Confessions of a Female Vigilante

By A.L. Sutter

Confessions is a psychological thriller, page-turning revelation about misplaced trust and the irreparable harm to the female psyche caused by relationships with men.

Lane Stone has been a twenty-five year prosecutor for the Los Angeles County District Attorneys Office, and now practices criminal defense. Claiming justice after a devastating experience of erotic transference with her psychologist of thirty years, she takes justice into her own hands.

Through the encouragement of the only true love Lane has ever known - Christopher, she seems to be redeemed. Doubt as to Lanes motives is raised by Chris best friend, Jimmy, an LAPD cop, but the mature unbreakable bond Lane shares with Christopher seems strong enough to put Lanes demons to rest.

Can the obsessive need for revenge ever be satiated?
Only you, the readers can hand down the verdict on Lane Stone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514405543

A.L. Sutter

A. L. Sutter has been a lawyer for thirty-seven years in Los Angeles County. She is also a musician with a bachelor’s degree in music from UCLA. She enjoys spending time with her family, making short documentaries and, writing books and screenplays. She currently lives with her significant other and Australian shepherd in Long Beach, California.

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Prologue

I t was a cool breezy night in Beverly Hills. The ubiquitous palm trees rustled, spurring their wild parrots to cackle like real estate brokers at a closing sale. Rush-hour traffic on Wilshire Boulevard marred the otherwise idyllic expansive mansions and exquisite gardens of wealthy lawyers, doctors, and hedge-fund billionaires. Lane Stone had waited in the janitor’s closet until 9:00 p.m., the hour that the building at 462 Linden Drive in Beverly Hills was typically vacant. She knew that the janitor cleaned the even numbered floors on Tuesday and Thursday and the odd numbers on Monday and Wednesday. Today was Wednesday, January 16, 2000, and Dr. Tim’s office was number 402. Lane easily obtained the janitor’s master key and opened Tim’s office, a ghost town inhabited by the collective consciousness of his patients—their secrets, their regrets, and their silent tears.

Dr. Tim left his office at 8:30 p.m. He walked to an adjacent lot—a luxury-car-detailing business—to reclaim his BMW 7 series, the family man’s stealthy sports car that exaggerated his power. Driving this car summoned memories of his athletic prowess in high school basketball, the forward who could drive around any defender. It was almost as if his car proclaimed to the world, I may have gray hair, but I can outrun you anytime I want. Lane quickly disabled the unobtrusive camera mounted in a corner by the window. She would have to obtain the security guard’s tape on the way out, but she would deal with that later.

Lane’s locksmith taught her how to install a double-keyed dead bolt. She was a quick study, having been raised by an electronics engineer—her deceased father, Joseph Stone, whose nickname was Mr. Makita. Her father’s favorite hobby was to disassemble and reassemble mechanical devices. Lane moved with alacrity, turning Dr. Tim’s dead bolts into devices to which she alone had the keys. There, Lane said aloud to herself. It’s done.

PART I

WHO IS LANE STONE

CHAPTER 1

Dr. Tim, Motive

D r. Tim Thomas, a psychologist, was long, lithe, and craggy in a Daniel Craig way. Appealing for a fifty-seven-year-old man. He looked as well tended as an English garden. Like a poodle just out of the groomer. Like someone’s pet, as if his wife had purchased his light blue, faintly patterned polished cotton shirts that looked like silk, his argyle socks, his partly wool nondescript dark brown slacks. A salon dyed his hair a medium ash brown. There was no hint of the maroon, pink, or rust, so often the unintended side effect of home-applied men’s hair dyes. He made himself unintentionally risible by allowing his snow-white thick curly chest hair to protrude from his shirt, which he studiously left unbuttoned just one button down, no tie. He did not wear undershirts.

Tim was stubbornly middle class, notwithstanding his accidental success at investing and a housing bubble, which bumped him into the millionaire category. He ignored the tax liens on his rental properties. His worn belt with the leather beginning to tear, the belt buckle a common metal, and the leather loafers well past their prime revealed a middle-class mentality. He had no idea what his pants were made of, what his shirt material was, or whether his shoes were cordovan leather or cowhide. He dressed up for work, but since he hardly worked at all, he was damned if he was going to invest any time or money in attempting to look like a Beverly Hills psychologist. You can take the man out of Palms, a formerly white middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, but you can’t take Palms out of the man. He was new, not old money. Most of the time, he walked to work right after his midafternoon nap, donning his dress clothes like a fireman on the way to the Starbucks near his office. Most of the time, he did not even comb his hair after his nap and before his first patient. His hair was thinning, but he wore it in a poufy style that was fashionable for a man his age. His hairdo was durable—it looked good when he woke up and still looked poufy hours later.

