Thursday, March 28, 2013

Getting bearings: My years working at a Playboy Hotel (1979-81), Part 1 of 2

[Edits done 4/1/13, important between asterisks. More edits 4/3/13 & 4/5/13.]

Subsections below:
Playboy was about image, for better or worse
A few initial extra points, including reference to famous writers
A quick stop to consider a Playboy-exploiting scene from a 1979 movie
Women working as Playboy Bunnies showed professionalism
The lessons for today posed by Playboy Bunnies
A nice theme ahead


Today, young people—not least, women—get a few laughs talking about Hugh Hefner as “the loin in winter,” around 90 and still putting on the old silk pajamas for some “men’s entertainment” with his latest wife, who is about one-quarter his age. Go ahead, have fun; I think he’s pretty ridiculous nowadays, too. But I have a few reasons for talking about my years working at a Playboy Hotel and Country Club, which was located in McAfee, New Jersey (the building is still there—long story what has become of it). I am proud of having worked there [see Part 2 for a qualification of this], particularly as I did simple busboy work; that was a good place for such work, for the tips you made on top of the below-minimum-wage pay, and when you were a student anticipating college and had to earn some money to pay for college, you were a fool to turn that kind of opportunity down.


Playboy was about image, for better or worse

Playboy—its day is past, of course—was also largely about image. One could probably do a pretty fancy essay on it here. Not only do I have a few points to make, drawing inferences (applicable to phenomena of today) from my own homely experience working there 30+ years ago, but there are a few points to make of a more general nature.

When I was still living in the Washington, D.C., area (I forget whether it was in 1984 or 1985), I stopped by the office of Phi Beta Kappa, which was several blocks from GWU, looking into possibly getting a job there. One of those wildly speculative tries, you know; the kind that would become the stock in trade of a freelancer I would be by the 1990s, where you are sending out resumes all the time, like routinely cast-out fishing nets that only rarely haul in a catch. Anyway, a rather elderly secretary looked at my resume, and made some snooty remark about my having worked at Playboy. I have always remembered this.

Among my possible retorts (which I saw fit not to make, then), see the first paragraph of this entry, concerning being practical about work when you were a student. Moreover, I would have added to her, Playboy was largely about image, and you seem to have been fooled by the image—thinking it is nothing but a seedy, disreputable place: a bordello, making exploitative fodder of women, about hedonism, not worth a true Cultural Pillar’s time. It was a business and, in my town at the time, a good place to work for a student.


A few initial extra points, including reference to famous writers

* You may have heard the remark made, “But Playboy magazine has good articles, too!” And of course, this wasn’t just a joke; it was a prime conduit for up-and-coming high-culture writers. Guess what two writers, greatly esteemed today, had some early items published in Playboy, in the late 1960s and early 1970s? (There may have been plenty of others.) Joyce Carol Oates and Garry Wills (a Playboy reference is not made with the Wikipedia bios for either of these writers). [For Web items showing instances of these writers' past work in Playboy magazine, see here for Oates and here for Wills (beware that some magazine cover[s] depicted may seem a bit salacious).]

* The people I worked with at Playboy—whether fellow busboys, managers, Bunnies, or regular-style waitresses—were all there to do a job. They ran the gamut in personality, professionalism, fun stories to tell, all else—just as at any other big employer. More to say on aspects of this, shortly.


A quick stop to consider a Playboy-exploiting scene from a 1979 movie

I hope to get to a review of the film Apocalypse Now Redux (2001; original film was 1979) before long. Among the many other things about that film that people can raise issue with, or appreciate (despite flaws), or both, is its portrayal of Playboy Bunnies. Now obviously Francis Ford Coppola in producer mode—or another producer on that film—arranged some deal with the Playboy corporation to use its logo and some company-specific ideas (like the Bunnies), with some money paid to the film, in return for giving the company some publicity, while also playing around with the company’s trademarks. So the Bunnies are shown—not just in what was probably Coppola’s sincere thematic attempt to catalog the way women are degraded by war enterprises, a cause for storytelling as old as “camp followers”—but in a way of making them seem bimbo-ish.

Of course, in the initial Hau Phat USO scene, rather spectacular at night, with the stage, band playing, and Bunnies dancing enticingly in “Americana”-type costumes (Indian, cowboy, etc.), they are there as temptations to the sex-starved soldiers in the audience. A riot of sorts ensues. “Yet another Vietnam-type mess,” the film seems to depict; let’s leave further discussion of that aside for now.

In the 2001 version of the film, the men on the PBR—Captain Willard, Chef, Clean, Lance, and the Chief—catch up with the Bunnies again (in daytime) when they come upon a military camp damaged by a typhoon, and two of the Bunnies are sheltered for the time being, one in a helicopter and the other in a dilapidated building—while the big Playboy helicopter stands idle within the camp. We are then treated to Chef initiating a good time with one Bunny, who used to work at Busch Gardens (note the many juvenile double entendres in this extended scene, with both Chef and Lance). Meanwhile, in another locale, Lance takes up with another Bunny, who seems in full dopey bimbo mode as she talks rather thirstingly about wanting to be recognized for her talent, and how she was exploited in some weird shenanigans where she had to hold some medals between her knees, etc. The scenes are well designed and photo’d—Coppola could always manage a visual treat—but the writing is a bit weak. But anyway, more than we saw at the nighttime stage scene, the Bunnies seem like Bimbo City. This even while Coppola also wanted to score one for lamenting the degradation of women by the War Machine.

I always have felt this rather slandered the idea of Playboy Bunnies. Maybe the Playboy corporation didn’t mind this at the time—filming was in 1976—because that played into the company’s wanting their hotels, where the Bunnies were commonly to be found, to seem like a Stately Pleasure Dome of Earthly Delights, including the idea of sex with a nubile young woman with bunny ears on her head (though such a thing would never come to pass).


Women working as Playboy Bunnies showed professionalism

A couple initial notes about what my work at Playboy was like, which would serve both this entry and a possible Part 2: First, the Playboy in McAfee, N.J., contained (along with its hundreds of hotel rooms) a number of different kinds of restaurants and/or bars, along with a clothing store, a sort of drugstore/variety concession, a swimming pool, tennis courts, and of course a golf course with the typical amenity of the “Pro Shop” (where the pros could raise a few cold ones). When I worked at the club, my “tenures” there, and locations, were as follows:

* from September 1979 to August 1980, *extending about a year's period that ended right before college* (Sept.-Dec. 1979, at the “Cabaret,” a sort of Catskills-like dinner club, where people ate a choice from a sort of limited, preordained menu of dinners, then saw live entertainment; Bunnies worked here; then, Jan.-Aug. 1980, the “Living Room,” an Italian-buffet restaurant of a stodgier kind, with standard waitresses and no Bunnies);

* a bit in December 1980 (at the Living Room);

* and again in May-August 1981 (this time at the Sidewalk Café, a place with hamburgers and such, and alcoholic drinks from a bar; Bunnies worked here, and this provided my richest experience of working with Bunnies).

Another preliminary note is that, as far as I recall and from a wide range of people, men and women alike, while there may have been occasional relatively juvenile talk about the Bunnies, by and large, people who worked there didn’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that women should have been “derogated” or what have you by the Playboy “Men’s Entertainment” ethos or the employment of the “Bunny” image in particular. Women who worked there, in particular, may not all have entirely liked it, but they went along with the business conceit, whether they were non-Bunny waitresses at the locations using such, or Bunnies themselves. And after all, the Playboy company was selling a sort  of “fantasy world” not unlike today’s Atlantic City or Las Vegas casinos, whether with scantily-clad waitresses or not.

In truth, the women who worked as Playboy Bunnies—as far as I could witness while a young worker there—were professionals doing a job, like anyone else. They ranged all over the map:

* a smart young woman who was the daughter of some corporate big wheel, who could engage customers in smart conversation, and hence got big tips;

* women more like Average Joes, maybe a stoner variety, or something else, who could do the Bunny thing well enough (and sometimes be bigger tippers to us busboys—we busboys did well when the Bunnies did well); and

* one woman (an anomaly) whose Bunny name was Daisy, who was very comely in bodily shape and not very bright (my high school friend Joe Coles said—and he was not far from the truth in this, and I’m not being mean to say this—that she “had three brain cells, and they were all disconnected from each other”; for me, it is not an easy “caricature” to say she was a somewhat cartoonish “dumb blonde”—I mean, she was nice enough, and I don’t think I’ve ever met someone like her since; and I don’t think her style was an act; and meanwhile, she was a very atypical example of who worked as a Bunny there). Daisy usually got big tips, probably because the salivating male customers were taken by her appearance and simple camaraderie.

But all these Bunnies were waitresses—of cocktails or otherwise. They took and filled orders, and handled payment with the cashier. They accepted tips. And as a regular practice, they gave us busboys who worked under them a percentage of their tips. Different women were differently generous, but by and large, when the Bunnies did well on a given day, we busboys did well.

There were strict rules at the club that no one was allowed to touch or otherwise deal with the Bunnies in any salacious manner—i.e., in a way that today would make an office-working woman want to cry “sexual harassment!” The Bunnies were all about corporate image, just as if you went to a McDonald’s and saw some shmoe there dressed up like Ronald McDonald. Men, of course (and whatever women who might be inclined), could ogle the Bunnies (just as they might at a waitress at today’s Hooters or the casinos that have waitresses dressed in a comely fashion). But clearly if some dork had a few too many highballs and groped a Bunny, he would be shown the door in no time.

The Bunnies wore costumes—of course, along with “ears” that were held up as a headdress of sorts—that looked from a distance like one-piece bathing suits, but they were actually on the bulky side, and had pockets for carrying things. I think they wore high-heel shoes—part of the image—but again, this was part of a costume.

There was also a “Bunny Mother”—a supervisor who worked with the Bunnies, while the latter all got dressed in their Bunny outfits in their special locker room. The “Bunny Mother” certainly didn’t wear a Bunny costume. The Bunny Mother—to the extent I understood what she did (other busboys there knew more about her, I think) had some supervisory function related to scheduling (and maybe did some level of coaching), and possibly addressed more normal workplace issues, etc. And the Bunny Mother, as I recall the one I knew about, did not look like a Bunny; she had more in common with Rosie the Riveter—and I recall she was hefty, too.


