Downhill Learning
One of 3 stories published in "Gamey: Lurid Accounts of Incidents That May Have Occurred." This book is published by your's truly and is available for the low, low price of $8 (I'll even sport shipping,) by sending said amount of cash to Joe Navas, p.o. box 1016, North Eastham MA 02651. Be sure to include a favorite recipe and a tip on how to reach without knowing yoga.
Downhill Learning
By Joe Navas
In the first half of 1982, I was the central figure in a cultural bloom of sorts that was so strange, flawed, artistically expansive and, ultimately, joyous that it made the Prague Spring look like the cocktail party before a figure skating competition.
My parents had been getting the dailies from the upcoming movie that my school’s guidance counselor was making about my impending psychological doom, and apparently it was a real old-school Exorcist-style shocker, because when the folks finally decided upon a course of action, the ensuing events were as unnerving as they were quick to unfold.
I was always a child who had a lot of time on his hands and not many people to spend it with. This is not to say that there were not other such loners locally, as many girls and boys (but mostly boys) that I knew were in the same boat. However, even they had little time for me as they were busy already honing the skills that would become invaluable later in their lives, such as when or when not to refer to someone as “my bitch,” or what color bandana goes best with a bright orange jumpsuit.
While these youngsters were torturing small animals, carving misspelled words into their arms, and lighting their siblings on fire, I could instead be found recording fake fart sounds on a tape recorder and gluing my fingers to the hood of the car.
It had been simple enough for my parents to accept my idiosyncrasies up until this point, especially since the I.Q. tests I’d recently undergone had finally laid to rest the nagging fear that I might be retarded. But as the B’s and C’s on my report cards magically transformed, and without much effort it seemed, into D’s and F’s, it was beginning to look as if my personally designed Waldorf-style approach to education was not working as well as we’d all hoped.
My mother, who comes from a long line of intensely mentally disturbed people from Pennsylvania (though that may be redundant), took the sudden emergence of these academic failings to mean that certain recent hormonal changes within me were not agreeing with my constitution. I could have told her that months before my grades dropped, as my ass had turned into a pair of jiggling, misshapen Casaba melons and my voice made me sound as if I were gunning for third place at a goose-calling contest.
My father, though in disagreement with my mother as to the reasons for my decline, agreed that something was definitely amiss and that action had to be taken soon, since he himself had only recently escaped the porkfat covered clutches of his in-laws and would be damned if he was going to allow a little puberty to turn me into one of them.
My parents arranged for me to begin seeing a child psychologist, which I took to mean that they could only afford to take me to some guy who couldn’t cut it as a psychiatrist and got sent to the minors.
I went along with it because I realized that my only other option was to start getting better grades, and we all agreed with a hearty laugh that wasn’t likely to happen.
My first experiences of any kind with analysts had been of the aforementioned school guidance counselor variety. I felt then, as I do now, that most of these people were found to be either too psychotic or too daft (or both) to make it as probation officers or bailiffs, so they decided to take the wealth of knowledge many of them had accumulated as occasional attendees at AA meetings, and apply it to the job of steering wayward youths toward the promised land, or military academies.
In our meetings, the counselor would sit at least ten feet away from me and ask me nicely and slowly to put the round peg in it’s proper hole, to which I would often make a joke involving his or her orifice(s) which I thought was simply hilarious and he or she might have as well had he or she not considered my suggestion so threatening.
The counselor would then throw in a couple of exercises that had something to do with cognitive skills and usually some test involving a picture of cow, which I still believe to have been some weird farm porn mistakenly included in the packet (which, coincidentally was manufactured in Oklahoma). Finally, with their hands thrown up in the air as they realized that the last time our intellects were actually comparable was when I was 14 hours old, blind, and unable to hold my head up by myself, and they were taking their psych final at UMass, they would give up.
Now, one would hope that a person who had ascended to at least this quasi-professional level in the public educational structure would be mature enough to, if not admit defeat, at least admit gross underqualification, but such professionalism is not necessarily as certain a find as one might expect in the ethical makeup of someone who’s job mostly involves keeping college brochures plentiful and sexually harassing the cafeteria staff.
It was with a sneer and a pathetic abuse of power that I was immediately and involuntarily enrolled in the class down by the boiler room.
This was the class that hope forgot. This was a raft named Shame, cast off into the Sea of Stupid. If the honors program was a well-lit mansion in the Hamptons, ours was a doorless outhouse in Manitoba.
At first, I honestly felt nothing either way about the demotion. I was really just glad that the tests seemed to be over, regardless of what they did or did not reveal. My parents’ decision to support this switch surprised me greatly on one hand, and on the other did not. It surprised me because I thought of both of them as exceedingly intelligent people, a belief I would cling to desperately during those times that I’d once again flushed money down the toilet,(literally; big bills sometimes too) as they assured me time and again that no, I was not adopted.
