by W. E. Gutman
“Anyone who would go to such lengths to fake lunacy, my boy, must be ill; ill or desperate. Now think very carefully before you answer. Which are you?”
I swallowed hard. “If I can choose between the two, ‘desperate’ seems a more fitting diagnosis, Doctor. I believe that, unchecked, despair will lead to illness, won’t it?”
“Only in the most extreme circumstances. But you may have a point, tenuous and conjectural, but a point nonetheless.”
“Please, doctor, you must help me. I’ve got to get out of this. I can’t stand it anymore.”
“Let me see what I can do.”
*
There exist ill-defined forms of mental illness, so subtle, so skillfully concealed and so utterly undetectable that they elude even those trained to recognize the myriad faces behind which they hide. Is he demented who pretends to be sane? Is he who fakes madness -- mad? Is “normal” behavior evidence of sanity? Is a clown “crazy?” Would his buffoonery be sanctioned outside the circus tent? He’s only play-acting, you say? What about motorists who willfully exceed the speed limit: are they clear-headed? Are citizens who, time after time rush to the polls and vote into office inept or corrupt politicians under the ludicrous pretext that they’re taking part in the “democratic process”-- in full possession of their faculties? Or are they imbeciles who deserve the scoundrels they helped elect?
Is the soldier who fires at an enemy he can’t see behaving rationally or, to dilute the horror (or ease his conscience), is he pretending to be shooting blanks every time he squeezes the trigger? If not, if he finds moral justification in sanctioned murder -- or derives some secret thrill from it -- is he demented, evil or a hopeless moron?
Are boxers who bash each-others’ brains out -- for money -- out of their minds? Would their fights-to-the-finish seem less brutish if they didn’t appear to enjoy themselves so much? Aren’t the fans who salivate at the prospect of blood, of a bone-crushing knockout, equally deranged?
Are the uninvited zealots who compel aborigines to cover their genitals “for the love of God,” who force-feed guileless children alien concepts and rob cultures of their identity, sane or psychopaths further unhinged by religious zeal?
What about the “prophets”? Were they merely deranged talking heads or cunning terrorists; clueless prognosticators or schemers blinded by their own fury; soothsayers and mystic diviners who spoke in riddles and esoteric babble or crafty politicians bent on sowing fear in the hearts of the masses? Were their intentions noble or did they suffer from acute megalomania, monomania and thanatomania (a consuming preoccupation with death?) Wouldn’t they all have been diagnosed as certifiably insane -- or called charlatans -- had modern psychiatry not spinelessly declined to see them as superstitious crackpots pickled in gooey mysticism and predisposed to treat all inexplicable natural phenomena as the manifestation of some unknowable, invisible spirit?
Aren’t the dream merchants, the demagogue-pedagogues and the healers who deconstruct reality and peddle cheap imitations of Utopia -- insufferable egomaniacs?
If men were put away for their natural tendencies, prisons and mental hospitals would be bursting at the seams. Madness is somehow less reprehensible when it festers in high places, when ruthless entrepreneurs and corporate kingpins are eulogized for their “initiative” and cunning, when my-country-right-or-wrong “patriots” brush aside lies, rationalize injustice, defend sleaze and political chicanery, when fanatical evangelism is hyped as “God’s work,” when fraudulent and unwinnable wars that only enrich bankers and cannon merchants are waged far from home in the name of “national security,” when freedom of thought is condemned as heresy and when all moral codes are rescinded to protect the interests of the moneyed elite.
Pray tell, who are the mad, I wondered as I agonized over Dr. Schwartz’s decision. A lifetime detour to America’s world of make believe would help tell them apart. Meanwhile, feigning madness was the only way I knew to regain my sanity in what appeared to me as a very deranged universe.
*
Citing “an intractable incompatibility with the exigencies and rigors of military life,” Dr. Schwartz recommended that I be discharged, honorably and unconditionally. As the paperwork made its way through the slow and serpentine bureaucratic maze, I spent another few days at the U.S Naval Hospital in a ward filled with men who had shot and stabbed themselves, ingested razor blades and narrowly averted strangulation in exotic but unsuccessful attempts at suicide. A few thrashed about and screamed or sobbed uncontrollably in the middle of the night. These men were not faking. Fearing for my life, I got very little sleep.
