Head Man

He thought he’d try a story called Believe It or Not
now that he’d met Robert Ripley.
Bobby didn’t ask Robert L. Ripley if he was related
to the Bring ’em Back Alive guy,
but that was Frank Buck: they were both mythologies
on the street, you had to have gone out of town
to hear about ’em. This Ripley was no magician,
though he seemed good hearted. He talked about you
as though you were some son of Roethke’s, who
didn’t have children. Ripley was no mystic,
he was a shrink with gray hair, portly, well spoken,
which meant there was no mistaking what he said.
Bobby was sitting there thinking this as it ended,
this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn Freud
from those who were required to read his biography,
which was the sole creation and one-man exploration
of the “talking cure” called “Siggy” in John Huston’s
adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s otherwise unfilmed
scenario. Mental adventures were rarely filmed.
Bobby sat through the hour obliviously.

(22 April 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander