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.

The Mirror in the Curio Shop by Constantine Gochis

Ricardo was struck by the pervasive emptiness of the shop, the subdued, even dim lighting.  He was the only customer.  He had been attracted by the subdued, even dim, lighting. He was the only customer.  He had been attracted by the curious antique quality of the ares in the windows of the store, an anomaly in a neighborhood of modern day markets and bistros.  He had entered on the off chance that he might find a gift, something unusual and meaningful, for his beloved Encarnacion.  She, his fiance, always spoke in enchanted whispers about the wondrous vestiges of yesteryear, the trinkets, toys and finery of the days of the Cavalier, as well as his blandishments of love he would bring to his lady--under the sharp eyes, of course, of the everpresent Duena.

The Curio Emporium would have such items, he thought. He entered there guided as if by some unseen force to a large glass table positioned under an ornate silken lamp, with fringes at its border.  He recalled his grandmother had such a lamp, in the long, long ago of his childhood.

The oval shape of the hand-mirror caught his eye. It was ringed by an intricately woven frame of fine, darkened metal, perhaps silver. It did not have the look of this century, or even the previous one. Perhaps baroque, he thought. 

It lay nestled in the wide assortment of second-hand merchandise on the dusty table that included other feminine vanities of days gone by--a comb, carved out of ivory, a matching ivory backed brush and a kindred box of the kind in which ladies were wont to store the fallen strands of hair that clung to their combs after vigorous brushing. 

He bent to examine the metal artistry that enclosed the mirror. It was indeed silver transmuted into dullness by long inattention. It was make a fine gift for his beloved Encarnacion. 

As he bent over the table, he noticed that the mirror reflected nothing but emptiness, a bottomless void. He looked at the lamp above the table, which though dim, lit the table and its contents, but was not mirrored in the glass. 

He thought it must be an illusion. He reached for the handle of the mirror, but he paused when he felt a sudden presence.

"It's not for sale!"  The voice was harsh, unfriendly, even hostile. "The items on the table are not for sale!"

He turned and beheld a tall, aged woman, clad from head to toe in black. Her face was guarded by the shadows, yet he discerned skeletal gauntness. She said nothing more, turned and seemed to glide rather than walk to the rear of the shop, her feet hidden by the length of her funereal gown. She was gone.

He was embarrassed, as if he had committed a grievous wrong. In order to disguise his discomfiture, he pretended to be interested in other musty items in the shop, but departed after what seemed a decent interval.

Outside, it was sunlit. He took a deep breath and exhaled the dust of the shop, and pondered the experience.

The image of the toiletry items lingered in his mind, but especially the mirror. Was it the lighting? Was it his imagination? His skin tingled in fear and relief. The image of the wraith-like crone, dressed in stygian black severity of a long ago era, obsessed him. She and the mirror were related in some way, he was sure. It was not his imagination. The lamp above the table did not appear in the oval face of the hand mirror, nor did it reflect anything else.

A sudden terror overtook him.  He turned with great apprehension so that the slanting sun was behind him and he looked down.  "There it is, there it is! he shouted joyfully as he saw his elongated shadow before him on the sidewalk. "Dio Mio, Dio mio--Gracias a nuestro Senor en Cielo, nuestro Salvador!" My God, my God, thanks to our Savior in Heaven."  His soul was unassailed, intact. He spat once with contempt at "el Diablo", the Evil one, for good measure.

Encarnacion listened to his tale. Perhaps it was his imagination, but she trembled at his account. He looked at her as she lifted her wide eyes to his, crossed herself and mouthed a silent prayer. 

"Amor de mi vida," she said to him. "You must never go into that shop again. I thought she was dead, dead, long, long ago." 

"Who was dead?" He laughed. "You cannot mean that emaciated specter in black, the proprietor, although she did look like death." He laughed again, but nervously this time. 

"It is she," said Encarnacion. "La Condesa de Mariel. My grandmother knew her.  They were classmates at the Convent of Misericordia, as children.  My grandmother is dead twenty years and she was ninety when she died."

"What has an old shop owner to do with an antique mirror, a comb and a brush?. This is some old ladies tale."

Ricardo's tone was scoffing and it irritated Encarnacion.

"Old ladies tale? The story ran for months in the press. Two men died. They killed each other over the greatest beauty of her time, the Condesa de Mariel. She became known as the Donesa del'infierno, the Countess from Hell. And it was over the mirror, the comb and the brush.

"Your grandmother told you the story?"

