New York Times prompted by an error of editorial magnitude “Mental illness in the family of Charles Laudor. Not Charles himself, “wrote the staff writer as an asides to rival ‘Sun’” “Yes, there is a Santa Claus, Virginia” some seventy five years earlier......however a mirror of a depressed sensibility appeared Monday a week ago..
Not unlike his mother Sylvia Plath, her son.Nicholas 47, an evolutionary stream fish biologist took his life ........ Alaskan “Winter’s tale”
PART I
Stay Loose in making his pedestrian rounds of New Chinatown in the Sunset Park flavour of Brooklyn, with the Verrazano-Staten Island gateway to the West, its loping bridge and streamers profiled as a sapphire necklace.
Unlike the White House entourage of 1000, the media sharks & paparazzi pirhanas double clicking into web sites around the globe, the Little Rock Yalie law school graduates, Mr. & Mrs. Clinton, Presidential Seal in tow, broke ebbs & tides on mainland China’s century old oceans of humanity.
He walked briskly past the Pakistani mosque, crossing the teeming avenue double parked with delivery trucks, Atlantic City busses for the gamblers, unto the sidewalks of vegetable peddlers, fresh fish, swimming eels, live lobsters, roasted ducks twisting on skewers in the restaurants, fashion designer digital watches, jade earrings, bracelets, necklaces, lady shoemakers mending soles.
His aging blues didn’t recognize the ruddy faced countenances of the husband and wife, no longer in the promising energy of their youth or middling, sitting on their thin slabbed chairs, holding court, in front of the Import & domestic corporation store that fronted for the 3 story apartment building they owned.
Where were they? He wondered. Could they hold out from the behemoth Chinese another year? They saw the handwriting on the wall for the decade they watched the demographics of the neighborhood change. Gentrification by any other.
One by one the retail stores went the way of the calligraphy symbols. The English letters in lower case. The aggressive lean and hungry humans slashing their way on bicycles car service busses put to bed any romantic notions of Charlie Chan, his #1 son, or no tickee no laundry.
The grilled shutters over the peeling white paint of the import store, the shelves crowded with figurines, seemed destined for the inevitable. As the gun store four blocks to the east, selling out its video tapes, the Silver Screen magazine featuring Sylvia Sidney on its cover, a $30 price tag.
In its place, A&M chain pharmacy run by who else, with their saws, hammers, nails, 3 by 5’s, planes, measuring tapes, glass panes, chisels, files, blueprints, slide rules.
Ten years of ferocious energy, smacking of Mao’s revolutionary exports. The Chairman’s last March with Chou en Lai, thwarting ChangKaishek, his Madame, envisaging Taiwan as the frontier’s mortal breathe, the leadership realizing too late Brooklyn’s New Chinatown was Formosa in disguise. Taiwan a burp on former Bill Knowland’s White House radar, before Dick Nixon assailed his stirrups into Ike’s saddle.
The Clinton’s 10 day viaje into the Orient couldn’t help but aid & abet the dynamic trade balance between the 2 giants. Exports of skyscrapers, shopping malls, gardentown houses with glitzy balconies, beepers, cell telephones, fax machines, smuggled CD’s, pirated videos, opium pipes I’m kidding, Serge protectors for cable clone computers. Programmers ad infinitum into computer science.
Where Luise Rainer and Paul Muni plowed their rice paddies in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth’, an agricultural society was being swept away by internet browsers Explorer Netscape, mainframes and pc networks, cloning the Shanghai Canton Peiping chic, with its Confucius chopsticks of software & hardware.
Rudyard Kipling’s Gunga Din of neighboring India before the Kashmir Pakistan nuclear threats & showdowns between the Hindus & the Moslems drowned out the sounds of ideology in Tiananmen Square, the hard-liners under aging XiDiem used power politics. Quench youth, ideals, open-mindedness, for the sake of the status quo. A direct assault on the structure was giving way to an indirect openness. Luise Rainer in the peasant hip hop role, with her prescience and ESP could never grasp. Art being upstaged by staggering reality.
Fifth Avenue had the P.R’s, the Puerto Ricans, 8th the Chinese Pakistanis, 13th the Jews, Orthodox, Hassidic. 18th, Italians. Brighton Beach, Russian Parkway.
