The Schopenhauer Cure(24)
Another incident marked Arthur’s stay in Le Havre: he was introduced to death. A childhood playmate in Hamburg, Gottfried Janish, died while Arthur was living in Le Havre. Though Arthur seemed undemonstrative and said that he never again thought of Gottfried, it is apparent that he never truly forgot his dead playmate, nor the shock of his first acquaintance with mortality, because thirty years later he described a dream in his journal: “I found myself in a country unknown to me, a group of men stood on a field, and among them a slim, tall, adult man who, I do not know how, had been made known to me as Gottfried Janish, and he welcomed me.”
Arthur had little difficulty interpreting the dream. At that time he was living in Berlin in the midst of a cholera epidemic. The dream image of a reunion with Gottfried could only mean one thing: a warning of approaching death. Consequently, Arthur decided to escape death by immediately leaving Berlin. He chose to move to Frankfurt, where he was to live the last thirty years of his life, largely because he thought it to be cholera-proof.
11
Philip’s First Meeting
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The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality, all else being the play of thought. But we could just as well call it our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.
* * *
Philip arrived fifteen minutes early for his first group therapy meeting wearing the same clothes as in his two previous encounters with Julius: the wrinkled, faded checkered shirt, khaki pants, and corduroy jacket. Marveling at Philip’s consistent indifference to clothes, office furnishings, his student audience, or, seemingly, anyone with whom he interacted, Julius once again began to question his decision to invite Philip into the group. Was it sound professional judgment, or was his chutzpah raising its ugly head again?
Chutzpah: raw nervy brashness. Chutzpah: best defined by the renowned story of the boy who murdered his parents and then pleaded for mercy from the court on the grounds that he was an orphan. Chutzpah often entered Julius’s mind when he reflected upon his approach to life. Perhaps he had been imbued with chutzpah from the start, but he first consciously embraced it in the autumn of his fifteenth year when his family relocated from the Bronx to Washington, D.C. His father, who had had a financial setback, moved the family into a small row house on Farragut Street in northwest Washington. The nature of his father’s financial difficulties was off limits to any inquiry, but Julius was convinced that it had something to do with Aqueduct racetrack and She’s All That, a horse he owned with Vic Vicello, one of his poker cronies. Vic was an elusive figure who wore a pink handkerchief in his yellow sports jacket and took care never to enter their home if his mother was present.
His father’s new job was managing a liquor store owned by a cousin felled at forty-five by a coronary, that dark enemy which had either maimed or killed a whole generation of fifty-year-old male Ashkenazi Jews raised on sour cream and fat-flaked brisket. His dad hated his new job, but it kept the family solvent; not only did it pay well, but its long hours kept Dad away from Laurel and Pimlico, the local racetracks.
On Julius’s first day of school at Roosevelt High in September 1955, he made a momentous decision: he would redo himself. He was unknown in Washington, a free soul unencumbered by the past. His past three years at P.S. 1126, his Bronx junior high school, were nothing to be proud of. Gambling had been so much more interesting than other school activities that he spent every afternoon at the bowling alley lining up challenge games betting on himself or on his partner, Marty Geller—he of the great left-handed hook. He also ran a small bookie operation, where he offered ten-to-one odds to anyone picking any three baseball players to get six hits among them on any given day. No matter who the pigeons picked—Mantle, Kaline, Aaron, Vernon, or Stan (the Man) Musial—they rarely won, at best once in twenty to thirty bets. Julius ran with like-minded punks, developed the aura of a tough street fighter in order to intimidate would-be welchers, dumbed himself down in class to remain cool, and cut many a school afternoon to watch Mantle patrol the Yankee Stadium center field.
Everything changed the day he and his parents were called into the principal’s office and confronted with his bookie ledger-book, for which he had been frantically searching the previous couple of days. Though punishment was meted out—no evenings out for the remaining two months of the school year, no bowling alley, no trips to Yankee Stadium, no after-school sports, no allowance—Julius could see his father’s heart wasn’t in it: he was entirely intrigued by the details of Julius’s three-player, six-hit caper. Still, Julius had admired the principal, and falling from his grace was such a wake-up call that he attempted to reclaim himself. But it was too little, too late; the best he could do was to move his grades up to low Bs. It wasn’t possible to form new friendships—he was role-locked, and no one could relate to the new boy Julius had decided to become.
As a consequence of this episode, the latter-day Julius had an exquisite sensitivity to the phenomenon of “role-lock”: how often had he seen group therapy patients change dramatically but continue to be perceived as the same person by the other group members. Happens also in families. Many of his improved patients had a hell of a time when visiting their parents: they had to guard against being sucked back into their old family role and had to expend considerable energy persuading parents and siblings that they were indeed changed.