"Not directly. The Condesa had confided regularly to her. My grandmother was like a confessor to her.  The Condesa told things to her she could not tell a priest."

"And your grandmother told you?" I concluded.

"No," said Encarnacion. "I heard her confession as she received last rites.  I won't tell you how or why I was hidden in my grandmother's room when she died.  That is a story for another time, other ears, many years hence. Listen, these are the words my grandmother heard from the Condesa. 

"There can be no passion in Heaven or Hell such as my lover brought me.  I hid nothing.  If my husband, the Count, knew, he gave no sign. I would not have cared if he did know.  Each time my lover left me, the Count's presence in the same room, in the same house, became intolerable.  I rejoiced when Esteban, my adored, brought me the toiletries. Each time I brushed my hair and held his mirror I beheld the image of his handsome face, and I could then retire into dreams of passion in my sleep.  I was like a a 'novia' a fiance with her engagement ring.  His gift became personified; they became him. I needed to show them to the other ladies of our coterie, like an ingenue would display her diamond of commitment, though there was certainly no ingenue among us. And so I did. It was like a knife in my heart when it happened.  

The Condesa de Monte Placido smiled above the rim of her teacup and said, 'I thought they were familiar. Your Caballero took them from me in a rage when I threw them from my bedroom just a few weeks ago. He said, waste not, want not.' There was an angry merriment in her laugh.

The laughter of the other ladies drove the knife deeper into my bosom. It was an affront to my honor, to the depths of my soul. I resolved at that moment that my lover would die. 

It was a simple enough task. I made my affair known to everyone.  It was something my husband's honor could not ignore. They were both good shots. They killed each other in a duel.

At that moment, I died also. Night after night I held the glass aloft and searched for my beloved's face. The mirror reflected nothing, nothing animate or inanimate.  It is La Maldicion di Dio, the Curse of God. I cast no shadow when I walk in the sun.  I have lost my soul."

Ricardo held Encarnacion close. She stared as if in a trance. He wondered why her grandmother had felt the need to tell this story to a priest when she died. But the answer came as Encarnacion continued with her grandmother's last words. "Now I can die in peace.  I could never enter heaven with the Condesa's secret on my heart.  It was a mortal sin I held and committed and bore all the interminable years of my life. I die now in peace."

Ricardo felt his fiance go limp.  He could feel the pounding of her heart against his chest. The recitation revived his original fears.

No. Surely it was the lighting in the shop. If the mysterious old woman had not stopped him from retrieving the mirror, he would have seen that it was only a glass. Yes.. He would have seen his face, had he had the chance to look.

Still he would not forget to go to Mass on Sunday. In fact, there was still time for a long delayed visit to the confessional. It is another mortal sin to take the Host at Mass without having confessed.  The soul is a very fragile instrument.

 

"

It IS Later Than You Think

I just named this story now, some 45 years after I wrote it. Well, not really is it a story, but a memorialization of what probably was something I saw when I used to ride the bus in New York. Going through the "memory drawer" which had spread to all sorts of places in my apartment, and trying to prune it down to the "I can't let this go yet!" state, I ran across this effort of mine. I seem to remember that I did it in response to some writing opportunity for some magazine. But I am not sure. I also, think it was rejected, but I'm not sure. In any case, when I read it again, I am rather pleased with myself that I even cared about the old when I was in my early to mid-twenties, and rather non-plussed to realize that I am an age I mention therein, 70. How did that happen?! (I also learned a new word recently interrobang, which is the combination of the question mark and the exclamation). 

Anyway, I have also realized that much of my writing style is not dissimilar to that of my father. That is purely a matter of genetics I'm thinking as he never instructed me in writing. But there you are. I clearly was not adopted. So as I wish to tear up the hard copy of this thing, and yet wish to preserve it, I am transcribing it here. About six of the upper right of lines somehow got torn off in the last decades, but I think I can reconstruct it enough to get the start of the thing. So here goes.

The woman snapped loudly so that everyone on the bus concomitantly snapped their head to look at her and the hunched, wrinkled old man struggling slowly behind her. "Over HERE, pa!" The shouting was not without reason as the aged parent wore a hearing device. Still louder she admonished him, "Over HERE, PA!". Then she shouted "No, not THERE, the seat is wet!" He looked at her puzzled. What did she want him to do? He could barely hear her. He hesitated, then finally obeyed. He sat. He said little. The passengers watched. I recall that I thought it was such a terrible thing to be old, to be so unnecessary. I felt a surge of apprehension because I knew that in time I would also reach that stage of life.  It was easier to shut out such feelings, to remind myself, after all, I am very young.

