Whip Appeal
At the request of the doctor’s assistant, Ron Verbish nestled into the big couch, as he had a hundred times before. The assistant exited the office, gently closing the door behind her, and leaving Ron alone. The doctor, she had told him, will be with you shortly.
After marinating in ten minutes of dainty blip-hop coming from an unseen speaker, the door cinematically opened and in walked Dr. Lewis Threedots, Ron’s zillion dollar psychologist.
“Nice day for a picnic, innit?” said Dr. Threedots. It was an inside joke of theirs of forgotten origin. Dr. Threedots was a big man, and he knew how to broadcast his dimensions. Big pants, big coat, big shoes, big beard, big hair, big voice, big breath . . .
Ron began nervously bantering about the weather—no rain for ages, hot in the sun, cold in the shade, yuk-yuk-yuk . . . Dr. Threedots eyed him suspiciously, so Ron propped himself up a little bit and said, “Doc, I got a problem.”
Dr. Threedots held his breath and maintained eye contact with Ron like they were discussing how to avoid an imminent nuclear war. Uh oh, the doctor thought. This man is the biggest milquetoast in the history of humanity. Basically sucks up the woes and trifles of the world like a hundred-dollar Hoover. Therefore if he says he has a problem, he has a problem—so I guess we’re not gonna sit around and yap about Milan Kundera and Caddyshack and the Los Angeles Angels, per usual, ad barfeum.
“For the last month, give or take . . .” Ron Verbish said, staring at his feet on the far end of the couch, “. . . since basically right after the last time I last saw you.” He sighed and looked out the office’s lone tiny window. “Shit, this is awkward. I’ve not talked to anyone about this yet and, I don’t know, it’s tougher that I figured it’d be . . .”
“Go on, Ron,” Dr. Threedots said, leaning in. “Lay it on me, bud.”
“Every time I take a shower, which is daily, and sometimes twice a day if I go biking or fishing or whatever, I get that Jon Secada stuck in my head . . . Blah, blah, it’s just another daaaayyy . . .”
Holyfugginshit, the doctor thought.
“Like, as soon as I turn the water on, it starts just starts blaring, right here between my ears,” Ron said, pointing at his head.
Dr. Lewis Threedots could not believe what he was hearing. For he too, had had Jon Secada’s Just Another Day start blaring in his head the second he turned the water on in his shower.
Ron’s lips kept moving but the doctor had tuned him out. Snap out of it, man, be professional. “For about a month, eh?” he said to Ron.
“Yeah,” Ron said. “I saw you last, what, the third Wednesday of May? It started like right after that.”
“Interesting,” the doctor said, nodding, hands clasped. What in the name of all that’s holy, he was thinking.
Ron continued, “It’s invasive as hell, doc. It just fucking lodges itself there and stays there. Over and over and over, ‘Cuz I…… Iiiiiii don’t wanna say it, I don’t wanna find another way . . .Make it through the day without youuuu’ . . .”
“Hmm,” the doctor said. Yeah, he was fully aware how invasive it was. He could sing the whole song using nothing but farts and burps if he had to. He decided this session would go nowhere unless he opened up . . .
“Ron, I’ll be honest, I’ve been having the same weird shit happen to me,” he said, throwing in an odd little chortle at the end.
Ron retracted his legs and swiveled and sat up facing the doc. “What do you mean?”
“I mean every single time, without fail, for the last twenty-seven god-awful days, I get Jon Secada’s 1992 summertime hit fucking single Just Another Day stuck in my head as soon as I get in the shower.”
“You’re joking,” Ron said, forcing a smile.
“I am not joking. I wish to hell I was joking.”
“Oh my God,” Ron said, staring at nothing. “Oh my God.”
The two men sat in silence for a long cold minute. The whir of the AC unit reduced the blip-hop muzak to a being merely implied.
“Have you ever had this happen before,” Ron asked Dr. Threedots.
“No, of course not,” the doctor replied, sharply. “Nor have I heard of it happening to anyone else, in my clinic or elsewhere. This is dragon country.”
Ron contemplated all this and then said, “I was thinking… Maybe it’s some place that I go a lot. Maybe the muzak at my CVS plays it a lot and I don’t notice. Or maybe at my Safeway or something.”
The doctor eyed him optimistically. “Which CVS, which Safeway?”
