Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir Page 4

  DR. YALOM: How do you explain that?

  IRVIN: Probably they want to spare us the horror. I remember the newsreels at the movies after V-E Day showing the camps and the mountains of corpses being moved by a bulldozer. I was in shock—I was entirely unprepared for this, and I’m afraid I’ll never get those scenes out of my mind.

  DR. YALOM: Do you know what your parents want for you?

  IRVIN: Yes—to be educated and to be American. They knew little of this new world. When they arrived in the United States they had no secular education—I mean zero . . . except the course to become US citizens. Like most Jews I know, they are “people of the book,” and I believe, no, I know, that they are pleased whenever they see me reading a book. They never never interrupt me when I’m reading a book. Yet, they show no signs of wanting an education of their own. I think they know that possibility has passed—they are so crushed by their hard work hours. They are exhausted every night. It must be so bittersweet for them: they work hard so that I can have the luxury of education, but they must know that each book, each page I read, tugs me farther and farther from them.

  DR. YALOM: I’m still thinking of your eating those Little Tavern hamburgers—that was the first step. That was like the bugle signaling the beginning of the long campaign.

  IRVIN: Yes, I waged a long war for independence, and the early skirmishes were all about food. Even before the Bar Mitzvah rebellion I ridiculed the orthodox food laws. Those laws are a joke: they make no sense, and what’s more, they cut me off from being American. When I go to a Washington Senators baseball game (Griffith Stadium is only a few blocks from my father’s store), unlike my friends, I can’t eat a hot dog. Even an egg salad or grilled cheese sandwich at the drugstore down the street is forbidden, because, my father explains, the knife that cut the sandwich might have just been used to cut a ham sandwich. I protest, “I’ll ask that it not be cut.”

  “No. Think of the plate that may have been used for ham,” my father or mother says. “Traif—it’s all traif.” Can you imagine, Dr. Yalom, hearing this when you’re thirteen? It’s insane! This vast universe—trillions of stars being born and dying, natural disasters occurring every minute on earth, and my parents insist that God has nothing better to do than to check drugstore knives for molecules of ham?

  DR. YALOM: Really? That’s the way you think at such a young age?

  IRVIN: Always. I’m interested in astronomy and have made my own telescope and whenever I look at the night sky I’m blown away by how tiny and insignificant we are in the great order of things. It seems obvious to me that the ancients tried to deal with feelings of insignificance by inventing some god who considered us humans so important that he should turn his attention to surveying our every act. And it also seems obvious that we try to soften the fact of death by the invention of heaven and other fantasies and fairy tales that have one common theme: “We do not die”—we continue to exist by passing on to another realm.

  DR. YALOM: You really have those thoughts at your age?

  IRVIN: I’ve had them as far back as I can remember. I keep them to myself. But to be honest with you, I think of religions and the ideas of the afterlife as the world’s longest-running con game. It serves a purpose—it provides religious leaders a comfortable life and it dampens mankind’s fears of death. But it comes at such a price—it infantilizes us, it blocks our vision of the natural order.

  DR. YALOM: Con game? So strident! Why so intent on offending several billion people?

  IRVIN: Hey, hey, you asked me to free-associate. Remember? Usually I keep this, all of this, to myself.

  DR. YALOM: Quite right. I did ask you to do that. You complied. And then I knock you for it. My apologies. And let me ask something else. You speak about fear of death and the afterlife. I’m wondering about your own personal experiences with death.

  IRVIN: My first memory is the death of my cat. I was about ten. We always had a couple of cats in the store to catch mice and rats and I played with the cats a lot. One day, one of them, my favorite—I forget her name—was hit by a car, and I found her by the curb, still breathing. I ran into the store, took some liver out of the meat case (my father was a butcher also), and cut off a sliver and placed it right by the cat’s mouth. Liver was her favorite food. But she wouldn’t eat, and she soon closed her eyes for good. You know, I feel bad forgetting her name and calling her “cat”—we spent tons of warm wonderful hours together, she sitting on my lap, purring loudly, as I petted her while reading a book.

