The day my son Max flew

“I’m in my late fives,” my son, Maxwell, declares to me. His birthday is coming up and he insists it must be at Wendy’s down the street, but he plans to defiantly wear a Burger King crown through the whole celebration, in protest of how that fast-food joint has fallen away in recent years. Max is my flesh and blood and all he wants now is stability for his Poppa. Simple needs, really. I find that stability by writing tales from my own splintered and fractured past. But I never thought Americans would have any interest in learning about how a fifty-nine-year old fellow with schizoaffective disorder and a titanium stent in his heart and a young son who binges on strawberry Frostys at Wendy’s.
 *
“Tell me all about you,” a willowy, visiting shrink from Albany named Dr. Halo said as she entered my room and rubbed her hands together hard as if trying to create some sparks, friction, and/or flames. It was a smaller, well respected psychiatric clinic, and Dr. Halo was an expert on trauma. “Is there something big, anything at all that you might share with me today, David?  We need to take numerous risks in our work together. Something, anything, you gotta takes risks or we’ll never progress along life’s psychic and neural highways, okay? We share a little here, more over there, just like we’re making old-fashioned shake and bake chicken back in the day. There’s got to be something you could share with me now, right?”
“I’ve got these explosives within me now, clinical depression and a bit of paranoia,” I said.
“Expand,” she said. “Bring me in closer.”
“Schizoaffective disorder can sometimes feel like an enraged bull is riding me 24/7, kicking all over the place, upside down and back on home again.”
“What kind of things get you paranoid?” she asked
“Lost or dead folks and a few birds cackling at me at 3:09 a.m. every morning,” I explained. “Or disconnected whispers ricocheting off the satellites, bouncing off my bathroom tile in the shower.”
“What do you fear, though?” she asked. 
“Hirsute monsters under my bed and clever shrinks,” I said. “In that descending order.”
Dr. Halo held her palms up. “I’m harmless as drying sheets on a laundry line on a scenic and wind-blown hill.”
“What the does that mean?” I asked.
 “Time is too precious to waste on a nosy shrink like me,” Dr. Halo said. “We want you to grow and reach for your goals, please don’t waste your life on my meagre thoughts, okay?”
            I frowned and said, “It was never that simple for me, though - I was happy to hear the buoyant news from Wall Street and the fact that my dad’s car dealerships in Woodbridge and Niantic and Essex were profitable and expanding, sprouting up and out like ambitious flora in June, catching all the healing sunlight, all that wonderful Vitamin D. That said, it was a combo of shame and humiliation wrapped in a brutal take down in late November of ’90 which nearly knocked me off a bridge.”
            “But you held on tight, though, true?”
“Yes.”
“Who was the perp?”