(Life of Socrates Book II {RAISING FLORA} ... Figure 4: Early Spring blooming of a lobivopsis)
When I was dually-diagnosed, people told me, ‘Well, the good news is, with the right meds and regular therapy, you can live a completely normal life.’ Dad said this more than anyone else. I tried to live this ‘normal life’. But I couldn’t land or hold down jobs. And I was basically living like a hermit. The ‘bipolar I with psychotic features’ was under control, thanks to the meds. But my second diagnosis, ‘substance use disorder’, was a fierce dragon which I could not slay. I couldn’t live this ‘normal life’. Father tried to reassure me that the prognosis was good. But he didn’t comprehend the struggle; he couldn’t understand the day-to-day mental, spiritual, emotional anguish. But they do, all who are in your network, as far as the workforce and social relationships are concerned, try to show you optimism. The one thing, though, all who are diagnosed with a mental illness have to contend with is contemplation of the act. Not in therapy, but in the regular sessions with your psychiatrist. ‘Are you having any thoughts about harming yourself?’
They always want to know. Then, they usually hammer the idea home, elsewhere in the dialogue by reiterating, ‘Having suicidal thoughts?’ ‘As if you didn’t just ask me once, now you’ll ask me again, put it in more blunt words.’ So, I know, for those diagnosed, there is no way to avoid the thought of the act. If you didn’t want it in your life, or to be made to think about it, you’d have to simply not go to see the psychiatrist anymore and in doing so, surrender your meds.
When the doctor would ask me whether I was ‘having thoughts about hurting’ myself I always said, ‘no’. It’s not that I was against honestly exploring my mental situation, but I wanted at all costs to forestall another hospitalization. And if I had told her the truth about the feelings I’d been having—about the act—I would have been locked up in the psych ward again. There must be some purpose for the question. Of course they don’t want you to commit suicide. But even if you haven’t been thinking about it, they remind you.
When I was in the depth of feeling out the act, I used to look forward to my appointments. I wanted to see my psychiatrist, if one last time; I wanted to see my therapist. My network was part of the plan. When I penned a note in preparation, I requested that Mom and Abba would inform the following people that I was gone: my therapist, my psychiatrist, my social worker, my AA sponsor, in that order. I wouldn’t have wanted them, especially the latter on the list, because he was the furthest removed, to go long without knowing.
XIII
I broke down and acquired a third plant—a new species; a succulent this time. It was only about five inches and it was not well potted in the ceramic dish I got with it. It felt wobbly when I first took it from the store and when I brought it home, the plant came right out. The roots were short in length. I dug a hole in the dehydrated soil and replanted it. Then I wetted the soil with about a half cup of water and in addition, because I wanted to make sure the roots got some moisture, dripped water gently over the crown of the rosette. The plant had rounded almost oval, slightly star-shaped, lobes of leafing. At the store, where my friend Kane the horticulturist worked, I inquired about the name.
‘Succulent,’ said the lady who helped me pick it out.
‘Yes. I know it's succulent, but what species of succulents?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? How can you be selling me a plant and not know what it is called?’ While I said this calmly, she could feel my slowly rising heat, my subtle frustration, I sensed it.
‘I’m sorry sir. Here perhaps this will help.’
She handed me a laminated card and I read it. This is what it said:
Succulent Care
Water only when soil is stiff and dry
Keep in sunny spot
Soil: 3parts potting
Soil: 1 part sand
Needs to stay between 65 and 75 degrees
‘I guess this helps a little,’ I said, disappointed in the crappy information card. I took a deep breath and calmed myself down, ‘When I find out more, do you want me to tell you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, please. Thank you, sir.’
‘Don’t call me sir. I’m Scott. I’m a friend of Kane’s.’
‘Hi Scott, nice to meet you,’ she responded. ‘He’s out to lunch, sorry you missed him.’
I laughed and said, ‘Oh well. Sorry. Didn’t mean to be so hard on you,’ to try and break the ice and make sure there was no bad energy as I turned around and walked out the store. I knew I would not be returning there; not to inform them of the name of the organism when I would find out, not to purchase another plant, not for any reason.
‘Bye, now.’
‘Bye. Have a nice day. Enjoy the plant.’
But as soon as I walked out, along came my friend.
‘Hey buddy!’ he said, ‘Buying a plant?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said, fingering the ceramic dish and eyeing the plant, satisfied while spinning it in circles in my hands, ‘something for the apartment.’
‘What’d you get? Succulent?’
‘Yeah, but I have a question. What is the genus?’
‘Hmm, I’m not sure. We can find that out.’
‘How?’ I asked.
‘Come back inside,’ he said, ‘we’ll look in the book.’
So I followed him back into the store. The bells on the door jangled again. The lady who sold me the plant looked embarrassed.
‘It’s okay,’ I said to her. ‘We’re just going to have a look at the book.’
‘Oh, right,’ she said, embarrassed, ‘the book.’
My friend gave her a strange look.
‘She’s new,’ Kane muttered to me under his breath.
‘Maybe she doesn’t know how to use the book,’ I whispered to Kane, so she wouldn’t hear.
