Fence Post

Clever name!  ...for this post; which relates to the publishing of The White Fence; on Kindle and Amazon. Which, by the way, I'm perfectly aware is self-publishing, so don't get yer bawls in an uproar.  But at almost 72 years old I felt that I didn't have forever to wait for someone to offer to publish the book at a legit publishing house. Which probably wouldn't ever have happened anyway.  I'm pretty much aware of my limitations as a writer.  But in the self-publishing world I feel like I'm up there with the worst of them.

Now it's done. And at this juncture I've sold probably several hundred copies, mostly print. Kindle is very slow...

The trip up north to pitch the book at the East Hampton Library was lovely in spite of the aches and pains that long road trips put on our aging bodies. We got to visit our Hindu friends in the Catskills and my sister who gave us a perfect party with perfect guests, and on the way home we paid a visit to one of the stars of my book, Frances Delaney Gardiner. Turns out her adopted town, South Boston Virginia, is a very nice place!

Now on to book 2.

But not before asking the important, and inevitable question, Why Bother? Wow. That's a good question! Mickey probably had the best answer, and it didn't take her a heart-beat: Because if I don't do something, I'll upset the lovely apple cart that is our relationship; because an idle mind is the devil's workshop. And besides, thinking about myself is what I do.

Jesus God, I don't want to write about my alcoholism. I hate being tagged in with everybody and his brother. But I suppose, to the extent that I'm committed to anything it's to autobiographical writing. Forgive me if I don't flog myself over finding the most appeal in the narcissistic writings of Miller and Mailer and Exley and Wolfe, and Nin and all of them there. And so, the geriatric rank amateur enters the fray again.

I've decided that the working title for #2 will be Holding On.  The White Fence, as we well remember, was, for several years at least, titled Hold Still.  Hold Still of course had to do with what I considered at one time a trauma, that is my days of modeling for my Pa while he took photographs to use in his illustrations. (Yeah, I go into it in The White Fence.)

Holding On, because, well, because I will be writing about my alcoholism, though I'll try to make it just part of a story, not the whole story, and, well, it will be a bumpy ride.

Recovering from Whatever....

Well this sucks.  I had specific intentions of avoiding the whole alcohol thing, thinking it's, (that subject,)  really boring the ass off the general public at the present time.  But it seems like I have some sort of a need to untangle my thinking about the subject, or about how to get past the subject.

That would be because after The White Fence, [formerly of the provisional title Hold Still,] I'm starting on another project, this one called Hold On, which is about the years 1980 and '81, in my life, the time during which my father died, my dog Molly died, a former girlfriend died of an O.D., and a new friend, a woman, a Feminist writer, with whom I was having a platonic but for me fascinating relationship, committed suicide. [Hold Still and Hold On both have sub-titles, but I thought I'd hold them in reserve.]  It was a bleak time for me but there would be no point in telling the story, assuming that there is any, if I left out that at that time I was, to use the basic vernacular of the day, "in recovery", abstinent from drugs and alcohol for over seven years, and working at a proscribed [that word again,] program, getting private therapy, and making an unimpressive living doing house-painting, something to which I was constitutionally able to give only a limited part of my attention-deficited mind.    

I feel that I have to come up with a way to insert the Drinking Thing into the story without seeming to assume that the reader has a fascination with it, because I know that isn't true. It's been my observation that most people think of alcohol as either a beverage or an antiseptic and that they either consume it for the flavor or the feeling, or both, or for more complicated aesthetic reasons having to do with gourmet dining; or they don't consume it, either because they have made a negative moral judgement about it for one reason or another, or they just don't drink, out of habit, out of a desire for simplicity, or for no particular reason at all. But the idea of someone becoming an alcoholic brings to mind not just the idea that it's a sickness, something that has become part of the political correctness of the day, and which I happen to believe myself, but also that the person is very apt to exhibit behavior that is uncomfortable to observe, possibly anti-social, and not infrequently dangerous. This goes against my idea that when writing something, the narrator, fiction or non-fiction, should be a bland, sort of not too visible presence.

One way of course is to make it fiction.  I've made a couple of feeble attempts at fictionalizing my adventurous life, but I've decided I just haven't had the necessary talent ingredients, including the perspiring persistence, to get that done. As it is, I may not live long enough to get #1 published, assuming that is, that if I had endless time, it would eventually happen. [Even though I am,  at the moment, in excellent health, in spite of being mildly hypochondriacal as well as psychochondriacal. My newest ailment along those lines is AvPD, a wonderful disorder I have mentioned elsewhere.] 

