I took little with me to Florida. I did take some books, but I left my guitars, and I traveled unencumbered into a new beginning that I looked forward to as a rooster looks forward to the sun. I sensed within that all would probably end up the same, but I anticipated something very different, and crowed for it. Something I did take in the car with me was a small baggie of crank. One of the reasons I told myself I was fleeing to Florida was to get off the stuff, but like Augustine I pleaded, “Oh no, not quite yet.” Soon after I settled in with Debra, in a small apartment in an adult community in Pembroke Pines, I took it with us to a screening of Stop Making Sense. When I pulled out the baggie I discovered that the crystals had melted in the Florida humidity, but I snorted the liquid anyway. Not knowing how much I was taking, I snorted the entire puddle as it moved like mercury in the snack bag. I drew the straw along the seams, trying to take in every drop. This was all I had and there wasn’t going to be any more. I didn’t want to save the stash for later, as I was going to be done with it.
I became sick and psychotic, shaking with violent tremors and full of religiosity as David Byrne burst out, “Boom, boom, boom, that’s the way we live.” The movie became real, and I was onstage in the big suit, moving deeper into the night. I was a kid thrust into the basement of a Catholic church with my Grandma Kelly; into a charismatic meeting where hippies played guitars and people shouted and spoke in tongues. It was possibly all too much for a kid in elementary school, and I joined with the incense, and monotone, chanted prayers in the mass above to forever seal the catechism into my mind. I was a vessel filled with spirit, challenged intellectually by the strange science of the saints, swirling too fast and praying that God himself would make it stop.
My Grandma added romance to the faith of my childhood. Religion was her hobby, and she sought to avoid living her life as a devout Episcopalian, only to die and find out that some deity other than Christ was really the One. So she dabbled in devotions. Long before the Beatles went to India Grandma had a swami. He’d sit cross-legged in the front yard of my Grandparent’s house chanting his mantra, his robes dancing about him with the wind, and my Mom, a mere schoolgirl, would race home from school to beg swami to move into the back yard so that her friends wouldn’t see him as they walked by. Grandma told the story of how, with the IM, she wished lightning bolts on Franklin D Roosevelt to make him cease turning the US into a godless, communist nation. She met and studied with the followers of the mystic Edgar Cayce, and squirmed as my mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.
I palled around with Grandma and Grandpa, he was a Christian Scientist, from church to temple to hall to reading room as a child, witnessing people wail to some other world the answers they were sure held the truth. We didn’t visit the Quakers because, as Grandma said, at their meetings nothing happened. From voodoo and the Devil to the secrets veiled by my own Catholic Church, she schooled me in the fact that people will believe anything. She looked on with pride as, in the year of my confirmation, I entered an exchange program with a Hebrew school across the street from my parish church; tasked to report back on what the Jews were doing over there.
Grandma came from money. My great-grandfather was an industrialist who won the Philadelphia Award for his work establishing inter-racial shelters for men during the depression. But what Grandma inherited she gave away to pastors, the weak, and later, to her own desperate sons. She would jump from joy to scowl with the fierce change of moods that today would lead to a diagnosis, but then established her as an eccentric old lady. But her faith and humor didn’t hold, and she died bitter and guilty and full of conspiracy theories. Too many questions; too many influences; too many people let her down. From her came my curiosity, my rapidly swinging moods, and a warning of how complicated things could get if I turned myself over to somebody else’s dictums or an unfamiliar spirit. Neither she nor I were ever satisfied with another’s answers, and she bequeathed me a cynical need to question all authority, whether the authority knew better than me or not. The more exalted the speaker the less likely the pronouncement was true, and skepticism, in the end, was the only true faith. I learned from her there was nothing to believe in. Rudderless, I followed her into the fray.
I came down from the drug and put it all behind me. My use of that drug was finished, my septum, teeth, and sense of presence and surety still intact, the chemical and the metaphysical out of my life easier than I thought they would be, once the purge was complete and my body was empty of the distracting pull of something different, somewhere else. I worried that Debra would think she took on too much in taking me in, and that she’d put me out. I had to straighten up and stabilize, for I had a chance to start fresh. The morning came, and I went looking for work.