  As for human death, there was a boy in my third grade schoolroom. I can’t remember his name, but I think we called him “L.E.” He had white hair—perhaps he was an albino—and his mother packed unusual sandwiches in his lunch box—for example, sandwiches of cheese and pickle—I had never heard of pickles in sandwiches before. It’s so strange how certain odd things get fixed in your memory. One day he didn’t come to school, and the next day the teacher announced that he had gotten sick and died. That was all. I recall no particular reaction—my own or anyone else’s in the class. But there is one extraordinary thing about it: L.E.’s face remains so clearly in my mind. I can still visualize him—with an astonished look on his face and his very light blond hair standing straight up in a short crew cut.

  DR. YALOM: And that’s extraordinary because? . . .

  IRVIN: It is extraordinary that his image is so clear. It’s weird because I didn’t know him very well. I think he was in my class only that one year. What’s more, he had some kind of sickness and his mother drove him to and from school, and so we never walked home together or played. There were many other kids in that class whom I knew far, far better, and yet I can’t remember any other faces.

  DR. YALOM: And that means that? . . .

  IRVIN: It must mean that death obviously caught my attention, but that I chose not to think about it directly.

  DR. YALOM: Were there times you did think directly about it?

  IRVIN: It’s hazy in my mind, but I recall I was walking around in my neighborhood, after having played on the pinball machine at a five-and-dime store, and the idea just thundered down on me that I was going to die like everyone else, everyone who lives, or will ever live. That’s all I remember, except I know that it was my first realization of my own death, and also that I couldn’t hold it in my mind for very long, and, of course, I never spoke of it to anyone. Until now.

  DR. YALOM: Why “of course”?

  IRVIN: My life is very solitary. There’s no one I can share those thoughts with.

  DR. YALOM: Does solitary mean lonely?

  IRVIN: Oh, yes.

  DR. YALOM: What comes to mind when you think of “lonely”?

  IRVIN: I think of riding my bike in the old “Soldiers Home,” a large park about ten blocks from my father’s store . . .

  DR. YALOM: You always say “my father’s store” rather than “my home.”

  IRVIN: Yes, good catch, Dr. Yalom. I just noticed that too. My shame about my home runs deep. What comes to mind—and I’m still free-associating, right?

  DR. YALOM: Right. Continue.

  IRVIN: What comes to mind is a Saturday night birthday party I attended when I was about eleven or twelve held at a very ritzy house, a house the likes of which I had never seen except in Hollywood films. It was the home of a girl named Judy Steinberg whom I had met and romanced at a summer camp—I think we even kissed. My mother drove me to the party but could not come to take me home, because Saturday night was the time the store was busiest. So, when the party was over, Judy and her mother drove me home. I felt such humiliation at the thought of them seeing my hovel of a home that I asked them to drop me off a few doors away at a modest but more presentable house and pretended that was where I lived. I stood on the front doorstep waving until they drove away. But I doubt that I fooled them. I cringe thinking about this.

  DR. YALOM: Let’s return to what you were saying earli
er. Tell me more about your solitary bicycle rides in the Soldiers Home Park.

  IRVIN: It was a marvelous park, several hundred acres and very deserted except for a few buildings for sick or very old veterans. I think those bike rides are my very best childhood memories . . . coasting down long hills, wind in my face, feeling free, and reciting poetry aloud. My sister had taken a course in Victorian poetry at college. When she finished the course, I took her textbook and pored over it time and again, memorizing simple poems that had a strong beat, like Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” or some poems in Housman’s Shropshire Lad, like “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now,” and “When I Was One and Twenty,” some verses from FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Byron’s “Prisoner of Chillon,” and poems by Tennyson. Kipling’s “Gunga Din” was one of my favorites, and I still have a phonograph record I made at a little recording shop near the baseball stadium when I was thirteen. On one side was my Bar Mitzvah speech (in English, of course), and on the reverse side were my recitation of “Gunga Din” and also Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” Yes, the more I think about it, I’d say those moments, coasting downhill chanting lines of poetry, have been my happiest times.

