The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Eighteen: My Raging Libido

My roommate turned out to be the kid who had called me a shithead in line the day before. Luckily, he didn’t seem to recognize me, and I didn’t mention it to him, so we didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about much of anything, in fact, that entire year. I had to keep reminding myself that it could have been worse. My roommate could have been one of those incredibly annoying kids who don’t know they’re annoying and talk your ear off from the second you wake up until you get back in bed. That would have been worse, I think, but I wasn’t always sure.

Dorm life was nothing like I had envisioned it. I figured that everyone would have their doors open all the time, because college was all about meeting new people and all that, but everyone just shut themselves in their rooms and no one seemed too interested in becoming friends. Not that they had no friends. I was on a floor with a lot of upperclassmen, and they had their friends from the years before, and they would have people over and close the doors and they were pretty comfortable with that. Which left me, but I didn’t mind it so much after a while. It gave me lots of time to do my work.

Even though the situation with my room had been sorted out, the bureaucratic nightmare that was life at BU was far from over. I got tons of letters and emails that were addressed to me, but weren’t for me, if that makes any sense. I got all kinds of messages from professors I hadn’t had who taught classes I wasn’t in and advised student groups I had never heard of. I was narrowly defeated in an election to become Vice President of the ski club. My hours at the dining hall where I did not work had to be shifted to make room for a couple of new hires. My economics professor thanked me for my honest effort and would be thrilled to write me a letter of recommendation. I thanked him back and asked for the letter by the end of the week, but apparently that issue got sorted out because I never heard back from him. Or maybe it was written but sent to someone else. I wanted to know what the guy would say about me.

My roommate stayed out of my way and I stayed out of his. The little passive-aggressive games we played with volumes and lights and cleanliness and whatnot could be unbearable, but they could also be a lot of fun. Neither of us ever spoke a word about them, of course, because that would ruin the game, and why would you want to do that? I didn’t approach anyone in any of my classes and never had anything to say to anyone who approached me. I got used to life as a person without any kind of meaningful social interaction and started thinking I would make a pretty good adult some day. I got to be very good at Spider Solitaire.

But there were times when I would get lonely, and these were the times I tried to do things differently. I was already in the honors program—though I still couldn’t figure out why—so one night, they hosted a coffee get-together thing and I went, hoping to find someone to talk to. But I found everyone there mostly insufferable. The program was an odd combination of overachievers who overestimated themselves and had gotten rejected by better schools and underachievers who had gotten dynamite standardized test scores but hadn’t tried hard enough to get a grade above a C in their lives. The overachievers were annoying and much stupider than they thought they were; the underachievers were inexplicably bitter and even a little hateful and always on the verge of a breakdown. And then there was me, all of these things put together, so I didn’t mix well.

But the honors kids were kind of a random group, and besides the fact that BU had decided that we were smarter than the other kids on campus, we didn’t have anything in common. I thought I might have better luck with a group I wanted to join. I found a complete list of student groups online and went through the whole thing, but it was mostly uninspiring. I signed up for two. There was a freeze tag club that promised to organize all kinds of games of freeze tag on campus, but it ended up being a weird sort of front for a religious group, so I only went to one meeting. Then there was a Simpsons club, but I never got an email or anything back from them.

So I was surprised one day to find an invitation in my mailbox. Not to a club, but to psychotherapy. The letter said that I had been recommended to our school’s mental health department on Deerfield Street, and they hoped I would call them to make an appointment.

At first, I was insulted. I mean, I had my problems, but who could think that I was crazy enough to need a therapist? But that quickly passed, and then I realized that I probably was crazy enough to need a therapist, or at the very least, crazy enough that I could benefit from the experience.

I showed up at the appointed place at the appointed time with my letter in hand, just in case I wasn’t on the list. I recognized the girl working behind the counter at mental health department from one of my classes, and I probably would have run off out of embarrassment, but I hadn’t noticed until I had already explained my business. I figured, oh well, now she knows. They left me waiting on a dirty little couch in the lobby for at least half an hour. I was too afraid to read or ask questions or something, because I worried that it was some kind of test, or at the very least, anything out of the ordinary I did would be noted. I wanted to make a very good impression.

Finally, a woman with a huge smile waved me into her office. Even though I had already decided to do this, and even though I had been sitting there for a while, I almost ran off when she called me in. I didn’t think “I should run off,” but I did have to think “DON’T RUN OFF,” and if I hadn’t said that I think I would have left. Like it was an involuntary urge that I had to beat back. I followed the smiling woman into her office, where she told me to sit down on a chair while she pulled up her own from around the desk.

“So do you know why you’re here?” she asked.

“I’m crazy,” I said, showing her the letter.

