Downhill Learning

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 jiggling pair of misshapen cantaloupes and my voice made me sound as if I were gunning for third place at a goose-calling contest.
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.
While my parents felt hopeful, I was now terrified. My impression of head-doctors 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’d made the mistake of renting the film “Frances” on beta only weeks before with the hopes of seeing Jessica Lange naked and as a nice little karmic lesson was left only with the fear that if I spoke my mind I’d quickly find myself staring down the wrong end of a freaking huge needle. 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 doctor 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 two-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 this 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 could make a straightjacket out of ballons? 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 I got to know him and began to see this man in a more humanistic light.
Our first few visits were primarily clinical, though not completely 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 nearly all of them didn’t exist. I came to trust and admire Geoff, 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 please 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.
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.
The tournament became an annual ritual for my father and I, and I looked forward to it every summer. 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 time that we’d tried to get cheeseburgers at a bank 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.
Most of all, I thank my parents, without whose initial careless disregard of consequence after an all-night Tequila and stag-film bender I would not have been placed on this planet to begin with. Not to mention that I’d probably be taller.