Tim was vain, having been quite a jock in high school. His father, Nate, was the school’s football coach at Hamilton High School, rendering Tim and his brother eligible to attend Hamilton High, which was just south of Beverly Hills and more prestigious than Palms High School. Back then, in the midsixties, basketball and football came naturally to Tim. Broad-shouldered and lanky, he had a musculature that was supple and toned. In high school, Tim was breathtaking in a WASP way. Literally tall, dark, and handsome—a cliché. Like the blonde cheerleaders or the prom queen, his physical gifts left him with a certain casual laziness. Everything came easy to Tim in high school. He never wanted for anything. Even his first job as a teen, working as a janitor at a facility for handicapped children, was handed to him by his father’s acquaintance. No burger joints for Tim. No boxing chicken at Colonel Sanders’s Kentucky Fried Chicken.

It was odd that Tim’s younger brother, Troy, dwarfed him in both athletic and academic accomplishment. His younger brother was voted best athlete in the same sports Tim competed in—football and basketball. This secretly rankled Tim as did his brother’s success as a lawyer—a profession that he contemplated but seemed like too much work to pursue. Psychology, with its infinite vagaries, lack of accountability, and long hours of nonproduction of anything except confusion, seemed the safest bet for him. He found a mentor in his abnormal psychology professor, Raleigh Meninger, at the University of Southern California. Back then, USC, nicknamed University for Spoiled Children, was reputed to be the college for ex-jock dummies with C averages and rich parents.

Raleigh Meninger, still a star in his midforties, was captivating and charismatic. On the first day of Introduction to Psychology, in a class of over three hundred students, Raleigh rode up to the podium on a unicycle for the purpose of provoking a discussion about what is normal and what is mental illness. Raleigh made his point that we are all on a continuum with no bright-line test as to what is normal and what is abnormal. The class erupted in applause at the conclusion of the lecture, and everyone in the class was secretly relieved to find out they were normal. Tim was hooked on Raleigh’s bold approach and on his engaging way of teaching: infotainment. Raleigh saw great potential in his student Tim simply because Tim was perhaps the best-looking psychology student in the school, and Raleigh wanted to maintain his largely female clientele. Tim performed all of his three thousand supervised hours with Raleigh, and the two had remained joined at the hip ever since—a partnership lasting over forty years. Tim never left the nest—no stomach to make it on his own. As Raleigh’s perennial teacher’s assistant, Tim still got most of his referrals from Raleigh, the alpha male. He felt embarrassed to still be partnered with Raleigh and about never having left home. But he was not embarrassed enough to do anything about it. It was all so comfortable, the life Tim had constructed.

Much like his childhood with two upper middle-class doting parents who shepherded Tim through boyhood and college, he found an ersatz parent to move in with in Raleigh. Raleigh was the rainmaker, and he provided Tim with a steady stream of clients. Tim endured a respectable slumming period in the psych ward at Los Angeles County General Hospital, which he found interesting. Poverty, schizophrenia, and ghetto-induced insanity are always so much more interesting when one has a comfortable Beverly Hills practice to retreat to. Never having had to fight for a meal or a dollar, never having been a victim of any kind, and never having to use food stamps, welfare, payday lenders, or to live on skid row, Tim had little insight or empathy for the county patients and felt no sense of white guilt, shame, or responsibility for the alcoholism, drug usage, and other ghetto-related conditions that set the stage for insanity.

He settled into a practice, which consisted mainly of big Hollywood egos and angry, bitter, nasty divorces. He told people what they wanted to hear and did it convincingly, making sincere and intense eye contact as he read their unsellable screenplays, took their side in unwinnable contests, and convinced them that it was normal to hate one’s spouse and children in the middle of a bitter divorce.