The lessons for today posed by Playboy Bunnies

I have thought numerous times over recent years that one difference between the women who worked as Playboy Bunnies in the late 1970s and some of today’s young female Turks in media companies is that the Bunnies knew they were doing a job. Today’s young Turks—I don’t know; I think they think they’re fighting the Good Fight for Women’s Rights, along with carting that mundane paperwork around. But if they remembered we are all in the office to, Number One, do a job, then they’d share something in common with the old Playboy Bunnies, which is that they are doing a job in line with the expectations of the company they work for. If a woman in 1979 was willing to portray a Bunny, to the (discreetly) horny looks of an occasional male customer, she would do this, with bemusement and a sense of safety. She knew the company rules would protect her. And she had income to earn, not some vapid ideal to raise a stink about, not quite appropriately within the context of normal company business.

You didn’t have women working then (at least as far as I saw) in an office setting as you might have today, a setting that has little in common with the old high-class Playboy country-club environs, and which may seem at first to have nothing to do with sex; and then—what do you know!—she’s being used to have her pretty face grease the rails in some greasier sales transaction.

As in, shall we say?, the seamier parts of today’s medical marketing, where, strangely, sex is used because, for an example, sometimes, the admin manning the computer “cockpit” at the conference table with the (my term) ad-agency pitch clique in a meeting where each side of the agency/client divide could see the other—well, that admin looks a bit like Bo Derek, and the dazzled (male) Big Pharma potential client says, “Sure, I’ll sign on the dotted line. You can have our business for our Baby Poison Sugar-Free Throat Lozenges.” (Fair balance: The paragraph contains a certain amount of satire.)


A nice theme ahead

Seriously, folks, I hope to return, when I have the right set of comments to make, to the theme of sex appeal used within the medical-advertising realm (whether in ads, or in the offices of the producing agencies). This is a very intriguing area. I’m sure numerous people with direct acquaintance with it could come at it from different angles in terms of evidence and evaluating viewpoints; but I think that in the aggregate, it would be an area with some pretty staunch views on what seems an absolutely unacceptable, or at least a highly questionable, “value.” I mean, sex appeal to sell medical interventions (to consumers), or ease transactions (amid insiders) on the obscure echelons of the industry: if that isn’t where American commercialism starts to get at its most perverse!

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Marvin Center Days, Part 13 of 13: A fond farewell for now

Summary observations, forgotten details, and other stuff all hustled into place as if…a new manager has just come bustling in!

[If you find a formatting problem, see my note in the Profile feature of this blog. Also, a longer version of this entry will appear, on my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog. Edits done 3/26/13, with important ones between asterisks. Another edit 4/20/13.]


Subsections below (numbering follows the full entry draft; certain subsections [4 and 6] are omitted for this entry):
1. Why did I quit the MC? A complex of reasons, befitting an elaborate job
2. MC-related (or GW-related) amusing topics yet to be covered (but not all here)
3. Summary observations on the MC
5. Have I given the full MC story (as to typical features)? Not quite

A special section appears as part of an entry that is the longer version of this entry, on my "Jersey Mountain Bear" blog: A thematic transition from the Marvin Center history to an early (1989) paid-writing job


1. Why did I quit the MC? A complex of reasons, befitting an elaborate job

Why did I quit the MC? I submitted my resignation on September 10, 1985, to be effective six weeks later—an unusually long lead time for quitting a job, in my overall experience. As it later turned out, Mr. Cotter allowed (after, I think, I requested) that I would stay on for another two or so months through the end of December 1985 while a replacement for me was found, and I trained the person a bit.

The main reason (which had to do with (3) below) that I stated in my resignation letter was rather gruffly put, and wasn’t the only reason. There were, more exactly, three reasons:

(1) I was tired of the same old problems that plagued the night manager job (especially the weekend version, which usually dealt with the fancier, and potentially more problematic, nighttime events)—part of the source for problems will be looked at when I discuss C.J. in subsection 2 ("MC-related...") below.

(2) I had to move on from GW eventually, because the graduate school phase of my schooling life was inevitably not going to be at GW (because of the programs I was tooled for and wanted to get into—I first tried for comparative literature). And generally I was committed to graduate school as a phase of my career since 1984 and would be through about 1988. (See also subsection 3 ["Summary observations..."] below, at the sub-subhead The MC was meant, in my mind, to be transitional.). This meant that, at some point (hopefully not too inconveniencing to the upper-level management), I had to quit the MC—the only outstanding question for me being when (and, further, my considerations regarding timing and rationale for leaving in relation to graduate school were more elaborate than this, and in a way were also a little naïve of me—as not to be discussed here).

(3) A particular problem came up—having to do with the Security department—that, when I addressed it in what I thought was an appropriate way, was a spark for my being angry at how triflingly I was handled in response. (It’s amazing how many jobs you can have where you can have an abiding, relatively low-level set of problems that you usually maintain patience with, but eventually can cite as a reason to leave; but what actually occasions, or provides a strong pretext for, your leaving is an unusual, stupid incident or issue that is inflammatory in its own way.)

The problem was that Security personnel did things in the MC that were not in accord with what the MC needed; in particular, I recall the outer doors being locked too early by Security at the end of the day. (There were some other things Security did wrong that I cited in a letter I wrote to the Security head in late August, but this one issue is what I clearly remembered when first preparing this entry.) It was a routine part of managers’ job (both student and staff MC managers) to lock the outer doors at the end of the day, which could be 11 p.m. or 12 midnight, whatever the official hours were, on different days. But sometimes Security guards did this locking too, not at our specific request. And I found that they would (sometimes) lock the doors too early.

Obviously the students had a right to get into the building right up until closing time. If a student wanted to stop in on the ground floor to get food from a vending machine, and knew the MC was open to midnight, if he or she found the outer doors locked at 11:45 p.m., this was a clear disservice to him or her. We managers would never have caused this to happen; our job was to be of service to the students, and we knew when building hours were. But some Security guards—I can think of one in particular who I knew locked doors early, who was in general (and in my opinion) a stupid oaf—took it on themselves to lock the doors early, as if completely out of convenience to themselves. I had seen this more than once, and enough to write a letter of complaint to *Curtis Goode, who I just found (3/24/13) was the addressee of the letter and I believe was the successor to Byron Matthai, the former* head of Security. I don’t think I named any particular guards in my letter.

Well, I never would have expected the response. In long retrospect, this looks like a case of my being called down for not “observing the chain of command”; and *actually, as I reinspected the letters (3/24/13) for the first time in a long time, I found Mr. Cotter referred to the "chain of command" explicitly, but there was more to this situation than I had recalled, including stuff that justified my position. (A subsequent little entry on this blog, and/or an addition to the expanded version of this entry on my "Jersey Mountain Bear" blog, will spell these things out.)* Mr. Cotter reacted disapprovingly, and indicated I should have channeled a complaint through him, which would then be handled as to go from the higher-level MC management (if this was deemed appropriate) to the head of Security (with probably an “appropriate” gloss of diplomatic language, though I didn’t think my letter to Goode was harsh). In short, I had (per the dissatisfaction with my move) short-circuited a “path for complaints” of the type I made, which path I never knew existed. And I got a definite feeling there was more of a perturbed sense, on the part of higher-level mucky-mucks, at how I wrote my letter to Goode (both the fact that I wrote it and, I’m less sure, how it was phrased) than there was at the original issue of the MC’s doors being locked with disrespect for students’ rights. (A subsequent review of my letter shows that I was strong in my tone, but on the other hand, I was succinct in referring to rather serious problems. Moreover, the specific problems I pointed out on the part of Security guards--and there were numerous--would seem to me to be more important.)

I don’t have much of a different opinion about this today, about 27 years later, than I did at the time (though today I would handle my reaction to the managerial reaction to me, as in my resignation letter, with a more seasoned manner). I think it was simply wrong for the whole issue to have been made one of my “not following the chain of command” than of some Security guards acting in inadvisable or vaguely “rogue” ways to the inconvenience of students. (It's possible the blow-up of emotions on the part of Mr. Cotter and maybe Mr. Goode was some of what exacerbated problems here, which could have faded if focus had been placed more quickly by upper management on the objective issues I raised, but I don't believe this--sticking to real issues really quickly--was done.) I thought this was petty of the higher-level types and almost too surprising. I was surprised Mr. Cotter was so much “not with me” on this. I have wondered at times if there wasn’t some other agenda (among the higher-level types) in play that wasn’t clear to me.

This kerfuffle seemed a good occasion to finally submit my resignation, which as I suggested under item (1) above had already been brewing (but had been “subordinated” to an attitude of patience) on the basis of the “same old, more typical problems” that kept affecting my job. (See the C.J. sub-subsection to follow.) [Update: Further analysis of the resignation situation is seen in this entry of April 1.]


2. MC-related (or GW-related) amusing topics yet to be covered (but not all here)

There are a few entries I drafted on various interesting topics related (or not so related) to my MC days, and I realized that some of them could be saved for a new, occasionally posted category—“GWU Days”—which would not be a long, close-together snake of series entries as the MC ones have been. Some could be put on my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog.

            Topics for future occasional entries

One draft has an interesting story on a GW visiting writer, David McAleavey (he was a poet; he was a teacher of sorts in 1984, but not a full professor; he seems to have become that later at GW). He had my help in 1984 when he was helming some little event at the MC. There was also a follow-up exchange I had with him in 1985—very interesting. Will wait.

The second half of the Fern K. story will wait. There is actually some very interesting substance to it, and it extends for some years, but I’ve dealt with it enough for now, in Part 12.

I didn’t want my Andy Cohen story to be sadly curtailed, so I will deliver a little follow-up, what it was like when I met up with him in November 1986, when I visited GWU and environs for the first time since February 1986 (and this was the first time I saw Andy since about April 1985). November 1986 was the last time I saw him. (See End note.)

There were a number of little college-life tidbits I found in my early-1980s diary that joggle the memory on some stuff from that time, not all of it related to the Marvin Center. They reflect how college could be then, whether showing how more immature one could be at that stage of life (regardless of one’s trying to be more mature in shouldering college responsibilities), or showing how things were in the 1980s (culturally, interpersonally, or otherwise) as different from today. Before too long, I will pay visits to some of these old anecdotes, for whatever relevance they may have today.

