Chapter 14
The Tin Drum
“Siggy,” Lev rattled on, “had plenty of lunacy of his own to worry about. For example, that thing about a phallic symbol being anything longer than it is wide. When I talked with him, he was getting cancer of the throat because of the cigars he was smoking, and he still couldn’t stop smoking them, then. Still, if anyone asked him whether cigars were phallic symbols, he said cigars were just cigars. So he died, presumably of throat cancer, and Norma said she never saw him in Heaven.”
“What brought up that subject between you and Norma?”
“She was asking me about her mom. But listen now.
“Oh, before I forget. I met a very creepy guy in England, a Rhodes scholar from Arkansas, if you can believe that. He likes to stick cigars in young women's vaginas, and he smokes marijuana without inhaling, and he says he’s going to be president of the United States. That might sound far-fetched, but with an Oxford degree and no holds barred you never know what he might weasel. Sorry for the insult to the weasels. I think he might be a clingon. You know about clingons.”
“I’ll keep an eye out,” I said. “Thanks for the warning.”
“Anyway, with the possible exception of that creepy guy, I think Freud’s notion about penis-envy is way out of line with any actuality, but I think some of his stuff has some rationality in it, and some of it a lot. For example, I think a lot of men love their mothers and are a little jealous of their fathers, but I don’t know any that would go as far as Oedipus did, killing his father and marrying his mother, at least not on purpose. But one notion of Freud’s that makes perfect sense to me is repression.
“Think about it. Is anyone going to think about anything that makes him totally despise himself? Of course not, anymore than anyone is going to stick a needle in his eye unless he thinks it’ll make him feel better by thinking he’s getting what he deserves. I mean that people can’t remember anything they can’t somehow reconcile in their conscience. Feel free to jump in, if you’re not following me here.”
“What about Hitler?” I asked. “He didn’t seem very forgetful.”
“Hitler believed in what he was doing. No one, not Hitler, not Jeffrey Dahmer, does anything intentionally without somehow feeling justified at the moment. Hitler somehow managed to think he was right, the master race, I guess.”
“If he thought he was right, why did he kill himself?”
“Like sticking a needle in his eye. He did that to punish himself for not getting the job done, the same reason some so-called Christians whip themselves. They’re trying to whip their egos into shape, to show themselves that at least they don’t like their sins, and so are better than their sins. In Hitler’s eyes, his sin was incompetence.
“The bad news in that is that people can rationalize nearly any horror, but the good news is that no one ever does anything intentionally that he can’t somehow justify in his own mind as being good. In other words, everyone’s good, at heart. Get it?”
I didn’t nod, and so Lev rambled on.
“So the purpose of psychiatry and psychology needs to be to clear up the rationalization while pointing out that fundamental fact. Freud said rationalization is another defense mechanism, and so putting that purpose into psychotherapy would defeat two defense mechanisms and cure the person, making him an honest loving person.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t get it yet.”
“Okay, listen some more, back on the matter of memory. I also called on Otto Rank, Siggy’s buddy who said that everybody’s fundamentally psychologically unsound because of the strain of being squeezed through a vagina, beginning life on Earth that way. He called it the birth trauma. Think about that.
“Trauma? There you are floating around in a nice warm womb, no wind or rain or need for teeth. Suddenly your head’s squashed, and you’re hanging by your heels like Mussolini with some big hand whacking your butt, and the temperature just dropped thirty percent. Think about what warm and cuddly means, and think about what alienation means. Oh, I forgot you’re an expert on alienation.
“Anyhow, put that memory stuff together with the rationalization part and remember that you can’t remember what happened before you could talk. Oh, there I did it again, forgetting you’re immortal, never been born. Well, take my word for it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been talking forever, but I’ll take your word for it.”
Lev’s learned U.S.A. colloquialism surprised me, but I understood it.
“So nobody can remember the birth trauma, but everybody feels bad about it, because it was a real pain, most people’s first pain. So they spend their whole lives feeling bad about something they can’t remember. That’s why people are so crazy. See what I mean now? Now do you get it?”
