Kellogg was discharged a month later. The staff and patients threw him a little party in the dining room and served chocolate donuts and milk. Mr. Halliday didn’t attend. Harold Field Kellogg, I read in the New York Times in 1990, died at the age of seventy-two, of coronary disease, on the island of Nantucket, where he had retired.
Patients on the fourth floor also were given weekend passes to visit home, but I wasn’t allowed to go to Brooklyn yet, lest I be exposed to the full blast of everything that waited for me on 18th Avenue. On weekends the fourth floor was mostly empty, and a little lonely. Maybe it was the inescapable heat one Saturday in August, but I was horny all day. I had nonstop sexual fantasies, and I wanted desperately to go to my room and masturbate, but with so little activity on the floor it was easy to get caught by a nurse, and I had pledged to Dr. Myers that I would not masturbate and fantasize about boys.
In a heat-induced trance, I walked down to the south lounge hoping to catch a breeze off the East River. The lounge was empty so I found an Esquire magazine and sat down in a chair and thumbed through it until I found a men’s underwear ad in the back. I sat and stared at it for a moment, and then I rubbed the magazine against my erection through my pants, and just like that, uncontrollably, I had an orgasm. I gasped and shook a little in the chair, and then lazily opened my eyes from my post-orgasmic coma to see Alessandra curled up on the sofa on far side of the room watching me. She had been there all along, so still that I hadn’t seen her. Now she stretched and yawned like a cat waking up. I held my breath until she said something, which was, “A great American writer.”
“Huh?” I managed to say, miserable and all sticky in my pants. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me.
She held up the book she had been reading, Day of the Locust. “Nathanael West,” she said. “Hollywood and desperation. Meaningless lives. Sound familiar?”
“I didn’t see you sitting there,” I said.
“I gathered,” she answered smoothly. “Don’t worry, I have two brothers. I’m used to catching fifteen-year-old boys having a wank.”
“I was not!” I protested. I stormed out of the room, in an odd crouch, hiding the front of my pants with the magazine. I looked ridiculous and it was all she could do not to laugh.
Alessandra discreetly never made reference to the incident, but I could never look her in the eye without thinking about it. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this story was that she walked away from the clinic a few weeks later and I never saw her again. She lingered behind one day after occupational therapy—she hid, I guess—and took an elevator down with visitors and strolled home. She was such a free spirit, I’m sure being locked up was soul killing for her. I read about her in the society columns for years after that. She cleaned up her act, got married to a rich guy in the movie business, and moved to Beverly Hills. I sometimes think I should call her up and say hello, but I’m sure she’d hate that.
Moon Over Miami
I had a little less than three weeks left before my grandfather’s money ran out and my stay at Payne Whitney was over, and nothing seemed resolved. Wasn’t the promise that once I understood my problems I would feel better? I did feel better, but that was because I was having such a good time at Payne Whitney. But I began to worry there would be no resolution before my grandfather’s gift ran out and it was time for me to go home.
Weeks passed in therapy uneventfully while Dr. Myers interpreted my dreams. His interpretations sometimes seemed arbitrary and convenient. In a dream, according to him, my mother could be represented by my father, or a misty character was really him, Dr. Myers. Or a dream about being scared on the Steeplechase in Coney Island when I was a kid was actually about having an erection. Then there were all the dream fragments about Miami Beach, dozens of them. Miami Beach things popped up in my dreams all the time; even when the dream happened somewhere else, there was a piece of Miami Beach in them, the white front steps of the National Hotel, the nighttime miniature golf across from Pickin’ Chicken, the tiny paper parasols stuck in the strawberry shortcake.
It was odd that I dreamed about it so often, because I had only been to Miami Beach once, I told Dr. Myers, when I was seven years old, but it was still very fresh to me. It was March, and Gog had surprised us with a gift of three round-trip plane tickets for my mom and dad and me, plus a week at the National Hotel on Collins Avenue, right on the ocean. We were flying on a Douglas DC 4, the fastest plane in the sky, and it would take only four and a half hours to get to Florida. Gog gave my mom and me the tickets in the store one afternoon, and I was so thrilled that I danced up and down the length of the store while Katherine sang “Moon Over Miami,” and everybody clapped.
