The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories

by Pagan Kennedy

  Right now, in one window of my computer, I’m donating my brain to science, typing information into an online form. It’s no more difficult than ordering a book from Amazon.com. You give your name, address, next of kin, and use a pull-down menu to let the Brain Bank know what kind you’ve got. For a moment, I linger over that list, deciding how to classify myself: normal control, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease. I click on “normal control” knowing that designation could change. That blood-soaked sponge in my head, so soft, so frangible, could be destroyed by any of a number of diseases. I have seen the villains up close on a computer screen at McLean. There, a helpful man in a lab coat showed me slides of brain tissue that had been eaten away by abnormalities, from the tangles of Alzheimer’s to the bloom of melanoma cells.

  We hope, of course, that all of this study of brain tissue will lead to the discovery of new pills and treatments. But along the way, perhaps it will offer another benefit too. The more we know about neurological disorders, the more likely we are to feel compassion for the people who suffer from those disorders. I’m remembering something that Dr. Taylor said about the moment when her brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia: “It was a relief. Finally, I could separate him from the disease. I could forgive him. I could love him again as my big brother.”

  The Mystic Mechanic

  At the Aladdin’s lamp, which perches high up on a pole, you turn off the main road and bump along through a back-alley wasteland of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here, steel statues rise out of the asphalt, wearing coats of red rust and decorated with mingled religious symbols. For instance, a line of menorah candles spells out the word “Allah.” The statues seem to come from some parallel Planet Earth where people have stopped warring over God and the only problem left is to come up with a logo for the new, peaceful, one-world religion. Next to one particularly tall steel slab, a cinder-block building squats.

  When I walk inside, Mahmood Rezaei-Kamalabad—Islamic mystic, artist, and auto mechanic—is hovering over a samovar. A compact man with a gray-shot beard, he bustles with frantic energy, as if he’s the host of a party that’s continually just about to begin. “Tea!” he proclaims. “You must have tea!” And he offers a steaming cup. Then Rezaei-Kamalabad, 52, finds himself under a Buick that hangs on a lift, explaining how brain energy affects the fuel injector and telling me about his inventions-in-progress that could help bring the major world religions into harmony. He plans, for instance, to glue a Torah, a Bible, and a Koran into one big tome but has been stymied because the religious texts come in different sizes.

  “All my thinking is ‘unite, unite, unite,’” he says, gesturing emphatically with grease-blackened hands, a loose Band-Aid flapping off of one finger. He’s tortured by contradictions and schisms, so tortured that he spent 17 years and—he estimates—$90,000 to build his masterwork, the Sense of Unity Machine, which he stores in an unheated room behind the auto shop. When he flips on the light to show me, my first thought is “electric chair.” A gurney hangs suspended from a steel frame that soars maybe 12 feet in the air. Old seat belts dangle, ready to strap you to the stretcher, and there’s a stained pillow to cradle your head. Rezaei-Kamalabad explains how the machine simultaneously spins you around and flips you head over heels, giving you the advantage of two prayer motions in one: You’re bowing and also whirling like a dervish. This combo, he says, brings about inner harmony and also cures diabetes. He turns a switch, and the gurney flings itself about in midair, seat belts flailing, while the motor screeches.

  In the interests of journalism, I know I should volunteer to strap myself into that thing and see whether or not I come out realigned. But I can’t work up the nerve. So instead I scream at Rezaei-Kamalabad over the thunder of the machine: “So, you probably use this machine every day.”

  He flips the switch off. “No, dear,” he says, in the sudden silence. “I used to. But I don’t have time now.”

  I’m startled by this answer: Why would anyone spend more than a decade perfecting a machine and then not use it? But before I can press him on this, the door to his shop tinkles—someone coming for tea. And maybe that’s the answer: This garage is also a Sense of Unity Machine, a crossroads for artists, cabdrivers, friends from the public housing development nearby, curious kids, techies, skate-punks, and spiritual seekers. In the hours I spend hanging out at the shop, visitors include a teacher who leaves a silk scarf for Rezaei-Kamalabad’s wife and an Indian-born customer who expounds on the history of Christianity in Madras. I find a book on his desk—DNA: The Secret of Life—signed by one of the authors, Andrew Berry, a regular at Aladdin Auto Service Center. “I drink tea here,” says Ethiopian-born Yohannes Joseph, a neighbor who came that day just to hang out. “I have tea in my house, but this tastes better. This place is like our home.”

