[prologue] of a spontaneous encore to the 'Life of Socrates' [quartet]
My first bout with homelessness was a long time coming. I was going down a whirlpool for years. Mostly between the times I was 19 and 21. Just after September 11, 2001, one or two weeks before I’d be off to Oregon to start music school at the university, I took a drive to North Hampton, Massachusetts, to buy some hash—a rarity in New England. On the way there, when I got off the highway, something went wrong with the car and I couldn’t drive it. I had to call a tow truck and have it brought to the mechanic. I spent that night on a friend’s couch outside of town. Well, more like an acquaintance than a friend, he was a tall ‘white’ guy with dreadlocks. It was he that was selling me an eighth of marijuana and a gram of hashish. The next day, my car was ready, so I started to drive back to Connecticut. But before I got out of Massachusetts, I was pulled over for speeding.
‘License and registration,’ demanded the female state trooper who was patrolling alone.
I turned to open the glove box to receive the requested documents, and out fell a Tupperware container with the weed and hash.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
I had no choice but to show it to her.
‘Step out of the car please. Take off your shoes.’
‘My shoes?’ I thought. But I did just what she said.
She put on latex gloves and before proceeding with the body search, asked me:
‘Do you have any sharp objects in your pockets that are going to poke me?’
I answered in the negative. I was standing, hands up, on the side of the highway in a foreign state, in my socks. She turned my pockets inside-out and finally said, ‘Hands behind your back.’
I was brought to the station, where a police officer called my Father and he had to drive all the way from New Congregation to come get me. We spent the night in a shared motel room. Despite no longer being a minor, I didn’t have to face a judge. But I also don’t have to tell you what Father had to say.
I had flunked most classes my first semester as a Music major at the University of Oregon. Drugs and sex took precedent over going to classes. And what would drugs and sex be if not joined by rock ‘n roll, the unholy trifecta, that clichéd phrase which has brought down so many heroes. When I came back from Eugene for Christmas vacation, I was informed by Father, I would ‘not be returning’. 'But what about my girlfriend?' I thought. 'Boy was she pretty...and talented; holy Christ could she paint!' So what would I do in the Connecticut suburbs while my peers were away studying at college? I worked. Merit Music (the musical instrument retail, rental, lessons studio where I worked in high school) employed me again but not for long. The music store had hands between the days of my early youth when I first rented a guitar there and took lessons, and when I was working there, a high school and post-high school job. The original owner had had the place for many years and despite its being a tiny mom-and-pop shop, was highly knowledgeable, trustworthy and organized. The new owner that he sold it to had a different style; didn’t have the knowledge or the class. He was, according to my own guitar teacher and mentor, ‘a real bonehead’. He married a public school music teacher from one of the surrounding towns in Connecticut, and became a stepfather to her daughters. Unfortunately, he made the decision to sleep with one of the youthful daughters, and found his ass locked up for statutory rape, for many years. Of course, the store sank feet-up. But not before this happened, when I was working there, after being home from college, grateful for a job, but not grateful enough, probably brainwashed by the direction the Merit Music wind was blowing in, used to steal money from the cash register. Usually, I took enough for a concert ticket, or drugs. I never got caught. Well, at least, I never got confronted. Still, I never really forgave myself for it.