  DR. YALOM: Our time is about up, but before we stop, let me say that I appreciate the scope of the struggle you’re facing. You’re caught between two worlds: you neither know nor respect the old world, nor do you yet discern the gate to the new one. This generates a lot of anxiety, and you’re going to need a lot of psychotherapy to help you with that. I’m glad you decided to come see me—you’re resourceful and I have a strong premonition you’re going to be all right.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A GAMBLING LAD

  It is 8 a.m. Wednesday morning. I’ve had breakfast and stroll down the gravel path to my office, stopping only briefly to say good morning to my bonsai and pluck out a couple of weeds. I know that those little weeds have a right to exist, but I can’t have them sucking up water that the bonsai need. I feel very content because I have an uninterrupted four-hour stretch of writing ahead of me. I look forward to beginning, but, as always, can’t resist checking out my email, promising myself that I will spend no more than thirty minutes on responses. The first message greets me:

  Reminder: GAME TONITE at my house. Doors open at 6:15. Delectable and expensive food provided. Eat fast—game starts promptly at 6:45. Bring barrels of moolah! Kevan

  My first reaction is to delete it, but I stop myself, and try to experience the wistful feeling passing through me. I started that poker game over forty years ago, but can no longer play, because my poor (and uncorrectable) vision makes the game too expensive: misreading the cards cost me at least one or two big pots every game. For a long time I resisted giving up the game. Getting old is giving up one damn thing after another. Now, even though I haven’t played in about four years, the guys continue to send me the invitation as a courtesy.

  I’ve given up tennis and jogging and scuba diving, but giving up poker was different. The others are more solitary, whereas poker was a social endeavor: these sweet guys were my playmates and I miss them greatly. Oh, once in a while we get together for lunch (flipping coins or playing a quick round of poker at the restaurant table to see who pays the bill), but it isn’t the same: I miss the action and sense of engagement in risky stuff. I’ve always loved the thrill of betting, and now all that remains for me is to try egging my wife into bets, bets on entirely silly things: she wants me to wear a necktie to a dinner party and I respond, “I’ll bet you twenty dollars there won’t be a single man wearing a necktie at the party tonight.” In the past she ignored it, but now, since I stopped playing poker, she humors me by occasionally accepting a bet.

  This type of play has been part of my life for a very long time. How long? A phone call a few years back supplied some information. It was from Shelly Fisher, whom I hadn’t spoken to since the fifth grade. He has a grandniece studying to be a psychologist, and on a recent visit he saw her reading one of my books, The Gift of Therapy. “Hey, I know that guy,” he said. He found my sister’s name in the Washington, DC, phone book and called her to get my number. Shelly and I had a long talk, reminiscing about walking together to school every day, going bowling, playing cards and step ball, and saving baseball cards. The following day, he called again: “Irv, yesterday you said you wanted feedback. Well I’ve just remembered one other thing about you: you had a gambling problem. You kept pressing me to play gin rummy with baseball cards as stakes. You wanted to bet on everything: I remember one day you wanted to bet on the color of the next car to drive down the street. And I remember what a kick you got out of playing the numbers.”

  “Playing the numbers”—I hadn’t thought about that for years. Shelly’s words stirred up an antique memory. When I was about eleven or twelve, my father converted his grocery store to a liquor store, and life became a little easier for my mother and father: no more spoiled goods to throw out, no more 5 a.m. trips to the wholesale produce market, no more sides of beef to be carved up. But things also became more dangerous: robberies were not infrequent, and on Saturday evenings an armed guard hid out of view in the back of our store. During the day the store was frequently filled with larger-than-life characters: among our regular customers were pimps, prostitutes, thieves, both sweet and sour alcoholics, and the bookies and numbers runners.