I needed something to do to pass the days and, more than that, I needed money. I was unsure of how long Debra’s hospitality would linger, so I got a job for a trailer leasing company as an operations manager, which meant I checked tailgates to see if they were bent, and kicked tires to see if they were flat, when the trailers were returned from rental. The other two men on the lot spoke Spanish, and we huddled around a cup of Cuban coffee drinking cafecito out of tiny medicine cups, the yard dogs straining against their chains and howling. We shared no language and couldn’t talk. Left to and within myself I calmed down. I understood nothing at work, nor did I understand why Debra would have me around at a time when her job was going well and her future was bright. I never really grasped the self-sacrifice of love. Home early, I spent afternoons by the pool at the apartment, took up cooking, and enrolled in an astronomy class at the community college. From whatever ailed me, I seemed to have recovered.
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My move toward independence made it difficult for me to come around to the realization that Debra wanted me around for more than a good time, and that, as the first few months passed and we did well living together, we had the foundation of something that could last. It was crazy for me to just up and leave everything I had and everyone I knew for the promise of a drink on the bay, and it was crazy for Debra to invite into her home a stranger she knew only from phone calls, letters, and a few heated nights. But we did it, and whether destined or demanded, we fell for each other and planned a future together. We based our relationship on a raw equality and strength of wills that would last as long as each of us pulled our own weight. We swore never to have children, lest our minds and our possibility should slow, and never to marry, lest we introduce some sense of property and commitment based on anything other than choice. We wanted to be together. That was enough. I fell into the idea of self-realization not through a relationship, but concurrent with one. Debra began the journey of the unattached, unfettered individual before me, yet in her it was tempered by a lack of grandiose thinking and the anchor of a consistent mind that encountered the same world every day. I was more flighty and initially suspicious of a relationship based on the satisfaction of selfish desire, but I was quick to come around and soon bore the conviction of a convert. Ever on the hunt for philosophical girding to prop up my ideals, I took my principles and values searching and found Libertarianism.
But something strange and parallel may have been happening. Having left any support network I had in Philadelphia, the idea of complete self-sufficiency was attractive, and necessary. What was not necessary was to abandon the liberal leanings and the sensitive, caring nature that had sustained me as I grew interdependent and compassionate into an adult. Now, in my mid-20s, Reason and Liberty magazines replaced The New Republic in my mailbox, and I swung hard to the right. I quickly became a slave to ideology, and I began to judge people based solely on their economic contribution and their independence from need. This was funny, because I relied completely on Debra for the chance to make a new start. I lived in her apartment, adopted her friends, and settled in to be what she wanted. I did what was expedient and, like a stray dog that needs to be taken in, I adapted to suit my new environment.
I wasn’t long for the trailer yard. As much as I liked spending humid days outside and learning how to curse in Spanish, I felt a need for something more. I contacted a headhunter who placed salespeople, and I interviewed for and landed a job with an upstart travel insurance company called Access America. My territory stretched from Vero Beach to Key West, and west to Naples and Fort Myers. I would spend weekdays driving around South Florida, stopping into travel agencies for much of the day, and changing from my business suit into a bathing suit and hitting the beach when the weather was right, as it was most afternoons. I was back in the travel industry, back to working with travel agents, and living the excitement of new products and new ideas that really were changing the marketplace. Now Debra and I weren’t only equals in outlook, we were financial equals as well. The temptations of Miami and Ft Lauderdale opened to us, and we dove into all that was available.
It was a heady time of hedonism and curiosity, it was South Florida, and we were living very well. Our lives floated on glasses of wine and we were seated at the best restaurants and the most in-demand concerts. The Super Bowl came to town, and we attended the best events, if not the game. Excess of everything was typical of the time and the place. We did very well, and unlike many in our class, we paid as we went along.
The tracts around our apartment complex were undeveloped, so I bought a road bike and logged miles speeding along the uncrowded roads. I headed onto the paths that dipped into the edges of the everglades, alligators lazily strewn in the heat about the maze of pavement, as the light rippled on the river of grass, or toward the mangroves that lined the intracoastal just before the bridge to the beach, thick roots of twisting plants plunging into lapping water as herons and terns fished and the sun singed the back of my neck. The Florida hills, a stiff headwind encountered when heading east to the sea, would challenge me, then push me home when I turned around with the joy of a child who had just learned to ride. Soon enough, Debra and I were taking bicycle tours of Vermont and Napa Valley, and skiing in the winter in Alta and Jackson Hole. We lived near the beach, but I was drawn to the mountains as if being outdoors would reveal some meaningful answers to questions of conduct and being that always dogged me. My mind, never long at ease, launched into rumination on what might be true, and what role I may have in it all.
