It’s been sort of fun not writing. And not the not-writing that you do when you’re supposed to be writing, but the not-writing you do when you have decided to do something else for a change–finishing a barn, working on my fleet of cars, helping your kid build his rock crawler, although every day he leaves me farther behind in the dust, skill-wise.

Not that it’s been all not-writing. I wrote a review for the Times Book Review.  And one for AMerican Scholar, of Leslie Jamison’s wonderful book, The Empathy Exams. An essay for The Believer, which is also sort of a book review, that will see the light of day sometime this decade, and another one that’s still only a twinkle in the eye of an editor at a journal that has “book review” in its title. I guess book reviews are what writers do when they are not-writing.

One reason I’ve been not-writing is that there is so much else to do, much of it gratifying in ways that writing can’t be. Hammer nails, saw a 2×4, put wrench to bolt, split wood–the rewards are so pure and immediate: a new building, a car that runs, a stack of firewood. And if you strip the bolt or muff the cut, you just fix that problem, no harm, no foul, no wondering whether you are stupid or senile or just a fraud. But another reason is that I would like to bust out of the psychiatry ghetto, and that’s harder to do than I wish it were.

Or it was anyway, until my neighbors handed me an opportunity. They didn’t mean to do that. They just meant to make themselves feel better about what they considered a disaster: a group home moved into town, and two of its three residents were registered sex offenders. Because I am the chairman of our local zoning board (or at least I think this is why), I was held responsible for their terror, and the result was a donnybrook of Hawthornian proportion. Which, naturally, I wrote about. It’s got a little bit about the mental health industry in it–mostly because my membership in that racket became part of the charges against me–but mostly it’s about other matters. Mostly it’s about the truth of the Sartrean maxim about Hell and other people.

The resulting essay constitutes my first foray into e-publishing. It’s a kindle single. I know, I know: amazon?! Well, don’t worry, I’m not going to be moving dead bodies for Jeff Bezos or attending his secret parties anytime soon. I consider this a long-awaited reach around, which is about all we lowly content serfs can expect these days, but is better than a sharp stick in the eye. Or in the somewhere else. And the folks at kindle singles have been very kind and helpful and competent, and they came up with a really nice cover. The essay is called Scotland (which is the name of the town that gave me my Hester Prynne moment), and it costs $1.99. You can find it here. I guarantee you it will be worth your two bucks to read it, and if it makes you feel any better (or less scornful), I get to keep $1.40 of that. (I know that makes me feel better.) And for your trouble I am throwing in, absolutely free, a an epilogue, right here on this blog.

OK. Enough justification. Next up, the epilogue.

Fucking scientists! First they’re showing me these really great pictures of naked ladies, I mean totally naked, nipples and everything, and just when I’m getting in the groove, I’m picturing Debbie Lowenstein’s face instead of the model’s, and she’s whispering that it’s okay for me  to do what I want to do to her, finally after all these years and Dave doing his best to stop it from happening, and they sneak up behind me and pop a paper bag next to my ear. Fuckers. I tried my best to hold on to that picture in my head, Debbie all naked and ready and shit, I mean you have no idea how hard it is to stay focused under those circumstances, especially when I’m still recovering from those damn kids he insisted on having, kept me up all night, plus all those years the wife was totally unavailable, years of either riding the hump or listening to her bitch about how she’s all tired and crabby from the kid being at her tits all day, and I’m just beginning to get my mojo back, Debbie’s right there, I’m feeling the old tickle in my balls, and POP!

The next thing you know, the scientists are nodding to each other about how I’ve become less alert to danger. But did they ask me? No, they did not. So I couldn’t tell them that I was fully aware of the noise, my prefrontal cortex was actually screaming in my ear, but I was just telling it to shut the fuck up before Debbie abandoned me. Which she did, of course. And then, the next next thing you know, Dave is going on about how this proves something about something about love.

