Marvin Center Days, Part 7 of 13, Andy Cohen: The Arc of a Jaunty Bohemian, First Third

(A prelude to another entry following my blog-entry theme: Against Mental-Illness Clichés and Canards)

Also showing how making common cause with peers from far-different backgrounds happened so fluently during college

[Edits done 3/1/13. More edits 3/7/13. More edits 3/17/13, important between asterisks.]

If you felt that my series on the Marvin Center had its interesting points but by and large seemed a little dry or irrelevant, now we deliver some rock ’n’ roll. There is indeed a meaty story to be told here that, rather surprisingly, has some relevance to office conundrums and such about 30 years later. It involves, among other things, the theme of highly personal behavior intruding on the workplace, and even some criminal situation regarding which I, as were numerous others, was questioned by GWU’s Security department.

Andrew S. Cohen, “Andy” or “A.C.,” a friend of mine from that time and the central focus here, is significant, and useful to discuss, for several reasons. Because his story is so substantial, I split it into three parts, each pretty beefy. He is a good measure of the colorfulness of working at the MC, when I was in my more seasoned phase there. He was a personality so impressive that I based a character, JN, in my novel from 1986, A Transient, partly on him—and the character impressed fellow writers who read parts of the novel at the Johns Hopkins University writers conference I was at in June that year (though whether they were so impressed by the Andy side of him, as opposed to other sides I heavily incorporated, is doubtful). Much later, in 2001-02, I wrote a chapter on Andy in a nonfiction mode, as part of an unpublished autobiographical work that (not so much of interest to you) covers my adult years through about 2000, and I am basing these Andy-related blog entries on that chapter—with important updates.

As I also found only in 2006, and after I had not communicated with him since late 1986, Andy had died in January 2003, at age 44. There is a paid, family-arranged obituary on him in The New York Times’ obituary database (dated January 31, 2003), which I will quote from, and the honorific things said there about him accord fairly well with the guy I knew from later 1983 through spring 1985. Andy left behind an ex-wife and two young sons, who today would be about 15 and 16.

In a sense, Andy has lingered in my mind for many years, even when, of people I met at college in the first half of the 1980s, the subset with whom I still have been in touch have been in touch over a far longer time. Further, at least one of them (A.V., actually, not someone in my college class, but who was a law student, and whom I befriended as a housemate) I know a lot better than Andy Cohen, and I certainly have done more creative things with him (A.V., including in the 1980s). Yet despite Andy Cohen’s memorability, some details have faded in my memory, while others certainly do not. I also find from my 2001-02 book chapter on him that some things about my years at the MC are more certainly remembered there, which I was foggier about recently.

Goes to show, with old, important times in your life, if you want to memorialize them, sooner is better than later, especially when earthquakes (which may affect your longer-term memory, though who knows why) happen resoundingly in your life, as have for many of us in the past decade-plus since 9/11.

Yet the thing about Andy that makes certain things remain in my memory for so long is that, as his obituary does not specify, he was a heroin addict, and this played a role in his dropping out of college when he was at GWU, apparently ending his college career for good (he had attended at least two other colleges beforehand). This also makes for something that has downright puzzled me for years—whether he had a role in a theft of fairly valuable material at the MC in 1985, which I will look at in a little detail in the second third of this blog portrait of him.

If these latter two things (addiction and possible implication in a crime) seem like details his survivors would not want publicized, I can understand. But as with so many other stories I’ve told on this blog, to feel I should tie my hands on something I consider important (to convey in this sort of forum), which someone else might consider too embarrassing to reveal, could well end up intruding on my rights, or perhaps the rights of someone else whom I’m trying to defend by wanting to tell the story—and this intruding may be more than is justified by the protection of the interests of the people who want to suppress the story. Does this sort of consideration sound familiar? And I think as I unfold this story, any of Andy’s survivors who might see it—I am less thrilled about his sons seeing it than the older generations of his family—might realize that in focusing on the positive Andy I knew and who made such an impression on me, I am not detracting from him too much—I am even telling more of the sad soul that those close to him knew he was—in my talking about some of the stark negatives.

Further, this story brings up in case in point about frivolous complaints of “sexual harassment”—made not less peculiar, when implying the harassment was of a homosexual sort, in a work environment that featured numerous homosexuals where how such an allegation was handled faced all kinds of questions of taste, embarrassment, and so on, not least for someone like me who was (as I am) straight.

Lastly, the issue of Andy’s heroin use, and most darkly the puzzling incident of stolen goods, brings up the question, What if a coworker goes downright crazy with some moves that are so outlandish that they leave close associates at a loss for even how to deal with them professionally, especially when the associates are young (twenty-something) workers?

A sketchy outline of the friendship

Through just about all my school years, as my own inadvertent “practice,” I had basically one really close friend per school year, or maybe per two-year-or-so period; I did not surround myself with a clique of “not-so-close” friends. In college I did roughly the same thing, though sometimes the “close friend” could be one of my roommates. Actually, during college, some of my friends ended up being from among my coworkers at the MC—work generally proving to be a good source of a certain kind of friend, as I found starting even in late high school, and still have found in recent years.

From, I believe, sometime in 1982 to about spring 1983, my “best friend” at the MC was a Randy Klemp, who was a countryish-but-hip guy a few years older than I, who was pre-law—and ended up attending law school (not at GWU, I think) and becoming a lawyer. [Slight correction: From an early-1980s diary, I find that Randy Klemp was gone from the MC by the start [?] of summer vacation 1983. Also, this diary says he worked at the MC only two semesters, which would certainly include fall 1982, when I know he worked on my car. The diary also says he was 26, and characterizes him as a former hippie (take that for what little it's worth).] Last I knew, he practiced out in Oregon, as I found from the Internet in recent years. He was fun to joke around with at the MC—he was one of those friends who managed to bond with you despite obvious differences between you. He was mechanically inclined; he serviced my crappy VW Dasher one time in, I believe, fall 1982.

Randy, as I seem to find from memory that I joggle in different ways, finished school at GW in spring 1983 (it’s possible he worked there through summer 1983 [words deleted that were inaccurate]). But I know Randy was around (briefly) when Andy Cohen was on the scene, and it seems from an earlier draft of this account that, after having been away for some time, Randy visited the MC (and GW) in fall 1983 [yes, this did happen], and Andy happened to encounter him briefly then (I know Andy did form a surface opinion of Randy).

In any event, Andy became a student manager at the MC the way so many young men randomly did, then could well end up being a friend for a time. He was first friends only (or mainly) with fellow student manager Jeff Barth, but the three of us—as I’ll say later—became something of a work-friends trio, and that’s how Andy started associating with me. Ultimately, as Andy and I became closer, Andy seemed to fill the slot Randy did, for me, pretty neatly.

