FIGURE 24. Jeff Holtzman and I soak up life in Ravello, Italy. Having lunch overlooking the Amalfi Coast on a warm summer day with a dear friend is my idea of heaven.
(Courtesy of the author)
Naturally, we talked a lot of science. Jeff was highly quantitative, and the numbers had to be really good before he would make any claims as to the results. He could think of the flaw in any experiment, and he often successfully challenged longtime views of the lab. He would agonize over an upcoming lecture, or suffer over an upcoming grant renewal, and all the time he was the best the field had to offer. Mentoring him consisted of little more than putting him in a cab to go home after a good time.
Our work often involved the use of a tachistoscope, a device that presents visual information to one half brain or the other. In order for the tachistoscope to work, one has to be a good fixator, that is, be able to stare at a point on a screen with great care and intensity. Many people find this task difficult, and we worked hard to develop that ability among our patients. This was part of the reason that we traveled up to New England at least once a month for six years in a specially equipped van, loaded with this kind of equipment. The patients’ families were wonderful to us; they always fed us lunch as we chatted. Investigating psychological processes in human subjects is a tricky and sensitive business. You are probing the innermost workings of someone’s mind/brain. One must always strive to communicate the deep respect and gratitude one feels to the subjects and their families for participating.
On one unforgettable afternoon, we had driven to a patient’s home in rural New Hampshire. We were gazing out the dining room window on our lunch break when I spotted a cow lying in the grass, staring down the hill, seemingly in a trance. I idly commented to the patient’s father on the cow and its contented situation. Jeff was busy making himself a second sandwich and I assumed had likely lost touch the conversation. As I was wrapping up my cow conversation, I said, “Still, why is that cow so content to gaze down the hill all day long?” Jeff shot back, “Beats me, but he sounds like a good fixator. Why don’t we go set up the old tachistoscope in front of him and see what’s going on?”
As the last word fell from his lips, his face began to redden. He stared at his plate wishing he were anywhere else. Usually, such faux pas were my department, and Jeff made me pay dearly for each and every one, so I intended to relish this opportunity. Turning ever so slowly in his direction I said, “What’s that, Jeff?” Gathering himself together he said, “I said I owe you one.” Both the patient and his parents howled. A few years later they wept when they heard the awful news about Jeff’s death.
Our New England trips were long, and they provided ample time to explore our views on just about everything. Jeff always talked about Ann. He was so proud of her. In short order she was arguing cases on behalf of the Wall Street Journal, the Daily News, Forbes, and any number of other impressive publications. He was apprised of all the legal details, and he took me through every one of them. I would challenge him, but he knew all the answers. If I hit on something that was privileged, he wouldn’t give the answer because he said Ann would kill him. I’d ride him, but he never gave in. I’d get frustrated and say, “So how does it feel to have your wife make more money than you?” He would say, “Great, great. I love her. . . . I can’t afford not to.”
Jeff very much liked for things to be logical and orderly, although he didn’t particularly relish orderliness in others because it frustrated his unbelievable ability to see relationships. He was an experimentalist. No one was better at that game, and it drove him to hilarity. One day, the results of a particular experiment were different every time he ran it. I said something like, This is good because maybe we’re getting close to what is true. He yelled back at me, “True? Are you crazy? I don’t care about it being true. I just want it to be consistent.”
He was extraordinarily giving and yet, at the same time, infuriatingly his own man. He helped the entire lab on every experimental detail, and those who didn’t take his advice should have. In his own work, he wanted, above all, not to make an error in logic on anything he reported. Could there be a loophole in his interpretation of the data? He would worry all night for weeks about a talk he had to give, afraid that someone would find a flaw in his reasoning. I would chide him with remarks like, “So you’re wrong. Big deal. We are all wrong at some level. This problem is too big for our miserable human brains to solve. All we are striving for is to be more right than wrong. We don’t have to be correct.” His response: “Bullshit.” I would tell him he was a compulsive jerk, and he would say I was a vague, undefined son of a bitch. We would go have a drink and decide we were both right.
When Charlotte and I married, Jeff was there. Our official ceremony was in Judge Rena Uviller’s chambers in New York, followed by an all-afternoon lunch in a private dining room atop the World Trade Center. The morning ceremony had been attended only by Charlotte’s sister and our good friend Nisson Schechter, who also happened to be the judge’s cousin. At one point, Nisson told us how Rena called him one night with a question. She was deciding a case, and the plaintiff and defense lawyers were both Jewish and driving her crazy with details. So she asked Nisson, who knew all words Yiddish, for the Yiddish word for something like the big picture. The judge thought if she could find the Yiddish for the big picture, she could break through to these guys. Nisson said he didn’t know the word but he would find out. He called seventeen rabbis. None of them knew. Finally, he called his old rabbi back in Detroit, who said, “Nisson, there is no Yiddish for the big picture. With Jews, it is all details, details, details.”
