They Were Real and Wonderful Days by Constantine Gochis

 We meet up with Dad's writing alter ego, Diogenes.

I am not always surprised to encounter by street bum friend in front of my house, but today I find him, ignoring my arrival, not eagerly solicitous for his periodic stipend, but sitting on an abandoned carton perusing intently a copy of People Magazine. It is held aloft so that I can easily read the headline:  "Journalist Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself".

For those of you who do not know Diogenes, he is a classic bum who has been on my tab for years. His history extends from the heights of affluence to the nadir of penury.  Additionally, his sagacity has always been a source of knowledge fro me, sometimes surcease from the petty trials of life; hence, I always supply him with what he reveres most--spare change.

I interrupt his reverie, somewhat annoyed that he does not greet me. I hail him jovially, disguising my annoyance.

"What ho," I say, "What news from the Rialto?" I am confident in the knowledge that he is sufficiently erudite to know the source of the line from a Shakespeare play. He was--Diogenes I mean--a man of intelligence and education as well as a CEO in industry before his wife abandoned him for the love of a poetess, making a bum out of him, financially, as well as in his incarnate state.

Diogenes does not respond immediately.  He reaches into one of many plastic bags and produces a book and a copy of a newspaper review. I would say the review was annotated, but that is incorrect.  It was lined in black ink throughout.  The book is the late Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in San Francisco".  I am curious as to what distraction would divert Diogenes from his usual purpose of small change or an occasional dollar bill.

"You know," he says without preamble, "I am in San Francisco at the time Hunter writes about, but I never see or feel the glory the reviewer sings about, the Reformation he extols.  It is of course a hymn to a glorious era.  I grieve now that I had no visionary awareness, though there were intimations.  I am not a bum at this time, and whenever one of the faithful hands me a flower, I get the feeling I am somehow at the root of their naked poverty.  My guilt deepens; corporate evil at work. I feel opprobrium in the air.  It is true. The wealthy must do some reflection on the meaning of life, see the visions so talked about, when tripping--albeit in the argot of the gifted enfants du Paradis, loosely children of Paradise--'cool man, make love, not war."

Diogenes reads from the review of the glorious meeting between the author and the reviewer in those halcyon days.

"In March of 1968, armed with two LSD capsules, I got there about 9 p.m. Hunter drank beer crushing the empty cans and throwing them along with cigarette butts into the empty fireplace.  The fierceness with which he hurled the cans and flicked the butts punctuated his non-stop rage about politics and religion and society. . . Hunter's position was, 'get the bastards before they get you!'"

Diogenes continues.

"We went to the men's room and sat in the middle of the floor, facing each other. Delicately, I removed the capsule from my pocket and tried to open it so that the tiny granules would be equally divided.  But things were swimming around. The granules slipped out and fell on my sweater.  Hunter and I looked at each other and shrugged.  And then we started sucking on my sweater.  Hunter stopped for a moment and said, 'What if some stock broker swine comes in now?'"

I said, "Indeed Diogenes, that is poetry," though I felt he was putting me on. I took the page from the Diogenes and read further. The reviewer had a kind of apologetic conclusion.

"And yes, to some degree it does show that anything was possible then. I don't want to minimize our drug fueled epiphanies.  They were real, and they were sometimes wonderful.  It was ignoring that actions have consequences. It was our denigration of the straight.  But it was about betrayal, mine, Hunter's for the sake of protecting our precious trip."

I looked sadly at Diogenes.  Had he been beguiled by the evil one? He had always seemed, despite his travailes, a straight arrow.  I felt that despite my chagrin at his apparently new found liberalism, he should have some reward.  Accordingly I increased my donation.  But I had to know the why of his defection.

"Diogenes," I said to mitigate my sadness, "when you finish the book, may I borrow it?"

"I don't intend to read it," he responded quickly.

"Why then did you buy it, or at least find it?"

"Of course," he concluded, "so that I might burn it."

Terse. Laconic. To the point, as always.  

Next by Constantine Gochis

It is two days in a row that I have done some reviewing of my father's rather voluminous short short stories, and observations and have actually posted them. I found myself separating a few out that I will never post, because something is missing, a page or because of how badly dad typed, lines I cannot quite edit to clarity.  I have also separated out those in which he waxes, often interposing tales of mythology, on sex with a certain amount of frankness. Oh, nothing extreme, but despite the frenzied society's embrace of the most disgusting habits, they will remove or flag something that is harmless or true, and censor it. It is wildly inconsistent. But we are, alas, the victims of the hubris which generates the inconsistency.

And,  in other postings, sometimes my father's cynicism is just too much, albeit I completely understand it. So, I've put aside several stories that will not see the light of day on this site. I have considered destroying them, but really, some are quite good. Maybe someone clearing out my stuff after I have shuffled off this mortal coil will think them worthy of some public denouement.  I doubt it, though, because neither dad nor I have any particular cache, especially the cache of fame. Still, he could be another Vivian Maier, the late photographer, whose hoard made her famous after her death. I think he might like that. The following really short piece was typical of dad's travels in his neighborhood. In his way, using words, he did what Maier did with her photos--he captured the detail of the ordinary parts of real life. 

NEXT

We spend our days in anticipation of some event, sometimes routine, sometimes joyous or sad.  e are destined for a lifetime to await the next call from some umpire in the game of life, within our roster of destined events--next. . .

I am reflecting on this matter as I inch my way towards an overburdened bank cashier.  

It is always crowded and burdensome at the bank.  I miscalculated in that I forgot that social security checks would be distributed early.  There is, this month, an intervening weekend before the third day of the month, the official day of distribution.  Washington is ever solicitous on behalf of the senior citizen on that signal day of our golden years. 