On the morning of January 16, Dr. Schwartz, accompanied by an orderly, presented me with a large brown envelope. He smiled.
“You’re free, Gutman. Get the fuck out of here.”
I let out a scream, jumped up for joy and hugged Dr. Schwartz.
“Thank you, doctor, thank you ever so much.”
“Don’t thank me. I just did my job. I believe that in the long run you and the U.S. Navy will be the richer for having parted company. Good luck.”
Dr. Schwartz smiled. We exchanged salutes. He spun around on his heels with military panache and resumed his rounds. I opened the envelope and pulled out a lily-white certificate. I’d been honorably discharged. My past misdeeds and subsequent hospitalization, I assume, were dutifully chronicled and may still be filed away in some Navy archive. Nothing in the discharge certificate itself, however, hints at my turbulent and foreshortened service.
The orderly helped me pack my sea bag and escorted me through a series of double-bolted iron doors to the hospital’s outer gate. I waved my discharge at the sentry as if it were a victory pennant. Deliverance has a very special scent. I inhaled deeply, turned my face toward the sun, slung the sea bag over my shoulder and walked out.
I had already seen and would see far more of the world as a civilian.
UP THE FOURTH ESTATE!
To speak English is not a virtue. Not to speak it is an infirmity. And so I proceeded to conquer the strange language I’d first mastered in school, a virile idiom full of Anglo-Saxon dissonance, peculiar rhythms and intonations, an alien tongue as bizarre as the fabled domain on which I alit that bleak morning in late January 1956.
But fluency in English, I soon discovered, was not enough. In language are imprinted elements of culture peculiar to those who speak it. I found myself denied a subtler eloquence, a poise, an intuitive effortlessness granted native speakers who acquire and articulate without the slightest exertion all manner of doctrines, partialities and cultural idiosyncrasies, most of which, hitherto unknown to me, and promptly rejected, would forever deny me the rewards of total assimilation.
After fifty-six years in the United States, I still have a hard time reconciling with a host of eccentricities, anachronisms and absurdities. Among them, is the two-party system -- two parties indistinguishable one from the other except for the partisanships and antipathies they inspire in their respective camps, both tied to corporate wealth, both intent on blocking reform in the name of capitalism, both involved in immense larceny against the poor. A close second is the Electoral College, which fails to accurately reflect the national popular will and risks foisting a minority president. (I would remain conflicted about the Electoral College every time I reminded myself that, in America, a reflection of the “national popular will,” would keep blacks confined to the back of the bus, going to ghettoized schools and eating at segregated lunch counters).
Transmitted from father to son, racism is an infectious disease that even self-described democratic societies do not seem able or willing to cure.
The rest includes a hodgepodge of contradictions, customs, biases and affronts: blue laws, the obscene incongruity of Thanksgiving as Indians pine away in “reservations,” the worship of matinee idols, the lionizing of athletes, root beer and sarsaparilla, televangelism, Girl Scout cookies, Roe vs. Wade, the death penalty, feminism, chauvinism, negritude, white supremacy, the senio
r prom, baseball, Columbus Day, the Super Bowl, cheerleading, soccer moms, baby beauty contests, marshmallows, reality shows, rodeos, and hog calling contests.
*
It took more than thirty years to climb the treacherous slopes. I began at the bottom, sharpening pencils and running errands for the legendary Red Smith and other luminaries -- Earl Ubell, Judith Crist, Walter Kerr among them -- at the late great New York Herald Tribune. My skills as a pencil-sharpener and a capacity to endure with a smile the cold indifference or the daily slurs flung at me by these demi-gods of the Fourth Estate eventually earned me a promotion of sorts: I was entrusted with emptying their wastepaper baskets into a large wooden bin kept in a hallway near the service elevators.
One day I asked to be allowed to work on the obituary column, a modest and reasonable request, I thought. The request was denied without explanation. Sensing my frustration, and bending the rules, Walter Hamshar, the kindly shipping news editor, sent me to the Hudson River piers “on assignment,” a euphemism for fresh air. I returned to the office empty-handed save for a bad case of wanderlust and a pocketful of demented notes in which I successfully argued all the reasons why I should sneak aboard a bauxite-laden freighter en route to Vancouver, Valparaiso and Vladivostok or hitch a ride on an old tramp steamer headed for Panama, Pago Pago and Papeete, instead of going back to work.
