Author's Preface  

In the 60's, when I was in my teens, I thought I wanted to die.  Although my background was belligerently bohemian, I was as far away from free love - or any love, for that matter -- as a soul could get.  In my youthful experience, real love was simply not to be found, free or otherwise, and so I tried to give up the ghost.  

"The All Souls' Waiting Room" is about the decidedly different childhood that preceded my suicidal longings:  I was to be kept free of repressive sexual and societal mores, largely through the child-rearing theories of the brilliant and persecuted psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich.  

In the eighties, I visited Vienna, many years and many brands of therapy after my adolescent attempts and while I was still struggling to find a way to write about my childhood.  The checkered political history and oddly paradoxical charm of the old city, particularly Freud's flat at 19 Berggasse (before its contents were moved to London), made a visceral impression on me.  Vienna is to psychoanalysis what Mecca is to Islam; anyone who was anyone in the pioneer days of the field had been there as a pilgrim.  Jung had visited, Reich spent many years as Freud's assistant at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Clinic.  Since, almost at birth, I felt I had been laid on the altar of psychiatry - "Here, fix her!  Save her!" - in Vienna I felt I had found a personal, cosmological home base.  

Some time after my return, I had a half-waking dream of a dramatic scene.  It seemed inspired, the answer to my creative problem.  It was the scene that was the seed for this book: 

In a celestial version of the Viennese coffeehouse called Demel's, the shades of Sigmund S. Freud, C. G. Jung, and Wilhelm Reich sit around a round marble table.  In front of each of them is a different kind of Sachertorte on a small plate. 

The three dead psychoanalysts debate the merits of the Viennese chocolate cake, Demel's version the Hotel Sacher's.  Jung, wearing a rumpled white linen suit, prefers the cake from Demel's.  Freud, on the other hand, in three-piece gray wool, insists that the drier Hotel Sacher's torte is more elegant and besides, it is the original recipe and so by far the best.  Reich, wearing a short white lab coat over dungarees and blue chambray work shirt, tells them they're both wrong, neither Demel's nor the Hotel Sacher's can compare to the sublime recipe of his mother's.  

Schlomo (Freud's real middle name), Gus, and Willie, as they think of each other, proceed with their celestial taste-test. Removing an ethereal cigar from his mouth, substituting a forkful of the Sacher's heady confection, Schlomo Freud chews thoughtfully.  "Dreamy!" he exclaims.  "Wunderbar!"  

Gus Jung takes a bite of his Sachertorte, the one from Demel's.  His small black eyes close briefly in pleasure.  "Magic! Alchemy!" he declares.  

Impatiently picking up his piece with his hand, Willie Reich takes several big bites at once.  "Orgasmic!" he bellows.  "And much better for you!" 

Buy a copy of "The All Souls' Waiting Room"  here -- if you're so inclined.

CHAPTER ONE

December, 1962 

Johnnine Hapgood came home from the miserable failure of her calculus final, sat down at her Formica-topped desk, and wrote a suicide note.  This was after a last, one-for-the-road food binge, followed by self-induced vomiting.

"To Whom It May Concern," she began.  She looked down at her little white dog, Moppie, busily playing with her little blue rubber ball.  Pouncing, chasing, barking and wagging her tail, Moppie was trying to cheer Johnnine up, but nothing could. 

     "I really feel like I've tried, but nothing I do turns out right.  I don't seem to have the knack other people do.  I think I'm defective, I go around feeling all shot through with arrows on the outside but on the inside I can't feel anything.  If there was a place to go for a trade-in, I would.  I need a thicker skin, elephant hide maybe.  And a stretchier soul, something like Silly Putty.  Otherwise the world hurts too much, everything bombs in a big way, I wish I could figure out why, but I guess I'm not smart enough and I just can't take a life of more of the same crapola . . . "

She crossed out the line 'I guess I'm not smart enough' and then thought of her ignominious incompletion of the calculus final.  Which meant the loss of all her plans for the future, all her reasons for living.  She put the line back in. Even though it tore at her pride, she refused to lie.  Humiliation was familiar and well-deserved.  She was a total and complete failure, a female putz.

Re-reading what she'd written, Johnnine thought hers was the worst suicide note she'd ever read.  Just like she couldn't think of anything brilliant or redeeming to do with her life, she couldn't think of anything redeeming or brilliant to say.  Shit, she thought despairingly, I can't even write a good suicide note.  Then, without knowing why, she reached for her old diary, the one from junior high school.  She rummaged through it until she found a poem she had written in eighth grade, or what would have been eighth grade except she had skipped it in a "Special Progress" program that smushed junior high school into two years:

     "The Man Who Killed Himself, 1958"

     He's dead, my mother cries, keening.

     Some boys found him this morning, in a rented car/He'd taken cyanide, his face was blue, she sobs.

     I look at her across the two feet of linoleum.

     But there is a yawning chasm, splitting the earth between us as wide as a canyon.

     I suddenly know we will always be a million miles apart.

     My mother's old lover, for whom she feels grief.

     The old hot night doctor, whose death brings me relief.

     Words of mourning are like dark stones

     Thrown down an empty well."

Johnnine tore the poem out of the diary, stuck it behind her suicide note, and folded them up together.  On the shag rug at her feet, Moppie was making a show of snapping her head back and throwing her rubber ball across the room so she could chase madly after it.  Any other time, it would have made Johnnine laugh.