The boredom of days working spent in the car driving between sales calls led me to talk radio and contemplation. Ruffled by the angry rhetoric of the radio, I became lost in my own thoughts, most of them about what I was reading. Debra and I would read aloud to each other; authors ranging from Ursula LeGuin and Doris Lessing, to Tom Wolfe, Dick Francis, and Anne Rice. On my own I read Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, and quickly became a staunch proponent of capitalist solutions to everything. Inevitably, my musing on the pre-eminence of individual, natural rights, and unabashed freedom of action and property led me to find a prophet, and that voice was Ayn Rand.
It’s hard to overemphasize how strong libertarian leanings were as the 80s wore on. Any vestige of my left-leaning youth crumbled before what I came to believe was a truer idea, and I embraced Rand’s objectivism as if a religious convert. It truly became a guiding principle, an enduring myth, and the irony of masses of people reading Atlas Shrugged as doctrine was lost on us all. Rand and her interpreters landed me firmly in business, yet I fancied quitting it all to study economics at The University of Chicago or George Mason. But in the end I was less interested in study and more seduced by personal gain. The fact that true freedom requires strong ethical underpinnings of fairness and cooperation evaporated. Rand maintained that we were all individual actors propelled by our own sovereignty, and productive competition too easily devolved into selfishness when applied by people like me looking to increase their businesses’, and their own, value. But that was the point. I didn’t bore of the spoils, and I joined right into the mindset of using money to keep score. The ideas of Rand stuck (I still find it hard to completely shake them), and while for a time I grew stagnant in my job, I kept looking up and excelled because of charisma and a propensity to persuade. I performed well, and in sales and debate I seldom lost. Despite what the frustrated voices of the punk music I listened to were trying to convince me, I leaned heavily into intellectual and individual freedom.
Objectivism demanded atheism, but my spiritual thirst was never quenched. Debra was raised by a strict religious father, and a disappointed, questioning mother, and she rejected the fundamentalist Christianity, in fact all Christianity, she had been born into. New Age beliefs were all around, and she took up tarot cards and horoscopes. The late 80s were a sexy time for the occult, with Anne Rice on the bookshelf and Angel Heart in the theaters. All this hocus pocus influenced me. I took the pull toward darkness more literate and theological. There was no evil in my occult leanings, merely powerful symbols of opposition. I was so anti-authoritarian that I dared to stand up to the greatest authority of all. I thought the definition of evil was action without thought - fear mongering and intolerance. What I was opposed to was the mindless acquiescence of the Catholic ethic I was raised in. The catechism classes had influenced me greatly, and now I was rejecting what I learned. I saw religion as compassion devoid of logic and set human intellect as it’s opposite. There was plenty of room for compassion and goodness in my worldview. There was no room for the supernatural. So, within myself, I began a war of wits with the lessons of my developmental years. The material and the purely rational won.
But still, for some deep-seated out of touch reasons, or some fault of my conclusions, I was drawn to the occult. I made no sense. I learned to read the tarot cards myself, and I found the style and glamour in the trappings of the metaphysical sexy as hell, as if I could make god and the devil irrelevant but still dress the part. Bach and goth music drew me in like calls from the forgotten, but still felt in muscle memory, past. The last vestige of my Catholicism was the near performance art of the mass; the ritual of ages re-enacted every Sunday, and the crucified body that hung over the altar became a siren call of the sacrifice of goodness. Yes, good would always win in the end, but only when good was challenged by evil could humankind really exist. I read a little Buddhism, and was taken by the lesson that attachment to greed, anger, and reverie was the root of all suffering. In my mind, greed, anger, and reverie were the engines of all material and human rights progress the West had given the world. Greed was good, and I felt the times personified. The pull of darkness was devilish fun then, but I would not come to know its full horror until later.
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I was back in the travel industry, and Debra left the car rental company to take a job in marketing with a cruise line. Our travel became more exotic. We took advantage of connections and freebies and jetted off or cruised to Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. We climbed the steps to the stupas of Borobudur, ate Nasi Goreng in Jakarta, and biked along the rice paddies of Bali. The mysticism of Indonesia fed into my spiritual wanderings, and the torches lit along the beach, while the monkey king climbed a palm tree and a circle of men rocked and chanted on the sand, left an indelible mark on my soul – assuring me my mind wasn’t fully made up about the veracity of otherworldly things. We danced in Caracas when it was still a place you could, or would want to, visit. Bequia had a beach and Paris a café that we called our own. For a couple of years our heads were full of gamelan and banderas, and we parted the seas as citizens of the world. Lenningrad, where we travelled in 1989, was a cold, pastel-filled, wonder.