I didn’t tell him that people do live forever and that the reason for the birth trauma is so they can’t remember and so try to find ways to feel good and eventually figure out that the best way to do that is to make others feel better. I decided to invite him to our mission-review and let him know that then.
“Then,” said Lev, “I paid a call on that other Freudian, Jung. Jung had a notion he called synchronicity, that he said was the explanation of what he called the collective unconscious. I thought that was the first step in the destruction of psychological science. Synchronicity is nothing but being in tune with cause and effect.
“I mean, we call it a chain, but it’s more like a chain-link fence, or chain mail. There are no spaces in the universe, as even Einstein understood for all his abstraction and artificial complexity, and so everybody feels everything all at once. If someone drops a shoe in China, the air it displaces will displace all air, eventually the air you breath right here. So not recognizing everything only comes from hodgepodging.
“Collective unconscious? We just share, whether we like it or not, and that’s what’s craziest about psychologists. They can’t share.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “They’re always talking about sharing!”
“They talk to hear themselves talk differently from other psychologists. Some of them make some solid central sense for a while, but then they go off on their tangents. Freud defined sanity as the ability to love and to work, lieben und arbeiten. The neo-Freudian Erik Erikson said it’s the ability to trust.
“To me, they both make sense. Love inspires work, and trust inspires teamwork. Without all of that, we’re all more alien than you are, alienated from our neighbors, alone in a sloth of despond. But psychologists and psychiatrists drive us all crazier by their failure at teamwork. They try to think they’re number one.
“Depth-psychologists promote psychotherapy, while behaviorists promote stimulus and response. Each decries the other’s approach, but the basic science is the same, in that a depth-psychologist gets his patients to cure themselves by facing the facts about themselves, by rewarding them with the notion that what they are is worth facing. Either way, it’s about making a person feel good about what needs to be done.
“But, if psychologists admit their similarity, they won’t get published. They won’t get professorships or have their names announced at seminars. The reason is that people name ideas for the people who create them, and so no two people can have credit for sharing an idea. ‘Publish or perish,’ people say; if they agree, they fail.
“It isn’t failure; but they see it that way, because it pitches them into ego despair, because they themselves wish to feel worthy as well, and they need for that that their names be announced and praised. And, worse, it seeps into individual therapy.
“The worst example of that is from another neo-Freudian. Carl Rogers called it non-directive therapy, making non-directive therapy Rogerian. What a non-directive therapist does is to encourage the client to express himself openly, at first. Then the therapist cuts the client’s legs out from under him. He gives the client’s ego a square kick in the butt, or the psyche. He makes the client feel invisible, out of the picture.
“’What I hear you saying is . . . .’ says the therapist.
“Then he finishes that sentence with something the client didn’t say at all, but rather with something that fits the therapist's idea of what the client would say, were the client to fit the theories the therapist professes, were he to fit the therapist’s claim to fame. So the therapist leaves the client feeling alone in the room, for all practical purposes. Except that the client feels he’s with someone who doesn’t think he matters.
“An anthropologist named Gregory Bateson formulated what he called the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. He said that people depart from reality when they can’t reconcile their abilities with the demands they feel are placed on them, when they’re treated as failures regardless of what they do. It’s kind of like Freud’s notion of repression, but it goes beyond memory to behavior and positive perception.
“The person really flips out, because he doesn’t find staying in viable. Because therapy is a last resort, Rogerian therapy tends to make people do that. When the client finds himself nonexistent in the eyes of the make-believing therapist, he has nowhere left to turn. The reason is that the therapist has already flipped out, for much the same reason. Then also, the clinician can easily jump the desperate client’s bones. In this last resort, the client is desperate for any attention. It can be screw or go crazier.
“Am I making sense to you now?” Lev asked.
“Yes,” I said “That stuff drives me crazy, too.”
“Yeah,” said Lev. “And the first reason they do it is that they need to think of people differently than other mental health professionals, to be a mental health professional of reputed stature, because we consider different better. All Earth leadership goes by the same motto: Bigotry is best.