It was a dazzling day, so simple and so meaningful. Jeff guided us through the whole emotional space, making sure we didn’t get caught up. Rena Uviller had qualities of mind and heart that accented beautifully the fact that the most important event of our lives was transpiring in her book-laden chambers. At lunch, we all buzzed and laughed so hard at so many things that we were positively giddy (Figure 25). Around two thirty, the judge said she would have to excuse herself, as she had to return to court to sentence a man who two years earlier had murdered one of his children. Since then, he had been out on bail being a model citizen and holding down two jobs to support the rest of his family. What to do?
FIGURE 25. Charlotte and I were married by Judge Rena Uviller. We followed the ceremony with a private lunch at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center. (Left to right:) Jeff, Charlotte’s sister Deezy Smylie, and my good friend Nisson Schechter, Rena’s cousin, attended as well.
(Courtesy of the author)
I will never forget that moment. In a matter of hours, Rena had performed our marriage, participated in the revelry, and was off to deal with a further matter of great complexity and import. Jeff had set the tone of jocularity, but he had also projected the fact that he was always ready for questions about the mind and the heart. Somehow, ending our marriage lunch with a social conundrum was uplifting to us all. Rena would not have introduced us to that dimension if Jeff, the stranger in the room, had not instantly been able to communicate a deep sense of dignity even through his humor.
And then, with mind-numbing swiftness, Jeff’s health failed. He had had a persistent cough for a few weeks, and when he started to cough up blood, he went to New York Hospital and was immediately admitted. His wife was about to have a baby, and for the preceding few months they had been under the stress of getting their apartment remodeled, living in drywall dust and all the rest. We had attributed his coughing to a million different causes. The culture showed it wasn’t pneumonia, even though the lung films suggested it. Jeff knew he was in a bad way, and he called his family and his closest friend, T.L., to his bedside.
Three days into his hospitalization, Jeff’s father, a physician, told me that he didn’t expect him to make it. I was shocked and outraged that a young man in the best hospital in the world could be dying. They ordered a CT scan, thinking it might be lung cancer. It showed nothing, and he continued to go
downhill. A lung specialist was brought in, and a quick pulmonary exam showed that Jeff’s lungs were inflamed. A biopsy finally brought the diagnosis of Wegener’s granulomatosis,* an autoimmune disorder. The prognosis was dim: Massive antibiotics and steroids were immediately thrown at it, but Jeff kept sinking. On the way to have the lung biopsy, T.L. reports that Jeff gave him a thumbs-up sign and said, “So lung.” He tried to cheer us all up with stories and gags, which Ann and T.L. brought out to the waiting room.
At five in the morning, after his biopsy, I found him in the surgical intensive care unit. He was full of tubes, so he couldn’t talk, but we carried out a conversation, with his part in writing. All he was concerned about was Ann—he felt horribly for her. I told him he was going to make it, but he ignored me and kept on probing for Ann’s state of mind. I promised him that she was fine and that I would take care of her. He told me to take my planned day trip to the University of Georgia, and a nurse came in to shoo me away. We smiled our good-byes, and I never saw him alive again. He died the next morning, ten days after he got sick. He was buried three days later, and the following morning his wife gave birth to their beautiful daughter.
We all struggled to cope with the loss through the following days, weeks, months, and years. Charlotte and I had our first child a couple of months after Jeff’s death. We spent as much time as we could with Ann and her baby. I took up cooking as a way to get focused on something new. We were all numb for a long time. Emotions are difficult things to understand. It is said by some that emotions are managed by old, subcortical parts of the brain, and as such they are inaccessible to conscious analysis. This may be true. It is also true that emoting does not obviate moods. My emotions won’t leave me alone, and simply thinking about all these things privately doesn’t help, so I write these stories. I have something happier, though bittersweet, to report as I type this. Two weeks ago, some twenty-eight years after Jeff’s death, Charlotte and I watched a radiant bride walk down the aisle, Jeff’s daughter. The best part was that she was witty and irreverent and cracked jokes the whole time, even when it was the groom’s turn to talk. There is no doubt she has Jeff’s spirit.
Jeff was smarter than most, he worked harder than most, and he was charming like few people in the world. With all of that, and with all his scientific competitiveness, he was remarkably free of ambition. We talked about it a lot, but I never understood it until his funeral gathering. Jeff’s friends came to New York from everywhere. We drank until we were numb. We stared helplessly at his beautiful pregnant wife, his dazzling mother, his spunky sister, his stately father. We talked, cried, planned, drank, laughed, and finally broke down. The truth was that Jeff didn’t need to be ambitious. What sustained him were his friends. He had collected in his short life the most astonishing group of friends I have ever come across. Whenever his phone rang, he knew it was most likely someone he felt for, felt good about. He always talked about his other friends, but most of us had never met. Only at his death did we discover each other, and the grace of that discovery was that, through his friends, it was clear Jeffrey David Holtzman would live on.
HAVE VAN, WILL TRAVEL
But I have gotten ahead of myself. While Jeff was working in the lab, LeDoux’s footprint at Cornell was expanding. He had decided to return to the original questions about emotion that fascinated him, and to his work with animals. As he did with everything, he plunged into the study with gusto and brilliance. It was only a few years before he would be known as the world’s expert on emotions and the brain. This meant learning a whole new suite of research tools and a new literature. No problem for him.
