Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow

Years ago I had a single blind date with a sighted woman who worked in publishing.  I’m pretty sure it was she who gave me an advance copy of a book called “Do What You Love– the Money Will Follow”.  I remember it had a white cover.   I told someone about it recently and commented that I still have it on my shelf, unread more than 20 years later.  I don’t see it anywhere as I scan the shelves now, but it’s possibly fallen into a crevice and been covered with fur along with my missing pocket book of jazz standards and innumerable other items.

I read a few pages and put it aside in disgust back then, like many things.  Like a middle class life, for example.  How that happened is worth a word:  I found I wasn’t cut out to compete for the love of wealthy people in the art world.  Displaying drawings and paintings in libraries, as my father suggested I try, was not the same as being a fantastically paid meteor in the art world firmament– I retreated into a kind of autism for a few months as I came to realize neither of these options was viable.

To my surprise, I found that I really enjoyed working with third graders.  I was hired as a teacher in a series of horrible situations.  Being a NYC public school teacher in poor neighborhoods was a bit like being a death camp guard in World War Two who loved Jewish and Gypsy humor.   I was as helpless as the children against the meat grinder that was at work on them, that was paying my salary and health insurance and giving me ten paid weeks off every summer. 

I worked full-time at four or five different NYC public schools.  Choosing which was the worst would be hard, and I’ve already used “meat grinder” and “death camp” and those pretty much cover the gamut.  I assume at least one of the principals I worked for was motivated by something other than lust for the virtually unlimited exercise of arbitrary will.  Assuming that, I can explain at least some of their distaste for their popular young male teacher as animated by a concern for the children.  

That was not the case with the last one, the principal whose clumsily sexualized tango proved deadly for any belated daydream I might have had for a middle class life.  Minnie Frego was probably insane, but was I any better?   In response to a series of escalating, mad provocations, as the new, mad principal zeroed in on me as the leader of the school I worked at for almost three years, I finally snapped.

“You’re not paying attention,” she told me tartly, as I tried to ignore the sickening demonstration of meat grinding she was conducting with my class for my benefit.  She had just crossed out the work of a bored child who was working on workbook problem number five when she was still working her methodical way through number three with the rest of the class.  She’d firmly told that child to fold his hands over his book and follow instructions.  I was trying to do the same at my desk, but it was burning me.  I was glancing at my required lesson plans when she called across the room to me.

“I’m doing this for your benefit,” she told me, as the eyes of every eight and nine year old Harlemite in the room turned to me.   It was like looking into the eyes of twenty-five smart young animals in the slaughterhouse chute.   I could not let them down, did not stop to think.  By way of response my arm swept everything off my desk on to the floor.  Then I folded my hands on my empty desk.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Rubber Crutch

They’re making them so realistic looking these days, it’s often impossible to tell what a crutch is made of until it’s time to depend on it.   Damnedest thing.   I could have sworn this was metal and wood.

“Tell that to your broken ass,” a casual observer suggests.

My Mother Reads

Driving back to New York from the outskirts of DC, where my once difficult aunt and still problematic uncle live in a well-kept, depressing home for unwanted old people, my dead mother is reading a story by Grace Paley.   The sun is fading behind the car like a world disappearing into the past as my mother reads the story like she’s one of the little girls, later women, arguing on that Bronx stoop.

“But Edie!” my mother pleads as Ruth, the perfect Bronx six year-old.   I used to buy my mother journals, try to get her to write, but she always complained that she couldn’t.  To hear her read a story, you’d never believe she couldn’t write one, she reads the stories exactly the way she would have told them.  Plus, toward the end she often spoke happily about how much she loved to lie.  She was pretty creative with some of those lies, too, and sneaky fast.

Eventually tears came to my eyes, driving as the daylight died, my dead mother’s voice coming through the car speaker, reading with such feeling, such understanding.   I used to urge her to write, she’d get defensive, then mad, but it wasn’t like I was writing.   I mean, I was writing, but I wasn’t out wrestling with other writers, proving my prose could kick their prose’s ass.  I wasn’t promoting myself, fighting the brutal fight to get recognized and paid, though my mother would once in a while read some pages I’d give her and smile and sometimes say “this is wonderful”.