Oh, well. I guess I should be used to it. He may not hear me, but I can hear him just fine. Dave doesn’t think so, of course. He probably doesn’t even think I’ve learned English, or that I’m there every minute of every day—when he tears up listening to Kate say to Bogie, “Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above,” or when he writes in his diary that night, “Good thing for Charlie that Rose was on the African Queen long enough to ovulate. But too bad for her. She should have stuck to her guns rather than turn into just another slightly higher animal. But at least she got Charlie to sacrifice himself in the end.” Or when he reads about some fancy theologian who says that suffering is a good thing because it scours away the floors and gets you deeper and deeper, like life is a housekeeping Olympics, and the winner is the one who scours not just the dirt but the tile itself, like I’m just scum to be scrubbed away by the steel wool of Dave’s higher self. I feel so misunderstood, and I’m really getting tired of it.

See, I know you don’t believe this, Dave, but I am as deep as it gets. And I’m smart enough to know what you think of me, that I’m just some sort of Caliban to your Ariel, natural selection infused into dopamine and testosterone, and then distilled into impulses and predispositions that need to be transformed into something spiritual and permanent like dying for  my religion, or working for NPR. Whether either of us likes it, I’m along for the ride. I am right there in your tongue as it clucks at the scientists who insist that human nature is no more or less than Plato’s chariot, executive function struggling to rein in both reason and impulse for no higher purpose than the preservation of the species. I am in your brain as you insist that there must be more to it than this animal imperative, that true depth is achieved only when you choose to suffer, that the good society is the one that affords ample opportunities to make that choice, maybe even insists upon it. And I’m in your eyes when you read your own newspaper, the one that chronicles the suffering that people don’t choose, all those poor benighted people who can only flail in the shallows of their own squalid origins, whose suffering has no depth and can only be relieved by following their animal impulses.

I’m dying in here, Dave. And not only because you dismiss me as fragmented and swinish, or think that your life is meaningful only to the extent that you can turn me into something I’m not. Religious people have been doing that for thousands of years. It’s because you don’t seem to understand how much you need me. Who do you think created you or drove you to your lofty newsprint perch? Where do you think the idea that the world needs more suffering comes from, or the belief that words like “web of unconditional loves” or “permanent commitments to transcendent projects” actually mean something, or the conviction that there isn’t enough suffering the world? Where do you think you get the capacity to overlook the hubris of your pronouncements, the superficiality of your grasp of science, the vapidity of a notion like “core wounds and core loves”? From me. You get all this from me, from this dirty-minded, low-rent, hedonistic, power hungry animal who lives deep inside you. Add it up, Dave. You owe me. Big time.

Actually, when the scientists showed up with the pictures, I thought you were paying me back. I actually believed for a moment you were finally recognizing that we’re in this thing together, Rose and Charlie fighting and fucking our way onto Lake Victoria, blowing up the Louisa, just letting it rip. And I thought I was repaying your gratitude with that photoshop job, Debbie L. so perfectly rendered, ready for our mutual delectation. I thought we were going to get closer to even. And then POP!

[NB: I am not David Brooks’s son, prodigal or otherwise. I am really 56 years old, and my father is not a NY Times columnist. If Brooks has a son named Sam or a grandson named Doug, then that is a coincidence for which I apologize in advance, although, if he does, I will agree in advance that I could have used Aloysius or Boniface and avoided the coincidence entirely, but Sammy and Dougie have such a nice ring. But I will change it if this regrettable possibility turns out to be the case.]

My dad really surprised me this time. I figured I’d come home to a real shit show, you know, a long I-told-you-so about the necessity of self-restraint, and then an even longer period of icy silence while he made me read The Wealth of Nations. Because really, a dad who does the marshmallow experiment—the one where you put a marshmallow in front of a kid, and tell him he can have that one now or, if he can wait until you return, he can have three later—on his own three-year-old, and uses not just marshmallows but those irresistible pink Hostess Sno Balls, and then, after the kid snarfs the Sno Ball the second his dad walks out of the room, waves a sheaf of papers in his face, reciting statistics about SAT scores and income and body mass index, how the kid who can’t resist the Sno Ball is doomed to be a fat unemployed slob, always a taker, never a maker—I mean, that’s not the kind of dad whom you expect to greet you with open arms after you’ve done what I’ve done.