But when my dad got home from work that evening he was in a grouchy mood because he had a fight with somebody at his father’s seltzer bottling plant, Jacob Goldberg & Sons, where he worked at the time. Jake Goldberg, Poppy Alta, was a peasant from Poland with a crazy, junkyard smile—one tooth, half-a-tooth, no tooth, a gold crown. My dad claimed Alta could bite an eighth-inch-thick piece of glass with those teeth and spit out the chunks. His wife, Leah, was a tough old bird with crepe-paper skin and two red cauliflower blooms of high blood pressure on her cheeks. She relaxed by playing solitaire at the kitchen table in the finished basement, chewing sunflower seeds, spitting the husks into her fist like a machine gun. She smoked, a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes a day, and every few minutes she exploded in a cascading smoker’s cough until she was red-faced and doubled over. Leah was wary of me. Even as a child I could see by the way she gazed at me that she knew I was a rara avis and not part of her durable tribe. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age eighty one summer night while playing canasta at the Six Lake House bungalow colony in the Catskills. The other players said she closed her eyes, passed gas, and slid to the floor.
When my mother put dinner on the table, she cautiously told my dad about the trip. She said that Gog thought we all needed a break—my dad worked so hard—and he had bought us plane tickets and a week’s stay at the National Hotel, and did my dad think his father would give him a week off at work?
No, he said, it was out of the question. They lived paycheck to paycheck and Miami Beach was expensive. Where would the money come from for meals and tips and all the other expenses? He said that Gog was intruding in our lives and instigating family fights. Sure, Gog could take off a week to go see his whores in Miami Beach, but not people like my dad, who worked hard for a living, carrying cartons of seltzer bottles up and down six flights of steps ten hours a day. He told my mother to give back the plane tickets.
I kneeled next to him, and took his hand and pleaded, but he was resolute—we were not going. I went to bed sobbing and I could hear my mother crying on the kitchen phone with Gog. Later that night, Katherine, the vermittler, stopped by our apartment to talk to my dad on her way home from a bingo game at Holy Ghost church. I don’t know what sorcery she used, but in the morning my dad relented and said we could go, as long as he could get the week off. I was so grateful I grabbed on to him and he lifted me up into his arms and I kissed his neck with gratitude.
The day of departure he was thin-lipped and scowling, getting tense over things like the zipper not closing on the garment bag. We were on the way to Idlewild Airport, my mother and I in a euphoric mood, when she said something funny and she and I laughed—I don’t know what she said, and it doesn’t matter—I just remember her laughing like a young girl, with her head back, she looked beautiful, we were both so merry. And then he snapped, his fury sudden and shocking. I guess his anger had been on the boil since he grudgingly changed his mind about going. He began to turn the steering wheel erratically to the right and left, as though he were struggling with an unseen hand trying to drive us off the road and crash the car. My mom grabbed on to the dashboard, pleading, “Izzy, Izzy, slow down! I didn’t mean anything!”
He steered us all over the Belt Parkway, raging against Gog and hi
s “who-ers,” and against my mother, a “fat cow,” and he said he was sick of me, that I embarrassed him in front of Irving the Jeweler last week by demanding to go home for dinner when he was talking politics.
“I didn’t do anything!” I shouted at him. “You pick on us! I hate you!”
With that, he reached inside the pocket of his tweed overcoat and took out the navy blue Eastern Airlines ticket folders, ripped them in half, and threw them out the window. For a second one of the folders caught on the inside edge of the window frame before it fluttered away down the parkway, cars running over it.
“What did I do?” my mother begged him, sobbing. She began to beat herself hard on the head and face with her fist. I was terrified. “What did I do?” she howled.
I tried to grab her wrists from the backseat to stop her from hitting herself, but it was no use. I felt so sorry for her, for me, for our lives. I looked around in the backseat of the car for something to stab my father in the neck with—a screwdriver, a pencil—but there was nothing, and I collapsed in a heap on the floor of the car and sobbed. My father got off the parkway at the next exit and turned around, driving us home in threatening silence. He pulled over once in Sheepshead Bay for me to throw up by the curb.