Still, I could not help but consider his plight. How ironic that this man who had worked, played, married and raised a child, that this once active, intelligent, vital human being was now conditioned to react to stimuli like a puppy. It was a terrible thought, but as Pavlov's dogs would salivate at the sound of a bell, this man responded to the hard shouts of an anxiety-ridden, seemingly bitter, middle-aged woman.  But he is old. He has no choice. It is unconscionable.

Here was one man, among many like him, condemned to inaction and slow deterioration because his advanced age makes him a symbolic menace to society. The old should be hidden away, tucked quietly in the nursing home to be viewed once a week, once a month, once a year, by a "dutiful" family that is footing the bills. Strange benefactors are we who keep grandma alive physically, but who see fit to smother her spirit by reminding her of her age, her frailty, her uselessness.  

Grandfather awakens early, perhaps five or six in the morning. He washes. He shaves, missing a short, white, but visible section of beard, but making himself presentable for the day to come. But what will he do? He will pace back and forth on the sun deck, often stopping, and staring, lost in thought. He will remember days so remote in time they seem to have been a dream, of a youth full and happy, perhaps a company presidency that brought respect, maybe reward. We prefer he not remember. He is old; he can have no dreams. No memories.  He returns to his room, sitting in a chair, listening to the ticking of the clock, hoping that someone, anyone, will come and speak to him, to make the wait easier, the wait for death. No one comes.

The old really are not forgotten, no, never forgotten.  They are very much on our minds, but we implicitly hope that their forced absence will help us ignore a fact of life, that we too will die. The old are frightening reminders that one day climbing stairs will be an adventure and that no amount of make-up will hide the dryness of skin, and the lines of "character". It will take twice as long to cross the street. We will be retired from our jobs to make room for young-bloods with creative ideas, with revolution, not evolution on their minds.

We refuse to accept the inevitable and those who have begun to pass through the portal of age and death become victims of our fear.  The child knows nothing of his mortality.  "Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies," goes some poem. Somehow realization of the existence of death comes, but not acceptance. We are creatures that seek permanence, security and comfort. Yet, we fin only insecurity and change. Change is the order of things, and we fight it. If old age is a stepping stone to the ultimate change of death, then we will inhibit its onslaught. We will extol all things youthful--music, clothes, hairdos, language. We will avoid things old, laugh away our fears, laugh at the old codgers and their complaining ways. Perhaps you have overheard a conversation between a husband and a wife and you might be reminded of the prevailing attitude. Grandfather is a nuisance. Whenever he comes to visit, he stamps around in the early morning waking the household. He is always in need of company. He is just so. . . .old. He is not a good influence on the children.  Wouldn't it be better if her were out of the way, somewhere where they could take care of his every need?

The media of communication perpetuate the attitude toward age. Jokes are bantered about as though none of us will ever reach the age of seventy. An old person is generally cast as an eccentric little mouse who wears bifocals and has a penchant for mixing a great arsenic cocktail, charming but silly crazies like the two in Arsenic and Old Lace.  The aged are perhaps the most stereotyped group of all, the librarian notwithstanding.  If you see a little old lady with an umbrella, she is likely to swat you with it for a minor transgression. The elderly, cranky and troublesome are embodied in the darling of The Tonight Show, lovable, old, Aunt Blabby.  I laugh. I love Aunt Blabby. But then, we think we can afford to laugh. We are not yet shriveled. We are not yet facing death. We refuse to believe we ever will.

I recall a youth who once, watching an old couple struggle to get up to exit from another bus, commenting in a voice that was genuinely intended as a whisper, but which was painfully heard--"It looks like they can barely hold each other up."  

Well, young one, your time will come.  It is later than you think. 

