He was down on Fifth Avenue just south of 23rd Street, on the second floor of a building that could have housed an unsuccessful theatre company or a manufacturing business that has been out-sourced and people are just waiting for their final paychecks to clear before moving on to the unemployment line. I wish I could think of his name. He was living proof that not all psychiatrists are rich,and that you don't have to have obsessive-compulsive disorder to become a psychiatrist. He had no secretary, he answered his own phone, always had lots of openings in his schedule. In short, a loser. People with bi-polar are always looking for a new psychopharm, so when I found this guy I thought he was cool. I liked his sort of loser-ish vibe, because my last psychopharm was this uptight rich guy with pictures and models of sailboats all over the place. And he yelled at me on the phone when I called to say I had just realized I had an appointment and was going to be 49 minutes late.

His name was Dr. Michael Something, Heller or something like that. He had rows and rows of huge textbooks in his office and framed diplomas everywhere. The office was academic yet hip, with a leather chair and giant mahogany desk with a glass top kind of a feel. It pissed me off that he slapped the diagnosis on me within five minutes of meeting me, especially since I was just getting to the good part about my latest humiliating experience in the workplace. I forget why I was crying, but instead of handing me a Kleenex, in the time-honored way of therapists who have co-dependency issues, he started scribbling out a prescription for lithium.

I saw him for a few months. He shared a suite with a bunch of other shrinks. These guys were really raking in the insurance. The waiting room was always packed. I remember a group of Hasidic Jews, and a very fat man in bedroom slippers. The only ones reading magazines were the family members trying to be brave. It was like being in an elevator, the way nobody looked at each other, just down or straight ahead. The office was the south west corner of East 96th Street, ground floor level with the blinds open, so if anyone you knew walked by they could see you sitting there with a bunch of losers, and then you'd have to pretend you hadn't seen that person and they hadn't seen you.

At least down on 23rd Street, I didn't know anyone. As a bi-polar upper east side recovering alcoholic, I always tried to look my best--and expected that others would as weel. It was a stretch for to be seeing this rumpled psychoparm. Luckily I had a great capacity for denial, so I just kept noticing things that would make it see like he was cool, a kind of maverick shrink, a "power to the people" kind of guy. I liked that he talked to me like we were in the same species. I could complain about my life, knowing that he too probably had no relationship, a crummy apartment and no savings account. I kept telling him how blah I felt on the lithium. The reason this conversation fell on deaf ears was probably because he felt blah too,and didn't think anything of it. Looking back, from the perspective of a second year Social Work student, I can see that he was depressed. Whether he had a depressive personality or simply a crappy social life, I don't know. He certainly had the wardrobe of someone with a crappy social life. But he was decent, the first psychopharm who treated me like a peer.

The downside, of course, is that he was as low-functioning as any of the clients whose blood samples and chart notes were in that crumpled manilla envelope. So I decided to attend the meeting of the Depressive and Manic Depressive support group. That, of course, is where I met Dr. Cute.

In the spirit of clinical integrity, I would now like to disclose my entire psychopharm roster. In the spirit of PTSD/ADD,however, I can't remember who they are, or how long I saw them for. My longest relationship with a psychopharm is my current relationship, with Marianne. Before her, while we were still in Manhattan, I had a number of therapists, each of which had his own psyhcopharmocologist supervisor/ sidekick, the Roy Rogers to his Pat Brady, the Tonto to his Lone Ranger, the Dean Martin to his Jerry Lewis. The most bizarre therapist I ever had wasn't really a thereapist at all, but a skinny Episcopalian priest who looked like a member of a British comedy group in the sixties. They had a show on Broadway called "Beyond the Fringe," if you are old enough of a geezer to remember it. Anyway, this guy was like the tall skinny Phd. guy who intoned, "Esau was an hairy man, but I am a smooth one."

So let's call him Jonathan, although it is a fabulous and sweet temptation to call him by his real name. He would choke on his teacup. Jonathan worked out of an Episcopalian Church in midtown, right next door to the Museum of Modern Art, a church with a boy choir, a "Church of England" feel, and the coolness of stone walls and tiny windows. Jonathan didn't actually have an office, so we met in various rooms in the rectory, where he would listen to my monologues and say things like, "why do you always shoot yourself in the foot?"

Jonathan sat there week after week in a leather chair pulled from room to room, his mouth open, clearly stunned by my verbal genius and ability to speak for long stretches without drawing breath. Plus which I was in my thirties, my hair dyed that sort of reddish or blondish shade favored by women whose grey hair is coming in so fast they can't keep up with it, but nevertheless try to. My wardrobe was depressingly corporate, my shoes sensible, my accessories muted. I was all but crying out "MAKEOVER!!"

Perhaps it was that malleable quality with which he fell in love. "What grandiose transference!" the A-student MSW students among you will be thinking. But Jonathan was sitting there week after week with a glazed look in his eye, which I know could mean only one thing. He was stupified. Meanwhile I had heard of a very prestigious psychiatrist uptown on Fifth Avenue in a building with a canopy and a doorman, a man esteemed within the community of sober alcoholics on the Upper East Side. He didn't take insurance but I figured so what, I just want to get his take on Jonathan. He had an actual brown leather chaise lounge in his office, possibly the exact replic of the "couch" Sigmund Freud might have had in his! It was the very first time I had seen such a couch, and I was too intimidated to sit anywhere near it, especially since it was just a consultation and he didn't take insurance.

I was so nervous and intimidated I got lost on the way there, even though it was only a few blocks from my apartment and I had passed by many times. So anyway we chatted. He asked if I had a boyfriend and how that was going. He said it was very healthy that I had a relationship with a caring person, and that love is really the greatest healer. When I left there I felt cured. It would be a little awkward to tell Jonathan that I had gotten a second opinion. Our next appointment was held in the storage room of the Church Thrift Shop, where we sat on folding chairs between racks of second hand clothes. I remember noticing fringe hanging down from a hanger above my head.

Jonathan, I began, I have had a consultation, a second opinion, with a psychiatrist who is familiar with alcoholism. Jonathan straightened up from his usual hunch, and pointed his chin at me. "A second opinion?! Why, is his penis bigger than mine?"

I did what any incest survivor would do: I completely dissociated from the comment,from the speaker of the comment, and the day,time and place the comment was made. Soon I was invisible, floating down Fifth Avenue past Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's Cathedral, like a balloon from the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, out of season and on the wrong side of town.