My father (pictured far left, in the swordfish shirt) fought Fascism in World War II.
He left my mother (pictured, far right), my two older brothers, and my yet-to-be-born older sister to keep the world safe for Democracy. The innocent, nose-picking 3-year old in the attached 70 year old photo is me. I was born post-War, in 1949.
My father was sent from Brooklyn, N.Y., to the other side of the world to protect his family against tyrants and terrorism at home. We were very fortunate; my father, his brothers, and my other uncles came home, in one piece, without a physical injury or PTSD.
My life-partner Carol Villano’s family, the Jacobsons, were not so lucky: they lost a 20-year old son named Herbert Jacobson, after whom my brother-in-law was named. Herbert Jacobson, the brother of Carol’s father (who also went overseas to fight the Fascists) died fighting the Nazis, who were in the process of slaughtering 6 million of his fellow Jews.
My immediate family was far more fortunate than nearly half-a-million other American families whose courageous freedom-fighters never came home. They died because a monster named Hitler, an authoritarian nationalist, anti-Semitic sociopath, was obsessed with expanding his empire, steamrolling through sovereign states, and annihilating all Jews, and anyone he did not like.
Now, 40 million free, independent Ukrainians—Jews and non-Jews– are living through this nightmare again, because another megalomaniacal Fascist tyrant named Putin, wants to overturn the world order and expand his imaginary empire, ending one of the longest-lasting periods of “peace” in world history. The only “Nazification” that has occurred in this Russian attack on the free, independent country of Ukraine, is in the mind and methodology and worldview of Vladimir Putin.
Unbelievably, there are authoritarian-loving Americans in our own country, undermining the US military and cheering on a murdering Hitler-wannabe dictator. Those modern-day Quislings include Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, Tucker Carlson, Mike Pompeo, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Traitor Greene, and many members of what used to be known as the Republican Party. Now, however, the GOP has been transformed into Grifters of Putin, since the Party, the National Rifle Association, and many individual GOP elected officials have received millions of dollars from the Killer Kleptocrat from the KGB over the past 7 years. And they have no shame about selling out our country to a murdering madman. Ethel & Julius Rosenberg were executed as spies for doing far less to benefit Russia.
These desecraters of Democracy—some of whom defecated in our Nation’s Capitol Building on January 6, 2021–have thrown dirt on the memory of Private First Class Herbert Jacobson, and on those of my father and my uncles and of hundreds of thousands of other soldiers who have made superhuman sacrifices to preserve peace and save Democracy for their families, and for families, just like ours, around the world.
My father was a simple, uncomplicated man, who loved my mother passionately, loved his children, liked his beer, and enjoyed playing the horses. Without thinking twice about it, he helped save Democracy for us at home, and for all of Europe, because it was, simply, the right thing to do. The peace for which he left his family behind in Brooklyn, lasted for some 75 years, led to the creation of the United Nations, of NATO, and the birth of new Democracies around the world.
His service to his country, and to all of humanity, made it possible for me to be born with personal freedoms unimaginable to him a generation earlier, and to enjoy a simple, carefree vacation in Niagara Falls, Canada, 70 years ago with him, my mother and my sister.
Ukrainians, and future generations of Americans, like my son, my nieces and nephews, and grandchildren, deserve the same simple pleasures of a free, full life, without the threat of war or mass suffering or repression. The anniversary of my father’s birth is next week, and to honor him, and the free lives he gave us, I want the world’s Democracies–including our own–to rescue Ukrainian families from the darkness and destruction unleashed by another Fascist sociopath, possessed with wild-eyed ideas and weaponry meant to suffocate human beings, and all human rights and freedoms.
(Whoopi Goldberg’s Comments About the Holocaust Should Have Been Turned Into a Nationally Televised Teach-In on the Nazi’s Extermination of 6 Million Jews.)
***
The Nazis would have hated Whoopi Goldberg, and not just because she’s Black and a member of what they considered a “mongrel” or “inferior” race.
They would have hated her because this smart, articulate, fearless woman pulled their pants down in front of millions of Americans on Hitler’s biggest, deadliest, most enduring lie of all: that Jews were their own “alien” race, separate and apart from everyone else in the world, especially his hallucinatory “Aryans.”
