TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

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CLIENT:... applied for disability and this doctor was supposed to help fill out the forms and send them into the disability office there, social security.

THERAPIST: Her psychiatrist?

CLIENT: Yeah. He had to fill out paperwork. She gets food stamps. Jodie won't go do that because it's below his level. Yeah. And Deborah is supposed to be getting cash assistance, starting probably the fourteenth of this month. Borrow $150 and then at the end of the month she gets another $150. That gives her $300 a month. I said, "Why can't he do those things, Mary?" "I don't know." He's got ADHD, he's bi-polar, he's got a little schizophrenia in him, but hey. He doesn't want to do those things. I said, "Well, good. You keep supporting her." [00:01:18]

THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah. Down that road.

CLIENT: Because you're the only way he gets cash because Aunt Mary won't give him cash. She said, "Nope. It's off your month's rent, polish the hardware floors," all this wonderful stuff.

THERAPIST: She makes him work for it.

CLIENT: Yes. I said, "Well, Mary, you're not the only one that's failed the kid. His father has." The aunt just thinks it's all a big ha-ha-ha.

THERAPIST: Would the aunt feel...? [00:02:02]

CLIENT: The aunt that he lives with? She's around him more than anything and she's a principal from a prestigious school. Why can't she get him help? She should know all the ins and outs of what's available for him, being a principal. Maybe her students don't fit that criteria, but I'm still quite sure she has ways of finding out about things. I mean I know when Lola's brother was a principal at some school and he's the one that find out about that school for Heath and all these different other schools he went and looked at. There are other ways to find out if you don't want to go down and embarrass yourself down at the welfare office and things like that. Why can't Mary look up all this stuff and he can fill things out on line and stuff like that? [00:03:12]

THERAPIST: Getting him some substantial help, as opposed to... yeah.

CLIENT: Why should it be up to Mary? She can't even figure out how to get help for herself. She still has to pay for her medications out of her pocket.

THERAPIST: She does?

CLIENT: Yeah. Why doesn't she own a card to get that?

THERAPIST: She doesn't have any insurance?

CLIENT: Nope. So, as I say, get her onto this it's like almost $500 and they're not. And she can only get a half at a time because that's all she can afford to pay.

THERAPIST: $500 for how long? [00:04:07]

CLIENT: A month. You'd be surprised at some of the meds. The Anaflex is very expensive, [trazodone] (ph?) is very expensive, buspar is expensive. Starting maybe October, I have already reached my limits on medications where I have to pay like $1.10 on some and $3.00 on others; but come the beginning of October, I don't have to pay the differences anymore because I've gone over my criteria so it costs me zero for my meds up until January 1st. And then the prices are going up where I'm going to have to pay $2.50 for the generic ones and I think $4-something for the other ones. I have to find out about I have Medicare and I have insurance, but I guess I still need that Part D one more thing. I don't understand why because I have my own separate different insurance for my prescriptions. [00:05:46]

THERAPIST: Part D is the Medicare insurance, and then you have another?

CLIENT: Yeah. I have a different one altogether for my medications. How the hell I got that, I don't know. I think I already have my Part D, so I don't know why I... you know? But my pharmacist is going to look into it for me because some of them are so expensive.

THERAPIST: For the prescription benefit?

CLIENT: For that Part D benefit, so the pharmacist was going to look into it for me if I needed any more coverage. That's that. I just don't understand.

THERAPIST: Mary?

CLIENT: Yeah. Cry, cry, cry, crier. I don't know. She's definitely not coming over for Christmas dinner. It's only going to be me and Deborah and that's it anyways. [00:07:15]

THERAPIST: What is that? The "cry, cry, cry" thing. What do you feel? How do you react to that?

CLIENT: I don't feel bad for her, not in the least. She gets herself into these predicaments. She has friends that are as loose as a goddamned goose. Her best friend, the girl with the split personalities sometimes she's Louise, which is her real name and sometimes she's another and sometimes she's all these other different names, all these different personalities Mary was always over at her house because she knew Louise's husband. I went to school with him. I never liked him because of the fact that he went with my girlfriend. [00:08:21]

THERAPIST: The one in Maine?

CLIENT: Yeah. This was during junior high school. He used to beat her. He was an alcoholic. He was a pothead. When I saw her with a black eye, (chuckles) he's lucky he lived. Brother Mickie paid him a little visit.

THERAPIST: With a black eye?

CLIENT: Yeah. Well my brother paid him a little visit and beat the living shit out of him and said if he ever saw Andrea with another black eye or bruise on her, he said, "Next time it won't be a beating, but you can gather what it's going to be." Shortly after that he broke up with her. Mickie was good for some things. (chuckles) [00:09:25]

THERAPIST: Mickie was the enforcer?