My father stopped talking to all of us and we lived with our heads down, in mourning. I saw those plane tickets fluttering down the Belt Parkway a thousand times in my mind. Still see them now.
I told Dr. Myers about a cold morning two weeks later, when my mother woke me before dawn, just after my father left for work on his seltzer delivery route. My eyes were closed but I could smell my grandmother’s Jean Naté perfume, clean and sweet, and when I opened my eyes she was there too, in her mink coat, her honey-blond hair teased and sprayed, and she called me her “little man.” Gog was there also, wearing an overcoat and muffler, and he was laughing.
It was hard to wake up a seven-year-old from a deep sleep, so they pulled on my socks and pants while I was still drowsy. I had to wake up, they said, because we had plane tickets for the first flight out from Idlewild, and we only had five minutes to pack. My mother jumped in the shower, threw a few things in a bag, and we were out the door, her hair still wet. I was half asleep as Gog carried me in his arms out to his Cadillac with the pointy tail fins, and drove us away from 18th Avenue. Arthur Godfrey was on the car radio, and my grandmother said that Arthur Godfrey owned a restricted hotel in Miami Beach called the Kenilworth and that we would never go there. My mother tried to comb the tangles out of her wet hair but her comb broke and she was upset until Gog said there were combs in Miami Beach, and we all laughed at how silly it was, and no one got mad at our laughter. My grandmother held my hand tightly so I wouldn’t get lost while we rushed through the Eastern Airlines terminal to the boarding gate and out onto the tarmac where the plane sat waiting, mammoth and breathtaking. I had a window seat, and there were giant propellers right outside the window, and they were loud and scary. We went up and down in the sky over the ocean, like a loop-de-loop.
When the plane landed at Miami Airport Gog held my hand as we stepped out onto a platform at the top of a flight of metal stairs and the warm, damp air caressed me, so soft and sultry it made me euphoric and slightly dizzy. That very afternoon I was bobbing up and down in the waves with Gog, the ocean a watercolor wash of aquamarines and emeralds, as warm as a bathtub. High tide had left the pebbly beach littered with Portuguese men-of-war, like hundreds of pink chewing gum bubbles along the shore. They had long, lacy tentacles that caused a painful blister, and Gog and I went up and down the beach and popped them with shovels. We ate lunch at a table by the pool while I dried in the sun wearing my new swim trunks and matching terry cloth–lined top. “It’s a cabana set,” I told a woman in the elevator, going up to our room. On Saturday night we went to the hotel nightclub, my face glowing with suntan, and the comedian who talked to me from the stage asked if I bet on the horses. The audience laughed, and he bought me a Coke.
Everybody was laughing in Miami Beach. It was a city in celebration, it seemed. It felt happy, it looked happy; the buildings were low and white stucco, curved and not sharp, and the sky was everywhere, no end to it. Every night after dinner we strolled the promenade of Lincoln Road, a hundred feet wide, pieces of the moonlight glittering in the coral rock pavement. Everyone was deeply tanned, men wore sports jackets and women wore mink stoles, no matter how warm it was, and we window-shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue and Peck & Peck. My mom and I had a room overlooking the ocean and we slept to the sound of the surf in a big bed with crisp white sheets and pillowcases. My sunburn felt good on the fresh-laundered sheets, and I had my mother all to myself, my father’s dolor back in Brooklyn except for occasional phone calls from home, his voice crackling from the receiver like an electrical current, and the click when he hung up on my mother.
The dream ended. Our time was up. We had to go home. I arrived at Idlewild Airport with a stuffed alligator and a coconut under my arm, mementos of irreplaceable times. We returned to find trouble. While we were away my father hadn’t shown up for work one day. Alta had fired him and they stopped speaking. My dad’s excuse was that he went to the Culver movie theater and fell asleep in the smoking section, and they locked up the theater with him in it. We never knew what the truth was. Alta accused him of being with a woman, and they got into a nasty brawl and my dad was banished from the business. He stopped talking to Alta for almost the rest of the old man’s life, until he was on his deathbed. After my dad was fired by Alta, we fell on hard times. He took a delivery job for
Reddi-Whip, and things looked bleak for us until he went back to college on the G.I. Bill, and surprised us all by becoming a high school guidance counselor with enough credits to get his PhD. It made no sense at all.