Now, his good looks, self-assured baritone voice, and practiced nonconfrontational manner were still irresistible to all his patients who lingered long past their optimum therapeutic term. Lane, like the others, came to see him just to see him, knowing full well that her psychic ailments would not improve: embitterment syndrome, oppositional defiance disorder, panic attacks, and revenge fantasies. No patient improved, but all could not wait to get in the building at their appointed times. Where else could one spend time metaphorically window shopping? Well, the office was right next door to Neiman Marcus with a tall handsome millionaire who was kind and who always made a point of saying her name, Hello, Lane, just like her Yahoo Messenger, which greeted her when she booted up. Having lost his memory for names, he kept each patient of the day on a small three-by-five index card hidden by his landline telephone so that his patients would not discover his memory loss or that he had never bothered to make an attachment to any of them. Lane discovered his memory crutch by watching him carefully—he sneaked a quick look at the index card just before he uttered his salutations. Just a quick glance told everything about this domesticated lion. He was a mere shadow of his former self, but he laughed at her jokes and never said no to anything. Tim was a thinner, taller, and lankier version of Robert Wagner without the Natalie Wood drama baggage.

He had learned a few stock phrases along the way to pacify and enable even the most demanding of patients. It depends was his favorite. He and his shrink buddies joked about that one a lot. Just like how doctors say It’s not clear when they don’t know the answer to a question, it depends had just enough ambiguity to stifle even the most potentially life-changing inquiry. By telling his patients it depends when they expressed a desire to fuck him, he wasn’t saying no, and he wasn’t saying yes. What he was intentionally doing was enabling them to stay in transference indefinitely. He was the ultimate enabler.

Tim didn’t need to work anymore, his investments having been so successful, squirreling his dollars away in German banks—he was, after all, of Germanic lineage. But there was the matter of his wife, Caroline, two years his junior but always on his case. The fire had gone out of their marriage long ago, and when he spoke of her, it was never with a light in his eye. He wanted to belittle her, but he didn’t dare. It was oh so tempting to unload about her on his patients, but he didn’t have the guts. He was completely cowed by his wife. His office being the only respite from her incessant threats, demands, and passive-aggressive complaints. There was so little sex in his marriage and so little of his independence left that he had to come to the office to remember that he had a penis. In his office away from his wife, he was the former hot jock in high school and just as successful as his lawyer brother, Troy, who had a thriving family law practice in Torrance. It was at his office that Tim conducted all his business, not wanting his wife to take any more credit than she had already done for her parents’ initial infusion of capital. He didn’t dare divorce her. No prenup back in those days, and she would take half of his investments, his annuity, and alimony, reducing him to live below the Beverly Hills poverty line—a cruel fate indeed. He might even have to sell the McMansion and live in Beverlywood. This could not be.

Thus, Tim practiced his lazy form of psychotherapy, technically called cognitive psychology in order to escape his wife, Caroline. He was sick of being her lifelong poodle. And he had to have some patients to talk about with his daughter, Alexis, to establish credibility that he wasn’t older than dirt as she thought. Alexis listened to some heavy metal, hard-core, and rap transmitted through the underground railroad of bad boy or girl music not sold in music stores. Alexis had lately taken to attending raves at Electric Daisy Carnivals where young adults could catch the latest in electronica like Ed Sheeran, Wolfgang Gartner, Mord Fustang, and Arty. Tim still listened to Frank Sinatra, Michael Bublé, and the Beatles, but he never bothered to memorize Lennon’s poetry. He never took the time to get the poetry of Dylan, a Jew whose real name was Robert Allan Zimmerman, who had a really irritating voice in Tim’s estimation. Tim would occasionally play the Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet in his rare moments of nostalgic rebellion.

Although Tim tried to share the Beatles, his music, with his Alexis, she did not accord him the respect that his nieces and nephews accorded his brother Troy. Worse yet, his daughter halfheartedly enrolled in the psychology master’s program at UC Santa Barbara, receiving C grades, and she was becoming disappointing like his wife—mediocre in every respect except for her lanky dancer’s body. He knew that Alexis’ highest accomplishment would be an MTW rather than a PhD—Mrs. Trophy Wife.

Alexis acted out her hostility toward Tim and Caroline by filing a sexual harassment complaint against the head of the Los Angeles County Mental Hospital Dr. Richard Feldman, a USC Alumnus. The alleged harassment was that Dr. Feldman told Alexis that her shirt was too short to wear to work. An investigation ensued in which Alexis focused more on finding additional intern victims who had worked with Dr. Feldman at County General than on her studies or her master’s thesis. Alexis developed a jacket as someone too difficult to work with. From there on out, no one would hire her for fear of being sued. Alexis, floundering at work and at school, proceeded to gain fifty pounds and threw in with a short balding tubby psychology student who understood her. Tim was bothered by his daughter’s disappointments but was ineffectual to alter her behavior or even to give her sound advice. He was her grand enabler as he had become to most of his patients.