CLIENT: Yes, yes. I dated guys and I'd say, "Yeah, you must know my brother, Mickie." He shook proper oh, best behaviors, believe me.

THERAPIST: They were a bit scared, huh?

CLIENT: Yeah. Mickie was the kid knocked the teacher to the blackboard. Mickie was the kid that knocked another teacher out or he put somebody's head through the wall, cute little things. That was Mickie.

THERAPIST: That was your brother? [00:10:07]

CLIENT: Yep. The one that parked his car in the teacher's own that was my brother. He wasn't moving his car because he just did it all over that new paint job on there. He was good. He was good.

THERAPIST: Not scared of anybody, huh? [00:10:31]

CLIENT: Yeah. My things were minor. So I knocked out the gym teacher? So I put a girl's head in a toilet bowl, locked a teacher in the closet?

THERAPIST: Small potatoes, huh?

CLIENT: Yeah. Small potato stuff compared to Mickie. But, yeah, we had a fun time in high school. (chuckles) Sam inherited the family house. It was a dump when we were growing up. It was a two-story house, two-family. When Louise and him got it, they just combined the well, they didn't even combine them. They just used upstairs and downstairs. If you go in the bathroom on the first floor and you'd look up, you could see or the bathroom upstairs you could actually watch somebody going pee on the toilet because there was no flooring. It was all holes and what-have-you. It was a mess and when I say a mess, a mess. [00:11:51]

THERAPIST: This was where?

CLIENT: Yeah. He was, I would swear, the original hoarder. They had to have someone go once he died he died during the summertime. My friend had to come up when he died. The house was infested with fleas. That's because they had eight cats and two dogs. It was disgusting. At nighttime you'd have to walk around with a flashlight because you couldn't see where you were going. They kept it in the dark. It was disgusting. Right now, they've gone through their third big, long truck where you throw the stuff out; the dump trucks the things that they haul into your yard that they throw everything in. They're on the third one and they have a fourth one that will be coming; and it's still not even half done. They have the attic to clean out, the whole second floor level, the level on the first floor, the basement, the back yard, and the garage. [00:13:28]

Mary went to go over to see Louise the other night and they wouldn't let her in the house. She said, "You're not allowed in the house because you have bedbugs and we don't have those. We only have fleas." I'm like, "What the fuck?" (chuckles) The kettle calling the kettle black. Mary has her meal delivered there, so she said, "Do you think you could take my mail and slip it out through the mail slot?" She said, "Yeah, I can do that." I just pissed my pants laughing. Just think, Mary, now all of a sudden you're too dirty to go in their house. [00:14:23]

THERAPIST: Yeah, she has fallen.

CLIENT: He had these books of thrones after that TV show, King of Thrones or something like that. He had all of the different volumes. She read them. She took them home. I said, "Mary, he had fleas in his house. Don't you think the fleas are in the goddamned books, Mary? All those times you read volume 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and half of them you read over at my fucking house. You'd go to a frigging doctor's appointment with me and bring the frigging book in with you. Mary, don't you think you were going to infest other people?" "Well, I didn't know they were fleas." I said, "Oh, God, Mary. Get your eyes fixed again." "I can't pay to go to the eye doctor." So I won't let her come in with her pocket book or her goddamned frigging coats or anything. Don't you bring a book into my house. She brought a couple of puzzles over the other night Deborah took them up for... (chuckles) Oh, my God. [00:15:54]

THERAPIST: You sound both worried about her and exasperated with her.

CLIENT: Yeah. And Deborah, you know? I guess her roommate did offer to cook Thanksgiving dinner. Deborah told her no because she doesn't know how to cook. I said, "Oh, okay. You could have ordered a dinner for $49.95, all cooked and everything. All you have to go is pick it up and it's all ready." Why doesn't she just do that for Christmas? Because I'm not cooking.

THERAPIST: And worse, it sounds like she's a hard person to be around.

CLIENT: Yeah, because you want to tell her off but, yet I mean I have [...] (inaudible at 00:16:56). Of course, she likes it when Mary comes over because she likes watching Mary falling in her food and stuff like that. To me, that's not funny, it's embarrassing. [00:17:16]

THERAPIST: No, it's really hard for you to see somebody let themselves go like that.

CLIENT: Yeah. And then she and Mark had a fight Wednesday night.

THERAPIST: Mary and Mark?

CLIENT: Yeah. Mark wanted to go to the store for something and she was going to go to the store and pick me up these big cans of these and they're only a buck at this liquor store by my house. They took a ride over there in Mary's car. He's shit-faced; she's shit-faced. I guess the line was out and around the corner. It's a little dinky place. Mark said, "I'm not waiting in this line. Let's go over to the store up the street." The cans of beer that were a buck at one store are $1.80 at this other store. Mary said, "Do you plan on paying the extra eighty cents on each can of beer?" "No." She lit into him. She called him nothing but a pathological liar. [00:18:35] (laughs)

THERAPIST: So what he was going to buy less beer or he wasn't going to buy it there at all?

