In the Problem Pit, Page 3

  Fein, Gerald, M.D. 38. White male. Professional resource person, now in his third problem marathon. Jerry Fein was either separated or partially married, depending on how you looked at it; he and his wife had opted for an open marriage, but for more than a year they had not actually lived in the same house. Still, they had never discussed any formal change in the relationship. His wife, Aline, was also a doctor—they had met in medical school—and he often spoke complimentarily of her success, which was much more rapid and impressive than his own.

  Galifiniakis, Rose. 44. White female, married, no children. She had been into the Christ Reborn movement in her twenties, New Maoism in her thirties and excursions into commune living, Scientology and transcendental meditation since then, through all of which she had maintained a decorous home and conventional social life for her husband, who was an accountant in the income tax department of the state of New Mexico. She had volunteered for the problem marathon in the hope that it would be something productive and exciting to do.

  Ittri, Benjamin. 32. White male. Draftee. Ittri was a carpenter, but so was Jesus of Nazareth. He thought about that a lot on the job.

  Jaretski, David. 33. White male, listed as married but de facto wifeless, since Lara had run off with a man who traveled in information for the government. Draftee. David was a sculptor, computer programmer and former acid head.

  Jefferson, Rufous, III. 18. Black male, unmarried. Draftee.

  Rufous was studying for the priesthood in the Catholic Church in an old-rite seminary which retained the vows of celibacy and poverty and conducted its masses in Latin.

  Klapper, Marjorie, B.A., Mem. Am. Guild Ther. 24. White female, separated. Professional resource person. Five weeks earlier, sailing after dark with a man she did not know well but really liked, Marge Klapper had decided not to bother with anything and see if she happened to get pregnant. She had, and was now faced with the problem of deciding what to do about it, including what to say to her husband, who thought they had agreed to avoid any relationship with anybody, including each other, until they worked things out.

  Lim, Felice. 30. White female, married, one child. Technically a draftee, but she had waived exemption (on grounds of dependent child at home—her husband had vacation time coming and had offered to take care of the baby). Felice Lim had quite a nice natural soprano voice and had wanted to be an opera singer, but either she had a bad voice teacher or the voice simply would not develop. It -was sweet and true, but she could not fill a hall, and so she got married.

  Menchek, Philip. 48. White male, married, no children. Draftee. Menchek was an associate professor of English Literature in a girl’s college in South Carolina and rather liked the idea of the problem marathon. If he hadn’t been drafted, he might have volunteered, but this way there was less chance of a disagreement with his wife.

  Murtach, William. 45. White male, married (third time), five children (aggregate of all marriages). Volunteer. Murtagh, when a young college dropout who called himself Wee Willie Wu, had been a section leader in the Marin County Cultural Revolution. It was the best time of his life. His original True Maoists had occupied a nine-bedroom mansion on the top of a mountain in Belvedere, overlooking the Bay, with a private swimming pool they used for struggling with political opponents and a squash court for mass meetings. But they were only able to stay on Golden Gate Avenue for a month. Then they were defeated and disbanded as counterrevolutionaries by the successful East Is Red Cooperative Mao Philosophical Commune, who had helicopters and armored cars. Expelled and homeless, Murtagh had dropped out of the revolutionary movement and back into school, got his degree at San Jose State and became an attorney.

  Sanger, Robert, B.Sc., M.A. 71. Black male. Wife deceased, one child (male, also deceased), two grandchildren. Volunteer. Bob Sanger’s father, a successful orthodontic dentist in Parsippany, New Jersey, celebrated his son’s birth, which happened to occur on the day Calvin Coolidge was elected to his own full term as President, by buying a bottle of bollinger champagne. It was a cold day for November, and Dr. Sanger slipped on the ice. He dropped the bottle. It shattered. A week later the family learned that everyone drinking champagne out of that batch had gone blind, since it had been cooked up out of wood alcohol, ethylene glycol, Seven-Up and grape squeezings. They nicknamed the baby “Lucky Bob” to celebrate. Lucky Bob was, in fact, lucky. He got his master’s degree just when the civil rights boom in opportunities for black executives was at its peak. He had accumulated seed capital just when President Nixon’s Black Capitalism program was spewing out huge hunks of investment cash. He was used to being lucky, and the death of his industry, coming at the end of his own long life, threw him more than it might have otherwise.

  Stanwyck, Devon. 26. White male, unmarried. Volunteer. Stanwyck was the third generation to manage the family real estate agency, a member of three country clubs and a leading social figure in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When he met Ben Ittri, he said, “I didn’t know carpenters would be at this marathon.” His grandfather had brought his father up convinced that he could never do anything well enough to earn the old man’s respect; and the father, skills sharpened by thirty years of pain, did the same to his son.

  Teitlebaum, Khanya. 32. White female, divorced, no children. Draftee. Khanya Teitlebaum was a loving, big Male-mute of a woman, six feet four inches tall and stronger than any man she had ever known. She was an assistant personnel manager for a General Motors auto-assembly plant in an industrial park near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she kept putting cards through the sorter, looking for a man who was six feet or more and unmarried.

