The interview was one of the most demoralizing experiences of my life. I’d lost an entire night’s sleep and the opportunity for a better job, and for a few minutes there in the headmaster’s office I’d lost my dignity, my whole sense of self. But out here in the cold water, after a good night’s rest, I’ve rolled away the heavy rock of no-sleep and rematerialized back into my body, and I’m grateful to the ocean for carrying me back into this bright brisk region of my chiaroscuro emotions.
SPONSORS AND SPONSEES
One early summer weekend, Asa and I take another trip out to Montauk, where we pitch tents in Grodin’s backyard. Andy Kessler invites us over to his current summer rental for a barbecue, along with a couple of his NA sponsees who are out for the weekend. Andy’s place is in a quaint old motor motel, built in the fifties, abandoned in the eighties, and boarded up for twenty years. Everything’s perfectly preserved—all the Formica countertops, the linoleum floors, the mid century furniture, even the linens. Andy found a little stack of fifties-era postcards with a photo of his room, containing all the exact same furniture. He gives them out as souvenirs to everyone who visits.
We eat out on the lawn, on a rickety picnic table, where Andy tells us how he came to rent the place. He was out at Montauk during the spring and happened to see workers prying boards off the windows.
“They give me the number for the owner, who I call three or four times before he finally gets back to me. We go back and forth on price, the length of the lease, all that bullshit. I think it was obvious how much I really wanted the place. But right before we’re about to seal the deal, he says to me, ‘You’re not a surfer, are you?’ Swear to God, those were his exact words. I’m not going to lie to the guy, so I say Yes, in fact I am a surfer. He basically hung up on me.”
“You must have been livid,” Asa says.
One of Andy’s sponsees—this haggard-looking guy with a crew cut—pipes up. “Fucker did that to me, I would’ve taken a shit in his mailbox.”
Andy laughs, puts his hand to his forehead. “You know, there was a point in my life when I would’ve done just that. But I realized he was basically just this sad old man, you know? I was out here in Montauk when we had that last phone conversation; the whole ride home I felt at peace with it. I figured it just wasn’t meant to be. But then two weeks later he calls me back, says he had a change of heart. So here I am, by the grace of God.”
DATA. ASSESSMENT. PLAN.
Fridays: 3–11 p.m.
Saturdays: 3–11 p.m.
Sundays: 3–11 p.m.
Mondays: 11 p.m.–11 a.m.
This was my weekly schedule for my first full-time job out of college back in Colorado, where I worked as a counselor in a residential treatment center for adjudicated boys, a place called New Horizons. Adjudicated is the technical term for kids who’ve been through the court system and done jail time; our clients were mostly young gang bangers from Denver, wannabes from the suburbs, criminally minded hicks, and assorted fuckups. It was the most demanding job I ever had and it paid nine dollars an hour.
I was a New Staff and the New Staff always gets the worst shift—in this case the weekend shift—working Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights plus the Monday overnight. Monday overnights were borderline psychological torture. I had to do administrative work and bed checks all night, and then take part in the Tuesday-morning staff meeting from nine to eleven. What it amounted to was a grueling, twelve-hour graveyard shift that left me pretty well shredded on my two weekdays off. My boss was a conservative hardass named Tammy who eventually joined the military, and who once reprimanded me for not participating during staff meetings, despite my having been awake for thirty straight hours.
Tammy also thought I was too buddy-buddy with the clients. I’d been working with kids my entire life—mostly at summer camps or skateparks, so using a point system and confronting negative behavior was a hard transition. Sunday-night free time was the only part of the job that came naturally. After everyone finished their chores, we pushed the mess hall tables to one side and rocked breakdancing moves on glossy linoleum. A strange reversal: all these black and Latino kids from inner-city Denver, and me, a white guy from a small mountain town, teaching them how to lie back on their elbows, scissor kick their legs wide, then snap into a tight spinning ball—that quintessential old-school move known as the backspin. They picked it up quickly, but no one beat my record of twelve rotations.