CLIENT: He had money to buy him self some nips and some scratch tickets, I guess, and she got pissed that he wouldn't give her the $6.00 for the six cans of beer that she was supposed to buy, so she had to pay for the extra $6.00. That was her ride. Meantime, he had already gone through a 12-pack of beer that I had bought on Monday, I think. That was to be for company on Thanksgiving or it was Tuesday. One of those days.

THERAPIST: He went right through it?

CLIENT: Yeah. He was over Monday, he was over Tuesday, he was over Wednesday. I didn't hear from him on Thanksgiving oh, we had called him in the morning to wish him a happy Thanksgiving, because he was working. Friday we had him from 10:00 in the morning until 9:00 at night. He would come by with the dog, stay about an hour and a half, then he'd go home, and then he'd be back out with the dog and stay another hour or two. This kept on going all day long. Finally at 5:00, he was back without the dog and he was back until 9:00. She had called at 8:00 looking for him. "Where the fuck are you?" "I'm at my mother's house." "Well, get your rear end home." He said, "Yeah, I'll be right there." Come 9:00, he's still sitting there on the couch with me watching TV. She called again. "You'd better get your fucking ass home because I want to fucking go out." He goes, "Oh, you want to go out?" She said, "Yes, I want to go shopping." He said, "Well, go ahead and go." She said, "Keisha's home." Keisha's 15-fucking-years old. She can be alone. I know she's got issues, but she hasn't been in that suicidal mood in a long time. Give the kid some credit. Let her think that you trust her to be alone. [00:21:23]

This kind is going to I don't know. I think she's beyond killing herself. I think that she might really rebel against both her mother and her father. Mark gets up at 2:00, 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. She'll be wide awake and on the computer, and she sleeps all day. He says, "Well..." Not good. Not good at all. I said, "Does this psychiatrist that she sees or whatever she may be know how to treat her issues?" Do they specialize in trans-gender teenagers?" "No." I said, "Don't you think you should take her to one that knows all the answers that she's looking for?" "Well, yeah, right. I guess we should." Never mind "I guess we should." [00:22:52] I said, "You and Deborah are going to have a rude awakening some morning because she might not try to kill herself thinking that by cutting her breasts off is going to help her become more of a man. I don't know what to tell you, Mark. Is she on the male hormones yet?" "No." "She should be." "She's only 15." "Quote-unquote, Mark. How many times have I told you that they start as early as three and four years old? I'm not wearing dresses. I'm going to wear boy's pants and boy's shirts and boy's sneakers; and they know at that age. I'm going to play with trucks and army men. I'm not going to wear dresses. Something like little James saying ‘I want to wear dresses, Mommy, and play with dolls.'" [00:24:13]

THERAPIST: Yeah, what do you think of that?

CLIENT: I think they would be just like Mark and say, "No, you don't. You're a boy."

THERAPIST: That old way that you, yourself, encountered around what a girl does and what a girl doesn't do, what boys do.

CLIENT: Yeah. I just knew so many people that were like that. I even dealt with it with younger children when I worked over at the hospital in the children's unit.

THERAPIST: What did you...?

CLIENT: We had a couple of children that wanted to commit suicide because they wanted to be opposite sex from what they were, and they just weren't getting the help that they needed to get. [00:25:16] One of the boys' father beat the fucking living crap out of him because he kept saying he wanted to be a girl and all of this stuff. He wanted to play with dolls and every time he did, the father would beat him. Oh, yeah. I don't know. I think deep down in his mind Mark is such a macho man with this big build and all of his stuff; and to think that his little princess wants to become a man... [00:25:59]

THERAPIST: But in a way, I think you're speaking to Mark and to maybe all men about that are looking to define women. You had so much in that way with your own father about trying to define who you would be and you happened to rebel.

CLIENT: It's not that I wanted to become a man or anything, a guy, just because I wanted to do boy things? Girls rode bicycles in those all my friends had bikes. I was the only girl who didn't have a fucking bike.

THERAPIST: Because it was unladylike? Girls didn't do that.

CLIENT: Yeah. I finally got one, thanks to my mother. I had to dress in dresses. I had to wear skirts, but not for long. Nothing like a pair of scissors. [00:27:04]

THERAPIST: Cut it off, huh?

CLIENT: Oh, yeah. To shreds.

THERAPIST: That's a pretty big message.

CLIENT: Growing up, at the age of 10 and 11, I think I was the only girl who I never knew what a training bra was. I went right from a t-shirt into a size 36C bra.

THERAPIST: Is that right?

CLIENT: Oh, yeah.

