The Martin Duberman Reader (37 page)

“Well, how can I put it without sounding rude?”

“Don't worry about that,” he interjected.

“You see, I've never thought of the universe as exactly ‘benign.' I don't see how anyone can, given the misery everywhere around us.”

“When I speak of the ‘benign nature of the universe,' I am refer
ring to its amplitude. The rhythmic renewal of all things. Nature's continuing ebb and flow.”

That's just what I was afraid you meant,
I thought uneasily, putting him down as an utter lightweight. I nodded in vague assent, but said nothing. Pierrakos allowed the pause to lengthen. Then he said, “I suspect it is precisely this universality that you are out of touch with.”

Then, without waiting for a reply, he went on: “It has been a difficult time for you. Not knowing what to do to feel better, you have come here. But you keep asking yourself
why
. What I suggest is that too much of your life has been ‘Why, why?' With no answers coming back, eh? You are here. That is enough.” He stood up and gestured toward the adjoining bathroom. “Please go into the bathroom and strip down to your underwear.”

“Strip down to my underwear?” I echoed in disbelief.

When I remained rooted to the chair, he added, “To offer a full diagnosis, I must see your body.”

Still in shock, I headed toward the bathroom. Watching me, Pierrakos suddenly said, “There is surprising strength in your movement. Even as you equivocate.”

“I don't understand. . . .” I mumbled.

“Excellent! For you, not understanding is already an advance. The value will be precisely in the foreignness. If I may quote St. Augustine, ‘Believe
so that
you may understand.' ”

St. Augustine, eh? That adds a little weight to the proceedings,
I thought sardonically, trying to neutralize the compelling feel of what he'd said. I proceeded dutifully to strip down to my underwear. When I reappeared, I nervously asked if I could keep my socks on. “It's chilly in here.”

“Socks off,” Pierrakos peremptorily replied. “It is essential to see the way your foot grasps the ground.”

Off came the socks. He then placed me in front of a large mirror, and walked slowly around me, stroking his chin and grunting inaudibly.

“It is very much as I thought,” he finally said. “Except for the
legs.” He let out a small groan. “Ai, the legs. The legs are
much
worse even than I expected.”

I flushed with embarrassment. I had had polio as a teenager and had long felt self-conscious about my thin legs. I resented attention being called to them.

“There's nothing wrong with my legs,” I said defensively. “I happen to be in very good shape for a man my age. So I've often been told, anyway.”

“Yes, no question about it,” he said without enthusiasm. Then he added enigmatically, “Even as a young child you were treated as a Greek god, no?”

“I don't think I'd put it quite that way—”

“—and as an adult much attention, much applause still comes your way, eh? But now it does not please you so much. Now you are more the melancholy god. Perhaps no god at all, eh? Perhaps now too much the opposite, in fact.”

I felt acutely uncomfortable and reached for the familiar as an anchor: “You mean what my ex-therapist used to call my God/shit syndrome.”

Pierrakos seemed not to have heard. “Now there is a dry, hopeless quality,” he went on. “Great sadness. A sadness you often enjoy.”

“ ‘Enjoy'!” I snorted in protest.

“You take great pride in suffering, in the assumption you feel more pain than others. It is your badge of superiority, no?”

As I began to mouth a protest, Pierrakos sailed right on. “You are also a man of deep feeling.” (Now
that
was decidedly better!) “Feelings that are now largely immobilized. Allow me to demonstrate what I mean.” With that, he directed my gaze into the mirror. I reflexively flinched, never having liked staring at myself. Pierrakos immediately picked up on that.

“I expected you to flinch. You are an intellectual. Intellectuals dislike paying attention to their bodies.”

“Isn't that something of a cliché?”

“You are right. Perhaps I should have said, they do not like to touch the ground. Look at your feet. Look at how your feet curl
away from the floor—as if you were touching hot coals. You are so badly grounded!” He let out a yelp of distress.

“Walk!” he ordered. “Walk!” When I did, he barked, “See, see? Your feet barely grasp the ground. Your walk is gingerly—like a pussycat. Now, come and see the difference.” He pulled me back in front of the mirror. “Look! Look here!” he said, poking my upper torso, his voice exuberant. “Look at the difference! Look at how easily the energy flows through your chest and shoulders! The vibrations are full, steady—really quite wonderful! And sitting solidly in the center: a great head,
alive
with energy.
Pulsating
energy!”

As I proudly stole a glance at the mirror, Pierrakos shifted his gaze back to my lower torso, sighed, and scowled. “You are like two halves of two different people. The top is a giant. But connected to what? To nothing. A Greek god with no pedestal, no base.”

“Is it as bad as all that?” I asked, not sure whether to laugh at the dramatics or cry at my plight.

“We will
build
a base!” Pierrakos nearly shouted. “We will bring the energy bunched on top down . . . down into those melancholy legs. We will ground you to the earth!” He grabbed my hand and moved me over to the wooden sawhorse in the middle of the room. “Come! I will show you more.”

He positioned me on my back on top of the sawhorse, with my arms hanging loosely over the sides. Then he told me to start slowly kicking my legs into the air, gradually increasing the tempo. As I kicked away, he watched me intently, occasionally encouraging me with a “Good, good.” After a while my legs began to ache, but he cheerfully told me to “keep going—keep going!” As I started to pant, and then groan, he unexpectedly said, “Your great sadness comes from your inability to find love. You have a large capacity for love. But it is thwarted.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. “This is really beginning to hurt,” I said, with no metaphor in mind.

“Yes. Faster now, faster.”

“Faster? This is killing me!”

“The opposite, I assure you.”