Raleigh, Tim’s mentor, still practicing and publishing important essays, really believed in psychotherapy. Raleigh was still vital in his eighties and had a great face-lift to prove it. It was expected that Tim, like Raleigh, have a substantial caseload of patients to be in the game. Tim had to have something to say at his wife’s dinner parties. In desperation to impress friends and family and even other patients with his vitality, Tim even discussed their problems and kinky sexual fetishes—without mentioning names, of course. He knew this was somewhat unethical—discussing patients’ problems—but rationalized his bad behavior on a technicality, which was that he was not naming names. His vanity was out of control. He was addicted to discussing his patients to impress others with his own success. He would do anything to avoid judgment day—when someone or somebody would conclude that his practice had been a complete irrelevancy, helping no one, and that he had contributed nothing to the greater good of society.

When patients asked for a diagnosis and asked how to change, he provided a facile checkmate explanation: genetics. If human nature were determined mostly by genetics, he wouldn’t have to worry about curing anyone, changing anyone, or providing even the most basic guidance, which even a good friend would provide. Alternating among it depends, genetics, and other enabling phrases to pacify his distraught patients, he did quite well. No one holds shrinks accountable for their sins. Psychologists seek out this profession precisely because they do not want the responsibility that comes with real work, like having to defend a criminal facing the death penalty. Or like having to design electronics for the aerospace industry. Or like being an electrician, plumber, or anyone else who produces a product or fixes a problem.

He did not have the discipline to help patients remake their character through the Melanie Klein method, Klein being one of the leading experts in object-relations theory. Helping someone on that deep emotional level of discovery took years of training, discipline, and treatment—ten years minimum in which the patient came for treatment up to five times a week. Tim was too lazy to become an analyst, which usually meant earning a second PhD. He simply could not fathom placing that much trust in the benefit of any school of psychotherapy. And if he ever did decide to become a psychoanalyst rather than a psychologist, he would have to have more treatment himself, years of treatment, and he would have to abide by the politics of the Psychoanalytic Institute. The institute was composed of a bunch of whack jobs that were just plain nuts and really disturbingly nuts—psychoanalysts who had been in treatment for fifteen years. Why bother getting another doctorate when he already had a license to steal?

And some of his patients—like Lane Stone, age fifty going on forty—were pretty funny, moderately attractive, and interesting. At the very least, he could get off on a fantasy about her or some of the other well-preserved Beverlys—that’s what he called the Beverly Hills women who frequented his office. Lane didn’t look Jewish, even if she spiced her conversation with occasional Yiddish to annoy him. Gay kocken offen yom, Lane would say about some schmuck who had rankled her. This phrase literally meant, Go poop in the ocean! If only so many of his patients weren’t Jewish. That damn Jewish-Yiddish whining was more of a turnoff than his wife’s stiff upper-lip-controlled burn.

During the obligatory occasional burden called sex that he engaged in with his wife, Caroline, he culled fantasies of Lane to get through the experience.

You’ve heard that old joke? A middle-aged married couple are attempting to have sex but not getting anywhere, and the wife looks at the husband and says, ‘You can’t think of anyone either?’ Tim loved to tell that joke to his patients in a deadpan cadence. He could always get a patient to laugh at that one.

Surprisingly, Tim had had relatively few sexual partners. His sexual repertoire was limited. He was prudish and regarded promiscuous women with disdain. He knew that it was precisely his prudishness and lack of imagination in bed that perpetuated the downward slope of his marriage but couldn’t drum up either the courage or initiative to reinvent his sexual self. Predictably, his fantasies about Lane were pedestrian. Sometimes she was straddled on his desk. Sometimes she was blowing him under his desk. He had many fantasies about her, even though he tried not to. He tried not to because she predicted that he would. Lane was the most overtly and sexually uninhibited woman he had ever met. He did not want another bitch controlling his life, even if it was his fantasy life. He did not like S and M precisely because his real life consisted of his wife’s S and his own M.

Thirty years ago, Lane Stone had found him quite by chance. Not realizing she had attended the same elementary, middle, and high schools as Tim, she stumbled into his office after hearing a lecture at UCLA by Raleigh Meninger. The topic of the lecture was how cancer patients could affect their outcomes with positive attitudes—complete poppycock. Most cancer patients resent this kind of blame-the-victim mentality that shrinks inflict on their patients and the public.