As I think about it now, I think that the challenge here is to keep the subject of alcohol and my own personal involvement with it in a perspective that allows it to be only one baby elephant in a room full of baby elephants, rather than the one big Pachyderm.  

  

Fernando Lamas

Yesterday I was informed by Martha, my significant other, in regard to a one-way conversation I was having with her about a book I'm re-reading, that I seem to develop any psychological symptom I happen to be reading about. I read quite a bit of psychological literature.  Be that as it may, allow me to rave on: 

Up till the age of about six I was on the fast track to be the most Interesting Man in the World. I was handsome and brilliant. But, unbeknownst to me or anyone but God, I had a genetic flaw; a gene, that if left unmolested in an environment of peace and tranquility, was destined to allow me to become Fernando Lamas. That is unless I encountered some unusual stress; which happened to me in the second grade. Her name was Miss Phillips.

Miss Phillips was an Apple Knocker from Upstate. That's the name the locals on Eastern Long Island gave to the school teachers who were sent by the government education Czars from upstate New York, where all they grow is apples and snow, to where we lived, where they didn't have too many kids, but had even less teachers.

There were some excellent Apple Knockers, but Miss Phillips wasn't one of them. She was depressed, mean-spirited, didn't like kids, and wasn't very bright. I'm being kind, but only because I was six and didn't have very good credibility as a school teacher critic.

I felt like I had been plunged into a cold bath. Until then, I had basked in the golden sunlight of my beautiful, entertaining mother, my baby sitter Mary Anne Milligan, my new baby sister, Baba, and my joy filled, smart, and creative first grade teacher, Mrs. Joyce.

There were only about four kids in Mrs. Joyce's class, so she was able to give me all the attention my narcissistic young psyche craved. We built an almost life sized cardboard house, and covered the floor with a braided rug we made ourselves. We made Jackson Pollock-like drawings, and pasted together paper chains with delicious wallpaper paste. Life was good.

Miss Phillips ruined all that by waving her magic wand and making me depressed. Or at the very least, dysthemic. Not only that, but my little first grade had been combined with a slightly larger second grade, who were kept back in order to make the school look bigger, or for some more rational reason that I wasn't informed of, and that meant I now became lost in a crowd of perhaps as many as ten other unruly small human beings, all crying for attention.

Miss Phillips did not do anything in particular to harm me, that I can remember. I'm sure I wasn't molested or beaten or locked in the closet. But suddenly I hated school, and my system was flooded with all sorts of chemicals from my Hypothalmus and Amygdala setting off sparks in my Corpus Callosum and Cerebral Cortex; Dorsolateral, Ventromedial and Orbitofrontal. Mentally, the shit hit the fan.

One short little gene, which I affectionately refer to as the Gene with no name, got a wiff of the wrong chemical and turned into Mr. Not-So-Nice Guy.  If this all is starting to sound a little scary, please, try to stay with me. That little gene stopped doing what it was doing and slid across the floor in it's tube socks, knocking the other little genes off kilter like a jackknifed truck on a crowded super highway hitting glare ice.

 That was the moment I turned into a neurotic; or what they called a neurotic in 1948. Jackson Pollock was one. So was Jean Paul Sartre. And Tennessee Williams. In short, any grownup worth talking to in those days was one.  

In my book, [That is to say, literally, in My Book, as yet unpublished, at this writing,] which I might have mentioned somewhere earlier, I went into my childhood as a neurotic, but to bring us all up to date, let me re-frame the discussion in contemporary terms, by assigning to myself a place in The DSM - Ta Da.... Five !

If you don't have a DSM V, you should get one. Then, I could borrow yours. I can't afford one myself. The price-tag amounts to the better part of my Social Security check. But I certainly would borrow yours, because I've read all the freebee articles on Google that give you tantalizing peeks at what's new and what's not, since the old days of DSM lV.       

Here's me, ever since that morning when I woke up in my attic bedroom and realized I had to go back to that gloomy hell on the south west side of the ground floor of the Amagansett Grade School; 

Cluster C (Anxious, Fearful ) Personality Disorders: .........( skip over OCD... ) ....Avoidant Personality Disorder: Inhibited; introverted; intense feelings of inadequacy; hypersensitive to rejection; socially awkward.

I was a different person. Of course, by then, being six, I'd already formed a completely developed cover-story, that of Bon Vivant and song and dance man, so I had to carry on; but it was all a big sham. I'll try to cover this material in more detail, if my attention deficit, (that's another story) will let me, at some future date.