Every once in a while, when the Muses beckoned or when my need for acknowledgment overshadowed the wisdom of anonymity (or the reality of an inflexible pecking order), I would compose short essays on this and that and submit them to the city editor. My tracts were invariably tossed, unread, into a large metal-rimmed receptacle that flanked his desk and which it was my duty to empty several times a day. In desperation, I wrote:
“There are people who make themselves inaccessible to those who need them most, those who most depend upon their tutelage. Like quicksilver, they’re never still enough to be overtaken. Agitated, choleric, bellowing here, clamoring there, they breathe fire, spit magma and piss vinegar. Bloated with self-importance, they secretly resent their superiors, pretend to tolerate their equals and openly delight in bullying the underlings. It’s impossible to get near them unless, exhausted and oxidized by self-combustion, they relent and become approachable -- and useless. One must learn to shut up in their presence. Addressing them might seem like praise to them. In their case, praise is flattery corrupted. Speaking ill of them while they are alive is risky; cowardly after they are dead.”
The city editor, a seasoned newsman on whose desk I’d placed my silly tract, was no fan of dark humor. He turned to the copy boy pool and pointed at me.
“Copy.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Hand me my waste basket, will you, boy.”
“Certainly, sir.” I walked over to his desk, picked the basket off the floor and held it at arm’s length.
“Paper is a precious commodity. It comes from trees and shouldn’t be squandered,” he said, tearing my essay into thin strips and letting them flutter one by one down the receptacle.
“Now please empty the basket.” He smirked and turned his back. Undaunted, I composed another tract.
“When the mighty have an opportunity to guide the meek, they rarely have the inclination to do so. When they wish to cow them, they never lack the means. The mighty scorn the gifted whose only possession is talent. The talented despise the mighty whose only gift is power. The others pity both for being endowed with either might or special aptitudes but no other discernible virtue. What reassures and sustains me against the contempt of the mighty is the certitude that they begrudge my gifts, not my frailty in the presence of might. They would no doubt kiss my ass if I were mightier but less talented than they.”
The city editor was not smiling this time.
“Now look, I could have you fired on the spot. If you value your job, you’ll stop pestering me. You hear!”
“Yes, sir.”
When one is accustomed to them, kicks in the ass no longer hurt, an axiom understood by those who dole them out as well as those who endure them. It becomes a habit. Copy boys belong to the latter category. Irrelevant, expendable they are the pariahs of a newspaper’s manifest caste system.
God denied animals speech to prevent them from telling humans off.
*
Across the short no-man’s land that separated the city editor from the rest of his staff, sat an old man whose features seemed frozen in a perpetual grimace, his upper lip curled menacingly, his nostrils flaring as if some foul odor inhabited his space, a scowl conveying both hostility and exasperation etched upon his face. On his desk rose in a neat pile a stack of paper towels and, next to them, a tall goblet of water which he fed with maniacal regularity from a glass carafe I was in charge of refilling. An empty carafe elicited a litany of half-muttered expletives in my direction. Every ten minutes or so, he would rip a few sheets, crumple them into a ball and dunk them in the glass. He would then scrub the palm and back of his hands with a vehemence suggesting self-loathing. I called him Lady Macbeth. The skin on his hands had acquired the sickly whiteness and texture of boiled chicken. He would call out, “Boy,” without a trace of a smile misspent and I’d have to run to the water fountain and fill up his carafe, or ferry a sheath of galleys to reporters, editors or headline writers huddled by the big horseshoe-shaped table. I resented these intrusions upon my time and inner-musings but survived them by engaging in smutty speculations about this strangest of compulsions. I imagined him engaged in furious masturbation and conjured scenes of maternal wrath for having “spilt his seed and fouled his hands in the presence of God.” The man had a wretched temper. He invited these unkind fantasies and I found myself despising the man more than the obsessive-compulsive disorder that afflicted him.
Partly dirty is not clean. Partly clean is still filthy.
*
Then, one day, the mighty Herald Tribune expired. In a few years, in rapid succession, New York, America’s media capital, went from a dozen newspapers to fewer than a handful. The war for jobs, fierce and bloody, proved beyond my capacity to wage. I was now 22, inexperienced, quixotic, trusting, naïve and ill-equipped to compete in an industry where natural selection had produced its own tiger sharks.