The Soviet Union was falling apart. Windows were left open at the Hermitage and paint peeled from the frames and sills. The idea of full employment was failing, as comrades in uniforms sat in what looked like elevated trashcans and manually controlled the traffic lights. As often as not the attendant slumped sleeping and the lights never changed. We walked through the snarled traffic. Marx, or at least Socialism, had held me in earlier years. But now I was an objectivist and adhered to the idea that everyone was personally responsible for their own outcomes, state be damned. Yet, the fine line between bearing one’s own consequences and blaming the victim was very slight. It seemed everyone in Lenningrad toed that line as the flowers of May bloomed and the sun drowned the gold fountain of Peterhof and the wind still blew frigid. We took a lot of Clinique products and tipped people in makeup. It was amazing what we could get for some foundation or rouge. We had a guide who had just finished her studies in history at a university. She was about to sit for her exams when it became apparent that so much of what she and her fellow students were taught wasn’t true, and much of what was true had not been taught. Not knowing what to answer, or even what to ask, was so daunting that no exams were held and everyone was just given a passing grade. She shrugged and smiled as she told us, “It is easier not having to remember, than it is trying to forget.”
Back in Florida, Miami Vice and MTV set up an image centered world where depth and insight rarely got through a confident pose, and clothes, décor, and chardonnay stood in for the lack of depth in most conversations. Tables were littered with lines of cocaine, but as soon as we got into the scene we pulled back into a few close friendships. After a night in Coconut Grove where some long forgotten insult was hurled and I held a man against a palm tree as I hit him, all the while Debra by turns pulling me off and joining in the pummeling, we realized that it had all gone too far and control was slowly slipping away, so we stopped dancing at clubs and, a little wiser and more mature, spent weekends on Biscayne Bay on a friend’s parents’ sailboat. The boat would list into every tack, and the wind would drive the bow into the running waves as the sun prismed off the whitecaps in a diamond cut dance of color set against the deep blue of the water. Other Saturdays we sat in the Orange bowl among screaming thousands as the convicts of the University of Miami took the field and picked apart all comers. The party of our lives became smaller and less raucous, and for a moment I considered leaving Florida to study finance at Columbia while I was still in my 20s. But impulse and restless energy seethed, and we bought a house near the beach off Dania Beach Boulevard instead. Days and evenings were spent dodging French-Canadians on the boardwalk in Hollywood Beach, and sitting on the sand staring at the ocean. I had no idea what I wanted to do. All that I had I had fallen into, and I came to this place with no planning at all.
But the things I fell into I was good at, and the company promoted me to Regional Manger for the Southeast United States. I was determined to make it work, and put some structure in my life to facilitate success. I began to travel during the week more often, and I pulled back from the buzz of South Florida, and soon everything became more and more routine. As the 80s gave way to the 90s I was becoming bored with my toys. Our vacation travel slowed, and after trips to Kauai and Sanibel we rarely left home at all. Twice a week we ate at a Moroccan restaurant owned by two North African/French Canadian brothers, both good-looking and suave. As we drank Vin Gris and devoured merguez and couscous in booths set with deeply cushioned couches, drop-dead gorgeous women came and went through the barely lit space, flirting with us and the charming men, and they made light in the usually empty restaurant. It seemed like Debra and I were the only ones who stayed and ate, and one night the placed burned down amidst stories of an escort service and organized crime. The food was good, though, and I was not very creative at leisure – I tended to be a prisoner of inertia when left with the opportunity to do just about anything else – and all of a sudden we had nowhere to go. So we bought better wine and cooked more at home. I was perfectly satisfied to be right where I was, and I spent hours just reading and contemplating ideas. My mind took flight, seduced by the best of the intellects of free thought and free markets. I finally had a firm philosophy of life. Individualism and freedom trumped all that opposed it, and my mind was made up that the human mind reigned supreme. I could not foresee that, soon, the chemicals in my brain would conspire to teach me a little lesson.
It was a picture of a mind that was as beautiful as it was dangerous. I sat by the pool and thought of how I stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and on the plain before the Grand Tetons, and walked nearly lost in great deserts and tropical rainforests. The natural world was striking in its beauty and perfection. But I also scrambled over ancient ruins and leaned against the rail of an outdoor patio on a high floor over Manhattan at night. I found the things man built as awe inspiring as anything nature could offer, maybe even more so because they first existed in some person’s mind – and then with the effort of people they were there. Anything an individual could imagine could come alive with intellect and bare hands. The strange spiritual leanings and philosophical ramblings that distracted me passed as a desire grew to set out and build something myself. The romance of the creative impulse acting upon the limitations of possibility won out, and I was transformed into one who believed that anything was possible, if only I willed it so.
