WEDNESDAY CAME QUICKLY, but not easily. By the time I finished work and took myself out to dinner before driving to see the psychologist, I hadn’t had a drink in over a week. I also had not hung out in my bedroom to do client work in almost the same amount of time. I had gone to six consecutive days of AA meetings, had spoken again about my problems with alcohol, had seen and talked with Toby three more times, and had visited my favorite tree once and prayed there for the health and happiness of my kids, Christine, and my becoming a better man. I had dreamed about the devil twice since I had made the appointment with my new psychologist and the Two-Knock Ghost had knocked intrusively within three of my dreams—the two of the devil and one where I was in my office with my new psychologist who looked to be exactly like the actor of the same name. Those knocks had especially knocked me off-kilter because I had just met my new psychologist—the famous actor—had found him exceedingly gracious. In my dream I was about to ask him for his autograph when the ghost knocked twice. How rude, I thought. What a punk. Between the devil and the Two-Knock Ghost, I could hardly have a pleasant dream anymore. One or the other would infiltrate my wonderful moments with their unique brands of terror. But tonight I would begin to address those issues as I drove the last mile to the psychologist’s office. I looked forward to the day when those nightmares would no longer invade my sleep. Within the last three blocks before the office, I thought that it would be super if I could go back home to Christine without the baggage of the dreams of the devil and the Two-Knock Ghost. After having them, I would always wake up feeling an emotional drain that was equivalent to a hangover. I would be able to let the effects of the dream dissipate quickly. Although I’d never had a dream about the Two-Knock Ghost while I was at home with Christine, I’d had several about the devil. Each time I had them I felt those lingering effects of the dream detract from my ability to be happy in the present moment. And so many of those present moments were ones that I shared with Christine, who deserved nothing less than my best from moment to moment.
In three more minutes the car was parked on the north side of the building at 8601 Fourth Street North. That building was one of a handful of sights in St. Petersburg where patients could go for kidney dialysis. But in the multi-floored building there were a variety of other office configurations, which included lawyers, new growing firms and several other small to medium sized businesses.
I took the elevator to the third floor, noticing that the hallways were painted a drab gray over an equally drab gray rug. It was a no frills utilitarian hallway. I opened the door to the office and entered. There she was again, the pleasant Dianne with the invitingly smooth southern drawl.
“Good evening, Dr. McKenzie,” she said, flashing a thirty-two-teeth smile.
“Welcome to your first visit with Dr. Banderas.”
“Thank you,” I said, appreciative of her kindness.
“You’re welcome,” she said. I immediately wanted to sit on the front porch of an old southern plantation, share a glass of iced tea with her, and talk about anything she wanted.
“The doctor is reviewing your introductory notes right now. I’ll let him know that you’re here and he’ll buzz me in a couple of minutes, as soon as he’s ready to see you.”
She smiled again and I took that as my cue to have a seat in the waiting room a few feet from her desk. Since I didn’t have a clipboard with all kinds of paperwork attached to it, I took more time than I had the first time I was there to look around the office. It was at first glance a tremendous upgrade from the hallway. There were three large potted plants that rose from the floor to a height of about five feet. One, I was certain was a rubber tree because my mother had one for years that was almost identical. Another was a lush green ficas, rich with leaves. A third was a small elephant ears plant, the kind that I had often seen outdoors in Florida, but was seeing now for the first time as office decor. On the table was a bouquet of pretty mixed flowers, the kind you could buy for about $3.50 at Publix. Neatly staggered on the table around the red vase with the flowers were a variety of about thirty magazines, including seven or eight Psychology Today. Dianne also had a red vase with a bouquet of different flowers on the far right hand outer corner of her desk next to several pictures of her family. It was an uncluttered office with just the right amount of plant life to make a client feel as if they were in a relaxed, comfortable environment. About the time I was thinking my last thought about the office environment, I heard Dianne’s buzzer go off.
“Dianne, I’m ready now. Could you send Dr. McKenzie in please.”
“I will, sir,” she said with utmost professionalism.
I was already standing and moving toward his door by the time Dianne said: “Dr. Banderas is ready to see you now, Dr. McKenzie.”
“You remembered.” I chuckled.
“That’s what I get paid to do here,” she joked back. She sprang from her chair and opened the door to her boss’s office.
As soon as she did that, I noticed the person behind the desk rise out of his chair and step toward the door to greet me. It was Dianne who spoke again.
“Dr. McKenzie, meet Dr. Banderas.”
When Dr. Banderas walked his last two steps to shake my hand, Dianne left the room and closed the door behind her. I almost giggled uncontrollably again, but stifled it, thankfully.
Dr. Banderas was the polar opposite of the famous actor. He was five feet two, stocky, with a full gray and black beard that was extremely well groomed. His eyes were the darkest of browns and large. They were friendly eyes, kind and wise eyes. I could tell these things immediately without reservation.
His head had lots of curly black hair, but only on the sides and in the back. He was missing a large oval-shaped portion of hair that extended from his forehead five inches to the back of his head where the hair started growing again. From the middle of his forehead to the sides where the hair grew there was a two inch gap of hair. He looked a bit like a monk in an expensive suit. As far as actors, he looked more like Danny DeVitto than Antonio Banderas.
As he extended his hand to shake mine, he said with a twinkle in his eyes, “Not quite what you had in mind, Dr. McKenzie. Am I right?” He shook my hand as I answered, “You nailed it, sir.” A smile illuminated my face as I spoke.
He was extremely easygoing as he finished the handshake and walked back around the desk to his chair.
“I get that all the time when I first meet people. However, most people get used to me rather quickly.”
I was still standing as he seated himself in his plush leather chair.
“Have a seat, Dr. McKenzie, either on the couch or in the chair, wherever you feel more comfortable.”
I chose to sit in the chair. I was fascinated by the looks of the man before me and I wanted to look at him squarely in his gentle eyes, but the plants and flowers in the room were distracting me. They were everywhere. It was as if I’d just landed in the middle of a tiny, well-manicured jungle island.