           

Andy, who I believe was 26 when he first arrived at the MC, represented my first richly positive friendship with a Jewish male since my roommate Eric Patent in 1981-82 (and less in 1983-84; Eric and I roomed in the dorm system in two separate school years, in different rooms). From another angle, Andy ended up—in a series of situations we’ll see below—being my first longish-term friend at college (or even compared to high school friends), who wasn't a roommate or academic competitor of any sort. Andy was also, I believe, the first such male at GW I socialized with as much as I did during free time, of which I had more following graduation. (That is, I did other things outside work with him than simply occasionally go to bars or the like, as I did “per the usual expectation” with roommates in earlier years—which is the sort of thing I hate to think about today, because of how dreary I remember it as being.)

Andy also had a clearly different background from mine—as reflected in my once jokingly calling him, as he allowed, “Mr. Park Avenue.” We were friends well for over a year. And yet the friendship ended abruptly (and this ending directly paralleled his dropping out of the MC orbit), and the big mystery about this fact wasn't so much that it was caused by the more generally understood disloyalty of a hardcore drug addict—though this certainly played a role—as it was the fact that I couldn't see the end coming the way it did and couldn't explain why it happened the way it did. This, of course, reflected my level of maturity at the time; but there were certain mysterious things about my association with him, broadly speaking, that are not completely resolved even today. In a way, saying that Andy was a drug addict and had additional, fairly stark personal problems seemed only an easy explanation for how the friendship ended, as could be offered by people who weren't bound up in the relationship with him.

The heroin addict side may set off bells in your head. I don't think I knew about this side of his life until many months, perhaps a year or more, after I'd begun to form a friendship with him. And then how he revealed that side of him and it turned insidious and ultimately subversive would seem, in retrospect, to have been par for the course. But it left me baffled and hurt, I suppose, and yet somehow I've never been entirely dismissive of him, which may reflect how he, somehow, not only charmed me but really was an ambiguous person, though maybe not simply a dark or very difficult one.

Andy’s 2003 obituary, by the way, includes: “Andrew loved reading (even while in the shower), long motorcycle trips, talking about and eating great food, East Hampton, Bob Dylan, falling asleep virtually anywhere[,] and being with his family and many friends.” Except for the focus on East Hampton and Bob Dylan (both credible associations with him), I would second all this—and it’s interesting how even his first-degree relatives, presumably, sought to cement his memorial portrait in these terms: Andy as a sort of hedonistic but resourceful bohemian, you might say. More: “…Andrew will be remembered most as a profoundly kind and gentle man who loved his sons above all else. Embodying a unique and wonderful mix of intelligence, curiosity, wry humor, sweetness, and a limitless capacity for unconditional love, Andrew, a man like no other, will be greatly missed.”

I would agree with most of that (on other parts, I don’t have all the direct evidence that I’m sure others do). Even accounting for the tendency of eulogistic memorialization to gloss things up a bit, this still seems to give a pretty fair impression of him. Thus it may seem all the more unfortunate to look at some of the dark things, but the larger picture of who he was, and why I deliver this story, will come into helpful focus, and both adds to my Marvin Center story and goes beyond it.

Andy as measured as an inspiration for fictional work

It may seem tedious that I make allusions to fictional works of mine that weren’t traditionally published, but here the reference is very useful. Skip this subsection for now, if you want.

It’s important to note that when I talk about Andy being inspiration for part of The Folder Hunt, this doesn’t simply mean that the way he “informed” a “dark” character in this novel was better than how he positively inspired my later novel, A Transient, or that the 1985 novel itself was better than the 1986 novel itself.

The darker side of Andy seemed—by spring 1985, when I was in a more doubtful phase of my post-college life, in part stimulated by Andy’s tribulations—good food for shaping a dark character in my first novel, whose composition at the time required a daring I was not used to then (or which I had to embrace, with risk, to become more of a writer). As I drafted the present account as a nonfiction chapter in 2001-02, I became amazed at how similar to my fictional character of Samson, the heavy-handedly posited “bad guy,” Andy was. [An important note putting this into perspective will be included in Part 13, the final part of this series.]

In fact, I believe that in late 1984 or early 1985, I started drafting in more explicit terms the character of Samson, as a key figure in the novel The Folder Hunt that I worked on steadily but with a generally seeking attitude (I gropingly sought plot and incident and a general moral point in it—while trying to find my writing voice with it). Though Samson was present in the novel from very early in the writing of the novel (probably in the rudimentary chapters done before I met Andy), the novel became more solidly, coherently, and darkly plotted when part of the plot involved the more pointedly nefarious actions of Samson—who worked for a housing construction company—against the protagonist, Harold McCord. Samson engages in certain machinations to victimize Harold, the hapless but mostly genuine character who once worked for the company, and through the novel is flopping through a difficult transition between longer-term jobs.

In a plot twist that I think I determined only in spring 1985, one of the things Samson does is jeopardize some aspect of Harold’s fate by revealing that Harold takes a certain kind of psychotropic medication. I'm pretty sure I didn't have Samson do this until Andy Cohen's and my friendship was already in the fairly-decisively downward part of its arc, and Andy turned out to be (rather surprisingly) unwilling to receive any sorts of lessons from me about how he could rescue himself from career failure despite his (to use a rather old-fashioned term) neuroticism and (still a valid term) drug use. By offering lessons, I mean whatever lesson I thought I could offer based on my own health-related life (which I’d theretofore kept a secret from Andy, as well as from others). This’ll all sound less cagey and quaint when I get to the second half of Andy’s fancy story.

In 1986, roughly a year later, when I was writing my novel A Transient, in much different circumstances and aptness to be creative than in 1984-85, I based the character of JN in part on Andy, as to certain playful and “friendly-neurotic” characteristics. So there—in very florid and fun form—was the positive Andy. And I’ve always felt that A Transient was the better novel than The Folder Hunt.

Just after arrival, Andy shows non-bitter colorfulness; and what his school situation was

For a good while, times with Andy were, as he used to say in a mildly slangy, faux-Southern-accented, long-voweled way, “Fiiine!” (He was from New York City, of course.)

As I said, Andy first was friends with a fellow student assistant manager named Jeffrey (Jeff) Barth, who was in my year in school (Jeff, independent of Andy’s affairs, lived in one of the nicest rooms in the upperclassman dorm of Milton Hall [where I also lived then, on the fourth floor]; Jeff roomed with the president of GW's student association, Bob Guarasci, who, as I said in another entry in this series, would end up heading the New Jersey Community Development Corporation in Paterson, N.J., by about 1995).