Where o where were the Native Americans? In their protected enclaves of New Rochelle? Hastings on the Hudson? counting their daily grosses from their Big Apple sweats.
Yet that one sentence of the morning Times shook Stay Loose out of his 8th avenue moorings. “A transmission error about mental illness in the Laudor Family . . . “not in the interior recesses of Charles Laudor’s poster boy son’s mind, Michael. .
And he trumpeted back in time, to his yesterdays in Hollywood, hitchhiking to Sunset & LaBrea, Charlie Chaplin’s studio, where the comic genius and Harry Lauder reminisced about their own yesterdays on London’s West End, rollicking pratfalls, bespeaking ages of absurdity, the species trying to make due with scarred imperfections, emerging from the womb. The cave wherever.
Oliver Hardy & Stan Laurel, Olson & Johnson’s Hellsapoppin, Abbot & Costello, and the tragic stabbing of Carolyn Costello by Michael Laudor in their Hastings on the Hudson garden apartment 3 days before Father’s Day, 1998.
Pregnant as in Dreiser’s ‘American Tragedy’, the 37 year old fiancee of the Jewish observant Laudor, into conversion at a New Rochelle synagogue, was playing out her role at a New York educational base, designing an E mail network for some 40 public schools. He was praying twice a day, his Job state of mind, into a word processor gone sour.
She had emerged from a middle class Navy family from Norfolk, Virginia, moving to Newton, Massachusetts, where she excelled at Newton High, going onto Yale for an English lit. degree.
Meeting the third generation Laudor in the Park Chapel street Madison towers British art museum New Haven commons frisbee throwing reality scene, couldn’t help but weave the 2 Elis into a gossamer chemistry. Undergrad & legal eagle out of former Anna Freud’s bastion atop the law school office of Dean Lou Pollock three decades earlier.
A raconteur with a photographic memory making it, both as an undergrad, and graduate student. What credentials for a resume the headhunters would say for startups. With his partner’s 60 hour week, a tireless commute into upper class matrimony.
The 35 year old Michael, the youngest of 3 sons born to the second generation Laudors, his father into academia as an Economics professor in Garden City’s Adelphi, once the home of Oakland Raider owner, Al Davis, a role of line coach. Now the base for Jerry Brown, his name, his edge, playing out his role as Mayor. A former theology student turned law student at this Yale Law reality scene, during the Vietnam war.
The process for yearning achievement runs deep in the New Rochelle Laudor circles. To be able to get an advantage among snake charmers and geniuses, at the same time not taking your agenda seriously is one thing. But carrying around a thumb scarred Joyce ‘Ulysses’ is another where the heroine, Molly, succumbs to seductive blandishments by Buck Mulligan??? Her H is on his commute, selling advertising space.
Gifted beyond giftedness, Michael Laudor, played out his gig on Friday nights at a Hasting Main Street bookstore, downaways from the Good Yarn.
He pursued a girl friend musician to Europe, his guilt of premarital sex coming back to spook him, the girl dusting him off, leaving him with the wound of unrequited love. An already manicness, pursuing him as the Devil in disguise, his sensitive nature, covered up by a hearty work ethic, story telling & memory.
The split personality below the surface. Fathoms and fathoms of deep probing and healing the wounds for another aggressive Charge of the New Rochelle Lancer into the conspiratorial net working of money and narcissism, surrounding his accelerated drive for more recognition in a glitzy ambiance.
Babe Ruth, Lou Gherig. Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippen. Michael Laudor, Carrie Costello.
A lawyer turned literary agent read of his battles overcoming the schizophrenic cries of delusion, encouraged the young man to scribble his confession for a book proposition back in 1995.
Over an expense account lunch, 60 pages of hallucinations, fantasies, the stuffings of depression, were rolled over to Max Perkins’s former house of Scribners, and the galaxy of Hemingway’s Thomas Wolfe’s Scott Fitzgerald’s self destructiveness. The agent Paul Reynolds, his father, ensconced in the same building. Photos of D.H. Lawrence, Orwell, Virginia Wolff, her Leonard, Spender, Auden, the Bloomsbury group, adorning the walls.
