The Last Time I Was Me. Cathy Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ a bunch of preposterously high and mind-numbingly scary bridges spanning the Willamette River.

      I cried my way into the city, because I felt like it, shoulders shaking, sounding quite like a dying warthog. How I am relishing my nervous breakdown!

      I slowed way down when I went over a bridge. The car behind me honked and the driver flipped me the finger, but I ignored him, eyes straight ahead, not looking down, down, down into that river below filled with who knew what kind of eight-headed human-eater or monster shark. (I do not like heights or bridges.)

      By the time I reached the Diamond District my face was red and blotchy and pale, my lipstick smeared. My mascara had trickled across my face and it looked as if dead ants had been buried in shallow graves across my cheekbones. I am a multicolored freak, I told myself, looking in the car mirror, a multicolored freak.

      I cleaned up as best as a crybaby can, running my fingers through my gold curls and adjusting my clothes. I was wearing jeans, a purple, lace-lined camisole, a lavender-colored silk blouse, some cool gold hoop earrings, and about three inches of bracelets. I also wore black heels with a strip of lavender on the toe that exactly matched the camisole. They are completely cool.

      Anger management class was located in a building that used to be a warehouse. In fact, this whole area of town, dubbed the Diamond District, used to be an industrial wasteland, according to Rosvita. Lots of rundown factories, warehouses, old stuff. But the location was too cool-close to the river, to downtown, to shopping and work-to stay that way.

      So one by one the factories were either bulldozed or converted and glass-walled buildings shot up. But the Diamond District had not yet been perfected, which probably lent to its appeal. Streets weren’t always paved right, tired factory buildings butted up to new, sleek structures, and there was a bit of a rough edge to it. I found parking near the address, crossed one street with potholes the size of Denver, and dodged a huge dump truck and an earth-mover.

      I looked at the address in my hand again. The anger management woman had told me that when I could smell beer, I was there. I could smell the beer. In fact, as I circled the building, I knew I was looking at, and smelling, a brewery.

      The temptation was almost too much for me. Beer and me have a long and golden and messy history and to slug one down right at that moment, or three or four, had vast appeal. I had heard that Oregon was home to a bunch of brothers who knew their beer, and I was anxious to taste the products of those bros.

      Two things held me back: One, I had been told to be prompt or else. Two, I was driving home. I have often been drunk in the last twelve years of my life, but I have never, ever driven after drinking.

      It’s like my other rule: I have been a bit slutty at different times in my life, and the sex left me colder and lonelier and more withered inside than I was before, but I don’t mess with anyone else’s man.

      Those are about the only two hard and fast rules I have, but they’ve worked for me thus far.

      I circled the building, trying to banish the thought of pouring gold beer down my throat, and looked for the double doors. Finally, I saw them. Painted green with a gold sign to the left that said, EMMALINE HALLWYLER, COUNSELOR.

      The entry was dark when I stepped in, but I saw stairs to my right and started to climb. The building, by my deductions, was probably one hundred plus years old with dust the same age, and dark as a caveman’s cave.

      I reached one landing and saw another gold sign that said EMMALINE HALLWYLER, COUNSELOR, and pointed up. This led to a hallway painted bright white. The white paint was thick, like frosted icing. At the end of the hallway, there were black and white photographs on both sides. All featured close-ups of people in the throes of one acute emotion or another: Joy. Surprise. Grief. Despair. Exhaustion. Depression. Panic. There must have been thirty pictures, all framed in black.

      The sign above the photographs said, PHOTOS TAKEN BY EMMALINE HALLWYLER. Super. She could photograph me when I was screaming, my face puffed like a red marshmallow, my mouth twisted like a red snake. I glanced at my watch. It was exactly 12:00.

      I was prompt. I looked like hell, but I was prompt and had not succumbed to golden beer, and guzzling.

      I turned one more corner and faced about twenty stairs.

      When I reached the top of the stairs, I had to blink. Light shone from all corners of the huge room from a multitude of windows. The floor and the walls were bright white, too. In one corner of the room, there were five red boxing bags suspended from the ceiling.

      In another corner, there looked to be a craft area. It was filled with glue and ribbons and tape and Styrofoam and wood. Scraps of metal, cardboard, egg cartons, and piles of stuff that looked like it came straight from the dump.

      In the third corner there was a number of huge pillows. A large sign above the pillows labeled it as the SCREAMING CORNER.

      In the fourth corner was a piano, a set of drums, guitars, and other musical instruments. I saw a violin. My heart squeezed real tight over that violin.

      In the middle of the room were seven beanbags. They looked like a rainbow-purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. In the center of the beanbags was a bigger-sized black beanbag and in the center of the black beanbag sat a woman.

      Now, I was expecting Emmaline Hallwyler to be about as wide as the Amazon jungle, with perhaps a black panther curling behind her and a venomous snake wrapped around her neck.

      There was no black panther, no venomous snake, and Emmaline Hallwyler was positively tiny. I could tell because when I looked in her direction she stood up.

      She was dressed all in white. White pants, white blouse, white high heels. It would have looked ridiculous on anyone else. Me, I would have looked like a gawky, temperamental angel who had had her wings taken away for punishment for some lousy offense.

      Emmaline, with her brown bob of hair and huge brown eyes and finely cut features, looked positively elegant. I would later learn that under the fragile elegance was a she-demon quite capable of knocking heads together and ripping people down to the size of pesky mice.

      “Do not move.” She said this with great authority.

      I hate when people order me about, but I obeyed. This class was court-ordered, after all, and with a good report maybe I could keep from getting too screwed with the judge.

      I didn’t move.

      She stared at me. I stared back. When you are used to working with male, egotistical advertising pricks who believe the earth was made for the pleasure of them and their dicks and everyone else is squash vermin, you get in the habit of not being intimidated.

      “I can feel your anger,” she told me, her voice ringing off the walls.

      “Gee, what are you, psychic or something?”

      “Stuff it, Jeanne. Your hostility is like burning hot rocks.”

      “Gee again. That’s why I’m here. Anger and hostility. Can I move now?”

      “No.”

      I waited. Perhaps she was taking time to feel my hostilic anger.

      “You’re barely hanging on.”

      “No shit.”

      “No, СКАЧАТЬ