He went in back of the counter and looked back at me, standing in the store, ‘Come on,’ he said. We went through an old wooden door and down a ramshackle wooden staircase. There was an office down there and a bookshelf which my friend approached. He pulled one off the shelf entitled, Biology of Plants.
‘Succulent, succulent, succulent, here we go,’ he said, leafing through the book and then apparently finding what he had been looking for. He showed me the picture in the book, ‘Does this look like a match?’ he asked.
‘Yup, that’s got to be the one!’ I exclaimed, amused.
‘Grap-to-petalum para-guay-ense,’ he read the name slowly. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll let you bring home the book to borrow. You read up on the Ghost plant,’ he said, shutting the book and handing it to me.
‘Ghost plant?’ I asked, confused.
‘Yeah, that’s what the paraguayense is called.’
‘Oh, I see. Okay, thanks for the book.’
Sure enough, the Graptopetalum paraguayense is called ‘Ghost plant’; said so in the book. It is native to Tamaulipas, Mexico and its origins can be traced to the mountains of the Chihuahuan Desert. The leaves are a gorgeous ‘frosty’ green—to borrow an adjective from the book—with silver, blue and purplish tones in limited shade; while pinkish and yellowish when in direct sunlight. The Ghost plant is of the family, Crassulaceae. That means that it engages in a special form of photosynthesis known as Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM).
The word ‘succulent’ means that the plant holds water. That is why these plants survive in and are native to arid climates. I kept mine in the windowsill, in the center of the two Coleuses. I told Mother about the new plant. I sent her a picture and said, ‘Do you recognize it?’ She said she had the same one on her kitchen table and do I ‘remember seeing it while on my last visit?’ I said I didn’t, but found it interesting that the same plant I picked up at my friend’s store was my Mother’s taste also; she being in Arizona, closer to Mexico, I guess it wasn’t that out of the ordinary.
Mother’s love affair with Arizona began with a generalized passion for the American Southwest. In the late ‘80s, I can remember, she went on a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a close friend of hers. The creepy friend who stalked me in Westport, when I lived there at a homeless shelter (See chapter VIII). Mom began to decorate the house in Southwestern style. Cacti and Native American rugs and art pieces adorned the living room and den, pictures of the Southwest festooned each wall. My parents found this titivating. Mother also became engrossed in Native American culture in general and took classes on their religion, anthropology and folklore.
In 1992, we took a family trip to Arizona. I was nine or 10. We flew out there from New York and rented a car. We drove through most of the state: Phoenix, Sedona, Jerome, Tucson, Flagstaff; the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Lake Powell, Canyon de Chelly. The Colorado River Gorge. I think we almost did it all. I remember all I wanted was a baja—a woven, hooded, poncho; Mexican style. We stopped at all the trading posts trying to find one. Finally, I located the baja. It was wool and had vertical, brown and grey stripes. I wore it all the time. As a family, we drove all over the desert that summer, stopping for the night at motels. In Phoenix, we stayed at a more chic hotel, the Arizona Biltmore. We were staying there at the same time as the band, Metallica, who were in Arizona while on tour with Guns ‘n Roses. They were performing at horse-racing downs. I ran into the singer and lead guitarist in the hotel elevator and at the pool and had pictures taken with them. On a Native-American reservation one night, we saw a tribal dance demonstration and vivid streaks of lightning flashed and cracked in the desert night sky.
The Native American and Southwestern motif continued to adorn the house in Connecticut. Abba got into it too. The following summer, when I was 11, we flew out to Colorado and rented a car; drove all over the state and then into New Mexico. In later years, when I was a teenager, my parents took another trip to Arizona, this time to a resort in Scottsdale. I did not accompany them. They went with another couple, Ryan’s parents. I think it was just an excuse for the men to play golf somewhere that had a temperate climate, and for Mother to return to the desert.
When I left the house in New Canaan to go to college in Oregon, my parents finally bought a winter home in Arizona. They became snowbirds, but only for a few short years. The events which ultimately led to their divorce occurred at the house in Scottsdale, or so I was told. I went to see the home only once. This was when I completed Daytop, before my free, 10-day trip to Israel. We stayed—Mother and me—for a week or more and travelled to Sedona. Fresh out of Daytop, I was like a baby. After that much rehabilitation and tough love, I felt innocent all over again. Everything was new. Mom and Abba were selling the house in New Canaan, which Mom and I were staying in, in the interim. Mother asked me, ‘Do you want to live with me in New York?’ I said, ‘yes’, and when the house was sold, we moved into a charming two bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side: 89th and Lexington, to be exact. I got a job, first at the Staples in the neighborhood (recall: I had been working at Staples in Waterbury during the re-entry phase of Daytop), then working at Manny’s Music, a very old music retail store in midtown, which has since closed its doors, sold its assets and inventory to Sam Ash, who in turn, are left to compete with the even bigger dogs, the Guitar Center. I took classes at the New School, near the New York University campus. I took an English Literature course: Introduction to the Novel, or Writing on Fiction, or something; and a Philosophy course: Introduction to Philosophy. I dropped the philosophy course; I lacked confidence and thought that I would get a bad grade. Before this, my experience in collegiate academia had been some music classes which I did not regularly attend at the University of Oregon and another failed try at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut where I took classes in music and sociology.