Of course, since I wrote this little piece, I have learned things about life. Sometimes, there is nothing to be done but for a friend or family member to become resident of a nursing home. We live in times, even more than when I was writing in the 1970s, where people are all over the place. Families do not stay together as once was the case. Someone, in the blossom of youth, decides to leave his or her home in another country, travels all the time, can visit with anyone he or she wants until that devil age hits, with its concomitant decrepitude.  Oh, yes, some people remain sharp and fairly well mobile, but there almost always comes a time when they simply cannot handle the affairs of everyday life.  It happens insidiously. Imperceptible almost. (For me, taking a heavy bag of used cat litter down the stairs has become anathema!)) And they cannot go back to their place of origin. Or the dementia simply makes their being alone at home too costly--and physically impossible. How many people have promised to keep mom or dad at home, but they not being terribly young and becoming health impaired themselves, have to make the decision to send mom or dad to the care of others? But there remains that distancing attitude I observed when I was young myself. Not so long ago, before my corticosteroid injection for hip issues, I was limping sufficiently I needed a cane to reduce the discomfort (and at the two month mark for the shot, I am keeping my fingers crossed!). People simple treated me as if I were invisible. And I wasn't terribly disabled. Go into a store in some hip shopping area, and note how the young respond. I could have sworn the other day that a couple of teenagers were laughing at me. What was I doing? Nothing unusual. But something about me generated giggles from Generation Z or Alpha (I wasn't sure of their respective ages). I have developed enough of a thick skin that comes with age that I noticed but remembered the line from Moonstruck, "You know you're going to die, don't you?" They don't, of course. And, differently from the time I wrote the original piece, I have returned to the practice of my Catholic Faith. I have a slightly different perspective about death, Memento Mori. Death is, for people of faith, not an end, but a door to eternity. That doesn't relieve of anxiety, but it buffers it a bit. 

I think. 

Three Score and Ten Years: Going Down Memory Lane

I did not expect to be quite this nostalgic, or as deeply affected by the fact that I am turning an age at which phrases like "Seventy is the new Fifty" resonate with absurdity. Fifty. Seventy. You've lived a long time and it has simply slipped by before you realized it! And there is nothing that can be done, except maybe to make the last score (if you've got it) a humdinger. That means more gratefulness and less crabbiness. It means for me, a lot of spiritual work, as a Catholic. It means paring down both physically and psychologically, getting to the meat of things. That's the goal anyway.

Part of the paring down has, as you may have noticed in reading these pages, if you do, been going through photographs. Since about 2010, I stopped using physical albums, as most of us probably have, but I have and had an immense number of albums from the time before the flood, before cell phone cameras. At first, I was putting some of them here, but I found this site that purportedly (for a price) allows you to store photos well, like, forever. You see, you can put stuff on the cloud with your phone plan, but after you kick, and stop paying, well, it's out there, but who knows where. In this plan I got, I am paying in monthly installments for a certain number of bytes, and presumably, after I kick off this mortal coil, me, my friends and family will be in the ether to be seen by whatever is left of society down the road 100 or more years--and I am not betting on our survival by the way. But IF there is a civilization, maybe someone will stumble onto the bunch of us I have stored and wonder about us, just as I have wondered about people I see on line long gone. I have always liked that connection. I don't know why. Maybe it's proof of the Communion of Saints. We are all part of one large thread. Or something like that. 

I am thinking of throwing a landmark birthday party for myself that I will fund, as I did, well, twenty years ago. It is clear that it will be the last one---in that if I make the next twenty, throwing parties will not likely be on my mind. Today I went to a little restaurant along the Sunset Strip that mixes the rustic with the California vibe. Depending on the price package, it is looking like the venue I might select. I could have had the Sunset Tower (formerly the St. James, an art deco hotel and facility) for $82,000.00 but I thought that a bit steep! 

Anyway I am wandering down memory lane in photos. Graduations, parties at the apartment I shared with my widowed dad while I attended college and law school back in the dusty days of the 70s, parties elsewhere held by college and law school friends,  weddings--wow a whole bunch of weddings of several folks with whom I am happy to say I still have relationships, visits to various locales, San Francisco, or Utah, or Missouri, or Italy, or London, or Canada. 

It used to be that when I perused these photos it didn't feel that long ago. Well, that's changed! I see how young we all were. Well, we are not. . .young. We are not. . . .middle aged. We are. . . .senior souls. I was looking for a word that would not offend you, or me. Suffice it to say, I now regard these photos as of another time and place. Regrets? I have a few. Isn't that a song? Wisdom? I am still in search of. . . .

Back when those pictures were taken, I was so uncomfortable in my skin. I hated how I was built physically.  That really hasn't changed, but now it no longer matters. I am no longer in the competition, even with myself, and that is enormously freeing. When I was young and well into my thirties I avoided romantic relationships--queen of the platonic I have always been--but during a lengthy therapy, encouraged by the now late psychologist who became a friend (along with his family)--I tried like the dickens to change all that. With his help I opened up emotionally, but didn't quite crack the nut of marriage and family. Met a couple of really nice guys but as soon as someone was available and potentially close--I fled or caused them to flee. 