“It hurts like hell!”

“What
does?” Pierrakos asked eagerly.

“My legs are
killing
me! I can't keep this up!”

“You can, you can. Your legs are shriveled. . . . Stretch them out. . . . Stretch them! Climb into the sky, Martin. Climb! Higher, higher. Reach into the sky. Reach up to your mother. . . . The more you feel the pain, the less its hold on you. . . .”

That did it. I was sobbing uncontrollably. But when I abruptly stopped kicking, Pierrakos grabbed my legs and set them back in motion.

“I can't!” I groaned. “I
can't
!”

“A little longer . . . just a little longer. . . . Feel the pain, you must feel the pain. . . .”

My whole body started to shake, my legs spastically shooting into the air. “You are very brave . . . very brave,” Pierrakos said encouragingly. “You are going straight into the abyss. . . .” (
Hadn't I heard that during LSD therapy? Probably came from the same New Age workbook.
) Then—just as I thought I would pass out—Pierrakos suddenly grabbed hold of my legs to stop them and wrapped me gently in his arms. “It will be all right, Martin . . . it will be all right . . .” he whispered soothingly. “So much pain . . . so much pain. . . .”

My body shook with sobs, but Pierrakos held me tight, softly rocking me back and forth. The warmth from his powerful, encompassing arms entered directly into my body. By comparison, my embrace of him felt constricted, lame. I suddenly knew that I trusted him—trusted the feel of him; my suspicions dissolved.

It took a good five minutes to calm down enough to begin to breathe normally. Pierrakos gently released me and suggested I get dressed.

Afterward, we sat and talked again. He repeated his conviction that whereas I had no trouble “activating” my intelligence, I had great trouble “finding a focus” for my emotions, getting them to work for me. He repeated, too, that my pain was “enormous”
and
that I “took considerable pride in it.”

I said I was amazed that so much had come out of me just by kicking my feet in the air.

“And you lived through it,” Pierrakos replied, smiling.

We both laughed, which prompted another homily—“You see, after pain comes laughter”—that I liked less. The follow-up made me still more uncomfortable: “And your aura has changed—from muddy gray to pale blue.”

“Aura?”

“The color around a person's head.”

“I'm afraid I don't believe in that sort of thing.”

“It's a well-established scientific fact,” Pierrakos said nonchalantly. “But it doesn't matter. We don't want you becoming adversarial. Combativeness is how you have always dissipated strong feelings—feelings better put to other use.”

That sounded right. But I wasn't prepared to have all strong feelings reduced to a single status. I needed to know more about
what
he and I disagreed over, before deciding which part of it I could “put aside.” Especially since Pete had warned me that Pierrakos “tended to be traditional in sexual matters.” And so I asked him directly what he felt about my homosexuality.

“I have no bias against homosexuality. I pass no judgment on it.”

Too flat, I thought; the first part sounds rehearsed, the second part a polite way of being negative. I wanted to know more.

“Would changing my sexual orientation be any part of the therapeutic agenda?”

“I have no interest in changing your orientation. If I questioned anything, it would be the way you separate love and sex—not who you have sex with. And I will not disguise from you my belief that anonymous sex, or sex with comparative strangers, is not in your own best interest. It works against wholeness.”

That sounded less judgmental about homosexuality than anything I'd heard in psychotherapy in the sixties, but the part about “sex with strangers” was traditional enough to leave me uneasy. Contrasting “promiscuity” with “wholeness”—even should the
contrast be, in some ultimate epistemological handbook, “true”—was a time-hallowed code for portraying homosexuals as sick.

What I said was, “In my view love and lust
can
coincide—at least in the early years of a relationship, when erotic zest is at its peak—but love and lust don't automatically, or maybe even frequently, come in tandem. And there is nothing dishonorable about lust when disconnected from love.”

“I am talking about
acting
on disconnected lust,” Pierrakos countered, but then sighed. “Look, Martin, it can't be a coincidence that immediately after an emotional experience such as you have just had, you embark on an intellectual argument. I would like to suggest that you are doing your best to dissipate the experience.”

“That could well be,” I admitted. “It does sound right. So let's drop it. At least for now. But it is unfinished business. I want to make it clear,” I added, mustering up a final dollop of defiance, “that I have a serious problem with some of your attitudes about sex.”

“It is clear. Can we now move on?”

“What do you suggest?”

“I want to return to the current situation. You are in crisis. You need a lot of help, and as soon as possible. A crisis
faced
can prove of great benefit. I believe I can help you.”

I let out an almost involuntary yelp—and to my absolute astonishment, started to cry again. I could hardly believe it. And the shock was redoubled when I felt Pierrakos's arms instantaneously around me.

“You know,” he said, “You're a very tough man in argument. But you are not exactly encased in concrete.” That made me smile. “You're all dammed up inside, but the dam is
very
leaky. That is a good sign.”

I dried my tears and started to laugh.

“Why have you stored up so much, I wonder,” Pierrakos said. “For what use? When?”

“I didn't know how much was in there. All I knew was that I felt stale, arid, unhappy. If anything, I felt dried up.”

“Parched would be closer.”

“Right now I feel completely drained.”

“I will tell you what I recommend.” Pierrakos shifted from an intimate to a professional tone. “For the moment, I cannot see you myself; my schedule is entirely booked. But I would like you to work for now with André Cossen, one of my associates. He is very good. I know you will like him. Think about it. I will write down his number for you, and when you feel ready you can call him for an appointment.”

“Are you sure you can't see me yourself?” My disappointment was palpable.
Same old story,
I thought bitterly.
I open myself up—and it turns out the person isn't available.