Sigmund Fraud, Licensed Impostor

Prologue

It was on a hot, sticky morning in August, 2019. I was in rush hour traffic when I had a flash of insight that would set the stage for one of the most important decisions of my life. I’ll probably never forget that day. Anyone familiar with I-476, the north-south corridor through eastern Pennsylvania, would think it the least likely place for any inspiration, much less an epiphany, but there I was, commuting to my office in Rosemont from my apartment over in Plymouth Meeting. It was the third day of yet another Philadelphia heat wave. With my car thermometer nudging eighty-four, the back of my shirt stuck to the seat like Saran Wrap on barbequed chicken.

     The morning sun, a sultry orange ball, was not nearly as blinding as it might’ve been under less humid conditions, but it wouldn’t be long before it’d burn through the haze, and when it did, Philadelphians would be in for yet another scorcher with no relief in sight. Apropos, for there was no relief on the Blue Route, either. There, NASCAR wannabes rocketed past me as if we were all in some kind of maniacal video game. Playing chicken with eighteen-wheelers had never been my thing, which enabled me to focus on something even more off-putting. My air conditioner had shit the bed, which meant opening the windows to a deafening, choking turbulence of humidity and exhaust fumes. Hardly the way I intended to start the day.

     In the cavalcade of vehicles passing on my left, I glanced over just as two attractive co-eds, both in colorful halter-tops, drifted by in a sporty red convertible. A Swarthmore sticker graced the bumper. Not even the din of traffic could hide the deep bass of their subwoofer: boom, boom, boom… Bouncing merrily along, hair swirling in the breeze and slapping at their faces, they were a picture of playfulness, seemingly free from the types of responsibilities that had become a heavy yoke around my neck. Out on summer break, I figured. I envied them. How different this heat would’ve felt if I were their age. Back then, days like this would’ve found me on the Atlantic City Expressway to scope out bikinis, beach, boardwalks, and beer—not necessarily in that order. Them’s were the days. As the girls disappeared in traffic, I lost myself to a reminiscence prompted by a familiar tune blasting forth over the radio. It took me back to a place I had spent years trying to forget.

… Thought I heard a rumblin'
Callin’ to my name

Two hundred million guns are loaded
Satan cries, "Take aim"

Better run through the jungle…

    Forty-eight years old, and CCR’s gritty ballad still rocked me with the concussive force of the RPG that had laid waste to my father’s platoon nearly half a century ago. I can never hear that song without imagining nineteen-year-old grunts slogging through rice paddies, naked and scorched Vietnamese children fleeing a horrific napalm attack, or blood-soaked bodies of My Lai villagers sprawled in a ditch like so much discarded refuse. And then comes the creepy image of Lyndon Johnson lifting his shirt to display an unsightly scar across his flabby stomach. I always wondered if he thought his appendectomy bought him fraternity with the thousands of young soldiers killed and maimed in Southeast Asia under his watch.

     Truth is, I was little more than a postscript of the Vietnam war, but no less a casualty in my own right. My father, Second Lieutenant Joseph P. Mitchell, died in Quang Tri Province, a victim not simply of the VC bullets that tore through his body but of a duplicitous bureaucracy that lied to the public in support of an undeclared war. The only beneficiaries of that Armageddon were the profit-driven, military-industrial complex and the power-hungry politicians who supported it.

     “Pop” was one of their victims. He was killed on October 12, 1972, just three months before that conniving bastard, Nixon, finally signed the Peace Accords. Three short months, and my would-be father would’ve come home.

     As it was, I never met him. I was born, kicking and screaming, six months later, eighty-five hundred miles from his mosquito-infested nightmare. They told me I was Pop’s final gift to my mother. That was one hell of a gift. Growing up, I went through periods of intense anger toward her, but mainly him for not being there for me. What the hell did I know? I was a kid, a fatherless brat. They always said he loved me, but I was like, “C’mon, how can you love someone you’ve never met?” “He loves you from above,” they’d say, looking wistfully upward. Love. That was really confusing.