Next, I bused tables at a French bistro in town. The restaurant was owned by a plump, blonde-haired, middle-aged woman who was engaged to the executive chef. From some South or Central American country, I made him a mix tape of all the Latin music I listened to, the mix began with a selection by the talented guitarist, Marc Ribot, ‘Dame un cachito pa huele’ from the album ¡Muy Divertido! (2000). I was fired a few shifts after the time I got caught taking one bottle of Stella Artois home with me after work. Then, I got an internship at an independent record label in New York City, called Shadow Records. They owned the masters to some Jeff Buckley duets. I lost that opportunity by making a mistake when putting together promotional packages for record stores. There was Subway, the sandwich shop. One day I was in my red Audi on the way to work, and I just kept driving past the restaurant. The thought of working in fast food was anathema to me. There was the old record store chain, Sam Goody, where I worked during the months of November and December, and missed hearing the Christmas music when I was jobless in January. Of all these, I held down the job at CVS the longest. I was a cashier and got high on diet pills which they sold over-the-counter. At all these jobs, I failed. I lived for music and to get high on marijuana and alcohol. When she was home from school on break, I had a lover. A true ‘friends with benefits’ situation, she loved smoking marijuana too. In the previous year, before she went to school in upstate New York, we experienced a strange and kind of funny coincidence when we both showed up for court-mandated community service on the same day. Same adventitious time, same adventitious location: we were sentenced to work together. She was in for shoplifting, and I—Socrates—for marijuana possession. After we did our community service we bought a six-pack of beer—we were still underage—and fucked in my bedroom in the late afternoon. Soon, I had a second lover. I had known from my class in high school. She loved getting high on cocaine; did it every day. The first lover’s name was Meghan, the second was Sari.
One day, I wasn’t working so I was home early in the day. The cleaning lady from somewhere in Central America or Mexico was over and she had brought her son with her, something she did not normally do. I always felt bad for the cleaning ladies. And we had had a healthy bevy of them over the years. I felt bad because I knew they didn’t have as much money as we did, and with their occupation they were not really going to be able to make much money at all, or so it seemed to me. I don’t know why I pitied them, or assumed that they were violently drowning in poverty. I had done very little over the years to improve my own financial situation, and what effort I had made was under the command and direction of my Mother and Father. So here was this young Latino kid, hanging out at somebody’s big house in New Congregation, while his mother worked. I asked him, ‘do you want to do something?’ He said, ‘sure, like what?’ It was summer, so he wasn’t in school. This must have been the summer of 2002, which would have been my first summer break had I not almost totally flunked and been pulled out of school by Dad. I suggested, ‘Let’s take a drive to Norwalk and look at the instruments in the music shop.’ Such was enough to get me excited, and I wanted to see if my young friend could join in my zeal. So we went to the music store and spent 20 minutes to a half-hour. We drove home, and on the way, he started asking me if he could drive. ‘How old are you?’ I remember asking him. I cannot remember what he said. It was well underage. I kept on refusing his request, but he kept on persisting. Finally, we drove into the cul-de-sac where the house was.
One more time, ‘Can I drive?’ he asked.
‘Okay, but just into the driveway,’ I told him, feeling like a pushover, but not yet measuring the degree of lack of responsibility that I was about to bestow on my parents’ cleaning lady’s son, and the expensive automobile which had been entrusted to me. I got out of my side. He got out of his. We switched sides. I got into the passenger seat and fastened my seatbelt. He climbed into the driver’s seat, and pushed the gas pedal a little too hard.
‘Whoa there, not so much gas,’ I said nervously, surprised at how bad a driver he was.
Then there was the steering. This kid had no fucking idea what he was doing with the steering wheel, unless he was purposefully trying to wreck the car, which I doubt, but today is a dark thought I wouldn’t put past reality, given the fact that the kid’s dad worked in a garage, the very garage that worked on the car, after he rammed it into the stonewall of the cul-de-sac, breaking the axel. The damage was so bad, we couldn’t move the car from where it was parked, its front smashed in; couldn’t even drive it back into the driveway. Had to call a tow truck to come and get the fucking thing. I admitted how it happened to the Parents, and I never heard the end of it. It was officially the straw that broke the camel’s back, as far as the car went. I would never be permitted to drive it again, nor did they pour the money into it to have it fixed. It was totaled. They sold it off for parts.