  In the 1970s, Rezaei-Kamalabad worked for the government under the shah of Iran, overseeing the repair of palace buildings. In 1978, he left for Boston, inspired by a message from Allah—who directed him to pursue an American education. He got out just in time. In 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution ripped Iran apart. “If I was there during the revolution, I could be dead,” Rezaei-Kamalabad says simply.

  He drove a cab and studied at Massachusetts Art, where he fell in love with a fellow student, Marianne Murphy. They married in 1984. He wanted to return to Tehran and live there. She didn’t.

  One night, he says, he prayed for guidance—should he stay or go?—and God sent him a dream: He found himself gliding down the Charles River in Noah’s ark, fog curling off the water. In the gloom, he could just make out the lights of the Hyatt Regency hotel. He knew the place well; every day he picked up customers there in his cab. The ark stopped in front of the Hyatt. Its door opened. He was sent out onto the shore, alone. When he woke up, he knew he had to stay in the United States. “I start to cry,” he says. “I did not have any roots here. Everything was in Iran.”

  A few years later, he began building his Sense of Unity Machine, which would rock him in the air, would cradle him in its curling prayer, bringing harmony to a man living in exile. When I think of him hunched over those plans, I’m reminded of Temple Grandin, a high-functioning autistic and Colorado State University professor of animal science who invented a machine to hug her, because she could not stand the touch of another person. Did Rezaei-Kamalabad hope for a machine that could soothe his particular pain?

  Maybe gyrating through the air—as he used to do, back when he had time to ride in his machine—worked some kind of magic on him. He exudes a rare sweetness.

  “Do you have an e-mail address,” I ask him, “so I can send you your quotes? I don’t want to misquote you.”

  “Oh, no, my dear!” he replies. “I would never interfere with your art. You can have me say whatever you want. Have me say swear words!” He laughs uproariously at his own joke and then hurries to his samovar, to pour in more spices.

  The Ballad of Conor Oberst

  Conor Oberst takes the stage in Eugene, Oregon, looking like a cartoon of an indie rocker. His hair flops around his head in a black bubble, and above the quickly drawn lines of his mouth and nose his soulful eyes stare out. Though he’s from Nebraska, he brings to mind some Japanese pop icon—Hello Kitty perhaps—the way he manages to seem both adorable and haunted at the same time.

  Oberst, once the child prodigy of the indie scene, has always had to battle his own cuteness. He wrote his first songs at age 12, began soloing in clubs at 13. Now, at 22, he has played in so many bands and been involved in so many side projects that you need a flow chart to keep track of them. He has confessed crushes into microphones; he has shaken and shivered; he has built a following as the bard of teenage angst. Until this year. Suddenly, Oberst has swerved in an entirely different direction. On a recent CD he made with Desaparecidos, one of the bands he leads, he lambasted American consumerism with a level of sophistication you rarely hear in three-minute songs. And in Bright Eyes—the band that’s c
learly closest to Oberst’s heart—his writing shows a sudden leap toward maturity.

  “Onto the stage I was pushed with my sorrow well rehearsed,” he sings on the band’s latest CD. “I hear the ice start to melt and watch the rooftops weep for the sunlight./And I know what must change.” With these two literate albums out this year and a knockout performance at the recent C.M.J. festival in New York, he has critics buzzing that he might be the next Bob Dylan. But for the kids who make up the audience tonight, Dylan is grandpa. The club smells like a high-school gym, of teenagers in heat. The kids are hip in the studied way of those who take advanced-placement English classes. Oberst thanks everyone for showing up. He shuffles his feet, as if overcome by a fit of modesty. He chugs from a bottle of wine.