“Remarkable,” Dr. Myers said when I finished telling the story. “This Miami Beach experience is the central story of your analysis. It’s a tent pole. It’s the blueprint to your psychological formation.”
Wow. We had a blueprint. A pole.
“You keep dreaming about Miami Beach because it was the real-life consummation of your deepest, most forbidden subconscious fantasy. It was in Miami Beach that you won the oedipal contest between you and your father.”
“Oh yes?” I nodded expectantly.
“Your absent father was dead, killed by you and your grandfather when you were whisked away without your father’s permission. In Miami Beach you had your mother to yourself for two weeks without your father. You even slept in the same bed with her. After watching her in bed with your father for so many years, it was your turn. But because your mother was a forbidden sexual object, your sexual confusion was crystallized.”
My confusion was certainly crystallized. It sounded so … sordid. “Is that it? I mean, is that the blueprint?”
“There’s something else that’s significant. You said this trip to Miami Beach took place in March? Well, eight years later, on what might be the same day in March that you were in Miami Beach, you tried to kill yourself, the way Oedipus blinded himself.”
It turned out he was right. I tried to kill myself on March 15, eight years to the day we left for Miami Beach. Spooky? Freud? Bashert?
The Miami Beach experience, he said, also explained the identity of the man was who was going to steal me away at school, or the stranger who was lurking in the men’s room at the Culver. It was my father’s ghost of vengeance. A child molester who would castrate me for sleeping with my mother, another reason why I turned away from women.
Really? It sounded fantastic, but it did tie up all the loose ends. Sort of. I liked the neatness of it. And anyway, I had less than a month to go before I was discharged, so I bought into this construction just to be practical.
Grand Rounds
Dr. Myers asked me if I wanted to be presented at Grand Rounds.
I was thrilled. I was a prince at the monster’s ball. Being presented at Grand Rounds was like being nomi
nated for an Oscar in the Academy of Mental Cases. I was so proud I told all the other patients as if I just had been notified I was class valedictorian. Only one person a month was chosen from the whole hospital, and it meant that there was a chance my case would be cited in a medical journal. You’ve heard of Freud’s famous pseudonymous patients, “Anna O” and the “Wolfman”? I would be known as “Patient Miami Beach.”
On the morning of my Grand Rounds I was escorted by an aide through a labyrinth of tunnels connecting Payne Whitney with the main building of New York Hospital. Grand Rounds took place in an amphitheater, attended by medical students, interns, residents, professors of psychiatry. Bleachers of people in white lab coats filled the seats. The legendary chief psychiatrist at Payne Whitney, Dr. Oskar Diethelm, and the chairman of the psychiatry department, Dr. Eleanor Jacoby, sat in the first row of the gallery. I was shown to a chair on a platform opposite Dr. Myers, who smiled reassuringly. The entire room focused intensely on me, and it was so intense that I began to shake. It wasn’t exactly as I hoped it would be. No cameras. No close-up. No Natalie Wood.
Dr. Myers gently put me through my paces, hitting all the plot points: my father’s temper tantrums; sleeping in the same room with my parents; the trip to Miami Beach; how I hated my homosexuality; and that I wanted to change. I even cried for them, an Uncle Tom gay boy. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I expressed my torment at being homosexual and my longing to be like everyone else. I thought that if I could convince them, it would come true. Dr. Diethelm sat with his chin resting on his hand as I spoke, inscrutable, but Dr. Jacoby scowled.
When it was over, I felt exploited. Dr. Myers shook my hand and said, “Good job.” Then an aide led me into the hallway behind the amphitheater to take me back to Payne Whitney when the door opened and it was Dr. Jacoby. She was smiling and she took my hand and patted it and asked if I was okay. She brushed my hair back from my forehead and said that I had been very brave, and that I was exceptionally articulate. Then she gave me a hug, and whispered in my ear, “Don’t torture yourself.”
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