The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine
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Cognitive Therapy
Douglas Krohn
dougkrohn@optonline.net
Rappaport, the lawyer, having exploited an arcane law never removed from the annals of Arabian justice, successfully sued a Saudi oil refinery for both the money and invested profits earned in infringing his client’s patent. The award was staggering, pleasing his client and making Rappaport – already a conjurer of big dreams – wealthy beyond his own fantasy. Wealthy and content – that was Rappaport, for he also had a wife who, even after thirty years of marriage, still kept a fresh appearance, and two ambitious children. Were it not for guilty ruminations that gnawed at his conscience – memories that could rattle him out of the gentle tomb of a Sunday afternoon – all would be perfect.
One such obsessive memory concerned a fifth of whiskey that Rappaport had broken over the head of a Harvard marching band member, when he was a senior at Cornell. Rappaport had never been much of a drinker, and in general detested relinquishing control to the caprices of his lost inhibition. But on the day of his final homecoming football game, Harris, his fraternity brother, ridiculed him as a prude and a killjoy, and coerced him into smuggling a bottle of scotch into the bleachers. “Come on, Marty,” Harris had prodded him. “For once in your life why don’t you ease up, just this once.”
“What makes you think I’m not eased up?” Rappaport had calmly argued in his own defense. “Since when is a bottle of whiskey a prerequisite for a good mood?”
“Marty, this is what I mean by ease up. You’re always so scared, like a sip of whiskey is going to kill you – like anything fun is going to kill you.”
His friend’s assertion reawakened in Rappaport the memory of a night several months earlier, when he for the first time tasted the ripened fruit of a woman, an eager co-ed at Syracuse whom he knew from back in the neighborhood. She had surrendered to him her flower that night, and he to her. In what should have been a tender celebration of their expulsion from the Garden, Rappaport became panicked by the thought that his prophylactic was riddled with microscopic holes. Inspecting himself, Rappaport could swear he saw a red patch emerge, invade and spread. Sweating and clammy, Rappaport broke the perplexed girl’s embrace and escaped outside. Through a dense snowstorm, he drove the Chevrolet he had borrowed from his older brother all the way back to Ithaca and directly to the college infirmary, where he begged a sleepy physician for a shot of penicillin. The injection into his buttocks stung and hurt for days, but Rappaport felt duly punished and absolved in his suffering.
“I am not afraid of fun,” Rappaport tried to convince Harris, but really himself, and grabbed the glass flask of scotch. He took a generous swig, tucked the flask into the inner pocket of his wool overcoat, and filed nonchalantly into the stadium, Harris smiling behind him.
By the end of the first half Rappaport was drunk. He had only two more sips of whiskey, but that was enough. Rappaport looked up at the halftime scoreboard and saw, for the fourth time in four years, Cornell on the short end of an eventual Harvard victory. This sense of inferiority always gnawed at Rappaport, but more so this day because of the whiskey that burned in his belly: it was just another example of Jewish boys from Stuyvesant unjustly overshadowed – now as young men – by their blue-blooded counterparts from Andover or Exeter. When the Harvard marching band took the field for their halftime show, they played to the stadium-side audience and, poetically, turned their backs to the students in the bleachers. Not even the lusty jeers from the students could turn the band members about face, and the collective ire of the Cornell bleachers grew. “So you’re finally showing us your best feature – your backsides!” shouted Harris, and the rest of the crowd laughed. Inspired by his friend’s joviality, Rappaport wanted to show Harris that he, too, knew how to have a good time. Drunk on scotch and insecurity, Rappaport removed the glass bottle of whiskey from his overcoat and hurled it onto the field.
The band played on, even after the bottle shattered on the trombonist’s head; their backs to the bleachers, they never saw it coming, and the bass drum drowned out the sound of cracking glass. Rappaport stood in frozen horror of his own deed, and saw in one fluid motion the glass bottle melt down the sides of the trombonist’s head; the trombonist clutch the back of his skull and spin around to the bleachers; and finally, as he fell backwards to the turf, eyes wide with terror, the young man cradle his instrument in his left arm as if it were an infant, and point accusingly at Rappaport with his right. The home crowd stood in disapproving silence, and an empty circle cleared around Rappaport. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Marty?” Harris scolded as he pushed Rappaport in the chest. The trombonist lay splayed on the playing field, and when Harris saw a half dozen public safety officers descend upon the crime scene, he grabbed Rappaport by the elbow and expedited his escape from the bleachers, from which he disappeared forever with his dark secret.