I also discovered an item in my early-1980s diary that has given me a lot of pause, and led me to draft an entry that is really more an item of family history than an episode of purely college stuff: I repaid a chunk of money to my mother in summer 1983 that was rather hefty for me then (and was probably the last of several installments over time)—hefty in view of more typical particular debts I had, and in view of the fact that I was working hard for my own interests, school-related expenses not least. Generally and obviously (to me, at least), we were never a family where “parents” turned their pockets inside out to put their children through college. In my family, since 1970, there was only one parent, and while we two children were in college, sometimes (not very often) “money flowed from child to the parent.” In this case, if I remember rightly (I have to revisit records of the episode, and it’s like an old, dark closet that does not please me to reacquaint myself with), I had been repaying my mother for a lot of money I borrowed from her for expensive and numerous repairs in summer 1982 of my VW Dasher, the junker I bought in spring 1982 that turned out to be a bottomless pit of mechanical problems. I think I was repaying her the last installment of what I owed, in about June 1983, as facilitated by my having more income rolling in. I was willing enough to do this at the time; I probably felt it was the decent thing to do, if I didn’t also feel obliged (by some signal from her). In retrospect, considering the many uphill challenges to my career over the long term, not least with respect to my mother’s (shall we say) financial ways, I take a dimmer view of that 1983 situation.

All these future blog entries will appear either in this blog or my other blog, depending on which is more suited to them. (My other blog is for more specialized tastes, so to speak; it is like my “alternative music” station, while this blog is my “Top 40” station.)

            Adding to the C.J. story a bit

The entry on C.J., Part 3, seems as if it could use additional narrative and analysis. At one point I added the note that the revenue-generating side of the MC (as to host groups from outside GW) may have been set up to pay off a mortgage that may have been taken out to pay for the original building of the MC, which was in the late 1960s. But this is just speculative. Another problem that affected us night managers directly (and rather hamstringingly) was actually within the more detail-oriented side of C.J.’s department: simple errors in scheduling of events. On occasion, two events could be scheduled for the same location at the same time, which was an obvious, embarrassing error. This sort of problem was part of the rationale for getting a computer system to handle scheduling there. This problem also, I think, was a prime example of the sorts of problems I considered when formulating my set of rationales for quitting my job at the MC: being tired of the same old issues that never seemed apt to be ironed out. (See subsection 1 above.)

Sleeping on Mr. Cotter’s couch

I’ll give here one little anecdote from summer 1983, because it’s amusing for reflecting the slobbishness of college life, and it does involve the MC. My dorm-mate Ron, whom I had lived with (along with another dorm-mate) in junior year (1982-83) at Milton Hall, decided to stay on the GW campus in summer 1983, as did I. Per usual university policy, the relatively cruddy, small dorm of  Madison Hall was used by the student housing system for summer students. For our particular convenience, Ron and I both lived for the summer in Madison Hall, which was a block or so away from the nicer Milton Hall. We found the Madison room unsatisfactory pretty quickly, he more than I, though an attempt spearheaded by him to get us back into Milton Hall for the summer didn’t work out (technically, as the housing office made clear, we could have stayed in Milton if we had made this intention known by a certain, earlier date). Anyway, we “liked it or lumped it” when it came to Madison Hall, though Ron took a while to let his dissatisfaction about our temporary setup go; he fairly routinely referred to the room and nearby communal kitchen, with friends, as a “rice on the ceiling” kind of place.

Ron was a fun roommate, generally, but he could be distinctly more of a partier than I preferred to be, and not just with me (he and I occasionally went out to bars) but with others (whose range of partying activities was greater than mine). One night I came home from work and found Ron had been smoking pot with a friend in our dorm room, and I needed to get to sleep. I think I had to work the next morning. I feared getting a “contact high” or such from the pot smoke, and overall it just made sense for me to get the heck out of there for sleep that night.

I had MC keys with me, so I got back into the MC and slept on Mr. Cotter’s office couch that night (this was in August, I think). Those were the days, when you could live like that. I don’t remember how well I slept that night. Nowadays, sometimes my sleeping situation isn’t terribly much different, but it’s less “catch-as-catch-can” and Spartan than that 1983 situation was.


3. Summary observations on the MC

Was the MC right in line with my more envisioned career direction? No

The MC was meant, in my mind, to be transitional. In fact, my work at the MC was, as I always saw it, a sort of way station, something to earn money from, pending more serious career pursuits (starting with further schooling—graduate school, which for me would not be at GW). See subsection 1 above. My occupying my job at the MC was (always in my mind, if less conveniently for upper-level MC management) a temporary phase that followed my graduation from college, and allowed me a little break after eight hard years of schooling (while I also took classes, usually one a semester, as a postgraduate, non-majoring student).

As I think about all this, I am sure my supervisors at the MC, especially Mr. Cotter, knew about this. But as time went on, I think the arrangement, or general idea, became less convenient to them. When I had submitted my resignation in late summer 1985, Mr. Cotter became especially disenchanted with me. I’ve always felt sorry about this; 90+ percent of the time I worked under him starting in January 1982, he was a good guy (and I’m not saying this in light of the fact that he died many years ago). In his quiet way he was steadily protective of his underworking managers. I’m not sure why he got miffed with me; perhaps my being (over months) opinionated about things in my staff time there got to him. The fact that I was bound to go to graduate school, eventually, should have been understood by him; I don’t think I kept it secret from him.

I have one possible explanation for why he became disenchanted with me: I think he knew my particular slot in the overall set of managers/shifts was hard to fill. At 30 hours (wedged into three days), it wasn’t quite full-time, but also, you had a lot on your shoulders on the weekend. And the more general onerous side of this old job exemplifies a particular type of phenomenon I’ve encountered numerous times since: that you capably occupy a weird slot of a job that leaves a lot to be desired, and yet, despite how often you alert supervisors to the job’s shortcomings, the supervisors never see fit to fix them all (or even most of them, at some jobs). Then after you’ve exercised an unusually large amount of patience with the job long enough and finally quit, it later turns out you are vindicated because your successor(s) never stay in the job as long as you did, or the job is reconfigured so that it isn’t quite so burdensome to successors. (This seems, in my long experience of the field, to be a typical feature of a lot of editorial jobs, and I’m a bit surprised how the MC job, which in many ways was blessedly free of the characteristic problems of editorial jobs, still had this large feature.)

In fact, the man who took my place in this MC job, a philosophy major (a year or more younger than I), stayed in it only about a year (as I found in November 1986); I myself had been in it, in its staff form, for a little over a year and a half.


The temporary aspect of my MC job, regarding my longer-term career goals, was the case while my transition to graduate school became complicated. I’d decided against law as a career, having turned down in about spring 1984 a partial-tuition scholarship to Boston University law school for a number of solid reasons. Unrelatedly, by late 1984, I was working on my first novel manuscript, whose most concentrated effort ended up extending from May 1984 to June 1985. This did not mean I was ready to try to become a writer yet (for a full-time or even depended-on part-time career; this sort of thing always looked like a big gamble).

And, as far as applying to actual graduate school programs went—which had started within late 1984, aiming at getting accepted in spring 1985, with school to start in fall 1985—suffice it to say that the process turned out complicated, and needed a repeat-try the next year. I won’t recount that process here; it is all too subtle and complex to spit out in a blog. But my process of seeking a suitable graduate school, complete with the kind and amount of financial aid I wanted, would continue after I moved back to New Jersey.

(The broader interpretation of what my plans were from about fall 1984 through about late 1987 is this: On one track, go to graduate school [first, in 1984-85, I would try—apply for, with the necessary component of scholarship-type aid—comparative literature; then in 1985-86 and 1986-87, I would do the same for philosophy], with the longer-term result of probably becoming a professor. On the other track, I would also develop my skills and practices as a writer of books, first of novels. The writing would be my true calling; the professor work would be a means to support myself. All this involved a considerable faith in long-term efforts working out, and one of my principles here was to aim to do something I could respect myself for [after a long process of getting to this level]. After an abortive semester in graduate school in 1987, in August 1990, unexpectedly, I would in a sense start to satisfy [a relative term here] both my “professorial” and writing “career aims” in the prostituting way of doing catch-as-catch-can editorial work, to the extent that this helped my writing efforts and was a means to earn money. Boy, does this open the door to a possible darkly humorous blog entry; let’s hold off on that.)

Actually, how this side of my 1984-85 career, with respect to the MC, pieces out, illustrates an important thing: my work life has always had multiple tracks, at different times and for different reasons. (1) In college, I had non-career jobs (like at a hotel, or at the MC) for money. (I never went the route of the “internship,” unpaid or otherwise; I found that area bizarre when I heard about it in college, and as much as I’ve learned about it over the years, I’ve always found the idea/practice quaint and the province of spoiled brats.) (2) With the MC, I had a temporary job prior to heading off to a full graduate school program (even while I did take post-graduate courses while still at GW). (3) Once I moved back to New Jersey, I was faced, for more brute practical reasons, with needing to get multiple jobs (usually in a series) to plug financial holes. Then in terms of sheer common-sense strategizing, while partaking in VISTA in 1986-87 and going to graduate school in 1987, I could not start a career job in those years (similar to sticking with the MC job in 1984-85 as a sort of stopgap).

After the blue-collar-type job of doing paste-up at a Sussex County newspaper in 1988, I didn’t really start more career-type work until editorial work beginning in August 1990. Then, I had three jobs in a row that were “full-time” or close: All American Crafts (1990-91), AB Bookman (1992-93), and Clinicians Publishing Group (1993-94). The politics and improvident nature of these places led me, not in any direct, easily maintained path, to become a freelancer, which really got underway in 1997 (in terms of enough work to meet my financial needs). Freelancing, with multiple things going on through the year, seemed the best way to keep money rolling in and not depend on any one company for “all your income” (which has long, for 20+ years, seemed the best policy where media companies are concerned). Freelancing for me lasted in its most provident phase about 11 years—1997 through 2007.

I’m proud to say I can account for the complexity of my work life, which in many ways was necessitated by circumstances and the crazy nature of some of the industry involved. I had no more the option to “become the man in the gray-flannel suit” and go to one employer for all my work life than I could wave a magic wand and become the Sheik of Araby.


In terms of a minor effect on my morale, the atmosphere regarding peer relations on the GWU campus wilted for me after my graduation. By early 1985 at GW, numerous old friends in my class were gone. For some, if they were going to some post-graduate schooling (either law school or grad school), they were doing it elsewhere. Other peers who had whatever other career paths to pursue had left the campus. As for those whom I’d known who remained, well, there was an odd change—I can recall one who attended the GWU law school, which at that time was called the National Law Center, who became more aloof from me, while I don’t think this was necessarily a personal reflection on me. Even within the MC context, people like Andy Moskowitz, who was the theater manager (having started that as a student and become a staffer at it later), became a little distant in their own way.