Lane concluded that cancer had nothing to do with psychology. It had to do with who qualifies for what clinical trials and whether or not one is too old by the time one inquires about getting into a clinical trial. The cancer game truly was a battle between patients, insurance companies, oncologists, and drug companies, and no psychobabble could alter the outcome. Cancer was a dark casino game depending on one’s age, the availability of one’s tumor cells for qualifying tests, and the clinical trial du jour.

But back in the seventies, Lane was naïve and bought Raleigh Meninger’s poppycock about attitudinal improvement leading to a better cancer outcome. Of course, psychologists wanted in on the cancer game. If attitude determined one’s outcome, more cancer patients would seek cognitive therapy. Cancer was a cash cow for so many professionals, but it was not for the victim patients. Some of the experimental drugs cost $12,000 per injection. But in her youth, Lane wanted to believe in something. Astrology and psychology filled her void of spiritual and religious emptiness.

When Lane first met Dr. Tim thirty years ago, he was larger than life. Already a staunch conservative Republican in his twenties, he nonetheless got caught up in the late sixties’ zeitgeist. He like the Beatles and the Stones and wore rust-colored cowboy boots that said fuck you, along with corduroy pants, to Raleigh’s office. He had a closely cropped beard and a physique like Michelangelo’s David. He had a thick head of wavy brown hair with natural highlights. His skin, if not ruddy, was not the pasty white with age spots that he had now. His ass was curvaceous back then. Now it was nonexistent. And he didn’t just sit back during sessions. He strode about his office like a peacock on parade, recommending a reading list of self-help books for confidence building: I’m OK, You’re OK, Looking Out for #1, and Games People Play. He was full of advice—full of insightful questioning. He cared because his sessions were recorded and reviewed by Raleigh, his mentor. If it weren’t for those recordings, he would have just drifted like he did now, sniping at her and asking irrelevant questions to satisfy his prurient interest, seemingly dumbfounded over things she took for granted.

Back then, Tim saved Lane. She, a physically abused child with a hypersensitive temperament, was a doormat, afraid of her own shadow, lacking in defense mechanisms and any self-confidence. Within a few weeks, Lane was head over heels in love with Tim, the result of erotic transference. Her projected identification of being in love was placed onto and into Tim. But she didn’t realize that her feelings were just the normal by-product of erotic transference. No, she was not just any patient of his. She was beyond transference. Or so she thought. She was sure that Tim was the same gentleman outside the office that he was inside. She brought him tape recordings of her original songs and piano accompaniments that sounded like Joni Mitchell and Carole King and read him her original poetry. She told him her deepest secrets about her abusive father and malignant mother.

She and her three sisters had been prisoners of war—cellmates in their tiny home in Palms, an unimpressive suburb in Southern California, also known as Barely Hills. She and her sisters were chased and beaten in the wake of the up and downswings of her father’s out-of-control diabetic blood sugar. Her mother joined in the fun, using first her hands but switching to belts, hangers, and shoes so as not to damage any blood vessels in her hands. No one knew of the horrors in the Palms Prison and its wardens Joseph and Cecilia Stone.

Later, after attendance of many mandatory seminars in child abuse required by the DA’s Office, Lane realized that the child-accommodation syndrome kept her and her sisters quiet about their abuse. They loved their parents desperately because that is the way children are. Although the syndrome usually applied to child victims of sexual abuse, the characteristics of the syndrome, namely keeping quiet about the abuse and the desperate need for parental approval despite the beatings, were tantamount to the accommodation of her and her sisters in the Palms Prison.

Lane quickly fell deeply in love with Dr. Tim, and she didn’t care whether it was just a product of erotic transference or not. She loved him in a sexual way and in an intellectual way. She loved his voice, his strut, his beautiful manly face, and his deep dark eyes. He was gentle and kind with her—everything her father was not. She could not even consider dating or looking at another man. Her love for Tim was that strong.