I’d had lots of fights with the Parents throughout the course of my adolescence, but now my recalcitrance was out of control. I got in a physical fight with Father. It didn’t go on long before he pinned me to the kitchen floor. Outside there was thunder and lightning and torrential downpours. On separate occasions, I called Mother ‘bitch’ and ‘cunt’. I spit on the floor. One night, during an argument, after car privileges had been taken away from me, I had a friend come over to the house to pick me up. I put on a Grateful Dead CD, my favorite, Without a Net (1990), played it on full blast, then locked the two doors to my room, so they (the Parents) couldn’t get in to kill the blasting music, before peeling off in my friend’s car for an extended amount of days. One day when my parents were out, I didn’t have money for weed. I found the keys to Father’s safe and in it, I found a gold Rolex. Well, I didn’t just find it. I always knew the watch existed. I had seen it previously when I broke into the safe to recover some commandeered Adderall. It had been given to him by a business partner—a success story. But I didn’t actually know the location of the watch; I didn't care. Would you believe that I pawned the fucking thing? Oh, I had a nerve. Drove right to Norwalk and got $500 dollars for it. That tells you what it was worth—a whole hell of a lot more than that. I don’t know how long it took, not long. I had crossed the border beyond rebelliousness and descended into a pit of turpitude. When Dad opened the safe, he noticed the watch was missing. He questioned me. I denied it. A detective came to the house. The detective questioned me. I denied it. Then, feeling that there was no place to hide, when the detective left, I admitted to the deed. After this, it wasn’t long before I was kicked out of the house with no money and no car; homeless in New Congregation, Connecticut.
I barely broke a sweat for starting out on the streets. I lived most of the time at Sari’s big house, doing cocaine and making love that was sophisticated for our age. Sari hid me from her parents who slept in separate rooms. Like I said, she did cocaine every single day, and I joined her. It even replaced marijuana consumption for me, for a time. When she didn’t have any money (homeless, I never did), she would drive to the gas station in one of the little urban centers in the neighboring towns. She always carried with her, her father’s gas station credit card. We’d go up to every car that pulled into the station and offer to fill-up their gas tanks on the card, in exchange for cash. This wouldn’t have been enticing for me, had I been the one getting pitched to; nevertheless, it always worked, if only we tried hard and were patient about the hours. We’d use the cash to buy small quantities of coke; always between a gram and an eight-ball. One night, I drove Sari’s car with her in the passenger seat, first to Burning Tree Country Club, where the Parents played golf in Greenwich. We got a table in the dining room and charged dinner on the tab to my Father’s account. During dinner, Sari’s nose began to bleed. Later that night, I drove the truck all the way from Greenwich in southern Connecticut, to Bedford, over the border in New York and we attended a medium-sized party in a huge house; good music buddy of mine from high school. There were boys there at the party from different schools, schools in New York, and while it was fun hanging out with different people from different backgrounds, I didn’t trust them. I got jealous that this kid, David Fierstein, from the woods in New York, was hitting on Sari. As a show of possession, I brought her to the guest room and made love to her. When we left the party that night, I became very paranoid and was convinced that David from New York State had given some cocaine to Sari and that she was hiding it from me. That night, she was wearing a fleece vest with a zipper compartment at the small of the back. I forced her, before getting back in the truck to leave, to stand still while I searched the zipper compartment and beyond for this mysterious cocaine that in my delusion, she was hiding from me.
When Sari couldn’t have me at her house anymore, I switched to Meghan’s. We smoked pot and had sex. She’d dig her nails painfully into my bare back. We used to raid her older sister’s medicine cabinet for the painkillers she had been prescribed for a breast-reduction operation. Eventually, I would take the fall for everything, but by reading my words, you can see how I wasn’t the only angel who had fallen from grace, slipping on the greasy and untrustworthy foothold of narcotics, et al. But after some months, the fun was gone when both Sari’s and Meghan’s parents caught on. So, I cut a deal with Dad, where I’d go to rehab in Florida.