I didn’t think that exceedingly intelligent people would allow their son to be put into a class that counted among it’s members 12 year old girls with full-back tattoos of Molly Hatchet and guys who smoked two packs of Winstons before lunch.
However, I also knew that they were banking on the theory that whatever had gotten into me, it likely was in there for the long haul and that this was just the first of many steps toward, hopefully, an academic rebirth. I was reassured by this, and it laid to rest any fears that the next phase of “Operation Bell Curve” was going to see me wearing a helmet on my rides to school as I enjoyed the luxury and charm (not to mention the notoriety) of the short bus.
After three weeks of this immersion in remedial academics, I was taken back to the guidance counselor’s office and told of a change in strategy. It appeared that the most recent of my intelligence tests had come back and that its results, combined with the fact that I had not given a single incorrect answer in the entire three weeks that I spent in juvie hall (a feat a chimpanzee named Reggie had accomplished years earlier) had garnered me a spot in an advanced class; a Class for the Gifted. And so I went, trying my best to look intelligent.
It was after only a few days in this class that my teacher, a Volvo driving, tea-drinking fellow himself, deduced that either I was beyond his comprehension (which was unlikely) or that my test results had been read upside down (likely). He decided that the best way for me to spend the school day was to sit in a windowless room and write very basic computer programs on the Radio Shack TRS-80 that was, as I would soon find out, not to be my only companion.
I would be accompanied by an incredibly bitter and tense eleven year old boy named Jim, who constantly had one nostril completely clogged with a booger that was exactly the color that most bathrooms had been decorated with in the early ‘70s. This detail would have been intolerable were it not for the perfect symmetry and the clean line this snot carved on the inner part of the rim of Jim’s left nostril.
Over the few weeks that Jim and I spent holed up in that room making the computer play pong with itself, I began to feel a certain sympathy, if not an empathy for him and his booger. He rarely spoke beyond the subject of computers, and even at that he was extraordinarily dispassionate, but on those few occasions that he did, he gave touching and desperate insights into a mind that had grown harder and more resolute with thoughts of revenge and redemption with each passing day.
Whereas my defense to the bullies had always been fast feet and a penchant for instantly demoralizing insults, Jim never fought back, nor did he cry. He was certainly not without emotion, as Jim could infuse even a conversation about puppies and bunnies with enough underlying, seething tension that in this age, he would definitely be one of the kids on the “Watch List” kept by the guys with the flak jackets.
His manner made me wonder if his father, a well known construction worker with a deep, however, as often was the case, mostly unsubstantiated history of domestic violence, had demanded he be tough, or if Jim had just grown tired of crying. I never broached the subject, as to do so at this age would definitely have gotten me punched in the head, and one memory I was fairly sure that I could do without was one of a little boy with a big booger having clocked me senseless in front of a TRS-80.
Needless to say, when the time had come for another evaluation, and the result, of course, was my removal from the smart class, I bid farewell to Jim with a great deal more sadness than I’d ever felt for the future (and some ex-) convicts in the basement.
I was quickly deposited back into the great, murky wading pool that was the regular student population, where I quickly and happily assimilated by getting D’s and F’s as fast as the teachers could hand out the exams.
The guidance counselors once again called my parents to the school, and once again my parents came with the blind hope that somehow at least some sort of answer to the questions surrounding my sliding performance could be given. This meeting however, I was told later, was the shortest one yet. Instead of the guidance counselor going on and on with every theory from too much pulling on my noggin during birth to my biorhythms to my eyesight, he laid it out quite succinctly and finally, I would say, correctly. He told my parents I was lazy.
I cannot even begin to properly describe here the joy and relief that my mother and father felt upon learning that there seemed to be nothing outrightly wrong with me.
I could just picture them high-fiving like idiots in an end zone, claiming victory over the silent killer called Dumbness that had claimed so many Americans already, as was evidenced by the election of Reagan and the skyrocketing sales of albums by Styx. I pictured them hugging the bejeezus out of the wannabe cop and all of them sobbing uncontrollably in a heap on the test-strewn floor.
Any elation though, however close or far away from this scenario it actually was, departed as quickly as it had arrived, and all I can say is that I am extremely grateful that neither of my parents are inclined to violence, though I’m sure that they played with the idea for a while. Thankfully, my folks, as most intellectuals with neither the time nor the energy to explain the bruises and cuts might, decided to forgo the beatings and take me to a shrink.
While they felt relief, I was now terrified. My impression of psychologists was that they would make every effort they could in trying to find the cure for what ails the mind of their patient, short of prescribing a lobotomy. And if all else failed, well, there was always the lobotomy.
I had failed at an incredible number of things in my life, given my age, and under this kind of pressure, I felt the odds were 6 to 1 that I’d soon be spending my days drawing with crayons on circular paper and trying not spill the contents of my drooltray into my Tang. The first psychologist I encountered did little to allay these fears.