After lights out, staff members wrote “DAP” reports on each client. DAP stands for Data, Assessment, Plan. First the straight facts about the client’s behavior during the shift (Data), then an analysis of these facts for underlying causes (Assessment), followed by proactive plans for dealing with the client in subsequent shifts (Plan). It’s a way of communicating with the other staff members and therapists, but also a legal record required by the state.
Despite my ambitions as a writer, I dreaded writing DAPs. I struggled with the act of reducing these kids and their complicated lives to a set of clipped sentences. Tammy pointed out the lack of objectivity in my reports, the overuse of creative language and metaphors.
“DAPs are for therapeutic purposes,” she said, “not for poetry readings.”
Though Tammy and I rarely saw eye to eye, she was good at her job, especially when it came to making sure the clients were staying in structure and watching their boundaries. And she had some astute observations about the kids and their personalities.
“There are basically two types of clients: Apples and Onions,” she told me during my first day of training. “We mostly get Apples. We call them Apples because there’s a deep emotional core at the center of their being. They can be sweet, but when they get angry or fearful they explode—their emotional core causes them to do things they later regret. Onions, on the other hand, basically have no emotions. They have outbursts of feeling like anyone else, but what really motivates them are layers and layers of criminal-minded thought patterns. They’re always thinking about how to take advantage of the situation and they’re always two steps ahead of you. These are the kids who grow up to be sociopaths, the kind of people who can murder someone and feel no remorse.”
Tammy’s description of Onions freaked me out. Apples I could understand, but people with no emotions? They seemed totally implausible, like Vulcans or characters from an Ayn Rand novel.
“Are there any Onions in the house right now?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Chris. Biggest kid in the group. Classic alpha male Onion. Not to mention a total narcissist. You’ll meet him tomorrow on your first shift.”
Data: During his first shift, New Staff took his shirt off during a basketball game at recreation time. Most of the clients had prison-house tattoos scrawled on their arms—hideous clowns and pot leaves and other shabby gangster insignias done with homemade tattoo machines. New Staff wanted to show these kids that he had his own tattoos—real tattoos, cool tattoos. Several minutes into the game, Chris fouled New Staff with an elbow to the ribs. When New Staff called him on it, Chris staged a tantrum and stormed off the court, then spent the rest of the shift glaring at New Staff and cursing under his breath. During the van ride home, New Staff confronted him on his language. “What the fuck you gonna do about it, tough guy?” Chris snapped back.
By the end of the night, Chris successfully turned every kid in the house against New Staff.
Assessment: Taking his shirt off was clearly a mistake on the part of New Staff. It was more an act of vanity than aggression, but Chris had taken it as the latter, as a direct threat to his alpha dog status. Chris was a ridiculous white boy wannabe gangster; even so he left New Staff shaken. Here’s a kid whose modus operandi was to gain control, to humiliate, to win at all costs—a true Onion and a total asshole. New Staff was hit with the hard realization that his new job was more prison guard than camp counselor.
Plan: Stand your ground. Learn to throw up some serious personal boundaries. Rejoice when Chris gets discharged after a month or so. Glare
at him when you see him cruising around town in his father’s convertible sports car. Keep your shirt on.
Data: Maki was a half-Japanese, half-black Crip from Denver. Well before his arrival at our facility, he’d gotten his sixteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant. Both families supported the pregnancy; they hoped fatherhood might be his ticket out of gang life. But six months later, both the girlfriend and her unborn child were killed in a car accident. Upon receiving the news, Maki went on a weeklong crack binge. Homeboy drove around Denver in a stolen car with a stolen shotgun, raging at the world, looking for someone to fire on, some red-wearing Blood or green-wearing Latino or white-wearing whale upon whom he might unload his towering rage and the tightly packed shell casings of his grief. He was finally arrested for grand theft auto and concealed weapons charges, and after nearly a year in jail, he came to us for “rehabilitation.” During his stay, he was treated with extra care by staff and therapists; he was on constant suicide watch and a heavy dose of meds for severe depression. Most of his spare time he spent making dark little sketches of graveyards and tombstones on his notebooks—RIP, TLF, RIP.
