The way the heat of summer meets the cool ocean breeze on Coney Island is unlike anywhere, I’m convinced. I used to go all the way out there just for one breath in that peculiar convergence of air.
In the summer of 1964, I was 22. I went there regularly. It was my sort of private ritual. The train ride out was the first part of the ritual, long enough for me to become someone slightly different by the time I arrived.
I always ordered a hot dog with ketchup, mustard and relish. I ate standing up. I listened as parents called their children back after wandering too far. When the loneliness I had gone there to escape crept back in, I'd return home.
On one occasion, in an attempt to shake off a particularly strong melancholy, I took a ride on the bumper cars. There was something exciting about contact without consequence. The jolt of impact. The smell of rubber. The sound of sparks overhead.
I lost track of time and when I arrived at my car, a police officer was writing a parking ticket. I gently tugged on his shoulder while pleading with him to not give me the ticket. Before I knew it, he was threatening to arrest me for lewd and indecent conduct, as if I was coming onto him!
How ridiculous. He let me go after I feigned extreme deference. I kind of blacked out on my ride home, not remembering how I got back.
Not long after that trip, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I would eventually open up a practice in the Village.
That Rosh Hashanah, my mother said she’d never been prouder of me for choosing this career. Her pride carried me for a while. I became good at being the person she was proud of.
After fourteen years of four times a week psychoanalysis, I found my wife. We were happy. Our love was sober. We never had the head-over-heels phase. It was healthier that way. We split grapefruits, did crosswords together and spent our anniversary at our favorite restaurant.
But on our ten year wedding anniversary, I met someone that changed everything.
I’m forty-six years old. I walk by a man in the Rambles of Central Park. He aggressively grabs my arm and says, “Let me see your dick!”
I am shocked and appalled and also grinning uncontrollably. No, he has me all wrong, I protest internally. That’s not me. I keep going. Then he comes up behind me again and quietly commands “Follow me.”
I don’t know why I followed him. I hated him.
“Is this your apartment?”
He didn’t answer. The apartment had strange dimensions and barely had the basic appliances. My real psychoanalytic training happened in those Thursday afternoons with Brad in the vestibule makeshift apartment on the Upper West Side. He taught me everything I needed to know. I don’t know how he knew but he just knew…everything.
My analyst, now my supervisor, kept alluding to a difference in me, trying to provoke my disclosure. I said that it was just one of those moments in life where everything was coming together. Not long after, I was answering my supervisor’s questions.
I’ve never told anyone about Brad but one of my patients picked up on it once.
“So are you trying to tell me you’re a little gay?” She asked me after I told her about the police officer.
“Is that what you think?” I retorted.
“It’s what I know thanks to what you’ve taught me.”
I was glad she couldn’t see my face. I looked up on the wall at my Caligula painting and wanted to kill her.
Sensing my rage, she said, “Oh I’m only kidding, I’m sorry, I’m feeling a bit cocky today!”
We sat in silence. She knew. But did she know she knew?
The following week, I decided hypnosis might help her.
Caligula, Salvador Dalí, 1972