INTRODUCTION
Saved by Compulsion – Spring, 1981
What’s my wife gonna say? Real life! My wife… what did I do? What am I doing using up my family’s rent money shooting coke’n having sex with anonymous men? This is beneath contempt. This is inhuman. This is like the guy eating bugs in the early Dracula movies. I have to cut this shit out. I have to stop this. My wife is pregnant! What kind of sick man am I? Maybe I better kill myself now. End it, end it, end it! Where? Where should I do it? Where should I shoot myself? In the car? I do have the gun.
I have to turn on the ignition in order to get the cigarette lighter working, and the act jars my nerves. Anxiously I scan the dark parking lot from behind the wheel, carefully lowering the driver’s side window. 'I have a gun, motherfuckers!' Now lit and smoking, I chase more Tequila with a mouthful of warm beer. I rationalize:
‘You can always kill yourself. You don’t have to do it right now. Just stop. Stop using drugs. Then you won’t have to kill yourself. Clean up. Work. Save. Own a house. A car. A boat. A dog. Don’t kill yourself, get rid of the gun before you do.’
‘OK, that’s responsible,’ I think. Yes, here’s some hope. The best, most productive and positive thing to do would be to get rid of the gun.
Can’t just throw $175 away though, responsibility insists. I could sell it to Big Eva! But Eva and I have already agreed it’s a crappy weapon. A small, poorly made revolver, I could sell it to someone else. Complicated, that.
A few more swigs of tequila with the beer chaser and this fresh cigarette is actually starting to taste good. I take my first deep breath in over an hour. A sudden sharp light sears the parking lot darkness. The back door opens, and I stiffen to see someone exit the bookstore on his way to his car. My eyes stare down at the dashboard for what seems an eternity, while tracking him with peripheral vision. I hear his car door open and then I shudder with relief as the sound of his ignition sweeps over me, renewing the effects of the valium, tequilla, cigarettes and beer. This impotent collection of palliatives do little to end the coke-comedown paranoia.
Maybe I should trade it back to Big Eva for some more coke. Then never buy it back! HA! She’ll be pissed at me, and I wouldn’t be able to buy any more coke from her. Then I could be straight!
What genius! Yes, the truly responsible thing to do is to end my relationship with Big Eva and cocaine. I’ll get rid of the gun and screw up my coke connection at the same time. This act will now put an end to this whole cocaine, perverted sex and suicide track.
Yes, it’s time to get hold of my life and be responsible, and I exhale an “at last” sigh. It’s a courageous thing to do, a responsible thing to do, and it’s the right thing to do.
I congratulate myself on taking this giant step to give up cocaine and perversion. I gratuitously start to compare myself to everybody I know who’s still using drugs but who has not yet taken this courageous step.
Those losers… I’m stopping. It’s a done deal. But I reason there is still a little rain left to fall. Some work left to be done to complete this new sacrifice, for in order to screw up the coke connection I have to trade the gun for some more. It’s a dirty job, even a dangerous one, given the current climate over there, but somebody’s gotta’ do it.
I can’t just throw all that coke away. That would be just stupid... thankless. So the good life; puppies, lawns with flowers and children laughing, yes. It’s starting now – officially – but I’ll have to use up this last score first. It's a symbol.
‘At least a gram,’ an eager bad-cop voice says in my head.
‘I don’t really care,’ says good-cop. ‘I’m above such considerations. I may just throw the shit away anyway.’
‘Yeah, right, responds bad cop. I could shoot half a gram maybe. Holy shit... That would be in-fucking-credible. Hmm… get fucked in the ass while I’m rushing on half-a-gram? After all, it will be my last time…’
This dedication to my new clean life has me looking urgently at my watch in that early morning hour wondering… wondering if it’s not too late… not too late to call Eva.