It was called Renaissance, and I think it was a little on the expensive side. The rehab was like a fucking vacation resort. There was even a swimming pool. I shared a spacious apartment with a guy named Steve. I can’t remember his drug of choice: either crack or meth. He had a mullet and spoke with a drawl. The amenities were plenty. I had a porch for smoking and a television set for entertainment. On Fridays, we took a van to the supermarket and shopped for food for the apartment. We took the same van to go from the residence to the offices where the actual rehab sessions were located. I didn’t do shit as far as my recovery was concerned, like I didn’t do shit as far as my education went. I broke the rules. I did lots of little things wrong. I picked up the telephone in the apartment and dialed my grandmother’s condo, where my aunt was also living also in Del Ray Beach and asked if we could get together. They give you telephones in your apartment as one of the impressive amenities, but you see, you are actually forbidden from making calls on them during the initial phase of your stay. Word got back to Father, who informed the rehab, who punished me. As a consequence, I had to turn in my beautiful acoustic guitar, which I brought with me, to my group therapist at the rehab. One day, fed up, I split the rehab. First, I sneaked into her [the therapist’s office] and re-commandeered the instrument. I relapsed on pot and a 40 ounce of malt liquor, returned to the program with my recklessly intoxicated tail between my legs, consequently got thrown out for good. I was homeless in Florida with a suitcase full of clothes and an acoustic guitar. I played on the beach boardwalk for change. One time I was spotted by one of the guitar teachers from Merit Music. I didn’t know what he was doing down in Florida. He gave me $20, no questions asked. I even shot heroin one night with an older kid who had a homemade tattoo on his calf. He had me go into the pharmacy and buy a pack of hypodermic syringes. He cooked the reddish-brown powder in a spoon. I had never seen this done before, only in movies. We shared the needle. It was my first time on the drug and I didn’t enjoy it. I remember being trapped between sleep and wakefulness, not achieving the former due to the relentless itching of my skin.
I had a court case pending. One of my many marijuana busts. Date was approaching. Homeless, I had no way to get back to Connecticut and see the judge. So I found out about ‘day labor’. You show up before dawn, ready to work, and groups of men (as many as are needed per job) are sent out. You get paid at the end of each day. Among the jobs I worked on were helping to build a private dock on someone’s backyard lake and cleaning-up a large construction site. I did this every day until I had enough money for a Greyhound bus ticket from Del Ray Beach, Florida to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. Then it is a train ride into New Congregation, (but I can’t remember riding it that time).
In Florida, I only spent one or two nights on the beach. I was always staying on a different couch or floor. Mostly graduates of the rehab and members of AA/NA. Back in New Congregation, it was different. This was the town where I was born and raised. Now I was living on her streets, begging. There was a lady who took me in for a couple of weeks. I slept on her sofa and she commissioned me to paint her entire family room maroon. I undertook the project; smoked a joint when she was out and listened to music on her stereo. I accidentally left half the smoked joint in an empty matchbox inside the room and her girlfriend, also an Alcoholics Anonymous member, found it and they both kicked me out; made it dramatic, too. At Starbucks, they claimed I stole from the tip jar, which was not true. They kicked me off the premises, nevertheless, and when I got caught back on their porch socializing, they called the cops and I received a restraining order, then a summons for trespassing. I couldn’t show up for or pay the summons, because I was homeless, along with paying an old fine for marijuana possession, and so the judge handed me a combined felony conviction. (But we’ll return to that).
Once I was hanging out in town, not knowing what to do with myself, when I bumped into Mom, in her beige BMW, stopped at a traffic light. I went to the window of the car to beg for a quarter to make a phone call on the payphone so I could find a place to sleep for the night. She rolled up her window, did not speak a word to me. When the light changed to green, she took off. I was getting hungry so I went into the Magic Wok, the Chinese restaurant in the center of town and asked for some food. They were kind enough to donate to me a to-go container of white rice. I ate it, sitting in lotus posture, on the sidewalk, outside the restaurant.
Every Fourth of July of my childhood was spent at Waveny Park, watching the fireworks and congregating with most of the town. With my backpack on, and just a pair of cheap flip-flops on my feet, I made my way to the park for the celebration, the summer of my homelessness in New Congregation. People would bring picnic dinners and sit on blankets with their friends and family, in the yard of Waveny Mansion. I ran into a group of guys (and girls) my age. They were all hanging out—the first summer-break of their first year away at college, the first summer break after 9/11, and America was at war; and the kids were partying hard. I, who had the reputation of being a party-boy (and a hippy), was the only one who was sober; homeless and cast-out, how could I partake? There was one character in this crowd of youths, this crowd of New Congregation High School graduates, who was making the biggest scene. He was the loudest, the rowdiest, the most fearless—the drunkest. He was Ryan Lindsay, my best friend from childhood—my best friend growing up. He spotted me, and he was not being nice.