By the way, I don't mean to imply by the above that I fully subscribe to the DSM-V.  Far from it. I'm a contrarian for one thing, and so disagree with everything, but also, I understand that theories are only written to supply structure and that structures are built to be torn down. 

For perspective, I rely on the insight of scientist-writer Prof. Barbara Oakley. In her book, Evil Genes*, in a chapter on Slobodan Milosevic, talking about the related disorder borderline personality, she says the following: 

"The bottom line is that, if one uses a categorical DSM-lV approach [..this being before "Five" came into being,] to analyzing borderline personality disorder, a person has to be so severely disabled to achieve a definitive diagnosis that he essentially can't function effectively in society. Diagnosis exists primarily to facilitate treatment in a clinical setting, but a number of problematic individuals - even if they do have symptoms that would reasonably qualify as clinically significant - just don't come into a clinic to receive the attention of psychiatric or forensic services.  

"Another problem with diagnosing borderline personality using the DSM-lV criteria relates to the fact that the criteria are written in clinical, dispassionate fashion that obscures as much as explains borderline symptoms. And there is yet another problem: the DSM-lV assumes that all nine criteria are equally contributory, and allows for the seeming paradox that someone with the supposedly enduring diagnosis of BPD could suddenly be 'cured' of the illness by overcoming even one defining criterion."  

On second thought, maybe I'll just stick with being neurotic.

*Evil Genes; Barbara Oakley, Prometheus Books, 2007  

  

Frank the poet.

While living in San Francisco in 1978 and '79, I had a friend, don't know what happened to him, who made his living designing boilers. He designed boilers for apartment buildings, for heating, and for various kinds of industry. I'm not certain what was the biggest one he ever designed, but he seemed to like the bigger ones.  

He found his job humorous. In fact he found practically everything humorous, in some inscrutable way. (He wasn't into self-analysis.)  He was also a poet. He wrote long, complex poems, which I couldn't make head nor tails of, but they looked impressive, and he was an insider at the City Lights Bookstore.   

He lived on Geary Street, near Chinatown and he was a third generation Irish San Franciscan.  I had a whole crew of these Gold Rush descendant Irishman friends who I met partly by accident, by running into them in the neighborhood, where I lived in a piss-in-the sink hotel owned by Hindus.  

I say partly because I am half Irish-Wasp cross, and looked more that way than Montenegren, at least when I was younger and thinner, and these Irishmen, several of them cops and firemen, thought I was one of them.  

Frank knew North Beach as well as anybody.  He took me around to the Jazz Clubs, where I met one of his good friends, Horace Silver.  He also told me, and here I'll have to pussy foot around a little, we were both former drunks, about a day he spend sharing a gallon of Gallo Pisano [sp.] with Richard Brautigan. They had found a nice comfortable empty abandoned apartment in Chinatown, off Grant St., and were settling in, when there was a minor earthquake tremor which caused the floors and walls to wobble.  Brautigan panicked, and Frank sat down on the floor and leaned up against the wall, and said, "Com'on over here and lean against the wall, it's the safest place."  Frank leered and chuckled when he told me this. He seemed to know I'd get the joke. He had the standard San Fran Local's view of earthquakes, which amounted to a very hearty fatalism. 

I suppose as one drunk to another we were both familiar with the tendency to take foolish risks easily but reasonable risks fearfully. And I expect that is why when my sister read my previous post, she was concerned that I was being too revealing concerning something in my history which I referred to somewhere as abuse, which I surmised may have contributed to my preferred drug of choice in the Sixties. So I should make it clear that I'm not Blogging here for the purpose of dumping my damaged psych on you for the purpose of illustrating how I put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Let's just say that like most people, I wasn't able to avoid some hard knocks in the process of aging.

My main purpose in advertising for myself is in convincing The Other, whomever and whatever will listen to me, that my combination of voyeurism and fascination with narrative has been put to some good use through my habit of writing things down.  

      

James Pennebaker

My book is out there in the world being read by a couple of people.  Not publishers or editors, just lay people I guess you'd say.  I did get a nice rejection from the agent Rita Rosenkrantz. I have a couple of new projects planned, either start on a second book or do a short story based on the War Years in Amagansett; something I'd like to do.

I'm speaking here as a legitimate writer which I am but only in my own mind, not according to the reality therapy of having made money at it.

Today I'm depressed. Don't tell anyone In Recovery about this. I know what they'll tell me.  Yes, I am being selfish and self-centered. It's what I always planned to do with my retirement. You show me yours, and I'll decide whether I think you've come up with a better plan. If it includes Bridge, Golf, or Fishing, you lose. Ditto reading Trade Publications.