* * *
The couch in the psychiatrist’s waiting room makes a hissing sound as you sit on the large leather cushion. I imagine a satanic snakelike image. I consider it might also sound like a final “Ooohh” sound of a man giving up his last breath. Beneath grammatical structure but clearly within the nuance of my observation, I imagine telling the shrink of this: ‘Is the couch pillow hissing or groaning?” What does that mean to you? Something satanic is hissing like a snake at the same time there’s this submission of the guy giving it up… What is he giving up? His life, no, his spirit, his life’s spirit?… to who.. to death.. I don’t know… or to anonymous cock? Is that the same thing? What comes to mind? I want drugs.’
What part of the cushion you displace with your weight appears to pop up again next to you. My cocaine addiction ended. I did, however, find gambling from an employee’s perspective as a pari-mutual clerk at the racetrack too much of a temptation. Not too much time passed before I eschewed this good paying job for a little more pain and suffering in its stead.
* * *
She slowly placed the newspaper down and looked up from the breakfast table. Her soft brown eyes looked concerned. Janice often did not miss one day a year at work, had never bounced a check in her life, and seemed perplexed that her husband of one year was not going to work. I suddenly felt terribly ashamed. These feelings were all new.
“How much do you owe them?” she asked.
I saw the narrowing circumstances closing in on me, forcing out my confession. I no longer had my job as a pari-mutual clerk, having just yesterday been escorted out of the money-room in handcuffs. The police had informed me I would be charged with embezzlement for theft of racetrack funds if I failed to come to an arrangement with the track. When I woke up in the morning, I had some difficulty believing it was all real.
I looked up half-panicked. It was as if I were coming out of some forest into this communal clearing; where people in this other world lived; awakening as one does from a dream, still unclear as to what’s really happened.
“I’m not going to work today,” was all I had told her. I’m jumping off a precipice of some kind. I am coming clean. I ignore the urge to make it sound like a joke. Something inside me is leaving. I am suddenly flooded with the realization that my good-paying job as a pari-mutual clerk was over and I was viscerally lessened somehow by this fact. I hadn’t realized how the simple statement that I was a pari-mutual clerk had served me so well as a prestige factor in AA, NA – and especially GA. It had created a part of me in relation to others who also struggled to make a living with a family. I had – and again had no consciousness of it – acquired something vaguely referred to as “esteem,” and couldn’t lose it fast enough. Repeatedly. I had failed…again.
That job had not been un-cool, and $100 a day in the early 1980’s was not bad for an ex-SSI mental patient with no marketable skills. So it was with a kind of sad surprise that I heard my own words coming out of me on their way to my wife. They brought a sadness I was unfamiliar with. It was as if I were a town crier learning of his own disaster as he spoke. I saw with sudden embarrassment how foolish I had been to think I had been cool betting so crazily.
“Twelve thousand dollars.”
“Twelve thousand dollars!” she shrieked. “Well, I’m not helpin’ you. You’re through.”
I had lost it. I blinked as if awakening in a strange room. This new experience of lingering responsibility was something I had failed to consider. This is how the rubber meets the road in the world of parental responsibility. The words (“responsibility, family, father, children.”) spoken by father and older males in the family along with meaningful looks and handshakes at the wedding had been heard, but they were words that drew in me only brief images of accomplishing god-like achievements. That’s all. Sounds. I had married that good-looking girl I had enjoyed bedding and being around. But now the family to be considered was my family.
I could see the surprise and disappointment on her attractive young face, and it pained me in way I had not experienced before. I realized that not only had I failed terribly as a provider, but that I was the provider. That was my role in life, and somehow I had never been more acutely aware of it than now, as it had just been cracked open and humiliated. I suddenly ached in a new and desperate desire to have it all back: my job, my paycheck, my freedom from the gambling compulsion.
This sudden passion for normalcy surprised me – or that part of me suddenly exposed to light – and the pain deepened as a growing ache in me reflected more awareness of what I had lost. Maybe it didn’t happen. It’s dreamy. I really still had my job. I would wake up and laugh with relief. Another part of my mental apparatus suggested that if this not be part of something unreal, I should quickly find a way to exist as though it were. Real-life consequences are met pharmaceutically. That option was no longer viable, however, for I was no longer alone. My wife and baby reflected a reality I had simply run from ever since leaving the mental hospital. For the last twelve years, designer drugs and narcotics had been my stand-in for taking responsibility. Real-life consequences were never met without them. Problems in life were always dealt with pharmaceutically.