Most of Mother’s time was spent in New York City, but when I moved to Israel, she became a snowbird and bought a house in Scottsdale and moved into a studio apartment, also on the Upper East Side, for the summers, mostly so she could spend time with her East Coast friends. It was on a high-up floor and had two perpendicular balconies. But in 2007, she got rid of the apartment in Manhattan for good. She did not have the financial means to afford both. I was coming up on summer break at the university in Israel. Years went by and I studied; happened to stay sober. Whenever I visited, it was in New York City, the Upper East Side of Manhattan, still. I wanted to visit the rest of the country, see the new house in Arizona. Mom tried to get me to stay in Israel. She said I didn’t ‘need a visit’. (In the previous years of my study in Israel, she had permitted me to come home in the summer for a visit, under the condition that I would see a psychologist who wasn’t Jewish, while I was in town). We had a minor fight. I attended a Bob Dylan concert in Israel that day and my review of the show got published in Ha’aretz, an old center-left Israeli rag. I had written the article without notes when I got home that night from the concert where I had smoked hash in the back of Ramat Gan Stadium—the first time I had smoked since I had begun school at the university. The article—although it was published—made some major errors as a result of intoxication and unpreparedness, including the actual date of the concert, and said that Dylan’s voice had a ‘high-pitched nuance,’ when—and as a musician I shouldn’t have erred in this—it actually, over the years, picked up more and more of a low-pitched nuance. I said, in my best attempt to translate a statement I had taken in Hebrew from an Israeli concert-goer, while filing out of the stadium after the performance, that ‘his voice seemed to squeak.’ What the fuck?
Mother called me and said she had changed her mind, that I could come. So I booked a roundtrip ticket from Ben-Gurion Airport in Israel to Sky Harbor in Phoenix, Arizona. Obviously, I had to change planes somewhere. While I was there, in Arizona, at the new house, Mother’s new house, I got another article published, this time in the Jerusalem Post, an old center-right Israeli newspaper, once known, before the founding of the State of Israel, as the Palestine Post. The article was about an English language political science Master’s program at Tel Aviv University. I was feeling confident from the articles. I had clips now. Would I be able to get a job?
Mother and I were in very different moods the whole week I was there. We fought the entire time. When I returned to Israel, my descent into crisis began.
Sometimes I was bitter with Mother for leaving the East Coast altogether. I didn’t love Arizona. But it was beautiful. I liked flying into the airport and seeing the mountains and the desert from the air, but when I visited, we didn’t do any travelling. We didn’t go back to Jerome or Sedona; never saw the Grand Canyon again; didn’t go exploring. It was just home. When I was in Israel and at my most Zionist-spirited, I proposed to a friend that my Mother is so drawn to the southwestern United States because she identifies with the desert. ‘It’s the Jewess in her,’ I said. ‘Only, she is in love with the wrong desert.’ Perhaps the Mormons, who hold that Native-Americans are from the lost tribes of Israel, would love my Mother. My Mother is easy to love.
Everywhere you look in Arizona, there are cacti. Considering how Mom used to decorate the house in New Canaan, here was looking at the real thing. They come in all different sizes and shapes. They densely populated the land with their grand, old, thick arms and their brilliant, variety of needles. In Mother’s corner of the desert, the Sonoran Desert, Scottsdale, right down the road from Care Free, the Saguaros reign supreme. They can grow to like 70 feet. They have thick upward curved arms and can live upwards of 150 years. To me, they get old to look at. Mother, she couldn’t get enough. One thing that really impressed me, in her backyard was a Lobivopsis, a cactus of about three feet of height. It sprang the most marvelous red and white flowers when I came to visit for (Easter and) Passover. Still, all of the beautiful cacti would not have been enough reason for me to stay. Not the mountains in the distance, not the temperate climate. I was a New Yorker, and I needed the frenetic energy.
But while I was there in Arizona, recuperating, and trying out my new ‘bipolar’ diagnosis for size, Mother forced me to get a job. I got two. One busing tables at a small family-owned Italian restaurant called Giordano’s. And then a second table-busing job at a popular café called Bink’s, which was owned by a young award-winning chef with restaurants all over the state. I got fired from the Italian restaurant. The owner never liked me. She was a widow and inherited the store from her late husband. They were originally from New York; Long Island, I believe. She made me buy black sneakers. Then, still unacceptable to her, she made me buy black shoelaces too. Then she complained that I smelled a little like cigarette smoke; could only have been, a little! She used to send me home early from my shift if she thought the restaurant was not going to be busy. This always irritated Mother, who had to then drive up to the restaurant and pick me up, interrupting her social life. Working at Bink’s was better. I wore a uniform that consisted of a red, short-sleeve, button-up shirt that said the name of the restaurant and bore its logo and tucked into a pair of blue jeans. I learned fast. It was probably the second week of my working there when I was invited to get high with some of the employees after work. How did they know I smoked? And I had been very sober, living at Mother’s ever since being locked in the psych ward of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. Well, we closed the restaurant doors. All did our jobs cleaning up the place. And then we went out into the parking lot, where not one, not two, but three different employees of this always-busy café in Care Free, Arizona offered me some of their smoke. The oldest, a middle-aged waiter, a Mexican-American with a handlebar mustache had a vape cartridge. The younger waiter, a ski bum, (probably in his late-20s) who also tended bar and gave me a free beer on my last day, had a glass bowl and some of his own herb, and lastly one of the restaurant managers, a pretty, skinny, cowgirl with an impressively long, sexy nose was smoking her own supply too, sharing it with me. We had this powwow in the parking lot of the restaurant, one or two different times. They all drove. Each time, somebody else drove me back home, back to Mother’s. The very first time, the younger waiter, with his long, blonde pony-tail, drove me in his pickup truck. We talked about music and I had him drop me in the road, about halfway between the entrance gate of Mother’s community and Mother’s actual house. It was dark, and I didn’t know the way. Plus, the little bit I smoked had me strongly intoxicated, for I had not smoked in a while. When I found my way home, I was shiny, giggling and glad to be home. Mother knew I was high. She had leftover grilled flank steak in the fridge, I remember. Angry and let down, she threatened to not let me go back to Brooklyn. But I won. The next time I smoked at Bink’s, I controlled myself better and did not get caught by Mother. I borrowed some Visine drops to use in my eyes and that, I reckon, made a huge difference.