Andy and Jeff hung out (at least at work) with their affinity that, I would assume, was based at least on being Jewish males, perhaps with similar interests (including talk about girls). But I guess it was because Jeff had already been working at the MC with me, and I had a cordial relationship with Jeff, that Andy came to be friends with me. And just as I’ve said Andy and I came from quite different backgrounds, he would also (before long) develop some close accord with me. Soon enough, Jeff, Andy, and I were a threesome of friends, but then Andy’s and my friendship grew to be something different from his and Jeff’s, or from mine and his and Jeff’s together (Jeff’s and my association was the least close). I think in a way, of us three, Andy and I became the closest duo for a time (at least through later 1984).

Andy was, in the 1983-84 school year (and at age 26), at either the sophomore or the junior level (while Jeff and I, both about 22, were at the senior level). Andy had attended what I would have said was at least one other college, and which I see from his obit were the two colleges of Hampshire College and the University of Vermont. GWU was his third try (and would, as far as I know, be his last).

As I've said, he was being given a sort of last chance of getting his degree while, I believe, he was being bankrolled by his parents. He had three sisters—I think he was the second or third of four siblings—and his father was a lawyer and his mother was a psychologist. He especially spoke approvingly of his sister Emilie (I never knew her name was spelled that way until I saw the obit).

He was, in my experience, a classic (and, for me, edifying) case of a young Jewish person with a jaunty, musing-and-quick-witted, relaxedly bohemian way of carrying on. He had critical and satirically humorous things to say, but he wasn’t rudely opinionated. He was warmly approachable to those whom he let be his (college-time) friends, and he could be, as he wished, casually friendly to strangers whom he encountered in the huge tide of people coming and going at the Marvin Center, and on the streets of the busy university campus.

This carefree social side of him was remarkable to me. He also had what seems to me a classic satirical attitude toward certain Jews (often based on appearance) that a range of young Jews could have at the time (how things may differ now opens up a topic too complicated to address here). One of his playful moves was to point discreetly at a JAP (a “Jewish American Princess”—a subcategory, defined by Jews at the time, that I do discuss elsewhere) who was walking nearby and suddenly—with subversive irony, sotto voce and with mock-innocent furrowed brow—say to me with mock curiosity, “Is she Jewish?” He would do it so the woman wouldn’t necessarily see him and be offended.

He allowed me to playfully join him with some of this sort of joking—of course, not a whole lot (it was all a complex area of “edgy taste”)—as I generally learned about that joking approach from him (and from others at GW). Once, drawing or typing on paper, I made a joke advertisement of my own obviously outlandish “fantasy” of some kind of Jewish-related event—this playful flier (on its narrowly technical side) took clues from how we building managers dealt in some way with the manner in which programs were promoted at the MC. The flier just (not following any MC standard), in a clearly burlesque way, heaped on a lot of clichés about Jewish life that, one would have thought at the time, couldn’t help but appear in jest. It included flung-around terms such as “Borsht belt” and maybe seltzer (I wish I could remember the “copy” more)—and Andy thought it was hysterical.

But my joining him in joking about Jewish cultural styles and the like could have its limits (which may have been a function of his being a bit moody at times). Later in our relationship—to show how edgy we could be—he went along with (ironically, somewhat affirmed) a playful comment that I made, that if he seemed like an anti-Semite who really loved Jews, I was an apparent philo-Semite who was really an anti-Semite.

One other time I made a joking comment that clearly was so satirical, it couldn’t be taken to heart, and it only-formally echoed some of the daily work business we dealt with: “Andy [or maybe I called him by some nickname such as we used], Adolf Hitler just called and wants all Jews out of the building.” (In those days, such satire wasn’t so outrageous. There was a fake, comic newspaper—Off the Wall Street Journal—that was circulated in about 1984 in D.C., and I think elsewhere in the country, that was written by satirists many of whom, to judge by their names in the publication, were Jewish. It included such an article as something on matters related to Ariel Sharon—this was only a couple years after the controversy over his handling of the Sabra and Shatila [sp?] camps in Lebanon—where it talked about Israel having an “Ashke-Nazi” party that was interested in finding “lebensraum” on the West Bank, or such. Obviously, this would raise major hackles among some today.)

We engaged in witty jokes about passing items of interest—and some jokes not-so-witty: once he thought it was hugely funny that we had come up with the idea in a playful conversation that the Library of Congress was only for members of Congress to take out books, as if it was their own private library. (Today a wide range of people could lampoon Congress for being as baldly presuming, but in specifically far more outrageous ways.)

We engaged in playful word-riffs and had certain pet phrases—we were a little neurotic or precious with this—some or most of which were derived from some of the verbal mannerisms of one of our supervisors, the full-time staffer Wil DeGrasse (see this Part; there, I have not elected to talk about Mr. D’s pet verbal expressions; I also found from an early draft of this account on Andy that Mr. D had been in the Navy).

Socializing outside work—when our times were best in 1984

Andy and I socialized outside of work. I went to a few apartments he rented; one, actually a cruddy old house in Arlington, was infested with fleas. (I forget how they got there.) And once, in summer 1984, for a sort of day trip, we went to a farmhouse being rented by the third-shift MC building manager, Zak Johnson (he is briefly mentioned here), who was an enterprising character and a friendly guy with a not-too-bad subversive streak who could always be professionally serious when it was needed. The farmhouse, a nice old place, was in the Virginia countryside some miles west of Arlington and had a cornfield nearby. Andy and I once walked through the cornfield, just to see where our walk would lead us to (basically, you went to not much else than more cornfield).

There were a lot of fun times we had. The friendship seemed (on a subjective level) to last a good while—I think it was (objectively) over a year and a half. (This was longer than my friendship lasted with Randy Klemp, the 2002 draft of this says. Today, I can’t fully remember how long the Randy friendship was—probably a little over a year.) Andy and I went through the cycles of one full school year, then part of another; and this period included similar cycles at the MC, with the various demanding events for which we had to provide support, and the changes in the building's schedule from busy season (the school year) to the not-so-busy season (summer). We went through at least one summer there together (1984), when the place was half a ghost ship and yet you still found ways to make the job more than a matter of biding time in excruciating boredom or in reading magazines, etc.

He was glad for me, on some level, when I graduated in May 1984. He advised me to “glory in” the occasion. He really had some generous warmth for me then.

Quirky, not-all-ominous sides to Andy

That he was a character quickly enough became clear to some. Angie White, the worker at the MC’s Information Desk (see Part 1; and Randy Klemp had known her better than I), remarked to me that Andy would be walking along—then, she said, he’d suddenly abruptly turn around and head off somewhere else—as if he’d remembered something he had to tend to—all while reading what he had in his hand. As she first described this, in an instant I could picture him in his characteristic “pose” of walking to do his duty somewhere, at a relaxed pace, in his rather sloppy semi-prep clothes, reading something (usually, I think, part of The New York Times) as he went—mystifying me how he could read while walking through a sometimes moderately people-cluttered building. (I never saw him read in the shower, as his obit says, but that sounds plausible.)