A wave of realization swept over me with a new and dangerous electricity, alerting every part of me that no pill or injection could fix this. Nothing could fix this. The rest of me – pained and stupefied – stood still now with the full realization of my failure. As the disaster I had made became fully realized, I knew what I had to do. This was the final straw. Not the most terrible straw. I had done worse. Much worse… before and after the mental hospital – but there was a final humiliation here that was simply too crushing. The defeat was, indeed too complete.
I retreated inside to embrace the only way out. I added conviction to ruminating desire. I will pursue this alien quest, and accelerate now into the tempting consideration of termination. I really wanted out.
There was nothing else to do. End it. For the first time in my life, I really wanted to. I would. Now. I could sense some kind of force rising up inside me, questioning my commitment, and I, assenting to it in self-consciousness yet again; sanctioned it, commissioned it consciously and let go of all that which keeps death’s attraction in chains. Yes, I want to die. Take me, I thought; giving myself totally to this snarling, rushing energy swirling up from my loins, through my spinal column up through the neck, seizing my brain as it made my legs, arms and hands freeze. Not unlike some science-fiction self-destruct sequence, I was now set to terminate.
The blood! It chilled in a freezing vibration through every artery. The brain locked, denying further thought. I was on the quick path to the next world. I got up, genuinely sad and barely able to push one grieved limb in front of the other on my way to destruction in the bedroom.
The complete conviction of what needed to be done – what would be done – became as impregnable as a glacier in my arctic mentality. Unmovable and unstoppable, its frozen climate raged only with the promise of dark relief.
As I got to the bedroom and closed the door, a small dart of thought flew across the frozen wasteland. It directed my attention towards the gun, and this sudden widening awareness gave rise to something totally unanticipated.
“It’s true,” I thought, and laughed. The dark spirit recoiled vigorously, palpably receding back from whence it came. Was that snarling force cursing me? The gun was no longer here. I had forgotten. I had given it to Big Eva as collateral for more cocaine at the end of my last binge! A spring of sunshine broke open my wild darkness.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Although I had never owned a bible, the proverb “Laughter doth act as a medicine” came to my mind. I laughed as my eyes grew moist. With warm blood coursing again through my body, I wiped my eyes and heard myself speaking aloud. In a strange voice, I heard my own words come back at me, “How the hell did I get here?”
CHAPTER ONE
Created in the Image of G-d_The Legacy of Eden
Something about the situation kept it hovering, waiting. The Golden-Yellow Chalcid sensed movement by the big leaf. The wasp had experienced this cycle once before, and had been able to incubate eggs successfully with her previous effort. This particular specimen of Spiliochalcis mariae was once again in reproductive mode and the same opportunity existed in the sparse shrubbery now under the portico of the new house. The wasp descended within an autopilot programmed before the beginning of time.
A Lapdotera froze as its slow senses realized – too late – what was over it, and now settling astride it. The caterpillar suddenly felt the wasp’s dagger-like ovipositor plunging in painfully as the mother-wasp’s funnel invaded its now-writhing body. Depositing her eggs into her paralyzed victim’s back, the wasp’s reproductive efforts would soon produce larvae, to feed and eat the still-living host.
The mother wasp, reproducing in the same manner that its own parent had, would thus allow for a life of its own extension to take shape, and the caterpillar would succumb, forsaking a butterfly freedom to give its very life instead to the invading, growing tenant, completing the process with its own slow, inevitable destruction. Unless...
Long Island, New York _ 1954
Having my own bedroom was a new experience. A large wooden placard of a cowboy character replete with chaps and spurs was on the wall, joined by a happy, smiling horse, and a cowboy hat so large it also had its own separate peg on which to hang. I had graduated to long pants myself, and it was safe to say I was every bit the cowpoke as I settled into my new five year-old world in the Long Island suburb.