I thought about Ryan often. He was often a character or subject in my dreams. It had been many years since we had talked, since he and I and our families drifted apart. One day, while at Mother’s in Arizona, I received a LinkedIn message from the man himself. His account said he was the vice-president of some investment bank. He had come a long way since his days introducing me to cocaine in high school; since his arrest, freshman year of college, for underage drinking, for which his name was reported to the newspaper, in the police blotter and published, permanently online, visible, at the top, in Google ‘search’. He wrote asking how I was. Saying that he had been listening to Pearl Jam and Nirvana recently and thinking about the old times. (He was a rap fanatic all his life, since the ‘80s, and his idol was the Notorious B.I.G.). He asked me whether I was still in Israel. He said that he remembered I was once a ‘fine young musician’ and asked whether I was still playing. I was frozen, embarrassed by my walk in life. I did not respond. I could not. It felt like being turned to stone. One year later, living in Brooklyn, while off my meds, I messaged him back. I had written a blurb on a GoFundMe page, asking for money so I could move back to Israel and pursue a PhD. He never responded to this. It was non sequitur on my part. Once time faded, I started to feel embarrassed. Then the embarrassment increased. Then I couldn’t stand it anymore. What was the point in trying? I couldn’t communicate.
XVIII
It was 2017, and I was in a horrible state. I had two extended hospitalizations under my belt. I was on new meds and seeing a therapist and psychiatrist at the outpatient facility in the hospital where I had previously been locked up for two weeks—my second hospitalization. I was very unhappy with the care at the Interfaith Medical Center outpatient mental health center. The psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jew, would keep me waiting for an hour or more, just to see him so he could ask how my sleep was and whether I was suicidal; have me walk, for some strange reason, in a straight line and touch my nose. The therapist, also a doctor, was combative and unhelpful. BET was always playing in the waiting room and I thought to myself ‘how much better and more appropriate it would be if they showed CNN or local news instead’. I had been back in the country for five years without any kind of steady employment. I was living in the horrid aforementioned apartment with two roommates on Union Street. I had nothing to do all day, every day. I tried everything to break the icy layers of my life. I went to meetings, I quit smoking pot, I even went to Marijuana Anonymous (MA) meetings online, until I couldn’t bear it any longer, then I went back to it. Some days, I’d go down to the synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway to beg like back in the day, back when I was homeless. But I couldn’t reach a groove anymore in asking the religious for tzedakah. My mendicant skills were locked behind an old door that I couldn’t seem to pry open.
Mother had an East Coast friend, lived on the Upper East Side and wintered in Mexico. She had a son who had schizophrenia. She must have been giving Mother advice on how to deal with my mental illness because all the sudden, Mom had ideas for me. One was going to a farm in the Berkshires in Massachusetts where I could go live and focus on my recovery. Another was a clubhouse in the city, a psychosocial rehabilitation program called Fountain House. Of the two, I only looked into Fountain House. I knew nothing about it, but I found out how to apply and began doing the work. I needed to fill out excessive paperwork and have my doctor—or my therapist who happened to have, as I just mentioned, either a PhD or MD—write a psychosocial evaluation summary. Within a week of applying to the program, I heard back. I showed up for my appointment at 11 a.m., I got the grand tour. Fountain House seemed to be a happy place. There were different units where you could volunteer and keep yourself busy. There was the Research Unit, they did research. The Education Unit, they did everything that came to school, including and probably most importantly helping members to acquire their GEDs, Associate’s, Bachelor’s and beyond. They offered a scholarship of $500 per semester that members could use towards taking a class. There was the Wellness Unit; they had an impressive gym in their unit with free-weights and machines. There was the Culinary Unit, they cooked for the whole house and ran a market; the Home and Garden or Horticulture Unit, that was self-explanatory and lastly there was my unit, the Communications Unit, where we maintained the weekly newspaper and seasonal literary journals, which all members were invited and encouraged to contribute to.
