Keepers and patients

At a lunch with some “old friends,” we were talking about our adult children and one of my friends, Vincent Amato, a corpulent fellow with a thick graying beard and longish hair, a wonderful sense of humor and love of history—mentioned that his son had become brutish as some kind of social worker. The son credited that to the fact that Vincent divorced his son’s mother and step-mother. I added that I have a daughter with an MSM from Fordham University and her mother and I were divorced. My other friend Frank Tolopko summed up the situation by saying, “wouldn’t it be funny if the world turned out to be all keepers and patients?” I said,“ It would be a psychological welfare state. We’re almost there.”

Frank and Vincent were boyhood friends on the lower East Side of Manhattan. Frank was the son of Russian parents and Vincent was a scholar of Russian history. That was their link. I could only get in a joke edgewise with these two. But Vincent taught English at Stuyvesant for 20 years, and Frank went from being a hot metal typesetter in the Russian language to a computer engineer, realizing Linotype was on the way out. Frank’s new career as a computer engineer was at the Indian Point nuclear reactor about an hour north of NYC on the Hudson. He spent many years there.

I realized that the three of us weren’t far from a keepers and patients state, given the number of therapy providers, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, shamans, true and false gurus for people who have run off the track or are about to do so. So, there are a lot of keepers among a growing number of potential patients. Just get a shingle and a license. I also thought if this was the paradigm for a Brave New World, one like Aldous Huxley created, in which “Everyone seems guilty of something” and he or she must be taking their due dose of Soma to level off.

Similarly, there’s the Big Brother syndrome of society, as depicted by George Orwell, the English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by a lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, a fierce opposition to totalitarianism, and a equally fierce commitment to democratic socialism.

Have the people of our so-called democratic societies allowed themselves to be captured inside this mind-fence in a dystopian property that often ties more knots in them than so-called “free societies?” But this is all rather grim to think of, and frankly, depressing. And it’s time to take my Soma. By the way, the three of us were eating in a restaurant near Columbia University called Le Monde, after the French newspaper. Tres hip and trendy.

As we spoke, Vincent ordered some French booze I never heard of, a taste of this and that, some cognac, a little sparkling wine. He even asked the college girl waitress if the yellow T-shirts the wait-staff were wearing were for sale. The pretty blond waitress from Colorado said yes and got him one. Alas, he took it to the men’s room to try it on. But with his Gerard Depardieu body, it turned out not to fit Vincent. Also, Vincent was a bit blitzed, talking about his several wives, kids, ancient grandparents and so on.

I was impressed that he liked my writing as much as he did. He had his own blog called “the Green Steps” in which he followed New York Times’ writers, not realizing he was turning out better material than he was critiquing. Anyhow, it was a cloudy pendulous sky that had been developing outside the window as we ate and drank—amd I was antsy after an hour and a half of lunch and conversation, and asked Frank to get the check. We always split it three ways, because either Frank or Vincent ate or drank more than I did. This time I got off the hook for twenty bucks for a burger with cheddar cheese, tomato, lettuce and pommes frites.

A few minutes after we walked out—Vincent heading to drive his car back to Queens and Frank to wait for his wife, Marlene, so he could drive her back to Massachusetts, the sky broke apart with thunder, lightning, a flood of late July rain. My wife, who hadn’t been feeling well and took of a few days off, it turned out, was working post haste with our housekeeper reshaping the form of the apartment and had three air conditioners on full blast. So that was our day—as keepers and patients of ourselves—as my housekeeper and my wife had transformed the West side apartment into a thing of beauty. The three Musketeers had met once more. On leaving Le Monde, Vincent suddenly thought he had seen Joseph Steiglitz sitting at another table.

Joseph Stieglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and the John Bates Clark Medal. All that, except it wasn’t him. The man Vinny saw looked older and duller. Vincent was seeing what he wanted to see in his perennial chase of literary greats. But God bless him for his dedication to literature, all things French, institigator of historic conspiracies, and admirer of pretty waitresses whom he over-tipped for a smile. This was definitely a man who wanted to live until he didn’t.

Frank, by now, was already speeding back north to the Berkshires in his Prius, talking to his wife Marlene, having helped shape the theory of Keepers and Patients—and Israel was still using its Iron Dome defense, a net of rockets that blocked all incoming rockets from Hamas. It was just another day in the lives of the Three Musketeers and the awful Israelis, who wanted a single state country, and double-talked a two state-state reality. The patients in that madhouse were revolting and wanted their keepers gone. We wished them luck. And if I’ve offended my buddies in any way, accept my humble apologies.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.