In fact, as Lucy S. Dawidowicz wrote in her definitive The War Against The Jews 1933-1945, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Bantam Books, 1975): “race was the leitmotiv of National Socialism.” Helmut Nicolai who set up the Nazi’s Interior Ministry’s plan for depriving Jews of all human, civil and legal rights, told a group of German lawyers precisely that shortly after Hitler took power in 1933: “There is absolutely nothing that we, that the new state, do not consider or appraise under the aspect of race.”
The Nazi’s biggest Big Lie—the leitmotiv of National Socialism– which was at the root of every atrocity Hitler and the Nazis committed during their reign of terror, was to change the history of German jurisprudence and of legitimate scientific research, by declaring Jews as a new and different “Race.” They did that by making up the Nuremberg “Laws”—the antithesis of the rule of law—which obliterated all precedent in German Law— and codified Hitler’s life-long obsession with and jealously of the Jews; first, by stripping every Jew living within the borders of the Reich of their legal and human rights, and then by exterminating them.
Writing in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler declared that Jews had been “sailing under the disguise of a religious community,” in other countries, and he would unilaterally end that by denying thousands of years of Judaism as a faith, Jewish civilization, history and culture. Under the code of Hitler’s cult, Jews were deemed a lesser, competing race—“a spiritual pestilence worse than the Black Death”– that needed to be destroyed, in order for Aryans, a fictitious race, to survive.
Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on authoritarianism and author of the best-selling On Tyranny (Tim Duggan Books, NY, 2017) writes in his brilliant 2015 book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, that Hitler spent every moment “inverting reality,” with his warped worldview and would plunge the world into war to accomplish it:
“ (Hitler considered) the struggle against the Jews was ecological since it concerned not a specific racial enemy or territory, but the conditions of life on earth …Since the Jews fought with ideas, their power was everywhere, and anyone could be their knowing and unknowing agent. The only way to remove such a plague, was to eradicate it at its source…The elimination had to be complete: if one Jewish family remained in Europe, it could infect the entire continent.”
Within seven crazed pages in Mein Kampf (pages 314-321, Manheim translation), Hitler reveals the pervasiveness of his delusional pathology against the Jews,” by blaming “World Jewry” for creating both capitalism and Marxism. He viewed the Jews as a mortal threat to totalitarian rule because of the Jewish people’s centuries long support for civil and human rights, religious tolerance, moral ethics, freedom of expression, the advancement of knowledge, equality, and advocating for “democracy and parliamentarianism,” and the rule of law.
Professor Snyder went on underscore the full extent of Hitler’s madness in a 2015 The Atlantic Magazine interview when his book Black Earth was published:
“So what Hitler does is he inverts; he reverses the whole way we think about ethics, and for that matter the whole way we think about science. What Hitler says is that abstract thought—whether it’s normative or whether it’s scientific—is inherently Jewish. There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings—whether it’s a social contract; whether it’s a legal contract; whether it’s working-class solidarity; whether it’s Christianity—all these ideas come from Jews. And so for people to be people, for people to return to their essence, for them to represent their race, as Hitler sees things, you have to strip away all those ideas. And the only way to strip away all those ideas is to eradicate the Jews. And if you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into what Hitler sees as its primeval, correct state: Races struggles against each other, kill each other, starve each other to death, and try and take land”.
That kind of blistering indictment of Hitler’s insanity and the unimaginable nihilistic depths of his evil, may not have been what Whoopi had in mind when she exposed the Nazi’s Big Lie that Jews were a “race.” But, she pulled the white sheet off of one of the most grotesque of Hitler’s lies that, in some quarters, has survived for nearly 100 years.
We Jews are, and have always been, a civilization, a people, and a religion and culture dating back thousands of years. We are not, and have never been, a race. To accept the Nazi fiction that Jews constituted a separate race, is to have fallen for Hitler’s most pernicious lie of all. Hitler’s fever dream of branding Jews as a sub-human racial entity, was not a semantic exercise; it was a vicious vehicle to create the Ninth (and final) Circle of Anti-Semitism, to make Jews “irredeemable,” as Mordecai M. Kaplan has eloquently written in Judaism as a Civilization. Enslavement, pogroms, or forced conversion to Christianity—as tortuous and deadly as they were to generations of Jews–were no longer enough for the Nazis; only mass extermination would fulfill Hitler’s demented dream.