Survival dictated that I set aside any serious journalistic aspirations, and there began a slow, steep ascent consisting of one teetering step forward and three breakneck backward slides. I went to work for “trade” magazines in the food, beverage, plumbing, medical and aviation industries. My longest job -- I took over the reins of an environmental engineering publication when the editor could no longer hold his liquor -- lasted eight years. I attribute this extraordinary longevity to impudence, luck, necessity in the face of looming indigence and the esteem of an editorial crew in whose eyes I could do no wrong. Other jobs came and went. I was fired, demoted, laid off. Several publications died under me in rapid succession. Many more moved out of town and were never heard from again. I called myself a journalist, but paying rent and feeding a young family demanded that between frequent sorties to the unemployment office I also accept work as a dishwasher, waiter, barman, elevator operator, cab driver, night-shift cable dispatcher, shipping line clerk, messenger and security guard. I ferried books in Columbia University library’s maze-like sub-basement. I then managed the Bizarre, a dismal Greenwich Village coffee shop specializing in unpalatable drinks and bad poetry artlessly recited by haggard bards bombed out of their skulls. Some jobs lasted less than a month, others less than a day. I would be fired for indolence, ineptitude or insubordination. Friends envy my mottled past. Why not, it’s easier than living it.
I survived and kept writing feverishly, often in anger and frustration, sometimes the docile medium of inspiration, often the instrument of a dull but providential freelance project. Neither my failures nor friendly advice -- “Come to your senses boy, it’s time you learned a real trade” -- diminished my resolve. I was writing and getting better, if not yet good enough, at what I did best
. I believed in the dignity of my cause and the legitimacy of my aims.
*
Sometimes, in exchange for quasi-security, one is forced to give up one’s freedom, swallow one’s pride. The New York Academy of Sciences, where I worked as a copy editor, fostered a climate of self-denial bordering on masochism. Mrs. Miner, the director, was an ogress. Diminutive, capable of glacial stares and pinch-lipped sarcasm, she ruled by fear and intimidation. Headed by Frank Furness, a meek and unremarkable man past retirement age who trembled in her presence, the editorial staff was recruited by Mrs. Miner from a flotsam of misfits, openly gay aspiring literati and educated blacks willing to earn slave wages in exchange for a prestigious Upper East Side office address. I have no precise recollection of the type of manuscripts I edited. I remember working in a Dickensian ambiance where dress and deportment were subject to scrutiny and criticism, where chatting was forbidden, overtime obligatory, lateness and absenteeism punishable by docking and a very public lecture, compliments of Mrs. Miner, on the virtues of punctuality, loyalty and decorum.
I quit after less than six months.
We deplore failure by ignoring the problems success might have wrought.
*
My first big break came when I was 48. Years of monotony dissolved instantly in an avenging sigh of triumph. Awestruck by a career that stretched from the sublime to the ridiculous, impressed by the number of languages I spoke (some of which are useless even as a last resort) an executive at OMNI, the now-defunct futurist magazine, hired me on the spot. A previous stint as the managing editor of Aerospace America earned me the editorship of a newly launched publication devoted to nuclear, biological and chemical warfare. The magazine was an instant success. I traveled far and wide in search of fresh stories. Contributing editors picked from academia, national security agencies, counterespionage, think tanks and the military wrote probing features and insightful analyses. Stringers unearthed facts that not only out-scooped the major dailies but also earned us a loyal following among U.S. and foreign military, intelligence and diplomatic circles. We were the first to point fingers at Saddam Hussein, warn against the growth of international terrorism and offer a quantitative assessment of the global biochemical threat. We ran smuggled photos shot with subminiature cameras showing captured weapons, gas masks and decontamination equipment in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. We were the first to report that Argentina had stockpiled large quantities of nerve gas and was readying to use them against the British during the Falklands conflict. We traveled to Iran’s southern front and witnessed the horrifying aftermath of Iraq’s mustard and nerve gas attacks against civilians. We uncovered and reported on efforts by Russia and North Korea to turn snake toxins, botulism, ergot, anthrax, smallpox and the castor bean into weapons of mass destruction. In short, we were the first and only magazine of its kind, anywhere in the world.