The program didn’t cost any money. The lunches cost $1.50. I started going just about every day. I wrote articles for the newsletter and made some new friends. I went to meetings there. Fountain House had an impressive art gallery across the street that displayed members’ work, and an art studio in Queens, just for members. There was ‘Double Trouble’ a 12-step recovery group, focusing on dually-diagnosed persons: people who have a diagnosis of ‘substance use disorder’, coupled with ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoaffective disorder’, ‘bipolar disorder’, ‘borderline personality disorder’, et cetera. Also in this vein, I attended ‘Friends for Change’ a group led by a social worker, who didn’t actually have a degree in Social Work, but was kind nonetheless, where we focused on changing behavior: drug and alcohol addiction, smoking cessation, healthier diet, exercise regimens, gaming addiction, gambling, anger management, et al. There was ‘Advocacy’, where we’d get together with an agenda about mental health issues: housing and the shelter system, navigating government benefits, local politics, et cetera. I sang in the chorus, I attended the ‘Poetry and Prose’ group, I attended ‘Men’s Group’ on Wednesdays at five, where we’d all meet in a bar nearby and with Fountain House cash, we were treated to a beer each. I always ordered a Coke with lime. I even played guitar and sang on some Friday afternoons at the weekly talent show.
One of the departments within Fountain House was known as the ERC (Employment Resource Center). They helped you on your way to vocational rehabilitation. They offered temporary jobs at outside businesses for between six and twelve months at a time, these were known as TEs or Transitional Employment. I worked hard at Fountain House trying to land a job. I worked two TEs, and learned how to network around talent and temp agencies. With all of their assistance, however, I was ultimately unable to find work.
Fountain House was a part of something called ‘Clubhouse International’. There were clubhouses like Fountain House all over the world, though none were as large and effective as Fountain House. All the clubhouses in the world worked together to define their mutual purpose. They all used a set of ‘standards’ that defined the program.
One day, I was outside the program’s building smoking a cigarette when somebody my age started talking to me. He was puffing on a nicotine vape. The conversation was shallow, but we exchanged phone numbers. A week later, I was at Fountain House on a Friday afternoon and got a text from Sebastian:
‘Are you at Fountain House today?’
‘Yes.’
‘My parents are out of town, do you want to come over?’
‘Sure, sounds like fun,’ was my response. Uncomfortable, shy, I committed, if just to be sociable.
He sent me his fancy address on the Upper West Side. I went to his apartment, which he shared with his parents, and drank three or four beers and watched television (I still had no TV at this time and watching one was a rare treat). It felt great to be out and about on Shabbat. Sebastian was Jewish too, but his family was extremely secular. He hadn’t even had a Bar Mitzvah. We were simpatico right off the rip. He had a diagnosis of ‘schizoaffective disorder’, but he acted very sane and collected. I was introduced to new and more people, through him; and slowly but surely, life was becoming almost fun again.
There were people of varying levels of functioning at Fountain House. There were your high functioning members like Sebastian and me. And there were higher functioning, like my friend, John, who did the lighting for Broadway productions. The lower functioning members had a variety of disabilities. Some would mumble to themselves all day and shuffle around, only communicating with other people when it came time to bum another cigarette. There were women who snapped at each other and started threatening arguments, fighting, it seemed, for their territory, like animals, until there were consequences to their actions.
There were so many social workers employed at Fountain House, you always could have your questions answered, and your problems, if not solved, then worked on. I put my name on a list for housing. I tried to advocate for myself, as Mother had taught me, to make sure my name came up. Finally, one month, it did. They contacted me about a shared apartment in the Bronx. ‘Great,’ I thought, ‘just what I wanted!’ and ‘That wait wasn’t so bad at all!’ We were going to take a van uptown to visit the new digs. I got in—even though just the prior day I had agreed to rent the studio apartment in East Flatbush. I was just starting to come down with a cold, that day. I got back out the van and told them, ‘On second thought, thanks but no thanks.’ Living with two Fountain House roommates in the Bronx would have saved Mom and Abba a lot of money. But I just couldn’t say ‘no’ to living alone in the studio in Brooklyn.
I had my doctor and therapist changed to a clinic where they were more familiar with the culture of Fountain House and therefore I was in a more comfortable environment (anything would have beat Interfaith). My physician was changed too; I started seeing the clinic’s nurse practitioner. At the new clinic they maintained my previous medication dosage from Interfaith. It consisted of 500 milligrams of Depakote, a mood stabilizer; and three milligrams of Risperdal, an antipsychotic. Usually, these two medications are used one in place of another, but for me they used both at the same time, evening and morning. My new doctor was better. She prescribed for me an antidepressant, saying the fact that I didn’t take one was a ‘little dangerous’. Or was it me who thought that? I went on 150 milligrams of Sertraline, generic for Zoloft. She also prescribed a sleep-aid, Trazodone. Most people say that they can feel the side effects of their medication. I never could. I don’t know whether that is because of my prior use of street drugs. I had such a high tolerance for the physical effects of these psychotropic drugs, I felt like someone could smash a glass bottle over my head, and I wouldn’t feel it.