Some of this aloofness or distance was subtle, and hard to specifically account for today; perhaps to some extent it reflected (aside from the other people’s reasons for it) my own self-doubt as I was in a transitional phase of my career, as I headed toward being more of an “itinerant artist” as well as along the quixotic path of trying to get into a suitable graduate program. Meanwhile, more objectively, these peers and I were no longer swimming in the “bolstering” and “dignifying” aspects of the hard and rewarding regimen of college as we all just had. Further, in late 1985 and very early 1986, I experienced the sheer element of career choice/“chanciness” as making things for me more “weirdly” unsettled, as the MC job was coming to an end and I had no good prospect in D.C. lined up as a replacement, and I wasn’t decided yet on returning to New Jersey. (This sums a subtle and important set of conditions very roughly. In some ways my novel A Transient, and more normal recollections of the time, would convey the situation better.)


The Andy Cohen situation cast a shadow on things. Most pungently, by summer 1985, the way Andy Cohen had left both college at GW and his job at the MC (which I told the darkest aspects of in Part 9; consider the parking-tickets issue), queered things for me. Though, more objectively speaking, my career wasn’t on any clear downward trajectory, after Andy had had his “meltdown” and left, I seemed (as a result) more isolated and/or demoralized. This, in itself, still wasn’t an especially big reason for me to leave the MC. Perhaps the Andy story will be further fleshed out to your satisfaction when I recount, later, our meeting in November 1986.


5. Have I given the full MC story (as to typical features)? Not quite

My 13-part series on the MC, believe it or not, leaves a fair amount out, to show the true range of detail and color of that job, but you get the picture of scope and responsibility of that job. (For a letter of reference I got from Boris Bell in 1986, look here.)


##

End note.

Another note on Andy Cohen. On proofreading my three entries on Andy, I am pleased to have presented as much as I have, while I regret these entries (especially the first) are a little repetitive in places. But all things considered, they are elegant enough, given the topic. One of the fun things about blogs is that I can present stories that are hard to get out in normal media, some of which stories I have had “in the garage” for many years. I tried to get some out in book manuscripts—and that as a general avenue turned out to be more quixotic than I would have expected. But blogs are like seeing your favorite rock musician live—there’s an excitement of spontaneity and insouciance about it, and there are fumbles and bum notes. If you want the full studio production of one of my stories, you would need to see the book. If you want a “live” taste of such “artwork,” in all its flatulent glory, “on Letterman,” here on this blog is your taste.

Further, the problem of having an elegiac portrait of a person (like Andy) come out seeming “schematic” or “self-contradictory” in a way, in the sketch-oriented confines of a blog, also might be apparent in my recounting my 1983-85 dealings with Fern K. in Part 12, and this concern may be relevant in my treatment of more recent workplace issues. Again, a fuller treatment in less hectic a “place” than a blog allows a more nuanced, fairer portrait, and certainly a “lovingly full” portrait—of anyone.

Anyway, one thing I said in my A.C. entries is that Andy provided some inspiration for my fictional character Samson. It’s important to note that (1) I “backed into” doing this specific derivation of Samson, in the sense that (in about early 1985) I sidled up to it not entirely easily, and I was selective with “modeling fictional characteristics” on a real person. (2) There were some moral scruples I had in 1985 about this—more generally, your becoming a fiction writer while modeling things on real people or events is a strange process that, as ethically fastidious as you may try to be, is still complex and “innocence-losing,” though (as you develop) you get more “integrally” adult about it.

(3) Making a negative character based on Andy may seem as if I was disillusioned about Andy at best, which was true in some regard; but it’s probably more correct to say that by March 1985 I was mystified by, as well as disappointed in, Andy regarding certain things about him; and as a college-age person can do, I worked this into my writing as a sort of “therapy” along with all else. I should point out, again, that there have been readily-enough embraced positive ways I’ve remembered Andy too.

A fourth sub-point here will wait for the longer version of this blog entry.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Movie break: Two R&B-loving white grifters save the day for their orphanage, leaving a trail of destruction that’ll cost them years in the “slam”: The Blues Brothers (1980)

An old favorite that allows us to do some “adult continuing education”

[If you find a formatting problem, see my note in the Profile feature of this blog. One edit done 3/23/13.]


This movie is very familiar to American viewers, and I will just mainly offer a few notes on details of it. Similar to The Shining (1980; see my second January 31 review), it is a child of its time that seems an exemplar of a certain kind of well-built movie, which has now been around so long that its many fans, young and old, have parsed it to death.

The Blues Brothers (“BB” for short) is what has been considered (probably rightly) the best movie that came out of TV’s Saturday Night Live. It is the second notable film in the career of director John Landis, whose first hit was Animal House (1978), and who helped write the final screenplay for BB. (Dan Aykroyd, one of its costars, wrote BB’s the original treatment, a 300+-page effort that had to be winnowed down.)

Landis is always interesting to listen to in commentary related to BB—whether in a making-of feature (which has shorter and longer forms) that is included in different editions of BB (videotape or DVD) or in promotional talk for BB’s sequel, The Blues Brothers 2000 (1998). (This latter film did less well, making much less than it cost, according to its Wikipedia article.)

BB is another film I’ve watched many times over the past 30 years, and I actually didn’t see it in the theater when it first came out. I think I first saw it on cable TV in the mid-1980s. It always seems to go down smoothly, even if your viewing is split into parts you space out through a day or across days (depending on your prerogatives). The extended DVD version is interesting for added tidbits, but even in the original edit, the film seems to sprawl a bit, while its construction (visual style and editing) makes it very serviceable, yet while some of the acting (especially of some of the musicians who are not professional actors) is pretty wooden.

Some scenes are well done (I especially like the Chez Paul [restaurant] scene, with both its humor and editing). But even where some connecting scenes are on the routine side, the fact that the movie tucks in a variety of blues and R&B music, whether heard from a car’s eight-track tape, heard as “underscore” music, or presented as played live (whether really live or not), is truly what jazzes the movie up, literally and figuratively. I myself am a big fan of blues and a lot of R&B, and these forms of American music sampled here are mainly what endears fans to this movie.

But also, a main draw is the conceit of two white blues musicians, “Joliet Jake” Blues (played by John Belushi) and Elwood Blues (Aykroyd), who grew up in a Catholic orphanage in a seamier section of Chicago, raised in part by another man, Curtis (played by Cab Calloway)—all three dressed in conservative black suits, black fedoras, and Ray-Ban–type sunglasses. Jake and Elwood have also helmed a locally touring blues band that, as one of its members says, was “powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.”


Origin of the main characters; the movie’s main storyline

The band itself is fascinating to listen to. The Blues Brothers characters were introduced on SNL a few years before the movie was made. Jake (Belushi) performed lead vocals and Elwood (Aykroyd) did accompanying vocals and played harmonica (his instrument, quirkily, carried onstage inside a locked briefcase). How the characters were developed Aykroyd describes in a film DVD extra. Their presenting music on the TV show led to recording of a hit album (the Blues Brothers and their band recorded Briefcase Full of Blues [1978], which charted to number 1 in the U.S. and spawned the Top 20 single “Soul Man”; other albums followed with or following the movie release, including Made in America [1980]). I remember a roommate playing part or all of Briefcase now and then during my sophomore year of college (1981-82).

As marketing-related considerations on the TV/film level go, the idea to make a movie with these characters was put into action “while the iron was hot”; Landis in making-of–doc commentary says that the original deal was for development, but suddenly the studio pushed for the film to be made. Thus Landis started shooting before a script was finished. Aykroyd’s fullsome original draft is probably what allowed as much creativity in the finished product as there is.

While apparently a lot of the original script’s backstory was left out, the movie is chock-full of earthy humor, occasional absurdism, and other fun originating from the two rather humorless-seeming oafs, white blues musicians who main source of personal “color” is the affectation of their forever wearing black suits and sunglasses. Apparently in keeping with their inevitable moral character, they can engage in occasional petty crime even in pursuit of a larger, noble aim—in this movie’s story, getting money to pay property taxes on their orphanage lest it be shut down. Viewers have remarked that church property typically isn’t taxed, but the opposite idea posited here contributes to the Macguffin of this film, the objective of Jake and Elwood’s rambling odyssey—to secure $5,000 to cover the orphanage’s tax bill, before the church sells the facility because it doesn’t want the increased liability (apparently “one too many” orphanage plus tax bill).


J & E comically make many enemies

In the process, Jake and Elwood run afoul of many, including the owner (played by Jeff Morris) of a countryside bar “Bob’s Country Bunker”; the leader, Tucker McElroy (played by Charles Napier) of a C&W group The Good Old Boys; and plenty of law enforcement personnel (including two long-suffering sorts, Troopers “Daniel and Mount,” who have been tailing Jake and Elwood since Elwood, with a horror of a traffic record, ran a red light). The law enforcement contingent of the plethora of enemies they’ve made in their odyssey take part in the final scene where J & E are caught just as they pay the orphanage’s bill. The contingent includes a host of police; Army; rappelling-down-a-building sorts like a SWAT team; and enough others, in all manner of vehicles (tanks, a helicopter…), that would lead you to think they were responding prodigiously to a major invasion by a foreign enemy.

To add to the fun are a small crew of men J & E also inadvertently offend—the only types of white folk that in this country could look “obviously dubious” in contrast to J & E (or just about anyone else): a group of “Illinois Nazis,” headed by a leader (who does craft-type painting of a model bird in spare time) played by Henry Gibson [URL] (always one for brave role choices) and his “Gruppenfuehrer [sp?].” The Nazis are played the way, in movies, they often seem best handled—as quintessential buffoons who might be serious in their beliefs but will be made the butt of jokes in short time. (Comic/director Mel Brooks has said that his own preferred way to depict Hitler is just to make him look laughable and ludicrous.)