He repeated the experiment at six-month intervals until I was eight, and the outcome was always the same, even though the Sno Balls got less and less satisfying, while watching Dad get all apoplectic never did). And just as the scientists (and Dad) predicted, I flunked out of college. Well, not flunked out exactly. After I booted my first sophomore semester—no surprise, I’d barely made it through prep school and freshman year, wouldn’t have without all that tutoring and Adderall, plus a couple of well-timed calls from Dad—the college would have had me back (we were paying retail after all), but Dad gave me a choice, or as he put it, an “opportunity to make good choices.” He told me he was giving up on trying to influence me, that it was high time I made my own mistakes and lived with the consequences, so he was just going to give me what was left of the money he’d put away for my college to use as I saw fit. But that was it, he said. When it was gone, it was gone, and I’d be on my own. So I’d better start making good choices.

The account had about $150K in it. I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, but I knew I wasn’t going to use it for college. I wasn’t going to be like Sam, sitting there all smug and self-righteous doing math problems while his Sno Ball attracted flies, and then, when he got his promised three, making sure to eat them slowly and right in front of me, sometimes stretching it out for a couple of days, walking around with a little coconut chip stuck on his lip the whole time, like he just had to rub it in, the same way he rubbed in going to Yale and getting tapped for Skull and Bones and on to Harvard Law and his job in a Washington firm and the house he bought right next door to Dad’s. I’d rather die, I thought at the time.

I did come pretty close, more than once. That night with the eight-ball of blow and the hooker sitting on my face and  the other one fellating me and it felt like my heart was going to jackhammer its way out of my rib cage and the next thing I knew I was on the floor, no girls, no coke, no money in my wallet. That guy who said he could turn my 10 grand into a hundred overnight, but then he disappeared and when I went to get it back, he pulled a gun on me. The time I got into a drinking contest with a surfer dude in a club in Ibiza and didn’t come out of the blackout until three days later, had to trade my watch to some nasty Spaniard to take me over to Mallorca in his leaky tub so I could go to the consulate and replace my passport and phone and scrounge up some cash until I could get my new ATM FedExed. I had to get Dad’s help that time, hated to do it, but it sure made the guy at the consulate move faster when he figured out whose son I was. I ignored his calls and emails for months after that, just didn’t want to hear it.

Of course, that lousy $150K wouldn’t have lasted these five years without a little help. About two years in, right after the trip to the Balearics, I ran into a guy I’d known back at Sidwell Friends. He’d actually finished there, went on to Swarthmore, but the whole Quaker thing turned out to be only a phase. He ended up in subprimes, then when that deal went south, sat on his money until real estate finished tanking, and then started buying properties in places like Atlanta and Phoenix. More than once, he told me, he bought houses or apartment buildings that he’d sold CDOs on for a tenth of what they’d been hocked for. The best kind of double dipping, he said.

My friend had some kind of database that let him see which areas had the most distressed properties. He wanted to buy them up in bulk, a block or street at a time. My job was to scout out the neighborhoods, and look for the places where houses were still occupied, where the pipes hadn’t been looted or the apartments totally trashed. These weren’t the cul-de-sacs full of abandoned McMansions that you read about in Dad’s paper, but places that had been marginal in the first place, where people were most pie-eyed at the prospect of home ownership. “The best of the worst,” he called it, and when I found him a good spot, he’d give me a vigorish off the purchase price and then, if the thing panned out, a piece of the take when he flipped it.