She was a 58-year-old former nun who, like many former nuns, had a queasy, preserved, formaldehyde smell about her. Whereas I thought anyone who’d just been sprung from convent life after 30 years would be showering on an hourly basis and buying new clothes of all sorts to try and shake the old feeling of the nunnery, she apparently was not quite ready to let go of all of its trappings, as along with the corpselike stench she had brought, appropriately, a 2 foot long cross with a bleeding Christ on it. I’m sure that as far as she was concerned, nothing could inspire a child to find the root of their being quite like the fragrant scent a of a stale, old, sexless woman and the looming specter of damnation, but I wasn’t quite sold on the idea. My parents, bless them, weren’t too keen on these details either and were just about to remove me from her care, when, oops.... she died.
Well that took care of that, and pretty soon we had found a wonderful young man with a Ph.D. from Brown, a warm smile, a beautiful, large office, and ... a grossly misshapen hairlip.
I wanted to ask my parents if this were some sort of revenge that they were engaging in toward me and if it was, I wasn’t ready to give in, but instead was very curious as to just what they might have in store that could possibly top the dying, smelly nun and the genius with the radical facial deformity. What was next? An obese Teamster with a 10-inch hard-on? Perhaps a clown who twisted balloons into the shape of Frances Farmer? I thought it best not to ask however, as I was hardly ready to accept that these ideas might pale in comparison to what actually lay ahead.
My new psychologist’s name was Geoff, and he spoke very clearly despite his lip problem, which quickly became less of a problem for me as got to know him and began to see this man in a much more heroic light.
Our first few visits were primarily clinical, but not cold, in nature. Geoff would ask me questions regarding my school life up until then. He would ask about my friends, who I had always been reluctant to talk about with anyone for fear that a simple investigation would reveal that many of them didn’t exist. I came to trust and admire him, and as a result of this, I wanted to impress him. He struck me as very adult, which, I would imagine, was the impression he was going for, what with the doctorate from the Ivy League school and the wingtips. So when the subject turned to drug use, I saw this as a golden opportunity to flex the muscles of my B.P.U. (Bullshit Production Unit) that I’d recently had installed by former members of the Nixon White House.
Geoff asked me if I smoked marijuana, which I actually had. “Yes,” I replied. He asked me how often I smoked marijuana, which was once, and I said “Twice a day, every day. For years.”
Now had I stopped there, it could have signaled the beginning a glorious life of rehabs and support groups, but I had to push it.
He asked me if I snorted cocaine. I replied “Oh yeah, four or five times a day.” He inquired as to just how many Quaaludes I required to get through the day, “About ten or so, if it’s not a Monday,” I replied. “Jesus... Mondays, y’know?” Heroin? “Two or three a day, depending on how I’m doing at the track. You know how it is with the ponies.”
As my answers painted a clearer and clearer portrait that bore an uncanny resemblance to Keith Moon, Geoff was seeing a pattern develop. I remember his unsuccessful attempt at suppressing a grin after the Quaalude answer, as that must have been when he fully realized that I was yanking his ivy covered chain. I ,of course, thought that I was laying it on so perfectly that he was viewing me as a contemporary. One of my friend’s sisters had attended Brown in the ‘70s and relative to her accounts of the lurid goings-on there, the tales I was weaving regarding my imaginary drug use were not likely to stun a man who had just graduated from a school that handed out acid and speed as part of their “Welcome Weekend Tote Bag,” which also included a generous allotment of lubricant that you might want if you wished to participate in the Roman orgy continuously occurring in the Hall of Science.
And then, strangely, just as quickly as my drug use had reached such Stones-esque proportions, it subsided. As our sessions went on, Geoff assured me that I wouldn’t be needing all those substances anymore. I agreed thoroughly and told him that with his help, I knew I could stop. Often the cliché “easier said than done” is used in these situations. However in this instance, “even easier done than said,” was entirely more applicable.
“I’m cured,” I stated rather matter-of-factly only a month later, making what I couldn’t possibly realize was a complete mockery of the hell I would endure some 18 years later. But from then on, our time together was spent walking down to the nearby pier, playing poker, and doing all sorts of other things that began to make my parents think that, while it was nice for me to have this kind of companionship, they could probably find someone from the local YMCA to pal around with me for a lot less than $100 per hour, and that’s even including the price of the necessary inoculations.
So ended the chapter of my life devoted to analysts, at least in the professional sense. My parents at least had apparently gleaned some knowledge of what made me tick from this experience, as the following months and years saw them taking me to films, concerts, sporting events, museums, and everything else short of strip shows and public executions, both of which I hope to take my children to someday. The very interesting thing about this ensuing cultural revival however, was that they assumed very separate roles in it. Sure, we still ate together, we still watched television together, and we traveled as a family to my tennis matches. But it was in the experiential expeditions that my parents felt each had something very singular to offer.