To Lane, now fifty, that former Dr. Tim was a distant memory. So many tumultuous events had occurred in her life that cognitive psychotherapy seemed irrelevant—a hobby for rich people. Lane was alone again and was desperate to find another gentle soul to enter the third act of life with. Lane made a pledge to herself that she couldn’t keep. Like a smoker who never quits smoking or an alcoholic who can’t quit drinking, Lane pledged, I, Lane Stone, will marry the next bachelor who wants to marry me, no matter how homely he is or no matter how loud he snores! As long as her date had some income other than unemployment, Lane was going to marry the last man standing, even if he lived in Anaheim—the equivalent of a one bedroom on Mars. In fact, anything remotely near Downtown Disney was the equivalent of living on Mars. There is nothing that speaks middle-class Willy Loman like Anaheim, or Anaheim Hills, with its cul-de-sacs, conservative Republicans, engineers, and more engineers with disappearing pensions, feeding off the war plants and the war machine. Yorba Linda fares no better. Guilty as charged, Lane thought.

Sure, Lane had tried Internet dating. After twenty or so dates with all shapes, ages, and sizes, Lane had had it with misrepresented photos, narcissistic babblers, and divorcees living in Travis Bickle dog-kennel apartments. She finally posted a profile on Fish in the Pond, a dating service that promised same-day hook-ups. This site suited her needs, and she did not sugarcoat words in her profile:

Don’t request that I can look good in either jeans or cocktail dresses. I only wear prom dresses (I was a prom princess, you know. I peaked in high school). What is your master’s or PhD in? If you can’t answer these questions, keep fishing. I’m a fifty-year-old woman who would like to meet a sophisticated man who does not live in his car, unless it is a Lotus. If you are driving a jalopy that would permanently be on your front lawn if you could have it there to tinker with, those other smelly fish are looking for you! If you are wearing tighty-whiteys, stretched elastic turning green, that are ten years old, consider donating them to the local fishpond.

Seriously, if you say Pacific Palisades, you should really live there. If you say sixty-four, you should not be seventy-four, then laugh and say, ‘I lied, but I told you I was eighty-six right away! If you do not own a home (trailers, duplexes, and cardboard boxes do not count), keep fishing. The termites in every corner of your living room should be just passing through rather than roommates. I’ve sweat blood to buy and keep my house, otherwise known as the black hole.

Please do not write if you are recovering from a heart attack, had or need gastric bypass, have sixteen stents, if someone said to you, You’re thirty pounds overweight, want a caregiver for your impending terminal illness, can’t cure your toenail fungus, have a facial tic (suppressed rage), or have cholesterol over 190. I know your last girlfriend had an STD, so no need to lay that line on me to absolve your guilt when I catch it.

I won’t prattle endlessly about my daughter if you agree to not bloviate about your relatives or how you’re their caregiver at 170 years of age. (I know you have to resettle them in assisted living, and so you’ll be gone for long periods—NOT!)

English should be your primary language and preferably not with a Southern accent. Although I’m a bit pretentious and a snob, I enjoy making friends, making you laugh (you should be already laughing at this full-of-myself profile), dancing/exercising, gardening, shaping my bonsais, kayaking, snorkeling, traveling, reading, movie going/watching theater and opera, cooking, school, and playing piano. Learning anything new, except riding on the back of your Harley or having to go to car shows, is high on my list. If your collar is blue, jump back into the deep blue sea where you can find some plankton.

Don’t tell me about the millions in your bank account, but you gave your house to your son, and I’m really missing out, even though now you’re temporarily living in an apartment. I’m unique like everyone else in this fishbowl. I’m a fertility goddess without the estrogen. Any music that is well performed is what I like, including rap, techno, dead metal, jazz, and classical. If you don’t like any rap music or raunchy black stand-up comedy, leave the fishing to funny people.

If you are ingesting Propecia, Proscar, Avodart (it causes retrograde ejaculation), or antidepressants, throw the fish back. She won’t hang in there until Armageddon when you finally come! Oh yeah, if Fair Isaac doesn’t think you’re worth 740, just go away!

I’m hoping to meet a man who is intellectually gifted, sophisticated, and funny as a stand-up comic and over eighteen. You’re not worth going to prison over, although Martha did lose twenty pounds there. On our first date, I would like to sample the merchandise from the neck up. Use mouthwash, brush your tongue too, and floss. If you haven’t bleached your teeth and never had braces, keep fishing. Remove the black hair from your nose and earlobes. Comb-overs? Keep fishing. Even baby comb-overs must be banished from the face of the Earth. Join the bald community and revel in your baldness!