I am so engrossed in this state of inconvenience that I do not hear the mellifluous bell tone that signals the availability of the next teller.  My reverie is broken by a rude and impatient "next in line!" on the loudspeaker by a stressed out voice.  The announcement is not for me. The ample lady ahead of me is NEXT. She, however, urges me forward.  I am familiar with the reason. She is waiting for a cashier who speaks Russian.

"Spasiba," I say and she smiles, revealing a series of alternately spaced gold teeth.

As the cashier ministers to my financial needs I look at the ever growing, snakelike file of walkers and canes. I hear the incomprehensible drone of new languages, as it must have been in the ancient city of Bab-El. I think, "Wherein O Maker of All Things, have we offended Thee again?"

It is no different at the Albertson Market where I must perform my next task of necessity.  I follow a lady bent almost into an inverted L, pushing her empty cart into the store.  There is more than the usual clamor and bedlam, more of the elderly maneuvering their metal prosthetic aids through the obstructed corridors of can laden shelves. But this is ordinary madness.  I am not prepared for what happens next.

An elderly man taps me on the shoulder.  He leas forward with a partially filled hand basket and says: "May I leave this a moment in your cart?"

He is also pushing a modified perambulator, one that carries a prostrate figure, covered snugly against inclemency, and immobile.  I would have thought her dead except for two bluish eyes that did not blink, yet betokened life.

"Was she looking," I thought, "at vistas beyond the scope of our vision, an incomprehensible dimension that might be next when we leave this world?

I did not ask any questions, but he answered the one I was thinking. "She's my mother. She's ninety-two."

I would have guessed she was older.  She had the appearance of a ancient cadaver excavated from a long abandoned tomb.

I motioned him to precede me in the checkout line.

As he pushed his charge forward I looked at the other customers.  No one was paying attention, even looking our way. Was this lack of curiosity, interest or concern, or was it whistling past the inevitability of our own mortality?

"You are a very kind gentleman," the man said in leaving.  I thought the accent was British.  Perhaps it was the way he emphasized "gentleman" that gave it a sense of class distinction.

"By the way," I said, "how old are you?"

"Sixty-seven," he replied.

I thought older.

"Next," called the sales clerk.

You may well ask. 

Mater Dolorosa by Constantine Gochis

The painstaking effort to put as many stories on my blog written by my father, continues, ever so slowly. I think by now, it is close to 100, and I cannot tell you how many more are, in my eyes, so good, so evocative of times and places in his life, that I still want to add. No matter. I will do what I can, when I can in the middle of distractions of (my) life.

There was a deep streak of cynicism in my father. And belief, especially in a religion, the one he was vouchsafed upon his birth, Greek Orthodoxy, and the one he was received into at age 85, Catholicism, the faith he conceded to me at the behest of my mother, was always resisted and always tinged with an unbeliever's sarcasm--at least to my mind. Did he become a Catholic because he believed? I will never know. Perhaps my late pastor and friend Monsignor George Parnassus had insight into that, and perhaps, since he received dad into the Church, he saw belief. I do know my father's practicality, and he always said that he wanted to make things "easier for" me. It was certainly easier to bury my father out of a parish and have him interred in the Holy Ground of a Catholic cemetery. Now that I am old(er) myself, and he has been gone over 16 years, I have realized how much he sought and achieved to make things easier for me. Because I see that now, in a way I did not (though if I really thought of it, was right in front of me) when I was young, I more than a little guilty that I often felt he did not hear what I felt I needed as a child, giving me entirely what he thought I needed. Now I see the overlap in the two, though I still think he often missed the point of my all too often objections to his parental style, which persisted right up until the day he died. In any case, this preface is prelude to a story that like him, circles religiosity, and critiques it, all at once, in a way that I often found a tad, shall I say it, dear dad, smug, spectating God and finding Him wanting. I suppose that is part of what doubt is.  And the realities of the world do engender doubt. 

    MATER DOLOROSA

If someone asks me where I am going, I do not know; and yet it cannot be by pure accident that I find myself in the old neighborhood.  Today it is the feast of the Madonna, Our Lady of Mount Carmel.  It is very festive, but not like in the days of my memory. Long ago the streets are lined with the stands of the peddlers.  One buys the watery but ice-cold lemon sherbert, the inevitable pizza.  There are the stalls that stock the disembodied facsimiles of arms, hands and other body parts, which the faithful keep in memory to the Saints' ordeals of penitence.  One sees again the massive candles that accompany the sculptured effigies of the Madonna and a pantheon of those saints.  Yes, it is very festive, but not like in the days of my youth.

How strange. You walk for hours along familiar streets searching for lost memories, and the years impose themselves, initially inexorably resistant, then suddenly a smile, a face like one you used to know, an old familiar air, a simple cooking aroma. 

Yes, this is the house.  It is the same, though perhaps a little shabbier.  Though it is hot outside, the halls are cool and dank  I would like to walk to the top floor, but the years weigh heavily on me.  Besides, I know what I will find, two doors heavily paned with frosted glass that face each other, silent guardians against the probing eyes of memory.  I hesitate. I turn to go, but the ghosts of other days, once aroused, do not return easily to their rest. Instinctively, my hand goes to the knob. "How futile," I think.  These are different days, and other unfamiliar lives abide here.  I merely stand and think how when I was very young. . .

Aunt Carmela was my favorite aunt.  She rarely smiled, but I was sure she was glad to see me whenever I called.  It was always the same.  She would go to her improvised cupboard behind print cloth suspended by a string, for three or four cookies.  Later, I would be allowed access to the player piano in that perpetually shaded room, where I would pump the pedals, my legs barely long enough to reach them.  Atop the piano three votive candles in little red cups illuminated three photographs casting eerie shadows in the semi-darkness.

Sometimes, I would sense her presence behind me, as I played.  She would be staring, tearfully, at the memorial photographs of her three dead children, two girls, by scarlet fever and her first son, by drowning.  The piano was his.  The daring devil may care, Tony, suffered a cramp when he tried to dive under a Hudson River ferry and failed.  Only Nino was left, her last child.  Young as I was, I knew she listened perpetually for any sound, any signal that he was coming home. He was as daring as his brother, unpredictable in his comings and goings, but when he did appear, though she did not smile, her face illuminated with joy.