The movie makes creative, and at other times adopting, use of blues and R&B modes

Interestingly, many of the performers who partook in this film were born in or around 1950, including Landis, Aykroyd, and Belushi. But numerous “old-timers” take part too, especially those who reflect the longevity of the blues/R&B that the film so lovingly celebrates: Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, and John Lee Hooker among them. The Blues Brothers’ backup band itself reflects both the initially synthetic nature of this project, and what the band and the film so enticingly resulted in. The session musicians, including bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn (who died recently) and guitarist Steve Cropper (both of whom helped make up the 1960s group Booker T and the MGs), were combined with numerous others, for a band that eventually became associated in people’s minds with the Blues Brothers and with each other. A look at the band’s Wikipedia article gives a list of the musicians, late-1970s-era and later.

According to a making-of doc, producer Robert Weiss (he was one of several producers) said the band represented a fusion of a Memphis rhythm section with a “New York” horn section (he probably said “New York” because the horn players came from the Saturday Night Live band). Dan Aykroyd, whose keen love for and expertise on the blues was a guiding force of writing the film, characterizes the band as “Chicago electric urban blues fused with the Memphis Stax/Volt movement,” the latter names (Stax, at least) reflecting record labels. (he references Chicago more in keeping with the genre of music intended.)

The film’s opening song, under some of the opening titles, represents the signature approach of this band. After we see Jake emerge from prison, his pudgy frame put into relief by the glare of morning sun, as prison gates open semi-portentously, he stands in  his dark suit like a cross between a dipshit and Mr. Kodiak Grizzly. He and Elwood embrace, and the music heralds the start of film’s two-hour fun-train. The opening song, “She Caught the Kady”—with lyrics like “She caught the Kady [a train, apparently] / and left me a mule to ride,” originally partly written by the bluesman Taj Mahal—seems in its bare bones a basic blues song (and roughly on a par with Hooker’s more Delta-blues type contributions within the film). But “Kady” is energized and made rather stirring by the Blues Brothers band with its sturdy guitar/base/etc. rhythm section and the fanfare-like horns. In this example, the movie all at once (1) “uses as an orienting trope,” (2) celebrates, and (3) elevates (sometimes almost with overproduction) the language and texture of the blues; and of course the movie adds some authenticity when some famous names do more typical versions of their own blues or R&B songs—Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and James Brown.

James Brown, in particular, is a marvel. He plays a minister (at an apparent Baptist church, though the studio setting makes it look pretty cavernous) named Cleophus James. He speaks part of a sermon that ought to sound familiar (“Don’t get los’ when the time comes, for the day of the Lord cometh—as a thief in the night!”). But when he sings a song in a signature James Brown way, adapting to gospel (during filming, the backing music was prerecorded, and only his vocal was recorded on the set live, according to the making-of doc), I’ll be darned if I know what his words are a lot of the time, but to the point, that music and his performance are so gut-appealing that you swing right along with them. You seem to get what you need of the meaning just from his intonations, rhythm, accents—stuff that includes what linguists call “paralanguage” and what blues and jazz singers do to add color and creative rhythm to singing.

(It’s interesting to compare this film’s stagey, comically overdrawn depiction of music and dancing at a Baptist church with the more realistic depiction in the Coen brothers’ The Ladykillers [2004], the DVD for which contains an extra that includes two extended gospel-song takes that were sampled in the film, which are wonderful to listen to.)  


The script’s writing is witty in unexpected places

Some spoken lines within this long story may seem a little baroque, but if you see the film several times, you appreciate the creativity of the fancier lines (examples of which we’ll see below). Other times the script can have an almost Samuel Beckettian simplicity, as when, early on, Jake and Elwood are about to be pulled over by police:

Elwood: “Shit!

Jake: “What?”

E: “Rollers [police behind them].”

J: “No!”

E: “Yeah.”

J: “Shit!

We can look at more elaborate examples via a kind of adult continuing education test (some quotes may be a bit off):

Question: How did Jake wind up in the “joint [prison],” where we find him at the start of the film? Answer (per Elwood): “The reason he got locked in the slam in the first place is from sticking up a gas station to cover you guys. He paid for the band’s room service tab for that Kiwanis gig in Colt City.”

Q: How does Matt “Guitar” Murphy’s wife (played by Aretha Franklin) reveal to Matt that two men, whom she doesn’t know at first, who want to see Matt are present in their diner? A: Wife: “We’ve got two honkies out here dressed like Hasidic diamond merchants.” Matt: “Say what?” Wife: “They look like they’re from the CIA or something.”

Q: How do Jake and Elwood and Matt “Guitar” Murphy greet each other, with a trading of notes from their checkered pasts? A: Matt to Jake: “How was Joliet?” Jake: “Oh, it was bad. Thursday night they served a wicked pepper steak.” Matt: “It can’t be as bad as the cabbage roll at the Terre Haute Federal Pen.” Elwood: “Or the oatmeal at the Cook County slammer.” Matt: “Oh, they’re all pretty bad.”

Q: How does Jake invite Elwood to join him at a table at the Chez Paul? A: [said with mock high-class archness] “Come, Elwood. Let us adjourn ourselves to the nearest table, and overlook this establishment’s board of fare.”

Q: How does the Mystery Woman played by Carrie Fisher explain how she got seven limousines for the elaborate ceremony that her family had arranged for her pending marriage to Jake, before Jake ignominiously skipped out, and “betrayed” her? A: “My father used his last favors with Mad Peter Trollop [an organized-crime figure, presumably].”

Q: What are the ironies employed where a good-natured joke is made about the blindness of the character Ray played by Ray Charles? A: After Jake, Elwood, and the band start checking out items in the store Ray’s Music Exchange, Ray appears from a back room, raising a kind of protective screen. “Pardon me,” he says. “We do have a strict policy concerning the handling of instruments; an employee of Ray’s Music Exchange must be present. Now, may I help you?” A bit later, when a young boy sneaks in and tries to steal a guitar hanging on the wall, Ray suddenly pulls out a gun and shoots toward the boy, hitting the wall intentionally. This scares the boy off. Of course, we merely smile at the idea that Ray could be such a good, scare-tactic shot when he is blind (something that doesn’t play into today’s debate connected with recent gun control issues).

Q: When Maury Sline, a booking agent played by Steve Lawrence, meets and J & E in a sauna, where Jake strong-arms him into arranging for J & E to have their band play a large facility in order to raise $5,000 quickly, what does Sline say that reveals his earthy sense as well as his ethnic side that includes use of Yiddish terms? A: He scorns J & E for being about to wear the same “[update 3/23/13] vakatsye suits”—I found this spelling (for a word meaning "vacation") in the Yiddish section of a multi-language dictionary I have—the Yiddish word basically means, in this context, “outlandish”; and he notes how when people come for entertainment, they “want to tummle [sp?; essentially meaning, make a racket], they want to carry on!”


In memoriam re several players

It’s surprising how many of the actors and musicians in this film have died, reflecting the 33 years since this film came out, as well as the varied ages of these people in 1980 (this list may be incomplete):

John Belushi (died 1982, age less than 40); Cab Calloway (1994); Henry Gibson (2009); James Brown (2006); John Lee Hooker (2001); Jeff Morris (2004; he can also be seen in a bit part in About Schmidt [2002], the acclaimed film directed by Alexander Payne and starring Jack Nicholson); Charles Napier (2011); Alan Rubin, “Mr. Fabulous” (trumpet player, 2011); and Pinetop Perkins, one of the bluesmen performing at the Maxwell Street location (2011); John Candy (1994).

Monday, March 18, 2013

Marvin Center Days, Part 12 of 13: Fern K., a schizophrenic woman who became something of a spectacle on campus

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

This is half of her story; the rest won’t be available for some time

This tale goes to show that women can suffer from schizophrenia and “be loose cannons on the street,” too—but not necessarily ready to shoot people; and it helps illustrate how psychotic women tend to be more approachable (as to allow possible help) than psychotic men

[If you find a formatting problem, see my note in the Profile feature of this blog.]

An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified.
Viktor E. Frankl, existentialist psychiatrist
and survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, in
Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to
Logotherapy (New York: Touchstone, 1984), p. 135


Prefatory note 1: Entries like the present one, and like this one about my helping some homeless on a cold night, are not presented in line with a middle class notion of “do-gooding” for which someone may or may not want credit. The actions recounted were done in line with one daily-life ethos, related to concern for suffering others  (for which recognition typically was not sought or received), and later written about from a certain artistic mode: examining, dignifying, and conveying (for whosever edification) the fact of stark ruptures, discontinuity, and mystery in life, and the corresponding challenge of moral response by individuals to the same, and/or of maintaining or acting on faith in the face of same. People can either accept this “religious” or “mystic” side to my literary efforts or not (while they may value the literary works for their other sides); but to see the “helping of others” as fairly ordinary middle class actions presented banally “for recognition” is wrong. This is no more appropriate than to say that short story writer Flannery O’Connor’s incorporating symbols and issues of her Roman Catholic faith into her work is somehow a “plastic Jesus” element that detracts from, or is otherwise incompatible with, her black-humorous and Southern gothic approaches.

Prefatory note 2: Nowadays, use of the words delusion and delusional is very common, often seeming to preempt use of other words that would be more appropriate. Delusion, in the classic psychological sense, refers to a belief that either on its face cannot be verified or proven false by readily available evidence or is still held to even when such avenues of proof are opened to the deluded person. Important aspects of a delusion are its being held to over considerable time, with little change based on experience, and its source being unclear. When someone says another person is “easily deluded,” this misuses the term; delusion by its nature wouldn’t come about easily. The term many people should use when they speak of someone who holds a belief that clearly runs contrary to common sense or scientifically verifiable reality (but which may be relinquished if evidence to the contrary is presented) is illusion. Meanwhile, the rough portrait of Fern K. that follows gives a pretty clear example of someone suffering from delusions.

Prefatory note 3. Ideas that men are the only ones prone to gun violence of the mass-shooting type are wrong: women can do this, too. For one example among several, see my subsection on Sylvia Seegrist below.


A novel story counters a commonplace notion about the uniformity of the mentally ill (and measures “needed” for them)

When people talk, as they do a little noisily lately, about severely mentally ill people as they may “feature” in public settings—or even in semi-public contexts like school campuses—as if some major new measures need to be enacted to deal with an unambiguously identifiable danger, these laypeople forget that so many matters of mentally ill people impinging on others don’t follow a formula.

They vary quite widely (some situations can be very full of unstructured contexts, frayed relations, and sheer chance…), and social morés and expectations about what can be done can vary quite widely. Further, the nature of one given person’s illness may define what kind of “danger” he or she poses very differently from that of another patient.