Whoopi Goldberg, a Black woman—whose human existence was not even contemplated in the US Constitution, and whose race was targeted for abuse, deprivation, and discrimination by Jim Crow laws even after American Slaves were emancipated—was criticized for telling the simple truth that the Nazis tore the world apart and massacred millions to deny: Jews, like many German-Christians, were Caucasians.
In fact, the Nazi’s themselves were upset to discover that Jews were not aseparate race, but part of the Caucasian race, when they were copying elements of the Jim Crow laws of some 30 American states in the early 1930’s as the basis for drafting their own “racial laws” against the Jews. Princeton Law Professor James Q. Whitman’s disconcerting book Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press, 2017)tells us that the Nazis felt it was a “gross error,” for Jews to be left out of America’s racist legislation. Many of the United States Jim Crow laws contained similar “drop of blood” strictures against Blacks—and criminal penalties for interracial marriage—that appeared in the Nazi’s Nuremberg “Laws.”
Whitman’s book revealed a discussion among Nazi lawyers when the radical Jew-hating Franz Gurtner (who would become the Reich Minister of Justice early in Hitler’s reign) expressed his disappointment that American Jim Crow laws didn’t include the Jews:
“This Legislation is not directed against Jews, but protects the Jews. That gives us nothing to work with; the aim of the American-style approach would be the contrary of our own.”
In short, while the Nazis initially felt America’s Jim Crow laws went a bit too far with punishment for miscegenation (although they later made the punishment for Jewish intermarriage with Germans more severe), they were upset that the American states had not subjected Jews to the same inhumane punishments as Blacks.
Karl Klee, Presiding Criminal Court Judge and Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Berlin, and a Nazi extremist among the Judiciary, did, however, see some use in America’s Jim Crow laws. He saw America—a leading democracy—giving the Nazis permission to declare Jews to be a separate race, and construct the racist Nuremberg dictum specifically against the Jews, the way America’s Jim Crow laws targeted Blacks. Professor Whitman found:
“Klee viewed American segregation as a form of ‘Nazi-style’ race protection, intending to alert the White population to the menace posed by Blacks. Jim Crow, Klee argued, was the American equivalent of one of the principal “race protection” strategies Nazis were using against the Jews…”
I signed my Certificate of Conversion to Judaism 42 years ago, in 1980, when the fundamentalist Christian group, the Moral Majority, was declaring that America was a “Christian Nation.” I agreed to “cast in my lot with the Jewish people and to live in accordance with the Jewish religion,” as the Certificate specifically stated. Nowhere on the Certificate, nor anywhere else, was there box to check for race, nor an oath to sign for ethnicity. I attested in writing, and verbally before a panel of three Rabbis, that I “knew and understood the principles and practices of Judaism.” At no time was I ever asked to join a “race” of Jews, or to recite a secret mantra.
Instead, I remembered the words of Holocaust survivor and Pulitzer Prize recipient Elie Wiesel from his 1978 book A Jew Today, written just two years ahead of my Conversion to Judaism, and over a decade before I worked with Wiesel on a project to promote greater understanding between Jews and Blacks in NYC:
“Whatever he chooses to do, the Jew becomes a spokesman for all Jews, dead and yet to be born, for all beings who live through him and inside him. His mission was never to make the world Jewish, but, rather, to make it more human.”
(Francis Bacon’s “Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror.”)
I tried to kill myself as a teenager, and I’m glad I didn’t succeed. Now, I want to educate others about my suicide attempt, and how to save the lives of those you love.
I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide lately. No, not committing it — I’ve already tried that once.
This time, it’s how I’ve become more committed to sharing with others the mysterious spiral toward suicide I traveled as a teenager, to the very ledge of taking my own life. Instead, at the last possible moment, I stepped back from the abyss, refusing to jump into it.
“Live, you asshole, live,” I screamed at myself. Suicide was not what it was cracked up to be. All I wanted was a different life.
