The car ride home was as awkward as you might expect. I’d stayed in the hallway for the entire remainder of the movie, and my parents actually walked out in the last two minutes in order to find me. There was no way to explain why I was standing around empty-handed in the dead center of the hallway, and so I was forced to admit that I’d been having a panic attack. They escorted me back to the car, my mother rubbing my back to reassure me and my father walking silently with an expression that was equal parts contemplative and disturbed. As his white Infiniti glided through the patches of orange streetlight along the levee, I sat somberly in the back of the car and listened to my mom make the case, as tactfully as she could, for a much-belated second visit to Dr. Bean.
“I just think it would help you to talk about it with somebody,” she said.
It had been five years since the last, and only, time I’d gone to see Dr. Bean. In my senior year of high school I’d been caught selling weed, and my parents had insisted that I go to a young psychiatrist named Christian Harris, whose office brochures described him as a specialist in “drug, relationship, behavioral, and adolescent therapy.” I took it as a joke and decided to be straight-forward with the guy. He looked like a bit of a douche bag and clearly spent his free time lifting weights, but otherwise he seemed decent enough, cracking jokes and movie references, coaxing me into talking to him as I might talk to someone my own age. The next day I found out that he’d called my parents and relayed every bit of personal information that I’d told him, and that he’d directed them to ground me for the remainder of the school year— no car, no phone, and no going out on the weekends. Thankfully, my parents declined his suggestion, but I told them if they sent me back to the guy all I’d do is tell him to go fuck himself then walk out. So then they sent me to Dr. Bean, assuring me that he was less heavy-handed, and that his technique was more about actual therapy than behavioral correction.
Dr. Philip Bean was a thin man in his fifties with wire-rimmed glasses, a thin wisp of grey hair, and deep creases in his forehead that probably developed from a lifetime spent furrowing his brow as he listened to his patients. He seemed like a more sincere person than the last guy, but I still had no intention of telling him anything personal. In fact, the only thing I can remember saying to him was, “I don’t trust therapists, and the last guy I went to told my parents everything I said to him.”
“My goodness!” Dr. Bean cried, “Well, no wonder you don’t trust therapists!”
He assured me anything I said would stay in his office, but I wasn’t sold so I answered his questions with the briefest, most indirect answers I could come up with. Afterwards, I told my parents that I hadn’t gotten anything out of it, and, thank God, they didn’t make me go back for a second visit.
But now, five years later, I couldn’t deny the fact that I needed help. I wanted the panic attacks to stop, and I was willing to do anything to make that happen, even if it entailed the vulnerability and humiliation of seeing a therapist. Dr. Bean seemed to be a good person with good intentions, so if I was going to see anyone I figured it might as well be him.
TO BE CONTINUED