This entry will boil down a story I have about a woman who was suffering (as she could well still be) from schizophrenia who got tangled up in brushes with the Security department and in odd encounters with students at GWU in the early-to-mid 1980s. In my position at the MC, I actually had some “grounds” from which to do something with her that would seem very novel by today’s standards, but which I think had some (limited) role in her getting a little more help later.

Subsections below:
1. One schizophrenic woman was a “quiet” example of that illness; times were different
2. The Andy Cohen story was a resonating lesson due to moral depth; Fern’s is more a “clinical” sketch
3. One part of Fern’s story almost coincided with notorious news of the 1985 Seegrist shootings
4. My first coming across signs of Fern in 1983
5. 1984: Fern makes the school news
6. Fern is back at GW in 1985, and this time I encounter her
7. During November 9-21, 1985
            Fern on the street, with bullhorn in hand
            Fern in to use the Marvin Center typing room
8. What’s ahead


1. One schizophrenic woman was a “quiet” example of that illness; times were different

To paint every person who might be given the designation mental patient—which designation usually requires seeing a doctor and being methodically assessed—as an imminent danger, or maybe even not quite so bad but still needing quick intervention—“treatment”—is simply naïve and, even within the relevant professional setting, unprofessional. (See my March 12 entry on related topics.)

This woman, Fern K., was severely sick, but if you dealt with her directly, you got the intimation that she wasn’t terribly much of a danger.

Also, times were different in 1984 or so, when many of us who are now in positions of some responsibility (or at least able to speak from helpful experience) came of age. But at that time, people still had sense (even if without the more detail-oriented guidelines you seem often to hear about today) about how to deal with the most psychologically-suffering ones among us. And other people (especially who are not able or disposed to intervene in social trouble posed by such a person) could be frightened by a very mentally ill woman.

So the story about how Fern figured in various odd situations at GWU may seem a little chaotic—but that would only be from the standpoint of the questionable opinion that every sick person has a ready safety net out there, or that (today) one more legal enactment (as with government moves supporting today’s “outpatient commitment” courts, as are in the process of funding and expansion in New Jersey) will shore up the system of “nets” even further.

But this is ludicrous to me; to me, there is no all-comprehensive set of social-welfare nets for the mentally ill, nor does there necessarily need to be if people are educated about some of the nature of the mentally ill and what can be done, and they have some facility for offering some help in this area. (Even the federal program of databases meant to support a “full” background check for those buying guns seems to have significant holes. See the New Jersey newspaper The Star-Ledger, March 16, 2013, p. 2 [in a wire service report].)


2. The Andy Cohen story was a resonating lesson due to moral depth; Fern’s is more a “clinical” sketch

My story about Andy Cohen (see the first installment here) is, in a way, the “heart” of my series of MC-related posts. For one thing, it shows why, when it comes to remembering something from 30 years ago, when your involvement with a person included some strong emotional investment and an ethical conundrum, that helps you remember the person and the problem ensnaring you both for many years, and also may lead to your learning something about life and people, over the years, as a result.

In the case of Fern, there were a lot of details to attend to, which my copious notes on her reflect, and there was a lot of footwork: with her, my dealings resembled average-type “case work” (of a social worker)—which in 1985 and some later years I did for free—more than did something like my rich dealings with Andy Cohen (which, of course, amounted mainly to a friendship). And partly for this reason, my emotions and sense of moral complication are not as rich regarding Fern as regarding Andy.

As well, the details of my Fern story require me to consult notes, and for this sketchy blog entry, I will present a select scattered set of observations, from 1983-85; a later entry (not to appear in this Marvin Center series) would cover 1985 and 1987, and there, I would skip over stuff from my dealings with her family in 1988-90, and a letter to her parents written much later, in 2000.

Fern was born in about 1951—I would find her age reported in 1984 as 33. By 1984, she was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and was basically homeless. She was treatment-resistant, in the sense that, as was said by one person (her father) with whom I spoke about her, she was such an adept escape artist that she could repeatedly get out of mental hospitals despite the efforts of people to keep her there. She spent time in numerous hospitals or psychiatric departments of larger hospitals over several years (we’ll see a list of some of them). At one hospital (at least), she had a number of applications of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy); we’ll see details on this. She had been put on one or more antipsychotic medications. She would be on the meds for a while, and as is not atypical among such patients, she didn’t like the effects, and found a way to escape the situation in which she was treated (including the meds).


3. One part of Fern’s story almost coincided with notorious news of the 1985 Seegrist shootings

By the way, the 1985 phase of my story started just within a few weeks after the October 1985 shootings (and killings) at a mall by Sylvia Seegrist, a woman suffering from schizophrenia, near Philadelphia made the news. I remember hearing about this at the time.

For information related to this woman and her attacks (for which she is still in prison), here is a blog entry from December 2012 from a Philadelphia magazine, prompted by the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting; here is a version of a 1986 news article on Seegrist; and here [I had a link for this, but it's not working; you may be able to find it if you Google Seegrist] is something from a New York Times article published in 2000, on “rampage killers,” that includes mention of Seegrist. Further, if you Google “Sylvia Seegrist,” you can find pictures/links to several other notorious mass-killing women. It is foolish to say such a phenomenon—female “rampage killers”—doesn’t exist; in fact, it would be sexist. There is no reason why women can’t do this; and understanding the illness (in highly unusual form) behind this—not that it entirely excuses egregious crimes—allows as much proper sympathy, compassion, and so on as there might be applied (limitedly) to male “rampage killers.”

I probably had the notion in mind, with my dealings with Fern in November 1985, that a schizophrenic woman causing some consternation at a semi-public facility within my area of business could have associations in others’ minds with the jangling newsy quality of the Seegrist story. But it became obvious that Fern, as a schizophrenic, was not a danger as Seegrist was. But Fern was difficult to deal with at first, in her own way.


4. My first coming across signs of Fern in 1983

I first got wind of Fern K. in 1983 when I was working at the MC, in the spring (probably in April, when the spring semester was still in session); this preluded my working at the MC for a summer for the first time. I found a copy of some fliers Fern had distributed in the first floor cafeteria, and it made references to her father being among a group that was trying to apply some dread treatment to her (we’ll come to details below; the delusional quality to her writing was clear enough in 1983). It also named her parents, and noted an apartment that had supposedly been arranged for her in North Bergen, N.J.

By spring 1983, I had already been well “indoctrinated”—in a firsthand-experience sense—in the colorful ways of the mentally ill by what I had witnessed from a distance (since 1980) of passing-through street people (and maybe it was in 1984 that I found a paper manifesto posted—obviously by a mentally ill person—on the ground floor of the MC, talking about some conspiratorial problem with a local supermarket chain). Also, one psych class I took (Abnormal Psychology) had a group of us (in spring 1981, I think) visit patients at St. Elizabeths in D.C. The fact that Fern seemed a schizophrenic was obvious from her own flier.

I saved the flier for my files. At the time I figured that I might not ever see evidence of her again, but maybe I could use the flier as inspiration for a writing project, or just against the day she might return to GW, for informing whatever practical benefit I might be able to bring to the situation. (This was less quixotic or vapidly “idealistic” than you might think, as we’ll see in some pragmatic developments ahead.) Certainly the flier interested me as the connoisseur of psychology I’d long been becoming.

The flier includes the following, typed (by Fern) with an IBM Selectric typewriter (all in capitals):

I am writing this newsletter in a desperate attempt to get assistance as well as inform the public of the news that the New York Post doesn’t as yet print about [sic; and in those days, the status of the Post as a credible news vehicle was different than today].

I would care to relate to you about a horrible experience that I have been going through due to the miserable workings of my parents.

In 1979 they began having me committed to psychiatric hospitals to help me get over my delusions.

In Sept. of 1981 I found out that I was not having delusions at all[, but] that in fact something was being done to me and [that] the hospital personnel were partic[i]pating for [sic] lying for the group that my parents are involved in.

I would care to state publicly that my parents have ordered the group that they are associated with to kill me and make the death appear to be [from] as natural [a] cause as possible.

The group is carrying out their plan for me with the use of a portable instrument that participants carry and when they are within a certain proximity with [sic] the victim (myself)[, it] can be directed to internal organs and through the use of some kind of wave can over-stress the body.

I’ve been running or trying to stay away from the group and now they are profusely using it on me in Washington[,] D.C. where I plan to go to finish school in May. [I don’t know in which year this May was; I found the flier in about April 1983.]

There are some references to details of the alleged plot against her, and she makes an almost blackly comical reference to her finding it hard to type because “some students at G. Washington U. [sic] have possession of this instrument in this typing room” (which had to be in the Marvin Center).

She lists hospitals she had been in (the names and spellings follow what she had typed; I edit a bit): Fair Oaks Hospital, Summit, N.J.; Roosevelt Hospital, in New York; Payne Whitney Pavilion, in New York (where, she noted, she had been given a “drug that I had totally adverse side [e]ffects from”); the St. Francis Medical Center, regarding which she mentions a Dr. “Nicolas [sic] M____ [surname redacted],” with whom I (GL) was briefly in touch in November 1985, and who (she remarks) had given her electroconvulsive therapy; Sibley Hospital, in Washington, D.C. (where she says she was a voluntary admission); Georgetown Hospital, D.C. (voluntary admission); Meadville City Hospital, in Meadville, Pa.; and Pocono Hospital (here she remarks she was strapped to a bed, possibly in four-point restraints).

At some point—the source will be seen below—Fern claimed she had lived in the dorm Mitchell Hall in 1983, but the GW student newspaper the GW Hatchet in 1984 said the student housing office stated there was no record of Fern having been there. In fact, as was widely known among students in the dorm system, Mitchell Hall, which was the only one (or one of only about two) that had single-student rooms, was a tough dorm to get into—with a longer waiting list, you could say, than any other dorm. It was highly unlikely that Fern, who at best, at any point, would be a part-time student (as we’ll see), could get one of the coveted rooms there (because I think only full-time students could or would want to get into the dorms, with cost one significant issue).

Also without the source immediately at hand, I see a note of mine saying Fern was admitted to the GW hospital in 1983. The Hatchet would say that Fern made nine visits to the GW hospital from July 1982 to May 1983. (Funny—I never heard anything about Fern being on campus in 1982, but GW was a very big facility, and the hospital was on the fringe of the total grounds. There wasn’t always news coverage of her—as we’ll see below when there was—whenever she appeared on campus.)