“Kind of hard to ignore the surroundings isn’t it, Dr. McKenzie?”
“It is,” I said, feeling more comfortable in the moment to look away from Dr. Banderas and scan the room. Every color of the rainbow was represented multiple times within the bouquets that adorned the office and in the variety of growing plants that he had.
“I hope you like it, Doctor.”
“You may call me Robert, if you like.”
I had never seen a room like this that was packed with plant life. It was beautiful and serenely comforting.
“I feel relaxed here, almost like I’m on vacation,” I said, still gazing at the multitude of plants.
“I wish I was more knowledgeable about the names of plants and flowers,” I said.
“I’ll make you a deal,” the little man said in an inviting voice that was nearly devoid of an accent, except for a slight lilt that was reflective of a Spanish speaking past.
“Over time, I will share the names of my plants and flowers with you.”
“That’s a deal,” I said, as I began to feel as if I was in a safe environment.
“Your paperwork states that you are a psychologist.”
“I am,” I responded matter-of-factly.
“It also said that you only recently acknowledged that you are an alcoholic, and you have come here primarily because you are being troubled by dreams of the devil and a ghost that knocks twice but never comes in.”
“That’s right, Doctor.”
“That’s quite a heavy burden for you to be carrying around these days, isn’t it?”
“It has been lately. But I think I’m doing the right thing now by attacking the problem head on.”
“I think you are too, Robert. But I must tell you that it is not often that I have a person who comes to me with their main complaint being dream terrors. And I have never heard of such a unique ghost as your two knock entity.”
I didn’t respond because he didn’t seem to be finished, and when he continued, he unknowingly proved me right.
“I read your paperwork the evening you completed it and subsequently, because of the unique nature of the Two-Knock Ghost, I’ve pondered your case at some length in the days between when you expressed your thoughts and this meeting. I don’t usually do this with clients, but I have come to a bit of a conclusion about your Two-Knock Ghost.”
“What is it, Doctor?” I asked while thinking that what Dr. Banderas had said about the Two-Knock Ghost was highly unusual, especially for a psychologist who had only spoken with me for a couple of minutes.
“I was fascinated by the concept of the entity you described. I had never heard of the Two-Knock Ghost. I tried, probably like you, to figure out what this entity was. I used every bit of logic I could apply to the situation and because I had never heard of anything like your ghost, I concluded that the Two-Knock Ghost belongs to you alone. It is your ghost, and it has probably not revealed itself either because you are not ready to know what it is, or you have been using the wrong approach in your attempt to communicate with it.”
I didn’t know I had an approach to communicate with the Two-Knock Ghost. Wow! He had dove right into my stuff and he was wasting no time letting me know what he thought. I remained silent. He did not.
“We’ll talk a great deal about the devil dreams, I’m sure. But I’m positive that the key to the Two-Knock Ghost is getting it to reveal itself. Of the strategy to accomplish that, I am not certain, but we’ll work on that together. Okay, Robert?”
His voice was soothing. And the way that he spoke was both intuitive and well thought out. I could not help but contemplate what he had said. The Two-Knock Ghost was my personal dream. And I sat there considering how the human psyche feared deeply that which we knew existed but remained secretive about its true nature.
We continued talking. Dr. Banderas completely backed off from talk of the devil or the Two-Knock Ghost and spent most of the remaining hour getting to know me. I shared my childhood in Chicago with him and he showed genuine interest in every detail that I expressed. I told him of my profound love for Christine and my children. Eventually, I told him about the crash that killed my parents and my grandparents. He was more compassionate than anyone but Christine had ever been with me. At one point, after I had expressed what I felt when I found out that four of my most deeply loved family members had been killed in one horrendous crash, he responded with the following statement.
“Robert, the depth of loss after an event like what happened to your family, is unfathomable. The impact on a person’s soul and psyche is immeasurable and the rippling effects of pain and feelings of devastation continue to haunt you throughout your entire lifetime. Because of the severity of the loss, a hole has been created in your heart that may never be filled.”
Again, he had hit on something that had been bothering me my entire life—that unfillable hole in my heart. As soon as he said that, I spoke up because I wanted to clarify something.
“Dr. Banderas, you are absolutely correct about that unfillable hole in my heart. But I feel like I’ve had that my whole life. Even as a small boy, I would go to my bedroom and play with my Legos, my baseball cards, erector set, Fort Apache. But I’d always feel lonely when I’d first go into my room. I’d feel emptiness, longing. It would wear off after a few minutes, after I’d get into whatever it was that I was playing with, but that feeling of yearning for something and not knowing what it was, plagued me my whole life, long before my family was decimated.”
“We have a great deal of searching of self to do, Dr. McKenzie. There are many closed doors inside you. But behind them are the answers you are seeking. Together, we will find the keys which will unlock those doors.”
I enjoyed talking with him. I loved listening to his nearly mellifluous voice, and our first session proved that not only would we share camaraderie but he would look at my realities from completely different angles than I would. He would go into my history with intensity and sophistication. I was looking forward to our next session before this first one ended. I also thought how really odd it was that a person would lay themselves bare before a veritable stranger, telling that person countless deep problems and expect that person to help them overcome those problems. Going to a psychologist was a daunting task for both the patient and the psychologist. Yet it’s done thousands of times throughout the world every day. The results of these mixings of usually random pairs are truly unknown at each beginning. I wondered what the results would be between me and this short, unhandsome, but caring gentleman.
When I left our introductory meeting, I felt good, buoyed by the fact that a man I had only met an hour before, had acknowledged that he had already thought deeply about me and my most profound terrors. It was only 8:42 p.m. If I cut across town, I could probably make most of the meeting at the Serenity Club.
As I drove across St. Pete toward Clearwater, I did not think about my Thursday clients. I thought about Dr. Antonio Banderas, the physically diminutive man who had become my new ally in combating the ugliest and most threatening of my enemies.