A far cry from today’s quick reads, and an E mail attachment to Hollywood, and Ron Howard’s ‘Imagine’ for the big screen payoff into the global apparatusik. Thinking big: options, small advances for a man with a Dr. Jekyl Mr. Hyde spin-off.
His word processor gone dry amidst the sun streaking thru his kitchen windows, bouncing off the balcony, the Hudson River’s surface below the village haunts, the nearby police station.
Prescribed medications were no longer effectual, the dosage and its permutations having no pharmacology impact. Nature’s restoring sleep, a remedy beyond reach.
Short-circuiting into delusions again, crying for help, knowing he was drowning but no one tossing a lifeline. Not that the network in his support system didn’t try. It was a ‘Titanic’, an illusion crafted together by a common minded team of pros and artists, reconstructing a memorable event for a moneyed modus operandi.
Into this awesome reality, walks Carolyn Costello. A year of Harvard grad study behind her, bringing her English Lit into cyberspace for the E mail network of 40 schools, not knowing Michael’s mentality had taken a different tack into flagellation and consequential self destructiveness. But the stabbing in that kitchen and its blood curdling spills may have manifested a struggle we are not privy to.
The body & soul split apart in that Hastings kitchen, as the physicists and their atom: the electrons neutrons splitting in those mushroomy clouds over New Mexico bluffs, Nagasaki, Hiroshima.
How Honore Balzac from his left bank Parisian rooming house on Vaugirard would characterize the crackup. Unfettered ambition friggen yearning in Napoleon’s classless society. Wounds to the psyche. The ego trips “off with their heads” if woman’s lib had its way. The Leadership manipulating the gullible, its saliva flowing in wake of sadistic ebbs and tides. Masochistic kicks? Right Yvonne de Carlo? Right! Prom dresses aside, you fought out the survival of the credits in Hollywood.
If only the youth of ourselves would know the future, would we ever throw the covers off, crashing the sleepies out of our eyes & washing peach like cheeks. . .
“It is required of a man that he share the passion & action of his time, at the peril of being judged not to have lived, “said Justice Holmes. Whether the third generation of Laudors was in to memorizing that line, besides briefing his cases, arguing the rules of law, the New Haven green left little to the imagination.
Didn’t Howard Dinnerstein of Chapel Street’s College Book Store throw himself into eternity, ducking out of a window from the West Haven’s V.A.bathroom. On the locked ward, didn’t a young man of a special religious bent, visited by his father, to no avail, take his insanity to the streets by jumping too.
Not that Laudor, Dinnerstein, and the young man, were self destructive in their origins. But they were trapped in the bourgeois leg irons of pretensions and airs. How could they navigate the streets of their suburbia barbecue when they had no seeing eye mentors for guidance thru the treacherous shoals.
Sensitive humans diminished & swept away in achieving hitech grubbing. Yet who could blame them. The cataracts from their hyperventilating, blinded them to realities playing out. How naive can you be? Feeling sorry for yourself.
No soup kitchens, labour gangs, welfare & food stamps, unemployment lines. YMCA rooms. Selling posies, corner of Chapel & Broadway. Snarling processes that delay & impede any growth & development in the course of the odyssey wherever.
Gardened guest houses, tennis courts, swimming pools, the two martini lunch, the trappings of tribal rites like E mail attachments for floppies, compound the slow descent into self pitying quicksand “it’s all so surreal, “said the waitress not knowing, Java was a computer language, handling a cup to Joel McCrea in ‘Sullivan’s travels’.
Honore Balzac scribbling his tales of hypocrisy amidst money making role players extraordinaire. No second citizens on the left bank, Henri, deux et les maggots. Coffee houses, oui.
In such a setting enters the gifted sweet third generation Laudor trying to make his mark. Long before the schism and tension between his body & soul erupts. The pseudo intellectual glitz, the peer pressure: all the elements for covering up one’s own velocity into a Michael Jordan acceleration are latent, hidden to a large degree, in the time table of growing up in a hot house arborium, with defense mechanisms for failure & rationalizations flowering.
Knowing the stuff of Arista, fraternities, initiation rites into privileged in groups. The hazing. Its intimidation, cowering in disbelief at the sadistic role models thrown up. Grade pressure to excel, surrounded by sympathetic relatives, uncles, kin with clout in highly influential places. We’re still being tested, folks, don’t ya believe in spontaneity. It’s all rigged.