These days my considerations are more in the direction of the eternal. Not like that is any easier because it is about the ultimate relationship and I haven't managed a penultimate human one.  It thus may even be harder, but the end game--life and happiness with God, as He always intended for us all does have a gold ring appeal. When Hamlet did his To Be or Not to Be speech, he saw the death he contemplated gloomily as the way to escape the slings and arrows of this life, a consummation devoutly to be wished or something to dread because of what might come after. But if indeed it is as advertised, there could be nothing better than the Beatific Vision. And I am walking and tripping on the road on the way there with enormous awkwardness and sometimes too often complaint. But I just want to stay on the road, which perhaps because so many forces conspire in this life against it, seems like crawling. But it is the right road. And the right direction. And with the help of the Sacraments, I just might make it. I appreciate those others on the road with me, sometimes pulling me along.  

Space by Constantine Gochis

 A one pager submitted to Dad's writing teacher in West Hollywood. Dad did not begin his brief work, "Space, the Final Frontier. . . ." That would have been plagiarism. 

Here we go.

Some time ago, Bea suggested we write about space. The time has come.

Well, space is like time.  It expands and retracts.  If one has plenty it will take all of it to do the job regardless how minute it is. Space is indispensable.  It can be given or taken away. It has an inner and outer capacity.

There is infinity to expansion and a boundlessness to its retraction, depths almost beyond the conception of the human mind. Scientists have further proposed that in the smallest of particles there are billions of smaller orbiting worlds, each on its own path.

One can agree to its palindrome state.  There is never enough of it and more than often too much.

It is something that can be used to describe your dearest friend, when paired in the past tense with "out", though there seems to be no recorded instance--to my knowledge--of anyone being described as "spaced in". 

Space can be an aperture.  The human form is alloted nine of these.  I pause so that each of you can withhold the verbalization of this statistic if modesty interposes itself as a consideration.  There is no need to count beyond seven, unless you named the forbidden areas as numbers one and two.

California garages have spaces too small for their cars, nor big enough for the storage of disposable articles you just cannot let go of.

The same is true of our closets.

The freeways are unintended parking spaces.

Lastly, there is media space, voices in endless, noisy, intrusive exhortation for your auditory senses; full screens to allow the gods and goddesses of illusion to parade their wares before the world, and persuade us that they come to serve us and provide us with the Good.

Space has the virtue of egalitarianism.  It has been said that 'the meek shall inherit the earth."  This may not be fully so.  There is enough to include all of us, in due time.

Count Gregory the First Version: By Constantine Gochis

Because I have been loading these dad stories onto my blog ever so slowly and with huge time interspersals, I have kept a list of what I have included on this site, so, hopefully, I do not duplicate. I pulled a "Count Gregory" story that was clearly written a very long time ago.  I had this feeling that it was one on the list, so I checked.  Sure enough in July 2019 I entered a Count Gregory story. I decided to pull it up and noticed that it is a different version. In fact, the one currently in my hand appears to be the "original" and dad did a fairly substantial edit, substantial enough that it seems largely a different story. A little background. Charlie was the man for whom dad worked through the 1950s and half-way through the 60s, at a baby photography studio, with its main office and warehouse in Brooklyn. Dad never did any selling as far as I know. When I was a kid, I knew he did some sort of managerial job, but I never knew, and still actually do not. But he always looked like it was something important. He had the continental style of a Count Gregory. He was handsome; he was both an autodidact and a college graduate on the GI bill. In 1965, when he was already in his forties, Charlie closed the business. Dad had to find another job, which he did, ultimately with the City of New York, and did well, though he always thought too little of himself. This is a true, or not true tale of interactions that occurred when he was working with Charlie. My father's nickname was "Buddy" when he was a young man, and through my young years, to the family and old friends, but later he discarded that name for a diminution of his own.

So, here is the original Count Gregory. My dad dedicated it to his old friend, passingly mentioned in the body of the story, Irving Elkin. 

In 1956, Charlie exclaimed, "The answer is right in front of my nose:  Buddy Gochis!

Arthur, his manager of many years had quit to go into business for himself, the Eastern distributor of what a Japanese exporter calls, "our most hot selling  product," which was nothing more than dinnerware of various sizes with a photographic emulsion on the surface. 

"Buddy Gochis," Charlie reiterates. "And he has a college education."

Now, Charlie probably had little comprehension of matters esoteric, like college. I do not believe he made great effort to provide this experience for his children, although his wife was a graduate of a name college. 

