Winter, 1971-72. My early days trying to be a poet. I am living with my parents and working the lobster shift—usually by myself—on the decollating machine at the Consolidated Computer Company on West 34th Street, in the era of keypunch card input. Multiple-copies of reports are printed on large, sprocketed sheets, separated by carbon paper, which my machine removes.
The faster I run the machine, the more time I have to input one-line poems on keypunch cards and hunt for uncancelled postage stamps on incoming packages; the faster I run the machine, the more likely it is to jam, consigning me to messy hand-decollating.
One night, after a binge of reckless machining, I’m an ink-stained wretch on the Long Island Railroad. The train teems with teens and early-twenties coming from a rock concert, laughing and whooping. Not long ago I might have been among them; now I just want them to keep their youth to themselves.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always the 3:10 a.m. to Babylon.
And here comes the high school valedictorian—a PhD candidate at Harvard—wearing a three-piece suit, carrying a leather briefcase. He joins me and says that earlier he delivered a paper at an academic conference.
“What was the topic?” I ask, and my ears—numbed from hours at the machine—hear him reply, “Kinesthetics.”
“You went into physiology?”
“No, Kant’s Aesthetics,” he enunciates slowly, and sneaks a glance at my stained work clothes. I tell him about my job and my poetry workshop, adding that I am applying to graduate school. He asks about my girlfriend of six years, and I just shake my head. Truth is, I haven’t applied to graduate school or started sending out poems, or gone on a date in weeks.
A couple of days later, I am excited when someone in my workshop tells me about her friend Jeremy, a Jungian analyst who lowers his rates for artists. “If nothing else, you could mine your dreams for poetry.”
Jeremy’s office is on Fifth Avenue near 11th Street, the heart of Jungian country. He is in his mid-thirties, with curly, longish dark hair, wearing dark green corduroy pants and a black turtleneck. Jeremy asks me a few questions, ending with “What are you afraid of?” I shock myself with the answer: “I’m afraid I am going to start twitching, like my father.” He agrees to take me on at a highly reduced rate, then mentions that our sessions will be interrupted in a month by a trip to Zurich to meet with his mentor.
Jung. Zurich. Fifth Avenue. Dreams. Oh, how the words roll off my young-poet tongue.
Perhaps to please Jeremy, I start having more interesting dreams:
I am a shrimp in lobster sauce, which fills the Fillmore East lobby on Second Avenue. Two of the other shrimps are engaged in deep conversation. I recognize one as the rock critic for The Village Voice. I am envious of the shrimp talking to him.
I am in hell, protesting that I have been unfairly placed here. I am assigned to give a talk on misery, and am in a panic because I feel inadequate to the task.
I open an industrial-sized freezer. There’s something wrapped in tin foil. I unwrap it. It is me.
I am a guest on The Tonight Show, and I am killing. I ad-lib one line that brings the house down, and has Johnny Carson banging on his desk for mercy: “You could get a job as a store display in a jello factory.”
My writing cupboard is newly stocked with surrealistic images that I cook into my poems, and I start to feel better about myself. The 3:10 a.m. to Babylon becomes a moving Yaddo. I miss Jeremy the two weeks he is in Zurich, but enjoy saying, “My Jungian analyst is in Zurich with his mentor.”
Our mutual friend invites me to a party, warning me that Jeremy might be there. The party is loud and crowded, with people dancing to Motown in one room and mingling in another. As I stand in the hallway between the two rooms, trying to impress a woman with my life as a working-class poet, Jeremy—hair unkempt, wearing a flowered shirt—dances by, lips in a pout and fists circling in a “do the monkey” motion. “Hey,” Jeremy says as he shimmies by.
“Who is that?” the woman asks.
“That’s my Jungian analyst,” I answer with pride. “His mentor is in Zurich.”
The next week, at the end of our session, Jeremy asks me to move from the couch to the chair for a few minutes, he has something to tell me. I am afraid the ride is over; I’m not crazy or interesting enough.