5. 1984: Fern makes the school news

In spring 1984, Fern made news on the campus in the most vivid way. The GW Hatchet had a few articles covering how, among other things, Fern did a minor assault on one student. Also, it was apparently at this point that she was given the designation of persona non grata (even while she was taking a class at GW and, accordingly, was allowed only in the building where she had her class). The conferring of the persona non grata status came from a number of different departments, including (as we’ll see) Security, the office of the Vice President for Student Affairs, and the Dean of Students.

In the Monday, April 2, 1984, Hatchet (I omit bylines with these quoted articles):

Woman disrupts Academic Center

            The GW Office of Safety and Security will apparently take no action against a woman who dropped a can of cola from the third floor of the Academic Center onto another woman’s head Friday morning.
[The Academic Center, at the time, housed a dean’s office, some academic department faculty offices, some class facilities I believe for specific unusual departments (such as radio-and-television [?]), and other amenities (I’m trying to recall). It was not a typical classroom building, but was a large, impressive facility, with balconies-of-sorts in a high-ceilinged atrium-like area, with much sunlight coming in; this was apparently where Fern dropped the can of soda from two stories up.]
            Campus Security would not comment on the incident Friday in which, according to one witness, as many as a dozen people at the Academic Center were verbally assaulted by the woman.
            Robert B____ [surname redacted], a GW student who works at the GW Television Studio, said he heard the woman who dropped the full soda can tell the woman who had been hit, “You don’t even deserve to be living,” as the latter woman tried to file a report with a security guard moments after the incident.
            B____ said the security guard refused to write up a report, and when B____ went to the Safety and Security office to complain[,] he was told that the woman had been involved in “two to three” other incidents involving Campus Security in the last year. “Their attitude was totally out of call,” B____ said.
            B____ also said that a co-worker of his, who wished to remain anonymous, said she saw the woman threaten “about 11” other people at the Academic Center Friday.
            The woman responsible for the incident is believed to be the same woman who visited the GW Hatchet Wednesday night claiming that people at the University were trying to kill her with a radio device.
            The woman, who identified herself at the time as Fern K____ [surname redacted], told the Hatchet she was kicked out of Mitchell Hall last summer after attacking another woman there who she believed had one of the radio devices in her purse. The housing office said Friday it has no record of the incident or of a Fern K____.

The newspaper was published every Monday and Thursday during the fall and spring semesters. The next issue (on April 5) had bigger news:

D.C. cops arrest GW student

A woman with a history of run-ins with GW officials was arrested last night at the Academic Center and charged with unlawful entry by Metropolitan Police (MPD).
Fern K____, 33, who has been involved in numerous incidents involving the GW Office of Safety and Security and the Medical Center, was arrested by GW Security officers and later taken to the MPD’s second district office and charged with unlawful entry. K____ was detained at the second district office last night and will appear in D.C. Superior Court this morning to face charges.
Last Friday, K____ dropped a can of soda from a balcony at the Marvin Center [sic; this should read “the Academic Center”; for one thing, the MC had no structure that allowed her to do what was alleged, from two floors above] on the head of a woman she claimed was trying to kill her with radio waves. According to one witness, she also verbally threatened a dozen other people. No action was taken against K____ after the incident.
A source at the Med Center said yesterday that “We have had repeated dealings with Miss K____,” and that she was considered a “regular” in the emergency room. K____ made nine visits there from July of 1982 through May of 1983, the source said, and is considered a “persona non grata” and forced to leave whenever she appears there.
K____ has attracted crowds in front of the emergency room using a megaphone and passing out leaflets which claim the hospital is trying to kill her by bombarding her with radio waves.
She visited the GW Hatchet last week and said “I really need help.” K____ said then that she was forced to lead a “ridiculous life” on the run from people who were trying to kill her with radio devices which send waves through the body.
K____ was arrested by GW Security officers last night at about 8:30 p.m.  GW Security would not comment on the matter last night, but MPD said that K____ was picked up at GW by Officer Ryland Franklin and taken to the district office.
K____ is a registered GW student this semester with a University identification. She is enrolled in a dance class.

If you wonder how she had money to pay tuition for a class, that is a very good question, and I’ve never had the answer to that (and I never felt the need to inquire anyone about it, either).

Another article appeared the following week, on Monday, April 9:

K____ released again

            The woman arrested by D.C. Metropolitan Police (MPD) at the Academic Center last Wednesday for illegal entry and disorderly conduct, was back on campus again Thursday and allegedly caused another disturbance.
            Fern K____, a part-time GW student who has had numerous run-ins with University officials, was arrested by officers from the GW Office of Safety and Security last Wednesday for disrupting a class. She was held at GW, then taken by an MPD officer to the second district station and held over night [sic]. K____ appeared in D.C. Superior Court Thursday morning and was released.
            Director of Security Byron Matthai said Friday that his office received a complaint from a GW professor on Thursday that K____ was disrupting a class.
            Matthai said that K____ was declared a “persona non grata” by the University last week, apparently in response to the incident March 30 in which she dropped a can of soda on the head of a woman from a balcony at the Marvin Center [sic; should be Academic Center].
            As a persona non grata, K____ is not allowed in any University buildings except Building K, where she has a dance class. The decision to take this action against K____ was made by Matthai, Vice President for Student Affairs William P. Smith [who, incidentally, also had some jurisdiction/responsibility over the Marvin Center, but not really day-to-day input] and Dean of Students Gail Short Hanson, Matthai said.
            K____ is enrolled in a Broadway jazz dance class at GW taught by Jasmine Leopold.
            Leopold said Friday that K____ joined the class in the middle of the semester with the agreement that K____ make up for the classes she missed by taking another class taught by Leopold at D.C. Danceworks. Leopold said that K____ is usually “very cooperative in class.”
            “I have a feeling that she’s harmless,” Leopold said. She said, however, that K____ has accused other students of taking money from her at D.C. Danceworks, and that some of Leopold’s GW students have complained that Klausner has threatened them in the locker room after class.
            “The atmosphere is different when she’s there,” Leopold said, as most of the 12 students in the class are “nervous” when K____ attends class.
            “She has a habit of walking in and out of class,” Leopold said. “I more or less let her do as she pleases in class.”
            K____ is already a persona non grata at the GW Medical Center, where an emergency room worker described her as a “regular.” GW Security is called whenever K____ visits the emergency room, the worker said last week.

I have notes written on a “While you were out” memo sheet, from either 1984 or 1985. I believe I made these as recording what some people told me with whom I talked about Fern. “Sec[urity] g[uar]d impression of her as harmless,” I noted, and he “said she [was] scared when Security deal[s with] her.” Another note says, “FK rolled around on floor in classroom—acted like dog?” I don’t know whom I heard this from.

I never saw Fern in 1984. And apparently she did not make the school newspaper for a year-plus after April 1984. Maybe the run-in with the city police led her to stay away for a while.

But the picture forming is one where Fern would drift to places including GW, like a lost soul, and in her untreated state sometimes accost people with accusations that they were part of the conspiracy against her (involving a radio-wave device). Why her family had little control of her would become evident.


6. Fern is back at GW in 1985, and this time I encounter her

The next time my notes and recollections tell me she had anything to do with GW was in November 1985, just a few weeks before my job at the MC was going to be over.

And at this time, I got directly involved with her, and how this developed led to a few interesting distinctions (which are appreciable in retrospect):

(1) I found out how to get in touch with her parents, who lived in a Bergen County town in New Jersey;

(2) I did enough—though I didn’t think it was worthy of honor—that one guard in the GW Security department who knew me (to chat with) said he wanted to recommend me to be cited by the Security department for recognition of what I did with Fern;

(3) I would be in touch with Fern and her family again in 1987 and 1989 (maybe 1988 also), with the last time I was in touch with Fern (by mail) maybe late 1990 or sometime in 1991 (I would send a letter to her parents in 2000); and, lastly,

(4) there was enough of my detailed involvement with Fern in 1985 that I incorporated these dealings into a book manuscript I wrote mostly within 1985, a novel between The Folder Hunt and A Transient (this in-between one was never fully completed, and I never sought to get it published, though parts of it—not related to Fern—turned up in later work). (For thoughts on the issue of confidentiality with an associate like Fern related to my fictional work, see Part 13 of this Marvin Center series, on Andy Cohen.)

Why, over several years (apart from taking a class in 1984), Fern went to GW is a little unclear. At times it could seem she was taking some kind of stab at getting a degree (?), and in 1985 the purpose was unclear. The fact that—while Fern was Jewish—GW had a large Jewish segment to its student population seems suggestive as one reason (and certainly other—and mentally healthy—Jewish students enrolled there more or less for its being the, or one of the, “de facto Jewish colleges in D.C.,” roughly put). But for one thing, I don’t think Fern knew anyone on campus (as from her home region of New Jersey). And certainly the academic efforts she made didn’t seem especially efficient and promising (and her story is much more decrepit than Andy Cohen’s). And, of course, she alienated people with her behavior as in 1984, so she was not there to make friends with anyone (or at least this did not happen; and I didn’t really become a friend, either).

To get ahead of my story a bit: Her father told me (in 1987, I think) she had been a performing artist, or an aspiring one, when young. He spoke with pride as if she had performed in Carnegie Hall when young and healthy, and she sang like Barbra Streisand. Fern had lived in New York City for a time, and was raped by someone in an elevator, or such. This was the prelude (a trigger, you might say, or “precipitating stressor”) for her developing mental illness shortly afterward (which, my notes suggest, happened in 1977).

This was according to her father; I never saw Fern before she was psychotic and living on the street in 1985. Her parents, it would turn out, would seem pretty reliable on (at least some) aspects of Fern’s life that could be seen in phases I could never have witnessed. I will discuss her parents in some detail if/when I get to Part 2 of her story. For now, it seems a safe hypothesis to say that Fern’s having been raped in 1977 precipitated her breakdown, while she also could well have been fairly heavily biologically predisposed to such a breakdown anyway; this sort of pattern of how a serious mental illness sometimes starts manifesting itself is common enough.