Thirty-year-olds who want a threesome? Go fish! Twenty-three-year-olds who think that they’re hot just because they are twenty-three and who will suck big balls at sixty when they turn into their fathers, go away. If you have ever used the term potty mouth, go take a hike. If you’d like to go to Disneyland, die fish, die!

If you say you’d like to see a movie, commit to a time and place! Don’t send endless e-mails asking, How was your day? Don’t say There’s no potential, but I want to meet the woman who wrote this profile, so let’s have pie at Polly’s. No, I don’t want to take that walk on the beach and look at the sunset. Isn’t that what everyone else does? You are a cliché!

And so Lane remained single, alone, and jaded. It was only natural that Shrink Tim seemed like the only viable option for her to go through time with. Lane had no idea that Tim grew up just a few miles from her in Mar Vista, another formerly white suburb of Los Angeles, went to all the same schools, and even had the same abusive math teacher Mr. Gutter. Mr. Gutter had traumatized hundreds of children and had given Lane mathphobia, a term that both she and Dr. Tim understood. It took Tim thirty years to tell Lane about their shared schools and neighborhoods, when Tim no longer behaved as a blank slate, a standard adopted by most cognitive therapists. She and Tim shared a laugh about how she was nominated prom queen by the Key Club; neither of them knew exactly what the Key Club was or what it did, although the Key Club, sponsored by the Kiwanis Club, was one of the largest high school service organizations in the country.

Tim broke all the rules now. He should never have revealed that they were practically contemporaries from the same schools and neighborhoods. He trashed any semblance of the therapeutic veil. Why not just ask her to the prom, fuck her, and dump her? No, being direct was not his way. He was like a crab, moving sideways. He had worked his way around all of her verbal assaults with it depends to the point of absurdity. He knew she had become obsessed with fucking him and said nothing in response, even when she directly brought her thoughts out in the open. In response to her opening the curtains on this explosive topic, he remained impassive, not looking away, looking straight at her, and making no gestures or facial movements of any kind and without any show of emotion as if it happened with every female patient whom he had treated in his career of over forty years. Silence. More container-theory jargon used by analysts.

Remain cemented in your chair, impassive and emotionless, to contain any positive or negative feelings for the patient. Managing countertransference and staying within your psychoanalytic container is imperative in order to manage countertransference and to enhance your patient’s transference, Raleigh instructed Tim years before.

Impassive silence was Tim’s specialty.

It was in the face of his silence that Lane first got the idea that she would rape him. There were pieces of information that made raping him a viable prospect. First, he had told her of another female patient who, frustrated with his impassiveness, pulled a gun out of her purse, pointed it at him, and pulled the trigger. The gun was unloaded, but he did not know that. He stated that he did not even move. He did not scream or cry out or even duck underneath his desk. Instead, he sat impassively and did not call the police, ever. He asked the woman why she had done it. She responded that she wanted him to feel what it was like to be helpless and afraid.

The fact that he never called the police was quite remarkable. This woman was an obvious danger, if not to him, then to someone else. She had committed a crime. Yet he did not report it. When Lane asked Tim why he did not report this crime, he gave a vague, nebulous answer regarding the futility of a police report, and the burden of having to go to court and testify. He wanted the woman to disappear.

Was Tim just too lazy to call the police? Or was it more? Lane intuited that something had happened between Tim and his patient assailant. Something borderline unethical. Something not within a proper course of therapy. He was worried that had he gone to the police, his female assailant would spill the beans about his unethical behavior and would tell his wife about an impropriety, sexual or personal. Lane did not know and probably would never know what happened unless she raided his files. But there appeared to be no files to raid. He had no visible filing cabinets anywhere in his office, just a big clump of papers on the floor. This man was so lazy that he kept no files. He lost track of his billing and seemed to have no system of any kind either in methodology or in keeping his business in order. But this was hardly a business. It was an excuse to escape from his wife, even for just a few hours per week. He hardly cared about whether he got paid or whether a patient’s time was up. In fact, some of his sessions ran over an hour, and he never once uttered the words, Your time is up. That would have meant his return to his palatial doghouse.

No, the full story of the female gun-toting patient would remain a secret as would his more remarkable failure to call the police and make a report. This anecdote, which he recounted impassively, loomed large in her decision that he would be her perfect first victim. He had too much to lose—his comfortable life, wife, in-laws, daughter, and relationship with Raleigh—to ever make a police report no matter how randy the rape became. She also knew how to disable his digital voice recorder and hidden cameras in his office, assuming he cared enough to have these things. She doubted whether he even cared enough to protect himself by recording the sessions or by filming them. But she had to find out. That would be the first order of business. Disable the documentary evidence. Then it would be her word against his. And what jury would believe that a woman would rape a man.

