More importantly, I could use my department as a way in with kids otherwise hard to reach. Some of my patients were severely traumatized or schizophrenic or coming from families in extreme conflict or duress; the nature of these patients’ problems was, whatever their complexity, identifiable. (The psychiatrists—Eric was among the youngest—often put these kids on Haldol; more than one came to me exhibiting, as a result of the mysterious pill, “tardive dyskinesia”—involuntarily sticking out their tongues, clenching and unclenching their jaws, smacking their lips.) But I was also encountering more and more patients whose suffering wasn’t clearly related to their circumstances, or whose circumstances were most notable for their normality—intelligent middle-class white kids from stable homes who were fine until they weren’t: the lost boys of privilege.
Jacob, my first Film and Video Department “intern,” was a lanky sixteen-year-old from a suburb of Chicago who went from years of excelling in school to failing in the space of weeks; he stopped doing homework, started skipping class, began to smell of weed, to smell in general; he shrugged when confronted with threats of punishment. At first his parents—two successful Realtors—blamed his peer group, the underwhelming teachers. But when they moved Jacob to a private school he became a kind of heavy-metal Bartleby (he preferred Black Sabbath), friendless and increasingly unreachable, scratching pentagrams into his desk. If they demanded that Jacob account for himself at dinner, he would stop eating at the table, maybe stop eating dinner altogether. If they suggested they go see Star Wars as a family, he would look at them as if they were speaking drivel. He would disappear into his room unless he was skateboarding, his injuries suggesting a growing taste for self-inflicted harm. He would come in through the kitchen door a patchwork of weeping abrasions and when they’d ask him how he was doing, need some hydrogen peroxide, are you hungry, I can heat up some pizza, there was the shrug again; he’d grab a Pepsi from the fridge and go upstairs and leave them blinking at each other across their kitchen island as the muffled fury of his music started up. (I imagined this scene taking place simultaneously in kitchens all across suburbia, a vast performance of which the actors are unaware, directed by a mysterious force that goes by the name or misnomer of “culture”; it was the opening sequence of one of my unmade films.) Everybody is in fine health; he’s never been spanked, let alone abused; we make a good living; he wants for nothing; we don’t think he’s gay and we’d love him all the same. But soon Jacob isn’t even hiding his Marlboros. Soon he can’t be raised from bed in the morning and is raiding the liquor cabinet by night. They established a dry house, but Jacob had a plastic fifth of something in his closet, downed most of it one evening, stole their Cutlass, and crashed it into a parked car a few blocks away. For both parents and patients it all seems to happen so fast: one day you’re going to Dairy Queen in the minivan after baseball practice, raucously singing along to “We Are the Champions,” and the next day you’re listening to a judge explain that Jacob has a choice between a length of juvenile detention and psychiatric care. A friend of a friend recommends the Foundation in Topeka; back then, decent insurance almost covered it.
What I knew as much by instinct as by training was that when a boy like Jacob shows up in your cramped but light-filled office, you should not under any circumstances ask him to account for his behavior (or the eraser burns all over his forearms, although para-suicidal rituals were much more common among girls); Jacob would be the last person capable of such an account; if he had the language he wouldn’t express himself with symptoms. And by the time he finds himself looking over my shoulder at my diplomas (in the early years they required us to hang them), my mom’s Chagall print in its silver frame, the picture of Orson Welles at his Touch of Evil weight, Jacob will have encountered this impossible demand for explanation so often from parents and teachers and coaches and counselors and judges and mediocre shrinks that he can no longer imagine any other way of interacting with the supposedly expert and concerned. My goal—what Jane insisted was my gift—was to come in at an unexpected angle to those conversations that had only driven adolescent patients deeper into silence. I could initially get so little speech out of Jacob—couldn’t even get him to complain about being at the Foundation (“It must be annoying that they won’t let you smoke in the room”; nod)—that I started my own version of activity therapy.
When I bought a new Betamax camera in the second month of Jacob’s hospitalization, I asked for his help testing it out; we spent a session taking footage of the white-tailed deer that were always bounding around the south edge of the grounds where a salt lick had been established some years before. A storm came up quickly from the west and we had to sprint back to my building, getting soaked by warm rain in the process; I was trying, awkwardly, to protect the camera under my coat; Jacob, catching his breath beneath the overhang, laughed at me a little; we laughed at me together. After a few more collaborative efforts, I asked Jacob to be my department’s intern, a position, I went out of my way to note, that might be reported to parents and friends, listed on a future job application. Then we took an off-campus trip to Wolfe’s Camera and Video downtown to see what new stock had come in; I was careful to consult Jacob as a colleague, to honor his competence. We saw a matinee at Gage Theater for the purposes of research: What did you think of that closing shot? Here is a book about the history of television I thought you might be interested in. Here is a flyer about the new film production major at the University of Kansas, something to keep an eye on in the future. However unconventional, a therapeutic alliance had been formed.
Then speech and signifying silence could do their work. Jacob, who is better, Led Zeppelin or Judas Priest? Because I hear the blues influence in Zeppelin, but Judas Priest just sounds like shit to me; maybe I’m already too old. (A little cursing could go a long way in forging a connection, gesturing toward a lexicon beyond the institution.) Jacob, were the kids at the private school less cool than the kids at the public one? Now Jacob would at least respond—he was the first kid to call me Dr. J—and if I could get the rhythm of quiet right, I could draw him out a little. I wasn’t interested in extracting latent content, making manifest some deeper truth motivating Jacob’s speech; my goal was to make the kid feel heard. I didn’t mind the cliché; in fact, I admired the phrase, its rightness of fit, a mixture of the somatic and semantic; maybe it explained the desire for heavy metal that registered as touch as much as sound. How much easier it would be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages; if there were a backmasked secret order, however dark, instead of rage at emptiness.
* * *
I saw the young by day, the old by night. After dinner, Jane would ensconce herself in her study to write for a couple of hours. (By the sound of the Selectric through the closed door I could gauge how the book was coming; working now against the deadline of her pregnancy—red blood cells were forming in Adam’s marrow; he was now capable of opening his eyes inside her—I could hear a steady rain of key strikes.) While she worked I’d circle Potwin’s cobblestone streets with Klaus, who lived two blocks away, a six-foot-three incongruously elegant Berliner and senior analyst at the Foundation who’d moved in the late fifties to Topeka from Zurich, where he’d worked with Jung. As a young man Klaus had been an up-and-coming playwright, as well as a competitive amateur boxer, his nose broken twice by nineteen, the age at which he married Elke, who was known in artistic circles for her experiments with photomontage. They had a son, Fritz, in 1937; in 1940 Klaus attempted to smuggle them out of Berlin, paying to have them transported in a truck carrying dry goods to Holland, where he would join them. After the war he’d piece together the story of how they’d been betrayed; two gunshots forever echoing in the woods, in his inner ear. Klaus himself spent much of the war hiding in a chicken coop, dreaming of reunion with his family (although in his dreams, Klaus once told me, Fritz was a girl), composing dramas in his head to pass the time, his cramped conditions causing the large man constant physical pain. When you asked Klaus about those years—most people didn’t ask—you got jokes, mainly about chickens, what you could expect from them in the way of conversation, input on your plays. His parents and three sisters died in Auschwitz. Only we chickens survived, Klaus told me, smile gone, when I pressed.