No one admitting to failure. Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ drowned out.
The competitive juices not flowing, the adrenaline for sweeping energy not tapped. The priapus sexuality denied, Being afraid, lacking confidence, crippling instinct. “Andre no longer believes he can win, “said McEnroe, Agassi’s lackless effort to re-revert to the form that won Wimbledon, his will hampered by taking himself for granted. Not having grit, the hunger, the flight like he had. On the defensive, doubts creeping in. When all he wanted was really attention in the beginning.
“What’s the secret of your success?”
Having expectations, goals that are realizable, and realistic. Showoffing our plumery feathers, severing the umbilical chord of dependency, dysfunctional family disarray. Isn’t it all self serving interest, improvising, changing gears, overdrive. Not getting down on yourself, second guessing the father son Oedipus,
Lorenzo’s ‘On aggression’ depicts the hen packing status seeking rites of animals, weaning away from the womb. The Declaration of Independence.
But who in their right mind abandons protection for the uncertainty of a marketplace where hateanger fear jealously & envy dominate the attention spanners. Our prisons, asylums into the con. Not a morality, polluting the instant gratification wide band electronic commerce.
Searching for love & joy, the third generation Laudor finds alienation & crippling rejection. SAT scores of 1440 of a 1600 perfecto peer group of double clicks with a mouse. What’s your pops do for a living? How’s he make a buck? What’s his rating on the ladder? How much of an estate did he leave?
No one freaking out like Dr. Faustus. “There is at bottom only one problem in the world & this is its name. How does one break thru. How do I get into the open. How does one break the cocoon & become a butterfly?”
PART II
The writing pressure finally got to Lauder’s charismatic soulful sound a year before the garden apartment kitchen murder of his girl friend fiancee nurse. His speech had become slower, and friends in the network expressed concern about his growing inability of getting up in the morning and facing the wee small hours where he couldn’t produce a string of pearls on his processor.
The orange juice black coffee upper middle class strivings had become handcuffs and leg irons around the ankles of his unconscious mind. An invisible presence swindling originality. Emoting straightjacketed, shylocked?
Flipping the mask of conviviality as O’Neil wrote in ‘The Iceman cometh’ “Yes, Yes, Yes “said Molly to her lover in Joyce’s (the third generation Laudor’s) ‘Ulysses’.
Communal living’s life style was on a wave length of a different mode. Throwing the sensitive to the syntax of society’s trappings drums out their sound, their potential to make life worthwhile when actually there hardly is anything under the sun that is unique and beautiful. Especially golden boys written off as inevitably great. “Destined for what everyone thought was greatness”.
Where’s the empathy? Caring kindness for the wounds humans inflict on each other. A haven for those anguished cries in those wee small hours the Chairman of the board used to sing about. The synagogue where Laudor prayed twice a day for a deliverance. A divine intervention, a response to his davening - unheard by God in Heaven. Zeus.
Resilience and bouncing back. With a grin and a smile as the lyric goes. Human rights. Repression of dissent. Radio free Asia! 5000 years. Mainland America 200.
The enclaves of New Rochelle, Hastings. Compasspoints of a reality scene, where the populace is playing out their inner needs. The grated Bel Air gates of exclusiveness into Stone Canyon Road, and Sonny Tufts alcoholic binges on his hovel, where we mowed his lawn uphill, for chic pride of ownership.
The uniformed guard at his sentry’s post, locking out an invasion, a trespass “No have nots today and tomorrow. Deliveries around the back, kiddo, “biting off a cigar butt, blowing it to the wind.
Sure beats working from a central casting data base, doesn’t it? Driving a bus in some metropolis’s bumper 2 bumper commute.
Third generation Laudor thrown to the pack. Caught without a mentor. Denied a professorship, blocked on his processor. His dreams going up in smoke. An aggressive leading man burned out, another rejection from the elite.
What a price to pay for wanting only to be wanted. A friggen war outside the B locker room, the big boys and their mates oblivious to any else’s hard-nosed drive for recognition, except their own. “I’m real proud of you, Michael,” said the mother, Ruth, a lone cheering section, her husband, victim to prostrate cancer.