Ron told him and Dr. Threedots said he had not stepped foot in either place in probably a decade. The two men lived in opposite parts of town and therefore conducted their daily business in unneighborly spheres.
“Perhaps we should conduct an experiment,” the doctor said, dreamily.
“I don’t wanna be a Guinea pig.”
“You won’t a Guinea pig, don’t worry,” the doctor said. “C’mon, Ron, I wouldn’t do that to you. We can just keep it real simple, okay? We can meet at a place with a shower, maybe that Planet Bareflex over on Corbitt, and, you know, just see if it happens, and document the whole thing.”
Ron thought of the two of them standing naked in the shower, both unconditionally humming Jon Secada, and he grimaced. The doctor detected what was going on in his head so he said, “Look, we meet there—or wherever we decide—and we wear swimming trunks, and I’ll set up my equipment . . .”
“You know it’s going to happen, so what’s the point? We’re obviously both doomed to have this stupid fucking song stuck in our heads the rest of our fucking lives—unless we decide to stop fucking taking showers.” Ron felt his face turning red. “I fucking love showers. Long hot wonderful showers. And my water pressure is a goddamn beast. I could sit in there all day. Except I can’t. Now I can’t. Because of…,” he trailed off and steeped his head in his hands.
Dr. Threedots leaned over and patted him on the back and said, “I love showers too. Favorite part of the day, no doubt about it. I’ll stand in there ‘til my wife has to knock on the door and check on me. Only, yeah, I can’t anymore either.”
Ron, head still in hands, began rocking back in forth. The doctor hoped to hell he wasn’t crying. “At least it ain’t that bad a song,” the doctor said, chummily. Ron broke out of his weird trance and looked at Dr. Threedots like he was a bowl full of ear cheese. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he wanted to hit someone in the face, as hard as he could, with bad intentions.
The doctor winced and leaned back and said, “Could definitely be worse, that’s for damn sure. Imagine if it was Aqualung or, I don’t know, Pancho and Lefty.”
Ron would in fact prefer either of those songs to Jon Secada’s melodramatic turdball.
Their time expired. Dr. Threedots made vague plans, which Ron Verbish dully acquiesced to, and the two men agreed to discuss these plans in more detail on the phone within the next few days. In short, they would pretend none of this shit was happening, secretly hoping the song would disappear from their lives and they wouldn’t even notice, and they’d joke about it in their session a month from now. But both men knew that this would not at all be the case. They were, in fact, as Ron suggested, doomed to have the song stuck in their heads for the rest of their lives while they showered.
Ron said bye to Dr. Threedots and left the office, also saying bye to his assistant on the way out. The doctor sat there for a while and then readied himself for his next patient.
An alarm. Triplets of sonic awfulness. An alarm clock on a cell phone. On his cellphone. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk! Dr. Lewis Threedots opened his eyes, ran his hand along the side of his bed until he located the cord on his phone charger and then traced it back to his phone. He wrangled with the phone until his alarm was silenced. Awful damn alarm. He had chosen it solely on the merit of its name: Hitchcock—nestled there between Hillside and Icicles.
Jon Secada.
What was that all about.
What kind of evil fucking dream . . .
Had he heard Jon Secada recently? Probably. Maybe in that corny beerhouse or whatever his wife had dragged him to the other night. O’Flannel’s Bubbles and Grubbery. Or maybe, yeah, in the CVS. Probably the CVS, he thought optimistically. Still, what a damn nightmare. Did he know anybody named Ron Verbish? He certainly did not have a patient named Ron Verbish. Dumb name, like out of a low-hanging Vonnegut book, or, yeah, a shitty dream.
Dr. Threedots slouched his way into the bathroom and peed his guts out, as he does, and then put on his robe and went into the kitchen and grinded a big handful of coffee beans and started his coffee and then went back into his bed and cheek-smooched his wife, who was still sleeping.
His coffee machine sounded its triumphant little chirp, so he went back into the kitchen and he poured himself a cup of coffee and put two Splendas in it and some creamer and then went into the bathroom and plopped down on the pot and let his bowels do its thing, all the while sipping on his coffee and checking emails on his phone.
When he finished, he opened the shower curtain and turned on the water—and, holyfugginshit, right there between his ears, with a sort of dazzling but hellish absoluteness, Babyface goes, “Keep on whippin’ on me, work it on me, whip all your sweet sweet lovin’ on me . . .”