“I am ending my practice, as it is now,” Jeremy declares solemnly. He has been going through some heavy changes personally and professionally. He can’t, in good faith, continue to do Jungian analysis. “I’ve rented a loft on Spring Street, and I am changing to primal scream therapy.”
Jeremy offers to refer me to another Jungian, or I can make the change with him. In college, I was intrigued by primal scream and other fringe treatments. A motto of the left is “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” and many believe that the likes of Arthur Janov and R.D. Laing are part of the solution. I am not active politically, so this would make me less of a problem. I can have interesting dreams on my own, but I need help to scream.
“I’m with you,” I declare. “What does your mentor in Zurich think about this?”
“He thinks I’m crazy,” Jeremy says. I wait for him to smile but he doesn’t.
Two weeks later I have my first session in Jeremy’s Spring Street loft, with peeling walls, no couch, no desk. A large portion of the floor is covered with a tattered wrestling mat, pillows scattered around. “Lie down, get comfortable,” Jeremy says, and we begin our transition from talk therapy to pre-talk therapy.
Jeremy sits next to me in the lotus position, and I turn sideways to face him, head pedestalled on my hand. We talk for a while about my dreams, then Jeremy asks me to lie flat on my back and make various noises. “Good, now let the pillows have it.” I punch the pillows around but feel limp and spiritless at the end of the session. “It’ll take some getting used to,” Jeremy says, his hand on my shoulder.
After a few sessions, I am screaming my head off and beating the crap out of the pillows. I am on the cutting edge. Spring Street. Primal Scream. I can’t wait for Jeremy to guide me back to infancy so I can curdle my blood with transcendent shrieks.
At one session, while lying on the mat for the ever-briefer talk segment, I mention my difficulty expressing anger.
“Let’s wrestle,” Jeremy says.
“Let’s what?”
“Wrestle. Let’s see what happens.”
Jeremy is two inches shorter than I but powerfully built, muscles rippling through his T-shirt. I am a runner, in every sense of the word. But I am also a gamer. “OK,” I say.
Jeremy reaches his arms around my chest and rolls me over. I halfheartedly fight back and am surprised that I am able to spin Jeremy around. But each time Jeremy is relocated, he regains control. Jeremy is toying with me, and I feel silly but don’t know what to do. After all, Jeremy is my primal scream nee Jungian therapist on the cutting edge on Spring Street.
Jeremy shoves me off balance and pins my right wrist with his left knee. Just as Jeremy’s right knee approaches my left wrist, I realize that he is going to hold me down until I scream bloody hell. I picture myself frozen in tin foil. I remember Babes beating up that kid in third grade. I’m with my grandfather in shul. I am in free-fall to the cradle. I bolt.
My surge turns Jeremy over and I pounce on top of him. Jeremy smiles and motions surrender. My adrenalin gauge zags toward empty, and I flop onto my back, breathing heavily but deeply.
“Why didn’t you fight back sooner?” Jeremy asks.
“Because only a sadist would hurt someone who doesn’t fight back.”
“How badly did you really think you could get hurt? And how did you know you couldn’t win?”
“I get it. I should send those poems out, ask those women out, apply to graduate schools.” I am pumped, my elation gauge zigs, but quickly zags back when I realize, “Someone else might have really hurt me.”
Jeremy tilts his head forward.
“I guess I have to know when to take risks,” I say.
Jeremy grins and says he’ll see me next week.
At the start of the next session, Jeremy tells me of another change in his practice. “It’s really hard to do this, one-to-one, in New York City.” Jeremy has bought a rundown house in the country. His clients will come for marathon group sessions. They will paint, do carpentry, and cook. Janov meets Laing.
I tell Jeremy I’ll think about it, and we shake hands. But I have gotten as close to the edge as I can for now, and I can’t risk falling off. I go back to dreaming on my own, letting out an occasional muffled scream into my pillow.
from the work-in-progress Based on a True Life: A Memoir in Pieces
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