It is strange that this sad house was the family gathering place on the day of the Madonna.  

The Church was only a few blocks from my aunt's house.  Each year, she hosted the family for the celebration, always dressed in forbidding black, never smiling and rarely participating in the ceremonies.

Yet, there was always laughter, and food and wine, and cookies in mounds--unprotected from the natural avarice of children. Teresa, my beautiful cousin from across the hall would dance the Tarantella with Nino, and all of us would clap our hands to the tempo of the usic.  Teresa would be flushed and happy, and everyone would remark on how well they danced together.  The children would repair to the fire escape, secured by sturdy planks, to observe the activity five stories below, watching the hydrogen filled balloons that escaped unwary hands.

Downstairs, the penitents continued their procession toward the Church, some crawling on hands and knees in supplication or in hope of a miracle.  Others walked barefoot, rosaries in hand, intoning prayers, interspersed with mutterings of self-castigation. But these things were far from us.  Here, there was food and drink and family and love, and looking down we could feel what God said at Creation, "It is good!"

The door on the right opens suddenly.  I am startled.  The face is unfamiliar, but looks very much like one I would expect, a ubiquitous face, lined, one that has known much of pain.  It is like my aunt's face, perhaps the last of generations, bound, like Prometheus, by the chains of custom and taboo.

I turn to go, but cannot.  There are voices from the past that intrude themselves. They seem to be coming from the landing that leads to the roof. The voices are familiar, insistent, hushed, afraid, uttering forbidden words of love. Cousins. Unmarried. "Jesu misericordia!" 

How hard it is to trace one's memory to that day of epiphany, when childhood innocence becomes disillusion.

There was music and laughter, and gallons of wine at the last party. There were trays of pastry, but one did not feel like having one more cookie.  Somehow the laughter did not hide the pain in eyes that did not smile.  Teresa, my beautiful cousin from across the hall did not dance with Nino. They sat as if a thousand miles apart.  I think of a phrase, "And for the first time they knew that they were naked in each other's presence."  So it must have been in that primeval beginning.  As I watched other eyes watched too.  Hate exploded.  A gallon of red wine came crashing down.  There was a flash of steel and ino fell, and rich red blood mingled with thick red wine.

A memory remains.  A face of abject, wordless sorrow.  It is her face, the face eternal of the Mater Dolorosa.  "There stood by the cross of Jesus, His mother. "

We must allow these restless ghosts to wander.  They are now beyond our compassion.  Downstairs, there are crowds and joy and laughter, and questions.  The festa of the Madonna del Carmine is at its height.  

 

Lessons in A (Personal) Aftermath--August 1, 2011

Although it feels as if I am not making a dent, I have been long going through my "stuff", especially things I never use, but feel deeply attached to, and an abundance of memorabilia, to purge and simplify. I already put most of my hard copy photos in the cloud, and I included scans of cards and notes sent to me over the years, and I tossed the actual paper. I used to call this saved content of my life, before we had the electronic revolution of the last 30 plus years, "the memory drawer".  Literally, it was all in drawers in my apartment. Although I believe that life on this earth is passing and not where or how it was supposed to be, and that I am (and you are) destined for eternity with God, there is this part of me, regrettable perhaps, but it is what it is, that doesn't want to have left no imprint during my time here. And so I write this blog. I have a podcast called "Ordinary Old Catholic Me" about the intersection of this life and my Catholic faith. I tell myself it isn't all about me. I just read a book about Vivian Maier, a woman whose life and eccentric connections with the world would never have been known but for the accidental discovery of her thousands of photographs that made her posthumously famous. Did she want to be famous? Given her psychological history, perhaps she would have said "No!" On the other hand, when she died all this creative material was out there, and providentially (I think) it was discovered and she has a form of immortality here in the memory of others. She had to have known that. I know that such people always fascinate me, maybe because I identify with them. And as much as I want to be known after I die, I want them to be known as well--I want to see their threads in the tapestry, and I hope that others might want to see mine, when I am long gone. In that book I just read there is a quote from Susan Sontag, "To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. By slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."

I would extend that thought to journals, and now blogs and other forms of documenting a time in lives. I read the creative remnants of the famous and the not so famous. So do many of us. When I go to an ancient place, like Pompeii, or Israel, or old, but not quite as ancient places like Oxford, and I see a sign in a quad that TS Eliot walked these grounds, I feel the connection of time, place and people. I think of it as a taste of heaven. So, there is my preface for today's entry. Yesterday, in my rummaging I ran across something I wrote just about a month after I retired. The truth is that my ability TO retire and my being (along with several others, it was not, I have difficulty still remembering, personal) compelled to retire happily coincided. It has been just about 13 years since the five minute end to my vocation of 25 years.

What follows is what I wrote just after that life event. 

Lessons in an Aftermath

About seven or eight years ago, I was on jury duty at the criminal court building which in the City of Los Angeles is only about a block from the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels.  I found myself gravitating toward Mass during the long lunch hours, with time to spare for browsing the gift shop.  On one foray, I bought a pretty calligraphic print, in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript, with the well known words of Saint Teresa of Avila, "Let nothing disturb you, nothing frighten you, all things are passing; patient endurance attains all things: one whom God possesses wans nothing for God alone suffices."

I displayed the print by my desk in my office where I worked as an ethics prosecutor.  Immersed in reading complaints of consumers, listening to their often angry rants about wayward lawyers and my personal failure as a government employee, and worse, they perceived, as the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse, I often failed to notice it or to remember its words.  I certainly failed to implement the gentle exhortation of patient endurance, time and again.  I had been taking Christ under my roof in the Eucharist on Sundays and making prayerful promises about my week to come.  Yet, my world was my office and its peregrinations.  I did not act as if God alone sufficed.  I did not feel it much either.