As for the reason I'm depressed. I'm reading Jim Pennebaker's, [Can I call you Jim, Jim?] book The Secret Life of Pronouns.  I heard about it through Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, and also through reading Barbara Oakley. Pennebaker did research on writing therapy; having people write about trauma, in short bursts, repeatedly. I decided to write about an episode of abuse when I was pre-adolescent. So I wrote a short piece, a page, and let it sit.  Figured I'd read a little more Pennebaker and then re-look at it. So, for the first day of sitting on it, I'm feeling that low grade depression that I've become so used to not having. This is real human Guinea Pig stuff. Also though, it's about tweaking some future writing.  ....Three specific episodes of abuse stand out in my memory of my childhood, including my High School years. The last one, which I don't mind talking about here in this format, was probably not abuse but more simply trauma, when I was punched in the face on the school bus, hit my head on the steel corner of one of the bus seats, and had a severe concussion.

Years later, I read, in a feature in Harper's Magazine that was a regular feature some thirty years ago, about the connection between concussion and alcoholic Blackouts. (In younger days I was a severe blackout drinker.)

What I find interesting as I mull this experiment over, this idea of revisiting a couple of specific, brief, but unappetizing moments in my past is that, even being a professional oral historian and contentedly autobiographical wool-gatherer, it's never occurred to me to do this particular kind of 'multiples of instant replay' experiment. [I just added that "multiples" terminology on my own...]  So, depressing or not, I'll continue to sit on it for the time being, and let you know if anything comes of it.

Three years later.....decided it was a bad idea.  

     

Laurence Vail

Notes:   Who was Laurence Vail?  Why do I identify with him?  How pretentious is that?  How dare I engage in Manque Business? These are the questions I will deal with tomorrow, or down the line....

.........I woke up at 5am, an hour ago, with the idea that I had to clarify or continue with the above mention of Mr. Vail and the Manque business, but then re-thought it.  I am stuck on the idea that I have to justify this Blog.  It goes back to having something to sell. ...That's where I am on that right now. (Laurence Vail, by the way, was an artist, and a critic, the first husband of Peggy Guggenheim, the father of her only two children, Pegeen and Sinbad. Father and children spent the summer of 1945 in the house I grew up in, the year before my family moved in. Lawrence was short on products. He painted, (under-productively, you might say), wrote some criticism, and he painted wine bottles, that is he actually applied paint onto wine bottles after finishing the wine. He was an alcoholic. I refer to the Vail family in my book.)

Robert Sylvester, a columnist in the New York Daily News back in the forties and fifties, (who also drank an awful lot,) and a friend and fishing buddy of my father, illustrator Ray Prohaska, used to write his column with little dots separating the gossip tid-bits.  Like..., Liz Taylor dating someone new.....Tony Bennett tonight at the Five Spot.....The Blues are running under the light in Montauk. ......For awhile, I wanted to be like Sylvester.  I even got a summer job at the News, as a copy boy, while I was in college.  I suppose I used my proximity to Sylvester, such as it was, as an excuse to use the dot dot dot affectation.   

I'm stuck on the idea that because I don't have a product I must therefore present some justification for blogging; some sort of collateral. So, in order to get unstuck, I'll just tell myself that the whole reason for the existence of the Blog as a phenomenon, is for the likes of me to leap over that problem.

When Blogs first came into being, I found one by a guy up in Alaska which was about how to be an Autodidact. That was around the time I started calling myself that. I'd read a book by a young woman, young at the time, titled something like, My Year as an Autodidact. I was well into a life of autodidacticism by then, but I bonded with these two folks, and went into overdrive around that time. I don't remember much about what the Alaska guy had to say; he did have some self-published books to pitch.  I must have read one or two.

......As a one time active alcoholic who stays sober, and reads, I can't help having noticed the amazing growth industry of sobriety memoirs, and can't help thinking that mine would be more interesting than theirs, or yours. These books, though, always leave me with the feeling that the author is stepping into dangerous territory trying to profit from a personal disaster that is only provisionally over, and usually with the self-sacrificing assistance of numerous people who feel safe only in their anonymity.  If you want cautionary tales, believe me, they are out there.  

......

In my early years of staying sober, the first five years being how I usually look at that arbitrary categorizing, I satisfied my yearning to do something creative by keeping a journal, and by reading with a sincere eye toward personal growth. It was the seventies, and the infantile sixties were in their adolescence, branching out from sex, drugs and rock and roll into the human potential movement and its broad array of consciousness changing activities; meditation, journaling, body work, group therapy, and etc;  I partook. 