I knew what Angie meant. Andy had those half-organized mental states. He was (very generally speaking) like me in this, but I didn't freely or proudly own up to this. From a longer-viewed perspective, our ways of developing competence were far different, based in good part on background if not also character. (Minorly, and said with warm humor, I didn't abruptly change course in walking somewhere, as to be witnessed, quite as he did—at least in those days.)

Little sidebar: This is rather clinical talk. And the focus on personality issues, on a sort of fussy level, seems like the sort of thing people in their twenties would be concerned with. You could also toss in here, for fun, how this story—inevitably shaped by memory—may go hand in hand with the kind of cultural assumptions that were current then, like the drug-abuser component of that movie (featuring the “Brat Pack” of that time) St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), which I don’t know if I fully saw, which had the dorky theme song written/performed by some rocker (whose name escapes me) that included the harebrained lyric, “I can feel the St. Elmo’s fire / burning in me!” If you knew what St. Elmo’s fire was, you know that if you felt it burning in you, you would have a curious case of swamp gas: St. Elmo’s fire is the same as ignis fatuus, a light caused by swamp gas that has some chemical interplay going on where it gives off some light.

But anyway, I was never finky to Andy about his being a character. I was loyal to him—to a fault, as it would turn out. (One of his favorite locutions was “It turns out that....”) I showed faith in him by being close friends of a sort despite our differences—differences such as my reserve, and his more promiscuous (not to say sexual) way of having social relations.

I almost never confided in him the kind of medication I regularly used: but once, I finally started to do this later in our friendship, by early 1985, and did so—if naively—to try to show how I understood about grappling, as he needed to do, with a severe neurotic problem or some such thing. In response, he said—with a sort of composed, vaguely friendly-humorous tartness that was one of his deviations from his usual friendliness with me—“I don’t want to know” or “I haven’t the slightest interest,” or some such self-defense. Actually, for him to be so aloof at that point (maybe January 1985) showed how the friendship was on a downward trajectory, if a gradual and befogged one, at that point. (In short, I thought, probably, that he might benefit from taking a psychoactive medication. We’ll see in a future entry the vivid background of why I did this.)

That was in the days before Prozac and people being freer to talk about such meds and the reasons they use them. Claims of nervous breakdowns are more freely tossed off today (almost as to trivialize them, sometimes) than in the mid-1980s.

His trouble finishing with college, and the start of his downturn

The following is on the impressionistic and eulogistic side. The next two thirds of Andy’s story, when they are posted, will focus things pretty incisively.

Andy accumulated his college credits slowly: he took maybe two or three classes a semester. He wasn’t taking classes fast enough to graduate in the foreseeable future. I don’t know if he got especially low grades. He did get an A or B that I was aware of; there also was an “incomplete” he got and then seemed slow, or unapt, to rectify. He seemed warmer to an English-related class than to others, and for this he once wrote a “book report” (as the professor apparently had called it; I was amused it was referred to this grade-school way), which was one of the items of work of his that I saw and that he found fun. In fact, he said he liked in general to write such a “book report” because, as he explained, he did them like the New York Times book reviews. (He’s the one who got me interested in reading those reviews on a regular basis, which I did for many years. Only the 2008 financial crisis has slowed this practice of mine down.)

I remember pointedly trying to help him study or do some paper (I don’t know if it was this same book report); this situation was such as allowed it—I wasn’t being a noodge with him. In general, he, in some “idealistic” sense, wanted to finish college, but he couldn't do the work. This seemed less a problem in 1983-84 than it was in 1984-85.

At some point, in fall 1984 I think, his father visited GW, largely to speak with him in a big effort to try to stave off the final unraveling of Andy’s school career—that is, to get him to make a last strong effort to be serious about himself. (It’s possible Andy had an “incomplete” and/or other inadequacies in his grades for the 1984 spring semester, as the reason for this. I can’t remember if Andy had taken a class in summer 1984.) On this visit, his father happened to greet me (as it happened) at the MC’s game room, and he was generally genial to me. His father even commented enthusiastically about The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth's novel that he saw I had been reading: “You'll be so sad when it's over,” he said.

(Of all the parents of people I’ve encountered who had the type of long-term psychological problem Andy had, as we’ll discuss more later, his father was among the very most cordial. Other parents, of young people I’ve run into problems with in media workplaces in more recent years, have been distinctly cooler, but that is likely, I think, because the “encounters” have usually been on the phone, which never allows for as fair a quick assessment of you as meeting you in person; and the problems that had arisen with the young coworkers were also far weirder—due to the problems’ ethically questionable intrusion on the workplace—and more apt to be presented one-sidedly to their parents by the coworkers.)

Andy went with his father to dinner that night—I can picture the scene at the game room: Andy seemed resigned, slightly embarrassed...he seemed as if he knew that there wasn't all a fun conversation ahead. There was a little more to the picture than this, but you get an adequate idea.

Meanwhile, on a more general level and as Andy had said (probably sometime in 1984), he felt that I “had it together” or however he put it; in relation to what the conversation was about, he thought I was composed and efficient, and, accordingly in some general and “eminent” way, different from him. (Once, I think unrelated to this, he spoke as if he thought I was from Connecticut—as if I was a standard-issue preppie, I assume he meant. I was surprised he didn’t know I was from New Jersey or hadn’t asked to know where I was from. This was a surprising deviation in his way of being appropriately curious and interested in a friend.)

I tried to help him study just to try to be a friend and, whenever this could tastefully be done, to counsel him to get past the block to achieving his way through college that he admitted was there. I wasn't condescending or smug, or nagging, in my approach. (Once, showing how free we could be, and this could well have not been in the context of my more serious “counseling,” in connection with his freely, half self-conscious and joking reference to his “analyst,” which I readily assumed was Freudian, I referred—in what might seem to you hypocritical coolness—to his “psycho-babbulist.” In those days, Freudian analysis, on the practical level, was considered quaint, and maybe extravagant for some people to choose it as a therapeutic option for themselves. Freudianism was by no means a main area of the very rich variety of psychology courses I had taken in my major.)

Andy worked well enough in the MC itself. He was a “functional” substance abuser, as the more modern jargon would be. After all, in some sense, that job was not terribly demanding in terms of work over time, but it did require enough knowledge of the minutiae of managing and securing the building, as well as a sense of responsibility, including in a building emergency. Andy took this job as seriously as most other student assistant managers there—perhaps a little more so, I would assume as a function of his older age.