“So your dead mother was a fan of your writing, how nice that must be for you,” says the guy standing on my head to get where I thought I was going.

The emotions I felt listening to my mother read, I’ll spare you.   How did I get the cassette?  It was found, by chance, in a box of tapes by my first cousin, my only cousin, really, as he was preparing to put the torch to his childhood home.  His older sister died young and I’ve tried to be more or less the brother he never had, he’s been the brother I grew up lacking.  We come from a very small family, most of the rest murdered en masse or dead of cancer.  Our two mutual grandparents, cancer.  His sister, cancer.  My mother and father and both of my mother’s parents, cancer.

“That’s impressive,” says the writer, eating my sandwich, drinking my single malt Scotch, dainty feet up on my hand tooled Corinthian leather divan.  He has all my stuff neatly arrayed in his condo.

But it’s not the cancer I’m thinking about, though on the same trip we visited a brilliant, patient, gentle man with a wise, slightly reptilian smile always at the ready, with stage four lung cancer, it turns out.  Explains a lot about how he looks.  He looked bad right after the radiation, but, even with his hair grown back, he looks bad now.  But he’s cheerful, taking every moment as a gift and planning on hanging around.  The new chemo is holding the tumors at bay, and he’s thankful for that, even with all the terrible side effects.

As I drove north, musing, I was unaware that a large library had fallen out of my pants pocket, onto the ground somewhere, probably at a Maryland gas station, with a tiny plink I didn’t notice.   My mother would not believe it, all the things that were on three tiny drives on a loop of black cord that together were no larger than a finger.  Maybe 2,000 pages, probably 1,000 tunes I’d recorded over the last few years, 200 short animations, maybe 500 drawings.   I have no idea what was on those flash drives, how to reconstruct them, back them up again.

Sekhnet was all solicitude, too much, really.  Her cousin reassured me that I could recreate the flash drives from my computer, probably.

It was almost like the gift of the found tape, recorded in 1986 when my mother was Sekhnet’s age, was cancelled out by the lost back up copies of my life’s work.   Why I was carrying my life’s work around in my pants pocket is a bitter little puzzle, at the moment.  As for the tape my mother recorded and sent to my aunt, another mystery.  

My mother once offered me $2,000, then quickly $3,000, to reschedule my court appearances and come to Florida for the week my aunt and uncle would be there visiting her, not long after my father died.

“You can’t leave me alone with them,” she pleaded, “I’ll jump out of my skin, just the thought of it.  If you love me, you’ll take the money and come down here when they come.  Please, Elie, there’ll be bloodshed.   Six days!   I’ll pay you!”  There was nothing phony about her desperation.  

The funny thing is, twenty years earlier she’d sent the tape of her reading Grace Paley stories (probably from the book of them I’d given her) to her only sister-in-law, the same woman she probably would have paid 5 Gs to be protected from.   By the way, I earned every penny of that $2,000.

“Your parents both look good,” I told my cousin at breakfast that last morning.   

“Way to kick me in the nuts!” he said, alarmed, echoing my mother’s tone as she bribed me to protect her from them.  “Why don’t you just take this fork and stab me in my right testicle?” he said, offering me the fork.

My uncle is 86, and except for the fact that he’s in a wheelchair after a stroke a year and a half ago, he looks like he could live another ten or fifteen years.  My aunt, a few years younger, also looks good.  Whatever serious health worries she’s had seem well in the past.  She’s steady on her feet, eats with a good appetite, the mild dementia agrees with her.

“I’d trade both of them for your parents, in a heartbeat,” my cousin said.  I nodded and chewed my breakfast, and thought of that ledger on which all our deeds are tallied.

Two minute drill

I’m on the timer now, counting down two minutes.  Unless I’m busy selling myself these days, and my program, I’m busy falling through the cracks into the past, a past of flashy, articulate non-worldly non-accomplishment.   A history of articulate failure, in  the cozy confines of my own mind, we might say.   Of course, in more than two minutes, this could be polished, shined up, presented better– but that would defeat the point of this exercise.   This is a test, at the end a buzzer will go off telling me “pencils down.”  Then the test will be scored.