Johnnine unfolded her note and added a postscript:  "Please find Moppie a good home.  Her AKC registered name is Flora Dora's Mopsy Topsy but it's not her fault, it was her breeder's idea."

Johnnine put down extra food and water and some clean newspaper for Moppie to pee on.  Johnnine hoped Moppie would whimper at her funeral, the way Lassie did when anything sad happened. Then she straightened up, still holding a few pages of the Village Voice, realizing there might not be a funeral.  Johnnine knew her mother's feelings about burial; along with a bewilderingly long list of other things, funerals and cemeteries were held in withering contempt.  "Waste of space!" Dinah fumed.  "The earth should be for the living, not rotting corpses!"  Jesus, Johnnine thought, mom might have me cremated before she even told Duncan I was dead.

She sat down at her desk and added a P. P. S.:  "Please let my father know, Duncan Cameron Kirk, he lives at 268 West 17th Street, top floor.  CHelsea 3-8853."

Johnnine imagined her father's look when he heard the news, the same blank, vacant, out-of-touch look he'd worn at her high school graduation.  Well, so he was out of it, so what, she thought, he couldn't help it.  Nobody could help anything, which was also why she wanted to die.  She knew exactly what her mother would do.  Dinah would cry at first, then she'd drink, then she'd take some pills.

Johnnine signed the note Sincerely, Forever, stuck the two pages in an envelope, and propped it up against the mirror over the bureau in her miniscule living room.  She had a feeling she was forgetting a few things but when she saw herself in the mirror -- round-faced, large-eyed, full-lipped -- she got distracted, deciding she needed more lipstick.  Just because she was killing herself didn't mean she didn't want to look good.  She touched up her thick black eyeliner and brushed her long straight honey-blonde hair.  Then she sat on the couch, opened the vial of barbiturates she'd swiped from her mother and a bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills.  Pouring them into her lap, she began swallowing handsful at a time, washing them down with a tumbler of the Ballantine's scotch Jerry had left on his last visit.  She felt very, very shitty.

Moppie jumped up on the couch and started licking Johnnine's hand.  Someone would be sure to want her, Johnnine thought, and then she felt like she was going to throw up.  Quickly, she lit a Pall Mall and pulled the smoke inside her, which stopped the gag reflex.  Then she felt dizzy, so she stubbed out the cigarette.  She lay down full-length on the jade-green couch, the one she had bought from her neighbor Ginnie Lee for twenty bucks and which Ginnie said matched the color of her eyes.  She made sure her black corduroy jumper came neatly down to her knees.  She looked down at her nylon-encased legs.  She sat up to put on her black faze-lizard high heels.  Johnnine loved them and wanted to die with them on.  She lay back down, crossed her arms over her chest, closed her eyes, and waited.

Her head started to dip and swirl and she hoped it wasn't going to be like a sick-drunk but then the whirling subsided and things started to feel dim, distant, almost peaceful.  The unrelenting noise of the city outside began to fade.  On the radio next door, Barbra Streisand was singing "Happy Days Are Here Again."

I look okay, she thought.  It wouldn't be like finding someone's brains splattered all over the wallpaper.  No drippy pools of coagulated blood or repellant bloated faces in her case.  Just an artfully composed young woman who looked like an Egyptian princess in her burial tomb, albeit (she loved the word) an Egyptian with blonde hair.

Some time passed, Johnnine was drifting off, when she heard a bell ring.  It sounded far away.  What was . . . ?  The phone, it was the phone!  Damn, what if it was Jerry?!  She knew she was kidding herself, he hadn't called in weeks.

The phone kept ringing, though it sounded like it was in the closet under a pillow.  Johnnine roused herself to get up and answer it, but discovered she could not move a muscle.  Exerting all her physical strength and mental will, she still couldn't move.  Her body completely ignored her commands, which was scary.  She kept struggling.  Get up, damn it!  This was ridiculous.  Then she heard a loud resounding POP! -- like the cork exploding out a champagne bottle.  Next thing she knew, she was looking down at herself from the ceiling.

She studied her former physical form with intene curiosity.  Somehow, Johnnine wasn't surprised or even grief-stricken at the sight of her empty, motionless body; now this was interesting!  She decided she did look like an Egyptian princess, a zaftig blonde Egyptian princess with her faithful little lapdog mourning beside her.

Johnnine heard the phone ringing but it didn't matter anymore.  She took a last look around.  The cockroaches in the kitchen and Moppie's tongue licking her lifeless hands were the only moving things in the tiny tenement apartment, for which new tenants were probably already lining up.

Her soul drifted out through the closed window, past the rusting metal fire escape, and hung in the air four stories above a busy, early-evening Bleecker Street.  Johnnine looked down on the heads of people bustling in and out of the little Italian groceries, on their way home to dinner.  The Christmas decorations wrapped around the lightpoles made them look like giant candy-canes stuck in the sidewalk; the rain had turned the oil on the street into puddles of rainbows.  Johnnine was intrigued with her new perspective, but something made her feel she had to ascend.  She loved New York, especially the Village, but it was time to go.  She didn't know where her soul was taking her, but it couldn't be any worse than where she'd been.