“Oh, no no no!” she assured me, her expression somehow changing even though her smile was exactly the same. “This is a sort of trial program,” she explained, “where mildly troubled students, who are maybe having a hard time with the transition to college life, are recommended to us by their Resident Advisors. But you’re far from crazy. We’re just here to talk with you, to make sure you’re doing OK.”

I nodded. I felt a little better, but was still a bit confused. “My R.A. recommended me?” I don’t think I’d ever spoken more than four words to the kid. His name was Igor and all I knew about him was that he rode a bike everywhere, even to the convenience store right across the street.

The smiling woman nodded. I looked on her desk and saw that her name was Dr. Thompson. She started looking through my file. “Oh, you know what? I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but your R.A. has recommended three times more students than anyone else. So I wouldn’t put too much stock into that,” she tried to assure me. And I was a little assured, except I was still there, and that had to mean a little something. “Looking at this," she went on, "I would say you look to be pretty well-adjusted.”

“Thank you,” I said. This is probably still the most sincere compliment I’ve ever received in my life. It meant a lot to me.

“This is a two-part program we’re running here today,” she told me. “Round one is a group session, and round two is one-on-one with a therapist. Don’t be frightened by round one. It’s not going around the circle and sharing stories, it’s a kind of experimental physical treatment. Some stretching and deep breathing, nothing more serious than that.” By now she was showing me down the hall into a big open room with bright fluorescent lights and gym mats on the floor. She introduced me to a girl named Sophie who had short, jet black hair and big blue eyes and dark purple nail polish and a smile almost as wide as Dr. Thompson’s. Sophie was very cute and I regretted that she knew I was crazy.

“Chris, is it?” she asked, and she grabbed my hand and pulled me through the door. “Come on in, sit there,” she said, pointing to a plastic folding chair and taking hold of my shoulders and pushing me towards it. “We’re going to start in a second.”

I sat and looked around. There were six or seven other people in the room, and none of them looked like “patients,” or whatever I was. They all knew each other and they all knew Sophie. Someone had written “ALCHEMISTS’ CLUB” on a little whiteboard at the front of the room, but I had no way of knowing if this was the name of the group or some kind of inside joke.

Sophie grabbed a chair and pulled it up right next to mine, so that they were touching, and sat down. “What we’re doing,” she explained, “is just a few stretching exercises that are meant to calm you down, make you relax, stuff like that.” She was kind of tapping on my legs with the palm of her hand while she spoke, for emphasis, and I was listening closely.

“Is that it?” I asked, because I thought I should say something.

“Well,” she said, kind of rolling her head and looking up, like the answer was on the ceiling, “since you're interested, it’s a little more complicated than that. We’re trying to find some muscle movements that will release some natural chemicals in your body to aid the relaxation. Is that about right, guys?” she asked the people behind her, whom I had mostly forgot about. They gave an unenthusiastic affirmation, and Sophie smiled again. The crowd was more interested in each other. Some were stretching, or talking to each other. Even though they were there, I felt alone with this girl. “OK, let’s start then, yeah?”

“Sure.”

“OK, first thing, just sit straight and look straight ahead.” Then she popped up out of her chair like she had forgotten something, and ran over to a shelf and picked up two coffee table books and brought them back. “I like your hair,” she said, and she kind of ran her fingers through it, which I normally find annoying, but it was nice this time somehow. She dropped the other book on my lap. It hurt more than it might have.

“Is this right?” I asked, looking straight ahead, trying to stiffen my spine as far as it would go.

Sophie laughed. “You don’t have to be that straight,” she said. “Just relax a little bit, and keep your hands on the book.”

I relaxed, and she told me “good.” She was in her chair again now, and she rested her hands on my shoulders and started turning my body towards hers. Her fingers kind of curled around my shoulders. I desperately tried to figure out if she was flirting with me or if this was just part of the therapy.

“All right, now turn a little further,” she said, taking her hands off my shoulders. I didn’t really feel motivated to turn now, but I did anyway. “Now keep your eyes locked on me,” she said, and for a second I hoped I was in a terrible movie, “and lift the book an inch off your lap.”

I obliged. She studied me. Everyone else in the room was silent now, and they were looking at me too. It was then that I realized that this was the extent of the therapy. This what was supposed to do something to me. I was in a room full of quacks. I didn’t know what to say, though, so I just sat there like an idiot, turning left, staring at Sophie, holding a book above my lap.

Sophie saw I wasn’t about to volunteer any information. “How does your liver feel?” she asked.

I wanted to think that she was somehow better than the rest of these nuts, and I really didn’t want to disappoint her, so I tried as hard as I could to make my liver feel something. Apparently your nerves don’t go there. “Not bad,” I finally said.

Everyone in the room, Sophie included, laughed. I hoped I had told a joke and not made a fool of myself.

“OK. Well this first one was pretty basic and your body is kind of resisting, so I don’t think this is going to work, so I guess you'd better just go.” She shrugged apologetically.