Assessment: Despite his Crip status, Maki was a charming kid with poetry in his heart, a true Apple. One of my female coworkers commented on his good looks—high cheekbones and green eyes and perfect complexion—and how in another life he might have been a model or a movie star. Maki’s was the most profound grief I’d ever witnessed; I wondered if it would keep him out of prison or land him right back there.
Kill or cure, it was hard to say.
Plan: Try not to upset him. Try not to say something ridiculous one day during group therapy about how maybe all his dwelling on death and graveyards is a disservice to his deceased girlfriend, who would want him to move on with his life, to be happy. He doesn’t know exactly what disservice means, but gets the drift, and doesn’t appreciate it one fucking bit, thank you. Leave this heavy shit to the therapists, the people with master’s degrees. Shoot hoops, give him his afternoon snack, make jokes, keep him away from sharp objects, and do your best to keep him moving, upright, awake, alive.
It was a relief to leave New Horizons and start graduate school, but I missed interacting with clients and our Sunday-night breakdancing sessions. I worked there for less than a year, but the kids and their stories stuck with me, became the subject of my novice attempts at fiction. And I found myself still thinking in DAP reports, applying the Apple/Onion label to literary characters, especially after I read Moby-Dick for the first time.
Data: Client tends to either isolate in his cabin or pace the decks of the Pequod. Client has obvious impulse control issues; he’s fixated on the idea of exacting revenge against the white whale. Unfortunately, Client’s negativity seems to rub off on his men, most of whom blindly follow his lead. Client also uses his disability as an excuse for not participating in recreational activities.
Assessment: Client’s elaborate revenge scheme against the perpetrator who took his leg is consistent with symptomatic patterns of post-traumatic stress disorder, as is his loss of spiritual faith and his suicidal ideation. Client wants to lash out against what he perceives as a blank, godless universe that has wrought so much misfortune upon him; Client views the white whale as the incarnate symbol of this universe. Client’s lack of empathy for his crew suggests he’s an Onion and possibly sociopathic. But Client does display some Apple characteristics in the end, for instance when he says, just before perishing, “My topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.”
Plan: Consider reassigning client to a below-deck post such as cook or steward, where he will pose less of a threat to himself and others. Encourage Client to empathize with the crew’s plight, to understand that his actions are affecting everyone on board. Place Client on twenty-four-hour suicide watch and discuss an increase in meds with his therapist. Client would also benefit from an increased exercise plan—encourage him to participate in recreational activities such as swimming or breakdancing. If these measures fall short, consider mutiny.
ALL I NEED IS THIS THERMOS
In May of 2006—two and a half years after moving to New York—I fly back home to Colorado for Kyle Grodin’s wedding. After arriving in Denver, I pick up a rental at Advantage Rent a Car and drive to my stepsister’s new house, which she explains is in a “rough” neighborhood called Five Points, a place that was considered notorious back in the eighties, but that has since started to gentrify. As I pull up to her street, I laugh inwardly at what she considers rough. It looks like a normal urban neighborhood to me—hell, it even has trees. And unlike my own Brooklyn street, it has no graffiti tags, rats, broken beer bottles, used condoms, or female junkies shooting smack in broad daylight. I have some trouble finding the house, so I give her a ring on my cell.
“Do you see me?” she says. “I can see you. You’re in a silver car. Look behind you.”
I turn around and there she is, standing in front of a brick Victorian with a newly planted yard and an unpainted picket fence, a good starter home for my kid sister the lawyer and her firefighter husband. I feel a little stitch of sibling envy—they’re probably paying less for a mortgage than I’m paying for rent back in New York. I park and undo my seat belt, anxious to give her a hug, but for some reason I can’t get the key out of the ignition. I sit there fiddling with it, until she taps on my window.
