Many years later, the whole hero topic is complicated. I realize that even extraordinary humans are a blend of good and bad. They save the world by day but by night, life goes on: bills, bad relationships, wrong turns, mental illness, real stakes and deadly fires. I see with adult eyes that the lives of my idols were difficult and full of hard choices. This jaded perspective is exacerbated by the flag-waving, yellow-ribbon casting of all soldiers, regardless of their actual duty or performance, as national heroes. Why does putting on a uniform make you great? It all feels diluted. I try to convince myself that there are also daily moments of valor like letting another car merge or offering to split the last snickers bar. But the child I was, who hid imaginary Jews from imaginary Nazis in her imaginary annex, would scoff at this definition as well. Not being a jerk doesn’t make you a hero either.

This week my sister called and told me a hero story. She is a family practitioner who works at an urgent care clinic. She also works for Doctors without Borders and has expertise in tropic medicine and underserved populations. When she is abroad, she rides around in dugout canoes and sets protocol for cholera epidemics. When she is home, she gives people Tylenol and tells them that the virus will run its course in five to seven days.

Several weeks ago one of her colleagues saw a ten-year old boy with an ear ache. He had a ordinary ear infection and was prescribed an antibiotic. A few days ago he and his parents were back, now seeing my sister. A teacher had noticed redness on the boy’s face near the ear. My sister asked if he had completed his medication. “No,” the mom said, “he didn’t want to take it.” When my sister examined the ear, she realized that the infection had developed into a condition uncommon in countries with widespread immunization and antibiotic programs. She called an EENT doctor and suggested he see the boy that day. She was told to give him more amoxicillin and make an appointment. She called the ER and was grilled on what she had done or not done, what she knew and what she didn’t. Finally, my sister lost her formidable Sicilian temper and bullied an ER doctor into meeting the boy and his parents at the hospital as quickly as it took to drive there.

The next day my sister received an email. The boy did indeed have the rare infection, which had progressed into a brain abscess so severe, they had to perform emergency surgery. Had he not been treated immediately, the boy might have died within hours.

I cannot stop thinking about this story. It has all the elements that intrigued me as a kid. My sister risked her reputation and within her own context, fought ferociously for what she knew to be true. She did not give up. She advocated for someone unable to advocate for themselves. She saved a life. She was rather nonplussed about the whole thing afterwards. Her nurses told her later that most doctors would have inadvertently sent the boy home. Why didn’t she? My grown up cynicism recedes as I add an inspiring epilogue. Heroes simply do what needs to be done when no one else will do it. There, my teacher will love it.

Next year that same little boy will be in sixth grade. My guess is that if asked to write a paper on “heroes,” he will choose firemen, his grandma or Jesus. He won’t realize that this homework opportunity is possible because a feisty doctor would not take no for answer. He will just shrug at the instructions and get to work.  

1) He got in hot water in Sophomore English for asking Mrs. Hill whether the verbal paradigm for “to lay” remained the same in certain non-standard usages of the verb.
2) He had terrible skin.
3) When we all went on an orchestra trip to Cincinnati, he told me and my best friend not to wake him because he might, by reflex, kill us with his bare hands.

Item 3 actually went along with a great deal of other stuff I know he told us but can’t remember when or the exact details. The gist of it all was that he had been a CIA assassin. Presumably he was much older than your average 10th grader, though again, it’s so many years ago I don’t remember whether this was stated or just projectively understood. My mental image of him is that of the fellow who gazes into the middle distance and lets you know through various proportionalities of statement and innuendo that he has Seen Things.

The other day, in another corner of the internet, I was reading as someone wrote about a troublesome friend of hers who might or might not be part of an elite cadre of killers. What I ended up posting in response* was something about elite cadres of killers needing a drama club. What I started to post instead** was a pointed little story about William.

Facebook puts us in unremitting, breathing-down-the-neck touch with our pimply past to the point where it can be surprising that there are people you knew who you’ve mostly forgotten. Once I thought of William, I emailed a friend to ask if she knew where he ended up. The last I heard of him was he had started going to the synagogue my folks went to, suddenly Jewish apparently.

Where he ended up is Kentucky’s death row. The rest of the story seems dizzyingly awful and perhaps fascinating and it’s all I can do not to write a book about it. (For better or worse, I don’t know how to write a book, and hardly have the concentration to write a blog entry.)

In briefest summary, he and a woman he knew decided he would kill her parents for her financial gain. It was either an insurance summary or a safe full of money–completely coincidentally I was watching In Cold Blood the same two days I read all this and am sure the two things began to run together. He ended up killing three people. Later, he would ask her for money she had promised and threaten to go to the authorities.

He would be sentenced to life with no possibility of parole until 25 years, would somehow forego this deal in an attempt to get a better one or get off altogether (not sure), and end up getting a death sentence. As far as I can tell, he’s still alive.

Beyond that, I’ll just post a few things from the court decision, which I googled up, and leave it at that.

Item 1
“Moreover, they were also aware of his propensity to recast himself as a fictional toughguy—i.e., a Navy SEAL and a “black-ops” operative—even as a young man while in high school. These creations of his were surely not credible under the facts adduced.”