  Once I helped my father carry an order of several cases of scotch and bourbon to Duke’s car. Duke was one of our very best customers and I was fascinated by his style: ivory-headed cane, suave blue cashmere double-breasted overcoat, matching blue fedora, and his mile-long gleaming white Cadillac. When we got to the car parked on a side street, half a block away, I asked if I should put my case of scotch in the trunk and my father and Duke both chuckled. “Duke, why don’t we show him the trunk?” my father said. With a flourish, Duke opened the Cadillac trunk and said, “Not much room here, Sonny.” I looked in and my eyes popped. Seventy years later I still see the scene with striking clarity: the trunk was stuffed to the hilt with cash-stacks of bills of all denominations, tied with thick rubber bands, and several large burlap sacks bulging and overflowing with coins.

  Duke was in the numbers racket—an enterprise endemic in my Washington, DC, neighborhood. Here’s how it worked: every day, bettors in my neighborhood placed wagers (often as small as ten cents) with their “runners” on a three-digit number. If they guessed correctly, they “hit the number, glory be,” and were paid sixty dollars for a ten-cent bet—600 to 1 odds. But, of course, the real odds were 1,000 to 1, so the bookies made a huge profit. The daily number could not be manipulated, since it was derived by a publicly known formula based on the total amount wagered on three designated horse races at a local track. Though it was obvious the odds were against them, the bettors had two things in their favor: the wagers were very small, and the ongoing “glory be” hope of receiving a sudden stroke of great good fortune relieved some measure of their lifelong, poverty-induced despair.

  I knew firsthand about this daily anticipatory excitement inherent in betting on the numbers because I occasionally, and secretly, placed a small bet myself (despite my parents’ admonitions), often with nickels or dimes I filched from the store cash register. (This recall of my petty theft makes me, even now, cringe with shame.) My father repeatedly pointed out that only fools would bet against such big odds. I knew he was right, but, until I got older, it was the only game in town. I made the bets through William, one of the two black men working in the store. I always promised him 25 percent of my winnings. William was an alcoholic and a lively, charming man, though not a paragon of integrity, and I never knew whether he truly placed my bets or simply pocketed my dimes or booked the bet himself. I never hit the number, and I suspect that, if I had, William, most likely, would have begged off by saying the numbers runner had not come that day or some similar concocted story. I finally abandoned the enterprise when I had the great good fortune o
f discovering baseball betting pools, craps, pinochle, and, above all, poker.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANGER

  My patient Brenda came to her session today with an agenda. Without even glancing at me, she entered my office, took her seat, opened her purse to remove her notes, and commenced to read aloud a prepared statement listing complaints about my behavior during our previous meeting.

  “You said I was doing a poor job in our sessions and that your other patients came better prepared to talk about issues. And you implied you much preferred to work with your other patients. And you scolded me for not bringing in dreams or daydreams. And you sided with my last therapist and said that my refusal to open up had been responsible for the failure of all my previous therapies.”

  During the previous hour, Brenda had sat silently, as she often did, and volunteered nothing, forcing me to work much too hard: I felt as if I were trying to pry open an oyster. This time, as she read her list of accusations, I became increasingly defensive. Dealing with anger is not my strong suit. My reflex inclination was to point out her distortions, but I held my tongue for a number of reasons. For one thing, this was a propitious start to a session—a hell of a lot better than last week! She was opening up, unharnessing the sorts of thoughts and feelings that had kept her so tightly bound. Moreover, even though she had distorted my words, I knew I had, indeed, thought some of the things she accused me of saying, and most likely these thoughts had colored my words in ways I had not recognized. “Brenda, I entirely understood your annoyance: I think you’re misquoting me a bit but you’re right on: I did feel frustrated and somewhat baffled last week.” I then asked, “If we have a similar session in the future what do you advise? What is the best question I could pose?”