My strategy was to hang around these places for a few days or a week at a time, looking in windows and drinking in the local bars and chatting up the residents to see if I could figure out more than what the real estate agents were telling me. I’d buy someone a round or two, tell them I was thinking about buying the place they were living, see if I could wangle an invite into their house by implying they would most likely be able to stay after the purchase if they were nice to me. Word would spread, and by the end of my stay, I’d have been in maybe half the houses, and I’d have a pretty good idea of whether we could buy it, kick the people out, do some cosmetics, and flip the place in less than four months.

Of course I felt bad about this sometimes. I’m human, right? I don’t exactly know what Dad would think, because we were mostly out of touch during that time. But I would read his column from time to time, and he talked a lot about bad choices, and I have to say that these people I was meeting had made some doozies. And it wasn’t just the pregnant 16-year-olds and the deadbeat dads drinking on the street corner and the kids running dime bags. It was the real estate itself. Here they were, living in the places they’d bought—signed their names to the mortgage and everything—and hadn’t paid a dime on in years. Or evicted from one house  up the street and living in another house that someone else had been evicted from, and doing it all over again when the bank caught up with them. They’d ask me how much their place might go for, and when I told them they’d whine about how come the bank would leave them in limbo for three years, or, worse, kick them out and then let someone else have the mortgage they could have afforded. I knew they meant me, but I didn’t take the bait, and we stayed pretty friendly.

And then one night in Orlando, after a few rounds, this guy pointed out that the banks would have been better off if they’d just negotiated that price before the pipes got stolen or the taxes went delinquent, said it didn’t make any sense to wait three or four years to get the same financial result and put a family out in the street in the bargain. Unless, of course, the whole point was to punish people like him, to teach them a lesson about who is in charge, about who needs forgiveness and who should dole it out, and in what form.

Once that guy got started, the rest chimed in, and that’s when it dawned on me. These people were like I had been with the Sno Ball. They wanted it all now and when they ended up with nothing, they were angry with everyone else in the world except the people who were responsible for their trouble—themselves. Especially the government. They seemed to think it was the government’s job to protect them from “predatory lenders,” as they called them (and I wonder what community organizer gave them that line) and to mete out justice to the people they held responsible for decimating their neighborhoods. They wanted to know why unemployment benefits had been cut off, food stamps reduced, school programs slashed, their neighborhoods left to the vultures, while the bankers got richer and the hedge funds hedgier, as if, now that they’d gobbled the Sno Ball, the government should step in and deliver three more on a silver tray.

Those people in Orlando didn’t seem to understand that the reason the government had forgiven the bankers and not them was that the bankers would know what to do with the forgiveness, while they would have probably just squandered it on their little families. They didn’t get it that the government stood ready to welcome them back to the fold, but only  if they were ready to get the chip off their shoulders and pitch in, which they could do by working hard to strengthen their companies, or if they didn’t have a company, to rebuild the infrastructure, or if there weren’t any infrastructure rebuilding jobs to be had, by strengthening their  church or embedding themselves in their community projects. “You have no idea what you are talking about,”  the guy in Orlando said. “Not a fucking clue,” and took a swing at me. I ran out the door, hopped in my car and beat it out of that place, vowing to give it a big thumbs up so that we could kick those people out of their houses tout suite.

I don’t know if I would have gone crawling back to Dad right then, because maybe I was too stubborn and proud, but I knew already that the voice in my head was his. And then, just a couple of weeks later, my old Sidwell buddy stopped returning my texts. Not only that, but my bank account, to which he had access because I let him run cash through it, turned up empty and my credit cards, all of which were his company’s, were canceled, and all I had was the few hundred dollars in my pocket and my Beamer. I was 25 and nearly broke, and I had no other place to go.

