Introducing My Therapist

So what was it like going to the therapist for the first time?

From what Travis told me, a lot of therapists see their clients (that’s what we’re called, not patients) on Zoom, but he prefers to see his therapist in person, and that office offers both options. Dr. Oliver said he wanted to see me in person for the first couple visits at least, so I headed over to his office, which was only a few blocks from the apartment Keaton hated.  I thought it was a good sign that I could find street parking close by, since Travis warned me that the parking lot for the building was seriously overpriced.

What was totally weirdass was that there was no receptionist or nurse when I got to the waiting room. There were just a bunch of chairs and a couch and old magazines (that was like usual) and a board with the names of therapists and doctors. (I noticed that there was an M.D. among them, although that’s not Travis’ psychiatrist, he told me.) So I pushed the button next to Dr. Oliver’s name a light next to it went on, and I picked up the clipboard he said he’d leave for me with forms to fill out. He told me to get there early as the paperwork would take a while, and, sure enough, it did.

I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but, after a while, the light on the board next to Dr. Oliver’s name went out, and I heard footsteps coming down a hall toward me. A door opened, and I figured that the dude who stepped through into the waiting room was Dr. Oliver. I put him at about 55, with brown hair that was starting to gray at the temples (what women call “distinguished”) and taller than me at 6’2” and 200. He had brown eyes behind wire-framed glasses was wearing an open-collared plaid shirt, khakis and loafers. I honestly had no idea what a therapist was supposed to look like, but at least this one looked like a normal enough dude.

“Mr. Block?,” he said, holding out his hand for me to shake. “Kyle Oliver. I see you found the clipboard. Did you have time to fill everything out?”

“Yessir,” I said.

“No need to call me sir,” he said, as he was leading me through the door he’d come out through. “You can call me Kyle, if you like. Most of my clients do.”

“It’s a southern thing,” I explained. I wasn’t sure about calling him by his first name, especially that soon. I decided to call him ‘um’ until something else seemed natural.

The door led to a little hallway with closed doors on one side. Dr. Oliver’s door was the fourth, and he opened it to let me through.

Inside, the office looked pretty normal. There was a desk, a couple wood file cabinets, a bookshelf, a couch, and a fancyass reclining chair, which is where he indicated I should sit.

Dr. Oliver took the desk chair and swiveled around to face me. He had a pad, pen and second clipboard. The clipboard with the paperwork I’d worked so hard to fill out he just put on the desk without looking at it.

“So,” Dr. Oliver said, “what brings you here today?”

“A buddy of mine told me I was depressed.”

“And?”

“And, well, I thought about it some, and I reckon he’s right. Mostly I have problems getting out of bed in the morning. Well…I have trouble falling asleep too, but the mornings are the real problem. I just feel so…I don’t know…so bad that I can barely move. I can’t get up and do my job and I’m afraid that’s starting to be a problem with my employers.”

“Any thoughts of suicide or harming yourself?”

I guess I looked surprised, so he added “I have to ask that.”

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

“What does ‘not really’ mean?”

“It means….I don’t know…I mean, no. No thoughts of harming myself. But…well…there have been times when I kind of wished I was dead.”

That was not easy for me to get out. But he asked and I reckoned it would be pretty lameass to start lying to my new therapist.

“Are you having any other problems? Change in appetite, for example?”

I nodded. It’s hard to believe, but I’ve kind of lost my taste for ice cream.

 “Are you drinking too much?”

“No. Maybe I’ll have two beers a night instead of the one I’m allowed to have, but that’s it.”

“Allowed to have?”

“I’m…it’s not that I’m on a diet, but I do have to watch extra calories.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I appear with my shirt off on TV all the time…and people like how I look with a six-pack.”

“You’re on TV?,” he asked. I guess he wasn’t a fan of the show. There’s so much shit to watch these days that our little reality show isn’t exactly a ratings-buster. So I explained about At Home with Maya and how I went viral and ended up getting a job out of it.

“So what’s that like? Being so good-looking that people write about it on your Instagram?”

He didn’t ask it like he was coming on to me. He just asked it.

“I don’t know. It’s not like I think about it all the time, although it’s not like I don’t know about it. And, hey, I might be out of work if I didn’t look this way.” I told him about my interrupted career at the hotel and how it came to its sudden end. Then I said: “do I need to go back to November 8^th, 1992?”

“What’s that?”

“My birthdate.”

“So you’re a Scorpio?”

I wasn’t expecting a therapist to be into astrology.

I reckon he saw that. “Don’t worry. I don’t exactly look up the horoscopes of my clients. But it makes for something to talk about.”

“I’m not a typical Scorpio,” I said. “I understand we’re supposed to be secretive. I’m pretty much an open book.”

“Have you told the people in your life about what’s going on with you and about your coming to see me?”

He kind of had me there.

“That’s not because you’re a Scorpio,” he said with a smile. I thought it was the kind of smile that made you feel at your ease, which made sense, giving what he does for a living. “A lot of straight guys don’t want to admit to having mental health issues.”

“I guess that’s me.”

“You mentioned a six-pack. You’re the athletic type, I take it.”

“Yessir. I was a pro ball player for one season.”

“So you must have played a long time before you made it to the pros.”

“I started tball when I was 6.”

“I did my graduate research work on athletes with a certain personality disorder. It was next to impossible to get guys to sign up for the study. The all-American jock doesn’t exactly want to get caught needing psychological help. Among other things, they think it’s gay.”

“That’s exactly what my best buddy would say. I haven’t told him. I haven’t told my girlfriend either.”

So I had to tell Dr. Oliver about Keaton and Joyce, and, before I knew it, our 45 minutes were up, just as I was getting into talking about myself to a total stranger. He swiveled around in his chair and came up with an actual paper daily planner and made an appointment for me for the next week. Part of me didn’t want to wait that long, although I understood already from Travis that you usually saw your therapist once a week. I also had to pay Dr. Oliver for the session – he charged $150, which was a lot, but I could manage it four times a month without having to dip into my savings. He had one of those portable tap credit card machines, which was the good thing as I never ordered checks to go with my ‘checking’ account .

Then we both got up and he showed me the way out…which wasn’t the way in.

I had to ask about it.

“It’s for the sake of your anonymity. You said you’re on TV, and someone might see you coming out the door to a bunch of therapists’ offices.” I wanted to say that the paparazzi who don’t follow me around could just as easily see me going in the front door. “Plus it keeps you from seeing whoever’s in the waiting room…and vice versa.”

“Oh,” I said. It seemed seriously lameass, but I had no choice but to go along with it.

So that’s how my career in psychotherapy began. I actually did feel better the next morning, not because Dr. Oliver did anything magical, but because I at least felt like I was doing something about what I reckon I was finally admitting was a problem.