The studio rests six stories high. On top of an old steam heater a fan drones in an open window. Clyde sleeps on a black futon that sits on the floor. He sleeps under a thick Central American bed cover his ex-girlfriend gave him.

It took a semester in the dorms, but he’d finally he managed to break up with her. It’s been a whole year now and he has established his own space. On the floor to his left there is a cup with olive oil in it.

Suddenly radio from the clock fills the room. Clyde tosses around. Time passes. He gets up and walks into his closet past kitty litter which is full with land mines of shit.

He moves through the closet and into the bathroom past the sink, which he calls the throat. He gets into the shower and cleans the shlock off his Irish wee-wee. Somehow, Clyde has no idea he is predominantly Irish.

It’s the summer. His fifty-four-hour work week is nearing an end. Today is one of his three eight- hour days. His high school friend John Randy is going to pick him up after work. They are going to catch a Phish concert at some theater in Delaware.

This morning, Clyde hits the tape deck and jams to Big Audio Dynamite in the apartment. He likes Mick Jones from the Clash and how he veers toward R+B and diversity in this music.

He attacks fruit out of his refrigerator drawers. The roaches dash over his kitchen table. He puts some water on the stove and prepares sugar-free hot chocolate. The roaches are crazy busy and of various sizes this morning.

Clyde used to have to spray one roach at a time. He’d spray for minutes and finally the roach would roll over on its back and die in the pool of chemicals left behind. A neighbor had suggested this particular black jack spray. Clyde bought it from the Sikh man’s convenience store.

As Clyde uses the spray on the table and around the kitchen area the roaches quickly die. He notices that his cat is watching him. Then he fills his hot chocolate takes a sip and spits out a roach. Once again, he has forgotten to check the clump of chocolate at the top of the cocoa before he sips.

When ready for the day, Clyde takes the stair well two stairs at a time. It takes some dexterity. Rarely does he encounter any one who comments about the noise his descending of the stairs in this manner makes.

Once out the glass doors of the decay of Pierre Apartments, he crosses Cooper Street shaking his head.

Gwendolyn is at the corner by the pay phone. This past winter every time they encountered each other they would both be underdressed for the cold. Now, in the summer, she sips beer from a bagged can. and comes at him with a masculine handshake. “What’s wrong today kid.”

Clyde loves the way Gwendolyn always inserts herself and commands respect even though he never remembers to use her name. He doesn’t suspect that she used to be a nurse. Nor does he get that she too had been put out of her house at an early age. Gwendolyn lives in the complex across the street that always has people coming in and out of it at all hours of the day.

“The roaches are bad this morning, I think the neighbors bombed their room. Does that ever happen to you?”

“Oh, we wouldn’t let there be roaches on our building.”

Clyde lives in the drug free complex and doesn’t understand. He presumes all complexes in the area have roaches.

Sure. he has studied social welfare from a suburban adjunct professor but there is still a lot about his surroundings that he doesn’t understand.

Hi professor had educated the class about what it’s like to be on welfare through assigning offensive books. Many of the students announced that they had been on welfare themselves and challenged his perspective and his choice of books. A few white women would concur with him.

One time the professor had asked the students if they gave money to the pan handlers down town.

“Why not?” he exclaimed, just in love with his power.

As clueless as his professor proved to be, Clyde doesn’t yet understand the concept of cash money even though he gets paid in it. He doesn’t imagine that when there is traffic coming in and out of a complex there is probably heaps of cash money changing hands, unlaundered money that can, with the right neighborhood connections, be used to control the roach problem. All he understands is that he gets angry when the people coming in and out of Gwendolyn’s complex call him Where’s Waldo.

Clyde crosses the parking lot for the dorms and passes a gleaming glass building before arriving at the small minimart. He is opening this morning and his coworker is closing. His boss arrives and unlocks the shutters so Clyde throws them up.

Before he turns the radio on to the local R+B radio station, he hears his boss muttering “Docy, Docy, Docy.” as he carries out his routines. Some might think he was muttering in Korean, but Clyde knows that he is remembering his mentors on the grill Doc and Ray. His boss admired Doc even though Doc cursed him to everyone he knew for taking advantage of Docs connects.

Doc had educated Clyde about how his mother had to lock him out of the house so he would learn how to fight and face the neighborhood beat down without running. Doc would smile at Clyde when he listened and lectured about exploitation. Doc had mentored his current coworker and friend, Craig G not to use the needle.

Doc knew he wasn’t getting paid enough for his long hours and left the job. Clyde had heard that when he stopped working, he went on a crack binge.

Clyde had really ended up liking Doc’s friend Ray who had been very direct with him upon first meeting. “Don’t worry Clyde, you can’t help it if you are an asshole, you were just raised that way.”

On one of Clyde’s first evenings closing the store, Ray had manipulated him to drive him to a friend’s house where he could cop. He’d only done it once. He also tested Clyde out by telling him about his sexual exploits with white women. When Clyde had continued to be cool with Ray, he would accept the role of being Clyde’s mentor on the grill. “Clyde, you have to work smarter not harder,” Ray would exclaim. Ray also gave Clyde the nickname, “Nervous Norton.”

Clyde admired Ray’s fifty-four hour a week work ethic, his wit, and how he had his weight under control. He treated Ray as a surrogate father until Ray left the job with Doc.

His boss used to build airplanes for a Korean Army, but came to America for a better life. Nobody except Clyde likes the boss because he has an educated air. Clyde likes that he is reliable and fair with his work routines. Clyde believes a part of his boss feels bad for the way he’d treated Doc and thus the muttering.

Sometimes his boss grabs his thin arms and crunches the bones and biceps. Then he says, “Clyde, don’t hesitate!” Clyde thinks he knows perfectly well what the boss is trying to communicate and accepts what his boss is getting at and yet somehow fails to give a fuck.

Clyde likes his boss a lot better than the owner. Craig G and all the neighborhood kids like the Korean owner. The owner is big, muscular, and shares his hunting hobby with all who will listen. He used to be gangster until he got married. In Asian gangs Clyde will one day learn, it is customary to leave the gang when you get married.

At first meeting, the owner had let Clyde know that he was easy to pick on. However, the owner stopped when Clyde showed sharp attitude about his compliance with handling the store Glock. All he had to do was let the owner know he wasn’t about to shoot anyone for four dollars per hour and the owner left him alone.

Clyde makes it a habit to pack those sandwiches with extra meat especially the tuna and chicken salad. The owner’s wife makes the salads and gets really angry. Clyde just ignores all the feedback.

Clyde knows that it is because of his attitude that the boss always tells him that Craig G is a better worker than him as if Clyde would care. The boss thinks such comments will curb Clyde’s behavior.

Clyde resents the fact that the stale cereal is sold for seven dollars a box. Clyde thinks the owner is leeching money out of the poor black and brown neighborhood. The deli sandwiches are the only affordable way to eat, and it is an expensive way to live. Clyde has seen the movie “Do the Right Thing!” by Spike Lee.

He contrasts the suburban houses that he imagines the owner lives in with the studio where he and other neighborhood people live. He thinks how there are no grocery stores for any of the kids who live in Camden. They have to drive thirty minutes out of the city to even get to a supermarket. He knows most of the mom-and-pop stores have high prices. Many of the kids in the city had to survive off of Ramin Pride.

As Clyde prepares the condiments for the afternoon rush, he thinks of the first kid he trained to work at the deli. This kid took him to the movies and taught him how to sneak into different theaters. When the kid finally found something that he liked, they’d settled in. The kid only lasted a few months and then went off to the crack trade. That kid was very socially skilled and knew how to connect congenially with Clyde like no other.

Still, Clyde hopes that he will make stronger connections with kids he knows from the neighborhood when they work here. He prays that they will like working with him and Craig G more than the lure of ready rock.

And yet when he hears about the white kids that commute into the city to take classes, talk poor, and boast how they steal from his boss, it somehow pisses him off worse.

Once he heard a frat brother who he’d taken a writing class with calling him out of his name, “Hey do you ever wonder how much change the panhandlers get out of Clyde Dee?”

Clyde thinks about how in reality no one asks him for change. He carries his cash in his sock with a dollar or two in his wallet. The very few occasions he’s been threatened he has donated a dollar or two to avoid a beat down.

In the store the customers treat him like he is family. One told him he was down with the brown. Another told customer told him of a local mechanic who was flaco like him. Flaco means thin in Spanish, but it’s also known as a cool nickname amongst players. The customers had a lot of love for Clyde and the community made him feel much less alone.

When commuting students like the frat boy comes down here and judge the locals according to stereotypes, it becomes hard for Clyde to befriend them.

Clyde has only made one close friend. He is ten years older and is in recovery from polysubstance abuse.

Clyde thinks his friend gets a little manic when he talks. His friend’s best friend is on the Philadelphia police force. He calls his friend a bad lieutenant in the police force. This bad lieutenant funds his friend’s education and expenses in return for under the table surveillance work. Clyde’s friend is also a writer. Some of his work, when he isn’t using vocabulary that makes him sound like Henry James, carries the tone of a mafia flick. He has introduced Clyde to many mafia flicks, but Clyde still doesn’t understand.

Even Clyde’s friend can misunderstand the neighborhood. For example, he accuses Clyde Dee and Craig G of listening to “gangster rap” in the deli. And he made a big deal once about the fact that his co-worker took care of him when he ordered a sandwich. Clyde thinks he misunderstands Craig G.

Craig G shows up after an hour once the grill and kitchen are set up. Clyde and Craig give each other the neighborhood hand shake and Craig straps on the apron the same way Clyde wears it. Craig G developed this style of wearing the apron and everyone follows suit.

Craig disappears into the bathroom and when he comes out Clyde is in the back getting a clean tub to fill with mayonnaise.  Craig chuckles, “You ever notice when its your own shit, it never stinks!”

Clyde who has never had to take a crap on that can retorts, “Oh your lucky it wasn’t me in there.”