But the words came too late, those yesterdays of encouragement water off her son’s obsession. The neurosis feeding into its own tumors. Not a cure nor a web site. Sheer desperation, avoiding the screaming inevitable.
What a baptism for an adolescent whose appetite is to live up to his yearbook notices. Believing in his credits, fear of making it into grown ups “when you’re old & gray.”
Yale Law school’s reality of torts contracts procedure common law pleading negotiable instruments equity criminal law real property rules of evidence corporations personal property constitutional law Moot court had to give way to the world of Anna Freud, second floor. Who else had the expertise? The quiet mind? But it was 3 decades after the fact. Freud’s daughter had outlived her stipend, returning to her hospital, outside London.
Lenny Ross, editor in chief of the law review, perished years later in Silicon Valley, by drowning on his third attempt, scampering under a fence into a motel pool’s deep end.
His theological buddy turned law student, Jerry Brown, on his own kick upstairs from the L.A. Jr. College district, became Chief Exec. of California, appointing Lenny public utility regulator; later into his role at Bolt, teaching law on nukes, his own disaster, lurking in that motel pool.
Why can’t geniuses take the pressure off their psyche? In the scheme of our life with its stress & strain. Where is the missing link? Not to be beaten by yourself. Nor the trappings.
Once led astray, they’re lost to Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies Charlie Chaplin Buster Keaton. Whatever joy they could offer to generation X, from their own embrace of the yuppies was forgotten: diminishing returns, the actuary’s eraser rubbing them out.
F. Scott Fitzgerald at Sunset’s strip Garden of Allah, was nursed by gossip columnist, Sheila Graham, while scribbling his Last Tycoon. But the great Gatsby Tender in the night was doomed, following his dear Zelda into oblivion.
What was once exemplary talent goes astray into madness. Rarefied promise is thwarted. Its thrust three times removed as though Dr. Faustus struggle is too exhausting: the mind cracks, the overachieving snaps the brain’s presence, never again living up to the vision. Beyond the ordinary the commonplace A Nelson Riddle arrangement for old blue eyes. “I did it my way” not with his lifeline. A pity. What a shame, “sobbing moans & groans.
The posturing and snobbishness, dissimulating with sincerity, when all it is a Machiavellian bluff. The mean spirited evil that Nancy Sinatra bespeaks of hate letters on her internet domain. Revenge on the information highway playing itself out.
Motives and misfigured selfishness. Gads to be alive, swimming in these infested waters brings to mind Frederic March’s “Prisoner of Shark Island”. Ah to sleep,to dream. That’s the rub.
Who is who isn’t. Sycophancy beyond the highly sophisticated cosmos of Pride & Prejudice circles. Power & its concomitant fear. Throwing the gauntlet at the pundit’s assigned reading list, the third generation Laudor boy did his thing, chasing his N. Rochelle coed to Europe, where they did their gig. But her intuition was into his soul, and she chose another.
No homespun Holden Caufield nor Huckleberry for inspiration. Joyce’s Ulysses for 20th century Dublin? The former are indigenous for suburbia? The Hudson instead of the Mississippi A sensitivity like Holden unhampered by needing to prove himself. But Dublin? A man in a passion rides a wild horse says Franklin.
PART III
Stay Loose’s own brother came to grips with Lenny Serge aka Lenny Ross some 4 decades ago on the Verdugo Hills High track in Sunland-Tujunga, a meltdown of suburbia. Mister Farnham, the substitute teacher-law school student in roll book attendance “attent-hut”. Running in place. Okay, all of us together. Running in place! 50 jumping jacks, 10 pushups, 10 four-count burbys. Free play. Devil grass on the track? “Pull it kindly please.”
Lenny ran the quarter mile, a huffin & a puffin. Asthmatic, the Warner Brothers’ largesse establishing a facility for bronchial stressed young people. Treatment at heights higher than the San Fernnando Valley, to the south. He was off his game, out of shape for 30 days in the big Apple, cultivating his Midas touch for the 64000$ ? His category, the stock market, his recall for the finer points, catapulting him to heights reserved for grandmasters & Air Jordan. How could you beat it $200 a day, Colorado Springs. Broadmoor Hotel. Dr?. Luck out at prestigious AFAcademy’s B.O.Q.