This year, with the CDC reporting that suicide attempts rose nearly 50% in adolescent girls, ages 12–17, from 2019 to 2020, and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry revealing that teen suicide is, currently, the second leading cause of death among adolescents, ages 10–24, I’ve become obsessed with shining some light into the dark corners of young psyches, by revealing what caused me to come close to abandoning all hope, at the age of 18.
The recent suicide of Congressman Jamie Raskin’s brilliant son, Tommy, during the height of his depression and depths of the COVID pandemic, has convinced me of the urgency of sharing my story, of my battle with depression and loneliness, and of not being accepted for all of my differences.
What slapped me hard across the face, when I read Raskin’s moving bookUnthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy, Harper/NY, 2022, was the section Congressman Raskin wrote about how his son Tommy behaved during the final week, when he took his own beautiful life:
“ …that rambunctious, loving, exuberant, combative, funny Tommy was absent the last week of the year. He was cool as a cucumber, patient and removed, inscrutable. He was unusually calm, even serene at points. Looking back, I see it clearly: he was acting logistically, methodically, precisely…He was stage acting. He was acting out the theme of I am not depressed and everything is fine because he did not want to alert us or activate us to undo his plans.”
That paragraph, on page 97 of Unthinkable stopped me cold. I had followed the same exact script as Tommy did, when I was in the final days of preparation for my own suicide attempt. Apparently, there was a predictable “suicide slide,” a stride we had gotten into, as we rounded third and headed for home:
“ . . . a lot of people who resolve to do it experience a kind of relief in their decision, instantly shedding anxiety and worry, and then a focused determination to execute their decision,” Congressman Raskin wrote. “Whatever compulsion drives suicidal ideation gives people, at least in some cases, a strange sense of direction. It is hard to reconcile an act of such shattering and destructive consequence for the people left behind with a commanding clarity of purpose, but it is apparently not unusual.”
I remembered reading a similarly chilling description in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, written several centuries earlier,when, on the cusp of killing himself, the young protagonist said: “Everything is so still around me, and so calm within my soul.”
I was stunned by the pervasiveness of that predictable pattern of behavior when the decision was made to end one’s life. I had lived it. If only I had talked about it years ago, I thought, perhaps I could have tipped off the Raskins of what to look for, and could have saved Tommy’s life, and the lives of so many others. If only, if only….
This is not a clinical analysis of suicide and suicide ideation. That can be found in the research of the Brain & Behavior Foundation, where brilliant scientists and doctors intensely examine gene and other potential risk factors to gain insight into suicidal thinking. However, our purposes are the same: to educate ourselves and others to intervene as early as possible to prevent suicide attempts.
I don’t want to say “if only I had written or spoken more boldly,” I could have helped save lives, and alert families about the sometimes deceitful signs of deep depression — for which treatment is available, and from which rescue is possible. I don’t want parents, siblings or friends to regret not asking “what’s going on with you,” or to be afraid to dig beneath the surface calm.
That’s why I’ve decided to tell my story, in simple, unscientific language, of why I tried suicide as a teenager, and how I survived:
****
“Live you asshole; Live!”
I knew I was different from the rest of my working-class, Italian-American family; an outsider, determined to find my own way; a way out of the chaos in our lives that was a constant. At 16-yeas old, I already wanted nothing to do with anyone I associated with such disorder.
My way of making peace with constant crises, to survive, was to become preternaturally calm, almost catatonic, in the teeth of the snarling chaos that engulfed us. It was precisely how I reacted one night in high school when I was looking at some old books in the storage closet above my parents’ bed. I heard a car door slam on the street out in front of our house, and then could make out my sister’s voice downstairs, arguing with my father. After a few minutes, my father raised his voice. Suddenly, my sister ran back outside, slamming the front door of the house behind her.
Within minutes, my father, cursing with each step, raced up the one flight of stairs to the bedroom where I was, and began furiously searching for something in the floor-to-ceiling closet in the opposite corner of the room. He didn’t see me, sitting up in the storage closet across the room from him. His face red with rage, my father emerged from the other closet with a shotgun he had stashed far in the back, behind hanging clothes. I froze.