Craig pulls out the tape Clyde loaned him and says, “You’ve got a hold of some slamming new jams on this one.”

Once last summer Craig came out of the can at closing time and showed Clyde a bone. Clyde figured he was offering to share it with Clyde.

Clyde shrugged, and expressed no interest with his face.

It was the only time Craig offered.

Craig never seemed to judge Clyde for his refusal.

Clyde went ahead and loaned him his backpack and ID so he could sneak into the University Gym. Last summer when he had acquiesced to get back with his girlfriend, Craig had given him a condom and said it’d be good if he finally got lucky. They had gone to an amusement park together, an event that made Clyde’s girlfriend exceedingly jealous.

Craig puts the BDP Sex and Violence tape in the deck and hit play. Clyde listens to the bass and familiar beat. Customers start to come in in waves and Craig and Clyde take and fill orders. Clyde ponders and learns intermittently from the lyrics . . .

Black drug dealer, you have to rise up and organize your business so that we can rise up

If you are gonna sell crack than don’t be a fool, organize your business and open up a school . . .

Or invest in a Prison, therefore you can be put in it. Everyone else did this and now they chillin

Above the law while you are under the law and still killin

Wake up my African brother, my Hispanic brother. America ain’t your mother or your father so don’t bother with right or wrong

Just check out the logic in the song . . .

In the thirties and forties the drug dealer wasn’t black; they were Jewish, Irish, Polish Italian ectcetera ectcetera, and they were making their lives a lot better . . . 

Organize, legalize, legitimize your business, remember everybody else did this

Clyde had first heard about KRS-One, the rapper, in sociology class. The black professor had said that KRS-One and Cool Moe Dee had been homeless and been able to create this music with almost no resources. Then, Craig had played his first album, Criminal Minded, at work.

Oddly, this latest album came from John Randy. KRS-One had played a concert at his white liberal college from which he dropped out. John had passed on the tape to Clyde earlier that summer. Clyde thinks it is a hell of a lot better than that Phish music John Randy is so crazy about.

This summer, Craig had borrowed his car and returned it with the gas full and invited Clyde into North Camden to ball with him and his boys. Clyde felt good about the real friendship and it was important to him.

One morning Craig G came in traumatized after hiding out all night in an abandoned building. He had been at a doughnut shop with his boys and there was some kind of confrontation. He’d had to run and hide out in an abandoned building.

Another time Craig had cut himself on the slicer and Clyde has taken him to emergency.

Clyde liked being there for Craig and it had helped them bond.

In a few years Clyde will be visiting John Randy at his parent’s shore house one night when John will get lit. Clyde will feel like John will be a bit racist, exclaiming to his father in front of his proper friends about getting picked up by a black man from Camden. Then Clyde will discover the black man is Craig G who will clearly be drubbling high on heroin.

Craig will be dating a white-women from Camden who had a scholarship to attend John and Clyde’s private school in Moorestown New Jersey.

The white girl will exclaim she can now learn all about her new boyfriend from Clyde.

She will only get the seal of his smiling lips.

It will be funny how much Clyde will realize that he’s changed

In about three years, Craig’s mentor, someone Clyde will presume to be his NA sponsor, will recognize Clyde when he will work in a Pennsauken video store and organize a reunion. Craig will have a union job and Clyde will presume he has beaten back smack. He will be so happy for him.

Craig G has a smile and general look like Tupac. He attracts a lot of women. At the amusement park they went to the year before, women kept giving him their number like he was a celebrity.

Craig is always hooking up with girls in the dorm. Even though Clyde is too shy to even think about a date, Craig always treats him respectfully. He has introduced Clyde to his main girlfriend and his best friend too. Clyde hooked them up with some real generous sandwiches.

The boss often polls the female customers about which worker in the store is most attractive and Craig always wins. One time the boss said he talked to a woman who had put Clyde first. He had grabbed Clyde arms squeezing his bones and muscles together: “Don’t hesitate!” he had repeated.

Craig G is not the only local of Clyde’s generation who educates Clyde about the lives that locals live. One day, Julio’s brother has come to meet Clyde and told him about the graphic violence he’d gotten caught up in at a club one night. Julio’s married sister was one of Clyde’s neighbors in Pierre Apartments. She has invited Clyde into her apartment and been really friendly.

Julio, one of the kids who works here, always comes at Clyde with a lot of aggression calling him a “Geiser” (or crack addict.) Also, he calls Clyde a “pus.” Julio makes it a habit to punch him while he is working on the grill.

One evening later on that Fall, Clyde will get fed up with Julio’s behavior and will agree to a fight after work. The boss will officiate and Clyde will wrestle Julio to the ground enough to demonstrate his physical dominance. Then, one fairly beaten, Julio will get up and give Clyde a unfettered knee in the balls.

Unable to speak for five minutes Clyde eventually will manage to call Julio a punk and a coward. The boss will look startled by this and clearly will not know what to do. Julio will just laugh and talk trash like Muhammad Ali.

Soon thereafter, Julio will show up at Clyde’s door step with his cousin and older brother. They will take him to the YMCA pool for a swim.

Clyde will go home after the swim and write a paper that his teacher will want to put up for a prize. Of course, Clyde will decline. He will only use the opportunity to try to make the teacher feel stupid. He hates teachers,

Clyde and Craig work the grill, the sandwich bar, and the pizza oven as the work starts to pick up. At noon the kid Angelo comes in and gives them each the neighborhood hand shake.

Angelo lives with his grandmother and is the oldest child to a woman who appears to be Developmentally Delayed. Clyde’s ex-girlfriend used to dote on him while she gave the neighborhood kids candy. She thought he was a cute and well-behaved boy. He had given his ex-girlfriend the biggest smiles and most sincere looks.

But currently, working with Angelo is a different story. Clyde sees another side of Angelo. Without having the benefit of a father figure, Angelo tends to get mad and bite back when told to do something. There are times he gets the job done and at times he goofs off.

Craig has just a little more patience with Angelo’s willful defiance yet rarely engages him. Clyde gets more frustrated. Thus, with Angelo, Clyde tries to step back and model Craig G’s tone.

Clyde used to work with this kid named Jose and had a much easier time. It’s true that Clyde already had a relationship with Jose having traveled with him to Pyne Point Park to help coach his baseball team. Clyde had known that Jose’s stepfather favored his younger brother and that Jose needed a little extra support.

When Jose had worked with Clyde, he had done everything right and there had been no disrespect. Since he quit, the neighborhood kids had all gossiped about him. Apparently, his step-father had sent him away to some mental health facility.

Today, Angelo directs himself to the walk in and stocks the shelves without comment. He also does the dishes in the back sink and takes the trash out. The lunch rush comes steadily for a few hours. When it thins Clyde and Craig take turns making deliveries. Then Craig leaves at two to return at four to close the store

At this point Angelo announces that he’s going to take his lunch. He walks to the front of the store and picks up a pornographic magazine and sits near Clyde. As Clyde slices meats, he flips through the pages sucking on his teeth and making a lot of delighted noises.

“Hey Angelo, you’re a little young to be checking out those magazines in front of customer,” says Clyde.

Angelo ignores Clyde with provocative expressions of delight.

The boss hears this and puts down his own pornographic magazine which is hidden inside a Korean Newspaper. He strides over from his perch at the cash register with his bullet proof vest on and looks at Angelo.

“No, that is bad,” he says, “You have to put that away right now!”

The Campus and City police come in frequently to fill their coffee or soda for free. All the neighbors point and whisper when the vice squad comes in. “They are the true bad guys,” a customer had once told Clyde. It will take Clyde decades of living to make sense of and understand these dynamics.

The only day Clyde didn’t see police abusing their power was the time the boss got held up at gun point and the owner showed up drunk with an arsenal of hardware. They were too afraid to come get free coffee that night.

Clyde can’t help but feel some judgement towards Angelo, the boss, and the police. What a fucked-up world they are all living in.

When Julio comes in for his shift and punches him and called him a Geiser, Clyde feels relief. Somehow, he stresses about Angelo’s morals and ability to survive the streets. He doesn’t know what to do.

The one-time Clyde will get his car window shattered, Angelo will come and tell him that Jose did it. Clyde will talk to Jose and easily discern that it was likely Angelo who broke the window. Whoever smelt it delt it. Sometime, Clyde fears, Angelo is going to get in trouble for pulling a stunt like that on the streets.

It will not occur to Clyde until many years later that he will have missed an opportunity to help Angelo out.

Clyde listens to the patter of the rain against the tarp above him. It’s an exceedingly gray day and he is sitting on the cement table and chair outside the mini mart. A mini-van rolls up along the narrow street.

When Clyde realizes it’s John Randy, he wonders how John ended up with a mini-van. The door slides open and Clyde recognizes a kid he used to know from grade school and a girl from his graduating class along with two other non-descript white twenty-year-old males.

Clyde’s hair is slicked back with gel. He is wearing a black Marlboro work-tee-shirt, his two- toned florescent green shorts, and his old-school white and black Converses. He doesn’t even think about the fact he smells like the deli.

The front seat is open and Clyde demurs a moment. Then, against his better judgement he opens the front door and climbs in.

His old grade school acquaintance is extremely friendly and catches up with Clyde in a graceful manner. Clyde has heard he is in construction, not school.

Clyde remembers sitting at the table in the grade school library with this guy and talking about war. “Better to kill them than have them kill you,” this guy had exclaimed.

Those were the days when Clyde had clout and confidence, back when he was formulating his pacifist philosophy.

Junior high had turned this kid into a metalhead and a part of the crowd that excluded Clyde. The kid’s favorite band had been Judas Priest.

Clyde tries to be friendly right back at him; however, he notices he is self-conscious. He does not feel grounded and in-the-zone the way he does when he is working with Craig G.

John Randy drives and the van is quickly over the bridge and on the interstate.

One of the nondescript males keeps talking about the dangers of Delaware cops. It seems very important to him that he is going to do something to break the law.

