PINING TO BE HUMAN

by Richard Bowes

In our last few issues, we’ve run several autobiographical stories by Mr. Bowes, including “Waiting for the Phone to Ring” and “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said.” These stories—along with this new one—will comprise part of his forthcoming book, Dust Devil: My Life in Speculative Fiction.

* * * *

So many years later I can still see the Witch Girls gliding over the grass amid the fireflies of a summer evening. I first saw them the July when I was four. That season in 1948 is the first piece of time I can remember as a coherent whole and not just a series of disconnected images. That evening I saw magic and told no one.

A couple of my parents’ friends ran a summer theater in Ithaca in upstate New York. They hired my father as box office manager and he, my mother, and I spent a summer there. My mother had stopped acting by then.

My bedroom window that summer looked out on a backyard with trees. Where we lived in Boston, my third-floor window overlooked an alley and beyond that a barn for the Hood’s Milk delivery horses and behind that the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railway tracks.

One night that summer crickets chirped, the trees sang in the wind, and women in long chiffon dresses walked silently over the grass. I knew they were the Witch Girls and stayed very still so they wouldn’t see me.

Those figures on that night were a memory that popped up at times later in my childhood to jerk me awake as I tried to fall asleep. Starting in my early teens they sometimes returned when I drank or got stoned and had started to drift off.

They remained a minor chill and not something I much dwelled on until my last year of college. The first person I told about them was a psychiatrist, Doctor Maria Lovell. She was French. Her husband was a controversial electronic music composer. Many of her patients were artists.

It was the winter of 1965. I had turned twenty-one and was in my second-to-last semester of college.

Doctor Lovell was a Jungian and so actually displayed some interest in what I told her. “Who were they?” she asked.

“When I first saw them they were characters in a play called Dark of the Moon that got put on in a summer theater my parents were with. It’s about a Witch Boy who’s in love with a human girl and becomes human to marry her. They used a lot of old folk songs in it.”

To illustrate this, I sang a verse I’d recently relearned, set to the tune of “Barbara Allen.” When I came to the line, “Pining to be human,” Maria Lovell gave a quizzical smile.

“There were two Witch Girls who wanted to break up the marriage,” I said. “That’s who I saw under the trees. Even though I knew the actresses who played the parts, had been in their dressing room and everything, this was very scary.”

“You dreamed this when you were small?”

“No, I saw it out the window when I was small.”

“Your parents were in the theater?”

“When I was small.”

“Do you remember other things from that summer?”

“I remember all the plays in the repertory. One was Abe Lincoln in Illinois which is about his life before he went to Washington. There was a scene where Lincoln read to his youngest son, Todd. The kid who was supposed to be Todd got sick or something and they wanted me to do the last performances. All it involved was sitting on Lincoln’s lap.

“The actor was a man who went on to play the father in Lassie on television. My parents were okay and didn’t force me. But there was this fire engine I wanted, all red and plastic with little firemen hanging on the back and a ladder that went up and down.

“So that was how it came about. I sat on the actor’s lap and didn’t look at the audience just like I’d been told. He read something aloud. I wore a costume with long stockings that itched but I didn’t scratch my legs. I was supposed to have a line but instead of me one of the kids playing my older brothers said it. And the last night when the curtain came down for that scene, the stage manager had the fire engine for me.”

“Was that before or after the Witch Girls?”

“They were at the start of that summer. Abe Lincoln was at the end, as I remember.”

“So you made your debut.”

“My only performances; I’ve never set foot on stage since.”

She made a note. “Next week at this time?” She never asked where I got the money to pay her so I didn’t have to say.

My writing teacher had referred me to Doctor Lovell after I told him that I’d secretly dropped compulsory ROTC and gym. Without four semesters of each I couldn’t graduate from college.

On my first visit Doctor Lovell asked why I’d done that and I said, “Because one day last spring in the gym, a couple of cadet officers who didn’t like my attitude jumped me as I came out of the shower, called me a faggot, and slammed me against my locker. Everyone stood around watching! I can’t go back.”

“It is all right to cry, you know,” she said and pushed a Kleenex box across her desk. My eyes burned and I blew my nose but I didn’t cry in those days.

“Their problems with their own sexuality led those young men to attack you,” she said. “How did you come to study to be a soldier?”

“That’s what happens to boys who lose scholarships at good schools. When I flunked out of the first college I attended, it got decided that a couple of years of close order drill would straighten me out. The alternative was getting drafted and I don’t think I’d survive a week in an army barracks.”

“I’ve seen many soldiers,” she said, shaking her head. “You are not one.”