He was, however, astute. I am a good manager, and he bought cheap.

I spent nine years in an atmosphere foreign to my nature. It is probable that fate has relegated me to associations I would rather not have, for sins in some previous lifetime.  Take, for example, the need to regale the "high average salesmen with emoluments such was "The Monday Night Fights," followed by a seance at the "Famous" a dairy restaurant on Eastern Parkway. Charlie usually ate too much, got dyspepsia, and blamed it on the soup, with farfel, which topped an extraordinary feast. 

I have often thought that if someone had spoken aloud the vocative, "Open Sesame" in these environs, a huge rock would have magically rolled aside, revealing a treasure worthy of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate.  

Among the charter members of these Monday night amenities was one of my brothers-in-law, a top "proof-passer", not above overcharging and adjusting the deposit and balance so that the first two copies of the sales slip did not deprive Charlie of his due, yet allowed an increment to be placed in that favorite direction, "South".

Then there was another Charlie.  He sold paper and was good at it. Later a photographer would appear, with an album, and the proof-passer, whose appearance was simply to give the lady of the house one "free picture" she was promised in the original package, which gave her lifetime benefits.

This Charlie was large and porcine in construct.  Curiously, his wife and daughter were carbon copies of himself.  When I would catch him, as I did many others, in some new scam, the boss would say, "It's ok, as long as they leave something for me."  His rationalization, which he freely gave was "You catch me on one, I get away with two."

There are others worthy of mention in this group. One day, I will provide at least four pages, single spaced, on each one.

Now, Count Gregory was not a part of this extraordinary phyllum.  In fact, he was not a Count at all.  That he found his way into this group was testimony to his ability to insinuate himself into places where he did not have the price of admission.

He was sartorially elegant; he was continental in mien and a lousy proof-passer. He was a Russian and an aspiring comedian, without a writer or an agent. He had one joke which he used perpetually, an eternal play on homophones, to wit, "I am not a Russian; I am never rushing."

I did not seek his friendship, but he solicited mine. In fairness, there was no favor or advantage implied.  For me, there were extraordinary encounters in the periphery of show business, of which more perhaps another time, as well.

The Count was "booked" at a relatively chic restaurant called the "Czardas", Hungarian cuisine predominating. It was, for those familiar with the continental cafe, a bistro, restaurant style, across from the "Viennese Lantern" where I was regaled frequently by a good friend of mine. We discussed business over an appetizer of Maatjes herring, followed by Wienerschnitzel, and washed down by a vintage, chilled Bordeaux

It was a Monday night, already not an augury of promise.  Besides myself, there may have been three or four other people in the joint. The Count had a sort of Victor Borge routine, a few notes at the piano, followed by a joke. Of course, he included his hallmark, "I am not Russian; I am never rushing," which hit the ground like a hard-boiled egg.  

Curiously enough, he had a stage presence and a charm.  My guess is that with a comedy writer, he would have been as good as any, given the Angel of 'Mozel" was disposed to smile on him.  Certainly, he was widely recognized in many backstage areas he brought me to as a guest.  He was hailed and greeted as a Count indeed; he kissed the ladies preparing for the show on the hand, or on the cheek, sometimes requiring a touchup of the lady's disturbed facial area.

In these peregrinations I found myself at several fundraisers for a new musical, or for a play, to which the Count might be invited.  They took place in the posh apartments of Central Park West, an area of which I already had intimate recollections. As a young boy, I had delivered centerpieces and orchids to the elite. As in the present cases, the address was merely an indication of class.  The interiors were usually tasteless and functional for the bare necessities.

I sat through a whole musical done by a pianist and several voices. While the music droned on, a soft voiced man, balding and bespectacled told me he had information from the spheres that I was destined for greatness. He moved closer with every pronouncement. After a polite interval I moved to another area of the room, next to a lovely creature who earlier had performed a guitar solo. Somehow, she took my hand, and held it in a caressing manor.  I could feel her warmth, or more correctly, her social aptitude, as she applied little squeezes at intervals. I do not recall there were many checkbooks in evidence at this fundraising gala. The Count was effusive but not forthcoming materially.  I was tapped and concerned that I may not have enough resources for a couple of cocktails and such, with the charming girl, who now held her guitar in one hand and my left arm with the other.

Now that I recall, the Count had great trouble watching the fights from our ringside seat.  Truly, he did not belong in this crowd. I wonder what sins he committed in his previous stay on this orb. My guess is that he was a real "Count"; maybe the one who did Rasputin in.