Yeah, yeah, thinks Clyde, Delaware cops are strict big whoop. This asshole needs to get over himself.

Before long John Randy pulls over on the interstate. John runs over to some bush in a wet green pasture and starts taking a leak. Clyde climbs over to the driver’s seat. Clyde learns they are driving the family van of a school associate. The family is on vacation and Clyde doubts they would approve of this expedition.

John Randy is still out urinating on the bush. Clyde feels he has unwittingly been had again. Now he is the designated driver of a stolen vehicle. The crew talks in the back and John is still urinating. They had all been fools to let John drive at all. No one else seems the least bit concerned about the danger that this posed! And the urination continues.

When John finally gets back into the van, Clyde focuses on his role as a designated driver. The crew is blazing weed and drinking in the back. Through the rearview mirror, Clyde spies the girl who graduated High School with him inhale.

Clyde still can’t help but get anxious when he thinks about the blaze of weed. He decided early on that he was not going to be pressured into doing any such thing, ever. Still, the fact that he has to stand out pumps up his anxiety.

He often thinks about how people have died smuggling her that weed she is inhaling! He knows how well these cohorts were treated in the insulated private school they attended. His father and mother were teachers at the school they attended. His father was a top administrator.

Clyde feels all the students at his school had it so easy. He feels this way especially since he has moved to Camden. Every time he sees his cohorts from that school all he sees is that they always want more.

Clyde doesn’t think about how this girl who inhaled had a mother who was a secretary at the school and how she was also (like Clyde) a scholarship kid. She may well have problems like he has! No, Clyde just thinks and thinks about how greedy it is to partake in what is essentially a slave business.

People like the kids will go to jail so the likes of he and his cohorts can be enthralled with no consequences.

As Clyde fumes, his cohorts coincidentally start to criticize his driving. Perhaps they can sense his judgments. Clyde remembers John Randy taking him to a house party back when he lived with him during his senior year. When Clyde started to fulfill his role as a designated driver, John Randy exclaimed that he was driving like an asshole. Clyde really didn’t know what this meant. Is this how all sober people get treated, or just him?

Now Clyde has to get off at an exit to fill the tank. The problem is that everyone has pitched negative energy his way. Some start directing him toward different exits to get off the interstate. Clyde can’t think. When he finally gets off there is no gas station to be found.

He gets on a road that heads the wrong direction and decides he’ll save time and make a k turn. The problem is that he is used to driving a stick. He instinctively reaches down to put the car into reverse and gropes at the air. Car headlights head towards him while he searches for the transmission lever to put the car in reverse. He jams on the gas and the van peals out backwards. Now everybody is laughing and criticizing his driving. Clyde is very distressed.

Drunken John, somehow realizes he has to calm Clyde. He steps up and directs him to a gas station.

When Clyde finally arrives at the stadium, the dark clouds are moving into dusk. The parking lot is full of tailgating hippies. Clyde is entertained with odd sights of funk. There are a ton of white kids his own age from sleep away colleges that he is not used to seeing.

He follows along while his eyes drink in the scene. There are no sport teams that he knows of in Delaware but the stadium is sizable. He is afraid he will be seen as just another damn hippie amongst the crowd without any awareness that he stands out like he is Where’s Waldo different.

Inside the stadium they find seats.

Looking out the stadium through the cemented exit walls, he can see hippies who must be jumping on trampolines. They are silhouetted against the dusky skyline. Clyde watches as every time they bounce up, they strike a different pose. There is water spray that is just barely visible surrounding them though he cannot see where it is coming from.

He can’t help thinking of the parents of these lost souls and wondering what they think of their kid’s lifestyles. This fills Clyde with a sense of sadness.

It will be eight years later when Clyde will learn that hippies use spray like that to get people on trips. LSD is something he should know more about. His grandfather was the head of the Harvard psychology department that hired Timothy Leary.

Many decades later Clyde will learn that his grandfather presided over the same department that conducted mind-control experiments on the likes of Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber,) Whitey Bulger (South Bostin’s Irish Kingpin) Ken Keasy (musician in the Grateful Dead) and Robert Hunter, (Author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) This clandestine program was entitled MKULTRA.

All his mother had told him that his grandfather had done some work for the CIA.

Clyde has learned that Phish formed at the University of Vermont. He can’t help but like the look of the lead singer and guitarist as he is clearly talented. However, as the night wears on the music gets stranger, more intoxicated and psychedelic. At one point John Randy leaves his seat and joins the crowd that is standing close to the stage. Clyde hears one of the others say that John is on an acid trip.

Toward the end of the show as Clyde is getting tired. He has found the long riffs self-indulgent and the psychedelic screech of a violin bow on a steel guitar just sound just plain stupid.

Clyde often looks out the exits as the hippies trampolining in the mist. They are now harder to see against the dark sky. They remain silhouetted by the exit lights. He finds himself looking at his watch frequently. He can’t wait to get going.

Back at the minivan, Clyde continues to think about how stupid everything is.

If he were a cop, he would just perch himself outside the stadium and pull over these badly behaving white kids and cart them of to jail. He starts to imagine the amount of DUIs and drug busts that could quash hippy glory.

All these white kids are allowed to come out and talk tough about evading Delaware cops and risk marks on their permanent record, but it’s all so fake.

Clyde reasons that the police are not allowed to target them. The promoters probably pay the cops off. Clyde thinks if it was found that the band was causing arrests to happen there would be less money to be made and it would be bad for business. He thinks of the neighborhood kids back in Camden and how the lure of the crack trade results in death and imprisonment. The whole scene just makes Clyde so angry.

As he drives out the parking lot John Randy is in the back getting a lot of love and support from the crew. Clyde is tense. He watches the stadium fade out of his side window as he follows signs back to the interstate.

As Clyde drives, he thinks of his ex-girlfriend who would agree with him about the stupidity of this summer evening. It is the only thing he really misses about her.

His mind flashes to the time she got mad at him and threw a milkshake against his windshield. It hit the windshield like the thud of all her attacks.

The attacks would start when she would get mad at him for leaving her Christmas morning to celebrate with his family. Months and months of the silence treatment would ensue. Clyde had found it very hard to be treated in that manner. Clyde remembered how he would often end up in tears after sex. She would be on top and he wouldn’t understand his own reaction. She would yell at him like he was her drunken father. It wasn’t until he needed to leave that shit got really bad.

Leaving her has been so hard. Everyone she knows hounds him about her resulting depression and sadness. It has been ongoing for over a year. The neighborhood was definitely on her side. Meanwhile, she stalked him and sat beneath his apartment window many nights.

Clyde listens to the crowd mingle midst the smell of alcohol and reefer. As the party starts to die down John Randy makes his way up to the passenger seat and keeps Clyde company.

Clyde thinks of the way John shamed him describing his father’s devastated look when Clyde was in the hospital. He remembered how John came at him for no reason and tackled him and held him down during the year they lived together. He remembered most recently how John had shamed him for leaving his ex-girlfriend.

“What’s on your mind John Randy?” says Clyde

“Not much Clyde Ryan!”

It’s been a long time since Clyde’s heard his real last name.

John looks out at the refinery lights and talks about them in a peaceful manner.

Clyde is reminded his favorite Bruce Springsteen music. A song from the Nebraska album starts to ring in his ear:

Mister state trooper, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me . . .

New Jersey Turnpike, driving on a wet night, neath the refinery’s glow, where the deep dark river flows . . .

License registration, I ain’t got none. But I have a clear conscience about the things that I done.

Clyde remembers that John is tripping on acid. He reflects back what John is saying and comments. There is a long pause.

John has an artistic side and can be very creative. Plus, he knows what Clyde likes.

Then, somehow in unison they exclaim to each other: “Who is your Daddy!”

This loosens the tension in Clyde’s shoulders. He and John have known each other since they were three years old.

Once in kindergarten John had found a flat piece of balsam wood and wondered what it was. Clyde remembered a show on Sesame Street where they showed the making of bubble gum in the factory. John and he had used the Mr. Sketch Markers that smelled like mint. Together they had colored the balsam wood. Then they cut it into gun size pieces and chewed. They were both perfectly happy with the results until the teacher discovered their green tongues.

As Clyde listens to John peacefully interact with him, he is reminded of his older friend and fellow faculty brat, Chester. His first impression of sleep away college came from Chester.

When Clyde reflects about reasons that drugs just aren’t his jam, he thinks of Chester who will one day be his step-brother.

Clyde had suspected Chester might be gay. There had been some squeezes that had made Clyde uncomfortable. But Clyde had just ignored them and moved away. He really cared about Chester.

Then, there was the day Chester had come home from the dorms at Wesleyan College.

Clyde’s parents had just split. There was no one to talk to about his despair. Other friends hadn’t talked or seemed to care about it. Clyde had wished they would. He didn’t understand why no one cared about him. There was just so much despair.

So, Clyde welcomed Chester home and hoped to have a meaningful talk about his parents’ divorce.

They had been in the basement and got distracted from their ping pong game. Chester started telling him about college and interacted with Clyde in the same way John Randy is now communicating, using metaphors and making observations.

Chester had boasted that his college was one of the best pot smoking colleges there was. He’d reported that he’d done acid and that he had a crush on a guy who was in the jungle breaking trails with a machete. This was puzzling to Clyde.

Clyde had ignored the sense he was falling into a trap. Yet he continued to hide his distress and deny what was happening to the friendship. Finally, he learned that the jungle man Chester had a crush on was himself. At that point they had made their way up in his room and Chester tried to kiss his hand.

When Clyde had come to and he was hiding behind a sofa in the family room and Chester was in the kitchen talking to Clyde’s mother about gay marriage.

Now Clyde not only hadn’t had anyone he could talk to about the divorce, he didn’t have anyone to talk to about Chester. His Mom hadn’t proved useful.

In fact, his mom will silently judge him for years about being so sensitive about the incident. She will use this as evidence that Clyde is mentally ill. One time she had a girlfriend kiss her and she just said no and it wasn’t a big deal.