I did not speak at the meeting, but I enjoyed listening to the alcoholics who did speak, revealing their struggles with alcohol. I thought at that meeting that it was true we were alcoholics. But there was something inherently different about us. My decline into alcoholism, though similarly long and insidious, never saw me raise my voice to or hit my wife or kids. It did not keep me away from home in bars. It did not make me have a sense of bravado and pursue other women to conquer. Although I always felt available to and easily approachable for my wife and children, I might not have been, in their eyes. Though I was only a few feet away from my family when I was in my bedroom drinking, it might as well have been a million miles. My closed bedroom door meant to my family “do not knock, do not come in, do not even think of disturbing the man behind the closed door.” I was like untouchable gold behind the impenetrable vault door at Fort Knox. Tonight, during that meeting at the Serenity Club when I did not speak, I realized that my great sin was that I’d neglected my family due to my duel compulsions of going into my bedroom to drink my precious rum and Coke, and for the betterment of my clients. It also became clear to me that instead of calling my children and asking them if there was anything I had done to hurt them while they were growing up, I needed to call each one of them in the next week and admit to and apologize for the sin of neglecting them the way I had all those countless hours when drink and God knows what else, lured me to that bedroom.
About 10:30 p.m., near the end of the meeting, at a moment when I got out of my head enough to look around the room to see the faces of who was there, I noticed Toby’s face. He was looking right at me as if he had been looking at me for a long time and was glad he caught my attention. When he was certain our eyes interlocked, he made a small but significant gesture with his right hand for me to come over to where he was.
I first nodded my head to let him know I got his message and then rotated my head in a way I hoped he would understand that I would join him at meeting’s end. When he nodded after my gestures, I figured he understood what I was trying to suggest.
There would be only one more speaker, a slew of announcements and the finale of the entire group’s recitation of the Serenity Prayer and the Our Father.
One minute later I met Toby in the lobby. He looked tired and intense.
“Can we go to the tree and talk for a few minutes? I have some news for you.”
“Absolutely,” I said excitedly, believing the news he wanted to share had to be about Mary Bauer.
We went to our cars and drove the three minutes to our majestic live oak. We parked, with him in front of me. When he was finished parking, he did not waste a second before his hand was opening his door and his body was heading for me. He crossed in front of my car casting a small, sly, smile on his drawn face. He entered my Electra and sat in the passenger’s seat, groaning ever so slightly as he did.
“Good news,” he said. “And you are partly responsible for it.”
“I am?” I said curiously.
“Do you remember the time we were talking about recurring dreams and you told me that for most of your life you had only three?”
“I do,” I said, but he wasn’t nearly finished.
“But then you said that other dreams occurred that made you realize over time that you had about 30?”
“Yes,” I said sincerely, curious where he was going with his story.
“I listened carefully to what you said about dreams and I’ve figured out in the months that I have been seeing you that I have about 20 recurring dreams.”
“Interesting,” I said, still wondering.
“After you asked me to help you with Mary Bauer’s case, I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew I had three snitches around town that I had used regularly over the past few years. I called all three of them within a week of our talking about Mary, with absolutely no results. For two days I went to sleep wondering what to do next. On that second night, I had a dream. In the dream, my partner, Patrick, said to me: ‘Why don’t you ask me? I have snitches too you know.’ And what he said next, sounded as if it was actually you speaking it to me. He said, ‘And just like those recurring dreams, you may have a lot more snitches than you’re consciously remembering and I may too. Maybe we can dig deep into ourselves to find those other snitches. Then we might have a better chance to get the answers that we’re looking for.’ His words woke me on the spot. I got out of bed and went directly for my address book. Believe it or not, I had not thought of this on my own. Patrick, who was probably you in my dream, told me to expand my thinking. Sure enough, I had a slew of names in there who had been my snitches years ago, some of them as far back as fifteen years. It was easy to pick out the names because I printed capital S before their names. Dr. McKenzie, I swear there were twenty-seven more snitches and confidential informants that I had forgotten about. That made a total of thirty, the same exact total as your number of recurring dreams.”
“Wow,” I said, reflecting on the wonder of how as a psychologist you may help someone in one area and that reasoning will bleed off and aid them in something entirely different.
“The day after my dream I started calling my old snitches and reestablishing relationships. I also asked Patrick for his list of snitches and, like he had suggested to me in my dreams, I asked him to dig deep for any of his old snitches that he might have forgotten. We put our heads together and came up with a total of forty-six names, fifteen of those names we had in common. Over the next several days we made over thirty contacts by phone and by actually visiting some of the old snitches at their last known residences. We had no luck. That’s why I haven’t talked to you about this until tonight. We were beginning to lose hope. Then finally we came to the name Eddie Green. Eddie is a skinny little black fellow. You’d think he was a crack addict. He’s really a fast talking, very pleasant, poorly educated, dog track gambling addict, who does pretty well there actually. He’s lived his whole life in South St. Pete. He knows all kinds of people. His father was a carpenter and he used to drag Eddie with him wherever he went to fix anything that was broken, or needed to be built from the ground up. Thankfully, Eddie learned the trade well. He got into some trouble about ten years ago, nothing serious, and I met him one day at headquarters on Thirteenth Street. Because he was so affable, I asked him rather casually, ‘Do you have your finger on the pulse of St. Pete?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I most definitely do.’ The more I spoke with him I realized that this diminutive carpenter might become a valuable asset for me from within key segments of the community. I taught him what it entailed to become a confidential informant, and for the next two or three years he proved extremely valuable for me.”
I was tired, but Toby’s story was interesting and I knew that he would soon get to the good part.
“I stopped at his old address a couple of days ago. Sure enough, he was still in his frame house on Fourteenth Avenue South and Twelfth Street. He was living alone but he told me that he had people staying there and coming and going all the time because the house was so big. What had started out as a small house had been added on to by Eddie’s father every time he had a new baby or a sick old relative needed a place to stay. Now it was a two-story, eleven-room, six-bedroom home with a huge den. When Eddie’s father died a few years ago, he left the house to Eddie, who was the first born and who had helped the senior Green build half of the house. Following Eddie in the family were five girls, none of whom were handy with the hammer. Eddie’s next four sisters were scattered over various parts of the U. S., having followed their men. Eddie told me that each of them had a saga, and not one of them was ever likely to come back to St. Pete.
