“THE QUEENS OF SNARK”

September 16, 2012 / posted in Musings / Comments Off

“You have the pulse of a runner and the heart of a lion,” my doctor enthusiastically reported, following a recent physical. To which my wife quickly added, ”And the pain threshold of a five-year-old girl.”

What is it that makes women think they are so much tougher than men?

Sure, women are capable of squeezing seven-to-ten pounds of humanity out of their bodies on occasion, but that’s hardly an everyday occurrence.

It’s not bad enough that my wife thinks I translate every ache and pain into high drama, but she and her friends love to compare notes about what weenies their husbands can be, thus baring my idiosyncratic behavior (over-stated in my wife’s telling for maximum comedic effect) for others to comment on. And the Snarky Comment Award definitely goes to my self-described “long-lost baby sister.”
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“STRAW DOG”

April 2, 2012 / posted in Select Essays / Comments Off

In ancient Chinese rituals, straw dogs were used as offerings to the gods. During the ritual, they were treated with the utmost reverence. When it was over and they were no longer needed, they were trampled on and tossed aside.

It was in that spirit that my partners in the ad agency asked me to relocate to London in the spring of 1992.

Ours was one of America’s largest independent advertising agencies, despite being co-headquartered in Detroit and Baltimore—two cities not exactly synonymous with the lore of “Mad Men.” We did, however, boast a London office through which we serviced the agency’s largest single client and one of the world’s truly global clients—British Petroleum. That we even had an account like BP was a tribute to the agency’s creativity and tenacity, as well as a perfect reflection of its unorthodoxy.
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“PERSONAL FOUL”

April 2, 2012 / posted in Published Essays / Comments Off

Gemini Magazine, May 2012

Senior year in college. The final hurrah before the hard slog of adulthood. The last taste of campus celebrity. The fleeting perception of being a big shot. The hard reality of taking a cheap shot.

“Get in shape, Don,” Rutgers hard-nosed offensive coordinator grumbled disapprovingly, his steel-capped cleats clanking the macadam walkway leading into the locker room, me sitting on a bench outside the door wheezing my ass off and threatening to barf…again.

We had just finished the first practice session of Rutgers football summer camp—two weeks of two-a-days in New Jersey’s late August hell.  The days ahead promised to give new meaning to the description I had once heard of “a football practice”…a period of intense boredom punctuated by moments of acute fear. The author of those words was presumably equating fear to the physical aspects of a game that demands the repetitive collisions of large bodies intent on doing damage to one another. Honestly, that part never bothered me as much as the psychological challenges of becoming a “starter,” and remaining one. That said, and what with my having been Rutgers starting fullback for the past two seasons, one would think I would have arrived at my final summer camp in the best shape of my life. Clearly, I did not. And so began my last year in football…one year too late, as it turned out!
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“THE MENTOR”

December 28, 2011 / posted in Select Essays / Comments Off

“They were living in a single wide with a Hispanic family with six kids. That’s ten people in a single wide! Imagine.”

The 30-year old man who said this to me lived in a double wide with his wife, three kids, one dog, three cats, and two rats…pet rats.  I’ll never forget the first time I met the rats.

I had just arrived at the double wide to visit the boy I had mentored for the previous two years and who was now living in this mobile home under foster care.  I said hello to the boy, now thirteen, his foster parents, two other foster children—both handicapped (the “they” referred to above)—the dog, and the three cats. Still trying to assimilate this familial scene, I was then asked if I would like to meet the final two members of the household—an introduction that would require a trip to the bathroom. With caution bordering trepidation, I followed the 30-year old man into the bathroom where I was instructed to look into the tub. There I came face-to-face with two unsettlingly large rodents…creatures with which I felt no sense of bonding and had previously seen only in the wild inner city, where I gave them wide (double or triple wide, if possible) berth.
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“MAD MAN”…Synopsis

December 28, 2011 / posted in "Mad Man"...A Memoir / Comments Off

“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

“MAD MAN”…A MEMOIR – Prologue

December 28, 2011 / posted in "Mad Man"...A Memoir / Comments Off

VALENTINE’S DAY 2000—London, England… A plain brown envelope arrives in the morning post. It contains a single sheet of paper that terminates my employment from the advertising agency where I have worked for more than 20 years—the ad agency of which I am a senior partner and head of international operations. I gaze out the floor-to-ceiling windows of my 8th Floor office overlooking London’s fashionable Covent Garden and think about my partners in Detroit—the bastards with the controlling shareholdings who have thoughtfully given me two weeks to pack up and get out. Happy fucking Valentine’s Day to them too.