Fountain House owned a farm in northwest New Jersey. It was located in the township of Montague, on the border with Port Jervis, New York and some rural Pennsylvania towns. The farm had 500 acres. There were all kinds of animals: alpacas, lamas, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, cats, dogs. When you went on a ‘farm trip’, you took care of the animals, feeding them and cleaning their shit, and then another task on the farm. I had scooped out the ground of an egg-chicken coop, painted the farm office, built a net to protect the meatchicks, chopped down trees into piles of firewood and in the summer, worked the garden, where there was a plentiful assortment of fruits and vegetables growing. On the farm, they even made honey from bees, and when the apple yield was sufficient, made apple cider in the fall. One day, I walked one of the many trails all by myself, it wrapped around a large lake that sat on the property and was visible from most rooms in the chalet. The chalet was half wood-heated, half oil. I loved throwing logs into the furnace in the mid-to-late fall, winter and early spring; I always made it my task. There were usually sufficient bedrooms for people to sleep, and have their own room.
I was on the farm one winter; there were two van loads of people. My van stayed the whole week, and the second van was just for people who were staying overnight. They happened to be people who, for the most part, were less functioning. Carl was an old African-American fellow, he was just staying overnight. What happened, I only know from hearsay, for I slept through the action, but on the first morning after having spent the night in the chalet, one of the social workers, Jennifer, greeted me in the morning and relayed that she had just returned from the emergency room with Carl. Carl, a 'paranoid schizophrenic', did not take his medication. In the middle of the night, in the pitch black of the chalet, he became convinced that he smelled blood. He went outside his room—on the ground floor—to assess the situation, and he swore that he saw one body push another on the stairs. Carl called 911, and Jennifer was awoken by the police ringing the doorbell of the chalet in the middle of the night. So, as I said in the beginning of the anecdote, it was a long sleepless night for them, in the psychiatric emergency room. But not for me, thankfully. Because of the incident, Jennifer and the second van departed for New York City early.
Cindy was a young lady who became a Fountain House member after I had been there for some two years. I was introduced to her on the floor of the Communications Unit. She was interested in going on the upcoming farm trip that I was going on and I was telling her what she could expect—what a ‘great time’ it always is. We discovered that we were both Seinfeld fans. She brought her Seinfeld DVD collection with her to the farm and we had a good time watching them. She knew all the lines better than me. The first afternoon, after working the farm, I announced I was going on a hike on the trail that circles around the lake. ‘Does anybody want to come?’ Cindy said she would. She ended up only walking about one-quarter of the way, but later insisting that she walked half. The next afternoon, after working on the farm, we drove the van to a very scenic waterfall across the Pennsylvania border. It was two ferocious levels of water cascading dangerously down a rocky cliff. She complained that her bag was too heavy and this was her excuse for preventing the group from descending the fun trail stairs to the lower level of the waterfall. I volunteered to carry her bag—it didn’t weigh anything!—and she agreed to walk the rest of the trail so the group could take photos. Cindy started going to the farm frequently. She even started volunteering to be the driver. She always dominated the situation, and was a touch supercilious to be a Fountain House member. I kept on reminding myself, ‘she can’t help it.’ She was always the chef in the chalet kitchen, (she always made Southwest taco night, and pasta with meat sauce), was always suggesting the night time activity (either a board game, or yet more Seinfeld). One winter, I went on a farm trip. I cancelled an appointment with my psychiatrist just so I could be available. The first two days were unseasonably warm. Then, Cindy informed everyone that snow was expected Wednesday night. She asked Jacques, the only social worker to accompany the six mentally ill members, if we could leave early, on Wednesday. He said he didn’t know, but they’ll call a morning meeting in the chalet. Jacques’ parents were Haitian immigrants, and his mother had died when he was young. He had a Master’s degree in Social Work from Columbia University. He was single at age 36, afraid of water (did not know how to swim) and without a driver’s license, (a city kid, had never driven). We had that meeting and Cindy began arguing with the young, muscular farmhand, who lived on the farm and was an expert on all things having to do with farming, even the weather. He told Cindy that he checked the weather and they were forecasting some freezing rain in the middle of the night, but that it is not supposed to accumulate or turn the roads to ice. Cindy stubbornly continued to argue the contrary. The farmhand, whose name was Matthew, won the battle, he was the one with authority. Sure enough, in the middle of the night there was freezing rain, but it didn’t turn to ice on the ground and the roads were fine. Generally, we are supposed to leave sometime Thursday morning and arrive back at Fountain House in Hell’s Kitchen at about noon. Well, Cindy was in charge, because she was the only driver on the trip; and we didn’t end up leaving the chalet and the farm until 12:30 in the afternoon, without having had lunch. When everyone was crammed in the van, finally ready to depart, Cindy and Jacques went back inside to mop more and left us sitting for about 20 minutes. About 35 minutes on the road and Cindy pulls off and announces, ‘We’re taking a little breather.’ Or, did she say specifically, ‘I’m taking a breather’?
‘Nobody’s eaten lunch,’ I said, ‘let’s take a breather at a McDonald’s.’
‘I’ll find one,’ said Cindy and off we went, finding a McDonald’s in about five minutes.
‘Can’t we just go to the drive-thru?’ somebody asked.
‘No,’ said Cindy as she parked the van, and gave some kind of usual excuse of her’s that I can’t remember.