My mother is a woman who has always been so individualistic and of such superior intelligence that she was as much a natural to take the lead on affairs concerning my artistic enrichment as she was a shoe-in to be voted “Most Likely to Get the Hell Out of Pennsylvania” by her senior class, which voted by stomping on the floor once for “yes”, twice for “no”, and three times for “I still don’t understand. Could you pass the sauerkraut?”
Once a week or so, she would take me to, usually, R-rated movies. I don’t mean to give the impression that she was taking me to the stripped down version of “Caligula” or “Porky’s 3”, but rather that we would go see films like “The Breakfast Club”, which had no nudity, and “Silkwood”, which featured a briefly naked but kind of disturbing and painfully scrubbed Meryl Streep, and “Witness” which, fortunately, showed the gorgeous Kelly McGillis nude but, unfortunately, did so in the context of her being Amish.
I was a twelve year old boy who thought naked women looked pretty cool, to say the least. Yes, I was there for the art, but chief among my concerns was whether the art in question was involving the showing of skin to an extent that I found agreeable. Of course, I was witnessing all of this, nudity or not, while sitting next to my mother, which made any enjoyment of the flesh displayed on the screen, at best, impossible and, at worst , deeply scarring.
In addition to going to the movies, we would also take trips to museums, where I would be simultaneously moved by the art I saw, and angered that my own creations weren’t gracing the walls.
I’d offered my “Conan” drawings to numerous galleries and art clubs over the years, but they all politely refused, preferring the tried and true “Marsh Landscape” and “Cape Cod Sunset” themes to that of “Buccaneer Bloodshed” and “Dragons with Swords Sticking Out of Their Eye Sockets (And Shit).” I could see their point from a strictly commercial perspective, but Christ , when did it become all about the money?
On the days that I was not being shuttled to this movie house and that or to this museum and that, I was cruising around with dad.
My father was a brilliant, handsome man who, despite his age of 69 years, commanded respect and attention and still turned the heads of women half his age, though sometimes this was simply because they were wondering if that smell was coming from him. Still, when we went places it was always as The Very Cool Old Guy and His Son Who Hopefully Won’t Become Another Frank Sinatra Jr.
We went to baseball games, where I was first introduced to the sport that would become, in conjunction with bebop jazz and an instinctive hatred of anything recorded by one James Buffet, the closest thing I have to religion.
I remember that this chapter in my existence was where I learned the importance of the strange duality of life as understood through the eyes of a Red Sox fan: The harder you wish to win, the less likely you are to do so, and the less likely it appears that you will win, the harder you must try; words to live by, which is precisely why I often find myself rooting for other teams.
By far my favorite event that I would attend with my Pops was the annual tennis tournament held at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. My father had spent a great deal of time in Rhode Island in the 1930’s and he offered a unique and cherished perspective of the area. He had been enrolled at the aforementioned Brown University from 1933 to 1937, where orgies had been ruled illegal as one of the provisions of Prohibition, though cocaine was still passed around freely. Wherever we went, he had a rich and detailed story for it.
The Newport Casino, where the Hall of Fame Tournament was held, was home to some of the last, and by the far the finest, remaining grass tennis courts in the country. They were meticulously maintained entirely by, of course (in keeping with tradition), people of color earning just enough to starve; a fact that I was fortunate enough to be made well aware of by a father who had once been one of these people cutting the grass.
Still, there were many rare gems held by this tournament, chief among them was that it was fairly small and cozy in terms of the facilities and the number of spectators, yet it still offered enough prize money to attract some of the world’s best players. Since it was such an informal setting, the players would often hang around the grounds between matches and chat up the spectators. I talked about pool with Tim Mayotte, spoke about something with Mats Wilander, though I still don’t know what it was due to his having known only a little English at the time and the only Swedish I knew was, yep, you guessed it, a northern tribal dialect rooted mostly in the Old Germanic form.
I had lunch with Vijay Amitraj and I got sneered at by Ilie Nastase, who was too old to play at the tournament, and I had no problem reminding him of that.
This became an annual ritual for my father and I (not the sneering at Nastase part. “Nasty” and I actually made up the following year). We did stop going after four years however, as my father’s Alzheimer’s had begun to make the drive somewhat treacherous and ultimately misdirected.
I think it was after the third time that we’d tried to get cheeseburgers at a funeral home that we decided it might be best to just go home.
At around the same time, I had begun to dye my hair and sport what would later be known as “The Sigue Sigue Sputnik Evening Wear Collection”, so though I was entirely up for shocking the traditionalists at the Hall, I couldn’t do so at the expense of my father’s dignity, especially since by this point he thought it was 1947, and trying to explain why my hair was pink would have taken too much energy that could better be spent just loving him.
But that was years later anyway.
I suspect that as my life goes on I will, as I do now, credit nearly every ridiculous and unexplainable creative thing that I do to that period of my life and the analysts who helped make it so strange and eventful, dead and alive, smelly and non. Those who were so remarkably stupid that I would not be surprised to find they’d died of suffocation, having forgotten how to breathe, and those who were not guidance counselors.