The road across from our new house was more like a doorway into a wonderland than a wide strip of asphalt. I had quickly discovered that magical properties lay beyond it. As in all things in life, access to this new domain needed mom’s approval, but this was not difficult to get. With permission obtained, opening the front door led immediately to a pathway which held only two minor obstacles: the occasional large flying insect, and a vague anxiety concerning some string with white strips of cloth that ran alongside the walk leading from the front door to the road. Mom said the string and strips of cloth must be avoided because of something called ‘grass seed,’ and stepping in the wrong place would mean we would not have something called a ‘lawn,’ but once past these unfriendly items, I was almost there.
Once it was clear no cars were coming, the street could easily be run across. Soon I became immersed in sights, sounds and smells that had never existed for me in that other place, which my parents called Brooklyn.
The pungent smell of heavy pollen amidst the tall weeds in the warm sun mingled with the towering cattails near the lake. The lake ran to the left, while a few acres of trees on the right held a magic all their own. The dark, cool mystery of the forest umbrella would occasionally allow a beam of sunlight to stream its way down into a small clearing. My older sister chopped away some branches in order to create a small haven within, and it was now complete with a place to sit and branches to climb.
It was magical, and produced something with real-life appeal as well. Mom had scolded us for getting green tree sap on her good cutlery in the making of our “fort” within the wooded area. Consequently, a sense of bonding with my older sister became part of my worldly landscape which included the lake, my dog running alongside, and of course the secluded, secret part of our small wooded area. Life was good. It was the last good memory I would have.
***
“You have holes in your pants… in the knees… leave them off tomorrow and I’ll make them into shorts,” said mom.
Something unpleasant overwhelmed my five year-old mind. I could only vaguely understand what holes-in-knees implied as emotion within me ran counter to having anything happen to my pants. It swept aside all consciousness. In my child-world, opposing anything mom said was consciously impossible, so to enter into a denial that it was happening occurred instantly, and one might even say naturally. I can’t accept what mom is saying, but I must always obey what mom is saying. Consequently, I felt only vague dread. The wheels thus turning, any protest would have to live below consciousness. But silent-protest it was, for in the morning I dragged on my condemned pants and ran out to play. I would learn however, that insubordination comes with a price.
Out in the field, I heard her call my name. It would never sound the same again.
“We have to change these into shorts,” she said, as I arrived huffing and puffing. I saw that she was pointing to the threadbare material over my kneecaps.
“No, Mom,” I said, backing up, as all thought fled, too frightened to stay coherent entering this new territory of independent – and contrary – opinion.
Her face appeared to work strangely; as if she were being watched. Onstage, following a direction only she was aware of, she appeared to be listening to some “other.” She then explained a new reality to me in a tone of ‘anybody-with-any-sense-knows-this-is-true.’ In a new voice full of tension, I was made the recipient of the irrefutable nature of her logic: “What would the neighbors think of a boy with holes in his pants? I stared uncomprehendingly. “They have holes in them” she reiterated. She had been working with the shrubs and had a pair of shears in her hand. She moved them towards me.
“No,” I said.
She grabbed me hard, and I had never before been held before in a hostile manner. We were out in the street in front of the house, and my mother’s sudden self-consciousness filled me in the same moment with my own, as I glanced around to see who she was listening to. Where are these unseen jurors who we must please? Who and where and what are these forces we need obey? There were no other people I could see, but the new houses, without trees in their front yards, peered out upon us through windowed eyes; curtain-less and silent.
“What would the neighbors think of a boy who had holes in his pants? We’re cutting them into shorts right now,” and she started to stick the cold metal of the scissor into the hole in my pants’ knee.”
It was not about holes in the pants any longer. I pulled away from the grotesque surgery only to find her holding me harder with one hand.
“Hold still!” came the command.
Unable to put my rage into words, the truth of what was loved more was being dealt face-up. My mother’s worshipful urge to satisfy the demands of these unseen – yet somehow all-powerful – strangers at my expense birthed a realization of shocking hate unspeakable; both strangling and suffocating my previous reality. This was madness.