Friday afternoons that winter, without telling my family, my friends or anyone else, I came into Manhattan from Long Island and talked to her. At that time a psychiatrist on one’s schedule was a sign of sophistication.

Her office was in the East Seventies. Walking fast, I headed down Third Avenue in my chinos and penny loafers and winter raincoat. For a couple of years my old man and the Army Reserves had kept me very crewcut and unhip. Now I was growing my hair like an English rocker. But freedom felt precarious.

Boston where I’d grown up seemed like a town compared to this city. Third Avenue was a cruising zone on a Friday afternoon. Guys stood casually on street corners, paused significantly in doorways, gave sidelong glances. Eyes tracked me from the windows of the bird bars: The Blue Parrot, The Golden Pheasant, The Swan.

I went into a place in the low Sixties. It was dark and quiet before the weekend began. Piaf sang on the jukebox. A pair of men in suits at the far end of the bar stopped talking when I came in. The bartender was big and bald. He looked me over and said in a weird little-girl voice, “You should try Rhonda’s.”

“I have a draft card.” The legal age was eighteen but in straight bars I always got carded. Sometimes they refused service because they thought my card was phony and I was underage. Gay bars were much less fussy.

“Scotch and water,” I said.

He waved the card aside and watched me put the whiskey away in a swallow. When I went to pay for it, he shook his head and poured me another. “You’re new?”

I nodded.

“Honey, I’d love to have you around but management doesn’t want kids in here.”

I hit the street a bit later with a glow on and the bartender’s telephone number in my pocket.

At Fifty-third the young boys stood in canvas sneakers and thin jackets, waited under awnings. Hostile and wary, they stared at me out the windows of Rhonda’s Coffee Shop and knew just who I was.

That afternoon I’d told Doctor Lovell about the Witch Girls because they’d been on my mind lately. It was also to turn the conversation away from the scary stranger with unblinking eyes who stopped me in a South Boston subway station when I was thirteen.

On my second visit I’d told her how he took me to a place he knew, opened my clothes, did me as I stood transfixed, gave me five dollars, told me to forget this had happened, and disappeared. The next time I saw his face was on the front page of a newspaper. He had killed two brothers a little younger than I was. The last time I saw the face was when he got murdered in jail. She wanted me to talk about that, but I didn’t even want to think about it.

At Grand Central I caught the cross-town shuttle, took the A train down to vast, doomed Penn Station.

Then I was on a Long Island Railroad car headed back to school surrounded by ladies with shopping bags from Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. I realized the plays I’d seen that summer in Ithaca were clearer in my mind than ones I’d been to that semester.

At the train station I caught the shuttle bus to the campus. The commuter school was mostly deserted on that February evening. A few lights burned in offices. A stray faculty member with a briefcase walked to his car. A pair of uniformed cadet officers strutted past. Guys like them had tried to make it impossible for me to graduate.

Suddenly I was back in the mire of a strange and seedy commuter college that had a major drama department and compulsory ROTC for all male students. I turned a corner and lights were on inside the playhouse; rehearsals were in progress.

The Witch Girls, one dark, one fair, stood on the front stairs smoking and shivering in the chill. Each had her long hair tied back and wore a black leotard and a diaphanous black top that flowed about her when she moved. The drama department’s main stage play for March was going to be Dark of the Moon.

They waved when they saw me. The girl playing the Dark Witch and I found each other amusing. “You a Witch Boy,” she called in a low, sexy voice, “and you always gonna be one.”

Mags McConnell, the Fair Witch, watched my approach through slitted eyes. She was a year or two older than I was and would graduate in the spring. Everyone knew that she had the hots for me. Having a girlfriend seemed a safe idea.

“I got ways,” Mags said in the phony Ozark accent everyone had started using onstage and off and blew smoke in my face. “I can turn you into a human boy.” We all laughed.

Inside, work lights shone on the stage. Cast members sat scattered throughout the house. Professor Cortland, the drama department chairman, who was directing this production, stood down front talking to the lighting techs.

Marty Simonson sat toward the back of the house. Like most of the cute boys in the cast, he was barefoot and wore bib overalls with the legs rolled above his knees. “God, you look fetching,” I whispered, just to see him blush.

Cortland looked my way briefly. “So glad you could join us,” he said.

I picked up the prompter’s copy of the script. The theater was the only interesting spot on campus. To get credit for a drama minor, I had to do things like this each semester. The first time I read the play I’d been startled by the power of my memories.

Cortland said. “Places. Rehearsal starts in five minutes.”

The first scene of the play has John, the Witch Boy, asking the Conjur Man, a kind of backwoods wizard, to turn him into a human. The Witch Boy was a tall senior with a dazzling smile who went on to star in several popular cigarette and deodorant ads on TV.

