The Crazy School Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m relieved to fi nally discover that sometimes a razor is only a razor.”
    “Must be exhausting the other way,” I said.
    He nodded, thoughtful. “Have you ever talked to your dad about getting some help?”
    I shrugged. Toyed with some papers on my desk.
    “Even therapy,” he said. “Just, you know, for a start.”
    “The thing is, Sitzman, he’s got a perfect genius of a disease. It protects itself. Plus, the onset timing was particularly shitty.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “It nailed him in the early seventies, which sucked in two ways. First, all the grown-ups were acting like lunatics generally, so he had a lot of camoufl age. Second, he got into primal therapy.”
    “Don’t know that one,” he said.
    “This guy Janov started it. He claims that if you’re told to tough it out when something crappy happens to you as a kid, any emotions you repress end up rattling around in your body forever.”
    Sitzman looked at me, perplexed.
    “Janov took it further. He said that all illness—cancer, head colds, psychosis, you name it—is caused by repression. He had this whole thing about how Western medicine only treats the symptoms, because the true cause of disease is repression. And 3 2
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    so everybody’s doomed to walk around poisoned half to death unless they ‘have their feelings’ about whatever happened when they were kids. But once you do, you won’t need any other kind of doctor.”
    “People fell for this?”
    “In droves,” I said. “He set up these centers where the paying customers could work on dredging up childhood bummers, so they could cure themselves by weeping and strangling pillows and yelling their heads off in soundproof rooms. Like, I dunno, self-exorcism.”
    “You’re shitting me.”
    “Sitzman, they ate it up with ginormous spoons, cross my heart and hope to die. Dad and the rest of them.”
    “That’s just absurd,” he said.
    I shrugged. “It was the seventies—a decade during which you could count on one hand the entire gamut of things that weren’t absurd.”
    “And your dad drank the Kool-Aid.”
    “Dad paid extra for the Big Gulp,” I said. “Besides which, they didn’t drink Kool-Aid in Jonestown. It was this cheap knockoff crap called Flavor Aid.”
    “Teacher-nerd trivia.”
    Someone rapped twice on the door behind me.
    “Might show up on your midterm,” I said, and turned to see who it was.
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    Dhumavati smiled from the doorway.
    She was Santangelo’s dean of students—tall and rangy, with a thick silver braid down the middle of her back.
    I rather liked her, had since she’d interviewed me for the job.
    “So your name, is that Dhumavati as in the Mahavidya?” I’d asked.
    “You’re familiar with Hindu cosmology, then,” she’d replied, pleased.
    “I grew up in California. Kind of comes with the territory, you know?”
    She laughed again. “A guru picked it for me. I’d been through a bad time, and he told me I didn’t have to be that woman anymore.”
    Interesting choice: the mother goddess at the time of the deluge, also known as “the eternal widow,” a deity invariably depicted as ugly and fearsome.
    “Not sure how I’d feel about being named for ‘the one who is without radiance,’ ” I said. “Doesn’t suit you.”
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    Dhumavati grinned—radiant indeed when she smiled, which was most of the time. “Beats the hell out of Gloria. What I started out with.”
    “Still, I’d have held out for Kamala. Tara.”
    And here she was, smiling anew from the threshold. “I thought you might like a little support with remembering that Teacher Refl ection starts an hour early today, Madeline. Sookie mentioned you’re still having some issues around the schedul-ing piece.”
    I was about to thank her for the heads-up when an explosive scherzo of shattering glass resounded down the