(The DSM-IV says that the onset of schizophrenia “may be abrupt or insidious, but the majority of individuals display some type of prodromal phase [prodrome = a set of symptoms foreshadowing a psychotic breakdown, just as, etymologically similar, a syndrome is a set of symptoms occurring together whose unitary cause isn’t clear] manifested by the slow and gradual development of a variety of signs and symptoms…” [p. 282]. The fact that some instances of schizophrenia can develop suddenly and in response to a stressor is reflected in the old category, which I learned in college in 1981, of “reactive schizophrenia.” See also End note 1.)


7. During November 9-21, 1985

Let’s take a look, being sketchy (because this is a blog entry), at the details of how I came to get more information on her, and get more involved in “helping her,” in fall 1985. This wasn’t exactly within the normal lines of duty and discretionary activity defined in my MC job, but that job certainly put me in a good position to do some of what I did.

            Fern on the street, with bullhorn in hand

I think the first time I encountered her was when she was addressing passersby at the Foggy Bottom Metro stop, which at the time was across the street from the GW hospital. She had a bullhorn. She talked about her father (and others?) coming after her with a ray gun. The story conformed basically with what you read above.

The general picture of this should strike you as if she was a street crazy, and that indeed was the initial (surface) impression she gave, but she didn’t look especially filthy or rag-covered in clothes. I was on my way home from work at the MC, I think, and other people were descending on the Metro escalators to the station belowground. I think it was this point that I started the mini-drama that I would record in some detail, incorporating it into the book manuscript I mentioned earlier.

I tried to strike up some kind of conversation with Fern. I wanted to engage her in some general way as if I could help her with some problem, but not directly alluding to her evident psychiatric problem. I think I suggested that we could go somewhere to talk (i.e., away from the people-cluttered Metro stop).

She was oddly shy about doing so. She seemed to have a weird, somewhat stubborn way of not focusing on me with her eyes (which lack of focus I think, theoretically, she would also have exhibited with anyone else who was directly addressing her as I was), which is fairly typical of a schizophrenic person who is untreated. (See End note 2.) This whole exchange may seem unlikely and naively recounted here, but as I foreshadowed, I’m skimping on details.

She became a bit hostile about not wanting my help before too long, and I tried to be careful with her. One or two passersby gave me a look as if I was a little quaint or goofy to deal with this evident oddball with her bullhorn. The mixed signals given by a person in such a state can be striking: though she seemed, in some sense, “paranoid” about me, I think she also understood that I was offering some form of help, and one would suppose that I didn’t seem to her like a mere crazy (after all, you should understand, I was a working man in charge of a central facility at GWU on weekend nights). She said something cryptic like I should check with ___, whom she seemed to refer to as a relative, who, Fern said, went “Wee wee wee” all over the place, or some such thing.

I am going on memory, and I deliberately don’t seek out the elaborate book-manuscript passage I wrote about this exchange in 1985.

I don’t recall if there was something in the student newspaper (to be seen later) about Fern in 1985; I don’t think there was. I do seem vaguely to recall there was some word about her that was going around, and (how I heard about this, I don’t remember) that she ended up at the GW hospital emergency room.

I went there, which as it happened was a day or two (or three) after her and my exchange at the Metro stop. I asked a worker there about Fern as she had behaved at the ER. (Today, probably, HIPAA or some such set of laws would prevent the worker from answering me on what I asked.) The worker said Fern had come, seeming to seek help, and the worker had asked her if she wanted to be admitted for treatment—this was said with jargon specific to the issue of the possibility Fern could be admitted to the psychiatric ward. But Fern declined, heading off uncertainly, or such.

It is pretty suggestive to me after these years that Fern’s way of initially gravitating to the ER indicated that somehow she felt she could use help from a hospital, but what this then negatively/vaguely meant to her—i.e., reflected in her strong hesitation arguably based on bad past experiences—meant ultimately that she didn’t go through with it.

Sidebar on the nature of “commitment” to a psych inpatient facility: not all admissions to an inpatient psych unit are matters of “commitment.” The women I helped in 2002-03 who spent some time in an inpatient unit in Sussex County, N.J.—two women I had first met days before in a support group—were a lot saner than Fern was in 1985, and they knew what they were doing in going to be admitted to the inpatient unit. (One had had it previously suggested to her by her talking counselor, and the other had been led to be admitted right after her appointment at the hospital’s outpatient-psych department with her psychiatrist, which was within a morning I was actually supposed to meet up with her to help her as a layperson extending a hand outside the support group in which I met her.) These facts are not covered by HIPAA or any other confidentiality rule, and I offer them—with the vividness of personal experience—to show that when it comes to entering a psychiatric inpatient unit, the matter is straightforward in some ways and tricky in others. And the situation might have been programmatically different in 2002 than in 1985 (and might have varied with hospitals), and it may be different today.

But as a general matter, when a person elects to go into such a hospital arrangement, this is not strictly speaking being committed. Sometimes you read in mainstream media (even The New York Times, as I’ve seen over the years) that anyone who goes into psych “inpatient” is “committed,” but this is not true. These facilities are for (along with whomever else) people who choose to be admitted, too. But there is certain protocol for the hospital to follow in admitting them, such as making sure the patient knows what he or she is seeking, and there are probably forms to fill out concerning insurance and various rights and responsibilities.

It’s likely that in 1985, at the GW hospital, the staffer was walking a line that was meant in part to protect a patient’s rights when she asked Fern if she wanted to be admitted for treatment. Beyond that, there may have been further questions, forms, protocol to square with. Fern couldn’t simply be yanked in.

As I found in 2002 with the two women I helped, once you are in inpatient, especially if part of your health issue has been suicidal ideation and an initial perception by a professional that you may be a danger to yourself in this regard, there then comes into play, after you’ve been there a while, an occasional application of vaguely Catch-22-ish questions asked of you, as if you can’t leave unless you can prove, or confidently aver, that you are no longer a danger to yourself. In this regard, if you are kept on in light of your answers, you are (I would interpret) in some pseudo-capacity of being “committed,” but it’s more being subject a decision based on passing professional questions as to your state of health rather than your being committed in the usual “involuntary” sense.

In November 1985, Fern, with her bullhorn on the street, may seem to have been a prime candidate for being “committed,” but she only entered the hospital ER as a patient coming of her own accord, and after getting questioned methodically by a worker there, she (however not-fully-rationally) declined treatment. The hospital itself couldn’t commit her on the spot.

The paradoxical quality of this situation as it was told to me, probably with a poignant component, struck me at the time, but I think it is consistent with some broader experience had, and morés encountered, by such patients over many years. For further reading on a really messy case of a schizophrenic woman who drifted through a long spell of inadequate help about 40 years ago, you could check out a book I happened to read in early 1986, in the aftermath of helping Fern in 1985: Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me? (New York: Vintage Books 1982). This Pulitzer Prize–winning book is about a Jewish young woman in the New York metropolitan area who had her first breakdown in the 1960s.

Fern in to use the Marvin Center typing room

The next time I encountered Fern was some days later (in November 1985), when she turned up at the MC, of all places, and wanted to use the typing room, which of course was for students. Obviously, a typing room attendant was the one to wait on her. This room happened to be across the hall from the administration offices. I think I was just ambling by on my usual rounds, and happened to find her there (I believe in the hall outside the typing room). It was coincidence that she showed up; she didn’t come there because I was there, because she shouldn’t have known where I worked. I don’t think I’d told her where I worked when I was with her at the Metro stop.

But in a sense, I couldn’t help but run into Fern if she turned up so close to the administrative offices. This story is to be continued, including the intricate way I found out what was on her latest flier (which she worked on at the MC typing room, over a couple visits), revealing the latest “news” and a sort of cry for help she was willing to put together.


8. What’s ahead

When I get to it, Part 2 of this story will recount how things rounded out with my business regarding Fern in 1985, including my getting in touch with her mother; in July 1987, my getting in touch with her parents, and at the same time with Fern herself (who was back home with them); and whatever relevant additional stuff I’ll recount (I had occasional dealings with her and her family through at least 1990). Basically I had no practical way to have any dealings with her during 1986, once I returned to New Jersey. And that year, I probably didn’t expect to deal with her ever again, once I was mired in my own personal challenges.

In 1987, the only bit of information with which I could locate her parents was what she had written on her 1983 flier. (Also, when I spoke with her mother on the phone in November 1985, I implicitly confirmed the parents’ location, so I had more grounds to later be in touch with them via that connection.)

Fern is not a person I developed a strong emotional attachment to, like other people over the years who could be considered “sad waifs.” Fern was more of a “case” in the sense of a troubled person on whom you developed, catch-as-catch-can, a set of informal personal records, and dealt with in some sense as “a professional,” not usually so much as a friend. She was really in such decrepit shape, especially in 1985, that all I could be was, in a sense, a “social worker” regarding her. As to whether my dealings with her in 1985 somehow clued her off to going back home to her parents, where I found her in July 1987, I have no idea. I’ll visit all this set of topics again in Part 2.

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End note 1.

The way we can understand how something discrete and short-term can trigger development of schizophrenia can be pursued this way. There are (or there have been conceptualizations of) both an acute and a chronic form of schizophrenia—this was a relevant categorization within the health-care environment in which I dealt with Fern in the mid-1980s; also, the two types I was taught in college in 1981 were process and reactive, the latter being defined by including, among other things, a “precipitating” factor. This fact of two types is reflected in, for just one source (among many), a 1983 book by Jerrold G. Bernstein, M.D. In it, he talks about forms of therapy as suited to different forms of schizophrenia-related disorders. He says that use of a short-term neuroleptic (antipsychotic drug), as an option or as a general practice, should be made in cases of “acute psychosis” and schizophreniform disorder (a category not quite schizophrenia). Getting the picture a little more complicated, he says that a low dose of a neuroleptic is “useful” for schizoaffective disorder, among other illnesses, while the problems of schizophreniform disorder and acute (or brief reactive) psychosis “by definition do not generally entail long[-]term maintenance medication” (Handbook of Drug Therapy in Psychiatry [Boston: John Wright-PSG Inc., 1983], pp. 49, 41).

Of course, Fern’s history, with multiple hospitalizations, alleged at least by her 1983 flier, strongly suggested she had long-term, chronic schizophrenia. But a rape could still have set it going.

End note 2.

The theory of problems in selective attention as a key dysfunction in schizophrenia was established enough by that time. If you Google “selective attention schizophrenia,” you will see several relevant search results, including a link related to a 1976 article by Sid J. Schneider that possibly was one of the research-related items of literature that helped establish this inroad on understanding schizophrenia at the time.