“A psychologist showed that plainly to me when I asked him what he thought of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM is a sort of dictionary that that association periodically updates so mental health professionals can use the same vocabulary when they talk about their clients’ problems. It doesn’t say how people get the way they get or how to get them out of how they get, but only offers names for symptoms and syndromes. In other words, it tries to be a tool for teamwork, for communication. A great thing, communication, I think.
“’The DSM’s no good,’ said the psychologist. ‘It’s written by psychiatrists.’”
I nearly spit in my beer, and I rose from my stool to get two more from Maggie, the barmaid who drew the wonderful charcoal portrait of Yeats that then hung on the wall behind the bar at Molly’s. A print of it hangs there now, although Maggie has now opened her own gallery. She took the original with her there.
“I thought you’d find that hard to swallow,” said Lev when I returned.
“Too bad about Yeats and Maude Gonne,” I said. “Too bad they didn’t work quite well together there, for their common cause, for Ireland. Too bad that keeps going on, and on and on, and on. I just don’t understand such separation.”
“A crying shame for all of us,” said Lev. “But that’s another story.
“As I was saying, mental-health professionals are mostly crazy, because they can’t get themselves to work together, and care much less for their patients than for their own fame and fortune. While I was studying psychology, I visited Stanford because it was the most reputable school for psychology in this nation then, and I mentioned Rank to the dean of the personality department, in his cluttered scholar office.
“’We don’t study Rank here’, he said. ‘This is what we do.’
“And he held before my ghostly eyes a big piece of paper with a squiggle line-graph drawn across it. My first thought was of the Himalayas, but my second thought was of embezzling accountants, people penciling people to death.
“’We don’t work with theory here,’ said the dean. ‘We’re empirical.’
“I had to leave. I got out quickly. I felt no need to sit and hear him tell me what he didn’t hear me saying, if I told him that empiricism needs a premise, that no fact is an island, as is no man. I wished to point out to him that worthy subjects for empirical study might be the sensibilities of his theoretical predecessors. But I saw he’d hear me threatening his claim to originality, whatever he or I said.
“I might have told him I heard him saying that his fame and fortune was more important to him than the mental health for which he professed to care. But, you know, I’m not that kind of guy. I’m too easy-going.”
“I know!” I said. “But what has this to do with Ben?”
“Ben’s crazy,” said Lev. “For all those reasons.”
“You mean my son’s a double-bound bigot?” I exclaimed.
“Exactly,” said Lev. “He thinks he has to be better or worse than his brother, and he can’t accept worse as an alternative. He sees you as a powerful big-guy besides just being his father, and he sees you as favoring Quincy, another bigger guy. Ordinarily younger brothers get over that, because the youngest is ordinarily pampered more in the early exigencies of comparison. I mean the younger is usually treated better than the older at the beginning of the younger’s life, because he’s newer to the family, besides being younger, more needful. But Ben was born when you were doing most of your post-world-war gallivanting, meeting people like Yasser and Mikhail.
“Besides,” added Lev. “I think he’s gay.”
“Gay!” I exclaimed, more loudly than I had to the double bind. “Are you crazy?”
Maggie looked with surprise, but the bar was mainly empty, that afternoon.
“Sure,” replied Lev. “If I weren’t crazy, I wouldn’t be a ghost. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong, or that you should shoot the messenger.”
“I’m not going to shoot anyone,” I answered. “At least not today, and I welcome your views, crazy or not. Earthlings call the sanest Earthlings nuts, and follow such as Hitler. So please tell me more. You know I trust you. You’re my friend. Ghost or not.”
“Alright,” said Lev. “Here’s the deal. One thing no psychologist, whether or not being crazy, has postulated for his name is what I would call the greener-grass syndrome, were I a mental-health professional, crazy or not. People want what they don’t have.
“That defines the word ‘want’, which is often confused with the word ‘wish’, proving a theological theory of mine that the devil is nothing but confusion. But what I’m trying to say now is that people wish for what they see themselves to want, whether they need it or not. While you were gallivanting, Ben wanted a male presence.