“Of course, I had told him early on why I was there, but Eddie was glib and I might even say happy to see me, as well as a bit lonely. So the words poured out of him like a faucet on full blast. But Eddie’s baby sister, Natalia, had just visited him three nights ago for dinner and had brought her boyfriend with her. His name was Reubin Tatum. He was a bruiser of a man, Eddie said – about 6 feet 2 inches, 245 pounds and unusually hairy. Eddie said it was the first time he had met Reubin. Eddie had ordered out for pizza and during the meal, the conversation flowed smoothly between the three of them. There was no shyness between them. And their conversation passed from how good Reubin’s and Natalia’s sex life was, to Eddie’s compulsive need to gamble on the dogs, to what Reubin did for a living. He had told Eddie he preferred armed robbery over selling drugs because it gave him a bigger rush. He told Eddie as casually as if he were speaking about his computer programmer job at Jabil’s Circuit, about his last three robberies, how much loot he stole and how much fun and easy the jobs were. The last one was a convenience store at Sixteenth Street and Ninth Avenue North and the one before that was the gas station and convenience store on Ninth Avenue and Sixteenth Street South, where he agitated a pretty little married lady and got $95 from her purse.
“When I heard that, I nearly jumped for joy, but I immediately became nervous because my cop car was parked on the street in front of the house and I didn’t want anybody to put two plus two together and figure out that Eddie had anything to do with what I knew now would eventually happen. I told Eddie that I would take care of him financially in a few days, but I told him I wanted to get my car out of there right away and I did, heading immediately to headquarters.”
Toby’s barrel chest was heaving in and out as his excitement in retelling me his story increased. And though he was happy right now, I couldn’t help but think that I wouldn’t ever want to tangle with this guy, if I were a thug and he was upset.
I didn’t want to cause angst for anybody. On the contrary, I wanted to make a couple of investigators very happy. But with the politics of human nature, you never truly know how people are going to take your sticking your nose into their business. I found out who the detectives were who were handling the case and I made an appointment to meet them the next day.
They were two detectives that I’d seen before and had heard about favorably, but I didn’t know them personally. They were both your old school, hard-nosed, diligent investigators of nearly thirty years with the department, Larry Mills and Art Barclay.
I told them every detail that Eddie had told me. To my deepest satisfaction, they were both gentlemen and showed a tremendous appreciation for what I had done to help move their case along. Right now they are adding what I shared with them to the Minutia they have already gathered. They not only told me that they feel confident they’ll make an arrest in seven to ten days, but they asked me if my partner and I would like to be present for the arrest. I said yes, of course. And all of this is because of you, Doc.”
He used that familiar vernacular again. I liked it immensely.
“That’s incredibly wonderful news, Toby.”
“It’ll be incredible when that SOB is behind bars.”
“I agree,” I said, reaching out my hand to shake his.
“It should be I who is shaking your hand, Doc,” he said humbly.
“You are,” I said, and we both chuckled for a moment.
“How’s the not drinking going, Toby?”
“The challenge is no fun, Doc. AA says to take it one day at a time, but I feel at times that the struggle is breath to breath. How’s it going for you?”
“Right this moment, not so bad. There’s been so many good things happening in the last couple of days, including what you told me tonight, that I haven’t thought that much about drinking. But I feel I have to be wary of what’s lurking behind every corner waiting to push me into a bar or a liquor store. Is your wife doing okay?”
“We both definitely have to take that one day at a time. She’s had so many scares and treatments, one diagnosis and prognosis after another, that it’s a way of life for us now. It’s that way of life that’s still a challenge for me to accept because I love her so much. Seeing her suffer still makes me want to drink and numb my pain. But I think that everything will get better if she goes into remission. So, you see, I’ve got a lot to work on.”
“We both do. But tomorrow is another day.” He thrust his hand out to meet mine. He was a true friend. There was no denying it. We parted company with each man feeling the caring of genuine friendship.
I was high on life on my way home that night. What an incredible day it had been. I not only felt in complete command of my sobriety, I was almost giddy with joy over Toby’s news that the detectives were closing in on Reubin Tatum. I knew better than to say anything to Mary Bauer until Tatum’s ass was behind bars. I knew how deeply positive the news of his being off the streets would affect her. I couldn’t wait to deliver the news to her as soon as it was given to me one day in the very near future. I was feeling so good that I found myself talking with my higher power. I was thanking it, primarily, over all it had given me. Then I found myself daring it to allow me to have a devil dream tonight or to have an unwelcomed visit by the Two-Knock Ghost.
“I feel too good to have a devil dream tonight God,” I thought. “And I don’t need to have any knocks from his cowardly, unseen little friend,” I continued. “Devil dreams are supposed to occur when I’m troubled, right, God?”
To be honest, I wasn’t sure how any of it really worked. I didn’t know if a good day of feelings earned me or any person a night of peaceful dreams. I didn’t know if you could ask your higher power for a night of joyful dreams and he would grant it. I knew nothing about the realities to the answers to those questions. What I did know was that I was communicating with whatever I thought my higher power was. It felt good. It felt restful. It felt blood pressure lowering wonderful. It was different. As I continued to communicate with my higher power during the last 30 minutes of my ride home, I felt closer to Christine.
* * * * *
Thankfully, my prayers to the entity in the upper regions or the inner strata worked, and I did not have a dream about the devil or the Two-Knock Ghost. Instead, I dreamed of music. I dreamed of sequences of notes that were hauntingly lovely, sequences that had never been heard before by any human being but me on the wondrous night of dream music. Once my brain accepted the notes as outstanding enough to pass my personal standards, it kept playing the main theme repeatedly as if on a musical loop. Little by little my brain kept adding small segments to the initial theme. Slowly, I was creating a song in my sleep.