‘Krane! Oh shit! Look everybody, it’s Krane! The homeless hippy!’
I didn’t say anything. I was being humiliated by my best friend.
A single cop emerged. A muscular build, with slick black hair, he was known to all, this being a small town, and had a special relationship with the town’s youths. He was Officer Ferrara. There was a plethora of Italian cops on the New Congregation police force, or so it seemed.
‘Ferrara! Yo, son! Officer Ferrara, kid! Why didn’t you bring enough donuts for everybody?’
‘Lindsay, how much have you had to drink tonight?’ Ferrara asked, relaxed, even smiling a little.
‘None of your business, Ferrara! I—I haven’t been drinking at all…anyway.’
‘You smell like booze, Lindsay.’
But he wouldn’t stop talking back to the cop. Ryan was shouting at the police officer; calling him, disrespectfully, by his last name, putting on a show for all the other kids gathered round to see. The officer did not even think about exercising his authority over the drunken youth. He understood Ryan's behavior. He saw me and gave me a dirty look before retreating from the throng of teenage New Congregation High School graduates. Ryan returned to me.
‘Krane man! Krane man, I spoke with your dad. He’s really hurt. You’re throwing it all away, man. You’ve got to get sssober; you’ve got to get your life on track.’
Family friends, they had had a barbecue at the Lindsay’s large home, in the woods, on the west side of town, for all the parents and their kids. It was at this function that Father had a talk with Ryan, my erstwhile confidante. He told him what a bad kid I was. In doing so, and doused with a healthy dose of alcohol and girls, he radicalized him.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, remembering all the times Ryan and I broke the rules together. All the smoking and the free-style rapping; all the drinking; the porn; how he had exposed me to cocaine for the very first time. Shooting hoop on endless summer afternoons...
‘You’re sssorry, Krane? Yoou’re gonna be.’ He pushed me down. I fell on my fully-stuffed backpack. ‘You useless, homeless, hippy piece of shit!’
I couldn’t believe the way he was talking to me, my best friend. I knew it was the booze. I couldn’t believe that Officer Ferrara let Ryan talk to him the way he did. It seemed like Ryan could get away with anything. If only his parents knew. Then again if they knew, they wouldn’t have cared, they would have covered up the reckless behavior, if just for the sake of maintaining a wholesome familial façade. I got back up and tugged on my pants so they were above my hips. I was shocked. Then I got hit by something. John Lane had thrown a little stone at me and called me ‘Jesus’.
Later that night, after the fireworks, John Lane and Ryan Lindsay told me that I could come out and party with them. Homeless, I was glad to have a place to go, to have company, even if they were drunkenly mercurial enough to abuse me and engage me in friendly socialization in the course of one same holiday evening. We walked through the crowd, through the park and the trails through the woods. All of the town’s people had flashlights and were carrying their blankets and picnic coolers. Finally we got to Lane’s van. They told me I could get in the back. I did. We drove for about a mile or two until they changed their mind, kicked me out at the locked YMCA, where I slept the night on my blanket at the bottom of a hill; using my backpack, as always, as a pillow.
One night, early on in this whole ordeal, I felt despondent and afraid. Not knowing what else to do, I went to the police station and told them that I was not allowed in my parents’ home and didn’t know what to do. They put me in a squad car and drove me to the emergency shelter in Norwalk. I slept on the floor of a basement. I was young, but I saw angels that night. I heard their soft whispering. The next morning I saw that I was in a rough and tumble neighborhood, so I made my way back to New Congregation.