“Not too shabby for two minutes,” a reader might say, but that is another story.  Here’s the buzzer.

Helpless Against the Avalanche?

Say your papers are piled over everything, as mine are.  You could experience a moment of panic confronting it, as I have from time to time.  It’s like looking at an avalanche about to happen, frozen in time, a jumble of all the moments it might have not become an avalanche.  There are virtues greater than a clear desk or kitchen table, sure, but those things are nice too.

Nicer, anyway, than that wall of papers, suddenly beginning to pulsate, about to overcome you.  I get back to it now, like the Dutch boy about to stick a finger into that little hole in the dike, to mix metaphors like the tossed salad of papers on either side of the screen where these words magically appear.

Monday Morning

Monday morning dawns late around here, Tony Bennett is already chatting amiably with Leonard Lopate.   Lopate asks a joking question and Bennett answers with his great, gentle laugh.  Why am I listening to Tony Bennett?  Then again, listen to him.

Somehow people get themselves to do tasks, then play later, if they get a chance.  I have many tasks to do, but all I want to do… yes, yes, never mind.   The children of my good friends used to tell people that I was a child like them.  I was forty at that time.   These kids are all older than me now, out in the world, making deals.

OK, enough of this, time to put my shoulder to the wheel, get out in the world and start making deals.   Let’s make a deal.

New World Odor

The old cartoon comes to mind.  Guy lying on psychiatrist’s couch saying “nobody listens to me,” and the shrink, behind him, is looking out the window, staring intently at something, or doing a crossword puzzle, checking his Blackberry.  “I’m sorry,” says the shrink “did you say something?”

Take a deep breath, friend, that old joke has become the new joke, the new world odor.   The smell of distraction is the prevailing stink.  Look at it this way– if you weren’t distracted, hoo boy.

Delcog III

Here on Delcog III we don’t mess around with pie in the sky, or touchy feeliness either.  Life here is as frightening as it wants to be, and nobody on the planet has any quaint illusions that it could be any different. 

“Oh, yeah, Delcog III, isn’t that a bit lame, sir?” a blunt reader might ask.

“A bit lame, earthling, sure, as lame as you like.  It could not be otherwise, no matter what color glasses you put on, no matter what olfactory filter you dial in.  The air here, for example, you cannot breathe it.  When your tank runs out you will die in four or five agonizing minutes,”  the Delcog looked off indifferently, then went back about its business.

And you wonder, who is the narrator here?  Who is Delcog?  Why am I suddenly part of this story?   Is it true about the atmosphere on “Delcog III”?  Am I living in a fool’s paradise of bottled air, will it run out and will I asphyxiate?

“You may scoff at Deleterious Cognition,” said the Delcog, “you may think it is the same as plain pessimism, or depression, mere expectation of the worst.  But it is more than a passive expectation of the worst, I assure you, my soon to be oxygen deprived friend,” the Delcog gave its version of a smile.  It was as bad as the confident prediction of an agonizing death.  

“Cognition,” continued the Delcog mercilessly, “is a thought process that involves perception, gathering information, digesting it and using it to make informed predictions while assessing various risk factors.  You label it Deleterious and we embrace that label, yes, cognition can be deleterious– to wishful illusion, for one thing.  Your dreams, my friend, they depend very much on your oxygen supply.  I note that you are wearing a four hour tank and that the gauge reads 5%.  Let us do the math together– 50% would be 2 hours of breathing time, or 120 minutes.  5% of four hours, therefore, is a tenth of 2 hours or 12 minutes.  I suppose we can round it down to eleven now.”

You know, I’m thinking I don’t have to take this kind of crap from some pedantic literary invention, yet I stand here, under the winking blackness.  I’m interested to hear what this sick bastard has to say.

“Of course you are,” said the Delcog agreeably, moving seamlessly into the past tense, “instead of making your way back to the ship to replenish your air supply you are listening to me rattle on with breath so bad that, I dare say, if you were not wearing the mask and breathing apparatus you would be unable to stand so close to me.  The ship, by the way, is at least seven minutes from us, so in three or four minutes the point will be as moot, as mute, as the song you imagine you are hearing.”  