I had a good long run in that portion of my career--twenty-five years--about a third of a statistical lifetime.  I comprehended hypothetically the dangers of being an at will long term manager in the midst of constant cyclical organizational renewal.  And although I saw the signs of professional danger among several of us similarly situated, since they and I had survived before, I could again.  This time, however, it was not to be.  The organization was going, we were told, "in a different direction."  We weren't going with them.

They say that losing a job is one of the most traumatic events in an individual's life.  In the first week or so, I went through the seven stages of grief in succession and overlap.  Acceptance was not coming easily.

No one is indispensable to a workplace.  But I would be lying if I were to say that I was not hurt horribly to have experienced how readily dispensable I was, without regard to the passion and commitment I had brought to the work of lawyer regulation.  I was both disturbed and frightened to find myself unceremoniously severed from that extended part of my life.  While my colleagues and I surely did good work, as our evaluations over many years would show, we will never receive extrinsic validation henceforward. In fact, the not so implicit future and transient message of our release cannot be other than that somehow we failed.  If they did not value me in that forum, I had no value.

I retrieved little from my office, my diplomas, a poster and my print of St. Teresa's words which now is displayed on my bedroom desk.  I find myself noticing it a great deal.  I find myself meditating on those words in a way heretofore uncharacteristic of me.  I am rediscovering words of similar import by others who experienced the crucible of the secular and spiritual worlds and were irrevocably transformed leaving us their guidance for our time.  Thomas a Kempis writes, "On the day of Judgment, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done, not how eloquently we have spoken, but how holily we have lived.  Tell me where are now all those asters and Doctors whom you knew so well in their lifetime in the full flower of their learning? Other men now sit in their seats and they are hardly called to mind.  In their lifetime they seemed of great account, but now no one speaks of them.  Oh how swiftly the glory of the world passes away. . .He is truly great who is great in the love of God. .  ."

Oh the tug of praise and recognition by my peers, by my bosses, by an institution! It is still there.  It will likely always be there.  But finding past praise meaningless and being severed from the possibility of future praise, at least from this source, has set me in a direction of my own, fitfully indeed, but certainly.

I woke up the other day.  As has been the case for nearly a month I remembered that the years of my niche legal career, painstakingly cultivated, was gone.  But something conjoined the memory.  I was momentarily ready to accept, without fear, the closing of that door and the opening of another where God alone suffices.  Now I must pray for the Grace of patient endurance as I embark on this last phase of my life.

****

Boy, are we inconsistent creatures! Well, boy, I am the queen of the inconsistent! All these years later I am still recognizing that the things of this world are transient, and yet trying to impose the memory of me into that transience. Perhaps that is the proof that we are meant to be eternal. And that heaven is the goal indeed overcoming the transient. Superseding the transient. 

As I commit this old bit of my writing to this forum, the world quite literally seems to be falling apart. Our nation is in a divide not unlike that before the Civil War, a battle of philosophies, where only one can ultimately be true. Our President is afflicted with the ravages of dementia, though it remains denied by the great and powerful who tell us what we are supposed to see. He has decided not to run for a second term for President, for reasons everyone knows but is pretended to be otherwise, but allegedly he is still the Commander in Chief for the next four months. Who exactly is running our country is a matter of reasonable speculation, but is also left unspoken, but certainly they were not elected as our Constitution requires. The former President was just nearly assassinated, left unprotected by the Secret Service we all used to admire. Today, the head of that service, after a defiant appearance before a Congressional Committee, has resigned. Last week, an "accidental" glitch shut down computers all over the world. And here I am worrying about my being remembered on this earth. But it is instinctual, clearly. In a way we are all the fictional Ozymandias, the king that is only remembered because the  desert dust accidentally cleared from his ornate tablet. 

I just like the idea that maybe 100 years from now, someone will be sitting on this very terrace in the middle of Los Angeles, if any of our world survives, reading this entry in my blog written on this day about another day in 2011.  

As to that print with the words of St. Teresa? That was moved to a wall in my living room. I am still working on the reality, the eternal reality, that God alone suffices. 

On Frasier, Stage 18 Paramount and Things Calling Again

I know I have written about my early ambitions and days in Los Angeles. Though I had announced myself (inexplicably, even unto today)  to the profession of attorney when I was fourteen, once I was in college, and introduced to college radio and the idea of becoming a television script writer, my commitment to being a lawyer wavered. I had always loved movies and television. But this period of my life had introduced me to the possibility of being part of the making of the product. Just before I attended law school (knowing how success in creative work is truly elusive), I partnered with my college/WFUV friend Len to seek fame and fortune in sitcom writing. There was a potential agent, at William Morris in New York, no less, but it seemed that our purpose was to be bodies coming in and out of his office showing traffic rather than getting any real headway. He didn't last there, and thus, neither did we. We made several visits to "the Coast" with tantalizing moments of "maybe this time something will happen". We became friends with a truly successful television writer/producer, also a Fordham alum. He showed us around the set of MASH, and we met the stars of the show, including a famous Fordham alum, Alan Alda. We had speculation scripts for MASH, for One Day at a Time, and such, and even had created our own sitcom. 