  Wattridge, Albertina. 62. White female, married, one child, one grandchild. Professional resource person. A curious thing about Tina, who had achieved a career of more than thirty years as a group therapist and psychiatric counselor for undergraduates at several universities before joining the SAD problem-marathon staff, was that she had been 28 years old and married for almost four before she realized that every human being had a navel. Somehow, the subject had never come up in conversation, and she had always been shy of physical exposure. At first she had thought her belly button a unique and personal physical disfigurement. After marriage she had regarded it as a wondrous and fearful coincidence that her husband bore the same blemish. It was not until her daughter was born that she discovered what it was for.

  David Again

  It was weird never knowing what time it was. It didn’t take long to lose all connection with night and day; I think it happened almost when I got off the elevator. Although that may have been because of the morning glory seeds.

  It was sort of like a six-day bash, you know, between exams and when you get your grades, when no one bothers to go to classes but no one can afford to leave for home yet. I would be in the pool with the girls, maybe. We’d get out, and get something to eat, and talk for a while, and then Barbie would yawn, and look at the bare place on her wrist the way she did, and say, “Well, how about if we get a little sleep?” So we’d go into one of the sleeping rooms and straighten out our bags and get in. And just about then somebody else would sit up and stretch and yawn, and poke the person next to him. And they’d get up. And a couple of others would get up. And pretty soon you’d smell bacon and eggs coming down the dumbwaiter, and then they’d all be jumping and turning with Marge Klapper just as you were chopping off.

  Barbie and Dolly-Belly and I stayed tight with each other for a long time. We hadn’t picked each other out, it just happened that way. I felt very self-conscious that first night in the common room, still flying a little and expecting everybody could see what I was doing. It wasn’t that they were so sexually alluring to me. There were other women in the group who, actually, were more my type, a girl from New Mexico who had that long-haired, folksinger look, a lot like Lara. Even Tina. I couldn’t figure her age very well. She might easily have been fifty or more. But she had a gorgeous teenage kind of figure and marvelous skin. But I wasn’t motivated to go after them, and they didn’t sho
w any special interest in me.

  Barbie was really very good-looking, but I’d never made it with a black girl. Some kind of leftover race prejudice, which may come from being born in Minnesota among all those fair-haired WASPs, I suppose. Whatever it was, I didn’t think of her that way right at first, and then after that there were the three of us together almost every minute. We kept our sleeping bags in the same corner, but we each stayed in our own.

  And Dolly-Belly herself could have been quite pretty, in a way, if all that fat didn’t turn you off. She easily weighed two hundred pounds. There was a funny thing about that. I had inside my head an unpleasant feeling about both fat women and black women, that they would smell different in a repulsive way. Well, it wasn’t true. We could smell each other very well almost all the time, not only because our sleeping bags were so close together but holding each other, or doing nonverbal things, or just sitting back to back, me in the middle and one of the girls propped on each side of me, in group, and all I ever smelled from either of them was Tigress from Barbie and Aphrodisia from Dolly-Belly. And yet in my head I still had that feeling.

  There was no time, and there was no place outside the group. Just the sixteen of us experiencing each other and ourselves. Every once in a while somebody would say something about the outside world. Willie Murtagh would wonder out loud what the Rams had done. Or Dev Stanwyck would come bv with Tina and say, “What do you think about building underground condominium homes in abandoned strip mines, and then covering them over with landscaping?” We didn’t see television; we didn’t know if it was raining or hot or the world had come to an end. We hadn’t heard if the manned Grand Tour fly-by had anything to say about the rings of Saturn, which it was about due to be approaching, or whether Donnie Osmond had announced his candidacy for the presidency. We, or at least the three of us, were living in and with each other, and about anything else we just didn’t want to know.

  Fortunately for the group, most of the others were more responsible than we were. Tina and Dev would almost always be in the problem pit, hashing over everybody’s problems all the time. So would Bob Sanger, sitting by himself in one of the top rows, silent unless somebody spoke to him directly, or to his problem, or rarely when he had a constructive and well-thought-out comment to offer. So would Jerry Fein and that big hairy bird, Khanya. Almost everybody would be working hard a lot of the time, except for Willie Murtagh, who did God knows what by himself but was almost never in sight after the three of us decided we didn’t like him much, that first night, and the young black kid, Rufous, who spent a lot of his time in what looked like meditation but I later found out was prayer. And the three of us.

  I don’t mean we copped out entirely. Sometimes we would look in on them. Almost any hour there would be four or five of them in the big pit, with the chairs arranged in concentric circles facing in so that no matter where you sat you were practically looking right in the face of everyone else. We even took part. Now and then we did. Sometimes we’d even offer problems. Barbie got the idea of making them up, like, “I’m worried,” she said once, “that the Moon will fall on us. Could we build some kind of a big net and hang it between mountains, like?” That didn’t go over a bit. Then Dolly tried a sort of complicated joke about how the CIA should react if Amazonia intervened in the Ecuadorian elections, with the USIS parachuting disc jockeys into the Brazilian bulge to drive them crazy with concentrated-rock music. I didn’t like that a bit; the USIS part made me think of Lara’s boy friend, which made me remember to hurt. I didn’t want to hurt.