The music I hadn’t been aware of swelled thrillingly, and along with it a sense of hope, soaring.  That is one amazing aspect of music I sometimes forget, it can fill you with feeling, sometimes impossible to express except through music.  

“Yes, that’s fantastic,” said the Delcog with a slight smirk, “talk about music, since it is more precious, apparently, than life itself.  It’s kind of funny: choosing music over life, since in the afterlife everybody is deaf.”

Now the Delcog had gone too far.  I was thinking about zapping him with my bop gun, raising some funk and a little sand too.  But what if he was right about the atmosphere being poison for me to breathe?  

“By way of example,” the Delcog said, “and forgetting about your insoluble breathing emergency a few minutes from now, you are writing this instead of working on a business plan, instead of figuring out how to recruit the crucial people that will allow your plan to move forward, instead of working on strategies to network and sell your idea.  Whatever you think about capitalism, baby, you’ve got to raise capital if you want your own business.  The widgets your business will make are no different than any other widgets, they’ve got to be branded, marketed, dressed in short skirts and marched out into the marketplace.  You think you are doing something special since you are ‘nonprofit’.   That’s very funny, if you think about it for a minute.  Oh, I forgot, you don’t really have a minute… that’s a little Delcog III joke… you actually have maybe nine minutes, or, actually, two– to decide to hightail it back to the ship and see if they can get the hatch open in time.” 

It was wearying talking to this guy, but I was already weary.  I got to thinking it was a long shot to make it back to the ship in time to save myself.  The music had stopped, I felt sick, sweaty and claustrophobic in my space suit.  I had to get out of it.  I pulled off the face mask, and, outside of the fartlike smell of the Delcog, who hadn’t been wrong about his breath, the air was very much like the air in a dank basement.  It didn’t smell very fresh, but it was fine to breathe.  I winked at the Delcog and went on my miserable way, shrugging into a long sideways leap in the low gravity of Delcog III.

Disorder

There is a book called the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I think they are using version IV now, working on five.  The book lists symptoms and describes  the gradated spectrum of each diverse, specific, and sometimes subtle, mental disorder.  

Among these are the perfect statistical descriptions of each of the several distinct types that make up the editorial board of the American Psychiatric Association– brilliant and nervous,  dour and paranoid, voluble and smiling but filled with unspeakable rage, intense, taciturn but almost completely quiescent.  Those who twitch and those who smile fiercely, with one eye twitching slightly from time to time.  The trained observer may catch the occasional micro-expression showing the primal will to violence, but, for the most part, the editorial board of the DSM looks like a high-level group of accomplished professionals.

And it is.   I drop this all casually, though, of course, it’s a cliche: the crazy psychiatrist.  But the authors of the DSM, the book that categorizes every insurable mental disorder, are a select breed of psychiatrist, true experts, standing at a rare vantage point, on the defining edge, that hair’s breadth between normalcy and disorder.  

Diagnostic:  their diagnostic checklists of symptoms will decide what mental disorder you suffer from, please answer the following questions.   Are you ever sad?  Do you ever have bad dreams?  Do you become sexually aroused at odd times?   Do you like to shake your leg rhythmically for long periods of time?    A code is issued for each customized disorder and the psychiatrist  prescribes, and a pharmacist dispenses, the suggested drugs, according to the scientific recommendations of pharmaceutical industry expert psychiatrists.   Because a code number has been submitted with this claim, everyone along the line will be paid well for the patented medication to make this poor bastard function better.

Except that sometimes the poor bastard functions well, medication or no, and at other times not so well.   These mood fluctuations are a symptom of our condition here, buffeted by the pressurized demands of the world around us.  I’m just saying– a person who is freaking out might do better resting in a quiet room with soft music than strapped to a gurney, people screaming, lights flashing, men with guns, as the sedation is administered.

On the other hand, I’m no psychiatrist.

DSM-IV DSM-IV.jpg