The job could also have long, sometimes very late hours, as when you had to stay to close up after a late-running party or the like. The third shift was usually worked by Zak Johnson alone (see Part 1 on Zak), but sometimes was filled by a student when Zak was off or on vacation, and this shift was a relatively trying thing of its own accord. Students usually worked that shift, if at all, during vacations or the summer, when the school schedule didn't make it prohibitive. Probably starting in very late 1984, Andy worked the third shift more than any other student manager, and as it happened, as could only be appreciated later, this was more as his academic career unraveled; his drug use was part of the picture of this arrangement, as we’ll see.

One night, I think sometime after he’d revealed his heroin use to me (which was no earlier than fall or very late 1984), he worked a third shift and, in the morning, he met me at the administrative office door by putting his head against my chest and wimpering or such. (This might have been partly in response to a recent, more-personal communication we’d had some hours previously.) He did this spontaneously, a little surprisingly, but knew it would be accepted. He probably had gone many hours without sleep, and I'm pretty sure he'd been on drugs (heroin) overnight.

I don't know how or, exactly, why the downturn for Andy happened. He’d been at GW perhaps two semesters (I’m not sure if he’d attended classes there in summer 1983) before the 1984-85 school year but, as I’ve said, he had a long way to go to get a bachelor’s, and he wasn’t finishing up his courses at GW as he needed to. In general, he lost what interest and nerve he needed to follow through with school. But the process was rather mysterious and as not-entirely-clear as it was sad.

Marvin Center Days, Part 6 of 13: The “Info Center,” and its pointed new “PR flavor” and reflecting how “culture shifts” were infiltrating the MC

With a quick preliminary look at staffers I’d forgotten

(This entry is partly to show what my relationship to Andy Cohen was, as first described in Part 7—to show how significant different some work associates were on some levels….)

[This entry may be subject to editing. Some edits 3/1/13. More 3/7/13, including from an early-1980s diary I checked. Edit 6/18/13. Edit 5/28/14.]

It’s funny how my memory of those MC days is. Some things of that very elaborate time are pretty clear; others I’m foggy on, and not always sure I can remember well, if at all. It’s like a big, colorful mosaic picture, with some of the tiles missing today.

Before I turn to the “Info Center,” I need to mention a few MC administrative staffers I’d forgotten.

See, I dug out of my closet my small set of memorabilia from that job, which I pointedly kept at the end of my time there, and which hardly reflected the volume of work done, though it gives a good synopsis of some of the most memorable stuff. There are job-description items and some health insurance papers, and some memos between me and the likes of Mr. Cotter. There is a fake “DAS,” the “daily activities schedule,” that was famously used by us building managers as a key document for dealing with our daily tasks. And there are two drawings of several of the MC staffers, which I’d forgotten about, and among these people, to add to the list in Part 1, are:

* Dot Evans, an office manager (how did I forget her?), an elderly woman with white hair (close to retirement, I think) but very effective in her job; I amusingly drew her with what looks like a notary public seal-maker in her hand (I think I did have her notarize things once or twice).

* Gilda ____ (first name pronounced with a Spanish soft g, as “Hilda”; and with Hispanic last name; I don’t want to risk trying to guess, but it was a pretty common Hispanic surname)—and you know, I can’t exactly remember what her job was. I think it was clerical and she reported to Dot Evans, or to Johnnie ___, the accounting department head; my drawing of Gilda reminds me that she had a strangely pigmented face, as if she had the results of a burn incident on her face, though it may have been actually a birthmark.

* Sterling McQueen, a receptionist who started some years after I’d first been involved with the MC, and he was another of the homosexuals (an important fact because, see, for there to be at least four gays on staff—Mr. Cotter, Zak Johnson, Jim Becker, and now Sterling—that was a pretty large percentage of the total full-time staff, and a future entry in this series will show why this is significant—I’m not making invidious insinuations).

The “Info Center”

The “Info Center,” I think it was called (was this a nickname for a more formal “Information Center”?), was what Julie Levy helmed, by which she got to have a fairly notable profile within the MC. I mentioned her in Part 1.

The Information Desk, as I also mentioned in Part 1, was the main facility used by students year-round on the ground floor (aside from the book store, which was mainly used at the start of semesters). It amounted to more than it sounds: it offered information, but among what it sold were a variety of newspapers (including foreign ones) and “parking tickets” (tickets for using the MC parking garage—for commuters, they were a hot commodity). It had a photocopying service with a state-of-the-art machine (a big IBM behemoth) that I liked to use sometimes (I forget whether I had to pay for copies, or whether students at large had to; I’m pretty sure students did, and as to whether I did, I think so…).

The Info Desk was actually the second-most prestigious area of the MC for students to work at, next to being a student building manager. (Almost all these student jobs, I should note, did not partake of the “work study” financial aid program. There were a very few workers who did that, but most did not.) The Info Desk also had a radio for calling us managers, which workers there did not uncommonly. Sometimes if people were holding an event in the MC and wanted a manager to tend to some sudden issue concerning their event, and wanted to track us down, they would have the Info Desk radio us.

A little trivia: One time there was a group of bagpipe players practicing in the rather-low-ceilinged area of the ground floor just to one side of the Info Desk. They actually were supposed to perform, I think, at Lisner Auditorium across the street. If anyone thinks bagpipes aren’t meant to be played outside, they should have heard them in that ground floor area. They seemed like they would make you half-deaf.

A new opportunity for Julie Levi

When Julie Levy graduated (as I did) in 1984, after having been on the student government and having been a familiar face I’d seen in the MC, inoffensive enough, and not someone I interacted with terribly much, she started to helm the new Info Center, which was to be on the first floor, which really had the most lobby-looking lobby of the building that was accessed off the street. This was also where the theater entrance was for the public. It was a nice, somewhat-muted-light lobby.

I think some council (ad hoc, I suppose) that comprised some broader-responsibility GW administrators, some MC administrative sorts, and the student government settled on establishing the Info Center because there was perceived to be a need for some central source of info for students that the MC’s own Info Desk wasn’t quite enough for (and which other parts of the GWU infrastructure fell short in, also). The Info Desk was largely an MC-oriented facility. The Info Center was going to be a kind of portal for the whole university. As part of its offerings, TV monitors would hang in each lobby, giving updates of what events were going on (I forget whether just in the MC or elsewhere too). And the Info Center could handle basic info and publicity, I think, for events outside the MC.

When Julie started setting this up—the facility had to be built in the lobby near where the telephones had been, and it seemed at first as if there wasn’t enough room for it, but it ended up being accommodated well enough—she seemed to change quite a bit. She was no longer the relatively unassuming sort I had seen up on the fourth floor, involved in student government business. She became rather self-promoting and a little presuming. (In fact, as I remember, she ended up being the sort of administrator who hung back in her boss’s office, and attended meetings; she was not a hands-on, circulate-through-the-building type as I was, and this was one key measure of our differences as MC-located workers, and also of how I have preferred to do my work through may jobs in the almost-30 years since.)