Another night, I walked all the way to the Parents’ house. Probably four or five miles from the downtown center where I spent all my time, not having anywhere else to go. I made it to the porch outside my old bedroom (yes, my room had a sliding door that led out to a great wooden porch, on two levels, with an outdoor couch and a loveseat with an ottoman; and peered slightly down slope upon a naturally running stream). I slept for the night on the outdoor upholstery. And in the morning, I wept, and wailed loud enough so that the Parents would hear me and take pity. Dad came out. He did not have me in the house, but he did not simply kick me off the property, either. He took me in his BMW ‘Boxter’ with the convertible top down, and we rode in that fashion to Westport, where there is a homeless shelter that goes by the name of the Gillespie Center. There was an always-stocked-with-donations kitchen, a room with sofas, a large screen television and a telephone, a bathroom with several hot shower heads (not separated by curtains: people used the showers one person at a time), and then there was the room for sleeping. This room had as many cots as it could hold. No separation between them. No privacy for sleeping at all. The first morning, I woke up to find out I had urinated all over myself in my sleep. One day, I was simply taking a walk through the streets of Westport with another homeless kid who had been hit by a car and had a metal rod running the length of his leg. There we were, walking down the street innocently; all the sudden I glimpsed behind me and saw Mother and her best friend—whom she spilled all of her secrets to—walking behind us, following us, light on our heels so as to not get caught, obviously. In one word it was ‘creepy’. I never figured out—to this day—just what Mom and her friend were up to that day, but it hurt and made me lonely and paranoid. I felt hunted; I felt orphaned. Mother’s friend cryptically whispered—just loud enough to be audible—‘Rikers’. Now, I’ve known this lady all my life. She's been like a sister to Mom. But boy did she have a dark side. What gave her the right to threaten us? What a bitch! I spent some months at the homeless shelter. But I was kicked out when I came home for curfew one night and failed a mandatory breathalyzer test. To this day, I don’t have any idea how I failed, for I truly was not drinking that day or night. And so I journeyed, again, back to New Congregation, the only home that I knew.
Being homeless, especially in your hometown, does not feel embarrassing when you’re going through it. You don’t immediately sense the ignominy. There are too many pragmatic concerns like where your next meal is coming from and where you are sleeping at night. I tried contacting old friends to see if I could stay with any of them. But nobody would have me. I was broken beyond repair, it seemed. And I couldn’t find anybody to ‘hurt me’ by ‘enabling’. Many times I slept in the park, in the woods; one night I slept in a parking garage. I slept on a bench outside the town’s public library, right in front of the window which peers into the children’s books section; I slept in an unlocked vestibule between the local Radio Shack and the CVS pharmacy where I used to work. Sometimes strangers trusted me enough to take me in. More AA/NA acquaintances had me and people from the coffee shop. Sometimes, people trusted me enough to have me in their cars, I took various aimless drives with people, and they would sometimes get me high, when I was lucky. I also was sometimes permitted to sleep in stranger’s cars. I could not get Dad to loosen his grip. He was impervious. I tried reasoning with Mother. She would not even speak to me over the telephone, let alone in person.
The second time I was homeless was under different circumstances. Also a whirlpool, these years took me from about the time I was 29 in Israel, until about the time I was 33 and living in New York City. It all started with Shakespeare. I was reading King Lear for a course at Bar-Ilan University in the suburbs of greater Tel Aviv. The family drama in the play, namely the rebellion of Cordelia, made me paranoid about my mysterious inheritance money and made me go psychotic for some reason, and in a fit of passion I accessed my Father’s ex-paramour’s Facebook page and sent her a message: ‘Fucking home wrecker!’ When Dad caught wind of what I had done he called me and we argued. Then, many months went by incommunicado to one another. So that when I repatriated to America—in a manic state, driven to ‘make it’ as a journalist—and finally we met while in Providence, Rhode Island, a black shadow seemed to sit on Dad’s face; there was a new distance between us.
At the time, my uncle was moving out of my long-deceased grandparent’s house. He was selling it and Mother was spending the summer in Narragansett, Rhode Island (where she summered as a child). She was with her then-boyfriend and other girlfriends and didn’t want me coming over until my birthday, the first week in August. I was just home from school in Israel and I was broke. It was a shock that I had returned to the United States and nobody was thrilled with me. I had no job, but had unpaid columns in Israel National News and the Jerusalem Post. I was also in the process of finishing up my Master’s thesis which I had to write on the poetry of John Ashbery. Mom put me up in a hostel. It was for visiting international students at Brown University. I wasn’t even allowed to stay with my uncle. It was a lonely summer. I spent my days hanging out at the Brown University bookstore. I purchased Microsoft Word for my brand new Mac laptop and everyday bought coffee. I spent the time reading magazines. They had a good selection. I was learning journalism from the outside, studying all the periodicals. One day, I was minding my own business, reading a magazine, when I was approached by the store’s manager and two campus officers with guns in holsters at their side.