  He prefers not to stand stark alone on the stage, so Bright Eyes contains an ever-changing bunch of friends. On this tour, Oberst has surrounded himself with more than a dozen bandmates, a glockenspiel, hammer dulcimer, bassoon, violin, cello, drums, guitars, banjo. It’s so crowded up there that the musicians have to jump over instruments as they navigate the stage. From song to song, they transform themselves from countrified hootenanny to folk strummers to guitar heroes—it’s hard not to be awed by their range. Oberst melts into the background, popping out now and then for solos.

  Truth be told, he does not seem the least bit like Dylan. He jangles his guitar strings and sings: “Love is an excuse to get hurt and to hurt./’Do you like to hurt?’/’I do. I do.’/’Then hurt me.”’ He fixes us with those Pokémon eyes. The kids—some wearing glasses smeared with reflections from the pink lights of the stage—mouth the words to his songs.

  And then, about halfway through the set, the mood shifts. The band wanders away. Now it’s just Oberst up there, and he leans into the mike to sing “Don’t Know When but a Day Is Gonna Come.” In the recorded version, Oberst mixed his voice so low you could hardly hear it, as if embarrassed by his lyrics. Now he hurls them out. “They say they don’t know when, but a day is gonna come, when there won’t be a moon and there won’t be a sun. It will just go black.” Each line lands like a piece of prophecy. As Oberst rips into a verse that wasn’t on the CD, the audience goes silent. They hold their breath.

  He’s angry. Oberst—sweet, skinny Oberst—is so angry that he hisses the words: “It’s hard to ignore all the news reports. They say we must defend ourselves. Fight on foreign soil. Against the infidels. With the oil wells. God save gas prices.”

  A boy holding a bike helmet curls into himself, punched by the words. The girls doing the bump freeze, their hips still cocked. Then the crowd shouts with delayed delight, almost as if fireworks have popped up near the rafters. Almost as if Oberst, by boxing the war into a rhyme, might be able to stop it.

  The next day, Oberst totters out of the Eugene Hilton complaining that he’s been poisoned. Too much wine last night. He’s detoxing with a supersize coffee as he drags along the sidewalk beside me. Up close, Oberst loses his cartoon-character glossiness. He is alarmingly pale. His hair falls into his face in loops, and he hides behind it. He begins a sentence, lets it trail off. He interrupts himself, stumbling over a thought. He’s skinny in a way that is only possible for a 22-year-old rocker on the road, with black-jeaned toothpick legs and a chest shaped like a fifth of gin. During the three days I trail his band, the only items of food I see pass his lips are a few pistachios. Admittedly, I am not with him some of the time. Still, his seeming ability to live on nothing but a tiny green nut or two contributes to his ethereal presence. He exudes the otherworldly aura of a person who—in some back part of his brain, some Omaha of the mind—is always writing a song.

  I’m escorting him to his next gig, Portland, in a rental Chevy. The young Bob Dylan would have made a miserable companion on a car trip—bitingly sarcastic (remember that scene in Don’t Look Back when he tortures Donovan?) and perpetually on the make. Conor Oberst, on the other hand, helps out by reading the map and asks permission to turn down the air-conditioning. Seemingly unaware of the stereotype concerning men and directions, he cheerfully rolls down his window and leans out to query passers-by, “How do we get back on Route 5?”

  When he’s not map reading, Oberst hunches over a newspaper. The news, as usual, is terrifying. North Korea is boasting that it will soon possess nuclear weapons. “I was sort of getting used to Iraq, and now this,” he says.

  I ask him when he decided to add the verse about Iraq that he sang the previous night. He tells me that he originally wrote the song that way, but then cut the most tendentious words out, worrying that it might sound “preachy.” During this tour, which coincided with the congressional debate on Iraq, he decided to put the verse back in. On most nights, his show peaks when he surprises his fans with the new-old lyrics.

  “I thought I would never sing political songs, but now it seems like the only thing worth singing about,” he says. “It’s difficult to think about anything besides the war.” He tells me—only half-joking—that he’s come up with a plan in case the draft is reinstated: he’ll marry a Canadian. Of course, in the unlikely event of a draft, middle-class poets like Oberst would be the last to fight. He slides his eyes toward me shyly. “I always embrace the worst-case scenario,” he admits. For some reason this strikes both of us as a punch line, and we crack up.