“What? You mean that’s it?”

“Sorry,” she said, taking the book from me. “Maybe you can come back in a week or so and give it another shot.” I was crushed. I never went back though, obviously, because Sophie aside, what a fucking waste of time.

I wandered back into Dr. Thompson’s office, and she asked me how it went. I shrugged and said “all right,” and she looked incredibly pleased by this.

“Now for round two, you have a couple of choices,” she said. “You can have a free session with one of our student therapists, or pay a little bit for a professional session.”

“Are the students worse than the professionals?” I asked.

“Much worse.”

I thought about this for a second. “Still, I’ll take the student.” She smiled and showed me to a smaller room with the classic setup of the chair behind the couch, along with a frowning kid who was to be my student therapist.

He was a grad student, but he didn’t look much older than me. I think he had been trying to grow a beard to give himself some credibility, but it wasn’t working out too well for him. He probably would have looked better without. He had long, greasy blond hair that was eerily straight and went down past his shoulder blades. He ordered me to sit down and nodded seriously at the smiling woman, who handed him my folder.

“This is a serious file you’ve got here,” he said after he had leafed through it a bit.

“May I see it?” I asked.

The therapist seemed genuinely stumped. But then he remembered that he was the therapist and he was supposed to know everything, so he said “no” very quickly and snapped it shut before I could read any of it from the other side of the room, not that I was trying, since I couldn't, reclining on the couch and facing the other direction and all. “Why don’t you tell me about why you’re here.”

“Well I don’t know why I’m here,” I explained. “My R.A. recommended me, I guess. But he doesn’t really know me at all, so I’m not sure why I’m here.”

“Do you have an idea why you might be here?” he asked, and even though it was a question, it sure sounded like I was being accused of something.

“I have a couple,” I said. The kid made a sarcastic little waving gesture, like he wanted me to go on.

So I thought of all the problems I had ever had, all the mistakes I had ever made, all the shit I had ever put myself through. Because, the thing is, I really wanted him to understand me. More than anything, I wanted to be understood. And suddenly reflecting on my entire life for the first time, I felt I needed to explain myself. Reclining on that couch, facing that wall, I was free to imagine anyone I wanted in the chair behind me, and so that invisible therapist became every person I had ever known, and I felt the desperate need to explain myself to all of them, because how does a person end up here? My same old patterns of mistakes and failures were so inexplicable, even to me, that I wanted to lay it all bare so that maybe someone smarter would be able to sort it out. Or if not that, I just wanted them to know why it had happened this way, and why it wasn’t my choice, and how sorry I was.

It was all too much, though, and I just said “I don’t know, I’m shy I guess,” and I hated myself, because it was such a copout, and it was the same thing I always do, because here was this opportunity to make myself better and I was too overwhelmed to even know where to begin, so instead of starting somewhere small and hoping that would lead me somewhere else, I decided to just leave it. Stupid.

“Shy,” the wunderkind therapist said, real deadpan, like he was pretending to think he had heard me wrong. I nodded. “Because that’s not what the file says.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”

The therapist sighed. “All right, are you finished lying? Or are we going to have to do this the hard way?”

“I don’t think I’m lying.”

I could hear the therapist throw open the file, and I think the reason he threw it open with such force in the first place is that he wanted me to hear it. “Christopher Sartinsky. That’s you, right?” I nodded. “Desperate for attention. Anxious, unhealthy desire for acknowledgment. Deep, insatiable craving for love and affirmation. Irrepressible, raging libido.”

“Raging libido?” I wasn’t sure about that other stuff either, but this raging libido sure didn’t sound right.

“Very raging,” he assured me.

“I’ve never had any problems with my libido raging before.”

“Well your resistance to my diagnosis only proves how right I am,” he said, and though I couldn’t see him I could tell he was smiling for the first time, in a very smug way.

I wanted to help him out, because I felt bad, telling him he was wrong and all, and also I figured maybe I could undo what I had just done and make something of this whole therapy thing. I turned around so I could look right at him. “Maybe I have a raging libido—” I paused, and I had to remember what I was going to say because this sounded so wrong. “Maybe I have a raging libido, and I’m repressing it, and that’s causing some problems.” That could be right, I figured. If it’s in my file, then there must be some explanation, after all.

“Why don’t you leave the therapy to the therapist?” he asked. Then he pointed to himself, just in case I wasn’t sure which of us was the therapist. “I understand you also have a paranoid delusion that someone is stealing your mail?”

“No, I have paranoid delusions that someone is sending me extra mail.”

The therapist threw the papers to the floor. “All right, if you’re going to fuck around with me so I can’t make any progress, then I’m going to ask you to leave, all right?” I just sat there, I was so shocked. But then what could I do? I got up and left, taking my raging libido with me.