Most of all, I thank my parents, without whose initial careless disregard of consequence after a 3-day gin and valium bender I would not have been placed on this planet to begin with.
And I’d probably be taller.
Downhill Learning
By Joe Navas
In the first half of 1982, I was the central figure in a cultural bloom of sorts that was so strange, flawed, artistically expansive and, ultimately, joyous that it made the Prague Spring look like the cocktail party before a figure skating competition.
My parents had been getting the dailies from the upcoming movie that my school’s guidance counselor was making about my impending psychological doom, and apparently it was a real old-school Exorcist-style shocker, because when the folks finally decided upon a course of action, the ensuing events were as unnerving as they were quick to unfold.
I was always a child who had a lot of time on his hands and not many people to spend it with. This is not to say that there were not other such loners locally, as many girls and boys (but mostly boys) that I knew were in the same boat. However, even they had little time for me as they were busy already honing the skills that would become invaluable later in their lives, such as when or when not to refer to someone as “my bitch,” or what color bandana goes best with a bright orange jumpsuit.
While these youngsters were torturing small animals, carving misspelled words into their arms, and lighting their siblings on fire, I could instead be found recording fake fart sounds on a tape recorder and gluing my fingers to the hood of the car.
It had been simple enough for my parents to accept my idiosyncrasies up until this point, especially since the I.Q. tests I’d recently undergone had finally laid to rest the nagging fear that I might be retarded. But as the B’s and C’s on my report cards magically transformed, and without much effort it seemed, into D’s and F’s, it was beginning to look as if my personally designed Waldorf-style approach to education was not working as well as we’d all hoped.
My mother, who comes from a long line of intensely mentally disturbed people from Pennsylvania (though that may be redundant), took the sudden emergence of these academic failings to mean that certain recent hormonal changes within me were not agreeing with my constitution. I could have told her that months before my grades dropped, as my ass had turned into a pair of jiggling, misshapen Casaba melons and my voice made me sound as if I were gunning for third place at a goose-calling contest.
My father, though in disagreement with my mother as to the reasons for my decline, agreed that something was definitely amiss and that action had to be taken soon, since he himself had only recently escaped the porkfat covered clutches of his in-laws and would be damned if he was going to allow a little puberty to turn me into one of them.
My parents arranged for me to begin seeing a child psychologist, which I took to mean that they could only afford to take me to some guy who couldn’t cut it as a psychiatrist and got sent to the minors.
I went along with it because I realized that my only other option was to start getting better grades, and we all agreed with a hearty laugh that wasn’t likely to happen.
My first experiences of any kind with analysts had been of the aforementioned school guidance counselor variety. I felt then, as I do now, that most of these people were found to be either too psychotic or too daft (or both) to make it as probation officers or bailiffs, so they decided to take the wealth of knowledge many of them had accumulated as occasional attendees at AA meetings, and apply it to the job of steering wayward youths toward the promised land, or military academies.
In our meetings, the counselor would sit at least ten feet away from me and ask me nicely and slowly to put the round peg in it’s proper hole, to which I would often make a joke involving his or her orifice(s) which I thought was simply hilarious and he or she might have as well had he or she not considered my suggestion so threatening.
The counselor would then throw in a couple of exercises that had something to do with cognitive skills and usually some test involving a picture of cow, which I still believe to have been some weird farm porn mistakenly included in the packet (which, coincidentally was manufactured in Oklahoma). Finally, with their hands thrown up in the air as they realized that the last time our intellects were actually comparable was when I was 14 hours old, blind, and unable to hold my head up by myself, and they were taking their psych final at UMass, they would give up.
Now, one would hope that a person who had ascended to at least this quasi-professional level in the public educational structure would be mature enough to, if not admit defeat, at least admit gross underqualification, but such professionalism is not necessarily as certain a find as one might expect in the ethical makeup of someone who’s job mostly involves keeping college brochures plentiful and sexually harassing the cafeteria staff.
It was with a sneer and a pathetic abuse of power that I was immediately and involuntarily enrolled in the class down by the boiler room.
This was the class that hope forgot. This was a raft named Shame, cast off into the Sea of Stupid. If the honors program was a well-lit mansion in the Hamptons, ours was a doorless outhouse in Manitoba.
At first, I honestly felt nothing either way about the demotion. I was really just glad that the tests seemed to be over, regardless of what they did or did not reveal. My parents’ decision to support this switch surprised me greatly on one hand, and on the other did not. It surprised me because I thought of both of them as exceedingly intelligent people, a belief I would cling to desperately during those times that I’d once again flushed money down the toilet,(literally; big bills sometimes too) as they assured me time and again that no, I was not adopted.
I didn’t think that exceedingly intelligent people would allow their son to be put into a class that counted among it’s members 12 year old girls with full-back tattoos of Molly Hatchet and guys who smoked two packs of Winstons before lunch.
