Saturday — July 10, 2010
Here I am back in L.A. I have been up in Sandpoint, Idaho,
for about ten days with my beautiful wifey, and now we are back
at home looking after our dogs and our lives generally.
With the exception of some noisy people renting the condo
below us, we had a great time in Idaho, as always. We rode our
boat out on the lake, rode our bikes around town, ate great
salmon, and watched the ever changing sky. Really, I believe
there is no view on earth better than the view out of our condo
at The Seasons, probably the most wonderful resort condo
community I have ever encountered.
I got quite a shock the day before we left when I saw in
the
NY Times that Robert N. Butler,
M.D., had died at 83 of leukemia. Dr. Butler was a famous expert
on aging and an advocate for the aged. And a kind-hearted fellow.
But before he did all of that, he was my psychoanalyst. Real
psychoanalysis. Four and five times a week on the couch. Thank
you, federal employee health insurance. He had a lovely office
adjacent to his home in Cleveland Park, a great home on a big
triangular lot.
He was a fine shrink and a kind, loving man. He had a way
of getting to the heart of things, sometimes quite sarcastically.
I well recall one day after many days of my endless moaning
about my mother, he sighed loudly and said, “Oh, a boy and his
mother.”
It was cutting, but it well summed up my greatly
excessively close connection with my mother.
When I went back to Yale Law School, Dr. Butler offered me
three excellent pieces of advice.
1. Make new friends.
2. Bind up your wounds.
3. Forget contempt.
All great words.
Of course, it might have included, “And stay the hell away
from the Yale Health Service.” It was going there that had laid
me low in the first place. I went there to talk about my
difficulty studying for Civil Procedure, taught by one of the
meanest men I have ever met, J. William Moore, and a terrible,
horribly incompetent teacher, too. The YHS, in their wisdom,
prescribed Trilafon and Mellaril, two of the most dangerously
powerful anti-psychotics on earth. It was like using an atom bomb
for the fourth of July in a small town.
My reactions, ataxia, inability to read, extreme fatigue —
totally foreseeable — put me utterly out of commission for weeks
and led me to drop out of law school. In the end, that was a good
thing, because when I went back, I wound up in the class of ‘70,
a much better fit for me than the class of ‘69. The class of ‘69
was one of the last gasps of the Silent Generation. They were
men, and a few women, who really wanted to be lawyers. My new
class also had a few of them but it was largely hippies and
radicals who wanted something else more like fun.
And, wow, did we have fun. It is just a guess, but I doubt
if any law school class in any law school in history had more fun
than the class of ‘69 at Yale Law School.
That was when we stopped getting kicked around by our
teachers, got high a lot, demonstrated against anything we felt
deserved our attention, and generally behaved like happy, very
spoiled children. Years later, people at Yale referred to our
time as “The Dark Ages” but they were wrong. They were the
flaming bright glorious ages. The fun we had, playing bridge
while stoned, mocking the teachers, watching great movies,
observing Duncan Kennedy tie the teachers in knots. Fun, fun,
fun.
I was a big student leader for telling a teacher to stop
bullying us or I would take my clothes off in Anti-Trust and
start reciting the names of the Vietnam War dead. The teacher was
so angry he stomped out of class and became a spectacularly
well-paid Wall Street lawyer.
I got cute little hippie girls following me around and
started wearing pink tie-dyed shirts and bell-bottom trousers and
sandals. I am telling you, it was happy days.
“Bell bottom blues, you made me cry…” (Great song by a
great singer.)
Anyway, why am I telling you all of this? Because Bob
Butler died and it brings back memories.
At Yale when I went back, I had a simply dreadful shrink
for two years and then a super great shrink named Sidney J.
Berman for a year. He was a prince and a great, great analyst. I
credit him with giving me a lot of the self-confidence it took to
be a student radical leader.
Now, I would laugh at us as we were. Maybe not, though. We
made fun of ourselves. We knew we were not really rebels. We were
really the gilded, unbelievably blessed youth of privilege. The
real stars were fighting in Vietnam. We had fun. They had
balls.
I don’t regret trying to stop the war, though. My
father-in-law, Col. Dale Denman, Jr., a highly decorated Vietnam
war hero, told me in 1966 that if he were not in the Army, he
would demonstrate against it himself. “It’s a meat grinder,” he
said. “We’ll never win and good men are getting killed.”
It’s amazing how all of these memories keep flooding back
to me. I can recall Col. Denman in his Dress Blues. This man was
not only the bravest of the brave, but as handsome a man as God
ever made.
His daughter has been my wife since 1968, with a few years
interruption.
That is the number one blessing of my life. That, and
America, and the fighting men and women, and the dogs lying in
bed with me. Psychoanalysis is good. Yale is good. Doctors are
sometimes good. Women, good. But dogs in bed with me. That’s
perfection. I see Brigid looking at me now to get back to bed
with her. Bye.