The Conjur Man was Carl Ryman, who at twenty-one was losing his hair but who owned whatever stage he stood upon. Five years out of school he had his own Off-Off Broadway repertory company of transvestites and manly women in a rat-infested loft on lower Second Avenue.

The Conjur Man repeatedly says that John is a Witch Boy and always will be and is never going to change even if he marries a human girl. Everyone in the company but Professor Cortland, so deep in the closet he didn’t get the joke, now said Witch Boy and Human Boy instead of gay and straight.

Holding the script through a dozen rehearsals had stripped away most of the magic. But at moments, like Carl’s performance, or when Lisa and Mags as the spiteful Witch Girls were on stage, I was four years old and sitting enthralled beside my mother.

I tried to stay slightly ahead of the cast, gave them lines when one occasionally glanced my way. But my mind wandered and sometimes when the actors missed a line, I missed it too. Cortland was not happy.

After rehearsal I sat in a student beer hall between Mags and Marty, laughing as Carl Ryman said, “The barest hint that you’re a Witch Boy and Cortland takes you on a camping trip to the Catskills so he can show you how the birds and the chipmunks engage only in Human Boy behavior.”

Mags took my hand and I let her. She had to leave early. I walked her out to her car. In her freshman year at Swarthmore Mags had a nervous breakdown and spent a few months in a hospital before coming here.

Our college specialized in bright, damaged kids who washed out at the good schools where we started and had to transfer. She gave me a Benzedrine tablet which I downed along with the beer I carried.

“You want to get together Sunday afternoon?” she asked as we kissed good night. I shook my head. It drove her crazy that I’d never say why I wasn’t available Sundays. “We could invite Marty,” she said. “Would that tempt you?” It did, but not enough.

Quite a bit later Marty drove me home because I currently had no car. He’d ended up at the college when his parents split up and there wasn’t enough money for him to continue at Penn State. I’d seen him the first day of fall semester in the ugly uniform and brutal haircut, looking very lost. I’d fallen for him, but we stayed just friends.

He stopped in a secluded back road along the way and we shared a joint. “Mags wants to turn us both into Human Boys,” I said and cracked up at his wide-eyed expression.

Apparently he drove me home because I found myself making my way around to the back door of my parents’ split-level. I shared a bedroom with my younger brother in what otherwise would have been the rec room next to the garage.

As I turned the corner into the backyard I saw figures in long dresses with silky tops and flowing sleeves. They moved toward me across the lawn. By the light of a big Long Island half-moon that looked like a stage contrivance, I saw that they had no faces.

I gasped and sat up in bed wearing only my undershorts. My brain was still soft with booze and drugs. In the other bed my brother stirred and turned over in his sleep. A light was on upstairs in the kitchen. I smelled cigarette smoke. One of my parents was awake.

I hoped it wasn’t my father. Very late one Saturday night in January I’d staggered in encrusted with snow. According to my brother I was so drunk and stoned that our father had pulled all my clothes off, smacked me around and put me to bed. My old rust-bucket had died in the blizzard half a mile from home and things were still cold and distant between my father and me.

Tonight my clothes were strewn on the floor which meant I’d gotten myself undressed. The chances were it was my mother upstairs. So I put on a robe and went up to the kitchen. She sat at the table doing the Times crossword puzzle. The clock said it was just past four. She glanced at me, quizzical, unsmiling, and beautiful. It seemed to me that she must understand exactly what I’d been up to.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked. “I heard you come in about an hour ago.” That I’d awakened her was unspoken but a given. She slept very lightly.

“Who were you with?” she wanted to know.

“Marty drove me. You’ve met him.”

She said nothing, drew on her Phillip Morris. My parents smoked but I didn’t much—not cigarettes, anyway. Again she gave me the look.

“I was thinking about Ithaca,” I said and kept my voice low as I tried to change the subject. My father, my two sisters, and my youngest brother were asleep upstairs. “Especially the Witch Girls,” I added.

She nodded and finally half-smiled. “You loved them. You didn’t understand much else in that play but when anyone talked about it, you’d say, ‘Oh, them Witch Girls!’ Everybody loved your doing things like that.”

“Did you want to come and see Dark of the Moon?” I asked my mother. She never went to see plays anymore. Rarely went out.

“Not if you don’t have a part in it,” she said, and turned back to her puzzle.

“I’m writing now,” I said and she nodded. She wrote too—had done scripts for local TV back in Boston when I was a kid.

Saturday morning, I was up again on only a few hours’ sleep in a maelstrom of brothers and sisters who needed rides to friends, to art or music lessons.