     But for all the times I hated Pop, I inwardly longed to know him. In the privacy of my bedroom, I’d secretly pour through the handful of photos we had. The one I’d come back to, time and again, was taken at Parris Island just before his deployment. He was in dress uniform sitting next to the American flag. No smile, just dead-serious. A soldier. A grunt.

     It wasn’t until I got a little older that I started to wonder if behind Pop’s rugged countenance—that Oorah, Semper Fidelis, First to Fight look—there was fear of what lay ahead. He certainly would’ve known about Huế, the fierce battle there that killed so many Americans. Who didn’t? The nightly news commandeered TV screens around the world with daily body counts and trenchant reports on battles like Tet, Khe Sanh, and Hamburger Hill. So no, Pop wouldn’t have been blind to the perils in those Godforsaken jungles.

     The flag in that photo might well have been a riddle. As a child, I figured it was the same one that covered his coffin at Travis when he returned home—dead. It came to us as a three-cornered memento. I didn’t dare unfurl it, but sometimes in my lonelier moments—especially after seeing kids my age playing catch with their own fathers—I’d carry that flag around like it was a teddy-bear. No one knew it, but for a long while I took it to school in my backpack. Up until Mom remarried when I was around ten, we’d visit Pop’s grave on holidays. I think my stepfather put an end to that. Prick. It seemed like he wanted me to forget the man that loved me from on high. I never did though.

     In fact, when I was nineteen, the same age Pop enlisted, I took my car (a beat-to-shit Ford Taurus) to the Veterans Memorial in D.C. It was October 12, 1992, the twentieth anniversary of my father’s death. Until that day, “Pop” had really never been more than a concept, a pretty empty one at that. To me, he had always been lost, so I set out to find him—if only on that long, macabre slab of polished granite.

     I avoided any guidance in locating his name. It was something I needed to do by myself, alone, just the way Pop died. This may sound hackneyed, but I likened it to a personal reconnaissance, a kind of “search and rescue” mission. My eyes and fingers traced across reams of hallowed engravings before I realized it wouldn’t be as easy as I’d imagined. Minutes turned into hours, which was good, because it forced me to absorb the full magnitude of the Wall. Names, countless names, each one representing a real person, just like Pop. But where in God’s name was he?

     My fingers chafed in patriotic shades of red, white, and blue as I scoured the marble. Gloves might’ve helped, but that would’ve denied me the pain I needed to feel. The repetition of name-after-name gradually became hypnotic. My years of reading about ’Nam got me thinking of rice paddies, hootches, and elephant grass. I don’t know how it happened, but the din from nearby traffic turned into the grinding sound of personnel carriers and armored utility vehicles. The distant fwop-fwop-fwop of helicopters over the Beltway became Huey gunships flying dustoffs with cargoes of rockets, body bags, and .30 cal machine guns. Aircraft flying into Dulles played out in my mind as Thuds, Phantoms, and Super Sabres loaded to the teeth with “snake and nape.”

     Once the sun had set, I was ready to give up, but there in front of me was the name I had been hunting. It was barely visible in the dim luminescence. Somehow that seemed symbolic to a life I had never known. Fifteen letters were all that would mark my father’s sacrifice. He rotated into Vietnam alone, and alone he rotated out: K. I. fucking-A. He wasn’t by himself on the Wall, of course. Fifty-eight thousand others flanked him, albeit most would have been strangers. Like me.

     I recall pressing my hand to the marble and felt it strangely warm under my touch. I traced over the letters like a blind person reading braille. It was like he had been lost all those years and I had finally found him. Then something strange happened. Slowly materializing on the black slate, like an old slow-to-warm television screen, was Pop’s face, but not the one I was accustomed to. Gone was the seriousness, gone too the fear. Instead, this tough, combat-hardened leatherneck looked at me and… smiled. His deep blue eyes bespoke tenderness and affection. His arms looked to be wide-open, kind of like, I don’t know, like Jesus on the cross maybe.