I finished law school and got a license in New York, just in case, and then when I moved to Los Angeles in 1981, I knew I had better get a license there as well, just in case. I was a dutiful follower of "just in case" which, as it turned out was probably wise. When you are young though, you feel like a slug, never launching into real life. My partner couldn't move then, but I hoped that once I was here, which I loved anyway because of the weather, and because it was so unlike New York, I would continue to write while passing the Bar and holding a job. I sort of did. At the time, one of my favorite shows was Remington Steele, and I wrote, at least partially, a speculation script for them, but then the show was cancelled. Len and I talked the future of our writing, if memory serves and there remained hopes. But life takes over, and passing the Bar and having a decent salary and getting a new job at the State Bar as a prosecutor, accounted for most of my time. In 1997, some fourteen years after me, Len did move to California as did his new writing partner. I had been working at the State Bar by then for eleven years. I still dabbled on my own, and without any connection to get inside. You don't just send scripts. There are often in house writers, and those jobs are understandably jealousy guarded. I worked as an attorney for 30 years, 25 of them at the State Bar. After I was retired, I still dabbled. Even within the last couple of years, I "created" a sitcom about the last renter in an otherwise all condo building and his adventures. But now, with the internet and web series, and how you get noticed, it all seems harder than it was before, and it was harder, and I guess my energy for such things has diminished considerably. Also, I find myself thinking more of final things, sorry to be so dramatic, but when you get to my age, it is pretty dramatic, thus much of my thoughts are about Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. It's not really as morbid as it might sound. This life is incredibly short as our parents warned us, and if you believe in eternity, which I do, there is something and Someone more important to prepare for. But still, I am in this world, though working to be less of it, and certain things just tug from time to time.

And so it was when Len, my old college friend, who still lives here and has produced a web series, Here to There, with his partner, Chris, suggested that we go to a taping of the reboot of Frasier. We both loved the original series, and both of us thought that though reboots are often unsuccessful, that this one was defying the odds. If the desire to be part of the studio audience is any measure, then Frasier is certainly a success in its new incarnation. The second season has promised to bring back more of the characters from the original series, and we wondered if one of them, Bebe Glazer, Frazier's unhinged agent, engagingly played by Harriet Harris, would be one of them. It was on Stage 18 of the Paramount Lot. Just stepping, or in our case, carried in a Golf cart by one of the young tour guide/staff onto the lot had me peering down the Road Not Taken. The particular stage, was built in 1941, and among the art produced there was Rear Window, with James Stewart and Grace Kelly. That incredible set, the one with the garden, the apartments with their unique residents, the fire escapes, the brick buildings so like the ones I grew up in in the Bronx, that evokes my childhood every time I see the film, that set was on this stage. It is at the door of this stage that Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, meets up with Cecil B. DeMille. Oh, and lots of television shows, including Star Trek DS9 and Voyager were filmed here, tantalizing facts for a fan. When you looked up, there was the original catwalk all around the building. 

Watching the actors, the director, the make up artists, the rest of the production staff at work amid the beautifully crafted multiple sets, made me happy and wistful. I love it when the actors try a bit, and even when they make mistakes. Kelsey Grammar would say "What's the line?"  and then quickly moved back into character. People do not realize what an effort it is to deliver the lines because they are often changed while filming is going on. There is a moment, that if you see the episode, ought to make you laugh as hard as it did me, when Ms. Harris as Bebe Glazer emphasizes a line with a lick of a swizzle stick. As I sat there, I thought, "I could write for this show" especially as some of the lines seemed to fit in with my particular style. Well, at least I thought so. The whimsy of what if. Studio lots feel like college campuses. I was really comfortable at my college campus, at that little radio station WFUV in Keating Hall, doing classical music, editing tapes (the really old way), a rock show or two, a poetry show and a radio sitcom. I could have been real comfortable at a studio and a stage like Stage 18. 

The theme song of Frasier, which I only recently heard discussed by Grammar and the theme writer, Bruce Miller, really speaks to me. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPj-pNBfOJQ

It really is about life, Frasier's life (though not specifically mentioned) as a psychiatrist and human being trying to mosey his way through in optimism when so much is not optimistic, and our own, and on this occasion, mine. Life is mixed up. It's full of all sorts of things. 

Hey baby, I hear the blues a-callin',
Tossed salad and scrambled eggs

Oh My
Mercy

And maybe I seem a bit confused,
Yeah maybe, but I got you pegged!
Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha!

But I don't know what to do with those tossed salads and scrambled eggs.
They're callin' again.

Scrambled eggs all over my face. What is a boy to do.

Goodnight, everybody.

Credit to Quora for the above

Even though I was a lawyer for 30 plus years (if you count the time in New York), I have always felt a little confused and uncertain about the choice that I did make. From a practical perspective, it was the best approach. I have a good life in retirement because of that choice, mostly, as often I say, guided by my late Depression era father. And I suppose that now I indulge some of those creative urges, writing this blog, doing a little podcast ( Ordinary Old Catholic Me, though I know you didn't ask), and still occasionally noodling with script ideas that will never get through the studio walls largely because of my erstwhile profession who make everything a potential lawsuit. There's always a chance something I write might make it past the parapets of Hollywood, if I have enough energy to assail the towers--but truthfully I don't. And those things that called again when I sat in that studio audience, with my former writing partner, is a different and more sober experience, than when they first called when I was a 25 year old just considering a move to Hollywood and everything was possible. 

But of course, life itself keeps calling until the last breath. There is hope in that. 

Once Upon and Time, When I Almost Became a Psychotherapist (and Wrote a Paper on "Ordinary People")