With the shotgun in one hand, my father began tossing underwear out of his dresser drawer, looking for the rifle’s cartridges. I watched all of this in disbelief. My father kept muttering, “I’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch, I’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch,” referring to the news my sister just told him. Unmarried and in her late teens, she informed him she was pregnant.
Before my father could find the bullets he wanted, my mother burst into the room.
“Al! Al! What are you doing? What are you, crazy?” she hollered at him. She slammed shut the bedroom door, throwing her chubby body in front of it, her huge breasts heaving up and down in terror and courage and instinct, like a female lion protecting her cubs.
“You’ll have to shoot me first,” my mother cried out, blocking the door.
They remained frozen in place for what seemed like hours, staring each other down, my mother sobbing, chest pounding. She did not budge from her position in front of the door, knowing that my father would never harm her. I was invisible to them, watching in silence from the storage closet, holding a book in my lap and thinking, wishing, that what I was witnessing was not real.
My mother, immovable and blocking the only way out of the room, stood my father down. He lowered his head, then the shotgun, walking slowly over to the other closet where he got it and placed the weapon back behind the hanging clothes. I sat there, still motionless and silent, observing my father embrace my mother when he walked over toward the bedroom door, where she stood like a sentry. I watched them walk out of the bedroom together, without saying a word to me, and wondered how I had stumbled into the middle of all of this. I was an observer, not a participant, in this chaotic life.
Numb to what I had witnessed and unable to talk about the trauma with anyone until decades later, when I recounted what I saw in great detail to six different therapists, I gradually began removing myself from my family, wanting no part of it. I became obsessed with getting out, and living a different life. I was terrified of staying stuck in my father’s world, with no time to think nor calm down nor breathe. I feared falling into the same deadening pattern of his life, of just getting through each day, getting up, getting out to work; to earn, back home to eat, to rest, to sleep, to brace himself for more of the same the next day and for days and weeks and months on end, until something makes you snap. As a lonely and confused teenager, I had no idea of where I would go or what I would do, but one thing was certain: I had to get out of where I was.
One of my sisters-in-law, sensed my growing unease and remarked how different I was from the rest of the men in my family.
“You don’t belong in this family,” she said to me at one Sunday dinner where the entire family was gathered. She shook her head and laughed: “Are you sure you weren’t adopted?”
Meant as a compliment, her comment stung me. I knew I was different — in fact, I wanted to different — but didn’t think it was so noticeable to my own family. Education would be my escape hatch, as would the arts and public service. I became enmeshed in after-school clubs like student council and the school newspaper and kept speaking and writing, and, like Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton, “wrote my way out” of my circumstances and into a full, four-year journalism scholarship to New York University.
I was the first in my family’s history to attend college, viewing NYU as my way out; an all expense-paid ride to new and unfamiliar places and far different experiences, which came at me fast and furiously. In my frenzy to flee from my old life, I underestimated how unprepared I was for a new one.
Sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park, I took out a copy of Plato’s Republic to read for my first-year Politics course. In the late 1960’s, NYC’s Washington Square Park was not a gentrified place; drug dealing and bocce were the two most popular sports. Each time I tried to read a page of my book, I was badgered by some disheveled looking guy asking for money or cigarettes, or whether I wanted a blow-job or a prick up the ass.
“You want a nickel bag?” asked the raggedy guy, sitting next to me on the bench.
I edged away toward the end of the bench.
“No, no thanks,” I said, pretending to go back to reading my book. I didn’t know what a nickel bag was, assuming it was some kind of cheap condom, since his offer came on the heels of a few offers for quick sex.
I got up from the bench and went back to my dorm room at the old Brittany Hotel on East 10th Street, extra housing NYU purchased for its growing student population. I shared a room on the 10th floor with four other roommates, all wealthier and worldlier guys from far away sounding places like Scarsdale, Shaker Heights and Santa Monica. Embarrassed to reveal my ignorance about both sex and drugs, I kept my “nickel bag” story to myself, climbed up on my bunkbed and tried to continue reading my book. I read quietly, curled up like a cat in a corner of my bed for about an hour, wanting to shut my eyes, and the rest of the world.
One of my roommates, a handsome, broad-shouldered athlete, came striding into the room. He came over to the side of my bed and flashed a dazzling smile.
“You mind disappearing for about an hour, Steve? I’ve got this girl coming over for a quick fuck, and I need a little privacy,” he said.
“Oh-uh-s-s-sure, sure,” I stammered. Of course I’d leave. Here was a cool, confident college man about to have actual sex, a subject about which I knew nothing. I’d want someone to offer the same courtesy to me, if ever I could imagine what a quick fuck entailed, or any fuck, for that matter.
I left the dorm and headed down to the Loeb Student Center to try to study some more. I watched sophisticated and self-confident couples embrace and kiss and laugh with each other. Their easy intimacy underlined my loneliness. I felt like an outsider within my own family; a misfit in Washington Square Park; and, a weirdo in relation to my rich, college roommates who saw me as the token poor boy, taking up their time and space in an overcrowded dorm room.
A few hours later, I slowly walked back to the Brittany and found the room empty. All of the beds, except mine, were unmade. I looked out of the window down to East 10th Street to see if I could find my roommates coming or going up the block to grab some dinner. I didn’t want to eat alone, but there was no sign of them.
I stared down at the sidewalk from 10 stories up and imagined what it would feel like if I jumped; what it would look like to passers-by; my head smashing on the concrete, arms and legs splayed in every direction, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz when the Flying Monkeys attack, and toss his straw asunder. The thought of strangers leering at my crumpled body parts, tsk-tsking in sympathy, and of my roommates giving each other the smug “we-knew-he-wouldn’t-make-it,” look, repelled me. I stepped back from the open window, knowing it would be impossible to grab a passing ledge, if, somewhere along my journey down to East 10th St., I changed my mind. I wanted to hedge my bets. Instead, I took the elevator down from the 10th Floor of the Brittany, stepped out into the crisp, fall night air of NYC, and walked past the spot where my body would have landed.
Without jumping out of any windows, I was tumbling out of control, unable to catch my breath. At night, I was too frightened to leave my dorm; in class, I was intimidated by how self-confident everyone appeared to be. I was awed by the Orthodox Jewish students, dressed alike, traveling together, gesturing to each other with passion, arguing, and sounding so certain. They knew who they were, where they belonged, and that they belonged.
Overwhelmed by my surroundings and the people in them, I cut classes, and spent days wandering around the City. I fell behind in my readings and class assignments. I isolated myself from my roommates and wandered the streets for some solace, and found myself ducking into St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church on Sullivan Street, just below Washington Square Park. I needed a quiet place to get away from the sounds of the street, and the even louder noises of my mind. I knelt in a pew at the back of the church and looked up at the ceiling.
“Sanctuary, sanctuary,” I said quietly, remembering the scene in the Hunchback of Notre Dame when Charles Laughton, playing Quasimodo, defiantly rang the church bells. Like the Hunchback, I felt deformed, totally different, out of place; someone being stared at because I was so unlike my classmates at NYU in the late 1960’s. Unrecognizable and invisible to everyone, even myself.
I sat inside St. Anthony’s and thought of my father, sitting next to me in church on Sunday mornings. I had grown to despise the Catholic Church, for the hold it still had on me, the fears it fueled about sex, it’s hypocritical condemnation of gays when so many of its priests were gay, it’s degradation of women, it’s insane support for the War in Vietnam. Yet, it’s predictable regimentation kept me tethered to all that was familiar. All that the Church still held for me was a quiet place where I could be with my father, alone — a rare moment in time.
I looked to my right, and caught myself wishing my father was there to tell me that I could make it at NYU; that everything would be fine. I wanted the Church, or better still, my father, to offer protection from the callous City which shrugged me off each time I tried to look it in the face.
I stared at the flickering memorial candles behind the altar rail. My eyes fixated on the flames dancing wildly, side by side, catching each current of air as someone walked by; licking up, over the edges of the shot-glass sized candleholders, with wax filling their red-tinted bottoms. I stayed in the church pew throughout the afternoon, watching the flames burn down to the pool of wax at the base of each candleholder, until finally, the candles quietly closed their eyes, ending their short, bright existence.
In that soft, darting light, and the twists of wispy black smoke that followed the flames’ disappearance, the outline of a simple plan emerged. I would quietly snuff out my own flickering little light. I would know when the time was right.
Less than one week later, I gathered on a Sunday afternoon with my brothers and sister and their families to celebrate our parents’ wedding anniversary. As my mother cooked in her tiny kitchen, the rest of us made small talk around the dining room table. My father abruptly turned to my older brothers and brother-in-law asking if they wanted to go out to grab a drink at a local bar before dinner. To them, and especially to my father, I was invisible again, as I was the day of the shotgun incident, two years earlier. All the other men in the family jumped up and followed my father out the door. I was an observer again, not a participant. I wanted to be invited, not excluded. My sister, noticing the hurt look on my face, asked me if I was okay. I lied, assuring her I was, pretending that I’d rather be home anyway. It was that final, small slight, the last gasp of my own quivering light, that convinced me there was no other way out than the one I had chosen.
There is a clarity and a certain quiet that comes when you decide to end your own life. All chatter stops — in your mind, from others, from other sources. A shroud of silence envelops you, which nothing and no one can penetrate. Everything moves in slow motion, and the tiniest action — the movement of a finger, the parsing of lips, the fluttering of an eyelash — is magnified. I was dumbfounded how I had not seen the simplicity of the solution before: the way out for an outsider is to leave; one way or another, just leave. During dinner, I watched my brothers’ lips moving, my father’s eyes glistening from a few drinks too many, but I heard nothing. Nothing anyone said mattered anymore. My decision was made; the scar tissue had hardened. I was immune to any more slights or pain.
That night, after everyone left and my parents were asleep, I slipped quietly into the bathroom. Carefully, I opened the medicine cabinet and picked an everyday poison as easily as I picked a pair of socks to wear that morning. The poison was a common household ointment collecting dust; a small tube with a tiny skull & crossbones on the back of it, warning against swallowing the white stuff that could be mistaken for toothpaste. I squeezed a small section of the contents of the tube on my left forefinger, placed it on my tongue, and ran back into my bedroom to wait for it to work. I pulled the cover up, tightly against my chin, expecting my body to suddenly get cold.
I wanted my death to be painless and quick — -no muss, no fuss, no blood — unlike jumping out a 10-story window at NYU, and unlike those suicides you read about in the New York Post where some poor soul blows his brains out by sticking a loaded gun into his mouth. Too messy, too violent; I wanted clean and quiet, like the wick of a candle, whispering itself out in its own wax.
I lay in bed, every sense on alert, my heart knocking hard on the inside of my chest as if it wanted to get out and have no part of what was going on. I stared at the shadows which moved across my ceiling, sometimes gliding slowly, sometimes fast, as cars passed up and down the block, headlights piercing the darkness of my room like giant searchlights slicing through the night sky, looking for anyone trying to escape.
I slid down under the covers to get free of the spotlights glare, all the time hoping the searchlights would find me and make me part of whatever it was they were doing. I closed my eyes tightly to make visions of my parents disappear. I touched the soft lump of poison on my tongue to make sure it was still there, and hadn’t slid down my throat. I imagined seeing the walls, moving closer to my bed; almost touching my feet, now my arms, pushing in on the headboard, driving me deeper under the covers in a tight fetal curl; giving me a few more seconds of life, a few more quiet breaths before I suffocated. Everything was silent.
“This is crazy,” I said aloud. “I don’t want to die. I just want a different life. Live, youasshole, live!” I commanded myself.
I threw the covers off my head, gulping for air, desperate for some saliva for my dry mouth, forgetting for a moment about the blob of poison on my tongue.
“Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit.” I felt the poison slide down my throat. I jumped out of bed and, wearing only my underpants, ran downstairs through the darkened house into the kitchen. Swinging open the refrigerator door, I fumbled among the beer and soda bottles and orange juice containers and found a nearly full half-gallon of milk.
“Induce vomiting,” I babbled, “induce vomiting,” remembering the instructions on the tube of ointment in case it was accidentally swallowed. Milk. Milk; drink more milk than your stomach can handle.
I ran back upstairs, clutching the cold milk container to my chest, careful not to trip or make too much noise that would wake my parents. I ducked into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. My heart was pounding against my chest. I tore open the milk container and started swigging huge mouthfuls from it; one after another, with milk dribbling down the sides of my mouth, dripping down from my chin and neck and chest and onto the tiny, square white-and-black tiles covering the bathroom floor.
I watched the reflection of my mouth and throat and the milk carton in the medicine cabinet mirror. I swallowed and swallowed again, not coming up for air until I felt my stomach swell. I placed the milk container down on the floor next to the sink, grabbed onto the side of the toilet with one hand, and thrust the fingers of my other hand deep down my throat, frantic to reach past my tonsils and pull out the poison. My hand, reaching into my mouth, helped the heaves begin, and they did not stop until there was nothing left to bring up.
“There. There it is,” I said softly in a weak declaration of triumph. I watched the white lump float to the surface of the milky water in the toilet bowl. I stared at it for a few seconds; just long enough to be certain of what it was, and then, I flushed it away. The white, cloudy toilet-bowl water was replaced with a small, clean whirlpool of clear water; a fresh start, a rare chance to begin again, and start building a new life.
Kevin Costner, long before “Yellowstone,” as Crash Davis in “Bull Durham,” expresses his beliefs.
I Believe in Consequences.
(*Highlighted Beliefs Courtesy of Crash Davis in “Bull Durham.*)
I believe in consequences.
*I believe in the soul, the cock and the pussy;*
I believe that people and companies ought to be held strictly accountable for their actions;
I believe unvaccinated US Troops should be dishonorably discharged for insubordination.
I believe that all public employees should be mandated to choose between a COVID jab, and their job.
*I believe in the hangin’ curveball;*
I believe that hospitals and doctors and nurses should be allowed by law to refuse treatment and hospital beds to unvaccinated patients;
I believe that NO children should be allowed into a public school unless they and their parents are vaccinated, with no squishy exceptions;
I believe that corporate CEO’s and executives whose products knowingly harm humans, like the Sacklers, the Koch Brothers, Big Tobacco, and Gun Manufacturers should serve mandatory jail time, not just pay multi-million dollar fines;
*I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone,*
I believe Trump & his fellow criminals and co-conspirators who plotted or acted to overthrow our Democracy should face life-in-prison, without parole, and be forced to recite the entire Constitution daily before they get their meals in jail;
I believe that people who commit hate crimes be imprisoned for a minimum of four years and be forced to learn Critical Race Theory and Diversity Training before they are eligible for parole;
I believe rapists and sex abusers—especially those who attack children—should be castrated;
*I believe there ought to be a Constitutional Amendment outlawing Astroturf and the Designated Hitter,*
I believe there ought to be a Constitutional Amendment banning corporate money, foreign money, laundered money, dirty money, or money made through shell companies from political campaigns or to bribe or pay present or former public officials;
I believe the Second Amendment ought to be amended restricting the “right to keep and bear arms,” to one handgun gun per citizen who has passed a civics test, a mental health examination, and is registered in a national gun-owners registry;
I believe that the manufacture, importation, sale, display, distribution or trade of any assault-style weapon should be banned and all such existing guns—and their ammunition– be melted into scrap-metal to be used for re-building bridges or as metal studs for housing;
*I believe in the sweet spot & soft-core pornography,*
I believe that no laws should be passed regulating the use of a uterus, penis, or anus, as long as no living human being is harmed by such use;
I believe that Roger Stone & Steve Bannon should be banished to Guantanamo in perpetuity, and deprived of all TV, internet service and human contact and forced to read the works of Jose Marti.
I believe Kevin McCarthy ought to be placed under House arrest in Modesto, California, in the same Delicatessen where he did his last honest work;
I believe that TV commentators, public officials or public figures like Tucker Carlson or RFK, Jr, who pedal disinformation and lies about health & medical issues, should be forced to clean hospital bed pans for the rest of their natural lives, and have their personal fortunes confiscated to fund health clinics in underserved communities;
*I believe in long, slow, deep, soft wet kisses that last three days,*
And, I believe, that, as long as I am with another consenting adult, NO ONE has the right to tell me who I can kiss, or love, or choose to share my life.