Well, it would not be rape as defined in the California Penal Code. Rape as so defined was the unlawful penetration of a woman’s vagina by a man not her husband. Technically, what she had in mind was not rape. It was forcible sexual battery, sodomy, and forcible digital penetration. However you sliced it, she was going to force him to engage in sexual acts with her as the grand finale of a year’s worth of him fucking with her head and taking her money. She would walk away with the satisfaction of just one time forcing this man to lose his cool. The gun-toting maul was an amateur. Lane would get into his head forever, and most likely, it would not be business as usual after she was through with him. She was not worried in the slightest about the consequences. She knew him like the back of her hand after their year’s worth of mind games.

Who was this mysterious stranger that she was so thoroughly and completely in crush with? He wouldn’t call it love. He would call it erotic transference—the phenomenon that strikes all vulnerable females (and perhaps males too) who see their shrinks as the guy (or girl) they should have been with: the charming, kind, all-ears, gentle, soft-spoken, stable mentor, friend, and parent who does not exist in real life.

Out on the tennis courts in Lane’s Huntington Beach condo-minium, Lane ruminated out loud to her friend and neighbor Casey, an affable, pretty, forty-something lesbian tennis pro who had been trying to convert Lane to the path of clitoral wisdom for years.

Face it, Lane, all men are dogs. Some are more trainable than others, but no matter how many blandishments he throws your way, underneath it all is a huge cauldron of testosterone ready to explode on you or whatever woman is foolish enough to hook up with a man. Take away their testosterone, and they behave normally.

Yeah, intellectually, I know you are right. But then I don’t see that side of Dr. Tim. He’s very contained. How often does a man ‘on the outside’ ever come along like this prince? After three months, it’s farting and belching. Some play practical jokes on you to release their contempt and hostility. One jester spun an empty laundry basket on my head to create static electricity, banging the basket on my glasses and ruining them. But he did get his guffaw at watching my hair rise from static electricity. Wonderfully humorous.

That’s it! Your backhand has really improved, Casey yelled, beaming at her protégé and ignoring Lane’s usual rant against her male partner du jour. Casey was so helpful to Lane. Her tennis game was really improving, and Casey, having once been heterosexual, knew genders, the good and the bad.

I’ve been imagining that the ball is Shrink Tim’s head.

Let’s take a five-minute break. I need to wolf down my snack. Too much caffeine this morning, and I’m ravenous, Casey said, walking to the court’s bench and her lunch box.

By the way, women in general are not practical jokers and would respect the hundreds of dollars it costs to get a decent cut, color, and blowout, replied the pragmatic Casey. Of course, lesbians usually get their hair done for peanuts by one of the other sisters in the circle of lesbian friends.

Poor Casey. Her Jewfro hair was butch-lesbian short and had already turned salt and pepper. She used no product or color. She wore no makeup. Casey was always proselytizing about the joys of being with a woman partner: soft cheeks, no five o’clock shadow, fewer risks of STDs, and a network of likeminded friends. Lane smiled and brushed off Casey’s cheerful dear-Abbey-the-lesbian advice.

"Very quickly, men stop grooming themselves and wear disheveled clothes bought at Costco on sale for two bucks a shirt in odd colors like orange and mauve. They leave their hair and toenail and fingernail droppings in the sink and tub, and the toilet seat is perennially up. About that toilet seat… did you ever notice how men create their own special rim of filth just inside the base of the seat that creates the odor of urinal?

It means that you will have yellow gloves on your hands daily, washing with Soft Scrub and pumicing the rim until the bad smell fades. When you live with a man, odors never completely dissipate. Lane figured that it was because most men were rotten to the core.

"But Tim, the almighty shrink, the personification of all sexual fantasies, is always impeccably dressed in clothes most likely marked by their day of use in his shrink closet: Monday, Tuesday, etc. At home, he probably wears ripped Costco sweatpants and soiled algae-grown underwear. Tighty-whiteys that should have been recycled into a Starbucks coffee cup sleeve. He’s been in a long-term marriage of convenience, and he and his wife stopped having sex a long time ago. He has no balls left, and if he does have them, they probably sag lower