After my parents moved to Long Island from Boston I’d flunked out of school and become a city kid lost in the suburbs. I had to beg for a lift to my part-time job as a stock boy in a shopping center. With that and the dark looks at me for my late hours and my short answers, I was just a bothersome child who couldn’t grow up.

Sunday morning after I’d had to go to church and sit through family dinner, I hitchhiked over to Bill’s place in Massapequa. Even when I had a car I traveled that way. He liked the idea that I wasn’t old enough to have a driver’s license and was saving money to enter college next year.

When I’d met Bill on the Fire Island ferry the summer before last, I’d told him a story about a strict father and the military school where I’d been sent. When I said I was a sophomore he assumed that meant high school and I hadn’t contradicted him. Sometimes looking young bothered me. But mostly I played to it.

His house was in a development kind of like the one I lived in. Bill was maybe forty and seemed safe. His camera was all set up on a tripod. He liked to take pictures. A photo of me on the ferry in short pants and a striped jersey was up on the wall. Certain guys noticed when I wore clothes my mother bought me.

“Get everything off,” Bill said, and helped me do that. “Take these,” he handed me hi-top sneakers and a basketball. Not your average high school gym outfit but then most of my moves took place on the couch. As soon as I got the money I needed for Doctor Lovell and a bit more besides, it was as if this had never happened.

That next Friday Doctor Lovell asked, “What is your earliest memory of violent assault? I don’t mean sexual necessarily.”

The question surprised me. I thought about it and an image came to me of an August evening with the light going away.

“That summer I told you about, the summer at the theater, was the first time I remember. A kid hit me with a rock.

“I was with some kids my age playing and one pointed up and said, ‘Look!’ I looked, and coming slowly down the slope from the yard behind was this boy who had been sneaking up on us.”

Doctor Lovell asked, “Who was he?”

“A kid, who, I guess, was a year older than me, a big deal when you’re four. His father was the local district attorney. Our parents wanted us to be friends. Until that summer I’d never been let out to play with other kids. My playmates were all my parents’ friends—actors, grad students. None of them had children. They’d sing, act out stories, do funny voices, listen enraptured when I talked.

“To me this boy was sinister and I shied away from him. Kids, like all animals, sense fear in others, and he came walking down the slope from the next yard, very slowly, smiling this big scary smile. I think he had the rock in his hand already. The twilight was behind him. I stood, rooted. Maybe he expected me to run and when I didn’t, he stopped a distance away. Still uphill from me, he let fly. The rock hit me on the top of the head.”

I rubbed the spot. “It still feels like there’s a scar.”

Doctor Lovell got up and came around the desk. She was a tiny person and made me lower my head to look and touch. “The fontanel, your skull bones, would have closed by that age,” she said. “This seems like a normal skull contour. There is, though, on the spot you touched, a small patch of almost white hair. What happened next?”

“I ran inside crying. I was awake that night and it felt like the inside of my mouth was swollen. Once I must have dozed and saw my father at the end of a long hall with a cartoon whirl of cats and dogs fighting like a wreath all around him.”

She leaned back against her desk directly in front of me. “Before I left Europe I was a pediatrician. Were you taken to a doctor?”

“Yes. I remember the waiting room and feeling like everything, the toys and kids and mothers, was spinning. I behaved badly, crying and not wanting to be touched. He shot something into my butt, I remember, and said I had a concussion.”

“Childhood concussion is hard to diagnosis. But that is what I would have said.” She sat behind her desk again. “And later you saw the Witch Girls.”

I thought for a moment. “All that happened after I saw the Witch Girls, not before.”

“And did you see them again that summer?”

“No. Not once that play had ended its run.” Then I told her about the recent dream in which they’d had no faces.

“Those Witch Girls could be what we call your Anima,” she said, “your vision of your female unconscious, in a way your soul. I’m sorry you don’t see their faces.”

That Saturday night was the final performance of Dark of the Moon. The party afterward was at a bungalow on the water in Long Beach. Rents were cheap in the off-season and lots of the theater kids lived there.

Dietrich and Lenya sang on the record player, the bathroom was thick with marijuana smoke, only same-sex couples were allowed to dance. Mags had Marty off in a corner. His ears were bright red. He cast several looks my way.

Mags then talked to another woman and took me aside. “Janette says she and Claudia are going away tomorrow and we three can have their place in the afternoon.”

“I’m busy,” I told her.

“She was really mad,” Marty said later, trying to be cool. I kissed him and he almost steered off the road.

* * * *

Sunday it was still drizzling and cold. I flicked the rain off the top of my hair as I walked up to Bill’s house. His car was in the driveway. A car I didn’t recognize was parked out front, which made me wary.