 In 1994, I had been in therapy for some few years and as apparently often happens,  I was one of those clients who seek to become healers themselves. No doubt you have heard the term "wounded healers". I  became fascinated by the process on both sides of the chairs. I was also no doubt in the thrall of transferential identification with my own therapist. But it all energized me nonetheless.  I did a lot of reading on my own, but decided I might be better off organizing my burgeoning interest by seeking a degree.  I had just turned 40, and needed to continue making my living as a government attorney, so I could ill afford quitting and going to school full time, which pretty much all the well known schools require. I found a local free standing school which catered to the working crowd, and would allow me to take classes at night. Of course, its accreditation was less than global and only applied to California, where I live. But that was fine with me, the main purpose was extending my exploration of my mind and minds at large, and if I did quit being a lawyer (as more often than not I wanted to do) got a Ph.D. or Psy.D and became a therapist, I wouldn't likely be leaving the state. And whatever limitations of accreditation of the school, there were several really great teachers, all of them practitioners. Five years later, having done all the coursework, passed the Comprehensives, having had the sacred honor of being a trainee therapist (under supervision) at a clinic for about two years, I decided it was not for me for a variety of reasons both external and internal, and quit before completing my dissertation and final oral examination. I have absolutely no regrets about the time and money I spent and the people with whom I came into contact and the learning I acquired. I kept a few of my papers, and in this mission of mine to preserve things, yet purge paper and other stuff, I am putting one I wrote in the Fall of 1995 in response to an assignment in a class Psychopathology II. It was the goal to take a movie which involves psychological issues and write on it referencing the aspects of the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) we had been studying. This was mine. I got an A, and the very nice comment "Excellent paper--very well thought out". I really liked this teacher, Michael Gerson, and I also still am moved by the movie I chose, so I kept this paper in hard copy for nearly 30 years as you can see. 

                                                                  ORDINARY PEOPLE

                                                                        Introduction

From the time of this assignment I wanted to write about "Ordinary People". However, concerned about focusing on a film so generally known, so discussed, so. . . .well, ordinary, I went in search of something more exotic.  I love films, so it was no burden to collect a few to watch again, "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof", "The Glass Menagerie", "The Little Foxes", "Marty",  and one I had never previously seen, the more recent, and graphic, "Damage".  This last Thanksgiving weekend, I came back to "Ordinary People".  I saw it fifteen years ago in a little theatre in Stamford, Connecticut with a college friend.  I wrote in my journal at the time, on October 11, 1980, as follows:

                                   ...(W)ent to see the movie "Ordinary People". It is about
                                   a family whose older son has died and whose second son,
                                   feeling responsible for having survived, attempted suicide
                                   and is slowly, heartrendingly on his way to a psychological
                                   recovery.  He has a father who, while loving, never saw the
                                   boy's problem and a mother for whom open feeling is 
                                   anathema.  As played by Mary Tyler Moore, she is a cold
                                   cheerleader. . . publicly wonderful, ostensibly affectionate
                                   and self-less, but unable in her private moments, with her
                                   second, younger son, to express even the slightest hint of
                                   love.  In fact, she rejects his love, even his touch. She gave
                                   it all to the first boy, the dead one. Conrad, her second son, 
                                   believes his mother never forgave him for living, and so it is.
                                   "Ordinary People" is about the way feelings can destroy lives
                                   or make them stronger.

The movie stirred me as before in its commonality, the commonality of struggling with a seemingly arbitrary universe.  Calvin tells his wife at the end of the film, "It would have been alright if there hadn't been any mess.  You need everything neat. . ."  That is precisely the point. It isn't neat.  It never is.

                                    When man is born, the human race as well as the individual,
                                     he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite
                                     as instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain
                                     and open.  There is certainty only about the past--and about 
                                     the future only as far as it is death (Fromm, 1956).

The person who tries to force the definite for himself and for those around him is going to wreak havoc beyond that given to us by nature, or, depending on one's belief system, by a "disappointed" God.

Beth demands control when it is not possible.  If she cannot control circumstances, she will control her response to them and the response of those closest to her.  Love is measured by a false front. But this orchestrated, nicely constructed family life has become a sieve.  Very messy feelings are leaking out.  A battle is joined amont the three remaining family members, both intrapsychic and interpersonal.  Two survive. One bolts.

                                                                            II

                                 

                                                                 The Story Context

Calvin is a successful tax attorney.  Beth is the ideal, careful, likeable wife and perfect mother.  They live in a well-to-do, well-ordered upper middle class existence.  They had two sons, Buck and Conrad.

Buck was blonde-handsome, outgoing and athletic. Conrad is darkly handsome, serious and quiet. 

When tragedy struck, it took Buck.  Buck drowned when the boat in which he and Conrad were sailing got caught in a storm and overturned.  Conrad lived, but tried to kill himself, in apparent guilt, by slashing his wrists.  Calvin saved his life and Conrad spent four months in a psychiatric hospital suffering from major depression, treated with everything, including ECT.  As the movie begins, he has been out of the hospital for a month and a half.  His look is tortured, his eyes sunken, his hair growing unevenly. He tries to do ordinary things. Choir. Swimming.

                                                                         III

                       

                                                                   Diagnosis

There are four players.  The dead Buck is no less important than the rest.  His live presence was, in hindsight, the tenuous glue for the family.  He was everything Calvin, Beth and Conrad aspired to be.  A little wild. Reckless. Risking. Careless. Open. Conrad idealized Buck.  Beth invested her expectations in him.  Calvin felt the need to tame him.  Buck was their defense against each other.

Buck's death is a catalyst.  By dying he cast everything out of place.  Unlike Beth's napkins in a drawer, these things, these people, could not easily be replaced or fixed.  

Conrad was cast about, first literally, subject to and witness to a horrible life changing event.  It is the stuff of post-traumatic stress syndrome.  He relives, awake and asleep, the tossing and turning in and against the storm, his brother and him shouting at one another to try to survive.  Dreams of the event wake him up in a hyperventilating panic and sweat.  He feels "on stage", detached, without enjoyment of the things that used to have meaning to him.  When there is an emotion, it is irritability, anger, explosiveness.  He cannot concentrate in class, at choir or at swimming.  He tries to forget that he hung on, that Buck let go and that he let go of Buck.  Family life, though, just goes on.  There is no mention of Buck, of that life altering, mind altering, emotion altering, moment in time.  Calvin and Beth compound the unreality and the trauma by not acknowledging it.  Conrad is expected to be as he was before the accident (there is a sense that it was primarily as a reflection of, or corollary to, Buck).  He is bound in every direction.