Clyde now thinks that Chester was likely tripping on acid. Somehow it helps explain why he was so freaked out as a teen.

Clyde was not proud of cutting off Chester. His resulting homophobic feelings, and the series of men who would later hit on him would be very painful for him to experience.

Clyde looked over at John Randy who was now sleeping and remembered an incident that happened a few years later with his mother.

Clyde had been noticing the way his mother was clearly acting very different with him when he came home from his summer work camp. She had been more permissive than she had ever been previously. When they went backpacking together, she had needed him and he had a sense of being idolized. Hypervigilance made him feel like it was a trap.

Then, the night he got his driver’s permit, his mom got really lit. Clyde didn’t think it was only wine she had been sipping. He had never seen her like this. She began begging him to go out and break the rules with her. She told him about all the men that were hitting on her but they weren’t as good as he. She begged and pleaded. She seemed flirtatious.

After that incident his mother seemed to cut him off. She was out partying most nights while he was up late working into the morning hours, completing school papers. The only contact she had with Clyde it had seemed was to yell at him for not eating. She didn’t show up on his prom night.  He was in the process of losing all trust he ever had in her.

That’s right, drugs may not be Clyde’s jam, but eating irresponsibly certainly was.

The following summer Clyde had landed in the hospital for the first time.

It will be many decades later but Clyde will remember being fondled in a bathtub by Chester’s sister when he was in third grade. Was it possible that this had started his hypervigilance and antagonistic feelings about sexual activity?

Not long after, Clyde will remember witnessing rape and incest among family friends. He had joined the family at a vacation cabin on the Rancocas River. He will only recapture fragments of memories. The graphic memories will feel dream-like and surreal. All he will know for sure is that he had run and been a complete coward. He is a runner not a fighter.

Once Clyde will realize he has a thing about blacking out these memories, it will bring up the question about other forgotten memories and his ongoing hypervigilance and inability to trust, forgive, or accept loved ones. Not trusting his poor mother will be a real problem whether or not it is justified.

Suddenly Clyde recognizes he is in Philadelphia nearing John Randy’s apartment. One of the non-descript male passengers is making a big deal that a cop is tailing them.

Jolted back into reality, Clyde is at a red light and accidentally jams his foot on the gas petal. The light is red and the minivan lurches forward through the light. He is so upset at himself.

“Wow, I love it! Fuck the cops,” said one of the nondescript passengers.

Clyde remembers how John Randy had invited himself to move in with Clyde when he first dropped out of his fancy college.

Clyde found he had mixed feelings about giving up his studio. When the bugs did not prove to scare John away, Clyde had relied on his therapist to help him tell John Randy, no.

Clyde didn’t want to wake up to the smell of reefer or get that reputation amongst his clean and sober neighbors.

So, John rented a place in West Philadelphia out by the colleges. It will take some years but eventually Clyde will realize that Johns father somehow owns the apartment complex.

The minivan finally arrives at John’s apartment. The crew disperses into their various vehicles. John stumbles inside and the lights go out. Then, Clyde goes home.

Luckily, for Clyde, it is a short walk to the Frankfort “L” line. Then it is just one transfer to the high speed-line.

Though Clyde has done this trip many times before, it is already past midnight which means that the stop by Camden’s Market-Street—the one close to his apartment—will be closed. He will have to get off at the downtown Camden exit. Clyde doesn’t care, he knows how to handle himself.

He finds himself thinking more about his choice to move to Camden. He remembers how his classmates had thrown him a party when he came back from the first of his hospital stays. He has to admit it was a nice thing to do, but John hadn’t really bought into the niceness of it. His heart towards his schoolmates had turned sour in the hospital. He no longer openly trusted anyone.

Kids from the streets had seemed to care more about him than his cohorts at private school. At least they saw and supported him while all the issues he had with his parents were stirred up. At school he was usually invisible.

Then, when the treatment failed and he got switched to an all-female unit, Clyde had continued to suffer stuffing his belly. His classmates just couldn’t understand the hell he’d been through.

Instead of accepting their good wishes and gift certificate graciously, he had been visibly embarrassed if not angry. He had thought about the fact classmates were the kids who had always teased him for being out of fashion and who tended to exclude him.

If not for the hospitalization, Clyde may have considered that he’d overcome these issues his junior year. He planned and organized the student body to get active in social services.

But being the identified and abused patient has a way of changing one’s perspective. Plus, John Randy had let him know that his partner had, behind his back, taken all the credit for all of his work. Many of his cohorts believed her.

Perhaps many classmates had observed his embarrassment and opposition. They would tend to take opportunities to cut into Clyde his senior year in high school when he was living with John Randy. After graduation he just wanted to get away from them as quick as he could.

When he had lost weight and had returned to the hospital for a second stay, he had invited this twenty-five-year-old photojournalist he had met at a school event to an event with his class.

“They all said you were bulimic not anorexic! And they were not very positive about you,” the photojournalist, soon to be his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend had said during their courting. Now at twenty-seven, she was the ex-girlfriend.

This had confirmed to Clyde that he had been right not to trust them.

Clyde’s mother had already let him know she was gossiping about him in the family sessions. She glorified the concerns and condolences she got from the popular kids in Clyde’s class regarding his bad behavior. Clyde couldn’t believe the therapist allowed his mother to taunt him in this manner. But the therapist had started punishing him by not letting him speak due to his non-compliant behavior.

Thus, his girlfriend’s words had confirmed that the gossip was slander and that it was controlled via his parents talking to their friends, his teachers. Clyde felt the whole school was unified against him and it only fed his self-destructive streak.

He had never started throwing up until they forced him to eat in the hospital.

In reality, Clyde’s accurate intuition often made things worse for him as it prevented him from faking his way into better relationships with others. Indeed, Clyde’s accurate intuition will get him in all sorts of trouble later in life until he learns this lesson.

Indeed, in the train it is hard for Clyde not to feel tragically flawed.

As he comes up the escalator out of the speed-line stop, he exits the tinted glass doors to witness a knife fight between two men surrounded by a sprawling crowd. One of the men stands upright with his fisticuffs up while the other positions himself horizontally swinging his knife widely. Clyde thinks about how everyone is out testing their nerves and wonders what the fight is about as he motors through the crowd.

By the time he is approaching Federal Street a black man takes a look at him and gives him support for his look perhaps or for just being out at this hour of the night. This helps Clyde feel safe. He is grateful to all the angels he’s met in this city who support him in this way. They far outweigh the stereotypes.

When Clyde hits Cooper Street, his pace quickens. He cannot wait to get back to his apartment. He takes the elevator up to the sixth floor and as soon as he enters his piping hot apartment the poor cat showers him with love.

But Clyde doesn’t waste much time with the cat. He skips over the carrots and the fruit and immediately attacks the graham crackers. Then he hits the ice cream. He isn’t even trying to restrain himself. He goes after some Pathmark muffins and makes sure to hit some of his ice, cold Crystal light drink. He eats the rest of his yogurt covered pretzels and is back at the ice cream.

After a while he goes through the closet, into the bathroom and braces himself on the sink (the throat.) He let’s go of all the disgust he feels from the night out with his so-called friends. The food blurts out of his mouth in clumps. He uses his hands to detach the clumps from the sink and wash them down. Sometimes he gets impatient and just jams the clumps into the throat. When he is empty, he returns to eating.

Clyde focuses his mind on Gwendolyn and Ray and the few people he can trust at the deli. Still, he cannot stop until he has made a dent into his hundred dollar a week food supply. In the hospital he had gone to AA meetings. He doesn’t need to turn to drugs to help him cope with the meanness in this world. He already has his jam. He pukes until he is exhausted. Then, he goes to sleep.

The post Jam on Rye in the X Generation appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Maintaining a sense of community support is precious when you struggle a history of exile. In my life words like “schizophrenia” and “anorexia” mixed with periods of institutional incarceration have resulted in alienation, trauma, and exile. It’s been twenty years since my most recent incarceration for “schizophrenia” and it remains very hard to find community support. I find the pattern of being othered replicates itself.

Healing from my most extreme experience of exile, “schizophrenia,” has involved outreach into many communities. I’d like to recommend community outreach because it’s been full of great experiences and rewards. But to be honest, although it is needed, it often results in repeated triggers that bring on emotional distress and familiar thinking patterns. Persisting has been very important as has finding ways to process those negative experiences and finding primary support.

Ultimately, I have learned to honor the communities where I have sensed safety and support that have enabled me to thrive and be authentic. These communities have enabled me to persist when I get triggered and feel othered. I am writing to share my perceptions about persisting through exile and to honor those places that have assisted in healing and soothing that sense of exile.

Starting with the Origins of Feeling Targeted:

This sense of exile I recently traced back in memory during an EMDR training. I remember being at a family friend’s farm and finding horns that fell off baby cattle. I remember being told that’s what happens to baby cattle as they grow, they lose their horns. It must have been Halloween, after my birthday at age of two or three. I remember the melancholy of feeling like one of those horns. The gray misty rain, the green pastures, the mud, the need to hold onto the horn that I identified with, those images have come back to me during periods of exile.

The family story is that the farm owner hid with me during hide and seek. No one could find us Otherwise I remember only traipses of what I presume to be the day. A glimpse into a crowded, festive room, the visual of a costumed witch, and the contrast, the grey, billowing fog, the misty rain.

I remember the owner asking me at a later point if I remember the day. I remember his sense of intensity. I remember feeling revolted when he touched my ass as I rode on his back. I remember feeling perplexed seeing him interact with his children who were far older than me.  I remain only suspicion about what may have happened.

The main reason I am suspicious is that I have recaptured other dissociated memories about other sex abuse events that went along with family stories. Those stories help explain behavior and actions that were always frowned upon. Clothing myself in the shower and refusing to let anyone see me in the buff, not sleeping for a year on end, starving, sacrificing myself for people I love, these actions would result in incarceration and labels.