‘This is him,’ the store manager said to the officers.
‘Step outside please,’ one of the officers directed me.
Outside they began asking me questions.
‘Have you been talking to women?’
‘Inappropriately talking to women,’ said the other officer.
‘No officers. You’ve got me confused with somebody else,’ I assured them.
‘You sure?’ asked the first officer.
‘Positive.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you what. Here’s what’s going to happen,’ he said, taking out his paper pad; static and a woman’s voice played from his walkie-talkie, ‘You can’t go back in there.’
‘You have to keep 10 feet from the entrance,’ said the other officer, finishing the first one’s thought.
‘Well,’ I thought to myself, ‘welcome to Providence.’ While I chatted, or received the warning, with the officers, my head spinning with both nervousness and shock, one of the store’s employees placed himself in the doors inside the store—where myself and the officers stood outside—standing akimbo, grinning, happy as a pig-in-shit to see the authorities making an example of somebody, anybody.
I remember silently blaming Mother for abandoning me in such a random city. How could this happen? What in the world had I been doing wrong? This is the city where I spent my Thanksgivings growing up. How had it turned on me? Why? Was I too far from the outside? Not spending enough money? Because I am tan? Jewish? The manager herself looked very Jewish, in a secular way.
I used to take the train from Providence to Manhattan for apartment shopping and an interview about an unpaid internship with ARTnews Magazine. I turned 30 that summer, and they told me I was too old for an unpaid internship. While I was in town, I bought a big bag of pot in Washington Square Park and took it back to Providence. Carelessly, I smoked it in my room at the boarding house. A gay Pakistani or Indian student who had made a pass at me, reported me to the administrator and I had to pack my things and go. I stayed over at the administrator’s house. She was a kind lady; a little bit chunky, with yellow hair.
Eventually, I got my own apartment in Crown Heights, in a building where I was the only ‘white’ person. I chose to move to this area because I knew that this is where the Lubavitcher Rebbe resided and in Israel, I had been close with some Chabadniks. When Mother had a studio on the Upper East Side, and I was home visiting from Israel, I made a pilgrimage there. It was easy to get to from Mom’s. You just ride the ‘4 train’ south until the last stop on the line. Then, you have to walk up, unless you take the West Side, Broadway Avenue ‘3 train’, which will let you out right in front of the synagogue, open all night, at 770 Eastern Parkway.
It was a one-bedroom with a walk-in kitchen and I never furnished it. Slept on an old dirty couch I took from off the street. Mother had opened a bank account for me and put in something like $12,000 so that I didn’t starve, (I had reached the bottom of my trust fund while living in Israel). Just to give an example of how she was getting old and beginning to struggle with reason and logic, though she would never admit it: she deposited the money, in a newly-opened bank account, at the most obscure bank, you could imagine. I tried to get a job with my soul, when my mind was out of shape. I sent hundreds of résumés out; never any response. I freelanced my journalism, wrote op-eds and even some advertising copy around town and the Internet. Alas, this was not enough for financial sustenance. My mood became rancid: angry and sullen. I was maniacally telling people off in emails to the university and pathetically begging for a chance in emails to publications. I became depressed and spent my days on the couch, listless. I never used the kitchen in the apartment; never went shopping for food. I ate out at restaurants, alone. Some days, I didn’t get off the old, dirty couch at all, not even to eat; I just laid there all day watching the network news on loop on the Internet, and bootlegged copies on DVD of recent movies I had bought in the neighborhood for cheap. Like the last five years of my living situation in Israel, I had no television.