About half the people got out to use the bathroom or order food. I ordered my hamburger and chicken nuggets and it came to just over three dollars. I didn’t feel guilty about not keeping kosher. I went back into the van and waited. Everybody was back in their seats, waiting. We waited and waited. Jacques and Cindy were still inside. We were too exhausted to go inside and find out what was going on. Everyone’s patience was growing thin. I looked in the restaurant window and saw Jacques and Cindy seated together at a table. Cindy had her head buried in her hands. Finally, after about a half-hour, Jacques came outside, opened the door of the van and announced, ‘Here’s the thing, guys, Cindy can’t drive.’
‘My fucking ass she can’t drive! That bitch better stop playing!’ snapped Billy.
‘This is ridiculous. You don’t do this to people you just don’t,’ said Ken.
The two girls remained quiet.
‘Does anybody have a driver’s license?’ asked Billy.
Everyone answered in the negative.
‘So, what now?’ asked Ken.
‘Yeah, what the fuck are we supposed to do?’
‘I’ll call Fountain House and have them send a van with two drivers,’ said Jacques.
‘How long is that going to take?’ asked Vicky, breaking the women’s vow of silence.
‘We’re about two hours away, I think,’ answered Jacques.
‘God-fucking-damn-it!’
‘Curse that little bitch!’
At first no one got out of the van, but me, to smoke. People were too pissed to move. The chatting was constantly centered on Cindy. Jacques and Cindy were in the McDonald’s this time for about 45 minutes. I went in for a cheap cup of nasty McDonald’s coffee. Then I went back out again. Jacques, the social worker, came out again into the van.
‘She’s doing this on purpose!’ yelled Billy at Jacques. ‘She doesn’t got nothing wrong with her. She don’t have no mental illness! She just want to fuck everybody over. That little bitch!’
Jacques couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t tell Billy to ‘calm down’; couldn’t explain that she was having a legitimate panic attack or that Billy’s own paranoid schizophrenia was rearing its symptoms under this stress. Jacques had a hard job. Billy went into the restaurant to confront Cindy. I watched from outside the glass window. They spoke only for a moment. I went back in, Jacques followed. Then, everybody went into the McDonald’s and grabbed two booths. We were seated on the opposite side of the restaurant as Cindy. All of the sudden, two cops barged in and stated in a loud voice to everyone whose ears they could reach:
‘We’re here about a guy, threatened a woman. Do you know anything?’ he asked one customer.
‘No,’ they responded.
He asked another customer. They all responded in the negative until he came across Cindy. Cindy spent about 10 minutes talking to the police inside the restaurant. In the end, poor Billy did not even have to talk to the cops. They took a report…on Cindy! Finally, the second van showed up with two drivers, both social workers, and we drove the remaining two hours of the trip, reaching Fountain House at five-thirty p.m.
XIX
From a young age, it seemed as though I was born to be a musician. I started taking piano lessons probably at six, but I was not successful, so I discontinued. I played the family piano, an old upright Acrosonic. I remember my teacher rebuking me for not practicing. She was an Israeli sabra, and came from New York State, or Stamford, Connecticut. Back then, it seemed way more serious, like I was really in deep shit for not practicing, er, for not understanding. I was exposed to classic rock and country music as a small lad. When I was six, in 1988, Abba took me to the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. I fell in love with the music. I became obsessed with the show. At home, I dressed up as the Phantom, wearing a suit, a folded paper napkin in the breast pocket of my blazer for a handkerchief, a cape and one of two masks I had: one that covered a vertical half of my face, and one that covered a horizontal half of my face, went over my nose and eyes. I even accompanied Mother to the supermarket, dressed-up in this costume.
I loved rock ‘n roll probably more than your average American child. Abba also listened to a lot of old Motown, such as Marvin Gaye, and British New Wave Pop of the ‘80s. When I was really young, Mom and Abba had family friends from the Twin Lakes Swimming and Tennis Club; German Jews, from Stamford. He was a doctor, a headache specialist, and a pianist and mainly guitarist. When I was a toddler, the doctor would come over the house and have jamborees and hootenannies, Abba on piano, the doctor on acoustic guitar (he also had a sunburst Gibson ES-335 and a black Fender Stratocaster, both from the ‘70s). They would play country music, mainly; and they wrote songs, collaborating together. The doctor was the talented one.
In the next two years, something happened and I felt ready again to try a musical instrument. This time, the guitar. I clicked with my instructor. He would eventually become my true mentor in life. I learned to play right away and even became advanced for my age. I went to guitar camp in the summer, played in bands after school and at home, practiced constantly. Abba kept on buying me better and better equipment, every couple of years.
By the time I got to Saint Luke’s School, I think at age 15, I was looking into majoring in Music in college. Back then, Jazz Band was my most important class. Maybe I over-exaggerated when I wrote, ‘I carried the jazz band’. I didn’t quite hold the band together completely, but I got credit for being one of the band’s major strengths. I purchased jazz CD after jazz CD. I could never get enough. I learned to play melodies and chord progressions by Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, but I never knew how to improvise a solo in jazz, especially bebop (I could manage a I IV V ‘blues’ progressions, or the I VI IV V II ‘rhythm changes’. My playing sounded like a bluesy, rock-influenced, at times, modal fusion. I was a guitar player in the end, not so much a jazz musician. I never accomplished jazz fluidity; too much listening to Jerry Garcia, and my friends' Phish tapes. Too much Eric Clapton when my fontanel was soft, yet.