Item 2
“In her statement of December 31, 2004, Wellnitz indicated that they and several of their friends had talked about setting up a commune. According to her, Meece even had a business plan for a commune entitled “Blackwatch Enterprises.” It was to be a “David Koresh” kind of colony. In fact, as part of the inducement for the murders, Meece “was promised to get to have his little dream commune” at the Wellnitz farm.”

Item 3:
“He sent me a letter saying that his life had been ruined and that he had read some book about the witness protection program . . . and that if I didn’t give him enough money to start a lawn care service that he was going to go to the police and confess as a hit man and get put in the witness protection program to Hawaii.”

*to be an asshole, yes.
**to be a bigger asshole

Once upon a time, I wanted to get my clinical license so I could be a shrink. Odd to think about now, but I was hell bent on it. I was working in a setting without the kind of supervision I needed, so I hired my own supervisor and stayed with her for two years. We’re friends now, which is a difference between supervision and therapy: you can be friends afterward. That said, in retrospect, she was basically my therapist.

One afternoon we were discussing a client who was trying to get disability* and about whose claim to same I was skeptical. Honesty about your own lousy motivations is important in clinical supervision as it is in therapy. I admitted that an ugly fantasy of mine sometimes is to use what I know about mental illness to get disability so I could drop out and never do anything again. Fantasies work how they work; I can easily see all the problems with this, but once in a while it gives me solace from that locked-in feeling life sometimes gives me.

My supervisor admitted her own version, which I think is sort of not mine to share here, though it was bizarre and compelling. Never one to quit while I’m ahead, I piled one more log on the bonfire of crazy and admitted my other escape fantasy: being the last person on earth. She looked genuinely puzzled and asked what the good part of being the last person on earth was, and I said (of course) that nobody could ever tell me what to do again.

David Markson may be largely to blame. He wrote a riveting or maybe stultifying experimental novel called Wittgenstein’s Mistress composed of fragmented observations made by a narrator you come to understand either is or believes herself to be the last person on earth. Here is a sentence chosen haphazardly to give you the flavor of her musings:

“Well, and I certainly would have found it agreeable to tell Ludwig Wittgenstein how fond I am of his sentence.”

It’s oddly matter-of-fact and occasionally funny but mostly it’s suffused with terrible loneliness…and she’s most likely just nuts, but meanwhile, she lives in the Louvre for a while, and in an abandoned house on the beach for a while, and so forth. She crosses the Bering Strait in a motor boat (the sick fantasy of any non-flyer.)

So, sometimes, as a DSM-worthy form of self-soothing, I do this, though really it just comes over me. I think about where I’d live if it were just a matter of breaking in, knowing there was no one left to stop me. Or I bring The World Without Us into the bibliography of my little nervous breakdown and try to remember how long it would be until I could drink from the Hudson. Or I think about the practicalities of keeping warm or fed. Or sometimes I just imagine the quiet, which is the very best part.

*either that or we weren’t and it came up completely some other way. Si non e vero, e ben trovato.

When I was a teenager, I fantasized about being 35. I had all these things I wanted to do with my body and brain. I wanted to fuck around and not care what anyone thought, and I wanted to be at the height of my intellectual control. I wanted to have answers for questions, and for people to take me seriously when I delivered my thoughts. I planned to spend my 20′s doing what I had to in order to ensure that, by my mid-30′s, I was undeniably well-informed, sexually experienced, and pulling back against the overeager narcissism of youth. I wouldn’t need validation anymore because I would be a complete person without neediness. I would exude competence.

In my 20′s, I fantasized about being 45. When I met women in their mid-40′s, they seemed so blissful. They often acknowledged my emotional opacity and said that it was OK; eventually it will be much safer to have feelings. Someday it wouldn’t be impossible to recognize good people, and that I’d learn, over the coming decades, what it feels like to be treated with dignity and care. In my 40′s, I might lose some of my rough, prickly shell. I decided that in my 30′s, I’d do what I had to do to learn how to relate to other people with trust and honesty.

In my 30′s now, I envy my friends who are 55. They are empresses who tilt their heads and say, “I think that’s right,” in order to agree. They get sad, even in public, and instead of everyone telling them to toughen up, we all cry along. When a 55-year-old cries, she cries with authority. No one accuses a 50-something woman of being needy, or just wanting attention, or trying to be sexy, because a woman of that age simply has needs, demands attention, and, often by not trying at all, is sexy, in a way that does not require physical intercourse to prove. Best of all, they don’t require intercourse anymore.

That was the part of the Roseanne Barr article that made me so envious. I knew there would come a time in my life when sex stopped being appealing just because it was a big mysterious realm of private experience that I didn’t yet have. What I didn’t realize is that one can have satisfied all one’s curiosity and interest in physical sex, while still feeling a zombie-like compulsion to make it happen, or at least to be thinking of ways that one might potentially try to make it happen. Maybe I thought that it only happened to men. I still have at least 20 years ahead of me before I get any relief. Horrible.

On fulfilling the fantasies of my youth, I am doing a pretty good job. I’ve become almost exactly what I thought I would be when I was a teenager thinking about my mid-30′s self, and, in preparation for having a full emotional life in my 40′s, I’m experimenting with having feelings occasionally, and taking much better notes about interpersonal relationships and how they work. Maybe in ten years, I’ll be eyeing those 65-year-olds with squinty-eyed jealousy.