“So, what soiled truffle of the psyche have you rooted up for me today, Mr. Piggy-doggy?”
When Dr. Friedman sneered, the left half of his upper lip humped up and wiggled like a caterpillar, a facial contortion made particularly repulsive, and mesmerizing, by his sparse goatee. Swinging wide the door, he followed his uncivil greeting with an uncouth slopping-the-hogs pantomime, and then, cupping hands to mouth, yodeled across the farmyard of his office, “Sooey! Sooey!”
I smiled thinly, grunted and settled myself with many a crackle-crinkle into the therapeutic armchair. (Friedman always made a great show of draping the analysand’s chair with a thick plastic sheet in preparation for our conversations.) As usual, my psychiatrist was angling for advantage in the nasty mud-hole melee for hegemony that constituted our weekly session. He poked and prodded with the pointed stick of his malice, ever probing for the soft, moldy spot on the melon rind of my mental health.
The previous week, he had lulled me with his phony conviviality (which I treasured so deeply) into a chance moment’s gullibility. And toasted by the weak glow of his counterfeit compassion, I had imprudently blurted out the nickname by which I was known among the neighborhood street urchins. Friedman’s dull eyes had sparkled; his slack, morose mouth had twisted. He rolled the epithet around his tongue like a jawbreaker found on the sidewalk, smacking his lips as he assessed its palatability. “Mr. Piggy-doggy? Hmmm. Yes, of course,” he muttered. “The oinking, trichinous swine wallowing in the muck and rooting for things best left buried. The slobbering canine with its yapping, tail-waggling hornpipe for affection: avid sniffer of droppings. Hee hee! Ja, das kinder have pegged him perfectly.” (Our beard-stroking headshrinker liked to sprinkle his soliloquies with German – as if he was Sigmund Freud, instead of just one of ten thousand San Francisco mind-quacks scrambling frantically for dwindling HMO dollars.)
“Mr. Piggy-doggy!” Crowing in forced merriment, throwing back his narrow head like a Weimaraner ululating at the moon. Taking something innocent and beautiful, and making it ugly and foul. That’s what he did for the $150 per hour I paid him.
Oh, he was good, very good, and I swore I’d never let him go.
Which was, of course, what he desired above all things.
*********
During our introductory appointment almost twenty years earlier, I had mentioned as a first concern, that due to unlucky circumstances, previous therapists had found it necessary to terminate the relationship just as we were getting started. (Actually, in an eerie coincidence, two of them had committed suicide in my presence.) I haltingly confessed that I couldn’t bear to face that abandonment again. (Therapists get a hardon hearing the word “abandonment.”) My voice cracked, my shoulders trembled, and I waited, for this was the crucial moment. And then – gotcha sucka! – he jumped in to assure me in the warm, sympathetic manner he still had at the time, that as long as I wanted to continue therapy, he would not end it unilaterally. Inside, I began my victory jig, but I needed to nail it home.
“Really?” I sniffled pitiably.
“Yes, really,” he said, touching my shoulder, and handing me a tissue.
“Promise?”
“I swear to you.”
And I got it all on tape! Before the year was out, he’d be frisking me like Frank Serpico for the hidden mike in the armpit or the groin, but by then it was too late: I had dozens of micro-cassettes piled inside my safety deposit box.
And so we waltzed as the years turned into decades, roped together like the plague-spotted Swedes in The Seventh Seal. In fifty-minute increments, Friedman and I gnawed at each other’s head like Dante's Ugolino and Ruggieri, like Franken and O’Reilly, like Britney and Madonna.
At least, that’s how I like to think of the relationship. Sadly, he has become a bitter, suspicious man and may feel differently.
*********
You might wonder how the children came to call me Mr. Piggy-doggy in the first place. Let me explain: one day, awoken during my afternoon nap by the shrill screams of the neighboring cretins, I had poked my head out the window to shout in vicious disgruntlement, “Shut the fuck up, you loathsome, little piggy-doggies!” This, I was pleased to note, stopped them in their rodent-like tracks, and for several moments they just stared at me, confused, abashed and uncertain, as I growled and slavered. Then, to my surprise, the boldest of them, a small, redheaded popinjay with big ears, stuck out his jaw and fist in a defiant gesture surprisingly reminiscent of Benito Mussolini, and yelled back, “We’re not piggy-doggies! You are!”
Temporarily taken aback, but convinced of the rectitude of my position, and tweaked at this incorrigible insolence, I quickly rallied: “No I’m not: you are! You’re the piggy-doggies!”
“No, you are!”
“You are!”
“You!”
“No, you!”
“You are the piggy-doggy!”
“You!”
And so on and so forth.
Soon the entire noisome brood had joined in, and the vigorous exchange of opinion continued with superb gusto for quite some time until another neighbor, Spooky Joe, poked an M-1 out his window, and swung it around to point first at me and then at the children. From behind his greasy curtain we heard him titter, “Kill them all!” And right then and there, we spontaneously decided to postpone the discussion until a more appropriate occasion. I shook my fist and bared my teeth one last time, and, rather well pleased with my performance, completed my tactical retreat to the couch.
The next day, the debate shifted to the streets, where it proceeded to be ferociously disputed with ever increasing numbers of juveniles – until that day soon arrived when I couldn’t walk past a schoolyard or an alley full of glue-sniffers, without the raucous clamor of infantile voices shrieking, “Mr. Piggy-doggy! Mr. Piggy-doggy!” (I assume the honorific was added at the instruction of a teacher, priest or parent, who felt, for the sake of adult-child relations generally, that a middle-aged man, social pariah or not, should be addressed as Mister by anyone under the age of seven.)
I continue to persist in my lonely stance, because I honestly do believe that they, in fact, are the piggy-doggies. Not me. To buckle now would smack of the kind of moral laziness, dishonesty and cowardice that spouses, friends and family have so often accused me.
I had explained all this to Dr. Friedman in the previous week’s session, though he made a great show of sighing, twiddling his thumbs and looking at his watch. (He knew this only made me more urgently voluble; when he really didn’t want to listen, he put on his headphones, clacked his castanets, and crooned “Linda Paloma” like I wasn’t there.)
And so today – I think you’ll appreciate my subtlety here – in response to the Doctor’s mean-spirited salutation (see above: “soiled truffle,” “sooey!” and so on), I curled and wiggled my upper lip, and delivered this devastating retort:
“I’m not the piggy-doggy: you are!”
Henry E. Panky
"If it quacks like a piggy-doggy..."
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