However, I also knew that they were banking on the theory that whatever had gotten into me, it likely was in there for the long haul and that this was just the first of many steps toward, hopefully, an academic rebirth. I was reassured by this, and it laid to rest any fears that the next phase of “Operation Bell Curve” was going to see me wearing a helmet on my rides to school as I enjoyed the luxury and charm (not to mention the notoriety) of the short bus.
After three weeks of this immersion in remedial academics, I was taken back to the guidance counselor’s office and told of a change in strategy. It appeared that the most recent of my intelligence tests had come back and that its results, combined with the fact that I had not given a single incorrect answer in the entire three weeks that I spent in juvie hall (a feat a chimpanzee named Reggie had accomplished years earlier) had garnered me a spot in an advanced class; a Class for the Gifted. And so I went, trying my best to look intelligent.
It was after only a few days in this class that my teacher, a Volvo driving, tea-drinking fellow himself, deduced that either I was beyond his comprehension (which was unlikely) or that my test results had been read upside down (likely). He decided that the best way for me to spend the school day was to sit in a windowless room and write very basic computer programs on the Radio Shack TRS-80 that was, as I would soon find out, not to be my only companion.
I would be accompanied by an incredibly bitter and tense eleven year old boy named Jim, who constantly had one nostril completely clogged with a booger that was exactly the color that most bathrooms had been decorated with in the early ‘70s. This detail would have been intolerable were it not for the perfect symmetry and the clean line this snot carved on the inner part of the rim of Jim’s left nostril.
Over the few weeks that Jim and I spent holed up in that room making the computer play pong with itself, I began to feel a certain sympathy, if not an empathy for him and his booger. He rarely spoke beyond the subject of computers, and even at that he was extraordinarily dispassionate, but on those few occasions that he did, he gave touching and desperate insights into a mind that had grown harder and more resolute with thoughts of revenge and redemption with each passing day.
Whereas my defense to the bullies had always been fast feet and a penchant for instantly demoralizing insults, Jim never fought back, nor did he cry. He was certainly not without emotion, as Jim could infuse even a conversation about puppies and bunnies with enough underlying, seething tension that in this age, he would definitely be one of the kids on the “Watch List” kept by the guys with the flak jackets.
His manner made me wonder if his father, a well known construction worker with a deep, however, as often was the case, mostly unsubstantiated history of domestic violence, had demanded he be tough, or if Jim had just grown tired of crying. I never broached the subject, as to do so at this age would definitely have gotten me punched in the head, and one memory I was fairly sure that I could do without was one of a little boy with a big booger having clocked me senseless in front of a TRS-80.
Needless to say, when the time had come for another evaluation, and the result, of course, was my removal from the smart class, I bid farewell to Jim with a great deal more sadness than I’d ever felt for the future (and some ex-) convicts in the basement.
I was quickly deposited back into the great, murky wading pool that was the regular student population, where I quickly and happily assimilated by getting D’s and F’s as fast as the teachers could hand out the exams.
The guidance counselors once again called my parents to the school, and once again my parents came with the blind hope that somehow at least some sort of answer to the questions surrounding my sliding performance could be given. This meeting however, I was told later, was the shortest one yet. Instead of the guidance counselor going on and on with every theory from too much pulling on my noggin during birth to my biorhythms to my eyesight, he laid it out quite succinctly and finally, I would say, correctly. He told my parents I was lazy.
I cannot even begin to properly describe here the joy and relief that my mother and father felt upon learning that there seemed to be nothing outrightly wrong with me.
I could just picture them high-fiving like idiots in an end zone, claiming victory over the silent killer called Dumbness that had claimed so many Americans already, as was evidenced by the election of Reagan and the skyrocketing sales of albums by Styx. I pictured them hugging the bejeezus out of the wannabe cop and all of them sobbing uncontrollably in a heap on the test-strewn floor.
Any elation though, however close or far away from this scenario it actually was, departed as quickly as it had arrived, and all I can say is that I am extremely grateful that neither of my parents are inclined to violence, though I’m sure that they played with the idea for a while. Thankfully, my folks, as most intellectuals with neither the time nor the energy to explain the bruises and cuts might, decided to forgo the beatings and take me to a shrink.
While they felt relief, I was now terrified. My impression of psychologists was that they would make every effort they could in trying to find the cure for what ails the mind of their patient, short of prescribing a lobotomy. And if all else failed, well, there was always the lobotomy.
I had failed at an incredible number of things in my life, given my age, and under this kind of pressure, I felt the odds were 6 to 1 that I’d soon be spending my days drawing with crayons on circular paper and trying not spill the contents of my drooltray into my Tang. The first psychologist I encountered did little to allay these fears.
