She Told Me

She told me she had been a tabletop dancer. “Got married 17 times that way. I would dance. They would marry me. I’d get bored, leave one, dance some more, and marry another one.”

“Why didn’t you marry a rich one?”

“None of the guys, I danced for were rich.”

“Too bad.”

“I wasn’t in it for the money. I liked the attention. My boob job helped.”

Rolled with fat, sloppy, balding, and boob-jobless when she became my patient, she was the prototypical Wal-Mart shopper. With her cart loaded with chips, candy, cigarettes, cat liter packages, cosmetics, Coors, and charcoal lighter, she could weave her way down one hundred Wal-Mart aisles without drawing anyone’s attention. My imagination lacked the reach to visualize her mesmerizing 17 men while table dancing.

Her wacky psychiatric descriptions seemed as fabricated as her dancing history. Sobbing, hysterical protestations marked her office visits. Every medication gave her bizarre side effects, but she constantly appealed for “pills to ease my bewildered brain.” Although possessing creative suicidal plans, she refused to be admitted to the psychiatric unit with all the “nut cases.”

Snakes were her favorite hallucinatory subjects. Once she claimed to see snakes climbing out of the wall—“Big snakes. Huge snakes. Cobras. And Boas. They are vicious too. They are trying to bite me and all of them want to squeeze me to death if they don’t bite me dead first.” I gave her an antipsychotic, Risperdal.

The next day her third-cousin, once removed left a message on my voice mail: “That medicine you gave Sally Sue made her go crazy. She put on pink lipstick and dressed in a pink baby doll gown and went walking downtown where she picked up a pinkless man and took him home and made out with him right on her pink carpet. That medicine turned her into a sex maniac. She told me you were the best psychiatrist she ever had. I don’t believe her, but that’s what she told me.”
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The characters and incidents portrayed and the names used herein are fictitious and any resemblance to the names, character, or history of any person is coincidental and unintentional.