The greenhouse effect on the ozone layers, the smog Lenny breathed in the Los Angeles basin, or the Clintons inhaled in Shanghai during their 10 day expedition to mainland China. 4 decades later the effect had gotten worse. The heat inversion contained those gasoline emissions from the freeways, and like the oxygen we breathe, it tainted our lungs, if not our neurosises. Coughing up phlegm, gasping for air ain’t no delusion. Right? Mister Farnham? Right!
Out on the track, Mr. Farnham sized up eleven year old Lenny. Did he have the mental toughness to go it alone. The humanities at Reed College, and Yale Law School and those contacts into major global capitol markets. Become a hard nosed greedy materialist? What’s to be of your 11 year old dreams & aspirations? Would he surrender, capitulate, give up to the cruelty, the pressure? Unable to become in the pursuit of himself? Vulnerable & tentative? Sadists, masochists, Captain Bligh’s whip lashing sarcasm “Mister Leonard, sir, could you, “ would you? “belittling, dissin. . . . . .
Mr. Farnham searching Lenny’s soul, wondered if he had the stamina to go the distance? Would he drop out. His nerves? Lame up, tired from the struggle? Could he tap into a second wind? Stay in there with the big boys? Sell out, give up?
Stay Loose’s older brother knew the looney tunes of our time. But what could he tell an 11 year old genius who was still in 8th grade, reality waiting 15 20 25 years down the road. Able to maintain his tempo, your stride. Believing in himself, keeping his game face. Not to choke up, emotions in check.
That there was a determinism, a pattern. A divinity if you will. A tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood lead on to fortune. Omitted all the voyages of his life are bound in shallows & miseries. On a such a full sea are we now afloat, & we must take the current where it serves, or lose our ventures. .
Would potential be short-circuited Aggression thwarted. Lose his way? Nobody to shore up a genius’s anxieties? “Your strengths outweigh your weaknesses. Let’s go for it, Prometheus.”
Coach Farnham could tell him. Nightmares of traumas, a block on his photographic memory, the frontal left lobe freezing for 43 years, opening June 1998, playing passive, a spinal tap, angiograms of mescaline, how to get pumped up, adrenaline’s faucet into the stream of consciousness. Yes Yes cries Molly in Joyce’s Ulysses.
To oust defeat from your insides, when you’re programmed for victory. Ah that’s the rub, Lenny, not to go back to the womb and its security. Tap into your potential from wherever. Verdugo Hills High, Mills, Yale Law, Columbia, Sacramento, Berkeley.
But the hang-ups for baby boomer achievers was still ahead for the 11 year old. To think big, persist and persevere from Sunland Tujunga Chapel Street to Portland, Oregon, California’s Silicon Valley. The dynamic energy, overcoming pettiness of nickel & dime opposition. God watchin over you, Lenny Serge aka Lenny Ross. Your friends are your worst enemies! Y’gotta believe in yer own intellectual honesty, it’s will power, boys & girls.
Should he offer Lenny a hand crafted Cuban cigar? A Castro disciple, after Batista’s overthrow, came to the states, carving the imperfecto cigars, with initials. “Whattya’ going to do with your loot, Lenny? Salt it away for retirement?” “Reckon I’ll invest it sir, “ he said, a blade of grass, a straw in his mouth. “You got anything hot. Good for a few points on a turnover Midsize corp, information highway like a Bill Gates Microsoft?”
They sat like 2 hunched over Indians, a teepee in the middle of the 1/4 mile track, the other boys hurdling, climbing the ropes in the gym, on the monkey bars, 2 man volleyball, 3 man basketball, kicking the soccer ball, legs, pate.
“How much capitol ya’got, Mr. Farnham?” “Whattya’ think of Royal Dutch?, Len. “Market is bullish. Oils are low. OPEC controls the spigot. World’s 4th producer got a new honcho hmm. 3% yield, sir. Lenny Serge aka Ross had no interior quarrel. “I can’t give you a good word, sir. Equation and the calculus of inflation, depreciation of purchasing power, common stock averages, Mr. Greenspan, and interest rates sounding like a broker from Truesdale Estates, north of Sunset, Beverly Hills, “International cartel. Shell, It’s American spoke. Dutch owns 25%. Ratio between earnings & Price is low. Don’t sell short or buy on margin, coach” he said, twirling the weed in his mouth.” I got it when it went on the big board Len, “the kid genius in blue shorts, breezy t-shirt, sweat socks, black sneaks, running past his youth, listening.