Incredulously, I had done this before … but not for the past several years. As the notes tumbled into their potential resting positions, I began to think, within the dream, that as soon as I awoke, I would go immediately to the piano in the living room and write this song for Christine as close as possible as to how I had dreamed it. This is how I had done it the last time I had dreamed music. It had culminated with me presenting the completed work to Christine three or four days after the dream event.
She had always loved the songs I had written for her, each and every one. There were no exceptions. And on this night as I dream thought about Christine, my heart expanded to new degrees of love for her. Then, as the bursting of emotions occurred, more notes began to tumble profusely, seeking to find their proper logical sequence in the dream song that I was creating.
Finally, I could feel myself rebuffing the notion that dreams only last some small finite amount of seconds. Surely this dream traversed the six and a half hours of sleep I had that night. Or so it seemed. And if it had not, how miraculous it was that the human brain and psyche could create a complete masterpiece of music in less than one full sweep of the second hand across the face of a clock.
When I woke in the morning, I sprang ecstatically from my bed and raced to the piano. I turned on the tape recorder and began playing the notes as I had dreamed them. I played furiously because there had been times in the past that I had lollygagged and the dream notes slipped away as the more time passed between my dream alpha state and my waking state. That mistake would not happen on this morning. Within forty-five minutes, I had the complete song on tape, with chords, three times. I was overjoyed because now I knew I could call Christine soon. And I could share with her something of substance and beauty that would reflect the other things of substance and beauty that I had been accomplishing in the past two weeks. It had been four years since I had written her a song. Oh no! Suddenly that sentence would not leave my head. Then came the shotgun blast to my very real and fragile stomach. Before this four year stretch of years that I had not written Christine a special song, the most time that had ever passed without me having done so was a year at most. Some years I would write her three or four. That shotgun blast was another realization that had gone from my brain to my stomach pit in a nanosecond, of yet another way that I had neglected my wife.
I could not control myself. I dropped my head onto my arm that I had placed on the piano ledge above the keys and wept for several moments. Then, as if the shotgun blast wasn’t enough, an irreverent freight train slammed into my brain. Rum and Coke will ease your pain. Rum and Coke will ease your pain. Rum and Coke will ease your pain. Like the rhythmic rolling of the freight train’s wheels, the insidious phrase kept rampaging through my brain. My body began to shiver. The tears would not cease falling. All the good feelings of the last two days dissipated to a pool of white hot grief.
The pain stole my very breath from me and knocked me from my waking state. I was now asleep on the piano in a tumultuous state of dreamless agony. It would have been the perfect time for a devil dream. What better time to kick an eternal candidate than when he is down. But instead, next to come were the bombs.
First the shotgun blast, then the plaintiff freight train, then the bombs. Boom. Boom. They jolted me from my sleep and almost off the piano and the bench where I was sitting. The bombs had come from the other side of the front door. I said, “Hold on a moment,” as I stumbled the few steps to the front door at the opposite side of the room from the piano. I had been startled by the bomb like knocks on the front door, but I hustled to open it anyway. I opened it. No one. The length of the balcony was devoid of people. It had happened again. The Two-Knock Ghost had intruded once more. This time when I was at my lowest ebb, having plummeted to horrific emotional depths upon the realization of another way I had neglected Christine. And the chicken shit ghost was right there ready to pounce on me when I was already flat on my back, prostrate upon my altar of shame.
I hated that ghost, the cowardly ghost of sound and fury who lacked any substance beyond its dastardly signaling device. I felt terrible in this nearly unlivable moment. But I was struck by the thud of reality. It was Thursday morning, and I had already spent forty-five minutes working on a song, two or three minutes weeping and twenty-five minutes of pitiable sleep napping. I had to go to work, work to help other people feel better, no matter how I felt. I had traded running for working on the song, but now I needed to shave and get ready to face the day with people in it. I hated the Two-Knock Ghost, but unknowingly it had done me a favor by awakening me. Otherwise, my aching soul and its attempt to hide from pain in sleep, could have caused me to be late for work. That was something I had never done. Thank you my unseen enemy.
When I got to work and saw Amanda, I immediately felt better. How could I not? Not only did I have a beautiful intelligent and pleasant secretary, but I had just driven across the lovely, small city of St. Petersburg, Florida. Sure, I knew what the problems were in St. Pete, but it was undeniable that St. Pete still possessed small city charm and was home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the States.
While driving to work this morning, I realized another way I had neglected Christine. When we first arrived in St. Pete and finally finished moving in, Christine asked me one day if we could go to the beach. I said, “Yes.” I said to her, “There’s a lot of choices honey. Do you have an idea of which beach you would like to see?”
Without hesitation she said, “Pass-a-Grille.”
“Pass-a what?” I remember asking her.
“Pass-a-Grille, like a George Foreman Grill except with an e at the end. I’ve asked some people in the grocery store what their favorite beach is around here and most of them said Pass-a-Grille. A couple of them said Fort DeSoto. I looked up both of them on the computer and they’re only a few miles apart. We could actually and very easily go to both beaches on the same day and spend a good amount of time at both locales.”
I could see the excited little girl in her face when she explained what she had to me. The equally excited little boy in me answered, “Let’s do it—right now—both places. Which one first?”
“Fort DeSoto.”
You should have seen her face then. God, my wife was beautiful, possessed with an eternal youth that human aging could not sabotage.
We spent four hours at Fort DeSoto that day and six hours on Pass-a-Grille. The day was capped off by dinner at the three-story Hurricane Restaurant and Night Club. We each had their tasty special, a grouper sandwich.
Both beaches were vastly different from one another, gorgeous in two totally different ways. From one stretch of beach at Fort DeSoto you could look to the south and see the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. A few blocks away, but still in the Park, you look west and could see Anna Maria Island.
Pass-a-Grille was a pristine one and a half mile long peninsula filled with beautiful new and old houses with a multitude of shapes and sizes. It was very sleepy the day we visited. It was the middle of the week and there was only a spattering of cars in the scores of parking spots they had on Gulf Way from Twentieth Avenue to the tip of Pass-a-Grille.