“Quincy also lacked your presence, but Ben was younger then and more formative, and Quincy had your presence at the comparable time of his life, when you were at Yale, studying at home. Your telling Quincy you had great expectations of him but not telling Ben the same fired Ben’s combination of problems into wacky-land, like a hair-trigger. A powder-keg doesn’t need much spark to explode, and you’re lucky the two of you were alone in Harvard Yard, with Beatrice and Laura somewhat away. Otherwise you might not know for years. Now he’s pulled your trigger.”
“He has indeed done that,” I said. “Thank God for it.”
“Any immediate ideas of what to do?” asked Lev.
“Not immediate, and I’m still not sure of the gay part.”
“Well,” said Lev. “Think about this. Consider why British male aristocracy seems so effeminate, if it isn’t that Nanny and Mum care for British children’s infancy while Pop plays polo, and then they send them to sexually segregated boarding schools, for what behaviorists call reinforcement. On this side of the Atlantic, wait until the pre-boomers of this nation grow to the point that they achieve some power, remembering that their fathers were away for the duration of the war, during the pre-boomers’ infancy.
“You know what I mean? Quincy is a baby-boomer, but he might have had a gay big-brother, if you hadn’t taken my advice not to start your family until you came back from the war. Consider that for the empiricists, how difficult getting the statistics would be, because of the closet-skewing. Liberace and Little Richard and Rock Hudson may die in the closet. I suggest you get closer to your son Ben. I suggest you help him fix all that. But that’s just what I think. It’s all on you to do.
“Anyway, the only problem I have with homosexuality is that closet thing. One kind of hiding leads to other kinds of hiding, another domino-effect. Dishonesty about one thing makes other dishonesty easier.
“So you two have to talk to one another.”
“Thank you, Lev,” I said to him.
I thought a little more about it all.
“I will do that as I can,” I said.
But how could I? How could I?
The afternoon sun was slanting through the open window to the street. Professor Big Stuff had come in and parked himself at the piano there at the front end of the bar. I looked up and broke my focus and thought of another question.
“Why doesn’t he listen to music?” I had to ask then.
Lev took more moments to answer than he usually did.
“This is going to be tougher to take,” said Lev, and he waited another moment.
“Didn’t you tell me that Beatrice’s brother and sister work at thinking they’re smart by thinking of ways to think other people are stupid? And didn’t you tell me that her brother is trying to make a career of being a musical preacher? And didn’t you tell me that Ben told you Uncle Pete asked him to give him massages?”
I got up, nodded to Professor Big Stuff, and got us a couple more beers.
“Go on,” I said on return, not acknowledging that I knew what was coming.
“Well,” said Lev. “That’s where Ben got that stuff about how stupid everyone is, why he uses that way of trying to wash away his ego despair. As for the music, maybe he has a bad taste for it, or maybe he wishes to make better music with someone not his uncle. It’s a goddamned shame, since music is such a wonderful way of bringing people together, of opening up our hearts and minds to all. Goddamned pervert preachers. And they’re all over. They sneak all over. All around Earth. God damned!”
“What do you think their problem is?” I asked, despairing.
“Same as all we’ve talked about,” said Lev. “People don’t know how important they are. People are so preoccupied with their own insanity that they don’t see what their lives are doing to life around them. That problem is most preeminent with parents, and least excusable with credentialed mental-health professionals, and craziest with priests. I know we need to love and forgive everyone and help them. But if God damns anyone, it must be pedophile priests. What grotesque misnomer, pedophilia. I love children.”
“People say love is cruel,” I said.
“People are crazy,” said Lev.
I looked around the bar. Besides the portrait of Yeats, on the wall behind the bar were insignia of United States Marine Corps units. Professor Big Stuff banged on the piano and sang his own compositions of intentional total nonsense, with occasional profanity to keep up interest in case anyone paid attention. A young man entered the bar in a dress that might have been appropriate for a character in The Grapes of Wrath. With easy grace and no flamboyance, he walked past us.
“Nice dress, Steve,” said Lev.
“Thanks,” said Steve, smiling at Lev and looking at me, and then walking on to the back end of the bar, where Maggie took him a mug of beer.
“What about that stuff about ‘Screw this country’?” I asked.
“Maybe Ben’s right about that. This country, for all its foundation on independence, still screws people. I realize it’s democracy, but I also realize that politicians are in a position to guide in the right or left direction, and I realize they have responsibility to accept advice from experts, from their betters.