“Hey,” she mouths. “What’s wrong?”
I roll down the window. “The fucking key is stuck in the ignition.”
“That’s weird,” she says. She gets in the passenger’s side and tries to help me assess the problem. Two years since we’ve last seen each other, but we’ve yet to formally greet each other—no How was your flight? or Great to see you! For some families this would indicate distance, but for us it shows how close we are, the fact that we can forgo pleasantries and team-tackle the problem at hand. If we learned anything from our pastiche family it’s this: Things go wrong, so deal with it. Our parents actually divorced long ago, so technically we’re ex-stepsiblings—a complicated label that we mostly ignore.
“So how’s New York?” Steph finally asks. She’s messing with the gearshift, making sure it’s in park.
“Pretty much a disaster,” I say, still yanking on the key.
She looks up from the gearshift, scans my profile. “You look tired,” she says. “Better let me try.” She takes my spot in the driver’s seat; I find the owner’s manual in the glove box and stand in the street next to her, straining to read in the dim streetlamp glow. I’m baffled by what I discover. “If a malfunction occurs,” I read out loud, “the system may trap the key in the ignition cylinder to warn you that this safety feature is inoperable. The engine can be started and stopped but the key cannot be removed until you obtain service.”
“You have to be kidding me,” I say. “What genius American auto engineer came up with this one?” It’s after midnight; I’m tired and just want to go to bed, but now it looks like I’ll have to drive the car back to Advantage, or wait an hour or more for a tow truck. The other option is just leaving the keys in the car overnight, which in Five Points doesn’t seem like such a hot idea.
Like some excessive punctuation marks to that thought, just then I hear the sound of brakes squealing, tires skidding on asphalt. Suddenly there’s an ominous black SUV right behind us.
The back door flies open, apparently kicked from the inside, revealing a kid with a gun pointed right at us.
He has a blue bandanna tied around his face, Wild West style, bandit style.
“Get the fuck out of the car,” he tells me. Which is confusing because I’m not actually in the car. At first I think it’s a joke, some teenagers out pranking people with paintball guns.
But the kid jumps out, puts the gun to my temple, and makes it clear this is no joke. The gun is a revolver—an actual revolver with a round cylinder and six bullet chambers. It looks like an old gun, and maybe for this reason—and also the fact that I’m getting a distinct Apple sense from this kid, who doesn’
t seem like he has it in him to shoot anyone—it doesn’t scare me as much as it probably should.
“Give me all your money,” he says, that old cinematic chestnut, and now here I am standing in the street, a revolver in my face, reaching into my pocket and pulling out all my money, which fortunately I have neatly folded into a faux-silver money clip, because it has occurred to me that in Brooklyn a money clip could be an advantage during a mugging, in that you can just slip out all your money without surrendering your ID and credit cards, thus avoiding hours of phone calls to all the banks and the DMV—yet now I’m testing out this strategy while I’m on vacation in Denver, of all places.
“Now get the fuck down on the ground,” he says, stuffing all my money into his own pocket—but again none of my credit cards or my ID, which by the way is still a Colorado ID, indicative of my ambivalence about being a New Yorker and my nostalgic attachment to this place where I’m about to be fucking carjacked.
Doing what I’m told, I lie down on the pavement near the rear tire.
There is no fear, just a sense of audience-like numbness.
It’s like watching everything through one of those wide-angled, handheld cameras in a skateboard film when it gets cold-cocked by an errant skateboard and subsequently tumbles sideways onto the street and despite a cracked lens still captures streetlamp shadows, voices, my own two ghostly white hands, the inflation valve on the rental car tire, the astronomical quantity of pebbles embedded in a foot-wide patch of asphalt.
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 14