We had the time of our lives that day. We had ridiculous fun. At Fort DeSoto Christine and I made love in the Lagoon. It was the first time we had ever made love outside. I don’t know why that was, but it was a fact. It was an incredibly joyful moment for me and I think for Christine also. Why? First of all, because I felt so much love and passion for this good, almost saintly woman, that I was able to stay within her body for well over an hour. I will never forget her little excited girl face of that day and I will never forget the womanly face of love that she gave me during that blissful hour plus inside her. A couple of times she closed her eyes for several moments and wrapped her arms tightly around my neck.
Christine had always made me feel like a man. But this day, this love making, two o’clock in the afternoon, outside, in public, with people only hundreds of feet away, was entirely different. I had never felt as much of a man as I felt on that day. I felt like a good and decent man because I was being enveloped by a woman of the same ilk. During this time we were intimate, I felt I had a handle on what the best kind of sex was, that there could ever be—because I thought I owned it that day. Thirty years with the same woman, loving her more deeply each time she presented me with a child. Loving her more from time to time when she made some random movement that she might often make, but I felt like I was seeing it for the first time. Loving her more when we were making love and she would say with a glint in her eyes, “Can we try this?” Falling in love with her all over again because she endlessly exuded the overwhelming sensuality of pure and unbridled kindness.
Yes, we had the time of our lives that day. But when I looked back on that day in its entirety, I remember seeing something now that hurt me, that I didn’t understand that day. I remember a look of disapproval on Christine’s face when I ordered my rum and Coke at dinner. It was there, most definitely, albeit subtle. There it was, a momentary, quickly flashed hint that she was not happy with my drinking. How many other hints had I missed or ignored throughout the years?
That day, that wonderful day when we made love in Fort DeSoto’s lagoon, watched a sunset on Pass-a-Grille and ate grouper at the Hurricane, was the last time Christine and I went to the beach together. This morning, during a period of my life when awareness was falling on me like raindrops from a summer storm, I had now become aware of more ways I had hurt the woman I loved. For a brief moment I excused myself from any fault by rationalizing that within days of that memorable interlude, each of us had become entangled in the work schedules of our careers. But then I dismissed the rationalization, knowing that I had become a man of excuses and that Christine was unwilling to accept them any longer. That’s why I lived at the Beaches of Paradise and Christine lived on Snell Island, 9.7 miles from me.
All that work day, which was only hours after my good news from Toby and my musical dream, I wrestled to try to gain some emotional balance between those facts and my sad awareness of more hurt that I had caused Christine. Suddenly I began to feel that my life had become somewhat of a game of keeping score. It was current good deeds and accomplishments versus poor and neglectful deeds from the past. At first, when I became aware of a past neglectful behavior, I would label it with a negative score. But after pondering it, after looking repeatedly at the cup that awareness was, I would eventually credit myself with a positive point, believing the awareness itself was a good thing. I could accept responsibility for it and try to correct the damage that I may have caused by the neglect. Then, I could stop beating myself up for it and move beyond it, learn and grow from it.
All these thoughts passed logically and swiftly through my mind between the time I said good morning to Amanda and my first client. Before that client, I buzzed Amanda on the intercom and asked her when Mary Bauer’s next appointment was.
“Next Friday at 1:00 p.m.,” Amanda answered most graciously, after a short pause to look it up.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Do you need anything else, Dr. McKenzie?” she asked.
“No thank you.”
“How about a nice cup of hot chocolate?”
It was 88 degrees outside. And still, the thought of hot chocolate soothed my imbalanced spirit even before it got here.
“That would be really appreciated, Amanda.”
My next appointment with Dr. Banderas was next Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. My appointment with Mary Bauer would be two days later. I couldn’t wait for time and life to pass so hopefully I would be able to give Mary news that would allay her anxieties of being hurt again by her assailant.
I felt the earth beginning to shift beneath my feet. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, I was a man of extremely comfortable habits. Even though I was separated from my wife, I had my favorite drink beside me whenever I wanted it. I had my career, my work, and my little bedroom to go into in the evenings to do my homework. I had my lazy assed self to be with everywhere I went. Compared to what I was becoming, I had slipped into a way of life that was sedentary both physically and maritally. I had slowly flattened myself into a boring, introverted alcoholic who had no right to be happy with a woman who was becoming more dynamic each day.
I was beginning to be determined to change all relevant aspects of my personality and behaviors. From now on I would try to jog in the morning. I would make time to practice on the piano. I would call my kids every week or two. I would plan for more family gatherings wherever they might be. I would stop at Sports Authority on Tyrone Boulevard and buy a couple of ten pound free weights and start toning my biceps and pecs. I would continue my visits with Dr. Banderas and continue with my trips to the Serenity Club while doing my work on my clients’ behalf on the way there.
But oddly, one of the most important places I would frequent would be the live oak that Toby had shown me. Even though it was only a tree, it inspired me every time I saw it. It was a living entity imbued with strength and majesty and once, already, it had made its way into my dreams and had spared me an onslaught from the devil.
My next step was to determine when to call Christine and determine when we would meet. When we did, I would have a variety of significant news to tell her. It would all be the truth, without exaggeration, punctuated by the song I wrote for her that I hoped she would appreciate deeply.
I was enjoying my new routine. Only three things would make my life better—rekindling my love affair with my wife, getting a handle on my devil dreams, and the terrors of the Two-Knock Ghost. How childish I felt at times when I admitted I was frightened by a ghost I had never seen. Over the next three days, I called each of my children and apologized profusely for my neglect of them all those many years. I also called Christine and asked her for her schedule. When she said she was free a week from tomorrow, which was a Friday, I asked her to have dinner at the Red Mesa on Fourth Street North only four miles from our Snell Island home. I was like a young boy waiting to go on his first date with his eighth grade sweetheart.