“I hate you!” came my response. I wish you were dead! I repressed. Her jaw slacked in disbelief.
She gasped and smacked me high on my left side, the first and last physical punishment I would ever receive from her. While tears ran down my cheeks, she prayed her demonic mantra aloud in a hypnotized, strangled voice. The curse was chanted over and over from the lips of my transfixed mother, setting in motion its larvic cycle, sealing its dynamism within me with its hypnotic suggestion:
“What would the neighbor’s think? What would the neighbor’s think of a boy who walks around with holes in his pants?
Centuries before the priests of Moloch demanded male firstborns be thrown into the fire to appease unseen spirits, and likewise this day would my manhood be made forfeit. The abuse of me as well as the emasculating amputation was her commitment, her gift, her offering to the alter of these unseen other people; this culture. This surrender would not merely be to mother’s power, however, but to a newer authority. Unseen “others” now demand I seek their approval; and I hear them all the time now; deep in my mind. They speak as if they're "me."
[END of SAMPLE]
To see the sexual point here, see "Worst Use of Cocaine for Sex" and "To Be or Not To Be". These are EXTREMELY GRAPHIC encounters – and "To Be or Not To Be" will take the reader beyond anything yet written in the English language concerning homosexual sex .
To understand homoerotic behavior by heterosexuals not interested in "searching for Mr. Right," – but who are being told by psychiatrists who themselves are chronic juveniles – that is what they are really after, (but are in denial from the effects of a hostile culture), PLEASE READ the following by HS Sullivan_Clinical Studies in Psychiatry pp160-163 (Norton) as well as the "The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry" notes below :
"... One should determine whether this entity is the organization of a definite integrating tendency that satisfies a need or whether it is a complex mental disorder in which the homosexuality is present because it so perfectly fortifies some abnormal mental process, some dynamism of difficulty." (NOTE: Read "To Be or Not to Be" as the most perfect example ever written to exemplify this type of homosexual behavior.)
PSYCHIATRY on HOMOSEXUALITY
HS Sullivan, from "The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry"p.295
“… to think that one can remedy personality warp by tinkering with the sex life is a mistake, even though it is very convenient doctrine for psychiatrists who are chronic juveniles. It may provide them with fees for enjoying their interest in pornography; but if one is a serious psychiatrist..."
See Below for more on this:
Notes on sex from Sullivan lecturing to other psychiatrists on SEXUALITY:
p.295 (CONTINUED FROM ABOVE) “… to think that one can remedy personality warp by tinkering with the sex life is a mistake, even though it is very convenient doctrine for psychiatrists who are chronic juveniles. It may provide them with fees for enjoying their interest in pornography; but if one is a serious psychiatrist, when one is presented with difficulties in the sex life of a patient as the reason the patient is seeking help, my experience has demonstrated rather convincingly that the patient’s difficulties in living is shown rather in his choosing this subject to present as his difficulty. In other words, people don’t go to psychiatrists to be aided in their sexual difficulties; but they do sometimes present this as their problem, and such problems show, when properly understood, what ails their living with people.
This let me warn my fellow psychiatrists: If you want to do psychiatry that can well be crowded into a lifetime, see if you can’t find something besides the sexual problem in the strangers that come to you for help. Quite frequently it is no trick at all to find something very much more serious than the sexual difficulty; and quite often the sexual difficulty is remedied in the process of dealing with the other problems. You may notice there is a slight difference here between my views and some of the views that have been circulated in historic times.”*
* ...obviously a dry reference to Sigmund Freud.
More specifically, so-called HOMOSEXUALITY:
In Clinical Studies of Psychiatry (pp.160-2), Dr. Sullivan’s proposes a view of homosexuality and therapy which was not only ahead of his own time, but apparently remains far ahead of many doctors today. Today's gay psychiatrists create misunderstanding regarding Dr. Sullivan’s position. They do not propose a different interpretation, what they propose is (in Dr. Sullivan’s own words), “an atrocious miscarriage of the therapeutic process.”