     I broke down, flattening my face against the stone to hide my sobs. Without thinking, I even muttered “Pop,” which looking back would’ve been the first time- the only time in fact- that I felt like I was actually speaking to him. My brain told me he had been lost and I had just found him. Was this hallucination or… was he really there? The image I saw was sure as shit my father, and if it was just my mind playing tricks on me, I nevertheless realized that Pop most certainly would’ve been there for me had he not been a goddamned Marine who died doing what his country asked of him, like it or not.

     Glued to the Wall, convulsed in emotion, I felt a hand on my shoulder, a sensation more personal in that moment than anything I’d ever known. Almost surreal. It felt like all the hurt from years of abandonment drained from my being like dogshit in a whirlpool. Instinctively I turned, only to see an individual melting into the shadows. I stared, half paralyzed, as the fading silhouette was swallowed by the darkness. Gone.

     Pivoting back to the marble, my father’s name glistened under my tears as if electrified in neon. I touched it one last time, marveling that it was still warm. Turning to leave, I hadn’t gotten more than a hundred feet across the lawn before something compelled me to look back. His etching appeared to sparkle. Was it me, I wondered, or was his name really standing out alone against that stark backdrop? Transfixed, I took several steps backwards, eventually catching my heel and falling on my ass. But looking up, it was still there, iridescent. No matter how much distance I put between me and the memorial, his name continued to radiate through the fog.

     At the time, it was the most powerful moment of my life. I drove home from that shrine with mixed feelings. Yeah, it helped to know that Pop had been acknowledged, if only in fifteen letters. And perhaps the visit brought me to a new, more realistic understanding, who’s to say?

     All throughout my childhood, I’d fantasized about him coming home. The young, battle-scarred Marine—a hero in every sense of the word—ringing the doorbell, duffel-bag slung over his shoulder, pistol at his hip. Rocky Balboa, incarnate. Magical thinking made worse because it never happened. Visiting the Wall, if nothing else, put an end to that. It reinforced to me that nothing, not a fucking thing, had ever given me the father I desperately wished for, or needed for that matter.

     But did it give me any closure? Not really. I’d learned pretty early in life how to not feel, and on those rare occasions when I did feel, hell, I was a master at hiding my emotions. So really the main thing I got from my trip to D.C. was recognizing how empty I’d felt for most of my life. If anything, my day at the Wall just made me more confused. Seeing Pop’s name didn’t bring me any closer to loving him. Hardly. I remained an uneducated philosopher always asking myself, what is love? If you don’t trust anyone, and I didn’t, how can you love? And if that’s true, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be capable of love.

     So anyway, the epiphany I had while driving to my office on that insanely hot day occurred almost two years ago. I realized then that something needed to change. It had been almost fifteen years since I had begun practicing as a psychologist, yet in all that time, I’d labored under the weight of unresolved issues. Some dated as far back as early childhood. Seems funny to think I had chosen the profession to help others—or at least that’s what I told people. Kind of like a surgeon I once worked with who explained his career choice in terms of “saving the world” when in actuality his was more about money and status, sexy cars and hot women. I’m probably not all that different.

     As an undergraduate, I had thought that a degree in psychology would liberate me from insecurities that had haunted my youth and followed me into adulthood. It didn’t. Instead, the profession fostered a kind of duplicity, one that took its toll in some rather profound and unexpected ways. Counseling others had proved little more than a distraction from the losses and abandonment issues that wreaked havoc on my desire for true intimacy.

     And so it was that while driving disconsolately on the Blue Route, I made a decision that had been long in coming. I needed help. I needed to figure out how I seemed to keep sabotaging myself. Identifying that was a pivotal moment. It led to me entering into psychotherapy with a shrink up in Jersey. Turned out to be a good decision. Seb’s the type of clinician who can smell horseshit a mile away and demands that his patients step in it, like it or not. He had me wallowing knee-deep right from the get-go. At times, I felt like I was in quicksand. But it was necessary and got me to the more contented place where I find myself today. It’s a hell of a lot better than where I was.

     As I look back, it all really came to a head about four years ago.