I should have slept well Saturday night. I was doing everything right. I was even praying—in a manner of speaking, attempting to communicate with my higher power. I even fell asleep talking with it, whatever it was. I didn’t label it male or female, hermaphrodite, young or old, bearded or clean-shaven. I knew as much about the appearance of my higher power as I did of the Two-Knock Ghost. But I knew that my higher power was a magnificent being, but the Two-Knock Ghost was malfeasance incarnate.
Sometime during the night, I was sitting with Christine on a white swing that was hung onto a huge branch of my favorite live oak. We were alone in a wide open green pasture with a long narrow brook that stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions, about two hundred feet in front of the oak. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and not another tree in sight. There were no rocks or boulders, no animals or birds and only the murmurings of the brook as it trickled from west to east. Christine and I were happy, holding hands and laughing as we swung beneath the branch. There were no words between us, just the silent bonds of a love that had overcome all problems.
I watched our dream swinging for a long time, not becoming bored for a micro second at the idyllic scene I was observing. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning from out of the cloudless sky hit the oak at its enormous base, split it and started it to burn. Why now I wondered? Why now when I felt that I had earned this dream by a week of good deeds, good decisions, hard work on my character. There was still nothing else in the picture but the tree, now ablaze. But dark clouds came rampaging into the azure sky. They were angry clouds, powerful and vehement as if being ushered in there by a force with evil intentions.
Through a cumulus nimbus cloud that looked like a faceless body builder on steroids, emerged the crimson Lucifer carrying his pitchfork. He too was ablaze with flame, though undeterred as he directed the clouds to give up more lightning bolts to the tree.
The live oak was helpless this night as piece by piece it ignited with a ferocity that only the devil himself could conjure. Christine and I were still on the swing, terrified that at any instant we too would ignite and suffer torturous deaths. And then it happened again—knock, knock—sounds differentiated from the thunder claps. But the knocks were not coming from the once idyllic scene, now ruined by Lucifer’s demonism. They were coming from my front door, twenty feet away from my dream bed. Suddenly my attention was divided between how to get Christine and I off the swing, which was a high fifteen feet off the ground and what the Two-Knock Ghost might do if it got into the house and made its way to my dream.
As the oak continued to burn, I noticed the flames drawing near to the ropes that supported the swing.
“Christine,” I said both logically and comfortingly, “if you scrunch down next to me, we can wait for the fire to burn through the rope allowing our end of the swing to fall five feet closer to the ground, then we could jump. It would only be a fall of ten feet, a lot better than fifteen.”
“You lead, I’ll follow,” she said, confidently.
I liked the sound of that, even though I knew it was only a dream. The devil was still in the muscle bound cloud laughing at our plight.
Yet again, knock knock, this time sounding closer, as if it was at my bedroom door. “Come in already you pathetic sissified demon. What more could you do to me than the devil has already done?”
I was angry now, angrier than I’d ever been before in a devil dream because Christine was with me. I would fight with the strength of Spartacus to keep him from hurting her.
The swing jolted an inch toward the scorched grass beneath the oak.
“After we land, we get up right away and get to the brook as quickly as possible.”
“Okay,” she said frightened but compliant.
Knock, knock!
“Come in already!” I screamed angrily.
Christine couldn’t hear the knocks. The ghost behind them was my solitary curse.
“Who are you talking to?”
“No one, Christine.”
And I wasn’t lying. I didn’t know still, after all these weeks, who or what the Two-Knock anonymous was.
The rope burned through, the swing slid closer to the ground and Christine and I jumped. Only slightly shaken, we held each other’s hands and raced for the brook. The refreshing water cooled our overheated skin and we huddled there in a tender embrace. For once, it felt like I had beaten the devil. He was still up in the muscle cloud, but I couldn’t figure out why he was laughing. Christine and I were safe in cool water. We hadn’t burned to death. Why was he laughing?
A moment later, he told me in no uncertain terms as he began to speak, the knocks could be heard behind him as if a demon accompaniment.
“You can have her in a dream, McKenzie, but you’ll never have her in real life. I’ll see to that. In real life you’ll both go up in flames. There will be no brook or tree to protect you. You’re higher power is a wimp compared to me. You’ll have no one to protect you because you believe you have no one to protect you from me, while I have legions to back me up in my quest to destroy you.”
I clung to Christine in the brook, as she clung to me. Yet I was aware it was only a dream. I wondered for a moment if she could help me fight the devil, but even in the dream I realized that in real life she had been aloof from me since I had moved out. She may not be punishing me, but I know she had high expectations for me to become a better man. I knew I was in the fight of my life, not only to win her back, but to defeat the devil in his evil nocturnal assaults and get the Two-Knock Ghost to reveal itself and face my fear of it head on.
Slowly, I watched the devil fade into the thunder cloud with only his hideous grin remaining—an atrocious antithesis to the Cheshire cat. As I held my wife in the soft purling of the cool brook, I watched the entire scene around me begin to dissipate. The flaming oak began to dissolve. The clouds turned black and slowly their blackness descended to the emerald grass inching its way toward the brook. I turned myself to face my wife and kissed her with conviction.
“I love you, Christine. And I promise we will be together soon.”
In the fleeting instant of that moment I wanted to believe we would be together soon. I prayed to my higher power that we would be together soon. But I was doubtful I could keep my promise, especially as Christine and I began to fade, the last thing I saw from the corner of my evaporating eye was Satan’s malevolent grin.
* * * * *
If I had not been a focused and determined man before that dream, I became an obsessed and compulsive man the next morning. I was out of bed fifteen minutes before the alarm clock clicked on to WFLA, Jack Taylor, and Ted Webb. Perfect. I walked straight to my small console piano and played Christine’s new song two times, slightly up tempo to save time. I had it down now, no mistakes. Then I left the piano, put my socks and tennis shoes on and was ready for my forty-five-minute run across the street through Five Towns.
My run completed, I was ready to face the day with vigor. My bad habits were becoming behaviors of the past. And my new habits were old friends with whom I had fallen out of touch. I was being dogged by the devil and a cowardly ghost in my dreams, but I was taking steps to face them down. And even though the devil had told me that I had no one to help me, I still believed in my new relationship with my higher power and my new psychologist, Dr. Banderas.