Ultimately, I only have a sense that the intensity of my reactions against sex abuse goes back further. For example, I just can’t imagine that I would dissociate so easily fondled in a tub at the age of nine and later, to behave so cowardly at the age of seventeen in the face of an atrocity that I am not even sure is real.

Sense of Exile:

Because I was “so sensitive” and perhaps because I frowned in all the pictures taken of me, I was exiled from my family and the school community in which I was raised. Male anorexia ultimately had a lot to do with this. Who starves themselves like that? It diminished a great deal of constructive work! I stopped being seen.

However, when I trace my history back at the school there was always a sense of rejection. Always a good student, I was nearly not admitted because I cut paper in an unusual manner. Luckily my parents worked there and were willing to have me repeat a year. There were early reports of how I failed to connect with other kids. There was the year I spent a lot of time home and sick. There was the fact that the kids picked on and bullied me. When I rebelled against the other kids, I got sent to counseling. I got psychological testing.

My sense of exile was clear in my decision to thumb my nose at the private school expectations of an expensive collegiate utopia. They published that I was going to a good school in the yearbook, regardless. However, I chose a local inner-city commuter college campus where I could afford to divorce myself from my parent’s influence. I would end up creating the space to hide daily binging and purging. I studied and worked the whole time. I never wasted time to go to a single college party. I graduated with a 3.9 GPA.

I fought a sense of exile among my graduate school affiliates, but I fought for acceptance. I was exiled at most jobs and among my twenty-something associates. I moved west where I knew very few people.

Extracting Pockets of Support:

I write to highlight the importance of finding the places where I did find a sense of acceptance. I owe them gratitude and vie to give back. I have developed and survived in spite of exile. I am more fortunate than many in that I have a career and have developed a sense of primary support.

I was first hospitalized at Child Guidance Center with whom Salvador Minuchin termed “kids from the slums.” I am relieved to say that in the face of what I consider to be significant institutional abuse, I did find streetwise kids had more compassion and acceptance for me than cohorts at private school.

Likewise, in college, working under the table at an inner-city Korean owned deli fifty hours a week through the spank of summer, I was profoundly touched by the fact that the community accepted me. They didn’t care if I was skinny and afraid of food. Meanwhile support and acceptance from cohorts continued to elude me as I entered professional positions.

For the last eighteen years I have found support working for psychiatric patients in a psychiatric unit. It’s true I have been less likely to feel supported by colleagues who called the clients, “crazies” or have took action to have me removed. But once again in the face of institutional abuse, I found community members heard my stories once I grew secure enough to tell them. It was with the clientele community that my mindful spontaneity and facilitation skills developed. I may have been a disrespected droid at family reunions and mainstream events, but I found myself again in the hospital back ward.

Support in the community gives you that sense of being known, respected and belonging. It is an important part of healing and human development. And yet to promote safety, the nature of many communities is that they set standards of behavior or social discourse that govern that sense of belonging. I have found that being fond of and accepted in one context can preclude one from fitting into another.

The road to rediscovering that sense of belonging can certainly be a long and winding one!

The Exile that Resulted from Battling Institutional Hypocrisy:

When I moved to the west coast, I decided that the mainstream needed to know how homeless and disabled people suffer. I was setting up services in a notorious section 8 housing complex. I alerted the newspapers. While it’s arguable I had the experience and capacity to understand the consequences of this prior, I had been taught by a mainstream therapist that if I thought corruption was real, I was paranoid.

It was the era of the psychopharmacology professional and the psychotherapy establishment that monitored me fronted kindness, yet predicted that I would be in and out of the hospital the rest of my life to any semblance of family support system that remained.

My coping strategy was to ignore corruption and work hard in the face of it. Housing Authority officials tried to bribe me by offering me as many tickets as I wanted to a music festival. I didn’t want to be paranoid and think it was a bribe, so I turned around and invited the whole community of residents that they serviced. I requested over a hundred tickets for the residents and was given twenty-four.

I have since accepted that the uninvestigated killing that alarmed me go with the territory in housing authorities, inner-city, and poor-community realities. It’s taken me a long time to accept. I had to go homeless and be an indentured servant for some time.

In my view, we are all a part of perpetuating those realities and decisions. The lure of fast money and soldiering results in a steady stream of death that is not often noted. Many people understand the injustice that happens, but they also know it isn’t safe to shine a light on it. Those that do end up in prison, dead, or unable to find work.

With unobserved rage from getting beat up in the WTO Protest and feeling ashamed for having run away from an incestuous rape, I was one bad ass who didn’t care. I was like Serpico! When I was threatened and told that curiosity killed the cat, I retorted, “Yes, but the cat has nine lives!”

As I started to believe I was being followed, I stopped taking medication and started to understand corruption better. I reached out to my one remaining college friend with a nefarious history and he made a credible threat. Still, I didn’t believe him. I tried to escape to Canada and was intercepted by police.

In fact, they were following me. It’s just that no one believed me.

Understanding the Reality of How American Society Maintains Control:

Being kicked out of the circle or rejected by the majority of the group often gets perpetuated by group leaders who either volunteer or get paid to manage. They vie to control the business and stay in power via controlling behavior and negotiating norms.

Whether done by the FBI, social service employers, educators, unions, lawyers or heads of the family fortunes, crime ring bosses, managers will go to great lengths to control and shape your behavior regardless of laws and justice. I have come to believe that much of it is about maintaining cultural delusions about wealth and privilege.

Thus, people who refuse to conform are pushed out and exiled. This can happen easily if you are not corrupt and are targeted by the community. It can also happen if you are too corrupt and targeted.

People have ways of sniffing out your history of belonging or failure to do so. They may look at the color of your skin or your gender or manners, or friends and presume the culture and experiences you have be subjected to and decide if they want you around.

For example, I believe that as a social services worker, being a productive and effective healer and promoting justice is a good way to get targeted. Clinics are there to make money and control costs, and arguably to control people. Input a little healing, and you become a threat to some people with six figure salaries.

It seems a good way to frame this is that you must agree to toque reefer, but must agree not to toque too much of it. Toque too much and you become a burner or addict. No toque, and one becomes an exiled joke. I feel its arguable that this was the quintessential dilemma that governed acceptance in American culture during the X generation. When Bill Clinton said, “but I didn’t inhale,” it clarified a lot. He promoted the very large Housing Authority company, with whom I was contracted to work, as a model of urban development. I knew that but I still alerted the press.

I must admit that I presume the toque, no toque dilemma happens at many sleep-away colleges and other developmental institutions like the military. I avoided this stage of life by living in a roach infested apartment and working under the table. This way I could live skinny and heal without being further targeted and shamed for being a thin man.

Some Historical Context:

Maybe in other generations it was different. In American history at one point it was more about accepting slavery or genocide. To fit in, one must sip the tea. One must go corrupt, just not too much so. Thus, Thomas Jefferson was cool, but hid his pedophilia exploits so as not to go too far. That’s a real American hero, yeah! He got to coauthor the American Constitution.

Makes you wonder what the history books will say about this era? When law and order is about preserving the Jeffery Epstein way of life via the execution of black men in the inner city, you’ve got to wonder! Perhaps this is what America First is all about. Donald Trump did say he could kill someone down on some avenue in broad daylight and his supporters would still vote for him. I have to say, I think he knew what he was talking about.

On the other hand, I would suggest that Donald Trump is transparent about the realities of social control and the feudal oligarchy we have all stupidly called American democracy. All the defenders of the dumb shit authored by Thomas Jefferson and other feudal pimps really believe in the law and constitutional democracy. I work hard to expose lies and cultural delusions, but I sure hope they can protect us from the mind state of a fascist xenophobe.

Perhaps it all boils back to the quintessential American dilemma, do I toque reefer!

“Take it easy, but take it!” This odd quote extracted from one of the bizarre cinematographic dissociative sequences in the movie, Midnight Cowboy still eludes me all these years later. I still say, no.

People like me who repeatedly get exiled and cannot find community might struggle with a sense of shame, trauma and the ongoing exile of pain.

The Science of Trauma and Surviving Exile

Indeed, when we turn to advances in neuroscience to understand what heals trauma: we end up with several different sects about how to create safety and resources. Some proponents identify community support as being important. Thus, in my local EMDR sect, people or things that have served as wise, protective, or nurturing support emerge as necessary resources to address the unthinkable.

The basic concept is to take inventory of good relationships that have existed and create community that you can bring with you to revisit victimization and help you through can be very transformative. Of course, some of these relationships can be with mythical fictional characters or public figures like artists, tv personalities. Or (gulp) politicians who are admirable (if that is possible.) For example, I have realized that Midnight Cowboy’s character Joe Buck is a personal resource for me. “Well, I am not a for-real Cowboy, but I sure am one hell of a stud.”

Taking a deeper dive into resourcing, I am learning that there are many ways to create a safe environment. Indeed, sometimes using mindfulness techniques and meditations can help create safety between the therapist and client. Thus, creating safety can form the basis for community support.

Taking the risk to listen and reflect on what the person experiences might be and help them feel safe and in the window of tolerance when they revisit traumatic images like the gray billows of misty rain, the green pastures, the mud and the cow horns.

Using mindfulness exercises is another way to build resources and keep the person in the window of tolerance. Then, using desensitization or bilateral stimulation and encouraging the person to reprocess that trauma or sense of exile can give people the tools to broaden their sense of safety and sense of support.

The result is that the sense of exile does not get triggered and new community support becomes attainable. Thus, people who attack you politically don’t trigger you into that sense of exile. Thus, you remember the community that accepts you and you avoid the tendency to dissociate and withdraw.

Keep Persisting!

I believe powerful community managers of many sorts will continue to exile you if your experience does not fit the mold they want to see or the realities that they have championed and the power of their salaries. Hacienda owners will attack you with all the power they have when you have done nothing wrong. Maybe it all boils down to the fact that you just don’t want to toque reefer for them, I don’t know.

Ultimately being exiled from their community doesn’t mean you should give up. The more you persist and utilize those communities that do support you, even if they are just in spirit, the less power those community managers have to exile you.