She was a 58-year-old former nun who, like many former nuns, had a queasy, preserved, formaldehyde smell about her. Whereas I thought anyone who’d just been sprung from convent life after 30 years would be showering on an hourly basis and buying new clothes of all sorts to try and shake the old feeling of the nunnery, she apparently was not quite ready to let go of all of its trappings, as along with the corpselike stench she had brought, appropriately, a 2 foot long cross with a bleeding Christ on it. I’m sure that as far as she was concerned, nothing could inspire a child to find the root of their being quite like the fragrant scent a of a stale, old, sexless woman and the looming specter of damnation, but I wasn’t quite sold on the idea. My parents, bless them, weren’t too keen on these details either and were just about to remove me from her care, when, oops.... she died.
Well that took care of that, and pretty soon we had found a wonderful young man with a Ph.D. from Brown, a warm smile, a beautiful, large office, and ... a grossly misshapen hairlip.
I wanted to ask my parents if this were some sort of revenge that they were engaging in toward me and if it was, I wasn’t ready to give in, but instead was very curious as to just what they might have in store that could possibly top the dying, smelly nun and the genius with the radical facial deformity. What was next? An obese Teamster with a 10-inch hard-on? Perhaps a clown who twisted balloons into the shape of Frances Farmer? I thought it best not to ask however, as I was hardly ready to accept that these ideas might pale in comparison to what actually lay ahead.
My new psychologist’s name was Geoff, and he spoke very clearly despite his lip problem, which quickly became less of a problem for me as got to know him and began to see this man in a much more heroic light.
Our first few visits were primarily clinical, but not cold, in nature. Geoff would ask me questions regarding my school life up until then. He would ask about my friends, who I had always been reluctant to talk about with anyone for fear that a simple investigation would reveal that many of them didn’t exist. I came to trust and admire him, and as a result of this, I wanted to impress him. He struck me as very adult, which, I would imagine, was the impression he was going for, what with the doctorate from the Ivy League school and the wingtips. So when the subject turned to drug use, I saw this as a golden opportunity to flex the muscles of my B.P.U. (Bullshit Production Unit) that I’d recently had installed by former members of the Nixon White House.
Geoff asked me if I smoked marijuana, which I actually had. “Yes,” I replied. He asked me how often I smoked marijuana, which was once, and I said “Twice a day, every day. For years.”
Now had I stopped there, it could have signaled the beginning a glorious life of rehabs and support groups, but I had to push it.
He asked me if I snorted cocaine. I replied “Oh yeah, four or five times a day.” He inquired as to just how many Quaaludes I required to get through the day, “About ten or so, if it’s not a Monday,” I replied. “Jesus... Mondays, y’know?” Heroin? “Two or three a day, depending on how I’m doing at the track. You know how it is with the ponies.”
As my answers painted a clearer and clearer portrait that bore an uncanny resemblance to Keith Moon, Geoff was seeing a pattern develop. I remember his unsuccessful attempt at suppressing a grin after the Quaalude answer, as that must have been when he fully realized that I was yanking his ivy covered chain. I ,of course, thought that I was laying it on so perfectly that he was viewing me as a contemporary. One of my friend’s sisters had attended Brown in the ‘70s and relative to her accounts of the lurid goings-on there, the tales I was weaving regarding my imaginary drug use were not likely to stun a man who had just graduated from a school that handed out acid and speed as part of their “Welcome Weekend Tote Bag,” which also included a generous allotment of lubricant that you might want if you wished to participate in the Roman orgy continuously occurring in the Hall of Science.
And then, strangely, just as quickly as my drug use had reached such Stones-esque proportions, it subsided. As our sessions went on, Geoff assured me that I wouldn’t be needing all those substances anymore. I agreed thoroughly and told him that with his help, I knew I could stop. Often the cliché “easier said than done” is used in these situations. However in this instance, “even easier done than said,” was entirely more applicable.
“I’m cured,” I stated rather matter-of-factly only a month later, making what I couldn’t possibly realize was a complete mockery of the hell I would endure some 18 years later. But from then on, our time together was spent walking down to the nearby pier, playing poker, and doing all sorts of other things that began to make my parents think that, while it was nice for me to have this kind of companionship, they could probably find someone from the local YMCA to pal around with me for a lot less than $100 per hour, and that’s even including the price of the necessary inoculations.
So ended the chapter of my life devoted to analysts, at least in the professional sense. My parents at least had apparently gleaned some knowledge of what made me tick from this experience, as the following months and years saw them taking me to films, concerts, sporting events, museums, and everything else short of strip shows and public executions, both of which I hope to take my children to someday. The very interesting thing about this ensuing cultural revival however, was that they assumed very separate roles in it. Sure, we still ate together, we still watched television together, and we traveled as a family to my tennis matches. But it was in the experiential expeditions that my parents felt each had something very singular to offer.
My mother is a woman who has always been so individualistic and of such superior intelligence that she was as much a natural to take the lead on affairs concerning my artistic enrichment as she was a shoe-in to be voted “Most Likely to Get the Hell Out of Pennsylvania” by her senior class, which voted by stomping on the floor once for “yes”, twice for “no”, and three times for “I still don’t understand. Could you pass the sauerkraut?”