It was a Friday night when I rang Dad’s doorbell. I figured Sammy and his wife and kids would be over for Shabbos dinner, and I heard them at the table, but it was Dad who came to the door in his stocking feet. He was still wearing his tie, but it was loose at his throat. He was holding a glass of scotch, and he looked wan and tired. (Later he told me he’d just come home from squaring off with E.J. Dionne on NPR, which I guess is harder than it sounds.) He blinked at me through his glasses, gestured me in. Right there in the hallway, I told him about the ungrateful man in Orlando, how I finally understood the lesson he was trying to teach me: that the world really didn’t owe me a living any more than it owed him one, that a man, no matter his race or creed or temperament or economic background, no matter how impoverished his neighborhood or how exploited his labor or how modest his desires, makes his own luck, and I begged his forgiveness. I got down on my knees and told him I was ready to go back to school if that’s what he wanted, that I’d earn my way by proofreading his columns or running his schedule or even shining his shoes. He reached down, pulled me up and into the biggest hug he’d ever given me. He told me that of course he’d welcome me back, and how there was probably a job for me on the Times business desk. We wept together.

Over Dad’s shoulder, I saw Sammy. His face was black with rage. “You’re going to reward him?” he said. He was nearly shaking. “Dougie just failed the Sno Ball test for the third time, and I’ve been using this idiot as the example of what happens if he doesn’t do better. What kind of message will this send?”

“The only message that is worth sending,” Dad said, and beamed at me. “That the line between good and evil doesn’t run between people or classes; it runs straight through every human heart. And when you finally realize that the problem is in that divided heart, that this world, or at least this society, offers everyone, regardless of circumstance, the CEO or son of an influential newspaperman the same as the chronically underemployed or the teen mom, the same opportunity to be good, and that it is our job to seize it—then you can be welcomed back to the fold.” Dad draped his arm around me. “Now, let’s eat,” he said, “and I’ll explain to you why I have become a Christian.”

I said I was done, and I am, except for one thing–this, from politico.com, in its coverage of DAvid Brooks and Marijuana:

But the real coup was a response from one Gary Greenberg, who claimed to have been a member of Brooks’s high school stoner crew. His piece was full of all sorts of unsavory details about Brooks, including the allegation that Brooks’s practical pot joke once got an African-American student kicked out of school and sent to juvy.

However, Brooks had never heard of Greenberg. The essay was intended as satire, and hours after its publication Greenberg was forced to publish a note at the top which began, “What follows here is satire of the Juvenalian variety.” Penguin, Greenberg’s publisher, sent his piece to journalists (including yours truly) and, when asked if it was real, replied: “Indeed it’s satire – but still a hilarious piece.” Less so as satire.

OK, I’ll say up front that I have no idea what Penguin did or why, and I will overlook the question of whether the fact that something is satire makes it more or less funny (although I will point out that what varies with the genre is the target of the humor). But, and this is important, I was not “forced to publish a note” explaining that this was satire. I did it because I wanted to, out of courtesy to a reading public whose sensibilities I had obviously misjudged (although not entirely–plenty of people got the joke, and I think the people most likely to take me seriously were those who a) wanted to believe this was true and b) who had a deadline).

And I’ll point out, for the thousandth time, that while I am sure it is true that “Brooks had never heard of Greenberg” (actually, I’m not so sure; I’m guessing he read my Nation review of the Social Animal and wished he’d never heard of me), his statement is not what “debunked” (as so many other outlets put it) my story. I debunked my story. I debunked it by making it, as Zach Beauchamp, one of the very few reporters to bother asking,  says, “epically preposterous.” I debunked it by telling everyone who asked that it was a satire. I debunked it by volunteering that information to the people who didn’t ask, which included many of the top news websites in the country, who were apparently in too much of a hurry to read the article carefully, let alone to ask me if it was true. And then I debunked it by putting that stupid, and widely ignored, to judge from my inbox and comments, disclaimer on the blog.

So don’t make it out like you guys tracked me down and forced me to confess like you were some kind of Eliot Ness to my Al Capone.  I added that note of my own volition and even though it goes against my own instincts and principles, because it was really inconvenient to keep answering the question. Plus, people seemed upset, and I have come to see that the Internet has outdated my principles and instincts, and despite my best efforts, I am a responsible citizen and a decent person.