  I guess that’s why we all three of us stayed with made-up problems, and other people’s problems: because we didn’t want to hurt. But I didn’t think of that at the time.

  “Of course,” Dolly-Belly said one time, when she and I were rocking Barbie in the pool, “we’re not going to get out of here until Joe Good up there in the Heptagon marks our papers and says we pass.”

  I concentrated on sliding Barbie headward, slowing her down, sliding her back. The long blond hair streamed out behind her when she was going one way, wrapped itself around her face when she was going the other. She looked beautiful in the soft pool light, although it was clear, if it had needed to be clear, that she was a natural blond. “So?” I said.

  Barbie caught the change in rhythm or something, opened her eyes, lifted one ear out of the water to hear what we were saying.

  “So what’s the smart thing for us to do, my David? Get down to work and get out faster? Or go on tie way we’re going?”

  Barbie wriggled off our hands and stood up. “Why are we worrying? They’ll let the whole group go at the same time anyway,” she said.

  Dolly-Belly said sadly, “You know, I think that’s what’s worrying me. I kind of like it here. Hey! Now you two swing me!”

  Preliminary Reports

  The one part of the job that Tina didn’t like was filing interim reports with the control monitors up at the old radio-telescope computation center. It seemed to her sneaky. The whole thing about the group was that it built up trust within itself, and the trust made it possible for the people to speak without penalty. And every time Tina found the computer terminals unoccupied and dashed in to file a report she was violating that trust.

  However, rules were rules. Still dripping from the pool, where nearly all the group were passing each other hand to hand down a chain, she sat before the console, pulled the hood over her fingers, set the machine for blind-typing and began to type. Nothing appeared on the paper before her, but the impulses went out to the above-ground monitors. Of course, with no one else nearby that much secrecy was not really essential, but Tina had trained herself to be a methodical person. She checked her watch, pinned inside her bra— another deceit—and logged in:

  Day 4, hour 0352. Wattridge reporting. Interaction good, Consenuality satisfactory. No incapacitating illnesses or defections.

  Seven individuals have stated problem areas of general interest, as follows:

  De La Garza. Early detection of home fires. Based on experience as a volunteer fireman (eight years), he believes damage could be reduced “anyway half” if the average time of reporting could be made ten minutes earlier. Group proposed training in fire detection and diagnosis for householders. 3

  (That had been only a few hours before, when most of the group were lying around after a session with Marge’s energetics. The little man had really come to life then. “See, most people, they think a fire is what happens to somebody else; so when they smell smoke, or the lights go out because wires have melted and a fuse blows, or whatever, they spend 20 minutes looking for cigarettes binning in the ashtrays, or putting new fuses in. And then half the time they run down to the kitchen and get a pan of water and try to put it out themselves. So by the time we get there it’s got a good start, and there’s three, four thousand dollars just in water damage getting it out, even if we can save the house.”)

  Fein. National or world campaign to wipe out VD. States that failure to report disease and contacts is only barrier to complete control of syphilis and gonorrhea. Group proposal for free examinations every month, medallion in the form of bracelet or necklace charm to be issued to all persons disease-free or accepting treatment.

  (That one had started as a joke. That big girl, Khanya, said, “What you really need is a sort of kosher stamp that everybody has to wear.” And then the group had got interested, and the idea of issuing medallions had come out of it.)

  Lim. Part-time professional assistance for amateur theater and music groups. States that there are many talented musicians who cannot compete for major engagements but would be useful as backup for school, community or other music productions. Could be financed by government salaries repaid from share of admissions.

  Murtagh. Failure of electorate to respond to real issues in voting. Statement of problem as yet unclear; no Group proposals have emerged.

  Sanger. Loss of market for dental supplies. Group currently considering solutions.

  Stanwyck. Be
tter utilization of prime real estate by combining function. Group has proposed siting new homes underground, and/or building development homes with flat joined roofs with landscaping on top. Interaction continuing.

  (Tina wanted to go on with Dev Stanwyck’s problem, because she was becoming aware that she cared a great deal about solving problems for him, but her discipline was too good to let her impose her personal feelings in the report. And anyway, Tina did not believe that the problem Dev stated was anywhere near the real problems he felt)

  Teitlebaum. Stated problem as unsatisfactory existing solitaire games. (Note: There is a personality problem here presumably due to unsatisfactory relationships with other sex.) Group proposed telephone links to computer chess-, checker, or card-playing programs, perhaps to be furnished as a commercial service of phone company.

  Personality Problems exhibited by nine group members, mostly marital, career or parental conflicts. Some resolution apparent.

  Transmission Ends.

  No one had disturbed Tina, and she pushed the hood away from the keyboard and clicked off the machine without rising. She sat there for a moment, staring at the wall. The group was making real progress in solving problems, but it seemed to her strange that it also appeared to have generated one in herself. All therapists had blind spots about their own behavior. But even a blind person could see that Tina Wattridge was working herself in pretty deep with a boy not much too old to be her grandchild, Devon Stanwyck.