“MAD MAN” chronicles a personal journey through the creative corridors of advertising agencies and the locked wards of psychiatric institutions. It spans the 30+ years from the late ’60s to the New Millennium; from New York’s Madison Avenue to Hartford’s Institute of Living; from Baltimore’s blue collars to London’s High Teas; from the mind-numbing effects of electroconvulsive shock therapy to the Machiavellian challenges of an international business portfolio. It is about a search to find one’s self among the eclectic cast of life’s characters.
The book begins in New York’s Son of Sam summer of 1977, on the rooftop ledge of the 47th Street YMCA. Looking down on the torn and twisted vision of his lifeless body sprawled on the 47th Street macadam, the author ponders his lost grip on life, even as he fears losing grip of his tenuous hold on the rooftop fence post. The story quickly evolves from suicidal thoughts to suicidal reality, against the backdrop of a wife and three kids at home, an affair at the office, and a mind that is simultaneously seduced by sexual opportunism and tormented by unforgiving guilt.
The book then proceeds into the dark hole of intensive psychiatric care. The reader will enter the locked wards of New York’s Bellevue Hospital, New Jersey’s Carrier Clinic, and Connecticut’s Institute of Living to experience the therapeutic effects of electroshock and the claustrophobic feel of straitjackets, padded rooms, cold wetpacks, and 24/7 “constant” supervision. We meet the characters that populate those worlds—characters who rekindle the author’s appetite for the edge and call up his recollections of the “relatively sane” world of advertising. »Read More