The old Info Desk remained downstairs, if I’m not mistaken, but some of its functions were trimmed. I think, for one important thing, you could still get parking tickets and newspapers down there.

I can’t fully remember, but I think Julie fell under Carolyn Jefferson’s purview where MC administrative interaction was concerned. (Which makes sense, following the logic of my modern-day interpretation of C.J. seen in Part 3.) Julie would sometimes be in staff meetings with C.J. and/or whoever else, and aside from it not being to my own taste as a worker, this reflected rather a departure from the culture of the MC as I had known it overall for almost four years, and as a student manager over two years.

Julie had her own staff for the Info Center (meaning, student workers), and by and large they had a somewhat more “upscale” air about them than was exhibited by the old Info Desk student workers. (The latter included some we managers would chat with a lot, not just Angela White but also a Donna Semkiw, whose father I believe worked for the State Department, and a young woman whose name escapes me but had a pretty Irish face [update 6/18/13: I am pretty sure her first name was Sharon]. [Added 3/7/13: Taking clues from an early-1980s diary I dug out, Donna worked at the MC through the end of summer 1983. I had probably first crossed paths with her as a coworker at the start of fall 1982, because I know she was there when fellow manager Randy Klemp was there, and he was definitely there in fall 1982.])

If I recall rightly, the new Info Center's workers did one dorky thing: they had to wear uniforms specially tailored to their facility, which the Info Desk people (and anyone else who worked for the MC) didn’t have to do.

Diane Hockstein, a cordial correlate of changing times for me

I don’t remember all the details of the new Info Center, but they gradually come back to me, and one aspect of it I remember well is one student worker, Diane Hockstein (who often worked there with another, somewhat overweight young woman with curly hair—I can picture her but can’t remember her name).

Why I mention Diane is, in one respect, rather banal. While some might say that in recent years I seem to cross the line at workplaces in terms of flirting, or proto-flirting, with young women there (who often are not far in age from me), I used to chat as something of a periodic routine with select young women at the MC. There was nothing ill-advised about this. Other male building managers did this with “friends of their choice” too; nothing sexist about it. Whether you would call my version of it flirting, I know that none of my female fellow talkers took issue with it as “untoward flirting.” Donna Semkiw was one such “compadre” at the old Info Desk, from maybe starting in 1982 and definitely running through 1983 [see added note several paragraphs above regarding timing]; and I think she might have left after graduating. [Correction per early-1980s diary: She left the MC at the end of summer 1983, but I think she graduated, at the earliest, at the end of spring 1984. Also, I recall corresponding with her once after I moved back to New Jersey in 1986, probably in late 1986.] 

Diane Hockstein, in a sense, I guess became Donna’s successor (not that this was manipulative of me; Diane didn't mind talking), at the new Info Center.

Another interesting way to look at this is one “banal” measurement of my book manuscripts: Almost every one is associated with some female with whom I’d had at least a passing acquaintance beforehand (and perhaps during its making). The book ms. need not be explicitly about the female to be associated with her (in my mind, but also reflected in some one of its themes). I think I chatted with Diane up until the time I left the MC in late 1985 (I forget when it started, but maybe in late spring or early summer 1985). When I wrote the novel A Transient after I was back in New Jersey in 1986, though that novel is one of my works least about a female I took interest in, I referred to Diane indirectly in one or two passages, and I consider the novel to be linked to her in the way just described, if it’s linked to any such female.

Thematic sidebar: When you read Part 7 of my MC stories, on Andy Cohen, you will notice two things: my friendship with Andy, however it may influence your thinking about me personally, was one of several work-related friendships I nurtured over years, and my “talking friendship” with Diane Hockstein helps flesh out this picture (I won’t further characterize it, for now). Further, to the extent that A Transient somehow “memorialized” these particular casual friends in some way, Andy is much more explicitly “portrayed” in the novel, while Diane is more passingly alluded to. This doesn’t mean so much that I valued one friend over the other; but one thing I would like to highlight is that, in my time at GW, I managed to make friendships, or otherwise build memories, of people who in some respects were vastly different from me, in a way that has proven considerably harder in my time since 1986 in New Jersey. But among the inferable reasons for this, when it comes to the peculiar nature of the media industry, the very least you could say (apart from the fact that, please, laypeople, the media industry is by no means an “extension” of academia) is that is has nothing to do with the context’s commonly being an all-inclusive community, as if everyone has a right to be there and an unfettered opportunity to make common cause with “different types.” Over 20 years, and certainly more in very recent years, I have seen that the media industry has a huge component of being about “workers only wanting to identify with their own kind.” Interestingly, my story about Andy Cohen, when it is completed, will show that, as vastly different an environment as it occurred in (and in as vastly different a cultural time), some particular aspect of it has striking relevance for some workplace-related issues today, I think.

Diane wasn’t someone I felt especially close to; I think I managed to be more this way with Donna Semkiw. But Diane would prove memorable for a particular reason: she was (please, don’t take offense) a spoiled young Jewish woman, but not in a way that made her obnoxious or aloof. There was something surprisingly “real” about her, considering that, for instance, atypical for an underclassman, she had a station wagon (from her family) to use on campus and lived in an apartment (which was atypical; even many putatively snobbish JAPs lived in the dorm system [update 5/28/14: the URL for this term, which was used overwhelmingly more by Jews than by others in my experience in the 1980s, has changed to this]). She had a brother who was attending the GW medical school—which at the time, I believe, was the most expensive medical school in the country. In fact, part of what made her “real” was that she worked in this Info Center, including wearing a uniform, and the average upscale young Jewish female student at GWU (not to say this means they were all JAPs; this was a category not encompassing all spoiled such women; in particular, Diane was not a JAP) did not do this. (Part 7 will include further discussion on JAPs.)

Diane was there to be a “working stiff” of sorts as a student, and Diane seemed by the background-related bare measures I just noted to have been someone unlikely to consort with someone like me in the limited way we were doing, chatting in idle moments at work…. And yet she chatted as she did with me.

Common cause again. Wow.

I looked her up on the Internet within the past few years, seeing evidence of her for the first time in about a quarter-century—indeed, she’d been working as a lawyer at some firm (in the Philadelphia area, as I found from another check very recently). She has still used the surname I knew her by (had she not gotten married?). In all, the impression from the Web site was that she was still about as “real” as I remembered her. (This is all reconstituting a portrait from old memories, and from bits of Internet effluvia….)

All this may seem on the trivial side, but from another angle, differently toned, Diane represented (to some extent) what the Info Center reflected more broadly: that a certain veneer of “upscale-ish,” broader-media-type service was being projected from the MC with that service, not quite the more everyday-business, newspaper-and-parking-ticket fare of the old Info Desk. And this paralleled a change in culture I saw happening at the MC as 1985 went on.

