She was inconsolable. And she remained inconsolable. It was as if Sappho was grieving for a dead lover.
She refused to go near the bathroom of their new apartment. The very sight of its drainpipe-less glitter was enough to put her into a suicidal depression. Papa Kuntzentookis had to buy her a chamber-pot. And it was only with difficulty that he was able to persuade her to bathe in the kitchen sink once a month. Where would it all end? he would moan to himself.
It ended as such adolescent crushes usually end. Slowly, Sappho emerged from her depression under her own steam. She was young and resilient, and her body was too hungry for love to go on mourning a lost love forever. But the ending was also a beginning, the beginning of something which presented new problems.
In her seeking, Sappho was still subconsciously attracted to objects which reminded her of her first love. The first time Papa Kuntzentookis was made aware of this was when he was summoned to school to confer with Sappho’s teacher. The teacher was a forthright lady, and she didn’t beat around the bush.
“Sappho won’t stay in her seat, and that disrupts the class,” she told Papa Kuntzentookis.
“This I don’t understand. For why does she leave her seat.”
“To go to the back of the room where the steampipe is.”
“So maybe she’s cold, poor child. For what I pay in taxes, they should heat these schoolrooms better!”
“If you ask me, it’s not that she’s cold. It’s that she’s too hot!” the teacher told him frankly.
“What are you saying?”
“She seems to have some sort of bizarre affection for that steampipe. She kisses it, and hugs it, and wraps her legs around it. If it wasn’t so ridiculous, I’d think there was something sexual about it.”
“Aha!” The light of understanding broke over Papa Kuntzentookis’ face. “I see now!”
“You do? Well I wish you’d explain it. It’s Greek to rne.”
“Hey, lady, you watch that! I don’t care if you are a teacher! Nobody don’t make cracks about the Greeks to me.”
“I’m sorry. I meant no ethnic insult.”
“Anti-Greek-ite!” Papa Kuntzentookis muttered. “What are you? Some kind of Turk or something?”
“Please, Mr. Kuntzentookis. I didn’t mean to offend you. I just want you to control your daughter’s behavior.”
“You control your steampipe! I’ll control my daughter!” Papa Kuntzentookis turned on his heel huffily and walked out.
But his subsequent talk with Sappho bore no fruits at all. She was in the grip of an obsession that was beyond her control. And this obsession led to one incident after another.
There was the time that Sappho leaped up on the counter of a soda fountain and attempted to impale herself upon a shiny metal seltzer spiggot. There was the time when she was driving along the highway with Papa Kuntzentookis and she leaped from the car to wrest a jack from a motorist attempting to change a tire and began making violent love to it even as the car came crashing down on the rim of the wheel. There was the time she broke into the showroom of an outlet for plumbing supplies and staged a one-girl orgy. And there was the time she climbed the girders of a budding building project, grabbed the riveting machine from a startled construction worker, and went so wild with passion that she almost toppled thirty floors to her death. Only his cutting the wire which fed the riveting machine its power saved Sappho.
Finally, Papa Kuntzentookis, at his wits’ end, sought help. He arranged for Sappho to be seen by a psychiatric social worker. Aside from her obsession, Sappho was an obedient girl, and she readily agreed to keep her first appointment with the social worker.
To her surprise, he was quite a young man. She didn’t know it, of course, but this was actually his first case. Naturally, he was very anxious to make good with it. And Sappho’s dark beauty only added to his fervor.
He asked her to describe her problem herself, and she did. When she was finished, his fingers drummed the table while he gathered his thoughts before speaking. “You are very fortunate that I was assigned to your case,” he told her finally.
“Why do you say that?” Sappho asked.
“Because I am the most empathetic therapist you could possibly have found.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Before depth analysis resolved my problem, I suffered from a sexual aberration quite similar to yours. Therefore I can identify with your problem quite easily. And that is very important if I am going to help you.”
“What do you mean?” Sappho asked. “What was your problem?”
“I—-” the young therapist paused dramatically— “was an incubator baby!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said I was an incubator baby.”
“Oh?” Sappho stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“You don’t understand, do you?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then I shall explain. We form our conceptions of what is sexually attractive quite early in life. To most infants this means a parent fixation. The boy baby is attracted to his mother, the girl baby to her father. And those concepts are lasting. That’s why psychology concentrates on the Oedipal feelings in patients. That’s why we make jokes about men marrying their mothers. But, since I was an incubator baby, there were certain early and lasting complications in my own sexual concepts. Do you see?”
“No,” Sappho admitted. “But go on. Maybe it will get clearer.”
“Right. Now, at the crucial stage of an infant’s life, when a mother’s warm and loving arms are needed, what was my only emotional contact with? An incubator, that’s what! Still, I shouldn’t be bitter. It really was quite an incubator,” he reminisced. “The most modern of its kind at that time. A miracle machine it was. Yes, a miracle of glass and metal, moving parts that whirred musically, flashing lights that imprinted themselves upon my budding vision like the most beautiful of rainbows, rubberized cogs that caressed me when I bumped against them-—such was the mother I knew and loved; such was the mother I grew up to search for as a mate. Is it any wonder that in my post-puberty years I was such a crazy mixed-up kid?”
“I suppose not. What did you do?”
“What could I do? I was in the grip of an obsession I didn’t begin to understand. All I was capable of doing was reacting to it. And my reactions were uncontrollable.”
“Just how did you react?” Sappho’s curiosity was aroused.
“Erotically, of course. Very erotically. Passing a juke box for instance—a juke box with its flashing, multi-colored lights and moving, metallic parts—I would become filled with overpowering desire. Ah, how well I remember the one in the malt shop I used to frequent as an adolescent. I was so in love with it that I couldn’t eat or sleep for thinking about it. First loves can be very traumatic, you know. It’s all very well to sneer at schoolboy crushes, but I tell you that what I felt for that juke box was as strong an emotion as any grown man is capable of feeling.”
“What did you do about it?” Sappho wanted to know.
“What could I do? Like all frustrated lovers from time immemorial, I brooded and pined. My reason told me that my love was beyond my grasp, but my emotions knew nothing of reason. I lost weight, became haggard, and then one day I faced the ultimate in desolation. The juke box had been removed from the malt shop. The owner had been unable to stand any more the crowds of kids it attracted. I tried desperately to find out where it had been taken, but I failed.”
“How devastating!” Sappho sympathized.
“Yes. It was. I tried to console myself with a pinball machine, but it just wasn’t the same. Oh, there was an attraction of course. But it was strictly physical. No matter how the lights flashed and the little metal balls bounced off the rubber bumpers, there was never any real emotional contact. Still, it was better than nothing.”