One rule of the street I’d learned early was that it was dangerous to be alone with more than one guy.

Bill greeted me at the door, wanted to take the wet raincoat and everything else off me. But that would mean I couldn’t leave. I stood in the doorway. “Someone else is here,” I said. “Who is it?”

The door to the kitchen opened and a big guy in a sweat suit, smoking a Marlboro, stood there looking at me like I was a lamb chop. Pictures of me holding the basketball were on the coffee table. I heard him say, “Bill tells me you’re a bad boy.” His laugh sounded like an old car engine trying to start. He moved my way.

But I still had the door open behind me. I shoved Bill aside and got out. “Come back here, little boy!” the guy yelled.

Walking home in the rain, I was angry that they thought I was that stupid and angrier still that I probably was. A nice old lady driving a 1950 Nash Rambler, the kind that looked like an upside-down bathtub, drove me all the way to my parents’ door. She warned me never to go out without an umbrella and rubbers.

* * * *

That Friday I had enough cash for one more session with Doctor Lovell. She asked me why as a kid I never told my parents or anyone else what had been done to me. The answer that came blurting out was, “I didn’t trust them to love me if they knew.”

“A compartmentalized life is one of the penalties that come with keeping so many secrets,” she told me.

“I have a girlfriend now,” I said. “There’s a guy I really like. I think I’m going to be okay.” I didn’t tell her how I lost the source that paid for the visits.

She looked at me. “You almost epitomize the molested child. Some aspects of life you know very well. In others you are young and immensely naive. We will stay in touch. I will give you a letter when you need it for the army. We will meet here again before long.”

* * * *

A couple of months later on the Saturday night after the end of the semester, the family was asleep and I was out in the backyard dressed in just shorts, looking up at the stars.

Mags had graduated and was apprenticing at a regional theater in Minnesota. We’d had sex often enough for me to think maybe I was human after all. I liked her and she loved me. Marty hadn’t joined us which was okay. Suggesting it had made me feel kind of like the Subway Man.

My parents were delighted that I’d gotten on the Dean’s List and helped me buy a little blue Plymouth Valiant. I was starting a job at the World’s Fair.

The night was mild and to someone raised in New England the air had a taste of the tropics. I went out the back door and walked barefoot on the grass. It seemed like a moment for the Witch Girls. But they never came when I expected them.

* * * *

In January I showed a letter from Doctor Lovell to the college psychiatrist who was very nice and the commandant of the campus ROTC who was not. But the gym and ROTC requirements got waived and I graduated.

My family was moving back to New England and the draft hung over me. But I landed a job as an apprentice fashion copywriter in the Garment District, sold my car, and moved into Anise’s Place, a rambling crash pad/commune on East Tenth Street. I’d managed to outrun the letters from my draft board.

My job meant that five days a week I dragged my ass out of the smoke and madness of Anise’s Place and up to Seventh Avenue.

In the Garment District insanity was organized. Old copyeditors smelling of cigarettes and gin snarled at me, “Cut fifteen characters out of the body, shmuck!” Buyers shouted, “Double stitching is not as big a selling point as the sleek mod look, understand?”

A few stories in my college magazine, a chaotic draft of a novel about a young kid who talked like Rimbaud and wrecked the life of an academic poet got me an agent. She wasn’t much older than I was and mainly wanted someone to go with her to parties.

All her plans for my writing career involved prominent writers who were looking for boyfriends. At a book party at the old Scribner’s store/publishing house on Fifth Avenue, she introduced me to James Baldwin. The bubble eyes that looked so strange in his photos were riveting in real life. He was charming and we kissed but left separately.

Then my Selective Service notices caught up with me and on a bleak morning I found myself shivering in my jockey shorts along with several hundred other potential draftees at the Induction Center on Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan.

The halls stank of tension and fear. For hours we got poked and prodded, gave up blood and urine, stood in lines. I felt like I was in a car sliding endlessly out of control. I had letters from Doctor Lovell. If they didn’t work I was going to be shipped to Fort Dix that night. My clothes would be sent to my parents in Massachusetts and the process of erasing me would begin.

Then I stood before a psychiatrist who sat behind a desk and read about the Subway Man and me, about how I had suffered an incidence of traumatic head injury as a child, was a conflicted homosexual, a compulsive alcoholic and drug abuser—the story went on.

Doctor Lovell had described the contents to me, “To save you the trouble of opening the envelope and discovering you can’t understand the jargon.”

The shrink sneered as he wrote the permanent deferment and I wondered how much he got off on having an endless succession of scared, nearly naked young guys come through his door.

Afterward in the locker room, my hands shook so much I had trouble getting dressed. A legend of the draft physical was the guy who flipped out to fool the army doctors and ended up permanently crazed.

Outside it was evening rush hour. I was too dazed to find the subway and wandered through unfamiliar streets. Then I saw figures with long, loose hair and diaphanous gowns paused on a corner. The dark Witch Girl turned slightly but not enough for me to see her face.

They crossed the street and I followed them past the Fulton Fish Market, through the Lower East Side and Little Italy. Neither of them glanced back again and though I tried I could never catch up.

In the middle of a block a panhandler looked up with crazed eyes and it seemed I knew him. When I looked for them again, the Witch Girls were gone and I was outside Anise’s Place.

The people in residence cheered my return, listened to my saga, turned me on to ultra fine hash. Next morning, in jacket, tie, and shined shoes, I was at my desk writing catalog copy. But the feeling that I was in a car sliding on ice stayed with me.

“Your description of me in that letter was awful,” I told Doctor Lovell.

“Understand that I put your problems in the worst possible light for the army. Now that that bad episode is behind us, we will begin work to make you better. What do you have to show me?”

I took out the creased notebook that was my journal and read. “Last night I had a dream I’ve had before. In it I came into the tiny cubbyhole that’s my room and discovered a door I’d never noticed. I pushed it open and discovered this whole other large room with a view of a big backyard with trees.”

Lovell waved her hand and smiled. “Darling, everyone in New York has dreams like that. It means only that you want a bigger place to live. With your new freedom you must get out of that drug commune.”

She wanted me to cut down on my drinking, to stop doing drugs, and find someone to love. Half-Witch, half-grandmother, was how I described her when people asked.

At a party in the Chelsea Hotel on a Friday night when I’d started drinking at lunch the day before, my agent introduced me to Arthur C. Clarke. He was very British and was about to write the screenplay for a Kubrick movie. He’d already found a young boyfriend who was Asian and relatively sober.

The next thing I remember was being awakened at Anise’s late Monday morning by an angry call from work asking where I was.

Doctor Lovell’s office was on the ground floor of a big East Seventies co-op where she and her husband had an apartment upstairs. One Saturday morning after staying up the night before for a nine a.m. appointment, I arrived in the tiny waiting room.

It seemed there was a patient ahead of me. I heard a man in the office say, “It’s utterly idiotic that I should be held accountable for every mistake some stupid sales clerk made. I signed the bill, thinking I was being charged the correct amount.”

Her answer was too low for me to hear.

“And it infuriates me that you’re taking their side,” he said. The door to the inner office flew open and a beautifully dressed middle-aged man with gray hair swept back like a symphonic conductor’s emerged. He carried a little dog under his arm.

Apparently unbothered that I might have overheard his conversation, he gave me one disdainful look and was gone. I recognized Maria Lovell’s husband, the composer Reynolds Strand, and felt pretty sure his anger had been an act.

“Come in,” she said and smiled when I did. “You see, my dear, that all relationships have problems from time to time.”

At that session I told her, “The night before last I had the soldier dream again. It was pretty much like always. I know in the dream that he’s a soldier and carries a rifle but he dresses like a college kid. He’s in this neighborhood of old houses with big lawns that looks like the town where my family moved. But there’s no one around, no enemy, nobody. He’s on patrol and I know he’s alone on patrol all the time.”

I paused. She said nothing so I added, “I understand that he’s me.” She nodded slightly. “The thing is, yesterday, on my way to work, I went through Astor Place. There are people lined up along the wall of the Cooper Union, panhandling. And I saw this bum I’ve seen before. He was in rags and with a half-grown beard and crazed eyes. And I realized he’s the kid in the dream except older.”

“You mean you dreamed this? Or that you had seen this street person before and that he then appeared as the soldier in your dream?”

I shrugged to indicate I didn’t see what difference it made.

“An inability to distinguish between dreams and reality is called delusion. It can be fueled by psychotropic drugs and amphetamine. You must stop taking them or there is nothing that I can do for you!” Her voice rose. She looked angry.

“If the soldier in the dream, that lost kid in a deserted world, is me now,” I said, “the guy on the street is me if I had been drafted.”

“Yes,” Doctor Lovell said quietly. Then she remembered she was angry. “You must stop doing drugs and drinking or that will be you in any case. What abuse did was to drive a wedge between you and your emotions. I am trying to help you reconnect them, and you are fighting me.”

I agreed and looked contrite because I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d seen and what I’d dreamed.