This preludes my entry about why I left the MC. That full story will wait.

Some relevant prelude: Numerous old friends in my class were gone. Many peers, who had graduated with me in 1984, had left the campus (and those few I’d known that remained, one or more of whom attended the GWU law school, which at that time was called the National Law Center, thereby became more aloof from me, not necessarily a personal reflection). My own attempts to start a term in graduate school were becoming frustrating.

Most pungently, by summer 1985, the way Andy Cohen had left both college at GW and his job at the MC (which I will tell starting in Part 7), really queered things for me. Though my career wasn’t on any clear downward trajectory, I seemed more isolated. And in some valid enough way, coalescing by the later fall of 1985, I was finishing up what allegiance/enthusiasm I felt I should have to D.C. as a great place to go to college, while I had never intended to go to grad school there.

It was in this somewhat shadowy state of transition that I chatted with Diane—probably most of this starting after I worked for two months at the Tennessee Valley Authority (April-June) in 1985, and that same year applied to the Peace Corps for the first time (and had seven personal references to do so, most or all from the MC—the only time in my life I’ve ever had so many references available).

Maybe seeming quite minor, Diane inadvertently taught me some things such as the fact that young people (her age) could use Yiddish terms in different ways from their parents. For instance, she referred (in talk with someone else) to a subset of me and some student managers as having been “kibbitzing around,” which I knew used the term somewhat differently from what you’d seen in literature by someone a generation or more older.

A Web page related to Diane can be seen here or here; I doubt she would remember me, but if she did, that would be nice.

Starker changes could be seen a decade later

When I visited the MC in 1994, I found that the administrative office—which was no longer in its classical haunts on the second floor but was on the office-rich fourth floor—had merged with the Program Board (see Part 1). This was far more radical a change, as far as I was concerned, than Julie Levy’s Info Center of 1985. The later change had to reflect more radical “visionary” decisions made by some council of GW administrators and others. And by 1994, I was long gone, and in an obvious sense couldn’t care about these later changes.

So if it sounds like my memories of the MC are of a college culture almost as forgotten as a lot of other 30-year-old things can be, actually, the basis of those memories was even more transient than that: the way the MC was managed, which a large group of us different workers put our sweat and heart into for years, changed quite a bit about 10 years after we were there, and what remains in your “bones” is how we had a professionalism forged there—and a way to get a lot of laughs at work, too.

That seems rarer today, at least in certain modern industries.

Marvin Center Days, Part 5 of 13: The time I let some homeless people sleep in the theater, and I stayed overnight to watch them

(Embodying an overlapping blog-entry theme: Against Mental-Illness Clichés and Canards)

With a brief talk about some ideas of the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard

[Edit 3/19/13.]

This story is an example of what you are capable of doing when you’re young and idealistic. But it was less naïve a “feat” than it may seem to you at first. [Note: See Part 12, March 18 entry, "Prefatory note 1," on the philosophic disposition from which I write on such a "charitable endeavor" as is recounted here.]

Shortly after I first came to GW in September 1980, I was struck by one thing you couldn’t miss on the streets: homeless people, who were also what you would alternatively call vagrants, bums, hobos…. Transient might be another name, but that could refer to a person who was in some kind of fundamental life transition (to put it nicely) and not necessarily a stinky, mentally ill homeless person living in failure mode on the street.

They lived on the street, and passed through the GW campus, which was essentially arrayed on city streets in the Foggy Bottom area. They were filthy, might wear a weird combination of clothes, might talk to themselves…. I still was periodically doing drawings in those days, as I had during high school at times; I drew one or more pictures of homeless people—they were like a wonder, a mystery to fathom.

In some sense, they made you think what often may seem trite: “There but for the grace of God [or chance, or strength of personality] go I.”

Some became familiar faces. You saw them come around every so often…. I remember a fellow student talking about them, and he said one of them was called “Jabber” by some students—not to his face, I would assume—because of, you guessed it, the way he talked. It does not surprise me some students had a more snarky way of talking about them than I did, but that is beside the point here.

How the decision suddenly rolled up

By the end of 1984, I had been ensconced in my staff MC assistant manager role for more than half a year. I had been associated with the facility, so that it was in my bones, since October 1980. I had graduated from college in May 1984. I had a confidence, not a strutting egotism, than came from getting somewhere after years of steady, dogged, hopeful work.

So when the weekend for the second inauguration of President Ronald Reagan came along—I never voted for Reagan, and never would if he was alive and ran today—I was in some sense ready—motivationally, in terms of what I was willing to risk, and regarding what resources I had at hand—for what I did when, that weekend, it was so colossally cold—for Washington, D.C.—that the inauguration was canceled! Reagan received his swearing-in indoors. (I think it got to be 10 degrees or less outside, Saturday night into Sunday morning. This was not impossible to deal with for me, but of course for Washington, D.C., it was an anomalous, bitter cold snap.)

I, of course, was working that weekend at the MC with my usual hours, including Saturday and Sunday nights. Now, I have recounted this situation at least once—I adapted it to a chapter of my first novel The Folder Hunt, which I was laboriously writing at the time. But I think I recounted it later, nonfictionally, too. Here I am just going on memory, and won’t try to recount all the details.

I realized how bitter cold it was going to be, and by January 1985, roughly speaking, I was not as naively agog/sympathetic to the homeless as I was more likely to be as a freshman four-plus years before. But I knew they were as much a part of the scene, generally outside the MC, as ever. (On rare occasions, one would come into the MC, usually to the ground floor, to rest and get warm, use the food vending machines, and so on. That provides a story about another of our managerial duties, dealing with homeless people if/when they came in, and obviously they could theoretically be a bother to the students in some way, but this was not nearly the problem that other non-student presences could be, such as the bathroom gays.)

Realities gamely encountered

When I finally decided to go see if some homeless people would like to spend the coldest night during inauguration weekend inside the MC, it was a rather brave, unusual decision for me to make, but I believe I felt it was justified given the extreme cold weather out, which was the worst I’d ever seen in D.C. Then, the process of going outside on my lunch break to do this was an interesting exercise in step-by-step stuff that was amenable to the fictional “existentialist” treatment—with one-after-the-other phases, depictions of moral wrestling/such, and accounts of somewhat dicey personal interactions—and thus it got in The Folder Hunt. Because it was so cold, and I had limited time, I limited myself to locations where I knew I’d seen some homeless men camp out for the night—one in the entry area of a large office building, another in the “atrium” of a Metro station, and so on—and this meant traipsing over several blocks.

In at least one case, all the homeless person wanted was food. And I took his order, after saying (I guess) where I could get the food (it was Bon Appetit [sp?], a hamburger place right near the MC). He wanted a (I believe, regular) hamburger…. (Later, when I brought him the food, he opened up the burger and said something like, “No catsup?” A lesson in human nature. Bon Appetit’s burgers were great, and I don’t remember why in this case there was no catsup, but maybe you’ll think of the expression “Beggars can’t be choosers.”)