Here’s a comment that I think perfectly summarizes the problem (and the beauty) of satire. It comes from a guy named Chris Smith.

You’re totally not a hack for trying to excuse your defamatory hoax against a windbag like Brooks as “satire”, and your half-assed, belated “apology” is certainly sufficient. On behalf of everyone who read this well-plotted piece of non-claptrap, I sincerely thank you for wasting our time.

PS – the above is an example of actual use of “irony”.

Now, I had to read this two or three times to figure it out, and I’m still not 100%  sure. I think what Smith is saying is that I am a hack, that my apology was insufficient, and that my piece was not non-claptrap or truly ironic. But it could work the other way–that it was not a defamatory hoax, that Brooks is a windbag, that his time was not wasted, that he’s sympathizing with my trouble in being understood as an ironicist. In other words, without knowing the valence of Chris Smith’s attitude toward me, it’s hard to tell what’s ironic and what’s not. I’m pretty sure I detected the valence after the third or fourth read, and that it is hostile, which makes the rest fall into place (but I’d point out, it works exactly the same way backwards). If Chris Smith were to contact me and say, “Dude, what have you been smoking? Of course I’m on your side,” I’d be a little embarrassed to think I’d spent all that time analyzing his comment and coming up wrong.

I don’t blame Smith a bit for my uncertainty, although I think he was probably more confusing than he intended. He made me think, which might contribute in some small way to delaying the onset of dementia. More to the point, if my understanding of his point was in some way crucial, if, say I was a writer or editor of a mass media outlet contemplating a piece about whether or not Gary Greenberg is a hack writer, I would reach out to Chris, who provided his email address, and just ask him. If he didn’t respond, or if his response didn’t clarify the question, I’d find some other way to find out–google him, ask his friends, look for other stuff he’s written, and so on. And I wouldn’t go forward until I had an answer that satisfied me, or if I did go forward, I’d note that I didn’t know exactly what the facts are here.

So let’s say you’re not Chris Smith, but Betsy Rothstein, a blogger for something called the Daily Caller. I’d never heard of either before yesterday at 10:53 a.m., which is about when I was pulling the battery out of the Bobcat. Her email went like this:

Name: Betsy Rothstein

Email: xxxx@xxxx.com

Message: Hi there. I write for The Daily Caller in Washington, D.C. I’d like to talk to you about your David Brooks essay. I need to verify that this is real, that you actually knew him, smoked weed with him, etc…

Thank you so much.
Betsy
P.S. My phone is 555-555-5555

It was one of fifty-seven emails that hit my inbox between 1045 and 1120. I thought I had answered it, but I think now that it was the one that my son was writing for me when he quit as my amanuensis. In any event, I did not answer Rothstein.

That didn’t stop her from posting, at 11:44 a.m. a story under the headline “Dude who smoked pot with DAvid Brooks surfaces, writes about it.” Unlike Chris Smith, Betsy Rothstein’s valence was  unmistakable from the first sentence, wherein she describes me as “a p[sychotherapist who has been diagnosed with major depression.” She does throw in a “he claims” and an “allegedly” here and there, but she obviously took the piece seriously, so seriously in fact that she confesses to finding it “so thick with bitterness and resentment… that it is almost hard to read.”

Later (and I don’t know when, because I wasn’t aware of any of this until last night), she posted an update.

The Mirror has learned that Gary Greenberg, the psychotherapist who claims he smoked pot with NYT‘s David Brooks in a story on his blog is actually a hoax. There is absolutely no indication on his blog, however, that it is a hoax and Greenberg has a long list of credentials. The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza asked Brooks about Greenberg and Brooks said he doesn’t know him. In addition, Wired‘s Steve Silberman tweeted with certainty that it was satire and wrote that he “checked” on it.  CNN’s Jake Tapper probably put it best: “People need to learn that creative lying does not = satire.” Greenberg’s site has yet to be updated with any clear sign that what he wrote was satire