The thing that I didn’t say to Doctor Maria Lovell was that I’d been told her story and thought of her as a bit magical and somewhat out of a dream. She was a French doctor who fled to England in 1939 just ahead of the Nazis’ conquest of France. She wanted to get to the U.S. and couldn’t until she heard that the actor Peter Lorre who was in London needed someone to accompany him back to the U.S. He was a drug addict and the Queen Mary on which he was to sail insisted there be a medical person along to administer his morphine. She signed on for that and got to New York. Once here she married the electronic composer Reynolds Strand, fourteen years her junior and a bit famous.

If I could accept her as something out of an Ingrid Bergman movie, I didn’t see why she had so much trouble with my dreams spilling over into my waking life.

I didn’t stop doing drugs or drinking. I lost a fine copywriting job and managed to land one for much less money.

Anise didn’t want me in her crash pad anymore.

Then on Avenue B on a perfectly clear afternoon, someone said, “Hello, Witch Boy!” Mags McConnell, the blonde Witch, had just moved back to New York and we fell into each other’s arms.

In her apartment near Avenue A in the East Village I was introduced to Geoff, her roommate, cute, twenty years old, a bit willowy, very funny, and officially bisexual. We all knew it was perfect as soon as we got together: I loved Geoff, he loved Mags, and she loved me.

When Doctor Lovell asked how I was able to pay her fees, I told her about an older guy, an art director, who I saw once or twice a week.

She shook her head. “In order to deal with what happened as a child you manage to believe that money is a prophylactic. Because you then use it to pay me, nothing that I say really touches you.”

One midnight Geoff, Mags, and I, along with half a dozen other people, went up to Max’s Kansas City to hear the Velvet Underground play.

We came in ripped and got nicely plowed. Then I saw Frankie the Bug Boy who dealt the meth of death. It struck me that this would be a nice way to top off the evening. As I approached him I recognized the one Frankie was talking to.

I’d only seen Reynolds Strand putting on a show in his wife’s office. Now his face was flushed, his eyes glistened. He had his arm around a very beautiful, very young woman, my age maybe. She looked European, slightly glazed, slightly remote. I watched the Bug Boy’s hand go into and out of Strand’s pocket, deposit a pack of powder, and extract a bill.

Then Frankie moved my way and we made a connection. Mags, Geoff, and I snorted in the women’s room and buzzed in the infrared glow of the light sculpture in the back room.

A couple of weeks later we three were floating on junk. Geoff stood naked before the front windows of the apartment. Sunlight framed his head of shoulder-length curls like he was a nicely endowed angel come with a message from heaven.

He looked toward Mags who lay nude on the bed and she smiled at me. Even with my high it angered me that they were just amusing themselves. At different times I believe each of us secretly thought he or she was the only one holding us together. It came up in the screaming fights we had. Once a week or so one or another of us went out the door for good and came back the next day.

Doctor Lovell told me around then, “I believe that your involvement with this boy and this woman with all its trauma and quarrels is your effort to knit some kind of coherence in your life. You are going about it in absolutely the wrong way.”

I’d thought the same thing. But I just shrugged and said, “It’s fun.”

She replied, “Young man, ‘fun’ is an American word. I never heard anyone in Europe say anything like it.”

That winter on the walk down the blank, cold morning streets to Astor Place, the change for my subway fare was often the only money I had on me. The madman I worked for fired me dozens of times and rehired me ten minutes later.

Then one morning I was falling out at my desk when he told me to get my coat, handed me two weeks’ pay in cash, and said, “Go in the hospital or something. Don’t ever come back here.”

My situation didn’t twist my gut until a bit later when the hit of junk that had gotten me to work wore off. For a moment on the cold, crowded street, I saw two figures in diaphanous gowns. No one else noticed them and the Witch Girls were gone without even a glance in my direction.

Since I couldn’t find a job, Doctor Lovell stopped charging me for my visits. When she said my personal life lacked any reality, I saw in my mind her husband at Max’s Kansas City kissing a girl much less than half his age.

* * * *

Geoffrey stopped going to school. Mags got handouts from her family. I peddled drugs in places the Bug Boy didn’t want to go.

One day that winter there was no heat in our building and we were all so jumpy and strung out with our three full-grown joneses that we couldn’t even stay together in the big bed for warmth. I stood in the doorway and screamed at Mags because she had accused me of taking five dollars she’d intended to use to buy food. “You owed it to me. It was mine. I turned you on last night and all this week.”

And when Geoff said, “She’s the only one who wants you here, asshole,” I slammed him against a wall once and did it again for good measure. Then I stormed out and didn’t return that night.

When I stumbled back there, the heat was on again and I was so high that I had even saved enough junk to get both of them off too.