There is great temptation to label Beth a narcissistic personality in the DSM-IV, Axis II, context, alternating with an obsessive-compulsive personality.  The element that seems to be missing from the obsessive compulsive personality picture is that while she is critical, primarily of Conrad, she is not particularly self-critical.  The "this is how I am" element is not for her ego-dystonic, although it could be seen as an avoidance of her own buried feeling of deficiency.  The walls are impenetrable. She is determinedly a false self, who refuses "misanthropic self-reflection" which would "reveal its own nothingness" and "would be its undoing". (Finely, 1978).  For her, Conrad's self-destruction is only an attempt to hurt her, not a child's natural cry for her love.  What may be most unforgivable about Conrad for Beth is that he is like her (as Calvin point out to a third party), in cutting off emotion (they were the only two not to cry a Buck's funeral). I admit to liking pop psychology books that sum up the soil in which someone like Conrad is cultivated.

                                          The child of the narcissist is never seen as she truly is.
                                          Even before birth, the parent has attributed characteristics
                                          to the child which jobe with the fulminating needs of his
                                          unconscious.  After birth, the child is maimed by endless
                                          attempts to improve her. She is found intrinsically unlovable
                                          and defective because she is born of a parent who feels
                                          horribly insufficient (although he can't admit it) and who
                                          unconsciously puts this label not on himself but on  his
                                          child.  The child can be attacked and corrected without
                                          the parent recognizing that he himself is the target. . .
                                          Children of narcissists emerge from this crucible with
                                          a common and most serious problem. They feel that they
                                          do not have a right to exist. (Golomb, 1992).

When Beth refuses Conrad's hug, refuses to be photographed with him using a crazy-making propriety and logic, "Calvin, take the picture. Calvin, give me the camera!", she dismisses Conrad's very existence.  Something as simple as setting the dining room table is a moment of hurt for him.  He says, "Mom. . ." longing for her to reach back to him.  The phone rings. It saves her from contact, and negates him.  "I wasn't doing anything, just getting ready for dinner. . . "  When he simply looks into Buck's room when she is in a vulnerable reverie, she shouts, "Don't do that!"  Don't do what? She treats even his physical proximity as toxic. (Her treatment of him after this tragedy begs the question of how she treated him as an infant). He is so toxic she never came to the hospital to see him.  He cannot help but believe he is toxic to others.  She engages in an almost purposeful, sadistic missing of opportunities.  She exploits her son's vulnerabilities.  In a sense, she is correct, Conrad's attempt to kill himself was an attempt to hurt her--his anger at her turned on himself.  It appears his anger has more than one target.  His mother yes, but Buck as well, for not surviving, for not being the strong one as everyone thought he was.  For fooling around on the boat. He is angry at himself, for hanging onto the boat successfully.  Finally, he is angry at his father, to whom he says "You don't see things, Dad".  To express the anger, without elaborate disguise, openly, is to violate the unwritten contract drafted by Beth, to which Calvin signed on at marriage, and Conrad by accident of his birth--superficiality, accomplishment, privacy, the refusal to acknowledge the inevitability of pain, to express it, to share it.  It is to be controlled, and if not controlled, ignored.  Conrad has been stranded psychically.  He had to make sense of the senseless.  He had to account for it all.  His mother's every action indicates that it is somebody's fault that somebody more important than him, Buck, died.  Unless someone did something, it should not have happened.  It could not have happened. . .but for Conrad.  Conrad's depression is where it all coalesces.  It is overwhelming.  There is nothing to do but to cut off feeling, and to destroy himself.  Destruction is better than pain, the intolerable of a lost mother and a lost self.  When, though, he begins to rebel against being held responsible, when he begins to think for himself, and worse, to feel something, to seek out healthy relationships (and a love relationship) she punishes him for the restorative rebellion.  He is "walking all over them" again, as if trying to kill himself was a personal affront to her.  What is worse, everyone knows all about it,  all those people for whom the front has been maintained, year in and year out.  

The boy breaks through the facade.  Partly, the breakthrough is thrust on him, by two events.  First is the relationship with his "girlfriend".  The second is the suicide of Karen, his best friend at the hospital.  His girlfriend is the only one to ask him anything directly about his attempt to slash his wrists.  "Did it hurt?" she asks.  It is the first acknowledgment that this is a part of him, of who he is, that it was all about pain.  She is embarrassed, but she hits the mark.  She is authentic.  Karen kills herself, although she seemed fine.  It was false. A pretense.  Another pretense by someone Conrad loved, someone he thought was stronger than himself.  He tried to take the blame for that as he had for Buck's death, and for his mother's refusal to love him.  All of these events set the stage for his damnation or salvation.  And Calvin's epiphany also sets the stage. 

Calvin has been a fence sitter.  He begins, though, to ask questions about his life with Beth.  When he asks her if she really loves him, she says, "I feel the way I always have felt about you." That is a profoundly evasive and unsatisfactory answer.  Where Conrad is fighting a raging depression, Beth fights a raging narcissism, Calvin is something of a spectator.  I could not say he fits any particular "disorder", but he has avoidant qualities, a certain inadequacy in the face of familial upheaval, a Candide like optimism that is misplaced ("He's great; Conrad's great!") and failing.  He beings to see things.  He begins to see them through his eyes, not Beth's.  It is courageous when he suggests to Beth that they all see Conrad's psychiatrist, Dr. Berger, recognizing a destructive element in the family and the need for a radical change.  If I have an image of Calvin it is that he, too long, failed to be a true buffer between Beth and Conrad.  He recognizes he was not listening to Conrad.  Conrad, for his part, leads the way to the understanding that Dr. Berger articulates, "Feelings are scary.  Sometimes they are painful.  If you can't feel pain, you can't feel anything else."

Conrad and Calvin tear up the implicit contract.  That means letting Beth go her own way.  The prognosis for Conrad and Calvin is good.  For Beth, it is problematic. 