I kept notes concerning my therapy, my Rolfing, my meditation technique, and my reading. I was in a process, and the process was was one of rehabilitation.  I wasn't someone who had just been a nice guy who drank too much. I had been a self-and-other destructive near-do-well. I was full of guilt. I was in desperate need of self-improvement. 

There is an interesting twist to this story though, in my humble opinion, and that is, that while my active drinking life had become a downward spiral of despair, what revealed itself to be a different path became more and more enjoyable. 

What's for sale here?

I'm sorry, I just haven't invented a better mousetrap, yet.  If I do, you'll be the first to know. I have written a book, it's a sort of memoir-history about Amagansett and my family's life in that little hamlet, but I don't expect to make any money from it. I wrote it out of personal need, though it was like self-root-canal to get it done; to the extent that it's done. I also felt that I couldn't write about anything else because I lack educational credz. That's cowardly I know, but I've always been chicken about being challenged.

Once upon a time, when I was in my early thirties, I had a girlfriend who was very well-off and well connected.  I was struggling to make a living, and one day she said to me, "I'd like to help you Tony, but you don't have anything to sell." I thought that was brilliant. I struggled with the idea for months, maybe years, I'm not sure, but within weeks I signed up for a creative writing course. I thought I'd try to write a book that could be made into a movie.
It would be a Somebody-Done-Somebody-Wrong story.  I wrote a few pages. And a few more. I never completed anything. I drifted around the country like a beatnik, struggled, wrote a few poems, met a few poets and writers, and, while I was still young and good looking, became a project for several talented and well-placed women in the art and culture socio-economic class.
My adventures at that time might make an interesting book, but in the meantime I've gotten very old and I'd be competing with a population of young memoirists just out of Iowa Writer's Workshop and associated places; a population only exceeded by the young abstract expressionists that crowd every mini-Soho in every city in the country that has more than one tall building on it's skyline.  Anyway, to be honest, I have all the notes and letters and if I live long enough I probably will write that What I Did book. 
The reasons for my not having anything to sell, then, are many and varied. It's my intention to go into some of those reasons as a part of the theme of this blog, 'Me, and why I find Myself so Fascinating'.

Introduction.

 

I'm calling this Blog 'Prohaska & Me' for the following reason or reasons.....For one, it could refer either to my persona and my other selves, or to me and my relationship to my father, which was and is interesting to me, or to my interest in the name itself which comes from it having been seen as weird and different by my peers, in my growing up years.

My name is Tony Prohaska.  Yes, there are more than one of us in cyber-space. The one you are most likely to confuse me with is the one in Topeka, Kansas who works for Hallmark Cards. So I'll distinguish myself by giving a few buzz-word type references: 

 

Amagansett:  That's the village I grew up in.  
 

Horses:  I like horses. [And, lately, I've also become inordinately fond of Donkeys and Mules.] 
 

Artist:  My father and mother were artists; see  Rayprohaska.com.  and I've had a lifetime fascination with artists and what makes them tick.  
My Age: seventy.  Born December 28th, 1942. as of; see to the right, below Post Settings.   [allow for age of post.]
 

Personality type.  Eccentric.

 

....Ah, now we're getting someplace. Why am I eccentric? I would say the number one reason for that is that I am narcissistic. I believe that is both a genetic and a transactional family process. Also it may have something to do with the fact that I don't have any children.

That leads to a related fact about my exalted self which is that I am a recovering alcoholic. I am assuming that it's O.K. to discuss something like that in this forum and if I'm wrong I stand ready and willing to be corrected. I've been sober 39 years, as of this past spring. [see; Post Settings] 

The other thing that is eccentric about me is that I consider myself, to some degree which I've never really pinned down, an artist. My intellectual curiosity has always led me toward learning about what makes the creative mind tick. While I have variously considered myself blocked, depressed, deprived, disoriented, transcendent, too good for all of you, not good enough, and failed; ...the failed criticism, or the Manque business, is the one I'm most touchy about, so please don't mention it unless you intend to be extremely gentle; like a gorgeous nurse with a maternal voice, snapping on a rubber glove and saying "I promise this won't hurt."
Is that a little obscene? Oh God, please forgive me! I forgot to mention. I'm also a spiritual person. Yes. It's true. At the moment my spiritual practice is connected to a horse that I'm riding for a short half-hour lesson once a week. It's kind of mind-body work. Not kidding here.

I guess that's it for my first e-blogger post. Over and out.