or something like that. Somebody gave me that book, I can't remembe exactly who, but it had a red cover with yellow letters on it's frayed paperback cover. It might have been Johhny H., complete with scratched coke bottle glasses and wrinkled clothes. Maybe it was Mark K, with his inability to say "s", but substituted it with "sh", like when he would say "yesh" if you asked him if he had weed on him. Doesn't matter either way. She had the paper and was reading (rereading) it infront of me. That's when I heard her utter the word. It poured slowly from her lips, like Mrs. Butterworth's syrup. And she dragged it out and let it echo all over the walls of her office, while I sat in the crazy chair forced to listen to it. H-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l. I knew what it was, but we never spoke of these things in my house. That doesn't mean those things weren't going on. Just ask Dick. On second thought, don't ask Dick. He'd deny it. Or freak out and punch his fists into the walls next to your face. Then you'd think twice about saying it again. Alpha dog Dick always beat his opponents into submission.