Before he switched to another field, however, LeDoux had contributed a key paragraph to a grant application I was writing. The split-brain team wanted a proper traveling van for testing. When we moved to New York City, we had ditched the old trailer and borrowed an old school bus going unused at a Cornell’s affiliated hospital in White Plains. We built our modifications into the rigid seats, but after driving the big yellow bus up to icy Vermont, we were done with it. It is truly amazing that we let America’s children ride around in those tin cans.
So, in our application to the National Science Foundation, we listed in the equipment section one GMC Eleganza motor home. They were about thirty-two thousand dollars. I was laughing to myself as I typed it into the formal grant budget pages. Such an item would definitely need a budget justification. In walks LeDoux. “Joseph, I could use a little help with stating why we need the Eleganza.” Joseph said, No problem, and disappeared for about an hour. He came back with a full-page rationale of why it was central to the program and why Eleganza, in particular, fit the bill. We needed it not only for the living area, which we would modify for our testing lab, but also places to sleep and eat, saving money on travel expenses. Into the grant went the Eleganza and its justification, and off it went to the foundation.
About nine months later I got a call from the foundation program officer. “I have some good news and some bad news for you on the grant,” the voice said. “We will not be able to fund the research assistant you requested and, for that matter, your own salary. It is tight times, as you know. But the committee did feel the Eleganza was a good idea, so they funded that in full. In fact, that is all they funded. To be candid, it sort of sounded like a Travels with Charley story. We like it.”
Well, we partied that night, and the next day, Joseph found an Eleganza at a dealership in New Jersey and went over to pick it up. I had to be at some meeting or other but when he gallantly returned with the brand-new vehicle we were giddy with excitement until it dawned on us. We were now faced with the greatest issue for any New Yorker with a vehicle: Where the hell were we going to park a twenty-six-foot van? Frantic phone calls were made. Finally, someone came up with a slim parking spot by a building on narrow Sixty-Eighth Street, between York and First, the building right next to Joseph’s labs! As this was all happening, the idea was born that perhaps he could live there during the week, as housing was tight. There was another problem. How does one get into the parking place from that narrow street? (Figure 26)
FIGURE 26. The tight parking place for the Eleganza is in the upper right corner. A very distinguished neurophysiologist told me once that the most important course she ever took in her life was high school shop. Practical knowledge shouldn’t be underestimated!
(Courtesy of the author)
Science is truly a team effort. We needed a backup specialist, and, by luck, I had had a summer job somewhere along the trail that taught me how to do exactly that, swiftly and adeptly, I must say. The gates to the parking slot were open, and up the one-way street I drove with cars parked on both sides. I pulled just beyond the opening, with Joseph and Jeff sitting shotgun. Charlotte, with the no-nonsense assuredness of a vibrant blonde Texan, held back traffic. Tough New Yorkers froze in their tracks, and I slipped the van into reverse and in one turn was able to back it down the slim driveway with a clearance of only four inches. Parking the Eleganza turned out to be my job for almost ten years. Oftentimes crowds would gather just to watch, and more than once they placed bets. At one point, the National Science Foundation officer had heard so many tales about trips in the van that he called to ask if he could stay in it over a weekend he was planning in New York.
The parking spot was next to an old city public-health building that had been taken over by Cornell. Right up the street on First Avenue was the most sublime Italian restaurant in the city, Piccolo Mondo. It was where we always went for either lunch or dinner when we found ourselves hosting visitors to the medical center, and we were great favorites of the maître d’. One day I arrived with Sam Vaughan, the distinguished editor from Random House, who upon stepping into the restaurant asked the maître d’, “Where is your men’s room?” The maître d’ calmly answered, “Mine is in Brooklyn.” Sam smiled and turned to me and said, “Everybody in New York is an editor.”
On one occasion, I had been seated for lunch at a famous corner booth, which, we were
told, was where Vladimir Horowitz ate almost every night. Dutifully impressed, I decided I should somehow return the kindness and proceeded to tell the maître d’ about the new carbonara recipe I had mastered from reading Marcella Hazan’s new cookbook. As my description rolled out, I noticed the maître d’ beginning to look ill. When I finished, he said, “We do not make carbonara here anymore, but for you I am preparing a dish of it right at the table so you can learn how to truly make it.” He did, and for the past thirty-five years, Charlotte and I have been making it at least twice a month.
Being in New York was like that: rich, unusual life experiences at every turn. The morning may have been spent on the hospital wards, examining fascinating patients with mysterious syndromes. Any day on the wards one might find a patient with an attention disorder such as the “double simultaneous extinction,” as described earlier, or a patient with a fascinating aphasia, or early dementia, or a more ephemeral disorder like a transient ischemic attack, which meant you had to think fast to glean and verify the phenomenon you were studying before it disappeared. Even if you walked into the sunroom at the end of the hall, where patients sat to warm up and relax away from their hospital room, a surprise might occur. One day I introduced myself to a gentleman who, in turn, introduced himself. He was Paul Weiss, the famous Rockefeller University professor and mentor to Roger Sperry. I told him I had been Sperry’s student, to which he warmly announced that Roger had been by far his best student.
Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience (9780062228819) Page 17