By Tardsie

Who’d Like To Go First?

Part 2 of 4: In which bureaucrats make decisions, hoodlum school is avoided, and the author confesses his youthful desire to make love to the world.

Be sure to check out our first installment, Don’t Forget To Hurt. You’ll kick yourself if you miss it.

Another consequence of my behavior has been three instances of mandated counselling.¹ Now, I think these kinds of therapy, when properly conducted, can work wonders in helping people get over their shit and on with their lives. But about the only thing I took from my first two encounters with the mental health profession is that not all professionals are created equal. In fact, some are kinda shitty.

And As Someone Who’s Spent A Total Of About 10 Hours In Various Counselling Programs, You Know I Know What I’m Talking About.

The first attempt to talk the bad out of me came during my junior year of high school.  I’d been recently booted from the choir program, and was having/creating issues in all my non-PE classes. The school bureaucrats quickly concluded that I was on drugs.² They offered me the stark choice of either seeing a psychiatrist, or else I could do my learnin’ with the brooding hardcases over at the hoodlum school. Since getting a shiv jammed into my eye-socket during fourth-period Reading Fundamentals would prove a considerable obstacle to my cherished goal of someday getting the fuck out of Tacoma, Washington, I opted instead for the mental health professional.

Who Knows? Perhaps I Would Have Met My First Boyfriend By Accident In The Dim Stalls Of The Wood Shop Bathroom.

The shrink I ended up seeing really looked the part. She was of that indeterminate age north of forty, expensively pantsuited and detached almost to the point of boredom. To her credit, when I told her that I had never done drugs, she didn’t ask me about it again. She asked me a lot of other questions, though, and made notes as I answered. She didn’t add or suggest anything, just kept peppering me with questions.

There was one topic, however, with which she seemed unusually preoccupied, leading her to ask one particular question several times. If ever, while responding to her ongoing interrogation, I mentioned a female with whom I wasn’t too closely related, she would ask the same question. “And did you want to sleep with her?”³

How Can I Express This Delicately?

I was sixteen years old–I wanted to fuck pretty much everything walking on two legs, a rather unselective sample in which the psychiatrist herself was included, although helpfully, I did not share this information during our sessions.  Instead I answered “Yes” about 50% of the time when she asked me about girls I wanted to pork, and lied the rest of the time.

But after confessing that I wanted to lay down with every other woman I met, there didn’t seem much else to talk about. I stopped going after the second session and nothing was ever said of it again.

So Am I Cured Now?

In our third installment, I’m Tardsie, And I’m An Alcoholic Apparently, it just gets worse.  See you there.

¹My use of ‘mandated’ here may be misleading. Two of the three experiences (the second and third to be detailed in the final two installments) were not mandated per se, but the result of institutional coercion. Only one of them was actually a legal thing. ∞ T.

²In fact, they were wrong. What really hurts, though, is that for a minute there you believed them. ∞ T.

³Just like that: ‘Sleep with her.” I’ve always thought that a prudish and not-very-accurate phrase. I mean, sure–sleep will probably happen, but that’s not really what I’m looking for, you know? ∞ T.