Dr. Campbell gestured to an oversize chair. I sat in it with my back facing the window. He peered at my file, frowning. Whatever Dr. Campbell asked me, I was ready. Just as long as it wasn’t, “What seems to be the problem?”
“What seems to be the problem?” he asked.
Before I could answer, he started asking more questions, one after another, like he was reading from a checklist.
No, I can’t sleep. Yes, I drink. One, maybe two nights a week. No, I’m not lying about how much I drink. Yes, I think about killing myself. No, I haven’t made a plan. Yes, it’s clear from your tone of voice that you have seventy-nine other veterans you’re responsible for besides me.
Dr. Campbell calmly pointed to a picture of a cabin that was hanging on the wall behind his desk.
“See this? This is my happy place. Whenever I’m feeling down, I think of this place and I feel better,” he said.
He looked at me expectantly, like a professor anticipating a student’s grand epiphany. Like this technique — the Log Cabin Technique (LCT), I imagined him calling it — was kryptonite for any patient resistant to healing.
My jaw must have dropped, but I didn’t say anything.
“Do you have a place like that?” he asked.
I stared at him. Was he asking me to find my happy place?
“No,” I told Dr. Campbell, “I don’t have a place like that.”
Dr. Campbell scratched something on a pad with his pen. Log cabin does not make veteran happy. Log cabin seems to make veteran angry. Veteran needs to be stabilized.
Dr. Campbell started to rattle off names of medications. Zolpidem. Trazodone. Antidepressants. Antianxiety meds. He wrote them on a prescription pad and handed me the paper.
“Just don’t drink alcohol when you start taking these medications, okay?” said Dr. Campbell.
Sure thing. Easy.
“Do you have anything else you’d like to say?” asked Dr. Campbell when he’d finished writing my prescriptions. I wondered if that question was part of his checklist, too. I said nothing. He looked at his watch.
“Are we done here?” he asked.
I stood up and walked out the door.
Jack nodded his head, hung up the phone, and sighed.
“Dr. Campbell says you need to be more open about your experiences during therapy,” he said.
“Dr. Campbell is full of shit,” I said.
“If you don’t like Dr. Campbell, you can see someone else at the VA,” Jack said.
“Fine,” I said.
“In the meantime, why not try the medications he prescribed? They might help you sleep.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“And there’s always medical marijuana,” said Jack. “A lot of vets find relief with that.”
“Yeah, already on top of that,” I said, cracking a smile. “Not exactly medical, though.”
“Oh, gotcha. Okay, then!” said Jack.
I got up to leave.
“Hey,” he said. “Actually, when you come in for your next appointment with me, would you do me a favor?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Would you mind bringing me an eighth?” he asked.
“Sure,” I repeated. “No problem.”
Jack was trying to take my pain away. The least I could do was do the same for him.
Jack led me up the stairs, past his glaring wife, and into his bedroom. He guided me through the room and into the bathroom and shut the door behind us.
I’d transitioned into the care of the therapists at the VA, so I wasn’t going into Jack’s clinic as often. So it made sense that this time, when he asked me to bring him some weed, he asked me to bring it to him at home. And that felt like a step in the right direction. Smoking pot with a licensed clinical social worker was a step up, mental health–wise, from pounding shots at the corner bar. It was good for me to be around another combat vet. Someone who understood what I’d been through. Right?
“Come over and hang out,” he’d said. “We’ll chill, we can smoke. It’ll be a good time.”
I drove to his home in Elkhorn, nearly an hour southwest of the city. My beat-up Honda trudged along dark freeways that cut through frozen cornfields and farmland. I arrived at a two-story single-family home in the heart of Wisconsin suburbia in the dead of winter. It’s the kind of place where cops and teachers drink Miller Lite during Sunday football games and take their kids to basketball tournaments at the YMCA. I rang the bell, and Jack opened the door. He led me through the kitchen, which opened onto a large, sunken living room. His whole family was there, sitting in the dark, watching a movie together.
“We’re just gonna be upstairs for a bit,” Jack told them.
His wife looked at me but said nothing. Maybe no one had told her, when they married, that in the holy military trinity of God-country-service, family was an optional fourth add-on.
As I greeted his family with a quick wave, something flickered inside me, then faded. It felt far away, like the soft thud of bass music pulsing from a distant car. It felt like something I used to know, something I used to be a part of. It felt like Saturday morning in the blue house at the top of the hill. It felt like the blue-gray tufts of shag carpeting in the living room, or the taste of raw cookie dough when my mom let Beck and me lick the bowl clean. It felt like begging for my friend to come over and play. Then the flicker became a sound, and I could hear my dad’s voice telling me no, my friend couldn’t come over right now. Because right now was family time.
Family time.
I couldn’t look Jack’s wife in the eye again. I was tumbling down a rabbit hole into another memory of my family. I was fifteen. I was sitting at the dining room table with my sister and my mom. My dad was standing over us, holding a handful of burnt, crumbling debris in his hand. He was so mad, his eyes were set to bulge out of their sockets.
“Are you kids smoking GRASS?” he sputtered.
Beck and I managed to swallow our laughter. “Grass!” we’d giggle later, laughing at the dated term for marijuana, which we called weed, or pot, but never grass. Beck and I seemed to agree, telepathically, that our only hope for survival was our mutual silence. She knew the weed wasn’t hers, just like I knew it wasn’t mine. But I didn’t know if it was hers, and she didn’t know if it was mine, and we didn’t want to throw each other under the bus in case one of us was, in fact, guilty. Beck thought the weed belonged to a friend of mine. I thought it was probably her boyfriend’s. We both looked down at the table and said nothing.
My dad waited, his whole body tense, for one of us to admit to our dark deeds. As the social work supervisor for the county, my dad spent his days with juvenile delinquents. He worked with social workers whose job it was to help families stay together and help biting, kicking, screaming, law-breaking