Furthermore, as they treat you like you don’t matter, are invisible, are inferior or are deficient, it gives you the opportunity to practice healing in the face of your original form of exile. You persist and reprocess and perhaps continue to champion the communities of support that have in fact been there for you.

The past year and a half as the community of support that I have worked for has been under assault. Managers say the county wants to create a new system. I tend to see it as another gentrification, race and class war cloaked in mental health reform.

Managers threatened closure and there was a massive exodus of many of the competent counselors of color with lesser tenure. Additionally, the one manager who supported me, was removed from power. Many of the clients gave up their treatment.

Indeed, I have witnessed yet again top down change imposed on the community has been very devastating for community members. I have seen this happen repeatedly in the hacienda system.

I have tended to view many layers of mismanagement. Ultimately, I believe plans have shifted towards blaming the unit’s failings it on the workers and layoffs. The inequity of work is stunning. The atmosphere is: keep one’s productivity high, and get targeted. My theory is that it will make it harder to fire us if we are productive. I have persisted and prayed, but have started up a private practice to protect myself if the cuts in fact prevail.

This week there has been a strike and the power that has mismanaged and harmed the community is reportedly going to be replaced. I still don’t know what this is going to mean for the community.

I have kept my memory of inner-city support in my heart and fought to maintain my productivity. Perhaps I am only clinging on to a baby cow horn in the misty rain. I have documented the work of the community. I worked with them for twelve years to create my redefining “psychosis” therapy platform. They are its architects and they have always deserved better.

I could write about ways I feel blacklisted and betrayed, but I am persisting to maintain community with love in my heart. I feel so touched as to encourage the reader to keep reaching for new community! Things may change.

I believe in peer support and not in involuntary medication. I have fought for these changes for our community for years. I have brought in peer counselors and they worked well. But when change is imposed in a top down manner, communities dwindle and the point is missed. Let change happen regardless of which top down political fool got in the latest punch.

I have heard that my boss of many years who supported hard work and good client care, says, keep fighting. He seems to have come around on the issue of peer support in his years of knowing me.

Me, I am just persisting as I always have done. Perhaps one day all those communities that have seemed to be turned against me will change. Maybe I will recapture a memory and realize that I am truly delusional. Until then, I will continue to persist and call out our cultural delusions.

The post The Challenges of Finding Community Support When You Have A History of Exile appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I went through five years of treatment for the treatment of anorexia that added to the negative transference I have for psychotherapy. This included three therapeutic relationships, three hospitalizations, and three therapeutic trends that were utilized back in the early nineties. I participated in mandatory family therapy, behavioral inpatient eating disorder therapy, and addressing the problem through a twelve step tradition.

As a result of these relationships I learned four additional lessons:

• lesson four, it is important to set reasonable expectations;
• lesson five, it is not helpful to make negative predictions;
• lesson six, it is important not to ignore signs of abuse in relationships; and
• lesson seven, it is important not to attack a spiritual tradition.

Again, although I am glad that this treatment helped me survive a life-threatening condition, reflecting on these experiences has always led me down a path of madness. I am left wondering if I am safe in therapy.

“Of course, you are safe in therapy,” I can hear the choir sing!

“Stay on the streets of this town, and they’ll be carving you up alright . . .” I hear Bruce Springsteen retort.

Oh, how I hate choir music, but what do you think?

Structural Family Therapy:

I instantly liked my second therapist just like I liked my first therapist. He was affiliated with Salvador Minuchin’s reputable Child Guidance Clinic. It would be intensive Structural Family Therapy for me.

My parents tried to drop me off with my suitcase and he said, “Wow, that suitcase is very heavy!” Then, he ordered my family to have daily sessions to save my life.

There were a lot of tense family sessions in which my father bullied me to eat and I hated myself for acquiescing. In fact, this made it harder to swallow my pride and eat even though part of me was hungry and wanted to do better. Instead, I learned to throw-up in trash cans to object to my father and the family drama that unfurled.

I was expected to gain a half pound a day or we were failures. I researched an article in academic journals in the hospital library that suggested that this was not a good plan for the long-term needs of eating disorder patients. My therapist did not respond to my effort to self-advocate.

Indeed, when I would fail treatment at this facility and get transferred, I would learn that six thousand calories a day would not enable me to gain so rapidly.

It was true this therapist that I had for one month was good at calling my parents on their shit. At the same time, he also would punish me for not gaining enough weight by not letting me speak in the session. He really liked my sister, he said.

It may not be fair to blame the next ten years of family cutoff on the distress caused in those intense sessions. The therapist told my parents that I would run from home. This was often thrown in my direction. My mother sounded good in therapy and clearly felt my struggles were my fault and let me know it a great deal over the years. My sister always made it onto the folklore of the family Christmas cards, but not me. My room would be converted into a study and I moved in with a high school friend.

There was ongoing contact, but I did what I could to divorce myself from my family. Particularly when I reconnected with them ten years later, they chose to listen to the negative prognosis of the psychology tests, called the police, supported, and in one case openly prayed for longer-term hospitalization. Up until then, my psychotherapists functioned as my parents.

Inpatient Behavioral Treatment:

It took me a while to get my next therapist because the hospital assigned someone who was incompetent. He was not an eating disorder specialist and didn’t get it, even though he wanted to work with me. The new hospital made me fire this man to get the specialist that all the women on the unit loved and recommended. If it were not for some assertive anorexic females who were appalled that my family was paying out of pocket and I wasn’t working with a specialist, I wouldn’t have had the pleasure.

I could tell this man was curious to work with a male and that felt good. However, his strategy seemed familiar: he encouraged me to be corrupt by talking about how bad his sons were. I tried to be influenced by this gender manipulation technique. “Be a man, be bad,” he seemed to say. “And continue eating through the night.” These quotes seemed to be his mantras.

I did manage to gain weight and cheat at my diet. I was clearly addicted to starving but locking me up and forcing me to eat by changing my environment worked. Oh, I suffered. I kicked and screamed more than most. But I changed. One day I objected to eating Brussel sprouts and pulled out the blue chair and the tube that was to go up my nose and I listened. Fucking Brussel sprouts, how stupid! When I gained privileges I cheated frequently, but I was prescribed so many calories I still made gains.

Starting to hook up with all the women on the unit took a second hospitalization because I was extremely sexually repressed. I guess having a girlfriend or two wasn’t so bad, really.

While I experienced an influx of polyamorous flirtations on the unit during my second hospitalization, I also met a twenty-five-year-old newspaper reporter on the outside who didn’t mind robbing the cradle. I think she liked me because she hated her father who was an alcoholic. I was basically discharged to her care. “Loose the raincoat,” was the professional advice to me with my inability to copulate.

Right before I was discharged, I had a female social worker acknowledge my situation and warn me not to fall for any women when I was in such a vulnerable position. I was stunned. My parents and my MD didn’t care to warn me in such a manner!

According to the MD, the treatment worked! He would discharge me a year and a half later as a success. However, in the process, the MD stopped validating me and supporting me. He didn’t seem to care about what I was going through with the solution to my problems, the relation with my girlfriend.

You see, my girlfriend got extremely controlling. I was not allowed to have external friends. He just didn’t seem to acknowledge the pain her silence treatment and abuse caused. My first family had failed me, but certainly this new solution had to work. He was proud of me for gaining weight, but he knew nothing of the world I entered living in Camden, New Jersey at a commuter campus.

Through it all, real disassociated trauma went unexplored. When I finally after two years got so fed up that I had to cut ties with the older woman, I started violently binging and purging in the roach infested apartment I managed to afford on my own.

The Twelve Step Traditions:

My mother saw my fourth therapist for a while and said she was, “really good.” She was like my first therapist in that she was less credentialed and saw paying middle-class clients. My Mom paid for the sessions.

This therapist liked John Bradshaw who was a lot like me in terms of rage and shame. I saw him speak in a video clip and saw he also had been through eating problems. Still, I just thought he was fat and sloppy looking. Still, when I was told that families were like water torture dripping on your forehead, it did make sense. As such, she seemed to understand and care about my suffering.

Once a week, I took the train from the inner-city to the wealthy town of Haddenfield, New Jersey. I’d buy a weeks-worth of groceries most of which would only get vomited down the sturdy old sink pipes back amid the roaches.

Additionally, this therapist would occasionally challenge my spiritual beliefs in ways that seemed inappropriate. “Some things are worth dying for . . .” she would say with sudden rageful intensity. She once told me that she was attacked by a psychotic woman when she worked in community mental health and her primal response was violence, and that was okay.

She also clearly didn’t trust my mother and often asked me if I was sure my mother didn’t sexually abuse me. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I really don’t trust your mother,” she would say.

To her credit, she did see me outside my eating disorder. She encouraged me to pursue one of my interests outside the confines of the blocks on which I was immersed in work and school.

I was smart enough to make friends with the good people from the crack house, the ones who did not call me “Where’s Waldo.” I learned there are many respectful people who get caught up in that lifestyle. I also made friends with many of the local youth. I even made a friend with a fellow student who was in recovery from drugs and alcohol. Who else on the working-class campus would befriend a anorexic dude who had an attitude, who outlined everything he read, who was the only person willing of able to answer professors questions, and who tried to act like his weight and food didn’t matter?

It was the summer of my junior year and I quit my job and hiked six hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail. Even though I barely had enough weight on me, I binge ate a lot that summer and burned it hiking mountains. I was proud of myself for making the trek though it was a lot of alone time.

When I got back and started binging and purging again, I made the mistake of feeling the therapist had written me off. I guess I blamed her for the new-found fury in my binging behavior.

I found a new therapist with better credentials. I chose not to accept this therapists’ line of inquiry and views of the impact of sexual abuse. In fact, it became toxic to me. It would take twenty years and writing a memoir to recapture memories that helped me start to understand myself.