Dad used to make it seem like I was better than I was, like I was some kind of musical prodigy. And it is true; I went after my craft with tenacity, with a dogged determination to always be improving. And while I didn’t know anyone who was better than me in my generation in town, I would have been out of my league compared to some of the players at Berklee College of Music. One night at dinner, Dad asked me, ‘Are you like the best guitarist there is, hands down?’ I didn’t know whether he was being serious or sarcastic. It felt like a put down. Was he, the successful radio executive, jealous of his son, the artist, the musician, the prep school hippy dude, the rebellious and promiscuous teenager, the high school rockstar?
When I was homeless the first time, I sold my instruments, all of them: A Canadian-made, electric Godin guitar. An electric Gibson ES-335 guitar (again, dated to the ‘70s), which was a gift from the doctor, (who died of cancer in his 70s). An acoustic Alvarez dreadnought guitar, with a solid cedar top; which I used to perform Bach’s Minuet in ‘G’ at my Saint Luke’s high school graduation. A rare, electric, Fender Rhodes piano (also probably from the ‘70s) Dad bought off my Jazz Band instructor for $400. I even sold a beautiful Remo djembe, which a female musician friend gifted me. My mentor was also her guitar teacher and we accompanied one another at recitals. We made out one time, and even went to a concert together, where she tried mushrooms for the first time, and totally freaked out. It reminded me of the scene in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, when one of the young women has a bad reaction to the psychedelic kool-aid, and goes into a state of hysterical and hopeless psychosis…is ambulanced out of the acid test, if I recall the book correctly. I sold all the instruments in one day, in one shot, to a store in Stamford, called Daddy’s Junky Music. I made some good cash. I didn’t care how much. I just needed a wad to go around with, to buy drugs, cigarettes and yes, food. Still homeless, which was the reason for my selling the gear, I went to sleep that night on the floor of somebody’s house, a stranger, and had my pockets picked; lost everything. After this experience, I could never get back the ability to play guitar really well. I lost it the day I sold my gear.
My first year studying at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, I had a classmate, a very attractive, Sephardic sabra girl, whose family was Modern Orthodox, but she wore jeans and didn’t cover her hair a few years later when she got married. Her name was Miriam. She was a singer and she was recording some songs with a famous Israeli record producer, who had, as a performer, some hits and classics in Israel, to his name; as well as engineering credits from studios in London. Without ever having heard me play, Miriam told me that they needed a guitarist, and would I come lay down some tracks? I said, ‘yes!’ I was thrilled. I took a CD of the music from Miriam and wrote some guitar solos. One Friday, Miriam picked me up at my apartment, off-campus, and we went to Nathan Cohen’s, the producer and composer of the music we’d be playing. He played back the track, the version I possessed, and I tried my ideas out.
‘No, no, no. Thees no gude,’ he said after he stopped the track. ‘You not play ze chord toneses.’
‘Okay, let me try it again,’ I said in my best Hebrew.
‘No, we move on to ze next zong.’ He said frustrated, but in his best English.
The second and final song was even more exigent. That week, I got a call from Miriam. She told me that Nathan was firing me. He was hiring another guitar player to finish the songs; an experienced Sephardic Israeli musician. I didn’t want to play any music for a long time afterwards.
My youngest cousin was born on my birthday, precisely. He proved to be very musical from a young age. He played piano and guitar and became more serious about the former. At a very young age he loved the Beatles, and when he got older, listened to jazz. He majored in Jazz Performance when he got to college. He finished his studies with honors, he followed through. He was my first cousin who I didn’t often see, but he was like my younger brother. I thought that feeling like an older sibling would bring out a nasty jealousy in me. But in this case, I was extremely proud. I wanted him to do what I was not able to do, but once had tried. And he did just that. He went all the way.
XX
In Judaism, there is a colloquial saying to bless the deceased, ‘their [the deceased] soul should have an aliyah’. This means that literally their soul should ascend. The righteous are to be resurrected in the ‘End of Days’. This is prophesied in Jeremiah and Isaiah and Ezekiel. At first, I went along with this belief. Then, I found it problematic. Plato, who was a contemporary of Isaiah (and legend has it they met once when Plato traveled to Jerusalem), believed in metempsychosis. That the soul will keep returning through new bodies, new lives, eternally (or as it is in Neoplatonism—and similar to Buddhism—until one span of a life is lived in perfect harmony with ‘the one’). I found this to fit better, only for a while, but then this too spoiled the act for me. For the act could have been seen in one of two ways: as a permanent end to existence, or, looking at it from Plato’s perspective, as a temporary moratorium on material existence, like changing TV channels. I wasn’t sure what I intended the act to bring. I wondered to myself, ‘Because Plato believes that the soul continues to live, even after death, and does not die with the body, does this mean that the body and soul are separate?’ I feel that when your body and soul are united, you are in the dirty, lowly, world of material existence. Then ceasing to exist isn’t something necessarily malignant. The Neoplatonic philosopher, Plotinus, writes in his Enneads (250 A.C.E): ‘At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates' soul remained in body; but Socrates ceases to exist, precisely on attainment of the highest.’