“If you will not stop doing drugs, I can no longer treat you,” Doctor Lovell told me. “They are not my patients, but I can’t imagine that your Geoff and Mags are in any better condition than you. If you love them, you all must stop living together and get treatment.”

And I said, “I think you’re living in a three-way just like I am. I saw your husband with his girlfriend. Does Reynolds Strand ever bring her by here?”

She was silent, looking at me. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “Yes, I know my husband has a mistress and I have seen her. He is very careless and I’m sorry you saw that. I regret that I have done you so little good. Obviously we cannot continue. But when you are ready to seek drug treatment, I will give you the referrals that you need.”

She stood then and escorted me out of the office and through the waiting room. I was in a kind of shock over what had happened. I don’t tower over many people but I did with her. She looked up at me. “And you WILL become ready and you WILL be back.”

* * * *

She was right, but it took me a bit more than a year and a day. Geoff had killed himself after he was caught in a drug bust and Mags went into the hospital. Friends found me crouched in the shadow of the Cooper Union building.

People held me, talked to me, made me drink coffee. In a bathroom mirror I saw again the wild eyes and scraggly beard I’d once seen or dreamed about. I needed help shaving because my hands shook. Every nerve in my body twisted. My legs and arms jerked. Painkillers from various people’s medicine chests cut a bit off the edge of that.

The last time I saw Doctor Maria Lovell was the next morning, a Sunday that carried a hint of spring. Desperate, I’d called her at dawn and left the number of the place I was staying with the phone service.

An hour later the phone rang. “Are you able to travel?” she asked. When I said I was, she told me, “I will see you at nine o’clock.”

My spine vibrated. I got off the couch where I was crashing, tried to get myself cleaned up, borrowed money for the subway.

I got to the office early. The doorman was a big German who didn’t like the looks of me. “The doctor is walking her dog and says you are to wait.”

I had a pain in my guts. After a few minutes Maria Lovell came into the lobby with her little dog.

It hadn’t been a year and a half since I’d last seen her, but she suddenly looked very old.

She gave me the once over and gestured toward her office. I saw her give a little nod to the doorman as if to say this was okay. Inside, she turned on the lights and indicated I should sit on the waiting room couch.

“How much heroin a day are you doing?”

“Twenty dollars.”

She looked at me appraisingly and asked, “Thirty, perhaps?”

“Maybe.”

She went into the office and came back with a glass of water.

“Take these,” she said and opened her other hand. It held two large pills. As I washed them down she said, “In a few minutes these will have an effect.”

The dog came over to me trailing its leash. “I assure you Kublai is not this friendly to everyone.” Kublai jumped into my lap and I held him. Whatever she’d given me came on strong. My aching bones became something going on out in the hall.

“What has happened to you?” Doctor Lovell asked.

I tried to tell her but all I could say was, “When I looked in the mirror the face was that guy I told you I saw begging outside the Cooper Union.” I began crying and couldn’t stop.

“I’m sorry your growing up has to be this hard,” she said. Then she went back into the office and made a phone call. I heard her talking as I patted Kublai.

As she came back, Doctor Lovell turned off the office lights and I knew her time with me was almost over. She had a couple of prescription slips with names and addresses on them. “Beth Israel is near the East Village. They will admit you today. You will speak to the doctor whose name is written here. I will call him tomorrow to make sure all is well. Do you have money for the subway?”

She went toward the door. The dog leaped up and I followed. In the lobby she turned to face me. “This will be the last time I see you. I did you a great disservice as your doctor when I grew too fond of you.” She reached up and I bent down. She kissed me on the forehead. “It is my belief that you will recover. Do not disappoint me.”

She turned and went down the hall to the elevators. Only Kublai was watching me when I paused at the door and looked back. Outside the bright day hurt my eyes.

What I’d done to Geoff and Mags seemed worse than anything that had been done to me. I thought it would have been cleaner if I’d gone to Vietnam and gotten killed.

* * * *

That night in the hospital someone screamed until the nurses shut him up. On the ragged border between methadone and agony I wondered if the Subway Man had spared my life because he saw himself in me.

For a moment I dozed and woke in a wooded park where the trees were tall as cathedral pillars. It was dawn or dusk and I was alone. Then, gliding in and out of the shadows of the leaves, were the Witch Girls.

But this time they stopped and looked right at me. Curious and a bit amused, they approached, knelt down where I lay. Their hands were cool on my forehead. They straightened my bedclothes, dried my tears, smiled as they sang the pining song I’d heard when I was four.

And we all understood that what I’d done and what had happened to me were the misfortunes that come to a Witch Boy trying in all the wrong ways to be human.