*  *  *

It had been more than 30 years since I first entered the ad agency business in Manhattan—a fresh-faced kid just graduated from Rutgers. And more than 20 years since I left my last psychiatric hospital—a veteran of a rehabilitation regimen of straitjackets, rubber rooms, electroconvulsive shock therapy, and a rather novel treatment known as the “cold wetpack.”
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“MAD MAN”…A MEMOIR – Sample Chapter

December 28, 2011 / posted in "Mad Man"...A Memoir / Comments Off

My march to madness had been steadily gathering steam since 1968—my freshman year as a grown-up.

I had just graduated from college and was sleeping on a day bed on the back porch of the home of my fiancé in New Jersey, trying to second-guess the odds of getting a job in New York versus getting my ass shot off in Vietnam.

It was a crazy time. Martin Luther King had been killed. Bobby Kennedy was about to be killed. America’s psyche was totally shredded by the war. And I had a wedding date breathing down my neck.

“You did what?” My bride-to-be screamed. She and her parents were downright apoplectic when I announced that I had decided to sign up for Officer Candidate School. “They shoot the officers first, you know. Our guys, I mean,” my fiance’s brother knowingly pronounced.
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“The Three Charlies”

September 19, 2011 / posted in Life & Times, Published Essays / Comments Off

Folly Magazine.

On a bitterly cold New England Monday in January 1978, I entered my third psychiatric hospital in less than six months. I would spend the next year of my life there, almost half of that time as a resident of Thompson 2, the Institute of Living’s most closely monitored, all-male, 24/7 locked-down unit.

I had been in such places before—New York’s Bellevue Hospital and the Carrier Clinic near Princeton in New Jersey—but my arrival to those “facilities” had been cushioned with substantial medication and no expectations. I arrived at Thompson 2 that January afternoon, expecting to step straight off a pampered country inns weekend and onto the idyllic rehab brochure that my Park Avenue shrink had shared with me in New York.

“Do it, Don.” He had implored. “A few months at the Institute is nothing compared to what almost happened last summer. You were lucky to survive a brush with death. Look at this as a fresh chance at life.”

His logic was sound, and persuasive, especially given that I knew I was sliding back into a very dark mental hole—a hole that had all too recently hurled me to suicidal depths and introduced me to handcuffs, straitjackets, padded rooms and electroconvulsive shock therapy.
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“BARBIE”

September 19, 2011 / posted in Select Essays / Comments Off

BarbieThere are no blondes in Mongolia. And damn few tourists. Yet despite their nomadic lives and geographic isolation, Mongolians remain surprisingly susceptible to the relentless onslaught of western culture. Or so I discovered when they started calling my wife Barbie.

It was late summer when we traveled to the heart of Asia. Sande’s hair was the picture of towheaded blondeness, thanks to her Scandinavian genes, Mother Nature’s solar rays, and a little chemical jolt from Emporium Josef during our London stopover. That she was wearing her golden locks in a ponytail only added to the Mongolian illusion that the fashion doll icon had arrived in the flesh.
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“TANTA ANNE & LOVER BOY”

September 18, 2011 / posted in Published Essays / Comments Off

ken againken*again, Vol. 12 No. 4

Lover Boy was my uncle. Tanta Anne was his aunt. Baltimore’s Pigtown was their home.

My uncle, the second oldest of five brothers and the one most likely to become a juvenile delinquent, grew up regularly charming his way out of the kind of trouble that usually landed his four brothers in fistfights, mostly to cover for Lover Boy’s small frame and big mouth.

His aunt Anne was a round, sedentary woman of the Wernsdorfer clan that had arrived in Baltimore from Germany in the late nineteenth century. Tanta expended no more energy than was absolutely required to get from one end of the day to the other, preferring to sit in her well-worn chair behind the painted screen of her front window watching the world go by and waiting for someone to throw a party.
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