The Confessions of Danny Slocum by George Whitmore

Author:George Whitmore [Whitmore, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480455092
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

TONIGHT I WAS EATING dinner and watching TV. A story about a pediatrician. The kindly doctor was filmed on his rounds.

All day long at work something had been flickering about the edges of my consciousness, something dreamed perhaps, perhaps something someone said.…

The doctor cut through a child’s ribs on the operating table. I began to cry. I managed to swallow the food in my mouth. I put the napkin over my eyes and cried.…

I grew up in a small Western city where one of the summer attractions was a musical comedy performed in the city park and sponsored by one of the newspapers. From age eleven until well into high school I acted and sang in those shows. We kids cavorted and mugged around the stage while the Wells Fargo Wagon was a comin’ down the street or everyone was declaring in four-part harmony what a real nice clambake it had been.

The year I was thirteen, I began riding to and from rehearsals with a schoolteacher who lived a ways out of the city, in one of its eastern suburbs. Taking the bus all the way downtown alone and then back home in the dark was an ordeal. It was much more fun riding with Ted.

He was a popular amateur actor who usually played comic parts in our summer shows and, during the winter, appeared in little-theater productions. Everyone loved him. He was a card. I liked him because he was funny and intense. He looked as if he’d stepped directly out of The Inspector General: long, string-bean body, Adam’s apple like a fist, prematurely balding.

Driving home one night, Ted brought up the subject of hypnotism. Casually.

“Ever been hypnotized?” His eyes alit on me briefly, then returned to the street.

I said I hadn’t. He said nothing more. Shifted gears. Silence.

Why? I asked.

“It’s just … kind of a hobby with me.”

Again, shifting gears, busy concentration on the traffic, street signs—like a man miming driving a car.

I asked him about it the next evening, of course. Did he think I could be hypnotized ? What made some people easier to hypnotize than others? Are you unconscious, in a trance?

He smiled indulgently at my questions (keeper of the mysteries), answered with a patient air, and saved his proposal for the next night.

“Would you like to?”

Be hypnotized?

“Yeah.”

I didn’t know. It might be fun, I said.

“I don’t hypnotize just anyone. I think I’d only put you in a light trance”—as if deciding—“to begin with.”

And so he did.

That night and the following night—and the next night, after rehearsal in the marble pavilion in the park. He drove to the other end of the park, next to the reflecting pool, behind a stand of pine trees.

I have no doubt that he put me in a real trance and that it was impossible for me to move my arm, that the pinprick in the back of my hand (the pin drawn from under the collar of his jacket) didn’t hurt, that his hot breath in my hair, as

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