The mind can grow as untamed and wild as a garden left untended, and once an impulse is acted on there is no turning back to the steady state, the homeostasis, that existed before one bent nature to their will. I impulsively became hyper-motivated to succeed. As the ideas of objectivism applied sank in I began to grow grandiose. Work suddenly became a calling, and I put everything I had into it. I set the bar of my goals very high, and chased challenges that pushed the limits of what I deemed possible. Then I began to exceed those limits. As my territory flourished and my responsibilities at Access America grew, my boss hinted at what could be possible if I rounded out my experience and completed my college education. So I enrolled in Nova University and took night classes while working long days. The company paid the full tuition. I transferred in some community college work, and applied a lifetime of general reading on an array of topics to test out of 60 credits. I took a class in political philosophy and filled the margins of Das Kapital with a refutation of Marx’s ideas, as if I was the intellectual equal of the man toiling in the basement of the British Museum.
My independence grew fierce and I was pissed-off at the left-leaning faculty. I’d sit in the lecture halls shaking my head, and quit asking questions and challenging professors in the certainty that I knew better than they did. No one could tell me I was wrong, and no one could tell me what to do. I finished at Nova with a 4.0 GPA, but had no interest in walking at graduation. The dean called and told me I had to; I was to be named Outstanding Student. I was not invited to give the valedictory address, since between transferring in credits, taking CLEP tests, and offering life experience for credit, I only took the minimum number of courses required by the university to receive a diploma. But they still wanted to recognize my achievement. I walked, and they did. Access America recognized it, too. My boss and the President began to speak of putting me in charge of the entire retail sales force. But that would require a move out of Florida.
Debra and I pondered the possibility in the living room of our house in Dania, under the bedroom loft bathed by light from the skylights, sitting on Roche-Bobois furniture while our two Abyssinian cats, AB and Eddy-cat, spun in a wok in the kitchen and chased frozen peas across the tile. We were yuppies, and life was as warm and soft as the sand we laid on just across a mangrove filled park and the intracoastal, where Debra mixed with the Quebecoise and I filled my head with dreams. I thought the way I lived was a profound expression of big ideas, when, in fact, it was as vacuous as the spring break kids stumbling into the dawn across a beer-soaked balcony in a cheap hotel in Ft Lauderdale. My boss hinted at a job in marketing for Debra if she’d come with me when I took on my new role at headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. Debra decided to come. We were a couple and, in our own self-driven way, surely in love and meant to be together. Her cards called us soul mates, and my reason found us each fulfilled. We traveled to Richmond and looked around. Gone would be the orange and purple on the water as the sun set in the west. Gone would be the dive into the pool any day after work. Gone would be the bike rides along the coast and the old Hasidic couple at the swing set on the north end of South Beach – she on the swing gently rocking back and forth while he pushed her, fast enough to ripple his long black overcoat, but slow enough to leave his black hat unmoved on his bearded head, watched by an old Cuban woman cleaning the patio of a bar across Ocean Drive, her lined face the one that stood out among all the exalted faces that stared at the world from magazine stands, and skated in and out of the palms in the morning on the beach as the cumulus clouds hugged the horizon and rays of sun streaked the sky. We were beautiful people in a beautiful place who couldn’t imagine the changes to come.
I accepted the job. It was 1992, I was 29, and I was on my way to a much bigger things. We sold the house, furnished, in Florida and moved into a rented rancher in the West End of Richmond. As if to slow down to the pace of the cultured South, I planted a garden in the yard hoping to grow something, but it was much too late in the season. The leaves in the huge trees that surrounded the property began to change colors, and the hues of the sunset in Florida hung from the branches that blanketed the hills along the open spaces, dissected by ribbons of road over which I’d have no time to bike.
You wrote: " Yet, the fine line between bearing one’s own consequences and blaming the victim was very slight."
There is a ton of new age philosophy that is infecting people's minds with this kind of BS: A Course in Miracles, The Secret, etc. It's infectious and not only is it making people hardened and cruel toward each other, but it is extremely easy to internalize, and enhance our self-hate and self-blame.