If it wasn’t for the fact she attacked my culture, she might have really helped me understand myself better. Instead, I sought refuge in the the medication craze . . .

The post In Psychotherapy We Trust: Part Two– Anorexia: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Twenty years ago, I experienced what might be termed a break from reality while I was working as a mental health worker. I worked in a last resort section 8 housing project that was rife with crime. It was called “The Hotel of Horrors” in an article in the local media.

For six months, I dedicated myself to acting as a safe resource to residents facing significant violence. I had the sense that my conduct which included alerting the press and working with local activists, was putting me and the project at risk. I kept doing what seemed to be the right thing and thinking, “I would be paranoid if I thought this action would be problematic!”

Still, my job was threatened by a supervisor who had a substance abuse problem. The pressure increased from the management company and a small segment of the residents. I decided to withdraw off the three medications I took for my hard-to-treat depression.

***

My own mental health struggles started with anorexia in high school and led to a rather impoverished and isolated collegiate experience. My best and only friend was an older recovering addict. I lived in a roach-infested apartment complex and made more friends with local people than I did with other students. However, when I graduated, I thrived as a social worker and was promoted once I put myself through graduate studies.

I was aware that I had a personality disorder that was often linked to schizophrenia. However, when I withdrew off my medication I found that I had enhanced intuition and that I experienced facts that were suggestive of corruption more intensely.

***

I called my old college friend and asked for advice and he threatened me. I bolted. I withdrew all my money from the bank, shaved my head and headed for the Canadian Border.

Sure enough, it was just as I feared! I was forced to stop to fill the tank at a gas station. Police had posted themselves at the station. “Did Mommy and Daddy say your brain chemicals are out of whack?” mocked an officer as they approached me.

I had my peaceful-ass taken in taken into custody with unnecessary pain tactics and bruised wrists. I was driven eighty miles from my car to the state capital where they turned me over to a psychiatrist to put me into a state hospital.

I first got confirmation that the mafia was in fact following me five days later after I finally surrendered to the police on a mountain pass late one night. My roommate identified himself as a Native American “hillbilly” with 130 IQ and told me the mafia was following me.

I had already met with my parents who had flown out to support the incarceration, so I told the “hillbilly” that I thought my family was the mafia.

***

I was only physically hurt once in the hospital. The beat down was by staff. My best guess was that I was outing an undercover FBI agent. I was confused. My parents were told I had become violent.

Indeed, I resisted invitations to run away with a Mexican mafia connected female who persisted in wooing me. I refused to join a white gang for protection against her. You see, I was hospitalized for three months in the State hospital. There would be icicles frozen on the inside of the window that was located above my bed.

***

When I got released, I packed the few belongings I had left that weren’t stolen, sold my car, and took a greyhound.

I tried to make it on my own. I got a job working in a daycare; but lost it when I ran out of medication. Then, I couldn’t find any work anywhere!

I had an aunt who found me a job at an upscale Italian deli in the bay area if I relocated. I moved to the outskirts boon town where housing was more affordable. I had a long bike and BART commute. I was able to use the service economy job with some help from my parents, to get back on my feet. It wasn’t easy because I had a bone to pick with the mafia and I was working at an Italian Deli with some substance-abusing rich kids, but I survived.

***

When I found myself incarcerated into a small day room for two weeks, I was traumatized. At least I knew not to accept the hospital social workers housing arrangements. Those kinds of resources are offered with the presumption of ongoing disability. Not only would I have had to deal with loss and ongoing psychosis, I would have had to languish behind the iron curtain of the mental health system. Many of my cohorts do so and end up on the streets. Many get put in jail or otherwise incarcerated and this dehumanizing treatment so often exacerbates the crisis.

For those readers who haven’t heard voices, try going through the traumatic treatment in our incarceration institutions, our public housing authority projects, or many of our board and care homes. See if you don’t come out hearing voices! I finally did hear voices after I escaped the Deli. I heard a demonic voice calling my name.

Now I am employed as a Marriage and Family Therapist and work with people in an inner-city mental health facility in Oakland CA. More and more as people are displaced in the city where I work, they end up in sprawling encampments, hard-to-get-into homeless shelters, board and care homes, bucket automobiles, and if they are lucky in a few years they may make it into an apartment in a housing project like the one I worked in. Many people who live in shelters work low wage service jobs like I did. Nowadays, it is easier for someone who has mental health struggles to fall and not be able to come back like I did.

The post A Glimpse Behind the Iron Curtain of the Mental Health System appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long

I never heard the melody until I needed the song . . .

. . . I never I spoke “I love you” till I cursed you in vain

Never felt my heart strings until I nearly went insane

–Tom Waites, San Diego Serenade

It is funny how sometimes one cannot really see themselves until they get a glimpse of a harsh paradoxical reality. Perhaps doing so gives one that alternate perspective that is so necessary to really see oneself and gain wisdom. I think that’s what Tom Waites is getting at in the excerpts of his song I posted above. That is why the ability to relate to others is such a powerful teacher and healer that is so needed in a therapeutic endeavor. Other people’s struggles help us stop and see ourselves better. Even if it is painful, growth is likely.

And, just as the song goes, I never really saw myself as a learning-disabled person until I just recently had the opportunity to sit with an individual while she was receiving a mid-life diagnosis. It was a diagnosis that I thought might be helpful. Little did I know that before this sitting, I rarely considered the full effect of how a learning disorder affects me as a writer, therapist and mental health consumer.

***

Learning disorders, as I often educate people as a psychotherapist, are an aspect of neurodiversity that are most characterized by an imbalance in areas of brain abilities. Some realms may be significantly lower, while other areas are particularly high. Thus, as my explanation goes, certain areas of learning become very difficult without a high level of support, time and determination. A person who struggles in this manner may suffer from attention difficulties, may need extra time to complete things, and may like Albert Einstein, develop a particularly high drive to exercise their strengths because of always struggling and straining to keep up. Of course, when not properly supported and safely nurtured learning disabilities can cause people stop exercising abilities and accept oppression.

I am also likely to talk about how learning disabilities are generally considered to be neurodevelopmental disorders. This means that they are severely impacted by a mix of biological and environmental stressors. There are a couple of points I accordingly am likely to highlight.

First, I will suggest that we are learning, intergenerational trauma can be inherited and this might contribute to the brain’s lower abilities. Second, I will argue that having learning struggles can lead to a resulting life of ongoing trauma and mistreatment that can add to and exacerbate the lower realms particularly if support is not provided. Thirdly, I will point out that it is well known and demonstrated that trauma results in brain damage and that learning disabilities give us an opportunity to address those issues of trauma. And most certainly, I will add that compensating for a relative deficit may cause there to be unusually high ability in some other areas and exercise always makes them stronger.

In addition, after making these points, I am certain to reference studies on resilience that demonstrate that healing from trauma and neuroplasticity can cause people to become stronger than they would have otherwise been. In fact, being damaged can cause the brain to strengthen up in ways that would not otherwise happen. Thus, creating a sense of safety and providing people the opportunity to heal from trauma enables them to grow so strong that they become grateful that the trauma happened. Many who attain that sense of safety become very practiced at being strong, spiritual, and high functioning individuals.

***

Unfortunately, the African American woman I referred for testing got informed that she had learning disabilities, without having any of my suggestions reinforced. I found myself reflecting on the fact that maybe my ideas are simplistic and not scientific. Instead, from my perspective, the focus was on what she couldn’t do, and what was possible to help her overcome these deficits thanks to modern technology.

I went home after the sitting, was editing a chapter of my current book, and suddenly found myself so hypercritical that I froze. It occurred to me that I don’t read the way others do. In fact, I hate reading so badly that I rarely look extensively at the work of others. Everybody says that to be a good writer, one must be a prolific reader. I usually tell myself that I learn through writing, not reading. I usually say that I am exercising my talents, making myself happy, and learning rather than wasting my time.

But in a frozen state, it occurred to me that I am not being realistic as so many negative people in my life have told me. Maybe those fears I am constantly working against really are true.

All the rejections I have been getting from journals and blog sites plus the people who have used the vulnerability in my work to politically marginalize me started to gain tractions in my head. Frozen, my sense of empowerment felt like it was swallowed up and wallowing in stomach acid. The fact that I won five literary awards for my memoir didn’t matter. Instead, I found myself returning to perseverations on the ways that my memoir has only heightened my sense of alienation. All that mattered was that it was not selling, attracting reviews, or achieving what I had hoped for, to decrease my sense of invisibility. Suddenly, instead of being unrelenting and meticulous during my seven-year struggle to write the thing, I told myself that couldn’t read the way other people do and that my writing must show it. I told myself that I had to work twice as hard as others to no avail. Old tapes started to dominate the day.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” one writing professor had complained in a college course, “but it took me ten rewrites to get my detective novel published!”

“Ten rewrites,” I had once been proud to say to myself, “that is nothing! And I am having fun.”

Suddenly, that confidence that once helped me thrive was taken away.

***

Sure, in school, I was always the last person to complete the test, but my grades were always good. It’s true some teachers tended to get on me about spelling that I could not do anything about, but I tested okay in meaningless math. It’s true when the homework got heavy in high school, I could only manage to get four hours sleep a night, but that was also because I played sports, exercised, and didn’t eat much. When I became addicted to starving, I just thought I was a hardworking perfectionist who didn’t want to be stopped.

When anorexia led to incarceration, I was forced to halt all behavior and gorge on food. Once the tears and fight subsided, I learned to write when I couldn’t exercise.

It’s true I had poured my heart into my poetry notebook the year before only to receive a B+. The comment from the teacher to my mother—the school reading teacher—was that my work was just too depressing. She didn’t like it.

Straight out of the hospital and still angry about the B+, I took writing assignments and turned in lengthy stories or songs instead. I wrote twenty-five-page papers with long bibliographies. The results: poorer grades and a college essay nearly got me kicked out of school because it made the school psychologist—my teacher’s wife and mother’s friend—think I was suicidal. I still wasn’t educated enough about the social psychology of the situation: I was exposed as a mental health patient, my grades suffered regardless of how good I was getting. I had a different experience and message than others. My successes, leadership, and hard work in eleventh grade became a subverted, living lie. When I chose my only available form of rebellion against this, to go to a local commuter college, the school chose to lie in the yearbook and said I was going to overpriced Antioch College in Ohio.