When I was in my last semester of classes in Israel, I began trying to make connections in New York, attempting to set up a new life there. I applied to write or edit for some Jewish-oriented magazines, and I dated online. One of the women I used to chat with on Jdate, Shoshanna, was studying at a school in Philadelphia to be a Reconstructionist rabbi. She was about two years my elder. We had some good conversations through the instant messaging service online, there. After a few fun, succinct conversations, the party spilled over to Facebook. At this time I was beginning to write essays in the Jerusalem Post, and once they got published online (the night before they appeared in print, in the paper) I’d share them on my page. I was surprised that I didn’t scare her off, revealing my conservative Zionist politics and all, as they were at the time (while I’ve always been a hawkish Zionist, I’ve also always been a proponent of Labor Zionism). Maybe she just wasn’t reading them. Either way, she must have been impressed. I was impressed with myself; at least I was doing something with my life; I was having a little bit of success. Eventually, I sort of slipped; I let on signs of the mania that I was experiencing, the symptoms of my undiagnosed ‘bipolar disorder’. I had been in class with a female lecturer who, no matter what, always gave me mediocre grades. That day, fed up with the Sisyphean exertion her hungriest student had demonstrated, we got into an all-out debate, in front of the rest of the class, during the lecture, about the true definition of philosophical ‘existentialism’ in literature. I couldn’t help it. She was the one that brought it up. The teacher started to lecture about existentialism and I simply disagreed, so I made myself heard. Surprisingly, she engaged me. That evening, when I got back to my apartment, after class, I saw that Shoshanna was online, so I messaged her: ‘What is your definition of existentialism?’ I was genuinely interested in what a very liberal rabbinical student would have to say. I don’t recall how she responded. I then went on something of a soapbox about my definition and conceptualization of philosophical existentialism in literature. Again, she didn’t say much. She cut the conversation short. But, nevertheless, I sensed a vibe. A vibe that she thought I was strange; or at least showing my true colors, my strange true colors. I would have denied it to you, had you called me out on it. But deep down inside, I knew I was strange. And I knew deep down, in my core, that I was mentally ill. I was, after all, very depressed at school. Notwithstanding this brief conversation, this slip, she stuck with me, keeping me as an open possibility for a relationship—intending marriage—for a couple of months. She must have remembered the very date I said I was flying home from Israel, this time with a one-way ticket. I don’t remember telling her this, but she knew somehow, because my first day back I got a message from her—we were still sticking strictly to communicating on Facebook—asking how my flight had been. I was honestly touched by this gesture. But then things got a little sour. I was in a bad mood one day, while in Providence, over not getting published and more so, not landing any kind of job yet, and I couldn’t control myself. For some reason, I typed into the Facebook message box between us, some random gibberish, venting my frustration out on the keys of my laptop, trying to communicate this frustration and even an unfounded disapproval of her. I pressed ‘send’. I really didn’t hear from her again. I even ‘unfriended’ her; then, about a month later, tried to reconcile. This time I must have successfully scared her off.
Back in New York, I was still freelancing my journalism, or attempting to. I was at a jazz performance in the city, writing about it for an online magazine, and I had ordered a drink on my card. The card was declined. Next day, I didn’t go out and that night, I estimated that I had enough remaining cash to eat dinner at a bar in downtown Brooklyn, an Irish pub. When the bill came, I couldn’t cover the cost and the owner of the restaurant came out and threatened to call the police.
‘Never come back!’ he shouted at me as I left.
The parents flew to New York and staged an intervention of sorts. It was at the office of a psychiatrist, ‘behavioral specialist’, inside of a hospital. He was short of stature, had short light-colored hair, and he spoke with a thick European accent. Present were only the Parents, the doctor and myself. Still, it was an intervention, a rare psychiatric one. The objective: to get me to admit I was mentally ill, go on meds and start outpatient group therapy with this doctor in this hospital (which was a schlep to get to). I had a hard time admitting I probably had ‘bipolar disorder’, because I had also been previously diagnosed with ‘schizoaffective disorder’ by a different psychiatrist. I felt that the two diagnoses cancelled each other out. That given the inconsistency, the diagnosis was thereby invalidated. After all, ‘homosexuality’ was once a legitimate diagnosis in the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual—the psychiatric guidebook for symptoms and their diagnoses). It had been voted into the book by a panel of old-school and bigoted psychiatrists. How reliable can it be?