“For example, you’re an economist, or so says your course-record at Yale. Immigrants founded this nation, with the excuse that they were fleeing oppression but with the reason that they could cultivate its resources for economic wealth beyond the natives’, and they called what they were doing the protestant work-ethic.
“Next, they imported Africans to do the work for them. And now we’re calling Mexicans coming here willing to do that work wetbacks, although little of the Rio Grande is more than knee-deep, and we try to keep them out. Next thing you know, the citizen bums afraid of anyone willing to do the jobs they’re too lazy to do will start trying to make a living by suing McDonalds for making them fat by letting them spend their welfare checks to eat dead cows and French fries.
“The food-stamp laws require them to prepare the meat and cut the potatoes themselves, and so the more fiscally responsible of them won’t go to McDonalds, anyway. But maybe they’ll find a way to sue the people who freeze the dead cattle and cut the potatoes into the TV dinners the food-stamp laws don’t consider prepared, sue them for not putting signs on the boxes giving them information they could get at the public library if they were willing to work for their own welfare.
“’Don’t eat me,’ a sign on a box might say to the homeless before they microwave their TV dinners. ‘I’ll make you fat while you’re not paying attention, as you don’t pay attention to the records of the politicians for whom you vote on the basis of their promises. Since you’re not working for a living and are too lazy and ignorant to go to the public library and read books and newspapers, you may as well spend your time in the supermarket, reading boxes.’
“Any historian worth that name knows that the fat-cat lawyers who make a living off such lawsuits have been corrupting economies since before the Pharisees. And any economist knows they contribute nothing to the economy, while honest work like picking cherries contributes much. And no one needs to read to know all that.
“He might be somewhat right about New England preppies, too. Harvard’s Hasty Pudding, which is famous partly for deliberate sexual identity confusion, selected as its man of this year an obviously unconstrained drug-addict movie-star, and no one needs to read to know all that, either.
“Still, communication doesn’t flow freely enough to the masses. Computers might cure that someday, with an international network anyone can access from a computer in his or her home. If that happens, the problem may soon be solved.
“But, until something like that happens, people like Jimmy Huffa will be taking workers’ money for services broader communication would let them do for themselves.
“Anyway, we need aliens to show us how to work. Thanks for coming.”
Lev never learned. Dead now for three quarters of a century, wandering the earth as he wished and seeing all of it, he kept his fundamental ghostly values. He thought people should be sensible, to themselves and to others for everyone’s happiness. And that notion lit all his thoughts, wherever he went, whatever he saw. Was he still beating the horse Dostoevski said was dead?
“I’ll ask Ben if he’s gay,” I said.
“Ask him if he’d like to be governor of California,” said Lev. “I know you could do that for him, and his will is good and basic, however hunting. He probably thinks the whole world is picking on him because he’s gay, and he probably hasn’t told you and Beatrice about it because he fears that you might, too. If you show him he’s wrong about that, he might see that he’s wrong about some of that other stuff, too. And he might form a California coalition of fruits for fruit-pickers.”
“I’ll ask him about that, too.” I said. “But not in those terms.”
“Fair enough,” said Lev. “Call it gay good work for all. Oh, and let him run on the Democrat ticket. I know your connections span the two parties, with Harriman and all. And it’ll help Ben know you’re not trying to push him into your mold.”
“You’re a pushy bugger in your old age,” I said to Lev.
“I don’t push any further than I can,” he answered.
Next day, I took an early flight back to Houston. I might have driven, but our Studebaker had long ago found its way to rusting in a junkyard, and I loved flying anyway. I was also an environmentalist, but that excuse wouldn’t wash economically or otherwise for a flight as short as from New Orleans to Houston. What did wash was the little extra freedom of thought, looking down to the silver cloud-tops.
I took a taxi to our comfy home in our comfy suburban neighborhood, with its magnolias shading the street and the houses, with bicycles lying on steps to some of the houses, while Volvos waited in drives. I kissed Beatrice and asked her where Ben was.
“He’s in his room,” she said. “A friend has spent the night.”