  What must it have been like to be 21 when the towers fell? Oberst and his gang used to measure themselves by the record deals they made or turned down. They worried about how to stay raw, about—really—too much prosperity. Now, according to one of Oberst’s bandmates, they agonize about a friend in the military who may be shipped to the Middle East. They have vague plans to take their protest beyond lyrics, but they’re not sure what that would mean.

  Oberst swam through high school during the plush years of the 1990s in circumstances that could be described as swaddled: he attended Catholic prep school in Omaha and hung out on what he described in one song as “that perfect peaceful street.” His dad, who works for Mutual of Omaha, played classic-rock songs in a wedding band; his brother Matt jammed with the neighbors; photos on a CD of songs from 1995 to 1997 show his parents kissing, kids playing with a reel-to-reel tape machine lit up in the background.

  As a seventh grader alone in his room, Oberst began to pour out songs into the four-track, recording tortured moods. David Verdirame, a former classmate of Oberst’s whom I met backstage at a show, remembers that kid with the sophisticated musical taste. “I was wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, and he made fun of me. He made me a mix tape of all these local bands I’d never heard of.” Verdirame—now a well-scrubbed fellow who could pass as a frat brother—locks me in an intense gaze as he tries to describe what the discovery of edgy music, especially Oberst’s, meant to him.

  “I had a lot of old tapes of Conor’s music,” he says. “They were so disturbing I had to throw them out.” His blue eyes laser into mine. “I threw them in the ocean.”

  Mostly, though, Oberst hung out with older musicians, who treated him as a peer. One “was playing a show one night,” Oberst remembers. “I went down to see him, and he was like: ‘I’m not going to play my last song. Conor’s going to play.”’ The 13-year-old took the stage. Soon he was performing around town, screaming and flailing as if to exorcise his teenage demons.

  Meanwhile, Oberst formed a band called Commander Venus. They recorded for a small label that eventually turned into Wind Up Records, which turned into one of the largest indie labels, home of the stadium rockers Creed. Before he had graduated from high school, Oberst learned what it was like to interact with big business. “I don’t think I could ever be on a major label,” he says, “because their idea of success and mine are vastly different.”

  When Commander Venus broke up, Oberst and his friends decided to form their own label, which started out almost as a hobby but grew into a real business. “The label splits the money 50-50 with the bands,” Oberst says. “There’s no paperwork. It’s trust.” They named their outfit Saddle Creek Records, after the
Omaha street where they’d hung out as kids.

  The share-and-share-alike ethic carries over into the way Oberst puts together his tours. Bright Eyes travels as a kind of summer camp on wheels. When Oberst tells me how he lost all his clothes in a New York cab a few weeks ago, I point to his faded black jeans, the long-sleeved T-shirt. “So where’d those come from?”

  He ducks his head, a bit sheepish. “My bandmates,” he says. “We always wear each other’s clothes.” I think back to when I was that age, how boyfriends and girlfriends would announce their passion by trading jeans and sweaters, parading around in costume as one another. Oberst must be in love with his whole band.

  Later that day, in the back of a Portland club, the band’s bassoonist, its bassist, a filmmaker and the guy who sells CDs at shows hang out in the kitchenette. Other band members pound up the stairs and find beers, then vanish. Somewhere downstairs a drum rattles experimentally. A banjo twangs and then stops mid-riff. With 15 musicians and a bestiary of instruments, the Bright Eyes sound check starts at 3 and drags on for hours, sometimes right up until an 8 o’clock show. Now, late-afternoon light cuts through a window, illuminating the attic dust that meanders lethargically through the air.

  The club has taken on the atmosphere of a sprawling group house in Omaha. Someone suggests that Oberst should cook everyone dinner in the kitchenette—and then the conversation winds its way back to other dinners whipped up in other cities. Oberst himself wanders in, sprawls on a stool, listens, laughs appreciatively. You can catch in him some echo of that 13-year-old boy who hung out at college parties, the perpetual little brother just happy to be included. You would never guess that he has masterminded all of this.