I told myself: “Live for your new behaviors and you’ll be living for the people you love and care about.” Where that thought came from, I am not certain, but once I had it, I wondered about what it really meant even though I would say it repeatedly throughout the passing days.
I thought about what it actually meant to live for the people I loved and cared about, by living my new habits. Part of that concept was easy to understand, as I realized that I was already making progress to rebuild relations with Christine and my children. But what about my clients, each of whom I cared about in various ways? In my recent new age of awareness, another one hit me abruptly as I was driving and thinking at about Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street North. How many clients had I cheated through subpar thinking, considering their cases with a sluggish alcohol muddled brain? It hurt me to ponder that, but I didn’t let it destroy me. The past was irretrievable. The only way I could make up for damage I caused my clients due to my shoddy homework, was to cease drinking and think with a clearer head in the future. I would do it. Night terrors aside, I doubted there was anything now that could provoke me to drink. Like the times I used to think that all other alcoholics were totally different and weaker than I was, I now started thinking that I would be completely free from alcohol substantially quicker than any alcoholic I’d ever met or listened to speak.
The next week I lived for my date with Christine and my appointments with Mary Bauer and Dr. Banderas. First came Dr. Banderas. When he asked me how I was doing, I was proud to tell him that I had jogged six times since our last visit, lost three more pounds, switched to a high protein diet, logged four and a half hours of practice time on the piano and was writing my second song for Christine in the past ten days. When I told him my personal accomplishments, I noticed a bright glint in his eyes which accompanied a wry smile. Here I was, sitting across from him in the luscious plant room, proud to tell him of my accomplishments and he was looking back at me, a man I hardly knew, exuding a sense of appreciation for those accomplishments. How easy it was for me to like somebody.
“What about your dreams?”
I recounted my singular dreams of consequence that I’d had in the past week with as much detail as I could.
“What do you think it means?” he asked me when I finished speaking.
Lazily, I answered, “I don’t know. What do you think it means?”
He wrinkled his face for the first time since I met him.
“I don’t think I know you well enough to venture an opinion at this time, Dr. McKenzie.”
He used the more formal tack with me than the familiar Robert to make a point.
“I did notice a couple of similarities to the dreams you had previously, however. You dreamed about the devil again and as terrifying as that may have been, he was upstaged by your Two-Knock Ghost who was loud and persistent but who remained behind its protective curtain. Even though you cannot explain to me what you think about your dream in its entirety, perhaps you could suggest to me why the devil, who you don’t believe in, continues to haunt you or at least why you think the Two-Knock Ghost persists in intruding into your dreams, but not revealing what it is.”
I wanted to say, “That’s why I’m here, Doc, to have you tell me as soon as possible what’s going on with these nocturnal demons.”
Again, all I could do was to shake my head no and to look totally ignorant, which I was. I thought but did not say it, “Not a very good psychologist, am I?”
“I have continued to think about your dream characters extremely often, Robert.” The glint in his eyes having given way to a more serious, but caring affect.
“I have begun to theorize that your disbelief in the devil may have come as a reaction to having been introduced to him in a terrifying way as a child. Somewhere along the development of yourself as a man, you probably concluded that however frighteningly the devil was introduced to you, it was wrong to teach a child in that manner—the manner of threatening a child’s immortal soul with fire and brimstone. Yet all these years later this demon is entrenched in your subconscious and wreaking havoc in your dreams. As far as the Two-Knock Ghost, my theories are more inchoate and obfuscated.”
“So are mine,” I answered. “It’s been a multi month annoyance and I still know as little about it now as I did in the beginning.”
“I will venture to say this,” Dr. Banderas continued, “I believe these two entities to be somehow inexorably linked. I believe that as we research one, we will inevitably understand more about the other. What do you think about that?”
He had put forth a theory, yet he was engaging my opinion about it.
“I think you may be right,” I answered, feeling exactly that.
“When you dream about one, do you dream about the other?”
I thought for a very long moment. My therapist was extremely patient with me.
“When I think about it, I would conclude that in the far greater majority of times when I dream about them both.”
“That is good, Robert. You’re answer supports my theory. Would you like to hear more of what I have been hypothesizing of your Two-Knock Ghost?”
“Please.”
“Because of the uniqueness of the ghost, I believe that the ghost itself is inexorably linked to you, as much, if not more to you than it is linked inextricably to Lucifer.”
“We’ll have to see about that,” I said, more surprised than disbelievingly. He was much farther along in his speculation of the Two-Knock Ghost in ten days than I was after several months.
“I don’t know what conclusions that you’ve come to in your long years of practice Robert, or in your even longer life, but where I’m at in my thinking at the age of seventy-two, is that nothing stands alone in our minds. Everything is closely intertwined. Even the distance of years between events does not negate how closely things are connected in the confine so of the subconscious. The key to understanding these emotional proximities is to unravel them string by string until we discover the truth at the core.”
He made sense to me. And it was comforting knowing that I was no longer alone in pursuing the core of the Two-Knock Ghost. My dilemma was not remotely knowing how the strings were wound around its core. I’d only had a few variations to the theme of this invisible pest. One was the loudness of the knocks. Another was whether they seemed frenzied or relaxed. Another was how many times the dual thuds had occurred within a dream. Otherwise, the Two-Knock Ghost was shapeless, formless, faceless. Was it Dr. Banderas’s objectivity that had him moving along more quickly than I was in solving the riddle of one of my rude demons?
“I know that you are pondering this all the time Robert. But the prospective that I am going to pursue this from is that the devil and the Two-Knock Ghost are inseparable in your mind. You cannot have one without the other.”
We continued talking with one another for the rest of our hour, with me sharing all kinds of revelations of my children, Christine, my parents, grandparents, my drinking, my practice, my childhood, my fears, my joys, my nocturnal dreams and the aspirations I had for the future.
I left there liking him more than I had at the end of our first session. I had more respect for him also, primarily because I could see him systematically turning the cup of my life over and over in his attempt to find the truths at my core.