Well, there it is. I leave you with someone's compilation on YouTube with some scenes that cannot help but have effect and cause affect.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7glYvP7syg

                                  

Requiem for A Barber by Constantine Gochis

    

My father spent a quarter of a century in and around the Fairfax District of Los Angeles when he moved to join me, his palm tree blue sky intoxicated only daughter in California. The neighborhood was reminiscent of areas in New York with which both of us were familiar and comfortable, little grocery stores and curio type shops and of course, barber shops, then very unhip and wonderfully cheap as nothing is any longer. He was an observer my dad. He has been gone 16 years. I don't think this or any such shop any longer exists in that area, which has given itself over to the Z or some such generation. So, in a way, this is a little piece of the history of the area. 

She was standing at the entrance of the barber shop.  The store was empty, all four chairs unoccupied. She seemed deep in thought and did not notice my arrival.

"Could I get a haircut, today?" I asked.

She started. Her large, blue eyes widened behind her massive circular lenses. She did not blink, not for an instant. She was happy to see me.  I am one of her favorite customers. 

She took both my hands, backing up, pulling me into the shop. Her expression was pregnant with a need to tell me something important. 

"Henry's dead," she said, fixing me with the unblinking eyes.  I detected no great sadness.

I was shocked. Henry was to me a fixture of the neighborhood, like the ancient lady who sits outside Canter's Delicatessen soliciting coins for Jewish causes with her blue and white slotted can.

"You didn't heard?" she pronounced. "Three days ago, three, a massive heart attack. Six in the morning. They called Vladimir."

Two extraneous thoughts entered my mind--the obvious but ubiquitous grammatical error was the first, and then the idea that I should have heard of Henry's demise. My contacts with the shop are rarely more than once a month. Imelda, however, has always treated me as special. I rarely escape a warm hug and, if I am unwary, a kiss on the cheek. At the very least, she clasps my hands in her pudgy, warm ones and holds them prisoner for an inordinate time.

I looked at barber chair number one, at which Henry could be found standing for as many years as I can remember.  A short man, perpetually old, taciturn, with a circular band of very white hair ringing the shiny nakedness of his head.

I expressed my sorrow, asked if there were any way I could help, extricated my hands and turned to go, but she stopped me.

"No," she said, "the shop is open. Vladimir and I run it. Come, sit."

She led me to her chair, the last one in the place, all the time talking in incoherent, incomprehensible, excited sentences.  There was something other than sorrow about her. It was a kind of relief.  It would have escaped me if I did not know of her history with Henry. There was, in fact hate between them, venomous and deep seated.

Vladimir, the other barber suddenly appeared from the back of the shop. He was pushing a broom that searched with manifest futility for wisps of hair on an immaculately clean floor.  There was nothing of sadness in his manner. He was humming a Russian melody, coming close to us as if to eavesdrop, peering through milk-bottle lenses, smiling. He had never been this intrusive before but I did not care. He spoke only Russian and it was questionable as to what he could see out of those thick lenses or understand. 

What was clear was that he, like Imelda, were acting as if a great burden had been lifted from them.

I was not sure what benefit might have accrued to Vladimir.  He was always a substitute barber whose services were rarely requested. His bad vision and his frequent sorties to the rear for another shot of vodka did not recommend him to customers. Imelda once told me that he had begged her to finish a shaving job on a supine, unsuspecting customer, relinquishing his soap encrusted razor to her with a shaking hand.

There had been a feud between Henry and Imelda from the first. He wanted her out from the day he hired her to accommodate a sudden surge of business.  That same day he fired her without giving a reason.

"I cried," she said. "I told him I had no money for rent, or food, and he let me stay." He wide open blue eyes teared at the memory.

Henry regretted his kindness immediately.  For Imelda, her next few years were a succession of trials and harassments, practically each she recounted to me as a bonus accompanying the haircut she was giving me. 

There seemed no rationality to Henry's animosity. He received fifty percent of every haircut she gave. She drew customers. His services were preeminently wanted by the Orthodox men whose rules seemed to preclude ministrations from a woman. She is an excellent barber if one does not mind the endless chatter. I suspect that Henry was jealous of her skill. 

I might have been an unwitting contributor to the feud.  Henry had been my barber for years before I discovered Imelda cut my hair the way I preferred.

Imelda is short and stocky, perhaps in her middle forties.  Barbering seems her only skill since she expresses great difficulty in finding more remunerative placement.  Still, she makes no demands of destiny, asks for little more than sustenance and is another victim of the pervasive injustice of the world.

"Just the night before he died, he missed striking me in my face by an inch." The remark came in sibilant tones through the mask she wears when she does her cutting, to avoid inhaling short hairs.  She was also wearing her customary cloth hat in addition to the mask, the red one, which alternated with another in green. 

The thought of Henry striking anyone was incongruous. "Henry seemed such a gentle man," I said.

She stopped snipping, incredulous at my comment.

"One night, without warning, he came to my chair and threw my hair dryer to the floor. 'Get out!' he shouted, shaking his fist in my face, his in rage!"

She pointed to a jagged tear in her white coat. "Here is one hole he made with his scissors. The other is in my green hat."

"Why didn't you call the police"

"He would lie, say he didn't do it. After that he would take out the sharp blades from my clippers and put in his dull ones. They cost twenty dollars a piece."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"I put in a lock and it stopped." She was silent for a time. I saw that she saw her status now as more secure. For now, Henry's wife needed the barber shop. Imelda offered a continuation of the money that would pay the rent. So, Imelda is happy. Vladimir, too. I did notice that she had not moved to chair number one. I had a theory. 

"Imelda, why don't you move the shaving lather machine to your position? I would make your work easier."

"Henry's wife won't let me," she responded flatly.

This could mean sentimentality, a wifely gesture to maintain Henry's earthly possessions just as they were when he departed. Somehow, I think not. Henry likely left strong residual impressions of his loves and hates before his earthly departure.