Once a week or so, she would take me to, usually, R-rated movies. I don’t mean to give the impression that she was taking me to the stripped down version of “Caligula” or “Porky’s 3”, but rather that we would go see films like “The Breakfast Club”, which had no nudity, and “Silkwood”, which featured a briefly naked but kind of disturbing and painfully scrubbed Meryl Streep, and “Witness” which, fortunately, showed the gorgeous Kelly McGillis nude but, unfortunately, did so in the context of her being Amish.
I was a twelve year old boy who thought naked women looked pretty cool, to say the least. Yes, I was there for the art, but chief among my concerns was whether the art in question was involving the showing of skin to an extent that I found agreeable. Of course, I was witnessing all of this, nudity or not, while sitting next to my mother, which made any enjoyment of the flesh displayed on the screen, at best, impossible and, at worst , deeply scarring.
In addition to going to the movies, we would also take trips to museums, where I would be simultaneously moved by the art I saw, and angered that my own creations weren’t gracing the walls.
I’d offered my “Conan” drawings to numerous galleries and art clubs over the years, but they all politely refused, preferring the tried and true “Marsh Landscape” and “Cape Cod Sunset” themes to that of “Buccaneer Bloodshed” and “Dragons with Swords Sticking Out of Their Eye Sockets (And Shit).” I could see their point from a strictly commercial perspective, but Christ , when did it become all about the money?
On the days that I was not being shuttled to this movie house and that or to this museum and that, I was cruising around with dad.
My father was a brilliant, handsome man who, despite his age of 69 years, commanded respect and attention and still turned the heads of women half his age, though sometimes this was simply because they were wondering if that smell was coming from him. Still, when we went places it was always as The Very Cool Old Guy and His Son Who Hopefully Won’t Become Another Frank Sinatra Jr.
We went to baseball games, where I was first introduced to the sport that would become, in conjunction with bebop jazz and an instinctive hatred of anything recorded by one James Buffet, the closest thing I have to religion.
I remember that this chapter in my existence was where I learned the importance of the strange duality of life as understood through the eyes of a Red Sox fan: The harder you wish to win, the less likely you are to do so, and the less likely it appears that you will win, the harder you must try; words to live by, which is precisely why I often find myself rooting for other teams.
By far my favorite event that I would attend with my Pops was the annual tennis tournament held at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. My father had spent a great deal of time in Rhode Island in the 1930’s and he offered a unique and cherished perspective of the area. He had been enrolled at the aforementioned Brown University from 1933 to 1937, where orgies had been ruled illegal as one of the provisions of Prohibition, though cocaine was still passed around freely. Wherever we went, he had a rich and detailed story for it.
The Newport Casino, where the Hall of Fame Tournament was held, was home to some of the last, and by the far the finest, remaining grass tennis courts in the country. They were meticulously maintained entirely by, of course (in keeping with tradition), people of color earning just enough to starve; a fact that I was fortunate enough to be made well aware of by a father who had once been one of these people cutting the grass.
Still, there were many rare gems held by this tournament, chief among them was that it was fairly small and cozy in terms of the facilities and the number of spectators, yet it still offered enough prize money to attract some of the world’s best players. Since it was such an informal setting, the players would often hang around the grounds between matches and chat up the spectators. I talked about pool with Tim Mayotte, spoke about something with Mats Wilander, though I still don’t know what it was due to his having known only a little English at the time and the only Swedish I knew was, yep, you guessed it, a northern tribal dialect rooted mostly in the Old Germanic form.
I had lunch with Vijay Amitraj and I got sneered at by Ilie Nastase, who was too old to play at the tournament, and I had no problem reminding him of that.
This became an annual ritual for my father and I (not the sneering at Nastase part. “Nasty” and I actually made up the following year). We did stop going after four years however, as my father’s Alzheimer’s had begun to make the drive somewhat treacherous and ultimately misdirected.
I think it was after the third time that we’d tried to get cheeseburgers at a funeral home that we decided it might be best to just go home.
At around the same time, I had begun to dye my hair and sport what would later be known as “The Sigue Sigue Sputnik Evening Wear Collection”, so though I was entirely up for shocking the traditionalists at the Hall, I couldn’t do so at the expense of my father’s dignity, especially since by this point he thought it was 1947, and trying to explain why my hair was pink would have taken too much energy that could better be spent just loving him.
But that was years later anyway.
I suspect that as my life goes on I will, as I do now, credit nearly every ridiculous and unexplainable creative thing that I do to that period of my life and the analysts who helped make it so strange and eventful, dead and alive, smelly and non. Those who were so remarkably stupid that I would not be surprised to find they’d died of suffocation, having forgotten how to breathe, and those who were not guidance counselors.
Most of all, I thank my parents, without whose initial careless disregard of consequence after a 3-day gin and valium bender I would not have been placed on this planet to begin with.
And I’d probably be taller.
posted by joe at 1:41 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home