Where’s the quid pro quo? Making a living? No, punchball, jumping rope, stickball, hide & go seek, kick the can, pitching pennies, monopoly, association, pickupsticks, erector set, gin rummy, knock, 21, dominos, electric trains, balsa planes, 28 bicycle, basketball, tennis, handball, sandlot baseball, swimming, diving, roller skating, summer campouts, marshmallows, sings at the campfire, Home on the Range. Being a knot hole kid.
“Do I have to take a shower, Mr. Farnham?” The warning bell sounding. “No Lenny ya haven’t worked up a sweat.” “Thanks, coach.”
“My pleasure,” he said, waving his right arm, half hearted from the elbow to the shoulder. But from the fingertips to the elbow, relaxed, loose.
Lenny Ross twisted the combination on this locker. When you get old you get cold his Bubbe, Dora, used to say.
No Holden Caufield or Huckleberry Finn. A contemporary stud. Could the Laudor boy absorb the shocks & stings. The father expiating the hallucinations. Gone with pancreatic cancer. Be polite. Give the 5 other law schools our regrets, “ Michael told his brother, Don. Before the schism in his soul, his wounds dressed. Into a leadership role, the father shoring up his son’s support system for the repressed torrential scourge of schizophrenia.
Mental illness, sorting out his options, choosing like Lenny Serge aka Ross before him, the Paper Chase. “Make enuff $ to retire at 40. Spend rest of my life writing fiction.”
New Haven commons, the greens & frisbee throwing, library, Thursday night, steak night, in law school. Paneled walls. Ancient tables. Carved with initials. No one surrendering, squiggling under wired fences with self destructiveness.
God that I might read the book of Fate, and see the revolution of our times. The happiest youths would recoil. The perils, the crosses to ensue. They would shut the book, sit down , and die.
The 3rd generation into privilege, chances at the gold ring. No self deception of hi rise Madison Towers on Park, the Stiles Dorm, the Yale Coop, Art & Architecture, penthouse cafe. College bookstore. Solitude for study, the creative juices flowing.
Networking legal eagle turned literary agent. Jackie Collins big bucks. Hollywood trash of who’s sleeping with who. Sissy quick reads. Those martini expense accounts. Scribners old vintage firm of Max Perkins waiting for the inevitable. Packaging the yarn for global audiences. Way beyond Buck Rodgers Flash Gordon Superman.
But the word processor & the double click mouse were out of synch, the patient artist no longer taking his cocktail like for the HIV virus, he was estopped. The brain waves not connecting like Dreiser’s anti hero in the American Tragedy, drowning his pregnant girl friend, his genteel poverty duds donated to Good Will Industries.
But Ovid’s metamorphosis failed to materialize. Stabbing 10 times in the back & chest Carrie Costello again & again in the fury, those in the twilight of a summer camp for gifted children.
His distraught mother, 2 brothers, knew the twisted avenues the third generation Laudor took before turning himself in to campus police.
“On a good day it took 40% of his mental energies to keep the hallucinations at bay. A bad day, 90”claimed a screen writer.
A letter writer to the Times. . . “the optimism of the professional for the likely behavior of schizophrenics who are allowed to live in society. If anti psychotic medications no longer worked as well, doctors struggling in futility to find the right prescriptions as attacking HIV anti-virus immunity systems. Given Laudor’s history, & the fact he was experiencing delusions, Hallucinations, hearing voices, withdrawing into the shell of depression.
The doctors failure to confine him until such a prescription was found, seems inexcusable. . . unconscionable immoral, bordering on negligence, if not worse.
Because of an editing error, an article on Saturday about a fatal stabbing in Hastings-on-Hudson, misstated the medical history of the suspect’s father, Charles. He did not have a history of mental illness, however, there was a history of mental illness among some members of Charles Laudor’s family.
Revisiting Hastings on Hudson.............. March 23, 2009