I ran as far away as I could run without using the college money which I suspected had gone to hospitalizations. In a ghetto with a girlfriend who was seven years my senior, it was the easy courses with lousy textbooks that got my GPA off to bad B+ start. Suddenly immersed in large crowded auditoriums, my anxiety went up and my attention, down. I would be struck with the worst kind of writer’s block. I started the practice of outlining and memorizing everything that I read. I ended up achieving a 3.9 average, but I never went to a single party or took any time off work.

My poetry teacher in college who repeatedly chose my poems to share with the class had once said at the end of an intense semester in which we wrote a poem a week: “Then, there will be some of you that have to keep on writing, not because you want to, but because you have to.”

I don’t know if I listened to him or if I just found myself to be one of those who had to write. I took fiction and personal essay classes and obsessed over my take-home exams trying to get the wording just right.

I did get diagnosed with learning disabilities working my way through graduate school. Because I was working with a psychologist who unbeknownst to me didn’t think I was college material, I became very aware of all my deficits and tended to communicate about this with my peers. I took a heavy dose of medications that I later found out I didn’t need to such an extent. Interactive courses in which the info came from multiple sources and required in the moment listening often overwhelmed me. I put my writing away during those seventy-hour weeks and did my best to become involved and social with my peers. I learned that I worked oh so much harder than they did to prepare for tests. I often got ridiculed for asking so many questions to keep myself alert and tracking, but I was used to that. When I got through those three years without a hospitalization, I happily returned to an intense poetry habit.

***

I must admit it was my suggestion that the African American woman get tested for learning disabilities. At least I educated her about my views of learning disabilities before I set up the testing. However, I was still stunned by the outcome. I later learned that the specific tests used were known to be culturally biased against African Americans. On a closer look at the material there were in fact areas of superior performance that we neglected to review. I am using this essay to thaw the writer’s block that has struck me in the gut over the past few days.

I do believe I will return to being happy obsessive, unread writer for my own lonely needs again.

A year after I graduated, I moved to the west coast to start over again. I think of the times since: when things were hard; when I had to escape incarceration and face homelessness, underemployment and long work days just to evade the mental health system and get back on the career track. When I think of these experiences, I get mad that people are reduced to different types of pathological disorders, like learning disorders. At the same time, as soon as I developed the diagnosis of schizophrenia, learning disorders didn’t matter anymore. I became a warehoused genetic cash cow. In the mentality of mainstream treatment, schizophrenia trumps neurodevelopmental disorders, yet so many of the institutionalized individuals I work with struggle with undiagnosed and unsupported learning disorders.

They are brilliant, complex, utterly alone, living in squalor, and extremely righteous and good people. I just don’t understand why psychological tests and treatments, and the demands of society make it so hard on good people to make a living wage.

***

Perhaps, the reader can tell, I have decided to be out with my history and experiences as a professional, writer, and mental health consumer. I still find there are many people who pick up on the fact that I am a little different and try to scapegoat and marginalize me. It happens repeatedly like the rising ebb of the San Diego sea on the shore as Tom Waits at one point had pondered.

I never saw the mornin’ ‘till I stayed up all night

I never say the sunshine ‘til you turned out the light . . .

. . .I never saw the white line, ‘til I was leaving you behind

Never knew I needed you until I was caught up in a bind

Really, it still hurts because criticism comes from every direction. However, eventually the hurt will go away. I will still be writing. And I hope and pray that that brilliant person I got diagnosed with a learning disability will be there with me, making the most of her meaningful life no matter what “they” say.

The post Learning Disabilities and Psychosis appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Back when I was just a yuppie, I learned a few points of wisdom about working through stigma. I needed mentors to help teach me how wrong stigma is. Now,  I want to pay forward some of  what I learned outside the class room  to some mental health academics and administrators who may not have gotten the same lesson.

I was learning to chop cheese steaks at a Korean owned deli and instantly enamored with this mentor on the grill, Mister Ray Gee. The deli was located just across the river from downtown Philadelphia, in the North Camden ghetto.  This Mister Ray and I were just meeting. We were both the same skin-and-bones size, our last names went together in rhyme, and any middle aged man who didn’t have a gut was an inspiration to me.

Mister Ray took one look at me and exclaimed in one breath, “Wow you are an Asshole! But don’t worry, it’s not your fault!  You were just raised that way!”

Without missing a breath, our supervisor, a short and stout man who we called Doc set me to work scraping grease off the floor with a razor blade. I dove into the work very comfortable with what had just occurred. I felt a little charge with the challenge. On my knees I scraped and scraped to overcompensate.

I immediately found myself thinking about how when I returned to school from four months of incarceration in two different mental health hospitals, I had only scoffed when my peers, the majority of whom had previously bullied me, welcomed me back with a little gift certificate. I had reasoned that  it wasn’t all that unusual of a gesture for peers at a private Quaker school to extend. I had only been humiliated. I had to acknowledge that it was asshole behavior.

I thought even more about the sessions the family had in Salvador Minuchin’s reputable inpatient clinic. One day in session, my Mom openly admitted that she shared the content of a session back to a work colleague. My Mom worked at the school I attended. She later gave me evidence that my private information was filtering down to the jury of my peers who were sorry and praying for her. When I returned to school much of this would appear to be confirmed. Worse no therapist on the hospital staff seemed to acknowledge my perspective.

On my knees, I sensed Mister Ray was intuiting aspects of these complexities with his test. If I was willing to pass his test, he was giving me a chance to learn something new.

In the yearbook back at Quaker school, my peers lied about the local commuter school I chose to attend. They said that I went to the high cost prestige of Antioch University in Ohio. I was an honor student and I was making them all look bad when I moved to the ghetto with a twenty-five-year-old girlfriend and save my parents money. Communication in my family about finances is such that I still don’t know if I really had a choice.

A few months later, I got my second point of wisdom from Mister Ray. By this time I had learned to use the grill from him. I had heard about his sexual exploits with white girls without judgment. I had aptly proven that outside work I was just a book worm in the library, but could curse. And though it was true that by that time he knew I lived with roaches to escape from an abusive relationship, I think what really earned me respect was my willingness to let him con me into driving him uptown after work to cop.

In any case, he decided to help me. He said, “Boy, you have got to work smarter, not harder.” It became a mantra along with his nickname for me, Nervous Norton.

Again, I felt profoundly understood. It wasn’t that I marveled because I didn’t expect anything from him.  We had fallen into a pattern of respect. With few words and resilience of spirit he inspired a spiritual healing within.

As a man with significant learning disabilities, I couldn’t afford to immediately practice Mister Ray’s second lesson. When I would be a graduate and fledgling social worker I would have a habit of positioning myself beneath supervisors as I worked my way through a Master’s Program and carrying out their will.

This worked fine until I graduated and got hired by a supervisor who also sustained a cocaine habit in a west coast city. I became radicalized and started breaking standard drug war codes of behavior in a section 8 housing project. This caused me to believe that I was being followed. I ended up incarcerated in an old order state hospital. It took two and a half years of poverty, but I eventually would recover. In order to recover I would need to learn how to do things like honor my mother in spite of those perceptions I had back in high school.I would need to accept stigma and find ways to do battle with it.

It wasn’t till six years after I recouped my career that I actually started to use Mister Ray’s well remembered advice. I started running groups about surviving “psychosis” using my own experience. I started my own personal practice of keeping in real in therapy.

Perhaps it was unique privilege to be taught points of wisdom by Mister Ray. They continue to help me see through the lies and shortcomings that currently limit our mental health field, evidence based practice and the medical model. I even see through elements of cultural bias in some anti-establishment rhetoric.

Sadly, Ray and Doc had only lasted a few seasons before they both quit because of becoming disgruntled with the Korean mobster management and oppression. I certainly didn’t blame them even though I ended up losing touch. At the Deli, stale cereal sold for seven dollars a box and there were no supermarkets within a ten mile radius.  Neighborhood contacts reported that Doc, who had used unacknowledged expertise to diversify the menu, had a subsequent binge on crack.

I ended up partnering with a similarly aged cohort from the neighborhood because I did need the money. My partner and I ended up mentoring youth beneath us. They had a choice, I would learn, between working with us under the table, and working to sell crack under the bridge. Some didn’t have longevity, but several did. For several years they were my family and social life.

Though I am well aware that not all academic and administrative folks need a lecture about mainstream paradigms, now that I am advocating for the development of an out of the box program in an utterly oppressive system, I find many who do. I believe we can train individuals who have experienced “psychosis” and are on the streets to run support groups. I have helped prove this could be done, but not everyone wants to listen.

At work as a psychotherapist in an inner-city program, I do therapy with good Mister Ray people who have more beauty in their hearts and suffering in their bones than me, but who are rendered immobile and impoverished. I believe a lot less harm could be done. I believe solutions exist that can transform the system from being a cotton industry to a soil saving industry of mixed nuts. It’s just that no one wants to listen.

I think of Mister Ray’s mentor-ship and what it must have been like him to observe an upwardly mobile, eager to work, perfectionist, anorexic white boy and decide in spite of my disgust, to support him. I figure it is something like making friends with a person who defends those stale seven dollar boxes of cereal paradigms that fail people.

I wish I had thought of him when I was thirty-years-old and working under pot smoking teenagers who acted so superior to me. I am not sure I am as good of a man as Mister Ray. But I sure wonder if more people who walk in the hacienda corridors of mental health power learned to have real mentors instead of facts and figures. It might help more of us learn how stigma hurts those poorly paid yuppies among us who benefit from it. Me, I am still just trying to get better every day.

The post Multi-Culturism in the Hacienda of Mental Health appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".