THERAPIST: Why not? Why didn't they get you a training bra?

CLIENT: Once I got to be 11, I was still in a t-shirt. So then from the t-shirt, I just automatically went into these big, humongous women's bras because I was so big-busted.

THERAPIST: And you developed around 12? 11 or 12? [00:27:53]

CLIENT: Yeah, which was embarrassing. I had these big breasts going into the seventh grade and all of my friends were stuffing their bras with Kleenexes trying to be big-busted. I was like, "Oh, shit. I wish I could have done that." No.

THERAPIST: It was hard for you.

CLIENT: Yeah. But I didn't go through the stage where I well, I did try a couple of times to tape my breasts down.

THERAPIST: You were feeling kind of embarrassed and exposed.

CLIENT: Yeah, especially when the kids would be calling me, "Hey, jugs." "Hey, melons." I hear they have this thing they call a chest cold and that's why they're all swollen." These cute things.

THERAPIST: Attracted a lot of attention, teasing.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: What about for your family? How did they react your father, your mom, your brother? [00:29:00]

CLIENT: My father would just look at me with a dirty look.

THERAPIST: A dirty look?

CLIENT: Yeah. My mother was big-busted, too. My brother eh.

THERAPIST: "Eh?" What does that mean?

CLIENT: He didn't give a shit.

THERAPIST: He didn't?

CLIENT: No. He said, "I assume you got enough aggravation in school today." Yeah. "Is that why you put the kid's head in the desk and slammed the desk on his head?" "Well, yeah. If he had any more remarks his head would have gone in there again," because we had those desks that you sat in that... [00:29:57]

THERAPIST: And you could open the lid? And you took a kid's head and slammed it?

CLIENT: And slammed it and slammed it and slammed it.

THERAPIST: Is that right? It must have brought up a lot of feelings to get called names.

CLIENT: All my friends were flat-chested and I wasn't. All my friends we wore white blouses and all of a sudden you'd see some boob coming up and they'd say, "What have you got in your bra, Kleenexes?"

THERAPIST: And you would have gladly traded with the, is that right?

CLIENT: Yes.

THERAPIST: It brought so much attention and exposure.

CLIENT: Yeah. It's a quarter of. Next week we're here? No. Next week we're over in I booked that already.

THERAPIST: And I gave you all the info you need?

CLIENT: Yes. Now, what about are you going to be here the tenth? [00:30:58]

THERAPIST: I'm not working Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve. I'm taking that whole week of Christmas off. We'll meet the third, the tenth, the 17th; and then off the 24th and the 31st. As we get closer to it, why don't we see if we can find a time to meet that week of the 31st? You're going to be here, right?

CLIENT: Oh, yeah.

THERAPIST: So we could try to find something. I'll be back to work on the second.

CLIENT: Okay. I can handle that.

THERAPIST: I gave you the code to get into the new building.

CLIENT: Yeah. The girl said to me, "Story Street in Cambridge?" I said, "Yeah." "Boy, I never heard of that. And what's your doctor's name?" I said, "Plant, like in a plant in your garden." "No. Story and Plant?" I said, "Yeah. Just call me Cinderella." [00:32:29]

THERAPIST: Cinderella, huh? (chuckles)

CLIENT: The last time I went to your office I wound up waiting for the bus until 12:30; and I tell them it's a 12:00 pick-up. No matter what, I'm out there. 12:30. And from here he took me to Watertown to pick up another patient.

THERAPIST: Oh, you've got to be kidding me. So what time did you get home?

CLIENT: 1:30.

THERAPIST: Did they drop you off first or second?

CLIENT: No, he dropped me up right after he picked up the other guy. They're bad, they really are. I said to Deborah, "I'm going with a scarf, a hat and gloves because I froze my ass off up there."

THERAPIST: Good move. Can they pick you up at [...] (inaudible at 00:33:22) ?

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Maybe that's the way to go.

CLIENT: And Mark said, "We're not to have any more arguments when it comes around to the Holidays." I said, "Yeah, but I'm not the one that starts the argument, Mark. You're the one that starts them." "But I'm sorry. I forget. You should know I'm drunk. I wouldn't say those things when I was sober." I said, "Oh, really?" [00:34:09]

THERAPIST: But that won't stop him from cranking.

CLIENT: He said, "You know I always come back to you." I said, "Yeah, I know. Just like a bad penny." One of the girls in the building gave me a Christmas set and it's a glass table. Mark is so fucking big and clumsy Deborah said to him, "If you break that table, I will take every piece of shard that's on the floor and put it in your body." How are you doing with my paperwork?

THERAPIST: I didn't finish it, Louise. I did not finish it. I'll have it for you next time. Sorry about that. Next time.

CLIENT: Yeah, yeah, they all say that.

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