(Clinical Studies in Psychiatry_pp163):
"As I have indicated earlier, I think that the whole business of the homosexual entity as an explanation is always to be looked pretty firmly in the face by psychiatrists who attempt to effect any great improvement in the mental health of the patient. One should determine whether this entity is the organization of a definite integrating tendency that satisfies a need or whether it is a complex mental disorder in which the homosexuality is present because it so perfectly fortifies some abnormal mental process, some dynamism of difficulty." (See Note:)
(NOTE: Read "To Be or Not to Be" as the most perfect example ever written to exemplify this type of homosexual behavior.)
"Where a person has felt that life is eminently worth living only in the preadolescent stage, when he did enjoy great intimacy with another person of the same sex, irrespective of whether that great intimacy was what may be described as on the non-genital or the genital level, I am quite willing to deal with that person on the basis that he is engaged in actual direct pursuit of satisfaction from members of his own sex, or as in homosexuality, as it may be easily called.
But where such experience is missing from a person’s life, then I think one is doing a great violence to the therapeutic principle to accept the notion that that person has anything like a simple drive to secure genital satisfaction by any type of behavior with members of the same sex. To work on this assumption, and to deal with this patient’s 'homosexuality,’ is, to my way of thinking, one of the most vicious miscarriages of therapeutic situations. It takes out of the culture a group of terms, which, in referring to behavior, carry all the culture’s evaluations of that behavior.
You see, if the patient has not found great warmth and satisfaction in intimacy with a member of his own sex, but later on is told by a psychiatrist that such intimacy is what he is after–or has, by his own paranoid processes, come to feel that that is what he is after, and the psychiatrist agrees with him–then he and the psychiatrist are talking about something that is, in its ultimate essence, merely a revolting difference between him and good people. That is all.
In has no meaning in terms of something that he has experienced, that he has undergone, and that therefore is a part of him. But it does have meaning as a particular type of horribly derogatory formulation. Thus, to attack a paranoid state, for example, on the basis of an attempt to understand the patient’s homosexuality is an atrocious miscarriage of the therapeutic process. This is a very nifty way to make it beyond the most perchance that any intimacy will be established with that patient. The psychiatrist’s approach means” Abandon all hope of a feeling of personal security, and then we might be able to do something.” But the developmental processes which we all have to undergo make it simply inconceivable that there is any such thing as abandoning all hope of personal security. So of course, what the psychiatrist does is to provide the patient with a new paranoid world, in which the psychiatrist is unconsciously taking a very important part. And since he is much more patiently engaged in hateful activity than anybody the patient has previously found, the patient may attempt homicide on the psychiatrist one day. But other than that I can think of no spectacular result except the passing of time.
So it is quite important indeed to discriminate between, first the isophilic phase of personality development and the satisfactions that can be acquired then, and second, the innumerable unhappy caricatures of living to which the term homosexuality is sometimes applied.
The people who have gotten well into the preadolescent phase of personality development before possibilities of further growth failed, and come to us with their life problems formulated in terms of homosexual concepts, are still somewhat near reality.
But people who have not gotten as far as the preadolescent phase of personality development, and who come to us with their life problems formulated in terms of homosexuality, are showing a very much more complex distortion of interpersonal relations and offer a much more treacherous basis for therapeutic relationships because they are that much less mature. Thus this discrimination has prognostic significance.
It is a discrimination between what is a sort of frantic exploration on the base of what is verbal prescriptions, as compared with regressive retreats from hopelessly difficult situations to a time in the past that was actually satisfactory, with new collisions perhaps with the culture in the process. Naturally the latter is much the simpler to attack, and the prognosis–the outcome–is much more apt to become favorable.
But if, on the other hand, you combine these two into some doctrine of homosexuality as applied to factors in schizophrenia, paranoid states or what have you, then you have missed the whole point of interpersonal psychiatry, and your results will be sufficiently mongrel so that you will never be able to feel very secure about what is what. But, on the other hand, you will never have any convincing demonstration of being completely wrong.
I will be ceating a .pdf of the above shortly.
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