Two men I finally got to come with me had been standing in front of the Metro station I mentioned, which was on K Street. (K Street is sometimes referred to in news reporting, as if it is a big, almost notorious lobbyist location in D.C. To me, it has just been part of the business district of D.C. as I knew it then.) There were actually four or so homeless men there, but two didn’t want to come, or didn’t answer my offer. The two that came fit what you’d imagine they’d look like: one was a longish-haired, bearded sort, and I think he wore something, with all else, that hung on him like a cape. It seemed strange, as far as how I might have looked, to be leading them back to the MC. I had described for them a building where they could spend the night; they probably had no distinct idea what the MC was—as we quietly walked along the street-lighted city streets with, I believe, new snow dusting the sidewalks.

I had them stay in the theater, which was not being used for any purpose that night (it didn’t just house staged plays). The theater seemed a good location because, in part, it kept the homeless men segregated from areas of the MC where students were. I’m sure I showed the men where the bathrooms were.

Staying overnight as “innkeeper”

I elected to stay overnight at the MC to keep an eye on them. There were rooms accessed off an upper floor of the MC that ran along one side of the upper walls of the theater—they were mostly offices of the drama faculty—and they (maybe two did) had little windows that looked out into the theater. I could stay in one of these rooms, where there was an uncomfortable little couch to try to sleep on, and occasionally I could look into the theater to see what was up with my charges.

They sat for the longest time in some of the seats, as if they were waiting for a play to start. I think eventually one or both lay down on the floor to sleep.

One had food with him, and at one point he took it out and ate it.

Andy Moskowitz was the theater manager—he had started in this role as a student job, I think, and later got the job as a staffer, similar to my becoming assistant MC manager for the weekends. On this particular night, I don’t remember if I assumed he’d be out all night, but at one point he did turn up, inconveniently for me. I don’t think I was able to “head him off at the pass”—to catch up with him and explain the homeless-visitor situation—but I remember talking to him at some later point, and he was surprisingly good-natured about it. He made some comment about one of the men having chicken with him (I think Andy was concerned about a mess resulting from the chicken).

I stayed the whole night and I think I was unable to sleep at all. I checked on the men through the window repeatedly, and eventually they got some sleep, as I recall. It wasn’t much but it was something. They got more than I did.

The next morning, around maybe 7-something or 8-something—when, as it happened, students were starting to come into the MC (again, not into the theater) for a normal day—I went down to the homeless men to prepare them to leave.

One thing I’ve always remembered is that, as I led the men out a side door of the theater, the bearded one—who was older than the other man and looked in some surface sense like a Cecil B. DeMille Jehovah—winced at first as he felt the bitter-cold air outside, then turned and gave me a hearty nod/smile of thanks for the accommodations. The other one didn’t say anything, as I recall. In fact, through all of this—my having them in extended over eight or more hours—we never talked at all, or very little (which talk perhaps comprised my telling them where facilities were, like the bathrooms). I think I left it up to them how much they would talk to me. But the bearded one’s gesture of thanks was such that it touches me even today. By which I mean that it doesn’t matter how “down” one is in life, how outside the social pale one is, a person can still show humanity in an intimation of mutual accord/thanks for such a thing as a stay overnight out of the bitter winter cold. I didn’t expect this.

Looking toward a general ethics lesson

At some point, one coworker who was a student manager, whom I told about my plan for this, referred to me with friendly joking as “Saint Greg” or such. I didn’t want such a remark, whether you called it a compliment or whatever. And I don’t think I would have again done a similarly bold thing at the MC, whether or not for humanitarian reasons. That is, having those homeless in, and staying overnight as I had, was risky along several lines, but I thought it was a moral risk worth taking. Sometimes you do this, and may never opt to do it again, because while the risks at one point seem acceptable, as a general practice you realize it doesn’t make a lot of sense. So it becomes a learning experience, and you do it once for the moral value, and then don’t do it again, but it may lead you to find some more “socially well-provided-for way” to do such a thing again.

This could be said to refer to my way of exercising charity in unusual circumstances, which in some sense encompasses (but is not limited to) my work in VISTA in 1986-87, and my involvement in a support group in 2001-03. I think it all falls under the Kierkegaardian notion of the (occasional) “teleological suspension of the ethical,” which is an idea that derives from what some might consider that philosopher’s rather rigid ideas of what characterizes variously moral kinds of behavior: there is the ethical, which means defining what is right to do by certain hard rules, and then there are things we opt to do out of faith, which don’t follow rigid rules but which we still do out of what could be called a higher calling. Through his books, Kierkegaard has various discussions that address all this, which I’m not prepared to lay out; there were his notions of the “knight of infinite resignation,” the “knight of infinite faith,” and the story of Abraham sacrificing his son….

If this sounds like something from a seminary, in a way it is, but Kierkegaard was an existential philosopher (which he only got characterized as after his death), and this all has more relevance and intellectual challenge for young people forming their values and place in life. When you’re an older fool like me—whose life seems, as time goes on and somewhat embarrassingly, to revolve increasingly (more than he has expected) around everyday things like coffee and chocolate and an occasional good laugh—it seems hard to dust off these old philosophic concepts to explain them to someone else. But in sum, my helping those homeless was me, as a young man, engaging in a sort of “teleological suspension of the ethical” on behalf of a couple of poor men who could use a night out of unhealthily bitter cold (I give thanks to professor Peter J. Caws for first teaching me about Kierkegaard; here is his GWU Web site).

(The “teleological suspension of the ethical” seems like a concept that Woody Allen could make comically-adapting hay out of, in a joke involving something done rather off-color by a male with a female. In fact, some philosophic concepts can be bowdlerized this way: Jean-Paul Sartre, who could apparently be a bit of a goat in his sexual life, referred to some of his loves as “contingent” versus what in normal philosophic parlance would, as a logically complementary concept, be the “necessary.” I think this set of premises, obviously tied to slovenly practices, may have caused some form of grief for his paramour Simone de Beauvoir. It’s been a while since I’ve read any of Annie Cohen-Solal’s bio of Sartre. By the way, Professor Caws also wrote a book on Sartre, published in 1979.)

I also recall talking about the homeless-stay stuff in a staff meeting, when I (generally speaking) came to account for what I had done. I don’t think Mr. Cotter was entirely approving, but I don’t think he was simply disapproving either. I think he understood that my doing this was conditioned in good part by recognizably freakish weather. I think a number of us had a decent enough brief set of comments about the matter, and then we moved on. I doubt I wanted to explain a whole lot my reasoning for having those homeless in.